A year ago, I posted this memory about my Mother, on what would have been her 73rd birthday.  In that entry, I promised to find another photograph that appeared in Better Homes & Garden.  It took me awhile, but I finally found it and scanned it in.  I packed the magazine away in her memory box and didn't get a good fix on the date; I won't pull it out now because it makes me too sad.  It's sometime in 1963.  I'm glad, however, to be able to show it here.  I also have an 8x10 of just her, as seen in the cover here, hanging on the wall downstairs.  In this one, it's just her, shot against one of those blue screens (the cover below is a composite).  There aren't many pictures of when she was younger because everything she had was lost in a house fire in January 1999.  Click on the image for a close-up.


Happy birthday, Mom.  Sleep peacefully, wherever you are.

Today marks exactly five years since my Dad and I arrived in Arizona, having picked up two households, a fully equipped garage, three vehicles and a mini-bookstore, and moved the entire sheeeebang 1,700 miles from the Chicago area.  I was going to post a couple of photographs-- the first house we rented, the first house Wes and I bought, the first dog we adopted.  And therein lies the ache: I have never been the most diligent of photograph filers, so I found myself going through pictures (because the envelopes were undated and untidily stored) that for the most part only made me sad.  Images of Lily in the first house Wes and I owned, taken on the first day she arrived from Oregon.  A shot of my great-grandparents' headstone, in the cemetery where I spread my mother's ashes (because she said as a child, her time with them was the happiest of her life).  A box of non-pictures-- Christmas, Easter and birthday cards from my Mom, my Grandmother, and my Aunt, all now gone to whatever waits in the Great Beyond.  Pictures of our beautiful New Orleans, taken at a convention before Katrina and the failure of the levees.  A photograph of my friend David Gemmell, taken at a convention dinner, another of my former boss and friend, David Kayner.  Not the memories I was actually wanting to record, but they are a big part of my life and so here they are.

There have been disappointments, losses, changes, and lots of hard work.  But there have been joys and gains and new dreams, too.  So while Arizona is not the paradise I thought it would be, it has been exactly what I, or anyone, should have expected:

It's been life. 

They say time flies, and I know that's often true.  It is, however, not true for all parts of that same year, or however much time you're specifically measuring.  In some ways the past year has seemingly passed quite quickly, while a big chunk of it, a heart chunk, has gone by agonizingly slowly.

Our beloved Lily died one year ago today.

There is little I can say.  Not a single day has passed that I have not thought of her often.  Very often, actually, and most of the time when I do, I still have to force my thoughts away because I will end up crying.  Yes, I miss her that much, even with the rock steady adoration of Goblin and the goofy love of Ghost.  Lily will always be a part of my heart, and that part is mixed with her ashes in her little Memorial Garden in the back yard.  When I went out there to talk to her this afternoon, I noted that there are blooms on the choya, and the other three cacti have blooms coming (we recently added a rather fragile new one). 

So, a few Lily Memories:


In the lefthand picture, Lily, was a young lady (about 16 months old) on a playdate with 8 month old Zeke the Wolfhound (pictured elsewhere in the Gallery, link below). It was early spring in Arizona. Look how beautiful and healthy she was.

In the righthand picture, Miss Chunky started out sitting on the couch, then simply let herself fall sideways. Goblin tried to squirm out, only to find Lily wiggling her way up and next to his chest. She immediately went sound asleep, and he just gave up and did the same.

Both photos will click out larger if you like.  For those who haven't seen, here's the full Lily Gallery.

Sleep tight, Lily.  We still miss you.

Would have been my mother's 73rd birthday.

I try heartily not to get on my soapbox about smoking (and let's face it, even though I quit in 1984, I was a heavy smoker back when), but now it almost physically hurts me to see people smoke. Especially now, having seen what my mother went through in her dying-- over five months in a hospital, so-called "rehabs," and nursing homes, then finally back to the hospital, all after having destroyed her body with cigarettes. Not just her lungs, but everything-- skin, heart, and especially her circulatory system, which was the thing that ultimately, even if in a roundabout way, killed her on May 4, 2005.

But I won't spend this little memorial space preaching about what could have been. Instead, let me show you a bit of what once was, a long, long time ago:


Click on the picture to get the blown-up version, please, and then again to make it as big as it can get here on LJ.  The dark-haired woman in the back is my mother.  What you're seeing is page 23 from a 1963 cookbook called "So-Good Meals," which was published by Better Homes & Gardens.  No, I'm not the ponytailed girl in the picture; my mother, not being a particularly patient soul, occasionally reminisced that she could have cheerfully throttled the three kid-models, because they kept trying to eat the food (which had been sprayed with varnish).  Times were better back then; in addition to this, my mother did another layout for BH&G, this one an oversized home decorating magazine.  I have it somewhere in the house but can't find it right now.  In that picture, she was dressed in 1960s light blue stretch pants and top and pointy light blue matching shoes, and gesturing authoritatively at a construction worker as she gazed at what she was going to have done to "her" house.

Yeah, things were definitely better for her back in the sixties.

Sleep in peace, Mom.

No, silly, not "date" as in meet myself at the door with flowers, take myself out to an Australian lobster tail dinner that involves lots of brie cheese and fruit and stuffed mushrooms, treat myself to a spectacularly spooky and action-filled monster movie (complete with drippy, salty buttered popcorn), then take myself home, pour myself a bottle and a half of good wine, and...

::ahem::

I mean date myself, with that dirty. bastard of the bane of all of our lives: The Calendar.

Twenty-two years ago today, on September 18, 1984, while coming home from my job in a downtown Chicago law office (back when you could still smoke in office buildings), I smoked my last cigarette. I walked into my apartment on Rascher Street, pushed the button on the answering machine, and heard this:

"Hi, Babe. Just wanted to know how you were doing."

The voice was my Dad's. He had taken the previous Monday off work (something he never did), driven me out to some suburb so far away that Jehovah left his canteen there, and paid $100 to have me hypnotized out of this bad habit. I'd walked out of there knowing it didn't work, because I already wanted to smoke. (Disclaimer: Hynotism does work for some people. It just didn't do jack for me.) I ground my teeth until the next day, when I gave in, and by the time I got that telephone message, I was back up to a pack a day at work. Which, actually, was kind of good, considering I'd been a four (yes, four) pack a day person before the hypnotist.

"Hi, Babe. Just wanted to know how you were doing."

I knew exactly what he was talking about.

And I never smoked another cigarette.

There is absolutely nothing as powerful as pure and profound parental-induced guilt.