Alecto's Ophelia

Speaking the unspeakable

I have been asked if I'm going to blog this and I'm not sure I can. There are two things and the second is much easier to write so I'll write it first. Last night one of my six chickens was murdered savagely by what can only be raccoons. I'm not exaggerating the brutality of the death. She was dragged from the coop (I think they lifted it right off the ground), over the fence, across the lawn and into the swamp shrieking the entire way and leaving a swath of blood and feathers that will have to be cleaned up before Little Girl comes home this evening. I was afraid NoMans was going to sit out there in his bathrobe for the remainder of the night throwing rocks but we put the dog in the pen instead and despite his diminutive size (he weighs all of 22 pounds) he sure does have a deep and ferocious sounding bark. And before anyone gets up in my face about it, yes I do know what those raccoons might have done to my dog but they didn't and he won't have to stay out there again.  Tonight the remaining five girls will stay in Homer's old puppy crate in the shed (which is fort knox) and the new fort knox will be delivered by fork lift on Tuesday of next week. There. That's that and I just wish I wasn't so damn upset about it but I am because I should have known better.

Here's the other part. The first part. My son came home last night. I called him on Tuesday because it was Cletus's birthday and he actually answered the phone. I asked him to come to her party but he was working and I asked him to come to dinner last night and he said he would and he did and I kept my judgmental mother mouth firmly shut and it was lovely. 

Doesn't sound like such a hard thing to write does it? Well, unless you're me and you were beginning to believe you were never going to see or hear from him again (it's been 17 months) it wouldn't sound so hard at all.

I can barely breathe and if I start crying now I will probably never stop. So listen, any of you out there not speaking or being spoken to by someone you love maybe now would be a good time to get over it. Seriously. We are all any of us ever has. Good, bad or indifferent.

p.s. there are a boatload of little baby eggs. we are eating all of them as fast as we can.

Somebody's Mother

Some things are beyond comprehension. Yesterday we got an email alert from the school system which was followed up by a brief article in the online paper (not sure what will show up in print).

Yesterday somebody's mother lit herself on fire and burned to death in one of our baseball fields. Her body burned for approximately 30 minutes before she was discovered.

Unless it turns out very differently, evidence supports the belief that she poured five gallons of gasoline over her body and then lit a match. Somebody stopped at the park to have lunch, thought a mannequin was on fire and called the police to put it out. The police arrived with a fire extinguisher and discovered the mannequin was a person and that was that. The fire department arrived but there was nothing to do.

This is the parking lot in which we taught my daughter to drive a stick shift. This is the town where my children go to school. This is the park closest to my neighborhood with a few nice fields and a great swimming hole. This is my home and that was my neighbor. In a town our size anyone living here is your neighbor. This is a thing which in itself is so horrible most of us will not touch more than the very edges of comprehension. This is a thing which perhaps ought to have been noticed and interrupted before it ever got to the purchase of gasoline. This is a thing of unbearable violence. This is a statement of internal brutality. This is a thing I can't even imagine.

Yesterday somebody's mother lit herself on fire and burned to death in one of our baseball fields.

I am so sad.

Stone Soup and then some

Tammy has got a beautiful post up today on Stone Soup which is a book I didn't discover until young adulthood but have managed to obtain multiple copies over the years. Stone Soup is a story about creating abundance out of scarcity, about cooperation even in the case where maybe we don't care directly - or we are so focused on ourselves that we believe we have nothing to give.

I live in an incredibly wealthy community. I cannot stress enough what I mean by these words. In my small town of approximately 8,600 souls and maybe 2,500 families a 5,000 square foot home is modest and not much is thought about 10,000 feet and above. My 2,200 square foot Ranch is considered a shack.

I didn't move here to hobnob with the newly wealthy. I moved here for the space and the schools and I wasn't paying attention to the changes that occurred in the 20 years since I last lived in what used to be a farming and horse community. I'm still not sure how big a mistake I may or may not have made. I have conversations with my seven year old where I find myself consistently redirecting her observations from 'we live in a tiny house' to 'we live in exactly what we need and only what we need and even what we have is more than our share'. That's hard to digest when she visits her best friend's house. Cletus at sixteen does just fine.

Not everyone in my town has a lot of money. Not everyone in my town has enough to eat. We do not discuss this. As a matter of fact, we don't even look at it. Part of this is our elderly population. They paid $10,000 for their homes forty years ago and now pay nearly twice that in taxes. They don't have it. The other side of our poverty are families with young children. Given that we don't have any legal rentals you'd be quick to think that's not possible. It's more than possible, it's quite real.

Now, poverty is subjective but I define it within my current environment as not having the funds to heat your house or feed your children or keep the lights on or have a roof at all. Anything else is cream. I know, harsh, right? I also believe that poverty is entirely unnecessary. But I have a story; it wanders a bit, bear with me.

About 18 months ago one of Little Girl's day care providers was forced to take short term disability to recover from a significant illness. I believe that she went without pay for six weeks or more. This day care provider is part of the dwindling supply of town families who do not live in large houses, do not make great sums of money and often do live paycheck to paycheck. Six weeks without pay can be devastating depending on how close to the bone you live.

An anonymous collection was taken up to help the daycare provider. No amounts too large or too small, everything dumped in the secret box to be collected and passed on by the Director. We wrote a check for what we thought might be a week's salary hoping that maybe five or six other families might do the same. Or maybe half that, or maybe a day. It's not like we don't have it, right?

Here's what happened. Everybody else dropped checks for about $25 into the box and then everybody talked. Somebody was so scandalized, and yes, that's the word I mean, by what we'd done that we were publicly humiliated for 'throwing our money around.'  I am still embarrassed. It's one of the reasons we pulled Little Girl out of day care and hired the nanny. Eventually the neighbor across the street stopped saying mean things to us directly and things settled down.

In the mean time, our town ladies want to raise $300,000 for new theater seats for the high school auditorium. The old seats are 40 years old and boy are they comfy! We sure did know how to make theater seats 40 years ago! So anyway, they want to rip them out and put in new red velvet seats but our school budget doesn't have enough money because we've already allocated 1.8 million to the rest of the theater overhaul. So we're fund raising, right? $50 is the minimum donation, $200 gets your name on a little brick. $2,000 and up would be most seriously appreciated. I refused to give them any money on the grounds that I can't bear the thought of all those comfy seats in a landfill.

During Cletus's last concert we were asked, by public show of hands (by the choir director) to raise our hands if we had donated yet to the seat foundation. I did not raise my hand. I might have been the only person who did not raise my hand. My daughter was humiliated, I folded and asked my husband to write a check. I felt filthy.

Here's the really windy part.

While we were away there was an article in the local paper. I think it was on the front page. There is a photograph of a woman pushing a load of firewood donated to her family by the Kiwanis Club. It's how she heats her house. Her family's in deep shit. Seriously. We have a food pantry, not many people put food in it. It is often quite empty.

We missed the article but we got the email from one of Little Girl's room mothers. They were collecting again; a lot like the day care provider. We got a gift card at Whole Foods for one week of groceries and we sent it in with Little Girl as instructed. It was meant to be anonymous.

We got a phone call last night. The phone call was from the room mother who collected the money from the other parents. Our grocery card was equal to the sum of all other donations.

How much does that suck in a town with this much money?

In any event, she was very nice about it, just stunned. And she wanted permission to tell the woman where it came from. We reluctantly agreed because the reason the woman allowed the article to be written in the first place was to draw attention to what is occurring around us. I think it is better to be anonymous because then you don't risk anyone's pride or it's not about you, or something like that - I'm having trouble with all this.

Today, at work, my cell phone rang. I didn't recognize the number and normally I would not have answered but I did anyway and it was this woman. She called to tell me what happened. Everybody has a story, right? She needed to tell the story. After she told the story she asked me what she should do with the money because other people were hungry too. I told her that it was her money and entirely her decision. She said she thought about maybe keeping $50 of it and giving the rest to the food pantry. I said she should do what was right for her, that I just wanted to help. In the end she said she would give the whole thing to the food pantry; an equitable distribution to all. She wanted to know if she could print my name in the paper, that maybe other people would step up. I said OK because she asked me to and how the hell do you say no to somebody brave enough to put herself on the front page of the paper (and they snub her in town now too) and I didn't really mean it but I'll do it.

I don't want to be stoned on my front lawn for doing something so crass as to make somebody look past their red velvet theater chairs.

So back to the Stone Soup that Tammy made with her child (it looks really yummy too, rock and all). Call me a screaming idealist, but what if, with every weekly grocery purchase 10% of the grocery bill went to the food pantry shelf? How hard would that be? Or a windfall of carrots (stolen from CG's cake of course), or those extra tomatoes or greens or what have you? What if?

Really, people, how hard can this be? Please don't answer that. I cried into my keyboard for twenty minutes.

Running Amok

Things change, the world moves on.

I feel like I ought to be writing something utterly profound; there's certainly been enough profundity running amok in my head lately and I find I can't write. I don't find that I have nothing to write about. Instead I took a walk over to Madcap's site and discovered that she's written something so mind numbingly intense I couldn't even respond to it; not even enough to say, 'welcome back, great post'. It was a great post. What's even more stunning is the fifth comment down. MC, I don't know if you'll delete it or not but you've got to admit that it's quite powerful in it's timing.

MC asks in the context of Elie Weisel's experience of himself during his father's death in a concentration camp (Night), "If we can't hear, are we accountable? Who blames the sleeper for his dreams?"

The anonymous fifth comment down is so full of utterly incomprehensible vitriol and hate that you'd think it's enough to bring the cosmos crashing down around us in it's pointedness and passion alone. The juxtaposition of Elie Weisel's pointed moment of horror and guilt against the backdrop of a comment suggesting ultimately that we will indeed annihilate ourselves with collective rage leaves me breathless.

I'm sorry, MC, great post and welcome back. I could not speak or write.

Things change, the world moves on?

I had NoMans put a very pointed Student Driver sign on the back of the car when he takes Cletus driving (I have removed myself from her presence so that she might learn to drive without the fear of not being enough since apparently even with my mouth shut Mommy is a formidable presence) so that people might be a little more patient and stop honking at her for driving the speed limit. Then I had him put another sign on the back of the car that reads (real big) STANDARD TRANSMISSION and then in smaller letters: Student Driver. They're still honking when she stalls at an intersection and still riding right up her backside when she stops at a stop sign that happens to be on a steep hill. The back windshield is not big enough for me to explain what a stall is and everything else that goes along with a clutch and a standard transmission.

The world, at least in these parts, has moved on and we have not moved with it.

Another reason for NoMans to do the driving. I would get out of the car at the stop sign and eat eyeballs or some other such atrocity. We've got enough of those I think.

On the state of being fearful

I'm going to look at fear tonight. By and large, I am not a fearful person. I might be technically afraid of something, I might shy away or back off but I am not fearful. I do not lay awake at night being afraid. I am not paralyzed by fear unless I have to go anywhere near our CEO and president (I do NOT know why he has that kind of effect on me). When something is scaring me my natural inclination is to either a) do something about it or b) ignore it or c) just blow the whole thing up and be done with it.

I am scared right now though. I am so scared I'm down right stupid. I am afraid of something that is only the smallest possibility, something that I've been aware of for as long as I've been in relationship with my husband. Something that just now has got my attention in the ugliest possible way.

I am scared to death that my husband is going to get sick and die a horrible death and that I am not going to be able to bear it. I am scared that this is overdue; after all, his own father was diagnosed with Parkinson's at 38 and NoMans is almost 44. I am scared that he's going to be frightened and alone and disconnected and that I will become an utter lunatic and just make things worse.

I don't know why I'm scared just now. Could be Jeffrey dying like he went and did. Could be that small cough or bit of difficulty NoMans had swallowing the other day or the way he breathes like a freight train when he's really, really tired and maybe not sleeping as well as he should. Could be my crazy lizard brain just checking in or it could be real and I just don't know it on top yet.

It could be anything at all. All I really know is how I feel. That's how I feel. Today, yesterday, maybe tomorrow. Nothing to be done but have it. Funny how that works.

Choices

Well. Now this is a tough conversation. I'll beat around the bush a bit first. I grew up with sky divers which roughly equates to being raised by and with wolves. Horny, beer guzzling wolves. The fact that I wasn't sexually active younger than I was (I was OLD for the time) is still somewhat of a puzzle. I'm not complaining, just noting. My parents were very open with my brother and I with regard to sex education. It started when we were four and six respectively and was repeated with more detail every year until I was about fifteen and then I think they figured they'd exhausted the store of appropriate information.

What my parents did not do was talk to me about sex once I was old enough to be actually sexually active. I take that back, there was some conversation about the male/female game and self respect. That was a very valuable lesson and I'm thankful for it. The public school system didn't say much; not one word past the sixth grade review of sexually transmitted diseases which were still referred to as venereal diseases. In 1976 there were just three of them; all of them curable. Actually, I'm certain there were more than three, we were just admitting to three.

Somehow I got myself to Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood provided me with a nearly free supply of Ortho-novum pills and a good handful of condoms for use through the first cycle. What had me go to Planned Parenthood in the first place? I'll be damned if I know; the bottom line is I did go and I was driven by the belief (and I STILL don't know where this came from because I have no evidence to support an actual teaching) that there are no accidental pregnancies and I had no intention of having a baby or having to face an abortion.

We say a lot more at home and at school these days. I white boarded the reproductive systems for both of my older children by the time they were seven. They can still probably render both sets equally well if asked. They had access to loads of books and the internet. We have withheld very little.

Except actual conversation once they entered the reproductive years. Interesting, isn't it?

I bought my sixteen year old daughter a box of condoms today. Actually, I had NoMans pick them up on his way home but I dropped them on her bed. I talked to her about this in advance. It was one of the hardest conversations I've ever had with my girl. And I've had some pretty tough conversations.

I thought it would be easy, it was agony. How do you tell a young lady in one breath that you would prefer that she abstain from sexual activity until she's some as of yet undefined version of 'older' and then five seconds later tell her you're going to give her condoms because you don't ever want there to be a mistake?  Not ever, not once because some of this stuff is just plain deadly.

I gave my son condoms too. It wasn't nearly as painful. I'd like to think that's because I'm older now and more conscious but I honestly think it's a screaming bit of sexist behavior on my own part and I am simultaneously horrified and well, horrified.

Post Script - Spook City - I was about to publish this post when my daughter arrived and asked me a series of questions that I just answered above. It was a homework assignment. I think I might feel a little bit better. Maybe.

Post post script - seriously, I originally titled this post Hard Things.

Schroedinger's Goodwill. Maybe.

Here I go uncovering my underbelly again. By that I mean I'm about to expose more of the warped, twisted mind of Alecto on the go. Where to start? Sometime in high school my mother gave me a book called Schroedinger's Cat. I can't even remember what the book was about, probably some piece of science fiction knowing my mother and the topic. In any event, because of the book I learned the rudimentary concepts surrounding the theory of Schroedinger's cat and later on learned a little bit more. Lets just say I know enough to be dangerous in some circles and sound extremely retarded in others.

The basic premise is this: The cat is in the box. You can't see in the box. Some poison gas may or may not have been leaked into the box. The cat may or may not be dead. As a matter of fact, there is a 50% chance going either way. Therefore... (drum roll or heady silence, take your pick) the cat is both dead  AND alive. In theory. See what I mean about being either dangerous or extremely retarded?

Now lets compare this with a particular accounting term called Goodwill. Actually, Goodwill is a real account on the Balance Sheet which is where I get in trouble in the first place. I'm OK with the P&L (Profit and Loss Statement) because it's pretty straight forward and follows a set of rules I subscribe to heartily whether you're measuring beans, money or how much cabbage the deer did NOT eat this season. It goes thusly: Revenue - Expense = Profit. Or: Revenue good, Expenses bad (which always reminds me of Four legs good, Two legs baaaaaaad and I just can't help myself). In other words, it's a very simple equation and as a programmer/analyst I absolutely get it.

And then there is the Balance Sheet. (noooooooooooooooooooo, not that, anything but that) Assets = Liabilities + Equity. I'm OK there. Right there. That's as far as I'm OK, after that it just becomes one big hairy string of plug accounts. What is a plug account, you ask? Oh, do let me tell you. Nothing we'd say to an auditor, that's for sure. A plug account is an account we use to put some numbers that we can't figure where else to put. them. 'scuse the grammar. Nothing to worry about, everybody does it. Right. And then we have Goodwill.

Goodwill bothered me a bit in college but since I figured I'd never have to look at another accounting text again nor come in contact with any such accounting type people (MARRIED ONE), I'd just be nice and let it go. After all, how, exactly, does one measure goodwill.  If I sell a shop is it the amount of business I expect to see given the nature of said established business? That would almost make sense, except it'd be fluffy as all get out and I don't much care for fluffy. I'd rather measure your receivables and a bunch of other things first. But I digress, that is not what Goodwill is for.

Goodwill is an offset. Goodwill is the difference, on the Balance Sheet (because all things must Balance, so sayeth NoMans the bean counter), between the price paid for a company (or thing) and the actual book value of the company (or thing). So, if my company purchases (which they do on a fairly frequent basis) a smaller company for ten dollars but the company is valued at 8 dollars then the offset is 2 dollars and that is PLUGGED to Goodwill.

Sigh. See what I mean? I know that we need to put that 2 dollars somewhere and I can even extrapolate, from the original definition of Goodwill, how we get there, but I just can't buy it in this day and age. It is no longer a truth and the fact that we still call it Goodwill often sends me into cataclysmic seizures (I TOLD you I was exposing my underbelly again).

I'm much, much, much happier with Schroedinger's cat being, at the very same time, in both states of dead and of alive. That part just tickles my tummy. The other part? Not so much.

Looking behind the curtain

This might be a two-parter, I have a lot to say tonight.

I don't think I paint a fair enough picture when I write about myself or my experience of myself. I tend to leave out the brains leaking out the ears or popping out the top of my skull and needing to be scooped back up and sorted out. That's because it's bad to admit that. Part of the reason it's bad to admit it is because a good amount of the time, showing the guts of the sausage making process is not necessarily forwarding. That's a metaphor; I'm not really making sausages yet.

The last month has been particularly difficult. NoMans got a new job and has a slightly longer commute but the real issue is that both he and I assumed his job came first. He's the man, right? He makes more money, right? I'm the mom, they're my kids, I own the daily feeding, right?

Deep sigh. Wrong.

I find myself doing this over and over, marginalizing my value as a human being because I'm a woman and therefore the secondary adult in the household. This is me, not him. What he thinks and wants and believes he's entitled to are kind of irrelevant if I've already bought into it. Blaming him, or any other man is pointless. That's throwing my power into, well the septic tank. I've been doing a lot of that lately.

So this week the top of my head blew off on Monday and every time I managed to scoop up my brains and screw my cranium back on it blew off again. Sometimes we have weeks like that, gender aside, it's the truth. It ended in a meltdown that had us up until four AM this morning and it was just terrible. I have nothing against meltdowns in general as long as they're contained. Good God, just read that last statement! How many of us live our lives like this trying to hold it all in and do no harm? How many of us remain invulnerable and unsupportable because we look at ourselves this way? Well, all right, I do.

Periodically my mother writes and asks how I am and in the response I find myself crying into my keyboard because I'm living so close to the edge right now. It has not always been this way and it will not be forever but it is. And it doesn't mean I'm not as strong or maybe stronger than I ever was, it just is what it is. I don't give quarter ever, to myself.

I spent two hours on Karl's website last night. Mostly I was listening to his music but I'd been crying so long and hard for no discernible reason I started to read and I read through months and months of his life. I read about farming and sick cows and babies and new trucks and the cost of running against the wire. I read and was touched by another life so different and so close to my own and by now he's got to wonder what happened to his stats. And today I feel a bit more at peace.

We all spend some time at the edge. Some of us spend what might seem like an inordinate amount of time there. Maybe that's what it means to be alive and present in the world? Maybe. I would not trade any of it but I would like the swelling in my face to go down a little now, please. The results of eight hours of crying are downright ghastly.

Part two - if you're related to me stop reading now. Go on now, shoo!

I love Christmas. I love Channukah (NoMans spells it different for me every time). I love Winter Solstice. I love the shortest day of the year and the coming into the light. I love the smell of fresh cut pine and a roaring fire. I love my house full of my family, packed in so tight you can't find a quiet place to think. I love the food and the warmth and the giving, I love it all. The commercialism comes closer every year to breaking my heart.

Never mind the kids, kids are easy, honest they are. Even a bag of chicken starter (which one of 'em just might be getting this year) works out well in a fit of scrabbling delight. Honestly, in most cases, you can give them anything and they will wriggle in joy over the anticipation alone. Go too far and you'll wreck it for them. It's about abundance and it's not. It's about abundance of surprise and delight and thought. It has never been about abundance of money. Money bothers me this time of year more than any other. In any case, my kids aren't what's killing me, it's the adults.

I need to give to my family the same way I need to breathe. I need to care for my family and show them that I know them and love them. If I have to give my brother another sweater I will cut my throat. Last year I picked up my knitting needles and went to town; they all got funky hats and scarves and later in the year my children got blankets and sweaters as I got better at the craft.

This year it will be about food and sustainable life. It is hard to eat food that comes from within 100 miles in Connecticut. So hard it's almost laughable but that's what makes it worth the journey. My sister in law, an attorney in New York City has almost got this mastered, almost. My brother looks at my canning and thinks I'm nuts except he took home two jars of tomato lamb soup and promptly changed his mind.

This year is about canned joy. Very little of the fruit is local but next year a lot of it will be because I'll  have started earlier. This year will be about lemon curd and ginger cookies, marmalade and spiced pickles, scones and breads. I'm getting really good at breads. I'm learning to track the wild yeast. This year is consumable and recyclable. This year is kitchen sweat and love. I feel busier and strangely, better today.

Alecto's Excutive Summary - For Russ

"Let's face it, I'm tired!"

NaNo finished last night. I even managed to, um, wrap it up, more or less. It ends with Kate driving back into the driveway at the end of a twelve year day only the car doesn't smell like feet anymore and she stands in the driveway looking into the forest... and you'll just have to wait until I publish the book(bwahahahha) Book? What book? There's no book.  I'll go back and look in a week.

My friend Russ over at R a d h o l e did what I would call an executive summary on himself. Russ is pretty cool and I love going to his site, he often makes my day. So Russ was asking who and where I was and I realized that while I'd been introduced to Russ through Amy's NaBloWriMo site in October he might not actually have a clue who I was so instead of answering in email I'll put it here:

Alecto's Executive Summary (hold the snarkiness until it's over)

I am a forty-three year old professional mother of three. That sounds ludicrous, doesn't it? That's because I have a very schizophrenic relationship with my self the creative programming junkie and myself the mother. Myself the creative programming junkie is very important to me. Myself the mother is a given. Sorry, ladies, but that's a fact. I've had to work harder to be taken seriously in the work environment than I have in motherhood. Sad, but true. And whether you share my values or not, understand that to me, the me that is outside of mother is just as important as the me who delivered those squishy bundles 21, 16 and 7 years ago. Yeah, I have a 21 year old son. How cool is that? I also have a 16 year old daughter and that's cool too right up until it's not. The 7 year old saves my sanity.

In writing the story of Kate during November I had to come nose to nose with some very painful pieces of my past. So here it is. I am a corporate fast track executive washout. I made it seven years in a technology corporation on the fast track to SVP of a major profit center and then who knows what else when I fell so hard from grace that I could not bear to go back in for another round. It's not that I did bad, it's that I lost my stomach for it. That embarrasses me more than I can tell you. If I was a man I would be shamed into oblivion for not picking up and going on. As a woman I have been given a buy and this is what shames me more than anything. I hang my head but know the truth.

So where was I? 43 year old mother of three, divorced twice, married three times, I might be the bravest person I know. Or most stupid, jury's still out. I receive no alimony and no child support from the father of my first two. The father of my third is a bit better and I got smarter. I am hard core mother, that's a fact. I am an application programmer and business analyst. I look at numbers and tell you, more from my gut than not, what a particular market is doing. For me it's in paper and printing at the moment but I'm pretty good at it. I work with databases and system architecture. I am the person you call when it all goes to hell. I don't have the answers but I'm the one who will work it out because I believe the buck stops in my lap, even when it doesn't. This is a not an attribute.

I care more about the food my children eat than the state of my databases. This causes daily angst as I try to wrap up in time to get home and feed them something organic and appropriate before they need to go to bed. The S on my chest is for Sucker and I'm finally OK with that.

I like to write, a lot. I recently wrote a 50,000 word book in 27 days. I am nuts.

I paint, mostly in watercolors but when I was younger in acrylics all over my bedroom walls. My mother was very good to me. I grew up with horses, sort of. From the time I was twelve years old I leased a pony or a horse so I could ride. I did the family laundry and a whole lot of other things to support this habit. It was never for free. I was very good, good enough to do things but I didn't care, so I hacked instead and was happier that way. I had a farm with horses during my first marriage. The horses have all gone back to my mother in Ohio, I'm OK with that.

I would like to have chickens in my backyard again. I might just do that. Even though it's going to piss off my neighbors so bad I won't be able to stand it.

I read a lot, almost anything except chick lit and romance, can't stomach the stuff. I like Mark Helprin and Stephen King. My favorite book is Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale. It's about magic, and cloudbanks the structural integrity of bridges and New York City before and after the turn of the century.

I live in a part of the country that is unbelievably privileged. I worked very fucking hard to get here. I am a high school drop out. I was raped on the floor of my living room at 17. The evidence of my case was hosed by the over zealous detectives, he is still out there. My parents emotionally abandoned me at 17 and then completely at 18. I cleaned houses to put myself through college. It was not so easy. I had a baby and a husband too, that part was OK. I am privileged but I have a really, really hard time acknowledging that. I am angry and that embarrasses me. 

I love music. I don't listen to nearly enough since I split with husband number two, who has a real knack for picking up the esoteric and eclectic. Lately I listen to almost nothing but what's over on Madeline's site or what's on WFUV, which is basically public radio.

OK, that's not exactly an executive summary, is it? I'm babbling. But there you go, that's me, precariously balanced and doing my damn best to have it all.

(p.s. I'm also a happy person. Because I want to be and that is all.)

(p.p.s. I just wrote 1,100 words like it was nothing. Damn. Look what happened? Maybe I can do this after all)

Good-bye The Lion

I am so fragile tonight and I'm like to say I don't know why, but I do. Sometimes we have enough layers pulled off that we become defenseless to the outside world but more importantly defenseless to ourselves.

I've been doing my usual blog surfing and aside from one new site David B. Dancy I'm visiting the same places I go every day; I'm just a little more susceptible to the human condition today.

So here are the people who made me cry today; Mr. Dancy, Cielo, and Father Luke. CG made me smile and remember who I was at fifteen and Cielo reminded me of who my mother is today. NoMans about broke my heart walking around like the living wounded and Amy being back made me ridiculously happy; it was like an early Christmas present from the Chanukah Queen.

But what's really got me is that The Lion died yesterday at 4:18 PM. The Lion has been dying for twenty freaking months! His dying has left my father an unbearable wreck as he cannot disassociate himself from the man he might as well have been married to for the last 37 years; they were that close.

When my father wrote last week that The Lion was on his way out again I didn't go. I think my brother might have but I did not. I justified not going by telling myself and anyone else who would listen that I spent most of the summer of '06 sitting in ICU on weekends knitting while The Lion did not die. I saw The Lion at Jim's funeral and he knew me and kissed me and it was good. I decided I had already said enough good-byes and didn't need to go back. I told myself it was not about supporting my Dad despite the fact that Jack made that gently but very clear. I didn't have the emotional bandwidth to cope and I let my Dad down, I could hear it in his voice today.

So I'm just sad. I am sad that The Lion is gone. Despite his failings, he was a formidable figure and I loved him and he loved me. He was larger than life for nearly all of my life. His name was Vic Deveau and he was my Daddy's best friend from 1970 until yesterday at 4:18 when my Dad sat at his bed at hospice and finally let him go and he deserves to have his real name published.

The Lion was played a pivotal part of my upbringing. I have written these things and therefore cannot bring myself to write them again so I'm finally going to migrate the posts from the last blog to this so that they can be cataloged together.

That's him up there, circa 1960 something or other. He was some kind of beautiful. They called him The Silver Fox. I call him The Lion and I call him Uncle Vic and I hurt so bad I can't see straight. Guess I better just let myself have that.

I am thankful for those of you who made me cry or remember myself today. It broke the walls down so that I could feel.

p.s. Father Luke 'yes ma'am'd' me. I'm having trouble reconciling the fit of giggles with the tears. I guess that's OK. Thanks, Father Luke. OK, bye.