We Have A Winner!

Wow, that was quick. The "Dog Toy or Marital Aid" contest is over, and shame on all you women who entered - the quickest person to correctly identify all the vibrators featured in both the quiz and my store is A MAN.

Pink Dream Poppies correctly guessed the dozen roses, the Fuzuoku, the Jack Rabbit, and the Tongue Joy.

For the sole purpose of self-amusement, I will be sending him the vibrator that we carry in the store but for some reason is not up on our web site. That particular vibrator, the lemon yellow one on the warm up round, is the one that gave me the idea in the first place. I don't know why it isn't on the web site, but oh well.

Anyway, congratulations to Pink Dream Poppies. I hope your clitoris enjoys it.

P.S. - Consolation prizes to E.W. and B.K. for getting the correct answers right off the bat.

Bribery By Way of Apology.

I like to think my blog has a refreshing lack of memes. And it isn't just because I haven't yet figured out how to post photos without the use of "Hello". No. Instead, I assume that because I have no interest in knowing what kind of dog or J.K. Rowling character you are, or who your celebrity husband is, you in turn have no interest in finding out that I'm a dalmation named Hermione who is married to Eric Bana. Besides, we all know that's not true. I may be involved with a celebrity, but it isn't Eric Bana, it's Owen Wilson. And because I don't have to pick his dirty clothes up off the bedroom floor and put them in the hamper every damn day, that makes Owen my celebrity boyfriend, not my celebrity husband.

Now that we all know the rules of my blog, it's time to break them! Here is a fun quiz, taken from My So-Called Lesbian Life. I scored very highly on it, as one would hope, getting all of the "warmup" round correct, and missing one on the "difficult" round.

THE CONTEST IS CLOSED.

Here's where the bribery part comes in, the part where you will forgive me for annoying you with yet another stupid quiz: if you can identify which items I carry in my store, I will send you one of them.

Here are the contest ground rules:

1.) Send entries to: customerservice@honeysuckleshop.com. Subject: Dog Toy or Marital Aid?

2.) First person to send in the correct answer(s) wins.

3.) Winner must be at least 18. You must send a link to your own blog as proof of age, or something similarly acceptable. If I know you or you've sent me e-mail before, that helps, too. I love you all, but I am too busy to go to jail for you.

4.) Frog is not eligible to play, since I think some people might think I was playing favorites and cheating.

5.) I will not announce the name of the winner unless you specify that you don't care.

Good luck! Have fun!

THE CONTEST IS CLOSED.

Put a Black Border Around Yesterday and Never Speak Of It Again.

You people don't thank Frog enough. If it wasn't for her, some other poor soul would have to be my friend and intercept Godknows how many phone calls a day during work hours and patiently listen to my stream-of-consciousness, hysterical bullshit, then tell me, from a safe distance of two states away, that I most likely have PMS and need to stop shouting about burning down the houses of people who piss me off. She takes it for the greater good of society, is what I'm trying to say here, and really needs some more appreciation for that.

Here's what she had to listen to yesterday while she was trying to get ready to leave the office for the weekend and go see Lily Tomlin. And see? Because frog had to listen to me when I was still upset, you don't have to! Thanks, frog!

When you have small children it takes less than one minute to turn a good day into a bad one. Right before Christopher was born, I took Alex to the DuPage Children's Museum in Naperville. The museum was packed with children and parents, school groups, staff members, and lots of whirling lights and gadgetry. Alex was engrossed in a large scale version of Mousetrap made of wood and using golf balls in place of plastic mice. I was standing about a yard from him, watching him gather up as many golf balls as he could and setting them in motion on the contraption when I felt a tug on the hem of my shirt.

I looked down and saw a little girl, about eight, looking up at me.

"What time is it?" she asked, wiping her nose on her sleeve.

"It's almost three," I told her.

She thanked me and trotted off, and I turned my attention back to the spot where Alex was playing. He was gone. I spun wildly around, looking frantically. I didn't see him anywhere. People kept getting in my line of sight, and every second I didn't find him meant he was getting further away from me. I could feel the rising lump of panic in my throat as I randomly picked a direction and started looking. I suddenly remembered what Vicki Iovine suggested and started shouting to anybody and everybody,

"Little boy lost! Lost little boy, red shirt, jean shorts, three years old, brown hair, green eyes! Alex! Little boy lost, three years old, brown hair, green eyes!"

Within a matter of seconds a staff member approached me, verified that I was missing a child and radioed to the front door. The front door staff immediately locked all the doors leading outside and several staff members, as well as some sympathetic parents, began looking. I found him about three minutes later playing on a big play fort with some other children, having quite the time, completely oblivious to the fact that he was, in fact, lost. Completely oblivious to the fact that I had become, in fact, a nervous wreck.

The little shit did it to me again yesterday.

We had just gotten back from a great lunch at the Zephyr (hot dogs, fries, and a scoop of chocolate ice cream appearing under the noses of my cranky, hungry children in less than 5 minutes, and the chicken noodle soup wasn’t bad, either – two pudgy preschool thumbs up!).

Alex began stressing to me the importance of (read: whining) going across the street to play with Jimmy. Jimmy is a recent discovery. In a social calendar filled with superfly ladies to try to kiss and declare undying love for, Jimmy is an actual BOYPERSON, and almost exactly his age. Jimmy still gets hugs and kisses from Alex, but it’s noticeably lacking a certain amount of heat.

The heat was even less today, for Jimmy stuck his head out the front door and said firmly, “I don’t want to play; I’m watching Lilo and Stitch" and ducked back inside. Before the door could shut, Jimmy’s two-year-old sister Dani slipped out the door and began twirling around on the front lawn.

I watched from my patio chair that I’d set up at the edge of the driveway as Alex and Danielle disappeared into their garage. Since I didn’t see the kids’ parents anywhere, I pulled Christopher out of the Ski Car where he’d been playing, crawling from the back seat to the front to kneel on the driver’s seat and steer the wheel, shrieking “Honk!! Honk!! Big truck! Aieeeeeeeeeee!”

“Come on, let’s go see what your bro is doing,” I suggested, and he came along amiably enough, albeit slowly. He held my hand as we crossed the street and walked across Jimmy’s lawn into the garage. Aside from the jumble of power tools and boxes that you find in garages, it was decidedly lacking in small children. I listened for a minute to see if they were hiding in there somewhere, because nobody hides more loudly than a pair of toddlers. Convinced that they were not there, I walked around to the side of the house. The back gate was open, showing a big orange plastic swingset. I went around back to verify that they were playing in the backyard. They weren’t. I turned to scan across the series of houses and yards.

“They went that way,” said a voice. It was Jimmy’s neighbor, Lenore, pulling groceries and more children out of her car. She pointed down the street that dead ended at another road in our subdivision. Clearly they had picked a direction on the next road and took it.

“Come on, Christopher,” I said, tugging his arm, “We have to go find your bro.”

Christopher picked this moment to assert his civil rights, going limp and demonstrating flawless passive resistance. I was going to have to pick him up and carry him, and although I’m used to lugging his 35 pound dimpled butt around, I am not strong enough to sprint around the block with him in my arms. I began to beg him to buck up and reason with him, a parenting tactic that I don’t think has ever worked in the whole history of under-twos.

“Hey,” said Lenore. “If you want, I’ll watch the baby while you go after the other two.”

I agreed gratefully and shot off down the street. When I reached the corner, I asked a woman getting into her car if she had seen a four year old boy and a two year old girl. She had, she said. They went thataway. This was verified by a pack of preadolescent boys playing basketball in a nearby driveway. I sprinted off, hot on the trail and regretting that I had picked that exact day to wear my khaki shorts with the shot elastic waist. I huffed along, holding up my pants. The woman in the car pulled up alongside me.

“Do you see them?” she asked.

“No,” I panted.

“Hey, I’ll circle the block for you – if I see them, I’ll hold them until you catch up.”

I thanked her and kept running. I was halfway around the block when I rounded the corner and spotted them. Somewhere along the way, they had picked up a green plastic tractor and were riding it down the sidewalk.

I screamed for Alex. Dani froze, but Alex pedaled harder at the sound of my voice.

“Alex, you better stop right now! RIGHT NOW!” I yelled.

Eventually, he stopped. The woman in the car was idling beside them, also saying, “Alex stop!” A woman across the street got in on the action, chastising Alex to “listen to your mother.” So he stopped. Dani looked around, realized she was lost, and started to cry. I picked up the tractor, grabbed Alex by the hand, ordered Dani to follow us, and marched back around the block to Jimmy’s house again. We finally reached the house and saw Dani’s father standing in the garage. I had never seen him before, and verified that he belonged to her before I explained what had happened. He gave a completely disinterested “Oh” which would have aggravated me more had I not been so completely pissed off at Alex and eager to get Christopher back from Lenore.

We walked next door to her house knocked on the door. Lenore answered.

“Did you find them?” she asked.

“Yes. I did. Where’s Christopher?”

“Oh, Leslie’s watching him,” she said.

Leslie? Leslie can’t be more than seven years old!

“Leslie!” called Lenore.

A sprightly dark haired child pinged around from the side of the house.

“Where’s the baby?” asked Lenore.

“I don’t know,” replied Leslie.

“WHAT?” I asked, staring at Lenore.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” demanded Lenore.

“He went that way,” Leslie pointed down the street in the direction I had originally taken off in. All the way down at the end of the street, in the middle of the street, I could see Christopher, standing there, surrounded by adults.

I took off after him, dragging Alex along (can’t leave him with Lenore, now, can I?) Lenore walked behind me, apologizing.

“That’s all right,” I muttered, while simultaneously thinking, That’s all right? That is NOT all right. Leaving my baby in the care of another baby is NOT all right. But I didn’t stop to get into it. By this time I was completely, totally stressed out.

When I reached the end of the street, Christopher finally heard me calling his name and ran to me.

“Is this your little boy?” asked a woman.

“Yes, yes it is,” I said.

My mouth was formed to say the words “thank you” to her when the afternoon took a nose dive from standing on a great pile of shit to standing under it.

“You know, your children are always running around the neighborhood unsupervised. You never watch these children. They are out here all alone every single day.”

I’ve had some criticisms leveled at me in the parenting department. Late picking him up from school? Check. Don’t spank? Check. Yell too much? Check. Talk over their heads with my husband about alternative sexual lifestyles? Check. But letting my 20 month old and my four year old with a diagnosed behavioral disorder run around the neighborhood unsupervised? Every day? NEVER FUCKING HAPPENS. Never. But at this exact moment, she’d caught me with my pants down. Almost literally. Even this time they were being supervised – but they got away from me anyway. They did. What can I say? They won, with an assist from Lenore.

I looked at this woman, who, if you’ll forgive my less than generous description, looked like a bulldog with a bad perm. I’d never seen her before in my life. And since, despite her erroneous assertion, I am always watching my children, this means that if I’d never seen her, she’d never seen them. She couldn’t have. But I was too tired to argue with her. Alex was in deep shit trouble, Christopher was crying, and all I wanted to do was go home and join him. But she seemed to be waiting for an answer, and I gave her a completely unfiltered answer, borne out of stress and misery.

“That is bullshit,” I hissed at her, not bothering to break stride to defend myself any further.

Not satisfied with trumpeting lies about me to all our listening neighbors, Bulldog decided she wasn’t finished with me yet, and decided to cock her leg and piss on me good.

“I know where you live,” she said, trotting along beside me as I pulled my children home. “I’m reporting you. I’m calling DCFS, and you’re going to have those children taken away. You never take care of them. Never!”

“You go right ahead,” I yelled back.

Feeling she had done her neighborly duty, she stopped walking after me and crossed the street, looking pleased with herself.

I finally made it home and yanked the kids through the door and, yes, yelled at Alex before sending him up to his room. Christopher began begging for juice. I was preparing him a bottle when the doorbell rang.

Here’s the One Good Thing, the thing that I was too distraught to appreciate yesterday. I opened up the door, feeling it was probably too early for a government visit but not putting it past Bulldog to be standing there to give me more unwarranted shit. It wasn’t Bulldog. It was the neighborhood women and their children.

They wanted me to know that they were sorry that had happened to me. That they had seen what had happened, and that Bulldog was way out of line. That they knew I always watched my children, that they had seen us walking around the block, they had seen me sitting in the driveway every time the children were out playing. Lenore was among the group.

“I want you to know how sorry I am,” she said. “I just ran inside for a second, but I shouldn’t have done it. I was wrong, and I went up to Bulldog and told her that I was the one responsible for Christopher running off. I promised I’d watch him, and I didn’t.”

“What did she say?” I said.

“She said your kids never wear shoes.”

An outraged murmur rumbled through the crowd. I looked down at their feet. All the women were barefoot, and so were their children.

“That’s why we live in a suburb,” said one of the women loudly. “So our kids can run around barefoot in the summer! Nobody’s kids wear shoes when they’re playing in their yards!”

And all the women agreed.

“She’s just got a problem because your husband stays home with the kids,” said another woman. “My husband stays at home, too, and he lets the kids run from yard to yard. That’s what kids do.”

“It’s a thousand dollar fine for using DCFS to harass people, you know.”

“I can’t let you take the heat for taking care of my kid,” said Dani’s mother. “You were looking after my missing kid when all this happened – I can’t let you take any blame.”

“I’ll tell you what – If she goes after you, she goes after all of us,” said another.

“You don’t do anything different from the rest of us – if she criticizes you, she has to answer to us.”

“We just wanted you to know we have your back.”

I was too distraught to fully appreciate their kindness then, but today, I do. It isn’t really Suburban Hell out here after all. More like Suburban Heck.

More Linkage.

From Rainy Monday In Reykjavik: The best post I've read all week, hands down. No, I take that back. I want those hands where I can see them.

The Onion gives us the low-down on celebrity bloggers. My favorite celebrity blog is listed, with this critique:

Bloggings she may one day regret: Pretty much all of them, but particularly "I have not overdosed on pills nor have I ever used heroin."

little.yellow.different has managed to find the world's most unfortunate name.

#!/usr/bin/girl has rejected your rejection, so expect to see her first thing Monday morning.

Notebook.

I got a couple of e-mails yesterday doubting the existence of yesterday's Caller #2. While it's nice that people have such faith in my creativity, the stories I tell are about 90% true. Some of the stories that people doubt the most - the cockroach story and the dead girl in the refrigerator story - are almost totally true. I gave the characters pseudonyms and changed around details that might identify the people involved, neighborhoods and places of work and such, and paraphrased the dialogue, but aside from that, the people involved ought to be able to recognize themselves immediately. All of my blog entries are essentially the same thing - people say stuff, I write it down. What's weirdest to me is that of all the stuff I've written, the story about the unusual PB&J that Alex got at The Sunrise Cafe was the only story I was sure no one would believe, mostly because I couldn't believe it myself, and I was there.

But everybody seems to be interested in Caller #2, so I thought I'd give more details about him. The flat truth is a lot more boring, so if you don't care about him, I'd skip this post.

He called the store about six weeks ago, and I jotted down some notes about him, once he got rolling and I realized I could mine him for blog fodder. I wrote some jokes down, too, while I was talking to him, but ultimately left them out of the final post, since the way the story wrote itself best was for me to let him yap away and not offer my opinion on him. I really wanted to portray the 17 1/2 minute stream of verbal diahrrea I was subjected to, so I thought it best not to interrupt his stream-of-consciousness monologue when writing the incident down. It did occur to me, at the time of our conversation, that he was either a gay man pretending, for whatever stupid reason, to be straight. Or a straight man pretending to be gay pretending to be straight, for whatever stupid reason. Since he gave me his full name, address, and a working credit card number, he can't really be considered a prank caller, but more like a legitimate customer hell-bent on fucking with me.
I used my notes yesterday to write the post. The post itself is condensed from the actual, hideously long conversation. It reminded me of taking notes from a bizarre lecture, then writing a paper on the subject matter based on the notes I'd taken. Here they are. The quotations indicate his verbatim words.

17m29s!!!!!

*This man is so gay

*So very gay.

*gay, gay, gay.

*She'd have to be "naive" to marry him. Deaf, too.

*"high school sweetheart"

*45-years-old

*VIRGIN??? high school sweetheart 41 at youngest. He acts like she's 16. Did he take a fetus to the prom?
*How would he pin on the corsage?

*"Husband's job to sexually experiment with wife"

*sounds like "Lyle the Effeminate Heterosexual" - old Dana Carvey SNL sketch

*Why is he telling me about his surgeries? Is he 90? Who wants to hear this?

*"leaking shit into my body cavity"

*early retirement

*bought gf a sub. to Playgirl - NOT GAY!!!! NOT GAY!!!! "experimented with gay" but "all behind me now" That was SO FUNNY!

*She doesn't like porn

*Never seen a penis? Oh, come on!

*Wants "lots and lots of penises"

*"4 foot tall ceramic penis"?

*I need to get off the phone

People I Do Not Understand.

1.) If you are filling out a job application and you come to the section that asks you to reveal any special skills that make you uniquely qualified for the job for which you are applying, under no circumstances should you write, "I'm a bit of an ass freak."

Not even if you are applying for a job to work for me.

2.) Last month an item we sell was featured in Playgirl magazine, a vibrator that comes in a case that looks similar to popular kinds of candy. The names have been changed to avoid lawsuits, and now they are called hee-larious things like "Better Finger", "Toot-Z-Pole", "Good-N-Horny", and "Life Savr" (I guess they couldn't come up with a suitably groan-inducing pun.)

Yay for us, it's been a bit hit with Playgirl readers. I'd always thought that only men subscribed to it, and the editorial staff was gamely keeping up the illusion that the magazine wasn't totally gay. Imagine my surprise when I found out through my orders that it's actually 50/50. Most of them have been calling us on the phone to place orders rather than submitting an order online, which is fine, mostly, but I've also been treated to the following conversations:

From a Woman:

Her: I want to order some of them Candy Vibes.

Me: Okay. Which ones do you want?

Her: Just the Better Finger, I think.

Me: Okay. Do you want UPS Ground for shipping?

Her: What's the cheapest?

Me: UPS Ground.

Her: Okay. That. Can I write you a check?

Me: No. You can send a money order, though.

Her: Where do I get that?

Me: A currency exchange or the post office.

Her: Okay. What's your address?

Me: 3326 N. Clark Street...

Her: (writing it down, mumbling) 3326 N. Clark St.

Me: Chicago...

Her: What city?

Me: Chicago.

Her: No, what city?

Me: It's not in a suburb. It's in Chicago.

Her: Yes, I know Chicago! You've said Chicago. What? City?

(Pause.)

Me: You think Chicago is a state, don't you?

(Pause.)

Her: Oh...Oh...no...no, I didn't! I thought....

Me: Chicago is a city. It is in the state of Illinois.

Her: Illinois! I knew that!

(End.)

A Man. Imagine, if you will, the most stereotypically gay male voice you have ever heard in your life. Like Richard Simmons. No, I take that back. Gayer.

Him: Hi!

Me: Hi!

Him: I saw those Candy Vibes you sell in Playgirl!

Me: Cool!

Him: I want to order some. Can I order over the phone?

Me: Yep, I can do that right now.

Him: Oh, good. See, I'm getting married next month, and I want to surprise my wife with some sex toys. I think it will be fun. See, she's my high school sweetheart. We didn't get married right out of high school, but we really should have. But I'm 45 now, and I figure it's never too late to be with the one you're supposed to be with, right? Right! So, anyway, she's a virgin and really naive and I'm going to try to help her explore her sexuality. That's the husband's job, right? Right! So I'm going all out on our honeymoon. I retired early due to a severe injury. I had three surgeries and do you know, they took my bladder right out of my body? I had severe internal injuries, and my colon was leaking shit right out into my body cavity, so they had to go and repair that. That's gross, right? Right! So I want to do this wedding up right. I bought her a subscription to Playgirl, that's how I know about your store. I'm not gay! I'm not! Oh, I went through this period where I thought I was gay, but I think that's all behind me now. Ha! Get it? Behind me! Ha! But anyway, I think I'll take four of those candy vibes, and do you have any penises? I'm looking for lots and lots of penises. I want to put them everywhere! I'm looking for a four foot high ceramic penis. Do you have that? No? Oh, you should really think about carrying those. Well, I'll just take the Candy Vibes, then.

Me:......Uh, can I have your credit card number?

(End)

Another Man, calling from an unblocked line.

Him: I heard from my daughter that you sell these Candy Vibes. Is that true?

Me: Uh, yeah.

Him: So I was interested in getting some. My daughter is going to have a birthday party, her sweet 16, so I was going to give them out as party favors. Do you have thirty of them?

Me: Yeah....I have thirty of them. But before you buy them, I would caution you to be aware of the laws of your community with regards to distributing sexually explicit materials to minors.

Him: What are you talking about?

Me: It's legal for me to sell them to you, that's fine. That's where my responsibility ends. But if you're living in, say, Naperville, it's against the law to give vibrators to underaged girls.

Him: (Silence)

Me: Look, I'm not judging you; I'm just trying to make you aware that sex laws vary from community to community.

Him: Okay. (Hangs up)

(End.)

I called Steve later to complain about the creepiness of caller number three, and found to my surprise that it's the THIRD time he's called us about buying those Candy Vibes for his daughter. Steve intercepted him the first two times and told him basically the same thing I did, which is: this probably isn't a very good idea, creep. But now we pretty much know that he isn't interested in buying vibrators for his daughter. He probably doesn't even have a daughter. Instead, he's getting his rocks off by talking to us about buying a vibrator for his fictional teen. I'm not too keen on being an unwilling participant in someone else's bizarro sex fantasy, but what can I do? He doesn't sound, you know, out of breath or anything over the phone.

One of Our Finer Conversations.

After bathtime but before Christopher's bedtime, yesterday evening. Alex and Christopher are playing with Hot Wheels. The TV is tuned to the Disney Channel and is showing a Disney original made-for-TV movie, "Cheetah Girls".

Girl on TV: OhmiGod, is that Steve? He is soooo plush!

TV shows shot of not-entirely-repulsive adolescent boy emerging from the driver's seat of a late model sedan.

Steve: Yes. I am plush.
[Pause.]
Wait, did she just say "plush"? Plush? Is that what the kids are calling it these days? I don't think I want to be "plush".

Me: I prefer the old-school meaning of "plush". You know, back when it used to mean people who were s-e-x-u-a-l-l-y attracted to stuffed animals. Maybe that's still what it means! Maybe this is a Disney movie for a more mature audience. Like Pretty Woman.

Steve: Well, it is on after 7.

Me: Poor plushies. Their fetish was totally under wraps until the internet and that Vanity Fair article about them. Do you remember that article?

Steve: No.

Me: I felt sorry for them. The reporter found the weirdest guy on the planet to interview, and all these furries wrote in to say they were being misrepresented, that nobody wanted to hang out with this guy at their Furry Conventions or whatever, and now he's viewed as the norm. That sucks.

Steve: Weird is weird. What difference does it make?

Me: This guy just wants to f-u-c-k stuffed animals. He's got hundreds of them in his bedroom with little holes cut in them...

Steve: I get it, I get it!

Me: ...like some kind of Beanie Baby harem. He doesn't even want to f-u-c-k actual women. Or men. Furries, on the other hand, want to fuck while dressed in cat suits. Maybe with the San Diego Chicken running around on TV for inspiration.

Steve: What difference does it make if they're rolling around in it or inserting it? It's all weird. There's no need to pretend one group is more "normal" than the other group when they're that far gone. "Oh, well, you can only f-u-c-k if you're dressed as a sports team mascot, but at least you're not boning a Beanie Baby?" No. Inserting it in a stuffed animal isn't that far of a leap, I don't care if they think the Vanity Fair guy is a big loser or not, they're not that far behind him.

Alex: I have a Beanie Baby.

Steve: Well, you can have it. Just don't tell that guy from Vanity Fair.

FYI.

What the men will be getting for Father's Day this year*:

*wives in lingerie

*explicit videos

*blowjobs

and

*a surprisingly large number will be getting fucked in the ass.

Happy Father's Day to all you dads out there, and please remember that lube is your friend.



*conclusions drawn from this week's in-store purchases.

Fusion.

Today's restaurant review: The Sunrise Cafe, corner of Foster and Ravenswood, Chicago.

Before Steve and I leapt from the frying pan of the city into the fire of Suburban Hell, I used to drive past this lesbian-owned crunchy hippie restaurant with stars painted all over the twilight-colored brick exterior. "Homemade vegetable soup!" the signs on the windows cheerfully proclaimed. "Fresh scones! Sandwiches! Salads! Birthday cakes!"

"You really should go," my friends would say. "They have great scones."

I put it on my to-do list, along with reading Ulysses and taking French lessons, and five years went by and Ulysses is still sitting on my bookshelf with an unbroken spine and it's still a big non as far as relearning the French I'd forgotten from high school. The Sunrise Cafe, however, was another story all together. This was something I could actually accomplish.

So before the boys and I went to the park, I spontaneously aimed the Ski Car to the side of the road when we approached the little restaurant, and I dragged them out and into the cafe, happily anticipating a veggie sandwich for me and some Tofu Pups for the boys.

The Sunrise Cafe only had three tables, and a bar with stools running along the front window. A deli area was set up in an L-shape that ended with an old fashioned brass-colored cash register. The only other people in the restaurant were two men sitting at one of the tables. We went up to the register, and I peered back into the kitchen in an attempt to catch someone's attention. One of the men, a very young Japanese man in his early 20's, got up, greeted us and motioned us to a table. I led the kids to the table and put my purse down onto the edge of the table top, which caused the top to flip over.

The boys were overjoyed by this, but frankly I didn't think it bode very well for the rest of the meal. We sat down, and Christopher amused himself by playing with the pepper, pausing occasionally to sneeze, while Alex and I looked around the place.

"What's that music called?" he asked.

"Japanese music."

"What kind of Japanese music?"

"You know, I'm not really familiar with Japanese music, so that's about as much as I know. It sounds like Japanese new age to me."

Behind the deli case window were rows and rows of sushi. Japanese pop bottles were lined along the wall on small shelves. It seemed I had come to the restaurant about 5 years too late, and I probably wouldn't be getting any of those scones.

The young owner came out again with a menu for me. It seemed to be an old menu from the previous owners, promising all sorts of hippie goodness. I looked at him hopefully.

"Sushi?" he returned my look of hope with one of his own. "I make sushi! Good sushi!"

Alex is a trooper in many ways, but there's no way he's diving into raw fish topped with wasabi. And Christopher we won't even discuss.

On the second page of the menu, an item read: Peanut butter and strawberry jelly, $4.99.

After kicking myself for not making the peanut butter and jelly at home and eating it at the park, I pointed to it.

"Oh, yes, yes," he said, nodding agreeably.

"Okay, just one, and they'll split it, and a chicken and vegetable salad for me."

He nodded again, and backed into the kitchen. He returned seconds later with ice water in small plastic glasses. Thin circles of lemon hovered just under the ice. He placed the water down on the table, and returned to the table with a small bowl of edamame just in time to see Christopher dump a sizeable portion of the water down the front of his shirt.

"Ahhhh, baby wet!" he said, and came back again with napkins.

Alex and I enjoyed the edamame quite a bit, mostly because he likes to shell things, and I like it when he takes a liking to new food.

"You wanna ham?" asked the owner.

"Ham?"

"On salad? I put ham..."

"No, no ham, please."

"Cheese?"

"Okay."

He then asked a series of unintelligible questions that I knew would just result in a complete communication breakdown, so I cut to the chase and waved him away, saying, "Okay, okay."

Lunch came quickly. My salad was romaine lettuce with glass noodles, tomato, cabbage, mushrooms, Kraft singles and chicken pot stickers, with orange French dressing on the side. He seemed very much like he wanted me to know that he made the pot stickers himself, so I feel like I should pass that along, along with the fact that they were pretty decent, and would have been better had they been warm and served with a soy dipping sauce.

The promised peanut butter and jelly sandwich arrived as well. He set it down in front of Christopher. Usually what I do is take their food right away, divvy it up and cut Christopher's into manageable, bite-sized chunks. This time, though, I was completely paralyzed by what was sitting quietly in front of my child.

My God, this sandwich.

My God.

I sat staring at it, unable to process what I was seeing, unable to hide the look of dumb horror on my face. The owner, seeing my strangled facial expression, grew anxious. His face clouded in concern, and he began wringing his hands.

"Yes?" he queried nervously. "Yes?"

But I was forced into silence, as the only words that had formed in my brain were words that I could not say to this sweet man standing in front of me, this man who, it was now excruciatingly clear, had no clue about American food combining.

This is what sat on the wobbly table top in front of me, this food abomination contrasting sharply with the simple goodness of the edamame, the thoughtfully served lemon-water, the cheery yellow-checked paper table cloth:

A club-style triple decker sandwich, on unwieldy puffy French bread. Layered between the slices of bread were, in this order, peanut butter, avocado, lettuce, tomato, onion, cucumber, Kraft American singles, and strawberry jelly. I was momentarily sure I was being punked, that Ashton Kutcher was going to show up and point and laugh. And I totally would have deserved it, because
I literally could not speak. And, for awhile, neither could the owner. Clearly, he had done something very wrong. But what? He did not have the vocabulary yet to ask me what the matter was, nor to understand my answer. But he tried. He pointed to a spot under the top layer of bread.

"Is very good peanut butter," he said.

A small hand darted out and grabbed one of the sandwich halves. Alex crammed a point of the sandwich into his mouth.

"What do you think?" I asked him, appalled but trying to hide it.

"Mmmmm. Tomato," he said appreciatively.

I looked up at the owner, who hovered over Christopher, his brow furrowed. "I guess it's okay, then."

And that was one of the tougher decisions I've made, to say nothing. But really, the owner made it, the customer for whom it was made saw no problem with it, so I let it go. None of my business, really.

Unfortunately, the owner had become upset. He pointed at Christopher. "He not eating!" he said.

To be fair, it might not be the devil's own sandwich sitting in front of him that's doing it. Christopher is a pickier eater than his brother, and lately just prefers to occasionally graze rather than eat a meal. But again, I couldn't explain this to the owner, who wasn't waiting for an explanation anyway. He shot off to the back and returned with a huge chocolate chip cookie, which he presented as an olive branch for his mysterious offense.

I don't care if one child hasn't eaten in four days and has crawled through a river of raw sewage to reach the table, and the other has ridden up on a fancy pony, you just can't give one child a cookie without giving one to the other, too, so I quickly broke the cookie in half and distributed the pieces.

The owner settled down into the remaining chair at our table, and began talking in some sort of Japaglish, of which I understood about every fifth word. The only thing I understood, I think, was that he was not married, but that someday he would be, and that he would like to have two boys and one girl, the girl coming last. "She be a princess baby," he said.

"I want to be a princess!" announced Alex. "Princess Fiona knows karate! Princess Elizabeth wears a paper bag! Why are you Japanese?"

The language barrier, a mixed blessing.

Then the owner began talking to Alex, which worked out very well. If you remember from your high school Spanish or French beginner classes, most of the conversations in the beginning of the book went like this:

Marie-Claire: Bonjour, Pierre!

Pierre: Bonjour! Comment allez-vous?

Marie-Claire: Tres bien, merci! Et vous?

Pierre: Tres bien! Alors, Marie-Claire, Quelle age etes-vous?

Marie-Claire: J'ai 17 ans. Et vous?

Pierre: J'ai 18 ans.

Marie-Claire: Qu'est qu'il y a a mange pour le dejuner?

Pierre: J'ai mange un peanut butter and jelly sandwich with lettuce, tomato, onion, and that shitty cheese food those stupid Americans eat. Et vous?

Marie-Claire: Ah! Moi aussi! Les Americans sont tres stupide, n'est pas?

Pierre: Bien sur!

Both: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

This is perfect small talk for a four year old, so they chatted in that vein until Christopher decided he had had enough and climbed out of his chair and began marching toward the open front door. I ran to scoop him up, and he evaded my evil clutches and darted behind the deli counter. The owner pitched in and got up, coming around the other side of the counter and blocking his path. Christopher fled in anxiety back to me.

"Maybe I just have the girl," said the owner, thoughtfully.

Time to go.

So I paid the check ($10), scooped up the kids, and took them to the park. On the way out, the owner told Alex that if he came back on his (Alex's) birthday, the owner would make him a birthday cake. I'd be all for this, except I suspect we might be presented with an eel covered in pink sugar roses.

Despite all this, the Sunrise Cafe is now my new favorite restaurant, and everyone should go to wish him well.

Just don't order the peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

I Got Nothing.

So here's some links to stuff I snatched off other people's sites.

I've been meaning to link to this Massachusettes wedding photo from My So-Called Lesbian Life since I first saw it weeks ago. When I compare my wedding photos to it, I can't find a single one that captures on my face the look of joy that is present on the face of the woman on the right. If ever I needed evidence that I took the privilege of marriage completely for granted, this photo is it.

And speaking of marriage, be sure to check out today's post on marriage by Ampersand at Alas, A Blog.

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From Gawker: The winner of the Worst. Blind. Date. Ever. award goes to this guy.

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I never thought there was a celebrity web site more appalling than this one. I was wrong.

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Mrs. Kennedy from Fussy has found a wonderful virtual boyfight between Judd Apatow, creator of Freaks and Geeks, and Mark Brazill, creator of That 70's Show. The level of pissy nerdery in this flamewar proves that the only difference between blogger nerds and celebrity nerds are those sweet sweet goody bags.

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Potentially very bad news for Lizbeth at Mom & Pop Culture: The anonymous blog of the supposedly A-list celebrity Rance may be written by...er, this guy named Keith.

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[Ed. note - Frog, do not click on the links in this segment. I'm not kidding.]
Andrea has found someone disturbing. So very disturbing. And on so many different levels.

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Eric Zorn discovers he can use the word "piss" on his Chicago Tribune-hosted blog. A nation rejoices.

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Frog started a meme called "What would your room in hell look like"? If "hell" is defined as a place that is so utterly unbearable that you are unable to blog about it because you've spent the past 20 years trying desperately to suppress all memory of it and avoiding everyone who even knew you when you were in that place, then hell must be junior high, down to the last made-for-right-handed-people-only desk. I thought I'd be able to write a long-ass detailed post about why, exactly, that junior high sucked, but damned if I couldn't do it.

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Leave it to Debbie Stoller to combine knitting and porn. I was unable to get past the premise of this issue's erotica to actually read it, but I believe the project in question is a cock sock. This is a sure sign of the Apocalypse - feminist knitters have now taken over everything. Are you knitting fanatics satisfied now?

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Finally, special belated thanks to Sour Bob for reminding me about Superdawg. How could I have been a parent for almost five years and somehow failed to introduce my progeny to Mr. and Ms. Hotdawg? Alex's verdict: Ate his own hot dog then stole and ate Christopher's when neither the baby nor I were paying attention. However, he found the chartreuse pickle relish slightly frightening in a Three-Mile-Island kind of way.

I Leave Kansas for Oz.

Ronald Reagan died the other day, don't know if you knew that. Sylvia was the first person I saw after I read it on the AP wire online, about 20 minutes after it was posted. She was working a private party that night and had come in to get some merchandise. She was leaning over the register, chatting with me when I mentioned to her that Ronald Reagan had finally died. She gave me a totally blank stare.

"Who?"

I stared at her, waiting for the dawn of recognition. Nothing.

"Ronald Reagan."

Nothing again, for another second or two, then she either realized who I was talking about or saw the look on my face and started pretending like she did. Then she tried to blame me for being unclear because I didn't refer to him as "President Reagan", but I'm not having that. I would use this as evidence as to the inevitable result of what happens when you send your children to public schools, but since I'm a product of public schools myself, that can't be it. I prefer to think maybe she just managed to successfully block him out of her mind. We should all be so lucky.

I did a toy party of my own last week, which I usually don't do. It was for a women's group in a tony northern suburb. They requested a time in the morning, which knocked everybody but me out of availability, as Sylvia, Rachael, and Carissa all have actual careers that they can't blow off for some quick cash. Since this is my career, the party fell to me. The hostess asked for a 9:00 a.m. start. I said fine, booked it, and forgot about it for the most part. As the time grew closer, I found myself jumping in a panic. "What's today? The 7th? When's that party? Did I miss it? Shit!"

I still can't believe I remembered to show up for it, but I did. Not only that, I also managed to drag my carcass out of bed at 4:28, two minutes before the alarm went off, so I could leave at 5:00. I was particularly proud of this, since it meant I didn't have to wake up Alex, who sometime during the night had climbed over my head and wedged himself between us. When I looked at him in the grey pre-dawn, zombie time of 4:30, he was sprawled out on his back, shirt off, his special baby blanket gripped in his fist, mouth open.

To get to this particular suburb, I had to drive 40 miles into the city, then through the city, then about 15-20 miles north of Chicago. If the traffic was horrible, it could take four hours. I didn't want to be late, because that makes people pissy, and pissy people are less likely to give you money. And there was no way I was driving all this way for nothing.

Even though I had to drag my ass out the door in a scratchy-eyed haze, I was still overwhelmed with the nostalgia of being able to put on a dress, heels, stockings, and makeup and get out the door without some small savage sliming me with snot and jelly. As a result of my relative cleanliness, I was feeling pretty cute. This feeling was verified by several truck drivers who charmingly drove alongside me, blowing their horns and trying to get me to lift my shirt. I should have obliged them, just so I could enjoy watching them drive off the road out of sheer horror and burst into flames. Be careful what you wish for, my friends. Five in the morning is a good time to be on the expressway, if you hate traffic and love flashing truckers, because instead of taking the three to four hours that I thought it would take, I was instead driving into the north suburbs an hour after I'd gotten in my car. I hadn't been up this way since I'd done children's theatre ten years ago, but it hadn't changed much. The last non-white people I saw were a black woman in plum colored medical scrubs and a very small boy who were crossing the Howard/Sheridan intersection. He was straddled across her, riding on one of her hip bones, his tiny body twisted at the torso so he could look forward as he rode along. He had a pacifier lodged firmly in his mouth and a lock of her hair wrapped around his stubby fingers. After that, the only movement on the sidewalks were a parade of white women, jogging along two by two. And I'm telling you, that was it.

I drove to the suburb, located the site of the party, and drove to the downtown area to see if I could kill three hours. The quaint downtown area still had the sidewalks rolled up, but I spotted an open Starbucks and ducked in to drink coffee and water and wait it out. The non-metered parking spaces out in front had nearby signs warning "90 minute parking ONLY" but from my experience in such suburbs, I correctly guessed that this was merely a polite suggestion, not something that was as enthusiastically enforced as it was in Chicago proper.

Inside the Starbucks, the all-white staff was busy serving lattes to the all-white line of customers. My all-white ass and I waited until it was my turn to order, and I trailed off before I even got my order out of my mouth because I noticed that the female employees were wearing half dollars on gold chains around their necks.

I used to have a neighbor back in Suburban Hell that had the worst case of sour grapes of anybody I'd ever met in my life. A couple we knew recently had triplets, and their families stepped up to help them, with one set of grandparents buying them the house they were living in, and the other set buying them two largeish minivans. You'd have thought they were selling arms to the Taliban to get their money from the hatred my neighbor directed at them. I'm not like that, okay? Really, I'm not. But I have to admit I had my moment there, staring at the Ivy league bound teenager behind the register wearing money as jewelry. Maybe it's a hip hop thing all the kids are doing nowadays and I'm just too old to be in on it, but I could not bring myself to throw my spare change into the tip jar like I do at the coffee house back in the city. I was unable to get past the idea that they'd just make earrings out of the quarters.

Not to mention that all the women standing in line stared pointedly at my shoes, which were neither Manolos or Jimmy Choos, but were, in fact, blue. And bought online.

I emerged 2 1/2 hours later to see that the downtown area, consisting mostly of banks, brokerage firms, and attorneys, had awakened. All the parking spaces were now filled, and it looked like someone had dropped a used luxury SUV lot in between the two rows of buildings. Escalande, Escalande, Range Rover, Escalande, Hummer, Range Rover, Range Rover, Escalande.

It was one of the looniest things I'd ever seen, like I'd inadvertantly driven onto a movie set where they were parodying rich people. But it was real. I stopped snickering when I noticed that the only cars that looked like mine had the words MAID SERVICE stenciled on their sides.

Years ago, I remembered one of my former bosses had gone to a dinner party up in this suburb. She said it was extremely uncomfortable, that everyone had looked at her like a new exhibit at the Brookfield Zoo because she was the first liberal the other dinner guests had ever met. I made a mental note to be as politically neutral as I could be. Especially since the woman booking the party had told me that the women in the group wanted to "see what someone in my line of work looks like."

It turns out I didn't need to be apprehensive, as the women were great, very welcoming, friendly and gracious. One woman was about my age, also with two small children, but the rest were in their 50's and 60's, and very happy to be attending the party. They were active participants, asked good questions, and dropped some money on toys, using platinum cards and writing checks that I didn't have to worry about clearing. And nobody stared critically at my feet. Or made mention of the fact that I never fully recovered from dragging my 100 pound suitcase up two un-airconditioned flights of stairs in 90 degree heat to get to the meeting room, and was very sweatily unladylike.


Amusingly, I did catch one of the women walking out the door with a Rabbit Pearl that she hadn't paid for. When I asked her if she'd like me to put that in a bag for her, she became so sheepish that it was clear she had just forgotten to pay. That never happens on any of the Southside parties we book.

The best evidence I had pointing out that I wasn't in the city anymore was when the hostess offered to pay for my parking ticket, if I had one in the "90 minutes ONLY" section where I parked. "But you know, they really don't ticket very often, so I wouldn't worry," she said. Another woman chimed in, "Last summer I couldn't park in my driveway, and had to park on the street. The police came to my door and asked me if there was a problem. When I explained that I couldn't use my driveway, they apologized for bothering me and said they understood."

In Chicago, I once got a ticket for an expired meter. I had just pulled into the space and was gathering my purse and bags when I saw the meter reader writing me a ticket. Ignoring my angry howls that I hadn't even gotten out of the car yet, and what was I supposed to do, throw the quarter into the meter before I parked the car?, she slapped the ticket on my windshield and ambled off to prove to some other poor sap that life isn't fair.

Later, The generous hostess wrote me a very nice e-mail thanking me for coming out there and asking me back to do another party in the fall. It turns out that she had to carefully cull that day's attendees from her women's group separating the ones who would not freak out from the ones that would. Evidently it was decided that I was palatable enough for a larger circle.

I could probably get used to having people look at my feet if I lived there. It would be nice to have enough money to send my kids to posh schools and not have to lock my Range Rover when I went shopping. To have clean sidewalks and tall old oak trees for the kids to play under - yeah, I could definitely see the appeal.

Back in the city I parked at a stop sign to let two black teenagers cross the street. They were holding hands as they crossed, him with a nylon bandana wrapped around his hair and wearing a baby blue sports jersey with the mandatory rodeo-clown sized baggy jeans. She was wearing essentially the same, but with no bandana and airbrushed acrylic nails. They giggled as he pulled her along out of the street. The air smelled like pee from the steaming open grates on the curb. An old woman crossed the street, wearing a green bandana and a shapeless knee length dress with black socks and dirty grey sneakers. She paused in front of my car to luxuriously scratch her crotch.

It was good to be home.

Alex, a Story in Three Parts.

Part Three: Old Skool Parenting, or, What the Hell Is Wrong With Your Child?

There are an awful lot of people out there who think Steve and I need to give Alex a swift boot to the ass. In fact, in the hierarchy of criticisms I get from blog readers (not that I'm keeping track or anything), "Your kid is a brat" is sandwiched uncomfortably between "You're a whore" and "You're a feminazi and oh by the way, tell me what it's like for your husband to go down on you", with "your love of them queers makes me sick" coming in at a distant fourth.

I sort of enjoy being called a whore in the same way I enjoy all the invitations to trendy club openings I get in the mail - if you met me you'd change your mind about me being a Samantha Jones-type skank who attends all the latest club openings VERY quickly. (Not that that doesn't sound nice. It does.)

As a fan of irony, I enjoy number three, and I really don't get enough complaints about number four to merit my offering my big fat ass for them to kiss.

Number two, though, fucking sucks every time, although I appreciate that the majority blame my inferior parenting skills rather than the few mouth-breathers who aim their invectives at my four-year-old himself.

More typically I see criticisms like this: somebody likes what I've written and links to it. Then somebody else will post:

I'm sorry, but I couldn't even finish reading that blog. She let her child climb on top of their car? I'm a militant mom, and if my kids had done that, I'd have spanked him then sent him to his room for half the day!

With all due respect, ma'am, I think "dickhead", rather than "militant mom" would be a more appropriate metaphor for self-description. But I suppose we all must reserve the right to see ourselves as we like.


In a perfect world, would Alex sit on the hood of our (broken) car? Well, yeah, actually. It was broken, after all. As far as the other stuff goes, stuff that causes people to politely refer to him as "a handful" or "hyper", we can only pick our battles. Sure, he may be sitting on the car, but he isn't smearing shit on the wall. He isn't pulling the rearview mirror off the windshield. He isn't painting the side of the house with sky blue acrylic paint. He hasn't brought the garden hose into the house and flooded the TV room. Sitting on the top of the car? Knock yourself out, kid! At least I know where he is.

I had an inkling that there was something different about him when he turned two, that his unruly behavior and complete inability to focus and listen was different from other kids. However, having never been around children for more than an hour in my entire life, I chalked it up to 1.) must be normal kid behavior, or 2.) I'm a shitty parent.

Sometimes number one was right, sometimes number two. But sometimes there was something else, something that didn't seem quite right. Why did I have to scream his name at the top of my lungs just to get him to acknowledge that I was speaking to him? What's the deal with him constantly jumping up and down? I've seen him do it for 30 minutes straight while watching TV. And finally, the most depressing: Why is he almost five and still not potty trained?

But rather than think that there was Something Wrong, I focused on the items on my shortlist, and clung to the memories of strangers complimenting him on his good moments when we were in restaurants or at the park.

I was pregnant with Christopher when we enrolled Alex in the local Montessori school. At the time I was very gung ho about the whole Montessori experience. I was an excelerated child, skipping Kindergarten and attending classes with older children that I could still out-read and out perform academically. While I ran rings around them in the book-learning department, they got their revenge on the playground, where my 4-year-old social skills couldn't match their 6-year-old sophistication. Montessori, with it's whole "learn at your own pace" philosophy, would have suited me perfectly.

I dropped him off the first day of preschool and went grocery shopping. I was so happy - here I was, unencumbered at the grocery store for the first time in three years, while my son was getting an ideal education. I floated in this little bubble of motherhood bliss until I arrived at the front door of the school at noon to pick him up and saw Miss Lisa standing there, holding a long, sharp pin.

"We need to talk about Alex," she began.

Pop!

Unlike all the other children, Alex had refused to cooperate at every level. He wouldn't sit at story time. He wouldn't sit at anytime. He turned the lights on and off. He threw tantrums. He broke things. He wouldn't pick up his toys. He threw things. He would not get on the same page with everybody else in the class and join the quest for individuality, by God. In short, he was a complete brat.

To her credit, Miss Lisa was gracious. "It might be just his age," she suggested. "Let's give him two weeks to see how he does."

Every school day, I'd strap him into his car seat and drive for an hour, to let him get a nap in before dropping him off, so he would be well-rested. Every day I'd show up at the front door, eagerly awaiting the daily report. Miss Lisa was tactful and kind. He's getting better. Yes, a better day today. A little improvement. He sat through most of story time today, so that was good. Miss Terri, her teacher's aide, was not so gracious, responding to my queries with a curled lip and a deferrment to Miss Lisa.

At the end of the two weeks, I called Miss Lisa to ask for the verdict. "He's definitely showing improvement," she said. "Bring him to school."

Hurray! I was so! proud! He'd adjusted and was going to come into his own now.

I dropped him off and went to Dominick's. I got a phone call from the school as I was heading home with my groceries. It was Miss Lisa. Could I come pick him up? And maybe, um, not bring him back?

"But why?" I stammered, shocked. "You just told me two hours ago that he was going to be fine!"

"I know I did, and I'm sorry. That was my fault. The owner of the school has been getting complaints from other parents about your son, saying he goes or they pull their child out. It's a business decision, not personal."

Oh. Not personal. Well, that makes it all right.

"Parents are complaining because he's hyperactive?"

"Well, no. They're complaining because he's pushing other children."

"What do you mean, he's pushing other children? I've never seen him push other kids, and I've asked you, personally, every single day how it was going and you've never once mentioned pushing. And besides, he's the youngest and smallest child there. Where's this "pushing" coming from?"

"I must have forgotten to tell you."

Oh my god. She's lying to me. Why? I still don't know, but come on. I spoke to her every day. I busted my ass getting to the school, which was still in session. The children were clustered in little groups of twos and threes in various parts of the room. My eyes darted around for Alex and finally locked on him. He was sitting quietly at a table, coloring. Not pushing. Not crying.

Miss Lisa heh heh'ed some sort of comment about how "well, right now he's behaving" but that was eclipsed by Miss Terri, who saw me and sang out "Hello!" in the most cheery of cheery voices. Miss Terri who for the past two weeks had treated me with only the tersest modicum of civility. It dawned on me that Miss Terri was behaving in such a perky manner because she wanted me to know she was happy that Alex was getting expelled.

Truth telling time: I know Alex can be difficult. I don't begrudge anyone for being relieved that he's out of their hair. But to deliberately and openly gloat to a child's mother about her child's expulsion from school?

I'm not a hater. And I'm not a confrontational person. But the rage I felt toward Miss Terri at that moment was a sharp and nearly vomitous loathing that, when I permit myself to think about her, is just as strong today as it was two years ago when I stood there in the archway of the classroom door and watched her retreating back, filled with the purest of white hot hate and realizing with absolute clarity that if 1.) she and I were alone 2.) I was not eight months pregnant 3.) I had a baseball bat, I would have matched her cheery mood when I broke the bat on her face. Never have I hated anyone quite that much.

As a parting shot, Miss Lisa suggested I have him tested for ADD.

We put him in another, less rigid (I know, less rigid than Montessori!) school. He made it through the whole year, but in May, Miss Nancy suggested we have him tested for ADD.

We put him in a teaching day care. The specialist who routinely checked progress of all the children suggested we have him tested for ADD. His teacher, Ms. Castille, (Ms!) who I am convinced needs to be worshipped as a goddess (The Goddess of Spaz?), found nothing particularly wrong with him. "He'll pull it together," she always said. "He's just fine."

I took him to the public school district's building for "special" children to get him evaluated. We spent four hours there. Three hours and forty-five minutes of that time required that he sit still. After the first two hours, they evaluated him for fifteen minutes. After making us wait for the evaluators to come talk to me for another two, in a conference room with eight children and one toy, they came in and sat down. I was the last parent they spoke to. Apparently, they felt he was retarded. And maybe autistic. Oh, and he probably has ADD, but they can't really test for that until he's seven. But he'll definitely need to be medicated. He could not, they said, count to seven.

"But he can count to thirty!" I protested. "In English and Spanish!"

Ah, but he wouldn't they said, and wouldn't is just as bad as couldn't. And besides, why would you have brought him here if you didn't think there was something wrong with him?

Something wrong with him. Something wrong with him. That rankled me. Still does.

I don't think there's Something Wrong with him. And I don't think I want the public school system of Suburban Hell thinking there's Something Wrong with him in perpetuity, either.

One of my employees had ADD, and so did her children. We'd talked about Alex, and she'd warned me not to get a public school diagnosis of any sort of behavioral disorder. She'd made the mistake with her son, she said, and now every single thing he does is attributed to his having Something Wrong with him, even if it's just normal kid stuff. "Don't let him get that stigma," she said.

I didn't like their attitude, anyway, and they sure didn't like my Fuck You attitude, either.

I had a long weepy talk with my pediatrician, who had a child of her own and was pregnant with her second.

"I don't think he has ADD," she said. "But I do think he's behind in some areas. Why don't you call School X? I hear good things about them."

And that's how Alex got into the school he's in right now, and how Steve and I ended up in parenting classes to teach us alternative methods of dealing with special needs children.

Not everybody was supportive about our quest to find alternative methods of dealing with Alex, methods that didn't involve a belt strap.

Our parents were the worst at this.

"Why do you always have to do the smart stuff?" complained Steve's mother.

"What the hell are you talking about?" replied Steve, taken aback.

"When children misbehave, people used to just spank them, not look for psychological problems," she said. "It's just a cop out."

My own mother echoed my mother-in-law, advocating a good stiff beating. She kept on this tack when she was visiting, treating him with arm's-length distain at his wilder antics. We were poking around a second-hand store when I came across a tiny outdoor chair that matched the adult chairs on our patio. For a dollar, I couldn't refuse. I was happily thinking of him sitting outside in the chair a la Baby Bear while his Mama and Papa bear sat in their chairs of corresponding sizes when my mother broke into my reverie by saying, "Now, this will make an excellent punishment chair! After you spank him, he can sit in the corner in this chair!"

I was horrified. Buy an item specifically to make my child miserable? Steve was so offended by the idea of the punishment chair that he threw it out in the garage, and no amount of reassuring him that The Chair Can Mean Anything We Want It to Mean has swayed him from lifting the ban on it.

And while my mother was there, I did spank him. Only partly because he'd been pushing my buttons. But partly because I was embarrassed for my mother to see me failing as a parent, and partly because I was starting to believe the Militant Moms were right. He was wild, he was bad, and I was a liberal hippie feminist shithead who was raising a generation of self-centered shithead kids. Afterwards, I sat outside his bedroom, sobbing, while he sat inside his bedroom doing the same.

My mother tried to soothe me with platitudes about how much better life would be now that I'd seen the light, and about how much truth there was to the old saw, "this is going to hurt me a lot more than it hurts you".

She was right about that. I fucking hated myself. And it wasn't the kind of "Oh, I ate that hot fudge sundae and now I feel fat and I hate myself" kind of assholery, either. I hated myself with a hate second only to the hate I felt for Miss Terri.

I wanted to kill myself, and I'm not a suicidal person. Physically hurting my child made me wish sincerely that I was dead. And you know what? When I caught myself thinking that my children were better off without me, and what was the best way to take myself out, I abruptly, angrily thought "Fuck that shit. Fuck it all to hell." And that was the end of it.

Once a month at Alex's new school we have a meeting with a child psychiatrist and a social worker assigned to the school. The first session, they watched Alex and me play together, the baby and the brown recluse who would rather read a book than sing "Wheels On the Bus". Who doesn't even know "Wheels On the Bus".

Their assessment of my parenting skills: Very Good.

Huh?

They liked that I let him dictate play, that I didn't try to control playtime.

"That's what most people do, try to make their child do what they want them to do, rather than let the child do what he wants." they said. "We have to retrain them to be child-led in their playtime."

It never even occured to me that being clueless could be an asset. And here I thought I was just being lazy.

Then they spent a month observing him. Their conclusion: No ADD. No drugs needed. Just as we had suspected. What they did see, however, was something called Sensory Integration Disorder, most often given the confusing and alarming acronym SID. They gave us a book with cases I could have written myself.

*Trouble with the potty? Check.

*Trouble listening? Check.

*Wants to be naked? Check.

*Can't focus? Check.

*Bounces up and down all the damned time? Check.

*Won't cooperate? Check.

*Can't eat with a fork? Check.

*Hasn't picked a dominant hand? Check.

*Can't bear light touching? Check.

*Can't bear to have his hair combed? Check.

*Quick to learn letters and phonics, but unable to put the words together and actually read them? Check.
Maybe one or two of these things would be incidental, but Alex had every single one.

They recommended an occupational therapist.

We pay $425 a month for Alex's school, and $100 a week for the O.T. Our crappy insurance won't cover any of it. We spend 30 minutes a day, broken up in 6 increments 5 minutes long, with a special very soft brush, brushing his arms, legs and back, and compressing his joints in his toes, ankles, knees, hips, fingers, wrists, elbows, and shoulders, ten compressions a piece, six times a day. We have a special rubber thingy for him to chew on when he gets stressed. Last week we got sent home with a drawing assignment for him to do at home every day. We have to scrape up enough money to buy special headphones for him to listen to carefully, specifically engineered classical music that will help him focus and listen to us when we talk to him.

"You know how most people have these psychological blinders, or "filters", I guess you could call them, that enable us to ignore the itchy tag on the back of our clothes, or tune out the TV when someone is talking to us (or vice versa, ha!)" said the Occupational Therapist, "Well, Alex doesn't have those filters, so he's receiving all his information in equal levels of importance, all the time."

"Oh, like being on LSD!" I said. She gave me an odd little smile.

"So I've heard," I amended lamely.

"Yes, well. I don't know about that, exactly, but if you brush him, you'll get him used to that feeling of light touch that he can't stand and he'll eventually integrate it.

Two months later, Alex was wearing clothes on a regular basis. He was letting us brush his hair. He sat through all of Shrek II at the movies, getting up to lie down on the floor only once. He got up and sat back in his seat the first time I asked him to. He doesn't need to be held in a death grip at the grocery store any more for fear he'll wander off and out of the store. He listens more. His conversations are no longer a series of non sequitors. And best of all, he's started to play with other children. He still has the tendency to assault the girls with hugs and professions of love, but I can live with that. I pick my battles, and the lines on the battlefield, by necessity, have to be drawn in different places than yours. And if I have to give a lesson learned, it's that experts may be experts, and grandparents may have wisdom and experience but they still don't know your child better than you do, and they will never know what works for your family better than you do, either. If you take anything from this year long outpouring on the blog, it's that one, that one plus the one about not returning used vibrators to sex toy stores. Don't forget that one.

So he isn't perfect, but he's getting better. And so am I. I haven't channeled Joan Crawford in months, although I still yell and get generally snippy, usually when I'm tired. Just like him.

Friday night, after I put Christopher to bed, Alex climbed up on my lap when I was sitting in front of the computer.

"You love Christopher," he stated.

"I do," I admitted.

"And you love Daddy."

"Yep. I do."

"Who else do you love?"

"Mmmmm...Grandma?"

"No! Who else?"

"Oh! Crowder Pea!"

"No! Not the cat! Who else?"

I thought about it for a minute, then leaned down and whispered his name into his ear, so quietly that I couldn't even hear my own voice. He flung his arms around me and held on to me tightly, burying his face in my hair.

"I love you, Mommy."

"I love you, too. I'm so glad I'm your mommy. You're the best little boy in the whole wide world."

"And you're the best Mommy in the whole world!"

And we sat like that until he got bored and climbed down, rejecting my embrace in favor of an ice cream sandwich.

The brown recluse was right. You fall in love, baby. You fall in love.

Alex, A Story In Three Parts.

Part Two, When Children Happen to Child Free People.

I'm not what you'd call a kid person, never have been. I think I babysat a total of three times in the 29 years before I actually became a parent and while it wouldn't be fair to say I hated every minute of it, I distinctly remember doing a certain amount of clock-watching. I made sure the kids were fed and clean and not sticking forks into outlets, but other than that they didn't seem to tap into any sort of nurturing vein that I may have possessed.

My high school friend Alexis made a killing out of babysitting. She offered to hook me up with some jobs she couldn't take, but I always declined on the grounds that children were involved.

In college I refused, for the most part, to audition for roles in the bi-annual children's musical, and it wasn't solely because no one will ever confuse me with Audra McDonald.

Out of college, I got a job as a day bartender. The owner's wife would bring in her toddler and leave the child, without asking, in the care of whoever was working the floor that day while she went downstairs to gossip with the accountant.

Often this task fell to me, and in addition to serving lunch to my regular customers and making drinks for the waitstaff, I now had to contend with keeping a toddler from playing with the hundreds of glasses behind the bar as well as the water-filled sink and clean ice. Not to mention that she was horribly underfoot and wanted to be picked up and held. And sometimes, she smelled like poo. I decided to train her to stay out from behind the bar, just like Steve had once trained Daisy, the non-housebroken American Eskimo that belonged to his roommate, to stay out of his room.

Just like Steve did, when the toddler would place one fat Mary Jane behind the bar, I was there.

"No," I said firmly, and picked her up and put her on the other side of the bar. She advanced again.

"No," I repeated, and moved her away from my side.

She advanced yet again, and by now she had become agitated.

Seeing that I was going to block her once again, she began to howl.

"Hey, Romper Room, could I get another beer?" yelled out one of my regulars.

I thrust the crying child away from the bar and dashed to the cooler. By the time I returned to this irritating, Sisyphean task that I was not getting paid for, she had come back behind the bar and was dumping olives into my clean ice. At the sight of my approach, she threw herself down onto the beery floor mat and began emitting sonic dog pitch wails.

"NO!" I said. Out she went. And came back again. Training Daisy was much easier than this.

When I picked her up again, I was furious. Angry at this horrible child, angry at her asshole mother, angry at not being able to think of anything else to do to keep this 3 foot tall monster away from me so I could go about the job of making decent tips and keeping the landlord at bay. I glared at her struggling in my arms. She was whipping her head back and forth, her face beet red, her patent leather shoes waving furiously.

"Keep it up and you're going to crack your head on the beer cooler," I told her, in a louder tone than perhaps I should have, "and no one will care."

The hostess, standing at the waitress station, gasped, then said firmly, "Leigh Anne, you should not have children!" and with that she took the still screaming kiddo downstairs to the office.

Strangely, this stung. I mean, maybe I bit the kid's head off, but she started it. Didn't she?

Not five minutes later, the owner's wife came upstairs with her offspring and sailed out the door.

"Leaving already?" asked the hostess.

"Oh, yes, you know you can't carry on any sort of conversation with a toddler around," she said cheerily as they sailed out the door.

"Yet you expect me to work," I muttered, but this time very quietly. So no one could hear further evidence of my heartlessness.

Imagine my surprise when, 3 years later, I found myself begging Steve for a baby to the point of tears. I'm not really sure what happened here. I turned 28 and something happened to my brain, some sort of procreational drive took over and overrode all common sense. Steve allowed that having a baby might not mean the end of the world, so we agreed that I'd quit taking birth control pills and see what happened.

What happened was this: nothing.

And I was okay with that. I had no urge to step the baby-making process up a notch. I didn't bother taking my temperature. I didn't have any desire to see a fertility specialist. We looked into adoption and regretfully rejected it because we didn't have the cash. Homegrown babies are so much cheaper than those fancified premade babies, it seems.

And I was okay with that. I didn't have baby dreams. I didn't grow resentful when other women I knew got pregnant. I didn't cry or gush over newborns. I made the mistake of smiling at a new father of twins one night when Steve and I were out to dinner at the Mashed Potato Club. He was walking from table to table, showing them off. When he returned to his table, the one right next to ours, I joked, "Hey, you've shown everybody else your babies; why not us?"

He responded by putting one of the babies in my arms. I froze and flashed desperate looks at Steve, who was stifling his laughter at my discomfort into a napkin.

And I was okay with that. I still wanted a baby. Just not enough to get shots in the ass or make Steve whack off into a Dixie Cup at a doctor's office while I waited nearby with my feet in stirrups. And I hadn't really given it much thought to what I would do with one if I had one, either. I didn't read any baby books. And, hell, all my friends were lesbians who weren't really into the whole gayby boom phenomenon. The most effort I put into it was asking the owner of the theatre company I worked for about motherhood. She was the most vain, self-centered, monstrous woman I knew, and she had two adult sons. I tried to picture her breastfeeding a child. My brain showed me a brown recluse in a nursing bra.

"Oh, you fall in love!" she exclaimed, in an unusual rush of sincere emotion. "You fall in love. You'll see."

At my next gynecologist appointment a year later, my doctor began to write me a prescription for another year's worth of Triphasil.

"I haven't really been taking them for the past year," I told her. "We've sort of been trying for a baby."

She looked at me. "Is your period late?" she asked.

"Yeah, but only a week or so. It's never really been regular, and I've been under a lot of stress with this show I've been directing."

"Uh-huh. Let's do a pregnancy test anyway. Can you go pee in a cup for me?"

So I sat in the examining room reading Infinite Jest and waited for her to come back so I could leave. I had composed my face to an appropriately good natured "Oh, well, maybe next time" reaction when she returned to the room. She looked at my face with a raised eyebrow and held up a second book, Planning for Pregnancy and Beyond.

There have been times in my life, I am sure, where I've been overcome with the kind of incredibly pure joy that I felt at that particular moment, but I really can't think of any others right now.

I very deeply regret that Steve wasn't there. I'm so sorry I didn't have the slightest clue that I was pregnant, so I could have dragged him along with me to the appointment. As it was, I showed up on the 75th floor of the Amoco Building downtown and demanded that he take me to lunch. True to form, he refused. I showed him my new book. He immediately changed his mind and ended up sitting across from me at lunch, staring at me in disbelief and repeating "Wow", until it was necessary to force him to be quiet. He finally asked, "When?"

"In August. Remember that night last month when it rained? I think that was when it happened."

"Oh. Oh, yeah! Yeah. That was great," he said dreamily, remembering.

Isn't it nice how people attribute the moment of conception to that time they had really hot banging sex? Who knows if it's accurate? Who cares?

We agreed not to tell anybody until I was at least three months pregnant. Steve and I then promptly went back to our respective jobs and told everybody. I spent the rest of the afternoon calling all my friends. Almost without exception, the phone calls went like this:

"Hi, I'm pregnant!"

"Oh no! What are you going to do?"

"Uh...Keep it."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

Okay, okay! I get the point! I'm another brown recluse in a nursing bra. But you know, lots of people have children. Stupid people have babies every day. Jesus shit, how hard could it be?

Alex, A Story In Three Parts.

Part One, Misdemeanor Drug Use.

During the first hour after taking LSD, the user may experience extreme mood changes and impaired depth and time perception as well as distortions in sounds, colors, movements, and the size and shape of objects. Higher doses can produce anxiety or depression...LSD is a Schedule I drug in the Pennsylvania Controlled Substance, Drug, Device and Cosmetic Act. Possession is a misdemeanor and is punishable by up to a 1-year imprisonment or a fine of up to $5,000, or both.

- National Drug Intelligence Center, Pennsylvania Drug Threat Assessment, June 2001

***********************************

I remember reading the purportedly real teen diary, Go Ask Alice, countless times during my tween years, revelling in Alice's juicy descent into total degredation that started with LSD, continued on with drug-induced rape, moving into indiscriminate drug taking rivaled only by indiscriminate fucking, and ended with her mysterious face-down-on-the-kitchen-floor-and-starting-to-smell death by O.D. a couple of years later.

Even though the book smelled like bullshit to me, I kept rereading it. I kept coming back mostly for all the fucking, even though the "diarist" regretted every single sexual encounter she ever had. She pined over her inability to ever do the deed with her true love, super-straight Roger. Regretfully, she was just too slutty to be worthy of him now that she was a part of that damned dirty hippie counter-culture, but she consoled herself (and me!) by getting stoned and nailing just about everyone else.

Lesson here: Give a teenaged girl growing up in Abstinence-Only Republicanland a phony Drugs Are Bad manifesto, and the only pages that will end up dog-eared are the ones where she can vicariously get laid.

I will admit to being sucked into the seemingly endless descriptive pages chronicling in lurid - and not particularly creative - details of her adventures with LSD, from the first time someone doses her drink ("Oh, wow, the music of Deep Purple really is deep purple!") to the last time someone doses her drink and she tries to scratch her face off.

After Alice, there was that after-school special starring Helen Hunt where she gets high and jumps out a window, then rolls around on the ground trying to slit her wrists with the shards of broken glass because the DRUGS WERE MAKING HER CRAZY, DO YOU SEE, O IMPRESSIONABLE TEENAGERS?

Actually, that was PCP that was supposedly responsible for this freakout, I blamed LSD for it because it was 1981, and I was 11 and was not able to discern the difference.

And then there was my college friend L.'s boyfriend, who annoyed everyone in his circle of stoner friends by continuing to take LSD despite the acid-soaked certainty of him being Jesus that would bubble up to the surface of his brain every single time he took it. Evidently, acid parties were never complete without him believing that he was hanging on an invisible cross with invisible nails through his palms.

"Do you know, he dangles there with his arms out until he wets his pants?" she said disgustedly. "I hate him."

"Why don't you break up with him?" I suggested.

"I can't - he's got great drug connections, and I never have to pay."

I think that's the real anti-drug message right there, if you ask me. Certainly more effective than Helen Hunt's melodramatic rolling around on broken glass or the bizarre "pot smoking leads to forcible sodomy" slant of Go Ask Alice.

What this is leading up to, of course, is that the constant onslaught of propaganda coupled with second-hand bad trip knowledge caused me to hesitate at least a full second before saying, "Yeah, okay!" when my coworker M. asked me if I wanted to hike out to into the Pennsylvania woods in Lancaster County with some truly tasty hippie dude whose name I can't remember and drop acid.

M. and I were living in a converted church in Lititz and driving 20 miles every day to work at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire. It was here at the Faire that I was assigned what was probably the worst job assignment ever - walking behind a horse in a daily noontime parade, me with a shovel, M. with a burlap bag. Every single day, our sense of dignity and self-worth hinged totally on whether or not that foul animal cocked its tail. The horse that held all this damning power carried A., the strikingly pretty redhead who played Queen Elizabeth I.

In real life, A. and I were, and still are, friends. At work, however, those dressed in velvet never missed an opportunity to demean those in rags and as sweet as she was, A. was the one who came closest to shitting on me in the literal sense, rather than just settling for mere metaphor.

Out of desperation, M. and I decided that the only way to gather whatever shreds of self-esteem we had left after the parade was to get the crowd on our side before the horse dropped the bomb. Every day, we would walk behind the horse, loudly praying that the noble steed upon whose sturdy back squired Her Glorious Majesty would deign to give us but one small souvenir. We had travelled many miles, we claimed, to see the Queen, and wanted only a small token to remember her by. If only God would bless us with a small favor, we would be eternally grateful.

The horse would often cock its tail for no apparent reason, causing us to begin celebrating, then hang our heads in utter despair. By the time the stupid thing finally did poop, the entire crowd would cheer our good fortune. In the most delightful blending of Mark Twain and the Renaissance since A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, some even offered to scoop it up for us. We declined on grounds that they would be robbing us of God's gift to us, but really we thought we'd get in trouble if we let customers whitewash this particular fence of ours.

We ended up being the most popular part of the parade, which of course did not go over very well with the stars of the show. A. herself thought it was funny, and would often join in, commanding the horse to "give us nothing", but two or three actors cornered our direct supervisor, the production stage manager, and demanded that he tell us to pipe down and quit distracting the audience from the "real actors."

13 years later, this has still been the only time any boss of mine has ever had my back, he fixed the complaining actors with an incredulous stare, then said:

"Maybe you don't deserve your jobs if you're getting upstaged by girls who shovel shit for a living."

Our bit stayed in, but as you can clearly see, this was a job that needed, nay, demanded, a certain amount of recreational drug use.

Tasty Hippie was one of the vendors at the Faire, who sold, in addition to an astonishing array of illegal pharmaceuticals, hippie jewlery such as anklets with silver bells and malachite stones, and herkemer diamonds wrapped in fishing wire and attached to thin leather strips for use as 1.) a necklace or 2.) a rearview mirror ornament. Being the poseur hippie that I was, I had all three of these items. I think I still have the anklet, as a matter of fact.

M. and I became tight with him, and that's how we ended up in his dirty blue, Grateful Dead bumper sticker-coated coupe, windows rolled down and headed deep out into the woods, our backpacks loaded with toilet paper, bathing suits, towels, snacks, crayons, paper, and water to which TH had added blue food coloring.

"When you're tripping, you need to drink a lot of water," he explained. "If the water is bright blue, you'll think it'll be more fun to drink."

We stopped at a diner to eat lunch before we set out and sat swilling back coffee and chewing on eggs and toast. A man, spine curved from age and dressed in a brown suit and fedora, shuffled by our booth on his way out the door. He cut a contemptuous look at M. and me, with no makeup and our hair in braids, wearing long tie-dyed dresses and Birkenstocks, and his eyes met the black liquid eyes of TH.

"Did you get your little hippie sluts high yet?" he snarled.

"Not yet!" I shouted at his retreating back, and was shushed by both M. and TH.

"Oh, what?" I said crossly. "He was rude. He deserved to get yelled at."

"Well, yes, except, point of fact being that I am going to be getting you high in about 15 minutes," said TH.

"And we are hippie sluts!" chirped M.

This buoyed us on out the door and back into the car, where TH gave us each a foil-wrapped sugar cube.

"How strong is this?" I asked.

"Well, it's stronger than blotter acid, but I just put one drop of liquid in the sugar cube, so I guess it's one good strong hit. You'll be okay. I've already tried some from this batch last week, and it was fine."

With that endorsement, I popped it into my mouth. I tasted grainy sugar, burning the back of my throat with sweetness, but nothing else.

I didn't feel any different. We pulled off the side of the road to a small parking area and hiked down a trail leading into the woods. After 30 minutes or so of walking, we stopped alongside a stream with a small waterfall that dropped into a cold churning pit of water about three feet deep. We spread out our towels and blankets and took out our snacks and drawing materials. TH sunk our blue water and beer into the stream.

I was staring intently at an ant trying to drag a wad of chewed pink bubblegum off to its lair when I realized that, shit, I'd had my nose about two inches from this insect forEVER. Hey, I must be tripping now! I looked up and saw M. and TH drawing pictures of me with the crayons they'd brought. Delighted, I ran over to look at them. TH's ant was wearing aviator goggles and a leather helmet. M. had drawn me as the bubblegum.

We went swimming in our clothes, forgetting all about our bathing suits until it was too late. Two hours into our trip, our dresses and jeans were drip-drying from the branches of the trees. TH, wearing soaking wet zebra-print boxer shorts, had disappeared into the woods to go to the bathroom. M. and I lay in our underwear on large flat rocks in the sun, sipping blue water, smoking a joint*, and enjoying the contrast of the green leaves and blue sky. The Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique was playing on the portable tape player she had brought. Abruptly, she sat up and snapped it off.

"Do you hear footsteps?" she demanded.

I listened. In addition to the footsteps, I could also hear a quiet jingly bell-like sound. From the trail emerged yet another old man with a Jack Russell terrier on a leash.

"Act casual," I hissed at M.

He did a doubletake as he walked past us, two very casual naked women smoking a joint, our clothes hanging from branches above us.

"Hello!" we chirruped.

"Uh..hello," he said, and kept walking, jerking his dog away from us as it came over for a friendly sniff.

We waited in silence until the sound of his footsteps receceded considerably.

"Wait until he finds TH," I murmured to M. The minute I spoke, TH leaped out from the woods, landing directly in front of the dogwalker.

"TA DAAAAAAAA!" he yelled, clutching the roll of toilet paper, his black hair wet and stringy from the water, the zebra boxer shorts still wet and translucent.

He was not expecting to see the dogwalker, and the dogwalker definitely was not expecting to see him, and they both emitted hoarse startled shouts at the sight of each other.

M. and I laughed until we cried. Then we drew a picture of it.

It began to get dark, and we were still tripping away. Not wanting to get stuck in the woods at night, we pulled on our mostly dry clothes, struck camp, and hiked back to the car. TH drove us back to his apartment, where we stayed up until 5:30, watching Nick at Nite and eating pizza. And we were still high.

I drove M. and I back to the church. LSD has the opposite effect that pot does on your sense of travel. With pot, you feel like you're going much faster than you are. I discovered the difference when I glanced at the speedometer and found I was going 75 miles an hour on back country roads. An astonishingly bad idea in Amish country, where you could take out a cart full of farmers just doing 45.* The only way I could make it home was to have M. stare non-stop at the speedometer and tell me every time I passed 45, which was frequently.

As further proof that God loves the stoned and the stupid, we made it safely back to the church parking lot, with only one terrifying yet ultimately harmless encounter with a skunk right in the middle of downtown Lititz marring our walk home. We ran into M.'s bedroom, a large room which had a giant stained glass window featuring Jesus shepherding a flock of lambs in place of a back wall. We watched the sun come up and fell asleep and as the light poured through the stained glass window.

At no time did I scratch off my face, think I was Jesus, or jump out a window. Mostly, it made me feel like I was five years old. Everything looked shiny and new and exciting. Everything was equally wonderful. Blue water, crayons, a wading pool, and reruns of Green Acres and My Three Sons made for a fine time indeed. The filters through which most adults see the world - the filters that enable us to tune out that which we don't want to focus on - were missing. I was receiving all kinds of information at the same time - the music, the smell of skunk in my room, the feel of the still-damp dress on my back all took equal importance, causing me to focus on everything and nothing all at the same time. For almost an entire day, we were constantly moving balls of unfocused energy, whirling and spinning, never settling down on anything for more than a few moments at a time, but each thing that caught our attention caught it with all our energy, repeating thousands of times on thousands of different objects.

Fun for awhile, but after almost 24 hours, I was ready for it to stop, which it did when we woke up at 3:00 the next afternoon with unbelievable, excruciating hangovers.

A., with whom I was supposed to go to Hershey Park, had left without me. That was okay, because I could not imagine the torture of walking around under the hot sun on amusement park asphalt. M. and I slunk back to the same diner and sucked down pots of coffee.

Our hippie waiter expressed concern for us.

"It's okay," M. assured him. "We just got back from a really long trip."

"Oh," replied the waiter. "Oh. Oh, yeah, okay. Drink more water. Do you want an aspirin?"

The hangover, which lasted two days, was enough to deter me from ever taking LSD again, so my career as a hippie was stalled permanently at poseur.

And what this has to do with Alex, I'll explain in the next installments.

*Drug Tip: Don't bother smoking pot when you're on acid. You won't feel it. It's just a waste of money.

**Drug Tip #2: Don't ever do this. Driving while tripping on acid is cataclysmically stupid.

Mash Note to My Store.

I know you freak a lot of people out. There have been people, particularly people at my son's preschool, who have started offering me tight-lipped smiles instead of the warmer small talk I was getting before the article in the Chicago Tribune came out. I know you're going to get my kids teased when they're in junior high. And I know you're embarrassing our parents, and how. Not to mention the fact that you took all our money and left us with nothing, not even enough money to replace the couch and carpet in the TV room.

But it's so nice being self-employed. It's such a relief to go to work every day and not have to hide from someone hellbent on giving me busy work, or, worse, someone who has nothing for me to do but refuses to let me occupy myself with personal work, or a book.

It's nice to be able to call in sick, run late, or take a personal day for my kids and not worry about getting fired for it.

It's nice to be able to make my own hours.

But best of all, if I didn't do exactly what I do for a living, I never would have met the woman who celebrated her 80th birthday by buying a Rabbit Pearl and three erotica books. She was brought to the store by her daughter, and as she stood in the front of the store, she smiled and said this:

"I've never been in a store like this before. This isn't what I expected at all! It's nice in here, I feel very comfortable. I'm eighty today, and I never owned a vibrator. I don't know what I was waiting for; I don't see anything wrong with them. But here I am, and it's my birthday, and it's still something I've never done. So I'm going to buy a nice one, because I've waited too long."

"Do you want me to leave?" asked her daughter. "If you want some privacy, I can go to the dress shop down the street and come back later."

"No, no," her mother assured her. "There's nothing wrong with what I'm doing. I don't mind that you're here. Besides, you'll need to know what I'm buying, so when I'm dead you can get it out of my room before anybody else finds it."

"I thought you just said there was nothing wrong with it," teased her daughter.

"There isn't," she insisted. "I'm just worried about you. You don't want people thinking your mother was a tramp!"

"They wouldn't think that! They'd be like, 'Go, Granny, go!'"

So Mom got her Rabbit and her books. She picked Anais Nin.

"A Parisian hatmaker named Mathilde leaves her husband for the opium dens of Peru," she read off the back cover of Delta of Venus, "Well, well!"

The daughter bought a feather, which she refused to let her mother pay for.

"Boundaries," she explained.

"You should at least tell me who the feather is for," wheedled her mother, but the daughter shook her head firmly.

I don't get customers like her every day, but it happens enough to make me grateful that I have the opportunity to make people like her happy. I've never felt that way in any paying job I've ever had. It was great to have met her, an eighty year old woman still interested in sex and still willing to have new experiences.

It was incredibly cool, and it's customers like her that make me absolutely certain I'm doing the right thing.

So, thanks, little store. Please start making money now.