Dr. Frankenstein's Pincushion

 

That's a picture of my brain up there. Well, it's a representation of my brain because I wouldn't want a scan of my actual brain up there because my brain might not be as photogenic as that one. My brain probably has a cowlick, a weird smile and one eye shut in every picture.  Anyway, I made that little graphic up there because I thought it would be more fun than a long, wordy post about how preoccupied I am.  

So, I am preoccupied. I've got a lot of irons in the fire...balls in the air...clichés in my post. In my youth, this would propel me into action. Now, it makes me want to curl up on the couch and eat popcorn while watching television shows about which I am ambivalent and playing Wizard 101 using my son's character. It is a sad state of affairs which reminds of a quote from "Ellen" (the show, not The Celebrity...because Ellen The Celebrity doesn't really talk to me much...or at all). Audrey says, "There is nothing worse than a sad lesbian...except a sad lesbian clown." Makes me laugh every time I think about it.

Sometimes, when I haven't been updating regularly, writing a post starts to feel like an insurmountable task. So, I'm writing this little post to put some pep in my step...light a fire under my ass...jump start the ol' engine. Anyway, I wanted to stop by and say, "Hello bloggy peeps!" I haven't abandoned ship - I'm just floating around in a lifeboat off to the side, hoping that Jaws prefers scantily clad heterosexual girls.

Bear with me

So, it turns out that I'm part bear. Not like a big gay bear or anything. I mean I am kinda hairy in some places and I'm due for a wax in some other places but I'm not that kind of bear. No, I'm clearly part bear bear, like maybe a little black bear but a super nice one. I don't bite and I certainly wouldn't do anything crazy like break into your house so to eat your garbage. Seriously, if I was going to break into your house, I'd go for donuts first or maybe a good six-pack of beer. Anyway, the point of this bear rambling is that I have been fighting the urge to hibernate all week. It has turned cold here and I want to crawl into my bed/cave and stay there for the next eight months. What? Bears don't hibernate that long? Well, I'm the kinda bear that doesn't do things half-assed. I want to sleep until spring which, in Minnesota, means June. As a result of my bear-ness, I have been lazy and I just realized today that I haven't blogged since Monday. Whoops. Just slipped my mind. You deserve more than all that bear business so I am going to share a lovely story about my youngest child. Tonight, I was standing outside in the cold pumping gas while Zeca climbed all over the inside of the car. When I got in, she was sitting between the driver's seat and the passenger seat. I said, "You better buckle up because I am driving out of here right now." She took her time returning to her seat and I said, "I mean it. I'm driving away!" She said in her most confident voice, "Mom. You would never drive off before I was buckled in because then we might have a car wreck and I would get smashed and then I would die and you would feel bad. You probably would feel really sad." She buckled in and I pulled out of the gas station, "Yes, I would feel very sad and I would cry a lot." But she had a solution: "Well, mom, you could buy a statue that looks like me and you could put my polka dot pants on it and my polka dot shirt on it and then you could sit by it all the time and it would look like me. Oh! Then, you could add a voice to it and it would talk!" I looked at her in the rearview mirror and said, "Um...that would be a little weird." She gave me a serious look and said, " You wouldn't miss me then...because you'd have the statue." Yeah, I'd always have the creepy, talking statue.

I think I'd prefer the original...sassy though she may be.

Family Affair

A good story must have the right amount of context and detail. Too little and the story feels hollow, too much and it drags so much that you start wishing you were a blind pirate with an endless supply of rum. I didn’t learn this from the writing classes I took at my fancy, liberal arts college and I didn’t learn it from a book. Everything I learned about storytelling, I learned from my mother and her three sisters. As a child, I’d sit and listen as they told each other story after story until the room vibrated with their laughter and I was mesmerized. They could turn a tragedy into something so funny that it would leave you breathless from laughing. They wiped away the pain of their mistakes through clever tales that invited others to laugh with them rather than at them. This is how they survived poverty, how they rose above the darkness of the past and disappointment in the present. They told stories and laughed to steel themselves against whatever the future might bring.  This past weekend, my sister and I drove to St. Louis to celebrate my aunt’s birthday. Family came from California, Minnesota and Kansas but there were two notable absences – my aunt Dollie who died in 2007 and my mother who died in 2008. We felt their absence as we looked at pictures but they were there in our laughter, in my aunt's hands, in certain gestures that we all share and, as always, in the stories. It would have been easy for me to become lost in the grief that I have tried so hard to keep at bay but, within an hour of our arrival,  I was laughing so hard that my ribs hurt. My aunts told stories I knew and ones that I had not yet heard. I told stories too and, in doing so, realized that I am no longer the little girl looking on in awe - I am finally one of them. 

I’ve always known that I carry the past inside of me but this weekend reminded me that it is my responsibility to carry it forward. Their stories are my stories and I will write them all down someday. I will. Until then, I will hold onto them tightly because those stories are my greatest inheritance. The same is true for us all.