THE OCCASIONAL PUNCH TO THE GUT

Ghost

2 Likes, 1 Comments - Cindy Maddera (@elephant_soap) on Instagram: "Ghost"

I came home from work to find the picture sitting on my home desk. Blurred and faded. Chris in the act of impersonating a jelly fish or reenacting a scene from the Simpsons. It could be either of those things. I recognize the room. It is the room where we all spent half our days hanging out, the student government office in Trout Hall. Is it even still called Trout Hall? For some reason I don't think so. I vaguely remember them moving the student government office too after we all graduated. God, this image is from a hazy lifetime ago, back when we were all so young and not so jaded by life's disappointments. That school was our Hogwarts. I don't think any of us even thought about what we'd do next, when we finally graduated and had to leave. 

I think we were all surprised and a little shell shocked when we realized that we would one day leave that place to stumble through to the next thing. Some times I wonder and dream about what it would have looked like to never leave. Not necessarily staying on as students, but moving into teaching. The only time teaching has ever crossed my mind was if I could teach there. I have no desire to do it otherwise. I wonder what we would look like, how the group of us would have changed if we had all stayed put. Would we just be older versions of our idyllic selves? Chris and Amy would have turned the UFO Independent Study into a yearly event. I would have taken over Dr. MaGrath's campus gardening project. Jen would be dragging a group of art students around to various places to sit and draw. Basically we would be the lost boys to Chris's Peter Pan. Never growing up.

Was I his Wendy?

I remember how it felt like we were not grown ups. Not even when we moved on from graduate school and entered the so called 'real world'. We still seemed to be just playing at adulthood. Like it was a game or a theater production. We watched cartoons and collected toys. We had hand-me-down everything from cars to couches. We still scavenged home decor from thrift stores and garbage dumpsters. The idea of being able to buy a house was so far out there that we thought it would be easier to buy land on the moon. We bought scooters and lived with his mom. We were children right up until the day we moved to Kansas City. We moved in an actual moving van for the first time, not a horse trailer borrowed from a neighbor. We bought a lawnmower and we bought a house. Our couch was still a hand-me-down couch and our furniture was still an eclectic mix of thrift store and IKEA, but it was our house with a garage and a fenced-in backyard. 

We were better off never growing up. 

The Cabbage was the one to find that picture. It had been tucked inside a book and had fallen free when she pulled the book from the shelf. There is always an odd tug and pull that I feel whenever my current life runs into my past life. Michael and the Cabbage are always respectful of my past. They placed that picture on my desk instead of back in the book it fell out of because they thought I might want it. Which was nice and sweet. But it still feels odd for them to run across such a random and totally honest picture of Chris. Like a science fiction show when dimensions in timelines cross paths. For a moment my timeline gets twisted into a loop and the now meets up with the then ever so briefly. Just enough to feel the oddness of it before it flips back into place. Like a twisting rubber band. 

We are better off never growing up. 

'CAUSE SOMETIMES WE'RE TEENAGERS

Fireworks

14 Likes, 1 Comments - Cindy Maddera (@elephant_soap) on Instagram: "Fireworks"

Michael and I are incompatible sleepers. I think I've mentioned this before. Chris and I were the same way, though I was less afraid of sleeping next to Chris. Michael has long arms that flail. Any way, one of the many secrets to a successful relationship is separate bedrooms. People are rude and cranky when they don't get a good night's sleep. They also tend to direct that rudeness and crankiness towards the person who caused them to not get a good night's sleep. Michael and I have our own bedrooms. Michael's room has a window a/c unit. Mine does not. During the Fall and Winter, we have sex in my room. During the summer we have sex in his room. This system works well for us. 

The thing that throws a wrench in all of this is the size of our house. We are a two bedroom house in desperate need of a third bedroom. The Cabbage and Michael have been sharing his room, which is fine for now, but the Cabbage is quickly approaching seven. She needs her own space. Yet, despite this, we hem and ha between moving and just making this house work for us. That's because normally the Cabbage is only with us every other weekend. During the summers we have her Monday through Friday every week. This, of course, is usually the time when we start talking about adding on to the house or moving to something bigger. Talaura said to me once that midwesterners are spoiled on space. I couldn't agree more. It is one of the reasons for the hemming and hawing.

This summer Michael cleaned up the basement and basically recreated our living room in the basement with our old couch. He's arranged all of our not-sure-what-do-with left over furniture into a sort of comfortable den. He's got the old TV hooked up to our old Roku and he's placed the a rug down on the floor. There's a side table and a lamp and he's stuffed pillows into a ductless vent that just happens to be right next to my bed to reduce noise. Before, I could hear everything in the basement. (One time I woke up because I could hear a rabbit being tortured by the cat and I swore it was happening in the living room because the sounds were so loud. It was all happening in the cat's dungeon.The cat is a jerk.) Michael's made it really quite comfortable down there and because it is a basement, the temperatures are relatively ambient year round. This is kind of important because a.) Michael is always hot and b.) that part up there about our seasonal sex habits and how there is currently a six year old residing in the bedroom with an a/c unit. 

So the other day, I asked Michael if he thought the basement was cool enough. He looked at me and asked "Cool enough for what?" He can a be bit slow on the uptake sometimes and when he saw the look I'd given he said "Oh!...OOOhhh! I don't know, but we should find out." We told the Cabbage that we were looking for 'important documents' in the basement and then hurried down the stairs while tugging off clothing and giggling like teenagers. Then we soon found out that though we were acting like teenagers, our bodies are not as nimble as a teenager's. There was a lot of "how about.." "yeah, what about..." "wait...no that's not going to.." "maybe if you move..." "CRAMP!" Also, the basement is still kind of a dirty basement. At one point, I touched the wall with my fingertips and then immediately regretted it. So then all I was thinking about was my contaminated fingers. When we were not trying to figure out the logistics of what we were doing, we would have sudden pauses where we would whisper "wait! did you hear that?" and "is that the dog or the kid?" Then we would be very still while we listened for pounding foot steps indicating a child headed in our direction. Turns out the thrill of getting caught does not just apply to being caught by your parents in the basement.

We emerged some time later after finding those 'important documents', Michael with a twinge in his back and me with a sore shoulder. Michael is more determined then ever now to really make that basement work for us and has started talking about futons and some sort of curtain/wall system. Just as long as his vision doesn't include velvet paintings and lava lamps, I'm game. 

I DON'T WANT TO CHEW MY VITAMIN

Thorny

"Thorny"

The alternative title for this post was The Noise My Nose Makes, because, holy goats, I kid you not, the other night it sounded like someone was dialing a rotary phone inside my right nostril every time I inhaled. The next night, as I rolled over onto my other side, I felt all the snot in my face shift over to the new side. It made the kind of sound that I image glaciers make as they gouge their way slowly across the earth. I am currently breathing through one nostril. That's actually progress. Wednesday morning I woke up with a sore throat and my right ear aching. I spent the day on the couch mindlessly watching TV. Thursday morning, I got up thinking I might go to work, only to have my body slam back into bed and declare otherwise. Friday morning, I got up, showered and dressed for work only to have my body slam me back down into bed again and say "Not yet." 

So for three days in a row, it has been just me on the couch with sometimes the dog, sometimes the cat or sometimes the cat and dog. I'm kicking myself now for not setting up a camera to do a time lapse. I'm sure it would look very cinematic with me laying in the same spot with the same blank stare while the animals moved around me. Sounds like a scene from a depressing Bridgette Jones kind of movie.  I've been watching a lot of TV. A lot of TV. In three days, I've watched the series finale of Mad Men (Which I don't recommend watching on the anniversary of your husband's death just because of that scene with Birdie and Don talking on the phone about her cancer), five movies, all of season one of the Lizzie Borden Chronicles, and a partial Designing Women marathon on LogoTV. I have also witnessed countless of ads for all of the things a person doesn't even know they need. For some reason the ads for adult gummy vitamins seems to have made the most impression (implantation?). 

Now, when I was a kid, I had Flintstone chewable vitamins like most children of the 80s. I ate them by the handful like candy because they were delicious. When Mom realized we were going through a jar of vitamins a week, she got a bit more diligent on monitoring my vitamin intake. But for a while there, I was eating a handful of sweet tarty yummy multi-vitamin goodness with my breakfast every morning. Ten million strong and growing. What did they expect? The Bayer company made them taste like candy and for a kid who didn't get candy unless it was a holiday, they might as well have just declared a serving size of ten or twenty. One vitamin. Ha! What a joke. Then I grew up. I learned to respect and appreciate my parents decision to limit our candy exposure. Thanks to them, I am not a big candy eater. I eat a bite of candy, think "Oh that's lovely." and then set it aside and forget about it for a month or so.

While I was growing up, I also learned to swallow pills and take grown up vitamins. I have been happily swallowing my multi-vitamin ever since. Not to long ago, I ran out of vitamins. I went to the vitamin section of Target and in the one hundred days (or so) since I last purchased vitamins, things on that isle had completely changed. All of the usual pill form vitamins had been replaced with gummy vitamins. Rows and rows of bright colorful gummy vitamins. It was like some Twilight Zone geriatric candy shop. I did not want a gummy vitamin. I take my vitamins in the morning. Gummy fruit flavors do not mix with toothpaste. I don't need to chew my vitamin. I don't need my vitamins to be gooey and stick in my teeth, but there's a little more to this than just eating a vitamin.

Gummy vitamins feel slightly insulting.  Kids get gummy vitamins because they're kids. They like eating chicken pressed into the shape of tiny dinosaurs.  Broccoli is a spoon for cheese or ranch dressing. Kids have to be tricked and bribed into eating things that are good for them. For God sake, they put yogurt in tubes with crazy colors because kids think that its fun to slurp their yogurt and as parents we totally buy into it because it's hard enough getting them to eat anything. I am not a child. I don't need to be tricked or bribed to take a multi-vitamin. I don't need my vitamin to be hip, cool, or sexy. I just need to take a multi-vitamin, preferably one I don't have to chew. I know. I sound curmudgeonry. Like maybe taking a bright pink chewy vitamin would make me less cranky. 

Breathing out of both sides of my nose would make me less cranky.    

LOVE THURSDAY

Silly faces make it harder to cry at goodbyes. We had a great, but too short of a visit with @birdpony and @admiralstarpony . Thank you guys for all of it. And love.

"Silly faces make it harder to cry at goodbyes. We had a great, but too short of a visit with @birdpony and @admiralstarpony . Thank you guys for all of..."

Monday morning I woke up to a text from Chad telling me that Facebook was saying that we'd been friends for six years. "Happy Anniversary" he wrote. I laughed of course because Facebook is silly, but then I was a little shocked by the six years. I told him that couldn't be right, it had to have been longer than that. Chad looked it up. He had pictures from that day where we all met for dinner. He sent me one he'd taken of me and Chris. Tears pricked the corners of my eyes. How could these two people look so happy? That look on Chris's face as he's looking at me has been captured in pictures so many times, it's all I know. I know that Chris looked at me with love. The date of the picture was proof that I had known Chad for six years now.

I told Chad that it still seemed longer. I said that I would have thought we grew up together. In a way, we did. Chad was taking an epic road trip across the country. We all met for dinner as he made his way through Oklahoma. Me, Chris, Amy, Brian and Chad. He said that we ate like Mediterraneans that night. We did. It was a Mediterranean restaurant and we lingered over dinner for hours. Chris played the part of Rosco, a hitchhiker Chad had picked up along the way. It was a running joke that had started as soon as Chad had left Atlanta headed for his adventures west. The beauty of Chris posing with a toothpick in his mouth and his hair all mushed down on his forehead was that no one in Atlanta knew Chris. They all easily believed he was really the crazy hitchhiker Chad had picked up. We were kids then. Joking around, laughing, dreaming. We still lived like we were in college with hand-me-down furniture from friends and family. 

Not long after that though, we'd all have to start dealing with very grown-up things.  Chad would lose his mother to cancer. We'd buy houses and lawnmowers. Amy and Brian would divorce. Some of us would move to knew towns and start new jobs. Chris would get sick and die. We just managed to fit forty something years of life into six years, that's all. I don't know how we did it or how the connection was made, but Chad has really turned out to be like a brother or a first cousin. Or a twin separated at birth. Maybe it's a past life connection. I have no idea. I just know that when Chad and I are in the same room we can laugh at the most absurd and ridiculous thing. I noticed a few times during our visit over the summer that whenever this would happen, Jess and Michael would look at each other and shrug with an unspoken "I have no idea what they are laughing at." Honestly I think half the time Chad and I don't either. 

It is just another example of the relativity of time. These are the kinds of connections that  you hold dear.  So, here's to those six years on this Love Thursday.