"Once there was a way to get back home." The Beatles

My son is leaving home. I know it’s time for him . . . but not for me. I think if I had a few more kids about, it wouldn’t be as traumatic, but I’m probably wrong. Maybe because I had him when I was a bit more mature, I understand how lucky I am to be his mom. I still cringe when I see some harried "mother" yelling at her child in the grocery store, or worse yet, just ambling ambivalently along as an infant without a choice screams its lungs out, probably for food or drink . . . or a little affection. This mother is usually way too young with about three kids under four years of age grouped around her. I find it highly disturbing.

Oh, I haven’t been perfect, and those times that I haven’t been will always haunt me, but I know one thing--if I ever felt that I came up short, I apologized. I’m not a yeller; I’m not a demeaning person; and I probably spoiled David, but not so much that he doesn’t fall over backward thanking me when I buy him so much as a box of animal crackers (which he still loves, by the way), a characteristic of his that only wants me to give him more. No matter the occasion, the kid has never whined about something he didn't get. Every birthday, every Christmas, to him has been "the best ever!"

When I was a kid, I made a promise to myself: If I ever have a child, I will tell that child that I love him or her AT LEAST once a day, and I will hug that child every chance I get! I think it’s the only resolution I have ever made that I have absolutely kept.

So I’m helping David pack up his room, the one that he keeps in monklike, precise order. I tell his girlfriend that I feel for her, and I know he’s in for some reality checks. He arranges his many books perfectly, along with his albums, but he’s no dweeb. In fact, with his humor (and I must add, good looks—I’m his Mom, after all, so give me a break!), he’s usually the life of the party, and the life of this house. As I help him fill boxes and try to give practical packing advice, I start to remember when, eight months pregnant, I stood on a ladder and stenciled Teddy bears across the wall borders. Of course, I had to paint over those when he went into Batman mode, and then came the neutral shade, plastered over with Pink Floyd, Jimmy Hendrix, Beatles, Steve McQueen, and Paul Delaroche posters—he has good taste, in this nonbiased Mom’s opinion. So I think it only natural that as we’re stowing his life into boxes, I start to tear up a bit.

“Focus Mom! I can’t handle that yet. You MUST wait for the actual moving day,” he instructs.

“Okay, okay. You’re right. Must maintain,” I reply. And we continue. Then, “You know you could always become one of those guys who stays at home and I could feed you whatever you want. Then you’d get depressed and become the thousand-pound man and we’d eventually have to have the back wall removed and take you out on a gurney,” I suggest.

“That’s always a fallback plan,” he assures me.

I don’t tell him that old adage about not being able to come back home, because it is so painfully true. Even if you do fall on hard times and return to your old room for a time, it’s never really home again. Wow, when I had my first apartment, I put one suitcase and a few books in the car and headed South to meet up with my sister in Atlanta. This kid, in comparison, has it made.

Still, when I drive away from that place, I’ll see the same little guy that wanted to walk into the school by himself on the “third” day of Kindergarten, the kid who grinned, waved, and ran into the school without me.

And, just like that day, I can guaran-damn-tee ya, I’m going to sob all the way home.

Forever Young

So Jack had a thrown back, and then my always healthy son pulled a neck muscle so badly that he missed a week of work and had to see a specialist. Just as they are both recovering, I wake up in agony. I can’t move my head to the left, a reminder of an old motorcycle injury when I was a wild seventeen. “If you were going to voodoo your problems away, why me?” I ask my now-cured son. “Sorry Mom, I already had a doll in your image. It was convenient,” he replies. No respect.

In one of those rare occasions, we go out on a Friday night with great friends Jill and Ray to a new place. The restaurant served, as one comedian says, “just enough food to piss you off” at an elevated price. Jack, the teetotaler, is always our designated driver but when I decide to order a mixed drink, which I seldom do (I’m a wino), he too orders a scotch. When the waitress comes back for a second round he says, “I’m the designated driver. What do you have to offer?” She lists the usual non-alcoholic fare and he says, “Okay, I think I’ll have a rusty nail.” (That’s a double-whammy liqueur and scotch, by the way.) We laugh tremendously because we will never understand his reasoning. Don’t worry. We all went upstairs to listen to the band and watch young singles pick each other up, where we continued to imbibe but he consumed coffee. Ironically, the band played their rendition of “our” music—the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Allman Brothers, and the Rolling Stones, et cetera.

“I feel old,” said friend Jill.

“Hell, they should all be asking for our autographs,” I replied, knowing that by now I probably look like Keith Richard’s sister.

One trip to the restroom and having a guy yell, “My girlfriend really has to pee!” outside the door brought back some good old memories. Wow, it’s sad that our wiser, but still fun spirits remain in our aging bodies isn’t it? Otherwise, we’d all be hell on wheels and the youngsters wouldn’t have a chance.

I guess that’s the reasoning behind it all.

Freelance Hell

Looking back on the past couple of miserable weeks, I’m reminded of one of those cheesy black-and-white films of the 1950s where the calendar pages are blowing off into the wind and the clock hands rapidly spin. On my personal film, this visual rendition of the passage of time would be accompanied by my framed faced in various expressions of agony, rage, and despair . . . perhaps a laptop computer smashing against a wall or me throwing back a glass of wine with my eyes darting madly to and fro, as in that old “Reefer Madness” movie.

Is it rabies? you may ask, if you’ve had the patience to read this far. Is it some sort of inherited mental disease? The answers are no and yes respectively, because I surely must have some sort of mental disease to have chosen the writing profession to try and make a “living.” It’s much more akin to “a dying.” Before becoming an unwilling participant in the world of freelancing, I could at least project my measly pay stub as a fulltime employee of people who viewed me as an adjunct who did what they would do if they had the time; but now even that semblance of stability is gone as I walk wearily into old age—and my time is flyin’ by like those damn calendar pages. I’m over half a hundred years old damnit! Shouldn’t I be sitting on the veranda talkin’ to the youngins about life, blitzed outta my mind in a good way?

Changing deadlines, competing deadlines, people who haven’t called you in months, but who now need a fast turnaround; it’s always feast or famine, but the feast is a small one and the famine a long one. Knowing this you try to say yes to everyone so that you can save up like the fabled industrious ant, but inevitably you land up as the grasshopper anyway.

Everyone thinks you must be doing this for fun, because who wouldn’t want to write one’s heart out and wait interminably to be paid a paltry sum? Then my computer shuts down amidst a complicated transaction and an errant e-mail sends without my permission and the adrenaline flows; my Irish face flushes a frightening red and as I throw cold water on my face I beg Jesus not to kill me now! Not now, when I’m having so much fun and when so much more enjoyment awaits!

So I survived another bout of multiple deadlines and finally received a check big enough to be consumed by one bill. Then my rich brother-in-law calls and says, “I just booked a Caribbean cruise for me and your sister next February and I was wondering who might take the boys to school and take care of the dogs. Then I thought, what about Aunt Gail? What do you think?”

I can’t even tell you what I think.

The Terminator

My older sister (by two years) Lynn and I have always had a typical sibling relationship: she tries to murder or maim me while I persistently cling to life. She’s a small person, barely five feet tall, but she makes up for her lack of height with extremely focused energy and explosive ire. Once, in the seventies, when we were in a van riding to a concert with friends, her hair burst into flame. I don’t know how that happened! Yeah right. The fire circled the edges of her curly locks like a halo, and my immediate reaction was to extinguish the inferno by beating her about the head with my bare hands. Unaware that I had just saved her from a brutal singeing, and seeing herself as a victim of an unprovoked attack, she retaliated. It took about three people to pull her hands off of my neck, all saying things like, “Not cool man, you were on fire, man.”

Anyway, I have survived, but sadly, I am still none the wiser. Because I was physically beaten into submission as a youngster, then suffered severely stunted self-esteem in my pre-teens when she and her friends gathered round me to chant “Go to hell Gail” there is no longer any need for physical coercion. I developed one finely tuned mechanism for survival however—sarcasm. It has served me well at times, even though my son often fondly asks me, “How come no one has killed you yet?” Oh they have tried, grasshopper. They have tried.

Still, old habits die hard (such as using too many clichés) Lynn still catches me with her cunning and even manages to argue with me when I agree with her. How does she do it?! Just the other day at a July 4th celebration, we began an innocuous conversation after she remarked on the height of one of the cousins. “Well, I guess our side of the family got the short genes,” I innocently remarked.

“What do you mean?” she asked as though interested.

I pointed out that my father’s brother (our uncle) and his son were both 6” 5”. Our female cousins on both sides are approximately 5’ 9” or 5’ 10”. We are all well below such measures.

“Hmm,” she said. “And how tall are you?”

“Only about 5’ 5”,” the unsuspecting prey replied.

Mom jumped in and stated that she liked her own height just as it is. Of course.

“How tall would you like to be?” Lynn asks ever so casually as she backs her victim into a corner.

“Oh, I’d like to be about 5’ 9”,” I answer.

Now she fixes me in her glare. If she could emit lasers, I’d be dead. I sense that something has gone “terribly wrong” as the newscasters like to say. Then it comes.

“Well I’d like to be 5’ 5” you bitch!”

How I love family gatherings.

Squirrely

Years ago, I started putting out sunflower seeds for the squirrel population in the woods surrounding our house. They have since grown greatly in population, courage, and girth. I usually fill a big red to-go cup with the seeds, fill up a feeder attached to the tree, and put some more out on the deck. I know, I know, I’ve heard all the admonitions, but I enjoy the little critters and they only get the stuff once a day, alright sometimes twice. When I peer out on the deck, it often resembles a Disney movie, with squirrels, chipmunks, and a variety of birds all eating side by side. I even get adorable flying squirrels at night, but when I read an article about flying squirrels making excellent pets, Jack freaked. Not to worry, I don’t like to keep wild animals in cages.

The price I’ve paid though, besides the cost of the seeds, is some very spoiled squirrels. I can be in the middle of a phone call, or writing an article, or answering an e-mail, but if I haven’t brought out breakfast in time, one of the squirrel troops is assigned to walk up to the glass doors, stand up with its paws pressed against the glass, and stare at me. This is followed by knocking on the glass with one paw. If I’m still unresponsive, said squirrel will make several running leaps and hit the glass with all fours. Several other squirrel spectators usually lounge around on the deck rails watching the performance which culminates in my emergence with the big red cup.

The other day, I inadvertently left the empty cup outside and it blew under the deck during a storm. This morning, one of the performance squirrels became so perturbed at me that he crossed his arms and glared at me through the glass. I was in the middle of an Internet transaction, so I hadn’t yet responded to his prompts. Finally, I filled another cup with seeds and headed out, but I was greeted with this strange grating noise that seemed to be coming from the giant oak near the deck. I was looking all around when the noise suddenly stopped. I put my hands on my hips and stared straight up into the tree. Suddenly from the uppermost branches of the tree, the squirrel lobs the big red to-go cup from the day before at me! (Luckily, it was empty so it wasn’t able to pick up much speed.) However, if one day I “suddenly disappear” (see previous post), please look for me in the oak tree immediately.

Confusion

Why do so many commentators state that someone suddenly disappeared? Can a person slowly disappear?

The cable T. V. people told me that I had to leave my phone open for a scheduled visit so that the cable guy could verify that someone was home before he came over. Wouldn't a busy line imply that someone is home?

A co-worker who was scheduled for minor surgery told me that the thing she hated most was that she couldn't drink any water immediatley before the surgery so she couldn't brush her teeth. What?