Don had a delightful post of spring pictures from his yard. I love Palasso Pentossi (commonly referred to as Don and Scott's house) it's a place of peace, light and water.
What I missed from his post was a picture of the wonderful Morning Glories he USE to grow. Beautiful, but apparently a little too prolific. I could never get the seeds to germinate. I think Psam finally went and bought seeds
The colors of spring are the light and greens of my hostas and ferns. And the pretty little forget-me-not type flowers.
The greens of my Akiba vine dotted with it's small maroon flowers (it has never developed fruit, but boy it grows and grows and grows.)
My favorite orange tulips in the mids of Dutch Iris greens. The purple buds of lilacs and fushia of the cyclamens on my deck. I love the colors of spring.
You know how you store those special moments in your life and take them out in your old age to pet them dearly? Wait, you’ll get there so take your Ginko. Some of my fondest memories revolve around music or involve music – crap in this case what’s the difference? I love music, I love my daughter, and some of my dearest adult memories are in the car singing with her.
Once upon a time I had this kewl 200SX. I loved it, bought it used and took the best care of it I could… which is to say, I wasn’t very good to it at all. When I married ex-number two we traded it in for a Chevy Luv 4by4 (the exact sequence of events is pretty fuzzy in my memory.) Music in the 200SX was pure Pat Benetar, Thin Lizzy, and Blondie… that much I remember. In the long run, because what woman ends up with the better vehicle, I ended up with a faded white VW Bug that we bought in a storage unit sale for $283 – note there was also a chest of drawers and a bureau in the unit, the Bug was in need of an engine and love.
Before you could say Chevy Luv I was driving a mildewy faded VW Bug that had definitely seen better days. Psam hated that car, I’m fairly certain it was the aromatic combination of oil and mildew that lovingly wafted through the small vehicle (I really tried to not use the heater for this very reason, but have you ever tried to NOT use the heater in a VW – yeah you understand.) Music in the VW was pure KZEL and well I and Psam were past Blondie, she wasn’t hot on Thin Lizzy, and I had a copied cassette of Supertramp.
Keep in mind that Florence is a whole five miles from Siuslaw River Bridge to Heceta Beach Road and at the time Highway 101 was just two lanes in most places. In my defense I must remind you that Supertramps’ Take The Long Way Home is the better part of five minutes, so if you wanted to hear the whole song, you took Rhododendron drive, past the dump, along the Siuslaw River and up 35th street, ergo we took the long way home. Hey it could have been worse, I could have played all 8 minutes and 52 seconds of American Pie, then we could have drove the che… VW past… crap it loses a lot in the translation…. Oh oh, I know she loves Alice’s Restaurant… I mean it’s only eighteen and a half minutes long – we could have driven all the way to Mapleton – and Psam loves all those
eight-by-ten colour glossy pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one
and Arlo was driving a VW microbus, red not faded white. But no, I had Supertramp and a oil soaked mildewy wafting faded white VW – Psam had to hold her breath or puke, and really I’m glad she has good lung power.
BTW, did you know that March is Sing With Your Child Month? No lie, some of my happiest times of parenthood were singing in the car with my daughter… we had a very special sound track that started with Nino Tempo and April Steven’s Deep Purple, included Sonny and Cher’s The Beat Goes On, Gladys Knight and the Pip’s Midnight Train To Georgia. Those were some of the best days of my life.
It has been a long time coming, but I’m ready for my next tattoo. Although I have to say, “Darm-it, that hurt!” And no, it wasn’t my first tattoo, but this one was more painful. Would I do it again? You better believe it. I promised Psam, oh a year or two ago, that I would get her a tattoo for her 18th birthday. But the truth was, I couldn’t afford it… oh a year or two ago. So now I could. After seeing my sister-in-law Roxinista’s foot tattoo she and her step-daughter both got in February I had to have one. Psam, Miseray and I were suppose to go to Area 51, but the shop was closed on Monday (Miseray’s day off) and she couldn’t get today off, so it was Psam and I.
Psam had connected with Rustoleum by email to get a working understanding of her idea, a trinity knot inside an orbis. I waited until yesterday to finally get my email from Big-T saying he couldn’t really see the detail in the shot above, so he’d drawn up a few designs. I loved the lily (I suppose you knew that.) I knew being on my foot it would hurt, but ohmybloodyhell, he said I took it well.
Big-T has been tattooing for two years, Restoleum the same – both were welding partners before Rusty took up tattooing, on Thursday he tattoo’d the Brit (Miseray's significant other.) As both Psam and I sat in our respective booths we were told about this great Celtic knot that Rusty had done the day before, Psam and I both knew the Brit had been in and the were very pleasantly surprised to find out the Brit was a relation. You know the family that tattoos together and all that.
Psam will need to go back to have the flames added to the outside of her knot and orbis,
I choose a tiger lily in coloration. I still owe Miseray the first hour of her tattoo to come, so I may go with her and get a stargazer lily on my other foot or ankle.
Kudos to Big-T and Rustoleum of Springfield’s Area 51 Tattoos, I’m in seventh heaven, and Psam’s still giggling in joy.
If you haven’t noticed how really fast time flies, well then you are either pretty young, or live perpetually “in the moment.” I’m over half way through my life, if my life line runs true to form, and parts of me think that is far too long, and the other parts think "Crap!" it’s not near long enough. Thank heavens I believe in reincarnation.
It was like yesterday the first time I said, “I remember about twenty years ago, when…” What I don’t remember is “the what” I was remembering about at the time; what I do remember was stopping in my tracks, mid sentence, and laughing out loud at the moment. Now I remember back over twenty one years ago (at least two decades since the first time I said “I remember about twenty years ago…”) I long knew there was something a matter in my marriage, I didn’t know the what. I didn’t know it wasn’t repairable, because it apparently had never been right in the first place, to become broken in the second.
All I knew was that I had been happy and in love, sadly he was neither and he told me so one Sunday afternoon. It had to have been bad; he interrupted a 49’ners game to tell me so and then left. I don’t remember where Psam was; I just know she wasn’t at home. I left the potato salad on the counter and walked west to the dune and sat down and cried.
For days, about three, I cried. And then he came back and told me, and I quote, “I think I made a mistake.”
“Yeah, you did, live with it.” If I was so devastated, and I was he’d just ruined my mine and Psam’s lives, why did I say that back to him? Because I knew that I could remain married to him but wonder forever more when he was going to walk out on me again. I could have dealt with an affair. There are myriad reasons for an affair. But for not loving a person, there is only one.
He was nice enough to deed over the house so Psam and I weren’t out on the street. I think it was a guilt move, but I’ll take it. In her early teens at the break-up, Psam was going through the changes and challenges of life that only a teenage girl can endure…along with her mom. But even more so she was there for me.
In the years between 2-X and Ducky, Psam and I we grew, endured, and triumphed. I worked three jobs, and she got her first. A friend of mine lent us her time-share in Reno and we made a week of it. I taught her to drive; she actually learned. I’d get a boyfriend and she’d beat his ass at chess (oh, crap the temper tantrum he threw.) She discovered boys that she didn’t want to beat up and her fingernails (she’d change the color every day – no lie); I’d find another boyfriend (yes, I was that crappy a mother.)
While I love my husband and life now, I could easily go back and relive those years when it was just Psam and I, maybe without the boyfriends. Because really, while for most it would have been the worst of times…remember there was a heart rending divorce in there, the truth of it all… it was the best of times.
Apparently it drives her crazy when I call and sing Happy Birthday to her. Well, I don’t sing Happy Birthday, I sing the Birthday Cake Polka - replete with my own lyrics, because I learned the song when I was five, and that was a very, very long time ago.
My baby turned 4 and 30 years today. The Olympics also started today. When Psam was born I had her name all planned out, I knew from the moment I found out I was pregnant that I was having a girl. I worked out a series of names, clashed with her father on potential monikers and we decided to split the difference. If she was a girl I’d name her if she was a boy, it was his call. There are things a mom just knows… her future name was apparently not one of them.
That February night 1976 I lay in the hospital bed watching the Olympics and really not sure what I would name her… and then a German Downhill (or maybe it was Slalom) with a name I’d never heard before hit the slopes and my tv screen in that small Florence hospital room and she had a new name. Sheesh if I’d seen Ryan’s Hope by then she’d have been named Siobhan.
My life has been made forever better with the birth of my daughter. She has been there through thick and thin. Shared my trials and traumas and shared some of her own with me. I cannot imagine life with out my beautiful little girl.
Now she has her own ray of light and joy… and I’m blessed she shares her Burp with me. Happy Birthday Psam… and thank you.
I’m not sure what this means, I’m not sure what my groove it. Certainly there are times I am stuck in the past, and far too many times I want to rush into the future. But today my groove is definitely focused on the most precious gifts I received.
Happy Birthday, to my little girl. 33 years ago (at this very moment of writing) I was screaming my head off “Never again.” Thirty-six hours of hard labor that was most certainly worth it, I just wish someone had warned me there’d be no drugs; no spinal block, no joy pills, no epidural, and definitely no epithelium (?).
33 years ago Psam came physically into my life and I have never looked back at the figure lost – because now I can go anywhere and not get lost due to the relief map of the US that was once my flat tummy. Never afterwards have I been alone. Psam had been there through it all divorces, romances, toads, frogs, and princes. She while she didn’t always like the roads I drug her down she endured, learned from my mistakes, and became the strong woman she is, a great mother, a splendid person.
An independent little soul who would roam my parent’s trailer park in her own little jeep. Following my dad around like he’d hung the moon, then screech at the top of her lungs for my mother, “He’s doing it again,” when he’d flip his two front teeth out at her. Her sitting on the kitchen counter in my mom’s kitchen perched next to my little brother, Buddy, watching episodes of Gilligan’s Island, sharing a kypted RC Cola from my other brother, Butch.
She never complained about the homemade clothes, the second hand bike, nor the homemade presents. Despite her room being painted hot pink, she never once said she’d have preferred it to be in her favorite red. She rocked. I was blessed with a child who devoured books, stood up for herself, and was a tomboy, who could spend a full day climbing trees and sand dunes with the best of them.
For 33 years I have been blessed to a partner in crime, my duets partner for road trips in a musty VW that she abhorred. Singing Deep Purple, The Beat Goes On, Heart and Soul, Midnight Train to Georgia, and Shhh-boom, but never The Long Way Home. I will always hold dear the memory of her, her cousin, and their friend harmonizing at their eighth grade graduation Amazing Grace. Watching her from the bleachers as she advanced in school band and concert choirs.
Today she is a wonderful mother, an open minded woman who gives all of her heart and soul to her son, and then stretches it farther for every one else. I can’t imagine being more blessed.
The groove in my heart is filled with the blessings of lessons, love, and joy that come with the motherhood and friendship of Psam. Happy Birthday.
I have lived in heaven for more than thirty years, the Central Oregon coast. You don't know heaven until you've been here.
I am happily married with three daughers, and a wonderful grandson, and my constant companion Arlo - my Bassett hound.
I serve as the Operations, Programming, and Promotions director for a small, hometown AM & FM radio station. It is the best job in the world. Well be sides being a talented author (which I'm not - and that and saving the world would be the only other job titles I would want.)
I am irreverent - a recent discovery
email me at
Cele at Celebrindal dot com
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