Edgy Mama

We’re back from the New Hampster, which was surprisingly fun. Not “surprisingly” because we weren’t with fun people (E’s fam) or a fun place (lakeland paradise), but because my attitude about traveling long distances with small children has never been the best. And the Atlanta airport proved me right by grounding us for an extra three hours (we could have been home sooner if we’d rented a car in Atlanta and driven).

The mind-numbingly dull experience of spending multiple hours in an overcrowded airport was overshadowed by ten minutes of heart-pounding hell when my son disappeared in the extremely busy terminal.

Everyone has a lost child story. Ours, which I’m still processing emotionally, goes like this: E and the kids are standing by the always mesmerizing vending machines. I’m sitting about 15 feet away (not reading, for one of the only times ever in an airport). I look up. I immediately see E and the girl. I do a quick scan for the boy. I don’t see him. I stand up. E realizes in the same moment that something is wrong.

“Where’s C?” I say. E shrugs, grabs the girl’s hand and starts walking through the crowd. He keeps looking back at the vending machines as if they are going to suddenly spit our son out along with a can of Coke.

I stand in the middle of the terminal, turning circles, looking every direction. I run towards the Men’s Room and ask some guy to check the bathroom. I start yelling my son’s name. E returns, empty-handed. We decide that he should go one way and I’ll go the other.

At this point, my girl is crying, scared. I make her sit down with our carry-on bags (which we have totally abandoned, computers, guitar, wallets and all). A nice Mom who had been sitting across from us comes to sit with my girl, who is now on the edge of hysteria.

I feel my own hysterics coming on, but I realize that I have to channel all my energy towards finding my son. I see E coming back down the terminal. Still no boy. I actually whimper outloud. I start jogging the other direction, weaving through the crowd. OJ Simpson’s got nothing on a terrified Mom.

A young woman, also a mom, whom I later learn is from Hendersonville, and the teenage boys of the mom who is watching my girl, follow me. I tell them my son’s name and describe what he’s wearing. I notice that I’m stuttering slightly. They start searching. I can see E talking to the guy back at the flight desk.

Now I’m yelling his name and people are looking at me funny. I see the door open to a janitor’s closet and go in there to ask about him. They haven’t seen him. I’m dodging people, scanning, looking in corners and behind rows of seats. I know I have a crazy, panicked look on my face because people are now actively avoiding me. Except for a few understanding souls who stop me and ask how they can help.

I head toward what my son calls the “moving hills,” better known as escalators. I wonder if he would have gone on one alone. I doubt it. At this point, all kinds of horrific images which I can’t even express aloud are revolving through my head. I’m imagining headlines.

I turn to run back to our gate. Just then I see E coming from the opposite direction, our son in his arms. I grab my boy, who isn’t even upset. “I was looking for you, Mommy,” he says. “I want some juice.”

E says our son was strolling along, calmly, but quite a ways away. A four-year-old child alone. No one stopped him to ask his name or where his parents were. No one hurt him or scared him.

He was only gone for ten minutes or so, but it felt like hours to me. A small rip, leaking blood, opened in my heart in those minutes. But it will have a chance to heal.

About a year ago, I wrote a post about attending the Bele Chere festival and writing my cell number on my kids’ arms with Sharpies in case we were separated in the crowd. It hadn’t occurred to me to do the same in a busy airport, but now I think it will be family policy in any crowd. Anywhere.

We love this Bele Chere scene for many reasons. Let us try to explain.

First, this was the freakiest street act all weekend. The costumes - perfect shabby chic. The act - bizzaro. These two combined fiddle playing and banjo pickin’ with some acrobatics and a poem. They weren’t that good, but you could feel the fun they were having.

Finally, look at the people around them. See the lady on the right walking by. She’s like, “WTF?” Then there’s the dude standing against the wall with his beer getting an eyeful of crotch. In the foreground, there’s the stray instrument and the ever present money hat.

This is Bele Chere, folks. Hell, this is Ashvegas. These street acts don’t just show up for the weekend party. They’re out working the city streets every weekend. That’s what makes this town great.

Several celebrities dropped by Ashvegas Saturday during the Bele Chere festival, but we thought Edgy Mama would appreciate seeing one in particular. That would be Herschel Walker, a football star at the University of Georgia. Walker won the Heisman Trophy in 1982, then played for several teams in the NFL, most notably the Dallas Cowboys.

Herschel Walker dropped by as part of a motorcycle ride to raise money for charity. NASCAR driver Kyle Petty led the ride. Petty’s father, the NASCAR great Richard Petty, was also there, as was pro golfer Davis Love III, as well as former model Niki Taylor.

Taylor also has a connection to Georgia - she was a passenger in a car that wrecked in Atlanta in 2001 and lay unconscious in a hospital bed for six weeks. The former Sports Illustrated swimsuit model suffered severe injuries, but has recovered and now lives in Tennessee.

Anyway, alot of the ladies wanted to get up close and personal with Herschel. One woman told her friend, “He sure is pretty to look at.” If you want more Bele Chere festival fun, drop by over at Ashvegas.

Hi boys and grrrls,

It’s me, Edgy, up in New Hampster. Found a coffee shop, which let me recieve my 71 e-mails (half junk) but they won’t let me send a single one (live free or die, indeed!). So, if you’ve e-mailed me, have patience, patience.

Typical of the Hampster, said coffee shop is located in an ancient house, held up by hand-hewn wooden beams (which I covet for the pnav).

Everything up here is old. The house we’re staying in was built in 1890 and has a name: Breidablik. Even the bedrooms have names. It’s wacky.

Some New York doctor of Scandinavian descent built Breidablik, which is huge and dark and creaky and has an awesome front porch–and a ghost. The house was purchased in 1945 by the Weathers family, who still own it and have populated the property with smaller homes for their descendants. It’s all very commune-like and New Englandy.

The lake is gorgeous, but ball-shrinkingly cold. Luckily, I don’t have any. I do have a sleek, seal-like natural wetsuit of my own (otherwise known as Mom blubber), so I’ve been able to swim, albeit not for too long.

I did attempt to wind surf two days ago, which was laughable, particularly for the ski boat of guys who kept passing by to chop up the water and watch my bikini bottoms slip lower as I tried to maintain my balance and pull the damn sail out of the murky water.

The weather can’t decide whether to be unseasonably cold or unseasonably hot. The first night we were here, we built a fire in the huge granite fireplace; last night, we slept sans blankets with all windows open. More NH trivia: this is the granite state, right? I only know that from reading John Irving.

My daughter thinks the folks up here speak a foreign language, because she can’t understand their hard accents. I love the accents, particularly the Maine-sounding one, where folks sound like they’re hawking their vowels through phlegm.

NH is famous, of course, for having no state income or sales tax. Supposedly, this makes it next to impossible to own a home here, because the state has to make up all tax income through property tax. Thus, there aren’t tons of houses. At least on the lake. Very different from the Southern lakes, most of which have shorelines packed with cabins and A-frames.

Also, the roads suck. Clearly, paving is not high on the spending list. I was dumbfounded when the barista only charged me a dollar for coffee, and when I handed her a dollar and a quarter, handed the quarter back. A dollar even. Remarkable.

So,that’s my oblication update–oblication because this isn’t really a vacation, it’s an oblication–we’re here because we’re obliged to take a family vacation with E-spouse’s extended clan.

Make sure to read the post below, which is much more interesting than this one–and one that I’d be loathe to write, but since Ash is in charge, he’s allowed to push the envelope. Can’t wait to read more of the ensuing discussion!

XOXO,

EM

As you’ve probably heard by now, the sex toy industry took a major hit yesterday with the arrest of a dude in Madison County who made “glass sex toys,” euphemistically speaking. He sold them to buyers all over the place. He also apparently sold a lot of weed, according to police, but that’s beside the point. Women across the mountains are grabbing their glass phalluses tightly and holding on for dear life. (And perhaps a few men, too.)

The suspect in the case was apparently quite an artist. Here’s what he said about his glassware:

We have a state of the art glass making facility with precision equipment which ensures you a quality & affordable finished product every time.
With a trained sales staff and professional glass designers, GlasseX brings to you the best in Elegant Erotic Glass Art.
All of our toys are 100% solid glass. Borosilicate Glass~harder than pyrex! non-porous (no tiny holes). Gypoallergenic, dishwasher safe, and they can be used with any lube.
They can be refrigerated or put in hot water to use warm or cold. They can be cleaned with warm soapy water and alcohol. GlasseX Erotic Glass Toys are trusted and preferred all over the world.

Well, that’s quite a hard sell. Dishwasher safe! Actually, from what we’ve seen, the glass creations of this guy really could stand alone as mini works of art.

But we want to hear from you. How do you like your sex toys? Hot or cold? Arty or utilitarian? Plastic or Pyrex? Battery-powered or simply long-handled?

Discuss…

As we slog into another work week, and pick up the blogging slack for slacker Edgy Mama, all the heavy lifting got us thinking about summer vacations. We haven’t really had one this year. Between replacing old appliances and trying to pump some extra cash into the Ashvegas retirement fund (aka Powerball - the jackpot’s up to $135 million), we just haven’t done anything this year.

In year’s past, we’ve hit the Virgin Islands, the real Vegas, Jamaica and pre-Katrina Nawlins. We’re living off rum-soaked memories of topless sunbathers, pulse-pounding slot pulls and the dulcet sounds of Jackson Browne at Jazzfest.

But that was then. This is now. The Edgy Mama clan is living up in New Hampshire, but we need new people to envy. Time to share. What are you people in the blogosphere doing for summer vay-kay? Might as well live it up now, folks. It’s going to be over soon. We’re already seeing the back-to-school displays up in Wal-Mart. So tell us what you did (or plan to do) for your summer vacation.

As the Edgy Mama crew wings their way to the fine state of New Hampster, we thought it appropriate to educate you, dear readers, about the importance and elegance of this great state. Edgy Mama has spoken, in somewhat disparaging tones, of this “Live Free or Die” state. In case you’re wondering, we think the babe on the right is from New Hampster.

So here goes:

1. Of the thirteen original colonies, New Hampster was the first to declare its independence from Mother England — a full six months before the Declaration of Independence was signed. This was critical to the development of today’s modern hampster trade.

 
2. New Hampster is the only state that ever played host at the formal conclusion of a foreign war. In 1905, Portsmouth was the scene of the treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War. 
 

3. The first potato planted in the United States was at Londonderry Common Field in 1719. We love potatoes!
 

4. In 1833 the first free public library in the United States was established in Peterborough. Today, that library is the world’s foremost repository for information about rodents. 
 

5. New Hampshire adopted the first legal lottery in the twentieth century United States in 1963. Damn, we love this state!
 

6. On December 30, 1828, about 400 mill girls walked out of the Dover Cotton Factory enacting the first women’s strike in the United States. The Dover mill girls were forced to give in when the mill owners immediately began advertising for replacement workers. (Edgy Mama would appreciate the feistiness exhibited in such a move.)
 

7. The Mount Washington auto road at Great Glen is New Hampshire’s oldest manmade tourist attraction. Numerous hamsters have died tragically on this route.
 

8. Daniel Webster was a politician and statesman, born at Franklin in 1782. He was known in his day as a mighty orator, a reputation preserved in the Stephen Vincent Benet story “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” in which he beats the original lawyer, Lucifer, in a contract case over a man’s soul. Edgy Mama is working on a follow-up piece, “The Hampster and Daniel Webster.”
 

9. The karner blue butterfly, lynx, bald eagle, short nose sturgeon, Sunapee trout, Atlantic salmon and dwarf wedge mussel are on the State’s endangered species list. Meanwhile, the hampster thrives.
  

10. Augustus Saint-Gaudens from Cornish was the first sculptor to design an American coin. His commission became fraught with difficulties related to Saint-Gaudens’ desire for high relief relative to the demands of mass production and use; and also because his initial design featured a rather hairy hampster that nobody really liked.
  

11. The Bavarian-style hamlet of Merrimack is home to the famous eight-horse hitch, and the Clydesdales maintained by the Anheuser-Busch Brewery. Did we mention that we frickin’ love this state?
 
  
12. Sarah Josepha Hale author and journalist who wrote the poem “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in 1830 is from Newport, New Hampshire. The orignial title, “Mary Had a Little Hampster,” was nixed by the author’s wise editor.
  

 
To learn more about the great state of New Hampster, go here.