Looking Back As Time Marches On...

The second weekend in October, I went back home to Ligonier, PA, the town where I grew up. Each year, our former hometown holds a huge celebration of its rich history called Fort Ligonier Days. From Friday to Sunday, the center of town is shut down and craft and food stands are erected all around the diamond in the middle of town, and re-enactments of the battle of Fort Ligonier are held. In addition to being historically significant, this festival is a lot of fun as well, with a parade that features some of the best bands, bagpipers and shriners in the area. The festival is held at what might be argued as a quintessentially perfect time of the year for Pennsylvania, autumn, just as the leaves are at their peak, with the chilly autumn air aiding their change to a stunning riot of color.

Growing up, we would go to the festival every year, rain or shine, to walk around with friends, watch the parade and, unsurprisingly, go find our parents as they would be drinking beer at their favorite establishment, Joe's Bar.

This year, we came as former residents many years removed, and walked through the town, pointing things out and remembering how, though some things had changed, much of what we remember from our childhood here had remained the same. We got to chat with our neighbor, Emily, who I was amazed to be able to identify on the spot and who now looks amazingly like her mother, but with much better hair.

As we ate some light food on Friday, I was surprised to hear my name called out by two girls that I'd gone to high school with, and was glad of the chance to get caught up with them. They were probably far too kind in saying that I looked very the same as I did in high school, but who am to argue with a compliment like that?

After the parade on Saturday, my sister Dee, her son Billy and I went out to visit our old house in Wilpen, and actually parked in the driveway and got out and walked around, telling Billy how the place had looked when we lived there, pointing out the wooden foot bridge that was, surprisingly, still intact and working. It was strangely amazing to walk around my former yard, and touching the sides of a huge oak tree that I remember my parents planting when I was a kid. I smiled and told Billy that we used to use that tree as "first base" during kickball games and that back then it were still small enough to almost get your hands around. The house, although slightly expanded by the new owner, still looked exactly as I remember it. I laughed and pointed out to my sister the old oval metallic stickers with the fireman carrying a child on it that mom and dad put on our windows to alert firemen that there were kids in that room if the house were to catch fire and the occupants needed rescuing.

My grandparents house, which was next to our house, looked much improved, and it was obvious that the new owners had done a lot of work on it. I pointed out to my sister the old well that was still next to the basement door, and we both laughed as we noticed the old textured cement area beginning to re-emerge from underneath the new coat of spackle the new owners had put over it.

We then decided to drive over to see Grandma and Grandpa's gravesite, which lay atop a very steep hill above St. Ann's Church. As we turned the corner onto the road that led up to St. Ann's, I began to feel something was wrong. It dawned on me immediately what that was when I realized that I couldn't see the church anymore. We pulled up the drive to where the church had been and got out, both my sister and I were in complete shock. I walked up the grassy hill where the the church used to be and saw a single brick sticking out of the ground. I knelt down and picked it up and realized I was crying. It was like someone had frozen my heart and then taken a hammer to it. I am not a very religious person, but this church was a fixture of my youth, a place I remember going for mass every Sunday and every holiday with my family and my grandparents, and to see it just... gone forever... well, after the rollercoaster year I've had, it just took the heart right out of me. I called over to my sister who was also crying and she quickly called my other sister and instructed her not to bring our father out here, lest the loss of the church really shock and upset him as much as it did the two of us.

I remember the last time I had been to the church. In 2001, my grandma had passed away and my family had gathered to lay her to rest. The service had been a good one, and after my Uncle finished speaking, telling us things about her that were weren't exactly sure he didn't quite make up on the spur of the moment, I got up and lamented the loss of this great woman, whom I had always adored. She had taken care of me since I was a baby, keeping me in line as only she knew how to do, instilling in me my pride in my Slovak heritage and showing me how to cook all the old Slovak dishes. Crestfallen, I vividly remember asking who would be throwing the peas at Christmas for the birds and the animals of the forest now that she was gone. (See my Christmas post on here if you don't understand this.)

It never occurred to me that the Catholic Church in Ligonier/Western PA would allow a beautiful historic church like St. Ann's sit idle and rot until it became unsafe and needed to be demolished. I can only guess they were too busy adding that monstrously huge, expensive looking addition onto Holy Trinity in Ligonier to make it look less like the former train turn-around station that it used to be and more like a real church to be concerned with the upkeep of a beautiful historic little country church like St. Ann's.

After my sister and I recovered from our shock, we went up to the cemetery and cleaned off Grandma and Grandpa's grave, visited with them. I then poured some good bourbon onto Grandpa's side of the grave. I figured it was the right thing to do and thanked him for introducing bourbon to me like he did when he gave me my first shot at age 7. I remember that I didn't much like the taste of it back then, and I kinda thought it was going to eat through my esophagus, but it certainly made for a memorable first drinking experience. My sister and I then walked around the graveyard, pointing out the gravestones of some of our other relatives and people that we had known growing up. I paused when I saw the gravestone of Grandma's bingo buddy, Mary Miney and smiled at all the memories her name brought up. I turned and looked back down the hill to where the church used to be and sighed. With the church now gone, the place looked sad and empty to me. When my sister said she thought it was time to get back, I walked back down the steep hill and, with one more sad look at what used to be my old church, I got back in the car and left.

When I got back to NC, I emailed the Ligonier Valley library and asked if it were possible to get some pictures of St. Ann's church. I got a nice email back with some digital images of the way it looked in the 80s and 90s, and some from as far back as the 1913 and 1960. I remember, albeit vaguely, the way the church had looked before it was remodeled in the late 70s, when, for reasons that go beyond understanding, the pretty gilded insides of the church with its statues of saints and the BVM (Blessed Virgin Mary) and Joseph were replaced with a more stark color scheme and a large imposing crucifix. Thinking of this puts me to mind of the scene in the movie "The Birdcage" where the two gay main characters, in a last ditch attempt to impress a conservative couple whose daughter their son wants to marry, take out all their flamboyant furniture and décor and replace it with large uncomfortable looking furniture made of dark wood and, of course, a large imposing cross over the mantle.

I'll post the pics I got of St. Ann's on here and am hoping that I might find some more pictures by emailing the diocese. I would like to get a bunch of pictures and perhaps have an artist paint a portrait from them. St. Ann's was a beautiful church, and, though it is now gone, will always be a part of my life that I will hopefully never forget.

Some Frozen Peeps and Melancholy Memories...

I spent the last week with my dad. Every 6 months or so, he has an appointment to get his bladder scoped to make sure that the cancer that they removed from there a few years back is still gone. So, I go out to the beautiful town of Mesquite for a week or so, every 6 months and we take a trip to St. George, UT and he gets himself some really good pharmaceuticals that make him pretty much not give a crap that he's getting a rather thick tube stuck into and far up an organ that is not used to having anything solid in it and that usually everything that does pass through it is goin' the other way. Of course, a major upside to this is the trip back to Mesquite, which may be possibly the only time I can drive a car with my Dad in the passenger seat in complete, blissful silence is when he's completely zonked out from the drugs he gets at that doctors office.

The rest of my days I spend helping him do things like go to Vegas and get his SUV serviced, or get him up to speed on cool computer-related stuff like Facebook. Then there's the 2 or 3 obligatory visits to the local casino, where my father proceeds to (inadvertently) make me feel like a total teetotalling buzz kill. I believe I can say that the producers of Miller Genuine Draft owe my father and his indefatiguable liver a debt of gratitute, since that's his cocktail of choice. He says it tastes as good 10 or 12 beers into a night as it does when he takes his first sip. I'm not entirely sure that's a compliment, as, after I had a sip, ran to spit it out and complained loudly that it tasted like swill... but apparently consistent tasting swill, no matter how much of it one drinks.

I found out this trip that I have my mother's "pissed off look." Apparently, it's eerily similar, at least, according to my father. He and I had eaten a late breakfast at the little cafe at the casino and when we came out, he asked if he could stay a bit and play video poker, and I was cool with that, as it gave me the opportunity to go get a few grocery items I'd been craving, and tool around the really pretty town where he lives. So, I left him there around noon, and came back around 3 pm to see if he was ready to head back. He pointed to the $800+ jackpot over the poker machines and said that it usually never gets this high and was ripe to be won. I resisted rolling my eyes, and headed back home, where I watched a movie and made myself a sandwich. At 5:30 pm, I went back down and asked again, and he got mad and said that I shouldn't tell him what to do and to go back to the condo and that he'd call when he was ready.

Yeah... that probably wasn't the right thing to say to me, and apparently that's when he really focused on my face and saw that I am also the child of his wife. My mother (God rest her soul) would have probably given him the look I had on my face just then, right before she grabbed him by his neck and frog marched his drunken butt out of the casino. The look on my face had people making a concerted effort to get the hell out of my way as I exited the casino. I got back home and called my sister and told her what had happened and, ever so sympathetically, she said, "HA! Better you than me!" When I got off the phone, my cell beeped its voicemail message alert and I realized I'd missed a call, and lo and behold, it was from my Dad. He said he'd be heading back up presently and that he was sorry I was really pissed...

I decided not to pick at it anymore, and when he got home, I let him twiddle nervously around the condo for a bit before asking how he made out (purposefully leaving out the words "in the 6 hours you spent in the casino" from the sentence.) He shrugged non-committally so I assume he didn't win anything. Casinos are funny like that... most people don't win, no matter how ripe the jackpot is. Casinos epitomize the despair.com saying, "For every winner there are dozens of losers, odds are you're one of them." Also, my Dad tends not to understand the concept of walking away while ahead. I went down with him on Sunday and played the slots, and won $80.00 (I started with $20.). I saw that the machine had gone cold and just stood up and left. My father thinks I don't know how to gamble. I think I've got a good grasp on it, tho,ugh which is why I don't do it often.

This morning (Friday), I was getting my stuff packed up for my Saturday trip back to NC, when I mentioned to Dad that I'd had a bit of a sad time at Wal-Mart on Monday. I had gone in there to get a prescription filled and noticed that they had the front aisles set up with candy for Halloween. When I'd visited in March, my Mom and Dad and I had gone there to get her some new lenses for her glasses and, after accidentally losing my father in the women's clothing section of the store, she asked me to take her, in her wheelchair, down those aisles (they were set up for Easter at the time), so she could get some marshmallow peeps. As I stook there waiting for my prescription, I could almost close my eyes and hear what she said to me on that day as clearly as anything. It made me rather sad, made me really miss my Mom, and it seems odd, to get such a strong memory in (of all places) Wal-Mart and over something as silly and insignificant as peeps.

After I told Dad that, I went to my room and called John to see how his day went, and as I talked, Dad came in and set a box of peeps on my stomach. He smiled and said he still had all of the packs of peeps we'd bought that day in the freezer. My mom loved them, but after her blood sugar started to get too high when the hospice lady checked it, she was rationed to 1 or 2 peeps a day, so apparently there's a ton of peeps in the bottom of the freezer.

Now, as I walk around the condo, I just need to stop and close my eyes and I can almost see Mom as she was in March, sitting in her wheelchair next to the dining table and doing crosswords with my Dad, or laying in her hospital bed next to the big bed in their bedroom where I was laying as she talked with me about how I shouldn't be sad, since she had to go sometime, right?

It's not all sad memories though, I remember the good time I had driving with Mom and Dad as I helped them move across the country 5 years ago, and going to Mt. Zion with Mom, Dad and John just a few years ago, walking through that beautiful park and then stopping afterward to get some souvenirs at the shops in a nearby town.

I sit here typing in this melancholy missive and think, "There's not much that I wouldn't give to just have her back healthy and happy so I could tell her how much I love her and how important she is to me and how I wished I'd said that kind of stuff more often." Then I close my eyes and remember her laying in bed, looking up and me holding my hand the last time I was here as she talked to me about being sad if she died and I think that she already knew.

-BK

These Thing Happen In Threes

While I was out the other day I bumped into a friend of mine who I'd not seen in some time, and I recalled the reason for that long absence approximately two minutes into our conversation. I remembered that this was one of my "friends" that I could only be around for short periods of time, because the more time we spent together, the greater the likelihood of our friendship devolving into, at best, a total crazed bitchfight, or, at worst, possible manslaughter, (tho I kinda believe I'd get off with a temporary insanity plea if it came down to me actually choking the life outta him.)

It was around the 2-minute mark that he asked me how everything was going and what I'd been up to recently. I mentioned that my mom, whom he'd met, had passed away as had my dog Buster (whom he'd also met, tho I think Buster liked him less than my Mom, but I can't be certain.) He grabbed my hand and said, "Oh, honey... you must be so worried, since these things happen in threes."

I kid you not... that was his response to the death of my mother and my dog. "Oh, honey ... you must be so worried, these things happen in threes."

It was one of those moments where time stood still and this post practically wrote itself in my mind. "These things happen in threes." OMFG... what a putz!

My near-instantaneous and totally snarky reply (probably one of the reasons I won't see this guy for another 6 months) was, "Threes huh? Well, if there is any truth in that statement I'd better back up so as to avoid the gigantic boulder or grand piano that should be dropping onto your head in true Wile E. Coyote Warner Brothers fashion. This will deprive me of having such a truly sympathetic friend as yourself, but I think I'll soldier on."

Mourning The Loss Of Man's Best Friend, (Or In This Case) Two Men's Best Friend

Ten years ago, John and I traveled out to Greensboro to a greyhound rescue called Greyhound Friends. John wanted to get a greyhound. He picked a beautiful black female greyhound and we put the deposit down for her. A few days later, John got a call that she didn't make it through the operation to get fixed, which apparently is not uncommon as greyhounds are especially sensitive to the stuff that vets use to knock them out, and could we come out and pick another dog?

So, back out to Greensboro we went. That time, we both agreed that we needed to get a male, as we didn't want to go through the same thing with another female. So we took our little girl dog Max with us to make sure whatever dog we looked at was OK with small dogs. John was favoring a brindle colored male in the top row when I spotted a big black and white dog with his tail wagging furiously at us as we walked by. I popped his cage open and leashed him up and motioned to John. It was his happy, tail-wagging demeanor (and the fact that he was about 4 inches taller/larger than the other greyhounds) that caught my eye. He wasn't nervous or skittish like some of the other dogs in the place. It was like he knew that we were coming for him and was ready for us to get him. He even tolerated our little dog Max, which was what clinched it and made him part of our family.

There's been times, over the last ten years, that I was furious with him, like when he went through his brief "chewing" phase from which the newel post on the stairs of our condo has never recovered, or when he would escape from our gated dog area and run off to the trailer park that was the next development over from our last house, or when he would "mark" various areas of the house to prove that it was indeed his house.

There's an old saying though, that "time makes all memories golden". I know that it's true. I wouldn't have traded him for anything.

About four months ago, Buster seemed to get a bit of a bladder infection, which when added into the fact that he's already an old dog, it made him unable to hold his bladder for more than a few hours at a time, and usually he'd let it go if he fell asleep, and he wouldn't realize it until he woke up. The truly awful part was the look on his face when he realized that he'd peed his bed, or peed my bed, or didn't hold it until he got outside and peed on the floor. Buster is the most facially expressive dog I've ever had. He gets this horribly sad, guilty look on his face that clearly says, "I'm sorry! I couldn't hold it! I tried! I'm really, really sorry!" To see this look... it's like having a knife stuck in your gut and twisted around a few times. There's no way to be angry at him for something like this, so you just pat him on the head and say, "Don't worry about it buddy, I'll make sure you get out more often."

About 4 weeks ago on Saturday, John and I were sitting on my bed talking and all of a sudden our poodle Algonquin started barking like crazy at Buster. John and I peered down over the foot of the bed where Buster had been sleeping on his dog bed and saw that he was trying to stand up but was unable to do so, and his head was pointed down and turned at a funny angle. He was also panting like he'd just run a race and his eyes had gone all wild. I shooed Algonquin off him and helped him get to his feet, at which point he stumbled towards me and fell over.

His breathing was becoming more labored, and he was finally able to get up, kinda sorta. He began to walk like he'd had a stroke or a seizure on the right side of his brain, which caused his left legs to not work real well. But, he soldiered up, walking up the hallway to the kitchen and got himself some water.

He then walked to the front door and waited as I got my shoes on and the leash onto him, then he stumbled outside and peed, then promptly fell over again. He got back up and dragged me down the walk where our neighbor was looking at my rather stricken appearance with alarm. I explained that I thought he might have had a stroke or a seizure, but that he had "demanded" to go to the bathroom. While I explained, Buster peed on a nearby tree, then leaned on it for a while and panted some more, then he decided he'd had enough, and dragged me back up the walk to the house. I got the leash off him and he stumbled back to the bedroom and laid back down on his dog bed and, once settled, promptly fell asleep.

At this point, I was pretty wrung out and upset, so I called my friend Daniel, who is a real fan of Buster's and left a message explaining what had happened, then mentioned that we were thinking that (if he did have a stroke and was in pain or incapacitated) we might have to take him to the vet and have him put him down. Neither John nor myself want to see Buster live in pain. He's been too good a friend to have to go though that. Daniel called back about 30 minutes later and asked if, after we ate dinner, he could come over later in the evening and see Buster, in case it was the last time he'd see him.

So I went up the road to a local Chinese restaurant and had dinner with Daniel and his partner Don and, afterward, they came back to the house. And wouldn't you know it, Buster gets up off his dog bed and runs to the door, tail wagging and happy like nothing had happened. I just shook my head and explained that he had looked really awful a few hours before, and that it seemed nothing short of a miracle for him to have snapped back like he'd done. On the upside, the seizure seemed to cure him of his bladder issue, so I took it as a sign that it just wasn't his time yet and allowed him to sleep in the bed with me again.

When my mother died in mid-April, I was fortunate enough to be able to get John's mom to come and stay with him and the dogs and take care of all of them while I went out to Nevada for the funeral and to spend some time with my Dad afterward.

When I got back from Nevada on Wednesday, I was expecting the worst. John and his mother had both sent messages saying how Buster hadn't been eating, and how, in general, the dogs had been going wild since I left. I walked in around dinnertime and Buster was sitting on the leather chair and he sort of wobbled his way off it and came over to me, tail wagging. I petted him and let him and the other two dogs out to pee. He then came back into the house and went straight to his food bowl and ate every last stitch of food in it. Seems he was just waiting for me to come back.

Later that night, John's mom and I were watching tv and I noticed Buster's chest near his front left leg had turned bright red, almost like a bruise, and that his leg had begun to swell. Over the next day, his leg swelled to double its usual size, and he began to limp badly on it. I gave him some painkillers and hoped the swelling would abate on Thursday.

When I got home it was worse. Buster stood next to my bed on Thursday night, looking longingly up at the covers... Apparently John's mom didn't allow Buster to sleep on the bed with her like I do. So I picked him up carefully and put him gingerly down on the bed, and covered him up. I slid into bed next to him and was nearly asleep when I heard him try to roll over. His swollen leg caught on the covers and he yelped in pain. It was then that I knew; knew that this would be his last night keeping me warm in my bed, and knew that I would be taking him to the vet tomorrow because he'd been too good a dog to allow him to live in pain like that.

I got off work at about 4 pm and hustled home to let all the dogs out to do their business. I hitched Buster up to the porch as I put the other two dogs back in the house, then he and I walked down to my car, where I carefully put him in his favorite traveling place, the back deck of my Prius. He was all perked up and happy to be going for a ride as we rode the short distance up to the Timberlyne Animal Clinic. I put the car windows down and went to see if they could see us without an appointment. I explained what was going on with Buster and the receptionist said it'd be no problem.

So I went to the car and fetched Buster and got him on the scale to be weighed. He'd lost a lot of weight, and was down from his 85 lb weight a few years ago to a mere 68 lbs. We went to the room and the vet came in and took a good look at Buster and then motioned to me. He said that he was pretty sure it was a tumor near the top of his leg, where the swelling was really, really pronounced. The swelling in his leg and the redness of his chest made him think that something around the tumor had ruptured and that blood was filling those areas. He explained that I could easily spend 4-5 thousand dollars to have them x-ray and amputate and go after the cancer with chemo, but then he said that it wouldn't buy him a lot of time, seeing as how he was in advanced years already, and that he could feel more lumps on his other legs as well. He said that the kind thing to do would be to consider euthenasia. I nodded, somehow already knowing that this would probably have been the case anyways.

I called John a few times, desperately trying to get through to him before I made any final decision. Finally, just as I was giving up, cursing him for not picking up his cellphone and vowing to superglue the damned thing to his head one night very soon, he called me back. In a voice thick from crying, I told him what was going on and asked him if he wanted to come see his buddy one more time before they did anything. John's voice was gone and I could barely hear him tell me that he just couldn't do it... he wanted to remember Buster as he saw him earlier in the day, laying happily on the leather chair.

Buster knew I was upset as I talked to John. As I was crying, he limped over to me and put his head on my lap and looked up at me as if to say, "hey.. it's OK. Don't be upset. I don't like to see you crying." He meant well, but being consoled by the animal that's about to be euthanized just isn't cricket, and I ended up bawling like a baby and hugging him as I sent out text messages and made calls to everyone who knew Buster.

The nurse came in sometime during this emotional outburst and I gave her the go-ahead to start the procedure by passing her my credit card. After my credit card cleared, the vet came in and told me how it would work, that he'd give him two injections, one of a tranquilizer to calm him down, and the other would be the euthenasia drug (some potassium mixture, according to my sister Kathy.) He then said that I could leave if I wanted to, that I didn't need to see it done. I was horrified at the very idea. "No!", I said to him, "He's my bud. I'm not gonna leave him now. I'm gonna hold him til the end." The doctor smiled kindly at me and nodded and patted me on the shoulder.

So, I got down on the floor next to the little cushioned dog-bed they'd brought in for him and he put his head on my lap. He barely twitched when the doctor gave him the first shot in his back leg. After a few minutes, he lolled his head up at me with a dull, stoned look that clearly said, "Wow... this is some GOOD SHIT!" A minute later his tongue sort of involuntarily popped out of his mouth and he drooled on me as he tried in vain to pull it back into his mouth. I scratched his head, ears and back all the while as the first drug took hold, talking to him and telling him how much I loved him. Just before the doctor came in to give him the second shot, I mentioned that, with him leaving like this, that it meant that Algonquin was now gonna be in charge. Buster's eyes narrowed slightly at the name and he looked up and actually gave me what I can only describe as a pitying look; one that clearly said, "I'm sorry, but that really sucks for you."

The doctor came in and told me that it was time to do the second injection. Buster didn't feel like going quietly, however, and as the doctor stooped down to where he would inject him in his rear leg, Buster let loose with possibly the most vile, bilious-smelling gas he's ever had. The doctor literally got up and had to go open a door less we all get sick. It was a rare bright spot in the whole visit, and probably the only time I smiled, though briefly, while in that building. After the smell abated, the doctor mentioned that he would check his pulse and let me know when he passed on. That was not really necessary. As he pushed in the plunger of the second syringe, about just less than halfway down, Buster gave a light shudder and was gone. I whispered, "Goodbye Buster. Bye-bye Buddy." I already knew he had gone, and that he wasn't in pain anymore. It was a small consolation to me, seeing as how the pain I was feeling now from his loss felt so enormous. The doctor listened to his chest and confirmed that he was indeed gone and then left me with him.

I looked down at him and carefully put his tongue back in his mouth and closed it, and then gently took off his collar. It's funny, when we used to bath him, I'd get him dried off and then hold his collar out and tell him that I needed to put it back on him so he'd be owned by us again, and he'd usually run right over to me and help me put it on him. This time, when I took it off him, as he lay so still, I knew I'd never really owned him, and that having him in my life wasn't an ownership responsibility thing as much as it was just a sheer blessing. I bent down and kissed him on the head once more and then got up and gathered up his leash, the invoice, and his collar along with the 30 or so kleenex that the vet and his assistant kept handing to me during my tear and snot filled visit. I stopped at the door and bid him goodbye once more, then walked out of the room.

I dumped the kleenex into the trash at the front desk and turned around as the vet walked toward me to shake my hand. He said that I'd done a very unselfish thing, by letting him go like I did; that it was a very good and noble decision.

It was then that I asked him why those types of decisions make you feel like you'd carved out your own heart, threw it on the floor, let everyone stamp on it, shit on it, then tried to stick it back in. Unprepared for this line of questioning, the vet gave me rather wide, alarmed-looking eyes. I went on to mention that other far less good or noble decisions, like for example, having a random fling hookup with a local college kid or skipping out on work on a nice warm Spring day, now those wouldn't even bring about a hint of ennui, guilt, or even, for that matter, a pause.

Then I asked him why that was, did he think? Again I got the wide, alarmed-looking eyes. I'm sure he thought I was just overwrought and half-crazy with grief. Let's hope so! After I got in the car, I really let go.... I wailed like a baby for a few minutes. Seeing Buster die, watching it actually happen, was a hundred times worse than seeing mom's body already dead at the mortuary a few weeks before.

Then I got really mad. I yelled at God, asking him "what the fuck was next?!?!" A heart attack for me? John's cancer to return? A car accident? Maybe a home fire or tornado? Lacking any immediate reply from on high, I pulled out of the parking lot for the Timberlyne Animal Clinic and headed home.

As I walked in to the house, I noticed Algonquin looking at me somewhat aghast and more than a little frightened. Apparently he is smart enough to do the math... Fat Owner and Buster leave the house together... and Only the Fat Owner comes back... holding Buster's empty collar. That can't be good! Funny, he's been on his best behavior since then. He must think his number is up next.

I walked upstairs and handed Buster's collar to John and sat down on the bed beside him. He just cried and I hugged him and told him just how good Buster was, this one last time.

It's a very sad day indeed now as we begin to mourn the loss of man's best friend, or in this case, two men's best friend.

Creating "Art" Amongst Utter Visual & Audio Disparity

I am sitting in front of my computer, putting together a set of flyers with a matching order card and an envelope for a free video set we're getting ready to send in the mail to our customers. It's for a "MILF mailing", one whose content targets customers who like to see videos with older women in them. This, in and of itself, doesn't seem all too out of the ordinary, seeing as how this is my job.

I am, however, working remotely this week as I finish up spending some time with my father in Nevada after my Mother's funeral last week. Being remote allows me a greater deal of flexibility as to where I can sit and create, or what I can wear while doing my work (though in truth, I've not really explored that angle too much. I'm sitting here in shorts and a shirt, which is pretty much the same dress code I keep at work. And besides, it seems to me that designing explicit flyers au naturale at the dinner table in my parents house would be so, SO gauche!)

So, to not get too off-topic, and to keep this to a shorter than usual blog entry, I am sitting here at the kitchen table designing these flyers while, to my right in the living room, the large screen HDTV is playing "The Sound Of Music" (one of the many DVDs I brought with me to pass the time.) I must say that the total juxtaposition of the hardcore sexually explicit nature of the material on the screen in front of me compared to the saccharine sweet "raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens" nature of the material on the giant screen to my right is so incongrously great that I honestly expect God to just come on down and smite the house at any second, or to look up and see a hole tear open in the fabric of reality.

The level of "gay" in the house was so high a few minutes ago, it actually woke my father out of a deep sleep. I'm kinda glad he's got the cheapo fire alarms, since a high-priced, more sensitive model may have accidentally gone off as the level of "flaming" skyrocketed as the movie progressed. My Dad, half-awake, proceeded to shamble out of his bedroom and down the hall to the living room where he looked around in bewilderment.(Or, as I privately thought, he seemed to be looking around to see where I had hid the other 30 or so gay guys that surely would have been needed to have brought the level of "gay" in the house up to such a homo-crecendo that it could have actually woken him up despite the half a Xanax he'd taken to get to sleep.) Giving up his cursory search for the gaggle of other non-existent gay men in the house, he then asked me to please keep it to a dull roar. I told him that I was sorry, and that I didn't think I was singing along quite so loudly....at which point he snorted, rolled his eyes, and mumbled something snippy and sarcastic about really having 4 girls in the family instead of 3 girls and a boy and then shuffled back to his bedroom and closed the door.

Oh well, back to the salt mines. This stuff doesn't create itself you know, and I still have a flyer or two, as well as an order card and an envelope to design. Luckily for me, I brought along "My Fair Lady" to watch once "The Sound Of Music" has played its last note! Tonight, I feel that I am well-fit by the immortal words of Professor Henry Higgins:

I'm an ordinary man, Who desires nothing more than an ordinary chance,
to live exactly as he likes, and do precisely what he wants...

An average man am I, of no eccentric whim,
Who likes to live his life, free of strife,
doing whatever he thinks is best, for him,
Well... just an ordinary man (that designs explicit adult materials for a living!)

Hmm... I think I can feel the level of "gay" in the house creeping back up into the dangerous "pink zone." I can only hope my Dad had the sense to put in his earplugs and take the other half of that Xanax.

The Battle Is Finished, Now There Is Peace.

My mother had a wonderful Easter. My sister Kathy and her husband went out and spent the Easter holidays with them and they had a great time. It was just as they were leaving to go back to Alexandria that my mother began to show signs of fatigue and illness. What everyone had thought was a simple respiratory infection turned out to the beginning of the end. As the week rolled on, my mother continued to get worse and worse, until, at lunchtime on Friday, she quietly slipped away. I flew out the next day and was able to help the mortuary guy put together a nice slideshow of pictures for everyone to see at the viewings.

This morning we had the mass for my mother and, though my sister Kathy and I had written some comments to say at the service, Father Bob apparently had a tee-time to make at the local golf course or something and he hustled her out of the church right at the end of the mass. It was a bit upsetting, but I thought it'd be nice to put my sister's and my comments here so that everyone could check them out.
I'll do Kathy's first. She wanted to read a selection from a very talented poet, Jilchristy Dee. It's called, "Your Dreams Were All For Us Mom":

Your dreams were all for us Mom, all for us
You traded your own dreams to purchase ours
Willing to accept lesser opportunities
So that we would have every opportunity

Every possibility
Every chance for a good education
Every security and confidence
Everything!

And our dreams became your hopes and aspirations
We knew that we were never alone in our dreams
For you were right there with us

You didn't mind if you didn't get the best education
As long as we were afforded that opportunity
It didn't matter if your work wasn't what you had hoped for
As long as it gave us the means to create our own futures

You willingly accepted all those hours away from us, working long and hard. You were okay with it... as lng as it provided your family with security and stability

So we grew up surrounded in your deep love and in your safety

You provided the room in our hearts for imagination to grow

You took care of the worries so that our hearts and minds could pursue our dreams

You never spent much on yourself

You never enjoyed many of the finer things in life

We were the treasure you invested your life in

And you gave everything you had for us

Everything Mom!

Everything!

And now we have lives that are abundant and full

Blessed with rich memories and cherished opportunities

We are surrounded in the peace and love of family

And trusted, loyal, friends

We have a life that was paid for in advance

Through the difficult and dedicated efforts of a loving mother

Who traded the best years of her own life

To make sure we'd have the best years of ours

Mom, you will never be forgotten!

Your love and sacrifice will never leave us

We will never quesion our own true worth

For you proved our value to us every single day

And now we hope that our lives have rewarded your dreams

Satisfied every dedicated effort you gave for us

Given you every honor

Every sense of pride

Every happiness and peace

Every dream fulfilled

Everything!

You and your cherished legacy will live on forever

In the lives and hearts of your family

For you have truly purchased a better life for all of us

Through everything that you willingly sacrificed

You gave us everything Mom!

Everything!

(copyright 2007, Jilchristy Dee.)

The comments I had prepared are not nearly as poetic, but came from the heart, which is all I could hope for:

I need to start off by saying that I’m up here speaking for two people today. My partner John is NC right now having the giant painful lymphoma-related ulceration on his leg picked at and prodded in room 5 or 6 of the Duke Wound Clinic. So yeah, though it’s hard to imagine, he’d want me to be sure to let you know that there are indeed worse places to be than at a funeral.

Earlier today, John emailed me to correct something I’d written in Mom’s obituary. He’d noticed that I’d written that Mom had lost her battle with cancer, and emailed me to correct my wording. He asked that I point this error out to you today and use the more appropriate word “finished.” My Mom finished her battle with cancer on Friday. John wanted to convey that the idea here is that a good life gone to cancer is not "lost" except for the physical presence of that person to everyone. He goes on to say that Mom will continue to be a beautiful presence in all our lives through memory, tradition, great stories around the dinner table, and inspiration and that there is no loser in that - just moving along. We, in fact, would be the losers if we were to feel that all that goodness is gone from us, forever.

For myself, I feel it necessary to point out that this funeral provides the perfect example for why my family should never, ever gamble, most especially if the stakes are life or death. If someone had come up to us 5 years ago and asked us to bet on who would pass away first, mom or dad, and we’d have all picked Dad. He’d have been the easy-money, the odds-on favorite for a bet like that. He’s had more work done on him than a ’79 Volare and the International Space Station combined. It would have seemed like a no-brainer bet at the time, and we would all have lost our shirts.

It’s often said that funerals and memorials are held to soothe the pain of the living, since those that have died have already moved beyond any pain. In this regard, I can see where it would be easy to stand up here and rail against the unfairness of the timing of my mother’s sickness and death, both having left her precious little time to really enjoy her long awaited retirement with my father. It’d be just as easy to curse God, calling him out as a feckless and mean-spirited thug for taking her away from us like he did.

Yeah, while that would be really easy, it wouldn’t serve the right purpose, it wouldn’t soothe anyone’s pain, and wouldn’t be at all what she would have wanted to hear from me. I believe she’d hope that I would try and find a positive way to look at this whole thing and present it to you. So here goes...

I remember when we were younger, Mom worried aloud to my Dad that she thought she might never live to see us grown up and out on our own, seeing as how her own mother had passed on at so young an age. Well, she and Dad got us all raised and on our own, even helping to take care of their assorted grandkids and grand-dogs and cats.

Once she and my Dad retired to NV, Mom began to worry again to that she’d outlive Dad and, without his retirement income, felt that she would become a burden on us. After she was diagnosed with cancer, she began to worry less about outliving dad and more that she’d go through the same pain her mother went through when she was young.

Through the help of her children and some serious pharmaceuticals, she fought bravely for the last 11 months, but to no avail. With all her treatment options dried up, she decided to return home to finish her battle with cancer in the peace of her home. It almost seemed as if she waited for both my sister and my father to go use the bathrooms so that she could slip quietly and painlessly away. Believe it or not, it was just as she’d have wanted it to be.

You see, a Lady always knows when it’s time to go and my mother was a great Lady.