Category: Uncategorized Page 4 of 10

Askar’s Story, Part 2

On June 11, 2010

February nudged March, which gave way to April. “You’re almost there,” I told Askar. “Only a few weeks to go.” “I’m so tired, SuzyAnnde” he said frequently, the weariness like a sad mask on his face.

One day in May he got a backache that wouldn’t go away. He started missing school and work. I would text him, “Are you working today?” “No, am not in school too.” He complained that he was way behind on his work. “You have to take something for the pain,” I said. “I have some pills but don’t want to take them.” The doctor at a clinic downtown told him it was strain and he needed to rest. I worried that he wouldn’t have the money to make his rent, but when I asked he said he was okay.

On my regular tutoring day he was back at school but he could barely sit – he was like a board leaning against the chair – his legs straight out under the table and his back rigid. After school I took him home. “Let’s get you some food before I drop you off,” I said. “Then you can rest your back all evening.”

He wanted to stop at an African restaurant near his house to get take-out. “You should try the food too,” he said. “You will like it.” I wasn’t too sure about that, but it smelled so good when we went in the door that I ordered meals for my husband and I to go. We ended up waiting forever for the food to be done, and sat at a table watching Aljazeera news on TV, which I’d never seen before. It was all subtitled in English, and I found it fascinating. Most of the news was about America and Europe, with some Middle East stories as well. “Can you understand the language they’re talking in?” I asked. The sound was turned down but I assumed it was in Arabic or whatever language they speak over there. Askar laughed. “It’s in English!” he said. “It’s not a Middle East station?” I asked, thinking it was some satellite station from across the world. He thought that was the funniest thing ever and laughed in spite of his pain. “They have Aljazeera in many languages” he said, shaking his head. ”It’s like CNN.” How was I supposed to know?

The food finally came and I tried to pay with my Discover card but they didn’t take it, so I handed over my VISA. It got rejected. “That’s nuts,” I said. “I always have a zero balance.” Then I remembered the new card had come in and I hadn’t bothered to replace the old one yet. I looked at the card and it had expired. “I will pay for it.” Askar said, and handed his credit card to the cashier. “I could write a check,” I protested, but he wouldn’t hear of it. “You do so much for me,” he said, and pushed my hand away as I tried to hand over my debit card. I took the food home and my husband and I had a feast. I felt bad taking his money, but I quickly repaid him by buying a yearbook for him since he couldn’t afford it. There was a big picture of him in one place and other pictures elsewhere. He was very happy.

One night he told me his friends wanted him to meet them downtown at a teen club. I felt odd taking him there. I wondered about liability if anything happened. But he had very little social life, and I thought, “What the heck?” He told me later that someone at the club told that his shirt looked like a gang shirt and he had to take it off. He tried to hide it but later, when he was ready to leave, it wasn’t there. I suspected the person who told him to take it off and just wear his undershirt had his eye on it and thought this gullible kid would be easy prey. “It was my favorite shirt and I had just gotten it a few days before,” he said.

As graduation drew near, I asked if he was going to the all-night grad party. “Too expensive,” he said. “I think they have scholarships, and I know the mom in charge. I’ll give her a call.” When I told her the circumstances, she said, “We can give him a full scholarship.” He neglected to get his paperwork in on time, but they were lenient and he ended up being able to go after several moms helped the process along for him.

At the senior awards, he got to go up on stage and accept an award for being, “Mr. Perseverance.” The principal told the students and parents in the auditorium about his story and how he overcame so many odds to finish his education. He was very proud.

On graduation night, the principal again talked about a couple of the students because her theme was “never give in.” One was Askar. She dragged the story out, and I knew she was trying to make the point that life can be hard, but you can press through the bad times and reach your goals. Askar was a perfect example. “I was so afraid she was going to say my name,” Askar said afterward. “I had my head in my hands I was so embarrassed.” “Everyone is very proud of you,” I said. I didn’t tell him that he was an example to so many of those kids who’ve had everything given to them and still whine about their miserable lives.

After graduation I looked for him for a long time in the sea of square green hats and graduation gowns. Finally we spotted each other. He ran over and gave me a long hug. It was the first time we had touched. I thought it might be against his religion so I avoided contact. He took me to meet his aunt and uncle, and his uncle, who could not speak much English, kept smiling and shaking my hand. “You are very kind,” he said, “you are part of this family.” He was very kind.

Askar’s brother was supposed to bring him a change of clothes but did not arrive on time. Askar got on the grad night bus wearing a long sleeved white dress shirt, suit pants, and wing-tip shoes. I felt sad for him because all the other kids were in jeans and tennis shoes. Luckily I’d packed a swimsuit and towel for him – an old one of my son’s – because they were going to a pool and he’d told me he didn’t have a swimsuit.

The next morning at 6:00 am I picked him up after the all-night party. “You don’t have to come,” he had told me. But I knew he’d be so tired, and the thought of him walking all the way to the bus stop and riding in the morning rush hour traffic for an hour and a half was too much.

While I was waiting to pick him up, I thumbed through the pages of a handout made by Portland Public Schools to give to parents along with the graduation program. They had students from all over the city, and I saw Askar’s picture. It had a long paragraph about everything he’d overcome to graduate, “while working two jobs and living by himself, he still managed to get a 3.78 GPA.” I was flabbergasted! He must have never slept to end up with that high of a GPA. When he got in the car I said, “I didn’t know your grades were so high.” “It was because of you,” he answered. “You gave me extra time to study or I would have had all C’s and D’s.” I don’t think that was true, but it was a nice thing to say.

Why have I written about Askar in a humor column? I guess because I will always think of him when I’m ready to give up. And I hope that anyone reading this will find an opportunity to help a kid. Even a little makes your heart swell, and you’d be surprised how many kids there are out there fending for themselves.

And though you’ve probably not laughed reading this, I hope you at least ended up with a smile.

Can You Keep a Secret?

By Suzanne Olsen

On May 26, 2010

In People, Uncategorized

I wonder how people manage to keep things secret. I haven’t had much luck with it. Once I threw my husband a surprise birthday party and two different friends of his called him to ask, “How do I get to the place where your surprise birthday is going to be?”

Granted, both of these guys have been stoners for years, but you’d think that even in a stupor people would realize that an invitation with the words, “SHHHH – IT”S A SURPRISE!” would know not to mention it. It’s one thing to let something slip, but there was no excuse for that, and it caused me a lot of misery.

Since my husband knew, but I didn’t know that he knew, he thought it would be funny to torture me by driving down to the beach that day with one of his friend’s to go crabbing. They left early in the morning and while they were on the water, his friend kept trying to get him to leave, but Esso said things like, “It’s such a nice day, let’s just hang out some more. You don’t have anything planned for tonight, do you?” When they finally left to come back home, he wanted to stop and eat, stop and buy beer, etc. Julius, the friend, sneaked off and called me to report that they were still in Tillamook and he didn’t know WHEN they’d be home.

I was, of course, a nervous wreck, because we hadn’t made “plans.” We’d talked about going out to eat with some friends but hadn’t firmed it up. I thought this would make things seem less suspicious. Esso finally called and said he was too tired to go out, and that he’d rather just stay home and order a pizza.

The inability of those two friends to keep a secret caused me a whole day of torment and agony. One of them had the gall to show up at the party pre-intoxicated. He parked himself in front of the microphone when it was time to roast Esso and rambled incoherently about who knows what until I bitch slapped him. Not really. I politely nudged him to the side and announced that they were going to take the food away, but he certainly deserved a hefty smack.

The reason I thought about this subject was because I was watching Biography and it was about Paul Newman. Some gossip columnist back in the day kept saying that there were rumors of trouble in Newman’s marriage to Joanne Woodward. For those of you who don’t know who she is, I can tell you that she’s this gorgeous, very classy actress. By sheer coincidence, people have told me I look like her. However, I think she looks like me.

Newman and Woodward got fed up with the rumors and took out a full-page ad in some newspaper saying their marriage was just fine and the gossip columnist needed to go bungee jumping without a cord. They didn’t say that because Joanne would have been way too classy, but they said something, believe you me.

Movie stars have the paparazzi and everyone else watching them, so I can’t imagine how they keep secrets, but they certainly try. When they get discovered doing something like having an affair with the nanny, they first deny it over and over. Then evidence starts piling up, for instance the nanny shares intimate text messages from the alleged perpetrator. Still the star denies it, though not quite so forcefully. “I did not have sex with that woman,” they say, then add, “not that I can remember.”

Another thing that’s interesting, when I was younger everyone thought I looked like Sally Field. People told me that all the time. Now she looks older than me, so I’m glad they’ve changed to Joanne Woodward, who is, as I’ve already mentioned, quite a looker.

Pssst – Can you keep a secret? I didn’t think so.

Sailing Trip Part 3

By Suzanne Olsen

On May 18, 2010

In Uncategorized, Vacations

Fast forward to four days later. We had settled into a routine. We got up and had a hearty breakfast of eggs and bacon and toast and coffee and oranges (to ward off scurvy). Then we’d pull up anchor or leave the dock we’d tied up to overnight. We started our motors and puttered further up the coast, past scenery that was surprising exactly like we’d seen every day so far. Then we stopped and had a nice lunch of sandwiches, chips, apples, and pop before starting our engines back up and going further up the coast. Late afternoon we arrived at a new dock or place to anchor and prepared a feast of barbecued oysters or something Esso had prepared like marinated steaks with grilled toast, salad, and dessert. The wonderful meal was accompanied by beer and wine, with Spanish coffees as after dinner drinks that took us all the way to bedtime.

Sometimes, if we were lucky, there would be interesting rock features or little secret coves along the way that Esso and Pat knew about because they’d been sailing up this way before, but the sites didn’t last very long. We’d sit all day long, and then sit all evening. Out of boredom, I gorged on potato chips, candy, fruit, pretzels, cream cheese, string cheese, pork rinds, licorice rope, Tootsie Roll Pops, leftover bacon, trail mix, cashews, and the occasional carrot or celery stalk.

Boredom was making my clothes too tight, which made sitting around even less pleasant. The rest of the gang was delighted with the R and R they were getting. I was going nuts. About the third day I started taking the little dinghy out that was tied to the back of our boat. I’d row it around and around the cove just to get my circulation going and check stuff out. No one else had any interest in exploring.

I had how many more days of this? On the 5^th day we went to a secret place Esso and Pat knew about that was full of oysters. We anchored about 500 yards away from the rocks and rowed our dinghy’s close in. Everyone got on the little rock islands and started filling bags with oysters. I didn’t have the heart to do it, so I rowed around in the dinghy. After awhile Eric needed to go back to the boat, I guess to use the facilities, and so I sat on the rocks and talked to Sue as they collected potato sacks full of oysters. Erick got back to the boat and neglected to properly tie up the dinghy. Oh boy, what excitement that was! We all yelled and screamed at him as the dinghy started drifting away, but he didn’t hear us. Finally he appeared on deck, gave us that “What?” look, and just kept raising his arms like he was trying to understand what we wanted. He held up a bag of potato chips and we all screamed and shook our heads frantically. The dinghy had floated past the front of the boat so he couldn’t see it from the back where he was facing us. He picked up a beer and pointed to it. We screamed some more. Finally he went to the front of the boat, probably to pick up the bag of pretzels, and noticed the dinghy, which was becoming a small speck on the horizon. He stared the sailboat up and drove it to the dinghy, where he jumped into the water to snag it. We were terrified he’d let the sailboat get away while he was fetching the dinghy, but he managed to retrieve the one without losing the other. I so appreciated the diversion and entertainment of that half hour of distraction.

I’m not saying that there weren’t good times. Evenings together were full of laughter and fun. But this was not what my vision of a sailing trip had been. We did try to put the sails up one day, but there wasn’t enough wind to get us going and we gave up quickly.

Pat and Sue were only with us for five days, then they headed back. We said our goodbyes and continued on. The first night alone with just Esso, Eric, and me, we decided to play Scrabble because it was the only game on the boat. Esso turned out to be the best Scrabble player in the world. He’d hold onto a bunch of X’s and Z’s until he could make a word on a triple word space, and then score 90 points.

In stark contrast, Eric would stare at the board for a solid ten minutes, until we’d lost all patience and told him he had to go or else, and then he’d spell the word “on.” Next time, same thing, and then he’d put down, “it.” You think I’m joking? If he got a three-letter word like “the” he was ecstatic. In any other situation I would have grabbed the board and flung it across the room, but I was desperate for any stimulation – even the most aggravating kind.

Lest you think Eric was a numbskull, he’s really quite charming and a handsome, 6 foot, slim guy who was a golf star in college and a successful architect. I think the Spanish coffees and who knows what else were fogging his brain.

I began wishing I’d brought a mu-mu, because waiting for Eric to move upped my appetite. I was wearing one pair of fat shorts pretty regularly – all the cute stuff I brought was still folded neatly in my duffle bag because I couldn’t get anything else to zip up. I knew I looked like a fat cow, and that made me want to eat out of depression.

I’ve got a couple more stories to tell, so this will again be continued. Hope you can stand all this excitement.

An Amusing First Communion

By Suzanne Olsen

On May 17, 2010

In Kids, Religion, Uncategorized

It was First Communion at church, and all the girls were dressed in these darling white dresses (symbols of purity) with little veils. The veils are a carry over from when all Catholic women wore hats or veils. Cradle Catholics of a certain age (ancient) will remember this.

When I was a kid, we weren’t allowed to go into church without something on our heads – and there was no exception. At a minimum, we had to have this little doily-like thing on our head. A doily is a round piece of lacey stuff about 6 inches across that old-timey people used for coasters, or, heaven forbid, decoration You still see these things in nursing homes. I never much cared for them, but that’s just me. Older women wore those long lacy things called matilda’s. Except I just googled it and they are actually called mantillas. All my life I thought they were matilda’s!!

The little bit of doily-like headgear we students wore was called a “chapel veil.” We went to Mass before school every morning except Wednesday, and if you ever showed up without your chapel veil, then your nun, who was as tall as the Eiffel Tower and wore a long black dress and massive headgear so you didn’t know what might be hiding under there, would bobby pin a piece of tissue to your head as she gave you a scowl that told you you had better not let it happen again.

Nuns back then were strict. They weren’t trying to be our friends, they kept us on the straight and narrow – they wanted us to be quiet and sit still while we learned and that’s what we did. We seemed to have a lot of fun, though, especially during the one-hour recess. But I’ve strayed off topic, which was the First Communion service I just witnessed.

The boys had on sports coats, slacks, and ties and the girls wore their white tea-length dresses with white, chunky-heeled shoes and ribbons and curls in their hair. They were paraded in front of the congregation as much as possible, which was delightful because they were really cute. So they came up to do the readings. They stood on a little platform, and put their mouths way too close to the microphone.

Which reminds me. I have to say one thing about the priest. After opening prayers, the priest, who was a substitute, asked us to spend a couple of minutes of silence to reflect on the topic of the day. We obliged by bowing our heads and the church got very quiet. At this precise moment, loud scritch, scritch, scritching came over the loud speaker. I finally lifted my eyes just enough to see what was going on. The priest had a determined look on his face as he fiddled with the microphone clipped to his collar. His fingers moving over its speaker was causing the noise, and surely he heard it too, especially when it got louder. Other heads lifted. By the time the “moments of silence” were over, he’d gotten it just the way he wanted. The only thing I had spent time reflecting on was what an id…. well, never mind.

So the first child, a girl, started reading and did an impressive job. She read such words as “Theophilus” as if it were Smith or Jones. A boy was next up, and he sounded like he had a mouth full of Corn Flakes. You couldn’t understand a word he mumbled. The third was also a sharp looking boy and he started off great but after a few words he paused, flinched, and then proceeded. This happened again, then again, and I realized he had the hiccups. The rest of the congregation caught on too, and we all chuckled softly each time he hiccupped. He’d swallow after each hiccup, which became more amusing as it went along. We were waiting for it, waiting and wondering if they had gone away, or if we’d imagined it, and then – pause – flinch – swallow. Don’t know why that was so funny, but there’s not much else happening in church so we, the congregation, would have been rolling in the aisles if not for decorum and sympathy for the little trouper and his parents. We kept our mouths shut to mute our laughs, and I saw several people with their hands over their mouths trying to hide their mirth. I almost applauded when he got done it had been such an entertaining show.

A couple of other things happened that I would share except I’ve run too long and there’s nothing above I’m willing to cut. Suffice it to say, the congregation en masse enjoyed this Mass.

Keeping the Peace

By Suzanne Olsen

On May 13, 2010

In Uncategorized

We’ve had quite the upheaval in Portland. Our police chief just got fired for a variety of alleged reasons. All I know is there have been some bad altercations between the police and citizens, and the citizens came out on the short end of the stick. 3 or 4 people have been killed over the past couple of years, and they generally turn out to be unarmed and/or mentally ill. One person had an X-acto knife. Oooo, dangerous! Whenever I read about these things, the first thing I wonder is why can’t the police just shoot them in the leg? That seems like enough to stop an unarmed person from doing too much damage. The second thing I think about is what the Italian police did to a guy in Rome.

My daughter and I were having breakfast at a sidewalk café across from a gigantic basilica (big church) that had a circular square in front of it (as opposed to a squarular circle). It was a warm, sunny Sunday morning and people were walking all around and going into the church. Marvelous people in flamboyant attire – one extraordinarily elderly woman was dressed very much like a bull fighter in red pants and jacket that had long slits at the ankles and cuffs with many layers of black lace sticking out. We watched an ancient priest in a white robe come slowly out of the church and start walking around the outside of the circle heading toward us. He moved at a steady pace but only covered a couple of feet a minute. It was like one of those Matrix movies where everything is moving at a fast pace except the person (or bullet) going in slow motion.

On the sidewalk about ten feet from us, a portly Italian man who was either schizophrenic or drunk started creating a ruckus. He was loud, ranting about something to himself. Almost immediately a little tiny car pulled up and four policemen got out. They surrounded the man, and I thought that my daughter and I had better run for cover before bullets started flying. But no one else was scrambling so we lingered at our table to see what was going to happen.

The police just stood there. A couple started putting on rubber gloves very slowly, and I thought they were going to throw him to the pavement and start hitting him and they wouldn’t want to hurt their hands. But they just stood there with the gloves on, forming this wide circle around the man. Passers by weren’t slowing down to gawk; in fact, no one was paying any attention.

The man started getting rowdy. He yelled Italian. The police just stood there, arms folded across their chests. He became more agitated and threw a set of keys onto the sidewalk with all his might. They bounced and skittered along. A rubber-gloved policeman bent over and picked them up and put them on the hood of the police car. The man gestured some more, gesturing with his arms to show his irritation like Italians do in movies, then he threw a bottle down that he had in his hand. It shattered. The two policemen with the rubber gloves bent down and picked up the glass.

I knew one of them was going to lose his temper any second and slam the guy up against the car and start frisking him. But it didn’t happen, even when his tirade grew more intense. Meantime the ancient priest had made it about halfway around the square.

This went on, literally, for at least twenty minutes. The police never tried to talk to the guy, never tried to calm him down or ask him to get in the car. They just formed this loose circle that grew as needed to accommodate the man’s flailing around and lunging. Finally, the little priest made it to where we were sitting. I expected him to go over and avail his services to help keep the peace, but he only watched the scene as he proceeded on.

I concluded that no one was paying any attention because people knew nothing was going to happen. The police were there in case the guy became hostile to others, but they obviously saw no reason to interfere with his ranting and raving. The guy finally started walking away, and one of them handed him the keys he’d thrown down. The four policemen watched him for a couple of minutes, then crammed themselves back into the tiny car and drove away. About that time the little priest rounded a corner and disappeared from view.

You know good and well what would have happened in America. The priest would have tried to save the man and gotten him worked up even more. The police, irritated that they’d been called away from Krispy Kreme, would have roared up in a big car with hemi, sirens blaring, and pushed the priest out of the way, grabbed the belligerent guy, thrown him to the pavement, kicked him a few times, tasered him, and then shot him a time or two just in case. There would be an investigation and the police would be exonerated because they had followed their training. I’d like to see that training manual and compare it to the one those Italian police must have been following. If I ever get drunk or go crazy, I hope I’m in Rome, where the police see their job as keeping the peace and not brandishing their piece.

Climbing Mt. Hood, Part 2

By Suzanne Olsen

On May 10, 2010

In Exercise, Uncategorized

After almost six hours of stair stepping, the final stragglers in the group (me, an 18 year old Japanese exchange student named Koz, a guy in his late 20’s, and the poor guide who had to stay behind for us slow pokes) arrived at the part of the mountain that made this an official “technical” climb – where being roped together would save our lives. It was a straight up sheer cliff of ice about 20 feet tall that we needed to plant our feet in the toe holes and hold on for our very lives. I was terrified. But I was roped to these guys and I had to go. It went fast because there was a line of people behind us, and the lead guy set the pace. This was Andrew, and he was as scared as I was. He wanted to get the heck done with it.

After we survived the Cliff of Terror, we had only a few steps to go before we reached the top. When we got there, we saw the other 20 people in our group, plus about 80 more crazy people. It was 8:30 in the morning. I was exhausted and just shy of the point of passing out and already dreading the climb back down, plus I had to pee. All that stopping for drinks of water caught up with me. I don’t mean to be indelicate here, but next time you look up at a snowcapped mountain, see if there’s a bush or a tree up there. There’s not a one. I was in a panic, because as miserable as every muscle and joint in my body were, my bladder was worse off. I had to go.

In case you ever find yourself in this situation with a hundred people around and nowhere to hide, here’s what you do. You move a little down slope of the crowd. It’s about 15 degrees, but take your coat off anyway, lie on your back in the snow, arrange your coat discreetly over your midsection, wiggle out of the three layers of clothes that have not been enough to keep you warm (despite what the guides said) and relieve yourself for as long as it took Austin Powers when he was first awakened after being cryogenically frozen for 20 years. This may take a full ten minutes, depending on how many water/rest stops you’ve took. Breathe a huge sigh of relief, and then move a little sideways (remember, you’re still lying down on a fairly steep incline), struggle back into your clothes, put your coat back on, and pretend you don’t know a thing about the steaming yellow river cutting little snow valleys into the snow as it flowed down the mountain right beside you. I’m sure this information will come in handy for you someday.

After all the agony of getting to the summit, nobody stays at the top for long. It’s freezing up there! Plus, even though the view is breathtaking, you can only look out over the vast empty plains and mountain peaks for so long, and then it’s blasé. Seriously. You look at Mt. Rainier and The Three Sisters and Mt. Bachelor for a few minutes; then you’ve seen it. I’ve noticed in movies that the people who reach the summit of Mt. Everest don’t linger around either, and I bet they can see more than we could.

Getting down, for the most part, was more fun than going up. Having a baby and getting a root canal at the same time without drugs is more fun than going up. Going down, you get to slide part of the way. It’s got a technical name, glaceeing, but it’s basically taking out the plastic garbage bag you put in your backpack and sitting on it. Gravity does the lion’s share of the work, but there’s danger in this simple act, too. I saw Kos go sliding at 250 mph straight toward a smoking, belching, stinking sulfur pit that probably went straight to the core of the earth. Luckily our guides had gone over “self arrest” where you roll over and dig your ice pick into the snow to stop sliding. Kos frantically did this repeatedly before he stopped on the edge of the foul pit, and then he had to climb all the way back up to the Hogsback, the narrow ridge we were on.

The guide who herded us slower ones to the top kept telling us we needed to hurry. We ignored him as we were trudging upward, but I found out why he was so insistent as we made our descent. When the sun beats down on the snow, even when it’s cold, the surface starts to soften and get slushy. Gravity and the slush duke it out, but the slush wins and you are no longer able to slide. Plus the snow gets so soft that you sink to your knees with every step. I can’t tell you how difficult it is to walk like this, but it takes forever to pull a heavy foot out of a deep hole and then pull the next one out. This went on for about two days or the last half hour, it was impossible to tell the difference. Everyone else in our group was already at the bottom, and had been there for an hour or more. Even Kos and Andrew were there. Just the guide and I straggled back at noon.

Let me tell you this. I hated climbing Mt. Hood more than anything I’ve ever done. But having survived it, I have to admit I’m proud to be able to say I did it, especially when I’m around a bunch of jogging, weight-lifting, buffed-up people. It’s nice to ask casually, “Have you ever climbed Mt. Hood?” Like it’s something I do for fun on weekends.

But I wouldn’t advise anyone else to climb it, ever. If you’re too foolhardy to listen to me and insist on going anyway, I have one parting thing to say. Don’t drink too much water.

Climbing Mt. Hood, Part 1

By Suzanne Olsen

On May 8, 2010

In Exercise, Uncategorized

When it’s a beautiful day, and Mt. Hood is silhouetted against a royal blue sky, I’ll hear people say, “Wouldn’t it be fun to climb to the top of that mountain?” Let me answer that question from my own experience. ARE YOU CRAZY??

It is not fun. I know, because my brother, the salesman, talked me into attempting the climb. He paid $25 dollars at an auction for the services of two guides to take a group to the summit of Mt. Hood. He invited thirty people to his home, served lots of wine, and then let the guides convince us that it would be “fun” to be part of their expedition.

Both these guides were tanned, taut, and toned. They ENJOYED rock climbing and snow camping. I had absolutely and positively nothing in common with them. They said our climb date would be in May because there’s LESS CHANCE of avalanche (how encouraging). We’d need to rent boots, crampons, and ice axes, and we’d be roped together for the last leg of the climb. Everyone got all excited when they started in with this technical jargon, but I heard the word Crampon which made me think of something bloody awful, and Ice Axes, which made me think of axe murderers, which did not bode well.

I had no desire to climb Mt. Hood. Anybody in their right mind would know that this wouldn’t be fun. Our guides said that we could get in shape by finding a bunch of stairs and running up and down them. Does that sound like fun to you? Also, our group had to be roped together like a string of sausages. Why roped together? In theory, if one person falls the rest would catch him. I wasn’t afraid I’d fall, I was terrified that one of the big sausages would slip and drag us to our deaths in some bottomless precipice. But group mentality and peer pressure overcame our better senses, and all of us signed up to go.

The guides were well worth the $25 investment. They took us on two hikes in the Columbia Gorge, and they took everyone else to the top of Mt. St. Helens. I wasn’t invited to that one, probably because I complained so much during the hikes in the Gorge. For crying out loud, they forced us to practically jog up steep trails in the winter, with snow on the ground. My response was to repeat, “I’m tired. Can’t we slow down? It’s freezing!” I was freezing because I guess I didn’t read the instructions that said not to wear cotton next to my skin (it gets wet from the exertion then makes you cold or some other scientific mumbo jumbo) so one guide had to give me his polypropolenesuperthinbutsuperwarmthermal shirt. That, and the fact that I’m not one to keep my complaints bottled up were probably the reason the guides must have waited until I was in the bathroom to tell the others about the Mt. St. Helens hike. Or it might have been on the instruction sheet that I neglected to read.

Whatever, in early May we were to meet at the appointed time, which was 2:00 a.m. (another reason I did NOT want to do this climb), at Timberline Lodge – so named because it’s so freaking cold at 6,000 ft. even the hardiest mountain trees cannot survive any higher. Our guides told us to go to bed early in the afternoon and get plenty of sleep. You can climb in a bed anytime you want, but if your thinking about being a sausage-on-a- string in an avalanche, sleep will not come to drown your fears.

I met the guides at midnight to hitch a ride almost two-hours to the mountain. I asked as many dumb questions as crossed my mind, mostly about what to do if someone was pulling me into a crevice (pronounced like your snooty aunt would say “vase” as in “crevaass.” They were patient at first but finally told me that if I knew what was good for me I’d lie down and get some sleep.

When we got there, the parking lot was full of climbers. What a bunch of idiots. Our group was doing this because we’d paid a guide, albeit only about two cents an hour by the time you factored in all the training hikes, but these nincompoops were doing it because they wanted to. Crazy. We all signed in so they’d be able to notify the families when we didn’t come back, another reassurance that this was not a good idea. Then we put on our heavy boots and stuck our food, water, crampons, extra clothes, garbage bags, and our trusty ice axes into our backpacks and hoisted them on. I didn’t weigh in, but it seemed like I was 200 lbs heavier than in my birthday suit, maybe 300.

I took the first step and almost buckled under the weight. Those boots weighed a ton, and even though I’d walked in them for a couple of days to condition myself, it was just too much with the backpack. I felt I couldn’t go on. Everyone chided me into continuing, which I did against my better judgment. You are probably wondering why I kept listening to these people. Me too. I guess I just didn’t want to be the only sissy in the group. Perhaps I felt that if I did enough complaining they’d kick me out and I wouldn’t have to feel like a pansy. You’d think they would have said, “It’s obvious you don’t want to do this, maybe you should not go.” But no one ever said that, au contraire! They did the exact opposite – the more I complained, the more they encouraged. Since I couldn’t give up, I just had to try harder to get booted out.

Want to know what mountain climbing is like? I couldn’t tell you. But getting to the top of Mt. Hood from Timberline Lodge, except for about twenty feet, is like this: Remember that movie, “Ace Ventura, When Nature Calls?” There’s a scene in which Ace climbs to the top of an infinite stairway leading to a Tibetan monastery. He puts a Slinky on the top step and gives it a little push. It starts going down the steps, one by one as the camera zooms out like the scene is being filmed from an airplane so that it can get all nine million stairs in. When the Slinky FINALLY gets almost to the bottom, it stops at the next to the last step. Ace raises his hands in frustration because now he’ll have to climb all the way back to the top and start over. THAT’s what climbing Mt. Hood is like. Each time you lift your leg, you are raising it like you are going up another stair. There is never even one step where you just walk. You are climbing the stairway to Heaven, or just shy of it. Plus you’re on snow and ice. Thank goodness for the crampons which keep you from slipping and sliding like you’re walking on a grease slick, though it’s not much consolation.

At about Silcox hut, not too far from Timberline, I sat down in the snow with my head in my hands and said I couldn’t go any further. “You can’t give up now,” the guides said. “It’s a beautiful day; you’ll never get a better opportunity; just keep putting one foot in front of the other.” I know they soon regretted prodding me along – wailing gets on people’s nerves.

The guides told us to drink plenty of water because it helps prevent leg cramps. My legs hurt so much I wouldn’t have even KNOWN if I had a cramp, but I drank water constantly. It was an excuse to stop and rest. By the time I was two-thirds of the way up, I rewarded myself with a drink after every ten steps. Did I mention the air is thinner and you get more out of breath with every step as you go up? That’s about the same time my pleas to go back turned into wails and near tears.

Tomorrow I’ll tell about the rest of the adventure.

Prom Night

By Suzanne Olsen

On May 8, 2010

In Kids, Uncategorized

The subject of today’s blog is also the reason I didn’t do this blog yesterday. It was Prom Day, and my daughter had requested dinner for her entourage at our house. So I had to slave, yes literally slave, over a hot stove AND clean my house for the six sets of parents who would be coming over to take pictures. I’d like to spend this entire blog whining about how tired my legs were but I know, as a writer, that you will not read any further if that’s all you have to look forward to, so I’ll talk about interesting things, starting with the make-up artist fiasco.

Actually, I’ll start a little earlier because those of you who read about the problems we had finding a dress will be pleased to learn that the alterations turned out beautifully – the dress fit like it had been tailored and made my already gorgeous daughter (people say she looks like me) into a veritable beauty queen. Too bad about what happened to it.

The girls all skipped school because they had to get pedicures, updos, and makeup done. I wasn’t too keen on that but my daughter pointed out that, “Everyone else skips school all the time and I haven’t missed a day all year. Katie misses class so much and she’s stoned most of the time and Celina….” They wear you down.

She got a purple pedicure, “it matches my green dress,” and she got curls in her hair. The next thing was makeup. At an auction, Jenna’s mother bid on the services of a makeup artist who would come to the home and do a small group for a special occasion. That was scheduled for 3:00. At about 2:00 the artist called and said she couldn’t make it because her husband was called unexpectedly into work and she didn’t have a ride. “We can come to your house,” Jenna said, to which to artist replied, “Oh, and there are child care issues, too.” “We can babysit.” “That won’t work, look I’ll call you Monday and we can reschedule.”

We live in Oregon, and it normally rains from November to July. On rare occasion, we get a sunny day. Ever rarer is a sunny day AND a warmer temperature. Yesterday it was sunny with a high of 71 degrees – downright Hawaiian for Portland. This may or may not have had a bearing on the artist’s sudden decision to break the hearts of these sweet girls just hours before their prom.

Of course this change in their perfect day was the end of the world. They all decided to call their dates and cancel the whole thing. Well, the thought crossed their minds, but then they rallied and stuffed their own makeup into duffle bags and came to my house to put it on. They crammed themselves into one small bathroom and stayed in there for about an hour with the iPod blaring so loud it drowned out all but the loudest squeals. At one point my daughter came in and said, “Sam put fake eyelashes on me, does this one look crooked?” I’m not a fan of fake eyelashes, mostly because I’ve never successfully gotten them unstuck from my fingers to transfer them to my eyelid. “They look beautiful,” I said.

When the girls emerged in their tank tops and shorts, they were knockouts. I don’t think a selfish, unreliable, flaky makeup/con artist could have done any better. At 5:30 – fifteen minutes before the boys and parents were to arrive, they raced out the door to go to Jenna’s house to get a memory stick for her camera. Good grief! Luckily they were back in 7.38 minutes and dressed in 2.4, so they milled around in their gorgeous dresses, looking for something to spill on them. My daughter succeeded. She rubbed up against something oily, Lord knows where, and had spots on the front AND back of her dress. All that shopping, altering, the tears, the fights, and finally finding the perfect dress (that cost a small fortune) only to have her get it dirty within minutes of putting it on. Kids – you gotta love ‘em or you’d strangle ‘em.

All the parents arrived on time (5:45) and we took pictures of the girls, but where were the boys? Everyone knows that girls are supposed to be late. It’s almost a requirement. But there were strange forces at work – a sunny day in May, false eyelashes that looked real, I hadn’t burnt the chicken – and now late boys. And I don’t mean fashionably late. They didn’t arrive for 45 minutes. They’d all gotten ready together, which means that instead of pulling up their pants, buttoning their shirts, clipping on their ties and tying their shoes at their own homes, they were at a friend’s doing it all at one time. How could they have been 45 minutes late? They blamed it on Luke’s mom. “She kept making us pose for more pictures.” They were awfully cute in their purple and green ties and black shoes so pointed they could have used them for arrows.

We took every combination of pictures you could imagine – serious, funny, girls only, boys only, moms and kids, dads and kids, couples only, couples only on stairs, group on stairs, group funny, couples funny, my daughter holding the dog. Finally, exhausted, the parents packed up and left an hour and a half after they came, and we served the first course – Caesar salad.

My husband was the dapper waiter – carrying plates out of the kitchen and refreshing their sparkling apple-pomegranate cider. Then I dished up their plates with chicken with lemon sauce, herbed rice, marinated green beans and garnishes of snow peas, radishes, petite pear tomatoes, baby corn and tiny radishes. It was pretty, though I knew most of them wouldn’t touch the garnishes. Then we cleared their dinner plates and served a lovely cake on a pedestal that Sharon brought, plus strawberries with whipped cream. A feast!

My kids won’t stay at a dinner table more than ten minutes unless forced, but this bunch wouldn’t leave. My legs were throbbing. Every now and then one of them would say, “Shouldn’t we leave?” and I bit my tongue before saying “YES!” out loud. Then someone else would say, “I’m having such a good time sitting here enjoying everyone’s company.” I don’t know who said that, but I wanted to slap them. My husband and I were just hovering in the kitchen, trying to give them space and overhear any dirt we could but these guys weren’t ever interesting. They didn’t cuss. They didn’t talk about sex. They didn’t talk about other people except to tell funny stories about them. SO LEAVE! I was saying over and over in my head to send the vibe. Typical teenagers – they didn’t pay any attention to me, much less my vibes.

Finally about 8:20 (the prom started at 8) they got up and the guys put on their coats while the girls rushed back into that small bathroom and stayed ten minutes. Then they loaded up into two cars and I took a couple more pictures and went back in the house. I looked out the kitchen window and they had all climbed out of the cars, so I went out to see what was wrong. They were spraying, “Just Prommed” on the car windows. Then my daughter sprayed directly on the car and had to run in and get paper towels because it was someone’s borrowed nice parent car and it might eat the paint off. Finally they loaded back up and I got to go back in the house and spend another hour on my feet cleaning up.

When they came back around 11:30 to rummage through the refrigerator and get the two other cars they left parked here, I didn’t even get up out of the Lazy Boy. “It was SO MUCH FUN,” they all said and took off. The girls were going to end up at Jessica’s house for a sleepover, and hopefully the guys weren’t with them.

And that is why I didn’t do my blog yesterday. Oh, and the dog ate my paper.

Vegetable Banter

By Suzanne Olsen

On May 7, 2010

In Food, Uncategorized

Today I went to the high school to volunteer tutor but I didn’t have any takers for awhile so I pondered the names of fruits and vegetables.

Eggplant. Where did that get its name? Sure, it looks like an egg in shape, but it’s purple. Maybe some purple dinosaur could have laid such an egg, but it seems an odd name. A cherry, on the other hand, is well named. It’s a happy fruit – a cheery fruit, if you will.

But who came up with the name for squash? It’s a word most often used to describe what you do to a bug. There’s a game called squash that’s played with racquets. I guess you could use the rackets to squash a bug, but it would probably crawl through the little holes. The point is, it’s neither a logical nor an appetizing name for a vegetable, and you just have to wonder how it got its name.

Some names don’t show any creativity at all. Green beans is one. You’ve got a bean and it’s green, so you go, “Duh, what will we call this thing. Uh, let me see, uh, I’ll think of something, uh, just give me another second here, it’s going to be a good one, uh, okay here’s what we’ll call it: GREEN BEAN! Star fruit is the same way. And I’ve never seen breadfruit – does it look like a loaf of bread?

If you want creative names, go to the melons. I love the name “casaba.” I’ve never eaten one but they sound exotic, like something you’d eat in your cabana on the beach. There’s also honeydew melons. Doesn’t that sound delicious? And cantaloupe, which sounds like some kind of sailboat – spinnaker sails catching the wind and good-looking guys in deck shoes and microbrews, slurping the juicy summery orange melon and tossing the rinds over the side. All of these are members of the muskmelon family, just so you know.

Also, here’s something interesting. If you scramble melons you get lemons. Did someone look at lemons and say, “These are the same shape as melons but we can’t call them the same thing or it will be way too confusing. I know! Lets rearrange the letters and come up with a whole new word!”

The Legume Family has some odd characters. The little guy is named a chickpea, which sounds sweet and cuddly, but it is also called the garbanzo bean, which sounds like a guy who smokes pot and surfs all day. My daughter was about four years old and had this little orange figurine that she called, “Orangie.” She was trying to be like her big brother, who gave everything nicknames, so she informed us that “his name is Orangie but you can call him “Tail.” We laughed so hard she started crying but we couldn’t help it – the thing didn’t even have a tail. It was two totally unrelated names that made no sense, just like chickpeas and garbanzo beans.

Here’s some names that do make sense: blackberry and blueberry. They at least let you know what kind of berry you’re getting. But what about strawberry? Is it the color of straw? Does it look like straw? Does it at least taste like straw? No. Then what genius came up with that name?

Here are names I like but they’re hard to spell – pistachios, avocado, cilantro, and rhubarb. In fact, my spell check says I’ve gotten two of the four wrong.

Finally, there’s the potato and tomato, so similar in so many ways. You can slice ‘em, dice ‘em and rhyme ‘em.

Here’s a sentence I made up that I think is particularly clever: This thyme lettuce squash and beet the boysenberry them before the news leeks to Rosemary.

Luckily for you, a student came into the library wanting my tutoring services, so my fruit and vegetable musings stopped here.

200 Days Down, 165 to Go

By Suzanne Olsen

On May 5, 2010

In Uncategorized, Writing

This is my 200^th blog! I’m more than halfway to my goal of doing 365 blogs in 365 days. Yippeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

I will take this opportunity to talk about trying to be funny. I mentioned before that I got satellite radio in my Prius for a 3-month trial, and I’ve been listening to comedy stations with really funny people saying very funny things. Oh how I wish I could remember some of them.

These guys are either telling some outrageous story that is funny all by itself, or they use surprise. A comedienne tells the story, “I went to the doctor with an ache in my back. He asked me questions for twenty minutes, looked things up in some books, then said, “Have you ever had this condition before?” and I said, “Yes, a couple months ago,” and the doc says, “Well, you got it again. That will be $100.”

Comedy is about connections – the ones you automatically make in your head and then the alternative ones that funny people throw at you. It’s about the people around you doing odd things, or it’s the way you can connect that odd thing with something else. Remember that old Pink Panther movie where Peter Sellers, in his heavy French Inspector Clouseau accent, says to a guy holding a sweet little dog on a leash, “Does you dog bite?” The guy holding the dog answers, “No.” So Clouseau bends down to pet the cute little thing and nearly gets his hand chewed off. “I thought you said your dog doesn’t bite.” The man shrugs his shoulders. “It’s not my dog.”

These comediennes are great observers of the ordinary. They take the most mundane thing and describe it until it looks absurd and funny. Jerry Seinfeld is great at doing that, and so was George Carlin. Seinfeld points out that studies show that the number one fear people have is public speaking. The second is death. If that’s true, and you’re attending a funeral, he says, then you’d rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy.

As Larry the Cable Guy says, “Now that’s funny, I don’t care who you are.”

I love reading Dave Barry’s books. He also points out ordinary things and then takes them to the depths of absurdity. For instance, he says that Magnetism is one of the Six Fundamental Forces of the Universe. The other five are: Gravity, Duct Tape, Whining, Remote Control, and The Force That Pulls Dogs Toward The Groins Of Strangers. He makes his words even funnier by capitalizing them as if they were truly some scientific or official entity.

It doesn’t matter how much you listen to comedy, though, to be good at it you have to practice it. That’s why I’m doing this exercise. Sometimes it appears to be simply exercise (I’m sorry), but sometimes I hit on a topic or story that amuses me and I laugh out loud. I hope I’ve given you a giggle or two here and there.

I’m thinking I may make up some people for the next hundred and sixty-five days. I wish I could say that my friends are really funny and I’m surrounded by humor – but frankly I am not. My friends tend to like to bitch about their lives to me because this is what women do with each other – we shop and complain. Others I encounter during the day are usually doing their best to hack me off rather than amuse me. My kids are teenagers, and there’s nothing funny about that. Plus life isn’t a whole lot of fun and games, truth be told. We have these great incidences of fun but they are like oil floating on water – the everyday tiresome repetitive functions are the water. You get out of a warm bed, make the bed, pick up someone’s discarded underwear, feed the dog, do laundry, fight traffic, work for a person who knows less than you do, dodge grocery carts, cook the same old dinner after sitting in the freezing rain watching a track meet. Yep, there’s a lot of water in life.

But when I approach the day with humor, I can find things to amuse me if I don’t let my natural irritation get in the way. So I’ll keep looking for subjects to write about, for another 165 days at least. If you see anything you like, please don’t hesitate to say something.