Indecisive Peach

You can’t, however, jump start a car with a scooter. The car revved, sputtered and died. I looked up at J, who stood outside the car door, “Can I get a jump?”

It felt good to drive my car around, albeit slow as molasses. Coming down from GS’s VW to a Volvo station wagon is like the feeling you get walking normally after walking on a movable floor at the airport – the brain tells you that things should be going faster. No, zero to sixty in about two minutes, puttering along with an uneven idle is all that was managed. But it was good.

J and I needed to putter around to charge the battery some more, but everything good and cheap was nearby. We ventured out to Ruby Tuesdays on the other side of town. I told him it was ritzy prices for an underwhelming delivery, but, why not. There’s always the salad bar.

The nine dollar salad bar as it turns out. “Water,” we both said hesitantly as the waitress came to our table. “Still plotting our escape are we?” I mumbled to J. He nodded glumly.

What’s interesting about Ruby Tuesday are all the stipulations. Add a dollar after 4 P.M. Three dollars if ordered with this, but not with this. Three dollar beers but a dollar more for this, two more for that, except on Tuesday, every other Friday, but not during Lent.

That'd be false advertising.

So we ordered burgers. Sitting at the table, we noticed a sign for free herb and cheese biscuits a la the reason one goes to Red Lobster. “With every meal!” I proclaimed, “Ask the waitress.”

We didn’t get a chance. Our waitress swooped in and set down two exemplars of their biscuits placed artfully just so on a square plate. Both J and I leaned it, eyed the biscuits, then each other. “Mmm, dough balls,” J mused.

I will be going home to clean out my car. I will be removing the parking stickers, the base tags, the German license plate. I will be removing all the trinkets that made it an extension of my personality – my graduation tassels; Chuck the Duck, who used to be strapped into the backseat; a neon colored frog given to me at a carnival; a small alien playing an accordion which I left on a small shelf so that his arching flights across the cabin would tell me if I was taking turns too severely.

I’m deconstructing about ten years of driving sundry that was consolidated from one car to another. A beaded necklace hanging with my tassels, with vibrantly painted wood starkly faded from the sun, was something I put in my first car when I was 15. I will tonight hopefully sell the last car that my Dad was able to fix for me.

The car had run its limit with me as I had no inclination to fix a car that didn’t have the amenities that I might like to enjoy in a car. That said, I will be going all scooter, all the time now. Actually, that’s how I have been for quite a few months, with spiders creating webs around the tires of the car. The car has remained just a place to have a secure place to park the scooter.

I feel less sad about this car than the first one I sold a few months back. I had something of a mental death grip on the first car. It had been the first car I had ever sold on my own, but I felt different after his friend translated why the buyer, a worn middle-aged gentlemen migrant worker, wanted a car – he was tired of walking to work at a local motel in the cold. I let go.

Sometimes…I thought, you have to let go in order for the Universe to do the rest of its job. I want It to do that for me now as well.

“I look like the statue of Liberty,” I said and shuffled around in the dress. The sales girl exhaled a touch less forceful to qualify as an actual sigh – very professional of her. “I think her …” and she pointed to her head, “is a bit more pointy.”

“And she has a tablet and torch,” I agreed. I raised one halfheartedly arm with a fake torch and mimicked grabbing a stack of books and resting them on my hip. “Much better!” I exclaimed and K shook her head behind me.

I think I actually snuck onto the wrong tour in the Hudson Harbor. I had purchased my tickets online, gotten to the pier thirty minutes before time to be told that a two and a half hour tour was sold out until three. That would not work. I was offered the 75 minute tour in an hour and a half and I took it.

I walked slowly to the other side of the pier, in front of the other ticket booth and the entrance toward the boats, debating lunch. “Plenty of room for the 75 minute tour now,” was a holler in the air. With my best desert tourist puppy-dog face, I asked if my ticket would be okay…and was quickly shooed on-board with a whole host of other Chinese tourists.

All bridesmaids shall be in a fetching shade of Copper Green.
And in polyester.

Alright, it wasn’t just Chinese tourists. There was a group of older gals from a cancer survivor group from Oklahoma and a well-preened local couple, who proceeded to yell at each other for not getting the shots of the statue right, the shots of each other right, the shots of THAT DAMN PIER OVER THERE right.

Ah, l’amour.

Shifting the Sun

When your father dies, say the Irish,
you lose your umbrella against bad weather.
May his sun be your light, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Welsh,
you sink a foot deeper into the earth.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Canadians,
you run out of excuses.
May you inherit his sun, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the French,
you become your own father.
May you stand up in his light, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Indians,
he comes back as the thunder.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Russians,
he takes your childhood with him.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the English,
you join his club you vowed you wouldn’t.
May you inherit his sun, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Armenians,
your sun shifts forever.
And you walk in his light.

By Diana Der-Hovanessian

I realized the other day, as I was attempting to move an e-mail from GS, that I had a conundrum. At some point, I will need to figure out another e-mail organizational structure. In a few months, he will no longer fit into the Friends category. And while I have a Family category… he’s not my Mom, nor my aunt. However, I thought, ‘We’re going to make a new family’. Then I thought, ‘But, a family of two is not really…or it is?’. So should I call it Family 2.0? Coupledom? Or, should I call it EndofYouth to be fatalistic like GS? Perhaps a learning tool with NewLastNameDoesNotIncludetheLetterQ?

Then a, hopefully unused, part of my brain exploded.

I was sufficiently disturbed enough to just quickly move his e-mail into Friends and resolve to think about this at another time. Which, at this point has been pretty much par for the course for most of the experience. GS and I are facing similar ideas that struck us during the first weekend after The Question with both of us sitting at a table next to each other and muttering, “Oh, maaan.” Then we had beers.

It has led to probably the most drama we’ve had as a couple, rocketing everything from the happily mundane, “Movie?” “Yes! And a hotdog!”, to “But what does it MEAN!” and comments that allude to how I should have been doing more thinking about weddings since I’m a girl.

I got a wedding Barbie when I was little. It was some sort of special edition Barbie that my Dad’s step-mom got me. She gravely told me, my Mom agreeing, how I shouldn’t really play with it and that it should be kept on its stand. I would eye it on the stand. It had very pretty hair. Given that I was about seven, it was off that stand, white dress tossed aside, a few weeks later. This clone was never to fulfill its factory dream of a walk down an aisle with teddy bear guests. I think this says a lot about my wedding visions and details with which I am, even early in the game, almost overwhelmed by. [I do, however, have a theory that women are beasts of detail and that when given a scenario that when told to perfect a situation are naturally overloaded with OMG!!11!!]

Did you know what a Bateau neckline was? No, neither did I. Pero, I keep swimming and thinking, yes, this will be useful when I go mano-a-mano with Levar Burton on Jeopardy someday.

For a moment I became vacant. The scene around me drifted away and it created its own sphere of creation with me watching because I had surrendered to the tug that kept me in place. To my left, his head bent over the shallow and thin ceramic bowl in front of him slurping the soup of green strips, of jiggling cubes, of cuts of carrot, and of noodles that were dots of meaning hidden in the bottom of the pot that you only find if you know that they exist.

Sitting on my right, she leaned back briefly in her chair before moving toward the table. She placed her elbows on it and placed hands under her arms with an expression that nature had given her no other view of being except to be with this man over the last fifty years and that she knew that this view was divinity.

There was no grace anywhere and there was grace everywhere.

Between one beat of my heart my vision was shaded with white, captured only from my view forever. There was a breath of something that fell away from me.

When speaking of having children, I like to tell people that I cannot wait to have at least two kids. “Man,” I’ll start lightheartedly, “It’ll be something awesome to have them fight in the car seats behind me,” and my listener’s face inevitably drops, “I’d probably goad them on. Let the better one win.”

This makes people skeptical about my future parenting skills, but, as an only child, fights about who gets more room in the back seat, who gets to use the Walkman, who gets to have the snack, and who gets a hug first, are not problems I have ever seen manifested before – and, anthropologically speaking, are crazy fascinating. You see, the only person I ever had to fight against was myself and all that really mattered was how badly I wanted what was at the end of the race.

For example I could rationalize that getting a B was just fine. A B was rated as “above average”. I mean, sure, an A “excellent” but wasn’t being above average pretty excellent in itself?

[I have been dealing with semantics my entire life.]

That said, experiencing the crushing blow of a C for the very first time in third grade (which I immediately crumpled up and threw away), I knew that I was going to be my very harshest critic, and to this day, I still am. However, every time I’ve had to fight myself, ultimately, the better version of me won.

[Ed. This post was done in tandem with my other Onlies at Arms, The Rebuker and PhDeath.]

Tell me about: field trips.
Topic submitted by CC, who was chasing her son around campus on a field trip.

The first field trip I ever went on, I forged the signature to go. For some reason I can’t quite recall now, I didn’t remember to get my parents to sign the approval slip. There was a small chance that they might have signed had they known about it; but in hindsight, since I was still about seven or eight, it was unlikely. My Mom was at that time in the Americans are Evil phase. Granted, she had grounds for that, as Utah on our arrival was going through a period of child abductions, but man, that did surely cramp my style.

My Dad’s signature was insanely easy to fake, a little scribble he learned to jot down as he was doing jet maintenance; a bit of a J, a hint of an M, very, very easy for a little kid. I think what lured me into my life of forgery was the chance to get to ride a bus. Buses were this illusive thing to me when I was little, it wasn’t until I was about 12 that I got to ride one with any regularity and there was a big, yellow-orange one waiting to take us to the garbage dump.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the garbage dump. I’ll leave it to you to speculate why you would take a group of second graders to the garbage dump and I don’t think that sort of dirty (literally and metaphorically) socialism was on our learning agenda.

Now, given that this was almost two decades ago [Holy crap], I remember only bits and pieces. Climbing on the bus, gleeful and impressed with myself that they had accepted my ruse, the large swaying magnet that pulled up blocks of compressed metal and dropped them onto a conveyor belt, and telling my Mom at the end of the day, “Guess what I did today!”

Dismayed again by a writer’s block, I gathered the only army one has in the world – one’s friends – and asked them to do the dirty work. I asked for subjects to write on, for them to just blurt them out and not to think too heavily on it, because that’ll be my job and sometimes is my downfall. The topics are pretty much the order I got them, only that some worked well together in a tandem post. Did you miss out on getting asked by me? Leave a comment and I’ll add you to the list.

Tell me about: the addiction of America to Hollywood.
Submitted by GS, the fastest responder.

Seeing a collage of Julia Roberts’ hairstyles in a magazine at the hairdresser, I had a thought – and this carries with it an allusion to level of the mundane in my inward narration – what is getting ready to go to a ritzy party like for Julia Roberts? Where does she leave her keys if she’s not driving? Does she bring an ID? What TLC rerun did she rouse herself from when she decided it was time to get ready? And then, what gave me pause was, by gum, yes, I would have glorious hair too if I stepped out of the house after an hour session with a hair and makeup pro.

This is what I focused on too. For her, it’s not just trying out a new cute little number she got on a sale or a debate on whether or not she’ll break a beer bottle stumbling over her heels – it’s her livelihood. But the corollary thought I had was something I absentmindedly asked several days beforehand to my Mom.

“Do you think men get really confused when they undress a real woman for the first time and it is entirely not what they’ve been cultured to believe it’s going to look like?”
She continued to stare at the television, “Don’t think they don’t have a façade that they’re working on too and that there is a similar pressure for them to achieve something that doesn’t exist?”

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I sat him down on my chair and hovered over my computer to type in the Google image search. I clicked on the first random picture, shook my head, came back to the first search results and clicked a more well-known picture.

“See! Doesn’t he?”

GS cocked his head sideways, murmured, “Why yes,” he leaned closer, “He does look like me.”

The Olympics were good for a girl in a longish distance relationship. A replicate of my boyfriend was skimming across the ice in a tight bodysuit, starring in commercials, and giving interviews. Even J, who previously was only half aware that the Olympics were on and didn’t know who this athlete was, didn’t quite believe me until a promo flashed on the screen and stopped him in mid-ridicule as I sat glued to the TV in the living room for one of the nights. “Wow, now that’s creepy.”

The darkened eyes, a smile with wattage, and similarly tossed hair were all a build toward the doppelganger effect, but what caught me was the duplication of the smile in conjunction with the facial hair.
GS has what I can only call an extended soul patch that adds definition to his face and that I hadn’t seen too often and now see everywhere.

I have never been a girl to actively go for a guy with facial hair; it has always been something that had come with the package. However, I’m very much aware that it’s their face to do with as they please and that love should not be a coercion of self. [That said, GS threatens me that someday he’ll grow out a real Mexican ‘stache and I will admit I cringe a bit.]

The first interaction with facial hair was with someone who I had known previously as not being able to grow any and who, when older, had grown a goatee. The new look was something I found somehow to be an amusing sign to how time had changed us on the surface. He had shaved it not too long after we came together, randomly, and as he picked me up for a date, I recoiled from him. There was too much remembrance of us when we were 17 and he looked immature and anachronistic. I was horrified. He grew it back.

J I knew only shaven clean, yet constantly grumbling about his five o’clock shadow that was sometimes a bit more of a midnight o’clock after he let it go a day or two. A few months back I suggested he grow out a beard just for the hell of it since his facial hair does grow so fast. Two days later, J was Evil J, who invoked a Commander Riker feel. J was suddenly a twin of himself who had just a bit of a darker edge. It made me actually twinge when I saw him and lament, “Where did J go?” He shaved it. I guess its upkeep was more of a mug than just trying to keep it all shaved.

I love to watch a man shave however. It’s one of those glaring male/female differences I find fascinating. It’s a strange calming noise to hear the blade slip or scrape against skin. You’re watching a man handle something dangerous with utmost calm and gravity. Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel as if that must be up there with the couple of key ideas of masculinity.

Other thoughts on male facial hair, can be found at Tales of a Mom (who inspired the topic).