Sometimes, it's just good news.

We just had an appointment with our Pediatric Neurologist and we don't have to schedule an MRI this year. It's great news. Apparently, Cully is doing well on the Keppra so that there isn't enough reason to go probing deeper into his brain.  It feels like something else to be thankful for as Turkey Day approaches. But as Chabon once again so eloquently explains in his article in Bon Appetit, giving thanks isn't always about all the good stuff in a year. Sometimes, it seems like we forget to give thanks to the challenges and failed attempts that give us something...else. It's good to consider that we can give thanks for our saddest moments because, really, they count, too.

Oh, Brother. (Flash Fiction)

He called five times in three days. This prompted me to consider he had something very important to share. Once the lines connected and the baby was quiet in the background, I heard him tell me Mom needed more protein.

“She is carb loading,” my bro stated as if reading directions from a pasta box.

“Are you checking her stools?” I returned. “Why would you know that?”

“She just needs more protein, Aim.”

“What are you really saying? I should cook more salmon when they arrive?” I said as I mentally perused my frozen meat selection in the deep freezer in our garage. The chest freezer that we bought from Sears after I decided to breastfeed our first-born and assumed it was going to pour out like a waterfall. Turned out, the normal freezer attached to the fridge would have been just fine. Something else La Leche Leaguers don’t mention is that, for 80% of the population, breastfeeding is like squeezing liquid from a 2x4.

My brother’s explanation of Mom’s apparent all-bread diet failed to go any deeper and life with our family was much like this. Talking in the margins. We all secretly hated each other but knew it was more complicated to cut off all the relationships completely than to just work around what you had.

In a nervous reaction to incomplete information, I started going off about my current gluten-free diet like a born again Christian. “It’s my new naturopath,” I couldn’t stop. “She wants me gluten and dairy-free for three months and then I can slowly reintroduce these foods and see if there’s any negative reaction.”

Silence.

“So if you’re saying Mom needs more protein then I can accommodate that when they visit next week,” I kept talking because I assumed the other line was now dead. “Because I have to really watch my own protein intake now that cheese and dairy are off the table.”

“Well I just wanted to mention that about Mom before I forgot to tell you,” Brother sighed as if trying to cleanse his ears from the waste I had just spewed his way. His reaction then was much the same as during his own Über Christian Period when he was in either judgment or disgust at everything I said aloud.

The Über Christian Period started once he completed the paperwork to attend Oral Roberts University with a complete straight face. He graduated, three years later, with an MBA and a penchant for silent prayer and speaking in tongues. Though our relationship was always limited to the weather and shared memories of what our other brother did that was funny or entertaining, we had to work hard to speak directly with one another. Something changed in him along the way, though, and he sought a relationship with me that usually included reflection on and a response to what I was actually saying.

“Also, make sure Dad has shade during the hottest points in the day,” Brother offered.

“Okay, because he’s a hot house flower?” I furrowed my brow on purpose just so it could be heard through the delicate satellite frequencies.

“Well he has had a lot of skin cancer,” He flatly stated with an eye roll back at me.

I knew that he was referring to our patio and its lack of any shade except in the square shadows from the pergola. I also knew that he was gently suggesting we DO something to provide appropriate shade from the long hot sunny days that would be encroaching during our parents’ visit. But the fact that he was engineering this from Atlanta and being all first born and responsible gave me a bad feeling. Instead of empathy toward our parents’ aging bodies, I felt something adolescent and rebellious creeping up in me and I didn’t want to be accommodating. Whatever I was about to say was, once again, rebellious.

I could hear his expression while I spoke: Dear God, please don’t let her go to hell.

Tastes Like Chicken (Fiction)

         As excessive quantities of fireworks were being purchased for July fourth celebrations in America, Karen had taken a train to southern England for her own fireworks show. On the train to the Isle of Wight, she revisited childhood memories of laying on her parent’s Oldsmobile staring up at the bursts of light and explosions in the sky while mosquitoes feasted on her ankles where the Off! didn’t make it. Karen was proud of herself for agreeing to this adventure with such little information.  But at 2am at the end of the first night of her weekend adventure, she stood alone on the balcony overlooking the ocean and the waves lapping against the enormous posts that suspended the deck and felt the fragility of her decision. Weird, she thought, how all living things seem to be teetering on something, relying on another thing equally unstable. Mostly, she was thinking how pissed she now was at her own gullible heart. God damnit, Sayed!

Sayed was born in England but his parents were from southern India. Sayed was the co-owner and co-investor of Isle of Wight’s largest nightclub, The Sphynx. After college, Karen had applied to any program that transported her oversees and out of Indiana and it was during a visit to London that they met. Sayed was nine years older but seemed unconcerned by concerns pedestrian. Nothing about their interaction the first night in a London pub seemed overtly romantic but Sayed’s invitation to join him for a weekend in the Isle of Wight was, at the least, unique.

Karen’s summers as a child were spent in a white, Protestant safe house of Barbies, riding bikes and shucking corn at a summer cottage owned by her Uncle Ted. Her mother cleaned and scrubbed the place each June with fervor of a woman on coke[1]. Uncle Ted rarely used the place and when he did he always brought a lady friend who hid, smoking on the back porch smelling of Bain de Soleil oil. Karen daydreamed a lot about a life less ordinary. She snuck into the guest room when Uncle Ted and his latest girlfriend were out and searched through the suitcases for what, even Karen didn’t know. A clue on how to be a grown up woman? A ticket to a glamorous life?  A mix tape? Karen always came up empty-handed except for uncovering cigarette lighters hidden throughout the luggage.

And now, standing on the balcony of the hottest night club on the Isle of Wight, Karen felt abandoned mostly by her own self ignorance. They had had the vegetarian discussion when they first met.

“You will like this,” Sayed said over the calm light from the candle.

“But it’s chicken,” Karen half smiled and took a long drink from her wine glass in preparation.

“Well, I made it for you and it’s not a bad thing to try something new once in awhile,” Sayed quipped from across the dinner table set with a romantic-esque candelabra, wine glasses and some low jazz she tried to ignore in the background.

“True.” Karen wasn’t sure how to respond and the wine limited her ability to rationalize the moment.

“Plus, you look very nice and we are going to a huge party tonight with loads of people to meet. You’ll need the energy,” Sayed said through his wine glass and a slight smile.

Karen interpreted the comment as being flirtatious and didn’t mind Sayed hitting on her. He wasn’t an unattractive man. Brown skin. British accent. You’ll need energy clearly referred to the sex he had planned to have with her that evening and she obliged the invitation by placing her fork, for the first time since high school, into a piece of chicken. As she pretended, the vegetables that accompanied the chicken tasted better than the chicken, but nonetheless, Karen faked her way through the meal and tried not to think too deeply about what she had eaten.

Sayed talked a lot about himself and the nightclub. Karen felt more like an adult on a wild vacation. Her parents didn’t even know why she hadn’t flown back to the States. “It’s time,” Sayed said and cleared the table. Though the club was only four blocks away, Sayed drove the red sports car and parked in his VIP spot.

“One thing you should know, and don’t be mad, but you said you would never eat rabbit, and well…you just did.” As Karen’s brain cells parsed the possibility a very tall, beautiful woman stepped out of the nightclub. Sayed grinned and they embraced. Karen did not listen for her name or say Nice to meet you. Karen felt 12 years old; like she was back at the kid’s table during Thanksgiving dinners, a spectator of the adult world where she so longed to be.

Though Karen wished she would have left or had the money to get a hotel, she drank and danced alone and smoked decidedly more. She was exhausted from the energy it took pretending to have a good time alone and headed out on the balcony. The sea was crashing in on the rocks below and the wind blew cooler against her bare legs. The night was ending and she was proud for appearing as if what Sayed did to her wasn’t weird.  Karen was at a loss for the moral of the moment but it was almost time to go, the balcony was empty and she felt taller standing over the waves. Pure freedom.  It’s going to be okay, she thought…the waves crashed on the rocks and with every break they uttered a little word, a specific life, as brief as the life span of a mosquito. 

---

[1] Coke: cocaine. Just for the record, her mother had never tried any drug though Karen thought her childhood might have been more interesting, however, they wouldn’t have been able to afford it. 

Thing Review!

How are you doing Clock of the Long Now? I don’t even know what punctuation to use when referring to…you…thing…clock contraption. All I know is that I got to Powell’s City of Books early to get good seats to hear Michael Chabon, one of my favorite writers – living. It was four years ago and it was a strangely sunny day in Portland. And you know what Chabon read? An article he had just gotten published about his son’s reaction to your someday existence. There are more than a few moments when I realize that I’m not that educated. I don’t know the Greeks beyond Zeus and Hera and forgot the plots of most of Shakespeare’s plays beyond Macbeth, Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. But, Michael Chabon is an extraordinarily smart man and has cool hair. During the reading at Powell’s I was one degree of separation (okay, two, since I sat in the second row back) from his genius energy power. He read, “The Omega Glory” and I cried at the end for just one second and then ran home to Google what the Clock of the Long Now really was. And it’s true. In Nevada, there’s the 10,000 year clock being manufactured to record the future.

At the end of every one of my creative writing courses that I taught at University of Phoenix, I would hand out copies of “The Omega Glory” and turn the overhead projector on to the Long Now website and I would watch what would happen. Many students would sigh and be frustrated at their lack of comprehending much of Chabon’s vocabulary but others would be able to overcome their limited vocabularies to see to the point of the article. One time, I had an ex military man in my class (strong, burly, outspoken and confident) wipe a few tears from his eyes. The class grew silent for a moment after they had finished reading and complaining and he said, “Amy, I want to thank you.”  And I knew exactly what he meant and had felt the same way after I ran out of Powell’s to get to my computer because the future is well…everything. Our day-to-day ability to feel our impact on the future is so completely buried in the minutiae of grocery lists, failed work projects, crying babies, back pain or lovers that never called. 

Thank YOU, 10,000 year clock. For reminding me to look up. 

A Joke

A crocodile walks into a bar holding a loaf of challah in one hand and a non allergenic labrodoodle in the other. The bartender says, we don’t serve your kind here and the challah yells, “Anti-semite!”


-Created by Mr. Doherty at 7:30pm on Wednesday, August 15, 2012.

The Gem in my Hotmail Junkbox

From Hospital,

With Due Respect, I am writing this mail to you with heavy tears in my eyes and great sorrow in my heart. My name is Mrs Karen Wright from Chile; my husband Parker Wright worked with Chile embassy in Malaysia before his death, we were married for 32years without a child and He died after a brief illness that lasted for only few days. I decided not to remarry or get a child outside my matrimonial home which my religion is against. When my husband was alive he deposited the sum of $5.5Million USD with one of the bank here.

Recently I have my test report that my liver has been damage due to cancer affection. The one that disturbs me most is my stroke sickness. Having known my condition I decided to donate this fund to help the orphanages around the world through you the way I am going to instruct here in. I want you to use this fund to help the Orphanages, widows, les-privilege to have there life’s a meaning, and to endeavour that the house of God is maintained. I took this decision because I don't have any child that will inherit this money and my husband relatives are not good at all because they are the one that killed my husband in other to have my entire late husband properties and I don't want my husband's efforts to be used by unbelievers. I don't want a situation whereby my husband inheritance will be used in an ungodly way.

Please assure me that you will act accordingly as I Stated herein.

Hoping to receive your response immediately

Mrs Karen Wright (widow)

****

Poor Mrs Karen Wright! I have so many questions to ask before I help you:

 1. I know you are a grieving widow but did your husband die of a "brief illness" or was He murdered   by his family? There's a big difference here, Mrs. Wright, and the latter involves police, courts and most likely jail time (or whatever sort of justice system you have down there in Chile).

 2. Where were you considering getting a child outside of matrimonial home? The local NICU?

 3. Sorry about your liver but clearly cancer loves it. Truly, cancer is affectionate in that way.

 4. Why would you spend $5.5 million USD to endeavour that the house of God is maintained? 

 5. Do you even know what bank your husband deposited that money? Because that actually seems like the place you should start searching. I don't know what year you were born but there are A LOT of banks now, just FYI (From Your Igloo).

Please assure ME that you will answer accordingly as I STATED hereafter. And please, Mrs Karen Wright (widow), take your meds!!

    

Book Review Alert!

In AA circles (so I have learned), the "next right thing" is whatever you need to do to get through the next part of your day. The "thing" or the action that helps you overcome your addiction. It is also the title of Dan Barden's newest novel and what I suggest you do if you haven't already picked up a copy. Barden's protagonist is Everyman, Randy Chalmers, an ex-cop with a drinking problem and anger issues that he doles out in explosive tantrums like a toddler not getting his way.  But Randy is especially pissed off because his AA sponsor, Terry Elias, has turned up dead in a hotel after ODing on heroine and this is NOT one of the 12 steps to recovery. Randy is on a mission to understand why Terry is dead and all kinds of crazy shit is going down in Laguna Beach.
Whether you've had an addiction, known someone else who is suffering with one, or if you have a heart beat, you should read The Next Right Thing. You'll be entertained and more.