Epicness

You guys, this day was so I don’t even know what that I can’t come up with a first sentence.

So I gave you that one.

It started with me having to run interference on Facebook posts. My sister, who often gets caught up in what she thinks is a good idea without realizing it could, um, totally hijack someone else’s day, posted on Facebook about how I was getting these governor’s awards at this luncheon. She posted my name. She posted a weblink to the Thing.

Nooo. What are you doing?!

And then one of my best friends, who is also Facebook friends with her, reposted it.

Oh, come on, no!

And then my aunt.

No no no no no!

Yelling that. Aloud in my kitchen.

So then I had to text all of them and tell them that I really appreciated their support but that I had deliberately not advertised this and could they please take down the Facebook posts? Because now literally 2,000 people know and I’m going to get questions I don’t want to answer. There are a lot of implications – strangers knowing too much, family and friends with whom I didn’t share the information asking too much, work possibly seeing it and questioning whether it was okay for me to lobby for a law while being professionally involved with my company.

Take it down, please. Now.

They did, fortunately, but I wound up crying. It was 9am and I was already on emotional overload. I was getting two governor’s awards for my victims’ advocacy work. I was giving a speech. Once it was a five-minute speech. Then I was told three minutes. Then I was told between three and five minutes, so I sort of merged the two, made it a Best Of and had Sam edit it. Which meant switching some things around a little and recalibrating. Fine. I can do those things. But the message of the speech… the impact of a stalker, the need for victim notification of prisoner release in cases of misdemeanor offense, the long-term effects of being a crime victim, the need for people who dedicate themselves to helping… it was heavy. My parents were coming. They would hear this speech and likely be set on edge and maybe even upset by it. Rick would be there. Or not, depending on his meeting.

An hour before the event began, my parents called to tell me they were stuck in bad traffic from an accident exactly nowhere near where they needed to be. I wasn’t sure they would make it in time to hear my speech, which would, of course, upset them. Then, sitting in my car in the parking lot outside the luncheon site, I drizzled a not insignificant amount of red nail polish on my blue spring coat.

So things were off to a great start.

My parents did make it in time. Somehow. So did Rick. He slipped in a little late and sat in the back, instead of at the table with us, the group of people receiving an award for the work we did. He did that work, really. But he came over after my speech, tapped me on the shoulder and said he was sitting elsewhere so he could slip out to tend to other professional obligations when he had to.

Seeing him felt sad. And good. And made me miss him. And made me hope. And felt awkward.

But I was glad he made it to get his award. And to hear my speech and see me in my really nice dress and heels with my hair up. He likes that look, and I’m a big believer in the lingering image.

I think my speech went well, but to be honest, I’ve blocked out parts of it. I wondered afterward if I had really said everything. I had written it all out, then rehearsed it so I would know it well enough not to have to read it word for word. But a whole section is missing from my memory.

The other speakers had lived through experiences so much worse than my own. I try not to qualify it that way. I try not to invalidate my experience vis-a-vis someone else’s, but when you’re speaking after a woman whose husband was killed and before a woman whose husband beat her and then murdered her two young children, you do feel like you’re unfairly spotlighted.

When the time came to give me my individual award, I looked toward the back of the room and saw Rick standing there in the doorway with the senator. He was backlit from the windows and surrounded by white marble. It was like he was glowing. I felt a pang. A few minutes later, when they announced our group award, I avoided looking at him but couldn’t help noticing the grin on his face. He deserved this, and he deserved to be proud. I was proud of him, too.

After that, he and the senator came and sat at our table, where my parents had joined us because our group was so scattered throughout the room. He wound up talking to my parents for a while. I have no idea what they talked about; several people had come up to me and I was justifiably distracted. And somewhat willfully ingoring his presence. Not because I didn’t want him there, but because I didn’t trust myself to act like there had never been anything between us.

After we left and I led my parents back to my house, I checked my phone and saw I’d missed a call. From the university. I returned it.

They offered me the job. Maximum salary allowed, title I wanted. I start May 1.

As promised, I texted Rick to let him know. His response: “Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! CONGRATS! You’ve had a very big day, if I do say so myself.”

It was a big day. A big, difficult, surreal, emotional on every level day. So much so that I don’t think it’s registered.

My mother wanted to frame my awards and hang them. In my bedroom.

No no no no no.

 

Always There

I want to post pictures of myself standing in front of my house online.

Lots of people have done that, right?

But I can’t. Because I have my mother. And a man who lives in my head and tells me he’s coming to get me.

Now, do I really want to post those pictures? Nah. They don’t even exist, actually. But there’s a very particular reason for that. When I bought my house in November, I didn’t take any pictures of myself in front of it. I thought about it, but I didn’t do it. I didn’t take any pictures of the keys held up in front of it, either. Thought about it… didn’t do it. I didn’t post any pictures of it on Facebook. Not even nondescript pictures of ONLY my house with no numbers and no street name. Because what if the stalker sees them?

Or my mother?

My thoughts and behaviors are governed by him. All the time.

And by my mother. It’s like what he doesn’t get, she does. And sometimes they overlap.

And the two of them are really pissing me off.

Every once in a while, I think about how having had a stalker has permeated my life ever since. It’s been two and a half years, but it’s like he’s there all the time. It’s not active fear, you understand. It’s just the knowing. Knowing I’ve been watched before, coming and going from my home. Knowing that when someone decides to show up and mess with you for an hour late at night, there’s really not much you can do to stop him except hope the police catch him. Knowing makes you more careful. Knowing makes you change.

Since July of 2010, on some level, he’s there every time I get into or out of my car, no matter where I am. Every time I stop at a stoplight in the dark. Every time I walk into or out of my home. Every time I walk through my house wearing less than a full suit of clothes. Every time I hear a noise I don’t recognize or one that sounds like a stone hitting a window, and every time I see a shadow or turn a corner or drive down the back alley to my parking spot behind my house.

When I was debating whether to buy a house, I worried that I wouldn’t be safe and wouldn’t be able to pick up and leave like I had before. When was looking for a house, I was always wondering in the back of my mind, “Will I be stalked if I live here?”

It’s an infuriating thing to think. Stupid and frustrating and infuriating.

When I meet someone new, I wonder. And then I remember I had never met him, so it’s useless anyway. When I think about dating someone, I wonder. When someone watches me in the grocery store or on the street or in a restaurant, I wonder. When I fill out forms that require my address, I wonder, even if they’re forms that would logically require my address, like at the post office. People delivering stuff to my house? I wonder. People installing appliances? I wonder. People who look at my license to verify I am who I say I am at the airport or when I use a credit card? I wonder. It’s always, always, always there.

Finding out that I’m being honored by the governor, and that I’m giving a speech, has given me new occasion to think about the whole ordeal all over again. And that’s okay. Along with other people, I turned the experience into something positive for others, and I’m immensely, deeply grateful for and humbled by that. It’s the only thing that made everything make sense.

But I’m also remembering it all, all over again, and it’s definitely working on me.

In spite of that, though, I managed to post a picture on Facebook the other day without thinking twice. It shows the window above my front door. It so happens that my house number is up there. But it’s a cool-looking picture – there’s a trick of light happening – I like it. So I posted it.

And I got a message from my mother.

“I know you closed your PO box (which I had so that I couldn’t be traced to a new street address), but don’t you think that putting your address online is going a little too far in case that creep thinks to look for you? When you pull up your FB page, it shows your pretty face in front of row homes, and the numbers on your window. There are ways to find out the exact location from pics online and that makes it easy to find you.”

First of all, my mother exaggerates. The street name is not on the picture, so although you can see the house number, you cannot see my address, really. Secondly, my mother believes everything she reads on the internet. Which is an issue on lots of levels, trust me, and I don’t know how we survived the presidential election. But that’s neither here nor there.

It’s not that she’s totally wrong. I do see her point. But in a sense, posting that photo was a kind of victory for me, a freedom, an unburdening. Not intentional. It wasn’t a declaration. It just happened, and it was a good sign, a sign that I wasn’t occupied by thoughts of someone finding me and doing me harm. And she took that away.

Now, I know she didn’t mean to do that. She doesn’t read it that deeply. She’s a mom, and her daughter lives alone in a different city, and she has always worried about that. And then something happened that she’d always worried would happen, and now she’s even more worried. But in her message, she reminded me of my fear and brought it back. She told me I could be found. She took away my enjoyment of something simple and small and made it about her own worries instead. She put him back in my head. In her effort to protect me and keep me safe, she made me afraid that I’m not.

I want one day. One day when I don’t think about him. One day when there’s not a single caution I take because someone once threatened my safety. One day when there is nothing in me that is afraid. I have not yet had that day. Even the day I posted that photo, I hadn’t gone without thought of him and his effect on my life.

It makes me tired and angry that he is so there. Working on initiatives to help keep other crime victims safer always means reliving that experience, but it’s the only thing I can do to make good come out of it, and it’s working. I just want the power to dictate exactly when and how and why I have to think about him and that time in my life. I want veto power over anxiety. I want to be able to block him from my head, take him out entirely, and erase all of his effects. But that would mean erasing the work I’ve done, erasing having ever met Rich, erasing having moved to a better home.

He is inextricably, undeniably woven into my life. And into my mother’s.  For her, that means reminding me to stay safe from states away.

For me, it just means wanting to forget.

Related posts:
A Stranger At the Door – Part 1
A Stranger At the Door – Part 2
A Stranger At the Door – Part 3
I’m Gonna Need My Meds For This

Beer and Police Work

My parents came to visit on my days off. And by “visit” I mean it’s very likely that Dad wanted to do some touching-up with the paint from the job we did when I moved in. When he was done for the day, losing the light, he wanted a beer. I hadn’t bought any. Which was sort of deliberate, because I tend to think my father drinks a little more than he should. I offered him a martini instead – his preferred brand of vodka (counter-intuitive, I know), but he didn’t want that.  He wanted to know where he could go buy beer.

Well, I don’t drink beer, my wine gets shipped to me, and I buy my vodka at the store across the street from work. So I have no idea whether any of the little corner shops in my neighborhood sell beer. And the places that do sell it are not places I’d like to go, if you know what I mean. They’re a little beyond the borders of where I’d be comfortable wandering. My father is 6’4″, 230 lbs, and, though aging, not necessarily someone you want to poke. I’m a girl.

See what I’m saying?

Point is, Dad insisted on going out to see if he could find beer. 

Literally wandering the streets looking for beer. 

Shortly after he’d  left (blessedly not wearing pajamas, although we may not be far from that), I noticed that my neighbor, Pedro, was outside. I went out and asked if he knew donde esta el cerveza.

He asked his friend, in Spanish, and translated for me. I knew the place he spoke of. It was not a place I wanted to go.

But my father was out wandering the streets. Unfamiliar streets. In search of beer.

So I went. Got stared at. Got sweet-talked. Got six bottles of Coors Light, cold, in a bag. Note: not a six-pack – that comes in its own box. This is just six loose, cold beers in a black plastic bag. Then I went home. I was a little concerned I might have to go driving around looking for my father, but he returned two minutes after me.

With beer.

He had found the place I should have known about. The place where I probably wouldn’t have gotten sweet-talked. I’ll remember that for next time.

After dinner (where Dad had his fifth beer, and a glass of wine), we settled on watching the rerun of the first episode of Downton Abbey, season 3. I like the show a lot, and my mother loves it, but Dad grumbled about it being so… British. Still, they were immersed in its story when the police chopper started circling a couple of blocks over.

Fantastic.

This was what I had worried about: after two months of quiet, we would have some sort of epic crime battle unfolding on the first night my parents came to stay. I think my mother noticed the sound of the helicopter, but she didn’t say anything. 

They went to bed at 10pm and I stayed up to watch a movie. “The Sessions,” starring Helen Hunt and William H. Macy. It’s about a sexual surrogate working with a man long-stricken with polio and essentially completely paralyzed except for one key part of his body. It’s actually a very sweet film, very poignant, and based on a true story.

At around 11pm, the chopper was back.

Oh, come on.

Circling… circling… cirrrrclliiiiiiinnnnnng…

Maybe Mom & Dad’s dueling C-PAP machines will drown out the sound. Of the chopper. And the movie. About the sexual surrogate and the client, who talks to the priest all the time about trying to have sex.

I don’t know which thing I’d least like my parents to hear.

Forty-five minutes later, the chopper was still chopping around. I was rolling my eyes. Catch him already! For crying out loud!

An hour.

Oh for fuck’s sake.

An hour and fifteen minutes. Movie’s over. Sex has been had. Helen Hunt has been naked a lot. Full frontal. Full dorsal. No cellulite.

I hate her.

Chopper’s still circling. 

Gah. You guys suck at catching bad people.

An hour and a half. I’m in bed. It seems like other choppers have joined in, but that’s probably really just the medical units flying back and forth to the two major trauma centers nearby.

On and on this search went. I wondered what this guy had done. 

I wondered why the cops were apparently so bad at finding him.

I wondered when they’d finally give up so I could stop worrying. Not about some bad guy breaking into my house, no. About my parents hearing it and figuring out what was going on and, from then on, worrying that I’d bought a house in a terrible neighborhood. 

Which I didn’t. It just ain’t the pastoral suburbs.

The birds finally peeled off about two hours after the search began. I have no idea whether they actually caught the guy. I have no idea what he did. You’d think I’d be worried.

Meh. I’m used to the city. Mine is not a bad neighborhood, but it’s not a far distance from one. You’ll hear sirens, because there’s a main thoroughfare just above my house, and because of the trauma centers nearby. But it’s a city.

This morning, I asked my parents how they slept.

“Great!” 

“Really?” I said carefully. “You didn’t wake up at all?”

“Well, I always wake up to roll over, but otherwise, no.”

Huh. No sign they had any awareness of the manhunt the night before. Only the marks from the straps of their C-PAP machines lingered on their faces. Completely unaware that a criminal had been on the loose nearby in the midnight hour.

Apparently, the dangers of alcohol and apnea put you at risk of not only dying in your sleep, but also of being murdered in your bed.

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas

My sister had sent me a picture of a child’s drawing. It was a little disturbing. This is what it was:

Yowza.

She told me she and my mother had discovered it in a pile of drawings my grandmother had kept since all her grandkids were little. It was in with all the other stuff my sisters and I had drawn, colored or made. This was in the 1984 section. But this was the only thing that didn’t have a name or a date on it. I know that the fiery stick on the left is either a cigarette or a match. I’m fairly sure the red-glowing stick on the right is a cigar, meant for my grandfather. I have no idea what the thing at the top is. A car cigargette lighter on a tripod? A bull’s eye?

And what had they won?

My grandparents were smokers. Actually, to say my grandmother was a smoker is an understatement. My grandmother was basically a human cigarette. A chain-smoker so serious about her nicotine fix that it had to be constant. She smoked four packs a day. That she got emphysema was no surprise. That she never got cancer is astounding.

Sister 1 is fairly convinced that I must have been the one who made this painting. I would have been seven in 1984. But I’m not at all sure it was me. First, I’m certain that I knew there was no H in “want.” Secondly, I’ve never made my Gs that way. Third, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have double-punctuated.

Even at seven, I was a bit of a grammarian.

I think one of my cousins was behind this, and it somehow got mixed in with my sisters’ and my stuff.

The bittersweet irony of this discovery is that my grandmother, in addition to emphysema, also had Alzheimer’s. By the time she was in her early 70s (when I was in my mid- to late-teens), she wouldn’t have even known she had stashed drawings away. She would have looked at them as though she’d never seen them before. She would have stared at her handwriting on the backs, with names and dates carefully kept, and had no idea the handwriting was hers.

Those precious (and discomfiting) memories she’d saved had all been lost, despite her care. Left for her adult grandchildren to find more than a decade after her death. Left for us to try to interpret. Memories have become mysteries.

This is the final post in my Twelve Days of Christmas series. As those who read it last year may recall, I used it to be mindful of the gifts I received every day. I have done the same this time.

The First Day: Memories

The Second Day: Comfort

The Third Day: Grace

The Fourth Day: Patience

The Fifth Day: Books

The Sixth Day: Hope

The Seventh Day: Perspective

The Eighth Day: Aspiration

The Ninth Day: Bounty

The Tenth Day: Simple Pleasure

The Eleventh Day: Inventiveness

The Twelfth Day: Mystery

These series have given me a gift of their own: the ability to look back and find a gift in something that seemed mundane or even irritating at the time.

Today the Catholic Church celebrates the Ephipany: the day the Three Kings brought gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh to the baby Jesus, following the star to his manger.

May 2013 provide you all with a star to follow, so you may find your gifts, and give them to those who are worthy.

On the Fourth Day of Christmas

On the fourth day of Christmas, lunch took seven hours.

The plan was really kind of ridiculous from the start: Mom would drive down to Aunt Beth’s house to pick her up, then drive over to NJ so she could sign some retirement paperwork at her investment guy’s office, not far from Sister 2′s house. Then they’d pick up Sister 2 and Youngest Neph and go to lunch. I went along because I was visiting to spend quality holiday time with family.

As you may remember from the Third Day of Christmas, my mother has become a terrible driver. It should take about 30 minutes to get to Aunt Beth’s house from my parents’. But there was a road closure and my mother’s head exploded all over the inside of her CR-V, which took a while to clean up, and so the 30-minute ride turned into 75 minutes and, unbelievably, a dose of Dramamine. (I can drive forever and not get sick, but if someone else is driving, I’m on the clock for 90 minutes. Half that if there’s a lot of stop-and-go. And with my mother lately, there is a lot of braking.)

“Why don’t we go back to Route 1 and take it down to Rhawn?” I suggested lightly. I knew my mother would know where she was going from there.

“Because it’s too far out of the way,” she responded as though being out of the way was the worst thing ever.

Let’s review. We were driving down to my aunt’s house, 30 minutes from my parents’ house, “on the way” to go to lunch with my sister in New Jersey, in order to avoid taking two cars across the bridge. Because that would be silly. Going straight to my sister’s house from my parents’ house takes 45 minutes. Getting there from my aunt’s house takes 45 minutes. So we’re already going 30 minutes out of our way and using probably $3.50 in gas one way for the sake of saving $3 in bridge tolls and maybe $1.50 in gas round-trip.

Secondly, how are you “out of the way” if you are, in fact, getting exactly where you’re trying to go in a manner with which you are quite familiar, as opposed to wandering anxiously around roads you don’t know, occasionally in the wrong direction? But avoiding going “out of the way” was a recurring excuse for bad driving in the last 24 hours. I held my tongue.

About 60 minutes into our 75 minute tension-filledbut for the love of God, not out of our way jaunt to Aunt Beth’s, my sister called. “What is going on? Why aren’t you guys there yet?”

“How did you know we’re not there?” I asked as my mother made a terrible and sudden left onto a side street. “Philmont Avenue was closed. We had to recalculate. I’ve been trying to call her to tell her.”

“Aunt Beth called the house,” my sister replied.

It was official: logic had been collectively abandoned. “Why the hell did she call the house and not Mom’s cell phone? And why isn’t she answering her phone?”

“She’s been outside cleaning out her car.” Such efficiency. Cleaning out your car to make that time spent worrying that your sister-in-law is dead on the side of the road a little more productive. And also make it impossible for your sister-in-law to call you and tell you not to worry that she’s dead on the side of the road. If my head didn’t wind up going through the windshield at some point on this drive, I might start banging it on the dashboard.

Opportunity knocked. My mother suddenly decided to turn left into a parking lot, prompting the long bleat of a horn as another car came up and rocketed past her on that side.

“Okay, I gotta go, Mom’s going to kill us,” I told my sister brightly. “Talk to you later.”

Finally we arrived at Aunt Beth’s, who began insisting that we blow off the paperwork she needed to sign since we had been so late, and instead just go get my sister for lunch. The whole point of my mother and aunt going to New Jersey was to get that paperwork taken care of; lunch with my sister was the bonus. Now we weren’t going to accomplish the paperwork, which meant my aunt would have to drive over another time, very possibly with my mother, and God only knew who would be collected in the carnage along the way.

I tried to tell them that my sister wouldn’t be ready for us to arrive yet, but they didn’t want to listen until I texted her and she told me she was naked and about to get into the shower. That convinced them to go accomplish the whole point of the trip first. Phew.

The paperwork thing took like seven minutes. I got out of the car to stretch, still nursing my back and very aware that I’d been sitting in a car for an hour and 45 minutes now.

Finally: lunch. Afterward, back at Sister 2′s house, Mom requested a duet with my sister on piano and me on vocals: “Memory” from Cats and “O Holy Night.” Don’t ask me why “Memory” has become a Christmas tradition in my family. It’s to do with my father wanting it sung at his funeral, and Christmastime being a traditional time for music-making. We can’t do the song at Dad’s funeral because we’re Catholic and it’s not a sacred piece, and also because it’s our dad and he would be dead and we probably wouldn’t be in the mood to sing and play. But in fairness, the song is from Cats, and that show itself is fairly deadly. And now every time I hear it, I think of my father’s eventual demise. Super-inspiring. Very Holiday.

Finally, we got back to Mom and Dad’s house. We had left for paperwork and lunch at 9:30am. We got back to the house at 4:30pm.

And then I had a martini and wondered how many lives I’d used up on that trip.

 

On the Third Day of Christmas

On the third day of Christmas, I realized where I got my trust issues.

It was a girls’ night out – just Mom, my three sisters and me. Mom had gotten us tickets to see “A Christmas Carol” up on the campus of Princeton University at a place called McCarter Theater. We were having dinner first. But Mom had never been there and really wasn’t sure about directions. Her computer was giving her trouble.

Enter trust issues.

Mom had fretted about the directions since before we got in the car. I had told her we could use the navigator on my phone, no problem. She wanted me to look up the directions that way 30 minutes before we left. And I would have, just to put her at ease, but I didn’t have my charger and I didn’t want to run down the battery too soon. My phone gives turn-by-turn directions and directions in list form, but I had figured turn-by-turn might be better if she found herself anxious in an unfamiliar area. Still, even in the car, as I tapped in the address on my phone, Mom was impatient. “I want to take Route 1,” she said.

“Okay,” I said as I plugged in the information. 

“Well, where does it say to go?”

“Well just get on Route 1 and we’ll go from there.”

The tires nearly screeched as she slammed on the brakes. In the middle of a populated road. “I’m not going any farther until I know where I’m going!”

What the…?

“Mom,” from both myself and Sister 3, in the backseat. She’d nearly been thrown into the windshield. 

I knew that explaining to my mom that the phone would give live directions from wherever we were, so that it was literally impossible to get lost, would only make her feel like I was talking down to her. It was enough that I had told her she has a navigation system on her iPhone. “It’s not hooked up,” she had replied, and I had had to keep myself from telling her it doesn’t need to be.

“Just get on Route 1,” I said again.

There was much second-guessing of the Google navigation on my phone, which has never erred. “Route 1 splits. It goes to New York or it stays in New Jersey. Which one does it say to take?”

I have to edit myself a lot around my mother. I didn’t say, “Well… we’re in New Jersey and we’re staying in New Jersey…” I said, “You’ve got it right. Just stay here.”

*******

–Braking!–

 

“This says Bank Street. I thought we were supposed to be on University.”

“It becomes Bank.”

*******

–Braking!–

“How am I supposed to go straight? There is no straight.”

“Yes there is. Look, see across this road here, that little street there?”

“That one?”

“Yep.”

“But I can’t get down that street.”

I didn’t say, “Mom, see the speed limit sign? See the other car going down that street? It’s not as narrow as it looks.” Instead I said, “Sure you can,” in a deliberately light and airy tone which I cannot believe she ever, ever buys, because it does take effort and she has to be able to tell that it takes effort even though I try to make it sound like it does not take any effort.

We managed to get to Palmer Square. It’s a lovely little village full of shops and not full of parking. We got there at 5:03pm, 27 minutes ahead of the time we were meeting Sisters 1 & 2. But we didn’t walk into the restaurant for 30 minutes, because of the angsting over the parking. Note: I did not say we couldn’t find parking. I said there was angsting.

 

First there was the agony of the parallel spot. I know everyone thinks they’re a better driver than whomever they’re riding with, but really. Very herky-jerky with the gas and the brake. I kept bracing myself and trying not to insult her by looking like I was bracing myself. A casual bracing. Nonchalant preparation for impact. “Oh, I’m just gonna put my hands here and lean my head against the headrest because I’m so relaxed by your constant brake-jamming. Oh, by the way, when did you become such a horrible driver?” 

Thirty-two unnecessary adjustments later, we get into the spot, and there’s a meter. My mother reads the sign aloud. My mother reads every sign aloud. She gets that from her mother. All women strive, be it wisely or not, to never become our mothers, and so I have sworn I will never read signs aloud. Nor will I hum a non-existent song or “do do do” silently so that the only sound anyone hears is my tongue clicking against the spot where my teeth meet my hard palate.

So she reads the sign aloud, muttering time limits and expanses and conditions. What it boils down to is that the meters are running for another two hours and 45 minutes, but there’s a two-hour limit on the spot. Which shouldn’t be a problem, because we have to drive from the restaurant to the theater, so we’re not staying in the spot longer than two hours anyway.

But there is great angst. There is much change-counting (requests only for quarters, refusing to hear that the meters take dimes and nickels, too, even though I offer them). Then there is a heavy sigh and a trek into an art shop for change. I watch my mother walk into the store.

“Ohmygod,” I heave as I lean my head against the window.

“Right?” comes from Sister 3 in the back.

“She’s exhausting!” I say.

“I know,” from behind me. 

“The braking?”

“I know!”

“Seriously?”

“Really.”

“You can’t just stop on a highway, Mom.” 

“Oh, but she did.”

Ten minutes later, Mom comes out and tells us about the very nice woman in the art shop who didn’t give her change, but did give her a free pass for a parking garage around the corner. Lovely. We go. 

“Lot full,” Mom reads the sign aloud. 

More angsting. “Should we just go back around and try our luck at that spot again?” We don’t answer because there is no good answer. My mother thinks out loud, particularly when her daughters are around, and truly every single thought she’d had in her head for the last 40 minutes had been spoken. I’m used to this, but I still don’t know when I’m supposed to respond and when I’m not. She pulled into the driveway of the lot and suddenly - 

– braking! –

“I don’t want to park here. I can’t park here.”

No reason. Just.. can’t.

Instead of driving around the lot to pull out head-first, she backed out of the driveway, nearly getting hit by another car (more braking). 

After we finally did park in another garage, and had dinner, and all piled into Sister 2′s Highlander to ride together to the theatre (no time limit on the garage), we really enjoyed the production of “A Christmas Carol.” I particularly loved the costumes, the sets, and the intermission when we realized there were two women who appeared just as pregnant as Sister 2, sitting in the row behind us. One of them asked my sister how far along she was.

“Oh, about 31 1/2 weeks,” she said.

“Oh, that’s what I would have guessed!” replied the other pregnant woman brightly.

“How about you?” my sister asked politely, figuring they were the same.

“Oh, I’m actually 37 weeks.” A coy eye roll and smile.

My sister’s eyes popped. ”WHAT?!?!” she shrieked. Not quietly. In a theater. She pouted the rest of the show, gap-legged with her hands folded atop my little niece’s grow-chamber. She later admitted she had forgotten her line, which, of course, is, “Oh, you look so great! Good luck! Wow, hope you don’t go into labor during the visit from the Ghost of Christmas Future! Hahaha!”  

Heading back to my parents’ house, Mom followed Sister 1. Sister 1 did not go back to the house the same way we had come. Instead, she got on I-95.

– Braking! –

(A groan from Sister 3 in the backseat.)

“We’re on 95?!”

“Yes,” I replied. 

“I wanted to take Route 1!” Mom declared.

A few miles later, Sister 1 pulled over to the side of the road and put on her flashers. Immediately, Mom thought the worst. Something was horribly wrong. “Is something wrong? Is she sick? Does she have a flat tire? Is her car dead? Oh, God…” Muttering, muttering, gloom and doom, horrors… we’ll all be killed here, obviously…

(Sister 1 had gotten a parking ticket and just spotted it affixed to the windshield on the passenger side. She stopped to grab it so it didn’t fly away. That’s all.)

Now I was glad I had stayed with my mother. Sister 1 had offered to have me ride home with her, but I wondered if Mom was comfortable getting there. Turns out, my suspicion was right. Mom didn’t know how to get to the house from here. It wasn’t tricky – my parents live right off of I-95. Mom can get there just fine coming from the south. This was the third time in the day that she was nervous about getting somewhere she knows how to get to. 

So I guided her back, careful not to sound – even to her – like I was at all surprised that she wasn’t sure. But I guided her down to an exit lower than she’d needed, figuring it was easier and much more familiar to her once she exited. 

“I should have gotten off back there,” she bemoaned as though she’d just lost a chance to donate a vital organ to a family member. “Oh my God, I’m sooo far down!”

I looked in the mirror at Sister 3, who just rolled her eyes and smacked herself in the head soundlessly. From where we were, it was two miles to my parents’ house. I wondered why all the drama.

The Ghost of Christmas Future revealed that next time? I’m driving.

 

 

 

On the First Day of Christmas

I was on the road at midnight when the day turned from Christmas Eve to Christmas, crossing into Pennsylvania. An hour later, I very quietly – I mean really, really quietly, entered my parents’ house, determined not to stir Twin Nephs and prompt them to come out asking if Santa had arrived. Instead I found their mother, Sister 1, framed in an idyllic scene. She slept peacefully on the brown leather couch, covered in a red blanket and backlit by the string of white lights that decorated the mantle where the creche awaited the baby Jesus. She had waited up for me… or tried. I took a picture in my mind before I gently woke her so she could go to bed.

The Norman Rockwell moments continued in slightly different charm as I bedded down with Sister 3. Others may have been dreaming of a white Christmas. Sister 3 was apparently dreaming of karate. I was a crooked jerky jockey who had driven her crooked hoss with a back kinked by muscle spasm, only to share a bed with Twitchy McGee for six hours of short winter’s naps interrupted by cautious repositioning on my part and wild fits of flopping on hers. 

Still, it was Christmas, and we were glad to be together.

At “seven zewo zewo” on the digital clock, Twin Nephs stormed the bedroom with trumpeted announcements of Santa’s visit. Neph 1 forcibly removed the covers from my person and demanded that I arise. He’s much more of a morning person than his brother, who is usually very quiet upon waking, but not today. Today was not an occasion for quiet upon waking.

Presents, presents, presents! Santa knew the twins had been good boys this year. Amazingly, the first gift that garnered screams of joy from Neph 1 was a safety helmet. Neph 2 was less impressed, but feigned happiness for his brother’s benefit. Neph 1, weeks before, had demanded that someone “take these crazy things off me!” after his first try at roller skating. Neph 2, ever different from his brother, had kissed pavement 10 minutes in and scored a goose egg on his head, only to jubilantly request another go. 

Neph 1 was worried for his brother’s safety. Hence the helmets. But they’ll get other use as well, since my parents gave the boys their first training-wheeled bikes for Christmas. Out on the deck in the cold after all the other gifts were opened, the grown-ups waited with cameras at the ready in various stages of pajama’d dress, looking like fools for ten minutes while the twins found shoes to put over their footie PJs and coats to don, though they knew not why. They payoff was a bit of a letdown, since the boys didn’t shriek with joy, but they did try to ride around the deck for a bit before breakfast.

After the holiday strata and a dose of my father’s Naprosyn, I hit the showers. I only had until 11:30 before I needed to leave for my road trip to work. Sister and BIL 2, along with Youngest Neph, arrived with 30 minutes to spare. Youngest Neph cared nothing for opening my gift; he had fallen asleep on the way over the river to grandmother’s house and now was feeling grumpy. No matter; his red fuzzy blanket sleepered self was all I needed to see.

The day at work was light and we made merry with a “Christmas Story” theme, one coworker donating a leg lamp and all of us paying our own way for Chinese food to be delivered, since the company couldn’t scrounge up a few bucks to provide for us. I settled for bits of carrot and peas (which I don’t even like) in my chicken fried rice instead of red and green sugar sprinkles for the Christmas repast. Late, I carried my crooked self home with music from my favorite mix of choral arrangements before capping the holy night with a video chat to friends in Australia and a glass of wine by the tree.

Then I Rockwelled myself up the steps and into my otherwise unoccupied bed for a long winter’s nap this time, glad of a long day of cheer, and the gift of anti-inflammatories and ice packs.

Heavenly peace.

When $1,000 Is A Bad Sign

I opened the card from my aunt figuring there would be a check inside. She had told me as much on the phone the other day. She doesn’t call often, but she had rung to ask how I was settling into the house. We chatted for 20 minutes about houses and neighbors and the usual things. She mentioned a housewarming gift. I’m her goddaughter, she has no money, and she’s crazy, so I’m always careful about what I’ll accept and not. My Christmas gift is usually (four years running) a fleece zip-up.

This year it was a check for $1,000.

I can’t remember exactly what I said when I opened it, but I think it was something like, “Holy shit.” This was not excitement. This was serious concern.

Even if she did have it, who on earth sends that much as a Christmas gift? Or a housewarming gift? Or the two of those things put together?

I called my mother. “We need to talk about the check your sister sent me.”

Mom said she had apparently sent one to each of her nieces and nephews. Same amount.

Well, shit.

My aunt has long been a bit of a buyer of end-times prophecies. It’s odd, considering she’s also very Catholic and one would think she would keep in mind the scripture that says that we know not the day or the hour. She thought the world was ending in 2000. Even had her daughter believing it. She kind of thought it might happen the last time this kind of thing failed to actually predict the Rapture.

Did she think it was for real this time? The Mayans?

And if so… what would we be able to do with the money?

But that’s an application of logic, and my aunt does not have a rational or logical mind. Oh, she seems entirely logical most of the time, but she’s not. If you question her or challenge her, the logic goes away. She wanted to get rid of my grandmother’s baby grand piano, and asked my dad to organize a group of guys to do it. But then she wouldn’t work with them on a schedule, and wouldn’t let them come into the house (my grandparents’ house, in which my mother, my aunt and uncle grew up, willed to her because she has nothing) when she wasn’t there. This wasn’t a group of strangers. This was my dad, my uncle, my brother-in-law and my sister’s boyfriend.

My mother was so furious at the perceived insult, she hasn’t spoken to her since then. That was the day after Thanksgiving.

But the problem is that isolation tends to make mental illness worse, and since my grandfather died, my aunt is even more isolated. She has a part-time job at a doctor’s office, but it’s hard to know how much she actually works and who’s around when she’s there. Her kids have long since avoided her as much as possible, because she pushes them with her prophesies and they’re afraid she’ll push it on their kids, too. Her daughter sends back every gift. It’s sad, really – she is a good person with a heart of gold, and she won’t give up on trying to let her grandkids know she loves them. And she does love them. She’s a very loving person. But her daughter and daughters-in-law worry about the effect she’ll have on the kids. And I don’t blame them.

The worry with the checks was obvious: is she giving away all her money because she’s planning something extreme? We normally wouldn’t think so – she’s so religious, she’d never commit suicide, we think. But then again, she also believes she gets messages from God, talks to Saint Joseph. So what if she thought one of them had told her to do it?

After several conversations with various family members, my mom wound up calling her sister. She took a firm line, because she has found that it’s necessary. She asked, bluntly, what my aunt was doing.

“Oh, well I just thought this was what Dad wanted me to do,” was my aunt’s reply.

My mother explained to her that if that was what their father had wanted before his death in February at the age of 93, he would have willed the money to his grandkids in the first place. And my aunt said if we want to send the money back, it’s fine – she just had to do what she felt she had to do. So it’s clearer now: this was the money my aunt got from the stock dividends my grandfather left her. And apparently she thought he would want her to give it away. Like she thought my late grandmother wanted her to move in with my grandfather. Would have been angry with her if she didn’t.

There’s a lot more that I don’t know about my aunt’s beliefs in an alternate reality and in a religious fanaticism. Apparently she believes some things have happened in the past which never actually did happen. And she will not listen to anyone who tells her they didn’t. She won’t listen to anybody.

So why don’t we get her help? you may wonder.

We can’t.

My aunt has no insurance, because she doesn’t have a full-time job and she doesn’t have any other benefits that would allow for it. Moreover, she will not consent to treatment because she doesn’t think she’s mentally ill. This is not a new argument. This has been going on for the better part of my life.  That means we would have to commit her against her will, and she hasn’t done anything severe enough (yet) to give us that power. Add to this the fact that no one wants to trick or deceive her, and we know that pushing her too hard will make her cut us out, so we won’t know anything about how she is.

So we wait. We wait and we worry, and what’s hardest is that we know she is suffering. She is frightened. She is suspicious. She is convinced her fears will become reality. She has lost her children and her grandchildren, and it’s easy as an observer to cluck one’s tongue and think it’s terrible that they abandoned her, and it is. But I understand why the did, because they grew up with this woman who got in their heads, and now they just want to protect their families.

This is the plight of the mentally ill. This is what makes me worry about my own mental health: I know there is a family history. Mostly depression or anxiety, we think, but sometimes this. All undiagnosed. My sister is an LCSW, and she’s not allowed to diagnose, but if she could, she says she would diagnose our aunt as paranoid schizophrenic with religious preoccupation.

We need a better way to care for the mentally ill people we love. We need more options.

If any of you are aware of any, please let me know.

Merry Lead-Up

I am sitting at my kitchen table, looking out at my festive and merry living room with its golden light cast about by the white ones on the tree and the standing one in the corner and the frosted ones in the Dickens Village houses and their reflection off the yellow painted wall. I am under a kind of spotlight from above the counter-bar behind me. The kitchen window is open a couple of inches to cool the house down from its stuffy 72 degree temperature after having the oven on for the last four hours. It reminds me of winter holidays at my grandparents’ house, when they did the same thing.

I am so damned tired. I yawned tremendously, four times in three minutes while folding laundry a little while ago.

There. I did it again.

But a it’s good tired. (Except for writing. I had “it’s” and “a” transposed in that sentence just then. And then I tried to spell “except” with a pound sign.) I’ve been on vacation this week, which is glorious. I mean that fact itself is enough to make angels burst into song. Fine, the angels don’t give a crap. I’m the one bursting into song. The angels are working overtime right now and kind of resent my absence with pay.

So first one of my besties from college, Joey, came to visit. We dined late on Friday after his arrival, at a cute little French bistro where the onion soup named for its nation was over-salted (and that’s saying something), but the ambiance was lovely and the boeuf bourguignon was divine. The next morning we sipped coffee as he flung open my front door and sang a song to the neighborhood.

I’m not kidding.  He’s like that. Gay playwrights are like that. Not to generalize.

We baked his grandmother’s thought-to-be-complex-but-actually-only-four-ingredients cookies and strolled through the park to the kicky little hipster coffee shop on the other side for a cuppa joe and a grand conversation with the baristo.  We traipsed through a couple of sections of my fun city, popping into shops along the way, trying on fetching and/or ridiculous hats, for example. We perused an appropriately grungy and hip record shop. And then we ducked into a restaurant for dinner, which was fanfreakingtastic as I expected.

I love love love finding new places to eat in tucked-away locales with friends. They are so impressed with me when I do this, because I’ve planned to go here, I’ve mentioned the name. But really I’m totally just using them as guinea pigs for my gastric galavanting. Win-win.

When Joey left on Sunday, I had a day with relatively little to do.

Just that one.

I watched football and read. A book. Lots of pages of it. It’s really good.

Monday and Tuesday I baked and waited for the various repair-type people to come repair things. On Monday night I watched “The Polar Express.” Twice. Because I needed some transportive magic, and that one does it for me every time. Tuesday I had friends over for dinner – my fettuccine Alfredo from scratch, which I make once a year and only once a year because if I make it more than that my arteries will slam shut and I’ll die. After my friends left, I put on “Elf,” saw the first ten minutes and fell asleep through the rest of it. How is it that you always wake up right when it’s over and the DVD is playing the menu screen on a loop?

Wednesday, Sister 2 came with Youngest Neph (BIL 2 was working), and we hung out and went to see crazy Christmas light displays that I’d tried to take Joey to but he’d pitched a nutty about sitting in traffic and we turned around and went home. Sis and I ate up the wonder on my nephew’s sweet toddler face while he “whoaed” and “wowed” and “dis is amazinged” down the street. Then we had dinner and watched “While You Were Sleeping” because we love that movie and we always laugh out loud at the very best part, which is like five seconds of a newspaper delivery kid riding his bike, flinging a paper and falling over. She drank ah glass of pinot noir, her 32-week-pregnant self very happy to sip it slowly with the doctor’s permission.

When they left this afternoon, I resumed baking and doing laundry (washer’s working! Huzzah!) All baking comes with Christmas music from either Pandora or the cable TV channel or CDs. And that comes with me snap-scatting around the kitchen with Frank and Johnny and Michael Buble’ (they play way too much of him on Pandora). I was just pulling a dozen oatmeal raisin chocolate chip cookies out of the oven when there was a knock on the door and the declaration of a UPS man’s presence. Holy Fast Delivery, Batman: it was the two replacement wine glasses I’d ordered from Crate & Barrel Tuesday night after I’d shattered a second one of the four I had. They arrived in less than 48 hours.

Clearly, the folks at Crate & Barrel are aware that the world is ending tomorrow and some of us need our wine glasses pronto.

The UPS guy commented on how great the cookies smelled, so I offered him one. He totally wanted it, but he checked his watch and said he didn’t have time.

I don’t know what that meant. When I say, “Do you want one?” do you take that to mean “Please come in, sit down and have a leisurely chew?”

So instead, I ran back to the kitchen, grabbed two from the cooling rack and handed them to him through the door, with a “Merry Christmas” and a smile. He took a bite and groaned with pleasure as he walked away.

UPS guy was kinda hot, by the way. And so I fleetingly wondered what Brown can do for me as I walked back to tend my oven.

And now I’m sitting. Sitting and enjoying. And thinking. I have one more day off before it’s back to the usual grindstone, working through Christmas and all. I still have some Christmas gifts to buy, and I have cookie trays to assemble and deliver. And I have a few more movies to watch in order to complete my holiday traditions.

But that to-do list makes me smile. I’m glad I find so much pleasure in the things that lead up to Christmas, since I so often have to work on the holiday and miss that one day’s shining moments. More and more, it’s about the lead-up, for me.

Merry Lead-Up, all.

Now Is the Time

I need someone to explain to me why we must so diligently defend the right to own a gun.

No, really. Someone please explain it to me. Real reasons.

I confess up-front: I hate guns. They are instruments of death, created only for the purpose of injury or killing. That said, I understand that some people need guns to protect themselves or their families from wild animals. I understand that some people need to hunt in order to eat. I understand that some people live in places where they don’t feel safe unless they have one. I have a bit of trouble with that last part, because I don’t think owning a deadly weapon should be a safety blanket, but I don’t live somewhere where I feel I need a gun, so I won’t claim I understand.

But here is the amendment so many people so vociferously and sometimes ferociously defend:

“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Why do we always seem to forget about the first half of that amendment and insist on the second half? A well regulated militia securing a free state. Also known as the military and law enforcement. Not everybody and their brother. Everybody and their brother are not a well regulated militia. 

What has happened so many times in our country is not just about the second amendment. It’s about a lot of things. But it does have a lot to do with guns, because the other potential reasons – the breakdown of family, the secularization of society, generational poverty, lack of opportunity, the glorification of violence in mass media – none of those things cause murder with spoons or sticks. Mental illness is a global problem – it does not discriminate based on age or gender, nationality or creed, geography or income level. I will always, always advocate for the mentally ill. I will always insist that we remove the stigma of those who are unwell. I could and might write a whole separate post about it. But there have always been the mad among us… yet there have not always been these kinds of mad acts. Proof of this exists in the numbers of gun-related deaths around the world. My God, we have so many more. And so, so many unsolved. Welcome to America: you’re free to fire. Wave that flag.

And it’s not that I don’t love my country. In fact, it’s the opposite. I love my country so much that I want to stop proving to the world how much tragedy we allow under the guise of defending words ratified 221 years ago (December 15, 1791), presently pushed in the name of commerce, trade and lobbying. There hasn’t always been easy access to guns. But we’ve already slid down the slippery slope. We already have literally hundreds of millions of guns in this country – I heard one estimate that there’s one for every man, woman and child.

The Constitution, the Bill of Rights – these are not the Bible. These are not the infallible words of God. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights were written by human beings trying to extricate themselves from a king. They had rifles that had to be loaded through the barrel with a tamp, and pistols that puffed smoke when they fired. Bring back Jefferson, bring back Adams, bring back Hamilton and Franklin and all the undersigned, and I swear to God they would all tell us we’re out of our minds for letting everybody who wants to own a gun do so in these times when we are not trying to beat back Redcoats in front of the farm. I swear to God they would want to know how all the people who walk into gun shows and all the people who thrill at the power of the weapon in their hands constitute a well regulated militia.

We are wrong about the Second Amendment. We. Are. Wrong.

But we have slid down the slope, so I can be reasonable. Can gun rights advocates be reasonable, too? I won’t take away your right to own a handgun or a shotgun. But I for damned sure am done with your supposed right to own anything more, or to own, frankly, more than one or two. I am done with your supposed right to own more than ten rounds of regular, non-armor piercing, non-hollow point ammunition for a handgun, or the average number of shotgun shells needed to bag your family’s dinner for a month. It’s just not reasonable. It’s not. And I declare this forcefully because no one has ever been able to explain to me why it is.

Twenty-eight mass shootings since April 1999 and Columbine. Twenty-eight. And every time, those who advocate for gun rights say “now is not the time… don’t politicize the tragedy… guns don’t kill people – people kill people.” I’m done with it. NOW IS THE TIME. Make it political, because gun rights are political. The NRA can go to hell. Twenty children are dead. 

I’m done.