Closet Monster

As kids, my older sister and I had this game that we liked to play. Truthfully, she was the one who liked to play it, not me. And, if you want to get technical, it wasn’t really a game, but more like a sport where I was the prey, and my older sister, with huge 80’s bangs in symbolic headdress, was the hunter. She would hide in any feasible spot. Behind doors. Under the bed. In the pantry. In the shower stall. Behind the toychest. Any precarious place available, my sister picked it for hiding, and then waited. And she was so patient. She would be completely silent, not even daring to breathe for what must have seemed like hours at a time. Focused, like a crouching tiger in my dark closet, just waiting for the opportunity amidst the dense jungle of frilly dresses and OshKosh overalls. And then it would come. I would meander adorably into my bedroom, carrying my Malibu Barbie by the hair, maybe a box of crayons tucked under my chubby arm if it had been a particularly busy day, and I would sit my little self down on my Strawberry Shortcake comforter and start to play. I must have looked so cute from my sister’s vantage point, my pink cheeks glowing from playing outside in the fall chill, the evening sun pouring through the window causing my blonde pigtails to shine like spun gold, my innocent third grade multiplication homework lying next to me on the bed. It must have killed her to do what came next.
“RAAAAAHHHH!” She would jump out of my closet, a snarling, teenaged Yeti in a black, sleeveless Quiet Riot t-shirt, screeching at the top of her lungs while clearing the six feet of carpet between the closet and the bed in one leap. She was right in my little face, eyes glowing, teeth bared in a maniacal smile, hair standing on end. She reeked of Hubba Bubba, Aqua Net, and Camel Wides, and she scared the shit out of me.
Had this been an isolated incident, I probably wouldn’t be writing about it right now, however, thinking back, there was probably a solid 5 year period where my sister hunted and scared me in this manner at least two or three times a day. Every. Single. Day. I still have nightmares about it; I still can’t stand horror movies or haunted houses, and I still freak out to the point of tears and convulsions when someone jokingly hides from me in the dark.
In what may be a complete miracle in the science of genetics, my sister and I are now very close. I swear this is because I never told on her no matter how much she tortured me, while our youngest sister would go running to mom or dad (still does) at the slightest hint that something was amiss. I’m 30, and my older sister is 36, and just as we still occasionally wrestle over the remote control, or call each other names, she still finds it profoundly amusing to hide around some dark corner and jump out and scare the crap out me. I still scream and hate it, but at the same time, it makes me nostalgic for the days when being frightened by my sister was my biggest problem, when my main worry was whether or not she would catch me borrowing her pink Guess? sweatshirt, and when I always felt completely safe because someone else was in charge of taking care of me, even when my parents weren’t around.
My sister has become one of my favorite people in the world for about a million reasons. The same humor that compelled her, at age 14, to torture me into submission, is what makes her so hilarious today. The Quiet Riot t-shirt is gone, the Hubba-Bubba has been replaced with Altoids, and the enormous bangs have shrunken to a semi-acceptable height, although somehow the AquaNet has maintained a prominent spot on her bathroom counter (she’s into quantity, not quality) So, while my sister continues her devious ways, in lieu of adulthood, I’m going to go to with the flow, remember the good times, and realize what it means to have someone in my family who actually gets me. So she can jump out and scream in my face anytime; just as in childhood, there will always be a part of me, deep down, that thinks that any attention from her is good attention. The only difference is that now, in the heat of the moment, I’ve been known to drop my cocktail.

We are so BACK!

Well, we made it back safely from Europe to find the Rockies heading to the World Series (!!!) and the Broncos sheepish from the most embarrassing loss in their history. I’m glad I was spared that one, peacefully watching, although not completely understanding, the Rugby World Cup in an Irish pub instead. But seriously, this was the most amazing two weeks of my life and I cannot begin to cover it right now, so a download of my trip journal will follow in a few days.
In the two-and-a-half years we have been together, including the last ten months of living together, that is the most consecutive time Mike and I have spent together in one shot, and I am happy to say that we didn’t kill each other. That means something, right? London was a blast, and Italy was one of the most gorgeous places I have ever been. I kept telling Mike that I felt like I didn’t deserve to be there. It was as if it were out of a movie, or a storybook, or a dream. I cried as we were landing in Ireland, wishing that my mom were there to show me her homeland. She always said that we would go to Ireland together one day, but we never made it. So, it was bittersweet, but following that brief sojourn into my slowly dwindling grief, I was able to really enjoy that part of the trip. Just because my mom is gone doesn’t make it stop being my culture, right? I tipped up a pint for her, and then we went exploring. It was amazing! I am now officially a world-traveler.

Europe Countdown: 1 more day!!!

So we leave tomorrow morning for the big European vacation. First stop London, then Italy, then Ireland, then back to London and then home. Woohoo! I am quite excited, although I have had to refrain from asking anymore dumb questions about traveling, at least to anyone except the Google. While the extent of my lifetime of travel has thus far included such exotic locales as Disneyworld and Kansas City, I figured I had enough common sense to be able to figure things out overseas. But then I asked one dumb question too many, this time about how to get money. Mike explained in the same tone of voice that a 5th grader would use to say "no duh!" that my money, much like here in these United States, would be coming from the ATM machine. So, I did the only thing I could think of and stuck out my tongue and stormed into the other room. As I have asked in my previous Europe trip countdowns, how the hell am I supposed to know these things?
I am way more street smart than Mike, but when it comes to foriegn travel, he has done it all and I have done it not at all. I was just trying to cover my bases. As long as I can shop a little at H&M, Top Shop, Marks and Spensers, etc, and eat a curry on Brick Road, and see Agatha Christie's Mousetrap, then I will be having a good time. I just wanted to make sure that I would have the money required to do all of these things. Oh, and the wine. I will need the wine in Italy. I will need lots of the wine in Italy, and then, after we get back, I think I am going to cut out the booze until Christmas. It seems like the logical thing to do. I basically want to spend the next two months getting my 5k down to a respectable number. The next one we will do is the Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving. Hopefully, by then my knee will feel well enough to rock it. But first, I am going to drink my weight in Italian wine and swing my blonde hair around at the locals. I hear they love that. When in Rome!!

iPhone-itis

Sorry, Steve Jobs, but I hate your effing iPhone. No offense.

My boyfriend, Mike, says it is because I am jealous that he has one and I don't, but after some real soul searching, I realized that just isn’t the case. I am pretty sure I know what the “i” in iPhone stands for, and that is 'ignore'. It stands for ignore your girlfriend, ignore your job, ignore everything else that is going on around you while you gingerly caress the new love of your life. However, although annoying, it turns out that still isn’t the main issue.

I thought the iPhone was cool… at first… for a few minutes, and then I went back to living my life. I have discovered that Mike, however, has taken on a new "i" dentity. He is bursting with the pride of being an early-adopter, the possessor of a fabulous man-gadget. But most importantly, what I have discovered is that he is now the proud owner of a brand-new, shiny second penis, courtesy of your folks over at Apple. What follows is my theory and the accompanying research.

Mike and I have been together for two-and-a-half years, and over that time we have become pretty familiar with each other’s anatomy. After watching him care for his penis for two years, and then watching him with his iPhone, I have realized that the two are, for all intents and purposes, one and the same. When I explained to Mike that he acts like the iPhone is basically an extension of his penis, he even looked a little guilty and sheepish before he rolled his eyes, and so I knew that I hit the nail on the head. He treats both items the exact same way. He is actually sometimes even a little bit nicer to the iPhone, not because he loves it more, but because it the newer of his two penises. He is so careful with it, and never goes anywhere without it, and he even checks it every couple of hours or so through his jeans to make sure it is still there, just like his original penis. And, just like his original penis, his iPhone also tells him the answers to all of life’s questions. It tells him what to do and where to go, and he can even use one to service the other, accessing pocket-sized porn at the touch of a button.

Many guys might enjoy having two penises, so just as a community service, I am here to tell you that, for $399, you can buy one. An extra penis of your very own. Just don’t expect your girlfriend to swoon.

And it isn’t just my boyfriend who acts this way about his iPhone. When we were watching the Broncos game last week at Hooters (what?) I asked where one of the players went to college. Before he even put his hot wing down, Mike whipped out his proverbial second penis and began touching the front of it, slowly at first, and then with more fervor. And, just as if it were a real penis, people began staring at it. They were whispering to their friends and wives…they were saying “look at that, that guy has one of those second penises…and he is caressing it right here in front of us at Hooters. I need to get me one of those. Only $399 for a second penis.”

And it even started a chain reaction. In typical men’s-locker-room fashion, the other men who were lucky enough to have them began pulling out their second penises so that they could be part of the show. Why should my boyfriend get all of the attention when they had two penises too?
Completely embarrassed, I made Mike put it back in his pants.

So, Steve Jobs, I am sorry to say that I will not be purchasing one of your iPhones. While I truly appreciate the opportunities that having even one penis would provide me, (making more than 75 cents on the dollar, for starters) I will stick with my little flip phone and allow my boyfriend to be the big strong man, the owner of all of the penises in our relationship. At least until it comes out in pink.

Monday

If the phone rings again, I’m going to throw it out my office window. I press my nose against the glass and picture my multi-line phone tumbling down onto the icy downtown Denver streets, crushed instantly by the environmentally irresponsible drivers of Hummvees and Cadillac Escalades. The mental picture makes me happy temporarily, and I slump back down in my chair. The chair, as always, squeaks loudly under my weight, and I remember for the fourteenth day in a row that I meant to bring in the WD-40 from my toolbox. I am completely unorganized. What am I doing here? Where am I going with my life? These are the two questions that I ask every morning, and then ponder for about an hour before I decide to begin any actual work. I rest my forehead on the edge of my desk staring past my lap to the cheap carpet below. My shoe is starting to split from the sole near my left big toe. As I start to raise my head I notice a small stain of unknown origins on my pants, this near my left knee. I scratch at it with a bitten nail and think that possibly, not counting my entire left leg, I look fairly put together, for a Monday.My boss comes strolling into my office seeming to have been here for hours. He has that 'settled-in' look. Stale coffee breath. An already loosened tie. I glance sideways at the clock (9:45) and half-wonder if he is there to discuss the fact that I have been in the building for all of twenty minutes, a twenty minutes that has been spent in the following productive manner: listening to the phone ring five times in a row without answering, pressing my nose against my dirty window, and resting my head on the desk, contemplating my direction in life.He stares at me in a strange way, and my mind starts to race, searching for excuses for being late. 'Deciding to floss for the first time in a week' doesn't seem to sound important enough, although it is the truth. Of course, the flossing led to other neglected hygiene rituals, and before I knew it, I was arriving at the office well after nine, albeit with very clean teeth, a perfectly bleached mustache, and impeccably plucked eyebrows.He, my boss, 'the man', sets a file on my desk, and then, with genuine concern, asks, "What's wrong?"I am confused, and he sees this so he expands on his extremely general question, one with several possible answers.
"With your forehead, I mean?"I touch my head and feel the line made by the edge of my desk. I assume that, just for good measure, it is also bright red. I don't say anything, and he smiles to himself and then leaves. He didn't even notice my eyebrows.

A college entrance essay...on a tangent.

I need to shorten this from 8 pages to 1 or 2...*sigh*

When my mother told me several years back about the day with the hermit crabs, it was the first time I viewed her as a person with a life that was distinctly separate from mine. As we become adults, we all realize at some point or another that our parents’ lives have not always been about us, their children. However, my mom was a single mom who raised my sister and I on her own, so I was always convinced that, in a way, we were her reason for living.
My parents divorced when I was five and my sister was three. My mom was just starting college at the time, and she was 28 years old. My older sister, my half-sister, was to live with my father, and so, my younger sister, my mom and I became a team, in it toghether. My sister and I learned quickly how to help run the household. My mom went to nursing school full time, worked full time, and was a full-time mom; I have no idea when she slept. As I got older, I became aware, albeit somewhat subconsciously, that most everything my mom did was to make sure that my sister and I were ok, and that we became good adults. That is why, when she told me over coffee about the day with the hermit crabs, I suddenly saw her in a completely new light.

The day with the hermit crabs began quite innocently. I was eight, and my six-year old sister was a source of constant turmoil in my life. She was always in my business, trying to hang out with me and my severely cool third grade friends, and, from my perspective, spent almost all of her time being a big, huge baby. It was a Saturday, and I was in the middle of writing a very important report for school, the subject of which was my pet hermit crabs. I would be bringing the little guys into school with me on Monday, and so I told my sister that she could help me by filling the sink with water and letting them swim around while I cleaned out their cage and got it ready for the big debut. She was more than happy to oblige, ecstatic anytime I went out of my way to include her.

I took the small plastic terrarium out on the porch to dump it out and hose it down while my sister gingerly placed the three crabs into the makeshift basket she had created with her t-shirt and carried them into the kitchen. She put the stopper in the sink, and began filling it with water. My mother, in the meantime, was sitting in the next room on the couch staring into space; she had been like that for almost an hour and had told us she was studying. Within five minutes, I heard my little sister shrieking with delight. “Wow, Cara!” she called to me “they are getting really frisky today! They’re coming all the way out of their shells. All the way!!”

This didn’t seem quite right to me because in my vast experience as a hermit crab owner over the prior two years, I had never seen one of them come all the way out of its shell. They were called hermit crabs for the very reason that they carried their little homes on their backs, never to vacate, and so I knew that something must be off. I set down the plastic box, haphazardly sprinkling blue and pink rocks on the ground, and went inside where I found my little sister perched on the kitchen stepstool with her pigtails askew. The stepstool was a purchase made by my mother to allow us to reach high enough to put dishes away, a dreaded chore, however, this day my sister was using it to maintain a bird’s eye view of the goings on in the sink. She was peering down into the water, her face alight with excitement and wonder; she beckoned me over with both hands, not moving her eyes from the sight below.

I ran over, and sure enough, there were my pet hermit crabs in all of their naked glory, shells left behind; soft, curled underbellies exposed. My sister and I chattered loudly back and forth standing shoulder to shoulder on the stool, enraptured by the Discovery Channel-worthy vision in front of us. We called our mom. “Mom! Come here, you’ve got to see this”

Nothing.

No answer.

“Mom! Come check this out. The crabs are going crazy”

Nothing.

No answer.

“MOM!! The crabs are ALL THE WAY out of their shells”

“Huh?” My mom walked into the kitchen, not looking quite like herself. “Are you guys ok? What’s going on with the hermit crabs?”

“They came all the way out of their shells!!” my sister said, and then pointed to the sink, basking in the I-told-you-so-ness of the moment.

My mom strode over to us in a half-run and looked into the sink. Her eyes got as big as ours were for a second, and then her adult logic and wisdom kicked in and she placed her hand in the water, quickly drawing it back, and then plunging it in again, scooping up our frisky pets and laying them on a dishtowel on the counter.

“You guys, this water is boiling hot! You’re cooking the crabs!”

I was instantly angry with my sister and began yelling at her, telling her how stupid she was. My mother was examining the crabs, while my sister started to cry. Seeing her tears, I started to cry, too, sure that my precious little pets were going to die. Then my mom started to cry, and she grabbed us both in a bear hug off of the stepstool, our feet dangling. We all stood there in the kitchen crying for several minutes. My sister and I exchanged glances through my mom’s arms, wondering if she was angry or sad, or maybe just a little bit crazy and if it was all because of us and the crab mess we had created. My sister patted my mother’s elbow as if patting a good dog on the head and murmured, “It’s ok, Mommy, it’s ok”

After we all calmed down, and following a brief family discussion of hermit crab etiquette, my mom helped us clean out the rest of the terrarium. We put our little friends back in their home and hoped they would make it. Miraculously, they did, one of them living for an additional four years, which I assume is unprecedented in the hermit crab world. I finished writing my report in perfect cursive, sitting next to my mom at the kitchen table while she wrote a paper of her own, clacking away on an electric typewriter, a huge cup of coffee in front of her, and her “study-music”, the flute stylings of Jean-Pierre Rampal floating softly out of the second-hand stereo. I gave my big hermit crab presentation that Monday, bringing down the house if I recall correctly. My mother turned in her paper, too.
Life went on, and I barely ever thought about the day with the hermit crabs again, until, at the age of 23, I decided to drop out of college and take a job opportunity I had been given with a financial company in Denver. I was disenchanted with school and figured this was my ticket out of Colorado Springs, my big chance to start being a real adult. My mother, upon hearing of this decision, invited me for coffee to discuss my impending life changes. I went, dreading the lecture that was sure to ensue.

My mom and I talked and laughed the way we always did and then she got serious. “Do you remember the day with the hermit crabs?” she asked, looking straight into my eyes, which, for both of us, was the same as looking into a mirror.
“Which one?” I asked nonchalantly, recalling with a smile several incidents involving the now infamous crabs. The time we lost one in the house for several days, only to find it clamped on to the cat’s tail. The multiple times my sister and I would place the crabs in each other’s beds in order to invoke a scream. PETA would probably frown on all of these hermit crab misadventures, but we were children tasked with the duty of helping to raise ourselves, and those crabs, along with the cat and the dog were a vital part of our upbringing and the teaching of responsibility.

“The day Courtney tried to boil the crabs in the sink,” my mom said, waking me from my childhood daydreams.

I laughed. “Of course I remember.”

I laughed some more, but my mom looked slightly somber.
“That was the day I was going to give up”
She told me the story of the day with the hermit crabs from her point of view. She had a paper to write, a big paper on the subject of something very intricate in the genre of biochemistry. It was due Monday, and she hadn’t even started. She was so, so tired. She couldn’t take it anymore; it was just too much. The little kids, the horribly difficult classes, the full-time job working nights in the X-ray lab. She was just going to quit. Maybe she could become a waitress, or get a permanent position in the lab, but there was just no way she could go on like this, exhausted and drained.
But then we snapped her out of it. Screaming about the hermit crabs in all of our childish drama, my sister and I brought my mom back down from her emotional ledge. It was her job to come in and rescue us from our six- and eight-year-old mistakes, and she did it. She saved the day, and saved the crabs, and saved my little sister from what would have surely been a lifetime racked with the guilt that comes with being a crab-murderess. My mom took care of it, and suddenly, for reasons she still did not understand, she could imagine going on, which she did. The next year, my mother graduated with honors from a top nursing school and went on to have a career that anyone would be proud of. At her nursing school it was tradition that each graduate walk down the aisle with a significant other, or a parent who helped them through. My mother walked down the aisle in her nursing cap, eyes gleaming, flanked by two little girls. We assumed that it was all for us.

My mother paused in her story of the day with the hermit crabs to sip her coffee, eyeing me over the rim of her cup to see if any of this was registering. Then she told me that, while most of what she did in her life was for my sister and I, when she did this one thing, persevering and finishing school, it was all for her. It belonged to her and no one else. She wanted me to have that, too.
I teared up at my mother’s story, and then did the only thing that I could think of, completely ignored her advice, dropped out of college, and started a career like I had already decided to do. In all of her infinite wisdom, she had also raised both of us to be steadfast in our decisions. So I left Colorado Springs and moved to Denver to become a career woman. I have been quite successful, too, but there has always that one thing missing, and this is where you find me now, eight years later, with no children or other excuses to stop me.

I am already getting paid to do something that I love which is to write. I am successful in my work as a financial copywriter, and while I, like many nine-to-five writers, harbor pipe dreams of escaping to the mountains one day to write the great American novel, I find my work fulfilling. It may seem odd to completely change my life when it is all in order and I am happy, but there is something missing. I crave that feeling that my mother described having on her graduation day. I want it more than anything right now, more even than that elusive great American novel.

My mother died in car accident last September. She was only 53. While I know she wasn’t perfect, she was seemingly almost always right. In this case there is no exception. It seems that it took the jolt in my life of losing her to put the wheels in motion, to wake me up to what I’ve been missing. The wheels are finally moving, and I am finally awake. I want to finish my degree. While her memory may be a driving force in my return to school, the degree that I earn will not be for her. It will be bittersweet to achieve my dream of graduating without my mother cheering me on, but this time it will be for me. I won’t quit until I am finished, even if I have to scare a few hermit crabs to get there.

From April, 2007

I have gained 45 pounds in less than a year.
I cried in a meeting in front of the senior vice president of marketing, and on the treadmill in a crowded 24Hour Fitness, and at the bookstore, and in the produce section of Whole Foods, the one on 1st and University Boulevard.
My little sister is filing for divorce from her husband.
I screamed in my boyfriend’s face this morning because he drank the last Diet Coke.
My older sister, as always, pretends nothing has happened, does not scream, does not file for divorce, does not cry in public while clutching a carton of strawberries.
This is my mother’s fault.


My mother drove off the side of a country road eight months ago. She rolled down an embankment, was thrown from the vehicle which then landed on top of her, and she died. She died. I still don’t know if she did it on purpose or not; my sisters do not know either. She was at a point in her life where that may have been her plan. But it could have been an accident, too. It wasn’t the first time someone missed that turn in her little farm town, the town where people refuse to wear their fucking seatbelts. Not even close to the first time. Lots of people had skidded down that embankment after taking the turn too quickly. Plus, how could someone deliberately leave behind three successful, funny adult daughters, two adorable, tiny grandchildren, a dog, a fiancée, and a world full of people who thought she was hilarious and beautiful?
Those are the things that make me think it wasn’t on purpose.
On purpose. That is what my sisters and I call it, “it” being the possibility of suicide. We call it on purpose when we talk about it, which we very rarely do.
I like to imagine that on that night, my mom was really thinking it was time to get things together, and she was just on her way home. The state patrol officer ruled it an accident, said she tried to correct the turn and, if she hadn’t told me just three months before, “Sometimes I just think I should drive off a bridge,” then I would be inclined to believe him. In fact, I am still inclined to believe him, but sometimes I just can’t make myself actually do it.
All I can picture and think and wonder about is what that last moment must have been like for her. It consumes me, and it fills my head at the most inopportune times. At work, during sex, while playing with my niece and nephew, while having a glass of wine with my best friend. I’ll just start to get comfortable in my own shoes again, and then it smacks me in the face, ruins my good time, ends my selfish bout of happiness. It is eating me alive. What was she thinking as it happened? Did she scream? Did she think of me, how much she and I look alike, how people would always ask us if we were twins? Did she think of the things she hadn’t taught my sister about raising her kids yet? Maybe her thoughts were of her big Irish Wolfhound, the way looking into his huge brown eyes made you think of looking into the wise eyes of a retired college professor. Maybe she didn’t have time to think of anything.
It must have hurt so much. What does it feel like when an SUV lands on your chest? The pain must have been excruciating.
Worse than childbirth, worse than her bad knee, worse than the pain of having three daughters who had thrown their hands up at her, unsure of how to continue helping her fix her life. That is what we had done, thrown our hands up for the most part, even when she had selflessly spent a solid portion of the past thirty-five years making sure that our lives were A-OK. That we were fed, and clothed, and polite, and smart, and that we tried really hard at everything.

She must have been so scared; it had to have been torture. And then maybe it was over. Maybe, on impact, she was gone. Or maybe it wasn’t as quick as they said. Maybe she suffered.
At the funeral, a woman approached me. She was tall. I remember that because I am tall, and she stood even with me. She was from the same little town, a nurse just like my mom, and she said that my mother hadn’t suffered, probably never felt a thing. She was trying to help me feel better, and I just smiled at her with my mother’s smile and looked her in the eyes with my mother’s eyes and hugged her, and then I let her walk away. I don’t even remember her name, can no longer picture her face. My sister probably remembers them, her name and face; she is good with things like that. This nameless, faceless woman, as it turns out, was the one who had been on her hands and knees in a ditch administering CPR right after the accident happened. She crawled down the steep, rocky edge of a curvy country road and pushed on my mother’s heart, willing it to beat; she tried to save my mother’s life. She, not me, was the last one to touch my mother while she was still my mother. While she was still beautiful and hilarious and smart.
I, on the other hand, was at a movie. Trust the Man, it was called, and if I remember correctly, it was quite good, although I am no film critic. The ringer on my cell phone was turned off. Obviously. They make you do that in theaters; they put up signs, have banners running across the screen like ads. And it makes me laugh that they still say phones and pagers, as in “Please silence all cell phones and pagers.” Who has a pager anymore? I had a crush on a boy in junior high who had a pager. In fact, I think that was the main draw, the intrigue and mystery that a boy with a pager possessed. I made the rookie mistake of telling my mom about him back then, and she, clearly misunderstanding my adolescent plight, said, “Why in the world would a thirteen-year-old boy ever need to be paged?”
She was always saying things like that.
Anyway, as the strict rule-abider that my mother raised me to be, I had my ringer on ‘Silent’ as soon as I set foot in the theater. I don’t mess with that rule, and I am the first to dole out dirty looks to those who have not complied.
I sat there in the air-conditioned theater, eating buttered popcorn and snuggling up to my boyfriend. It was the Sunday before Labor Day. The end of the summer. The leaves would start to change soon, and I didn’t know it then, but the coming winter would be the worst that Denver had seen in twenty years, something to do with global change and Al Gore. But it was still summer, and I was at a movie with the man I’ll probably marry. I sat there for two hours, happy and selfish with greasy fingers and a big Diet Coke, blissfully unaware of what was going on 150 miles south of us in Gardner, CO, population 500. I was sitting in a Denver theater, and my mind was in New York with Julianne Moore and David Duchovny. I might as well have been a million miles away.
When the movie was over, I had eight missed calls. Eight. I don’t get eight calls in a week unless you count the Rocky Mountain News subscription sales department. But in two hours, there they were, eight of them.
We walked out into the warm night toward my boyfriend’s car, a silver Saab. I have told him before that I feel strongly that Saabs are for women and gay men, but he still loves his, and so that is where we sat, in his Saab outside the Esquire Theater. And that is where I was the last time I felt like me, like a daughter, like a person, like the woman I was raised to be. That is where I was the last time I felt like I had an anchor in this world, when I was still someone’s spitting image.
The Esquire Theater is a Denver landmark, and as I listened to my messages, I stared at the tall, slender letters spelling out E-S-Q-U-I-R-E, white on purple, glowing and bold. My curiosity at blinking red light signifying so many messages gradually merged into a dull realization. The recordings, the chaos on the other end of the line, my mom’s fiancée wailing my name like a scared child; all of this, the complete cacophony of it all, subsided into an ache, like a cramp, or like that feeling when you’ve swallowed too large a bite of a sandwich and it becomes lodged, not choking you, but not moving. I couldn’t tell you now where the physical hurt was in my body, but it was there, aching and pounding. It is still there now, in my chest, in my head, in my shoulders, in the sockets behind my eyes that are my mother’s eyes. It is part of the new me, and I do not foresee it ever subsiding.

According to the messages, there had been an accident, or as I may have mentioned, it was maybe not accidental.
I still didn’t fully have a grasp on my new reality. I watched a typical Denver woman, gorgeous and athletic, walking her dog through the thickening twilight down 6th Avenue, past the silver Saab. Her Golden Retriever made eye contact with me, and I instinctively longed for the softness and innocence of my own dog as I called my mom’s best friend.
Her voice quivered, shook with the weight of what she had to tell me. I said her name aloud, and she cried openly and apologized over and over as if I was hell-bent on punishing the messenger, as if I thought it was her fault. She told me about the accident, and then she told me that my mom was gone. Gone. Dead. Passed Away. In a Better Place. I didn’t cry. I didn’t get it. I just shook a little. I listened as she told me to call the state patrol, even efficiently producing my own pen and paper to take the number down. I said I would call her back and I calmly told my boyfriend to take me to my apartment.
What followed over the next few weeks was hectic and insane, although I remember being quiet and calm and business-like. I wrote an obituary. I called the Irish Wolfhound Rescue to tell them to expect memorial donations. I used the words “in lieu of flowers” as if they were a part of my everyday vocabulary. I hired a funeral director. I was a businesswoman making business decisions under deadline. It was similar to being at work, except for the part where it was emotionally debilitating.
The funeral director was a woman in her 70’s who was not all there, her hair a tangle of faux auburn curls with an inch of white at the roots, her polyester, elastic-waist pants twisted slightly off-center so that they looked uncomfortable, like a small child wandering around in twisted pajamas. Normally, the pants would have tipped me off that I had not made the best choice as far as funeral directors go, but I was catatonic. She could have been wearing a sombrero and I would have let her arrange my mother’s funeral. This stranger sat there with my sisters and me as we discussed how the funeral should go, talked about what should be said, had the most personal conversation of our entire lives. She made inappropriate comments and made us all very aware that this was the point-of-sale for her, that she could not possibly give a rat’s ass about the woman my mother was. To her credit, her manual dexterity was spot-on and she handled the credit card transaction with astute competence. My little sister sat holding her petite, one-year old daughter in her lap and fumed in the general direction of this woman, a woman my mother would have detested. My mom would have hated her own funeral, too. It wasn’t classy or beautiful; it was drab, and unorganized as if it had been thrown together in a couple of days by group of women who, although normally very Martha Stewartesque when planning events, were in complete shock. Strangely, I remember feeling quiet and calm and business-like.
A week after the funeral and cremation, that same woman handed me my mother’s engagement ring in a plastic bag labeled “Bio-Hazard.” It was the only piece of jewelry my mom had been wearing when she died, and this woman apparently found it hazardous. I put it on my finger, knowing it would fit me perfectly and planned to wear it until I could get it back to my mother’s fiancée.
The funeral director, lacking couth and in a general state of senility, had neglected to clean my mother’s ring. After washing my hands, I looked down to see diluted blood on my hand, trickling from beneath the diamond solitaire towards my wrist. My mother’s blood was on my hands. In what is probably a very inappropriate feeling to have about human blood, I wanted to save it, soak it in, ingest it. Instead, I just sat on the couch and stared at it. For an hour. And then I snapped out of it and did the grown-up thing --- because daughters who no longer have mothers need to act grown up--- I took off the ring, cleaned it, washed my hands, put the ring back on my finger, and then went back out to the living room. I will never be the same again after that. Never.
Now eight months have passed. It is Spring, and I am no longer quiet and calm and business-like. I have become angry and tearful and child-like. With all of the maturity that I can muster at age thirty, I still just want my mom. I want her all the time. I need to talk to her about some stuff. I want her to keep her eye on me. I want her to give me advice. I want more than anything to hear her crazy laugh, or watch her tie those loose knots in her hair with one hand, or to taste her potato salad, or to hear her sing off-key. I want her to know that, if given another chance, I would do anything for her, anything to help her, to save her, to keep her close to me. I want her to see my dog, and how well-behaved he is even after she accused me of spoiling him. I want her to know my boyfriend better, to know that I will probably have children one day with his red curly hair, and I want her to know how she and I would laugh about their little red curls, because that is just the type of thing we would have laughed about before.
I want to look her in the face again and feel as if I am looking into a mirror, a mirror that knows everything about me, at least everything about me up until the first Sunday of last September. A lot has changed since then, and it would be nice to talk to my mom about that, too.
Although I have never really believed in silver linings, preferring instead to take the cynical, sarcastic route, I can say that I have learned a whole hell of a lot in the past eight months. About myself, and about the importance of sisters, and about the hardships that people face in life and the toll it takes on intimate relationships. I learned that using work as an excuse not to deal with things only succeeds temporarily, and I learned that I am tougher than I knew, and I learned that some of my friends are better friends than I thought. However, what has been the most eye-opening is what I have learned about the relationship between a mother and her daughter. It is disheartening, I suppose, that I have acquired all of this knowledge, now having nowhere to apply it.
I was raised by a strong, single mother. And she raised me to be fiercely independent just like her, so much so that I spent a large portion of my life thinking that I did not need her. But I did, and I do right now.
I feel a little more ok, and a little more in control, and a little more me every single day. I am still angry and sad, and there is still an emptiness that I am unable to put into words. However, I will continue to be my mother’s strong daughter, and so will each of my sisters, and right now, that is all I can give to her to replace what I was unable to give eight months ago. I hope she understands.

Europe Countdown: 2 days

Crap. In all of the hurry with preparation for the trip this weekend, I forgot that I actually had to work on Monday and Tuesday. CRAP! I am so not in the mood to write about financial performance and investing. I am ready to get on a plane.
I had one scary thought last night, and that is that I will actually be flying over the ocean. Over the entire body of water that is the Atlantic Ocean. I am not really the best flier that I know. I get a little scared, a little motion sick, and the fact that I am six-foot-one doesn't really help matters much. Besides, I have seen Castaway. I know what can happen when you crash into the ocean, never to be seen again.
Usually I spend a typical flight squirming and trying to find a position for my legs that doesn't involve severe rug burn from the chair in front of me. So far it has just been trips within the continental United States, but this is going to be eight hours of hell. While I appreciate my stature, I sometimes wouldn't mind being a more cute and feminine 5'3" or so; I would fit so much more nicely that way. On an airplane I feel like such a freak. I can feel people staring at me as I make my way down the aisle with my head cocked to the side slightly to avoid dragging it along the ceiling. The other people just stare and pray silently that I will not be occupying the seat next to them where I will most definitely steal all of their space. Maybe I will drug myself for the flight. A little Tylenol PM maybe? Or I have that vicodin left over from my knee injury....hmmm, not a bad idea. Either way, Mike better give me the aisle seat Wednesday morning. That is all I have to say.