That Voice, you know the one

I know all the parents in the audience—and not a few of you older siblings—will absolutely understand when I say, some children’s toys are obnoxious. Blinking lights, ear piercing sounds, you name it, those things were designed to make other people crack.

Someone once gave my sister’s boys these key chains. If you pushed the button, they lit up and played an annoying song. I’m sure you can imagine how pleased she was when her boys decided those key chains were the funniest things on the planet (times two, of course). I’m not certain how the boys managed to live, but this is where the story gets ugly. Children will be horrified, and parents will say, “No jury in the world would convict you.”

My sister’s husband saw one of the key chains sitting in the drive way. If he didn’t swerve the truck out of the way, he would surely run over it. He hit the key chain. Then he backed over it, twice, for good measure. He went to the store thinking that damned key chain was done and gone. It’ll teach the kids to leave their toys in the drive way. Ha, ha. Triumphant father drove over the key chain on the way home too.

When the boys came out to greet him, one of them saw the key chain. “Oh no!” he exclaimed as he ran out to grab the key chain, heart in throat at the loss of his beloved toy. He retrieved it from the driveway, and hit the button. The light went on, and the song played. All was saved. My sister’s husband glared at the keychain.

The key chain fell in the sink, was stepped on by the horse, chewed on by the dog, and, after my sister had warned them to pick up their things and it was left out, the key chain was put into a bowl of water and frozen.

Yes, frozen.

In the freezer it stayed for over a year as the family recovered from the parental hysterics (they hated that toy!), when my sister’s husband had gone on a fishing trip. When he returned with much fish on hand, they needed to go through the freezer to make room for the fish. Everything came out of the freezer, including the key chain.

It thawed, and one of the boys saw it. “Oh hey, there it is, I’d been wondering what had happened to this.” And before either my sister or her husband could get to it, he’d pulled the key chain out of the bowl that had encased it for a year, and he hit the button.

As the stupid song began to play, my sister deployed her husband for the hammer. Yes, the hammer. He smashed the key chain with the hammer… and you know what? The key chain got stuck on. As in, it couldn’t stop playing the first five notes of the song. Over and over and over.

Last week, as I was bemoaning the drudgeries of rewriting a manuscript, when Elizabeth Seckman made a comment:

“And the whole time the little voice never does go away that's whispering "you suck". I wish I could pull the plug on it, but I think it has a battery too.”

Whenever I think about the voice that nags the crap out of me (and it does!), I’m reminded of the key chains. Annoying song I can’t stand, a limitless supply of power, and my complete inability to turn it off. I don’t know if there’s any real cure for that little voice, but you can change its song. Give it a couple of lines, treat it like a canary and see if that stupid voice will sing some of those lines back to you (and hopefully not in an ironic way).

And just remember, everyone has that little voice.

Oh, and the key chain ran out of batteries after two weeks stuck in the on position, but it had to be banished from the house during those weeks. I’m sure you can imagine why…

Tales from ancient history: Magic is real

I’ve been lucky enough to go to Hawaii a couple times. On the first trip, I spent some time in Oahu. If you’ve never been to Hawaii, I can warn you, Oahu can seem like any other big city with one extra feature: miles of beach. Having lived in or around a number of cities with beaches attached, I didn’t swoon over Oahu, and I was starting to wish we hadn’t booked time there. The locals scowled, and we were solicited at every opportunity. I wanted to move on, get to the big island and see a real, breathing volcano. I wanted to go to Kauai so I could hike the Nepali coast, I wanted more than the tourist trap in a beautiful land. I’d already done that.

But being stuck in a city, we made the most of it. We walked the streets, poked our heads in the shops, and, of course, we found ourselves walking along a street where people were selling their wares from carts. One stall was a pick-a-pearl shop. If you’ve never encountered one of these, let me warn you, they are interesting, addictive, and anyone working such a stall will try to upsell you. They make their money selling jewelry for pearls that are really fake pearls shoved into a real oyster long enough to get a real pearl layer. Sometimes the pearls are nice, sometimes… not so much.

By accident, we’d stopped right in front of this stall while we tried to figure out where we were headed. Of course, the cute Hawaiian (and this is a guess, but he really looked Polynesian, so I’m going with native Hawaiian here) saw us, and called out to us. “Come on, pick an oyster, take a chance. There’s a pearl here with your name on it.”

Jokingly, I leaned away from the group and said, “Oh no, I couldn’t. I wouldn’t want to ruin you like that.” I’d been barked at a lot by people trying to sell me something. I wanted to turn the tables.

“How would you ruin me?” he asked. Clearly, I wasn’t playing by the script.

“If I pick out an oyster, it’ll have two perfectly matched, black pearls, and you’ll never be able to convince anyone it was true.” Now my group was interested. I didn’t normally engage the vendors in chit chat, and I never made predictions about what would happen. Who does? What was more, I knew it down to my bones. I knew I would. It was like the world had opened and I could see into the future just a short distance. It was a strange thing to know, but I had no doubt. None.

Complete madness. But I was completely willing to walk away, never having cashed in on it. Well, the vendor had other plans. I’d somehow presented him with a challenge, so he egged me on some more. I gave him one last warning. “I’m not kidding, you’ll never convince anyone this was real.”

Undaunted, he passed me the little tongs to pick an oyster out of the bucket. “This I’ve got to see.”

Now I had an audience, and everyone in my group was going to play. We all picked out our oysters, but the vendor kept a careful watch on me to see the trick. There wasn’t one. If we’d been bad people, we would have used that opportunity to maybe steal something, but we were all those goody-two-shoes types. When everyone had picked their silly oyster (at this point ensuring a pretty lucrative sale in the very near future), we all did the silly aloha welcoming for the pearl.

He took my oyster first. Can you blame him? I was a bit anxious myself. It was all bravado fuelled by a gut feeling, but my gut has led me astray before, would it this time?

He cut it open and out popped a black pearl. Then he hunted around in the oyster with his knife, and out popped a second black pearl, perfectly matching the first.

He jumped and yelled “Oh my god! How did you do that?” He shook his head in disbelief. He had watched every step of it. He’d initiated it. He’d called out to me, so how could he have been taken for a ride?

“Magic.”

I had the pearls set into earrings.

Tales of ancient history: the day I lied to my grandmother

First, I want to thank everyone for their kind words about my protag Boxy. After your comments, that story has definitely jumped the queue in WIP land. Thank you.

Today I’m starting a series of stories from my younger years, things that have happened to me, or those moments where suddenly the world just made sense in a different way. If this isn’t your thing, don’t worry, I’m going to try to keep these to one a week.

This is Vesta (image from NASA), an asteroid.

And to start off, the day I knowingly and willingly LIED to my grandmother.

Before this story will make much sense, you have to understand that my poor grandmother was incapacitated at birth by oxygen deprivation, and the damage was permanent and long lasting. She was the classic definition of slow, suffering from mental retardation. Now this didn’t hinder her ability to be part of a family, it just meant that she couldn’t read and had the emotional range of a six to seven year old. I loved her dearly.

But sometimes explaining the world—you know, like the lyrics to Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”—was challenging.

When I first came back from grad school (my undergrad was a long drive, but I made it home for Turkey day and Christmas every year; when I went off to grad school it was on the opposite side of the country) my grandmother asked me what I study.

Before this, I’d always told her “Rocks, Grandma, I study the way that rocks move and change over time.” It had been my standard response for a few years, but for some reason, I was feeling full of myself.

“I study meteorites, Grandma.”

She gave me the confused look. “What’s a meteorite.”

A cascade of answers flew through my brain: the oldest rocks in our solar system, ancient pieces of rock that didn’t become part of the planet, rocks kept from becoming a unified planet by Jupiter’s gravitational well, but none of them quite fit my grandmother’s working vocabulary.

“They’re rocks that fall from the sky,” I said.

She rolled her eyes at me. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Rena. Rocks don’t fall out of the sky!” the ‘even I know that,’ was, of course, implied.

My argumentative scientist—you know the one who starts every rebuttal with “Actually…”—started to kick in. But then something crazy happened.

I’d never experienced that moment in life when in the span of a split second thousands of possibilities all occurred to me at once, and I realized how terrible the truth could be. Imagine someone who’s a hypochondriac learning that Rocks Actually Fall from the Sky?! And some of these rocks are not small—just ask the dinosaurs—some hit the ground in a field of debris the size of Texas. How terrifying would that be for my poor grandmother.

And then, oh, then I thought about the impact of this truth—Scientific Fact!—on my poor mother. Every time my grandmother found a strange looking rock she’d call my mother “I think I’ve found a meteorite! You should send it to Rena!” or the phone call in the middle of the night “I think a meteorite just hit my roof, what if there are more? You should come over to make sure.”

I could see that scenario only too well, and of course, my disgruntled mother—who was watching this exchange—would call me up just after getting off the phone at midnight with my grandmother. I could just hear her bedraggled, more than slightly annoyed voice when she called me: “I just talked to your grandmother, who tells me there’s a meteorite on the roof. Thank you, ever so much for educating her in your field of study. Next time could you study fluffy bunnies or something?”

But I’m a scientist, and scientists tell the truth.

But what is a fact worth? Who would it hurt if dear old grandma lived on in ignorant bliss?

I could see the little devils on my shoulder, and one of them was dressed like my mother. “Oh god, Rena, just this once,” she pleaded.

The whole family watched in complete silence. Surely many of the same thoughts had just occurred to them in that same split second. Either that or they were morbidly curious about how I’d handle this blatant challenge to the existence of my scientific career (something I was teased about frequently).

I sighed. “You’re right, Grandma. Rocks really don’t fall from the sky.”