Adding Chocolate to the Ritual, Part 3

Elsa had a secret. What she didn't want anyone at work knowing was that Elsa, the quiet bookkeeper type that looked rather mild and unobtrusive, was just who Elsa felt like being at work, not who she felt like inside. Oh, she wasn't lying about who she was, not really. She liked wearing penny loafers and soft pink cardigan sweaters. Really, it was a much more comfortable style than the heels and skirts that the other bookkeeper wore. It made people forget about her. It made it easier to sit back and watch if she weren't under the spotlight herself.

It wasn't that she didn't like the people at work. They were interesting people. They really were. But if she were even a little more flamboyant or chatty, she never would have glimpsed them the way she did. It was her gift, to be able to see people when they didn't notice her looking.

For example, Marion, her co-bookkeeper, picked her nose when she though no one else was looking. That Elsa was looking never occurred to her. Elsa had a way of lowering her eyelids just a bit to make her eyes seem a bit unfocused. She could see things right through her lashes. She never stared straight on either. It confused birds at the park as well.  The birds were happy flitting in and out of the people there, she noticed, until some human, usually a toddler, ran after one with that intent stare that said it may have been a baby, but it was still a predator. The birds would occasionally perch on the bench where Elsa sat eating her sandwich. She had perfected the art of not moving to respond to their visits either. This kind of thing worked with people too. If she acted as though she hadn't noticed, the bra-digging, the pantyhose adjusting, and the nose picking continued unmolested.

Elsa had even perfected the art of photographing unsuspecting people using her iPhone. Most people thought that holding the phone up in front of their faces with their thumb aimed at the faux-button on the screen was the way to take a photo. Elsa had a way of looking totally preoccupied with some game on her phone and still being able to tilt the thing at the right angle, from waist level, and getting a great shot of Marion with her finger buried to the knuckle in her nose. A little Photoshop work and that knuckle/nose tryst was cropped and enlarged to fit the screen of her laptop at home, though she wished that her iPhone camera came with a bit more resolution than it did. It was a small price to pay for the anonymity. Everyone sat and fiddled with a phone. It was a lovely hobby and it made Elsa very happy.

Thank you for listening, jb

'Lacuna' by Barbara Kingsolver

I just have to acknowledge the books that I've been reading lately.

For a while, there was a drought. You know what that's like. You go from book to book, not really engaging with any of them, but then, bang, the skies open up and it's raining, pouring, a deluge of words and you, with not enough time to read them all at once.

There was 'Lacuna' by Barbara Kingsolver. My, oh my, that book will leave you with food for thought for a while. It's fiction, sure, but there's so much history and biography in it, that I actually looked stuff up on the Internet and ordered a few other books from the library.  Imagine how proud my fourth grade teacher would have been, the one who loved me, the one who gave every student a book at the end of the school year, a book I still have to this day. Yes, Mrs. Winkler, my favorite teacher, would have loved that I read a book that stirred my curiosity so that I read another book and in the process, learned about important figures in history and learned some history itself and learned how people can behave. Plus, if I'd actually read the book and didn't just sit in my car during karate listening to it on CD, I might have learned to read a little more Spanish. That might have eased my boring habit of reading the cautionary words in Spanish on the sides of appliances.

Okay, well now I have to go help Nick with homework I'm no more qualified to complete than he is.  I'll tell you more about the appliances and the books later.

Thank you for listening, jb

 

Adding Chocolate to the Ritual, Part 2

To a lion, Elsa knew her name meant 'freedom' even all these years after that ridiculous movie, but to a woman, it seemed to mean 'librarian.' Elsa wasn't a librarian, though she loved her books, but she did work at a dowdy job. Elsa was a bookkeeper for a chain of laundromats. Her desk didn't have a window, though the laundromats themselves were sunny and clean. It was the niche market, for them to be sunny and clean. She suspected that her boss had had the walls of her office painted using surplus paint from the Army. The concrete walls were a dingy gray. The desks and chairs may have been army surplus too, though Elsa knew they wouldn't fall apart any time soon like the crap that was sold in the office supply stores she was sent to at least once a week.

Elsa knew she wasn't going to live her dreams through her job. She managed to get through her day using a series of rituals. When she arrived for work, usually a few minutes after eight, she started by wiping down the coffee maker, then making coffee, and grabbing a cup for her boss before the oily residue turned it rancid. Her boss liked his coffee dark, but not rancid. Then, she made herself a cup of peppermint tea using water she brought in once or twice a week in a gallon jug. She used an old hot pot she'd been using since college. Now and then, things were stolen from people's desks at work, but never her hot pot.  Sometimes, people even ate lunches out of the refrigerator in the break room if they looked too fresh. Elsa kept her own lunch in her large black purse. No one ever expected to find anything of value in an oversized ugly black purse owned by a middle-aged bookkeeper.

After she made her coffee, Elsa ate one small chocolate from a candy dish on her desk, then worked on accounts payable. At 10:23 am, she took a break by walking around the loop that housed the offices. She picked 10:23 because most of the employees took a break at 10:00 and she wanted to avoid them, even the ones who lingered. When she returned to her desk, she took note of the volume missing from her candy dish. When lunchtime came, Elsa put on her coat, picked up her ugly black purse, and walked out of the office. She often ate in a park two blocks away, but sometimes, she bought a tea latte from the coffee shop in the grocery store and ate her lunch there. She usually brought a book. These days, she was reading 'Lacuna' by Barbara Kingsolver, a lovely book about artists, revolutionaries, and McCarthy's hunt for Communists beginning in 1947. Elsa had to be careful not to get carried away by her book during lunch. She usually got back into the office a few minutes after 1:00 pm and began her ritual all over again. While she was at lunch, her candy dish usually took a pretty deep hit.

Elsa had a good time with that dish. Even though she wasn't close with anyone from the office, she enjoyed what that dish could do. She had intentionally picked a beautiful dish, a blue and white dish from Uwajimaya before they closed their nearby store. Then, she bought different kinds of candy for her dish to see how people would react. She usually put Halloween sized chocolates into her bowl, but when that depleted too quickly, she'd buy something different, like Bit-O-Honey or Clark bars. When she did that, people had the audacity to come by her desk when she was sitting there and complain that they preferred Snickers. When she stocked it with Snickers, the skinny bitches came by, gingerly took a single piece, and complained that she was ruining their diets. She loved that one.  Once, she put a single grapefruit into her candy dish. No one took the grapefruit, though even the skinny bitches complained about that betrayal. The skinny bitches were happiest when she replaced the bowl with a Costco bucket of red vines, but then Elsa continued her own chocolate habit out of her desk. Once, she filled the bowl with loose M&Ms and it emptied in a day and a half. Even when she talked to people about the peanut bowls at the bar being the dirtiest place in a tavern, people didn't blink or slow their consumption. When she put loose M&Ms into her dish, she always ate from her own bag in her ugly black purse.

To preserve her ritual, she never ate more than five M&Ms at a time. She also liked Dove candies, but she could never afford to put Dove candies into her bowl on a regular basis. She reserved them for Valentines and Halloween. Twice a year, she treated the office to Dove candies, though she frequently carried them in her ugly black purse.

If she had to sit through a meeting, she alternated peppermint lip gloss, hand cream, and rarely, when she was struggling to stay awake, a Mentos from deep in her ugly black purse. She could find them all by feel.

She got through her day by alternating making tea, eating a single chocolate before the next task whether it was payroll, collecting records for the tax firm, or writing out the books, and at the end of the day, restocking her candy dish.

No, Elsa knew that her dreams weren't likely to be found in that dingy gray office.

Thank you for listening, jb

 

What I Found on My Walk

Adding Chocolate to the Ritual, Part I

Elsa liked rituals. She liked going to Catholic mass, even though she wasn't Catholic. She regretted, sometimes, that she couldn't go to confession. She liked slowly opening the foil wrapper from a chocolate and using her tongue to take it into her mouth without ever having touched it with her fingers. Letting the chocolate melt slowly in her mouth was much better than that dry wafer they used in the communion ritual. Why couldn't Jesus's body be made of chocolate instead of a dry caked disk of 'bread?' What the priests placed on her tongue really didn't even resemble bread, when she thought about it. Yes, chocolate might make that ritual way more interesting. Chocolate and wine. The body of Christ. The blood of Christ.

Elsa wondered, if she were Catholic, if she'd be excommunicated for saying that. She wondered, if she were allowed to go to confession, if she would have to say six 'Hail Marys' before she was forgiven? What did it mean to be forgiven on a Saturday night and start over on Sunday morning? She wondered how that would feel. Her upbringing wasn't like that. Her mother was still reminding her of mistakes she'd made years ago, like the time she'd showed up at her mother's doorstep a little too drunk to drive. That night, she'd learned that her mother's doorstep wasn't a haven, even though the man she'd gone out with that night had plied her with drinks, then told her that she owed him since he'd bought it all for her. Since the guy had picked her up, her mom's had been the only place Elsa had thought to walk to from the bar. Her mom had mentioned that night so many times she'd lost count. Elsa never mentioned how that man had made her feel. That night taught Elsa to meet people at the restaurant or bar. That way, she could get herself home and she never had more than two drinks on a first date.

Lately, Elsa had been staying home more than she'd been going out. It was just easier that way. Saturday nights had become a ritual of renting a movie and eating nachos and pizza rolls, as if it were New Year's eve or the Super Bowl every Friday night. Elsa liked her Saturday nights.

Still, a little bit of chocolate on a Saturday night might be a good tradition. She wondered why she didn't add chocolate to her party.

Thank you for listening, jb

 

Taking Out the Garbage

It was a late Sunday night and Myra was about to go to bed when she realized that everyone had forgotten to take down the recyclables.  She hated going outside at night.  She blamed the movies.  The Blob, I Am Legend, A Cabin in the Woods.  She was afraid of the dark.  It was the human faces, usually, the ones that morphed into monsters, that made the hair on the back of her neck rise. It was the angry face suddenly appearing at the glass that made her heart jolt with adrenaline.

She knew the monsters weren't real, yet the metaphor was there.  People, more than anything else, could be monsters.  So, in the dark, she realized that it was human faces that she imagined flowing toward her in the darkness. She was okay in the porch light.  She managed by the garage, though that dark edge around whose corner she couldn't see was a problem if she stared at it for too long.  But the worst was by the road, beyond where her motion sensor light on her garage could reach.  That darkness was deep and only a moonlit night or an occasional car on the lonely road could provide relief.  It didn't help for her to bring a flashlight.  All that did was bob around and highlight her vulnerability, making her feel as though she were being watched.  For some reason, she felt safer without it.  That didn't mean that she felt safe. 

In a self-help book, Myra had read that, to fight phobia, she needed to 'feel the fear and do it anyway.' That was hard.  She'd done it with spiders.  She had become the one to capture a spider in a glass, to slide a piece of paper under it, and take it outside to be free.  She'd even pressed back against the fear to lean back out over the cliff the first and last time she ever went rappelling, that time her friends were going and insisted that she come along.  Once she was over that edge and bouncing along the cliff, it was actually fun. 

Her driveway at night was different.  It was a darker, deeper fear, as if the dark place beyond where the light could reach was another world, as if there lay the abyss in all it's dread and splendor.  Walking toward it, especially pushing a loud and awkward bin, was heart-rending.  She was too far away from her front door for retreat, too far from the safety of the garage or the car either.  She always clicked the garage door closed just before she reached her porch, imagining that she had just enough time to leap into the house if something came around from the dark. 

Something.

She stood at the bedroom door and told Chuck about the recyclables.  He was already in his pajamas. She hadn't undressed yet.  Justin had already been asleep for an hour. 

"So, should I wait until morning?" she asked.  Chuck just raised one eyebrow at her.  She hated when he was right. It was worse when he didn't even have to say a word to be right.

Feel the fear and do it anyway.  Did anyone own that sentence?  She felt as though they should. 

She slipped off her slippers and grabbed the crate they kept in the laundry room.  It was mostly full.  She slipped on her garden shoes and wished for the hundredth time that she had a dog. 

She had to put the bin down, turn, and wiggle the front door handle to make sure she wasn't locking herself out.  That would have been a nightmare, even with the key under a rock beside the house.  It was all a nightmare.

The air was balmy and damp.  The afternoon rain still smelled sweet and she thought she could smell blackberries.  She stood at the door, one hand on the knob, and took a deep breath.  Something could sneak into the house behind her after she moved away from it.  Another deep breath.  Breathing was another part of fear management, she remembered. It all looks easy in a book.  When you were busy with the phobia, scenarios played out almost faster than you could adjust to them.  Before she left the safety of the porch light, she clicked the garage door opener.  The light came on in the garage.  More safety, unless you thought about how it highlighted you.  Getting to the garage wasn't too hard.  Though true monsters wouldn't be slowed in the least by eight foot fences, having a fenced back yard helped.  Another reason for them to get a dog, she thought. 

She walked down the sidewalk, trying not to focus on the darkness at the corner of the house.  What lay beyond that edge? She walked to the corner of the garage and dumped the contents of the smaller bin into the larger one. Too much noise.  There were bottles and cans crashing about.  Would that draw even more attention to her? She stood in the garage for a bit, pretending to straighten up Chuck's work bench.  It was quiet but for the dripping from the trees.  She looked out into the darkness as the motion sensor turned off.  It took two steps from safety and some arm-waving to turn it back on. 

It was time. 

Just before she'd begun to move the recycle bin toward that dark place in the driveway, she heard a noise.  It was breathing.  She was sure of it.  She stopped, her heart flopping in her chest.  She struggled to breath silently.

It stopped.

She was almost ready to move again when she heard it again.  She couldn't bear to look away from that dark place by the road.  At any moment, the flow of near-human faces would begin, emerging from the dark and lit with rage from within. 

There it was again, almost like a rasping breath, then a groan.

This was not her abundant imagination.  Was there really a person out there?  Her own voice seemed out of reach. 

"Hello?"

The answering silence only made the adrenaline flow into her elbows and knees.  It was funny how you could feel just how far that chemical reaction had reached.

She stared, thought she saw a slight movement, and lost track of time trying to see it again.  Then, she heard the breathing, closer this time.  Myra didn't move.  She couldn't.  The only thing that was moving was her heart, which seemed to be beating itself senseless against her ribs.  The motion sensor went out again.  Nothing could induce her to move for a moment, not even the safety of the motion sensor light.  She was not 'feeling the fear and doing it anyway.'

She took a ragged breath.  It wasn't as good as a deep one, but better than nothing.  Another.  Still staring into the abyss.  Another breath.  Another. 

Then, she silently walked forward the two required steps and waved her arms for the motion sensor.  It came on.

She saw a face.

She screamed.

It growled.

She screamed again but realized, finally, that a black bear had just stood up in her driveway.  She realized that even it was surprised and afraid and she'd just blinded it with her light.  Before she could decide what to do, the bear turned and ran into the dark place by the road. 

She took a minute just to let her breathing come back to normal and just stood with both hands still on the handle of the full recycle bin.

She screamed again when she felt something touch her shoulder.

"Hey, you okay, Hon?" Chuck asked. She slapped his hand away and burst into tears.

"There was a bear," she said into his chest, "in the driveway."

Later, after Chuck had taken the bin down to the road and they'd both walked back into the house, Myra realized that the crate she'd used in the laundry room was still outside by the garage door.  'Feel the fear' or not, she was not going back outside to get that thing until daylight.

Thank you for listening, jb

Hooligans

I'm glad it wasn't the end of the world, but it is a new day for this blog.

I'm going in a new direction.  I hope you will go with me.



They had spent the day in their usual way, together.  Some things were work. Some things were play.  The kids went with them to walk the dogs and they'd tried to stop at the Red Robin to eat, but the crowds were too big in the streets and, Ryan had said, too unpredictable. 

"Why do people believe this drivel?" Sheila said as they drove their Subaru to the stop light at the Diary Queen. The windshield wipers went in and out of sync with the music on the radio. Ryan thought it was funny how they did that sometimes.

"Not everyone believes it," Ryan said.

"I'm hungry, Mommy.  Can we go through the drive through?" Missy asked.

"Not tonight, hon.  The drive through is closed," Ryan said, fiddling with the wiper frequency to let the rain blur the windshield for a minute. 

"It is not," Josh said.  He was sitting on the driver's side in the back and Ryan had hoped the window was too fogged up for him to see.  The line was wrapped around the building and people were honking.  Josh groaned, knowing that his dad would never wait through all that.  Even he wasn't sure he wanted to wait that long.

"We'll go home and cook up some corn dogs, Missy.  How does that sound?" Ryan said.

"Honey, can't we at least stop at the store for milk and vegetables?" Sheila asked.

"Nope. I've got a bead on this place and it isn't going to get any prettier in the next twenty-four hours."  He clicked the doors locked before the car crept forward to where the homeless man usually stood.  He had handed the man a dollar plenty of times before, but this time, Ryan could see that the man was yelling, shaking his sign, and there were other people standing at the corner, just standing there, despite the constant rain. Ryan had never seen the man yelling before and the crowd of people were totally new.

He just wanted to get his family home.  The light turned green again but the cars only creeped forward.  Where did all these people come from?  The dogs, both golden retrievers, paced in the back.  They'd had a walk, but for some reason, they'd stayed closer than usual and hadn't played with their normal flair.  There hadn't been many people at the dog park, but the ones that had been there weren't chatting the way they usually did.  If Ryan didn't know better, he'd have thought a thunder storm was coming.  He noted that the moon was full.  He didn't know why he'd looked, but he had checked on Starmap Lite and he knew the moon was full behind all of these clouds. 

The light turned red again.  It seemed as though the people on the sidewalks moved closer to the cars when they stopped moving. 

"What the heck are all these people doing out on a night like this?" Sheila said.

"They're hooligans, out to take advantage of all this end-of-the-world stuff." Ryan tried to sound confident, but he was keeping his eyes open. It was only 5:45 at night, but it was winter solstice and it felt much later.  He felt alert, the way he had when he'd gone into the city with his friends to hear live music. He noticed that some of the people on the sidewalk had bottles of wine or beer in their hands.

The light turned green again, but one of the men had leaned into the window of the front car and it wasn't moving.  A couple of people honked their horns. 

Suddenly, a couple of bottles flew out of the crowd and hit the second and third cars on their passenger sides.  A car to their left bolted across the yellow line and drove down the road on the wrong side to the intersection.  Oncoming cars swerved around him like water around a stone.  He reached the light and made a right across them all, honking as he went.  It was a BMW, Ryan noticed, as the car disappeared into the traffic.  At least in that direction, cars were moving a bit.

"Asshole," Ryan muttered.

"I heard that," Missy said. 

"Why don't you sing us a song, Sweetie?" Sheila said.  Ryan gave her the fish-eye when Missy began with 'and Bingo was his name-o,' a song she'd been singing incessantly for the past week.  At least it helped to drown out the sound of the crowd.  Sheila began to sing with her. 

Suddenly, a bottle hit their car and shattered into pieces.  Sheila let out a little scream.  People surged forward and pressed against the car and it rocked a little.  Their damn light was green again, yet not moving and now Ryan wished he'd had the balls to do what Asshole-in-the-BMW had done.  He put the car in reverse, just to be able to move it a little.  That worked with the crowd for a minute, but when he stopped, they went back to pushing.  Someone hit Missy's window with a big mag light and it cracked.

Ryan, helpless to do much else, moved forward in his spot again.  The big mag light popped against the window again and the glass shattered and fell out.  A couple of hands reached in and grabbed at Missy's shoulder.  Sheila got up quickly and tried to grab her little girl out of their reach.  Josh, thinking clearly, reached over and pushed the button to release her seat belt and Sheila, kneeling on the seat with her seat belt still attached grabbed Missy and tried to drag her into the front seat, but the dogs were suddenly in the way, the sweet golden retrievers that almost always followed the instructions to stay in the back of the wagon.  They had transformed into raging beasts and it took a minute before Ryan realized they were protecting Missy.  The hands retreated and Missy quickly crawled into her mom's arms in the front seat. The dogs stood on the seat, their rumps up against Josh, their noses just where the glass should have been.  The low growling wasn't loud, but a small space appeared next to the car.

Ryan's heart was racing.  He was boxed in on three sides with cars and on the fourth with people.  He put the car into reverse yet again and backed up until his bumper gently tapped the car behind him.  Then he turned the wheel as hard right as he could and revved the engine.  The car rocked up over the curb, scraping once one tire cleared, yet still moving deliberately forward. The crowd melted away except for one man in a black jacket.  He hit the grill, fell sideways, and slid down in front of the car. The car lurched up as if Ryan had gone over one end of a speed bump.  People screamed and rushed forward again.  Ryan was driving on the sidewalk now and still moving forward.  The crowd parted for him to pass.  He drove in the grass of the Bank America a bit to go to the right of the light post.  When he went off the curb on the other street, cars made way for him.  He realized, as he drove the car home, that he'd used his turn signal to get back onto the road.  What the hell was that?

Wind and rain coming into the broken window made the ride home distracting and miserable.  No one said a word.  Missy kept her head buried in her mom's shoulder.  Josh looked out of his foggy window, eyes wide.  Sheila looked straight ahead and held Missy in her arms.  And Ryan pressed his lips into a tight line as he drove, carefully again, all the way home. 

By the time he pulled into his driveway, he knew his life was never going to be the same again, even if the world didn't end tonight.

Thank you for listening, jb