Point 1 : When men have a mid- life crisis, they usually buy small sports cars. Usually red or black

Point 2 : When women have a mid-life crisis, they may- or may not- buy tacky clothing.

Point 3 : Our house has one mirror. It is in our bathroom. The Father is 6′4. I am 5′2. If I stand on my toes, I can just see the tops of my eyebrows in our mirror.

So, you figure out how I took this. For the what i am wearing today thing.

I love my tarty pants.

Today, I went to The Big City. When I came home, I- as usual- could not have carried one more thing. My elbows ached, in fact.

The Baby was very disappointed, for usually I appear at the front door like Santa out of season, bearing things for every one. Today, most was for myself.

Most of what I bought was clothing for myself. Before I set off this morning, I was here : the only pair of jeans that fit me were a pair that made The Great Move over here in 1982. While it is nice that they fit once more, all of my other jeans looked like denim Chinese baggies.

And I found myself standing in front of a shop door which told me- in acid yellow- that I had arrived in the middle of the dwaze dagen. For some reason, I found the idea of the sale of the century irresistible this morning.

I came home with three pairs of pants, which I love and make me blush, and two tops that will do. My favorite tops always came from the men’s section of L.L.Bean and I have yet to find another line that I like so well.These tops were from H&M, nice colors, fabric too thin for my taste.

But the pants, oh, I love them. Two pairs of blue jeans and one chocolate brown corduroy pair. They were labeled as being boot leg, but they are not. I grew up in the 70’s, I know the difference between a boot leg and a bell bottom. They are bells.

All three are 27W, 30L, the size that I wore in college. Sounds great, but it isn’t : having a baby at 42 equals stomach which calls a sharpei to mind. Immediately. The pants get even more vulgar : I suspect that there is spandex in them, for sure in the cords.

And, like wearing naughty drawers which no one will ever see, they are all cut very low at the sharpei waistline. Here is how low : when The Girl came to see what I had bought, she said, how cute!.

When a 12 year old calls the clothes that you have just bought cute, there is no doubt about it : they are inappropriate for your age.

Unless you are 12.

And then she said this : they make your legs look so much thinner.

How can you fight that ?

Since I usually wear sweaters which look like something out of the men’s section of L.L.Bean, casual strangers will never know what lies beneath that woolen bulk.

But I do. I like it.

My reasoning for buying clothes in a size that I last wore for a short time after The Boy was born ( read : 10 years ago) is as follows. If I keep wearing the bag lady clothes, I won’t notice if I am gaining weight. With these, I will.

It sounded good at the time.

And then I bought myself a pound box of Leonidas chocolates. A custom box, all dark chocolate, and, yes, some of the marzipan, no, no creams, and yes, that one I like.

We shall see how long my new clothes fit me.

We have never bought a set of dishes. Of course, we have dishes, but they are hand me downs, almost ( but not) entering the legal definition of antique.

Plus my odd collection of red ware.

Today I looked at dishes on line and realized something : although I like blue transfer ware to look at, if I imagine a pile of pasta on it, it turns my stomach. Or just about anything else I might prepare.

Blue doesn’t go well with food, does it ? Yellow and brown and red ware do.

Blue transfer ware…nope. It seems more suited to roasted hunks of meat and boiled vegetables.

While I shall never buy any of it, I just love this stuff.

From here.

The Baby tells me that she knows what boys are afraid of.

Oh, I ask, and what is that?

Standing next to me, she has me lower my ear next to her mouth and whispers her secret into my ear:

Boys, she tells me, are afraid of being nice.

I confess that- at the moment- I am simply gazing at my now silent shoes, their glossy black, patent leather toes stare blankly up at me. It must be because I slept very poorly last night. Yes. Usually, my days are accompanied by the bright, aluminum sound of taps, tinkling off of my toes and heels, as I go through my days, shuffling off to Buffalo and whistling while I work.

The girl is back from camp.

Not that that in any way has any thing to do with my now silent shoes.

I found myself wondering today how that silent, shame ridden, tiny percentage of the elderly who are beaten and abused by their children got to where they are today. What was the path that they took which led them into their present cave of loneliness and betrayal ?

Not that that in any way has any thing to do with The Girl coming home from camp today.

Like Scrooge, I assure myself that perhaps the bit of cheese that I ate last night was off, leading my mind- as a result thereof- into dark and Gothic alleyways today.

What I need is a good night’s sleep. And tomorrow the sound of my taps singing will accompany throughout the day.

After all, tomorrow…

This morning, before he jumped upon his white stallion and headed off to brave the evils and dangers of modern society, The Father said to me, …and next week, I will be in England.

I must have had an unusually blank look on my face, even more inbred than is my pre- coffee wont, for he then said, I told you four months ago that next week I would be going to England during the week of whatever next week is.

Uh, I said, when do you leave ?

Monday.

Uh, when do you come back ?

Thursday.

Ok. Got it, I said, and shuffled off towards the coffee pot.

In between processing the deluge of cootie contaminated items upstairs in the laundry room, I checked on everyone’s schedules for the next ten days or so : The Girl ( who returns from camp tomorrow, during a narrow window of time between the guy coming to fix the heater arriving and The Baby coming home for lunch- a narrow window during which I must guide Opa to The Girll’s school as The Father and the white charger have to be somewhere else ) has Thursday and Friday off.

I am running off to the Big City on Friday morning. I would love to be young enough to say that it is because I want to blow this joint and party hearty, but the truth of the matter is that while I do want to blow this joint for a few hours, my mission is to buy velcro. Black velcro.

I know, but as I always say, I was born under a lucky star.

On Monday and Tuesday, The Boy and The Baby have off. Their calender has the rather cryptic phrase Study Day on it. I have already asked The Father to see if The Baby can go and visit her Grandparents on one or the other day : at the moment, she is chronically bored. And she hasn’t spent the day there since at least, oh, last June.

Possibly last May.

Possibly months before either of those two options.

Today as I prepared the last bits of dinner, catching up on life with The Father, he mentioned that on Saturday, we were going out to dinner. I do a vacant stare quite well, of the sort that just doesn’t work when playing poker, a sortof lost in a wrinkle of time slightly panicked look about , where I am obviously in a state of befuddlement.

Do we have a baby sitter, I asked.

We’ll check that out, he said.

Stirring the butter/ flour mixture ( yep, I know, it’s a roux. But I’m not a roux sort of person…) I asked him where we were going.

To Belgium.

Read : to my favorite place.

Any problems with that, he asked.

Nope, I said.

See ? I kid you not, I was born under a lucky star.

A few days beforeThe Boy left for School Camp , he brought home a bright red letter from the school. I suppose that it was on red paper to make it stand out from the half dozen other letters that the children bring home from the little hole down the street each week.

Danger ! Danger ! That is red.

The red letter informed me that despite the heroic efforts of the Cootie Brigade, cooties had just popped up in Group 5. Oh No ! The red letter gasped ! Just days before school camp, when Groups 5, 6 and 7 will be living in each other’s pockets for three days ! Oh, me! Oh, my !

I was told that my Happy Camper would be poofed with something before he returned to Casa Kitchen and that I must be very, very diligent, and check for cooties every morning until…well, I don’t know until when. I suppose that I will get another letter from the school, perhaps on green paper, which will hail the return of peace in the valley.

The minute that I read the red letter, my head began to itch. I found my two, professional strength cootie combs and checked myself, oh, about hourly, the kids about twice a week.

That is right : professional cootie combs, for you see, we have had cooties invade our happy scalps before. But I doubt that anyone recalls that, for that was the summer when Karen had cockroaches the size of trained seals and won that year’s Bloggie for The Grossest Bug Story Blogged In Europe By An Expat.

I didn’t even come in third and we were crawling, I tell you, simply crawling. As gross as it comes.

So, this morning I was checking The Baby’s hair- there was just something about her head, some aura perhaps that niggled my trained eyed – and sure enough, right behind her ear : two eggs. I searched and searched and searched and searched. And found about a dozen more. And finally, the Queen Cootie. So, The Baby was home for the day.

A check on The Boy cleared him .

When The Girl got up at 9 ( she leaves for her school camp today), I checked her, found one egg and she was put on the list as well. I dosed the three of us with this great stuff ( it is probably straight DDT ) which smells just like nail polish remover and – now, this is the voice of experience- really kills every crawly in sight and out for two weeks.

After an hour, The Girl washed her hair and then The Father picked her up to take her and her various and sundries off to her school. The Baby and I will leave the stuff on the full 12 hours recommended.

And then I began the clean up. All the bed clothes, all of the towels, all of the jackets, all the pillows from the couches- in short, the laundry room was filled to a height of about 4 feet with things that I must boil.

That’s ok. At least I now know for sure that we don’t have cooties.*

Any more.

* I don’t actually know if I had them or not : there is no one to check me. But I’druther be safe than crawling.

Cooties.

Yuk.

Laundry.

As I sit here, I can smell the scent of burning wood.

Some where in town, some one has started their fire place.

It smells like autumn.