Piano Jimmy

"Piano Jimmy" and Eunice, back in the day.

By now you know that my dad is a "one of a kind" sumthin' you don't wanna mess with. It's disconcerting for newcomers and out-of-towners sometimes. White, with flava, tho?! How'd you do that? How'd that happen to y'all? Yeah, I know. It don't wash off me neither, yo.

Well, squirrel friends, it's called "Old School", and it ain't exactly learned on your particular mean street. Yeah, those streets are mine, too. No, amigo, it's way back time. You see, when I was a kid, my father didn't even know where his father was, or what name he used, because my Ole Grandad didn't just hand out info like that, not even to family people, because in my line, family might be the first fellow who do you wrong, know what I mean?

Yeah, you do. It's like that with my folk, and so it is with me, too. 
Oh, I can keep a line on 'em any time I want to, because this New York-grown girl knows how to keep a light touch on her folk without putting too much pressure on 'em (because they sure as heck can't handle that, yo), but I didn't learn my all my skills from that paternal girl you see next to big Jimmy, mes amis.

No, my Grandma checked out young, too. But what my dad did have for me growing up was a little black book, the kind that he showed me once in awhile, because he taught me where to find it in his closet. 
It was in the front pocket of one of his suit jackets that I gathered for my mom to go the dry cleaners every week for his Mad Man-style job. 

You know, the kind tailored at "Wallach's" in the old Nanuet mall, 
made just for him off them measurements cards in the leather-chaired back of the store, girl. Yeah, but that was just another one of my many, many jobs, too, along with gatherin' up the wash, takin' down them clothes pinned to the line before it storms outside...there ain't nuthin' this ole girl don't know by now, feel me on it?

'Course you do, 'cause you been through it, too. And that's how me and my people did it: sometimes poorly, but always with great heart and soul, because we managed to survive without entirely cutting the cord to the mainland, you know? 

When we wanted to get a bead on our old Acadian boy, the one who knew how to play a reel or two for you at midnight on the "piana", drunk but still way betta than you'd ever be, we knew what to do. 

You'd go get lil' Jimmy's black book and look for "J", because that's where it was written for me to see: Piano Jimmy, under the letter "J" in my dad's old black phone book.

Come on down and see me when you want to, mes gens. I ain't forgot them old ways any day of the week we got, at any time that's good. "Happy Father's Day" to you, as well.

Trinity

An old tree stump is rife with mushroom life,

as a forsythia bush mixes with the trees, roofs and sky,

and "The Great Tree*" opens up to the world with many arms.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tis_people_%28Canada%29

( Welcome home, "Mes Gens" )

Countdown to Spring!

That's A LOT of snow, dude!

Well, folks, it's that time of year when we become totally fucking sick of the snow, like, so over it, you want to punch someone in the face just for not shoveling, like any decent human being would. Yeah, it gets that bad here sometimes. 

That'll melt sometime in April, maybe. Yay...

Luckily for us, we live in the most bitchin' place on earth that is New York, New York City, and the greater tri-state area (including Canada and New Orleans as my territories:), a place so in balance with nature that each season is a beautifully perfect and brilliant three months long*, so just when you want to die from sweat during the hottest, most doggiest days of August, the month of September rolls in like the coolest, sweetest breeze that's ever kissed your face.

 

Just ask any remaining member of the 70s group Earth, Wind, and Fire. They wrote the song about it!

Spring Countdown

(Click on me above)

*http://www.nps.gov/gate/planyourvisit/weather.htm

Homecoming

Two doorways.

As I knew I would, I came home after many years away. They were good hard years of some fun, some heartache, some adventure, and some travel, with much added experience. I loved it, but it was time to go home, and I knew it. So one day, on the cusp of financial ruin, I gave in to what I knew to be true, cashed my last paycheck, packed what few bags I had left in the bare sublet room I slept in because the rest of my stuff was in storage, and moved to a spare room in my moms' apartment to weather the storm. It was rough seas all the way, but that's like any real passage of time: to stick with you it has to hurt a little bit and sometimes a lot, and so it did.

Lamplight at night.

But I'm here now, and very glad of it. I know this place like a seedling knows how to grow in soil ripe for the planting. I took to it and it has, in it's own turn, taken back to me. This is my territory and my kind of land, that of my ancestors, which stretches all the way up to Canada, and I plan to savor every bit of it, like the food here that feeds my soul, because I've been cooking and serving up versions of it with home ingredients all of my life, in preparation for this time period.

Blue light, yellow light.

Stay tuned for next week's feature that I alluded to last year (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2014/02/stay-tuned.html). I referred to it as obliquely and discreetly as I could, obliged as I was under certain legal circumstances with stringent conditions that had to be followed, lest I suffer the consequences that come from jumping the gun. I do not play a young man's game, my friends, and I am happy to report that particular storm has now passed, though I'm sure others will certainly follow suit, because our very human ups-and-downs are the stuff of life itself.

Curtain and window in mid-morning light.

"Bienvenue" to you, new to this here and now.
Welcome to the light that's always been.

Baby Genius

"Look, Mommy! I can read!"

My oldest brother James was a baby genius, and he knew it. We all knew it. We taught ourselves to read to entertain ourselves during those long, tense quiet silences that fall over unhappy households, each family member in their own room (if they had one to retreat to, though privacy was always violated as needed, for leverage in yet another battle or war), after our parents fully checked out of their difficult marriage in these half-hearted attempts to solve the problems they have yet to fully resolve, in all the usual ways that adults do. And so it went: need to cook a gourmet meal? Oh, that what those books are for! You can read, can't you? 

Taunts, jeers, mocking tones, and much nasty teasing followed, and that was just when we were kids. Same with making a Halloween costume, or throwing a baseball well, or any of the other gazillion things that those pesky creatures called "kids" need to know, or at least want their parents to pass on to them, so they can spend some time with them. And so we did it, each and every one of us. Not one person in my family is a professional writer, reader, designer, artist, photographer, publisher, singer, dancer, martial artist, athlete, yogi, healer, counselor, therapist, master chef, mother, leader, public speaker, archivist, researcher, librarian, linguist, communicator, innovator, technologist, or naturalist except me, and so I became all those things, and so much more, because I had to.

"Here, you take him. He's too heavy for me to carry. My back hurts."

Schools stopped regular, standardized IQ testing in the 70s because it supposedly "hurt" the other children's self-esteem, but that's pure bullshit. They needed the bright kids to pull up the ratings for the rest of the class, and so I was docked in a senior year at high school that went very bad for me very quickly, because it was supposed to do just that out of envy and spite (so I wouldn't beat my mom graduating at 16, thus debunking her as the make-believe family intellectual), even though my oldest brother's last official IQ test in the public school system topped at 146. At 16, I already had college credits and all my high school requirements met. That book-reading served us well throughout our rough childhood years, when we were left to our own devices, so much so, that every decent professional I've related to has told me so, to my face: my parents are lucky we're not dead, because we should be, and several times over, each and every one of us.

And so, when I looked through a pack of old photos that were supposedly sorted by my mom specifically for me to have (more on that some other time), I found nothing organized into neat categories, but then, I never needed her to do that, did I? Instead I found more evidence in this ridiculous farce of an ongoing trial within my family that requires even more truth, and that's in just one photo of the two that I post here: that of a very sweet and very adorable, chubby-cheeked, little baby genius we called "Jimmy", reading to himself as my mom shoved food into her mouth, oblivious or simply spiteful to his needs, because he can.

We all can.

Magic

A horror show. No, not a fake movie: the real deal.

Every year my aunt Marilyn gave us the worst gifts should could get away with, and that was the point. She had responsibilities an an adult she hated. She gave one son to her mother to take care of, then left her daughter by another father to drugs, jail, and prostitution, hiding behind the falsely fretting, hand-wringing, long-suffering mother posture. It was sneaky and clever, which was also the point. She wanted to be seen as devilishly smart, like the thief who can't get caught, locked in a childish game of cat and mouse with life that included the people around her who were closest to her. She had a wild teenage past, complete with bad tattoos and a stint as a Go-Go dancer, with lurid white vinyl boots and the also-requisite bad attitude that fell flat with the laissez-faire Acadians in her clan, pragmatic and slow to anger, every single one of us. Wayward youth? So what! Same, man! And ain't that the world we were dealt? Ho hum.

In response to our sangfroid demeanor, she upped the ante to get the attention she wanted. And so, she embarked on a career as a petty antagonist, with her barbs and pat, trite, oft-repeated quips, her rapid-fire, snappy replies, and her nearly constant smoking and drinking. It still didn't really bother us, though, because we love a raucous bon temp, too! What's next? She had a genius IQ that she hid out of laziness and spite, choosing to become my father's ever-dependent. When she lost a job, he had her go to a bank (my dad started in business as a banker), where they promptly sent her to a facility for IQ testing, which, unfortunately for her schemes, came back genius level. They told my dad that she could do whatever she wanted, but that she chose not to. She could have any job at the bank, but she chose the easiest one of all: a teller. She liked being easy, and that's what she did, over and over again, in full view of us.

It was the same with our so-called "Christmas gifts", or birthday presents, or school graduations, or weddings, or...you get the point. She had to make an appearance to save face by honoring her benefactor's kids (my father), but how best to subtly show her disdain? Aha! Tacky presents. Eureka! It wasn't something you could necessarily prove in a court of law, but it delivered the intended bad effects upon the recipient, with just the right amount of bitchy, clever pettiness, the exact affect she wanted.

And so it went, the same bad joke every year: ugly wool sweaters that immediately caused our skin to itch, which my mom backed up by forcing us to wear in front of her as a "thank you" that was really a "fuck you" without the gesture or words to prove it. Huh. Clever, girl. 
If the scariest horror movie that year was an evil puppet gone psycho, she sat there at the table, smoking and listening to us talk about it, so she could buy a ventriloquist dummy for me that she could pass off as a beloved relic from her youth: "Oh, Mortimer Snerd! I loved him!", from a show none of us kids had ever heard of. She laughed when I said it gave me the heebie jeebies at night (because that was the point), so I simply solved the problem by putting it in the back of my small bedroom closet with a blanket over it. Done. It went away eventually at a garage sale, just like her pin cushion that was the shape of a Victorian woman's expensively shod foot, knowing that I didn't sew regularly as a hobby, because I had so many others that she could openly ignore.

She pretended not to know me, just like she neglected the birth connection she shared with her offspring. We were disposable, and she remained angry that she was never center stage until the day she died from a slow suicide of cigarettes and alcohol, refusing until the very last day she struggled for breath on this earth, choking on the kitchen floor of the house my father bought then gave to her after he moved on, refusing to quit her bad habits even after the diagnosis was delivered with an oxygen tank for her to breathe with, and oh, the horror of that, forever depriving us of someone who could be the funniest, warmest soul you ever met, delivering a big loss we all keenly felt, the power of her final hurt put upon us for the rest of our lives. 

Long may she rest in the peace she never found nor gave to those she was supposed to love the most and hold onto the hardest. She was my father's only sibling in the world, a man who paid dearly for her every sin with generosity and faithfulness without ever getting the genuine, heartfelt "thank you" he deserved for his consistent, regular attendance and filial duty to her, by leaving him alone in a world he chose to excel in, because he chose to live. 

Amen to you, my faithful who are also "The Faithful", during this time that is our continued Holy Week.
 

A horror show in a box cleverly disguised as a "gift".

Happy Birthday to Me

When I was growing up, birthdays were rare breaks from my very strict norm. It was the one day (read that again: ONE DAY) of the year when I was allowed to choose what we had for dinner as a family, and what kind of cake would be served as dessert. As I got older (say, around 7 or 8 years old), birthdays became trading opportunities for my brothers to petition me with (ahem, more like, try to strong arm me into), by giving up my birthday dinner for money. If I switched out my usual spaghetti and meatball dinner with something more palatable to them, ("So boring! You pick the same thing every year!"), something they preferred, like spare ribs, they'd give me an extra $10 or $20 bucks for my birthday, which was really money for the Christmas gifts I'd spend for them, and they knew it, because it came up quickly on the heels of December 17th. Everything in our household was up for negotiation: my birthday, my gifts, my privacy, my body, even the food I waited all year to have free from strife, or so I thought. 

We were desperate for these few scant "outs" from our daily lives, which my parents could not tolerate as well, because they bartered between each other over just about everything, like a couple of spoiled and highly deprived children. It was excruciating to endure and bear witness to, and so, birthdays lost their luster eventually, too, just like everything else in that house did, quickly becoming another day to me, and a very abusive one that was rife with potential conflict at that. In short, I grew up, even when the people around me couldn't or wouldn't, stuck on just one speed or another. You want my cake that badly? Sure, take it, I guess. I mean, what the fuck?! It's readily available food! What gives? They became greedy, grasping, rabid animals in the face of this one freedom we had among the crushing grinding reality of our day-to-day life that my parents so hated. So, as I matured, it went: first, it was my simple chocolate cake with whipped cream and canned peaches that my grandmother had perfected over the years, next it was my humble pasta dinner so that I could have money to buy the few things I wanted, needed or liked. In short, I became a mother, as the people around me began pushing and pulling against one another after I caved into their stronger desires. 

At the end of the day, it was just a spaghetti and meatball dinner, covered with tomato sauce and coated with grated cheese on top. Shit, I could make that any time I wanted to, with some advanced planning. I was already a master chef by age ten, absorbing and inhaling my mom's few scant cookbooks in the pantry, because she considered cooking a plebeian chore for lesser minds, far beneath her "advance degrees in science" kind of mind, a skewed and warped view of her "feminism" loudly pronounced through a wedding gift titled  "The 'I Hate to Cook' Cookbook" that sat on the pantry shelf in accusation. It spoke to her desperation for some kind of legitimacy, one that she would never really be able to achieve on her own, given the problems inherent with her brain chemistry. She wasn't bashing against oppression. She came up against her own inequities, and creative cooking was just another one of her shortcomings that she cleverly hid, saying that baking was more precise and to her liking, because the measurements were like her lab concoctions at work, which were so much more important than us and our dinnertime. 

And so it went throughout the years, as I watched these days ripped away from me one by one in a type of silent horror show, like the throwaway milestones they had become to my family. First, it was the food I liked, then my gifts were traded for money given grudgingly, shoved at me from across the kitchen table, or thrust hastily into my hand as we passed each other by in the hallway, on my way to my childhood bedroom. My supposedly big adult years became birthday bashes they could use to manipulate one another with, and also use against me to dominate me with their far more pressingly petty needs. I knew it went haywire one year, when I found myself eating grossly over-sweetened cake that I did not like nor want, in my grandmother's overheated apartment, that I grew sick over with a painful food headache from yet another forced ingestion that had to take place in front of my very sick godmother, to placate her mental illnesses through her viciously depraved sweet tooth that she angrily substituted over actual medication, in tribute to her before I was finally allowed to reach my intended destination of a Sushi dinner my sick mother paid for with her birthday coupon, which she promptly screwed up by falling down on a slight sidewalk incline to the restaurant the moment I was distracted by opening the door for her in the bitter cold night. 

Whenever I folded in family, they ruined it gleefully and spitefully, right in front of my face. My brothers took away my 40th from me cruelly as well, co-opting the play I wanted to see with one of their selections instead, picking the restaurant and meeting place, booking a hotel for their families' comfort and enjoyment by pushing me into a forced engagement that I hated every minute of, culminating in my nephew taking and eating the birthday cake right off my plate in front of them without bothering to ask anyone about, that they pretended to ignore. In families with rampantly untreated mental illnesses, I was simply another pawn they tried to pass around abusively, as a covert excuse to hide their real intentions. Such was force of their hatred against me.

The next morning after that 40th birthday debacle, I found myself sick and throwing up into a tote-bag that I had bought from a breast cancer charity in honor of my cousin's successful battle against Stage Four Lymphoma (I bought her one for Christmas, too): on the subway, and in full view of fellow passengers, because I no longer drank as much alcohol as my family did anymore (I was well into MMA training at the time), stumbling through a full-blown snowstorm, stopping to heave in big gulps of cold air so as to not get sick again in public, desiring only to climb four flights up a rundown Brooklyn townhouse to an apartment I could barely afford but made due with through my salary by finding a rare rent stabilized place in a good, safe neighborhood. 

I knew something had to give, and that something was me, because they would kill me if I allowed this to go on. Certainly, they had bankrupted me until I had nothing left except myself to give. And so it went on: over these preceding next few years, I fought battle after battle with everyone in my family, as they deliberately turned their backs on me one by one, during my time of greatest economic need (which had never happened of such duration and acuteness before), to finally, in this year, achieve the real success my family has always needed. How did I do it? By allowing them to bash me bloody, body and soul, pushing my body and brain to its' limits, to achieve the actualized success of a self-sustaining kind, the type my people have always needed, by becoming a leader who is a force to be reckoned with, and on to the destiny I have always been fated to be, recounted here as a Queens' true life tale about the real Game of Thrones.

This year I will order food that I want, off the menu of a female warrior who runs her very own kitchen, cooking her very own type of food, in this town we call home, paid through blood, sweat, and tears covertly disguised as a paltry birthday lunch on my mother's dime, long overdue and sorely lacking. Finally on this day, our day has come. And so as my birthday approaches, so does our day together. As a united people, we will move forward through the power of a forceful realization felt in my body and soul, a queen to be linked and joined to her destiny at long at last. Enjoy this 17th day in winter in remembrance of me and on the house, to be always paid by me through The House of Doucette. Long may we reign, in peace and in victory. Amen to you, my children, from your ever-loving Mother in Christ, who is also Marie the Beautiful, Marie the Strong, Marie the Brave, and Marie the Brilliant, the very words you spoke near me to invoke the spirit that will be here forevermore. We have won. The fruits of my success will be yours to savor eternally ever after, on this 45th birthday of mine in the year of Our Lord 2014, the 17th day of December will forever and always be known as my true Mother's Day because it is for you, my people.

My 39th birthday at my grandmothers' house, December 17th, 2008. I made a minor typo in the photo caption when I posted it on Facebook back in 2008, which was immediately pointed out to me in typical "clever" hipster fashion as an error, unsolicited as it was by a older and supposedly more powerful man from my employed publishing past.

The Grasshopper

Grasshopper at dawn.

When I was growing up, my parents repeated a handful of fables to us as moral lessons routinely, but my father more than most. He loves slogans, sayings, homilies, quotes, and clichés, so much so, he puts his favorite ones on mugs, plaques, t-shirts, whatever.

But no matter how many times he repeated the story of the grasshopper and the ant, the moral of the story was always the same: be like the ant, not the grasshopper. It became so well-worn with time, that now all he has to do is repeat the shorthand version of it, as we say it back to him with our eyes rolling: "Be the ant, not the grasshopper." That's training for you!

And, of course, I took to children's literature like a future publisher takes to books, which means I absorbed it like it was my second skin, so tightly woven with my own personal history, that it has become intertwined with the fabric of who I am through the daily practice of it.

Grasshopper in morning light.

Now, as it grows colder and darker, the fruits of our labor take on even greater importance. Those of us from northern climates know that particularly, down to our very DNA: work hard, because winter is coming. Our animals fatten up every August and September, because that's exactly what every snow dog I've ever had does instinctively.

It was just one of the many things I thought about this morning when I first saw this lingering grasshopper in the dark light of dawn, because I was already up at 6:30 a.m., (before the alarm I set the night prior goes off, because I've trained myself to do that, so as not to disturb the rest of the household), placing our county receptacles by the curb for recycling pick up. Work, work, work, and then work some more, and always give back. That's what real communities do to make it through the tough times. À bientôt!
   

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ant_and_the_Grasshopper

 

Strip Mall Cemetery

A liquor store parking lot, and a journey back through time.

I've noticed this lot ever since I moved back up to Rockland County, after many years away. Last winter, I began walking to town, first from my mother's place, then closer to town on my own. It's a little cemetery squeezed in between two shopping lots, a place of history that pops out in contrast to the bland surroundings. But the headstones weren't the only thing that attracted my notice. A lot of loud-mouthed, raucous crows squawked at me whenever I walked to the grocery store, cutting across one parking lot to the next.

Who are they?

I'm no stranger to the bird of my Corvus line, an ancestry of Norman, French Swiss, and Irish, who take their heraldic symbol from the large black crow. Whenever I cawed back at them, they answered me every single time, being the excellent and highly intelligent mimics that they are. The names on the stones read Bogert (http://books.google.com/books?id=WdwNExWb7_QC&pg=PA42&lpg=PA42&dq=Jan+Bogert+New+York&source=bl&ots=aNFCMqTdtM&sig=5YRC7DNAO9ON14cu-meztwUv8nw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6FNBVMi-LajlsATNs4Eo&ved=0CEYQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=Jan%20Bogert%20New%20York&f=fals), a family that I thought could be remnants of the old French Huguenots who sailed down the Hudson from Canada, looking for lumber and good farming, which is something this river valley has always had in abundance.

A historical marker: hidden, but also in plain sight.

Since then, I've read excerpts about the Bogerts (www.mytrees.com/ancestry/New-York/Died-1707/Bo/Bogert-family/Jan-Bogert-an001161-302.html), a prominent New York Dutch family who changed their name immediately upon arrival in New Amsterdam, when they began buying land in large parcels. 

A noisy family of crows circled overhead, whenever I came near.

And just like so much in my life, a seemingly random gaggle of circling, noisy black birds led me back in time to a place of big mythological significance to me, because not only am I heir to the oldest Métis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tis) and Acadian roots of this New World, but I am also a descendant of the very first Dutch and British families, too.

Cemetery in wintertime.

Such is the nature of inheritance, in this Autumn time when the old spirits and the new mingle in the air over cemeteries from times long past, beckoning to me again and again, by no mere accident or quirk of chance. That's the power of fate.

Ah, yes. This is no accident or random event.

When our local historian, who is also one of our librarians, told me that the old Bogert farm was near a large well and the encampments of two Indian tribes, I had to smile because deep down, I already knew it. I felt it in my bones, just as the crows called it out to me showily, heralding aloud that I had arrived safely home, from travels near and far, surviving adventures both small and frightful, big and powerful, dangerous and heady, just like my ancestors had.  I'm back, and I'm ready to share my story with all of you. 

Marker I.

Marker II.

The Peregrine Falcon

A predator sits in the playground.

Yesterday, on my way to the library, I noticed a man standing in the street next to his red car. He stood out further by turning his head and pointing towards the playground, and there it was perched atop the swing-set: this stunning and very large bird of prey. I immediately crossed the street to get a better look at it, and another woman was taking pictures on the sidewalk with her handicapped son. I said out loud that I thought it was a Peregrine Falcon as I walked towards it, and today's quick research on the Internet proved me correct. I took a few photos of it through the chain link fence, being careful not to disturb it with any sudden movements, or act aggressive towards it in any way, when it opened it's huge wingspan and flew across the street, right in front of me. I thought it was one of the coolest things I'd ever seen, as I cheered aloud for it! YEAH!! 

The hunter in its' perch across the street.

The large hunter looked at me from it's new heights in the tall tree, which is a very smart, safe thing for a falcon to do, when humans have clustered around it pointing objects. It looked right at me, and squatted. I thought it was poised for another take off, but it lowered its' head into it's chest while staring at me with its' large eyes, lifted its' tail, and poured out a thick stream of watery white excrement to ward me off from getting any closer. Message received and understood. 
I have the utmost respect for beautiful predators, because they live hard, brutal lives, but this one even more so than usual, because we almost lost it several years back. The return of the Peregrine Falcon is a major victory for us as a people. It was almost extinct along the eastern seaboard, and its' return is a major event for us all. 

Welcome back to your territory, Brother Bird.

May the hunting here be to your liking.

http://www.newburyportnews.com/news/local_news/article_b41d2f22-c61f-57a8-9c39-d1211017a3dd.html

A Tale of Two Kitties

The bird hunter at his afternoon post.

I noticed early on that a certain tomcat living on the second floor of a particular old house in a small Hudson River town likes to watch small sparrows cavorting among two large bushes planted in the front yard. 
I loved his hunters' intensity, watching his little head spin around to catch the birds' quick-flighted movements. Does he see me? 
I catcalled out to him from the lawn, waving my hands around. Yes, there's his head moving my way. He definitely sees me. Nice as the cat is, he didn't interest me much. I'm the type who prefers a furry snow dog by my side, but C'est la vie. I love animals, especially cute lil' house pets.

Tomcat on his windowsill. Wait, is that another cat?!

Then, one day....there she was! A second shyer kitty, hiding behind the smaller boy cat at his hunting post on the windowsill. She was harder to attract with my calls for attention, but I finally got her to look at me before she left for the quiet corners of the apartment she shares with her Tomcat. My neighbor told me their story one dark night while I watched the sun set, under the decorative eaves on the lit porch. 
They are indeed brother and sister like I thought, two rescue kitties that were part of an abandoned litter his friend found in a cardboard box by the side of the road. At first he collected one, then he went back for the sibling, and I'm glad he did. They form a perfect match set: he, the smaller wiry hunter; she, the quiet but bigger, gentler girl.

 

Oh! I see a second kitty! Looks like the girl sister!

We talked about a lot of things that night, touching on subjects lightly and quickly, like people born to the same clan. And just like my innate sense about animals, so are my gut instincts about humans: his people also come from Maritime Canada, off an island called Newfoundland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newfoundland_%28island%29), 
like my Acadie (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_Scotia). How did I know? 
By their names, Cassidy and Evangeline. 


Read it here: http://www.bartleby.com/42/791.html.

Bart Discovers MMA

Forgotten at school, again.

"Where's your brother?"

Uh oh. Police Mom Marge is here.

Bart's caught fighting in the playground...

...with Homer's support. Ooops.

So Marge takes on the head of a fight league in order to protest violence, and its effect on kids...

...and kicks his ass. Margie likey!

But, what effect does it have on little Lisa and her brother Bart?

A new generation of fighters! Tune in to the very end to see who wins.

Dedicated to me and my bro Bernie, fighting since we were babies in the late 60s, now celebrating a great sport that finally matches the dreams (and scuffles) of our youth. Special "shout out" to all you "crazy" kids and silly, little dreamers. Here. We. Go.

Sweet Cherries

My life, in a bag of cherries: 
bilingual, Oneontan, sweet, and always in season.

Religious Signs, and Other $ Matters

Jesus and Mary, Co-Pilots in Suburbia.

Oh. This Acadian will keep her money, then.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acadians

I have the mug!

I wonder what I'll be when I grow up? So hard to know....

People love all sorts of folksy shit that I don't necessarily have time 
for, because it's excessively repetitive to someone like me. I know coaches who base their entire careers on delivering these neat little quips in the form of cutesy quotations (usually ripped off from
someone way more famous), and I don't specifically have a problem with sayings, except that I've heard them all my life. Why, you say? 
I'm so glad you asked! 

Oh, that's right! I have the fucking mug! Every damn day, people.

My dad programmed us (some would use the nicer word "trained"), like we were an elite military unit, and, look at that! Fast forward some 40 years, and here we are: leaders, all. So it's not that I personally find you distasteful, though if you try to cram too much of your crap down my throat, I will get angry (trust on that), it's just that I really don't need your fucking input at this particular point in time, because if I do, I will ask the questions I want to to get the answers I need. How do I know? I have the mug. 

Look! Here's a plaque my dad sent me with a quote on it.

p.s. - Yes, that's me in the morning, and yes, I am aware that shot is a bit overexposed (but that's not the point of that picture), and no, I am not wearing any makeup, because that's me having my morning cup of coffee (and no, I don't need makeup to drinking a fucking cup of coffee at home, alone), and yes, I am 44, and no, I have never had plastic surgery or used Botox, because (and this is important), I am a fucking working class New York girl. Get it together, ho. You're pissing me right the fuck off, and if you don't like it, then wear sunblock, bitch.