O’s got tennis lessons this afternoon. G has Brownies. I’m not sure why I said we’d be in two places at the same time. It seems I’ve forgotten how to plan and the calendar sits forlornly by the computer where it quietly suffers its neglect. Why oh why can’t I just write things down? Then I’ll know not to schedule a hair appointment for the day I’m supposed to help out in G’s classroom. Guess which activity is getting canceled? Oh alright, don’t be so damned judgmental. If you only knew how hard it was to map out a two hour cut and color appointment with Orlando on a Friday. It’s been months. I’ve got serious and ghastly roots showing. G and her bitchy teacher will survive my absence. I know they will. (Plus I’m still not sleeping well. This scattered ineffectualness is just a product of the insomnia, right? Surely it’s not old age?)

The weekend is yawning before us with a whole lot of nothingness on the itinerary. I thought we’d get our burning permit and gather a winter’s worth of sticks and twigs and spark a bonfire on the driveway – the white trash version of Spring clean up – but it’s supposed to be cold and windy. I need at least 45 degrees and some semblance of sun to put myself out there. I chap easily. My skin gets all dry and sprouts cracks and deep fissures when exposed to the sharply cold air. I’m delicate. Just think Scarlett O’Hara with work gloves and steel tipped boots. I can hustle up some leaves and dig a decent hole in the ground but it’s got to be comfortable conditions for me to wield the rake or the shovel or the kerosene and a box of matches.

And because, frankly, I don’t give a damn, it’s frozen chicken pot pie tonight for dinner. Thank you Mrs. Bud’s Family Sized Meals in Minutes. The short cut will please the males in the Madmarriage household who adore a good sodium rich, fat heavy meal every once in awhile. Tomorrow I’ll subject them to Shrimp with Feta and Wine Sauce over Penne but tonight I can only manage enough wherewithal to pre-heat the oven.

So happy weekend. May you all have the joy of baby sitters, the mirth of evenings out on the town with friends and the pleasure of days full of stimulating activity. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. I’ve got three Netflix films (No Country for Old Men, Atonement and Michael Clayton), a gallon of cheap wine and several boxes of Girl Scout cookies in the cupboard. I think I’ll make it to Monday. And maybe I’ll even have something interesting to blog about by then. No promises though.

During these days of quiet, I am supposed to write and mostly I do. I move into his office and take up residence before the REAL computer. I can close a door. I can find a pen in the little pen holder thingie that sits beside the flat screen monitor. It feels serious and mature. It’s a marked improvement over my usual position in the dining room, where I am subject to all manner of disturbances – the pets, the phone, the kitchen, the husband who walks heavily through the room on his way to the bathroom where he will mute his conference call and relieve himself, 45 times a day.

When it’s just me here alone, and the writing is done, or I need a sort of break from the page, I float around drinking cold cups of coffee, watering plants, occasionally joining the cat for quick stretch in a sun beam that is splashed across the bed. I clean the toilets and feel insanely satisfied at the prospect that they will remain just as I left them for at least another four hours before the kids get home.

To celebrate, I play music – loudly. I’m one that believes each life has a soundtrack, that work and workouts and driving and cleaning and cooking and sorting the recycling is all made better, poignant even, if accompanied by the appropriate score. But I can’t really shake the house with my soundtrack while My Better Half is here trying to earn a decent wage. So when I’m here alone you might find me rocking out a little. This week it’s the Ryan Adams version of When the Stars Go Blue but Bono and The Corrs do a pretty respectable rendition too. And I’m also very, very apt to be listening to Third Eye Blind’s Jumper. Even though it’s so ten years ago, I find it kick-ass inspiring every time I hear it (the video is glaringly bad but I still love the song, gets me up that steep hill every time.)

When I’m alone, the way I occupy the space is entirely different. I worship the solitude. But take comfort in the fact that it is fleeting. There is reassurance in the prospect that others will return.The house will, again, fill with laughter and shouting and drifting humanity, but for now it is mine.

(It has been a slooowwww week here. The end of January fades into February and I’m offering up too many posts on tennis and sun beams. I promise next week is going to be edgy and angst-ridden which makes for good blogging if difficult living. Thanks for hanging in there with me.)

And while my mind trips from moon walk to space craft, it then jerks spastically from space craft to monkeys. I think NASA and see primates strapped to crude rockets and fired into the void. Animal sacrifice, flying monkeys -an idea inspired by the L. Frank Baum? While the Wizard of Oz was written in 1900, the first monkey-launch was in 1948. Nearly half a century devoted to the idea of sending Albert, a Rhesus monkey into space. Albert I died in flight. Suffocation. His namesakes, Alberts II through V, were also unlucky. Suffocation, force of impact and fiery explosions. All Alberts lost.

And then the geniuses at NASA, ruling out the possibility that bad science was the source of the problem, retired the name ‘Albert’. And finally, in 1959, Able and Miss Baker returned to earth safely. Mission accomplished. Able has been ‘preserved’ and is on display at the Smithsonian. A mummified hero of primate proportions.

While my brain is firing at random, let’s talk Christmas ornaments. The holiday is sort of a loose affair in this household. Egg nog and stockings -sure. Well wrapped presents – certainly. Jesus -kind of. Shrine to space monkeys – you bet. There is a whole section of the Frasier Fir dedicated to our friends the astronaut monkeys. At least four of them (pictured here) dangle daintily from the drooping branches. I feel just a little bit better about animal testing of all kinds, now that we honor the Alberts and the Ables and the Miss Bakers of the world on Christmas.

But the hunt is on. The dog senses the sacred status of those felt friends and is now pacing the perimeter of the tree hoping for an opportunity to relieve us of one of those monkeys. She’ll settle for a butterfly or drummer boy but it’s the monkeys she’s really after. She has been there since 6:30 this morning. Salivating. Devising a plan. Watching those monkeys hanging like temptation from mid-tree, which might as well be space.

As for Spider Mama and mini-me – they are all gone. GONE I say. Not a single spider is left hanging in the now tattered and forgotten web in my east bedroom window. There are tons of bugs still stuck in the awkward, splayed poses of the vanquished but there is no spider left to eat them. Rather than think of the spider-absence as a sure sign of arachnoid demise, I prefer to think of it as a temporary loss. Those spiders packed it up and went to Bonita Springs for the Winter. They’ll be back, come April, with the robins and the tulips and the sweet smell of new grass.

*****

There’s been a nice and unexpected development in the bus situation and I’m left feeling reassured that there are some kind kids still left on the planet. I did a little reconnaissance yesterday. And hired a fifth grader to do my snooping. I have an acquaintance whose son rides the bus with O and G. He’s a quiet kid, a well-behaved eleven year old who is rarely in trouble. I asked this child’s mother if she had heard any bus-tales from her mild son. She had heard nothing but promised to ask him about the bus on his return from school.

She called last night to say she’d spoken with her son and he had validated O’s cry of foul. According to quiet-boy there are two or three kids who give my O a really hard time. This child not only felt concerned about how O was being treated, he felt sympathetic enough to offer to be O’s seat partner on the bus. There is safety in numbers. There is safety among the green vinyl seats of school bus hell when a big fifth grader offers to watch your back. Needless to say, O and I are thrilled and thankful and anxious to see how this new alliance changes the dynamic on Bus 7.

*****

While I’m talking about dynamics, I’ve gotta share the interesting news that was presented to me last night. (Yes, it was a very busy phone night at the Madmarriage household). I was chatting with my friend and mother of another student in O’s class, (okay, I was complaining about the trials and tribulations of being a room parent and she was patiently listening), when she broke in to tell me about the true drama at hand in classroom 137. According to my friend, there has been a great to-do surrounding a the new kid, I’ll call him Justin. Apparently Justin has a penchant for developing long and violently disturbing stories during journal time. His tales of animal dismemberment and bloody conflicts have frightened some of his classmates. The mothers of the frightened classmates have launched a full offensive designed to remove Justin from the class and the school. Phone calls home to Justin’s parents have not been returned. Child services may be called in to do a home visit. A witch hunt, perhaps justified, perhaps not, has been launched. There are angry mothers demanding that this Justin-kid be burned at the stake.

I feel sort of sorry for Justin, clearly there are issues at hand. And I feel deeply sorry for the teacher, Mr. S, who must soldier through the brouhaha and sort fact from fiction all while trying to reach Justin’s disinterested parents and dodging the expert advance of mothers with inflamed imaginations who, if left to their own devices, would have Justin hog tied and roasted on a spit.

I am confused by my own reactions to the news about Justin. After all, I had a perfectly normal conversation with Justin’s mother just yesterday about the upcoming class Halloween party. She didn’t strike me as negligent or pathological. She did mention that they had just moved. Perhaps, in the relocation process, her voice mail was broken and phone calls from the school were lost rather than ignored. I’m inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt and I guess I’m naive, but I have a very hard time believing that a parent would purposely ignore phone calls from their own child’s teacher. The idea of deliberate neglect is just so hard for me to fathom.

But while I’m feeling all kinds of progressive and accepting, I’m also wrestling with my inner neurotic. After all, there have been more than 50 school shootings since 1997, Columbine (the mother of all school disasters) and Paducah and Jonesboro and Va. Tech and Cleveland, all jangling at my nerves, making me feel edgy and irrational and fiercely protective.

This Justin-thing is a tough one as it is really none of my business until, well, it is. And it will only become my business once my O is directly effected, violently or otherwise. So I soothe myself with the facts. All but one of the notorious school shootings were perpetrated by children twelve years old or older. There is only Mount Township, Michigan to remind us that even six and seven year olds can die at the hands of their peers.

Amid all this worrying, my e-mails to the parents of Room 137 about candy corn relays and spider web cookies and Monster Mash Freeze Dance must seem incredibly discordant and unbelievable. But, really, eight year old children and their parents should be concerned with pumpkin table clothes and how many jelly beans are in the Halloween jelly bean jar. Morbid thoughts of potential grade school violence are just not normal.

Each year, this parenting thing gets a little more complicated. The answers to difficult questions become more elusive and obtuse as my children grow older and spend their days swimming up stream, in a river of peers and perverts and juvenile delinquents. What a world. What a world.