merimask | Cake and stuff.

I'm baking Mom's birthday cake. It smells awesome and it's making me hungry!

So, thank you to everyone who was very clever and sweet and gave me exactly what I wanted in my Xmas stocking...(seriously,

moonphased, I would LOVE a Celestial Brush because I'd just run around painting sunny skies and "blooming" everything in sight! Everything is cold and grey here, now.). The funniest, though, came from my brother John, who gave me "eye-safe perfume".

See, when we were kids he was a little booger who lived to torment his sisters. One rainy day (there was always a direct correlation between boredom and the amount of monkey-business that John got up to) he had driven my little sister Nancy and I into our bedroom with his antics. He stood outside the door , (a thick old-fashioned giant wooden door with a big old fashioned keyhole running right through it...there was a skeleton key that locked all the bedroom doors, but who knew where that was? I just had to prop a chair against the knob to keep John out), and taunted us. "You smell! My sisters stink!"

Well, those are fighting words to a young girl (I think I must have been 9 or 10 at the time). Of course I cared about how I smelled! And fortunately I had a bottle of "Love's Baby Soft" at hand (cheapo 1970's little kid version of Chanel no.5), so I grabbed it and said "Put your nose up to the keyhole and see how bad we smell!" , and sprayed the Love's Baby Soft into the keyhole. I'm thinking to myself that he'll get a snootfull of good-smelling stuff and that'll show him!

But from the other side of the door come these howls and shrieks of agony. What I didn't know (but should have guessed) was that instead of putting his nose the the keyhole, John put his eye to the keyhole...and I'd sprayed a ton of cheap perfume right into it! Oh holy crap, what a noise he made! So he runs bellowing down the stairs to find Mom or Dad and tell 'em what happened and I'm running right after him yelling too "That's what you get for!" (it was our favorite line of defense). Of course I got in trouble, but John learned never to corner a girl with her perfume at hand (an important life-lesson...we're dangerous!). Also he had to spend the rest of the day smelling like "Love's Baby Soft", which I'm sure was no fun for a 6 year old tough guy.

I'm pretty sure he's never forgiven me. ;-) But that's okay because I think he's ONE man who knows the absolute importance of following a woman's advice exactly. Or y'know, you might just get maced with kiddie perfume.

In other news, I'm a bit blue because yesterday my beloved old Volvo went the way of the Dodo. That car was a tank and it just kept running...right up until last week when it finally stopped. It was 17 years old and it had almost 300,000 miles on it and it was an awesome old car. What makes me saddest, though, was that it was a gift from my Dad. He LOVED that car and when the Mazda I'd been driving started to go all old and funny on me, he gifted me with the Volvo (at the time it was 8 or 9 years old but y'know, Volvos aren't like other cars. They last forever). He said "I don't know what kind of favor I'm doing you, here, because this thing is costing me a fortune to repair", but it turned out his mechanic was just a barracuda who was taking advantage of Dad's penchant for fixing every little creak that the car made. I drove it pretty much trouble-free for all these years. Dad died in '01, but in his old car I felt like a little piece of him was still with me.

Now the old Volvo is gone too and I'm sad. When someone you love dies there's that awful period where you feel the loss so keenly and of course that's terrible. What no one talks about are the little painful, daily reminders that show you in a thousand ways how that person has been removed from your life. Lance Armstrong wins the Tour De France again and Dad's not there to enjoy it. John buys a mansion and Dad didn't get to see that. Cirque Du Soliel buys one of my designs and I can't call Dad up and tell him. Those stretch out over the years...little events and happenings that slowly erase the evidence of that person, bit by bit, until all you have is pictures and memories. It's like watching Dad disappear slowly and it hurts. The effect is cumulative. I felt like a part of him got towed away to the dump yesterday and my heart is just a bit more broken today.

This probably doesn't make sense to anyone who hasn't lost someone close to them. *shrug* The wonderful and terrible thing about life is that we all get our chance to learn these lessons eventually.

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I felt like a part of him got towed away to the dump yesterday and my heart is just a bit more broken today.

*love* That must be so hard. *hug*

It only REALLY sucks sometimes...but those times keep blindsiding me with no warning.

*hug* You're so sweet.

I understand a bit - back in 2002 my Dodge Shadow died. 13 years old, 250,000 miles, my first car. Bought it myself, paid it off early, drove it all over the eastern United States. That car drove me back and forth to Ohio when my (now) huband lived out there, back and forth to Syracuse while he lived up there, all over. I loved that car. As a co-worker here described it "the driver's seat was the exact shape of my butt." Butt was not the word he used. It finally died the death when it cracked a piston, and whether or not I could afford it, I needed a new car. It sat out behind the apartment for weeks while we figured out what to do. We found one of these wrecking places to come take it away for free - actually Bob did. I couldn't do it - it felt like betrayal. And the day before they came to take it away I went out back, got behind the wheel and cried my eyes out for about a half an hour. Heck, I'm tearing up remembering.

It wasn't just about the car, although that was a lot of it. It was Mom walking me through my first loan application; Dad going to the dealership with me to MAKE them fix it right when they were yanking my chain; Bob driving down to where I worked at the hardware store to see the new car; all those drives across the length of Pennsylvania during the years apart; the accident where I got scratches and the ass in the new Acura had his frame bent; driving lengthwise through "the storm of the century" because at that age love is really, really stupid; packing for Pennsic; moving to Syracuse; driving wherever I wanted to...

It's not just the thing: it's all the things associated with it and all the memories it was a part of. I loved that car, and I still do. If we would have had space, I probably would have kept it to try to fix. But I suppose one dead car in the family is enough. But my current keys still hang off of it's key ring.

We spend so much time in our cars that they really do become almost like a part of ourselves. My Dad always LOVED his foreign cars...he had Volvos and Saabs and VWs all his life (he was very European in his tastes), and I was touched when he gave that Volvo to me because he loved it so much. I knew that losing it someday was going to suck, and it really did. :-/

*hugs* I'm doing a drawing of Jim's sister right now, and while I had only known her about two years before she passed away, there are still daily things that get Jim....Unpacking our Christmas stuff that we had gotten from his parents was one of the hardest things we'd done in a long time.

Even the drawing is difficult for me...keeps bring up the memories of when Megan (the baby) first came home from the hospital...it was right about this time of year.

Losing someone so young has got to be the most tragic thing. :-( I don't know what I'd do if I lost my brother or my sister. We lean on each other so much, now that we're grown. I'd be adrift if I lost that.

The holidays just make it all harder, y'know? So many memories.

Yeah. Every year is a little easier, but it'll never be easy.

Isn't funny how little things always trigger our emotions? Sorry about the car. It's another link to your father that you're loosing. I understand the feeling. I lost a little cloisonne fish that I bought while my aunt was in the hospital. When I saw it was gone I felt like I was loosing her again.

Oh God, perfume in the eye would suck! It'd be like walking through a perfume department full of demented women at the mall.

I'm a few days away from it all now and I'm feeling much better (it sure didn't help that "car drama" coincided with "bad hormone day", when my female-ness has me shaken AND stirred). :-/ Still, not much fun. I guess it's human nature to attach meaning to things...which is great as long as we have those things around as reminders but it SUCKS when you lose those important things. Shame on me for falling in love with something as transitory as my Dad's old car (what did I think I would do with it...turn it into a huge planter in the back yard some day?). *shakes head*

Perfume in the eye apparently hurts, A LOT. Or so my brother says. ;-)

Cake and stuff.

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