Pish-Posh and a Well Done Wedding

I, like apparently two-billion other people around the world, watched part of the Royal Wedding. Actually, I saw it on the news the next day. I wasn't about to get up at one in the morning and watch it like some colleagues I know. Yep, they got up to specifically watch the Prince marry the common girl he had been living with for years. There are some observations I have noticed about myself in this process.

I like the English-all of them.

Just about any country that is or was part of the British Empire, I smile at. I think I like them because they like us. Sure, we have opinions about each other, but families do that. Still, we truly like each other and like to spend time together.

I like the Canadians. When the crazies in Iran invaded our embassy and took our people hostage for 444 days, they had several dozen Americans that were caught outside the embassy when it was taken over and they sheltered them in their own embassy, made them fake passports, citizens, and got them out with the rest of their own people, right out from under the Iranians noses. That was just good form.

The Aussies are the British version of American NASCAR lovers. They play hard, work hard, and were just a bunch of bandits cutting a life out of a area of the world that was just like ours, only sixty times bigger. They have common sense, dress comfortably, and frankly don't care what people think. If anyone doesn't like what the Australians do or say, they can get the hell out, thank you.

Then of course, there are those in the Motherland and its extension-Ireland. I am sure I am missing other territories and for that, I apologize. It is the Motherland that I really have discovered a true affection for. After all, Scotland's there and so is the birthplace of the single malt. I also like some of their words and phrases. 'Pish-posh' I heard one Brit say on TV.

Pish-posh-hmm.

I have a poster in my classroom taken from when the Brits were being bombed by those pesky Huns during WWII. It simply says, Say Calm, and Carry On. Well said-oh-there's another one-well said. Some how, I need to weave into my vocabulary pish-posh, The key is to not sound like Mary Poppins Italian towel boy.

Frankly, any place you can have a calm Welshmen, a sly Scot, and a crazy-eyed Irishman-or lady, together under the same cause, you got something no one wants to mess with but many want to be around.

Pish-posh? No, not yet.

Sure, they spent a lot of money on this thing. A lot of money in a country that is struggling economically. But you watch the people and there was a celebratory pride. It was part of their identity. It was their heritage.

It was part of ours.

Family.

There is something about this country and its people. They do put on a party really well. They drink hard, cheat at fighting, love their country and each other. The fact is, they can track their heritage back thousands of years. I noticed the prince doesn't even have a last name. Did you know that? No last name. Sure, he's from the house of Windsor. What does that mean? What name did he use on his driver's license application? I think the work 'prince' is in there somewhere. He rattled off five names when he was putting the ring on his brides hand. They were all first names. Good form.

Heritage. Sometimes it isn't so nice to look at. You look hard enough, you'll find that dark, ugly side. But then there's the colorful, hat wearing, flag-waving, singing out of tune, side of family.

Yep, good form.

A Sunday Morning in April

For many today, they wake up on this Sunday morning and in some form, celebrate Easter. They mix traditions of such things as wearing their best clothes to church, often being the only day of the year some members of the family even go to church. I remember my father, on this day, would go with the rest of us, all in our suits and mother and sister in dresses with those little cap/hat things with the pretend veil that covered the forehead. They would even wear gloves.

Celebrating the rise from the dead of the Son of Man was almost always preempted, at least for a few years, by me sitting up in our Mulberry tree in the front yard with my fully automatic Thompson, that I got from the toy aisle of Skaggs Drug Store, waiting for the Easter Bunny to show up so I could machine gun his fluffy little butt back to Arkansas, or where ever Pez candies are from.

We use to hunt real eggs, not those plastic containers which, I'm sure, originated in France in some neighborhood where it is totally acceptable to have pasty skin, no chin, and a weak handshake all under that now well-worn label of just be yourself. You know the containers, shaped like eggs of different colors, where you put candy or coupons to a movie in. People have gotten so afraid of a little food poisoning. We use to hunt the eggs until their shells were so cracked they made a noise when you simply held them in your hand. Then we would bring them inside and make egg salad; the color from the mono-sodium gelatin phosphate #3 dye turning the salad a pale blue. Just eggs and real mayo, no celery or any other crap.

We kept the mayo on the shelf next to the sink, next to the peanut butter. We never kept it in the refrigerator until I got married and I was asked why I was putting the open jar back on the shelf. "That's where we've always kept it," was my answer.

I can't keep it there any more.

Not once did we get sick. At least I don't remember getting sick. Tying gastric-distress with egg/mayonnaise consumption in the Williams household in the late sixties was never on the radar. We were the family that use to dip our potato chips in a side of mayo. So, eggs that were hidden in bushes, under trees, and sometimes buried with a shovel never held a health concern. This age-old tradition has simply fallen by the side of the road, never to come back, I'm sure, because of those guys in France.

This Easter, we have a lot on our plates. We have things that distract us, push us down, cause to feel wounded and pained. We sometimes stop and realize things are not only not fair, but often it feels like bad guys and Evil is winning. I don't have all the answers. Most of the time, I don't know the question, but I know where to start.

Evil, never----ever wins, ever.

It starts with a basic question-If there is a god and if this god IS the God of the Universe-the inventor of the the Big Bang, Enya's music, the Banzai pipeline on the North Shore, and the cinnamon roll, then is it possible he could chose us to be his kids?

Sunday is about a lot of things, but most of all it is a love story, pure and simple, probably the best and greatest love story of all time. It is a story about a father running towards his lost child, scooping them up and holding them so tight they gurgle the words "Daddy, I can't breathe." Then the two fall to the ground and laugh and cry together, the father still holding the child close. Nothing that kid could ever do, would separate that father's love from them again---------------------------nothing-------------------ever.

Now, saddle up. Grab your Thompson's, a canteen of water, and some warm egg salad. We got some rabbits to hunt!!

Happy Easter.

"Git out of my way-I'm going to sneeze!"

This will be, should be, the last of the series on preparing for, and living through, an Arizona summer. I hope you have been taking notes, putting them into a three-ringed binder you went to Target to specifically buy for this review and study, and tabbed the sections accordingly. If you did, I'm afraid you have more to worry about than the six months of suffocating heat you are about to enter.

Allergies in Arizona, especially the lowlands like Phoenix and Tuscon are terrible. According to some study somewhere, we are the third worse climate for allergy and allergy related symptoms. The Third!! People use to come from all over the world to recover from disease's like tuberculosis. Problem was, they brought their plants with them, you know, to remind them of the old country they would never want to see again. An Arizona Spring is the worse time of year for allergies.

I never remember having allergies growing up. Maybe I did and never knew it. You feel like you have a cold or flu all the time. You cough and hack and feel achy, and your face just leaks-constantly. You take one of those generic allergy relief meds, a case of those breathing strips you wear on your nose at night, and a bottle of Southern Comfort just to get you to the next day. I went to the doctor a couple of years ago with these symptoms that had lingered for two or three weeks. I was sure I needed something cut or lanced or something. She asked me three questions-"What trees do you have in your yard?" Mulberry and Olive. "Ah huh," she said and made a note. "What kind of grass do you have?" Bermuda was my answer. "Ah huh?" She made another note. "Any pets?" Two. She took a deep breath.

Come to find out we were lucky enough to have the first three plants on the Mother of All Allergy Lists with regard to plants not even mentioning the dogs. And everything was in bloom now-right now, in my front yard.

What does this have to do with summer? You see, once it starts to warm, I mean really warm, things in the desert begin to die-quickly. I guess we could be living somewhere like those sites depicted in Sunset Magazine. You know the images, those people who have back yards where you spit a seed out and it grows. Their yards are jungles of vegetation and neat places to hide when you and your kids are playing Army Rangers with broom sticks for guns (maybe that was a different generation?). Anyway, I think those people have faces that leak too.

At least I hope so. I want to share the good times. So, we gird our loins, and pop the salt tablets, and wear hats that frankly we make fun of people who don such attire any other time of year, just to survive. We shop at malls and see movies-all indoors with the thermostat set at 68. We switch to living more at night although temperatures posted at the 10:00 o'clock news is often well over 100 degrees. So we hunker down and take smaller steps and dream of Halloween.

We're always in a sweatshirt by Halloween.

Dress for Survival-not for Success

Okay, continuing our series on prepping for the days to come called an Arizona summer, we need to establish a few rules. Last week, we set our baseline of maybe getting ahead of the game and even toying with such ideas as using a tanning salon so our bodies would not wind up in a burn unit after a day on the beach in San Diego, the favorite refugee camp for Arizonans escaping the heat. Today, its clothing.

With attire comes a level of self pride. There is a distinction, obviously, between the young; lets say those in their real early twenties and teens; with everyone else. As the young get older, I have observed, they discover that comfort surpasses style.

Women are so much better at this then men at the younger age, but then border line later in life with style and trying to retain that sexy/stylish/beautiful look they think they might have lost but in fact, didn’t. It is this change that brings them to the discussion table. Men, young men, on the other hand, have a tendency to embrace stuff that makes no sense at all.

Example 1-Young men wear ball caps sideways, making them look like a modern day Lenny from Mice and Men (for those whom have never heard of it—it’s a book). In order to do this, they need to consciously ignore the feeling of the hat as it pinches theirs heads because in all the dream world of the hat manufacture, they never thought anyone would wear their product contrary to the way it was suppose to be worn. I’m waiting for someone to start another look where they wear it upside down. Now that will look good! Summers in Arizona require hats. If you truly wear them sideways, people just think you’re slow and will start talking to you in a loud voice—thinking you’re deaf as well.

Example 2-Young men have also forgotten to pull up their pants. This was a style some years ago when Mark Walberg was known as Marky Mark and did underwear commercials. It was a style that two years ago began to fade. Someone forgot to tell the Arizona connection. Nothing funnier than watching a young man with a pair a shorts hanging almost to his ankles, having to hold them up with one hand as he walks down the street. Pictures should be taken of these men, stored in a photo album, and secured until that man is thirty; then on his birthday, presented to him as what he use to wear. We older men have our leisure suit photos, the young—shorts dragging on the ground. Shorts in an Arizona summer is a required dress. It kills the functionality if you wear them long enough to cut off any fresh air circulation while both hands are filled, one with your pants and the other with your bag of pork rinds.

You combine these two examples on a young man walking down the street and one can not help but think that poor fellow has to write letters to his grandmother with a crayon and will spend the rest of his natural life working an assembly line sorting colored glass at the city’s recycling facility.

Now ladies, frankly, you’re perfect with some minor suggestions. Frankly, men have really no say in what you look like when we dress like that described above. But can we make some minor suggestion(s)?

Ever since we have accepted you and your shoe choices, which is a major realization of style and its importance in your self-esteem, we are left with only two minor things.

Spandex and moo-moo’s.

There are some things you need to be aware of. Young men (those wearing the crap above) will always be surface people. Your looks are what they are attracted to. Whether you can survive after your plane crashes on a deserted island never crosses their minds. What you looked like after you crawled from the wreckage—that’s the important part to them. The application of spandex is only good for one thing-the gym.

Women should never wear spandex past the age of twenty; in a climate where the daily temperature is over 100 degrees by eight o’clock in the morning; or the woman’s body mass would test the tinsel strength of the fabric weave.

Look ladies, here’s the thing, we are all in this life for the long haul. Those in the Donner party survived because they had something to survive on. Those skinny women who were so attractive to the others were the main course come supper time because their body mass index was so low they couldn't survive the blistering cold. They had no staying power. Embrace the fact that the average woman’s size in the United States is a size 12 and move on. Those women are survivors! You don’t need to wear moo-moo’s or whatever the Hawaiian name is for those one-piece dresses large women and some men wear unless comfort is your middle name. Those can be equally unsettling.

We had a neighbor once who lived behind us. She was from Greece or some place from the Ukraine, I think. She would climb up on a ladder leaning against our back wall and call to us holding her cigarette in one of those extended filter things that Natasha used in the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show (it was a cartoon). We all laid bets she was a former Russian tower guard in the Gulag at some time and used her ‘get away from the electric fence’ voice in callilng us. She wore those moo-moo things. She passed before spandex made a showing. Just the idea of her in eight yards of black Spandex is enough to cause a seizure. Bottom line is this-dress this summer with loose fitting, breathable clothes, comfortable shoes, hats facing front, carrying a bottle of water.

We can get all wrapped up in the hype of needing to wear this or that just to say we have this or that when we really need to dress to survive. When the first skinny person became the pot roast for the Donner group, I bet, if you could of asked them, they wished they would have bulked up a little bit before they got to that pass in the dead of winter. Yep, just a little bit of me thinks they were a size 12-or even a 14.