Huh?

Nobody ever warned me that I'd turn into a blathering idiot when I hit 50. I can't remember shit (sorry, Mom, that's your word, I know). I repeat myself, repeat myself, repeat myself; swear I brought things home but instead left them elsewhere (yes, Nicole, my favorite cooler was still at the cabin), look for clothes I sent to the Goodwill long ago, have imaginary friends and can't remember quite significant things I did 20 years ago. I get back from vacation and can't remember my e-mail PIN. Thank God I wrote it down before I left. So far I haven't left my keys in the refrigerator, but I know that could be coming sooner than I expected.

I thought only truly old people did this. Heck, my mom didn't start getting "scattered" like this until she hit 70-something. And instead of letting this frustrate her, she just bought more PostIt^TM notes.

So far this isn't all that debilitating, luckily. I don't usually get lost in the car, embarrass people or myself unintentionally or act legally insane. I probably annoy my children and my husband more than I do myself -- they already know I'm kind of OCD anyway. But when I try to lighten up a bit and am not compulsively tidying my house/workspace/dresser drawers, this is what happens. Promise me: If I get dangerously forgetful, hide the keys in the fridge. That would scare me into submission.

And the rockets' red glare ...

Sorry for the blog lag here, but we escaped to Cedar Lake for a blissful 10 days that went by in a blink. The days began with some of the best babyback ribs I've ever tasted in my life, courtesy of friend Seth Roxberg, whose parents, Dick and Ellie, have a place in Isle and invited us for a yummy Fourth of July picnic. Seth rubbed and sauced and smoked those ribs lovingly all day, then we fought the mosquitoes for them until we were stuffed. The next night, the Roxberg womenfolk joined us for our traditional Cedar Lake fireworks display.

Our neighbors on the bay, Ken and Jaci Gangl and their family, began the tradition when all of our kids were little. One of their friends, a pyrotechnician par excellance, got us all hooked on shooting mortars high in the sky over the lake. We had the only yard open enough not to burn up our cabins or our boats, so our yard has been the fireworks' stage ever since. Ken begins shopping early in the spring, then a few weeks before the fourth he wires and packs and sets all of these fuses and God knows what else. This year he had back surgery on June 30, so he got everything set before he went under. That's dedication.

It's probably illegal or something, but our lake association kicks in a good $500 or so for the fireworks, and everybody gets a half-hour of beauty and booms that rivals any professional display. Boats bob out in the center of the lake and honk their horns with appreciation. We hear "oohs" and "ahhs" and whoops and whistles after each launch. We all get a kick out of that. It's the highlight of the summer. Our kids still act like they're 10, planning their calendars around the fireworks, except now they pencil in the kind of beer they'll serve at this blessed event.

Before anybody gets all "you'll blow your hand off" over this post, know this: Ken wires the whole thing for remote control. It beats the days when he and a cadre of brave 40-something men (including my fire-obsessed husband) used to run around in the dark with blow torches to set these things off. (Rule of thumb: Never stand over a mortar to see if it's lit.) That really set my heart aflutter. All I could see was the headline: "Twin Cities father maimed in stupid fireworks display that he helped to orchestrate." Now the same 50-something guys can safely flip a few switches. And we do move the boats away from our dock. Maybe next year we'll set the thing to music. Or maybe we'll play some Sousa on an old boom box. We have to retain the event's "amateur" ambience; that's part of its charm.

This is one of those crazy traditions that make memories for children, just like the Fourth of July kiddie parade in Virginia, where I grew up. We used to dress up in costumes and decorate our bikes and parade the entire length of the main drag, Chestnut Street (from the mine pit all the way to Silver Lake, which seemed like miles when I was four feet tall) -- and at the end, people from the Chamber of Commerce or something gave each participant a quarter. For that quarter in 1964 or thereabouts, I marched down Chestnut in a hula skirt and a Hawaiian print bra when it was 36 degrees at parade time. Then I headed right to the Pic 'n' Pay and spent it all on candy. Which costs a lot less than Coors.

OK, I'll bite

Emilie and a bunch of other women posted this on their blogs, and I can't resist. Besides, it's a reader-grabber. It's the NEA's "Big Read" list; they guess the average adult has read six of these illustrious titles. How sad is that?

We're instructed to: "1.) Look at the list and bold those you have read. 2) Italicize those you intend to read. 3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE.4) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them."

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen


2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien


3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte


4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling


5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee


6. The Bible (but, of course, I'll never finish it)


7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte


8. 1984 - George Orwell


9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman


10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens


11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott


12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy


13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller


14. Complete Works of Shakespeare


15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier


16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien


17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks


18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger


19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger


20. Middlemarch - George Eliot


21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (twice!)


22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (once in high school, once in college, twice in grad school ... let me tell you about all the incidents of golden imagery in this book ... oh, my. This is the perfect American novel.)


23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens


24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy


25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams


26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh


27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky


28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck


29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll


30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame


31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy


32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens


33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis


34. Emma - Jane Austen


35. Persuasion - Jane Austen


36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis


37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini


38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres


39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden


40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne


41. Animal Farm - George Orwell


42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown


43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez


44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving


45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins


46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery


47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy


48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood


49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding


50. Atonement - Ian McEwan


51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel


52. Dune - Frank Herbert


53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons


54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen


55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth


56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon


57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens


58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley


59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon


60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez


61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck


62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov


63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt


64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold


65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas


66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac


67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy


68. Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie


70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville


71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens


72. Dracula - Bram Stoker


73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett


74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson


75. Ulysses - James Joyce


76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (several times)


77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome


78. Germinal - Emile Zola


79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray


80. Possession - AS Byatt


81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens


82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell


83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker


84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro


85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert


86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry


87. Charlotte's Web - EB White


88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom


89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle


90. The Faraway Tree Collection


91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad


92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (en francais!)


93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks


94. Watership Down - Richard Adams


95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole


96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute


97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas


98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare


99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl


100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Happy anniversary to us

It's our 31st wedding anniversary today, and I woke up in bed by myself this morning. Sigh. So I got up, went downstairs and found my sleepless partner dozing in the chair. His knee hurt. And his business has him in a worried funk. I always thought by now we'd be taking it a little easier, the kids would be on their own, we'd be done paying for schools and basketball camps and swimming lessons and iPods. But I didn't think we'd be paying $4 a gallon for gas, that groceries for two would cost over $100 a week (at one time, that fed a family of five quite nicely), that I'd be prayin' for furnace season to end, and that we'd be 10 years into a struggling family business.

But all finances aside, do I have a regret in the world? Not one.

We are blessed. Thirty-one years ago today we started something pretty rare. He's still my best friend, and I'm still his. He still makes me laugh, and I still put away his laundry. It's a fair deal, even though most young couples would think we're old-fashioned. Together we raised three fabulous children, of whom we're so proud. They're like badges of honor on the sash of this marriage. Do we have disagreements? Sure. But doesn't everybody?

Sometimes you have to be thankful just to be there -- to be present -- for each other. My friend Arlene's dad, Clarence Vail, died a few days ago. There's a story about him in the St. Paul Pioneer Press today. When he died, Clarence was 101, and he and his wife, Mayme, had been married 83 years, longer than any other couple in America. Their secret? Nothing fancy: Just respecting each other and working together to get through the day, the month, the year.

Facing an uncertain future is always a little easier with a hand to hold. And I'm still so grateful we were able to keep a promise we made so long ago.

If it's all the same to you, those are laugh lines, not wrinkles

MinnPost writer Christina Capecchi, one of this blog's few but esteemed readers, has an interesting piece today on wedding trends that reveal our society's obsessions with celebrity, its stunning lack of self-esteem and its amazing gullibility: "Here comes the bride -- picture-perfect, thanks to the likes of Botox, veneers and stunning makeup."

About to become a bride herself, Capecchi has interviewed providers and pushers in the "personal services" industry who aim to make brides (and their mothers, mothers-in-law and little dogs too) feel not quite good enough to walk down the aisle without having a little "work" done. Now I don't know about you, but just the thought of a Brazilian wax makes me catch my breath a little. If you think anyone's gonna stick a needle in my face, you have another thing coming. And if my teeth are crooked, old and not bright white, well ... that's what photo retouching is for. As Popeye said, "I yam what I yam." I'll be a mother-in-law, with gray hair and a girdle, I guess. (Unless, of course, I can wean myself from wine except on weekends and get to the gym a few more days a week.)

I do hope, however, that my soon-to-become daughter-in-law doesn't get sucked into all of this self-flagellation and knows she's beautiful just as she is, inside and out. I'm reminded of a line from a song in the 1965 TV version of Rodgers & Hammerstein's "Cinderella": "Do I love you because you're beautiful or are you beautiful because I love you?" (Nostalgia alert: You can swoon over the dreamy prince here. I used to pretend I was the princess, played by Lesley Ann Warren, who, I might add, has crooked teeth and a funny smile and is breathtakingly gorgeous just the same.)

Sha na na, dip dip dip dip ...

We have a job-seeker at our house -- a 23-year-old, engaged-to-be-married guy who's a good dresser with lots of ambition, is easy on the eye, has a bachelor's degree in business communication, reliable transportation, a little job experience in radio and remodeling and washing cars. Take my son, please ...

It's a tough row to hoe for these newly minted college graduates. I remember looking for that first job, writing cover letter after cover letter, blanketing the world with my resumes and trying to act all mature and confident when I actually got to beg a real person to hire me. When I finally succeeded, I think I was making all of $5 an hour, a living wage in 1977. I was thrilled to have the job even though I basically hated it because I'm really not an extrovert and had had to be with people ALL DAY LONG. I didn't like the job much, but it sounded good on paper. My first child was my little excuse for a graceful exit since I am not a quitter and didn't want anyone to call me a job-jumper.

Now job jumping is normal behavior and a sign of ambition. Go figure. I've been in the same job 20 years. Does that mean I'm not ambitious? I don't think so. I'm just lucky and content and have good health insurance. Why mess with a good thing? I know some corporate types who would gladly trade places with me. Besides, right now I am wearing flip-flops and a pair of bermuda shorts and have had one tiny phone call all day long. I get paid for reading, writing, editing, advising, planning. All the things that one nearsighted, wardrobe-challenged, introverted grammarian can do. And lately, I get paid for being the devil's advocate, the "common scold." Everyone needs at least one.

Not exactly Perry Mason

On Saturday I officiated at an argument worthy of witness by the Supreme Court. The defendant? Owen, age 3. The prosecutor? William, 3 himself.

W: "A truck is a car with a box."

O: "No it's NOT. It's a truck. A truck is not a car."

W: "Yes, yes it IIIIISSSSS! A truck IS a car!"

O: "No it's NOT! A truck is not a car, it's a truck!"

This conversation continues escalation, punctuated by a good-sized slap to the head, followed by another, at which point the parties were returned to the bench. Sobs all around.

Me: "Owen, you're right. A truck is a truck. And Will? You're right, too. A truck can, indeed, be a car."

O: "Nonna, that's not right."

W: "Yeah, Nonna, that's not right."

Me: "Well, at least you can agree about something."

Case dismissed.