I Serenade Elly with a Halting Version of Love Me Tender

For Christmas I got my darling Olive a ukulele, a tuner and a cutesy ukulele kids book. She didn't touch it once except to take this photo:


So I started messing around on it and voila! I became an uke addict in several weeks. At first it was difficult because although I can read music I have never played any instrument and aside from watching Jeremiah play classical guitar wasn't really sure how you played/strummed etc.

I learned though and loved it.

Now my friend Elly who plays ukulele like nobody's business is sick and I guest uke'd for her 'cause she's got the unholy shingles from hell. Let's all wish her speedy recovery!!!! HOPE YOU FEEL BETTER SWEET ELLY GIRL!

Regardless I posted a video for her and am on her site today.

If you promise not to make fun of me either publicly or privately I will link you. OK? Promise? Uke Me Tender at Buggin Word

Well Check Up's My Ass

I don't like to take our children to the doctor that often because honestly 'well check up' seems like an oxymoron when you're in fact taking the children to a hot bed of illness for essentially no reason.

So I skip lots of check ups and once about every two years, other than in the case of the multiple cases of strep throat and ear infections our children are blessed with every year, I take all four children together to get weighed, measured, vaccinated and eye exam'd <---- I just made that up. So clever.

Regardless I made this maneuver the other day with Rose, 11, Olive, 9, Maxine Jane, 6 and Elijah 4 with a reluctant life partner Jeremiah in tow. Every year I think it's a good idea to get everyone's check up just done and over with and although Jeremiah reminds me of the horrors of the previous years I still do the same thing.

First Max had to change her clothes four times before she felt comfortable enough to go on the short walk to our doctor's office.

This is her waiting in the waiting room with Jeremiah:


Then each child had to be told over and over and over again on the walk, in the waiting room and in the exam room that we had no idea which children were going to get which shots and how many. All I knew is that Rose was missing one required chicken pox vaccination and so as far as I knew she was the only one getting a shot. It took forever for the nurse to weight and measure my lovely giants and then even longer to take a history and ask pertinent growth/milestones/health questions about each child.

Not to mention the excruciatingly long eye exams where Maxine decided she didn't 'want to be tested right now!' and could only read the top line on the chart. She also told the nurse she didn't really know her alphabet (she can read) and that she had to do the symbol part that toddlers do instead. She is a joy.

After all that madness it turns out that all the children are wonderful and exceptional and although Max doesn't know how to tie her shoes and Elijah can't write his name they seem to be doing just fine.

The room seemed so freaking small:


Then the shot tally came. Rose was getting three, Olive two, Elijah four and Maxine not a one. She then began to taunt her siblings and shake her butt at them, "All right now! Shake yo booty, shake yo booty!" in front of the doctor and when we admonished her for this she locked herself in the hall bathroom and screamed for ten minutes.

Our doctor happens to be a very young actually kind of strange yet cool woman (when I say very young I mean my age of course) and she agreed to guard the bathroom so that Max couldn't make a run for it. Then Jeremiah and I split up the remaining three kids and I went in one room with Rose and a nurse while he stayed in the other with Olive and Elijah. It turns out he lucked out because his two were tough as nails without any tears and Rose was a mother fracking mess.

"NO! No. Mom I can't do this, I can't do this, I can't do this. MOM! No! Oh my Gosh! I can't do this, tell them no! I can't." Nothing like a shaking, sobbing, normally tough 11 year old to top off an exceptional doctor's office visit.

I wonder if next year I'll do the smart thing and split the visits up over several days/weeks.

Probably not.

Updates and Surprisingly Enough...A Puppy

You might have read my short fiction piece Ezra that I had submitted to several short fiction contests and which was still in the running when I posted it here on Blogging is for Dorks. If you did you may have been of the opinion of the three editors that sent me lovely and helpful emails about how they felt although I have as one editor put it, 'an incredible and undeniable talent' and that I may be as the other put it, 'wasting my time in such serious and potential shock for shock value content' my work is not ready for publication on their sites and thus not in the running for the contests' prizes. I can roll with that.

You might have also read my whining about my Grandmother's death AGAIN.

But what you don't know is after much more than a year in the making Jeremiah and I have adopted a puppy which our children named Blueberry Bertha (after the aforementioned dead Grandma). I have always said I wanted the perfect puppy and would even pay an arm and a leg to make sure I got the perfect one.

In the end it turns out that was me being an asshole because we all know just like there is no such thing as the perfect baby, there is also no such thing as the perfect puppy.

Because my children are completely and totally dog obsessed we made a list of our favorite dog breeds and then saved them on a search list on Petfinder.com in order to get email updates if any of these breeds came into our area.

And there she was, Blueberry is half Wire Haired Pointing Griffon and half who knows what because the Puppy Mill that was probably breeding Blueberry's purebred mother into an early grave got pissed when she became pregnant with an unknown father's puppies and promptly dumped her at a pound in Ohio, pregnant. This particular pound has had problems with this particular breeder in the past but say there is nothing they can do about it. I have no idea why they would do this but hey, that's how the asshole crumbles. That sounded much better in my head, by the way.

Regardless Blueberry and her siblings showed up on Petfinder and by the time Jeremiah, Elijah and I made the two and half hour drive there Blueberry and her brother (I like to think of him as Huckleberry) were the only two of her litter left. Her mother had also been adopted earlier that week. The women at the shelter told us that all the families that had came in didn't want her or Huckleberry because they were the most wiry of the bunch. Really?

We adopted her right then and there and took her away from that sad, horrible and over crowded place which very much changed my mind about shelters and adopting dogs instead of buying from breeders.

The girls met her on Monday night after coming home from their Dad's house and shit a proverbial brick. They have all been excellent, as has adorable Blueberry who is already well on her way to being house trained and likes to nap on Honorable the giant stuffed lion.

Here she is, revel in her adorableness:




If you are in the Ashtabula Ohio area and want to adopt a very, very nice puppy AKA Huckleberry you can find him here: http://www.petfinder.com/petdetail/22334557

Heaven

Sometimes I find myself daydreaming about what heaven is like in the most childlike ways possible.

I will think of happy, healthy children bounding around on white clouds like fluffy trampolines, surrounded by chubby Care Bears and plump yellow stars with comically smiley faces.

I will think of rolling green fields with patches of bright wildflowers and a scattering of dense trees in tightly bound groups, perfect for the picnicking people under their canopies. Quilts laid out and big wicker baskets filled with juice boxes and nicely wrapped peanut butter and jelly, crackers and cheese, celery with cream cheese. Couples with children playing charades and giggling, people on their own stretched out with a book in their laps, couples holding hands and talking about in depth and coupley type things, secret things I can't hear.

Sometimes giant crocodile tears form in my eyes and fall like much heavier masses on to my cheeks, running down my neck like rivulets. Selfishly the heaven I most covet is the one where my grandma is making me scrambled eggs at the stove and she's telling me about something random and inconsequential and I'm sipping my coffee milk and my cheeks are rosey because of how very warm her house is. I slip my fuzzy slippers, fuzzy slippers I keep at her house next to her purple satin bed, off my tiny feet and stretch out my toes to admire the red paint she painted my nails with the night before. She puts my eggs on a plate, gives me rye toast with blackberry jam and slices a tiny sliver of butter and lays it on top of the fluffy yellow eggs before she peppers it to death and then puts the plate in front of me.

She'll sit across from me and just drink her coffee, just a little bit of milk in it, just like I drink it right now and she just stares at me and watches me eat.

"Is that good Magoo? Is that just the way you like it?" She smiles and reaches across the little round oak table to squeeze my chubby little hand in her thin wrinkly one.

Then the daydream is broken with a lurching and nauseating halt because that thin wrinkly hand is burnt along with her thin wrinkly body into a million billion tiny pieces of dust, part of which sits in my Momma's front living room.

I watched that hand being funneled with IV's so many times during so many transfusions, the very thing that kept her alive and in my world.

When she decided that she didn't want those tranfusions anymore that thin wrinkled hand became even more thin and wrinkled, wizened and weak and I held it so tight even in the very end when she was gone from me.

I'm afraid heaven will really be my Grandmother welcoming me into her celestial kitchen and then smacking my butt super hard for being such a baby these last 8 months since she died. She'd be mad that I was such a turd while she was in hospice, how I shut down and how instead of helping her pass through this life to the next I yelled and cried and was mad and begged her to stay with me, to change her mind.

I am ashamed at the way I acted, ashamed that I sat at her bedside and pleaded for her to change her mind. I even tried to bribe her with a nice warm bath at home, she so wanted to take a bath at the end when her mind was dying and her body was dying.

Hopefully the real heaven is my Grandma will have seen and known all these things and she'll take me into her arms, pinch me lightly and say, "I've missed you so much my sweet baby girl. I'm not mad at you. Now let's get you something to eat!"

Ezra

(NSFK)

This piece I wrote after a particularly emotional weekend of watching the movie Sylvia about Sylvia Plath and reading her poetry and The Bell Jar. It's entered in several fiction competitions so if I happen to win any of them I will have to take it off this site. I would love any feedback you might have and be warned, it's not a very 'nice' piece per se. Read with caution I suppose.

Ezra sat in the bar on his own, he looked creepy and sad. Unfortunately for him and for the uncomfortable patrons that shared the bar with him he looked every single inch the junkie that he in fact was. With his dark greasy head down and forehead parallel to the shiny bar he could watch his reflection ever changing along the grains of wood shellacked upon it’s surface. He himself was unsure why he came to this particular bar but it may have been the only one he could ever remember going to. As a younger man he hadn’t been very much the bar going type.

Starting at around 7pm that evening Ezra rose from his spot at the bar and made as though he were going to leave much to the satisfaction of the other clientele and the bartender. When he stood his clothing uncrumpled around him and straightened like starched garments, bland in color and in fashion. He left a dollar on the bar although he did not order a drink and walked with a lumbering gait to the restroom at the very back of the bar, ten feet away from where he had been sitting. When he exited the restroom he passed up his spot at the bar as if he were on his way out of the establishment and instead upon reaching the large mahogany doorway he made an about face, finally lifting his countenance to the appropriate human angle and took in his surroundings for a short moment. Obviously liking what he finally saw around him or making his mind up about something even unrelated to the environment he then returned to his seat at the bar, head down again, fixed gaze again. He did this about every hour on the hour until last call. Every other time he did this he would with voice exiting directly to the bar below him ask for a draft beer and a glass of water. The bartender later commented that Ezra’s voice was sure and steady, with an almost attractive quality belying his appearance.

If we could peer inside Ezra’s mind, first parting the thick swathes of brown unwashed hair, tangled upon tangles, then making a polite incision in the side of his pock marked face, marked by the uncontrollable picking he did at teenage acne, we could peal apart that marked dotted skin and the blood would flush from the parted piece and it would lay lifeless and limp from his skull, dead tissue opposing the owner’s deadened psyche.

But if we could do all that (and I’m sure that some could) we might then be privy to the fact that Ezra had suffered abuse at the hands of a much older man for many, many torturous years. Ezra was a few months older than 12 when the man his parents trusted and later took blackmailed amounts of cash from first entered him. Sometimes Ezra would be glad for the attention, shut off the pain or the embarrassment just long enough to enjoy some of the hurried caresses on his pimply cheek or equally pimply back. Other times he would black out, possibly drugged and not care until later when he felt sore and misused and sick. Then he would cry in his mother flaccid arms, breathe in the smoke she carelessly blew in his face. She would say, “There, there Ezra. Go to your room. I’m going to work.” And she did go to work, she wasn’t a fat prostitute or a careless junkie abusing Ezra in the strangely forgivable ways. She was just a tired woman who worked and had a tired husband who worked and the combined nature of the two were too uninterested and yes even too tired to care what happened to their son.

Ezra remembered his abuser better than he remembered his own father. He supposed when able to suppose anything at all that he never really looked at his father, just looked through him. He always had ample time to look at his abuser long and hard before the man would mount him sweatily. Ezra would study the man’s thin black hair which was oddly Hitleresque and if it was a toupee it surely didn’t move during this man’s heavy exacerbation upon Ezra’s orifices. His abuser had a Pekingnese nose which sparkled with snot upon ejaculation and a thin drawn mouth which oddly disappeared into the heavy recesses of his ridiculously fat chin and neck with every strange and awkward thrust.

That night at the bar Ezra didn’t think about the atrocities he endured as a child, he didn’t fill his thoughts with venomous clouds of puff for his mother’s inabilities or perhaps joint guilt, he didn’t plot revenge or feel despair.

The whole night he instead thought of a girl that he loved once. A girl that loved him too, if only for a brief moment. She gave him momentary joy and yes, although Ezra was abused and horribly scarred he had lived a fairly normal life, partied with his fairly normal friends, attending school and college with fairly normal results. It was during these college years at an fairly common college party that he met his girl. He fell in love with her almost instantly in an annoying and clichely cloy fashion. He followed her around his own house party all evening long, memorizing the lines of her round body in order to fantasize about her body while attempting to work himself into masturbatory sleepiness. Her face was generally plain but her generous mouth more than made up for it. Her clothes were bright and her shoes very boyish. Her dark hair was as generous as her mouth and stopped like puffs of clouds lingering above her shoulders as if they were threatening to rain on her.

Her friend introduced Ezra to her at some point in that casual way young people introduce each other.

“Oh, Jane. This is Ezra. This is his house.”

“His house! Ha! I had no idea. Well Ezra, thanks for letting us trash your house.” She put her arms around his slouched shoulders and he was so very glad he was sitting because she pulled his head into her breasts and gave him a tight squeeze. Why would she do that?

“Thanks. Well, whatever I mean. You can come here anytime you want. There’s a lot of people who live here.” His face burned on the inside but his pallor never changed on the outside. So strange he was.

And it was true, the giant house was given to him by his abuser to do with as he so fit. He had parties, slept in different rooms, on the floor, on the velvet purple couch with the painted golden tassels, in the top floor’s claw foot tub just because he has seen it done in the movies. People came and went, squatted there. His mother came and cleaned, left without saying a word to him. He would fill up makeshift ashtrays with half smoked cigarette after cigarette, eat whatever was in his path and then left it where he had eaten it, left it sitting discarded and then rotting. He sold drugs, bought drugs, dealt with scary large black men with even scarier larger black guns and didn’t feel one iota of fear. Didn’t feel one thing until he met Jane.

That night she said one or two words more to him but he did notice her every so often peaking her slanted small eyes at him. He had seen that type of interest on many people’s faces before, the ‘what’s wrong with Ezra?’ look, the ‘why is he like this?’ look, the pitying glances from Jane were enough to make him lock himself in the aforementioned top floor bathroom and shoot up enough dope to put him to sleep, take him to that brink of sleeping and dying he loved so much, or thought he loved so much considering he could never really remember the actual physical feeling of it.

Two days after meeting Jane she came around to his house again, this time in the day, this time wearing much less bright clothes but no less boyish shoes. Her hair shot out in two blunt horns off the back of her head and on the very top she wore a big red bow, clipped on to one curl brushed off of her forehead and pinned back the the top of her skull.

He didn’t hear her come in to his house, didn’t hear her rummage through the rickety yellowed cupboards looking for cleaning supplies and food. Didn’t hear her swear under her breath when she couldn’t find any. Didn’t hear her leave and come back again laden with bags of the supplies she had been previously searching for and bags of groceries to fill his fridge which had never seen a piece of fresh fruit once ever in four years. Ezra only saw her hours later at his sink washing the fifth load of dishes since she had started. She had made a makeshift vacuum out of a plastic weed baggy and a rubber band and swept his house with the old red sweeper his Mom had brought over months ago and had promptly forgotten about. She had scrubbed the yellowed cabinets and had found with satisfaction they were white underneath. She had cleaned every bathroom, although Ezra winced at the idea of her wading through the filth and fecal matter, the drug paraphernalia, the festering sickness of it all.

She poured him a gingerale with ice and made him a tomato sandwich with miracle whip and swiss cheese. She sat across from him at the table he never even realized was there before and watched him eat, chin resting in two adorable tiny hands. Although he was aware how ravenous and animal like he must have appeared to her he was always beyond caring what others thought about him. Not for an innate sense of being judged but rather for an innate laziness and the knowledge that people will always despise him in the end, that he was rotten inside. So why even try?

She took his clothes from his house in giant black bags and he doggedly followed her into the street and to the neighborhood laundromat, which he never had once entered. She washed his clothes, folded them, asked a neighbor for the use of some of her laundry baskets because she didn’t dare put his clothes back into the bags she originally transported them.

“Murphy’s Law Ezra. Aren’t you a biology major or something like that?”

He followed her the whole time, watching her little body sway while she sang to herself, head bobbing to the sound of whatever was in her head. She barely said a word to him the whole time but didn’t seem to dislike the fact that he was there following her.

After the laundry, filling the never used dresser like she had the never used cupboards and refrigerator she told him she would be right back and left, closely the door gently behind her.

Although fairly certain she would never come back he didn’t not return to the top floor restroom he had spent the last two days in since the party and shoot up the remainder of the mind numbing drugs. He instead went from room to room to inspect Jane’s work. The phone rang and instead of it echoing from somewhere amidst the hoarded junk and filth the phone rang clear and true from an end table in the front hall of his home. He answered it. “Hello.”

“Is this Ezra Horowitz?”, a stern voice inquired on other line.

“Ummmm....” Ezra wasn’t sure how to answer, his mind was still foggy and suspicious from the drugs.

“We’re looking for the son of Mathilda Seymour Horowitz. His name is Ezra, do you know him? Are you him?” Not so stern anymore but unmistakably impatient.

“Sure, this is Ezra.” Why not?

“Ezra, your mother was injured outside of her workplace in a drive by shooting. Obviously she wasn’t the target but she was seriously injured. She is at St. Sylvester’s on W. Brady St. Do you know where that is?” Now the voice was kinder, still impatient. Ezra wondered if the woman he was speaking with wore one of those folded nurse’s hats. Did they still wear those? Had they ever wore them or was he just imagining that? He made up his mind to ask the voice on the other line if she was wearing at hat when she abruptly interrupted his thoughts.

“Well Mr. Horowitz, your mother’s information shows you are her only contact. You should come and be with her. She’s quite damaged and sadly to say in a lot of pain.” The voice was wrapping up her call, passing the buck now. She had done all she could do.

“Thank you for calling.” And Ezra gently set the phone in the receiver. He had expected to cry upon first hearing the voice’s news but the tears in his glassy and practically colorless light eyes remained orbital, never left his lids or slid onto his cheek. He didn’t blink until they were finally dry and then he laid down on the couch to wait for Jane in the dark.

She arrived an hour later laden with more shopping bags. She had bought Ezra linens and a comforter for his bed, socks and boxers, under shirts and button up flannel shirts and three pairs of cargo pants. One grey, one olive and one khaki. She even bought him a pair of thick bulky pajama pants and a matching fluffy and almost feminine pajama hoodie.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of cash and handed it to her. She took it without any argument and put it into her purse.

She made him noodles with butter and basil and parmasen and watched him eat just like at lunch time. She washed the dishes and they went to the only bed in the house with the new linens she had bought and made the bed together. Jane took off her clothes and Ezra took off his and went and took a shower in the tub he thought he would only ever sleep and shoot up in. Washed and fairly hygienic for the first times in years he got in bed with Jane and made her come with his mouth. She rolled and sighed and groaned but nothing was stirred in his continuously slack organ. The only thing that was stirred that night other than Jane’s clit was his heart.

The next morning when he woke up she was gone. There was oatmeal sitting in the microwave with a yellow note stuck the front of the machine. “Eat up. Enjoy your new clean house. Goodbye Ezra.”

He never saw Jane again.

Now he was sitting at the bar, thinking about her. As he stared and barely moved other than to blindly take small sips of the beers or water he ordered every other hour he imagined her like a tiny little gargoyle perched on his shoulder, making some absurd face and grimacing at the smell of him.

“This is going to be last call.” The bartender directed this at the remaining three people, Ezra and a couple at a table as far away from him as they could get and still be in the bar.

Ezra raised his head and smiled at the bartender shyly. He rummaged in his pocket, pull out a crumply and visibly dirty $50 bill on the bar and slowly smoothed it out with one large pale hand, blunt fingers making sure the edges were flattened and the bill was laying out entirely. He stood there for a moment, staring at nothing in particular and headed to the restroom once again.

Later the bartender told the police that there was only two shakes of a lamb’s tail before he heard one loud, ear shattering boom. He ran to the back to find Ezra slumped next to the bar’s one dirty urinal, terrifying black gun lying alien like on the beige and black checkered tile. His head was bloody and misshapen and his neck and back was partially slumped over his sitting body. In his left hand, unfolded and straightened out like the $50 bill on the bar was Jane’s microwave note.

“Eat up. Enjoy your new clean house. Goodbye Ezra.”

Literary Tattoos

I have spent a bit of time on contrariwise.org looking at literary tattoos and coming up with what line or poem or quote from the literary vaults I would put on my body and where.


Bukowki's 'Bluebird' is perhaps my favorite poem of all time (or at least for this month) but I have found it near to impossible to pick just one or two lines from it. If you happen to know the poem or get the chance to clicky on the link, give me your favorite line or two and let me mull it over.

This guy picked one of my less favorite poems by Bukowski 'my doom smiles at me'...and an obscure line from it as well: But hey, to each their own. I do like the type font though.

Here's another Bukowski tattoo:

Which is an excerpt from Love is a Dog from Hell.

I don't like this actual tattoo but I love the poem:



i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart) -e.e. cummings


One of my favorite quotes is from Henry James, who is also my favorite author. -I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them.


And of course Hemingway has "There is not friend as loyal as a book."


Just because it's boring me to list these ideas I have I'll wind up with two quotes from Barrie's Peter Pan which has a very special place in my heart.
“Oh, the cleverness of me!” -Peter Pan

Peter: Forget them, Wendy. Forget them all. Come with me where you’ll never, never have to worry about grown up things again.

Wendy: Never is an awfully long time.

When the Short People begat Giants the Sixth Sign was Revealed

Jeremiah and I are not very tall people. He is around 5'8" if that and I am under 5'3".

We also happen to have very tall children. Granted, three of these children do not belong to me and Jeremiah, they belong to me and my 6'5'' ex husband BUT

...this is my blog and I'll go with whatever fucking logic I want so go jump out a window or something ridiculous like that.

Or don't, which would be fine as well. Better yet maybe you shouldn't jump out a window at all, I think it would be better for both of us if you didn't do that. OK? OK.

Regardless my point is that I have this weird future vision of Jeremiah and I standing at one of our kids' graduation parties or proms, insert family occasion here, surrounding by four giants. Lovely, beautiful giants but giants nonetheless.

Our pediatrician likes to makes guesses on her patients' adult heights and rewards herself when she's right. (Talk about a long term gambling problem) So the other day she took her turn at guessing my kids' adult heights. (Also she gives herself a 2 inch leeway which is bullshit)

Rosey, my eldest daughter got the most specific height 5'8''-5'9''. She'll supposedly be our smallest child...more than 6 inches taller than me.

Olive, (who will be 9 years old on Sunday!) will be 6'0''-6'2''. And actually I might guess taller considering she has two aunts taller than that on her dad's side and she's built just like them.

Maxine Jane who was very underweight and under height (is that even a term?) for the first five years of her life consistently is now approaching giant status with gusto. She will be 5'9''-5'11''.

Elijah will be in the same approximate height category as Olive, 6'0''-6'2''.

Wouldn't it be crazy if I had birthed and raised a gaggle of super models!? I'm not sure if that's the lifestyle I would want my children to lead but hell! They might all be naturally very thin and won't have to do uppers and coke all the time to maintain their weights. Maybe they could all be those natural type thin people like Gwyneth who eat macrobiotic raw foods and do yoga and pilates.

What do you think?