The secrets of stillness

Some nights when I was little and sick, or when I woke from a nightmare and looked out my bedroom window into the dark tops of the trees and saw terrible things in them, I would muster my nerve, slip out of bed and half-run half-tiptoe into their room.

I would always go to her side of their bed.

“Mom,” I would whisper into the dark, “I’m scared.”

Always on her stomach, I wondered how she breathed sleeping like that, her face pressed into the pillow. While I stood there quietly breathing in the musty smell of a warm down comforter in a cold room, I worried that she was suffocating, she was so still. And then, suddenly, on intuition and my single whisper alone, she would be up, tiptoeing from her room to mine wordlessly, leading me with her hand on the top of my head.

Once in my room with her, it was no longer a scary place. Trees were trees. Shadows were shadows. My fear seemed ridiculous, misplaced. I always half expected her to leave upon our discovery that there was nothing to be afraid of.

But instead, she would slip into my twin bed, scooting all the way to the edge and motioning me in. Gratefully, I'd join her. There we would lay on our sides, an S next to an S, her arm over me, both our heads on one pillow.

And just like that, in a minute or two at most, she would be asleep, perfectly still. It was the only time I ever knew her to be still, I think.

I would listen, wide awake: Her shorter breaths became long ones, rhythmic in and out, in and out. Sometimes the pause between them would grow so long my heart would almost stop in a panic, but always it came and went eventually... in and out.

I would want to move, adjust. Maybe I had an itch. But she was always so still that I never could bring myself to. Instead, I willed myself to be like her -- I willed my bones to be heavy, my body to go numb. I listened to the in and out. I made myself be very still in the black.

In and out, I listened.
In… and out.

I trained my body to be restful, my breath to be long like hers.

In… out.

And her great, warm, rhythmic stillness would press me down slowly into the night, as I listened to her sleep song. And a terrifying night would transform into something known; something velvet-deep and calm.

I never woke until morning was brassy and bright upon me, the night like a vague memory. She was always gone by then, up and busy.

She was always moving until I needed her, and when I needed her, she taught me the secrets of being still.

My plant can beat up your plant

My meat-eating, homegrown family got me this for my birthday (along with sundry other awesome things, including a bottle of rum, a tub of frozen mojito mix and 27 spankings*):



























It's a spotted northwestern pitcher plant, and it is carnivorous.

It is beautiful, and I love this particular plant, which is why I figured they got it for me -- until this morning, when I realized it was possibly the smartest, most secretly ironic joke in the world.

They got a vegetarian a plant that eats meat.


*Spanking reference completely falsified. I grew out of those (by which I mean a single hand could no longer cover the surface of my ass) when I turned 11. I just wanted to see if you were paying attention.

Me and TV

My relationship with TV has been a little weird since my childhood. I was raised by a mom who had a few basic rules around our house, like most kids. And, like most kids, my little brother and I didn't really mess with them, because these were the hard core basics.

The thing, though, is that in most households these might include things like "Go to church every Sunday" or "No premarital sex" or "No raising your voice to your mother". But traditional rules weren't so much our mother's style. She was a badass with a wide hippie streak. Sex, foul language, religion and debauchery weren't so much her concern. What she DID concern herself with were such classics as "No soda in the house -- or anywhere near the property", "Lunchables might be 'cool', but if we didn't grow or kill it ourselves, it's not going in your sack lunch" and "No more than 30 minutes of television daily" and, worst of all: "Absolutely no cable TV".

These rules outraged my brother and I. Sure, we didn't have to go to church and we could dissappear into the woods from sunrise to sunset on a Saturday like a couple banchees and not get in trouble, but with all the wisdom of 7 and 12 year olds, we felt socially crippled.

Of course, we were crafty, and devised a sophisticated plan to beat the system: Every weekend, we tromped through the woods (yes, literally) to our neighbor's house.

The neighbors had two kids exactly our ages, and their parents kicked major ass. There, they had a television in every room, including the kitchen, they ate off wonderful things called "T.V. trays", they had four or five different tins in their pantry full of different varieties of junk food, and they almost neverhad to talk to each other or go outside, preferring instead to sit in front of cable television.

We were in heaven.

I knew it was wrong, even back then, but I just. couldn't. help. it. My brother and I spent hours of our precious youth on the floor in their living room, gorging ourselves on all the crap my mom wouldn't let near our house and stuffing our minds with garbage, from M.C. Hammer videos to Singled Out and The Simpsons. But we didn't passively watch -- we were, like, in the lean-forward position, the whole time. Picture a chubby kid with a candy bar when he sees his bully older brother approaching to snatch the treat away. You know how he suddenly starts cramming the thing in his mouth, trying to swallow it before it could be taken from him? That was us. We were transfixed, and my mom would've been pissed.

Reminders of those days remain with me, though now what really gets me are documentaries and infomercials. For a while there, when my hippie ways were still in their nascence, I banned T.V. from my home, recognizing my tendencies to fixate on the contraption and believing it would help keep me from spacing out, when I had time to do so. Later, I decided this wasn't financially prudent, as it caused me to have to go to theatres to watch movies, when with a TV you get basic channels and can use a DVD player to watch as many documentaries (and/or episodes of Sex and the City) as you like. And, when I find myself home alone, just me and the TV, I do.

To wit: I watched EVERY SINGLE EPISODE of Alone in the Wilderness when it aired on PBS, because the person I lived with at the time loved it. That's right, I skipped reading or socializing or excersizing and instead watched a very old man make a doorknob with his bare hands, with such riveting commentary as "Today, I built a doorknob. It took me fourteen hours with this here chisle and wood file." followed by, well, nearly fourteen hours of an ancient man whaling on a chunk of wood.

Yeah.

Last night, I found myself completely sucked into a documentary on morbidly obese people.

Have you seen this? It's the one with the two guys -- one's in Mexico and the other the US -- and they both tip the scales at something like a thousand pounds, but they're medical miracles. Their hearts are normal, their blood pressure, organs, everything is just ticking away in there, while these guys can't even get out of bed, much less their house.

Instead, they watch jazzercize videos from the 80s in bed and sorta wiggle along to the music. And run internet businesses. One of them sells designer jeans on Ebay to pay rent.

This was, of course, really sad. Also, a little hard to watch, with moments of complete hilarity. (I'm sorry, YOU try not to laugh at a 1000 lb man gleefully doing arm circles, naked in bed, to Madonna's "Holiday". It's priceless, people.)

And a couple weeks ago, I decided that what my kitchen really needed was a Magic Bullet, but before I could purchase the miracle salsa/sorbet/peanut butter maker, my friend snatched the phone out of my hand and clicked off the television, sucking me back into reality.

(Now if I could just figure out what to do with this juicer, food dehydrater and Bowflex System...)

Splitting a satsuma.

No snow. No frost, even, usually.

The only sign that it's Christmas are the twinkle-lights in the trees, Starbucks' holiday specialties (the Peppermint Mocha and the Eggnog Latte), and the commercial frenzy, the nightly staged indoor snowfall at the downtown mall encouraging more spending, more, more. The clash of hope and dissapointment, faith and capitalism, frenzy and isolation, charity and greed -- and the bustle, more than anything, building to a deafening roar synonymous with Christmas.

Everyone clutching, grasping, hoping for the same thing, sometimes catching hold of it by a slippery tail -- just for a moment, spirits soaring -- only for it to, a moment later, slide just out of reach.

There's a lot of sadness and quietness and loneliness hidden just under the surface of this season; a poor girl dressed up for a moment in borrowed clothes, the tags still on.

And yet.

And yet, it's a little magic.

Not a lot magic, not magic like when you were little and pulled out your tooth two days before it would have come out on its own just so you could stuff it under the pillow and try to stay up all night to catch the tooth fairy under there.

Or tip-toeing down to the living room in the middle of Christmas Eve night; going slower and quieter than almost any 6 year old can stand to, tips of your fingers trailing the walls, avoiding the creak in the third-to-last stair, expectantly reaching to pat the stocking you know hangs from the banister, imagining what might be there but unable to see in the deep and silent black.

And not a lot magic like when the sun hit the clouds just right in the late summer afternoon, the rays streaming down through the trees in a way that reminded you of the illustrations of God in your kid's bible - those bright, near-solid beams of light from the sky, the sense that you were suddenly caught in the presence of God making the tiny hairs on your arms stand on end.

And not magic like that first sudden dip and swell of the possibility of love, or, later, the hammock of new love turned to something else - a retreat, sustenance.

Not quite that magic, but.

Magic, a little, still. In snippets in all the days around Christmas:

The glow of a family room, hot with a fire and the Christmas tree its only light.

You and I lying on the couch, toe to head, clutching full bellies, Charlie Brown's Christmas on the radio, barely touching fingers, not speaking.

My brother, back from college, all broad and tall, loading up the woodbox for my mom, each piece making a heavy thud. When he finishes and comes back inside, the scent of aged wood and sap on his hands, the glow of pride and a cold morning on his cheeks.

The humble celebration we'll have on Monday: a board game, pots of coffee consumed while we talk about politics, travel, family, what we don't know. While we talk about talking; when we talk, as we do, about how we talk.


I'll split a sastuma -- three ways.

Four Yahtzees in one game! Who would believe it?!

Let's let the dog in tonight, just tonight.

What is "Yule Tide", anyway?

It's harder than you think, splitting a satsuma three ways.


There's no snow. No frost, even.

There are no elaborate gifts, no huge gathering of extended family, some of them almost strangers. No midnight mass, no relative dressed up like Santa.

Everything will not go right. I'll burn the 3-minute peanut brittle, a recipe I know by heart and the easiest thing to make. She'll be overly busy, doing what she can to avoid a moment of silence, loneliness; pressured, a little, as I am, by her hope for a perfect day. My brother will answer the phone in the middle of dinner.

And yet.

And yet, in these things, not in spite of them, we three will notice: It's a little magic.

Not a lot, not too much. Nothing showy or obvious. A little magic.

Just enough.

__________________

Happy Holidays. May they be just enough, just right, a little magic.

Painting my Grandfather

(For the record, this to the left is "Portrait of an Old Man", by Rembrandt. Not my Grandfather. Certainly not by me. Just want to give credit where it's due -- you know, to famous painters, in particular.)

My grandfather was a painter. He painted boats, flowers and landscapes, mostly. Boats because he loved them, after a stint in the Navy. Flowers because my late grandmother loved them. Landscapes (well, all of the above, really) because they didn't have faces, hands or necks.

Sometimes, though, he'd try to paint my siblings and I, which is how I know why he mostly did boats, flowers and landscapes. He never was much for painting a graceful human form, but he tried. And in his attempts, you could always see what part of you most appealed to him; it was the one part that looked in place, as if he started at his favorite feature, meditating on its every detail, painting around it only because a random pair of eyes or a dangling, faceless smile in the middle of a canvas doesn't really look right.

There was one feature you saw that he understood, and the rest of the painting always seemed like a clumsy afterthought. Not careless, just not carefully loved, either.


Recently my family has had the unfortunate task of going through, claiming and disposing of my quickly-fading grandfather's posessions, as he's been moved into assisted care. There, he hardly eats, and he slowly becomes milder tempered and sweeter in disposition as the present slips into the past and then into the darkness of dementia, leaving only Now, and then a moment later, Nothing.

He hasn't painted for a long time.

Last weekend found my brother, sister and I judiciously splitting up under the premise of privacy, and poring through his things in separate rooms of his house. We were politely there to divvy up the belongings of a man who no longer had any use for them. This was precisely as awkward and sad as it seems.

Gingerly, we picked through the evidence of my grandfather's life. In the drawer next to his bed, I found his old navy dog tags sitting right on top of an old box of unwaxed dental floss, and I was suddenly struck by the profound contrast between the two -- a visual study in the precise meanings of the words "symbolic" and "banal".

Each of us kids carried a notepad, on which we were to list items we would take.

Also, the notebooks were our contingency plan should any two of us desire the same artifact. If we both wanted the same thing, somehow these lists would make the resolution of the potential conflict seem easier. This plan seemed holey at best to me, but it turned out there was no need for it at all. Each of us gravitated to objects that best proved the existance of the man we most hoped our grandfather was.
In watching us and what we collected, I discovered that to each of his grandchildren, my grandpa was an entirely different man.

My sister collected photos, china, silver. My grandfather, to her, was a provider. A success. A family man.

My brother was most fascinated by military paraphanalia, cufflinks, old cigar boxes and coins. He also dug up a set of shot glasses with fishing flies painted on them, which he immediately took up and rushed to me with, thrusting them in my face like little palm-sized treasures. He was proud of those. In his eyes, my grandfather is my brother's favoriate war books come to life -- a dusty, rugged Hemmingway. A soldier, a smoker.

As for me, I found an old yearbook from 1930-something. Under his name, it read "Artist and writer of the school, temperamental as a rule." It had to be mine. That was my grandpa. I described the book - it's cover, location, in my notepad and moved on down the bookshelf. I quickly also found my long-gone grandmother's (hers read "Small, but mighty"). That went in the notebook, too.

I also claimed, uncontested, many of his paintings, along with his easel, boxes and jars and tubes of flaking paints, dull, frayed brushes. A few sketches, unfinished canvases.

My grandfather was an artist.

The weight of every cool, heavy brush in my hand as I examined them all made this description incrimentally more alive and true.

My stomach tightened in sadness when I turned up his backgammon set with its well-worn leather cover and heavy, rounded black and white tiles. My grandfather couldn't be beaten at backgammon. That is, of course, why he so loved to play it. And I understood that. Always have.

Like grandpa, while examining the accumulations of his lifetime, I was an artist. With his own belongings and alongside my siblings, I painted his life into my own with an awkward, tender heart.

An artist. A man never at a loss for words. A proud competitor.

A man who makes sense to me, who I understand.

My grandfather.

My grandfather was a painter. He painted landscapes mostly. Boats and flowers, too. And people sometimes, but not much. I used to think he was bad at painting people. And maybe he was. But because of him, I know about painting too -- about painting people, especially.

I know about painting people not how you know them, but how you love them.

My grandfather was a painter.

Parking lot puking

Woke up exhausted today. Got an extra coffee in the morning, thinking I'd just slept badly. It wasn't long before I was swept by waves of nausea. I actually got up from my desk a couple times, headed to the ladies room. When I got there, all I wanted to do was puke and get it over with. But then I realized that if I did, there was a good possibility that someone else would come into the bathroom while I was hurling.

And since the only people on my floor are folks that work at my company, they would recognize my feet, and speculate.

Eating disorder?
Hangover?
SARS?

I just couldn't go through with it. So, swallowing hard, I retreated back to my desk, where I considered getting under it and throwing up in my wastepaper basket.

Finally, lunchtime.

I dodged the executives who usually ask me out to lunch and hit the elevator. Down to the lobby, across to the second elevator and down to the parking garage. Finally I arrived at my car door, weak, green, and clammy. I climbed in, reclined the seat, and thought I'd just take a little power nap during my lunch break.

Slept for 30 minutes, then woke up nauseous. And this time, it was for real.

Flug open car door, in a panic. Swallowing frantically, I scoured the garage for an appropriate place to hide and puke. Nothing. Desperate for relief, I finally ran around to front of car, where I hunkered down, squatting (skirt hiked up, mind you -- NOT ladylike) between my bumper and the cement wall of the garage.

And up came the coffee. And water. Relief, at last.

I'm a bad puker. I get all teary and shaky and super self-conscious. I want my mommy.

[Note: I called my mom after this puking episode, and after the obligatory 'ooohhh, sweeetie!!!', she got straight to the point:
Mom: "Oh my God. You're not pregnant, are you? Because that would really..."
Me: "No! God, Mom! That would be entirely impossible. ENTIRELY. Jesus.
Mom: "Well, you can't blame me for asking. But yeah, I guess that would be impossible."
Me: "Wait--what the hell is that supposed to mean? Why would that be impossible? I mean, I'm not a gargoyle, for God sakes!"
Mom, condescendingly: "Oh, no. Of course not, sweetie. You have a winning personality. You just focus on feeling better, now."]

Puking honestly traumatizes me. I fight the whole process. Every heave is painful, and in between them are little hiccups of misery. Like I'm 8 years old.

But afterwards, everything changes. Momentarily, I'm overcome with a rush of euphoria. Afterward, I'm always sure I'm cured of whatever ill got me to the puking part to start with. It's like I'm on a narcotics binge and am manic and superpowerful.

I've been saved! I've once again thwarted death! I'm the queen of the world! I can FLY!

Of course, that's why people do drugs: to escape reality. 35 minutes after the parking lot puke I was back to misery.

And periodic puking.

But I'm the kind of person who never believes other people when they say they're sick and have to leave work. I mean, how many times have you called in sick just to sit in a beer garden all day, or to spend the day on the lake, or to start your weekend early? So because I don't believe anyone when they take sick days, I am held captive at work when I'm actually sick out of some sort of weird reverse psychology guilt complex.

[I should be Catholic, I swear.]

And since I'm leaving on Friday for Philadelphia and will be in NY Sunday and Monday for work, I doubly can't justify taking off early today. So here I sit, queasy, weak, gross, in my skirt and heels (which I thankfully missed in the parking garage squat), waiting for 5:30.

::sob::

[If there is a Mommy in the greater Seattle area who could maybe just stop by my work and give me ginger ale and brush my hair and call me 'sweetie', please comment with your full name, home and cell numbers and location. Or better yet, just come. Here. And make me all better. Please.]

Guilt or die

I just ate a steaming hot plate of guilt and responsibility. The chef? My mother, who is completely committed to being sure I come out of this whole young-adult thing on top, with a clean house and a balanced checkbook.

I've mentioned before how my mother was very involved in, like, everything when I was growing up, right? Local elections, fire district and emergency response plan, her career, my "upbringing", my education, my calcium intake... it was all her domain. And bless her heart, she ruled her kingdom with an iron fist, a clock set 7 minutes ahead, three functional calendars, a strong cup of coffee in the morning and at least one late, disorganized, gasping child/spouse in tow.

It was always cool when I was growing up having a mom who attended everything and knew all my friends by first and last name, driver's license number, address, and political party and stuff. I lucked out, though, because she's actually very cool. And pretty. Which means my guy friends liked her and my girl friends looked up to her.

Yeah, my mom was cooler than me.

Anyway, now that I'm older and she has less direct contact with my peer group/life, I have

a) higher self-esteem
b) a chronic lateness problem
c) more time to fixate on why her being very type A and very involved occasionally sucks for me. Namely, guilt.

You see, two of her greatest passions happen to align with two of my greatest weaknesses: letter-sending and voting.

My mother writes letters with the regularity of clockwork. Though we only live approximately 20 miles apart, I can expect something in the mail on a near-weekly basis. And she makes her own cards, so they're very Martha Stewart (and each letter probably takes her an hour, including labor). I mean, it's actually very awesome to get stuff in the mail - until I consider carefully the time she's invested and the fact that the last time I sent HER mail was... well... never. Then the guilt creeps in.

I'm a taker! All I do is take, take, take! When am I ever going to make time for anyone besides my boss, my cat and myself?! I can't even write a letter to my own mother!

It's pretty bad, this guilt. And it's compounded by the fact that in these letters, she usually includes something she feels I'll find relevant or interesting. Such as a clipping on how to best avoid contracting meningitis (more on this later), or how to make a "Quick And Easy Crockpot Meal" or about how many glasses of milk I should drink per day to avoid osteporosis. (I drink zero glasses of milk per day. She drinks 3. Guilt and self-loathing? OOOh! Another helping, please!!)

And that's not even the worst of it.

My mom's involvement in the voter registration process in our home county means that she is almost as inflamed about voting as P. Diddy himself. She actually mails my absentee ballots on to me -- in a different county, now.

And I'm so threatened by them that I actually fill them out most of the time, because I picture my mom standing there over me, with a "Vote or Die" t-shirt on, wearing it completely without irony:

"Vote or DIE, honey! I mean it! And if I don't kill you, you'll probably wish you were dead! Like how about I come by your office with a sack lunch and ask if somebody forgot something this morning? How about that, Lizzie? Yeah, maybe you should just VOTE, dont you think? Or DIE, remember?"

I'm a bad person. I honestly don't have an opinion about school levees or random referendums. I'm pretty focused on really important issues. Like, paying my car insurance and learning how to apply streak-free self-tanner and determining the most effective abdominal workout and generally being a consumer whore.

And here's my mother, sending mail to everyone she loves on a weekly basis, running a home and working multiple jobs (for fun) and volunteering, and trying to continue to shape me into a responsible, contributing 'adult', even from afar. Poor thing has her work cut out for her.

I'd help her out, but, you know, I've got a lot going on. Like, there's a new "US Weekly" out and the Nordstrom's Half-Yearly Sale is coming up. And another Goddamn absentee ballot to decode, too. So yeah... I'm pretty booked for the next couple weeks.

My heritage: Workoholism and Alcoholism (or "Workers, drinkers, robbers and nutjobs" or "Why I am the way I am")

PART 1: My mother

When my mother retired from her career as a buyer and trainer at the headquarters of a very large department store, she did exactly what no one with any sense does: went immediately back to work.

She "retired" almost 15 years ago and is now probably doing more than she was when she was working full time AND raising children AND keeping the house AND taking care of a small farm, etc. In fact, I know she is. She runs half a company, substitutes at a high school, sells high-end golf carts, volunteers for the fire district (or something like that -- I don't know, it's related to firemen. I can't even remember what I do half the time).

She also has a book club and a Bunco group (if you don't know, just think a bunch of women gossiping and escaping their husbands once a month under the guise of winning some cutesy prizes at the end of a 3-hour long dice game). Plus, she hand-makes and sends probably 20 greeting cards a week, writes letters daily, manages the household finances, works out and volunteers for the county's voter registration office. She is just a total busybody. She works hard, and doesn't know how not to.

PART 2: My father

My father, in sharp contrast, retired last year after a very successful career in human resources as "upper management" or "the man" at a major utility company in Seattle. In essence, think "the Bobs" from Office Space. Yep, that's him. An white man in a suit telling people they're not doing their jobs, firing them, and making sure they're more efficient, which everyone obviously hates.

When my dad retired from this job, he did something that baffled my mother and I:

He retired.

Yes, he literally took off his suit and tie for the last time, put on hammer pants and a sweatshirt, made himself a gin and tonic, went straight to his favorite recliner and went directly to sleep (with a newspaper across his lap and a spoon and a jar of peanut butter handy).

His days now involve mostly reading, working out, puttering about, surfing the Internet (purportedly reading the news, and not looking at pornography; I'm just not asking any questions), sometimes fishing, or golfing. But where his DNA and mine are clearly shared becomes apparent the moment you spend a day with him. One of his favorite passtimes is the same as my own: having a good, stiff drink.

On particularly big days (family gatherings, for example) this might begin as early as 3 or 4 pm and last until about dark, when he finally is guaranteed to fall asleep in his recliner. During these days, primary activity is mostly limited to the worn path from said recliner to the liquor cabinet and/or fridge and then back to the recliner.

Now, my father is not an alcoholic. I think he just figures he's retired, and he enjoys a martini now and then, and what the hell. It strikes me as the mentality of a college student, really. The "eh, fuck it, how about a drink" mentality. Which I totally get.

It IS worth mentioning, however, that alcoholism has reared its head elsewhere in my family, the same way being Type A has...

PART 3: The Crazies

I have a great-uncle who we call "Squinty-Eyed Claude". Squinty-Eye is a drinker. One popular Claude story has to do with a family reunion for which he showed up thoroughly sauced and slurring and during which he followed around two little girls who he was trying to befriend but instead repeatedly reduced to tears, and raised their mothers' suspicious eyebrows. Claude has one eye that's always smushed up like he's got something in it, and his cheek sorta squishes up towards his eyebrow, almost making his whole eye dissapear. He looks like he's been around the block because, well, he has been around the block -- with a flask.

Somehow ol' Claude managed to produce a son, "Crazy Lenny", who looks like he's been around the cell block a few times because, well, he has. Crazy Lenny took to drinking like his father (which is to say that he does it like it's his job, only he's never quit it, been late to it, or lost it). Anyway, Crazy Lenny has a problem with judgement. He has a grossly inflated sense of self which more often than not, drunk on both Pabst and some crazy, powerful idea, has inspired him in the past to do completely insane things.

Once, while running from the police after robbing a store, for example, Crazy Lenny ran to the rooftop of a nearby building. This whole "escape to the roof" thing turned out not to be such a good idea, because once the cops followed him up there, of course, he was stuck without an escape route. At this point, most normal people would probably just give up the goat, surrender, and do a little jail time.

Well, Crazy Lenny wasn't too keen on that option. So, sized up the building he was standing on, and, determining that he was both brilliant and related to Spiderman, he decided he'd just jump from the rooftop to that of the building next to it. [Please remember, these are regular mid-sized city buildings, with a good hunk of thin air between each.] So he ran, and jumped.


I like to think that somewhere in the middle of the jump he decided maybe he shouldn't have done that, right before he fell, like Wyle E. Coyote in some Roadrunner cartoon, three stories to the street below.

A few hours later, he was lying in jail with a broken leg and a slightly more reasonable perspective on how to be "on the lam", so to speak. But apparently this didn't do much for his sense of his own physical ability, because a few years later, after getting out of jail, he would attempt to jump into an open boxcar of a train for a ride, only to misjudge the speed and distance of the train, jump too late, and bounce off the boxcar, sliding down to the train tracks. This is not a good place to hang out, which is also something Lenny learned when, split seconds later, it severed his arm, but leave his alcoholism and bad judgment intact.

So I think it's pretty clear that par for the course in my family is to have either Workaholic or Alcoholic tendencies. These two things may or may not also lead to At Least Slightly (or, in the case of Lenny and Squinty, Very Dangerously) Crazy tendencies.

__________________________________

I think we had a breakthrough in "group" today, folks.