Sunday In A Small Town

and how wind chimes freak me out*

(reprised)

Sunday morning. Cold, grey, quiet. I love this morning. I also love how talking about my aversion to games started such a great discussion. I love how there is room for all of us; you can love games and its not hard to find friends to play with you; you can hate games and while it's harder to find like minded spirits, you can rub the dog's belly while others are playing. I am so satisfied with that!

I am really loving the Showtime show "The Tudors". It's true that there is way too much sex in it for me to be really comfortable, just as I suspected. Really no need at all to watch Mary Boleyn go down on Henry the 8th. I very much dislike Jonathon Rhys Meyers because he is such an arrogant actor (I've read interviews and he's such an asshole). However, I underestimated how much I love that time period, the history that accompanies it, the back drop, the costumes, and the fact that all these people had to operate without television news, radio, phones, or computers.

What I'd really like to know is, when will Jonathon start growing the famous red (unsexy) beard that Henry wore? And when will he start to wear the fat suit? Henry was NOT a skinny guy.

Sunday in my family was never about church since we weren't Christians. Sometimes my parents had us all sit in a meditative circle at their Buddha altar and "ohm". But mostly Sundays were about yard work and food. My mom always seemed to cook good food on Sundays. Sometimes after doing some weeding my parents would let us play with friends but friends were hard to find in Ashland Oregon on Sundays unless you went to church. Most of our friends were born again Christians. So Sundays came to symbolize emptiness in the afternoons. The whole town was steeped in an oppressive quiet.

It gave room for me to hear the wind chimes on every one's porches all across town in an eerie tinkling that sounded more like human keening. Sundays have always been a day of acute discomfort to me because of its emptiness filled only with the lonely aching longing of the chimes which sound like empty souls trying to find purchase on the banks of hell.

Most of my friends already know this about me and I have discussed it here before: my incredible aversion to wind chimes. Here in Mac someone very clever once left a little tiny wind chime near my front door. I sense that it was left there by a Christian person trying to untie my brain. Luckily it was so small it couldn't even really catch a breeze.

Wind chimes make me think of places where serial killers hide. Where bad things happen. Where humanity has deserted and all that is left is metal music in the wind. They are like ghosts whining about purgatory, caught in the metal tubes forever, like a pale recording of their shadowy souls. Tinkling tinkling tinkling away into the empty Sunday air like a persistent hammering in my brain.

I realize that chimes are just chimes. I am only telling you what they make me feel like and why they fill me with dread rather than delight, as they do for many people. My mom loves chimes. Many of my friends love them too. I respect that. They don't hear the same thing I do or have the same memories of the empty atmosphere filled with them. I never make a fuss about other people having them**. Even when they are tinkling away and unscrewing my head in the process. I just pretend I don't notice and then later I try to shake the sound back out of my head like water out of my ear.

I didn't really notice Sundays in Santa Rosa so much. Probably because no one I knew went to church. Instead it seemed to be a day for community, everyone out in their yards doing yard work but stopping to chat with neighbors taking walks and kids running around together in a great melee of shrieks and flying dirt. Sundays were for being home, or hanging out with neighbors close by. Sundays were for cooking, like they were for my family growing up, and then play. Filled with noise and laughter and friendly gossip.

Here it is the same as it was in Ashland. Most of my town is in church right now. There are even buses all over the place to transport you to church if you can't get to it on your own, which seems insane considering that there are churches within spitting distance of almost every house in town. We have a lot of churches here. I suppose there are a lot of spiritual needs that go along with all the teen pregnancies that seem to accompany very churchy towns. I heard Santa Rosa had a big teen pregnancy problem, but it can't compare to the rate here***!

Later we're going to go to a Slow Foods potluck for some good food and talk with other like minded people who relish cooking, the time it takes to make good food, and using as many local ingredients as possible. I have lots of food to make to keep it from going to waste.

I canned 15 pints of chunky spiced apple/pear sauce. I also canned five pints of grenadine. I worked almost all week. I have also finally propositioned friends to help write the magazine so we are all starting the great project of writing the thing. I'm very excited about it!

I hope you all have a satisfying Sunday, whatever it means personally to you.

*If by this time you are asking yourself "What the hell DOESN'T freak her out?!" then all I have to say is welcome to my world of anxiety. When people notice that I "worry" a lot, they don't really understand the half of it. Having generalized anxiety means that my experience of the world is fraught with both rational and irrational fears. I have a very long list of things that disturb me, freak me out, and depress me. Sometimes I even impress myself with it.

**Not to my awareness anyway. I know I've commented on them to people before but I don't think commenting is the same as making a fuss. I don't know, maybe I do make a big stink and I just block it all out? Only my friends and family can really say for sure.

***Actually, charts show that teen pregnancies are on the decrease here. That's good news.

Congenital Misfits

It is only the beginning of the school year and already we are proving to be Max's teacher's challenging family. Not only is Max slower than all the other kids at doing pretty much everything, but his parents aren't alarmed by this fact and have actually admitted that they were the same way as kids. What can she do with that? What's worse is that Max comes to school mostly exactly on time or a little bit late but NEVER a minute early. EVER. Since he takes forever to do his morning tasks she has asked us to get him there early.

We are tardy slow people.

The crimes against us don't stop there though. Max took a spelling test that he failed and his teacher sent the offending test home to us with a note that informed us that all of the words on the test are ones that all second graders should already know and could we please practice with him until he learns them?

We are tardy slow stupid people.

This teacher is a six foot tall gorgeous amazon with the most startlingly white straight teeth, is fresh out of college, and has the fire of idealism burning in her breast. If there is any child that can dampen those fires and chill that idealism, it's Max. Something tells me she's not going to enjoy his special brand of charm and is going to insist on trying to squish him into the mold of student she wants to be teaching.

I do actually feel bad to be the one with the kid who's going to give her trouble all year long. I will actually try to help Max get along a little better by setting the alarm clock earlier and work on those words. I respect his teacher's desire to get the best education for the kids in her class and to expect them to keep up. But I also know that nothing I can possibly do is going to make Max into a kid he isn't. I'm different, perhaps, than many other parents in that I don't have a desire to force him to become someone he isn't just to satisfy other people's need for comfort.

My dad certainly tried to make me shape into someone I wasn't. Both my parents were driven witless by my own pace about things. You can't rush me. Even now. You just can't pressure me into becoming a comfortable known entity that I most certainly am not. I'm not going to like hazelnuts no matter how much everyone else does or how classic and universally pleasing the chocolate/hazelnut combo is. I don't like it.

That isn't to say I won't ever like it, but if I change it will have to be on my own terms, in my own time and way. Philip is no different. Max is like a little reflection of us. So it's hard to rustle up the proper amount of concern about our transgressions against the educational institution.

We are CONGENITAL MISFITS.

Something that's been kind of nagging at my brain in a very insignificant manner is the fact that I cannot explain how come I like watching medical shows like "ER" and "House" and how it is that I can watch really creepy British mystery shows like "Prime Suspect", when at the same time I find the show "The Office" excruciatingly depressing, "Curb Your Enthusiasm" quite depressing as well, and "The Sopranos" too violent and coarse. All I can really boil it down to is that the shows I like have strong sympathetic* characters in them and/or there is a pleasing balance of things gone wrong and things made right. But honestly, I really can't say.

I've discovered that there is only one brand of bedding that I like: Charter Club's "Damask Stripe" sheet sets. I have two duvet covers and one sheet set of it and it is the very best in my closet and stained from old bloody nose incidents and worn from lots of use. They are not cheap and I wish they were. Trying to save money last year I bought a few sets of much cheaper sheets from J.C. Penny's and you know what? TOTAL CRAP. The sheets don't fit very well on our mattress even though they say they should. One of the fitted sheets is already shredding at the elastic corners. Oh, for the money to have a few more sets of the good ones. Does that make me a materialistic luxury seeking mistress of commerce? Is it too much to want sheets that fit even after four hundred washings?

Incidentally, Macy's socks pretty much kick ass too. I've had the same socks from them for about three years that are only now getting to the point where I'm going to have to retire them due to having worn really thin at the heels and balls of my feet. I have bought socks from a number of other sources that wore out in six months.

So I'm a fan of Macy's. So what? Does that make me a bad bad girl?

I'm sitting here at my computer writing and I keep staring out the window at the row of maple trees in my view that are changing colors-I keep soaking up the bright flecks of red on one and the completely fiery canopy of leaves on the one right next to it, waiting for more things to say because I don't really want to start my day. I'm in my pyjamas and it's almost 11 am.

Isn't that what Sundays are for? Besides fire and brimstone, obviously. For the record, Sunday has been my least favorite day for almost my whole life. That reminds me that someone (probably someone I know very well) stuck a little tiny wind chimey thingy in the planter box by my front door. I just want to say (for the record) that I AM NOT AMUSED. I keep meaning to toss it away or put it in someone else's yard. But it seems so cruel to do that. What if the person who left it there isn't aware of my very deep unbudgeable HATRED for wind-chimes of all kinds and meant only to be sweet? I don't want to be the curmudgeon that squashes the kindness in others.

If I give it to a little child will I be absolved of the crime of getting the willies every time the tiny tinkles reach my ears?

Well, I must pry myself from this desk and do something. I don't know what, but something. Maybe I should make those twelve jars of mustard pickles I was planning on making? With those vegetables that have been brining for 36 hours now...

Have a great Sunday wherever you are!








*To make matters more obscure than ever, what is "sympathetic" is extremely subjective and personal so we may never all agree on the definition of a "sympathetic character".