Extreme Home Makeover: Cherry’s Room Edition
Posted: June 20, 2011 Filed under: A Zany Life, Housekeeping, Joined at the Heart, Mouths of Babes, schnauzer follies, Writers Write | Tags: family, writers, writing Leave a comment »In the midst of pestilence and disease, I made over Cherry’s bedroom. New paint, curtains, light fixture. I pulled up the Berber and painted the concrete slab a glossy chocolate. The thing about painted concrete, besides the fact that it’s cheap and trendy, is it has to cure. Six days. You paint yourself out of the room and close the door. Or not. I couldn’t resist a peek. Or two.
Day four, I’m checking the sweaty surface. Will it ever dry? The seventy percent humidity isn’t helping. The phone rings. I turn my back for a millisecond. Talk. Hang up.
“Jasmine? Jazzy?” Where’s the puppy? ”Shit.Shit.Shit.Shit.Shit . . .”
She’s yaps from the middle of the shiny floor. “You can’t catch me I’m the Gingerbread Schnauzer.” Dance. Dance. Dance. Puppy paws on concrete.
Smack. Smack. Smack. “Shit.” The sound of black flip-flops on wet paint. “Jazzy, come. Jasmine, come.”
“Let’s dance, mom.”
“Damn it. Jazzy come.” She bounces. I stick. Her little feet float above the surface. Weighing less than three pounds is an advantage when walking on wet paint. She doesn’t dent the surface. My BMI leaves size seven footprints. ”Gotcha.” I grab the little rat and deposit my shoes in the trash.
On day four, the floor the gets another coat. Hence I live with the expression, watching paint dry.
Flipped Switch
Posted: June 17, 2011 Filed under: Joined at the Heart, Mouths of Babes, Writers Write | Tags: family, perception, Trusting Your Instincts, writers, writing Leave a comment »“Mom, I have butterflies.”
“You’ll do fine. Just do what you practiced.”
Coco was the youngest musician in the warm up room. She watched a teenager in a tulle dress play Bach. The girl sat her viola on a chair and knocked out Ode to Joy on the grand piano. Returning to the strings, she twitched. The instrument hovered and crashed to the floor. The bridge splintered.
Coco lifted her bow and played A Simple Gift. The butterflies melted. Seconds earlier, I wondered, would she balk? Run away? Freeze? Now, she understood, nerves are universal.
When Coco’s name was called, she marched out of the room like she was twenty instead of nine. Later she said, “This was the best day of my life.” She won a position in the orchestra.
The End in Mind
Posted: March 31, 2011 Filed under: Joined at the Heart, Mouths of Babes, Writers Write | Tags: family, writers, writing Leave a comment »Yesterday, Coco and I argued about the violin. She loves to play. Practice? Not so much. After sparring a few minutes, threatening a few more, I yelled. “Get a notebook and make a list of what you need to do.”
Anyone who knows me, knows my history with the To Do list. I’m ashamed to say, I’ve passed on my angst to a nine-year old. Coco took out a notebook. She scheduled five minutes for bowing, ten minutes for fingering, ten more minutes for working on the rhythm to a Haydn melody. In all she played forty-five minutes.
At the end of the night I said, “I’m proud of the way you practiced.”
“I used one of my habits.” Her school teaches Stephen R. Covey’s The Leader in Me curriculum. “Make a plan. Begin with the end in mind.”
I’m trying to follow her example.
