#remembery

When my mom died, we asked people to bring rocks (she liked this Jewish tradition of remembrance) to put in a basket in her memory. Some folk painted rocks, some folks brought little ceramic knickknacks and gewgaws, others brought rocks from their gardens or farms, or maybe just from out in the parking lot. I don’t really like boneyards and columbariums; these places are soulless and strangely…

I was cleaning the bed linens this morning, which always accompanied a spraying down of the mattress with hydrogen peroxide & essential oils (no, not lavender; I don’t especially like lavender). Into the “warsh”, as my great-step-grandmother would say, with the sheets and mattress cover. I love doing the bed linens in summer because there’s nothing better than clean, line-dried linens on a…

Do you remember the time you took me with you to your sister’s wedding? It was in small town somewhere and I was jonesing for a cig but no place was open and not even the bar was holding. I think I opted to spend the service itself in the tub in our weird motel room. Pulled the TV on its cart into the space between the bathroom and the main room and ran a bath. The tub was new. Only the tub was…

New Post has been published on http://cenobyte.ca/wp/2013/12/20/i-am-never-forget-the-time/

I am never forget the time...

The Long-Suffering Sarah and I decided to make the best of a class in high school with which neither of us was particularly enamoured. It wasn’t even so much that we didn’t like French class. It was that we didn’t really appreciate the exercises we had to do. Our teacher one year insisted on having the students create les diologues using the vocabulary and declensions we were learning at the time. This, educationally, is a brilliant strategy. But it was boring.

I mean, there we were, two students who did fairly well academically, having to fill out (at times) preformatted paragraphs with sentence endings left blank. Things like: Je n’ai pas fait mes devoirs parce que… (we finished that one with “mes mains ont été agrafés au plafond”, and Je n’aime pas faire la vaisselle parce que… “je suis hydrophobe”. Granted, we learned a LOT more French this way, and our escapades usually resulted in our teacher trying desperately not to bust a gut while the rest of the class screamed for a translation.

So one of our “diologues” was to make a presentation to the class for Christmas. The Long-Suffering Sarah and I decided we would do a cooking show. We baked cupcakes and cookies the night before our “show”, and then made sure we had an inflatable santa with forks taped to its head (because we were making “les petits gâteaux aux reindeer”. And we couldn’t find an inflatable reindeer so we had to dress Santa up.

The inflatable part is important because étape 1 is the étape in which we murdered the reindeer. Can’t make les petits gâteaux aux reindeer without tuer les rennes. Right? Right. So we had this inflatable Santa-cum-reindeer all inflated at the front of the class, and, in very meticulous French, we listed all of the ingredients you’d need (beurre, sucre, farine, les oeufs, un renne), and then we began to outline the process.

We stabbed the ever-loving shite out of that reindeer, then jumped about on its corpse and shoved the whole thing into le four for a set amount of time. Whence we had previously stashed the cupcakes and cookies.

New Post has been published on http://cenobyte.ca/wp/2013/04/04/lordloveaduck/

Lord Love a Duck

 Did I ever tell you about the time my Gram and her neighbour took me for a drive in their small town in the 80s, and we saw a Young Man wearing Very Tight Trousers, and my Gram, who was usually so proper and reserved, said “Gol, if he passed wind, he’d split those trousers right in half!”? I thought I was going to die.

Or the time NOBODY believed me about the litany of foodstuffs Gram would offer if you even thought about considering a visit, until we had a game event and Gram drove into the middle of the yard and leapt out of the car offering fried chicken to everyone? Or perhaps a tomato sandwich?

Then there was the time my Gram bought my father a dildo from Consumers Distributing?

Probably.

While I didn’t always see eye-to-eye with my Gram, she did some pretty amazing stuff. Her family was a family of means until the Great Depression, when my great Grandfather lost everything by offering farmers credit on the bills they owed him. They survived the dust bowl, and my Gram, rather than doing what was expected of her (getting married and turning out as many kids as possible in hopes that some would survive), she instead found whatever work she could, taking in laundry and working at shops to earn an income. When she did marry a just-starting-out farmer, she had my father, and returned to work. She had a 30 year career working at the bank in her town. She did what most women in the 40s and 50s would not do.

She survived the Depression, the war years, small town gossip, two husbands, one daughter-in-law, three of five siblings, and the madness of the 20th century.

There’s no denying that she’s a bit of an odd old bird, my Gram.

My mother treated her terribly, which is something I’m ashamed of.

She had the most amazing laugh – when Gram got going, no one within earshot could help themselves; we all dissolved into fits of belly laughs, until there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

There are times I will miss her. Most of her 87 years were good ones, she told me a few weeks ago. “When I go,” she said, “I won’t have any regrets. I’ll know I lived a blessed life.”