Tag Archives: children

Dear Zoo

26 Feb

From John James Audobon. So you know it's real.

Dear Zoo,

You fill me with joy.

Also, potentially, with tired feet and hopefully, sticky fingers from something disgusting to eat like cotton candy. Maybe rage when the little kids won’t get out of my way to let me see the pandas.

So the thing about the San Diego zoo is they tell you it’s too big to walk around and then make you wait in a giant wooden structure that looks a lot like the playground at my elementary school before they decided that little kids shouldn’t have the opportunity to jump off essentially a three-story building. Then they pack you onto buses and drive you around. And you can’t see anything because you’re on a bus so you can’t get even near a crowded fence.

I am always surprised, however, at how clear the gate is around the flamingos. Their knees! They bend backwards! Is that not the craziest thing you’ve ever heard???

I thought so.

MM

Dear Tights

18 Dec

Dear Tights,

With the awesome vertical stitching and general cute-ness: you say one size fits all.

YET. I am 5’6″.

Also known as NOT THAT TALL and your crotch doesn’t reach my crotch and that means we have a PROBLEM. I am making the universal sign for crotch-to-crotch dysfunction right now. It came out of trying on vintage onesies and jumpsuits but it is applicable here and now so I am putting it into service. Someday there will be a youtube video. You heard it here first. Such a gesture exists and it comes in handy surprisingly often.

Also known as I went out and bought three different pairs of tights because it was the mall and there was a live band playing and children screaming and strollers blocking the escalators and my mother and sister discussing minute details of fabric compositions and salespeople offering “three for $27″ and the people and music and lights, my god, the very holiday spirit of it all throwing up all over me…

When I was little, I hated tights. They pulled in places that you don’t want things pulling, then now or ever. As a result, I forced my mother to buy my tights just a *little* bigger than I needed them.

A Very Merry Matching Velvet Christmas (and yes, I think that is a pizza)

As a result, I had saggy knees from the ages of about two to six (oh all right then, nine). At which point I refused to wear tights entirely.

It's like I'm wearing leg warmers for crying out loud.

Now I’m an adult, so I am fractionally more tolerant of things that aren’t comfortable. Thought I still mostly get dressed by the feel test: ie, how soft does this feel? does it have stretch? (Hey people, don’t judge. Some of my classes are three hours long and yes we sit in those individual table-chair amalgamations that might actually be relics from medieval days of torture.)

But above and beyond that, today my sister said, “I just got these tights that I’m wearing. And they’re a little too big. And they are so much more comfortable this way.”

Yep. That happened.

Love,

MM

PS– If any of you want to share your old Santa photos / matching-velvet-dresses-with-lace-collars pictures, you know where to find me.

PPS– What is that Santa looking at? How did two children manage to look straight into the camera, and he, who not only is an adult but looks into that cheeping stuffed animal’s eyes professionally, is staring way off into right field?

Dear End-of-the-Semester

10 Dec

Dear End-of-the-Semester,

I’m tired. I have a headache. YOU SUCK.

I still have a fifteen page paper to write. I was feeling all on top of things, because my final portfolios for both my poetry workshops were due last week and I got them done with little to no stress. Then this week I had fifteenhundredeleven tutoring workshops, and my professors decided (rightly) to celebrate the end of the semester with us by making our last classes potlucks. Potlucks!

I love potlucks.

These look scary to me.

Then before you know it, I’m making cookies on Sunday, blueberry muffins Monday night, and I’m running home in between tutoring and classes on Tuesday to make cupcakes (because they can sit in my car all day Wednesday while I’m on campus without turning green– like meat, for example). Then, before you know it, I’ve burned the cupcakes, and I’m running home Wednesday to make another batch of cupcakes and all of a sudden I’m a crazy PTA Mom (hi guys!) and I can hear a little voice inside of me that sounds a lot like nine-year-old me trying to reassure my mother, “But no one will care if you just buy something!”

And something else inside of me says, “But I can have it all! / I hate the grocery store.”

And then before you know it, I’m not putting my poems to bed because I’m busy making cupcakes for all the other poems in the class and they’re crying and I’m crying and the second batch of cupcakes is burning and all I want to do is watch Tombstone but I still have a fifteen page paper to write and I hate everything I’ve written this semester and I’m wondering why I didn’t just bring the open, half-eaten, stale bag of chips that’s in my cupboard.

And then I’m sitting at my laptop saying, “I just want everybody to be happy! I’m doing my best! Why doesn’t anybody appreciate me?!?” And yes, my laptop is my husband in this analogy. Metaphor. Conceit. What is this, again?

Oh, I’ve got the end-of-the-semester blues….the blues….the sad-sack blues…

Why don’t you come with foot rubs and soothing chamomile tea and maybe a parade celebrating everything I’ve done all semester? Hmmm? Think we could work that out? I’ll bake you something delicious to eat…

Not fondly,

MM

PS– And then I’m running around like a cracked out bakery chef saying, “Please take a cupcake. Please. Take. A. Damn. Cupcake.” Because I already have cookies and muffins at home and what am I going to do with all the cupcakes? I love cupcakes. I do. I’m not opposed to eating a lot of them. But I live alone. I get headaches from too much sugar. I have a headache. Someone take a cupcake. (That is not a euphemism.)

Dear Nice Things

1 May

Dear Nice Things,

You were quite the strong  presence on my walk with the dog today.  To be fair, she is a very nice dog and it is a very nice day.

I passed 2 schools just letting out for the day, complete with droopy-flagged elementary-aged crossing guards.   I passed approximately 11 dogwoods in full bloom, one lilac tree, dozens of those crazy green alien flowers that I’ve never seen before this year, one girl riding on the handlebars on her dad’s bike over the grass in the park, one little boy complaining about having to wear his shirt, and I saw no crows even though it is trash day.

In the background, I could hear the metallic clink of bats busy batting.

On 1 shady porch slept a father with a newborn baby in his arms, feet propped up on a wicker stool.

And 1 little girl ran up to her white picket fence just as I was passing and said:

“When you jump, you fly a little bit.”

Which is a very nice thing indeed.

Cheers,

MM

Dear Signage

18 Apr

Dear Signage,

We’ve had several amusing encounters lately, and I’d like to document them here.

Exhibit A that grammar is important and people are bad at advertising and good at getting in their own way:

“STOP” ANTS
The Pest Store
555-1713

Tacked to a light pole near a currently empty building, formerly sketchy looking co-op market grocery (aka druglord hangout). (Hey, maybe s/he really liked fruit).

But why would I want “stop” ants? Wouldn’t I want to just, you know, actually stop them? And what’s a pest store? Is it like a pet store, but for pests? But why would I want to buy pests? So many questions, so few answers.

Exhibit B that people assume they are understood:

CHILDREN.

It’s a road sign. That says CHILDREN. On a two-lane country road in between Amherst, Northampton, Easthampton, Hadley, and Smallhampton. Or somewhere around there at any rate. What about CHILDREN? They exist? They are nice? We like them? Please drive slowly? Please pick them up?

Also amusing in the way of children near Amherst, Massachusetts:

SCHOOL BUS

Now, this may seem like a perfectly normal sign. We see this painted along the sides of…well, of school buses, all the time. What we don’t often see is this as a removable sign (complete with flashing yellow lights) on top of a sedan, a SUV, a minivan, and another sedan. That’s right, people. In Amherst, the so-called “SCHOOL BUS” is actually what I grew up referring to as a car pool…

Exhibit C that Amherst is really, really small (but lovely! oh so lovely!):

BISON FARM.

Along the highway, less than a mile from the town. That is, across the street from the Howard Johnson. Oh, I’m sorry, I mean, the HoJo. Because that sort of stupid “I’m hip with the people” self-inflicted commercial nickname worked out so well for WaMu.

So do bison go “woooah” kind of like a fog horn, or is it more of a “moooo”? Do you think they could function as SCHOOL BUS as well? For the CHILDREN?

WHEN WILL IT “STOP”?!??!

Cheers,

MM

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