Giant Update!

well, it has been an interesting few days. on friday afternoon stan picked me up because he was going to test drive new cars. see, they've been thinking that it would be easier and cheaper in the long run to get a car for me to use rather than taking off work to drive us places. so they started looking into cars, thinking they can give it to their son when he turns 16. anyways, Fran wants a mini cooper so stan and i went to test drive minis. he took me along just for the heck of it. yesterday, sunday, they bought one. i've overheard enough to know that olive is paying for who knows how much of it, since (in theory) i'll be using it to run errands and things. they are going to play with it for a while before i get it, but supposedly i'll be able to have it "three or four days a week." oh. my. word.
yesterday i went to the singles ward for church. there were maybe a dozen people there, fairly split down the middle gender wise, though two of them were missionaries. the girls in relief society (a whopping six of us) were fairly nice and the missionaries are adorable idaho boys that are so cute you want to spoil them and pinch their cheeks. (although the cheek pinching may be the result of living with a 91 year old woman.) the rest of the guys, save one, are (as I told seth) gnome-like creatures that emerge periodically into the sunlight but avoid the fairer sex at all costs. i half expected them to hiss or curl into a ball like a beetle if i looked at them. not that you would WANT them to pay attention to you. heavens no. and of course every person in my family (and the church) over the age of sixty is determined to marry me off in the next few weeks, which is frightening since i've seen what they have to offer. oh. my. word.
then today i was sitting with olive outside, since it's nice out, and i was trying to think of something to say. she can't carry on what i would consider a normal conversation because she can't hear well and has a hard time understanding things. so everything i say to her is half shouted and very simple so there is low chance of misunderstanding. or so i thought. i saw a disgusting lizard creeping towards me and after shooing it away, mentioned that i had had a friend who had served a mission in LA. for some reason she heard the word "friend" and interrpreted it as "fiance". she immediately began pestering me with questions like, are you going to marry him when you get home? what does he think about you being down here? what does his parents do for a living? and various other questions all involving the word marriage, or some form of the word. i sat there for a brief moment thinking, 'how in the world did she connect those two things together' then tried desperately to explain that just because i had a guy friend, doesn't mean we were engaged. i kept saying 'he's just a friend' and 'no he's not upset about me being down here because we aren't engaged' and finally tried to explain that he was dating my friend and so therefore not engaged to me. she asked if he was going to marry her and i said 'i don't know. it's not really my business' which she interpreted as "yes". then she got fairly upset and said, 'well, does he love her?' on the one hand i am very confused about where all of this is coming from and on the other trying very hard not to laugh because its all so completely ridiculous. somehow it went from me saying "I have a friend who served a mission in Los Angeles" to me suddenly getting married to seth being engaged to two people at once, one of whom olive is SURE he doesn't actually want to marry. ((seth and daneesha i am soooo eternally sorry for somehow getting your personal lives dragged into such awkward questions. i really have no idea how it happened. please please forgive me.)) even now, as i write this, im laughing because i STILL can't figure out how she linked everything. of course, this particular line of thought led to a firm lecture about not taking anyone's advice about love (again, this is funny because that's exactly what she was doing) and somehow this led to a tangent about divorce. all from a rather inocuous little statement triggered by a lizard. i can just IMAGINE what will happen if she gets even more confused and calls my grandma to relate everything. a bloated, runaway defense budget run by republicans can never inflict as much damage as a few elderly women with telephones and nothing to do. OH. MY. WORD.

As the title may have suggested, all of you lucky receipients of these messages are going to receive them whether you like it or not, because typing these are one of the great highlights of the week. So deal! (Enter evil, dominating laugh here). The following letter may sound a bit disjointed because the subjects have nothing to do with each other, but are a bit amusing, at least to me.

First of all, those of you who have ever been to BYU-Idaho know the squirrels are evil spawn of satan with homicidal tendencies. The squirrels out here, however, actually act like animals, except they are so numerous I fear they may one day rise up and reclaim the state in the name of Squirreldom. Whereas the Rexburg squirrels were rather small, unremarkable, and rather rabid, the ones out here are large, brown and hyperactive acrobats. Considering all of the people out here, you would think they wouldn’t be afraid, but they seem to be more scared of humans than we are of Dick Cheney with a gun. I must admit it is impressive to watch them leap three feet and land on a branch an inch thick. But I still keep a wary eye on them because when their cousins in Rexburg give the signal to attack, at least I will be ready.

Every day for the past few weeks I have heard a Lady GaGa song playing over the loudspeakers from the nearby middle school. Why they blare this song over and over again for hours is beyond me. At first it just made me want to GagGag, but now I’m being reminded of the true meaning of the word “gaga”. Occasionally a voice will interrupt the song, telling a student to report to the office or to return a lost sweatshirt. Why is it so loud? The entire valley doesn’t care if Billy needs to report to the principal’s office. And what about his poor parents? "So I heard your son Billy got called to the principal's office," the neighbors will say. "What'd he do?"

So I may have mentioned the excessive amount of pricey cars out here, like BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar, and the occasional Astin Martin. To those of us who live in the real world, these cars would seem like a pretty cool thing to have, but out here, everyone has one, so it doesn’t really seem like a big deal. In fact, if you only get the “low end” BMW everyone is looking at you like, oh please how lame, kind of the way we would wonder why anyone would buy a dumpy Ford when the F150 is readily available. Anyways, I was at a stoplight the other day, looking out the window, and a Ford Explorer pulled up next to me and I got really excited to see a Ford SUV. I thought, “Oh my gosh, a Ford” with the kind of reverence most people reserve for Lambouginis. Then I thought, “Good grief, I’ve been away too long if I’m getting that excited about a FORD!”

So, Olive has been in a rather snarky mood the last few days and constantly mentioning in a polite, roundabout way that she’s bored. Of course, everything I suggest for her to do to occupy time and whatnot, she turns down, so I’m having a hard time conjuring up sympathy. But last night I was able to figure out how to start the fire in the old-school gas fireplace. She’s been wanting the fire lit since I got here, but she couldn’t remember how to do it and I obviously had no idea, so we haven’t had a fire. (Not that one has been needed in 70* Southern California weather.) Regardless, having a fire made her very happy and brought back all of these memories about her husband, most of which I’d heard before. But she had a few stories that were interesting. She said her husband was somewhere down south once, working on a movie, and she went down to visit. So there she was, a woman from Hollywood and used to polite, wealthy society, in the Deep South. She said at one point, she needed to use the ladies room and asked a nearby black lady for directions to the “powder room”. The reply was, “Well, sweetie, I don’t know where the powder room is but the shi* room is over there.” She was so shocked that a lady would say that to a stranger. It was one of those rare, happy and lucid times where she sounds almost like her old self and I could understand why she had so many friends. She kept saying funny things like Greek men were “miserable, squatty” things and that Dick Cheney is “dumb as hell.” Every once in a while she’ll say things that shock even me and I’m so glad no one else can hear them or I’d fear for my life. Once she said she had a Jewish doctor. “I didn’t like him,” she said. “He was Jewish.” Or she’ll say she taught in Ogden, Utah and hated it because she had “a lot of blacks in the class”. Then in regards to the Hispanics it was “look at the kinds of people they’re letting in the country”. These may be things people think, but they certainly don’t say them out loud. Apparently when you get old, your brain gets some sort of laxative and it all comes squirting out all over the place. And embarrassing racist blurbs aren’t all. I’m used to swearing since many students in Bozeman had a wide variety of curse words they like to air out, but Olive is certainly giving them a run for their money on sheer volume. Who came up with this "sweet little old lady" crap? It all reminds me of the Monte Python skit of the town terrified of the local gang of old ladies who go around harrassing young people.

As a consequence of my situation, I have far too much time to think about things and since my conversations with Olive have to be very simple so she can understand me, my thoughts have likewise gotten simpler. This does not mean they are simpler in a purer, transcendently philosophical way, more like dumber. For example, I was thinking how much I dislike the sound of nail clippers clipping nails. I mean, who really cares about that right?, but I found the sound very annoying. Not as bad as nail files. This sound, to me, is far worse than nails on a chalkboard. It makes my bones hurt just thinking about it. I also stumbled across the thought that I dislike the sound of dishes clanking together, the brushing of teeth (because it reminds me of the dentist), the sound of liquid being quickly poured into a glass (because it makes me have to use the restroom), and Free Form Jazz. We’re all very sorry their cat died from horrible intestinal explosions, but must they record it and pass it off as music? I also don’t like the wascly wabbits wustling awound in the bushes because it makes me think my stalkers are getting too close again. I suppose I'll have to get out the Stalker-B-Gone spray again. On the other hand, the wooden steps up to my room creaky terribly, which I like, and when it rains, it makes the coolest sound hitting the roof and echoing around the lofted ceiling. I also found I really like the satisfying snap of the shampoo bottle lid closing. Good heavens, I need some serious intellectual stimulation.

During the war, Olive was a hospital recreation director, apparently the youngest one in the country. From what I could gather, she was in charge of entertainment for the soldiers in the hospitals recovering from whatever injuries they had sustained in Europe or the Pacific. She said the patients in the mental ward had to be locked up and anything from the outside that went in had to be checked for anything sharp, for safety reasons. One day she was supervising the mental ward while they were watching a movie or something and man comes up and opens his hand. Lying on his palm was a razor blade. Trying to stay calm she asked him what that was for and he replied with a smile, “To cut the faces of pretty girls.” She didn’t explain exactly how she got out of the locked room, but somehow she stayed calm enough to keep him calm and got the MPs to come in and take care of the situation. Then she said she was walking down the hall thinking, I think I handled that okay, and her knees buckled and she had to hold onto the wall to keep from falling. Delayed reaction shock I suppose. Her boss man told her she did a fantastic job doing whatever it was she did to control the situation. She said afterwards when she could be scared she was thinking, “How did he get a razor?” “If I hadn’t stayed calm all the other mental patients would have gone crazy.” Scary to think about. That’s been the only story she’s told me about the war until tonight. We were talking about something completely different and suddenly she said, “A guy came in and took off his medals and handed them to me saying, ‘I won’t have any use for these. They’re shipping me overseas tomorrow.’ He went under. They told me they bombed his ship and they all sunk.” I was like, “Geez, that’s rather…intense.” “Yeah, what do you say to something like that?” Indeed, what do you say? It reminded me of the Dixie Chicks song, Traveling Soldier. Depressing, but most excellent song. That’s where she met her husband, since he was in the Navy. They met in October and were married New Years. Then he went on to become a Park Ranger at Mt. Ranier and then eventually Death Valley. Olive told me it was so dreadfully boring for her there and one day she started to cry, thinking about how she had gone from being the country’s youngest hospital recreation director to sitting in a desert without car, radio, anything really. One of the stories she’s told me is when she was sitting on a big rock near their pool and her husband says, “Pigeon, why don’t you go inside and start dinner.” Ever the faithful forties wife, she did so without question. Suddenly, her husband came inside, grabbed his pistol and went back outside. She followed and saw him shoot a huge rattlesnake that had been curled up right next to her rock. Had she moved a few inches in one direction, it would have bitten her. I find this story more disturbing than the mental patient with the razor. I hate snakes. During the fireplace night, she told me how one of their friends had called to tell them that Stan’s song, Ghost Riders, was to be on the radio, on the show that played the top songs in the country. I think it’s similar to our “Top 40 Countdowns”. Anyways, the friends drove up and Olive and Stan crowded around their car to listen to the radio. They didn’t hear the song and Olive said maybe it hadn’t made it. Just as they were about to give up, the announcer said, “For the first time in the history of this show, Ghost Riders in the Sky by Stan Jones.” She said they all started to scream and jump up and down. I read an old magazine article written ten years later that said the song was such an instant hit, he made $100,000 overnight. Olive said it became the number one song of 1949 and there were so many people coming to Death Valley, not to see the desert, but to meet Stan Jones. Stan’s boss finally said he either needed to transfer to Florida or leave, so they moved to Hollywood. According to this magazine article, he never spent more than half an hour writing songs and wrote quite a few big hits. He also created and starred in the number two TV show for the time, though I have never heard of it.

Outside I saw a cloud shaped like a rabid beaver, teeth bared as it leaping to eat someone’s leg. Just thought I’d share that. The water here is so dreadfully chlorinated, when I turn on the tap I half expect a soggy pair of swim trunks to come squeezing out and somewhere, far away, a little boy is sitting in the corner of a pool, naked, and wondering what the devil is going on. There are also so many mushrooms growing in the yard every morning I expect to turn the hose on some Nirvana-seeking hippies. After all, this is California. I’ve given up on trying to keep this house as clean as it should be and am now simply trying to keep it liveable. It is impossible and frankly a bit ridiculous to mop the floor every day or twice a day because it adds that much stress to me and more stress is the last thing I need.

As you may have noticed by my pictures on FB, I am officially a thief. The lemons were hanging there so tantalizingly, just begging to be picked. There was an orange tree as well, but I thought an armful of lemons and oranges and mail and toting a 91 year old was not conducive to a good escape. Perhaps later, under the cover of darkness and wearing black, I’ll return and pilfer to my heart’s content. Then again, most of the houses here have security signs blaring “Armed Patrol”. I don’t really want to be shot in the process and be forever labeled Kim, the Citrus Kleptomaniac.

*On Monday I was feeling a bit stifled and about to go crazy, so I pop in my headphones and wandered the yard, dancing to music and wondering if a cartwheel would cripple me. During a particularily jam-worthy song, Olive comes outside. “Are you cold?” she asks. “No,” I answer. “But you’re shaking.” I reply, “I was dancing.” Well, not anymore. It reminded me of the joke about someone dancing like no one was watching, but someone was and, assuming the person was having a seizure, calls the ambulance. These jokes, along with the one from Tommy Boy about only doctors going to school for ten years, are no longer funny to me. Hitting a little too close to home, they are.

Tuesday morning Olive’s friend Heather called and in her lilting Scottish accent, asked me how I enjoyed my first earthquake. Though it was apparently large enough to be felt, I felt nothing. Nothing even shifted places on the walls or the shelves, so I decided it wasn’t a real earthquake and I certainly don’t count it as “my first”. Unfortunately, now every time I imagine a slight shaking or vibration, I freeze, thinking it’s the Big One, the earthquake to top all earthquakes, the worst event in California history. So I got onto some website that tracks earthquakes all over the world and emails you when events are happening in your area. I signed up thinking that I’ll get an email warning me of an impending earthquake and I’ll be able to mentally prepare myself. Then I realized when they send the email it will probably be DURING or immediately after the event, in which case I’m pretty sure I’ll already know we had an earthquake. It’s not like I’m going to run the gauntlet of a violently shaking house like some kind of Indiana Jones movie just to check my email and make sure that yes, this is indeed an earthquake I am experiencing. Whew! What a relief, wasn’t sure there for a second. As I told a friend from church, I’ve just hit the part in the scriptures when Christ was crucified and the earth was experiencing horribly violent earthquakes. Talk about bringing the scriptures alive! I’d rather not get THAT close to scriptural experiences thank you very much.

Aside from the angry earthquake gods, nothing else has really been going on this week. There are no new stories from Olive, though there rarely are, and this daylight savings bull poopy is really kicking my butt. This lack of sleep combined with my crushing homesickness for Bozeman just might be the death of me. Then again my death may involve an earthquake-caused giant, bottomless crevasse, like in the movies. I may fall all the way to China! An American in China without a passport. China with the roving death vans and the hundreds of disease with no cure. Oh goody.