A Duckling at Sea

Getting a feeling that your two-year-old has more sense than you do isn't pleasant. I had that feeling at a party for my daughter's fifth birthday. 

Jon at another party, probably the same year.

I've never known why the face-painter put that

dot on his forehead. Photo copyright protected.

My then-husband and I threw this party with the parents of one of our daughter's friends whose birthday was at about the same time. Since we were saving money by splitting the costs, the four of us decided to spring for a moon bounce. This one was purple and built to look like a storybook castle. 

That moon bounce was the delight of every moppet at the party; they were jumping, tumbling and fanny-dropping within its mesh-y, net confines and squealing with delight. But by the end of the day, the moppets were tired and the moon bounce sat empty as the children ate or entertained themselves more sedately elsewhere. 

One of the other mommies at the party slipped over to me and whispered, "The moon bounce is empty and the rental company's on its way to get it. Let's go play in it!" And even though my fellow mommy and I were curvy, good-sized women, we saw nothing amiss in the two of us frolicking in the moon bounce as though we were forty-pound five-year-olds.     

We left the house and giggled ourselves over to the side yard where the moon bounce sat, seemingly glum. The sunlight, which earlier gleamed from its purple hide, was now dimming into dusk. It was obvious to us that the moon bounce was lonely and needed two grown women in it, so we slipped off our shoes and clamored in. I was surprised at how much work it was to hop around in there, and though I was getting winded, I was having fun. A few minutes later, my son, Jon who was two, toddled over and laboriously hauled himself up into the moon bounce.

"Hi, there, Jon!" I called. The exertion and bouncing made my words come out in breathy chunks. He sat near the moon bounce entrance, rolling and bobbing, a duckling at sea. "Did you come to bounce with us?"
     
"Uh-huh," he smiled. He struggled to gain his footing but fell on his bottom every time one of us mommies landed; still, he remained good-natured about it. 

Suddenly, the other mommy lost her balance. She fell backward into the net wall which proceeded to stretch several feet in an ominous, yawning bulge then snap back to fling her across the entire width of the moon bounce. She slammed against the opposite wall which also stretched and bulged before flinging her in a sweaty heap to the middle of the moon bounce floor.

Jon, still on his fanny, placidly watched as the mommy went hurtling. Then he looked at me calmly, the lips on his little gnome face parted, and he spoke these very wise words: "I gettin' outta here, Mommy."

With that, he flipped onto his tummy, swung his legs out of the moon bounce, and with a little thump, plopped onto the grass. He padded away leaving me with the troubling notion that there went a two-year-old who had more smarts than his mother. 

And I wondered how many years I had before he'd notice.  

Be it Ever So Humble and Odd

One day, when my gal-pal, Lyle and I were still raising babies and up to our ears in diapers and baby food, she said to me, "Sometimes I wonder how many weird things there are about my house that other people notice and I don't."

Image copyright, Teece Aronin

After she said that, I wondered too, especially since we were at my house when she said it. I still wonder years later, just in a different house. I no longer have raising babies as an excuse, but still, life gets hectic, my kids couldn't care less if our house looks like we just hosted a frat party, and I'm not very handy. You get the drift.

As I write this, there is a cobweb growing ever bigger on the front porch, as if our house were practicing for Halloween. There is duct tape wrapped around the kitchen faucet, and the kitchen waste basket is in the pantry, one step down from the rest of the kitchen and out of reach of everyone but giraffes and orangutans, because when we put it anywhere else, the dog gets into it and trots the contents all over the house.

The paint is peeling off several of our interior doors, but only at about six inches up the outside edges because that is where the cats squeeze their paws in to open doors that aren't quite latched. If we were to shut the doors more tightly when we want privacy, the paint would be peeling off the outside of the doors in whichever bottom corner the door knob is on because that is where the cats "knock." Since they tend to "knock" with their claws, we can tell which of us is most popular with them by comparing the number of scratch marks. 

There are two large pieces of plywood lying in my driveway, placed there by the restoration company before they deposited a garbage dumpster over them last winter; that was because the basement had flooded. I keep meaning to call the company to have the plywood removed but I'm too busy knocking down the cobwebs and wrapping duct tape around the faucets. Household maintenance can be demanding.

Our car has idiosyncrasies too. There is a towel covering the front passenger seat because during a girls' weekend last spring, I forgot one of the weekend's many candy bars in there and it melted. Then there was a period of several weeks where the trunk wouldn't latch because I had broken it trying to attach a bungee cord, and since it didn't fly up and nothing was getting wet in there when it rained, I let it go until the car was smashed up (not my fault) and it had to be in the shop anyway. The only thing that got tiresome about not having the trunk latch were all the people pointing it out to me that my trunk wasn't latched. Sounding appreciative when you're actually annoyed is annoying in its own right. I wanted to say, "Oh, thank you, but it's fine. It's been like that ever since I stuffed my ex-husband's body in there last fall."

Anyway, I suppose life is like that for everyone to some extent. It's easy to get used to little oddities until we're barely aware of them. 

I hardly noticed that body in the trunk until I bought a bookcase at Ikea.

My Smart TV

I am a baby boomer, and as such, hold dear memories of when watching television did not require a certification in electronics. 

When I grew up we had two televisions, a Zenith and a Philco. Both sets were black and white, and the Philco swiveled on a base with four wooden legs. The picture swiveled too and couldn't be trusted to stay in one place for more than a few seconds. When The Outer Limits' announcer said, "We will control the horizontal, we will control the vertical," I'd shout the eight-year-old's version of, "Oh, thank God!" 

When I was growing up, we had seven television channels, and switching around within them was a breeze, even though, until the advent of the TV remote, one had to get up off one's fanny to change channels, and actually touch the set, which made TV viewing at least somewhat interactive and one way to get a little exercise. 

Once remotes came along, the couch potato was born, and it was possible to flop down on your sofa and channel surf for hours. 

A neighbor of my aunt failed to grasp the intention behind the remote and would get up, walk to the TV, pick up the remote from on top of the TV, change the channel, put the remote back down and return to her chair. But at least she wasn't a couch potato. She was no genius either. 

Today, unlike some of their owners, TVs are "smart." My TV said right on the box that it was smart, but I attribute this to the fact that smart TVs are often arrogant and boastful. Being complicated, difficult and frustrating doesn't make you smart. 

At any given moment, my kids and I might be using our "streaming stick" (something that sounds like it should be a home pregnancy test) to watch a show and then need our game-pad to access what we want to watch next. When I was young, the most technically advanced procedure we might have to perform on a TV was adjusting the rabbit ears on top. 

I need my kids in order to watch television because I'm so dumbfounded by all the equipment needed to watch one stupid TV show. In my defense, even my son referred to one of our recent TV tech add-ons as "that cable thing we just got." 

Last night both kids were going to be away so my daughter got me all set up to watch HGTV. She was going out the door when I asked how to change channels. Syd said, "I'm sorry, Mom, but I think we'll have to wait until I have more time." 

Then she left me all alone with the TV and all the "stuff" that goes with it. 

The first thing that went wrong was the audio getting out of sync with the video. My son tells me this is because we have a cheap internet service provider. Eventually the show I was watching shut down altogether and a message appeared on the screen saying: "Due to inactivity, playback was stopped to save bandwidth."

I sat bolt upright, clutched my bag of chips and yelled, "Whadda ya mean inactive?" And isn't TV all about inactivity unless you're an actor in Sons of Anarchy? Was I supposed to be wired to the TV so it could monitor my heart rate? If it was so smart, why didn't it just walk over and feel my pulse? 

After Syd got home, we wanted to switch to Hulu for Parks and Recreation, and it was another big process just to do that. I watched with envy as her little fingers danced around all the stuff and like a miracle, Parks and Recreation came on.

"Syd, do you think you can ever teach me how to watch TV without help?" I asked.

"Oh, sure, Mom," she said. But she said it like I'd just asked if there was a chance I'd ever build my own spaceship, and she didn't have the heart to tell me it was hopeless. Still, I'm optimistic. 

But I'm saving my receipt from the Acme Rocket Ship Company just in case. 

Starstruck Marta and the Torch Song

Their names were Marta and Joe. They were born in Poland before 1920 and met in the U.S. while still very young. According to Marta, they’d been married forever.

Image copyright, Teece Aronin

I met them in 1980, I believe. It was when they showed up at the Hollywood Hills office of Forrest J Ackerman, whose many idiosyncrasies included shunning the period after his middle initial. He was a literary agent and editor of "Famous Monsters of Filmland," a magazine children had been clamoring for since 1958. I worked for him during my summer vacations from college. 

Marta was slim, almost frail, and elegant with her soft voice, her white, free-flowing hair and her loose and gauzy garments. Joe fit her perfectly. Slim, neatly dressed, and with a pencil mustache, he could have been a movie director in the silent age of Hollywood - and she a leading lady. 

Unaware of Forry's sci-fi and horror niche, they had come hoping to find a literary agent for a book of poems by Marta. They were about her heart, her husband, her sons, her gratitude, and the buckets of wonder she could wring from a single ray of sunlight.

That sunlight was important because Marta was supposed to be deep down in the dark by now. She had been ill for most of her adult life with a heart condition doctors said would kill her before she could grow old. They also said she should never have children, but she defied the doctors and the odds, acing pregnancy with the birth of a healthy son. One of her poems was about the bright and perfect joy of hearing that baby cry for the first time.

Soon after, Marta aced another pregnancy and gave birth to another healthy son. Joe stood by her through it all, doting and protective. Joe, who had survived a pogrom and seen someone killed right in front of him, found himself partnered for life with a woman whose experience with death was just as threatening and, astonishing as it sounds, far more personal because the threat came from her own heart.

The couple was in their late sixties the day I met them, and they proceeded to “adopt” me, this apple-cheeked college kid from the Midwest. One Friday, they ventured from their home, a sleek, one-level mid-century modern in the California desert, to L.A. to pick me up for the weekend. Settled in for the evening, Marta, who adored Joe's voice, begged him to sing for us. Eventually he gave in with an acapella performance of an old torch song about the agonies of love, "I’ve Got to Pass Your House to Get to My House."

A little recent Googling revealed some history on that strange song I’d never heard before and hadn’t heard since. Released in 1934 on the Columbia label, it was recorded by a young Bing Crosby. The genre was "pop," which is a little hard to believe when you hear the song. 

That weekend was filled with white wine, delicious food and talk of everything from sex (which I had yet to experience), to desert weather, to writing, and there was lots of talk of writing. It was one of the first times anyone had treated me as a fully formed adult equal.

They both had so much to say, and every other word wore a fresh coat of grace. As to that old song, it may have been recorded by Bing Crosby, but you haven't heard it until you've heard it sung by Joe to a thrilled and starstruck Marta.