One California, one Spider, and one Dragon

I lost such a great friend over 3 rolls of sushi. No…it was more than the sushi I ate off her plate when I took her to lunch. Even though she offered the sushi to me, I shouldn’t have eaten it because she had done me a big favor and that’s why I had taken her to lunch in the first place, and she wanted to put the extra sushi in a box and have it later or maybe let her fiancé taste it. But I was trying to be vegan because I thought it would be good for my health and ordered a bowl of vegetables instead of a meal and that’s what got me eyeing her sushi. But it was more than that. She had owed me money and I took it. I should have said, “Oh, no, you keep it,” but I had a surprise in mind that I didn’t tell her and I should have. I really should have. She’s getting married and I was saving up to give her money toward her wedding dress. Why hadn’t I said, “This is toward your wedding dress” before I pocketed it? Because I was too busy eating her sushi and because I had wanted it to be a grand surprise when she began shopping for her wedding dress. <>

<>There is more if you can bear it. She drove me all the way into Manhattan to pick up the jacket I am going to be wearing to my son’s wedding, and even though I paid for parking and tolls, I didn’t pay for gas. Why? Because my big thought was that I am saving up money toward her wedding dress as a surprise. We couldn’t find her the lot where her car was parked and the ticket had no address on it. What kind of a garage gives a ticket without an address on it? A scam garage, that’s what kind. The guys who took her car weren’t in the parking lot. They were outside it, on the curb, just waiting for two rubes to hand them the keys. And they weren’t just her car keys, a whole ring of keys for her apartment. I felt so guilty that her car was stolen from doing me a favor. How am I going to give her money toward her wedding dress if I owe her a car?<>

<> We dashed through the streets like Henny and Penny who thought that the sky was falling, the dressy jacket in its white zippered bag flapping, a sail in wind. I was ready to call the police when she found the lot where the car was waiting. But that wasn’t all. Before I ate up her sushi, I told her that her white coat was pilly and she needed a new one. But that wasn’t all either. When she came back to my house after I had eaten up her sushi, I flaunted the pricey pendant my husband bought me to match the pricey jacket. All this flaunting with her sushi in my belly and her gas burnt up in service of me! The pendant was my birthday, anniversary, and Chanukah present from my husband, possibly all the presents for the rest of my life, but there I was, her sushi in my stomach, her gas tank down a half, and I never told her, “I’m paying something toward your wedding dress because you’ve been such a great friend all the years.” No, I was waiting to surprise her. But since I ate her sushi, siphoned her gas, besmirched her white coat with my words, and flaunted that pendant, the only surprise is that I lost a friendship with a dear friend.<>

<>In The Prophet, Khalil Gibran said that talk was half-murdered thought, but thoughts that are kept back as a surprise over sushi can murder friendships.

In a Russian restaurant in Brighton Beach

You see what I mean about my husband, Bernie's hair in my last post? He used to have thick, wavy, dark hair that I never bothered with much. But somehow now that it's shaved, I can't resist running my hands over his scalp. I was telling a woman at a party about it, and next thing I knew, she walked over to him and began rubbing his head. I got so jealous. I'll tell no one about how great his scalp feels again! Well, I guess I did tell you, but please, if you see him, no matter how hard it is to resist, please don't run your hands over his head. Thanks.

My Card to my husband, Bernie, on his 64th birthday

“I’ve waited years to play this for you,” you said.

With your suit and tie still on from work, you walk into the bedroom, that wry look on your face when you’re trying to hide a smile, you slip a CD into the player. When I get older, losing my hair, (gone, honey) many years from now, will you still be sending me a valentine, birthday greetings and a bottle of wine? I’ve bought you a bottle of wine this birthday as I have for years now, your new favorite, Reisling, as if the lyrics had unconsciously been in my head. If I’d been out since quarter to three, would you look the door. Since you bought your store, you’ve always left at 3:30 am, sometimes quarter to four, and locked the door behind yourself. Sometimes, after you’re gone, I hear you call me. “Rochelle, Rochelle,” and I wake just before my alarm rings. When I’m sixty-four, you’ll be older too. You still see me as the fourteen year old girl who sneaked into Roches Beach Club to meet you, my locker boy. If I say the word, I could stay with you. Yes, stay with me all my days, my years. I can’t knit you a sweater by the fireside. We sold our house with the hearth and found a home with a patio. Also, I can’t knit. I could be handy mending a fuse. Oh, remember in Wavecrest when you tried to change the fust by prying it out of the wall with a screwdriver and I lied for you? “I did it,” I told the super, batting my lashes like a bimbo. Anything for you. Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four. I need you. I need you more everyday. I feed you pasta with pesto, I tell jokes, my fingernails gently rake your bare back. Doing the garden, digging the weeds, who could ask for more? You, with your green plastic watering can, tromping through the living room on the way to the baskets of impatiens and the pot of fuzzy chenille. Every summer we can rent a cottage, in the Isle of Wright if it’s not too dear. We shall scrimp and save, grandchildren on our knee, Bernie dear.

Meet Nancy Rubin Stuart, Award-Winning Biographer

Rapidly declining value of national currency. A dangerous dependence upon foreign products. Suppression of civil rights. Shabby treatment of veteran soldiers.

Sounds familiar? Oddly enough, early warnings about such events are not the product of a contemporary writer but emanated from one of our nearly forgotten Founding Mothers, Mercy Otis Warren, ( 1728-1814), the first female historian of the American Revolution, and a confidant of John and Abigail Adams.

I had no idea about Mrs. Warren's alarmed pronouncements when I was researching and writing THE MUSE OF THE REVOLUTION: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation in 2003-2007. By late 2007 and into 2008 I was thus struck by the similarities in the early Federal period and those today -- just when this biography was about to be published.

Rest assured though, it wasn't all doom and gloom for the Revolutionary-era woman writer who possessed what John Adams called a " genius pen" meant to records the events of the Revolution in her famous History. Now that the book is published, I'm told that readers chortle over the sixteen-letter argument between Mrs. Warren and John Adams of 1807 over his performance as the second U.S. president. All of which reminds us that we should never put anything in print we might later regret! Even in emails!

The Hypnosis Weight Loss Seminar Should be Renamed

Forty people sat in hard chairs, listening to relaxing music and the commnading voice of the hypnotizer.

"You see yourself stepping on the scale and your ideal weight appears," he croons.

Instead, I visualize a lab report with my name on it. "Cholestrol, 130," And after the hypnosis, while we were all still fuzzy-headed, the hypnotizer intoned, "In order for your weight loss to be permanent, you must buy our super fiber supplement. (It cost $90 for a one-month supply.) "Over the next four months, you could loose fourteen pounds of undigested food from your colon." Hold onto your hats. He went on to tell us that his mother began taking it and she found undigested kernels of corn in her poop, and she hadn't eaten corn in over a year. Blech, blech, blech. Then there was a Q&A that lasted forty minutes where people shared intimate info about their bowels.

Maybe I'll just take the cholestrol-lowering drug my doctor recommended!

What would you rename the seminar? Poopnosis?

The best entry will win a pound of prunes.

Hypnosis for Weight Loss

I don't actually need to lose weight. I need my cholestrol to go down from a burbling 252. But when chocolate cake is put before me, everything else goes out of my head. Chocolate birthday cakes--mine, other people's.

"I can't," I say. "Cholestrol."

"Oh, you only live once," they say, and cut a generous wedge and plop it on my plate.

Does this make sense? Yes, well...for the moment anyway.

So Thursday night, unless I fried chicken out of it, I'm going to this weight loss hypnosis seminar at a local hotel. I'll tell you about it on Friday and over the next few weeks, I'll let you know how it works...or doesn't!

What a Wuss I Am!

Here I am, afraid of racoons, while Vicki Broadrick who teaches educational pschology at UCLA extension copes with a 400 pound bear coming to her deck, going through her garbage, once even getting inside her house and ransacking her fridge. Yet she maintains complete sympathy for the bears. She believes that we, humans, are the ones who have encroached on their territory.

The One Who Won't Follow Directions

This is my three-year-old granddaughter, Rebecca's dance recital. She's the third one from the left. Watch how singlemindedly she doesn't follow directions and wait until you see what happens when it's time to get off the stage!!!

.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXaPFKPtcBY