“G’s pony died.” It’s my sister.

“Oh no. She ok?”

“Yeah. She is. But I’m not.”

“Sorry ’bout that. What happened to it?”

“Not the pony. Our dogs.”

“Huh?”

“You know, our dogs. Yours and mine. When we were little. I was telling mom this morning about the pony and how glad I am that husband took care of it before the girls got up. ”

“Yup…”

“Cause I would hate for them to see something like that. The trauma and all.”

“I bet.”

“So I say to mom ‘you know, it really bothered me when Dad put the dog down that time’…..” She lowers her voice and I know exactly what she’s gonna say. “…. in front of us.”

“Poor Guts” I shake my head and picture the sweet little herniated stray my sister and I picked up when we were kids.

“Exactly! And you know what she says?” She pauses. For effect. The way she does when she’s got a doozie. “She says ‘your daddy had to shoot Pup, he was really sick’ ………..and I’m like …….HE KILLED PUP!?”

Holy crap. “He killed Pup too!”

“That’s what I’m saying!”

“Pup didn’t run away?”

“Seriously. I mean, good grief. No wonder we have issues.”

She sighs. I agree. Then we start talking about pilates and core flexibility.

Sisters are the best therapy.

Mawsie’s house was on a hill. When she was old and I was young. After she died someone sat a bear on her porch. They killed it and stuffed it and left it there, because it was something to do and they didn’t want it in the house.

Her husband passed away some time back in the thirties. She never had another. She buried a baby without a name….a little boy with a long one…..a daughter whose man didn’t want her to live anymore.

In a rocking chair. Where the bear sits now. Sat Mawsie. Her hair black and bunned. Her house coat striped in red. Laughing. Loud. That’s how I remember her.

My grandfather buried his head and cried when his momma died. We never saw him tear. We never heard his pain. But we knew. Because Mawsie was gone…and my grandfather had never buried his head before.

I had to do my fair share of adjusting when I moved to England. I survived the culture shock and the beans for breakfast. But it was the whole “You say tomAAAto , I say tomAHto” thing that took a while. If I’m honest, it’s still taking. (Last week I asked a concierge for directions to the rest room. He sent me to the lobby.)

So here we go. For the American novice (i.e. tourist, holidayer, vacationer) traveling to the mother land, a few pointers – because our English, isn’t always that of the Queen.

Bangers (n.) – Sausages. As in ‘Bangers and Mash’. An English meal.
Biscuit (n.) – Cookie or Cracker.
Brolly (n.) – Umbrella
Bum (n.) – A humorous term for a person’s backside. (Not vagrant.)
Butty (n.) – Sandwich.
Cheers (phrase) – Drinking toast. Also means goodbye and/or thanks.
Chemist (n.) – Pharmacist/Pharmacy
Chippie (n.) – Fish and chip shop. (Chips = Fries)
Cupaa (n.) – A cup of tea.
Football (n.) – Soccer
Gob (slang) – Slang for ‘mouth’
Holiday (n.) – Vacation
Knackered (phrase) – Tired
Lift (n.) – Elevator
Lorry (n.) – Truck
Nick (v.) – To steal
Pants (n.) – Underwear (Can also mean lame.)
Petrol (n.) – Gasoline
Pinch (n.) – Steal
Quid (n.) – Pound (As in money, not weight)
Snog (v) – To Kiss (thanks oob)
Stone (n.) – 14 pounds (weight)
Tea (n.) – A light early evening meal (also a drink of course)
Torch (n.) – Flash light
Underground (n.) – Subway

Am I missing anything?

I’m away and the blog’s on autopilot. This means reruns. Looking for feedback on that which has none. Criticism. Construction.

From the novel….it’s death and dumplins….

When I was three I began gathering flowers from the mountainside; placing them into open caskets of distant cousins. I ate chicken and dumplings in parlor rooms beside dead uncles of other uncles at least once a month when I was five. During a wake that same year I hid my cousin Dewey’s General Lee Matchbox at the feet of our great grandmother’s sister. She was dead and he never found it.

Death was never new or upsetting. My family was an old one and people had been dying all my life. It was the course of things. People were. Then they were not. Grown ups shied away from children to cry. They hid in bathrooms or basements and came out with hush on their face and said ‘be quiet’ and ‘don’t run’.

Death was never frightening. At its worse, it was only silence and we’ll never see her again – but we never saw her very much anyway.

Grandma said death was angels and lambs and chasing honey and warm biscuits with mason jars full of buttermilk – for those the Lord called home. She didn’t say anything about the ones who died because someone else didn’t want them to live anymore. The women of penny virtue who walked the streets and got spit up by the river. The men who put a gun against their head because life was too hard and they were too weak. Or the boys children sometimes find in the wood because….

Mr Avis, a spirit-whipper-upper at one of the town’s Free Will establishments, said death was the womb, where you’re born all over, onto one side or the other. He and his deacons were black and white with no shades of grey. They preached hallelujah or the fury of God in loud angry voices, like it was their job to scare you half to death and make you glad you were a Baptist.

Grandma, I didn’t understand. She was sugar and spice and a little bit of slaw (’cause slaw was good on everything) and that kind of talk just didn’t make any sense to me.

I ignored Mr Avis because my mother always told me to, and because everyone said he sweat too much for an honest man.

I asked Pa, because he’d know and he’d know right. He came by all his sense the hard way. Like when someone put a pillow over his sister’s face and smothered the life out of her. Or when his daddy stopped living right in front of him, with a bullet and a bang, because he didn’t have the patience to hate himself in the other room. You think and you know more about things when they happen to you. And just about everything had happened to Pa. But whenever I questioned him he never said much. He’d just give me a dollar and go play Amazing Grace on his organ.

So I never really understood. Not until……

All those bodies. In funeral homes and my grandparents’ living room. They were never dead. They were what happened after death had left. When the thing that comes after, had been and gone.

The kid in the crabapple bush wasn’t that way. He wasn’t a body at an all night wake, or someone to write an obituary about. He was dead. I knew it even though he didn’t.

I saw death in a child’s face for the first time in my life, and I understood. It hurt me and scared me and followed me around in a dream…where it lay beneath my bed, dressed in red with one torn eye. A young body over an empty grave full of hands and hell and things I couldn’t see, reaching for me, to pull me into something that wasn’t.

I never grew out of it, because its not the kind of thing you do; and when i got older, I was never sure the thing that tried to swallow me whole as a child was kept away. So I went away….from everything and everyone it followed.

Death became a stranger to me because those caught up in it were strangers.

Until Belle died. Then I had to go. Pa asked me to.

I wake up at 3am. My head hurts and I can’t sleep. I watch Tony Robbins sell confidence on the telly. The sun’s out by 5. Back in by 7. It’s gonna pour.

I’m on my way to work and notice I have on two different socks. Why am I wearing socks? I spend the day at my desk. For lunch I have three bananas and a cup of hot water. Because it’s there.

At 4 I notice my sweater is on backward. I right it at my desk. The Fedex man stares. I don’t care.

I leave work at 5. Trip over my own left foot three times. A chav shoves me at the station. “Sorry Love.” Blows smoke in my face. “Places to be.” I want something hard and flat and painful to hit him with. I feel like a Bret Easton Ellis novel.

An hour later I’m tired and anxious. I can’t wait to get home. Veg out over Cartman and Chianti. I say it out loud when I think it. “Ke-ANN-ti”. Like Lector. Just before he sautes Liotta’s lobes.

Cartoons always make me feel better. Fat kids and cheezy puffs.

I’m not answering the phone tonight.

It’s been one of those weeks…and I don’t know why.

Mother’s Day. 1984. Of course she remembers. It was the year Billy and I brought home a dead horse.

Read It: You can’t make this stuff up.

We were going to take it to school for ‘show and tell’. Lucky we showed it to momma first.

My life has always been full of signs.

He tells me my hair looks funny and then ….it’s on. I want to say I hate his jacket and who looks good in orange anyway? I don’t. Instead I give him the look and ask “Why would you say that?”.

“Because I love you.”

How do you argue with ‘I love you’, even when you’re mad and know it’s just a cover up? I tell him he should be dressing naked women. He says don’t temp him.

The job would suit him. He pays more attention to what I wear than I do. Things like this:

“Those earrings are too dramatic.”
“The shoes. No.”
“This cut’s more flattering.”

My sister has a polar opposite. She once dressed in paint splattered sweatpants for a dinner party with a bazillionaire….just to see if her he would notice. He did. Said she looked great. “Whatever. Let’s go.”

Fair enough, she’s hot as hot. And he wore a ‘If you ain’t wasted you done it wrong, Class of ’93′ T-shirt to his own baptism. (It was white.) But even my sister couldn’t pull off painted joggers over fine wine and truffles.

She says I’m lucky. I say she is. We envy one another, and deep down know we’re both right.

Gentlemen, listen up. A man who knows the value of a pair of red French soles is a good one. But sometimes, we really don’t want to know how we look, even when we ask.

Get it? Got it? Good.

Two old men. A diner near the Tug River Valley. One wears a red face. He calls his friend Plez.

Plez: The General’s a pastor now.

Red: I reckon?

Plez: Yup. Says God spoke to him. Set him on his course.

They figure on it. For a while.

Plez: But we don’t know. We don’t know if He really did. Or if the General just thought it, or wished it, or made it up to suit him.

Red: The Lord can speak to a man.

Plez: But this ain’t a wise man and it ain’t wise things he’s saying. And the Lord don’t speak foolishness. He’s been around too long for that.

They shake their heads and drink their coffee and think about the man who just took up God; but took Him up better than most.

Plez: I told him I’m a publican – that’s what they called sinners in the olden days.

Red: The Lord ate with them.

Plez: Yes sir.

Red: I’d rather be a sinner beside Jesus than all right on my own. Any time.

Plez: He’s all ornery ’bout me goin’ fishin on Sundays. I told him I ain’t heard a man yet went to Hell for fishin.

Red: If the Lord ain’t in the good earth, where’s he at?

Plez: He’s behind that pulpit pointing his finger and tellin’ people the devil’s holdin’ onto ‘em.

Red: Not My Lord, friend. Not My Lord.

They finish their coffee and talk about the weather.

Tall Dark & Handsome’s brother just got back from the North Pole. More or less. He spent two weeks in Svalbard dog sledding through white-outs and walking on thin ice.

My mother went to Chicago once when she was 17. Barring truckers, that’s about as far as any of my family got until I started traveling.

Growing up we didn’t do vacations. We did the State Fair. Every summer we’d head to Lewisburg so the old man could loiter around livestock and engage in commerce with the carnies. Funnel cakes were the highlight, but I didn’t eat them because it was too hot and they were too sticky. My brother did. He’d wash them down with big gulp cups and then jump on the ferris wheel until he threw up.

Friends, let me tell you, the only thing worse than doing family vacation when you’re a 15 year old girl is doing it around collapsible tents, farmyard animals and bagged gold fish.

But people do it. All the time. They go to stare at prized pigs and hairy heifers. To swallow hot dogs and slurpees and sing along with country crooners.

It’s alright for some. But not for me. And not for my brother. Not now. We’ve moved on and out.

He still likes ferris wheels though.