Hello, all!
For those of you in the Philadelphia/tristate area, I will be performing tomorrow night at “The Fire” on West Girard. If you’re in the area, stop by after 9 pm to see the show.
I will be performing not one but TWO new songs from my upcoming EP! Machine and Radio Silence!!!!
Be prepared for a night of fun! What’s better than a bar? A bar with music!
Julia Mae
“I’m not creative, like you,” she said. “I’m an editor. I guide things. I don’t pump things out quickly like you or Karyn, but I do what I can.”
I ponder the differences between what the ignorant perceive as vanity, and the wise perceive as knowing what you are good at.
Which I am guilty of is the real question.
~*~
Based on a real conversation, and Lance’s blog mention of “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon. (One of my favorite inspirations.)
More to follow soon.
“A hurricane of laughter like a song
Your voice like a blue storm in my head.
You whispered,
(Kissed my soul)
I am a pebble in your river.”
~*~
Instead of cleaning, this happened.
Now back to scrubbing with bleach…
“In our first apartment, we watched the rain. I held him when he was sick.”
She took his black peacoat last. “I remember, and he does, too.”
I, mistress, fought the rebellion, but lost the war.
~*~
36 word challenge for Week 60
Of Trifextra was a fun morning for me. I had to use three words: rain, remember, rebellion, to tell a compelling tale in 36 words exactly.
I like it when affair stories come out on the OTHER side. Of course I’d rather not have them happen at all but we authors tend to take some sort of sick sadistic pleasure in making our characters suffer. I’m sure there’s a psychological analysis in there somewhere.
My first full-length short story, a scfi tale relevant to today entitled “The Newcomers”, is out to two magazine contests. I hope to win both, as one was an abridged audio version for The Missouri Review’s annual Prose Audio contest and one was for the Ohio Review’s fiction contest.
Wish me luck! I hear back in April so I will let everyone know.
Also back in the studio this week for some serious work. Serious. Like traditional, old school overnight musician work. It’s going to be awesome!
“I’m up all night in the studio/and you’re up early on your ranch/you’ll be brushing out a brood Mare’s tale/while the sun is ascending and I’ll just be/getting home from my reel to reel/there’s no comprehending…”
~Joni Mitchell, “Coyote”
Love you all, dear readers, and glad to be back.
~ Julia Mae
I used to think that children were like butterflies. They’d stay inside a cocoon you would shelter and watch until they would finally break free. You’d catch a glimpse of them floating by as young adults and then they would vanish into their own little world. Mysterious. Hard to fathom.
But as a teacher I came to understand children were not always sweet little things.
I found I had to wrap myself and my heart up tight with an Ace bandage in order to maintain control over my students. Had to feign cheerfulness or sternness as required. There wasn’t room for too much getting close. And yet somehow the children seemed to creep in anyway.
There was one I felt an affinity with, an odd thirteen year old that started with me when she was only eleven. I couldn’t say why, but she had become a sort of rock in my life. A reliable part every Tuesday evening, and she would make me laugh with her silly stories and wild opinions.
This week, she came into the room in tears.
“Whoa, whoa, what happened?” I asked, thinking it was just another fight with her mother.
She told me.
A local boy had just committed suicide over the weekend. He was happy. He was popular. “Everyone liked him,” my student said, scuffing her neon sneakers on the floor of the studio. “He was in high school but we were all still friends with him. A good friend of mine, she’s kinda overweight and gets bullied a lot. She says she’s feeling suicidal too.”
“What?” my hands slammed on the piano keys, startling her. It seemed out of the blue.
“We go to talk to the counselor and stuff. But she’s out this week. My friend said that the boy – Chris was his name – he was the only one that ever told her she was beautiful everyday. She doesn’t know what she’ll do without him.”
I started trembling.
“Okay, we can’t let this go,” I said in a stronger voice than I felt. “Sweetie, you need to take her to get help. Do you talk to her?”
She nodded.
“Will you talk to her tonight?”
She nodded again.
“You tell her from me: I used to be suicidal too. When I was her age, actually. But I got help, and I am much better for it now. Often it’s a mental imbalance – a hormonal imbalance. Did you know that?”
She shook her head, her eyes filling with tears again.
“Okay, well, sometimes a doctor will put you on herbal medication or harder medication and it straightens you out. I’m not saying that will happen to your friend but it might. She needs to go to therapy so they can talk about changing the way she thinks. Changing her thoughts from negative ones to positive ones. That’s what the therapy does. But you can’t let this go. This is important – her telling you that was her cry for help.”
I didn’t want to see another incident, I thought. Not another suicide so close to three accidental deaths the week before at the same school. I would not let this happen.
My student piped up. “At lunch today this random girl we didn’t even know said something about her dad and about maybe her not eating so much.”
“Geez… did you punch her?”
She laughed and I held a hand out. “I don’t advocate violence, but seriously, what did you do?”
“Me and my other friends went over to her table and said, ‘Hey, why the heck would you say that to her? Maybe you shouldn’t eat so much!” That was more like my strong student.
“Yeah, those bullies? That girl? You tell your friend they are just doing it for power. They just look for a weak link in the system. If it wasn’t her, it would be someone else.”
“Yeah, I told her even if she just like, yells in their faces or something, but doesn’t cry and take them seriously, that was fine.”
“Good.” I wrote down a number on paper and folded it up very small. I held it out to my student.
“You tell her,” I said as she clutched that piece of paper like a lifeline, “you tell your friend that her place in the world is so important that a complete stranger is willing to talk to her if she needs the help. You tell her.”
“I will,” my student said.
In those two words, she looked every bit the fragile thirteen year old she was.
I gave her a hug and sent her home, feeling that maybe I went too far, but hoping her friend would get help.
I saw myself as a thirteen year old, lonely and begging for help. Maybe that’s what had made me react so emotionally. I saw myself in that girl and wanted to stop her from having to go through all the bad things that I experienced in life.
I felt terrible. I cried and tossed and turned all night.
I had never been thrown into such a serious situation before. I had never dealt with it. What would another teacher do? What would anyone do? In this day and age, something as simple as offering your help could be interpreted in negative and damaging ways.
What a shame this world had come to that.
I looked to my family for advice and my cousin told me I had gone too far, that I should have just told her to get help and that was all. I overstepped my bounds, she said.
I didn’t know if I had. I fretted about that. I fretted about the girl. Was she all right? Was my student handling things okay?
The next day, mid lessons as I sat distracted with a piano student, her mother stopped by the studio. I went out to talk to her in a free moment.
“Did she talk to you?” I asked her. She said her daughter hadn’t. She was there for another reason. I sat her down and explained everything that happened.
“Did I go to far?” I asked. “Is it okay I said all the things I did?”
“You know her really well,” her mother said. “She’s tough.”
“Because I know going into detail about those things… I just thought to myself: another adult would just say: go get your friend help, and wouldn’t explain why. I wanted her to know why.”
“And you absolutely did the right thing. Thank you. I really appreciate what you did for my daughter,” she told me. “Her friend is going to get help, I promise you.”
“I just did what I felt was right.”
“And you were.”
That night I sat writing on my computer and my mother came in, knocking on the door. “You know,” she said, “you might have saved a little girl’s life.”
“Maybe I did,” I said. “Even if she isn’t suicidal, it’s a cry for help for something. I just did what I had to.”
I wondered, thinking to past heroes in history, if this is how they felt. Satisfied they did a good job, but not really feeling they did anything special. I hadn’t. I hadn’t. I just didn’t want to see a little girl hurt.
Such gossamer threads hold our lives together. Fragile, like a butterfly’s wing. We don’t see how they connect or help until one of them breaks and we all fall.
If we watch one another for the signs, maybe we can prevent that.
I cried again and my mother hugged me like I was just a child myself.
“You’re a good person,” my mother whispered. “That’s why you care so much.”
She was right.
Maybe caring was all it took to make the difference.
The Ace bandage around my heart had started to unravel, but I found that I didn’t mind.
~*~
So this is entirely nonfiction. This just happened.
This was written for Write at the Merge 3, which gave the prompt of the two words: “gossamer” and “Affinity”. And also, for the Scriptic prompt exchange this week, Eric Storch gave me this prompt: The Ace bandage had become unraveled, but I didn’t mind.
I gave Andrea this prompt: The eyes are not the windows of the soul, they are the doors. Beware what may enter them. (A quote from “Doctor Who” but please don’t feel you need to write about him. Just a little inspiration!)
But in all seriousness:
If you notice anyone you love acting strangely, suddenly giving away old things, leaving a job, breaking up with or divorcing a significant other without much warning, keep an eye on them. Talk to them. Find out why they are doing these things on a whim.
The boy who committed suicide this past week was a popular child, and no one suspected anything was wrong. However, he did end a long relationship the week before he died, and he took the time to write letters to all the people he loved, (which definitely took planning,) which were found upon his death.
I believe that education about mental illness and depression are key to preventing teen death. I didn’t learn specifics about these things until high school, but I had already felt depressed and suicidal at the age of 13. It was only because a friend told on me to my parents that I am alive today.
People will tell you that the world is a much more progressive place than it used to be, that mental illness is no longer a stigma.
This is a lie.
I have faced bullying, misunderstandings, and I am fairly certain (but unfortunately have no proof) that the real reason my last job ended suddenly was because my boss found out I was seeing a therapist. While I only have a very mild case of depression that is now under control thanks to therapy, changing the way I think and a daily regimen of St. John’s Wort, there are hundreds of others afraid to get the treatment they need because they are scared what people will think of them.
We need to start educating our children younger, and not wait for a young life to snuff itself out before having that serious talk. By then, it’s too late. The damage is done.
I fully advocate teaching children about these things from a young age. Make them see that mental illness is not a sign of a bad person. Good people can have major problems. And some come out the other side – mostly – fine. I advocate a community where students, teachers, friends and families all communicate with one another. If I had not reached out to my student’s mother as well as my student, perhaps nothing would have changed. But I felt open enough to approach her anyway and do the right thing.
Say what you will. I am not a mental health professional. I would never say I could counsel a child. But I have been through the experience myself and I know what that little girl now faces.
I wasn’t sure at first if I should have said all I did to my student.
Now? I know I made the right choice.
Would you?
~jms
The diner was the place to be.
Rose always thought so.
“Here’s your coffee and the cream,” the waitress said.
(Cindy, the computer of Rose’s brain ticked: had two kids and a husband in jail. But Cindy was convinced he hadn’t done the crime he was incarcerated for.).
She loved the way the waitresses all knew her. And she knew them. She loved the solid feel of the table. The clink of the metal spoon as it tapped the glass rim of her mug. The smells. The people.
“This is early morning perfection, Cindy,” she told her waitress.
Cindy leaned on her hip. Her lipstick was one shade too bright for her skin tone and Rose found it terribly distracting.
“This is not perfection,” Cindy said. “You’ve been a writer too long. It’s going to your head.”
“I’m serious! No friends bother me with endless text messages. No mother calls with redundant questions about how the new dishwasher works. Perfection.”
Cindy sighed and went back to the kitchen.
Cindy didn’t understand. Rose would snuggle with her fiancee until the last possible minute when he left for work. Then, she was left to her own devices which meant, in simple terms, that she was free to write and read and be.
Cindy came back with another regular waitress in tow.
(Pat, the brain computer clicked.)
“This is an intervention,” Pat said. The rest of the diner stared. It was only two old ladies and some construction workers but Rose felt herself blush. “This is it, Rose! You need to stop coming here!”
“What?” Rose choked on her toast. “What are you guys talking about?”
“You! You’re a writer,” Cindy said. “You can’t come to the same diner every day and expect to write good things. You’ll write about the diner and nothing else!”
“That’s not true!” Rose lowered her voice. “Please. It’s the one place I can get away from it all.”
“It’s not,” Pat said. “It’s for your own good. We will ban you for a week. “
Cindy folded her arms. “The boys won’t let you in, they already know.”
Pat stepped closer. “You are going to write something new. And then you can come back.”
“This is ridiculous!” Rose said.
“This is tough love,” said Cindy.
They stuck to it. 8 am the next morning, Rose approached the door. But one of the kitchen boys was there.
“Sorry, Miss Rose, but orders from the boss. You can’t come in.”
“Lee is in on this too?” Rose threw her arms up in the air. “You know you’re the only diner in this area, right?”
“Too bad!” His jacket creaked as he tightened his crossed arms. “Find somewhere else.”
Left with no choice, she went to the Starbucks next door out of spite and glared at him the whole way down the sidewalk.
The Starbucks was stuffy and crowded and she balked at the state of the floor. She crammed herself between a businessman and a gaggle of preteens she was shocked to see awake.
“Don’t you have school?” She asked them.
“Holiday,” one of them quipped before going back to gushing over Justin Bieber or Taylor Swift or whatever it was those teens did.
She wrote nothing worthwhile that day.
Wednesday she tried again.
“Really,” a different kitchen boy said, “you’ve got to get the hint. No diner!”
She got a Wawa coffee and a wrapped sausage biscuit and sat by the lakeside.
A goose came up to her in a completely un-wild fashion and nipped at her jacket until she gave it a piece of her biscuit.
Then, honking, they all came, and thus ended the lakeside adventure. An old man sitting on a bench across the lake laughed her to her car.
Thursday she avoided the diner and went to the lake again, this time armed with an umbrella. It wasn’t raining, but she opened and closed the umbrella at the geese until they left her alone.
The man across the lake laughed and laughed. He was back again.
She wrote for a while and looked up when her hands started cramping. The man was still there.
Rose walked around the lake’s edge until she reached the bench. “Hello,” she said.
“Hello.” He smiled at her. “You seem to have made quite an impression on our geese.”
“Yes,” Rose laughed. “Your geese?”
“Well, the lake’s.” The man waved a hand over his shoulder. “That’s my house in the woods over there.”
She peered between the trees. “You mean that’s your house?” She had passed the green mansion many times and had always wondered who lived there.
“That’s the one.”
“You always light it up for Christmas time! I drive past the lake just to see it.”
“Oh, my sons did that.” He laughed. “But I’m afraid those days are coming to an end.”
“Why?”
“My wife passed away a few months ago. I’m afraid my sons aren’t speaking to me at the moment. Matter of the will.”
“I’m sorry.” Rose hated to see families torn apart. “Have you spoken with them?”
He shuffled his feet in the dirt. “Children need time to process things. They’ll come around.”
“You seem sure.”
He chuckled. “I’ve seen quite a bit of life. Things happen for a reason, and people do change. But families are like elastic. They have a way of snapping back. Just some of the facts of life.”
These words resonated so with Rose they sat in silence by the lakeside for a long time.
When she returned to her car, she began to write.
A week later, she passed the diner on the way to the bank.
Cindy poked her head out of the front door. “Hey! Rose! You can come back now!”
Rose smiled at her. “Sorry. I have a date at the lake.”
“But don’t you have a fiancée?”
“Not that sort of a date. A writing date.” Rose waved, and walked away from the diner.
~*~
As writers, we get so stuck on places sometimes that it kills our creativity.
I wish I had people like Cindy and Pat looking out for me like that. The green mansion on the lake is real, although the man is fiction. I still wonder who lives there.
The diner in question is loosely based on the best diner in Bucks County PA: Mil-Lee’s. If you visit, you must go. Delicious food. Maybe you’ll even see the lake on the way. 
Thanks for reading, as always.
~jms
1. Write at least 1 challenge blog entry a week.
2. To lose 20 pounds and an additional 10 next year, the goal being my college weight. (But I’ll look damn good after 10 pounds because I know my body)
3. To appreciate those around me more.
4. To get a full time job that I enjoy and that challenges me.
5. To eat more fruit, vegetables, legumes and whole grains and to drink more water. (Earth made versus man made foods. No more chips or soda.). Drink more skim cappuccinos instead of lattes and make sure I’m only eating 1 “dessert” a day.
6. Send my newly edited manuscript back to the editor @kgwaite for one more check then on to the agents once more!
7. To exercise 30 minutes a day: walk 4 miles daily or do 20 minutes of full body strength training (like Pilates or slow controlled martial arts or swimming) or dance for 30 minutes every day. My herniated disc is going to make this goal hard but I will do it!
8. To get in touch with all old friends and enemies, even if its just once this year, just to say hi and get rid of old grudges that haunt me.
9. Take my anxiety meds every day when I am supposed to so I don’t have random panic attacks or depressive episodes. This one is a must.
10. Read a book a month.
11. Start taking voice lessons again so I am always in tip top shape.
12. Finish my album and start performing live again with merchandise in hand at last!
13. To love.
~jms
What are yours? Feel free to comment below.
Past and Pending
~*~
I took the river road until I reached the end
I wrote those words into my song “Lullaby”, but I had never actually taken River Road all the way up. When Meagan called me looking for an adventure, I thought about the words again.
“Let’s go as far North as we can today,” I said.
“We could make Easton and back before sunset,” she said.
My best friend for about thirteen years, Meg was the one with wanderlust. It was the bug she had given me: a virus I didn’t mind catching. Now I had the desire to get out and leave, find new paths and journeys. This was the gift of Meagan’s friendship.
“Okay. Let’s go.”
The air was cold that day. We were glad to be in a car as we drove past the Delaware river and half-frozen lakes. There were waterfalls as we passed rocky hillsides. Actual waterfalls. I hadn’t seen the like since Colorado and stared out the window in awe. It was truly magical.
We talked about travel, geography and the Jersey Devil while munching on sourdough pretzels.
“Sometimes,” she told me as she turned the wheel, “while driving through the Barrens, I used to look for the Devil. Watching for shadows against the stars. Because those are the woods where Legends could still be alive.”
This was our friendship. Topics meandering and lovely all the while. We were poets and writers and liked to lose ourselves in “lines dissecting love” and life and other things.
The Shins’ Past and Pending was on right after a John Doyle reel. Eclectic music, but it fit our personalities. I didn’t listen to the words, but the sound made me think of all our road trips together. And while we’ve never taken a really long one, they are all memorable.
Once, we ended up at Seaside Heights during a cold spell in March, walking down the deserted boardwalk. You never know with us.
This trip, I got a sandwich from a supermarket deli, and the hunger trumped the odd taste of the food. “You never know,” she said, eyeing my sandwich dubiously. “These places the food could go either way.”
We were off again down the road, sometimes listening to music in silence, which we have always been wont to do.
I missed her when she was away at grad school. She is like family to me, the big sister I’ve never had.
As icicles dripped off of cliffs of “hills-not-mountains” around us, I wished.
“I wish it could always be like this,” I whispered to myself. I hope the years and miles never change our camaraderie.
We round a stone wall, laughing at a strange mural as we enter Easton and prepare to journey homeward.
the strange mural of Easton. Canal Poseidon? Triton? We could not figure it out.
Days like this precious moment of friendship are mile markers on the path of my memory. And in the dark times, I travel them over and over again.
Days like this, past and pending, are all that matter.
~*~
Write on Edge has begun a new and fancy challenge. This time, it was 500 words or less, the song Past and Pending by The Shins, and the word: “WISH”. I immediately wanted to write for it. It took me some time to be inspired because I couldn’t decide if I wanted to take the song at face value or not.
My final decision on it was what you just read.
Meagan is truly my best friend. She has a wonderful poetry blog, which I encourage you to visit.
I’ve been driving myself nuts all morning trying to find the term one of the ancient writers used for the form of love – I want to say either Socrates or Plato spoke of this form of platonic/friendship love – between two members of the same sex and said it was completely different from the love shared between a man and a woman.
This love was not romantic or sexual, but it was the strongest form of love, that only true friends could share, and it was rare. If anyone can remember the name of this, or what it’s called, I would appreciate you leaving a comment. I Google searched and checked my college textbooks but had no luck finding the term!!
Anyway, the mysterious missing word for this love was going to be the title, but instead it became Past and Pending, haha
Thanks, as always, for reading.
jms
I am on the edge.
2012 is about thirty seconds from being over, and 2013 is coming at me fast.
I am standing on the back porch of my parent’s house, watching someone else’s firework. Bright flashes of multicolored lights that I barely see as I dwell in my own head.
I am wondering: why do we sever ourselves from the past but then dwell on it?
Why can’t we forget?
Old ghosts seem to be coming back to haunt me tonight.
Someone starts singing Auld Lang Syne drunkenly across the street.
I haven’t taken my medication… I don’t know if that’s why I can’t stop obsessing, or if I’m just melancholy.
It’s not the way I want to start the new year. I don’t want to be here. I was supposed to be in downtown Philadelphia with some friends. But a friend got sick and the party was cancelled too late to make other plans. And now…
Now I watch the false golden starlight of fireworks under a cloudy sky.
Maybe that’s why this night has felt rough, my mind recalling new years from before and how shitty they seemed in hindsight. The parts not with my friends. The parts with other men, other places. The years in school, miserable, feeling so alone.
God, I hated that feeling. I shiver.
At least you’re not spending it over a toilet, I remind myself. Those years are long gone.
My mother counts down out loud beside me.
The arms of my lover feel strong as they come around me. He shelters me from the cold of the night.
“Why didn’t you wear your jacket outside?” he asks me as he nuzzles my hair. “You don’t want to get sick again.”
I don’t want to get sick again, I think. I want to be well.
So be well, I tell myself. You idiot.
“HAPPY NEW YEAR!” My mother screeches, dancing around on the balls of her feet. She blows the noisemaker retrieved from storage.
His arms vanish as he dials his own mother, ever a sweetheart, ever thinking of others.
Well, I don’t need his arms to feel secure.
I’ll wrap myself up in the blanket of this night and remind myself that it’s a new year.
I take a deep breath and join my mom, whooping at my neighbors.
I’m tired of being on the edge of anger, of hate, of pain. This guilty post-school graduation misery, feeling trapped and sad.
This year, it’s going to be different.
He rejoins me, giving me a passionate midnight-and-two-minute kiss. Then he stands beside me, laughing at my mother’s antics as she dances in her slippers, in the snow.
The three of us welcome 2013 as illegal fireworks light the sky above us and I resolve to put the past where it belongs:
in the past.
Happy New Year.
~*~
For the Scriptic prompt exchange this week, Michael gave me this prompt: I’m on the edge.
I gave David Wiley at http://scholarlyscribe.wordpress.com this prompt: A short drama set in a locale that is exotic to you.
I was experimenting with a new tense today, which I’m not sure I like, but I tried, anyway.
This New Year’s was not happy for me at first. While the above account was a bit fictionalized, it was based on some reality. I have been spending a while feeling melancholy and miserable. I hated my college career so much (the experience, not the friends I made) that I sort of forgot the good things I learned from it. It’s been two freakin’ years. It’s time I get over it and move on. I don’t know why my OCD decided to dwell on that the other night, but it did. But a little before midnight, I sort of just stopped myself and gave into the celebratory spirit.
So I hope this year you all are happy. I wish you the promise of love, the joy of the friends around you, and all the best things in the world. Happy 2013, dear readers.
love,
jms
Nate and I on my actual New Year’s Eve.
Resolutions and a Write on Edge challenge to follow!
Three mini Christmas trees were staked to a fence outside of a discount Mattress World.
“What, are they trying to warn off the other trees?” I asked from the back of the car. “Run! Run while you still can?” I laughed maniacally.
It was Christmas Eve 2012.
The strangeness had only just begun.
We arrived at the tiny, cramped rowhome that is my grandparents’ house. It was lovingly decorated and lit, my mentally retarded aunt successfully having taped all ornaments and stockings to the stair banister.
The tree had ornaments too, of course.
“You’re drooling all over your Christmas dress, honey,” my cousin told her nine month old baby. It’s all right. There were a plethora of doting aunts, uncles, and great aunts to assist with the bib.
Which the baby ripped off immediately as she gave us a look like: really? really, guys?
My aunt Monique brought her boyfriend-of-sorts. Friend. Boyfriend. Oh hell, no one really cared. He’s a fun guy around the dinner table that gets our sense of humor. And he also taught us the Stick game.
“This is the year of honesty,” my aunt raised her hands in the air. “This is the year I speak my mind.”
“Was every year before this the year of the liar?” My cousin mock whispers across the table.
“Julia, what did you do to your hair?” My aunt Monique asked suddenly.
“What?”
She held a hand up sideways in the air between us. “I can’t figure it out. If I look at you from this way, neck up, the hair is fine. If I look at you neck down, the dress is fine. But red hair and a teal dress? It looks terrible.”
A stocking plopped to the floor, its Scotch Taped existence on its last leg.
The table erupted into laughter, including me. “Oh, this is the year of honesty, huh?” I managed.
“The year she stops being nice,” my cousin said through tears of laughter.
It became the running joke of the night, other partygoers lifting their hand up periodically as they said: “you look great neck up but the rest is terrible.”
My mom replaced the stocking on the banister, securing the Scotch Tape once more.
My father, the overprotective sweetheart that he is, took me aside and said: “honey, I want you to know that you don’t have to stop going to the salon and cut your own hair to save money. I will pay for it if you want.”
“Do I look that bad??” I shrieked to the room.
Well, at least my boyfriend responded appropriately with a text of “you look beautiful.”
Christmas Eve as usual, as my cousin called from Florida and we shouted replies across the table.
“It’s 75 degrees here today,” she said over speakerphone.
“It’s snowing here, does that make you feel bad?” My mom shouted back.
“Haha,” she said, which I read to mean “no.”
Gifts were exchanged. My Babci retrieved an old metal lunch tray which she said was for the baby. It was Strawberry Shortcake, and if you can remember what that is, then good.
“It was mine as a baby!” My mom said.
My cousins interjected in between raucous laughter.
“It’s rusty!”
“Throw it away!”
“It was mine too!” My aunt replied, banging her fork on the table. “I want it!” She is just doing it to rile up my grandmother, which works.
“I didn’t get a gift for the baby! It’s for the baby!” My Babci shouted.
The baby in question banged her fists on the metal surface, giggling as she drummed away.
“That’s right!” I called, “little musician, yeah!” I was overly excited about this.
“It’ll be great until she closes her fingers in the tray accidentally,” my eldest cousin said, “which is why they stopped making metal lunch trays.”
My Babci gave all of my aunts her famous cherry Bon Bon recipe. I can’t make you understand how valuable this recipe is to our family. Every big event had these confections. And last night we talked of having a bake off at last.
“I’ve been wanting this for years!” My aunt Carol caressed her copy.
My aunt Monique flipped out upon not receiving one.
“You don’t bake,” we tell her.
“But I should always get one! Mom has always been fair! She always gives us everything exactly the same!”
My Babci wordlessly hands her a copy.
“See? I’m happy now,” Monique said, sitting back in her chair.
“I did give you the cherries with stems,” my Babci pointed out, “since you’ll use it for cocktails and not baking.”
“Hang on,” my eldest cousin shook his head, “you guys have been asking for this recipe for years and you just now get it for Christmas? She jipped you out a legit gift! She just photocopied the recipe and put it in a bag!”
“Not only that,” I told my cousin, “but she says she didn’t include the little tweaks she made over the years.”
“What?? Or brandy,” my cousin said. “See? Not even the brandy for the recipe.”
“Hey yeah,” my aunt Carol said, “where’s the brandy?”
My aunt Monique’s boyfriend was reading the recipe aloud. “1/2 cup brandy,”
“No,” my Babci said, “more like a cup. I just, you know,” she tilted her hand like it held a tipping bottle.
“You drink the bottle?” I joked.
“Let sit for a few hours,” the boyfriend said.
“She means sit with the bottle,” Carol laughed.
“Ohhh, that explains it!” I said.
“I’m going to let my cherries soak for a week,” aunt Carol grinned, “Soaked in brandy!”
“Let the cook off begin!”
I will keep you, dear readers, apprised of that situation as it continues.
The evening wound down, my eldest cousin and I sipping Alize out of tiny Christmas mugs while we talked of his time with the Coast Guard in Kuwait.
“Crazy times,” he said, shaking his head. “Crazy.”
There and here, apparently.
The stocking fell again.
We didn’t put it back up.
I wish you all a Merry Christmas, and I hope you all have found stories and excitement of your own.
More stories to follow as they happen and by god, they will happen! My family is nuts and always provides!
~jms
