Thirty Days Hath September...

              Today’s the last day of September, so I’ve decided to say my official goodbyes to summer and force myself to accept it’s over. But, let me warn you - I’m not happy about it. That's right - I'm downright droopy. Please, fear not, I’m not dense. I knew it was coming, since it magically happens every damn year. It's just that I'm afflicted with a serious case of magical thinking when it comes to summer, so I cling to it when it’s here and imagine that if I hold on to it hard enough it won't go.

So, now that I've seen the light (well - more like lack of it), I've been able to appreciate the swarms of pine cones covering my driveway (seriously - you can't miss 'em). They've been yelling at me with their Christmas-scented breath that it’s time for me to accept that fall is not going to turn back into summer, no matter how much I pretend it will. One out and out bonked me on the head the other day when I was walking down the street, I guess to remind me it was about time I gave up all my wishin’ and hopin’.

What worries me is that those stupid pine cones might be portending a cold, cold, cold and dark-as-a-dungeon winter. I'm shivering just writing down the word cold, because it makes me think about the possibility of one more New England winter (my 30^th!). Hmmm, the very thought of it launched me out of my chair towards the thermostat. I turned it on, oh yes I did, and let it warm up my purple-with-fall-cold toes. What a difference a few degrees of Fahrenheit make.

Once I warmed up, I was seized with a case of fall fever, so I ran around the house like a squirrel on speed, zipping up the screens and yanking down the storm windows, then closing up all the open air conditioning vents (with a few quick curses thrown out, because of all the damage that stupid air conditioning unleashed in August).

I know I sound like a Scrooge (bah, autumn), but it’s because I'm a summer gal from head to toe. I'm not a pumpkin patch picking, leaf-peeping, cider-mulling, football-game-going rooter tooter. I mean, all of those things are terrific...for the fall guys. I'm a California girl - a Beach Boys-er. A sun shining through my dirty (never been cleaned) upstairs windows at 5 a.m.-er. 

Sigh. Bye.

Dear Blogreaders,
     I've been laid low by a massive 5-day migraine, which explains why I'm not writing (or talking or doing much more than curling up in our bed in a fetal position). 
     Stay tuned, though, because I plan to jump back in the saddle and pick up the mighty pen (tee hee - I mean, type on my lovely laptop) once the pain recedes. 

Movie Madness

How’s this for surreal? Drive to a park, walk down a path to a former dog “beach,” listen to some moving speeches from family, relatives, and friends, watch someone dig a hole in the ground to receive cremains, empty three baggy’s-full of ashes into the hole, and mound the dirt back on top.

Find a nice pile of stones to put over the mounded spot, talk for a few minutes, walk back down the path to the car, drive back to the house, drive like the wind to pick up Harry’s pizza and salad, then race back to feast on it.

Drive to a neighborhood church, walk in and wander around its empty rooms, watch as so many people arrive they fill up the room. Hold up a teeny, tiny Flip video camera to capture the cast of hundreds who have crowded in to honor Janet with speeches and piano playing. Step up to the podium and read some words on a page that try to capture what it’s like to be a best friend among a sea of best friends. Meet and greet once all the talking and piano playing end. Go home and toss and turn – then have nightmares.

Luis Bunuel, where’s your film crew when I need it? Don’t you know that I feel like I’ve been cast in one of your movies?

Yep. My life has become a foreign film. What’s odd is how incredibly real it now seems. Sure, on a day-to-day basis, my old life was real, too, but in a different way - painful, annoying, upsetting, fun, agonizing, delightful, and scary, all at the same time. I took that old reality for granted, though. These days surreal is my new reality (sort of like how 60 is the new 50).

Since I started living on Planet Janet, I feel surreally disconnected from planet Earth. I used to think reality equaled down-to-earth activities like hanging out with my husband, reading, running errands, going to the library, knitting, cleaning the house, cooking yummy dinners, emailing, talking on the phone to the usual suspects, shopping, thinking clearly, watching Netflix videos, going to the movies, exercising regularly, or enjoying Connecticut’s amazingly beautiful fall weather.

These days reality makes me feel like I'm living inside a giant kaleidoscope. I turn in one direction and I’m hanging out with a 10 month old and 3 year-old. Turn again, and I’m interacting with a changing cast of adult mourners. Keep turning, and I’m helping to organize bills and receipts, obituary editing, or memorial-service planning. Turn once more, and I’m exploring the rocky terrains of sadness. The weird part is, living in this new amorphously psychedelic reality makes me feel useful – and alive. Yeah - achingly alive. But blurred around the edges.

It produces bad dreams, too, when I fall asleep. In one dream a very dangerous person was on the loose. He wanted to kill someone I was close to. I tried to protect this person (I can’t remember whether it was a male or female) from the killer, but it wasn’t possible, because the killer had amazing super powers and could track my every move. I tried to think of ways to hide, but I couldn’t figure out how to avoid being found.

After I woke up, I realized that it's impossible to avoid death, because it’s inevitable. And omnipresent. Yeah, it’s merely waiting in the wings to swoop down and snatch me up. Like it snatched up Janet.

Move over, Carl Jung.

Shake It Like A Polaroid Picture

Someone asked me the other day what all the brouhaha was about Zumba. What, you’ve never heard of it? You have no idea what this marbles-in-the-mouth-sounding exercise class is all about? Here’s what you’re missing: loud Latin-beat music, constantly-moving legs, lots of open-mouth panting, buckets of sweat, easy-to-follow steps, and a mumble-jumble whirlwind of arm movements.

Why go to a class like this? To shake yourself silly, that’s why. To dance the blues away. For a change of pace. To move like crazy to songs that make you want to clap and stomp your feet. To race over to your water bottle and glug down a gulp or two to revive yourself before you hop, skip, and jump back to your spot. To move and groove like there’s no tomorrow.

No, don’t shake your head and say Zumba’s not for you. Try it. I promise, it’s not hard to follow the teacher’s moves. As soon as the music starts, you’ll find yourself shimmying, jerking-ing, salsa-ing, and cha-cha-ing up a storm. You’ll be instantly gratified.

Does this old body of mine sometimes balk? Sure, but when it does, I just slow it down and go through the motions. When it doesn’t, I find myself Zumba-ing with the best of them.

Yes, yes, sometimes it’s a struggle for my 61 year-old body to gyrate and wave its arms around like a June Taylor dancer, but since I’m far, far from one, who cares. Sure, I look kind of crazy in the mirror, but that’s the beauty of Zumba: it doesn’t matter.

No, I’m not being paid by the Zumba people to hype it. I just wanted to let you know what’s available, in case you’re as stubborn as I am and don’t like to try new things. Or you're sad because your best friend died and all you want to do is hibernate. Zumba-ing helped me pack up my sorrows, lace up my dancing sneakers, and celebrate living like it was 1999.

Going in Style

I will probably get in a lot of trouble with someone, somewhere for putting an obit in my blog that identifies my friend and uses her real name. But, I'm doing it anyway, consequences be damned, because I want everyone to roar with laughter and cry along with me (and all her other gazillion best friends) as I celebrate her life. 

She would've been on the phone with me this morning, cackling with laughter at the irreverence and length. She also would've noticed that the obit on the following page was twice as long (but three times as unexciting). I wonder what she'd have said if she'd known how much these suckers cost...$4.00 a line. Count 'em up, folks - we're talking one expensive send-off.

Enough about money - click on the title of this blog entry and you'll be brought right to her Hartford Courant obituary.

Stopping to Smell the Rose(s)

My best friend, who died with her family at her side on 9/11/09, used to tell me I was her best friend. What amazes skeptical old me is that I believed her. In fact, her endorsement made me feel so loved and special that sometimes my little old ego got way, way too big for its britches, causing me to pat, pat, pat myself on my back. I also got so full of myself that sometimes I’d even strut around my house after I’d talked to her, because she made me feel so popular. I liked imagining that I was more loved and special than any of her other regular friends, the ones who populated what I have recently found out is a gargantuan, multi-peopled, best friend planet.

Well, get ready for some even more amazing news. There are now (and this is only based on yesterday’s count) 3, 479 other people who claim that she told them they were her best friends. The craziest thing is – we all are. I know you might have a hard time believing me, but let me tell you a few details, and you'll become her best friend, too.

I’m not sure how one short, Canadian-American, maple-syrup-guzzling piano teacher was capable of pulling off convincing so many best-friend-needing people that she loved them the most, but isn’t it downright delightful that she did? She was a brilliant con artist who somehow connected us to her like she was a gigantic surge protector. That’s right - she out and out plugged us all in to her love – maybe so she could keep us from finding out about the gigantic best friend Ponzi scheme she was clandestinely operating.

Yesterday, both the mailman who stopped by and the CVS pharmacist I spoke with on the phone to cancel her pre-ordered prescriptions told me they were her best friends. A few days before, nurses and doctors at the ICU said they were her best friends, even though she never gained consciousness, so we’re talking ESP here. Each and every piano student and their parents who called or stopped by said they were her favorite. Her three daughters individually confessed to me that they were her favorite, as well as absolutely  and positively her best friend. Her granddaughter, who can’t speak yet, made it clear to me that she was her Bubbie’s best friend. Her grandson, who can talk, announced he was her best friend (and also her favorite). Each of her dogs yippingly communicated to me that they were her best friends. I know – it’s amazing and wonderful, isn’t it?

Her house has been crawling with people who’ve been coming over and leaving off food and goodies. The phone has been ringing off the hook with calls from people who emphatically assure the machine that they’re her best friends. Aren’t those people lucky, though, to be able to hear her voice again on her answering machine?

Love just keeps on pouring out of all these best friends, like she poured hers all over each and every one of us, each and every day she was alive. She truly was everyone’s best friend, our own, gooey, 100% pure Canadian maple syrup (which you now know she was addicted to) that streamed over, under, around and through us, her endless batch of luscious, best friend pancakes. 

Ahh, how good she was to the very last drop.

I’m Going Down, Down, Down…(thanks Bruce S.)

I’ve been so busy trying to keep up a good front, act like an adult, do the right thing, and stay focused on being useful that I haven’t allowed myself to feel down about the fact that my friend is almost done dying.

I have decided to let down what little hair I have left on my head and face up to my sadness, with the help of idioms, similes and metaphors, since they have officially become my new best friends. Bear with me as I try to describe what it’s been like for me to lose my old one.

I’ve can’t think up much of anything positive to say about watching someone I just spoke with on Sunday afternoon suddenly stop existing as I knew her on Monday morning. Watching her die has been painful, like pulling teeth without Novocain, frustrating, like trying to find a needle in a haystack, and pointless, like beating a dead horse with a stick. Dying, after all, is not as easy as pie. It’s as hard as nails. And it’s not for sissies.

For watchers like me who aren’t doing the dying, it isn’t easy to face the fact that all you can do is watch someone else do the work while you just stand around, staying alive.

I mean, watching has been comforting, that it has - but boy has it also been scary. It’s left me with a lot of down time to feel sad, guilty, angry, bitter, superfluous, and impotent. It’s also made me feel so jealous that part of me has wanted to climb into that hospital bed, next to my friend, and join her.

Watching a friend die has been a roller coaster ride – but without that cloyingly delicious cotton candy smell wafting up, or those happy-scared-ecstatic shrieks echoing through the air. It’s been a horrific house of horrors trip, full of sad good-byes, tearful embraces, and bewildered why-you’s.


This is one trip I’d rather not be watching you take – but I have no choice. So, here I stay, waving goodbye, crying out how much I’ll miss you leave on your final gut-wrenching, headache-inducing, sob-producing, if-only-I’d…, what-if-we’d..., why-didn’t-you…oh-what-will-I-do-without-you journey.  

Bad Things Happen to Good People

I know, I know, I know. I am going to sound incredibly trite and stupid – but I want to know why bad things happen to good people. I don’t want to know why good things happen to bad people, because I could care less about them. All I want to know is why the good ones, the very ones who don’t deserve to suffer, end up doing just that. I never actually ask this question out loud, but I've been silently thinking about it all week. 

Right now a good one (good, better, best), my dearest, sweetest, most generous, long-timiest West Hartford friend, was silenced when she stopped breathing before the EMT’s arrived. She’s now lying unconscious in the ICU, plugged in to what appear to me to be an incredible array of machines – but they are keeping her alive, so I’m grateful for their intrusive existence.

But, oh, oh, oh – how she’s suffered (often in silence) these past few years, from terribly debilitating problems like GERD, asthma, non-stop sinus infections, and diabetes (brought on by all the prednisone she has taken to control her freaking sinus infections). She has been so sick that she has no longer been able to breath easily, teach without struggling, take her dogs for long walks, travel, go out on the town, or talk as much as she used to.

She’s undergone so many invasive tests, procedures and treatments that it’s amazing to me how positive and upbeat she’s continued to be. We often compare and contrast her breathing problems and my migraines, but usually end up laughing hysterically at ourselves for generating so much kvetching and moaning. 

I’ve been visiting her in the ICU, where she’s still unconscious, paralyzed (by drugs) and unresponsive. Even though I’ve never talked to anyone who’s unconscious, it’s not as scary or bad as I thought it’d be. I merely lean over and let my spontaneous babbling loudly fill her ears with details about the nurses, her friends who have visited, her daughters, various doctors’ explanations, and the highs and lows of her blood pressure.

As I talk, I pretend to myself that we’re talking on the phone, which makes it easier for me to talk up a storm to the one person I’ve talked to almost every single day for the past 24 years. I blab on and on, saying anything that comes to mind, because talking helps me (Ms. Glass-is-Half-Empty) believe she (Ms. Glass-is-Half-Full) will recover. 

According to one nurse I spoke with, “…hearing is the last thing to go.” I want to believe she’s right, so I keep filling up the silence with my words. In my humble opinion, at this point in time, silence is the farthest thing from golden, "hope is the thing with feathers..." and talk is anything but cheap. 

What Happens If You Blog and No One Comments?

I remember my first day of Philosophy 101, when my professor earnestly asked our class, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” I didn’t have the answer I was sure he wanted, so I kept quiet. I wanted to give him the right answer, but my answer didn’t feel right enough. Or, I might not have answered because I’m such a concrete a thinker I only like answering answer yes or no instead of conjuring up original responses to abstract philosophic musings. Did my not commenting that day invalidate his question?

If I write a blog and no one comments, are my words worth writing? Are they invalid?

Are my words invalid if you don’t talk back to me when you read my musings on daughter-missing, air conditioning leaks, migraines, dieting, or petty hatreds? If I expect a response, am I asking more of you than I was able to give forty-two years ago?

Are you asking the computer screen (if you like talking to it like I do) why I continue to publicly philosophize about these rather random thoughts? Are you wondering why I keep exposing my words to what I like to think of as you, my amorphous, blogospheric audience – even after you remain silent? Can my blog be considered worthy if almost no one comments?

Oh dear. I’ve gone and replicated my professor’s class, filled with a sea of invisible, silent me’s, haven’t I? By trying to answer these new-age questions, I’ve turned myself back into that nineteen year-old college student self, that stranger in a strange land. Yep. I have officially morphed out of myself, back into someone who continues to have trouble re-imagining the bigger picture (the forest for the trees).

Therefore, I’ve decided to change course and answer my questions.

Yes, writing my blog is a worthwhile activity, even if no one responds. Maybe because these days I’ve become somewhat deaf, I am no longer able to hear trees falling in either forests or my back yard (let alone actors talking in movies or on TV shows, like Mad Men, my current favorite).

Now that I’ve finally opened my mouth and talked…or, to be more accurate, written back, I would like to imagine that my uber-edited, unresponded-to paragraphs are ultimately making a teeny, tiny bit of difference, responded to or not.

Class – what do you think?

They Say That "[Hate] is Just a Four-Letter Word" (Thanks, Bob Dylan)

Sunday was my husband’s 62^nd birthday, which means he can now buy cheaper movie tickets, instead of paying full price. He is also able to pay less for each golf game, so we’ll be about $20 richer this year, considering how much golf he plays. I think that’s about it for perks, though. He says he hates getting old, but the alternative is worse.

I’ve hate things, too. Like golf, for instance, which I claim I hate so much I refuse to even try playing. I have convinced myself that I hate standing outside on chemically manicured grass, hitting a little ball into a hole I can’t see. My husband claims that I have chosen this hatred. I told him that I hate golf because I once had a boyfriend who was such a fanatic that when we went anywhere in his car, he had to make sure he’d put his clubs in the trunk, in case he suddenly needed to stop paying attention to me and practice putting. I bet I chose to hate this great love of his because it meant I wasn’t.

What I have come to realize is that these so-called hatreds of mine have so totally invaded me that they’re hard to let go of.

Like my hatred of eating pickled herring, which my husband loves, but which I refuse to eat, because once my brother (an early herring lover) threw it up all over me and the back of the car after eating some. The smell was so bad that I got sick, too. Or my hatred of frogs’ legs, which I developed after my mom tricked me by claiming they were a new chicken dish. When she revealed the truth, I immediately started gagging and crying, because I started visualizing those poor sacrificed frogs. (I visualize rabbits, too, which is why I hate it when they’re on restaurant menus.)

Then there’s my hatred of tapioca pudding, which I once puked up after eating it at my cousin’s. (Those lumps – oh, lord, those gloppy lumps.) I learned to hate cigarette smoke, which I used to love, after I gave up smoking in 1969. I now hate smelling perfume, which I wore for years, because it gives me migraines. I hate people who crack gum, especially when they’re sitting next to me in the movies, even though I spent an entire afternoon at a friend’s house when I was fifteen, practicing and practicing until I mastered it. I hate loud (or any) music played in restaurants. I hate using Porta Potties. I hate the sound of leaf blowers, especially my next-door neighbor’s (he is the king of leaf blowing). I hate water leaks inside my house (I found two new ones from the air conditioning leak). I hate winter in Connecticut (I believe no explanation is necessary).

I know, I know. I should not hate. Hate is a four-letter word. It’s better to love than hate, a mantra I repeated to my daughter when she was growing up.  But, my propensity to hate things keeps multiplying. Lately, I’ve started hating thin, beautiful, athletic, younger women. I catch myself staring at them with pure, green-monsterish envy. I hate them because I’m fatter, droopier, stiffer, and older – which is not something I want to hate (but I do, oh I do).

Yikes.