Scattershot

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

Alexander McCall Smith's series about the The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency will never be the same for me after Sunday night. The problem? I watched the new HBO series based on the books.

    It's not that the series wasn't entertaining, well-acted, and beautifully filmed. It was. The problem is that the main character, Precious Ramotswe, is not the Precious Ramotswe of my imagination. She is just a bit too young, a bit too pretty, a bit too sweet. My Precious Ramotswe is more dignified, more controlled in her reactions, and even more "traditionally built," as Precious herself would say.

    Oh, I'll keep watching the series. I like it a lot, despite my problem with Precious. But the books will never be quite the same for me. When I read the next one, I'll see HBO's Precious Ramotswe instead of the one my imagination created and grew to love. HBO has killed my Precious.

    I should probably simply refuse to go to movies based on books. I have never once been completely happy with the movie version. Though it's been way too many years to count, I still haven't forgiven Louise Fletcher for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Yes, she won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Big Nurse, but I don't care. She was simply not Big Nurse. She wasn't even big, for heavens' sake. And Jack Nicholson as McMurphy? Where was his red hair? In my imagination, McMurphy was definitely a redhead.

    Okay, I guess I'm a bit inflexible, but not completely so. I wasn't especially fond of the girl playing Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, but Robert Duvall as Boo Radley? Excellent choice. And Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch? Perfect, perfect, perfect.

    And now I have to stop typing because thinking of the movie always reminds me of the line, "Stand up, Miss Jean Louise. Your father is passing." It's my favorite line of all time, and I choke up every time I think of it.

    Every time.

The little guy at the supermarket

A little boy about six stood awkwardly to the side of the supermarket checkout aisles when I was getting groceries yesterday. He wore cowboy boots, blue jeans, a belt with a big buckle, and a cowboy shirt. His hair was combed and parted neatly at the side. He looked completely out of place in this suburban supermarket full of little boys in baggy shorts and T-shirts, giant, blinking shoes, and stylishly gelled hair.

    But of all the cute kids in the store, the one I wanted to take in my arms and hug was the little cowboy. There was a sweetness and innocence on his face, a shyness, a little-kid vulnerability that was missing in the oh-so-hip faces of the others. Maybe it was because he reminded me of the little boys I grew up with in farm country. Maybe it was because I always feel so protective towards those who seem shy or awkward. Maybe it was because he looked, somehow, so darned polite. I feel certain that if I'd said something to him, he would have answered softly and called me "ma'am."

    So many kids, at younger and younger ages, look so worldly-wise to me, as if they've jumped from innocent toddlerhood to the cocky know-it-all-ness of adolescence--but while still in elementary school. Sometimes I'm absurdly pleased to see a child's face that matches, at least in my mind, his actual age.

Homeless?

We had a blizzard in Colorado on Thursday. Today it's beautiful and sunny out, though cold, and there's snow on the ground. I bundled up for a walk a while ago, and as I went out the front door, I saw a woman in a motorized wheelchair going down the street. She held a child bundled up against her.

    "Maybe she's going to the library," I thought, watching for her to turn in to the library street. She didn't. Something seemed odd, but I set off for my walk.

    As I walked around the park, I later saw what appeared to be the same woman, this time pushing a supermarket grocery cart with the child inside on top of some plastic bags. I was concerned. You expect mothers to be pushing strollers, not grocery carts. And what had happened to the motorized wheelchair? Was I just imagining things?

    I looped through the park and came back, hoping to find her again. I was worried that she and the child were homeless. Even as I looked, I wondered why I was trying to find her. What was I going to do? Invite them into our home? Give her money? I didn't even have my wallet with me. And what would be the conversation starter, "Excuse me, but are you homeless?" What if she was just out enjoying some sunshine with her child?

    I didn't find her, but I did see what seemed to be the same child, this time with a young man. She was bundled up in what looked like the same lavender snow suit, and they seemed to be wandering aimlessly. When I got closer and found the child staring at me the way children do, I thought I'd stop and chat, but the man veered off another path. Was he trying to avoid me?

    I looped around the park again and found him still in the same place with the child. This time, though, I saw he was text messaging with a cell phone. "Surely a homeless person wouldn't have a cell phone," I thought. But who knows?

    The whole thing troubles me. I don't know if I was seeing the same child or several different children wearing lavender. And why would a woman be in a wheelchair one moment and walking a short time later with a grocery cart? Maybe I've been reading too many stories about the homeless. Maybe my imagination was working overtime.

    But again, maybe it was not. My heart breaks to think of a child with nowhere to go on a cold day like this.

     All I know is that I will increase my donation this month to a local organization that helps families get on their feet. It's so easy to forget charities when money is tight. Yet that's exactly when we should not forget. That's when we should give more, no matter how small the amount.

    When I walk tomorrow, I'm going to watch for a child in a lavender snow suit. I'm hoping to discover, somehow, that she's really okay.

Yoga voice

I go to a 6:00 a.m. yoga class once a week. The teacher in my current class, like every other yoga teacher I've ever had, has an amazingly soothing voice. No matter what she tells us (no, invites us) to do, it sounds SO appealing in that yoga voice. She'll say, "Bring your right hand over your right shoulder. Reach up your back with your left hand and grab your right. And breathe." Her voice will smile as she says it, and it will sound like just the best idea in the universe. We'll fall all over ourselves trying to bring our right hands over our right shoulders and reaching up our backs with our left hands to grab them.

   I wonder if yoga teachers are given some special kind of voice training. They can lead us into trying the most contorted, twisted poses, the most impossible poses, and we won't suspect a thing. Time and time again, we'll be surprised that something isn't quite as easy as they make it sound, or look. (Of course, the teachers themselves calmly do all the poses with the greatest of ease, usually smiling beatifically as they do so.)

    Every class ends with us lying peacefully in the dark with our eyes closed, relaxing and breathing. In this particular class, we even get a tiny neck massage with peppermint oil. (When I try to tell my husband about this, he gives me a "THIS is an exercise class?" look of disbelief. But of course this is a man whose idea of exercise is skiing uphill for seven miles, pulling a sled with a week's provisions for four. Once, when I was skiing with him and we reached our destination, he unharnessed himself from the sled. It was kind of in my way, so I decided to push it aside. I couldn't even budge it. Anyway, his idea of exercise and mine are clearly different.)

    But back to the voices. As I listened to the teacher today and marveled, yet again, at how she makes everything sound so appealing and inviting, I decided that maybe I don't really need yoga to de-stress after all. Maybe what I need is to hire her to come talk to me all day. "Now let's pull up the company budget," she'll say, "and see what we can do about cutting those printing costs. Breathe..."

    It sounds heavenly.

Hunks on the road

I don't like to mention other men's looks around my handsome husband, but at one point in our recent trip to new Zealand, I just couldn't help myself. I found myself saying, "They must have a rule here: All road construction workers must be good looking."    

    Certainly all the workers I saw were hunks, except for one pot-bellied man with a "Slow" sign I saw towards the end of the trip.

    I got out of the car to ask one hunk what was going on during a 20-minute traffic delay on a narrow mountain road. (Really, I wanted to know!) I could see a helicopter repeatedly diving down into the canyon ahead, rising with a huge container of water, and disappearing. The hunk explained that they were doing some blasting in the area. Rocks and debris would crash down, and the helicopter was enlisted to help wash everything to the side of the road. Then a bulldozer would push it all into the canyon.

    It was amazing to watch the skill of whoever was flying that chopper. (I did tear my eyes away from the hunk.) There wasn't much room for error between those steep mountain walls, but again and again the helicopter dove down, came up with a load of water streaming behind, disappeared for a moment, and in only seconds was doing it all again.

    In the meantime, the hunk walked among the cars, smiling and answering questions, letting people know how much time was left, and--I'm sure--making a few teenage girls' hearts flutter.

    The helicopter was excellent entertainment, and the hunk was an excellent host. My theory is that the tourism board, not the public works department, must have hired him.

    If so, a good choice. A good choice indeed....

Driving on the left

Only a few hundred feet after my husband and I got into our tiny rental car in Christchurch, New Zealand, venturing forth cautiously on the left side of the road, we encountered a roundabout, a busy highway, and torrential rains. It was scary.

    It got scarier. Soon we were on a narrow, winding mountain road with no railing on the curves, one-way bridges everywhere, and terrifying views of a swollen river, far, far, far below. I wanted my husband to slow down to what I viewed was a safe speed--say, ten miles per hour. But he had quickly become used to the left side of the road and buzzed along at what he felt was the fine and dandy speed of much too fast for me.

    I wanted to kill him.

    Luckily, I restrained myself, and soon we were both distracted by the interesting signs in New Zealand. Here just a few:

    Merge like a zip.

    Take extra care. Accident black spot.

    1080 kills everything.

    Grip, don't slip.

    Driver reviver--free coffee.

    Donkey poo for sale.

    And our favorite and most mystifying: a sign with what looked like two breasts, complete with nipples. No words--just the breasts.

     It wasn't until we encountered more of these signs that we realized they don't always come with nipples. Someone must have drawn them on the first one. Still, we never figured out what the sign meant. At first we thought it must have something to do with speed bumps, but there weren't any speed bumps around. Then we thought it might indicate hilly roads, but the roads were so obviously hilly that no one on earth could have needed a sign to point that out. It was a mystery. 

    Also a mystery were the culverts. The gazillions of them all had names. "Gilbert Culvert," for example. Or "Lone Creek Culvert." We couldn't figure out why they warranted names.

    Finally, there were the large warning signs beside the road. Honestly, I can't remember what they said, but it was something akin to "Be careful or you will DIE!!!!!" They always brought my attention back to my husband's driving.

    Not a good thing. I suppose I could have driven, but, really, I'm much better at backseat driving. That I have a real talent for.

(Below, one of the hundredsof bridges in New Zealand.)

In praise of New Zealand's bathrooms

The land is exquisitely beautiful, and the people are incredibly nice. But equally wonderful, at least to me, is the outstanding quality of New Zealand's toilets. (And they are called "toilets," not "restrooms" there). 

    Every woman in the U.S. recognizes the "Should I commit?" dance we do when approaching restroom stalls. We tentatively push open the stall door and take a hesitant peek, hoping not find anything disgusting. Only when it seems halfway decent do we dare to go on in. (All too often, "halfway decent" is the most we can hope for.)

    You don't need to do the dance in New Zealand. In three weeks of traveling around the South Island, I never once encountered a dirty or disgusting restroom. The restrooms were clean. They were efficient. They always worked perfectly. No overflowing toilets. No toilets that didn't flush properly. No filth. There was not a toilet plunger visible anywhere, and my friend who lives there says he's never even seen a plunger in a New Zealand store. It must be because they aren't needed.

    Now what's really amazing about all this is that all the toilets are low-flush. In the U.S. people complain about low-flush toilets all the time because they so often require more than one flush, and no one understands how that is supposed to save water. In New Zealand, the toilets are all low flush, and they work perfectly. They look different than ours; they are smaller and perfectly round. But they work.

    The restrooms also have tall (around two feet high) sanitary product disposal containers in each stall. These brilliantly designed containers allow someone to put something on a tray and have it disappear without ever needing to reach inside to push things down. You never see those overflowing little short containers with the swinging doors that are so common and so inefficient in the U.S.

    And there's more. The hand dryers work. You just hold your hands underneath, and they actually dry them. No need to push a button. No need to give up and walk out the door drying your wet hands on your jeans.

    Most wonderfully, from a woman's point of view, were the restaurant restrooms (excuse me, toilets). Many of them were unisex. No need to wait for the one with the "Women" sign on it to open up. You just take the first one available. It is so much more efficient than our system.

   There are no fast food restaurants in most of the towns, so people eat at wonderful little bakeries. Oddly, these don't have toilets. But the people there can refer you to the town's public toilet, which is always—of course—perfectly presentable.

    We need to take some lessons from the Kiwis. A country that can get its toilets right is a great country indeed!

(I think people would probably prefer not to see toilet pictures, so here is a view of New Zealand's gorgeous Milford Sound.)

 

Apologizing for success

I read a newspaper article this week about a boy who had won the state spelling bee, as had his two brothers previously. "We're not nerds," joked the mother, who home-schools the kids. The boys play football and care for their menagerie of animals, among other un-nerdy activities.

    It occurs to me how often the "not nerd" apology accompanies reports of a child doing something that requires brain power. But why isn't the reverse true? When a child is a great runner or football player or gymnast, there aren't usually any "not stupid" apologies. No one seems to feel the need to say that the sports whiz gets good grades or is an excellent reader or loves algebra. Sports are cool, and if you're good at them, nothing more is necessary.

    But if you're good at something requiring brain power, much more is needed--for example, proof of being normal, proof that you can do something besides use your brain.

     I think that shows something about where our values really lie.  

    And I think I don't like it much.   

Blood lust?

Saturday night, I went to a Colorado Eagles hockey game with my husband. About midway through the third period, I found myself thinking, "There hasn't been a single fight in this entire game."

   And then I realized I was feeling, well, disappointment--me a person who wears her coat over her head in violent movies, leaves the room when people are beating each other up on television shows, and is still haunted by an image I read a month ago about a kind of torture used during the Inquisition. How could I be disappointed in a lack of violence?

    I'm not proud to say it, but I was. Do we all, perhaps, have some kind of blood lust, even if it doesn't show up very often? When I  was teaching, I would sometimes see a herd of kids racing down the hall toward a fight, and they would look thrilled, ecstatic. Were they thrilled to see someone beaten up, or were they thrilled to have something out-of-the-ordinary enliven their day? Was I disappointed not to see a fight at the hockey game, or just disappointed that the fight wasn't adding some excitement to the proceedings?

    I don't know. But I do know that a fight finally erupted in the last couple of minutes of the game. 

    And it was strangely satisfying.

The simplest things can be hard...

    When we arrived in New Zealand three weeks ago, I stepped up to the counter at a bakery and ordered a cup of coffee, black. The woman said, "long flat"?

    I stood there stupidly.

    "Long flat black?" she repeated.

    "Uh, is that just black coffee?" I asked.

    "Yes," she said.

    I said "okay" and waited for her to hand it to me. Instead she gave me a number on a stick about 18 inches high and looked to the person behind me. "My coffee?" I asked. She pointed to the number. Having encountered those already in my short time in the country, I figured it out and sat down.

    Five minutes later, my coffee arrived and I took a sip. I almost spit it across the table. "What's wrong?" my husband asked.

    Now I like my coffee very strong, but this, this coffee was undrinkable. It tasted as if she had given me an eight-ounce cup of quadruple-strength espresso. I left it behind.

    Coffee is a big deal in New Zealand, I soon discovered. Even the tiniest bakery in the most remote area has what it takes to make a fresh latte or a cappuccino. I saw a drip coffee maker only once the whole time I was there. I finally learned just to treat myself to lattes (They cost only about a dollar and a half, U.S. currency) or to order long flat black, half-strength.

    I'm still not sure exactly what long flat black means, but "flat white" means coffee with milk that is not whipped or frothy. At least, I'm pretty sure that's what it means!

    (The Moeraki Boulders in New Zealand, below)