Common Threads

Counterhackery

When a hacker sends a Facebook Messenger greeting posing as your friend Betty saying, “Hello. How are you doing today?” and you can clearly see that the new fake friend has zero posts and only two mutual friends, you begin to wonder:  is every lie a sin if the friend is inquiring on false pretenses in the first place, or is your best attempt at an injured tomboy adventure story fair game as an answer? You decide to change your own password as a security precaution before responding, brewing your lie in countercrime for a few minutes. 

Betty’s Hacker: 

Hello. How are you doing today? 

You: 

Not well, Betty. I actually fell out of a tree today while trying to rescue my cat that had been stuck there for three days and was being attacked by a hawk that kept coming around. The cat and I both fell, and when we did I fell on him and squished his innards out and killed him in the process, also breaking both of my own legs and one arm. The hawk got away. Thankfully, I am able to text back to let you know how I am doing. Can you please send money to help with my medical expenses?

And then you send a message to the real Betty to tell her the truth about your lie and encourage her to warn her real friends not to take her fake friend requests. Because friends don’t let friends’ hackers get away with attempted lies and foolishness about who they really are.  

What else could you share in the name of friendly counterhackery? 

Kim’s Tea Set

My father recently sold one of his houses, and among the treasures I received was my childhood porcelain  tea set. My mother had taken the time before she left this world to carefully label it “Kim’s” with a blue magic marker. Since I’m the only daughter, that probably wasn’t necessary, but it shows she wanted to make sure I got it when the time came. Our dad has lost his moorings and is now dating a woman with three grown children and 11 grandchildren and who doesn’t like dogs, so perhaps mom‘s labeling was more intuitive than any of us would have believed. In any case, it’s a Hygge feeling to get my tea set back on the other side of 50. I look at the disintegrating box and think of how we’ve both aged, this tea set and I. We both have been broken along the way and are missing a few pieces from our original start up set, but we can still hold water. 

The pink Sears Big Toy Box logo rests in the corner of the box, bringing back all the warm feels of visiting my grandmother at work in the Sears catalog division in downtown Waycross, Georgia in the 1960s days of the Wish Book -yesterday’s Amazon with a slightly longer wait time and a lot more hope. 

My 54 year old hands pick up the teapot and pretend-pour a cup of hot tea into one of the little rosebud cups and wish my mother were here to impart her golden wisdom as the imaginary tea leaves and liquid coalesce and the saucers remember all the once upon a times. 

Flint and Steel 

As aesthetically pleasing merchandise displays go, I would have to say that my favorite luxury soap boutique is on the minimalist spectrum. Its glass doors open to clean white walls  adorned with matching shallow shelves offering highly-fragranced colorful soaps lined up in neat rows with custom-printed label bands on pastel scrapbook papers. The aromatic allure is a modern form of witchcraft. 

Marbleized and solid colored hand-sliced bars promise relaxing or invigorating lathers of sensual transport to other worlds where worries and troubles are vaporized into steamy swirls. 

So many choices: Mystic Quest (rumored to contain dragon’s blood), Oatmeal Honey, Vegan Castile, Morning Citrus, Cool River, Mountain Mist, Lavender Fields, Purple Haze, and the seasonal scents.

I can resist all these, though. I amble, spellbound, over to the men’s shelf and select a bar of Flint and Steel as my husband’s Valentine’s Day gift. I put it to my nose, close my eyes, inhale deeply, and smile. The label doesn’t reveal my suspicions, but I figured out its secret ingredient a long time ago. 

Pheromones. 

Broken Mirrors 

Even with today’s fashion trend of leggings under skirts, it doesn’t take too much to remind me why I choose pants over dresses every time I go shopping. A sighting of a glass elevator, an open staircase, a surfer dude, or an angled shoe mirror, and I’m a time traveler straight back to 1981 to the halls of my South Carolina high school. 

He showed up in French class with his shoulder-length wavy blond hair,

wrinkled t-shirt and flip flops, and Sony Walkman headphones. Madame Howard called the roll, but Doug L. kept right on daydreaming of the beach, with his closed-eye head groove. We didn’t know it then, but in that split second the lasting image of a yearbook “most popular” superlative was forever seared into our minds. 

All the girls wanted to date Doug L., but his heart was somewhere back in California paddling out to catch the next wave. What he hadn’t left there, though, was a prankish bullying sort of humor that wouldn’t quit. He cheated on English tests by writing the answers on a scrap of paper and taping them to the ceiling over his desk using a yardstick so that it appeared to everyone that he was looking up in deep thought to recall the information.  He raised his eyebrows and invoked a romantic accent with an inflected question mark on certain French vocabulary words, especially the week he spent walking up to every girl in the school and asking, “un morceau?” 

But the prank that sticks with most of us still cuts, thirty five years later. He laced a jagged piece of a broken mirror in his shoes and went around looking up every skirt, winning bets about what color underwear we were all wearing, leaving us broke and baffled about how he knew. 

Until we saw all the boys huddled over by the smoking wall, doubled over with laughter and pointing at Doug’s feet.  And that is how a broken mirror or a Walkman or a frayed shoelace moment can shatter a day or a life. 

Itching 

I’m itching for a Covid trip

straight down memory lane

ticket stubs and photographs 

       calling out my name 

where to go and what to do – 

is anybody game? 

A drive to Vail

A flight to Maine 

A train to New York City 

all I need’s a B&B escape 

from my self-pity

Just Write

Three years ago, 

Sarah said to just write. 

Set a goal: 5 or 10 times a month. 

Set a timer: 10 or 20 minutes. 

Pick a topic: whatever comes to mind. 

Open a journal, pick up a pen, and write. 

Bring words to life on the page. 

Make it a habit. 

Some days, revisit seedlings. 

Other days, remain satisfied. 

Watch what happens!

A Sonnet of four quatrains with a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF and a rhyming GG couplet, with lines of ten syllables in Iambic pentameter with the emphasis on the second heartbeat. 

 A Diminishing Thyroid Sonnet

I didn’t eat for health again today 

instead I ate a pound of M&Ms 

I know there has to be a better way 

than caving to my cravings and crazed whims

My thyroid’s gone and left me in the dust 

these pills I’m taking frankly don’t absorb 

I’m scared to even measure my huge bust 

my derriere’s a pair of cratered orbs 

no diet can be found to satisfy 

and exercising’s too much work for me 

a serving size is hard to justify 

so obese may just be what I will be 

someone please come and turn this barge around 

or to the fat farm my big ass is bound

Alternate Plans for Educators During a Pandemic

our pantries stocked
with emergency tuna
we have a plan b, c, d, e….

but like tufts of a dandelion
parachute we wonder:
will we hold?
or will
Sal Khan get his wish
and become the world’s
one teacher?

Steps to being Kim Johnson

First, reconsider. But somebody has to do it. So…

1 Be born to a Southern Baptist preacher in seminary who plops you down on his desk in the middle of all his open books and speaks to you in Hebrew. Just smile and coo. 

2 Accept that you will always be in trouble somewhere- even when you’re not in trouble everywhere. The church shares joint custody of PKs.

3 Love dogs. Want them all – even ones that aren’t yours to have. 

4 But reject cats. Your DNA makes no sense why this is so. It just is.

5 Be accident prone! Fall off houses and out of trees and get thrown off of strange bareback horses you had no business riding in the first place. Then lie about how it happened. No…..wait. Be a creative storyteller. Yes! A mystery writer with a less incriminating plot. 

4 Don’t pay attention in math class. It’s boring as all hell and you’re never going to be successful at it, anyway. You can’t even count. 

5 Grow up on two Atlantic Coast islands. Learn to crab, fish, swim, ski, and how not to drown in a “for real” undertow – not just the one you’re living in. 

7 Have a little bratty brother who finds less trouble than you but who always gets caught. Write a book about him one day and tell all the family secrets – well most, anyway. You’ll be friends for life. 

10 Don’t listen. Do it your way, the way your friends say. What does family know, anyway? Throw a wedding with the wrong one, then see what family knew. Get a divorce and be grateful for three good things that came of it – your children. 

7 Listen. Consider your family’s nod. They tell truths others won’t risk. Marry the right one – the one who calls you the love of his life and is the only man on the face of the earth who could possibly ever mean it. Love that man to pieces! 

8 Move to the Johnson Funny Farm. Have dogs – lots and lots of dogs. Realize you are far more successful at parenting dogs than you ever were at parenting humans. 

9 Read. Write. Teach. Travel. Blog. Enjoy too many sweets. Wave a tearful goodbye to your thyroid, wipe your eyes, and then throw away that Kleenex! 

10 Realize at your mother’s death that your dad has reverted to speaking Hebrew. Pray that you can find him his own Schnoodle puppy who speaks all languages of the heart. Call your partner-in-crime brother who still loves you and devise a tag-teaming delivery plan: a surprise Schnoodle attack. 

11 FaceTime the delivery. Just smile and coo in Hebrew. Grab five more Kleenex – one for letting the puppy be someone else’s, and one for your dad’s happy Hebrew heart!

In the End

every morning
I pour the kefir and
swallow eight teeming world populations
of life: 50 billion
microscopic bacterial organisms
in a double gulp

all in the name of probiotic health. 

I line up the containers
on the refrigerator shelf
and ponder these
overpopulated colonies
like so many bacterial pilgrims
boarding a Mayflower
praying for a journey of survival
through treacherous depths

and wonder
what they hope for
in the end.