I wanted a fairy tale reunion with M. I think we both missed each other. We got a massive fight, instead. Probably, it will all be cool. I’m counting on it all being cool. But, one thing I can’t do when I’m upset is sleep. So, thank god for all the laborers who are giving me the long weekend to try to relax.

Meanwhile, there have been some notes of high-ness. Some good among the bad. Some fairy tale moments among the real world.

For example, I spent Friday desperately trying not to channel Pat. I went to work in an absolute Pat frame of mind. Nervous, expectant, worried. Why? Because whilst I was out of town, M. had the notion to schedule a cleaning service to come in and, well, clean.

It’s a fair concept and compromise to our both have full-time jobs and full, time-consuming interests like writing (of which I have done little) and running (which I think he has done and I never will) and, well, living things that are far fucking more interesting than cleaning one’s living space. I am eager to have the weight off of my domesticity failures with the simpler act of check writing.

But, wholey moley, talk about flashbacks. Some time in the 70s, when Pat recognized the Supermom phenom was bullshit and even if it wasn’t, it wasn’t for her, in between whipping up meals from Peg Bracken’s I Hate to Cook Cookbook, teaching full-time and raising five children, Pat briefly hired what was then called a “cleaning lady.” An individual, a local woman, probably a personal referral, before the service industries blossomed with a thousand services. (I loves me the service economy.)

The anxiety was huge, though. A stranger coming into your home and cleaning your dark corners and dusting your skeletons. And, the failure, the symbolic, unrealistic, stank of inadequacy, because in days that last only 24 hours and the weeks of a mere 7 units, you, the woman, the mother (in Pat’s case) are neglecting the properness of a home, the fortress of your family’s castle.

Will the stranger judge you and your dingy grays?

For me, though, in a new millenium, I was determined to let my true colors fly and not clean the house for the cleaning staff. The prior to arrival ritual of cleaning before the cleaning stranger came was, somehow, coded into my mother’s DNA. I fought it. I fought it hard. (Although, I did load and run the dishwasher (with M.’s dishes from while I was gone mind you) before fleeing our apartment for a day’s paycheck earning.)

The interesting thing is I work with a mix of people from a mix of places with a mix of values and experiences. The vibe I got there when I admitted my anxious eagerness to see my transformed home that evening was a resounding “Hell ya.” If you can write a check, employ someone, earn some time, limit stress it’s a contribution to society well worth the investment.

Maybe it’s because there’s a fair chunk of folks who work with and who have lived in other countries where your need for service is a job and opportunity for someone else.

But, yeah, hell ya, I’s don’t want to scrub and vaccuum and sanitize. And, the Maid Brigade, the company M. found, left mints on the counter. My mom’s cleaning lady never did that.

Good chance I’m hellward bound after today, when the afterlife calls. Or the Day of Judgment. Some bad kind of god day, anyway.

You see, I was trying to get the one person at work who I know might be doing the whole mass thing and celebrating the Easter weekend to start a movement and take Good Friday off. Since she could head to an evening mass, and she knows I ain’t what you’d call devout or maybe a “believer,” I couldn’t get the movement going.

There’re a couple of kickers in my head about the whole exchange. The first is that I hadn’t figured for a minute that moving out here to the Bay Area, you know the kind of place with crystals and hot tubs and meditation and massage therapy and Jim Jones, a blue-state zone with seekers and lost souls, lousy with liberals, that here I would meet some native-born capital C Catholics.

Catholic to me is a Boston thang, or maybe the Vatican. I mean here you go to a Catholic school and there ain’t no lock the kids are all following one holy and apostolic church, and there’s probably a curriculum chunk of cultural knowledge and sensitivity. But, in my growing up, other religions were something you read about in books, or maybe Jon Feldman did an extra report in front of the whole class once a year.

So, we were chatting about the church and all, and a devout mom’s belief in the lostness of lapsed Catholics and her sense of anger from the folks who left.

Got me thinking. I think anger is the right word. In my writings, I gotta figure out how this all works into shit, but angry is the word for Pat when priests and their belief systems came into view.

It wasn’t the ultimate holy beliefs that seemed to chap her. It was the material, political world, from the earthbound place where priests actually reside.

I don’t know at the end of the day or night or her life if Pat believed in god, big G or little g. I don’t know about the trinity. The Holy Ghost, the Son of God and Man. I would guess so, in the same way I knew she liked meat and potatoes, because they were the staples of her life.

But, I do know, there was a chip on her shoulder slightly smaller than Nebraska when the church itself was invoked.

Maybe it was cynicism she had come by as a youngster, when her monsignor uncle had friends from the city archdiocese visit the family summer place, where they would have cocktails with their “chippies.” That was back in the olden days when priests dated women on the downlow in some kind of parish “don’t ask don’t tell” dealio, where discretion was the requirement, and life was a bit simpler.

Or maybe it was just all the sadness, the sense of loss without a safety net when my father passed away. He believed, he had studied for the priesthood once, but his church didn’t catch her when she fell. Or at least didn’t provide her the kind of soft landing she, widow, young, and with five kiddies, had wanted and needed.

One day, during one of the thousands of grocery shopping expeditions Pat and I trekked, I had a question for her. My entire life. my dad was discussed in soft, gentle tones, referential. No bitter words were ever passed. There was no speaking ill of the dead, and the deceased was now a saint.

So, I asked her. Given that she had never spoken a negative word to me, never had anything bad to say about her husband, but surely in any relationship there is some darkness, I asked her if there was anything she didn’t like about my dad. No beat was skipped, apart from a thoughtful pause, “He was too religious.”

She went on to explain with a huge dose of levity that when it came to the church, his belief, Catholicism, for her tastes, he was too serious. It was too much work, and not enough fun, I gathered, and she wished he would have lightened up.

But, she wasn’t angry at his belief, just the church.

I’m mildly obsessed with the kid from Missouri that they found after disappearing four years ago when he was 10 or 11. How fucked up must it be to be living that kid’s life.

My obsession, though, is on kind of a side note. And, that note is not that the alleged fuckwad perpetrator, likely pedophile, shares a family name with my fam. Nope that’s kind just the fun part.

My obsession is on the angle CNN seems to be taking, more in its broadcast teases than online. The whole disbelief that this pizza guy/mortician helper could do it drama I get. Like he could be a dickwad over parking spaces not a kidnapper.

OK, got it, classic fucked up dude next door quotes. Ted Bundy helped shovel snow, Jeffrey Dahmer was polite, yada. That angle on CNN is classic (or hackneyed). But they keep ominously dropping in phrases like, “And, none of his neighbors questioned who was living at his apartment…”

Um, what? From now on, anyone moves in with a teenager or younger, I’m assuming pervert. I think that’s what CNN wants. If he don’t never bring home a pizza, my hypothetical neighbor, I’m fucking calling the SVU squad. We are all fucked up pervs lusting in pedophiliac fugue states waiting for our moment to nab a kid of our very own.

I totally dig it taking a village. I’m psyched to be moving to a neighborhood where there might even be folks who act neighborly and shit. And, hell yeah, I hope if I hear some crazy ass shit going on next door, I don’t act as courageously as Kitty Genovese’s ‘hood.

But, pretty much, I can’t be living ever so suspicious 24/7. I mean, I can hate people all day long, but I just can’t be assuming they’re completely fucked up creeps.

By the way, what the fuck kind of part time job mix is that–making pizzas and answering phones for dead people, or whatever you do as a phone operator at a funeral home? (I never paused to think of mortuaries as high volume enough to need phone answering as a specialized task.) I got friends (I swear I do) who mix up avocation, vocation, part-time gigs, full-time gigs, and all sorts of odd jobs. But pizza and death seem so incongruous.

The beauty of the out of the blue email from the depths of sorry hell is it answers a structural question rattling in my brain pan.

To do something with the Pat book idea, I’ve been chewing on a story arc. To keep it all light and humor like, I’m thinking a thread, and workable arc could begin with the now classic episode of my life’s fuckedupedness — The house fire the week I first ever tried standup. Cuz, you know, nothing says funny haha comedy like, mom’s survived a fire, and I got a microphone.

The ending of that arc, could logically then be the ending of the real fucking arc, Pat’s and my relationship ending on this here mortal coil and all.

That’s cool, but I wanted more. The end that is the beginning, the point, the universal theme. You know, the smart shit, the pretension that makes a book an objet d’arte.

So, check it, my pretentious life’s lesson, story arc ending. The last fucking gift Pat handed to me on a silver tray of dripping irony.

Her death was the catalyst for the kiss off to the bad, bad man. The man who she suspected never treated me right, who she never liked, sight unseen, because he was too chickenshit to meet her.

If she hadn’t died, I may never had the scales drop from my eyes and, who knows, I may even have maintained some kind of fucked up, hobbled friendship with someone who isn’t capable of actual friendship.

So, the story will end with how I have continued on in a way, I think and at last, where she may actually have been happy and proud of me. Pat wasn’t Jesus, and lord knows, though swell at playing the martyr, she wasn’t a saint. But through her death, I was reborn.

Or some shit like that. It’ll be a comedy book, I swear.

I should never have felt so proud of getting my cards done. It was inevitable that karma would sneak up and fuck me in the ass.

Pride goeth, blah, fucking blah, so I ended up losing my cell phone at a mall and running around getting it canceled and getting a new sim card and shit. That, of course, after back tracking around said mall for a pointless search that turned up nada.

I had a schedule. I had plans goddamnit. Why must the gods be smoting gods?

Among the Christmas joy and falderol and lights and irritating songs, I had a cool thing crop up via the place of work. Someone of the emeritus variety associated with the school down the road is hanging in some office space writing a book, on a Mac, which is where I come in handy. I’ve been providing ad hoc sort of tech support, hand holding when documents have acted up. (As is required by Microsoft Word regardless of OS.)

Anywho, the guy needs some formatting help and proposed I help for a price, given his usual student helper is under the weather. Alright, I say, ‘cuz your jammed up, but I can’t commit long term, all account of the book idea I have my own bad self.

We meet more formally to discuss what needs to be done for him. We go through that, he slides his notes aside and says something like, “I got some stuff published, yo, so let’s talk about your book idea, and maybe I can give you some advice.”

Awesome. Cool info, good insight, really encouraging when I tell him a couple of the stories I want to flesh out in the department of Pat and Dee-Rob, the adventures. I let him know the title and why. He’s either wickedly polite, or honestly interested.

Light editing and some mano to mano writing talk, makes me all tingly inside.

The punchline is for those who knew and loved Pat, or realized a little bit of the leit motif of our relationship. The book the guy is writing, it’s on GUILT.

Rimshot.

When I posted a link to this photo,

a thoughtful reader suggested a little equal time or something for my humiliation or adorableness.

Here’s the infamous Blue Bird flying up to Camp Fire Girl ceremony that haunts my dreams. I think the picture is from around 1974. Sadly, upon reading the world-wide-web, I stopped moments before the thing went coed. (Although, I’m pretty sure if any boy in my town signed up, he’d be known as a Camp Fire Faggot.)

The beauty of this picture in my mind is several-fold. First, I apparently was 20-feet tall back in about 5th or 6th grade and have been shrinking ever since. How else to explain that I’m about a foot taller than all of the other girls and as tall as the men in the photo. One of the dads, Mr. O’Brien, in real life was what you might call a long drink of water. Here, he is dwarfed by my collosus.

Secondly, count the parent to little girl ratio. Right there is a story. A story of regret, of an almost life-long sadness, a dream unfilfulled, a wound open. Or maybe Pat wasn’t really my mother or hated me too much to pose alongside me. I am the “orphaned” girl who throws the count off.

Some pinhead without sense of, I don’t know, what would they say in today’s PC jargon, a sense of “difference” in families, alternative maybe? Anyway, some douche decided the perfect thing was a father-daughter picture with the members of our troop. Um, yeah, thanks Einstein, I’m the little, fatherless girl, way to help me blend.

The cow my mother had was doubtlessly in direct proportion to the stupidness she perceived in whoever insisted on the Father/Daughter thang.

She boycotted. Carol Anne’s mom, also named Pat, was not a douche in the least. She tossed her husband out of the roster and replaced him, exhorting my Pat to join her. She would not be moved. The picture was taken, and the giant, woman-sized girl stood alone. (In my mind, there should be a yawning gap where they all step back away from my freakishness and the aloneness comes out in better contrast. Ah well, if only I stage-directed the world.)

Here’s what it really looked like:

Here’s how it looks in my head. (And, Photoshop masking is AWESOME.)