Alecto's Ophelia

The Baby

It is true, what they say. The first baby is photographed every three minutes, the baby book is filled out religiously, and the photo albums are over stuffed. Everything is recorded from the apgar score to height, weight, and head circumference, from birth to college graduation. The second baby gets a bit short shifted and the third has an empty baby book only because it arrived in the baby shower basket. Or because it was purchased by the father who is the second husband and a new parent and slightly artsy.

Poor Elizabeth.

However, there are exponentially more photographs of this child than the other two put together (the digital age and an artsy father) and there is even a portrait done in soft pastels from a photograph taken in the backseat when she was nine months old. 

Yesterday I found the baby book. I didn't expect it to have a damn thing and technically speaking I was correct in terms of the things you would normally record but we got an eyeful anyway. We sat side by side on a crate in the lower bedroom and read it out loud. 

She was born on December 11, 2000. On July, 2000, I took put intentional photographs of all four of us taken at the beach, me, her dad, Mike, and Lucia, each photographed, smiling for her specifically. Hello, Elizabeth! Hello from our beach! You are already here but you can't see it yet! Next year you will!

These four photographs are glued into the book.

Her birth stories, written almost immediately, which protects the accuracy, are in the book. They are written by both parents. I have never seen this before. I know it happens, but I have never seen it. We tell it from the day before, the night of, and delivery. We tell it from the leaving day. 

We tell bits of other things as well. There are photographs from the baby shower simply because I had them. Nothing from her christening because by the time she was a year old we were done with it.

In the back of the book there were three pieces of paper.

First, the pink card from her hospital bassinet. Why is my name 'Baby Girl'? Because we left right away and they had no idea what your name was. Also, you never even hit that mattress. I missed a thing about that card but found it later.

Second, on a piece of paper from a pad from when we all worked at the castle (I had a case of the stuff and it is ubiquitous and 20 years old and I STILL have some) my labor notes from the living room. You can see what time I started, how many minutes apart and how long my contractions lasted before I went upstairs to shower, what time I called the doctor, when I kicked the bed to wake her father, and what time I left the house. Damn.

The third piece, we almost missed it. It was my discharge paperwork or part of it and hard as hell to read. Finally I saw this thing in the upper left corner. Holy shit.

Baby Girl Mother's Last Name.

Holy fucking shit. 

When did THAT happen?

When Mike was born it was 

Baby Boy Father's Last Name

When Lucia was born it was

Baby Girl Father's Last Name

Not only that but Father's Last Name was slapped on my paperwork too, despite my identification.

I looked back at the pink and white bassinet card.

In very large letters on the top center of the card:

 

MOTHER'S LAST NAME

I'm a girl!

Elizabeth. 

What?

Elizabeth. You did not automatically inherit your father's name. It was a CHOICE. 

Ohhhhhkay.....

You don't even know what that means, do you?

Not really. Why isn't my name on that?

Elizabeth. That was your name. Technically that is STILL your name. You just got more names when we filled out your paperwork.

I don't get it. My name is Elizabeth. Why does it say Baby Girl! or I'm a girl!?

Because they didn't know what your name was. How could they possibly know what your name was?

Didn't you tell them?

No. Actually. We didn't even talk to the them in question and even if we had, your paperwork wasn't done.

What do you mean?

You don't have any name other than your mother's last name until your birth certificate exists legally.

What?

We hadn't filled it out yet, we were getting the hell out of there.

They let you leave?! They let you leave with a baby without a name?!

Elizabeth, many babies don't have names right away.

HOW IS THAT EVEN POSSIBLE?!

{deep sigh} Sweetie. You had a name. You had a name from the moment we knew you were a girl. Relax. 

*****

When we got home I unrolled the very heavy paper I've carried around for a VERY long time. I don't know why he didn't finish it. I was tired. I felt like shit. It takes a damn long time to finish a drawing like this and a pregnant woman's body changes as fast as a new baby. It could have been finished with photographs but that's hard too. On the other hand, I don't think we thought to take them. There are some really beautiful photographs taken late in the third trimester in the nursery in beautiful light. I have no idea if I'm clothed or not. I really hope not but I guess it doesn't really matter. We have what we have.

For years I wondered what the hell I was going to do with a seriously unfinished drawing of a woman sixteen weeks into pregnancy. I know the way he works and I know how significantly this drawing would have changed before it was finished. I know how different the paper would have looked. He works in charcoal but honestly, he's really painting with it and the body is a landscape. He has only just started.

What we have is a shoulder, where he will work for another few days, where he thinks he will go next, and the general outline of what he wants. That's it.

Last night I asked him if this could be cropped before matting and framing because I was tired of having it rolled up in a closet. He said yes, because there was really too much drapery going on at the bottom anyway and all that was lost because it hadn't even been framed yet. I said I was afraid to touch it. I, this reckless, runs with scissors person who cuts her own bangs still at almost 55 and damn well should NOT do that. 

I am not willing to lay one finger on his work. He will cut it down for me today and almost nineteen years later it will go up. 

Lucia was born on August 19, 1991. Sometime late in the third trimester, her father set up lighting and took photographs in black and white but also in color to see what he'd get. His black and white work was always very good. We sent them off to the Fuji labs. I don't remember when they came back. What I do know is the August issue of Vanity Fair hit the shelves first and there was Demi Moore on the cover shot by the already legendary Annie Leibowitz, stark freaking naked standing with one arm up and one arm down and I about had heart failure.  

Well, we just won't show anyone, he said. That's just plain sad, I sniveled. We haven't even SEEN them yet, he replied. You're right, I'm a cow. Stop it!

They were beautiful. We put them away even though the best shots were on the floor. Somewhere around here there is a postcard size watercolor I did of one of the floor shots and I'm going to find that fucker... that poor kid's boat got hijacked by a legendary cowgirl with a camera and and and that woman who has irritated the shit out of me for no good reason since probably then.  

So, that drawing, that drawing is what took me out yesterday at the end of it all. That's what the third baby got. That's what I got. 

This morning I woke up feeling like I'd been hit by a truck. I still feel that way. This is because yesterday, sometime between 12:15 and 1, Adam pulled a string we found at the bottom of a box which contained just a handful of words and the entire world fell open. I haven't really processed that yet but I can see clear though to China, through the hole I dug in the sand. It is true, you know. It is true if you keep digging that you will dig to China. And if you have an Adam to hold the rope when you suddenly find yourself face forward hanging over that abyss, you will be OK. 

1501

The Swan

The bay window is the only concession to any sort of obvious post twentieth century renovation. That and the outlets, all but the odd one above the stove that I wouldn't in a million years plug a damn thing into for a number of reasons, the wall sconces in the bedrooms, and the two overhead lights with pull strings, one in the kitchen, and the other in the upstairs hall (I'm not going to count the furnace, hot water tank, or washer and dryer as I can't actually see the things unless I go to the basement). The smoke detection system, however, is terrifying. THAT is surely a twenty-first century thing. I've never seen anything like it and initially thought my landlords must be insane or masochistic or all of the above. I didn't even see them at first. There are only three that I can identify although there are two other boxes which don't make sense. One might be the siren. Yes, siren.

The first large dome is at the foot of the stairs in the foyer and this makes sense. It will detect anything in the kitchen or the 16 x 12 living space. The second is at the top of the stairs and will pick up anything in the bath or two bedrooms. But there is a third and this is the insanity. It is smaller than the other two and not quite the same. The first two almost look as if they might be connected to a water source and if I get too close it seems to blink at me. I can't really tell if the green light is changing from three feet away to six inches. It's just weird so I don't touch it, especially after what happened with the other. 

The smaller of the three is only four inches across and nearly flat. It comes out maybe an inch and a half from the ceiling at the center and I never noticed the damn thing. I think I must have registered the other two. I certainly noticed there was an alarm system and also was aware that it wasn't armed and chose to keep it that way. 

Here's the thing about the small, white dome: The small white dome is literally twenty-four inches from the left side of the gas stove and the gas stove is forty-seven inches from the middle of the burner to ceiling. Consider the implications. There is a vent of the sort I can barely remember but couldn't tell you where I've seen one or when. It seems industrial and makes me think of very old restaurant kitchens before those big hoods were common. There is a hole right through the house directly behind the stove. The hole is ten or twelve inches in diameter and opens and closes with a chain. When the vent is open, there is a switch that turns on a high speed fan. The blades behind the bars are terrifying. Did I mention the behind bars part? Serious, industrial bars. If they were not behind bars I am quite certain my fingers would become mincemeat of their own volition. Even if they had to drag me across open flame to get there. 

I knew the vent was there because Mike discovered it when we were moving in. It's been open this whole time he told me, pulling the chain and closing it tight. Oh fuck, I said, there goes my December gas bill. And promptly forgot.

The first time I cooked I decided to make a curry which starts by cooking peppercorns in oil, followed by onions until they are caramelized. This is a requisite base, there is no other way. This produces smoke AND steam but not a whole lot because you're not burning it unless you've got a 15,000 BTU flame going, and I did not. I walked away for a moment, which should tell you how NOT hot the pan was and I know I was in the foyer near the door when an alarm of the sort I've never heard in a house outside of a movie went off. Apparently it was right over my head, but I missed that part.

Elizabeth shouted from the kitchen: I think it's the smoke alarm, Mom!

Turn off the gas!  

I opened the door to the porch and started fanning in air wondering what the hell was going on and then the alarm went off. OK, good and what the fuck was that all about. I shut the door. The alarm went back on. I opened the door and fanned some more. Jesus Christ! I went into the kitchen. No smoke. What the hell! I still didn't see the dome. Our landlords came up the basement stairs. Huh. OK, I guess that door downstairs actually does go somewhere. 

So the alarm system is attached to the other alarm system which goes right to the fire station, which, as it turns out, is right around the corner and the sirens we've been hearing which sound just like the Indian Point test sirens (you cannot make this shit up) had gone off and joined in with the house. The lovely ninety year old man punched in a code and turned off the alarm but there was no turning back the firetruck. He went back downstairs and to the front of the main house to meet the truck and pretty soon the nice fireman was in my kitchen.

No smoke, he said. Seared peppercorns and caramelized onions, I said. Ah, yes, he said, those seared peppercorns and caramelized onions, they'll get you every time. With a grin. 

There's no smoke, he said to my landlords. I have no idea why that thing went off. My landlords were flustered and not happy about this at all. I was confused as shit. The woman showed me the vent.

Ohhhhhhhh. Crap. I'm so sorry. OK.

When he left, I changed plans and seared some boneless chops on top of the mess on fairly low heat. The smell was still in the air, but no smoke. A little steam though and the fan was on.

AND the alarm went off. FML.

And around we went. 

The fireman showed me the smoke alarm.

Holy shit!

Exactly.

Why is that there?!

Exactly.

Why is it not over there? I asked, pointing diagonally across the kitchen.

Exactly. You might ask them to have it looked at to see if there's a problem and you might also ask them to have it moved. 

OK.

Later I spoke with the woman who looked shocked.

No one else has ever had a problem.

very carefully... well, is it possible that people didn't cook all that much? It is rather close. That nice man said it probably should be over there and maybe we should have it looked at to make sure it's not too sensitive?

How can that be? People must have been cooking! And that gay couple, you know, they must have cooked, and they were perfect, they did everything right!

(oh for the love of god)

OK, we'll be very careful, I'm so sorry.

Later she came back to the front door and apologized. She said she'd be sending someone out to have a look because we really needed to be able to cook in the kitchen. She said she'd let me know when they were coming. I thanked her and reiterated that we'd be very, very careful and said I completely understood the need to be so careful with such an old house.

It's been about a month. I don't think anyone is coming. I'm OK with that. I really do understand. And it might be that the thing is over sensitive but I also know that people who live in apartments, especially single people, do tend to not cook all that much. I am possibly the only person who has needed to move in a bakers rack to store cookware. I could be wrong, but I expect so. There is literally nowhere to store anything of significant diameter or height. The cabinet in the wall can handle diameter, but not height, and not the weight of some of the more serious stuff. No one who has had need or the means to cook at high heat has been here. I know this because it cannot be done with that thing even in conjunction with that fan. 

I am going to learn to cook again. Differently this time. This is kind of cool.

So that's my kitchen story. I didn't have the guts to cook again until last night. I tried the 'sear chicken in a pot with the lid on' which is really boil chicken in it's own juices. Erm. Nope. Perhaps it will be 'broil the chicken strips on each side' and then toss into the pan and we'll see how smoke free we can make that. I'm trying to figure out how to cook bacon. These things can be figured out, the same way you figure out how to cook differently when you do NOT have a stove or a refrigerator or a microwave or anything else which for me, has been all of the above at any one time or all at the same time. As I said, kind of cool.

Furniture has been and continues to be a challenge. We are on our third kitchen table. The first never even made it into the house. I could have taken off the legs but when I got to the door and realized that a 30 inch table and a 30 inch door does not mean a 30 inch table is going through a 30 inch door. I also realized that 30 inches by 40 inches in that kitchen were actually going to be an unmitigated disaster. I went to Amazon and ordered the cheapest table they had which was a drop-leaf 28 x 28 that could become 28 x 36 or 28 x 44. So here's the problem with the cheapest table at Amazon (or probably anywhere), it's pretty bad. The drop-leaves were, um, sag-leaves so that didn't cut it. 28 inches wide wasn't enough and 36 inches deep was too much. Crap. Back to the tag sale site. I typed in 24 x 36. Lots of results. Apparently this is a very popular dimension for kitchen islands that want bar stools. Nope. See, the thing is, we need to use that window seat. It's not so much a space thing (although it is that but we could get away with sitting at the side and the end), it's for the love of the window seat. This is very, very important.

I was close to despair. I was considering the purchase of an island from the tag sale site and then having Mike cut several inches off the bottom. This was becoming a very viable option. I had two or three selected and saved and then there it was. 

She didn't actually call it a table. I didn't notice that at first, but it came up in my search because of the dimensions. I fell in love. Elizabeth looked at the colors in the photograph and made gagging sounds. Shut it, E. Paint, remember? Paint and we distress it as we see fit. OK, fine. The price was absolutely right and the dimensions were 23 x 36. One inch shy of what I wanted in depth I could live with. The thing was old as shit but sturdy. Sold. On the way to the car she said, this desk has been in my family for years. I was heartbroken when none of my kids would take it so I put it out there at the lowest price point I thought I could without having people buy it without knowing what it was but also to say to the right buyer, hey, this is free. Did that work?

Yes, ma'am, that's exactly what I thought you were doing (and it was). I bought Lenox service for twelve and everything that went with it for $50 for my daughter that way. She didn't advertise the everything that went with it part. I didn't know that until I got there. Did you say desk?

I did. 

Oh, wow. You're right. It is a desk. That's really cool.

What did you think it was?

Well, it's not like it doesn't look like a desk, it's just that I really needed a kitchen table exactly this size and when I saw the photograph I realized I needed exactly this table for my 250 plus year old house.

THAT's where this is going?! 

(me, panicking just a little) Yes, is that ok?

That's wonderful! You can use the drawer for napkins!

That's right, I can.

Elizabeth: and I can do my homework in the kitchen with the best light in the house because there's a bay window and we need this table because of the bay window and I'm so happy!

Woman: you make me want to cry.

Me: Wow. 

*****

I bought the bolt of fabric the day Elizabeth and I went to Joann Fabric to buy the fabric for the quilted curtains. I bought the foam and the weird stuff that goes around the foam when you're making cushions. The foam was a shock. Did you know you can buy foam remnants just like you can buy fabric remnants? You can't always get exactly what you need but I got lucky. I needed 72 x 22 and I got 96 x 30 and that was just fine and I clearly can't cut a straight line on the diagonal but the weird stuff I bought is kind of thick so that's OK. The fabric was the miracle though. The fabric was close to $30 a yard and there was just no way I could afford that. She stood in the upholstery aisle wistfully stroking it and I said, no, I'm sorry sweetie, you have to come down here to the 60% off section or you have to come to the remnants and we have to make a patchwork. The kid generally does not care.

She cared. 

I'm so sorry, E.

There was an older woman rehanging bolts to our right looking straight at us. Most of the younger people in this store don't sew or knit or craft and while they're nice enough and they try to be helpful, there will never be a synergy, there will never be that look that says...

Oh, honey, I know that look, I feel it with you.

She came over to the bolt and looked right at Elizabeth. 

Do you know that when there isn't enough fabric left on a bolt to sell for one project that it goes to discount?

Elizabeth: blink

First it goes to discount and then where there's a yard or less it goes to remnants. Do you know what remnants are?

Elizabeth: My mom says they're the last bits of fabric that are leftover and you can use them for very small things or patch them together.

That's right. Sometimes people make whole quilts out of them. I'm just going to see what's left on this bolt. Sometimes they get put back by mistake.

She turned to me and asked how much I needed (I know she knew exactly what I needed based on the conversation about what we were making and what was already in my cart). I told her I needed three yards if it was 54" in width and a little more if not but all of the upholstery fabric was 54" so three yards should do it.

But you might need a little more for a valance above the bay window, don't you think?

I would but I really can't afford it. (I'm thinking, this stuff is not going to the 60% section until there is less than two yards, no way in hell)

Well, let's see what we have. 

She takes it over to the cutting tables, shoves some guy aside and rolls it out and rolls it out and rolls it out. And. Rolls. It. Out.

Well, we have five and a half yards here. 

Elizabeth looks like she's going to cry.

The way I see it is like this: You buy three yards and that leaves me two and a half and I have to put it on the 60% side and I don't think I can even sell two and a half yards of upholstery fabric.

Seriously?

Yup. Nobody buys two and a half yards of upholstery fabric. They buy four yards or six or eight or ten.

Oh. 

So I can sell you the three yards you need at 60% off and throw in the remainder of the bolt because there's nothing I can do with two and a half yards but throw it in the remnants and this is not going into a quilt. That way you get your cushion and your valance. You look like you can make up your own patterns for that sort of thing, am I right?

You are right. 

$36. Or: $6.55 per yard. Less then I paid for any of the quilting fabric for the curtains that will drop my gas bill in half. 

This shit just does not happen. 

So it's been sitting there, the bolt of fabric all rolled up in the corner by the cabinet and the foam and lining stuff were under the table in the living area and the other night I got frustrated because just stuff. Well this is what happened.

I have these things that carry weight. We've been talking about books but I have other things. Some of them are photographs (uh. thousands. it's a problem) Some of them are things my children made me and even a thing my brother made right at that cusp when he was old enough to make pretty things and old enough not to give a shit and so handed it off to me after school: here, you want this? Yes. I do. Thank you. 

I have this other thing. When Cielo first started cutting glass, this thing she started doing when she reached out into the ether to touch a part of her father, one of those parts of a person that is private, you know, when a person goes off to be by themselves and they do a thing. It might be hunting or hiking or coin collecting or painting or woodworking or building boats, or any sort of thing. Cielo's dad cut glass.

So one day Cielo found his things and decided to cut glass. Cielo taught herself, one step at a time to cut glass and in doing so, she met her dad in a way we can meet a person through touching and seeing the things they touched and saw. As Cielo learned each new thing and progressed, she went from rudimentary shapes to pictures and then she made the swan. The swan was beautiful. The swan is beautiful. 

I love swans. Cielo probably has no idea how much I love swans but that's not really the point. One day the swan was in my possession. Of all people it was Portnoy who hung the swan from fishing line from the large window in my living room where it made me happy and caught the only real direct light in that house. When we started packing, I was afraid to take it down. I was afraid it would break and this was irrational because I was packing china and crystal, a great deal of which desperately WANTS to shatter, is irreplaceable and terrifyingly old. 

But I need the swan and there can never be another swan. I could ask for another swan and I might get another swan but there is absolutely no way I could get a swan like that.

Why?

Because THAT swan is full of the sort of juju which only happens once. It's the juju you get when a door opens. The door won't stay open very long and it isn't meant to stay open. Cielo opened that door by sheer will and persistence. She drove her head, heart, and shoulders into the door, leaned, and leaned, and leaned, and with every piece of glass she cut and cracked and cut again, that door inched open just a bit more. 

And then one day she passed right through her daddy. Or he passed through her, or something, and every last bit of those moments worked their way into the glass she was touching in those days and there they will stay.

So I left the swan hanging for quite a while, until Mike said I had to take it down and take it down he did. He wrapped it up and put it in a box and he carried that box to my car. I left that box in the middle of the kitchen floor. 

The night I decided to cut up the foam and lay out the stuff that goes on the foam (what the hell is that stuff anyway?), and drape the fabric just to have a look and really, to make Elizabeth smile, was the night I pulled out the swan. I pushed the foam back a bit and stood on the window seat. I held up the swan and asked, here? No? Here? No? Here? Ah, OK. Should I hang it now? No? Why? Oh. OK. Later then, when I find the other roll of fishing line. So I put it all back and carefully propped up the swan on the foam and the fabric. I pushed the table back in place and pushed up more fabric and it wasn't going anywhere. 

On Thursday morning the light was beautiful. My fever broke late afternoon on Wednesday and probably I should have stayed in bed but there was chaos to face. I stopped three feet from the door and just looked at it. 

This is the part of the house I fell in love with, right here. I love all of it really, but mostly this and this isn't even the old part (except that cabinet to the right is built on a hole which is where the original stairs were but that's another interesting story). 

You have to look carefully. You can only see the top peeking out. Eventually you will see it all, fitting perfectly, dead center in that bay window, in my house, my space, my kitchen, over Elizabeth's window seat. 

3758

How many copies of what? Exactly?

Natural disaster is Nature's way of purging. Pretty sure. I try not to think too much on the what and how of it although if you read Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, she does get kind of specific in a couple of areas. 

My parents' standing joke about knowing when it was time to move: When we hang all the pictures, it's time to go.

More or less accurate.

I recall being vaguely aware of a book issue having occurred when Elizabeth's dad and I moved the two big kids and ourselves out of the two bedroom, 700 sq foot first floor apartment to the 2,700 sq foot Colonial we purchased a few months before Elizabeth's arrival. 

In retrospect, I'd been hauling around the same load of books from home to home since I had a load of books to call my own but I'm not sure I could say they were growing exponentially until I had money for books, which would be after I left home.

Note: Money for books is not subjective. You either have money in your pocket or you do not have money in your pocket. Money for food and rent and other things that come before discretionary is subjective. This is a problem I've worked very hard to address and for the most part, I think I'm doing OK. I don't believe I've purchased more than, um, six books in the last twelve months and only two of them were for me and only one of them

FUCK.

Add another six to that list from the book signing and that's the only other time I'll admit to having set foot in a bookstore. Let's just stop, ok?

Back on books. 700 sq feet is quite a lot when you think about it. That's 100 sq feet more than I have now although two less people so never mind. Anyway, when we moved, somehow about ten boxes of books ended up in the basement behind the bar which we were never going to use anyway. I didn't do inventory, clearly. At some point, probably after we replaced the furnace and discovered all sorts of problems with that part of the house, I discovered the black mold and the books and never mind the shoes. Never mind the walls. The books. There is no saving books that have been intimate with black mold. There is no saving YOU if you insist on opening the pages and wafting that shit about in the basement just to have 'one last look' at the pages. Elizabeth's dad threatened death, dismemberment, and my mother.

I put the cases of black mold books on the curb with no warning notice. Just taped up with a sign that read: TRASH. That's a lot of books. Let us not discuss the rest of that mess down there. 

Natural disaster (seriously. I consider that house a natural disaster) = book purging.

When we moved to Weston, I just packed them all up and unpacked them into the built-in shelving on the lower level, and the four tall standing bookcases I already owned. Good stuff. Later I added another case which turned out to be a lot bigger than it looked, based on the sheer number of books I pulled out of the damn thing. 

Books continued to accumulate. 

Before the intentional purge, I counted 4,000.

CHILDREN! GET OVER HERE AND GET YOUR SHIT OUT OF MY HOUSE!

I happen to know there is still an enormous box (24" x 24" AT LEAST) in the attic, which is effing FULL of Manga which that damn kid would NOT stop buying with every ten dollar bill she got her hands on at some point in her life. Those things are not in the count. I do not consider them books. I'm not going to explain that particular prejudice either, as graphic novels are very high on my list of book priorities. It's an unreasonable, triggered, prejudicial anomaly brought on by long term, persistent filial harassment. Yeah. That's it. I would burn the box except I don't have the energy to brute force it all the way to the driveway and I really don't feel I'm qualified to contain a burn of that size in an attic. 

Right. So. The book problem. I also, oddly enough, allowed my child and her spousal unit to walk away with three halves of the three standing units. The deal was this: Anything you take off those shelves, you must dispose of. What happened? Books all over the floor of the lower bedroom, now sans shelf. It isn't that there wasn't anyplace to put them (actually, there wasn't), it's that they were all over the damn floor. You people are closer to thirty than twenty. How is this behavior even possible? In your heads. I mean in your heads. It's possible because I didn't run after you and make you clean it up but wait... what's wrong with that sentence? Go back to the first sentence.

The book problem. The truth is, she took what mattered and left the stuff she outgrew which is the genre she chewed through like, um, hmmm. Like. Scooby snacks. That's it. Scooby snacks. Like the year I read 100 books and couldn't remember more than half of them except I think these might all have been the same book, more or less. Vampire sex, werewolf sex, zombie sex (ok, maybe not so much, parts fall off), king of the jungle sex, witches, warlocks, and I'm not really sure what THAT is, sex and more and more and more and how many shades of grey DID we end up with before we all stopped that business? 

She did not care for Little Birds although I noted her own copy, and not mine on the floor of the room. At least she gave it a shot. 

I did not feel bad about leaving the supernatural sex behind.

I DID feel bad about all the Harry Potter. I didn't much care for Harry Potter other than the fact that he got an entire generation of would be not so much readers to put their noses between the pages of a bunch of books and glue them there. I'm pleased that Ms Rowling managed to take it as far as she did without jumping a battalion of sharks to get there but it wouldn't have mattered if she did; those books were bloody well readable and engaged the world. Literary snobs: take notice and shush up (I'm talking to you, Alecto, you can have it out with the Twilight series if you really need to go to town on something). 

What I'm not clear on is how we ended up with SO MANY of these books. In hardcover. Now that I think of it, I'm not sure I've ever seen a Harry Potter book in any other form. Do they come in paperback? Do they come in trade? Interesting. They littered my house in various states of decay and disrepair. I am hoping Mike managed to locate the original duct taped first edition of the first book and squirreled it away because it would break his heart if the damn thing was there and then vanished. I am fairly certain that between them they took what needed to be taken of the series and left the rest to me. I hope they are aware that I left it all behind. I have no room for Rowling on my shelves. If I were a betting woman... she's in there somewhere anyhow.

Elizabeth's Dad: Alecto, do you know you have multiple copies of The Poisonwood Bible?

Me: I did not know that. How could that have happened?

Elizabeth's Dad: Alecto. Your books multiply. You loan one out and get nervous it's not coming back and replace it before it has a chance. That's how it happens most of the time. Then you don't remember you did it.

Me: Really?!

Elizabeth's Dad: Really.

Me: So I have two copies?

Elizabeth's Dad: You have multiple copies.

Me: Crap. 

Elizabeth's Dad: Let me know how many you find.

Me: You want one?

Elizabeth's Dad: I don't really need any more books but even if I did, you know you wouldn't give one of those up. You're like Smog. You'd be trying to figure out which one mattered most and then you'd keep them all.

Me: What else do I have?

Elizabeth's Dad: Duplicates?

Me: Yeah.

Elizabeth's Dad: Alecto. Who packed your books?

Me: I did?

Elizabeth's Dad: I won't even answer that question. Go unpack your books.

Later:

Me: Elizabeth's Dad, I'm not really sure I have two copies of The Poisonwood Bible. I've unpacked a lot of my books and so far I don't see two of anything.

Elizabeth's Dad: (laughing). Seriously? Here is one copy and over here (3 feet to the left) is another copy. 

Me: Oh. Shit. 

Elizabeth's Dad: Want me to show you the other duplicates on these shelves?

Me: No, thank you. I'll unpack everything and then do inventory.

Elizabeth's Dad: Do WHAT?

Me: Inventory. I'm going to do an inventory of all my books by author, title, and location. I'll start now before I unpack too much more so I can start rearranging them. I'll inventory the shelves upstairs and the boxes and then figure out where I really want shit because some of these shelves are going to have to be double stacked. 

Elizabeth's Dad: Let me know how that goes.

Me: You have no faith.

Elizabeth's Dad: I have faith in a great many things. You and book inventory? Not so much.

The Great Book Inventory

This is not so silly as it sounds. You just have to not move anything until you're done doing it. Problem is, I think I might already have broken the system, but only a little. 

Here is Proof of Lunacy:

There are several things possibly not right here. First, I wish I had a publication date column and possibly an edition indication because in some cases it does actually matter. It also matters on a personal level. The Foundation series, who's edition, specifically? Mine? Jack's? Mike's? My mother's? They are all here. No shit. That's a snotload of Asimov, especially since each of us would have owned different books in the set. I don't believe there is a single set that is complete, start to finish. While there are multiple duplicates, each of us started with an inherited first three books and at least two of us started with our mother's. Replacements of the originals started to happen when the binding glue gave up but that doesn't mean we let go of the book. I have a book titled Pavane which is in such completely horrid condition due to my mother's parrot, followed by one of her dogs, in addition to multiple re-readings, that even though someone (Elizabeth's Dad, no doubt) has replaced it for me with a trade paperback AND A BOUND GALLEY (of a book which was published in 1968 and I have no idea how he did this but with regard to books and the people who belong to said books, the man is magical), the original remains. 

Before I continue, #2 in the orange section just below Mr. Hawking's Magical Nutshell.

Go ahead. Read it. Consider it. Think about this. I'll help you out a little. I opened THAT book when I was nine years old. I must have been bored as fuck. I have a lot memories of my parent's bookshelves and they go way back. If I had to pick one set of memories which did not involve defining the version of free range child at one drop zone or another (mostly just the one), that one set of memories would be of books.

When close my eyes, this what I see:

I see a filmstrip and I hear it too; the old 8 mm sort that rattles or crackles or something in its reel and I can smell the heat. I think I'm viewing it against a white sheet, but maybe it's a wall. That part doesn't matter much either because it's more about the content and the sound of the film running through the machine. Too fast, it's going too damn fast and I want to slow down because my heart lurches and I remember who my parents were once upon a time and who they still are under all the layers of life that has wrapped and barnacled and bricked and shielded the people they were before the wars. 

Life was was rugged on my parents. Say what you will about personal choice, not following the dotted line and staying in the communally prescribed box; I don't think it should have to be so damned hard just to have a life that isn't ordinary. But it was. It was damned hard on both of them and so they got lost, each of them in their own way and when I watch the filmstrip I see who they were when I was very, very small and there were books for miles and miles and really not a whole lot else. 

There is money for books and then there is money for fixed expenses and then there is money for food and gas and finally there is money for other things. 

Later it was jump money but I don't really know where the books fit. I don't think they fell very far down the ladder but I do know they fell. You can't judge that though. You can't judge that until you, you personally, have been face to earth at terminal velocity which is when the experience of falling stops because the experience of falling is caused by acceleration. You cannot judge that until you have been face to earth, stable, not tumbling, and in the miracle of physics, reached your arms forward and shot backward. You cannot judge that sort of thing until you have landed, feet, knees, elbows, tits, downwind, sobbing, AGAIN! AGAIN! AGAIN! 

I don't go to the drop zone very often for a reason. 

So that is an entirely other filmstrip. But books.

On the floor of an apartment in Michigan there are bricks which my mother has painted a very shiny black and dark red. The bricks are the pillars which hold up the boards which make the shelves which line the walls which hold the books which are the heart of the space. They are the only thing in the apartment that holds weight. There is also a record player, the portable sort with a lid that locks down and a cord that tucks away and a handle to pick up the box and take it elsewhere. I know this because at some point I inherited the thing along with the vinyl which I'd do anything to have back. The music of my parents did not match the music of their generation. Was it Wagner? Perhaps. Was it Debussy? Most assuredly not. My mother sang me Scarlett Ribbons until the rocking chair would not hold out and it was not until I was well into my thirties that I learned about Harry Belafonte. I wept. Her voice was low and sweet and in the minor key. 

There was never a book off limits except one, one time and even that was only a request the year my mother read Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird and maybe I was fifteen and it was the summer of Salem's Lot and Strange Wine and I wanted to pick that up as well because she'd devoured all three at the beach in two weeks and I'd read them right behind her but not that. Please don't, she'd asked of me. Please don't read this. She looked grave, or frightened, or something in between. Why not, I asked? Because you are not ready for this. I don't think you would understand and I think it might damage you. 

She did not tell me I could not. She asked me not to and so I did not. I asked her when I could read it and she thought about it. Probably when you are eighteen, I guess. I would like you to wait until you are eighteen. I waited until I was eighteen and then I ran right out and bought a copy because you know that sort of thing stuck in my head and when I got to the part with... oh, you know, there is no one part. When I got to the end I was glad. It wasn't about any one thing I shouldn't have been reading. It was about what one person can do to another when humanity has lost itself entirely. Nothing Stephen King has ever written has taken humanity to the low that Jerzy Kosinski took it in that particular portraiture of of a boy adrift in the forest during WWII. Mr. King is fond of redemption. Mr. Kosinski held up a mirror. 

Books and books and books and books and they stretched for miles in apartments and then in houses and in the middle of all this there was an actual bookshelf which contained my mother's books. In that bookcase there lived the complete works of Shakespeare but not shoveled into a single book. I don't recall ever cracking those open but now I wish I had because of what I've recently read in the front of the other. There were graduate level books which is how I learned to work my way from Middle English to Modern English which is not what we read and speak today. I did this one sentence at a time working back and forth within context, sometimes lost entirely. I suppose if I'd had reference material or known how to use it, it would have been easier.

Why? Because the words were beautiful. I don't know what has happened to these books. I have a terrible feeling though. 

About that blue book on the shelf I picked up at nine and flipped open and read and reread and drove myself crazy until I understood well enough what was going on in The Tempest. Why? I was not a literary genius, that's for sure. And I'm not inclined to work a puzzle either, for the sake of working it. If the problem isn't applied to something relevant, I don't care about it, I'm not interested, and I'm going to have a damn hard time maintaining focus.

Here is why. on the lower left quadrant of the right page I saw this first:

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell

 

I read this stanza to myself and then out loud and then one line at a time until I my heart broke. 

Then I started from the beginning and worked my way to the end. It took a long time, even with the notations at the bottom. It wasn't so much that the language was difficult; it's that the man was just ALL OVER THE PLACE. On the boat, on the island, off the island, on the boat, is there a storm, isn't there a storm, who is magic, why the magic, what the hell? And really, WHY are you doing that? I was nine, cut me some slack. I didn't really get it until I went back for it in high school. So, you can imagine my distress to find the bastardization of the No Fear Shakespeare version. 

Here is the punchline. I never noticed this before but it makes perfect sense. Spring semester, 1969 it appears my mother would have been teaching freshman lit at the very least. Undergrads are not Shakespearean scholars. They do, or did, however, consume copious quantities of classic literature. I suppose if you need to cruise through it, then you need the 1969 Collegiate version of Shakespeare for Dummies. Ayuh. Exhibit A (which is kinda sexist, but what the fuck, it was published in 1968):

Exhibit B:

The Tempest for Dummies ~ 1968 Collegiate Edition

The notes at the bottom were crucial. To a nine year old. OK, I'm sorry, they are useful to anyone for whom Shakespearean Modern English might be new and also for anyone who might struggle with contextual language. Not everyone builds vocabulary through context. I do, by the way, have one hell of a contextual vocabulary; half the words I will absolutely mispronounce having passed on Latin in high school. I was devastated to learn the vocabulary section had been removed from the SATs. I was also knocked on my ass last night to discover that my youngest hadn't the slightest idea what I was talking about when I made reference to the Spanish Inquisition OR the Crusades OR the Children's Crusades, or, actually, crusades or holy wars of any sort other than those things going on in the Middle East. 'Nother subject entirely. 

And finally, exhibit C:

Did you know teachers have to buy their own books? Who knew? Well shit, of course they do. My father made these purchases and despite the fact that he belonged to the History Department, these books were clearly NOT for the History Department. I also find it highly unlikely that he could have cracked the cover of a single book on his list (unless that one on the top is his) without breaking out in hives. What I would give to have these back.

These, by the way, are the titles burning at the beginning of Fahrenheit 451; a statement I consider irrelevant, these books have already been consigned to the dead along with access to a broad vocabulary and reasonable grammar. All the better to speak you with, My Dear. 

The filmstrips continue well past the time when I remember my parents making the movies. I recall the boards and bricks coming from Kalamazoo to Manchester, from Manchester to Moodus, and then? I don't know what happened then. Then is when the filmstrip stops. The books don't stop but the filmstrip stops because the books as a collection vanish. They are no longer the centrifugal part of the house. 

There was a time when all the John D. MacDonald books, at least the Travis McGee series, stacked all in a row, side by side with Fanny Hill (that green paperback still pops out at me) and Hemingway and Ayn Rand and Michael Crichton (before the crap) and Isaac Asimov and William Goldman, (way before the Marathon Man years but those came in their own time), and the seeds of a library my father has built which is simply astonishing. All books stood at parity; from Shakespeare to Bismarck, Churchill, and Fredrick the Great, to Shirley Jackson, Fanny HIll, John Galt, and Travis McGee; if it was a good enough read to keep because it hammered at ya for one reason or another, then it held enough weight to own shelf space with its spine facing outward. A book is a sacred thing.

I had money for literally no thing as a kid. New clothes came as a shock when I got them. However, do you remember the scholastic book program? Those few colorful pages advertising those wonderful book possibilities? I never ONCE had a limit. I circled to my heart's content every time we had an order, carefully totaled up the order and without comment, my mother wrote a check. Without fail, from the third grade until it stopped being an option, I had by far the largest order in the class. I don't remember ever being disappointed. I chose carefully. I have never wanted to own a book I didn't care for because I knew perfectly well I was going to have to carry it around with me. Turned out carrying them long term wasn't a problem. I wore them out. Read them in bed, in the closet with a flashlight, in the forest, in the underbrush, high in the treetops, in the forbidden barn at the drop zone, in the creek bed, dry or not, at the bar at the end of the day, in the car, in the field until the pages frayed and fell from the bindings. 

Scholastic books weren't made to last AND I had a limited supply until I grew into my parent's bookcase and had my own funds.

Can you see how I might have a problem now? 

{the subject of libraries and my relationship with said institutions should probably not come up at this point for fear of doubling the word count and also possibly invoking several counties worth of library policy}

The current problem is what I may or may not have done on the way out the door.

and you thought the current problem was where I was going to put the damn things

Pullman, Philip. Did I keep everything he wrote? Did I decide yay or nay on the Golden Compass series and then throw in The Book of Dust because I forgot? How much Stephen King should I, or should I not have left behind? In choosing to leave some of his lesser works behind, lesser being an absolute crapshoot in this case, did I leave behind a first edition I should have kept even if I decided, in a fit of crankiness, that I didn't particularly care for the story? We're not talking about Under the Dome. Didn't like it, leaving it behind for sure. Same with Duma Key. Personal preference. However. Not so sure about some of the other stuff. I get obnoxious about that collection periodically. He is my favorite story teller and I've a great deal of respect for the man on many levels; mostly for his honesty about himself as a writer, about writing in general, about telling stories, and about how he sees the world. His words have been a near constant companion from the moment I picked up my mother's copy of Salem's Lot at the beach at 15 and discovered whole new dimensions, textures, and ways to vanish off the face of the earth. I discovered Harlan Ellison the same week. Nowhere in my packing did I come across the paperback called Strange Wine. This is a very sad thing because I am nearly certain that it came to Weston with me. 

So the shelves are full but the inventory is not. I have done something slightly stupid. I believe I've emptied a box onto a shelf. Or two. Or three. They were at least inventoried boxes. After that I picked up half a shelf of cookbooks and moved them to the Harry Potter room (in which there are no Harry Potter books. Maybe there should be). After that I plucked one or two cookbooks off other shelves. I can rectify that by removing them from the shelf inventory. This can still be fixed.

Because sitting on the floor with the computer in my lap, looking sideways at the spines is tedious, I photographed the shelves, cropped and labeled each photograph and inventoried from the desk. What you see at the top of the post is what a seven shelf bookcase would look like if lying on its side. I haven't put those in inventory yet. They don't look like that either. It was more fun to play with the cropped photos than stack them randomly. The bookcase Elizabeth and I made in January or February of 2016 is rather large, as it turns out. That thing is packed. It's the last I've got to inventory and then there are at least one or two more boxes hiding around here. I think. Once it's all on the spreadsheet I'll sort it and take a deep breath. 

The awful part will be knowing what I've left behind. 

There is a very big difference between packing up a house and moving, even when you are purging and packing, and getting up and walking out. When you get up and walk out, you take what you can carry and go back and forth when you can for what you can.

I realize that sometimes you walk out with what you can and never look back. I don't honestly know what is better.

You do the best you can with what you have and what you can. 

What you take with you comes in unlabeled boxes and large contractor bags. Sometimes you can unpack as it comes in and sometimes it piles up on bedroom floors and fills up the living area and the entire floor of the kitchen. You think about sending it to the attic but realize you might as well just put it out on the curb if you're going to do that. 

When there are too many bags and boxes to move, you force yourself to find time to start unpacking some of them. You hope you have not thrown things in there that you should have left behind. Sometimes you have because you had to move too fast. Sometimes things have to go back in the car to return to the garage for the container and you go through the letting go all over again. Sometimes you realize there are still boxes sitting at the top of the stairs that should have come with you three trips ago.

Honestly? It is awful. But the books, the books are good. Counting books is good. Duplicate books are good. There can never be too many books. 

I hear rumor there may even be three copies of Winter's Tale. Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale. (please don't go near that movie)

When my parents got divorced, there really wasn't much to discuss. She kept the house and the contents of the house. He walked away and started over. All he really wanted was his great grandmother's soup tureen (which I just now have taken from his possession even though I've had the rest of the set for ten years) and he wanted the Travis McGee series. Problem. They shared that collection. She wanted it too. That, apparently took some negotiation. MacDonald published The Deep Blue Good-bye in 1964. The 19th, Free Fall in Crimson was published in 1981. I expect that was out in paperback by the time my dad left in 1983 but I don't know if they would have had the 1982, Cinnamon Skin and The Lonely Silver Rain, which was his last, wasn't published until 1984. The problem being, the first sixteen were published between 1964 and 1974. The man did not sleep. MacDonald's Travis McGee is the predecessor to stories and character's of the likes created by Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard (and a bunch more, but those are my favorites). The guy is EPIC. Anyway, it looked like it was over. MacDonald was always writing other stuff (never slept) but the steady stream of Travis had dried up. Four years later Travis turned up again in The Empty Copper Sea and we got four more after that. So you see the problem, yes? No interwebs. Used bookstores are probably good for books between 1978 and current and you might pick up something from the mid-seventies if it's in good shape, now being the early 80s, but you can't count on it. If Travis was considered anything other than pulp fiction, he might have stood a chance. 

My dad got them in the settlement. 

Later I found the missing pieces online. I'm not really sure how the hell missing pieces happened. I'd like to say I suspect my mother but. OK, I suspect my mother.

Let me return to a conversation I had with my youngest in the car on one of our many trips schlepping stuff from Weston to Chappaqua. 

Elizabeth: Mom, why do you need all those books? Are you really going to read them all again?

Me: Elizabeth, I'm probably never going to read any of them again. OK, that's not true. In touching them, I'll be inspired to read some of them again but mostly I'll just know they're there.

Elizabeth: Mom, I don't get it. Why do you have them? Why all this angst?

Me: You really don't know, do you?

Elizabeth: Is that bad?

Me: No. That's not bad at all. You are either a reader or you are not a reader. It's OK.

Elizabeth: I read!

Me: Of course you do, sweetie. Being literate doesn't make you a reader and this is a sensitive subject and pisses people off. Remember that conversation we keep having about opinions versus assertions?

Elizabeth: Yup. Your opinion or observation is not the same as an assertion and does not invalidate mine unless I say so.

Me: Right. So can I explain myself without you getting all hot and bothered because I have to tell you, I'm getting worn out listening to people say things that are different than how I see the world but not saying how I see the world and Mommy is just tired but you DID ask, ok?

Elizabeth: I did ask. OK, go ahead.

Me: Elizabeth. I realize I use the declarative voice, so I'm sorry if that's hard to hear but I am tired, OK?

Elizabeth: yes, I'm listening.

Me: Elizabeth, I'm not going to apologize for any of this, OK? You're just going to have to be a big girl and not put this on yourself unless I tell you what you should think.

Elizabeth: MOM!

Me: Right.

Me: Elizabeth. Readers have an actual relationship with their books. Swear to god. I think it's probably different for everybody and some people handle walking away from books better than others and some people read more than others. Some people have a broader spectrum but a reader is a reader. Some readers have a really hard time reading but they are still readers. Your brother is a reader. He struggles with it but he is a reader. Books are precious to him. Your sister goes through books like water but they are very specific stories. Her taste in books is very, very narrow although I think it might be broadening. She is not attached to her books though, at least not so much. She had no problem dropping her books and picking up a kindle. This does not make her a non-reader, it's just different. She has some attachments, just not many. 

Elizabeth. Readers identify with the story, get lost with or become the characters. If a character is not well developed, I think a reader will have trouble. C.S. Lewis, in the film, Shadowlands said that we read to know we aren't alone. I don't think C.S. Lewis actually said that but his character does. It's true though; we do read to know we aren't alone. So when I look at those books on the shelf they all mean different things to me. There are some books that changed me forever. There are specific authors who are responsible for having formed large parts of my basic belief systems.

Many of those books have and continue to broaden my world view. Every time I read a book written by an author from another culture which shows me an entirely other perspective in a way that allows me to have empathy for the community without trying to make the community or the protagonist like me, in other words, I step into their world, my world view gets bigger. When I started reading The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and I got to the part about God's Carotid bursting open and a million people dying of hatred, the back of my head blew apart. Elizabeth, I will never be the same again because of that one small passage. She is a very powerful writer and her non-fiction is far more significant, but her two pieces of fiction are books I could never part with.

The books I hold close, I hold for many reasons. My favorite book in the world is in that collection. I don't know how many times I've read it and I don't know how I'd experience reading it at this point in my life, but it broke my heart in more ways than I've managed to consider at this point. I am still considering some of the points Mr. Helprin was trying to get across. They made a movie. I am horrified.

Elizabeth. Madeline L'Engle's books. I have all of them, at least all from that set. A Wrinkle in Time flipped a switch in my brain when I read that book. I think of love and tesseracts and missing fathers and lost brothers and being braver than you ever thought you'd have to be. I think about the first time an adult told me it was a horrible story and that her girls, the right age to be reading it, absolutely hated it. They were reading it at school and had to break it apart and do something with the paragraphs or something. It ruined the story. Something died in me right there on West Lane in Stamford in my husband's childhood home while my sister in law told me the sky had turned black. I was terrified that I would have children who would not love that story, who would not understand about love and tesseracts and missing fathers and lost brothers and being braver than you ever thought you'd have to be and how damned important that all is. Especially the tesseract.

Elizabeth: The tesseract?! What the hell is a tesseract?!

Me: Exactly. 

Me: Do I need to continue?

Elizabeth: No. You don't. You love your books. Your books are a part of you. I get it. And it's OK that they aren't a part of me. It doesn't make me stupid.

Me: Stupid? Jesus, no. But you are compassionate. I appreciate that. Thanks for listening. You really have no idea.

Elizabeth. I think I do.

Me: I'm sorry about that. In a perfect world it's an 'of course'. 

So here is what I'm pretty sure I did. I packed the arc. I packed what I felt must be saved. Perhaps there were some errors on the way, but I did my best. 

Last one. This is another bound galley which I am fairly certain he bought somewhere in NYC as it's got a $20 price penciled on the inside. He's not in the habit of purchasing bound galleys. What I have or had in my possession came home because he has worked in the publishing world for a very long time and brings me what is relevant. What is relevant is also what is current. I will never understand Pavane and he's not talking. The Book of Kells was published in 1985 and in looking at the current reviews on Good Reads, I'm having a bit of giggle. Honestly. It's not that damn hard to read. It's well researched, historically accurate, best I can tell (I did actually do some research because...), and if you're going to read about time travel, there WILL be some jumping about. Be prepared to work a bit to keep up. Also, Viking Ireland. It's bloody. Characters are a bit on the nasty side. Get a grip. Life was not particularly pleasant. Attend a history class at your local university. Ah, wait, shut it, Alecto. Never mind. Anyway, the point of this book is that it is the source, the root, of my daughter's name. Yes, there is another child with the same name and a spelling we adopted that I knew when I was younger, who's tenacity I admired, but this is the one. Oddly enough, it's halfway anglicized in the book so I'm not entirely sure what people are complaining about. Derval (that's a character from the twentieth century) translates it half the time anyway. 

The original paperback is in the photograph at the top of the post, dead center stack, on top of all that C.S. Lewis, by the way. 

6682

None of the above. Please.

For a while I was feeling bad about the length of my posts, but more importantly the amount of time spent writing them. Sometimes an entire day, an entire Saturday morning and most of the afternoon could be blown on a post.

I had to think about which word to use. My first choice was 'wasted'. 

Here are some unhelpful words:

1. Bad
2. Blown/wasted

SM gave me unsolicited written feedback once or twice about grammatical errors or other such things and got swatted for his efforts. If I was interested in spending any more time adjusting my grammar, sentence, or paragraph structure I'd have already done it. If he felt the need to critique it, he should stop reading and move on to something else. He let it go, or at least stopped pointing it out. Apparently I was clear on that one. He resorted to periodically indicating that my posts were dense as hell, full of metaphor, and hard to get through. He wondered if I was intentionally oblique. Well sometimes, yes. I don't want to give you a direct address or reveal a name but otherwise, not really. I might ask you to pick something up out of context or just live with the fact that you won't have a particular reference if you haven't been reading since 2007.

If you didn't read The Tempest, you surely won't understand the significance of sea change either but that has become socially acceptable. You'll pick it up in context. Sort of.

If you don't have a clue about The Tempest or think it's a film from 2010, my heart breaks, but these things happen. I think about the opening scene from the most recent Fahrenheit 454 where the books are burning, the works or art, Da Vinci's diagram of man, the philosophers, all of it, and I think, this is beautiful and pointless; we have already done it.

Did you know that the vocabulary part of the SAT is gone? I did not know this. I'm not going to get into it either. I'm just noting the passing of things. We will rotate back, I expect, when we realize what we've done.

Circling back to the unsolicited advice, I'm not meaning to pick on SM; he wasn't aware of the purpose of the posting and some people kvetch about the things that bother them. I started putting the word count at the bottom of each post so he wouldn't have to take it out into Word to find out. Some people need to know these things. I'm actually one of them.

It was not his fault that I started to feel bad about the time spent, it was mine.

If I actually had the time to get into that this morning, it might be what I wrote about because I've learned an awful lot about those feelings and how they're attached to a great many things that have come slithering and oozing out of those boxes in the garage as the lids lift slowly, one or two at a time in some sort of controlled fashion in the new office with the same guy in Croton-on Hudson.

This is important, this part: ..."as the lids lift slowly, one or two at a time in some sort of controlled fashion..."  Oddly enough, there isn't much emoting as you'd expect, or as I'd expect. I've said, and I've written that I'm afraid if I start crying, I'll never stop. Portnoy had said, on many, many occasions that I just needed to touch it, touch it with a feather at first and then cry that fucker out (fucker being my word, not his). Turns out, that isn't necessarily true. If I've been crying it out on and off most of my life and it's still there and growing like some off the charts stage four tumor, I really don't think crying's the answer. 

Again, not what I'm getting at this morning.

I have exactly thirteen minutes left. 

I really am on a clock this morning and I really do need to get a post out. 

I don't know who told me but it was a revelation and probably I am the last to know. There is fight or flight and I know all about those two things. They're what put that shit show ocean of cortisol in my head which has been there for god only knows how many years, probably most of my life. 

There is the third option called freeze.

I learned freeze I think in Watership Down. I think. The animal goes tharn in the lights of the oncoming Hrududu. That's the word, I think, for anything with an engine. I think Stephen King uses the word as well in The Stand which is probably where it had more significant impact. 

Freeze. I freeze a great deal but it isn't so simple as straightforward terror. So this is none of the above, please. But I'll take it because it's far more accurate than the first two. 

Perhaps freeze happens when the brain overloads with that one last thing. I don't know. 

My brother said, when I was out in Colorado just before Thanksgiving,

Alecto, this is what Winston Churchill said about when you find yourself in hell, he said,

"When you find yourself in hell, just keep walking"

The actual quote is: "If you're going through hell, keep going."

Close enough. Jack, he says, periodically, Alecto, keep walking. And I do. When I freeze, I pick a point on the horizon and walk toward it. All systems shut down but the O/S so that I can keep walking toward that point on the horizon and then the lights start to come back on, one by one in the most essential order. 

I am four minutes over now and there are 981 words and this is entirely un-proofed. 

I am safe. 

 

Still Life With Lint

I'm sorry about the tilt. I convinced myself that the tilt was better. Maybe you get more of something. More of us, maybe. More dog, more light, more truth. I did not move a damn thing this morning before I took this shot. The electric blanket is left over from the night the furnace went out. I can't get her to let me put it back. It's unplugged. Woman. Please. The slippers are hers. Mine are on my feet. The quilt hanging over the window is not, in fact, as heinous as I thought two Christmases ago when I chose not to finish it. I know, it's too dark and you can't see it from here. It is reminiscent of a pattern the blogger Madcap made or used or something so many years ago. There is a gold spiral below the circles that is too low to see and on the back, yes, on the back of this thing, is one square yard of fabric quilted into the white backing.

Who the hell does that?!

Me. 

Madcap gave me and two others a single yard of fabric with a red dragon and a month or more to do something with it. I thought I knew and then I did not and it sat and sat and sat until I made the quilt for Lucia and Pat and the dragon was for both of them. I thought it was very clever right up until I used an egregious border fabric. An eighteen inch egregious border fabric. You cannot see it because it's just that awful. I realize it can be remade, I can iron out the quilt and hang it, use it, or give it away. Right now it is keeping the heat more inside than out of my very, very old home. The house suggested I do this the evening I was ready to start sewing and realized I had no idea where the foot pedal/power cord unit for the machine had landed. Or not. There is another on the back window and there was a Frank Lloyd Wright throw on the third. It worked.

I tried exactly once to get a nail into the plaster, bounced the hammer off my thumb a couple of times and just before resorting to brute force, with the late summer, 1986 masonite wall incident still fresh in my mind, got off the chair and hit the interwebs.

Oh. I see. I have already knocked on most of the walls in this place and have identified which are most likely to be original walls, which are the oldest replacements, which are really old wallboard, which are possibly, no shit masonite, and which might be? actual wallboard? maybe sheetrock? OK, probably I'm not even remotely that lucky in terms of hanging things. Light things, wonderful, really, really effing wonderful. Otherwise, I do know how to find a stud. I won't be locating that sort of stud and I sure as shit do not feel like drilling holes into walls that have animal hair mixed into the mix. That's just WRONG. 

A picture rail system costs a shit load of money which I have no intention of spending even if I could. Also, I'm pretty sure it would look more than vaguely out of place in here. I understand that I could get away with a couple of holes on either end but just, no. There may or may not have been honest to God picture molding in this room at one point but I kind of doubt it, given the use of the room. In the big house, for sure. Probably still there. 

The molding is old. Not old as in not in such good shape old, old as in of a different texture and feel old. The 1.25 inch hanging nail goes in, but not without some effort. The last .25 slides into something with much less give. Is it air, maybe? No idea. The base of the hook jams itself hard into the plaster and I hang the long, light dragon which you cannot see, against the opposite wall with about eight inches of visible wire and it has a little more than one inch of pull away from the wall. Wonderful.

I suffer for ninety minutes with the art I have taken from the house and the small space I have in which to hang. This shit simply does NOT belong or really fit in this space. I have moved the bookcases together to make it easier. I do have thoughts. I didn't leave that big a gap between those two paintings by accident. They have to be separated by something. Maybe. But I did figure out why some pictures hang forward at more of an angle than others and it isn't really about weight, it's about the tension in the hanging wire which is a freaking bitch to fix. You really do have to just swap it out and you'd best know what you're doing. Neither of the oil paintings have glass but the frame on the left is as heavy as it looks. The water color resting on the bookcase is as heavy as glass that size should be.

I do not want that to break. Sparky's wife made that painting and I don't know when because I can't see if it's dated but it was a wedding present. The blue multimedia square is light, light, light and was picked up in Israel by a very old friend. Oddly enough, all four of these paintings were either wedding presents or an anniversary gift purchased at the gallery where a wedding present by the same artist was acquired. I kept the smaller of the three, surprising myself, not that I wanted any but that I'd argued for this which was so different from the first two. If I'm right, this was purchased just before he left and had a price tag suggesting she'd finally been found. I am not fond of gold frames but they appear to be fond of me.

The landscape on the far left is done by a man whose hobby was painting but he worked on Wall Street until the crash in 1929 at which point he moved his family to a home they'd purchased in Southwest Vermont which is where he spent the rest of his life doing mostly nothing but painting and odd jobs which kept the lights on. Thousands of paintings, the man was prolific. Thousands of paintings which were mostly landscapes within a thirty mile radius of his home. He had a one man show in the town of Manchester. I'm not sure why this is as relevant as the number of collections that hold his work today. I am also not sure where my mother acquired the painting or why she thought it made a good wedding gift but it turned out to be wildly appropriate; it just took some time for the relevance of that particular landscape to meet me head on coming around the bend. 

This house trembles like an old wooden rollercoaster in high winds and I wake up in the night, not all the way, but enough to know the world is not coming to an end. I listen to the walls, the eves in the attic above me, the sounds of the floor blow, and more importantly, the not sound of the windows rattling. There is a distinct difference between trembling and shaking and I have never heard or felt this before. I go back to sleep and in the morning wonder if it was a dream. It takes me two weeks to ask Elizabeth if she heard the same. Yes. 

The house says, be patient, be deliberate, be thoughtful, and be kind. The house says, assume nothing. The house says, it probably won't look at all the way you thought it would and it will NOT look anything like the way anything has ever looked, but if you just STOP and put that hammer down and take a breath and step back and close your eyes and

For the love of God, try to stop overthinking everything...

Elizabeth: Mom, that looks weird hanging down like that.

Me: Yup. Sure does. Ever notice how in some museums that's how paintings hang from the wall? 

Elizabeth: Huh.

Me: I only have nine feet of wire so I can't be cutting it all up tonight and restringing shit so that's going to have to wait and I can't be pounding nails every three inches into the molding (ah, so that's what the rail system is for), so I'm going to have to think this through. 

Elizabeth: Huh.

I shoved the blue chairs into opposite corners. It looked not nearly as nice as the room we'd planed but it opened the room up. Fuck it, I don't actually care anymore.

Elizabeth: There goes our magazine room.

Me: Yup. There goes our magazine room and here comes room to walk.

I left the dog's bed squashed behind the chair with enough room to come in and out. She refused to use it. I see. She is not a cat and so it is right out in front where everyone can step on her but she really doesn't give a rat's ass about that just so long as she isn't banished. 

Adam talks to me every Saturday at 12:15. He used to not talk much at all because in the beginning we were like oil and water and he worked out pretty quick that I struggled with feeling invisible and so he mostly shut the hell up and prompted or redirected me but stopped correcting me and I never heard another declarative statement out of him again.

DO NOT TELL ME HOW I FEEL OR WHAT I THINK OR WHAT TO THINK.

That seems so long ago. 

It seems so long ago, typing up the list which was really a letter which was really not to him at all but to the world at large, everyone I'd ever come in contact with who'd managed to break my heart one way or another with some sort of prognosis. It started out with a list of how I experienced our sessions and ended with a list of requirements. 

The things that I need in order to continue. He asked for a copy.

A copy? Dude. This shit is electronic. This IS your copy.

I think about the concept of a diagnosis and how uncomfortable they make me. The moment we put a label on something, I notice we stop listening. Mostly we stop listening to ourselves. I recognize the label helps with an explanation but after that it's too easy to hang onto a bunch of words and not hear the rest of it. Is it any wonder my world imploded when just three hours with a person looking directly removed the label that kept me safe?

I don't think about the labels at all anymore. I don't think in terms of bi-polar and I almost never think PTSD although that's certainly what we're dealing with but the diagnosis isn't the point. He's just pulling strings. Sometimes a string is pulled, I look at it and he asks me:

Is that really a problem?

....

Or do you just think it's a problem because you don't deserve good things?

....

I don't have to have an answer anymore either. And I'm allowed to have time to process things. And one time I walked into his office and just sat there and cried and he said:

I'll just wait until you're done, OK? If you need to spend the entire session crying, that's fine too. 

And then he did the damnedest thing. He sat in his chair, turned slightly away, completely still, and looked out the window as if in an upright savasana. When I raised my head and straightened my body, he turned back to me. 

Sometimes I still think the ledge is narrow but I don't remember the last time the wind blew too hard to stand. I don't know that I feel any less alone in a regional sense, but I don't really feel the desperation of alone either. As I settle into the house that repeatedly says:

Listen.

I prepare myself for Elizabeth's impending departure. Classes start again on Thursday and while she won't be living in the dorm, she'll have late classes and a life and she should have these things. She should be significantly less here. She should not be here when I get home. We have worked out a system with our tandem parking that whoever leaves first takes the car parked in front. Conceivably we could go days without seeing each other. 

I prepare myself because I realized just the other evening that I am finally in that house I've been thinking of since Lucia was maybe eighteen months old. The house that morphed over time and oddly enough, despite my flat out refusal to have a second floor because I didn't want to deal with it, does INDEED have the second floor Portnoy fucking insisted on because he wanted to hear the wind in the trees. 

Well, Portnoy. You can also hear and feel the rollercoaster as well. Weren't thinking about that, were you? Except he was pretty clear he wasn't going to live in an old house. I look around periodically and remember the way he tore my house apart, finding everything wrong with it and for the life of me I could not figure out why a person would see the world that way. Now I look at this old house and try to see it through his eyes wondering how it would choose to offend him because it most certainly would. It would know exactly which buttons to push and which to push hard. Portnoy. Why do you have those buttons and why would this house, of all houses choose to push you right over the edge?

I think that a house that has managed to stay upright for this many years has got a good bit of power in its walls and that's not something to be taken lightly. 

Listen, it says. Put that hammer down and listen. 

OK. 

I am pretty sure that sitting on the small white sofa in this empty room is going to be an entirely different experience from sitting on the other sofa, even though it was mine, in the big empty room in the house in Weston which, by the way, had very little to say at all. 

Listen, it says. Listen.

OK.

Still Life with Lint

 

2442

 

Unless you're smooth between the legs. Like Kierkegaard.

The first and only year I used an accountant, the sort of which you hand over your life and after which you write a check, I was told this:

"Opinions are like assholes; everybody has one."

I believe there may have been a part two which suggested that said opinions either, a) couldn't possibly stink; or, b) were, unlike everyone else's asshole, lily white.  The first part stuck, the second was an added bonus that just made me think of Jim DiPreta looking at me in outrage over something and saying, and I bet your shit doesn't stink, either!

My knee jerk response was a deadpan "I don't shit". 

I was probably nineteen, freshly engaged to his twenty-five year old high-school buddy, and still blissfully unaware of the situation my thirty-two year old son refers to as: "Mom. It came as a terrible shock to me the day I realized most women of your generation were not only NOT like you but not even remotely like you. I'm still confused." I still thought the term used to describe me at seventeen was a good thing, something to aspire to, a combination of power, grace, and the ability to take your ass down if you fucked with me. My boyfriend's best adult friend called me a Poison Butterfly. 

Dissonance. Plenty to go around. Help yourself to a handful.

How was I to know that Jim DePreta, who later married a woman named Gail under two conditions: 

1. that she quit smoking immediately (she started smoking again two weeks after the honeymoon)
2. that she let go of the idea of having children completely (there was a baby two years later),

had an expectation of 'woman' that was so foreign - to me - that it was highly unlikely we'd be able to engage in any sort of meaningful conversation without a rule book; I was clueless and he was cast in stone(ish). 

"I don't shit" came out of my mouth unbidden and horrified me. What did that even mean? 

Jim DiPreta laughed so hard beer sprayed across the bar, the bar stool crashed into the table behind us, and with a double-fisted death grip on the edge of the bar, he turned, red faced and said without a trace of irony:

"You are Spec-tac-u-lar."

I searched the room for my gonna be husband in desperation. It was time to get the hell out. The bar in Jim DiPreta's mother's basement had just become a no fly zone. A bar as hostile territory. This was a genuine first and let loose a ripple across the known universe. Bars are safe. They're full of interesting people; you never know who the hell you're going to meet, but bars are safe.

Interesting belief. 

We left so fast I didn't stop to use the bathroom and peed in Jim DiPreta's mother's petunia beds at the side of the house; an act which seemed perfectly ordinary to me, discrete, even, but left Joe nearly apoplectic if apoplexy can also be associated with hilarity. 

You just pissed like a race horse into DiPreta's mother's fucking petunias!!!!

I had to pee! You want me to pee in the middle of the front yard?!

Well, no, but you dug up her fucking petunias!

Well, I REALLY had to pee and they'll be fine by morning.

I don't think they're ever going to be fine, did you SEE them?! They were floating away. There's a fucking HOLE where about six of them USED TO BE PLANTED. 

Oh. Do you think I should go put them back?

NO I DON'T THINK YOU SHOULD GO PUT THEM BACK! THEY'RE COVERED WITH PEE AND WE'RE GOING TO GET CAUGHT!

We're going to get caught having peed in the petunias? Is that bad?

Holy shit, Alecto, get in the fucking car.

OK. But just for the record, when you pee in a cornfield, I don't think anything floats away. I'm sorry I didn't know petunias couldn't handle being peed on. I won't do it again. Next time I'll pee in front of them in full view of the window.

GET IN THE CAR.

Yes, sir.

Don't 'sir' me, you haven't meant a 'sir' in your life.

THAT, sir, is most assuredly NOT true.

Later:  OK, so I know I'm supposed to be sorry and I know that you know that I'm not sorry so it would be pointless to tell you I'm sorry but is it helpful to at least tell you I know I'm supposed to be sorry?

....

I'll try to be sorry. I'll let you know if I get to sorry. Will that work?

....

Holy crap, Joe, I am NOT sorry for peeing in the petunias but I am sorry you're upset. 

OK.

DiPreta's an asshole.

Yup.

Has he always been an asshole?

Yup.

So why is he your friend?

Because he's a really good guy.

Oh. OK. I know a bunch of assholes who are really good guys. But, Joe?

What?

He really doesn't know what to do with me.

Yeah, I got that.

I'm sorry about that.

I'm not.

You're not?

Nope. Did you meet his girlfriend (this was way before Gail but it might as well have been Gail)?

Yup.

What'd you think?

Um.

Say it.

She exists to make beds, do dishes, and give the best blow jobs ever. 

Do you think I want that?

Does HE want that?

Of course he wants that. That's what he was brought up to want.

WHAT?! Were you brought up to want that?!

Have you met my family?!

Well, yes, but, I'm confused.

Do you think any of my sisters exist to make beds, do dishes, or give the best blow jobs ever?

Yeah but you said your wife was going to be rail thin forever and your kids were going to march in uniform.

Have you met my mother?

Yeah, she's thin?

That's not what I meant.

OK, your mother isn't Jim DiPreta's mother and your sisters don't exist to give the best blow jobs ever.

What does Joanne do for a living?

SHE JERKS OFF RABBITS!!! 

Alecto! Seriously? 

She's working on the male birth control pill. And that requires jerking off rabbits.

Alecto, that's a family joke. She has lab assistants for that, or something, I don't know. 

OK, and your other sister is a landscape architect and your other sister is just weird and your brother is, um

Let's not get into that, do you get the point?

I get the point. Do you get the point?

I get the point. Are you sorry about the petunias?

I am not sorry about the petunias.

Exactly.

I have no idea what you mean by that but I'll assume I'm not in trouble anymore.

You can assume you're never going back to Jim DiPreta's mother's house.

...breaks into the Hallelujah chorus...

Later Jim DiPreta and I were friends. It really didn't take much, maybe because we were young and the country wasn't at war with itself and it was OK to be friends with people who had opposing points of view which are really just viewing points or points from which we view the world. There is a subtle distinction but it's really important. 

I would not have used the word opposing ten years or maybe even five years ago. I looked at that sentence and wanted to change the word to 'differing' but that would have been putting lipstick on a pig. 

Putting lipstick on a pig.

Look at it. I am embarrassed. Mortified, actually. It's OK, I'll go first. Here is my asshole. If I show you mine, maybe you will have a look at yours or maybe think about the fact that, unless you are smooth between the legs, you do, in fact, have one and it does, in fact, STINK TO HIGH HEAVEN.

I hold Barack Hussein Obama II in extraordinarily high regard for many, many reasons. I am utterly humbled by the man, driven to tears in some cases. Much of this is wrapped up in my own belief systems, my own history, and some of the things that matter most in the world. To me. Did you just go to race? When I use words like that, in my experience most of my audience goes directly to race and literally cannot hear a word I say after the fact. Doesn't matter which side of the political aisle you're standing on either; he's either a threat or a personal fucking agenda. Check in.

Never mind what the man stood for or where he came from or what he was attempting to accomplish in his eight years. It all gets lost in the noise we no longer call racism; we now call it cultural bias. Makes it easier to look at. Whatever. 

My point is this: We can't see him. Not really. He stirs up an awful lot of our stuff though. He stirs up stuff for better or for worse and quite honestly, I think most of us missed the freaking point of him entirely. That's all I really need to say on that subject because this isn't about #44, it's about what he said and my own personal mortification. 

He said, about Sarah Palin, and this is paraphrased because there's no point in getting the entire thing, it won't help, he said that having her in office would be like putting lipstick on a pig. In other words, a pig is still a pig. 

There is so much fucking wrong with that statement. 

How hard would it have been to - here it comes, Barry - 'call a spade, a spade'? (see what I did there?) How hard would it have been to say:

The woman has absolutely no experience, or not enough experience and is entirely unsuitable for the job. Or, the woman is a loose cannon, or, any one of a hundred things he could have said that were considered objectionable. Many, many metaphors could have been used that were NOT directly derogatory and for the love of God were not

Sexist beyond reason

I am still cringing. 

He shot himself in the chest with that one, not the foot, the chest. He missed that major organ to the left but still, it was a significant wound and I don't care who wrote the speech, he said the words and we backed him up. So that sentence should really read: We shot ourselves in the chest with that one. I know of one other person (doesn't mean there aren't more) who has been willing to publicly use the phrase

We the People

when discussing current political events. I don't doubt that there are many, many people thinking it but I've only ever read it one place in my feed and he is hesitant because of the level of activity and I understand that. He drives a partisan agenda with his posts and he is literally the only friend on Facebook I'm seeing do this and while he's not squeaky clean, he strives for political neutrality, moving us toward communal ownership of current events.

This post was brought to you today by a conversation I had with Elizabeth about pendulum swings, which occur naturally in the world and after she went to bed I kept thinking and then I looked up a word I've been quietly applying to the Ds just as liberally as I apply it to some of the Rs and remembering way back when, in 1983, I think, when I registered as an I because I wanted no part of either party and only just recently changed that to a D so I could vote in the primaries because I could not vote in the primaries when the battle between the Progressive White Haired Dude and the Woman Who Would Be Queen raged on and on and on like a conflagration that nearly consumed itself and in the end, left us all wide open and vulnerable and completely oblivious to the truths of

• We the People
• Freedom of Religious blah blah blah (sorry but it's true)
• The Right to Vote (and the right to an opinion and privacy)
• The difference between Patriotism and Nationalism
• The definition of Fascism 
• The onset of Nihilism (didn't see that coming, did you?)

I quietly posted this to about one third of my audience, the third least likely to tear each other apart in the comment section at 11:09 on January 16 and then went to bed. I guess what I'm asking of us all is accountability. The posts begins with women and ends with Americans. I'm not just talking about the Ds. I bring us up because we are loud, arrogant, self-absorbed, and not doing any of our causes any favors at this point. We are astonishingly hypocritical. I am waiting for the lottery box to come out. I really am. How easy it would be. Anyway, I believe if you're going to clean house, start in your own kitchen, wash your windows, scrub your floors, and don't forget to clean up those mirrors. Turn on the lights in your own house first. 

 

Yo. Progressives. That means you too. I only call you out because you are the only lot of us which appears to collectively believe it's bathed in rose water. Just sayin'. 

 

...I am not a Progressive. I evolved beyond that twenty years ago. Shut the fuck up and leave me alone...

 

January 16, 2019 - 11:09 PM   

 

I was thinking about a time when I couldn’t find a word for the opposite of misogyny and was really bothered by that apparent gap; the invisible misandrist wandering loose, an orphan thread ready to unravel us in a moment of gross hypocrisy.

 

I’m glad we have the word today. I’m not sure we’ve learned to use it properly, with any level of collective responsibility; but we have it and that is powerful.

 

So today I was thinking about Fascism while I was talking about cultural pendulum shifts in terms of energy. I think about the direct correlation of summer roadwork with the intensity of the prior winter. Frost heaves and pot holes. If you take the word Republican out of the definition of Fascism, then the word becomes politically neutral and it’s only about power and agenda. If I can’t get the word Republican out of the definition, I’m afraid we’re going to need another word for the next pendulum swing because the rest of the definition is subjective. Mostly.

 

We’ve been extreme, intolerant, nationalistic, and authoritarian for a very long time. I’m just not sure how long we’ve held each other in such clear disregard.

 

Honestly. Mrs. Pence is free to seek employment at will with a few exceptions, none of which involve religious beliefs or schools. That We the People would have the audacity to question her religious and moral convictions, much less choices in this era where we fight for those rights is astonishing - and indicative of how hard we’re going to swing. It’s going to hurt.

January 20, 2019 - 1:00 PM

Let the record state:

I am a single issue voter.

I will stand on the front lines with a coat hanger if it comes to that. God help us all if it does come to that. I also recognize that (the collective) You have very different and very strong feelings on the subject which are in some cases just as strong (and just as valid) as mine and this causes extraordinary dissonance. If I make you wrong, then I don't have a leg to stand on when I tell you that you cannot make me wrong. This is a zero sum game, this wrong-wrong business. Insert the word choice. Or not - at our peril.

I am a fervent ally of the LGBTQIA community. Also, that acronym can grow, shrink, change as is meaningful. I don't care; it isn't up to me. Let the record state that as of today, the acronym represents: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual/Allied/Aromatic/Agender (or trying to work it out, or none of the above). I will take bullets for you. I will refuse to use traditional pronouns intentionally. I will insist on gender neutral bathrooms. I will quietly hold your hand through the scary places that don't know quite what to do with you yet. I will walk in front of you, behind you, any place you need me to be. I will learn to dance on the left for you, and only for you and make it part of the norm all across the country, wherever I dance as a cis-female; as an older cis-female. (because I fucking suck at it and I sure as hell wouldn't do it for anyone else). And most importantly of all; I will admit to not having a freaking clue what you might want or need from moment to moment, day to day and recognize it's up to me to pay attention. To pay very, very close attention. 

However. Karen Pence may work wherever she wants to work and believe whatever she wants to believe. That is her right. Mike Pence, as our current VP does not have to support the LGBTQIA movement. As a matter of fact, he should not. It would be a bit suspicious if he did. Mike Pence is VERY clear about where he stands on certain issues which is why he scares the bejesus out of me. We vote for a reason, People. Until I see Karen Pence doing things to people who don't want them done, then shut the hell up. 

Civil Rights. Really? Do I need to get into this? 

Immigration. I'm going to come back to this.

The Dreamers. Holy mother of God, you've got to be kidding me. 

I started this sentence out at 2799 words so I'm going to try really hard wrap this up in under 1200. We do not enslave people. Period. I could write you a book on that one and what exactly enslavement means. That's a very broad definition. I include women's rights under the heading of Civil Rights. I am not looking for a discussion on this. My point is to tell you who I am, in defense of calling my own party a bunch of fascists. I believe that when we tell a woman what to do with her body we are, in fact, enslaving her and we've been doing this without even thinking about it for, well fuck me, forever, people. I believe that when we appropriate the Black Lives Matter movement because All Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter, we are hitting at the heart of racism in a way we aren't willing to even look at. Look. At. It. It struck a nerve. Look at the nerve. Yes indeed, all lives do matter. But. Find your own tagline. That movement exists for a reason. So that's a few sentences. I believe what I believe, you believe what you believe. Wrong-wrong is a zero sum game.

The Dreamers. oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god oh my god..... the shrieking in my head is still too loud for words. I can't even have a rational discussion. 

Immigration. Three points:

• Before you say GET OUT, do your homework. Take a good hard look at foreign affairs.
  • Where are they coming from and why are they coming here? What has happened? Put yourself and your family there. Sit there. Sit there for a solid month. Just think. I'm not asking for a decision. I'm asking you to do your homework.
  • What is our relationship with their country? What was it? What is it now and how did THAT happen? What is our relationship with the country that caused the crisis if there is a crisis (oh come ON)?
  • Check bullet two again. I'm just asking you to think. I'm not actually asking you to change your mind. For the record, I'm asking the Ds to think as well. Trust me. If I say the words: 'maybe you should leave that flag alone for now' one more time... and never mind the gun issues.
  • Look around at who is already here. What are they doing? What jobs do they have? Do we want these jobs (I am NOT suggesting we let people across the border to clean our toilets, I'm suggesting we take a look at our current economic situation and think it all the way through)
  • Look around at who is already here and what they're doing. Why do they have THOSE jobs. Why don't we have those jobs? Is it because we don't pay them as much? Are you sure? Are they better than us? Why is the IT world not really white anymore? I don't mean the ground level, I mean coming up the chain. If they go away, would we have to work harder, would we need a better education? Oh crap. Fix that.
• When and how did YOU get here?
  • Really? You're going to give me that argument? 
  • Do your homework. Just about every nationality that came through the gates after a point in time (I'm too damn lazy right now to go get it) got trashed on the way in. Your family did too. How long did it take your family to be whole again?
  • Why did your family come here? Go down every branch. 
• This last one's a doozy but I promise to throw myself under the bus too:
  • So, here's the deal and I have the paperwork to prove it because my mother's cousin Larry is nuts: down at least ONE, maybe TWO branches of the maternal line, I've been here FOR-EVAH. Since the dawn of American time. You may call me WASP. I've decided that gives me the right to throw everybody off the Island. Not enough land, sorry. Not good enough, sorry. Wrong sort, sorry. Wrong families, sorry. Not enough money, sorry. Anyone from the South is a known terrorist (south of, um, Austria and East of, uh, lemme think that through, oh hell, Angles and Saxon and be done with it) and anyone from Ireland is a monkey, and don't start with the Germans, and if you've got a hint of...Just don't like ya, sorry. So. Take your families, and your stuff (or leave it, we don't really care), and get out. Go back where you came from. Now. You have twenty-four hours before ICE is at your doors and they won't ship you out nicely. 
  • Ahhh... there are a few countries in the Middle East from which we will be offering amnesty. It's a supply and demand thing. We'll let you know.
  • Right. Some of you don't know which country to pick and couldn't find family if you had to. OK, fine, apply for amnesty and here is the camp nearest your current location. Your kids will be over there. Sort of. Some of you have to go anyway and also we realize your country doesn't actually exist anymore. Not our problem. 
  • Some of you have warrants out on your entire family line. Didn't know that? At least we gave you a heads up. Out. Now. We don't like you. Try Canada. 
  • Me? I got here by way of the ship that got rid of the horse thieves and alcoholics. We came under the guise of Religious Freedom. After that we amassed enough firepower to kill off the original property owners. Initially we let more and more of you in and sent you West with instructions to kill off the property owners and take the land. Things have not worked out well. I can't really go home because I literally have no idea where to go. It's been way too long and there are way too many branches. Also, I believe there may be a warrant out on my entire family line. In Wales. Possibly. 

So that's it. I know it doesn't read like it in the end but this is me, bluer than blue and ashamed. I didn't write this piece as a confession for the sake of getting it off my chest. I wrote it in an effort to do something called voting black. That isn't going to make sense to any of you so you'll just have to take my word for it. It's a game and if played in the right context it's powerful as all get out. It's about a zero sum game and what it takes to have it be otherwise.

This isn't about I'll show you mine if you show me yours. It's about I'll show you that I can actually see mine and hope like hell you'll look at yours. Unabashedly, in the cold, hard light of day. If that doesn't happen, then I walked under a bus for no really good reason other than, it was either speak or keep looking into the abyss and to be perfectly frank, I'm not particularly pleased with what those men did with the freaking *premise* of Buddhism. Dammit.  

There is nothing to pick apart here, people, nothing to agree or disagree with. If you find yourself wanting to argue or disagree with something then I've hit a nerve and THAT is where to start. If I failed to hit any nerves at all, well, crap. 

4222 missed.

Bricks, walls, and barriers: Crossing the State Line

This is not a fair representation. It was posted mid December, 2008 and while I suppose the mushroom cloud went up in February, strafing, which may or may not have been a new or newish thing continued throughout the year. I walked through minefields stepping on or over IEDs as if the consequences were the same either way, and what looked like a casual step off a cliff into a bottomless chasm didn't happen for another seven or eight days. After ten months of casually strolling through minefields, consequences irrelevant, I guess it would look like a casual drop. 

That reads like hyperbole, doesn't it? I really don't think it is; I think it's as accurate a description as I'm likely to come up with at this point, of where I'd come to, four months short of forty-five and three years and barely plus into my third marriage. Muscling through it because that's what you do if it's the strongest lifeskill you've got in your toolkit and all the rest have been epic failures. 

How can an inanimate thing possibly be an epic failure? 

I'm noticing my footwear. Fucking insane. 

Afterward, shoveling hours of snow from an impossible driveway the year Weston, at least, received an accumulation of over nine feet of packed snow in under six weeks (I know this because it buried the eight foot garden fence posts, drift free and then continued upward), I know perfectly well that I wore boots and gloves and also a hat until I was too warm to stand it. And here is what I thought:

I thought about bricks. Bricks going up and bricks coming down, but never without clear intent; no bombs, you see? It was always either me or David behind a walled tower and I could never get it straight, who was in that space and needed getting out or who was bricking whom or doing the un-bricking. Just bricks, one at a time going in and going out. In the end it was me in what looked like a beehive and him that got out although I can't really know that. He may very well have built himself a sarcophagus for all I know. He may always have been living in a long, narrow chamber with an airtight seal. The point is, I have no way of knowing and it took a damn long time to stop trying to work it out. Even when I thought the thinking was long over, maybe especially when I thought the thinking was long over, the churning like gears grinding, continued.

It never had a damn thing to do with David. He was a colossal tool on the way to the epic failure of my own survival, which is what happens when that's the go to in your toolbox. 

Adam pulled another string yesterday. He's getting better at this. I guess that's what happens when you have more data points; you can see the strings and which ones to pull to maybe get somewhere. Lately he's been pulling at, 'you don't deserve good things?' or 'you don't deserve good things to happen to you?' or finally this, 'when a good thing happens to you, you hold onto it.'

Yes. Yes, I do. I hold onto it desperately even when it's not a good thing. I hold onto it for dear life as if I'd drown or die without it. I hold onto it because there is only this and without it I will not survive. 

And later, in the car driving to Weston to meet Elizabeth for another sweep through the house, this: another round of THAT will kill me. I don't know how to not have THAT happen. I am not good at this game. THAT was far worse than THIS. THIS is maybe something I can survive; THAT is not. 

Surviving and fighting. Those are the two words that come up the most often in those weekly 12:15 sessions. The word 'fight' is not used aggressively but in the end I suppose the world's greatest defense is always to tell a woman it is her fault in terms of the use of that action or behavior. What might be a defensive act is thrown back in her face and it is not good. She is, at the very least, a shrew. You know, just to be clear, there isn't a damn thing wrong with defense. Just to be clear.

Last night our landlords had a knockdown drag out fight that lasted a good thirty minutes before it went silent for a bit (I think they both needed a breather - he's ninety and she can't be far behind although they don't look a day over a DAMN healthy (no joke) eighty-eight)) and then started up again, which really only lasted a minute or two. I think they were both out of steam.

Elizabeth looked shocked and scandalized and I laughed so hard my bladder about gave out on that new white couch we allowed ourselves. 

They're just fighting, Elizabeth. She's pissed as hell at him and she's passionate. It's coming out. I can't hear the words she's using but by God, is she fucking mad at him! 

I thought old people just got, I don't know, placid.

Why would you think that? Just because they're older than you or me or whoever you think might be the line between not exactly old and old doesn't change who they are. If you are passionate and full of fire in your youth, I expect you will always be passionate and full of fire. And by the way, people fight. They fight like the base animals that we are, which is NOT a bad thing. We just say it is. 

The sound of things being thrown and solid, heavy 250 year old doors being slammed.

Is she throwing things at him?

Why do you assume it's her doing the throwing?

Because it's her doing the yelling?

Listen to yourself.

Oh. I can't assume anything.

You can't see, you can't assume. But yes, I suppose it's because he's a passive slow burn kind of guy, but I have seen him good and pissed off, but she is effusive and bubbly and the other side of that is... I have no idea what the word is for the opposite of bubbly. She is effusive but I don't want to use the word rage because I don't hear that, I hear mad as hell at him and it's not fair to use rage. That word is overused. Also, Elizabeth, sex does not necessarily stop either. Just sayin', sweetheart.

Oh, I knew THAT.

You did?!

Well why would THAT stop?

Right. So, listen, those two have been married for a fucking LONG time. You know that, right? At first we couldn't figure them out but then we sort of did and I'm going to guess they're at sixty or more years. Think about this. The choreography of that battle scene, the score of that composition is cast. They could dance it, play it, sing it with their eyes closed, ears plugged, metaphorical lips sealed. It is just a part of an incredible ballet which will only be complete when the first dancer dies. 

This is the state line we've crossed into. I should be horrified and I am not. I am a little concerned about a few other things but those are things I'll probably work out. They are small things that a lifetime homeowner won't know how to deal with like gas furnaces (I only understand oil) going out and a smoke alarm with a sensor in the ceiling literally three feet from the stove, which, when activated not only can't be deactivated by me but sounds like you might imagine a robbery at a museum and the fire department shows up within about four minutes. Twice in one night. The first time I was frying peppercorns; it's the base for a lot of Indian curries. I had forgotten about the vent which is in the wall and the damn thing is a HOLE in the wall with a fan. I still wasn't really producing smoke. The second time, ten minutes after the guy left, with the fan going, were two boneless pork chops searing. No smoke. No smoke at all. 

She was beside herself. No one has ever had trouble with the stove. Before I could stop myself (but gently)...

Well, it is possible that people haven't done a great deal of cooking? (that was the part I should have left out) The man said that maybe we should have the sensor moved a bit farther from the stove? Over to the other side of the kitchen (the kitchen is not very big)

No! That can't be! The last couple were perfect! They did everything right! We loved them! They were gay, they had to have cooked! Gods forgive her, she's nearly ninety, ok? 

I cringed. I was trying so damn hard to make sure we did everything right. Exactly right. 

Oh, God, I'm so sorry. It's OK, really it is. We can just make sure we don't cook anything at all that will set it off. Please don't worry (no onions, nothing with oil, ok, only boiling water and try not to make steam and nothing in the summer, just the oven ok maybe no cooking but I am never going to let that thing go off again). She looked relieved. I'm guessing he's a complete pain in the ass when things like that happen. Twenty minutes later she came back and said they were going to have it looked at and maybe move the sensor. She'd let me know when the technician was coming. I smiled and thanked her. She looked relieved. 

And then it happened. I came home and the house was cold. Not terribly cold, but cold. I keep it cold, but not stupid cold. I keep it at 65 downstairs during the day and knock it up to 68 at night or 70 if Elizabeth is really cold. I don't have the quilted curtains made yet. Upstairs I keep it at 60 all the time. They have done something to make the two zones actually effective. Upstairs was still at 60. OK, that's good. Downstairs was at 58. Not so good. I went downstairs and had a look at the furnace. What the hell do I know. It had no obvious reset switch (oil, remember? and a boiler as well, this is important). I felt the water tank. It felt ok. I went upstairs and ran the water. Hot. Good. The furnace MUST be ok. Plus I could hear SOMETHING running. I checked the thermostat again; it was set at 65. FML. I turned it up to 70, as if that would remind it that it had work to do. I went upstairs and knocked that one up to 70 which was the first intelligent thing I'd done.

The next thing I did was probably (I'm pretty sure) unbelievably stupid although I can't know for sure. I can only hope the furnace is new enough to have a cutoff switch on the gas line. I opened the breaker box. 

Think about this.

All circuits were good. Leave it the fuck alone, Alecto. Close the door. Nope. I threw all three breakers for the furnace. Yup. All three of them and then threw them back again. Nothing. I had another look at the furnace. I really do know that I should have seen the light through the two little holes at the top. I do know this. There was one little switch hidden near the top but I couldn't read what it said. I switched it back and forth.

WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?!!!

Nothing. 

I went upstairs. Still 60. OK, that's a good sign, right? I deliberately did not touch the baseboard radiators. 

I brought the electric blanket downstairs, plugged it in and settled down next to Elizabeth. When we went to bed, the living room was at 55 and it was 58 upstairs. Fine. I will call them in the morning after my 8 AM with the Ukraine so that I don't wake them up and we will not speak of this breaker business. It never occurred to me to check the stove. Had I checked the stove I never would have done what I did later in the day.

In the morning I woke up and I was warm. Of course I was warm. People always think a cold house will wake you up. I suppose if you keep the heat at 70 and sleep in some sort of clothing with lightish blankets then you will wake up with an extreme drop. But think about this. When you are camping, even in late summer, if you are anywhere north it can get pretty damn cold at night. If you are on a pad and in a good bag, you will be warm at night and the tent, unless it is big, will also be warm. It will not be until you step out of that tent that your warm body will say: Holy shit, it's COLD this morning!

HOLY SHIT! It was 45 degrees in my bedroom. Well alrighty then. I knocked on Elizabeth's door and let her know. She had an 11 AM interview at a summer camp so I told her that she should stay in bed for a while longer, then shower and be dressed warmly by 8:30 and be prepared to crate the dog when someone showed up. It was only 50 downstairs. We share a common wall and a common-ish floor. 

I said I didn't know exactly how long it had been out because we kept it cold and didn't notice quickly and also slept under heavy duvets so we wouldn't have woken up if it didn't get much colder. I said absolutely nothing about the breakers. I called the gas company to make sure it wasn't about a gas cutoff. I didn't think my bill was due yet but this was the first cycle. It was not due yet. 

I should have stopped there. 

I did not stop there. I called and pushed buttons and pushed buttons until I got a body and just asked if there'd been any way gas could have been cut off even momentarily to that area, thinking maybe my landlords had a newer model that would have righted itself (should have checked the stove, woman).

So. Know what happens when you call the gas company and say something like that? They tell you to get the fuck out of the house. Stop what you're doing, get the fuck out. No matches, no cell phones, no nothing, and get out. They call it a gas emergency and they send a service guy on the run. 

Do you want me to call your landlord or do you want to do it? Slight reproach in her voice. We both knew what I'd done by making that call. I'd begged her to call it off. No can do. Required by law and I was required to say: Yes, I understand and yes, I am evacuating this instant.

I called. I told him. Ah fack it all. 

I meant to go home right after Elizabeth left. So they wouldn't be stuck having to wait with the repair person for however long it took but shit blew to hell at work and I did not go. When I arrived home at 6 I backed into the gravel driveway like a lunatic in full view of the large bay window in the kitchen, noticing that the light was on but not processing that information. I have never backed into that driveway like a lunatic. I wouldn't do that. It's gravel. We don't fuck with the gravel. I'd had a fuck all hard day.

There he was, standing in the kitchen on wobbly legs (apparently he'd been in the hospital because his heart has problems and periodically it lands him there) with a repair man working on the stove because one of the back burners wouldn't light on it's own and needed a part (I DON'T CARE I CAN'T USE IT ANYWAY). He did not look happy. I have no idea what was wrong with the furnace. I know that it works. On his way down the stairs to the door that will take him into his kitchen, he passed the banister which needs to go back on the wall to my second floor and he knows this.

So you don't want this? 

I do want this. I need to wait for Elizabeth to come home so we can put it back. It's been down so we could move the beds up. (and I just told you this when the alarm went off but I can't tell if you don't remember or if you're just mad at me because I haven't done it yet).

The truth is we could not get the standard size boxsprings up and around and I had to order split box springs but the banister should have gone back nearly right away, I just hadn't done it. Later I moved the banister to the stairs heading to the second floor. 

I'm just awfully glad I figured out why the washer door wouldn't shut by myself.

Listen, I know perfectly well that as a tenant it is my right to have things work and that I also should call the building manager or the landlords when something does not work but this is a unique situation. To start with, the rent on this place in this town ought to be about 40% higher than it actually is given what it is. Secondly, they screen their tenants very carefully. They would far rather have it empty then be uncomfortable with the living arrangements. I know what my options are in Westchester County. I'm OK with them, but this is a good space for us for a lot of reasons and two of those reasons live in the large space attached to our small space. 

I expect that if I were those two people who took a chance on a pair of people and a dog (remember, dogs were not on the menu), which is a subset that doesn't quite make sense to them but somehow after two hours of spell binding not only did they take us but they took the dog, and if I had gone to great lengths to make the cottage perfect (they did) and then things started breaking immediately, I might also feel just a wee bit anxious. 

We aren't quite sorted out in here yet but in the morning, at 6:30 because that is when I woke up (I really wanted another hour) this is our living space with the low watt light on and the dim-able uplight in the far right corner (the clock on the left will go somewhere when we've sorted everything else out and the clock on the right belongs to Elizabeth - for some absurd reason I decided I needed an analog clock - in the kitchen, and the bathroom, and my bedroom and um, yeah, so at $7.99 each they actually keep pretty good time):

No art on the walls, bookcases not quite sorted out yet, everything behind the couch still full of boxes and the drop-leaf table with the first coat of blue but covered with photographs and, well, art, and fabric and the sewing machine is under there somewhere and coats are in the closet and also there is Cielo's self-inflating, continuously re-inflating all night long (yes, that is a thing apparently), and finally self-deinflating bed in the closet which will fit directly behind the couch on another blue carpet when the couch and the very light table pull all the way forward into the swivel chairs. 

When I turn and back up into the nearest ink blue chair, I can see my desk, and what's meant to be the foyer (we never come in this way but it leads onto a lovely covered porch which is home to the garbage and recycling bins (WHICH CAN BE LEFT OUTSIDE WITH STUFF IN THEM BECAUSE WE DO NOT HAVE AN ANIMAL PROBLEM IN THIS NEIGHBORHOOD), a largish table which was meant for the kitchen but can't make it through the doors (I could take the legs off but I don't think it would actually work in that kitchen) but will work just fine outside because it's ancient and metal, not wood, and I see that the less than $100 bakers rack that Elizabeth and I assembled with those clamp like things that tighten when you tighten the screw because the parts that came in the box broke (of course they did) is tilting at the top and I don't know yet if that is because of the house or the weight of the pots and bowls but I think the answer is a little of both as there isn't a straight angle to be found in this house and this is a thing I love beyond reason. Also, lean or no lean, that cart is solid as shit. It will do fine. 

The vacuum does not live there. I am supposed to use it and then figure out where it does live. I'm a little worried about that last part. There is no longer any reasonable space in the Harry Potter room. The cats. You know, the cats. 

There is peace in this place. Do you know why? I do. 

3605

Yes. That is the dog's bed.

The dog's new bed has arrived. Hers has not. Therefore. I allowed that that damn dog could have a lie down on my own personal stash of clean couch blankets, given that the couch hasn't arrived either. 

None of this is a surprise except the bed part and since the mattress is here we don't have a whole lot to complain about.

The house is 270 years old; we'll cut it some slack. Maybe box springs weren't a thing 270 years ago although it does beg the question, what the hell have people been sleeping on up there lately? As in this century and quite honestly most of the last one.

I happen to own two complete sets of bedroom furniture that can respectfully call themselves antiques. None of this 'mid-century' shit (that's called early attic, ok?). My Granny, bless her heart, was born in 1913 or something like that and the one set was hers. Why a child has a masculine brass bed is beyond me but you can take it up with the Scots in the midwest. I'm not going there and also I much prefer it to the feminine version, especially the brass plated swirly nightmares constructed, uh, just past mid-century. Sigh. 

The older set belonged to my, um. Crap. I want to say my Great Aunt Gertie but she might actually be a myth. Hard to say. I'm going with Granny's aunt. So let's make that way old, turn of the turn of the century, etcetera. In any event that would make both beds what we used to call standard and now call full since there isn't a damn thing standard about a 55" mattress. Oh. The. Horror. MY other Grandma had a three quarter bed which went in a very small room and that was a truly cool thing. She said it was very difficult to get sheets for it. I'll bet. It's no picnic getting sheets for a 55" bed either. They are absolutely out there, no doubt about it, but let's not start on the limitations and at some point. Well, just never mind.

My POINT is that the only furniture I left home with (more or less) when I escaped from Weston were two sets of bedroom furniture I was afraid were going to end up in storage until I died and somebody refused to pay the rent at which point they'd end up at the dump. 

Everything went swimmingly. Sort of. Lucia bailed which meant we were short one male body which meant it was me and Mike getting the stuff up and down the VERY FUCKING STEEP STAIRS which some moron decided to carpet. We are permitted to tear it up but at this point I realize it's insulating the place (which is losing heat at AN ALARMING RATE - I'll get to the bit about the quilted curtains later) so I haven't been able to bring myself to do it.

In the end I asked Elizabeth's father to interrupt his romantic weekend (I owe his girlfriend a great deal at this point - he still owed me and we're not even yet but I'm willing to offset based on her pain) and come help with the box springs because they weren't going up. We thought maybe some more muscle (yes. we are just as delusional as I sound) might actually make a difference.

No. No box springs. Mattresses on wooden slats threatening to take out the works. Honestly, I think we'd better off just putting them on the floor. But here's the thing, did you know they sell split box springs?

Yeah, I know you know about the ones for king size beds; that's sort of a given. And they make them for queen size beds WHICH, if the dork nozzle who sold me my first queen mattress had know back in 2004 (maybe they didn't have them in 2004?) I would have been a far less unhappy camper when I tried to turn the corner at the top of my 1912 colonial. Yah. 

But a standard size box spring that is split in two. That is a truly fine invention. Why? 

Oh, come on. What's the alternative, really? This is me we're talking about. 

Measure twice, cut once. Sure. I say that now but that's never how it actually turns out. 

The apartment size sofa and two tiny swivel chairs which will all three (but certainly not at the same time) fit through a 31 inch (you do know that means 30, right?) door frame will arrive on Thursday as will the interwebs. This? This is me burning through my data plan like a Colorado wild fire. Now I'm going to dial up some netflix on the big screen (I think this thing is a 27") and sing the praises of the glory of the personal hotspot. 

And my inferno of a data plan. 

Oh, right, so the heat. Con-ed is my provider of both gas and electric. Gas is for heat, hot water, and cooking and electric is for lights, and all other appliances that aren't the range. That would be a washer, drier, dishwasher, and my daughter's hair. 

During the month of December I took possession which means I took the con-ed bill. The heat was kept at a constant 50 F and the lights were off. The doors were closed and locked except for when we were coming in and out. The vent in the wall over the stove was unfortunately FUCKING OPEN WIDE FUCKING OPEN - you know, LIKE A TWELVE INCH HOLE IN THE FUCKING WALL WITH BLADES. But still. 

The con-ed bill for December is $128.

Holy Mary, mother of sweet baby jeebus. 

These are not the original windows. Of course they are not the original windows. I found those things up in the attic. Fascinating. These windows look to be however hold the sort are that have the pulley system for raising and lowering the sashes. Yikes. Also, did I mention they're ginormous? As in nearly floor to ceiling. There are three in the living space which is only 16 x 12 feet (do the fucking math), three in my bedroom which is 16 x 10 I believe, and two in Elizabeth's which is a really weird size and shape but much smaller, one in the bathroom and another in the hall. There is a bay window in the kitchen which isn't as bad but it sure as hell isn't good with that hole in the wall. Also, there is an old window between the range and the Harry Potter room which is what we call the pass through between the kitchen and the living space because it is part old fashioned (and minuscule) butler's pantry and part, literally, Harry Potter's room under the stairs short the door which is going to have very soon (OK, a privacy curtain) because my cats STINK. 

We went to Joann Fabric today and I realized I'd failed to educate any of my children and that was just fine. Elizabeth nearly passed out in the aisles of fabric because this was literally the biggest fabric store I have ever been in and I've been in some whoppers. All totaled we walked out with 24 yards of cotton in three different colors and by keeping her safely corralled in the PLEASE BUY THIS SHIT AND GET IT OUT NOW section, I didn't hemorrhage. The only problem with buying from that section is you're either going to get OH MY GOD WHO THOUGHT THAT WAS A GOOD IDEA or, um, I need 9 yards and um, there's 18 inches on this bolt? We made it work. So I'm hoping no one notices the dragonflies in the living area. 

They wanted $16 a yard for pre quilted fabric. HAAHAHAHHAHAHA. 

I found the cheapest batting I could find in the largest cut and I'm going to use old sheets to back it (that's what we do anyway, right? The most expensive part of this were the stupid clip rings. I thought long and hard about tabs but tabs really do not fly on quilted curtains unless you don't ever want them to move. Been there done that. 

And then I found the foam remnants. I found a 72" foam remnant that is 2" thick and the weird white stuff you're supposed to wrap around it before you cover it and then the 50% OFF SALE ON THE UPHOLSTERY FABRIC OMG OMG OMG. Yes. I peed myself. 

Elizabeth has a very large roll of very beautiful fabric she picked out herself. She's not sure exactly how this all works but she was damn glad to see me walk through this door with the sewing machine after tonight's hit and run on the Weston house (the car was packed).

OK. Now I'm done. 

Also, Happy New Year. Here's to moving on. 

We speak in music and we do not have to walk on our knees. Any of us.

Somebody must have smacked somebody upside the head. Maybe. I heard the words thank you twice from the bandicoots but now that I think of it both bandicoots married into the family. I'd say, 'so, never mind', but I'll take it. It was good, the genuine acknowledgement for a number of things. 

Lucia's husband acknowledged that she was, indeed a black hole when it came to giving her stuff. You never quite knew how it landed or if it even landed. Mike, he said, is even worse. I agreed. Good, I told him, it's not just me. No. It's not just you. The woman is sentimental as hell and keeps all that stuff on her night table. 

Elizabeth. Don't be a black hole. Tell people how much these things matter to you. It's not enough to tell me. Tell them. And for the love of god tell S, not Grandpa! Grandpa will have no idea what you're talking about and he will NOT remember to tell S. 

This is Elizabeth's final play list:

Three things:

1. Cynthia is her dance teacher. When asked, she produced that particular piece of music in about five minutes. When I listened to it, I agreed immediately. All these years later and she's got my daughter pegged as a dancer.
   
   
2. Lullabies from the Road are recordings. The Tiger Mom Agreement was made after I'd made the partial move to Basking Ridge, right before her senior year began and she realized she wanted to go out with a bang, not in a senior slump, and she wanted the backup she'd had in sixth grade when her world went to pieces because what was asked was too much too much and she came to her knees.
   
   I made her record the request because there was no way in hell I was going to behave that way with a sixteen/seventeen year old without the evidence of the request to back it up. In the end, Tiger Mom looked a little different but when it comes right down to it, the motivation behind the actions and the meaning is the same. I love you with all that I am and you have my complete attention, inasmuch as I can force the bandwidth - which is how she came to know Toto and how I came to know the Hanover Marriott like a second family.
   
   
3. Do you give a seventeen year old a recording of Wild Geese? Not often. This poem was written for the walking wounded, the adults who have crossed the fields of their twenties, the foothills of their early thirties, and fallen to their knees in the mountains or the deserts of their early to middle years; life being what it truly is when we find out the truth of what it means to be human. 

Download 26 Wild Geese 2

Yes. You read this seventeen year old Wild Geese over the phone and on FaceTime on a regular basis and you put it on her playlist at the very end, hoping that she will remember, knowing that she will not (do any of us?), but with the understanding that when she hears or reads it again it will already be in her bones and maybe wake right up again. 

Oh, Zilla Pat, if you haven't worked it out is Lucia's husband, and Legacy is 'back at you' to the town of Weston from Elizabeth.

When Lucia was 18 she was in so much pain we over compensated. I found her FOUR discs the other day and she was flabbergasted because, of course, she'd lost them. I no longer had the playlists in my library which meant I couldn't easily rebuild them. I could have told you maybe half of what was there and Mike's is lost in my head except for one which he tells me meant and means far more to me than it ever did to him. I look at him askance and somehow don't really believe this. Uncle Jack was being pretty damn direct. 

The thing about giving a kid too much music is the forest is lost for the trees. Or the trees are lost for the forest? Something like that. Too much is too much. How do you know what your parents are trying to say to you when they have bombarded you with fifteen pieces of music each and your brother has given you six?! Your step-father, the one who exited without warning not quite eight months earlier and failed to even show up, did the same. 

I put the playlists back together and then picked out 27 tracks from 63 which turned out to be very easy. Each set of submitted songs came in two categories: The songs I want to give you because I have something very important to say and here is more stuff I want to give you because I love you so much and I have no idea how to fix you, so have some of me. I sorted based on CD number and track number and they were in perfect order. Then I took the remaining 36, added a bonus track, removed a couple of David's and called it the flip side. The bonus track was Mumford & Son's cover of The Boxer because it is worth a listen and also Paul Simon was involved and that explained a few things. The Boxer and The Gambler were put on those CDs from my mother, as if she'd had anything to do with it, because they are the songs I most associate with her. I have no explanation for The Gambler other than I heard it a lot in the car on the way home from the bar at the end of a Saturday night. Maybe she was singing; it is a very singable song. If The Boxer isn't self-explanatory, I can't help you.

I gave her everything.

Here they are.

Lucia 2009 - The Original 4 Discs - yeah, that last track is what you think it is.

Lucia 2018 - The Remix - The Final Front Cut

Lucia 2018 - The Remix - The Flip Side

And now I believe I am officially late but I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure that's OK.

I woke up at 5 for no good reason at all and decided today was the day for the last post from 43 Blue Spruce Circle. 

And apparently this was a good thing to write about. 

As Elizabeth said; that sure is a lot of music. Well, no kidding. We seem to speak that way around here. 

Happy New Year, People. I'll be back. Packing and moving and other things to do. 

Peace.

 

Oh just grow the fuck up

S. If you're reading this: Don't even think it. Just let go. Like me. Just let go. Even if we just end up with roast and squash and asparagus. It's ok. I'll throw some potatoes in the car just in case and it will be just fine. Love you, miss you, can't wait to see you. Being with you in VT is part of what makes my life bearable at this point. You should know that. This note is also at the end. I just had to get it out.

I remember crossing that point very clearly. It was ugly, painful, and the fallout was epic. I have no intention of falling off that cliff again. As it turned out, there was no one to catch me then, and there's no one to catch me now which isn't exactly true anymore but it would be far better for both of us if I grew the fuck up and used the one of the poles my brother put in my hands when we started climbing toward Chasm Lake. 

On the first day when we made what turned out to be the test run and I was in snow shoes, he helped me strap them onto my feel and then let me go. This is just my life, I realized later. There are no lessons in life, not really. You jump in the deep end and work this shit out and if you're lucky you aren't by yourself in the dark and somebody can tell you, maybe, what you might do to make it a little easier while you're doing it.

I notice that lately as someone I work with spews information by the ton in my general direction without much context and expects it to fit neatly, creating its own context and is literally apoplectic when I either need to ask again and again or just don't get it right. Periodically I pull up a PowerPoint illustration and the photograph I've taken of his whiteboard to back it up and he snarls something about .... grrrrr..... should have checked the server list.... grrrr. We all have our moments, don't we? 

But it was easier with Jack; just put them on and let's see what you can do and half an hour later when he turned around to watch because he was deliberately not watching so I could work some of this stuff out without the pressure of being watched, he suggested some minor corrections that might make some things easier. Cool. Thanks. That really helps. 

The information wouldn't have helped in the beginning when I really just needed to figure out how to not tip over in different terrain. 

Later we were traversing steep, really steep terrain on deep snow where even shoes weren't going to necessarily going to keep me from post holing and the possibility of tipping left and falling down an incline that wouldn't kill me because of the eight feet of snow which wouldn't avalanche badly because it was only an eight foot base but it was still a long fucking way down before the break and I was going to cry on the other side but not before and I had no fucking way how to get across in those shoes and he just watched me from seriously, only thirty feet away and said just this:

It's ok, take your time. You can do this. I know you can do this.

Eventually I realized I did NOT have to do it on my feet with my snow shoes even if he'd done it on his skis.

I dropped to my knees, cut the back of the shoes loose, dug my knees in deep, and crawled across until I could reach his pole. When we were back on the trail I cried in his arms for a good five minutes. I asked if he would have gotten me out of it eventually and he told me he could not have gotten me out of it but he could have gone down and gotten me back up and I would not have died even if I thought I would have died from that fall. I cried for another five minutes and he just held me until I let it go. So. Much. Collected fear. 

I've still got that pole, at least one of them metaphorically speaking and as gentle as I'm trying to be I realize that drawing and holding boundaries is not always gentle business. When people storm the fucking gate, however they choose to do so, I guess you've got a couple of choices. You can turn around and run like hell, you can throw some serious walls up, or you can stand and fight. The question is, what does standing and fighting look like?

I don't really care to yell. I feel bad about myself and I don't think it's generally effective. I am getting a little sick of Princess having hissy fits any time she's called on her shit though. Which Princess? Pick a Princess. At this point it doesn't actually matter anymore. 

The littlest Princess has already threatened to move back to the dorm if I make her unhappy at which point I looked at her and asked, and what exactly are you going to do when you run out of tuition (shades of first Princess)? 

Dad says I have enough to cover my undergrad and some grad school (somebody's math just went in the toilet).

I don't think that works if you add in the dorm.

Well I'll work that out then.

The same way your sister did?

Well I'll get student loans then.

For an anthropology undergrad?

Yes.

Which you have to start paying the minute you graduate? I had you pegged as smarter than that. You are aware that I'm not going to pay those loans for you, yes?

Of course not.

You might want to check with your father as well. I don't think he's likely to pay them either. Also, Hunter does not have dorms that I am aware of.

Yes, they do.

OK, that's great. So have you taken into consideration the cost of New York State schools as an out of state student?

I'm not. You live here.

But you don't.

But I can say...

No you can't. Also, I'm not staying. There is no way in hell I am living in this state and paying these taxes and car insurance if I don't have to. And also, wherever you decide to live? Get your insurance covered. If you're an instate resident on your own policy, it's about $4,000 a year and given how fast you went through cash last semester, I expect you'll have to sell your car. On your father's CT policy it will cost him about $2,000 a year to add you depending on how much USAA likes him. They like me a lot. Unless of course you screw up again. So, I'm just saying, you two really need to think things all the way through and finally get this through your heads. Are you ready? For real, are you ready?

Yes...?

Seriously. Pay attention.

OK.

Mom Does Not Equal Money. 

This dissolved into a thirty minute conversation about her personal accountability to a Chappaqua household which is what led to the meltdown last night. 

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

Sometime around 7:30 PM she walked out the door which was when I decided I should really just go to bed. My sleep app indicates that I fell asleep at 7:46 and woke up at 5:00 AM. Last night was the Solstice which is a big deal, or was a big deal in this household and I guess last year was the last one. If I want a Solstice celebration I'm going to have to do it by myself and since that matters more, at least to me, than what happens on the random date of 12/25, I probably should. Also, there was Jeffrey and that was hard yesterday. Anyway, enough of that. 

I kept hearing my brother tell me: She's 18 years old now, Heather. As if I should know what that meant.

I do know what that means, the problem is seeing and enforcing the boundaries especially when the majority of her immediate world is telling her she's right to be a baby, remain unfettered, and pretty much do exactly what she wants to do, in the moment.

Her father's not helping.

It's Christmas. Look, asshole, you've never once, except for three years ago when we all flew to Colorado to see my brother, had to deal with what MOST divorced parents have to deal with. You have ALWAYS been with your child at Christmas. Your bloody parents have ALWAYS had her at Thanksgiving and MY FUCKING MOTHERS DAY and Christmas and see her any weekend you decide is required. At the drop of a hat. This Christmas we invited you to Vermont when my dad couldn't make the drive South. When S couldn't make the drive South because she's got way more to cope with than I can even begin to imagine I think. 

YOU, are being an asshole about this.

You are also aware that we are in the middle of moving and your daughter is responsible for far more than her room. You are aware that these things happen on weekends and that you took her last Saturday to the ballet for her birthday. I can respect that.

Her siblings aren't helping. At Thanksgiving they were given tasks. Small tasks, but tasks all the same. They were ignored. I found out when one of them asked for the FOURTH TIME AS IF I'D BEEN REFUSING TO TELL HIM: Mother, please, when are we leaving, coming home and where are we going? I have to get Dad's dogs handled? (Son. Would fucking love it if you would handle mine while we're at it).

Note to the crew of Five (which includes Elizabeth's father)"

You received invitations from the Airbnb for a reason. If none of you have the invitations with the checkin time and address please tell me and I will provide it. For the fourth time. Or you can just scroll up in this conversation. Reiterating the Thanksgiving, and many other conversations, including the suicide prevention conversation, of which I seem to be a party of one, I am NO LONGER the cruise director around here. Handle it or it will not happen. I paid for your lodging which was just over $700 for two nights and information that was readily available. You are welcome. It won't happen again mostly because it can't and even if it could; I'm done. The words thank you don't appear to be in anyone's vocabulary. How the hell did I fuck that up so completely? 

Dump any of this on S and I promise you, I will be most unmerciful. 

Right now I am literally underwater - as in treading water. My number one priority is remaining employed. If I don't remain employed the entire house of cards comes down around my head and shoulders. Remaining employed requires a very steep learning curve and navigating waters full of sharks. Sort of like MasterCard but hopefully not so bad in the end and also hopefully I learned some things that will be useful. Unfortunately I have stopped responding to the two agents who are supposed to be negotiating with the two mortgage companies who are about to be very angry with me and I have not found an accountant to deal with the IRS yet. All this was supposed to be done by the end of the year. I am in trouble. And swimming as fast as I can and I am NOT Nemo. 

I also have to get the hell out of this house and into that apartment by next weekend. that means the house has to be moved and then emptied with the exception of staging furniture. Somehow I don't think any of you understand what that means because your shit is still here or you think it's ok to leave it for me to haul out. Either way, it's a lot of work to do while I'm working 60 hour weeks in which each day leaves me compromised and by compromised, I mean one of those people who should not be behind the wheel of a car. I would work more hours on the weekend but my brain is recovering and I'm trying to move.

So. All that to explain me, under water, OK? Please get Christmas handled the way I asked you to at Thanksgiving. I am not asking for much, just these few things prepared ahead of time. One will require research but I promise you, it can be done in excellence. Non-dairy products have come a very long way in the last 30 years.

That is what I said pretty much verbatim. Here is the response:

Mike: We're all kind of busy, Mom, but I'll be free sometime this weekend.

(FUUUUCCCCKKKKKKK YOUUUUUUUU I SCRAPED QUARTERS OUT FROM UNDER THE CAR SEAT FOR FORMULA WHEN YOU WERE 6 MONTHS OLD AND SKIPPED MEALS FOR YOU, YOU BASTARD, YOU STILL DON'T KNOW WHAT BUSY MEANS)

Me: silence

Eventually Lucia: I can try to make some pies when I'm up there? No guarantees.

(WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU? YOU'RE A NURSING STUDENT. CAN YOU NOT DO MATH?

Me: Elizabeth. Please do math. 

Elizabeth: Oh.

Me: I'm not going to do anything about this other than ask you a question. Should I stop at Walgreens and buy some cans of stuff?

Elizabeth: I'll speak with her.

Elizabeth's father:  I'll handle the potato thing.

(Oh. Thank. Fucking. God. This is not hard.)

Last night: Elizabeth: There's going to be a compromise: On Sunday I'm going to Grandma and Grandpa's house to celebrate Christmas at 2 PM...

Me: That is our last moving day before I get the van...

Melt down. Crying on the floor of the dining room... Elizabeth calling her father... Elizabeth leaving the house because her crying, melting down mother is just too much to handle and I snap.

After she's left, of course.

Because we don't get our grownup stuff on the babies.

Hello, World: These people are NOT babies. 

Jack:  Heather, Elizabeth is 18 now.

Heather: I know.

Heather: Oh, right. Now I get it.

So, Elizabeth, when your mother is sitting on the dining room floor hyperventilating after having a brief, sobbing jag because you and your father have, yet again, been irresponsible in your choices, your choice to look wounded and angry and leave the house because 'you can't be here right now'' is irresponsible also because it actually makes it worse. It doesn't make it worse because I need you to take care of me. I do NOT need you to fucking take care of me. What I need is to stop receiving constant feedback that says: "when you behave in a way that makes me uncomfortable with my choices, I am going to walk out on you." Or: "when you behave in a way that makes me uncomfortable or show me that you really are up against it because I'm going to continue to behave as if I'm responsible when it's convenient" THAT'S FUCKING PUNISHMENT AND ONE MORE THING I HAVE TO DEAL WITH. WITH YOU. Dammit. 

I have an appointment at 12:15 today. I meant to use it to cry for 45 minutes because I really think I need to just let loose but what I really think I need to do is name literally everything that's sitting on my shoulders causing this perpetual migraine.

I went bed with the migraine, slept a full nine hours and still, woke up with it. The migraine is not hormonal. It all starts with the tension in my neck. 

It was good to write again. This has been very helpful and I need to find a way to carve out the time to do it more often. 

I do wonder when Elizabeth thinks she's going to make that dairy free chocolate cake?

Repeat: S. If you're reading this: Don't even think it. Just let go. Like me. Just let go. Even if we just end up with roast and squash and asparagus. It's ok. I'll throw some potatoes in the car just in case and it will be just fine. Love you, miss you, can't wait to see you. Being with you in VT is part of what makes my life bearable at this point. You should know that. This note is also at the end. I just had to get it out.