Up and Down Week

Hi Mom and family,

It's been an up-and-down week.

I was in a really foul mood all of Monday because I was feeling so bad about the present I'd given Ethan pinching his thumb. (The catapult, made with large rubber bands that snap it like a mousetrap, had snapped right onto the little guy's thumb.)

It seemed so difficult to go do the errands I had to do. I was really glad that I'd gone to buy the cashier's checks (IRS and Arizona Department of Revenue) on Saturday.

Then I realized that I would have to go to the bank again. When putting the forms in the envelopes with the checks,  I'd put the IRS name on both of the cashier's checks, instead of the Arizona Department of Revenue. So, into the car to drive down there again. I had ripped up the check, and in order to make it cancel, they had to tape it together and put it through the machine. They were all consulting about it.

Mortified, I apologized profusely. "It's okay," the teller, Rosa, said. (Over half of the tellers are Hispanic because so many of the customers are more comfortable in Spanish). "Next time just don't tear it up."

Then it was on to Starbuck's to go on-line to find the address to send the government one to, as they'd put that information on P.4 of the instructions, and I'd only printed out Pps 1-3. The whole day seemed  like "three steps forward, two steps back", all while moving zombie-like through the funk of a bad mood.

While at Starbuck's, I wrote an e-mail to Dale Jr. saying how very sorry I was that the toy I'd given Ethan had ended up hurting him. "You tried to warn me off giving it to him, but I didn't listen. You gave him a wonderful party and I enjoyed it very much."

The drama rehearsal  was troubling because the one girl who doesn't know her lines well enough was taken out of rehearsal by her grandmother, half way through. What was really aggravating was that they left so fast that I didn't have a chance to remind her grandmother to ask her hip-hop dance teacher if she could miss one class in order not to have to miss our performance.

I stopped back at Starbuck's to put that long weekend blog online, and it was wonderful to get the following e-mail from Dale Jr. It said, "No need for apologies Mom, he really likes it, he was playing with it after the party."

Relief spread all through my whole body. Not the "grandmother from hell" after all!

I wrote back that it showed a lot of gumption on Ethan's part, to "get back on the horse." (That is, to get right back playing with a toy which had injured him.)

When I got home, I told Dale Sr. about getting the e-mail that Ethan liked the toy. Dale Sr. said ruefully that when the injury happened, he'd had the same reaction as me ...we'd seen that the little guy's hand was in the wrong place but our brains didn't register fast enough to get down to the floor to stop him from pulling back the catapult and letting it go.

Tuesday I did four hours of yard work, pruning, re-potting, weeding, watering, and raking. I'm still so behind on all of it, from those several weeks of fatigue I had.

I went to pay my phone bill in person, so that I could ask them to put my phone on the correct date. I don't know when it started saying tomorrow's date instead of the correct one, but it really was messing up that app I've been using which lets you you log in your food and exercise each day.



On the way home I stopped at the Carniceria/Panaderia "El Rancho" (Butcher/Bakery) and ordered some dinner to go from their steam table. I really liked the red stew, the rice, and the beans, but the green chile stew had large pieces of floppy cooked pork rind in it. (The chickens got that.) Dale Sr. said the beans, to him, had "a funny taste"; I think maybe it was epazote.

They were also rolling out balls of dough for one of the myriad kinds of  "pan".

 
Around 4:00 PM I went up to the Boys & Girls Club with the worksheets for those lines which had been missed when I tested them Monday. I had my eye on the door like a hawk, to be sure not to miss any of the parents, and was able to talk to all of the other parents/grandparents about our second choice of performance dates. To my intense relief, all said the alternate date would work out for them. A couple of them said they were really excited about it (the performance) which made me feel good.

One of the moms is a girl who was in my drama club many years ago when she was at the Jr. High school. She said she could ask her work if she could leave an hour early and make it up another time, so that the other girl wouldn't have to miss her hip-hop dance class. I told her how grateful I was. She said, "Those classes really do cost a lot."

When I came out of the club into the parking lot, I got this photo of the rather moody-looking sunset. 

 
On Wednesday I left for Tempe two hours earlier than usual. I had heard about a "bluegrass music jam" which takes place every Wednesday at noon in the Tempe senior center. which is in the same The complex as the Tempe Library where I go for my Arabic lesson.

It was a really nice group, about fifteen old guys sitting in a circle. (I had to remind myself that I myself was as old as half of them were!) The leader, who played slow but very nice banjo, did a great job of leading them. He really made sure that everyone quieted down so that, even in a group that size, even the guitar, mandolin, banjo, and fiddle solos could be heard. There was much that was a real treat to listen to. And he constantly showered the group with compliments.

 A lot of the songs were old-timey songs I was first exposed to in the Alan Lomax songbook, when going through it with my recorder as a teenager. Some that I knew from the bluegrass group of the friends Oscar and I and John played with. 

The guy with the fiddle, second from left above, did slowish but tasteful fiddle solos. Skeleton-thin and gentlemanly, he looked and sounded like he should be on a front porch of an old cabin in Tennesse.

I went right from there to my Arabic lesson, and right from that to the Boys & Girls Club. The Arabic lesson was fine, I didn't speak much Arabic but any time I spoke any English I wrote it down and we translated it. For my lessons, I've been looking back in the notebook for sentences which were part of my past lessons, and putting them into different verb tenses and voices. Such as "dual past, female" and "present plural, male", etc.

Thinking about Wednesday's drama rehearsal makes me cringe. I marched in there with a nervous determination that "today I was going to get them to really knuckle down", as our performance is fast approaching. Only to walk into the club and  there were all these riotous activities going on, some sort of celebration where all the kids who had been good had a turn pushing the staff around in wheeled chairs, and all the other kids were yelling and cheering.

Of course the kids in the drama club were grumpy because I made them leave all this fun and go into the empty "teen center" next door
 to rehearse.
 And I made them go through it five times. Half-way through the fifth go-through, a whole noisy group of kids trouped into the teen center and I told my kids, let's perform our skit for them!

This meant that my club had to perform for a bunch of kids who were sitting on couches very close to them, and Darrel, the autistic boy, kept breaking into inappropriate snorts and giggles. My young actors, usually so ebullient, all performed in a cowed monotone, so of course their performance was not interesting to watch. As soon as we started the skit, I knew it was a mistake but it would have been more awkward to stop it. Afterwards two of my club members said they wanted to quit.

"You can't quit," I said, "because if you two quit, we'll have to cancel the whole thing." They looked miserable, I felt awful. It was upsetting to see a kid with a super live-wire personality deflate so completely.

I'd told myself I was going to come home and give the house a complete going over so that I could start right into gardening the next day. But instead I had a glass of wine and watched a Canadian movie about an older man who arranges to wed a young mail-order Mexican woman, and ends up falling in love with her mother.

Yesterday, Thursday, was taken up with going through my bills, a hair appointment, an hour up at the Boys & Girls Club and an evening at the Handlebar Pub and Grill.

At the club I made some phone calls so that parents know I need the lists of names of people they want to invite.

While we were eating, Dale Sr. noticed Bob Schoose (the guy with the mega-personality who built Goldfield Ghost Town). With him were Ron Feldman who owns the riding stables near there, also someone who's known Dale Sr. since he was a teenager, and their wives, sitting at a nearby table. I went over to say hi, and a little later LuAnne came over to chat for a minute.

 I hadn't recognized Schoose, now totally grey and thinner than he once was. Dale Sr.  hasn't been that friendly with him since Schoose and Jerry G. had a falling out.

When I asked Dale Sr.  what the argument was over, Dale Sr. said, sotto voce "Oh, Schoose screwed him over like he has everyone else." 

Schoose came over to chat for a minute, and I got this picture of the two of them. I have to admit Dale and Gary are right about Bob Schoose's faults, but I also feel that on the whole he added a great deal to their lives.

At the other front table were Kurt Decke (who taught at AJ school district for years, the last decade at the alternative school with my friend Laure) and his neighbor. They are also big fans of Hans Olson, and we really had a fun time enjoying the music. Kurt has had a very difficult time adjusting to his wife's death.

Hans is such a good musician and the songs he sings are so wonderful, that hearing him was a great cure for my emotional week.

At the table behind us were an older Mexican man in a cowboy hat, immaculate white tee shirt and pressed khakis, and his bearded, intellectual-looking son. Hans was singing "The Night the Bottle Let Me Down", in response to the older Mexican man's request for some Merle Haggard. I noticed we were both singing along with the chorus, so I went and stood by their table and sang it with him, the same harmony I used to sing with John.

 Before they left, the older man stopped by our table and asked us if we liked mariachi music. He said they were in a mariachi group, he played guitar and his son played the trumpet. But he said what he really loved was country music, in particular Marty Robbins, Merle Haggard, "and Linda Rondstat's songs".

Then he was telling us some terrible jokes.

"D'ya know why people come across the border two by two?" he asked.

"No...why?"

"Because they saw the sign that said 'No Tres...passing' ". (You may remember, Mom, that "tres" means the number three in Spanish.)

His son came over to fetch him, and asked if he could leave him with us.

Love,
Lennie