Let Me Call You Sweetheart

Yesterday was the anniversary of my grandfather’s death. I did not remember, terrible as I am with dates but my mother reminded me this morning. It was three years ago, on a Friday and my mother called me at the office to tell me to come by the hospital on the way home. I didn’t even know he was in the hospital. I was still getting over the sudden death of my father’s father who died on the 8th. I also didn’t take it too seriously when my mother said this may be the end. Maybe I didn’t want to believe it or maybe I just couldn’t fathom another loss so soon.

Carrie came with me to the hospital. He was in the hospice ward. If you’ve never been in one, hope you never will. They tried to dress it up like a park. A porch swing with fake vines crawling up lattice behind it sat in the hallway. It was a nice gesture but plastic greenery on hospital walls makes the whole experience somehow sadder than the sterile white of a regular ward.

I was not prepared. I don’t think anyone could be prepared for what we saw. My grandfather unconscious with one leg cocked at the knee, every breath rattling like bubbles in a fish tank. I lasted approximately half a minute before running to the porch swing, reduced to great heaping sobs. My mother said she was staying the night. I told her I couldn’t. I don’t have the constitution to watch a loved one die. So I went out and got as drunk as I could. I woke up the next morning to the sound of my mother leaving me a message on our answering machine that he died.

I don’t think about those minutes at the hospital when I think of him. I think of how he always slept under an electric blanket. When I would stay with him I would crawl in under the blanket with him and we would watch The Odd Couple together, laughing our hearts out. He was obsessed with a bargain, clipping coupons weeks ahead of my visits so we could walk to Peoples Drugstore to buy twenty four packs of toilet paper on sale. It was one per customer so I would stand in line by myself with my money and coupon then wait for him to make his purchase after me. When we returned to his apartment we would have to wrestle the new purchases into the hall closet filled to the brim with past bargains.

He loved horse racing. Anyone who knows me and reads this knows that his love for the races is alive and well in my mother and me. The day that Secretariat won the Triple Crown my grandfather and my uncle were there at the finish line. At my grandfather’s funeral I couldn’t help but smile at the horseshoe shaped arrangement covered in Blackeyed Susans. He and Margo, my grandmother, had taken one of there friends to The Preakness Stakes. They were sitting at a table when my grandfather saw some friends of his from the liquor distributing business. He went and chatted with them for a moment then came back to the table and told his friend he had arranged for him to watch the race from the finish line.

My grandfather loved life. He loved cocktail hour, pretty women, dirty jokes and music. One of my favorite photos of us is me sitting in his lap, both of our mouths opened in song. We were performing for anyone in the room. It is a song we sang countless number of times to countless people at countless gatherings. The tune is from “Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with you…” but we are singing about a Chevy. “Let me call you Chevy, I’m in debt for you…” I have no idea where this version came from. I don’t know if he made it up or heard it somewhere, but he taught me every word and I loved sitting on his lap and belting out the words, my screechy eight year old voice competing with his.

Wherever he is now he is sipping a tumbler of Scotch, telling dirty jokes to anyone who will listen and singing. One day I will stand at his side and we will do it together but for now I will make due with seeing his face in my own features when I look in the mirror.

Harder Than a Rubik’s Cube to Figure Out

When I brought the mail in yesterday I was so excited to see cards and a letter mixed in with the junk mail. I opened the cards first as they were addressed to Carrie and me and that way I could read them then pass them on. The letter was, curiously, addressed only to me. More curious was the name and return address was no one I recognized. I opened it thinking it was a piece of mass mail that was printed to look like a hand written letter.

No. Not exactly. It was a letter from a girl I went to high school with apologizing for mean things she said to me SEVENTEEN years ago. She wrote that recent events led her to think about what she did and she wanted to apologize in case she hurt me. I was more than a little shook up. For starters how was I supposed to remember her amongst the 500 or so other students who taunted me in high school? I was the class reading-while-walking-open-about-my-homosexuality outcast. Maybe if she’d poured pig’s blood on me at the prom I would remember her but saying a few ugly comments isn’t going to stick out.

I couldn’t let it go. Who was this person? I got on classmates.com. No photo but her name listed under my high school did confirm that she indeed go to my high school. I googled her. I image googled her. I looked through archives of the local paper by her maiden and married name. No luck. Finally, I called her. She seemed a little shocked that I was calling. I guess other victims of her apologies have received the letter and moved on with their lives in silence feeling warm and fuzzy inside.

I wanted to know what she said back then but she never let on and I was too chicken to ask. What happened isn’t really what’s bothering me. It’s the fact that I can’t even conjure up the slightest guess as to who she is or what she looks like. Or how she got my address for that matter. That’s a lie. I am dieing to know what happened but am also too afraid to ask for fear that memories of my four hellish years of high school will come rushing back. I lived through them once. I don’t think I could do it twice. Still, I’m going to have to find my yearbooks and look her up because the suspense is killing me.

When Nothing is Black and White Anymore

First came the knowledge that I need to wear magnifying glasses at work and while reading. Then to add insult to injury I am washing my hands at the sink this morning and what do I see? A gray strand of hair staring back at me. Anyone who knows me will ask, how did you see it through the highlights? To this I say, it’s been since July since my last touch up and gray hair stands out against dark roots. Ugh!

I dug out a tuft of hair and separated the offending strand. Pluck! There in my hand was my first gray hair. I held it up to light, turning it this way and that, making sure it was indeed what I thought it was before I rushed out of the bathroom to tell my coworker. She hated to point out with the recent recommendation of glasses and now a gray hair it is time I face my aging. Ugh!

I came back in my office to call my mother. I’m not sure why since she is still laughing and calling me four eyes. She seems to take great pleasure in my age anxiety. This little tidbit of news started her laughing all over again as I sat there on the phone holding up the hair to anything black in my office, willing it to be blond not gray. Mother reminded me that when I was four years old or so she would sit on the floor in front of the couch while we watched television and I would scour her head plucking any gray hair I found. Well now it’s her turn.

The symbol of my rite of passage now rests in an envelope in my desk. I thought about labeling it in the event anyone goes looking for an envelope to send correspondence to an unsuspecting client but I couldn’t think of label that wasn’t too weird. “Jacqui’s First Gray- Do Not Open”. “Personal and Not So Confidential-Do Not Touch”. I’ll need to throw it away before days end but I’m just not ready. First I’m going to call my hairdresser and make an appointment to get these roots done. Any longer and who knows how many of the suckers I’ll find.

Dilateus Permanitis

Yesterday I went to the eye doctor for the first time EVER. It was a bit like Disney World in that they are constantly moving you from one room to another so you never quite feel like you’re being made to wait. I almost cried when they put the numbing drops in my eye (BEFORE THEY TOUCHED IT!) but I didn’t which I had to remind Carrie of lest she feel the need to further cement everyone’s view of me as a wimp.

I was dreading this appointment because no matter what routine exam I’m going to have I invent 100 different freak accidents that could occur. So when the doctor was walking us to the counter and I asked if anyone’s eyes have ever stuck this way, it was no wonder she looked at me a bit cross eyed.

“Like how?”

“You know. Dilated. They never went back to being undilated.”

“No. Not to my knowledge.”

What you don’t see in the above exchange is the completely mortified look on Carrie’s face that I asked the question or the look of sympathy the doctor gave her when she revealed that I was indeed serious.

Tootsie Roll Pups

I walked in today to find the equivalent of a Labrador Kegger. First were the guilty faces staring back at me. Then, barely visible over the brown and blond fur, an EMPTY brownie pan. Blood pressure: Elevated. One step into the sun room revealed what was left of THE UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS pound cake that last I saw it was resting nicely on the kitchen counter this morning. Blood pressure: High. To add insult to injury when I rounded the corner there on the bathroom floor, as if they were looking for a tissue to wipe their choclately, sugary snouts, were the contents of the bathroom trash can. Blood pressure: Somewhere over the rainbow.

As a side note, the photos you are about to see in NO way absolve my dog from guilt. He's just too stupid to look at me with a guilty face!

LBD

She's sleek and a vixen. My girlfriend and my dog love her but who loves her the most? Her mother who has to keep herself from calling in any 24 hour period to ask how she's doing. Our answer has always been the same: "She's fine. Driving Isaac crazy. Kicking all of the pillows off the couch. Well, tonight we all say see for yourself......































































































Ed would be proud of the last two. I am personally jealous of how good she looks in my fur wrap. See you next week.
J, C & C

The Ranch

Carrie and I go to the ranch almost every weekend. We have been doing this for almost the past two years. It is a place full of everything. Hope: every sunrise brings the promise of a new day and an unsurpassed view of cattle waking to the new day to begin to graze. Anticipation: each calf crop brings with it the excitement of speckled babies bedded down in the grass as new mothers stand guard nearby. Love: the love we bring for each other to this environment as well as the love of animals who trust you to feed them and scratch them behind the horns now and then. Trust: they trust us to care for them, we trust them to provide that love mentioned above. Dread: when a calf falls ill and you spend the following days hoping it will make it through. Thanks: for the rain, for the wind, for a cloud covering the beating sun, for fresh air, for the ability to bask in the joy that is the ranch. Regret: I would love to say there is none but at times we all think we waited too late or did too little. As a part of human nature and mother nature I feel the need to include regret although we all try not to dwell on the past. The ranch is the circle of life in its purest, most basic form and every Friday night I am hopeful, full of anticipation, in love, and trusting there will be no dread or regret. If there is I accept that it is the circle of life and we all have to sit back and enjoy what we can. There is also sharing. Share in my experience with the photos below:

Who Is That Masked Girl?

We are heading out of town this afternoon (again). We worked half the cows on the ranch last weekend saving the really mean ones for this weekend. I thought I should pick up on this blog again since after tomorrow I may be short an arm from one of them slinging their heads in a tight space making future blogging highly unlikely.

Carrie had four new tires put on her car yesterday. She had taken it in for a routine tire rotation and balancing. Routine for A-type anal retentive people like her, rare occurrence for change your oil only when told to people like me. They called to tell her all of her tires had splits in the sidewalls and would need to be replaced. I immediately attributed this to her careless, break neck speed, driving but apparently it was just a defect. The tire man did say however that it could have been really dangerous if she had had a blow out. “Really dangerous” because we would have been going 95 to 100 miles per hour. That is miles per hour not miles per day.

This very scenario is what I think about for two hours and fifteen minutes every weekend on the way to and from the ranch. I imagine the sound of the blow out and then my life flashing in front of my eyes in my final moments. My stomach is a hard ball of wax the entire trip, flipping and turning circles. Carrie says there’s medication for my condition. In lieu of medication she and Alison have also suggested putting a dog mask on my face for the duration of the trip that they found in, thank you, Bark magazine.