tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10271056609992564832024-02-20T14:25:22.942-05:00The Cranky LibrarianDispatches from a librarian, mom, reader, pop culture freak, and all-around grouch.Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.comBlogger759125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-81895166379663854662015-04-02T05:00:00.000-04:002015-04-02T05:00:03.379-04:00Nobody Answers<i>Oh, the lonely sound of my voice callin'</i><br />
<i>Is driving me insane.</i><br />
<i>And just like rain the tears keep fallin'</i><br />
<i>But nobody answers when I call your name...</i><br />
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Vince Gil, "When I Call Your Name"<i> </i><br />
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A beautiful Kentucky autumn day. Sunlight streams through trees on fire with fall color. A mother and her teenage daughter are driving on a winding two-lane road from Falmouth to Erlanger, a journey that takes just under an hour in real time but can feel like eternity when there's homework to do, and laundry to wash, and daylight to burn. <br />
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The family makes this drive often. The asphalt is familiar, the curves well-worn, the landmarks noted. At least one month a year, sometimes two, the mother's husband and the teenage daughter's father checks himself into the rehab hospital in the center of the small town of Falmouth to seek treatment for alcohol addiction. On Sundays, the mother and daughter visit. The drive down highway 27 in late morning is hopeful; the evening drive back home is funereal. Both women miss their husband/father. Both worry about him--<i>Did he look jaundiced to you? Do you think he's putting on enough weight? </i>But the biggest worries on the ride home will always be unspoken. <br />
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<i>Will this be the last time? Can he stay sober? How much longer can we all do this?</i><br />
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And the blackest worry of all: <i>How many more times do we get to visit him at the hospital following a binge? At what point do we visit his grave instead?</i><br />
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This particular visit, the mother is in her new car. It's a smart, red compact car with a Japanese engine and an American body, like no other car this UAW family has ever had. Its very presence in their lives points toward the new decade ahead and a time of change. The teenage girl will be finishing high school in a couple of years. The oldest daughter in the family recently became a mother to a little boy cherished beyond reason. The mother operates her own beauty shop inside an upscale nursing home and has money of her own to spend for the first time in many years. It would be easy to look ahead with hope.<br />
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And yet on the road back from Falmouth, hope is hard to find.<br />
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The new car has an FM radio, front and rear speakers, and a cassette tape deck. This is the first family car to have such ridiculous amenities. During the drive down that morning, the teenager first listened to a top-40 station; when that began to fade out, she popped in her Beatles Greatest Hits tape.<br />
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On the way back, it's time for the mother to listen to Vince Gil.<br />
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The daughter is only listening because she has to. Until the fifth track. As soon as she hears the piano intro and Vince's pure, high voice come in on the first verse, she suddenly becomes interested. She turns it up.<br />
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<i>I rushed home from work</i><br />
<i>Like I always do</i><br />
<i>I spent my whole day</i><br />
<i>Just thinking of you</i><br />
<i>When I walked through the front door</i><br />
<i>My whole life was changed</i><br />
<i>'Cause nobody answered</i><br />
<i>When I called your name.</i><br />
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Something about the plaintive lyrics and the soaring melody and the near-religious fervor of Vince Gil's vocals--the girl feels a lump rise in her throat and tears well in her eyes.It is the first time, but not the last, that she feels so moved by the beauty of a melody that she cries. That song is also how she learns there's a "repeat" button on the tape deck. They replay the song several more times, let that side of the tape finish, then start the same side all over again just to count the tracks until they can hear that beautiful chorus. It becomes a standard on all their remaining drives to Falmouth together. And even after the little red car has been passed on and the mother gets newer, nicer vehicles, she always has to have a tape deck. Because during the most trying journeys of her life, she has to listen to Vince. <br />
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Fast-forward many years later.<br />
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This time it's a spring day, but sunshine is still breaking through the trees and filling the space with warm light. The daughter sits at the mother's bedside in their final hour together.<br />
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It feels like one of those evening drives back home from Falmouth. The same feeling of blackness, of uncertainty, the same lack of hope. A journey has come to an end. <br />
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The mother begins to stir. She is there, but she is no longer herself. The cancer has taken away too much. She moans; the nurse comes in and says it's not necessarily from pain and that it's simply a sign that the end is near.<br />
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"Shhh, shhh," the daughter whispers. "I'm still here. Let me play some music for you."<br />
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On her phone the daughter first cues The Beatles--"Here Comes the Sun" and "Let It Be," two favorites from those days of long car rides on a country road. <br />
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The mother quiets. She closes her eyes in half-sleep. The daughter has to leave soon; she has to pick up her own daughter from school and feed her before resuming her vigil. One more song.<br />
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As Vince Gil's impossibly beautiful voice soars and fills the room, the mother's eyes open briefly. For just a second she seems to know her daughter is there. The grip on her daughter's hand becomes a little tighter. And as the song finishes she drifts back into restless sleep, something close to a smile on her face.<br />
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A short time later, the call reaches the daughter. Her mother is home at last.<br />
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Over the next year, the daughter will listen to her mother's favorite song often. It will become a touchstone--when she needs a good cry, when the grief becomes too much. A little over a year after she loses her mom, she will play that song one final time in the kitchen of her childhood home just hours before signing the papers that allow that home to belong to a new family.<br />
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As the daughter closes the door, the poignancy of the lyrics take on a new meaning.<br />
<br />
<i>Your love has ended</i><br />
<i>But mine still remains</i><br />
<i>But nobody answers</i><br />
<i>When I call your name...</i><br />
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<i> </i>Rest in peace, Joan. It's been three years today and not a day goes by that I don't think of you. I'll play some Vince for us today and remember those drives and the days when we found comfort in music.<i> </i><br />
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Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-3029359479075711912014-11-20T16:00:00.000-05:002014-11-20T16:00:02.100-05:00This picture explains everything you need to know about my childhood.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhjdOX6EUf2MpjIFlxAzwg0NcLiB6RLGzfCAhz4MPnSFczjA8bXDmcm0K4ADgX5hI6GjAFHLW1d6ez17OqX8zVsKsTuN2NvVjMjzYUC9GJreN0PO6jS0l_sm_7yVG8iSY4R3E2kUQBWtk/s1600/Photo+Nov+19,+9+49+20+PM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhjdOX6EUf2MpjIFlxAzwg0NcLiB6RLGzfCAhz4MPnSFczjA8bXDmcm0K4ADgX5hI6GjAFHLW1d6ez17OqX8zVsKsTuN2NvVjMjzYUC9GJreN0PO6jS0l_sm_7yVG8iSY4R3E2kUQBWtk/s1600/Photo+Nov+19,+9+49+20+PM.jpg" height="280" width="320" /></a></div>
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In going through old photo albums looking for inspiration, I found this. I can't get tired of looking at it, you guys. Because, if you look closely, you can see my entire childhood.<br />
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Clearly, I'm playing school here in our wood-paneled family room with the awesome chalkboard my dad got me when I was in kindergarten, and which was my most beloved toy for many years after. The Big Yellow Bear and Mouse-a-fee Mouseriddle are not paying attention to my lesson and are engaged in some sort of risky behavior behind me. But I'm wearing my favorite outfit, a hand-me-down from more affluent cousins who wore DESIGNER CLOTHES AS CHILDREN, so I don't care. I'm fabulous and I know it.<br />
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Along the back wall of wood paneling, under the picture of <a href="http://newheavenonearth.wordpress.com/2012/03/06/what-are-you-still-resisting/jesus-knocking-door-pg/" target="_blank">Jesus knocking</a> on your door, are two stand hair dryers. My mother was a beautician who sometimes worked from home, and I thought for years that a hair dryer with a hood was just a standard piece of beauty equipment until friends came over and were like, "WTF?"<br />
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The blue portable one is sitting on top of an ancient ice cream maker that I can only remember making ice cream in once. I'm pretty sure everyone who ever had one of those ice cream makers only made ice cream in it once. There's probably one of those in every basement in the lower 48, still in the box, full of promise but smelling vaguely of mildew and disappointment.<br />
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The closet behind me was the scariest place in my house. The previous owners were DIY non-geniuses who turned their carport into a family room and didn't feel insulation was necessary. In the blizzard of '78 we had 6 inches of snow in that closet and it rained in there more than once. All that moisture and neglect caused a hole to rot away that over time became big enough that a large, angry stray cat once got in through it in the middle of the night and picked a fight with our house cat in the hallway outside my bedroom. It was one of the most bizarre things that has ever happened to me. And my life has been full of some pretty bizarre shit.<br />
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Let us not forget the red shag carpet. And that fern whose frond is invading the far left of the picture. It really tied that whole room together. When there wasn't snow in it.<br />
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When/if I write my memoirs (tentative working title: <i>No, Really, I Thought This Was All Normal</i>) this will be my cover picture. Because that little slice of off-kilter 80s suburban white-lower-middle-class-life captured on Polaroid film is my time capsule.<br />
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Opening it today has been as fabulous as that designer outfit. <br />
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Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-16572191301257598492014-09-05T17:15:00.000-04:002014-09-05T17:15:00.079-04:00Through a glass. Darkly.I'd like to start by saying...I'm fine. Or at least, I will be fine. Eventually.<br />
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If you've been wondering where I've been, well...I've been wondering that, too. After a declaration in May that I was going to get more serious about writing, after fixing up a quiet corner of our home into a writer's nook, after even toying with the idea of taking a year off of my real job to see if writing full-time could produce anything, I failed to write anything this summer longer than a swim-season grocery list. And while those lists are long and include all the main food groups a growing swimmer needs, like Clif bars by the dozen, it wasn't quite the writing I set out to do.<br />
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I have excuses, if anyone cares to hear them. Ainsley had some recurring asthma issues that kept us in doctor's offices and pharmacies more than usual. The 11-12 age group in swimming also has a more intense practice schedule than 10-and-under swimming, so I was running to and from the pool and sweating it out in a hot car in the pick-up line more than I anticipated. We had more travel meets this summer, too, meaning not only was I busy every other weekend, I was stuck in a hotel room 2 hours away from home every other weekend. It's hard to write when you're never home, and hard to find something to write about when the only drama in your day was that your young athlete didn't come out of practice on time because she prefers daydreaming in the locker room after practice to keeping Mom from sweating to the point of dehydration in her Pontiac Vibe.<br />
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And yet I still could have used the cushion of summer vacation to take that step into writing I'm always threatening to take. But I didn't. I didn't do a lot of things I set out to do this summer, actually. With the bottom line being...I sort of quit. Checked out. Gave up.<br />
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You may not have noticed if you saw me this summer. I didn't make a big deal of it, I didn't talk to anyone about it, and I assumed my blues would, as they usually do, lift on their own and melt in the bliss of a Kentucky educator's summer like so much snow.<br />
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I'm still waiting.<br />
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I tried the various tricks in my bag I reserve for times like these. I did something outside every day. I exercised. I napped. I attempted meditation. I went away on vacation. Sometimes, briefly, the fog lifted. But it always came back, and by the time I started my pre-school-year extended employment days the first week in August, I was like that frog we always hear about who lands in a pot of water that keeps getting hotter and hotter but the poor amphibian doesn't realize until too late that he's <em>thisclose</em> to boiling. <br />
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My realization that I was almost boiling came one sunny afternoon when I was headed to the gym to clear my mind and learned that Robin William was dead in an apparent suicide.<br />
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Like many with ongoing depression and anxiety, it has been a trigger. The idea that someone as brilliant, as seemingly joyful, as family-oriented as that man could wake up one day and go, "F*ck it, I'm done," hits hard. If he couldn't find a reason to go on, to push through the pain another day, what the hell hope do the rest of us have? I have always assumed that no matter how dark things get for me when I'm going through a depressive episode, I'm always going to get better. Through medication or therapy or self-awareness or all three. Because I always have.<br />
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And I would guess Mr. William always had, too. Until that one time he didn't. And that one time he didn't trumped the many times before that he did. <br />
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It's frightening beyond blog-post words. <br />
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I'm taking steps to get through whatever this is I'm going through now. I acknowledge that a winter and spring that saw me weathering a basement flood, unexpected orthopedic surgery, swine flu, and dental woes culminating in dry sockets (the pain of which I feel is tragically underrated) could get my chemicals out of balance. I acknowledge that some changes in my work environment could have me feeling just overwhelmed enough to magnify everything. I acknowledge that on top of all of this I just turned 40 and have a very active family and probably don't take enough time to do basic things for my mental health like get enough sleep and eat something for lunch with more healing power than a bag of Cheetos and a Snickers. <br />
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Basically, I acknowledge that I have some baggage I need to put down. I've enlisted some help. Things aren't so bad that I don't see hope. This, too, shall pass. And God knows I've been through worse.<br />
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In the meantime, I'm just not really feeling like writing anything. I have just enough creative energy to say one light-hearted, possibly-funny sentence per day, and while that's awesome for Facebook or Twitter, it makes blogging or starting the Great American Novel sort of complicated. So I'm signing off for a while. (To give you any indication how hard I'm finding it to write, I started this on August 12. And have only been able to focus on it roughly 30 seconds a day.)<br />
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I'll focus on getting back on track. I may be back. Or I may start writing a memoir or some essays or, at the very least, a recipe book I can spiral-bind and pass along to my grandchildren when they come over to my house in their flying car and ask, "What is this 'book' thing of which you speak, Mamaw?" Because writing is important to me and I know I'll find healing in it again. <br />
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So, you'll be hearing from me again soon. Maybe not on this platform, but somewhere. <br />
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In the meantime, thanks for reading. <br />
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<br />Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-72698271460483921112014-05-28T18:00:00.000-04:002014-05-28T18:00:02.599-04:00Friends of the FamilyFor the first time in many years, I cried when someone pulled away from my house.<br />
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When I was a kid, I cried every time we had house guests and they left. And every time we were house guests and we left. Goodbyes are hard for me; I can't seem to get over the "I miss you already" part to look forward to the "I'll see you again soon" part. As I get older and begin to lose more people from my life, I've also learned that, sadly, you can't take for granted the whole "I'll see you again soon" part. Goodbye is, sometimes, permanent. <br />
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In my adult life, we've had plenty of house guests who I've hated to see go. But the vast majority live a short drive away. I know that, in a year at the absolute most, we'll be hanging out sampling Kentucky's finest bourbon again. When my college roommate and her family pulled out of my drive Sunday, it was different. She lives in Atlanta; it had been seven years since I last saw her in person. We both have younger children and lives it's hard to get away from. It could easily be seven years again.<br />
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My tears Sunday night also came from the realization after spending a couple of days back in her company that my friends have become, especially in the two years since I lost Mom, my family. <br />
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When you lose that last parent, you so often lose the various threads that tie you to the body of your blood family. I have a sibling, but we are two very different people with nothing really in common except for the genes we share. In times of crisis, I now turn to the group of people who support me by choice, not chance. The men and women who grew up with me, went to school with me, pass me in the halls every day at work, share a side yard. These are now my people. My tribe. They now know me better than anyone else still living on this planet. We've shared laughs. We've shared tears. We've broken bread together at occasions of both great joy and great sorrow. We've climbed mountains and fought in the trenches. Our bonds are deeper than blood. <br />
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My college roommate's visit brought back a trove of good memories. Of course we talked about those. But not having seen her in a while, we also re-discovered each other as adults. Adults who, since our last adventure, have lost some of the people we held most dear. Who are raising children in an increasingly scary world. Who balance work, family, and our homes. <br />
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We've changed. But we've changed together in spite of the miles. And in just a couple of hours spent catching up on the front porch, we were right back to being two girls who shared a dorm room. <br />
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No matter what, we'll always have Danville.<br />
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And though we aren't connected by blood, I will always think of her, as I do so many others of my friends, as family. Family who have been there for me when I've needed them the most. <br />
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We weren't born to the same mother and father. But my friends are my brothers and sisters all the same. <br />
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<br />Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-5835610728637465952014-05-11T06:00:00.000-04:002014-05-11T06:00:05.997-04:00Other Mothers<em>"I didn't know I had another mother."</em><br />
<em>"Of course you do. Everyone does."</em><br />
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--<em>Coraline</em><br />
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Today being Mother's Day, I will, of course, honor my mother. She was a good one, and I owe so much of who I am to her. But I also want to honor my other mothers; those women in my life who had no genetic or societal obligation to me and my raising but who loved me, fed me, and cheered me on even when I was falling over hurdles/singing off-key/making questionable hair and clothing choices.<br />
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In this spirit, I want to wish a happy Mother's Day to Other Mother Jayne, my childhood best friend's mom, who did not freak out the first time she invited me over for dinner and I put cottage ham and green beans (the first time, but not last time, that I had that greasy-good Cincinnati specialty) onto one single paper plate which the cottage ham just sort of...dissolved. God love her, she still didn't freak out later that same weekend when I ate an entire jar of Klaussen pickles from her fridge. Basically what I'm saying is there are a lot of times Jayne should have freaked out on me when I was at her house, which was almost daily. I was not big on social graces at the time. She gave me rides home from everything her daughter talked me into participating in and cheered for me when I ran the last leg of the girls' 4x400 relay in 8th grade, even when every team but ours had already finished the relay before I even started my leg, leaving me to do the loneliest 400-meter "dash" in the history of awkward athletics. She was always patient, always kind, always welcoming, and still looks out for me to this day. <br />
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I also want to say "Thank you" to the Other Mother who is, actually, my older sister. Eleven years my senior, she filled in the gaps that my mom couldn't or wouldn't. I didn't realize it until years after I left home, but my mother was borderline agoraphobic. Especially in those early years of our move to northern Kentucky, which must have completely overwhelmed her, seeing as how she had spent her entire life previous in rural small-town one-street-light Appalachia. My sister went to school open houses, spelling bees, school plays, parent-teacher conferences, and even visited my kindergarten class last-minute when my mom bailed on her plans to talk to us about her job for Career Day. (For what it's worth, my classmates were just as enthralled by my teenage sister's description of working the cash register and baking potatoes after school at Ponderosa as they would have been by my mom talking about giving wash-and-sets to ladies in their 60s.) When the UAW went on strike and Dad wasn't working, Joanie made Christmas for me, buying all my toys that year and asking nothing from my parents in return. My childhood would have been rather bleak without her in it. <br />
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And finally...Other Mother Kathie. THE Other Mother, from a marriage standpoint. She raised a good boy who turned into a good man who turned into the best father. She made me believe I was pretty--she was the first female I wasn't related to by blood who told me so, and sometimes this made me think it was possibly true. I learned so much from her, everything from the importance of spring cleaning to making milk gravy to grieving with grace. She and my mother were two very different people with two very different personalities, and each balanced the other's world views during my impressionable teenage years. Some women have mothers-in-law from hell and see their significant other's mother as the enemy; I am grateful that mine treated me as one of her own. Like my own mother, I miss her deeply. <br />
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The saying, "It takes a village to raise a child" has become more controversial than it should be, perhaps due to the politics of the person who most famously said it in a public forum. In my mind, it is absolutely a true statement. No one mother can be everything her children need. Sometimes you have to call in an assist to fill in a gap you either temporarily or permanently can't provide. I am lucky that I had women who stepped up for me those times and in those unfamiliar areas where my own mother couldn't. <br />
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After you have celebrated the fabulousness of your own mother today, take some time to remember your Other Mothers. They didn't care for you because you share half their DNA; they cared for you simply because they wanted to. Even when you ate all their pickles. <br />
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<br />Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-28071939347522653392014-05-03T08:00:00.000-04:002014-05-03T08:00:00.767-04:00The force is weak with this one.There are certain things we wish for our children. Health. Enough intelligence, initiative, and ambition to place them on a solid-enough career path to allow them to eventually move out of our basements and feed and clothe themselves. Self-esteem. Not necessarily beauty, but at least straight teeth. Braces, they be expensive. <br />
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Sometimes we want them simply to be a little like us. To share a common passion, to have our same sense of humor, to be good at something we're also good at. It helps assure us that while we can't be immortal in our own bodies, we can live on through passed-down traits from generation to generation. <br />
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Which is why it pains me deeply to say this today, on the eve of May the fourth: my daughter hates <em>Star Wars</em>. Each word a dagger to my nerdy heart. Hates. It.<br />
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I have to believe that this hate has more to do with taking a stubborn stand against something the yucky-blucky boys in her class love than with the movies themselves. After all, we can't even get her to sit down to watch the first one. (And, to be clear, by "first one" I mean "Episode IV." I am a purist in this regard, and don't you dare try to Jedi-mind-trick me into believing otherwise.) She decided she hated everything pertaining to the Force several years ago before I even had a 31-inch Darth Vader gracing our hearth or displayed my lightsaber over the mantle. She hates it on principle and in theory, not so much in practice.<br />
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This gives me hope. <em>A New Hope</em>. A "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope" hope. Seriously. She likes Gandalf, she just may like old Ben, too. <br />
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She greatly enjoyed the <em>Lord of the Rings</em> trilogy and is suffering, like the rest of us, through <em>The Hobbit </em>(she adores Legolas, so thank God he makes an appearance), so one would think <em>Star Wars</em> would be a natural fit. Her generation is also accustomed to dystopian fantasies and rebellious teens blowing stuff up; they cut their teeth on <em>The Hunger Games</em>. I can't help but think a girl who adores Katniss Everdeen will someday cheer for Luke to get that proton torpedo into a hole roughly the size of a womp rat. Luke and Katniss are cut from the same cloth, really--rural teens who find themselves fighting (and whining about fighting) against a vast and oppressive regime using skills they didn't know they had until called upon to save the world as they know it. Katniss even sports a very Padawan-esque over-the-shoulder braid. Ainsley has to at least feel some cathartic teen angst when watching these movies, right? <br />
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I plan to find out. I have been over the moon (I mean Death Star; that's no moon) ever since the fuzzy black-and-white picture of the cast of the new film was released this week. There's Carrie! And Mark! And Harrison! And the impossibly tall guy that plays Chewie! And OMG Andy-freaking-Serkis. My two geek worlds collide in that picture and I can hardly see straight. <br />
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So a proclamation went out last night over dinner. As a family, over the course of the next year, we will watch the original trilogy. Multiple times, if necessary. If we have to, we will watch the prequels. But only if we have to. I may not be able to make her love it, but I want her to at least be able to tolerate it. For we have a date. We will go, as the family unit we are, to the opening of the new film when it finally arrives in theaters. We will do this because the best memories from my childhood revolve around seeing various trilogy films for the first time--I saw Episode IV the night it premiered on HBO, I watched <em>The Empire Strikes Back</em> at a midnight showing with my Dad the weekend it came out, and my sister and brother-in-law waited in line for hours to get three tickets to take me to <em>Return of the Jedi</em> on opening night. I have to see this new movie. And whether she knows it yet or not, so does my daughter. If she's going to use her hate, she needs to know what it is she hates. And maybe, just maybe, there's more than a Sand Person's chance in Hoth of her letting her guard down and her prejudices go and liking this epic story of good and evil. <br />
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I can't just let her go to the dark side. The dark side being, of course, teen vampire romance movies. <br />
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I don't want to force my kid to be someone she's not or like something she doesn't simply because her mother loves it. But the cultural impact of these movies can't be denied, and I want her to at least know about them and make an informed decision. Then, if she doesn't like them, I will accept it. I won't like it, and I'd be lying if I said my feelings wouldn't be a little hurt. These movies were a huge part of my childhood and loving them is a part of my identity and embedded into my DNA. Not my midichlorians, George Lucas. My DNA. Leave the Force the mystery and ancient power it's supposed to be and quit explaining stuff you don't need to explain.<br />
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Wait, what? Where was I? <br />
<br />
I would imagine that someday my daughter will have children of her own. And she will pass on to them some of her childhood loves--<em>Phineas and Ferb</em>, <em>Harry Potter</em>,<em> The Hunger Games</em>, <em>Divergent</em>. They will either like it or they won't, and she will have to cope with that. If I am lucky enough to still be on this planet and not be a shadow-y, see-through apparition appearing at Ewok celebrations, I'd like my grandkids to ask their mother why Mamaw has a big robot-looking guy dressed in a black cape on display in the basement right next to a weird light-up sword (and, if dreams come true, an R2-D2 keggerator.) And I'd like my daughter to answer that question with something other than, "Because your Mamaw is a weirdo." <br />
<br />
Ideally, her answer to why Mamaw has all these strange things in the basement would begin thus:<br />
<br />
<em>A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away...</em><br />
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Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-38844730344497858422014-04-25T17:30:00.000-04:002014-04-28T08:44:34.127-04:00Reach for the starsWhen I was eleven, I found nothing in my world nearly as beautiful as the full-color pictures of the Orion Nebula in the pages of <em>Astronomy</em> magazine.<br />
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Always a nerdy girl who couldn't decide between the Barbie Dream House and the Millennium Falcon, I became obsessed with the night sky and with the burning desire for my own telescope when I was in fifth grade. I don't know how it started, but I know that by Christmas of my 6th-grade year I was lobbying hard for a backyard telescope. It took my parents so off-guard that my mother began to ask her hair clients if they knew anything about amateur astronomy. It turns out one did, and before the telescope came I inherited five years' worth of back issues of <em>Astronomy</em> magazine, cast-offs from the college-departed son of one of Mom's ladies. <br />
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The magazines, it would turn out, were better than the telescope itself. <br />
<br />
The telescope we could afford, purchased at Toys 'R' Us, was a huge disappointment. My dad and I could see the craters of the moon and, with a solar filter we probably shouldn't have trusted (I swear I haven't being seeing colors as brightly the past 29 years), some impressive sunspot activity. But stars were no starrier through the lens of our scope, and Jupiter and Saturn and Mars no more than small bright discs with no detail. The telescope sat in the corner of my bedroom collecting dust until I myself went off to college, when it became the problem of our local thrift store. <br />
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But no dust gathered on the <em>Astronomy </em>magazines. <br />
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I marveled at galaxies, nebulae, and clusters, and the amazing telescopes, trackers, and specialized cameras that made capturing their images in colorful, detailed glory possible. I wondered what sort of training one needed to have that job--sit at an observatory under a huge reflector telescope seeking and finding the marvels of our vast universe. Years later I found out that the training one needs to do this job actually requires a hell of a lot of advanced math, so I lost interest in it as a career. But I never lost interest in looking through a telescope and seeing the beautiful and amazing universe we live in. <br />
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So much so that I majored in astronomy in our state's Governor's Scholars program and lived for the Wednesday night viewings out in light-pollution-free rural central Kentucky, where I first looked through an amateur telescope large enough to allow me to see the rings of Saturn. Seeing that planet through a good eyepiece for the first time, at once both smaller and larger than I imagined, I gasped. It didn't look real; it had the pastel hue and crisp edges of a piece of penny candy someone had dangled at the end of my field of vision. But there it was--a celestial body I knew was so far away its light took five hours to reach my eye, but so close it seemed I could reach out and grab it. <br />
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Yet outside of viewing nights, my astronomy major was all math-y and physics-y and involved discussions of the big bang and photons and black holes and the space-time continuum. I was an arts-and-humanities-brained person trying to grasp quantum mechanics. I grew miserable and felt dumb on a daily basis and didn't look through a telescope again for years. But, oh--Saturn's rings. That's the stuff of poetry. <br />
<br />
Flash-forward two decades. Two GSP astronomy majors have a daughter who likes to watch shows hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. Jason, wanting a high-quality amateur scope without a high-quality pricetag, built a large reflector telescope so good that one of our friends used her iPhone to capture a picture of Saturn's rings through the eyepiece. Let me repeat that, so me at eleven can have her mind blown--I married someone who built a telescope powerful enough to show the rings of Saturn (and one of her moons) at a time when nearly all humans have a high-quality camera on a phone they carry with them all the time in their pockets. <br />
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In another plane of existence, in a parallel universe, 6th-grade me just got the shivers. <br />
<br />
Last night, to make sure Ainsley's and Jason's spring break fun went out with a (big) bang, we took a family field trip to an observatory. Reservations were made before we knew it would be a cloudy night, but even on cloudy nights seeing a movable observation roof, a giant antique telescope, and getting a lecture on deep-space objects is good geeky family time. Luck, for a change, was on our side--shortly after dark, at the end of the lecture, the skies temporarily cleared. We took turns gazing at Mars, Jupiter with 4 of her moons, and a double star. The detail of these bodies was the best I've ever seen. I was giddy. It wasn't a page from one of those long-lost <em>Astronomy</em> magazines, but it was the stuff nerdy dreams are made of. And my own 11-year-old and my husband were just as in awe as I was. <br />
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I burned through a lot of dreams when I was kid. Like many, I dreamed of being rich, of being famous, or being a star. For a while, I dreamed simply of seeing stars. Not with my naked, nearsighted eyes, but in a way that makes this huge and overwhelming universe feel a tiny bit smaller. A tiny bit more accessible. A tiny bit more human. <br />
<br />
On a suddenly clear night in April, my family beside me, I finally got to look through a huge professional telescope and see the details of another world. I reached for the stars and grasped them. And it was just as amazing as the Orion Nebula on the pages of a hand-me-down magazine. <br />
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<br />Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-48596935497521603102014-04-16T16:30:00.000-04:002014-04-16T16:30:00.893-04:00Let me bring you a plate.Food is love.<br />
<br />
I've often heard it said but never really experienced it until the outpouring of food-love I received in the weeks following my shoulder surgery. My friends and co-workers, knowing that providing healthy food with one arm for a growing swimmer could be a challenge, kept a meal train going for me that included homemade specialties, our favorite carry-out dinners, and restaurant gift cards. I didn't have to prepare a dinner on my own on a weeknight until I started weaning from the sling. It was a gesture from those closest to me that on more than one occasion made me so grateful I could (and did) cry. <br />
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I come from a southern-slash-hill-people family, so I should have known that food isn't always just food. If I was sick, if I'd gotten my feelings hurt, if I was coming home on break during my difficult first two years of college--I got fed. My mother knew how to soothe my heart by way of my stomach better than anyone. <br />
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And when she had prepared for me one of my favorites, be it chicken and noodles, or fried spinach, or a cheeseburger, or even just a sloppy peanut butter and jelly sandwich, she always announced its readiness with the same verbal dinner bell:<br />
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<em>Supper's ready. Come fix you a plate. </em><br />
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What a great colloquialism: <em>Fix you a plate</em>. Just that word "fix" implies healing and repair. For either your spirit or your body or perhaps both. It's not just putting food on a piece of ceramic--it's arranging it according to your own needs and personal aesthetics. It's art and medicine all at once. <br />
<br />
My mother always said that the food she cooked for other people tasted better than the food she cooked just for herself. In her later years when she lived alone she rarely ate her own cooking, and swore that when she cooked for others, she cooked with joy and love. The proof for her was literally in the pudding. The banana pudding. <br />
<br />
Because I am my mother's daughter, my first solo dinner following surgery was homemade chicken noodle soup for my ailing daughter. She came home from school last Wednesday looking pitiful with a spring cold, and she needed love in the form of protein, veggies, and carbs. <br />
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She was on my mind as I cut carrots, cubed chicken, and simmered broth. I didn't just sprinkle poultry seasoning into the pot; I poured in a little of my heart as well. <br />
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And I'll be damned if that wasn't the best pot of chicken noodle soup I've ever made. <br />
<br />
I'm determined to pay forward the kindness of my friends and colleagues. I've brought food to ailing friends and family before, but not as often as I should. I am in debt to those who helped me through a physically tough time, and the debt needs to be paid in chilies and casseroles. <br />
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So if you find yourself sick, or in spiritual turmoil, let me know. I'll stop be your house. And I'll bring you a plate. <br />
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Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-56155064391308590992014-04-02T17:00:00.000-04:002014-04-02T17:00:05.812-04:00Two Years<em>Hi, Mom.</em><br />
<em></em><br />
<em>I'll admit, I'm currently going through one of those phases where I'm pretty uncertain about where I stand on God/heaven/an afterlife/angels, so I don't know if these words will find you. And if they do, that first sentence is probably breaking your heart because your firm and unshakable belief has been confirmed and I'm down here doubting and debating you as usual. No matter. Because two years ago today I sat at your bedside in hospice and held your hand and said goodbye to you for the last time without knowing it would be for the last time, and I find myself missing the spirit that made you you, wherever that spirit and energy may now be. And I need to talk to you even if you can't listen.</em> <br />
<br />
I wrote the above paragraph yesterday after school in an attempt to express the heaviness and sorrow I felt knowing that today is my least favorite anniversary. I typed it while Ainsley did homework, then stared at it, had no more words, and went about the rest of my day. <br />
<br />
I went down to our basement laundry room and began to take my daughter's clothes out of the dryer. As I stood there, I mulled words and phrases around in my head trying to figure out what I could possibly say to you, my readers, and to myself, that would give me comfort and strength and express what it's like to lose your mother too soon. <br />
<br />
And then I saw something out of place on top of the lint filter. Something that I did not expect to find at all, especially not in my clothes dryer. I found a necklace. I found <em>the</em> necklace. And I've been trying to wrap my head around it ever since. <br />
<br />
To tell you that story, I have to tell you this one. <br />
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In the months following Mom's death, Ainsley and I both clung to tangible items that had once belonged to her that made our healing hearts feel a little less empty. For me, it was one of her watches. It was too small for my wrist and more white and more large than I prefer my watches to be, but I wore it every day that first summer. For Ainsley, it was two things: the little stuffed lamb that had sat at Mom's bedside in the hospital and which she told me she wanted Ainsley to have when she knew she wasn't going to make it, and the silver palm tree necklace that Mom had brought back for Ains from vacation not long before she got sick. <br />
<br />
Ainsley wore the necklace every day the first weeks of her summer vacation, only taking it off for swim practice. One day she got invited last-minute to go to the neighborhood swimming pool with our neighbors, and in our rush to get her out the door, we didn't secure the necklace first. When she came back from the pool it was no longer around her neck. Neither a frantic search of her swim bag nor violent shaking of her towel, swimsuit, and cover-up yielded the necklace. For a week I retraced her steps through the yard, called the pool, checked the lost-and-found, looked for something shiny on the pool bottom. With a heavy heart, I accepted the necklace's loss and mourned for it. It was the last gift she ever gave her granddaughter, and it was gone. <br />
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That was July of 2012. Since then, life has moved on. I had forgotten all about the lost necklace. Until it suddenly appeared in my dryer the day before the second anniversary of Mom's death. <br />
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I immediately ran upstairs to Ainsley, still doing homework in her room, and saw that she was as surprised as I was. She had not seen it since that day at the pool, either. But together we came up with the most logical explanation for its return.<br />
<br />
Sunday night I washed her swim bag, which she had taken with her that day. Even though we turned that thing upside down and inside out looking for the necklace initially, and even though it's been emptied and washed several times since July of 2012, it must have been hidden deep inside a pocket. It finally emerged Sunday, and hid itself in the three other loads of clothes I did until, like the magic bullet or the one ring, it perched itself cleanly out in plain view. <br />
<br />
<br />
That's the logical explanation. <br />
<br />
But the timing of its discovery leads me to believe (bear with me, skeptics) that there is an unseen hand in this, and that it was a message of comfort to get me through a difficult day. <br />
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Do I believe in angels, or ghosts, or that the energy of the dead can somehow communicate with us from whatever is Beyond? I still don't know. It depends on the day, the slant of the moon, and how recently I've watched a horror movie. I've seen things that could lead me to believe that a bit of our souls, a bit of the energy and electric charges that make us us, sticks around a bit after we've breathed our last. Yet the older I get, and the more bitter and cynical I get, the less I believe in things I can't quantify. I doubt. Daily. And will probably spend the rest of my days in a cycle of belief/disbelief that colors my views on God, the afterlife, and the supernatural in various changing shades of gray. <br />
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Today, I lean toward belief. Mostly because it gives me comfort. Today, what was lost has been found. I feel my mother's presence in this whether it's there or not. Because of this, it's not a sad day. It's a happy day. My grieving heart has been made light. <br />
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So Mom, if you are indeed listening...thank you. Even if the necklace was not your doing...thank you. For everything. I love you, and I still miss you, but now I know: there's always a little piece of you in my heart. Like the necklace, there are times I've thought it was lost. But it's still there, just waiting for me to find it again. <br />
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<br />Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-74226641125719844792014-03-24T15:00:00.000-04:002014-03-24T15:00:00.342-04:0090 DegreesI've been through some painful things in my 40 years:<br />
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Childbirth. A bone marrow biopsy. A chemo drug that made my veins burn. Mantle-field radiation. Being required to read <em>A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court</em> in 10th grade. <br />
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And I feel I can say, with no exaggeration or hyperbole, that physical therapy following rotator cuff surgery is, if not at the top of the list, a very very close second. To <em>A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. </em><br />
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The first two weeks of therapy were splendid. Honestly. After being warned by at least a half dozen people, who had either had the surgery or heard about their best friend's cousin's neighbor going through it, that it makes grown men cry and call out for their mothers, I was pleasantly surprised by how<em> good </em>it felt to have my shoulder stretched and exercised.<br />
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"You are a pain champion!" I told myself. "You are going to rock and roll this therapy and show everyone that you are a tough little warrior princess capable of leaping orthopedic centers in a single bound with one arm!"<br />
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That was before the pulleys. If me prior to the third week of therapy was rainbows and unicorns and Pharrell's "Happy", me this week has been more thunderclouds and porcupines and Samuel Barber's "Adagio For Strings."<br />
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If the pulleys weren't bad enough, my physical therapist followed that up with 15 minutes of manual stretching so intense I was pretty sure I started to go into shock. It didn't feel like she was just working muscle and tendon. It felt like she was stretching my bone marrow. Possibly my soul. I got cold, developed the shakes, and began to mildly hyperventilate.<br />
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"We doing okay?" she asked.<br />
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"Yes," I said with my mouth.<br />
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"WHAT THE F&^%$ DO YOU THINK? I'M BREATHING THROUGH CLENCHED TEETH AND AM ABOUT TO LOSE BLADDER CONTROL DOWN HERE. I AM NOOOOOOOOT DOING OKAAAAAAAAAY!" I said with my brain. And then I punched her in the face.<br />
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Not really, for she is a sweet young lady and she means well and this is all for the greater good and all that horseshit. <br />
<br />
I am usually not at a loss for describing anything, but I cannot fully capture what having a surgically repaired tendon stretched feels like and why it hurts so very badly. You wouldn't thing such a thing could cause so much pain. Childbirth pain makes sense because in labor a woman's cervix and a baby's bony head meet and pass and it all nearly defies the laws of physics. Gunshot wounds make sense. Crushed bones make sense. The near-blinding pain caused the first time you raise your operated arm with your non-operated arm with a pulley? It should not make me weep in my car after. But it did. And probably will again. Ad nauseum. I would have preferred five minutes of labor to five minutes of pulleys. Maybe. Probably. I don't know, maybe I should think on this one. Can I get five minutes of sitting-on-a-white-sand-beach-with-a-margarita instead? <br />
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The goal with the pulleys, so I was told, was 90 degrees of motion. I haven't had geometry in a while, but I know that's a lot of degrees for a freshly repaired tendon to handle. I got to 85 and begged for mercy, was told unenthusiastically that I'm doing great, and had a bunch of stuff hurriedly typed into my permanent medical records.<br />
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I'm guessing my file now says, "Underachiever," "Wimp", and "Low pain threshold." Seeing as how I was always a straight-A rule-follower and game-player, this is hard to accept. But accept it I must. For I feel at this point the only other options available are:<br />
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1. Be okay with my physical therapist making like Chewbacca and ripping my arm out of its socket (I know we never see this on screen, but Han says Wookies do this when they lose, and since Greedo shot first we know for sure that Han Solo is a good guy and never, ever tells a lie.) (Sigh.) <br />
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2. Take enough Percocet before each appointment to lapse into a hazy halcyon hallucination where pain doesn't exist and HOLY CRAP! Ninjas! (This is lost on you if you haven't been keeping up and don't know that narcotics make me fight ninjas in my sleep.) <br />
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So I don't really know what to do except show up, do the best I can, and cry if I want to. You would cry too if it happened to you. <br />
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Because shoulders are bitches. <br />
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<br />Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-13874192950737727002014-03-17T15:30:00.000-04:002014-03-17T15:30:00.198-04:00GirlyIt was a big weekend for the kid. In fact, after this weekend's various beautification rituals, it may not be appropriate to call her "the kid." She may have done gone and raised herself into "young lady" territory.<br />
<br />
Nah. She'll always be the kid to me.<br />
<br />
Friday was haircut day, a ritual for us the first free Friday afternoon between swim seasons. After receiving her standard cut, my normally shy daughter, who can barely order her own food in restaurants and generally doesn't speak to adults unless spoken to (and sometimes not even when spoken to, if she's in a mood) piped up and asked our stylist for curls for a birthday party she was attending later that evening.<br />
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Our hairdresser worked her magic, twisting adolescent hair expertly around a curling iron and applying enough hairspray to give the planet an asthma attack. The end result were glamorous, voluptuous waves cascading down the back of a girl who looked red-carpet ready. When she glimpsed her finished 'do in the mirror, Ainsley's smile said it all: <br />
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I am beautiful. And I'm maybe just now realizing that. <br />
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There was no reflective surface left unloved on the drive home, and as we saw her off for a sleepover with her fellow swim girls, she radiated a confidence and grown-up aura that made her mother's eyes get a little misty.<br />
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Cinderella had exchanged her soot for glass slippers. It won't be long before the princes (and the frogs) come knocking. <br />
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As these things generally do, the temporary curls longed for a more permanent companion. After a traumatic ear-piercing attempt when Ainsley was four, a mistake that promptly led her to swear off earrings for seven years, the kid decided to take me up on an offer I made last year:<br />
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<em>Whenever you decide you want your ears pierced, we'll do it. Just say the word and I'll take you before you have a chance to chicken out. </em><br />
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Saturday afternoon, she said the word.<br />
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This time, there were no tears. Just joy at another rite of passage. And just like with the curls, the transformation was bigger than the act--my pre-teen looked several years older just with the addition of a tiny bit of bling. <br />
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I shudder to think of what the first visit to the Clinique counter will do.<br />
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When she spends long hours cuddling with Lumpy, her favorite stuffed animal, or making endless arrays of rubber band bracelets with her Rainbow Loom, I can forget that she's on the cusp of womanhood. One foot, wearing a pair of Day-Glo flip-flops, is firmly in the world of children. The other, wearing tasteful but fashionable Sperry loafers, is in the world of women. She still plays the part of "girl" really well. But more and more frequently, the young woman she's going to be peeps out from behind the rainbows, peace signs, and glitter. It's a beautiful and terrifying transformation to watch; once she steps over that threshold, a part of her is lost to her father and me forever. She'll always be our daughter, but there's only a fleeting moment of her life when she's our little girl. It's a sweetness that only lasts long enough to break your heart. <br />
<br />
Oh, dear. These next few years are going to be tough. <br />
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Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-85733430367405275222014-03-10T16:00:00.000-04:002014-03-10T16:00:02.832-04:00Ninjas In the Bedroom: Why Percocet Is, Actually, a Bad ThingI'm back.<br />
<br />
In case you were wondering, shoulder surgery is made of suck. It's painful. It's inconvenient, due to the ever-present sling. And it's very, very humbling.<br />
<br />
Once you've been dressed and undressed by your spouse in a decidedly un-sexy-times way while your upper body is still doused in iodine and covered with a thick white bandage that strongly resembles a 1960s maxi pad, it's hard to pretend to be the strong one in the relationship. <br />
<br />
The procedure itself was not the difficult part. And yet I still had every intention in the minutes leading up to the surgery of backing out. It was a little worry stone I kept smoothing in the corner of my pre-sedated mind--<em>You still can run away from this.</em> But then the blue mask came over my face, and I found myself next in a recovery room with my left arm numb and heavy. <br />
<br />
My first words, when I woke and found my voice?<br />
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"Holy shit. I can't believe I let that happen."<br />
<br />
The nurse was not as amused as you might be and showed concern for my mental status, checking my vitals thoroughly before helping me into my clothes and sling. <br />
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According to the surgeon in post-op, I really needed this surgery. Once the fancy little arthroscopic cameras got in there, they found that a second tendon was torn all to hell. I was a bigger mess on the inside than I appeared on the outside.<br />
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Which is pretty true of me in general, actually. <br />
<br />
The nerve block, which made my left arm feel intriguingly like it had been transplanted from a larger, clumsier alien being, made the first 12 hours bearable. And then, as they are wont to do, the nerve block wore off. Spectacularly. Leaving me immobile on my couch for most of the day after surgery, understanding why people in pain pray for death. <br />
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And I didn't have too many options in fighting the pain. For I learned that Percocet makes me bat-shit crazy. <br />
<br />
I'm already a little crazy in that I have some paranoid tendencies and want to control everything and have an overactive imagination that already sometimes hears the not-there footsteps of intruders in our home at 3am. Narcotics take all these fun qualities and magnify and concentrate them into one sharp laser beam of crazy. Condensed crazy that my brain plays with destructively like a child who has just discovered how to burn ants with a magnifying glass and the sun.<br />
<br />
In the haze of post-nerve-block pain, I took a heavy dose of my prescribed painkillers. Minutes later, I closed my eyes. But instead of dreaming of unicorns and rainbows, I launched into a half-dreaming hallucination that men in dark clothing were descending from wires in the ceiling to do me harm. I came up out of the haze swinging to fight them off. Unfortunately my limb of choice was the left one. The sling kept me from doing too much damage, at least I hope. But the resulting pain was blinding and instructive. Ninjas, it turns out, are tough to beat.<br />
<br />
I vowed to let ice and rest do the bulk of my painkilling for the duration of my recovery and have, mostly, kept this vow. Sometimes you just have to choose "sane" over "comfortable." Though occasionally "comfortable" is too appealing to pass up, in which case you warn your significant other that you have taken your crazy pill and to keep an eye out for unusual muttering and behavior. And traveling bands of ninjas. Because you just never know. <br />
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I'm working again now, and driving, and more or less self-sufficient. Except that I can't cook or clean. So friends and co-workers have come through with food and I have, for the first time in my life, hired someone to clean my house every other week. I am not proud of this. I am a woman raised in a lower-middle-class family and I feel I have suddenly and undeservedly gone above my raising in a way my mother and grandmothers would not approve. <br />
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But that little bit of crazy we talked about earlier includes some OCD, and I need a clean house, so...there you go. I feel bougie beyond words. <br />
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Each day will allegedly get easier. Most days I feel improvement; occasionally, I do too much and a day feels like a setback. It can be depressing. But I've gotten through worse. <br />
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Much worse.<br />
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Spring will come and with it warm sunshine, blooming flowers, and freedom from my sling. I can hardly wait. <br />
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In the meantime, I'll just keep surviving. And fighting off the imaginary ninjas as best I can. <br />
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Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-12790333044792760142014-02-26T15:30:00.000-05:002014-02-26T15:30:01.791-05:00Well, that was unexpected.Never, ever say to yourself, "This couldn't get much worse." Because it can. And it will. And Fate will dump a bag of flaming poo on your doorstep and laugh at your tears. <br />
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Last week I found myself the sickest I've ever been in my adult life. With the exception of the whole cancer thing, of course. I had a confirmed case of influenza despite the fact that I get a flu shot every year, wash my hands so often they crack and bleed, exercise, eat right, and take those probiotic tablets that are so in fashion these days. The only thing I can think of that led to me being so sick is that I turned 40 just days before and maybe hit my "Sell by" date. Like that questionable container of sour cream in the back of your fridge, I am in a rapid state of ruin. <br />
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The biggest consequence of this illness, besides putting me in touch with my own mortality, is that it has pushed shoulder surgery back a week. I would feel like it's a stay of execution, a call from the governor, except that it simply postponed the inevitable. I'm right back on the Green Mile in just a few days. <br />
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I also learned that I am not, actually, Wonder Woman. Like so many working mothers of a certain age, I balance a lot: job pressure, running a kid hither and yon, cooking, cleaning, handling home repair crises, staying in shape, binge-watching trendy water-cooler shows like <em>House of Cards</em>, etc. For weeks, I've battled through ever-present exhaustion to knock out my daily to-do list, sleep and mental health be damned. <br />
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So not having enough energy to even get out of bed, let alone vacuum something (though believe me, I tried) forced me to take a step back from my busy life and un-busy it. To accept that sometimes, I need help and rest. To let the husband and the kid take care of me every now and then. To realize that while I am not old and am in relatively good health, I do have physical limitations. I am human, and therefore I occasionally need to stop and breathe.<br />
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It's good that I learned this now seeing as how I get to turn around and have another test of my endurance in the form of shoulder surgery in just a couple of days. I've accepted offers of meals from some of my friends. I am hiring someone to help me with the heavier housework every other week for the months after surgery that my left arm will be immobile. I am willing, I think, to let some things slide for a while. I won't beat myself up for not working out (more than physical therapy exercises and walks), for accumulating a little dust, for grabbing dinner at Chipotle instead of cooking something myself. If I'm tired and sore, I'm going to sleep. If I can't fold the laundry, I'm going to pass the buck to the other people who live in my house. <br />
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At least, this is what I think now in the comfort of having two good arms. This is all subject to change based on boredom, restlessness, and self-loathing. <br />
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If you pray, please pray for a straight-forward procedure with no complications and a quick rehab and recovery. If you are more of a positive-vibes person, please send those my way. If you honestly don't think either of these things work, feel free to send bourbon. Any and all of the above would be appreciated (both by me and by the other adult in my house who will, no doubt, have his hands full, his patience tested, and his sleep interrupted by a sore, grouchy, be-slinged wife.) <br />
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As soon as I can write again, I'll update. With my good cheer and ever-present optimism (sarcasm alert!) enhanced by what we can only hope are really, really good pain meds. <br />
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<br />Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-30433772235730704732014-02-12T06:00:00.000-05:002014-02-12T06:00:11.738-05:00Well, it just all goes downhill from here, doesn't it?I turn 40 today. <br />
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Yes, yes, happy birthday to me and all that. I'll go home tonight and have some cake and open some gifts and be really and truly grateful I made it to this point in my life.<br />
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And after putting on a brave face, I'll quietly inspect my wrinkles, grays, and various sags, and weep for the sad fact that I am, indeed, getting old. <br />
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I wouldn't feel that way if I didn't have concrete proof that I'm falling apart. A week and one day after I turn 40, I'll have surgery to repair the rotator cuff I inexplicably tore in the fall down my carpeted stairs that I really felt at the time was not a big deal. I didn't want this. But it happened, and two different medical professionals have told me I have to go through with this if I'd like to be able to use my left arm at all in the future, so the first months of my 40s will be spent in a sling, weak, dependent on others, in pain, and making good friends with physical therapists. It's so exactly the opposite of how someone wants to begin that decade that I feel the need to applaud Fate for her creativity and sense of dramatic irony.<br />
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After a year or so of good health, a year where I really felt I had taken charge of my physical fitness and nutritional needs and made strides in the war against middle age, I can't wrap my head around losing this significant battle. I've done everything right. But I was still no match for the powerful combination of high heels and gravity.<br />
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Damn you, heels. Damn you all to hell. <br />
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As I've said several times already in 2014, it could have been worse. Yes, it could almost always be worse. <br />
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That will be so comforting when I wake up from surgery next week unable to move the left side of my upper body and my husband has to help dress me, feed me, and wash my hair. So comforting that if anyone dares tell me that, I will hit them. Hard. With my good arm. <br />
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I can't help but feel this is just a sign of things to come. That despite my best efforts to look at age as a state of being and not a number, I actually am getting too old to do certain things. I've taken great pride in my relative physical strength the last few years; I can lift furniture, carry heavy boxes, move the solid wooden tables in my library even if the custodians stacked them end over end, relocate bags of top soil from the garage to the chipmunk holes all over our yard, and basically do anything my suburban mom life needs me to do. <br />
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Pride goeth before a fall, however. Oh, how it goeth. <br />
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I could, technically, get full strength back inside of a year and go back to carrying overloaded laundry baskets up and and down 2 flights of stairs and moving the dresser in our bedroom out to search and destroy stinkbugs. But these things could also have to be put in the "Ask For Assistance Because You're An Old Lady Now" column. Believe it or not, that makes me sad. I want to stay independent and strong and be that person who works her ass off to help others, not be the one being helped. <br />
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A part of me also fears that the day I have to ask for help moving the ottoman is the day I start down a slippery slope that ends in house dresses, orthopedic shoes, early-bird dinner specials, and meeting the girls for water Zumba followed by warm tea and nap time. It's the beginning of the end.<br />
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My 30s were eventful. I went through some shit, but everything I went through made me physically and emotionally stronger. I built calluses and muscle and coping mechanisms and discovered craft beer. My 30-something years made me tough.<br />
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And I worry that my 40-something years will make me soft. <br />
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So, in the coming weeks, if I do not write, it's because I have one arm in a sling and have taken a lot of pain meds and am in general letting myself go in the name of healing. <br />
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Send good thoughts and positive vibes and prayers if you're into that sort of thing. This old gal could use all the help she could get.<br />
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See you on the other side of 40. <br />
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Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-102774372432145572014-02-08T07:00:00.000-05:002014-02-08T07:00:03.142-05:00Glass HousesOne thing I shouldn't be surprised by, but am, is how very ugly people can be behind a veil of Internet anonymity. <br />
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Click on the comments section of any major news story published online and you see it--hateful words spewed for strangers to read. Words that go beyond merely being one person's informed opinion. Words meant to inflame. <br />
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I firmly believe that most of the commenters would not say these same words out loud to another human being whom they could actually see and hear. Even complete assholes don't, generally speaking, walk up to a stranger on the street and tell them they're going to hell, don't deserve to live, are the scum of the earth, etc., etc., etc. Besides taking massive balls, throwing hate in a stranger's (or politician's, or celebrity's) face could very well end with the speaker getting his or her rear end handed back in a rather bruised and battered condition.<br />
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But in the comments section? Choose a clever name and don't give away your location, and no one will ever know the dark thoughts that lurk in your heart and occasionally exit your fingertips via keyboard. <br />
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And when something terrible happens to a public figure, the worst of the worst comes out. <br />
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As anyone with a television, social media account, or eyes and ears knows, a talented actor died last week at too young an age from an apparent heroin overdose. The first reactions I read were of sadness--a talented man, a friend, a partner, and a father was gone. That inspires, in those of us who are human, a largely sympathetic response. We may not have known this person in real life, but most of us paid money at some point to watch him on the silver screen. As many times as <em>Twister</em> has been on cable, I'd guess we've all invited him into our homes through our TV screens. For the most part, early reaction was at least a "Well, that sucks." <br />
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Within an hour, some reactions became, "Guy was a loser who had it coming." "Another addict dies. Shocking." "Good riddance." And these were the gentler negative responses. <br />
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Perhaps I'm just going soft now that I'm older. But an early death of a productive member of society seems deserving of my sympathy rather than my scorn or hateful words or, worst of all, a smugness that things are going so well in my world that I can judge others for their addiction. <br />
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Here was a person who did not make the news daily with DUIs, drug possession, and public intoxication. This was a guy who got nominated for acting awards for nearly every role he played because not only was he talented, but he took his job seriously and behaved professionally on a movie set. <br />
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I'm sure in time tabloid media and entertainment magazines will publish the full story and we'll find out that (spoiler alert) he was kind of a crappy dad and partner while he was high. Addicts generally are. But that doesn't mean those he left behind didn't love him, won't miss him, and do not have good memories from the times he wasn't under an influence. I'm going to go out on a limb and say the deceased was, more often that not, a rational human being who did not want to be found dead next to drug paraphernalia. <br />
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Emphasis on that whole "human being" part.<br />
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If you have read this blog for any amount of time you know that I am the daughter of a man who battled addiction for the majority of his life. Most of us who come from addictive families see this not as a character flaw, but as a disease. A gene that, thank God, most people do not have. <br />
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But that's a hard talking point for people who have never seen addiction up close and argue that it comes down to self-control and choices. <br />
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The first drink is absolutely a choice. For some, the many drinks that come after that are a need. A craving I can only understand because I watched it tear my family apart. And one that I've grown to have sympathy for because I saw my dad actively fight it and try over and over to stay sober. And fail every damn time because the alcohol was stronger than he was.<br />
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Does that make him weak? Probably. Does it make me angry? Yes. Does it make him a bad person who would have deserved an early death by overdose, a loser whose death shouldn't make anyone pause? No. I do not think so. <br />
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Addicts die as a result of their addiction. That is a fact.<br />
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And if they didn't make the tabloids on a daily basis with their bad behavior, if they were nominated for awards for their profession, if their colleagues spoke respectfully of them even before their untimely death, if they leave behind a family to mourn them...are they still lesser human beings, just another addict?<br />
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I personally have a hard time seeing it this way. Had my father died from an alcohol overdose (as he very nearly did once) instead of from cancer I still would have been in grief and I still would have needed support. His death would still have felt to me and to those who loved him like an injustice. <br />
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"Good riddance" would have dismissed the good in his life along with the bad. It would have dismissed me. <br />
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I know it makes no difference to anyone who posts a comment. It makes no difference to the people I follow on social media, some of whom are my friends whose opinions I respect something like 99.9% of the time. <br />
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But it makes a difference to me. And therefore, behind my own shroud of relative anonymity, it needs to be said. <br />
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Before you throw that stone, think of whose glass it might break. <br />
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<br />Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-68687104647439125952014-01-30T12:18:00.000-05:002014-01-30T12:18:00.420-05:00Out of the WoodsI walk up the stairs to the familiar offices on the second floor. I visit this building twice a year on good years, more often in those years when I've felt a lump or a bump or had a scan come back slightly awry. It's not the same building I started this journey in; that was a tiny office down the road whose clientele quickly outgrew the space. Cancer, it seems, is big business these days. <br />
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No matter how many years have passed, I still get nervous before each checkup. It doesn't make sense, when seated in a room full of women wearing head scarves or wigs and men so weak they need wheelchairs or walkers, that I would be the lucky one. The survivor. The one who beats it. It comes with a guilt to sit among these faces and hear my name called and know that my emotions when I leave this place are going to be so very different from these others in my tribe. I have a lot in common with the other men and women in this waiting room. But the one difference, the big difference, is a hard pill to swallow.<br />
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I've been cancer-free for ten years and will survive. Too many do not. <br />
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The faces at the front desk and at the nurses' station where I get my blood drawn and my blood pressure checked and my weight measured have all changed. I don't know if the faces back in the chemo suite have changed; I haven't been back there since my initiation all those years ago. Is Fran, the nurse with the big laugh, the one who cried with me when my veins had hardened and made the IV preparation a Herculean task, still there? I want to know, and yet I don't. This is a hard job, and no one seems to do it for very long. I'd like to think Fran is still charming both those with hope and those without. But I'd also like to think she took a well-deserved permanent vacation to a tropical beach home with plentiful rum. Chemo nurses have earned such luxury. <br />
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The one face that hasn't changed is my doctor. He doesn't so much enter a room as charge through it. He is aggressive in every sense of the word; he speaks loudly, he doesn't tolerate bullshit, and he doesn't play nice with his prescribed treatment plan. He wants to kill your cancer. That simple. He's not there to comfort and coddle. It was off-putting at first, because I was young and my cancer diagnosis was tragic and I just didn't get how he couldn't see how very sad this all was. But he grew on me. <br />
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Much like, well... a cancer. <br />
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I eventually learned that he has a sense of humor. An exceedingly dry one. After all, this was the person I ran into at the frozen margarita booth at a church festival several summers ago. <br />
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"I hear those things give you cancer," said a voice behind me.<br />
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Not everyone gets to have a cocktail with their oncologist. But I highly recommend it. <br />
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As always in our appointments, the "How have you been?" questions are followed by a long silence. He is a thinker and a studier who pores over his notes from last year and my tests from this year for a full five minutes before speaking. I've learned not to interrupt. I won't know what his conclusions are until the end of the physical exam, which has become like a choreographed dance: I raise my shoulders so he can check the nodes above my collarbone, I swallow hard as he checks my thyroid, I raise my elbows slightly and relax my shoulder muscles as he checks under each arm. I inhale and exhale. I lost my modesty many years ago when it comes to medical personnel, so I barely bat an eye as my entire body is scrutinized looking for unusual growths. I remind myself to breathe those times that he spends a little longer in one area of nodes, or checks the same area twice. I tell myself that he's just being thorough and try not to sweat and feel slightly ill.<br />
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Sometimes it works better than others. <br />
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Today, after the chit-chat and the exam, he goes back to my chart. This is unusual. He hasn't spoken in several minutes, and I prepare myself for news. Good or bad, I'm not certain. But I feel as if something has changed. <br />
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"Would it break your heart if I said I think this is the last time I need to see you?"<br />
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Oh. <em>Oh</em>. It has been ten years, and I know this means I'm cured. But I'm not ready to let go yet. I will always, always be afraid. There was a monster under my bed once, and even though we've slayed it, it's still there. I've seen enough horror movies to know that sometimes the monsters come back. And they bring friends. <br />
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I have no idea what to say. I've become co-dependent. I need to hear every year that I'm okay. I need to watch the instant CBC machine analyze my blood and get the results placed in my hands. I need that appointment card on my fridge, giving me a date I can hang something concrete on. <em>My immune system has seemed a little weak this year, but I see the doctor in January, so I can ask about it then. I've felt a little pain in my upper right side that I'm worried might be my liver; the doctor can check it for me in a few weeks. I sometimes think I feel a lymph node in my neck; good thing I see the doctor this summer. </em>These appointments are my touchstones. It's like tagging home plate. I can't let go.<br />
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But it's time. And I know I must.<br />
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"It might break my heart. But I think I'll live."<br />
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He smiles. I smile. I get a quick reassurance that the door is always open if something comes up, and that I will still be seeing the radiation oncologist once a year to deal with the side effects and risks from that part of my treatment. But the radiation oncologist has only known me from the point my cancer was already in remission and I just needed some rogue cells mopped up. That's not the person who saved my life and made me whole. This guy is. But I know it's time to say goodbye.<br />
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"Yes," he says. "I think you'll live, too."<br />
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I gather my things and walk out of the room. The doctor turns immediately into another exam room; his work is far from over today. The receptionist smiles when she sees that I do not need to make a follow-up appointment. I walk down the stairs and into the cold winter sunlight.<br />
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I'll live. <br />
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Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-46833519202357683042014-01-17T15:00:00.000-05:002014-01-17T15:00:03.598-05:00You never really understand a person until you fall down a few steps in her shoes.Another paper to file away in the "Why can't I just be like other women?" folder. <br />
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This one says, "Suspected proximal bicep tear (partial)" and is my receipt for a little trip I took this week to an orthopedist after another little trip I took down five of our living room stairs. <br />
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After last week's fun-filled basement water extraction adventures, I felt the need to make a grand return to form at work on Monday and don a pair of my mother's high heels. Any time I want to feel professional and semi-attractive, I turn to one of two pairs of her shoes that actually fit me. And wonder, after just an hour of wear, how in the hell that woman trounced around in elevated shoes every single day of her adult life. <br />
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For, when it comes to stylish but painful footwear, I am not my mother's daughter. I have neither the ankles nor the will for it. <br />
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In this case, I really should have just stuck with my cowboy boots. <br />
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Midway down the steps leading from our bedrooms, a heel caught in the hem of my dress pants. I knew I was going down. My brain had just enough time to form one thought-- "Oh, SH*****T!"--before my body succumbed to the stubborn forces of gravity. I do have a fighter's instinct, though, and I vaguely remember bracing myself and hanging on to walls and banisters and carpet for dear life in an attempt to, much like Sandra Bullock's character in a recent motion picture, pull off a win against earth's sucking. <br />
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I admitted defeat when I found myself curled on my back in our entryway, nearly fetal, hoping my padded ass broke most of my fall. <br />
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It initially seemed that it did. Except for a left arm that felt weak, as though I had just performed a bicep curl with a refrigerator, I felt none the worse for wear. Jason helped me up off the floor, as he so often does, and I completed a day of work. IN HEELS. Though I think it goes without saying that this will be the end of that. <br />
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24 hours after the fall, the bruises and the pain began to appear. By lunch on Tuesday, my left shoulder and bicep muscle spasmed and burned. A call to my doctor's office for advice led to a referral to a local injury clinic where I was told that I may, indeed, have a bit of a problem and that in some point in my tumbling down the stairs, I must have fallen onto an outstretched left arm.<br />
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I don't remember that happening, but the pain and weakness I felt during the shoulder exam tells a different story with not as happy an ending. <br />
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Fortunately (or un-, depending on your personal view on Vicodin) I do not have enough pain to need the bad (good?) drugs. I don't even need a sling. Unless the MRI I'm supposed to have but am thinking of cancelling BECAUSE DEAR LORD THEY HAVE TO INJECT DIE INTO MY SHOULDER JOINT shows a more serious injury. But I doubt it will, because it truly feels like the tear is starting to heal. In fact, the only things that still aggravate the pain and make my left hand go all tingly are typing, texting, and driving.<br />
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All three of which I'm doing right now because I'm Catholic and like to suffer. Kidding! I'm not really Catholic anymore. (Kidding again. But barely. And I am still typing.) <br />
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Everything will heal eventually except for my pride, which may be permanently damaged at least as it pertains to my ability to wear nice shoes. I couldn't even navigate stairs in them; my mother, at my age, worked 8-hour days in a beauty salon wearing them. The woman will never cease to amaze me, even now that she's gone. <br />
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Now, if you'll excuse me, I have an appointment with some Alleve. And perhaps an MRI machine. <br />
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Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-57413297508832349122014-01-13T21:22:00.000-05:002014-01-13T21:23:35.197-05:00Standing on the edge, contemplating the viewI almost wrote a post last Tuesday night about The Ledge.<br />
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The Ledge isn't a physical place. But I go there from time to time, just the same. It's the brink I reach in my mind sometimes, when life circumstances or chemical inbalance or the sad slant of the winter sun colors everything in my world in blue. <br />
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After the coldest day in 20 years here in Kentucky, and after a delayed start back to school and to a normal routine following our holiday break, and after a Christmas that for some reason I just couldn't get behind and enjoy, I found myself once again on The Ledge. I stood there, looking down into the chasm, knowing that I was only one step away from the darkness, but also knowing that stepping into it was a choice I was not making. I would pull myself out. Winter would become spring, routine would save me, and I would soon be able to step far, far away.<br />
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But then on Wednesday a frozen pipe burst in my home while I was at work, and my finished basement flooded, and mother nature and bad insulation came up behind me and gave me a forceful push. And suddenly The Ledge didn't seem like such a light-hearted little view on depression. <br />
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Sh*t got real.<br />
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If you're keeping score at home, this was the second basement flood in six months. But the first one, in the bright glow of hindsight, was not bad. We called an emergency restoration crew, they worked to dry us out, and 72 hours later we were able to move furniture back into place. <br />
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72 hours from this flood, and we are nowhere close to moving furniture back into place. I don't know how many more hours we're looking at, but my guess is...many. A lot. <br />
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I'm forcing myself to look away from the darkness and into the bright side, which contains these things:<br />
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--We didn't lose anything that can't be replaced, like pictures or family heirlooms or my lightsaber.<br />
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--The damage is covered by our homeowner's policy.<br />
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--We got further proof that our neighbors are good people who come through in times of crisis and offer tequila afterward. <br />
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--I learned that my kid is rather unflappable, like her father, and therefore a calming presence in the face of her mother's general tendency to flip the freak out. <br />
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I'm able to look at the bright side for about five minutes at a time, or until I have to enter my basement laundry room to start or finish a load of laundry, and then the hyperventilation at the mess left behind and the noise of industrial fans and dehumidifiers becomes cloying again and I have to breathe into a paper bag that once held a bottle of (you guessed it) tequila. What I think I'm saying here is that it all comes back to Patron in the end. <br />
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The damage has felt like a loss. Like one more thing in the past couple of years I've been forced to grieve. I've been through all those stages before and recognized the white-hot anger I felt when I learned that the previous owners finished the basement so beautifully but didn't insulate one outside corner. I recognized the denial I felt when my eyes told me there was water pouring into the basement but my hands wouldn't believe it until I forced their contact with the water-logged carpet. I recognized the bargaining, the sadness. <br />
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And when I finally got to acceptance, roughly 48 hours after the initial incident, I recognized that, too, the way one recognizes an old friend. <br />
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Things will eventually be fine, as things so often are. For that's all the basement is: a thing. It could have been so much worse. <br />
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As for The Ledge...well, I'm still standing there. I started to fall in, but there were many hands offered, and strong people to lift me out. <br />
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It's up to me now to will my feet in place and begin to back away. The first step is always the hardest. <br />
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<br />Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-49331275580871482052013-12-18T17:30:00.000-05:002014-01-13T21:24:30.684-05:00Christmas LetterDear family, family I never see, family I see more than I'd like, friends, acquaintances, friends who used to be acquaintances, and acquaintances who used to be friends: <br />
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I hope this letter finds you well and that you and yours thrived in the year 2013. Unless you're one of those people who always seem to fall backwards into good luck and prosperity even when you've done nothing to earn it, in which case I hope you at least had a terrible stomach bug or found a hair in your filet mignon or got a speeding ticket on the way to the new Mercedes Benz dealership in Fort Mitchell (where, and I am not making this up, you can practice your putting on an indoor miniature golf green while your luxury vehicle gets tuned up and crusted in diamonds.) <br />
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2013 was a good year for our family. Better than 2012 in that no one in the immediate family died. But we still went to a lot of funerals. <em>Hey, Death. Can you do us a solid? Maybe dial it down a notch in 2014? Thanks, bro.</em><br />
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When we weren't at funerals we were travelling to swim meets, and while the latter is more enjoyable than the former, it's only by a small margin. We learned a lot this year as our young daughter became more competitive in this sport. For instance:<br />
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1. Swim parents are big drinkers.<br />
2. Swimming is a wonderful sport that teaches children the value of hard work and perseverance, keeps its athletes in peak physical condition all year long, and can remain, more than many other sports, a life-long passion and its own way of life.<br />
3. Swimming has the ability to suck the energy from a parent's soul and the money from a parent's wallet once every month when the whole family joins in the caravan of swim gypsies spending entire weekends in hotel rooms and crowded bleachers struggling for air and just a few precious moments of unscheduled time.<br />
4. 1 and 3 are related. <br />
<br />
But our kid did well, and while not the fastest girl on the team, she was the hardest worker and one of the most-improved. She has a significant collection of 4th- and 5th-place ribbons from last year, and I promise you I am more proud of those than the superstars' parents are of their swimmers' gold and silver medals. <br />
<br />
Our daughter also gave a piano recital this year, played a few hymns in church, and, more importantly, learned to play an indie-rock song called "Ghosts" by the band <em>The Head and the Heart</em>, who we all also saw in concert. This is an exciting development, because we desperately want our child to have better musical taste than we did as kids so we're not forced to listen to her practice Tiffany's 1988 classic "Could've Been" 20 times a day the way our parents had to. Sorry, Mom. <br />
<br />
The hubby and I are at our same jobs, which, God willing, we will keep long enough to get big, gaudy service awards from when we retire to New Mexico, which we fell in love with this year as we got caught up on <em>Breaking Bad</em>. Subtract the meth, the intense showdowns, the amazing acting, and the heartbreaking study of the addictive nature of power and greed, and that show was really just a long commercial for the desolate beauty of the desert southwest. I'm buying that blue stuff Walter White is selling, if all he's selling is the clear skies of Albuquerque. <br />
<br />
<br />
We did not take a vacation this year, a situation we will surely rectify in 2014. In fact, we have bright hopes for the upcoming year. We'd like to get away for a week to somewhere with warm sun and blue waters. We'd like to do a little more home renovating. And we'd like to see a bit more of our friends, who are like family to us. And just like with our extended families, we have a bad habit of not taking time out of our busy schedules to simply enjoy their company. <br />
<br />
If I make a New Year's Resolution, it would be this: to stop more often and be with the people whose company I enjoy the most, my friends. Because they're awesome people. And they usually have good beer around. And we are, after all, swim parents, and that sort of thing matters to us.<br />
<br />
Just kidding! We'd love you even if you didn't drink. But we would worry about you, because seriously, not even the occasional glass of wine with dinner? How do you make it through the holidays?<br />
<br />
Join us at a swim meet 2 1/2 hours away from home after driving through a snow storm, and we may convert you. <br />
<br />
<br />
So, as the old song says, as we inch closer to Christmas, and the end of this year, and the beginning of a new one, and to our inevitable doom (sorry, I turn 40 this year):<br />
<br />
May your days be merry and bright. <br />
<br />
(Just not so bright that you find yourself on more than one occasion on the putting green of a Mercedes dealership, because that's just excessive.) <br />
<br />
Sincerely,<br />
The Cranky Librarian<br />
December, 2013<br />
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<br />Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-61643193563915963402013-12-12T17:00:00.000-05:002013-12-12T17:00:03.997-05:00A Very Boy George ChristmasThe December of my fifth grade year was going to be full of awesome.<br />
<br />
After a year spent in the wilds of Knox County, we were finally back home in northern Kentucky where I could get good pizza and cheese coneys any old time I wanted to. I was a hot-shot fifth-grader ruling the roost with my best friends in our last year of elementary school, and after much cajoling, I finally had 80s hair; my mother had given up the fight and my hair was cut from the "Dorothy Hamill" I'd had since I was 3 into a short feathery bob that tried to be Courtney Cox in the "Dancing In the Dark" video and some days actually reached that mark. <br />
<br />
Because the previous Christmas had been so lonely, and we'd had so little money, my mother and sister were making up for it by organizing a steady stream of big-ticket family activities every weekend between Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. Our little family, very Hobbit-like in general and not inclined to adventures when there were naps to be taken, actually had plans. Plans that went beyond going to Florence Mall or throwing pennies into the indoor fountains at the deserted shopping center beside McAlpins. It was an exciting time to be one of us.<br />
<br />
And yet, as it so often wasn't, luck was not on our side.<br />
<br />
The first blow to our schedule was completely Dolly Parton's fault. <br />
<br />
My mother had always loved Ms. Parton and related to both her humble Appalachian upbringing and her obsession with big hair. So when we heard the news that Dolly was going on tour with "Islands In the Stream" partner Kenny Rogers, well...how were we supposed to say no to that? One of their winter stops was in Rupp Arena, a shrine in the minds of most Kentuckians and a place Mom and I had never been to before. Tickets were purchased and the countdown begun.<br />
<br />
Honestly, I did not care about Kenny and Dolly. I was in it for Boy George.<br />
<br />
In a gesture that would continue for years after, and one that I continue with Ainsley to this day, I received an early gift of one stylish and showy outfit that would be my uniform for all dress-up events that holiday season. Mom's taste was not as trendy as I would have liked for these outfits, but in 1984, she totally nailed it. <br />
<br />
She bought me an off-the-shoulder oversized silky white tee with a multi-colored, be-glittered likeness of the one and only Boy George. (It was only later that she realized the face on the shirt was male and the lead singer of the group that sang "Karma Chameleon"; she thought it was a woman's face in a really kick-ass art-deco style.) His eye shadow was represented on the shirt in purple glitter, and the eyebrows, blush, and lips were airbrushed in charcoal and pastel pinks.<br />
<br />
Be still, my beating heart. <br />
<br />
Pair that baby with new zipper-leg ankle-length jeans and the off-brand pale gray penny loafers Mom found, and I was ready to rock the Arena. I even had a mesh head scarf that could be tied in a bow the size of Texas to hold back my newly feathered hair. <br />
<br />
Look out, Dolly. This kid was totally going to steal your spotlight. <br />
<br />
And then Dolly got sick. She fell ill with pneumonia and cancelled several tour stops. Rupp Arena was not rescheduled. There was nothing I could do but look longingly at Boy George hanging forlorn in my closet. And listen to my brother-in-law ask, over and over again, if Dolly Parton with a chest cold was worse than a giraffe with a sore throat. <br />
<br />
But then my mom gave me permission to wear George to our fifth-grade Christmas program. I had a small poem to read (with two other girls, but still) and a place on the first row of the risers for our group choral numbers. I couldn't wait to be seen.<br />
<br />
"Who's that charming young lady with the great hair and the totally rad Boy George shirt?"<br />
<br />
"I don't know, but baby, she's gonna be a star!"<br />
<br />
Alas, on the day of in-school dress rehearsals, the intense sore throat and body aches I'd woken up with that morning, but hadn't told my mom about (the show must go on and all that), caused me to make a sudden exit during "Silent Night" to rid my stomach of my breakfast and huddle shivering in the bathroom until the school secretary could check on me. I had my first and only case of strep throat. I had to drop out of that evening's sole performance.<br />
<br />
Boy George and I were devastated. <br />
<br />
Our family had one more chance at fun, and Boy George just one more chance to come out of the closet. (My closet, I mean.) On the evening of my last day of school before Christmas break, we had tickets to see our beloved Kentucky Wildcats play. I was going to get to see Rupp Arena, after all. Though everyone else was going to wear blue and white, I was by-God going to wear my new shirt, which still had the tags on it. It was all I could think about all day, even though we were going to be racing scooters in gym class, which was every 5th-grader's favorite thing to do. That and pulling bra straps.<br />
<br />
When it was my turn to race, I was so focused on the evening ahead that I was in my own world. I was a distracted driver who couldn't be bothered to focus further than the blue plastic handles on the sides of the scooter. <br />
<br />
I went out of my lane and into another student and landed on top of a scooter handle. With my face.<br />
<br />
My eye bruised and puffed immediately and blood trickled from a cut above my lip. Our gym teacher led me aside to clean me up and ice my eye. I was inconsolable.<br />
<br />
"They won't take me now!"<br />
<br />
"Who won't take you where?" (I'm sure she thought I had a concussion. And given that I saw stars and talked nonsense for 5 minutes, I may have.)<br />
<br />
"My family! They won't take me to see UK and eat at Joe Bologna's and I won't get to wear Boy George because my eye is swollen and I have a busted lip and they won't want me out in public!"<br />
<br />
The gym teacher sighed as only an annoyed teacher trying to be patient can. <br />
<br />
"Your eye will be fine. Your lip will be fine. I don't see any reason why you can't go to the game. Now go sit down before you hurt yourself." <br />
<br />
We did go to the game. But I was defeated. I decided I should not wear a shirt featuring a face with purple eye shadow and voluptuous pink lips when I also was sporting an accidental purple eye and a very pink lip. For once, I wanted to fade into the crowd. I wore a UK sweatshirt and allowed my feathery hair to partially conceal the damage to my face. It was fun. But it's hard to see a game through a painful and partially shut eye. <br />
<br />
I did finally get to wear Boy George when a boy in my class (named George, and I swear I'm not making that up) asked me to go see a movie with him over Christmas break. It was magical in a way that Dolly & Kenny, my school Christmas program, and even the UK game could not have been. For it turns out that my "date" was a huge Culture Club fan. Unlike my mother, he knew exactly whose face was on my shirt. And gave me the first compliment I ever got from a boy:<br />
<br />
"I like your shirt."<br />
<br />
It was an innocent date, of course, chaperoned by his parents and discussed over the phone with mine. It was spontaneous, born of two friends with nothing to do on a snowy Sunday afternoon after our Christmas presents had been thoroughly explored and were beginning to get boring. It wasn't a dramatic scheduled thing like a concert, or a basketball game, or a Christmas program. I had built the expectations for these things up so much in my head that when they didn't go as planned, I was disappointed and disillusioned. I had no expectations for my trip to the movies, except that the movie keep me awake and provide more entertainment than watching my father watch football. It did not disappoint. <br />
<br />
At Christmas, we tend to over-schedule, over-plan, over-think. We raise our expectations for magic so high that we are bound to go out of our lane and fall face-first into disappointment. <br />
<br />
It's not the big things at the holidays that create the magic. It's the little spontaneous moments that make the joy.<br />
<br />
That, and fabulous t-shirts. <br />
<br />
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Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-17182699329372621672013-11-27T12:30:00.000-05:002013-11-27T12:30:01.825-05:00A moment of sincere (mostly) gratefulness. Every year, despite the fact that I hate Thanksgiving (not the idea, but the execution), I like to pause and list some things here that I am thankful for. Because I think it's important to do that more than once a year, not just on that one day when some poor sap who drew the short straw has to work her butt off preparing a huge meal and cleaning up a huger mess and then sending everyone out the door with just enough goodwill to keep them from murdering someone in a Wal-Mart over a Black "Friday" deal on a TV made in a factory employing foreign children working for pennies an hour.<br />
<br />
Ahem. <br />
<br />
So here it is. What I am thankful for in the closing days of 2013.<br />
<br />
<em>That we sold my mother's house. And put that whole chapter of grief and "closure" in our rear view. Finally.</em><br />
And that the young woman who bought it was happy with her purchase and did not ask if someone had died in the house. <br />
<br />
<em>Ten years cancer-free</em>.<br />
Technically, I'm cured now. Technically. My body, I think, knows this, and is just waiting for my brain to accept it and stop worrying so damn much.<br />
<br />
<em>A healthy daughter who is bright, kind, and the hardest-working kid in the pool at swim practices.</em><br />
No matter what becomes of this "dedicate your late adolescence to the Swim Gods" thing we have going on, whether she pursues it in college or someday leaves it in her wake, she's learned a lesson about the value of hard work that I never could have taught her. <br />
<br />
<em>That, in a nation with an increasing wealth divide, I'm part of the few. The proud. The middle.</em><br />
We're two employed people who live in a modest house in a safe neighborhood and, when we wish, can afford to buy the good beer. My thankfulness for this, and my awareness that it could all change in the blink of an economic downturn, cannot be overstated. <br />
<br />
<em>Not having to put my hand inside a turkey cavity at 6am on Thanksgiving day.</em><br />
My sister and I are dining out, and one of Jason's sisters is doing the turkey for his family gathering later in the week, so I get the year off from fondling livers and giblets. Woot.<br />
<br />
<br />
<em>For the tall guy.</em><br />
I'm sure it doesn't shock you to know that I'm not an easy person to live with. This year was worse than most; I spent too many free Sundays in my mother's house cleaning out 35 years worth of memories, and then came home with both literal and emotional baggage that made me weepy, angry, and a touch temperamental for days afterward. Thank God I have someone who puts up with me. And who has the good sense to know when I'm lingering on the ledge and calls me down for Dewey's Pizza and a <em>Breaking Bad </em>marathon.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
That's it. What are you thankful for?<br />
<br />
Now, go beat someone up for that TV. 'Tis the season! <br />
<br />Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-39705458486100534682013-11-22T06:00:00.000-05:002013-11-22T06:00:08.245-05:00Santa, The Boogeyman, and a Shooter On the Grassy KnollWhen I was eighteen, I believed in a much more interesting world. <br />
<br />
Magic was real. Miracles happened. Aliens had crash-landed in the New Mexican desert and sometimes hovered their super-cool aircraft above populated areas. <br />
<br />
And Lee Harvey Oswald was only a patsy in a vast conspiracy that took out a vibrant, charismatic leader.<br />
<br />
These things were certainties. I knew them to be true in the same way I knew that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. It never crossed my mind to doubt; I had seen evidence on the TV and in books. I was young, innocent, and impressionable. Anything that I couldn't grasp in the context of what little experience I had gathered in my short time on earth had to have a dramatic, if not otherworldly, explanation.<br />
<br />
Then life happened. <br />
<br />
The girl who sat enthralled by her high-school government teacher's unit on the Kennedy assassination and possible Cuba/mob/CIA connections, who wrote a 5-paragraph persuasive essay that Oswald was not the only person with a gun trained on the President that afternoon in November, who believed that a dark contingent in our own government wanted this man out of the way due to a cold war agenda, is now a woman who no longer believes in fairy tales. A woman who watched the towers fall because a handful of men successfully hijacked commercial jetliners in a plan that should have gone wrong. A woman who learned first-hand how fragile life is and how easily it can be taken from even the most youthful and vigorous among us. <br />
<br />
On this, the 50th anniversary of the "Where were you when..." moment of the generation before mine, even the teacher who taught me so much about that day is gone. Good men are taken every day by illness, by accident, by bullet, by cruel act of terrorism. It doesn't take a conspiracy. Sometimes it's just a tragic alignment of the stars that places a person in the wrong place at the wrongest of times. <br />
<br />
So, at 39, I no longer believe a well-trained, well-camouflaged government agent fired the fatal head shot from the grassy knoll. Though we will probably never know if someone in a position of power encouraged an angry, unstable young man to head up to the book depository that day, I no longer believe it matters. I believe that Oswald sighted the President through his scope and pulled the trigger. And that's the part of this tragedy that really matters. That decision in that moment contains all the blame and all the tragedy of this murder most foul that we ever need to know. <br />
<br />
As unfair as it seems, the power of one person to do evil can change the world. And take away a father, a husband, a leader of a great nation. I understand the need for so many to see conspiracy; it's comforting to think that it takes a tangled web of organization, coercion, and cover-up to kill a man who was larger than life. That a single person can't possibly bring a nation to grief.<br />
<br />
But a single person can.<br />
<br />
I have made peace with the lone gunman. For there is a flip side:<br />
<br />
One bad human in the right place at the right time can create tragedy. But one good human in that same place and time can stop it. If you believe the one, you have to believe the other. <br />
<br />
And, in the immortal words of Fox Mulder, I want to believe. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-63992521218937811522013-11-16T07:00:00.000-05:002013-11-16T07:00:08.159-05:00When I FallI've been thinking a lot about fathers and daughters.<br />
<br />
It started when the kid tackled her dad last night as soon as he walked in the door from work. Before he could even put all of his stuff down, she grabbed him from behind and wrapped her arms around his waist in a ferocious and genuine display of affection. It was such a moment of pure adoration that I had to turn away; my heart hurt to see it.<br />
<br />
I'd always heard about the special bond between fathers and daughters, but didn't really get to experience it myself. At least, not while I was a child. Just when my father and I began to truly know and appreciate each other, and just when we began to see the world from the other's point of view, I lost him. <br />
<br />
In the years after I lost him, and especially after I lost my mom, I had moments of revisionist history where I could only see the good in my parents. Ask me about them, and they had suddenly ascended into sainthood. <br />
<br />
But I also had moments of intense anger where I blamed them for how screwed up, to put it delicately, my sister and I are in our own distinct and colorful ways. They were both severely dysfunctional people who didn't always put forth a great deal of effort to live normal lives, and a lot of that crazy rubbed off on their children. <br />
<br />
It doesn't help that my father was really two different people, and my memories are colored either "good" or "bad" depending on whether it involved "Sober Dad" or "Drunk Dad." I'd like to think that had "Sober Dad" been the only one I'd known, our story would have ended very differently. And more peppered with stories of me tackling him as soon as he got home from work. <br />
<br />
I believe this is how it would have been. I do. Because no matter what, my dad was ready to catch me when I fell.<br />
<br />
One night when I was very young, not even in school yet, I was awakened by a horrifying nightmare. A cartoon bear had appeared in the window above my bed, and as I struggled against the awareness that it was just a dream, I saw its massive claw break through the wall and reach to pull me out of my cozy bed.<br />
<br />
I screamed a scream that my mother remembered and talked about for years. A scream that made her knees weak in the tub of warm water she was soaking in and made her not immediately able to stand up to see what was killing me.<br />
<br />
Still screaming, I tore back my covers and took off out of my room and down the hall so quickly that my dad hadn't even gotten out of the living room yet. I found him in front of the couch, crouched, both arms open. It was the position you assume when you are about to catch something vaguely the size of a small human. I didn't stop until I was safe in his arms.<br />
<br />
"Someone in the window!" I said. I have no idea why I said that. It had been a something, not a someone. And I had dreamed it. And it was wearing a hat. <br />
<br />
My father's protective instincts and adrenaline in full force, he so aggressively took off out of the front door in search of the assumed peeping Tom that he ripped the nail clean off of his left middle finger. By the time he searched the yard, my mother had removed herself from the bathtub and learned that it was not so much a person I saw as Smoky the Bear. <br />
<br />
We laughed about it later. Not at the time. But later. <br />
<br />
My mother would always remember how Dad tried so hard to protect us that he painfully injured himself. I would always remember the pose he struck--part Johnny Bench, part firefighter catching a kitten falling from a tree. <br />
<br />
I would see the pose one more time. This time I was an adult, living at home (but not for much longer; Jason had put a ring on it), finishing up my first year of teaching. I was experiencing a bout of the worst insomnia of my life and had taken a dose of melatonin given to me by my future mother-in-law. It was a Sunday night, and as we always did that year on Sunday nights, my parents and I were watching a rerun of <em>Cheers. </em>I felt a tickle on my bare leg and looked down to see a rather large, black, hairy spider on my leg.<br />
<br />
I screamed loudly. And stood up and shook all my limbs in the most frenzied Hoky-Poky of my life.<br />
<br />
And as soon as I starting shaking, my father got up off the couch, crouched, and held out his arms to me. <br />
<br />
After the pandemonium had passed, after the spider was searched and destroyed and a Silkwood shower taken to remove all the spider cooties, I had to ask my dad a question.<br />
<br />
"Why did you get up and hold your arms out when I screamed? What did you think was wrong?"<br />
<br />
He puffed on his cigarette for a long moment. "You had just taken one of those sleeping pills, and you've never taken one before. I thought you were having a reaction. A seizure or something." Another puff. "I thought I might need to catch you." <br />
<br />
That was the last time my father physically caught me. But he saved my ass from hitting the ground in other ways. When I was in grad school and my car needed a new transmission. When a long lapse between pay periods while Jason was still in school and I was working at EKU threatened to keep us from buying groceries during the holidays. When I was going through cancer treatment and taking unpaid days off from work.<br />
<br />
And every time he wrote me one of those checks, turning the money over without a lecture or reproach, knowing that I would be good to my word and pay him back, I saw the same picture in my brain--my dad, arms out, keeping me from hitting the ground. <br />
<br />
For that is at the heart of every decent father-daughter relationship. And what makes them so special. Even with his faults, I knew, deep down, that my father would always catch me. It's what the good ones do. And as much as 50% of the time, he was one of the good ones. <br />
<br />
(That sounds sad and self-pitying, but it's not. I work in education. Some kids' dads don't even break into the double digits.)<br />
<br />
All this to say that I understand why my daughter adores her father. Why she throws her arms around him so unabashedly. <br />
<br />
A mother's job is to raise her daughter up as high as she can go.<br />
<br />
A father's job is stand beneath, crouched, arms outstretched, waiting. Just in case. <br />
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Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-61740325803100496122013-11-05T18:00:00.000-05:002013-11-05T18:00:03.363-05:00But that's so much less interesting than my ghost theory. When my mother started having what she called her "spells," I, of course, started to have them too. I've never been one to let a loved one suffer a medical condition on their own. <br />
<br />
When I first experienced the same strange and horrifying nocturnal freak-outs my mother had been complaining of there in our little one-bedroom apartment in Knox County during our lost year, I knew that this was different from the time my sister broke her foot and I developed a limp. This was no sympathy pain or attention-seeking behavior. My mother, for once, took me seriously. And it was decided.<br />
<br />
The only logical explanation for what we were experiencing was supernatural. Possibly demonic. Either we were being haunted, or our souls were leaving our bodies nightly. The light of day always made this sound ridiculous and we smiled and shook our heads and made jokes.<br />
<br />
But when it happened to us at 3am, it was no joke. <br />
<br />
Upon our return back to northern Kentucky, Mom went through a battery of tests. She wore a heart monitor for a month, submitted to a stress test, had a brain scan, and spoke to someone who I think may have been a psychologist. All was normal. Our old family doctor shrugged it off, and as the years went on we had fewer of these episodes. Though they did not go away entirely. Since it's rare to have one of these episodes now, years have gone by since I last thought about them. Until I read an offhand comment left on my favorite blog last week, and I realized what so terrified my mother and me has a scientific, medical name.<br />
<br />
Sleep paralysis. <br />
<br />
Basically, it's a moment of mental wakefulness but physical paralysis early in the sleep cycle. You have all the crazy brain activity and dreaming of REM without being fully asleep. You also have the physical paralysis associated with REM sleep, which doesn't bother you so much when you're deep in slumber.<br />
<br />
It bothers you a lot when you're not in slumber and are hallucinating that there's a demon in the corner of your room. <br />
<br />
Trying to give myself a good scare on Halloween, I read the comments section of a blog post where readers were asked to talk about the most terrifying thing they had personally experienced. One responder mentioned sleep paralysis and the hallucinations that come with it. I gasped. <br />
<br />
So that's what that was. Huh. <br />
<br />
Further research reveals that some people feel a presence pushing them down into their mattresses. Other people feel themselves levitate. Still others see nightmare creatures that, of course, aren't really there. My mother and I experienced all three. <br />
<br />
The worst was always the nightmare creatures.<br />
<br />
Mom frequently sensed a dark male presence just at the foot of her bed and once saw horns sticking out of the shadowy figure's head. I usually saw ordinary objects transform into terrible apparitions. <br />
<br />
The first time I experienced what I now know was sleep paralysis, I was snuggled with Annette, my knock-off homemade Cabbage Patch doll, sewn by a friend of my mother's to tide me over until the real thing was easily available and affordable. I relaxed under the covers and in a lightning flash felt the world shift. There was a buzzing noise inside my head. My eyes were transfixed on Annette and I realized I couldn't look away. I couldn't move my eyes, or my head, or my limbs. I willed myself to scream but could not. Annette's face then began to change, turning monstrous and evil and <em>alive</em>. You know the clown in <em>Poltergeist</em>? Annette became that clown. And I was powerless to escape. <br />
<br />
I know, right?<br />
<br />
<br />
Having a name for this still doesn't explain a few things about it. Why, for instance, my mother and I suddenly started having them at the same time. And why any time we travelled together after I reached adulthood I would have a "spell." The last one I remember having, in fact, was one of the last times we went to Barbourville together and shared a guest room. In that one, I hallucinated that she morphed into your traditional large-eyed, oval-headed, pale-skinned Roswell-ish alien. <br />
<br />
When I was finally able to move, I woke her up screaming, "Your face is white! Your face is white!" <br />
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We had a good laugh the next morning over coffee. I can't say she found it as funny that night. <br />
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Like many that have these, I've found ways to get myself back to reality-world when in the grips of an episode. Knowing that what I'm seeing (probably) isn't real helps bring me fully awake, as does concentrating on one body part that I'm trying to make move. If I can move a finger, I can break out of it. As a tired mom, I sometimes just will my eyes closed and hope for the best. <br />
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On rare occasions, though, I still freak out whoever happens to be sharing a bed with me by watching his face turn into a monster's and screaming myself awake. What can I say, it makes the hubby's life more interesting. Fall asleep next to me and expect the unexpected.<br />
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Now, at least, one of my problems has a name that isn't "crazy" or "mildly possessed." I'll sleep better at night.<br />
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Or not. But either way, I'll know any clowns I see in my bed are hallucinations. <br />
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(Insert joke here.)<br />
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<br />Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1027105660999256483.post-43118438578735619592013-10-30T16:00:00.000-04:002013-10-30T16:00:01.946-04:00I ain't afraid of no ghosts. But I am afraid of everything else. I no longer sleep with a light on. It's been years since I had to peek out of the shower curtain every 5 minutes looking for Norman Bates. I only check closets and under beds on those rare evenings I get home and realize I left the garage door open all day. Most of my childhood ghosts and superstitions have been scared away by advancing age, growing wisdom, and working-woman's exhaustion that makes me not care so much if a homicidal maniac is hiding out in my basement to murder me in my sleep so long as it gets me out of a faculty meeting the next day.<br />
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That does not mean I've outgrown being afraid. For I still see the boogeyman. It's just that now he looks like suspicious growths, fiery auto accidents, and women who have borne multiple children and yet still wear size 4 skinny jeans. Seriously? Nothing scarier. <br />
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So this Halloween I will not be frightened by Michael or Freddie or Jason (the masked murderer) or Jason (the husband who likes to startle me in my sleep by having the nerve to think that he can just wander into our bedroom willy-nilly while I'm having a nightmare about tax audits). I'll only be spooked by the truly scary things in life, which aren't so easy to dress up as for trick-or-treat. <br />
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Unexplained basement floods. (<em>The water's coming from inside the house!</em>) Melanoma. A large spider that disappears in your bedroom in the 2 seconds it takes for you to retrieve a shoe. Colonoscopies. A really long and recurring hair in a mole. Loss. Being so desperate for money and power that you put all your principles aside to become the kingpin of a drug cartel specializing in blue meth and high body counts. <br />
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Actually, I hear Walter White is going to be the big costume of the year, so I guess that last one's totally do-able. <br />
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This year, instead of watching monster movie marathons and the creepier episodes of <em>The X-Files, </em>I will be freaking myself out checking for lumps and swollen lymph nodes, running a credit report to look for signs of identity theft, and maybe spending some time standing next to our washing machine, which may or may not have been part of a recall of washers that have randomly exploded during the spin cycle. <br />
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Because on October 31st, everyone deserves a good scare. Don't look now, but your retirement plans might have just walked up behind you, ready to say, "Boo!" <br />
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Happy Halloween, fellow adults. <br />
<br />Library Ladyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10598292542165692366noreply@blogger.com1