You Get to Have Friends...

...until you change the terms.

That, it would seem, is the theme of the week. It hurts, even when I've made the changes out of self-protection or against my better wisdom.

There are all kinds of ways to lose friends, after all.

Actually, I've lost three friends in the last several months and it should have been a warning of what was already too late: being pals with people you employ or work for.

In the case of A, I asked for an accounting of several hundred dollars I was paying out and got anger and vague answers to my questions. Again, the warning was there when I had, months earlier, put a down payment on the work I would be asking for and suggested starting on something already in place only to be met with friendly silence until my freelancer's regular job wasn't producing the rent. I figured we'd get the project done sooner or later but I got angrier over the claim that accounting for time is impossible until I took my freelancer's inventory* and pretty much made it impossible to be met with anything more than fury.

It happened again last week. After factoring in the need for time to write, my still-fragile ankle (I spent some days in Arizona in sandals. I'm really not ready for sandals.), the temperament of the dog, and the fact that my other steady gig will be moving in June, I decided I would have a somewhat better shot at serenity if I didn't walk that dog for a couple of months. It was one of those brain-waves that sometimes hit in an awkward but correct instant. I wish I'd had it a couple of weeks ago but keeping their interim dog-walker on is probably a good thing for the walker and not the embarrassment ("What will I say to X?" the owner dithered about the walker who had been with them pretty much since December 20th, when I left for Christmas) that my decision was portrayed back to me.

I received a terse email this morning saying that they had changed some plans and would not need me to board the dog in a couple of months. I wrote back that it was fine and "are you angry with me?"

So far no answer.

I had -- how to put this? -- laid down some boundaries that protected my wallet, my body, my time and my serenity**. I'm a nervous wreck when I walk that dog, who has bloodied me several times by entering into battle with other dogs, and who has tried to bloody several humans, not all of whom are over four feet tall.

These are all good reasons, objectively speaking. I would have hoped that A didn't want to rip me off, and B would have simply respected my time and health. Nonetheless, I'm two friends down.

& then there's the ol' When Harry Met Sally crisis. I don't really need to tell the story with that introduction, do I??? The gag here is a day of quarrelsome emails that were based on the fact that I have a dumb crush & Harry does not. Harry felt the best way to deal with my crush was to disavow having inspired it.

No problem there, Harry. I fought it like the flu.

But I still had a crush. And that crush makes certain things really painful. Harry couldn't seem to get past his innocence and I fell into a sink-hole of explaining my explanations. I wondered whether, after all this sturm und drang, I should terminate the flawship. I was angry about trying to save his innocence but still get to claim my feelings. That turned into having my inventory taken (do you feel better now, A?).

1. I was angry as an attempt at dealing with my feelings.
2. I was threatening Harry as a sorry attempt to make him feel the way I did.
3. I am constitutionally bitter and rigid.
4. Miscellaneous stuff I can't recall because I deleted those emails for good.
   

The first two were patently incorrect. I was angry at the endless exchange and the claim that because Harry had not promoted my crush, my crush was therefore insignificant. I didn't threaten; I wondered out loud.

As for numbers three and four...I don't know. I don't have an outside perspective on myself. I am in ways, and probably not in other ways. I wonder if the split of these adjectives and their opposites are true of everyone?

I felt like a small pile of ugly dust when I finally begged that the exchange stop.

Here's the amazing thing, though, about me and about serendipity. Having cried myself into a sinus headache, I got a Twitter from someone I'd exchanged a few tweets with. How was I, she asked, and then, email me what's going on. Her perspective helped and I made a new cyber friend out of it.

And later I thought about two things that happened the last time I saw Harry. We'd fallen asleep. He woke me up coming out of a bad dream, moaning to talk himself up to consciousness. Later I woke him up -- laughing in my sleep. And I sneezed once and he laughed because my sneeze actually does come out as an achoo. "It's part of my adorability factor," I retorted.

So I'm left pondering, can I be friends with someone I had a crush on (Harry pretty much tortured the active part of it out of me, as though I'm no longer contagious), who couldn't sit still while I worked through feelings I was honest about, and finds me bitter and rigid (a combination I would run from in someone else).

And who wouldn't find laughing in her sleep and achooing charming as hell? I do, at any rate.

So I'm down three friends, up one, and I like two teeny things about myself that I hadn't even known about before. Who's winning? Who's hurting?

* In twelve step parlance, taking someone else's inventory -- i.e., telling that person what is wrong with him or her -- is a crime punishable by righteous indignation.

** As in, "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

Long Time, No Blog

The Sprain took two months in a walking boot-cast to heal. It wasn't pretty but after six days in regular shoes I guess it was inevitable. The weather locked me in & my lack of options locked me in. I shut down in order to survive myself. The only things I was interested in were farm games on Facebook, chick lit novels & dessert. I had to hire a walker for Daisy for several weeks. Do you know how wrong that felt?

My ankle hurts a little today but I guess that's inevitable as well. As soon as I began to be more mobile, even in the boot, I began to pursue errands that had piled up. Today I walked all over Montague Street & environs, getting my hair cut & going to the bank & picking up a prescription. I wore shoes that weren't bad for my still-swollen foot but weren't as supportive as the others I've opted for. I find myself tired this evening, too tired to attack cleaning the top of my desk or looking for some software that's gone missing (which has entailed cleaning where no man -- but all the dog hair -- has gone before). I'm writing a dull blog at the plaint of a friend. I'm afraid my words are few.

For the duration of the Sprain, I depended mostly on my cell phone because my portable phone didn't work & my back up old-fashioned phone threatened to trip me & has no capacity for storing numbers. This meant I didn't make many calls either. Finally, today, I went to Radio Shack with the two-year warranty I'd for once taken out on it. The manager opened up the receiver and reconnected the battery.

Can you say stupid?

It's been that kind of winter. Telephonically challenged. I misplaced the software for my new camera & even though I couldn't go voyaging for snow photos & even though I wouldn't admit it to myself, it was like another language gone missing. The Radio Shack manager also suggested I go to the Canon website & simply download the software.

Score two for stupid.

But in my mobile state, I'm itchy to...I don't know what the verb is. Live? Join my species? I love my Canon but it's a big hulking thing so I bought an Olympus that was on sale and will fit in a pocket. It will be good to start speaking & conversing in images again.

We won't talk about my weight although I may be more gloomy about it than the reality. My therapist said he didn't see a change in my body.

My therapist also edged around the possibility of hospitalizing me for depression. That scared the shit out of me. I worked very hard to rise above that need. Laundry one day, bed the next -- for a week or so I vacillated between getting dressed & staying in bed with Daisy, who has been a real trooper through this. In retrospect, which is really only two weeks or so, it seems as though my "accomplishments" included laundry, doing the dishes, taking a shower. I will remember this winter as the Sprain but I won't remember much of what I did beyond raising vegetables on Farmville & the grit in bed that the dog & I collaborated on because I had to wear the boot all the time. Oh, & Vicodin. That was nice.

Life is going from zero to sixty now. I'm seeing Riverdance tomorrow night. Friends from Seattle are in town for the next few days. I leave for Seattle & Portland to do book stuff on Wednesday. Somehow or another the publisher of Berkley has handed off the form & price of my next book(s) to me & my editor. My agent called earlier to tell me to make an appointment with my editor to figure it out but a day of errands left me too tired to really understand what the hell this means. It hurts my feelings that Angry Fat Girls has had such a lousy run of it, that even my fucking hometown newspaper hasn't reviewed it. It's a more important book than Passing for Thin because it is NOT a fairy tale & the hope it offers is the hope each of us has to find in our own truths.

For a couple of difficult months, my truth has been a small dark ghetto. I didn't have hope. I barely had endurance. But endurance had to be enough.

Homesick

I took to falling down last week -- last week! it feels like years ago.

Once I stubbed my toe on an uneven sidewalk. I went down on my face, nicked my forehead, bruised both knees, grazed my hands. Two nights later I got my feet tangled in a hump of bad sidewalk and did it again, bruising my chin. The night after that, I got tangled between two cars and fell hard to my knees. There was a snap. My left ankle plumped out like a sponge. I could feel my right knee bleeding. It was a difficult walk home.

It was clear I couldn't walk Daisy let alone my usual coterie of dogs. She went off to Uncle and Auntie's house the next afternoon. Boomer's mom brought ice packs and groceries and the name of her podiatrist, then walked me over on Tuesday.

The x-rays did not show a fracture. It's worse: a very very bad sprain. I'm in a boot that I'm allowed out of to shower -- and no weight on the foot in the shower -- and I'll be in it for a month. The doctor was very stern: if I don't wear this Frankenstein foot for a month, I'll be in the hospital.

And I can't afford the hospital. That's why I waited two-and-a-half days to have it treated: I can't afford the ER either.

For a day or two I enjoyed being at loose ends. I'm making friends with television. I have a lot of sedentary work to do. Marian Keyes's new novel comes out today.

Right now, however, I would kill for a nap but am afraid I'd be too groggy for the AOL podcast I'm doing at four. I should be working on my book proposal but I'm oddly shaky. Is it restlessness channeling as nervousness? Post-morning dose of vicoden jitters? Yes, but it's more because I have a dangerous lump in my throat.

I miss my dawg! I miss her friends! I know I can't walk her yet and I know it would not be good for her to come and visit only to be towed away again. She's such a mama's girl that way. Much as she misbehaves for me, she freaks out when anyone else holds her leash, even when I'm right there. She would be depressed if she had to go away again.

My father isn't helping, either. Saturday night, when all I wanted was his take on whether my ankle was broken or not, he wandered off into an announcement that he thought he'd buy a foreclosure house in the Phoenix area and rent it to me. I'm seriously considering moving there so this was a lovely piece of news. By Tuesday he was announcing that he's selling his house in Arizona and moving permanently to back Montana. My head is still spinning.

Were my choice of geography up to me, I'd be moving to Seattle. I have a lot of friends there, and a lot of relatives. It's a real city. It's beautiful. The weather, while dim, is not often given to extremes.

Phoenix became real at Christmas. I could help my dad out. It's inexpensive. I know some people in the area. There is someone I'd like to know on a more consistent, lazy basis. As soon as I proposed this consistent lazy -ship and was not, to my dismay, discouraged, I wanted to A) vomit, and B) move to Ballyhillion on the northern most tip of Ireland. I'm frightened of being hurt. I'm frightened of myself -- of needing anyone, of my jealousies, of my insecurities, of my conviction of lesser-than. I'm afraid of being shipwrecked in the desert.

And that's just me. What's on the other side waiting to be frightened of???

Having a house seemed like a nice reason to go to Phoenix. I could board dogs and grow roses. I'd be near my father and old friends. A house seemed to equal something like a Life, making a -ship less loaded and back to lazy. I'm bereft at the loss what never was, at my father's move back to Montana, at...this thing I don't trust will leave me unscathed.

Then again, not having the obligation of being a tenant makes me free to pick up and flee to Seattle whenever I want.

Right now it's compounded by working on a new book proposal. I want to write essays about the non-weight side of my life. Funny essays. I need at least one to put it in my agent and editor's hands. I'm working on a piece about my father, who is a very funny man and a very quirky one. Unfortunately, I'm not finding him funny today. I feel betrayed both by his Saturday announcement and by the thought that he'll be in Missoula. The relationship I've had with him is about to change all over again and I'm finding that hard to cope with in the wake of losing my mother, losing my dog, losing my foot and my dread of losing a friendship to a -ship.

This blog is a procrastination, meant to keep me awake until I have to call AOL and productive while I ignore "Pa de Deux". Ironically, this is very painful to write and the essay is about how my father lives on his own planet. I'm calling this hoped-for collection Me: A User's Guide. If I do a good enough job, it should serve as a handbook for how to get money, tears and keys out of me. I hadn't intended for the piece about Dad to do more than entertain and teach a reader about what it means to be a Kuffel. I hadn't intended to work on it while feeling the earth shift under my one good foot.

Weird & Better

I've been back for eleven days after visiting my father in Arizona over Christmas. They've been jittery with publication obligations, which sometimes leave me deer-in-the-headlights about things like putting my luggage away (finished THAT this morning) or opening the Christmas cards that came while I was away (I don't even know where they are now). In the mean time, life rushes on & I've neglected Car on the Hill for other spaces & there are things I want to say about my life that belong here.

I went to Arizona not knowing what to expect of the first Christmas without Mother. Would I cry the entire time? Would I sleep & eat the entire two weeks to escape the misery? Would Dad want me to spend the time doing non-Christmas things? I had a couple of TV spots & a radio interview lined up, as well as a friend & a cousin to see, & my social life increased late in the game when another cousin, the sister of my Phoenix cousin, came to stay for a couple of days as well. Dad began to fret about her visit. Where would she sleep? What would she want to eat? Would he like her?

The approach was a little fraught, then, with questions. Little did I think I would learn more about my relationship with my mother by her absence than I had in the 53 Christmases we'd spent together.

I believe 2009 stands as the most pleasant Christmas in memory.

I couldn't put up certain ornaments: they were too laden with association, too much Mom's. But Dad wanted me to put up the tree, of which he could only see the blur of the lights, & when we sat looking at it, I described what ornaments stood out, which I think he liked. I brought out two new holiday CDs & he loved If Mozart Wrote White Christmas, playing it well beyond the 25th. I did some cookie baking and took a bag to the Christmas Eve dinner we spent with old friends, & he asked me to make extra copies of calendars as gifts, which our friends enjoyed. (I did two this year, at Shutterfly which has a sort of scrapbook/caption capacity: "2003 in Lab Years" had dog quotes; 2010 Flowers had seasonal floral quotes. One of my dog walking clients cried over the dog quotes.)

Friends were kind enough to send my gifts to Arizona so I had things to open on Christmas afternoon. Dad loved the bottle of obscure & hugely expensive rum I brought out (opened it on the spot & took two big swigs). I wasn't sure he'd want gifts but after some phlegmatic responses he gave into his greedy side & I set about finding the best I could. I made seafood casserole & a faux yule log that is delicious. It was a quiet day. He watched football & I read Laurie Notaro's An Idiot Girl's Christmas and Augusten Burroughs's You Better Not Cry, which did, in fact, produce copious crying from me.

The visit was pretty much like that. Low key. Smaller but in the spirit of our years together. Together but separate.

Therein lies the insight: that together but separate.

When my mother was alive, life was together but divisive. She hated his sports, his documentaries, his Library of Congress books for the blind, so Dad retreated to their bedroom to watch TV & listen to his tapes through his headphones. Dinner had to be early because later upset Mom's stomach & meds, & my father's historical disinterest in talking at the table is abetted by tracheal problems, leaving Mom hungry for conversation, which fell on my shoulders. In the last few years she had less to contribute but more greed of me than ever.

While Dad hung out in the bedroom, Mom napped through Oprah & her knock-off line up, then on to Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy and the news. Somehow she had the idea that I loved those shows, or would if only she could get me to sit down & watch. She never did remember from visit to visit that I spend the half hour of Wheel calling out "Bankrupt! Bankrupt!" & she got furious with my father during Jeopardy because he sat there rattling off the answers.

Bookended with the Dr. Phil white trash problems, I felt like I was living in a trailer on the moon.

Dad's come out of the bedroom now. Football & boxing are such a steady roar that I can ignore them. I enjoy listening to his tapes -- we spent the days leading up to Christmas with Magellan's voyage and the smell of butter cookies.

I certainly ate too much but in the past I would wake in the middle of the night and go out to the kitchen and take a pile of crap back to bed. Every night. This time I engaged in this garbagey behavior perhaps four times. I ate less during the day, & had two day-long comas (the day after Christmas, the day I had an 8 a.m. TV gig that I got up before first light to drive the unfamiliar route to & then spent my vertical time running to the toilet).

The house felt quieter despite the roar of television or talking book or CD (Dad is quite deaf, even with hearing aids). He didn't expect me to watch football with him & I was involved in his books or enjoying his music. Our tastes are similar & we met up with each other when they coincided. Even then, however, we each live on our own planet, which we understand & wave to each other from.

This is not to say he can't be demanding & it drives both my brother & me crazy to be doing one thing for him only to find him next to us with a request to do something else, spoken in the sort of voice that we have to take a breath & ask, "Can it wait?"

But I found, in the absence of my mother, that I was more intact. I felt an expectation from her, rightly or not, to give ALL my words to her. I'm 53 & ever-single, a writer & dog-walker: I don't have that many words to say out loud. I know I was the light of her life but it evolved into a cost to my body & my self-respect & my energy, & I used food-induced comas to escape whatever it was I felt I should & probably wasn't giving her.

I love my mom...but I can live with my dad.

At least I came home with fodder for therapy.

Crazed

Things are going fast if not furious here. I'm trying to keep notes on what it's like to publish a book and you can find them at my website, http://franceskuffel.net/blog.htm, if you're interested.

You'll find out about getting sucked into the Fat Wars, misinterpretations, how publicizing a book has changed and how much time it now takes, how my life has turned from being a Writer to an Author.

I have tons of things to say that belong on Car on the Hill, but right now I have to walk some dogs.

Me, me, me -- & you, you, you

Comfort and Joy

This fall has been a traumatic time in my family, most lastingly, perhaps, because of the schism of alienation in the wake of my mother's death.

Enough said.

I was talking to my pal BJ not long ago about how she was decorating her new house for Christmas. She's new to this concept of trees and wreaths and whatnot, having fallen in love with the idea after marrying an Italian. She's still adverse to the notion of Santa Claus or nativities, and he gets a Christmas stocking while she gets a Hannaukah stocking, but for the last couple of years, nothing has delighted her more than getting ornaments as gifts and buying them after Christmas. In the latter case, she puts them away still packaged and is surprised all over again when she opens them the next year.

So we were talking about her tree, which she put up some time in mid-November and I asked what other decorations she would put up. "Nothing," she said. "A wreath...lights!"

"Icicle lights," I recommended. "No lawn ornaments?"

She laughed with derision. "No sleighs, no inflatable anything. I won't live in a Bay Ridge display."

I laughed because when I was growing up, we lived across from a carninval. Each year, our neighbor made one more mechincal gizmo from wood and machinery -- a carousel, a waving Santa on the roof, a elf-run workshop. I don't remember everything that filled his yard, but I do remember the traffic in our cul-de-sac, bumper-to-bumper on the days around Christmas. Most of the other then-seven houses kept the spirit up, I told her, by putting up lights. My mother sewed long strings of gold foil disks to hang in our living room window, with gold lights in evergreen boughs in the flower box that ran along outside.

"Oh, and we decorated the circle of the cul-de-sac," I remembered. This was my brother Dick's project. Our court had a small stone circle with some evergreens and a birch tree. For much of the fall we saved the lids of coffee and other large cans, and collected copies ofReaders Digest. We spray-painted the lids and thronged them with glitter, punched a hole in them and hung them up in the circle. We folded each page of Readers Digest to make a point so that when we were done we had a large heavy diamond-shaped object that we also spray-painted and hung. We put up flood lights. It was very homely but had the advantage of being unappealing to pranksters.

"You had an enchanted childhood," BJ said with a certain wonder in her voice. I thought about that and decided yes, in main I did. Passing for Thin and Angry Fat Girls tell the grim stories but I know from the Rooms and from friends how good I really had it, especially at Christmas.

That's an odd statement in a way because when I was a kid, gifts were not always my parents' point at Christmas. I recently got a Barbie catalogue and nearly choked when I saw that one of the reissued dolls was Nurse Barbie. I got my first Barbie in first grade, which was in the days when it was clothes we wanted for our dolls, not more dolls. Barbie was expensive. The clothes were beautiful. Now it seems the opposite is true. Girls collect the dolls and the outfits are frayed rags.

So I got my first Barbie and she was the first bubble-haired Barbie, the pony-tailed version just phased out. And I got two outfits, which would have to last her a year of play -- a tutu and pointe shoes and that nurse's uniform.

Need I say that I bought Nurse Barbie that night?

My brothers often gave me choice between a birthday or a Christmas present, the two dates spearated by less than two weeks. The next year, my brother Jim gave me a packet of Barbie shoes and hats.

We all know that not only can a gal have too many shoes, but an eight-year-old is especially in need of Barbie shoes.

I think I got Ken in second grade but one of the puppies made short work of him and ever after my Barbies -- Midge, Francie, Skipper, Tutti, Todd and Jessica -- were, unbeknownst to me, lesbians. I think Barbie had to be replaced at some point because she was an amputee. More fine work on the part of Jet or Sandy or Buff or Jan.

The first cooking memory I have is of waiting impatiently for my mother to come into the kitchen to make sugar cookie dough for Christmas cookies.

Last year I gave BJ a mistletoe ornament and her husband a bike ornament. They had a few of these personal ornaments among their generic but pretty balls and I felt kind of sorry for them for not having a tree that is their lives' histories. I just put ours up and saved the few fragile bulbs from my childhood for prominent positions. We have Henry VIII and his six wives because I'm obsessed with the Tudors, and Clara, the Mouse King and the Nutcracker because we all love the Suite so much. There is a cathedral radio like the one my father grew up with, many gnomes because my father loves them (and calls them g-nom-eys), a number of Labradors, a hippo in a tutu because one of my parents' "songs" is [Offenbach?] the piece in Fantasia ("Dance of the Hours." Note: remember to tell Jean the flowering bush is forsythia.) There are oraments from all over Europe and the Southwest, the University of Montana, cloisonne bells that match my mother's small collection of Japanese cloisonne that my father brought back from R&R while he served in Korea, Polish emblams and German and Englsh Santas from my mother's of the family. This morning my father asked why we don't have any mushrooms, which he studied and during surgery made replicas of with the hot substance used to make artificial hip sockets.

Of course, when I was a kid, there were some fancy glass balls, some less fancy ones, and a lot plastic. The lights were the big colored ones and my brother Dick would string tinsel, strand-by-strand, for hours. At some point, my mother made a popcorn garland: I remember taking the ornaments out each December and nibbling on the incredibly stale popcorn.

My father actually had candles on the trees he grew up with. They were lit for about five minutes with a bucket of water at hand. My mother's father invented (and should have patented) strings of white fairy lights from the switch board lights at Bell Telephone where he worked. Her baby doll and straw carriage were left behind in a move but I still have the electric oven of the `30s that was another year's big gift.

Because I was the youngest by seven years and because my mother figured out that T.I.N.S.* from the handwriting on the packages as soon as she could read, Santa was downplayed. We opened our presents on Christmas Eve -- we are Northern Europeans whether we know it or not -- and as I was in the bathtub later, I would hear my father or mother saying, very loudly, "Ohhhh...Santa. Francie is going to be SO sorry she missed you!"

I'd go running out to the living room, wet and nekkid, but he had ho-ho-ho'd off to thenext door neighbor's house and I was left with a tricycle (white, with those plastic streamers on the handle bars, so pristine that I remember riding it through the house) or a cradle and high chair for my baby dolls. Then, when I was four or five, I asked my mother why there was a Santa on every corner Downtown. They were the Salvation Army of course, and the six blocks of Higgins Avenue that was our Downtown, and a place we wore white gloves when we visited, was merry with ringing hand bells. She was tired of Santa and had been disillusioned early enough that she looked down at me and said, "T.I.N.S." End of THAT ritual, though I kept hoping that if I said I believed, I actually would and Santa would come back.

That, I believe, is double-magical thinking.

There was so much snow when I was a kid! Forget about quilts and blankets of snow, this stuff huffed down in boulders and stranded my father's Jeep in mid-driveway. One year my brothers were broke and so they built me a snowman as tall as our house. I loved that more than Barbie shoes and I loved my Barbie shoes. The dementia of the project tickled me and it was such hard work to go to for a baby sister.

All of this left Christmas Day wide open. We always had dinner with our aunt, uncle and cousins, always a reprise of Thanksgiving, always mincemeat pies and "poison" (a.k.a. oyster) stuffing. There was, also, always a paranoia about cranberries, a condition we grew up with from the holiday dinner my aunt served without cranberries. My father and uncle, his brother, excused themselves and went out to find a can. Where? In those days, there were no 7-11's, no grocery store was open -- society expected housewives to be ready in advance because that's what all women did. Somehow the cranberries were procured and I wonder still if they went to one of my father's nurse's houses or my uncles railroad buddies to find them. They grew up in Missoula, went to the same grade school I went to. They knew everyone between them. My uncle had the most wonderful dimples and melodious laugh, as did my other uncle. All of their kids inherited both. Put my eleven paternal cousins in one room, tell a joke, and you will hear the music of the spheres.

There are pictures but not many of those Christmases. To take a home movie or photo meant, in the former matter, a six-foot light bar that instantly made all participants' behavior completely abnormal. And cameras had single flash bulbs that, once used, smoked and had to e thrown away. The temperature of the living room was raised by a good five degrees when movies were taken, and another ten degrees when we burned the wrapping paper in the fire place. Please don't tell Al Gore about that.

So much of what I remember has been lost -- the big Christmas bulbs, the plastic ornments peculiar to the 1950s, tinsel and the patience to string it, the Big Snow, the ice skating rink at the University where my brother Jim danced with me, the hats we wore (knitted ovals that covered the ears and tied under our chins: the Vermont Trading Company just started to carry them and I bought two), the worry about finding last minute cranberries. But a lot of it is on our tree, collected in fond memory of who we are and where and when we came from.

There are ornaments I couldn't bear to unwrap and hang this year - the tin treadle sewing machine that was like the one my grandmother used, the quilt blocks, the Scarlet O'Hara figurine (my mother to my father when Francie wa third grader, when Gone with the Wind was released every ten years: "I am not waiting until my daughter is nineteen before she sees Gone with the Wind!").

But a lot of them are hung, rehung, admired after being forgotten for a year. And now I'm going to go make my grandmother's sugar cookie dough.

*There Is No Santa.

Snow Day

Well this really sucks -- or maybe it doesn't.

I tripped in the Grand Canyon this October & smashed the lens coverings of my camera. If I was careful, I could still use it but last week it died a true death. I find I'm lonely without my camera. It's been a good friend. I'll replace it in lower-priced everything in Arizona but in the meantime I can't show you what my street looks like under whipped cream.

On the other hand, it's one more reason I don't have to put on 8 million items of clothing & go outside.

I was due to leave The Bat Cave for La Guardia at 6.30 a.m. for my 8.30 flight to Phoenix. When I called American Airlines last night about the weather conditions, the Human said the flight was on but to call as soon as I woke up. At 4.45 this morning I called & found out my flight was canceled & please hold for the next available agent. I knew, after something like 24 hours of cancellations, I had to stay on the line if I was going to get a flight in time for Christmas. At 7.15 a Human voice interrupted the music & woke me up.

"M'mpg m'mph, yabba, bwaf," I said.

"I can't understand you," the Human Agent replied.

I shook myself awake and told her my flight had been canceled and what should we do about this. She reticketed me for Monday afternoon & I found myself truly alone for the first time in years. There was white snow-light pooling into the Cave, I was exhausted from therapy, errands, packing & laundry the day before, Daisy is staying with her auntie & uncle for the duration of my trip & went off to the Fields of Snow in New Jersey yesterday. I keep thinking she's sleeping at the end of the bed & will start whining any minute for a walk. It's very quiet. I slept till 11, called various car services to cancel & re-book, read, called my father, read, napped, considered a spot of interpersonal turmoil I've hit but had had explained to me by New Therapist & now it's 8.30 & I've taken two Klonopin & thought I'd write a spot of blog before it hits.

I love Daisy. You know that. But I'm oddly enjoying this strange solitude that comes from everyone thinking I've left & no dogs to be wrenched around by & resting after an incredibly busy week. I've boarded with dogs for something like two weeks, had a promotional video & podcast to do at Berkley, a day of tradition with my friend Meem (Union Square Xmas Fair, Qi Dong massage in Chinatown), a marathon present-wrapping day & another of delivering, then a Saturday of errands & appointments & chores. Had I made that flight this morning, chances are I'd be a zombie tomorrow. Maybe I'll be a little fresher & rested for today's enforced downtime.

I'm missing a radio interview in Phoenix, however. Never a good feeling but, well, not my fault.

I'm actually looking forward to this two weeks in Arizona, although I know it will have some heart string tugging without Mom. Does Dad really want a tree? Does he really want cookies? Will I be forced to make mincemeat pie with my mother's alliance? Despite the questions of who my father and I really are when it comes to Christmas, I know my presence there will do more good than not. It's a good feeling, to be needed.

One of the gifts of this year's general yuckiness has been a growing correspondence with one of my cousins. She gifted me her kids who have adopted me. I'm like a pig in shit with all these younger first-cousins-once-removed who are snarky, smart, articulate, educated & share some common ancestors we can laugh at. One lives in Arizona & another is coming to stay with Dad and me (I should tell him this, yes?) for a few days.

I'm looking forward to 2010. Angry Fat Girls may have been turned down for some of the media coverage that Passing for Thin got (20/20 wants all five women in the book & I've been creative in protecting their anonymity), but I think AFG is a much more important book. PFT is a sort of fairy tale come true; AFG is the truth waiting at the close of every fairy tale. I want very much to make the point that weight gain is not merely statistically inevitable but biologically and emotionally normal. If we can't live with our selves we won't sustain weight loss and will make being overweight a form of 24/7 punishment. I want to salve some of our collected woundedness.

I want my relationship with my family to mend. New Therapist asked how I expect this to happen & I said, "Organically." I'm not sorry for this hissy fit(s) I threw over not being at Mother's memorial service but I am working through the anger & not mattering to my family. The lump in my throat right now is MUCH smaller.

I'm done with writing about fat & thin. I'm moving on to the kookie side of my life, of being a peasant in Brownstone Brooklyn. Today is the only day I've not had some light bulb flash of something I need to add to one or another planned essay.

I've eked out enough savings to plan another trip abroad, either to Budapest/Krakow or Brussels/Amsterdam. I'm planning to go to Seattle & Portland to promote AFG & will see many friends & extended family there, as well as snoop around Seattle as my potential next home.

Right now my attention is on those things. It's also on the intangibles of what I want from therapy -- setting boundaries, making myself heard, not reacting to stubbing my toe by automatically saying, "I hate myself." It's high time I hie myself off to the Rooms to get those boundaries & automatic reactions applied to food as well. But for now, it's a small miracle that this Panic-Disordered Lady can run a half dozen errands & get herself into a shrink's office.

These are the ruminations of a snow day. I'm grateful this difficult year has less than two weeks to wreck its grief, worry, stress, loneliness & rejection on me. I want, for the first time, to be the driver of the new year, rather than a nervous cringing passenger.

So. Happy new year to all of us. May the snow melt quickly.

In My Own Two Hands

Things are coming together for the publication of Angry Fat Girls, and between the work involved with promotion and Christmas preparation, I haven't had any time at all.

However: here it is, in all it finery:

I'm setting up an Angry Fat Girls website & redoing my personal website at franceskuffel.net. Look for changes to come.

I think it's a glorious cover & have no idea how the art director came up with it. But then she probably has no idea how I come up with some bizarre metaphor, either.

You can pre-order from Amazon now and it should be in bookstores in late December - early January. Its official publication date is January 5th, the eve of the Epiphany.

Will post soon. I'm freeeeeezing.

Junkie

A close friend called last night and took me to task -- gently, a little bit -- for leaving my blog readers dangling for a month. I'm sorry. I've been on a bender of pain and finding ways to dodge the pain.

I start my days wondering whether it's a Klonopin day (if my heart is beating fast and my stomach is fluttering at the thought of leaving the house, leaving bed), or a codeine day (if my heart is in my throat and I've got to try to show up. Some days I use those drugs, other days I get back in bed as soon as possible, or I zone out on computer games or, of course, at night, sugar.

The other day I realized I was really and truly poisoning myself with sugar. I was dashing to the toilet a half dozen times a day, shaking like a leaf and so, so tired. I have a very fragile few days' reprieve and my energy is a bit better as are my visits to the bathroom.

But each of the last three mornings would have been a codeine morning had I chosen to swig some back. Let me explain that my reaction to codeine is a muffling of bad feelings and a slight heightening of good ones. It's also dangerous if not taken with a lot of water, on a full stomach. And one of the reasons I'm making an effort to reign in my food is that my new shrink commented on Saturday that it's no wonder I'm so tired: I'm hanging onto the cliff above all the grief, fear, anger and love that I need to go through that it's exhausting. He's right. So I'm trying to get rid of the sugar/flour & let myself fall off the cliff, as frightening as that is.

My poor friend who prodded this entry: she got to hear a shard of the abandonment by my family and my fright over Christmas alone with my father. There are other things gnawing my insides as well. I don't have a good feeling about the fate of this book. I know of an adoption going on and my birthday is soon -- I want to write a letter to that baby to tell it how special it is. I've started work on a new book proposal and, wouldn't you know, despite it not being particularly about me, I hit a spot where I'd have to talk about how apart I've always been from my family: dead halt. Nor am I sure I want to write that book. There is a boy on the far, far periphery of my life that I try hard to keep behind my dinky fake Christmas tree on a high shelf who has fallen off the shelf a few times. My favorite aunt died a month after my mother did.

I don't even know where to start letting myself feel this stuff although I'm weepy as I write this.

There have been wondrous things as well, of course. I've discovered a branch of my family who care unjudgmentally about me, who are hilarious, literate, interesting. I spoke with the cousin my age about my aunt's brief illness and that little contact with a cousin I've always looked up to was marvelous. Hero's dad took Daisy and me pheasant hunting. Daisy put up a flight of crows, found a dead pheasant and played nicely with a pheasant from the freezer, her repugnance to feathers a one-off before she caught on. I watched how much fun she had following Hero's lead into the brush, how well she took my commands to go with Uncle S., and her concern when I lagged too far behind. I saw about 95% of what a Lab is all about that day.

I've spent masses of money creating a wardrobe for my hoped-for publicity, mostly in browns (a bright color will really add pounds; black is what is expected of authors, fat women and New Yorkers) & I've assembled a couple of calendars for gifts and a raffle item that were absorbing, amusing projects. I want to start my last calendar, for the Labs, today.

And, after two months of being unable to concentrate on much, I'm sick of chick lit and can, with certainty, say that the only writers in the genre truly worth reading are Helen Fielding and Marian Keyes.

But I've been in heroin zombie mode except for those times I had to get it together, and exhausted from the effort afterward. I keep thinking of first lines of this blog but fall into pointlessness almost as quickly as I think of them.

Fingers crossed that I stay clean. I've got Christmas to do, dogs coming out of my ears, and vegetables to chop.

Public Confession

I had a b-a-d week & it all culminated in acting out yesterday.

I desperately needed to be at my mother's memorial service in Missoula on Sunday. I needed to hear what the co-founder of the "alternative Catholic community," which I call Our Lady of Off-off Broadway, said about the years of working with my mother in the Church. I needed to remember my mother with friends from high school who have the same context as I do for her. I needed to see how my father reacted in the moment.

But I had a dog to board, a promotional video to do & a flutter since then of more interviews for Angry Fat Girls. My publisher is optimistic about the fate of the book. I am cautiously hopeful.

Not only, then, could I not go and everyone set the date in stone, but I didn't hear from anyone except my high school friends about the service or about being missed. I went to Mass with friends, who held my hands during the prayers for the community. We met another friend of our age for brunch & laughed ourselves silly at all the old Catholic stuff which we share an obsession with. I was happy until I got home & saw the emails from friends about the service, at which point I fell apart again.

Something burst in my heart yesterday morning & I blasted off a phone call about the timing of the memorial. I think Christmas is going to be cheaper this year because of it, and my publisher is seeing if the last line of the acknowledgments can be changed.

& so began my day.

What was big became venal. Daisy took a dump in a pile of leaves at dusk & I couldn't find it & didn't search very hard for it. Later, Henry took his dump & I was deep in conversation with a friend about how death opens up thinly healed family dynamics. No one saw & I didn't venture out to the ed of the dog run to pick it up.

I always pick up poop that can be picked up. I am insistent about this because dogs are in such danger of being hated in the city as it is.

The grocery stores had none of the free local broadside newspapers I need for the Italian greyhounds's crate but two copies of the New York Times were lying around the vestibule so I took them.

Petty thievery! The only thing I can say for myself is that given the state I'm in, the dogs were lucky to get a good walk & play time, and that the greyhounds are lucky I went over to feed them & clean their crate. This morning I washed dishes that were two days overdue. I finally put the toilet paper on the roller. I'm blogging instead of playing Monopoly, which I downloaded. Maybe today can be a little bit better. No transgressions today. Keep "forgive us our sins as we forgive others" in the front of my brain. I didn't yell at Henry when he broke my favorite bowl today. I've picked up poop. I wrote my sponsor. I am trying to be somebody in the wake of feeling my family regards me as no one.

But, Lord, I wish I had some gumption to take on a bathroom shelf or noodle around a new book proposal or walk over to the office supply store to buy bond paper. Beyond hurt, anger & bouts of impatience with the dogs, I am empty.

Damn Me

I should have kicked & screamed when plans were being made for my mother's memorial service in Missoula. I am booked until about Friday, November 6, & had earlier advocated for doing it on Thanksgiving weekend but I acquiesced to doing it on the 1st. I didn't know how much I needed to see old friends, of mine & of my parents, & to see my oldest nieces & nephews.

It's like a whole new fucking death, this being cut out of the formality of saying goodbye. What was I thinking?

Life Is a Buffet

Last night Daisy & I stood next to a young woman on a cell phone as we waited for the light to turn across from the Binge Store. Daisy gave her a happy look & she said, "Oh, what a cute puppy!" Unfortunately, Cute Puppy's look of interest swiveled immediately to the trash can on the corner which was filled to the brim with the tossed out eats wrappers of the intersection of Binge Street & Binge Boulevard. She jumped up & started pawing around before I pulled her out. I slid a look to the cell phone woman & said, "She's a buffet eater."

The light changed & I heard her telling her friend my remark. It made me think as I doled out ice cream to Daisy, freezer-burned enough that I think I may have lost my taste for the stuff for a minute. I've been low lately & using my blog as a way of talking. This strange zone of quasi-grief is not the only thing in my life. There is a buffet of moods, observations & tasks that I don't report here.

For one, after I posted yesterday, I took a galley & a gift over to Daisy's Uncle Gerry. We sat in his garden & I told him I'd ordered Eye Witness guides to Belgium, Amsterdam, Cracow & Budapest, but that I'd also been looking at a website called The Blue Army because I have an itch (mainly to buy up the girft shops) to go to Fatima & Lourdes. Fabulous tour but, we agreed, unbearable after a maximum of three hours because of one's fellow tourers. He gave me a handful of leaves to smell, lavender that kept breathing the scent of wellness every time I crushed them again. A small hour-long chat that did worlds to bring me out my morning funk.


I have decided that the only thing more wonderful than a slender woman wearing black balerina flats is a slender woman wearing red ballerina flats.


As Daisy & I were crossing yet another street (sans ice cream for once), we slowed our pace to match a whizzy-haired hippie mom with two kids who were ahead of us. She was loaded down with their backpacks & of course one had the name tag "Maya" hanging from it. I think even Daisy rolled her eyes.

It's odd that if I were to hop on a train & go ten minutes beyond New York City the leaves would either be in great yellow piles or blazing on the trees. Is it the ambient heat of the city that keeps the same trees that turn colors everywhere else from turning here. It's rare to see a tree in fall foliage. I didn't grow up with much of it in Montana so I miss it more keenly knowing it's out there, a ring of fire around the city.

Today I terminated & cut up two credit cards. One company tried to convince me the monthly fee & 23% interest was in my best interest. The other asked what they could do to keep me. I told them I wouldn't keep any credit card that was more than 14%. She very generously came back & offered me 14.99%. "That's 15%," I said. "Yes it is," she agreed. I terminated. Did Citizen's Bank think I would listen to the fourteen rather than the ninety-nine?

And finally, an overheard conversation between a yuppie mom & her eight or nine-year-old son.
Son: Mom, do you like nature?
Silence as both parties think about this question. Son realizes it's a sumb question.
Son: Like, you know, leaves?
Mom: Yes, I like nature. I like trees & flowers & animals...
At which, Daisy began barking her big scary bark for no discernable reason.

I wonder if there is a book in the Blue Army? I wonder what a year of Marion devotion would make me?

Now I have to deal with all the jewelry I brought back from Arizona & confirm the appointment with the possible new therapist. Noon on Halloween. Doesn't that sound...auspicious...?

Contrary to Evidence

This morning it occured to me that I need to go back into therapy. I wish I didn't. I have a pretty good idea of what's wrong with me -- low self-esteem, depression, addiction, social anxiety. I also have some ideas about what's right with me -- talent, intelligence, wit, generosity. But I don't know how to get the two categories to balance each other out.

I've been sitting at my computer most of the morning doing the usual things, taking pleasure in none of them and wondering why I'm doing them. I need to get into my files, three feet away from where I'm sitting, and find some stuff for my publicist and editor. I planned to put away all the clothes that happen to be out. None of this is difficult work but I can't do it.

My brother called to tell me that my last and favorite aunt is in the hospital being treated for lymphoma. I spoke to the cousin I'm closest to in that family and it was good in the moment -- we cried about our parents and laughed about our parents, recounted the many ways her father (my father's youngest brother) and my father were tied together. But when I hung up I was empty. Empty or full. Full of a feeling of what's-the-point. I walked Daisy, then walked myself to the ice cream and cookies at Gristides, took two klonopin and we shared a bingelet.

Today I'm on the verge of tears.

The deal with me is that whatever happens, I accuse myself. Objectively, of course, I didn't kill my mother but it's easier to mutter "I hate myself" than be sad. That has to be fixed. So far, I haven't been able to.

When I realized I should get a shrink, I wondered what sort. I trotted my fingers over to the Psychology Today website to look for therapists in my neighborhood. Much as I love Dr. Miller, it was a three-hour commitment to get to the Upper East Side and back again. It's time to shop local. The website has a nifty diagnostic test and this is what it told me:

• You appear to have experienced at least one major depressive episode.
• You show signs of Generalized Anxiety Disorder.
• You appear to suffer from panic disorder with agoraphobia.
• Your responses strongly indicate that you suffer from Body Dysmorphic Disorder.

I also came up as having lesser symptoms, kind of like having a minor subject area in college, linked to "Social Phobia," post-traumatic stress disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder.

Who, I wonder, decides which of all these states gets capitalized??

My body dysmorphic would have been off the scale if it asked questions besides those concerning anorectia/bulimia.

I found a therapist a few blocks away and emailed him. I think it's time to try a male shrink again. Now I'll have a cigarette, brush my teeth and get ready to call my father about my conversation with my cousin. That may call for a nap.

Onward through the Fog

I thought grief would be a spectacle. You know, breaking down in public, asking the missing one if everything is OK or if she has some wisdom to shed on some subject. I went through a grief similar to that when the Boy from Connecticut dumped me in Round I but this is different.

I don't get it, frankly. I always thought that when my parents died, I'd be headed for Payne Whitney. Up until last May, Mother was the person I was most consistently open with, the person I went to for advice about everything except men. It's not that I don't have a lump in my throat as I write those sentences, as well as the operative phrase "until last May," but this frame of mind I'm in is more like a fog than a fire.

My concentration is almost nonexistent except for stupid computer games. Sunday I slept 19 hours. I never really unpacked from my trip to Prague and came home with some of my mother's jewelry and scarves so the Bat Cave is like a jigsaw puzzle dumped out of the box.

I keep losing things. My checkbook went missing in Arizona but I found it at the last minute and packed it in my suitcase. It did not, however, come out of my suitcase. I've looked ineffectually for it everywhere. Then my ATM card went missing. I found it but only after I'd gotten a replacement. And those are just the important goners.

Nor can I remember things. I sat down, sans checkbook but with a notebook, and paid bills, writing them down. When I looked at my checking account a few days later, there were bills I wrote down that hadn't gone through and bills I'd paid that I hadn't written down. It took an hour to find check blanks and a new ledger and then I called all my credit cards because I had no idea what their balances were after traveling for four weeks out of five. I bought a gift for friends, along with a few other items, and discovered when I got home that the box was empty.

And let's not forget handing over my passport at the bank to get a new ATM card and being unable to remember my social security number for a good three minutes.

I feel haunted -- not by my mother but by a feeling that I've forgotten something important. When I'm out on the street I'm in a rush to get home and do something but as soon as I arrive, I stall out.

It's a miracle my animals are alive and that I haven't walked into an oncoming delivery truck.

All this forgetfulness and losing stuff makes me incredibly anxious. Add stomach problems to the mix. I would love to be able to sit down and cry my eyes out if only I needed to. I'd much rather be in paroxyms of grief than in this light-headed Alzheimer's state.

I'm clinging to accomplishing small things and to the hope of another day's abstinence. I was so wound up over the bank card and keys I needed to return yesterday that I couldn't decide what to do or in what order. But I managed both as well as groceries. I went through masses of papers last night. It took at least two hours when someone else could have done it in 30 minutes, but things are paid and National Public Radio is $25 richer. Today I've done one load of laundry and found a photo for my Lab Lady blog. I've brushed my teeth and taken my morning meds. I remembered that a hungry stomach means I should eat before getting into a new twitter of disorganized organizing.

For the time being I guess I'm going to have to slow w-a-y down, keep my lights on dim and the windows open.

But if anyone finds my brain, could you let me know? I'll gladly pay overnight shipping.

Hello Again

Thank you everyone for so many kind wishes, prayers and listening ears.

I got home very late Monday evening from three weeks of mostly dealing with the Aftermath. Sorting, giving, tossing, organizing; reading tiny bits of paper to my father; eating & sleeping; absorbing.

It's good to be home. I have a lot more absorbing to do.

This is not so much about Mom being gone. She began to leave, emotionally and mentally, when she fell in late May & was in such rotten shape that to regret her dying when she did would be an act of cruelty. She would have been 88 years old this month & she was ready. When the social worker at the nursing home asked her three days running (she couldn't remember much by September) if she knew what hospice care meant, she replied it meant end of life. Then asked how she felt about that, she replied, "Shit happens." I'm more OK with her death than I imagined I would be.

But it was an intense time of family & looking at family. Much of this began earlier in the summer & circumstances conspired in various weird ways to keep me looking back in time. Conversations with cousins, with people I knew in grade school, being a unit with my father & brother, making calls & receiving visits, figuring well, we're talking living wills and family trusts -- is there a better time to ask about my birth mother? Much was revealed, much has been forgotten, only a little of it all is something some of us can address.

My brother & I were pretty united over the summer in our efforts to help & plan but death, even a benign one, is a wall one hits, I suspect, with the kind of impact that brings out undercurrents. I collapsed one day soon after Mom died, binge-reading, napping & finally sobbing hoarsely. Jim did not collapse. He soldiered on, reading mail to Dad, sorting business papers, making business phone calls, wrapping up my mother's official life. I have lived alone my entire adult life & I'm not only used to having a lot of private time, I need it. I wasn't surly through that day but I was not communicative nor was I a team-player. Around five I began to stir & Jim walked into my room & said, sarcastically, "Are you going to connect today at all???"

I snapped back in equal sarcasm, "I'm going to take a shower." Which I did & then came out & made crab quiche for dinner.

When we drove to the airport for his flight home, I got a lecture between his taking cell phone calls. Dad was hurt by my moodiness. Dad didn't know if we could all spend time together in the future. Et cetera.

I listened & was mortified. I'm used to being as much in my own world when I'm with my father as he is -- I thought -- used to being in his own world of talking books, science lecture series, football & the Discovery Network. I didn't mean to hurt my father but my "mood" was exhaustion, escapism, grief & a response to how accustomed I am to Dad being literally plugged in to anything but live human beings in his home.

And, dammit, I listened & accepted without retort. I began to see an old pattern re-emerging in that week with my brother. He kept answering for me or cutting me out. People would ask when I was planning to leave & despite my having an open ticket & no set plans, he would give them a day that for some reason he thought was best. We had a small remembrance party with my parents' Arizona friends & the hostess said Jim would say a few words & then Francie would say a few words -- except that Jim thanked everyone for coming for me.

Years ago, he took me to see his shrink to see if I had any memories of childhood that would shed some light. I'm a pro at shrinks & after a while the man broke in & said, "You're great. You know, I met your parents & I've been seeing Jim for a while but nobody ever talks about you. It's like you don't exist or something."

Yes, well, that's a pattern. & rather than turn things narky, I said nothing of my own hurt feelings & ability to speak for myself & let him codify me into whatever story of me he's comfortable with.

I'm "sorer" about that than I am about my mom's death. Once again I feel as though I have no brother, both because the man who calls me "Sis" (Sis? When the fuck did I become SIS? I HATE that name; it's as bad as being called "Fran". Sis makes me feel like a 16-year-old snake & Fran is a nasally whiny version of "fat". Sis infuckingdeed) doesn't get that I am a grown-up (& he could have spoken to me at 2 in the afternoon instead of letting his resentment fester until 5) person on my own, and because I eventually came to feel resentment & disgust rather than anything more fond for him.

I laugh that he is my mother's child -- uber-organized & organizing, dogmatic according to his own lights, a little belittling of my father for Oedipal reasons of his own. I'm my father's child -- happy in my own world, relaxed about certain kinds of things. He needs to DO in order to justify his days & I need to BE in order to survive mine. He's far to the right socially, politically, theologically & I wonder if this gives him some sort of patriarchy complex, a need to be the Man.

I'm sighing here & thinking, whatever. The full story turned out not to be all about Dad being hurt. I felt more manipulated yet. I wonder what other childhood attitudes will blossom in the next few years & I wonder if I'll have a brother after them.

All of this was particularly odd because a week or so after he left, two cousins came to visit. They were eager to hug & catch up & I had to warn them that I am the Antichrist to their similarly conservative headroom. It worries me a little -- I am glad-handy with everything they find reprehensible. It worried me more when I jokingly said that Catholicism is as heathen a religion as anyone could wish & they nodded solemnly. It's a paradox that I'm sure the Old Testament, somewhere, warns against: how can one love someone whose advocacies in life are anathema -- possibly, in their gestalt, sinful?

All of which makes "love" feel a little fragile.

I've always known death brought out the worst in people but I thought it was material rather than whatever this is. I went on to spend two nice weeks with my father & if Jim's competency with legal papers made me feel pointless, I did a lot of heavy lifting & cuticle-ruining going through closets, drawers, desks, under beds. Dad & I drove up to the Grand Canyon, which in nearly 20 years of spending half or more of the year in Arizona I've never seen. We had a nice time & we experienced that wonderful rare thing of synchronicity when we stopped at an Indian market outside the Park as we drove toward the Painted Desert. I don't know why that was so but we enjoyed it the same way, inhabited that 15 minutes so happily that our rhythm the rest of the day was set. It was a two-day excursion we'd never done because in those nearly 20 years my mother simply hasn't been well enough for it.

There are second acts to come even as, once again, I wonder why I can't open my mouth to stake my boundaries and my self, & why I'm not right -- as in, stable & OK -- the way I am.

Scrapbook

This is what I want to remember about the first day of my mother's death watch:

After we'd all taken our turns at sitting and talking to my mother, maybe 1/4 conscious, my father retired to the recliner in her room and listened to a book-on-tape while Jim sat by Mom and read a book. I, who was three hours off of everyone else (except maybe Mother), sacked out on the floor and fell asleep. I woke to a room in which the only noise was the oxygen machine and the small noises of my family in snug proximity, each of us in our own world. It felt like I was three years old again.

I want to remember, too, the tears dripping off my father's nose as he held Mom's hand during Bach's "Ave Maria".

With sore tired eyes, my father and I came home while Jim spent several more hours with Mom. He asked me to arrange Last Rites for today after having shrugged off the suggestion on Saturday. We will, once again, gather as a family to participate in the most solemn and hopeful blessing of the sacraments. The last time we did this, Mom was part of the standing circle.

We are ready.

The Price of Sunlight

I'm in a gushing hurry to finish many things before leaving to board with a dog and leave for Prague on Sunday, but I couldn't let your responses to my last post dangle as though I were too numb to absorb them. Indeed, your sympathy -- and in many cases, your shared experience -- had a profound impact on me. Possibly even more impacting was the effort and tears I put into writing that post and waking up on Monday to a calmer disposition.

It was weird, though. On Monday I felt like the previous couple of days had been a lost weekend, with grief instead of food or booze or something. I ran into a good friend who I see nearly every day and it was like I'd been far away to someplace bleak, like Chernobyl. But the air had cleared. The humidity dropped, the air was cleaner and cooler. I'd cried most of my available tears and had tried to articulate this process and its peculiar grief as best I could. I understand my reaction a little better and I definitely feel a community of people going through the same feelings.

But the price of having a little light back in my scope of vision has been not being able to get to sleep at night and waking to a churning stomach with all the things I have to do before I leave on Sunday. There comes a point in the afternoon when I wilt. I've been unable to get my body on to a subway to exchange dollars for crowns -- Herald Square feels amazingly too daunting for me. When I took a look at the Czech Airlines website, however, I saw that I could make the exchange at JFK.

And today I plum fell over and badly bloodied my knee, either not paying attention to Daisy or to the uneven sidewalk. Gawwww...

Sometimes I wonder what hallucinogens I was taking when I booked this trip. I'm an agoraphobe! Is someone who can't face the bustle of Midtown fit to travel to a place where there are words with no vowels???

I've done the best I can. I booked a lunch cruise of Vlatava River for five hours after arrival. I should just about make it, with time for dropping my bags, having coffee and finding the meeting place. From then until 2 I don't have to think. I can just take pictures of the bridges and castles and drink Czech beer.

It's been hard to go from that blotted grieving place to semi-productivity, but I wanted you to know there are breaks in this hideous process. I have a coaching project on hand and I really do love not only cleaning up prose but finding the story that is often missing from the pages. I've run errands when I can steel myself to get out and done odds and ends toward being out of hear in reasonable order on Sunday. I feel much better that I won't be a loose ends with jet lag when I arrive. I also booked excursions to Nizbor to see the Bohemian glassworks, to Kutna Hora, an amazing cathedral town, and to Terezin, because I believe that if one can visit a death camp, it's a moral obligation to do so. All of it leaves another six hours a day to see Prague in my own slow fashion.

And I think I will buy Christmas ornaments for my parents while I'm there. I think I will try to focus on what is beautiful and possible in their futures.

With a lot of help from my cyber-friends.

Blotted

Oh, yeah -- we're back to discussing depression again.

This ongoing mood I'm enduring is weird. I've written before about my beasts of depression -- the black dog, the red beast, the gray dog -- & I think that what's interesting is that my depressions have specific colors attached to them. A red depression is anger turned inward. A black depression is very very bad. A gray bout is milder but has a hopeless quality.

One reason I've been relatively silent lately is because I really don't want to talk, don't want to feel. I had dinner with very close friends last night who have gone through the business of how to deal with failing parents. I described how I want to sleep all the time, how my stomach is always electric with a stress I can't attach a name to, how lonely I feel & how incapable I am of soothing that loneliness.

"Yep," A. said. "That's the Elderly Parent Depression. We should find a color for it. Maybe blue. Or lavender."

I've been think that perhaps this feeling is the static on a television, an absence rather than an excess of feeling. I forgot that white is the combination of all colors when I typed it into Google images, thinking instead how blank white is. One of the first suggestions it gave me was "white tiger". OK, I thought. I have my beast. Padding almost silently as it stalks me. Not bad. This is a quiet mood.

But it's not quite right, the white tiger. I don't feel hunted in this mood-space. I'm not torturing myself with accusations, or at least not the kind that make me feel at once filthy and helpless. I think we've been very high-handed with my father, announcing plans to move him and Mom into assisted living in Montana on September 14th, transferring all their medical records, making lists of what will be moved north, even talking with my dad's financial adviser. But I also know that my brother and I can't keep flying to Arizona when there's a crisis and that my father is terribly lonely with Mom in a nursing home and blindness making him dependent on car services and Meals-on-Wheels. We're doing the best thing for them but I feel that in doing what we're doing, we've stripped my father of a lot of his vitality. Meals-on-Wheels for Mr. Cook? Every week he sounds a little more reduced, a little less in possession of his command over life. Will it come back when he's settled and Mom is with him? Will Mom shake out of her lack of interest that has come with the consequences of what I think now was a stroke?

I tell myself it will all be worth it when he walks outside on September 15th and smells the pure, sweet, cool air of the Bitterroot Valley. Will it? Can we re-create his mental stronghold for him? Will his curiosity and desires return?

Perhaps what I'm feeling is what I'm hearing. Without one of us there to read him his music, lecture and Library for the Blind catalogues, there's little excitement or eagerness in him. He seems not to have lost his appetite so much as his taste and his cravings -- and a reason to cook. When Mom was home for a couple of terrible weeks, she barked commands. "Water!" "Bathroom!" Now my brother and I are informing him of his next moves. And with Mom more comfortably established in the nursing home, his wife has turned into someone more vacant than he's ever known her to be, losing her thoughts and her own tastes and cravings (except for chocolate). His world is small and out of his hands.

And I am haunted by it.

There is color in this grief and terror and loneliness I am experiencing, but not much and not clear enough to define the outside world by. I miss my mom -- not only because I can't get hold of her in the nursing home but because my mom isn't really there any more. Now I'm starting to miss my father, too. What I seem to have -- a conversation with them, a visit -- is leached of its vibrancy and possibility.

Maybe this depression, as I suffer through articulating it, is the way my father, blinded by macular degeneration, sees the world. Incomplete and without a center.

In the Day

My world has been rocked so severely this summer that I badly want the emotional space to absorb and deal with crises in other people's lives. Things are going on in my extended family's lives that need a certain amount of what's left of my heart, and my heart needs to rebuild by being there for them and by being here for myself.

To whit, this is Day Six of a clean abstinence that pretty much drifted down on me in a meeting. Something about having acquaintances console me and stroke my arms carried that ineffable grace we all need to take whatever the first step toward healing is.

My crisis upon arriving back from Arizona is abating. I know my manuscript will be accepted; Henry has departed for the suburbs and is beyond my clutching grief; my prescription company has finally gotten back in touch with me; there is a modest amount of income coming in from dogs and from coaching writers, a gig I find I really like. I'm a tough and honest judge of writing, but I'm good at it.

My loose ends seem still to cluster around the book, however. When will the legal department vett it so that the second payment can be made? Will the woman who participated in the book sign the necessary waivers? How in the world can we make a January pub date when we're already so behind? Should we move it to June or the following year?

My mother is such a moving target of good, lucid, humorous spells, followed by bratty breakdowns, followed by gasping, gray-faced immobility and incoherence, that I can't say much more except that my parents will be moving back to Montana in September. This, of course, has consequences for me. I'm not looking forward to regular visits to the ghosts of my home town. It's twice the expense of flying to Phoenix. There is one Very Very Important Person in Arizona who I'll know longer see every so often. And all of this has been coming to a head in the last two weeks, with about three or four weeks to go -- a time period in which I must make some money and will be away for eight days in Czech-fucking-Republic. I just accepted a boarding job that will end with a last walk just before I go home and pick up my bags and leave for JFK. Last night, in sorting out the dates, it all became real to me.

So add a dose of extremely useless guilt that I'm not on the spot to help with this move.

I have serene moments and once-a-day or so meltdowns. Today I will write or call a good friend of my parents' who is one of the heads of the "Alternative Catholic Community" in Missoula to ask him to perform Last Rites for Mom. My mom's involvement in forming the ACC is how she got ex-communicated. I call it "Our Lady of Off-Off Broadway". Suddenly I find their inclusiveness ("Our Father and Mother...") not quite as hilarious. I need them. I will be easier in my heart for the Rites and I think Mom will too.

But today is today: surprise! I've got dogs to walk and board out. I have Zoloft to pick up at the drug store. I have finances to take a serious look at. Writing this is heroic but then each action in the day feels heroic -- brush my teeth? Impossible. Do it anyway. OK, if I can do that, maybe I can take my meds. Maybe I can wash the breakfast dishes. Maybe I can pick up a few things at the store. Car on the Hill is so far and beyond those mundane things that I feel like a weight liftress.

I doubt I'll dive into my novel today but I might get to Psychology Today. What I'd really like is a mani/pedicure -- my fingernails are so long they account for half my typos.

In this day, I will try to be fair by my dogs. I will try to keep my needs up to date. I've been eating deliciously. I've begun toasting old fashioned oats in a skillet -- high heat for about five minutes, stirring often -- then adding them to yogurt with vanilla and blueberries. Summer tomatoes are in and deserve better than my usual dressing, so it's been olive oil, salt, lemon juice, cayenne (helps digestion) and black pepper (helps depression). I can really taste the greens and the tomatoes this way. Dinner has been yogurt, late. Comfort food at the dangerous part of the day.

I think I'll look into some electronics I'm interested in today. I think I will gave a giddy little hop for meeting each impossible challenge -- dog gigs, grocery shopping, emails, looking after my body. I was smart enough to start the morning off with half a klonopin: my brain is scrambled eggs and I've been forgetting keys and dog things and words because I'm already onto the next hurdle. Klonopin settles my brain down enough to -- well, write this before I go walk Boomer. Wear life, as an acquaintance says, like a loose sweater.

I'm feeling everything at once today. Fear, grief, shame, loss. Tranquility, acceptance, hope, relief. Anticipation, eagerness, pride, gratitude, love. My hatred is minimal and I have little curiosity -- don't really want to read or write. But then, when one is in the midst of all of that going active on at once, missing one defect and one asset ain't all that bad.