Distance Vision

Well, there is no more wandering this earth without glasses for me. I am at the threshold of must-wear-glasses-to-drive. And I have been camped in must-wear-glasses-to-read for well over a decade. Now, I have to get around with two pairs of glasses, at least one of which is usually sitting on my head.

I've never studied optics, or even thought about the subject. And I have an idiot streak. For years, I wondered why restaurants would pile the chairs on the tables at the end of the day. Seemed like a lot of choreography just to signify that the restaurant was closed. I think I was in my mid twenties when I finally figured out the purpose of this Sisyphean task. I was out to dinner with some chatty people and we closed the joint. The owner turned up the overhead lights and the bus boy put some chairs up and started sweeping. Which is when I had my epiphany. So THAT's why they pile those chairs up. (OK, so I have an idiot streak AND, as my poor husband will attest, I suck at cleaning).

All this to say that I have been under the mistaken belief that distance glasses are somehow different from reading glasses and must be hand-crafted to one's exact prescription. I've had multiple pairs of $16 rainbow-colored readers stashed all over the house for years. But the distance glasses were another story. I spent a lot of money on fragile Italian frames so funky, they should have come with an expiration date – the optical version of those idiotic boob-warmer sweaters all the young things were rocking back in 2006.

However passé those frames were starting to look, I was damn well getting my money's worth. Over the course of 6 years, I had the lenses replaced three times, until the delicate frames finally broke. I then spent six months squinting at road signs and complaining about the blurred TV set.

Finally, I stopped procrastinating and went in for an eye exam with a new ophthalmologist – an honest one. "Look," she admitted, "I'd love to make money off of you, but the fact is, all you need to see far is a 1.25 reader." It took a while for my sluggish brain to wrap itself around the concept of over-the-counter distance glasses. "Are you sure?" I asked the doctor. She was sure. Incredibly, no vision professional, opthalmologist or optometrist, had ever explained to me that over-the-counter glasses could also boost my distance vision, and I didn't have to shell out for those stupid designer frames.

The eye doctor did half-heartedly try to sell me on a few other options. Bifocals, contacts, prescription sun glasses, light-sensitive-prescription-sun-glasses-that-turn-clear-indoors and of course, eye surgery. I wasn't buying any of it, which was OK with her. She doesn't need the income: she's a renowned specialist in focusing issues. Patients come from all over the country to work with her. There's an autographed picture of Christopher from The Sopranos on her wall, thanking her for helping him read like a normal person. Full disclosure: my daughter went to this doctor for vision training. In addition to their sessions together, she had to buy special software to practice at home. Daily, diligently, she sat in front of the computer, wearing old timey 3-D glasses with a red lens and a green one, exercising her eyeballs. No doubt the training has made her a more efficient reader, but I could have bought a pair of designer distance specs for every day of the week with what she spent on her vision workouts.

So now I have added two pairs of distance glasses to my collection. Theoretically, one lives in the car, although it has a tendency to plant itself on my cranium and hitch a ride into the house. The other pair hangs out on my night stand, so I can watch TV. I do my best to remember to take them off before I get up and walk around. I'm trying not to notice the dust bunnies.

Wanderlust

Once upon a time, when we were resentfully living in Cleveland, my husband and I took a ten-year anniversary trip to Paris. As we strolled through the left bank, we fantasized about relocating to France, as my sister had recently done. I came up with the notion of opening an American style cookie store. Yes, I know, France Land of Pastry, but cookies, plain old easy to bake chocolate chip cookies, not to mention snickerdoodles, were unknown in the City of Lights. (This was years ago and I have no doubt that today you can find a cookie on every coin de rue).

By the time we got back to our hotel, we had already franchised our cookie business and were poised to expand into Italy. Would we ever have really done it? Probably not. My husband is hopeless at languages and I would have been condemned to life as an interpreter. But mental and, occasionally, actual relocation has been a leitmotif in our relationship since we first met. I had just moved to Los Angeles and he had been pondering spending a few years in Saudi Arabia, where there was an overabundance of overpaid contract work. Due to my lack of enthusiasm for gender apartheid, we didn't riff on that notion for very long.

There were other near-moves and actual relocations. We moved from LA to Cleveland for my husband's job and spent five years fantasizing about getting the bleep outa'there, which we finally did, settling on my home town of Washington DC so my parents could be near their grandchildren. We lived there for a good long while, but my husband hated the climate and pined for Los Angeles. As far as I was concerned, that was not an option. Too much asphalt, too much sprawl, too much time gone by. Still, the wanderlust never fully dissipated. We took a family trip to Costa Rica and marveled at the lush scenery, tropical climate and enticingly low cost of living, but couldn't quite see ourselves as gringo neocolonials. After an Alaska vacation, we seriously contemplated a move to Seattle. We pictured ourselves boating in Puget Sound and salmon fishing in the Inside Passage. We'd get a large freezer to store our catch after it was flash-frozen and shipped. I even looked into a Winter dogsledding trip in Denali, which my husband informed me I'd have to take, and pay for, by myself. The wilderness beckoned - the Olympic mountain range, the Cascade volcanos, the alpine lakes of British Columbia.

Three years ago we did move West, but adjusted our destination to the Bay Area. We thought it would be a better advertising market. The HR person in my old job told me I was so talented, I'd have no problem finding a job. (She lied). Our son was (is) having a difficult adolescence, and the therapist recommended boarding school and a change of scene. I was mad at my parents, who didn't believe in ADHD and blamed all of our son's issues on our lousy parenting.

The first year was a romantic empty nest experience. We lived an unfettered adult life, went out when we felt like it, read lots of books, took walks and worried slightly less about our kid, mostly because we hadn't yet realized that the the artsy Ojai school we had chosen for him was a holding pen for spoiled Hollywood brats. My old boss kept feeding me freelance work. Our daughter graduated from college, moved to San Francisco and quickly found a job. Everything was falling into place like level 2 tetris.

And then it all went to hell. The kid, the economy, our daughter's career and grad school plans and my poor husband's joints. The long nature walks I'd envisaged as our bonding activity became solo meditations on hubris and loss. Our son got into all kinds of trouble. Our daughter left her boyfriend and moved back East. The lucrative freelance dried up when my old boss got down-sized. And my guilt at having moved away from my parents came crashing down on me like a cartoon anvil.

I eventually found a part time job telecommuting, ironically, for a Seattle agency and I get regular assignments from freelance contacts in DC, Philadelphia and New York. I work at home, in my pajamas, with only the dog for company. After checking off every possible transgression on the teen age hellion to-do list, our son is slowly turning himself around. I miss my women friends terribly. My daughter is a first year law student on the other side of the continent. My husband and I have no social life: It's hard to meet people when you both work at home and no longer have young children.

Why am I telling you all this? Because Joni was right. You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone. A home of your own, where you have a history. Parents who are predictably, charmingly annoying and turn out to be right about things like the dangers of uprooting yourself when you're not so young anymore. Comrades who know you and your life story, who get your jokes, who are actually willing to provide a sympathetic ear even if your story bums them out, because it's understood that sooner or later, you'll do the same for them.

You want someone to tell you to make your move and follow your dream? Go watch Oprah. Of course, if you have a job to move for, or you're young and unencumbered by family responsibilities, relocation can be an exciting possibility. But beware of wanderlust. It could be naive romanticism in disguise. An adult ADD impulse. A desperate need to believe that you're still young and daring. A subconscious desire to escape things that will hitch a ride on the moving van and resume tormenting you after you unpack. My advice to you is bloom where you're planted - as long as it's not Cleveland.

Old Times

It was lunchtime at Bellini's, a Harry's Bar wannabe in Cleveland, Ohio. I don't recall whether it was business or pleasure or who I was meeting, but I remember having to wait, always a good excuse for alcohol. I'm normally a sapphire-gin-and-tonic-two-limes person, but this time, I'd gone for the girly drink: one of Bellini's eponymous slushy peach cocktails. I glanced above the bar at the TV, on mute and tuned to an ancient rerun of Mayberry RFD. And then my head exploded.

No, it was not brain freeze from the frozen bellini. It was the stunning revelation that I looked older than Andy Griffith.

We all have our Andy Griffith moments, those holy-shit-am-I-really-that-old awareness flashes. Anything can trigger one, from catching an unexpected glimpse of your reflection to dealing with some horrendous, life altering problem and wondering how did I get here? (Cue Talking Heads). Any way, your age is your age. You can let it trip you out or you can shrug it off. Or, I suppose, you can lie.

I recently saw the profile of a childhood acquaintance on a social media site. She lists her age as ten years younger than my sister. Who, in turn, is four years younger than me. Which would make this lady (yes, math face, this was a test) fourteen years younger than yours truly. I'd be jealous but for the fact that, back when we were in school together, our age difference was only three months. I don't get this. Fourteen years is hard to pull off. People from your past know your real age. And personally, I would rather have people say I look "good for my age" than exclaim "Oh my God what happened to HER?"

Now, money is the great equalizer and Madonna has plenty of it. She is throwing massive amounts of cash at preserving her hotness. She has incredible hulk veins from excessive working out. Her forehead is smooth and shiny as Olympic ice. Bony spurs have sprouted beneath her eyes. I think they are supposed to be cheekbones. The poor thing has to work so hard to work it, you almost feel sorry for her. Madonna, here's a little creative direction for you. Take a step back and stop art directing yourself. Get back in touch with your original spontaneous, brash Italian self. Wear elegant cocktail dresses. Tone down the makeup. Eat some pasta and gain twenty pounds. Be real. Be entertaining. Have ideas and opinions or you will fast become an immaterial girl. As a performer, you are at an age where you either have substance or you start to come off like the drag version of your former self.

Yes, folks, we're all on the same subway – some of us got on early and some just two stops back. Fading isn't fun. No woman likes to look in the mirror and see her mother staring back. No man enjoys throwing his back out performing some heretofore routine task. And whatever your gender, having to wear reading glasses really sucks. So yeah, you can throw money at plastic surgeons and personal trainers and colorists and aestheticians and that may work for a while. Just try to maintain some perspective. Think about charitable things your money could do. Remember your bucket list. Wouldn't you rather cross off Tibet than have a tummy tuck? Take a long hard look at Joan Rivers and see if you don't get a little queasy. (Which isn't to say it doesn't suck to age out of, say, your staple clothing stores. I remember thinking The Limited and Express would get me through the rest of my natural life. Now, I don't even go in those stores: I rely on J. Jill and Chicos and hope to God I don't look like Michael Phelps' mother.)

Life, unless you're very lucky, gives you perspective on the vanity thing. A father with a troubled teen isn't too preoccupied with his own bald pate. A middle-aged mom doesn't tend to focused on the size of her butt when her own mother starts to show signs of Alzheimer's. Cliches like "Count your blessings" and "As long as you have your health" start to sound like the wisdom of the ages (or maybe the aged). The latest wrinkle on your face may be annoying, but rarely more so than the latest wrinkle in your life.



For the record, I meant THIS Andy Griffith...

Not THIS one. And no, I won't tell you my age, but I ain't lying about it either.

Talking Up Serpents

I was speed-walking distractedly down a ridgetop in Briones Park, pumping my arms and kicking up dirt. The light was long past golden, and I was determined to get back to my car before sundown, when the bobcats, coyotes and mountain lions come out. My mini-back pack was starting to dig into my shoulders, and as I stopped to adjust the straps, I noticed something long and white flapping in the brush. I crouched down to get a closer look. Draped over a shrub was a discarded snake skin, paper thin and rustling in the wind. It had obviously been shed by a rattler of impressive proportions. The head and tail end were missing, but the skin was still over a foot long and maybe one and half inches wide. I picked it up for a closer look. I could see the fishnet pattern of the snake's back scales, and the parallel ridges that had once girded its belly.

I tucked what appeared to be the least fragile end of my find into the back pocket of my daypack and resumed walking, the snakeskin flapping behind me like a banner. A couple of hikers were coming down the dip in the path ahead, towards me. Of course, I had to ask if they would like to see my snakeskin - an invitation that, were I a man, could have made me sound like what my daughter calls "a huge perv". But I am an eccentric middle aged lady, and if they thought I was insane, they did a good job of hiding it. They paused for a quick look - I think they were impressed.

I had seen rattlesnakes at Briones a couple of times before. Now, I watch my step. Especially since I broke my distance glasses about six months ago and have a tendency to confuse cow pies with coiled serpents. (One smells, the other hisses). But I made it safely back to my car. Despite its fragile appearance, the skin held up quite well and currently adorns my office bulletin board.

Once I had done a little research, I was less impressed with myself for finding that snakeskin. It seems rattlers molt three or four times a year, depending on how well-fed they are (strictly a function of the size of the rodent population). Out of 16 varieties of rattlesnake indigenous to the United States, a grand total of ten can be found in California. It is likely that my souvenir was shed by the redundantly named Crotalus oreganus oreganus, or Northern Pacific Rattlesnake. And now, a few fast facts about rattlesnakes:



• They are easily identifiable. That signature tail is just one of the rattlesnake's distinguishing characteristics. Rattlers have thicker bodies than most snakes and triangular-shaped heads with a distinct “neck”. Their lidless eyes are hooded, with elliptical pupils. Don't get close enough look into them or you might discover that rattlesnakes strike at a speed faster than the human eye can process! While rattlers have much better night vision than we do, they are profoundly deaf. However, they are exquisitely sensitive to vibrations, such as those caused by your approaching footsteps.



• They give birth to live young. Yes, I realize the photo is about as gross as the extra-terrestrial hatchery uncovered by Sigourney Weaver in Alien 2. No, I did not take this picture: I would have dropped my camera and run screaming from the room. Rattlers are ovoviparous, which means that their eggs hatch inside the mother's body and the young are born live. The 10-inch long snakelets are already venomous at birth, living proof that not all baby animals are cute. These babies won't get their first rattle until their first molt, roughly ten days after they are born. They compensate by being more aggressive than their elders. Fortunately for us hikers, many rattlesnake young are gobbled up by hawks, eagles, badgers, or coyotes.



• They add on a rattle every time they shed. However, the rattles eventually break off, and it's rare to see more than ten of them on a single snake. The notion that you can tell a snake's age by the number of rattles on its tail is simply not true – rattlers can live for as long as thirty years, but you never see one with thirty rattles. The rattles consist of keratin "beads" of hardened skin around the snake's tail. When the serpent shakes its rear, the beads bump against each other and make that signature warning sound.

If you see this florid organ on a rattlesnake, it means he's glad to see you.


• They have strange body parts. Rattlesnakes are pit vipers. This term refers to a pair of openings, called loreal pits, located on the sides of their heads. Loreal pits are an infrared sensing device, enabling the snake to sense the temperature difference between the cool night air and a nice, fat chipmunk. (Remember the alien's heat-seeking vision in Predator with Arnold Schwarzeneger? Same concept). Snakes, including rattlers, don't smell with their snouts. They flick their tongues in and out to sample odors in the atmosphere. Inside their mouths is the "Jabobsen's organ", which relays smell information from the tongue to the brain. The forked tongue is a directional aid that lets the snake know whether those tempting field mouse pheromones are wafting from the left or the right. The lucky male rattlesnake has two penises (or is that penii?), called hemipenes. (The bad news is he's hung like a sea anemone - see photo above). He only uses one hemipene at a time, and both remain inverted inside his body until it's time to get busy.



• They have retractable teeth. If a rattler is busy sunning itself while digesting some hapless quail, its fangs lie flat inside its mouth. But when it gets ready to strike, they rotate downward 90 degrees, into stabbing position. Like little hypodermic needles, the snake's hollow fangs inject venom into its prey. Designed to fall out and grow back several times a year, the fangs break off easily, sometimes getting swallowed right along with dinner. The snake's hinged jaw can literally drop out of its socket, enabling it to swallow prey as large as a cottontail rabbit.


Slumber party!

• They take the winter off. Rattlesnakes hibernate from November to April, usually in large groups. They like rocks or rodent burrows but have been known to camp out in the basements of buildings. In the summer, they spend their days chilling under rocks and shrubs. Hunting happens at night, with the help of those heat-seaking Jacobsen's organs.

• Their bite rarely kills a healthy adult human. Rattlesnakes can actually regulate the amount of venom they release. They may bite "dry" in self-defense - why waste perfectly good venom on something that's too big to eat? If you do get a shot of venom, you could be in big trouble. The poison disrupts blood clotting and destroys tissue. Even with prompt treatment, scarring is inevitable. Read about 13 year old Justin's snake bite and look at the hideous photos of his surgery, if you dare. (I'm actually sorry I looked - the poor kid's arm looks like a detail from an anatomical drawing of a flayed man.)

• Which brings us back to shedding. Rattlesnakes slip out of their outgrown epidermis as soon as they emerge from hibernation, and they shed two or three additional times each year. The snake rubs its nose against a rock or branch until it creates a big enough tear to start slipping out of his skin, which turns inside out in the process. It would be nice if people could do the same - simply shed our exterior when it starts to cramp our style. Wriggle out of our past. Grow a new skin. Of course, any human who can pull this off is probably already a snake.


More fun with Northern California fauna:

elephant seals
Berkeley-ites
Ravens
cougars
newts
goats
clown perverts


P.S. Happy Halloween!

No words.

I'm sorry, I can't talk now. It's August. I have been working like a dog for the past three months, including weekends. I have been writing non stop about things like hip replacements, multiple sclerosis and gynecological surgery. I'm about to devote my entire weekend to a website for a PR firm. Am I grateful for the income? Very. Am I having interesting, potentially blog-worthy experiences? Nope. That would require leaving the house.

Now, my daughter is here visiting for a month before she starts law school. Or doesn't start law school. She is getting cold feet because she's having such a great time as a freelance writer and would rather become a journalist. I alternate between the you-will-never-make-a-living-in-that-dying-industry speech and the follow-your-heart-and-do-what-you-love speech. Truth is, I know she will have regrets no matter what she chooses. She is a glass half-empty kind of gal. That is not my daughter in the photo, by the way. I was looking for gag visuals to illustrate the concept of "no words." I picked that girl because she wasn't trussed and leather clad. Don't do a visual google on "gag" or you just might.

Anyway, since I have had no life recently, I have nothing to say. I need a break, and I need to spend some time with my kids and my husband. So I am officially going on hiatus for the rest of the Summer. See ya' in September.

Namastoe

It had to happen sooner or later. My inevitable yoga accident. Did I dislocate my shoulder in the three limbed backbend known as Wild Thing? Nope. Did I strain my neck looking around at my neighbors while in shoulder stand? Not this time. Did I hit my head against the wall, falling in an aborted handstand? No, at least, not recently.

Here's how it went down. I was in three-legged dog with my leg pointing toward Nirvana. Using way too much momentum, I swung my leg in to transition to a lunge, but my foot was angled wrong and I slammed my pinky toe on the hardwood floor. It hurt like a son-of-a-you-know-what. What's more, the instructor was focusing on me because I was new to his class. Gritting my teeth and planting my good foot solidly into the floor, I held my breath (huge yogic nono) while he adjusted me in Ardeshandrasana. Mercifully, I was on my good foot – my other leg was extended, foot flexed, broken piggy delicately throbbing.

I did not cry wee, wee, wee all the way home: I stuck out the class. I am macho that way. I was able to slip on my loose sandal and drive home but by bed time, my foot was swollen and mauve. The next morning, the little toe and its cleavage were the color of a grape popsicle.

I skipped the x-ray and doctor visit. I have it on very good authority that all they do is tape your toe and send you home. So I stayed home, and taped my toe. My spouse keeps shaking his head and giving me pitying looks. Years ago, I tripped over a vacuum cleaner cord and snapped my big toe in half. On the X-ray, the severed phalange floated above the rest of my toe like a little cloud of bone. But my husband doesn't remember the vacuum cleaner, or the cord. He says I just started doing some random spaz dance and fell over, which, given my modest degree of natural coordination, is entirely possible.

Goat World

I was walking down Berkeley's Wild Cat Canyon road, to my left the grassy hills of Tilden Park and to my right, a series of rustic modern homes perched on the sloping terrain. As I approached a blind curve, I heard a plaintive moan. It was a nasal, insistent, baritone in a pitch not uncommon for a male voice. The sound, however, was not human. And while there are several herds of cows in Tilden park, it wasn't bovine either. The mystery resolved itself when I rounded the bend: Before me was a vast, standing-room-only herd of goats, in the throes of a feeding frenzy. Never mind that the menu consisted of thorns, thistles and knee-high, dry, dead grass. It was an all you can eat buffet.

Fire season is serious business in California. One carelessly tossed cigarette and a brush-covered hillside can burst into flame like a fourth of July sparkler. A sizeable chunk of Oakland, Piedmont and Berkeley was virtually vaporized in the Oakland Fire Storm of 1991. 2,800 homes and all the surrounding old growth vegetation went up in smoke. The neighborhoods have been rebuilt, but they can also be re-burnt if the surrounding hills aren't groomed on a regular basis. Ergo, the goats.

As a fire hazard reduction system, the eco-friendly goat method has really caught on. The tactic is both green and efficient: Four hundred hungry goats can level an acre of vegetation in one day! The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission rents the four-footed mowers to help chew away potentially hazardous vegetation growing too close to their water pipelines. Google uses a herd to trim the open spaces around their headquarters. Even private citizens are going goat. A lady in my business women's networking group recently posted an inquiry for a herd to come chomp on the daunting thistle patches that were encroaching on her property from the hillside behind her house. (Goats don't really eat tin cans, but they are partial to weeds - a belly full of poison oak or poison ivy only leaves them itching for more). She got multiple responses, including a link to Goats R Us, a family business located right here in Orinda.



I don't know exactly where the Goats R Us folks have their farm, but I have seen their herd in action at Briones Regional Park. They employ a goatherd who stays on site, in a shabby old trailer. He works with a pair of energetic and ostensibly Spanish-speaking border collies. If the goats begin to stray, he grunts something en espanol, and the dogs spring into action. When the hillside has been thoroughly cut back, the goats are carted off to do their baaaaaaaad thing somewhere else.

Goats live about as long as dogs do, and when they get to be a decade or so old, they're not so keen on boarding a truck to go grazing. Goats R Us pampers their old nannies and billies, whom they affectionately refer to as retirees, and put them out to pasture close to home. This is kinder than what is happening in a lot of Bay area restaurants, where ( sorry, vegans) goat meat is all the rage. I had cabra stew once in Mexico and it was not an experience I am anxious to duplicate. Goat cheese is another story. As proud as I am of my French heritage, I have to admit that Californians make some damn fine goat cheese. Humboldt Fog by Cypress Grove Chevre, has plenty of character. Redwood Hill Farms makes a great French style "crottin" and their website is fun to visit, although the use of Vivaldi for their video tour is slightly, if appropriately, cheesy.

So next time you find yourself at a petting zoo, give that little goat an extra handful of pellets to say thank you. For its meat and milk. For mohair, alpaca and pashima. And for helping the State of California keep the annual fire season under control.


I once dated a guy who looked like this.



Say cheese.


Goats in the Smithsonian
Goats-a-gogo

My cup is half empty.

Dispatch from Planet Yoga. Today,I showed up for a crowded class taught by the Strawberry Man. As I lay my mat down in the front row, I noticed the receptionist, one of a half dozen boho babes who work at the studio in exchange for free yoga classes, setting up three people down from me. I turned my attention back to my own mat as the Strawberry Man began recounting the legend of Shiva and Shakti, which he saw as a parable of male/female relations. The Strawberry Man seems to think about the man/woman thing quite a lot.

But back to the receptionist. It's not that I was staring – like a good yogi, I do my best to turn inward and focus on my own practice. But as I contorted my spine to try to achieve a perfect revolved triangle, I caught sight of her doing the same. My soft yogic gaze suddenly sharpened and fixed itself on four giant ringworms on her back. Bright red, like Target logos. Except for the one on her neck which looked like an out of control hicky.

So much for turning inward. Ringworm is contagious. Highly contagious. Almost as contagious as Ebola, Pink Eye or the Macarena. I spent the whole rest of the class obsessing over whether the poor girl was using a communal mat. I always bring my own, but while I wasn't personally at risk, the thought of the entire kula breaking out in circular fungus blooms was just too nasty. Especially when, at the end of class, the receptionist rolled up her mat and slipped it back on the shelf for the next unsuspecting yogi.

What should I do, I wondered? Talk to her? How rude. She might get mad and she's bigger than me and why would I want to make the poor girl feel bad? She probably had no idea about the ringworm. How often does one look at one's back anyway? (The only time I ever check out mine is after a carbohydrate binge, when I feel compelled to do a butt-check, and I'm invariably sorry I looked.) And yet, I couldn't just stand idly by while Molly Ringworm infected the entire studio.

In the row behind me, I had noticed the Strawberry Man's sister, also attending class. She is a fantastic yoga teacher in her own right, and an empathetic person. Perhaps I could quietly alert her to Molly's fungus situation and the studio would stage a dermatological intervention. But by the time I thought of this, class was letting out and the Strawberry Man's entourage had dispersed. There was no one else at the studio whom I felt comfortable narcing to. So I took the coward's way out; I went back to my car and left a voicemail.

The next morning, I got a voicemail back. The receptionist was not contagious, she had been cupped. This is a form of alternative medicine in which heated glass cups are applied to places on the back that may or may not correspond to acupuncture points. As the cup cools and contracts, it forms a vacuum, sucking up the skin. The oldest mention of cupping is in a 1,550 year old Egyptian medical textbook called the Ebers Papyrus, but it seems some version of the practice exists in every culture, from China to Europe to the Middle East. My mother remembers cupping from her French girlhood, albeit none too fondly. The procedure may be tonic, or therapeutic, or simply have a placebo effect – I have no idea. But it does leave unsightly red burn marks that look a lot like ringworm.

Anyway, now I don't have to feel bad about embarrassing the receptionist at the yoga studio. It seems I've embarrassed myself instead.



Ringworm? Cupping? Tattoos by Target? You be the judge.


Zorba and Bouboulina share an intimate moment.

Links:

Gwyneth Paltrow loves cupping.

The cupping runneth over.

A cup, a cup, a cup, a cup, a cup.

Meet my other blog.

Like Eucalyptus Way? Check out my other blog. Generally shorter, snottier and less sentimental.
http://snideties.blogspot.com/

Safe and Secure?

My eighty year old father-in-law is in no way chipper. He has limited mobility and uses a wheel chair. And yet, he feels compelled to prove his old-manhood and fly south to Florida every Winter so he can look out at a golf course he's too infirm to play on and maintain a pool in which he's never even dipped a toe. The yearly migration is all the more of an ordeal because someone on the No Fly List shares his common Irish name and surname. The poor guy has to have his wife wheel him up to whoever's in charge and proactively explain that he is not a member of the Irish Republican Army.

No doubt my father-in-law is the victim of overzealousness on the part of airport security. But my own recent experience exposed incompetence of a different sort. I was on my way to see my family on the East Coast. By the time I realized I had left my California driver's license in my back pack the last time I went hiking, my husband had dropped me off curbside and driven away. I called him in a panic, but there was no time for him to get the license and come back: I was going to miss my plane. Get on the BART and come home, my husband sighed. You'll never get through security.

Instead, I threw caution to the wind. I still had my old, expired DC license in my wallet. The California DMV had punched a hole where the expiration date used to be. Don't know why I kept it. Probably as a marker to evaluate how much I've aged in the past three years. (A lot). I put on my best poker face and handed my invalid, perforated license to the Baggage Checker. He stared intently at my photo. Then at me. Then at my photo.

The Baggage Checker gave me back my i.d., took my suitcase and waved me through.

On to security. I took off my shoes and my jacket, piled my stuff into a bin, sent it down the ramp and headed for the Security Chick's podium, briefly contemplating whether I should cover the hole in my i.d. with my thumb as I handed it to her. The Security Chick snatched my card and aimed her little flash light. She stared intently at my photo. Then at me. Then at my photo.

Did I mention that I was returning from a different city and therefore had a one-way ticket? Danger, Will Robinson! Homeland security red flag!

The Security Chick handed me back my bum license and waved me through.

Having pulled off my subterfuge,I felt strangely guilty. Guilty and nervous. So nervous that when I stopped at the ladies' room, I left my boarding pass on top of the toilet paper dispenser. Fortunately, the nice lady who went in right after me noticed and handed me the pass before shutting the stall door. I went to wash my hands and plopped my carry-on down on the ground. Next thing I knew, a young woman was standing right behind me. "Is this your bag?" she asked.

Irrational thoughts flooded my brain. Is she undercover FBI? Does she think I'm a terrorist? Is flying with an expired license a federal offense?Are they going to call the bomb squad and try to detonate my carry-on? No, no, I don't think so, and no. She was a just a young mother and her own mom was right behind her, brandishing a poopy toddler. My bag was blocking their access to the fold-out changing table.

The rest of my trip was uneventful. My husband Fed-Exed the valid license to my parents' home, just in case the DC airport security staff was more competent.

Somehow, I doubt it.