The Gift

I stare at the candle holder squatting on the table like a malevolent imp. Red and blue beads glare out from behind shrouds of black tar. It was supposed to be a cool-looking, hand-crafted candle holder. Instead it has turned into something nasty. It is "The Candle Holder from the Black Lagoon". I dread showing it to my son. Nick is going freak out.

This morning when I woke I walked into the workshop to see what had been created overnight. I found a jar on the workbench, covered in gray cement. Where was the grout? I wondered.

Last night before I'd gone to bed, I'd left Nick sitting on the stool, busily hot glueing glass beads onto an empty jar. It was going to be his present to his girlfriend, Melissa. Her birthday party was the next day and he was trying to pull off a hand made gift for her.

Actually, the candle holder idea was a compromise. Originally he'd wanted to make her a globe lamp mosaicked with glass beads. I'd convinced him to try something easier, since it would require having a place to plug it in and he wasn't sure how to work the cord or whether or not the base had to be cemented, too.

All of that just seemed like a lot to work out less than 48 hours before the party. A candleholder was just about possible, I figured. Nick agreed. Before I went to bed last night I had brought in a tub of white, pre-mixed, sanded grout, pointed out the instructions on the back and left him to it.

What I was looking at this morning wasn't grouted at all. It was cemented. Seriously cemented. And it was gray. What happened?

I went into the kitchen and started making coffee. Nick walked in then, looking like he hadn't slept at all.

"Nick, have you been to bed?"

"I slept for an hour."

"I saw the jar on the workbench. What happened to the grout?"

"It didn't work. It not only didn't work, it dissolved the glue that was holding the beads on the jar. So I had to clean it off and start all over again."

"I'm sorry, Nick."

"Yeah, so Dad helped me make cement and I used that instead."

"Now what?"

"Now I'm supposed to take a sponge and wipe off all the excess cement."

"I'll help you find the stuff to do that." I felt guilty about the grout. Who knew it would melt hot glue? "This is just one of those journey things, Nick," I said, trying to find a bright spot for him.

I filled a bucket with water and found a big sponge. I put some newspaper down on the kitchen table, got Nick some rubber gloves and set him to work cleaning off the cement from the beadwork.

After twenty minutes or so, still feeling guilty, I offered to take over for a while, which is when things went from bad to horrible. As I rubbed on the bottom of the candleholder, a chunk of cement fell off taking four beads with it.

"Uh oh," I said. Nick looked over at the large pile of cement on the newspaper and said, "Please tell me the beads haven't come off."

"I wish I could."

I told him to go jump in the shower while I thought about what to do next. Cementing the thing again wouldn't work because there wasn't enough time for it to set up. We could always go buy a present, except Nick was already exhausted, and a trip to the store wasn't going to help that.

I took the jar out to the yard and used a hose to clean off the rest of the cement. Most of the beads fell off in the process. There was no way we could use the same jar again. There were globs of hot glue all over it and they weren't coming off. Plus, now that the cement was gone I could see where the grout had stained the glass already. It was wrecked.

I went back into the kitchen and scrounged around the cupboards looking for another jar with a lid. No soap. And then I decided to look in the refrigerator to see if there was another jar like this one that could be used. I found a salsa jar, emptied the contents into a mason jar, then rinsed it out, dried it and waited for Nick to get out of the shower.

When he came back into the kitchen, still depressed, but clean at least, I showed him the new jar. "You'll need to re-glue the beads onto this," I said. He nodded listlessly. He'd already decided that this nightmare was never ending. Now he was just waiting for the next worst possible thing to happen.

I decided that we'd use another craft product to put around the beads. If the point was to make everything dark except where the light would shine through the glass beads then this stuff would work just as well and as a bonus I was pretty sure I could get it to dry before the party at 3:30 this afternoon.

I told Nick what I was going to do and sent him to bed. Then I got to work on the candle holder.

Propping it on its side I took Liquid Leading and started squirting it on the side facing up. It flowed into all the cracks between the beads, clinging to the glass like it was a lava flow going around rocks in the landscape. This might turn out pretty cool, I thought. Melissa was into gems and minerals, maybe this would end up being like gemstones in aggregate. Or something.

By the time I finished outlining all the pretty glass beads, I'd started to realize that the difference between this stuff and the cement was that with the cement, and the grout, for that matter, what you ended up with was a fatter looking jar, with pretty colored bumps in it. A uniform thickness all around. It looked regular and crafted and nice.

What you got with liquid leading was something that looked malformed and lumpy and evil. And there was nothing I could do to make it look any better. I briefly toyed with the idea of removing all the liquid leading again and just leaving the thing to be a glass jar with beads on it. But that would be even further away from what Nick had wanted in the first place. I just hoped he wouldn't be too disappointed when he woke up to see what had become of his gift for his girlfriend.

By two o'clock I couldn't take the suspense anymore and woke Nick from a sound sleep. He sat up in bed, nodded when I asked him if he was awake, then fell over again. A half hour later I told him what time it was and he panicked, getting dressed, running his fingers through his hair, getting dressed again. I hesitantly asked him if the candle holder was going to be okay and he looked distractedly at it and said, "What? Oh, yeah, that's fine, Mom," and went back to hunting for the perfect black tee. "Are there any of my shirts anywhere that are clean?"

We ended up putting the jar in a gift bag with a cushion of tissue paper over the top. I warned him to tell Melissa not to squeeze it for at least 24 more hours to give the stuff a chance to harden up. "Yeah, yeah," he said, and then it was time to go.

Later when the boys came back from the party, I was in bed, so I didn't get a chance to ask how the gift had been received. I had to wait until the next day. When I saw Nick at breakfast I asked him how Melissa had liked it. "Oh, she liked it." "Really? What did her mom say?" "Frances? She said it was 'interesting looking.'"

Art is a process, just like life. It's not what you end up with, it's what you learn while getting there.

Nick is lucky to have a girlfriend who likes him enough that even when she's presented with a black lump of goo masquerading as a candle holder all she sees is that he cared enough to make something especially for her. And I'm lucky to have a son who loves me enough that even when I mess up his life all he sees is that I meant well. It's a gift.

Hygiene!

On the way to the community college this morning I caught a whiff of something unpleasant and leaned over to sniff at my son who was riding next to me in the passenger seat. It wasn't him. Sam looked at me and raised an eyebrow. "It's me, isn't it," I said and he nodded. It's finally happened. I have worse hygiene than my kids.

When I was young, in my single digits, I showered as infrequently as I could get away with, or whenever my mother caught me and forcibly threw me into the tub. Dirt didn't bother me a bit, especially when it was on me. As I grew older, cleaning myself up got to be more important, so that it wasn't unusual to try to sneak in extra showers beyond the 5 minute one we were each allowed by my father in the mornings.

Dad not only timed us, he'd start flushing the toilets one after the other if we overran our official limit of hot water. And he was so proud of his own tried and true method for getting clean, that he used to demonstrate it to us when we got to be teenagers, acting out all the steps.

He started out by showing us how much shampoo to use, pointing to a nickel in his palm. "You don't need a lot of shampoo! Just a little bit is plenty! Wash your hair first and then, while you're rinsing your hair, take the soap and then work your way down all the way to your feet. By the time you're done your hair is all rinsed and you're done. It shouldn't take you any longer than five minutes!"

Bless the man, he was paying for the hot water contained in two 40 gallon hot water heaters, and there were ten kids to get clean and out the door every morning besides himself. But back then, we didn't use the shower just to get clean, we used it to wake up as well. So it is with my own children now. I get them out of bed, but it isn't until they're midway through their morning ablutions that they actually become conscious.

Maybe the reason that I'm so much less showered than they are these days is that they've actually got places to go. I'm merely the means for them to get there, so cleanliness doesn't really enter into it.

Sam's got classes on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. Nick and Sam have clubs on Mondays and Wednesdays. Already they have reason to jump in the shower five days a week. Some of these classes/clubs have (gasp!) girls in them.

I, on the other hand, am meeting no one of any significance whatsoever in person in any way. I'm a stay at home, work at home, trapped at home mother and destined to remain that way evermore. I've tried looking for work away from my cozy confines and no matter how carefully I craft my resume it always sounds like I'm being smug about the fact that I've managed to make a living for the past twenty years without benefit of office politics and a dress code.

Well, maybe the dress code thing could be useful, especially on those days like today, when I sniff my own armpits and realize that it's not just my t-shirt that's stinking, but the sports bra underneath has that unmistakable sulphurous vapor that comes when you forget to remove a load of laundry for more than a half an hour after the final spin cycle while living in a tropical climate.

And, I'm sick today, which means I'm feverish, which means all of me is warmer than usual and it makes everything about me that much more pungent. Truly, my son is heroic in his efforts not leap out of the car and attempt to flag down any passing stranger to carry him the rest of the way in to campus, rather than ride another mile in the car with me. At least it's not raining. We roll down the windows. The drivers behind us shrivel and die.