Counting Cows

Since my father died I can’t sleep anywhere except on the couch. We have four unused beds in three separate unused rooms of our house, not counting the day bed on the sun-porch.

Two are king-sized.
All four have very comfortable mattresses.
Handmade quilts made by old southern women adorn them.
One even has a memory foam mattress pad.

Still...

I can only fall asleep curled up on the mangled brown sofa, tucked in the corner of our living room. Have I mentioned it is six inches too short for me to stretch out? My mother, never the most patient person to begin with, is ready to wring my neck.

“Son, for the love of God just pick a room and sleep there.” She shakes her head, plagued with worry.

In her mind, by sleeping on the couch, I have found yet another way to be different. She finds it odd and upsetting. I hear her talking to my Aunt Shirley, a one-sided series of whispers...

“Now he’s sleeping in the living room.”
“Every night.”
“On the couch.”
“What’s next? Peeing in the yard?”

Why am I sleeping on a sofa that was clearly not built to accommodate my six feet three frame? I don’t know---it is certainly not good for my back.
Or my hip.
Or my neck.

It started when my father was sick.

Let me be clear about his illness before we go any further---it was the most horrible thing we have ever been through as a family. I’m not complaining and I won’t go into all the unpleasant details all over again but it is important to know that I’m not talking about the flu or bursitis. His body stopped working and his mind emptied out like water pouring down the drain. Dementia. That’s what the doctor’s said. As if that wasn’t enough, something switched off in his body and he could no longer use his arms or legs. Dementia and Paralysis. As far as diagnoses go, that’s pretty broad, if you ask me. Essentially it was pretty accurate, though--- a complete loss of mind and body.

He:
Couldn’t go to the bathroom alone,
Couldn’t clean himself,
Couldn’t feed himself,
Couldn’t remember us,
Couldn’t remember his own name.

He could remember to be angry though and, hey, I have to tell you I GET that. The anger. No one could begrudge him that. He had every reason to be royally pissed.

The thing is, he didn’t have anyone to blame...

So he took it out on us. He was perpetually frantic---puzzled by this predicament he’d found himself in. Around the clock we ministered to him, working in shifts and working together to calm him and clean up after him. Nothing made any difference.

Still paralyzed. Still bewildered. Still pissed.

But I promised not to go into unpleasant details. So, I will just say this:
He was terrified and angry and we were exhausted. Anger. Fear. Bone weary fatigue. That was our new default state.

But I can’t fairly blame the sofa sleeping all on my father. The truth is I’m all out of sorts---deflated and unfocused and more than a little overwhelmed by the things I have been feeling (and trying not to feel) since he died. If anything, the recent events have simply agitated a pre-existing condition. I suppose I feel that if I settle anywhere then all this... STUFF...is going to catch up with me. If I pick any one of those bedrooms then it is official---I’m back home... and I don’t know how I feel about that. There’s more too, of course but for the life of me I can’t seem to spit it out. Isn’t it funny how we...people, I mean...only see our own problems deeply enough to be scared of them? Like animals we feel this fear and the fear makes us stupid and tight and bound to crazy routines that keep us trapped.

And afraid.

So...

A thousand times I have slept on this sofa and risen and slept again...and risen until the bottom has nearly fallen out of it. Underneath the cushions I have placed two sturdy wooden boards to keep the couch from sagging. I have sworn to give the poor thing a break---a little love for the love-seat--- but I can’t fall asleep anywhere else. Somehow the shape my body makes when I lie there, a tight narrow curve, is the position in which my body feels safe.

We are moving forward---my mother, my sister, and I---baby steps, certainly, but still it is something. Last week my mother took the last of my father’s clothes to Goodwill and I cleaned out his tool shed. We have painted the room he slept in during his last days with us and decorated the sun room where we parked his wheel chair during the day. I never settle in those rooms, though. No one does. But if anyone ever decided to venture in and sit for a spell the decor would look fabulous.

We have a new dog.
We planted a garden.
We cleaned the garage.
We do our best to keep the farm running.

Just yesterday we walked up the road to the top of our property line to count the cows. We lost a cow last month when she was having a calf. She went missing and we found her dead in the lake, the calf stillborn. These are things my father would have watched for. He would never have let such a thing happen. Now we pay better attention, though I cannot imagine what I would do if a cow needed me to help during a birthing. Vomit probably.

Nevertheless, Mom and I walk the road and check the cows because it feels like we ought to. The quiet little dirt road in front of our house meanders up a hill and wraps around our pastures. From the road we can count the head of cattle on either side.

On this day, before we have gotten halfway up the hill, Mom starts hollering at Abby, the new dog, who has an uncanny knack for finding repulsive things to eat. It appears she has found a crushed armadillo. The ground around the roadkill is peppered with sun-dried armadillo fetuses, given up to some pick-up truck like candy from a pinata. Abby is up to her ears in it before we can stop her. By the time we catch up she has made quick work of the goop. Mother looks up at me, both of us green around the gills, and we hurry away. Shortly, we hear Abby’s collar jingle as she trots up beside us and mother says decisively, “Don’t even thinking about licking me”.

Abby is nothing like sweet Milo, our beloved American Eskimo Spitz. She is a filthy, rummaging beast that takes delight in rubbing in all forms of decaying flesh and fecal matter---and we love her. We love this dog. When Milo died, only two months after Daddy did, my mother announced that she would never get another dog. I knew better than to argue with her because I understood that Milo was special. He was not a dog. He was our toddler, a little bit slow, who wore white fur pajamas around the clock. Abby showed up at our house, almost a year to the day my father died. She was filthy, malnourished, and walked with a bad limp. Though worse for wear, she was still one of the most beautiful dogs I had ever seen---a mix of a Golden Retriever and Australian Shepherd, copper colored from head to tail with beautiful golden eyes. It took us two days to get her to trust us--- endless repetitions of kneeling, holding out our hands, and begging her to come to us. We were pretty sure that someone had abused her, possibly thrown her out of a moving car, her hip was so badly dislocated. The idea of someone hurting this beautiful and sweet-tempered animal burned in my mother’s gut. One evening as we watched television she absently stroked the dog’s back. As her hand moved to Abby’s hip and rested on the misshapen bone, my mother looked to me and said evenly,

“ I’d like to get my hands on the sonovabitch that did this and kill him.”

Some days I forget to put on pants. On this day of cow counting and armadillo eating we are already a good quarter mile from the house when a white pick-up comes speeding down the hill. At this moment I realize I am wearing only my Hanes boxer briefs and a too-tight tie-dyed tee shirt.

“ I’m not wearing pants, Mama.”

She replies, simply, “Oops.” and motions for me to step into the ditch for the truck to pass. While waiting there in the tall grass I notice wild blackberry bushes growing along the fence line and remember an awful story my grandmother told once about a girl who was bitten by two copperheads while picking blackberries.

“Don’t you just loves blackberries, Davey? Well, snakes love them too!”

Her voice was sweet and engaging but I knew better than to let myself get fooled. Something horrible always happened in one of Meme’s stories. By the end...

“and those snakes were hanging off of that girl when she crawled out of them bushes. Hanging.”

My grandmother loved gruesome stories.

“Dead as a hammer by the time they got her to the hospital.”

I suspect my mother might remember the story too because the split second the pickup passes she makes a quick, awkward jump out of the grass and back onto clear road.

From the top of the hill that overlooks our land, Mother is already counting aloud and I stop to look over the pasture. The cows graze there just beyond the fence and further down the hill, our little house, dominated by a pecan tree my grandfather planted too close to the front porch seems simply miniscule.

In 1969, my mother and father purchased this house in Atlanta for a mere five thousand dollars. The city was making room for a new airport and our new/old home was cut into fourths and transported on trucks eighty miles west to Heard County. The little house from the city adapted to its new life in the country. It was extended and improved as its family grew up and changed. It is on the decline now, that’s clear. The roof is leaking and the gables beg for a coat of paint. From where I now stand I can’t see the little victim of urban renewal that it once was--- in pieces and out of place among the dirt roads, trees, and cows. I see a house and a garden. A barn. The apple trees my daddy planted. The window to my room. A yard that needs mowing.

My home.

I blur my eyes and it looks, for a moment, unreal--- as if someone has lifted a needlepoint farmhouse out of a frame and plopped it down in front of me.

“ I count twenty-one over here.” Mother says.
“ Twenty.” I counter.

She smiles and pulls me closer to the fence, a better vantage point to see the new calf standing behind its mother. It is less than a day old and it’s already up and running.

“You’re right. Twenty-one.”

The sun begins to dip below the tree line. It will be bedtime soon. From where we stand the road home curves into a near perfect circle and I can’t help but wonder if my daddy planned it this way when he put the fences up fifty years ago. Gray Road wraps itself around us and from the embrace I can see everything that matters.

We watch the new calf play for a good long time and then we head back home.

Raised By Television

I was raised by television.

Occasionally, my birth mother ambled by to feed me or clean up a mess I’d made but she knew better than to try to get between me and my Magnavox. In seventh grade one of my teachers did a Student Time Management Survey and it was determined that I watched, on average, eight to ten hours of television daily---when you lump into the sum entire weekends.

“That’s outrageous, David!” She said it laughing but I could tell she was really taken aback. “I’m going to tell your mother to ration your T.V.”

I thought, “Don’t make me come after you, lady.”

She continued, “Do you realize television is a full time job for you?”

Of course it was.

“When do you have time for homework?”

The truth is that I never had any trouble in school and I credited that to my television shows, thank you very much. I learned just about everything I needed to know up till fifth or sixth grade from The Superfriends---Biology, Physics, Earth Science, Writing (dramatic structure), and even Philosophy and Ethics. At a time in my development when my mother and father were working sixteen hour days 364 and a half days a year to make ends meet I learned right from wrong from a man in a cape.

My favorite commercial from when I was a kid was the Enjoli lady. This woman in a long, blue evening gown danced around holding a frying pan while a montage of images from her day flashed in the background. She was a happy woman, apparently, full of spunk as she hailed a taxi and tickled nearly to death to look over a bunch of boring looking papers at her high rise office. She had it all and she knew it! The selling point for the whole commercial, really, was the music, a jazzy little ditty that went like this:

I can bring home the bacon (wonk wonk wonk)
Fry it up in a pan (wonk wonk wonk)
And never never never never let you
Forget you’re a man!
‘Cuz I’m a woman!
Enjoli!

I remember being mesmerized by the woman’s teeth, so very big and white and prominent. Something about the teeth combined with the frying pan frightened me a little bit. It somehow made her seem cannibalistic, at least in my mind. The lyrics were a little confusing for my five year old brain too. First and foremost: If she had bacon already then why did she care about some man? The ad campaign seemed a bit flawed too, throwing bacon at us and then talking about the perfume. In my opinion, with just a little tweaking here and there, the advertisers could have sold the hell out of pork. Then again, who really needs to put money into selling something as essential as bacon?

I wanted to love Wonder Woman when it came to television---and I did for a little while. All the World War Two stuff with the Nazi villains was a little tedious, though.

“Ve vill destroy Vonder Voman?! Mwhahahahahahaha!”

Still, it was far superior to the show, in later seasons, when the writers took it into present day---around 1975 or so back then. Diana Prince was some kind of spy in bell bottoms who had a little remote control robot that she worked with---kind of like something out of Star Wars. I found myself being embarrassed for the actors and often winced while watching.

Poor Lynda--- I can’t believe she said that line with a straight face. Oh no, they aren’t going to make Lyle Waggoner do that are they?! POOR DEBRA WINGER!!!!

And if a nine year old is bothered by poor writing then, well, there’s something wrong.

My best friends during the late Seventies were two sisters, Christy and Tracy Horn. Christy was tall and blond and Tracy was shorter with light brown hair---both still the prettiest girls I know. We were about seven years old then and they always wanted to play Charlie’s Angels. Christy was Farrah Fawcett (Kris) and Tracy was Jacklyn Smith (Kelly). Oh, how I longed to be Sabrina and many times I secretly imagined I was Kate Jackson as I jumped into the seat of my Big Wheel and sped across the driveway. But I was, technically, a boy and ultimately I’d never be a real (or even pretend) angel.

So, I had to be Bosley.

More often than not we’d cook up some caper where Kris and Kelly were on assignment alone and needed a last minute hair styling or pedicure. Like poor David Doyle, who played Bosley on the series, I became the perfect character actor for my girl friends. In the concrete basement of their Ranch Style house I played everything from a massage therapist, to a race car driver, to a hitman, to a chauffeur. I vaguely remember a disturbing afternoon when I pretended to be a drug dealer trying to force Kelly into prostitution. I was trying to get Tracy to lick some baby powder when the girl’s mother, Pat, walked in. At that moment, Christy, who was tied to the hot water heater, hissed,

“Just eat the heroin, Kelly, it’s the only way!”

Fantasy Island was just about the best thing ever, wasn’t it? It was worth sitting through the perennially moronic Love Boat just to watch it. The only problem with the frame story format of Fantasy Island was that one of the three plot lines for each episode invariably scared the living shit out of me. One episode, about slavery and voodoo upset me so much that I kept the whole family up whining and fretting and eventually got a spanking. See, I was a jumpy kid, prone to night terrors in the first place and the last thing I needed was something creepy to spark my imagination.

To this day I will not watch episodes of the old Night Stalker television show.

Some of my best memories center around television. In the summer of 1975 my sister and I dropped everything at four o'clock everyday to watch Dark Shadows. She'd make pineapple and mayonnaise sandwiches for us and we'd sit, eyes glued to the screen, to see what Barnabas had up his sleeve. On Saturday nights I could stay up late and she'd let me watch Saturday Night Live with her. I could never stay awake through the whole thing and I hardly understood the humor but I felt grown up nonetheless. Emily Letella and Rosanne Rosanna Danna were my favorites. One night, while watching, Tammy woke me from a deep sleep. I was dead to the world, passed out on the orange shag carpet of our living room floor.

"Look! Look, David!" She shook me and lifted me up into her lap.

The Not-Ready-For-Primetime Players were doing a skit and they were dressed as all my favorite characters from my comic books. John Belushi was the Hulk and there was Spider-man! When Garrett Morris looked at the camera and said, "I is Ant-Man!" I got so tickled that I nearly wet myself.

The good old days are gone, as far as television goes...or maybe I’m just growing up. I am lucky if I watch eight hours of television a week. The other day I heard a guy in Starbucks guiltily admitting to his boy buds that he was ADDICTED to reality TV!!!!!!!!. And his very trendy friends tsked and held up their fingers in little cross shapes as if that might ward off the monster that is The Real Housewives of Atlanta. Then they all sipped their Chai Tea Lattes and Moccachino Lattes with Skim Milk and gabbed like lonely spinster sisters about the mess that Project:Runway was when it moved to Los Angeles.

I think that one day television will be credited with the death of human culture and civilization. Some alien race will arrive in a thousand years, long after some bomb or plague has wiped everyone out. They will excavate and study our dead culture and feel true terror and sorrow for mankind. Here on Earth, surrounded by the empty homes built as shrines for our television sets, they will remain clinical and distant. But back on their own planet, light years later, one of the alien archaeologists might tell his wife of the emptiness and disgust he’d felt on this dead world.

“Like vines these "boxes" strangled everything out of them. Everything. Death must have been an easy adjustment.”

Agility

My sister and her dog, Radar, have been doing agility trials for years. Tammy and several of her friends actually organize and present between two and three trials of their own a year. Last weekend she invited me to come and watch.

Remember Battle of the Network Stars, the old TV special where you could see Nellie Olsen in a three-legged race with Chico and the Man? My favorite part of that show was the obstacle course. At first glance, that is what agility looks like, a pared down version of an obstacle course. Several raised bars provide jumps and a large A-frame ramp separates several hoops and a tunnel through which dogs run. The dog that completes the course in the shortest amount of time with the fewest errors wins. What makes this sport such a challenge is that the dogs run off leash and with only their owner's hand signals to guide them. A smart owner or handler is just as important as a fast dog.

"Bad handler!" is the worst thing you can say to a person involved in agility. It's like telling an African-American woman that her weave looks cheap. In other words, if you go blabbing "bad handler" in the wrong neighborhood and aren't very lucky, you might get a good killing.

Dog people are amazingly warm, funny, and generous people. They are outgoing and smart and can talk to anybody in the world.

They can talk to anyone...
about their dogs.

They can talk about anything...
that has to do with their dogs.

They love people...
who like to talk about their dogs.

I mean this in the nicest possible way.

Dogs are not separated by breed in agility meets, so it is not out of the question to see a Great Dane and a Pomeranian run the same course.

Having said that, exotic breeds are real surprises at agility meets. This past Sunday, a Borzhoi, Cleo, whose lanky spiderlike legs brought to mind a lumbering Roald Dahl inspired puppet, ran early in the afternoon. Like most of the other dogs Cleo had been clearly over-adored by her master and her eyes were permanantly fixed and glassy---quite literally damaged by the joy of so much petting. The sanity appeared to have been stroked right out of her. That, combined with a loose-limbed floppy gallop made Cleo a beautiful nightmare among the stouter bodied Australian Shepherds, Shelties, and other working dogs.

The Aussies clearly meant business---their expression showed it. About a third of the competitors were Australian Shepherds and they were magnificent to watch. Radar, my sister's two year old Aussie, knocked off a rather difficult course in about twenty seconds flat. He is one serious Mama's boy. By comparison the other dogs seemed downright nonchalant. Bull Terriers and Boxers, both decent competitors, appeared to be bored by the whole thing. For instance, Huckleberry, a three year old Bull Terrier, ran the course shortly after I arrived. I use the term "ran" loosely, for he really only exerted a mild trot. He seemed to be grunting under his breath, "fuck this. fuck this. fuck this'' in time with each step. To make matters worse he was clearly more interested in the woman eating peanut butter crackers outside the ring. At one point he stopped in the middle of the course to sniff a metal folding chair and his handler lost her cool.

"Ferchristssake Huckleberry it's an empty friggin' chair!"

"He doesn't seem very interested." I said to Tam.

I watched a floating lump of custard, a Pomeranian named Pittypat, move like an agitated tumbleweed over the course as Tammy explained.

"Some of the breeds have no work ethic and some just have a laid back attitude---a different kind of disposition. I mean Boxers and Terriers are great dogs but sometimes they seem bored and unfocused."

Pittypat had disappeared on the far side of the A-frame and after many many seconds I wondered if we had lost her. Finally, she emerged at the top, tongue lolling and heaving from exertion. Without hesitation she dove down the rather steep incline on the other side, made the final jump and ended her run. Her owner, an overly color- coordinated man in his fifties showered her with praise and treats.

The next woman to run her dog, a forlorn looking dachshund named Liesl, had apparently been approached by shadowy figures just beforehand and told she and Liesl would be killed if the run was not completed without error within 30 seconds. "Killed." They must have convinced because the woman ran from hoop to pole to A-frame to tunnel, flailing and screaming and fairly on the verge of hysteria, "LIESL! NO! FASTER!!! HERE, LIESL! OH GOD!!! OH god, LIIEEEESL!!!!" The little dachshund, obviously a perennial nervous wreck, ran in terror up and down and finally to the end of the course and had to be consoled with a treat which she promptly threw up.

From the sidelines, a fragile looking mixed poodle named Clovis with a small fountain of hair tied in a bow sat unhappily in her owner's arms.

"Get that hair our of her eyes!" my sister teased " She must be miserable!"

"Oh, she loves it!"

The owner gushed with certainty, as if she and Clovis had just gotten up from brunch and gabbed together about how practical and invigorating it was to have hair in ones eyes.

"We shouldn't have layered it so much and now we need to wait till it all gets one length again."

I noticed that the woman's hair and Clovis's fur were exactly the same, streaked and tipped the same colors, brown on blond on auburn.

At that same moment on the course, Marcus's owner was having trouble in the weave poles. The single line of poles might as well have been a corn maze to the small Aussie/Lab mix. It was taking forever and he was making several errors. Tammy and Clovis's owner involuntarily tsked together,

"Bad handler."

When Marcus finally crossed the finish line, his owner dropped to his knees and praised him,

"Good boy. GOOOD BOY!"

It had been a crappy run but the love was still evident...no, love wasn't the right word. Care. The care was evident---and not just how owners cared for dogs but the opposite too. These people are cared for---loved and considered and watched out for. And I found myself thinking:

Playtime all day.
Petted within an inch of one's life.
Meat for a reward when you do good...
or when you do not so good.
Unconditional love.

Where do I sign up?

New Leaf

It is easy to laugh to at my mother for being over-protective---and she was, believe me--- but, as a child, I was a walking blight of misfortune. During the ages of, oh, seven and ten I had survived both Rabies and a bizarre Hornet/Honeybee/Yellowjacket cross species attack, as well as being run over in thr parking lot of my parents' conveinence store. It didn’t help that only three weeks after my tenth birthday I was nearly bitten in the face by a large rattlesnake. The only thing that saved me from what would have certainly been a horrible and lethal strike was that the live and injured snake was so tightly wrapped in a bale of hay that it could not bite my soft white cheek. I’d like to lie and say something cool and butch but the truth is that I was forced to haul nasty old hay in the hot sun and wasn’t paying attention when I picked up the way-too-heavy bundle and brought it to my chest. Before I could toss the load on the back of the pick-up I saw the snake nestled in the straw about a centimeter from my right eye. Here's what happened:

1. I screamed like a freshly castrated male banshee.

2. I took a deep breath so that I had the lung power to support another very loud and girly bit of hollering.

3. Shaking. Everywhere at once. Eyes. Teeth. Bladder. Yes, I peed.

4. I wept for a very long time and had to put on my pajamas and watch Gilligan’s Island until the smell of venom was only an unpleasant albeit recent memory.

The only thing that makes any of this remotely satisfying is that as I screamed and urinated in the field, three grown male field hands watched the whole thing unfold and they too screamed.

Like women, they screamed.

Like women forced to touch snakes to their faces.

Stories like this made my mother throw plates when she heard them. Later, she’d emerge from the bathroom and we’d have family meetings. I called them “New Leaf” meetings because they were rife with change and she began every meeting by saying,

“We’re going to turn over a new leaf. Today.”

The leaf was never really a new one. It involved me being raised away from sharp edges and serpents and automobiles and rabid cats and trees and chickens and insects and other people.

Limerick

There once was a poet named Shea
who craved a shag with a rhyme everyday.
She said with a curse
pound me with verse
of Edna St. Vincent Millay!

25

This is a recent trend on Facebook---write twenty-five facts about yourself. I ignored the whole thing for a while and then, out of the blue, sat down last week and wrote mine out. You know what? It's not a bad thing to do. It's supposed to be a way to tell people who you are---turns out I was starting to forget myself.

1. My grandmother Opal Hyatt Rainey helped raise me. She began virtually every conversation with, “I want to tell you something awful.” So, if you’ve ever had to listen to one of the awful stories you will now understand why I am compelled to tell them.

2. I can’t tell a sad story, no matter how hard I try. It always comes out with equal parts of gruesome and silly---that’s as close as I can get to weepy. Silly. Gruesome.

3. On two occasions I’ve had people who called themselves psychics or mediums refuse to see me and would give no reason. One woman asked if I had ever been hypnotized and I said “no” and she looked me in the eye and said, “don’t ever let anyone try.” She wouldn’t touch me or shake my hand.

4. I love Ginger Ale. Love it. People think I am an alcoholic because I order Ginger Ale at a bar but the truth is alcohol is about the only drug I don’t hanker for occasionally. My friend Jamie housed me over the summer and we were so poor we couldn’t afford anything. Someone brought over champagne one night for a little party---some group that watched some HBO series I couldn’t bear---and they didn’t drink it. So, I opened and drank the whole bottle it in one sitting. I only drank it because it was the closest thing to Ginger Ale in the house. I know that is as bass-ackwards as it gets.

5. I know I sound like Jan Brady when I talk---it’ a girly voice. I have a very believable deep baritone chest voice that I use from time to time in rehearsals or when presenting something to a group. I call it my “grown up voice”. One of my teacher’s, a very no-nonsense woman at UW pulled me aside one day and said, “David, if you can you should always use your grown-up voice.”

6. About six years ago I woke up and couldn’t get out of bed. Literally, I was too tired to walk. The fatigue came and went for about a year and then got worse---so bad that I was certain I was dying. The doctors found nothing. No cancer. No AIDS. No awful named-for-the-first person-who-died-from-ailment. When someone suggested depression I thought it was the craziest thing I had ever heard because I always thought of myself as a happy person, even wacky. Yes, even zany. Three years of this misery prompted me to try everything, though, and now I understand and manage my depression.

7. I won’t watch TV that describes encounters with killer snakes or that doesn’t have a real title. No VENOM E.R. or NINE DEADLY WAYS TO DIE because my feet are never quite as happy on the floor now that they’ve heard of a Black Mamba. TRASHCAN FULL OF SKIN and BORN WITHOUT A FACE will not do. Those are not story titles. They are headlines and I’d rather just not know about it.

8. As a child I rarely ever remember dreaming and when I did recall a dream it never made a lick of sense. My dream life right now is startling. I go to bed at night and there’s a really good movie playing in my sub-conscious. I wake up crying all the time---or laughing---or crying.

9. I have kept a blog for nearly ten years and it means a lot to me. They are the stories of my life in my voice. It bothers me that “blog” has the connotation that it has. It is a way for me to express myself. That is important to me the way money or status is to other people. www.crowedavid.blogspot.com and www.holdingpatterns.blogspot.com

10. I do believe in God and I expect he’s saddened by the way Christianity is used to hurt those who need him the most.

11. My dog, Milo, has been the love of my life. He is nearly fifteen years old and he is the best thing that has ever happened to me. My eyes are welling up as I type this. I really have no idea how I can ever say goodbye to him.

12. My favorite color in the biggest Crayola box is Cornflower Blue. If you ever want do something sweet and a little off-beat for someone you love then find out what their favorite Crayola color is and go online to crayola.com and order an entire box of that color for them.

13. I get Valentine’s Day and Halloween mixed up in my head all the time.

14. I have gall stones and if I eat too much fried food I have about eight hours of the worst pain I have ever felt in my life---pain so bad I have to be drugged---by professionals.

15. I rarely eat fried food. (see #14)

16. My two favorite books are The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon, by Tom Spanbauer and The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman. I have real problems with ending a book. For me, it is a little brutal to say goodbye to a character---like losing someone you love. I almost never recovered from Philip Pullman’s, The Amber Spyglass.

17. I can’t bear seeing a group gang up on an individual. I will side with someone I detest if they are overwhelmed.

18. I think I may be a weak person but it may be just the opposite.

19. I can’t watch Law and Order because I don’t like to see attractive people go to jail.

20. My mother and I have awful fights and we disagree on most things but she is hands-down the funniest person I know.

21. I would rather lose a couple of good teeth near the front of my mouth than eat shredded coconut. It tastes like lightly sweetened hair, as I imagine it, and it is revolting to me.

22. I read comic books. They taught me the fundamentals of directing and of telling a story. I don’t care who you are or what you do, you should pick up a copy of Scott McCloud’s, Understanding Comics and you will learn something important.

23. I have a very active and unruly imagination. Usually it prompts me to laugh at bad times, like say… a funeral---taunting me with images of radioactive killer chickens---just to see how badly I can offend loved ones. Not cool.

24. I don’t cotton to men much. My best friends, except for Jamie Bost, are female.

25. I believe that heaven and hell are the same place, that after we die we are taken into a big collective consciousness. To some people “hell” is losing identity. To some “heaven’ is being re-united with our loved ones and the sense of wholeness that comes with understanding other people. I dreamed it years ago and it seemed about as likely as lakes of fire and pearly gates.

I Know It's Round...And It's About Love

My mother is a wonderful, funny, talented woman who has exactly ONE tactic for getting the myriad number of her wants. She shames. It’s not like she is limited, though. She’s like John Wayne in every movie he ever made. He had a pony and a pistol. She has a wrung out dish-towel. To say that my mother is the hardest hitting fullback in the game of guilt would be a gross understatement. When my mother passes by, Jewish grandmothers drop to their knees and touch the hem of her jogging suit. According to my grandmother, my mother’s first words, around age two, were:

“What did I do to deserve this?”

Actually her first words were gaga mama dada---but she was weeping when she said them.

As a child I would lay on my belly in a lava pool of orange shag carpet and draw on a big newsprint pad all day long. After several hours the carpet was peppered with my Crayolas. Mother would eventually come into the room and demand,

“Davey, put the crayon back in the bucket as you finish with it. Each crayon.”

Did I hear her right? That was insane? How can I possibly create if I follow such a---I couldn’t bring myself to say the word--- system? Before I could make an argument she’d take a single pill and swallow quickly, saying only that the crayons in the carpet were making her nervous.

At first, the mere suggestion that I had made my mother unhappy would have me reeling. I’m like those companion dogs that cannot be punished because they are so overly attached to their masters. Whereas a big, dumb Golden Retriever might need a hard whack on the nose with a rolled up newspaper, a more neurotic dog, like my Milo would react to a spanking as if he’d been dropped in hot oil. I learned early on, when Milo was still a puppy, to temper his punishment. When I came home once to find every stitch of carpet in my rental apartment shredded and every now-exposed inch of floor covered with feces that Milo had obviously strained all day to expel, I had to take a deep breath and say simply,

“Milo I am so disappointed in you.”

Anything firmer, any extra punch in the monotone delivery would throw the dog into a coma. As a kid I was sensitive like this but after a few years living with my mother I began to see into her workings. Over the years I have gotten wiser and to some degree become inured to her ways. Her response has been to simply turn up her volume and after almost forty years any lingering sense of subtlety is long gone. Strangers watching us would see a bizarre caricature of a mother/son relationship, something akin to a silent absurdist French film involving clown-waiters, screaming women, and the existential horror of rural life. It hasn’t helped matters that as I have grown older, my mother understands nearly nothing about my life. When I decided to study theatre I may as well have signed up with those crazy Google people going to live on Mars. Mom does pretty well tolerating my limitations---she loves me, I know. She is unhappy with me now, though, and the only way to please her it seems is to learn to read minds and stay telepathically connected to her all the time so I will be able to do everything the way she does. About a month ago, sick to death of the way all our conversations begin and end I simply interrupted her and said with absolute sincerity,

“Tell me what you want from me and I will make it happen for you, now, as close to the way you imagine it as I can make it. I want to do it---whatever it is.”

Let’s talk about natural disasters. The spirit in which I surrendered was lost in the awful fight that went on for days. I never even found out what she wanted, probably for me to put my initials on the diet Pepsi lids as I opened them so she’d know who to blame when she found one behind the toilet in the spare bathroom. Though it may seem unlikely, I wasn’t trying to be a smart-ass---honestly. It just seemed easier to give her what she wanted without having to feel worse about myself in the process. It backfired in a big Tacoma Narrows-bridge-disaster kind of way and somehow in submitting to her I showed a complete lack of character and respect for the people who love and feed me daily.

And I wondered uncharitably if maybe what she wanted all along was for me to feel bad. Or she needed me to feel badly about myself as I did the things she wanted me to do---or didn’t do more likely. Could she be punishing me for not being more like her? For not being someone with enough chutzpah to think to write his own initials on his own Pepsi bottle so the empties could be traced back? For being so clearly different from the other humans she knew? For not being someone she could love as easily as she’d like to?

This summer during July 4th I walked along the lakeshore in Chicago and watched the people lying out on the lawn and along the beachfront. In crowds and in chaos I am visited by God. I do not care if you believe me because I believe it. I know I am given gifts of grace. This day from the corner of my eye one thing took focus and everything else in the park, on the sand, and in the water slowed to a crawl. Time seemed to stop as I watched a woman watch a baby who was reaching for a beach ball. His little hand was so tiny against the bright blue and orange circumference of the ball. He reached and grabbed but his hand was too small and his fingers were wet and the ball slipped away, rolling a few feet away. Each time he’d grab for his prize and it slipped further down the lawn. His hand was too small to hold it. The last moment before time started up again and my portion of grace ended brought me to the woman’s face. Love. Pure love for this little boy. This woman would sooner leap in front of a train than harm this child that she loved. I think of my mother and myself with our slender fingers and artist’s hands---the same hands. We have my grandfather’s hands actually, and we understand how sad it was that his hands might have held a paintbrush if he’d not been handed a plow. There is such a deep love that we are sometimes connected through generations in ways we can’t comprehend yet. It hurts, like my sweet Milo hurts, when he feels something he doesn’t understand and can’t stop feeling. Somehow our lives have become full of something that we can’t see well enough to hold, much less understand. If I could just hold it I could turn it around and see all the sides and then I’d know what to call it.

The Walking Wounded Playing Hopscotch

I was raised by the women of my family---my mother, my older sister and my grandmother. My sister gave me literature, everything from Harold and the Purple Crayon to Rosemary Rogers’s Sweet Savage Love to Robert Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land. My grandmother gave me space and patience. Meme was never an overly affectionate woman but I spent many happy summer days fishing with her in silence and just as many nights warm by her fireplace watching her crochet. Her hands were tiny and confident as she looped looped looped the yarn. My mother was everything else to me. Everything. She was the one who fed me, listened to me, and doctored me and that was a fulltime job in and of itself. During my childhood it seemed that every time I stepped a foot outside the front door something alarming happened to me. Here is a short list of my injuries:

1. Bitten in the face by a German Shepherd.

This was possibly provoked---I was very young and in agony from the pressure of the animals jaws on my face and the grass burns on my legs from where he dragged me across the lawn as my family chased him. So a lot of it is a blur.

2. Attacked by swarms of hornets and yellowjackets.

What makes this especially special is that the two species seemed to have coordinated their attacks. Yes, on the same day and at the same moment I was bitten nearly to death by yellowjackets AND hornets. What happened was I managed to step in a yellowjacket nest while throwing rocks at a hornet’s nest a safe distance away. The rock hit, I stepped on the yellowjackets and the pain from their stings on my fat little feet and legs made me forget what I was doing and run into the swarm of hornets I had stirred up. I went to the emergency room for this one and clearly remember hearing the kindest nurse in the world quietly asking my mother if I was retarded.

3. Run over. By a car.

I was snug inside our store, then called Crowe’s Grocery, and happily eating a Nutty Buddy when my mother spotted me and screamed from across the room, “Davey, you’re dripping that icecream all over the floor I just mopped. Take it outside or throw it away.” As I was making my way to the plate glass doors at the front of the store some man who was pulling in for gas was having a heart attack. He blacked out and his foot hit the accelerator and he drove me back into the store through both glass doors. A big local woman named Honey Bailey was shopping for onions and saved my life. The car’s axel hit the curb and stopped the car before anyone inside was injured but I was full of momentum and kept going until I met up with Miss Honey’s butt. Because I hit the cushion of her fanny instead of the steel counter, I lived. Still, I almost lost my right hand and I was in several versions of a cast for the better part of a year. I was seven years old. Because of this I was not allowed to go outside again alone until I was twenty-one.

4. Rabies.

The worst things happen in summer, don’t you think? I decided to take a stack of comic books and read them in the sunshine on the front porch. My mother heard the sound of the screen door opening and closing. I knew she heard because I could hear her footfalls on the hard wood floors as she ran from the laundry room. She stood in the doorway looking at me. She was about to say something and then changed her mind. We had already discussed, as a family, the impracticalities involved in keeping me inside for the rest of my life. Finally, my mother, who had been holding out the longest bit her lip and surrendered, saying “ he’s in God’s hands now then.” That may seem a little dramatic but it was less than a week later I sat on the front porch thumbing through a really dreadful issue of Wonder Woman when a strange calico cat walked calmly up on the front porch and bit the living shit out of my foot. There was no preamble at all. It seemed the cat’s only purpose was to bite me. Two days later The County Health Department issued the first of many bulletins announcing that Rabies had been found in several animals in the county. We never found out if the cat that bit me had Rabies or not because I took the shots---about eleventy jillion of them in my belly.

5. Pecked. Tormented. Crushed.

Our rooster, Andre, named for the then wrestler Andre The Giant attacked me and my cousin Michael while we played badminton in the front yard. Andre was a big chicken (gigantic not cowardly) and mean---a truly evil, hateful soul, no doubt doing penance from a genocide-ridden past life in the body of a rooster. My cousin Michael liked to taunt Andre by putting the shuttlecock over his nose and holding the lower half in his teeth. It looked sort of like a beak. This drove the rooster completely insane and he'd fly at us, at which point we’d run like madmen for the safety of the house. On this particular day my mother, no doubt sick and tired of our antics with the chicken, had locked the front door. She’d complained a hundred times already that we were letting all the cool air out every time we opened that “goddammed” door. So, with the door locked tight and Andre at our ankles, drawing blood with each nasty little peck of his beak, we began to climb the closest tree we could find. Michael is part monkey and I was just plain fat so he was already at the top of the tree while I dangled like bait over a raptor cage about six inches from the ground. Before I could gather my wits enough to cry for help the second worst thing that could happen did happen. The limb Michael was sitting on broke and he fell about ten feet into me and together we fell on top of Andre. Michael did not have a scratch on him. I broke a wrist, lost two teeth and missed losing an eye by about a centimeter. Andre was not quite as mean and large ever again---actually he was dead, flat as a pancake. It ruined my favorite pair of shorts too, a light blue pair of Bermudas with red stars. Every time my mother tried to lay them out for me to wear I could only think,

“Them’s the pants I killed Andre in.”

Gathering the Bones

It is three o’clock in the morning and I am helping my father gather invisible bones. As usual he is angry because I am not up to snuff. Unable to move more than a fierce wiggle, Daddy lays on his back and does ALL the hardest parts of bone gathering---the most taxing parts of the job. The detail work is simply unbelievable. He screams for my mother and for me to let him get to bed, to stop tormenting him, to let him get back to his own house where people love him.

“You are at your house. WE love you.” Mother nearly chokes she’s trying so hard to get it out and then she asks me, “Should we give him another pill?”

I say that I don’t know. See it’s a double-edged sword. The Seroquel makes him sleepy enough but it also makes him mean---crazy drunk mean with emphasis on “crazy”. Best case scenario: he sleeps through the night with only one or two short spells involving urine, screaming, or a trip to the floor.

Worst case scenario? Well, we are still in the middle of that.

Alzheimer’s and a spinal cord injury must be the Batman and Robin of the medical world. Together they are just about unstoppable. See, all the long grueling hours of rehabilitation therapy literally disappear overnight. My father can’t remember how to use the walker or even what it is.

“What is that thing over there?” he asks twenty times a day.

“That is the walker you have to use when we take you to the bathroom.”

“What do I need that for?”

Every day he forgets that he cannot walk. He is not completely paralyzed, just in the extremities, so every day he falls at least four times. At 189 pounds it becomes a daunting task to get him back to his chair. We are getting better at it though. The strap is indispensable. What is the strap, you ask? Nothing diabolical, I promise. It is a woven belt that wraps around my father’s waist so that we can support him better when he stands. Without it, he becomes an unmanageable lump but when we hold him by what I am beginning to believe is this magical strap of support, he is able to actually take some steps on his own---well, we support most of his weight. At least I don’t have to carry him like a baby everywhere he goes. On many levels this is a good thing.

The Alzheimer’s makes my father forget how to use the parts of his body he can still access. We get him to the side of the bed at night, slow awkward steps while we hold the strap for dear life. This is hard work for one person---not as bad for two. His wheelchair is a better option for long distance travel---that’s anything more than ten feet these days but getting him in and out of it is often harder than walking him there. Once he’s sitting on the bed my mom and I have to literally (I mean LITERALLY) show him what muscles to use to move him across to his side---he has to sleep against the wall, otherwise he’ll wake up and try to walk and fall. That's what's happened tonight, somehow, even though my mother was sleeping next to him. He has somehow fallen anyway and he's wide awake and in a state.

“Look at my hands.” He sounds almost desperate. Inconsolable. “The bones are sticking out.”

Mother has been through trying to reason with him, telling him where he is and that there are no bones in the house---only the tired old bones in our bodies. I join them towards the end of the reasoning phase because I hear, from the sofa in the living room, his voice rising with anger.

So, to curb his anger and keep this from a fullblown tantrum, we play along. No matter how absurd or incomprehensible we take a stab at giving him exactly what he asks for. Sometimes he needs baskets to pick pears. On other occasions he needs just the right tools to fix something that isn‘t running to suit him. The part that is the hardest on us is that it happens when we need to sleep. I have heard it called Sundowners. It is an aspect of some cases of Alzheimer’s.

Bone picking: Mother is terrible at this, at the pantomime. Dad snaps orders and she moves like a ghost across the hardwood floors of my old bedroom. She makes no sound at all, nary a footfall as she moves. In a pink and white nightgown she stands, pretending to pass to him trays and tools for all the hard work that’s been left for him. There are so many bones that have to be picked. “Hurry!” my father begs and this is when I know he’s seeing Hell.

I surprise him by gently taking his hand and saying, “I love you daddy.”

I surprise myself by meaning it.

“Goddammit my hands!” he shrieks and pulls away from me.

It hits me, a very real urge to run screaming into the night. But which shoe to wear for something like that? See, my Teva sandals would be THE shoe to pick if I could only have one pair of shoes for the rest of my life. The open toes wouldn’t really do for late night crazy running though. The shoe question flutters out of my mind as a scarier notion lands. See, “crazy” is a big word where I am from, right up there with “death” and “God” and “tractor” and “dirt”. Will I be like my father some day, babbling nonsese into the night? I already feel it, a loss for words or way to express myself. In a rehearsal I often freeze up in the middle of an important thought or moment. I always told myself it was just from my own excitement, the rush I get from tackling an idea or image from a play. Now, I can’t help but wonder.

“I gott get mee-tree.” My father says with more than a little relief. Although he says nothing else, his “whew!” practically hangs in the air.

I haven’t a fucking clue what a mee-tree is but I smile anyway and say,

“Thank goodness. Now we can all get back to bed.” and before the bones call again we do that. We all go back to sleep. That’s when my dream comes, my own special bone gathering---somewhere in the 45 minutes of sleep my little dream window was opened just a crack and here’s what floated in. I woke up and wrote down what I could remember.

There is an old man at the door.
He wears clothes that are the colors of the dark woods.
Every day he came in my daddy’s store.
Every day my mother waited on him.
I know his name but I have never seen him.
My mother has seen him many times
but she can’t remember his name.
My father forgets him and he forgets everything.
The old man is waiting on the dark porch.
He’s been borrowing breath because
He needs to get inside
So that he can make sure
We never
Forget
Him
Again.

The next day my mother says that she heard me crying. Am I all right?

“A bad dream.” I say.

“What was it?”

“I can’t remember.” I lie.

Lost

I expect it was as close to being born again as we can ever get without dying first. I'm not talking about Jesus Christ---I'm talking about my roommate's alarm clock. It's very LOUD!

The sound pulled me out of a deep sleep, an almost tangible place that had weight from thoughts strung together like masses of coral---not linear thoughts so much as a radiant pattern of imagination. It was a web of dense and wild possibility I call heavy dreaming. At 4AM, the sensation was of tearing, as if a sky full of linen had been ripped down the middle. When the alarm broke I was both inside and outside at the same moment, in front of the sky and behind the sky and, of course inside as well. Inside, the dream was working up to be something dark, and as usual the terror wiggled onstage as something harmless from my childhood.

I have always had an unhealthy and, well, strange connection to the old television show Lost In Space. It was 1978 or so when channel 17 started broadcasting the reruns on Sunday mornings at 9AM. For me this was not simply a genius stroke of program scheduling, but an act of kindness that made my eyes water and my heart swell with joy. Up until that that time in my life Sundays had been a sadly untended part of the weekend. It was a melancholy day to begin with, a day for saying farewell to it’s happier prettier sister Saturday. At best, if luck favored, Sunday became a quick bright romp that had the good sense not to linger after the sun went down---because Sunday night was a sick sad place. Sunday night at my house was all about getting ready for Monday morning---and school. By the time I was able to write my name I hated God because nothing he could ever do would make up for Elementary school. It wasn’t book learning that galled my craw so much---I was a good student. Like a poorly socialized Spitz at the new dog park, I hated other children. I found everyone at my hick school to be either dumb or mean. After I got to know them better I realized that I had misjudged them all. They were dumb AND mean. Wouldn’t life be easier if dumb and mean were genetically uncommon traits, like brown eyes and blonde hair? In any case, a little Lost in Space made the good times from Saturday night roll for this eight year old a little bit longer.

The root of my Lost In Space obsession and the reason I believe I am dreaming about it thirty years later can be fairly blamed on God. Growing up Baptist was (insert anything bad anyone’s ever mentioned about the cactus humping hypocrites) but the real rub was this: Sunday School started at 10AM and I was dragged, sometimes kicking and screaming, from in front of the television set at 9:45AM every Sunday. End result? I never saw a single ending to one single adventure. Did the carrot alien mate with Judy? Did the hippy aliens’ scheme to brainwash Penny and Will succeed? How would I know? I only saw them get into their messes, never out of them. Television was nothing like it is now. Today we get back to back to back repeats of the same episode of The Closer and Saving Grace. Back then, if you missed a twist or turn in one of your stories, well, often that was the only chance you ever got. I’m only saying that me and the Robinson family have unfinished business and it has maybe ruined much of my life--- and I blame God, my parents, my sullen self-absorbed excuse for sister and the members of Roopville Baptist Church. That’s all I’m saying.

I sleep in a place of uncertainty, a scary dreamscape that keeps a tight lid of all of its goings on. It’s like my brain is Burma and my dreams are cries for help that ain’t gonna make it to the rest of the world. The only hint that anyone has about what’s happening in the unrevealed country of my dreaming is the waking moments---and they are often just plain scary and sad---awkward and insistent flailings to consciousness. Sometimes I literally have to will myself awake, so overwhelming is the dream. Once, someone told me I sang a lovely but deeply upsetting verse of Patsy Cline’s, The Wayward Wind and promptly woke up in a blind panic. Friends, family and complete strangers don’t know how to help. To complicate matters--- once I am awake the emotion and the desperation that I feel as the dream unfolds have absolutely no waking connection to the specifics of the dream. For example: I might say to a therapist that my dream the night before scared me so badly that I had to turn on the light, wake my elderly mother and have her hold my hand while I cried myself back to oblivion. My therapist, bored and sleepy but good at pretending otherwise, suddenly perks up and clicks her pen. She asks what the dream was about?

I say, “The Robot from Lost in Space was playing a prostitute named Dolphin on Hawaii Five-0 and she/it really got hurt falling in the sand on her/its tank wheels.”

My therapist is a very nice woman. She listens although she feels betrayed. I continue, hoping she will understand something I don’t.

“The part that I can’t shake is The Robot’s sad determination to put her lipstick on herself even though her hand was shaking and it looked awful. Chin Ho had to lie to her because he knew that for a woman like Dolphin, her looks were everything.” I look to my therapist for some support.

She clicks her pen again and leans back in her chair.

Having said it, I realize how completely stupid it sounds, how stupid the whole damned show is---and how truly sick I am that my personal terror is a crippled hooker with a fishbowl head and a Doris Day wig.

So, even though Will, The Robot, and Dr. Smith are admittedly and indefensibly silly, the weft of my most recent dream was getting ready to reveal something dreadful. The soulless buzz from the robot’s voice and neck gear had become the closest thing to joy that the dream could muster. The green sky, certainly radioactive, had moved into the complexions and dark circles under Will’s and Dr. Smith’s eyes and they had both relaxed and stopped doing the things they always did. Dr. Smith’s perennially pursed lips softened and his anxious unhappy hands moved from their home in front of his breastbone to a kinder but lonelier place at each hip. They opened like little dying butterflies---fingers, knuckles, wrists, goodbye. Will, never one for extraneous fidgeting, stopped standing up quite as straight and his eyes accepted the blessing of numbness that all the bright people one day yearn for. Watched from everywhere else Will and Dr. Smith simply stopped--- a thumb on the pause button. From many places where I stood the freeze revealed more. They submitted to the weight of some awful truth that came from the sky. Whatever was ahead of us in the heavy dream surpassed horror and panic. Horror became quaint, like VHS tapes or neat looking old typewriters. Whatever it was that waited at the end came on like quick death, a blink of something that would be a blinding neuron of agony if it didn’t move so quickly.

Here’s the thing: my sleeping life is rich, so rich I am beginning to wonder---no WORRY---worry that I may never come back from the heavy dreaming. Every day I am less connected to family, to friends, and to my waking life. Everything I have truly loved has existed behind my grey-green eyes and nowhere else. When the lids close at night I am going further and further into infinite expansive imagination.

My alarm clock saved me from the quick death that Dr. Smith and Will met and I feel---jilted.

Your Move

My uncle Willard was a really nice man, a good father by all accounts. He married my Aunt Peggy when he was fifteen and she was fourteen. They raised five children and were bound at the hip until he died--- today.

That was yesterday. Right now I’m playing "good son" for my mother, oohing and nixing the outfits she has been considering for the funeral. Like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman when she finally gets to shop, my mother is trying on and modeling everything in her closet, looking for the right thing to wear to the funeral. In all fairness to Mother it is only a little bit about vanity, about looking better than my aunt Linda and aunt Connie. Mostly, my mother thinks that by doing things right, the best we can, we are sending the message that we loved Willard. And we did. I have the best stories from my summers at his house in Stone Mountain when I was a boy. My cousin Michael was the only real boy I knew and I played like a boy when I went to visit. The books stayed at home and I skinned knees and lost teeth and played in the mud. Michael probably remembers our shameful summer of Dungeons and Dragons too.

My mom is back with another armload of outfits. I nod and smile a little as she shows off and then talks herself out of wearing a brand new black pant-suit that is perfect for the occasion. She hauls out a pretty crème colored summer jacket and I before I can say “no” she has spotted a busy black-and-white toothy-print jacket that is rightly hiding in the back of the closet---and while I’m wondering if William Escher will be the theme, I am suddenly sick to remember that a funeral, especially this one, will be a social event. I haven’t seen my cousins in twenty years. Some of them have children older than we were when we saw each other last. What have I done with my life? Obviously I have no kids---shrunken ovaries I tell everyone---practically microscopic. I am still in school. I have no hair. And...

I am terrified of death, my own and other people’s, but especially of facing a day like this one, a day when I’ll have to choose alone the right clothes to wear for my mother and sister.

“David,” my mother snaps, “are you looking?”

Now we have moved from funeral appropriate clothes to the items she has bought on sale or that my Aunt Shirley has given her. Mom is showing off a red suede dress that makes her look like a big rectangle. In ten minutes she will be modeling swim wear.

As I stare hard at forty, I am beginning to doubt that I will know the kind of love my uncle Willard and Aunt Peggy had; certainly I can’t hope for anything like the seventy years they shared together. In fact I’m concluding that I secretly want to be alone---less people to say goodbye to. The best evidence is my last feeble effort to find a mate.

A few years ago, sick and tired of being single, I decided to place a personal ad in a local paper. My ad said:

Single Male. Overweight with a bad attitude about romance. Kind and plain. Hates long walks on the beach---or anywhere else for that matter.

I thought it was honest and funny. Apparently I was the ONLY one who thought so. When I showed my best friend, Jamie, the ad in the paper, he read it and laughed and then when I told him it was my ad he asked, “are you deranged??” Apparently embellishment is not only allowed but required in such matters. It reminded me of the day Frank Sinatra died. I was working at the Ansley Mall bookstore and my boss Valine, an emotionally turbulent Frank Sinatra fan, shakily requested that I build a display in honor of the singer. My displays are fabulous, simply. In a perfect world I might be recognized one day as the Albert Einstein or Tiger Woods of retail point of sales displays. With two sheets of brown construction paper and glitter I can build the arts and crafts equivalent of a working time machine. In any case, in this instance I ran into problems with lettering. The most sophisticated lettering system our store could afford was a maddening set of punch out stenciled vellum letters. Despite my best efforts these letters, once used, were forever getting torn or lost. Usually Valine titled everything. She’d look at the display I had made and then hand me a title she’d written on a little yellow post-it. For example, our Christmas display last year was quite elegant---yards of shimmering silver and gold fabric draped the Christmas cookbooks and photo gift books. The title was:

A Christmas in Silver and Gold.

This time she handed me a yellow post-it, still moist with her own tears, that said:

In beloved honor of the incomparable Francis Sinatra, Born 1915, died 1998. Old blue eyes we will miss you.

Now, if you have never worked with these stencil letters I am talking about, I will tell you THAT title requires a lot of punching, spacing, and tracing. A LOT. I was missing many letters too, most missed being the small letters “i”, “w”, and “r”. In the end, after much futzing and sighing, the display contained a single photo of Sinatra and read simply:

“Dead Today”

When Val came back from the bank she saw the completed display, dropped the bag of change she’d just picked up, and shrieked. She shrieked--- and that’s really the only word that can describe the rude sound that came out of her--- an anguished sound that suggested a burning by hot oil. It was so shrill that a homeless person, warm and comfy in one of our plush reading chairs, got up and left with no prodding. In the midst of the yelling and cursing that followed I burst into tears, something I hate to do. I cry huge shameful tears that are true and unmanageable, tears that make my deadliest enemies want to hold me and tenderly stroke my face until the world is all better. She sat me down and started over, calmly explaining that the title would not do, that under no circumstances would “Dead Today” be all right that it was disrespectful. I nodded, doing my best to turn off the waterworks. Instead, she began to cry too, for Frank, and I kept crying and we both just sat in the break room for about half an hour weeping. Still, to this day, I cannot imagine why she reacted the way she did. I expect that the too-honest personal ad came from the same part of my fucked up psyche as the Frank Sinatra display. Regardless, I could never come up with a better description of myself for the personals page and I flat out refused to lie. That seemed like an exercise in sadomasochism. Why trick someone into rejecting you? In my experience being rejected took much, much less effort and planning.

So, in the end I suppose I--- we all have been given at least a couple of options: We face a lifetime of companionship and then a heartbreak---no, "shattering" is a better word. In the end we are shattered because that's the mildest way I can think of to describe what my aunt Peggy must be feeling. We are shattered OR we live a quiet life and willingly leave when the time comes. We happily leave the nothing we always had.

Who made up these rules????

Sad Pet Stories

Roberta’s Story

Roberta was a sad little dog to begin with, in look and in circumstance. She was abandoned near Highway 27 with a litter of five puppies. Her moist, mournful eyes managed to get all of her puppies adopted by passers-by, but when the pups were gone the eyes got even sadder. Still, everyone who went in or out of my Daddy’s store patted her on the head or gave her a hunk of their barbecue sandwich or a pickled egg. I hated the way the eggs floated like eyeballs in that big jar on the counter. I wouldn’t touch one of those, or the pickled pig’s feet for that matter, with a ten-foot pole. Roberta loved them, though, as well as the attention she got from the folks who went in and out of Crowe’s Country Corner all day long.

One day something awful happened to Roberta---no one knows exactly what. Maybe she was hit by a car or maybe it was something more diabolical. In any case, sad Roberta showed up at the store one morning looking much, much sadder than usual. Her fur was missing---all of it---well not exactly MISSING because one thick strand still attached the fuzz to the dried up little ecorche body. It gave her the look of a drunk socialite fresh off a hit and run accident, carelessly dragging her mink coat on the floor behind her as she ambled from party guest to party guest. Everyone who saw Roberta was instantly horrified. Children cried. Women screamed. Grown men tossed their untouched barbecue sandwiches in the garbage can and burned rubber out of the store parking lot. I felt sorry for Roberta but I couldn’t bear looking at her up close. She was literally a walking scab. So, whenever I was pumping gas and felt the tentative touch of her cold nose against my calf, I breathed and prepared myself, then quickly glanced down to locate the one patch of fur still intact. At the bridge of her nose there was a soft white little tuft and I stroked it for as long as I was able. Her whole body shook as she wagged her tail and I worried that the jerking motion it would shake loose her coat.

One day Roberta didn’t show up for her breakfast of outdated cans of Alpo or old ground beef. We never knew what happened to her.

Crazy Cat

The kitten I picked turned out to have Muscular Dystrophy. It wasn’t evident at first---all she did was lie still and nurse. Soon though, even before the eyes opened, it became clear that my kitten was not normal among the litter. The ironic thing is that at first glance she was the most common. Out of the mix-matched litter of tabby and blotchy calico kittens, my kitten’s black and white fur seemed a little plain. That’s probably why I picked her in the first place. When the litter was up and walking my kitten’s head began to wobble and weave as she moved. It was as if the head might just slide off its mount. We started calling her Crazy because of her gait. The big dogs were afraid of her. When she came into view our Pit Bull, Dino, and the German Shepherd, Sport, approached to sniff her. At the first crazy wobble of her head, however, the dogs would scatter and bolt around the house. The only time I ever saw both big dogs run like that was the time they ran up on Mr. Peck Turner’s electric fence. Every time they saw Crazy wobbling towards them, though, they’d just scatter. Honestly, her little palsied prancing was creepy---it made her seem overly eager and more than a little deranged---and the whole time she was running towards you. One time Dino was so scared by Crazy’s meanderings that he ran into the side of the house and cut up his face.

In short, Crazy ruled the roost.

One day when my mama was running late for work she ran out to feed the animals and she threw the breakfast leftovers onto the dry food and the gravy got all over Crazy. She was covered completely. The big dogs fought for the best bits as they always did and in the frenzy, Crazy was eaten alive.

Black Dog

We had a tiny girl dog show up in our yard one day so pregnant she was just about to pop. Later that night she had a litter of only two puppies, one male and one female, both solid black. I named them Punch and Judy. Three weeks later Judy got run over by the tractor and Punch’s named didn’t make sense anymore so we ended up calling him Black Dog.

Princess Island

I grew up before there were many standards or practices to follow: no Amber alerts or Code: Adam for lost kids at the supermarket. There was no such thing as the metric system either---well it was around but none of the teachers at my backwoods school really understood it well enough to teach it. So, I never learned measurements at all. My teachers knew that they were not supposed to teach the old ways with gallons and inches so they didn’t. The problem was they never bothered to teach the other either. So we got nothing---an entire generation of Heard County idiots.

Of all the nutty teachers I have had, one takes the cake. She was the second grade teacher--- she was young and all of the students thought she was very pretty. Her name was Patsy Carter and we all called her Miss Patsy--- or Miss Carter if we were being punished. Before anyone really knew about child molesters, Miss Patsy seemed keenly aware of the presence of these predators in our community and she did her part to educate us about the dangers of talking to strangers. She used to tell each of her classes about a place called Princess Island. Miss Patsy started the story like a fairy tale by building up this island where all little girls were treated like Princesses all year long. They had icecream every day for breakfast yaddaa yadda yadda. People would approach all the prettiest girls and invite them to come to Princess Island with them. “Some little girls,” Miss Patsy began,”would actually run away from their parents and jump on a boat waiting in the harbor bound for PRINCESS ISLAND!!!!”

“But,” Miss Carter added, suddenly distressed, “when they got all those little girls out on that island, can you imagine what really happened?”

She paused for emphasis before adding,

“sailors molested every one of them right there on the beach and then fed them to sharks.”

I was only nine years old at the time and I remember when my class heard this---you could have heard a pin drop--- and then a couple of people in the back started crying. Miss Carter casually said,

“Oh, the criers were the very first to get noticed.”

This brought a brief surge in the crying and then the sound of muffled sobs.

Angie Chapman found her voice after several long seconds. When she spoke she sounded frightened but curious. Angie was a good student and always asked the right question.

“Miss Carter, what about boys? Do they ever…”

Before she could finish Miss Patsy Carter stopped her.

“No boys, Angie. It’s PRINCESS Island, after all. But sometimes very special little boys got picked up too.”

She looked directly at me and I clutched my MY PRETTY PONY book satchel protectively. One girl, Rhonda Lipham, stood up and said,

“Well they tricked them girls into going and I wouldn’t fall for it. No way.”

Miss Carter got up and crossed around her desk and for a moment I thought she was going to bite Rhonda---instead she took Rhonda’s hands like the two of them were best friends in the world. Then she said,

“Rhonda, do you know the difference between being TRICKED and being TEMPTED?”

Before Rhonda could take a stab at it Miss Carter answered her own question.

“A TRICK means you end up somewhere you’d never want to go. A temptation means you end up somewhere you MIGHT want to go someday---and if I hadn’t told you about the beach and the sharks---well you wouldn’t turn down an offer to be a Princess would you? In your heart you want to be a Princess don’t you?”

Buck-toothed and proud, Rhonda held her ground and would not reply but clearly she was rattled. Quickly, Miss Carter spun back to the teacher side of her desk and said,

“Well that’s all the time we have for Princess Island.”

Then we learned about negative integers and I clearly remember wishing we could go back to talking about being raped and fed to sharks.

Home

Roopville has a wacky history. Named for the Roop family---the richest people in the area back in the early nineteen hundreds—--the town hit it’s first rough patch when the Roops were killed by a waterspout. Technically, a tornado picked up a large section of the Chattahooche River and dropped it on their house. Yes, the entire family was drowned---by a tornado.

As a child I loved it here and I played everywhere. My mother says that every time I went outside I was attacked by a dog or hit by a falling tree limb, and truly I have bled all over town---but after all is said and done it was a pretty decent place to grow up. My parents’ house was in the most rural part of town with no neighbors for miles. My best friend was my dog Prince, a Pit Bull/Dachshund mix---imagine a black Pit Bull head with a wiener body and 3 inch legs. Although he was funny looking, Prince was a vast improvement over my first dog. Sport, a proud German Shepherd, had held off nearly a whole year before succumbing to every dog’s natural desire to bite me in the face. Still a toddler, I petted the wrong part of his back and was rewarded with fourteen stitches. Sport, it seems, was not such a sport after all.

By the time I turned fourteen, Roopville had lost much of its shine. I would have nuked whole town quicker than you could say “hellmouth” if I’d had a warhead or two at my disposal. Uranium is tough to find though so instead I took up calling my hometown RoopVILE or occasionally POOPville---depending on my mood.

Roopville used to be a thriving---well at least populated community. Back in the late nineties plans were being made to widen the then two-lane highway 27---the main drag. Mr. Judson and Miss Francine Bell, two members of my church, pitched a fit because the new highway was going to eat up about fifteen feet of their old front yard. Apparently Judson or Francine or one of their kids had some powerful connections with the D.O.T. because at the last minute the road spared the Bell’s yard and bypassed Roopville completely. So this is Roopville now…

(insert sound of wind and crickets)

Back in 2002 I lived in Portland, Oregon for about six months. When I came back I picked my car and my dog up and started the two-hour drive home from Atlanta. At about 1AM I found myself in Twilight Zone territory. I called my mother and said, “Mama, where did Roopville go?”

Above Roopville is the little college town of Carrollton. The place is teeming with a better class of rednecks than you find in Roopville. Why better? There’s this business of a County line and quality of vinyl siding on the houses but the only real difference in the redneck is that the ones in Carrollton can afford new clothes from someplace other than Wal-Mart. Have you ever read Dr. Seuss’s Star-bellied Sneetch book? Well, it is like an anthropological study of my people. Dr. Seuss must have secretly lived among us like Diane Fossey with the mountain gorilla just before he penned the story of the sad, misguided, and prejudiced Sneetches.

The Ave

I’ve been in Seattle going a month now. School is three weeks gone but I’m not going to write about that yet. Let’s start with the area outside my new apartment.

University Avenue is lined with trendy shoe shops, vintage clothing stores, and restaurants. Evidently Seattleites love Thai food because there are Thai restaurants EVERYWHERE! They have cutesy punny names too. Ready? The Thai-ger Room, Thai One On, Appe-Thai, Thai Me Up Thai Me Down, and High Thai-d. I ate at High Thai-d my first day here and got “thai-errhea.”

Pho is big here too. Pho (pronounced without the “O” sound) is a Vietnamese soup. To get the pronunciation right I pretend I am about to say “fuck” and leave off the “uck”. Imagine the largest bowl of Ramen noodles you have ever seen, then add meat and vegetables, spices, and crunchy bean sprouts. Pho is damned pho-ine. It’s cheap and there is plenty left for several meals the next day. Re-warmed at home, pho is “slap your mama” good.

There is a comic book shop about twenty feet from my back door. This is disastrous. Imagine Curt Cobain and Robert Downey Jr. managing a halfway house and you’ll have an idea of how bad an idea it is to have comic books this close to me. I have NO self-control. At first I wandered into Zanadu Comics telling myself I needed just a few things---figure references for my Costume Design class. Then I began to wander over to Zanadu when I felt sad or alone---or when I was happy and alone. Now, I go there whenever I am alone. I tell myself I can stop anytime…

There is also a barbershop across the street---cheap cuts for $10. I went in last week and asked the guy to buzz my head and did he ever buzz it. Afterward, the barber asked if the cut was close enough and I said,

“ I think you nicked my BRAIN STEM!!!”

Shit, what guard did he use? A negative three? My head is still sore and chapped and my skull is lily white. I bought a cheap toboggan and now look like a Swiss fashion model gone to pot.

The Red Toolbox

The Tony Brewer Company, an Atlanta-based event design company, provided me with one of the best jobs I have ever had. My criteria for “work happiness” begins and ends with the PEOPLE I work with. Tony Brewer employs a bizarre mix of florists, interior designers, working mothers, and migrant farm workers. The end result is oddly (and consistently) lovely. I am talking about both PRODUCT and PROCESS. It never failed to amaze me what these people could do with a shit-ugly hotel banquet room given only a few mis-matched pillars, some scaffolding, two skinny rolls of yellow Sateen fabric and a bucket of Gerber daisies. They are like Sarah Jessica Parker on awards night: jump in the closet, throw on a bunch of crazy shit, and then go win an Emmy! The owner of the company would slap me soundly for saying this but they do their BEST work when they have the LEAST to work with. That’s a compliment but the designers, all very gay, LOVE to have lots of FRILLY and PRETTY to work with--- even if they end up not needing it. One of my managers, Sean, an eight-foot gay man who I suspect is the lovechild of Jeff Stryker and Pollyanna, loves his pretty FABRIC and SPARKLES so much that he invariably ends up wearing them at some point. It wasn’t uncommon for Sean to prance through the warehouse in a pink sateen sarong and a feather boa saying,

“HELLO. MY NAME IS STEPHANIE STARNES AND I AM YOUR NEXT MISS CHITLIN!”

The “AM” was always spoken with a kind of silly certainty. I could imagine an overzealous pageant coach whispering to Stephanie Starnes before she strutted onstage,

“say it like you mean it and you WILL be our next Miss Chitlin!”

Sean is an incredibly sweet and high strung man, easily upset and unable to hide it. Once on a job, Sean was having a fit about something. He was so enraged and upset he had apparently forgotten he was wearing a turban he’d fashioned out of several yards of sequined fabric. Dashing about the event site, hollering and flailing, he looked strangely like a jilted gay Sasquatch. The owner, Tony, snatched him by the arm and pulled him close to where I was working and whispered angrily,

“Sean, we can’t have you running around all willy-nilly!”

I thought, “more like willy NELLY.”

As if they could read my mind, they looked at me and snapped,

“David, you’re mangling the living hell out of those Hydrangeas! Pay attention to what you’re doing.”

I don’t think they ever came to terms with me---a homo who knew NOTHING about flower arranging, fabric, draping, or interior design. More often than not I was sent to help the Production Department move the heavy stuff. Given a simpler set of skills to master, I remained clumsy and ignorant. Still, Jerome, Leo, Marcus, Kelvin, Dion, and I worked pretty well together. Eventually I learned enough about the flowers and became such a clear threat to the safety of the Production crew that the company put me back into the floral department for good.

My favorite memory of the Tony Brewer Company is from a wedding the company planned in Barnsley Gardens, a resort area in North Georgia. A bunch of us had driven up and worked for two solid days setting up this hellish wedding, a perverse tribute to Old South cotillions. By the second day on the job none of us had gotten more than a couple of hours of sleep. At one point I went down to the church basement to take a poop and fell asleep on the toilet. Later, I was awakened by a surly janitor who needed to clean the stall before the ceremony. Upon returning to work I was asked sharply,

“David, where have you BEEN???”

I answered sheepishly,

“That depends on how long I’ve been gone.”

That same afternoon, I was told to paint some long, black metal poles black. When I pointed out they were ALREADY black I was told in no uncertain terms that they were "semi-gloss" black and to achieve the right effect, we'd need a "flat matte" black. There were about fifty of these "too shiny" black poles and I was painting them in the sun so they would dry quickly. I remember placing the poles on the ground and sitting so I could relax as I painted in long slow strokes. The next thing I knew Sean was shaking me out of a very sound sleep. He hollered,

“David, what the hell are you doing?”

Startled and groggy, I dropped my brush. When I reached down to grab it I saw that I had been “sleep painting” and both my legs were painted black.

In the end, the event was arguably one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. It was truly breathtaking---but also exhausting. By 11:30 that Sunday night everyone else was wiped out too. I knew this when I went to the normally pristine and well-organized red toolbox that we carried wherever we went. I was looking for a hammer to rip nails from a board. Inside the toolbox I found no hammer, nary a tool in fact---only this:

1. a cheeto
2. a single woodscrew
3. a piece of fried chicken
4. a clump of hair

This is the best memory, the one I mentioned before---the five minutes following this discovery in the toolbox. We all took turns looking into the red toolbox at our "tools" --- and we laughed. We laughed so hard on top of our exhaustion that we had to sit down and catch our breaths. Finally, as we stood to finish our clean-up, the clock at the church struck twelve midnight and the automatic timer took the flood lights on the grounds out one by one. In pitch blackness, only half finished with our clean up, we sat in silence. Sean said,

“Shit. Please tell me we brought flashlights.”

Someone else said with complete sincerity,

“They ought to be in the red toolbox.”

Dream

People love talking about their dreams. I think it makes us feel like movie stars a little bit, or at the very least remarkably UNIQUE. Nothing is more tedious, though, than listening to other people describe their kuh-RAZY dreams. It is ironic because even the truly wild and goofy ones are somehow---dull. I think it comes from the fact that dreams are such self-contained little conversation pieces. See, it takes no creativity to begin describing a dream and once described, the very nature of dreaming acquits any sloppy storytelling. So, we are let off the hook when we begin to tell our innermost subconscious thoughts. There are no rules in the telling, therefore no STAKES, and that lack of tension kills the whole thing. In any case, allow me to bore you for about half a minute...

I am really baffled by my dreams lately. See, my dreams have only recently started to make any sense. As a kid, they were usually colorful, splashy nothings. Once I dreamed about a clear glass bowl full of blue ice and spinning. That’s it. That was the WHOLE dream.

Let’s move on.

As an adult, my subconscious has apparently audited a few night classes in screenwriting. Most recently I dreamed that I was undergoing a rigorous interview process to become Julia Roberts’s nanny---or more precisely, the nanny for her twins.
Going into the dream I was aware that I had already made it through two interviews with attorneys. Now, I was finally meeting Julia herself and she was not at all what I expected. Her onscreen coltish verve was in reality replaced by a fatigued skittishness. Her people made me sign a dozen or so confidentiality clauses and swear secrecy on a Bible. Then Julia took me to the nursery to meet Hazel and Huck. She lingered shakily in the doorway smoking the stub of a cigarette. I remember trying to engage her as we approached the crib but she would have none of it. It was strictly [meet the kids then we talk]. I leaned over to peek at the twins and I saw two white puppies---little fluffy American Eskimo Spitzes (like my dog Milo). Her twins were puppies. I looked over my shoulder in time to see Julia Roberts put out her cigarette on the heel of her shoe. She did not look up when she said, “You can see why we want this kept quiet.”

I didn’t blink before saying, “Ms. Roberts, they are ADORABLE!”

Hearing this, she dropped to her knees and burst into tears. With ice broken, we became fast friends---even tossing a ball around the Nursery for the twins.

Now, where in the HELL did that come from?

God$$$$

Oh God, being poor sucks.

For the record, when I talk about money (or lack thereof) I am not talking extremes. For example, I have never lived on the streets (though I’ve spent the night in my car many times). On the other hand, I’ve never had a savings account either. This middle ground, or more precisely, LOWER middle ground is the root of my dismay.

See, I have $14 to my name. Period. In a little blue cup in the cupboard I have a ten dollar bill and four ones rolled up tightly and tucked out of sight. There is no windfall, or even piddling stipend, on the horizon---no paycheck, no refund check, not even a gift certificate to redeem. $14---that’s it. I have a job but it won’t start for another few days, meaning I won’t see a paycheck for at least two weeks. Oh, Lord…

When I came to Chicago I planned for this but clearly my plan sucked. Everything’s out of synch. The job I got (was LUCKY to get) didn’t need me to start right away. No one else seemed interested in hiring me. Starbucks, Caribou Coffee, Borders Books, Barnes and Noble (the list goes on) all had HELP WANTED signs in the windows so I filled out applications. It’s been a week and I haven’t heard a peep, which begs the question: Do I look insane? Do I look like a criminal? Is there something about me that screams: BAD EMPLOYEE?!!

Being unemployed is an awful, useless feeling. To offset my shame I have been volunteering at the Presbyterian Church across the street. It beats sitting home and watching reruns of Law & Order. The Pastor and church staff didn’t know quite what to make of me. When I first stuck my head in the office and said, “I’d like to volunteer” they didn’t understand. Then later, they thought I was sent over by someone named Denise to play a practical joke on them. When it finally set in that I was just there to volunteer they were a little embarrassed. The Parish Nurse gave me a rag and some Murphey’s Oil and sent me to work. About an hour later the Pastor came up to me while I was polishing the pews in the sanctuary and said,

“This is so kind of you. We sure hope to see you in service on Sunday.”

Without thinking I blurted, “Oh, God, no!”

He looked at me funny and I added, “but thank you for asking.”

Then he said, “We have a service at 9:00AM and 11:00AM if you change your mind”.

Not trusting myself to say even remotely the right thing, I just shook my head like the Seinfeld woman who wouldn’t taste Jerry’s apple pie.

It’s pretty clear I have a weird relationship with church. I’m not a heathen, though---not completely. In fact, I say my prayers every night. I have a theory about them as a matter of fact. It comes from this wacky bit of trivia I picked up from an episode of the West Wing. Studies show that prayer clearly helps people who are ill get better more quickly than people who are not prayed for. I checked the facts online and it’s pretty wild and apparently true. Stranger still, my gut TELLS me it’s true; I think that prayers work BUT only when we pray for others. Anything else is like referring to yourself in an essay,

“In MY opinion…blah, blah, blah…”

It is redundant since we are connected to God. Besides, if EVERYBODY prayed for someone ELSE, we'd all be covered, right? So nightly I pray for people whose tragedies are fresh in my mind via the eleven o’clock news: the seventeen year old who overdosed on bad heroin near Wicker Park (and his family), American soldiers killed in Iraq, poor Natalie Holloway, and even long-dead Terri Schiavo. Yes, I know she is old news but I have never felt sadder for a family in my life. Prayers couldn't make her better but hopefully it eased her suffering. The most tragic part for me is that she lay in a coma all those years and only began to get our prayers near her release. So, even though I know she is long at peace, I still toss in a little good energy for her mom & dad every once and a while.

So, I AM a believer---maybe even religious, though the connotation gives me the willies. The thing is--- the only times my faith in a higher power have been sorely tested were when I went to church regularly.

Golly---more than a page about MONEY and CHURCH. My lower-middle- class Southern roots are showing today.