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my mother's sisters

September 30, 2005 By pia

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?
********************************************************

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

Filed Under: my parents Tagged With: my parents

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Comments

  1. Bone says

    September 30, 2005 at 11:21 pm

    When I write about the past, it’s easy for me to get lost in how I felt then. And I think people confuse that with how I feel now. But they’re not the same. Although maybe they are more the same than I would like to admit.

    In reply to your comment… we got stuck on a train to Coney Island (an hour one-way maybe?) and our car didn’t have air. And it was July. And I still loved NY 🙂

  2. Chandira says

    October 1, 2005 at 4:08 am

    I don’t think you should judge yourself over the aunt thing. So long as you can love her now, is all that matters. We are what we are when we are it, and that’s all.
    “No praise, no blame.”
    My family just healed a 21 year feud, over really nothing. It can happen, we can forget pain and move on.

  3. JC says

    October 1, 2005 at 5:48 am

    I love that picture of your mom being a cross between Jackie and Mary Tyler moore. They were the two beautiful people when I was a girl and they were the essence of style and “city.” I think that Jackie will always be considered a classic.
    I can understand how it would be hard to remember how you think it would be hard to remember how you felt about things “then.” The thing is that we do so much sorting and analyzing and coming to terms with things after the fact that it makes it very hard to remember how we felt then.

  4. So Lost says

    October 1, 2005 at 6:23 am

    Just popping in from Blog Explosion to say hi!

    Have a great day!

  5. Miladysa says

    October 1, 2005 at 7:32 pm

    We look back with maturity and experiences that we did not have when we were younger and see how we would behave now not then. I think it is all part of growing up.

    I really enjoyed this post and I love your blog design!!

  6. EKENYERENGOZI MICHAEL CHIMA says

    October 1, 2005 at 10:07 pm

    Your life is a romantic classic and will make a great book and melodramatic film that a good director can clinch some Oscars with it if well produced with Nicole Kidman as Pia Savage and who do you think should play Zachary?

    If I have the money, I pay you over $3 million for the film rights to your story.

    I thank God for blogging. Because, if not for blogging I would have missed knowing and reading such a unique culture of human nature as defined in the personality of Lady Pia Savage.

    Simply, put once again, you are a romantic classic.

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About Me

I live in the South, not South Florida, a few blocks from the ocean, and two blocks from the main street. It's called Main Street. Amazes me too.

I'm from New York. I mostly lived in the Mid-Upper East Side, and the heart of the Upper West Side. It amazes me when people talk about how scared they were of Times Square in the 1970's and 1980's.

As my mother said: "know the streets, look out and you'll be fine."

What was scary was the invasion of the crack dens into "good buildings in good 'hoods." And the greedy landlords who did everything they could to get good tenants out of buildings.

I'm a Long Island girl, and proud of it now.
Then I hated everything about the suburbs. Yet somehow I lived in a few great Long Island Sound towns after high school.

Go to archives "August 2004" if you want to begin with the first posts.

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