Legs

When I was about 10 years-old, it occurred to me that I didn't like my legs. It happened as I was shooting them a sideways glance in a department store mirror and was horror-struck thinking that I had no kneecaps. 

Legs in the Skirt, copyright Teece Aronin. Available on
products at Redbubble.com/people/phylliswalter. 

In that place where my knees were supposed to bow gracefully outward, they didn't; it was as if my “knee yeast” never rose. I pointed this out to my mother who replied with that time-honored retort of mothers everywhere: "You're fine."

Of course, that experience in the department store wasn't enough to deter me from saying you're fine when my own kids complained. Karma bit me for it when I said, "You're fine" to my son minutes before he threw up all over his suit, his shoes, and the interior of my new car on the way to my aunt's funeral.

But that day in the department store did inspire me to buy my swimsuits online as soon as the technology became available.

The other thing is that I have big legs and "cankles," the seamless merge of ankles and calves. My biggest complaint about my cankles is that they make it hard to buy comfortable ankle socks. I'll bet there are enough women with cankles that if someone were to design the cankle sock, that person would make a fortune. I think the biggest argument for cankle socks is that they would be big enough to never get lost in the dryer. 

I haven't worn a dress, pantyhose, and heels at the same time in ages, but I remember that those three items, worn together, did great things for my legs. I still had big legs, but they were big, SEXY legs. Even the cankles stopped being cankles and transformed into the legs’ equivalent to great cleavage.  

My mother's legs were a lot like mine, and my father was crazy about her legs all their lives together. He loved to tell the story about the day he was following her up a steep stairway on his way to meet my grandmother and aunts for the first time. He said my mother kept nervously glancing down at him and clutching the hem of her skirt tight around her legs. He found her bashfulness endearing. 

A while back I was dating a man who said to me, "Your legs are perfectly fine."  

"True," I said, "They move, and they manage to support my weight."

 And I wonder why I'm single. 

He rolled his eyes. "You have what I think of as rich legs, and they're beautiful." When he said that, I got weak in my nonexistent knees. 

So, I'm going to rewrite that old song, When a Man Loves a Woman to sing to myself as needed. I'm calling it, When a Woman Loves Herself and Her Cankles.  

Is it My Fault He Was a Fraud?

I love men, but like unrefrigerated mayo at a Fourth of July picnic, men don't love me back. 

I'm still sorting out an experience where there was enough of what I can only call malevolent relationship weirdness going on that for just a minute, I wondered if it was my fault.  

Was it my fault that after nearly a year of dating a man, he told me something jaw-droppingly "surprising" about himself (no, he wasn't married) followed by his unilateral decision that this issue was too big an obstacle for a continued relationship? And all just one week after encouraging me to be freer with him? 

When he told me all this I cleverly pointed out: "But this is just one week after you encouraged me to be freer with you." 

It seems that when I became freer with him, I became happier with him and we couldn't have that in part because the surprise he'd just shared, aka the bomb he'd just dropped,  might not be conducive to my continued happiness. 

When asked, "Why didn't you tell me this sooner?" he replied, "Because you couldn't have handled it sooner."

Interesting how Jack Nicholson here knew what I couldn't handle when I'd handled much bigger bombs from much better men. 

"What do you want to say to me?" he asked, dipping his head tenderly to one side so that it appeared he really cared.

"I have nothing to say to you," I replied.

"Well, if you did have something to say to me, what would it be?" he coaxed.

I won't quote myself here because my response was lengthy and contained a lot of Fs. 

He smiled and said he understood.  

It would be a huge leap for me to imagine how this man could profess to know what I could or could not deal with much less understand how I felt. For me it had as much to do with the deceit I perceived as the revelation itself.  

And that's where I come in again: Was this somehow my fault?

Maybe it was and maybe this is the reason: Maybe I just happened to attract a man who knew not that his secret was something I couldn't handle, but that it was something I should never have to handle. And instead of being open with it, or better yet, not pursuing me in the first place, he helped himself to almost a year with me under false pretenses.

In short, maybe I'm the reason because I'm the one who just happened to attract a fraud.

A Man, or a Building, Like That

Recently I lost someone I had come to love. Oh, it’s alright in the sense that he didn’t actually die, but he’s gone just the same.

Building Down 

Image byTeece Aronin

If I imagine my life as a skyline, the building that was this man is gone from it. There is an ugly gap such as one sees after a building is demolished, brought down in that clever way demolition experts use.

You’ve seen film footage of these detonations, I’m sure. There is a countdown, a roar, and the building collapses onto itself like an accordion dangled by one strap and then dropped. This method of demolition minimizes the risk that someone will get hurt. 

It was this same building, just weeks ago, that pounded the mattress with his fist as he laughed himself sick at my jokes, who found it endearing and not annoying when, because of my bad driving, I smashed the pristine snow in his yard. Now I grieve the gentle, funny, fallen building, and I dread the morning light where the gap in the skyline is so jarringly evident.

Nights are somehow better. Darkness blacks out the skyline, and I almost forget for a while, curled up inside the evening chatter of my children.

Writer C.S. Lewis lost his wife, Joy Davidman to bone cancer. His book, A Grief Observed, was based on notes he made as he mourned her. Said Lewis: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

If grief feels like fear, it is because so much of grief is fear. This grief of mine fears that now, when it rains, instead of dashing into my warm, sound building, I'll stand outdoors instead, lost and abandoned, a weeping clod. My pain will stick to my body like a see-through second skin, and parts I'd shown only to him, will gleam in the wet, public light.

It is the fear that now I'll have to find someone else with a van and as much patience as my lost one had to help me haul home that sofa from the thrift store to replace the one the dog chewed up. And this replacement person must be someone I can sleep next to, blissful, as he drives, even though I know I look drunk or anesthetized or in some other slack-faced way, compromised when I sleep.

Where do I go to find a man or a building like that, and to whom will I offer up my love, with the exception of my children, because my love for them will be hardwired and unconditional forever? Was, is, and is forevermore. 

If there are angels, protectors who watch over us, wanting what is best for us, do times like these test them, too? Do they blame themselves, as if symbolic deaths and imploding buildings were a ball they should have caught, but dropped?

I will find my way through this grief, and since he is grieving too, I hope he also finds his way. Then I will offer my friendship. When we have stopped grieving, I will offer him that, and maybe we can try each other on for a different kind of fit.

I hold tight to the ability to grieve. I wear it like a badge earned many times over, and I see it as hope that hurting deeply means living deeply. 

The alternative of not living, someone told me, is deadly. And the alternative of not living deeply, I tell myself, is worse than death.

But again, if you know this answer, please tell me: Where do you go to find a man, or a building, like that?

Wet Bread - If the Great Flood Really Happened, It So Should've Happened Like This

According to something I just read online (although shockingly, it might be one of the few online pieces not to be completely accurate), one of the most ambitious plans ever masterminded by God, was nearly botched. If the snafu hadn't been caught in time, someone God intended to survive the Great Flood would have been killed, which, if we take the story literally, would have altered the future of mankind. I'm not sure if this is part of the Hebrew Scriptures or not. If it is, then this is old news. Still, I didn't know about it so maybe you didn't either.

Noah's Ark
Copyright, Teece Aronin

Now, I have no intention of getting all religious on you, but I will acknowledge that, of course, many people believe God is perfect and by extension so are His plans. So I'm not even going there. I'm simply sharing what I read which was that, for some reason - God only knows why - God told Noah to destroy the first person to announce the flood's onset. But when Noah's daughter-in-law, Aphra was baking bread, water suddenly poured from the oven. 

Understandably, Aphra exclaimed that the flood was commencing, and since she happened to be the first to do so, God had to quickly shift gears so Noah wouldn't kill her. In God's plan, Aphra had to survive to help repopulate the earth post-flood.

So, I got to thinking: How might all this have gone down, and what gears might God have shifted to save Aphra from a terrible fate? Consider this possible scenario:

It's a hot, humid day and the forecast is calling for rain. Aphra stands in the kitchen about to take a loaf of bread from the oven. She is cranky, not only because it's hot, but because she's pregnant, has a headache, and the oven hasn't worked right for days. 

But mostly, Aphra is cranky because her husband, Ham, and a bunch of kooks, specifically Ham's father and two brothers, are next door in the backyard - again - hammering away - still - and the father, the biggest kook in the bunch, is claiming he will save them all, plus a whole boatload of animals, from a flood. Now really, how asinine is that? 

Young Aphra and Ham live next door to Ham's parents, Noah and Emzara, and this has been a sticking point for much of their marriage because Aphra detests the region's swampy summers. Noah and Emzara moved to this area, popular with seniors, when they retired, and Aphra resents Ham for dragging her here too. Ham exhibits an almost sappy adoration for his parents, but Aphra finds them intrusive and preachy. Today, every noisy smack from a hammer is making her resentment stronger and her headache thumpier. Some linguists believe that this is where the term "pounding headache" comes from.

Anyway, since construction began on that thing next door, Ham's two brothers and their wives have been staying with him and Aphra. And lately, animals have been brazenly strolling in from outside, putting their feet up on the furniture and smelling up the house.

Now Aphra stands in the kitchen, blowing her bangs out of her eyes. A cloth is tied around her hair to keep it out of her way but a loose, raven-colored lock has escaped the cloth to stick against the back of her sweaty neck.

She remembers what the locals say, that it isn't the heat, it's the humidity, and that's certainly the case today. The air is suffocating, and Aphra muses that one could practically drown just from breathing. She dismisses the thought as crazy. No one would be drowning around here anytime soon. And there wasn't going to be any stupid flood either. God, Noah was such a nut-ball.

With impulsive fury, Aphra goes to the kitchen window and yells in the direction of her in-laws' backyard. Immediately, all hammering halts, and every man freezes dead in his tracks, straining to hear. Ever since the ark, they've all been living in similar doghouses so this could have been the shriek of any one of their wives. As each man prays it isn't his, there comes another shout:

"Ham! I said, get your @$$ in here!" 

With the exception of Ham, all the men sigh with relief, and construction resumes. Ham straightens and looks in the direction of his prize donkey grazing in their backyard. Why would Aphra want him to bring it in the house? Then the realization dawns: Ham is the @$$ his wife is yelling for.

A momentary sadness darkens Ham's gentle features. He is embarrassed by his wife's public use of coarse language. Would she kiss her mother with that mouth? And his own mother would never say such things. Still, Aphra is a sweet, good natured girl overall so he will overlook this one small flaw.

"Coming, honey!" he calls. "Be right back," Ham tells the others. Striving to be cheerful, Ham heads for home. But once in the house, he sees his wife's expression and all hope is dashed.

"What?" he asks.

"When are you going to realize that I matter more than that crackpot out there?" Aphra wants to know.

"Baby," Ham answers imploringly, "that's my dad. Please don't talk like that. He's been nothing but good to me all my life."

"Really? Then why did he name you Ham?" his wife shoots back. "You are named after the meat of an unclean beast. What kind of father names his son after something filthy and disgusting?"

Ham winces. He has wondered this himself. His parents are strict Jews. Why would his father have named him Ham? And even if the idea was his mother's, why would his father have allowed it?  

"Well, I'm sure there was a good reason," says Ham. The defense is as weak as his manhood.

"Yeah, right!" his wife barks. "And here's another thing: I want you to stop messing around with that dumb boat!"

"Uh, actually honey, it's an ark," Ham corrects with instant regret.

"Alright - ARK!" Aphra roars like a pregnant, hormone-riddled fire-breathing dragon. "Do you have any idea how many things need fixing around here? Take that oven for instance! You've been promising to fix it for days, but no! The ARK comes first! You fix that oven and you fix it now!"

With that, Aphra yanks on the oven door and a huge rushing gush of water erupts from the opening, smacks into the couple's faces and soaks them before spilling to the floor.

"Jesus, Mary and Joseph!" Aphra yells, then wonders dimly who those people might be and why she would be yelling their names. "It's the . . ."

Knowing his father will kill the first person to announce the flood, Ham clamps a hand over his wife's mouth then tells Aphra for once in her life to just shut the  #*?% up. And since he's on a roll, he tells her to lighten up on the G#??*&n swearing. 

Ham lifts Aphra into his arms and hustles her over to his parents' backyard where everyone jumps aboard the freshly completed ark. Aphra looks embarrassed, and some linguists believe that this is where the term sheepish comes from.

"I'm sorry, Ham," she says. "You were right. There really is going to be a fl . . ." 

Hams's hand shoots out like lightening to silence her again, accidentally bumping her head against a signpost pointing the way to Alligator Alley.   

For some reason not clear to Aphra, seeing her bump her head makes her husband smile.

And some linguists believe that this is where the term happy accident comes from. 

Emile, Are You There? It's Me, Nellie!

When my marriage ended and the dust finally settled, my kids told me I should try online dating. Inwardly I groaned, but I have to admit, I was curious. It had been nearly 20 years since I'd last dated; my mind, face, body, my very psyche for that matter were different now - in some ways better and in some ways not. What kind of men would I attract? Would I attract any? Who might be out there who would make sense as the other half of a couple with me?

When I met my ex-husband, my weight was a healthy 140 pounds or so and I was in my late thirties. But during my second pregnancy at age 43, I developed gestational diabetes, a condition which resolved itself after the birth of the baby, but which had left my metabolism so wildly out of control, that my weight ballooned to over 250 pounds. Despite consulting an endocrinologist, and doing everything she told me to do, including exercise, the most weight I ever lost at any given time was six pounds - honest: six pounds. And every time I lost those six pounds, they would fly back and wrap themselves around me faster than you can say, "big mama."

I'm sure the life stressors we all cope with were part of the problem, too, and that I sought too much solace at the bottom of a bag of chips, but overall, I tried very hard to eat in a way which should have landed me at a healthy weight but just couldn't seem to succeed.

Eventually, I opted for bariatric surgery and my weight dropped to something somewhere in the chunky range. Then divorce stressors replaced family stressors and I lost about thirty pounds without even meaning to. So when my kids started nudging me towards online dating, I was thinner than I could ever remember being as an adult; about a size eight. But that weight fluctuation had led to a confused self-image, so I often stared in hard-blinking amazement at pictures of the handsome men approaching me on the dating sites I'd chosen. Why were they attracted to me, I wondered. I won't mention the sites by name, but they rhyme with Scratch.com and No Way, Stupid.

But it's funny (and not in the hah-hah way) that I could learn so much about the mysteries of physical attraction at such a late stage of life; sometimes more than I wanted to. Some men who reached out to me online seemed to think the heavens had opened up to deposit me in front of them. Then again, one man I dated struggled with his lack of physical attraction to me while feeling very connected to me "emotionally and intellectually."

Hearing this hurt, so when he finally managed to articulate this concern, I grappled for my dignity, sat up straight in my pen and demurely folded my hooves atop my udder. And it was a herculean effort to limit my weeping to only one set of my six eyes.

Then, one night he and I had dinner with his sister who was chatting me up as we waited for a table. "So you met my brother on Scratch.com?"

"That's right," I smiled.

"I never had any luck on Scratch," she mused.

"Neither did I," I said. 

And then we all laughed and laughed and laughed. I was joking - mostly, but zinging him a little felt good. I have to say, though, that knowing him was very much worth the jab to my ego and he proved himself a wonderful friend. And one of my most honest, damn him.

But really . . . Who can explain it? Who can tell you why? Fools give you reasons; wise men never try. Oh, wait, that was Emile De Becque serenading Nellie Forbush in South Pacific. Some Enchanted Evening was the song. And that was physical attraction the way it should be.

Now, if I could just find my Emile De Becque, I might even be willing to change my name to Nellie Forbush. Then again, maybe just Nellie.