so it's been a while ... sorry about that ...why a bra is better than a man - the beginning

Well, it has been more than a little while since I've updated.  Writing is kind of like going to the gym ... you don't realize just how many muscles you do or don't use until you don't do it for a long, long time.  This has hurt, but in a good way.  It is just a beginning to make sure I didn't break something too important because we all know that November is coming.

~~~~~

“Babe.”

I, Stephanie Plum, consider myself to be multi-lingual. I speak English, naturally. A smattering of Italian, courtesy of the neighborhood and a fondness for the world’s most perfect food, pizza. Bergese, not necessarily a language per se, but it could be one. Come one, everyone who is raised in an Italian American home that is in the berg speaks Bergese; it is commonly known as guilt.  It is a combination of body language, tone of voice, sighs, and a lack of words. The lack of words provide the context of what I haven’t been doing lately of which I should feel guilty: no husband, a job no one really approved of, and no big plan for either one in the foreseeable future.

My final language is Babe,  the single word that had so many meanings: good, bad, sexy, impatient, unruffled, and always me.  I have been the recipient of long and complex salutations from Ranger Manoso.  Ranger is a man of few words.  Much like Bergese, it is a combination of understanding the body language, the tone, the inflection, and the incredibly short sentence structure. Why waste an entire sentence when a single look sometimes combined with a solitary word would suffice?  Plus, each word out of his mouth seemed to fill the room with pheromones or hormones that short circuited most of the brains of the female of the species. When we first met, I either babbled constantly or was left mostly mute.  Now, I still babbled but I could mostly control my own thoughts.

I glanced up from the list I was composing to notice he was leaning against my kitchen counter, arms and legs crossed, and a slight upturn of his lips. Tonight was different, he wasn’t in either basic black or some form of cammo. Ranger was in jeans, the well worn and painted on kind. The white, lightly striped oxford shirt set off his light chocolate coloring.  I am sure others might think he had mocha latte colored skin, I preferred to think of it as the color o a Snickers bar, fresh from the freezer. You know, not quite milk chocolate but yummy and delicious all the same. Yummy but full of not always great consequences and dangerous to those who should leave such things alone. Me? He wasn’t dangerous to me, much.  Sure, we had had our night a long time ago. And, yes, he had ruined me for other men, especially Joe Morelli, but my wounds had been licked and I had mostly healed.

He quirked his eyebrow. As a kid, I spent hours in the mirror trying to both quirk my eyebrows and wiggle my ears. I could manipulate my ears just a fraction not so anyone else would notice. The eyebrow thing? Not so much. I usually looked more startled than curious. I would have better luck stenciling an eyebrow that way, but then I’d always look lopsided and a bit deranged.  Then again, a bit deranged wasn't necessarily a bad thing. I am a bounty hunter and it wasn't necessarily a bad thing to look intimidating.  

“Yo,” I said.  Hey, two could play trade long, elegant nonsequitirs. Besides, I was in the middle of a project. A list. A possibly life changing list. The list wasn't for or about me, it was for my sister Valerie’s daughters. I immediately lowered my head to the notebook page and bounced my pen on it to clarify my thoughts.

“Why is a bra better than a man?” he asked.

Ranger is silent and stealthy like a cat. I hadn’t heard him come behind me so he could read over my shoulder.

I covered the list with my arms, looked up and glared at him. Val’s daughters were getting to the age when they were going to know the facts of life sooner than later, not that I was planning on having that talk with them. But I could put my vast knowledge from my past career as a lingerie buyer to good use by explaining the finer points to them.  

“Exactly why are you here,” I asked asI shot a look at my watch, “At five-thirty?” Was he after a favor? Usually if he wanted a favor it was in the form of a distraction and he showed up after nine, sometimes ten o’clock. Was he bored? Was he lonely? Nah. This was Ranger, he was never bored and from what he had told me about his family he would probably never be lonely.

“Dinner? It’s been a while.”

“I don’t know about you, but I had dinner just last night.  I even had it the night before.” Once dinner might have been construed to mean the prelude to a possible something. It had been so long since we had been alone together in a situation that might have been misconstrued as a date that it was probably the prelude to a work discussion.

“You know you’ve got to eat.” He took the three steps from my kitchen table to the refrigerator, opened it, and shook his head. “Your hamster could starve to death on what you keep in here.”

Two whole sentences and one was an attempt at humor.  Something was either very wrong or possibly very right.

writing doodle - deeper and deeper and now what?

I woke up to find my skin was hot enough to use as a cooking surface.  Too bad I don't like eggs, I could have made several on the surface of my stomach. I felt just awful enough, I might even eat them.  Then again, maybe not.

By the time I staggered into the bathroom, it was as though I'd been beaten about the he
ad and torso with an ugly stick.  Every quarter of an inch of less, there was a raised red patch.  It looked kind of like a bad case of poison oak, but none of the patches were weeping and frankly I haven't been outside enough to be exposed.

The only possible solution was that the hives had spread during the night.  My positive affirmations CD didn't do its part to keep me from obsessing about another upcoming 'w' word.  I have no problem with the 'm' word, it is the 'w' word which creates problems.  All the planning, posing, pretending.  Not to mention all of the bills for a blow out for a woman who changes personalities within five minutes of receiving a diamond solitaire, which she probably wants to upgrade anyway.  If the personalities of my intendeds had ever returned to normal, the entire 'f' experience, I mean fiance experience not the fun f experience, might not be so disturbing.

I found my bottle of calamine lotion and some q-tips, the oatmeal scrub for my bath, the ever present bottle of bendadryl, and the towel that gets kept in its own baggie after it has been boiled for 30 minutes and dried in an extra hot drier, and completed my morning plans.  

First the bath to calm the current dermis, then swabbing the raised areas with calamine.  After the bath, two tabs of drugs, and finally a call into work since I am not effective on any kind of drug, not even Advil. 

"Louie," I called into the bedroom.  "It's a short trip this morning.  There's no time to doddle. Come on, oatmeal."

Louie raised his head from what had just been my pillow and glowered.  Louie is half dachshund and half German shepherd.  I knew the dog who sired him, my grandfather's long haired dachshund, Max, a little dog with an ambition to do big things and a penchant for digging.  The female was older and probably didn't feel anything or just didn't care enough to disengage him. By the time the owners figured out what happened, it was too late.  Louie was the only survivor in the litter.  When he was whelped, the owner delivered him to my grandfather who gave him to me.  Told me a real man was judged by the way he treated his animals.

Great.

I am the proud owner of a designer dog.  To give you a better visual, Louie is a full sized shepherd from nose to tail and the rest of him is a low rider.  I think of him as my own personal canine cocktail table.  You wouldn't think that a dog with four inches worth of legs could jump a six foot fence but has to be shoved to get onto the bed at night.

"I promise to make you your own bowl of oatmeal if you make things quick."

Oatmeal is a magical word, his favorite food, and a command.   Once the word has been said, it is an implied promise that he can have a portion of cooked oatmeal, non-sweetened.  He was off the bed, had  his leash in his mouth, and aimed his body at the backdoor before I finished my sentence.

writing doodle - deeper and deeper down

As I expected, he wouldn't let go of those horrible, haunting words.  I tried to take a drink of water, but couldn't get my lips to close over the glass.  Good thing that I like wash and wear; I was probably going to wear more than half of the glass home, the rest was poured down the drain.

"So, Sam," the hypnotist said.

I put my hand up to stop him. "Gabe," I said.  "My name is Gabe."

He couldn't get my name right, but he could push all the rest of my buttons.  Maybe he was related to my second ex-wife or my former outlaw, I mean mother-in-law. That woman found all of my buttons in the first thirty seconds we met.  Too bad she didn't go away when the marriage ended. Then again, if it had rained money and she thought I was behind it, she would have had issues.

"Right.  That's it, Gabe. Right.  You're named for an archangel." He looked down at a desk calendar and flipped through a series of pages.  "We need to continue this next week. I want to desensitize you to these words so they don't hold you back in your every day life."

Right.  I was named for my grandfather's horse.  When I came out, I had an overly long face and moved my jaw a lot.  Good thing I didn't remind  him of his other horse, Goober, or the rest of the world would think I'd been named for a character in the Andy Griffith Show.  I know there are people out there who love their families, but sometimes mine is just too close.

By day, I'm a business analyst.  I talk to a series of spreadsheets every day, just numbers, formulas and graphs.  By night, I was wing man to a friend who just committed the 'm' word, marriage.  There is no problem handling Manny being married, goddess knows he waited long enough to find the right one; but he was treating it like something everyone should do until they got it right.  I did it three times before I was thirty-five.  The only thing I can say about marriage is that the end of it is expensive and I had only just paid off the last of the settlement with Joanne about six months ago.

"And you can call me Uriel," he said. He poked his thumb into his chest like I'd confuse him with someone else.

Uriel? Really?  Goddess bless.  "Family name?" I asked.

 "No, my mother channeled my name before I was born.  If I had been a woman, I would have been Maya."

Now my lips tingled, my shirt was damp, and I wanted to rub some kind of lotion on my skin.  My hives respond to three things: avoidance, olive oil directly applied, or bendadryl.  Oh, and sleep.  My body likes to sleep stress off or do other things that usually wind up with an exchange of vows that get broken immediately. 

"So your mother channeled the name Uriel?" I had no idea why I asked.  I had had no intention of engaging him in conversation.  There was a bottle of olive oil in the cupboard at home with my name on it. There was also a cold beer.

"No.  She came up with Dieter," he said, frowning.  "Dieter Goldstein just didn't have a good ring to it.  When I came of age, I chose Uriel."

I took a deep breath, knew I wasn't going to say anything else, and shoved my hand into my front pants' pocket.  Somewhere in the bowels of my pocket were my car keys. The sooner I discovered my keys, the sooner I'd be on my way home and have two beers. Maybe there was a baseball game on TV.  That would be mind numbing. Then again, this is November and the World Series ended not that long ago. Football?

"... and Uriel looked pretty hot on a Tarot deck I saw when I was younger," he said with a sigh.  "If I'm not going to look hot, I can at least get in touch with vicarious hotness."

Ginger ale.    I was going to have to stop by the store and get a bottle of ginger ale on my way home.  Maybe that would calm my stomach. Saltine crackers and ginger ale.  I would handle my nausea and upset stomach just like a pregnant woman from a movie in the 1960s.

"Back to the subject at hand, Sam," Uriel said.

I glared. 

"Gabe," he said, wincing.  "Sorry."

"No, I don't think we need to do this now, or ever," I said.  "It was," I took a deep breath, "interesting. Have a nice life." My keys finally dislodged from my pocket and flew across the room.  Why me? Why today? Why this guy?

"You don't understand," Uriel said, touching my forearm.  "This is a gift from your father.  Every week for the next six months or he remarries, which ever comes first."

Great, my father bought the crazy train and this guy was the engineer.  How deep was the drop from the caboose when it's really time to get off?

writing doodle - deeper

"Please count backwards from fifty to one," the hypnotherapist intoned.  "All the while you are going deeper and deeper down."

I took a deep breath and began to formulate my argument. I wouldn't even be here if it weren't for my father's insistence. That he was willing to pay for my session was beside the point.

"Always sinking deeper and deeper down."

Years ago my father took me to a hypnosis show, he clucked and woofed on command.  He was the most popular person who made it to the stage. The hypnotist liked him so well, my dad got asked to be part of the regular show. Even now, some twenty years later, each time he hears a doorbell he growls just a little.  He claims not to do it, but I know better.

"We are going to go to a beach resort.  The sun is bright, the temperatures are perfect, and nothing distracts you from relaxing and enjoying yourself."

Forty-one.  Forty.  Thirty-nine.

"May I call you Sam?" he asked.

Sure.  You can call me whatever  you want, sweetcheeks.  "Actually, it's Gabe."

"Sorry, Gabe.  Now that you are deeply relaxed, we can work on your allergy."

I don't now, nor have I ever had an allergy. I just break into the hives every now and again.

"According to  your father, you have problems with certain words."

I have problems with the same words everyone else does.  Really.  Words like: fired;  overdrawn; speeding ticket. I nodded.  It was easier than out and out agreement.

He muscle tested me on a few words: commitment, married, monogamy.  All came out fine.  Then he went to engagement, wedding, and pregnancy.  Not only did I respond the way he expected, but the hives I'd been suppressing in my upper lip came to full bloom and inflated beyond reasonable safety limits.  I looked like a duck.  A sad copy of a duck. 

"Remember that these are just words and have no intrinsic value on their own," he said.

Right.  If he kept talking, I'd need to go to the ER soon.

lack of doodling ...

A new year is almost upon us and I haven't got my Christmas letter drafted yet (and it is usually accomplished by mid October because you can't edit a clean sheet of paper).  It is as though I've given up on my truly creative side.

I would love to make all kinds of real, plausible excuses for more or less giving up writing.  Truthfully, there is no good reason - whatever good means - for my failure to dream, imagine, doodle, or let the creative side of myself out to play.

Just a few images of what I have and haven't been up to in recent months ... sort of.

I have honestly been stubborn as 

taken at the Mesa Mormon Temple

well, as Jack - Santa used to own a donkey named Jack and I have no pictures of him.

I thought if I spent time with my niece and nephew at Metro Phoenix's own beach, it would  help.  

 OK, no sand anymore, but there was once upon a time.  And it is the first wave pool in Arizona - all in all a good time for people watching.

Yet as I watched people, I didn't put my butt back in the chair to type, dream, or doodle.

(Apply enough sunscreen and imagination and you can pretend that you are at a beach).












It became a full mystery to me why I was continuing to let the muse play, go on trips, and not produce a thing - not even produce.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mystery Castle - Phoenix