Kelly Poe Wilson

I am a planner–obsessively so: I am the only person I know who gets laughed at by people in the travel industry because I make my reservations so very, very, early. In fact, we have one vacation in the works for next summer that I made the original reservations for in 2002 (to their credit, the folks at this particular travel firm did not laugh at me; their attitude was more along the lines of “sure, we’ll take your money–freak”).

My husband, however, is not a planner; in fact, if there was a word for someone who flat out refuses to plan for the future (besides, of course, Republican), I’m sure that he would have business cards printed up with his name followed by that very word on them. Sometimes I swear he’s just one dreadlock away from sitting in the park singing “Jah provide the bread”: in his universe, everything always “just works out”; there is no need to “get all worked up” about minor details like hotel reservations and driving directions printed off of Mapblast because, “hey, everything always turns out ok in the end, doesn’t it?” (Oh, sure: the fact that I am there clutching my three ring binder full of confirmation numbers has nothing to do with that at all.)

So it was with a certain amount of perverse satisfaction that I heard the details of a recent camping trip he took with our two children while I was out of town at a writer’s conference, especially the parts where the trip, amazingly enough (to him), did not quite “all work out”.

To me, camping trips involve planning to the nth degree: the food requirements alone can require more strategizing than Napoleon’s push into Russia; this is because, unlike my children, Napoleon’s soldiers were willing to eat something other than chicken strips and Yoplait Custard-Style Vanilla yogurt (generic imposters need not apply).

Then there is the clothing: hopefully, Napoleon’s soldiers had enough sense not to fall into the creek more than a half a dozen times each on their campaoign stops, and therefore could travel without first having their mother pack them no less than seven changes of clothing per night. My children, however, are not so gifted.

Knowing all this, it was not surprising to me that the first planning faux pas involved dinner: spaghetti. Now, for my kids noodles are usually a sure thing; on this night, however, they failed to satisfy: it seems that no one had planned on bringing any bowls. Or forks.

Next came the small matter of the tent. We have two tents: one is a small two man tent from our “pre-children” days, while the other is a tent approximately the size and weight of a circus tent. We usually take the latter, and fill it (see above: seven changes of clothing per night). On this trip, however, my husband decided to bring the two man tent, using the theorem that 1 adult + 2 children=2 adults. This theorem would probably work quite well if you were placing the 1 adult and 2 children into a bag and preparing “Shake-n-Bake”; as a method for determining how many people can fit into a tent, however–not so much.

Needless to say, between the non-dinner and the non-sleeping the camping trip ended early–about 14 hours early (they were back home before dark, having stopped at Burger King for dinner on the way). Hearing all this on my return, I couldn’t help but try and turn the whole thing into a “teachable moment”: expecting a long, drawn out tale of woe, I casually asked Clementine how her “camping trip” had gone. “It was great,” she replied. “We got to sleep in our own beds and Daddy took us to Burger King for dinner! You know,” she added thoughtfully, “Daddy’s right: everything does always work out in the end.”

My son, Clyde, loves being a boy. He loves to laugh at people whenever they fall down and hurt themselves (including himself), he loves eating the last slice of cold pizza while standing in front of the refrigerator, and he loves to watch TV in his underwear. But most of all, he loves being able to pee standing up.

He is almost five now, but to him the novelty and joy of this act never fails to amaze and delight him. “Come look!” he’ll command from the bathroom, and I’ll troop in just in time to see him standing in his evening bath, peeing into the cup we keep next the sink for rinsing. “I peed in the cup!” “Great, Clyde, um, thanks,” I’ll say, taking the warm cup from him and emptying it into the toilet. (What else could I say? After all, the whole cup thing is kind of my fault: I’m the one who–after watching him pee into his freshly drawn bath before stepping into it one night–pointed out to him at great length the inherent flaw in this system; the fact that he now pees in a cup instead of the bath shows me that at least he was listening. And besides, it’s not like I brush my teeth in that bathroom.)

He also enjoys peeing in tandem: if another male in the house is using the toilet, Clyde is always willing to sidle up next to them and have a go. (This, too, can only be seen as an improvement, since he also used to display this same enthusiasm with females as well.) And, of course, just like every male I have ever known (or driven, walked, or ridden by), Clyde loves to pee in the great outdoors.

In fact, he loves to do this so much that, like a sinner who has just found salvation, Clyde will “witness” this joy to others. (“Have you heard the good news? Peeing outside is great!”) He is willing to bring his message to just about anyone, but lately, the one he has been preaching to the most has been the little boy who lives down the street. (In this, too, I guess charity begins at home.) Of course, it wasn’t exactly a hard sell: no sooner had our two-year-old neighbor, Mision, seen the blissful expression on Clyde’s face as Clyde “watered the flowers” in the front yard then he was stripping off his diaper, eager to join in the fun. Unfortunately for all concerned, Clyde was just as eager to teach him, because that is where things started to get tricky.

There are all kinds of teachers: some believe in learning by rote while others in teaching by example; Clyde, unfortunately, is neither of those. Clyde believes in taking the “hands-on” approach, and, reaching over to Mision, that’s exactly what he did.

As you can well imagine, this led to a certain amount of awkwardness between Mision’s mother and myself, the sort of awkwardness that, had we too been male, could only have been covered up by some serious sports talk. In this case, however, I covered it up by shouting out words that I never thought I would hear coming out of my mouth.

Although by the time Clyde was born I already knew that there would be times when I would have to betray my inner thirteen-year-old by saying the kinds of things I had sworn never to say–things like: “Because I said so”; “Just one bite”; and “No, we can’t order pizza for dinner again”; never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I would one day be shouting out the words: “Everybody keep their own hands on their own penises!”

Of course, I also never thought I would have to pay such close attention to the glass I used when I brushed my teeth, either.

There was an article in the newspaper recently lamenting the fact that, by the time most felonious parents are released from prison, they will be facing an almost insurmountable technology gap: unlike their children, most of these ex-cons will have no idea how to use an iPod, a Blackberry, or even a cell phone, which will necessarily make reestablishing any sort of respectful relationship with their children difficult at best.

To me, this was quite disturbing: if being able to operate an iPod, Blackberry, or cell phone is what it takes to gain my children’s respect then I might as well just start running red lights and writing hot checks now, because I’m hopeless. Forget even iPods and Blackberries: the last time I tried to use a friend’s cell phone I ended up handing the whole thing back in disgust, saying, “Never mind: I guess I didn’t really need to find out about those lab results today after all.”

It’s especially embarrassing because I don’t even have ten year’s incarceration as an excuse (unless you count nearly ten years of motherhood, which sometimes I do: sometimes, in fact, I consider it to be time served of the hardest sort). On the contrary, in the world of technological ignorance motherhood is clearly no excuse: there’s plenty of soccer moms out there who can dial a cell phone, record little Alexis’s playdate with Cheyanne in their Blackberry and listen to the latest Rush Limbaugh podcast all at the same time (and, who, frequently it seems, do so while attempting to merge their Cadillac Valdez in front of my cowering Suburu). So what is my excuse? While there are, as always, many deep-seated and piercing psychological issues that could easily be blamed for my technophobia, by far the most compelling one is this: I’m terribly, terribly cheap.

That’s it. Even though I’d like to claim some kind of forward-thinking, back-to-the-Earth, live-simply-so-that-others-may-simply-live philosophy behind my Luddite ways, the hard truth is that I’m just plain cheap. My house is free of cable TV not because “my children shall never be sullied by crass commercialism”, but because I can’t bear the thought of parting with hard earned money just to watch TV. It’s the same reason that I refuse to buy video and computer games: although I’d like to be able to say it’s because they’re too violent; it’s really the violence they will do to my wallet that has me afraid.

The odd thing is, my own childhood was exactly the opposite: growing up, my stepfather would always run out and buy the latest gadget, no matter how expensive or untested it was: we were the first ones on the block with a “microwave oven” (it had two features: “on” and “not on”); the first ones to have a “car phone” (it came with its own suitcase); and, naturally, the first ones to have a VCR (Beta, of course).

Who knows, though? Maybe it was living with all of those crappy, first run electronics that put the fear of purchasing into me in the first place: it’s true that every time I think about buying them my inner child starts in–“What? Don’t you remember trying to rent a movie in the “Beta” section of the video store when all they had left was Smokey and the Bandit IV, Ode to Billy Joe and Arthur Returns?”–until once again I’m unable to complete the major purchase of a piece of technology.

If you look at it that way, it’s almost as if I’m doing my kids a favor by not exposing them to the fabulous world of modern electronics at a young age; at least now they won’t have to experience shoppus interruptus like I do every time I go to buy a new stereo. Plus, they won’t feel so left out the next time they’re in jail.

Summer is almost here: I can tell by the way I can open the gas bill without first having to pour myself a drink; by the way Clyde’s foot injuries start bleeding immediately (as opposed to twenty minutes after his foot finally thaws out–our little Jethro don’t much cotton to shoes); and, of course, by the way the water glasses start sprouting from every moderately flat surface in our house like mushrooms.

Remember that scene in Signs, the Mel Gibson movie about alien invaders, where the little girl has left half-drunk glasses of water all over the house? And how it just so happens that the aliens hate water, allowing Joaquin Phoenix to get the upper hand on the evil, creepy alien guy by smashing all of the water glasses right next to Mr. Creepy Alien? And how, in the end, old Mel is actually glad his daughter had this weird water fetish, because it ended up being one of the things that helped them survive? Yeah, well, good for Mel Gibson and all that, but if creepy aliens ever invaded my house they might as well start picking out their new colors, because, when it comes to the drinking glass diaspora, I don’t have even a tenth of Mel’s patience.

It must be hereditary: as I recall, growing up in Phoenix I was never allowed to hold an actual drinking glass in my hands until I was a teenager; before that it was Dixie cups kept in a special dispenser by the kitchen sink. Given the heat of the Phoenix summers, you would think that Dixie cups would’ve been the perfect solution to the problem of vast packs of thirsty children roaming the neighborhood. And you would’ve been right–if it hadn’t been that Phoenix was so hot; and Dixie cups so small that trying to get enough water in the middle of a pack of thirsty, jostling kids was like trying to put out a forest fire with a water pistol.

Speaking of water pistols: as I remember, the worst side effect of having a scrum of children and Dixie cups gathered ‘round the kitchen sink was that “super-soaked” was how everybody ended up, along with the floor, the wall, and anything else in a twelve foot arc around the faucet. That’s one of the reasons why, when my children got old enough to get their own water I forewent the Dixie cup route entirely and instead went traditional (traditional hillbilly, that is), and started my own personal jelly jar drinking glass collection. It took a little time, but by virtue of hard work, perseverance, and some serious PB&J consumption, by the time my kids could finally reach the kitchen sink we had enough drinking “glasses” for everyone in the entire neighborhood; unfortunately, this meant that the first sign of hot weather left my house looking like it had been made over into Early American Marmalade.

They were everywhere: in clusters around the couch, on every square inch of night stand, and lined up on window sills like beer bottles in a freshman dorm. The worst part was that not one of them was ever empty; in fact, most of them had so little water missing that it was hard to tell the difference between a glass that has been drunk from and one that had simply succumbed to the natural processes of evaporation.

Because of our current drought situation, I am hesitant to pour any of the water out; however, my first two solutions–drinking the water myself and pouring it on the houseplants–ended up with me confined to the bathroom and the plants turning yellow and dying (come to think of it, that’s how I felt, too). Once again, maybe my mother was right after all; maybe Dixie cups are the way to go. It’s either that, or pray for an alien invasion.

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Way back in my college days, one of my room-mates brought home a bagel from Safeway. It was marked as “day-old”, but unless the person in charge of marking things down counted days the same way some fundamentalists do when they assert that the Earth was created in seven days (with each day corresponding nicely to modern geological time periods of hundreds of millions of years), this bagel hadn’t been “day-old” since time was measured by sundials.

The first clue as to this bagel’s geriatric state came when we tried to cut it in half and it shot out from under the knife and made a dent in the drywall. The next came when someone tried to take a bite out of it and nearly lost a tooth. (We were college students, not college graduates.) At this point the bagel ceased to interest me as a food item, but did interest me immensely as a piece of art; kind of a “non-functioning functional” piece of performance art, one that, despite the promise shown by its first graceful flight across the room, didn’t really perform.

No matter: so enchanted was I with my miraculous new find that I painted it with glow in the dark poster paint and mounted it on permanent display in our living room (ok, so I used the convenient hole in its middle to hang it on a pre-existing nail in the wall). There it remained for over a year, until the time came for me to move; of course I packed up the Sacred Glow Bagel (or, SGB, as it had come to be known) and took it with me to my next house. And the next. Eventually I got to the point where the SGB was the first item I moved into a new abode, the same way Christians will first move their crucifix, or Jews their mezuzah. (Admittedly I didn’t actually worship the Sacred Glow Bagel; but I did think that it was a pretty good joke, which, for me, is as close as anything ever gets to religion.)

Fast forward twenty years or so. The Sacred Glow Bagel, like so many other precious and irreplaceable items, is now lost to history, (along with some other not-so-precious and easily replaceable items, like all three of my copies of Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty), and yet, somehow, the spirit of the SGB lives on. Unfortunately, where it lives on is in my children.

I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but somehow my children managed to inherit my ability to hold on to perishable items long after they should have perished, but not my ability to see these items as the kitschy works of folk art that they are–to them, they are just another legitimate building block in the healthy food pyramid.

Even for a housekeeper like myself, who is relaxed to the point of slovenliness, there is just something about watching your son come strolling out of his room eating a piece of pizza when you know for a fact that you haven’t had pizza in over two weeks. Or watching your daughter pull a fuzzy Christmas cookie out her pocket and eat it. In June. I’d say that it was like watching squirrels put away acorns for the winter, except for the fact that the squirrels’ actions fill an ecological niche: what niche can possibly be filled by secreting Easter Peeps in your sock drawer until November? (And don’t say it’s for the ants–even an ant has more sense than to eat something that has been in close contact with one of my children’s socks.)

If this keeps up I fully expect to come down to breakfast one day and find my children gnawing, rat-like, on the newly rediscovered SGB. Actually, that’s probably the best case scenario; I’ll probably wake up to find them listening to Jackson Browne.

In a typical week, I get a lot of suggestions about ideas for my column; usually these suggestions are somewhat along the lines of: “you should really write about how the government is trying to poison us with contrails” or “why don’t you ever say anything nice about George Bush?” My usual response is either: a) a knowing smile and the words, “Yes, I see your point,” (thanks, Way), or, if the person seems relatively coherent; b) “And this would relate to the subject of my children, how?” Recently, however, I got a suggestion that I could actually use: a friend of mine whose children’s sled had been stolen from them at the sledding run just the day before suggested that perhaps I should write a column about “The terrible type of person that would actually STEAL a child’s sled.”

Finally, I thought, something I could use, especially since I, too, had been sledding with my children just the day before. (No, I wasn’t the terrible person in question). In fact, it was that very sledding experience that prompted my response to her tale of sled-less woe: a very Napoleon Dynamite-ish : “Lucky.” Needless to say, this wasn’t terribly well received.

Despite its reception, however, I still stand by my reaction: after all, how much luckier could you get than having your sled stolen while still at the sledding run? No more sled means that–through no fault of your own, through no exercising of the “meanest Mommy in the whole wide world” prerogative–sledding is now over for the day Even children can comprehend that when the sled is gone, so is any chance for more sledding that day. (This is what is known, in my book, as a win/win/win situation, meaning that everything turned out the best for me, myself, and I.)

This same thing cannot be said for some of the other ways for sledding to end prematurely, like frozen fingers, high-speed collisions and icy face plants. In fact, a quick examination of even the simplified version of the North American Trauma Scale (where x=severity of trauma and y=the length of the ensuing crying jag) will clearly show how it is truly in everyone’s best interest if the sledding expedition ends by theft rather than injury.

Of course, if you’re the only one at the sledding run, or if everyone else at the run just hopped off some kind of church bus, then theft isn’t really an option, and injury is your only hope for going home in a reasonable amount of time. In that case I always recommend picking the slope with the greatest number of beer cans at the top: the cheaper the beer, the better. (The rationale here is that, in much the same way that PJ O’Rourke suggests that the volume and quality of roadside crosses is the best way to judge how dangerous an upcoming curve is on a Third World byway, it is also possible to use the volume and quality of beer cans at the top of a sledding run to best determine how foolish one needs to be to attempt the upcoming hill. Therefore, a slope with a few empty Guinnesses at the top would probably qualify as a bunny hill, while one with its own small mountain of Busch cans is clearly a Black Diamond run.)

Now, I’m sure that there are some people out there (probably from Phoenix) who would wonder why anyone would choose to end an idyllic day’s sledding early. These are probably the same people who picture their family standing cosily at the top of the sledding hill, sipping hot chocolate from an engraved thermos and wearing matching LL Bean snow outfits. For the rest of us, though–the ones that know that the scene at the sledding hill is more reminiscent of Shackleton’s “Endurance” polar expedition (minus the stiff British upper lips) than a Norelco Xmas commercial–know that the surest way to ensure an enjoyable snowy day with our children is to put a thick (and preferably insulated) piece of glass between us. At least, it is until they get old enough to drag their own sleds back up the hill–or buy their own Busch beer, whichever comes first.

Except for the wind, I have always looked forward to spring in Flagstaff: the daffodils, the Tevas, the impromptu tea-turning-into-cocktail parties in the back yard. As my children have gotten older, however, and as their extracurricular activities have diversified and increased, spring has become for me not so much the season of renewal as the season of “re-shoe-al”; it seems that every year we end up buying an Imelda-sized load of shoes just to see us through all of our new activities. There are the soccer shoes. The riding boots. The water socks. Shoes for school and shoes for the creek. Shoes for the recital and shoes for hiking. And, as sure as every new box of shoes contains a delicious looking little package labeled “Do Not Eat” (which someone will immediately try to eat), the advent of all these new shoes brings the true harbinger of spring himself: the shoe thief.

The shoe thief is that nefarious ne’er-do-well who sneaks into honest folks’ homes at night and steals their children’s shoes; you’ll know when he has ventured into your neighborhood because that’s when your children’s shoes will begin to disappear. And when I say disappear, I mean that in the most literal sense; it’s as if, during some point in the night, their shoes were sprinkled with some kind of magic powder that causes them to instantly vanish from sight–a child’s sight, that is.

That is the worst aspect of the shoe thief: not only does he manage to steal your children shoes from right under their noses (there’s a visual for you), he also manages to always steal them in the five minutes immediately preceding whatever activity those shoes were needed for; sometimes even in those few seconds it takes for you to say “Hurry up, everybody; we’re late.” What’s even worse is that, in the midst all this confusion generated by the various accusations and indignant denials, the shoe thief will then put those same shoes back as if nothing had ever happened; in fact, nine times out of ten he will put them back in the very place your children have already looked, including: pushed under the bed, dangling off of the swing set and on the neighbor’s porch. Yes, they looked there, and no, they’re sure they weren’t there before. Why? Because they looked there; they looked everywhere. Just now. During the commercial. Not that commercial, the other one. Yes. Everywhere.

When you think about it, that’s really quite impressive: everywhere is a lot of ground to cover, especially during a thirty second commercial break. But, then again, who am I to be so suspicious and doubtful? For all I know they are using some sort of super secret astral travel device that allows them to search other dimensions and universes in the blink of an eye. Still, even with the benefit of astral travel it would be quite impressive for them to manage a search of absolutely everywhere in the aforementioned thirty seconds, especially since, from my perspective, it appears as if they are really only searching three places: the TV screen; the air directly between their eyeballs and the TV screen; and perhaps (although I’m not sure) a spot somewhere just behind the TV screen.

The funny thing about everywhere is that it somehow never manages to contain the one spot where the item is actually located, like the bathroom floor. This is true for every item that my children have ever looked everywhere for; in fact, there are so many different items that seem to fall outside the purview of everywhere (homework, violins, glasses, other people’s car keys) that I’d be a little surprised if anything at all ever was found anywhere in everywhere. Although, to be fair I must point out that perhaps everywhere is already so full up with items missing from other peoples’ searches of everywhere (like Osama bin Laden, O.J’s “real killers” and G.W.’s WMDs) that, conceivably, not one thing more will fit in there, least of all an enormous pile of my children’s stolen shoes.

I live in a house with two males: one tall, one short. This means that I spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning pee off of the toilet. “Pee up high, pee down low. Pee on the rim, pee in the bowl.” (Dr Seuss: The Lost Years). Doing all of this pee-wiping gives me time to think; unfortunately, what I usually end up thinking about is how much I hate wiping up pee, and whether or not doing so is actually the worst job in the entire world. During my most recent clean-up, I had almost decided that, yes, it was (how do they get it behind the toilet?), when suddenly I remembered something that happened last Fall, and I realized, happily, that cleaning up pee isn’t the worst job in the world–working at Peter Piper Pizza is. Or rather–working at any Peter Piper Pizza near my kids, is.

I don’t know how I could have forgotten this fact, especially since the last time we went to Peter Piper Pizza was such a memorable experience that I am surprised even my inverted “cleaning pee off of the back underside of the toilet” position (known in yoga as “Downward Facing Mom”) would allow it to slip my mind for one single minute.

Somehow, it seems, it came to pass that, through the unhappy confluence of a prearranged sleepover and an unexpected accident, I ended up being the sole “responsible” adult in charge of five children at Peter Piper Pizza. (I know: those of you with five or more children of your own will scoff at this, but remember that you have the advantage of having had your children one by one; like the Athenian youth who practiced lifting a growing calf each day until, eventually, he could heft a full-size ox, you have trained for this event. I, on the other hand, with my measly two children, have not; hence, for me this was the equivalent of having a full grown bull dropped into my waiting arms.)

To compensate for the fact that my charges had me totally outnumbered I resorted to a trick that every parent is aware of, but no child-rearing book ever mentions: bribery. First it was the pizza, and then, when that no longer entertained them (about thirty seconds after the pizza arrived), it was cold hard cash: every time the natives started to get a little restless I would pull another twenty out of my purse and buy yet another round of game tokens. In no time at all this largesse on my part–coupled with the fact that, in exasperation at their pitifully low Skeeball scores I finally got up and showed them how to cheat (what are they teaching our kids in school these days, anyway?)–meant that by the end of the evening there was a pile of tickets on the table taller than Kip’s nachos. Which meant that before we could leave we would have to redeem these tickets for prizes. Which is where the Worst Job in the World comes in.

My only hope for a karmically decent future life lies in my firm belief that the girl behind the prize booth counter at Peter Piper Pizza had just come back from an extended “smoke” break in the back of a VW bus; otherwise, I am sure that the hell this group of children put her through will condemn me to being reincarnated as Paris Hilton’s purse dog. Here’s how it went:

PPP Girl: “You have 761 tickets.”

Children: (45 second group consultation) “We’ll have a piece of bubblegum.”

PPP Girl: “You have 759 tickets.”

Children: (another 45 second committee meeting) “We’ll have another piece of gum.”

PPP Girl: “You have 757 tickets.”

And so on. For twenty-five freakin’ minutes. At first I found myself wishing that I’d brought a book to read, but towards the end I was wishing I had instead brought pencil and paper–by the time they had picked out thirty pieces of bubblegum, 9 sugar straws, 3 Styrofoam gliders, 1 candy watch and 5 pieces of plastic “bling” I could have written my own book. Maybe even a book on something useful, like, perhaps: how to fix a busted Skeeball machine.

There was an article recently in one of those fluffy “magazine” inserts they put into the Sunday paper that was bemoaning the terrible increase of “clutter” in our lives; according to this article, the clutter we surround ourselves with mirrors the obesity of our bodies: both are just examples of “too much in, not enough out”.While I’m not entirely sold on the analogy (at least when your judgement fails you in Target you can always go back the next day and return the karaoke machine; donuts, however, are like special occasion dresses: once you walk out of the store with them, they are yours–and your hips’–for life), there was one part of the article that really did resonate with me: the part where clutter and “clutterers” were rated numerically according to their severity (kind of like hurricanes).

According to this scale, Level One clutter would be something like a newspaper on the bathroom floor, whereas Level Five clutter would be when you have to start using the backyard as a bathroom because of all the newspapers blocking the way to the toilet. Clutterers themselves were rated in much the same way; unlike clutter, however, their ratings were somewhat fluid: a person could easily start life as a Level One clutterer and then, without warning, swiftly make the transition to Level Five.

As the mother of a child who owns wall to wall collections of “collections” (scraps of paper, shorn Barbie doll hair and other people’s socks, just to name a few), this did not come as good news.

My daughter, Clementine, has always been a clutterer: she was practically born a Level Three (I’m surprised she didn’t try and keep the placenta), and has done nothing but deteriorate since then; in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she was most of the way towards the dreaded Level Five already.

I used to say that it was like living with Howard Hughes, and joke that someday we would go into her room and find shelves covered with urine-filled jars and toenail clippings, but lately I’ve realized that this was simply wishful thinking on my part: Clementine has never voluntarily put anything up on a shelf in her life.

Not that she hasn’t had plenty of opportunity; she has an abundance of shelves–all empty, all the time. She also has plenty of clear plastic storage boxes. I bought these for her thinking that perhaps the real problem was a lack of organizational space, and not a complete and utter lack of concern over floors that go “crunch” when you walk on them. Needless to say, on this, too, I was wrong.

Unlike the shelves, though, at least her boxes sometimes actually get used; unfortunately, this use usually occurs during those times when I insist (read: scream, threaten, cajole, beg and demand) that she “clean up her room”. I say “unfortunately” because Clementine approaches these boxes the same way New York City approaches its landfills: fill ‘em up and move on to the next one. The first few times she did this the subterfuge actually worked: glancing around the apparently newly “cleaned” room I somehow failed to notice that the boxes contained, not “Legos”; “puzzles”; “Barbie clothes” and “art supplies” as their labels indicated, but rather exactly one shovelful each off of the floor. This meant that a box opened at random was just as likely to carry: one (dirty) pair of underwear; three extremely urgent notes from her teacher (dated last month); two stuffed animals and one half-eaten apple as it was to carry any of the items carefully listed on its front. In fact, with Clementine’s method, it seemed to become even less likely that the item mentioned on the outside of the box would actually be found on the inside of it, sort of like a grade school (and PETA friendly) rebuttal of Shrodinger’s cat.

Which reminds me: speaking of quantum physics (I was), some people will try and tell you that chaos like Clementine’s merely indicate intense inner activity. Einstein, they will assert, never worried about keeping a clean desk. This may be true, but I’m almost positive that Einstein’s desk never went “crunch” when he sat at it.

A few Sundays ago, our ten-year-old TV set finally breathed its last. Of course, this wasn’t just any Sunday: it was Superbowl Sunday, which perhaps explains both my husband’s distress and the corresponding lack of my own. (Although, in my defense, I must say that I doubt any reaction on my part short of an animated re-enactment of Edvard Muench’s The Scream would have been deemed acceptable). Trying my best to be sympathetic, I commiserated briefly, remarking how it was a shame that we didn’t have enough money this month to buy a new one; my husband reacted to this news exactly the same way I would expect him to react to the news that we could no longer afford to pay our oxygen bill: his eyes popped so far out, and his breathing became so strained that I briefly wondered if perhaps this was to be the time when I would finally get to witness “apoplexy”: for all the times I have read about someone’s reaction being “apoplectic” (I read a lot of Jane Austen), I have never actually seen apoplexy occur in real life. Until now.

I did almost see it once, when I was a child; perhaps not uncoincidentally, this brush with apoplexy also occurred after the untimely demise of our TV on a Superbowl Sunday. Apoplexy was neatly avoided that time, however, by the timely intervention of my mother, and her willingness to play along much more believably than I about the relevant depth of tragedy involved in the death of a beloved TV: after my stepfather frantically called her at work and told her to “pick up a TV on the way home”, she, with no snide comments whatsoever, did exactly that. It showed remarkable restraint on her part, I’m sure, but, unfortunately, forestalled my first true witnessing of apoplexy. (As a side note I should add that even though my stepfather did not actually become apoplectic at the loss of his TV on Superbowl Sunday, neither did he fully accept it: the non-functioning TV remained in the living room for several years after the arrival of the new one. In fact, they sat side by side, as if perhaps there was a chance that the new set could somehow teach the old one how not to be dead.)

Unfortunately for my husband, however, I am not my mother, and this time no “after-work-TVs” would be forthcoming. In the first place, I don’t even know where you are supposed to go to buy a TV: the one that so recently expired had been given to us as a wedding present, and any TV I had ever been in contact with before that had always seemed attached to someone else–room-mates and boyfriends being the best sources for TVs that I knew. The second reason I wasn’t going to be “picking up a TV on my way home” was that, to tell you the truth, I was actually glad the TV had died: at the time of its death we really hadn’t been on friendly terms for several years or more.

I’m not quite sure how we drifted apart. It seems like one minute I was in junior high, impatiently waiting for “The Love Boat” and “The A-Team” to come on, and the next I was the mother of a two-year-old slowly being tortured to death by “Barney”, or worse yet the mother of a nine-year-old who wants to watch “Skating with the Stars” and “Ugly Duckling”. Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that I think “Real People” and “That’s Incredible!” were any less schlockingly dreadful than the reality shows that are on today, it just seems to me that at least shows like “Real People” involved a whole lot less crying.

Not that there was any shortage of crying people at my house with the TV gone–my husband alone was doing a pretty good imitation of an “American Idol” results show, and Clementine was all set to channel “America’s Next Top Model” when, as luck would have it, the guy down the street decided it was time to wrap up his yard sale and price all his remaining TVs at $5.

And so, just like that the Superbowl was watched and the advertisers of another round of “Dancing with the C-Listers” could be assured of yet another year of Clementine’s brand loyalty. Everyone, it seems, was a winner, except for me. It was almost enough to make me experience apoplexy.