Karen Sandler

Category: Old Memories

  • From Zero to Rage in a Millisecond

    Twenty-plus years ago when my two sons were quite small, I had a very upsetting experience while waiting in a Costco parking lot for my husband. It was night time and it was just the three of us. A man in a big pickup pulled up next to where we were parked and when he opened his door, it banged into the side of my car.

    Not long before this, my younger son had carelessly done the same thing and made a ding in a lady’s car door. We had to go in search of the owner, do the whole exchange of insurance and contact information. I’d impressed on my son that he had to be more careful opening his door.

    So when this man banged our car, I got out to say something to him. The moment I said the words “You hit our car,” he exploded verbally, spewing out obscenities, his sudden anger at me (when he was clearly at fault) unexpected and frightening. I’m sure he saw me as vulnerable–a woman alone with two small kids. I certainly felt that way. In any case, I immediately backed down, scared but seething inside. The man went on his way.

    This incident came to mind because something similar happened today. I don’t want to say where it happened. It’s a place where I’m the customer, and I was unhappy with something that had happened, something that should have been done differently. My first impulse was to call the person’s boss to complain, but I thought instead that I would just talk to the person directly.

    I told the person all this, that I wanted to avoid calling his boss. As I spoke to him, yes, I was ticked, and I probably sounded irritated. But when I told him what I wished he’d done differently, he immediately pulled out the big anger guns. He used the f-bomb and made it clear he thought the fault was mine and not his that the mistake had happened.

    I walked away and told him I’d take it up with his boss. He threw out, “You do that,” then followed me, carping at me some more. I tried again to get my point across, but kept walking until I got in my car to leave.

    Unlike the experience with the guy in the pickup truck, today’s was more unpleasant than scary. But to have a near stranger blow up at me like that was kind of shocking. Even if you think a customer is annoying (and yes, I can be annoying sometimes), you smile and apologize. In this particular situation, I had a valid point to make, but he wasn’t having any of it.

    What’s also interesting is that the same person was around the day before when my husband and another man were working on a project. I introduced myself, talked to him, made some suggestions about the work he was doing, and he took my requests with equanimity. So what was the difference today? Was he having a bad day? Or was it that I was a woman by herself, without two other men within earshot?

    Unexpected explosive anger isn’t restricted to men. I’ve known women who respond the same way to get the upper hand. And truly, there’s nothing else you can do in these situations but back down and walk away. But the next call you make should be to someone who can do something about it.

    So I called his boss. Which I now wish I’d done in the first place.

  • RTW – My Favorite Book I Had to Read for School

    Today YA Highway‘s blog prompt for Road Trip Wednesday is What’s your favorite book you had to read for a class? First of all, school of any kind was a mighty long time ago for me. We did have books back then. Yes, they were paper bound between covers, not on papyrus scrolls. But it’s a little hard for me to remember which books I read for pleasure, and which ones I might have been assigned to read.

    But I did happen to read quite a wide range of books in 10th grade. We had the best English teacher ever, Mrs. Luckensmeyer. She was definitely a factor in me becoming a writer. One of our weekly assignments was to fill two pages in our composition books (front and back of the two pages), which really inspired my creativity.

    I also loved how she had us do book reports. We were free to pick any book we liked from the school library. After reading it, we would hand it over to her in a one-on-one session. She would then flip through it and ask random questions about the book.

    Okay, this would probably be terrifying for those students who never actually read the book. You couldn’t fake one of Mrs. Luckensmeyer’s book reports, like you could if you did it in written format and referred to Cliff’s Notes. But I thought her book reports were great. (Did I mention I was kind of a teacher’s pet?)

    So I read some pretty interesting books. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, for instance. And the one that I think was my favorite of the ones I read in her class because it was just so darn weird.

    Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis. I remember it being a little horrifying (a guy wakes up transformed into a cockroach!), a little gross (the guy is injured and starts turning all gooey and pus-filled!), and a little (a lot) bizarre (who turns into a cockroach anyway?).

    Not the usual kind of book a 14-year-old reads. But at that point in my life, I was choosing books by their title. The title was cool, so I grabbed it off the shelf.

    I later read plenty of classics–Dracula and Frankenstein, most of Mark Twain, plenty of science fiction and fantasy. But Kafka’s Metamorphosis has stuck with me all these years. It still gives me a chill just thinking about that man-to-cockroach transformation.

    So how about you? What favorite books do you remember fromschool? Creepy, wonderful, heart-wrenching? Have you read them since, and do they hold up? Let me know in the comments.

  • My Father’s Daughter

    Years ago, my mom told me a story about my dad that was both funny and telling. Early in their marriage, my dad decided to paint the picket fence surrounding the house they lived in. The thing is, he didn’t just get out a can of paint and start painting. He had to figure out a better way. As my mother told it, he spent more time rigging up a contraption to hang the paint can around his neck for handy access than he did actually painting the fence.

    I am so my father’s daughter, luckily with some modifications. While I have that same compulsion to find that “better way” to do a task, I resist that urge when the straightforward way will do. But I can come up with thingamajigs with the best of them.

    For instance, I’ve been spending more hours than usual at my computer working on the developmental edit for Awakening, the sequel to Tankborn. I was ending up in a fair amount of pain by the end of the day. Not only was there some carpel tunnel type inflammation, the pressure on my wrist bone from my mouse pad and laptop led to quite a bit of soreness.

    So I put on my thinking cap (the one I inherited from my dad) and considered options for protecting my hands. I went digging through my fabric supply in the garage and came up with some black fake fur I’d used to create some stuffed animal or another. I started out by just cutting a couple rectangles, then folding them in half for extra padding. Resting my hands on those made a world of difference to my comfort.

    But I still had a few issues. How did I keep the rectangles from unfolding? How did I keep the pads on my wrists? Once they were on my wrists, how did I keep them from slipping too far down my arm?

    What you see here is what I came up with. I stitched the rectangles into squares. I added a piece of black elastic to hold the guards to my wrists. Then, to keep them from slipping down, I tied on a couple of hair bands. Hmm, I suppose I should have looked for hair bands in black to keep the same color scheme.

    This is how they look in action. They are dorky looking in the extreme, but since I had all the material on hand, they were free to make (and not too time consuming). Plus, they work just fine, at least to pad my wrist bone. As a protector against carpal tunnel syndrome, they suck, but that wasn’t their purpose.

    For that, I had to rearrange my work space. I use a laptop, and I could never get a very good wrist angle while typing on the keyboard. Not to mention with the screen being down at desk height, my neck was having issues with my head constantly tipping down to see the screen. So I did two things. One, I got an external keyboard with its keys laid out in a slightly more ergonomic way. It allowed me to a) have my forearms level with my wrist (essentially parallel to the floor) and b) have a comfortable angle between elbow to fingers as I type rather than straight on.

    The second thing I did is elevate my laptop. This allows me to look at the screen straight on rather than tipping my head down. I feel rather smug that I didn’t have to buy the rack it’s sitting on. It was tucked away in the garage (because we never throw anything away), just waiting for a brilliant idea to put it into use.

    What you can’t see in the pictures is that I have a drawer open on the mouse side, and a board on top of it to give my arm support when I’m mousing. All of these changes have made a big difference in my comfort as I make my way through my manuscript.

    Unfortunately, my cats tend to thwart my ergonomics when they lie in my lap and drape themselves across my arm. Casper here isn’t as much a problem as Tenka, who suspends half her 14-pound body across my left arm. Ouch.

     

    But I think my solutions are pretty cool. And I think my dad would be proud.

  • In My Father’s Footsteps

    There was a book I read when I was maybe 7 or 8 in which the boy character is taking a walk with his father. The boy tries to match his father’s stride, to place his feet right alongside his dad’s. I have a very clear image of taking a walk with my own dad after I read the book and trying to keep pace like the boy did. Of course my shorter legs couldn’t quite keep up.

    As an adult, I turned into a hyper-speed walker. I can’t seem to help myself–I go on a walk with someone and without even meaning to, I’m blasting along at mach-10, leaving most other people in the dust. I think I got it from my late dad, because when he was younger and still robust, we’d take walks together and neither one of us had trouble keeping up with the other. My two sons walk like I do. None of us seem to know how to meander.

    This came to mind the other night as my husband and I were leaving the “dance barn” where we do international folk dance on Friday nights. The “dance barn” is an outbuilding on the 20+ acres of property owned by some friends of ours. The space we dance in is a converted goat barn (no joke), hence the name “dance barn.” And although it’s not exactly out in the middle of nowhere (the freeway is only a couple of miles away), when we turn out the lights, it’s pitch black outside.

    So there I was Friday night with the flashlight, leading my husband through the darkness. Except my legs didn’t know how to keep pace with him. They just kept striding along at my usual mach-10, not only leaving him in the dust, but in the dark as well. I had to keep reminding myself to sl-o-o-o-w down so he could see where he was walking.

    I felt kind of bad about that. But it was a nice memory of my dad, and those long ago walks we used to take.

  • Temptation: 1, Me: 0

    Generally speaking, I should not stop for yard sales. If I do, there’s a .999 probability that I will spend money. Usually it will be some small knickknack that only costs a couple dollars. But sometimes (like today), it requires pulling out my mad money to lay down some semi-serious cash.

    I could blame it on my husband. I certainly blamed him that time I was admiring a kitten at an adoption clinic and begged him to let me take her home. We already had three cats, and I counted on him to tell me, in a reasonable tone of voice, “No, Karen, we already have enough cats.” He did not. Instead, he said, “Sure, let’s adopt her.”

    Cosette turned out to be a wonderful cat who spent most of her waking hours snuggled up to me. Sadly, a heart condition cut short her life at a young age.

    In any case, you can see that my husband is supposed to be the safety brake to my acquisitive nature. So when we stopped at a yard sale to check out a dining room set (we actually do need a dining room set), I counted on him to temper my temptations. But I’d already seen the school desk/chair when we were scanning the offerings from our car. Close up, I liked it even more. It turned out the price was kind of reasonable and when I made an offer, the counter was exactly what I’d expected and was willing to pay.

    So, I said, “I want this.” Hubby’s response…crickets. Other than opining that he had no idea where in the house we would put it (I said I’d jam it into my office if I had to), he just let me go on my merry way.

    I did pay for it with my aforementioned “mad money,” cash I receive from book sales that I happened to have tucked away. So the purchase didn’t impact our household finances at all. But hubby didn’t exactly live up to his side of the bargain by saving me from myself.

    But why did I want it, from the moment I spotted it at the yard sale? Because (A) I love old furniture. I love that it’s made from solid wood, that it’s well put together. It’s something I inherited from my dad, I guess. He loved to work with his hands and was an amazing woodworker. (B) I’ve always thought purpose-built furniture is particularly cool. The fact that this is a combo desk-chair is so neat. (C) I love its connection with the past. As I was carrying it into the house, it occurred to me that my mom likely sat at a desk just like it when she was in school in the 30s and 40s.

    There’s a divot carved out of the desktop and I can imagine a restless boy like my father carefully drilling out that hole with his pen knife to while away the slow moving hours in the classroom. There’s a big X scrawled across the desk top too, maybe made by some frustrated student who just had enough of the times tables when a beautiful spring day awaited him or her just outside the schoolhouse windows.

    What am I going to do with this desk-chair? No idea. For now, I piled a few of my granddaughter’s books in the storage area under the seat. She’s a toddler and a little too small to use the chair, but I bet she’ll be intrigued by it next time she comes over.

    And maybe I’ll just sit in the chair myself, write out a few times tables and think about the students who once used it. Girls like my mom, who won a contest in high school with the slogan “Don’t be square, the cafeteria’s not the place to brush your hair.” And boys like my dad, who would sit in old stuffy classrooms dreaming about how he would have much rather be running in an open field with a kite, or riding his bike to the ocean.