Tales from the Shark Tank

Yesterday in checking my son’s school backpack, I found a message from his teacher regarding Halloween. It said that they would be taking no notice of Halloween for “a number of reasons”, and that we should under no circumstances send our kids in or with costumes or send treats.

What a pity. Halloween, which more than anything else is about pure innocent fun for kids, has been preempted by political correctness and religious conservatism. Yes, I know, its roots are Pagan. But at this point the only association between the Pagan holiday – Samhain – and Halloween is the date. A modern American Halloween has long lost all associations with the observance of Samhain. Dressing up is a children’s game, nothing more. I hate to see them deprived of it.

Joseph asked to go to the park Sunday, but we quickly found it was too cold for comfortable play. So in the interest of letting him run off some small-boy steam with other kids (and maybe letting us sleep through the night), I took him to a McDonald’s playland.

I knew it was going to be interesting when he climbed into his booster seat and leaned over with a glad cry of “there it is!” “It” was his current favorite book, one in the Magic Schoolbus series. He began reading as I drove, and when we got to Archland, he asked if he could please bring it in with him. Not being hypocritical enough to refuse him when I had my own book in my hand, I perforce assented.

And guess what? The slides and gerbil-tubes had no allure, compared with the siren call of a book. Other children could run; he had a book and a mommy who could help him over the hard words. His happy meal had a toy in it (the real attraction, as he doesn’t eat meat if he can help it) which was promptly stashed in mommy’s purse for “later”. He did ultimately go and play, but not until we had read that book through twice – once with the occasional boost, and a second time so he could do it all by himself.

No question about it – he’s our kid!

For the past several years, Halloween has been cold. Not cool. Not chilly. Downright cold. So this year, I decided that Joseph’s costume should be warm. He actually wants to be a ghost, which is classically easy. I got a length of white polarfleece fabric, and cut and stitched it into a kind of floaty poncho with a hood, with appropriately accented eye and mouth holes. It’s warm enough to serve as a lightweight blanket at need.

So what is the weather forecast for Halloween this year? High of 75. Even by the time the hour of trick-or-treat comes around, it will be way too warm for that fleece ghost costume. My crystal ball indicates that I shall be spending some quality time with an old cotton sheet tonight.

Every year around late autumn, I seem to come down with bronchitis. Since I also often go to a retreat at a campground around the end of October, I had considered the two factors likely to be related. Retreat is good for the soul, but not necessarily restful to the body, and camping in October in these latitudes can get iffy.

This year, for assorted reasons, I can’t go to the retreat. One of the factors I considered was whether I could afford to be sick when I got home. The answer was no, not having taken time off work to stay home with Joseph a few weeks ago. When my first two attempts at obtaining a babysitter for Saturday failed, I did not try a third time.

So what’s happened? I have bronchitis anyway. I’ve just missed two days of work. I assume I needed to stay home, as I’ve slept two entire days without giving myself insomnia, and still have all the energy of a chick that just finished the epic Battle of the Eggshell. Antibiotics already have it in retreat, but “better” is not “all better”. My friend is arriving from New York tomorrow evening, and her room isn’t ready for her because I haven’t had the energy to work on it since Sunday. Wick’s been working and has taken primary kid watch to let me sleep so he hasn’t gotten at it either. I know she won’t hold the state of the house against me, but I really did want to welcome her with at least a bedroom ready for her.

Bleah, I say bleah! Phooey, that is!

Ok, fair warning. This is going to be a rant. If you aren’t up for that, stop reading now.

Any time I mention that I am working on my weight and/or physical condition, someone assumes that it is because I’ve bought into the myths that thinness equals beauty or that being heavy is shameful or sinful or some similar nonsense. Frankly, that’s a whole lot of crap. If anyone who is looking at me is petty enough to devalue me because of my weight, I don’t give a flying damn, and I resent the assumption that external societal expectations would be the only reason I would come up with such an idea.

I’m going to use some numbers here. I haven’t until now because it seemed irrelevant. But here they are. Right now, I weigh 200 pounds. I’m trying to get back to 150, ok? That’s reasonable for a woman who will be 45 in two weeks.

What I am not trying to do? I’m not trying to get back to what I weighed in my dancing and gymnastics days, which was 115. I’m not even trying to get back to the 125 I was when I wore the wedding dress hanging at the back of my guest room closet. Those aren’t reasonable expectations. What I want and all I want is a body that is at least vaguely familiar to me and comfortable to be inside of. But that’s not about image, or standards of beauty, or anything else external. Is that clear? I don’t give a damn what anyone looking at me thinks, nor am I narcissistic enough to assume anyone else is even looking. I do care what *I* think. I do care how *I* feel. But none of that means I’ve bought into the Hollywood myth.

We have a friend who is moving here from NYC. She will be living with us for several months while she gets herself well enough situated to get a place of her own. Joseph adores her and it’s mutual, so we’ll have three adults for one small boy. She has already made it abundantly clear that she expects to babysit, cook, and so forth. She is quite determined to be a full contributing member of the household, not just a boarder or a long-term guest. I consider all of that a good thing over all.

But since this isn’t just a visit of a week or so, it behooves me to shift my stuff around so that there is room for her to do things like, oh, say, hang up her clothes and put things into drawers. While it was mostly spare space, I had put a lot of professional clothing for which I had gotten too fat into that closet. I didn’t want to get rid of it, I wanted (and want) to get back into it. My mother-in-law gave most of it to me over the first several years of our marriage, and it is good, classic stuff – Pendleton suits and the like.

But some of them are a solid three to four sizes smaller than my current dimensions. Looking at those tiny waists is depressing. Remembering that when I got them some of them were loose is even more so. I know that in addition to sheer weight gain, menopause has done quite a job of shifting things around as well. Even if I manage to lose all (mrph mumble) pounds, there’s no guarantee I’ll fit back into those things, and at the rate I’m going there will be a mead shortage in Valhalla before I’m back down to a size 8.

Anything size 12 and up I’m packing into storage bins with mothballs. Smaller stuff, and things that are easily replaced, are going to either the friend who went down two sizes with menopause or the Julian Center. But I’m wondering if those bins aren’t an exercise in Egyptian river travel in and of themselves. I don’t know if I’ll wear these things again, or if I’m just setting myself up to revisit this place 5 years from now, and cluttering up my house with the stuff in the meantime. And with my favorite recovering Brooklynite arriving Wednesday or Thursday, I don’t really have time to figure it out.

Like many employers, the State of Indiana offers flexible spending reimbursement accounts for day care and medical care expenses. Basically the money is withheld from your paycheck before taxes, and then after you spend the money on day care or doctors, you submit a claim and get reimbursed. It saves us from having to pay taxes on several thousand dollars a year. I send my claims in about every 2 weeks, as it is convenient and matches the cycle on which I’m paid. Mind you, this is our money the benefit management company is holding. I earned it.

In this entire year, I have had one claim go through without having to call and prod the management company, and that was in late September. My most recent claim was lost. I faxed it in, and they usually track their faxes by computer, but this one vanished into limbo. Was I sure I had sent it? Yes, I told the rep on the phone; I had the confirmation sheet. I gave her the date and time on the print out. So I refaxed it, and I have another confirmation sheet. Per the CSR’s suggestion, I called back to follow up. This time they can’t access my file. Could I call back again in half an hour?

Ok, I know this saves us quite a chunk of money yearly. But I’m sincerely wondering if it’s worth the time, trouble and attention I have to give it to get my own money back.

In lieu of lunch this afternoon, I went for a walk down along the river, hoping to get some snapshots of the turning leaves. The walk was wonderful, although I only took a couple of pictures. The smaller trees along my path were already entirely bare, and the large maples behind the tenaciously green. The sun was out, but the temperture fairly cool and the breeze sharp enough to make me glad of my grey cloak.

But I did have a couple of fun encounters of the human variety. The first was with a little girl in a blue dress, who couldn’t have been above 5. She saw me coming, and stopped stock still. Then she began to call “Mommy! Mommy, look!” I was about to turn and see what she was so excited by when she went on “There’s an elf-lady, Mommy!” Her mother and I both laughed.

The second was with a man who works in the building. I see him fairly frequently, as he likes to hang out outside whenever the weather is halfway decent and read. He slowed down as we were walking to compliment the cloak and ask if I had gotten it at a science fiction convention. No, I told him, I’d made it, and added rather wistfully that I hadn’t been to a con in about 5 years. But it did start quite a pleasant conversation. I suspect we’ll talk a bit more when we see each other after this.

Besides, that gives me an idea. Once Joseph is old enough to enjoy cons, if we start going again, I might sell my cloaks there. Some things never really go out of style…perhaps because they were never really “in”.

Last night after I picked Joseph up from his babysitter, I ended up driving toward home along State Road 67. The little guy had asked to go to Arby’s, and I had headed for the nearest one, but we hadn’t gone in. He’d had a meltdown about my choice of route and started throwing things at me, so I was headed directly home. I’ve noticed that the behavior that is most directly associated with his autism increases by several orders of magnitude when he’s sick – so much so that if he goes from angel to demon in the course of an hour, we’re off to the doc the next day. Usually he has an ear infection.

On our way we drove past a seedy little motel that has been there as long as I can remember. It’s one of those little places with a dozen rooms that advertises that they have Air Conditioning as if it were a recent innovation, and that will rent rooms by the night, the week, or the month.

I had a client/ friend who stayed there for a few months. I’ve blogged about him before – the messed up ex Green Beret whom I represented through his divorce. He was, among other things, convinced that the sheriff would arrest him or kill him if he drove into his home county. I tried repeatedly to explain to him that it was safe for him to get an apartment, that the only thing the court order restrained him from doing was going to see his wife wherever she was, that the equivalent of an Old West wanted poster with his face on it was not on every telephone pole in Hancock County. It was all to no avail. He changed the color of the paint on his truck and essentially hid. But I was his attorney, so he made sure I always knew where he was, even when he wouldn’t tell anyone else. About every other day I had to reassure his wife, who cared about him deeply but could no longer live with the armed bomb he had become, that I knew where he was and that he was ok. Originally I had asked her to work through her attorney, but that got unwieldy very quickly, and so we made an agreement between counsel that he would not take it amiss if I spoke to her directly, if all she wanted was reassurance of H.’s well-being. If she didn’t call one of her friends would. They all understood that I had given my word and would not tell them where he was, but that didn’t stop them from worrying.

So I called. I got to know the owner of that little motel so well that I could simply call and say “Hey, have you seen H. today? His wife’s worrying again.” And she would tell me. If she hadn’t seen him, she’d try to ring his room for me. If that failed, she put me on hold to go pound on the door. She woke him up drunk a few times that way. Another day she found he hadn’t bothered to get any food, so she went to the grocery and got him a few things. He told her to add it to his room tab, but I doubt she did. But she was my eye on the spot, letting me deliver honest reassurances without driving across town to check in person.

He’s long gone, but the little motel is still there and still looks exactly the way it did ten years ago. And I can’t drive by that flickery neon sign without thinking of the man who lived there for a while, with his old battered grey pickup and his Willie Nelson hair and beard, hiding out from The Law when no one was trying to lock him up.

Generally speaking, I know that what is commonly referred as the “holiday season” is upon us when I start getting catalogues in the mail. (Never mind that from my point of view the holiday season runs from mid-September to early October.) It escalates with the arrival of a seasonal onslaught of invitations to assorted professional or philanthropic receptions. I don’t just mean the pleas for money from local missions and the March of Dimes Foundation. I mean “invitations” to all members of the State Bar Association to give a donation to their particular charity, with the lowest figure on the list of suggested donations set at $100.00. I have news for those folks. The J.D. after a person’s name is does not automatically confer sufficient prosperity to emulate the Lilly Foundation, however much one might be so inclined. I used to start seeing catalogues at the beginning of November, with the mass petitions for charity beginning about the same time, and the receptions and targetted campaigns getting rolling right after Thanksgiving.

Not this year. Catalogues are already arriving in my mail in flocks on a daily basis, and any company from whom I have ordered on line in the past 2 years is bombarding my in-box as well. The annual requests from the Wheeler Mission and St. Jude’s hospital came over a week ago. And today I got the first set of invitations for a reception for members of the bar who might be interested in doing pro bono work and another for allumni of the law school Wick and I attended to meet and shmooze with some legal luminary or another. It’s barely the middle of October. By Thanksgiving the mail carrier won’t be able to fit it all in the mail box, if it grows at the usual rate. And you know? I can shop when I want/ need to without prompting. Really. I wish all these folks would quit decimating the forests in the name of “holiday spirit(s)”.