This is probably the last re-post of my fave stories. I'm going to put up the rest that I feel comfortable with as archives. Please keep in mind that my sisters currently read my blog if you choose to leave comments (thank you).
One of my sisters moved to Arizona two summers ago. Things did not work out for her exactly as she had planned, and she was scrambling with those last minute details. I got a call from her the day before she and her fiance were planning to drive across the country, asking me to take her cat, Treasure. Treasure is a sweet black girl kitty with white markings on her face, neck, belly and feet.
I told my sister, "of course". I’m an animal lover, I already have cats (who hate the dog). Taking in one more cat for my sister’s sake was not a big deal (as long as no one told the landlord). Treasure is one of the sweetest, shyest little skitty kitties in the world. I adore my sister, she took in my son when I was so f’d up that I didn’t know what I was doing. I probably owe her a million favors, not that she’d ever call me on them.
I figured Treasure would just hide out in the basement until she got comfortable. I put food and water down there for her, and I knew my kitties would never give her any trouble. As long as she hung out in the basement, the dog wouldn't give her any trouble, either.
My cats are indoor only cats, exclusively. I live on a very busy street, my cats are fixed, there is no need for them to go outside ( although they sometimes try). Anyway, I assumed Treasure was an indoor only cat, also – especially since she was such a scaredy-cat!
For the first couple of days, Treasure would meet me at the top of basement stairs, and let me pet her. I thought this was a milestone of her affection, considering she hardly ever even acknowledged my presence at my sister’s house. My niece told me that her friends thought she was making up the cat, because no one ever saw her!
A couple of days into Treasure staying with me, my landlord said he needed to change the filter on the furnace. I let him in through the hatchway. At the same time, I needed to take out some rugs that my sister had given to me and vacuum the hell out of them in the driveway. I never thought anything of it, until I realized the next day that Treasure had not greeted me at the top of the stairs that morning. Nor did she, the next day, or the next. I was Flipping Out! Turns out Treasure actually did go out from time to time when she was living at my sister’s house. No one ever saw her go out, but she was no longer in my basement…
For a few weeks after, my son kept telling me that he saw Treasure around the neighborhood, when he was taking the dog out for a walk. Obviously, he could not get close to the cat with the crazy dog on the leash in his hand. Every time he tried, the cat would run off, and he wouldn't see her again for days.
One evening, he came home telling me that Treasure was right up the road. We ditched the dog, and I drove over to the house, thinking my son could hold her in a towel while I drove, in case she was freaked out. We could not just walk her home that way (across the very busy street). I drove up very close to the yard where she was. I got out of the car, gently, so as not to spook her. I very sweetly crooned over and over, “Hi Treasure, baby, hi, do you remember your Aunty, I was so worried about you, sweet baby”, all the while very slowly creeping forward with my hand out in front of me, to pet her head, and her sweet nose, and ears.
The cat responded as I expected her to, cautiously, then warming up to me, until I could pick her up. I picked her up, and pet her, and kept crooning. She was still highly agitated, so I chose not to hand her off to my son, but to just put her in the car and drive the 5 houses up the road with her in the backseat. I figured we would just deal with it when we got there, rather than my son getting scratched.
As I was basically throwing the cat into my car, this lady came running out of the house I was parked in front of, yelling, “Tuxedo, Tuxedo!”. I was so incredulous at the time; it seemed to me that she was running in slow motion, “Tuuuuxeeeedoooo, Tuuuxeeedoooo”. My mind could not grasp what was going on.
It turns out that I was stealing her extremely friendly cat, who was lounging in her front yard and was willing to get in my car with me. Whatever – don’t judge me ;). I really thought I was doing the right thing, at the time. I grilled this woman about when she had gotten the cat, was she sure it was Tuxedo and not Treasure, etc. It was more than a little embarrassing, especially when I found out Tuxedo was a boy. You just can't fake that part. I’m pretty sure my son did not want to be seen around the neighborhood for a while after that.
We never saw Treasure, again - :(
And now, courtesy of the our family home of really bad jokes:
“What if she had called the cops on you? Do you think you could have gotten arrested for stealing pussy?”
My all time favorite Christmas cartoon is the The Year Without A Santa Claus. My brother Jimmy and I both loved it. Our favorite part was when Heat Miser did his song and dance.
We always joked with our mom that she looked exactly like Heat Miser, right down to the hair, and her dancing abilities. Only, he could sing better.We didn't like their version of Blue Christmas, though. We liked Elvis's version much better.
Jimmy could be counted on to unbutton his shirt and flip up his collar to give us his rendition on demand, as long as Elvis was already playing, you know - backing him up.
I'm not really going anywhere with this, just reliving some good holiday memories and traditions.
Every year it's little bit of a tradition that we have a big sandwich lunch on Christmas day. When we were younger it was a treat for us to have a sandwich that had more than one piece of meat and cheese. We would make Dagwood sandwiches with a variety of meats, cheeses, breads, condiments, maybe pickles and roasted red peppers, the more the better. We always finished it up with a plate of Mom's homemade cookies.
One year, while my sister Bouf was making Christmas cookies, she and Jimmy decided to make something a little naughty. And they put it on Mom's dessert plate of Christmas cookies.Thank god she had a sense of humor!
My sister, Kouf, had us over for dinner one evening. My sisters, Bouf and Shouf, joined us. My son had recently started kindergarten, and was learning lots of new and fun things.
Kouf and Bouf both had teenage daughters at that point, but neither of them was there that night, for whatever reasons.
After we finished a wonderful meal, Kouf suggested my son would have more fun in the childproof room upstairs. She adored her nephew and had a chair set up for him in front of a television with a vcr playing Disney movies. This was also the room outside of her teenage daughter's room, there were t.v. trays and a phone and games and books, mostly on built in shelves. This was a really cool room.
Anyway, the sisters were downstairs chatting and singing, and maybe drinking, and generally having a good time when the phone rang. Kouf turned down the music and answered, and immediately gave us the blow-by-blow. "What, this the State Police?" Our dinners immediately came up in our throats thinking about her daughter.
The next words we heard our sister say were, "No, no one called 911 from this line.". "Oh, okay, I understand.". Apparently, someone had learned about the importance of 911 in his kindergarten class and decided to test the system. And called and hung up on 911 FOUR times. Their policy is that if they get a 911 call, even if they call back and receive a response that they are not needed, they have to send a police officer over to check things out in case a hostage is trying to send them a signal. A hostage could very well be trying to signal 911, but when they call back, someone could have a gun to their head telling them to say that everything is all right.
When I heard that there was a state police officer on his way to my sister's house, I WAS PISSED. I yelled up First Name, Middle Name of my son, Get Your Butt Down Here and Put Your Shoes On, Because You and I are Meeting That Police Officer Outside and Explaining Why We Wasted His Time.
Luckily, the police officer in question was unbelievably understanding. He explained to my son that now he knew if he ever had to call 911 that they would always be there for him. He didn't give my kid a hard time about a false call, but did try to explain that he shouldn't use 911 if he didn't really need to. I was so impressed by the way this particular officer dealt with my kid, when he really didn't even need to be nice. Needless to say, my son has not ever needed to call 911, again.
One of the many places we lived when I was growing was on a very busy street. I loved this house, I still do. It was on the market recently, and I would have bought it in a heartbeat if I could have afforded it. It was set way back off a dirt driveway, surrounded by overgrowth and trees. It was a raised ranch with 4 bedrooms, 1-1/2 baths and a fireplace in the living room. At the time it was a dump that really needed a lot of work, but I remember it with fondness.
This was where I got my purple Schwinn bicycle with a push button horn that my brother taught me how to ride down the big hill in the front yard. This was where my brother taught me how to play baseball in the back yard. As there were only two of us, we had to say, "ghost on first", "ghost on second". This was also where the little creep shot me in the leg "by accident" with his BB gun. I have a lot of great memories, there. I spent much of my time outdoors, exploring in the woods, often with our German Shepherd, Schnitzel, who was probably my best friend at the time. My mother had a big blue Rambler. The back seat was a bench seat, and seat belts were unheard of at the time. It was kind of fun because if my mother took a really hard turn, we'd all go sliding across the back seat and crush each other on the door. It was like the amusement park ride that goes really fast in a circle and you can't keep yourself from crushing the person sitting next to you, depending on which way the ride is going.
One day when I was probably 7, my mother piled four of us into the car to go to the grocery store. I don't remember who was sitting next to whom, but I was on one side of the back seat and Bouf was in the middle. Mom was taking a left onto the very busy street and she gunned it because there were cars coming. We all went sliding across the backseat toward me, which should have been fun - until the door popped open. I fell out of the car onto my knees with a line of traffic coming at me at anywhere from 40-60 miles per hour. My adrenaline must have kicked in, because I remember getting myself up and over to the side of the road, and then when the traffic eased, getting back over to the side of the road that our house was on, while my knees were bleeding down my legs. And waiting and waiting for my mother's car to come back. She didn't realize at first what had happened but finally registered Bouf's hysterical screaming that I had fallen out of the car and turned around to come back for me. I think to this day that Bouf may have been more traumatized by this incident than I was. She saw me falling out of the car and couldn't catch me!
I got an honor position on the couch for the rest of the day with a blankie and everyone treating me like a princess. Bouf even walked up the store and bought me a stuffed animal, Bimini, that I treasured and slept with for at least a year before he was stolen from me on a cross-country bus trip to Las Vegas.
I always locked my car door for at least 10 years after that.
For a long time I couldn't understand how my mother didn't know I had fallen out of the car until I was writing this and started to think about it. A couple of years ago, I was driving my son and two great-nieces to the mall. I often tuned out the younger niece's screaming, because it was almost constant, and I'm the kind of person that really needs to concentrate on my driving. It had started raining, and I closed the rear windows. My younger niece started screaming, but I ignored her because I assumed she was just upset that I had rolled up her window. My son starting yelling, "Mom, Mom!" but he was in such a panic that he couldn't get the words out. "MOM - HER FINGERS ARE STUCK IN THE WINDOW!". Wow, did I feel like a loser! Thankfully, no harm was done to the poor baby, or her fingers.
When is this "you're turning into your mother" shit going to stop?
My brother, Jimmy, was a lot of things to a lot of people. He was a natural born comedian who hid an abusive past behind a wall of comedy. He almost never let his tragedy side show.
He was the kid who gave my uptight mother wet-willies, and she would laugh. He was the kid who told our mother that he was growing tomato plants in his bedroom in the middle of winter, and she believed him right up until those plants started growing stuff that didn't look at all like tomatoes. He was the kid that took care of both his older and younger sisters, because he felt he had to be the man in the family after my father moved out. He was the kid who took the brunt of my father's brutality before the bastard moved out.
I remember an exceedingly cold night in which my father had told my brother not to let the fire go out in the living room fire place. Jimmy could not have been any older than 11 or 12 at the time. When my father got home from the bar in the middle of the night, Jimmy had fallen asleep on the couch in the living room, and the fire had gone out. He made Jimmy go out in the snow in his pajamas, bare foot , down a set of stairs, over the driveway and up a hill to get more wood for the fire. I can't put a number on how many other similar situations the kid had to endure.
Jimmy started getting into trouble when he was 12. He started using drugs and alcohol around the same time. They sent him to the military academy for ninth grade where my father had gone to high school. Jimmy hated it and made sure he got kicked out. That was pretty much the end of school for him. It turns out that not only do mental health issues run in my family, but also dyslexia. Back then, they just thought he was stupid. He used to ask me to fill out his job applications for him because his "hand writing was so bad." He was pretty much illiterate.
He was the nicest guy you would ever want to meet. He was funny, he was kind, he was generous. He loved kids, he loved wildlife, he loved to go fishing more than anything else in the whole world. He may have eventually looked the part of a dirty, greasy alcoholic who got into bar fights and did some time in jail, but he was never any of those things to us. To us, he was always the only sweet little boy in a house full of girls. "Excuse me, ladies, but I believe someone left their soiled panties to soak in the sink, and I would like to brush my teeth."
I pretty much adored him. Even when he threatened to break the thumbs of a much older guy who I thought would be dreamy to have for my boyfriend, when I was 13. He taught me how to play baseball and how to throw a football. He taught me basic self-defense, and gave me a knife to carry when he found out I was hitch-hiking.
When I was 16 and finally had a much older boyfriend, he offered to give the guy a ride home. I found out much later that Jimmy had waited until they got to my boyfriends house, pulled out an unloaded gun and put it to the boyfriend's head and asked, "are you sleeping with my little sister?". Apparently, the guy nearly shit his pants, making my brother a much better judge of character than I was, in retrospect.
I'm not condoning any of the following behavior. It is the truth, and part of the story.
He had already had a couple of DWI's, as they were called then, when he got pulled over driving an unregistered, uninsured car, containing an unregistered, unloaded fire arm. Possibly the same unregistered, unloaded gun as above. He had picked up a hitch-hiker whom he claimed he didn't know was carrying a large amount of marijuana, which the hitch-hiker stashed under the seat. Possession is 9/10ths of the law and Jimmy got busted for it. He finally lost his license and was lucky enough to be put on probation. He then got caught driving without a license, this time with possession of cocaine. He got sentenced to two one-year jail terms, back to back. In our area there are very different terms you could sit out. Jimmy got sent to what we affectionately called the Brooklyn Country Club. It's like summer camp with dorms, but more barbed wire, and less swimming.
When Jimmy got out of jail, serving less than six months of a two year sentence, he really seemed to have changed his law-breaking ways. He never again got behind the wheel of a car until he had his license back. However, he and alcohol were never very far apart. We thought that he had kicked his love affair with drugs, but we were wrong.
He got steady work at a lumber yard. He and my father moved together into in an apartment. Jimmy sometimes spent weekends at my mother's house, and sometimes spent them at my oldest sister, Kouf's house. He was helping Kouf's husband turn the attic into rooms that they could rent out. He seemed to be a nomad, who was welcome anywhere he went. He was always the life of any party he found himself at.
After five years, the State of Connecticut agreed to give Jimmy his license back. I took the day off of work and brought him for his driver's test. He passed with no problems. From that point on, all we talked about was getting our motorcycle licenses together. I don't know why it seemed so important to us, but it did.
Maybe it meant to me that I had finally proven myself to him that I was an equal, that I could stand up to him, and his friends that he wouldn't let me date. I so wanted to be a bad-ass bitch in his eyes, I guess. Maybe for him, it was the same in reverse. He had taught his little sister to be a bad-ass who could stand up for herself in a world that he tried to, but could not always, protect her from.
Three weeks after getting his license back, we spent a Saturday afternoon together looking at bikes. Neither of us was ready to make any decisions, but we had fun with it. I dropped him off at Kouf's house. I had plans, and Jimmy was staying with her for the weekend. He hadn't yet gotten himself a car.
Kouf and her husband also had plans that evening. Jimmy apparently walked to a nearby bar looking for cocaine. We did not know until later that he had been shooting cocaine intravenously. From what we pieced together, he couldn't find any cocaine, so he decided to try heroin for the first time as it was all that was available. He bought a bad batch that killed 17 people in the Connecticut and New York area.
The next day, I was rather a bit annoyed with my sister, Bouf, for waking me up on a Sunday morning by banging incessantly on the front door at my mother's house. I was hung over and assumed she just needed to do her laundry and had lost her key or something. I opened the door, and was already half-way back up the stairs when she said, "Wait, Fancy, I'm here for a reason - Jimmy's dead". I literally cried like a fucking baby, sitting on the stairs, telling my poor sister that she was a liar. It could not be true, we had just spent the day together. We had plans, goddammit! Why was she being so mean?
My mother had worked a 12-hour shift the night before, 7pm to 7am. Bouf and I had to wake her up and tell her that her only son was dead at the age of 26 of a heroin overdose. That was definitely one of the worst days of my life.
My son, J, went on a road trip with my sister, Bouf, about two weeks ago. Her objective was to get her car and her dog to Arizona, where she moved last year with her fiancee. They spent about 6 days on the road from CT to AZ. The rest of the time was spent doing fun things!
I missed my son, but I'm sure we both welcomed a break from each other. My son recently turned 14. Need I say more?
My sister scheduled the flight for J to come home into an airport in Rhode Island. The only non-stop flight from Phoenix to our neck of the woods was into T.F. Green airport, outside of Providence, Rhode Island. Let me tell you, I hate Providence. I have almost never gone there or back without getting lost. Also, I cannot see very well to drive at night. At night, and in the rain, forget about it! J's flight was scheduled to come in at 6:25 PM. It was pouring rain here today, my tires are bald, my cell phone died recently, and my check engine light came on this morning. To say I was a little worried about the trip would be putting it mildly.
Freak out much, miss worry-wart? It pretty much stopped raining and I got there fine. Okay, I got lost about 4 times, but I had given myself more than enough time, I never really didn't know where I was, and had almost an hour left to kill. I brought a book to read in the terminal, no biggie.
I finally noticed people are coming out of the gate, and stood up to wait for J to disembark from the plane. I saw him coming out of the gate and I thought he saw me. He gives me a brief little chin up, eyebrow up acknowlegment, but then he walks away. I thought, maybe he didn't really see me, so I call out his name. Without looking at me, he says, "I saw you" and continues to walk away. I stood there with my jaw dropped open while about fifty people were looking at me, with incredulous looks on their faces. Oh yes, my son did diss me in an airport full of strangers. Never one to miss an oportunity to make it all about me, I said out loud, "I'm so glad you're home, son". In retrospect, I can see why he probably wanted nothing to do with me in the first place.
He continued to walk ahead of me by 10 or 15 feet all the way to baggage claim. I actually had to bite my lips to keep from crying. When we got to baggage claim, he finally turned around saw the look on my face. He said, "what?". I said, "you couldn't even say hi to me?". I had to walk away for a couple of minutes. I was really feeling very hurt, and at the same time, I was really feeling that I was turning into my mother. So, I chose the high road. I pretended everything was okay, until I really felt that everthing was okay. He did not feel like he had done anything wrong, he was worried that I was going to try to hug and kiss him in front of everyone, and that would have mortified him. I told him that in the future, he could at least greet me, and tell me that he was not open to public displays of affection. In his own words, "hugging your mother at the airport is lame". In my words, "not acknowledging your mother at the airport is lame."
He was completely fine after that, he was my boy again. He bought me a beautiful turquoise ring in Arizona that he gave me as we were leaving the airport parking lot. We talked a little on the ride home, and a lot more after we got home. The dog went bullshit when she saw him! He showed me the things that he had bought, and the things that were given to him, and the pictures that he had taken. All seems fine, now.
Good lord, is it just me, or does being 14 really suck ass? You could not pay me a million dollars to do it again. And you would have to pay me two million dollars to be the parent of a 14 year old, again.
I have three older sisters. I have to explain their nicknames, because I don't want to use their real names. When they were growing up, they had an imaginary club called the Kit-Kat club. I'm sure my oldest sister was in charge, but cannot say for sure as I was probably not even alive at the time. What I do know for a fact is they gave each other these nicknames, as I will give you in birth order: Kouf, 10/60; Shouf, 1/62, Bouf 12/62. My mother, god love her, had 3 babies in diapers at the same freakin' time.
It was four years after Bouf before another child was born.
According to the story, when my mother was pregnant with the first child, she swore if it was a boy she would call him David. Instead, Kouf was born.
When my mother was pregnant with her second child, she swore if it was a boy she would call him David. Instead, Shouf was born.
When my mother was pregnant with her third child, she swore if it was a boy she would call him David. Instead, Bouf was born.
When my mother was pregnant with her fourth child, she said (in a yiddish accent), "God, I promise if you give me a son, I will not call him David". And so Jimmy was born.
Her fifth child was me, four years after Jimmy. My mother was just lucky as hell that I was even born. She developed prenatal diabetes while carrying me, and she also slipped in dog poop and went down a flight of stairs and almost miscarried me.
Apparently, she had wanted six kids. Unfortunately for her, she had to have an emergency hysterectomy within a year or two after I was born.
Even God has his/her limits on the number of kids you are allowed to fuck up. Or at least a limit for my mother. My father eventually had another child, and fucked him up, as well.
I'm still looking for a knight in shining armour, complete with the white horse. I'd prefer if he was not already married, or gay.
I promise I will always give you Way Too Much Information! How could you resist that?
