Grandma’s Lemonade.

  
Or maybe you do. Maybe you have superpowers yourself. Maybe Superman shouldn’t be tugging on your cape. Maybe. 

Let’s say your superpower has to do with crossing your eyes. While sucking the life out of your 15th morsel of high fructose corn syrup over the last 45 minutes. After a month of sleeping in a hot little log cabin. And by “sleeping,” I mean not really sleeping at all. Mostly scratching non-stop at the scabs left by the armies of mosquitoes that view you as their own personal high fructose corn syrup morsel. Perhaps this sleepless, scratching, sugar overdose bears a causal relationship to the cross-eyed superpower. Admittedly, we’ve gotten a bit circular. Perhaps a bit off-piste. 

But “on-piste” here on a Massachusetts highway means an all out, space cushion-popping, steering wheel-gripping battle with, oh, about 25 million other drivers. So I wish we knew an alternative, off-piste route to get where we are going. Waze is no help. The bodiless voice keeps us entranced, laser focused on the bumper too close in front, a little buzzed from huffing on what smells like diesel fumes. 

Once the cross-eyed wunderkind awakes from his coma-like backseat nap of a thousand years, he will use his newfound powers to speed along our drive. Clear a path. Add a little rocket fuel. Goose the engine. Something. Anything. At this point I’d settle for a quick and fleeting hit off that sticky lollipop, if I’m being totally honest. 

Then again, that might constitute tugging on the aforementioned cape. And you don’t do that. 

Thanks for reading. 

Virgin Blog by Mrs. Wascinski.

I prefer my Phlebotomists be Catholics..

  
I’ve chosen some unusual venues in which to break a sweat in the past. I have less-than-fond memories of pounding out laps circling the perimeter of a cracked pavement parking lot in Tulsa strewn with cigarette butts. Baking at 100 degrees. Private law practice, with its six-minute increments and time-compressed trips to gather deposition testimony, made for some unpleasant training sessions. Cranking out laps in 20-yard hotel pools, scraping my fingernails in the shallow end. Narrowly missing closed head injury during sketchy flip turns in 12 inches of over-chlorinated pool water. 

I left all that behind, though, when I gave up law practice many moons ago. Yep, nothing but moonlit single track interval training. The pungent smell of non-native eucalyptus heavy in the air. Lazy lattes after heart-pounding hills on the bike in Marin. Sweat wicked away effortlessly by only the absolute latest in performance fabric technology. The trendiest pastel stripe blazed across my jersey’s front. The edgiest last name of European descent logo’d on my left butt cheek. My pockets stuffed full of foil-encased energy gels bearing flavors like “Raspberry Monkey Java,” and “Fuel of the Gods.” Leaping over unidentifiable roadkill. Weaving around tightly-tied, black trash bags on the roadside bursting at the seams. Preparing to dive into burnt roadside undergrowth with every oncoming car and its obligatory bass thumping with distaste for dudes wearing sparkly compression socks and Carolina blue running sneakers. 

Yeah, it’s like that. 

I’d prefer eucalyptus and Fuel of the Gods. But Hefty bags and frisbee-thin possums (or skunks or squirrels or cats, or actual frisbees) are mostly what I get. 

Like yesterday. 

My 13 year-old’s baseball team’s tournament in Modesto collided headlong with my growing fear of a “DNF” in a race one month hence, due to 46 year-old hamstrings without enough recent mileage in them. Only way to avoid that kind of ego-crushing outcome is to slog through the preparatory miles on the appointed days beforehand, without fail. 

So I find myself pounding colorful, “zero drop” shoes on boiling pavement. Whipping my head back and forth and back again whilst gingerly prancing over the impossibly active train tracks. Hoping my being so hopelessly out of place will not inspire some road range incident. I rehearse in my mind twisting my body Matrix-like to avoid a crushed Monster Energy can hurtling in my direction at 70 MPH. In the midst of one such rehearsal, I crunch underfoot the backbone of something long dead. I imagine it was a cute little sparrow rather than a housecat or feral skunk. Truth be told, I’d prefer the lingering emotional sting from the cat rather than the skunk oil. We have 2 long hours of driving ahead of us and the Prius’ AC would give that skunk stink some awful currency. 

The aforementioned Hefty bags are everywhere. Most bulge with what could be elbows and shoulders. It’s all I can do to resist looking hard at the mute bags, for fear of seeing something — or someone — poking out that would require spelling my name for a police report and testifying against a fellow with tatooed knuckles back in this county a year from now. I ignore this civic duty of mine even while acknowledging that there exists a 23% chance I will end up in a roadside Hefty bag given my poor training venue choice this particular afternoon. I can live with 23%. 

Mercifully, the humid and ill-conceived run ends uneventfully, as it turns out. Other than the fragile bone fragments I pluck from my sneaker’s treads, nothing I encountered along the way will disrupt my sleep  tonight. And lo and behold, I’ve managed to sock away another hour to bring me that much closer to crossing in one piece my first finish line in 13 years.  

Nothing but glamorous, postcard-perfect sessions for me, from here on out. Well, at least until next weekend. 

Thanks for reading. 

 
Nine year-old Everett Baker Beadling is at it again. There does not appear to be an impulsive, impatient bone in his body. Nor tooth. I think a tooth is different than a bone. As I may have hinted before, on occasion, Everett does not like to do anything he does not want to do. Does not like to be told what to do. By anyone. Parents, uncles and aunts, and now, dentists. 

At our last visit, Everett displayed a burgeoning second row of shark teeth. You know, like the ones we all lost sleep from seeing in the movie, Jaws. 

 
Yeah, something along those lines. Apparently, there is a reason baby teeth start to get wiggly. Tempting to youngins, too tempting to resist tugging and twisting. They need to come out. They need to make room for the big boy teeth pushing up from below. 

It never occurred to me that a child would simply refuse to pull out the baby tooth. “Not gonna do it. Don’t try to tell me to do it. Just watch.” In the past, Everett has continued to allow baby teeth to reside in his mouth way past a PG-rating. Hanging by a thread. He once twisted a tooth 720 degrees around, inducing dry heave sounds from the people around us, and it still didn’t come out. 

So now he has a second row of teeth. Well, really only one tooth waiting its turn. But that tooth is not located anywhere near where teeth should be located, in my professional opinion. It’s not even immediately clear, at first glance, precisely which stubborn baby tooth the wayward adult tooth intends to replace. Maybe it just plans to stay where it is, sort of playing zone defense for any morsels that need an extra little chew after passing through the front line. 

Maybe Everett is on to something here. Some superior adaptation that would help propagate his genes on down the line. An extra tooth no one else has, save for my son, my grandkids (his kids), my grandchildren (his kids’ kids), and so on. 

Perhaps Ev has inherited this tooth situation from someone else before him. Not on my side, I don’t believe, unless it is a generation-skipping extra tooth gene. I pulled my baby teeth out at the slightest provocation. So cavalierly that I occasionally still dream about pulling out my adult teeth for no good reason, waking up euphoric that my mouth in actuality is not missing any teeth. So I don’t think he got this particular super-power from me. 

I have leveled threats and bribes. To no avail. The tooth fairy’s seemingly deep pockets mean nothing to Everett. The dangling tooth will come out whenever Everett — and Everett alone — is good and ready. I just hope I live long enough to witness it firsthand. 

Thanks for reading.