Yarn Yoda and the Force

Posted on January 7, 2018 by Kathleen Fox

“Do. Or do not. There is no try.”

I don’t know whether my grandson Henry, at age five, can quote Yoda’s advice to Luke Skywalker from The Empire Strikes Back. Chances are he can.

I assume this because long, long ago, in a theatre far, far away, I remember watching Henry’s father watching the original Star Wars movie when he was about a year younger than Henry is now. He didn’t fidget; he didn’t talk; he didn’t get drowsy even though he had just finished a huge Thanksgiving dinner. He sat enraptured through the whole film, meanwhile munching his way steadily through a big bag of popcorn that he should not possibly have had room for.

Here and now, in this galaxy, Star Wars has come around again. This means a whole new universe of toy light sabers, action figures, and other galactic merchandise.

Including Yarn Yoda. Continue reading →

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The Perfect Christmas Tree

Posted on December 15, 2017 by Kathleen Fox

Because our neck of the woods includes actual woods, it’s a tradition for many people to cut their own Christmas trees. (And where did that expression come from, anyway? Why isn’t it the “head of the woods” or the “heart of the woods” or even the “left elbow of the woods”? According to informed sources, aka Google, this phrase apparently came to be used for a small local area because “neck” was a term for a narrow strip of woods. Which, really, could just as well be called an “elbow.”)

But never mind that. In this part of the world, for a mere ten bucks, you can get a permit from the Forest Service to go out to the Black Hills National Forest and get a tree. This involves finding the perfect tree, cutting it down (unless you’re Paul Bunyan, a tree saw is probably safer than an ax), and hauling it home. (Don’t forget the rope or straps to tie it to the top of the car or secure it in the back of the pickup. Trees have been known to escape.)

These tree-cutting expeditions, of course, are perfect opportunities for spirited family discussions about exactly what constitutes the “perfect” tree. Continue reading →

Categories: Family, Living Consciously | Tags: , | 2 Comments

Leaving the Lights On

Posted on November 29, 2017 by Kathleen Fox

Even by the standards of an early-morning person like me, 8:30 p.m. isn’t really late. But in the short days of late November, when you’ve just staggered off of an airplane at the end of a day that started 20 hours earlier on a different continent, 8:30 p.m. can feel like the deep, dark middle of a very long night.

But the plane landed promptly, my friends were at the airport to pick me up, and when we turned from the dark street into the dark driveway of what I expected to be our dark house—there was light. My daughter had stopped by to turn up the thermostat, and she had left the porch light on for me. Plus the light inside the entryway, plus a lamp shining warmly through the front window.

The impact of this simple gesture went far beyond the practical kindness of making it easier to lug my bag up the steps and unlock the door. The light allowed me to walk into a warm, bright haven instead of a cold, dark house. It made me feel safe and welcomed me home.

And I was reminded of one of the stories my father told. Continue reading →

Categories: Family, Living Consciously | 4 Comments

If Only Miss Muffet Had Known This

Posted on October 31, 2017 by Kathleen Fox

A few days before Halloween, eeriness is in the air. Even on NPR. Driving across the state last week, I heard some very scary things.

The most frightening was a “Science Friday” interview with two arachnologists who were terrifyingly enthusiastic about spiders. I had never before heard anyone use “spider” and “adorable” in the same sentence. They were especially excited about the peacock spider, named for the bright colors and pattern on its body, which according to them is not only adorable but is also gorgeous.

Given the season, the interview focused on scarier critters, the black widow and the brown recluse. The scientists were quick to explain that, even though their bites can be dangerous, these spiders are still adorable because they don’t really want to bite you. The reason? Energy conservation. It takes a lot of body energy to create venom, which of course is intended to paralyze prey so the spiders can eat. Efficient little critters that they are, they’d rather save the precious stuff for their next meal than waste it repelling enormous and inedible humans. They will only bite if they believe their lives to be in acute danger.

If you see a brown recluse spider, it probably isn’t. They weren’t named “recluses” because they run around in public. They prefer their privacy and will be happy to leave you alone if you leave them alone. Their brown violin-shaped body markings are also shared by many other harmless spiders, like the wolf spider. You can easily tell the difference, because wolf spiders have spiky little thorns on their legs and brown recluses have fine little hairs. Also, wolf spiders have eight eyes and brown recluses have six eyes, arranged by twos in a tidy symmetrical pattern.

So if you see what you think is a brown recluse spider, there’s no need to panic. All you have to do is sneak up on it until you’re close enough to count its eyes and see the tiny hairs on its legs. About, oh, an inch away from the end of your nose ought to be close enough. Just be careful not to appear threatening, so it won’t bite you.

Actually, all of this information about the harmlessness and general adorability of spiders was quite useful the morning after I heard it. I was about to step into the motel shower when I realized I was sharing the bath mat with a fuzzy brown spider the size of a Shetland pony. Okay, okay, that’s an exaggeration—it was only the size of a Chihuahua. Just with longer legs.

Well, maybe not quite that big. But big enough that, even without my glasses, I could clearly recognize it as a spider. Big enough that I really didn’t want to share my bathroom with it. And definitely big enough that I wasn’t going to stomp on it with my bare foot or whack it with my hairbrush. Besides being a reasonably live-and-let-live kind of person, I didn’t want to deal with the yuck factor of spider innards all over the bath mat.

So arachnicide was not the answer. Instead, I flapped a hand towel at it, herding it out of the bathroom. It disappeared around the corner. Out of sight, out of mind: problem solved. I enjoyed my shower in privacy.

But when I came out of the bathroom, the spider was just a few feet away from the door. Not moving. It was staying camouflaged against the brown carpet while it caught its breath, I decided.

I detoured around it as I went across the room to get dressed. I detoured around it again when I went back to the bathroom to dry my hair. I detoured around it again when I went over to the desk to check my email. I went to breakfast. I came back half an hour later.

The spider was still in the same spot, looking smaller somehow and not at all threatening. Because it was dead. I swear, I never touched it. I never even got close enough to count its eyes.

The arachnologists forgot to mention one thing. Apparently, it’s possible to frighten a spider to death.

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“Have you vertigo?”

Posted on October 25, 2017 by Kathleen Fox

Oh, the crystals in your ears can have you leaning on the wall.
The only way you can get out of your bedroom is to crawl.
It’s like an awful morning after, but you had no wine at all,
And it’s all because of the crystals in your ears.

It’s a pain to call the doctor, as upon the floor you sprawl.
And when you finally see her, she’s not much help at all.
“You will have to wait till the pangs abate—and try not to fall.
This is just a glitch with the crystals in your ears.”

You can let it overcome you and just sit right down and bawl,
Or try to see the humor though you cannot stand up tall.
“Have you vertigo?” “No, I don’t think so, it’s just down the hall.
It just seems too far with these crystals in my ears.”

Oh, your friends may laugh and tease you if upon their help you call.
As they joke about your weakness they might have a ball.
But the heartless crowd that is laughing now will be left in tears
When their balance fails from the crystals in their ears.

With apologies to songwriter Ted Harris, all the musicians who have recorded “Crystal Chandeliers,” and anyone who has experienced benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, which while it lasts is not the least bit amusing.

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Person to Person

Posted on October 12, 2017 by Kathleen Fox

Way, way back in the olden days, when telephones had rotary dials, making a call meant putting one finger (or, for those with thick fingers or manicured nails, the end of a pencil) into the hole by the appropriate number, rotating the dial all the way to the right, letting it spin back to the left, and repeating for each number. Which is why we still often say we “dial” phone numbers, even though touch-tone phones with buttons started replacing rotary phones in the 1960’s.

Back when long-distance phone calls were expensive and not to be made thoughtlessly, you could dial “O,” get an operator, and place a person-to-person call. Not just to a given number, but to a specific person at that number: Mr. Jones in the purchasing department, or Uncle Albert, or your mother. Such a call cost more than a talk-to-anyone call you placed yourself, but if the person you asked for wasn’t in, the call wasn’t completed and there was no charge. A whole generation of college students found this useful. After a holiday or weekend visit home, placing a person-to-person call to themselves at the home number was a free way to let Mom and Dad know they had arrived safely back at school.

Today, the Internet allows us to communicate freely, easily, and almost instantaneously with vast numbers of people all over the world. The very idea of placing a phone call with the help of a human operator—and paying by the minute for it—seems almost as cumbersome and outdated as sending a telegram or writing a letter with a quill pen dipped in ink.

But one thing hasn’t changed. Every electronic communication we send out—an email, a text, a tweet, a blog post, a shared photo or video, a comment on social media—every single one is still a person-to-person message. Thousands of people might see or read or share it, but each one is a separate human being responding in an individual way. Even an automated robo-call or bot that targets huge numbers of random recipients originates from some real live person somewhere. And all that spam is received by separate people whose irritation and inconvenience is downright personal.

So, on the outgoing side, before you post or text or send any other kind of communication, it might be helpful to stop and consider whether it’s worth sending. I doubt that many of us would go to the trouble and expense of placing an expensive person-to-person long-distance call just to yell at someone or call them an idiot. Maybe it’s not a good idea to do essentially the same thing just because the Internet makes it easy.

And on the incoming side, we can take advantage of one very useful feature of the person-to-person call: If you are the one it comes to, you don’t have to accept it. You don’t have to participate in divisive or insulting messages, crude jokes, drama-stirring incitements to indignation, pseudo-sentimental appeals, unsolicited ads, or anything else you don’t want in your life. Every incoming communication comes with a choice to take it in or ignore it. You can read or view it or not, respond to it or not, disconnect from its sender as much as possible, make liberal use of spam filters, and choose not to waste time and energy on junk. No person-to-person message can be completed unless you say yes to it. You don’t have to be “in” to every piece of spam that comes your way.

Categories: Living Consciously, Remembering When | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Twinkie Pyrotechnics

Posted on September 20, 2017 by Kathleen Fox

You have to heat a Twinkie in the microwave for 45 seconds, on average, before it will explode.

Or so I read in the newspaper this morning. No source was cited for this intriguing and slightly disturbing little bit of information, but since it was in the paper, of course it must be true.

Still, an inquiring mind fueled by a wholesome breakfast and a second cup of coffee would like to know more. Such as:

How many trials did it take before researchers came up with the 45-second average? Three? Ten? One hundred? This is important; the more repetitions, the greater the scientific validity.

Was the microwave set on full power? And did the researchers experiment with microwaves of different wattages? After all, as anyone who has ever burned a bag of microwave popcorn knows first-hand, cooking times in different ovens may vary.

Who came up with the idea of exploding Twinkies in the first place? I can imagine two likely possibilities. One involves a college-dorm microwave and a certain amount of beer. The second involves a couple of bored 12-year-olds left unattended in a kitchen.

After the experiment was complete and the results duly logged, who cleaned up the mess in the microwave?

Is exploding a Twinkie properly categorized as scientific research at all? Or should it be considered performance art?

And perhaps most important, who funded this research? A weapons lab? A competing snack food company? A dental school? Or is there some sort of center for the discovery of alternative uses for junk food? (Someone somewhere, after all, had to come up with the idea of deep-frying a Twinkie.)

Perhaps it was the makers of Twinkies themselves. As a marketing strategy, it’s not a bad idea. Admit it: reading this has given at least half of you the impulse to go buy a package of Twinkies and do your own experiment.

Maybe it was NASA. Researchers there certainly have an interest in food that can remain edible throughout long space voyages. Suppose the Cassini space probe had left Earth in 1997 with a couple of Twinkies tucked in beside its scientific instruments. It’s possible the preservative-enhanced treats would have still been in their original condition when, in September 2017, Cassini plunged into Saturn’s atmosphere and disintegrated.

Now that would be a spectacular way to blow up a Twinkie.

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The Barefoot Princess

Posted on September 12, 2017 by Kathleen Fox

It has been pointed out that everything Fred Astaire did on the dance floor, Ginger Rogers did too—backwards and in high heels.

I was reminded of this recently, watching one of my granddaughters not long before her third birthday. In a pretty pink dress, she was riding her little pink princessy scooter. Not in high heels, of course. In bare feet, with nail polish on each rather grubby toe.

Starting in the driveway, she would charge uphill on the sidewalk—more a slight slope than a steep rise, but uphill nevertheless—driving the scooter as hard as one hard-working little foot could make it go. At the end of the street she would turn, perch on the scooter, and hurtle back downhill. Grinning with glee, her hair and skirt flying, she would go faster and faster, then swerve at the last minute and screech to a halt just before she ran into the mailbox. More Evel Knievel, perhaps, than Ginger Rogers.

Being dressed like a little lady only proved to be a problem once. When she crouched low on the scooter on one of her runs, no doubt trying for maximum acceleration, the back of her skirt wound itself up in the back wheel. She couldn’t stand up until she was untangled by the combined efforts of Mom and Dad.

Who didn’t tell her to slow down, to be careful, to not be so wild, or in any other way to “play like a girl.” They merely suggested that, if she wanted to sit down on the scooter, shorts might be more practical than a skirt. As soon as she was extricated, she took off up the hill to make another run—standing up that time.

It is gratifying to see little girls like my granddaughters growing up in a world where being “girly”—enjoying prettiness and dressing up and all the femininity those things imply—is completely compatible with being strong, playing hard, and taking risks. As well as dealing with and learning from the scrapes and bruises that sometimes result.

What Ginger Rogers did in high heels was certainly impressive. Just think what she might have been able to do in bare feet. With or without nail polish.

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Hollyhock Dolls

Posted on August 9, 2017 by Kathleen Fox

Hollyhocks are weeds. Or so I’ve been told by several “real” gardeners. The kind of gardeners who know the proper temperature for compost, whose tomatoes flourish, and whose gladiolus (gladioluses? gladioli?) win awards at county fairs. The kind of gardener that I definitely am not.

Maybe feeling intimidated by those experts is the reason I never got around to planting hollyhocks, even though I always wanted some in my yard. Even though I carried a secret stash of hollyhock seeds in a little plastic bag through six moves. Both their identity and their provenance were definite, because in the bag with them was a scrap of cardboard torn from the top of a cereal box. Written on it, in my Uncle Ernie’s careful handwriting, was “Hollyhock seeds from the Smith place, 1983.”

Three years ago, I finally planted those seeds, along with some others scavenged with permission from the garden of an old mansion-turned-museum in Trinidad, Colorado. Amazingly, some of them sprouted. Some of them grew. Some of them even thrived.

This year, despite drought and heat, they and their descendants have taken over half of one bed in our flower garden and are blooming vigorously. I have to admit that they have spread like, well, weeds. And that with their huge leaves and tall stems they do look a bit, well, weedy. I might even acknowledge that I would be wise to cut some of them back this fall before all those seeds mature.

But in the meantime, I can show my grandkids how to make hollyhock dolls the way my sisters and I used to do.

Here’s how: You pick a few blossoms that are fully open, plus a matching number of half-open buds or smaller blossoms. You strip the stem off of the buds, along with the green leaves that support the bottom of the flower. (A real gardener, no doubt, would know what those are called.) This reveals a little eye-shaped opening between each partially furled petal. Carefully slide the stem of one of the open flowers into one of those openings as far as it will go. The larger open blossom, upside down, becomes the long, full skirt of a gown. The white bottom part of the half-open bud becomes the doll’s face, adorned with a frilly hat.

 

Okay, maybe the faces are a little rabbity, the hats a bit crooked, and the gowns a trifle uneven. But they’re fun. And, given the generous abundance of hollyhocks, nobody cares that you pick them.

The other day, as we passed on our daily walks, one of my neighbors said, “I just love your hollyhocks. They remind me of my grandmother.” She asked if she could harvest some seeds, which I’ll be happy to share.

So it isn’t just me who understands what’s going on here. It doesn’t matter that, to some gardeners, hollyhocks look like weeds. To some of us, they look like memories.

Categories: Family, Remembering When | Tags: | Leave a comment

Fairy Tales You Thought You Knew

Posted on July 19, 2017 by Kathleen Fox

We all know how the fairy tales go: Stepmothers are invariably wicked. Stepsisters, ditto. Even porridge-eating bears are terrifying. A handful of magic beans, and Jack the not-so-bright son turns into Jack the giant-slaying hero. The big bad wolf is, well, big and bad.

Or maybe not.

Once Upon a Different Story retells five classic fairy tales from another point of view. I can’t be sure this is what really happened, of course. But this is the way I heard it, in their own words, from characters who have been misunderstood or overlooked for years. These stories were told to me in the voices of:

The Big Bureaucrat Wolf, a public servant with a clipboard and an attitude. “The guys say B. B. stands for Big and Bad, on account of I’m such a hardass in my building inspections. Most of them, they take a little cash on the side every now and then, to overlook stuff. Not me. But you wouldn’t believe some of the things I see. Like that little pig’s shack. It didn’t just violate every building code in the book; it violated logic, common sense, and the law of gravity. Hell, I didn’t even dare knock on the door for fear the whole flimsy mess would come down.”

The Murdered Giant’s Wife, traumatized by a tattooed drug dealer out of control. “Well, of course it all started because Jack found those beans. Magic beans, you Downlanders call them, but there’s nothing magic about them, really. We all know how important the beans are to our diets and how dangerous they are to you. We all see the videos about Downlander addicts and how crazy and unpredictable they can get. So something we take seriously is bean control.”

The Fairest Queen of All, Snow White’s frustrated stepmother. “From the beginning, I did the best I could to make friends with Snow White and love her even though she didn’t love me back. I don’t think I could have managed without the magic mirror. It couldn’t help me deal with Snow White, but at least it simplified the other major challenge of being a queen: looking fabulous. Let’s face it, looking beautiful is what princesses and queens do. Nobody wants to know what we think; nobody cares how we feel. They just expect us to show up, look perfect, and smile graciously.”

The Determined Mama Bear, coping with a tiny golden-haired home invader and the child welfare system. “Poor little Goldie; everyone in our part of the forest knew about her. Out in the woods by herself, all hours of the day, when she should have been safe at home. And her only a little older than my Baby. Oh, I’m sure Goldie’s parents have plenty of problems of their own. Usually I’m not one to judge people if I haven’t walked a mile in their paw prints, as the saying goes. But I don’t care what their issues were—it was no excuse for neglecting that sweet little girl the way they did.”

The Softhearted Stepsister, who can’t see the charm in Cinderella’s anti-royal crusading. “‘Oh my God! That’s Cinderella!’ Jane’s shriek made me drop my sociology book and focus on the television. A hunky young reporter with perfect hair and gleaming teeth was in front of the palace, reporting live on the latest demonstration from the anti-aristocracy group calling themselves “Unoccupy the Throne.” The camera zoomed in on a slender girl carrying a sign so big she could barely balance it. I could see why they chose our little sister. Even in ragged jeans and a scruffy sweatshirt, Cinderella was beautiful.”

Once Upon a Different Story is available in print and ebook formats. You can find out more about it here.

Categories: Just For Fun | Tags: , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

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