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My Husband Gives Hickeys


To me by the way. He is not in the business of hickey placement on anyone other than me. Just wanted to clear that up from the get-go.

 

When first we met, in person, and things got heated (okay, burst into flames), I made mention of the fact that I bruise pretty easily. Being a high school teacher at the time, I didn’t need to show up at work with hickeys.  Correction. I didn’t want to show up at work with noticeable love bites on my neck. (An aside here, I love when Olympia Dukakis’s character rags on her grown daughter, played by Cher, for having “love bites” on her neck the morning after she has been shagging mightily with her fiancé’s younger brother ( You… you got a love bite on your neck. He’s coming back this morning, what’s the matter with you? You’re life’s going down the toilet! Cover up that damn thing! Come on, put some make-up on it!). It is an awesome mother/daughter exchange and my favorite movie by far, which is weird given the fact that it came out nearly two decades before I became a widow myself -Cher’s character is a widow – FYI). Okay, back to topic. I didn’t want my students to see aggressive kissing evidence on my neck. Not because I was not entitled, as grown woman, to engage in consensual lovemaking with my boyfriend, and then fiancé, but because I wasn’t married and the kids knew it. No matter what you say to kids about the difference between adults who can take care of themselves engaging in sex and teenagers – who are still trying to either pull their heads out of their asses or wipe the shit from the eyes  –  it still pays to claim the moral high ground literally with them. This applies even when you aren’t, in fact, being all that moral. Teens will do what you do only because everything that comes out of your mouth sounds like, “Blah, blah, blah and blah.” That’s why I had colleagues who had miserable times with their students. They were rude and bossy and couldn’t figure out why they got that back in kind. And it’s simple. They do as you do. So fake it, even if you aren’t doing what you are telling them they should be.  The second reason I didn’t want love bites, is that I didn’t want to be teased by any of the adults that I knew. Co-workers mostly. Not that I didn’t get a little ribbing about the whirl-wind romance and the whole Internet meet-up thing, but there are just some things I considered too much information. Really?! You ask. You?! To which I reply – don’t mock. On the screen I am fearless, but in person I am so shy and introverted you might wonder if I write this stuff or someone is just pretending to be me. (You might also ask why anyone would want to pretend to be me but that isn’t today’s topic.)

 

I noticed the bruises last night when I got up to pee. Damned middle-aged thing but also, I don’t find UTI’s fun. I hoped that they were just the result of the recentness and would fade by morning, but alas – no. Of course by morning, I had forgotten and in my rush to get my workout done, I took off for the gym without even combing my bed head out. I must have looked the sight dropping off my little girl at the child minding. Disheveled and sporting love bites. Left no doubt as to what I had been up to the night before (or even that morning for all they knew). Rob redirected my attention to them at lunch. And being reminded, I scolded him. I also recalled for him the fact that he once told me that he didn’t give hickeys because they were crass and immature. That was in response to my original warning about the ease with which I bruise. He was sheepish but ultimately unrepentant and tried to conveniently weasel out of the, now, numerous instances of hickyage he has bestowed on me since I retired from teaching last June. You might wonder if I have been able to leave my mark on him, but sadly, I have not. His swarthy Hungarian heritage protects him and I, apparently, haven’t the bite to match my bark. (By the way, I do not bark at any time during sex. It was just a metaphor).

 

Since I had errands to run in Sherwood Park after dropping Katy at school, I needed to camouflage said love bites. I don’t own much by way of make-up. I don’t use foundation because it just accentuates wrinkles. So, I took my hair out of its workout bun and hoped it would hide the “evidence” or at the very least shadow it a bit. Later as I chatted with Rob, he reminded me again that he has never given me a single hickey and that any love marks were probably the work of an incubus. You know that you are a fortunate woman indeed when your husband can come up with a cover story like that one.

 

I guess that I shouldn’t mind. After all, I could be one of those women whose husbands prefer porn to the real thing or don’t take the time to do a thorough even job to even leave a mark. It could be one of those 15 or 20 minute once a week jobs that even have an assigned day of the week  like lawn mowing or putting out the trash. Hickeys are a sign of heat and being lost in flames. I should wear my hair up on purpose on days like today. Flaunt them like a new tattoo. 

St. Patrick Isn’t as Irish as I Am


My daughter was asking me today about St.Patrick and why he needed to drive away snakes. I was getting her ready for school at the time, selecting the proper combination of green to ward off pinches. I keep forgetting that her in Canada it is not verboten to discuss religion in schools, so Katy is often reciting to me the public school version of my own Catholic school education. To tell the truth, I don’t remember the circumstances that led up to Patrick’s expelling of the snakes. Patrick was not Irish but a missionary from Britain trying to convert the heathen Irish. His snake trick has more ties to the paganism in practice there at the time to anything he may have actually done. I told Katy I didn’t remember why which prompted another question. Ignorance is not an out. She just keeps asking questions until I know an answer.

 

“How did he drive out the snakes?”

 

“Magic.”

 

“Who helped him?”

 

“God.”

 

“So God was his assistant?”

 

I had to smile. It’s an odd way to put it but in a way she is right. God is just there for the assist. Everything else is up to us.

 

“That’s right.”

 

“Who is God?”

 

“He’s the one who created the universe.”

 

“How’d he do that?”

 

“I have no idea.”

 

This time she let me off the hook. Perfectly green and sure of her Irishness, she bounced off.

 

I’d forgotten that it was the 17th.  St.Patrick’s isn’t one of those holidays I paid much attention to even as a child. As a teacher, I took care to remember the days when I was expected to wear specific colors, but the emphasis on drinking that is so heavily associated with the day where I grew up and where I settled as an adult, really turned me off to marking the holiday beyond color coordination. One of the things that struck me about today this year was that Katy knew she was Irish. She is more Irish in ethnic heritage than she is any thing else thanks to me. But, this is relatively new information. When I was a child and a teen, I wore green not really knowing if I was Irish in any part at all. Being adopted, I did what I had always done which was to adopt my parents genetic make-up as my own even though I was clearly different in most aspects from the physical to the intellectual to personality. I was in college when I learned that I was indeed half Irish though I suspected from my red hair and fair skin that I likely was. Still, it was such a big deal to be able to say that my ancestors came from Ireland. Mine. Not the ones I borrowed. People who gave me a true genetic link to that far away island.

 

It’s just an odd thing that came to me today in an innocent moment with my child.

Playlists for Wankers


Nowadays I am a playlist girl with my beloved iPod and my click and drag iTunes catalog, but back in the day when Walkman still ruled I was all about mix tapes. I didn’t even know that there was a word for what I was doing then. I would sit with my tape recorder positioned next to the radio to catch my favorite songs as they came up on American Top Forty countdown every Sunday afternoon. I am not even sure where the idea to first do this came from either. I don’t think anyone showed me or told me what to do. It was an instinctive pre-teen thing. Popular music and adolescence have a long history. As the technology, such as it was in the 1980’s improved, I eventually had a boom box with a double cassette deck, which allowed me to tape tapes and capture singles as best I could from FM radio. I was good at that too. A quick finger, I seldom missed much past the opening bar or two of any song I wanted to record. But, I wasn’t much of a mixer. My tapes were eclectic to say the very least. Even when my next upgrade to a boom box with a CD player and a double cassette allowed me to organize, I didn’t often take the time. I wasn’t someone who made tapes for her friends or crushes. Until I met my husband Rob, I’d never been the recipient of someone’s musical taste either. Sharing music is an intimate thing you know. It is revealing of those things about you that no one suspects. Your passions. Your odd sense of humor. Where you find meaning and where you were at different stages of your life.

 

During my new hobby of periodic trolling for interesting blogs to read and share, I sometimes employ the tag surfer. It will bring up the latest blog entries that correspond to the many tags I have checked off on my search page. One of these searches revealed a piece on play lists about songs that refer to masturbating. That is something I have frankly never thought needed a soundtrack, but I recognized many of the songs the blogger had listed. 80’s songs, a lot of them that took me back to college days: She-Bop by Cyndi Lauper I remember was such a big deal because it was about a girl and even in our twenties, none of my friends at the time would admit to doing such a thing. We were all such prudes really and this in spite of the predatory sexual attitudes that were just becoming the vogue for young women. We would talk all racy and raunchy about sex and guys, but couldn’t talk about ourselves anymore than we could ask for what we wanted from the guys we dated. As I remember it, unless we were drinking (heavily) we couldn’t even sing songs like She-Bop and I Touch Myself in the company of anyone. Songs about guys doing themselves were different. Dancing with Myself and Turning Japanese were double entendre enough we could ignore what they meant because, well, they didn’t mean us anyway and everyone knew that guys did nothing but jack off, right?

 

I have to admit that the idea of a self-wanking playlist isn’t on the top of my list of things to listen to as I mainly use the iPod for working out.  But the idea of a sex mix isn’t a bad one. Rob used to send me love songs during our long distance days. He would attach them to his emails. Desperately Wanting and Got You Where I Want You. Mark Knopfler’s Prairie Wedding is still one of my favorites. Our first weekend together at the Holiday Inn Express in Idaho Falls was soundtracked by A Perfect Circle primarily but also an interesting variety of heavy metal and rock. Nights on the sofa, before its lice infestation and subsequent banishment to the Clover Bar Landfill, were accompanied by the satellite music provider Max Trax, The Edge – mostly because the windows were always open and we are loud. I can’t say if any of the songs were romantic or even remotely related to sex or making love, because there is a difference. It was loud and pulsating. Like those long ago days of dancing until sweat drenched in the clubs of Iowa City. Primal and urgent and out of breath, knowing that the next day you were going to feel it in muscles you didn’t know you had.

 

Funny the images that music will bring to the forefront even when it’s just a list of long forgotten tunes.