INCONSTANT MOON

If they say the moon is blue,

We must believe that it is true.

 Old English Proverb    

                                                                                           

    “It was different in my day.  Kids respected their parents," Mom said. "My mother and father were wonderful.” 

   Her father was a drunk and a pedophile.

   By the time Mom turned five her mother was in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down. It happened on the night of a blue moon. No medical opinion rendered, the family suspected witchcraft.

   “My father worked hard and he took care of mother. He only drank for birthdays and religious holidays,” Mom said in his defense. 

    Then I must have a photographic memory for those holy Hallmark days of Grandpa lit up, his eyes and lips shiny, unzipping his pants and grabbing little hands to rest on the hard surprise there. We never told. The aunts and uncles paid no attention to the kids hanging around jolly old Granddad.

    “It only happened once,” Mom says when I remind her that he molested her, too.  “And my mother chased him with a frying pan.”  

    That’s her story and she’s sticking with it. That was the night of the blue moon and her mother never walked again. No more chases with the frying pan: truth waned with the moon.     
      

    “We were happy then,” Mom says.  “Life was simple.” 

    She smiles at her happy-ever-after ending to the story of her life. She’s 83. I still have a life to live, a ways to go, the irresistible pull of the blue moon to fight.

Published in 2007 in Storycircle                              

Sister, Sister

Now for something personal:

This is my sister. She recently forged our elderly mother’s name and stole thousands of dollars from her.

My mom worked six nights a week for years to support me, my brother and my sister. In her fifties, she took the GRE and got a job with the state. She was only able to save this money by living like a pauper. Once she retired, Mom insisted on subsisting on her social security checks, and banking the small pension she’d earned from the state.

It’s amazing how much interest can accumulate if you save every nickle and never spend a dime. She said the money was for her old age, so she wouldn’t be a burden to her children. Mom was sure she’d get cancer. She did. On her tonsils. Had chemo and radiation (The Tattoo Lady, Mother and Me), and beat it, although she still smokes.

Mom rescued my sister countless times from abusive relationships (White Lies), bought her cars, paid for repairs, saved the cars from repossession, paid down payments on homes, rent, and the list goes on. Every single one of my sister’s husbands and boyfriends were welcomed into Mom’s house where they mostly laid around. In order to discourage them from staying too long, Mom engaged in a peculiar form of domestic warfare where she put the lowest wattage light bulbs in their room and hid the toilet paper.

We — the sibs and Mom — laughed in those days at our mother’s eccentricities. We thought my sister would change, that things would get better. Why not? She’s smart and articulate, just has bad taste in men, and an addiction. To substance, yes, but more to a losing way of life. She's dedicated herself to bad decisions.

Mom’s heart is broken. She tried so hard to fix my sister, even lying to protect her when it put me in jeopardy. Mi familia. I got out, that’s my salvation, but my escape is only one of distance. I used to feel sorry for my sister, but this latest cut to our mother goes deep, beyond the blood, all the way to the bone.

"She’s bad, bad, bad," Mom says, all the orneriness gone out of her voice, making her sound feeble and old.

I think I might lose her any day, any hour, any minute, and it makes me so angry that my sister did this now.

All photos by author.

Damn you google images ---- I think

Spent untold hours today exploring the more obscure workings of Blogger, Myspace, and my very own website, www.sramosobriant.com. My host is godaddy.com, which I highly recommend for impatient and frugal users. The technical support people all sound like cheerful, all-American types (I think they're in Arizona).

I clicked on a button labeled user statistics and was whisked to a heretofore unexplored world of graphs and URL's indicating yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, and, yes, hourly hits on my website!
136,000 in a little over a year. How is this possible?

Turns out Google Images has indexed the photos on my site. If you type in moon and clouds, my photo comes up first. Over 3000 hits on that alone from the U.S. But there's also Google Images, UK and Spain and Denmark, and the whole rest of the world, including google in languages that look impossible to pronounce.

Furthermore, some of the URL's for specific websites are listed. For some reason, they came back to my site untold times to copy my images. I sent them messages asking them to credit me, but not sure I want links to vampirefreaks (they have a job board which was comforting, but I'd have to join to read it). Egyptian Goddess might be okay. Tikki used my picture as the background for his homepage on Myspace. He's nineteen and into hard rock, but he also wants to be a graphic designer. I sent him a friend request. He has 73. I only have 7.