I know it has been awhile, and I truly do apologize.  There was a huge ice storm, and as God is my witness, my dear ones, we will be going over it.  However; I feel compelled to speak to you today about another subject.  Eye brows.  You probably have never given a lot of thought to the two hairy creatures crawling to greet each other in the middle of your face.  You take for granted every morning that they will be there waiting for you to notice (or not) them in the mirror.  Well my darlings, in this I must be the bearer of bad news.  Eye brows thin with age.  It’s true!  In fact, in my family they sometimes disappear altogether!!

When I was just a child of say thirteen, my mother held me down one day, as mothers are likely to do, and said “you need your eye brows plucked.”  Granted I was the proud owner of a heavy European Uni-brow, but my life was rolling along just fine.  I had what we referred to as boyfriends.  I had friends that were of the same sex too.  I wasn’t so appalling that people were throwing rotten tomatoes at my hump and protecting the eyes of small children as I walked by, but it had been decided by the powers that be…and so it was.  I don’t know if my mother enjoyed inflicting pain on other people, or if she was just unaware of my screams because she was already becoming deaf, but she didn’t use any of the things that people use to help with the pain for virgin pluckees.  No ice, no Vaseline, no bullet to bite on…no she just took off,  tweezers in hand, and about six hours later she announced that I looked better.   She gave me the hand mirror and I took a look.  Between the rivulets of blood running down my face and nose,  I could see tiny little lines above my eyes.  They looked like the outline of Bozo’s eyes before anyone had filled in the grease paint.  I was shocked!  Maybe I was shocked, and then again maybe I just looked like I was shocked.  Then my mother said, “It will be better when the swelling goes down…go get some ice.”  Really?  Ice now?  You held back when I was screaming my pre-teen head off, but you think now is a good time for ice?  Guess what I think now is a good time for?  Of course, these are things you think but never say to your mother when you are that age.  At least not if you want to live.  That night at dinner everyone was at the table, by this time there was only one sister still living at home, plus the parents and me.  Everyone was already seated at the table when I sat down.  Dad was talking and passing plates.  When he finally looked at me, he said “Good God girl, did you see a rat?” I said no, and he said, “Then quit making your eyes do that.  It ain’t right.”  Well, needless to say I ran to my room with my sister’s laughter as my curtain call.

I bring this up because I have recently had to begin filling my eyebrows in.  I mean obviously I grew them back  after that debacle. I kept them separated of course, although I think they still keep in touch.  However no one my age lived through the Brooke Shields era and maintained pencil thin brows.  Not if you were a style aficionado.  But just as age makes some things wider…boobs, hips, memory gaps, and so on…it makes some things thinner…lips, brows, attention spans and  so I had to go to one of my favorite stores to get an eye brow pencil and brush.  Of course there were mirrors everywhere so you could try samples on and I began to people watch.   Young women don’t really bother with eye brow pencils.  They have their brows professionally arched and then wax them as needed to maintain that perfect WTF look at all times.  Older women don’t arch their brows.  They have a IDGAF look on their faces.  (you can figure it out)  I don’t have an arch to my brow.  I have to pencil it in, and on the left side it’s on the back half and on the right side it’s on the front half.  This leaves me with a kind of…don’t ask me, I’m a looney toon…look on my face, but they ask anyway.  What I love though, is those women who are in their 70’s and 80’s who come in for the big guns in eye brow products.  These are the women who are my mother’s age and loved that big semi-circle around their eye and the big, full red lips.  These elderly pin-up chicks totally dig the make up counter.  They will pay any amount for the perfect red lip stick, and if they can find a thin tipped, fawn brown brow brush with a perfect applicator wand…jump back Mr. Happy, granny’s good to go.

My brother-in-law’s mother was a very meticulous woman.  She was always well dressed and she always had her hair and make up done.  As her life progressed she became encumbered with dementia.  She ran the family a merry chase.  She was always creating a little turmoil in her own way.  For the most part it was harmless, and other than having to watch her slowly lose herself to this horrible illness my brother-in-law always handled it with calm and grace.  But one day he went to visit and take his mother to the doctor.  There sat mom ready to go.   She was fully dressed, her hair was done, her make up was intact, and she had two bright blue half arches above her eyes.  He asked her as nicely as he could what she had used to draw in her eyebrows.  She had used a blue sharpie pen.  My brother in law loves describing the look on the doctor’s face when he escorted his mother into the examining room.

That’s a true story, dear ones.  Grandmas sometimes have blue eyebrows.  I personally can’t wait to get to the point that I am so old I can get by with crap and people won’t say anything to me.  All these whiners around me now call me out on every little thing I do every day of my life.  Forget a pill, whine-sleep too late, whine-fall asleep at the wheel…well you get the picture.  They are just nipping at my heels.  Do this, do this, do this, oh don’t do that, don’t do that…you shouldn’t have done that…no wonder you’re tired.  Tired’s ass…it’s a wonder I can even remember my name or think for myself, let alone draw eyebrows on my face.  If I could I’d make them plaid, and not the family plaid either, just some skank lowland plaid that no one in their right mind would wear, I would just to piss them off.  Then maybe they would leave me alone and let me sit in the corner with my plaid eyebrows and my little invisible friends and my cup of tea…and read my little book…and talk to myself…after all I really am the only one who understands.

If you’ve been paying attention, you know I am the product of Southern folk.  If you are the product of Southern folk, then you know they will eat just about anything.  Did you ever wonder why?  When I was younger I remember being in the car with my parents and having them stop by the roadside and pick leaves off of a plant, take them home and fry them in (probably) bacon grease with some egg and eat them.  Polk salat…not salad, as I thought for years…salat is what the funky leaves were.  Do you know what it does to your children when you pullover and graze on a road trip?  It’s not good.  Every time we saw some road kill, I was afraid the car would stop.  Every time I saw a plant with berries I was afraid that Jed and Jethrine were gonna jump out of the truck and set to pickin’.  It was a scary environment to grow up in. 

You can probably empathize, even if you aren’t blessed to be from the south, as far as greens go.  I mean, there are seven zillion kinds of lettuce.  Here’s the difference…have you ever had mystery meat?  Mystery meat is any meat that can’t be determined by observation.  It doesn’t look like anything you’ve ever had before.  My father was a hunter.  He brought game home and expected us to eat it.  He would kill small things and large things, and when he killed all I could think of was the beautiful animals in Bambi.  That didn’t really fly in my family.  It was kind of “you’ll eat what’s put in front of you and you’ll like it.”  There were times when the budget was tight and mom would dig something out of the freezer.  It was like something being removed from the morgue.  She would put it in the ‘fridge to thaw.  I would try to read the butcher’s paper to see what it was, but usually the moisture in the freezer had worn the ink off the package.  The next night she would peel off the white paper, and there would be the meat…but what kind of meat was it?  I was the youngest child.  My sister that was older than me by 6 years loved to torture me and she would tell me it was a kitten, or my pet rabbit, or anything that would bring me to tears.  When dinner was ready I would pass my plate to my dad and he would start putting things on it for me.  “Do you want potatoes?  Do you want green beans?  Do you want chicken?”  I looked at him like he was from another planet.  I had seen the butcher’s paper.  I knew he had never hunted a chicken.  What in the hell did he take me for?  For one thing, there wasn’t a drumstick to be seen, and that was the best part of a chicken.  He had lost his mind, and apparently thought I was as stupid as he was.  How to respond?  Now keeping in mind that I was probably all of six years old and momentarily stunned I answered in the only sensible way I could.  I looked at my father and said, “that’s no damn chicken!”  There was a brief silence around the dinner table that night. Brief,  Then laughter erupted.  I was so relieved, I thought I had gotten by with it.  I mean after all, I was just speaking out of shock.  It was temporary insanity judge…I swear.  Finally everyone calmed down and mom said come here and I went to her and she took me by the hand and led me to the bathroom.  I was so stupid, I didn’t even see it coming when she washed my mouth out with soap.  I don’t remember what the soap tasted like, but I’d be willing to bet it was better than the mystery meat…which I didn’t eat.  I did eat everything else though…at least the things I recognized.

My parents will eat anything.  It’s truly disturbing.  I have seen them eat turnips and the green tops that come with them.  I have seen them eat beets, mustard greens, chicken gizzards, dandelion greens, but perhaps the worst of all is generic Spam.  This gelatinous gunk is called Treet.  For the life of me I can’t imagine why.  Until I left home, there was always a metal can, with a key on the back of it, of Treet in the cabinet.  My father loved it!  He would put it on crackers, he would fry it in the morning and have it with eggs and toast, he would slice a slab of it off and have a Treet sandwich.  I wouldn’t touch the stuff with a ten foot pole.  He asked me once why I wouldn’t even try it and how I could be so against something I had never even tasted.  Here is what I tried to explain to my father: Meat shouldn’t come in a can.  When it comes in a can and you have to remove it a horrendous glopping sound happens and it is beyond gross.  Then it looks like it is covered in snot.  If you look at it, you see a gray glob of square mush that has snot dripping off of it and I have never in my life seen that in any butcher shop or meat section at the grocery therefore in my mind it is undefined and I don’t eat undefined foods.  I was about fifteen at this time, and pretty sure the world revolved around me and what I liked and disliked.  So explaining Treet to my poor idiot father was just one of my many daughterly duties.  I had like a million.  OMG!!  Anyway, later in that week I was leaving the house to go on a date, and I went in to kiss my dad goodbye.  While I was there I asked him to come and meet the guy I was going out with.  Mom already had and apparently she had informed him about my date because he said.  “Boys shouldn’t go out with my daughter.  Let me tell you why, they have one thing on their minds and it isn’t the movies or a pizza.  They come in here with zits on their faces looking like they inhaled a pepperoni pizza and the pepperoni just stuck there.  It is beyond gross.  I have never seen a boy that is worth you.  Not in school or in the gym therefore this date is undefined and I don’t go meet undefined boys.”  (I took liberties with the quote it has been several years and I may not have it verbatim.)  I had to crack up.  My dad had just compared my date to generic Spam.  As it turned out he was right, but I still haven’t ever eaten canned meat.  Maybe it’s because that date left such a bad taste in my mouth.  I just don’t know.

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