Happy 2009!

Doesn't it seem like yesterday that everyone was bracing for the Y2K "disaster" that never came?

And here we are -- another New Year in its infancy. I'm not one for resolutions, but you're reading one of them. I resolve to get out my feelings more this year. They're disjointed, with no connection whatsoever, but here they are.

By this time next year I'll be the mother of an official driver-license-holding teenager, on her way to spreading her wings for independence. I've devoted so much of my being to this child that I'm not sure I'm ready for the empty nest.

She's beautiful, brilliant and sensitive -- exactly what this world needs for its future. Can I let her go? I don't know. She needs to be let go, and I hope and pray I'm not so selfish I can't let that happen. I love her fiercely. She's my life's joy.

I'm recovering from some funky stomach malady, so the first nibble of the day wasn't black-eyed peas and greens. I hope the New Year's gods can forgive this indiscretion and bless me with luck. It would be nice to win the lottery, but you have to play to win. If I can't swoop up on Powerball winnings, I hope I can at least keep my head above water this year.

My little dog isn't getting any younger. He's had eye and back problems this year. I wish him an easy, healthy year as we grow older together.

It's my fervent prayer that the economy pull out of this dismal slump. Uppermost in my mind, of course, is the fate of newspapers. So many good people have devoted their lives to the truth with very few monetary rewards. Please, for their sake -- for my sake, even -- don't let newspapers die. We're not perfect, but we're out there trying our damnedest to give the public an unbiased look at the events coloring their world. The same cannot be said of so many bloggers and citizen journalists, many of whom color themselves as objective but reveal their bent. Kind of like Faux News with a keyboard.

(And yes, I do realize I'm using a blog as my podium. I, however, make no claim to be a journalist here. This is where I blow off steam -- it's subjective, and I have no plans to change that.)

I have high hopes for our new POTUS. Barack Obama is no messiah, but he gives me optimism. New ideas are needed. The status quo is not working. I now count down the days to the end of the error -- a man neither elected by the people nor for the people.

Reading about the possibility of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner having a New Year's baby makes me smile. It's irrelevant to my daily life, but I think they're absolutely darling. So many times I've latched my hopes onto a Hollywood couple -- Brad and Jennifer, Reese and Ryan -- only to see it end in divorce. (I still haven't forgiven Brad for cheating with Angelina Whorlie.) I have faith in the Afflecks. They seem ... almost normal.

Why was Friends the last great sitcom? I love The Office, but there is still a void left by the six people who gathered in my living room every Thursday to make me laugh .. and cry. Though I've always loved Friends, I still mourn for the pre-Monica Chandler and the Joey who was dumb and lovable, not brain dead.

Of course, Jim Halpert does help ease the pain somewhat ... (Is he gorgeous or what?!?)

And speaking of guys who make you drool, I'd gladly be Rob Pattinson's cougar. Long or short hair, bald ... I don't care. Just in case anyone out there knows him and wants to pass the word ...

Happy New Year, everyone! Both of you.

AFK ... or, It's Always #$%@^% Hot in Tennessee

I realize I've been neglecting my blogging duties. I hate it, too. I actually enjoy sharing my thoughts and views with all two of my readers.

Life, however, has intervened. It's brought some surprises, some pleasant, some not so pleasant, and one that totally caught me offguard.

The not so pleasant first: That feeling I've had in my gut for months turns out to be physical. Pending the results of an ultrasound, there may soon be less of me as some surgeon gets the opportunity to wield his laser-surgery thingy and extract my gallbladder. With all the misery the damned thing has been causing me (if it is indeed that), I'd let him take it now. I sure as heck don't want it anymore.

The Girl is growing up way too fast for me. Now in high school, she's exploring her career options and, to my consternation, is exploring a profession very close to mine. I've guided her away from this field all her life, only to find her attracted to it. Sigh.

I helped chaperone her and 60-something teens to a band competition yesterday. It was hotter than seven hells in July. I wound up getting sick during their performance and sought solace in a shady area until sundown.

Personally, I have never thought a band festival was a place to take a date. Apparently, The Ex is not of a like mind, for he squired his latest to the one and same. It was my first look at her. And -- I'm cuter and look younger! Ha! I was even cuter with my sweaty hair, pulled back oh-so-unelegantly in a ponytail with strands falling unevenly around my face. And that's the end of this oh-so-mature and meow moment.

My good friends (and you know who you are) can read all about the offguard thing if you e-mail me. :)

I'll try to do better here. Promise!

The Worst Day of the Year

Yep. It's today.

I almost ran out of gas on the way to work. I love my car, but like everything else in my life, it's got its quirks. Its most major one is that my gas tank can be virtually empty and the needle on the gas gauge points to a quarter of a tank.

Or more, as it was doing this morning. But when it gets low, the car starts sputtering. People on I-40 don't like it when sputtering cars are sharing their road. One trucker particularly didn't like it. He can kiss my ass.

After making a stop I wasn't necessarily planning to make and driving about a mile out of my way to get 3 gallons of gas, the car was happy. But I was late for work. Not good.

We were two people short in our department today. One of them was the supervisor. Guess who's the supervisor when the supervisor's not around?

Everyone in this county who ever thought the newspaper might be interested in their story showed up at my doorstep today. Most days, that's OK. Today it wasn't.

I had two jobs to perform today -- mine and the supervisor's. My end wasn't looking so good. Then the proverbial shit hit the fan. Major story. Must get in the paper ASAP. Must have already-stretched-thin staff on the story. Now.

After a few hours in the scorching heat, the already-stretched-thin staff straggles back in from newsgathering to put their work together. That's when my Very Loud Co-worker decided to pump it into high gear. Only this time she was joined by her dickhead friend.

Blahblahblahblahblahblah ... And so it went. Louder. And Louder. AND LOUDER. The already-stretched-thin staff was having trouble concentrating over their chatter. I was having trouble concentrating. So, I did what any quasi-supervisor would do. I got up, went to their Corner 'o Chat, explained what was going on, and asked them to keep it down.

Very Loud Co-worker was sincerely apologetic. I thought it was classy of her.

Dickhead said, in his most sarcastic voice, "Oh, we're sorry."

He can kiss my ass, too. No, wait. I don't want him anywhere near my ass. He can go fuck himself. With a white-hot fork. The size of a pitchfork. Sideways. Up his ugly anus. (Can you tell I really don't like this guy?)

Today was shitty all on its own, but it was destined to be that way.

Had she lived, today would have been my mother's 64th birthday.

Her birthday is always hard for me. It's when I miss her most.

So many things were left unresolved between us. There's no way, barring recovery from the mental illness that eventually led her to take her life, that things could have been resolved.

In the last few years of her life, our roles had changed. I was the mother, reminding her to take her medicine and keep her psychiatric appointments. She was the meek child with good intentions she rarely carried out.

I have yet to grieve for her properly. I have yet to shed a tear. I planned the funeral. Picked out the coffin and her attire. Chose the spray of flowers adorning her casket. Arranged for the pallbearers because her lazy-assed nephews couldn't be bothered with it. Made sure Daddy had his Xanex so he could get through the service. Held my daughter as she weeped for the grandmother who would never see her graduate from high school or attend her wedding. Drove all over East Tennessee shopping for funeral attire for both of us.

It's seldom slowed down since. I miss my mother on the anniversary of her death and major holidays, and I travel 60 miles from here each Memorial Day to place flowers on her grave. But it's her birthday -- the anniversary of the day she drew her first breath -- that I mourn her.

Happy birthday, Mommy. I love you.

At peace

July 5 has come and gone, and Tommy didn't visit.

I can draw only one conclusion: He's at peace.

Tommy was my cousin -- rather, he was my mother's cousin. Their mothers were sisters. Tommy, however, was closer in age to me.

From the moment he grew tall enough to reach a gas pedal, Tommy was a frequent visitor to our house. Mom served as something of a surrogate parent to him. He sought her advice while reserving the right to take it.

Two of those times he went against her stick out in my mind. He had barely turned 18 when he decided to join the Army. One week at Fort Jackson, however, quickly made him how sage Mom's advice had been. He called and wrote letters, begging Mom to find him a ticket out.

Of course, she did. She and others worked to prove how Tommy was the only help his elderly mother had. His mother doesn't drive, and to this day she lives a sad existence in a little house in my hometown. Tommy, who had become quite adept behind the wheel, promised to help out his mom any way he could.

He was as good as his word after the Army granted his hardship discharge. Not wanting to completely bail on Uncle Sam, he chose to stay in the National Guard and cherished those weekends once a month and the yearly training that were part of his commitment.

Which brings us to another incident when Tommy chose to shrug off Mom's sage advice. One day, he was accompanied on his visit by a shy, brunette girl. That girl, he declared, was the one he planned to marry.

His betrothed was a sweetie, but Mom knew that a marriage at their ages would be doomed. Tommy, however, would not be denied his brown-eyed beauty, and they exchanged vows a short time later.

In mere months, Mom's prediction came true. Tommy was shattered. He vowed to win back his bride and, to her credit, she tried. She was often with him when he visited, but never were they to live under the same roof again as husband and wife.

On July 5, 1979, I was with Mom and my sister en route to my grandmother's when a radio broadcast was interrupted. There was a horrific auto accident south of town. A car was involved in a head-on collision with a coal truck. No names were available but, in a rare move for the veteran newscaster, he reported that both occupants of the car were dead.

We barely got in Grandma's door when the phone rang. It was Tommy's mother, and what she was saying was impossible. Tommy -- her baby boy, the closest thing Mom ever had to a son and the cousin my sister and I looked to as an older brother of sorts -- was dead.

He was only 21 years old.

A friend driving a powder-blue Ford Maverick had stopped by to pick Tommy up early in the morning. They were planning to go south of town to look for ginseng -- "sang diggin'," as my grandmother called it -- in an attempt to make some big bucks from herbalists who view the root as gold. Back en route to town, the friend decided to pass a slow-moving car in front of them. Unfortunately, he was on a curve, and he and Tommy likely only saw the coal truck that hit them only seconds before their lives ended.

It was my first closed-coffin funeral. A portrait of Tommy in his National Guard dress uniform sat on the coffin. That was, I think, the reason I couldn't accept that Tommy was gone.

I didn't sleep for days. I looked for Tommy to come in, roll his eyes and tell us how silly the authorities were to believe it was him in that car.

I held on to that fantasy as Mom helped his mother sort through the legal tangles of his estate -- left messy because of his tender age and the fact that he left a widow who was legally his wife but hadn't lived with him for almost a year. I looked for Tommy every time a car pulled into our drive.

It never was him.

Then, as July 5, 1980, dawned, a strange thing happened. Tommy made his presence known that day. I can't remember exactly how, but I knew he was with me that day.

It happened again and again -- each time on July 5. The most memorable is July 5, 1984. I had been expecting Tommy all day, but he so far was a no-show. Maybe it was because I was in Florida with friends, I thought.

I was padding along a deserted beach on the Gulf after dark when I began hearing footsteps echo with my own. I stopped many times and looked for someone behind me, only to find a beach vacant except for my presence.

Then it dawned on me: Today is July 5. I smiled, flush with peace. I knew who was with me. We walked along that beach -- Tommy and me -- for several minutes before one of my friends showed up. I was disappointed -- for Tommy, three was a crowd.

I received a few more annual visits from Tommy. Then, on July 5, 1989, they abruptly stopped.

That has left me bittersweet. After pondering on it for a while, I came to the conclusion that Tommy had made it to the other side and found the peace that for some reason had eluded him. I've often wondered if it was because Tommy was taken so young -- that he had been denied the life that was in front of him, so he came back once a year to claim just a scrap of it. I'll always be grateful that it was me he chose to share those moments with.

I'm thankful he's at peace, but I miss him. On July 5, and every day.

He didn't visit this year. And though I know in my heart he won't next year, I'll still be looking.

My home and heart are open any time he decides to drop by.

Happy birthday, Grandpa!

Had he lived, my dear grandfather would have been 90 years old today.

I know everybody thinks their grandfather was the greatest. But mine really was. I'll put him up against anyone.

I can't remember a time when I didn't adore my father's father. By many standards, he was an unexceptional man. He didn't finish elementary school. The Army rejected him for having flat feet. In all his 71 years of living on this planet, he had traveled no farther than Kentucky -- and Georgia, for the great reject the U.S. Army issued.

Those people who would dismiss him on those terms don't know my Grandpa.

He was loving, loyal and kind. He loved a chaw of Red Man, mixed with Beech Nut. Nothing was more restful to him than sitting on the front porch on a summer's evening with a bowl of vanilla ice cream. And no meal was complete without a spoonful of Peter Pan peanut butter.

(I'm glad my grandfather didn't live to see the Peter Pan recall earlier this year. It would have crushed him. Choosy mothers may choose Jif, but grandfathers loved Peter Pan.)

Grandpa's childhood was rough. He was 6 when his mother died, and his father sent him into the bowels of the earth as a coal miner at age 14. He was paid in scrip -- or rather, my great-grandfather was. Grandpa didn't see any of his pay for years.

He married my grandmother in 1940, and together they raised five children. My father was their second born, and the second son. While he worked in the sawmill by day, he, my grandmother and the kids worked to build what became the family home. Grandpa designed it himself, and it was the place I thought of as home for my first 25 years. Even today, the word "home" conjures up images of the house my grandfather designed and led his family in building.

I was the first grandchild, and I freely admit my Grandpa spoiled me rotten. One of my first memories is of being devastated because I couldn't marry him. I thought then -- and I still think today -- my grandmother got the last good one.

My childhood memories are filled with Grandpa, who served as a surrogate father when his own son abandoned me, my mother and my sister. He was a consummate storyteller who could keep me in stitches. I double over when I regale others with his stories, but they look at me with stony silence. That storytelling gene, undoubtedly, died with him.

I was in college when my grandfather began having health problems. The coal mines took their toll, and combined with years of smoking, he suffered from emphysema. He suffered a heart attack while in the hospital for pneumonia, and while he recovered from that, it was another stealth disease that robbed his mind and eventually claimed his life.

Alzheimer's disease. It was a funny-sounding term I remember reading about in John Irving's Cider House Rules. Now, we were living it. Thoughts and functions that once seemed involuntary were taking their toll on my wonderful grandfather. Nine months before it would claim his life, the disease erased any memory of me. I -- and the rest of the family -- became mere faces hovering over his bed.

His hard-fought battle was lost in 1991, and a day doesn't go by that I don't think of my Grandpa. I honored his memory a couple of years later by naming my daughter after him, and I tell her often about the great-grandfather I wish she had known -- the great-grandfather who would have poured all his love onto her.

Happy birthday, Grandpa. I'll love you forever.