Holly Northrop Blog

My nerves are shot. My therapist tells me that I have enormous anxiety (ya think?) and to take more Xanax, that that is what it is there for. I so do. Clearly, with each passing day I become less and less employable. Oh sure I can go spend the day in Manhattan walking around for six hours shooting. I do think my photography is getting better but I can't help but think that in the not too far off future I'll be sitting in some Social Security office somewhere filling out a form having to do with my ability to 'handle' a full time job.

It started with a weird cold that I caught within minutes of landing in the Charlotte, North Carolina airport this past June. While Martha went to rent a car, I walked over to baggage claim to grab our bag. It's always a surprise when it actually comes down the chute isn't it?

Anyway, the minute I turned around to the carousel, a rush of air blew over me and within minutes, I had a sore throat. It was weird and got really weirder. The whole visit I had a wicked sore throat and on the last day it turned into a cough. Thankfully, the flight home wasn't a cough fest but from the first night home and for a solid week after I slept on the couch every night coughing my fucking head off. And I mean COUGHING. I would cough all the air out of my lungs and then gasp for air. It was frightening.

So frightening that after Martha tried for days to get me an appointment with a doctor but no one would see me for four-five weeks, I walked over to the emergency room where they took an X-Ray of my lungs, gave me a scripts for antibiotics and cough syrup with some yummy Vicodin in it. The X-ray looked good so they diagnosed me with Acute Bronchitis and sent me home with instructions to follow up with my doctor five weeks from then.

I took the antibiotics and nurtured the cough medicine and for about a week, I felt better. But the minute the drugs stopped I started coughing again. Some days it felt like I just couldn't breath. I started to get worried and well, a little weirder so the head doctor decided to up my meds. Nice.

A week or so later is when I dropped Victor's Horizon 202 camera.

After $158 to fix the camera I go to my 'follow up' doctors' appointment where my new doctor reviews the X-ray and then asks me if anyone told me what they found in my lung?

WHAT?

Seems there was something 'funny' on the X-Ray; a grayish area in the lower right lobe. She wants to have another technician review the X-Ray and then decide if we should do a CT Scan. She'll call me.

Right.

So I TRY to go about my normal existence by obsessively chewing gum and working out and then jumping out of my skin every time the phone rings. Finally, after two days my cell rings while I'm out shooting in Manhattan. They want to do a CT scan. I call Martha and in what can only be described as extremely pathetic, I start crying while walking along the edge of the East River under the Brooklyn Bridge. (Yet I still continued to shoot photos, very odd) I am convinced that I have lung cancer and that I was going to be dead by Christmas, or at least by the end of September. I think I'm turning into Woody Allen.

The CT Scan was set for that Friday with my follow up visit two-weeks from then. On the day I walked over to the hospital for the scan there was a monster storm coming over the Catskills. Thunder, lightening the whole works. I walked over a little early so as not to have the heavens literally open up on me. They took me early, walking me back to the waiting area of the machine. Just as I am walking by the open door of the room, a flash of pure white light bursts out of the door. It was as though an enormous flash bulb went off to my left just as I was walking by. The timing was perfect and I bet my skeletal image is UV Ray burned into the wall that was on my right. Kind of like an early man cave painting.

Obviously, the hospital, which is on top of a hill, was hit by lightening. The CT machine was fried and they had to take me over to the other machine in the ER.

After the scan I'm told that if they find anything they'll call me, otherwise I'll see my doctor in two-weeks. What is with the wait for a phone call thing? Jesus Christ. After a few days I have both Jasmine and Martha up my ass to call the doctor but I just can't. I do not want to know. La, la la la la la la... I retreat, withdrawal and go into my own little happy place. Besides Jasmine was easily distracted because she was in the process of moving back to Pittsburgh having finished up school. She found a nice one-bedroom apartment in a good area of town and she's even going to have a cat.

On a beautiful Saturday morning and four days before I'm to go back for my follow up doc visit, I innocently check the mail. In the mail was a letter from Jasmine's college. I open it thinking it was a letter congratulating her or maybe even her diploma, but no, it is a letter informing us that she isn't graduating. She is one credit shy of a degree and they have put her on academic probation but she is invited back for the fall semester to finish up her course work. The one credit that she needs is an incomplete. They also sent along a copy of her miserable transcripts unlocking the 5-year mystery on just what the hell was going on in college.

This event was truly unfortunate for all of us.

After the crying, yelling and a few nasty phone calls, Jasmine swears that once she gets a hold of her professor that the incomplete will be changed to a passing grade, I walked out of the house stormed across the street and called the neighbor a jackass.

Monday Martha got an alert from Jasmine's checking account that she was $100 overdrawn. Upon further inspection, it was discovered that Jasmine had managed to motor through $1600 in four days. All of which is more or less explainable except for the $263 at Ikea.

Tuesday Martha got another alert from Jasmine's checking account indicating that there is now $270 worth of overdraft charges.

Thursday at 8:30 in the morning and with 1 ½ Xanax in me I stood in the doctors' small exam room pacing like a caged tiger. Finally, she comes in and immediately tells me that everything is fine.

The 'funny' thing on my CT scan shows a calcified granuloma that is usually benign and generally caused from either a prior early childhood incident with the lungs like pneumonia, or histoplasmosis. Histoplasmosis is commonly caused by a fungal infection and is endemic to the Ohio River Valley. Interesting. I'm thinking it's the combination of sitting in the Ohio River Valley woods sniffing glue at the early age of twelve. That would cover both. Oh hush, it was only for one summer and the damn shit gave me a horrible headache. What can I say, it was Ohio and I no longer live there for many, many reasons. Think Gummo. Seriously.

So right. We go to Pittsburgh this Thursday to visit with Jasmine where we will dance and sing songs. Should be a good time.

It's not the individual events so much as it is the stress of the all events happening at one time or for an extended run of time. I dropped a friend's camera but it was fixed and he's still talking to me. As far as I know, I don't have lung cancer but for over two weeks I convinced myself that I did. I just have chunks of things in my lungs. So far, Jasmine is a mess but she will figure it out, she has to.

Martha is in North Carolina with her father, who is in the final days of his life. We got a call last week from her dad indicating that he thought it was time. This was right before a massive snowstorm dumped two feet of snow on us. It took Martha two days of horseshit to get a flight out and she had to drive to Connecticut to do it.

The roofers finished the last shingle six hours before the first snowflake fell. Our brand new roof is covered in some areas with almost twelve inches of snow. I shoveled our driveway four times on Wednesday, just to keep it to a level that I might be able to handle for Thursday morning, when Martha was going to need to get the car out of the garage and drive to the airport.

Thursday morning I woke up before the sun and was outside shoveling snow by 7am. I had only two and a half hours to dig out the ice covered two-foot high drifts that our driveway had become overnight. By 9am, I was physically finished but the driveway still had major ice drifts. Martha came out to relieve me and dug out the remaining blocks. After that, she traveled for over twelve hours before she was finally at her hotel room in Winston-Salem.

She wanted me to stay home, deal with the cats and to just be here so she won't have to worry. I am home alone, with nothing but my crazy head. I'm not even working, they can kiss my ass as I have taken some time off. Her last words to me before she left were, "Can you wait till I get back to completely flip out? I don't want to have to worry about you while I'm down there. Just wait until I get home."

"Okay babe, no problem." I smiled.

The whole shoveling two feet of ice balls thing was fucking awesome. Martha promised me that she was going to buy me a snow blower. Three days later my back is still fucked up and now, I have no way to the chiropractor. Whatever, out of sheer desperation I've made a 'homemade' traction device that as long as I don't 'accidentally hang myself', seems to be providing some relief.

Being home alone and thinking about death is always a good place for my head to be. After thinking about Mr. Harvey and all the wonderful years of knowing him, my head starts rattling around all the other kinds of death and weirdness that I've seen. There is my dad and the whole bat filled funeral. And then of course my mom and not only not knowing exactly what she died from but why on her deathbed she requested that I not be told she was dying. Or how both of my parents deaths involved my ex-husband. I am still at a loss as to why the fuck that happened. My thoughts bounce around to when Jasmine had cancer, and how I was so frightened that she was going to die. That constant stomach filled fear that has permanently scarred my innards to the point of chronic nervousness. I don't even know that if she was healthier, and suddenly became obsessed about her wellbeing, if that would make me feel any better.

I think about people that I've know that are now dead. Friends, distant relatives or bizarre friends of my parents, float in and out of my brain. I spent a good half-hour Saturday while scrubbing the floors remembering a neighbor friend of my moms'. Actually, there were two, the Robbins; they were a mother and daughter duo. Mrs. Robbins, who was roughly ten years older then my mom, would come down to the house at least once a week and hang out at our kitchen table, drinking, "coffee" and clear drinks with ice cubes in them. The Robbins lived on the corner and Mrs. Robbins was the atypical sixty-year old Jewish wife of an atypical sixty-year-old Jewish husband. Mr. Robbins had hurt himself years prior and was mostly wheelchair bound. He was a survivor and had the number tattoo on his arm. He seemed nice enough, very quiet almost invisible even though he was in a rather large metal chair. As a family, they were rich and traveled all over the world several times a year. The oddest thing about the Robbins was the fact that their only daughter, Sheila, who in her mid-thirties, still lived at home. There was a rumor that Sheila had been briefly married once but now things were very, very different.

When Mrs. Robbins was over, she would end up sitting in my chair at the table, directly across from my mom, going on and on about all of her jewelry, (she had big gold rings on every finger), and hand blown glass that she bought while they were vacationing on some tropical island. She had a tan that was so bronze that she almost blended in with the antique walnut table that my parents bought while we were on our vacation in Michigan.

When Mrs. Robbins wasn't going over a recent trip tally, she gossiped nonstop about all of the neighbors. Neighbors I didn't even know we had. She knew everyone's comings and goings and wondered aloud about their lifestyles and drama. The family from India who lived behind us and whether the dot on the mothers head was a real ruby; the folks at the end of the street who's son was killed in Vietnam and how sad it must be to be in the house and how she just can't bring herself to visit them. And then there were the kids who were caught drag racing in front of her house, she just happened to notice one kid in particular was a kid she had seen me with before. She had seen me 'climbing' (her word) out of his car. What a great thing to tell a parent.

"Hey, yeah I saw your fifteen year old daughter climbing out of a dark green Nova the other night. That boy was arrested for drag racing right in front of my house. He looked like trouble." Doesn't really sit too well no matter what kind of family love you've got going on.

My house was already a war zone without any help from Mrs. Robbins. I must say I hated to see her around the house because it usually meant that a handful of shit was going to be flung my way before the visit was over.

She was an insentient neb and I have always believed that she is the one that told my dad she saw me sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night and even more menacing, she was the one who anonymously called my folks and told them I was pregnant when I was thirteen. The result of that particular phone call caused me to run away for weeks on end to avoid being smacked into a pulp on the vinyl kitchen floor. Mrs. Robbins was so vocal about everything and felt that she was well within her right to say whatever entered her mind, no matter what.

One hot summer day while I was lying on the couch watching Gilligan's Island, Mrs. Robbins was over, yakking with my mom about being discriminated against at Krogers. Something about how the bag boy would not help her wheel her groceries out to the car. As I was lying there listening to her, I wondered to myself how that panned out to discrimination, when suddenly the conversation switched up and she turned towards me and shouted over the banister that separated the kitchen from the family room;

"She is never going to amount to anything." She snorted while pointing in my direction. "I can tell to look at her."

My mom just stared at me. I rolled my eyes, crawled off the couch and went up to my room to smoke a bowl. Ah yes, memories, like the cracks of my mind, dirty water memories of the way it was.

But the real story with the Robbins has more to do about their own hidden family dynamics then I could ever realize. Even though my mom was as nutty as they come, I knew then that I was glad that Mrs. Robbins wasn't my mom. Even at my pathetic self-absorbed teenage age worst, I still pitied her daughter, Sheila who lived at home. Sometimes Sheila would also come down to visit with mom too, not nearly as much as Mrs. Robbins but at least once a month. Mom didn't like Sheila too much because she felt that she was too depressing. (I find this very amusing, and still do.) She would rather spend time with Mrs. Robbins then listen to Sheila talk about her mother.

Mrs. Robbins was driving Sheila bat shit and given what I had seen up till then, I was totally on Sheila's side. Sheila was roughly eight ways of fucked. She was in her mid-thirties, questionably married, (in hindsight I think she was gay) She did go to college and had some kind of liberal arts degree but was never able to really find a job or move out of the house. Her mom always insisted that she help with her father, who was partially paralyzed and needed a full time nurse, not his daughter wiping his ass full time. What Sheila was doing, and she was only doing it with my mother, was reaching out. She had no friends, and never went anywhere, except to my house about once a month.

Sheila's miserable life went on this way all thorough the 70's and sometime in the early 80's she decided that she had had enough. The details are sketchy but the gist was that one morning Sheila snapped and killed her mother, stabbing her several hundred times all around the kill zones. She then turned around and stabbed her father, who was unable to do anything but sit there and watch his daughter kill his wife. She only stabbed her father a few times but just enough to kill him too. Then, Sheila went upstairs and hung herself in her bathroom. They didn't find the bodies for over two-weeks when finally a neighbor, not my mother, called the police because their mail and newspapers had been littering their yard.

I remember the day that mom told me of the murder/suicide. She was shocked, as was the whole neighborhood I sure. I was living far away from Shadowcrest Court and hadn't been home in years but as mom was going over the details of the murder I kind of understood. Sheila's buttons had been pushed. All those years growing up there, I just figured my house was, you know, 'That House. The police were always there, you could constantly hear my mom screaming at me over the Rolling Stones and there was that nasty time my dad beat the shit out of me in the front yard in plain sight of Mr. Pishotti, who was walking his two full sized poodles. You know, we were 'That House'. But clearly the winner here was the Robbins family for the murder/suicide at the corner house. I think we came in second place.

I did mange to do a few things over the holiday besides lay around and watch movies. I cleaned up, or more likely messed up, some of my code; added a new logo thing and did some general site maintenance. Real boring stuff. I pulled work for the Krappy Kamera Contest and Toycamera.com has me as the featured artist. I'm not sure for how long I'll be on the homepage so the gallery link is here.

Miss Simon came through here Tuesday-Wednesday and then again on Saturday night. She has her very own version of travel hell that only underscores our decision to stay here and have the rest of the country clog the nations highways. Why travel when New York City finally clears out and one can move about without too much annoyance? Shave a few million off the total and things become quite nice. So nice that a trip from Jersey to Queens really wasn't that fucked up even with the 7 train running on a screwy schedule.

Jasmine went to Grandma Northrop's house in Tennessee. According to Jazz, grandma has been sick and therefore the two of them didn't do much. Jasmine spent the majority of her trip to the deep dark south hanging out with the twenty-three year old neighbor boy and his friend, smoking dope and getting drunk at an all-night bowling alley. The crabapple certainly didn't fall very far from that tree. She stayed up partying all night Saturday and then boarded a 8:30am flight to Charlotte where she had a small layover until her flight to Pittsburgh dropped her off at her fathers. By the time he saw her I can only imagine what she smelt like. I am so glad I was totally out of the loop on all of it. It's way funnier over the phone then in person.

Thanksgiving was different this year. Well, wait, Thanksgiving has always been a little different seeing as how I haven't played the roll of 'daughter coming home' in twenty-five years.

As your average disgruntled fucked up kid of the 1970s, Turkey Day was always my favorite day to do a shit-load of drugs. That is if we did not go to Grandma Schneider's House. Grandma lived on a hilltop full of black snakes, about 15 miles outside of Midway, PA. She had a chicken coup and every year slaughtered her own turkey. Grandma Schneider's house was crazy scary and anything stronger than a joint was NOT recommended. The coolest thing at Grandma's house was her black and white dog named Zippy. I hung out with him as much as I possibly could.

If we stayed in Ohio, I would hang out with dad all day while he watched hours of football. It was the one safe place to be, even if he fell asleep. Mom would never mess with a day of sports and I would lie on the floor between the TV and my father, reading horror novels. (I became the dog.) Salem's Lot and football saved me from my mother and myself.

The last time I "went home" for Thanksgiving was in 1980. I had been away at college for the five months prior and after eight hours on a Greyhound bus from Pittsburgh, I arrived in Cincinnati with a duffel bag full of neurosis and a head full of acid. I was having a good day and it was precisely because of the drugs that I was able to be pleasant.

It is almost as though my dilated pupils had taken a photo of that particular day. I remember the image of dinner so very, very well. Probably because it was the last time I ever went home for a holiday. I remember it better than I remember any actual conversation that most likely happened between the three of us. The image of the turkey candlestick holders that caught the wax drippings from the candles, their light flickering off of my mother's china and for a brief moment, everything seemed comfortable, still lingers in the shadows of my psyche. I recall how my eyes followed the light around the thin gold rim of my plate and then looking up to my left at my mom just as she smiled at me. I then shifted my eyes over to the right at my father and caught a glimpse of him watching her with his crooked, Dick Cheney grin.

He had good reason to keep an eye on her. My mom could go from semi-happy and laughing to yanking her lit cigarette out of the beanbag ashtray and pointing its red ember at my nose, murmuring strange things about Meadville, marijuana, abortion or my 'rotten friends'.

Yes, well enough of that silliness, she is dead now and her china sits in a moldy basement in Butler, PA. C'est la fucking vie.

Thanksgiving was different this year. I made Filet Mignon and Martha ate almost a whole homemade pumpkin pie. We watched the fine cinema of Fritz Lang with his masterwork M and we took naps. A little bit of German horror, a nap, extended family floating in and out, and turkey lunch with friends in Queens. It all sounds pretty perfect to me.

There is no way to describe the absolute joy and jubilation that comes from knowing that Jasmine's PET scans are all clear. I didn't even realize just how fucked in the head with worry I truly was until the word came that she was fine. I started to cry at my desk at work. Tears of relief. Then, within two minutes I suddenly was exhausted and in dire need of a nap. But, in the middle of a newspaper deadline, I stayed chained to my desk.

Jasmine is learning the fine art of first apartment furniture gathering. She has already snagged an end table from the clutches of the trash room and then, last Tuesday, she found herself with a day off, wandering around Macy's furniture liquidation sale. She bought an entertainment stand for eleven dollars. That's as good as any yard sale or Goodwill. I have trained the young grasshopper well.

The only catch was that she had to get it home all by herself. So, she carried it through Newport Pavonia mall, drug it on the Light Rail at rush hour and then walked it three blocks to the apartment. There really isn't any place to put this 4ft by 2ft thing so it is currently shoved up against the window in the living room. There really isn't any place to put anything in this apartment and we don't have a storage space. We have eight weeks until move out and the stacking of crap has already started. The office is a disaster zone.

Plans are in the works for Miss Jasmine's 21st birthday. They now include a fancy water front dinner at The Chart House and she is busing in college backup in the form of a boy from PA to help her celebrate. Oh sure, Martha, Sheri and I are just great and all but we tend to wrap it up kind of early. We'll get tired and cranky and the talk will turn into a three-way mom fest with no end in sight. At least with one of her own kind around we'll instinctively back off, not so much to save Jasmine but more of a not letting the others see how ridiculous we can get.

But yes, back to the idea of company in our cramped little domicile. He is gay and will be Jasmine's roommate next year. Horror of horrors we are having a boy in the house. Hmm, does it count if he's gay? Well, the cats will let us know.

CUT ME OPEN
Well, hey what's this I see? A surgery date has been confirmed...and why, yes, it looks like...July 27th at 10am in the morning they will be taking my left adrenal gland out. We shall see. I have to jump through all those hoops that I jumped through in February so let the games begin. I'll believe it when I wake up in the hospital doped up and hallucinating. At least all this time has made Martha and I deal with some adult stuff like Living Wills, Power of Attorney and the all-important Last Will and Testament. Hey, they are going to put me under so we had to go there. Thank you to Olivia for the use of her super cool Notary stamp.

AMERICA: THE MOVIE
Why has 60 Minutes been nothing but reruns for the past several weeks? What the fuck? Isn't there ANYTHING to report on? I mean the whole cancer sniffing dog thing was cool but honestly, they should be ashamed of themselves for phoning it in like every other news and entertainment program. What about Sandra Day O'Connor? (This country is so fucked) What about Live 8? What about the Increase in the Number of Documents Classified by the Government. Or National Organization for Women pissing and arm waving at Bush over abortion rights. It's not just 60 Minutes either. Dateline and 20/20 are just as useless. I don't get it. How can so many of us not care? My own newspaper has turned into something I no longer recognize. The Village Voice is not what it used to be that is for sure and the word "evolve" isn't what I'm thinking of. The right is the new left and the true left are a bunch of sky is falling fruit loops.

What? Everything is fine, the economy is great; don't worry about healthcare, or jobs. Where's my fucking iPod? Katie Holmes said YES! "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda." -George W. Bush, Greece, N.Y., May 24, 2005

And you know, Freedom ain't free, biatch.

EVERYTHING ABOUT ME SAYS GO AWAY
Sunday night, a little after 5:00pm and I had the apartment all to myself for about the two hours. Jasmine was at work and Martha was out doing the most social of activities. She was golfing with two other lesbians. As predictable as that is, it is just as unpredictable that I won't play along and be the fourth wheel on the lesbian golf cart. I'm just not that kind of girl, although I happen to like a girl who is a golfer. I love to nap to golf and I really do dig Annika. But it's more than just golf that I won't partake in. Martha explains it away with excuses that I'm not very social and "that's okay", which, I suppose, it has to be.

She and I had a conversation about how if anyone ever needed a mentor in life it was I, because almost everyone I've ever known has turned up full of shit and exclusively self motivated. I did have a teacher once, senior year of high school that I trusted and gave me basic life stuff. She was part of that new Hippie way of Team Teaching and insisted that her students call her by her first name, which was Cindy. She treated all of us like adults, even if we fucked up and skipped class to go smoke dope in the parking lot. At the time, I thought she was cool because she was the first adult to vocalize to me that my mom was probably insane and not to pay too much attention to her. But, by that point, it was a little late in the game and I was out of the state of Ohio within three months, regardless of whatever horseshit my mom pulled. I would have thumbed to college if I had needed to. My mom hated Cindy and constantly told me so, but it was the only time I ever got straight A's in high school.

This was also around the same time that I met a girl that was a little older than me named Jenny. We both worked the nightshift at Frisch's Big Boy and became fast friends. She lost her right eye when she was a small child via her little brother and a tree branch and she now had a glass eye. One slow night when I was bored out of my skull I asked her if I could see it. She responded by popping it right out of the socket and holding it up in front of my face. Both of my eyes shifted focus between the marble eye in the foreground and the dark hole of her eye socket in the background. From that moment on, I thought she was the coolest girl I'd ever met. That single act of unconscious behavior blew my mind.

Ah yes, but that was a hundred years and countless buckets of whiskey ago and unfortunately, the basis of my bullshit detector rests somewhere within the seeds of my youth. Over the years, I have met some of the finest folks under the strangest conditions and I have watched some of those same folks turn the strangest. It really is tragic when you fail to live up to someone else's expectations.

Whether its lovers, family or friends, you think you are all on the same page but then the page changes and you realize that some of those that you love can't keep up. You recognize that they are in remedial reading and stuck on junk that was never who you were in the first place. Or maybe who you were for one day, on acid and walking around with a camera but not who you are all the damn time. But in their head, that's how you have been filed so now you are stuck living out somebody else's absurdity. Oh sure, some fake it real well and a have glazed over understanding of the words that are coming out of your mouth. They fake it until they can't follow along anymore and either walk away or blame all their heartache on you. Others act out in aggressive deeds of hostility in the hopes of showing you just what an asshole YOU are. That is when you start to realize that blood is thinner than water and everyone is apathetic unless it directly relates to themselves.

Ah, I have a point in there somewhere but who cares.

Yeah, so that is what I did when left alone. Write and listen to my new Say Hi to Your Mom CD. (Everybody send love to Eric in Brooklyn.)

Fuck it, and chalk it up to being so fucking overworked that I'm nuttier than normal. Siren is so up my ass that all I dream is green. Let's just say that this year is particularly painful and I spent the majority of my 4th of July weekend working on it. I like the site though but I am also fried. I keep telling myself that it is for the greater good of the collection of hours and another portfolio piece. I'm collecting my overtime to cash out for my surgery. It would be nice to use that instead of ALL of my vacation time. We do have that beach house thing in October that I daydream about daily. Last week was just downright ugly with the Union threatening to strike and then pulling me into there little circle of strange. That's right, I'm now a Union employee. God help us all.

I used to be frightened of water before the summer of 1973. I never learned to swim as a small child despite my family's Country Club membership and the few cracks the local swimming instructor had at me. He scared me and nothing ever works if you yell at me. I dig in and will not give it up. My parents yelled at me all the time to no avail so who the fuck are you in your weirdo Speedo?

We moved to Cincinnati when I was ten and while there is a wealth of horror stories revolving around that whole event, the swimming one is what I'm going with here.

My mom loved to go to Kenwood Mall. The Kenwood Mall was about a twenty-minute drive from the house and she did this at least four times a week, Monday through Friday. I believe it was around her hundredth time driving up and down Montgomery Road that she noticed a swimming pool off to the side and before I knew it, she was dropping me off at the pool three or four times a week, weather permitting. Not only did I not know one single kid at the pool, seeing how we were two school districts over from mine and we had only lived in Ohio for 6 months, I also did not know how to swim - at all.

Odd? Why yes it was odd behavior and I have no idea why she did it. She used the swimming pool as a baby sitter and probably had a small bit of hope that I might drown. She would lather me up with sun block and then shove me in the car with a beach towel, a bottle of Coppertone and a laminated membership card. We'd drive down Montgomery road to the a hotel where she would U-turn that big brown Buick around and drop me off. Then she would drive away with no real indication as to when she would pick me up. After a few weeks of this it seemed to average out to where I was spending seven hours a day by myself at the pool. I was 10.

The first day she did this I stood in the parking lot for a minute and watched her drive away. Then, I turned around and walked through the rickety metal gate and over to the lifeguard, who was all of 18 and wearing a yellow string bikini with a big white daisy on each breast. She was leaning over the counter at the concession stand, laughing and smoking a joint with the boy who ran the place. I told her that I did not know how to swim and could she make sure I didn't drown. She asked me where my membership card and my mother were. I handed her my card and said I didn't know where my mom was. She looked at my card, then at me and told me to stay at the other end of the pool.

At first, I stayed in the kiddy end where I just sat in the water and watched the mothers with their infants. Over those weeks of being the redheaded looser at the pool, I noticed that the real action was the deep end of the pool where the cool kids were, laughing jumping off the diving board and playing Marco Polo. At first, I thought the game was called Marco Polio but anyway, slowly over several weeks, I would inch my way into deeper and deeper water. Once I figured out how to tread water, I was dog paddling all over the place and I was constantly getting in the way of their water games. No one helped me and the stoner lifeguard never even noticed me or the few time I hacked up a lung when I got in over my head.

When mom dropped me off she never gave me any money. "What the hell do you need money for? I paid for the summer membership." She'd bark at me. I'd tell her that I'd get hungry after about four hours dog paddling around an Olympic size swimming pool and maybe if I could have some potato chips or something to help break up the day. No, was the answer to that. So I started taking nickels, dimes and quarters out of my coin collection to the pool with me. I only needed a dollar a day for a bag of Andy Capp's Hot Fries and a Mountain Dew.

After twelve weeks of robbing my own coin collection, the money was almost gone, but by that point, I was diving off the diving board and swimming on the bottom of the pool like a true bottom feeder. In three months, I made not one friend but managed to teach myself to swim without parental or adult supervision of any kind. One of the last days that I was at the pool my mom came a little early to pick me up and she saw me jump off the diving board. She had no idea that I even knew how to swim at all let alone that I was jumping off shit.

When I came up for air, I saw her standing at the edge of the pool, staring down at me. I climbed out, grabbed my towel and walked barefoot across the black tar parking lot to the car without saying a word. I stood there dripping wet and hopping from one foot to the other while mom laid out a black plastic garbage bag for me to sit on so I wouldn't get the seat wet. She was pissed because I was supposed to be air dried by the time she picked me up, when ever that was. The rule was I had to get out of the water an hour before she came but I never knew where the hell she was at let alone when she was coming, so I was doomed to fail daily. But that was the nature our relationship. She'd set them up and I'd knock 'em down. It was a system that worked until the bitter end.

—Excerpt from Learning to Swim

Let us see. Tuesday I had a surgical procedure and the lessons from that day were abundant. What all did we learn? In no order:

• No yelling in the car on the way to surgery.
• The driver of the car needs to listen to the copilot or 'You Need to Shut Up!' will be said in a loud, stern voice to the driver and all laughter will stop until driver apologizes and admits they are an asshole.
• Always pack extra water and noshing pretzels no matter where you are going because it is a given that at some point during the day, any one of us, will become thirsty and feel nauseous.  Moreover, all that will be available is New Jersey tap water and hospital turkey meat.
• One cannot rush Same Day Surgery.
• Always bring more drugs into the operating room then will be required.  The patient just might need the double amount due to decades of recreational drug use and the nonstop quest for the perfect buzz.  If you have it with you, then in the middle of an operation, one of your nurses will not have to run out of the OR to get more narcotics.
• Having anyone do anything to your groin (besides fuck it) is ridiculously uncomfortable and the average non-doctor brain has no place for imagery of that nature.  Unless you have a hospital fetish or more of a surgery fetish, I suppose.
• When I sleep, my blood pressure is 60/40.   If my blood pressure falls below 90/60, I will pass out hard, scaring the nursing staff, and terrifying Martha.
• Bayonne Hospital has an extra box in the 'relationship' question for 'Life Partner'.   
• It is possible to have an IV taken out of a vein and seconds later shoved right back in the same fucking vein.
• Having a woman dry shave your 'woohoo' under florescent lights while both of you are wearing surgical hair nets is not a secret fantasy of mine.   I have a tickle spot that no one, not even I knew about.  
• Nurses are cranky for very, very good reasons.   

LETS HAVE CHURCH
Easter is Sunday? Wow, that seems fast. Isn't it in April? The calendar I look at every day is not a Christian one and no day is Easter. According to The Witches Almanac, Spring 2005 - Spring 2006 (The Complete Guide to Lunar Harmony), Friday is a Full Moon called The Seed Moon and Sunday is nothing more than the 27th of March. That entire Easter thing has always seemed strange to me.

The first thing is how I found out about the Easter bunny and the whole Santa thing from a 5-second sentence that my mother spit out at me, one hot summer day in Meadville, PA. Prior to her outburst, I enjoyed the whole basket of candy and the cute little bunny icon concept. The pastel colors made me feel good and I was even getting on board with the bonnet thing. While not a huge fan of candy I did love those speckled eggs and the solid dark chocolate bunny. I was happy in my ignorance and knew very little about that other version of it. I new Jesus died "...for somebody's sins" but I did not understand how the candy basket thing related to that. I could not understand what we were celebrating. But I ate the candy anyhow.

That particular summer morning way back in 1967, I was digging around in the kitchen cupboards when I found a bag of the specked malt Easter eggs. I pulled the bag out and showed it to my mom, who was sitting at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette.

I said, "Look mom, it is the same candy that the Easter Bunny brings me." holding the bag up to show her.

She looked at me, took a drag of her Salem and said; "Yeah, I'm the Easter bunny, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Clause too."

Ah yes, no one ever said that mental illness was pretty. I was five and she killed three birds with one stone that day. Plus a whole bunch of other stuff that works itself up and out of me at weird, inappropriate times.

Shortly after THAT, I started watching Dark Shadows in the daytime with the elderly couple who lived kitty corner from us. They had a poodle and I would sit on their living room floor in front of the TV, with the dog lying beside me watching the black and white Dracula soap opera. The couple never had any children so the dog had an incredible life. The woman, whose name I think was Grace, taught me the meaning of the words, 'porcelain figurines' and 'animal worship'.

The second thing is a fast-forward a few years to the age of nine when I was living in Trenton, New Jersey. At this point, I am a stone cold horror movie buff and all holidays sucked - except Halloween. That is the only holiday worth a damn. Every Saturday afternoon I would watch countless B-Movie horror flicks instead of running around the neighborhood.

I was particularly fond of the Dracula theme in the films but not when he was mixed with The Wolfman and Frankenstein. I liked my creatures of the dark to remain individual. They are three different things and there is no reason for all of them not to kill each other. Like their one big difference from the remainder of the herd is what will bond them to the rest of the dark side. No, no. Why wouldn't Dracula drain The Wolfman's body dry?

I would watch The Munsters but I could never understand why not one of them ever took a nip at the niece. Same with The Adams Family. Normal looking humans were always stopping by but it was just fun and oddness. And just exactly where was Jesus in all of that? I mean all that rising from the dead and living in suburbia but those were comedies with very little horror.

At that point, my little nine-year-old brain had begun merging Jesus stories with horror stories. Unbelievably I went to Sunday School then and every week I found myself taking issue with one thing or another that they were teaching. I had begun to see Jesus as more of a Dracula type figure or Dracula as Jesus. It worked both ways.

So then, in 1970 the three of us moved to Cincinnati Ohio where I could not stop doing drugs, reading Steven King novels, or flipping my own shit out with The Exorcist. Easter was a four-day weekend filled with springtime teenage vulgarity. By then, there was no church and there was no bonnet. My head was filled with Salem's Lot and I had made a connection between Dracula, Good Friday and Easter. A few bong hits later I even had it all wrapped up nicely to now include the speckled eggs and a chocolate bunny. A little bit more 'mind expansion' and I had wrapped my head around the fallen angel, God's right-hand man, Satan. Horror and The Bible go hand in hand. Death, dying, and the fight for our soul. Good vs. evil: classic B-Movie Horror stuff.

Having been raised on a watered down version of the Presbyterian faith, and my own faith in horror, this holiday always makes me want to see a scary movie or read a good ghost story and The Bible doesn't count. I have an idea; maybe we will go see a midnight showing of The Ring II this weekend. We have wanted to see it and I think Saturday night just might be right.

Daniel 12:2 And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.

This weekend is a road trip to school to drop off a printer and a cram course for Miss Jasmine on college aid. Grandma wants to change the rulebook, (she is notorious for that, drove me nuts when I was the daughter-in-law and now, here it is again) it is time for Jasmine to get on the same page as the rest of us. Ignorance is bliss no longer.

GREEN IS A GOOD COLOR
I shot Park Slope on Sunday. If I were 32, rich and not only newly married but a new mother to boot I would so live there. I'd spit out babies with strawberry blonde heads like crazy and spend my days doing Park Slopey things with my multiple kids shoved up some au pair's ass. I'd go to the Food Co-op, palliates class, shopping and maybe even an art gallery. I would spend more money in a day than the GNP of some third world countries and I would waste so much time fucking around at nothing. It would be awesome and I would be such a bitch. Well a different kind of bitch, unlike the Jersey City cranky bitch, I would be the Park Slope mommy bitch. I would have to learn to speak in that constant nasal monotone drone that seems to be everywhere these days. It must be that the new yuppie tone. Kind of like a new ring tone.

Funny, in the 80's I hated "The Yuppie", who at the time was primarily anyone over 30. I lived in Denver and a Denver Yuppie was pretty gross in that blonde, coke fueled ski bunny way. Now that I am on the other side of 30 and cruising at a screaming pace in the land of 40, yuppies are still anyone over 30 and they are still a stuck-up drag.

I hate to admit it but I have always been jealous of the upper middle class. Not the filthy crazy rich, no, they amuse me but the upper middle has always bugged the shit out of me because of two things: privilege and a sense of entitlement. Kind of like the president. He grew up with all the privilege; yet, all he really learned how to do was snicker. He has the air of entitlement as though he were so much more than the C-Student, beer and whiskey shooters frat boy that he was/is. Oh wait, he quit drinking and found God, that's right.

SURGICAL PROCEDURES
Ah, yes indeed, lot-o-things happening over the next two weeks. Martha and I met with the new surgeon on Monday morning and I am finally on someone's surgical rotation. We both had an enormous amount of information placed in front of us but the gist is one day next week I will finally have this freak-a-zoid tumor removed.

I am scared for all the normal reasons that folks get scared about surgery but I am also pensive about the removal of the tumor and just what does it feel like to feel normal?

Anyway, I have to have a few tests and then go on mega blocking drugs. I figure once I start the heavy meds, I am not going to go anywhere. Moving around the apartment will be a difficult task I am sure.

So I guess it is a good thing we are going to see Jazz this weekend. Hmm. I will be too fucked up to rip her a new asshole like I did the other night.

The new hospital is in the middle of the nice white northern part of Jersey. It smells clean and looks pretty spick and span, unlike Christ hospital. I am sorry but I have been to Christ enough times between Jasmine's tests, Martha's stuff and my own personal nightmare to be able to say that there are parts of that hospital that are dirty. Whenever I am there, one word floats around in my head: Fungus. I have this feeling that if I check in there for the adrenal surgery, I'll end up with some bizarre staff infection and because I am allergic to penicillin and all sulfas, I'd probably be near death within hours of being admitted.

Christ is an urban hospital and I'm thinking that maybe a suburban white bread spread is what I'd like. It's what Jim and I did with Jasmine. She was born in Aurora Hospital and twenty years ago, that was a pretty creamy part of town. At the time we lived in total shit, in fact we lived within the Denver city limits, right there on Clarkson and 13th Street in a 3rd floor attic apartment with no air-conditioning. (It was July.) We were young and pretty stupid but not stupid enough to go to the city hospital right down the street. Instead, we drove an hour south to the prairie home companions of white upper middle class America. I don't care what they say, hospitals are like schools. If you want a good one, go to where the money is.

I have been thinking a lot about my C-Section lately because it was the last time I had surgery and my brain is struggling to try to remember some of the basic stuff about hospital stays. The sharing a room thing, all the weird sounds and screwy smells, general nausea and the constant request for more drugs. Stuff like that.

Sleeping in the same room with another human that is sick with a very different deal is strange. "Hi, I have a rare adrenal tumor what's wrong with you?" Seems kind of odd that we stack ourselves up like that. It is instinctual for us that when one of us is sick we want to get away from them. That goes way back to the beginning and is buried deep in our thick caveman skulls. But in a hospital, you are forced to share to not only personal life story and major illness but also a bathroom.

Bizarre memories have been floating around in my brain since I left the surgical consult on Monday. I seem to be remembering things from my mom's breast surgery after her first round of cancer when I was in sixth grade. She had a roommate that was very ill and at one point, the hospital moved the woman to intensive care while mom was there. That whole thing freaked me out. This women lying next to my mom and getting sicker and sicker bothered me more than my own mother's illness. Mom's cancer was not even a big deal because my parents made it a non-issue. My dad played it way down, at least in front of me. I'd like to think that he was a little worried but my mother never once broke her crazy stride. So by all appearances things looked just as freaky normal as they always were except the location had changed.

I have two very vivid memories from that week. One is of my dad struggling in the kitchen, to the point of massive amounts of profanity. This ended up with me eating ice cream and jell-O all week long. The second thing happened two days after my mom's surgery. It was nighttime when dad and I stopped in to see her. The roommate was sleeping but mom was sitting upright in bed smoking. She had the pull cart over her bed and on it was a deck of cards; the latest McCall's magazine; a drink that looked like a real drink but it was probably tea; a pack of Salem cigarettes and her red aluminum and beanbag ashtray from home. I guess dad had brought it for her on a previous visit. She had an IV and all the other necessary tubes jetting out of her boobs but she was just sitting in bed, smoking a Salem in a low-lit hospital room. This image is burned into my brain to the point that I could paint it on a canvas.

One other hospital memory I have is when I was around four and had my tonsils taken out. I actually remember the nurse and being in the crib. The room was pink and the nurse had one of those nurse hats that looked just like the paper one I had in my toy box at home. I also remember my throat being so sore and wait, yes- again with the ice cream and Jell-O.

Martha and I went to the Liberty Science Center over the weekend. It is something that Martha has wanted to do since we moved to Jersey City and it feeds the geeky girl in both of us. So I packed a large bag of pretzels for noshing on and off we went to the Light Rail and the badlands of New Jersey. Man, it is total shit out there. Yuck. Anyway, we didn't see the IMAX stuff due mostly to time issues but we did wander around the exhibits. We went there during off hours to avoid the colossal bullshit of the general public but even then, well I have to say this, kids suck. Kids and their pushy, self-center parents are just horrible.

There were only a few families who had well-behaved children and they appeared just as annoyed as we were with all the running and shoving. Families who seemed a little happier with each other unlike the screaming familial octopuses that made up the landscape. What is with the shoving? I had more than one child run up to an exhibit I was looking at and push me aside. If I had been the same age as this sticky, mouth-breathing thing, I would have punched it in the face and just dealt with the adult punishment that would have followed. It would have been a normal reaction then and one that was hard to control even at my age, now.

But because I am the supposed adult in these types of situations, I looked to the parents of these little monsters and what I got back from them was the look of "fuck you get out of my kids way". Nice job there Mom, when did we stop with the whole manners thing? It's not as if Martha and I were the only childless couple there. There were other folks trying to have a general good day of it too.

I am probably part of the last generation that persistently had the shit smacked out of them. Our parents hit us everywhere. At home sure, but in public too. Places like the grocery store, parking lots, department stores, restaurants and yes God, even the church. Some used the quick backhanded smack in the mouth and some just out and out abused the shit out of us with the use of props such as a belts, a tree branch (also known as a switch) or my mother's personal favorite, a yard stick.

Other adults, like teachers or perfect strangers could even hit us. Now there was a protocol for the teachers and it involved a 18 x 4 x 1 piece of wood that looked like a mini boat ore, and so it's name; The Paddle. In seventh grade, I was hit with the paddle and I do not remember what I did to deserve it but I do remember the teacher who did it. His name was Mr. Cobb and he smacked my ass four times after class. It hurt and I made sure that, going forward, all bad shit that I did in school never resulted in the use of The Paddle. You could suspend me or give me detention just stop with The Paddle thing. Hitting or the threat of being hit was a great deterrent and all-purpose motivator.

Yes, this was back in the day when it really did take a village to raise a child and all the adults were active players. I even had a woman, whom I did not know and did not know my parents, yank my arm almost off my body because I would not stop running up and down the sidewalk in front of her ice-cream store. Funny, up until that moment, I had always thought of it as MY ice-cream store and this is why she needed to correct me, and rightly so. She grabbed me, yelled at me and then made me apologize to a group of old women that I had been bothering. Then she made me sit on the bench in front of the store with her for a few minutes until she though I had calmed down enough to leave. I did not hate her but she did scare the shit out of me. Pretty much from that point on, I started to understand that whole respect for public space kind of thing. It wasn't anything my parents did or probably could have done because I would not have acted like such an idiot in front of them. Because why? Because, they would have smacked the shit out of me. No it had to come from some weird cranky lady correcting my behavior in order for me to understand that I was an asshole.

But if I had said one word to that child after being shoved by her at the Science Center I probably would have ended up in an argument with the mother to the point where the Homeland Security chick who searched my purse at the front door would have ushered me into a backroom somewhere. So instead, I glared at mom and her stroller the size of a Lazy-Boy recliner, applied massive amounts of hand sanitizer and tried not to laugh.

Some of the best birthdays are the ones that I can't seem to remember that well. I was either too young or too fucked up but I do remember thinking at the time that these were great days regardless of whatever distorted reasoning's.

Over thirty, birthdays are a time of reflection but at a young forty-two, I already have entirely too much thinking going on in my life. Does everything have to be so dreadfully serious? One of the best birthdays that I ever had was my fifth and all that happened that year was my Aunt Virginia and Uncle Johnny came to town and we went out to dinner. But the little details from that day are what make it a great day.

It was 1967 and my Aunt had given me a mod-orange, yellow and brown dress. The sleeves were puffy and made of translucent chiffon. The hemline hit mid-thigh and I loved it. She gave me a pair of white go-go boots to complete the ensemble. I'm surprised I didn't pass out. Maybe I did, I can't remember but I do remember sticking my left foot in that boot and zipping up the zipper to my knee. You couldn't have smacked that smile of my face no matter what.

From that moment on, my Aunt Virginia was the best person in the world. Aunt Virginia and Uncle Johnny were not actually related to me. They were friends of my parents and soon after my fifth birthday I didn't' really see them too much. By the time we had moved to Ohio they were just a memory in the house. Most of my parents' personal friends fell out of flavor after a few years but the business, country club friends stayed around much longer. I think it is directly related to anyone who actually came to the house. Once inside folks didn't seem to eager to come back around.

For my birthdays mom would buy a Pepperidge Farm frozen 3-Layer Vanilla cake with white icing and write Happy Birthday on it. Sometimes, she would make red flowers or there might be candles. Mom had convinced herself that I was allergic to chocolate so she would only give me vanilla anything. Easter candy was either pure sugar balls or chocolate vanilla - a total joke with the use of the word chocolate. All store bought cakes, cookies, milk and any desert item was vanilla. Halloween, well almost all of it was thrown out. I didn't have my own freewill with chocolate until I was a teenager and by then I was into a whole other kind of candy. In fact, I'm not really a candy person. Oh now I can motor through a box of Godiva dark chocolate truffles just as well as the next crazy bitch but 'candy' has never interested me. But I do make a wicked double layer chocolate fudge cake.

But back to my fifth birthday. That night we all went to the country club for dinner. I wore my new dress and boots regardless of the arctic wind coming off of Lake Erie. The maitre d' sat us next to a table where identical twin girls were sitting with their parents. I was mesmerized. I had never seen twins outside of the Ed Sullivan show and I could not stop gawking at them. They had long blond hair and matching black velvet outfits. And they were about my age. This blew my mind. Mom and Dad bitched at me all through dinner to stop staring at them but I couldn't. Besides they didn't care, they kept giggling and waving at me. I had bright red hair and that was something they had never seen before other than Bozo the Clown and THAT was assuming they had a color TV at their house. Most people didn't in 1967. We had our own little Carney show and if all of the adults would have just backed the fuck up and let the natural weirdness of children take place it all would have been fine. Instead, my parent s bitched at me and their parents bitched at them. No one had a good time except the three of us.

LIFE IN A LETTER
Sunday morning I was digging around in my old photo albums, the whole memory kind not the arty farty ones, looking for a photo taken of Sherry and me on my 17th birthday. I had been writing about this whole birthday thing and I wanted to run that photo, maybe, I didn't know but I wanted to find it. I have hardly any photos of my life before 17. I have one baby picture, three photos that were taken in Sherry's bedroom and my senior photo. So the pickings of a life prior are quite slim. Anyway, I came across a strange letter that my dad sent me in late July of 1979.

It was between my junior and senior year of high school. I was 16 and away at a summer arts program that I had paid for in cash pulled together from a combination of drug money and a full-time night shift job as a carhop at Frisch's Big Boy. The photo that I had been looking for, and had since found and displayed on the bed in front of me, was my thumbtack in time. The return address was a P.O. Box in Cincinnati, not the house address. He had also given me his private number at the office. Previously, I had only his secretary's number.

In the letter, he had written some very different things to me, unlike the usual mantra of what a fuck up I was. So different that he even wrote down that he was proud of me, that I had worked hard AND that he thought I was talented.

It is all very strange and it left me itchy and with a headache. I know better than to read his letters but this caught my eye because of the return address. I have no memory of it, except the one line about being proud of me. I do remember thinking something about it being in writing, words to hang on to, so speak and then sticking it in a book. Isn't that funny? Probably because it was so different that I just didn't have any idea how to process it. My mind is a terrible thing.

All this is just an overwhelming desire to find meaning in something that most likely does not have any to begin with. But, that is what we do. Look for meaning in the meaningless.

SAVE A TREE
The holiday library party wasn't too horrible with the general public in public thing and we even went on a geek tour of the stacks of books down under the main library. They have seven floors of books running under the library for two city blocks. That is totally insane. Sushi was great but I can no longer eat the tuna tartar that has the mayonnaise in it. It makes me sick, sick sick. After dinner, Martha and I toyed with the idea of buying a tree.

Every year, Martha and I always have the 'price' talk when it comes to trees. She wants a free one and I think anything fewer than fifty dollars wrapped in a pretty New York moment is great. We decided to wait and maybe Martha could pick one up out by where she works in during the week. So we go home and do the "I'll feed the cats Fancy Feast while you change the litter box" combination and life went on its normal Sunday night routine.

Martha took the cat litter down to the recycle room and there in the middle of the room was a beautiful tree measuring just under six-feet tall. It was laying there on the tile floor with a brand new, heavy-duty tree stand, still full of water, sitting next to it. It was as though someone had just given up on Christmas right out of the gate. She put it on the elevator and pushed it through the front door calling my name. I ran to the hallway and there she is standing there holding a tree with a big ass smile on her face. There is nothing wrong with it, the needles still stick and it feels soft and dewy. It is beautiful and it is Martha's favorite price, free.

Now I just have to stop at K-Mart to pick up new Christmas lights, I can't find ours. Actually, I think I gave them to Jasmine for her dorm room. I also finally get to buy a squirt bottle for Zoë. She's a bad kitty when it comes to the evergreen and this year is going to be a wet one for her.

But talk about a really super cool birthday present, eh? A free Christmas tree.

And oh yeah, one more thing, McDonalds delivery, seriously? Isn't that one of the seven signs apocalypse?

A year ago, I was down in Ohio dealing (or not dealing) with the death of my mom and I cannot seem to shake the sensation of that icky spectacle. Life after your parents die makes for a strange sense of awareness. In my case a whole bunch of things make it a little more troublesome but for the sake of something normal I'll just state some obvious stuff. I am an only child and my grandparents are dead. The whole cousin thing is so small and distant that I have no idea who is still alive. I was the youngest first cousin and there were only a handful of us. My relationship with both of my parents was, let us just say fucked and I am being kind. The troublesome parts are the anniversary dates, the particular days that seem to stick in my head and remind me of the mountain of bullshit from where I come from.

Bad anniversaries do that I suppose. The whole cancer thing with Jasmine works very similar in my mind but truthfully, what comes slamming back is the fear. She does not worry, I do, and we usually end up yelling at each other about it all. It's a good time for she and I and those within earshot enjoy it too.

Christmas season and weird family shit go hand in hand but when you are a family of three, the strange sticks out more.

LEARNING TO SEW
My mom and dad had a plastic Christmas tree that they kept in a huge Sears box in the basement. Mom hated pine needles, plants, pets and anything living that might make a mess. Likewise, my worthiness was constantly in question. Every year my dad would lug that thing up the basement stairs and assemble the razor sharp wire mess in the family room. He usually did this around the fifth or sixth of December, whatever day fell on the first Sunday in the month. We never went to church (what, are you kidding?) and by that point in the school year I was usually grounded so the whole day was pretty free.

First, he would pull all of the pieces for the tree from the box and lay them around the room. The view from the kitchen looked as though my father had done bad things to an unnaturally green evergreen.

My parents had an old black lacquered stereo console that they must have bought sometime in the fifties. It was in every baby photo I ever saw and there used to be plenty of those. My dad was a photographer and shot a great deal of film of me as a child and mom as a new mother. He also photographed every Christmas up until I was around eleven. Then he just stopped. Anyway, the console had a radio and a turntable that played 33 & 1/3's, 45's and 78's. My dad had a huge collection of 78's, mostly big band stuff but this was the one time of year when my mother removed the lamb from the top of it and opened the lid. Bing Crosby's White Christmas blasted repeatedly, so much so that to this very day I cannot tolerate it.

While Bing would sing, my dad would snap the pieces into the tall green metal tower and by mid-tree the profanity would start. As a small child, I would sit at the kitchen table and watch with wonder. As a teenager, I would sit on the kitchen floor with a head full of acid and attempt to analyze the whole experience.

My mom had the box with the all of the ornaments and crap we put in the front windows of the house. Decorating the tree was my job because I was "the artist" and they considered it a birthday present to let me do it. In a weird way, I was into it. Every year I decorated the tree that dad built.

Dad would finish snapping the last wire branch at the top with a final "fucking thing" statement and then he'd step back, gaze at it, tilt his head from side to side and then glance over at me in the kitchen, clap his hands together and say "Okay, it's all yours" and walk off. Elvis had left the building. He would stomp off to his office not to be seen again until dinner.

At that point, Mom would come on stage with the box of garland, lights, ornaments, tinsel and the white angel for the top. Once she had given me all the props, she would go back to decorating the front windows of the house with plastic Christmas wreaths, the center of which had a single red candle with two white snowbells on each side. They were the prettiest thing, six of them in all and every year I never understood how we ended up with something so understated.

I had a least and hour of alone time with the tree before mom would be back, sitting on the couch, chain smoking and watching me decorate. She never said anything to me; she would just sit roughly ten feet away and keep an eye on me. Calling it creepy isn't quite right it was more disturbing. I honestly don't think she was even looking at me. At least that is what I told myself then. I think she was off in her own thoughts and daydreams. Sometimes, depending upon how wasted I was, I would ask her what she was thinking about and her only response was "Dinner." Once dad had finished with his part, we could stop the music so the only sound was the ticking of the grandfather clock and her hitting a cigarette. After about a half hour, the family room was full of low haze of stagnant air made pronounced by the smoke.

Everything about the tree was glitter. Glitter covered all of it, including me. It was more like a gay disco tree than the gay disco trees I would see years later during my clubbing of the holiday seasons.

Most of the balls came in highly reflective colors and others were a Spiro-graph styled fabrication with sharp pointed edges. Metallic paint was everywhere as was sprayed on snow that would scrap my fingers as I removed them from the storage tissue. The lights were huge bulbs of fire hazard red, blue and green. Every year my mom would buy three large boxes of garland (gold and silver) and five boxes of tinsel. There was so much tinsel that strands of it would melt to the big bulbs after hours of on time.

The idea here was that my father did not want ANY of the green parts of the tree to show. One year it suddenly hit me why this was important to him. Well it didn't hit me, so much as I just asked him about it before the branch snapping when he was still organizing and in a fairly good mood. He told me that when he was a kid they were so poor that some years they didn't have Christmas but they always had a tree. The decorations were a few "shitty" (his word not mine) home made ornaments and a bare tree made him "feel poor". He liked the plastic trees and he wanted them COVERED in crap.

It usually took me three hours to decorate the tree and by the time I was finished the thing looked like it was made of aluminum. It was so reflective that you could use it as a mirror, apply mascara, adjust your clothes etc. Granted, it was a distorted mess and more like a funhouse mirror but it was excellent for the close-in work and fit the mood of the house perfectly.

Once plugged in and admired on the first night, it was pretty much forgotten by my parents until it was time to take it down, the first week January. I however hovered around it as if it were a shrine. I would lie on the floor every night watching TV, my eyes alternating between Welcome Back Kotter episodes and the glitter fest to the right of it. The competition for my attention was intense.

According to Martha, I have now carried on with a few of these bizarre traditions. I totally control the tree, the decoration of it and require constant approval while "creating it". A few things are different, though. We always get a real tree on my birthday and the green is the best part. I don't believe I own any normal Christmas music but I have several punk Christmas songs but I never play those either. The more bizarre things I have found along the way end up in the tree and tinsel is forbidden for a variety of reasons. Nobody likes pulling long silver strands out of a cat's ass but the first week in December will forever remind me of my Ohio Christmas's. Last year was just the seal on the memory. The burp on the Tupperware.