Chocoholics Anonymous

May 2, 2014May 1, 2014 / roughwighting / 39 Comments

My eyes dart around the front of the store when I first enter, bells tinkling to announce my arrival.

If there is a cluster of school girls, or worse, a cadre of 70-something women wearing plaid coats that smell like moth balls, I distract the group (for instance, by exclaiming “Oh my gosh, look at that horrible fistfight going on two doors down”).

That usually gets rid of my competition for the 10-12 seconds I need to get in front of the line.

I pick which black-and-white-striped clerk wants to help me. No, not the officious, tight-bunned, narrow-lipped woman whose nametag says “Brenda.” She’s stingy.

I smile at Ralph, roly-poly and sweet. He recognizes me and acknowledges, “Just dark, right?”

I wink back and he whips out a dark chocolate buttercream sample. Then, if Brenda is looking the other way, he pops out a free dark chocolate caramel too.

“Thanks,” I say gratefully. “Now I just need a small bag and please add…”(and I’m embarrassed to admit how quickly and succinctly I point through the glass display)… “two nougats, one marshmallow, one almond, two dark chocolate cherries, and then, of course…”

“The Marzipan!” Ralph crows.

“Three!” I blurt out.

He triumphantly plops them into the bag, weighs them, and I hand over my cash. We silently high five each other as the Girl Scouts shuffle back into the store, unhappy that they had no luck witnessing a fight.

“Sweeten up,” I mumble to them as I back out of the store stuffing the anonymously white bag into my purse.

Little White Pearls

April 25, 2014April 15, 2014 / roughwighting / 40 Comments

For the past two and a half days, the throbbing has been unrelenting.

She presses her lips tightly together, sprinkles more glittery diamond dust on her wings, adjusts a strap on one of her tiny silver slippers, and sighs.

Another busy night ahead. Thanks to Sophie in Massachusetts, she counts 10,346 children to visit between 9 p.m. and 4 a.m., and the way little Timmy Tucker is pulling at his back left bicuspid as he says his prayers in Payette, Idaho, she’ll be visiting 10,347 children.

She places her white luminous hand on her swollen right cheek and moans. She doesn’t have time for this!

Once she gets back home from her job, she’ll try for 40 winks and then up with her own children, boiling some henny penny eggs and squeezing some rose petal juice for them before putting them on the grasshopper bus to the firefly pre-school.

Husband Danny will want help counting the little white pearls she’s collected during the night to deliver to the fairy counter. The way expenses are going in Fairyville, she hopes some of the pearls are big ones tonight.

A particular painful twinge in her mouth makes her shudder. She flicks her wings and heads out the window, grinning despite herself.

Whoever heard of a tooth fairy with a toothache?

Click Here!

April 18, 2014April 15, 2014 / roughwighting / 28 Comments

Thank you for following me. But, um, are you following ALL of me? Every single last bit?

In other words, do you see me the way I want you to see me?

Do you see the real me? The one with all my bells and whistles, with my form just right, my hem straight, my colors matching, the headlines bold and brilliant?

You can only answer yes, honestly, if you click on me.

Or more precisely, if you click on the title of my post when you receive it in your Inbox every Friday.

If you don’t click, but read my post as it arrives to you in e-mail form, you’re not seeing the real me! You’re seeing an outline, a draft, a ghostly form of my true intention.

So PLEASE, click on the title (like the one above that says “Please Click”) and enter the world of Roughwighting the way I intend you to see it. Full of background baby-blues and a white landscape for a differently colored font each post. Photos that pitch perfectly to the right or left of a phrase that I want to focus on. Quotes that are highlighted and indented “just so” – just so my reader, YOU, gets the gist of what I’m flashing about this beautiful absurd disturbing chaotic and incredible life of ours.

The way I’m meant to be viewed…

Please click on the title of my post each week. I promise, you’ll enjoy the benefits of color and pizazz. And, if you’re in the mood, you can read further down the blog post to see the replies of the brave, brilliant souls who have the courage to comment and (hopefully) commend.

Most importantly, though, THANK YOU for reading my flashes of life.

Clickingly yours,

Roughwighter

The End

April 11, 2014April 11, 2014 / roughwighting / 25 Comments

The end could be the beginning, or,

it could really damn well be the END.

A famous quote is needed here –like “to be or not to be.”

No Shakespeare am I, but I wonder if

“The end of never is the beginning of always”?

Books finish with The End. But is the story over?

Do the characters live on, at least in the reader’s mind?

In that case, the end is never-ending – infinite,

at least until the last reader is gone.

A week before my dad died, he declared,

“I’ve realized that when I die, it’s over.

Nothing is left but cold old bones.

I go nowhere, and nowhere is the end.”

I ignored him, hoping for some hope but

held his hand when he took his last breath.

Joyfully we both realized at the same time

That he was wrong.

In honor of National Poetry Month, and in the words of Rumi:

Bad Hair Day

April 4, 2014April 4, 2014 / roughwighting / 28 Comments

I’ve never had a bad hair day.

I’ve had a bad hair month, of course, and even a bad hair year.

My first bad hair year occurred when the new hairdresser ignored my plea to “only cut the split ends.” But you know that sound.

Snip. “Oops.”

Snip. “Oops again! Better even it up.”

My college long-haired look.

I was a freshman in college in Virginia, where everyone talked in a slow drawl, and the hairstylists in the beauty salons all wore teased hair and cherry red lipstick. I walked in the shop, a tiny ‘Steel Magnolias’ kind of place attached to the owner’s home; I sported a long brunette mane that almost reached the middle of my back.“Just a trim,” I said. “Boyfriend’s coming for the college harvest dance.”

I left the place with curly hair cropped at the bottom of my earlobe. Actually, looking at photos of it now, the haircut suited me.

But my boyfriend didn’t think so, and he tagged after my long-haired blonde roommate all weekend long.

Now, I’m smarter (and older – no long hair anymore). When I find a hairstylist I like, I stay with her, year after year after year. She becomes a member of the family, so to speak. She knows to not even approach my hair with mousse or spray or anything sticky and smelly. She knows to only cut a ‘fraction’ each time (if she really followed those directions, my hair would be reaching my rump by now). She doesn’t panic when she hears me breathing out, breathing in, loudly, with each snip.

But my man is the most nervous one during my every-6-week-salon trips.

“AGAIN?” he asks. He hates my hair when I return from the hair salon. No matter how diligent the hair stylist is, she can’t recreate the way I dry and style my hair (which includes closing my eyes, waving the blow dryer around my head for 7.5 minutes, scrunching my curls, then leaving for work)