Pine Boxes

I'm lying in a pine box of sorts.  It is a lovely, soft, knotty pine.  There are carefully carved, honed and sanded sleigh sides.  There's a headboard with finials and scrolls, one with a particularly large, dark knot with a space in it where you could put a finger or a penny or a small toy.  There is a pillow under my head, and I stretch my feet out to tuck my toes between the mattress and the footboard.  There's a warm breath in my back, and I roll over to find it's source.

Staring back at me, and strangely I am not surprised by this or disturbed in any way, is my long deceased brother, Ben.  In his eyes, those deep dark pools of blue with rings of black, so full of love and innocence, I see my reflection and his eyes seem to drink me in.  He is six, as always, and he has the Cat in the Hat in his hand...for the seventy millionth time.

"The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play, so we sat in the house, all that cold, cold, wet, day.  So I sat there with Sally, we sat there, we two, and I said, 'how I wish we had something to do.'"

My mother and my sister read that book to me, and I read it to all my younger siblings, but it was reading it to Ben, over and over, that has emblazoned its rhymes on my memory.

I am lying in a pine box, whispering sweet nothings into my little brother's ear, my neck enveloped by his too short arms on his stubby little body, him pretty much drooling in my ear as he told me he loved me the best right back. We are lying there underneath a woolen Hudson Bay blanket that we may have ordered earlier that year, or purchased years later from the L.L. Bean outlet in Maine.  I am strangely not suffocated and overly hot as I usually am under any bed coverings, especially such a heavy, insulating one.  But that is only because we are actually under the ethereally light lace coverlet from that dead artist woman's store...the one who painted our refrigerator, and whose cute art with hearts and doves and swirls and flowers has always influenced my doodles...what's her name, it's on the tip of my tongue...I even see her off in the distance through the eyelets..Lil? No, that's It's Only Natural's owner, Jill, Jen...And she's gone and her name escapes me.

I am lying there with Dr. Seuss  too, on his and dad's birthday, and speaking of dad, he's there too, and fits?  No he never fit in those little sleigh beds that were actually closer to the size of a trundle bed than even a true twin.  Perhaps death has made dad smaller.  No, even on his deathbed dad was remarkably large and strong and weighty and willful.  Maybe this is the king size bed down in mom and dad's bedroom and this is a childhood pileup revisited. Maybe he just fits because he's stacked three deep in a pine box-o-torium better known as Calverton National Cemetery.   That is it.  I look up, there's mom in her pine box, and yet a few feet higher is dad in his pine box.  Of course now that I look, again, Ben's is a furry faux funny rabbit box, mom's is a shoddily made walnut missing one of its handles  yanked off by Dave or Phil in the wrestling match that was getting it down the half spiral staircase of the Kittery Baptist Church.  And dad is chagrined at his finery as it was his express written will to be interred inside a simple pine box.

I wake up suddenly.  And it is the morning of dad's birthday...the one he shares with good ol' Dr. Seuss.  So there's a reason for the bizarre setting to the dream I was in the middle of having before some child kicked me awake with a Bump, and how that bump made me jump, jump, jump!  I'm in a deep tailspin, now.  I feel bummed, and missing all those dead people, especially Dr. Seuss; I have a tendency to feel deeper sadness over unrelated losses than those that affect more closely.  That's also a total lie, but, there's an element of truth.

My Aunt died a couple of days prior to this dream, and I'm sure the passing of my father's sister, and the sadness that death brings to the children of any mother regardless of her age and the thought of that for my cousins, I'm sure that this had some part to play in the maudlin torrential downpour I was lying in the midst of right at that moment. I can't even find the right way to communicate my sympathy and empathy and condolences to my relatives. So I don't.  And i regret it.  But i'm dug in now.

For the next week I am tired, and achey, and over reactive to everything.  And I feel a heaviness and it feels like a pine sleigh bed is tied to my back.  Because it is; two of them are.  In the midst of all this sadness, there is a string tied to those beds, and they are slipping away because they've been willed to someone who is not a member of the family, and never knew Ben, and they are pulling chunks of withered, dessicated, deteriorated, defunct heart out with them.  I have trudged through the week between dad's birthday to mom's birthday/deathday, lugging these heavy solid wooden relics with me and smashed everyone with them as I encounter people throughout my day.

I'm afraid to go to sleep.  I'm not interested in what this excessively emotional week in convergence with the always sneakily significant day has to bring me in dreams.  To make matters worse, Ray Lamontagne, Carly Simon, Carole King (with her recent songstress partner Sarah Bareilles) Gungor and Great Big World have been my mental minstrels and I can't convince them to stop singing their sad warbles to me.  My phantoms are strong ones, and they are my precious; I love that they are strong and will not quit me.  So, I'm going with the least negative of my current playlist songs, one that at least in addition to speaking of mortality points to eternity and maybe even a temporary hope here on earth as well: I am mountain, by Gungor. Happy day mom.  Happy weird week entire family.  And I'm truly sorry for your loss, cousins (couthins as another cousin Lindsay used to say).



I am mountain, I am dust
Constellations made of us
There’s glory in the dirt
The universe within the sand
Eternity within a man

We are ocean, we are mist
Brilliant fools who ruled and kiss
There’s beauty in the dirt
Wandering in skin and soul
Searching, longing for a whole

As the light, light, light of the skies, of the skies
We will fight, fight, fight for our lives, for our lives

I am mountain, I am dust
Constellations made of us
There’s mystery in the dirt
The metaphors are breaking down
We taste the wind inside a sound

As the light, light, lights of the skies, of the skies
We will fight, fight, fight for our lives, for our lives
As the light, light, lights of the skies, of the skies
We will fight, fight, fight for our lives, for our lives

Momentary carbon stories
From the ashes, filled with Holy Ghost
Life is here now, breathe it all in
Let it all go, you are earth and wind

A Pure Spectator's Look Back at Les Jeux Olympiques d'Hiver

I love the winter, but only in theory these days.  Having lived in winterless climes for the past umteen years, I realize that my tropicalization is nearly complete and I would probably hate the winter if I had to experience it for more than a day or two.  Full disclosure: I can't even feel my fingers and toes when the A/C is on full blast at work.  But, I grew up with winter, albeit a fairly mild version of winter of Long Island tempered by proximity to the Atlantic's warm waters.  It was winter nonetheless. The bay would freeze over and we would go ice skating.  The snow would fall and snowmen would arise in the yard.  Untold hours were spent outside making and throwing (and hopefully pegging someone else in the face with) snowballs, wearing too large snowpants and too small duck boots and knit mittens that within minutes were not only soaked but frozen stiff the wear of which seemed preferable to making snowballs with no barrier between fingers and snow.  No one wanted to come back inside until all the fun that was possible was soaked out of the day, because once you went in the warm crackle of the fire burning inside the lapis blue enamel coated cast iron fireplace guarded by the two stern hessian soldiers drew you in with its warm arms and wouldn't let you go.

There was that memorable childhood ski trip  to Vermont.  Velamints from the vending machine that accepted pennies and free hot cocoa at the lodge, lessons for the older girls from a (as legend has it) fantastically handsome college student named Rob who was equally and uniquely in love with each girl who remembers the story, lessons from some lesser human for the youngsters.  Thermal long johns, James Taylor, Carly Simon, and the Everly brothers as accompanied by John and sung in three part harmony by the ladies, with (loudest and longest) countermelody by dad and conducted by the perfect pitch having, knower of all harmonies, muth.

I even went to College in Colorado and had more than my fair share of ski trips to the various resorts of the region.  I just never got very good at the snow sports.  I think I was always scared of breaking something and thereby losing my place on the swim team, which was basically unimaginable as it was pretty much the only thing that kept me sane during my tenure at the Colorado Drinking College of the Rockies.  (If Yiotula is reading this: I remember when we went ice skating at the hockey rink...I thought I was so cool because a: seniors were hanging out with my lowly freshman butt, and b: I'm pretty sure that adorable blond firstie with the tats on his leg helped me up one time when I fell.)

So the Winter Olympics have a special whimsy to them in my sight.  I have memories, mostly good (although ask me about that snowstorm the night before my graduation, sometime, it's a doozy), of my times in snowy places to which I am always taken back whenever I see these games.  I was never a winter athlete so I have no delusions that make me want to become the oldest ski jumper at the next Olympics.  Just the right mix of memory, magic, fantasy, and snow to make them seem ethereal and otherworldly.  But these are sporting events, and there's no containing my rabid fan status of all things athletic, and there is no quelling my enthusiasm for #Murica.  So, here I have sat for the past 16 evenings, watching and screaming at the TV, hoping for these events to place the red white and blue at the top of the podium.

First of all.  Russia.  Not a huge fan.  Especially because I was constantly creeped out by Putin creepily popping up here and there with his creepy old man lurker face.  Plus, the venues with the ubiquitous "Hot. Cool. Yours." What are they Belks? "Modern. Southern. Style."  Free word non-association.  Words that don't go together in anyway whatsoever?

Bob Costas threatened to derail (said darryl) these games right from the start.  I guess, in his defense, perhaps he had never had that good Russian Vodka straight from the source before these games.  And maybe a few of the local Russian extras on set were daring him to go shot for shot, or sip for sip as they would think of it, with them.  Bob, note for next time: never get in a land war in asia, never go in against a sicilian when death is on the line...oh and only slightly less well known than those two - never try to drink Vodka (Russian slang for water) at the same rate as the fellas from Sochi. The drunkenness, aka Bob's eye infection (wink) made Bob even less interesting and more annoying than usual.  And believe me when I say Bob is nigh unto my least favorite TV personality.  They hilariously put him on the fast track detox program and we got a more than slightly mockish Matt Lauer as his replacement for a few days.  Talk about your travelling mercies!

The agony of defeat was really the theme for me, personally, as I watched USA set me up with Gold Medal hopes and then BOOM!  The flying tomato posts a score that would have won the gold by quite an impressive margin during the qualifying rounds and then doesn't even medal for trying so hard to put the most epic halfpipe run of all time down.  Bode Miller, my Winter Olympic love of my life, fellow old person, wearer of scruffily handsome facial hair, has the most impressive training runs, far outperforming the field, and doesn't land on the podium once the actual event arrives. Oh! Canada! Dealing our hockey boys and girls defeat after defeat.  Those two days were excruciating: all the effort of live streaming those games straight into my classroom in an attempt to educate these children of the south about a little cold weather culture, all the struggling not to screech at the players things that at are unseemly to say in front of ninth graders at a Christian school, all of the breath holding and high hoping.

In the midst of my disappointment at these games I was struck by the different kind of attitude the Winter athlete brings to sport.  I suppose it would be called the "slacker" mentality, but you see i've put that in quotes, because the sheer level of work and effort and hours these people put into their sports is decidedly UN-slacker-ish.  Oh yeah that is a real word.  I was amazed at the way that the contestants were all truly thrilled for the winners.  Instead of the downcast, dejected spirit you would expect to see from a first loser, or 10th placer, or DNFer, each participant in these games seemed to truly thrill and glow at the best performance of anyone, even if it wasn't their own, or even someone's from their own country.  Hugs were held, tackles were made, real genuine smiles were plastered all over all the faces at the bottom of mountains.  Perhaps the winter sports elite are such a small tight knit community that they all really and truly love one another.  Perhaps the fact that they spend their days in the cold causes their hearts to be so warm.  Or maybe these people are just terrific sports.  Whatever it is, it was a sight to behold. It didn't lessen my own disappointment, but it did bring a nice other perspective to the party and it encouraged me to be a little bit less of a negative nellie.

As ever, there was Mary Carillo, who is Bob Costas' antithesis, she is everything he isn't.  You love her for all the reasons you don't love Bob.  She is perhaps the nicest human being on earth.  I love all the spots that she did.  I love the enthusiastic way she embraces every experience.  I love the way she loves each person she encounters and presents the behind the scenes stories of the home country to us every time we watch these games.  She inspires me to be a better person and to get out there and do something new.

There were wins, to be sure: Ladies' snowboarding of all kinds, slopestyle skiing, awesome dogpile celebration, Bode getting that bronze (despite an epic interview fail on the part of the reporter, which he was both heartbreakingly sweet during and remarkably gentlemanly about after), Ligety getting his gold, TJ Oshie taking it to all of Russia, that baby girl Mikaela Shiffrin bringin' it in the slalom, the silence and chills inducing twizzle perfection of Davis and White.  We had a fashion wins as well, those sweaters in the opening ceremonies were almost enough to redeem the relative let down you felt watching these ceremonies in comparison to the London ones and the sad fifth ring refusing to open.  The Hollie Hobby throwback patchwork snowboard American uniforms that were almost entirely obscured by those gaudy Shochi bibs.

I love walking in the Winter Wonderland of the Olympics.  It reminds me of being young and freezing, in an awesome way.  It humbles (but in the actual sense of the word humble) me as I know I have no talent for any of these things, not even remotely.  It thrills and exults me as I watch victories, both expected and surprise.  It depresses me and sends me into hibernation because every time I fall in love with these strangers who represent this country and I cannot take it when I invest an abnormal amount of emotion in them and they suffer defeat.

But as for me (and my house), I am ready for summer.  I am ready to do a few extra squats and sit-ups, don a bikini, get my kids to the beach, build some sandcastles and body surf the ocean waves.  Because winter and I only get along for so long, then I need to get right back to my endless summer that is life in Florida.

PS...The Star Spangled Banner is the shizz as far as national anthems go.  Having heard a lot of the others, I miss even a bad rendition of our own.

Standing Joke of the Year-

There's a song by my old love David Gray that has at various times over the past several years reminded me of the ill advised marriage I bound myself in and the ridiculous human being that occupied the other half of that bondage for nearly a decade.  I love that welshman, the soft wail in his voice, and the sad way he can't seem to find a real love, at least according to his songs.

As I drove away from the Duval County Courthouse I heard the song quietly singing behind the loud cries of Jacksonville's new Black Panthers admonishing black men to stop rapping in a disrespectful manner about black women and treating them instead like the queens that they are, which was all oddly tangential of a completely necessary demonstration regarding the absolutely unconscionable murder of a black teen by a middle aged white man: because the boy's music was too loud.  The topic of that trial is so much more salient than what I actually am writing about, but I can't see past my own rage at my situation to give it more careful thought.  I too am a completely egotistical human, it's an inescapable sentence of these 46 chromosomes in collusion with a bent nature.

There it was, playing underneath the TV news tents as they set up to bring you whatever glimpses of the lawyers who would emerge in two or so hours when the courthouse closed down, no doubt both proclaiming a victory on the day:

It was a kind of so-so love and I'm gonna make sure it doesn't happen again,
You and I had to be the standing joke of the year,
You were a run around, a lost and found, and not for me I feel

Take your hands off me, hey,
I don't belong to you, you see,
And take a look in my face, for the last time,
I never knew you, you never knew me,
Say hello goodbye,
Say hello and wave goodbye


As I cursed my ex husband in my heart for his lack of employment, his current decision to devote his every waking moment to graduate school (how very nice for him, wouldn't we all love to have that particular luxury) for the next two years and the court's assent that this was somehow NOT CRIMINAL, I sang along, remarking to myself that the lyrics were oh so comically on point. It was at best a kind of so-so love, no real fire-he was short and not my type, which could best be described as uber alpha and ultra ripped and pretty darn handsome. There wasn't much of an intellectual equality either, but I allowed myself to believe his kitschy ability with music somehow brought him to a near rival to my own genius status-a non truth to which our marriage counselor once subtly tried to alert me. And he NEVER laughed at me, and as Taylor Swift knows I am seriously hilarious.


And I'm gonna make sure it doesn't happen again. In so many ways. So many ways. Every interaction with that (man?) reminds me that I will never marry again. Taunts me that I am incapable of love. Wards me off of any potential emotions I would ever dream of allowing myself to have at all. Ever...again.


The line in this song, that has for much of my marriage, and certainly post-marriage, gotten me where it hurts is, "You and I had to be the standing joke of the year." I look back on the early days of our relationship and there were those who knew better. "They won't last, she won't put up with that." "If I wanted to I could break them up today." "Don't get involved with someone crazier than yourself." Just juxtaposed to the men that I had always been attracted to, one had to wonder, why is she being so ironic. It wasn't irony i was going for. I just thought the opposite of my sinful, carnal, vile ways had to be the right way to go. I didn't know that there was a possibility that I was who I was on purpose. That there could have been constraints under which the satisfaction of my wants and needs were part of God's will for me. I could feel it when we went out, the quizzical stares as yin and yang went out to dinner and he would seem totally disinterested in me. But I buried it. I turned away from my perception of reality to try to be someone I wasn't. I knew my friends must secretly be saying that this relationship has to be a joke, but I told myself that if that was true it was simply because they could not possibly understand. I could hear the thoughts of strangers who were frantically trying to do the math, and it never added up, it never did for me either.


Nothing would give me any greater pleasure in life that for him to have taken a look in my face for the last time in that time at the courthouse, I never knew him, he NEVER knew me. Oh the ways in which he never knew, never understood me.


Say hello, wave goodbye. He couldn't' even muster the cajones to say hello to me. He couldn't even find the Richard to answer my questions in court. I cannot imagine that I was married to him. I cannot contemplate that I made four children with him. The insanity of it all makes me question myself at my core.


I hear him even now singing this line, "We tried to make it work, you in a cocktail skirt and me in a suit but it just wasn't me." Can't you? I mean honestly, I dressed up, I was as nice as any woman. I threw parties. I cultivated relationships, for myself and for him. I tried to make it work. He wore a suit, he tried working. That just was not him. Now he is who he wanted to be. The unemployed 38 year old psychology student. Physician heal thy FU(#!N% self.



You're used to wearing less, and now your life's a mess, so insecure you see


How does a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy justify not working AT ALL, and not SUPPORTING his FOUR children (who were his PLEASURE to bring into this world) at all? His life is most certainly a mess.


I had decided earlier in this evening not to be "that girl." I have gone back on that, and I am that girl. I hate him. And I don't care who knows it. I apologize for being this petty girl. There are secrets that I keep, so many of them, and this is not one. I want to scream, and shout, and let it all out (yes this is a quote from bit bit). I want to curse at the top of my lungs, but there are four young children present, and there are employees of the providence school who may read this. I can visualize cutting tendons and sawing through ligaments to flay his arms off his body and then beat the ever loving tar out of him with his own limbs. But I won't, because it is illegal, and because the release would only be temporary and I would then feel guilty.


Say hello. And wave Goodbye.


If only this was actually goodbye.

Kat In A Tree

 So this scene out of my afternoon totally reminds me of mom, and seeing as I'm on a muth souvenirs kinda kick lately, I'm gonna share this one too. It's pretty funny on its own merit as well.

My cat is getting to that age where she, in the words of my young sons, wants a boyfriend. She is hitting her estrous stride and has an itch that needs to be scratched.  So to speak.  As I was opening the door this afternoon she darted out of the house. And immediately ran up a pretty sizable tree as fast as dem kitty cat claws could carry her.

I was only home to grab a few forgotten items for my trip to Charleston, SC for the weekend. However, I didn't want to leave her outside to get knocked up by these hooligan strays so I decided to climb up and save her from a pregnancy none of us needed that she so desperately and furiously was scheming to make happen. I had just come home from work and as you can imagine was not properly dressed in repurposed curtains for the task at hand. I was instead decked out in my dress down Friday military chic finery: olive drab skinnies with multiple zippers, contrasting flannel, chunky cream infinity scarf, high heel uggs, and mil inspired jacket finished off with dads big green watch and a lapis enamel bracelet from Santa. It's a riff on my katniss weather day garb. Fellow prov teachers you know what I'm talking about.

The boots posed a particular impediment to climbing. The clunky square 3.5 inch heel was perfectly constructed for getting caught where branches conjoined. Undaunted by the clear danger they posed, I scrambled up the tree in my boots.

Just as I was approaching the tree a handsome slightly younger man with a very fine black puppy with white socks and a fine upright gait walked toward me. The man said, "awww poor cat up in the tree," in a deep sing songy voice. My eyes scanned up the tree for the appropriately large limbs to quickly grasp in order to demonstrate my athleticism and lack of need of assistance.

I sped up the tree and retrieved the cat. And proceeded downward. Here's where the trouble began.  I was halfway down the tree when small branches stretched out to poke at my eyes; I maneuvered my face around these slight branches but paying such close attention to them I placed my boot too deeply into a crevice between two branches. My heel got stuck. As I tried to wrestle my heel out of the tree crook, I realized I needed a new place to put my hand in order to have the proper purchase so to finagle that foot out of its current prison. I moved my hand to a Lower branch but this proved to be unhelpful as what I really needed was the full use of both my hands as one was presently occupied by petunia.

Handsome walked up behind me. I began to panic as my mind raced through several scenarios as to what his approach signaled. Was he trying to help me get down. I don't need help. If he did help me was he going to accidentally or not so accidentally grab my derrière as his method of aiding me. Because I hate my rear to be touched and above all I hate it to be surprise touched. Was he going to just stand there and mockingly or even admiringly, depending on his general disposition toward me, take in the view.

It took a wormhole-ish seconds that felt like minutes for me to free my heel. Only to get the toe of the same shoe stuck in the same branch joint.
A few more seconds (centuries) later my toe was free and I jumped from a branch that was slightly too high and landed in the plants below, rather elegantly if I do say do myself - for an old lady in her work clothes.

Handsome looked at me from where he stood no more than three feet away, the perfect distance to indicate one wants to leave your social space behind and enter your personal space with a handshake and exchange of names. He said, "That was pretty impressive!"

I looked at him, smirked, and in my best Jess Day from New Girl voice, replied, "I've climbed a few trees in my day."

Dropped the proverbial mic...(grenade?).

Walked away.

In my periphery I could see him pleasantly standing there, lingering just a few moments, in case I again became sane, decided to act my age and walked back to introduce myself. In your dreams thunder.

Whereas mom had a talent for turning a cat up the tree situation into a social win for everyone and would have thrown a parade including all the neighbors in the festivities and declared it a national holiday - victory over cats in trees day - or handsome men meeting day - I walked away without even getting cutie's name. And doing my dead level best to seem as offensive as possible so that he will never attempt to engage again. Well played, Jess,  kick him in the shins next time.

Last Night I Dreamt I Went to Manderley Again

There's a type of homesick maudlin romanticism that is built into my DNA.  It is most certainly not a character trait I would choose from a rational standpoint.  But there are some things you don't actually have control over, both strangely and unfortunately.

I dream most vividly when my sons are away.  I can sleep deeply because I do not have a constant vigil to keep. What, you ask, would I do in the case that some oogety boogety  (thanks Helena Bonham Carter's husband for that) man came to my door to snatch my children from me?  I have a plan or two up my sleeve, but I'm not foolish enough to let you (and possibly the boogie man) in on that one.  On Wednesdays I sleep the sleep of a woman who hasn't had a good night's sleep in ages, and doesn't have the weight of the world on her conscience.  And I dream .  Once in a very rare while I dream.  

Last night I dreamed of my mother.  I dreamed of her in vivid technicolor.  I dreamed of her in a way that she has not been remembered since her death in my own dreamscape.  I saw her face, and I heard her voice.  I saw her gray brown hair (not because it had grayed but because it was so far on the ash side of the color spectrum) coifed just the way she liked it in its barely medium bob cut.  I saw her somewhat rimless pink toned glasses.  I heard her inimitable voice.  She was arrayed in her olive and khaki shades with pleats in her pants and breasts in her shirt that I am to this day jealous I didn't inherit. Her voice rumbled out at me in a way that though my recollection of the specific discussion topic is much more dim, the sound and the quality of her voice is oh so clear in my memory of that dream.   

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.  It seemed to me I stood beside the iron gate a while, and I could not enter, for the way was barred to me."

I stood there listening to her, imparting wisdom into my own life's situation, and I could not enter in with her.  I asked her to interact with me, but she couldn't because she was no longer of this world even in the dream space we temporarily shared together.   I waited for her to solve the problem I was having, to reach the person I could not reach, and together we watched the third walk away.  Forever. The profundity of the loss of the other person as they walked away could have been lost on me if not for the unexpected and admittedly unrealistic presence of my quite real and alive mother in the reve scenario. 

I woke up and began my day in the usual way, except for the clawing of my mother's image in my brain.  Her overstated, nearly anachronistic, fur coat draped over her shoulder because it has just been THAT cold this week.  Her steel grey blue eyes barely squinting out over her slits for eyelids through her rose tinted glasses.  Her under made up face that had maintained a complexion and a suppleness any woman her age would have envied.  She slowed me, and called me and looked me straight in the eye and told me exactly what I needed to hear.  She had returned to my life with me and left an imagined dream comfort behind.  Hours later the face of her and the sound of her had completely faded, leaving me feeling the way I usually do about her fourteen years post death.  But while it lasted it was a good dream.

Something Happy

I realized looking back on my blog, that, in keeping with its original charter, I paint a pretty bleak picture of my life.  Only writing about the things I want to get OUT of my head, which tend to be the negative stories.  I've decided that I'll share something terrific with you this time.  Just to show you that I am well aware my life is mostly sweet.

Years ago, back during a time before both my parents died, when in fact they both were very much alive...a time that is hard to believe was ever real...as if it is actually a fantasy made up in my brain to overcompensate for my current 30 something orphan state.  But it was real, they both were alive for all of my formative years. For most of those years our family lived on the south shore of Long Island in a tiny village called Bellport.

We had a ship's bell on our door post to the left of the door as you're facing it from the outside. It was copper with a faint patina and mounted on the portico (it wasn't actually a portico, but it did seem very grand and architectural at the time) via an anchor. It's ringing was how you knew it was time to come home from wherever you were.  You could be down at the bay, skipping rocks across the water, and you'd hear the bell ringing and run home.  You could be climbing trees in the woods, jumping from ever higher branches, daring your body to  break beneath you as you hurtled to the earth, and you'd hear the bell and come running.  You could be playing a game of front lawn kick ball with your siblings and whatever friends and neighborhood kids you'd managed to rope into your madness and that bell would ring and you'd run inside.  You'd run through the rocks away from the water and up the hill, make a left, as you sped onto Wyandotte Lane, as peanut butter breathes (the name for humidity and allergy induced belabored breathing we frequently experienced) burned up your lungs.  You'd cut across the Arcery's lawn and almost step on Rosie, their glorious Irish Setter and run through the split between the great big pine and the blue spruce between our properties over the lawn onto the pebble driveway and take a hard left to head for the steps of the stoop.  Up, four brick steps guarded by half barrels full of impatiens, ring the bell to your left because it was funny and plow through the door, probably slamming it in your wake, which would bring a pretty stern reprimand not to slam doors.

Saturday night was always taco night in our house, ever since mom and dad picked up the tradition from a fellow navy family stationed with them in Hawai'i, although seeing as I wasn't alive it could just as well have been San Diego, or even Beeville, I'm sure someone who knows better will correct me. In addition to being taco night, during the time before the time when everything went insanely wrong, it was also the night when you'd bring your friend of the opposite sex by to be tested and tried-what was dross would be burned away and if anything was worthwhile it would withstand the fire and you would  remain a friend, or more, of the family.

We stood around the kitchen.  Some set the table, properly, of course.  The napkin and fork on the left side of the blueberry LL Bean plates, knife (and spoon if necessary) on the right side of the plate with the cup up at the top of those utensils.  The entire place setting stood atop a blue and cream calico quilted place mat.  The napkin was likely encircled by a papier mache elephant or tiger dad brought home from india one year that had since been gnawed by a german short hair that we kept for only a summer and returned to the gifter, our uncle, after he ate nearly everything in the house and we realized we never asked said uncle for this great gift.  Some fried corn tortillas (are flour tortillas even an option for tacos? I think not). Others diced tomatoes into perfect centimeter cubes and still others shredded lettuce, using a knife, not a food processor.  Usually the guest had the honor of grating the cheese, in part to see how they would react to the inevitable grating of their own knuckles after being instructed to keep going even when only a nub of cheddar remained.  Whoever was in need of punishment diced the onions, to the tune of their own tears, and the weakest link got the pickles.

It was a pretty well rehearsed concert, perfected over decades with a certain harmony that accompanies shared genetics; if you were lucky enough to be invited, you'd better hope you found a way to fit in.  Ten, maybe eleven people squeezed around the table within thirty minutes, and that's when the real test began. Would the would be suitor be observant enough to take a miniscule enough amount of meat so as not to offend the other ten people at the table to expected to have anywhere from six to ten tacos that night despite the fact that only two pounds of ground beef had been cooked and dressed in tomato sauce.  To be fair, it wasn't just suitors, it was close friends, frenemies, and random strangers mom picked up off the street from time to time, as well.  But the testing was mostly for the wanna be boyfriends.

Nervous people are rarely naturally good at math, so the majority of the fellas failed, and gloriously so.  They were summarily reprimanded and drawing back their bloody knuckles never made that mistake again.

We would clean the kitchen with the same precision.  Then retire to the living room for a sweet game of pictionary.  Here's the thing about pictionary, there are certain combinations of sisters in our family that can with a single stroke of the pen communicate a complex several word answer, infuriating everyone else as they watched in disbelief, sure that something nefarious was afoot. After Meghan and I trounced everybody handily, it was usually time for the boy buddy to go home.

He'd be led to the door.  And watched, by the whole family.  Then we'd sing, "Oh goodbyeee, oh don't you cryeee, there's a silver lining in the skyee, fair thee well old friend, until the end, we'll be back another year, so goodbyeee....for it's hard to part we know, and we're far from....a tickled to death to see you go....goodbyeeeee etc..."

If the young man were deemed truly worthy, there would be an encore.  A game of Dr. Tangle, led by mom.  Mom would have us all join hands, in a circle, under the stars, with the moon herself holding court above the brick patio.  Then we would be instructed to cross over to the other side under two clasped hands or twist under our own arm and our partner's or even throw a leg some arms.  Then it would be the job of the outsider to untangle us. Or not.  Or it's just funny to get tangled up with nine other people.  Then we'd have one last chant "one, two, three and a zing, zing, zing."  Followed by some freeform high kicks and raucous dancing.

If you couldn't handle the heat, you got out of the kitchen.  Hilariously, they always came back for more.  I guess mom was a social genius.

At the end of the month you're another year older...

I begin each New Year hurtling, careening, even careering down a dead end street called January with a brick wall at its inevitable end that is perennially my birthday.  If you've known me for any amount of time, or even been reading my blog for a full year, you know the melange of feelings I have over doing 195 down this road as I watch the barrier of getting older draw ever closer to me at an alarming rate.  Despite knowing exactly how this month will end-me in a puddle of blown expectations that I knew better than to indulge-I am compelled to become an optimist about this time of year because as a human at my core I am a creature of habit, and as my orbit makes its close pass around the sun I believe that its bright light will ignite something amazing in my life and somehow I will escape incineration.  Famous last thoughts.  You can't fight physics.

There is a special heaviness to my anticipation this year.  I look in the mirror and I see my formerly eternally youthful face has finally caught up to my years and fairly accurately represents those years.  One of my worst flaws, top three at least, number one at times, is my vanity.  Truthfully, it is borderline narcissism.  I want to be young and beautiful forever and I want everyone to think so.  If you find that this is too much sharing with my outside voice...recall the whole purpose of this project is to put my inner ramblings down on paper-you were forewarned.  You entered at your own risk.  Judas Iscariot in the reflection betrays me and breaks my heart and oh how she sneers at me all the while.  The wrinkles and crinkles from all the years of what I believe a friend of a friend would call unfettered joy no longer fade as the smile does.  The loss of collagen and a genetically low level of elastin leave peaks and valleys permanently etched around my eyes and lips.  I won't even tell you about the things my body is doing to truly disappoint me.  It is sufficient to let you know that I've been chasing an elusive unattainable body ever since I was 14 and my 20 year old self dies a little inside everytime she remembers I never appreciated her.

And that's just the lead blanket that is presently laying over me...There is something deeper and darker catapulting me toward birthday destruction this year.  I have spent three years in a bit of a coma following the epic Christmas of 2010, known in closer circles as that epic Christmas before the Christmas to end all Christmases, or better known in my head as, F--k that I'm outta here Christmas when I finally left my then husband.  Finally.  There's a certain measure of numbness that one swaths herself in whilst walking through a lengthy divorce.  I was deep in it, and looking back...I'd have to say pleasantly so.  Going through the motions has an elegant ease, even a poetry to it that you can only, as is the case with so many things, appreciate in hindsight (ugh so cliche).  The muscle memory carries your numb self through the steps as you accurately navigate your way through your uber mundane life. You do, you don't think, you most blessedly do not feel.

I woke up sometime in the middle of 2013.  I don't know how or when to be precise, probably because it was the narcotic kind of sleep of the chemically dulled - even if those chemicals are naturally produced by your own body in response to your own circumstance.  It takes a long time to wake up from that kind of sleep.  You wake in levels.  Degrees of realization that you are still here and you aren't exactly a robot leftover of the zombie apocalypse that you overestimated the end of your marriage to be.  The problem with waking up is that you are now susceptible to insult from all manner of emotion.  Most recently my insults have come from parents of the students that I teach.

Ideally, we aren't supposed to tell stories outside of school; realistically, I've had a few doozies and while I keep a lot of secrets there are some that I have trouble hiding inside.   This week, I returned to my job to two letters written to the school board whose sole purpose was to castigate me and call for my removal from my job,  without saying it in so many words.  "Prayerfully" and passively dressed up to seem holy and righteous, from two sets of parents who weren't satisfied with the "B" that their students should have been so lucky as to receive.  I can take that, I can deal with that.  You aren't going to please everyone.  These ladies have been tearing me up for the better part of five months, now.  I don't teach.  I teach too much.  I teach too fast.  I am too smart and can't bring it down to the level of ninth graders.  I have not prepared the students to succeed.  I don't care about the students' success.  I want to see them fail.   I refuse to take responsibility for their education.  It is death by a thousand paper cuts.  They sting and annoy at first, but hundreds of insults later and I begin to look like the idiot who deserves these insults.  No rational human being could be so dogged in their insistence that a person needs to be reprimanded, reformed, and fired if necessary, if there weren't some real problems.

I have watched in agony as I am painted into a corner by the cruel brushstrokes of ineptitude and hatred. Slowly and painstakingly removing the facts, and replacing them with a bitter taste of gossip on the lips of influential parents in the swamp like pool that is private education.  The truth about me is that I love education, I don't necessarily think I have the "teacher calling" but education is near and dear to my heart. I want to see students work hard and learn and earn good grades.  I want to see them form good habits that they can bring to college and the work force.  I want smart, talented kids not to make the mistakes of ignorance that I made in my youth. I work hard, for little reward, but reaching just one and drawing out their best can make it all worth while. My disaffection this year stems from the fact that I don't think there is a one of them that truly wants to achieve anything but the minimum which equates to keeping their parents off their backs.

Finally this week these parents in their letters to the school board attacked me to the core of who I am.  One went so far as to say that I lacked the proper ethos to teach at the school where I am employed and implied that I do not embody Christ-like behavior.  Stabbed in the heart.  Not even by Judas.  By a stranger.  You don't even know me.  I would love to show you some NOT christ-like behavior.  Oh how I would.  And how I could.  Because you are most certainly correct that I am a black hearted sinner, full of hatred, foul languages and improper desires.  In a different life, in a different situation, if the doors slid in a slightly different direction and pace, I would let you know just how not like Jesus I can be.  But so is she.  And so are you.  And so is he.  We all fall short of the glory of God.  I hope there are a few things that people around me know: one of them is that I kinda suck as a human being, another is that I love Jesus and the last one is that I want to do a great job at whatever it is that I put my hand to.  The most important part of that factoid sandwich is Jesus.  So, it should not come as a surprise to you that this last round of libel has just wrecked me.  I can't really fight against that kind of insanity.

In light of this, as I'm hurtling headlong toward (insert age here), I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up. I need a change of pace.  I need to, now that I'm wide awake, be myself and be appreciated for it. I have two and a half more weeks in which I will be blindly zooming (sic) toward disaster hoping that miraculously my eyes will be opened just in time to steer myself in the direction I "SHOULD" be going with my life and avoid the sudden calamitous end of this year of my life beginning yet another one where more of the same misfortune rules my days.  I don't know why I put that kind of ridiculous importance on the day i finally decided to slide out of my mother's birth canal.  But I do.

Here's to weathering the storm of January 27th and making some importantly difficult decisions with eyes wide open regardless of the day.

From the Indigo Girls...serious throwback to back in the day...

"There I am in younger days, star gazing,
Painting picture perfect maps of how my life and love would be
Not counting the unmarked paths of misdirection
My compass, faith in love's perfection
I missed ten million miles of road I should have seen
Meanwhile our friends we thought were so together
Left each other one by one in search of fairer weather
And we sit here in our storm and drink a toast
To the slim chance of love's recovery."