Once upon a time in a chubby, pimply existence, I could read Aldous Huxley and dream. I don’t know when or why, maybe it came from Pat’s having all sorts of developmental education books lying around the house, and reading up on “freedom.” Maybe it was just the ’70s, the “Me Generation,” the consciousness-raising personal empowerment, naked in a hot tub potential human and full of human potential, post-Vietnam 1970s.

For a brief, 12-minute spree, I was optimistic and idealistic.

I thought about California. I thought about Marin County and wine and transcendental meditation and being on the bus or not being on the bus. I wanted to drink the Electric Acid Koolaid. I sat at recess and tried to empty all thoughts from my mind.

Some day, I thought, some day, I will reach up to the fullest chi-soaked moment of my full human potential and center myself into happy, contented, intellectual, capital ‘G’ growth. And, I’d probably live in an environmentally sound, geodesic dome made from recycled materials.

No doubt, at some point my natural-born cynical juices flowed anew in my veins. But, for a moment I dreamed of a great society.

My boss has me researching places for a team retreat. Among the places that came up was Esalen, ground zero for some human potential movement funkiness by Big Sur. (Yeah, the same Big Sur where Janis’ ashes once went blowing in the wind.)

Clothing optional hot springs, meditating hippies and bunk beds. I’ll get right not that.

One of the things I like about me (and sadly those are few and far between) is that I seem to have a knack for old folks telling me stories.

Like when my buddy’s mom told me about the “vagabond lover” in their family tree, who got tossed from a Hungarian village for his wayward ways. Or Sammy on the bus telling me about moving from Jamaica and his relationshp with his wife.

Last night’s version was the family’s patriarch of the host to M.’s family telling me about his “roadhog” youth, his four cars and a motorcycle and how someone in his family well-connected and of high rank in the police department had to get him out of jail. Fast times, fast cars in the old world.

I love hearing other people’s adventures.

Also, I learned two knew dirty phrases last night. One in Fukinese Chinese and the other in Malay. Every time I’m with any kind of family for any period of time, I realize that all families are about as equally goofy and obnoxious.

Nothing makes you feel whiter than sitting in a Chinese restaurant, eating Chinese family style with a couple of Chinese families.

M.’s aunt is in the Bay Area with his uncle and their daughter. They are staying with a friend of the uncle’s from way back when in Penang high school. We met up with them for dinner in some place in the East Bay that I would never have heard of in a million fucking years.

Family-style dining in an “authentic” Chinese place (I fucking love calling stuff authentic. I’m Margaret fucking Mead keeping an eye on the “natives.”), anyway it involves a big table, a giant lazy susan, and a phenomenal amount of food.

You know the whole cliche about Asians all eating healthy and light and all that shit? It’s a stereotype that leaves out the 1 billion plus Chinese wandering the planet. Those people will eat anything and are damn proud of it. When we were in Malaysia, we passed a Chinese seafood restaurant with a neon sign, “If it swims, we eat it.” Sure the Japanese are munching on seaweed, rice, fish and soybeans, but the Chinee are piling on the sauce and staying open minded.

So, we ate.

My favorite moment at dinner might have been provided by the high school friend’s not young dad. (There’s a cliche about Asians that holds true — When the fam goes out to dinner, you don’t know how many generations might be representin’.) At some point, he announced “My son-in-law’s white, too.”

Awesome. I fucking love when shit happens that could have been in my whitey-white Boston suburban childhood, but the races are reversed. No doubt, Pat would have announced something similar had I been with M. and she came across another Asian/White couple.

So, granddad then whipped out the photo section of his wallet and, indeed, his son-in-law was whiter looking than me.

The other thing making me self-conscious about diversity was the gigantic bag of goodies and treasures Aunt Fay brought from the homeland. My fucking god, I am intimidated.

Here’re a couple of shots.

That second shot is about nine different packets of curries to cook up authentic style. Holy shit. In my culture, salt and pepper are a little out there in the spice line.

Here’s a quick, typical snippet of a conversation regarding the bounty with the aunt: “So, when you are cooking the chicken, maybe just cut the chicken in half, and take just half of the packet. You can put the other half in the freezer.” Then sprinkle a little of this, do this other thing I can’t remember and you’re done.

I didn’t have the heart to explain M. and I live a life where defrosting something from Trader Joe’s is a home-cooked meal.

Goddamnit, though, I am nothing but an overachiever at heart. The gauntlet has been thrown down and cook I will. The up and downsides of living with a dude born in the “Spice Islands.”

A couple of other things about the humongous back of South Sea treasures. One item is a jar labeled with Chinese characters. The Roman alphabet about says “jigonghoubao.” A Google search brings up not even a full-page of hits, and almost none in non-Asian characters. From the weblog entry of someone out there in the universe, I gather that the product is also available in Venezuala at Chinese markets. (Leading me to conclude they have Chinese markets in Venezuela.)

The major ingredient of the product is “Buddha’s hand.” Apparently, again via Google, I discover something of which I have never fucking heard.

I guess we got us some spicy, candied citrus treat.

The last item of note (or at least that I am noting right now) is a box of “Plain crackers.” They look to be your basic, square saltine. I cannot adequately describe my warmth and amusement at this item. Pat, bless her soul if we all have them, would most definitely have herself packed in a treasure like that.

It is not just my mother who would send off or cart around the mundane, the common, the readily available around the world just because she knows she like them.

I’m on a lunch break for a day long workshop “Putting you passion into print.” If I can deconstruct what I could write a book about and how to sell the fucker, maybe I could answer the question about whether I should ever jump on stage.

Not that i actually jump on stage, or move that much for that matter.

But, comedy could be history for awhile, so I guess that’s not history but hiatus. I gotta fucking write rather than just rubbing my intellectual clit, as it were, and maybe get other folks to read my bullshit.

Working title — Pat and leopard print panties.

Target, department store deluxe to the certain demographic we seemed to be rocking, had a fab-u-lous sale on just what I thought we needed in our home sweet home.

I had been itching to get off the bottled water teat and live the righteous green path of filtering water.  Truth is I'd drink it just fine out of the tap, but sometimes I like it cold, and them little bottles is so convenient.  But, watching the recycle pile pile up is a chore in and of itself.  

The answer, of course, yuppie pseudo-science joy, the Brita water pitcher. 

 Better yet, we enter the local Target, and I read the fine print:

Choose Space Saver pitcher, Atlantis pitcher or 4-pk. pitcher filters.

FREE $15 iTunes card with purchase of any 2 BRITA items shown! Quantities limited; no rain checks.

Only thing is, the computers conspired against me and no special bargain iTunes card was spit from the silicon coils.  Nope.  But I hung tight as the cashier chick enacted the emergency flashing aisle number sign to hail a manager.  Lesser mortals might have paid up or walked out, but not I, oh no, not me.

Finally, the manager could get no obedience herself from the cash register gods, even though she says she had witnessed on the day prior the self-same bargain working it.  Try as she may, and parse the English together as we did, since I would be damned if I had to buy two pitchers and no filters, or two refills of filters and no pitchers, there was no satisfaction.

She said, I've got a plan.  It's cheating, but it just might work.  She rings up one of my purchases for $15 less and away we go, ready to filter with joy, love in our hearts, cash in our pockets.

Goddamn, I just loves me an item on markdown. 

I’m getting this in under the wire, before the Ides of March has passed. I have 10 minutes to write and post (or I’ll blow it and just applaud myself for trying. Afterall, embracing mediocrity and missed standards is very U. S. of A.)

Sure you got St. Patty’s Day in a couple, but for me the week is about a whole other Pat of note. The never that far from my thoughts (unless that makes me complete batshit, loopy, Norman Bates crazy) Pat, the Pat the Crab of historic note. My mater who would have been 77 this year, had she lived so long, and surely would have said something bitter as crushed aspirin on your tongue but just as likely funny, witty, cripplingly cutting. Alas. Today is the St. Pat’s Day for me.

The interesting thing about her birthday being today was the oddity of listening to a co-worker bitch about her mother. One of the greatest things about Pat is she opined on her children’s adult lives, oh fuck ya, she had opinions, but intrusive the woman was not. Well, her intrusions were essentially psychological warfare not physical insinuation.

The chick at work has had a slew of as yet unresolved chronic health issues. Pretty much a raw deal all around of not feeling well, but able to be out and about, yet not nailing a “cure,” if such a formula might there be. She was born in a country far, far, far away, and that’s where her family is. Except they’re not, because she’s sick, so they flew right out to give her a hand. (Or, actually, bum her out and otherwise cause stress in that special way of any parent of adult children.)

My point being — Shit, the mountain, as in the one to which Mohammed better get her ass, because the mountain sure as hell would not be coming to her, the mountain that was Pat in her castle, would not have flown half-way across the world to hold my hand. No fucking way. And, for that I thank her, on my knees truly grateful, happy dance, thank her.

Why? Because the shit-side of the adult stick is fixing your own stuff. I think one of the coolest legacies that Pat left behind is we all can take care of our own damnselves, thank you very much. Sure, caring is good, relating with others, living, loving, blah, fucking, blah, yay family. All swell. At the end of the day, though, there’s enough work going on to get through life that if everyone could mind their own patches, we’d all be fine.

I can’t even imagine being sick and also having to deal with keeping up some semblance of a respectable life suitable to a visiting mother. I only hope M. realizes how lucky he has it that there is not even any possible specter of that domestic scene.

Completely, unrelated, but maybe a bit, because it’s still Pat talk, she really should have hung around a bit longer. She should have done that and not given up. I was talking about that with Number One Son, my family’s oldest sibling.

(By the way, “#1 son” was always a perhaps racist nod most likely to Charlie Chan. It was said as a phrase that was definitely foreign and vaguely “Oriental.” Imagine my surprise, me a knee-jerk liberal, a wordsmith, a multi-culti, bobo cliche with an ear toward cultural sensitivity (or me, a screaming, stereotyping, rabid racist, you decide), anyway imagine my surprise when I met M.’s Asian family. His aunts were all introduced to me as #1 aunt, #2, etc.)

So many things, though, had Pat lived she would have been pretty pumped. I believe she would like M. I know she would be happy that I’m not miserable. (I really miss that I will never know what surprising variations on stereotypes she would come up with–at minimum along with the usual potato dish at a family gathering, I expect there would be a bowl of rice. She might even dig up chopsticks from some where and have them ready for her guest (especially if by some weird insurance disaster, Building 19 ended up with a stockpile).

Number 1 Son pointed out she would love that finally one of us, his son, is at a private, Catholic school. Not for the Catholic part, but for the intimacy of a parochial education providing an edge she wanted for any of her own kids, had we not all patently refused. She likely would sit by one of the large, bay windows in the late afternoon, watching while her grandson ran by training with his track team.

I also just found out that the nephew in name, but pseudo-first grandson, my cuz (who I won’t name, because the idea of publishing my thoughts here offends his finer sensibillities. Mostly because he’s a pussy), cousin will be breaking the Y chromosome streak. That event would have had her shopping retail and buying ever cute girly thing in sight. Dollhouses would be hammered out overnight. Manna would fall from heaven.

Seriously, she would buy retail baby clothes. Full price. I have no doubt.

Sleep would probably be a pursuit beyond swell right about now. I’ll end this little bit of lengthy and not sufficiently honorable memorial post with another thought.

Two weeks after I hit the same age as my father died, and in the same week as my mother’s birthday, they’ve had a week-long special lunch event at the employment place. They’re showing a video repeatedly of how to use the portable defibrillators, they’ve added in discreet corners of the building.

They really do spare no expense for the work environment.

So, despite mourning her loss and generally loving and respecting her, sometimes I just hate Pat enough that were she alive, I’d feel like shaking her.

In other words, my idea of mental health is finding new ways to blame my mother for shit. In today’s episode, I finally got into seeing a doctor after waiting a fucking week in agonizing, oh god why does my brain hurt am I dying pain. Couple hours later, and I’m mostly headache free.

Pat comes into the picture, because she mostly was a suck it up and shake it off kind of trooper. I swear to anyone who might listen, rare as they are, she would proclaim “You’re not going to cry are you?” as a challenge. Yeah, ma, way to go making me feel like a big old pussy when I was in pain.

On top of her bite the bullet and get on with life mentality, she was also adverse to the medical community. Apparently back during the Eisenhower administration some medicine provided in some situation never worked, ergo all medicine was kind of questionable. She did get us all the proper vaccinations and whatnot, and some actual medical problems were treated by professionals, but she wasn’t one to race her hurting babies off to the doctor. Not when a drop of bourbon could get you to sleep through the night.

I think she was actually kind of doctor phobic and much of her adversion was more fear than lack of belief. The truth is, and the truth she lived by, is sometimes seemingly well people go to the doctors and then get diagnosed as sick. Of course, to the rational, the words “seemingly well” have significance. To Pat, “well” than “sick” than dead was the progression.

As a result, I think, of growing up avoiding doctors and trying to pull myself up by the bootstraps, I figured just one more day and the headache would stop. But, it didn’t.

Headache on Sunday night, headache on Monday, Tuesday, slept in and took a half day of work, trying to sleep the headache away on Wednesday, Wednesday headache, Thursday, sleep some more and then finally decide to beg for health care. Begging, headache, headache, begging and finally, Thursday night, there is relief.

I got a shot in the ass that wasn’t Demerol. (I could have gone for the Demerol if I got M. to come and pick me up, which assuredly he would have done. But, in less than a week that would have meant his rescuing me from a tequila crisis followed by a narcotic coma. I decided on self-respect and no need for rehab with the weaker, non-hardcore painkiller injection.)

And, I got a whole bunch of niftily packaged “migraine attack” meds. I don’t know what is more exciting to me, the medical vindication of someone saying my wicked bad non-leaving headache sounded like it could be a migraine (although, that does scare the shit out of me), or the drugs themselves.

Each 5 milligram bit is in its own little blister pack, then that little, blister-packed disk is in a rip-open pack, then three of those packs are jammed in a hard plastic wallet. It’s like fun candy packaging for grown-up prescription lovers. Merck deserves an advertising award for packaging.

Of course, I will now waste some time and brain cells finding out the good, the bad, the dubious and the long-term, five-headed mutant possibilities of the latest and greatest prescription-strength cure. But, I will also smile at the head free of ache.

If there were one characteristic inherited from my mother I would like to nuke is the inability to just fucking relax and enjoy.

Pat could suck joy from the happiest of occasions by worrying what could go wrong or envisioning an ending of plagues, pestilence and destruction. A good report card meant you couldn’t go higher or possibly keep it up. A job promotion meant more work. Newlyweds couldn’t see the bills and tolls of real life. Taking vacation time meant that work would discover they didn’t need you. Anything and everything was fraught with danger or the possibility of failure.

In essence, of course, she was right. Life is full of tragedy and failure and shit you can’t control. But what’s the margin in always thinking about the pain and missing the moment’s pleasure?

All of this verbiage is my long-winded introduction to a simple fact: I got a fucking job.

The salary is livable, the benefits seem great, during the summer every Friday there’s a barbecue, apparently they were hooked on me for the job not long into the interview, I’m interested in the work, and in a way, I’m getting back on a horse that my former employer pushed me off.

Still and all, I’m nervous and scared as hell.

In this adult life I’ve been existing in, what with the being an orphan and all, holidays have been missing a certain something on which I couldn’t quite put the old finger.

Last night, though, I solved the mystery and perhaps it will make sense to those Irish Catholics or possibly Jews among you bored, I mean thoughtful, readers out there. My holidays have been relatively guilt-free with the passing of Pat.

Don’t get me wrong, I really do wish Pat lived through more holidays and happily (or about as happy as she could constitutionally muster). But, the woman was a master at making her baby daughter (and all of her children and her siblings and her students and likely random strangers on the street) feel helluva guilty. No matter what, she did more for you than any effort on your part could ever hope to equalize.

I’m trying to think of a good example of the Pat guilt conversations. Here’s one, which has stuck in my head for a good 20 years now. I went to an expensive private college, because it had the kind of journalistic writing program I wanted, and for pride and values and not letting the goddamn world keep her down any more than it already did, Pat, goddamnit, made it clear that her kids were going to school anywhere they wanted.

(OK, not anywhere, she wouldn’t let me apply to Barnard and/or Columbia’s journalism school, because the idea of her daughter in the mean streets of NYC ghetto was untenable. And, there were many arguments over Holy Cross, because it was small and not very far away and Catholic and not very far away. I chose 326 miles away. Coincidence? I think not.)

So, anyway, I froze my ass off in Syracuse and studied pretty seriously, because there was fuckall else to do in arctic February.

Money was pretty tight, and tuition was pretty high, and I purposely worked hard enough to get a couple of bucks extra in financial aid via academic scholarship. Only in Pat’s world, and it was a world of extreme levels of pride, extra cash from the school was charity and she wasn’t taking charity from no one. Therefore, she never signed and mailed the forms that she, as my parent and guardian, was required.

Nevertheless, there were moments when the bills from the bursar’s office were looking to be unpaid. Honestly, I could never quite tell if the money was non-existent or my mother was just habitually late in bill paying. I called home, needing to know whether I could stay or should line up some work back home to come back another semester.

The guilt above all other guilt, the alpha-omega of gut-wrenching, heart-aching, ungrateful kid conversation ensued. She had discovered that she could stretch even Hamburger Helper to cut back on costs. In fact, she had been eating almost exclusively items she could buy with a coupon or skipping meals entirely to save for my tuition. At one moment, she implied that the meat in catfood was essentially the same as buying a can of tuna.

(That last is classic, diva, drama-queen Pat. She wouldn’t actually eat pet food, but she loved the drama of suggesting the possibility. (As a note, there is absolutely no resemblance in this point to this author. I fucking swear.)

So, with coupons and grit, I graduated an expensive school with honors, and she almost watched me do it (but had to go get air).

Anyway, I was remembering all of this guilt, because M.’s landlady, who is extremely nice to him, has been cooking up a storm. She made spaghetti and sauce the night my plane came in, so I would have something to heat and eat on my midnight arrival. Last night, she made a gigantic pot of chicken stew with dumplings and wouldn’t let me do any of the cleaning up. For breakfast, there was fresh brewed coffee and sausages, and tonight a roast pork is planned, which she will start as we roam around sightseeing and what not.

I haven’t done anything and I surely haven’t done enough. Pat’s spirit is here for the holidays.

Perhaps one of the biggest mysteries of my adult life has just been solved, I think.

To back track, I loved my mom in a lot of ways (and by the way, Pat would have balked at my invoking the word love in her direction, forget about publicly, that would have been inexcusable), but in so many ways her irrational…I don’t know the word to use… phobias, maybe, but also belief system, whatever it was, it was infuriating. The saddest thing about her death, which I think affected a lot of people, most especially her siblings, was the sense it didn’t have to be. Not like with a sudden tragedy, act of god, car accident dramatic sense of it didn’t have to be. No, a literal couldn’t this whole thing have been avoided somehow feeling. Maybe I’m not explaining it well, but throughout the funeral and still to this day, you almost couldn’t, can’t help comparing other women her age (or the age should would have been) and thinking “Hey, they’re alive and doing stuff, why isn’t she?” She allowed her life force to just slip away.

There were symptoms, harbingers of the reality, something just ain’t quite right. Hair loss (and I don’t mean thinning I mean long gone), dessicated skin, appetite issues, chronic pain and wearing sweaters in June. The pain was epic and omnipresent. Walking ached and ached some more over that. (She always said she was arthritic, and she had been treated sometime circa 1964 for it. She never had any of the swollen, gnarled joints of arthritis, and who the fuck knows where medical science was 40 fucking years ago. The weird part is it was always about walking and her legs, but not about her knees, and almost to the end she used her hands to build dollhouses, still able to grip and lift.)

And, of course, there was the chronic depression, which could have been the angst of her ancestors, who wrote poetry and drank and described a bitter and real life and made themselves miserable and wonderful simultaneously (at least, I guess, that’s what I think of when I think of people like Joyce and Shaw). Maybe it was depression with cause, like the three people I know who broke a little bit of her irreparably when they died (a brother, a husband and a boy, essentially part son, part grandson, but it’s complicated). And, those losses were the big ones, the earthquakes. There were more and more life things conspiring against her, sometimes you could almost think, who wouldn’t be depressed?

But, today, with one phone call that’s part worry and relief, all of the questions are answered. It’s all just a fucking hormone. A slight imbalance, adjustable and maintainable by modern medicine.

I’ll stop being all philosophically, bullshitty and cut to the chase, my sister called. She’s not been feeling well (the depth of that statement is really only just being revealed). Finally, she went to the doctor, who was shocked to find she is rocking the charts with record high scores in whatever the test is that comes up hypothyroid!

So, what if you have hypothyroid problems, what happens? From here I got this list:
Fatigue
Weakness
Weight gain or increased difficulty losing weight
Coarse, dry hair
Dry, rough pale skin
Hair loss
Cold intolerance (can’t tolerate the cold like those around you)
Muscle cramps and frequent muscle aches
Constipation
Depression
Irritability
Memory loss
Abnormal menstrual cycles
Decreased libido

I don’t know about the constipation, menstrual cycles or libido, because we weren’t the kind of family to ever talk about that stuff, but I’ll vouch for the rest as matching the very things Pat worried about most.

Fucking hell, she should have gone to the GODDAMN doctors.