I've Got Sand In All the Wrong Places (22 page)

You need a safecracker to get into my keyboard.

And the same thing happened to me yesterday with the remote control. My TV remotes have a back that slides off and each one takes two batteries. At least Comcast gives me a little drawing to help me understand which way the battery goes in, but the diagram was worn away on my older remote and I couldn't read it. So then I tried to reason it out, trying to figure out whether the nipple would go on the spring part or the metal-contact part.

I chose wrongly at first, going for the spring part.

Don't ask me why, it made sense at the time.

If you ever go to a casino, leave me behind.

I did that to both batteries, but they didn't fit in easy, so I had to jam them down on the spring. It should've tipped me off, but I'm not the kind of woman who gives in easily.

When things don't work, I force them.

Then I tested the remote control on the TV, but it didn't work, so I figured by sheer deductive reasoning that I had screwed up yet again.

I took off the back of the remote, figuring that I could just pop the batteries out and turn them the other way, but I had worked so hard in jamming them on the spring that both batteries were stuck inside the remote and I couldn't get them out.

Impressed yet?

I had to get a butter knife and wedge it under one of the batteries to get them out, which is a time-honored way of dealing with mechanical problems.

Try to follow along, if you're not as talented in the engineering department as I am.

After about twenty minutes, I succeeded in getting the batteries out of the remote, but the metal springs were bent beyond recognition.

I tried to press them down with my finger and mold them into their tiny springy coil, but no luck.

I had to throw away the remote.

So what have we learned?

My brain doesn't work, all the time.

And that batteries are out to get me.

 

Mother Time

Lisa

Tempus fugit.

That's the Latin for, when the hell did
that
happen?

Or, literally, time flies.

I say that because that's how time feels, especially as we get older and we're moving more slowly.

In fact, not only is time flying, but so is everything else, and especially nowadays, when email is the new snail mail.

I can't remember the last handwritten letter I got, but then again, I can't remember anything.

These days, texting seems to be the preferred mode of communication, and it used to be that I texted only with Daughter Francesca and Besties Laura and Franca, but now my plumber will text me and so will any assorted tradespersons, including the guy who came to pick up the PortaJohns after my book club party.

And no, his name is not John.

But I digress, because my point is that time is a relative thing, which I think some smart guy said even before me, and I never realized it so much as I did this weekend, and actually, at the book club party.

First some background.

You may know that Francesca and I host a book club party at my house for book clubs who read my April books, to show them our gratitude. We had several hundred people to the house last weekend, on both Saturday and Sunday.

I know it sounds crazy, but Mother Mary told me that if you really want to show someone you care about them, you have to have them over and feed them.

So we do.

And by the way, thanks to you, dear readers. More and more of you are supporting these books because last summer, the most recent in the series,
Does This Beach Make Me Look Fat?
became a
New York Times
bestseller.

Yay!

So thanks are most definitely in order.

Anyway, back to the book club party. We fed them and gave them a show, at which both Francesca and I spoke, telling stories about our writing lives, our dogs, and mostly, each other. And when it was Francesca's turn to speak, she told a funny story about me and happened to say that it drives her crazy when I tell people that she's thirty, because she is only twenty-nine.

That's just the kind of line that made the twenty-somethings in the audience nod in complete understanding.

And the fifty-somethings in the audience laugh and laugh.

Time truly is relative, especially among relatives.

But truly, I never gave validity to this point of hers until I saw all the younger people in our audience nodding, and most of them came up to Francesca later and told her that their mothers did the same thing about their ages and it drove them all crazy, too.

Which is when I started thinking about why we mothers do this, and why it drives our daughters crazy.

And I realized that, for mothers, time is related to memory.

Mother Time.

And I can clearly remember Francesca as an adorable little toddler, all blue eyes and curly blond hair, clutching a yellow giraffe that was her favorite toy. When any adult asked her how old she was, she would hold up three little fingers and say:

“I am this many.”

I'm willing to bet that there is no mother reading this who doesn't remember her child saying, “I am this many.”

And when you can remember a child saying I-am-this-many, you will have an impossibly difficult time dealing with your child's age at all, once it gets over twelve.

Much less when she starts driving.

Or moves to New York City.

I still can't believe that Francesca is twenty-nine, so, in my mind, it doesn't matter if I round it up to thirty or down to twenty-eight, I feel like all the years blur into one big year, so that a year or two doesn't matter, either way.

Except maybe it does.

Who wouldn't want an extra year at the very end?

So maybe our daughters are trying to teach us something.

Now all I need is sixty fingers.

 

God Gave You Two

Francesca

I woke up from a dead sleep in the middle of the night to searing pain in my eye, knowing with total certainty that a dog had walked on my face and accidentally scratched my cornea. My first thought?

Not again!

That's right,
again.

I'm embarrassed to admit that this freak accident has happened to me twice. What are the odds?

Apparently pretty good if you sleep with dogs.

The first injury happened three years ago when I was staying at my mom's house in preparation for our annual book club party. The night before, all five of our Cavalier King Charles spaniels slept with me—I'm their favorite—and as I was waking up, one of my mom's puppies got excited to say good morning. He snuggled and squirmed all over my face, and, in a badly timed blink, he caught my eyeball with one of his claws.

I knew it was bad, because I could feel the flap of my torn cornea when I blinked.

Hope you aren't squeamish.

I went to the ER and came back in time to co-host the party, I'm hard-core like that, but by the end of the day, my eye had swollen shut like a prizefighter's.

They say the cornea of the eye has more nerve endings than any other part of the body. I felt all of them.

I lay in bed trembling for the next few days, and that was with prescription pain medication. My eye did not reopen for two weeks, and full vision didn't return for over a month. I still have complications from it.

I remember my ophthalmologist asking, “Does the dog
have
to sleep in the bed with you?”

Um, yes?

And exactly three years later, home at my mom's for the book club party, sleeping in a bed with five dogs, one scratched my eye again.

The good news: this scratch wasn't as bad as the last one, and I'll make a full recovery. And in this case, it happened the day
after
the book club party. And finally, it happened to my
other
eye.

That last one is arguably good news, since this was supposed to be my
good
eye, but hey, God gave you two for a reason.

You're thinking, surely now I'll stop sleeping with dogs in the bed, right?

Ah, no.

What is wrong with me? Am I stubborn or stupid?

Probably both.

But dogs-in-the-bed is a way of life. As a little girl, I shared my bed with up to three golden retrievers. I told them stories before I fell asleep. Their snores were my lullabies. Their fluffy bellies were my big spoon.

My current dog, Pip, has slept in my bed since he was a puppy. Cuddling him is an essential part of my routine to unwind. And every morning, instead of reaching for my cell phone and scrolling through emails first thing, I roll over and reach for his fluffy little body.

Caffeine for the soul.

Ironically, I'm not much of a cuddler when it comes to sleeping with humans. When past boyfriends have gallantly invited me to lay my head on their shoulder, I invariably get pins and needles in my ear. And I know it's cute when girls complain of being cold all the time (we get it, you're skinny), but I run hot. I get overheated sleeping against another body, and it's not fun for anyone. An ex called me his “little furnace.”

A dog, on the other hand, takes up less space, doesn't have to get up for work before you, and only farts
above
the covers.

And to get serious for a minute, my dog was crucial to my emotional recovery after being assaulted. I struggled the most at night; when I would close my eyes to go to sleep, my mind obsessively replayed the attack. But placing a hand on Pip, burying my fingers in his soft coat, and listening to his little snorts were the only things that broke that cycle. His tactile presence pulled me back to the safety of the moment and filled me with a sense of comfort and love.

So the dog stays.

My eyes will just have to be more careful going forward.

And look, the ophthalmologist also said that cats are typically the pets that cause eye injuries. So I told the cat she is not allowed on my bed.

She just jumps up anyway.

(I'd wink, but I already am.)

 

In the Soup

Lisa

Once upon a time, I had the great idea that I was going to try to make butternut-squash soup.

And as soon as I started, I realized almost immediately that this was a terrible idea.

By way of background, I got the idea because I had just come back from a book tour, so I was meeting a lot of wonderful, brilliant, beautiful people, by which I mean, people who read my books.

Yes, you.

I love you.

I'm grateful to my readers because I feel so blessed and/or lucky to be able to make a living telling stories, whether fictional or all too real, like the ones contained in this book. And because I feel so grateful to my readers, I love to go on book tour and actually meet them, and my book signings are not typical, to say the least.

I don't read my own book aloud at my book signings because my readers are fully capable of doing that all by themselves. Instead I tell them the story of what inspired the book, how I got to be a writer, or funny family stories, and the conversation opens up pretty quickly into questions, which begin with readers asking me about my creative process and end with us gabbing about life, love, dogs, and carbohydrates.

We even exchange recipes.

It's not a cookbook signing, it's a girl signing, which is basically the same thing.

This is even more true when Francesca and I tour for these books, because we put on a little mother-and-daughter show which entertains our readers, and we all end up hugging, fighting, or weeping.

Which is basically the same thing, too.

It's an estrogenfest.

Or an estrogen-replacement fest.

Bottom line, it's fun.

So it was during one of my signings that one of my readers started telling me about all the wonderful soups she made for autumn; and then the conversation segued into Crock-Pots and soup recipes, and you can see how this led to the butternut-squash recipe in question.

Which begins with butternut squash.

And should end right there.

By the way, I have never ever owned a Crock-Pot, though Mother Mary did, and I ordered one up right away, excited. It's just my kind of toy because it came with no directions, except plug it in and don't burn down the house.

Gotcha.

I had a butternut-squash recipe in mind because my reader told me that all I had to do was get a butternut squash, peel it, chop it up, roast it with olive oil, and throw it in the Crock-Pot with water and voilà.

But I was stumped at the threshold.

First off, thank God for the signs in the produce section, because my grocery store has a positively bewildering array of squash, most of which is decorative.

I didn't make that mistake.

I'm not cooking the centerpiece.

Before I saw the squash signs, I had no idea which squash was the butternut and I became dazed scanning the squash varieties, all of which are shaped like a blunt object, color-coordinated to autumn.

Finally I found the butternut squash, which looked nothing like butter, nuts, or whatever a butternut is. Next to the butternut squash was a special bin that showed butternut squash already chopped and covered in plastic.

That should've tipped me off, right there.

But no, I was a butternut-squash virgin and didn't recognize the red flag, produce-wise.

I bypassed the precut squash in favor of the real experience.

Accept no substitutes.

I hoisted the biggest of the butternut squash, which qualified as working out, and sat it down in the front compartment of my cart, showing it off like the small child that it resembled.

Also it was visible proof that I was buying an actual food thing, marking me as a true home cook.

Then I brought it home and gave it a bath.

I should've put it to bed, because at this point, it was ten o'clock since I hadn't had any time to food shop that day. But no worries, I figured that it would take maybe an hour at most to make the soup, since that's what I had remembered my reader telling me.