Monday nights are his studio nights. My night to engage in aimless wandering. Alone.

We seldom do anything apart. Lea once questioned the benefits of this. “The danger of always being at each other’s fingertips,” she said, “is that one day you wont be, and where will you be then?

I said it works for us because we know what it’s like to be apart. Really apart. Four thousand miles apart. We once went an entire year without seeing one another. And, until last year, being separated for six weeks at a time wasn’t that uncommon. So we have a lot of seconds and minutes to make up for.

But I digress.

Tonight I’m listening to Simon & Garfunkel. Playing with a plastic dinosaur. And reading Oscar Wilde in the interim. Fitness Bootcamp starts tomorrow, so I may order pizza as well. Normally I don’t do things that counter-productive. But it’s a Monday.

It always happens around 3:00am when I open my eyes and catch the light from the street lamp throwing itself onto the shadow sleeping beside me.

For a split second I go completely out of myself. I’m startled and even a little angry because I have no idea who this person is! **

My heart is pounding and my voice is caught and even though it just takes a moment to remember, a moment is enough. I’m wide awake and just really annoyed because I’m never gonna get back to sleep and why do I keep doing this?

I’m not sure what this says about me. Chaz will say it’s a boundary issue and I need to get it sussed out properly. Clare will tell me I just need to stop eating Bengali before bedtime. But I’d like to think it’s only this: I’m use to a California King. Not the proximity of a Queen.

When I told The Euro about it he just rolled his eyes and said, “Well, an hour before you do that, you wake up singing some freaky Victorian nursery rhyme in a really scary little voice. Sometimes, I have to get up and leave the room. You’re that spooky.”

At least he can’t say I’m not an interesting bed buddy. (My grandmother will NOT LOVE the way that sounds.)

—

**To the 5 (FIVE) family members who have already written to ask ‘What happened to your husband?’….Good grief, it IS him. Otherwise, there’s very little point to the story. Comprenez-vous?

I just googled ’sister quotes’ and was bombarded with purple prose. Sunshine and solace all over the place. Save it for the love letters because, lets be honest, sisterhood isn’t so much a Hallmark card as a Lifetime movie. And I mean that in the very best ‘Help Farrah Fawcett Cage Her Evil Ex Up In the Fireplace’ sort of way.

Seriously though, I think this quote from Toni Morrison probably sums it up better than anything:

A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves - a special kind of double. ~Toni Morrison

Though I have a sneaking suspicion, if my own sister were asked to pull a quote from her hat, it would be this one:

Big sisters are the crab grass in the lawn of life. ~Charles M. Schulz

Anyway…I just found these photos floating around in cyberspace. So I decided to steal them. She has 24 hours to request a retraction.

No real reason at all to post this except to say “Mal, dollface, call me!” and “I’m getting tired of all this text.”

Nothing goes to lighten up Hazlitt and Homeland Security like a party for a three year old. Photo taken in January, at very same party.

There’s no getting around the insanity that has been my week. I still haven’t got that organizational thing down. It’s a work in progress. If it were up to me, I’d hire my chica to do it for me. She’s saved my bacon more than once, always with a smile, and she’s doing it again tonight.

Speaking of bacon, we once had ‘matching’ email handles: bigporkchop and littleporkchop. I can’t remember where the inspiration came from. I think it was a stuffed monkey. Either that or the British and their love of sausages.

The Euro’s dad was talking about boundaries the other day. How Cumbria isn’t really Cumbria, but something all together new and not right-sounding. How some of Cheshire use to be some of Lancashire and how politicians like to redraw the map as it suits them. “You don’t really do that in America, do you?”

I said “I don’t know” and got to thinking about McDowell County, West Virginia. I remember hearing, or reading, or somehow being aware of, a movement to eliminate the county by absorbing it into the neighbouring two.

Iaeger will still be Iaeger, I suppose, but it will be somewhere else. Even though it hasn’t moved an inch. And all the money that should have been spent, but wasn’t, on repairing the county after the floods (the building materials still sit, covered in dust, in the flood condemned post office) would disappear into the redrawn boundary. All the mistakes that were made, all the city-centre roads that haven’t been paved since 1976 and all the scandals that made their way onto the Today Show would be erased by many of the same people who made them in the first place.

I don’t know that there’s any legitimacy to the rumour. It may be one of those urban myths. Either way, I’ve been thinking about it a lot since I heard about the Iaeger Dairy Bar shutting down.

When the last horse in a one horse town drops dead, where do you go from there?

I don’t know about you, but if I had a daughter with an auto immune disorder that attacked her skin cells and prevented them from making pigment, I wouldn’t look at her and say “Wow. You’re really pale.” This is what my mother said to me last week. I felt like Ricky Gervais in the Extra’s episode where he drowns his face in soup.

I called my sister to tell her about it and heard her get that Cary Grant look (Not unlike the Gervais look) before she broke out in wicked giggles. Then I felt bad because I know my mother hates when I make my sister break out in wicked giggles and because her comment really didn’t bother me. At all.

The thing is, I’m not that sensitive about it, but I feel like people should expect me to be and they should act accordingly. (Yes. Horrible, I know.)

Random hotel photo. My sunkissed look. Also rocking the hunchback look. Clearly.

I mentioned it to Flynn who shot back and urgent one-liner: “Are you an Albino???”

No. But if I didn’t take care you’d never know it. I’ve spent the last ten years out of the sun - no pigment to protect against skin cancer - and wearing Jackie O shades and Factor 85, even in the winter. I started dyeing my lashes and brows about 5 years ago, when they all turned white (Pigmentless skin means pigmentless hair. Apparently.) As for my head of hair, I’ve never let myself find out what’s going on there. I’ve been visiting the colourist since age 19 when the above mentioned Flynn told me, in no uncertain terms, that “Dishwater Blond” was not my look.

It’s 98degrees on this new street of mine. My neighbours are enjoying their patios and pools. I’m wearing cotton gloves and wide brimmed hats and wondering if I’ll ever learn how to work this pale but interesting look. My grandmother promises it will all be worth it when I’m 65 with fabulous skin. I’m gonna hold her to it.

My grandmother’s not the biggest fan of Ralph Stanley. But it’s not Ralph’s fault. “Bill use to follow him around every weekend. Playing music. He’d leave me at home.” Bill’s her husband. Bill is Pa.

My mom talks about another Bill. How he was always “around” when she was young. How, other than his height and his big white hat, she never knew there was anything exceptional about him. Me, I remember being five or six years old and shrugging a big “So What?” to my same-age cousin when he pointed to his daddy and the tall, white-hatted man singing and playing music together back in the mountains. “Why that’s Bill Monroe girl! Don’t you know nothin’?”

The truth was, I didn’t know much. Not when it came to that high lonesome sound. But I’ve been trying to remedy this. Last night The Euro (Who loves Bluegrass. Who can’t abide Country.) and I were invited to go along with S & J to hear J’s 83 year old grandfather.

They get together on Friday nights. A group of what my own grandfather likes to call old timey musicians. In a little use-to be-country store with old coca-cola signs hanging on the walls and a pot bellied stove in the corner.

People drop in and pick up fiddles and mandolins and whatever else may be laying around or stashed, conveniently in their car. One fellow walked in with a base twice his size, sat in down in front of the door and just started in playing. Without a word. A lady stopped by, to just say hi, grabbed a hundred year old fiddle and…good grief she was good.

In 1946 George Orwell outlined his four great motives for writing in the essay “Why I Write”. He believed these motives exist, in different degrees, in every writer. I’d be lying if I said he wasn’t right. For me, it’s mostly about Aesthetic Enthusiasm. It’s also about a kind of peace that comes over me when I’m under no pressure to get it right. Or when I’ve finally pushed that boulder up the hill. I’d like to think I’m not as egocentric as Orwell but every writer has to have a little bit of ego going for her. Why else would she think her words important enough to preserve?

—————–

In Orwell’s own words. Why he writes:

Sheer Egoism - Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc.

Aesthetic Enthusiasm - Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed.

Historical Impulse - Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

Political Purpose - Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

I get to see my sister soon; and I’m pretty darn stoked about it. Her husband’s leaving the country on business for a day or so and I’m going in to laugh at her toes. She has these tiny little toes that look like they’ve walked through a hornet’s nest. Those are my brother’s words, not mine. I wouldn’t say such things because, like my other brother, I have Hobbit Feet. My peep toes hate them.

Anyway. Last week I get this email from her (See previous post). She’s talking about her six year old. I keep saying “You should really do a Mommy Blog” and she keeps saying “I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”

I plan on making the Euro take some decent photos - because I only have two of she and I together where we’re not ten years old and in our bathing suits, holding watermelons in one hand and shot guns in the other.

I am not joking.

And this is exactly why we’ve been approached to write a screen play. But I’ll tell you about that later.