And Max Said, "Be Still"

If I were ever forced to make a list of my five most prized possessions in the world, at least two of them would be books. One of them is my ancient, elderly, bruised and beaten and battered paperback copy of Slaughterhouse-Five that I stole from a yard sale when I was in high school. The page corners are dog-eared and passages are highlighted and underlined and notes are scribbled in the margins from I can’t even tell you how many essays I wrote about it. I don’t know where that book is right now, and I won’t allow myself to die until it is located. (Note to my husband: this is not a challenge.)

The other book is hardback, still in its original dust jacket, was a gift for my husband the first Christmas we were dating and has pretty much saved our relationship hundreds of times since then, and is basically pristine except for the fingerprints. Three sets of fingerprints, to be precise: his, mine, and hers. Because the other book is Where the Wild Things Are, and even when she was very small, our daughter knew not to mess with the Wild Things.

I don’t know a lot of people who don’t know about the Wild Things. The book was published before I was born, but not too long, although it seems like everybody including my own parents was read that book as a child. I’m sure my parents read it to me, because I remember the pictures, and I remember sitting in the dark at night thinking about those creatures who roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws, and I remember never once wondering what “gnashed” meant, because I already knew, from the book.

We went through a phase, a wonderful phase, my favorite so far, where Shae wanted to read Wild Things every night before bed for like a whole month, and my husband and I would take turns reading it to her, and we each had a different way to read the story. My husband, surprisingly, is all energy and light and loud noises, and when he reads it to her there is a lot of laughing and giggling and crazy frenetic dancing. His Max is much more regal than mine, more kingly, and his voice is deeper and manlier, and his Max is strong and assertive. I think she likes his version best, honestly.

Because mine is different. When I read the book, and we get to the bit about “LET THE WILD RUMPUS START” there is jumping on the bed and crazy choreography and hooting and hollering and howling at the moon and sometimes I’ll pick her up and fly her around the room, but when we get to the part about “BE STILL” my voice breaks a little bit, cracks ever so slightly, and once we round the corner of “OH PLEASE DON’T GO, WE’LL EAT YOU UP WE LOVE YOU SO” … there is quiet. My Max is sad. He misses his Mommy and his toys and his string cheese and all the things that he loves best in the world, and when he says, “NO,” it is a whisper.

In that moment she is not Max any more – I am. And I have gone from being master of the house, superhero of the world, king of where the wild things are, to a tiny little thing, just a mom, whose daughter is growing right there in the bed where we are all snuggled together reading, and I can feel the time ticking away, and already she is about to start kindergarten and soon middle school and then high school and then college and then marriage and then children and I just want it all to stop, to calm down, to be silent and small again, my little baby, the best thing that has ever happened to me, the greatest thing that I have ever done in my whole entire life, possibly the greatest thing that I will ever do, and I just want it all to be still.

So I whisper “NO,” and she steps into her private boat and sails back almost over a year and in and out of weeks and through a day and into the night of her own room, where I have always been waiting for her, with her supper.

And it is still hot.

===

NY Times Obit

NPR Remembrance

Sendak on Colbert: Part 1 and Part 2

Pictures of Pickles

My grandfather's funeral is today, and I just can't even, so here are some pictures of my kid eating a pickle on a stick from when we went to Musikfest the other night.

You try and have a good weekend. I'll be drinking myself blind. See you on the flip side, hopefully.

(PS: This is not denial. This is strictly avoidance. I know the difference. I just wish I didn't have to.)

Worth A Thousand Words

I have a million memories of my grandfather. He's the person who taught me how to read a stock prospectus and a racing form. He bankrolled my first trip to an Atlantic City casino, although I doubt he was aware of it at the time. He and my grandmother used to take me out to dinner at the Palmer Dairy Bar when it was still around. He was with me the first time I remember eating fried clams, and I think it's because he liked soft-boiled eggs and strawberry shortcake and rice pudding and peaches in cream -- actual peaches, sliced up in a bowl, with actual cream poured on top -- because he liked these things, I used to eat them when I visited my grandparents as a kid, and they still take me back to my youth when I eat them today.

What I don't have are many pictures of me and my grandfather together.

I think that having a digital camera throws into stark relief how really different his generation and mine are. Were. Whatever. To me, it is no big deal to take 300 pictures in a single afternoon, but back in the day, when everything was on actual film and developing cost money that we didn't always have, pictures seemed like more of a luxury. There are pictures of us together somewhere, no doubt, probably in my mother's attic and closets somewhere, but it took me hours of the last few days to find only a fraction of the quantity of photos of the two of us that I was able to find of him and my daughter together in only a few minutes.

And the weird part is: most of the pictures that I can actually find are things I don't really remember.

Maybe the best picture I can find of us is a picture of him dancing with me at a wedding. I can provide context -- it was the wedding of a good friend of the family, the sister of one of my aunt's ex-boyfriends who also happened to live up the street from me until I was 11 years old, and I was one of the bridesmaids, and I can't remember the exact year, but you can tell from my hairdo that was most definitely during the Bon Jovi era, probably right before I starting dying my hair with Kool-Aid and listening to The Cure, and the happy couple twirled around the dance floor for the first time as man and wife to "I'll Always Love You" by Taylor Dayne, and afterwards I repurposed that pink dress, shortened the hem to tea-length and then wore it when I went to the "Prince & Princess" dance in 9th grade with my first really big heartbreaking crush who ended up spending the evening trying to get one of my classmates-slash-arch-nemeses to make out with him in the corridor by the lockers, so I guess the wedding must have been in 1988 or early 1989, when I was 13 or 14 -- but I cannot remember one thing about being in that wedding, except that there were like eleventeen people in the bridal party and my sisters were junior bridesmaids and the reception was at the Elks Lodge and the bride and groom are now divorced for about 10 years.

For sure, I don't remember this moment when I danced with my grandfather, when we were both smiling and happy and clearly having a good time, and more than anything in this world right now, I wish I could.

There are pictures on my hard drive of my grandfather dancing with one of my sisters at my wedding, and with my other sister at her own wedding, and I swear that I can close my eyes and remember every single thing about those times, even though I am not even 100% positive that I was even actually there when the pictures were taken -- I can hear the music and tinkling flatware and smell the food and wafts of perfume and feel the love and laughter in the reception halls, but I just cannot remember ever dancing with my grandfather like this, standing close and letting him hold me, just being near him.

And I would give anything, absolutely anything, if I could.

Already I have forgotten how handsome my grandfather once was, so tan from being outside all summer long, tending his gladioluses and strawberries, skimming and vacuuming the pool, playing cards and having the occasional beer, drinking ice water from my great-grandmother's tin tumblers and eating tomatoes fresh off the vine like they were apples. Almost a mythic creature, a well-aged classical hero with his shimmering silver hair and his strikingly blue eyes and the birthmark on his temple shaped like a heart. He spent most of his last two years in that damned chair in his living room, watching baseball or Notre Dame football or cable news, his health and his strength and his color slowly waning, leaching out of him into the ether somewhere. He was not himself at the end, not the Poppy that I will always see when I close my eyes and think about summertime and slot machines and strawberry shortcake.

Dear God, I miss him so, and I will lay awake nights for the rest of my life trying to remember all those moments that have not been captured in pictures.

Five Stages

First: thanks to everyone for all your kind words, tweets, and comments over the last few days. I can't tell you how much you all mean to me. And I am not being sarcastic or anything right now -- I am honest-to-God serious. Thanks for being nice people.

=====

I'm still processing my feelings about my grandfather's death, so this post will be all over the place. Probably I should apologize, but I won't. I'm not sorry about it -- I'm not really anything. I was hoping to have something deeply profound to say by now, but I'm a 20-year veteran of different kinds of therapy, so I know that all this stuff happens in its own time and whatever. I am also intimately familiar with the Kübler-Ross model and can report that I've skipped over denial and have gotten to acceptance already, but I seem to be having trouble with the stages in between -- for whatever reasons, I keep rapidly cycling through anger and bargaining with longer stops on depression.

This is perfectly normal, of course, and I am aware of what's happening and can sort of let everybody know what's going on, but I am finding myself in some trouble during those periods of depression: namely, I am running out of Oreos and dill pickle potato chips and Klondike bars. Fortunately the new Costco up the road opens up at the end of the week, just in time for the funeral, so I can stock up on comfort foods.

What is surprising me most, I think, are those swings back to anger. There are very specific reasons why I feel angry right now, reasons that I won't go into right now (or maybe ever) because my family does not deserve to have hurt feelings right now to go along with their broken hearts, and also because I know, logically, that my anger is selfish and potentially self-damaging. Anger usually is, of course; it is also, in this particular case, at least, pointless and fruitless. I just need to keep reminding myself what the best therapist I ever had told me a long time ago: anger comes from pain. Pain, when left unchecked and untreated, becomes anger. I know I need to let it go. But that's always the tricky part, isn't it?

So for now I am doing what we all are right now, which is holding it together the best that I can. My grandfather's passing was not unexpected, but what has surprised me is how unprepared I was for it, even though I thought I was ready. I made my peace some time ago with the fact that each visit with him might be the last, and yet I still feel blindsided by the one that actually was. For the last few months there has been a general sense of foreboding, that we all knew the end was near, but I almost feel that in the deepest lizard parts of my brain I was half expecting him to outlive us all, somehow. It was a ridiculous notion, but hope that you didn't know you had manifests itself in strange ways and in stranger places and at the strangest times.

=====

My daughter, surprisingly or not, has been my greatest source of comfort in the past few days. She is only four, so her relationship with her great-grandfather has been short-lived and not as fraught with personal baggage as my relationship with her great-grandfather was. He was her Poppy Mousie, and he was almost always in that chair, and he gave her candy even when Mommy said no, and snuck her tastes of birthday cake frosting  even before we had the candles in, and watched horse races and baseball games with her. He loved her, and she loved him, and there is nothing else that needs to be said about that relationship because that's all there was to it. An old man and a little girl who loved each other.

We told her that Poppy Mousie died and we asked her if she knows what that means. At first she said, "He is up in the clouds and now Owen will take care of him." Later, she added, "It just means we aren't going to see him any more, but he'll still be there."

She's so smart, that one. Just like her great-grandfather.

=====

When I got the news very late Thursday night or very early Friday morning, I'm not sure which, I rolled over in bed and pretended to go back to sleep. I went numb for a while, and I didn't want my husband to worry more than I know he already does. He is worried about me but he doesn't want to ask how I am feeling, not because he doesn't want to know, but because after 17 years together he knows well enough that there is little he will be able to do. I laugh and cry and rant and scream in public, my heart bleeding on my sleeve, but most of the actual work of coping is done privately, inside my own head and my own heart, and nobody can really make me better but me. He can help, be a strong shoulder to cry on and an open ear for listening, but he cannot fix me. I married him in part because I know that he knows this.

What I didn't tell him was that I was actually awake, lying there in the dark, listening to him breathing next to me and my daughter snoring in the next room and the air conditioner running in the window, and I was trying to remember: what were the last words that I had with my grandfather? I can't remember the last thing he said to me. But I very distinctly recall what I said to him the last time I saw him, two Saturdays ago, just five days before he passed away. He was asleep in his chair.

"I don't want to kiss you goodbye, because you're sleeping now and you look so tired, but I love you."

I can live with that.

=====

"I think: He and I have been talking ever since I learned how. A million words. All of them final, now. I don't need to make him give me any more, like souvenirs. I think: Let me not define his death on my terms." -- Dave Barry

Goodbye

Bye, Pop.

That's all I have for now. Sorry.

Papillon (Hot Butterfly)

Oh, it's caterpillar season. After a couple of years of pretty light gypsy moth activity, it appears the tents are back in full force near my grandparents', and of course when you are two, this is fascinating:

I always loved caterpillars, before I learned just how destructive they really are. I still kind of think they're cute. At least I will always have lightning bugs.

Maybe my recollection is hazy, but I don't remember trying to actively kill every bug I saw when I was Shae's age. I was more of a girlie-girl, and I still get my husband to dispose of the spiders, flies, millipedes, etc. that turn up in the basement. But not my kid:

I'm not sure whether to be proud or horrified.

Dark and Stormy

Sometimes, on days like today, when the weather is weird and I'm not sure what season it's supposed to be and I'm overextended and under-rested and having a bad hair day and the afternoon just will not end -- sometimes, on days like today, I find myself struggling to live with myself. Maybe it's nothing, maybe it's normal, maybe everybody hears a random Warren Zevon song on their iPod and they start wondering whether the world would be different if they ceased to exist. Disappear, never to be seen or heard again. Not suicidal or anything, just ... existential.

I often joke that when I am no longer of this Earth, I will be driving the bus directly to Hell to assume my rightful place at Satan's left hand. Fire and brimstone do not scare me; I have lived through the Presidential administrations of two different Bushes, one of whom could not even successfully run a baseball team. Billy Joel and I are in agreement: "I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints; the sinners are much more fun." And I already work in some super-secret Ninth Circle of Hell, the one reserved for middle managers and the designer of the collapsible cubicle wall and the inventor of Muzak.

And it's not like I expect to go to Heaven, either, to join in those pinochle games in the clouds, where one great-grandmother can give me shit for not knowing how to cook a two-minute egg and the other can raise holy hell because I wantonly leave the house without applying lipstick. Much as I would love them, I just don't see myself strolling around inside the Pearly Gates having spirited (heh) debates with my father-in-law about the merits of the designated hitter while my grandfather plies me with shots of blackberry brandy for a change.

What I think I am most afraid of is that nothing comes after -- that I will spend an eternity in an infinite abyss of nothingness, of desolate loneliness, where I won't remember anything or anyone I once knew. No cheesesteaks. No Mexico. No "War Pigs" or Weird Al or "What A Wonderful World." No dragonflies or daffodils or Dutch-processed cocoa. My disembodied soul will also be disemboweled, directionless. Dark, and oh so very alone.

And what I know I actually fear, more than even that? Is that sometimes, on days like today, I will feel all those miles and all those aeons and all those metric tons of solitude when I am still here. This is what depression feels like to me.

Although I'm not entirely sure that one is necessary, I still feel the need to apologize to G for everything that happened yesterday.

You see, I had a migraine that ruined our whole day. It wasn't a bad one, as far as my migraines go, but it was bad enough. I kind of knew it was coming and maybe I should have given G more warning, but I've always been stubborn and I must admit to a certain amount of better living through denial. Perhaps it is better to say that I was suffering, at the beginning anyway, from a preponderance of hope.

We were both up late on Friday night, until after midnight, and I was up before 8:00 yesterday morning. Inadequate sleep is one of my triggers. To kill time until we were going to leave for the baseball game, I played a video game until noon. Doing puzzles on the computer for an extended period: another unwise move. Plus, it was hot and sticky after a few days of rather nice weather. Barometric changes sometimes set me off.

It didn't start to get bad until we were on our way to the game, though. Stopped at Wawa for lunch, and had a delicious roast beef ciabiatta melt sandwich. (If you're anywhere near a Wawa, try it! Fantastic.) But the juice from the tomatoes dripped on my shirt, and I was irrationally irritable about it. I practically started to cry when G wouldn't turn the car around to take me home and let me change. I wonder now if he wishes he had.

[ED.: To review: Lack of sleep? Check. Eyestrain? Check. Humidity? Check. Hunger? Check. Random everyday stress? Check. Oh, we can already tell that this is going to end well.]

When we got to the game, it was already too late. At that point my headache was already im full force, although I remained optimistic that I could battle through it. That's the thing about migraines, sometimes: they can blow over like afternoon thundershowers. Not often, but sometimes. If I give myself a wide enough berth, stay cool and calm, there is about a 50% chance that I can will myself to remain functional.

No such luck yesterday. By the time the game started, I was a goner. My migraines make me hypersensitive to stimuli of all kinds, particularly sound and light. Controlling one or the other helps -- for example, if I get a migraine at work, I can make it to the end of the day by putting in my earphones to block out background noise, or by making my cube as dark as possible and wearing sunglasses indoors. (Not entirely unlike suffering from a hangover that starts at 2:00 in the afternoon.)

But at a baseball game it is nearly impossible control your surroundings. Plus, we were in a different section than usual, so I had to deal with change, in addition to endless mindless droning chatter and the harsh glare coming off the field and the marked lack of air in the stands. And the smells! Food and people and the city and the grass. Everything. The absolute kicker was when people in the seats next to us showed up late. Manners especially matter to me when I am feeling ill, even though everyone knows that etiquette rules do not apply (1) at sporting events and (2) in Philadelphia.

I don't remember much after that yesterday, except that I needed to leave, and G knew it. I was miserable, short tempered, almost hysterical, trying to breathe without making a sound, practically gouging my own eyes out so I could have some darkness. We left before the end of the third inning, I think -- I don't even remember. We made one stop on the way to the car, so he could get water and I could throw up. Someone laughed at me, called me a stupid drunk, and I didn't have the strength to argue.

Sometimes when I get a migraine, I see "in color," where everything has a sort of a psychadelic haze around it. That happened yesterday on the ride home: objects were in supersharp focus, and I could see each individual leaf of every passing tree, and everything was outlined in shades of purple. I don't always see purple, but that tends to be the most frequent color I see. Maybe it's because that's my favorite color. Anyway, at that point I know all hope is lost. Once I start hallucinating, I know I need to put myself to bed and hope for nuclear war.

We left the game so early that we didn't hit any traffic, so we were home before the Penn State game started (which is impressive, since the Phillies game started at 3:55). I took two Advil, two Tylenol, and an Aleve, turned the air in the bedroom down as far as I thought I could stand it, and tucked myself in. I didn't take a Toradol for only one reason: I wasn't sure if I was doing being sick, and I hate to waste good medicine.

The timeline isn't entirely clear, but I'm pretty sure I was asleep by 6:30. I woke up once during the night, around 11:30, and went to the bathroom. G was still up then. As a preventive measure, I took a Benadryl at that point, so I knew I would sleep through the rest of the night. Probably I didn't need it, because I slept until 8:00. Almost 14 hours in a row. I feel better now, but still exhuasted. Maybe football will perk me up, or maybe I only feel temporarily better, like the eye of a hurricane is passing over my head.

[ED.: Bonus reference materials: Joan Didion's essay "In Bed." WARNING! Background on linked page might cause seizures. Or migraines.]

Not sure whether you noticed or not, what with the Earth continuing to revolve around the sun every day according to its usual schedule, but this week marks the publication of the final print edition of the self-proclaimed “world's only reliable newspaper,” Weekly World News.

WWN, the sister publication of that other giant in the world of hard news, National Enquirer, was nothing short of genius in the 28 years it was around. Don't believe me? When the shutdown of the paper was announced, every major U.S. News outlet – and I do mean every – covered the rag's demise. Perhaps the best tribute appeared in the Washington Post. Yes, that WaPo, home of Woodward and Bernstein and my secret alien lover, Gene Weingarten.

Of course, everybody covered Elvis's funeral, too, and we know what a scam that turned out to be. Everyone knows that The King didn't really die 30 years ago; he's been living in Kalamazoo. Or he was until 1993 anyway, when WWN reported that Elvis actually did finally die, and then later disclosed in a series of follow-up stories that prior reports were yet another elaborate hoax.

So who knows what the real deal is with Elvis these days – my guess is, he's living it up, smoking Cuban cigars and drinking mojitos and playing pinochle with Amelia Earhart and Eddie Clontz and P'lod, the alien with the Gene-Simmons-esque tongue that Hilary Clinton was having an affair with a few years back.

What will I do without WWN? Where will I get all my news about “the exploits of alien babies, animal-human hybrids and dead celebrities”? Wherever will I learn about the “shocking and almost always exclusive reports about extra-terrestrials, ghosts, scoundrels and scientific discoveries, such as the cure for lovesickness found on the walls of an ancient Mexican monument”? [cite] You just can't trust the pinko neo-con libertarian mainstream media to report these things accurately, without bias or baseless accusations!

I was wondering about this when I happened upon the truly uplifting story of Jonathan Lee Riches, distinguished resident Williamsburg Federal Correctional Facility in the great state of South Carolina. It is a true tale of passion, conviction, and mind over matter. It's about grit, and determination, and how Michael Vick owes him $63,000,000,000,000,000,000 [sic] – sixty-three (!) quintillion (!!) dollars, payable in gold and silver (!!!) – for “physically hurting [his] feelings and dashing [his] hopes.”

And as I read this story, I thought: Who needs to make shit up, when reality is weird enough to begin with?

I'll miss the adventures of BatBoy, though. And I do hope that someday he finds Osama bin Laden. Tell Eddie I said hi, won't you?

I spent the weekend at my grandparents', as I've been doing since approximately the dawn of time. My grandparents are great, and they have a pool. Comes in handy when it's 412° and 206% humidity. Almost everyone was there this weekend. It was just like old times. Except: it wasn't. Things are never as they were, are they? My grandparents are still the same as they ever were -- card players, joke tellers, gracious hosts who always have a supply of assorted Tastykakes at the ready -- but at the same time, I can see them changing before my eyes, and I don't like it one bit.

Took a walk around their yard on Saturday, and I spent a lot of time reminiscing about what used to be. The pop-up camper used to be right there, on the side of the house, filled with laughter and juice boxes and suntanned children playing spades and taking naps and pretending. I still remember Nana Shively's sheets: white, cotton blend, with a red rose print, soft from years of wear, always cool in the middle of a sweltering summer day, fragrant with the familiar perfume of mustiness and fabric softener.

Where the table is now, on the concrete patio, there has always been a table, but this weekend it was just Nana and Poppy, Kim and my mom and me, when it used to seem like God and everybody would be there every day. Nana Agnes, Nana Shively, Faye and Gladys and Sr. Patrick, Aunt Shirl and Pam. Aunt Bet and Tina and Stephanie and whatever kids we would bring along from swim team practice, some of them relatives, some of them friends, all of them family.

Now we drink from paper cups of ice water and cans of generic diet soda when there used to be a refrigerator filled with Coke in the garage. Colored aluminum cups and plastic Tupperware tumblers would hold ice water and Hi-C and Hawaiian Punch and sun tea and, now that I look back on it, probably mixed drinks made of whatever was around. Sometimes for dinner the grownups would drink wine, chablis I think, from a giant green bottle.

Towels and bathing suits would hang all over the fence in various states of air-drying. I recall the summer we all had "Where's the Beef?" beach towels. There was a constant rotation of gradually fading bright colors coming from the garage, reds and blues and pinks and yellows and stripes and abstract patterns. They would wave in the wind like so many flags of a comfortable kingdom. Now the only towels are mine, and they don't stay on the line for months at a time any more; as soon as I get dressed, someone folds them and sends them home like unpopular leftovers.

But it is the garden that has changed the most, so much it almost kills me to remember. There used to be roses everywhere, every color. My grandmother was so proud of her roses once. The bushes were always so properly kept, deadheaded regularly, watered and fertilized and loved so very much. Up in the yard, by the trees, were Poppy's tomato and strawberry plants, his wild rhubarb, his bright red gladiolus that seemed to grow as tall as the trees. Now there are hibiscus, beautiful but not the same, and a riot of cosmos and some other flower that nobody knows the name of, growing unkempt like weeds. Annuals, as though everyone suspects that next year there might be no one there to see them.

Maybe if I had children of my own things would seem different to me -- the cycle might continue, unbowed and unbroken, unchanged. But then again, maybe not. Perhaps all the years of wrangling us kids, of zinc oxide and iodine and baby oil, of ants on the deck and caterpillars and naps in the grass and swim meets and skinny dipping, perhaps all of it has finally caught up with my family. We're not, none of us, as young as we used to be. It is unreasonable to expect us to continue as though we are.

But I'll be damned if I don't miss the days when there was nothing more to life than diving for change at the bottom of the deep end and feasting on Schafer bologna and Country Time lemonade and fudgesicles. When did summer get so bittersweet, and not the fall?

Kurt Vonnegut, author of about a million books including one of my all-time favorites, Slaughterhouse-Five, has died. So it goes.

I wish I could say that I had actually met the man and known him well, but I didn't. However, I did get to dance the hokey-pokey with him once. But we'll get to that. And of course he has inspired and impacted me in ways that he will never know about. Or maybe he does. Who knows?

My first exposure to his work came sometime around the eighth grade, when one of my teachers – Mr. Grier, probably, who was exactly the sort of teacher that I believe Vonnegut would have approved of – gave my English class a pamphlet that Vonnegut had written for International Paper, titled "How To Write With Style."

It's funny that anyone would ever ask Vonnegut about how to write with "style," because while he most definitely had a voice and a perspective all his own, he did not write with the sort of elegance that one associates with greatness. He was aware of this; as he said in that essay, "I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench." So it goes.

Whether it was his intention or not, in that piece Vonnegut also gave voice to what would turn out to be my Secret of Life. To this day, I have another quote from that pamphlet in my mind at all times, and on the wall of my cube, where I can see it every time I turn around, in case I need a reminder about what is really important:

"I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have?"

Shakespeare said "To thine own self be true," and he meant it; so did Vonnegut. He wrote about what he knew and what he saw and what he loved and what he hated, a world and a life filtered through Indianapolis, a World War, the firebombing of Dresden, book bannings and book burnings, depression, two wives, seven children, and 69 years of smoking Pall Malls. So it goes.

All of these helped to create a body of work and a humanist sensibility that have profoundly affected me in ways even I am not fully prepared to deal with. Obviously I loved very much that in Vonnegut I had found someone who was older and more experienced than me, who also agreed with me on matters of some import. He was something of a socialist, and a member of the ACLU. So am I, in part because from reading Vonnegut's books I learned that it was OK, encouraged even, to question authority and trust no one, including yourself.

Vonnegut also gave me some of favorite lines to quote when things get out of control, weird, or downright stupid, including but not limited to "Welcome to the Monkey House." Of course, most of the people that I deal with have no idea what I really mean by that, because they've never read the story, but I strongly suspect that Vonnegut himself had some of the same problems from time to time. So it goes.

And none of this really explains why I'm walking around in a weird kind of funk today, mourning his passing. It's because I keep remembering a moment, from May of 1994, when I was a sophomore in college. Vonnegut was the commencement speaker at Syracuse that year, and I was on some committee, and I ended up at the graduation dinner-dance. Where I joined Vonnegut in doing the hokey-pokey.

If there's a heaven, and Vonnegut believes in it, that's where he is right now, no doubt. Smoking his Pall Malls and being unstuck in time and shooting the shit with Kilgore Trout and laying naked with Montana Wildhack and being his rumpled old Indianapolis self and doing the hokey-pokey.

Hopefully he'll save a spot on his dance card for me, someday. So it goes.

Most of the time, my family is really cool, as far as families go, but there are times when I want to get all Jan Brady on y'all's asses and be all, "I wish I were an only child!" Except that I have Jan Brady Syndrome (JBS) to the nth degree, and instead of wishing I were just an only child, I also sometimes wish that I didn't have parents, either, or aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents, either. (Which is really a weird thing to wish for, existentially speaking, because then how would I be here?) But all that aside, I have days -- like today -- where I sound just like that Calvin and Hobbes cartoon, to wit: "I wish I were dead ... no, I wish everyone else were dead."

Because, let's just face it: families suck, sometimes. Nobody else on Earth has the ability to bother, annoy, nag, bug, pester, torture you like members of your own family. They know all the secrets that nobody else knows. They know where all your buttons are, all your breaking points, and they know how to step over those lines in such a way that there is nothing you can do to stop them, even if you really wanted to, which usually you kind of don't. (Yes, I said it: in families, the difference between "good attention" and "bad attention" is so fine as to be negligible. We all already know this.)

Right now I am having a problem with a member of my family where, if I weren't such a goddamn chickenshit (and also so acutely aware of the consequences for everyone), I would call the cops and have their ass arrested so fast the flashing rooftop cruiser lights would cause seizures. He's not a particularly close member of the family, but he's family nonetheless, and it makes my blood boil to be forced to admit to this. What he has done does not affect me directly, but it impacts a lot of other people to whom I am related, and so the effects have rippled out to me.

I have so many questions that I already know will never be answered, but that someone, anyone, needs to ask ... How could you turn your back on your own father? How could you leave him in a hospital or nursing home to suffer like that? How could you not want closure, even if it's closure to an imperfect and unpleasant life? How could you not care about his feelings, even if it meant that you had to set aside yours? How could you not be willing to make that temporary sacrifice when everyone, even he, knew that he was dying? How could you not want to be there for the final moments in the life of someone who loved you, even when he didn't, in the best way he could, when you knew what was happening? How could you not be a son to your father at the one time in his life when he needed someone, anyone, but especially you to be a son to him? How could you let someone else have to bear that burden for you, you cowardly son of a bitch? And -- here's the $64,000 question, I guess -- how could you behave this way when you have children of your own?

These are not my questions to answer; I doubt very strongly that they are even mine to ask. But nobody else is going to ask them, so I might as well. I don't know how anyone could sleep at night, behaving as this particular relative did ... but then again, this relative is also an addict who is ruining the lives of all the people around him, including and especially his children. And, he knows it, but doesn't seem to care. It's his own personal cross to bear, I guess.

Except: it isn't. This bullshit? Affects. Us. All. It's hurt my mother, my father, my grandmother, my grandfather, my cousin. And so by extension? It hurts me too. It's not just your father whom you've turned your back on, you selfish rat bastard -- it's all of us. Every one of us who has to help clean up the mess and the chaos that you left behind in your wake because you are too selfish, immature, narcissistic, irresponsible, self-indulgent, and damaged to bother even paying attention to what you've done.

So I hurt, deep in my heart, and I'm not even the one who fucked up here. I am hurt because I have family, and I was raised right, and I love them and worry about them and want to do everything I can for them, simply because they are related to me. Because their blood is my blood, their people are my people, their sorrows are my sorrows, their sins are my sins.

And I don't want to be punished for something I would never dream of doing, you obnoxious, arrogant fuck. It's not right, and it's not fair, and I would never do that to you. I don't like the way your behavior has made others feel, and tangentally how it has made me feel, and the easiest way to protect myself from this kind of pain is to be alone. All alone, with no one close enough to hurt, and no one close enough to hurt me. I wish I were dead ... no, I wish everyone else were dead.

No, actually: Alan, I wish YOU were dead.