Friday, October 8, 2010

The Imperious and the Obsequious


Ben has a wonderful new teacher this year, who believes that students should actually be challenged.  This week’s spelling words were based on the book that his class is reading in class this month, The Secret Garden.  Since it’s a nineteenth century novel, it has some arcane words (like arcane, I suppose).  I doubt that any of these words are on Georgia’s CRCT exam, and that’s just fine with me – I’ll refrain from jumping up on my soapbox and offering my opinions on standardized tests.  At any rate, Ben came home this week with his list of 10 spelling and vocabulary words.  I was impressed.

Ben is enjoying his new spelling and vocabulary words.  He especially enjoys using them when he talks to his sister.  He has found that his new big words come in handy when he wants to insult her.

“Libby,” he told her in the car today, “I think that you are quite imperious. You’re also surly.  And you’re definitely not obsequious.  Oh yeah, and you’re also massively stout.”

Libby protested.  “I know he’s insulting me, but I don’t know what he’s saying!” 

I played along and refused to translate for her.

Libby decided to exact revenge.  We had been rocking out to “Semi-Charmed Life” by Third Eye Blind when she got a hold of the iPod.  After searching through the music library for a few minutes, she cranked up the volume and turned on… Justin Bieber.

Ben and I howled in protest.  “NO!!”

“Not fair!”  I yelled over the radio.  “You can’t do this to me! I’m collateral damage!”

Then it got worse.  She started to sing along.

Baby, baby, baby, ooh
Like baby, baby, baby ooh
Like….

We howled even louder.

Ben surrendered.  “All right! I take it back!  You are un-massively stout!  You are un-imperious!  I mean it!”

But she wouldn’t turn it off. 

As I write this, she is posting on Facebook, telling all her friends how she got Mama and Ben in the car this afternoon. 

 But I’ll show her imperious little butt. 

I’m putting on Lady GaGa when she gets in the car next time.  And I’m gonna sing along:

P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face
(Mum mum mum mah)
P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face
(Mum mum mum mah)

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Rock of the Marne Race Report: September 19, 2010


Allen and I headed up to Savannah, Georgia on September 19th to race the Rock of the Marne Sprint Triathlon.  I am turning in my race report today.


Rock of the Marne Triathlon Race Report

Fifteen Good Reasons, and One Excellent Reason, Why Rock of the Marne is My New Favorite Triathlon

1.  The name:  “Rock of the Marne Triathlon.”  Even if you didn’t know that “Rock of the Marne” is the nickname of the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, how cool is that for a triathlon name?

2.  It’s the oldest triathlon on the US Mainland. First raced in 1979, as a half-Ironman, by a few guys who got together to swim a little, bike a little, drink a little, then run a little.  Apparently, in that order.

3.  Beer.

4.  From a bottle.

5. Served in a glass.

6.  At 9 in the morning.

7.  It was fun watching Allen try to balance his bike and gear on the way to the car after he had his two beers.

8.  It’s a deep water start in Savannah’s Forest River.  And you get to jump off a dock to get into it.

9.  It’s a flat, fast bike course around the perimeter of Hunter Army Air Field.  And it’s a pretty nice tour of the base, too (and, at the speed I go, the bike really is a “tour” for me).

10.  I got to chat it up in the beer line with a bunch of hottie male triathletes (triathletes get better as they age- grrrrr….).

11.  I beat Allen in the swim- again- even though the last time that I swam was about a month ago (but he whips my ass in everything else, including transition).

12. The race director instructed us not to park in the church parking lot across the street (it’s Sunday) – or you will be “struck DEAD!”

13.  There was no pressure to attempt to place in my age group after I saw the Team USA uniforms on a number of the athletes there, and realized that they just got back from the World Championships….


14. I actually beat the girl on the beach cruiser.

15. We parked at the mall across from the base. It doesn’t get any better than that:  triathlon and shopping.


The Most Excellent Reason:

 It really got me, and I got choked up, when the race director announced, after I crossed the finish line, that I was”… racing in honor of her son-in-law (to be), Sgt Charles Gaines, 3rd Infantry Division, Iraq.”

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Lost Loves, Part II: Please Stay in Florida

Ben has a Lost Love now, too.  It is summer, 2010, and our last day of vacation in the Florida Keys.  We are camping on Sugarloaf Key and we are trying to squeeze every last second out of the day, before we have to pack the Scamp and head home.

Allen and I are heading out into the Bay in our kayaks, to see if it’s possible to paddle out to sea from our campground; Libby is reading or writing or texting or doing all three at the same time.  Ben wants to go to the pool.

Although I am Paranoid Mom, Allen convinces me that there will be other people at the pool and I will not find him at the bottom of it after we finish kayaking. 

He returns, having not drowned, as we are beginning to pack the camper.  He is quiet, and he looks sad.  This is not an uncommon occurrence, since Ben is like me, what you’d call “sensitive.”  Having his Nintendo DS run out of power can cause this kind of behavior with Ben.

Today, we are unable to pry the reason for his angst from him.  He just won’t tell us.  This is serious.

Finally, we throw out a wild guess: “Ben, is this about a girl?”

Bingo.  The gates open up, and the story spills out.

She’s from Arkansas.  She’s on vacation with her parents.  They have come to the Keys for Mini-Lobster season, a yearly 24 hour grab for Florida Lobster which precedes the actual Florida Lobster Season.

Ben met her at the pool.  They swam, and they talked a lot.  They both love video games.  She knows a great app that Ben should put on my iPhone:  “Bowmen Attack.” They are, obviously, perfectly suited for each other.  Ben is falling for her, fast.

Her parents call her.  She jumps out of the pool.  She’ll be right back, she tells Ben.

But she never comes back. 

Ben rides his bicycle over to the pool a couple more times, to see if she’s come back.  He rides around the campground trying to catch a glimpse of her.   But she’s gone, probably off in her parents’ boat to go diving for lobsters.

As we pull up to the office to check out, Ben jumps out of the truck, for one more look at the pool, just in case…

Will Ben think of her every time he plays “Bowmen Attack,” like Allen thinks of his BC co-ed when he hears “Please Come to Boston”?  Probably.  That’s how Lost Loves are. 

Author’s Note: 
Oddly, after talking about all of this, I realize that I don’t remember having a Lost Love.  Ok, maybe one, now that I think about it.  I met him during a 2:00 a.m. fire alarm, at Landis Hall at Florida State University in 1986.  We talked, we laughed, it was wonderful… but then the Fire Department gave the all-clear, and we lost track of each other in the crush of students going back into the dorm to go back to sleep until someone pulled the fire alarm at 3:00 a.m.  I moved out of the dorm right after that, sick of the college idiot freshman  fire alarm pranks.  And I never saw him again…

Any lost love stories out there?  I’d love to hear them.

Friday, September 10, 2010

Lost Loves, Part I: Please Come to Boston


Lost Loves:  those individuals who inhabit our lives, and our hearts, for a brief moment in time.  The world shifts, somehow, and for a little, you are Meant to Be; then, suddenly, the world shifts again; and as quickly as they come into your life, they go out, never to be seen again.

My favorite Lost Love story is Allen’s:

Please Come to Boston

“Come here-I have something to play for you.” 

I dragged Allen into the living room the other night.  I had a surprise for him.  My iPhone was hooked to the stereo.  I pressed the button, then took his hand and led him to the center of the room (fear not, the story isn’t going to get any steamier).  I slipped my arms around his neck and gazed up into his eyes.  I love that I can actually look up at a man—this almost never happens to 5’9” me…..

So, in the center of the living room, I drew Allen close, and gazed up at him, and began to sing along to the music:

Please come to Boston for the springtime
I’m stayin’ here with some friends and they’ve got lots of room
You can sell you paintings on the sidewalk
By the cafĂ© where I hope to be workin’ soon
Please come to Boston
She said no
Boy, won’t you come home to me

He was speechless for a moment.

“Oh…. my…. gosh…..”  he finally said, a dreamy kind of smile appearing on his face.  He looked down at me, and held me tighter, and sang with me:

Hey ramblin’ boy, why don’t you settle down
Boston ain’t your kind of town
There ain’t no gold and there ain’t nobody like me
I’m the number one fan of the man from Tennessee

Libby, on the couch, watched this whole scene with teenager skepticism.  There were two middle-aged people slow dancing to lame ‘70s music in the middle of the living room.  This was somewhat odd behavior— but her mom and her step-father were somewhat odd.  It was she who coined the term “Nerd Love” to describe our romance, after all.

“She doesn’t know the story, does she?”  Allen asked.

“No, I don’t believe that she does,” I replied.

So, shuffling around the living room rug to the strains of Dave Loggins’ “Please Come to Boston,” Allen told her the story.


It was 1975, and Allen was in Submarine School in Groton, Connecticut (while I was in Elementary School over in Hamden, Connecticut, I enjoy reminding him).  He had a rare day off, and he and a fellow sailor wanted to go check out the area.  So Allen drove the fabled ’67 Firebird over to Cape Cod. 

The Cape was another world to my sun-bleached surfer boy from South Florida.  It was cold, and windy, and barren.  There were high sand dunes which obscured the view of the grey Atlantic from the road.  But, when he climbed up on one of those dunes, there were whales—whales—breaching offshore (the only whales that we have in South Florida wear Speedos on the beach).  He watched their huge forms surface for just a moment, then disappear beneath the waves.  The sight was extraordinary.  For Allen, it was like a sign:  extraordinary things were going to happen today. 

Of course, some things will always remain the same, no matter how unusual the circumstances.  Sailors must go steamin’.  They stopped in town for the night to eat lobsters, drink beer, and look for female… company.

… She was sitting at a table in the bar, laughing with her girlfriends.  She was pretty, sweet-looking – not glamorous by any means, but Allen liked looking at her.  He liked looking at her a lot.

He came over to her table and struck up a conversation.  She was with her friends on Spring Break.  She told him that she was a co-ed from Boston College.  She was smart and funny, and soon the two of them were sitting alone, talking about anything and everything.  Could it be that The One, the one that he was meant to be with forever, had suddenly entered his life? 

Allen doesn’t like to dance, but she wanted to, so she took his hand and led him to the dance floor for a slow dance. 

She drew Allen close, and she gazed up at him, and she began to sing along with the music:

Please come to Boston for the springtime….

That was it.  It was over.  My sun-bleached surfer boy sailor from South Florida was in love.  Here she was, a co-ed from Boston College, singing, asking him to come to Boston for the springtime….

This may be the best day of his life.  This was beyond extraordinary. This was a miracle.

After the dance was over, she stopped back at the table to check on her friends.  Her friends wanted to go walk around the town, see what else was going on, she told him.  She’d be back in a little while, promise, she told him.  He’d be waiting, he told her.  She squeezed his hand, and she smiled.  He watched her leave, and anticipated the moment that she’d walk back through the door again, to him.

It seemed to Allen that the night dragged on forever, shooting pool and drinking beer- and waiting for her.  And waiting for her.

She never came back. 

The next morning, he drove the Firebird sadly back down cold, gray Cape Cod and back to Groton, to finish sub school. 

He traveled around the world, then came back here to Waresboro, Georgia, and to me.   

But, all these years later, in the middle of the living room, I am the brown haired girl in the minidress on the coast of New England.  And he’s going with her, to Boston in the springtime.

Libby admits that this is, indeed, a romantic story of Lost Love.  Lost Nerd Love, maybe, but still romantic. 

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Race Report: Georgia Veterans' Triathlon 2010

Meanwhile, back at the Woman’s Triathlon….

The Georgia Veterans’ Triathlon is held, appropriately, in Georgia Veterans’ State Park, in Cordele, Georgia: up the road from Tifton, and down the road from Macon on I-75.

The park is fabulous- we’ve camped there twice, in a huge campsite, and stayed at the Lodge once, in a beautiful room (in which I proceeded to put black marks on the wall with my bike- they came off, thank goodness). The park is on Lake Blackshear, and sports both a regular gold course and a disc golf course (giving me two different opportunities to suck at golf). There’s a great museum with some great military memorabilia, a swimming beach and a couple of great restaurants. So, once you’ve finished your morning workout, and have eaten your post-race sausage dog provided by Stripling’s General Store, and take your nap, there are lots of things to do.

As for the race itself- it’s one of my faves.

The swim is a 500 yard beach start in the very nice warm water of Lake Blackshear. The bike course is rolling and a little technical, following the road that follows the edge of Lake Blackshear. The run covers 3.1 miles of park road (and is sometimes brutally hot).
It’s a well-organized, fairly small, laid back race.

The women started in the last couple of waves, so it was basically a Woman’s Triathlon later on the course. This is a very good thing.

I believe that I’ve discussed the phenomenon in other blog posts. An all-woman triathlon is very different from a co-ed triathlon. . I over-generalize, I know- we do have very assertive and aggressive riders in my gender- but there’s a different vibe there, especially amongst us back-of-the-pack female athletes. Although Cordele is, of course, a co-ed triathlon, our starting position created a Virtual Woman’s Triathlon.

Two classic examples of Woman’s Triathlon behavior from the race:

I Had to Use the Mom Voice.

As a rule, I do not mind young people racing triathlon alongside me. There are some excellent young triathletes out there. The kid that I had to deal with on the bike course, that day, was another story entirely.

Kid was an absolute nuisance on the bike. I caught up to him a couple miles into the bike, on one of the more treacherous turns in the course. He was weaving all over the road; he’d call “on your left,” start to pass, change his mind and nearly ride into another cyclist. When someone tried to pass him, he looked over at them and sped up. He drafted. He blocked.

But when Kid finally started riding to the left of the center line, I had about enough. It was time for the Mom Voice.

“You need to get on the right side of the lane NOW! You are breaking the rules, and you are going to get hit by a car and then you won’t grow up to be a pro triathlete (actually, I pray that you don’t grow up to be a pro triathlete, period).”

The Mom Voice worked- at least, long enough to get around the little monster and get some distance between us.

[At this point in the report, I would really like to climb up on my soapbox and express my views about Kid’s participation in this triathlon. But, for the sake of brevity, I will refrain. Perhaps another time. Soon.]

No, No: You Go On. I’m Not Competing Today.

I was, thankfully, past Kid and on the final couple of miles of the bike course. I was thinking about passing the woman in front of me when, suddenly and inexplicably, she flew over her handlebars and lands, faces first, on the ground.

I unclipped and dropped my bike on the grass.

The poor girl was trying to sit up. There was blood dripping from her chin, and she had somehow woven herself into the bike when she crashed. One of her feet had lodged itself in the spokes of the front wheel, of all places. I wiggled her foot out of her shoe to free her, as there seemed to be no way in hell that I could free her shoe from inside of the spokes. We used the sock to put pressure on the gash in her chin, which was now dripping blood steadily onto the asphalt.

No fewer than 4 other women stopped, jumped off their bikes, and came over to help. Another woman slowed down to talk to us.

“Are any of you girls competing today? ‘Cause, if you are, you can go ahead, and I’ll stay with her.”

We all insisted “no, no, we’re fine. You go ahead and go. We’ll stay with her.”

And we all did, until a passing truck driver offered to carry her and her mangled bike back to transition. One of the girls helped her to the truck; another loaded her bike on to the bed of the truck; another loaded her own bike onto the truck and rode with them.

I got on my bike and rode out onto a now empty course. I wasn’t disappointed about the loss of a lot of time in the race, but I really didn’t want people to think that I was last in because I was an incredibly slow pathetic biker. This is also a very classic Woman’s Triathlon attitude: we are pathologically afraid of finishing last, because everyone will laugh at you and point and you will be completely humiliated and never do another triathlon again, if you ever do one to begin with, because what’s the point in doing a triathlon if that’s going to happen to you? This is why, of course, our beloved Sally Edwards always volunteers to be the Final Finisher in her Woman’s Triathlons.



Surprisingly, I was not dead last that day. I did manage to pass a few people on the run. Everything else ended fine. Kid disappeared before I could throw him (and his parents) in Time Out; the injured triathlete, I heard, needed stitches on her chin, but that was about it.

I had my sausage dog, and my nap, and then played a very bad game of disc golf. And I remembered, even though I don’t race as much as I want to, how awesome this sport is—and how awesome women triathletes are.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Ben's Greatest Hits

Ben says the strangest stuff. He makes these comments at odd moments, in the most unlikely places. He doesn’t realize the impact of what he’s said until everyone in the family stops and stares at him, and then bursts out laughing.

We’ve compiled a list over the years of Ben’s Greatest Hits:

______________________________________________________________________

We are in line at The Dollar Store, buying 50 items that we really don’t need-- but, hey, they’re only a dollar! The usual sibling bickering is occurring behind me as we ring up dollar toys and dollar candy and dollar knick knacks. Libby is exasperated with her brother.

“Mama, why did you have to have another child? And why did it have to be a boy?”

Ben shot back. “So when we move to China and Mommy has to give you away, she’ll at least have one kid left!”


Ben has arrived home after his first day of kindergarten. He is regaling us with all of the events of the day.

“But the best part, “he says, “is that we had these great new cookies at snack time: Fig Mutants!”

________________________________________________________________________

We are arriving home after a trip to Wal Mart. As we pull into the yard, we notice that our beloved dog, Bobo (he died this year and we miss him a lot), is limping. Ben and I get out of the car to assess the situation.

“Ben, I can’t figure it out. Which leg do you think he hurt?”

He looks at Bobo carefully. “His front passenger side one.”

________________________________________________________________________

We are grabbing a bite at Zaxby’s. Ben wants to exchange his honey mustard dressing for ranch dressing to dip his chicken fingers into. He heads up to the counter and returns several minutes later.

“Ben, we already had ranch dressing at the table,” Libby said.

Ben throws his hands into the air. “Now you tell me! After I stood in line for then minutes and had to watch a man mating llamas!”

This made more sense when we turned around and saw the television hanging over the counter. It was tuned to a documentary about llama farming on Animal Planet.
__________________________________________________________________________________

Stay tuned for Ben’s Greatest Hits Volume 2. Libby will be the co-editor. Although she usually tries to ignore most of what Ben is saying, she comes to me now with something she just heard him say: “Mama, you have to put this one in the blog, too!”

Friday, August 13, 2010

Ben Misses All the Cool Stuff: A Post from Camp Scamp 2010

Can you see the deer down there?
Ben misses all the cool stuff.

I do not know why it was his unlucky fate on this vacation.  It wasn’t that he was doing anything wrong, per se.  It was just that he always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I am sure that he got tired of someone telling him that he “should have been there!  You should have seen…”

the salamanders

Missing the salamanders is an especially unfortunate event, since Ben loves salamanders. He has posters of salamanders; he has read books about salamanders.  But he had grown tired of hiking up the trail to Anna Ruby Falls, then back down the trail from Anna Ruby Falls- about a mile, up and back, on a pretty steep path. To limit his complaining, we let him head back down the trail while Allen, Jenni, Libby and I lingered at the Falls, watching the cascading water, taking pictures, and wondering out loud watching waterfalls and taking pictures of them was fun (my theory is that people are attracted to water because they are trying to find their way back to the primordial soup from which they emerged at the dawn of time- but, hey, that’s just me).

On our way down, Jenni wondered if we could find any salamanders along the path.  She found a good place to hunt:  on a big, wet, slimy rock next to the trail.

We saw little brown heads.   Then we saw more little brown heads, peering out from the rock. And then, like those pictures where you have to make your eyes all out of focus and fuzzy so that, all of a sudden, you can see the 3D picture in the pattern- there they were.  Little salamanders, big salamander, all over the rock.  Our ‘oohs’ and ‘aahhs’ attracted a crowd, which we regretted, since people started coming over and plucking the salamanders off the rock to play with. (People:  leave the poor salamanders alone!  Don’t you remember “look, don’t touch?”)

Ben, who, as I told you, loves salamanders, was far down the trail.  We yelled, but he couldn’t hear us.  He was, needless to say, disappointed. This disappointment resulted in bickering with the other sibling, which resulted in one of the siblings kicking the other, which resulted in Mom hollering. But, of course, the siblings were back to being friends by the time we got back to the campground- which is how these things work in my family.

the swimming deer.

A couple of days later, we headed out to Tallulah Gorge, near… well, up there in North Georgia somewhere.  This is one impressive hole in the ground, nearly 1000 feet to the bottom. I refused to go within 5 feet of the railing; Libby had to take me by the hand so I could look down the big hole, because I felt like the floor was falling down below me.  But the view was definitely worth getting all woozy over:  there were giant rock cliffs, and a river flowing at the bottom, hundreds of feet down.

Since we had been in the car for over an hour, during which time I assume that he must have consumed a quart of iced tea- Ben had to find the restroom.  Quickly. So he headed back down the path, away from the overlook, in search of the restroom.

Still clinging to Libby’s hand, I hung over the rail with Allen, Jenni, and Libby. Something was swimming in the river, traveling from one bank to the other.

“It’s a person,” one of us guessed.
“No, it’s a dog, I think,” said another one of us. 

When we all looked closer, we realized that it was a deer.  Way down below us, a deer was swimming across the river to the other bank. 

We didn’t know that deer could swim, and we had no idea why a deer would even want to swim across a river like that.  We were fascinated.

The deer finally made it, and hoisted herself up the bank, off to find– whatever interesting thing was on the other side of the river.  And that is, of course, when Ben reappeared.

A pattern was forming:  Ben leaves.  Something interesting happens.  We postulated:  if we keep sending Ben to the bathroom, what else interesting will happen?

We may try that.


Although Ben tends to miss some of the more extraordinary things in life, he often makes extraordinary observations about the more mundane things in life. “How did you miss that?” often becomes “Where did you come up with that?”

Monday, August 9, 2010

How to Tube the ‘Hootch: Another Dispatch from Camp Scamp

Author’s Note:  As I posted the last post, I realized that there are actually people out there who have never ridden an inner tube down the Chattahoochee River.  These people, of course, have been deprived and have obviously led a sheltered life.  I wrote this a couple of years ago, during our last vacation to Helen, Georgia, in the North Georgia Mountains.  Our whole great big family loves to spend the week together up there.  Allen first took the girls there years ago.  They loved it so much that they passed up trips to the beach and to Disney World to spend time up there.  The kids and I have become converts, too.  Our kind of fun up in Helen is to “tube the ‘Hootch:” to ride down the Chattahoochee River in inner tubes, all of the family (just 6 of us when I wrote this- we’ve expanded since then).  Here is my handy guide to tubing the ‘Hootch, in case you ever get up that way.

To tube the ‘Hootch, you put on your bathing suit, grab your push stick and your water shoes, pile everyone into the pickup truck, and drive down the street to the Cool River Tubing Company. You pay your fee- five dollars for the short run or the long run, nine dollars if you want to tube all day.  You line up outside the storage building, and pick up a big plastic inner tube.  You want it to match your outfit- so you choose blue, green, yellow. There are no pink ones, unfortunately- those are used by a competing company.  The kids then have to decide whether to get a kid-sized tube or a grown-up sized tube- of course, they always want the grown up size, even if they’re so small that they’re going to fall out the bottom.  And then you have to choose what kind of bottom you want:  hole or no hole.  Tubes with no holes are for those who want to keep their butt relatively dry and warm; the open tubes are for the daredevils who wish to brave the 70 odd degree water. If you have a tube with no hole, you have to decide how deep you want the seat. A deep seat can make a difference when you’re trying to push yourself down the river and over rocks- too deep a seat makes this a literal pain in the ass. 

You pick up straps to lash inner tubes together by their handles—they come in handy for roping in kids who cannot or will not manage by themselves on the ‘Hootch:  those kids that either goof off and ‘accidentally’ falling into the water, again and again, or who manage to keep getting stuck on rock after rock.  When I get tired of watching either spectacle, I usually grab the offender and strap them to my tube.  It’s more fun that way, anyways:  you have better momentum and an easier time getting over the obstacles.

After collecting your tube, push stick, life jacket, water shoes and straps, you head over to the school bus, give the employees your tube to load into the trailer, and climb on board with a ton of excited kids, old couples, young families, church groups, and one family that most definitely is not from Around Here and has never been tubing in their lives and asks all kinds of nervous questions of the other riders.

 You get trucked up the river a ways, and then dropped off by the side of the river with your tube and your gear.  You plunk your tube into six inches of water at the drop-off site.  You push your tube into deeper water, where there’s a good current. Then you plop into the tube and give yourself a shove, and you are floating down the river, somehow, because the water is not even a foot deep in some places.

On crowded days, like the weekend, there is a log jam of tubes on the river. I sort of imagine them as giant platelets clogging a blood vessel (what do you expect? I’m a pathologist). You get really friendly with your neighbors on the crowded days, as you bump into them, shove off of them, dodge their cigarettes (occasionally) and stick your feet in their faces.

On less crowded days, your family is strung down the river, in no particular order. The only given in this scene is that one of the kids will be at the end of the line of the family, flailing around in the tube because they’re stuck on a rock. 

You get to watch all of the different approaches to tubing: one guy has his head back and is dozing; two young lovers are hooked together and in their own little world; a kid is paddling along, somehow; a mom is herding all of the kids together with the pushstick, or she is floating in the back of her group, as the sweeper. 

You float down the river, past the hotels and restaurants and folks watching you from their tables, entertained by watching you try to push yourself off a boulder.  You try to dodge the fly fishers.

Along the way, there are a couple of trees that people have loaded with their chewing gum.  There is a collection of single flip flops nailed to a tree:  the tree of ‘lost soles’- get it?

There are rocks to maneuver around, and the occasional ‘rapids,’ where the water moves a little faster, and you may occasionally plunge a foot or two.  There’s a very deep spot on the river which serves as a swimming hole, if you’re brave enough to jump into the cold water (I’m not).

And then you’re at the end of the ride, behind Cool River Tubing Company. You jump into the water, hand your tube to the helpers, and climb a set of stairs back to dry land.  You get your land legs again, and head back to your hotel, all drippy wet and planning the next ride. Maybe the long run tomorrow. Maybe the short run again later tonight, if it doesn’t storm. 

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Finding Enlightenment in a Fluorescent Green Inner Tube: A Letter from Camp Scamp

Well, I finally got my butt into an inner tube on the Chattahoochee River. Floating down the ‘Hootch in a fluorescent green inner tube, I wasn’t expecting to find enlightenment.  But I did.  I will share with you the insights which I acquired today.

1. Go With The Flow
2. Two Is Better Than One
3. You’ll Get There Eventually- Maybe Not How You Expected To

1.  Go With the Flow.  During the last few weeks at work, interspersed between looking at a million slides under the microscope and doing autopsies (and having the angry family members of said autopsy on the phone yelling at me), I fantasized about the Chattahoochee River.  I imagined the wonderful feeling of my cold butt floating down the ‘Hootch in an inner tube, the warm sun on my face. 

We finally made it to North Georgia, and to the Chattahoochee River.  The big white school bus took us down the road from the Cool River Tubing Company, and dropped us down by the riverbank.  We jumped off the bus, carrying our inner tubes to the middle of the river, and hopped in.

  Alas, my beautiful dream seemed to turn into a nightmare 200 feet down the river.  My tube was stuck on a rock and I couldn’t move.  After a few minutes of this unpleasantness, I took matters into my own hands.  I stood up in the river and tried to move the tube over the rock.  My feet slipped on the slippery river rock and tumbled over; one of my flip flops slipped off and began to float down the river. Someone caught the flip flop for me, and I tried to flip the tube back over. I slipped again. My hat fell off and into the water. I tried to catch my hat while not letting go of the tube-and my other flip flop slipped off. I retrieved my wet hat, righted my tube, and got the one remaining flip flop from the nice family that had retrieved it for me.  I flopped back into the tube, clutching my one flip flop, wearing a soggy hat and cursing loudly.

 The reality of tubing the ‘Hooch was nothing like the fantasy that I had so carefully preserved in my head for all of these weeks.  It sucked.

I heard a voice drift back to me from down the river:  “Just go with the flow.”  Words of wisdom, I thought.  Then I realized that it was Allen’s voice.  This pissed me off, because I hate it when he says something wise that I didn’t think of first. 

Despite the fact that I don’t like it when he’s right- and will usually do the exact opposite of what he suggests, just on principle- I went with the flow.  I stopped fighting.  And when I inevitably got stuck against another rock, I waited.  The water rushing past me freed me.  I didn’t push against the rock; I didn’t stand up and try to walk over the rock.  I just waited for the water to carry me around?    That was my first Universal Truth of the day.  The moment that you stop fighting , that you stop trying to push against an immovable object,  that you stop trying to control everything- that’s when the water picks you up and begins to take you down the river again.

2. Two are Better Than One.  Ben and I seem to be the klutziest, dorkiest tubers in our party.  If there’s a rock to get stuck on- we’ll find it. If there’s a big branch by the side of the river with a snake hanging off of it- we’ll find a way under it.  If there’s a spot in the middle of the river where there’s absolutely no current- we’ll find ourselves in it.

Our antics entertain and/or annoy the hell out of the other members of our party.  You can see them, watching us from down river, looking either amused or completely exasperated.  And it is embarrassing for Ben and me to be the only people on the river who just really can’t tube.  I mean, it’s a simple concept:  you sit in an inner tube, and you float down the river.  Yet… somehow we do a lousy job of it.

So, today, Ben and I strapped our inner tubes to each other with a thick nylon strap that the tubing company provides for such a purpose.  We were going to do this together.  Two crappy tubers should equal one decent tuber, I reckoned.

Certain members of our party believed this to be an idiotic idea:  two bad tubers hooked together would not equal one good tuber- it would equal a total disaster.

But we showed them.  Two are better than one.

An amazing thing happened. When Ben and I, tied together, approached the rocks that conspired to impede our path, Ben would boing into a rock and bounce off; this carried him  back and would slingshot his tube around mine;  he could then pull us both, albeit facing backwards, though the rocks and back down the river.  The Doubters could do nothing but look on with envy.

Safely down the river, Ben lay across the tube on his belly and paddled.  I sat back in my tube and pushed with my push stick.  And we got ourselves down the river, whooping and laughing.  And there was another Universal Truth:  it’s fun to go down the river, through life, by the side of the people that you love, one pulling the other through the rough spots.

3.  You’ll get there-eventually.  It’s going to take you as long as it’s going to take you to get down the river.  You’re going to get down the river when you get down the river, even when you want to get the hell out because it’s lightning.  You’re going to get down the river when you get down the river, even if the rest of the family is waiting for you on the side of the river, tapping their feet, checking their watches (they do that).

You may not get down the river by the straightest route, the fastest route, the easiest route.  You may not get down the river with your hat still dry or with both flip flops still on your feet.

But you’ll get there. And, somehow, it will all be ok:  that’s how you needed to get down the river. You needed to get down the river that way, so that you could think about Life and Universal Truths- and then sit down and write all about it. 

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Camp Scamp 2010

It is time once again for Camp Scamp: our yearly foray into the wild, using the Scamp as our base camp.  Last year we headed into the wilderness of Southern Connecticut and New York:  facing giant lobsters and New Yorkers.

This year, we were supposed to attend Camp Scamp Canada 2010.  However, thanks to my not-so-careful reading of Entry Requirements for Canada and, worse yet, Re-entry Requirements for the United States (Passports?  You gotta be kidding!), that adventure ended before it began.

With three days to spare, we revised the Camp Scamp 2010 Schedule of Events. When work gets intense, my favorite escape is imagining my butt in a green inner tube floating down the Chattahoochee River; therefore,  a trip to the North Georgia Mountains seemed in order.  And then?  Head south to visit the family, and then…. Why not?  Drive clear down to the edge of the United States, and show the kids the Southernmost Point in the U.S. - Key West, Florida.  We were gonna have it all:  the cool mountain air and the warm Caribbean breeze.  Camp Scamp 2010 was going to be truly epic. 

Letters from camp are, of course, a summer tradition; I suppose now they’re emails, tweets, Facebook posts, text messages and Skypes from camp. But, at any rate, communications from camp are a key element of the sleepaway camp experience.

(For the definitive example of the genre, I refer you to Allen Sherman’s classic Letter from Camp)

What follows is a series of communiquĂ©s from Camp Scamp 2010:  the good, the bad, and the ridiculous.  Our Letters from Camp.

Friday, June 25, 2010

Denizens of Disney



A Helpful Field Guide to the Inhabitants of the Magic Kingdom

Dedicated to Libby, and to the poor souls standing in line for The Jungle Cruise on a 90 degree day in June

(Author’s Note:  the study of Magic Kingdom denizens has been a long and arduous process, encompassing hundreds of woman-hours, and thousands of dollars worth of tickets and Mickey Mouse ice cream bars.  I present this guide to help you, the reader, identify and more fully appreciate these creatures.  Please be advised that they are wild, and in their natural habitats.  Please exercise caution when dealing with them, both for your safety, and for theirs.) 

The Newlyweds.  Identified by their unique Mickey Mouse ears: the female’s is white, with a veil; the male’s is black, with a top hat.  Also wear new, shiny wedding bands and glazed looks.  If you’re not careful, you will knock them over; they don’t pay attention to their surroundings, only to each other (and have only rarely seen the light of day on this honeymoon).

The Foreign Tour Groups.  These seem to be a rarer species these days, for unknown reasons.  Beautiful creatures in matching orange t-shirts, led by a frustrated woman holding a flag and yelling to try to get their attention.  Usually harmless, but can occasionally clog major intersections.

The Stroller Commandos.  These creatures use a stroller as a weapon to advance themselves through the crowd, much like a battering ram.  They have apparently forgotten that they have a kid in there.

The People Who Rush the Gate of the Attraction and Nearly Cause a Stampede, Even Though the Show Repeats Every Eight Minutes.  Self-explanatory.

The Button People.  It’s their birthday, their anniversary, their family reunion, their first visit.  They are given a button by the cast members to advertise the reason for their celebration. You are obligated to offer them congratulations.

The Self-Appointed Entertainers. Small sub-population of teens and young adults, often drunk, who have decided that the park would be even more fun if they provided additional “entertainment.”  They scream like banshees in the Haunted Mansion, and love to enact dramatic sequences with the costumed characters that inhabit the park.  They find their actions hilarious; everyone else finds them annoying. ((hi mommy, I know your describing me here so…thank you for remembering :]))

The Photographers.  Will stop in the dead center of Main Street, causing a traffic jam behind them, so they can get the perfect shot of Cinderella’s Castle, or, more often, of their loved on in front of the Cinderella’s Castle.  Become extremely annoyed if you accidentally get in their shot.

The New Parents.  Will wait in the afternoon sun for 90 minutes so they can bring their child on Dumbo the Flying Elephant- a ride that takes approximately three minutes.

The First Timers:  Appear lost- because they are.  They have yet to figure out that the Magic Kingdom is arranged in a circle.

The Thrill Seekers.  Will spend the entire day running from Space Mountain to Thunder Mountain to Splash Mountain.  Love to tell everyone: 1. how many times they rode the ride 2. how much they screamed 3. how sick their friends got and 4. how SOAKED they got on Splash Mountain (OMG!).

The Parents Who Should Be Tied Up and Made To Ride “It’s A Small World” 100 Times in a Row.  It’s 10:30 p.m.  Their four-year-old is hungry/cold/exhausted and sobbing in the stroller.  The parents, however, refuse to leave the park until closing time.

The Kid That You Wish You Had:  Parking your car in the Dopey lot is exciting.  Riding the tram from the parking lot is exciting.  Looping through the endless attraction lines is exciting. You don't have to spend money on them to make them happy.

The Disneyphiles.  Recognized by their Goofy hats, Mickey Mouse t -shirts, Tinker Bell handbags, and lanyard full of trading pins. Excellent source of Disney minutiae, like where the closest Hidden Mickey is, or where the best ladies room in the park is (Main Street, behind the Crystal Palace, near the Baby Care Center).

The Gazillionaires.  Stay in the suites at the Contemporary- for two straight weeks.  Buy the $500 Mickey sculptures in the Main Street Emporium as souvenirs for their hired help.  Usually have a nanny in tow.

The Sitters:  Always male.  Will find a convenient bench in the shade and wait for the rest of the family to finish watching the show/riding The Mad Tea Party/finish yet another trip into a gift shop.   Also can be spotted on the People Mover in Tomorrowland going round and round and round….

The Strategists.  Plan the trip like a military campaign, with a set itinerary, Fast Passes, designated meeting points- and actual restaurant reservations.  Refuse to be deterred from “The Plan”.

The Person Who Only Wants to Ride the Haunted Mansion, and is Content to Walk Around and Eat Mickey Mouse Ice Cream Bars the Rest of the Day:  That’s me. 

About the author:  Dr. Smith has been visiting the Magic Kingdom regularly since 1975.  She still remembers the names of all of the “E” ticket rides- and actually knows what an “E” ticket was.  She is considered an expert (in her own mind) in Magic Kingdom sociology.

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Long Island, 2010. After the Gulf Oil Spill.


I am writing this post from the beach in Southampton, New York.  The Halsey Neck access point to the beach in Southampton, New York, to be exact.  It’s a serene kind of beach:  it seems populated with thinkers and walkers and readers rather than body boarders and beer swillers and barbequers.  It’s not like the Florida beaches that I grew up with; it’s a more contemplative type of beach. A beach to simply look, and feel, and smell, and to think of nothing and everything, all at once. 

My kind of beach.

I’m sitting on the sand looking out in the water, and I am trying to imagine the salt water covered in thick, shiny, greasy masses of slime.  And I am especially thinking of another beach like this, far to the south, along the Gulf Coast. It’s another contemplative beach like this, where I used to sit and think of everything and nothing- like I am doing now; where I sat as a quasi-intellectual college student writing bad poetry.  Not much has changed- except I’m now a 41 year old quasi-intellectual adult writing bad blog posts along with the bad poetry.

Allen and I visited that beach a few weeks ago, down there in the Florida Panhandle, before all of this happened. It may have been a farewell visit; I suspect that it never will look like the way that it did in April.  What will all of that pristine sand and the clear green water look like covered in oil?  Will that fine white sand blow for miles down the empty beach and pile up in drifts?  Will there still be sand dollars buried in the sand?  I doubt that the sand will blow, or the sand dollars will stay alive, when the oil comes.

In April, the weather can be quite unsettled in the Deep South.  We headed down to our campground on the beach just as a line of severe weather was headed down the same direction.  We arrived in the late evening, and it looked like the worst weather had passed us by.  We were safe, in our campsite hidden behind the dunes.  There was nothing to worry about.

I woke up in the middle of the night.  The sky was flashing; I could see it even with my eyes closed.  Flash…flash……flash…flash. flash…FLASH…..flash flash flash…. The sky glowed greenish.  It was dead still.

 I have seen storms like that before in my life- the storms where the lightening comes so fast that the thunder can’t catch up, and the sky glows from all of the electricity.  They suck all of the air surrounding them inside- inhaling the atmosphere- so that you seem to be a in vacuum before the storm arrives. They are a living creature.

That storm lay off the coast, stalking us, and waiting to strike.  I lay there, feeling frightened and helpless. Our little cocoon of a camper suddenly felt thin and fragile. All we could do was wait….

That storm now seems to portend what was to follow.  We were fortunate that night:  the monster slunk back out to the open ocean and away from us.  This new monster- this oil from the broken well in the Gulf- I don’t think this one will retreat.  This one will not be content to sit offshore, menacing. This one is coming.

Like that night in the camper, I feel helpless today,  in the face of this oil spill, the dimensions of which I simply cannot get my mind around.   

Right now, the only thing that I can do is to ride my bicycle down to the shore in Southampton. I chose to not turn the ignition key in the car. 

Maybe this disaster will effect a change in the nation’s psyche.  Maybe we will consider consuming less fossil fuel.   Maybe some of those people who drove their luxury SUV’s down to the beach access at Halsey Neck Beach will leave them home, and ride their bikes instead – they can park them next to mine, in the nearly empty bike rack.  Maybe we could make our roads safer, so that the other type of “traffic”- pedestrian, bicycle- could travel without fear alongside the cars and trucks.

Maybe we won’t be able to kill this monster- but maybe we can stop a new one from being created.

St. George Island, Florida, and the rest of the Gulf Coast:  you are in my thoughts and in my prayers. 

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Snakes Alive (2010 edition)

There’s (sort of) a new addition to our menagerie- the one that includes three cats, two dogs, I’ve just forgotten how many chickens, two fish, and one freshwater snail…

I’ve named our new addition Bob. I had decided, after numerous interactions, that he deserved a name. So Bob it was. And, now that he has a name, I feel somewhat protective toward him- which, for me, is rather unusual.

Bob is a snake. A really big snake.

(Above: one of Bob's cousins, from the UGA snake website)

Bob made his first appearance last summer, shortly after the rattlesnake incident. Having just recovered from that ordeal, I was sitting on the patio in the evening, and watched something slither toward the
grape arbor. It was dark brown, dingy, and fat. Water moccasins are dark brown, dingy and fat. But, after the rattlesnake incident and the resulting trauma that it caused, I was in denial. “That is NOT a water moccasin… that is NOT a water moccasin…” And then it slithered under the grape arbor and out of sight. My denial mechanism asserted that I hadn’t really seen a snake at all, much less a water moccasin. And so the incident was forgotten.
______________________________________________

“Be careful when you go in the garden… there’s a giant cottonmouth in the garden! Eek!”

That was the text message that I received two weeks ago from Jenni. I had been in that garden the day before, on my hands and knees, pulling weeds. While a cottonmouth was stalking me, apparently.

The possibility of a large water moccasin roaming the yard was not amusing, so I headed over to Lowe’s to buy a bag of snake repellent (yes, they actually make the stuff). The problem was, what if I put down snake repellent, and he was trapped inside of the yard, rather than outside?

Of course, Jenni also said that it may be a non-venomous water snake, as they look very similar. However, I prepared for the worst- that I had a cottonmouth in my yard- and hoped for the best- that it was really just a water snake.

I got the opportunity to make the distinction, up close, feeding the chickens that evening. I went out to the carport to bring the chickens a scoop of chicken feed- and there he was. Hiding under a table. He hadn’t spotted me, thank goodness.

With my usual calm and thoughtful demeanor when confronted with a reptile, I jumped up on a bench and screamed for Allen. I also began swearing. Loudly. In Spanish (in times of great stress, Spanish seem to be the best language in which to swear, in my opinion).

Allen came out. He got too close to the snake for my comfort, as per usual. So I started swearing at him in Spanish.

We stood there- me on top of the weight bench, and Allen by the table- trying to figure out what we were dealing with.

Dusky color? One vote for cottonmouth.
Thick body? Not so sure. The vote could go either way.
Big triangular head? Definitely not. One vote for water snake
Slit-like eyes? Hard to tell. Wasn’t planning on getting a closer look.

General opinion was leaning toward ‘water snake.’

“Let’s catch it” Allen suggested.

“Are you nuts?” I said. “You don’t know that it’s not a water moccasin! You just think that it’s not a water moccasin! You have a hypothesis that it’s not a water moccasin! You have not proven that it’s not a water moccasin!”

I headed for the back porch and waited for Allen to get bit and die, since he refused to listen to me.

“Come here!” He finally said. “I have him pinned with a broom.”

The snake was trapped underneath the whisk of the broom. He was curled up, and casually sampling the atmosphere with his tongue. He looked pretty placid.

“He doesn’t look particularly dangerous,” I said. I crept a little closer to him to get a better look. If he were a water moccasin, I doubt that he would be this docile; he probably would have tried to swallow the broom by now.  
I snuck even closer, and got a couple of pictures of him on the camera phone to post to Facebook, of course, so our herpetologist friends (believe it or not, we have more than one) could identify it for us.

“Do you want me to let it go?” Allen asked. “I can dump him in a bucket and take him away somewhere.”

“Nah- let him go.”

We let him go, just like we did with the rattlesnake. As icky as I find them, they are magnificent creatures, in their own way. And he’d clear the yard of vermin- a nice perk.

Allen took off the broom. Bob hauled ass.

I watched very carefully where I walked the rest of the night.

Bob has decided that he has nothing to fear from us, so has decided to carry on his business with us around. Last week, he was in the lawn, sunning himself and happily slithering around the yard.

Bob may still scare the crap out of me, but I am learning to peacefully coexist with him. Out on the carport last night, the dogs and I heard a rustling sound from between some boxes. Out slid Bob, trying to gain some traction on the concrete and get over to another set of boxes. “Oh, thank Goodness!” I thought.” It’s not a rat; it’s only Bob.” He must have been hunting frogs and rats, which seem to love the comfy carport.

Of course, the kids have raises a disturbing possibility- what if Bob is really Bobbie? What I Bobbie in hunting food for her babies (do they even do that?) What if there are about to be ten more Bobs in the yard? I am not sure I’ll be able to peacefully coexist with… Eleven Bobs???

“Aye! Mi Madre
!”

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Dispatches from the Scamp #1: Allen, Janna and Libby Go to the Movies


The Scamp has spent a lot of time at Ft. Wilderness Resort and Campground at the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida.  We race quite a bit at Disney, and we use it as our home base; we also like to celebrate any and all birthdays there.  Most of the time, we don’t even bother going to the Theme Parks—we just hang out down by Bay Lake and watch the fireworks and the Water Parade, eat like pigs at the Trail’s End Buffet, and spend hours in the Meadows Swimming Hole, sliding down the water slide and making like lobsters in the hot tub.

I think that the absolute best thing to do at Ft. Wilderness is to attend the nightly Campfire Sing-a-long and Movie in the outdoor movie theater at the Meadows Recreation Area.  You spend the first half hour singing corny songs and roasting marshmallows with Chip and Dale in the open-air theater.  When the fire dies down, they put on the Disney movie for the evening.  In the pre- “now available on DVD for a short time before it is returned to the vault” days, I got to see Cinderella  in that theater for the first time; watching Cinderella turn into a princess on the screen, on a cool summer night when I was a kid, was magic.

I still love the experience as a grown-up, and drag the family there every chance that I get—although we scared the pants off ourselves when we watched Meet the Robinsons out there- that scene in the future with all of the Bowler Hats and the world in shambles- very creepy watching outside in the dark.

I went with Allen and Libby to the movie when we stayed there last month.  Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the featured presentation.  I hadn’t seen the film in years, so I was excited.

It had been raining on and off that evening so, by the time we arrived, very few people were left in the amphitheater. Both Allen and Libby enjoy creating a running commentary to any movie they attend; I usually try vainly to ‘shush’ them.  That night watching Snow White, they were both in rare form.  Even though I’m usually the designated movie shusher, I joined in—there was no one close enough to hear us, so I only felt slightly guilty talking through a movie.  If you were within earshot, this is what you would have heard:

(Libby):  Ok, so what’s the deal?  The Seven Dwarfs look all cute and cartoony, but Snow White?  She just looks… bizarre….

(Allen):  Ok, now remind me:  what’s with the old lady with the apple?
(Me):  She’s the evil stepmother/queen and she hates Snow White’s guts because she’s way prettier. You know: ‘Mirror, mirror/on the wall/ who’s the fairest/of them all?’
(Allen): I get it.  She’s pretty scary all huge like that.
(Libby): Right?  I’m 14, and she scares the crap out of me!

(Libby, Me and Allen):  No!  Snow White, don’t do it!
(Me):  Don’t you know that you’re not supposed to talk to strangers? Geez, how stupid do you get?  Snow White:  sorry.  You deserve what you’re about to get.

(Me):  They kept a dead girl in a glass coffin because she was ‘too pretty to bury?’
(Allen and Libby): GROSS!
(Me): And, really, pathologically, that’s not really gonna work out to well, because….
(Libby): Mother! Really??  Allen, this is the exact reason she’s not allowed to watch medical shows with us anymore.

(Allen):  The LIPS?! He kissed the dead girl on the LIPS?!  Ewww!!!!!

(Me): Awwww…. They’re off to live Happily Ever After in the Castle….
(Libby):  Is that the Castle at Walt Disney World?
(Me):  No, that’s Cinderella’s Castle.  I think Snow White’s Castle is at Disneyland.
(Libby):  I thought that was Sleeping Beauty’s Castle?
(Me):  Isn’t that in France?
(Libby):  Sleeping Beauty isn’t French….

(Allen):  Oh no!  There’s a big red shiny apple back in the camper!  Don’t anyone touch it!!!

(Me):  I’m gonna have nightmares about that witch.  Do you know how scary she is when she’s huge like that…?


(Ok:  it’s not Mystery Science Theater 3000, but we thought  we were funny…)

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Scamp Season

It is Scamp Season once again. The beginning of the oppressive South Georgia summer season sends us scampering (pun intended) toward cooler, balmier locales: down to the Gulf Coast, up to New England, or, maybe this year, even up into the Canadian wilderness.


The Scamp is our 13 foot, fiberglass eggshell camper. It houses a dinette that converts to a bed, a couch which converts to bunk beds, a sink, some cabinets, and a two burner stove. It has an icebox which doesn’t always keep things cold enough, and an air conditioner that sometimes keeps things too cold.

We sometimes complain about the meager living space, the lack of privacy, and the tendency to bust your head on the door if you don’t duck; but, if you suggest to any of us the possibility of moving to a more spacious trailer, we protest loudly. We adore our Scamp.

While on the Gulf Coast this weekend, we bought a Jolly Roger flag for the Scamp: 3’ x 5’ black and white skull and crossbones. It flew high atop the Scamp, popping in the wind at our beachside campsite.

This is the latest and greatest decoration to adorn the Scamp. It also boasts three different strings of lights (flamingoes with palm trees, stars, and white twinkling ones), a Mickey Mouse garden gnome, and a pair of pink plastic lawn flamingoes. The effect is pretty cheesy, but we like it that way. The Scamp attracts attention wherever it goes, regardless. Strangers stop by, asking if they can have the Grand Tour of the place. “Stick your head in the door,” we say.

It’s our little play house, our little tree fort. We hide out in it away from the rest of the world, decorate it in whatever suits our fancy, and then use it as home base for our adventures. One week it’s a beach house on the shore of a white, sandy beach; then, it’s a cabin in the woods, surrounded by tall pine trees. Quite often, it is our hideaway in The Happiest Place on Earth, in the Old West Fantasyland of Ft. Wilderness at Walt Disney World. Spending the weekend there is probably the best bargain, and the most fun, in the entire resort.

We’ll be on the move again this summer. The work week will end, and we’ll have the Scamp ready to roll to… wherever. We have it down to a science: we pull into a campsite, and down go the supports, up go the awning and the lights and the Mickey gnome and the lawn flamingoes and the pirate flag and the chairs and the lanterns and the barbeque grill and the picnic table. We’re back in our clubhouse, ready for adventure.

We’ll send you postcards from the road. Stay tuned.

Sunday, May 9, 2010

If You Play Your Cards Right....

I decided not to do the flower thing this year. Flowers wilt eventually, and then you throw them away and they only live in your memory — unless you are my grandmother, and you take a picture of them, and then they live on for all eternity in a photo album, along with the pictures of you opening every single present at your wedding shower, and every birthday cake you ever had.


So, I’m here on the Internet to give you your Mother’s Day present—where everything, good or bad, exists here in perpetuity, like Grandma’s pictures ( I suggest that you don’t look too hard at my Facebook albums, because I think you’d probably rather not see what I was up to my senior year in high school). Nothing is private here on the Internet, which is fine; for Mother’s Day 2010 I am writing your present, and I will happy to share this post with the with everyone.

Welcome to my blog. The name’s a little weird, I know, and I have been thinking about changing it—I ate a lot more Chinese food when I started it, but, now that my figure getting a bit too… “womanly”, I’ve backed way off. Have a look around if you want—I don’t think that I’ve skewered our family too badly here (yet).

But enough introduction. On to your Mother’s Day present.

If You Play Your Cards Right….

“If you play your cards right….” Now that I am grown up, and have been to Las Vegas, I understand the meaning of this term: it means, when you play blackjack “if you stand on, like, a fifteen, or sixteen, you have a pretty good chance of beating the house, because they have to draw to at least seventeen and, because of this fact, they have a pretty good chance of busting.” Or something like that.

When I was a kid, “if you play your cards right….” had a completely different meaning. “If you play your cards right” meant “we are on our way to somewhere awesome unless World War III breaks out in the back seat and I can’t take this car ride anymore.” But, either Armageddon did not occur, or you were very tolerant of our sibling squabbles, because you never did turn the car around.

We were adventurers, you, me, Kate and Bill.

We loved our road trips. We took short jaunts to neighboring New Haven to The Yale Peabody Museum. We looked way up at the Brontosaurus skeleton in the Hall of Dinosaurs, years before it became an Apatosaurus skeleton. We climbed the huge stone stairs. I remember that the museum smelled as ancient as it looked. I love that smell (When Ben and Libby visited last year, they weren’t as impressed. “It smells weird in here,” they said. “But it’s the Peabody smell--don’t you get it?” I answered. You know what I mean. They didn’t get it).

Then there was the epic trip to New Orleans one summer, the one when we turned onto Bourbon Street, which was not the only slightly naughty tourist attraction that it became years later, and you realized that we may not have landed in a very “appropriate” part of town. Didn’t you try to cover my brother’s eyes when the strippers started swinging out of the windows on the second floor of the clubs?

But the best road trip of all was to The Magic Kingdom, in Walt Disney World. We would get up before dawn to make the drive to the park, so that we could be there when the gate opened. Over breakfast at the Crystal Palace Restaurant, on Main Street U.S.A., we pulled out the park map and planned our day like a military campaign. We marked the guidebook up with checks to mark our “must see” rides, and plotted our route through the park. We rationed the “E” tickets to make sure that we had enough to ride The Jungle Cruise; we reconnoitered possible parade-watching positions, and predetermined which horse we were going to ride on Cinderella’s Golden Carousel (mine will always be the circus pony with the red, white and blue headdress) . We stayed until the very last possible second when the park closed, and then you drove us home, in the middle of the night, down the deserted Florida Turnpike. I’m sure that you were exhausted, but you didn’t have the luxury of sharing the driving with any other adult back then.

I’ve come to realize a couple of things after all of these years:

We really didn’t have a lot of money. Our epic vacations were financed with a shoestring budget. We rationed those “E” tickets because extra “E” tickets cost a bundle, and we didn’t head to a hotel at night after leaving Disney because it was expensive. I never considered that thought when I was a kid: how difficult it must have been to find the money for even a single day at Walt Disney World. But, trust me, when I look at my credit card bill at the end of a trip down there, I am even more appreciative of what you had to do to get us there.

And, even more, you not only single handedly financed our epic adventures—you planned and executed them by yourself. Driving home in the dark after 18 hours at The Magic Kingdom couldn’t have been much fun by yourself—but you did it. And trying to keep your kids safe in a pretty rough part of the French Quarter, or after accidentally taking a wrong turn in New York City—that couldn’t have been much fun either. But you did it.

Nowadays, no matter what happens in the back seat, I don’t turn the car around, either. I don’t want to miss a thing. Sometimes, I think I get more excited than the kids about the adventures that are down the road.

As when I was a kid, my own family has its epic adventures: up to Long Island Sound, down to the Gulf of Mexico. We ride inner tubes, kayaks, surfboards, paddleboards and mountain bikes—always looking for somewhere to go, somewhere new to explore.

We still take those trips to the Magic Kingdom, and it’s the same as it always has been with us: the map, the plan. Ben likes to be in charge of the map now. Ben likes to be in charge of the map everywhere, actually. And, even though I have a partner to share the driving, and even though we can afford to sleep at a Disney hotel now, and even though we don’t have to worry about rationing “E” tickets anymore, those trips with the four of us- to Walt Disney World and beyond- will always be some of my favorite memories; memories made all the better by understanding what you did to make it all possible.

I know that “I’ve played my cards right….” For sure.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. I love you.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

A Dispatch From Behind the Microscope

Hi-


I am not hunched over a murder victim at the moment, the glare from the overhead lamp revealing some important clue about the perpetrator. Yes, I am a pathologist; no, that is not how my day goes. I suppose that solving murders all day would be cool, but I also like what I do here at the hospital. I thought that I’d share my day with you so far:

8:00 a.m. Arrive at work. Talk with my associate about what’s been going on in his absence; the interesting cases, and a little hospital gossip.

8:30 a.m. An oncologist (cancer doctor) calls, and is interested in knowing about one of his patients, a person who has a colon cancer that has recurred after treatment. The surgeons just took out a portion of the colon with the new tumor; the oncologist wants to know if the tumor has spread to the lymph nodes and the tissue around the colon. I tell him that I will call him back once the pathology slides are ready for me to read, so that I can look under the microscope at the lymph nodes and the tissue and give him that answer. He’ll have to decide what to do next: whether he’ll give chemotherapy and, if so, what kind and how much.

8:40 a.m. A fax comes through with a report on special studies done on a woman’s breast cancer. The test helps determine what type of treatment the woman is going to receive, and also can help tell how aggressive the tumor will behave. I dictate a report to send to the doctors, and give them this additional information

9:00 a.m. Time to get ready to present cases at Tumor Board. I have taken pictures through the microscope of some interesting cancers; I put these pictures and additional information into a Power Point presentation for the noon conference. I also head to the textbooks to find out some additional information about the cancers that I am going to present at the conference; I like to teach the audience some stuff, occasionally.

9:45 a.m. I get to look at the first microscope slides for the day. The first case is one that we are especially interested: a gentleman with a large mass in the middle of his chest. He’s having a lot of trouble breathing, so it’s very important that we find out what’s wrong with him so that we can treat him appropriately. The surgeon removed one of his lymph nodes for us to look at. He definitely has some kind of cancer, and, from looking at the slides, it looks like he may have a very aggressive lung cancer. We are waiting for a couple more outside studies to be done to be sure, but we are pretty sure that we can tell the doctors what it is for sure today.

10:00 a.m. Making up clues for a scavenger hunt here in the lab. It’s a fun way to take a break.

10:30 a.m. A surgeon sends some tissue samples from the operating room. He needs a frozen section, which is a special procedure where we freeze the tissue, cut it, stain it, and put it on a microscope slide quickly so we can put the slide under the microscope and give him a diagnosis. This sample is a lymph node from under the arm of a woman with breast cancer. He needs to know if the tumor has spread to the lymph node; if it has, he will need to take out all of the lymph nodes in her axilla, both to find out how far the cancer has spread, and to take out as much tumor as possible. If the tumor hasn’t spread to the lymph node, he won’t have to take out all of the nodes (do an axillary dissection); this is a very good thing, because oftentimes women who have an axillary dissection have problems with swelling in the same arm after the surgery, which is very uncomfortable (lymphedema).

11:00 a.m. It’s time to look at more slides (tissue samples) under the microscope. Essentially, the pathologist is supposed to look at every piece of tissue that’s removed from a person when they have surgery. For the most part, that’s true. So I look at skin biopsies, and make sure that skin cancers have been completely removed; I look at gallbladders that were taken out because they had gallstones and caused a lot of pain in the patient; I look at pieces of fallopian tubes from women who had their tubes tied (it’s important to make sure that the doctor cut all the way through the tube, so that the woman can’t get pregnant again, which is exactly what she wants). I look at the slides, then dictate a pathology report that I will sign later.

12:00 p.m. It’s time for Tumor Board. Technically Tumor Board is called a “Multidisciplinary Cancer Conference.” In English, the primary care physicians, surgeons, radiologists, oncologists and pathologists all get together to discuss their patients with cancer. We hear their histories, look at their x-rays, and I show the pictures of their tumors, that I took from the microscope. Then all of the doctors put their heads together and decide what the best treatment for the patient is (this is all confidential, by the way; we don’t use the patient’s names). Things can get a little heated in there, by the way, when all of the doctors don’t agree on the best course of treatment.

1:00 p.m. Tumor Board is over. Whew! I’m a little nervous about public speaking, so I am always happy when I am finished. I take a break and eat pizza with the lab employees. It’s National Medical Laboratory Professional Week, so we’re celebrating and having a party. Since pathologists are lab professionals, too, I get to party too!

1:15 p.m. And on we go. We talk to a few more doctors about their patient’s pathology reports; I call a doctor for more information on his patient, which will help me make a diagnosis on his biopsy; we talk to a surgeon, whose patient is in the examination room, waiting to hear if her breast tumor is benign or malignant (it’s most likely malignant, but we have to do some additional studies to confirm that; it’s not always a matter of looking at a slide and diagnosing a cancer— oftentimes, there are a lot of grey areas between benign and malignant, and even after all of the tests, you may not be able to tell—but, of course, try to tell that to a malpractice lawyer).

2:15 p.m. And our report is back on the very sick guy with the respiratory problems: it is indeed a very aggressive lung tumor. Fortunately, chemotherapy and radiation can shrink the tumor quickly, so he may be feeling better soon. Unfortunately, the long term prognosis is not so good.

2:30 p.m. My fourth Diet Coke of the day.

2:35 p.m. Looking at a particularly hideous tumor under the microscope: a malignant blood vessel tumor. The surgeon couldn’t get the whole thing out. He took a large piece of skin and fat, but there is still tumor at the edge. It looks like he may have to go back and get more; luckily, he was very careful to mark the skin, so I can tell him exactly where he has to go back and take more tissue. Surgeons rock.

2:55 p.m. I am signing reports now, on the computer. We used to have to manually sign the typed reports, not so long ago, but now that we have electronic medical records it’s a lot better. These reports will all go onto the patients’ medical charts, and copies will be sent to their doctors.

3:00 p.m. A little down time. It’s not my turn to gross today: that’s when you look at all of the tissue that comes out of the operating room, with your eyeballs, not your microscope. You can tell a lot just by looking with your eyes, and feeling the tissue. Breast cancer will look like a crab and feels very hard when you touch it, for example. After we look, and touch, and measure, and describe the tissue in a report, we take little pieces of it that our techs will make into slides that we will look at the next day. I will take a little piece of the hard area that feels like a breast cancer; I will take a little piece of tissue from the edge of the specimen to make sure that the tumor has all been taken out. Not everything that we examine is cancer; we look at tonsils from little kids, and appendixes; we look at tissue when a woman has a miscarriage, and try to find out why her pregnancy failed.

3:30 p.m. The slides from the colon cancer are here, the one the oncologist and I discussed this morning. Her tumor has gone through the whole colon; the cancer has spread to most of the lymph nodes around the tumor. The oncologist has to figure out what to do now.

4:00 p.m. Things start winding down for the day, in my office, anyways. I finish signing my reports, check my email, check my snail mail, check my inbox, and check my list of pending cases, to see what I’m going to need to do tomorrow.

5:00 p.m. Outta here. I wear a pager, and carry the phone at all times in case a doctor has a question, or a surgeon needs us in the OR, or there is an autopsy that may need to be done. So it’s never really done here- I am still pretty much tethered to the hospital. We take turns taking call, though, so each of us can have a break, or go out of town- as per our contract, we have to be within 20 minutes of the hospital if we are needed.

I will post, eventually, on the thing that makes us pathologists notorious: The Autopsy. I think it’s not quite what most people envision, and maybe I can dispel some myths.