Archive for the ‘family’ Category

Min is not actually my dog. No matter how much I loved her the very most more than anything, and no matter how much she loved me greater than pies and ham, she does not actually belong to me, and I do not actually belong to her, except in our hearts. She belongs to E’s brother and now that A has moved to SLC where his job, his school and his fiancee all are, he has taken his dog with him–which means my stewardship is over.

A came and got her Friday night, while I was out. I stumbled home kind of tipsy, was confused when no dog came exploding with joy to see me, limbs akimbo, tongue lolling, stub of a tail beating back and forth in a wild blur. She is supposed to circle around and around me and through my legs and push her face into my knees and cover me with love when I sit down to scratch her butt and then climb on my lap and sigh and put her head down like everything is finally right with the world and she couldn’t imagine anything being any better than it was right there and then, forever.

I can’t keep up with whether it is cool to like Valentine’s Day now because it celebrates the universal spirit of togetherness we must embrace in order to make it through these dark times and to honor our renewed spirit of national hope and optimism, or cool in the spirit of irony and the embracing of dorky things like Care Bears and heart-shaped boxes of chocolate, or uncool because it is cliched and commercial and who really needs another pair of edible panties and it is exclusionary of those not in relationships and also cheesy or lame.

My personal stance, my plank in the platform, is that I am very fond of Valentine’s Day. I am a fan of love; I am glad that there is a day that honors love, in all its forms, filial and fornicatory, penetrative and otherwise.

It has been, officially and by the numbers, exactly one year since I finished packing up the U-Haul truck that was sitting in the driveway in front of my San Francisco apartment, slammed down the back door, and got on the road to Utah. Packing frantically, hauling all your crap down a long hallway and down a steep driveway and around back of the truck and throwing it up onto the bed and running back inside for more and having arguments about what fits where and how, and why the other person is crazy go-nuts and should just be quiet, that doesn’t leave much time for introspection, for the I am leaving beautiful San Francisco and my beautiful apartment and my friends and my job and everything I know to move to Utah? freakout.

God, when you put it that way it sounds completely insane. Exchanging California for Utah? For Utah? Really, for Utah?

Today is my beautiful mother’s birthday. She is mumblety years old, and looks about half that, which is sometimes very annoying. She has the kind of perfect pure white hair that you are forced to describe as “snowy,” the kind that you wish you will have when your hair starts to change. It is the kind of beautiful color that makes the idea of ever even considering “hiding the grey” seem like a terrible abomination.

Everyone says my mother and I look so alike, but she’s got blue eyes and cheekbones that make me grumble, because why couldn’t I have gotten them? And her nose, too? She’s got a perfect nose. Instead we share the small mouth and the little knob of a chin, the body shape that runs up and down through the line of women in our family–if you got us all in a row, every woman in our family, you could see, in a casual glance, that we are related.