By the mid-seventies, although my divorce was still several years in the future, I had two kids under the age of five and was embarking on my new life as a single mother.  I was living in Arizona.  I had managed to pay cash for a used 14 X 70 mobile home which was parked on what we called my parents’ “back forty” on Border Road in Bisbee Junction.  (Border Road was a much safer place back then than it is now, but that’s a whole other story.)

I had a job selling life insurance under the best possible circumstances—my immediate supervisor, my District Manager, was two hundred miles away in Phoenix.  Through a set of circumstances that still seem miraculous to me, I had a wonderful babysitter—Dolores Decker.  I would stay home doing paperwork in the mornings, looking after the kids while I did so.  Then, after meeting up with my parents for forenoon coffee at the Doughnut Shop, I’d hand the kids off to Dolores and go to work.  I had both my parents and Dolores as backup. ( How my daughter has done everything on her own is something that I marvel at every day.)

The mines had already shut down by then, so my clients weren’t in Bisbee so much as they were scattered all over Cochise County.  If you’ve read my Joanna Brady books, you know it’s a big place—80 miles square.  If I had evening appointments in Willcox or Sierra Vista or Benson or Douglas, I’d have to drive home once the appointment ended, all of which made for my getting home late at night.  Once I did, it would take a while to unwind before I could go to sleep.

My kids—who went to bed at a reasonable hour—were early risers.  I was not.  It pains me to admit that I often left them under the watchful eye of Captain Kangaroo for half an hour or so while I got myself work wise.  (My daughter, who always gives me high marks on the quality of my mothering skills when she was little, has obviously forgotten the Captain Kangaroo era!)

One evening when I came home, Dolores reported that earlier in the afternoon when she put the kids down for naps, she found my daughter playing nurse with her younger brother and handing out baby vitamins.  As a reasonably responsible mother, I kept the medications on the top shelf of the kitchen cabinet—well out of the children’s reach, or so I thought.  What I neglected to realize was that, with the help of a handy kitchen stool, my daughter could clamber up onto the kitchen counter and from there, reaching the vitamins was a snap.

What to do?  I didn’t want to endanger my kids, but I still wanted to get my beauty sleep.  I went to bed and thought about it for a while.  Then I got back up and went back to the kitchen.  There I located a light-weight metal pot lid and put that inside the kitchen cabinet in question with the lid leaning against the inside of the door.  The next morning, I was dead to the world when the pot lid clattered into the kitchen sink.  By the time I stormed out of the bedroom, demanding to know what was going on, my daughter was out of the kitchen entirely.  I found her huddling in a corner of the living room saying the words, “That never happened to me before in my whole life.”  

And it never happened to her again, either.  I kept the pot lid there for weeks, and it caught me unawares more than once, but my daughter was permanently cured.

I’m writing this in Coos Bay, Oregon, where I’m doing a series of four library presentations for local Friends of the Library groups.  It’s a six and a half hour drive from Seattle to Coos Bay.  On the way down we stopped off at the Thirsty Lion Pub in Portland to have a bite of lunch.  I ordered an appetizer of Tahini meatballs and an order of roasted Brussels sprouts.  My mother would have been astonished at the very idea!  She was never able to get me to eat a Brussels sprout on a bet, but then she never cooked them the way I like them—with a good char all around.

For dinner, once we arrived here, I ordered the prime rib.  Let me tell you, I was lusting after that “fully loaded” baked potato.  Dan, our trainer, says no matter how much you exercise you “can’t outrun your fork.”  What I’m trying to do is teach my fork to make better choices.  Instead of the potato, I ordered sautéed spinach with slivered almonds, and I left the restaurant feeling like I’d done a good job.

While we’re in Coos Bay, we’re staying at the Mill Hotel and Casino.  On the backside of the building is a long boardwalk—part board and part pavers. A  round trip from one end of the boardwalk to the other with an additional circle in the far parking lot adds up to a 1400 step lap.  It’s cool and overcast today.   Yesterday it was clear and sunny.  When I went out to walk, I wore a bright red shell and an equally bright red visor that my daughter and granddaughters gave me for Mother’s Day the year we all went to Europe.  (I confess, the visor had languished for a couple of years in an unopened compartment in an under-used piece of Roll-Aboard luggage, and I only found it when we were packing to come here.)

As I went striding up and down the boardwalk two different people, complete strangers, told me how terrific I looked.  I was thunderstruck.  As a kid I was always the Ugly Duckling.  I was the tall, gawky girl in pig-tails who wore thick glasses and who couldn’t catch a ball of any kind.  Ever.

To have two complete strangers tell me that on the same day when I’m verging on age 72?  Well, to quote my daughter, “That never happened to me before in my whole life.”

Oh, and before I sat down to write this blog, I finished today’s ten thousand steps.

Walk on!!