Tag Archives: Pat

Pat 2015

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I’ve been thinking about my mom, but I can’t figure out the angle here.  Well, there’s the anniversary of her day of birth.  But, maybe it’s this:  After getting my perfomance reviewed at work — corporate America’s annual dance or bloodletting depending on how you are doing–I keep wondering if she’d be happy or pissed at me.

First week of the month, I was going full-on existential postal.  I can’t think much about where I am in life before I start thinking of all the places that I am not.  I am not rich, famous and beautiful, and I’d be good at all three, goddamnit, so I should be.  The crisis du month, though, was the triple-decker pileup of my birthday, my performance review and this thing at my place of toil that I can’t describe but involves sharing stuff about yourself.  

Amid the self-loathing caused by age and excess self reflection, I had a fleeting thought about my mother. A point I will get to after I set it up with too much detail.

Some days, I think I confound some of my coworkers.  The environment of my paycheck generation is well-educated and high performing. It definitely charts about the curve by most definitions, or it’s proof positive that with the right motivation and circumstances, and money to pay for it, anyone can get a graduate degree.  There’s a metric ton of letters after people’s names.

I was too desirous of money and the associated purchases — groceries and rent mainly — to stick around ivied halls any longer than I had to do to get my bachelor’s.  I wasn’t burning for any more learning of the formal sort circa 1985.

From 1985 almost to the day she died, Pat, my mother, reminded me I could still go to grad school.  I let her down on that decision for decades.

Today, I am docorate-less and masters-less in a sea of masters and doctors.  I have more years of relevant experience than many, though, so I hold my own with common sense and moxie.  Hence the confounding, I just don’t defer to not knowing shit, because there’s a lot of shit I know even without the sheepskin to prove it.  

it’s a bit like the end of the Wizard of Oz; I grant myself a doctorate of thinkology.

Now here’s where Pat comes in… That woman worked hard, year after year, helping to educate other people’s kids.  That hard work full on cramped the woman’s style.  Some of the other teachers and the school administrators crushed a bit of her creative sparkle. She was a little pounded down.  By retirement, she was caved in by it all.

She indoctrinated me into a fear about work.  A fear that you could lose your job for many types of infractions.  She had near perfect attendance over years and years.  She carried out all of the side jobs and extra tasks asked of teachers with nary a complaint — bus duty, after hours tutoring, grading papers on her own time, mentoring young teachers and helping with banquets and school events in the evenings.

I learned and listened and I have almost perfect attendance and do a lot of good citizeny extras at work.  But try as I might I can’t bury my non-conformist tendencies.  I am a good worker bee in a happy hive, but I’m a square peg in a round-holed world.

Problem is, I like it.

So, I work in a job that is easy for me.  I sacrifice some pay and will likely never have a good title, but I know everyone in the building.  My days are laid out with honkingly wide swathes of leeway and not a lot of  having my clocked punched by somebody else.

It’s a trade off.  It’s a choice.  And, it’s a little bit of anxiety.  If I got the gig where I got the pay that meant I have to manage stuff, I might fail.  I might have to leave my sneakers at home.  I might have to be at my desk for geometrically larger periods of time than I am now.

I think Pat might see the genius of my choice.  For good benefits and a not awful paycheck, the man isn’t keepnmg me down and the thoughts inside my head are free to breathe.

Outwardly, she’d tell me to do more.  She’d ask about promotions and growth opportunities.  She’d worry. 

Or maybe she’d smile.

It ought to be a holiday

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Every year, well more frequently than that, I think about my mother. I think about her on the Ides of March, the portentous day in which Brutus stabbed Caesar and my mother was born. Not the same year, mind you, as I’m not tapping this out on my ancient Roman computer.

Actually, it was portent upon portent for old Pat. She was born on the Ides of March the year of the stock market crash for the Great Depression. She was meant for great things.

So, another anniversary rolls around.

I like to remember the ways in which Pat stood out from the crowd. Or in my warped and selfish and self-absorbed brain, the ways in which Pat affected me and stood out from the crowd.

Today’s memory is tied to the current season of my manual toil. OK, typing and sitting at a desk isn’t manual labor, but some days it grinds you just the same. I got callouses on my tappy type finger tips.

At work these days the pesky little papers (now computer files) that once a year worker drones planet-wide, or at least U.S.-wide, bemoan are due — the annual performance reviews. The neat little report where you and your boss get to write out how you’re “meeting expectations” and otherwise doing what a cog does when one is employed.

You say to yourself right about now, I can hear you breathing and thinking, you say, but how does that relate to Pat. Surely, she was not your boss, apart from the sense in which we are all subordinates to our mothers.

Well, here’s the thing. I might be one of the only people rambling around that has written their own performance “self reports” for the decades that I have been employed as a grown up adult, who got their start years before they were allowed to work.

Pat, enmeshed in some heavy duty politics and just short of Brutus-like backstabbing in my town’s school system, turned her typewriter over to her precocious daughter one fine day and asked for her help in word smithing her review. She had to describe her classroom contributions, and since she floated around helping learning disabled kids within other people’s classrooms, she had to talk about that too.

By nature, she was a mix of fierceness on some opinions and topics (ahem, Catholic molesters) and shy reticence on a whole lot more. She complained to those nearest and dearest, but she was way too polite to complain to anyone or anything with any authority, including a cashier at a convenient store. (Although, the school teacher might pop out at any time if said cashier couldn’t do the math to make simple change.)

Real humility, not the false stuff that often passes for humility, was part of her core, and she could not find any words at all to describe what she contributed. She knew what she did, but she couldn’t spin it to advertise her brand.

I could do that for her and with some nudging to not get carried away with florid prose extolling her greatness, together we spoke about her patience with kids in the classroom. Her vast experience. Her gentle but persistent nature. Her true and deep caring for children and learning and education. Her mastery of basic skills and pedagogies and learning methods. That she could set and meet goals until the sun rose and set a hundred years.

She was a champion to a whole lot of kids fumbling in classrooms with dyslexia, a host of other syndromes and disorders, and simply poor study skills.

Pat was also a drill sergeant. No misplaced modifiers, misspellings (which I incidentally just mistyped), prepositions dangling at a sentence’s end, no math not shown happened on her watch. For the stuff where there is a right and wrong way to do it, by god she was going to teach you the right way or die trying.

All of her skills, the ones that made strangers come up to me in high school and beyond and say they knew my mother and that she was great, they were in her heart effortlessly as a teacher.

But, she did suck at telling management what was up. I helped do that for her. I was a kid and it was a fun writing assignment and in truth I had no feel for the politics or fear of the consequences, so I could write without inhibition. She could not. It became an annual ritual in her later years of work.

Now, about a thousand years later, or maybe just shy of that, I have to do the same kind of reports for myself.

So, I sit at my desk and return to the game that I had done at my mother’s typewriter. I right fast and furiously, and I have learned how to advertise my own brand but temper it with a soupçon of self-reflection. I allow for the things I do not know, and I hammer out my strengths. I find the notes of self improvement that are surmountable and demonstrate my good attitude.

I try very hard not to by cynical. But, for that to happen, I do not dwell, I do not agonize. If I spend over 15 minutes on the thing, at about 10 minutes in, I walk away until my head is in the game and I give it only 5 minutes more.

It’s impossible to tell your boss that in addition to my 25-30 years of doing the things for myself, I might have done 10 years more. We breeze through the things, the virtual online handshake is done and another year will pass.

And my highest proof of mastery were the words of my attorney, the one I hired on account of my work at the time not really feeling the love, the labor lawyer who helped me out of a jam. That besuited gentleman pulled all of my Human Resources records out of the belly of the employment beast, and he went through each paper with the loving care that an hourly fee will get you.

Upon sage and learned analysis, he proclaimed that while many a person had come through his office doors with a sad story to tell about the workplace, almost all of them had some marks in their permanent records. But my file, the years of reviews and meetings, they were a pristine and glimmering example. He said in all his years of lawyering he had never seen such stellar performance reviews.

More on money, but not mine

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After a 20+ “career,” or something like a career, I guess the kids call them “jobs,” working in non-profits and grant management, I ended up in a strange little niche. Instead of looking for money, I help give it away.

The environment is greater than first world conditions, it's privilege and quality of life and life-work balance.

Smack dab in the world of the richies, my poor self works.

Life is literally a buffet, at least on some days of the week. And, almost every damn day, having been trained as the accomplice to my mother's many capers, I have to squash deep down the desire to tuck a free bagel or yogurt or two, wrapped in a reused plastic bag, into my purse.

Allah will provide

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Growing up I had an a mythical or maybe horrific relationship with money and finances. It was a semi-idealistic view, but with an undercurrent of mixed messages and vague dread.

The basics were covered. Food, clothing, shelter, yup, we had them. So I didn't want. At least I didn't identify with the kids in the government-subsided apartments in town or the ones who carried their tattered meal cards that promised hot food every day. I had my ham and cheese sandwich on white bread and an apple, thank you very much, I was good.

Yet, I wanted. I knew my pants might get tighter and shorter for a few more months than the better dressed girls growing alongside me. Some of the same designer labels hugged my back and backside except in my case the labels were cut out or over-imprinted with another designer name — The House of Irregular.

I never noticed at home, but when I went out and ate at friends' houses, there was variety we didn't have. Or maybe freshness. Much of my gastronomical intake was from a chest freezer in the basement loaded down with day old bread and treats from the bakery outlet and meat bought in bulk and repackaged in plastic wrap in suitable meal chunks.

Ground beef was stretched across multiple days in various disguises. Burgers, chopped with onions and spices, mixed with mac and cheese, sloppy joes and fabulous taco fiestas, a new an exciting food idea in our white bread town.

It wasn't until adulthood that I understood the magnitude of my mother's feeding five kids, maintaining a household, paying for the house and all on a public school teacher's salary. I cannot type that we were poor, because that betrays what an incredible job Pat had done keeping us afloat. But, we weren't rich.

The climate on these issues was hot and cold. We didn't talk about money. Grown up stuff was solely my mother's domain, and she felt no compunction about keeping the details under her hat.

However, at a moment's notice, an unexpected squall would kick up and the lack of money would rush to the forefront of the drama. Want the coat with the little extra design and worst of all retail, first-run tag? Better run for cover before the barrage of “Who do you think I am?” “Who do you think you are?” “I work so hard, and you kids don't appreciate me.” “I work my fingers to the bone for you.” “You just take, take and think money grows on trees.”

Worst of all: “Fine. If that's what you want, you can decide. I'll just go without a coat this year, if it's that important to you.” Followed by silence. A thick, ominous silence.

Speaking of coats, Pat rocked a red dress coat with a real fur collar on special occasions, like holidays and church. On ordinary days, she'd wear the kind of ordinary, drab jackets and “car coats” that got folks through New England winters, and she wasn't opposed to wearing a hand-me-up from one of her own children. I have a dim recollection of Elmer's glue, the collar and tragedy that had my mother soaking and scrubbing fur for days. That dress coat had to survive another year, and by god she'd make it happen.

Good at math and figures and observant, I started to piece together the situation. But, money was an abstract concept for me about which I hadn't learned to manage. I only learned there wasn't enough.

The vague dread lingers in adulthood.

I seemed to have inherited Pat's knack for money management. In fact, I pretty much have made a living largely because of that knack, managing million-dollar budgets for other people.

I can make some calculations in my head. I know the logic of compounded interest. Putting together a contract or grant or spending plan is more muscle memory at this point in my career. I literally made four times what I put into my first condo when I sold it. Car dealers don't intimidate me, they are a game.

Still in all, I worry about money. Sometimes rationally. Sometimes not. I dream of having the kind of nest egg that negates any possibility of concern. Hedge fund billions.

I remain a thousandaire.

However, my mother's lessons end at one crucial point. My whole lifetime, or maybe not the first few years before my dad died, Pat scrimped and saved for survival. Only in her later years, with a paid off mortgage, a remodeled house thanks to a well-insured fire, five grown children with their own jobs and homes, a pension and a scattered but flush shoebox of investments, she still scrimped and saved as though it was for survival.

Her final years were Campbell soup, and they could have been caviar.

Worry as I might about cash, I don't live in privation.

I used Pat's money, my small inheritance, to buy a new car, finance a move cross-country, help create a settled household for my partner, who had less than me growing up. I shopped and paid off debt and created a new chapter in my life, but with a jumble of happiness, anger and bitterness.

If I had realized how much she would leave behind, I would have angrily tried to shake loose her self-induced deprivation. It's a remaining regret I have for not having done more before she died.

So, today, I worry, but I talk myself through it. I may not have a nest egg, or this week even much in my savings account. But, I have a comfortable life. My only debt I couldn't pay off in a minute is my car and our house. It's worked out in worst times than these, I remind myself.

Maybe the future will require cheese sandwiches and raman noodles again. Worry? Yes. But to live and live well and as best as I can, that is imperative. Otherwise, what's the fucking point?

Nothing to see here

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I just don't feel rant-y enough these days, which I think is the death of interesting. Probably a horrible Rorschach of my twisted psyche that I equate anger with interesting.

Let's face it though. Puppies and rainbows just don't grab the headlines like massacres.

The fantastic part of the week was my aunt's visit. M. and I were both proud to show off our little house, our little town, our little lives.

My aunt revitalized me to pay tribute (or tithe) to the dearly departed Pat and try to capture something of her indelible mark on the planet. I had completely forgotten what may indeed be the punchline of one of the best little bits of her house fire saga.

After my mother's house burned just about to the ground, the phoenix rose. Well maybe it wasn't to the ground. The walls and roof were still there, but where decades of life and possessions were accumulated there now lay smoldering ruins. I honestly didn't know dishes, kitchen cabinets and food could all melt and fuse together into one unrecognizable mass dripping from the walls Dali-style.

The days after were baby steps of rebuilding. Until all is lost, you really do not understand how much you take for granted just getting through a day. Underwear, for example. When your house burns down, all you got left in that department is the smoky set of drawers on your backside. One pair of undies while everyone around you can cavalierly put on another pair without waiting for the wash cycle to spin down.

I twisted Pat's arm at Walmart. We didn't just pick up a jumbo pack of multi-colored cotton panties in her size. We picked up two. I think I coerced her into somewhere in the range of a full two weeks' of freshness.

My aunt took her to CVS for sundries. Sundries turned out to be a carefully chosen shade of lipstick and a more impulsive canned ham. The canned ham was punchline enough in the story, and you could end it there.

But, this week, my aunt reminded me of the next tier of that story. The tier that makes the story soar just a little bit higher, and reminded me of how a house fire does destroy damn near everything.

One thing you can't tell from movies or TV shows or news reports about fire is that it smells. Everything smells. Like a barbecue pit of hickory and mesquite, smoke crawls into every space.

The house smells. The air in the neighborhood smells. The clothes on you when you walk away from blaze smell. Smoke gets in your hair, your skin. The odor is pervasive. It doesn't wash out instantly. Especially so if you haven't yet gotten all of the new clothes to wear that you might need and you're making do with what you got.

Pat smelled. Behind her back, my brother took to calling her “Old Smokey.”

So, there they are in CVS examining the lipsticks, my mom and my aunt, her sister.

My aunt began to sense a little unease in the crowd in the store. People in the store had begun to smell smoke and report it to management. There was the bustle and hum of a building panic and emergency effort.

Pat looked at lipstick colors.

As they went to check out at the register, the store was beginning to enact it's safety plan and evacuate the customers. In perhaps the greatest single moment of understatement in the history of the world, Pat left the store saying, “Don't worry, it's just me.”

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!

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.

Spreading the word

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I just lost a 3/4 written attempt to update thanks, not, to the WordPress iPad app. Fuck you to those who gave me a false security in computer code.

Other than that, I started the day on Facebook and ended up reading this interesting ‘blog post from Barry Crimmins.

Now Barry and I go way back, although he wouldn’t know it or likely remember me. During the first war for oil, waged by the first President George Bush, the Herbert Walker one, I watched Barry at an anti-war rally. It was actually an ill-fated date, in which after the day of protest my would be suitor opted for the pulchritude of my apolitical roommate over our shared political affinity.

Barry was also the force majeure behind comedy at Cambridge’s Ding Ho restaurant, a legendary show that laid the groundwork for the Comedy Studio, my home away from home when Cambridge was my home. I got to work with Barry a couple of times there and afterwards shoot the shit about comedy, politics and upstate New York, where he grew up and I got a college degree.

I’ve always liked his writing. His call for his own excommunication and people to turn their backs on a church whose leadership was at the very least complicit in not stopping child molestation struck a particular chord.

I feel fortunate that not only was I allowed to be a lapsed Catholic, arguably I was raised anti-church. Condemning the bad behavior of priests and the hierarchy that protects itself at all costs is second nature to me.

One thing that Barry’s essay has me reconsidering is my attitude toward the parishioners. I’ve always taken a wide berth in questioning the religious choices of others as none of my business. But I think he is correct in asking people to reconsider supporting an institution with a fetid history and the corruption to let the worst of human behavior continue and, until very recently, unchecked.

To understand my attitude to the church, you have to know my mother.

Two essential things, I think, set Pat apart in my memories: (1) as a mother of five and a schoolteacher, she was a ferocious defender of kids, and (2) she had little patience with phonies and hypocrites. Combine the two, and no doubt if she hadn’t walked away from the church years before, she would have been on cathedral steps with signs and shouts for justice the minute the first molestation scandals broke.

She died condemning the archdiocese of Boston for not outing the pedophiles in it’s ranks and treating them as the felons they are.

Pat’s break with church started well before the scandals, and as the youngest in our family I got the easiest ride where Sunday mass was concerned. Unlike some of my siblings, I never sat in parochial school or had to prove I attended mass by producing from my pocket a copy of the weekly church bulletin. All of my holy sacraments were performed in intimate gatherings among friends in family homes.

I think it started when my dad died. No, i think it started before. As an adult, I once asked my mother if she had anything critical to say about him, because what little she did speak of him was hushed and glowing praise. She smiled and told me that if anything he was “too religious.”

Apart from occasionally wanting to sleep in on Sunday, I think she never bought into the unassailable nature of the men who ran the church and the notion that those mere mortals should be worshipped too. Ironically, she married a man who left the seminary after he enlisted during World War 2.

I learned the word “chippy” from her, as the only noun I ever heard her use for women she remembered from her childhood. It was reserved for the women who accompanied the priests visiting her family’s seaside cottage each summer. As the niece of the coastal area’s Monsignor, she got to see a vacationing side of the men who came to visit him.

Maybe it was one of those memories kids have that aren’t totally accurate, and maybe some of the priests she met were good men who keep their vows. It colored her belief in the leaders, I suspect, though, even if she stuck with the church for many more years.

Later, when she became a widow, her disappointment in the established order of the church further crumbled, when without a man beside her she became an outsider. I don’t know the details of what and when and who exactly, but she remained bitter about her newfound status and unchristian treatment.

As a kid, I was lucky. When the local parish became unbearably reactionary and stodgy in the face of the turmoil of the 70s, a group of families rented space (from Protestants) and arranged for their own folk masses (newfangled service with guitars and pita bread, instead of organs and communion wafers). A round robin was formed where each week a different family or two worked on the theme and arranged for the communion gifts. A Jesuit from Boston College High School drove to the suburbs to say the mass.

Among our neighbors, in an offbeat, mildly revolutionary act, I think Pat found some of the religion and sense of community she craved. Where our parish church was pro-Vietnam and anti-women wearing slacks, this group leaned proudly left and may have been the most sincere Catholics I have ever met. I still remember the fervor and powerful grip of Mr. Boyce’s three-fingered handshake during the sign of peace. The prayers called out and the collection for a sister community in the Ozarks or Appalachia were heartfelt.

For me, it was fun. Where my older brothers and sister were brought up in the formal church, I had my First Holy Communion in a purple dress in my friend Janice’s living room. Penance, or what the cool kids now call Reconciliation, was eye-to-eye with a priest in the Morrissey’s den, cleared of toys and games for the solemn occasion.

It couldn’t last. Shortly after sanctioning the group and threatening to tell Rome, the church called us all back and brought in a hip, young priest who was meant to be more in touch with the community. He wasn’t. My mother stopped going just in time to allow me to refuse Confirmation, the sacrament where I would reaffirm my faith and be seen as an adult by the church.

I remain unconfirmed and unrepentant.

In young adulthood, I became more aware of Pat’s enmity to the church in general and priests specifically. I think my favorite episode came in the aftermath of my cousin’s Holy Communion. A schoolteacher to her last, over coffee and cake, she took exception to the age appropriateness of the priest’s asking a group of seven year olds to describe when they had last felt the savior’s presence in their lives.

The argument on early childhood development versus the lord was epic and ended in an exasperated priest telling her to seek psychiatric and spiritual counseling.

I’ve told the story before of how I learned from my aunt that my mother was pro-choice. If not for the arrogance of ao Catholic doctor at a well-established Catholic hospital booking a legal and routine D and C without asking my mother or explaining why, beyond his decision she shouldn’t have more children, I would never have been born into the hands of a Jewish obstetrician at a city hospital. Thank you, Pat, for exercising your right to choose and refusing that blessed abortion.

Late in life, she talked about Pope John Paul II and how his church was involved with the Nazis. She felt that by virtue of Jewish people being eradicated from Poland there was no way the Catholics couldn’t have known what was going on or downright sympathized with the Nazis. Her head would have exploded when former Hitler youth, Pope Benedict XVI grabbed his throne.

So, today, I sit reading about the church’s marketing campaign to have us lost sheep “come home.” I’ve read what Barry has written, and I appreciate the gift Pat gave me of not taking any of it at face value. I’m comfortably agnostic with atheist leanings, and I try to walk a secular human path of decency.

I have dear friends who believe, and maybe they are right to believe in Jesus, his teachings, the Virgin Mary, and a supreme deity. I honestly don’t know, and i suspect will never have the conviction in my lack of faith like Dawkins or Hitchens.

However, the acts of man, the church with it’s money and corrupt self preservation, I do not believe in them. No manner of explanation or prayer would ever convince me other than it is completely evil to allow a young kid to get raped. Letting it happen again, and again, and again is unconscionable.

Not writing and writing

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I guess it’s summertime and I’m busy going on adventures, like whitewater rafting, walking to the beach and barbecue. And, of course, there is my most recurring adventure, sitting on the couch and getting fat.

I’ve had some ideas for things to write here. I could write about the full on anxiety and trembling I felt whitewater rafting when the full force of my first experience on the Nile came back and I started feeling irrationally and overwhelming phobic. I could write about Dr.Laura and how I learned about her epic fail from a chat with a homeless dude named Larry in Berkeley.

I could write about my experience concocting an evening outing for work that turned into my own little amusing performance art piece in which with a little help from some friends I brought a crowd with some uptight and overeducated folks to a veritable hippie street party. I could write about the mundane, or maybe the way in which I still feel like an abused spouse in the workplace, even as I only get positive reinforcement in this job.

Or, I could do what I’ve been doing and not write.

For over a year, I’ve been naval gazing and hang wringing and other body part manipulating in a pretty unspectacular, boring cave of writer’s block. Someone asked me seriously, genuinely, strongly why do I write, or more why do I feel compelled to write. Further, he told me I didn’t have to write and I certainly didn’t have to validate myself through self-flagellation at a keyboard.

It struck home, and I haven’t gotten full on unstuck. Combine that with the sinking feeling that the books I loved as a little girl are a technology with a cloudy future. Being an author was never an easy row to hoe, now with the state of publishing it seems worse than dirt farming.

This week, or more last week, though, I was reminded by life one of the reasons I do want to write. Not to be all cliched and philosophical at the same time, but sharing stories is kind of what it’s always been about humanity wise.

A good friend, someone who I feel would have been a great friend had I not fled Boston, lost her mom. For the past year or so, she’s been keeping house and cooking meals and taking care of her mother however she needed. She emailed me a few days before when her mom was in a bad state after a stroke and then a series of strokes. The inevitable happened on Thursday.

Now, on the side of the country I left, she’s gone through the busy flurry of wakes and a funeral and having folks back to the house and making food and eating and storing food. No doubt, she’s functioning on autopilot and in the coming months she’ll feel intensely the change in the universe from not having to worry any more about her mother’s fragility and missing the place where her mother used to be.

I have the kernel of the idea about my mother, Pat, and me, and a few shallow chapters on my ‘puter, because story telling keeps us sane and keeps us knowing we aren’t alone. Not only would I get to exercise my demons by writing them down, but just maybe a reader would dig it and breath a little easier.

I can’t do anything to help my friend out but talk on the phone. I told her about my small smoking binge for the months that followed Pat’s funeral. It felt OK when she, having quit years ago, told me she and her brothers had been having a smoke on the stoop. For both of us, I think, there’s something cathartic in knowing someone else did the exact same thing.

The other day, I took a day off of work for no reason and with no plan. Ultimately, I wandered the aisles of Target and Daiso, a Japanese store with housewares and junk. It was relaxing to have absolutely no agenda. I came home with new underpants and various things for the house.

I laughed out loud in one department of a department store. A middle-aged woman and an older woman, crooked from osteoporosis, stood side by side in front of a shelf if empty bins. The older woman was examining a little plastic storage bin, carefully considering the possible purchase. The other woman, who really could only have been her daughter, questioned why she could possibly need it.

“You never can have enough storage, you know.”

The retort was quick and exasperated, “Yes, you can. Especially when you have no where to put it.”

I smiled a friendly head nod, as I passed by them in the aisle.

The dialog and its tone were so familiar, so comfortable. Among friends and strangers, I’m sensitive to all of the daughters and all of the mothers living through the last phase of their relationships. It’s a tough rite of passage, frustrating and rewarding.

On top of losing my mother, there are also a thousand ways in which I remember the Pat I did know and have in my life. I almost wrote on Twitter the other day that I can’t pass doll house furniture without quashing the urge to pick something up for her.

I wish now I could get some of her inspired and surprising creativity.

For example, I know she could help with another thing I could write about–a friend with breast cancer. She’s an unlikely friend, in that we’re not contemporaries (in fact she’s the same age as my uncle) and lives in Washington, DC. Still and all, we are long-distance coworkers who have swapped stories and realized some kinship, including strong-charactered mothers, and sharp, wicked senses of humor that have caused almost as much trouble as laughter.

As the contemporary of my aunt and uncle and from the generation about which Gail Collins writes, she’s straight up first generation feminist and solidly liberal. The pink ribbons, pink everything else and what Barbara Ehrenreich bitches about for its infantilism leaves her flat.

As does the notion that she should be a docile and placid patient, as opposed to the pugnacious fighter in her soul. I pity the poor oncologist or radiologist who doesn’t take the time to explain enough.

I want to send her something, especially post surgery and going into her second chemotherapy treatment, when she’s talking wig shopping and whether to go down to the army base for a $10 head shave from the barber there (apparently that’s a real option). If Pat were here, we could brainstorm. No doubt she’d come up with an off-the-wall scheme or some bizarre conglomeration of bargains and nonsense. Maybe she’d loan her a hat.

At gift-giving moments like this one, I always imagine the crazy, ragtag, assembled over weeks gift basket, which in my memories was colossally large, that Pat put together for a retiring colleague.

She didn’t leave behind blueprints for how to do such projects proud. I need those skills and those plans now, with one friend sick and another grieving.

At the same time, I need to remember all of the fights and frustration, big and small, with Pat or with life, including all of the many indignities she described as holding her back in life. If I remember the thousand things that made her great and the thousand things that made her troubled, i might have a story. I definitely would have a reason to not become complacent,

My life ain’t bad, But, somewhere there is still a gnawing. Maybe the words will escape some day, late to help my friends, but in time for some one else.

Writing the modern way

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Early adopters M. and I are, so here I sit with Apple’s latest gewgaw on my lap. I have to say this little thing is something.

Now, me, I’ve gotten all sorts of portable devices over the years. I had Motorola clamshell phones that let you download weak, little Java or Brew applets. Chunky pixels of solitaire games or calculators that required a whole lot of clickity clicking.

The web, I’ve been surfing that thang for years and years. Normal folks don’t remember the magic of pairing an amber screen of text with a zippy 9600 baud modem and discovered words on bulletin board services that were left behind by other explorers. Usenet was a mystical land.

Gopher. I went down some Gopher holes and found treasures of information. I was a member in good standing with Delphi, and that neighborhood of oracles. I had mastered WAIS searches a year or so before I ended up sleeping with a guy responsible for some of the core code.

Yeah, I’m geek girl enough to sleep with a true geek guy. (In those days it also meant a house full of roommates who not only could code, but could gather up the binary files and make “Simpson” episodes and Grateful Dead and Phish bootlegs appear from data strings.)

Hell, I even rocked a Sidekick for long awhile.

But, this, the iPad, it’s not your grandma’s computer. Although, it probably should be.

I think the best thing about it is it doesn’t have much of that computer feeling to it. Not a lot of pesky menus or commands. Just words and pictures that humans might use.

Want a book? Hit the iBooks icon, which looks like a book, et voilà. Want to know what books you have? Tap on the library. Want to buy a new one? Tap on the store. Pretty much the same thing for loading up apps and email accounts and whatnot.

I know for sure if my mother were alive I would buy her one.

Now Pat wasn’t a dumb woman, or particularly fearful of trying something new and different and electronic. Among her computing accomplishments was to not only find on the web a bunch of images of Wyoming when my sister moved there, but to download them and print them up on good photo paper for a collage of framed art. However, AOL and her desktop set up were haunted by various gremlins.

A common call I might get, whilst sitting home alone some quiet evening, was “Help. There’s just a big line or thing on the screen and it won’t go away.” Or, “I click on that thing and it doesn’t make that sound.”

What that generally translated to was an errant mouse drag or two had made a menu bar stretch to half the screen obscuring the menus that could it back under control. Or, maybe in the days of modems, the familiar squeal of the phone line never connected. In later days of cable modems the email window wasn’t crying out “You’ve got mail.”

Hours of our relationship, which ended in one of us dying prematurely, could have been salvaged if Steve Jobs had been inspired sooner and technology had caught up to Pat’s fantasy of how “that damn computer” should have worked.

A lot of people hate the cult of Mac and the messiah that is Jobs. It is in the end a commercial enterprise, and he’s a very wealthy man.

However, I defend him and his products perhaps because of his personal interests and how they are found in his designs. It is the tech company where CEO Jobs stood in front of an image of intersecting street signs – Liberal Arts and Technology. It takes a guy who likes to read books himself to design something a book reader might like.

Mostly, I think computers are designed and made by geeks like me who enjoy clicking around and solving puzzles and don’t mind coded language. For them, and some of the time for me, it’s OK to have to click on and on through a series of Skinner-inspired conditioned responses.

Normal folks, though, and a good percentage of the time myself, don’t want to have to think that hard. In Jobs’ world the computer is a means that should be easy with the hard thinking part reserved for the actual task at hand.

We just want to click on the picture of a book to get there and have the reading be the main event. That the iPad does quite prettily.