Prologue –

Years ago we (i.e. Halsted and I) amused ourselves with the tales of Neddy the bear. I have always had in the back of my mind the desire to recreate some of those stories for you. I have forgotten them all. So, as an extended wedding gift, I am writing 52 “Neddys,” one for each wonderful week of your first year of marriage. I will mail them in numbered envelopes each week or perhaps one or two or three at a time. Read them when you are together.
My Love Always,
Mooms
October 16, 2010

Neddy begins . . .

Neddy was not the most attractive bear in the bin. No little yellow raincoat with adorable floppy hat, no large bottom to stick out of honey pots in an endearing way, no snappy prose written by Dr. So-What to define his eccentricities. He was a bear who in a very straightforward way was loved and then retired.

At this particular juncture in time, he had a great coming together of mind and body, of love and desire or perhaps just expectation and fear. The only way he knew to put things right was to go on an adventure, for he was tired of lying there wrapped in tissue paper staring at a wrinkle.

“Pah!,” you say, because you are old. “Neddy bears cannot be tired or stare.” Well, due to an abnormality in the manufacturing process, this bear could. Some bears got an extra claw or a very sweet expression but Neddy received “reason.” He didn’t think much of it but every now and then it piqued his interest to move about. So this, the first day of whenever, he was moved into position for an extraordinary adventure.

You’re invited along. I will chronicle, for in the manufacturing process I was accidentally given a delightful psychic connection to Neddy. Go figure.

Week the first

Tissue paper surrounding a bear and tissue paper in a shoebox are very the same. The tissued Neddy fell behind the shoe rack and into a tissu-ey box on its way to somewhere else. After a good deal of bumping and scrumping, Neddy cleared his throat and said a mental, “Hello?” to the clump of tissue next door to his face. No answer. I am not a very good conversationalist, I have a teeny lisp and it makes me sound sloppy. I have bare patches where there used to be fur and one of my eyes is definitely drooping. I can fully understand why the clump is silent. I am no longer a “cute” bear and no one really wants to talk to me, or hug me or do anything with me. He gave one more little sad grunt toward the clump and went back to staring. If there were such a thing as stuffed bears with real tears, they would have been there.

Now, we know that Neddy was talking to a mule. Not a donkey-type mule but a shoe-type slipper (all frothy and pink, doncha know) and yet, one so very stubborn as to not be able to chat with anyone she thought beneath her beneath. Puh-leeze, she thought, a toy bear? Like I have the time to shoot the breeze with such a thing. Without another thought, she had made a painful contribution to Neddy’s downward spiral of insecurity.

The Upshot:
If you are cranky and stubborn and don’t answer the simplest interrogatory even from a worthless, beneath-you type of person, you are delivering a big steaming helping of insecurity to someone who may want to like you or even love you. Neddy is sad because of the mule. His first adventurous feeling in the world of new love is insecurity. This could have gone better.

October 23, 2010

I’m back at school and ready to do something interesting on this blog.  This weekend I will begin to add one Neddy story per week.  I have written about 58 of them but only 52 were meant for Halsted and Darren as a continuing wedding gift.  They will soon be married one year and are moving to Scotland to learn and grow.  I have mailed the Neddy stories to them one per week so that they would read them together and feel loved, for they are.

I’m going to try to update this blog weekly but for now suffice it to say that I welcome all to view whatever it is I feel like writing.  That sounds deliciously selfish.

I have joined the army of Nanowrimos. A country of adjective accumulators. A land of language listers. The territory of writing terrors. I am writing a novelette of 50,000 words in 30 days and tonight, right on schedule I have competed laying down 3400 of the little demons. So why do I feel a need to write even more in this blog, when tomorrow’s goal is another 2,000 words or more? Ah, but I know the answers to mine own questions – it just gives me a power boost to ask the question and then say, “Aha, here’s the answer coming right now. I am writing tonight to show off.” Yes, I have written the first 3400 words and I’m proud because goals like that make me freak. I gather control by brushing off deadlines until the last minute, knowing exactly what I can accomplish in exactly what amount of time. I’m on top of my own little schedule and proud of it. And see, I still had 165 words in me to put on this blog. And now I am spent. Good night and Good Luck other Nanowrimos – God Speed your little fingers and fertile imaginations – 28 more words. See, I can do this – 7 more! 200 words Score!

Zooey is how Halsted spelled kitty’s name at the vet, instead of Zoe. I thought it was so adorable that I still spell out Zooey when I call them. I put it on her tags. But Tom has changed it to the standard spelling so yet another bit of fun is gone from my life.

Zooey is not well, but she isn’t sick. She has a very nasty looking growth on her lower abdomen and the doctor thinks it may be cancer. She says that Zooey has about 3-6 months to live. No one has told Zooey because she still jumps on my desk every morning to be petted and praised (“Pretty Kitty, Beeuty-ful kitty”). She still tries to beg food from me no matter what sort it is. She still checks on me in the morning and waits outside of the bathroom for me and for all of these I love her.

My cousin’s wife passed away this week. She had a cancerous growth and tried to treat it with holistic medicine. By the time she decided to live and give in to standard medicine, it was too late. Only a few days before she died she told her sister-in-law that she didn’t want to eat and get fat, nor did she want to lose her hair. She weighed 80 pounds and hair is just what’s under your hat, not what’s in your heart. She was scared but she lived out her last months as she wanted.

We could take Zooey to a cat oncologist. Or we can let her live out her remaining time skinny and scraggly furred and waiting for treats and cuddles. We don’t know what she wants but we have to imagine that we do. We try to put ourselves in her place. We think we’d be happy to have 16 years (about 64 people years) and make as little impact at our departure as possible. We’d want people to remember us jumping up and nosing their hands to get more petting and resting our weary little head on their shouders and heaving little sighs between the purrs.

Hell, we don’t know what she’d want. So we make the selfish choice, denial. I can’t even look at her tummy. When she goes I don’t know what I’ll do. I think for the rest of my life I’ll expect her to be with me and I imagine I’ll love her as much then as I do now.

Yes, that is part of the title song of the musical we saw in previews a few nights ago. I probably shouldn’t comment here because we know one of the actors who worked very hard to make unworkable material work. I could review it here but I haven’t the strength. I had a hard time even laughing about it because it was so wrong. So here’s the thought I posit. When do we reach the point in our own work that we cannot see the flaws, cannot hear the criticism, and cannot understand that we are not only not reaching anyone but actually aggravating them? When do we know when to hang it up and keep some musicals to ourselves or for the private salon, if you will. Perform it in a place to be raunchy and stupid without forcing people to pay money to see that we are mindless. Never again to ask the audience to sing, “Me and my clitoris, my clitoris and me.” Never to parody Martha Stewart as Martha Skrewit, a home help guru who recycles the by products of sexual liaison, into slickers and penis-shaped lolly pops. We did not need an entire stage filled with a Swami and his “posse” teaching us to “Keep your rocket in your pocket and your mouse in the house.” If you are laughing at this perhaps you can explain to me when everything, and I do mean everything about sex, became a bad pun? Yarrrrghhhh. Kama Sutra? I think not.

Reading The Old Curiousity Shop by Charles Dickens and I’d like to share an excerpt from Chapter the Fortieth:

“He had already had a misgiving that the inconstant actors in that dazzling vision had been doing the same thing the night before last, and would do it again that night, and the next, and for weeks and months, though he would not be there. Such is the difference between yesterday and today. We are all going to the play, or coming home from it.

I was working in the office the other day and the television was tuned to WTTW. It was pledge week. Most of the time that’s a pretty okay thing. Lots of Monty Python and other special programming. But there is a dark side. NPR often has self-help “gurus” (when did that become an expression?).

I vaguely heard this man talking about his son listening to hip hop and he conducted an experiment. He asked his son to hold that hip-hop CD close to his heart and he would try to move the son’s arm (sorry I am very vague here but remember, this was all going on at the fringe of my cognitive space). He could not move his son’s arm or he could, oh, whatever, it was weird. He was saying that the CD held negative “energy” (essence) that prevented the son from realizing his potential. Okay, you’re right, I should not be trying to talk about something I hardly heard and barely understand. But it bugs me. First of all, the guy bugged me. You know the type, big, big white teeth, receding hairline, wardrobed like the affluent midle class about to go slumming in the inner city, smiles too much, refers to his wife as the “light of his life” (wonder if she’s energy efficient), says “here’s what you should do to be a complete person” a lot, too. I’m getting to the point, don’t rush me. Is a hip hop CD that powerful? Can it intercede between a young man and his potential? I was intrigued and somehow horrified. A few singed pages of Fahrenheit 451 fluttered through my memory. Will there be a CD Squahing Event where all the power of all the young men is then bonded back to their future plans. I think that’s just spooky. I’m not giving up my Tom Waits “Alice” CD. Don’t even ask me. I’ll take the cut in power. I wasn’t going to raise my arm anyway.

I have been through all of the emotions one could feel about holidays: feared them, loved them, hated them, anticipated them, dreaded them and finally accepted them. It’s amazing how calm that can make you feel when you finally strip away the emotions and enjoy them for what they are — a relief. Winter is half over, you usually have enough nuts stored to live until Spring when you can gather more. You can stop fearing the weather and it’s ability to kill you with a single drought, artic blast, heat wave, tsunami, or Homeland Security threat, or whatever can bring the little lump of watery protoplasm you call yourself, down to base level. You give away some things to make people smile. It’s important to be able to make someone smile even for a moment. These are dark wintery days full of fear and a smile is a huge payoff for a lump of peat or a beeswax candle — lovely gifts in one era or another. Even if your dear ones smile at your stupidity in selecting the chia scarf or the candy bonsai — it is a smile nonetheless. You can’t make a mistake unless you give matches to Joan of Arc or something like that. A calendar to a death row inmate seems a little callous. So, here it is Smilemas, Halfway Holiday, Gigglemas, Smilegift or Giftgiggle. I just sit back with my eggnog and enjoy.

Of course, naturally, without a doubt, never any question, sure thing, right away, no problem. Reassurances that all will go well. I am only certain that nothing is certain. Is Sadie gone? I feel her behind her door watching her soap operas, waiting to go bowling, sitting on her kitchen chair reading her newspapers. I wonder what it is like to be dead and secretly think that to fade away, as she did, is desirable and maybe even certain. People care about you less and less. You feel more and more invisible and more and more like you have nothing to contribute. Certainly useless. Better off wandering away mentally and physically, seated on your tiny ice floe, waving to your loved ones and urging them to go on contributing to their certain world. Sadie, if you’re out there, and I’m not certain that you are, but perhaps the electrical impulses that you were can relate to the electrical impulses that are the internet, I just want to say that I am certain that I did not care for you enough and if my mother is out there with you, tell her the same.