my mother's sisters

True confession: when I was on vacation I stopped keeping up with the news. I wrote and did blog related things for up to five hours a day because it’s fun and my compulsion was fed.

I got into a tiff with a San Diego columnist over parenting being a person’s true legacy. Because if it is I’m dead. Really I find it funny. I know that I have made an impression on some kids as my parents’s brother, sisters and friends did on me.

How else could I describe my mom’s hippie Buddhist sister who left her family to find herself when her older daughther had just graduated high school and her younger one had a year to go. She had been my idol until then.

When my mom kicked me out after high school, she gave me $25 for bus fare to my aunt’s house in New England.

My aunt asked one question: “Pregnant or drugs?”
“Both maybe.” I turned out not to be pregnant but my mom had found an ounce of pot in the back of my closet. Normally my mom would have never looked in the closet but my best high school friend and I had gotten into a car, drove around the block and came back to my house. That was rather stupid, but I had just graduated high school and neither of us had ever bought drugs before.

Even though my behavior was suspious, my mom still wouldn’t have looked but roofers were putting a new roof up. What if there was a fire and the firemen had to climb into my bedroom, run to the back and look through the closet? To know my immediate family is too understand that this behavior is typical. If something is going to go wrong, our family will be prepared. Usually.

Fortunately, my uncle made a great mother/father. So did his brother who was married to my mom’s middle sister, the “most beautiful,” (my sister and I can’t tell them apart in pictures,) the brain and the bohemian. I was the only person in the family she liked, including I think her own sons. In the early ’60’s she worked and my uncle who married my aunt when the boys were ten and thirteen, stayed home. He was an incredible cook, and, like most people in my mother’s family, was an artist.

My dad, a CPA, married into this very boho unusual family knowing that my mom was the most normal. When I was a kid she reminded me of a mixture of Mary Tyler Moore as Laura Petrie and Jackie Kennedy. She was 5’0 and petite; my dad was 5’11, but they looked great together. She had the most flirtatious, funny laugh but she was so gosh darn cute. I adored my mother; she was much more eccentric than people thought she was.

Anybody who knew her sisters understood that my mother had to be. Her sisters were nuts. My parents loved and accepted my hippie Buddhist aunt, something I wasn’t able to do years after my aunt left. I’m sure that she had reason to, but you don’t leave when one daughter just left and the other had a year to go.

I wrote this awhile ago and never put it in because I felt so judgemental and sick at myself for being so. It’s a rough draft as is everything in my blog.

I’m confused which seems to be my general stance on life. If I haven’t been to your blog, I will be, hopefully by Monday.

I have to go play with my niece because she’s just eleven and I’m still her idol. I never want to mess our relationship up. Do you think I was too judgemental with my aunt?
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And the DJ on the radio just played a song I never heard, and didn’t particularly like, about the club I never mention by name, but everybody did know my name, and a thousand careers were launched though not mine obviously. I can neither sing on tune nor play an instrument though I looked like I should have.

It makes me happy knowing that people I care for much, bought the club, and let new careers begin. It’s been closed for years. In its stead is one of New York top bars for down and dirty drunks. I know because during Zachary’s worst day’s the bartender would call me and ask me to pick him up. I would laugh.

As I did when the owner of the club where everybody knew my name, and life story come to think of it, would call me to pick him up. Only I laughed a bit harder and said a few more choice words.

I have been having a hard time writing about Zachary. First I thought it was because he’s from New Orleans; then I realized that he was a good person with many problems, and I have to get back into the mindset I was in during our years together rather than write something that doesn’t express how I felt then