Archive for the ‘Maggie Van Ostrand’ Category
When Mother’s Day rolls around every year, I remember my mom’s often-said favorite lines that my sister and I called the 7 Deadly Sayings. And how much we hated hearing them. I suppose my own kids are saying the same thing about me, since I unwittingly carried them forward with the next generation.
Maggie van Ostrand
I expect most moms have their own 7 Deadly Sayings but, just in case you want to compare notes with mine, here they are.
1. On a slovenly room: How many times are you going to step over those dirty jeans before you pick them up?
2. On whining, such as “OMG, the prom’s tonight and I’ve got this huge pimple … ” That should be the worst thing that ever happens to you.
3. On abject misery: Give up your pain for the poor souls in purgatory. They’ll get out sooner.
4. On a way to make me shape up: Do you want me to tell your father about this?
5. On a mini skirt: Are you really going out like that?
6. On bad behavior: Just wait until you have kids of your own.
7. On how she apprehends a transgression: I’ve got eyes in the back of my head.
Along with my dad, she would sometimes spout off with:
If a job is once begun,
never leave it till it’s done.
Be the labor great or small,
do it well or not at all.
I especially loathed that poem, partly because it took so long to hear. I never wanted to hear it again in my entire life. I hadn’t realized back then how much and how subtly it influenced me. I learned that lesson in the most embarrassing way: when my own daughter was encouraging me to stop procastinating, she said the hated poem and she said it imitating me, as I used to imitate my mom. Nonetheless, hearing it once more, I was forced to complete my tax returns.
The worst thing about mom’s sayings, and that dreaded poem, is that they were usually right, and they always worked.
Well, I don’t know about the rest of you but, I’m weddinged out. There hasn’t been this much media coverage of an event since Lindsay Lohan’s last arrest. Nothing wrong with the Royal Wedding’s bride or groom, and nothing wrong with the opulent setting of Westminster Abbey, though I’m resisting the temptation to criticize some of those hats that looked like the women’s heads had exploded in spaghetti, bowling balls and a
few birds.
Maggie van Ostrand
Questions were raised by my kids who viewed the event and thought there would be “at least 100 other people watching this, right mom?”
Questions from our kids can drive a mom insane because it’s humiliating to have to say “I don’t know dear,” when moms are supposed to know everything. It’s no longer enough for them to know we really do have eyes in
the back of our head, now they want answers, too.
“Mom, what’s a troth?” I thought it was a lazy troll (troll + sloth = troth.) My daughter had to wait another full day before I had time to find out that when we pledge our troth, we are pledging fidelity. Seems like overkill to
me, since they had already pledged to “forsake all others” and keep one another “only unto him/her.” Poetic and lovely, but redundant. Not wishing to editorialize, I just told her “fidelity” and to look it up.
Prince William and Princess Catherine
The kicker question which required research was “What’s that square in the floor that everybody is walking around?” I wanted to know that as well and learned that it is the burial place of The Unknown Warrior from World War I. In that hallowed spot upon which not even kings and queens may trod, lies an unidentified British soldier killed on the battlefield during World War I. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on November 11, 1920. There are many graves on the Abbey floors, including Chaucer, Dickens, Austen, both Bronte sisters, Kipling and, well, you get the point, but The Unknown Warrior’s is the only grave which is forbidden to step on.
Thanks to the Internet, I was able to answer the questions of my curious kids, all questions except one. We just cannot figure out why everybody calls the bride Kate with a K when her full first name of Catherine is spelled with a C.
Maggie van Ostrand
All is not lost in networkland. In an effort to liven up the otherwise snooze-worthy Oscars for next year’s telecast and bring back the millions who dozed off right after Kirk Douglas’ earlobes presented Best Supporting Actress to Melissa Leo, Charlie Sheen has been hired to host in 2012.
Celebrities attending the annual event will be encouraged to wear their own jewelry, buy their outfits off the rack, and say how they really feel about attending. It is felt that women viewers might favor hearing celebs respond to the hackneyed question, “Who are you wearing?” with “WalMart.” Actresses, now referred to as “female actors,” will be asked to butt out and be photographed only from the front. Celebrities will continue to walk the carpet, which will be green in an effort to attract Westminster Dog Show viewers.
Because of the conventional mid-show sag where awards are given out that nobody outside the industry has any interest in, the second half of next year’s show will be co-hosted by Sheen and Jerry Springer, the theory being that bad taste is better than no taste at all.
You don’t like the President’s budget proposal? Try the Top 10 from the People, who kept it simple so members of Congress can understand it.
Maggie van Ostrand
First a few reminders: Salary for a House member is $174,000, not counting perks, one of which is called their “allowance.” This is a euphemism for lots of extra taxpayer money ($900,000, commonly called “almost a million”) given to them for office supplies and salaries for almost 20 loyal underlings. They get about $250,000 (commonly called “a quarter of a million dollars more”) for office expenses (what, that wasn’t covered in their ”allowance”?), including travel (we’ll bet they don’t go Economy and we also bet these might include golf trips). You don’t even have to be alive to get this money, as evidenced by the late Robert Byrd’s continuing salary of $193,000 even after he’s been in the ground since last June.
We the People aren’t crazy about learning that Senators get even a bigger allowance for their office expenses … more than $3.3 million. Each senator is given $500,000 to hire up to three legislative assistants. If they’d only learn to type for themselves, that taxpayer money could support ten taxpayer families. Let us now get to our simple Top 10 Items, to wit:
Contractors are all the same. They just have different faces so you can tell them apart. It’s a nightmare for a single home-owning woman to deal with male contractors who seem to think we’re not the ones paying them. For one thing, they don’t look you in the eyes, they look you in the chest. They don’t talk to you as a human being, they talk to you as a dimwitted slug. In fact, they don’t really want to talk to you at all, they want to talk to a man, preferably your husband, the one they assume pays the bills.
Maggie van Ostrand
For some reason, when contractors can talk with your husband, it brings a lower job estimate than if they have to talk to you, a woman, otherwise known as someone who thinks a Philips Head is the head on the neck of someone named Philip, when it’s a special kind of screwdriver with a wonky tip.
What if you haven’t got a husband at the moment? You are defenseless, powerless, and apt to sign the contract they so presumptuously shove at you with the pen they just happen to have in their hand. I’ve experienced shoddy workmanship without a husband to direct and inspect their work before final payment is made. And that was before I realized I needed a new roof.
When it dripped rain on my sleeping head during a recent storm, I realized the old roof wouldn’t last another winter, and started calling roofing contractors. I learned how to deal with feckless contractors; there’s nothing more frustrating than to handle a contractor with no feck.
It gets tiresome listing all the things you want to change about yourself but know in your heart you’re bound to fail. Again. Like you do every year. My resolutions were getting too elastic anyway. I kept resolving to not get hysterical every time I got lost while driving somewhere new, and then I loosened it to blaming Map Quest and then loosened it further to shrieking at my new GPS because it didn’t know left from right. What’s the point of making these resolutions?
Maggie van Ostrand
Instead of doing that this year, I’m going to thank the unsung heroes who invented things that will continue to make life easier for yet another year.
The Whistling Tea Kettle
Since I tend to be absent-minded when concentrating on a topic to write about, or if I’m on a phone call, or if I find myself deliriously embedded on the Internet researching a story, I would’ve burned the house down years ago, if not for that shrill whistle, alerting me to water reaching the boiling stage. So I consider English inventor Sholom Borgelman (changed to Borman) a hero for inventing the whistling tea kettle in London just after World War I. Read the rest of this entry »
Christmas shopping for me will always be the once-upon-a-time of memory: walking on Fifth Avenue — it’s probably snowing, windows decorated like the fairy tales of childhood, with incredible train sets, dolls with beautiful porcelain faces and long yellow hair dressed in ball gowns from royal courts of “the old country” (as grandma used to say). One year, such a doll danced with a toy soldier in a red jacket and tall, feathered hat. Round and round and round they went, never to tire, never to grow old. A little girl like me could stand, enthralled, holding onto my mother’s hand, having all these precious gifts, if only for that moment.
Maggie van Ostrand
There were replicas of steel suspension bridges; an entire miniature department store with different floors, an up-and-down elevator, tiny people moving about, cash registers with tiny numbered tabs which shot up ringing a little bell for each purchase; incredible mechanical dancing clowns; log cabin villages with families standing outside, smoke coming out of the chimney as a young Abe Lincoln sawed logs outside; everything seemed to have moving parts.
One year, there was a metal cathedral maybe two feet high which played Christmas carols sung by (I learned later) the Vienna Boys Choir. Nothing was made in China, with the possible exception of children’s sets of China cups and saucers you could see through if you held them up to the light. The steel railroad cars that sped on metal tracks right through little villages with blacksmiths who banged away on an anvil, trees whose leaves never fell, The General Store with geezers spinning silent yarns on a bench outside, tall and short houses, one of which contained an immobile quilting bee, bus stops, and the wonderful Train Station itself. No wonder boys and their fathers were held in a state of rapture looking in the store window at such life. We used to imagine these wonderful toys coming to life after closing time, little anticipating that one day, movies about that very fantasy would be made, perhaps by grown-up kids who once gazed longingly in those same windows.
Today’s kids will also have Christmas memories: plastic logs, plastic computers, plastic dish sets, figures of plastic comic book heroes. If you ask a five-year-old what he or she wants for Christmas, chances are they’ll say “A television for my room,” or “an iPad,” or “my own Blackberry.”
Whatever gifts children get, be they an old-time working replica of a Ferris wheel, a modern-day Angry Bird app, or set of giant stuffed germs, we can be sure of one thing: considering the heavy plastic used to package today’s toys, batteries, even cosmetics, unless they have a flamethrower, nobody will be able to open the boxes.
Every time my kids ask what I want for Christmas (or birthday or Mother’s Day), I now tell them “nothing.” Last year, I told them “Nothing I have to dust,” but that didn’t work and I got a bunch of nice presents I have to dust. Thanks, kids. They must get their gift ideas from their grandmother, who continued to send me a pair of white gloves every single Easter, even though I moved to Los Angeles where nobody wears gloves except the coroner.
Maggie van Ostrand
Last Mother’s Day, when my son asked what I wanted, I described a knee-length, white terry cloth robe with belt. Nothing fancy. I just wanted a robe like the one that had literally worn through; small wonder, I had it since I was about 18. In fact, there was a robe exactly like the one I wanted hanging on the back of his guest bathroom door. I showed it to him. “Get me one just like this! This is it!!”
When the New York Journal assigned this interview, it could not have known how difficult it would be to get to the bottom of the Rudolph myth. Neither could it have known how complicated would be the logistics involved in getting reindeer witnesses together to talk to us. Luckily, our quest for success resulted in new and sometimes shocking information.
Maggie van Ostrand
According to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, both male and female reindeer grow antlers every summer. Reindeer are the only members of the deer family (Cervidae) in which this phenomenon occurs. “What, you think horny females are limited to humans?” sneered Vixen. She was a bit edgy, having recently given up smoking.
“You must tell your readers that male reindeer drop their antlers at the beginning of winter, usually late November to mid-December and we retain our antlers till after we give birth in the spring,” added Prancer. Therefore, according to every historical depiction of Santa’s reindeer, all of them are female. “Humans should have guessed as much,” she grinned, “since we’re able to find our way to your house without directions.”
