Leslea Tash's Blog, page 18
November 27, 2013
The Oak Room
There’s a fancy restaurant in Louisville, within the fancier Seelbach Hotel. It’s call the Oak Room, and it’s one of the few five star restaurants in town. Pricey, swanky, elegant—an affair to remember.
One year, my mother and step-father took me to the Oak Room for our Thanksgiving. While we were there, my step-father had a chest pain. His hand rose to his chest and his face contorted. I’d seen angina before. I knew that was what was happening.
At the time, both my parents were healthy. My mother was years away from her first bout with cancer, and John was hale and hearty, towering at his six foot-something height and nearly half as wide as he was tall. It would be more than a decade before Parkinson’s would rob him of his vitality and lust for life.
In between trips from the attentive waitstaff that evening, however, John fumbled with words to express how he was feeling.
My mother, who had helplessly stood by and watched her second husband die of a heart attack approximately ten years earlier, held her hand to her mouth and dissolved into silent tears. Knowing my mother as I did, I am absolutely certain she was just as afraid of ruining our elegant dinner as she was that something was genuinely wrong with her sweet (but obviously overweight) husband.
It wasn’t the first time I felt calm overtake me in a frightening circumstance. Setting down my utensils and leaning toward John, I asked if he was okay.
He replied that he was fine, but his face told a different story.
"John, we’ve seen a heart attack before," I said, speaking for my crying mother and for myself. "We know how to deal with it. You’ve got to be honest, though. Are you having chest pains?"
"I’ll be fine," he said. "I’ll be fine." And he forked back into his exquisitely roasted turkey, the cost of which was doubtlessly several times the cost of his medical co-pay.
John took reasonably good care of himself despite his tendency to indulge in rich culinary delights. In the end, it wasn’t his heart that killed him. It was a combination of disease and loneliness, and possibly drugs given as pain-killers while in a facility.
I wish I’d been there to say goodbye. He was my friend and I loved him very much. I never felt angry that I had to facilitate our family of three as the sole adult communicator—not angry at him, anyway.
My mother was another story.
She is gone now, too, but I think of her every day. I never stopped loving her, although I think less sophisticated members of my family will forevermore repeat to one another that I hated her. Of course I hated her, but I loved her, too, and if you don’t understand how those emotions can co-exist, we are simply different species of humankind—because anyone who knew the truth of the day-to-day relationship between my mother and me couldn’t accept a version otherwise.
This Thanksgiving I find myself preparing for the feast I’ve always wanted: surrounded by a loving family, in my forever home, where I can reasonably expect to live the rest of my life. We are surrounded by trees, and so we call it The Treehouse.
It’s not the Oak Room. It’s more like the Room Surrounded by Oaks, Poplars, Maples, and Ash. God only knows what else. I’m not as good with trees as I’ve become with birds.
It won’t be elegant. It won’t be five star, maybe (though I hope my family disagrees).
It will be perfect, no matter what, because we’re together.
But I will miss Mom and John. I will miss all the times I had them to myself, though I was hopelessly lonely for a future still many years from realization. I will miss the three of us, I will think of our Thanksgiving on the beach, of funny trips roaming the countryside, I will miss it all.
I will give so much thanks for what I have, but I will miss them so.
I had an extroverted friend who missed the memo on this one....
I had an extroverted friend who missed the memo on this one. She hurt me pretty severely. She didn’t hurt me because she was an extrovert, though. She hurt me because she was a narcissistic asshole who burns through friends like some people burn through a tank of gas.
Hey, guess what, tumblr? Being a grown up doesn’t make this shit go away. In fact, sometimes it makes it a lot harder to bear. I miss my friend.
I miss the friend I thought I had.
The great thing about being an adult is being able to accept what I can’t change, and have the courage to continue to love my friends, and make new ones in the wake of such a deep hurt and disappointment.
November 26, 2013
Lightbulb moment
The older I get, the easier it is to take the spotlight off myself and allow it to shine on others who need my ear, or my shoulder. This is a good thing.
Today, while writing (then deleting) a comment to a friend over the loss of a non-parental spouse of a parent (a step-parent who didn’t raise him), I had a lightbulb moment.
I was tempted to briefly speak about my mother’s abuse upon the occasion of my step-father’s death, but I went back and deleted it. His grief isn’t about abuse. (Not the lightbulb.)
However, there was something good in there, so here it is:
I know abuse is supposed to be a symptom of disease, but when the propagator decides to turn her abuse into an art form, I don’t think it’s a disease anymore. I just think it’s a choice to be a horrible person, and it’s nearly impossible to be bulletproof against something like that, when it’s directed at you personally by someone you love—by someone who is supposed to love you.
To all who are suffering this holiday, or preparing to suffer through a painful holiday with an abuser, I send you all my best, all my peace.
I hope you survive & live to flourish & move on.
November 25, 2013
November 24, 2013
heaveninawildflower:
Wren by Edwin Alexander. Illustration from...
Wren by Edwin Alexander. Illustration from ‘Wild Sports of the Highlands’
Published 1919.
http://www.archive.org/stream/wildsportsnatura00stjo#page/n9/mode/2up
November 23, 2013
November 22, 2013
November 21, 2013
14 Ways to Tick off a Writer
Very funny. Especially #10.
(#7 is the best)
1) Go on Amazon and give the book one star because “the plastic wrapping was slightly ripped when it arrived from the seller.”
2) Ask what the new book’s about. After the writer answers, say, “Oh, that sounds exactly like that T. C. Boyle book that came out last year. Have you read that? You have to read it! Yours sounds exactly like it!”
3) When interviewing an author on the radio, make sure to give the wrong title for her book. Just wrong enough to show you care. Is her book called Please Call Home? You might call it Please Come Home or The Homecoming or Home is Calling. Sit back and watch while the author figures out how to correct you on air. Good times!
4) Email saying you want to be a writer too, and you notice the writer lives in the same city, and you wonder if he could spare two hours sometime soon to have coffee and fill you in on how this whole writing thing works. Do not give any indication that you have ever read the writer’s work or care about it in any way. Do not address the author by name. Just cut and paste.
5) “So you’re a writer. What do you write about?”
“I write literary fiction.”
“Yeah, but, like, mysteries, or…?”
“Um, sort of realistic stuff. Novels and short stories.”
“Thrillers?”
“No.”
“Romances?”
“No, just…”
(whispering) “Like Fifty Shades kind of stuff?”
“Sure. Yes. Why the hell not.”
6) Approach her at a book festival with no introduction, wearing a backpack large enough to be full of explosives. Explain that you’re trying to find an agent, and no one here has been any help at all. Ask if you might give her your manuscript so she can pass it on to her agent. Then just stand there staring. Be sure your pupils are dilated.
7) Read ten pages of the author’s book. Realize that it’s absolutely not for you: you thought it was a zombie story, and it’s actually historical fiction about Alexander Graham Bell. Go on Goodreads anyway, and give it one star for not being a zombie story.
8) If you are related to the writer, be sure to ask, repeatedly, when his novel will make it on the New York Times bestseller list. Alternate this with questions about film rights, for maximum effect.
9) Email the author saying you admire her work. Once again, give no indication that this is true. Attach five of your most recent short stories, and ask if she’d mind taking a quick minute to give them all a read and respond to you at her earliest convenience with detailed comments.
10) If the author is a close friend, and especially if you’re well off, borrow her book from the library instead of buying it. Make sure she knows you spent money to go see the sequel to Snakes on a Plane. Wonder aloud, in front of her, what you’re going to get all your relatives for Christmas. Bonus points for asking if she’s making royalties yet.
11) Say in as patronizing a tone as possible, “It’s such an accomplishment just tofinish a novel! You should be proud of yourself just for that!”
12) Show up at a reading. Raise your hand to ask a question. Launch into a ten-minute description of your novel-in-progress. But in a whiny voice, with a question mark at the end. That totally makes it a question.
13) Ask what’s up “with all the ebook stuff and the self-publishingand nobody reading anymore. Does that worry you, that no one reads anymore?” Try to bring this up before nine a.m.
14) And remember: If all else fails, ask about her writing routine.
