And on the Seventh Day, he made a mess

Mike has moved into Shoe String Harbor. He's deserted the Wee Cottage, leaving it to its fate. And to the mail we forgot to tell Uncle Sam to forward (allow me to briefly wallow in a fantasy of living in a pre-digital age where my debtors can't find me). It's exactly one week until, in all likelihood, we will be reunited in the kitchen you see here. I hope Mike gets it cleaned up by then.

To his very great credit, he remembered to do something that I wouldn't think of until I'm walking up to the door and the movers are streaming in around me, boxes of crockery in their arms. Here's what I would be thinking: "Oh, pants! There's no shelf-paper anywhere!" But Mike made himself useful during this weekend of living in an empty house with just one twin bed and the couches that he'd rented for so long he'd bought them by default. He thought of shelf-paper, before the arrival of the objects that would go on the shelves. He then cut and pasted and jigsawed his way through rolls of the unweildy sticky stuff.

And, as you can see, Mabel is in position and awaits ignition.

I've been calling Mike up every ten minutes or so, to quiz him about the house: "What was the shower like?" and, "Is the sideboard too big for the dining room?" I'm giddy with relief that we've closed on the house, but the Coldsmith-Christie Year From Hell means that I still, still lack faith in a future. I keep waiting for a piercing thunderclap, a parting of the heavens, and the sound of gods cackling. Boy, we sure fooled her. I'm still riding my bike, but I won't go on the routes I once regarded as somewhat dodgy if still safe for the careful rider. I just know that if I get on that bike in the wrong part of town, I'll be mowed down by one of Austin's finest laptop-jockeys, texting and talking at the same time. And of course I'm worried about the flight. I keep checking the weather forecast, to make sure that clear skies are expected for next Sunday. Yes, I possibly will be taking half an anti-anxiety pill before I get on that bird.

For 44 of my 53 years, I have lived in Texas and in counties close to or inhabited by my mother. The very thought that I can do anything else still seems like heresy. And we all know that the punishment for heresy can be biblical. I keep looking over my shoulder.

So I'm paranoid, my teen is sulky, and my mother is depressed. To jolly my mother up, I extolled the virtues of NYC bus tours. "Mom, it's so cool," I told her. "They have these double-decker buses that take you around the city's high points. You can get off, have a look around, and pop back on to the next one." My mother's response: "Will they pick us up at your house?" It took me a moment to stop spluttering and find my tongue. I'd told her a hundred times that where we would be living was at least 50 miles from the city. I reminded her of this fact again, when she, my still fit and able-bodied mother, remarked, "Oh, I know it's far away, but it's just too much trouble if they won't come pick you up at your door."

Did I really say what I remember saying? "Mother, as Morgan Freeman would advise, you can get busy living or get busy dying." No matter. She's very skilled at ignoring people when they say anything truly unpleasant.

Time Dilation, or how Fourteen Days can Seem Like Two Decades

On the day that Jesse turns fourteen, we are also fourteen days out from flying to New York and leaving Austin. For these last few weeks, Mike and I have been suffering from the relativistic effects of being really ready for something that isn't allowed to happen yet. We're not eager to leave Austin, but we are soooo ready to be reunited under one roof. At 3 weeks from the day of departure, it seemed like there was still six months to go. At 2 weeks, it feels as if there are now 4 years to go. The minutes drip past, each drop of time travelling the distance from the highest raincloud to the bottom of the deepest canyon.

I want to crawl into a stasis chamber and stay there until they call us to board our flight.

And, meanwhile, there are many birthday celebrations. I realize that when you and I were young and had to walk five miles in the snow to school everyday, birthday parties did not even dare speak their name. My mother threw me exactly one, when I was four or five, and it wouldn't surprise me if she resented even that one. For that reason, as well as a general incompetence at all forms of entertaining guests, except maybe with a dinner party, my party planning skills are complete and utter pants.

I wanted to do something large in scope this time. I wanted to invite every friend Jesse has and every schoolmate she has more than a nodding acquaintance with. This would be a combination bon voyage and birthday party. It would not be like all the other anxieties of my present life, which crank slowly past, one painful turn of the screw every time a supernova is spotted, but instead it would be large, somewhat lavish, and over with quickly.

Of course, I couldn't think of a single appropriate venue or activity. Jesse's idea -- rent one of the party boats that cruise Town Lake -- made me white with fear. Especially when I thought about the bill. I consulted with my friend Robin, who has a teenage son. She was full of ideas. We could have a party at a local rock climbing club's 'party wall'. We could go to one of those laser arenas and the kids could use each other for non-lethal target practice. Or we could try paint-ball. Or we could just hire a room at the local roller rink. I presented these ideas in turn to Jesse and they were all flatly rejected. Too large. Too small. Too boring. Too boy.

All Jesse could come up with was a Series of Intimate Events. Dinner with that chick, a movie with this other one. The most she would let me gather together at one time were her 3 friends from the middle school band. Overly excited, I found a discount service that rented a room at the Hilton for me before J. had a chance to change her mind. There would be a pool, a hot tub, a walk down Sixth Street on a Saturday evening. It would be fun!

We arrived at the Hilton, a few blocks from Sixth Street, the city's, er, lounge district. The girls took a tour of the hotel, self-guided, then we all went to the hotel spa, where the pool and jacuzzi beckoned. It amazes me how vulnerable I still am to some of my lower-middle-class instincts. My mom always booked us in whatever Roach Ranch we could afford. The showers drizzled you with warmish water, the carpets reeked of that awful rug pomade they use in vacuum cleaners to conceal the smell of mold and old beer. The Coldsmith kids considered themselves quite lucky if there was a pool that hadn't been closed by the health department.

I'm still that kid in some ways. Though I've been put up by past employers in more than a few swanky accommodations, I still can't help taking a step back in places like the Hilton. We entered the foyer to the spa and pool area, where desk clerks waited with sotto voce offers of fluffy robes. I was momentarily tongue-tied, certain that this couldn't be something we had paid for. Surely, I thought, some hotel flack was about to swoop down and inform us that those towels and that pool were reserved for the Hilton's VIP Class.

Whatever my habits as the descendant of sodbusters, there was to be no swimming that evening. We'd stepped onto the terrace to the sound of a great clap of thunder. The girls scurried back in and re-settled themselves back into their hotel room. Rain started to beat at the unopenable windows. Clearly, dinner and a long walk on Sixth Street would be ill-advised.

But they didn't seem to mind. Fourteen-year-old girls can giggle a lot for a long time, over nothing at all. I mentioned having pizza delivered to the room and they were ecstatic. The piled on to the bed. They watched the movies they'd brought on a laptop, shunning the fancy LCD TV in the hotel's wardrobe. They giggled some more. They only required that Mike and I be absent as often as possible. The thought crossed my grumpy mind that if they weren't going to use the pool or the TV, we could have stayed at the kind of motels favored by my mother, where you have a view of the Interstate and where the sticky substances are never cleaned off the remote control.

Mike and I had drinks with friends in the hotel bar and returned to find the girls still watching movies and giggling. We let them stay that way until about a half past midnight, when we made them shut it down. The next morning, I found them like this, all sacked out in the same bed. Apparently, the two girls designated for the other bed thought, at the last moment before surrendering to the sandman, that two feet was just too far to go. I think I now understand where all those cases of middle-school headlice come from.

Eventually the girls got up and made their way to the hotel's lovely salt-water pool. The temperature was perfect and the hot-tub warmed us up nicely. So long as I kept my distance, I was allowed to take pictures.

But after the giggling, the tears. The guests were all dispatched homewards and we returned to the Wee Flat, where Jesse rediscovered that her life sucked in every possible way. We've returned to the reality of what's left in these fourteen days, the many protracted goodbyes, the last-time-to-see people and the last-time-to-do things. And the Latin homework. We've been home just three hours and my dear daughter has cried four times.

If I can't find that stasis chamber, I may have to turn to Mojitos.

Black Feet Stomping

I can't be the first girlfriend in history who, once snagged into marriage, wondered if her new husband had practiced just a little deceptive advertising. When we were dating, Mike would actually dance. This was the days of the New Wave pogo, and Mike was pretty good at it. It almost made up for his lack of cooking ability. While other guys stood drinking, propped against the walls, wandering why they were unable to pull any birds, my future husband showed them what a little prodigious dancing could achieve.

After we married, he not only quit dancing with me, he denied that he had ever danced. Or at least if he had danced, he must have been crazy-mad with the demon drink. And I wouldn't want him to get that drunk again, would I?

And that wasn't the only charming little trait that seemed to dissolve at the altar. During out courtship, he had spent his money freely, a little too freely. I was concerned that I would always have to be the sensible one, the one who insists on dinner at home instead of at the Ritz. After we married, however, I discovered that Mike was half Scots, something else he hadn't freely expanded upon. Which was wise of him. I'd been in London for five years when I met Mike and I knew that signs of Scottishness should raise a red flag with any girl. Scotsmen are known for their miserliness. "Meanness", the Brits call it. Maybe Scots are tight, or maybe they just like to hide income from the English. Either way, it amounts to the same thing.

In any case, I can be forgiven for not figuring all this out while there was still time to get a pre-nuptial agreement. Mike's not entirely a creature of the 18th century croft. He is quite willing to splurge on the horse when the mule is cheaper so long as there's only a few dollars' difference between them. He's willing to buy the house that costs the most per square foot as long as it comes within the total budgetary figure he has in his head. And if someone else is losing on the deal, Mike'll spring for it every time.

After twenty years of marriage, that's water well under the bridge and far out to sea. The sad thing is, I'm not so very different from Mike. And here's the perfect example. As a result of The Diagnosis and Other Stressful Things, I've talked myself into a number of indulgences in the past few months. I bought the digital SLR camera I'd been hankering for (that Nikon D40 is sweet). I increased my Spode collection. And I had plans to take myself to one of Austin's premier hair-stylists and get my coiffure attended to: highlights, cut, lavish massaging of the temples.

And then I got wind of what the pricetag would be should I let Maurice style my hair.

And so to plan B, at least as far as the hair-styling is concerned. Our local salon, Innu, has a wonderfully talented hair-dresser. Thirty bucks for a cut and something under a hundred for highlights. All she needs is a little guidance. To help guide her, I've downloaded software that lets you do a virtual makeover of yourself. You can even try 'styles of the stars'. Trouble is that when I tried the "Jennifer Aniston" style, I got someone who looks like American Indian activist Russell Means.On to Plan C, I think.

Anyway, thinking of Russell Means and the Black Feet of North Dakota, I'm reminded of a more literal example of the tribe, the one I picked up at 2 AM last Monday morning at Kealing Middle School. Yes, our fair princess had returned from the band trip to San Diego, where they allegedly played their instruments, but also visited the beach, the zoo, the amusement park, the boardwalk and other sights. On the trip back, a harrowing 24-hour sit-down on the bus, they stopped at many fast food joints. My kid, never much for shoes at the best of times, said that she could never find her shoes and get herself fed in the miserable amount of time they had to stop and eat. So she went into KFC and MacDonald's and God Knows Where Else barefoot. Barefoot.

I only found this out later the next morning, though I should have wondered why, at 3 AM, she was taking such a long time over her shower. "I'm washing my feet!" she wailed when I complained. The next morning, I found the towel she'd used to get the muck off and it was as black as if it had been rolled in road tar. Which I guess was pretty much what had happened to it.

That was how this blogging week started for me. The end of the week must surely have had Mike wondering why he had married me. We made the offer on Shoe String Harbor more than six weeks ago and applied for a mortgage. Standard stuff. But the news of the economy kept gnawing at us during the long approval process. My worries intensified when a friend told me that he had sold his house twice but in both cases the deal had fallen through because the buyers couldn't get a mortgage. The banks, which had tanked the economy by giving half-million dollar loans to janitors, had suddenly gotten religion and were now suspicious of everyone. I gnawed off several fingers in the wait that would never end.

When we finally did get the mortgage I was intensely relieved but still very keyed up. Upon hearing the news, I got up from the lap-top, my foot neatly hooking into the cable that led to the one object that I could not afford to break, the hard-drive containing all of Mike's genealogical reseach, all the Napster downloads and ITunes library, and the family photos from the last 5 years. The drive crashed like a china teapot. In high anguish, I scooped the bits up into my arms and got into the car, determined to get the drive to the data recovery shop ASAP. Backing out of the driveway of the Wee Rental, I promptly scraped a small ornamental tree. Tree 1, Corolla's fender 0. In five minutes, I'd managed to do $2000 worth of damage to our worldly goods.

This teaches me that when I'm really, really relieved about something that I've been very, very stressed about, I must have a glass of champagne before I do anything.

Countdown: Three Weeks, Five Days

There was a brief moment when I feared this recent getaway to New York would never come off. I was planning to take advantage of a hiatus in parenting duties, a hiatus provided by my kid's trip to San Diego with other members of the Kealing Middle School band. But then her trip was canceled due to swine flu, thus endangering my trip to see Mike for a weekend of fun.

Fortunately, friends agreed to take Jesse off my hands. I pitied them for the glum kid I was about to dump on them. The band trip, a trip where very little music would be played but much shrieking and giggling on buses and hotel rooms would take place, was the only bright spot in her year. And here it had been canceled.

And just as suddenly as the trip was off, it was on. My mum was quite peeved that the swine flu had mutated from World Wide Panic to Big Fat Yawn. But I was thrilled. If Jesse's trip was back on, then so was mine. And I was ready. Mike was going to take me to Montauk, at the tip of Long Island, for the weekend. I had already learned last summer that I liked being near an ocean, a real ocean, with waves big enough to make, you know, noise. The Gulf just kind of sits there and quietly simmers. And it's not cold, beautifully cold like the Atlantic. Touch the waters off of Galveston and you get a nasty burn.

But I'm getting ahead of my behind. After the resumption of the trip and my flight up to JFK, but before Mike and I drove from the Wee Cottage to Montauk, I spent a few hours in Cold Spring Harbor, checking up on Shoe String Harbor (the house we're buying) and getting a brisk walk in. But it's hard to get much exercise walking around the north shore of Long Island, because you're constantly being stopped in your tracks. Now these are azaleas:


Austin is blessed with more rainfall than much of the rest of Texas, and because of this, you can convince yourself that the place is green. But then you go somewhere really green and you find yourself suddenly not bragging about those arthritic live oaks you were once so fond of. And this time of year, Long Island is not just green, it's purple, white, red, pink.

I swore that I would not commit to planting anything more than a few basils when I got to the new house, but when I looked across to our future neighbors' house and saw the color in their yard, I got that helpless feeling all over again. Maybe Mike will have me planting hyndrangeas after all.

After the survey of house and the 'hood, I enjoyed a brief spell of looking at ranges again, which I promise not to dwell on here. Though I really do want to go on about range-top BTUs and the benefits of twin convection fans until I'm blue in the face and the reader is just blue. But I'm nervous talking about such things. Many years ago, before the Interwebs and email, I belonged to a group that self-published personal essays every month. Think of it as an early form of blogging. One month, I contributed a post about how heart-broken I was to be leaving our house in Wales. The next month, one of the other members roundly criticized me for my self pity. At least I had a house. I got the impression she thought that people who had comfortable surroundings should at least have the decency not to mention it. So I'm not mentioning it. But if you want any gumbo off of the beauty I plan to install in my kitchen, you'll have to stroke her stainless steel brow admiringly. Dr. Seuss, great chronicler of the domestic, would have understood my love for a solid, serious looking stove: We shall take her home. We shall call her Mabel. You will have to love her, if you eat at our table.

Once we got to Montauk and had settled into our comfortable digs, we went for a long stroll on the beach. It gave us a chance to talk about Hell's Teenager and the forthcoming year: setting up a new house, getting our kid to walk herself to school every morning (she can get lost just going next door), getting me into the plastic surgeon's for a spot of reconstruction. Fortunately we're at an age where we allow ourselves not to commit to any plan, since we can't ever really remember what the plan is.

And while we walked, we watched these Martians play around on boards in the water. The odd rubber skin gives their species away.

Later we popped over to a grocery store for the basics of any self-catering holiday: granola, OJ. We asked the cashier where she'd go for dinner. A smiling Jamaican lady, she advised us to steer clear of the Sushi-fusion place next door. "Try de Dock," she said. We drove a couple of miles to the other side of the penninsula, where the Montauk wharf looks out over the Long Island Sound.

Walking up to The Dock, I couldn't help but be excited. We had a local recommendation and the place was going for a kind of Mad Max by the Sea feel. The restaurant's porch featured several long chains, looping from from tree to tree, festooned with objects which I gather had been found floating somewhere nearby. And there were various minatory signs up on the walls, the biggest one warning parents not to let their children run wild. You could tell by the spit on the floor, the ranks of gin bottles at the bar, and the smoke curling around the crevices, that 'running wild' was strictly an option for the adults, who didn't want any competition.

To drive home the point about kids, I guess, there was this little guy, hanging on the porch.

And I guess this is what Montauk sailors think of as the ideal trophy wives. These ladies peer down at you as you approach The Dock, hoping for a nice meal.

And the meal was, as I say, more than nice. Mike had the fried shrimp and I the seafood linguine, which was very fresh with scallops big as potatoes, served in the Italian style, which is a little too ubiquitous on Long Island, but it's so well done, you hate to complain.


After the meal, we went for walk, first on the docks, among trawlers with huge spools of nets, then along the Long Island Sound, where we caught the tail end of a sunset.

In 3 weeks, we'll be together again.