Mama and I were discussing First Communion dresses. I felt that some of the specimens I had seen on the racks when searching for the V-meister’s dress were a little inappropriate.

“For example, spaghetti straps. Can you imagine?” I complained to Mama, who agreed that the world was indeed going to hell in a handbasket as evidenced by the latest First Communion fashions.

“And it was slim pickins’ just to find something with a cap sleeve,” I lamented. “I had to buy the V-meister a bolero jacket for the sake of human decency.”

“Times are changing,” Mama agreed. Then, sensing an opportunity to segue into a topic that has evidently been consuming her, she asked me what I myself would be wearing to the V-meister’s First Communion.

“And what about you?” Mama said. “Will you be bringing your décolleté tomorrow?”

“My what?”

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence.

“Do you know what a décolleté is?” Mama asked, using the French pronunciation.

“Well, yeah.” But what was Mama implying?

“It’s lovely, of course. It’s just that, don’t you think, especially in church, a low neckline can be a little distracting?”

I have never been distracted by my décolleté. In fact, I was only half aware I had one. Still, I assured Mama that I would be wearing nothing short of a turtleneck and hung up in a hurry.

Now I am paranoid. Every morning when I get dressed, I look down to see what’s the what. Most days everything seems to be tucked away neatly, but you never know how your décolleté is going to act in a given situation. I have had to take certain measures, such as walking around with my arms crossed and standing no less than five feet away from a person when we are talking. Also, I no longer permit myself to lean over.

Tomorrow, I am going to Nordstrom to get fitted for a Shakespearean collar.

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The problem with having young children is you just can’t devour a chocolate bar without being noticed.

The other day, I gave my kids a healthy after school snack of apples and wheat germ. Then I planted them in front of an educational television program and scurried back to the kitchen, whereupon I opened the pantry and proceeded to stare inside.

I noticed a chocolate bar.

I took that chocolate bar and began to unwrap it with the stealth of a sniper. I even paused my breathing. The first velvet bite was mere inches away from my mouth when two small humans, about yea big, materialized behind me.

“WHAT ARE YOU EATING MAMA?”

Lickety-split, I tucked that chocolate bar into the elastic waistband of my yoga pants.

“Oh, just some raw almonds. Would you like one?”

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Last night I had a crisis of confidence and couldn’t fall asleep until the wee hours of the morning. P-Dawg cited some hocus-pocus about white light emanating from my laptop and interfering with my brain’s blah blah blah science math fatal error la la la can’t hear you, but the fact is I was trying to figure out a way to reach a wider audience with my writing, an audience that might tip the balance in my “writing income” bank account over into the triple digits.

Blogging is so effortless that it’s made me quite a lazy writer. Also it doesn’t pay. I haven’t been submitting articles for publication lately or writing anything other than fluff (my favorite!) on the old blog. I am working on a book and making pretty good progress, but I get so discouraged reading about the publishing market these days. I do believe a writing “career” is within my grasp, I just don’t know how to grab it.

So I decided to hypnotize myself (again).

Perhaps the answer to my dilemma would spring forth from the inner recesses of my consciousness. Maybe a voice would boom specific instructions about where I should start submitting or how I can improve my book.

It took about forty-five minutes to go through the whole rigmarole of relaxing every muscle in my body, then envisioning myself descending a long staircase to a place of beauty and peace. Once there, I would row a little boat to an island where all the answers would make themselves clear.

But when I got to the bottom of the staircase, I was on the Atlantic seaboard. The beach was nice with no jellyfish, but the roaring saltwater waves were going to make it exceedingly difficult to row the crappy little boat at my disposal over to the island without capsizing.

The problem, you see, was that I’d inadvertently mixed up two incompatible methods of self-hypnosis. The one where you descend a staircase to any peaceful place you want and stay there, and the one where you envision a placid lake with a boat that takes you to the island of your subconscious.

Still, I couldn’t ignore the island. And I couldn’t relax on the beach until I at least tried to get to it. But it seemed so impossible and the stress of it all had caused a rogue muscle in my leg to start twitching.

I turned around, walked back up the staircase, and took a Tylenol PM.

When I woke up I realized that I’d gotten my answer.

The next time I go down there, I’ll bring a cooler full of beer and an outboard motor.

Image courtesy of The Graphics Fairy.

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My husband and I agreed, even before having children, that we would never go to Disney World. If our kids were to ask about it, we would deny that Disney World existed. Because you see, the P-Dawg and I do not like crowds. We do not like cartoon princesses or licensed character merchandise. We do not like manufactured fun or any place with more than two or three trash cans in it. When we go on vacation, we like to read books, eat great food, and move around as little as possible. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but I could also do without direct sunlight (dappled is OK).

I don’t know how it happened, but last week we took the family to Disney World. And we had a blast. Really, it was a perfect family vacation. In other news, I don’t know who I am anymore.

What happened?

We stayed at a family oriented Disney resort (Wilderness Lodge), which took us to the Magic Kingdom by ferry in about ten minutes. If we wanted to go somewhere in the Kingdom that wasn’t accessible by boat, we would simply wish upon a star and be instantaneously transported (okay, there was a monorail and a nice bus system). There were no lines to get into any of the parks. We didn’t have to keep track of paper tickets because a swipe of the hotel key card got us into all the parks, paid for our meals, and unlocked the fountain of youth.

On most days, we went to a park in the morning and relaxed by the hotel pool in the afternoon before dinner. The trick was to have no goals or ambitions and leave when the children began complaining. When a child was no longer able to put one foot in front of the other of his own accord, it was time to head back for some rest and relaxation. If there was a long wait for a ride or attraction we really wanted to see, we used the Fast Pass option, returning at the designated time and getting through with no wait.

I didn’t see a single piece of garbage in the entire Kingdom and even though there were a lot of trash cans, they were well sealed with no flies or bees buzzing around them. One of these trash cans talked and walked around. I saw it give a kid a hug. One morning I even witnessed a “cast member” (that’s what Disney employees are called) dusting the rope fence on our hotel ferry dock. Another time I saw a street sweeper whistling while he worked.

At Disney World, there were no mosquitoes. Whatever those Imagineers are doing to keep bugs out of the land, it’s working and I would like to employ it in my own backyard, ecosystem be damned. The perfect weather, coupled with this dearth of insects, is one of the things that made Disney so magical.

I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed the rides, for example, “It’s a Small World.” My only beef with that one was that Lithuania was not represented. The P-Dawg and I took advantage of the hotel “Kids Club” and had a fancy romantic dinner one night. I laughed at all the jokes on the Jungle Safari ride, marveled at real animals on the Animal Kingdom safari, ate awesome authentic pizza at the Italy Pavilion at Epcot, and got a special behind the scenes tour of the aquarium, probably because my adorable son was wearing a Mickey Mouse hat and asking a lot of questions about sharks.

We only lost him for five minutes the entire time we were there.

Lest you think that our vacation went off without a hitch, I must tell you there was one incident of utter heartbreak: I accidentally reformatted my camera’s memory card on the last day, wiping out all of our precious memories except the ones on my phone and in my own head. As we speak I am running some kind of super duper file retrieval software but so far it hasn’t uncovered anything. It makes me almost want to weep, but I’m trying to buck up and be a woman about it. Despairing is not the Disney way.

Still, I’m hoping that someone at Disney will read this and offer me an all expenses paid trip so I can recapture the magic that I accidentally erased. And next time, I’ll be sure to splurge on the “PhotoPass” option, which would have taken the photography responsibilities out of my hands entirely.

Believe it or not, this isn’t even a sponsored post.

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Last weekend we joined my friend V and her family at one of those domed structures that houses several pools and slides, not to mention contraptions which spill giant bucketfuls of water on your head every fifteen minutes. It was extremely crowded there, but the children had a blast while I scurried from one end of the waterpark to the other saying, “I swear I just saw him in that treehouse two minutes ago.”

Afterwards everyone was ravenous, but there would be no greasy waterpark pizza dinner for us! We were headed to a nearby winery with an excellent seafood buffet where children are always welcome and reservations are not necessary.

When we arrived, there were so many cars in the parking lot that my friend V and I selflessly volunteered to be dropped off by the front door to scope out a table while the menfolk went in search of a parking spot. For some reason, the restaurant was packed to the eaves with diners conversing in low voices with heads bent together over plates of steamed mussels and bud vases containing a single white rose.

“What is going on here?” I wondered while my friend V fought her way up to the hostess station and requested a table for eight, lickety-split.

The next one would be available on Sunday, July 15th.*

“We’ll be dead by then” I sobbed inwardly while gnawing on a knuckle. I didn’t want my friend V to think I was some kind of a nutritionally-driven wuss.

A strange thing was happening at that restaurant. It was almost as though the entire state of Ohio had decided to eat at the same place on the same night! Did they know something we didn’t?

One thing about my friend V is she never gives up. While our children ping-ponged around the holding area, she continued to stand in front of the hostess until a table miraculously opened up. “I can’t believe you swung that!” I told her as we stepped into the elevator leading up to the attic storage room**, where we were going to eat.

The crab legs, prime rib, coconut shrimp and heart shaped risotto balls were delicious, even if we had to ride up and down a couple of floors every time we wanted to re-fill our plates. We still couldn’t figure out why the restaurant was so darn crowded, but then again northwest Ohio wine country is a pretty up and coming vacation spot.

“This is is just plain crazy,” I said to the P-Dawg as we elbowed our way up to the chocolate fountain with dessert plates of strawberries in hand. “You should leave some room for the Double Chocolate Love Bomb of Love. I hear it’s pretty good.”

Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody! I hear it’s sometime this week.

* Where “Sunday, July 15th means “in a few hours.”

** It was a really nice attic.

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Legend has it in my famiglia that a great-great-great grandmother on my father’s side married a deserter of Napoleon’s army when it marched across the fatherland. I have always blamed this soldier personally for my short stature and the fact that I don’t possess your typical Lithuanian blond-haired, blue-eyed looks.

But the French ancestor has also served me well, especially as a conversation starter at parties.

“Hello, are you enjoying the party?”

“Yes. I am directly descended from Napoleon.”

I always chalked up the ease with which I picked up French to this particular family member, and felt pretty confident that with my beret, baguette, and striped boatneck shirt, I easily passed for a native during the time I spent living in France.

Whenever someone would comment on my impeccable accent, I would say,

“Thank you. It’s because I’m part French.”

But all of that changed last weekend.

I’d been hounding my father to write down his childhood memories of Lithuania for years, and every time I asked him how it was going, the conversation would go like this:

“Hey, Tėveli! Kaip tau sekasi prisiminimus rašyti?” (Hey, Dad! How’s it going with your memoirs?”)

And my dad would always tell me that he’s making good progress.

“Kiek tu jau puslapių parasiai?” (How many pages are you up to?”), I’d press him.

And he would say:

“Two paragraphs.”

But last week my Dad presented me with three single-spaced pages of his completed memoirs. He packed a lot in those pages – everything from how his family was separated while fleeing, to how he used to amuse himself in the refugee camps by picking apart detonated bombs.  I’m thrilled with it (and very grateful – ačių Tėveli!).

As a bonus, he included a family tree, which begins with the infamous French ancestor.

Whose last name was, “Felice.” Or maybe, “Feliz.”

I did a little bit of research about this surname and about the history around Napoleon’s path through Lithuania.

It turns out the name is Italian or Spanish. What’s more, Wikipedia told me that thousands of Spaniard and Portuguese conscripts deserted Napoleon’s army in Lithuania during the summer of 1812 and went on to loot, pillage, and terrorize the locals.

I took it pretty hard. It’s not that I’m not thrilled to be one-thirty-second Spanish or  Portuguese or Italian, only that for these past thirty-nine-years, I have believed myself to be one-thirty-second French. Also, my great-great-great grandfather might have been a marauder.

There would be no easy way to break it to my dad, so I went over there this afternoon and told it to him straight:

“I hate to tell you this, but we are Spanish, not French.”

He was clearly devastated.

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” he said.

“It’s just as I always suspected,” added Mama.

“That explains the moustache*,” my friend V said when I broke it to her.

And indeed, now that I’ve had a few days to take it in, I am very excited about my Spanish or Portuguese or Eye-talian blood. Of course, there are many things I will have to adjust accordingly (note: buy some pirate shirts and leather pants), but it does explain my fondness for paella and Spanish wine.

The only drawback so far is that the P-Dawg has started calling me, “Gomez.”

That’s the jealousy talking, right there.

* I don’t really have a moustache.

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I grew up hearing my grandparents’ stories of the idyllic Lithuania they remembered from before the War. They fled the country in young adulthood, so their memories are soft and diffuse, like the scalloped-edged photographs in our family albums.

I borrowed one of those albums from my parents today and scanned in some of those old photos. This one, of my maternal grandfather with his father, brothers and sisters on their estate makes me want to jump inside of it. It was taken sometime in the early to mid 1930s, when they couldn’t have known that less than ten years later, they would be separated and their lives forever changed.

Seriously, I want to lie down in that patch of sun-dappled grass right next to that dog and just hang with all of them. I want to eat a plum still warm from their orchard and feel the same breeze that swept through their fields. I may even want to milk a cow.

I know it wasn’t paradise. But it sure looks close, doesn’t it?

This one is of my maternal grandmother’s side of the family on the occasion of my great-great-grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary. I don’t know why more people don’t pose for photos up on the roof.

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When I heard that stupid groundhog forecast six more weeks of winter (not that it’s been a bad one), I knew I had to repost this article I wrote for The Smartly last year.

PUNXSUTAWNEY, PA – Punxsutawney Phil passed away this morning from a massive heart attack upon emerging from his hole for the 125th year in a row.

According to his agent, Phil had been pushing for a rain check on the Groundhog Day festivities because of the impending blizzard, the brunt of which was due to hit Punxsutawney early February 2nd.

“Look,” said Phil’s agent about his late client, “Phil was older than dirt, and he and Phyllis had been living in a climate controlled tank at the Punxsutawney Public Library for the past twenty years.  Only way he’d come out on February second anymore was if we agreed to set him up in a heated burrow underneath a fake tree stump.”

Phil, who suffered from diabetes and high blood pressure, had been under an incredible amount of strain this year to forecast an early spring.

“He had access to newspapers and free Internet over at the library,” said his agent, “So he knew it was going to be bad out there pretty early on. I think the stress and cold just did him in.”

Witnesses report mass confusion on the scene in Punxsutawney Wednesday when Phil collapsed. “Evrathing seemed normal at first,” noted Chuck Wagner of Scranton. “He crawled on out and looked around. And I sez to my wife Dottie, I sez ‘Dottie, I bet he done seen his shadow.’”

But shortly thereafter with microphones and cameras from all the major new outlets trained on him, Punxsutawney Phil keeled over and didn’t get up again. “At first we thought it was just another publicity stunt,” Wagner noted. “Some folks started booing and I heard a fella behind me yell for him to “man up.”

Phil was rushed by ambulance to Punxsutawney Area Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

Punxsutawney Phil is survived by his wife, Phyllis, and one nephew – Pittsburgh Pete, who has no plans to take over his late great uncle’s responsibilities upon graduation from meteorology school this spring. “I have interviews lined up with CNN and the Weather Channel,” Pittsburgh Pete stated. “No way am I going to spend my career doing hit and miss forecasting from a g-damned hole.”

A public memorial service is planned next Saturday at Gobbler’s Knob. In lieu of flowers, mourners are asked to give donations to the WWF (World Wildlife Fund.)

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I’m pretty sure that both my children love me, they just have different ways of showing it.

The V-meister has always been affectionate, showering me with kisses and smothering me with hugs every opportunity she gets. When I tell the V-meister that I love her, I’m guaranteed a heartfelt, “I love you too, Mama!” right back.

When I tell my little son I love him, he sticks his tongue out or makes a face. He shows his affection by hanging off my back like a monkey or plowing headlong into my abdomen after a nice, long running start. He won’t sit still long enough for a proper hug, and I have to put him in a headlock if I want to peck him on the cheek.

The only exception is bedtime, which he milks for all it’s worth. When I lean in for a goodnight kiss, he grabs my entire arm like a life-preserver and reels me in as close as I can get. I tell him I’ll stay for a minute and I can hear him counting the seconds under his breath.

Last night I stayed a little longer  to bestow extra kisses on his freshly showered head. And after a little while he said in mangled Lithuanian, “Mama, aš myliu tu” (“I love you, Mama”).

It was like being asked to the Homecoming dance.

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My daughter the V-meister has a fantastic memory. She recalls a lot of very specific things that happened a long time ago and which I frankly sometimes wish she’d just as soon forget.

“Hey, Mama. Remember when I was two and you forgot to buckle me into my car seat?”

“No.”

“Or how about that time we got stopped by a police officer and you said, ‘CRAP ON A CRAP CRACKER’!”

She has always been a whiz at facts and figures, able to quickly summon very specific information as though retrieving it from some kind of file cabinet. (Her brain?) Verily, she sometimes even speaks of the “folders of her mind.”

One thing I know for a fact is that my mind has no folders. Maybe it did once, but now it’s more of a desk with towering piles of papers on top of it. Often I have a vague hunch that something I need is somewhere near the bottom of one of those piles, but damned if I have any idea how to go about retrieving it.

And this issue is not just limited to ancient memories. You put a child, a pet, and a husband in front of me, and I’ll go through each one of their names before scoring on the third try. I never understood this when my mom or grandmother did it, but now it’s perfectly clear that people should simply be numbered. Also, I’ll tell you the same story three, four or seven times with absolutely no recollection of ever uttering a word of it,  and just today I forgot where I was going on my way to pick the V-meister up from school.

(There are more things I wanted to say in this blog post, but I forgot)

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