Nov 10, 2011
Every fall the Muumuu Mamas, nine middle-aged women, go to the beach for a weekend. The others have demanding jobs, with too many needy people, students, committees, travel. I am the only one who has retired, but I have Amanda. The beach weekend is our escape, and we look forward to it all year.
Planning begins in the spring, when someone sends an email: is it time to begin looking for a house? At least six weeks before the trip someone sends out a sign-up sheet for meals, and food porn fills our in-boxes..
Over the years we have gone from house to house, seeking perfection. Michelle, the most fastidious of us, sets the standard. The consensus: we want a house that is nicer than our own. (For some of us that would not be hard to find.) I am happy in shabby, and have a fondness for shacks, but I can wallow in luxury with the best of them.
For two years we rented a house that belonged to friends of Michelle, but she was active in gay rights in Florida, the friends grew more conservative, and that became uncomfortable. Then I found a beautiful house at the part of St Augustine Beach where driving is forbidden. When we arrived it had just been sprayed for bugs. Ceal couldn’t stand the smell, and earthworms were committing suicide in the swimming pool. The next year we rented the house next door, but the balcony had no shade.
This year we think we have finally found a permanent home. It’s on the ocean, two stories, with five bedrooms and five baths, two living rooms, a deck upstairs and patio downstairs, a swimming pool, and a long boardwalk over the dunes to the water. Its name: Peace of Paradise.
EARLY MORNING AT PEACE OF PARADISE
Peggy, who arranged the rental, goes over early Friday to open the house; the rest of us drive to the beach in twos and threes. When Iris and I arrive, we find Marcie, Michelle and Peggy already there.
Peggy challenges us to find the ugliest thing in the house. She gives us hints: it is downstairs, and has been put away. After a brief search, Iris comes back upstairs, waving her trophy. A flamingo tchotchke, neck curving down, its rump a burst of pink feathers, standing in front of lurid green leaves. It is one of a pair of bookends, and I long to steal them for the shelf in my office.
Apart from the bird, the decor is inoffensive, standard beach themes with not too many shell-encrusted items. The swinging gate from the beach to the boardwalk has a mosaic peace sign. Iris decides that the ceiling fan in the living room, huge blades shaped like palm fronds, is the only feature that is unacceptable. If she weren’t so short, it might cut off her head, and anyway, it is clunky-looking.
The Mamas give me a downstairs bedroom all to myself with a huge jacuzzi tub in my private bathroom and the pool right outside my door. They say it’s because I go to bed and get up so early, and they want me away from the main part of the house. But they spoil me, I think, because they are through with child-rearing and I have Amanda.
Many of us are cooks, all of us are gluttons, and the food is endless and varied. Among other treats this year we have the best cioppino I have ever eaten, black rice salad, warm red cabbage slaw, pasta with walnut pesto, a pear and apple cake, jelly tots. Plates of cheese, vegetables and hummus, and bowls of nuts are laid out on the counter, and there is always an open bottle of wine. I make black beans and rice for Friday dinner, Julie makes Caesar salad. I was planning cornbread, but all of us thought somebody else was bringing eggs and milk.
Saturday morning I finish writing about 7:30, and decide to jump in the freezing pool. A physical therapist once told me that ice is my friend, but I admit I was also showing off. I strip and step outside. Think a minute. Go back inside and fill the hot tub, sink until my breasts are bobbing, and turn on the jets. When I am hot to the core I pad out to the pool, walk to the edge and jump. If I hesitated I wouldn’t do it, and in mid-air I have a moment of exhilaration, thinking, “Can’t turn back now!” I tread water for about fifteen minutes, every aching joint and bone crying hallelujah. When I’m cold to the core I return to the tub.
I smell bacon upstairs, and I’m tempted. But once I go up and connect, it will be hard to tear myself away, and I am so happy to be alone, pampered, free. I contemplate a nap. I write a little more, and then a smoke alarm goes off, piercing even way down here. I’m ready.
Iris always brings her griddle and makes pancakes, but with no eggs or milk we graze – coffee, yoghurt, cheese, fruit, bread, sweet potatoes, bacon – there are plenty of choices.
After breakfast Marcie, Iris and I go to the store. While they are at Publix, I go to the Dollar Tree for a coming-home gift for Amanda, and find bags of rubber snakes, perfect for her Halloween Medusa costume. We head up A1A to the fish store, and while Marcie buys the fish for dinner, Iris and I go to the fancy thrift store down the street. I find a nice purse for Amanda’s birthday for $9.50. I plan to fill it with little gifts, individually wrapped. I am a little concerned about heavy metal rings on either side, which could make it a handy weapon, but I decide we have outgrown that concern.
If our weekend has a theme it is, “No one does anything she doesn’t want to do.” People walk on the beach, read, write, swim in the ocean or the pool. A 1500-piece jigsaw puzzle attracts several of us, but by Saturday night it's abandoned as too hard. Iris and Michelle have brought their extensive beading supplies, and they and Julie spend some time making necklaces.
There is always someone cooking, someone eating, someone tidying the kitchen. We turn on the music and dance. We talk and talk, and sit in comfortable silence. We take naps whenever we want.
At dinner and afterwards we are all together, talking about our lives, telling stories. This year Julie has a variation on Dictionary. One person reads the description on the back of a romance novel, and then all the others write first paragraphs for the book. The leader reads all the paragraphs, and we guess the real one.
Marcie’s daughter Naorah named us the Muumuu Mamas when she visited at 10am on our first beach weekend and found us all lounging in our muumuus drinking wine. We get together as often as we can, for dinner, canoeing, or celebrations. We’ve made Christmas cookies, and Christmas stockings for the HOME Van. When I had knee surgery, Joe spent the night with me at the hospital and the Muumuus took daytime shifts, so I was never alone. The nurses thought we were a church group.
One husband thinks we go to the beach to get away from our husbands. Marcie says, “No, it’s because we want to be together.” (One of us who shall be nameless says, “The other is just a fringe benefit.”)
The beach weekend is our gift to ourselves and to each other. It is a celebration of our friendship. I don't know how I would manage without the Muumuu Mamas.
DAWN
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NEXT WEEK: The Church Search: An Infidel in Church, Part I
Nov 3, 2011
In October I went to Jane’s Stories annual Writers’ Retreat. It was my second time at a writers’ conference. At the first, three years ago, I met Sandra, who told me that her goal is to find one new writer friend at each workshop she attends. It was Sandra who encouraged me to go to the Jane’s Stories retreat. click
I needed no urging. Like most loving mothers, I welcome any chance to re-enter the adult world. And this time, unlike the last, I felt I had something to offer. If a writer is anyone who writes regularly, and an author is a writer who has been published, a blogger is somewhere in between. I’m proud of my blog, and had just acquired beautiful cards to identify myself.
Just before my first conference, Amanda came to live with us for the second time, and I wondered whether I should go. Leaving Joe on his own for three days with an unhappy and confused little girl was troubling. But the conference was here in Gainesville, so I would be home every night, and Joe urged me to go. This time it happened that once again Amanda was going through a rough patch, and once again I considered cancelling. But Joe is an old hand, and it was just 24 hours. So I headed off to St. Augustine early Saturday morning, enjoying the solitary two-hour drive into dawn.
MATANZAS BAY – images.google.com from city-data.com
The retreat was at a restaurant, in a room overlooking Matanzas Bay. It included a two hour workshop on memoir by Karen Sayler McElmurray, author of two novels and her own memoir, Surrendered Child. Sandra Lambert and Anne Martin Fletcher described their successful quests for an agent, and gave pointers. Georgia Banks Martin spoke on fairy tales and poetry. We had the opportunity to have a manuscript or query letter critiqued. I brought a query letter for my third novel and Anne wrote useful scribbles all over it. click click click click
Attendance was small, which surely disappointed the hard-working, all-volunteer Jane’s Stories board. But it produced a most wonderful workshop, in which everyone felt free to participate, and had valuable things to say.
This was all interesting and helpful. But for me the most important part was being with people who are writers, who know what writing involves, and think it is worthwhile work. For each of us it is different – we are more or less fluent or blocked, frightened or brave. Most of us have been all of these.
These women have experienced writing as I have. Mucking around in my mind to dig up thoughts and catch them as they fly out. Beginning with a plan or throwing scraps at the screen to see what happens. Returning the next morning to find words dead on the page, or a sentence that sings. Tidying up the mess – one of my favorite parts, as I am a decisive editor. Exulting when, after many revisions, a draft feels final. (It never is.)
They have also experienced the grim and tedious business of trying to get published. I have submitted for years with no success, though once I had an agent, and two editors have been effusive about my writing as they rejected it.
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” said Samuel Johnson. In truth, only a fool writes for money. The odds of making money by writing are probably smaller than the odds of a high school athlete making it in the pros. If it’s money you’re after, play the stock market; if it’s fame, try serial killing.
NO BLOCKHEAD HE? – Dr Samuel Johnson, after Joshua Reynolds Photo: THE GALLERY COLLECTION/CORBIS
I had dinner with Sandra, who is herself beginning to experience success, with publication in two prestigious literary journals. Her generosity is an inspiration. On her blog, full of beautiful photos and paeans to Florida nature, she tirelessly promotes the work of others, new authors and old. She doesn’t waste energy on carping and belittling. Unless she is critiquing, she saves her breath for praise.
Sandra’s attitude was an example and a gentle rebuke to me. In the intensity of my long wish to be published, to be heard, I had become selfish and envious. I clung to a distinction between real writers and dabblers. As though it were a race, I looked around to see who was ahead of me. But writing isn’t a competition, though the world would make it one. There is room for all the flowers in the garden.
POPPY GARDEN – by Slatesculpt at flickr.com/photos/57031315@N02/page3/
After dinner we went to Anastasia Books, where five women read from their work: memoir, poetry, essay, fiction. I bought a book of poems by one, and a memoir by another. Some of the writers have had more success than others; all were well worth listening to. To hear them was to remember that we each have unique vision, and can speak with a unique voice. I intend to go to workshops when I can, and be inspired, not threatened, by other writers’ gifts.
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NEXT WEEK: The Muumuu Mamas Go to the Beach
Oct 28, 2011
On a recent weekend I tackled the clutter in my office. My office consists of a small bedroom, with a big desk, lots of books, and a bed, and a large former closet. The closet is my computer and file room.
We have four file drawers to hide the business of life, but my personal files were on two small shelves behind me in the computer room – files about Amanda, and writing, and recipes. To Do’s were piled in no order on a three tier plastic tray next to the computer, and the rest of the computer desk had lists and works in progress and books to return to the library and dirty socks. The big desk was covered with stuff from our Africa trip: souvenirs, gifts, postcards, camera equipment. A jumble drawer in each room held…jumble.
CLUTTER
I spent the better part of three days organizing, cleaning, and culling. I enlisted Joe to help with the Africa stuff, since a lot of it was his. Then I went through all the papers littering the computer desk and the To Do tray, all the folders on the shelves. I took down a storage box, threw out a bunch of files from ancient matters, and replaced them with files from middle-aged matters. With glee I discarded many papers from our two years as foster parents, and consolidated the adoption papers into one accordian file.
I went through the drawers and equipped each with plenty of pens, pencils, markers. I hid the scissors way at the back where I hoped only I would find them. (Amanda and Joe have their own, but you know how scissors go wandering.)
Now the computer desk has only the computer, the printer, and a paper tray. The shelves behind me have writing books, stationery and computer supplies. Active files are tidy on the big desk.
TIDY ME
I am blissful in my new space. The trouble is that I believe the order will last, and I’m really too experienced for such delusions. It’s like giving up smoking. You do it over and over, always hoping, and always relapsing. Or like love when you’re young. First you say, “This is The One.” Then, after several, you say “Is this The One?” After many more, you’re likely to say, “Fuck it, there ISN'T One.”
Still, I did give up smoking on the fifth try, when I was 36. I did find The One – I won’t say how many tries – when I was 48 (even if he does leave his stuff on my desk). Is it possible that at 64 I have finally conquered clutter?
NEXT WEEK: Finding My Better Self at a Writers' Retreat
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Oct 21, 2011
I grew up in houses full of books. Book shelves are as fundamental to my sense of home as pictures on the walls. When I visit a friend, I head to the bookcase, and imagine moving in for a weekend so I can read her books. When Iris and I, both single mothers, decided to share a house, I was thrilled to see that she had an almost empty bookcase, then dismayed to discover that she considered books clutter, and used the shelves for ornaments and organizing.
My husband is resigned to my clutter, and he himself has shelves of natural history books, but he was pleased when I spent the first week of my retirement reducing the collection by a third. (Thus making room for more books.) With less money, I did resolve to rely more on the library, but I still have little bursts of book-buying, and my family gives me books for Christmas. I try to keep the collection culled by giving away anything that isn’t a keeper.
I always pack books when I travel. I like to take books about the place I’m going, and a fat Victorian novel for a vacation from the vacation. One is not enough. Suppose I don’t like it, or worse, suppose I finish it. Once, alone in Nova Scotia, I found myself on a Sunday with nothing to read. The only store open in Cheticamp was a drugstore, with a tiny book rack of mostly junk. I found an Agatha Christie, but it was a quick read, not nearly enough to fill the tired hours after morning hikes, and the long nightly stretches of insomnia.
MY B&B IN BADDECK, NOVA SCOTIA HAD A BOOKCASE
L'ACADIEN TRAIL NEAR CHETICAMP: GREAT VIEWS AND MOOSE TURDS, BUT NO BOOKS
When I travel by car, books are no problem – even for a weekend I have two or three in my tote bag. By air, with a small suitcase, it’s more of a challenge. In France I had a used paperback of Les Miserables, torn into five sections for easy portability in my purse, though I had to overcome a lifetime of training to mutilate a book.
An e-reader is the obvious solution, but I am a technophobe. I hate new gizmos. I grumbled when I had to learn to use a computer for work. Answering machine, cell phone, digital camera – I could write an essay about my long resistance and eventual submission to each of them.
So I bought a Kindle before our trip to South Africa with great reluctance. First I borrowed my stepdaughter Leah’s for a couple of days, to see how I liked it. I was amused to see what an ambitious and improbable collection of free books she had downloaded, including War and Peace, and the complete works of Shakespeare and Dickens. I read a few pages of the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. I didn’t know whether it was the Autobiography or the Kindle that I liked, but I went ahead and bought one anyway. And I discovered the appeal and peril of the Kindle.
First, I downloaded a list of free books for Kindle, and a list of free children’s books. Then I went shopping. I’d never read any Wilkie Collins – I downloaded the The Woman in White and the Moonstone. Willa Cather’s My Antonia. Dicken’s Tale of Two Cities. To my shame, Virginia Woolf’s fiction has always been beyond me. I decided to give her another try, and downloaded Night and Day. For Amanda’s bedtime story I found Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, E. Nesbit, L. Frank Baum, and Hans Christian Andersen.
A character in The Moonstone uses The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe as his guide in all situations; it’s free on Kindle. The Moonstone plot turns on opium, so I found Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. I’d always heard Edward Gibbon was the great prose stylist of the 18th century, so I got all six volumes of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Now I understood Leah’s collection.
Everything had been free so far, and though I may never read the Gibbon, no harm done. Then I went on a spree. I had already read a lot of non-fiction about South Africa, but fiction illuminates a place in a way non-fiction can’t. I bought thirteen contemporary South African novels. Amanda is a reluctant reader, but loves anything with a screen. Ten easy-reading children’s books. I flew off to Johannesberg with nineteen novels and fifteen children’s books in my purse (not to mention Gibbon).
I loved the Kindle, and delighted in its special features. With one click I can look up almost any word in the New Oxford Dictionary. I can highlight and store passages that appeal to me. I can search a word, which helps when a minor character whom I’ve forgotten reappears. I often mis-lay a book when I’m in the middle of it, and wander the house trying to find it. If I remember to put my Kindle back in its garish neoprene cover, it stands out wherever I leave it.
MY HIGHLY VISIBLE KINDLE
Buying books on Kindle is easier than ordinary internet shopping. It may be too easy. When I hear of a book on NPR, or read a review in the New Yorker, I am much more likely to buy it. Most of these are happy impulses. I’ve read a fascinating account of two teachers in Colorado at the beginning of the twentieth century, and a warm and witty novel about a widowed British colonel and an Indian shop-keeper in Sussex. click click Nothing I buy is very expensive, but even in 2011 ten bucks is ten bucks, and though I never finished the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, I still believe a penny saved is a penny earned..
So I traveled around in South Africa and Swaziland, with a book always available for me and for Amanda, and thought I would write an essay in praise of my Kindle. And then we came home. Blissfully I sat in my ancient La-Z-Boy, early in the morning, lamp over my left shoulder, coffee beside me. Home at last. I reveled in the familiar sights, sounds and smells (we DO have a dog), and I looked over at the bookcase.
Every book I saw called up memories – not only of its contents, but of where and who I was when I read it. Books are the most reliable companions, more constant than a lover, less trouble than a dog. But my memories of books are inseparable from their physical presence. The cover entices me, and the book designer’s choices about typography and placement and proportion become part of the reading. click
When I read a book on Kindle, the design disappears. All the technical challenges and choices that permit a book to fly through space and arrive on my Kindle within moments of my request are invisible. The author’s words come to me unmediated, and there’s something exciting about that. But a book on Kindle is like a phone conversation instead of a visit.
I wouldn’t give up my Kindle; there’s nothing like it for travel. Still, when I’m home, I’ll choose the serendipity of a trip to the library or book store, or the familiar volumes that have comforted and nourished me all my life.
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NEXT WEEK: Tidy Me
Oct 14, 2011
MIAMI AT NIGHT BABOON FAMILY, SOUTH AFRICA photobucket.com wisin_23 copyright 2011 Joseph S. Jackson, by permission
We are going to South Florida one weekend, South Africa the next. I sit with my coffee and make yet another list. It takes about ten minutes to assign the remaining To Do’s to the remaining days.
In the middle of writing a task for Wednesday I glance up at Tuesday. “Check boxes.” What boxes? I need cartons to tote canned goods for the HOME Van, but that’s not what I meant. What I meant has fallen into the void that follows behind me, swallowing thoughts a minute after I think them. It is gone, like a twig sucked down in the current, and like the twig it will bob up again somewhere down stream. I know there’s no use trying to find it now. I return to Wednesday. There, right next to “load flash drive,” is half a word: “Dil.” Shit. That’s gone too.
My mother-in-law, Naomi, lives in Deerfield Beach, in a second-floor condo overlooking a canal. We stop for lunch and a swim on our way home from Miami Beach. She makes us coffee for the road, and I go down to the car to get my travel mug, grabbing a couple of satchels to carry down. Unlock the trunk, put them in, go back upstairs. “Where’s your mug?” Joe asks. Oh.
I go downstairs again. I take the plastic bag with our wet bathing suits, and the gift bag Naomi gave Amanda to celebrate the adoption. I unlock the car, put them inside, and go back upstairs. Open the door, and stop still, my mouth gaping. Joe laughs. I turn around without a word, and head back down one more time, thinking, “coffee mug, coffee mug.” This time I succeed, and head back up the stairs for the third time. My mind may be slipping, but my legs are growing stronger.
Finally, after bouncing from bed to bed in Johannesburg, Kruger, and Swaziland, we are in our own house in Capetown, and I am cooking our first meal. Very simple: burgers with no buns, salad, potato chips from the plane. The burger meat is too lean, and the stove puzzling – I’m accustomed to gas. But as the burgers cook, I prepare the salad.
OUR CAPETOWN KITCHEN
The kitchen is well-equipped, and I pull out a blue plastic colander to wash the greens. I tear up the iceberg, arugula, spinach and watercress. Get the oil and vinegar, salt and pepper. The kosher salt is damp in the grinder, and comes out in clumps. Oh well. Plenty of pepper, and then oil. Toss well, add the vinegar.
Joe sets the table, Amanda gets the burgers, I bring the salad. I return for the salt and pepper and am puzzled by the puddle of oil on the counter. I examine the bottle – no cracks, no oil down the side to show I spilled it. I wipe it up and we begin dinner. Joe serves himself salad and says, “Liz, this is a colander not a bowl.” He shows Amanda the holes – in my defense, they are inconspicuous in the dark blue plastic. But it all comes back to me – I forgot to wash the greens, and dressed the salad in the colander.
I used to ask my law students not to come into class late, or talk during my lectures. “I lose my train of thought, and there’s no telling when another one will come down the track.” I don’t believe this is Alzheimers or dementia, just late middle age. Although it is a nuisance, I find it amusing, I suppose because my friends are in the same boat. But writing entails catching thoughts on the run, then tidying them up. How can I do it when my thoughts disappear?
I could carry a little notebook, but I fear it would be one more thing to lose, like keys and glasses. I’m sure there are plenty of memory tricks on the Internet – aging boomers are a booming business. I will probably let it be. None of my thoughts are so valuable that I can’t afford to lose them. And another train always comes along eventually.
. 
WHEN'S THE NEXT TRAIN?
Photobucket.com: Tracks. by ILYB2014
NEXT WEEK: Why I Love Like My Kindle
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Oct 7, 2011
(Warning: This story is not for the faint of gut.)
The HOME Van is a gang of volunteers who go out twice a week to campsites and parks, delivering food and miscellaneous items to homeless people. The food includes a supper bag with a sandwich, hard-boiled egg, granola bar, fruit and water, a cup of iced tea or hot cocoa, and homemade cornbread and soup.
HOME Van soup is really good. It's thick with vegetables, beans, potatoes, rice or pasta, and meat (or meat substitute if made by a vegetarian). The people who live in the woods love it, and often take seconds and thirds if there’s enough. A cup of soup is my supper on Thursdays, when I ride the van. It’s more fun to share a meal than to stand by while others eat.
I coordinate the soup rota, and when no one else can, I make the soup. Though I love to make soup for my family, five gallons is a challenge. Browning five pounds of meat, chopping all those vegetables, sauteeing the onions and celery – it’s too much, and becomes slightly disgusting. It also takes a good part of the day, and transferring the boiling hot soup into the thermos, then lugging it to the car, is a pain in the neck.
A couple of times I went all out, but now, on the rare occasions when we don’t have anyone to make soup, I make beanie wienies: ten pounds of chopped hotdogs and six giant cans of pork and beans.
5 GALLONS OF BEANIE WIENIES (AND 10 DOZEN EGGS)
This should be easy. What could go wrong? Usually, nothing, and most of our homeless friends love beanie wienies. But there was a day…
It was late November, a chilly day by Florida standards, and a good day for eating beans and hot dogs. After a morning making sandwiches at HOME Van Central (Arupa and Bob’s house), I brought the five-gallon pot and thermos home. I chopped the dogs and opened the cans, stirred it all up and put the pot on a low flame. Then I relaxed with a book, popping up every twenty minutes to stir.
Finally the stew was simmering. I ladled it into the thermos with a two-cup Pyrex measure. This is a hot and gloppy job. Blobs of bean landed all over me, the stove, and the floor. When the thermos was full to the brim, I screwed on the top, wiped off the sides, and cleaned up the floor, the stove, and me. I put the scorched pot to soak with a layer of baking soda and an inch of water at the bottom.
All set to go. Ten dozen eggs in the front seat, two big pans of cornbread in the back. I had worn-out knees back then, instead of my blessed bionics, and toting the thermos to the car was a struggle, but I got it up on the back seat, and headed out.
I was turning onto Main Street when the thermos fell over and the top popped off. Five gallons of beanie wienies at flood stage covers a lot of territory. They flowed over the back seat and the floor, drowning the cornbread.
I had no cell phone to call Arupa, and anyway, the van was going out in ten minutes; there was nothing she could do. The people who live in the woods would have to make do with bag suppers and hot chocolate.
At HOME Van Central Arupa opened the door to help me unload. Quicker than a flash mob, every fly in Gainesville arrived for the feast. Where had they been, and how did they know? We put the eggs in the van, marveling at the mess. I skipped the Thursday night run, and went home to clean up.
I ladled and scooped and wiped, but it was way beyond me. Fortunately, Steve, Amanda’s aunt’s boyfriend, had worked as a car detailer. He came over the next morning, and in an hour or two the car looked as good as a six-year-old Corolla owned by a slovenly grandmother ever will. The smell persisted, but we thought it would dissipate over time.
It didn’t dissipate. It got worse. Steve came back to try again. This time he removed the back seat, and found that the flies had done their job. There were maggots everywhere.
Who isn’t disgusted by maggots? Only a mother fly. I excused myself, and Steve cleaned them all up, then sprayed the car again with a nasty floral deodorant. For months I drove around town with memories of maggots, breathing air scented with beanie wienies and chemical flowers.
We bought a new thermos for the Van. Now when I bring soup, I strap the thermos into the front passenger seat, and put out a mother’s restraining hand when I turn or stop. The Great Beanie Wienie Disaster became one of our many stories, which I share with you in honor of the ninth anniversary of the HOME Van. click
ARUPA AND THE HOME VAN
NEXT WEEK: This Short-Term Memory Thing
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