HGTV'd

One of several rooms that could use a makeover

Home and Garden Television is starting a new show where they drive around the country surprising fans with a makeover. The way they put it is "surprising fans with a jaw-dropping makeover". It occurs to me that "jaw-dropping" can be taken more than one way.


I have more than enough rooms that could benefit from a makeover (all of them, in fact), but I see a problem with my applying to be on the show. I just do not speak HGTV's language.


First of all, when homeowners are asked how they want their finished room to look, they are obligated to say "warm and inviting". Notwithstanding that "cold and forbidding" as a design style went out when people stopped building medieval castles complete with moats, it is considered necessary to say you want your room (oh, excuse me, "space") to be warm and inviting because it's not the sort of thing that someone who spent years studying design could be trusted to think up on their own.


It is also necessary to state that you want your roo - uh, space, to seem  both cozy and spacious. Of course, you can't say both words together like that so that everyone will recognize how impossible that is. You have to use "cozy" in one sentence and "spacious" in the next, or better yet, the one after that. 


Furthermore, it is important for some reason to want your whole house to "flow". Where, I don't know. A few months after Hurricane Katrina, my husband and I went to New Orleans to look at the neighborhood where he grew up. We met a woman who was standing by the foundation of her former home. The slab wasn't even left, just the footings that the slab had stood on. I do not want my house to flow anywhere, thank you. I think houses should stay exactly where you left them last time you saw them.


People also seem to be willing to spend outrageous amounts of money to make their bedrooms look like hotels. I do not understand this. I have never been in a hotel that makes me think, "I want my house to look just like this." Partly that's because we mostly stay in places like Comfort Inn when we travel, but even our $450 a night room at the Hermitage Hotel in Nashville, while lovely as hotel rooms go, didn't make me think, "I want my bedroom to look just like this." It just looked too anonymous, like a hotel or something. Of course, I did like the view, but it's not like I could take that home with me.


The other thing that amazes me is how much money people spend on kitchens. Fancy kitchens don't say "rich" to me. Fancy kitchens say "If I were really rich, I'd hire a cook and wouldn't care what kind of dump I stuck him or her in, but I'm not so I did this instead."

While we're on the subject of what rooms "say", I should note that some designers, like Candace Olsen and Sarah Richardson, always want their design elements to speak to one another. The mirrors speak to the windows, the rugs speak to the curtains, the chairs speak to the sofa. They don't even need people to have a party. If it were my house and I heard all those objects speaking to one another, I'd check myself into a psychiatric facility.

And no matter how high end that facility might be, when I got home, I wouldn't want my bedroom to look like it.

Powerless

The power cage, suitable for squats, bench presses, rack pulls, and with the addition of a board across the bars, use as a martini bar.

About ten years ago, I found a book called Strong Woman Stay Slim and began weight training. I had always had an uneasy relationship with exercise, since I have no co-ordination and find  rapid movement awkward. Weight training proved to be a revelation. You pick the weight up, you put the weight down. It's totally uncomplicated, and actually got to be fun. An internet friend suggested a news group devoted to weight lifting, and while I did my little 3 pound overhead presses and unweighted squats, I read about the exploits of men and women doing power lifts - squats, deadlifts, and bench presses -  with what seemed to me to be unimaginable weights. I gradually got stronger and leaner. One day at work, I was about to carry a 40 pound, non-ambulatory child down the hall to PT when he reminded me that I needed to get his back pack, which was sitting on the floor. As I bent my knees to reach for it while keeping my back as straight as possible to keep his head from hitting the floor, it suddenly occurred to me that there might be a practical use for squats and deadlifts in my line of work. Then a few weeks later when I found myself pushing a hefty teenager whose power wheelchair battery had gone dead through the hall, I added bench presses to the list. After a few months of spotting me and handing me the bar for my squats, my husband was easily persuaded to buy me the above power cage, which he referred to as my jungle gym and used between workouts for drying blankets and other large pieces of laundry not suitable for the dryer. We share.

I never reached my goals: 100 pound bench press, body-weight squat, and 225 pound deadlift, but I did get stronger and leaner. Then I broke my ankle. It healed and I returned to  my weights, but my foot kept swelling. A trip to the podiatrist revealed a frozen toe joint, and then I had foot surgery. The rack collected dust and laundry and when my foot scarred up and was slow to heal, I finally sold it. I kept my dumbbells, as well as my bars and plates.

When I retired this month, I decided my number one priority, no matter what else I did or didn't do, was going to be my health. Since I still have my dumbbells, I began where I started, with my "strong women" exercises. For cardio, I checked out what I call "little old lady exercise class" (and what is officially called "Senior Exercise Class")  at a nearby public park.

Ah, the ghosts of gym classes past. "Little old lady exercise class" is low impact and geared for an older population, but it is still largely based on dance moves and other movements that require doing one thing with one foot and something entirely different with the other, or the opposite hand, and all four extremities at once. It incorporates stretching (I'm as flexible as a brick), balance (I have an inner ear disorder), and eye and jaw exercises which give me time to catch my breath, if nothing else. I am so spectacularly bad at little old lady exercise class that after the first day sympathetic members were telling me not to worry, I would get better with practice, apparently not noticing or caring that this was tantamount to telling me that my performance sucked. Oh, well, it's not like we are doing this for grades.

Last week a half dozen or so residents of a group home showed up and now I'm not the worst person in little old lady exercise class. I'm the third worst.

My plan is to start deadlifting again as part of my weight training some time in early February. I'll start light, 40 pounds or so, but maybe that will help me feel like my old self again, instead of powerless.

Dressed to Kill

Our local newspaper does a weekly feature called Style File in which they interview some hapless local mall denizen about what she is wearing. Since I'm never going to be interviewed for Style File unless as a wrong example, I decided to interview myself, for fun and because since I retired I have way too much time on my hands:

NAME: Coleslaw

AGE: 63

OCCUPATION: Retired

Tell us about what you’re wearing.

A Land's End cotton sweater, bought on year-end clearance, a two-year-old pair of JC Penney cotton work pants, an even older black cotton jacket, also bought on clearance, a glass necklace my sister-in-law bought me at a craft fair and my dressiest orthopedic shoes. 

Who or what most influences your style?

Pieces that I can wash when I spill lunch on them. Or breakfast. Or coffee.

What’s the best fashion advice you’ve ever gotten?

Whatever it was, do I look like I took it?

What’s your favorite trend right now?

I'm not a follow trends sort of person. To be one of those, I'd have to know what the trends are.

What trend do you wish was already over?

Crocs, although I'm not sure they count as a trend. Maybe they're more like a meme, or a social disease.

Are you a shoe or handbag kind of woman?

Well, let's see, I own one daytime purse and four pairs of orthopedic shoes, so I guess that would be shoes. 

How many pairs do you own?

I could have sworn I just said four.

Name a celebrity whose closet you’d like to raid.

Let's see, who is my size? Aretha Franklin? Sharon Gless? Paula Dean?

Your house is on fire and you can grab only one thing out of your closet. What would it be?

My cat.

Make us laugh. What was your biggest fashion mistake?

I have a picture my parents took of me in my Easter outfit when I was around four. My jacket is buttoned wrong and I seem to have spilled ice cream on it. That's pretty much been my fashion look ever since.

Incarnation

Did the baby in his straw in Bethlehem

Finally understand the point of “Us or Them”?

Your kinsman will never throw you out 

into a shed. They’d rather do without

themselves and give you their own bed.

But even strangers will feel some sort of pity

(If only because Mary’s young, and pretty)

 and offer you a spot against the night.

“Do you think she’ll be all right?”

The innkeeper’s wife asks

Before she hurries back to endless tasks.

And does he finally understand that our big brains

Are why our mothers feel their labor pains

Just as he predicted, and love us anyway?

There in the hay

She wraps him up and sings in an angel’s voice.

“Joseph, he’s here! Our baby! Rejoice!

He has your eyes

And your mother’s smile.” As she lies next to him, 

Shielding him from the cold

Does he realize?

Or is he dazzled by the Magi’s gold?

Because really what’s the point of an incarnation if not

To understand what a body is, and what 

Constraints it puts on us and how 

Tiny we are against the world, and brave,

The people that he says he comes to save.

Yes we choose sides - the stranger and the friend

But if you’re going to have to send

Some teenage boy out on Judean fields to tend

Your sheep, how else do you tell

The ones who are in it for the lols

From the ones who’d die to save your lambs from wolves?

Until someone comes up with something new

“Us or them” is what will have to do.

How was he as a child? I think I can chance

a guess. “We piped for you and you did not dance.

We wept and you did not mourn.”

He was born a baby, but how odd

Our games must look seen through the eyes of God.

I hear him answering, “I tried to play!

But the children never liked me anyway.

I was a know-it-all. When I was twelve, I went into the temple

And tried to teach my elders. They were kind.

They recognized a mind

that wanted to learn and had a love for God.

And yes, I get the joke. I’m not that simple.

“But the God they see is petty and makes demands.

You can only enter the temple with clean hands

So you cannot stop to help that stranger

Set upon by a robber band.

The only one who can help is that poor sod 

Who thinks he has already earned the wrath of God.

But I’m not like that at all!

I’m not that small-minded! I’m like my Dad:

When I’d pick up something sharp in the workshop,

He’d say, “Thank you, lad. I needed that”

So kind, and then say, “Here son,

Do this for me” instead of waiting for the damage done, and then the beating.

I want to be like that! I didn’t know!

I didn’t have a dad myself until a short while ago

And now he’s gone. Your lives are so

Short! Help each other while you’re here.

I’ll wait. I have eternity to wait.

“I’ve learned a few things. I won’t make bets with Satan any more.

Who knew how long that story would endure?

And that I’d be the hero?

Will my people forgive me anything I do?

See, you need to forgive each other, too.

Please?” he says.

But as each Sunday scholar knows

That isn’t really how the story goes.

He didn’t come to listen, but to preach.

His loss

If he’d listened, would he have wound up on that cross?

And puzzled? “My God, my God”

So he was crucified

The way that many other people died

And I’ll weep for them as much.

Don’t expect me to make a fuss

For a God who blew his chance to learn from us.

Shy And

After 36 years working at the center, I am finally retiring. Four weeks from today I will be a lady of leisure, at least until financial realities force me to take a job as a greeter at Wal-Mart to pay for my nursing home insurance. Since I have been employed since the age of 18, this is going to be different, to say the least. I will have to get my head around who I actually am without my job, or at least get my head around the idea that I don't have to be anybody in particular.


My co-workers, some at least, are having a hard time with my decision, too. They keep insisting I am going to be bored and miss my job. I'm 63 years old and work with toddlers who have low frustration tolerance, maniacal energy, and voices loud enough to break glass. I think I'll risk it.


My retired friends, on the other hand, have no regrets. Some of them wonder how they ever found time to work. That worries me. I was hoping that retirement would bring leisure time, lots of it, even if I have to devote a few hours a day to a strange practice I have heard of called "housework". What little I know of it seems to require taking some kind of "Pledge". I'm sure I can find out more on Google.


My BFF is also going to be retiring at the end of the year, now that her youngest is graduating from college, so we are looking forward to trips together to places our husbands don't want to visit and girlie lunches in tea rooms. Thirty years ago we used to go to marches and rallies together. Things change. Friendship hangs on.

Love

spider lilies blooming in the backyard

My husband is not the romantic type. His attitude for the most part is "I told you I loved you some time or another and I'll get back to you if that changes." Once when we were on a cruise I saw that there was a ceremony being held for couples who wanted to renew their vows. When I asked hubby if he wanted us to renew our vows he did not even look up from his coffee as he asked in bewilderment, "Why, have they expired?"

What hubby is is the practical type.  When I locked my key in my car twice in one month, hubby drove thirty miles round trip each time to unlock the car with his spare key. Then he bought me a magnetic key holder to put under my bumper. When my son had an ambitious science project to complete that required simulating a beach in a kiddy swimming pool, hubby borrowed a pickup truck and drove to a sand pit in the rain to buy sand. When I had surgery on my foot, hubby helped me wrap my foot in plastic bags and get on and off my shower chair for weeks until I finally got the bandages off.


Not to mention that he does most of the housework and half the cooking.


Even so, occasionally I am moved to remark that it's nice to get flowers as a surprise. And surprise he does. One day I came home from an errand to find a vase full of orange flowers like the ones pictured above sitting on the mantle. 'Where did you get them?" I asked. As it turned out, he got them from the vacant lot next door to a rent house he owned downtown. "There are a whole bunch of them," he added. "If you like them I can dig some up and plant them in the back."


Ah, my ever practical hubby. The spider lilies, as it turns out they are called, are the oddest flowers. The leaves bloom in the spring, then they appear to die away, and leafless flowers pop up a few months later, when I least expect them. As I said, it's nice to get flowers as a surprise.


So I'm keeping him. Him and the spider lilies.

Stalking Miss Iowa

Abbey is the one in blue.

Every September for the past nine years, the small non-profit organization I work for has held a fundraiser breakfast. For the first seven years we had the usual run of motivational speakers, including one who was informally voted Worst Speaker Ever. Last year we had the good fortune of getting D.J. Gregory, author of  Walking with Friends, as our keynote speaker, and everyone was mesmerized. One of our board members noted, "I can listen to Dale Brown at practically any meeting I go to, but I don't get to hear speakers who have disabilities."


So this year my boss tried to get Temple Grandin, but that fell through. Instead we found Abbey Curran, Miss Iowa-USA 2008. Abbey is your ordinary, run-of-the-mill drop dead gorgeous beauty queen with cerebral palsy. When Abbey entered her first beauty pageant, one of her teachers tried to discourage her, saying, "Abbey, be realistic." As the parent of one of my little ones noted, "I'm surprised she would say something like that. Was she trying to get sued?"


In addition to being gorgeous, Abbey is a very funny speaker. She talked of growing up on a hog farm and how all her friends envied her. Abbey also talked about her first beauty pageant, and how worried she was that she would fall getting to the stage. She was proud to report that she didn't fall, but her dress did – right to her knees.


(I'm not sure whether to believe that story.)


I didn't exactly stalk Miss Iowa, but what with one of my co-workers taking official pictures, the news people taking pictures, and several of the organizers taking pictures, I had to squeeze in where I could to get a few blurry, badly lit shots. She didn't seem too upset.


Later that evening, my husband and I went out to dinner. At the next table I heard a woman saying, "I gave them a donation. They showed a video that really tugged at your heartstrings. And the speaker was from Iowa. She won a beauty pageant." Small world – she had been at our breakfast. On my way out I thanked her for her donation, hoping all the while I didn't still have hot wing sauce on my face.


I wonder about the Abbeys of the world. What is it that makes some people say, "I can do that" when everyone else is saying, "Be realistic"? Are people born with that kind of confidence and determination, or do they develop it as they grow? Just being gorgeous isn't enough to win you a beauty contest. You have to enter. You have to show up.


You have to be willing to risk falling on your face.