Charlie Brown Christmas Tree

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Charlie_Brown_Christmas

One of my favorite "poverty stories" from my mom centered around my Norman Irish/French-Swiss (from Alsace-Lorraine) grandfather's Christmas Eve tippling. He "slaved like an African" as he used to say, underneath the ground in New York City's dirtiest environments, just to make sure other families were provided for, even while he worked to make up the difference to his own, as is customary among first generation immigrant families establishing a strong foothold in a new land, which is exactly what my ancestors have always done. I've always taken an enormous amount of pride from my previous generations accomplishments, and this charming lapse in my grandfather's customary tight rein upon his family freed me more than he could guess, though I suspect he knew the outlets that I needed, because he needed them, too. After all, he raised my mother.

You see, parents of seriously disordered family members (and children made parents before their time) need an extraordinary amount of strength to break through the addictions, compulsions, tics, and nervous disorders of the people they care for, in order to provide for them, but that doesn't mean they always appreciate it. My mom regularly panics when she's confronted with the severity of her illnesses, threatening the most serious hurt and abuses she feels she can deliver upon the heads of the very people who care for her the most. Like every high-performing person before me, the stress of caring for the sick and infirm is an extreme life condition to bear up under, one that's greatly relieved at times by the tempered mellowness of a good stiff drink, and an Irish one at that.

My grandfather kept a good bottle of strong Irish whiskey on hand at our house at all times, for those times when he needed relief from the very people who were most dependent upon him at the time of my growing up, which was my youngest aunt and grandmother. I always felt an enormous amount of empathy towards him, as he taught us in our home about the merits of a great crystal glass (also an Irish tradition), and the grace of a "good pour" to deliver the optimal amount of pleasure from a single glass of excellently-brewed malt savored in a hard-won peace, safely apart as we were at those times from the more wild extremes of our extended family. People like us, who are always in charge under penalty of death or serious hurt to a loved one for our slight lapses in their consistent care, learned early on to cherish the finer things in life like those that simple, well-done crafts provide for us.

It was no different for me. When I was forced by economic brutalities visited upon me through a careful network of systems I didn't design (hence the corrupt injustice of it all) to live with my mother for a time, 
I drained every drop of alcohol in her place. Even my mom's Italian relatives who have no real stomach or palate for drink took part in a relieving glass in the evening, needed as it was after a grueling day in the life of Diane. I found a stash of plastic-bottled whiskey my brother hid in the back of her pantry many years ago (and drained it dry with my mom's visiting cousin from Texas who always stays for free on her couch), an old weird bottle of homemade strawberry wine brought over years ago by an equally weird friend of hers (and never touched, because my mom and her siblings trained each other to covertly hide their compulsive addictions behind more superficially acceptable forms of release, like shopping and eating), and any other booze I could find, because life with the seriously sick is one hell of a ride.

So when my mom complained her faint little baby complaints about my grandfather's evening tippling bought with the scant extra he had leftover from a holiday paycheck that was spent all year in the planning of its expense carefully (just like I do, with every penny accounted for correctly in my tight household), doled out as it was among her and her siblings first, because they whined so much about this mythical "deprivation" of theirs that they suffered with, I admired the restraint and the courage that it took to channel all of his energy towards moving this family forward, even if it skipped a generation or two. So what if he got drunk off his holiday pay? What did any of them do around him (except for my loving grandmother) but bitch and moan about their phantom complaints brought on by the delusions of their own fevered minds, distorted as they were about his true priorities that were sound (in me), and have withstood the test of time.

So what if he only had enough leftover to buy the last Christmas tree on the lot, and often a small sparse one at that? When my mom and me and my middle brother recovered enough financially to become a family unit again, one of our first acts as a newly divorced family was to fly as a group to visit my violently out-of-place New York brother adrift in the blandly white Midwest, to celebrate Christmas together again as a family. We giggled as we gathered around his little apartment tree, happily surprised and pleased with ourselves for pulling off the impossible by becoming a family again, against all the odds in every book there is. That's what I think about when I think about my Christmases past: how incredibly lucky and blessed I am to be alive and with you all, in this miraculous century of miracles and light. 
Merry Christmas to you, in 2015. See you soon.

The Doll's Wig

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisque_doll

One of my parent's favorite party tricks is retelling their supposedly impoverished childhoods that never really bore up to reality, and how could it? All of my grandparent's provided for their children excellently (and their children's children) for well beyond their years, every one of them going on to college, with the exception of my dad's sister Marilyn, who became an unwed mother and proud Go-Go dancer. Not exactly stellar, but what did they expect? American assimilation was rough for our poorly educated great-grandparents who were "fresh off the boat", back in the days when it was a truly rough ride indeed. My grandparents coped with an economic depression so profound it's infamous worldwide, with parents who may or may not choose to work again, because they couldn't read, write, or speak English.

It made the mundane and middle-class financial deprivations of my parents seem ridiculous in comparison to them and us, which they are. My parents came off the big economic boom that war always seems to bring to winning societies, without them ever really confronting hunger, starvation, or death, except when they did stupidly reckless things with their lives, which they sometimes still do. They were (are) like children to us, and that's how I treat(ed) their woes: like the children of privilege that I know them to really be, because without my grandparents and me, they'd be dead, something they can admit to when they are feeling satisfied, generous, and well-fed, which is all the time.

And so it came as no surprise to me and my brothers when my parents always lined their pockets plushly to over-filling first, questing to fill needs that are much more psychologically-based than true-to-life, severe as their disabilities can be at times. They pout, throw tantrums, threaten, intimidate, harass; they do everything short of murder, and on some days, I could see them in both of those roles, too. My dad used to tell me brief stories about his "Greaser" adolescence in Brooklyn that ended when his best friend was electrocuted for murder, forcing my grandmother to ship him off to the Navy, like she'd sent her husband to war many years ago.

Next to my father's unmarried mother "living-in-sin" and a missing alcoholic for a dad, my mom must have felt performance pressure keenly. And so she mined her roots for scenes that she could use during their resource-based arguments, like two children fighting over a bag of candy. The unfortunate effect for us caught in the middle was always the same result, though: there was way less available for us, and that's exactly what happened as a result of my mom's poverty stories. She told us that they were so poor, that one year the only thing she got for Christmas was a doll's wig for her old doll, and that was it. She used it to justify her tight pocket for each and every year that we presented our Christmas wish lists.

Of course, she neglected to tell me that it was probably one of the finest wig's money could buy, from a store that my grandmother must have pinched pennies to please her bourgeois daughter with the unreasonably pretentious airs, but that was the price my grandparents paid for a fancy parochial school education. They figured it was worth the price if even one of their disordered kids could get a job after college, and it panned out, like all of my grandparents really good plans do, and just like mine do. After all, I learned from the best. 
Life for us is a world of plenty.

Sugar Monkey

I've had a sick mother all my life, but she will deny it almost every time you ask her about it, except on those days when she chooses to be agreeable about it, and that's about the best way to describe it, in a nutshell. When I was little, her back hurt too much to carry me, after years of toting my much bigger and older brothers around, so she told all of us that she had a "bad back" with perhaps an early onset of arthritis. After that, she made a big deal about lying down in total quiet and darkness ("I must lie prone and still for awhile in utter darkness and silence. Thank you...": cue whispered sick voice), and if anything dared disturb her during resting time periods, she became imperious and abusive, like a mythical princess complaining about feeling a pea under several mattresses, which wasn't far off from her off-Broadway version.

She made my dad put a wooden board under their mattress that was already super hard or "orthopedic", because my mom loves to use medical-sounding words to describe her psychic pains. If we dared wake her up in the middle of night with our bad dreams, she sprang up like a vampire roused out of it's coffin before nightfall, gasping for breath and completely cold. She told us we couldn't move the bed at all, because every "jar" we made gave her excruciating pains to her lower back. When she really did break her back by her continued insistence on tennis lessons after her MS diagnosis (my mom has never been an athlete ever, but she'll lie about that most days, too), she told us that she had to lay perfectly still to get a good nights sleep.

And so it went. When my paternal grandmother took ill during a visit to our house, my mom took the opportunity to play out a hysteric scene that included dramatically folding like crumpled paper and dropping to the hospital floor in pain, even though she wasn't the one dying. "That's when my MS 'kicked in'"!" she likes to tell people, blaming my dead grandmother for her still undiagnosed illness. 

After the gift of MS was given to her, anything and everything became an excuse to cover her tracks, ones that often lead her to describe her self-prescribed "issues" with someone else as the source of all of her angst, aches, and pains besides herself. When I got laid off, she used me as the primary target for her "depression", so she could get an anti-depressive prescription from her neurologist in the city.

Because I can accurately construct a real timeline for just about anything, she dumped me from doctor duty because I was hip to her game. Her and her weirdo sisters do crazy shit like take limo rides to see a "specialist" in the city, but they'd ignore you being homeless at their feet, just like her phony church lady sister who uses the church to fill in her dull, lifeless schedule. She'll tell you she's religious, but she's just mouthing the words. My mother is tricky, though, because even if she's "crying wolf", she may actually be hurt, but she wants to parlay it into another type of scenario over healing quickly, because that would rob her of stringing it out into series of soap opera-like vignettes that she can fill in her time with, too. She's told me to my face that she likes to visit "quacks" because she has this delusional idea that she can "Jedi mind-trick" them into giving her any type of pills she wants.

My mom absolutely loves hoarding medicine and papers, too, which makes it visually easy for me to assess exactly where her head is at. Because she has a background as a lab technician, she's savvy enough to work a con game that includes official-sounding language to mask her real symptoms, and she thinks she's really good at it, but not with me. She does genuinely have a lot of disorders, and those I take very seriously. Right now she has really bad mouth pain that she calls "Neuralgia", which may or may not be related to MS nerve damage, but she's had it for years even though she can't quite remember. I took her to a few dentists in exploration of her condition with no solutions, thus giving her a great excuse to go into full-on "Princess mode" by booking a fancy car and whisking away into the city for a glamorous turn with a pricey doctor (hopefully handsome, too, so she can visit him many times over) at a certain university she used to work at many years ago, giving her the proper amount of attention she feels she deserves.

Ditto with her diet. She and her siblings all have eating disorders (which they call "food issues"), like they're at a dainty, white-gloved tea party for debutantes only. It's insane because they all have such a thick lowbrow Bronx accents that people outside of the tri-state area can't understand them when they speak. They're the ultimate provincials with arrogant "bougie" ways, a striking contrast between their continued, ongoing ill health and a certain glowing girl who was made to do chores for them all of her life, because they don't have time with their "busy schedules". It's insanely ridiculous, because they're basically office workers, with the soft stubby bodies to prove it. 
My mom has almost no muscle whatsoever at times, making her extremely prone to back-breaking falls, until we forced her into a regular schedule of PT/OT that she's since become accustomed to, though at first she treated her healthcare professional like a manicurist she could wave away when she didn't feel like it.

Of course, I found an expert therapist who also uses her training in clinical psychology with the elderly to work my mom (she mistakenly dropped the info that I have to remind her about during one particularly grueling circular argument she was desperate to win against me), because my mom likes to threaten to throw people into mental institutions if they don't follow her commands. It's a childish game of "I know you are, but what am I" that continues until her stress has been released through the heightened, angry confrontation (like a toddler does when tired), immediately forgotten after she gets her chemical payoff from her angst, which is followed by an equally nuts game of "I have no idea what you're talking about", milking the doddering senior act for all its worth, because she got caught making threats again.

Then, her head droops onto on her chest, falling asleep while you're speaking to her in mid-sentence, in complete opposition to her awkward hyper-vigilant tenseness a mere minute or so ago. If anyone dares to suggest to her that she should take a nap, or notices how weird it is for her to tune out the way she does in the middle of a conversation, she snaps to her next compulsive routine that centers around tea. You see, my mom has also been a sugar addict all of her life. I'm sure it's fun as heck for her healthcare team to deal with. When I told her this past weekend that she was "my sugar monkey", she laughed delightedly at it, like it was a game of truth-or-dare for her to win, which is so fucking odd, because I've known her all my life. She wakes up to several strong cups of coffee with sugar, and continues her hard usage throughout the day, using our Irish tea tradition to cover up her over-ingestion of cookies, cakes, crackers, and pie.

Anyone who dares to mention her nod-offs to her gets the ole MS-related excuse (which could actually be true, if she's between her doses), or her exhaustion from metal distress (uh uh...we've given my mom a very easy life compared to ours), or it's simply because she's getting older. Some of it may be true, some of it may be her delusional fantasies, or some combination of both. I've never met a better liar than my mom. Even the hardcore drug and alcohol junkies in my family lie weaker than her, so good and practiced she is at it, though with her type of checking out, I'm not sure if she knows. Recent studies have shown what we've always known to be true, that treetop monkeys eat a leaner type of diet that lends them a calmness denied to their bottom-feeding fruit-eating monkeys as the epitome of over-aggression, fighting with their band of monkeys throughout the day. Guess which one you are, mom? Guess which one your special little monkey is? "Oo oo"! 

It's not a problem for me, though. I know her better than anyone, because I've taken care of her the longest. It's okay: I'll grab you the best fruit from the top of the tree, mama. Ain't never gonna let you go down on my watch. Just remember: "fructose is sugar, too", Dr. Diane and have at it, my lil "Sugar Monkey"! Here's that recent data we talked about this past weekend, while you ate pie in the middle of the day that would have given me an instantly vicious headache (http://bit.ly/1SuPkTG). I just talked and watched and waited on her as she ate, salvaging some cheese crackers from her pantry (she keeps anywhere from 6-12 boxes on hand, because "they're all different"). By the way, did you notice you didn't get the healthier turkey leftovers? 

They gave you some of the desserts, and someone was rude enough to cram different pie types of top of each other in an angry rush (like women who diet compulsively do), in a rude gesture that said you aren't even worth the time it takes to separate desserts carefully into sections, just sloppily crammed on top of one another, in shame and haste. I saw that, too. And that cherry had no flavor, the one I picked out of the pie tin to taste while you ate slices of coconut cream pie. 

It was the strangest thing, given how much your family protests to be "foodies", isn't it? That pie had no absolutely no cherry flavor at all....it was just one dull sweet note with no flavor, like the kind of food served in hell, cruelly robbed of any taste as a punishment for someone who suffers from, say, gluttony as a vice. Odd, don't you think? 

http://orthomolecular.org/library/articles/webach.shtml

http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2015/01/07/sugar-health-research

http://abc13.com/health/study-sugar-is-as-addictive-as-cocaine/533979/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/

Wild Turkey

"Wild Turkey Walking" by Wing-Chi Poon - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wild_Turkey_Walking.jpg#/media/File:Wild_Turkey_Walking.jpg

It's hard for me to describe my parents to friends and acquaintances. How to tell them that, entertaining as they may seem, these were the young people who were supposed to comfort me after school with a big warm hug and cookies with milk? "Ohhhmigoshhh...", as that dawning recognition spreads over their faces, I know I freaked out my new friend with that particular little exercise. Puts it in a whole new perspective, right? Exactly. And so I began a tradition of prep work before any family interaction, or, if this friend of mine is also a little dense or arrogant, I may toss them into it fresh, with no lube (as they say).

My dad lives in a place so extreme, that the people who live there ask me and my friends the same question every time we pop up there, like celebrities from outer space just there for their intense scrutiny: what do we think of West Texas? The same question, every single time, from people who see Rockefeller Center and other famous things only on t.v. What do you think we think?! It's weird, and it's the complete opposite of our reality as native New Yorkers. I turned the tables on my dad's liquored up friends the last time I visited him on Thanksgiving, by revealing the deep dark secret that my father and stepmother are actually New Yorkers (!!!), and that my dad actually gave birth to his kids while living there! That really threw them for a loop. I then asked them how they felt about New York City when they visited, to watch them squirm uncomfortably in their chairs this time, thrown as we were together from holiday invitations given out in desperation, rather than any type of familial loyalty.

On that visit, I gave my cousin a breast cancer tote bag that I bought for her, in support of her while she battled Stage Four lymphatic cancer (during which my dad frequently called me for advice), and she gave me her warm thanks, which is more than I usually get, strong-armed as I am into getting a two-way ticket to "Nowheresville", but not much else besides the obligatory room-and-board that comes with any hotel stay. My dad's weirdo friends gave my cousin obscene gestures behind her back when she wasn't looking (making her the focal point for their Conservative-fueled righteous indignation), choosing to attack her for being a societal dependent when, in truth, she doesn't choose to be an addict, which is weird coming from my father's mentally ill Vietnam vet friend with the long-term PTSD and his brittle yet openly mannishly aggressive wife. Who the fuck are they anyway? Better than us? They like to pretend New Yorkers are this disease that spreads, while they hide their trauma and sicknesses from full view, choosing instead to use them as weapons in their lives covertly. 

Me? I prefer the honesty behind my cousin's bubbly yet fake persona. Liar that she is ("When do addicts lie?" with the answer: "When they open their mouths", ba-dump bump), but at least I know that she's family. The rest of them try to pat me down for spare change that I don't have, while going on their expensively outfitted Californian pony rides and generically bland cruise vacations. Susan's at least upfront about her needs and what drives her real agenda. Not so with my dad and his crowd, people who buy heavily into the "rich white man game", which means they all pretend to be Conservative Right-Wing Christians* out west for money and job security. "Who's the bigger liar at the table?" is not a game that I like to play.

But, occasionally, when the moon aligns with the rest of the planets just right, we can have a good time, mostly by chance or my doing, or plain ole luck, because my family out west doesn't think I'm worth enough of their time to even plan events that I'd enjoy, open as I am about my lifelong preferences. I know, right? What's to miss?! Sometime our interests overlap, like my love of the outdoors and hiking, because it fits neatly within my dad's conformist "white man" persona, the one who likes to seem like a masculine hunting and fishing guy. And so, one holiday me and my ex (the upstate Indo-European) found ourselves in an old pickup truck following my dad and his family, while he picked up some domesticated animals to dump onto his ranch, because that's about as much as he does for other humans and lifeforms, sometimes. 

You just happen to be part of his schedule, like the delusional diva from "The Met" who thinks the spotlight is always on her. It's creepy, but that's his "Mad Man" generation to a "tee": they use old t.v. shows and movies like they're guidebooks to life, instead of entertainment with the occasional deeper fare thrown in, but mostly likely not, because my dad's wife doesn't "cotton to cussin'", which is part of the homespun act they put on for their new friends far out west, people who don't put together "New York" with "secretary" and "mistress" right away like we do. Wholesome, right? We usually play along with their routines because it's not worth pointing out, which is exactly why me and my ex made fun of my dad all the way from Colorado to New Mexico, about his next harebrained plan for restocking the world with hunted animals (like wild turkeys) on just his corner of the world, hoping that it spreads out from his ranch at the epicenter, so he can take all the credit for it. Professional, n'est-ce pas?

It's not exactly like working for the "Department of the Interior" for the U.S. government, is it? Nope, but that's exactly what he does: he forces his family and friends to witness him buying these poor animals and then releasing them onto his land (and his land only), to often be brutally slaughtered by the predators that live there, even as we tell him that animals migrate, and he doesn't own them or control them in any way, with extremely limited success. He may or may not understand the intent, or it might be him acting out in his delusion of grandeur because he simply doesn't care, so much does he want credit for his bizarre little experiments. It was horrifying actually. Over the years, he released Bighorn Sheep** and other animals without notifying anyone about his intentions, just to play G-d with His Creations.

That's why, over our Thanksgiving break, our dad made us watch him pick up some turkeys he bought to "grow" out at some dirty farm (the horses this farmer had were filthy up to their knees from the mud and feces he kept them penned in), by making us herd Wild turkeys onto his trailer. When we remarked on the unsanitary conditions to him as proof of his uncertain goals (he got caught behaving inappropriately and wastefully again, basically), he assured us that he would report the farmer he'd just paid thousands of dollars to do a job badly to the appropriate authorities, but I highly doubt that happened. We made fun of him with my youngest bro in the second truck all the way down to "his" ranch land (charmingly named "The Flying Asshole"), a place that's off-limits except to him and the county's Game Warden (by law), bumping over the hills and gullies to witness him doing yet another stupid thing that was waste of time and money.

On his signal, we manned the bolts to his trailer, and on the count of "three" we opened the gates to the it, to see a fast flurry of feathers pass briefly before our eyes, before the turkeys did exactly what wild turkeys do, and roost high on the treetops of the only tall trees that exist around there because it's near a pond; atop the ranch's small stand of big Cottonwood trees. For years afterwards, we jokingly asked him if he'd had any signs that they were still alive, and he'd do his "little boy" routine: pout while looking down at his hands, explaining to us one more time that they'd probably been eaten by predators, just like his foolish dreams about the non-native Bighorn sheep that we knew became coyote fodder under his watch, but we still allowed his big public display of making a show about caring for them by hiking us atop "his" mountain (competing with us the whole way uphill), with binoculars to look for them from afar.

He released them to get them killed, because he's too arrogant to consult an expert who'd guide him through it, just like his horse riding "lessons" and during a dozen other really dangerous activities where people in my family (including me) almost died under his watch. So, you can keep Thanksgiving this year, peeps. You can leave me the turkey and the "Indian" boy, though. I know what to do what them. They're the kind of natives I like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_turkey

http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/birds/wild-turkey/

*      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_fundamentalism

 **   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bighorn_sheep