Years ago, when my son was maybe 10? 12? I asked him to run into my bathroom, get into the middle drawer, and bring me back my nail clippers.  Ever the cheerful young man, he said, “Sure!” and darted off.

One minute later he appears, holding a Q-Tip, having completely spaced my original request in 60 seconds.

So you can imagine my thoughts this morning as I dropped him off for his first day of work at his first job. He’s going to be a dishwasher at a local restaurant (Los Dos Molinos, which is about the best ever). I will endorse his skills by saying that, after years of seeing Sam handle our own dinner dishes, I will eat from their china and use their utensils with complete confidence, knowing that he is behind the faucet.

When I dropped him off, my first thought was to simply drive home as he walked up to the front door. But something (maybe it was a cotton swab) made me stop and make sure he got in the door. Which he didn’t. Seems the restaurant wasn’t open yet, so the front door was locked.

I watched him knock on the door. I watched him pull out his cell phone and call. Then I watched him leave a message. He saw me waiting and approached the car, and he thought checking out a back door would work (that’s executive-level thinking, Evans!) and I offered to drive him around to the rear of the strip mall.

I’m sure that the owner of the restaurant (a lovely woman, whom I have talked to in passing for some thirty years as some combination of our family members have eaten in her establishments around town) assumed I was a typical helicopter mother as she ushered Sam into the kitchen for a morning of Dishwashing Delights. But I’m not, really.

I just remember the Q-Tip.

© E. Stocking Evans

….is I’m not going to blog at all.

Psych!

Just read this month’s column, specially featured in the New Year’s Day edition of the Ahwatukee Foothills News, and you’ll get it.

© E. Stocking Evans

T.S. Eliot would be proud. My mind is a complete blank.

Mind you (pun intended), it’s not for lack of junk to think about. I got lots of that.

It’s that there’s so much to think about, that it all has become a blizzard that has approached whiteout conditions in my tiny brain pan, and I cannot so much as scrape the metaphorical ice off my allegorical windshield with my symbolic credit card so I can try to start the hypothetical car of my mind, only to find that the engine block has frozen and cracked.

There’s nothing to stop me from making a few analogous snowballs, however, while I wait for the Triple A truck:

- Steve Jobs passed away, sadly, and such is his presence that, despite stories of his legendary, shall we say, mercurial treatment of his employees and family, the Twitterverse exploded in grief. Margie Phelps, the daughter of the pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church, exploded herself with the thought of all that PR opportunity and announced that she and her cohorts would picket his funeral as Jobs was, apparently, the anti-Christ or at  the very least, his second cousin and was rightly in Hell.

Hilariously, she used her iPhone to tweet the news. Even more hilarious: when that little irony was tweeted back to her, she told the world where to get off and quit hating on her because, and I quote: “God created iPhone for that purpose!”

Which means that God is in Hell, according to the High Priestess of Hate. Epilogue: God had enough money and so was able to arrange for the one thing those families of our fallen military could not:  privacy and thus, sanctuary from Phelps and her minions.

- One of the reasons the anti-freeze has leaked out of the radiator of my id is that the world keeps looking for, and conducting the same stupid arguments. In my quest to thaw out my brain freeze, I was reading Huffington Post and stumbled across a contribution from Jamie Lee Curtis extolling the virtues of growing heirloom tomatoes and creating artisan bread and playing word games whilst drinking hand-crafted gourmet coffee and why the heck aren’t we ALL doing that instead of banging our heads against a corporate wall and what does that say about feminism?

The comments de-evolved into the usual debate about what women should *really* be doing and what feminism is really about and included, of course, the standard snarky comments about women who abandon their children because they don’t really have to work.

This was a rare occasion where two of my pet peeves get together and mate to make a gigantic Snowmageddon:

First pet peeve: wealthy, clueless actresses/celebrities spouting off about the realities of being a working mom and presuming to understand the priorities of people who are not independently wealthy. Normally I dig JLC and I really liked that magazine piece where she posed in her underwear without any re-touching, and I like it that she doesn’t act like she can hide from Time (the way we measure entropy, not the magazine). I just don’t know when the bleep her reason abandoned her. Any idiot knows it’s more fun to play Words with Friends and grow tomatoes or [insert any leisure activity here] than haul one’s ass out of bed at 5 a.m. to go to work. Apparently just any idiot hasn’t figured out that for so many of  us, there would be no tomatoes or word games (or roof over our heads, or food for our children) if we didn’t haul our asses out of bed to go to work.

AND

Second pet peeve: any debate about what women should be doing with their lives. By people other than the woman herself and her immediate family. Because here’s a clue: YOU (and by ‘YOU’ I mean the general ‘you,’ not *you*) ARE NOT QUALIFIED TO EVALUATE WHAT ANY OTHER PERSON CHOOSES TO DO WITH THEIR LIVES, provided that the laws of the land are being observed. If the laws of the land are not being observed, then you have the same chance as anyone else to sit on the jury.

This…this, dear readers, is where my fingers get the typing version of brain freeze. I’m so tired of reading all this stuff. I’m even more tired of writing it.

And that’s the nice thing about dying in the cold…it’s really kind of peaceful and quiet.

© E. Stocking Evans 2011

It’s the first week of the month, and we know what means: new column’s up! You can click here or click here:

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Readers ask; I answer. It’s that simple to clean out the “Inbox, Interrupted.” So, here it goes:

Would you be willing to reduce your life expectancy by 10 years to become extremely attractive or famous?

No. However, right now I’d consider making the trade for a four-hour nap. There’s just not enough coffee, people. Not enough coffee.

What is one household convenience you couldn’t live without?

Hands down, the Crock-Pot. You thought I would say coffee maker, but I can buy coffee anywhere. I can’t buy the convenience of having dinner cooked right when I get home from work.

Are you superstitious?

Yes. I knock on wood and have lucky eyeglasses that make me smarter, and my morning coffee MUST be in the coffee cup my son, Sam (gratuitous plug for “Super Sam Comix” inserted here), made for me.

Why do you promote your son’s Facebook page that features his cartoons?

He promised me a cut. That, and I sort of owe him after last month’s column.

List three books that have changed your life.

“The Women’s Room,” by Marilyn French. None of it makes sense any more to anyone younger than me, and thank goodness for that. It describes a world that simply doesn’t exist any longer. But if you read it, you’ll understand why I don’t like being called a “girl” at age 51. I wasn’t born surly; it was those books, giving me ideas.

“The Mind Traders,” by J. Hunter Holly. It’s about a planet where the inhabitants use their mind powers to get each other to do chores for them. My brother gave me this book to read when I was 10 (I’m pretty sure that he wanted to dominate me into doing his chores), and I have not been able to shake the sci-fi monkey off my back. “Asimov,” “Clarke,” “Heinlein,” “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” you name it. It translated into a love of “Star Trek,” which is how I met my husband, and how I got my kids. Technically, I owe my life to Gene Roddenberry.

The entire “Harry Potter” series by J.K. Rowling. It’s not just that it’s fun and fantasy, I wish I’d gone to Hogwarts instead of spending 12 years in the Catholic school gulag and I so would have been in Ravenclaw. It’s that my oldest daughter and I settled into a habit of reading the books together and making dates to see the movies together. When the last book came out we read our respective copies at the same time in a marathon night-long session, texting across town to each other with our gasps and, yes, even a few tears when Fred dies. Thank you, Ms. Rowling, for all that wonderful time together.

If you could travel back in time, what would you tell your 10-year-old self?

1. Floss.

2. Calm down about the multiplication tables. Someday you’ll make your living with math, even though you failed it in third grade.

3. I’d warn you off some huge mistakes, but some of the best things in your whole life will result from those mistakes. Sorry. You’re on your own.

4. You think you want a Porsche, but trust me on this: The Crock-Pot is way more useful.

© E. Stocking Evans 2011

Lafayette's marriage contract

News links sometimes disappear, so I’ll paraphrase: In Mexico City, roughly half of all marriages end in divorce within two years. So liberal lawmakers are proposing that budding brides and grooms be able to get a two-year contract on their marriage, with an option to renew, so as to avoid the cost and challenges of a divorce.

I may have blogged about it before, but my tagging is execrable so I can’t be sure, so bear with me: these guys may have an idea.

I think divorce has skyrocketed because (and while I hate generalizations I’m gonna do it anyway) many men still believe they’re operating under an old model, or have been raised by men who did, and modeled the behavior. Old model: back when a woman HAD to have a man to survive, all you needed to do to be a decent husband was to bring home your paycheck (or at least most of it), not drink too much, and not hit anyone so hard as to leave a mark. If a woman needed you to survive, all you had to do was be survivable.

Sadly (but only for the Old Model and the divorce rate), women have caught on to the fact that we don’t need to put up with ‘survivable.’ And that being alone might be better than being with someone who is just ‘survivable.’ And that the definition of ‘decent’ could be upgraded.

So I’m going out on the ledge to say: it’s a good thing the divorce rate has skyrocketed. It would be a bad thing if that Old Model persisted, and the divorce rate is a sign that it won’t. There are many who would tell you that the women’s libbers killed marriage as we know it, and I am fine with that. If the institution of marriage is to survive at all, and we’re going to really strive for romantic love to be the basis, the foundation of marriage needs to change so that it is a partnership, not a job.

Would the two-year Mexican contract accomplish that? I don’t know. Would I be on my best behavior if I knew I was getting a performance appraisal every two years and wanted to keep the gig? Most certainly. (Note: it might behoove all of us to treat our marriages as constantly being under review; how many people have been blindsided by a divorce, swooping in out of the blue like an eagle after a mouse?)

If I were in a relationship trough (and we all find ourselves in them) and knew that I had to stick it out at least until the end of the contract would it keep me from walking out the door and then maybe we’d be out of the trough when it came time to renew? Perhaps. Does the lifelong commitment thing make people depressed when they’re in a trough and make them more likely to want to pull the relationship plug? Would knowing that they had an out in two years make it easier (kind of like ‘one day at a time’ for an alcoholic)?

I know this: if you want to preserve the concept of marriage, managing the expectations of people about to get married would be a better place to start, rather than making it easier for married people to bail. But a lawmaker can’t do much with that, because that would involve manipulating social mores and pressure and conventions on a grand scale, so a two-year contract is born, with its little tail vigorously wagging the dog.

Full disclosure: my parents have been married for 61 years. They tell everyone that they kept the peace for the first years by agreeing that whoever left had to take all five kids; since then, they’ve lived in a death penalty state. Don’t believe it: they still make out in the kitchen. And we all know couples like that. So I’ll stipulate that truly happy marriages were forged back in the day, and can be today.

© E. Stocking Evans 2011

Eh, just buy stock in Nestle’s, as we do this twice a year.

There’s an epilogue/prologue to all this: Dad and I were reflecting on Patrick’s birthday last night and we can’t even imagine Patrick at 56. It defies all reason to think of him as a middle-aged cartographer, eating oatmeal and making maps and reading sci-fi and losing track of the world for weeks on end. It’s insane, because this is how I always think of him, still.

Me? I make it a drinking game; every time I think of how much I miss him, I do a shot. Of Nestle’s, of course.

This is what I wrote last year about RackRack (my sister’s name for him) and his birthday.

You know the drill. Click for a link or click to read more.

(The print edition was fun, though: they added stock photos, which is a first for the Mom, Interrupted.)

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Let me tell you, Ahwatukee: The Kids Interrupted are smart.

Of course I think that! All moms believe that their kids are budding Einsteins. But when you can’t swing a dead pot roast at our dinner table without hitting a conversation about metaphysics or the time-space continuum or whether transporter technology is really possible, I have to wonder.

Our 17-year-old son, Sam, is no exception. An enthusiastic historian, he’ll spend an entire meal discussing the significance of the Trans-Siberian railroad, or discoursing eloquently about the Spanish Inquisition. He can give you 15 minutes on how socks were the cause of the Battle of Gettysburg without pausing for breath.

He’s also an artist, and a pretty talented one to boot (insert shameless, nepotism-laden Facebook plug here for Super Sam Comix), who makes the most of everything we give him. We took him to a den meeting when he was 6 and he’s now almost completely turned himself into an Eagle Scout. We gave him art supplies, and he promptly turned them into prize money (this trick hasn’t worked with his allowance yet).

Like many parents, we gave him a cell phone so we could communicate with him when he was gone on outings and field trips. For several years, we had precisely the kind of experience you would expect from an absent-minded adolescent boy with a phone: He could never find the phone.

Until the day recently when Sam found himself a girlfriend. And then roughly five minutes later, and no doubt using the glow of true love, he found his phone under a pile of socks and old burrito wrappers. And, apparently in keeping with his mission to make the most of everything we give him, hasn’t put it down again.

We know this because every time we see him, he’s texting. Walking down stairs, eating dinner, mowing the lawn, he’s texting. And because last month, our family sent (and I am not making this up) 21,453 text messages.

Just so we’re straight on this: Everyone BUT Sam sent 46.

If you’re keeping score at home, that’s almost 700 texts a day. I’m an analyst by trade, so I just couldn’t stop myself: If it takes 10 seconds to send a text, 21,407 text messages translates to 115 minutes, or two solid hours every day doing nothing but hammering away at a 3-inch wide keyboard with his thumbs. While he’s pretending to listen to us. Or doing his chores. Or his chemistry homework (but not when he’s driving. He hasn’t quit texting long enough to get a job so he can afford insurance).

That’s gotta hurt. Especially when you’re not watching where you’re walking because you can’t go 30 seconds without reading the latest missive from that nice girl. Or without sending an impassioned note back.

And like an all-you-can-eat buffet owner going bankrupt after the football team decimated the prime rib station, the T-Mobile people are quietly trying to kill our unlimited texting plan.

So, yes: Sam, Interrupted is plenty smart.

But not so smart that he didn’t think about what he was doing when he dared me to write this column about him.

© E. Stocking Evans 2011

There’s a dirty joke in there somewhere, but I’m not stooping to pick it up.

I’ll let you do that.

Seriously: my sainted mother asked me to make sure I posted August’s column. So here it is. For Mom,  about Dad, fresh from the Ahwatukee Foothills News.

This column first ran the  month my oldest daughter turned 18. Everything you read here is still true, and has only gotten better.   Some days I dream of winning the lottery,  and then I remember: oh yeah, I’ve already done that.

The first time I saw you, I was lying flat on an examination table and an ultrasound tech was counting baby toes and I swear on all that is holy, she said, “Whoa. That baby is smiling and waving. You don’t see that every day.”

And you were, and no, you don’t. But I still have the picture. I cried a little that day because I couldn’t wait to meet you.

Everyone warned me that daycare would warp your brain and make you aggressive and pushy.

Your idea of aggressive and pushy and warped was to persuade an entire school to elect you student body president, right after you persuaded a local organization to award you a scholarship and promote you to a national competition.

Everyone warned me that girls were the worst. That the teenaged moodiness and the angst and the drama would engulf my home and cause me to regret being born and wish that a meteorite would strike me dead while you slammed doors and cried and hollered that you were off to get a few tattoos with your ex-con boyfriend, Butch.

But you showed your idea of drama the day your boyfriend (happily, you’ve never dated Butch) broke up with you and I found you sitting at the computer with tears pouring silently down your face, trying to work a Scholastic Aptitude Test practice problem.

You want to be a teacher when you’re done with college, and I know already that you’ll be a great one. The day you were born you taught me how it feels to love someone else more than I cared about myself.

You’ve taught me that it is impossible to die of pride. If such a thing could happen, I would have been reduced to a puddle of gelatinous goo the day you won the school spelling bee in fourth grade, or when you begged for the opportunity to take your little brothers to the store to buy them their school supplies (how could you think I’d say no?), or when your sixth grade teacher told me that she looked forward to coming to work every day simply because you were in her class, or when the dean of students at your high school told me with a completely straight face that you ‘are a blessing’ for the school.

Thanks to the rip in the time-space continuum that has developed as I get older, it feels like just yesterday that I was waving back at that baby on the ultrasound monitor, when it’s really been eighteen years. When we went to the store the other day to pick up your birthday cake, I promptly dissolved in the middle of the bakery section when I picked out ’1′ and ’8′ candles and realized that I had purchased the candle for your very first birthday cake in the very same store.

Since that very first picture, you’ve never stopped smiling and waving. And if I obviously have not stopped crying, it’s only because all too soon you’ll be waving goodbye.

E.S. Evans 2007

Except when I take off from posting. I got kinda sick of myself for awhile, and even though I can’t get much vacation from myself doesn’t mean YOU can’t.

I don’t take off from the Ahwatukee Foothills News, though.   Since 2002, I have never missed a deadline. And this month was no exception. You could click this to read it right off the site, or you can read it after the jump. Of course, all I can do is jump virtually now….

Like a fine wine or an aged cheese, I’ve never had a problem with getting older.

Not for me, coyly turning 29 five years in a row. Not for me, covering my gray hair. Not for me, cringing if anyone looked at my driver’s license (OK. I still cringe, but only because my weight is on it. I’m not made of stone, for Pete’s sake. Just Cheetos).

So I have never flinched at a milestone birthday. Sensitive about my age? Hah! I’ll see your Grim Reaper cake and raise you a case of Depends. Toss in a box of Preparation H and you’ve got a deal!

That all changed this spring. I was driving back home from Tucson and just south of Casa Grande, I realized that in 18 short years I will be 70 years old.

And that’s when I nearly drove off the road, because all of a sudden my dotage seemed, not like some nebulous concept that was for other people, and not for me (how could it be for me? I still feel like I’m 19), but something that was going to smack me in the future dentures in less time than it has taken my son to become a man.

And that didn’t take any time at all. He was born, like, yesterday. Which means tomorrow, I’ll be, like, old.

As I usually do when confronted with my mortality, I called my parents, who are in their mid-80′s and presumably have sorted out these issues. I told them about the 70 thing and they just laughed and said, “Seventy? That’s nothing. You can do 70 standing on your head.” Sigh of relief, but they kept talking.

“Oh, yeah! Seventy’s nothing. Things don’t start to go to heck until you’re 75.”

Which would be great, and for some weird reason 23 years to old seems more manageable, except ‘things’ are obviously starting to go to heck now. Something called “impingement syndrome” in my shoulder means I can’t take off a T-shirt without weeping. Apparently hammer toes are hereditary, because my feet look exactly like they belong to my 84-year-old father. The only good thing about the bad feet is that they’re so repellent that you won’t get too close to me and see my wrinkles forming just like time-lapse photography in a National Geographic special, turning me into Keith Richards’ doppelganger.

I’m starting to regard my poor, cranky chassis the same way you eye your old car: It’s paid off, and used to be reliable, but you’re starting to wonder if it would make more sense to just junk it and get a new one.

Except if Keith Richards hasn’t been able to get a new one, I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to.

I’ve learned a few things here:

• If you Google “hammer toes,” you won’t ever want to eat again.

• The getting older thing will be OK if I can land a movie role playing Johnny Depp’s dad.

• De-evolving into an old Johnny Carson joke (“I’m so old…HOW OLD ARE YOU?”) would be funnier if I had any comfort that any of you were old enough to remember who Johnny Carson is.

I’d take a show of hands, but my shoulder…Ow.

Ahwatukee Foothills resident Elizabeth Evans can be reached at elizabethann40@hotmail.com. Her column appears monthly.