So, one time when I was 9 years old I decided to go camping in our back yard.  This was very brave of me, because we lived on an acre of land that was nearly all woods.  I would NEVER do that now.  It was at the end of summer, and I'd spent the afternoon making a tent out of two sheets that were hanging on the laundry line, and placed bricks on the bottoms to hold them out at an angle.  I'm not sure why Mom let me do that, but she had always been really good about letting me make hiding places and cubbyholes for myself underneath tables and inside cardboard boxes.  What? Don't look at me like that,  I was an only child...I had to amuse myself.  

Anyway, so I had been playing in the "tent" all day, and when evening came, I just wasn't ready to say goodbye to it,  so my parents gave me a tarp to lay on the ground inside, and let me carry my sleeping bag, pillow and a flashlight down with me so I could spend the night.   For a while, it was all fine.  I could see the glow of lights through one of the sheets coming from the house, and as long as I knew my parents were awake, I felt perfectly safe.  After the lights went out, I started to get that butt-numbing fear of all the things that were probably lurking and salivating through sharp yellow teeth just outside of my cloth walls, and the crickets chirping from what sounded like underneath my sleeping bag weren't helping matters.  Not to mention that I could feel every little rock and twig underneath the tarp, but I had been determined to stick it out all night, scoffing at the idea of coming back to the house if I got scared.    In fact, I wasn't even going to go inside to use the bathroom, because I knew they would hear me and think I'd chickened out, which was just not going to happen!  But, eventually my imagination got the better of me and I started to panic, so I picked up my pillow and sleeping bag, and headed up to the house.

I remember all of that vividly, right down to the exact moment I made the decision to give up, but for some reason I have no recollection at all of what made me decide not to go inside, after all.  Perhaps my bravery came back once I saw that there were no werewolves laying in wait for me, but whatever the reason, I stopped just short of climbing the steps to the screened porch, and passed out on one of the patio chairs, instead.  That's where I was found by my parents, at whatever hour they came to check on me:

While rummaging through some boxes that had come from my mom's house, I turned up a 4 inch tall stack of old post cards that had been carefully saved, and kept in a cedar chest that my great-great-grandmother once owned.  I figured all of the postcards had been sent to her and my great-great-grandfather, but it turned out there were some addressed to people I've never heard of, so I'm not really sure how they all came to be together in that chest.  Many of them had no message at all, just the picture on one side, the addressee and postage on the other.  Some of them were boring, some were really strange, some were creepy, and some were downright offensive.  I always thought of the turn-of-the-century as a grander time, when people were more polite and even the simplest of greetings had an air of class about them, so I was a bit surprised to disover how ugly, bawdy and tacky so many of them were.   

My g-g-grandfather had been Mayor of South Bend, Indiana at one point, so there were plenty of glad tidings from people who seemed to ooze class and refinement, as well as inoffensive cards from people who I presume just went with whatever was popular at the time.  For instance, this is one of 4 different post cards sent from 4 different people that depicted dogs looking at a chick:



Nothing says Easter like a pit bull standing over a defenseless baby bird.

This one I rather liked because the message still stands just as true today as it was in 1904:




I absolutely love this one, especially because the woman glued a picture of herself to the front in an effort to, I suppose, show how much she looks like the woman in the cartoon.  I would love to know what sort of glue she used, because 100 years later, it's still holding fast.  I guess in 1905 "sexual harrassment" wasn't quite the hot button issue that it is today:



Her written message says, "Such funny things office guys will do ---ooo---", so maybe that's from a song?  
Times sure have changed, because if Boss 1 or Boss 2 ever came at me like they were going pull a move like that, I would take off my shoe and beat them about the head and neck with it. 

 I try to scan old pictures and add them to Flickr on weekends, and the process takes a while on our old PC so I don't get many posted at a time, but with the last batch I had a particularly good time remembering all kinds of little things that I haven't thought about in years.  (These aren't listed in chronological order, or any particular order, really)

I have this thing - and in the beginning I thought it was kind of a normal thing, but eventually started to clue in that it's more like a defect. I know that everyone has to deal with loss and heartache in their lives - some more than others, some sooner than others. It's inevitable, and as we get older it becomes something we are faced with more regularly, so we all develop our own little ways of coping. So far, my special coping mechanism has been to completely and utterly refuse to deal with death at all, but now that a fair amount of time has passed, I'm starting to think my plan might not be the most effective.

You know how some people like to have photographs of lost loved ones out on display in their home, or maybe at work, or even in their wallets? Other people listen to certain music over and over because it reminds them of the dearly departed. Some people like to keep something personal of their loved on them all the time, like maybe a watch or a necklace. All of these people choose to have daily reminders of the people they miss, because they enjoy thinking about them and keeping their memory alive. I think this is wonderful, and very healthy, and have no problem with it at all, as long as it applies to other people.

What I personally like to do in the way of remembering special people who are no longer in my life is to make sure there are no photographs of them on display anywhere, even in places where I might accidentally stumble upon them. I also try to not listen to any songs that remind me of those people, which means having to HASTILY change radio stations, or remove certain music that I really like from my iPod. I also do my best to not think about those people for colossal amounts of time, like say, more than 30 seconds per thinkage. And the reason I do these things is not because I wish to rid myself of these people, but simply because I can't take the grief. I mean, right now, typing that one line made tears instantly spring forth and shoot down my face, which is humiliating and inconvenient any time it happens while away from my home, and can even be humiliating and inconvenient sometimes in my own home.

I do not wish to be The Girl Who Cries. I did not used to be The Girl Who Cries, and I dislike the lack of control over my emotions that has developed over the past couple of years. That is not to say that I am always crying...I'm not. But in order to avoid always crying I had to make a plan of action for myself (e.g. absolute refusal to voluntarily think about Sad Things) so that I wouldn't accidentally start bawling at inopportune times around any and all people, which would eventually lead to me becoming The Girl Who Cries, aka The Girl Who Makes People Uncomfortable, who eventually becomes The Girl People Avoid Because She Might Cry At Any Moment. I mean, I would avoid that girl, so I expect everyone else would, too.

By now, I should be able to talk about the people I love who are gone if I want to, right? SURELY by now I should be able to look at pictures of those people and smile, remembering good things about them and their lives. I am not a special case who has had to endure overly traumatic and excessive loss - there are people who have been dealt heaping amounts of grief and unfairness in their lives, who have been forced to survive losses so great that my brain can't even fathom the pain, and yet, most of these people dig down deep inside themselves and find the strength to not fall apart every time they think about something that punches them in their grief bone. Which is why I think maybe I'm faulty.

I'm concerned that whatever part it is we are supposed to be born with - the part that helps us eventually become steady after the violent rocking a big loss causes - might have been left out of me. Like there's some kind of iron bar located just to the right of our stomachs that our innards grab hold of whenever we start to feel emotionally wobbly, but mine never developed, or it fell out into the potty at an early age. It turns out that no matter how many anti-depressants one might shove into her cheesecake-hole, medicine does not make an inner-iron bar sprout into place.

So now I am left to wonder how long I'm going to be this way? It can't be forever, because there are still so many people that I love, and I have to face the fact that I am going to lose a lot of them in my lifetime, which means I need to go ahead and restore myself back to full health, like in a video game, so I can be better prepared to handle bad things when they come, because THEY ARE COMING. My emotional immune system that is supposed to help fight kicks to the gut is really low, if the fact that just last night I cried like an idiot when surprisingly faced with a photograph of my Dad's recently-killed dog (DOG! Not even a person! A DOG!) is any clue. So what I am in search of is some of that stuff that other people use to make themselves not cry as their knee-jerk reaction to sadness. Anyone know where I can get some of whatever that is? When all my tiny friends cried after Bambi's mother (SPOILER ALERT!) got killed, Tiny Me didn't even get misty. I watched Terms of Endearment as a young girl and felt nothing. "Beaches" did not make me cry, it only annoyed me. I want to go back to being like that - cold and black-hearted. How does one achieve that without doing hard time in prison?

I'm going to visit my mother-in-law after work, and take her to dinner. I hope SO MUCH that she wants me to take her to PF Chang's. My favorite dish there is the:

WILD ALASKAN SOCKEYE SALMON STEAMED WITH GINGER
Served over stir-fried shiitake mushrooms, bok choy, tomatoes and asparagus.

Hoo-boy, is it ever good. We don't have a PF Chang's on our side of town, so any chance I have to go there is a big treat. If she wants to go somewhere else, I will do my best have only a small tantrum, but she loves it, too, so I'm thinking my odds are decent.

I just called their headquarters to find out if there are any new locations being planned for my area, but nothing in Georgia is coming. Dammit! The suburbs south of Atlanta are sort of the dregs when it comes to good restaurants. Mediocre chains we got, but the REALLY good stuff requires a commute.