Herbie Hancock & Bill Bryson

Don't know when my master bathroom became the recharging room. There are only two electrical outlets. I've got my toothbrush, phone, and camera battery all recharging, and then my little nightlight in one plug. I know I'm unlikely to forget my phone if I plug it in here, but will probably forget it plugged anywhere else.

Funny image, remembering the old Miller and Paine Ladies' Lounge on second floor of the downtown department store. Besides the clean restroom with dozens of toilets, the lounge also had a room for lady shoppers to put their feet up, rest and refuel, meet friends before a lunch in the Tea Room, take care of infants, or even read the newspaper.

Nowadays we do all our recharging electronically. What would the Miller and Paine Ladies' Lounge look like with laptops recharging, women multi-tasking by cellphone, instant-messaging, listening to iPods, and showing the kiddies a movie on a tiny portable dvd player to keep them from fussing?! That would only happen if we slowed down enough to sit even briefly in the lounge.

We forget that we need to put our mental feet up, rest, meet friends before lunch, and refuel. I'm grateful to have a three-day weekend. Even more, I'm glad to have a gray, rainy weekend reminding me to keep things simple and recharge. Lunch and walk with a friend, writing, making art, listening to Herbie Hancock's River: the joni letters... Wayne Shorter's sax flows through me like mercury beads from a broken thermometer scooting across the bathroom floor.

Laughing. What wonderful biofuel for the psyche! Bill Bryson's memoir of childhood in 1950s Des Moines, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, has me laughing so hard the tears run down my cheeks.

The Turbo Tax return will wait another day or another week. How much better I feel for untasking and relaxing!

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

When the down escalator is down

Missed the train after the rehearsal this evening. The escalator down from the Park & Ride level to the track was broken. Plus, the elevator was unavailable because repairmen were moving loads of escalator stairsteps down to the track level. By the time I found the stairs and went down the three or four flights, my train was pulling out of the station.


With a half hour to wait, I moseyed over to watch the action at the repair site. I did not say, "Pardon me, boys, is that the broken escalation? Woo-o-woo!" They were very polite and glad to talk about their work, but I didn't want to scare them breaking into a song and dance routine.


An escalator step looks much bigger laying on the sidewalk than it does when you are standing on it. The repair guys told me each step costs five hundred dollars, and they were going to replace fifty steps. That amounted to half the steps on the Mockingbird Station down escalator.




As subway escalators go, Mockingbird Station's is a baby. I've never been down the Wheaton Station escalator on the DC Metro. It descends 230 feet, making it the longest in the Western Hemisphere. DART's longest escalator descends ten stories at the Cityplace Station, and has 213 steps.


Dupont Circle is my favorite Metro escalator. I love riding up into the Circle. Best of all, I love the anticipation of going to the Phillips Collection nearby. An afternoon at the Phillips can't be beat.

Growing up in the Sixties, I watched shopping mommies in pointy-toed/pointy-heeled shoes ride the escalator at Miller and Paine department store standing on their tiptoes so their heels wouldn't get stuck on the steps. In those days one still had the option of telling an elevator operator, "Three please," instead of riding a "heel-catcher".

Millions of kids have probably had escalator nightmares of forgetting to jump off an escalator and being sucked into the netherlands below the floor. Isn't that how Pinocchio ended up in that place where kids were turned into donkeys? My best friend, Janice, had escalatorphobia to the point that we ALWAYS rode the elevator, not just at the downtown department stores, but also at Gateway Mall. To balance that, my Danger Baby had elevatorphobia, so we always rode the escalator or climbed stairs.

Similar shoes are in vogue now, so I asked the repair guys if the escalator broke because obese women in pointy-heel shoes got sucked under the floor to donkey land. No. It's the wheely briefcase carts that get stuck. No, obese white-collar workers don't usually get sucked under to donkey land holding onto their wheely carts. The white-collar workers yank their briefcases free at the bottom of the escalator, damaging the stairsteps. If you see those people, better warn them about the donkey ears.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Sleepless Walking Down O, P, and Q

More thoughts on moving mental furniture:

By the time I was seven, I was spending lots of mental energy fighting off sleep by visualizing the route from Lincoln to Pierce, Nebraska. I would imagine walking the 120 miles from my house to Grandma's, by way of Seward, Columbus, Madison, Norfolk, and Hadar ("Hello Hadar, See Ya Later!"). I would visualize the Blue Boot shoe store signs and windmills along the two-lane highways just in case I ever had to run away from home, or perhaps be called upon to assume the role of my parents just like Bert Park's description of the duties of Miss America's runner-up.

What are my little preschoolers visualizing to keep from surrendering to a nice afternoon nap? What mental furniture are they rearranging? What routes are they reviewing? Why do they fight so hard against the after-lunch siesta cherished by everyone from college freshman to senior citizen? It's the sort of thing that makes me lose my marbles...

We all have things we fret about to ward off sleep or to retrieve sleep at two a.m. I review the Seven Dwarfs, the Seven Deadly Sins, the strange names of the Goss sisters (Loy, Billy, Vin, Effa Dale, and Alice June), the three members of the superband Cream (I forget Jack Bruce). "The whole nine yards" refers to machine gun ammo. It was Bobby Gentry who sang "Ode to Billy Joe". Igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic. Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived. The Greek alphabet--pi rho sigma tau upsilon phi chi psi omega won't ya go to sleep!

Yesterday at the post office after writing out the Express Mail and customs forms to mail the camera battery charger to Italy, I couldn't remember the four number PIN for my debit card. Yet I can blurt out the fourteen numbers of my library card with ease.

My dad and I have tried mental strolling down the main street of Pierce from the 1920s through the 1970s. Other times I contemplate the shimmering, revolving Hamm's beer sign with the bear in the canoe I saw walking into the package store in Columbus, Nebraska, that time when the public restrooms in the park along the river were locked. Must have been my first time in a tavern, as I can still see it clearly over forty years later. Maybe 1963... Hamms the beer refreshing...Hamms the beer refreshing...



I've lost the ability to name the counties of Nebraska by their assigned car license plate numbers based on population. Yes, Lancaster was 2, Douglas 1, Sarpy 3, Hall 8, and Platte 10. I've forgotten the rest, even Red Willow County. Colfax? That's something to worry about at two or three a.m.



Some nights I attempt an imaginary 1974 university pub crawl. These sleepless icy sidewalk treks begin at 13th and Q Streets inside the Hong Kong Pizza King, the spiritual home of ham fried rice. They head west to Casey's at about 11th and P with the chili dogs, then across the street to the tavern that had dime draws. What was its name? Across P again past Der Loaf Und Stein, the Greek hangout, which was later transformed into a quiche/french onion soup/spinach salad/fern bar. Then down the alley from 13th to 14th, from O to P to Barrymore's.

Barrymore's was my favorite space. The bar was in the backstage area of the old Stuart Theater. What could be finer than sipping a bourbon sour while staring up into the catwalks? Maybe having a sandwich of cream cheese, walnut, pimentos, and olives on rye?

Back into the icy alley toward 14th and the Zoo Bar. Paying the cover charge for live blues from Chicago. Or maybe a stop at The Watering Hole where the decor was peanut shells and lost car keys nailed on the wooden beams?

Do rabbits contemplate their fortune cookies after lights out? I've been dreaming that Norton, the class rabbit, got loose in the Walgreens where my sons used to work. The bunny would be better off picking up take-out from Hong Kong Pizza King and planning his next escape up Highway 81 through Humphrey and David City.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Fabric departments

In the days before Consumerism and Product Liability lawsuits, we rode around in nonsafety carseats, and slept in cribs and playpens with unacceptable slats. Safety was all about not taking candy from strangers, and always covering filling station toilet seats with rows of tp.

Mom sewed most of our clothes, so we spent a huge chunk of our Wonder Years in the fabric departments of Montgomery Ward, Kresges, J. C. Penneys, Miller and Paine, Golds, and Hesteds. We flipped through innumerable Butterick, Simplicity, and McCall's pattern books, and tried hard to not get into trouble with the clerks or Mom. We learned the true nature of suffering without contemplating Buddhism or wearing Love Beads. We did select a lovely remnant of floral printed corduroy all in rusts and lavendars for an excellent Nehru jacket, though.

At Kresges and Hesteds the fabric was mostly large folded pieces and bolts laid out on big wood tables. The fabric smelled of sizing, the accumulated aromas of old buttered popcorn, coloring books, dust, blue parakeets, and yellow canaries. This was where Mom would buy yards and yards of corduroy in red, bright yellow, Robin Hood green, royal and light blue to make jumpers and bathrobes.

The fabric department at Miller and Paine was spacious, and smelled more of wool and yarn and well-sharpened scissors. I think it was on the fourth floor, and had windows and natural light. That's where I picked out the pattern and bright blue fabric with red and white Flower Power daisies all by myself to sew my first bellbottoms (with elastic waistband) in about 1967. I felt that the long-time clerks did not really approve of my choices, but I sincerely believed the pants would be groovy as I rode home on the bus after shopping.

At Golds you had to be careful because the fluorescent lighting distorted the fabric colors. The department had a low ceiling that tended to make children bored and restless, and moms irritable.

The clerks in the sewing department of Miller & Paine were extremely knowledgeable. They could tell the shopper how to lay out the patterns, and could even demonstrate sewing techniques on the department's sewing machines. At Golds the clerks would help you find just the right buttons and notions to achieve a look straight out of Seventeen magazine. Then you could ride the escalator down to buy some Yardley white lip gloss.

You rode up the escalator to the Penneys fabric department. Mom always had to go look there, even though she rarely bought anything. I bet it was on the third floor, because it was upstairs from the floor with the restrooms, which was upstairs from the first floor candy and nuts. Someone tried to reach over the door of the stall to steal my Aunt Shirley's purse, so safety became about watching your purse while covering the toilet seat and then trying to not fall in! I'm pretty sure it was a white crinkle-patent leather purse with a gold chain!

Montgomery Wards fabric department was a very small area jam-packed with endless bolts of gingham, children's prints, plaids, dotted swiss, and later double-knits, walling in small kids like an evil corn maze leading to a pattern book table crowded with moms and kids one step over the line from sane. Or two. It was there that we found the patterns and bargain fabrics for Halloween costumes and Easter dresses, winter coats, and flannel nightgowns. I still have flashbacks to the rows of buttons, thread, zippers, rickrack, and bias tape, but therapy is helping a little!

The Wards' shoe department was right across the central aisle from the fabric. The entire area smelled like the rubber soles of inexpensive Skips--the Wards' version of Keds. The shoes were in big bins, so you had to scrounge to find the right size. This is where we learned that Consumerism was all about checking for ourselves that both shoes of a pair were the same size, and that one was left and the other right. Let the buyer beware. In the cheapo jewelry department we could waste our allowance on John Lennon tinted granny glasses and surfer cross necklaces.

Let the kid beware. Next to the sewing department, and across the aisle from the Skips, was the escalator, fenced in with a cast iron railing with unsafe bar spacing. Down the escalator you could buy Hot Wheels, light bulbs, 45 rpm Top Forty hits for eighty-eight cents, and cotton candy. You could even imagine escape from a sewing department that seemed like a perpetual cartoon anvil drop. In a moment of incredible fabric-induced tension, my little brother stuck his head through the bars to watch the relative calm of the escalator. His head would not come back out of the bars. Firemen had to be summoned to release this Monkey Wards captive from his escalator zoo.

My own sons managed to get their heads stuck in the backs of rocking chairs, and their jaws trapped in mixer beaters. Panicking sons and their very pregnant mommy got stuck in the indoor playground slides of McDonalds and Richman Gordman stores. I probably could have sued Sunbeam, the maker of the mixer, for millions of dollars since the world has changed.

I went into Hobby Lobby this afternoon to buy some felt. I needed to cut nine one foot squares. There was one yard remaining on a bolt of 72" wide light blue. I picked up that bolt because it was easier to carry than a full bolt, and because I thought the store might give me the whole yard at a discount instead of cutting the 2/3 of a yard I wanted. (Boy, that's such a Seventies idea.) First thing, I asked the clerk if the felt was really 72" wide. She ignored me and went on folding a pink remnant, so I measured it to make sure. I told her I wanted 2/3 of a yard. Instead of cutting through the fold for a 72" x 24" inch piece, she turned it ninety degrees so that she actually cut two pieces 36" x 24" inches. I told her I was completely mystified why she did that, and had to explain to her what difference it made. I said I would take it anyway, since I wasn't making a 72" banner. I didn’t want Hobby Lobby to dock her pay, which is undoubtedly minimum wage. This is like a sixth grade arithmetic story problem with the answer in the back of the book. She never will figure it out. Very sad, but it didn't smell like either Skips or stale popcorn.



© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Main Street books

Jacquielynn Floyd's column in today's Dallas Morning News is about Mark Rice, and how he came to write a new book about the history of downtown Dallas. The book isn't available yet, but I look forward to reading a copy. It certainly sounds like Rice has done a great deal of research for the book, to be self-published by Brown Books.

Floyd says, "the newly published Downtown Dallas: Romantic Past, Modern Renaissance, is a beautiful jewel of a book. More than a handsome coffee-table volume for history buffs (which it is), it's also a memorial to the downtown Dallas that's irrevocably lost and a bricks-and-mortar guide to the history that's still standing, for those who care enough to look for it ... the book is a fascinating read, deftly interweaving buildings, history and personalities." I hope it has maps, and as much history as reminiscences.

I've recently enjoyed paging through a book about the downtown and main street of Lincoln, Nebraska. A Street Named "O", edited by Mary Jane Nielsen is a paperback with many photos, overlapping contributed reminiscences, a few recipes, and some newspaper reprints. Published in December, 2006, by The Lincoln Women's Club, the book is available at Lee Booksellers. It's fun nostalgia for Lincolnites and Nebraskans, but suffers from repetitiveness, a shortage of historical information, and a lack of maps.

Strolling down your memory main street is a good mental challenge. My Dad and I have shared some fun trying to remember, map, and blog about Pierce, Nebraska's main street and downtown. We're not ready to write a coffee table book yet, though!

Dust storm

The wind was whipping up when I went to Whole Foods Market about noon. The store was an aesthetic adventure. Huge bins of perfect organic produce shining under spotlights while the audience of physically fit foodie shoppers pushed carts in low light. Fantastic stacks of exotic cheese, a gleaming array at the olive bar, jewel colored shrimp on mounds of ice competed for my attention. My list was short. I held firm to the knowledge that I wouldn't actually do the type of cooking these foods demanded once I got them back to the condo. I was just window-shopping, like the old days of fancy window displays in downtown Lincoln.

It's been many years since I read Don DeLillo's apocalyptic White Noise, but I remember that the grocery store grew more beautiful as the world outside it decayed.



Took this photo looking down the street toward the llama farm about four p.m. The world seemed faded, but glowing, and the air tasted like wagon ruts. Winds were gusting to sixty mph, and visibility was less than half a mile. Dust was blowing in from the west, bringing "most of Lubbock" to Plano, as one friend commented.

I'd been on a little errand to the post office and a little store. The wind had blown the front door of the store out of its frame so it was hanging at ninety-five degrees instead of ninety. The little shopkeeper was up on a tall aluminum ladder with a screwdriver trying to fix it, head ducked to keep flying grit out of his eyes. When a customer went into the shop, he climbed down to ring up the sale. When the customer went out, the ladder blew over, just missing the lady's head.

It's White Noise. I'm going home and hunker down. I wish I could read Don DeLillo's description of the particulate-enhanced sunset right now!

"Ever since the airborne toxic event, the sunsets had become almost unbearably beautiful...."

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN FORT WORTH HAS ISSUED A BLOWING DUST ADVISORY...WHICH IS IN EFFECT UNTIL 6 PM CST THIS AFTERNOON. A HIGH WIND WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 7 PM CST THIS EVENING.
A STRONG LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM MOVING ACROSS OKLAHOMA TODAY WILL CREATE WEST WINDS OF 30 TO 40 MPH THIS AFTERNOON... WITH GUSTS OF 60 MPH POSSIBLE. STRONG WINDS WILL ALSO RESULT IN BLOWING DUST WITH VISIBILITIES AS LOW AS 1/4 TO 1/2 OF A MILE.

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Intersection of Three Songs = Trivial Fun

It all started a couple weeks ago when coworkers spontaneously burst into song:

You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

I was born the same year Tennessee Ernie Ford's version of the 1946 Merle Travis song was recorded at Capitol Studios in Hollywood and sold over a million copies. Tennessee Ernie had a black and white tv show when I was little, and he had a mustache, and he looked a bit like my Uncle Swanee. I didn't understand why Ernie got to be "Tennessee Ernie". I thought I ought to be "Nebraska Nancy Lou" even if I didn't have a mustache. Tennessee Ernie Ford's signature sign-off was, "Bless your pea-pickin' heart!" In my youthful misconnected mind I thought "owing my soul" had something to do with shoe soles, and particularly with the Wells & Frost Shoe Store on "O" Street. I didn't shop at Wells and Frost. Brady's Juvenile Shoes was much closer to my dad's office, and to the Miller & Paine tea room with its famous macaroni and cheese and cinnamon rolls. Plus, Brady's store had giant rocking horses and funhouse mirrors .



I don't need an iPod, that's for sure! I've got entirely too many songs on constant tornadic rotation in my mental storm cellar. In Nebraska we head to the basement when tornado weather threatens. As kids in the era of Tennessee Ernie, my brother believed that a species of scary beings known as "The Gooeys" haunted our basement. Gooeys or no Gooeys, a basement is a good thing to have in tornado country when the sky turns that creepy green color.

A Cockeyed Optimist is the second song rattling around in my corn-popper brain:

When the skies are bright canary yellow
I forget ev'ry cloud I've ever seen,
So they called me a cockeyed optimist
Immature and incurably green.

I have heard people rant and rave and bellow
That we're done and we might as well be dead,
But I'm only a cockeyed optimist
And I can't get it into my head.

I hear the human race
Is fallin' on its face
And hasn't very far to go,
But ev'ry whippoorwill
Is sellin' me a bill,
And tellin' me it just ain't so.

I could say life is just a bowl of Jello
And appear more intelligent and smart,
But I'm stuck like a dope
With a thing called hope,
And I can't get it out of my heart!

I've got a full tank of things I can't get out of my head!

On my DART train trip to work a third song began to compete for attention with Tennessee Ernie and Kansas Nellie.

"Roll In My Sweet Baby's Arms" seems to have been written by Charlie Monroe, and recorded by darn near everyone including Lester Flatt, Buck Owens, Dolly Parton, and possibly Alvin and the Chipmunks performing with the Grateful Dead. I didn't realize it could be a square dance!

OPENER

Sides face, grand square

I ain't gonna work on the railroad
I ain't gonna work on the farm
I'll lay around this shack
Till the mail train comes back

Allemande left & weave the ring

Rolling in my sweet baby's arms

Dosado and promenade

I'll lay around the shack,
till the mail train comes back
Rolling in my sweet baby's arms

Three songs in my DART-riding brain crisscross paths:

trivial
1432, "of the trivium," from M.L. trivialis, from trivium "first three of the seven liberal arts," from L., lit. "place where three roads meet," from tri- "three" + via "road." The basic notion is of "that which may be found anywhere, commonplace, vulgar." The meaning "ordinary" (1589) and "insignificant" (1593) were in L. trivialis "commonplace, vulgar," originally "of or belonging to the crossroads." The verb trivialize is attested from 1846.

Trivial fun is found on a particularly splendid page of the Online Etymology Dictionary that includes "pipsqueak", "pun", "bullshit", "penny-ante", "snookums", and "quibble".

The Jinx of the Truly Dreadful Movie

There are really bad movies, and then there are really bad Kevin Costner movies. My brother-in-law has a graphic visual expression to explain the sensation of being trapped. "I was ready to gnaw off my left arm." A long-winded Sunday sermon can bring on a beartrap moment. So can a high school commencement in the sweltering climate of the Dallas Cowboy's Texas Stadium.

Kevin Costner provoked an epidemic of left arm gnawing a dozen years ago. Any viewer who survived 1994's "Wyatt Earp" without a sympathetic laudanum overdose drowned during 1995's "Waterworld".

The Jinx of the Truly Dreadful Movie began in the winter of 1969. Mom dropped the three of us at the Cooper Lincoln theater on "O" Street on one of those Nebraska winter days when the excrutiating glare off the snow compounded by bickering kids trapped in the house can give anyone a headache ranking 7.8 on the Richter Scale. My brother was anxious to see "Krakatoa, East of Java". I won't expound on that day's bad movie jinx, except to say that it involved Dr. Pepper. The movie was memorable for its bathtub tsunami special effects. The Dr. Pepper became woven into family lore and legend along with the movie's geographically incorrect title.

Krakatoa is still a fascinating subject. Simon Winchester wrote a fascinating book about the 1883 explosion of Krakatoa a few years back. The Twenty-One Balloons is a favorite read-aloud memory from sixth grade. Tomorrow the Discovery Channel will air a Krakatoa docudrama, but I won't be watching. I can't risk it.

I popped a cassette of The 21 Balloons in the tape player for my students yesterday. The tape dis-enwrapped and re-entangled all over the place. The jinx is alive and well, serving up disaster specials on blue plate tectonics.


"Krakatoa, East of Java" may not be the worst movie I've ever seen. That title could belong to the 1990 kid movie, "Shipwrecked". I took my three little boys to see "Shipwrecked" at a downtown Midland theater where we were the entire audience. This hokey movie involved a gorilla on a South Seas island. And that gorilla's zipper was very visable. Within hours my youngest had broken his arm, but I'm not sure if Dr. Pepper was on the scene.



I sent another son to the store for shredded cheddar (not Dr. Pepper) just before we were going to watch a VHS tape of "Krakatoa, East of Java" that I located online for five bucks. I'd been wondering for decades if the movie was as bad as it had become in the family legend. My son ripped the side mirror off the car returning from the store. The jinx continues!

Revolving doors and escalators

I learned so many things at the Miller and Paine Department Store in downtown Lincoln as a kid. It wasn't exactly All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, by Robert Fulghum, but it was major life skills. I learned how to go through a revolving door all by myself because my mom and my younger siblings were in the next compartment. I learned how to step onto an escalator, and how to pay attention and step off. I learned that I probably wouldn't be flattened and sucked down into the underbelly of the escalator if I forgot to step off, but that it wasn't worth risking since I was very skinny and easily flattened. Grown-up ladies had to stand on tippy-toe to ride the escalators so that their high heels would not be caught in the stair treads, and they would not be trapped for all eternity and sucked down into the underbelly. Somehow when the third grade Sunday school class sang out "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" each week, I thought He was trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath were stored in black patent leather high heels. My mom helped me learn to step to the back of the elevator, and to tell the elevator attendant sitting on her fold-down stool, "Three please," in a loud and polite voice. I learned that if you know that you like the macaroni and cheese with two cinnamon rolls it's okay to order that every time you go to the tearoom.

My sons are in revolving door and escalator mode this month. One son is finishing grad school, receiving the light blue hood for education, and moving to his new job in Ohio. Another son has zoomed in from Italy with barely enough time here to sell his diggity dawg Dodge Intrepid before zooming back to Germany. My youngest will pass through the Lone Star State for a crash course in the nomadic virtues of traveling light. I can't push the elevator buttons myself, but I can step to the rear of the elevator and go along for the ride!

Fretting and Stewing

It's amazing the things that keep us awake in the middle of the night. It's not surprising that we wake up in the night, trot to the potty, then worry about affordable health care for an hour or more. The U.S. health care and medical insurance system is a waking nightmare affecting all of us. Still, I don't worry about deductibles all that much. Lately I've been fretting about my lack of a winter coat for dress occasions.

My last dress winter coat was paid for by my parents when I was a sophomore in college. My gosh, I bought it at Hovland Swanson in Lincoln! It was a camel-colored wool wrap style, and hung in my coat closet for over twenty-five years. I liked it, but it was a rare winter when it actually fit. Some winters I weighed 105 lbs., looked anorexic, and the coat wrapped around me twice. Some years I was pregnant, and the wrap wouldn't go around my middle. Many winters I never had a single occasion for a dress coat. Then we moved to Texas, and it just wasn't wintery very often. Finally, alas, I hit a stage in life when it became obvious that the camel coat was never going to be big enough again. One year some natural disaster set off numerous coat donation drives, and the camel coat and I said farewell. It was sad, as we never really knew each other well, like employees in adjoining cubicles assigned to different projects.

So every recent autumn I have fretted about my lack of a dress winter coat. Menopause is a good thing, since I rarely need a coat anyway! Still, I know my parka looks really dorky on those January opening nights at the Dallas Opera.

Fretting, stewing, and insomnia don't have the hold on me they once did. I don't worry about the first day of school, or what to give people for Christmas. I gave up keeping track of the plastic chickens for the Fisher Price Farm. I got rid of my spouse so I wouldn't have to worry about what to wear to his office Christmas party. Okay, there were a few other issues involved in that transition, but we won't go into that now. There's no obsessing about what to wear to work anymore. When I started back to work a dozen years ago, I would be awake half the night, then unable to swallow breakfast, worrying about what to wear.

Funny thing. Next to nobody notices what you are wearing, as long as you are in the wide spectrum of "normal". Nobody cares what you do as long as you don't wipe boogers on their sleeve or puke on their shoes. Most people don't remember what you gave them for Christmas last year. Those plastic chickens will turn up eventually. In the meantime, EVERYBODY ELSE ON EARTH is obsessing about their own winter coat. We are all just galloping past each other at high speed, trying to lasso the right outfit!

So today when I went for some recreational zoned-out wandering at our aged, decrepit mall after a couple hours of spray-painting student sculptures, I was pleased to find a London Fog coat that fit without even looking for it! Better yet, it was seventy dollars off. Hat and gloves were on sale, too. I am good to go, and just not going to worry about that anymore! This coat may only fit one winter if I get suddenly skinny. It may hang in my closet for the next twenty-five years. I'm just not going to fret one way or the other.

Planning your day is so important

"If I quit before noon should I bring my lunch home?," my dad used to ask my mom across the Cheerios breakfast table. I knew that meant he was mighty tired of his job and coworkers, and probably of carrying his sack lunch on the bus. His sack lunch usually had a thermos of soup along with a sandwich, fresh fruit, and cookies, so it wasn't all the lunch's fault. Maybe indecision over whether to carry the brown bag back home or to abandon it caused him to just eat it and keep his job despite the aggravations. Many days this mustard and mayo dilemma paralysis makes perfect sense to me, and keeps me employed through another afternoon.

In a team-building/corporate-training/pass-the-monkey seminar a few years back our facilitator stressed the use of Day-Timer calendars to set goals as well as record appointments and assignments. Much of this seminar whizzed over the heads of our team of "look at all the pretty colors" art and drama teachers. Still, I've carried my Day-Timer to work and back every day since 2000 and managed not to get paint all over it. My calendar has been annotated with birthdays, soccer schedules, and zit doctor appointments for my kids all this time.

Yesterday was a busy one in Lincoln. Two bank robberies in one day! One suspect was nabbed after she walked the four blocks from the bank to stand in the long line at the Subway sandwich shop in the center of downtown during the noontime rush.

Plan your day. Should you bring the loot home if your rob the bank before lunch? Should you carry a sack lunch with a thermos of hot Campbell's soup, a roast beef sandwich, fresh fruit, and some cookies to the bank job? Order the fresh fruit cup instead of the chips and pickle? Maybe eat a late brunch so you won't be all that hungry after robbing the bank, and can just hop the first train out of town? Stop in at the Christian Science Reading Room after robbing the bank, and use the bag of loot for a naptime pillow?

My extensive reading about the James and Dalton Gangs, thanks to Nebraska novelist Ron Hansen, leads me to believe the usual routine is (1) have a hearty breakfast or at least lots of strong coffee; (2) rob bank; (3) get out of town; or (4) worse case scenario, have your bullet-ridden corpse displayed at county fairs all over a tri-state area. Again, I stress using your Day-Timer (if your fingers are too fat and your vision too poor to program your calendar into your cellphone!)

Bank robber, or robberette, Eva Fischer, spent her misguided moments in the stomping grounds of my youth. We could ride the bus downtown to swim lessons at the YWCA at 15th and N, then shower, dress, and buy a giant Tootsie Roll for a nickel. Walk next door to the main city library at 14th and N to check out some books, then continue on foot to Dad's office building at 13th and N to pick up prescriptions, have a dental check-up, and make a lunch rendezvous plan. Next walk south on 13th to Brady's Juvenile Shoes to get back-to-school oxfords and ride the giant rocking horses. Back north to the old Sears Roebuck with the wood floor at 13th and N to buy some Buster Brown socks and undies, then on over to Miller & Paine at 13th and O to meet Dad for lunch. Sometimes we ate in the tearoom on the fifth floor, and sometimes at the lunch counter in the bargain basement. The macaroni and cheese and the cinnamon rolls were the same either place. After showing Daddy our new shoes, he would go back to the office. We would cross 13th and pass the Walgreens with its lunch counter. Heading east along "O" Street we might visit the Toy Castle before proceding to Hested's to look at the bolts of corduroy in bright colors to sew back-to-school jumpers. If we ventured west instead we could windowshop at the more fashionable Ben Simons store, then pick up a Milton Bradley game or some "notions" at Woolworth's. I liked the Woolworth's store because the entrance was at a 45 degree angle to the street.

My parents would suggest that Eva stop in at the Cornhusker Hotel right there by the bank to have a Reuben sandwich for lunch. She could pop into the Sharp Building for a haircut before catching the bus back home with all her loot.

Transplanted to 1965

My parents gave me the gift of solitary downtime to daydream and recharge. Parents want to give their children the best of everything, but sometimes the best gift is the time to do nothing.

My parents were strict, thank heaven. They expected us to be out of our PJs and into clothes by noon on the weekend. Until noon we could stay under the covers reading about Laura and Mary Ingalls or Robin Hood, build with Tinker Toys in the living room, or play Barbies if we put on our bedroom slippers. We had some really keen gold space boot slippers. Funny, but the slippers didn't even have a Disney princess or registered trademark movie tie-in on them. We were free to imagine what they might be.... and they were magic.

We survived without adult-organized activites and sports for the most part. Some winter Saturdays I did ride the city bus downtown to my swim lesson at the YWCA, then bought a large Tootsie Roll for a nickel, and checked out some new biographies at the main Bennett Martin Library next door before catching a bus back home.

In the afternoons I could draw floorplans for fantasy homes on graph paper to the background sounds of Celtics/Lakers games with Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain in quite short shorts, or the heavy breathing of Kurt Goudy stalking the elusive trophy African velpdeeloop on "The American Sportsman". I could play quietly while my dad napped on the couch with the newspaper over his face. Often, I tore interesting photos out of old magazines to make into collages or just keep. I still have some of those clippings in my files.

The sounds of my napping dad's slow breathing, the dryer running in the basement, the rain, and maybe my mom's sewing machine gave an underpinning rhythm to my day. I didn't have to accomplish anything or be anywhere, except as I devised. As the afternoon ran out, a calm would settle in. All is well with the world. All is well with the world. The living room would become darker. I would lay on the carpet studying the pictures in books of architecture and art, or Herman Miller furniture catalogs. I could stack three LPs on the spindle of the hi-fi. "Rhapsody in Blue", Prokofiev's march from "Love for Three Oranges", Cole Porter or "Claire de Lune", Mary Martin in "Peter Pan", Ethel Merman in "Gypsy", Lena Horne or Petula Clark, Ray Walston singing either "Those Were the Good Old Days" from Damn Yankees or "There Is Nothin' Like A Dame" from South Pacific. When you're a Jet, you're a Jet all the way.

Accomplished incredible feats early today--bagged a pair of those elusive trophy perfect shoes, mailed packages to my dad and nephew, swam laps at the Aquatic Center, called a friend and laughed until my sides hurt. This afternoon has been for the rain and the dryer, sorting photos torn out of old magazines, quietly recharging.

In the mid-Seventies I participated in a group listening to classical music with Nelson Potter in UNL's Centennial College. I especially liked the clarinet music of Poulenc. Next winter the Fort Worth Opera will perform Poulenc's opera, "Dialogues des Carmelites". I sense that I'm supposed to attend, so I'm listening to this lovely music, and becoming curious about the French Revolution and religious orders. There's studying ahead!

I'm struck today that the very kind of afternoon that gave me great peaceful and creative energy forty years ago is still the most wonderful sort of Saturday afternoon.

Get on the bus, Gus

I think there should be City Bus Theater; part Mystery Dinner Theater, and part Diner Theater, but more mobile. Actors get on and off at different stops, and do improv on the bus, while the audience rides along wavering between avoiding making eye-contact and joining into the improv. This idea isn't new. Actors pop on and off of the subway in New York City doing little bits of comedy and drama, funded by the city.



I rode a bus a lot back in my Lincoln days. Went downtown as a kid to swim lessons at the YWCA and to the public library, or to the dentist. Did my Christmas shopping at Woolworths and the department stores after a ride downtown, where all the lights are bright* . I rode a city bus home from high school via the VA hospital and the mall. Commuted to the university, and learned it was possible to walk the six miles to campus carrying a large, heavy bookbag if I missed the bus.



On a cosmic level, I learned the bus never arrives until you give up and accept that you missed it. The whole privacy concept on public transport is a topic open for discussion. You ride along putting your energy into creating the repellent force field so you don't have to interact with the other passengers, and yet you are eavesdropping. You pretend to ignore people acting out in various ways, but you gradually develop relationships with the repeating stranger. You ride the bus home from work every night for five years with the same guy, gradually becoming more intimate, but you never learn his name or where he goes after he gets off at 33rd and Randolph Streets... How would Studs Terkel get the stories of everybody riding on the bus?

There's a popular kids' book and play called "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever", and then there's Ms. Frizzle and the kids on the "Magic Schoolbus". Somewhere in the middle is "The Best Field Trip Ever". The field trips that are burned into my memory are the trips to the Lincoln Journal and Star newspaper offices, the Gooch's Mill macaroni plant, and the Skyline Dairy ice cream plant.

I can remember exactly five times when I got in trouble as a kid, not that I was perfect, but, well, actually I was real close! Usually if I strayed, my over-active guilt complex kicked in, so no official sanctions were required. One time I got in trouble on the bus on the way to a field trip downtown. I'm pretty sure it was fourth grade, and we were on our way to visit the newspaper. We had received a lecture about not making faces and waving out the bus windows. Imagine my surprise to look out the window of the bus and spot my dad walking down the street on his lunch break. Wouldn't you wave??? Of course! Would a jury convict?? "An example was made of..."!

Mom and I used to have a wardrobe evaluation--"You can't wear that! It looks like an outfit the woman eating the Velveeta sandwich at the bus stop would wear." Geez, I miss Fritzi today. One month. Anyway, we also used to say, particularly about her mother's fashion color combos, "That looks like a nosebleed on raspberry sherbet."

Jim Lehrer is a major bus fan. Have you ever read any of his books about the one-eyed lieutenant governor of Oklahoma, or his White Widow?

*DOWNTOWN by Tony Hatch- as recorded in 1964 by Petula Clark
When you're alone and life is making you lonely
You can always go - downtown
When you've got worries, all the noise and the hurry
Seems to help, I know - downtown
Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city
Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty
How can you lose?
The lights are much brighter there
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares
So go downtown, things'll be great when you're
Downtown - no finer place, for sureDowntown - everything's waiting for you

Don't hang around and let your problems surround you
There are movie shows - downtown
Maybe you know some little places to go to
Where they never close - downtown
Just listen to the rhythm of a gentle bossa nova
You'll be dancing with him too before the night is over
Happy again
The lights are much brighter there
You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares
So go downtown, where all the lights are bright
Downtown - waiting for you tonight
Downtown - you're gonna be all right now