Modus Operandi

My life has always been lived inside the lines.

As a child, I always chose not to get into trouble. When my brothers and sisters played out in the backyard, I stayed inside with my mother, watching her cook and iron, as I kept out of the trouble my siblings were finding. I quickly found out that when I stayed out of trouble, it pleased people. That’s how I became I people pleaser. If doing something would displease someone, I wouldn’t do it. I was that way at home and at school, and everywhere I went. It became my modus operandi. Do the safe thing. Do the right thing. Do what pleases others.

In my family, I was the one that attracted positive attention at home and at school. I missed out on a lot of things fun and on a lot of growing experiences just because I had to stay within the lines. I remember when I graduated from high school. I was going around getting my year book signed. I took it to Mrs. Juarez in the Attendance Office. She looked at me and said, “You have never gotten a CUT, have you?” I said I hadn’t so she signed my book “to one that has never gotten one” and then stamped it with her CUT stamp.

When I got to college, everyone else was into drinking and smoking pot. In the dorm, they were all amazed that I had never been out drinking with friends in high school and that I had never smoked pot. Even now, at 52, I surprise people when they find out that I have never smoked pot or taken any drugs.

Sometimes I get tired of living inside the lines. I wonder what it would be like to have an adventure that took me beyond those lines, just once. What would it feel like to be the “bad girl” for a change?

One of these days, before it’s too late, I will do something outside the lines. Just once I will do something wild!

The Gas Stove~Mother’s Day Memoir

We had a gas stove in the kitchen. It was almost always on. Good things came from that stove and the best part was that my mother was always there, at the stove, near the stove, using the stove and wherever my mother was, I wanted to be.

My mother made flour tortillas for every meal. She was in the kitchen making the dough–the masa–before the rest of us were out of bed in the mornings. When I was dressed and ready, I would go into the kitchen and watch her. I sat at the red formica table and watched my mother bring the rolling pin out then she would dust the table with flour and take one of the little dough balls and set it in the middle of the flour. She’d begin to move the wooden rolling pin back and forth over the little ball, flattening it, turning it over, and flattening it some more until it grew big enough and thin enough to cook. By then the black cast iron griddle (called a comal) was hot enough to cook the tortillas and my mom would put the thin layer of masa on the griddle for just a few seconds then flip it over. She would spend the rest of the time walking the four steps between the stove and the table to flip the tortillas over as she kept rolling out more tortillas to cook. I was always scared that she would burn her fingers when she turned the tortillas over.

I loved the smell of tortillas cooking on the griddle. Tortillas, when they are cooking, smell of warmth and freshness. The smell meant that when the first one was cooked and had cooled a little, my mom would let me have it. I would be the first one to take the round flat tortilla and fold it in half, tear a piece off of it and put it in my mouth, tasting all the work and the love my mother had put into that one perfect tortillas.

I was always amazed that none of the tortillas burned while she rolled out more and more. It all looked so easy. Somehow my mother timed it just right. While she rolled out the tortillas, I would sit at the table and talk to her, asking her questions about what she was doing and why she was doing it and what would happen if she did it differently. She would answer my questions and sometimes she’d laugh and ask me why I was so full of questions. I asked her once why her fingers didn’t burn when she turned the tortillas over and she said it was because she didn’t use the fingers. She said she used her fingernails. That’s why she couldn’t ever wear pretty polish on her fingernails, because if she did, it would burn. Another time I asked her how she got the tortillas so round and perfect. My mom said the secret was to run the rolling pin over and back just one time, then to turn the tortilla a little bit before running the rolling pin over and back again. She said you had to keep doing it like that, roll over and back, flip, roll over and back, flip, until the tortilla was ready to cook. Sometimes she would tell me I should run and play outside with my brothers and sisters but I never did. I liked to be inside, with my mother, next to her, talking to her and learning from her. As she cooked on the white O’Keefe & Merritt gas stove, my mother and I kept each other from being lonely.

When the tortillas were all done, enough for the nine of us, she would put everything away and start on the food. I got to stay and watch and when I was old enough, I got to help her with the cooking. That’s how I learned to make tortillas and my three sisters didn’t. That’s how I learned to make the enchiladas, tostadas, the menudo, chile verde, and all the other foods our family loved to eat every day and my sisters didn’t. That’s how I got to spend many hours talking to my mother and listening to her, learning from her and letting her learn about me, and my sisters didn’t.

My mother did other things in the kitchen and I learned to do those, too. I remember that she used to iron in one corner of the kitchen and I remember her sewing our clothes when we tore holes into them. But one special thing that I loved most that my mother did in our pink kitchen was sing. She almost always had the radio on and when the radio was on, she would be singing. She knew the words to all of the songs and when there was a new one, one she didn’t know, she would take a piece of paper and write the words then she’d put it next to the radio until the next time they played the same song and when they did, she’d rush over to the radio, grab the paper and write down more of the words until she had them all. Then the next time the new song was on, she could sing it without looking at the paper. I loved hearing the music but I loved hearing my mother sing more! I learned the words to some of the songs and sometimes I would try to sing them too. One song I liked was called El Caballo Blanco. It told the story of a white horse that escaped and ran from one city to the next, admiring the countryside of Mexico. I liked that song because I had been to some of those places. When the white horse died in Ensenada at the end of the song, it always made me sad.

Sometimes my mother would take me by the hands and twirl me around the kitchen as the music played and as her mouth sang the words to the songs. My mother loved music. She loved singing. She loved dancing.

When I think about my mother, these are the times I like to remember. Those days were filled with wonder and love and the promise of good things.

Angels

“An angel is someone you feel like you’ve known forever, even though you’ve just met.”~Unknown

I met an angel this week. When was the last time you met one?

Ripping through

Ripping through the wrapping paper on the large square box. Corina found tissue paper inside of the package. She pulled the tissue paper out, patiently, carefully. Her father was watching. She hadn’t expected anything from him but now that she was finding only tissue paper, she had to wonder if he was getting back at her for not having invited him until the last minute. It hadn’t been her fault, though. Her mother had said that if Corina invited her father, she wouldn’t go so she had not invited him. Then five days before graduation, Corina’s mother called her to tell her that her father was very hurt to not have gotten an invitation and that Corina should invite him. If only she had not listened to her mother, she would not have ripped her father’s heart with the hurt of exclusion. Luckily, she had been able to find someone with an extra ticket for graduation and her father had been included.

Finally, Corina got through the tissue paper to find a pile of two dollar bills. When she was done counting them, there were fifty of them. Her father had managed to give her one hundred dollars for graduation and he had gone through the trouble of going to the bank to get crisp, new bills. She was glad she had been able to include him and not just because of the gift he had brought, but because he was her father and although their family had been ripped apart for years, she still loved him.

[This is a Manic Monday post; today's word was RIP.]

Oy vey!

I love technology and learning about all things new, yet sometimes I wish things would stay the same.  Recently, the laptop that I thought I would make do with for another year or so, gave out.  I had to get a new one.  I shopped.  I took my son shopping with me (well, because he looks at some things that I don’t and because he knows some things that I don’t).  We found one two weeks ago and I bought it.  For the past two weeks, I have been getting my Vista OS working the way I want it to work and getting my software patched/fixed for this operating system.  Then about five days ago it started to overheat and shut itself off.  Oops!  I thought it was a fluke until it did it again.  And again.  And again.  Yesterday, my son was here and I showed him.  We went to Best Buy so he could spend his gift cards from Easter and while we were there, we looked to see what they had in the same price range.  I had given up on the Gateway.  Luckily, they had a Dell and I was within the 14 day return period.  Last night, after my son went home, I backed up my stuff and deleted things and my passwords from the browser on the Gateway and off I went to exchange it.

Luckily, everything went smoothly and I was in and out of there withing 20 minutes.  It was closing time so they were pretty efficient so they could get out of there!  I brought the Dell home and plugged it in.  I turned it on.  It powered up but the monitor didn’t come on at all.  I was baffled.  I thought there must be some setting I was missing.  Of course, I couldn’t call Best Buy because they had closed about five minutes after I walked out of there.  My daughter arrived home just then and I showed her.  She tried it.  Nothing.  We figured the monitor was dead.  So I put everything back in the boxes and brooded.  I had been offline for a couple of days and I still had not caught up on all the time I was either without a laptop or without my functionality on the new OS.  I was upset.  I couldn’t sleep all night.

This morning, we took it back.  Luckily, the technician looked at it and said, “Oh, Dell’s do that.  You have to “power cycle” it.  So he took out the battery and put it back in again and my monitor worked!  Yay!  I brought it home after my daughter’s part of the trip (breakfast and Target).  I am finally setting it up!  I think this one is a winner.  I like it.

However, in the process, I’ve lost all my bookmarks and all the blogs I read.  So I have to go through and search and get those back.  It will take some time.  So if I am not reading your blog and I normally do, I’ll get to it.  Or you can leave me a comment here and I will be able to follow your comment to your blog and bookmark it.  That would actually be faster!

By the way, I am setting up a Firefox extension called Foxmarks.  It allows you to synchronize your bookmarks so you can access them from any computer.  When you add bookmarks, you synchronize and keep it up to date.  If I have to switch out a computer or am using someone else’s computer, I can still log in to foxmarks and get my bookmarks.  Pretty nifty, huh?  Too bad I didn’t find it last night before taking the Gateway back!

Okay, I’m off to see if I can load some of my software and the patches for it.  Wish me luck!

Spell-O-Matic

When I was growing up, my family didn’t place value on books or reading or writing. For me, it was horrible because I loved them all. From as early as four or maybe before, I loved to play with letters and words. My mother thought it was strange. I was the fifth of seven children and the only one that would rather stay inside, playing with letters. I didn’t know they meant anything. I just loved playing with them. I used to cut letters out of the newspaper and play with them, arranging and re-arranging, much like Scrabble tiles (which I never even saw till I was in high school).

One day, on a thrift store trip, I saw this wonderful toy that I just had to have. My mother didn’t know why. She discouraged me and offered a doll but I persisted. She finally relented and bought me the toy….the learning toy. I loved to sit and play with it and when my mother said I had to go out into the backyard with the other kids, I would take my toy with me and sit on the steps. What was this toy? I never knew what it was called. It was an oval shaped orange slate with metal bars that had wooden letter tiles on it. You could move the tiles around the oval till they got to the right metal bar and then you slid the tile in there, creating words. I was too young to know about words. Too young to read; too young to write. So I just played. One time, my brother, David, ran by me on his way down the stairs to play tag with my other brothers and sisters and he told me I had spelled it wrong. I didn’t know what he meant. He said if I moved the “t” behind the “a” it would say “cat.” That’s how I found out that letters could mean words and that words could say things.

I kept my orange word toy for a long time, even after I had learned to read and write. Then it got lost. Decades later, in fact only a year or so ago, I was at an antique shop with my daughter and there was a plastic version of my learning toy! It was smaller and it was round instead of oval like mine but it was almost the same. On the box it said “Spell-o-matic” and there was a company name on it. I went home and looked online, typing in the Spell-o-matic till I found one that was just exactly like the one I had as a child. I bought it online and a week later I received it in the mail. I treasure it.

A Night Of Firsts

I was twelve and my sister, Sylvia, was thirteen.  I was in sixth grade and I wanted to go with my school to see a performance of the Young People’s Symphony, put on at the civic auditorium.  It was at night time and we were going on a bus.  I really wanted to go.  I had never been to a music performance and I had never been to the symphony.  My teacher, Mr. Cassinelli, had talked it up.  It was the first time the symphony was putting on a performance for kids and if it wasn’t popular, they wouldn’t do it again.  Mr. Cassinelli said we were responsible for making it popular so that other kids could enjoy it in the future.

Shake and Quake

It was a Saturday night in December. I was about four years old. I wasn’t in kindergarten yet so I know I was no older than four. All of us, my brothers and sisters and parents, were sitting in the living room watching Godzilla. The lights were off in the room and we were scared. Godzilla was walking through the streets of Tokyo, destroying everything in sight. On TV, the ground was shaking. People were screaming.

Then, I realized that everything was shaking in our house. I looked up above onto the ceiling and realized that the light fixture was swinging from side to side. Just then, my mother realized it too and she screamed for us to go outside. We were having an earthquake!

Growing up in California, I grew up used to earthquakes. We have them all the time. After some time, you get to the point where you know the difference between a 3.0 and a 4.0 and if you really have one, you know when something is over 5.0. When we had the Whittier Narrows earthquake in southern California, I knew it had to be at least a 5.8 but bet it had been over 6.0. When all was said and done, it was reported as a 6.0 and eventually downgraded to a 5.9.

Then came the fateful morning of January 17, 1994. We were all awakened at 4:30 in the morning by the 6.7 magnitude earthquake. No one slept through that. At the time, I lived about 25 miles from the epicenter. That was the scariest natural disaster moment I have been through, even for a California girl, used to earthquakes. When all was said and done, over 50 people had died as a result of the earthquake and over 1200 were injured. Freeways and overpasses were damaged and closed to traffic until they could be repaired. In some instances, that took months.

Some of us are used to the quakes and have learned to live with them. They are not predictable, as are some storms. They just hit when they do. The best we can do is to have our supplies in order and be as prepared as we possibly can.

One Eye

I wear contact lenses. Even with them I am half blind. Without them, I can’t see to walk without holding on to the wall, quite literally.

The night before last, one of my contacts fell out for no apparent reason. Sometimes they fall out because they dry out or because I rub my eye or something but this time, I don’t know why it fell out. I cleaned it and tried to put it back it. I couldn’t get it in and my eye became irritated from trying so I put the contact away and figured I would try in the morning. At least with one in I can sort of function.

On Saturday, I got up early to take my car in for an oil change. I tried putting my contact in again. It wouldn’t go in. Without that contact in, I can’t see well enough to drive so I didn’t take the car in. Instead, I waited several hours before trying again, unsuccessfully.

It is now Sunday afternoon and I still can’t get the thing back in! I’ve always had trouble getting them in and out. I’ve worn contacts since I was 20 years old. I’m 52. You’d think I would be able to do it by now. But no! Now my next course of action, should I not be able to get it back in by the morning, is to take the other one out and use my +3.50 readers. At least with those, I can see well enough to drive safely. Then when I need to read or write, I will put another pair of readers over those. For now, I am reduced to making the text size super big on my computer and to closing my contact-less eye as I try to read. Looks pretty funny to see me typing and trying to read with one eye closed.

When I win the lottery, I am getting lazik surgery for my eyes.

Yeah, right.

Paper, Plastic, Or $$$ ?

A proposal in front of the California State Assembly would charge the  Consumer up to 25 cents per plastic bag used for their purchases each and every single time they go to the grocery/drug store.  Would YOU pay it?  What are the alternatives?

Personally, I probably would not pay it BUT I also have purchased the “green” bags offered by each of the retailers i frequent on a regular basis.  For examplpe, I have four Target tote bags for my purchases, 6 Grocery Outlet bags, 2 Safeway bags, 2 Wal-Mart bags, 4 Trader Joe’s bags, etc.  Each was purchased for a maximum of $1.00.  I keep them in the car and when I shop, I take my own bag(s) in for my purchases.  I  can use any of these bags at any of the stores at which I shop.  I can also use my own non-store bags for my purchases.  A perfect plan for those of us that have many tote bags or some of us that have those wheeled bags for our purchases.

In California alone, 19 billion plastic bags were used last year.  Plastic bags do not break down completely in landfills.  So do you want to be a part of the solution to the problem or part of the problem?  Personally, when I do use a bag from a retailer, I feel bad.  I blame myself for not having brought enough bags with me.  I blame myself for polluting the environment.

What do you think?  Is the per bag fee fair when we forget to put a reusable totebag in the car?  Personally, I think it is.  Perhaps if it hits our pocket book more of us will remember to put those tote bags into our cars or purses so we can put our purchases into them.