This was the first Mother and Father’s Day in many a moon I could be happy for other people.

In 90, my Dad planned his own Father’s Day. We went to visit his aunt in an old people’s hotel on Long Beach in the Island.
“Where are the girls?”
“They’re right here.”
“Hi, Aunt Ann.”
“Where are the girls? Such nice girls.”
“Right here.”
“Aunt Ann, it’s us, hello.”

Finally we gave up. That was before I was a Licensed Social Worker and knew giving into the fantasy was a viable valuable technique.

Aunt Ann had always been beautiful and sweet, and so she was in deep dementia.

Then we went to an excellent Mexican restaurant in Island Park. Island Park’s known for its excellent restaurants, beautiful inlets and waterways, great bars if you like bar fights. They look real nice. The bars that is, not the bar fights though there is a certain artistry to them.

My sister and I actually spent part of an evening sitting in the car listening to some great vintage disco and watching bar fights. Hey, we know how to have fun.

Island Park’s also known for Al D’Amato, and uh Mafia connections. It will always be remembered by me as the school district that refused to open one year for fear of AIDS from the toilets or some such shit.

But this Mexican restaurant is beautiful. A man sketched my father, and gave us the sketch. The man was a professional artist and my father at 76 had the type of face people liked to look at. Especially my mother who could still basically see then.

It was a perfect family day. My father had one wish. He never wanted to grow old and decrepit and he never did. He was to die Passover/Easter weekend of the next year.

I hope there is a heaven and my parents are reunited. My mother didn’t believe at all, and that used to worry me. Just in case, only people who believe….well, I don’t know. I don’t exactly have a religious education and we are Jewish and Jews believe in the big sleep, with….

My father half believed, and the half of him that did believe asked me if he should shave half his moustache while still alive, so when he died the people who knew him before 69 would recognize him.
“Only if you want to look like an idiot in this life, daddy.”

When I told this story to relatives they laughed. They knew my Dad, and it was so typical.

The summer of the last Father’s Day, my sister had a Hampton’s share and was to meet the man she’s still married to. They have a wonderful daughter who will be Bat Mitzvahed in November. So Father’s Day’s continues in our family.

I have to give Jacquelin a bit more than a fountain pen. (Old Jewish Bar Mitzvah joke: today you are a man. Here’s a fountain pen.) It was never funny to me and still isn’t.

So clamor for my book which is coming along, and almost up to shopping. That is the last I will say about it, until I have good news, and that’s one promise I do intend to keep. Even if I can’t keep myself from talking I will.

But clamor for it as I believe I have the best platform in the world; bloggers, and I would love publishing people to understand that people who read my blog buy books.

I can promise you that nothing in the book has been in Courting. Isn’t it amazing? I have a whole life never contained in here.

This particular book is about one pivotal year in my life. It’s a Senior Year in High School/coming of age tale but told differently than most, and I think told very well.

I even learned that linear thing, and how to find a true beginning, middle and end, while retaining the essential Pia’isms.

It took a long time. But I have many more books that are just spilling out.
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Blogging’s been changing so much. When I’m on summer vacation, I buy every woman’s magazine I can find. Never read most during the year. Gawd, do they have blogs, and some invite their readers to begin blogs under their umbrella.

But we who have been blogging for awhile, we did it. We made blogging into what it is today and we should be damn proud of ourselves.

Yes I know this began as a Father’s Day post. It still is. My Dad, for all his faults, wanted to share center stage with me. Actually he wanted me to take the stage over.

In my heart, somewhere, I know that my parents are up there, somewhere, together, planning my ascension. Not up there, but down here. They believed in my talents. Had weird ways of showing it sometimes, but….
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If you’re not celebrating Father’s Day, summer officially begins this week, and please don’t tell me you hate summer. Summer’s magic.

All dreams can be wished in summer and many will come true.

I will always believe in the beauty and majesty of summer. I am a Cancer, on the cusp of Leo and my parents always made me feel that all summer belonged to me.

That was one of the most wonderful gifts that they gave me. A belief that in this one time of year, dreams come true.

Days are long, and no matter how much work you have, there has to be time in summer for enjoying life.

It’s different than the holiday season. No pressure to find the perfect gift. Or the religious wars or anything that can cause friction. Maybe from bathing suits, but my secret to a happy bathing suit season is a secret.

Summer’s about slowing down, going to the beach, having barbeque’s, laughing a bit too much, listening to songs you can sing along to

Summer’s about possibilities, dreams still to be dreamed, day dreams that can turn into reality, 57 Chevy’s, old fashioned convertibles, ice cream soda, lobster rolls, dunes, getting sand in shoes and all over. Especially when it’s me

So have a wonderful summer. And clamor for my book. I’m not sure how yet. You figure that out for now.

I can’t believe that after four years, endless revisions, throwing out entire chapters, great stories and more, I have a viable book.

And just in time for summer.

When the stars twinkle just for me, and the moon comes out just for me, and two million people in Central Park sing “happy birthday” to me.

Dare to dream the impossible. It’s summer and anything can be possible. Man first landed on the moon in summer. Just for me. It was my birthday, not that I’m celebrating it this year Really.
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Please err on the side of caution. It seemed like almost every day since I have been in Myrtle Beach, some kid has been badly injured or died.

Two days in a row, kids fell off hotel balconies.

A woman, I have come to know and like, son’s best friend was celebrating his 24th birthday. At 6:30 AM he decided it was his birthday and he just wanted one more. He didn’t live past his 24th birthday. And my new friend’s son drove eleven hours from West Virginia in the pouring rain just to go to his funeral, and drove right back.

We all think we’re invincible, even at my age, but….

Hate to say this but if you drink or drug or both, please don’t drive. Otherwise I will take to the roads, and then….

On that note I’m off for the beach.

And back from the beach. Did I say clamor?

Honestly I haven’t been that great a blogger this past year. My mind’s been otherwise occupied.

I almost discourage comments by not having recent comments on the sidebar.

Sometime last week I had my 600,000 hit since November, 2004. I wasn’t really paying attention.

I take my blog off BE frequently but always end with the same or more credits. It’s one of the sweet mysteries of life I haven’t actually analyzed or obsessed over.

Stumble it!

First see the Wombat’s wonderful musical critique post, and there are some great surprises.

The great unrequited love of my life, Frank Rich, has an excellent article where he compares Iraq not to Viet Nam but to WWTwo. Why? We denied exit visas to many many Jews and let them die. That’s another reason I became me. The knowledge that we allowed this has always crazed me. Yes I was the only nine year old to bore her friends with bad American policies. It’s a Select article. I should begin a page of copied articles.
The Times has a great editorial on our delusional president.
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Many people have died for our country. Many died to help to keep it great and for democracy.

Many have died needlessly. Many vets come back brain damaged. They did in Viet Nam also. There were no services specific for Viet Nam Vets. The VA was a mess. Yes, I know it is now. It was even worse then.

Most protesters always supported the Vets and would have died before hurting them. I can’t say that enough because I was a teenage hippie/anti-war protester who did end up pepper gassed when my friend wanted to go out for dinner after a protest in DC, and the policeman directed us into a riot.

It was my friend’s first demonstration. He was a Volvo driving frat president who wasn’t used to being treated like that. The experience changed him more than it did me as I told him not to ask a policeman. And I was so harmless. But if you looked like a hippie, you were the enemy to many people.

I never want the country to go back to not being able trust people who are supposed to help us. We are all in this together, and have become pretty united in our want for this needless war to end.
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i first saw Country Joe & The Fish when I was in high school. There used to be many free concerts at The Band Stand in Central Park. The first time I actually remember meeting the boy I would briefly marry was at a Jefferson Airplane concert there. He had introduced himself to me many times, but I was in my usual state of oblivion, or somebody this good looking, bright and funny, can't really be interested in me.

Yet of all the concerts I saw there it's Country Joe who stayed with me. Remember every detail of the concert. It's an interactive song. You have to participate.

I'm putting in the revised version because it's too perfect. And yes I support the troops. I support them so much I want them home soon and healthy.

This is an "X" rated video, and very beautiful. Very very beautiful, and I don't usually associate Country Joe with beauty.

I was going to put in Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice Restaurant” but it is almost nineteen minutes long, and the code was disenabled, so here’s a link.

It was my father’s favorite song. My father supported the Viet Nam war. Had this non-understandable thing for Nixon and later Reagan but he didn’t think that people should actually go to Viet Nam and maybe die or be disabled.

When my parents and their friends went to Stockbridge my father got a much coveted present. A traffic ticket from Officer Opie. It’s all in the song. Non-linear I just realized!

My father didn’t like the first Bush.* First Republican in many a moon he didn’t love. Was scared of his CIA connections and power.

My sister and I believe with all our hearts that he would have hated this Bush much more passionately.

I can’t listen to “Alice’s Restaurant” without thinking about both my father and my husband who was very good at evading actual physicals. Strange or not, the stories endeared my father to him. That and they both lived to make fun of me In a nice way

LET’S GET OUT OF IRAQ QUICKLY AND CONCENTRATE ON HEALING THE VETS. MIGHT HELP HEAL THIS NATION

*My perfectly healthy father, or so the doctors thought, suffered a massive stroke and died five days later in 91. He told me he was losing his will to live. Truth is I think he missed a good political fight. He had misguidedly trusted Nixon and Reagan, but how do you trust a Bush?

My Mom died a month after 9/11. Two weeks after the attack and two weeks before her death, she asked me if I thought the attacks were retribution. Said she couldn’t state that to anybody else. At the time, I thought she became demented overnight. I do think she too lost her will to live.

I answered her properly but I should have been cheering. I didn’t think it was retribution. I did want war then

Any and all anti-war work I do is dedicated to both my parents memory, as what has happened would have been unimaginable to both of them.

My father might have argued for the war in Viet Nam, but when I was in high school, he was very proud that I stood up for my principles. And waited for the bus from DC, when I went for the 67 moratorium while I was in high school, until four AM.

I honestly don’t care if bloggers dislike me for my increasingly strident politics. I love this country. It’s a wonderful one. We don’t have a draft. We do have an increasingly tired armed forces who should be home. I would be against a draft in this case. As Frank Rich eloquently points out, the people who we claim to be fighting for want to come here.

We’re a mutt nation, and were once the greatest country because we’re so hybrid. We must let people come here who risk death, torture and other things if they remain in their country.

It’s the morally responsible thing to do. Immigrants enrich our country. Not saying anything new but most of us are descendants of people who came from other countries.

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It was exactly half a lifetime ago tomorrow that I met Zachary. So scared that I won’t have another half lifetime from now—you know what mean? 28 more years? Kind of like living even when it’s a mess

Wrote the above in an email to a friend yesterday; he said “you won’t put it in your blog, but you should.” Because he said I won’t…
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On a raw, rainy day in late May, she remembered a perfect May day in 1979, when she walked into a club not knowing that her life would change forever. She remembers most details of that day, the lavender cotton tee with wooden beads hanging from leather around the V neck, the Willie Wear lavender pants designed for girls with small waists and larger hips, the lavender Candy cork bottom sandals that she wore.

Generally she dressed to be noticed in lower end designer fashion mixed with vintage 40’s and 50’s dresses. Fortunately she had stopped in Macy’s before going to the club because she bought Gloria Vanderbilt jeans She also bought a tie dyed tee, newly back in fashion, as they were every few years.

This was all good because she wouldn’t be going home that night and had a job where, well once they sent a guy home because his fly was broken. That was the extent of the dress code.

May 20, 1979, the last day of her life as she once knew it. Much loved at her job because she could get maximum work out of people and have them thank her, nobody except Adam the time keeper minded her coming in late that whole week.

She was the only supervisor under personal probation to Adam. That was a joke as he was a drunk who would fall off bar stools after maybe two drinks.

She was forever trying to explain to the people she supervised that if they came in between 8:30-8:37, they wouldn’t be late for payroll purposes but would be late for company if we want your ass purposes.

Nobody seemed to be able to grasp this simple and stupid concept. So she would take the time sheets and change every body’s times herself.

Obviously she couldn’t do this if she continued coming in late because her new boyfriend Zachary would stand at the door and say:
“You can’t go. You’re a prisoner of love.”

She never found this enchanting. She needed her job as most of her best friends worked there. When she had first begun almost two years before, she couldn’t believe the wide variety of people she met, how friendly they were, and how she felt, she was essentially paid to socialize.

No matter how much work she kept back, she still always had the highest production in the room. Coding documents with little summaries isn’t brain surgery and she couldn’t help being fast.

She wasn’t one of the first to be promoted.

Most people couldn’t believe that. They didn’t know she had woke up one night to find herself in the project director’s bed, and had running screaming out. He was a nice guy but at 350 pounds not really her type.

She did feel bad that she had let him on, and allowed him to buy her meals she didn’t eat as she was always on a diet and drinks she did knock back because everybody knew that liquor didn’t count in calories ingested.

Oh yes the 70’s the last great debauchery decade. She lived in a building where she was the youngest, and watched her neighbors drink constantly.

She worked across from St Paul’s Church. Many years later it would become famous as a place where Ground Zero workers could go to relax. Then it was famous among her friends for morning devotional services, or a place where her friends go during morning break to smoke pot.

She never took part. Partially because she didn’t believe in wasting a good high at work, partially because she was basically a girl who could find trouble easily enough without inviting it, partially because she was scared, and partially because she sat next to somebody who would take out a sandwich consisting of every smelly meat and cheese possible ten minutes before break began.

As soon as he took out the sandwich she would begin to heave and then would run into the ladies room. She did lose 20 pounds thanks to sandwich man, and a diet of her invention which she won’t go into as it was so weird and she wouldn’t want people emulating it.

Her job became her life. When she finally was promoted, the project director forgot how angry he was at her and took full credit for her being such a great supervisor. She never told people about that night, except for the Blenderbusters and they didn’t count as they were her three best girlfriends. The project director told many people.

She developed a rep for being bad, but sweet and a great worker. So bad that a few years later when she worked at another company doing the same thing but without the weird time rules, a man who would become the one after Zachary asked her if it was true that she had slept with __and__and__and__and so forth.

She hadn’t. She still find it odd that the project director told so many people. She’s in a weird mood today and wishes, a bit, that she hadn’t chosen to go into the club where her ex-husband was soon to be the owner and Lucinda Williams was performing

She can’t remember if people at the bar where she was sitting stopped talking when Lucinda played. She would bet not as she’s pretty sure Lynn Samuels was there. Lynn never shut up, and had the New Yawk accent nightmares are made of.

It was before Lynn became a radio host and had elocution lessons. She, or I to clarify, knows that’s hard for people who have heard Lynn on the radio to believe, but yes, Lynn’s accent was much worse.

Lynn always wore combat fatigues with a hat. She blessed Lynn because it was it so easy to look pretty next to her, and she was constantly in this club filled with the used to be famous, soon to be famous, almost famous, never had a chance to be famous, as in Zachary. Obviously she had problems. That’s why she ended with Zachary.

She is in a weird mood today, not really due to tomorrow’s not major anniversary. She just wasted an hour looking for “The Roaches” “Face down,” and she will be damned if she’s going to sing it.

Walked in
looking so pretty
now you’re face down

I need a name for the club. I need motivation. I need good weather. I have the same friends I had then. They claimed I was lost to blogging. I don’t believe that to be true.

The book is very different than the blog. It’s about the earlier years. It’s fiction. I hope to have a first draft ready when I come back from North Myrtle Beach which is supposed to have the best weather in the US. If that’s true I just might end up there as I can’t take raw May days. It’s not normal.

Stumble it!

Here’s one of the great unrequited loves of my life Frank Rich’s column in Truthout so it’s not a Select piece. i know The Times is losing subscribers, but many of us pay $500 a year. We should really be able to link the articles. I guess I can copy them and put them in the sidebar.

Sometimes commenting can really change a mood. Acton Bell’s posts always make me laugh. Oh sorry, didn’t know you meant them seriously. It was also the first time I commented on a comment. My knight in shining dawg, Doug, has sharpened his commenting claws…
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My best friend tells me that writing is solitary by definition. Yes, I know that.

It was fun to focus on blogging because it’s interactive. I could tell myself that my writing was improving. I could tell myself a lot of things.

I’m trying to finish a complete first draft of Electric Haired Chic: A Memoir in the form of Fiction by Memorial Day, and I have rediscovered something about myself. I need face-to-face interaction, often, with friends and family.

I don’t even mind talking on the phone anymore and I considered it to be a great intrusion. I still do if it’s a telemarketer, any political or issue group, etc. If a real person calls, they will a get half hour, at least.

It’s another day where the sun keep tries trying to make an appearance. I need sun and warm weather.

I tried forcing myself to write the ungodly number of words I make myself write every day, for my book, and just couldn’t. I’m in need of intense socialization.

Unfortunately people do make plans in advance, or I haven’t been in touch, or….

This book is something that I have been working on for four years but couldn’t figure out the structure until recently. I have other books pretty much written, but this is the one that’s meaningful to me. Fiction is freeing in anything but this book.

I keep telling myself to change my high school boyfriend to somebody more interesting, and who isn’t a Mack truck driver. He wasn’t very interesting.

But I’m pretty sure I’m the only person in the history of my Long Island suburb whoever had a date pick her up in a large truck or any, probably, many times.

There’s nothing wrong with big truck; it was the world I came from that had the false values. And yes I rubbed it in.

I don’t regret it but am not as enamored with myself as I was for far too long.

I have never felt like giving up. I do today.

If I give up I will spend the rest of my life wondering and feeling incomplete because this was such an important part of my life.

The sun actually did come out just now, as in a blue sky, so I’m out of here. Unfortunately the sun itself didn’t serve as a mood elevater. I’m hoping a walk will do it.

Feel like my whole life is a battle for sun, and we’re in the midst of global warming so it’s selfish and unfair of me.

I went to B&N and bought books. Books that you devour in one sitting, and kind of wish you had read in the store.

It’s gorgeous out. Incredibly beautiful. I now know what 62 degrees feels like 62 degrees feels like. It feels good

I wrote this entire post because I wasn’t going to let a title like that go to waste

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I moved the stuff written here to beneath the post. I will have Three Word Wednesday up tonight.

This is the beginning point of my memoir though of course it’s not in these words

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“Who is everybody?” My father would ask that over and over again, through the years, when I would say that I wanted to do something because everybody was

I didn’t have the vocabulary or later the complete understanding to explain that “everybody was the masses that form every community. To be included in communities is a wonderful thing.

My father believed in building, leading and being parts of communities and yet he wanted his daughters to be staunch individualists when we were twelve.

“Who is everybody?” The friends that a twelve year old girl needs to feel complete. Twelve, if not done right is the age you will come back to through out life to make right. As you can only be twelve once, it doesn’t work. Continue Reading »

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