The House I Grew Up In

I grew up in a cul-de-sac, a phrase that I learned in 5th grade meant " a sack of coal". The cul-de-sac was inhabited by elderly people: Mr. Lewis with his garden of cactus, Mr. Gordon who ran his finger across bird crap on his car, tasted it, and then said "yep, it's shit", the Voskamps with the brick wall where the neighborhood kids played hide-go-seek behind, and the Skandrups who had the best lawn to play "smear the queer" on.
    The house I grew up in was a modest Ranch House, blue and white, with a juniper bush hedge and a palm tree on the easement just above the house to the East. It was a 3 bedroom house, 1.5 baths. My parents had a waterbed, queen size, where I watched The Monkees, The Last Unicorn and The Ewok movie while riding the ebb tide out in a laundry basket. Their bathroom had a tiled floor and a shower where my mother kept open buckets to catch excess water to hydrate her gardens.
    My brother's room had an overhead fan that he broke the lights out of when he tossed a softball up into it. He also had mirror closet doors that, when he was away at school, I would practice En Vogue's "Never Gonna Get It" with his electric guitar. When I sleep walked I would wake up underneath his desk.
    My bedroom faced out onto the street with a large shrub directly outside the window. The screen of the window was screwed in, something I learned when I tried to run away to live with the wolves. My closet doors were mirrors also; my parents installed them after showing us Poltergeist II (where the ghosts come out of mirrors to steal the children), this after showing us the Poseidon Adventure just before we went on a three week cruise.
    More later, if I'm not too messed up by traumatic childhood memories to continue

Loss

  Yesterday the baby and I hung out with David  "Mother Lode Progressives" Roddy ; we took him to the Pine Grove farmer's market where we listened to the music and bought salad and Habanero Jelly and lavender and then geocached in the next-door cemetery, because nothing says "fresh organic produce" like a graveyard looming over the fruit stand.
     We found the cache at the grave of a little girl killed in 1868 by a gun trap, then we walked around the cemetery while the baby played hoppity hop on the graves and tried to dip his hands and feet into the puddles of stagnant water where loved ones, long dead, are supposed to put fresh flowers. We joked about the names of the dead and discussed where or how we would want to be laid to rest forever.
    Later that night I received an e-mail from someone I love and admire that her father had died.
  Today I brought her a plant and a card and tried not to cry in front of her.
   My second year of college my best friend and I went to a Mormon Dance where I was promptly asked to leave for smoking in the parking lot. My best friend and I drove to the beach and stood in the parking lot staring at the stars, I said "hey, there's Venus, and there's Mars!" and my best friend looked up to the sky, smiled and said "oh, Hello Dad!"
  The next morning I woke up and thought to ask my best friend to have breakfast with me, instead he knocked on my door and told me that his father had died that morning. He had to leave.
    Two years later my best friend and I and his girlfriend held a seance on the spot where his father had died and I now and always will believe in ghosts.
    My best friend and I are no-longer best friends, in fact when we do see each other (which is very rare since he lives in Columbia) it is terse as our lives have forked in drastically different directions: I am married to the love of my life and have a gorgeous child and now have almost nothing in common with him, which needless to say makes conversation difficult "Hey, I haven't seen you in three years, yeah I have a baby and a different life where I'm actually responsible" him: "I've been traveling around the world and have met tons of interesting people and I have no sense of actual commitment" Me: "so, yeaahhhhh,"

Invetory

 What I Have on my Bookshelf Right Now (Besides books)
   as inspired by Naiobe.

• A bottle holding flamingo, spotted owl, goshawk and chicken feathers
• An ostrich egg
• A box painted with stars holding the dried bud of every rose I have ever received. 
• Sculpture of a Horned Lizard mad from glass and burned horse hair
• New-world monkey skull
• several bottles dug up from out friend's yard
• a paper crane
• 2 woven paper matts
• a box in the style of an "oriental" filled with paper
• a bluebird ornament Hman gave me the day the baby was born
• a stack of trivial pursuit question cards
• another box, made of wood in the shape of yin-yang
• a wooden and cloth fan
• a copy of the DVD Billy Jack

Dark Irish