The Good Vibrations Tour

(From the WP version of News From Hawkhill Acres)

We’re back from wallowing in the (somewhat limited because it’s not tourist season) fleshpots of coastal Maine. It was a really nice break from dealing with what winter has done to our house, driveway and psyches. And speaking of Crystal Energy Healing Power (just seeing if you’re paying attention), did you know that amethyst is supposed to help with anxiety, sleeplessness and symptoms of ADD/ADHD? Well, according to the proprietor of a little shop we visited where shelves of precious and semi-precious stones and crystals attracted my crow-like children’s eyes, it is.

It’s no secret that both of my kids and my dh have been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder. However, after living with the effects of ADD for lo these thirty years (in June), I can’t help but wonder why it’s called Attention Deficit Disorder or ADD instead of Attention Surfeit Syndrome or …  Ah, maybe that’s why.  After all, everyone I know who has the diagnosis has no problem paying attention. Give them something they’re interested in and you can’t tear their attention away. Put them in a room where there’s a lot going on and they’ll pay attention - to everything at once - which effectively means that they don’t pay attention to anything.

I have the opposite of ADD, whatever that is. I can focus on anything unless there’s a full-blown melee going on or someone is throwing food at me, so, I don’t need an amethyst crystal to help me keep my mind on what I’m doing. Daughter, on the other hand, who has trouble sleeping to the point where she’s been known to waken and run to the window several times a night in the autumn when the leaves are falling, because one fell outside her window, does need an amethyst or anything else that will help her relax and get those zzz’s that are so necessary to her well-being. (Not to mention that when she doesn’t sleep, I don’t sleep.)

So we got an amethyst and she put it under her pillow in the motel room and it worked. She slept like a top. That, of course, led to a discussion of whether there really is anything to the whole “crystal energy healing” that the shopkeeper talked about while we were there. My theory, and I always have one, is that there might be something to it, because of vibrations.

Physics teaches us that everything in the known universe vibrates constantly. Every piece of matter and anti-matter, including the matter that makes up the human body, is moving at a frequency of its own. (Of course, with humans, you tend to notice it more when they’ve had a lot of coffee.) So why shouldn’t crystal vibrations have an effect on humans?

While I don’t want to teach my kids that every cockamamie theory that New Age devotees come up with makes sense, I don’t want them to have closed minds either. And, of course, there’s the ol’ placebo effect. My feeling is that why it works makes very little difference as long as it does work. If Daughter sleeps better because she thinks the amethyst helps her sleep, then it’s helping her sleep.

Coincidentally, my brother sent me some large chunks of salt crystals for my birthday. They’re supposed to help clear positive ions from the vicinity of computers and electronics OR you can take a bath with them in the water and it relaxes you. I opted for the clearing the air wheeze and have two of them next to my PC. I can’t tell if they’re generating any negative ions, but they sure are pretty and soothing to look at. (And in a pinch, I could break a little piece off and sprinkle it onto my sandwich if I forget to salt it before I bring it downstairs from the kitchen.)

Besides absorbing crystal lore, we spent some time beach combing and also visited The Farnsworth Art Museum, home of the Wyeth collection. Both of my young artists were inspired, so after the museum we went to a really well-stocked art supply store in Camden and bought enough oil pastels, oil paints, paper and brushes to equip all three of the Wyeths. We walked around Camden until we felt like we lived there. We had several really good meals and the kids loaded up on cable TV, because we don’t have much TV at all at home.

The only downside to our trip was that my usual bad hotel karma was working. We had booked our hotel from Wednesday night to Wednesday morning, so I was flummoxed when the bill slid under our door on Saturday afternoon. When I talked to the manager about it, he said he’d understood that we wanted the room for four nights and had already reserved that particular room for someone else, so we’d have to take a smaller room with double beds rather than queen-sized beds if we stayed.

We decided to spend our last two nights in Bangor, so I made a reservation at a motel there, telling them that we wanted a “quiet room with two queen beds on the first floor.” The woman I talked to said there’d be no problem with that. However, when we arrived and went to the desk, another woman told us that we had a room with two double beds.

“But, I specifically asked for queen-sized beds,” I told her.

“Well,” she said, sounding as if I should know this, “There ARE no rooms with queen beds on the first floor. They’re all doubles.”

“Okay,” I said, “Then how about something on the second floor.”

She said that was doable, so we got our keys and headed up to our room. It was spacious, clean and quiet, so we brought our bags up and were unpacking when a horrendous whining noise broke out in the room next to us. It sounded like about a hundred dentists drilling at once. We all looked at each other in shock. I phoned down to the front desk and asked the desk clerk what the heck was going on and she told me that some repairmen were fixing a light, but they’d be done soon.

Two hours later, they were done and we settled down to some peace and quiet. We sent out for pizza, watched a little TV and went to bed, only to be awakened at 11:30 by the new occupants of the room next door (we were calling it Hell Room by this time). They seemed to consist of about twelve toddlers and seven yappy little dogs, but at breakfast the next morning, we met them and it was two toddlers, an infant and one yappy little dog with ADHD. Boy, could that crew have used some amethysts.

Yea, Nay, What the Hey

(From the WP version of News From Hawkhill Acres)

Somewhere in the bible there’s a recommendation that you “let your yea be yea and your nay be nay.” I believe this was an admonition against swearing as in “I swear to high heaven I did NOT take the last cookie. It must have been the aliens that swooped down and sucked it up with their ray gun.” For some reason, god had a thing about people using oaths or embellishing their yeses and noes.

Well, I can relate to that. I decided a couple years ago that I was going to do everything within my power to say “yes” instead of “no” to my kids, even though my genetic makeup leans toward the other model of parenting. That would be the parenting style where you automatically say “no”, no matter what your progeny asks you, on the basis that whatever they ask you is a bad idea and will lead to tears, bruises, a mess or time behind bars.

When my youngest son died suddenly, I realized that the parenting style that I had been raised with wasn’t the way I wanted to raise my two remaining kids. If I had realized what a lousy parenting style it was, I would have dispensed with it when we acquired our first kid, but we can’t go back and do this parenting wheeze over, unfortunately.

So, from 2006 on, I’ve done a pretty good job of saying “yes” to almost everything my kids have asked of me. Luckily, I have pretty sensible kids. They seldom ask me if they can do things that are dangerous or expensive or extremely time-consuming. But yesterday, my son asked me something that I couldn’t say “yes” to and it’s bothered me ever since.

He’s 18 and his two best friends are 17. They have their licenses. He has his permit. They were all going to a movie and he asked me if he could ride with his friends. I didn’t even have to think. I said, “No, I’m sorry but you can’t.” He said he understood and gave me a hug and a kiss and went upstairs to bed, but I could tell that he was disappointed. Why wouldn’t he be?

Today, his friends pulled up to the movie theater in Josh’s little red car with the bumper sticker that reads, “Don’t piss me off. I’m running out of room to bury the bodies.” Never mind that Josh is a nice kid who gets straight A’s, babysits his little sister and has never given his parents a moment of worry. The bumper sticker says it all. “I have a license, a car and a healthy level of testosterone.” Showing up in the passenger seat of your Mom’s SUV with your little sister in the backseat just doesn’t cut it.

I’m really sorry. I wish I could see my way clear to letting Son ride with his friends. If they had been driving for a year longer, I’d give it my blessing. If Son had enough hours in to get his license and had passed his road test, I’d loan him my car and he could show up driving a vehicle and be on a par with his friends.

But, for now, he’s just going to have to put up with being driven around by his mom. It makes for some awkward moments and adds several trips a week to my schedule, but it beats lying awake nights wondering if I’ll be getting a call from the State Police. There’ll be plenty of time for him to give me gray hair when he gets his license in a couple of months. Of course, what with the price of gas, he’ll be lucky if he can afford to drive past the mailbox.

And speaking of driving, we’re driving to the coast of Maine for a two week vacation. This blog will be on hiatus until we get back. I’ll probably have a lot to blog about, seeing as how Son and Daughter and I will be sharing a motel room and Daughter and I will actually be sharing a queen-sized bed. Don’t miss the next exciting installment of “As the Clamworm Turns, A Maine Idyll” or something like it.

Shifting From Park To a Low Idle

(From the WP version of News From Hawkhill Acres)

One spring ritual around here is the April visit to the Dodge dealer to get the ol’ Durango sorted out after a season of driving up and down the rutted washboard formerly known as our private road. It was great when the warranty was still in effect, but the odometer hit 100K in March, so this time we’d have to pay. I was going to skip the whole thing, but then we got a safety recall notice on it, so the geek, who works nearby, dropped it off one morning.

I had his weak excuse for a vehicle, which is even more decrepit now that I backed into it last weekend. In my defense, he’d parked it within two feet of my rear bumper, almost blocking me in between it and the garage. But in his defense, it was one of those deals where I came out, looked at his car behind mine, got into my car, started it, looked in back of me and crashed right into the sucker.

How I could miss a whole car is troubling, unless you take into account that I was being yakked at by a ten yr old who just got “Disney Friends” for the Nintendo DS and has to tell me all about Stitch, Pooh, Dory and Simba’s doings whenever we get into the car. Why she saves it up until then is a mystery to me, as is so much of my interactions with other people, including Geekdaddy’s surprisingly gracious reaction when I went in to tell him that the Durango’s trailer hitch had gouged several huge holes in the Taurus’s front bumper.

His only concern was that the airbags hadn’t gone off and once I assured him that they hadn’t, he gave it a brief, unconcerned look and went back to blogging about union matters and Daughter and I went on our way to town.On our way, we picked up the mail and there was the recall notice for the Dodge. And that’s how Geekdaddy ended up calling me the next Monday afternoon to tell me that there was a little problem with my car.

“Well, it’s not unsafe anymore,” he said. “As a matter of fact, it couldn’t get any safer. It’s so safe that you can’t possibly get into an accident, because you can’t drive the thing. They can’t get it out of Park.”

He went on to tell me that the head mechanic was working on it, but if he couldn’t get the shift to move, the dealership would rent a car and deliver it to the geek at the computer mine where he works. However, about an hour later, he drove into the driveway in the Durango. Obviously, there’d been a paradigm shift. Or a shift of some kind.

He said the dealership had called another dealership or something and had figured out how to get the shift to move out of Park without stripping any gears or shredding any metal, which is a good thing when you’re dealing with transmissions. No harm was done. There was no charge and the Dodge was once more fit for duty.

The thing I found the most ironic about the whole thing has to do with the reason we brought it in. The safety recall was to fix a problem that Durangos have with jumping out of Park. Odd that the repair seemed to create the opposite problem of not being able to get it out of Park at all.

There’s probably some kind of deep message there, I’m sure, about balance or yin and yang or something philosophical like that. However, I don’t have time to go into it right now, because I have to call the Dodge dealer and ask them to come tow my car in so they can get it out of Park, where the shift is stuck apparently permanently, albeit it safely, in the driveway.