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Personal blog of christian
writer & fallible mom
Katy McKenna Raymond
in Kansas City, Missouri

Katy is represented by
Greg Johnson at
WordServe Literary

Read more Katy at
LateBoomer.net

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Recent Posts

• Try
• Becoming Brenda Starr
• Off Beat
• Scattered
• That’s It
• So I’ve Finally Signed With An Agent. Now What?
• The Spoon
• Sciatica
• Sweetheart
• A Woman’s Train of Thought Has No Caboose
• However much we own, we are all still living on borrowed time
• After all, when restaurants shrink portions, they don’t shrink prices.
• As with everything in life, balance is key.
• Slow down, you move too fast…
• Yeah, I know. I have issues.

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E me at katy @ ngenius.com

One Block Over (#395)

I think about Walnut Street pretty often, seeing as how it was only one block over from Grand Avenue, where I grew up. Walnut Street held way more fascination for me than Grand ever did.

One of my best friends, Mary Mahoney, lived on Walnut. She was the oldest of seven girls and her mother taught me how to sew on a sewing machine when I was in the fifth grade, but that was before Mrs. Mahoney (who sewed one entire outfit per day since she had seven daughters to keep in Easter dresses) sewed right through her own finger with the machine needle and made me doubt her competence.

I didn't sew much after that.

My Girl Scout leaders, Mrs. Sparks and Mrs. Hymer, both lived on Walnut. They were short, middle-aged blondes with pixy cuts and stylish clothing which may or may not have been custom-made by Mrs. Mahoney--I guess I'll never know.

We had Scout meetings at Mrs. Sparks' place, and she presided over me completing enough badges to fill a sash, making me feel like a plump, green, miniature Miss America: the Cooking badge, Books, Crafts, Sewing (thanks to Mrs. Mahoney), Knitting, Outdoor Life, Music, Theater, and the most coveted of all for Catholic Girl Scouts, the Marian Badge. Devotion to the Virgin Mary is not without its rewards.

Later, when I was twelve or so, Mrs. Sparks started sellling Elegance make-up door-to-door out of a naughahyde bag, and I became one of her sales representatives. I bet I earned eleven dollars or so before I decided Walnut Street ladies must not be the Elegance Cosmetics type.

My very first experience with Walnut was when my new seven-year-old twin friends Maureen and Marian Smith turned down the street to take the shortcut through the Scanlon's backyard in order to get to their own house on Grand Avenue. This would have been OK, except that it was my first day at St. Elizabeth's School, and Mo and May were supposed to help me find my way home. Their mom told them so.

(We didn't have a car back then. My mother and father couldn't drive and besides, I was the oldest and my mom was busy with all those little kids. I walked a lot.)

I didn't dare turn down Walnut Street with the twins, though they egged me on to do it. "It's OK. We do it all the time. We jump over the flowers and climb the fence and then watch out for the dog who bites and then we're there."

If I followed them, I'd have to jaywalk across Grand to get to my house, and I was only allowed to cross at corners. My mother had told me to keep walking until I saw the house on the corner with the pink paint, and to cross there, turn, and walk three houses till I came to mine. Since there were no other pink houses, that's how I would find Grand Avenue.

By the time I'd walked the long block alone--for Mo and May deserted me--I was lost. So lost that I approached a big lady waiting at the bus stop. I was crying. "Could you please tell me where Grand Avenue is?" I asked. She scared me a little, because she had very dark skin, and I'd never seen anyone in the whole world with dark skin. She folded her large self almost in half, to get down to my level.

"Why, honey, it's right here!" She pointed up to the street sign, which because I was seven years old I could read, and she was right! Then I saw the house on the corner with the pink paint, and I was so happy I wanted to hug her.

(Later Mama told me that if she was a dark woman, she was a maid, that she did ironing for one of the ladies on our new street, but that she didn't live anywhere around us. That's why she was waiting for the bus. That made me sad. She was nicer to me than anyone had ever been. I was really hoping she lived on our street.)

My education on Walnut Street was complete the day I walked past the school on a Saturday and saw the nuns' underwear hanging out on the clothesline in the convent yard next door.

A girl grows up mighty fast once she finds out the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet wear black bras.

---

Deep (#396)

You know how people say they love a certain piece of art because it speaks to them "on so many levels"?

Doug and I just got back from the Plaza Art Fair, where we actually began to question whether or not we have levels.

---

Role Model (#397)

Every time I come across this quote from the wildly prolific Isaac Asimov, I get a kick out of it all over again:

"Whenever I have endured or accomplished some difficult task--such as watching television, going out socially, or sleeping--I always look forward to rewarding myself with the small pleasure of getting back to my typewriter and writing something. This enables me to store up enough strength to endure the next interruption."

---

Evidence (#398)

I don't trust computers the way some people don't trust banks.

You know the kind of folks who really believe all that nonsense about how if you had $100,000 on deposit in the bank and you went to withdraw all your funds in cash, they wouldn't exactly have it? That they'd have something like $7000 of your money, and the rest would have been loaned out to needy individuals and businesses?

Yeah, those people. Well, I'm just like that with computers.

Today I bit the paper-and-enormously-expensive-ink bullet and printed out my novel-in-progress. Then I three-hole-punched and bindered the 130 pages, and I've been smiling at it ever since.

It's a book now, in my mind--an incomplete one, a largely unedited one, but a book. It turns out I'm way more of a hard-copy kind of woman than even I knew. There's something so hopeful about finally holding in your hand the evidence of things not seen.

I've feel like I've just been to the bank and pulled out all my cash in small bills.

---

Today (#399)

Here's a question that's more challenging the older you get, and since I'll turn fifty soon, I'm plenty challenged:

"When was the last time you did something you've never done before?"

Being a visitor in a psych unit was new for me, an experience everyone should have at least once. I don't, however, plan to expand my resume by becoming a patient there.

I'm also getting a little professional counseling, a first for me--not because I haven't needed it, but because I'm chicken.

How about you? Do you intentionally stretch yourself by taking on new experiences? I'm curious.

---

On Her Rocker (#400)

Mom's still in the hospital, taking even more mood-altering drugs than she was before--all in an effort, of course, to stabilize not only her problems with depression and anxiety, but her seizure disorder and other medical issues.

As a result--which we can only hope is temporary--she is quite unsteady when she tries to walk.

This wasn't lost on her ten-year-old grandson, Brendan, when he visited her and, with his dad, helped her take a little stroll.

"What did you think of your grandma?" I asked the lad on the phone yesterday.

I'm so glad I asked, because his response gave me a great story to share with my mom, who laughed her head off when I told her.

"Oh, I thought she was doing pretty OK," he said, rather philosophically for a young man of his age. "Except that when she walks, she swivels."

Always, always, beauty from ashes.

---

Crappy Birthday (#401)

"I'm pathetic," I told Scott. "I picked up the first birthday card I saw, and bought it."

Today is my husband Doug's Big-Five-One, and I'm off my game. What can I say? Some years, it happens. I usually choose beautiful, romantic cards with grainy photographs of guitars and lace and brass beds with rumpled linens, but not this time.

It's not Doug's fault, of course, and I guess it's not mine, either. It's just life.

I read Scott the text of the card, and I could discern his inward groaning through the phone.

"So," he said, a little cautiously, "you just grabbed the card with the sports car on it, and that was it?"

"Worse," I admitted. "I grabbed the bright green one with the gold glitter dollar sign in place of the letter S."

"Whoa," Scott said, and with that, I knew he understood everything I'm going through.

And, I must say, so does Doug.

---

Deja Vu (#402)

"Are you in the shower?"

Her voice was thin, shaky, and I could picture her holding the phone away from her face, on the edge of hanging up and moving on down her list of memorized numbers.

When the phone rings as early as it did Tuesday morning, I know what's coming. Other people's mothers, though, might start a conversation with "Are you awake?" or "Are you eating?" or "Are you in the middle of something?"

Not my mom.

"No," I said, calmly, but on red alert. "I'm not in the shower. I'm sitting at my desk, talking to you. What's going on?"

I knew as soon as I heard her voice precisely what was going on, and that the day had finally come to admit her to a psychiatric unit. By the end of the day, the deed was done.

She had many crying jags that day, making it like most days recently. At one point, she looked at me and said, "This is the day my mom died, thirty years ago."

I'd forgotten the date somehow, and the knowledge of it startled me, especially since Mom had let me know that she herself wouldn't be surviving to see the next day.

And then it hit me. The day Grandma died, when I was eighteen, I didn't immediately answer my phone when the call came. Mom tried to reach me five or six times in a twenty minute period on that long ago death day. I would have responded, of course, but I was in the shower.

"Are you in the shower?" Mom asked.

No, Mom. I'm right here.

---

Water Log (#403)

We don't own a rain gauge, but let's just say we've had about a gazillion inches of the stuff in the last 48 hours, officially ending a horrible drought.

"The neighbor's pond's looking better," eighteen-year-old Kevin says. "Can't even see the shopping cart."

That's life in the boonies.

---

Little Train That Could (#404)

A typical conversation in the Raymond household:

Katy: {Insert eloquent, intelligent, insightful comments here.}

Doug: Exactly.

Katy: You're just agreeing with me to end the conversation. Like if you said, "Absolutely."

Doug: But sometimes when I say that it really is the end of your train of thought.

News Flash to Husbands Everywhere: Your wife's train of thought has no caboose.

---

The Widow’s Right (#405)

My brother John has been running to a local grocery and fixing himself salads for lunch when he doesn't have a sales meeting. Two weeks ago, an elderly patron of the salad bar befriended him.

"Add kidney beans," she advised. "It's the only bean that won't make you fart."

He took her advice and wasn't sorry. A week later, he ran into her again.

"How are you doin'?" he asked.

"Do I know you?"

Did she think he was hitting on her? An old lady can't be too careful these days.

"We met here last week, and you said I should get the kidney beans, and I did," he said.

"You know," she said, as her eyebrows furrowed and she waxed philosophical, "kidney beans won't make you fart."

It is a rare woman--and a determined one--who has gathered unto herself such a miniscule amount of the universe's knowledge, and yet is so willing to share.

During today's lunch hour, he saw her for the third time, and he greeted her in his usual friendly manner.

"I remember you," she said, and he saw something register in the vicinity of her eyes.

"I haven't farted," he responded.

She smiled. "I told you so."

Like the biblical widow who gave her last two pennies in the temple collection, behold a woman who gave everything she had.

---

Onward (#406)

Today I discovered my rantings/writings of some weeks ago.

What I love about me--and how weird is that phrase?--is that even when I'm really, really sick and horribly despairing, I manage to hang on to humor. I was really, really sick and horribly despairing when I wrote this:

"So I've written 7000 words, and I'm stuck. So stuck that I've gotten the migraine from hell, the kind that sends you to the ER for Demerol and then to bed for a few days, and then to the optho-neurologist, just to be sure your optic nerves aren't so irretrievably swollen that you're about to go blind all together.

He will say there's nothing remarkably wrong with me, unless he adds that there's been an incidental finding of a brain tumor that he wasn't really looking for. (Don't laugh--those are the words a doc once used to pronounce me neurologically healthy, except for the brain tumor.)

The doctor won't be able to believe that I would devise such shallow and hollow excuses as migraines and tumors for not pushing forward with my book. He will find me a poor specimen of a novelist, if there ever was one.

'But I don't know what to write next,' I'll whine, like he's a shrink. Sure, he's my head doctor but not that kind of head doctor.

'Well, what happens next? Shouldn't you just write what happens next?' he'll ask, innocently.

That's just the most maddening thing a human can ask, as far as I'm concerned. What am I? A fortune teller? How do I know what happens next? I made these people up, but I can't just dream up situations to plunk them into as if they were any random characters, like my husband or kids, or something.

The stuff that happens to them can only happen to them, and I have to know them really well before I know what kind of stuff could happen only to them.

Every time I think I've got a good start, it all comes to a sad end. I've got nothing."

Well. Since I wrote those words, I've added another 23,000 to the novel. It's not everything, but it's not nothing, either.

I'm not really sick right now, and the despair could be more horrible than it is. So I press on.

After all, I am a fortunate patient. This time, at the neurologist's, there were no pesky incidental findings.

---

New Life (#407)

I wasn't eavesdropping, but I couldn't help overhearing snippets of the two young women's conversation in Starbucks.

Here is the essence of what I heard: adultery, verse, every day, chapter, two weeks, God, fear, that's what he does, questions, reason, love, forget, dream, pray, experience, know, remember, scared, worried, sure, hard, it's over, Holy Spirit, let him show you.

And I thought, Yes, that just about says it all.

---

Time (#408)

On my desk in our bedroom is a framed black-and-white picture of the five of us, taken on Scott's birthday two years ago. It is not crisply black-and-white-there is a hazy, grainy quality to it that makes it look older and perhaps wiser than it is.

We all look happy and relaxed and young, seated in the grass by a stream on the Plaza, legs crossed, heads in hands, content.

In front of the picture on my desk in our bedroom sits my round clock from the Pottery Barn, the one Carrie gave me a couple of Christmases ago, when she was just a girl. It is round and sits on stumpy silver legs like an old, beloved Big Ben, with a black knob on top for my fist to stop the day from beginning, should I find the idea disagreeable.

The clock is big, and so must sit six inches in front of the picture so that I can see the photograph while I work. The light shines through the window just so today, causing the silver backing on the clock to be superimposed by reflection over the five of us, as we sit by the stream, content.

On Doug's shirt, the reflection of the black arrow on the clock's back points the opposite way from what it should. Dare I take a chance on turning back the hands? If I followed the arrow's mirror-reverse direction, would I end up losing time or gaining it? Would my husband have cubits added to his life, or subtracted?

On the leg of Kevin's jeans, a rectangular door has appeared. The current battery grows old, I am certain. Who knows if the clock is even keeping accurate time at all? If I replace the battery behind the little door, will time end up going faster, slower, or at just the right speed?

Will I ever be happy with the speed?

I listen to the clock for several minutes; it never misses a beat. The distance between the time of the picture and the time of the present grows ever longer.

Do I only imagine that the five of us in the hazy June picture look younger and younger as the clock ticks from now steadily into forever?

The light shines through the window still, only now I know what I must do.

I move the clock to the other side of the desk and keep on writing.

---

So We’re Even (#409)

Sometimes, Dave Barry is the only man on earth who can clear matters up for me. Yesterday's column about females and their rear ends served just such a purpose.

Don't get me wrong. I understand the whole rear end thing. Dave's column provided the answer to a related question that has disturbed me for years, and he didn't even refer to my actual question once.

We've all read the studies on how often men think about sex. I've asked around, and the sheepish looks on the faces of the males I've queried has supported the results of the studies.

My question has always been, "So how do men actually get anything done? How are they able to be productive members of the work force, upstanding citizens, good husbands and fathers and neighbors, with all those distracting thoughts hitting their little minds at the rate of one every five seconds? How?"

As it turns out, men have oodles of spare thought time in spite of their pesky predilections. Dave Barry says that decades go by without the average male giving a single thought to the size of his own rear end.

Ladies, I ask you. Can you imagine what we could accomplish with all the time those guys have on their hands?

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