a moment in the day: a shot

I'm just pulling the garbage out of the can to get it ready to take it to the curb when my sister texts: "Hey mom and I are gonna have a shot for dad in a min can you too?"

It's August 11. Five years—five unbelievable years long—since our dad left this world. My mom loves good tequila and doesn't drink it much, but she has a nice bottle that she and Edina once in a while, for a special occasion or remembrance, will take down and pour a shot and toast.

I start going through the cabinet. What can I use? There's an open bottle of red wine on the counter but it's 95 degrees out at seven in the evening, and somehow a shot of something hard seems less of a fireball to your stomach than red wine right now. The phone—the land line, we only talk on the land line—starts ringing and I run through the house to grab it. Mom's on the other end, ready with her little shot glass with Edina close by. I tell her I'm looking for what to use, and I pull down from the high cabinet in the kitchen the bottles my hand can reach. 

A pretty blue bottle that turns out to be gin. A brown bottle that looks to be less than a shot's worth of rum. Mom says that Edina says that I can use "three fingers of milk" if I want. That sounds better than the gin.

"I've got Cointreau!" I say and find a pretty shot glass in the lower cabinet and pour. 

I don't know where to go for this moment. I don't want to stand in the kitchen next to my garbage bag. I go out into the dining room, then through to the edge of the living room. There's nothing of Dad in here, but Mom and Edina are waiting, so I stop, and I realize that what I was doing was moving toward the spot in the corner of the living room with Nicholas's painting and Nicholas's ashes, one loss pinch-hitting for another.  

I say, "OK!"

"I'm clinking with Edina," Mom announces. And then, "I'm clinking the phone!"

I clink the phone. "I'm clinking the phone!"

The phone's plastic so it's more like a clack.

And now a sip. Sweetness that tweaks at my nostrils and burns down into my stomach.

"Edina shot," Mom says. "I'm sipping."

"I'm sipping," I say.

"You know, your dad liked Cointreau," Mom says.

And I am so happy. I didn't know that. Or if I knew that, I forgot it. I just remember that when Dad was drinking he liked Scotch, which we don't have. 

I raise my glass to the fact that Dad liked Cointreau.

After we hang up the phone and Mom and Edina go off to make nachos, a fitting dish for a Dad day, I linger to sip a little longer, not yet ready to get back to taking out the trash.

My dad

I lost my dad a year ago. Not long after, my aunt asked if I was going to write an obituary. What I wrote was mostly that, a little bit upside-down from the traditional structure, but something that pulled together who he was, at least to me. I thought today, on the anniversary, I would post that here.

*

Don Chandler Little was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on October 6th, 1945, and grew up in Maysville, Kentucky, the only child to Frank Chandler and Stella Aline Little. As a kid, he loved playing baseball with the neighborhood boys and listening to games on the radio. In the summers, the family would vacation in Florida where Don would play golf with his dad, check out the Daytona Speedway, and lounge on the beach, devouring paperbacks one after the other. In high school, he played French horn in the band and landed the lead part in his senior class play, Mr. Coed.

When he graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Accounting from the University of Kentucky, Don was awarded a Corning Glass fellowship, which gave him the chance to travel the world. He saw Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, India, Israel, then headed to Europe. In Brussels, he took a pause in his touring to work at the local Corning Glass offices to earn some extra traveling money. Stopping one day into the First National City Bank, he was waited on by Kathy Cooke, an American living overseas with her Naval family. He asked her out and the rest is history.

Because Kathy invited Don home to Holland to meet her family. "I know what's going to happen," she said. "You're going to meet my sister and fall in love with her."

And he did.

And he did.

Lucy Cooke and Don Little met in mid-January of 1968. Their first date was Chinese food in London's SoHo in February. In April, they were engaged. Statistics on marital success based on longevity of courtship be damned.

They returned from Europe and were married on August 24th, 1968. Don had landed a job at Arthur Andersen and Company but first headed off for a few days' honeymoon, followed by a trip to his boyhood home in Kentucky to visit the local draft board. Unsure how to classify the young men who'd been awarded Corning Glass fellowships, the draft board had given each a business deferral, but now that Don's fellowship had come to an end, that classification changed. To 1A: draft immediately.

"Your wife doesn't happen to be pregnant, does she?" a woman working in the draft board office asked him.

She explained that if his wife were expecting, he'd be eligible again for a business deferral. Eugenia Bain was born approximately nine months later.

Statistics on domestic success based on preparation and planning be damned.

In August of 1971, Don still working for Arthur Andersen, they moved to Melbourne, Australia, where their second child, Edina Kathleen, was born, in September of 1972. They lived there until May of 1974, when they moved back to Washington DC, and then, a little later, Southern California, welcoming son Frank Chandler in July of 1976.

By then, Don had left Arthur Andersen and was working for US Rentals. The family of five became a family of seven with the addition of Carmen Garcia and her two-month-old baby Liz. In the early Eighties, Don started G/L Systems, which provided payroll and other accounting services to local businesses. The family continued to grow, welcoming the next generation: Amy Bullard, Alex Bullard, Abigail Bailey Little, and Hana Tateno.

In Don's business G/L Systems, which he ran for almost forty years, he described himself as a "one-stop comptroller." But what else was he? Husband, father, grandfather (known to his grandchildren as Pops). Lover of sports, particularly ice hockey and baseball. Avid reader. Punster. Clever namer of pets. Ardent scholar of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. Ardent enthusiast of tasty things including frozen yogurt, milkshakes, Junior Mints, Heath Bars, Klondike Bars (his last discovered treat), and Lucy Little's excellent cooking. Lover of music. A storyteller at heart. A true gentleman. A computer whiz who was known to review new programs for software creators. The dad who did his kids' taxes for years even though taxes were his least favorite activity in accounting. Bringer of surprise bouquets of flowers. Orchestrator of cunning and elaborate gift schemes. Sporter of the most dashing beard. A quiet force who knew his mind and spoke it well. A generous person. A respectful person. An authentic person. The perfect emblem, in this daughter's opinion, of what a man should be.

a moment in the day: moon

It's 7:54 on July the 20th, 2019, and I'm sitting in front of my laptop computer in the thick air-conditioner air, waiting for the big moment.

I had set my iPhone alarm clock so I wouldn't forget to watch at just the right time. Fifty years ago right now—or two minutes from now—Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon.

I have a Youtube video all ready to go. So I can watch the moment on my laptop  (a thing Neil Armstrong never knew about when he was walking around on the moon) via the internet (a thing Neil Armstrong never knew about when he was walking around on the moon). I googled the exact time and then used the internet to convert Coordinated Universal Time to Pacific Daylight Time (there are a lot of things I did tonight that would have blown Neil Armstrong's mind back when he was walking around on the moon) so I'd know exactly when I would need to be watching this thing in order to honor my membership in the American Society of Nerds (if there were such a thing, Neil Armstrong would surely have been a member).

I click the play arrow. I throw it into full screen mode.

The muddy, contrasty video opens up on what is apparently NASA: three big screens taking up most of my screen, the middle one showing a huge map in alien neon greens, and in the lower corner a spread of small computer consoles with men working at them, bathed in mauve. A muffled voice says, "Neil, this is Houston, loud and clear."

My nerd heart leaps.

I watch the little figures at their mauve computers move at the bottom of my computer, and then one of the big screens before them blinks. My computer blinks from the earth to the moon. The color disappears and it's all black and white and gray. Shapes that mean nothing to my eyes.

A voice says, "And we're getting a picture on the TV."

The first images I see from the moon are upside down. I only know this because the voice on the TV tells me so. When they flip right side up, I still don't know what I'm seeing—just gray, contrasty shapes—until something starts to move and I start to make out what's going on. It's Neil Armstrong's shape emerging from the rocket.

I was born on June 14th, 1969. Mom and Dad always say they held me up to the TV so I could watch. Of course I have no memory of it. I have no memory, even, of the last telling of that story. Who was it who held me up? Mom or Dad? Whenever I think about the story, it's always "we" in my head. Was I fussy or quiet? Did my eyes connect with the shapes on our TV or was I looking off elsewhere? What was I wearing? I mean, I was just over a month old. Was I naked? Was I mooning them watching their man on the moon?

On my computer, Neil Armstrong is descending the ladder. As he steps down onto the surface of the moon, I don't know exactly what time it is because I'm in full-screen mode—it could still be 7:55, it could have nudged past to 7:57. I watch the almost indistinguishable shapes of rocket ladder and spaceman. His big, bulbous space helmet. "It's one small step for man," he says, and I wonder, did he practice this speech in front of the mirror as he was shaving in the morning before takeoff? "One giant leap for mankind."

"I think that was Neil's quote," the TV voice says, "I didn't understand it."

I think the thing that has always stuck with me about the moon landing, personally, beyond the wonder of humans first doing this thing that was so seemingly impossible and magical, is that my parents held me up to see it, that the moment for them was as much about their first baby as it was the near reaches of outer space.

Or I could be projecting a little.

I pick up Nicholas and hold him up to my laptop screen as Neil Armstrong walks around on the moon. Nicholas is unimpressed.

a moment in the day: short story

I'm up before six, sitting at the computer. In a few minutes I'll have to run down to wake Stephen up and then in about forty-five minutes, we'll leave to pick my parents up at the hotel and take them to the airport after a glorious three-day birthday visit of eating and talking and eating and talking.

I'm reading a random short story in an online literary journal. This strikes me as strange, suddenly. That my mind is on something other than their impending departure. That I'm not sitting here pining in advance of the leaving.

I've been known to pine in advance to crazy degrees. Like for the weeks leading up to the visit. Every night, dreaming that I'm in California visiting them, or they're in Portland visiting me, and it's the last night, and tomorrow they'll be gone.

Sometimes I have the goodbye dream when no trip is even on the horizon. Sometimes night after night for a ridiculous number of nights. I get why I was so obsessed in my early adulthood, when I really didn't love my life on the road, and coming home to visit family was the big bright spot in my year, but it's weird to finally have a life I really like and still pine so hard for that other home.

This short story is organized into bite-sized pieces jumping forward and backward through time. The family is like mine: a mom, a dad, two sisters and a brother. Except that they fight all the time.

Weirdly, I didn't even have the dream last night, on the last night. Is that what being fifty is like? Have I finally, finally grown up?

I realize it's after six, so I run down quick to go into the bedroom and turn off the sound machine and stop Stephen's soft snoring. Forty-five minutes, and we'll leave to take them to the airport. I go back upstairs and sit back down in front of the computer. I finish the short story. I don't know why the ending makes me cry.

Lu

When I was a kid, I had a baby doll. Her name was Lucy Barker.

She was named after my mom's first and middle names (from before Mom married Dad and got a maiden name to replace the middle).

I also had a second baby doll. She was smaller and had a beanbag body and a plastic head.

Her name was Little Lucy Barker.

I wish I could claim to have named both. As a kid, I remember I was proud to have two dolls named after my mother, who was, as you must know, the Very Best Human in the World.

It was my dad who suggested those names. He was also the biggest pet namer in the family. When we got two kittens he named them too:

Two-Lu and Tre-Lu.

I swear he didn't always name everything after my mom, but like with the dolls, I loved that the kitties were named after her. The way Dad named things, it felt like the perfect expression of love: simple and funny and joyful.

I never did have any kids to name anything, but I'd like to think if I were mulling names, my dad would say, hey, I've got a suggestion.

We kids, as young adults, used to laugh about how we often called my parents' home "Mom's house." Sometimes mothers get all the accolades. In 2001 I stayed there for Christmas, and I learned that my two-year-old then-nephew Maxx (now Amy) called it, "Lulu's house."

I said, "Maxx, where does Pops live?"

Expecting the answer to be Lulu's house.

"In the office."

a moment in the day: wheels

I pull up to the curb and sit a minute, listening. I rarely listen to music on my commute to work, but today I impulsively grabbed a John Lennon CD, and now I’m just sitting here listening to the wheels go round and round, and I don’t want to turn it off. But I got a late start and I should go in.

Listening to John Lennon makes me feel my childhood in a very visceral way. It makes my body feel weekend trips to the lake, feel myself lying in bed at night unable to go to sleep until I reach the end of the Beatles tape I’m listening to… that one vivid memory I have of riding to the dentist with Mom behind the wheel of the van, and Lennon singing, nobody told me there’d be days like these. Strange days, indeed. Most peculiar, Mama.

I have only a memory of a memory of a memory of the day he died. My mom on the phone crying. Talking to my aunt Kathy. I wasn’t even at my peak personal Beatlemania yet when that happened. With as obsessed as I was, as a kid, with all things John, Paul, George, and Ringo, I know that part of that obsession was my wanting to love everything my mom loved.

I turn off the car, grab my bags. Cross the street in a rain so fine it’s like walking through a memory of rain.

There's a heaviness under my ribcage.

My childhood is so far away.

It’s strange to think that I am so much older than he would ever be.

Open the door to the office and walk down the hall to the time clock. Punch my numbers in, in the tiny rhythm I always do.

Shave and a haircut. Two bits.

From my kid diaries: a recording of the first short story I ever submitted - with the spelling errors intact and my commentary in blue

The one change I made to the entry is to put the story itself in italics rather than all the quotation marks I have in my diary, because it gets a little confusing.

*

We got 2 Hitchcock magazines in the mail and I turned imediately to the “Mysterious Photograph.” It is a sort-of contest they have every month. They put a picture in the magazine. You take that picture and write a story (250 wds or less) about the picture. The winner gets $25 and the story apears in the next Hitchcock magazine.

Well, it was a picture of 4 people on a rocky island. One is fishing.

I took the magazine to the computer room, wrote up a story, and set it with the magazine in Mom’s room, where she was napping.

I wrote:

“Cast it over there, Starkey." I instructed, pointing to the left of the tip of a rock that jutted out of the water, "It’s in a little box."

I sat upon the rocks. The island was in the middle of a large bay, and it consisted soley of rocks and boulders. Starkey stood above me with a fishing poll, carefully casting and recasting the hook into the water; I sat below him, shouting directions; Manfred and Buffalo paced behind us.

Starkey lowered the hook, and it sank into the water, once again, with a quiet "ker-plop."

He dragged it around for a minute and then brought it out again, bare.

“I can’t Whitey." Starkey groaned. (He always told me that he called me Whitey because of my perfectly straight, white set of choppers.)

Sure, stealing all those jewels was simple, but when Manfred rowed us to the little island in his little rowboat, we lost the box over the side as we docked. Now, I could not leave until we found that box. Our Pal, Nicky, would be here to pick us up and take us down to Mexico tonight; I had to find that box before then.

“You have to." I retorted, "We’re not leaving until you do."

God knows, I couldn’t leave without my toothbrush.

Mom loved it. I was so glad. As soon as I revise it as much as I can, and give it a title, I’m going to send it to the magazine.

*

I like how I was so proud and sure of this story that I printed it out and took it into my mom's room while she was sleeping. I'm sure she proofread it and made me change all the spelling errors before I sent it out. I honestly don't remember what kind of a response, if any, I got from Hitchcock Magazine. 

On her birthday, early journal entries about my mom with the spelling errors intact and my commentary in blue

1978

January 14—I woke up. I ate breakfast. got the mail. It said: it is a chain letter. Mom helped me do what it said. We checked my rocks and put them in a thing with silver stuff and prackticed magic. Then watched T. V. This might be my first diary entry ever. 

1979

May 6—I went to the beach and home. Showed Mom Jackie Weaples. I think this was a game I made up that was like jacks but using weaples. Do you remember weaples? They were pompoms with eyes and feet.

1980

May 1—I did a tape some time ago of me singing Tomorrow.  Today I listened and Mom did too.  She said it sounded like me.  I listened.  I sound like Annie—a 10 year old singing star who is in a play!

1981

May 27—Jamie Reding got her period.  I'm jealous.  Mom says she'll get me some things just incase I do.  She might get me a bra soon too!

June 1—Dear Diary, I'm getting more and more anxious to grow up. Mom says that I'm growing faster every day I sure hope that I can change my personality.

July 6—I predicted a song on the radio. I got to bring food to customers at Mom's resturant the Friench Pantry.

1982

May 16—I got a Panda Plant. Mom got me an entry blank for the astrosmash shoot off. Astosmash was a video game I was very good at. 

August 16—I got up on the slalom for the 1st time this year. I did it on my 4th try, Coco honked the horn. Mom skied 1st time this year they honked the horn for her too. 

October 31—Halloween. Lucy (Mom's) birthday. I came home. We finished sound effects. I taped over something on one side and both taped what I taped & what I taped over. We decorated. We bobed for apples. We didn't make pop corn balls. We split up the E.T. cards (treats) Today marked an evolution in Halloween as we know it. Almost no one trick or treated. I think the sound effects were something having to do with decorating the house for Halloween, like we kids taped ourselves making ghost sounds or something.

1983

March 7—After school I had a long talk with Mom about life. I got special on "Ladybug". (Another video game.) We got a new girl in our class (Shelby). Gayle called her a slut! (I don't think she likes her)

March 19-—Mom got mad at us for not being responsible. We cleaned the house & made a card (a leaf) saying "We're turning over a new leaf" & put it out with flowers.

April 21—I was so mad. Gayle & Julie & her group were making fun of me. I got mad & I should get mad. Gayle gets mad because I'm mad because of what she says & does. I told mom & she showed me a form of self-hypnosis! She says we have different parts of our personalities. She said give your strong, brave, happy part a name. She had "Susan" & I chose "Jenni". You imagine the sad or mad or shy part (with a name or without) knocking on a door & don't let them in. Say and see the name of your best part (Jenni) over & over in your mind. Make the other names disappear or go back in your head, lay or sit with your legs not touching & hands not touching. When Mom was trying it at home for the 1st time, Frankie who was 3 yrs. old at the time came in and said "Who's that woman? Who's the woman knocking at the door? Don't let her in!" he closed all of moms doors & shutters & looked at mom & said "But it's you Mommy, the woman is you."

P.S. My tooth came out. 

1984

It's April 1, April Fools day. I had an enormous weekend. Thats all I could say for it—enormous. I'll start with Friday. Well, Mom finaly sold the French Pantry. Its no longer ours—now its 'MJC's salad & wine bar.' We had a party for the old restaurant. All (well most) of the people who ever worked there, came and had a great time. Colleen brought Sean over & I took most of the night babysitting him.

9/14/84 (5:52 AM) I woke up at 5:47 as always but as I passed Mom & Dads room, they were not still asleap in it. Their beds were made, the room was clean, and they weren't in it. So, I started down stairs. Something's happened, I told myself with dread, someone died. Because, why would they be up like this? They usually get up at 6:10. I found dad in the computer room. Mom isn't at home. When I asked what happened, he informed me that Mom has gone to the hospital with Carmen who's going to have her baby.

1985

3-25-85 9:16 PM

....What makes a person, I think, is not looks or talent or brains, but morals and personality. After all, when the body is gone, the real you still lives on. And that is your soul—you.

I have been described as “nice” by many people. But, what am I really like—the real me—? I guess I have many different personalities. To different people, I am different. I’m still a kid. Heck, no matter how old I get, I will still not understand myself fully.

I have been known to be grumpy, at times, but I don’t think I am any more grumpy than anyone else. If anything, I have been known to be a cheerful person. Tonya was surprised when I got flared up about Tricia saying my clothes are weird, always. She said it was the first time she had seen me angry. I think many people this year don’t picture me getting upset. Some of that is because I am so much happier with life this year than I was last year.

Mom always acuses me of being pessimistic. And, that is probably true. If something good could happen, I say it won’t. And part of that is because of my pride, which is alittle too high. If it doesn’t happen, I don’t want to have thought that it would. I’m working on that.

But, basically, I think I’m a pretty mature person. Sure, I have my faults, as does everybody (does Julian Lennon?) but I’m working on all of them.

April 7

I went down stairs, got out a couple of disks, switched on the computer, and made a couple changes on the old man story. I still have to give this story a name. I want the name to be as equally symbolic as the story. I thought of using the idea of the falling star in the title, because the stars shooting across the sky are a very big part of the symbolism in the story. But, every ‘star’ry title I come up with sounded wrong because the word star also means a celebrity, and if I named it something like “Fallen Star” or “When a star falls”, it also sounds like a fall of a great celebrity, which my old man was not.

I printed out a copy of it, when I finished revising, and gave it, once again, to Mom for proofreading. She said it was better, but there are still brown spots in the banana. I am begining to wonder if I will ever finish this story. Oh, but, I am so glad she is doing all this reading and telling me what she thinks is wrong with it. God, I am grateful to her for doing this. I mean, it must get boring once and a while. Now and then, she must look at that story and think to herself, oh, God, not again. So much credit goes to her for telling me what to change. I think, if I could dedicate a short-story to someone, I’d write in the dedication space for this one:

To my mother, Lucy Little, who’s practically done half of the work.

Saturday, 4/13/85 Morning.

....which reminds me of the conversation we had while eating blueberries this morning. Mom kept talking about me being such a good person, for a teenager. It may have embarrassed me when she said it, but I sure hope it’s true, and not just mother-talk.

a moment in the day: decision

I'm driving Stephen to work, and we're making a decision, even though we're not saying so. Noni's funeral in Arlington. Maybe I made my decision earlier, sitting in front of the computer, looking at prices for flights, doing the theoretical math in my head of airfare plus hotel plus transportation plus eating out plus eating out, but a decision isn't really a decision until you say it out loud.

Stephen and I drive in silence under pink and white blossom trees. Once when I was a kid, visiting Noni and Coco in Virginia, we went to Winchester for their famous Apple Blossom Festival. Beautiful old, Colonial buildings and block after block of flowering trees. That's all I remember from that time. That, and the continuing notion that all things lovely and exotic could happen in the company of Noni and Coco.

My memory of that time - and all those wonderful childhood times - is more like a picture postcard than a movie in my head, now. A picture of a moment. Or rather, it's just a picture of a picture of a picture of a moment, and even though I know that every time you remember something, you're only remembering the last memory of the memory before it, I make my memory take another picture of Noni and Coco and all those flowers, for safe keeping.

It's not really just about Noni, of course. Going out for the funeral would be a chance to be with these people I rarely see - Mom and Dad, aunts and uncles, cousins. A decision isn't really a decision until you say it out loud, and so, driving under the pink and white blossom trees, I make my decision: I'm going to let Stephen say it.

He gives a little sigh. "I guess people who are maybe thinking about buying a house should be careful with their money."

I just say, "Yeah."

We pull up at the curb and I let him out. I tell him to have a good day. I head to the grocery store.

On the radio, the classical station is playing that show where they examine the music of the cinema, and today's topic is leitmotif. Recurring musical phrases that embody certain characters or themes in a film (or opera, for that matter). They're playing a piece from Star Wars. An ominous repeat of a single note, then a trio of notes - big John Williams orchestra with the march of an Imperial army underneath. Darth Vader's theme. Just the thought of the great battle of the Rebel forces against the evil Galactic Empire makes me start to cry.

a moment in the day: dream

I wake up before the alarm goes off, and the last bit of dream sits here, on my pillow. I've dreamed it almost every night for the last month, in some way or other. Dreamed it for the few weeks before I flew to California and I've been dreaming it since I came home. Always the way with one of these California visits. In the dream, it's my last night there and I'm going to have to leave again.

It's weird to me how hard I grieve for that part of my life that's far away. Not weird that I miss my family, but how much. With how good I have it here. A good and interesting man as my husband, a good job, my friends, my endless, beloved projects. My doggie. It's not like before, when every time I left my family in California, I was heading off to an existence that felt crushingly boring and distinctly not mine. But no matter what I have here in this lovely Portland life-after, there's that one deep hole I can't fill.

A week and a half ago, the Saturday of Noni's memorial, stepping up to Mom and Dad's door, me with my good shoes in one hand, Frank and I were talking about death. Partly because of Noni, yes, but also, I think, partly because Frank has a daughter now, and children are the markers of the swift and endless passage of time.

"I think about how I won't exist," he said, "and I think about how I won't exist forever. All that time going on forever and ever..."

He was freaking himself out just thinking about thinking about it.

Though I believe, like my brother, that after I die, my consciousness won't continue, won't go to some heaven or into some new body, death isn't the forever that obsesses me. Walking up to Mom and Dad's house with my good shoes in my hand, I was thinking about my life - all that time - how little of it will be spent with this handful of the people I love most.

The other night, back here in Portland, Stephen and I sat up in bed doing what we love to do, watching an old movie. It was The Merry Widow, with Jeanette MacDonald shrouded in black tulle and Maurice Chevalier singing, "Girls! Girls! Girls!"

Late, ten thirty at least, and I started to doze, just a moment. Jeanette MacDonald and Maurice Chevalier were embracing, and then my eyes closed and I started to dream. Dreaming about that same hug, but instead of MacDonald and Chevalier, it was Mom and me.

a moment in the day: september, 1985

A little memory moment for Mother's Day. This is from my diary, September, 1985. I was sixteen. Frank would have been just nine. Horatio was our dog.

Poor punctuation and overblown teenager, already-want-to-be-a-writer language intact:


I was feeling really sick Sunday night. Mom & I were watching the T.V., she on the couch, and I on the floor. “Death of a Salesman” with Dustin Hoffman which was well done but depressing as hell.

Frankie got a hug from mom because his teeth hurt, and I wanted one, too. I came crawling over to her, feeling just like Horatio. When Frankie was gone, I got a cuddle from Mom. Oh, I could just feel the mother, daughter love we had between us. I remembered that feeling from times long ago when, as a younger child I got cuddles, and the feeling brought tears to my eyes. I must have looked really funny, my legs curled on the floor, half teenager, half child. I thought for a moment about having lived with her all my life. It was one of the best feelings in the world.

spotlight on songstory: mine

Here's a little taste of what I'll be reading at SongStory, at Someday Lounge, coming up on March 7th.

Tackle Box

I took a career test in college, the kind where you answer questions about your interests by filling in the little circles and then the computer spits out proposed careers and courses of study. When I got the results back, they said I had unrealistic goals and would have to readjust my aspirations if I ever wanted to amount to anything.

What the computer didn’t know is that what I wanted to amount to was a circus clown. At the time, I was dating a circus clown—and, in my nineteen-year-old sureness and my nineteen-year-old naïveté, figured I’d be marrying a circus clown. And whereas my nineteen-year-old sureness was more like thirty-five-year-old sureness, my nineteen-year-old naïveté was really probably twelve-year-old naïveté, which means I was really, really sure. I was going to marry him and go off on the road with a brand new, readymade career and a brand new readymade dream, to match all the overblown and under-accomplished ambitions of my earlier days.

My first ambition in life was to sing Annie on Broadway. I saw the musical in L. A., and as I floated there somewhere between the dark of my seat and the bright of the stage, there seemed nothing more delicious than tragic, singing orphans. Annie’s voice, so big and brass, I could feel that sound like it was coming right out of my chest. I decided in an eight-year-old instant that this was the life for me. In order to attain this goal, I sang Annie’s songs quietly into a cassette recorder and only showed my mom.

[i'm the one on the right. i don't know if i ever noticed before but mom and i are both wearing the same kind of flop-neck turtleneck, striped.]

I'll will be reading with Kevin Sampsell, Lidia Yuknavitch, Courtenay Hameister, Brad Rosen and Vanessa Veselka on March 7th at Someday Lounge as part of the March Music Moderne music festival.

Facebook invite is here. And info on the other great events that are part of March Music Moderne is here.

holiday catalog day

Two days to cram in the week's work at Powell's before Mom and Dad arrive and I take the rest of the week off. This two days happens to include the launch of the Holiday Catalog, which means approximately 55 staff favorite titles chosen to be displayed and sold at thirty percent off. Looking at it here in the glow of my computer screen, that just looks like some innocuous number, 55, but it's a huge endeavor. In the Green Room, it means reducing by half our display of author events books, moving into that open space half of our bestsellers and filling three cases with the Holiday Catalog books. In the Orange Room, this year, it meant completely reconfiguring the layout of about a third of the room, moving tables and spinner racks, taking books from this table and loading them into this display case, and vice versa. [I didn't have to move furniture - my hands were always on the books.]

This year, too, the morning was compounded by another huge display promotion switching out, and it was my job to take care of both. And to assist in the changing of signage posted and hanging in various places where the Holiday Catalog was going. I had help from some excellent coworkers, and still I worked pretty nonstop from seven in the morning to six-thirty last night to get all the books out, the signs up and four window displays put in place.

Holiday Catalog launch is always equal parts stress and exhilaration for me. No, maybe more exhilaration. There's something about running up and down the back stairs, pushing cart after cart down those corridors. Something about the pass of hundreds of books across my hands.

When I got home last night, Stephen had cheese waiting. We got in bed and put our feet up and watched Shirley Temple shorts.

Today: going in an hour early, maybe staying an hour or two late. Dealing with all the carts of books I abandoned at the end of yesterday. Overstock that needs to be put away, books that need to be relabeled for different sections. Posters advertising the Holiday Catalog need to go up. A hundred plus shelf talkers need to be notated with shelf locations and distributed. The books I order need to be tended to.

Then straight from work to an art opening and then home. And then home. Stephen and me and Nicholas and more cheese and a glass of wine. And then Mom and Dad.

Have I said lately how amazing this woman is? Have I said it enough? And it's not just the avocados and vegemite.