I guess it's over. My heart is broken, and the e-mail just added insult to injury. I feel lost.
It was such a beautiful thing, I felt a love I didn't know I was capable of feeling. I'm still grieving, probably will be fragile for a while. Please bear with me and keep me in your thoughts.
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Hi Leigh,
We are sorry to hear that we have discontinued a favorite product of yours.
At this time the Trader Joe's Shrimp Gyoza have been discontinued in all our stores. We will forward your comments and request to bring this product back to our Buying Department and that will be taken into future consideration.
Much thanks,
Nicki K. Customer Relations Trader Joe's
-----Original Message----- From: Sent: Monday, October 27, 2008 5:29 PM To: Web Customer Relations Subject: Trader Joe's Product Information Form
Name: Leigh Ann Frink Phone Number: Your Trader Joe's: Cary Email Address: Product Name: Shrimp Gyoza Dumplings Sku # : Date Code:
Comments: Does the Cary store still stock them? They're my very favorite things in the whole world and the reason I drive 25 minutes to shop. They weren't there the last two times I went. Please let me know if they've been discontinued... I can't imagine why they would be, they rock!
--------------- UPDATE! Friends of Leigh Ann, especially those of you who don't leave comments because there are more of you, please click here, put "Thai Shrimp Gyoza" in the product box, and ask them to bring it back! Please? I think you're pretty/handsome. Really. You're awesome.
So I give you my very favorite musical match-up of all time: William Shatner, Joe Jackson and North Carolina's own Ben Folds doing Pulp's ode to English classism, "Common People."
Hey kids! You know what would be fun? Another caption contest!
Here's one to get things started:
"With time and funds running out, Senator McCain's scare tactics are becoming less subtle."
Wait, wait, I've got another one:
"Cindy tried switching his food to the anti-hairball formula, but John, like most old cats, rejected change."
UPDATE: Crap. D-Listed ran a caption contest with the same shot! Although "McCain tried to reach across party lines, but his shock collar went off" is good, ours are better. (Insert Vincent Price laugh a la Diff Girl's referenced song.)
Ding, ding ding. Grammar police here. I'm going to have to write you a ticket for committing the most egregious, skin-crawlingly horrible error someone with above a second-grade education can make.
My God, that one irks me to no end. Seriously. "Your" is an adjective meaning of or relating to you or yourself or yourselves especially as possessor or possessors (source: Merriam Webster). "You're" is a contraction of the pronoun "you" and the verb "are." My welcome? Gah!
I never intended to be this pedantic, and it was certainly never my dream as a little girl to be a wordsmith and editrix. I wanted to be a horse jockey or a rock star. As far as I was concerned, I'd marry Nick Rhodes from Duran Duran and join him on tour a la Linda McCartney with Wings and be famous, rich and fabulous.
To be completely honest, I hung on to my delusion of grandeur through college, with never a thought of career in my head. I majored in English because it was easy for me and I never had to try very hard (big disclaimer: I failed 15 hours of math to get the one math credit required at my liberal arts college).
Reality, along with poverty, set in after I graduated and moved to Raleigh. I was fortunate to find a low-paying job I HATED editing vanity reference books. From there I moved to advertising then to corporate editing and freelancing for self-published authors.
Editing incorporates a lot of skills. The hardest is copy editing, where every little typo that slips by, no matter how many other things you fixed, is on your ass. It's not fun. That's why when my first column as an "Our Lives" columnist in the Raleigh News and Observer misspelled my name, captioned my print picture as "married to a English scientist" and the online interview as "Leigh Ann Frink describes why he wants to be a correspondent," I was glad it happened to me and not someone else who would have written a snotty letter to the editor.
Copy editing is the hardest, but working with authors is the most treacherous. It's downright painful sometimes having to approach an author and gently guide him or her toward what the client really wants from his or her work. It's a delicate task, but it's my job to guide the author to make the best work he or she can for the client/audience or veto the print. Sure, I've dealt with whiny prima donnas (especially in advertising) who would throw themselves on their swords over the deletion of a single word, but most often, as I've found, the writers want to create great product. Though I am the editor, not the writer, I do my best to develop strong relationships with my writers, because, really, it's my neck on the line if they don't deliver because I didn't give them good specs or feedback.
Is it too late to go back on that horse jockey position? Seven inches of height, 50 pounds and no knowledge of riding are an impediment, you say? Rats. At least I can be an editor.
I really, really worry about becoming a crazy old cat lady (staring at you, Miss May). I try not to write too much about them, and I don't collect cat figurines, or wear applique cat shirts, or dress Dave and Eudora in little outfits and walk them around the neighborhood in a baby stroller. Yet.
I grew up with cats. Lots and lots of outside cats. Just like my parents, who were both raised on working tobacco farms, did.
One of the things I missed the most in college, of course, was having a cat. So after graduation, even though Rex and I moved into an apartment in Raleigh with a "no pet" clause, even though Rex was not a cat person, I brought home a kitten. I couldn't help myself: She was a tiny gray tabby in a cage at McCrory's at Crabtree Mall, all by herself. She cost $9.99.
I lied to Rex. Told him I'd rescued her from the parking lot of our complex. As always, he gave in and let me keep her. We named her Lovecat Margaret, after one of my very favorite Cure songs ever and Rex's favorite English prime minister.
My God, Lovecat was the least social cat ever. She was, quite honestly mean as hell. Her favorite toys were a disposable razor, a used battery and a pack of matches. Rex and I had friends over for a dinner party and they stared on in horror as I talked with my hands, as usual, but with a four-pound cat attached by all four sets of claws and all her teeth to my hand. She refused to be litter trained, so after much disappointment on my part, we sent her back to Shallotte to live at my parents' house as an outside cat.
Before my parents had a chance to get her fixed, she got knocked up by a very brave tomcat and had a litter of four kittens. A neighbor's dog got loose and murdered her as she tried to protect her babies.
My littlest sister Amy cried as my parents gave those kittens away 15 years ago, but she insisted they keep one, a gray male she named Blue. He was an outside cat, but, like his mother, he was tough as nails.
Blue stared down many a dog, got in a lot of fights with other male cats and gained a lot of scars, but he always loved his people and greeted everyone with a purring ring-around-the-leg. He was the king of the property.
Over the past few years, Old Blue came more and more to resemble the cat from Stephen King's "Pet Sematary." Each time I went home and saw him, he'd lost more teeth, become more deaf and his voice sounded more and more like a death rattle. His body had become a bag of bones and he moved along creakily. But he hung in there.
Last week, Blue started losing control of his bodily functions and had long since stopped cleaning himself. My mama was sitting in her swinging chair in the back yard and saw a fresh hole my daddy had dug. "Is that for Blue?," she asked him, knowing that she would be the one to take him to the vet's office for the last time.
The next day, she set the cat carrier on the ground under the carport and Blue walked right in. She had lined it with one of her best towels -- a blue one. My mama held him, wrapped in that blue towel, in the vet's office, stroking his head as the drugs set in. It was only when a vet tech named Jill came in the room that she started to cry. "Blue was Amy's cat," my mama said, "he was the last living thing we had left of hers."
After Blue drew his last breath and left his suffering behind forever, my mama declined cremation and brought him back home. My daddy buried him out on the back of the lot near the dozens of cats, hamsters, guinea pigs and parakeets we had growing up in our very own pet cemetery. But Blue's spot is special: My daddy piled a huge mound of dirt on top of it, broke an earthenware flowerpot and placed the pieces over it to keep it safe. My parents are going over to the beach this afternoon to gather seashells to place around it.
The little food mart in the strip mall nearest my house makes its money off beer, phone cards and lottery tickets. I just popped out for a beer run, walked into the store and saw the two things I can always count on seeing in there: the two Lebanese brothers who own it watching television and speaking their native language, and a chain-smoking, 60-ish lady playing video poker.
As I walked past the counter, I saw a flash of something at eye level mere feet in front of me. I stopped in my tracks as I realized that it was a shoe. On the freshly polished floor, between the door and the beer cooler, a pasty, middle-aged guy was spinning on his upper back and shoulders in full body rock. He jumped to his feet and announced in a thick Jersey accent, "Now that's old school," before walking past me, through the parking lot and down Bernard Street.
The shopkeepers and video poker player had apparently ignored him and kept doing what they always do. I stood there blinking for a second, then made my purchase and came home.
Yes, things are bad and scary in the world and our country: We're all one step closer to living in boxes and wearing barrels with suspenders, a vapid beauty queen could be a heartbeat away from the presidency, and, if the DVD I just got in the mail (unsolicited) is to be believed, radical Islamists are going to come kill us all in a matter of minutes.
But today, we put our fears aside and live for the moment, for today is the sweetest of days. Miss Eudora Thunderkiss, Goddess of Sweet Cosmic Bliss, celebrated turning three today! By celebrated, I mean sat there looking nonplussed as her mommy and daddy sang "Happy Birthday" all day long.
So, fans of Eudora or mammals in general, take a look at this video of her first jumpfrom the couch when she was eight weeks old and remember that there is nothing sweeter in this world than a baby with a milk-fed belly.
And just for today, at the very least, feel safe and secure and know that everything will be right in the world. Seriously. Somehow, it will. I'm gonna look at this purring, smoosh-faced cat on my lap and keep telling myself that.
My nephew, Joshua, was four years old and strapped in his car seat in the back of my old, beater car. We were coming back to Raleigh from Asheville for a weekend of "Lilo and Stitch," the dinosaur museum, Exploris and the "build-a-bear" store at the mall.
"Aunt Lee Lee?" he asked as we drove down I-40.
"Yes, buddy?" I responded.
"Are you my mommy's sister?"
"Yes, buddy, I am. Just like Banyan is your brother."
He thought about that for a while. Then he said:
"My mommy has another sister. Uncle Amy. She lives in heaven."
As the tears started to stream down my face over the pure, unadulterated sweetness of that moment, I just wanted to wrap that little boy in safety and comfort and make sure he never, ever had to feel pain. I wanted to make sure he had ice cream for every meal and had the Disney Channel playing on a nonstop loop all around him. I wanted him to have a pet unicorn that could fly and take him across a rainbow after school. I wanted him to have the golden ticket and live in the chocolate factory with the happy Oompa-Loompas. I wanted him to be Bastian Balthazar Bux, gliding across the clouds as Limahl crooned "Never Ending Story" in the background.
Six years later, I still feel that way about both my nephews. Joshua's 10 and Banyan's 8, but I want them to stay little 'til their Carters wear out. And I want them to... just. be. happy.
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If that made you cry, leave me a comment, 'cause I'm a little teary, too. :)
--------- Forwarded message ---------- From: E Date: Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 6:29 AM Subject: Oct 7th column To: "frinkink@gmail.com" <frinkink@gmail.com>
Mrs. Frink, I read your column today. The question I have is what makes a woman want to keep her maiden name in marriage? I am a man who has been married for over 15 years. I don't wear my wedding band because metal reacts with my skin and produces a rash.
Evan Raleigh, NC
Sent from my iPhone
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Dear Evan-
I kinda covered that in the column. Good luck with your rash.
When I was growing up, I used to watch Friday Night Videos eight inches from the television and at very low volume, so as not to wake up my Sainted Southern Mother. We didn't have MTV then, and the new wave music I adored irritated my James Brown and Elvis-loving mother to no end. Much like my 17-year-old stepson's Scandinavian "love metal" makes me want to vomit from my eyeballs and drive ice picks into my eardrums. But I digress...
While I was in college, my hometown got MTV, and my younger sisters got to go through high school with it, though they had to wait for the parents to relinquish control of the television and go to sleep before they could rock out to music videos. Just like I did. Yes, videos... MTV used to play them.
I came home for a visit the year after I graduated from college and, as I was used to heading out to the club at midnight, stayed up later than my parents. So, after they went to bed, I started watching MTV.
It was a treat for me, as my roommate and I were barely scraping by and couldn't afford cable. I sat on the floor, eight inches from the television with the sound turned down just as I'd done seven years before, trying not to wake my mother.
The "November Rain" video that I'd heard so much about came on, and I perked up with excitement. Two minutes into it, my mother, in her nightgown and unable to sleep from the noise, walked in. I was diving for the volume button when my sainted Southern mother saw what I was watching and said, "It's so sad when she dies at the end."
My mother, my Sainted Southern Mother, spoiled the end of the video for me. But we sat together watching it, and as we did, I wondered what other hair bands my mama was into and what other secrets she might be hiding.
I was just a small-town girl, living in a lonely world. I took the midnight train from Shallotte, to Elon College, to London and down some ridiculous roads in publishing and advertising. Now I'm a corporate communications hack, blogging silly stories about herself.
I am deathly afraid of frogs. The word "hamster" makes me laugh. I once saw a miniature horse pulling a cart with a dog in it down my residential street. I grew up in a sleepy beach town on the N.C. coast pronounced, against all linguistic rules, "Shuh-loat," I got carded once at a club and the bouncer informed me that the DMV had misspelled "Charlotte" on my license.
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