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Remembering the past, but digging the future

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Stupid that I haven’t been writing. I got only positive feedback from writing my skewed remembrance of my uncle Ron. For those who knew him and know me, I think I got a teeny bit of truth in my meager typing. For those who didn’t know him, I think they got a flavor of a man who no doubt influenced the woman I have become. Is there anything more that you can say about someone than they touched your life?

Meanwhile, back at the mundane of my life, it goes on as lives do. And as lives crank out in our modern days, my text messages yesterday crossed different folks in different places and circumstances, but they hit my phone and came together.

Text number one came from a friend who last summer lost her mom, as they say even though it always sounds the same as what happens to kids in supermarkets and is solved with an overhead page. Yesterday would have been her mom’s 90th birthday, so she did what we all should do — headed to the casino to see Englebert Humperdinck. (Nota bene: my Mac correctly spellchecked Humperdinck.)

Text number two came from my cousin, son of Ron. In addition to one month from Ron’s death, it’s 28 years from what I’ve always thought was an unbelievable burden for a little kid to carry around. My cousin’s brother died at the age of 10; this month he would have been 38.

For me, pile those unhappy anniversaries onto the one Hallmark occasion above all others that I’ve ignored for most all of my life — Father’s Day. I almost never remember when it even is if no one reminds me. One blessing about the holiday as a kid was that only sometimes did the school year favor a Friday afternoon in a balmy June where kids were told to make cards, draw pictures and celebrate their dads. Some years school let out for the year, and the holiday was completely forgotten. For me, making cards and that day were a creative and emotional void and always will be.

That void haunted me for a long time, like maybe I was rocking the soul of a serial killer, unable to generate love and emotion for a man who helped bring me to life. Thanks to Psych 101 type classes and reading, I eventually forgave myself the developmental reality that four-year-olds just don’t grok death. And, I guess, four years of life wasn’t enough to forge the kind of relationship that I could now remember 43 years later.

So, yeah, it’s hard not to think about death. Harder for my cousin who’s steeped in it with the painful disconnect of celebrating Father’s Day with and for his own kids, while saying goodbye to his own. Kind of a cosmic dick kick all around.

And all I have is weak sauce reminders to take it easy on himself and focus on all the good in his life, his wife, his kids and the future and other nebulous and useless words. The shitty part is not only is it all I got, wisdom from a Reader’s Digest essay suitable for a dentist’s waiting room, but I fucking mean it. Deeply, soulfully, well except for the shallow and weak part.

Like where do you put the fun truth that my cuz was alive in 1972, and now the Bruins brought the Stanley Cup home again? Simple things.

I’m typing this entry on a sunny day with a lemon tree outside my window dive-bombed by at least five different kinds of birds and at least one hummingbird literally hovering just outside the glass. My immediate future is likely friends, bowling, of all fucking things, at the kickass 50s-looking beachside bowling emporium in town and a crab dinner. (M. is fucking OBSESSED with crabs this year. A couple of years into living by the ocean he realized edible creatures live in it.)

My more distant future is unknown, but judging by my healthy, un-chewed fingernails there ain’t any observable or immediate storm clouds. In fact, for the first fucking time in a checkered work history, I do believe a reorganization is bringing the likelihood of my doing alright. Maybe even better. My favorite note to the whole episode so far is the ultimate head honcho of the salt mines where I work sitting me down to ask whether I was happy. I couldn’t help but begin my reply with this disclaimer — I was born in New England, Boston Irish through and through, happiness is outside of my vocabulary.

Who’d a thunk Pat’s baby daughter might still turn out OK?

A friend also just did a bootstrap project and created a book and my words are included inside. I find that crazy to believe, even if it’s a small, homegrown project.
Mug 0F Woe V4

I guess this all is what is meant by a happy life. Marred by the inevitable pain, of course. Death, relationships good and bad, confusion, setbacks. I can’t help but consider them, dwell on them even. But like everyone else on the planet, I muddle through, soldier on, walk it out. Nothing else to do.

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Holy! Holy! Holy! Final draft

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Here’s essentially the version that I read at Ron’s funeral. I was happy to be part of the celebration of a wonderful life, but I truly wish his time had not come. Amazing to know how loved he was, and I was a tiny planet in a good man’s orbit.

******

I really don’t know how to feel, so I did the only thing I ever learned to do. I wrote. Badly, maybe. Thoughtfully, possibly. With futility, definitely.

The closest I ever had to a father figure left this mortal coil. A true mensch, a sensitive soul, my uncle Ron died.

I thought about writing a euphemism for died, but for all the poets, madmen and philosophers seeking the truth, I couldn’t do it. Ron was the first person I ever met who talked about the Beats–Ginsburg, Kerouac, Burroughs. For all of them, the word is death, and today it’s Ron’s word, too.

The thing I remember about Ron is that he was the first grown up that spoke to me like an adult. I remember real conversations, or rather they were very real to me. Given that I was about 6 years old and he was in his 20s, his mileage no doubt varied on what he got from the dialogs.

I dogeared and wore thin the pages of a picture book he gave me way back when, called “That Mean Man.” It was its non-treacly story and non-kiddie flavor that made it long a favorite after I was past picture books. It traveled to college and crisscrossed various moves. I regret not knowing where it landed.

When I heard the news, I went home to find a tiny gift I never gave Ron over the couple of Christmases we didn’t return East. I meant to give him a small badge from the Beat Museum in San Francisco. Long before I ever moved west, North Beach existed in my imagination. Ron’s love for books and the Beats taught me where City Lights Bookstore and the Condor club are, and I hoped that someday he’d visit and see for himself. I picked up the pins from the museum for Ron, proclaiming Ginsberg –“Holy! Holy! Holy!” and “Starving Hysterical Naked.” Now they will hold a place of remembrance on my desk.

Coincidentally, Nancy told me a story about my father and his influence on her as a kid that I thought I could have said about Ron. My father was someone who tried the new, bringing gadgets and food to Nancy’s Dorchester, a neighborhood not known for exploration. Ron was that to me in my suburban world. Nancy and Ron were my perception of the 60s and 70s counterculture.

Ron read books that raised eyebrows and listened to rock. He spoke to me and my siblings and his high school students like a real person, including innuendo and jokes. He admitted to having inhaled way before it was asked of presidential candidates. Ron was the adult who argued the virtues of “Exile on Main Street” and “Beggars Banquet” above all other Stones albums. He was jazz records and quoting postmodern analysis of just about anything. He was the babysitter not knowing how to handle an unruly brood of five letting my brothers smoke a novelty cigar. He was nerdy passion for books, art and music in equal measure to a passion for sports.

Ron and Nancy were Newbury Street in the 60s, urban life and walks in the Public Garden to feed the ducks after reading “Make Way for Ducklings.” I met my first hippies and interracial couples and a gay man through them. I tried new foods, like the exotic pita bread suddenly appearing on store shelves next to the Wonder Bread, and got to sip wine.

Ron was also after school adventures and schemes with Pat, my mother, as they both used their school teacher afternoons pretty well.

There is a part of the non-conformist me that I think I owe to both of them back in those afternoons. I learned about shy adults with passions bubbling under the surface. Early on I talked about writing with Ron, a closet writer who said his stuff wasn’t good enough to see the light of day. I am certain that he was wrong.

Perhaps most of all, Ron taunted a kind of affection and sensitivity in me, giving me the hugs that were not second nature in my family and speaking out loud about feelings. I modeled behavior that he showed and eventually I’ve gotten better. Ron and Nancy were the most couple-y couple in my world as a kid.

Now, I use their “take care” as a goodbye (which actually works pretty well in California.)

That’s all I have right now, and it’s not nearly enough. Maybe instead, I’ll just re-read Ginsberg, and remember a teacher who opened up my world and heart to the life I have now. Ron is Holy! Holy! Holy!

Holy, holy, holy

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I really don’t know how to feel, so I’m doing the only thing I ever learned to do. I’ll write. Badly, maybe. Thoughtfully, possibly. With futility, definitely.

Today the closest I ever had to a father figure left this mortal coil. A true mensch, a sensitive soul, my uncle Ron died today.

I thought about writing a euphemism for died, but for all the poets, madman and philosophers seeking the truth, I couldn’t do it. Ron was the first person I ever met who talked about the Beats, Ginsburg, Kerouac, Burroughs. For all of them, the word is death, and today it’s Ron’s word, too.

The first thing I remember about Ron is that he was the first grown up that spoke to me like an adult. I remember real conversations, or rather they were very real to me. Given that I was about 6 years old and he was in his 20s, his mileage no doubt varied on what he got from the dialogs.

I dogeared and wore thin the pages of a picture book he gave me way back when.

That mean man, who shared his chicken pox but never his jelly beans, deserved his score of mean children who made him live unhappily ever after.

It was its non-treacly story and non-kiddie flavor that made it long a favorite after I was past picture books. The book traveled to college and crisscrossed various moves and apartments. I regret not knowing where it landed.

When I came home tonight, I pulled open drawers and scanned shelves to find a tiny gift I never gave Ron over the couple of Christmases we didn’t return east. I meant to give him a small badge from the Beat Museum, an earnest little storefront in the heart of North Beach.

Long before I ever moved near the San Francisco Bay, walked down Grant Ave. to Columbus and by Jack Kerouac Alley, North Beach existed in my imagination. Ron’s love for books and the Beats taught me where City Lights Bookstore and the Condor club are, and I hoped that someday he’d come out here on a visit and see for himself.

As a placeholder for that visit, I picked up the pins from the museum. “Holy! Holy! Holy!” and “Starving Hysterical Naked.” Now they will hold a place of remembrance on the bookshelf by my desk.

I want to say so much more. Ron was the adult who extolled the virtues of “Exile on Main Street” above all other Stones albums. He was jazz records and quoting postmodern analysis of just about anything. He was the babysitter not knowing how to handle an unruly brood of five letting my brothers smoke a novelty cigar. He was nerdy passion for books, art and music in equal measure to a passion for sports, even though a natural athlete he was not.

Coincidentally, my aunt, his wife, told me a story about my father and his influence on her as a kid that I thought I could have said about Ron. My father to Nancy was someone who tried the new, bringing gadgets and food and whatever to her Dorchester, a neighborhood not known for exploration. Ron was that to me in my suburban world.

He listened to rock and jazz and read books that raised eyebrows. He spoke to me and my siblings and his high school students like a real person, including innuendo and jokes. He admitted to having inhaled way before it was asked of presidential candidates.

Ron and my aunt Nancy were Newbury Street in the 60s, urban life and walks in the Public Garden to feed the ducks after reading “Make Way for Ducklings.” I met my first hippies and interracial couples and a gay man through them. I tried new foods, like the exotic pita bread suddenly appearing on store shelves next to the Wonder Bread.

I got to take a sip of wine and beer, and instead of soda was allowed sophisticated drink mixers like Squirt from the corner store.

Every perception I had as a kid in the sixties and early seventies was influenced by what seemed at the time a Ron and Nancy’s counterculture lifestyle to my mom’s post-war mainstream self.

Ron was also after school adventures and schemes with Pat, my mother, as they both used their school teacher afternoons pretty well.

There is a part of the non-conformist me that I think I owe to both of them back in those afternoons. I learned about shy adults with passions bubbling under the surface. Early on I talked about writing with Ron, a closet writer who said his stuff wasn’t good enough to see the light of day. I am sure that he was wrong.

Perhaps most of all, Ron taunted a kind of affection and sensitivity in me, giving me the hugs that were not second nature in my family and speaking out loud about feelings. I modeled behavior that he showed and eventually I’ve gotten better. Ron and Nancy were the most couple-y couple in my world as a kid.

Now, I use his “take care” as a goodbye (which actually works pretty well in California.)

That’s all I have right now, and it’s not nearly enough. Maybe instead, I’ll just re-read Ginsberg. Ron and everything are Holy! Holy! Holy!

Another year, another day to mention Pat's Day

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Ah, the Ides of March have come, and for me that means thinking about my dear old madre. She would have been 82, I do believe, if her stroll here on planet earth hadn’t ended.

For all times, I hope to celebrate my own memory of Pat by choosing to eschew the conventional. I hope I always pick the bright red bloomers and sassy bra over the pale pastels or floppy white cotton. If the woman taught me nothing more, it was to enough to know to have a little fun in the underwear world.

A friend back in Boston, who unlike myself actually gets stuff done every now and again including the Idatorod, is working out an idea. It’s a book compiling stories of embarrassment and tragi-comedy, called Mug of Woe. She sent me a note, so I sent her back a little bit of my embarrassing life. It got me thinking, and writing more again.

In a completely separate universe, metaphorically and literally, a friend in California had a party on Sunday afternoon featuring her favorite psychic. I wrote about Felix last year round about this same time.

Once again, he mystified my skeptical soul with shit I can’t explain. The dude says my dad is there and is showing him something about mowing the lawn. He even mimes the full body gesture of starting the old style gas motor, yanking on an imaginary rope. Felix asked if I understood why he would be mowing the lawn.

Everyone who knew my dad in 1968 would know what the lawnmower was all about; it’s essential information. My father was mowing the lawn when he suffered what would be a fatal heart attack.

But I ain’t writing about my dad today. Nope.

Felix the medium is chatting up my mom. He mentions something about frilly clothes, but it’s not clear to him, and it’s not clear to me. Frilly wasn’t Pat’s outwardly defining style.

Pat is showing him writing, my writing, and near as I can tell, she’s cool with my pathetic ambitions. I’m supposed to write, spirit mom, spirit Pat indicates, and she understands.

At this juncture, I feel like I need to explain a bit about writing to the assembled room, about what I’m trying (painfully and lazily and fitfully and occasionally happily) to get out on paper or electronic screen. I mention my writing about my relationship with Pat and the working title of “Burying My Mom in Leopard Print Undies.”

Felix is rolling with this interruption. I gather spirit mom is cool, too.

Then I tell them one of the stories about why that might be the working title of my book about our fucked up by largely functional mom-daughter relating. I give the Reader’s Digest condensed down version. The story, though, is the self-same one I had just sent off to my friend’s Mug of Woe project a scant week before this close encounter.

Way back in the dark, distant days of the 1970s, I went shopping with a junior high pal and her moms. It was that day that I learned Pat had a different sensibility than the hausfraus in our ‘burb.

When I dropped my drawers to try on some pants, my little buddy’s mom lost her mind. My 11-12 year old tush was swathed with black lace, the very lingerie Pat had given me the Christmas before. In fact, she had given my sister and me each matching boxed sets of undies feature red, black and white lace.

Seems my buddy’s mom found them unseemly. She didn’t believe me when I told her my mom gave me the black lace. In her, albeit cramped and tiny, universe, little girls wore white cotton, at best with a miniature pink satin rose marking the front from back.

Felix the medium jumped in somewhere at this point in my story telling. The voices over there had confirmed the frilly clothes reference with which he had begun. Pat was channeling in black lace.

Over the years, I came to appreciate Pat’s sense if underwear whimsy. It’s like regardless of the mood, weather or whatever shit is happening in your life, you can have a party down below, or underneath as it were.

My sister and I bought her a lovely matching set of leopard print bra and panties with improbable yellow lace to return the favor. Sadly, we bought it the day before a priest waved incense over her mortal form and we buried her next to my dad.

However, it was the quintessential out-of-step gesture she would have dug had she been there to see them. It’s the kind of quintessential out-of-step gesture that I think keeps me amused to this day, and in turn keeps me from looking the haggard 47 years that people assume I should look.

Tomorrow, undercover of some semi-respectable work clothes, I’m rocking red satin. Wherever you are, whatever you do, even in the tiniest gesture, it’s good to let your freak flag fly.

Pat taught me that.

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Because I sent almost 1200 words to a friend for a possible book thingie, I added a second paragraph to my “comedy” bio. That’s almost like doing something.,

Never sure whether to be teacher ‘s pet or class wise guy, Dee-Rob still gets in trouble for her sharp wit and sharper tongue. Wickedly funny, Dee-Rob’s sardonic outlook is worldly without being weary, and she is very happy to laugh first at herself. Most of all, Dee-Rob proves that not only can a woman be tough, she can be damn funny.

After being seen at comedy clubs and shows all over New England, Dee-Rob shook the snow off her boots and currently lives on the coast in the San Francisco Bay area. She occasionally turns up at open mikes, comedy showcases and storytelling events in Northern California. More often, she’s playing Angry Birds instead of updating her weblog or photo gallery or working on an unfinished memoir, “Burying My Mom in Leopard Print Undies.”

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Cracking my knuckles and trying again

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I’m veritably sitting poised over the keyboard, loosening my joints and my thoughts. As long as it’s not my bowels I should be OK, loosely speaking.

It’s been quite a while in weblog time that I’ve written on the interwebs. A year has changed. I’ve seen Hawaii. I’ve celebrated yet another anniversary of my birth, 47 and counting. We’ve celebrated M.’s, too. I won’t name the number, as he keeps accusing me of outing him. Go figure, I imagine the marathon man should be proud for having done what he does for so long. And, I’ve been freed from the shackles of another off-kilter boss-employee relationship. The world keeps spinning on its axis.

Despite being much more attuned to avoiding weblog entries that might interfere with my income stream, I do have one thing to say that’s really about myself. I’ve had a pretty long career in the old, non-profit business. My first gig was in 1989, a literal lifetime ago in that folks born then are now voting, drinking citizens of the world. It’s had some ups and some pretty awesome lows from a storytelling point of view.

Here’s the interesting thing. Year after year, job after job, minor task after major overhaul, I’ve had one weird little bit of luck, if you could call it that. A bit of my success has always been surviving the nuts, freaks, screwballs, characters, and all level of unique individuals that comprise the American workforce. And the key word there is surviving — I’m the last buffer of sanity (well close anyway) that keeps Employee A from gutting Employee B like a cold mackerel.

In that first job, I got promoted on the strength of the near certain strength that NO ONE ever wanted to talk with two managers to whom I reported, if it could at all be avoided. Invoices got paid, grants got submitted, and I greased the communication skids for two very angry-seeming women.

Later, it was I, the soul female under 55 not banging the seriously Lothario-challenged chubby, yet well-coifed, director of a major research lab. His charms escaped me (and thank heavens, mine escaped him), and I held piles of some dysfunctional shit together among days of comforting the weeping women and juggling neglected paperwork. Through it all, I helped put together and work with the government on the largest grant the organization had gotten to date for the biological equivalent of the moon-landing. I walked away with my hymen unscathed by an asshole’s extramarital shenanigans and a kick-ass reference from a National Medal of Science award winner.

In another world, I convinced the lab staff to clean up just enough to prevent inspectors responsible for upholding two different sets of government regulations from declaring a toxic waste site. I was dubbed or deemed or unholy blessed as the one person able or willing to communicate with a certain nuclear scientist who had papered her office like the corner of a gerbil cage and refused to account to just anyone who asked about her work with radiation. Yeah, like atomic, that kind of radiation.

Down the hall, I was the UN negotiator for an underpaid lab of Indian postdoctoral students who when not facing all sorts of racism by surrounding scientists were jacking up paperwork to a fare-the-well, unable to keep straight DEA forms for classified substances and/or NRC logs for irradiating the odd lab rat. From them, I learned how to pronounce names like Gautam and that the preferred method the research nurses used in communicating with them — raised voices alternating with passive aggression — was not actually effective.

In my last gig, I foolishly kept millions of dollars of budgets flowing and all sorts of paperwork in apple pie order, in addition to my regular, daily toil. In doing so, I inadvertently saved the ass of one of the most ineffectual managers I ever met, who incidentally all witnesses to my job demise point to as the trigger man. The sweet ending of that tale is that as time rolled on others discovered what I had been doing to help the organization and he had not. Last I heard, he’s selling real estate at his partner’s company.

Here I sit, still employed. I’m at that sweet spot when I am well-liked and respected, I think, and quite possibly on the cusp of wearing out my welcome (if history is prologue). Only this time, the narrative has shifted. I withstood and helped make productive another crazy situation, and now someone else has moved on before me. A co-worker characterized it thusly — I’ve been holding a large cup of crazy and now that cup is gone (or has been depleted or emptied or cracked or put down or whatever else might flog the porcelain receptacle metaphor).

New people, new challenges and no doubt new characters. For better or worse, I persevere. I am the clover patch on the lawn of working America. It might not be symmetrical waves of Kentucky blue grass you imagined, but when noxious weeds start creeping in, I keep the dust from blowing up, the crab grass from taking over, and I ain’t half bad.

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I'm beginning to wonder if I'm an optimist

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In my life of toiling for a paycheck, things have been heating up organizationally speaking. There’s been some talk of some departments combining, and, therefore, implied slight changes to the status quo. Mostly the status quo is going to hold, as it generally does.

But, I’ve been in the thick of conversations about making plans, and making meetings about making plans, and having conversations about making plans. Mostly, it’s been conversations. I realized something in all of that talking for the sake of talking. I may not be the cynical, pessimistic asshole I think I always thought I was. Nope, my glass is actually half full.

What a horrible realization, self-awareness-wise. I’m actually a beam of sunshine in a cloudy world. OK, maybe not, but there are a lot of folks who are definitely more of a downer than I try to be. Either that or the great mass of folks just enjoy bitching and moaning. Actually, I think that part is definitely true.

This week, I sat in a meeting full of brainstorming-goodness-looking-to-the-future-change-management happy, happy office stuff. At one point in a small group someone who won’t be here in the future (notice given, replacement starting) who wasn’t in the job during a particular time of some change, opined at length about how this person didn’t think we should go through that all again. Come again, you weren’t here, you won’t be here and you’re worried about something that no one said would happen and never actually happened the way you believe? Got it.

It all felt like a great big communal squandering of opportunity.

Enough about them, this post is all about me.

Now, I’ve been fucked over by jobs in the past, and I will be fucked over in the future, I expect. I’ve been battered, bruised, hurt and variously promoted, demoted and fired. Through it all, though, mostly I’ve been employed in some capacity and have had reason to hope that some kind of green would still make it into my bank account. Knock wood and all, given the shit economy, but I haven’t been on food stamps yet.

Neither have any of my co-workers. Actually, I don’t even think any of my co-workers have been fired or faced with layoffs. Pretty much to a person, I think employment has been a bit more velvety smooth than the national average. Leastwise, I haven’t heard too many good stories to suggest otherwise.

What I realized is these folks with a level of comfort and privilege are waiting for the hammer more than I am. Maybe because I’ve been kept down by “the man” at least enough to not exactly have a boot heel on my throat but a thumb under which I’ve been kept, I have perspective. I have a experience predicting where the pain will be, so I don’t waste time imagining where it probably won’t be.

For example, I’m optimistic that they won’t go searching for a giant turd of new leadership. Why? Because I’ve seen giant turds, and the conditions that lead to their hire. I’m not seeing those signs, right now. It all got me impatient with other people bringing the room down with those particular misgivings. I don’t understand pessimism without evidence, I guess.

Of course, in a few months time, who knows. Maybe I’ll be writing up a song of how I guessed so badly and wishing Nancy Pelosi had signed the country up for more weeks of unemployment pay.

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Sock monkey

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Before Christmas I bought these cunning little kits at a cunning
little organic store a couple towns over. I thought I’d make a
Christmas present for my cousin’s bambino. That idea went the way of
other failures in the vortex of time management.

Now a co-worker gave birth, so i’m thinking of that target audience.

Honestly. It may just be too damn ugly.

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