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But It’s Too Small to Matter, Right?


Dee was one of the top 15 readers in the bookmobile’s summer reading program. Nevermind that Rob and I read most of the books to her because she shared this honor with about five kids under the age of four. That’s the digression.

We attended the bookmobile party honoring the top readers, who received giftcards to Dairy Queen*, and participate in a scavenger hunt for more cheap tainted Chinese plastic. After the awards, there was a quickie lunch of hotdogs and cake. I don’t eat meat because my stomach literally punishes me for even the slightest transgression, but Dee happily downed one. Her horror about flesh eating hasn’t made the leap to what she actually eats yet. That will be an interesting day. She also accepted a piece of chocolate cake with obvious disappointment because she isn’t a fan of chocolate in large chunks – Smarties in vanilla ice-cream, okay, but that’s the extent of it.

Parents were naturally eating alongside children, so I stood out as I always do, and had to explain multiple times that I can’t eat meat and I avoid baked goods because of a peanut allergy – particularly when chocolate is involved. I realize that food allergies or intolerances are not readily or easily understood by most people who don’t have to interact with the afflicted on a regular basis. I know too that there is a a certain amount of resistance to the idea that the good of a few people sometimes means inconveniencing more people**, but I am always surprised by stories of the willful disregard of someone’s allergies by people who think that the allergic are somehow overstating their sensitivities.

“I have a friend with a peanut allergy,” one of the librarians said, “whose mother-in-law nearly killed her with chutney. My friend asked if there were nuts in it and her mother-in-law repeatedly assured her there weren’t. She ate the chutney and was deathly ill. The mother-in-law admitted then that there were nuts but in such a tiny amount, she didn’t think it would hurt.”

“That’s terrible,” the other librarian said.

“But it’s too small to matter sometimes, right?” the first said, looking to me for confirmation.

“Even tiny amounts count,” I assured her.

After we got home, I found a message from my dear friend, Sis, whose oldest daughter is getting married next weekend. I called her back and we chatted. She wanted to know if there was anything she could do to facilitate our trip and to invite us to the rehearsal dinner and the brunch the morning after. At the last moment I remembered the food. Buffets are notorious for spreads a mile long and just as deep without a single thing I can eat. Even though she is one of my closest friends, she is baffled by what I can no longer eat.

And it’s not that anything is necessarily deadly – that I have encountered to date anyway – but gastric pain (not discomfort, there is a difference), sore throat, and what I can only describe as hives on the roof of my mouth are unpleasant enough for me to avoid things even if it means not eating at all and merely watching others.

Fortunately, most of my own family love me enough to move tiny mountains to ensure I can eat (my dad’s funeral dinner was another matter – I really had to nag to get edible food on the menu). I am sure something will be thrown together and in any event there is a restaurant and room service.

*I really dislike the practice of rewarding kids with food. Her dance teachers hand out suckers and the school has popcorn and chips. Small wonder there are so many freakishly large children these days. It’s not healthy to have rolls of fat and if it’s rolling, it’s not baby fat.

** Smoke is the other issue that brings out the intolerant whether they are smokers or people who see nothing wrong in that most horrid of suburban inventions – the backyard firepit. People with lung aliments should simply suck it up and quit overstating the impact on them, right?

Conversations with Dead Husbands


Just to clarify, I get song signs from my late husband, Will, and that’s it. There’s never been anything more aside from a couple of dreams here and there where he has more or less been just an extra. He doesn’t speak to me or rattle windows or make the floorboards squeak. In the early months after his death, he – according to Dee – would stop by and play with her and there was that picture he showed his face in, but he saves visitations for Rob.

I’m not kidding. He visits Rob in dreams.

I woke Friday morning to find that Rob was up even earlier then usual and dressing in the shell of our not quite finished walk-in closet. Allergies are currently beating me about the sinuses and ear tubes due to the fall harvest ringing our little hamlet with a thick dusty residue making uninterrupted sleep impossible, so I lay in bed for a bit to get my bearings. The other night I’d heard my name being called from the corner of the room by the wall cupboard and for some reason I glanced over there this morning. I saw a bright glow behind the door that quickly skipped to the middle of the room and vanished on a run towards the blinds.

“Was it headlights maybe?” Rob asked when I told him.

No, headlights aren’t yellow or perfectly round and they leave streaks.

But I digress because I only mentioned the voice and the light to Rob after he told me about the dream that woke him up early.

“I was sitting at a lunch counter with Will,” he said. “He was on one side and I was on the other. There was a third person too that I didn’t know and seemed to be facilitating our conversation.”

I searched the first husband archives in my brain for a place that matched the description. Nothing matched. We didn’t have haunts like that though something makes me believe it was a place where Will used to play pool. Perhaps in one of the little hole in the wall southern Iowa towns in Warren county.

“I wasn’t sure it was him at first because he had longish hair and was leaning forward so the hair covered the sides of his face,” Rob continued.

Will started losing hair shortly after we were married. It vexed him horribly because male pattern baldness ran on both sides of his family and, in addition, he was sprouting hair on his chest for the first time.

“I’m going to be bald and have a hairy back,” he would complain. “Great.”

But when he was young, and unemployed, he had long hair and really wanted to find a job that would sanction long hair. He kept his hair short – sometimes shaved to the wood – for comfort in the stuffy warehouse were he worked and then later because of the fact that his hair was falling out, but he really was a Kurt Cobain wanna-be with his flannel shirts, dreams of long locks and a dark inner poet.

“We had a long conversation, and I don’t remember it all but two things stood out,” Rob told me. “He said he wanted to take a bike trip in Mesa Verde with you and that he thought I was doing a great job with Dee.”

Will talked a lot about the Boy Scout camp down in New Mexico. It was his favorite place after the mountains. We schemed for a while about making a move to Denver after we were married, and he always talked about wanting to make sure that at some point we took our children to visit his favorite places out West.

“And then there was a group hug at the end,” Rob finished.

The last time Will visited Rob in a dream, he hugged Rob. Hugging was something he picked up from my mother – who basically forced the whole huggy culture thing on our family when she went through her middle-life crisis and was a Charismatic for a while. The hugging stuck and the talking in tongues mercifully faded into family folklore.

I have to admit that sometimes I am a bit annoyed by the surreptitious way Will keeps tabs and inserts himself. However, I am glad for the mini-updates on him, knowing that he is getting on with his existence on whatever plane he is residing and is happy with the way things are going here.

a little bit of sugar


… attracts more flies than vinegar, or something like that. Now that things seem poised to tip down South – because if lynching a government census worker is just unrest as usual then there has been a serious lowering of the tolerance for dissent – I think it might be time for the media mongerer’s to couch their distaste, ridicule and hatred in something uptempo and with a beat that sets toes tapping.