the scale

Posted on 01/14/2024 by dandelionpages.com

This morning, on day three of Zepbound, I sat staring at the scale across the room, tucked under the bathroom cabinet yet somehow still covered in dust that nearly hid the footprints from who-knows-when the last time was someone stepped on it.

Then I remembered the other scale. It was 1985 and I was eight years old, and my mother had put me on a diet. She had taken a half-sheet of poster board and made a grid so I could write in my weight each day, and there were pictures of hot fudge sundaes from Mayberry’s that I could have with Grandma as treats if I made goals.

I went from 87 pounds to 58 pounds on my first diet. We were still using pencils instead of pens at school and I knew nothing about training bras, but I knew about calories.

That scale had a small dial on the edge, just behind the window showing the judge-and-jury needle and wheel of numbers, that allowed me to adjust where “zero” fell on the scale. It was a way to cheat. I couldn’t cheat much, but I could knock off a pound, a pound and a half. It felt good to do that.

This morning, as I sat, I realized that was intended to do what the large green scales with chunky sliding weights, the ones at the doctors’ offices, could not do. It was to adjust for clothing.

Digital scales can’t do that. They display a red number that burns onto your retinas the evidence of your failure.

I’m not eight years old any longer, but I am still staring at a scale on the bathroom floor, wondering how to bend this painful universe of pounds and fat in my favor, somehow. Somehow.

alice’s restaurant

Posted on 11/23/2023 by dandelionpages.com

They play it on NPR stations around the country, at noon, though sometimes WNCW waits until 12:07 because of announcements and such. I wrote them a strongly worded letter about this last year, on the subjects of sacrilege and responsibility to the public.

It was August of 1996. Stuffed into the back of my old dark blue Pontiac T1000 hatchback were my possessions in life. A laundry basket full of my clothes, a suitcase containing my cassette tapes and toiletries and a lot of socks. A Caboodle organizer, pillows, a blanket, a radio, books, things I can’t recall, but it all had to be stuffed in to the gills. Everything I owned, the shirt on my back, a cassette player and some batteries, and twelve hours of driving ahead.

I left home for real. I had dropped out of college at Carolina because I ran out of scholarship money and didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up, if I ever grew up. It made sense. A friend had offered me a place to stay in a town just north of Tampa, until I could get on my feet.

I set sail. I had glanced at a map before I left. I found my way around the Atlanta beltway and stopped in Valdosta to eat at a Shoney’s, marveling because I had only heard of Valdosta as a far-away place. I continued, noting the changing vegetation, Spanish moss, palm trees, hot wind when the window was rolled down. I was nineteen years old, so I drove five miles per hour over the speed limit, terrified of being pulled over. Cars whizzed past me on the left. My journey took a long time.

I stayed with Bill and Dawn for six months before finding my own apartment. It was in their home that I was exposed to folk music beyond Nanci Griffith. Dar Williams became a taproot for me. Later, Kate Campbell’s music changed me forever. But there is an afternoon I recall, when Bill took out a vinyl album of Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant and said, “You need to listen to this. It’s long. Pay attention,” and set the needle to the very outside, to the first track.

I did listen. I thought it was odd, but I laughed. I laughed a lot. Then I told him I didn’t like it, but within a year, I had gone out and bought a cassette of it.

And when the Pontiac became a Nissan Sentra, and another newer Sentra, when Florida returned to North Carolina, when NPR boosted its signal and I could tune in on the car radio, when I had a cassette player in my car, I learned every word of “Alice’s Restaurant” until I could sing it with perfect timing.

Every year at Thanksgiving, NPR still plays it at noon, and I rush over and turn up the volume on the sound system. “They’re playing it!” I yell toward the kitchen. Then I return to stirring the cranberries as they simmer, and I sing every word.

But I think it sounded better on vinyl.

the kayak and the bunny suit

Posted on 09/23/2023 by dandelionpages.com

I own a bunny suit. I can’t remember why I have one. I think that seven or eight years ago, Old Navy came out with one-piece pajamas, and the bunny onesie just sounded like a good idea after that. The first one I had was pink, but I left it in Ireland for someone taller than me (not hard to find), and P.J. got me this one. It’s gray with a white belly and has a hood with big floppy ears, a full zipper, and unlike most bunny suits, it’s footed with fleece that’s warmer than wool socks and elastic at the ankles that makes it perfect for a short human pretending to be a bunny.

This is in my possession because, while I’d be mortified to the edges of the Universe if someone besides P.J. saw me in it, the bunny suit is the warmest garment in the history of ever. It’s doomsday material. The fleece is miles thick and except for your face and hands, the suit has you covered. It’s the thing you put on when you have a fever and are having chills. It’s the thing you put on if you were stuck outside and just came back in and you’re shivering and need to get warm quickly. If you wear it when your heat goes out, you sleep soundly anyway. This is a bunny suit to be reckoned with.

It even has a carrot zipper pull and a fluffy white tail.

That’s not what I came here to tell you about. I came here to talk about the kayak incident.

There is little that P.J. and I have found in nature that is more beautiful than autumn in Vermont as seen from a lake. Call it a cliché, but it’s only that because it’s true. The lakes in Vermont are dotted with sailboats and kayaks long after the summer swimmers and paddleboards disappear. People picnic on the shores, bundled up in flannel shirts and windbreaker jackets and scarves. Red-cheeked artists set up easels. Photographers carefully step out onto rocks.

The kayakers are braving those waters knowing that they’re downright dangerous. By mid-October, the water in many lakes has fallen to 55 degrees. That water is cold enough to cause muscle rigidity, a pounding heart, rapid breathing, and confusion. It shocks the body. Even without shock, the colder the water, the shorter the amount of time the body can stay in before blood pressure begins to do interesting things and words like “embolism” can enter the chat.

That’s why when P.J. took her Hobie out onto the lake, she was appropriately dressed in wetsuit gear and aware of the risk.

And it’s a good thing, because after a wonderful time kayaking around the lake, within ten yards of approaching the boat ramp, something in the water behind her went KERPLUNK SPLASH. P.J. turned quickly to see what it was and the Hobie rolled and dumped her right into the waiting frigid waters. That’s when she learned that her wet gear was completely inadequate, and she hurriedly walked the kayak the rest of the way to the ramp and hoisted it onto the trailer and went home, blasting the heat in the van the whole way and thinking only of getting warm.

When she got home, she realized that a piece of the kayak was still in the water. The important piece. The Hobie has a drop-in component called a Mirage drive that acts as flippers under water and lets you paddle by pedaling. It’s basically a kayak pretending to be a duck.

It was non-negotiable. We had to get it back.

“We’ll have to agree on sections to search to minimize the time we’re in the water,” P.J. said. We planned it out. She would wear her wet gear and other things on top of that. We’d have poles to feel around and swim shoes so we could feel with our feet. She gave us four minutes, tops, and then we had to get out of the water, no matter what.

“I don’t have any wet gear, though,” I pointed out. We thought hard. Then it occurred to me. “I do have the bunny suit! I could just wear whatever in the water and then change into the bunny suit as soon as I got into the van. That would totally work! Were there, like, other people around at the boat ramp, or was it pretty deserted?”

“There was one truck, nobody else. You could change in the back.”

The next day, we returned to the lake in late afternoon, when the sun was aimed at that patch of water and we’d be able to see the bottom. We told the crew working on some renovations to the front of the house that we were going to grab some dinner, knowing they’d be gone by the time we got home. They didn’t need to know why we threw large bags of towels and clothing and two paint roller extension poles into the back of the van.

We stood at the edge of the water and reiterated the four-minute rule to each other, then thought long and hard about the beauty of the lake and the joy of kayaking and how important it was to get the Mirage drive back. But love of P.J. was the only thing that was going to get me to enter that water, so I thought about that, too, and steeled myself, and counted to three, and then counted to three again, and resolutely waded in with my pole to catch up with P.J. We braved it.

Four minutes later, there was no sign of the Mirage drive. We’d only struck mud and grass.

There were two trucks in the parking area for the boat ramp, but as we peeled off wet clothing in the van and dried off, we decided they were hunters and off in the woods somewhere. P.J. dressed warmly and I put on my bunny suit. Within a minute, I was cozy and warm. We got into our seats in the van and stared at the water, perplexed. Where was the damned thing?

Discussion on the drive home concerned submersible metal detectors and next steps, which found us rational right up to the point where we crested at the top of our driveway and saw that the work crew was still there. P.J. made a casual remark about how it was sunset and she didn’t understand how they could even see what they were doing, but I said, “OH JESUS FUCKING CHRIST I CAN’T GET OUT OF THE VAN THEY’RE GOING TO SEE MY BUNNY SUIT!”

There was nothing for it. Not only did we return home without a key bit of kayak, I also had to walk across the driveway to the front door with a fluffy white tail shaking behind my butt and floppy ears. The workmen were intelligent and ignored me, or maybe it was too dark to see, in the dim of twilight. The walk from the van to the door took more fortitude than wading into the water.

Epilogue: The next week, we traded a six-pack for the loan of an old jon boat, and we tried for an hour to find the Mirage drive using rakes. It’s still at the bottom of the lake.

tech girl

Posted on 09/14/2023 by dandelionpages.com

I didn’t go into IT because I love computers.

I went into IT because I hate computers and love people.

I came to it late. When you’re the girl at the top of your class, no one tells you you’re allowed to follow a career path that lets you use your hands, play with wires and screwdrivers, repair machinery, or – and this was big – generally do “guy things” for a living.

I should have known when I was sixteen. My first computer was a Tandy 1000 with a hard drive, the last model Radio Shack made before discontinuing the line. Beside it was a dot matrix printer that I used to work on the school newspaper, my hands a blur of mastery on the keyboard as I typed up articles in WordPerfect 5.1. The day that the printer became decidedly jammed and beyond repair, I was incensed, and I took my Daddy’s screwdriver to it until it was a pile of so many springs and wheels and bits. I found the jam.

I missed the hint when I put the printer back together and it worked perfectly. But it seemed normal to me, unleashing wrath on an inanimate piece of computer equipment and bending it to my will. It didn’t seem like a vocational calling. It was as natural as breathing.

My twenties and thirties were mostly about being a secretary. Sometimes for a lawyer, sometimes for a school system department, sometimes in a courthouse; always, I was the resident “computer person” that people asked for help. One attorney said, “You’re really intuitive with these, you know.” The clue whizzed overhead as I dove into paralegal studies.

The epiphany came in 2006, when I began working in the school social work office doing data analysis. A small pile of old IBM Thinkpads sat on top of a filing cabinet in our office. I asked about them and learned that the tech department (run by a woman with BPD who screamed a lot) wouldn’t touch them because they were too old (even though they were the model we were currently using), and that one had a bad floppy drive and one had a bad hard drive. I asked if I could Frankenstein them, with nothing to lose, and opened one up with a precision screwdriver. That was a big day for me. That was the day I broke my first laptop piece and ordered my first replacement part on eBay. A new world was born.

I got all three laptops up and running.

The screaming lady caught wind of it and became my mortal enemy. I wasn’t allowed to switch into a tech role in the school system until she retired. Within a month of her departure, I was on the help desk as a lead.

In the meantime, I’m pretty sure I repaired a laptop or desktop computer for each of the fifty-odd social workers in that department. I took the computers home and did the work on the side for $10/hour (student fees – and I still believe I’m learning and now will not allow anyone to pay for services, unless it’s in zucchini or lessons about this and that). My screwdriver collection grew, took on tiny tools and little gadgets. I built two desktop computers and a server for home. I repaired HP laptops by baking their motherboards in the oven on a cookie sheet at 385 degrees for 8 minutes with some quarters stacked on top of the graphics chips. I bought broken ones on Craigslist and attempted to repair them. Most of them I made worse. Most got recycled. But eventually, I taught myself enough to sit for the A+ certification exam and pass, the first time.

What is it like? I hate computers. I take joy in manipulating them, correcting them, reprogramming them, and when all else fails, thumping them or having at them with a screwdriver and a mission statement. The job satisfaction is in the human beings on the other end. Each co-worker I handed back a repaired computer was incredibly grateful, relieved that they hadn’t lost their son’s graduation pictures or their tax returns, able to work on their degree in the evening, able to do their banking without a virus, able to do anything at all. I understood what the moving parts did, but they understood restoration.

The pandemic clarified this for me. I was responsible for almost 200 classrooms’ audio/video equipment and computers and for a revolving door of broken Chromebooks (we sent 45,000 of them out to homes). Repairing was immensely enjoyable. I ripped the laptops apart and used the good bits left over to cobble together working ones so students would have computers to use to attend school remotely. I taught others how to do it. I oversaw their work. That should have been an ego boost that anyone would call job satisfaction.

Job satisfaction came early one Saturday morning in the fall of 2020, when I sat outside on a grassy patch of parking lot at an apartment complex, next to the office building (for wi-fi signal), across from a young mother and her three kids, helping her first-grader get signed on to a Chromebook. I had talked by phone with her several times that week and we just could not get things to work. She had passed through anger and frustration and into a passive, weary despair, and I had heard that in her voice and set up the appointment. So we masked and sat in the fresh air on the dewy grass, laptop out, and before she had to feed the baby and leave for work, I had fixed the problem and made her daughter smile.

It came when I talked a Spanish-speaking grandmother through resetting her grandson’s password over the phone, my broken Spanish even worse than her broken English. I spoke slowly and met her where she was, when making a capital letter began with “okay, toca a ese-hache-i-efe-te, pabajo y izquierda de las letras, mira?” and an hour later, I was spent and she was relieved. We got there.

It came when I sat across the desk from our CIO and had a heated argument about our implementation of an online-only job application system, after a cafeteria cook for an elementary school held back tears in my cubicle after I helped her change her password and tried in vain to steer her through navigating the awful new software. She just wanted to change schools. She was being bullied at her current job. No one would listen to her because she didn’t know enough English to explain, was not literate enough to write it out, could not use a computer to type it or to escape from it. We were cutting the bottom tier of our tech-capable employees out of the picture in the name of streamlining and modernizing.

The cafeteria lady hugged me when I quietly got a paper application from someone in HR and handed it to her.

I am in IT because I abhor leaving human beings behind. I am in IT because it places me in a position of power to advocate, to have a say in where “can” meets “should’ in technology. And if it means kicking a copier or quietly threatening a printer and instilling fear in its circuitry, so be it.

Now I work in a hospital. It’s exactly like a school. I receive messages and phone calls and frequently jump up to scurry down the hall, up a staircase, to do what needs to be done, however small or repetitive. I use humor to put frustrated people at ease, and I savor the relationships that form over time with those I serve. Sometimes, there’s a screwdriver or a mouse in my pocket. Sometimes, I get to help a patient directly. Sometimes, I get a high-five in the cafeteria.

It feels like a superpower, being in IT. And my career has almost nothing to do with computers.

snow music

Posted on 09/12/2023 by dandelionpages.com

For all the talk about fertile gardens and verdent views, my heart belongs in winter.

Since moving to Vermont two years ago, I have been through winter twice. True winter. Not the winter of the South, when snow would flirt with a few passing days and coats were always too warm; nor of the winters of my childhood, when there was enough snow to play and taste and to say, “It snowed.”

Winter in Vermont is a handfastness with folds of whites and grays, a gasp of blue-pink piercing cold that welcomes and bites, blinds with torrents of falling flakes and chills the air so clear that distant white mountains seem close enough to reach out a mittened hand and touch.

In the first winter here, my wide-eyed joy at the first snows was replaced by a deep love for the deeper grip of January, temperatures so cold they made the air smell like rainfall, the way living required a simple deliberateness, the early falling of darkness, dark coming, dark going, driving in falling flakes under tree branches heavy with the snow.

And while driving, I came to love two very different pieces of music that I heard while sheltered inside on nights so wintry that trees cracked open. Each made me jump up and run over to the radio to find out more.

Natalie Merchant’s cover of “Poor Wayfaring Stranger” has open chords that mimic the joining of barrenness and beauty of the snowy field I see on the way home from work, spread out before me and dotted with a single red barn.

Ola Gjeilo’s “Dark Night” plays on my morning drives in the heart of winter. It seems to light up the snow in swirls of cobalt and turquoise and glints of red, more luminiscent than my car’s headlights. It renders the icy inclemency thrilling.

I played the Gjeilo on the way home from work today, to remember, as summer has begun to relent. I yearn for iron-cold dark night again, and for snow.