Category Archives: Momentousness

I’ve been really slacking on the blog front.  Shame!

I will never be a famous, awesome blogger if I can’t managed to squeeze out more than post a month, now will I?

But, there was something that I had to write and until I did that, I felt like I couldn’t write about any of the other trivial silly things that I might have, like giving myself a weekly speed test for running a mile or going on vacation to Kaua’i.

The thing is that my Aunt Mary, my mom’s twin sister, died on May 10.

She was sick for a long time.  Cancer of the appendix that kept turning into cancer of this and cancer of that.  They took little bits out of her one at a time until I’m not really sure what was left in there.

It went on for so long that I got used it.  And because I was on the other side of the country, I didn’t have to confront the reality; I only had to settle myself with the idea.

When she finally did die, I thought it was fine.  A relief more than anything else.  The horribleness of her story was finally over.  My mother did not have to make the trip out to see her every weekend to weep at her bedside.  It was good to be finished.

David and I went to the funeral, flying out on a red eye on Tuesday night, arriving in JFK on Wednesday morning.  We went to pick up Nana from her nursing home and then to the service.  I expected it to be hard, but fine.  Tolerable.  It was so much worse than I expected.  It’s normal to not see Aunt Mary most of the time.  She’s never come to visit me here in California.  But it is definitely not normal to see those cousins, to see her children and her step children, to be there in her scene and to not see her.  She seemed so horribly missing.

And then later, taking Nana back to the nursing home… she had appeared so stoic through it all, but then she started to cry.  She said “She was my little baby.  I held her in my arms.  How can I never see her again?”  It was possibly the most despairing moment of my life.

Aunt Mary was like a fairy godmother to me.  When I was a little girl, she didn’t have children of her own, me and my brothers were the only nieces and nephews, and she absolutely doted on me.  The boys were wild and unruly, but I was *the little girl.*  I was the outsider in my dirty, tumultuous, heathen family.  I wanted cabbage patch dolls and make-up and the clothes from Benetton that all the other popular girls wore and, much to my mother’s disgust, Aunt Mary would always oblige.

When I was 11, I flew from North Carolina to New York all by myself to visit her.  She bought me a red dress and took me to see a Broadway musical and to eat at the Hard Rock Cafe.  It was amazing and fantastic and wonderful.  A fantasy.

But as much as she loved me, she always wanted to have her own children, of course.  I was too young to know all the details, but she had quite a few miscarriages before she and her husband (who she’d only just married when I was 8 or 9 or so) decided to adopt.  So in her early 40′s, she adopted two children – newborns each – about two years apart.  And just like she had spoiled me on birthdays and on various special occasions, she spoiled these two children.  But every day.  Until they grew up into something awful.  Maybe because of the over abundance of cloying love, maybe because of their genetic nature, maybe because of a thousand things combined.
After her marriage to a man ten years older and becoming a mother of two, I was no longer her favorite.  But I was getting older and didn’t really need an aunt for whom I was the favorite any more.  Later, I moved to California and I saw her very rarely.  Probably I didn’t even see her every time I went home to visit my family, which is usually only once or twice a year.

So by the time she got sick, I was already removed – emotionally and physically.  More than other feelings, I hurt for my mother going through the loss of a sister, a twin.  And it scared me that I could now be at an age in which my parent’s people, or my parents, could die.  And I thought that it would be fine.  It will be sad, but ok.  It is ok, but now that it’s over I see that there is still the grief of a little girl who lost a very special aunt.

Aunt Mary and me, 1 year old. 1978.

I am thirty-three years old today.  Thirty-three.

Which is like saying that I’m now Hoozle Puddit.  What does that even mean?  And how did it happen?

But it happened, and I’m 33 now.  I cried a little this morning.  I’m not even sure I could articulate why.  It all just feels so beyond my control.  And it feels so incredibly meaningful and meaningless at the same time.

So to make 33 feel like something, I want to commit to 3 things that I will do this year.

By end of the day, September 24, 2011, I will:

1.  Have no credit card debt.  None.  $0.

2.  Lose *some* weight.  I don’t want to commit to a specific amount.  But it will be something.  Ideally, it will be enough so that I’m not technically overweight, let alone obese.  But let’s just call it something.

3.  I will not pull a single grey or white hair out of my head.

That is all.

Carry on.

I turn 32 years old today, which is how old my mother was when she had me.

Turning 31 was a little scary, because it was the first year of just settling in to the *thirties.*
So I’ve settled now.  A bunch of days passed.  I turned 32.

I would like 32 to be the year that I make some good headway at being a grown-up.
It’s time to find a new job.  One that I love.  One that inspires me to work hard again.
I’d like to get a handle on my finances.  I won’t be able to clear it up in a year.  But I would like to be able to say in a year’s time that I’m in a better place that I’m in today.  Laughable as it may be, I’d like to have a thousand dollars in my special savings account nicknamed “house savings – do NOT withdraw!”
I hope to be a good, reliable partner.  I have such welling for the David.  I need to learn to have patience and care for this person who can not read my mind and isn’t here just to agree with me.

I could keep listing the things that I want to do, want to improve upon.  But I also don’t want to set up the expectation that is the year of self help.  Because I rather like the self I have.

thirty second birthday

A strange thing has happened:  my Toyota Echo was stolen and I simply don’t have a car any more.  I had one.  And now I don’t.
This past weekend, I picked up a check from Progressive, in essence, having sold the non-existent car to my insurance company.  In a really disappointing turn of responsibility, I’ve decided to hand the check over to some credit cards and make a real concerted effort to do some debt reduction.
So I don’t have a car, and I don’t have a prospect for a new car, and I also don’t have a pair of Tiffany earrings or a trip to Greece.

That Toyota Echo was the first car I bought myself.  Mom and Dad did give me $3000 for the deposit, but after that I forked over the $255 every month for 5 years.  I cried in the process of agreeing to make the purchase, as I was terrified of the commitment.  At 22 years old, 5 years of payments seemed like a very long time.  But I did it.  I even finished a few months early.

I keep thinking of the poor little Echo trying to make friends with the mean, scary cars in the ghetto.  Or maybe the Echo has just been totally mangled and all of his important parts have been removed, leaving a sad little shell.  And what did they to my Dave Matthews sticker?

This car mostly got me to and from Whole Foods, or the West Oakland BART station.  It takes me to my weekly session of UGH, otherwise known as my cello lesson.  Jessica and I drove it to Las Vegas once and another time to San Luis Obispo.

But when I start thinking of car memories, they generally go farther back… to Red Car and to Gordy.  Both of those cars were 10 to 15 years old when they came into my life and they both died in my posession.  Both of them were the types of cars to just crap out while I was driving them, leaving me frantically trying to restart as I edged through the toll plaza or down the main drag of my college town.  Thus, was I motivated to buy myself a brand new car and never suffer the tragedy of car death again.  So some cars die and others are kidnapped.