Sunday In The Yard With June

Today was one of those days I wished we lived closer to family. Our reward for spending two hours weeding the neglected garden, flower beds and yard was harvesting all of these:

I’m not sure what we’re going to do with fourteen cucumbers but if I lived closer to the family they would mysteriously appear on front porches or we would be bringing salad to dinner tonight (after we invited ourselves over).

Dessert would be these little morsels:

The perfect apple for my dad, too. A little sour but not too firm. Otherwise it could prove to be the $20K apple if he bit into it wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time I cost him a lot of money.

August, summer is winding down. School starts in 18 days. We may find out tomorrow when Wally leaves. I’m sentimental already. And it looks like rain.

Mrs. Kravitz

image found here

I was deadheading the salvia today when I remembered a conversation I had with one of my neighbors a month or so ago We had been home for about four days, I was still unsure what time zone I was in much less what day of the week it was so I was a little rough around the edges from the jet lag. The flowers had bolted while we were gone and were close to their peak even before we left for our trip in early June. While we had been away the weather had been too hot too fast especially in the south bed. My salvia was spent, the big pink showy things that threaten to take over each year were done, and the dianthuses bordering the front walk were done, too. Rather than let them go to seed naturally, like I would in late August, I gave them all drastic haircuts murmuring little prayers that I wasn’t killing the plants and they would bloom again before next May or June. I’m crouched down in my perennials, surrounded by the hum of bees, enjoying a hot dry morning when I hear a familiar but not entirely welcome voice from the public path adjacent to our south yard. Our neighbor, Mrs. Kravitz and her husband George, were walking their elderly and fat golden retriever.

“Oh your flowers were so pretty! Why are you doing that to them” Mrs. K said, her voice dripping with judgment because that’s how she always sounds.

“So they bloom again. They bolted while we were away, just like my radishes and salad greens. Too hot too fast this year.” I looked up at her squinting against the sunlight and really wishing I didn’t have to be nice to this woman.

“Are you sure about that? I’ve never heard of Salvia coming back.” I swear I could hear her tongue click against her teeth. She couldn’t stand The Girl and I and really wanted to see us fail at this whole redoing a distressed house thing because we are the scourge of the earth and everything Jesus hates. Whenever she sees us her disappointment that we are gay and not just like her family radiates through her hypocritical eyes and threatens to beat us over the head. I wish I could say I can’t stand this woman but really what I feel for her is beyond the emotion of hatred. I feel sadness she is so incredibly intolerant of us not only because we are queer but because we are democrats and we are not Catholic. That’s a lot of criteria we fall short in. She is a Christian in bigots clothing. During election season, they had an anti-reproductive rights campaign sign in their yard and she approached our next door neighbor and told C she was going to hell if C didn’t vote yes on this particular referendum. (I never got a chance to ask her how many babies they were going to adopt…) A couple of months later Mrs. K rushed over to C’s house and was terribly upset she might sell it to “that homosexual couple who were looking at it last week.” When C told me about this, I saw red. The following Sunday was the open house and how I wished I knew a bunch of drag queens and really Nelly queens so I could round them up for a tour of the house. The evil fantasy of squealing over dressed drag queens tripping up the front walk made me cackle like an evil genius. A couple of years ago, she and George refused to go to their across the street neighbor’s wake because he died an AIDS related death. And they pointedly said this is why they weren’t going. They can barely bring themselves to speak to me when I‘m outside and I always without fail give them a cheery hello, trying to take the high road. Because someday I’m going to get a chance to tell her about the Jesus I know who believes in loving your neighbor. But the icing on the cake was definitely last month when she stood on my property dispensing gardening advice and her yard is a boring mess of weeds and petunias. All of this flashed though my mind as I looked up at her, praying God would speak through me and silence Edgy June Cleaver.

Isn’t it wonderful we are gifted with filters and the ability to speak internally because this is what Evil June said before nice June spoke up:

Actually you stupid judgmental woman, I’m not sure if they will bloom or not because all I know about gardening is what I learned from a handful of magazine articles and gardening last summer. So you know what? If I’m wrong you can come over here and tell me just how wrong I am, which I’m sure you won’t hesitate doing. So now just move along with your self-righteous self and feel assured you are the perfect specimen of human

“Mrs. Kravitz, it’s going to be interesting to see if they come back isn’t it? These are all perennials so my guess is they will be back bigger and better in a week or so. You and George have a nice day.” I beamed at her as I turned back to my work willing her to disappear.

It’s been tempting the last couple of weeks to make her a big bouquet of Salvia and just lay it on her doorstep as a neighborly gesture of good will. It was also tempting to ask if we could borrow their extremely gay rainbow paper party ball thingy I can see from the street in their garage. It would have been nice to hang on our porch this June 28th to celebrate the 41st anniversary of the beginning of The Gay Rights Movement.

But I didn’t. Maybe next year if it’s still in their garage and I’ll even give her a bundle of salvia in return for the loan.

The Invisible Distance

. . .surely grace flowed between us as we flung away certainty, and said yes to the unknown, out at the edge of light, where it ends, or becomes more brilliant. --Andre Dubus

I’m borrowing the title of this blog entry; it’s a title of an unpublished essay written by my Oldest Friend. The Dubus quote opens it and I thought it was fitting for my own story of migration. Something that’s been on my mind a lot lately as I see the end of school years looming ahead on the horizon and we can decide, without a need to consider anyone else, where to live. I was relating this to OF a couple of weeks ago and her exquisite answer was: “Would you really leave. . .after Beav graduates? I don't think you realize how rooted you might be there. No doubt the long winter has worn you down. I remember in Kearney having to cut all the spring flowers in bloom because of a freak late frost. I have read these lines over and over and my answer is simple.

I don’t know but I think. I think I want to find out what it means to migrate rather than run away. I want to see if the light is more brilliant on the edge of the unknown just like my oldest friend has done. Oldest Friend lives terribly far away from me but she is--in these ballyhoo technological times--a phone call, skype or email away from me. OF migrated a few years ago to New Zealand. A big brave move on her part. NZ is so incredibly far away so when I told her we would be visiting Cambodia early June I realized I would only be a quarter world away from her rather than half a world. She feels like people have forgotten her but she is never far from my thoughts. Now she is working on a PhD exploring migration. This process is an academic migration for her to and she is setting out in the wilderness of different disciplnes vastly different from the comfortable enclave of Creative Writing. We met when I was nine and she was almost eight. OF’s family migrated all over the world and now she herself is one prone to migration. Both our families had reluctantly moved to Albuquerque for the sake of Dads’ career. It’s just what you did in the 60’s and 70’s if you were climbing the government ladder. OF lived across the street from us and I’ll never forget the day she came over to see if I would like to play. Her mother had sent her over and when I look back on this; how ballsy of her to just show up. What if I hadn’t been interested in books and ballet and dolls? What if I had been some sort of Tomboy or a psychopath who tortured kittens? If that had been the case, our migration story would have never unfolded. She would have stayed at her house avoiding her mother’s vodka infused wrath, reading books and writing stories; while I played ball with the boys or hid in my closet safe from my sister’s mood swings, venturing out only to torture kittens. Divine providence for me, I loved to dance and make up stories and use my imagination over and above toys; as did she! OF made those three years on that wind swept and naked mesa bearable. Later, she made my early days of motherhood bearable and the last year of my marriage survivable. Once my sister and I were laughing about Albuquerque---that fake laugh-so-you-don‘t-cry-laughter--and Mom stepped into the conversation: “Oh girls, I think those were the best years of our lives! Your dad and I felt like we had made it!”
“Where the Hell were you living? Dad worked all the time, Sister suffered her first major depression and we lived in the middle of a terrible desert that was either too hot, too cold and always without fail, windy.” My mother’s cluelessness took my breath away. Since that time, one of my beggy prayers is the boys let me know just how crappy their lives are, if they are crappy.

I spent half a semester in a writing class exploring those years and how and I spent a year in therapy trying to figure them out. I remember telling my therapist it was like someone had taken an atom bomb to my family; Sister--in her defense--found herself dropped from a fairly backwards small town school in the South into a progressive school in the West. A recipe for rebellion that had the added flavor of the social upheaval of 1970 sprinkled all the way through it. But over and over again, the one thing that surfaced in both my writing and my therapy: OF was the anchor that tethered me. Rather, she helped offer me an escape from the terrible arguments between Sister and Mom; Mom’s own depression, Dad’s necessary absence, my own feelings I had been dropped into the wrong family. I know I was her life line as well; her family was in a greater disarray than my own. When I look back on those years, it makes me cry to think about OF’s own Mother and the losing battle she had with alcohol. J was such an intelligent and talented woman but she was sick and her sickness became the fulcrum of the family’s malaise. Being so young I was only becoming aware something was deeply wrong with her shortly before we moved back to Texas. A few years ago, I wept over the memory of an afternoon at OF’s house and J’s unspeakably humiliating behavior towards her children. I can’t remember what happened afterward this particular episode but I’m sure we left in a confused rush and tried to lose ourselves on the mesa: a place I hated because of its emptiness but loved for its refuge. The winter of 1971-72 was particularly difficult at my house: the arguments between Sister and Parents were at a fevered pitch; mom spent a lot of time on the couch. It was dark and snowy. One afternoon, I’m not sure why, but me and OF decided to walk into the mesa and were going to see if we could get lost. We walked away from our back wall (we were still the last street in the city at that time) and into the mesa towards the foothills. I remember stopping almost a mile from the houses, at the base of a road which ran from one side of the mesa to the other--Tramway Road--and still, despite snow that was blowing and swirling, I could see that stupid house. It was hopeless, I couldn’t leave them, and they would always be there in the distance.

Years later, I purposefully moved away from Them and yet I could still see and feel them in the distance. Always. That’s the amazing thing about migration. You take bits and pieces of that first family with you, no matter how intact or fractured it might have been. Just like the people who have migrated from us via death, they live with you. That home lives in you. I have a mesa that lives in me. Whenever I’m stressed or overwhelmed I dream about the mesa. Sometimes it’s the prairie outside of Lubbock and other times it is the mesa in New Mexico. As an adult I have learned to appreciate and embrace the inherent spirits of those vacant mesas outside Albuquerque and love the sage filled mesas of Taos County which have become almost a spiritual refuge for me. Hindsight has taught me it was a gift to live on the edge of suburbia because we had that magnificent wild place to spin our stories and create separate different lives for ourselves. We spent entire days in the mesa, exploring arroyos, catching horned toads and shouting into the wind. Before Albuquerque, my wild space was the Big Thicket near Houston Texas the antithesis of the vacuous mesa. I believe William Gass wrote an essay many years ago about the importance of wild spaces in children’s lives. I feel like a poster girl for such theories because I know spending the day in the woods or on the mesa helped my imagination fly. As much as I hate to admit it, rediscovering the mesa, albeit in Northern New Mexico, taught me there was a lot of there there. So much that I can’t stop writing about it or thinking about it or finding new ways to frame the experience of discovering the first member of my tribe: the woman who helped me mold my imagination; challenge the exploration of my gifts; and make me think about and learn from the Big Medicine lessons in our lives. Migration is Big Medicine.

I contemplate and dream about migration whenever I feel stagnate in some aspect of my life and sometimes its my children or my career that throws me into a rant about selling everything we own and leaving without a forwarding address to just get the Hell away from this place; ninety nine percent of the time I am that Thing blocking my path. Travel serves as migration away from the things which frustrate me about my life which is probably why “re-entry” is hard for me. Because when I get back: the same things wait for me. A career that no longer delights me and teenagers which are threatening to bleed my soul through my right ear. I have only myself to blame for these two things which makes it all the more teeth grindingly difficult to face all over again after two measly weeks away from my daily routines.

Sometimes migration, forced or voluntary, physical or psychic takes us to ourselves: our true selves; not the person Mommy or Daddy or society wanted us to be. That happened to me years ago as a young adult. But usually, migration is simple movement because in the immortal words of Buckaroo Banzai: “No matter where you go, there you are.”

In Which Our Heroine Takes a Sledge Hammer To A Wall

"Eeyore," said Owl, "Christopher Robin is giving
a party." "Very interesting," said Eeyore. "I suppose they will be sending
me down the odd bits which got trodden on. Kind and Thoughtful. Not at all,
don't mention it."

"Brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not
there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to show how badly we want
something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want
something badly enough. They are there to keep out the other people.” Randy
Pausch The Last Lecture

I’m a little late on this Last Lecture bandwagon and I finally listened to his lecture about childhood dreams today. A lovely bit of synchronicity in my life because I’m moving towards a couple of childhood dreams in tangible--albeit--baby steps. Too bad I have strong Eeyore tendencies and think any minute the world will discover I’m a faker and completely without any abilities so paralysis sits next to me. My other pet theory I like to play with and coddle is I really have been given the odd bits of talent and luck; those odd bits “which got trodden on”. (That quote always makes me giggle dispite myself) I also have made a BFF out of guilt. I’m facing down my fiftieth year and finally, finally courageous to do something with the imaginative sparks I have been gifted with. What the hell took me so long?

I am my own brick wall.

Not the first wall I’ve encountered.

Years ago, I underwent a reiki healing session help overcome some (then) chronic back pain but what really happened was a release of old bad psychic energy, which in turn did away with the back pain. Stay with me here even if you don’t believe in metaphysical healing because frankly six years later, I’m not too sure I fully believe what happened to me. During the reiki session, I was given a vision of a dirt wall that was created with mud, trash and twigs. Those who were positive forces in my life surrounded me and were helping take down the wall. Bit by bit we disassembled the wall. People would come and go and some would try to get me to stop working when it was obvious I was very tired. My helpers would tire and stop working, trying to convince me to rest but I would gently indicate it wasn’t time for me to stop. When the people who I allowed to weigh me down or hurt me the most entered into the picture, I would physically push them away so they wouldn’t interfere with the task. The wall was circular and in the middle of the wall was an entity (God/Jesus/Buddha/Me whomever it was It) bathed in light and a warmth that shone on the back of my head and I felt comfortably warm. Two of the most malevolent people in my life returned and started to cram dirt, rocks, trash back into the wall as I took it down and I was filled a deep and abiding anger as I pushed them away, screaming at them to leave me and to stop building the wall. When I pushed them away, I would push them away and out of the warm light. Soon the wall was gone and all that was left was a trench and I walked the circle my eyes shut against its’ brilliance and savoring how it felt on my skin. The depth of my grief and the sobbing after the treatment scared my wonderful practitioner. She was very afraid she had released something better left untouched and had accidentally broken something inside of me. Something had broken, it was a dam. A dam of resentment, pain, anger and self-pity. Who knew this was the first step.

Since that day, life has been pretty simple and satisfying over the last six years. I’ve been given enormous and generous gifts of people, time, oppertunities, you name it it’s been given to me. However, in the last eighteen months my life feels like it’s at the brink of becoming a murky, uncertain and difficult mess. Fortunately, I have gained enough personal insight to know this doesn’t mean I’m going to get so ridiculously depressed I can’t leave the house or work or care for myself. Tearing down that dirt wall moved me past the point of suffering from ever again suffering such a depression. Yes, I refer to it as a healing. Because it was.

So why all the naval gazing? I’m exactly 72 hours from my 49th birthday and birthdays always call up the worst in me. My woo-woo therapist told me my mom‘s last month of pregnancy was probably very difficult and that‘s why birthdays are hard for me. Mom couldn‘t remember such details about her pregnancy, which is particularly telling. Whatever, I think it’s just my birthday and I err on the side of too much introspection to begin with. Deep thinking: a Piscean occupational hazard of sorts.

Now I am faced with a big brick wall that I thought was The Economy, my age, my sons, my geography, my socio-economic level. . . That brick wall was everything but what it really was. Me.

I am my own brick wall.

Should I hit my head against in exasperated defeat?

Use it as a prop to watch my final years go by as I ruminate in everything I could have done?

Do I take a sledge hammer to it and move it?


Tigger wants to move it. Eeyore is afraid it will fall on her while she’s swinging at it. But if it falls, it's no longer in the way, right?

So Peace out this week and I will. Promise. And just in case you are getting me presents all I want for my birthday is a son who acts his age and gets his shit together and another son who doesn’t act as if he is the center of the world. A public option for health care would be nice too so I can quit my thankless job without feeling completely irresponsible.

source here

Going Home For The Second Time

Looks like this entry will be all over the map, much like I’ve been the last 50 hours or so. Beav and left for the airport at the lazy hour of 0530 to meet a bus to catch a plane to jet off to see my dad and meet our new family in San Antonio. I call them “my” new family now but 50 hours ago, they were just his new family and I was a part of his other family. (sheesh, I sound like a ten year old going to meet Daddy‘s new wife and their new baby, don’t I?) Anyhow, we left one cold and foggy place for another cold and foggy place (I know, I know WTF is up with this, twenty degrees in San Antonio, Hell-O Al Gore?. . .) I was pretty nervous about meeting my father’s special someone and her family. I wanted her to like me; and maybe love me someday. I’ve met her before when I was much younger and remembered her as a beautiful and sweet friend of my mother‘s. I knew who was who in her family and the victories and their losses over the years. My dad’s beloved was my mother’s Maid of Honor 58 years ago and my mother in turn witnessed her simple ceremony that same week when she married my dad‘s Air Force battle buddy. My mom and M were confidantes over the years and shared a special bond only women who have weathered the same things at the same time forge. I remember my mother calling me when M’s oldest daughter died after a brief but valiant fight with breast cancer. Mom could barely speak for her own anguish. Mom treasured the jewelry Daughter had made and spoke with pride (as if she were her own child) when M and Daughter went to France to sell her pieces. It wasn’t any surprise that M opened her heart to Dad immediately after Mom died and helped through those first difficult months from her own experience of grief and loss. M’s daughter (just about my sister’s age) died a few years ago and M lost her husband about ten years ago. So much grief to weather in one life but M loved my mother very much and helping Dad probably helped her, too. As the year has passed, their friendship has turned to love. I am terribly sentimental and this turn of events and their shared history makes me sigh, smile and believe this Universe is benevolent. The two of them are building a life together and my father “impetuously” moved to San Antonio. I say “impetuously” because my dad isn’t one of these people who would rush home from work on Friday and announce: “Honey! Load up the kids! We’re taking a trip!!” No, my dad is very methodical and a planner. So when he asked me (why he asked, I’ll never fully understand!) if I would mind if he moved to San Antonio to be closer to her I knew this wasn’t some half-assed idea like I would have (and have had. Lubbock, I’m looking at you). So he did it and he bought a project house in a delightful mid-century neighborhood. I thought I was in love with my folks house in NoTX but I really see the potential in this one and can’t wait to see the transformation. I’ve already planned the flower beds with things that only bloom indoors at my house and are invasive in SoTX. (when it’s not part of the artic circle) I told M if The Girl had come with us she would have been chomping at the bit to get started on some of the projects. I saw a couple I wanted to tackle, too. M and her daughter L arranged furniture and the UDO (useful decorating objects) for him and it was lovely and in many ways looked as if my mom had done it. M had been in the NoTX house a few times and must have a photographic memory because the guest room I was in had many of the same pictures and such as before. It was touching she had included my mother’s old family photographs.

Anne Lamott says that grief is like a lazy susan, some days it turns and you get rage, other days you turn it and it’s just a fact of life, this loss. I had discounted that summation as not applying to me, I felt like I had reached a point in my own grief for the loss of my mother where it lived deep inside and it was just something that happened to me. Mother died. Of course she did, she was old and she was unwell. She was also miserable with pain and depressed because of her failing mental status. Her death was a blessing for her in many ways and much harder on the rest of us. A couple of weeks before Christmas, I noticed I was feeling a free floating sadness and it took a day or two to figure out what was wrong. It was grief. Christmas was important to my mother and I think I was still in a state of shock last Christmas so I felt her absence keenly this year. So I was already had the seed of revisiting grief and loss in my mind. I was prepared to love these people based only on the evidence of the way they had swept my father into their circle and helped him through his own tremendous loss in ways I couldn't because this is my first time with grief so close to my heart. On Wednesday, I didn’t have a lot of time to think about my own experience of grief as I was reintroduced to M and her delightful family who all welcomed Beav and me like we had just come home from a long trip and my own raw insecurity makes such warmth from strangers a little overwhelming. Which is probably why I cried for about two hours yesterday as I drove through the unspeakably beautiful western edge of Hill Country? My tears came from relief because I experienced the same people my father did and I understood his affection and love for them. I was so afraid my father’s new life would exclude his daughters. This morning I thought back to a dream I had last week. It was one of those lucid dreams which I believe is a visitation from those we love. Dad, me and Mom were standing in the kitchen of our old house and she was packing things in paper and putting them in a box. She was talking to me and unfortunately I don’t remember what she was saying which had troubled me last week. But this morning when I flashed on the dream, I remembered she was happy and animated: excited to be packing the kitchen. And again, I cried. I cried tears of joy and relief for my father. Tears of joy for me. I can’t wait to get to know my new family in South Texas. Dad showed me a letter M’s son wrote and it was so tender and sweet as he described the “light returning to his mother’s eye” and how he had been afraid she would spend the rest of her life alone. I knew that fear, I didn’t want Dad to be alone, either. I had also seen the light C described his mother having. It lives in my Dad’s eyes.

So now I have a new home and a new family special gifts for the new year. L, who is near my age with a son almost exactly Beav's age, is a funny, intelligent and a strong woman, M’s sister C is just as smart and capable with a deliciously wicked sense of fun, and M's grand daughter--Violet Bella--who’s photography I’ve gushed over at etsy (lovely serendipity) after following links of newly listed items is someone I'm hoping to meet in person this spring whom I getting to know through her own art and words. M herself who is tranquil and thoughtful in ways I only hope to be.

No accident I met them on The Twelfth Day of Christmas because that’s just how grace works.

"I Will Not Fear. Fear Is The Mind Killer" --Frank Herbert

My title is a quote from Herbert's Dune. I wish I could say I've read the Dune novels but I prefer my fantasy and SciFi up in my face on a screen. But I love that quote and I have to revisit it every few years. One of my imaginary chums linked this yesterday and I haven't been able to stop pondering these questions. Some of them are no-brainers but some of them made me stop and think. Hard. Really really hard about the state of my life.



How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are? 25

Which is worse, failing or never trying? Not trying

If life is so short, why do we do so many things we don’t like and like so many things we don’t do? because so many of the things we don’t like are those things we “should” do either for our own perceived well being or for the perceived greater good.

When it’s all said and done, will you have said more than you’ve done? Unfortunately up until this point it will be said unless I get off my ass in 2010 and Do.

What is the one thing you’d most like to change about the world? I wish everyone had a positive outlook and a fully developed sense of self then it would completely unnecessary to use force to change another group’s mind about what “god” is or isn’t and war would become a bad memory.

If happiness was the national currency, what kind of work would make you rich? owning a little ex-pat hang-out bookstore/coffeeshop/laundrymat, writing, gardening, swimming in the ocean, reading, laughing and eating really beautiful food.

Are you doing what you believe in, or are you settling for what you are doing? settling

If the average human life span was 40 years, how would you live your life differently? I would have never remained in nursing this long and I wouldn’t have had children.

To what degree have you actually controlled the course your life has taken? 100%

Are you more worried about doing things right, or doing the right things? Doing the right things as they are set forth by others I deem to be “in charge" or "an authority”.

You’re having lunch with three people you respect and admire. They all start criticizing a close friend of yours, not knowing she is your friend. The criticism is distasteful and unjustified. What do you do? Respectfully disagree, saying something how it’s not appropriate to talk about someone who isn’t present. This is a mote question because the people I respect and admire don’t openly criticize others without being asked by the person for input.

If you could offer a newborn child only one piece of advice, what would it be? Just be yourself and tell everyone to FU if they don’t like it

Would you break the law to save a loved one? yes

Have you ever seen insanity where you later saw creativity? Yes, I wish I could tell you about some of my patients, they are brilliant, creative and undoubtedly insane.

What’s something you know you do differently than most people? Tie my shoes

How come the things that make you happy don’t make everyone happy? Fortunately we are all different and different things make individuals happy which is why being a human being on this plain of existence is so remarkable and wonderful.

What one thing have you not done that you really want to do? What’s holding you back? I want to live in a foreign country only I’m afraid I couldn’t support myself and realistically I can’t leave my fifteen year old son nor would I expect him to uproot his life to serve my dream.

Are you holding onto something you need to let go of? Most of what I hold onto is unnecessary dross both in a literal and metaphoric sense.

If you had to move to a state or country besides the one you currently live in, where would you move and why? I would move to Mexico tomorrow because I love the culture and the people coupled with where I would live in Mexico has the benefit of my ideal weather.

Do you push the elevator button more than once? Do you really believe it makes the elevator faster? Yes but no. Pushing the button twice gives me a false sense of control and I find this a metaphor for much of my life.

Would you rather be a worried genius or a joyful simpleton? Joyful simpleton. At this point I’m a worried simpleton.

Why are you, you? I am me because I am part of the largess called humanity and I have a place and a role here. I will never know the extent of the place and role but it is necessary even if it is a single monumental moment touching one other life.

Have you been the kind of friend you want as a friend? Only since about 1987 before that time I stomped all over people.

Which is worse, when a good friend moves away, or losing touch with a good friend who lives right near you? Losing touch with a good friend who lives near

What are you most grateful for? My Self

Would you rather lose all of your old memories, or never be able to make new ones? Never being able to make new ones would signal the end of my life. The End is just another stage and I would rather progress forward than lose what I have in the past. At the end of life--when I am unable to make new memories I will have my old memories to relish and relive those beautiful, precious moments before death comes for me.

Is is possible to know the truth without challenging it first? No. How do you know something is true if you don't challenge it, turn it inside out, upside down and test it.

Has your greatest fear ever come true? Thankfully not.

Do you remember that time 5 years ago when you were extremely upset? Does it really matter now? Yes it actually does because I was right about someone.

What is your happiest childhood memory? What makes it so special? It’s a combination of several: playing in the Big Thicket, collecting black berries and wild flowers completely oblivious to the dangerous animals and snakes living in the forest. I was without fear of the unseen and safe from my family’s dysfunction.

At what time in your recent past have you felt most passionate and alive? Three weeks ago when I was contemplating what grace looks like in my life.

If not now, then when? 3.5 years
If you haven’t achieved it yet, what do you have to lose? Only more time

Have you ever been with someone, said nothing, and walked away feeling like you just had the best conversation ever? Never except during intense lovemaking.

Why do religions that support love cause so many wars? Because humans are dualistic creatures and have both light and dark. Dark is dominated by ego and despite the fact we are trying to teach one another to love we believe our message of love is “better” and want to convince others of this so we do it by way of force once our ego is in control.

Is it possible to know, without a doubt, what is good and what is evil? Yes. But I don't believe this human construct "evil" exists: to believe in evil minimizes the omnipotence of the being which see as infinitely merciful and loving that I call “God”.

If you just won a million dollars, would you quit your job? In an instant

Would you rather have less work to do, or more work you actually enjoy doing? More work I enjoyed.

Do you feel like you’ve lived this day a hundred times before? No thank goodness; not that today hasn't been perfectly swell.

When was the last time you marched into the dark with only the soft glow of an idea you strongly believed in? I’m not sure I’ve ever had that sort of courage but I very recently I am flailing in the dark with a lovely idea which makes me ebullient.

If you knew that everyone you know was going to die tomorrow, who would you visit today? Diane

Would you be willing to reduce your life expectancy by 10 years to become extremely attractive or famous? Oh hell no

What is the difference between being alive and truly living? I have up until very recently been only alive and my resolution for 2010 will be to truly live no matter where that takes me or what it looks like. Being alive is going through the motions doing what is expected despite or what I’m supposed to do versus what makes me feel passion.

When is it time to stop calculating risk and rewards, and just go ahead and do what you know is right? Now. Now. Now.

If we learn from our mistakes, why are we always so afraid to make a mistake? Mistakes hurt and have created a lot of pain for me in the past.

What would you do differently if you knew nobody would judge you? Some days it feels like I would do everything differently. Other days it is as simple as quiting my job and taking something which pays much less so it necessary to have total faith in the Universe to care for me in light of my best efforts to care for myself and my family.

When was the last time you noticed the sound of your own breathing? This morning, I noticed it was too fast and I needed to be more mindful.

What do you love? Have any of your recent actions openly expressed this love? I love to create with words and I write daily.

In 5 years from now, will you remember what you did yesterday? What about the day before that? Or the day before that? I doubt I will remember what I did yesterday even one year from now.

Decisions are being made right now. The question is: Are you making them for yourself, or are you letting others make them for you? I make my own decisions much in the same way I disallow making decisions: out of fear. I suppose I don't make my own decisions, do I.

Humor me: I'm suffering from a bout of blogarrhea this week because I have a lot on my mind and want to get it all off my chest. I'm calling this Part I of III (Do I get an award for the worst extended metaphor like in the history of the internets?)
Happy New Years Eve Eve!

Teenage Mutant Ninja Karma

In the middle of all the angst over Wally and what happens next Beav has decided it’s time for him to regress back to Weird Hormone Boy. I thought we had left WHB behind at the Crack Shack but I guess I was wrong. WHB is not welcome here because there is not enough room for more than one moody person in this house and by default of my age it gets to be me! Seriously, didn’t the kid get the memo? I’m the only one allowed to be grouchy. Beav has also reverted back to his previous incarnation of The Boy Who Won’t Get Up For School. Hells bells, the kid who hated school always got up on time and this one? He loves school Loveslovesloves school. Fortunately, the only person nagging is me because back in the day it was a chorus of me and Wally which would lead to Beav crying in grades 2 through 5 and yelling at us to leave him alone in grades 6 and 7. I’m not sure how much he actually hears because if I had to listen to my whining nagging voice I sure has hell wouldn’t stay in bed because I would welcome a chance to go to school and get away from it! And it’s not as bad as it was when he was in the second grade and I had to hold him down and force his shoes on him, carrying him to the car. Once he went to school in jammies. Because I‘m just that mean. This morning, he managed to get dressed and hopefully brushed his teeth and was sorta kinda awake he comes into the family room where I’m doing something emergent on the computer like checking in to see if my Fb friends have purchased sheep dogs for their farms or they have managed to “ice” someone in Mafia wars when I hear a very terse young man voice bark at me: “Let’s go.” Not, “hey mom I’m ready” or “Mom can you please drive me to school now?” And certainly not: “Mom, sorry you will have to speed on the highway to get me to school on time but it’s time to leave. I should have rolled out of bed when the alarm went off.”

I ignored the terse command because I’m usually not the friendliest person in the morning, either.(I know everyone is reeling with the shock,, I’ll wait here until you gather your senses) I come by my morning nature naturally but my father makes me and Beav look like Little Mary and John Sunshine. He was like the meanest grouch in the world before work. I always hoped he would wake up to a civilized state by the time he got to work. When I say mean, I don’t mean he would start the day out by beating us or hurling insults at us. No. He would sit and glower at the Today Show and offer monosyllabic comments in Jane Pauly‘s direction and grunt at me and mom. When I was in high school I would sit at the breakfast table with him; mom would putter in the kitchen and I would try my level best to be conversant with them even though I was half asleep and the 36 electric rollers jammed into my scalp didn’t help elevate my mood either. Besides that I had HEAVY things on my mind like…should I have lunch with Donna or Paul because if I had lunch with Paul we could watch All My Children at his house and his mom would make us something really good…but if I had lunch with Donna we could go to the mall and skip fourth period but that would involve lying to the attendance secretary and just how afflicted with menstrual cramps can one girl be…would anyone notice my new blouse and did my jeans make my ass look cute or flat and was Keith really interested in me or was he interested in me to get to Amy because everyone was interested in Amy anyhow and why should I bother because it was all going to end in a big explosion of heartbreak like everything else had ended this past summer ... So given my mood state any given morning of my senior year why not bait the hell out of my dad with incendiary remarks about how I thought Jimmy Carter was doing a great job .

I was poking a sleeping dog with a stick. An old sleeping dog with a sharp stick. An old sleeping dog who had been abused by mean people when it was a puppy with a stick. An old sleeping dog who had been abused by mean people when it was a puppy left in the cold to starve with a stick.

Poke poke poke…I think Jimmy Carter* is cool and what he is doing in the middle east is cool.

GRRRRR noises, comments about Southern Baptists as president,…hick farmer…democrats…ruined the economy…

Pokepokepoke I think Israel is wrong…”

“GRRRR…1948...how can you think that…it‘s their land”

PokePOKEPOKE“The cold war is stupid and pointless. No one is going to nuke anyone. It‘s just a waste of money.”

Have you ever seen someone breathe fire? I know my kids have seen me do it. Beav saw me do it yesterday after he auditioned for The Most Ungrateful Teenager Of The Year Award (the boy nailed it too, he made Wally look like the Dali Lama and Sister Theresa’s love child) Anyhow, it was at this point I would make some sort of peacenik dove remark completely uninformed by any reality other than knowing I would get my dad’s attention and he would breath fire at me.

By the time we were finished establishing which side of the aisle we were one; my dad had me burning the flag and I had him lobbing missiles at Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan. My mother started referring to breakfast as World War Three. What she didn’t realize is I always started my early morning diatribe against the war machine just to see if I could get him to string a sentence together first thing in the morning. Just to see if he was paying attention because when I was 17, I was three.

So now when I hear Beav say in his barky little man voice: “Let’s go!” I hear my father and instead of getting upset with Beav, I laugh, because I would rather the commute to school not resemble Breakfast Wars 1978.

Dad and I still go at it. In 2003 I almost asked him to leave my house because he was going on and on and on about how great George Bush was. Just like an old dog that had been poked with a stick one too many times and exacts Cujoesque revenge on his abuser. Karma’s a cruel bitch sometimes, isn’t she? And this summer I almost put the old man on my email filter because he insisted on sending me emails about how Obama wants him to sit before a death committee because the Neurontin he takes for his terrible neuropathic pain is costing Medicare too much money. Looks like I’m getting poked with my own stick.

The other stick I’m getting poked at is The Messy Room stick. My mother would threaten me with the Front Lawn Humiliation. We would go around and around like Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin on the way to Camp David because I had not developed the fine motor skills necessary to hang up my clothing after I had had it on for three minutes and decided it was what I wanted to wear. I was threatened with all sorts of things, mean notes about taking my clothes to Goodwill or never sewing for me again or--her favorite threat--putting everything on the front lawn. Now I was clueless and thoughtless when I was seventeen but I wasn’t stupid. I would have to be so dumb it burned if I thought she was actually going to take the time to move all that crap on my floor to the front lawn. Really? It would be easier to just hang everything up in the closet. Yesterday, I was cleaning the house and audibly groaned when I saw Beav’s room. He’s normally relatively tidy. When me and Ward went to our first parent/teacher conference for Beav his tote was perfectly arranged. Scared the crap out of me, I flashed on a picture of a boy with blistered, bleeding hands from compulsive hand washing (oh don’t I wish that now) Of course the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree and I considered leaving the “front lawn” note but then I stopped a minute and thought about it. Screw the front lawn, I could take a picture of his room, post it on my Facebook page tagging it as a picture of him so it would show up on his wall. The shock and awe I thought this would inspire continues to make me cackle like an evil genius. Can you imagine? Much better than the lawn. Much. I may just file this away for future reference. Feel free to use this with your messy teenager or messy spouse. But I’m not sure this would be a great idea because Karmic justice could be served all over me if the kids took a picture of me screaming at them about something and posted it on their walls. Yeah…no.

The “My Parents Hate Me So They Bought Me The Crappiest Car Ever” karma is living at my house, too. Beav won Most Ungrateful Teenager Award yesterday when he got huffy with me about the 1990 Honda I will be giving him. Obviously, I’m giving him this crappy beater because I don’t love him. Why else would I ruin his life? It couldn’t possibly be because I can’t afford to buy him a car with the magic checkbook that makes all his dreams come true. (I think my checkbook is magic because without fail there is always enough to provide what we need with a little left over for what we want. But that is a subject for another blog entry) The Honda has been a source of consternation since last winter; when Wally decided buying the Honda was all part of my diabolical plan to ruin his life. The Girl suggests we keep it forever and give it to Wally or Beav’s kid as a present. The grandkid would point out what an awesome relic it was and be grateful--tearful even-- as I cast a withering stare with my filmy and rheumy eyes towards the once thankless boy who is now a middle aged man with his own unappreciative son or daughter. Besides that? Every teenager needs to start out their driving life with a crappy car. The car at the top was my second car and it was nice compared to the first car: The Stupid Death Machine Pinto who’s only claim to fame was a decent 8 Track tape deck. I’m still not completely convinced that car is why I wasn’t the most popular girl in school my junior year.

After discovering I was ruining his life via the Honda, Beav told me what he wanted for Christmas and It’s a good thing Beav didn’t see my face when he assured me the PS 3 is no longer $700 but a paltry $300. But he assured me he doesn’t need 120 gigs of gaming memory, just 80. What a magnanimous boy I’m raising. And what a relief it’s NOT as expensive as it was this summer! Too bad it’s what I spend on both boys each Christmas. I guess I’m going to have to live with his Whoville like disappointment when he wakes up and imagines The Grinch stole his PS 3 and left behind crappy gifts. Please excuse me while I pat myself on the back because I had a What Would Jesus Do moment versus a What Would June Do moment after he gushed his great news of all the money I was saving this winter. Instead of setting fire to his dreams, I simply mouthed to the back of his sweet dear head: “Oh. My. God. Where is the pod you crawled out of and why don’t you find that nice kid Beav and bring him back here because I don’t like this current boy who claims he is my youngest son.” If I had allowed June to respond, the verbal flash fire would have destroyed our family room. Feelings would have been hurt and Beav probably would have run away from home. Or worse. He would have been completely oblivious to my ire and asked for some other crazy expensive shit. Like a rocket ship or a pony.

My final crime against He Who Is Self-Entitled was the audible gasp over his eight hundred dollar camp dream. Eight. Hundred. Dollars. For camp. One week of camp. Not a month of camp. Young Life Camp. Jesus camp. I don’t need to dust off my New Testament to see that Jesus didn’t charge more than my share of the mortgage to be a member of his flock. Now some of his nefarious priests did in the late 15th century but we live post reformation and it doesn’t cost 800 bucks to love the lord. That’s free. And for a tank of gas I can drive him up Floyd Hill to a lovely trailhead where he can take a walk and bask in the glory of nature for about 20 bucks. Fifteen bucks if we drive the Honda.
















*in the Old Man's defense: he volunteered for Habitat For Humanity over the last few years and thinks Jimmy Carter has done great things since his presidency.

A letter To My Son

collage by Tim Lukeman

Wally,
It’s so hard to stay out of our own way, isn’t it? I have been in my way most of my life. It is my fervent prayer your reaction to the pressure of the test today will help you see the value of staying out of your own way. Usually the biggest stumbling block is ourselves. It is not the size or the length of your arms but thinking something is wrong with the size and the length of your arms. Remember your cousin is taller and just as thin when he went into the Marines and talked himself into being able to do the push ups necessary to graduate. I think you have yourself psyched out and have convinced yourself you can’t do this. I believe with conditioning you will be able to do these push-ups. But you won’t find out if you quit in the middle of the test. I know this won’t happen again. I think the price of this self-sabotage was so great that you learned a hard but very important lesson.

I talked to Beav this evening and then your dad. Don’t worry about the Beav not being proud of you or disappointed in you. He was so sad for you he was about to cry. He understands how much this means to you. Your dad took it well and has a lot of questions I tried to answer. Questions about graduation in January, what happens next, that sort of thing. I tried to answer them the best I could.

I’m humbled you called me first. I’m so thankful you trust me but I am so terribly sorry my first reaction was one of dramatic panic. I hate that part of my personality. It wasn’t what you needed, what you needed to hear was how I know you are disappointed but you also realized what a stupid mistake quitting in the middle of the run was. You needed to hear what big medicine this is and what a transforming situation this will be for you and how you approach challenging situations in the future. Remember how I have always told you I believe things don’t come to you as easily as other people because you are learning what it is like to work really hard for something and therefore you will appreciate and hold dear all you achieve? This kind of perseverance is the stuff great men are made of. My guess is you won’t quit in the midst of a race or a run, ever again. You took this setback as a man, too. You didn’t blame anyone else; you took full responsibility for quitting without mentioning how muddy it was or cold or whatever like you would have about nine weeks ago. I am so proud of you and how grown up you are and I am blessed to be your mom.

Your graduation is simply delayed by a few weeks. You can come home at Christmas, we can fatten you up and you can work out everyday to strengthen you upper body. I have no doubt you will graduate in January because I know whenever God closes a door, he opens a bigger door. Two others in your platoon, but they also will get 24 hours off. Vermontmom is still coming for the weekend and if you aren’t too embarrassed she has a message for you from me. I‘m glad you have 24 hours off. You can eat a meal and linger over it as long as you want.

Please don‘t beat yourself over this. Just pick yourself up and keep training. That you didn’t quit and ask to come home during reception or when you were in hospital with pneumonia tells me you ARE Army Strong. You just need to prove it to yourself by continuing with your training. OMG do you realize that on Aug 31st you couldn’t even do five proper push ups, your running time wouldn’t pass, you didn’t know how to dismantle, clean and fire an M whatever-it-is you carry around. You hadn’t jumped off a 35 foot tower (that I know of) climbed a big wall, ran five miles with 70 pounds on your back; nor did you know how to start an IV, dress a wound and identify someone going into shock. That’s a lot to learn in eight weeks! It makes my head spin and I’m used to multitasking with things falling apart around me.

The Girl and I discussed what we would make for you while you are at home. Christmas dinner will be pot roast, garlic mashed potatoes, the usual vegetables and carrot cake. I’m off both Christmas Eve and Christmas day; I’m so excited about this, too. It will be good to be with you and spend some time together as a family. Beav has missed you more than he will admit. I can‘t wait to see Kipper‘s reaction when you come home.


Please take care of yourself, your heart, your soul and your body. Have a wonderful day off on Saturday and laugh a few times. The laughter will free your spirit.

I love you.


Mom



Today’s Inspiration:

YOUR HUT IS ON FIRE
With all that is going on in our lives at this time, I'm sure at times
we all feel a little like this. Read all the way to the end.

The only survivor of a shipwreck was washed up on a small, uninhabited
island. He prayed feverishly for God to rescue him. Every day he
scanned the horizon for help, but none seemed forthcoming.

Exhausted, he eventually managed to build a little hut out of
driftwood to protect him from the elements, and to store his few
possessions.

One day, after scavenging for food, he arrived home to find his little
hut in flames, with smoke rolling up to the sky. He felt the worst had
happened, and everything was lost. He was stunned with disbelief,
grief, and anger. He cried out, 'God! How could you do this to me?'

Early the next day, he was awakened by the sound of a ship approaching
the island! It had come to rescue him! 'How did you know I was here?'
asked the weary man of his rescuers. 'We saw your smoke signal,' they
replied.

The Moral of This Story:

It's easy to get discouraged when things are going badly, but we
shouldn't lose heart, because God is at work in our lives, even in the
midst of our pain and suffering. Remember that the next time your
little hut seems to be burning to the ground; it just may be a smoke
signal that summons the Grace of God.

Faded Photographs

Even though I have a lot of blog worthy ideas swirling around in my head; I promised myself this week, before I launch back into the world of nursing, I will finish Wally’s scrapbook. It’s about time isn’t it? I thought it would take maybe six months of diligent work but it took me eighteen months! I kept hitting creative or emotional walls and then came summer with the advent of my other writing project and gardening. The picture on the blog is the last image in the album. It was a very weird picture of him standing next to my dresser in my messy bedroom when he was two. Why I took his picture at that moment I’ll never remember. What makes this picture strange is it is triple exposed and in the shadows you can see Christmas as well as a fragment from an image on a deserted highway outside of Taos. Even in the 90’s with point and shoot cameras it was hard to double expose film. This film was exposed three times. I remember talking to the guy at the camera store who told me chances are the film didn’t advance in the camera and it was a small miracle any images were visible.. Much less a collage of images which capture our busy life, and at the time, happy life as a family. The Beav came downstairs Tuesday night when I was laying out the last pages and asked me if this was Wally’s Christmas present. I laughed the idea off because, please, would a 19 year old really want a baby book and scrapbook of their school years as a gift? Beav assured me that Wally has changed so much over the last two months that he would probably think it was “cool” I had finished the book. When I finished this afternoon, I was a little choked up like someone who had finished their first marathon. It was a relief to have completed the task but at the same time I was really saying good-bye to the little boy.

One boy album down, one to go.

I think Beav is secretly hoping I start on his book this winter but I’m a tired of looking at little boy pictures so I think the next project will be to put the very old and very fragile family photos Dad recently gave me in an album. Just a simple acid free album, no embellishments and the journaling will be limited to identifying (if I can) people in the photographs. Some of these photos are unspeakable funny and sweet: my cousin and Sister playing with Hula Hoops, baby me pulling Sister’s hair, my mother and her sisters over the years grouped together, the body language apparent which sisters had just fussed with one another. Many of the photos I’ve seen over and over again but one picture was a surprise. It’s a candid snapshot of my father and mother standing together, he is standing behind her and his face is almost shadowed by her hair blowing back. They are bundled up and probably huddled close against a chilly Kansas wind. Their hands are gently intertwined one with the other making this beautiful candid photo sweetly intimate. I love stealing glimpses at the past before I was born. I also have a set of photos from a particularly rowdy party my parents had when I was about two. Who knows where I was that night, probably locked in my room with my eight year old sister supervising me, giving me Kool-aid and animal crackers when she wasn’t trying to convince me to stick my head between the very wide slats. I’m kidding I was probably not in a playpen but playing with a screwdriver and an electrical outlet [wink]*) Anyhow, those crazy kids were having fun, drinking their very strong cocktails and smoking their strong cigarettes. Those were the days, weren’t they when you could put your two year old in a play pen, get drunk and smoke. Damn, I was born too late.



*for the record, I was at my grandmother’s house and was no doubt being indulged by her and teased by my older cousins.

WheEEee!!! And Away We GoOOoooOOoo!

picture from halifaxparkour.com

Wally leaves for Georgia in twenty-four days, his date was bumped up by six weeks, so I gulped when he told me. I've known he was leaving home to join the military for almost a year but think the date being pushed from July to October put off the inevitable: he was leaving home to learn how to fight in a war. A stupid war, I believe we can't win. I have tried to live as an example of fighting for what you believe and walking your talk. Where I failed with my kids is not teaching them to walk my talk. (I'm joking a little) I'm proud of him; proud he wants to serve his country but I wish it were in a less dangerous capacity. I made the mistake of seeing this film. Not the best choice in movie entertainment a few weeks before your eldest son leaves for the army. But I'm glad I saw it because it confirms what I have believed for years: we are the terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan. Knowing how strongly I feel about this, a few of my friends have asked me: "How can you let him do this?" How can I not. Number one, he's an adult. What am I going to do? Lock him in his room?

All in all I had good parents. They had their issues--who the hell doesn't--but they did a lousy job at supporting our choices and their lack of support led me to make even more horrible choices (case in point: my first first marriage). If they had not shunned me but tried to understand who I was and what I wanted in my life; things would have been so much easier for me. Namely, no first marriage. Luckily, their mistakes with me and my sister have taught me to step back and allow my children to be individuals.

The other reason I'm glad I saw The Hurt Locker is I realized my son, like me, is driven by adrenaline. Watching the specialists deactivate bombs and assess who was "friendly" and who wasn't was exhilarating. As much as I bitch about how busy my job is...the expectations are unrealistic...blah blah whine blah... if I'm not dealing with some sort of rapidly changing situation I have a tendency to get bored. I noticed this on Saturday when we had a "normal" day. No admissions, no discharges, no "events". By three o'clock I was reveling in the way it felt to be completely frustration free. By four I was bored. When I was a young nurse, just a few years older than my son, I was an adrenaline junkie. It wasn't a good shift unless I was taking care of the sickest baby in the unit or going to the high risk deliveries. Sick, eh? People ask me why don't I work someplace less dynamic and less stressful, like telephonic case management or wellness counseling or--my favorite "kill me now" job--a doctor's office. No thanks, I would rather put a sharp object in my eye. Eureka! Despite our differing politics, the apple didn't fall too far from the tree. I can at least warn him that adrenaline junkies burn out, sometimes in a flaming spectacle of life changing PTSD.

The Beav was born on the 49th anniversary of Hiroshima and by the 52nd, my life felt like a bomb had hit it. Oh. My. God. The boy was a handful. Because I didn't give him to the gypsies when he was three, I've been gifted with a delightfully even tempered teenager. As I type, Mr. Busy is on his way to the DMV to get his permit. Looks like this fall and winter, I will be revisiting Adventures In Driving. (there's an adrenaline ride if there ever was one!) It was on Beav's sixth birthday when his brother told him about Hiroshima and how we were going to name him Enola Gray. Of course, this brought on a chorus of tattling: "Mom, Wally's teasin' me!" Luckily, the teasing has stopped. I can't say I miss it, either. Now Mr. Busy keeps himself occupied by upgrading his computer on his own and jumping off walls. His methods for adrenaline rush.

I am amazed how much Wally has matured in the last seven months he has lived with his father. The other day we were in the kitchen and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Wally wave his hand quickly towards Beav's head (like he was going to knock off his cap). My conditioned reflex was to drop my voice a register and bark in my finally honed K-Mart mom voice: "Leave your brother alone!!" I got as far as a barked: "Leave--" when they burst out laughing," Gawhd mom, he was brushing away a fly! We don't pick on each other anymore!" Too bad they were laughing too much to hear my explanation that a fourteen year habit is hard to break.

Sometimes parents forget to grow along with their children. I think this is another way my parents failed. My father still thinks I'm twelve. He is in a complete f**kin'' uproar over the the health care bill because Obama is gonna take away his medicine and urge him to just die already. I've tried to explain Palliative Care and how it figures in to the new health care plan; how it doesn't mean he won't be eligible for medicines due to his advanced age. Years ago, when my mother was having open heart surgery and I was able to explain the indication for each gizmo attached to her and every med going into her body, he was stunned I knew so much. It makes me insane when he asks me a question and then doubts my response. I think the next time he asks me a question, I'm going to make up the answer just to see if he fact checks it! But what joy he will experience when he gets to correct me. What affirmation he will feel that I am still an ignorant child!

It looks like my next touchstone in parenting is remembering my boys are growing up and have the capacity to manage (gulp) deadly weapons. That would be the Really Big Rifle and Really Powerful Side Arm in Wally's care and my truck under the direction of the Beav.

This makes me nervous.

Beav's goal in video driving games is to run over buildings and pedestrians until it all ends in a fiery crash.

Wally's goal in Halo is to stay alive.

I think I'm more worried about Beav and the truck.

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

I walked into my father’s house yesterday and it hit me like a ton of bricks, she is not coming back. In February I wasn’t gob smacked with grief like I was (obviously) in October. Probably because I was too busy planning my father’s birthday party and had just a few days to focus on that. But yesterday, when I walked in there was something about the house; the smell, the feel of it that overwhelmed me with a wave of lose, sadness and--yes--self-pity. My mother was dead. All trace of her was gone in the house. I had no mother. Mother’s day was pretty much like this too. Had I known how I was going to react to the Hallmark holiday in May, I would have planned differently and worked or slept all day. But I couldn’t sleep through yesterday. Or maybe yesterday was more difficult than that day in February because TG couldn’t come with us and this is the first time since we have lived together we haven’t traveled together. That I missed her on top of missing my mother threatened to overwhelm me with grief.

Last night, while Dad was grilling after I sacrificed blood to the sacred mosquito we started talking about Sister’s trials and tribulations in the dating world. I made some offhand remark about spending a lot of time in therapy. He was incredulous I had spent two days a week for a year in therapy; that part of my decision to live in a terrible little rental house was so I could afford CBT and get off the antidepressants that were making me crazier. At first, I was miffed he had forgotten all of this. Then I realized: he probably never knew about it because I never told him and my mother thought it was a confidence and didn’t give it away. Until October fifteenth, I could count on one finger the number of times I chose to tell my father something important before I told my mother. Now he is the only parent I have to confide in and it hasn’t been all that bad, either. Once upon a time my father and I talked but we discussed the things I was comfortable with like my career and investments. Now I find myself engaging him in conversations about all the things my mom and I shared; family and friends of family news, travel plans, house plans…everything short of how erratic my periods are and the cute shoes I found on sale. What a gift to discover this relationship. Too bad it took losing one parent to discover the other.

I still expect to see my mother as I turn a corner in this house. Early this morning, Dad and The Beav went fishing and I had the house to myself for a few hours. It was so terrifically quiet and the first time I had been alone in the house in years. My grief felt unsettling and frankly a bit of an over reaction, it’s been over eight months since she diedwhy am I weepy about it now? Why did I feel the same emptiness I felt on October 16th when I walked into the house twenty four hours after she died. My father has a large picture of her prominately displayed, she’s standing near the water on Mikonos a few years ago, the last overseas trip she took. It’s not a very good picture of her, she looks tired and I can see the pain in her face, around her eyes, I sense her breathlessness as she tried to make a one last trip before admitted she needed oxygen 24/7 and was in unbearable pain due to her osteoporosis. I felt a buried well of loneliness for her open and then I realized living 800 plus miles away from home wasn’t helping my process. My sister and my father get to live everyday with reminders of my mother. Me? Because we saw each other just a few times a year, I have days every few months when I miss her tremendously. A one step forward three steps back approach to grief. But isn’t it part of my nature to make everything as difficult as I possibly can? I coped today by staying out of the house as much as I could when Dad and the boy were gone.

Once I was away from the house, I relaxed and was filled with the pure zen joy of being in the place I long to return to. I also realized how far I had come to be a person who is intrinsically happy. I am now a naturally happy person whether I live in a city where the Rockies meet the Midwest or in my home town or--God forbid--Lubbock Texas, I will be happy. (Lubbock is stretching it a bit, I don’t really want to try this theory out in with a return to West Texas) Because wherever you go, there you are. Despite doing things the hard way sometimes, being prone to “the glass is half full but dangerously close to falling off the edge of the table: I am deeply happy and content with my life. Once I realized this it was easier to step back into my mother’s house and own all my unaddressed grief.

Today was unspeakably hot with the gift of a sudden hard rain. Where I come from a rain like this cools things off. But here the humidity shot up to about 1100% and it felt as if we were in Houston or Florida or a Swedish sauna. After dinner, The Beav, mirroring my earlier restlessness, asked if we could go somewhere and “do“ something. I was feeling hemmed in after the rain and wanted to be outside in the sauna because it’s novel enough to experience my lungs adequately filled with oxygen but it’s a bonus to have hydrated skin. Besides that, I love the earthy cedar smell after the rain. I suggested we take a drive and see what had replaced a lovely old farm at the end of a road near the ‘rents house. When my parents built their little house it was in the last subdivision on the road. Now I jokingly refer to their neighborhood as the “ghetto” of one of the most expensive and exclusive bedroom communities in the state. Over the last thirty years, horse farms, old homesteads and densely wooded creek beds and a river bottom have been sacrificed for million dollar McMansions and McRanches. I am prone to sentimentality so you can only imagine the wistful feeling I have when I drive and remember the wild spaces. I’m such a sap, I can turn an errand to Walgreens into a trip down memory lane. Tonight wasn’t any different as we meandered down the roads, me lolling in how much I love this place despite the ridiculousness of the traffic, the heat and the Bubbas. The Beav didn’t even roll his eyes too much when I tried to explain DogMan to him and showed him the creek bottoms we would visit as kids trying to catchh a glimpse of the maniac who undoubtedly had a bloody hook and an appetite for teenaged girls. We drove down country roads which have blessedly missed the onslaught of nouvelle riche homes and marveled at the ground fog’s ethereal presence in the bottoms. Beautiful and eerie, I think we both expected to see the specter and Beav freely admitted it was “creepy“ at dusk with the fog hanging onto the dense canopy of trees. I wanted to walk along the creek but I’m very deathly afraid of snakes and boggy dusk is a recipe for copperheads and water snakes. So I stayed in the car on the road over the bridges, keeping the windows down so we could breath the rich air. I took us down roads I haven’t driven since I was 17. I felt a great sense of peace as I the curves and turns automatically not really sure where we were going after the DogMan Tour. But after we turned down a road partially closed due to the rain, I knew where we were going. A place I had forgotten about until tonight. The zebra at the horse farm. Why I had never taken the boys when we had visited is beyond me.

Back in the day there were several zebras at this horse farm and after we were bored with looking for Dog Man, we would stop at the side of the road, calling to them to lure them closer so we could take a good look at them. (Damn, meddling kids that we were, teasing the farm animals!) As I approached the fence I prayed tonight was NOT the night for charging and he would stay a safe distance. God agreed it would be undignified for my child to see me squealing like a girl as I flailed across the road to the car so the zebra stayed on his side of the pasture.
“Why’d you stop?“
“Zebra”
“Wha--? Na Ah, there is NOT a zebra over there, what kind of zebra, a real zebra? Sure mom. . .“
After a minute of: “Not over there but there“ type directions he saw it, the zebra hanging out in the pasture, contemplating the grass as he munched it. Fascinated by this phenomenon in suburbia, Beav lost his teenaged veneer and composure for a few minutes as he marveled at the animal and tried to fathom how and why a rancher would keep a zebra on a horse farm a mile from his GrandDad‘s house. His enthusiasm was infectious and I became fascinated with the beast all over again. I got to catch a glimpse of my little boy tonight. For this alone, Gram would have loved sharing the zebra with him. But the boy was soon replaced by the young man texting his best friend as I pulled back onto the road and headed for home.

Sitting On The Fence

photo by Jeff Greenburg date unknown


This week my horoscope mentions

It's a ripe time to revise and rework your past, Pisces. I'll trust you to make the ultimate determination about how best to do that, but here are some possibilities. 1. Revisit a memory that has haunted you, and do a ritual that resolves it and brings you peace. 2. Return to the scene of an awkward anomaly that remains unsettled, and finally do a duty you neglected. 3. Make your way back to a dream you wandered away from prematurely, and either re-commit yourself to it, or put it to rest for good. 4. Dig up and contemplate a secret that has been festering, and come to a decision about what you can do to heal it.

I spent at least five figures in therapy so I’m not haunted by memories; I haven’t a clue what he means by an “awkward anomaly”; I don’t do secrets, so the only thing festering is what I’m giving TG for Christmas next year. By process of elimination, my job this summer is revisiting a dream and moving aside the fear of putting together a fiction written in no less than three notebooks and one dream journal over the last twenty plus years. I have wrapped months of energy around my fears.

The first and foremost fear is the whole thing sucks and I’m wasting my time with this old idea. Next out of the basket is I subject my closest friends with readings and they feel bad when they have to tell me it sucks. Years ago, I participated in a disasterous workshop with part of this piece. The writer guy--a real Bukowski type--hated it; thought it was a piece of crap; basically told me this would be on the list of things he is condemned to read in Hell. The criticism was particularly painful as he salivated over the other woman’s piece. She was one of those wispy women prone to wearing long flowing scarves and equally long flowing hair; her voice soft but emphatic when she read. Her piece was a story poem, a phantasmagorical fruit salad of magic realism meets surrealism meets Jane Austen. I thought it was a mess against my straight up piece of narrative. I think it was just a few months ago, I realized Bukowski workshopped with his dick. Perhaps he would have liked my story better if I had been more like Jori Graham‘s disciple: young, pretty and eager to get stoned with him. In hindsight I can’t believe I let this sorry old man wannabe Beat poet take away my pen and my notebook . Leave it to me to be silenced by an old and lecherous hippie.

Aside from this blog, emails, Facebook updates and random chat on Table Talk (link) I don’t write much. I can use the time sucks as excuses. I can use my kid as an excuse. I can use the house and the endless chores as an excuse. But I’m out of excuses. The only thing Beav needs me for is my driving, banking and cooking skills; the big house projects are done (!) and the nuts and bolts of house work takes maybe four hours a week.

My other excuses rest in the end product. This will all be a waste of time because print is dead and the only people being published are writers like Nora Roberts and that chick lit Shopping/dating/I’m a fabulous wreck of a Gen Y woman. This will be a waste of time because ultimately, it will suck and no one would read it anyhow. Ok, my family might read it and say: “Well at least you tried hard” or some such platitude which ultimately means: “don’t quit that day job cuz you need to eat!” Finally, why would anyone give a shit about this yarn I‘ve been spinning in my head. But my very favorite excuse: someone wrote a lovely book and used part of my title(link). The title I've imagined for twenty years. People will see my title just before her’s on the Amazon list and will think: “That woman copied Azar Nafisi’s lovely title!” (as if it’s already published, see excuse number one)

The fence was already getting uncomfortable before Rob told me the stars were aligned just right. Before the star’s blessing I had promised myself the next four months of habitual writing. Not daily, that’s a recipe for disaster. The only things I do consistently every day are brush my teeth and whine. Rather, I have set aside time three days a week to write in four hour blocks. If our patient census remains low like it did last year, I’m devoting my call days to writing. Writing what could be a doomed novel is more productive than sitting on my hands waiting to be called into the hospital. Hell, with all those notebooks to combine, I have enough material to edit this summer without generating any new ideas.

September I will evaluate if it’s time to put this dream on the shelf or proceed onward. Years ago, during my other lifetime, I read Canfield’s The Aladdin Factor and I learned an exquisitely simple formula: If I ask for something there is a 50/50 chance the answer will be yes. If I don‘t ask, the answer is always ‘no’.

It’s scary to ask for what you want. Much like standing en point atop a picket fence.

photo by David Street 1998

My Glass? It's half full but sits precarously close to the edge of the table

Bringing people Figgy Pudding and decking the halls is always a stretch for this Grinchy McScrooge and because this year has been wrought with challenges; I'm slogging my way towards next Thursday. Like many people, I use this time of year to take stock and plan for the next year so since Thanksgiving, I have rehashed the bad things rather than rehearse all that is good about my life. Last week, I hit bottom when I had an anxiety attack because I had to unexpectedly leave the house. A simple trip to the grocery store turned into an ordeal. Scary, eh? I’ve been down the agoraphobic path and it isn’t one I want to revisit. Teetering on the brink of a depression that would make 1999 look like a case of the blues and 1979 a trip to Disneyland; I pulled out my trusty copy of Power of Intention and Feel Good Workbook as an attempt to recreate what happened in 2008.

1. February: After we Returned from Mexico, Ward kicked Wally out of the house. Wally was devastated, threatening to spin out of control and frightened; I was angrier at Ward and Alexis than I‘have ever been in my life. I felt punished because I took a vacation.

What really happened: Wally and I grew closer. I tapped into strength I didn’t know I had and was able to maturely put aside my anger and negotiate terms with Ward and Alexis.

2. June: We were robbed and with my computer, most of our jewelry was taken. The worst part was sweet Kipper was traumatized. We lost sentimental pieces of no value to anyone but ourselves. My extensive and valuable collection of vintage jewelry, gone. The process of documenting what was lost: going through pictures and sending them to strangers at the insurance company felt more invasive than the break in.

The other side of this: The Girl had hidden her late mother’s wedding band and some jewelry I gave her last Christmas. The robbers managed to miss a one of a kind custom necklace. More importantly, I learned we have wonderful neighbors who stopped by to make sure we were OK and extend their sympathy after word got out we were robbed. Two of my co-workers gave me lovely pieces of jewelry just because they had heard about the robbery. (I still get teary when I think of those gifts.) Most importantly, no one was home when it happened. Finally, we have another tax write-off.

3. June: My assigned unit closed due to low census and my income dropped by 10% until just recently. Not only was my unit closed but there wasn‘t enough work for any of us. With gas at an all time high and food costing an arm and a leg, the economic picture at Chez Cleaver was grim.

Flip side: I only worked two days a week and had at least two days a week to do whatever I pleased. It was like retirement! I had time to write, mess around with art projects, scrapbook and just hang out. I discovered the joy of Pilates and Yoga. What did I do without? I stopped making unnecessary trips in my elderly gas guzzler, I practiced the economy of: “Why am I buying this? Is it necessary or am I fulfilling some other need? “ Seriously, did the Cleaver’s do without? Nope.

4. October: My mother died.

Another version: My mother is no longer suffering chronic physical pain nor is she suffering under the weight of guilt surrounding her 40 plus nicotine addiction and how it altered her quality of life and along with it my father’s quality of life. I was blessed with reconnecting with family and longtime friends. I realized how much people care for us through their acts of kindness and caring. Most importantly, I fell in love with The Girl all over again.

5. November: The economy completely melted down and took 50% of my retirement savings with it.

The big picture: I am still employed and Obama is going to be president and Clinton will be Secretary of the State. Life is looking sweet.

6. November: My son joined the military. He wants to join the medical corp and work with Marines on the battlefield.

What really happened: He has a sense of purpose and figured out all on his own without wasting five figures, school is not his gig. (I previously beat this point to a pulp)

These are just the big things. This year was one tiny cluster fuck after another. Lucky for you rehashing them bores the crap out of me, much less anyone reading this. It was like the Universe was Hell bent on gas lighting me. It could be worse: We are healthy, employed and I love my family more than ever. And best of all? For the first time EVER in his WHOLE life, Beav gets up for school without drama. Before? It was as if I had asked him to cut his arm off with a dull knife or clean the fish tank.

One of my imaginary friends linked this video a few weeks ago and the expressions worn by Hardrock, Cocoa, Joe and Santa match how I’m feeling about Christmas. I swear, Hardrock looks like he is doing community service time.


It isn't any surprise, after losing a couple of weeks to melancholia and then seven days working away from melancholia; I’m a bit behind the eight ball as far as Christmas preparation goes. Even though I lost those precious days off, I wouldn’t back away from commitment to making half of the presents. I hit my crack dealers on Tuesday, and yesterday was an arts and crafts extravaganza at my house.


My gifts rock. But I’m not posting pictures; I don’t want the gifts leaked to my sister and I haven’t a clue if she knows about my blog. The buttons offer a hint. I love my gifts so much, I considered getting her a gift card and keeping these things for myself.

My family arrives next week and I’m preparing for four additional people in my house. I’m not one for a jamboree so this is rattling me a bit. Given the tenuousness of my recent emotional state; the urge to take to my bed a la Alice James has occurred to me on a couple of occasions. I battle The Urge To Nap by kicking into Type A mode; lists are made, tasks divided. Just to make things more interesting, my unit has reopened and I’m scheduled to work the next three days.

Naturally.