Awkward Moments Day

Posted on March 18, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Cringe events. We all have them, right? I am definitely no stranger to them. And I think most people get kind of defensive in the aftermath, right? Nobody likes revisiting those occasions, do they? If you do, let’s talk, because I’m super curious about that kind of outlook on life.

But part of storytelling is digging into that junk, right? So here’s an awkward moment.

Growing up, we would take vacations that involved visiting family. We all lived kind of far apart, and these interactions were not particularly frequent. As a result, when these visits did occur, they tended to last too long and everyone got on everyone else’s nerves. I think I sort of had it imprinted on me that it wasn’t officially a family visit until my couch potato dad had gone into hiding by reading a book in the living room and my hyperactive mom had gone angerball on him for not helping with family activities and pretty much ignoring all the people we had driven 2,000 miles to see. Since we only ever visited my mom’s family, I grew up under the impression that my dad was the antisocial outlier and the way you were supposed to behave as a guest was to jump in and be useful. It wasn’t until I met my husband that I realized other families actually did just sit around reading and watching TV rather than cooperating on yard work or pitching in on scrubbing out kitchen cabinets. I have yet to meet a family that spends a week on outings and planning touristy things, although I aspire to that on my better days.

My mother’s family was also extremely direct. If you did something stupid and someone saw, there wasn’t a lot of “Oh my,” and looking the other way. It was more, “Wow, that was pretty dumb of you!” humiliation with an instant chaser of “OK, now let’s fix it” good-natured education. (Unless the audience was my grandfather. In that case, the reaction was almost always, “NO NO NO! Get out of the way, you moron, I can do it faster myself.” And he could, and he did. And sometimes you learned how to do it right and sometimes you learned to tell him, “I’m a moron, remember? You do it.” The funny thing about my grandfather was that he always accosted you directly but praised you through channels. I had to find out from my aunt that I was a competent genius. And my cousin had to find out from me that she was a fantastic and resilient hospitality pro.)

Anyway, this pattern continued into adulthood, and the aggravation got worse as the family got bigger. My dad got allies in my cousins and my husband, but my dad had shifted a bit and was now among the doers. My dad, always a chatty guy, also got less diplomatic as he aged, and he became less inclined to roll along with guests like Ben Franklin’s fish.

But he never called anyone out directly. Instead, what he liked to do was waylay someone (usually on their way to do something) in a (usually rather public) hallway and vent in a whisper-yell about whoever was doing whatever. Most of the time, he would be placated with a smile and an eyeroll; sometimes it would take a nod, but then it was over and he’d start rebuilding his head of steam until he had to blow it off again to someone else in some other hallway.

I walked up on him doing this to my mom about me, my husband, and my kid on various occasions, but these were not particularly awkward moments. I knew he was the way he was; I could read him well enough to perceive his annoyance; and usually I either agreed with him and hadn’t gotten around to working it out yet or I figured it was a Him Problem more than a Me One and sailed on by.

But then there was the time that he cornered me in a hallway and railed about my “So! Stupid!” relative who was in the next room—and whose father walked like fog on little cat feet and came upon us just as I was nodding and going, “Yeah, I know. Very stupid.” And then my dad and I both just stood there slack jawed and redfaced as Relative’s Dad gave us the side eye, stuck his chin out a little, and kept on walking. To this day, I am not entirely sure whether RD even heard us, whether he in fact agreed with us, or whether he actually did mean to shut us up. All three are possible; they are not even mutually exclusive.

But it is moments such as these that have left me convinced that it is much better to do things my grandfather’s way. Be direct. Be clear. Get it out and over with. You might still have an awkward moment, but it will be over faster and you can get to the “OK, now let’s talk about all your good stuff” part faster.

Unless, of course, you are dealing with a newly acquired significant other of your offspring. All bets are off in those scenarios. You gotta give those folks a chance to assimilate before you make them a member of the family in that way!

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Evacuation Day in Boston

Posted on March 17, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Evacuation Day is celebrated on March 17 in Massachusetts. It commemorates when, in 1776, George Washington and the Continental Army drove Loyalists and British forces out of Boston, ending an 11-month siege.

In history class, you read a lot about Boston during the Revolutionary War—the massacre, the tea party, Bunker Hill—but I, for one, don’t remember hearing much about this, which is too bad because it’s a great story about military sleight of hand and perseverance. It would make a great novel.

Washington had been hankering to attack Boston for the better part of a year, but his officers kept refusing and insisting it was a nonstarter because the British were receiving supplies by sea. They pushed  Washington to wait until the waters around Boston were frozen—and then to keep waiting; settling in for a nice, sedate siege. It’s funny how much of military history involves sitting, stalling, leeriness, listlessness, deliberation, drag. I’m not saying outright cowardice—that’s a different animal. But I do find reluctance to move a big recurring factor in my reading. Don’t get me wrong, that’s totally understandable—if the option is “hey, let’s die today” or “eh, wait a while and see what shakes out,” I know what I’d go for. But at some point, someone’s gotta blow a whistle and someone’s gotta do a job.

(This preference for movement might explain my psychosis about cancer treatment, actually. I know that chemo and radiation play a part and there are good reasons to go that route—but given a choice, I know mine will be to go Defcon 1 immediately and Evict That Scumbag Tenant with extreme prejudice. This is why I’m not a doctor, and it’s why I’m not a military strategist, and it’s why I lose at chess.)

Anyway, while Boston was struggling along under British occupation, Henry Knox won a fight at Fort Ticonderoga (Home of the pencils! But not til later!) and dragged 59 cannons 300 miles (not by himself) to Boston—a feat that came to be labeled “the Noble Train of Artillery” and that has several nonfiction outings but that I think would be a great name for another great novel. Bernard Cornwell should get on that.

So then Washington gets to work. Under cover of night, he tells one bunch of men to hump all those cannons up Dorchester Heights to the southeast—nothing like a big uphill finish after a 300-mile trek!) Meanwhile, he stages an engagement in Cambridge to the west. The British blast away at the troops in Cambridge all night, only to have the sun come up and reveal the big, menacing fortifications looming over the town. 

The British did take a shot at dislodging the guns but were thwarted by a snowstorm. So on March 17, 1776, 11,000 British soldiers and hundreds of Loyalists bailed from Boston by boat.

And that is the story of Boston’s Evacuation Day. Note that there is a related Evacuation Day—New York’s was on November 25, 1783. But that’s a whole other story.

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Panda Day

Posted on March 16, 2025 by arwenbicknell

The first pandas arrived at the National Zoo in 1972. I was 1, and didn’t care. But when I was a little older and visiting my grandparents in Virginia, I was all about the bamboo loveys. I honestly don’t remember how old I was—probably too old for stuffed animals, but I requested one as my souvenir anyway. My grandmother, who had a thing about souvenirs matching the venue, was delighted I had asked for that and not for a new dress or a flowered umbrella or some other non-zoo-oriented item.

I loved the bejeezus out of that bear. His black ears pretty much faded to blue and his white fur turned a distinct shade of dirt-gray.

In time, my grandparents left Virginia, and our tourist outings involved other places. The zoo (and the Saturn V, and the Hope Diamond, and the ice cream parlor at the American History museum) were all happy memories, but firmly stuck in my past.

So it was kind of funny that I was living in Virginia when I got married and had a kid—and my old panda was one of his first stuffed animals, though not one he really played with. My panda got a buddy when the kid had an outing to the zoo with his dad and his uncle one day while I was at work, and he came home with an updated (and much plusher) stuffed bear.

We went to see them somewhat regularly when the kid was small. Unfortunately, he was too small and has no recollection of it. We went to Boo at the Zoo one year and had a great time. My memory of the zoo in those later days was that it was still a lot of fun to visit, but rather inconveniently located and that the walk to the Metro at the end of the day was a really tough uphill walk carrying a dead-weight toddler. (No, I don’t remember why I didn’t have a stroller. I think the point was to wear the kid out? We tended to overdo it a bit.) 

The new pandas are in DC until 2034. I am optimistic I’ll get back there for one more visit before I’m done traveling.

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Everything You Think Is Wrong Day

Posted on March 15, 2025 by arwenbicknell

I don’t know, does this really warrant a blog post? Maybe I’m wrong about this.

This is another one of those things that feels like every day for me—or at least every other day. I like to think that remembering I might be wrong about everything means I am a somewhat intelligent person—or at least makes me a slightly less annoying person than I might be otherwise.

I have had my share of hubris-fueled embarrassments, however. There was the time I was five and absolutely positive I could find my way from the park to my great-grandfather’s house—a whole four blocks or so—and got hopelessly lost in a tiny town of 1,500 people. I overshot by one block south and two blocks east, knew enough to realize I had screwed up somehow, and was walking back to the park to start over when my uncle came looking for me. He made me follow him home, and I am pretty sure he took the longest, most roundabout route he could think of to teach me a lesson.

There was the time I told my dad it was of tantamount importance that he sign a permission form for me to do something or other and he couldn’t do it until he recovered from the coughing fit he laughed himself into.

There was the time I bet my not-yet-husband that Aretha Franklin sang Rescue Me and wound up owing him a LOT of … ahem … favors. I’m not sure he ever actually managed to collect in full. (I have occasionally wondered if that was what finally prompted him to propose. But he assures me that if he’d known my prowess for making jelly and dinner rolls, he would have proposed regardless.)

My current Wrongness is centered on our hot tub. (Side note: Hot Tub Day is March 28!) There was a hot tub at our house when we moved in. It broke—last year, I think? I insisted we replace it with a new one, harboring visions of using it in fall, winter and spring. I think we have used it twice. When we were out of town a few weeks ago, we had a hard freeze. Naturally, the breaker flipped while we were got and the entire tub froze up solid as a rock, cracking the pump—requiring a $2,000-repair for a machine we barely use. But hey, maybe this will inspire us to use it more? Or it will freeze up again and we will just use it as a giant flower planter, as my husband proposed we do when the first one broke. Because if ever there was a person entirely suited for Everything You Do Is Right Day (which is tomorrow), it’s him.

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Write Down Your Story Day

Posted on March 14, 2025 by arwenbicknell

I have a lot of stories. I write them down often.

But I might as well use this day to confess why I resurrected the blog. I’m working on another book, and I’m hoping my stories here entice at least a few folks to buy it if I ever get it published.

The thing is, this book isn’t really MY story. It’s mostly my mom’s story, with some of mine sprinkled throughout, and then an entirely made up daughter to lend some drama.

But if you’ve been reading my posts, you probably know that my mom has some pretty good stories. And the ones I have used here aren’t even the best ones, which I’m (duh) saving to sell.

I am hoping to have my first draft done by June, and to be querying agents by December at the latest.

While you wait, here is a story my mother loves to tell about me.

“When you were three or four, I lost my emerald cocktail ring. I knew that I had lost it, I didn’t assume you’d swiped it from my jewelry box or anything. But I also knew that you loved shiny things, and if you’d seen it lying around, you would have been all over it. So I asked you if you had it. You said no.

But c’mon. You were four. So I asked again. No, you hadn’t seen it. And again. No, And AGAIN. NO I NEVER TOOK IT. But I knew it could take some doing to get that baby memory going, so I kept poking at you.

Finally you sighed, looked right at me and said, “Ummm. OK. Yes. I saw it. I was playing outside, and I was walking to my swing, and I saw it in a gopher hole, but before I could get it, it fell into a rocket ship that took off and now it is in space somewhere.”

“Well, that was even better than the time you told me you were in the vacant lot behind our house—where you really weren’t supposed to be—because you were hunting lions but found a horse, so I figured you really hadn’t seen the ring.”

I remember being four (vaguely), and although I would LOVE to say I had perfected the art of snark at that age, I am pretty sure that this was just a desperate ploy to get the bare light bulb out of my face and end the interrogation. What I do remember is (1) there was a horse for a little while in the vacant lot behind our house, and I named it Linda, and (2) my mom laughed and laughed about the rocket ship, which was shocking to my child brain that was braced an unjust punishment.

Maybe that’s when I decided words were my jam? Hard to say. It was around that time that I wrote a Book of Arwen (nothing like the book of Mormon, mind you), but it was a picture book of things I liked about my life. I wonder where that is.

Oh, and the ring did eventually turn up—in a pocket of a pair of my mom’s blue jeans.

So, that’s my story. And since I imagine we all love stories, let’s do another book giveaway: Tell me a story, and I’ll send you someone else’s!

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Popcorn Lovers Day

Posted on March 13, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Like a lot of you, my childhood memory of popcorn is not instant gratification taking too long. It was oil in a pot with a lid. (My grandmother used bacon grease, which was pretty great.) I remember when I was about 5, my dad got my mom a Sunbeam electric machine shaped like a circus train car, which was amazing to my small brain because you could watch the kernels pop, and then when it was ready, you dumped it upside down and used the top as a bowl. I don’t think bacon grease entered into that equation.

One year, when I was 5 or 6, my mom took an entire day and made a billion caramel popcorn balls for a Christmas caroling party we had been invited to. I am pretty sure this only happened because we lived in California; if we had been invited caroling in Illinois, my mother would have assumed those people were crazy, she was not about to go running around the tundra in single-digit temperatures at night singing to strangers. I have to admit, I don’t remember the caroling. I do remember the caramel. That stuff was amazing, but she never, ever made them again. I asked her later for the recipe and she vacillated between “too much work to bother” and “I don’t remember.” I suspect a plot.

My first job was for a movie theater, and I was extremely disappointed when I discovered that we would pop bags of corn ahead of time in a back room to ensure that we did not run out. The movie theater was also where I was schooled in the difference between “butter” and “butter FLAVORED topping”—the “flavored” part was very important and management would lecture you if you omitted the word when offering it to customers—and this was well before the days of food allergies being an acknowledged thing.

I still love butter flavored topping, even though I know it’s probably 100 percent carcinogens and I have seen how the buildup around the machine’s spigot becomes a sort of silicone-like consistency that you can peel off and play with.

And, of course, the microwave entirely changed the popcorn game in my teens. My adulthood has involved virtually no bacon grease at all. When we went to such things, we would routinely get kettle corn made in giant kettles at festivals and farmers markets and so on, but I think my son was 15 before he was aware there was another way to make the stuff at home. We made some on the stove once, and once was enough; we all rushed right back to the 40-seconds-or-less approach and the jar of kernels sat untouched in our pantry until we threw it out when we moved eight years later.

When my kid was a Boy Scout for about 15 seconds, he sold popcorn for a fundraiser. We fell in love with the chocolate drizzled flavor. Then he followed in my footsteps and went to work in a movie theater, and we found the stuff again under the name Zebra Popcorn from Popcornopolis.

We have also done a lot of popcorn add-ins over the years. Cheddar flavoring powder. Ranch flavoring powder. Throwing a bunch of M&Ms or Reese’s Pieces in the bag at the movies. It’s good stuff pretty much any way you present it.

But I do wish my mom would tell me how she did those caramel balls.

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Hitchcock Day

Posted on March 12, 2025 by arwenbicknell

I talked pretty recently about my love of Hitchcock movies and how that started with my dad showing Rebecca and Shadow of a Doubt as part of a library series. I realize it’s not politically correct to appreciate Hitchcock these days, but there was a lot to the fellow. My appreciation progressed with adoration of Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart (and my husband still has a massive thing for Grace Kelly).

What I didn’t know until after college was that he also gave work to other members of the Algonquin Round Table. Of course, I knew Tallulah Bankhead was in Lifeboat, and that Robert Sherwood wrote the screenplay for Rebecca, but there was more! As someone who adored Dorothy Parker in her 20s (although I have grown out of it to some degree, as she herself apparently did in later years), this was a Worlds Collide moment.

Dorothy Parker wrote Saboteur and has an almost Hitchcock-length cameo in the flick. (But she does get a line: “They must be very much in love.”) Robert Benchley plays a corrupt and cynical newsman in Foreign Correspondent—not sure how much acting was required there. Finally, there is a sort of circuitous story about Alexander Woolcott cribbing a story written originally by Marie Belloc Lowndes in 1913 about an elderly lady’s mysterious disappearance from a hotel and titling his story “The Vanished Lady,” which became Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes.”

Some other Hitchcock writerly collaborations: Ben Hecht, Ernest Lehman, Raymond Chandler, Thornton Wilder and John Steinbeck punched up his scripts. He angled but failed to get Ernest Hemingway and Vladimir Nabokov on his train.

And, of course, on the non-writerly side, Salvador Dali weirded up Spellbound’s dream sequences with those crazy eyeball curtains.

What’s your favorite surprise Hitchcock discovery?

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Johnny Appleseed Day

Posted on March 11, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Am I alone in the impression that Johnny Appleseed has gone the way of quicksand and the Bermuda Triangle? I heard a lot about all three of those things as a kid but they have virtually disappeared from the cultural lexicon, so far as I can tell.

I have a probably false memory of seeing a cartoon on TV making fun of the guy, that he wasn’t intentionally planting apple trees, just spitting out seeds as he walked and up the trees popped in his wake. (Note, this is NOT the Disney thing, which is sincere in its homage.) Even as a kid, that idea cracked me up because I knew that trees require way more attention than spit and a stomp.

The real guy was named John Chapman, born in 1744, and he has a museum in Ohio. I’ve never been, but now that I know it exists. I might add it to my Random Roadside Attractions list. (Fun fact: other things in Ohio are a tower of VW bugs and a library with a piece of Hitler’s urinal.) Chapman sounds like he was a benign sort of fellow, studying orchardry and then embracing a sort of missionary life, plopping down in places long enough to plant apple nurseries (with planning and fencing) and to proselytize for the New Church, which ended up influencing Transcendentalists and Mormons. He died around 1845 and is buried somewhere in Indiana. (The exact location is disputed.)

Unsurprisingly the dude also loved animals and apparently became a vegetarian later in life. But here’s the thing: He also must have been a pretty canny businessman. He left an estate of more than 1,200 acres of valuable nurseries to his sister when he died. That’s a far cry from the hobo who dropped seeds from a bindle. There’s also a school of thought that he wasn’t as virtuous as all that: Michael Pollan wrote about the guy in 2001 and basically says that the apples Chapman planted were useless for eating but great for making hard cider, and the reason the guy was so popular was because he brought booze to the Midwest.

Hey, there are worse ways to spread the gospel, I suppose.Am I alone in the impression that Johnny Appleseed has gone the way of quicksand and the Bermuda Triangle? I heard a lot about all three of those things as a kid but they have virtually disappeared from the cultural lexicon, so far as I can tell.

I have a probably false memory of seeing a cartoon on TV making fun of the guy, that he wasn’t intentionally planting apple trees, just spitting out seeds as he walked and up the trees popped in his wake. (Note, this is NOT the Disney thing, which is sincere in its homage.) Even as a kid, that idea cracked me up because I knew that trees require way more attention than spit and a stomp.

The real guy was named John Chapman, born in 1744, and he has a museum in Ohio. I’ve never been, but now that I know it exists I might add it to my Random Roadside Attractions list. (Fun fact: other things in Ohio are a tower of VW bugs and a library with a piece of Hitler’s urinal.) Chapman sounds like he was a benign sort of fellow, studying orchardry and then embracing a sort of missionary life, plopping down in places long enough to plant apple nurseries (with planning and fencing) and to proselytize for the New Church, which ended up influencing Transcendentalists and Mormons. He died around 1845 and is buried somewhere in Indiana. (The exact location is disputed.)

Unsurprisingly the dude also loved animals and apparently became a vegetarian later in life. But here’s the thing: He also must have been a pretty canny businessman. He left an estate of more than 1,200 acres of valuable nurseries to his sister when he died. That’s a far cry from the hobo who dropped seeds from a bindle. There’s also a school of thought that he wasn’t as virtuous as all that: Michael Pollan wrote about the guy in 2001 and basically says that the apples Chapman planted were useless for eating but great for making hard cider, and the reason the guy was so popular was because he brought booze to the Midwest.

Hey, there are worse ways to spread the gospel, I suppose.

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Fill Our Staplers Day

Posted on March 10, 2025 by arwenbicknell

“If they take my stapler, then I’ll set the building on fire.”

For a long time, Office Space was a friend test for me: If you’d heard of it, you were OK, if you’d seen it and laughed, you were certainly worth having lunch with. If you could quote it, you were instant inner circle. My best friend/boss and I bonded when she noticed that I had a novelty box full of Pieces of Flair on my desk.

My friend Elana actually worked on that movie, wrangling extras in Austin. I remember when she told me about it, I was like, “Ugh, the Beavis and Butthead guy? Really?” But she assured me that it was great. She was, of course, correct. She told me years later that she stayed friends with a lot of people she met on that job, so I am left with the impression that at least some of it was as fun to make as it is to watch. 

But there are other staplers with more wince-worthy cinematic claims. Drag Me to Hell has a nasty scene. Deadpool staples a mask to his face. John Wick and Mark Watney patch up their wounds with staplers. Less troubling, Batman uses one to threaten Commissioner Gordon in Batman Begins. Jeff Bridges uses a stapler to hem Robin Williams’ pants in The Fisher King (Writing that sentence, it really feels like it should be the other way around, but this is correct.)

Back to Office Space, I never knew anyone who bought the iconic red Swingline, but I know I bought myself a psychedelic purple one in the 2000s after someone stole my office-issued black one. It was a. mistake, because apparently it takes a weird size of staple. Fortunately, with the advent of the digital age, my need for staples decreased markedly and paperclips generally sufficed when needed!

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Barbie Day

Posted on March 9, 2025 by arwenbicknell

Barbie has taken a lot of flak over the years. She’s unrealistically proportioned and bad for body image. She’s a dolly, so she’s bad by default because girls should play with trucks. She’s blond. She had an astronaut outfit but no interim outfit for when she went through basic training (since most astronauts had military backgrounds back then); or a doctor’s coat but was way too young to have made it through med school. And the only criticism that, to my mind, has any merit: She’s a crass materialist.

She came along in 1959, when my mom turned 8. My mother insists she never had one, and I can believe it because I am pretty sure my grandmother had figured out by then that my mom was not a dolly girl, much to her disappointment. My mom got that disappointment back in spades with me, because I loved Barbie. I loved makeup, I loved dresses, I loved pink. Since my mother controlled the money, though, all that stuff was generally trumped by books and durable pants and colors that didn’t show dirt.

Grandma to the rescue! I got one of those big Barbie makeup heads as a tiny child, which my mom and uncle instantly renamed Chuckles the Clown after my first attempt at applying eyeshadow and lipstick. Through the years, I acquired a couple of Barbie dolls (I know I had Beauty Secrets Barbie, who came with a purple case of teeny tiny beauty implements that were constantly disappearing and then reappearing stuck to my bare feet; and I know the last Barbie that I got was Golden Dream Barbie, who came with this pantsuit and cape with a weird half-skirt thing that flowed out behind her.) I’d get an outfit or two for Christmas, and the fun part of that was poring over the catalog of other outfits to see what I had, what I wanted, what was ugly. I never got the cool stuff, like the horse (I think it was called Dallas?) or the Corvette. I never got a dream house, I had to manufacture a mansion out of my bookshelves and discarded book boxes. By the time I was 9, though, I was more perplexed by Barbie than anything else. Those shoes that never stayed on. The fact that her head could ghoulishly pop on and off and that it fit perfectly in the crook of her perpetually bent arm. When I was in fifth grade, my friend and I did the math to scale up Barbie to human size. I don’t remember the numbers, only that we knew she would look freakishly odd—partly because her boobs would make her fall over, but more because her neck and legs were ridiculously long.

There are those who say Barbie creates an unhealthy body image, even with her new thicker middle and flat feet. I suppose it’s possible, but I never considered Barbie’s body to be aspirational. Her wardrobe? Yes, absolutely, a thousand times yes. Her horse? You betcha. But her giraffe neck and Crystal Gayle hair? No thanks. My hair was halfway down my back and that sucked hard enough. Maybe there were girls who were brunette or stocky or had freckles had issues, but I had friends who looked like that and as far as I know, none of them wanted to look like Barbie, either. We were all materialistic little greed-balls in it for the Stuff.

I suppose that might have had some negative repercussions for me. I ran up a lot of credit debt in my early adulthood. But that was for travel and phone bills, not for my wardrobe. And I never did get a horse or a Corvette. Interestingly, one of the things on my Random Roadside Attractions list that I want to see someday is Mechanical Barbie and the Band of Many Kens, which is a kind of roided-up music box in an Italian restaurant in Ohio.

I had a boy who loved science and space, so Barbie wasn’t really on my radar as a parent. Honestly, I mourned the loss of Nancy Drew more than Barbie.

But maybe I was an anomaly. What was your Barbie experience?

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