Woody & My IBF

I will not eat
I will not pray
I will not love
I will not Tuscan Sun

I will find fried chicken
I will go to Graceland
I will sleep in a flop house
I will eat crawfish

I will go on a road trip, just me and my imaginary boyfriend.

The bumper stickers, decals and magnets on a woman's car says an awful lot about her, embracing the minivan.  My Child Is An Honor Student. Outlines of lacrosse players. Black and white ovals denoting locations which the driver thinks will look suitably impressive.  Those full-color car wraps about Mary's Florist or Edible Bouquets. Pink ribbons for breast cancer support. I (heart) something. Soccer Mom. Yellow triangle Baby On Board.

Men typically have in-your-face decals, like Calvin pissing on something, flames, fire department logos, My Other Car is a (fill in the blank). Lost Your Cat?, Try Looking Under My Tires. NRA. I'd Rather Be Hunting (very popular around here).

The decals, if any, that I put on my woody will also say something about me. I'm not sure I can put anything on the car in case removal will peel up the varnish.  I obviously can't use magnets.  When we started our business, we bought magnets for the sides of our cars, hoping to simultaneously drum up business and prove to the IRS that the vehicle was actually used for business.  I couldn't figure out what was wrong with them, the magnets that is.  They just plain didn't stick.  Um, my Saturn had a plastic body.

So. What do I put on the side of the wagon? In 1941, those slide off stickers of states were regularly accumulated on the windows.  I think I'll do that, if I can find any.

In any case, there remains the opportunity to do my own thing. Here are some choices:

Running Away From Home
www.woodyescape@blogspot.com
Wherever I Want To Go
Talk To Me
Amy (in script below the driver's side window)

My imaginary boyfriend thinks they all suck.

I was in the post office today, picking up a package from Norma, when the man ahead of me in line was mailing a bag of charcoal. Huh? I caught a bit of the conversation which went something like this:

You know how it is in the mountains.  There's some firewood, and I asked him what he uses to start the fires.  He said that he scavenges whatever he can get, some scraps of pressure-treated wood and so on.  Well, I don't want him breathing that stuff, particularly when it's burning. I told him I couldn't send the liquid, but I would send him a bag of charcoal. Don't worry, he said, they'll light it with diesel fuel.

Then it dawned on me.  The mountains were in a war zone.  I asked him if his son (I assumed) was in Iraq or Afghanistan. Afghanistan, he said.  As he turned to leave I told him to thank him for his service.  I will, the man said. My son always says that to military men (and women), and shakes their hands. His father is a Navy SEAL.

After the man left, Norma said to me that his other son was killed in Afghanistan.  And they sent this son to the exact same place.

Ya ever met one of these?

Now you know why I'm heading South.  There is apparently absolutely no way to get rid of these. They are disgusting.  Because the emit the lovely stink when disturbed, you can't smack them.  You have to pick them off one at a time with toilet paper and flush them. I tried vacuuming them, along with the Asian lady beetles (don't let them fool you, they're not our kind, dear).  They make the vacuum cleaner smell funky. Forever.

Stink bugs come into the house in the fall to hibernate.  They don't eat anything and they don't reproduce.  The problem is they fly.  They fly really loudly, believe it or not.  And it's always a possibility that they'll drop down in your hair.  It happened to me once.

Because of the weather this summer, two generations hatched. They tell you to close the cracks in your house so they won't get in. Well try that in an old house whose floors shrink and swell according to the humidity.  Anyhow, I had to do something, so I called Orkin.  They sprayed, but even the experts said it probably wouldn't work.  It made me feel better, though. Never mind they took all my big mouse traps and put in those sticky traps that make rodents laugh and catch only flies and spiders, the latter of which are good, as you know.

Then I had the great discovery. Flying Insect spray does not work, but Ant and Roach killer does! Never mind that you still have to pick up the bodies with toilet paper (they still smell, even when dead). I could control them! My windows became hazy with bug spray, but hey, no flying dinosaurs.

I was informed that the onslaught ends with freezing temperatures. It does. However, if you have a wood-burning fireplace, you have firewood.  And guess where stink bugs go when they can't hibernate in your house?

Thus, our plan to flee. Okay, one of the reasons we're running away from home.

I just learned that Midge, that tramp, actually had children with Allan.  Hmmm, Ken's friend Brad was much cuter.

The 7th passed.  The 10th passed.  On the 11th, I had to track Brad down.  His makers apologized and said they thought I didn't know when I was leaving. True. But Brad, oh Brad. How could you do this to me? I am in desperate need of my imaginary boyfriend.

BTW, Brad is named after Midge's impeccable boyfriend. Like my Brad, her Brad had no package as far as we could tell as girls. It makes it less complicated, and excuses vibrator obsession (Charlotte?).

This is us:

Yes, they exist. While undertaking various tasks, I had the Pennsylvania Farm Show on the television.  All day. One can learn how a pig suckles,waiting expectantly for the time between udder massage and milk let down. Children compete on knowledge of poultry (why is it important that we look at the vent, anyone?).

An event that takes all day is call the Sheep to Shawl competition. The teams literally sheer sheep, card and spin the wool, and then weave a shawl, in one day. The shawls are quite beautiful and brought up to $2200 at the ensuing auction. The Lamb and Wool Princess, dressed in jeans and a sash, distributed the prizes.  The junior division starts with the wool (they don't have to sheer the sheep), but go through the same thing.  There is a prize much like Miss Congeniality for teams. Teenage boys seem to be the spinners.  The teams have very colorful names, like Four Lambs and a Ram, and Surfing Ewe S.A. The last names ranged from Goodpastur to Schmittle.

Then a visit to the Woodmobile. Each panel was described in minute detail. Here is the "don't move the firewood" exhibit. Apparently, moving firewood carries insects that are not beneficial, including the Emerald Ash Borer. There is another panel which the guide describes as why trees are good for ecology.

I missed the apple pie competition and "Discover What Dogs Can Do," although the photos on the website are quite impressive. There were also goat displays and a "Hershey Bars, Cookies and Brownies" competition. I also missed Pineapple Upside Down Cakes, which is a shame because I love pineapple upside down cake.  Oh, and look!  It's Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog that decides if we will have extra weeks of winter. If I had attended, I would have had the opportunity to consume the Famous Farm Show Baked Potatoes in the food court. Methinks there are also corndogs.

And of course, there are the tractor square dances. You gotta watch this.  It's worth the full five minutes.

Are for Gypsies and whores.  Or so my father said.  I still don't have pierced ears.

If you were alive in the 70's, you know Herbal Essences shampoo. The commercials showed a teenage girl with long, straight hair parted in the middle.  The ad exhorted to tell someone about the shampoo's impressive performance, and they will tell someone, and so on and so on.  The girl fractured into two, then four, than sixteen little long-haired girls. The shampoo smelled green and a bit like patchouli. When I was fourteen, it made me feel very groovy, like velvet posters that glowed in ultraviolet light.  You know they still have Spencer Gifts?

My younger sister used Herbal Essences too, getting another jump on me in the personal hygiene Olympics. She got to shave her legs first, too.  It sucked.  Come to think of it, my blue-haired, leather-clad little sister took me to my first bar.  She married the cute lead singer in the cover band, of course before I got married.

When I was a child, my mother used Prell shampoo.  It was green and viscous, and came in a sort of funky shaped bottle of which I am at a loss to describe.  My bestie reminded me that Prell was so thick that the commercial showed a pearl floating ever so slowly.  One day, they had a pearl in their shampoo and were convinced it was real.  I was struck by how clearly every one of us remembered the shampoo mom used.  I thought it was a girl thing, but every man I talked to knew as well. Boy, Prell should never have gone out of business.



While Prell was contemporary, the Breck girls were classic. Grace Kelly.  Brooke Shields (!!!).  One after another, they looked over their shoulders from the back of McCalls and Good Housekeeping. McCalls had paper dolls too, that you could cut out and pinch on the dresses of the current holiday with paper tabs on the shoulders and waist.  Hats came with slits to pop the little heads through. My mother never played with us, so my paper dolls stayed on the page, with no oaktag reinforcement to make them stand.  As I got to elementary school, I was certain that if I used Breck shampoo, the honey-colored elixir, I would be pretty too.  Maybe mom would play paper dolls with me. I combed and combed and combed my hair, but to my eyes I was still the below average girl.

When I went away to college, we started using "conditioner." Before that, the only product we used besides shampoo was the VO5 in the tube that smelled a lot like Vaseline.  It probably was Vaseline.  My grandmother used it. The whole idea of cream (or creme) rinse was very sophisticated. You had to go to a department store like Bonwitt Teller to buy Pantene.  It was like having a Cartier watch. Pantene conditioner smelled like a cross between Crisco and butter, and looked like it too.  The bottle had a gold cap, proving it was worth the five dollars a bottle.

My mother rolled her hair on pink foam curlers, the same way she did since the 1940's. Her hair came out with a wave over the eye and she pinned it back near her ear with two criss-crossed bobby pins. She wore those pink curlers to bed every night for the the thirty-three years I knew her, and I'm sure many years before that. I wonder what my father thought of that.  I tried it once.  It hurt like hell.

My mother never had her hair "done," although my Aunt Mary Alice had a portable hair dryer with the huge vinyl shower-cap type thing into which the hose fitted.  You could carry the thing with a plastic strap over your shoulder, although the extension cord had to be really long for the portability to really matter. The hose looked like a vacuum cleaner hose, and I can still smell that vinyl.  When I run into a real shower cap, not one of those saran wrap ones you get in hotels, I remember the hair dryer.

Aunt Mary Alice and all the other stylish ladies used Acquanet.  Acquanet would hold any hairdo (we had hairdos, not hair styles) through a hurricane.  Later, when we had ballet recitals or school performances, we used lots and lots of hairspray. We also used Noxema to get our makeup off, a very adult thing to do.

And now there are aisles and aisles and aisles of hair "product." I wonder what my mother would have thought.

I'm not sure what happened.  My man-child is fragile. I have gotten strong. I adore him, I adore what I think he is, I adore the idea of him. He helped me get my groove back.  I hadn't thought about men for years before he came into my life.  I still have no interest in more appropriate men.  It was safe for both of us, I think, to have the age difference, the geographic challenge.  It worked as an almost-real imaginary relationship.  And then I got closer to wanting a real relationship, and he was still imaginary.

After I behaved badly, and felt horrible about it, I felt an enormous sense of relief. It was so visceral, so real, that I'm sure I'll remember where I was when I felt that, like a certain song brings me back to a poignant time in my past.  The calmness, I think, was the release of risk, the release of the uncertainty that comes with caring for someone.  And I am sad.