Not in My Wildest Dreams

Late middle age has crept up on me, and I can still honestly say it is the most terrifying nightmare I've ever had. In it, I am at a wake for my maternal grandparents. In reality, my grandmother died in the mid 1970s and my grandfather, years before her, in the mid-1930s. 

Image by Teece Aronin

At the wake, my grandparents are laid out in a wooden double coffin that looks oddly similar to a piano crate. My grandmother, looking like the 86-year-old she was when she died, is dressed in a snow-white wedding gown. My grandfather appears to be a young man, in keeping with his early death while still in his forties. Although he was not in the military that I know of, he is dressed in a muddy, wool, World War I uniform. It seems he died in battle and is being buried in the uniform he was wearing when killed. His hat lies under his hands which are folded across his stomach. His face and body appear to be those of a worn and battered store mannequin, hard to the touch with telltale chips all over. 

The room is filled with people coming to pay their respects, and suddenly the crowd parts to reveal my grandmother, padding around barefooted. Her wedding gown is gaping in the back like a hospital gown, and she is dragging an IV pole around with her. I look to the piano crate/coffin to see that my grandfather is no longer there either. I'm both shocked and terrified, thinking that if my grandmother could rise from the dead, hop out of a combination piano crate and coffin and scamper off to join the party, there was no telling what my grandfather was up to. 

Then a voice, a sort of Hercule Poirot presence, makes an announcement. He tells the crowd that my grandfather's corpse has been stolen and that both thief and corpse are still somewhere on the premises. 

Like someone who has fought her way to the surface of a deep and murky pond, I smash back into wakefulness. I am shaken but confident that my grandparents are securely ensconced, side by side in the cemetery - and not in one huge double-sized grave - just two nice regular-sized graves - as any long-dead married couple should be.

Losing Our Faith

Faith, my ex-husband's mother, died a few weeks ago - she of the indomitable will and the bottomless spirit, the woman who, despite our differences on so many things, I cared a lot about. Even on those post-divorce days when I'd walk into the laundry room, grateful that she would never again be privy to the messes I squirrel away in there, I still cared.  


Turns out that at the end of her life, when we hadn't seen each other for years, she still cared about me too. 

Whenever the topic of my mother-in-law comes up, I tell people to imagine Joan Rivers. Faith was tiny, even before cancer, and she was viciously made even tinier because of  cancer. 

She was blond, Long Island born and raised, Jewish, whip smart and opinionated - and she could be runway ready with a half-hour's notice. We were so different that the gods of New York must have conspired with the titans of Michigan, laughing themselves sick as they pulled the switches and pushed the buttons that would result in us meeting.  

Sometimes we drove each other crazy, like when she would insist we were running out of gas when we still had half a tank, and I would absentmindedly lock us out of the car - with it running and worse, with just half a tank of gas. 

A few weeks before she died, my ex-husband, Michael asked me to bring the kids to Maryland where Faith lived in a care facility near him. I wasn't sure how she felt about me anymore and wondered how seeing her would go. But when she introduced me to her caregiver, she said, "This is my former daughter-in-law, Teece, who for some reason I'm still very fond of. What can I say; shit happens."  

Hearing that she still cared, I tentatively called her Mom again, and she didn't seem to mind.
She was in a lot of pain and very tired, but when Michael teased her, she'd close her eyes and make the blah-blah sign with her hand, having the last word without speaking. One day when we visited, we brought her a candle in an off-white bisque holder. She couldn't light the candle because she had oxygen tanks in the room, but I knew her well enough to know she'd like it for the bisque holder and for the fragrance. She had us place it on the television stand where she could see it from the chair which was where she now spent nearly every waking hour. 

Since Faith's passing, memories of our 13-plus years together float through my mind. Once, when the kids were small, Faith was with us at a friend's party. For some reason, Michael had driven separately, so on the way home he was in his car, and I was driving Faith and the kids. Suddenly the car took a lurch and thumped down on one side. 

"Oh my God! Did we just have a blowout? We just had a blowout!" Faith yelled. 

"We did not just have a blowout," I said, knowing full-well that we had just had a blowout. But the dread of Faith suspecting we were neglecting our tire maintenance when we had kids to keep safe made me determined to will that tire back into one piece.

"Teece, don't you think you should pull over?" she gasped.

"Nope," I said, "We're fine." 

The car rode like a wheelbarrow without the wheel, and the fact that I kept relentlessly pushing it on was a tribute to the pigheaded attitude I sometimes fell victim to when Faith was involved. 

"Teece, really, don't you think we should stop?" she pleaded, and after a few more seconds, the fact that driving that way was idiotic and a danger to my kids finally sank in and just as my hubcap went winging into parts unknown, I pulled over. Michael pulled over too. 

There was pretty much nothing left on the rim but a few shreds of clinging rubber, so Michael called AAA.

"What about your hubcap?" asked Faith.

"Well, I guess it's lost," I said. To me that was the least of our problems.

"Don't you think we should go look for it?"

I glanced in the direction the hubcap had flown and saw nothing but a guardrail, a treacherous drop and a thick ground-cover of brambles. I looked back at Faith.

"No, I don't think we should go look for it."

"But wait! Down there! Isn't that it?"

Down there, as she put it, was way down there where a faint glimmer of something metallic was barely visible.

"Even if it is, it might as well be on Mars," I answered. 

"I don't mind! I'll see if I can get it!"

"Don't you dare!" I yelled, even as she was scampering off. "You'll kill yourself!" One leg swung over the guardrail and then the other. "It's just a hubcap!" 

Before you could say, "Sir Edmund Hilary, Faith was beginning a sharp descent down the treacherous slope. I couldn't bring myself to watch, I was so sure she'd fall.

I took a peek when I heard a whooping victory cry and saw her at the bottom of the hill, waving the hubcap over her head like a first kill. 

"For crying out loud," I sighed, laughing at the same time, "she's nuts."

Faith clamored up and hopped back over the guardrail, grinning and thrilled that she'd saved us from replacing the hubcap. 

Never once did she lecture me about neglecting my tire maintenance. My fear that she would was just me being part of our problem. 

Now the real problem is that she isn't here anymore.  

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. 

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. 

Clodchunk's Revenge

Ever since Homo erectus struck his first match, mankind has sought satisfaction in the communal consumption of burned, dead things. And when some Neolithic dude or dudette searching for a good buzz discovered alcohol, we were off to the races.

These two pivotal discoveries, fire, and later, alcohol occurred roughly 136,000 years apart, yet each helped pave the way for the modern-day barbecue. Not that there has to be alcohol at barbecues, but if you saw the caliber of folk I hang out with, you'd know it could only help.

So today I started thinking: What was the first barbecue like, the first one with alcohol on hand? This was probably during the Neolithic period, so imagine with me if you will . . .

. . . a sunny day in Asia Minor, a block party is in full-swing and the blocks are granite. The event is a B.Y.O.V. (Bring Your Own Vessel) gathering. Oonka Ugga is scolding her children for bothering their father.

“Goon-Goon! Morsquat! Leave your father alone! You know it takes him forever to build ONE SIMPLE LITTLE FIRE! And you know he’s even slower when people WATCH HIM!”

“But we wanna learn how to build a fire!” whines Goon-Goon.

“Well, you certainly won't learn by watching your father! Now scoot!”

Clodchunk Ugga is a man on his knees, literally and figuratively. Sweat is beading on his brow. A tiny spark kindles amid the leaves and twigs before him. A fragile flame takes hold and Clodchunk Ugga can’t believe his good fortune. Excitedly he blows on the fire and . . . the fire goes out. Clodchunk’s thirty-third time’s a charm, however, and this time the fire leaps to life.

”Hah, Oonka!” he yells derisively, pointing at the flames. “Take that and shove it where the hot and golden ball don’t shine! And while you’re at it, stop belittling me in front of the kids!”

Oonka groans, dismissing her husband with a wave of her dainty, calloused hand. “Oh, puhleeze. People have been building fires for 136,000 years and it took you that long just to build that one! Do you have any idea how slow you are at fire-building compared to Wham-Bam Boom-Boom?”

“Now that’s just great!” yells Clodchunk. “It’s been all of five minutes since the last time you mentioned him! Congratulations, you broke your own record!”

Despite his bravado, Clodchunk feels emasculated. Soon he is pouring his first gourdful of bite-bite juice. Several gourdsful of bite-bite juice later, Clodchunk is itching for a fight and if it turns out to be with Wham-Bam Boom-Boom, why, that's even better.

It’s just a matter of time before Wham-Bam saunters over, all cocky and arrogant-like. He is tall - nearly 5'7" - and his jet black hair stylishly glistens with boars' fat. He sneers at Clodchunk then gives Oonka a long and leering once-over.

“Well, hi there, Oonka.”

“Hello, Wham-Bam,” Oonka demurs, coy and blushing.

Wham-Bam directs his attention to Clodchunk.“Who started that little flicker for ya, Cloddy old boy? Did Goon-Goon do that? Or was it Morsquat?”

Clodchunk pretends to ignore Wham-Bam, squats down near the flames and points. “Hey, wow!” he yells. “A diamond – right there by the fire! Well, will ya look at that!” He reaches toward the flames then jerks his hand back. “Ooh! Ooh! It’s way too hot for me to even touch it! I guess I’m just not man enough!”

Wham-Bam rushes over to where Clodchunk still squats. “Where? Where’s the diamond? I don’t see it!”

“Right there!” Clodchunk bellows, still pointing. “You can’t see that? Why, it’s huge!”

Wham-Bam gets down on his hands and knees, his rump in the air, his face practically in the fire. “I still don’t see it!” he yells.

"It's right - THERE!" grunts Clodchunk, shoving Wham-Bam's head into the flames which instantly singe off Wham-Bam's eyebrows. "Oh, sorry, Wham-Bam. I guess that was nothing but a big - dumb - rock . . . kind of like you."

Alarmed, Oonka hurls a gourdful of bite-bite juice at Wham-Bam’s head in an attempt to cool him down, but the alcohol, combined with the boars' fat and an errant spark, cause his hair to erupt in flames. Explosions can be heard for blocks. A second dousing of bite-bite juice only makes things worse for some reason.

Grinning, Clodchunk jerks a thumb in the direction of Wham-Bam’s smoking, bald head. “Now, that,” he boasts to Goon-Goon and Morsquat, “is how you build a fire!”

Sweet Nothings

Sometimes in marriage it’s all about timing. Take for instance, Melrose and Ed. 

This was the early sixties and Ed worked for one of Southern Michigan’s General Motors assembly plants. He was that era's quintessential “regular Joe." He went to work in clean but faded coveralls and carried a big, black, barn-shaped lunchbox. 

And like a lot of men back then, Ed just might have been a wee bit chauvinistic.

But whatever Ed’s attitudes towards women, they did not include the conviction that after work his place was with his wife. His place, Ed felt, was with his fellow assembly workers at a neighborhood drinking establishment; the cinder-block construction, neon light illumination kind of drinking establishment.

Meanwhile, Ed’s wife, Melrose was the regular wife of the regular Joe. She stayed at home even though the kids were well out of the nest, claiming she was focused on homemaking. And she maybe wasn’t quite as on top of her appearance as when she and Ed first met. 

Melrose might also have had a tendency to meet her husband at the door (on the rare occasions he came straight home) in curlers and a house dress, the bunions on her feet peeking at Ed through threadbare slippers.

So there's a chance that each of them had reason to feel a bit resentful of the other.

One night, Ed was out at the bar knocking back a few while Melrose lay in bed dreaming of Ed’s early demise, so bitter was she over his nocturnal fellowship habits. When Ed came stumbling through the back door, Melrose didn’t hear him. 

This, of course, was before the days of cell phones when a third party could pick up the phone and either join the other two parties or just listen in, provided said person's phone was in the same residence as at least one of the others. 

When the phone rang, it startled them both, Ed in the kitchen and Melrose in the bedroom. They picked up within milliseconds of one another, Melrose assuming it was Ed and Ed with no clue who it was.

They said hello in unison before Melrose yelled: “Where the hell have you been? Do you know what time it is?”

“Hell, yes, I know what time it is!” Ed yelled back. He consulted his watch but it kept swimming around in front of his face. “By the way, what time is it?”

“It’s time your drunken carcass was here where it belongs! Why the hell aren’t you home?”

“What the hell do you mean, why the hell aren’t I home? I am home and damned if it isn’t hell!”

“Well, if you’re home, get your ass in bed!”

“My ass is in bed! It’s name is Melrose!”

“Aw, go to hell!”

“No! You go to hell!”

Ed and Melrose slammed down their receivers.

A few seconds later, Ed’s boss hung up, too.   

A Perfectly Beautiful Son

Mother's Day will be here soon, so I thought I'd reach way down deep in the memory drawer and pull something out that I wrote years ago and haven't looked at in a while.

A picture of me with my own son

A woman once told me about the day when her son, born with cerebral palsy, came into the house upset because some neighborhood kids had been bullying him. She stood with him in front of the full-length mirror she kept in her bedroom and said, "Look at yourself. That's your body and it's beautiful." 

After she told me that story, I wrote this poem for her. I'm sharing it here for all the mothers of children with disabilities. Your children are amazing, and they have made you more amazing too and probably stronger than you ever thought you could be. Happy Almost Mother's Day to all of you.

A Perfectly Beautiful Son

"I'm crippled and useless; the kids say I am."

"You're my perfectly beautiful son."

"Mommy, how can you say that when you know how I look?"

"You're my perfectly beautiful son. You look like your father. You're lucky, my pet. He's handsome and strong. Can't you see? You belong. Be proud, my beautiful son."

"My feet drag on the ground; I fall down all the time."

"You're my perfectly beautiful son. And when you fall down, you get right back up. You've never stayed down and I know you won't now. Get up, my beautiful son."

"My hands always shake; I spill everything."

"You're my perfectly beautiful son. And when your hands shake, I will hold them in mine. It will steady us both; not just you but me, too. Hold tight, my beautiful son."

"My speech comes out funny; people can't understand."

"You're my perfectly beautiful son. And when I hear you speak, I hear magical sounds. The words are so clear and their meanings so dear. Speak out, my beautiful son."

"People think that I'm weak, just because I'm so small."

"You're my perfectly beautiful son. And your heart's grown so strong, how could you be weak? To me you're so mighty, sometimes I can't speak. Stand tall, my beautiful son."

"The kids have been saying I'll wind up alone."

"You're my perfectly beautiful son. You have so much to give and a great life to live. And when the day comes that a girl sees this too, I'll love her so much - but not like I love you. But I'll love her to pieces, and I'll shout to the world, 'My son's found his true love! What a perfectly beautiful girl!"

Me and Martha and Stan and Ollie

It once appeared that I was on a Martha Stewart-like career trajectory, the likes of which have not been seen since - well - since Martha Stewart. 

The birth of my daughter seemed to trigger a hormone-fueled artistic binge and I started painting, took up photography and, most amazing to me anyway, started designing my own hand-painted pillows. When I was making the first two or three, I didn’t even know what the sewing term, “right sides together” meant. I just happened to trip into an explanation of it while watching a craft show on HGTV, to which, now that I was both wife AND mother, I had become doubly addicted. 

In case you’re not a sewer, putting the right sides together means that, in effect, you’re sewing something together inside-out, then, just before you’ve stitched it all the way around, you stick your hand in, turn the item right-side-out and then sew up the last little bit. That way, your stitches don’t show. 

Hearing that explanation of right sides together came as a huge epiphany and explained why most sewn items look the way they do. Who knew? Most people, probably, but that was beside the point because now I knew, too. And now my pillows would be a lot more professional-looking and there would be no stopping me. After I'd made a few more pillows, I asked the opinion of an interior decorator who told me that they were worth over a hundred dollars apiece. Could she have been drunk, I asked myself later. No, I didn't think so. 

I am a great lover of the comedy team, Laurel and Hardy, and one day, I took a piece of cloth and painted onto it their likenesses as they had appeared in The Music Box, a short from 1932. In it, Stan and Ollie struggle to haul a clunky, crated, upright piano up a seemingly endless flight of steps. I never did perfect my Stan, but my Ollie looked just like him, even if I do say so myself. When I finished painting the cloth, I put it in the dryer to set the paint, then sewed it (right sides together) onto another piece of fabric and stuffed it. I really liked this pillow.

One day, I screwed up all my courage, tucked that pillow under my arm and walked into a shop that specialized in movie memorabilia. Timidly, I asked the owner if he would put it up for sale. He looked at the pillow dubiously – I mean, who could blame him. After all, people aren't exactly clamoring for Laurel and Hardy-themed pillows. If he put it in his shop window and a crowd gathered, it would have to be because the pillow had spontaneously combusted. So, he wouldn't buy it from me, but he would display the pillow in the store and give me most of the money if it sold. 

I left the shop feeling as victorious as Martha Stewart must have after her first bake sale because now a new Martha had been born! One day, I would be a guest on Martha's show where she would complement my pillows and I would gush over her edible gold-, silver- and copper-leaf hand-dipped Christmas cookies. Yes I would. Oh, my head was filled with visions of pillows and Martha, of Martha and pillows. 

It wasn't long after, that my then-husband, Michael and I celebrated our wedding anniversary and when Michael presented me with a wrapped bundle, he was apologizing.

“Teece, I hope you’re not insulted or upset. Believe me, I had all the best intentions.”

Now, Michael always said Teece-I-hope-you're-not-insulted-or-upset-Believe-me-I-had-all-the-best-intentions any time he'd just done something insulting or upsetting - or potentially divorce-worthy. But when I opened the gift, my heart filled with love. He had paid $90 for that pillow just so he could give it back to me for our anniversary. 

But wait a minute, that was sweet and touching and all, but if launching my Martha Stewart-style business empire meant my husband was going to be buying back the product line piece by piece, the future of my enterprise looked bleak. But I was fine with this thoughtful gesture. After all, it was a sign of a strong marriage when one spouse cared enough for the other to ruin that spouse's chances at a billion dollar hand-painted pillow empire. And I'd have done the same for Michael. So yes, I was okay with it. 

Anyway, I got the pillow in the divorce. And these days, like the artist who created it, that pillow, as you can see, is a little worse for wear.  The paint is worn and smeary-looking and the pillow itself is now flat and lumpy; again, a lot like the artist. But the pillow has become very special to my daughter who keeps it on her bed. So yes, I am still okay with it. 

And I guess it really is the thought that counts – in this case, all the way up to ninety bucks.