Memorial Audre Lorde 1950

If you come as softly 
as wind within the trees
you may hear what I hear
see what sorrow sees.

If you come as lightly
as the threading dew
I will take you gladly
nor ask more of you.

You may sit beside me
silent as a breath
only those who stay dead
shall remember death.

If you come I will be silent
nor speak harsh words to you
I will not ask you why, now,
not how, nor what you do.

But we shall sit here softly
beneath two different years
and the rich earth between us
shall drink our tears.

My friend and fellow blogger Heather lost her daughter yesterday unexpectedly, and I cannot find words. Heather’s blog is offline now due to, I assume, the server crashing back up and running. Visit the March Of Dimes to leave a donation in Madeline’s name, send her family well wishes on her twitter stream and view Madeline’s brief and beautiful life at Heather’s Flickr page.

I’m not much of a dog person.  I’m not much of an animal person, truth be told.  Every now and then, though, there will be some animal and our paths will cross and that animal will have to be mine.  Like this one.

I was picking my oldest up from kindergarten one day and the mom of one of his classmates had a box of puppies.  But not just any puppies; they were more like Silver Dollar puppies.  They were *this* big.  Tiny.  Barely hatched.  Cotton balls, I’m not kidding you.  I checked them all out, because I’m not that dead in the heart yet, and one of them waddled her little butt over to me.  That was all it took.  She was ours.

I named her Izzi because the person I hate more than any other person in the world had just pissed me off beyond all belief, cost me a job I loved and a few very important relationships, and I had to get her back.  So I named my dog after her baby.  Yes, I am that much of a bitch.

She is rumoured to be a Pekingese/Chihuahua mix, and I’ve always assumed there was some Terrier in there, but she’s never looked like anything other than an 11 week old golden retriever.  When we brought her home, she was so small she could fit in The Donor’s coat pocket.

We took her to the store to get a leash and collar, and the clerk laughed at us and then took us to the cat section.  Her food bowl was an olive oil dish you use on the table to dip your bread in.

As she grew she learned that she liked to pee like a boy and sleep on her back.

She also figured out one day that if you fucked with her, she could kill you in your sleep.

Her life was a-okay.  We lived in this little tiny apartment with lots of other very large dogs, and she made loads of very big friends that taught her how to bark, how to catch a ball, and how to stick up for herself.  There was a guy who lived upstairs from us, and she loved him and used to break out of our apartment to go scratch on his door until he let her in.  She ate his food and peed on his floor.  We ended up kind of sharing her in a weird sort of ‘strangers in an apartment building’ way, (he babysat her, I scrubbed pee out of his carpets) and now he’s my kids godfather.

She liked to sleep with us.  When we first brought her home, she cried and cried and cried (for 10 whole minutes) until we caved and drug her in our bed.  And there she chilled out happily for a long time.

Until, one day, when she realized it was way more fun to sleep in-between momma’s legs while she snored and snored and snored, which was not awesome.  But there was no stopping her, until one day when we fucked her whole world up.

She knew I was pregnant before I did.  She started sleeping at the foot of the bed, right on the floor under where was stomach was soon to be.  She started walking underneath me all day long, she got really crazy territorial around me, and ultimately she starting getting protective.  And by protective, I mean she started biting.  Everyone.

She nipped the boys, she snarled at the mailman, she peed on every.fucking.thing.  She drove me CRAZY.  I couldn’t tell if she was defending me or jealous of the baby, but either way, it was getting out of control.  I started thinking that maybe we couldn’t keep her, what with the baby coming.  And then she got hit by a car.

I realized that screw it, I love that damn dog, and I’m keeping her even if she won’t walk on a leash to save her ass, even if she hides her little turds all over the basement, even if she chews holes in the middle of my mattress.  She stays, period.  And then The Donor got transferred to Canada.

We had to decide if we were willing to bring a dog across a border who bit, whether or not she could handle that transition after having to deal with a baby (whom she actually really liked in the end.)  We ultimately decided to leave her.  We asked The Godfather to take her, but the timing sucked for him.  We asked our neighbors, but they’d just gotten a dog.  The Donor’s aunt finally agreed to take her, and then it happened.

She was across the street, visiting with the neighbors and their new dog, when the cable dude came by to hook something up.  He tried to give her a treat and she punctured his hand.  He was really cool about it, but we knew we were running on borrowed time now.  This was too far, too much.  We decided we’d have to have her put down.  That night, very randomly, my friend Marge came over to visit.  I cried on her shoulder about the whole thing, and she left a few hours later and one dog heavier.

Izzi has been with Marge since June of 2006, and she’s never been happier.  Marge and her family are 4-wheeling, Jeep driving, mountain-living people with loads of cats and dogs for Izzi to be friends with.  I miss her sometimes, but really, she’s so much happier there.  It’s a perfect fit.  She loves them, they love her.  I couldn’t be happier about any choice I’ve ever made than to hand my dog to her that late night in June.

And that’s where the guilt comes in.  See, Izzi, well, she kind of got eaten last night, and now my best friend is bearing the brunt of the sadness over the loss of my dog.  Our dog.  We had a dog together. She had to pick up her, wrap her, bring her in from the cold, call me, and all I can do is sit here and write a stupid post about her. I was home for a year and a half and I never once went to visit Izzi, I didn’t send her a treat on her birthday, nothing.  I gave her up, and she died last night, and my friend is hurting bad from the loss, and I feel horrible about it.  But damn, it was good while it lasted.

Saturday night, I couldn’t sleep.  Which is weird only because I was so tired, my eyeballs burned.  I tossed and turned and eventually took something to knock me out.  I figured I was just over-tired, or had one too many cups of tea that night.  Oh, no.

My great aunt Baba died on Saturday night.

I do these things.  I dream about old, ex boyfriends that I haven’t thought about in years, and the next morning they call to say, “Hey, we had a baby last night!”  No matter what I’m doing, I look at the clock every time it says 12:34.  If I’m asleep, I will wake up for it.  Talk about annoying.  If I sleep through my alarm clock, I will wake up exactly 5 minutes before I have to be where I am late for getting to.

Anyway, that’s so not the point.  The point is, Auntie Baba took her leave of us in the middle of the night on Saturday.  I know you’re going to be all, “Oh, I’m so sorry!” but really?  Don’t.  Let me tell you a little about her first.

Auntie Baba is my husband’s great aunt, his father’s aunt.  She was born in 1913, which is before WWI.  Which, WOW.  She was married to her husband Gordon for 50 years or so before he died.  They never had kids, they traveled, they collected things from around the world, they had friends and played bridge and did whatever it was they wanted to.  They owned a little mobile home in Palm Springs, and though I imagine they could have afforded more, they were more than happy with their little home on the golf course in the desert.

I met Baba many years after her husband died, when she was 87.  We’d mailed pictures and letters, but when she was 85 she was diagnosed with breast cancer.  Her response was more or less, “Fuck THAT shit.”  And that little 85 year old woman kicked cancer’s ass.  I took the boys to meet her after her treatments, and let me tell you, that woman was a rock star. She was pissed off that they wouldn’t let her keep her driver’s license, even though she was slowly going blind.  I mean, ‘how exactly did they think she was going to get to Bridge and seriously, everyone in Palm Springs is ancient and they all drive like shit.  Why can’t she, too?  I asked her what the secret to her health and longevity was, and she told me.

She drank a lot, she smoked a little, she swore, she traveled and she loved.

That’s a smart girl, if you ask me.  She had happy hour at 3 pm sharp every day.  She had her friends and her bridge club (she REALLY liked bridge, to each his own.)  She had a “suitor”, and I don’t ever want to know what the meaning in those quotation marks is.  She lived surrounded by her family, her niece and the families that have grown from her, and my husband’s family.  Her walls dripped with photographs spanning generations, children and families that all loved her dearly.  She loved my children, who look like her cherished and only nephew, their grandfather, who died entirely too young and took a piece of her heart with him.

We all had no doubt they’d be saying her name on the tv and over the radio in 5 years, when she hit 100 in full force.

She regularly wrote, and as she grew older, the letters became harder to read.  The Christmas checks for the kids grew larger, to the point where I questioned whether or not she actually knew the dollar amounts she was writing.  In her letters, in her scribbles of handwriting, I could see her slowly slipping away.  But that woman held on as long as she could.  She went out kicking and screaming, and once the dementia took her, it wasn’t a month before her body gave out, too.

There is one thing Baba will never do, and that is not live life on her own terms.

She has insisted on being cremated and her ashes entombed in some sort of column thingy, all the way on top, where the sun will always shine on her and she’ll be forever warm.  She’s asked that there be no services of any kind for her, which feels odd to me.  I mean, of all the lives to celebrate, hers was the one.  She was a shining example of taking a life by the reigns and riding as hard as you can.

But what Baba wants, Baba gets.

Our family will quietly commemorate her life one day next week, once she is settled in for an eternity of desert winds, and I will do my best to teach them the things that she would have wanted them to know; that life is too short for regrets, that anything worth doing is worth doing well, that you don’t need more than what keeps you comfortable, and that if you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong.

Rest in peace, dear Baba.  Rock on, baby, rock the fuck on.

A few, um, years ago a wrote a little post just saying I was having lunch with a boy named Tim.  I wish the comments had carried over so you could read a little more about him.  Either way, I never really said another word about it, so I thought I may as well tell you all the story today.

I met Tim at the Burger King on 88th and Wadsworth in Arvada, Colorado in my junior year of high school.  We went to high school together, but he was a big popular soccer player and I was a complete, scary, theater geek dork who had just moved to Colorado after leaving her insane mother in the middle of the night in Delaware.  I’d seen him, but never knew his name.  We had a monumentally different core friend group.

Anyway, some friends and I were out driving around the mall and some guys in a car started following us.  One of my friends knew them and so we let them follow us to the Burger King.  I can’t remember what we talked about, but I do know that by the end of the night, Tim and I were running around laughing our asses off, crowing each other Queens and Kings with those paper Burger King hats.

I never expected to talk to him again, knowing how the social structure in high school goes, but he totally came up to me a few days later and said hi.  And then he called me over to his locker one day, just to talk.  We ended up being really good friends.  His boys, THE boys, gave him more crap than I can ever begin to describe to you for hanging out with me.  One day, I was walking away from them in the hall and they gave me that glare-with-a-shoulder-bump thing that asshole jocks give people they don’t like, and as I walked on I heard him say, “Shut up, I just like her.  She’s nice.  You could be, too, you know.”

You stick up for my honor?  You’re stuck with my ass for life.

We graduated and I gave him a Burger King Hat, he wrote something very sweet in my yearbook, and that was that.  A year, a year and a half later, I ran into him somewhere.  My boyfriend and I were broken up, and so Tim and I went out to Ground Zero in Boulder (and if you know what that is, congrats, you’re ancient) and had one of those one-thing-leads-to-several-nothers nights.  I’d tell you the details which are actually quite funny, but honestly it’s one of the most silly, romantic, awkward memories I have, and I’m keeping it to myself.

We never “dated.”  We just hung out.  A LOT.  I was living with a friend with a colicky baby, and he’d come over at night to help me with her.  We never went out on dates, I never met his mom, we just watched movies and ate Snack Packs and did other things I won’t mention.  We were young, not even 20 yet, single, not looking, and old friends.  It was safe and easy and comfortable.

And then my 20th birthday came.  I didn’t hear from him, and I noticed that I hadn’t heard anything.  My nose was actually bent a little out of shape about it.  We weren’t dating, he didn’t owe me a call or flowers or anything, and I had no right to expect any.  I went to bed kind of upset over the whole thing, even though I’d had a lovely party with a bunch of friends.

I should mention here that my roommate and I shared a bed because the baby had the second room.

I stirred in the middle of the night because I thought I felt something at my feet.  I thought it must be Jen, and so I rolled over and tried to get back to sleep, when I realized that I was really feeling something at my feet.  I froze for a second and then ever so slowly, I tried to sit up.  Right there, right in front of my face, was Tim.  In my bed, damn near right on top of me, grinning his dorky ass off.

Dude, what the FUCK do you think you’re doing?

To which he replied, “It’s your birthday.  You didn’t think I’d miss your birthday, did you?”  And he leaned up, gave me a quick kiss, and ran out of the room.  I jumped up, followed him out, and in the living room I asked him exactly how he’d gotten in, since the doors were all locked.

“I broke in through the patio door, of course.”  “Dude, the patio door is on the balcony, three full stories from the ground.  How’d you get up?”  “Oh, that.  I climbed all the balconies.”

He climbed.  All three balconies.  In the middle of the night.  To say happy birthday.  TO ME.

I told him he could leave the way he came in, and he did just that.

He continued his very non-committal relationship with me for a few months, even though his friends we still downright pissed at him for seeing me.  We had a really great time together, and then my ex and I decided it was high time to give us another go.  I went into the place where Tim worked to tell him I couldn’t exactly be sleeping with him anymore, and I saw something I fully did not expect to see.  The dude’s lip quivered.  He stammered.  He wished me luck and walked away.

Oh, fuck, dude.  You liked-me liked me, and you never told me?  FUCK.

Anyway, I didn’t see him after that for a long time.  He moved to Florida, and his friends who so disliked me eventually came around.  I’d see them out occasionally, and they said that Tim sold them on me, and that they were sorry they’d been so mean, and that they’d misjudged me.  At our 10 year high school reunion, 8 years after our little thing, one of them had Tim on the phone and handed it to me.

We totally re-connected.  We’d talk on the phone sometimes, email sometimes, and once he called me all drunk and told me he loved me.  And then he handed the phone to his drunk friend, also in Florida, who told me that, Oh yeah, he loves you.

That is why I was nervous to have lunch with him.  We have a lot of emotional history, after all.  Lunch that day was totally nice, though.  We talked about his job, how he’d finally managed to leave Florida, and my kids.  We just caught up, like good little grown ups, and made tentative plans for another lunch.

I can’t remember if we actually made it to another lunch, but he and his friends used to come to my bar about once a month to hang out.  We were emailing pretty consistently again and texting back and forth and just kind of around in each other’s lives, you know?  A few months before I moved back to Canada, and back with Josh, Tim and his same two friends and I all met out at some Denver bar for drinks.  Tim was smashed by the time that I got there and it wasn’t an hour before he had to go home.  I hung out with the other guys for a while who explained to me that the reason he was so smashed was that he was nervous to see me.  That he was going to try to make his move that night.

(Aside: It wouldn’t have worked.  Just throwing that out there.)

I talked to him the next day on the phone, just for a second, to make sure he’d gotten on the right train home, and I haven’t spoken to him since.  I’ve sent a few emails, and a little while ago I sent him a friend request on Facebook, but he never answered it.

He died last weekend of unknown causes.

He’d apparently met a girl, got married, came home from his honeymoon and had some surgery on his ankle.  Four days later his brand new bride found him unconscious and not breathing.  3 1/2 weeks in a medically induced coma brought no help, and his wife and family pulled the plug last weekend.

I know a lot of people who’ve died; like, an unreasonable amount.  Most of my houses in my chart are in death.  It kind of surrounds me and shit.  But I’ve never had someone this physically close to me die, and I’m having a really hard time processing it.  Some whom I’ve lost, I can pinpoint their smell, or the feel of their hand in my memory.  This one, I’ve got a pretty good recollection of through every single sense, and even though it’s been more than a decade, and more than a lifetime without him having a big presence in my life, I find myself aching today.  Some part of me feels like there’s a void.  The saddness that comes with that feeling is, quite frankly, shockingly low.

I never told him how much he meant to me.  I never thanked him for sticking up for me for all those years.  I never said I was sorry for ignoring how he felt and just going about my way.  I never said a lot of things I ought to have.   His services are on Tuesday in Denver, and I am going to try to find a way to be there so I can say these things to the ether, and maybe, if I’m very wrong about some of my core beliefs, he’ll catch them.  In case I can’t make it, I’m putting it here, and sending it out from me, and I hope it gets where it needs to.

Tim, you changed my life.  You made some very awkward years easier for a scared girl who just couldn’t handle anything harder than what she was facing already.  You were the first boy who ever was “interested” in me, and you were a perfect gentleman from start to finish.  It’s men like you that restore my faith in mankind in general.  I will cherish every single moment I’ve ever had with you, and don’t think I don’t know how lucky I am to have had them.  When it comes time for me to tell my boys about how to treat a woman, you will be the first example I bring up.

I will miss you, my old friend.  I thank you, and I’m sorry.  You are not dead in my heart, and you never will be, as long as I have one.

See what happens when you get all cocky and make playlists and shit?

The OTHER hamster dies.

Causes, unknown.