Common Ties and Common Ties

Hey Look!

I came home from a crappy day and look what was in my email box!


Dear Nancy:

Thank you again for submitting your story, "Fooling Dolores," with Common Ties – we have been sorting through a large number of submissions, and we have chosen yours from among them!

We are very excited about your story – now be sure to pass it around and check often for reader comments!

Congratulations, and thank you for your powerful contribution.
Elizabeth


Common Ties is "an interactive story blog," that publishes personal accounts or stories about events in everyday life. This is how they explain it:

"It is based on the hunch that people write best about what they know best - their own stories and the stories of those around them. This is journalism at its most intimate; real stories of real people that illustrate who we are and how we are connected."

It's like the online version of NPR's "This American Life."

Even better- if they want to publish your story, they pay you!


This news couldn't have arrived at a better time. I came home from seeing private psychotherapy patients all day, the last of whom had just lost her father, and the kitchen was a mess. In fact, the entire newly cleaned house was once again, trashed...muddy dogprints, the detritus of a day of boys being home sick, dog hair...

I was feeling a little cranky when I opened my email.

But with the good news, I felt much better. I wanted to share it. And when my family's reaction was considerably underwhelming, I burst into tears at the dinner table and fled to my bathroom where I sat on the potty and felt real damned sorry for myself.

All I could think was, my dad would've been excited. He would've said, "Oh, honey, that's great!" He wouldn't have asked the kinds of questions that poke holes in the fragile balloon of happiness. He wouldn't have been teenaged-boy disinterested.

Even in the midst of blowing my nose on tissue paper and snuffle-sobbing, I knew my reaction was not exactly rational...it was, in fact, totally off the wall. Worse, I had no idea what would make me start sobbing at the dinner table.

And then I remembered my last patient of the day. Hello! Her dad just died. She is dreading the holidays and it was my job to affirm her feelings and help her sort through the memories of holidays past.

I did this so easily. Too easily, in fact. I even wondered why it didn't seem to bother me at all.

Remember, I am a trained psychotherapist.

Duh!!!

So, I crawled out of my self-pity opt, apologized to the family, and still just miss the hell out of Dad right now.

Shortly before he died, he went to his filing cabinet, removed a green folder and handed it to me. The folder had my name on it. Inside was every newspaper clipping, every review, every picture of me that had ever been printed...And this included the picture of me as a Girl Scout in Sixth Grade, marching in the Memorial Day Parade.

There was no love like my Dad's unconditional, no-holds-barred, love. And I know at least one other person right now who feels the same way...and if I think about it for a nanosecond, I know a lot more...It's tonight's common tie, I guess.

God, I miss him swell.

It Is Not A Good Day To Be A Fish...

The Unnamed Ones came home from school with a stomach bug. But they are men...


and didn't call The Mom.

Instead the Oldest Unnamed One curled up in his bed, in the dark, wearing his Eagles jacket and wrapped in his quilt. I didn't even see him as I walked through the house, into my room where I found the Youngest Unnamed One, a.k.a Bag Boy, curled up in my bed watching HBO and hugging my pillow.

I found the dead fish on my way to get the thermometer.

The Oldest Unnamed One keeps/kept it on the counter there because "It stinks!" I told him, "Change the water more often!" He said, "It's not that!" But I didn't hear conviction in his voice.

Still the Beta made it over two years, so I suppose that's good in fish years.

However, a boy must be responsible for his pets, so I called, "Hey, come flush this fish!" I know the demise of the fish is not news to the boy. It appears to have been dead for at least a day or two and it is their bathroom.

A croaking voice from the Oldest's bedroom cried weakly, "I can't. I think I'm going to throw up!"

That's when I realized we were dealing with a plague.

One dead fish, two sick boys and you know, I'm not feeling too hot myself. I'm sure it's all in my head. Sympathy pangs, right? Because I really can't get sick. Not now. Not with the weekend two days away. I have, for once, plans.

Wonderful, indulgent, all-about-me plans.

Let's see...the boys had stomach aches over the weekend that have now blossomed into throwing up today, Tuesday. I have a stomach ache today...that puts hurling on what, FRIDAY?!

I know. It's a selfish, bad mommy who thinks of herself when her boys are worshipping the porcelain throne.

But...I'm going here:




Where I will see this:


And soak in this:


And I'll do a little of this:


And this:


And I'll sleep a lot here:



And I'll look out at the woods and feel like this:



Unless of course...I become a plague victim.

Which would probably be karma for thinking about the weekend when my boys are thinking about hurling!

The Boy Who Never Knew I Loved Him

Let's just get this part over with- of course we all fall in love in high school. It's practically a given. Half the time they don't even know we're in love with them, but love is love...even when they don't know.

I doubt the boy I not-so-secretly loved ever knew...or if he did, he was too kind to let on, to nice to openly break my heart by putting words to his feelings

You know how I know this?

One night, long after high school and college, when I was living alone in a drafty, old duplex, he and two other guys from "the day" called. Of course they were drunk. They called, they said, to tell me they'd just been talking about me and decided I was the "girl we most respected" in high school.

Is that the kiss of death, or what?

I mean, it's wonderfully sweet. Thank you. I will dine on that fact in my old age. Hell, even now I am pleased to hear it.

But you don't say that if you're in love with a girl. You say that when you've already said, "I love you like a friend, like my best friend, like my sister"...etc.

I was his designated driver. This occurred shortly after the night when he told his dad he was sleeping over at a friend's but was really staying out all night, partying. In his infinite and impaired wisdom, he decided to cruise by his house at 5:30 a.m. There, in a plaid bathrobe, at the end of the driveway, stood his father, retrieving the Sunday paper.

My wild boy toots the horn of his white V.W and says "Hey, Dad!" as we drive by.

He was grounded for months and I became the designated driver.

He was going steady with a girl who shared my name, Nancy. He married a girl who was everything I'm not but still someone I competed with because she was the "good girl" at Dad's church and I was the "bad influence." It really got under my skin when I learned she'd "won" him.

When we hung out, he wore an over-sized Army jacket. One night when it was very cold, he slipped it over my shoulders and I was enveloped for hours in the scent of him. He would do things like this, sweet little things that I treasured and remembered for years.

I was his confidant- to the extent that any teenaged boy ever confides his feelings and thoughts to another human being.

I was, in a word, his pal.

At some point, years and years later, I tell my dad about my unrequited love. That's something girls do, I suppose. But Dad's reaction surprised me.

"Oh, that would never have worked!" he said, laughing. "He's way too conservative for you!"

My pot-smoking, under-aged drinking, cohort who busted our friends out of military school and lived the wild life was now conservative? No way!

"He married the perfect woman for him. You'll see. Next time you visit come to church."

"They go to St. James?" I am astounded. He was Catholic if he was anything. She had him attending an Episcopalian "Catholic Lite" church! That spoke volumes.

One Spring, before Dad retired, I go to church. I am waiting for the service to begin when I feel a light tap on my shoulder. It's Her. "Come out to the parking lot," she says sweetly...and I do not mean fake sweet, either. She actually is sweet. "I know he'd love to see you."

Damn. I am at the 10:30 service and they attended the 8 o'clock. She is the only reason I will get to see him.
wq
I rise and follow her outside into the parking lot. A green SUV sits across from us, its engine humming in the cool Spring morning.

"Look who I found," his wife says, sliding into her place beside him, leaving me standing on his side of the car feeling awkward.

My boy has grown up.

You know how they always look fat, bald and much older and you're just shocked by how badly the years have treated them? Not him. My boy has morphed into the spitting double of Robert Freaking Redford!

My heart snaps again and I wonder if he hears it.

I am so polite. We make small talk. They are the perfect couple, I realize. They fit together. She, like me, is a social worker but in a hospital. I am too overwhelmed to remember what he does but I do see immediately what Dad was trying to say.

My wild boy has become his father.

"He would want to be the one in charge and you would've fought that all the way," he'd said.

Dad is right. I would not have Her finesse. I am the bulldozer type. She is the whisper of conscience.

And, I might add, she doesn't seem to have gained an ounce or aged since high school either...Dammit!

This would've been a boring confirmation of what we always come to realize about our old boyfriends...that they would've been so totally wrong for us...had I not looked into the backseat of the SUV. There sit the two sons.

The eldest is sitting straight in his seat, every bit the proper oldest boy, very polite. In fact, both boys are polite and well-schooled in the social graces.

But it is the second boy who makes my day.

There sits my boy, reincarnated. Oh, he's dressed appropriately enough, and his facial expression mirrors that of his parents and his brother...But there in his eyes, is that mischievous twinkle I remember so well.

I smile at him as I think, Run boy! Go be wild before you have to grow up and become who you "should" be. Don't take your dad too seriously. Sure, he means what he says now, but once he was just like you, wild and longing for adventure. Live it up, honey, the future is nipping at your heels.

Such wicked, rebellious thoughts for the most respected girl.

I turn away from the boy and take a last look at this boy grown into Robert Redford. I do not see a twinkle in his eye any longer. I'm sure this is exactly as it has to be, but still I am sad...Because the wild girl who still lives inside my heart did so love that bad-assed boy.

Stinking Rugs and Failed Salvations

I have this old rug. Well, not really that old. It’s a Pottery Barn rug, 10’x 13’, maroon, purple, brown squares resembling a patchwork quilt. It is thick, soft wool and it stinks.

I didn’t notice it at first. It was such a steal. Hundreds of dollars less than one bought in a Pottery Barn store. The colors, so rich and lush, pulled me into its comforting spell. I just had to use it in my new office…Even though the walls of that office are done in pale, peach-colored grasscloth from the 70s.

Peach wallpaper, maroon rug, teal blue carpet underneath that. It was a design nightmare but with enough stuff on the wall, you don’t really see the peach color and the rug completely covered the teal, industrial carpet…Which made opening the door a bit of a challenge as it wasn’t cut to accommodate a thick, wool rug…but I made it work, sort of.

That’s when the odor became noticeable.

Contained in that small 10 x 13 foot office, unrolled and exposed to the air, my sweet, dear rug exuded an unmistakable smell.

I watch CSI. I read. Hell, I write mystery novels. I’ve attended lots of forensic conferences and ridden with police officers all over the country. And while I have never actually, first-hand visited the infamous Body Farm, I know the smell of decomposition and this rug had it in spades.

I stood in my office, looked down at my e-bay prize and envisioned the only thing I could- A dead body.

Oh, the thing had been cleaned afterward. I knew this because there was also the strong odor of chemicals, but the dead body scent still lingered.

I did the only thing I could.

I called the Unnamed Ones, loaded it up onto the back of a pickup and drove it home.

We dragged it onto the sunroom, unfurled it and I worked on it with the carpet cleaner and every anti-stink product known to man. It worked. My beautiful rug became the touchable, work of art I’d known it could be. We pulled it into the family room and there it stayed, lush and welcoming throughout the winter.

Someone said, “Don’t you think it makes the room look too dark?”

No, I did not- anymore than I thought the maroon clashed with the peach wallpaper and teal carpet in my office.

But then came the Spring and the April Showers and once again my dear carpet began to emit a familiar smell. This time it was not dead body. It was Dogs Too Prissified To Pee Outside When It’s Raining.

I have a very low tolerance for this behavior.

The rug had much less of a tolerance.

The little bastards were crafty. They switched favorite spots on the rug- peeing indiscriminately everywhere they could find a squat-able square.

We chased after them. We spot cleaned, de-odorized, scrubbed, chemicalized and in general, did everything the killer did to get the dead body stink out of that rug, but it wasn’t working. No matter how much we scrubbed- there was still a faint whiff of urine…and dead body.

The Unnamed People I reside with began to complain. I countered if they were more firm in their handling of the Unnamed Dogs, we wouldn’t have this issue.

Finally though, I had to concede defeat. We rolled and folded the massive rug up into what resembled a bent-in-half hotdog and shoved it in a corner of the sunroom where it awaited either the brawn to carry it up into the attic or the Miracle of Destinkification.

Periodically someone would say, “You know, it stinks like dog pee on the back porch,” and I would give an injured sniff and say, “Well, one of them peed out there.” I would mop the porch with buckets of Pinesol and then they’d complain about that smell!

Spring turned into summer. Dad got sick and I spent almost six months in New Bern praying for a bigger miracle and then I came home to the life I had left behind and the Unnamed Ones who loved me.

But Friday I could ignore The Damned Rug no longer.

I spent the afternoon hauling the sunroom furniture out onto the patio, scrubbing the terrazzo tile floor, and then rolling “It” out onto the clean, slick surface. I vacuumed it first with a Kirby, the nearest thing to a tornado ever invented. I brought the carpet cleaner down from the attic, (which was no small feat when you consider that I had to fight my way through Christmas, Easter and Halloween decorations with a damned machete.)

I loaded up the machine with the approved and appropriate cleaner and then I pulled out my Secret Weapon. When I was with Dad in the assisted living facility I made friends with Mona the Wonder/Cleaning Woman. She turned me on to her never fail carpet cleaner and deodorizer.

“You know what happens on these carpets,” she’d said. “This never fails.”

Okay, so it didn’t work on the carpet in my rental unit- but that carpet had been in place for hundreds of years and dirty, drunken construction workers had wrought untold amounts of desecration to it- so that carpet didn’t count.

For added insurance, I sprayed every other deodorizing and carpet cleaning product I own, and with four dogs and one cat, trust me, I have ‘em all.

I went over it with the heavy machine. I detached the hand tools and used them. I put muscle and sweat into my labors. And then the carpet machine blew up.

I mean white-smoke-fire-and-the-smell-of-melting-components blew up. This added a new aroma to the mix.

When the Unnamed Others arrived home they wrinkled up their noses. “It smells worse than it did before!” They touched the rug. “It’s not even wet! Are you sure you did it the right way?”

After three hours of solid, back-breaking labor this was not what I wanted to hear. Things like: “You poor thing! You must be exhausted!” came to mind.

We carried it out onto the patio and draped it over the wrought iron patio chairs. I settled for waxing the terrazzo tile floor and fantasizing about committing multiple homicides then disposing of bodies in stinking, maroon wool.

My joints and muscles ached. I was frustrated and my feelings were hurt. Worse, I couldn’t quite figure out how and why I had become so invested in this hunk of noxious rug.

My friend, Marti, called and I explained about the rug. I said, “I don’t know what it is but I don’t want to give up on it. I mean, it’s mine. It just feels like it’s something of mine that I don’t want to lose.”

Marti was very matter of fact about the rug.

“Bring it out here,” she said. “We’ll use the power washer on it.”

“The power washer? On a wool rug?”

“Sure,” she said. “I clean all my carpets with the power washer. I figure, fuck it, they aren’t going to get any worse and I drag ‘em out in the driveway and turn the power washer on ‘em.”

“And it doesn’t ruin them?”

“Nope. You’ve seen my rugs. They’re fine.”

And they are, too. Every square inch of Marti’s house is pristine and odor-free. She has met the enemy and they are hers. Dirt runs when it sees Marti approaching.

A feeling of relief washes over me. Marti, somehow, intuitively “gets” me. She may not know why the rug is important- she only cares that it is- therefore, saving my rug is important to her- without question, attitude or hesitation.

She also gets that calling in a carpet cleaner is not an option. For some reason the salvation of this carpet is a personal, hands-on mission not to be left to the ministrations of strangers.

That night, as I lie in bed, I try and sort out my feelings about the rug. Why does it mean so much to me?

I mean, I am a trained psychotherapist. I do know that pouring this much energy into the salvation of an inanimate object is irrational. I should haul the thing to the curb and be done with it. But I just couldn’t give up on it. I, personally, had to save that rug.

Which is when, of course, I realized what that rug symbolized.

Dad.

In my battle with the maroon carpet I had the tools, the chemicals, the know-how and still…once again, I was failing to save something or someone I loved.

One day there will be a “power washer” for Pulmonary Fibrosis.

Yellow Raincoats and First Loves

It is raining when I look up from my novel to see his face. The carpool line snakes around First Presbyterian and it will take too long to reach him if I wait. I really can’t wait, not after seeing his eyes, big and brown, blinking not against the raindrops but holding back a wall of tears I know will soon burst like a dam.

I pull into the parking lot, grab the huge bright yellow and pink flowered umbrella from the backseat and head for him, my eyes never leaving his face. I have never seen my little boy hurt like this.

He stands in the queue next to his stiff, stern kindergarten teacher, wearing his older brother’s hand-me-down, yellow Mackintosh. His sneakers squish in the deluge as he steps out to greet me, to take my hand in his.

I know not to stop, not to ask “What is wrong?” until we are a safe distance away from the others. But we are not quite to the parking lot when I see the convulsive jerk of his shoulders. Barely contained grief is leaking out around all the edges of his being.

I stop and kneel down beside him on the wet sidewalk. I am trying to both shelter and hide us with the oversized, Mary Poppins umbrella.

“Ben, what’s wrong?”

He looks at me, stricken, as tears well up and course down his sweet cheeks.

“It’s Dennifer,” he says in his quaint, gap-toothed lisp.

“Jennifer?” The first love of his life, the cute little blonde with the perpetual smile…the damned hussy! If she’s hurt my boy…I compose myself.

“Did something happen?” I ask.

He is sobbing now, his body wracked with silent, deep waves of grief that cut through his body, making sound impossible. For a long moment we are frozen as he tries, hiccups wails, tries again and finally speaks.

“Dennifer said she don’t want to be my gwirlfriend no more. She’s gwoing to…gwoing to…” He sobs, hiccups again, gasps for air. “She is gwoing to marry her cousin!”

I pull him into my arms and hold him close. The umbrella shelters us both from view now, hiding the two of us as we cry for broken hearts, the pain of first loves and brazen hussies who decide their cousins are better than sweet, little boys in yellow raincoats.

We Are Not Morning People

We are not morning people, not back then and certainly not now!

I don't even think we come to life around here until sometime after dinner...Well the boys don't. They stumble out of bed, bleary-eyed from watching The Colbert Report, bump into walls as they stagger to the shower and stand for what seems like hours beneath the hot water, sleeping.

How do I know they are sleeping in the shower? Well, after fifteen minutes, when I bang on the bathroom door and yell at the Youngest Who Must Remain Unnamed, he calls back, "I'm coming! I just have to rinse the shampoo out of my hair!"

Yesterday I was on him again. "There's no hot water left for your brother's shower! What are you doing in there?"

At dinner he offered this explanation of his prolonged, underwater experience. "The conditioner bottle says to leave it on your hair for six minutes. That's what I was doing."

He says this with a straight face.

This morning I couldn't tell you how long he was in there because I was in a coma. Apparently the puppets I made for his AP World History project were such a smashing success a few weeks ago that he's again volunteered to "make" the puppets for this next project.

Six Dollar Store Barbies gave their all, and most of their hair, to become a Japanese Post-Classic era peasant (and the leather shag area rug also gave up a few stray strips), a Buddhist monk, a Samurai warrior and two aristocrats. It took two of us, working hard until midnight to finish.

I would've taken pictures but I was so sick of the little shits I just shoved them in a plastic file box and locked them all away. Besides, if there is a Barbie Humane Society I don't want them over here banging on the front door with picture in hand, screaming, "You have defiled the sacred image of American womanhood!"

Yeah, as if...

The Youngest Unnamed One seems none the worse for wear this morning, but I am a total loss.
I guess I'm not a morning person and not a late night person either.
Damn, I must be getting old!

P.S...I am mentally smacking myself on the forehead...It has occurred to me, just as it must be occurring to you, there is one other activity that could explain the length of time it takes my adolescent boys to shower....Ewwww! Okay, I'm taking the Tilex in there right now!!!

Do you see this face? This cute, innocent, trusting face?



That is a picture of my baby brother, John, taken when he was about five. Doesn't he look sweet? Who would want to hurt a little fellow like John Andrew?

I'll tell you who.

Kim Nichols, that's who. The bane of our existance. Our nemisis.

Next door to the old rectory where we lived, there was a duplex. It crouched between our hulking wreck of a manse and the Smith's house where my best friend and her five brothers and sisters lived. In order to reach the oasis that was the Smith's house, you first had to pass by the rowhouse where Kim Nichols lived with her grandmother and her grandmother's 26 chihuahuas.

Kim Nichols was the troll that lived beneath our childhood bridge.

Every day, without fail, Kim beat me up. If she didn't catch me on the playground, she trapped me on the way home. She was my age, maybe a year older, and she was a torn-down terror of a girl. Redheaded with horrible buck teeth and freckles. She would outrun me, overtake me and knock me down no matter how I tried to escape and I lived in fear of her throughout my elementary school years.

Little did I know she was torturing my little brother at the same time.

I guess we each thought we were the only weakling tormented by Kim and it was our private agony to bear in silent shame.

But my brother was five years younger than Kim. He wore a heavy metal brace on his leg, the result of running through a plate glass window. He was a very easy target.

The only relief we had from Kim came at dinnertime when her grandmother would step outside onto the back stoop and surrounded by her yapping menagerie would yell in a high, shrill voice "Kim-eeeee!!!"

The screech would echo across the narrow back yards, bounce off the the brick walls of our homes and signal blessed relief from our tormentor. Kim's supper was the equivalent of a Christmas Truce in wartime. It lasted as long as it took Kim to eat and elude the clutches of her grandmother.

Late every afternoon we all smelled supper cooking at the Nichols' house. It was always the same odor because Kim's grandmother cooked a homemade meat and rice concoction for her 26 dervish dogs every single night. I have no idea what she fed Kim.

I only know that I loved supper time at the Nichols' house.

It was just never enough of a respite.

This past April, as my family gathered to be close to Dad for Spring Break, John finally gave up his secret.

"That bully beat me up every day!" he said, taking a pull on his Corona. "And I was just a little kid!"

"She did it to you, too?" I asked.

He nodded. "Yeah. I hated her. She'd knock me down and I'd run home cryin' every single day...Until one day when I'd had enough." John looked around the table at the adults, a mischevious smile bringing a gleam into his eyes. "Do you guys remember Ultraman?"


Unbidden, the long forgotten theme song of the Ultraman T.V show streamed into my conscious memory. Ultraman, the precursor of the Power Rangers.

My brother doesn't wait for the answer, he sees it in our faces.

"I watched that show every day," he said. "Every single day."

I remember my brother, inches from the T.V, soaking up shows that feature superheroes, believing every bit, every word...crying for an entire week when Robin got swallowed by a giant clam in a cliff-hanger episode on Batman, unconsolable until the following Sunday night when Batman saved his fearless buddy. Of course he watched Ultraman.

"This one day," my brother said. "She knocked me down, hard, and I just lost my shit! I got so mad I cried. I screamed at her, 'I'll get you!'" And then I ran back home, only this time I knew what I had to do. I was going to turn into Ultraman...You know how the guy stuck his fist up in the air and lightning hit him and he turns into Ultraman?"

I am nodding, trying to see how a five year old boy could actually believe he could become a superhero.

"No," John insists, reading my mind. "I was going to be Ultraman. I was going to show Kim Nichols!"

He is laughing, tears streaming down his face, reviewing the home movie in his head.

"I ran into the kitchen and I was crying and saying "I'll show her! I'll get her!" And I pulled open the drawer, took out the tin foil and wrapped myself in tin foil!"

Our eyes widen, we are now laughing with him, seeing the sweet, little boys swearing vengence and believing himself capable of exacting his revenge with super powers given to him by a roll of tin foil.

"I ran back outside. I was screamin' for her and there she was, still standing out on the sidewalk, looking at me like I'm nuts. I mean, here's this little kid screaming he's going to kill her and he's covered in tin foil...which of course comes flying off while I'm running but I don't even know...I'm Ultraman and I'm going to kill Kim Nichols!"

We all want to ask, "What happened?" but we are also dreading the inevitable answer. My brother sees all of this in our eyes but for a long moment he is laughing too hard to continue. We are at once horrified and unable to look away.

"I run up to her and I'm screaming, 'Ultraman!' I punched her as hard as I could and then I turned around and kept on running right back to the house."

"What did she do?" We ask.

"When I got to the front porch, just before I ran in the door, I looked back and she was still standing there, looking at me, like she knew I was crazy or something...But I didn't care because Ultraman had defeated her!"

He was laughing. We were all laughing, big, fat tears pouring down our reddened faces. We were John, we were victorious against the neighborhood bully.

"Did she leave you alone after that?" someone wants to know.

John shrugs. "I don't know. Probably not, but I don't remember it happening again. I think she thought I was crazy and maybe that's why she left me alone. But it didn't matter anymore what she did. I was Ultraman!"

I try to remember when Kim stopped beating me up and can't. There was a brief period when I tried to befriend her. I don't know if this was before or after Dad told me Kim lived with her grandmother because her mother was a biker and had run off with Kim's father, leaving her mother to raise Kim...like a 27th chihuahua.

I remember taking Kim to church, kneeling on the thin, red velvet cushions as Dad read his way through the communion litergy, the church hot and stuffy, quiet except for the sound of Dad's voice. Dust motes danced on a shaft of sunlight that lit the aisle beside us. That is what I saw just before Kim fell out onto the floor in a dead faint.

I was petrified, frozen in a self-conscious panic. I didn't know what to do. Was I supposed to stay respectfully kneeling and not make a scene? I ignored her, watched as the ushers rushed to her aide and finally, as her eyes rolled back in her head, moved to follow her as the two men carried her out of the sanctuary.

I have only one other memory of Kim. We are in her house, in her small bedroom where the wallpaper is a sepia memory of rose sprigs and her bed is hard and covered with a cheap chenille spread.

We sit side by side and I realize, too late, that she is staring at me with an expression I do not understand.

Without warning she turns and kisses me, hard, on my lips.

I am once again frozen, incapable of reacting for what seemed like the eternity it took to inhale and run down the steps, out her front door and back to my own bedroom with its bright colors and pink cabbage rose wallpaper. I slam the door behind me, sink into my bed and try to erase the entire memory from my head.

But here it still is.

I remembered her kiss when I heard years later that she'd died riding drunk and high on the back of a Pagan's chopped Harley.

And for a brief second I wondered if it were somehow my fault. If I hadn't run, if I'd somehow avoided that kiss, come up with another way to deal with her advance, rushed to her side when she fainted, known, understood, read her better...would she have made other choices? Would she still be alive?

I hear my father's chuckle in my head..."You are not that powerful," he would say. "You can't make anyone do or feel anything. That is up to them...You don't have that much control, no one does. We all create our own reality."

I know, in my head, that what my father says is true. I am powerless to change anyone but myself. The only demons I can defeat are my own.

I didn't understand Kim then and even if I had, that knowledge alone wouldn't have been enough to save her. One gesture, one word would not be enough to take away her anger and pain any more than it would be enough to push her over the edge into a self-destructive end. I couldn't stop the sea of rage and unhappiness that led her to attack others and eventually destroy her own life.

We can only control our own lives. This seems at once freeing and selfish and I think long and hard about it, wrestle with it until I can flip the concept over and face its other side...

My brother changed his life the day he became Ultraman.

We're All Bozos On This Bus!

Marti and I are at lunch today when she leans forward across the table and says, "Your sister said something to me in New Bern before right before your father died and it's haunted me ever since. I can't get it out of my head."

"What?" What could Becky have said to Marti that made her feel both haunted and unable to ask me about it until now?

"Remember the day your dad was out of it and he thought he was on his sailboat?" I nod. "He was annoyed with you and your sister, which I completely understand," she adds, as if I need the reassurance...which is also odd for Marti- to feel I would need to know Dad's behavior that day was not something she found to be unusual.

It was, of course, unusual. It freaked everyone but me out. Dad was mad. He wanted tools to fix his boat so he could begin his journey...so he could leave us...and we didn't, at first, know what to do. It took me aback for a moment, until I realized where he was in his head.

I work in nursing homes with elderly demented patients. I know delusions and I also know it is far better to join in with them than to try and force the person to see a reality they can no longer accept. So, I simply did as my father asked.

I walked across the room to his dresser, looked back over my shoulder at Dad sitting upright in bed and said, "I'm opening the Lazarette hatch. I'll have the tool you need in a second. Hang on."

Becky and everyone else left the room. My friend, Martha, looked scared. They didn't understand that it was all right. We were playing the same game I'd played with my children years ago when they were toddlers. We were playing Make Believe.

I am remembering this while Marti continues. "Becky and I were out in the hallway and she said, 'Now you know what we grew up with.'" Marti looks at me. "What did she mean by that? Was your father an angry man?"

My first instinct is to laugh. Dad, angry? The most patient man on earth? How could my sister think that was how we grew up- with an angry father? But at almost the same time I am seeing flashes...

I see me at age eight, a streak of motion flashing past, wearing my favorite wine-colored dress, the one with the big sash that Dad always had to tie and re-tie for me, the same dress I was wearing the day I got stuck in the toilet and called and called until he came to pull me out. He had been mad at me then. He was mad the day I ran around and around our massive, dark walnut dining room table, trying to escape the spanking he wanted to deliver.

We called the dining room table "The Bombshelter."

We hid under the table when Dad got mad, when he came home irritated by his day, or by us or by something three little kids couldn't understand but knew was somehow their fault. When you are little, all the ills of the world are your fault, the consequence for your bad behavior.

"No," I say to Marti. "He wasn't an angry guy at all!"

I hear his voice in my head. Pieces of a lost conversation come drifting back into my memory. "I was unhappy," I hear him say. "I wasn't in touch with my feelings, so I was angry a lot. That was before I went into therapy."

"He didn't know himself very well back then," I tell Marti. "He was tired. He worked all the time then had to take care of us, too. His unhappiness leaked out and he would blow up every now and then, but it wasn't often."

I scour my memories, wanting to be completely honest with my very best friend. I can't call up any violent episodes. I can't remember him losing his temper with me after elementary school. Instead I remember him telling me we create our own realities- that nothing can bother us unless we allow it to. I wonder if this was something his therapist told him.

I remember the last time I saw Dad get angry and it makes me smile. We were building my front porch when he realized he'd mis-measured. He gritted his teeth and growled. "Arrrrgh!!!" Then he tossed down the hammer and said, "Damn, damn, damn!"

And I laughed because it was so out of context there on my front stoop. I was a grown woman now. I had children inside the house. He was their grandfather and yet, here he was, having a mini-temper tantrum right outside my open doorway.

I remember him doing this exact same irritated dance whenever he was extremely agitated and vexed and I remember laughing at him as a child, a teenager and now as somebody's mother. It happened rarely and perhaps it made me uncomfortable, maybe this is why I always laughed. I was nervous.

I think hard about this for a long time after lunch and conclude that while I may have been nervous when I was very little, the laughter of my adolescence and adulthood was more about finding him vulnerable to the same emotions and foibles as me. Otherwise, he would've been too Christ-like to remain human.

His mess-ups were my reassurance that he was after all, just a person.

I remember coming home from work one night and finding him at my kitchen stove, preparing spaghetti for dinner. My boys were toddlers, running around and around the center island, in-between his legs, growing louder and louder with every pass.

As I stepped into the room I heard him. "Argggggh!!!"

My mother is sitting on the sofa at the edge of the kitchen, oblivious to the chaos swirling around Dad and his irritation. She does not see that he is worried they will get hurt if they bump up against him and cause the sauce to spill, or burn themselves on the oven door. She is out of it until he yells.

"Dick," she says. "What do you want me to do?" She sounds half-hearted and helpless, truly clueless.

"I don't give a damn what you do, just do something!"

The children are not traumatized by this. They don't stop running but they do make a wider circle. The are smiling, laughing up at him as if he has just made a joke...which, in his own way, he has.

I want to applaud. I want to say, "Well, it's about damned time you got mad!" But of course I don't. Instead I step into the room, scoop up my two frisky children and kiss their wiggly bodies, set down my bag and begin to set the table.

"Need a drink?" I ask, not waiting for the answer and instead pouring two glasses.

Our eyes meet when I hand him his tumbler, his preferred glass of choice. He sighs. "Hel-lo, Nanny Poo!" he says. The frown lines vanish from his face, his shoulders relax and he gives me an apologetic grin- as if he is sorry for not being Superman, for not being able to be both mother and father to me, grandmother and grandfather to my boys and all things to all people, single-handed and invincible...

But of course, in my eyes, he is all of those things and more.

His frustration with himself and the way he runs his universe, his willingness to share his imperfections...they are all the permission I need to be more tolerant of my own mis-steps and tarnished expectations.

Later, when I lose my temper with my own children, when I do the wrong thing, fail yet again to be the Best Mom in the Known World, I remember my role model and find it so much easier to go to my guys and say, "You know what? Mommy was wrong and I am sorry."

I have shared my father's bemused grin with my boys and had the amused glint of validation returned to me in their understanding and delighted gaze. We are sharing the insider joke that travels between the generations of my family....

Arrrrgh!!!! Damn, damn, and double damn! We are not perfect after all!!!

We are only human beings doing the very best we can...and sometimes this just pisses us the hell off!

Cookie Update...

I went to see Cookie in the nursing home today. She was in her room, sitting in her wheelchair, just like always. But unlike even a month ago, Cookie is very different...Her beautiful white, perfectly styled hair is dull and disheveled.

The bruises on her face from falling out of her wheelchair have faded to an ugly greenish-yellow. The bruising on her hands is worse. They tell me she has been wandering, trying to escape, banging into walls, against doors, at windows and this is why her hands are bruised.

Her shoes were off. Cookie always wore shoes. Her clothes were stained and mismatched. Cookie has always been meticulous about her appearance.

She stared up at me, uncomprehending. I spoke to her and she didn't respond, just gave me a slight smile, like maybe I was speaking Japanese and while she knew I was a friendly person, my words meant nothing.

For one long minute I thought she was completely lost to me.

And then she said, "You are my sweetheart. I know that's right."

The nurse came in and had to almost yell in Cookie's ear in order for her to hear. That's when I understood that it's not that Cookie doesn't understand me, she just can't hear me. Her hearing aid is still lost.

"I think the facility is going to pay for a new one," the nurse said.

I should hope so.

And while they're at it...maybe they could sink some money into paying the staff a living wage, employing good people and enough of them to insure that patients like Cookie don't sit in their own urine, hurting and looking homeless or afraid or both.

Clogging for Jesus and Little Elvis...

This is me and Marti indulging in our passion...Clogging.

For the unenlightened, clogging is kind of like southern tap-dancing and it's usually done to bluegrass music, although it can be done to just about anything as long as it's got a lively beat. Clogging's kissing kin to Irish Step Dancing.

I got started on this peculiar hobby when my marriage was taking a turn for the worse and I needed a life. Sad but true, this is the only life I could find that both piqued my interest and didn't cost an arm and a leg to learn.


I was thrilled with the idea but also terrified when I started. I mean, I can't dance. I can't even walk and chew gum unassisted...Still I showed up that first night and that's how I met Kenny.

Kenny could teach a brick to dance. And he did...much to my total amazement. Big Kenny's the guy in the picture below standing on the back right, hands on hips, watching the team dance at my house. I'm there on the front row left. I know it's not a pretty picture...but if I don't share my little life traumas how will I ever let them go?




Sometimes, under the influence of Margaritas, we just bust loose in Marti's kitchen. That's how we can tell if we're still sober or not...If we do a routine without messing up or falling down, we're not drunk yet.


Sometimes we all ride out to Brown's Barn on Saturday night. We love to go out there because the local farmers who host the entertainment are all in their 90s and refer to us as the "pretty clogger girls." Do you know how long it's been since I was called a girl?

Marti and I dance to whatever the band's playing...that is, assuming they're not top-heavy with ballad singers like Little Elvis:


Little Elvis wears a black, combed yarn wig, a white denim jumpsuit studded with huge fake jewels, a faux-leather, rhinestone-encrusted wrestling championship belt he found at Goodwill and a white cape lined in red satin.

He believes he is Elvis. "I ain't never worked a day in my life," he tells me proudly. "If I need more money than music's bringin' in, I just go pick up cans along Highway 29."

He arrives with his wife, Baby. Baby goes 5'7" and 250lbs, all packed into size 10 red polyester stretch pants. One day she'll have enough in cans to buy teeth, but for now she's gummin' it. Still, Baby always has a smile for a stranger, along with a Little Elvis trading card.

One night, when Pretty Amy the Clogger came out to the Barn with us, Elvis gave the three of us big rhinestone rings. Then, perhaps feeling a tad guilty, he walked up on stage and dedicated "Love Me Tender" to "The love of my life...Baby..." He pointed her out as if there was anyone who didn't know her by this time and she smiled back at him with a delighted, cockeyed grin.

It's sweet to find true love still alive and flourishing.

Of course, I've had my own magic moments out at the Barn.

One night a guy I hardly ever get to see, Harvey from England, came with us. Harvey is a small, wiry fellow with huge, soulful eyes. On this particular evening he'd been up two days straight studying for finals at the School of the Arts. He was ready for a good time, remembered my tales of the barn in the middle of nowhere and decided this was the night to take me up on my promise to show it to him.

He was itching for a party.

And can you believe Harvey had never even heard of Wild Turkey?

He took the bottle, stared at it curiously, then poured himself about 3 inches worth. Before we could warn him, prepare him, caution him or at least slow him down, Harvey drank it-without pause or hesitation.

Of course, he about choked to death.

"What the hell was that?" he asked.

We told him and then found out he hadn't eaten in two days either. Harvey is younger than us. He lacks survival seasoning.

Marti and I have had a few shots, but not on empty stomachs. So when our designated driver, Marti's husband, drove us out to the barn, we felt no pain. Harvey seemed none the worse for his half-glass of straight bourbon and in fact, seemed almost sober. He was talking about doing a documentary on the barn. He was definitely excited about soaking up southern culture.

This seemed like a harmless, worthwhile thing to do...take Harvey to see The Barn.

I forget sometimes that Harvey's an actor. He's just blends in with his surroundings and I don't realize he's up to anything until it's too late.

After I'd danced with Marti awhile, I thought maybe I'd better go check on him. I didn't want him to think we'd just brought him and dumped him.

I shouldn't have worried. I find him standing in the center of a circle of old men, jabbering away. When he spots me, he pulls me close and begins introducing me as his sister. He says we used to sing together and would just love the opportunity to sing with the band. He says all of this without one trace of his British accent. In fact, he sounds every bit as southern and country as any of the folks standing around him.

I give Harvey the eye, the same eye I give the kids when I want them to know I'm going to kill them if they don't knock off whatever it is they're doing. "Now, Harvey," I say. "You know we cain't do nuthin' like that!" I say this in my very best southern accent. "I ain't sung a lick since Daddy died. I just cain't bring myself to...After all, he died in the pulpit. Singing the old songs just makes me relive that awful day."

Harvey gives me an admiring glance. I'm in too deep to turn back now.

Harvey is one with his redneck entourage. They hang together like long lost brothers. Harvey and his fan club insist and before I realize what we're doing, he's pushed me into a shed and we're rehearsing, well, I'm rehearing...Harvey's faking it.

Ten minutes later I find myself marching out onto the stage with my "brother," past the bass player who is a dead ringer for Einstein. The stage lights half-blind me but not enough to blot out the shocked, delighted expression on the faces of my friends, Marti, Mertis and Gary.

I find that I am now 100% sober. I do not think this is necessarily a good thing to have happen when I am about to pretend I'm one half of a hymn singing brother and sister act.

But the band begins the intro and there's no turning back. I open my mouth and begin to sing "Where Would I Go But To The Lord."

Harvey tries to sidle away from the mike but I grab him, clutching him to my side in an absolute death grip. "You're gonna sing, you little bastard," I hiss between verses. "And you're gonna like it!"

Harvey lip-syncs.

This does not work well if you're singing a two-part harmony, but whatever. I'm stuck. Harvey looks at me with huge, puppy-dog eyes and I find myself forgiving him instantly. It doesn't matter that I am totally humiliating myself...not that I was that bad...I'm just not a duo.

The song ends and Harvey soaks up the applause. I escape off stage, behind the barn and collapse laughing against its rough brown wall. I would never have done something like this if it hadn't been for Harvey. I would never have stepped that far outside my conventional and insecure self without Harvey nudging me on.

Harvey has somehow taken our everyday fun and cranked it up a few notches. And I am not the only one who feels this way...

The old guys still ask for him every time I show up. I tell them he's in California and won't be back for a long, long time. I let a wistful expression cross my face as I slowly walk down the line, shaking their hands and kissing their grizzled cheeks on my way up onto the dance floor.

I smile to myself..."Yeah, I still miss my brother but my aim is getting better!"

Paybacks are a bitch. I'll run into him on his turf sometime and when I do, there's no telling who I'll be...

The Merry Gamesters

The Gamesters



The Team- Back in the Day

Losing and Winning

When I separated from my now ex-husband, my biggest fear was that I'd lose my boys-that they'd quickly see the grass was greener on his side and leave me for the better pastures. After all, the ex'd moved into a Disneyland-style apartment complex and he made much more money than I did. It was all I could see- the glitter and the money.

Friends said, "Those boys love you! They won't leave you!"

But what match is my love to the allure of new toys and a Par 3 golf course? They were only little boys...kids like stuff.

I couldn't see it then.

All the reassurance in the world wouldn't convince me.

When a friend brought over a board game and announced we were all going to play, I felt like I was slowly being suffocated. A board game up against Disneyworld? "Surely you jest," I told him. "It'll never work."

The game was Heroquest, a precursor to Dungeons and Dragons. Each of us was assigned a role. I was the Elf. The oldest boy was the Wizard (he likes control.) And the youngest was the Barbarian as well as the Dwarf. Scott played the role of Zargon, our enemy, the Evil Sorcerer and controller of the game.

The four of us were to do battle with the evil forces of Zargon in order to save the empire. We had to travel past goblins, orcs and warriors on our way to finding a hidden relic needed for the empire's salvation...or something like that. At every step, Zargon would visit various challenges upon us.

The two Unnamed Ones and I lost the first game within eight moves.

Scott smiled, every bit Zargon. "I told you, you have to learn to function as a team."

In our competitive and customary thirst for individual victory, we'd set ourselves up for defeat by not working together.

That Scott was a pretty bright fellow.

That day we became the team we are now, a loving, unstoppable force. It was the beginning of a beautiful love affair...

Not with Scott...with boardgames and not just any boardgames, either, we wanted the new, the unusual, the un-boring...In short, anything other than Monopoly or Scrabble.

It didn't cost a lot of money. It didn't involve air fare or golf clubs or swimming pool memberships...but it did involve time and in that time we laughed and deepened our respect for and understanding of each other.

Okay. Not completely. You can't change genetics. We are totally competitive and, as you probably know, live to whoop up on each other.

One day a few years ago the ex arrived by to pick up the boys while they were in the midst of a Scrabble game with my dad. I was in the kitchen but I could hear everything.

"Here, bud," he said to the youngest, "I see a word in your letters. Let me see those tiles."

"No!" The Youngest Unnamed cried. "I know what I'm doing!"

"Come on, bud, give me your pieces. Let me show you."

He insisted. He took the tiles out of the child's hand, placed them on the board and then turned back to the Youngest Unnamed, clearly expecting congratulations and gratitude. But the Youngest was so angry, he cried and left the room.

I never worried again about losing my kids.

But I did worry about him losing them. When he called a few months after the Scrabble fiasco to ask "Why won't the boys ever talk to me?" I tried to help the man out.

"Because you don't listen to them. Because when they try to tell you how they feel, you say 'Now, Bud, you don't really mean that!' and just roll over them with the way you want them to feel. You compete with them and have to win. You didn't like it when your mom did that to you. Try not doing those things to them."

Six years later he is still relating to the boys in the same way and expecting different results. It is sad to watch because the kids are almost grown and he is losing them.

This is hard for me to watch. My dad was the opposite of their father and I am so much richer for the gift of his respect.

My ex is missing out on such an opportunity because he hasn't learned that winning and being in control isn't at all what love is about...it's about mutual respect and teamwork.





Boardgames We Love or Have Loved...

Tribond
Wiz Dumb
Wise and Otherwise
Apples to Apples
Man Bites Dog

Blowing Smoke and Leaves

You will not catch me outside blowing leaves off the grass. No way.

If I were going to blow leaves, I certainly wouldn't do it while there were still leaves on the trees. That, I think, is pointless.

My friend, Mertis, begs to differ. She spent a lovely fall afternoon this weekend carefully blowing all the leaves off her grass.

For about 2 whole minutes the lawn was once again green. Then a gust of wind hit her big maple tree and now the lawn is yellow.

Now, she says, she has to do it all over again.

I ask her why she doesn't just let them stay there for awhile.

Mertis shakes her head. "Can't. It'll kill the grass."

Okay, I don't want to be stupid here, but isn't winter going to do that anyway?

Mertis looks at me like I'm stupid- which I may be but blowing leaves seems about as pointless as say...dusting my attic...or dusting underneath stuff that no one can see under...or maybe even dusting areas where no one's really going anytime soon...like the dining room.

We go in the dining room, what, three or four times a year? Why dust in there unless someone's coming over you don't know all that well and you're afraid they'll ask you to show them the chicken feeder you had made into a chandelier because no one else had one like it and you wanted to be the first...

Blowing leaves is as pointless as, oh, I don't know...balancing my checkbook.

Is the bank ever wrong? And if they are, is it ever enough to really make a difference? Like, has anyone ever gotten rich off a bank mistake? Have they ever gone to the Carribean for a vacation courtesy of bank error? I don't think so.

Besides, it's not like I don't know how little money I have in there. Why reconcile my checkbook with the statement? Isn't that like closing the barn door after you've given someone a taste of the cow's milk? I mean, balancing my checkbook will only make me feel worse about my miserable fiscal state. It could affect my self-esteem and do enough psychological damage to impact my motivation.

If I'm not motivated, how will I ever earn enough money to worry about balancing my checkbook?

There are so many more productive things I could be doing with my time...Like writing a blog every day for a month because I thought it seemed like a good idea. I told myself it would get me back into the habit of writing every day.

It has gotten me back into the habit, all right...the habit of being neurotically obsessed with what I'm going to write about!

Still, talking into cyberspace beats blowing leaves in the cold any day!

Flea Sisters to the Rescue!

There we are, my sister Flea and me. She looks like an earthy, Italian actress and I look like a runaway from the Grace Kelly School of Making Nice.

She is two years younger than me and throughout our lives we have struggled with sibling rivalry and the usual assortment of crap that comes with every dysfunctional family. (As if there were any "normal" families.)

As adults we have grown closer. In fact, I even made the two of us main characters in Sophie's Last Stand, a novel I set in New Bern. I call her Darlene in the book, make her a little bit goofier than she really is but kept her insight and wisdom true to life.

I only thought we were close a year ago.

That was when we found out Dad had Pulmonary Fibrosis and would probably die within two years. Sibling rivalry and stale family baggage is no match for death- especially when the person dying was our beloved father, the hero of our lives.

During the last few months of our journey with Dad, the hospice nurse coined the nickname we still use. We are The Flea Sisters- You can swat at us, cuss us and scratch all you want but you just can't get rid of us. We hung in with him right up until the end of the ride and then...we were lost.

I waited until I'd been back home almost two weeks before I called her for the first time since the funeral. That's when she told me that our adrenaline rush of coping skills was gone now and we were entering into hard grief. That's why I'd been bursting into tears at odd moments, picking fights, feeling put-upon and generally losing my mind.

Just talking to my sister made me feel better. We were sharing the same load again. We were Fleas and we could take anything...even Dad's death.

Of course, I didn't call back for another two weeks, almost three. I'm just so damned phone-avoidant. Actually, I didn't want to talk about it. Talking about it is somehow different than writing about it...Talking is less predictable. You never know where you'll wind up when you're in a conversation. You might talk about things that unexpectedly make you cry.

But my eternally wise friend, Kim, was on to me...

"Your sister and you have a lot of work to do with the new definition of your relationship. Don't let your sense of loss and distance manifest into something you cannot repair. It is hard to redefine what you are when you are in the midst of change, but you need to address it (change) and set the rules up right from the start. What the hell am I talking about? Well, I'm saying that you already know you have the propensity to go long stretches without contact. It's likely your sister has that too. If you don't set the paramaters for conversational stretches now, it can become all too easy to lose each other, and that would be such a shame. Grief this profound can turn a heart hard by nature, because hardening is the easiest way to block pain. You two need to wallow in it together and keep that softness between you. I'm no authority, but I've seen it happen too many times."

I promised Kim I wouldn't let this happen to us Fleas and I would report in when I reached her. I am so glad I called.

Of course, she was at work and I had to leave a message. When she called me back I was writing the blog about the Oldest Unnamed One turning 18, so I was already blubbering. She said, "I can make it through the week, but I'm a basket case on the weekends. And last weekend Mom rode me about making copies of the funeral CDs."

"Did you listen to it?" I asked...another "Is this normal?" check-in. I made a copy of the CD and I so far, haven't been able to even entertain the idea of listening to it.

"What, are you kidding? No! I just heard the organ start up for the opening hymn and I was crying. I'm not gonna listen to it, not now."

Then she said, "I feel him around me...At least I think I do. I mean, I see him acting in my life and I talk to him all the time." She paused for a second and I wondered if she was crying. "I have to believe he's there," she said softly. "I couldn't take the alternative. He can't just be gone."

I feel my throat tighten up and my eyes are burning. Where are you, Dad? I know the answer is supposed to be "I'm everywhere," but I don't feel it. Maybe it's just that his absence is so large in my life. Maybe I can't feel the shadow of him. Maybe the bleed-through from the other side isn't enough to even hit the bottom of the well that is my missing him.

I tell her of course he's there. But then I tell her my truth, that I can't feel him very well. And we both deny that he isn't there. "Even if he's still looking around," I say. "He's checking in now and then. He'll be back."

But I am not doing so well at believing this.

So I talk about Thanksgiving. I am dreading Thanksgiving but I don't tell her. Instead I invite her to come up for Thanksgiving- after she's had dinner with Mom. "You could spend the weekend," I add.

The relief in her voice is palpable. "Oh, really? Oh, Flea, that would be great! I didn't know what I was gonna do!"

She says she will farm out "Horrible Hanna," (her new nickname for her daughter A.K.A The Black Angel of Death (See Sept. 21st blog entry) to her father for the weekend and really get away from everything.

We will pile up on my couch with a thousand happily-ever-after movies like "Little Miss Sunshine." I will even endure "The Lake House" because she says I really need to see it.

We will have a Slug Fest- we will lie around like slugs not feeling pressured to go out and shop with the masses because, hell, we are flat broke these days. We won't have to apologize for it, either, or explain how we feel. We can just be.

We will wear matching T-shirts I intend to get for us. "Today's not your day and tomorrow's not looking so good either!" I'm going to Costco to see if they still have those electric blanket-like throws so we can have matching heating pads and feel even more cozy in our Slugdom.

We will be doing exactly what Dad would want us to do. We will be starting a new tradition and honoring the old ones.

But best of all, we will be thick as fleas.

Parenting Mistakes: A How-To Guide

Warning! Promise Me You Will Not Do This!

There will come a time in your parenting life when, I promise you, you will want to show your children that you, too, were once young.

This moment will come shortly after they have rolled their eyes when you try to make some comment about something they are about to do, or have done, that you, too, have done. They will look at you with pity and you will be overcome with the need to show them just how “cool” you once were.

It has happened to me and I do not want you ever to experience the utter humiliation I was forced to endure at the hands of my offspring.

See the pictures? Are they not just sweet? A showcase of young love heading off to the prom. Me, a ninth grader, going with the total coolest, best-looking guy in the senior class- the guy who was sooo cool he even started Earth Day at our high school. He was, to use an only slightly dated term, the total shit.
So I searched and finally found the old pictures and brought them to the dinner table one night. I am ashamed to have to tell you this, but if I can spare one human being the embarrassment and pain, well, it’s worth it.

“See?” I said proudly, spreading the pictures out across the table. “I went to the prom…and with the most handsome boy in the senior class!”

Kiss of freaking death.

“What kind of car is that?” The Younger Unnamed One asks.

“A Corvair. Martin called it Frodo and it had a guest book you signed…”

“Frodo!” They snicker, completely forgetting how into the Lord of the Rings they were only two years ago.

“What is that guy wearing? A white tux jacket? He looks like a band leader or something!”

“Hey, that white jacket was very cool,” I protest but they have moved on.

“Hey, hey look at this!” The Older Unnamed One cries. “Look! The guy is like smiling the same exact smile in every picture! His face like never moves! Dude, that is strange!”

I grab a picture, examine it and then pull a second one over, and a third. How did I never notice this?

My sons are rolling around on the floor now, sobbing they’re laughing so hard. “Look, look, look!” They scream, over and over. “The loser isn’t even real! Mom, what were you thinking?! He’s an alien!!”

I was thinking I was cool back then, back in “The Day.” I was thinking we could connect and relate on an intergenerational level. I was thinking I had been dating the hippest, coolest guy in the school. That’s what I was thinking…But never mind…

I gather up my pictures, take another peek at the smile that is the same in every, single picture, the expression that is always the same from frame to frame to frame and think why didn’t I ever notice this?

Later I stand in front of the mirror and smile at myself. I walk away, come back and grin again. I do this several times thinking, it’s my smile. Don’t you always smile the same way? Yes, by now alcohol is involved…but not enough to make me feel young and cool again.

I study the pictures and see that while my smile is the same, the rest of my face moves…my eyebrows lift, I stick out my tongue, I appear to be embarrassed…but his face does not change.

I go up into the attic later and pull out huge tubs of photographs- the ones I promised I’d put into albums before I forgot which baby is which and when each shot was taken. I search and search for signs of my former “coolness,” and realize most of my “cool” moments were not witnessed by a camera for very good reason…but of course, I can never tell Them that…

So I am un-cool and I must accept my role. After all, what teenager wants to compete with his mom for the title of coolest? (I know, it’s called something else by now, but you know what I mean!)

The worst part of this is…I don’t stop showing them pictures. I have enough photographs to entertain them every night at dinnertime for months, but I don’t do this. Instead, I wait until they bring girls over and then I whip out a few treasured pictures from Their childhood.

It is a low blow, I know, but in the jungle that is parenting there are no rules, only survivors.

Bird- Then and Now

Then












Now

Flying Into His Future

Tomorrow, November 3, 2006, at 11:35 p.m. my Oldest One Who Must Remain Unnamed will turn 18.

It is hard for me to believe I have kept track of anything for 18 years, let alone a child, but somehow I have and he is wonderful.

I remember thinking shortly after he was born and I was totally postpartum emotional, that I could not bear to think of letting this precious bundle go in 18 years, that it would break my heart.

I even remember saying "My life will be over. There will be nothing left once he's gone."

Oh. My. God. Was I ever that melodramatic?

Well, I am also the same woman who, upon returning from the hospital with my bundle of unnamed joy, watched E.T for the first time and sobbed because I thought my baby looked just like poor, lost E.T!

Still, I knew I loved this boy way too much to ever cut him loose, yet I knew I would...I knew I must. It is what a good mother does, she gives her child wings and one day watches him soar away.

Tonight he is with his beloved at a Guns N Roses concert. And if he is flying high on anything other than the joy of being 18 and in love I will kick his 18 year old ass...But I digress and he won't, fly high that is, not digress.

This child-rearing stuff...the books, the magazines, the experts, the current studies...they're all crap when it comes to getting down into the trenches and actually raising this baby. Also, despite my best attempts and careful monitoring- he has managed to turn out perfectly fine and wonderful all by himself. He is his own self and I realize I have merely been the inn keeper these past 18 years.

I'm the one who taught him to look both ways before he crossed the street and other useful stuff you need to know to stay alive- but developing into the wonderful man he is, well, he pretty much did that all on his own.

But he will always be my baby.

I suppose tomorrow I will have to call him "a man" or "an adult male," but I won't do this around him. This is the same boy/man who, when he turned five, cried as if his heart would break, all because I said, "You're a big boy now!"

"I don't want to be a big boy!" he sobbed. "I still want to be your little boy!"

I suppose he thought that if he were a Big Boy he'd have to leave home or become someone he wasn't ready to be.

I remember that night holding him while he cried in his red bunk bed in his Mickey Mouse bedroom, rocking him and soothing him. Telling him over and over again..."You will always be my little boy. No matter how old you are, you will always be my little boy."

So tomorrow when he wakes up, bleary-eyed and staggers out of his room grumpy because he has school, I won't call him a man.

And when he heads off to school and calls back over his shoulder, "Love you, Mama!" I won't say it then either.

I will keep this knowledge to myself and leave it unspoken between us because after all, he doesn't need a label to know who and what he is...and I am not sure which one of us would be the one crying over the pronouncement. Because if he is a man, he will soon be leaving to build his own nest and start his own world- a world I can only hope to orbit around now and then, when invited.

I will not rush him into becoming the Big Boy. I will not shove him out of the nest before he is ready to take wing...Only then will I watch him soar away and whisper to myself, "There goes my baby, my big boy...the man I helped learn to fly.

Claiming My Personal Style

Okay, pour yourself a cup of coffee, Sheria, it's time to talk style. (And by the way, thanks for your kind words. I totally admire what you're doing with your life!)

Dad was right. When I asked him what he did in his 50s he said, "I quit shaking."

Right on, Dad!

Well, I'm still shaking in lots of ways. I'm neurotic about lots of things...like making or returning phone calls. It's just some internal glitch. I know I should call. I want to call. But this mule-like part of me digs in its heels and refuses. I hate to make phone calls. The shrink in me says, "Honey, it's fear of rejection. You are not secure enough in yourself to think the person on the other end will want to talk to you." Pitiful, if true. I should be past that by now. And Kim
one of the wisest and funniest bloggers in the known universe, is right...I do tend to let time pass between phone calls to the important people in my life because, well, because I don't know why! But, to quote Chuckie on Rugrats, "As God is my Witless," I will call the Flea sister today and report back here to you guys....Maybe that'll get me off my ass!

But I digress...I am trying to say that now I'm 51, I have become comfortable with my style...at least my clothing style.

Every year, every freakin' season, "They" come out with the new, must have, look for the season. For years I kind of felt bad about not exactly living my fashion life to the letter, but still I remained a bit of a maverick. I would wear some of the stuff They said I should, but the rebel always branches off.

Today I am announcing my true fashion sources. I am here to admit where I shop and how I come up with my "Look." And the reason I'm giving it all up and claiming my source is the recent issue of Style or People or Vogue or whatever magazine which claims we must now move from hip-hugging, low-cut jeans to skinny-legged, straight jeans.

Give me a freakin' break!

Do you know how hard it was to shove my pear shaped ass into low cut, hip-huggers? Do you know how bad that looked? Do you know how hard it is to stoop down and retrieve a can of peas from the bottom of the pantry without your shirt riding up, your pants riding halfway down your ample ass, exposing your lime green thong panties and a generous portion of plumber's crack?

Damn! It meant I had to buy all new shirts and low cut thongs and STILL sometimes I would hear the unsuppressed titters of the Unnamed One and his girlfriend...the signal that once again, I was overly exposed.

This is not good for my reputation as a formidable mother, let alone a sexy, red-hot mama.

I forced myself into those jeans after seeing a show called "The 10 Things Not To Wear" and realizing I wore at least 4 of those items, including Mommy jeans and overalls.

Damn! They were comfortable...but I gave in to vanity and insecurity.

However, I draw the line at skinny jeans. I'm going right back to what I like, to my own funky little out-there style. Aging hippy meets....hell, fill in the blank, it varies from day to day. And even on my meager budget I can afford this trendy, chic style.

I like to call it Goodwill-Closet of Mertis Rejects.

It works for me.

Face it, whatever was in style will be back in style soon. That is why God made Goodwill. I mean, I have a Dana Buchman, cashmere jacket and I only paid $4.75 for it. The skinny jeans are there along with the broomstick skirts we wore last year and the western wear look and the hip-hugging bootcut jeans. It's all there and it's cheap. And you can buy stuff that needs to be dry cleaned because when it's time to dry clean it, you just give it back to Goodwill.

And when that fails, there's Closet of Mertis Rejects.

My friend (in the interest of Unnaming People my friend has been given the following alias) Mertis, is a quasi-recreational/therapeutic shopper with a low tolerance for the frustration of actually trying stuff on or returning it if it doesn't work. She gets tired of stuff. She changes her mind about stuff. Thank God!

She is like most of us only she is my size, so I hang around when she's cleaning out her closet and Voila! I'm back In again!

Mertis is providing a great service to humanity. She is donating to a worthy cause AND she is still shopping. Mertis does not confine her love of kindness to only me- if said item doesn't work for me, Marti steps in to try it on, and if not her, then another friend benefits.

It is charitable recycling at it's best and we are so totally grateful.

It has made it possible for me to become the fashion maven I am today...and I'm good with it. After all, fashion is temporary but friendship is forever.

I Miss My Mind

How has it come to this?

Today I couldn't find the keys to my office. It's private practice day. I had patients lined up and scheduled on the hour throughout the day...And I couldn't find my keys anywhere.

It is beyond walking from the bedroom to the laundry room and forgetting why I wanted to go the laundry room in the first place (paper towels, which for some unknown reason I then turned around and grabbed from under the kitchen sink.)

I thought I was doing better with this losing-my-mind stuff. I put my keys in the same dish in the front hallway (not there.) I put my purse in my office (depending on whether it's the brown or the black one. Whichever one's not in use is allegedly in my office closet but then, so is every other valuable piece of paper, photograph and piece of equipment I own but don't use...like the fax machine I pull out from beneath all the photographs only on occasions when I MUST send a fax before a nursing home day.)

The keys to the office stay in my purse or my car. Period. End of story. So where the hell were they? I know, the last damn place you look, that's why they call it "the last place I looked!" Why would you keep looking after you found the lost item? Unless of course you're me and you forgot what it was you were originally searching for.

I had to send my 8 o'clock patient home, run back to the house and try to find the spare keys. There are six keys to get into my office, but I make do with three....It's a long story so just trust I can do it with three.

I found two. Luckily when I returned just before 9 someone was already in the building, so my two keys worked fine. (Until this afternoon when I realized they did not work fine after all, I'd just left my office unlocked for five days!)

I dash off at 11 to let the dogs out and meet Marti for lunch and this time I leave my glasses in the office! Be afraid. I am driving without glasses and in a hurry and I REALLY need to wear my glasses. I'm just so used to wearing one contact lens that I forgot and drove off blind. (I wear one contact lens because then I can see, kind of, things in the distance and still read small print.)

I'm only wearing glasses today because yesterday I tried to multi-task too early in the day and without enough coffee. I tried to clean the shower stall while also cleaning my body. A bit of Soft Scrub with Bleach somehow missed the tiles and flew into my eye.

I hate when that happens.

I think maybe I have PMS. PMS makes me nuts like this but I'm not real regular, so who knows?

I tell all this to Marti as soon as we're seated.

She shakes her head. "That's not it," she says. "We're just stressed."

The waiter is having a worse day than I am. He has to try four times to bring me my lunch...but then it was my lunch and not Marti's so maybe losing my mind is contagious.

Whatever.

My one o'clock has wonderful tie-dyed socks and I covet them.

At two o'clock I have a free hour. I run home, throw a pork loin roast into an oven bag, coat it with cranberry jelly and Thai chili sauce, set the oven to slow cook and dash back to the office for the next session.

My three o'clock isn't quite as depressed as last week. He looks more animated. He talks without me having to drag the words out of him and I am relieved to see him better.

My four o'clock is a couple.
I marvel at them. They are so young and I am awed by their ability to keep their marriage going for ten years without enough money, with her working three jobs, 7 days a week, and both of them coming from dysfunctional families of origin. They are back on track after a tense time and it is time to send them back out into the world.

I say, "Think of me like a shovel. You don't carry a shovel around everywhere you go, do you? No, you keep it out in the shed until you need it. When you need me, I'll be here."

I will miss them.

My five o'clock I am seeing for the second time. She had to cancel our last session. I picture her in my head, a middle-aged woman with a deeply lined face. I am shocked to see a woman who looks a good fifteen years younger walk in and sit down on the overstuffed, white loveseat.

She is working, going back to school, caring for a brother's family, and driving to Duke hospital three or four nights a week to be with her mother who she thinks is getting better maybe, but I know is dying.

She says, "My mom died three days after our first session. Is it bad for me to feel relieved and lost at the same time? I mean, I miss her but for some reason I feel as if a burden has been lifted from my shoulders."

I smile at her. "That is absolutely normal," I say. "The journey is different for everyone and you will have lots of ups and downs. You will get better at life without her, but you will never forget her. You will never be the same person you were before she died." And then I asked, "Do you find yourself seeing more of your mother in your brothers and sisters, in yourself, since she passed?"

The woman's eyes widened. "Yes!"

I nod. The journey is different, true but it is also the same- grief is a worn pathway we all will travel at some point in our lives.

My five o'clock leaves and I check my cell. Two missed calls and a text from one of Those Who Shall Remain Unnamed- The Youngest Unnamed One. "Where are you?! I need $30 for judo and you have to sign some forms!"

I text back "I'm on my way. B hm n 5."

I drive, listening mindlessly to the radio, pull up in the driveway, step out of the car, and just like that three words jump into my head. "Brown leather jacket."

The keys are in my brown leather jacket. I know this suddenly, without question or hesitation. They are in the jacket I have only worn only one time this year, five days ago during a cold snap.

I come through the door, slip the car keys into their dish, walk to the coat rack and slip my hand deep inside the pocket.

I wrap my hand around the six keys and four supermarket "VIP" tags attached to a plain silver keyring.

And I am even wearing my glasses.

It has been a good day after all.