Ah, to be a schoolboy again.  And drawing pictures with schoolgirls.  And learning so many new things, with visual aids in the classroom to enhance the rich imagination of childhood. ─AS
 
Drawing On Eyelashes

Remember, when you were a kid, doing drawings, and in those drawings drawing eyelashes on some animals to show that those animals were female (lizards, mice, fish, birds)? Another question, this one for bats: Bats, why must you swoop about, swooping for blood, when you could just do you know what with your lashes and almost surely get better results, like maybe even a little ceramic bowl of blood with your name on it (and yes, I know that your name is difficult to spell, Empress of Moldovia, but try to be positive, please)?

I forgot to tell you earlier that I have made a time machine which shows all of time up until now on an overhead projector from 1980. You are going to have to decide who gets to operate the rollers, and if there is any bickering, we’ll just wait until tomorrow to do this. Good.

Here, you get a dry-erase marker. And you, and you. You don’t get one. Why? Because your behavior last week when we were doing the Praying for the Bean Plants experiment was ridiculous, especially since you know that there is no gambling allowed on the premises. Okay, hold on a second while I get this thing going…. Okay. Now please say, “Pause, please” whenever you’d like to draw on some eyelashes, and draw them! It’s almost lunch, so some of you might have to wait until after. Oh, and there is an index right here, so it’s really not hard at all to find what you are looking for. Here are some suggestions: lizards, the pope, mice, Glenn Beck, fish, strip mines, Margaret Thatcher, birds. Please do not forget to put the cap back on when you are finished.

 
If only, when I was in the fifth grade, and giving and receiving those little baby blue  heart-shaped confections with the small red printing on them, I had had the wisdom imparted by this next piece.  I daresay I might have had a better marriage. ─AS

Valentine

Q: Which child is loved best by its mother?
A: The child who receives the most valentines in the small, decorated bag taped to the front of its desk.

Q: Why do we celebrate Valentine’s Day?
A: Because of Saint Valentine, who fell in love with a white deer in the forest, then a white dove in a dovecote, then a brown squirrel (also in the forest), then back to the white dove.

Q: Is it true that a proper valentine is bright red and trimmed in lace?
A: Yes, like the human heart.

Q: Is it true that Saint Valentine was a brown deer?
A: No one is sure.

Q: Will I ever find love?
A: Yes, at a bar. You will be offered a pastis by an elderly man with an accent. He will tell you that you look just like his dead son. He will show you a photograph of his dead son, whose name is Stephen. You will fall in love with Stephen.

Q: Which valentine is better, one with a mouse hugging another mouse or one with a bluebird carrying a valentine in its beak?
A: The latter.

 
I can’t wait to meet the narrator of this next story, as well as her extended family.  ─AS

Your Pig Family

When I signed up for the show, I was like, he’s the bachelor, right? So I knew you’d be amazing. But I had no idea you’d be so amazing. I mean, I knew you’d be amazing, but not this amazing, you know? You’re like everything I’m looking for, and when we connect we have this, you know, energy. I hope you know that I’m here for the right reasons. I can’t believe we’ve made it this far. The one-on-one dates have been just, you know, incredible. And last night in the hot tub. Every time I look at you, I’m like, wow. He is so amazing. And now I’m going to meet your family in Seattle. That’s just, well, I’m nervous! Totally nervous but totally excited and happy. I can’t believe we’re taking it to the next level! And then your pig family in Issaquah. I’m more worried about them than your other family, you know? Because people’s pig families can be really critical. One time, a long time ago, I was dating this guy, and his human family loved me, we totally got along, but his pig family just did not like me for some reason. I think it was his pig brother, you know, jealous or something, I don’t know. So the relationship didn’t work out. But anyway, everything happens for a reason. I’m just so excited and nervous! It’s going to be amazing. I’m like, what kind of wine do they like? Should I bring flowers? My pig mother hates flowers. They remind her of the hospital, which you can imagine, remember I told you about her back problems? She’s seriously in a wheelchair more often than she’s on her feet. She’s so strong, so strong. Anyway. I’m super excited! Whew. Just breathe, right? It’s going to be amazing.
 
Catherine Coan’s first book, Aviation (poetry), was published by Blue Begonia Press in 2000. Her design work can be seen at Stay, the downtown Los Angeles hotel she created with business partner Amy Price. Her Canary Suicides (assemblages in vintage bird cages featuring little feathered demises) are currently on display at Arty, the downtown L.A. gallery she co-owns with Price (also at www.canarysuicides.com <http://www.canarysuicides.com/> ). She has taught university literature and creative writing since 1995.

The first of the three featured stories speaks to the collapse of the real estate market, and the great bargains to be had for buyers with cash in hand.  As readers will discover, however, getting that “dream house” may be more complicated than that.

Hummingbird Nest Ranch

Sotheby’s: Was $75,000,000, Just Reduced to $5,995,000. Recession Special!

HUMMINGBIRD NEST RANCH. The finest world-class equestrian estate on approximately 123 acres, built in 2004, just 40 minutes from Beverly Hills! Beautiful Mission Revival-style mansion (approximately 17,000 square feet, designed by Richard Robertson). Approximately four of the 123 acres boast a Native American burial site!

The three-level main house has thick stucco walls, copper gutters, a courtyard succulent garden with an aggressive fifteen-foot carnivorous plant, and a Spanish-style roof.

There are five bedrooms plus attached guest quarters, an office, a cabana, two heated pools, a twelve-person Jacuzzi, and a gazebo. Luxury details include paver tile floors, decorative tile work around the windows, wood-beamed ceilings, and a state-of-the-art French kitchen in red lacquer and stainless!

Surrounding the main house are three guest houses, ten staff houses, and substantial hunter-jumper equestrian facilities including an international grand prix arena (600×300 feet); rubber-and-sand mixed ring (300×250 feet); derby grass field (650×250 feet); large main barn (approximately 20,000 square feet) with 37 stalls (14×14 feet), six grooming stalls, two wash stalls, vet office, and farrier’s workshop and quarters! In one of the stalls lives a man with a human body and horse head (Palomino) named Carl who does not wear clothes and will not leave. But, again, the stainless and red lacquer kitchen. Also, derby grass field!

This is a green property with three private water wells, solar panels in several buildings, water treatment and distribution system, a roving sinkhole that may or may not have swallowed a film crew, and two fuel storage tanks (gas and diesel, 500 gallons each). The estate is gated, uses public utilities and solar energy, and prominently features a helipad.

 
If one was once doing much better before the deep recession, perhaps this tale of the ephemeral nature of comfort and relationship will strike a chord.  If not, at least enjoy this little gathering.

Camp

Sit by the tiny fire, yes, the flame there about the size of the flame on a lit match, and I will tell you a story. I have made coffee for you over the fire in a little iron skillet from the dollhouse. The one that burned down. Yes, this is what is left of the house: the ash, this tiny skillet, and this fire. A family lived in the dollhouse, a family of mice. They called themselves a family, but really they chose each other. You already have coffee? Well, here, I’ll add the coffee I made to the coffee in your travel mug. They had hard and separate lives for a long time, and just before the fire, they found each other and the house and there was a brief period of peace and television. How’s the coffee? I’ll bet you can’t tell the coffee I put in there from the original coffee you had.
 
Lastly, there is the story of a baby who was an enigma since birth.  Readers may puzzle over its life and times.  Is this story also its epitaph?  Or is it with us still?  

Baby Onionhead

It did not cry, even when it was born, even when it was kicked by its siblings. Its pale green-piped translucence was lovely in sunlight. No one named it. No one could tell if its heart could break.
 
Catherine Coan’s first book, Aviation (poetry), was published by Blue Begonia Press in 2000. Her design work can be seen at Stay, the downtown Los Angeles hotel she created with business partner Amy Price. Her Canary Suicides (assemblages in vintage bird cages featuring little feathered demises) are currently on display at Arty, the downtown L.A. gallery she co-owns with Price (also at www.canarysuicides.com <http://www.canarysuicides.com/> ). She has taught university literature and creative writing since 1995.

are always fighting evil in a thong,
pulsing techno soundtrack in the background
as their tiny ankles thwack

against the bulk of male thugs,
They have names like Buffy, Elektra, or Storm
but excel in code decryption, Egyptology, and pyrotechnics.

They pout when tortured, but always escape just in time,
still impeccable in lip gloss and pointy-toed boots,
to rescue male partners, love interests, or fathers.

Impossible chests burst out of tight leather jackets,
from which they extract the hidden scroll, antidote, or dagger,
tousled hair covering one eye.

They return to their day jobs as forensic pathologists,
wearing their hair up and donning dainty glasses.
Of all the goddesses, these pneumatic heroines most

resemble Artemis, with her miniskirts and crossbow,
or Freya, with her giant gray cats.
Each has seen this apocalypse before.

See her perfect three-point landing on top of that chariot,
riding the silver moon into the horizon,
city crumbling around her heels.
 
“Female Comic Book Superheroes” was published in the book Becoming the Villainess from Steel Toe Books. It apeared on The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor.
 
Jeannine Hall Gailey’s first book of poetry, Becoming the Villainess, was published by Steel Toe Books. Poems from the book were featured on The Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily; two were included in 2007’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, and Rattle. She lives in San Diego, where she volunteers with Crab Creek Review and teaches at National University’s MFA program. You can learn more at her web site, www.webbish6.com <http://www.webbish6.com/> .

For people in their late-thirties and, particularly past forty, athletic prowess has rarely been world-class competitive.  Especially with indisputable proof of being free of performance enhancing drugs.  The body gives out, not all at once but imperceptibly slowly to most.  This is, of course, not true of professional athletes whose performance and statistics are under microscopic scrutiny at all times.  

Even as a child I always rooted for the oldsters; knowing the obvious fact that, if I was lucky, I’d be old too someday.  So, when I was a little kid, there was George “The Fossil” Blanda, the oldest player ever to play in an NFL game aged 48 years, 109 days.  He was a quarterback until he was 43 and a kicker during and after.  The only NFL player to appear in games in four different decades, having debuted in 1949 and finishing the 1975 season with an appearance in the AFC Championship game.  He was good the whole time too.  Later there would be Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who was playing on a championship Lakers team at the age of 42.  The Lakers played three consecutive NBA Finals in his last three years, winning the first two.   Baseball, a team sport easier on the body, had always had players in their 40’s, most of them pitchers and pinch/designated hitters.  Many of them played in The World Series.  So there were and still are old guys I can root for, but none like “Satchel” Paige (who was still playing, at 59, in 1965, before I was old enough to be aware).  Paige, widely considered the best pitcher who ever lived, was excluded from Major League Baseball until he was 42, because he was an African-American.  He became the oldest rookie in MLB history.  Such were his talents that he remained effective into his fifties.  Therefore, there is a single example of an athlete past fifty who was still competitive in a major American sport.  But in team sports, like in the case of “Satchel Paige”, one may never get to play for a championship based on one’s own merits.  Golf and tennis are two sports where the greatest glory is achieved by individual effort.  Given the predisposition I’ve described, one can imagine my glee, in 1986, when Jack Nicklaus became the oldest Master’s champion at the age of 46.

Last year, I got to root twice for men who would defy decrepitude: Rocco Mediate and later, for Greg “The Shark” Norman, both of whom made deep runs at becoming elderly champions at a golf major.  Rocco Mediate, 45, threatened against the number one player in the world, Tiger Woods, at last year’s U.S. Open at Torrey Pines.  Woods, being Woods (even with a blown-out knee), added another amazing clutch putt to his résumé on the final hole of the tournament forcing an 18-hole playoff (the rules of this major call for a full round the following day to determine the winner).  When Tiger sank that putt I considered the playoff contest between the world’s 1st ranked and the world’s 158th ranked to be merely a formality.  Well, supreme nice-guy Rocco surprised the world at large by continuing to play brilliantly, if unevenly, finishing the playoff in a tie and ultimately losing in a sudden death continuation on the 91st hole played.  In The Open Championship (which is how the British like to refer to their sole major, a right I think is indisputably theirs as the earliest practitioners of such an event) “The Shark” looked poised, at 53, to become the oldest golfer ever to win a major.  That record is apparently vigilantly defended by the ghost of Julius Boros, who won the 1968 PGA Championship at the age of 48.  Greg Norman is simply the manliest player who was ever great.  Whether it was strategically necessary or not, he always aimed right at the pin.  He had one of the hugest and purest swings ever seen and he was ranked number one for 331 weeks.  Also one of the unluckiest players in history, he was robbed of victory by incomprehensible “miracle shots” so many times that his peers jokingly told him in the clubhouse: “Stay away from me, man.  You’re snakebit!”  His great golf more than a decade behind, he shocked the world by becoming the oldest 54-hole leader in a major.  Leading by two strokes going into the last round, he suffered a meltdown that left him settling for a tie for third place.  Two bummers in a row for lovers of the geriatric.  But what just happened in Scotland are the most stunning development and the cruelest blow to those who would steadfastly ward-off “the home for the aged”.

No one seriously entertained that Tom Watson could contend for his sixth title at the British Open, less than two months shy of his 60th birthday, despite being the greatest links player of a very long era in golf.  He was ranked below number 1300 in the world going in.  He himself planned/was scheduled to miss the cut and be in the commentator’s booth for the final two days as an expert (a five-time champion who got one of those titles at this year’s course, Turnberry in 1977).  Or so they all thought.  (Actually, Watson was being cagey as to what he thought his chances were of still being in the match on the weekend).  But Watson set a record on each day for being the oldest player to lead a major.  At the end of 54 holes he had sole possession of a one-stroke lead.  He had completed the third round with a one-over-par 71.  (Not that it was great prescience, but I did say to my best friend and former golf buddy Mike, “71 might be good enough if he can just do that again tomorrow.”  It turned out to be the exact score necessary for Watson to win.)

I am crestfallen.  Mr. Watson missed a putt on the final hole of regulation to card a bogey and opened the door to a four-hole playoff with the eventual winner Stewart Cink.  He lost a most valiant battle.  He competed for the title of “all-time geezer in a major sport”, legitimately contending for a major championship until the very end.  He nearly schooled all those whippersnappers.  He came to the final hole with a one-stroke lead, needing to score a four (par) to win.  He had a perfect drive.  Later he would describe how on the 18th hole (72nd of the tournament) he flew the green with an eight-iron he thought he struck perfectly (it was right on-line but long).  I thought: “Not a problem for Watson,” [who had a brilliant short-game all week].  He just needs to get close and sink a putt for victory.”  Unfortunately, he didn’t get close enough and missed the remaining eight-footer.  He scored five.  One man’s cinq is another man’s sank.

In what was clearly an agonizing post-tournament press conference, Tom Watson fielded journalists’ questions with candor and grace.
 
Asked how it feels he said: “It tears at your gut as it always does.  It always did tear at my gut.”

Asked if, at his age, fatigue was a factor in the four-hole playoff loss: “It looked like it, didn’t it?  It didn’t feel like it.”

“Before coming to Turnberry did you really think you had a chance?” another asked.
 
“It was almost…The dream almost came true.  I don’t like to go to Augusta [Augusta National, home course of The Masters]… I feel like a ceremonial golfer there…  But out here I have a chance, I knew I had a chance.”

Indeed!  There is no joy in Mudville.

Footnote:
There was an Olympic Gold Medalist, Oscar Swahn, in a shooting (marksmanship) event who in 1912, at 64, became the oldest Olympian so honored but, although technically a sport, it doesn’t require much physicality.