If you are familiar with that classic tearjerker film “Terms of Endearment”, you know that Shirley MacLaine’s character is the best possible advocate for her hospitalized daughter. Remember the scene where Debra Winger needed to get her shot and her mother would not give up until the nurses took care of that? That’s my sister, Erin. Everyone in our family wants Erin present if they become ill. She will get all, “It’s past ten. My daughter is in pain. I don’t understand why she has to have this pain. All she has to do is hold out until ten, and IT’S PAST TEN! My daughter is in pain, can’t you understand that! GIVE MY DAUGHTER THE SHOT!” and then everyone in the entire hospital, nay the county, will be afraid and start giving shots to everyone just because my sister said so. She is just that badass.

Any free moment that mom slept back at home, Erin was out in my garage. She’s been fascinated with all the stuff my mother has collected over the years. I’m not so much fascinated as I am WHEN CAN I PARK MY OWN CAR IN MY OWN GARAGE? with the whole thing and I’m struggling with patience over the seemingly eternal mess of boxes. Moving, as everyone knows, sucks. That’s the word people use for it, too, anytime you mention that you are moving.

“You’re moving? Ick. Moving sucks.”

“How’s it going with the move? Moving sucks.”

“There’s a devastating oil spill? Moving sucks.”

Every day for the past three weeks I have spent time out in the garage futzing around. That’s what I say when mom asks what I’ve been up to when I’ve spent any length of time downstairs.

“Hey, mom. You ok? Need anything?”

“I’m good. What are you up to tonight?”

“Oh. Futzing. You know.”

Here’s how futzing works. I take a large glass of ice water and my phone with me to the garage, search for the corner I want to work on, and start moving stuff around. Or futzing, if you will. (And you will. Because I have already used that word a ton.) Sometimes I just want to clear a path or find the box of coats that still need to be hung up in the front closet. Other times I am distracted by things I’m moving to a specific corner of the garage so that when mom feels better she can start to go through stuff. The thing that is constant is that I find something from my grandmother or from my childhood or even from my marriage that will make me stop and have need to sit down and cry about it. What have we learned so far, boys and girls? We’ve learned that moving sucks and there is crying.

The quick and dirty on The Garage: My mom has a lot of stuff. My grandma’s stuff makes me miss her and is a source of pain when I go through it. There are some unidentified footwear that I keep moving to a new spot. I have a new gas can (but no mower – go figure) that I try hard not to trip over. I’ve done the calculations and about 10% of the stuff belongs to me. Everything else of mine has made its way into the actual living part of the house.

I think that by now I have touched every single thing in the garage and it still looks a mess. Let me provide a visual for you (taken with my phone of course):

Thank you, Angella, for helping me label my horridly taken photograph of my disgusting garage. Next time, I’ll let you Photoshop my head on Halle Berry’s body.

It’s a treasure hunt out there for sure. There are family heirlooms that would be worth quite a bit to a collector. My grandpa’s cowboy hat, an old tractor seat, and a box of photos of relatives who came over on the boat and photos of my great aunt who was a state representative. I know I come from good stock when I explore the richness of my heritage, but some things just can’t have a price put on them.

During her first visit, Erin found something in the basement when we were packing up at the old house. It’s from a Freshman English extension course she took in 1968 in Lemmon, South Dakota.

Basically, no man of the white race is superior to a man of another race. All men’s tears are wet and salty, all men’s blood runs red, whether his skin is yellow, brown, black, white or red. The pangs of hunger, the bliss of happiness, spasms of pain, the fury of anger, or the blessed relief of sleep for a tired man are universal feelings for all with no regard for the color of their skin.

But it was the first paragraph on the second page that really did me in with her words.

Should one of my children wish to marry a person of another race, all other things being equal, I would not exclude them from the family because of the color of their skin. If they are the means necessary for my child’s happiness they will be welcome in the family. Oh, yes, I’ll admit there would be some fear in my heart because I am well aware that the world is not ready to accept inter-racial marriages, particularly the black and white, and of course no mother finds it easy to see her children experience heartache.

It’s never occurred to me that I had to question my grandmother as to how she felt about my mother marrying a black man or how she felt about me and my sisters being of mixed race. Not once as a child did I question whether or not she loved me as much as my all-white cousins. When we visited her in South Dakota and stopped by her work as we pulled into town she welcomed us with open arms and introduced us to her friends and co-workers like we were family. Because that’s what we were. It only occurred to me to start wondering when other people asked me. “How did your mom’s parents feel when she brought home a black man? Was it like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” If I were smarter and sassier back then when I started getting those questions I might have retorted with, “I don’t know. How did your family feel when they brought home such an asshole from the hospital?” Grandma pulled out her best jams and homemade breads and fed us amazing homemade foods when we arrived for a visit. Every family does that, right?

When people ask what it was like growing up with my heritage I usually have to stop and wonder what they mean. My experiences are mine. Yours belong to you. I grew up eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and we went on trips and we visited museums. Didn’t other people do that? My guess is that people want to know things like how my white mother figured out how to do my hair. Incidentally, she didn’t, it was a total mess that my father took over and after I was old enough to get corn rows the older black girls in my neighborhood took over from there. Or maybe they want to know how I identify and the clear cut reasons as to why I associate with what. Perhaps their queries are geared to the perspective we had as young children and how people, all completely ignorant, responded to us and asked us to whom we belonged and why such light-skinned kids were hanging out with such a dark-skinned man. Did it not occur to them that he might be our dad? Those were the most confusing questions from strangers because it seemed so obvious to us.

The other papers my grandmother wrote were about Orwell’s 1984, a critical essay responding to an exhibit of the Indian peoples of the Dakotas, a critique of Herman Melville’s novella Bartleby the Scrivener, and two character studies. One of Calpurnia from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and the other from an Irwin Shaw short story entitled “The Girls in their Summer Dresses”.

In 1968 my mother was 20 years old. She would marry my father two years later and give birth to me another year after that. Grandma was a good writer. She got an A from her professor on that paper.

But I couldn’t possibly ascribe a grade to what reading those words gave me.

My great niece who kept trying to take a nap in a roomful of people. She was folding back the rug and taking a couch pillow to get comfortable. Mallory was highly amused by this and Mason was just trying to get goofy in my photos.

My laptop, the one issued to me by the district for which I work, has finally decided to kick the bucket and ascend to that place in the sky landfill where computers go when they retire. While it’s a total inconvenience and the 15,000 pictuers I had on there are safely located on the external hard drive I bought last year, I am super sad about it. First, because I love MacBooks and cannot afford to purchase one for my own personal use and second, because I have to borrow the only other laptop in the house which belong to my sons. If there is a third it is this: the laptop on which I am currently writing is decidedly NOT an Apple product and Apple long ago lured with their sexy talk into their Den of Awesome and made me a believer. It was probably when Apple told me that I had a nice booty, a decent frontal load, and that, for a woman my age, my skin still looked fabulous and shiny and taut. Thanks a lot, Apple, for hitting me where it hurts.

Now you’re wondering why it took so long to get my stuff transferred onto my external hard drive but the most
simple explanation is that there is no good time to drop off my computer at the district computer services because I need it every single day. When they offered to set aside a whole day to get this done after school got out I took advantage of the opportunity.

You know what? Stop wondering about how and why I do things. It’s none of your business.

I’m doing that thing again where I’m talking to blog readers like they’re sitting right next to me and also like we’re really familiar. My apologies. It’s just that I haven’t even had 30 minutes to myself lately to bother committing to writing a full post. Often, lately, I’ve been having the same thought over and over: Is it too much to ask that I set aside some time to just write?

It has a lot to do with all the happenings going on in my life. There are so many new changes and events that a friend asked me when I was going to check into the mental hospital because people don’t take easily to this many stressful events. Coyly, I asked, “Oh? Like what? What big things do I have going on?” It was just an excuse to push her buttons. “So you don’t think negotiating a divorce, buying a house, changing jobs, having two sick parents, and having a child graduate high school are big things? I’ll be visiting you in the hospital, lady.” It has occurred to me in writing that sentence uttered by my friend that I haven’t bothered to explore, in writing, what’s going on with my current job and now really isn’t the time to delve into it but, at some point, I will.

For the time being, I will just share some pictures of events that have taken place in my life this month.

My dad, Mason, and Mallory on the first night in the new house. Dad, recovering from his heart attack, did the cooking and none of the moving of boxes. I’m so glad he’s got that good New Orleans cooking gene.

Just before Mallory came to sit on the couch with the two of them. They were having Man Talk Time and I was eavesdropping and using my phone to take some pictures. Does anyone else find it humorous that these two are blood related?

My mom and I found it rather comical and diverting that, while she took a trip to the ER, the number of this particular machine was “42″. Apparently, it is the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Thanks Douglas Adams. I have not, however, found it comical that both of my parents have had heart issues lately. No. Not comical at all.

And finally, this is a picture of my great niece again. She has some amazing curls in her hair and when it comes out of the ponytail on top of her head this is what it does. I think we should all take a moment of silence for the magic and wonder of this hair.

There is no way I could make this up and I swear that I only did this ONE TIME, but I have finally closed comments on the Gain Review contest I had going on in conjunction with BlogHer and did the Random Generator to pick a number. You can probably guess what it was, can’t you? Of course you can.

It’s 42. So congratulations commenter number forty-two! I’ll be contacting you shortly and someday, when I truly am admitted to the Crazy Shack, you can probably find me in room 42 reading The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

Being the tornado that she is, Mallory stepped into her role as interior designer and finally I got to take advantage of her college degree. She whipped everyone into action including my sister and two nephews who came to help. “Put this here.” and “Books can go there, but where are the boxes of pictures?” and “Why haven’t you painted this and put on knobs like you know you should, Mom? That would be cute!” At the very least, my living room and kitchen are livable at this point. She knows, after living with me her entire life, that when my home is a crazy mess then my head is a crazy mess. No one wants any of this crazy mess I tell you.

She walked through the house nodding her approval of paint colors and checked the light switches and checking the space between the kitchen island and the refrigerator. All passed muster. This is what she’s always done, really. In fact, in the house she spent most of her time growing up in, she managed to convince her brothers that they should all switch rooms at one time or another. Mallory is one to scope out a situation, scanning and surveying properly, and then swooping in to get shit done. She, more than any of the other kids, remembers our first apartment when I went away to college (and lived in the married housing section) and what a little roach box that was. One bedroom and the world’s tiniest appliance kitchen. Luckily, the refrigerator there was just her height (I could see over the top of it easily and put in a shelf to make the most of the space) and she could reach the milk to get herself cereal in the morning if I was still sleeping. One morning, when she was about 3, she let me sleep in and when I woke up I noticed a clean bowl and spoon in the sink.

Me: Mallory? Did you clean your dishes? Is this from your cereal this morning?

Mallory: No, I just had cereal. I didn’t clean.

Me: Then why is this bowl so spotless?

Mallory: I dunno.

Later, I learned that she hadn’t gotten the milk out to use with her cereal but instead grabbed a carton of heavy cream. Apparently, she liked it because she licked that sucker spotless. I laughed and laughed until my side ached from thinking about how my little girl must have devoured that creamy, rich cereal that morning.

In that tiny little box of an apartment we had to share everything. We slept together for the first few years of her life so that now, even at 24, she is comfortable jumping under the covers with me and chit-chatting until it’s time for her to go.

And it is. Time for her to go. She bought her first house along with her longtime boyfriend, Kolin, and they are managing to create a lovely, creative home that is open and inviting to their friends and family. Today, in fact, is her brother Mason’s graduation and she is hosting the party for him. It will be a fun-filled day I’m sure. We’ve come a long way since then and I’m more proud of her than I can adequately express. Even trying to list the things that make her incredible is daunting so I will leave this belated birthday post for Mallory with a picture I stole from her friend, Claire. I saw it on Facebook yesterday and realized that it summed her up, complete with the very incredible friends she’s made over her lifetime.

I think maybe they were on a fishing expedition and I can only imagine the great night they must have had to go outside in a kiddy pool and pretend to cross the sea. It doesn’t really matter. Mallory has managed to grow into a person I’m proud to know let alone raised. Her magic touch in life is a stunning entity to behold and the people she keeps in her life are no less amazing.

Devin, Paul, Tiffany, May, Marianne, Claire, and Mallory. Having a good time in college and NOT even being drunk when they do it.

He gave me my one and only Valentine’s card this year. He used to steal my laptop from me when I visited his mom (my sister) and then he would write lovely, long letters to me. He can play chess, football, and still kick your ass at being warm and loving and he has the best laugh. Ever. In the History of Man. He’s so smart that it hurts my head to think about it.

He is made completely of awesome.

“You know, you actually turn 40 twice, Erin. Once when you turn 39 because all you can think is OHMYGOD I’M GONNA BE 40 NEXT YEAR and then once when you truly turn 40.”

She reminded me that I’m a mere 14 months younger than she.

Guess who turns 39 this year? Yeah. That came right around and bit me in the butt, didn’t it?

Erin always got to do everything first. She got her license before I did, when she asked to go roller skating with her friends on a Saturday all by herself she got to go alone. Erin also got to make mistakes before I did so that I could watch her and tell myself that I didn’t want to make those same mistakes. (Let’s face it. I made all new ones. I wasn’t very smart.) She got married right out of high school and moved to New Mexico but came back to Illinois after her second baby.

She works harder than anyone else I know. It drives me crazy but I’ve seen her clean her house from top to bottom after working a full day and she seems to go, go, go long after any normal, rational person has lost steam. Nobody is as exacting as Erin.

She’s a crier. If anything sentimental happens, Erin will be crying. (Even though I watched as she gave birth to her third child and teared up, she gritted her teeth and pointed at me and screamed, “Don’t you dare cry right now, Kelly Marie!” because she’s also dramatic with that pointy finger of hers and likes to use both of my names when she scolds me.) The entire family has said at one time or another, “Oh, Lord. Someone get Erin a tissue because we know she’s gonna cry.” She’s a pretty crier, too. ANNOYING.

She’s an encourager. If you feel like you can’t do it she is right there telling you that you can.

She’s the first person I wanted to talk to when I found out that Maddie was back in my life and she’s the first person I will call when I think the world is crashing down upon me. All “what am I gonna do?” conversations start with my big sister. When I got a tattoo on my back she decided that she wanted one, too, and now all three of us have the same tattoos. Sometimes I like to point out that I GOT MINE FIRST but then I look at her tattoo and realize she went bigger and fancier than mine.

Happy Birthday, sister. I love you fiercely.

I know you’re crying as you read this so get a tissue, wipe your nose, and collect yourself you big baby.