*Modern Love

Prior to her performances, I would observe her pre-show nerves while she was evolving into the glamorous rock star. I imagined it must have been a scary thing to go out into a crowd of young people and pretend to be someone else when you had a hard enough time just being you. Or maybe not. 

She seemed to vibrate as she skipped through the house, smoking those tall brown More cigarettes in the red and gold box, one after the other, closely followed by a waft of grey smoke: her ghostly entourage. The apartment filled with the overwhelming chemical scent of Aqua Net Extra Hold hairspray and the distinctive sounds of Mark Garson on the piano playing Bowie’s Aladdin Sane. I’d sit on the floor just outside the bathroom’s open door, silent, as I loved taking in all of her smells and feeling the sporadic bursts of warmth from the hairdryer embrace me, burning the familiar scent of my mother into my mind forever.

On this particular night, her stage was the middle of a roller-skating rink, and she dressed in a cream colored suit, a thin tie covered in Japanese characters, her hair short and feathered on top, and the hit song “Modern Love” was blaring over the loud speakers. Mum was David Bowie.

Excerpt from chapter fifteen | changes | Everything's Hunky Dory: A Memoir

*Job Security (Time for Cheer)

I’d never tell the other kids in the neighborhood of our favorite game—not because I was ashamed of it, but because it was sacred. Besides, if I did tell them of it, I’d undoubtedly be interrogated, then told our little game was illogical and stupid. I, for once, didn’t care how logical or practical or intelligent this was. It was love, and the best we knew how.

She’d bought all of the Alvin and the Chipmunks albums and played them while we cleaned the house. We were always cleaning the house. I never had the heart to tell her their shrieking voices made me feel like my eardrums were shattering and brain imploding. We’d sing along to their Christmas album, imitating their shrieks the best we could, “Christmas, Christmas time is here. Time for toys and time for cheer . . .”

She had a very special way of getting us to willingly engage in child labor. If it weren’t sing-alongs with the three rodent evangelists of consumerism, she would set the alarm on the microwave and say, “Ok, kids! Whoever finishes cleaning their special area of the house by the time the alarm sounds wins!” She’d make a trumpeting sound as if she were initiating a horse race, then exclaim, “And they’re off!” We would run around like mad, giggling, one with window cleaner and paper towels, one with wood polish and a dust rag, Mum with the vacuum, and we’d race to the finish.

Even though we'd caught onto her tricks, we never did complain. We wouldn’t actually win anything in particular other than a nice clean house for Mum’s friends to party in. It was job security; we took what we could get. 

Excerpt from chapter fourteen | name of the game | Everything's Hunky Dory: A Memoir

*Disappointment, Please.

“We’ll be OK Mum, you can go, we’ll all take care of each other,” my sister and I sobbed. We repeated this nonsense to her over and over and over. Could she sense we were lying? In death, surely one gets closer to the spirit world and can finally see through bullshit lies being told, I thought. I didn’t agree with our promises at all, especially knowing the state of cold separation our family had retained for years apart from the past few months when we were forced to come together and care. My dream of being a close, caring family had finally come true, but under these set of circumstances I’d gladly take the disappointment I had come to know so well. I hoped we would take care of each other, that the family environment we’d built the past few months would remain—that I could continue hosting family nights with dinner and board games—but it wouldn’t be the same without her infectious laugh, her charismatic draw, and her special set of dysfunctions she unapologetically brought to the table.

Excerpt from chapter one | wild horses | Everything’s Hunky Dory: A Memoir

*A Brow, Unfurrowed

[That night . . . ] Mum’s face had drastically begun to change. This woman who started out a gorgeous model (often mistaken for actress Farrah Fawcett), a David Bowie impersonator, then famed paranormal investigator, lived her last years with a face hardened by the guilt she held within and affected by the substances she used to try and forget it. She’d gone full circle.

“Look. Her face has no wrinkles at all, it’s totally smooth,” my younger sister Kelli said. I agreed, although I didn’t particularly want to as I was reminded of the only detail Mum had revealed to me of my grandmother’s death the day she had passed many years before. I hadn’t seen that brow un-furrowed since I was five.

We decided to tell her these details in case she could hear us. We spoke aloud to her the entire night. Sometimes I’d look up above me so that if her soul was hovering over us, as I’d heard from countless accounts of near death experiences, she could see my face and could know I loved her and that I really was smart and paid attention to what folks said about the afterlife (a last-ditch effort at impressing the unimpressionable).

“See Mum, see. I do love you.”

Excerpt from chapter one | wild horses |Everything’s Hunky Dory: A Memoir

Untimely Expiration Dates

Today I’m re-organizing my home, cleaning and putting items on the ‘free to good home’ listings for my town. It feels good. Any clearance of clutter is healing. These once treasured items (or, perhaps, not so treasured) will go on and serve a higher purpose than taking up space in a storage closet. My older, smaller aluminum dog door will be giving a neighborhood pup a bit of freedom; my ceramic pots will be proudly displayed in someone’s garden; my random, strange Christmas basket-type thingy will be given as a gift, as it was given me, and will undoubtedly be placed on the free to good home list after December (that is if anyone ever picks it up from my front porch).

And then it happened. I came across an unmarked white envelope. Once I had it in my hands, I knew what it was, so I carried it with me to a comfortable seat on the sofa and opened it, knowing I’d not only be opening up the envelope itself, but also quite possibly the floodgate of tears behind my eyes.

Mum’s California driver license. 

In the photo, her head is slightly tilted to the left, with a slight smile and those tired, tired eyes. No matter what the past has held, all I could think of was, “What I wouldn’t do to see that face again.”

Shortly after wondering why her number started with an N and mine with an A and whether or not the DMV has some sort of secret code for ID numbers (“Give it an A. Better keep our eye on this one.”), I saw in red capital letters above her photo: EXPIRES 07-12-14.  

Her driver license hasn’t yet expired. It’s still active, but she’s not.

And when it does expire—that’s it. No further licenses will be issued. Ever.

On June 30th, 2009, the date this license was issued, she was still drinking more than seven beers per night. She was still working at an incredibly stressful job, consuming large amounts of processed foods, smoking cigarettes, and quite possibly enjoying the occasional bit of speed (she’d never admit it to me, though I’ve heard stories from others). She would have had no idea that her oldest daughter would be in possession of her driver license, sitting on her sofa in Ojai on June 9^th, 2013, crying tears of disbelief that her mother had expired before the DMV’s officially provided expiration date. She had no idea that the lifestyle she had chosen was giving her a rare form of stomach cancer and there would be no tests, no renewals.

What am I doing today? Will I be here tomorrow? How many more driver licenses will I carry before I expire?  Will I expire first or will it? I have no message to share here, other than to just say with tears in my eyes that we really have no idea how short life really is. And whether we have disabilities, aren’t able to relate to people, are in a strained relationship, working at a dead-end job, have no job prospects at all, are not able to have children, are worried about finances, stressed about retirement—it’s all going to end. When, we don’t know. And what’s important? What’s really important? I can’t tell you. We have to be able to admit to ourselves what is important and take it off of that false societal scale made for us when we were just wee children.

Maybe a long life wasn’t important for Mum. Perhaps alcohol and the feeling it gave her was. Who am I to judge? But I’ve hated it. I’ve hated that it took her away from me. I’ve hated, more than anything, that we were never able to form the mother-daughter relationship I had always dreamed of. But that was my dream, not hers. And what I’ve learned in recent times is not to attach dreams to people. People are utterly unpredictable emotionally, spiritually, and just like in the case of Mum leaving the planet at the young age of fifty-seven, physically. William Shakespeare said, “Expectation is the root of all heartache.” I totally get that one now, Bill.

So I will return to re-organizing and making my life what I want it—free and clear. Free to be me, and today, clear of clutter. I can dream and hope and pursue without having those dreams, hopes, and pursuits attached to a heart and lungs and brain—other than my own. I can miss Mum, and I will when I hear her laugh in my mind, and my heart will ache a little when I come across bits and pieces of her life in random boxes and envelopes—and I can know it’s because I want what isn’t. And I can be OK with that. 

And a note for my fellow pathetic fallacy friends: the sad, Christmas basket-type thingy has, indeed, found a good home.

*On Death & Disneyland

[Photo credit: Donn Shy (Mum) | Melancholic visit to Disneyland with 
one rebellious little sister and one brilliantly cooperative brother.]

[The night we said our final goodbyes] We looped her favorite home video she had proudly composed and edited which consisted of photographs and video footage from Mother’s Day 2007 when I had taken her, my brother Tony, and sister Kelli to Disneyland. The DVD was a humorous contradiction, as on that day I somehow had the off-kilter, yet self-proclaimed brilliant idea for the entire group to only take melancholically posed photos, only in front of the rides that were closed for refurbishment, or in front of the “Cast Members Only” signs. Basically anything we had no access to, anything that had the potential to create a tinge of disappointment, we would use as a backdrop for Mum’s professional photographic lens.

Sullen, dejected, sad, fixating on the uninspired tiny pebbles on the ground, and sometimes seemingly screaming in anguish, the result was an incredibly humorous video/slide-show with a cheery theme song. This memory became a great one Mum would cherish so much, she’d later confess to popping it into her DVD player and watching it any time she felt down, which sadly happened to be more often than not.

Excerpt from chapter one | wild horses | Everything’s Hunky Dory: A Memoir

*Excerpt from Chapter One: Wild Horses

“Please don’t go . . .”

I had begun conjuring up everything I had ever read about crossing over, the light, and near death experiences. I only hoped Mum would be problem free for the first time. No more creditors calling her phone. No more deranged bosses demeaning her. No more hoping to win the lottery. No more hoping. No more disappointment in her choices. No more suffering. I hoped she would finally possess the peace I’d always wished for her, even if it weren’t in the gorgeous hillside community of Summerland, California with an easel and paintbrush in her hand (always my own Nancy Meyers directed personal dream for her, never her own). I more wished she’d snap out of this nightmare and, ironically, drink another one of her damned beers and put me down in some rude, familiar fashion. 

Excerpt from chapter one | wild horses | EVERYTHING'S HUNKY DORY: A MEMOIR