One Good Line

Another day on death row. We used to laugh at the lowering of our own standards: "If nobody dies, its a good day." Well.... they're gettin' lower. It was a pretty good day.

Last week we went to get new cell phones. One of the great things about being married (there are so many) is consolidation. He puts both phones on one lower bill and pays it. How can I go wrong? I know there are those of you out there who disavow (well, you'll disavow almost anything. admit it) the loss of womanly independence and the right to fuck up your own credit, but I'm loving it. I married a responsible man. And those of you who know me can relax now. Quit worrying. I can't sink the ship. I'm not driving.

So anyway, there we were, in cell hell, the ATT/Cingular phone store. If it was Safeway, there would have been a mass exodus, people would have mutinied in earnest. Take a number my ass. My husband, bless his sweet unexpecting heart, said, "We'll just run by and pick up the phones on our way to the meeting." "Okay, Honey" I said, knowing--knowing all along how it goes. He tells me, "I did this all over the phone already. It will be a breeze." I smile. I know we'll never see the meeting. He says, "Don't worry, I even have the guy's name I was talking to. Sergi." But I know we'll spend the evening looking at ear buds and lime green disco phone covers and leather phone holders and god knows how many different kinds of the same damn phone. And there is one chair for a bzillion people, and I keep thinking of Asha, who says don't lean on things... if you stand without support you will have better balance and be more graceful, and I know she's right, but I'm so tired after a long day among the old and older. But I do it: I stand. And I am all the more graceful for it, if you can imagine that.

Back in cell hell it finally became our turn. OUR TURN. Then its all fun and games, shooting the shit with the twenty-something kid who tries to explain the difference between analog, digital and gps. The shape and frequency of radio waves. Remember: I don't care. But we sit there like a tree full of owls as he explained ad nauseum about how there are no long distance charges. And it was like being in the dollar store. It's how much? a dollar. how 'bout this? Dollar....

Sergi says:

There's no charge for long distance
NO charge?
Yeah. There's no long distance.
What about when we're out of the calling area?
Yeah. Then too. NO long distance.
What about...
Nope...
But...
No.

And on it went. It was all one dollar. NO LONG Distance.

But then came the part I want to talk about. We started to talk about guarantees and bringing things back and what do we do and (as Cooky says) who shot Willy. I'm sure you know what happens when you bring back a cell phone without the box. I don't have to explain that do I? It's as though the box was the single most important feature of the purchase. "Oh, I'm sorry, we can't return it if you don't have the box." Now, let's not even talk about how impossible it is to get the damned thing out of the box in the first place, let alone back in. And to maintain the box in its pristine original condition. You'd think it was a first edition Hemingway. But you gotta have it. That's gospel. I'm tellin' ya.

So, the guy, his name was actually Sergi (Sair-gay) tells us about the phones. We ask, "How's the reception?" And he says the thing I'm writing this whole goddamned post about. He says: "None of our products are guaranteed to work. That's why we have the 30 day guarantee."

I had to hand it to him--he kept a straight face.

I didn't.

I used to sell drugs. I'll admit it. The statute of limitations is up. But I sure as shit wish I'd thought of that line. I really do. "I'm sorry, none of my products are guaranteed to work." To amuse you, this is the best one I came up with after many years of practice: "This shit's so clean you won't feel it until about fifteen minutes after I'm gone."

See. There's a reason I have to be a social worker for two more months. It's pennance.

tributes

So, my theme has changed from apathy to, well, whatever is a step up from that. The primal shrug. It isn't so much that I don't care, as that I can't care about everything as much as it seems to need to be cared about. There you have it.

I'm so happy for Mark that he finally made it out of there. Another one. Another in an endless line of lives that have, six degrees of Kevin Bacon, touched mine. He was so smart. The history is this: Mark cracked his head while four-wheeling at 19 years old........ then, died at 45ish. Long damn life. He should not have lived. Quadraplegic, mostly deaf, half of half of one eye. But you gotta hand it to the guy, he could still appreciate Victoria's Secret catalogs. God bless testosterone. He could hand spell, and so could I. That was the basis of our friendship. That, and I had the rarely respected authority to boss around the people who took care of his body. I tried to take care of his mind.

He wasn't a very good speller.

Or driver. He had an electric wheelchair -- one of those giant red Jazzy models that take up more room that they should and weigh as much as my house. But the thing about Mark was he never really got it that he couldn't do stuff. He kept a very high opinion of his abilities, all evidence to the contrary, and was fearless.

He thought he could roam the streets in this wheelchair--no eyes, no ears-- and we just couldn't let him. I wish we could have. I wish I could have just opened the door and let fly. But better judgment won out and he remained imprisoned. Cared for. If we had care about him rather than for him, we would have locked him in a room with scantily clad women drenched in hot mustard and barbeque sauce and let him indulge himself to death. He did love mustard. I tried to explain to him, time and again, the importance of safety and my burden of protection. But he didn't get it.

The place where he lived, where I lived from 8 to 5 monday through friday for years and years, sat on top of a hill, with locked doors and window alarms. One day the locked door was just open, just barely, and he charged it in his electric wheelchair. He made it as far as the curb, tipped and fell into the street. As I ran out behind him, righting the ten-ton chair with six other staff, his fingers were madly spelling "I- l-e-a-r-n-e-d." I don't know if he did or not. We took the chair away from him. It wasn't safe. It wasn't. Still, I hated doing it. But he was running over people, and that wasn't okay.

With the old people, tributes feel different. With Mark, it just seems a long time comin'. There is no life to review. There is a State system of care provision that is imperfect and easily indicted, and Mark was a victim and recipient of it. It is better than nothing. Idealists would not agree with me, but fuck them. Idealists don't want the Mark's of this world free or visible. They think they do, but they haven't been to the circus. They haven't seen the man behind the curtain. Mark was not pretty. His life was miserable and expensive, and I can't speak for him, but it looked too damned hard from where I sat.

Some tribute, eh?

daughters

There's more. There always seems to be more. Once you begin to see the story of it all, the willingness of the aged to tell the tale, there is nothing but story, and in between, paperwork. Frances Lee's mother sits in a wheeled recliner during her waking hours. She yells, over and over again for her daugher and for water. She can only drink thickened liquids, so her question is never answered, her thirst never quenched. Her daughter visits almost every day. They are from Kansas, the Kansas of long ago, with prairie-straight hair, parted in the middle and wound into braids that sit on either side of her head like Danish. If you listen, you can tell their hair used to be red. She was telling me a story about her mother becasue her mother is sitting in the chair dying, and I'm new, and she hasn't told it to me yet. She warns me that she never shuts up, but living among the dying, I've learned to end conversations. She tells me about her grandfather, on mama's side, and " his big cavalry moustache and long red hair." How he fathered thirteen children with an invalid wife (ya think?), and raised them all. She tells me about all of the children in her mother's family, how one of the 13 was murdered while she was walking home after a bingo game. I was kind of surprised to learn that they played bingo during the depression, but I guess life goes on. They shot her through one eye and she lived for awhile. She reminded me that back in those days, they didn't keep you in the hospital if they expected you to die--they sent you home. And they made her mother sleep on the sofa so Mary could die in her bed, and all she remembers is that the cat had kittens that night. That's the story Frances Lee's mother told her, handed down to her, and she tells me so I'll know a little of her mother, the woman she was before she was taken by Alzheimer's. She's back-woodsy--Frances Lee is. Could have stepped out of the cast of Deliverance. She doesn't understand medication. Calls them magic pills. She's old herself. Her mother must be a hundred.

So that's the story for today.

one teensy little lie

I lied today. I have said for a long time, and this by way of literary bio: I'm a liar, not a writer. Truth be told in these few pages....

But there I was, hard at work among the dyin'. I was in Ardith's room, asking the "20 stupid questions." They range from, "Have you had any hospitalizations in a psychiatric facility," which almost no one answers ambigously; and "Are your bowels regular?" But my favorite by far is this: "What is your lifetime occupation?" My favorite answer to this question so far is this: "Oh, honey. Get a chair. This is going to take awhile." And it did. It took me awhile to find a chair, because I was in a hurry, and I only had 12 spaces to fill in and I tried to pry the one fact out of her. Just one word. Sum it up. Snap it up. I have work to do. And then, as the moment settled around me, as I saw the longing of her unexpressed story, the madness of not being able to say it outloud, of having to play it over and over again in the waning light of a vanishing mind, I sat. Impertinent. Stupid. And she told me of her husbands, and her life as a model. A model. As her body spread around her like shade. And just a little about her children. And this is the lie of it all.

Ardith died this morning.

You can't judge families. I know this. If there is one thing I've learned about dyin' is that there is no right way and no wrong way. Everybody does it different. Some teach us how to live, some how to die. Ardith's daughter hadn't visited her very often at all and the staff judged her for it. They had a tough relationship, from what I hear. And I don't know anything. But she showed up this morning--the daugher--and she was the way daughters are upon the death of a mother: Orphaned. Lost. It doesn't matter what went on before. The gaping wound of childbirth and all the years between lay exposed to the neon halflight of the hospital room, her mother's trinkets lining the shelves above the single colonial maple dresser she had hung onto, stautes of dancing dolphins and stuffed valentine bears, precious trash, dollar-store bingo prizes, all packed and moved in an instant. And the staff was mad at her. She was desperate to know if her mother had asked for her, if she was mad at her, if she loved her. She asked that: "Did she say she loved me?" No one could answer the question. What can you say? They are all good Christians, and I'm the kind of Christian you'll find in Anne Lamott's book Travelling Mercies. Barely Christian. Just barely.

So I made up a story. It wasn't a whole lie. I had let Ardith tell me the story of her life. I just made it a little bigger, a little sweeter, a little more of what she was looking for. A little more about her.

She thanked me. It was that easy. Then it was over. And I let the rest of them think I made the whole thing easier on her, but really, as always, I was just making it easier for me.

barbies

Mae died. I'm not sure when. It doesn't really matter. It hardly mattered that she lived at all. I was only one of many who cared for her, who lifted her from bed to chair and back again with the help of many other paid people. But I cared about her. She was odd. It was her psychiatric diagnosis: Funny Looking Kid Syndrome. Look it up. It sounds awful, but it seems that the endless barbs of the young and insensitive take their toll. Her appearance, however, did not keep her father from fucking her, or shipping her off to the nuthouse when she delivered an 8 pound tumor at the age of 11. Oh, I know I'm not supposed to tell these stories. But they are an enduring part of the medical record and I just don't want them to die with her. Who else will tell them? She was sterilized. Probably for the best.

To look at her was to view the work of an unskilled sculptor-- a haphazard face, eyes too wide set and off by several degrees, big and round and accusing. Her hair, thin feathers around her face, had no color really at all. Her body didn't work very well. I don't know that it ever did. Like so many, she found comfort in food, in the food from her own metal tray and the trays of nearby, less observant, inmates. Rolls of Mae spread around her like shade, and as she grew ill toward the end and the fat began to go away, and she began the long process of disappearing, her skin simply stayed, stretched like pizza dough over bones as pourous as sandstone, subject to gravity like the rest of us.

The thing is.... she had this Barbie collection. Looking back, it seems unusually unkind to have purchased Barbies for Mae. Shit--it seems mean to buy them for me. It seems mean to make them at all, but that's not the point. I wonder what happened to them -- those skinny dolls, the gold standard of body types. They must have been worth a mint. She had boxes of perfect, unwrapped barbies, guilt presents no doubt from dear old dad. But I don't want to focus on the legends, the hospital stories, handed down like nasty treasure from one shift to the next, morsels of sexual myth that keep the interest of underpaid caregivers, and which may or may not be true. They seem true. They could be true. She did give birth at 11. They did call it a tumor. She came to the nuthouse and stayed... long before the trend in therapy was in full swing. She grew up there. Then, we brought her to live with us.

Living with Mae, which is what you do if you run a residential unit, was sketchy. Its funny. In her chart -- the location of pure truth-- it said things like: suspicious... does not trust caregivers. Hoarding behavior. Well, no shit. What they don't say is that the people who come out of those places, those warehouses for the undead, are crazy if they aren't suspicious, if they don't want to keep all of their worldly goods in plain sight. She wasn't nice -- that much is true. But she was consistent. She didn't like anybody. We coined the word "snarky" to describe her, then, when State surveyors said it wasn't a word, we found it in a british dictionary. She was snarky. She embodied snarkiness.

Oh hell. Mae is dead. It's not that I wish she wasn't. I wouldn't have wished her life on anyone. I guess I just want to say out loud, in the only way I know to say things out loud, that she lived, and in the living, enriched my life.

I just wonder what happened to the barbies.

blame

Whew. Well, I'm feeling better and a little less shocky today than yesterday, yesterday than the day before. We got up Saturday morning and my husband is a guy not to leave things undone. Get on the phone to the insurance people and get it rolling. So, it is rolling. From the moment of impact, however, it now occurs to me, it is all about controlling the information -- the assignation of blame. It starts from the first comment, when she gets out of her car and says, "I was trying to run it. Were you?" I did not answer that question or any other in a natural manner. Insurance keeps me from the real truth, which will come out as I allow it. "I'm not sure." I hedge. "I just stood on my brakes as soon as I saw you." You. Your fault. You should not have been where you were and now we are where we are: standing in the middle of Division during rush hour, the cold hard street slick with sleet. Say that three times fast. And I control my human impulse to care about her. If I care about her, if I commiserate, I will have to pay my deductible, I think. So I maintain my distance, make the appropriate calls, and control the flow of truth. A bit at a time. Leaking out like truth will. It begins to dawn on me that it is okay to go through yellow lights. That this accident, may, in fact NOT be my fault at all. I look at it from her lane (at this point I am still wandering in traffic. The policeman not yet curbing me.) I look up and see the sign: Left turn yield to oncoming traffic. That would be me. I was oncoming like a _________ (you decide.) But not very fast, or the wreck would have been worse. So I begin to adjust my perspective. By morning, the wreck was indignantly not my fault and the insurance company -- hers, not mine -- had better come through. Its funny.

So, blame momentarily assigned, we got a little rental car, a kar, a toy, a KIA. And I am so jumpy. Jeez... If a light turns yellow, god forbid I am anywhere in the vicinity. So, we decide we are due a trip to the coast in a cheap little car with cheap gas. So, off we go to Bi-mart to buy me a pair of waders because it is winter and we are going night clamming. Sneaking up on the damned things in the dark, waves hopefully not sneaking up on us, off we went. The road over there was beginning to get snowy and I was a little concerned for the trip back, but it was such a good diversion from the wreck that I didn't really care. We got a dozen medium clams-- me, the lady with the lamp, K digging like mad when we spotted one.

Now, it is Sunday night. We've eaten the clams, the truck is in the shop, and our world is spinning on its axis, as well as it has since the Tsunami.

mother trucker

Well, I wrecked the pretty red truck. Broke it bad. Some woman tried to do what so many Portlander's try to do: make the left turn off Division and 60th before the light changes. It is the strangest feeling, one I don't really remember because I've always been so drunk when I've crashed, and I've crashed bad in times gone by. But this was so slo-mo. I kept thinking, oh, I'll stop. This won't really happen. But it did. She did not yield. I locked up the brakes and just fucking sailed into her. T-bone style.

I handle things so well. Not things like happiness or success, but car wrecks, disasters...?? I'm your gal. I was a little shakey, but it was so cold and rainy. All I could think was to exchange information (not something I used to do, oh... i want to tell a couple of stories!!! the 76 El Camino!! the hit and run on the Allegheny Drawbridge) but my hands wouldn't stop shaking, and I realized about ten minutes into it that I was standing in the middle of Division in the rain on Friday at 5:30 and everyone passing hated me. I was in grave danger of being smashed like my shiny red truck. So the nice police-boy asked me to stay in one place, which I could not, and finally (trumpets sound in the distance) my husband showed up in his shiny white charger -- I mean truck. God was I glad to be married just then. He picked up a crow bar and extracted the fender from the front tire so we could roll to the body shop I had conveniently wrecked in front of. They took a torch and cut off the fender that was in the way (at no charge -- I recommend them) and off I went.

What surprised me was how hard it was to call my insurance company with cold fingers and a tiny cell phone. And the help line was hard. Too many choices. It should just say: "Did you have a wreck? I'm sorry. Find the first warm spot you can and go to sleep. We'll make it all better." But having my husband is almost that good. He just took care of biz and got us out of there to die another day.

Then, Jane and Chris came over for dinner. I tried to cancel, but decided it would be a good diversion afterall and it was. It was good to see them both. Them and their rocket racket. I wondered why I was so compelled to prepare enchiladas last night for tonight. What do they say? Always cook casseroles ahead in case you have a wreck. No, that's not it. It's about changing those panties.

Well, my honey is playing White Stripes in the basement and I'm all tuckered out. Glad to be breathing.

It has been a busy day.

dyin'

There are things I will need to record as I spend my days in this place. In the mission statement (any company has one nowadays) it says: "nobody wants to come here." I spent some time today with an old woman who wants to go home. She wants to go home so bad that she's losing her mind. And she doesn't get it that she can't. She can go to somebody else's home and be a foster person. She can go somewhere else. But nowhere else is home. And the trouble is, she has no idea where she is, but she has just enough left to know where she isn't. And it isn't really even there anymore. Home. The farm. She spent 60 years in the same house and I can't convince myself to convince her that this is okay, that this alternative living is a little like home. The only thing that is like home is that she's there. It is not not not home.

I sat with another woman today who said, "I look down the hallway and I see the line of old women in chairs and my body won't do what I want it to and I wonder what is next for me." We wonder together which is better, to lose the body or the mind, and neither of us know, but she is closer to knowing. She used to be a hairdresser and vanity left her a long time ago.

And they are dying, one by one by one, and I didn't want to do this anymore and I don't know how long I can.

yesterday's news

Advancing across this spectrum. We went on a boat ride last night, the Portland Spirit. My expectations weren't huge, but I did expect it to be more like a boat ride than a floating restaurant. But I guess that's exactly what it is. I'm glad it was new year's eve and I was all dressed up because it was pretty fancy. The music was a piano bar of standards played by "the very handsome and wonderful [somebody] Goldberg. " We were up on the top deck and ran into him and I asked him if he knew any blues. He said he did, then went back to his piano and put a little spin on Danny Boy. I like Danny boy. I like Moon River. But we were a captive audience unless you really like to swim, in the rain. The rain. K won the trip by being the guy to take the most alternative transportation in Hillsboro (the Maxx) and so it wasn't much money and the food was great. We just should have taken it in the summer. The starlight deck was awash with puddles deeper than my clogs (don't wear clogs on boats). Our waiter, our personal waiter, was Gherrralll (emphasis on the final sylabal.) He and the rest of the crew could sing too. They had to. It was part of the job. The gay community was well represented, and an old woman sitting at the next table from Roy, Utah was horrified. After we docked, we drove back home, let the dog out, and went to a dance. It was awful. Every song sounded like "Achy Breaky Heart" and I longed for a good blues bar. We won't make that mistake again. We came home and played scrabble. That was the funnest part. I kicked ass.

So it's 2005. I'm going to bake a ham.

tenants

Back to the notion of a feudal lord....

I approached the Talent exit with some foreboding, some expectation of unwelcome emotion sneaking up on me. I am so glad to have moved that I experience a certain sense of guilt over my lack of regret. (I'll always find the dark side of happiness.) I loved that house, that kitchen I designed by and for myself with not-quite-white tile countertops, open cupboards and twig drawer pulls. I expected to feel like I was returning home, rather than visiting my property, and that the sense of abandonment would be overwhelming. Tracy had warned me that the photinia hedge was thirty feet high, but as I pulled into the driveway, it wasn't. It was high, but manageable, and the guy who lives there fully capable and willing to take care of it. It is part of the contract. They live there, my tenants. They live there like I did, with mountains of stuff. They are there to stay, for at least a couple more years. They aren't just camping out, waiting for the garbage bags to pile up so high that they have to move. I've done that before. Replaced by trash. Forced out.

So be it. It was my first house. But not my only house. When I left, I was going home.

women

I am posting this here, hoping those who don't email might read and know how much I appreciate them:

I received an email from my sister in law that inspired me to acknowledge my women friends at this time of year. Thanks Julie, this will not do your letter justice, but here I go....

As my life has changed so dramatically over these past couple of years and I am three hundred miles away from everything and everyone I have ever known (except my husband, who, it seems, I have always known) I have missed little and regretted nothing. I miss my son most of all, but lingering in the corners of my busy busy mind, among the cobwebs and misplaced ideas and unwritten books, are my friends. The women. The sisters, buddies, in-laws, nieces, cousins, coworkers and path-mates.

Julie spoke of the impossibility of naming, at this time in life, (halfway already, can you believe it?) a "best" friend. You are all the best. I am blessed to count so many among those who have been willing to put up with me over the years.... and, having lived in one place for so long, I have the great advantage of having people who know me, who I have allowed to know me, for a long, long time. Not everyone has that. You have seen me through this life, drunk and sober, rich and poor, single and married and all that lies between. You have watched my foot-stomping resistance to change--always for the better... eventually. Many times, you had to believe for me, to push me, to see my little sanctuary in Talent as a beautiful prison, empty without someone to share it with. But that sanctuary had to be built -- and torn down in its own time. Creating it allowed me that time that so many women are denied, to come to know who I am, alone. But Lorretta said it best (as she so often does) "...its like learning to play an instrument from a book. You can't hear the notes. Eventually you gotta get out there."

I wish all of you just some of the happiness and depth of experience I have known. I wish the next year would open your heart like ripe fruit, that you will take the time to see who you are, at you most essential. I have spent a great deal of time and money to know what Dorothy knew at the end of the journey: that it was always right here. And the shopping was fun along the way, but my life today, my sweet and simple life, needs little decoration. It is whole.

merry christmas

Bably blue topaz ring with diamonds, empty book, spa day at Dosha, Curious George Jack in the box. That's my haul so far. Nice.

I'd like to make this a serious end-of-the-year implosion, but I'm not there yet. I'm happy. I have so much, and so many. I'm making an apple pie, waiting to put the turkey in. I'll include a recipe for something eventually. We did the thing: got up and opened gifts. We leave tomorrow for parts south to see my son and check on my property down there. The hot water heater blew up last week, so need to see what's going on with the tenants. The tenants. Makes me feel like a feudal lord. Fitting for christmas.

Happy Birthday Jesus. An unpopular diety in my world. May you not get lost in the ribbon and paper.

moments

I have these moments. I record them here, in the relative safety of obscurity, friends and strangers reading my mind, or what's on it. And I think I end up looking like a sentimental moron, a bleeding heart, which I may be, but not today. I called my son, once the love of my life, and he didn't give me enough attention, so now I'm mad. Mad about Christmas and all the memories I carry alone. Alone. He tells me he is golfing. "We don't golf," I tell him. "People like us don't golf." It's funny. It's like when my friend Madonna told me I should buy a house. I said, "I'm a renter" as though it was a social category. I thought there were two kinds of people: people who own property and people who rent from them. I didn't know you could move from one social strata to another. And, I maintain, golf is reserved for the upper crust, of whom, I maintain, we are not. The Big Book described them when they said, "...that impeccable coat of tan one sees upon the well-to-do." I don't know what page that's on. The leisure time, plaid pants crowd, the flat chested women and short haired men, the days at the club. My son, MY SON, knows how much an annual membership is at the Rogue Valley Country Club. Well, he is white, and could, I suppose, get in. But once they knew his name, his father's name, I guess my fear is that they'd reject him. Now that's codependency at its finest. Kurt Vonnegut said it in Cat's Cradle: there are two kinds of people in the world. People you know and people you don't know. We'll, the people I know don't golf.

So he plays golf now, my little boy who hid in the cracks of some junkies attic while bullets blazed downstairs. Does this mean he's overcome the tragedy of his upbringing? I put too much emphasis on the past. I know. I know. But I was there. And sometimes, I want him to look backward in horror like I do instead of blythely skipping through his good life, drunk as a dog.

I said, "Isn't golf kind of an expensive sport?"
"I make quite a bit of money, Mom." he said.

OH.
Really.
Pay me.

So, he's doing okay, golfing the winter away, and I'm in a puddle up here in happily married land, missing my baby. He's not a baby anymore. He's golfing. He's a golfer. I guess there are worse things. He could be in therapy and tell the stories of his life. Maybe, just maybe, there will be a God who lets the stories die with me, and he can not know what happened to us for so long, and he will have a happy life.

shiny things

We got the tree today. A noble fir, 7 feet tall, for money. We thought about taking the girls up in the woods to murder a tree, but decided not to. Haley was horrified. "you were going to make us cut down a tree?" she said, as though it were hunting. Killing. Perhaps there is hope in the young. I didn't point out that the one we will purchase was killed. But the argument against sneaking up on trees is so hard, and its Christmas, and I'm lazy. So, we bagged a 7 footer down on Powell and 42nd, from the boyscouts, and drug it home to decorate. It is pretty. It was interesting, the blending of the ornaments.... I don't know if I've felt quite that married yet. His and mine. Ours and ours, and then I found Marky's football. And the little wooden horse he hung when he was two and I have a picture of it, standing in the light of the little christmas tree in that house on 4th and Oak in Jacksonville, that house of so many tragedies, so many troubles. And I shed a tear for all that is now behind me. I miss my son, but what I miss is gone. I miss that little boy who hid under the covers with me, silent and hoping, trying to disappear. I miss the 7 year old who hadn't lost the magic yet, who questioned me, saying, "Tyler doesn't believe in Santa Claus, Mom. Isn't that stupid?" and I had to say yes, but he was on the cusp of knowing. And the 15 year old-- I said I'd never miss him, but I do-- that christmas morning when he had actually bought me a gift, the first time he thought to get me something on his own since he was a child. It was the first CD by Joan Osborne and he played the cut "what if God was one of us?"
really loud, and I pulled his new snowboard out from under the sofa, the used white sofa, in the last house I ever rented. And now I am here, in this house that is my home, with this man who is my husband, these girls who move around me curiously, watching, waiting for me to go and leave things the way they were. K put up lights outside. He thinks its hokie, but I think they are beautiful. So far, we are the only lights on the block. I think he is secretly proud.

The tree is beautiful.

slices of pie life

Well shit. Just lost my whole post. Was talking about pie, and the holidays and all. I baked two pumpkin, a lemon meringue and a huge NY cheesecake which beat out a Costco one by a mile. The taste-test was patently unfair, I'll admit, but my crust is the best:

graham cracker crumbs

cinnamon

brown sugar

real butter

That's it. Use reasonable portions of each. Better than any I've had. I do love pie, and just can't quite NOT eat it until its gone. So my belly is full and I slept in. Carb hangover. Nicole is on the couch and we are lazy today. K went to work early and is doing half a saturday to suck all the leaves off the streets of Hillsboro. Next weekend is the toy run and the Kershaw knife show. Big Weekend. Anything to wear my jacket. I guess I could wear it any time, but it seems excessive. Weighs a ton.

The day was okay (Thanksgiving) and as much as I loved being away from the tensions I always experienced within my family, I missed Marky. We called him and told him that no matter what, next year we would all be together. He assured us he'd have his license by then and would come up here. We had lots of people over, some wanted, some unwanted, but you gotta feed 'em. Tom cooked the turkey. I'll give up his recipe. He'll never know. I doubt he can read. And for the unwanted: I just pictured them as Indians and it was like the first Thanksgiving all over again.

Tom's Turkey

Weber BBQ: get the coals going.

one turkey: 12-16 lbs.

Sit the bird, legs up, in a disposable foil roaster

cover legs with foil

Fill roaster 1/2 full of water

Squirt lemon and lime juice in the body of the bird. (I think he squirted at least half of each little plastic thingy. So, I think probably 1/4 cup of each.)

Tent the bird well

Cover and Wait. Our 15 pounder took 3.5 hours.

Tom says you can use the remaining liquid for gravy. I didn't. I wish I had. My gravy was shit.

There are so many stories I could relate about the holidays. Several for each. My top contenders for Thanksgiving are:

1. The Damn Ham

By now, following this blog, you've gotta know a little about my family, such as, any event was cause for dark and ongoing celebration. The police showed up about half the time to quell our spirits-- all in vain. Eventually however, our spirits, and some of our lives, were quelled.

Anyway, this Thanksgiving wasn't long after I got sober. And in my family, electing not to drink was an act of such disloyalty as to ostracize me for years. Looking back, it is more likely that I ostracized myself out of fear-- fear of the power of family to pull me back, vortex-like, to the center: a bottle of cheap whiskey and a mason jar of water.

So, there we were, me (about three years along) and my son, 12 or so. We had been invited to my brother's home in Gold Hill. I asked, like you do upon being invited, "what can I bring?" "Nothing." came the reply. It was a hollow sound, and the permafrost of my sisterinlaw's mood, the neverending anger at my drunken brother, crawled through the phone line like a snake. "nothing." Hissssss.

So, I made devilled eggs. When in doubt: cook.

I dressed up. This may have been my first and maybe greatest mistake. I was excited to be alive and sober back then. (Oh, hell. I still am.) But it was so new to have clean clothes. To have clean levis that had never belonged to anyone else. I wore a pink blouse. I don't think I ever wore it again. Pink satiny fabric with swiss dots. My skin crawls now.... I know now that being in my family was largely about disappearing. Don't stand out. Don't get noticed. Its why I wear black and little else. Blend. God forbid. (God, don't you love these glimpses into my psyche? Isn't it fascinating?) Anywho..... There we were. All dressed up and nowhere to go. Trapped in Gold Hill with a family who, upon arrival at about 11:00 was already engaged in the favorite family game: "Guess What I'm Mad At." Its that game where you don't get to know the rules until you break them. And they really had a head start on the party favors.

So, in we walked with our shiny pink, squeaky clean lives and a plate of devilled eggs. I could hear cupboards slamming in the offing, my sister in law, no doubt, expressing her dissatisfaction with her lot in life, knowing she could have done better. Its hard to sit down and go throught the pleasantries at times like this. Harder still to brave the kitchen door and face the dragon, but for the sake of the story....

I placed the eggs on the kitchen counter, and pushed through the door to ask the question women are supposed to ask: "Is there anything I can do?" (Pay for three years of therapy?) As you might imagine, there was nothing I could do. In the first place, we were having HAM, a travesty, a departure from tradition, which, in my mother's view, was just further evidence of wrongdoing by my brother's wife, who she despised. My mother, long banished from the kitchen by this daughter in law, sat seething on the sofa with the rest of them. The whole room seethed like ocean waves, resentment writhing below the surface, kept in place only by the thinnest of social norms which were even then being slowly eroded by the booze.

Dismissed, I joined the rest of the family in the living room where all sat in silence. Eventually, my sister in law came out of the kitchen with a small saucepan of steaming corn. (Another demerit from my mother: "The only vegetable that woman ever cooks is corn! Can't she serve anything green?) Now, ordinarily (or rather, in the past) we had done things like: iron a tablecloth, set the table, get some flowers for a centerpiece.... but such is the progression of alcoholism, holiday customs tumbling like dominoes in the wake of the death march.

She set the hot pan of corn on the bare wood table.

We all glanced at one another, waiting, waiting. We are good at waiting. Soon, the main dish arrived. My sister in law burst through the swinging doors into the dining room with a huge ham impaled on a huge meat fork, supported only by her oven glove and slammed it down in the middle of the (bare, wood) table. "There." she cried, and bolted from the room in tears, swinging doors swinging off the hinges.

Most of us hesitated, but not my nephew. Not Tyler. He stood up from the row of spectators and walked to the table, plunged his fingers into the side of the ham, came back with a fistful and started eating. Just another dinner at home.

************

STORY # 2: What Did You Do For Thanksgiving?

I'm tending bar on Friday night, the day after Thanksgiving. A guy walks up to me. I say, "Hey, what did you do for Thanksgiving?" He says, "Spent it with you."

bossy

It's not that I liked being the boss during my former life, its just that I didn't have to do so much when it was up to me. I am lazy, after all. Nowadays, I kind of tow the line for a really nice person who is in charge of me. If you don't know me, really, really, know me, I'm a little hard to be in charge of. Its not an ego thing so much as it is a matter of attention, or more precisely, inattention. Remember: I don't care. And now, in this job, I have a buttload of shit to do all the time. ALL the time. Not a moment passes that life doesn't hang in the balance for some little gray headed elder who is counting on me. Now, those guys... I do care about them. But the rules? Not so much. I attend to what I care about. So, I'm adjusting to life in real time, life in the nursing home. Seeing the humanity of it all. We admitted a poet the other day. Nobody really knows this but me. And when someone says they are a poet, its potluck: you never know what you'll get. But she is a good poet. She let me read one of hers, a beach at sunset thing. And while it was ordinary, there were some nice images and I could feel the wind in my hair. I told her so, and honored her poet-ness. We shared, commiserated actually, the rarity of gifted folks like ourselves, and I moved on to the next new one, coccooned in the electric bed of old age, hair no longer coiffed, reduced to the lcd of what it is to be an old woman. skin and hair. Those things we cherish too late and too little. The things that do not keep.

on my own again

First, I decorated the office. Then, I could work. I hung the usual wall hanging where I can see it, colors that soothe me, soft textures that remind me of home. I began the uncertain task of organizing. I can't begin to explain why it doesn't work for me. Well, I'll try. You know the whole thing about short term memory. Well, I don't know if it was all the drugs and staying awake from 1976 until 1987, but somewhere along the line, I lost whatever thing it is that enables filing. For instance, one day I'll file an employee accident report under A for accident. The next day, I look under R for report, then E for employee, then the mindfuck of it all is that everything is a report and its all about employees and then I think screw it, I'll file everything by the first letter of the first word unless its "The" and then I won't have to remember one word, but then I forget I decided that and it all starts over. Then, I make one giant E file and try to put everything about Employees under THAT tab, and then I realize there are too many employee-related things, that, in fact, all things are about employees, and I'm screwed again and have only an E file and no others, and then what to I do with the bazillion color-coded file folder with contrasting plastic tabs??? WHAT???? Then I try to go by topic, but once you start splitting hairs, there is no end to that shit and there's not enough tabs in the world to sort it out and there is only one piece of paper in each four-dollar folder. And the old learning kicks in and the memory of some driven bitch in a red suit and cropped hair is standing in front of a too hot/too cold/too big conference room in the basement of the Windmill Inn with burgundy tablecloths folded into fans and pitchers of ice water and she says: if you only have one piece of paper, you don't need to file it. Oh, great. Its like making an outline: if you have a A you have to have a B. Well I never do. I always end up with A I a i .... you get the drift. So, I don't know how in the hell I'm going to organize this office. What I ended up doing the last job was hiring someone who hadn't spent the better part of the seventies and eighties in a coma. And the sixties. Let's, at the very least, be honest.

Honestly.

Well, Sid is growing like a little weed. He tears the shit out of anything red. He loves to play. He can sit and is learning to lay down. Sort of. He's pretty manic right now. More fun than I've had in years. We take him to the dog park and he just gets rolled by the big dogs. He runs up to me, hides in my shadow, then takes off again. He helps me understand love. He comes into the room and finds me, first with his eyes, then launches himself through the air in my general direction. Once we've made contact, he can do anything. Once he knows I am here, or there, as the case may be, he can run with the big dogs or lay in his favorite spot next to the heater and be away from me. But first, he has to know he is loved. I helps me see who my son is, and why it took him so long to go away from me. But he has. Finally. He is a good man, and all the better for the love he can be certain of. He knows who he is. He runs with the big dogs. I miss him so much.

Monkey See

It was Monday today. I know it was Monday all the world around, but it really hasn't been Monday in my world for a long time. And even over the past week as I went the distance back to work, it was new, and a little fun. Now it is just Monday, and I am expected to perform like a trained monkey. I am trained. The 23 year old who is training me is so pleased when I get it right, when thirty years of training (do the math) perform their alchemy and I know stuff. Stuff she didn't even think to tell me. Its magic.

She is very good at her job. She is the best there is. Ever was. She is so good, no one can take her place. And she has made certain that is not a secret.

I remember being the best there ever was. I remember making it my business to be better. I remember Mable Butts and her bedside table full of mints; and Cleve Walker, a drunk who got caught and landed in a nursing home, and when confronted by the resident zealot, said, "if people in heaven are like you, I don't wanna go." I remember Eudora Hood and her poem, "Those Golden Years Are Really Tarnished Brass." I was the best for them and to them. No one could do what I did. No one could do what it is paid people do for old people, which is to live their lives for them, like I did. I won prizes for it. I got employee of the month. Of the fucking century.

Then I quit my job. And I didn't even try to tell them how someone could take my place. I'd spent years convincing them no one could. They believed me. I forgot to tell them I wasn't staying. I forgot to tell them I mostly didn't even want to be there, would rather have been at the bar. That's how good I was. Liar Liar pants on fire....

plumbing

Well, it finally happened. My laziness caught up with me. It seems so innocuous while its happening. I make coffee in a french press almost every morning. Sometimes I use the drip pot, but usually we prefer the thick, high powered muck of caffiene, water just squeezed past, black as a bible. But the thing is this: there is no filter -- no tidy paper to catch the grounds in, to package them up like a soggy christmas gift and toss away neatly in the trash. So, in the morning fog, my own personal fog, it just seems too hard to take a spatula and scrape the grounds into the trash, or harder yet, the compost bin outside in the cold back yard. So sometimes, some very foggy mornings, I take a risk and rinse them down the sink. They usually go. Its intermittent reinforcement at its best. Sometimes its a little sketchy, a little lag time passes, but then the water goes on down the pipes to wherever water goes, and I am still free. No one knows.

Well, they do now. I am so busted. To my credit, I admitted it right off. "Honey," I said, "I plugged the drain with coffee ground. I know you'll be mad. But I fixed it." He asked, like any man would, "Why do you do that?" and I told him that was not a conversation we were going to have. Just leave it that it won't happen again. He did, bless him. He stormed around a bit. I said, "what can I do to help?" He said, "whatever I tell you to do." So, I was a guilty servant. Then, in the midst of my nearly overwhelming guilt, he makes a phone call and says, "Yeah, between coffee grounds, grease and the chew I spit down the drain all day..." and I was released. Released. It was his fault as much as mine, which I, of course, was quick to point out. I didn't belabor the point, but it did get me off the cross.

He got it fixed. I love men. Have I said that? I love their willingness to climb up on the roof and stick that nasty old snake down drains of unknowable destination and drag muck out with bare hands as I stand gagging in the background.

One of the nice things about plumbing problems is that I got to clean out under the kitchen sink.

So, life goes on here in my new world. I can't imagine living anywhere else.

late pumpkins

Just another day in paradise. I forgot to mention our pumpkins. We downloaded patterns from carvingpumpkins.com, the kind of patterns that are not carved all the way through the flesh. K carved one of Frankenstein and one of Gollum. They got lots of attention from the passing parents with kiddies and my favorite was when I asked one woman to guess who they were and she said, "John Kerry and Ghandi." Well, close. I don't know about you, but carving a Ghandi pumpkin seems somehow wrong.

But that was then. This is now. Still sick, still working at the new job. My head is clearer but I miss my mind.