Annnnnd…she’s back.

I have not abandoned my blogging. I have merely been away, gathering new material. It is so easy! I visited my family.

I grew up in Kansas City, amongst plenty of relatives and family friends. I realize now I was one of the lucky ones – protected from bad-deed-doers and encouraged by those who were good - or at least neutral.

As it was the Memorial Day weekend, it was time to decorate the graves. This has been a tradition and source of some friction as far back as I can remember. My daddy and mother took grave decorating very seriously. (Mother even threatened to haunt us if graves go undecorated.)

Daddy would drive (as long as he could) to a small cemetery in central Missouri next to the church where his parents married more than a hundred years ago. (Well, actually, they didn’t marry in the church. It was extremely muddy from heavy rains, so the minister stayed on his horse, rode up to face my grandparents in their buggy, with the attendants staying on horseback on either side. This gives lie to the notion that weddings need to be big productions.)

So in that cemetery are my grandparents and great grandparents and other assorted relations. But the row that haunts me is five or six children who died in the 1918 flu epidemic. They are buried side-by-side next to their mother; the woman who was the midwife who helped deliver my father. (Whew! Now that’s a “house that jack built” sentence.) She survived, and later asked my father to put a red rose on her grave every year. He did, and now my cousins do. But there are only five of us left who know the story. Eventually, her grave will go undecorated on Memorial Day.

In Kansas City we visit two cemeteries. Various relatives, family friends, dear ones – scattered through the parks and the best we have to go on is, “I think grandpa is over there by that bush.” Sometimes the cemeteries have staff members with clip boards and hand-held radios to help you look for your loved ones, sometimes not.

The ground is always hard. It’s usually hot, always inconvenient. The Dollar Store flowers barely stick into the dirt.

And yet. And yet. There is my Uncle Bob and Aunt Nema and her mother. He was grievously injured in WWII, injuries that defined the rest of his life, yet all his headstone says is his name, dates of birth and death, and “World War II Veteran”. He was so much more than that. So much braver and more complicated, living at least 30 years longer than anyone expected.

He’s the one who built wooden ramps under his trees so the squirrels could come up to his porch for Vanilla Wafers and Blue Diamond walnuts (he said they could tell the difference if he bought the cheaper brands) and not get their feet wet. It’s true. I saw it. He also left cookies and nuts at the base of another tree where the squirrels were “shy”.

Aunt Nema was born prematurely, kept warm on the open door of the oven, where the warmth of the pilot light was enough to keep her alive. Her stepfather propositioned her on the way home from her mother’s funeral. She left immediately, turned out of her home to make her way by herself. And she did.

My grandparents are in the other cemetery. They died on consecutive Fridays in the spring of my Junior year in high school. My grandfather died first and when my grandmother was told she said, “I’ve lived 53 years with him. I’ll not live a week without him.” And she didn’t. She died of a broken heart. Literally. It ruptured.

And we visit my godfather who lived just a few doors down from my mother in “the old neighborhood”. He was the first man daddy met when he moved to Kansas City and ultimately introduced daddy and mother – but that’s another story for another time.

He went around the world four times as a cook in the Merchant Marine in the war – one of the most dangerous things to do because the ships were unarmed and juicy targets for the Nazis. I have the Bible his mother gave him before he left for war. It is inscribed “for my dear son”- and I have a photo of him in his dress uniform. So proud and so impossibly young.

He married a young woman who lived next door to my mother. She ended up being  my godmother – funny and sassy and loving, she essentially raised her much younger brother because her mother was often ill.

And then there is the row that holds my mother, my daddy, and my brother-in-law. I’ve written about my parents – so unique and loving, but full of puzzlements that still bear discussing.

My brother-in-law was killed in a car accident. He was an adult-sized elf. He had twinkling eyes, vastly talented with guitar and banjo, interested in everything. He could identify trees and stars and bird songs. He even forced a hyacinth to bloom early so that he could greet me at the airport with, “Hiya, Cynth”. A lovely man, gone too soon.

And there I am at these graves, sweating with my cheap silk flowers that are hard to stick in the ground. This year, my sister stayed in the car because she cannot walk, and her daughter did the bending and wire-sticking. We talked a little about each of these dear ones. Visited with them. Spent a little time. How brave they were in their lives, in their own ways.

It is a good thing to decorate graves. 

Upon Being Hit On By a Homely Lesbian

This goes back years and years, and is filed in the “Purple Foot” file of things I didn’t understand then, and don’t understand now.

Up front, allow me to make it perfectly clear that one’s sexual proclivities are really of no interest to me (except a certain prurient curiosity that makes me want to stare at a Gay Pride parade because the costumes are fabulous). As a woman, I do understand powerful connections with other women. Most of us have best-est friends that may date from school, spanning the years through dating and first jobs, marriages, children, deaths and divorces.

We talk about everything. What color to paint the kitchen, new landscaping, is it time to get new tires, someone else’s rotten behavior and/or the children’s, misbehaving spouses, good or bad medical news, movies, recipes, and holiday plans. (Of course, all of these topics could be covered in one chat, but my favorite friends and I have an ongoing conversation that really never stops – even if we don’t actually speak for months.)

Now, the lesbian thing doesn’t move my meter. Assuming it’s like any other friendship, except with sex, I don’t get it. The plumbing is wrong and the whole business strikes me as either amusing or embarrassing. So, that’s why I’m not a lesbian.

And now, time-travel back with me through the decades, and we land in the 70s when I was working as a reporter and anchor and taught broadcasting courses on the side because I wasn’t making enough money to keep a mouse alive (and was being paid probably 50% of my male co-anchor but that’s another topic).

One day I got a love letter from one of my (female) students. We weren’t friends – just the standard teacher/student relationship. She seemed bright enough, but was perhaps one of the homeliest women I ever knew, gay or straight.

Her letter was overwrought and passionate, ending with the disturbing sentence that every night she was coming to my apartment complex and kissing my car bumper good night.

Now what, may I ask, am I to do with this information? First, may I say, EEUWW. No one, of whatever orientation, should be kissing another’s bumper good night – especially without permission.

And, if you are, this is not information that should be shared unless some sort of romance has developed, and can be seen through the rosy lens of infatuation, because otherwise it’s creepy.

I eventually talked with her and told her I wasn’t interested, but it has always kind of bothered me that the only lesbian I’ve ever attracted was homely.

But, there you go. Sometimes you’re the windshield and sometimes you’re the bug. And sometimes someone is kissing your bumper good night.

The Amusement Never Stops

Karl Rove has said something that has lit up the news cycle. He either did or did not say that Hillary Clinton has brain damage as a result of her fall that caused a TBI, i.e. a blood clot that had to be treated and then she had to wear special prism glasses, which is what you wear when you have vision problems after a TBI.

Almost writes itself, doesn’t it? Here’s the part I’m amused by. (Just the one?) If you just repeated what her staffers have said about her injury and treatment, then you add a few percentage points because it’s their job to make it sound as mild as possible, you come up with the absolute fact that she had a TBI.

Thousands of people do – every walk of life. Veterans, old farts, mommies…there are car accidents and tumors and industrial accidents and bombs…a Black Museum of ways to do it. I am very sorry it happened to her, but I am very annoyed with the way everyone is carrying on about this.

The snarky implication is that she has brain damage. (Insert your comment here. I won’t. I’ll wait for you…3…2…1) It is possible, but not inevitable. Her recovery may have been utterly complete with no residual symptoms at all.

The insult here, to her and to everyone else who has ever needed treatment for a brain injury is that the people who are representing her believes that NO ONE can be trusted to understand what has happened.

So, in lieu of good information that drives out bad, we will have another “issue” that cannot be discussed with science and facts.

Arrgh.

BTW…from the CDC…

A TBI is caused by a bump, blow or jolt to the head or a penetrating head injury that disrupts the normal function of the brain. Not all blows or jolts to the head result in a TBI. The severity of a TBI may range from “mild,” i.e., a brief change in mental status or consciousness to “severe,” i.e., an extended period of unconsciousness or amnesia after the injury.

Who Has the Brain Injury NOW…?

I hope you didn’t see it, but I posted the story about slamming my head into the entertainment center and getting a concussion…twice. Now, that’s damned embarrassing. I feel much better now that I’ve removed the extra post.

But if I could have figured out a way to make you feel as though it was YOUR fault, I would have done it.

Improvement is coming slowly from the concussion and the Dilantin toxicity. The only thing that is even remotely interesting about either or both is how boring this is. There is something to be said to, and for, and about folks who are having to behave themselves, exercise, and wait out a recovery they have every faith will arrive, but there’s no guarantee.

But it has come to me that the above sentence exactly describes life.