''Just say the word and tell me that I'm forgiven''

Alright FF, if yesterday's happy song jerked your tears, I can make no guarantees about today's sad song. I promise that one of these meme categories will soon provide me with a funny, upbeat memory, but not today I'm afraid.

Day 4: A song that makes you sad: Never Gonna Let You Go by Sergio Mendes

I remember the day we went to pick up my mom's ''new'' little red Camaro. She had pointed out several times on the street what kind of car she was getting but she always pointed out one that was shiny and new. "See that one right there? That's a Camaro. That's the kind of car mommy's getting. A red one.''

I was surprised at the used car dealership at how chipped the paint was, how the interior smelled like an old ashtray, how the visors hung badly, and how the stuffing was coming out probably through a cigarette burn in the dark upholstery that was stained with unidentifiable liquids. I touched the car while I peered inside the window and quickly withdrew my hand. It was summertime in Mesa, Arizona, the air was thick and dry and almost burned your lungs going in, and you could easily fry an egg on the hood of that car.

Mom was starting over. My dad, far away in Albuquerque, was no longer holding her back and neither were we: me age 7, the Huta kid age 4, and the Chulster age 8.

Mom had a new job working on the assembly line at Motorola. That and the dealing of weed to a few friends and relatives paid the bills and allowed her to spoil us just enough when we visited her. It paid for her new apartment.

That apartment. It was a tiny duplex on a corner near a car wash with a tree that was good for climbing and oleander bushes that filled with bees. Most of the neighbors had covered their windows in tin foil to reflect the sun out. There were no garages on our block, just carports filled with junk and yards with grass that was yellowed and dried and patched with dirt.

You would never guess by looking at the inside of her place that it was just on the border of the projects, that most of the neighbors on our street were on welfare. Inside the apartment was a twenty-something single woman's oasis of independence, a hideaway where she could reinvent herself in a world unhindered.

She had painstakingly decorated the place in her hip, youthful 80s way. Everything about it was a statement of creativity. Restaurant menus she had nicked and hung up carefully on the dining area wall every which way seemed the epitome of funky and fun. Her bedroom was a den of seduction where she had hung Chinese umbrellas upside down over her bed, covering the light and creating an aura. On top of her dresser she had her own swiveling earring rack filled with big cheap earrings, just like the ones in shops that I loved to spin round and round until I was told to stop. She had covered a lamp in a romantic black mesh which was surely meant to kindle something I knew that I didn't know much about. Her negligees hung from the expensive kind of silk padded hangers, not the wire ones that tangled themselves up on the closet floor impossibly at my dad's place in a mess of dirty laundry and shoes. Those negligees probably fit her nicely now with her new boobs. Her designer friends she met in her photography classes came over and as they listened to my mom's Sade album on the record player, in their cracked voices of holding in a drag from a joint held tightly by a roach clip, they would comment on how creative my mom was and how great her apartment was and how happy they were for her. She must have lay in bed alongside my dad and dreamt for months about how she would decorate her own place once she got away from him and his grandmother's hand-me-downs that filled their joyless home.

But back to the little red Camaro. That car, like the apartment, represented a break from the prison of family life or the prison of my dad, from the ugly long brown family car he had humbly accepted when his grandmother passed, since he was worse off than any of his eight siblings. This was supposed to be a happy day for her, a day of confirmation that everything was going better for her now.

We stood around restless while my mom closed the deal: Chulster, with her signature summer sun scowl and her orange popcycle stained lips, the Huta kid covered in a layer of sweat and grime, with her golden baby curls and pouty red lips, and me, with my stringy thin braids going down the sides of a face over-populated by wreckless freckles.

She paid for the car in cash, shook the dealer's hand, and her three little sweaty girls crammed themselves into the tiny hot Camaro that now had her name on the title. The hairs near our ears curled from the heat and our faces flushed and as she reached over the front seat to roll down the passenger side window, she warned us not to touch the metal trim on the windows because it would burn us. She awkwardly put the keys in the ignition, not used to exactly where it was. The engine started up and we were off. Mom could now tick off another item on her to-do list for making a new life.

The hot breeze gushing into the non-air conditioned car was welcomed with relief and she turned on the radio. ''I was as wrong as I could be, to let you get away from me, I'll regret that move, for as long as I'm living..."

''Mom?'' the Huta kid asked. She scooted her tiny body up to the edge of the hot red velour seat. ''Mommy?''

''Shhhh!'' the Chulster turned around from the front seat and hissed angrily. ''Mom's sad.''

''I'm never gonna let you go, I'm gonna hold you in my arms forever, gonna try to make up for the time I hurt you so…''

I could see the back side of my mom's profile and could tell her cheeks were wet. She switched lanes furiously while wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

''Mommy?'', the Huta insisted in a worried small voice. ''Mommy, ARE YOU CRYING, MOMMY?''

''But if there's some feeling left in you, some flicker of love that still shines through, let's talk about, let's talk about second chances…''

''Mommy is this the 'Never Gonna Let You Go' song?'' Huta urgently needed to know while tapping on my mom's shoulder.

''Yeah honey, it is.''

''Does it make you sad, Mommy?''

''Yeah honey, it does''.

''Is that why you're crying, Mommy?''

''Yeah.''

Huta looked around at the three of our tear streaked faces and confirmed, ''Me too. I'm sad too, Mommy.'' She looked down and her bright red lower lip protruded outward and then she proceeded to carefully examine the rest of us for clues on how to be sad from a song. ''Never gonna let you go...'', Huta belted out in her tiny voice, to sing along with the rest of us who were singing it softly under our breaths.

I was heartbroken because even at 7 years old I knew the song was a lie. She was letting go, of him and of us, she was only going to hold us in her arms while we were here visiting from Albuquerque, not forever, like the song said. There was no flicker of love that still shone through and there were no second chances and she didn't have any regrets like the guy singing did, otherwise we would all be together again with Dad. So why was she crying? Because she wished she felt like the guy and girl singing? Did she wish that for our sake she didn't need to face life as a huntress just one last time?

From time to time I'll be at a the mall or in the grocery store and I'll hear this song on the musac and there is no amount of time that can pass between my seven year old self and my adulthood to make me not feel as confused as my sisters and I did that day in my mom's little red Camaro.

StumbleIt

I've got one hand in my pocket and the other one is smashing my neighbor's stereo

So, you guys didn't really believe it was going to be 30 songs in 30 consecutive days, did you? Come on, cut me some slack - I can barely remember how to type a sentence.

Day 2: Your least favorite song


1995 was not a good year for me.

I graduated from high school in spring and was due to start college in the fall. I didn't know why I wanted to go to college. I only knew that it sounded slightly better than working at Dairy Queen and I had heard that this was what successful people did, so I went with it. I had no real aspirations of what to study and minimal interest in anything other than trying to look cool and listen to music that I though affiliated me with cool. The more obscure the band, the more attractive I thought I became to people with this particular brand of cool, but the shit couldn't be too obscure, otherwise I would lose touch with the whole coolness barometer altogether. By the time I graduated from high school I had a good, trained grasp of the fact that anything liked by the masses, with a few exceptions, was automatically suspect, even though I knew very little about what really made music good.

I was heading to a state school. My parents had lacked the cultural capital required to know what went in to exploring a college education for their kids. There were no trips to the nearby PAC-10 schools or out east for interviews or campus visits. I was never encouraged to do things that might look good on a college application. My parents didn't know the first thing about looking into scholarship options. The only time I ever remember my mother talking to me about college was to say that her dream for me was to go off to college and marry an older boy that was about to graduate which would apparently secure me a worry-free future sustained by a college boy salary. Great vote of confidence to get me started at college, eh?

I thumbed through the housing options catalogs and was sold on the idea of 'getting the most out of an authentic college life experience' where I would have an 'important networking opportunity' and would likely establish relationships that would be memorable to me throughout my life.

This was a golden opportunity to try out new versions of myself. I had a clean slate and was heretofore unpigeonholed. I could change my hair, my clothes, my interests, and my taste in music. I could redefine the coolness barometer altogether to fit with the real me. The trouble was, I wasn't comfortable enough with myself to determine what it was I really liked and felt lost without a reference to see how I measured up. I looked around me and was overwhelmed with trying to determine where I belonged.

In high school I had barely been within the margins of the cool crowd. I didn't get asked on dates or to dances a lot, but I got invited to parties and was generally good at tethering myself to people that were well accepted. I was carefully perceptive about what kind of belts were being worn at the time, just how worn my levies should be, and the minimum acceptable number of earring holes required to be part of the crowd. So even though I was a few notches down on the pretty scale compared to the girls I most admired, I fit in with the scenery and didn't draw too much attention to the fact that I had no business being there or anywhere really.

But in the college dorm environment, I couldn't clearly identify the alternatively cool anti-mainstream crowd I had elbowed my way into in high school and I was suddenly surrounded by hundreds of stunningly beautiful, rich women in their prime that were rushing for sororities, whose parents had shipped them off to sunny Arizona from the east coast. I looked around and knew that being on the margins of cool wasn't going to cut the mustard. But I didn't have the confidence to attempt to be accepted at the sorority level. So I duly linked greek life to the claim that it was all just a bunch of bullshit and that I hated it, while I secretly browsed the catalogs of the sorority houses and imagined what it would be like to live in one of them.

I was lonely as fuck at a time when I was unable to appreciate aloneness. I became friends with some of the girls that weren't really into the sorority thing. They were nerdy and smart and knew things like that U of A had a top notch medical school and what your GPA had to be to get into law school. They were all so sure of what they were studying and spent hours at it, while I wandered around bored, with my books barely cracked open. I hung out downstairs on the cement benches where people with obscure t-shirts that seemed integrated and happy and cool smoked cigarettes, but I was too shot down in my loneliness to approach them, only able to muster up occasional eye contact in the hopes that someone would come talk to me. The few fleeting relationships I managed to form made no impressionable impact on me. I don't remember a single person's name of the people I shared months living alongside.

This Alanis Morissette song was popular at the time and the girls in the room in front of mine blasted it multiple times a day with their door wide open for the entire first semester. Every young 18 year woman - nerdy, hippy, alternative type, sorority sister - sang this song from the top of their lungs while clutching their hearts or wrapping their arms around other like-minded women and they all felt like it was written just for them. They were all high but grounded, sane but overwhelmed, lost but hopeful, baby. They knew it was all gonna be fine fine fine. I guess they all had one hand in their pockets and the other giving a high five and I hated them all for their camaraderie and their college life experience that I felt so disconnected with.

Besides, the song is just dumb. Who puts one hand in their pocket while the other one is playing the piano? Please.

I left U of A after one semester.

StumbleIt

I’m fine, really, I just needed to go for a jog and to say the fuck-word ten hundred times

I step into the elevator and stare in the mirror at what can only be described as a thirty-something, American dork giving me the stink eye. She’s wearing these dumb blue running shorts she’s had for like 15 years which act as some ridiculous cake topper for the hairy and mole-ridden legs that haven’t seen the sun in 9 months and that are probably about to get rocked into a melanoma frenzy by the hot Seville sun.

There are tits somewhere under this sports bra that is so tight that I become forcefully acquainted with the previously unknown phenomenon called ‘back fat’, which I just quickly add to the list of body parts I would like exchanged for something else. The hidden, smashed up tits are stupid, inadequate blobs of uselessness though because they’ve never once served either one of their real purposes. I’d be better off with mosquito bites, or cancerous moles or watermelon jelly beans for tits.

My workout clothes are out of style and too small for me because I refuse to spend more money on shit that's gonna rot in my closet from lack of use. And by 'refuse to spend money on' I mean 'can't buy because pretty soon I’m gonna be unemployed'. But whatever, I'm not talking about money and my stupidly precarious job situation, okay, I'm talking about the fact that my boobs are idle, ineffectual flesh quagmires and that I never fucking exercise because I have problems with self-discipline.

Today's different though. Today I'm going running. Yeah, like, with my ipod and all my stupid gear and shit. And I look like a total dork but I don't care. Because my body parts are stupid anyway and they go with my dumb outfit.

Today I want to smash pavement with my heels, until my head turns a scary shade of red with a rush of the opiate of endorphins, no matter how much the impact pulverizes my whiny little bitch of a sacrum that, while I'm at it, should be added to the list of body parts that need to be exchanged.

I raise my lip slightly exposing my teeth in disapproval at my reflection. Stupid elevator mirrors. I should have taken the stairs. I decide that I don’t care if my sacrum shatters into a million pieces. It’s not like I’m pregnant and I need to be careful. It’s not like I’m “healthy” anyway. Nature already decided that my kind are to die out, so what’s the diff? Ha! The pavement is going to feel what I want to do to people’s faces. People like my doctor with his stupid 25 thousand million dollar scheme he has cooked up to make me a sci-fi baby in a petri dish because I apparently require weird lab equipment and a million dollars to have a family. He'll only do this after stabbing me for scary blood tests and looking in at all my rotted organs and after cutting out a chunk of my husband’s balls and after making him jack off on demand. Bam! How does that feel, stupid pavement face? What up with your science now, bitch? The pavement also gets to be all the stupid people that have pestered us to have kids because my god, it’s so goddamn simple, you just lay down and deposit your cum and voila!- you have a vomiting woman and a positive pregnancy test and truckloads of like hope and excitement and shit and, you know, a future that doesn't resemble the fucked up one that's in my mind right now.

I blast the music on my ipod and hope people hear it and know I’m not interested in humanly high fives, chit chat, eye contact, sharing the universe with them, offering them a drop of water if they were dying of thirst, or being a member of their stupid society with their stupid ideas and their seeds they spread like a germ diaspora while my shit never gets fertilized because it sucks. Them, with their perfectly functioning ovaries and sperm, with their abilities to bust out their junk at any given moment and create the seedlings of a human, statistically speaking, with nearly anyone that just happens to walk by. Them, with, you know things like property in their name and, oh I don’t know, a steady income so that they could adopt a little baby if they wanted to, a little baby that needed a mommy and daddy and that's out there and that needs me. I know I only live in a rental apartment and I might not have a job soon, but I'm gonna make it and so fuck you for not letting me have a family until I'm fucking old and gray and too decrepit to have one.

I don’t belong in that society. I guess I’ll just hang back here with the a-holes that think breast milk in a sealed container in a fridge at work is offensive and that say they don’t want kids simply because they don’t like what it would do to their beautiful bodies as if gravity ain’t gonna fuck that shit up anyway. We'll just hang out here with our dogs and talk about furminators and about how great life is without kids and how people with kids fucking suck.

By the time I get back home, my head is clear and I don’t hate everyone anymore, and science and society are cool as shit again, and I'm gonna survive, I guess. But my face is red for the next three hours and my back really fucking hurts.

Stupid sacrum.

StumbleIt

I'm losing my mind a little. Do you know what time I was supposed to be here?

There are a lot of things that I’m realizing about myself now that I’ve moved. Maybe with more light you see things more clearly. One is that I have been needlessly being a bitch during most of my waking hours for the past several years. Okay, it's true that I was utterly, hopelessly claustrophobic in my job and in my house to the point of wanting to headbutt my way out of reality, and now I feel like I’m finally out of prison, but still.

Another realization I've had is that I’ve spent far too many years acting like clocks and watches were for pussies.

So, tickety tock, I bought a new clock.

It’s a beautiful brass and metal German antique clock from the 1950s. It's in the shape of a starburst which makes me feel all hip and in-the-know decoration wise. But best of all, it has the most lusciously subtle whispering tick tock you’ve ever heard and listening to it is like Earl Grey and cashmere and bubble baths and pine-scented candles and chicken enchiladas and sunsets and foot rubs reformulated as the sound waves of a metronome.

When I sit on the sofa I don’t want any bullshit electronic gadgets jacking up my tick tock time. Not like Luisito. Luisito has to have some gadget carcinogenisizing my oxygen every waking second of the day (but I'm turning over the nice leaf so I don't yell, I just drown everything out but the tick tock). But when he's cooped himself up in his office, fabricating homemade 3D glasses or planning his robot project, I sit in almost-silence with only the tick tocking of my new timekeeper to be heard. The sound of finely gauged progress over the sundial is all I need; to hell with nanotechnology and interceptors and shufflers. I don’t even want any music. I only want my tick tock.

Tick tock reminds me of the clock in my grandparents home that used to bewitch me and calmly terrorize me with its swinging pendulum. I would stand before it on an almost-silent-yet-ticking Sunday afternoon when there were no lights on in the house, but the sunlight would pour through the Frank Loyd Wright style skylights above and into the entryway where the clock patriarched over the rest of the furniture and the light would make shadows all over the bluish porcelain statues spangling the neighboring shelves. I imagined unlocking it's chamber and slipping my lanky skinny body inside and coming out the other end where there would be another world beyond it, a melty flowery surreal world, with crystalline streams and pots of gold at the end of rainbows. Maybe one where everyone was a centaur or people served you Turkish Delight from sleds or where you could drink some potion and become really small or really big or you could cross into an enchanted forest and ride through it on the back of a tortoises where you would only survive because you would find a nice cow that you could milk or a giant white dog looking thing would give you a sky-ride to a princess where you could fathom one grain of sand.

But tick tock also reminds me of the clock in my house when I was in high school, a mini grandfather clock because my mom was trying to be fancy when she bought it and thought it would go well with the cherry wood entertainment center that was way too nice for everything else in our house. This clock in particular and I were engaged in a constant game of wits as I pushed the gas pedal to the floor in my Toyota Corolla racing myself home on the freeway from my boyfriend's house in the wee wee hours. That clock usually won and would proceed to ruin my life every time I came in past curfew bracing myself for another encounter with one teary-faced mother who was taking it very hard that I no longer did what she said.

When I was in college, I decided I was done with clocks altogether and I even swore myself off watches. At that point all they did was remind me of how incompetent I was, of my total lack of organization and they impulsed me to feel that frantic panic of running late every time I needed to be anywhere. I used to talk about how timepieces in general represented some kind of human bondage. God was I ever pretentious when I was in college. I wish I could wind the clock back, oh a good twelve years or so and stuff a sock in my mouth and tie myself up and force-listen myself to the tick tocking while erasing my brain of the cliches I'd learned that I didn't know were cliches. That shit would get reprogrammed quick like.

Now? Now my clock feels like home for better or worse and grounds me in something I fully accept as mine. It makes my future gain its will to glow again. But at the same time it makes me panic slightly and feel like I'm running late for something really fucking important that I don't know how I've managed to not show up on time for. I feel like I've been hitting snooze for several years.

I know now why real grown ups have a real ticking clock in their homes and I understand why twenty one year olds that don't have to worry about anything other than if they are going to drink Four Peaks that night or Tom Collins don't. Real grown ups need to be reminded, subconsciously that time is actually moving, even if you act like an a-hole for five years pretending it isn’t.

Tick tock. I already miss my new home, because I know someday I’ll move from it. I know the landlord will want the flat back long before we are ready to leave, or maybe, if things aren't entirely fucked, our family won’t be so small anymore. I wonder how many ticks that clock will breathe in and how many tocks it will breathe out before that happens, if it ever does.

So now I’m on the market for a watch, preferably with subtle tickage.

And you know what else? I want to see an infertility specialist (or is it a fertility specialist?). Because I'm 33 years old and and I fear my clockwork may need repair. Luisito doesn't want to because he thinks we're maybe just wound up too tight causing our hands to spiral backwards frantically, not allowing our mechanics to function properly at all. But I wonder if there isn't some spring that's been dislodged or a wheel that's been rusted, or maybe the wheels' teeth aren't matching up properly due to misuse.

On the other hand, maybe we're a time mechanism that is set to a fucking explosive.

Or maybe I'm a perpetual motion machine that's has suddenly been told that perpetual motion was disproved by physicists.

Help.

StumbleIt

Gum and Madge

I pulled the car up to the same house I'd pulled up to countless times before. My eyes scanned the yard where Easter egg hunts had taken place, where tag-you're-its had gone down with hurried breathing and where hide-and-go-seek boundary rules had been defined. My sister Huta got out of the car seemingly free from this assault of memories. Her surroundings don't change as much as mine do. She's in the thick of her memories more often than I am. Intensity and attachment to memories must be a function of absence from their triggers. I felt like taking her ass down her on the lawn and tickling her so she'd remember too. Please remember like I do. But I gathered that would irritate her somewhat, and since I'm no longer inclined to fuck with the Huta, I restrained myself.

"Grab the food", I hollered back as I walked up towards the gate. I pulled it open in what seemed like slow motion and recalled the time my tiny body clung to it while someone pushed me back and forth on it. The bougainvillea next to the gate that was usually in full bloom and full of bees on the white adobe wall was all shriveled up, a barren skeleton of a plant, dying of thirst in the Arizona sun. What the fuck? That's not how I had remembered it. I was inside a traitorous memory; instead of the clear colors and hugeness of it all, it had all been violently downscaled, shrunken by my adulthood, and weeds had germinated through the cracks in the patio and the paint on the door frames was now chipping away. Things are always much better kept in memories.

As I turned the doorknob to my grandparents' house and let myself in as I always had before, I half expected to find my Grandpa Gum clad in his favorite checkered button down shirt and his jean-like slacks, standing on a ladder fixing the ceiling fan or sitting in his chair poring over his history books with his glasses at the edge of his nose, his long slender legs crossed like a woman, just as my dad's legs do when he sits. I expected my grandmother to be in the other room re-wallpapering the dining room or baking 20 dozen peanut butter cookies for the church bake sale.

The scary grandfather clock that used to haunt me as a child stood tall in the foyer, but not quite as tall as it should have stood. I knew just where the key to it was hidden -- on top of it on the back right corner. I could easily reach that key now. I wouldn't need to stand tip toed on a chair if I wanted to open up the grandfather clock and peer into it with my heart pounding. But I ignored the urge to do that. My Great Grandmother´s Lladro statues sat unshined and dusty, but right where I remembered them. The pink silk couches, the same couches that have been reupholstered half a dozen times were exactly where they ought to be. The place, as always, had the feel of a cold museum, filled with untouchable icy artifacts with museum-keepers that were not much warmer.

Instead of standing on a ladder, Grandpa Gum was struggling at a snail's pace with a walker to make it to his chair so he could rest. I kissed him despite how uncomfortable I knew it probably made him and said hello. I tried not to let on that I was surprised at his frailness, his strong frame withered into a stoop, his once clear and sharp eyes sunken into his skull with the glossy fluid look of an aged gaze. He barely moved or said a word, a smile being more than he could muster these days, incapable of giving a warm hug. It didn't matter. He had never been capable of giving a warm hug before, even when he could.

"Why hello", my grandmother said, putting her arms around me with a smile. This tenderness...it's new. Added to the chipped paint and the short grandfather clock was this strange affection I hadn't seen before in her. It betrayed my memories of her.

"Where should I put this Grandma?" my sister asked referring to the take out food she was still holding.

"Oh, just put it anywhere." My grandmother waved a careless hand.

"How are you Grandpa?" I asked him as I took a seat next to him near the giant fireplace that for some reason was as scary as the Grandfather clock.

"I'm great. I'm just waiting to die," he stated, matter-of-factly.

I stared into Gum's emotionless eyes and in a moment, no longer than a couple of seconds, I saw a man that had fought in World War II, a man that had made it through law school with fucking narcolepsy, a man that had married the woman of his life and had had eight children with her. I saw him receiving the news about the death of his son in Vietnam. I saw him anxiously waiting in hospital rooms for news good and bad. I saw him starring at the Great Wall of China and Stonehenge and the Grand Canyon and Mount Everest and the Egyptian pyramids. I saw a man that was appointed to serve as a federal district court judge by Jimmy Carter. I saw him, dressed in legal garb, starring into the eyes of the worst of humanity, along with the wrongly accused, the framed, the exploited. I saw his blunders in Tibet and his winters in fucking Siberia. I saw him dancing and speaking in other languages and kicking any one's ass at a crossword puzzle or backgammon. Old Gum had out read us, had out bred us, had out travelled us, had out earned us, had outwitted us, had out fucked us. He had stood firmly inside the panopticon of human experience and had seen the best and the worst that life had to offer and check mate, he was fucking done. In his flat reply to my question regarding his current state of being, in so many words he told me that he'd be damned if he was going to will himself into another five years of this diaper bullshit he was currently putting up with.

Unsure how to reply to his death wish, I said nothing to him at all and I turned to my grandmother who was in a much more pleasant state of denial regarding her own deterioration.

"So, how're the kids?" she asked me, politely inquiring about the offspring I wasn't aware I had. It dawned on me for a moment that maybe the reason why she was being so unusually warm was because she was confusing me with someone from her church. I brushed it off.

"You mean my nephews, Grandma? They're good."

She looked at me, and confusion momentarily crossed her beautiful blue eyes, through her rhinestone-rimmed glasses that sat on a perfect nose, above gorgeous cheekbones covered in gentle lovely wrinkles. She smiled, showing the teeth that had made it all these years, but furrowed her brow trying to sort it all out and I noticed how her snow white hair shifted forward.

Huta, uncomfortable, and possibly wanting to speed up this grandparent visit stated, "Well, our food it getting cold, so why don't we have dinner now".

"Oh we can't have dinner now, I'm afraid." Grandma replied.

"Why not?"

"Well, because my granddaughters will be here shortly and they're bringing us dinner".

Ah, Fuuuuck.

"Grandma," my sister said in a gentle whisper, "That's us. We're your granddaughters."

This time the perplexity lingered longer and was a bit more disheartening.

I glanced over at Gum, who I believed was contemplating finding some hidden strength within to take us all down with his walker. He glared at whoever looked his way.

The doorbell sounded and Aunt Eunice made her skinny appearance with her tattooed eyebrows and a tub of ice cream under her arm. Thankfully, she was quickly recognized by both her parents, taking a bit of the burden off of us for feeling like intruders in a home we had spent so many Christmas Eves, so many birthday parties, so many Thanksgivings.

After awkward two-pats-on-the-back hugs only serving to remind us how thin the threads to the fabric of our family are, we sat down around the table with paper plates and plastic forks and passed around the Olive Garden take out.

"Why, this meal is delicious. I don't remember the last time I had pasta," Grandma graciously exclaimed.

Gum's shaky hand wasn't allowing the noodles to stay on his fork long enough to reach his dentured mouth. I stole a glance at Huta and knew we were both regretting the Olive Garden decision. I began to worry about his hungry looking limbs and digits that weren't cooperating to help nourish themselves.

"Gum. Put your fork on your plate like so and turn. See? Like so," Grandma instructed. He pretended not to hear her and went on trying to shovel a shaky fork full of unstable noodles into his mouth. "Gum. Down and turn. Like so," she repeated in an increasingly irritated tone.

"Leave me alone," he eventually growled at her with his mouth full of what small morsels had made their way there by chance.

She gave up and turned to me, "So, how is Spain?"

Internally, I breathed a sigh of relief that she still knew who I was as I answered, "It's great, Grandma, we're doing really good. Just working. You know."

She stared at me, questioningly. "So, are you from Spain?", she asked me with that worried crinkled brow.

"No, Grandma. Remember? I was born here." Her confusion didn't have time to linger, because my Grandfather interrupted her.

"Madge? What happened to Bob's ashes?"

Aunt Eunice audibly choked on her Fettuccine. "Bob's ashes?" she blurted out incomprehensibly with her mouth full of food. "What are you talking about? Uncle Bob died?"

"Yes, Uncle Bob died," Gum calmly replied to the inquiry of his dead brother. "Bob's wife is bedridden and she had his ashes sent to Madge and me to handle them."

"My god", Aunt Eunice replied in disbelief, "When did all of this happen?"

Grandpa turned to Grandma, "Madge? Do you recall when all of this took place, because I don't."

"Oh Gum, I don't have the foggiest idea."

My Grandfather with a steady voice and no movements stated flatly, "I suppose it was a couple of months ago now. Madge? What did you do with my brother's ashes?" He asked her again as if he were inquiring about the location of his favorite pen or the crossword puzzle he was working on.

But Aunt Eunice was already in a fury, frantically calling her siblings and informing them that "we have situation here and I think you had better come over to Mom and Dad's. Were you aware that Uncle Bob died? Well he did. Two months ago. They have his ashes but they don't know what they've done with them. They were supposed to have arranged a service and apparently forgot to."

Huta and I gave each other knowing let's-get-the-fuck-outta-here looks and began to clear up the dinner mess. There were upset tones and minds that were in disarray and we no longer felt we should be there.

So goodbyes were said with bewilderment and frustration so palpable I could feel it and suddenly I realized that this might be the only time I had ever been able to pick up on any emotion whatsoever from my grandparents. But there was something else there besides the confusion and fear when my Grandmother grabbed my hand and gazed into my eyes and pleaded slowly, "Do come again," maybe with waves of knowing who she was even talking to but with certainty that there was love between us somehow.

On our way out I closed the door behind me. I walked through the carport I'd walked through so many times before. My grandmother's car used to sit right there, the one she used to pick me up in to take me to the ballet or to a play when I was a child because she was concerned about my status as the child of divorce and didn't want me to feel neglected. In her frosty, restrained way, she had loved me. And today, even with her not knowing precisely who I was, had marked the first time I had ever really felt it as an adult.

I noticed that the laundry room door was ajar and the light was on. I peaked my head in and remembered a favorite hide-and-go-seek hiding place. I smiled, turned the light off, and shut the door. Weeks later my grandmother would be found by my aunt in that hot laundry room in the middle of the scorching summer heat, with nothing on but her underwear, completely dehydrated, mixed up and distraught, unsure of how she got there or how long she'd been in there. When things calmed down and my grandparents had been fed, hydrated, and bathed, their pride had effectively withered to the point that they were finally willing to have a look at those pamphlets of Aunt Eunice's on assisted living.

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Fuck was that ever long. If you've made it this far, you deserve some kind of reward for reading that. This story is not entirely true. It's based on several true stories, not all of which happened directly to me, but my point was to recreate them and experiment a bit with description and dialogue. Thanks for making it to the end. Critical feedback welcome.

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The Mixed Tape

Every time I go home to Arizona for a visit, I walk through my mother's door, tired and worn down from the long journey and I take the load off my sore shoulders from all of my many heavy bags and I plop them down on the ground in the guest room, glad to be in familiar surroundings. I stare at the wooden chest my father gave me and it stares back at me, beckoning me to toss aside the doilies and the tacky ceramic figurines and coffee table books my mother has placed on top of it, open it up, inhale the distinctive cedar fragrance, and remember.

But the thought of opening it and becoming acutely aware of time, and in my case space, makes me gulp slightly for extra air. Besides, I don't have to open it up to know that underneath the Guinness coaster I kept from a pub in Ireland, the U2 ticket stub from the 1993 tour, the embarrassingly immature letters exchanged with friends or exes, and the incense burner that once filled a cozy apartment with hippie aroma, underneath it all, surely somewhere at the bottom of that chest, tucked inside an old shoebox, there must be a long lost mixed tape.

That mixed tape, if it is there as I suspect it is, would have survived the many moves and shifts of home. It would have escaped being accidentally placed in the box of cassettes to be sold at the garage sale which a brave mystery shopper would gamble a whopping 15 cents for, not knowing what would be on it. It would have somehow survived the brutal, tidying hands of my sister who had no idea how much fleeting feeling had gone into this delicate piece of plastic and wheels and coils of tape when by mere chance she tossed it absentmindedly into the 'junk to keep' pile as opposed to the 'trash' or 'Good Will' pile.

Mixed taping is quite a forgotten art, isn't it?

No, it is not the same as burning someone a CD or sharing a playlist or sending someone a YouTube link. It just isn't.

MP3 playlists don't have the folded flap to be filled in with ever-so-neatly executed tiny penmanship, perhaps even a second draft, with the first flap having been tossed because a right mess was made of it, and a new one having been stolen from a fresh unused tape so it would be just right.

Burned CDs don't have that clicking noise on the tape between the songs where years later someone, a real person, can be heard carefully pushing pause after having run back into the room near the song's end, conjuring up the images of the tape-maker fumbling through all of the CDs laid out on the floor in front of the stereo. You can imagine how the tape-maker pored over the CDs painstakingly one by one, to identify the best of the best of their songs with just the right lyrics sending just the right message to the recipient of the mixed tape. Runner-up songs that didn't make the mixed tape cut would be eliminated distressingly, but only after much indecision. An entire Saturday would be killed to create this musical anthology as a parting gift, crafted as the perfect compilation of ardor and devotion turned to the foreshadowing of absence and recognition of the fate of circumstance.



Maybe that mixed tape would be exchanged during a good-bye with a quivering voice awkwardly saying:

"I want you to take this tape I made you...and I want you to just listen to it."

And words would be giant jagged stones to be tripped over and fallen onto and injured by accidentally. Because the compiler of the tape was afraid that muttered words would be the wrong ones, coming out in the wrong way without a fraction of the eloquence of the composers of the songs on the tape. But this tape was also an insurance policy of sorts because if feelings changed, words were too committal, whereas, a song's true meaning could be easily questioned, or its inclusion on the tape could be justified based on musical appeal alone, having nothing to do with its lyrics.

But maybe the recipient would forgive the tape-maker for borrowing sentiments from songwriters, unable to say anything original from within and with decision. She would listen with wonder, looking for clues, as if the tape-maker had actually been the one who had written all of the lyrics. Maybe the recipient would listen to that tape that very night again and again, Side A, Side B, Side A, Side B...



And maybe the recipient would sink into her seat on her first international flight ever, and buckle herself in for a long flight and maybe she would put on her headphones and let the mixed tape soothe her excited mind.

She would listen without an inkling that this tape that contained so much intent and emotion, would soon be forgotten, the compiler would soon forget having ever made it.

She would not envision that after much listening and much rewinding and fast forwarding of the tape and undertaking many repair procedures with the careful precision of a chewed up pencil, she would soon tire of listening to it, and might even stick her nose up to that kind of music later.

She would not foresee that as the months passed, the original meaning of the songs, reflecting the momentary feelings of the tape-maker, would be lost to her and the songs would take on new meaning for her somewhere else across the world.

When she gently pulled the flap out of the case that she had placed into the seat back pocket of the plane, she would admire the craftsmanship that went into its careful inscription, and she would be wholly unaware that it would soon enough get misplaced, leaving only the tape floating around unlabeled and unprotected to be tossed into an old shoebox and thrown at the bottom of a cedar trunk somewhere to never feel the rotating spindles of a cassette player again, to mix and possibly unravel among the other junk and memorabilia, just like any other artifact of an ordinary past.

"I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in" by Hryck from Flickr
"TDK C90" by Status Frustration from Flickr
"Cassette" by Tania.Paz from Flickr

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Balloon watching

At the young age of six, I was whisked away, along with my eight-year-old sister to start a new life in Albuquerque with my dad. Dad didn't want the divorce and he was gonna be damned if my mom was going to take away his daughters.

He was taking the kids.

He was gonna be in control so that he could see that they were not badly affected by the stigma of divorce.

He would figure out a way.

He was flying off with them; it would be just the three of them for now, somewhere better, if he could get lucky, if the wind would only blow the right way this time.

I'm not really sure why the hell he picked Albuquerque. Maybe Phoenix held too many reminders for my dad about his failed marriage. Maybe it had never brought him anything good and he wanted to try his hand somewhere else, somewhere far, but not too far from his other young daughter, just three years of age who my mother had managed to get custody of. Maybe he wanted to be far enough away from the frowns of his disapproving family and the muffled snickers of my parents' "friends". Maybe the I-told-ya-so looks were too unbearable.

My dad was around 29 years old at the time; tall, a full head of beautiful light brown curly hair, clear blue eyes, straight teeth that had escaped the eager, greedy hands of his family's orthodontist when he was a teen. My dad grew up in all-American, upper middle class family of nine children in Arizona during the 60's. He escaped Vietnam by just a couple of years, unlike his brother who my father, at age sixteen, saw buried. His father was a federal judge, his mother had a master's degree in Psychology but was a housewife and a devout Mormon. He came from a family with a history of power and success; his maternal grandmother had served in the Arizona State legislature in the 1940s (no small feat for a woman at the time), his paternal grandfather was a Professor of tax law. All of his siblings had gone on to law school, or had become accountants or had started to work their way up the military ranks.

Compared to them, my father had a head full of hot air.

My father had not a dime to his name, just some nice oak bedroom furniture and a clothes dryer, but nowhere to put it in our tiny apartment so it stood in the living room absent a washing machine (my mom had gotten the washer).

He had never gone to college like the rest of his family or travelled much out of the state. He had not done much of anything except disappoint his parents and my mother, who he had married at the ripe age of 19. He grew up in the Mormon tradition, but it was likely a life-style choice of his parents rather than being deeply ontological. They were at the same time cultured and well-educated, steeped in community and family, and very well-respected.

They were grounded, not like my father who was floating off into space, with all the others who would never make anything of themselves.



They probably didn't like that my dad smoked pot.

They probably didn't like that he had asked them for money to start a sales call center out of his apartment; to start-up a vending and snacks company (based on the "honor system"); to get his real estate license; to pay the IRS all the money he owed them; to buy himself a Ford escort to replace the giant brown Chrysler he had also been gifted from his grandmother.

They probably didn't like that he had opened his uncluttered mind to becoming an evangelical to soothe a failed marriage, a career that had gone nowhere and to find meaning in life. It must have been so easy to turn to that and it must have itched at and irritated their Mormon roots so.

Scoffed at by his family and ex-wife, he turned to his two young daughters to fulfil him. He learned to braid their hair for school. He did their laundry, properly sorted and all. He made sure there was a nutritious breakfast each day, specializing in chocolate chip pancakes on the weekends. He learned to make quiche and chicken enchiladas. He made sure they took their Flintstones vitamins. He had them see a counselor with experience on dealing with children of divorced parents. He bought an ATARI, somehow, who knows how he got the money, but they played Pac-Man for hours together.

He sometimes accidentally burdened them with things he probably shouldn't have shared with them, such as how lonely he was or how worried he was about whether the food would last all week until his next paycheck. He didn't have anyone else to talk to. It couldn't have been easy to find a female ear or heart with all the baggage and debt he carried.

And then I'm sure he would plant his feet firmly again and vow to never burden them like that again, to keep his head out of the clouds, to make them think everything was okay. Everything would be okay.



He had tears in his eyes a lot.

Defeated.

Regretful.

Utterly disappointed with life.

And those two girls picked up on every bit of his discontent and yearning.

Each day at the breakfast table with bowls full of oatmeal and Flintstones vitamins ready to chew and orange juice poured, four big eyes would stare up at him and give him some kind of motivation to put one foot in front of the other. Sometimes those little people asked him if he was sad. And he would blink his tears away and smile and say, "No."

One time he took them to see the Albuquerque Hot Air Balloon festival.

Maybe he stared up at that colorful New Mexican sky while the girls took turns sitting on his shoulders and maybe he wished he could glide away with them in one of those air-filled, stripe-spangled jewels, effortlessly through the crisp sky to somewhere else, somewhere easier.

I know one little girl wished it.




Three is a Crowd by JadeXJustice from Flickr
Untitled by TailspinT from Flickr
Mass Ascension by a4gpa from Flickr
Checkered Sky by JadeXJustice from Flickr
Above the Crowd by a4gpa from Flickr

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Jim the perve*

When I was sixteen years old I got a job as a waitress in a retirement community (not to be confused with a nursing home, I always insisted).

This place was posh alright; rich retirees looking for a social life, aerobics classes, bingo night, golf outings, etc. It was called "The Springs" and was sold as the shiz in terms of old fogie living. The pictures on all the pamphlets showed young-at-heart-but-wrinkly models with perfect dentures laughing their way through their golden years. Included in the ridiculously priced rent was a "dining experience" where you had to sit in assigned seating with other old people you probably couldn't stand and where you could enjoy the luxury of a menu that rotated Salisbury steak, liver and onions, and chicken fried chicken again and again and again until you were begging to be euthanized by your family already.

My job was to serve these people liver and onions and Chablis wine and make sure their dining experience was everything the pamphlets had promised them it would be. Normally the old folk ate in silence. When they did speak, they shouted at each other because nobody could hear a fucking thing.

There were two dinner sessions, one at 4:30 and one at 6:00 and each retiree was assigned to one depending on their preferences, but Jim came and sat down at 4:30, and sat straight through until the 6:00 hour when he would eat.

Nobody wanted to sit with Jim.

Jim was in his late eighties, had sunken in blue eyes, no hair, dentures that on a good day he remembered to wear down to the dining room. He walked very very slowly with a cane but could be quick as lightening when his meatloaf didn't sit right in his stomach.

Every single time I passed by Jim's table he made a comment along the lines of:

"Shake that ass."
"Gimme someathat."
"Be a doll and sit on my lap."

It never ceased. But occasionally the comments were more aggressive, along the lines of:

"Get your ass over here, I'd fuck the shit out of you"

to which I would reply,

"Oh whatever Jim, as if you could even get it up anymore, and even if you could, I wouldn't go near your wrinkly ass."

(Keep in mind these were the days when Viagra was probably just the wet dream of some old pharmaceutical chemist at Pfizer).

On and on we would tease each other throughout my shift, three days per week.

Mind you, I am sixteen years old, but never did it once cross my mind that this was beyond inappropriate or that it might even teeter on sexual harassment. Jim was too old to give a shit about the fact that he might have been breaking some kind of rule, if indeed he ever had. The other waitresses stayed away from Jim, but I always sort of egged him on.

Once a month I would pick Jim up in my little Toyota Corolla and I would drive him literally next door to the Native New Yorker for buffalo wings and I let him introduce me as his girlfriend, but the waitress who knew him by name always gave me a knowing wink. I would order alcoholic drinks and they wouldn't card me.

Sometimes I would let Jim put his hand on my knee for a few seconds before accusing him of being a perve and shoving it away. Then he would accuse me of not knowing how to have fun with my own body.

When Jim wasn't being a sick fuck he was kind and concerned about my schooling and my future and he gave me advice and told me stories about his children who he hadn't seen or spoken to in years.

He would bring me pictures -- proof -- from when he young and beautiful and in the Navy. He showed me these pictures as evidence that at one point in his life it was he who was the object of the gazes of the sexually deprived. He brought pictures of himself holding babies, proof that at one point he was loved by his children.

He must have looked at me in my teenage glory and thought about the cruelty of life being without second chances. Maybe he thought about all of the social conventions he had followed that got him nothing but a wrinkly face and a useless body and a Salisbury steak on Tuesday nights. Maybe he thought about the many women he had fucked when he was in the Navy or maybe he thought about all the women he would like to have fucked and didn't. Maybe he remembered his daughter and how he had made a butchery out of fatherhood.

When I graduated from high school I tried not to forget about Jim, despite having the life of a typical 18 year old that had since moved on to better things than waiting tables at an old folks home. I'd stop by every now and then but soon he had changed. He had stopped teasing me and some days he thought I was someone else, maybe his daughter.

Then one day I came to visit and Jim didn't live there anymore.

Or anywhere.

Poor Jim.

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By the way, has everyone had problems subscribing to my feed? From what I can see everything is okay in my feedburner and it says 8 people are subscribed, but commentluv can't find my feed and a few other say they are having problems. Can anyone help my ignorant ass?

*Key's post reminded me of this.

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