Attack of the Bleacher Creature

At the end of Grade 6, we were all 12 years old, and dying to start Grade 7 because most of our mothers had told us that once we started Grade 7, we could wear makeup. A little makeup. Just a tad.
I remember going to the mall with my friends where we spent hours agonizing over how to spend our allowances. I remember every piece of makeup I bought that day: One emerald green eyeliner, one dark blue eyeliner, one purple eyeliner, clear mascara (maybe the silliest invention ever, but very ’80s ), concealer cream for the black bags under my eyes that my friends insisted I cover (and we wonder why girls and women are so image obsessed) and foundation to shovel on my wrinkle-free, zit-free, perfect 12-year-old skin. (The beauty industry gets you early and gets you good.)
Pretty much every girl in my class looked the same on that first day of school, everyone that is, but Laura.
Laura was a weird girl. She came into Grade 7 with a bad rep because she’d allegedly made out with boys under the bleachers. (Years later when a group of us were reminiscing, we wondered: Our school didn’t even have bleachers, did it?) But what Laura did on that first day, sealed her fate as a weirdo: She came to school with the eyeliner on her lower and upper lids. It wasn’t that she used too much or put it on in a funny way – it was the colour. Her eyes were tomato red. She looked like she had a school’s worth of pink eye. It’s how I looked at Queen’s after I pulled back-to-back all-nighters to finish sociology essays. She had outlined her eyes in lipliner that must have had a name like cherry explosion or red-hot rouge.
I thought about Laura this weekend every time I looked in the mirror. Early Saturday morning, when I wasn’t really awake and hadn’t had any coffee yet, my son and I were playing in our living room. I asked him for a kiss.
He looked at me and smiled and came charging toward me. But instead of his lips connecting with my cheek, his chin smacked my eye (actually the black bag under my right eye). I don’t want to sound like a wuss, but it hurt. A lot. Enough to make me cry.
“I sorry,” my two-year-old cried as he saw a tear roll down my cheek.
I wiped away my tear and then felt another one coming. I wiped that one away too, a pink-tinged tear …
Blood!?
My bag under my eye was bleeding? (At least I wasn’t bleeding black.)
Hours later, for the first time in my life, I had a black eye. Spots around the bottom of my eye was purple, blue – and cherry explosion red.
I was asked the same question repeatedly over the weekend: “What happened to your eye?” (I actually thought it was strange so many people asked me this because what if my black eye wasn’t from a kissing accident with my toddler?)
I’ve also had friends and even a doctor once ask me about the number of bruises I had on my body. One, I’m sort of clumsy. Two, I’ve always bruised easily. Three, when you have a busy life and a toddler, you’re often rushing around, doing things haphazardly, too quickly, too fast and accidents happen. And now I have to do insane things to entertain my son like climb dirt piles and run up slides and give horsey rides around my kitchen.
There are so many more bruises to come.
But bruises disappear.
After a few days, my black eye was gone.
But I’ll always have the memory of my son running so fast, so hard, to kiss to me, that he turned me into Laura Red Eye, the Bleacher Creature.

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The husband, the beer-can fish and the perfect sandwich

I think my husband is pretty close to perfect (sorry to gush but I'm still a newlywed so I have to savour the love). How do I love thee? Let me count the ways (but I don't have much room here so I'm going to count only to three).

1. You leave love notes in my car.

2. You've taken up running so that I have someone to accompany me on my five-kilometre loop.

3. You (happily) went to the movies to see Sex and the City with me - which, by the way, was almost two and a half hours long. And it was bad. So, so bad.

See? There's a lot to love.

But he also has some major flaws.

My No. 1 pet peeve is the kind of thing that can kill a relationship.

Ladies, I know you're with me on this one: A steak sandwich and its chopped-up, saucy sister sandwich, the Philly cheesesteak.

We like to spend our money in local, specialty restaurants, but sometimes, if we're travelling or out with family, we eat at chain restaurants and that means he's going to order The Sandwich of Doom.

This is how our conversation goes: "Ready to order?" the server asks.

"I'll have the steak sandwich," my husband will say.

"Yeah, um, could we actually have

a minute?" I'll snark. And then I berate him.

"Why are you having that? It's never good. You always say it's tough and chewy. It has no taste. It's full of gristle. The bun is like cardboard."

And then he gets it anyway. And he doesn't like it.

"I don't know why I got that. It's never good. It was tough and chewy. It had no taste. It was full of gristle. The bun was like cardboard," he'll say.

So you can understand my horror when he ordered a Philly cheesesteak from a little hole in the wall called the Lakeview Tavern and Restaurant in Erinsville, a town about 45 minutes northwest of Kingston.

From the outside, it looks dumpy. But inside? It's fantastic. There's a bar with red vinyl swivel seats. The restaurant's tables and chairs are mismatched and many chairs are brown-flowered vinyl, just like the kind my grandmother used to have in her dining room.

There are arcade games - Ms. Pac-Man, Terminator 3, and, my favourite, Big Buck Hunter III, which lets you shoot animals with a massive gun. (My son thought this was incredible, even though we didn't put any money in it.)

There are stuffed fish and deer heads on the wall. (My son thought these were incredible, too. It was like going to the petting zoo and not having to actually touch the dirty things.)

And then the piece de resistance -a fish hanging on the wall made out of Molson Export beer cans.

"Nemo!" my 23-month-old son shouted.

"Hi Nemo! Hi! Hi! Hi!" he squealed, just days after discovering the animated fish movie Finding Nemo.

And then it was time to order. I asked for a chicken wrap. My son got chicken fingers. My stepson ordered a burger and my stepdaughter ordered breakfast - eggs and bacon.

All simple roadhouse staples. "And I'll have the Philly cheesesteak," my husband said.

Once he got it, he took one bite and then shoved it at me.

"Taste this," he said.

"I know, I know, it tastes like cardboard," I said as I bit into the -

Tender strips of melt-in-your-mouth steak, sauteed onions and green pepper dripping in a sweet barbecue sauce and blanketed in mozzarella, on a warm, toasted bun.

A fish made out of beer cans and a delicious steak sandwich. What more could a girl want? A glass of Shiraz.

And Lakeview has that, too. My husband. Such a genius.


And here is the rest of it.

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The controlling man in my life

I need to apologize to every mother who, in my self-obsessed 20s, I condemned as being a bad parent because I thought you were letting your baby be a wild child. I know now that you don't control your toddler; he controls you.

While my 23-month-old is the apple of my eye, he's become a crab apple in the past few weeks as he learns to assert his independence.

He has two favourite sayings. If he drops something and I offer to get it, he'll reject my help: "No, I get it!"

And my baby boy who used to love being in his stroller or in a shopping cart, doesn't like to sit anymore.

"I walk!" he'll demand.

One of my favourite things to do with my son is (was) grocery shopping. He'd sit in the cart and choose green peppers for me to bag and we'd open a bag of cookies in the store and each have one.

This week, when we went shopping, I evidently brought the wrong child. Strange, how the spawn of the devil looks just like my angelic boy.

We stepped into the store and there, just a few steps in, was my worst nightmare: A bin full of pink, blue, green and purple balls.

"Balls!" my son shouted. "Balls! Balls! Balls!"

(Whoever set this display up, doesn't have children or has a vendetta against mothers.)

Before I could grab my son, he picked up two balls and then kicked them toward the broccoli. Then, he escaped under the turnstile, leaving me behind with the shopping cart.

On my way to grab him, I threw two bunches of broccoli (just 99 cents each!) into my cart and took off in my high-heeled shoes. We zipped through the pharmacy for diapers and then headed to the meat section for chicken, still playing soccer with two balls.

Then, he picked up the balls and whipped them at a frozen hamburger display and then ran away.

With five packages of cold, soggy chicken skewers under my arm, I set off to catch him, my purse still in the cart, now an aisle away.

And then he fell. Face first. The screams echoed in the store.

I picked him up and carried him back to the shopping cart, his legs like egg beaters, whirling around, kicking me in the thighs and stomach. I grabbed one ball from the frozen burgers display and chased the other, which was rolling towards the dairy section.

"I walk! I walk!" he screamed.

As soon as I put him down again, he took off. Giggling. I caught up to my son in the cereal aisle, where he threw himself on the floor and started kicking the shelf, causing boxes of bran to topple.

"Excuse me!" a woman said, exasperated as she tried to get past us. I scooped up my son again and

stuck him in the main part of the cart with the food. As I flew around the aisles, my son calmed down.

I was checking my grocery list, enjoying the peace, when a woman strutted over to my cart.

"Ma'am," she spitted. "Your son -" she paused. "Is sitting on your broccoli!" He must have sensed the hostility

because he snapped out of his happy place.

"I walk!" he screamed.

We dashed to the checkout, where my son whipped the balls at a 20-something male cashier - over and over again.

"I'm so sorry," I apologized - over and over again.

"This is the best part of my day," he said, as he rang through my flattened broccoli.

"It's fun." Fun?

And here is the rest of it.

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Essential tactics for gossip girls

My husband and I have a thing we do (OK, it's a thing I do) when I want to tell him a story about someone when we're out in public.

If we're going out for dinner, I'll prep him on the drive to the restaurant.

"Tonight," I'll say, "I'm going to tell you a story about Dan Bandanamana. But, when I do, I'm going to call him Bille Bo Bob."

"Uh huh," my husband will reply, knowing that he's going to have to sit through one of my dramas.

It's a scheme I've devised so that I can talk about someone without worrying about whether his wife/sister/coworker/brother is sitting next to me - unbeknownst to me.

I started doing this a few years ago because when we went out for dinner we could never tell stories that involved anyone because we were always surrounded by people we knew, or people who we knew knew us, even if they didn't know we knew them. Know what I mean?

The new-name scheme is a plan I think other people should adopt.

I was out for dinner the other night with my girlfriends talking about whether it's OK that we feed our toddlers wieners, chicken fingers and chocolate milk for dinner when I heard: "Blah, blah, blah, Sarah Crosbie, blah, blah, blah."

The table next to us was having a good time chatting - about me. I was sitting just one person away from them so I gave them a smile.

They were so involved in their conversation, they didn't notice my gesture. Nope, they had no idea that that girl enjoying her glass of Australian shiraz was me. Sarah Crosbie.

"Blah, blah, blah, Sarah Crosbie, blah, blah, blah," – I could make out only every third word or so. I wasn't annoyed I was being talked about. I was amused. But then, my amusement turned to worry. I know I'm due for a hair cut and, yes, I've gained five pounds over the last few months. Maybe I looked so out of sorts I didn't even look like myself?

Working at a newspaper brings a certain amount of celebrity when you live in a city the size of Kingston.

There are times I like chatting with readers - like when I'm out on a date with my hubby, having a nice time, sipping wine - (when I look good) -and there are times when I'm not so keen about chatting with readers, like when I'm at the drugstore buying diapers with bedhead and raccoon eyes from yesterday's mascara.

One time a few months ago, a lovely older man who was in his 70s or 80s met me at the cash register and wanted to chat.

"Well, fancy meeting you here so early in the morning, Sarah Crosbie!" he said with a huge smile.

"I'm getting my newspaper. Whatcha getting this time of day?"

"Oh, well, you know," I said, as I tried to hide the box of tampons behind my back.

I slowly backed away, mumbling something about having to go grab something, anything, to get me out of the humiliating situation. It was like having to talk about feminine products with my grandpa.

I also once had a Kingstonian tell me she was at a little resort, Los Corales, in Santiago de Cuba, the same week my husband and I were there - and she saw us.

Saw us doing what? I thought. Frolicking on the beach? Kissing?

Hoovering our dinner? Jumping in the pool with our clothes on? My mind raced as I tried to rewind the entire vacation in my head.

I don't have a problem with people talking about me. All I ask is that if you are going to take my advice and give me a new name so you can gab about me openly, you make it something fun like Billie Bo Bobette.

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