Based on the surgeon’s expression, I gathered mine wasn’t the typical reaction patients have upon being told they’d be losing an organ. Apparently, most patients don’t cheer.

But after being so sick for so long, after being able to eat little but Cream of Wheat for weeks, I couldn’t hold back my excitement that it might soon be over. Although I’d been hearing my symptoms were “textbook gallbladder” for weeks, I feared the tests would show I was fine. Then I’d be back to square one.

But not this time. For once, there was no “wait and watch.” This time, the culprit had been identified, and my trusted surgeon was quick to set a date to take it–

Sorry about that. Had to answer the door. Magazine salesman. Nice guy. He actually asked if my mother was home, like he really believed I’m too young to have a house of my own. Jeez. He sure had some good deals on those magazines, though. And I believe in supporting the young. So where was I?

A few days before going under the knife, I mentioned my upcoming surgery to a coworker. An eavesdropper overheard. “Oh yeah. I had that done. Came back to work the next day.”

“You did what?”

“The next day,” he repeated, with a cocky head bobble. “Doc said to take two weeks off, but I didn’t see the need.”

Another chimed in. “Same here. I even stopped by the office on my way home from the hospital.”

I stood stunned for a moment, feeling conflicted. Although it was reassuring to hear the surgery might be such a breeze, it was difficult to suppress the urge to deliver a shin kick to anyone who would return to work so fast, thus making those who don’t look really bad. I decided–

What’s that, Celeste? No, we can’t go to the pool. I’m working. I’m writing my column. Besides, it’s raining. The pool will be closed. Yeah, I know the whole reason to go to a pool is to get wet, but trust me, it’s closed.

Sorry. I never realized how many interruptions there could be at home during the day.

It wasn’t long before I began hearing tales from the other end of the spectrum-horror stories from those flattened by the procedure.

“I couldn’t eat for a week,” a friend said. “Then it was nothing but baby food for a month after that.”

“The pain was so bad afterward I was convinced I was having a heart attack,” my aunt–

Oh no! Fidgety dog with watery eyes! Still trying to housebreak the pup. Back in a sec.

I ended up somewhere in the middle. I went into surgery at 8 am, and was on my way home by 11:30 that same morning. (I did NOT stop by the office on the way.) The first few days are a bit of a blur. I remember being bloated and tired and sore. I remember my own personal crowd (dogs and cats) following me as I tested one uncomfortable sleeping space after another. I remember much “Law & Order,” a few videos, many magazines and one really good book.

Even though it was often uncomfortable, it was more rest than I’ve had in ages. Maybe ever. That part was nice and–

No, honey. I don’t think I’m ready for Cajun just yet. No, not Indian either. Or Chinese. And no, smart aleck. No Cream of Wheat.

That reminds me. There has been one somewhat embarrassing complication from surgery, one I normally wouldn’t discuss in public except I believe both an explanation and an apology are owed to those seated near me at the Clay Center performance of Mountain Stage Sunday night.

You see, we purchased our tickets long before knowing I’d be having surgery a week before the show. And when we requested seats in the very center, it was done without realizing how many unfortunate people would be seated between the newly gastronomically challenged and the nearest restroom. For this–and for having such large feet–I am truly sorry.

My apologies, too, to those I may have inadvertently body-checked on my way up the aisle.

I was about to open our back door to let the dogs out when I noticed a robin that appeared to have flown face-first into the bank by our deck. Its neck was at an awful angle and its wings were splayed out on both sides. I didn’t want the dogs to get the body, so I shooed them back inside so I could move the bird. When I stooped to get it, though, it hopped upright, shook itself off, looked severely annoyed, then flew off. It had apparently been sunbathing.

Celeste didn’t believe me when I told her birds sunbathe, so I dug up these pictures of Bammy, the bluejay we had for years, who was forever finding spots to stretch out in the sun.

How fast the hoochie mamma have fallen. Just days after donning low cut and tight clothes, I’m now in seach of anything baggy and soft, anything that won’t stick to my incisions. I look like I’ve been shot. Several times. One up sorta high, between the ribs, two more on the right side, another at my belly button. I’m not sure which hole they actually used to take out my gall bladder, I’m just glad that it’s gone. Even if I do whistle when the wind blows.

And so now I’m home recuperating. Enjoying the bliss of oxycodone. Actually, I’m not sure what the big fuss is over that drug. It just makes me sleep and not hurt.

The first two nights I had to sleep sitting up in a chair because the gas they’d pumped into me made it hard to lie flat on my back. I had a dog beside me, one on my feet, a cat low on my lap, and another (Squirt) balanced carefully on the arm of the chair. Squirt would regularly touch my face, as if worried. Once I didn’t open my eyes when he did it and he tapped again and again until I did.

Geoff’s been an angel, babying me in a way I’ve never experienced before. And Celeste has been . . . missing. Up with my parents one night, then with her dad. She got home last night. Immediately insisted on taking pictures of my stomach for Mom’s Boo-Boo Book. (Which is now, I believe, in its second edition.)

I’d been saying how much I needed some time off of work. Didn’t expect to get it this way.

“All women should get in touch with their inner hoochie-mamma every once in a while,” said my friend, Pam, as we pushed our shopping cart through the Walmart in Ripley.

“Now that’s an opening line for a column if ever I heard one,” I said, pausing to examine a lacy black camisole that was cut down to there.

“You should write it,” she said. “It would be a public service.”

“I’m not even sure I know what a hoochie mamma actually is.”

“It’s a confident woman who knows how to work it,” Pam said. “One who attracts attention with little or no effort. And they don’t necessarily dress slutty, but provocatively.”

I did a quick assessment of what we were wearing. Capris and sneakers. Shirts with collars. It was more homeroom mamma than hoochie mamma.

I’ve never been style savvy. As far as fashion, I’m way over there on the conservative side. The same holds true for Pam, a married journalism professor and mother of two. But once a year, when the two of us get together at the WV Writers Conference, we attempt to lure out our inner hoochie mammas. And in what has come to be a tradition, we do this by sneaking away from the conference for a field trip to Walmart, where we try on nothing but inappropriate clothes.

“So you’re saying I’d be doing a public service by encouraging other women to strive for hoochie-mamma wanna-be status, like us?”

“Hey–we’re way past the wanna-be stage,” Pam said. Her side of the cart was growing faster than mine, so I grabbed a few of the closest tank tops that met our credentials. (Those credentials being that it couldn’t be something either of us would normally wear, especially in public. Except according to our own self-imposed rules, we’d each be wearing one of those things later that night.)

“Look at the size of the neck holes on these,” I said. “Is this whole line of shirts made for women with freakishly oversized heads?”

At the dressing room, we encountered Tina, perhaps the most pleasant WalMart employee I’ve ever met. She directed Pam and I to dressing rooms across from each other, then entertained us with enough funny anecdotes about dressing room escapades to fill a whole ‘nother column.

“Hubba hubba,” I said, wiggling my eyebrows lecherously as Pam modeled a severely scooped turquoise number.

“You can see almost to my kneecaps in this neckline,” Pam said.

“But you have cute kneecaps,” I said. Ignoring my most sincere compliment, she resigned the top to the reject pile. Soon, I noticed her arms wiggling strangely in the air over the top of her dressing room door, then heard a snap of elastic, followed by a low, muttered curse, then a giggle. “You ok?”

“I can’t get this thing on,” she whined. “It has one of those built-in shelf bras and it’s all twisted or something. I can’t contort myself into it.” She paused. “Or out of it.”

Finally, she emerged. The shirt was a winner. And I’d found one of my own. (That lacy black number that was cut down to there.) We dressed again in our boring old clothes, bid farewell to Tina, then headed back out into the store, where for some strange reason, we began to attract the attention of men.

“What’s going on?” I asked Pam after a beefy construction worker type had stopped me, insisting he and I had once been “very good (wink-wink) friends.”

“I think it’s our confidence,” she said. “June Cleaver has become Peg Bundy, at least for a while.”

As Peg 1 and Peg 2 swaggered out to the car, I realized she was right. We both seemed changed. Our excursion had transformed the way we viewed ourselves. No longer were we drudgy, middle-aged, working moms. In the course of just one fun and magical hour, we had become hoochie moms instead.

Thanks to John Leaberry for alerting me to the ironic placement of ads just to the right of my Sunday column this week. The column was about how women shouldn’t have to be skin and bones to be beautiful, yet the ads are all about how to lose weight.

No, this isn’t my house.

Now I know why they’re referred to as “The Good Old Days.”

While cleaning house recently, I ran across an issue of Woman’s World from November 1933. (And no, smart aleck. It hasn’t been that long since the last time I cleaned.) Of course, such a find called for an immediate break from my work so I could peruse the pages, and upon doing so, I ran across the following ad:

“Special quick way to put pounds on fast!”

Huh? People actually once wanted to do that? I read on.

“Now there’s no need to have people calling you ’skinny,’ and losing all your chances of making and keeping friends. Here’s a new, easy treatment that is giving thousands healthy flesh and attractive curves–in just a few weeks!”

The clever copywriter continued. “Day after day, as you take Ironized Yeast, watch ugly, gawky angles fill out, flat chests develop, and skinny arms and legs round out attractively. Life becomes a thrilling adventure.”

And then the tone turned grave. “Skinniness is a serious danger. Authorities warn that skinny, anemic, nervous people are far more liable to serious infections and fatal wasting disease than the strong, well-built person. So begin at once to get back the rich blood and healthy flesh you need. Do it before it is too late!”

Instead of being ahead of my time, I now realize I’m way behind it instead. My day came and went long before I was here to enjoy it. Back then, I’d have been the picture of robust health. A model of physical perfection. Why, oh why, wasn’t I born in a time when hipbones were meant to be pleasingly padded instead of protruding?

Reading that ad made me wonder when and why our society’s perception of beauty had changed. I have an old picture in my house showing of a long row of–by 1930s standards–bathing beauties. By today’s standards, many in that picture would be considered at least 20 pounds overweight.

In paintings from the 19th century, beautiful women were full-figured. Rubinesque. Even into the 50s, celebrities were curvaceous. Now, the “beauties” are emaciated, sharp-boned. Callista-Flockhart-esque.

In that ad from 1933, it warned that, “skinniness is a serious danger.” I wonder if perhaps it wasn’t the perceived danger of thinness that ended up creating the allure. It was seen as risky and dangerous, and therefore appealing. It was something difficult for many to achieve, something only the celebrities or the rich, with their private chefs and personal trainers, could manage. Being skinny became a status symbol.

The public, in their desperation to be just like their gaunt role models, began dieting and exercising to excess. Somehow, skinny became synonymous with healthy, and the women whose figures once would’ve been considered appealingly shapely came to be viewed as rotund. Instead of hearing how pretty they were, they began being told how pretty they could be.

Thankfully, a few celebrities have entered the scene who don’t fit the last few decades idea of standard beauty. There’s no denying that Queen Latifah is anything less than gorgeous, or that Kate Winslet isn’t as glamorous as one of the many starved-looking waifs with coat-hanger collarbones.

The zaftig actress Camryn Manheim wrote “If I am presented with the choice of a rice cake or tiramisu, I know that [fitness guru] Kathy Smith would desperately want me to choose that rice cake. But that’s not living. That’s merely existing. I want to live in a world with tiramisu.”

And I want to live in a world where women like Manheim aren’t devalued for making that choice.

I picked up the pup from the vet on Friday after he’d been neutered–a procedure which Celeste and her friend Jordan found endlessly fascinating.

Finally, Jordan asked Geoff, “How do boy dogs get girl dogs pregnant anyway?”
Geoff answered, “Dice.”

“Dice?” Jordan said. “How?”

Geoff: “The boy dog throws one dice and the girl dog throws the other. If the boy rolls a higher number, the girl dog gets pregnant.”

Jordan: “Oh. OK.”

Sometimes the best compliments are those heard by accident.

“My wife is a writer,” my husband said to a long-lost friend on the phone recently. I then heard him telling her about some writing awards I had won, and I realized his words made me sound more accomplished than I feel like I am. Even though what he told her was accurate, it sounded strange–and nice–to overhear what Geoff (my idea of a real writer) had to say about me. I mentioned it later.

“I’ve noticed you seem uncomfortable telling people you’re a writer,” Geoff said. “Why is that?”

“I’m never sure what to say when someone asks what I do,” I said. “I feel like I’m a fraud if I say I’m a writer.”

“So who gets to claim they’re a writer?” he asked.

“Someone who does it full time, I guess. Someone with a journalism degree. Someone who makes the majority of their income from writing or has achieved a certain level of fame.”

He retrieved his well-worn copy of John Gardner’s “Art of Fiction” and read the following excerpt (which I’ve abridged) of what Gardner believes to be the definition of a writer:

“The storyteller’s intelligence is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections); a refusal to believe what all sensible people know is true; mischievousness and childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies); a marked tendency toward excessive eating, drinking, chattering and a weird fascination with dirty jokes; a strange mixture of playfulness and embarrassing earnestness; patience like a cat’s; a criminal streak of cunning; psychological instability; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good.”

“Except for that drinking part,” Geoff said, “That’s pretty much you.”

“I’m not sure if I should be flattered or insulted.”

He laughed. “Probably both. I just know that when I first ran across that quote, I recognized myself immediately.”

“Just think,” he continued. “Call yourself a writer and you have a job description with a built-in excuse for what you always thought were character flaws.”

I think he could be on to something there.

I’ve learned that being in the company of other writers can make me feel more like one myself. That first occurred to me a few years back while at a statewide gathering of writers. I was having such a good time, and realized it was because I finally felt like I belonged, like I had something in common with everyone there. Writing can be such a solitary thing. There’s no water cooler to cluster around with your cohorts on a regular basis and compare complaints.

But once a year, there is. (Although many of my cohorts end up clustering around a jug rather than a water cooler.)

The West Virginia Writers conference is held the second weekend in June at Cedar Lakes in Ripley. (That’s next weekend, for those of you without a calendar handy.) The workshops at the conference are great, and it’s going to be fun getting to meet the likes of Lee Maynard (author of Crum) and listening to a reading by Chuck Kinder (legendary W.Va. author and current head of the writing program at Pitt). But it’s hanging out with all the other writers from around the state that I most look forward to. It’s not every day that I get to consort with those as immature, uncivil, and mischievous as me. (Last year’s conference included a field trip to WalMart to try on totally inappropriate clothes. I suspect it’s going to become a tradition.)

I’m not sure why I have such difficulty seeing myself as a writer. I write all the time. No, it isn’t my day job, but it’s become a huge part of who I am.

And who I want to be.

I’ve been fighting the blues a lot lately. This week has been especially rough. Yesterday, Camille would’ve turned four. So of course, all week, at every turn, I’ve encountered one brown-eyed four-year-old after another.

I’m tired of getting this way. I want more space from this, want it to be further from my thoughts more of the time than it sometimes is. It HAS gotten easier. It really has. It’s just as the milestone dates hit — June 1, October 8, November 26–that I get markedly bad.

Tomorrow, Celeste is heading to the beach for a week with my ex-laws, Patty & Bernie Vingle. My ex-SIL and her son are going, too. Celeste and I have never been apart for that long, and I know I’m going to be a wreck worrying about her, but she’s so excited about going. She and her cousin, Hunter, who is five months younger than her, get along so well. He’s as rough as she is prissy, but they never argue and just have the best time together.

She got her braces on this week — another reason I’m depressed. ($2,700 — I’ll be paying on this debt for years.) I’m really proud of how she’s handling it so far. She’s usually something of a weenie when it comes to even the mildest discomfort, but she really wants straight teeth. Hers are terribly crooked. Poor kid took after me there. She has an expander in the roof of her mouth to make more room for her adult teeth. We have to turn the key once in the morning and again at night. (We aren’t starting that part until she returns from the beach.) It looks like a torture device and it makes eating difficult, but she talks pretty good around it.

And finally — the pup is losing his manhood today. (We had an appt for that way back, then they found the mange and didn’t do it.) I called our new vet’s office this week to make an appointment, and while talking to the receptionist, I asked how much it would cost. She said, “It’s priced according to size.” That struck me as funny so I said, “Great! His nuts are tiny so this should be cheap.” There was a long silence, then she said, “Um, I meant the size of the dog.”