Newscoma

Homer knows. Squirrel Queen knows. Big Daddy knows.

You see, this month is the anniversary of my mother’s death. It’s significant. We love and we lose.

We do.

And we remember. And if we don’t, shame on us.

She was named after a box of shoes that my grandmother saw on a box in Michigan during WWII. She didn’t have a middle name because my gram thought her name was long enough.

You know, I do this every year, and each year, it gets harder.

Dammit.

It will be a decade. February 28th.

I’m going to get this out of the way. On that day, I will have to drive into the country to stare at the fields and meadows she loved, then go to her grave and lay down flowers. She liked flowers, but maybe, this year, I will play Beethoven or John Coltrane there.

Will that comfort her?

No. It will only comfort me.

So, anyway, I want to tell you the story, one I might not have told, about her. She was a musician and she studied music. She studied theory and how music evolved. She loved Miles Davis better than anyone and thought he was the epitome of progressive transition in music where there wasn’t a blueprint. She loved that. She thought Gil Evans was a genius. She made Homer and I listen to the blues and then Mozart because we may have lived in Hooterville but we were going to know THESE things. We needed to appreciate all music or we would have gotten a hard stare. We needed to be open-minded. And, this wasn’t a request from her.

It was mandatory.

And I thank her.

She loved her kids, she loved her husband and she loved music. As a child, there was always a violin, a bass, a cello lying about the house in Hootervegas although she was a singer and a pianist but the instruments were there because she was always in school.

I have no musical ability. I wonder sometimes if that was disappointing to her. I did other things. She encouraged me. This, of course, is of the good.

She was really beautiful. She was a petite woman that was the unaffected beauty queen of the local town who was more interested in politics than chiffon in 1960 but she was living in a small town and women didn’t do politics as much back then. She hid in the shadows. Not because that those options weren’t there, they were, but it meant a fight with a bunch of societal crap. And it did. Don’t deny it. She opted out but taught us (Homer and I picked it up, Mom, so you did your job well.)

I think she always canceled my dad’s vote out. And she made me watch Watergate and anything she thought might form me. At ten, it drove me crazy. Today, I smile when I write ‘not so much.’

She talked about feminism when it wasn’t even conceived in small rural towns. Did she make mistakes? Yeah. Did she teach me how to be an equal. Don’t even doubt it because I know I am. You know she did.

And she taught Homer and I to think for ourselves.

She was so shy. Painfully shy to the point it took her breath away until she sang on stage or she was at home with her family. Man, this woman could smile and it washed over all of us but she hated being in a group of people which is weird for me because I can hang in a church basement or at a nudist colony. This ability of mine didn’t come from her, I assure you.

Her shyness was her enemy and her largest demon. In the day, it was being shy, now I’m sure there are 20 different clinical names for it.

With that said, she created her life in spite of it all. She sang, won a contest and performed with the Everly Brothers because of it (Mid-South Fair Talent Contest, LWC), met my dad over a hamburger, fell in love and started her journey. She was a bit vain, who isn’t, but remained beautiful and curious and incredibly in tune to the world around her. She kept her hair blonde, because Big Daddy liked it that way. And her eyes were so blue they were deeper than the color of the ocean. I see these eyes in my youngest niece, Chuck, who doesn’t even know. She never met Jacque, how would she know? So I have to tell her and show her pictures. That’s my job.

Jeez, this is always hard.

She was completely confounded by me. I wasn’t traditionally beautiful like she and Homer were. I was different. I was eccentric. And she honed that in me.

You know, she loved me anyway and taught me swagger.

She smelled like sunshine. Dammit if she didn’t.

Homer was the good kid who would whip your ass in five minutes although I think most people think I’m the tough one.

I’m not. It’s Homer.

I was the kid that walked the line but wanted to dive into the deep waves of rebellion and free-spiritedness which didn’t interest Homer but, dammit, it did me. (And it did for my mom because she told me this before she died. It’s an odd thing between us. I never knew that I was her free-spirited one in her eyes.) I wanted to know those depths. And I did, delving into things that probably weren’t good for me but I was ambitious and bright enough to not go too far into the dark although it beckoned me. It was dangerous and sexy and I wanted the passion of it all. She knew this about both of us. And she guided, taught and only stopped me when I went too far.

Sometimes we went too far. We had a safety net.

Her name was Jacqueline. Named after a box of shoes and I find that to be so very compelling and charming.
The night before she died, my friend Mark, who my blogger friends met on Wednesday night in Nashville, came and sat with me in the hospital at midnight that horrible evening. He came. You guys need to know this for reasons I can’t explain. He sat with me as I sat slumped against the ‘dying room’ at the local hospital against the wall in the bright, fluorescent hallway at midnight and he tried to convince me that it wasn’t as bad as I knew it was, and despite it all, I knew in my depths that she was dying.

She was leaving and there wasn’t anything I could do.

And he tried to help.

That, my friends, is why he’s my friend. Even when I disagree with him in public.

And he did my mother’s eulogy in a packed funeral home where all I did was smile at people who apparently needed more comforting that I did, I smiled and I talked of things that were wonderful. I gave a hug and I said it was going to be okay to strangers and friends alike.

I didn’t cry for two weeks. When I did, I didn’t move for three days.

This, my blogger friends, will happen once a year. This is a gift, and curse, I give to myself.

So, I raise my glass to the woman who gave up so much for me.

Allow me a moment… as this is my blog and isn’t this what blogs are for?

I’m allowed that.

As I’m an obituary junkie, please don’t let me die with this headline.

I must stop looking at obits.

H/T Fark

There are things that confound me and then at the same time do not surprise me at all. Yesterday, in the national news arena, we watched three very vital stories hit our television/internet worlds and the reaction to all three stories was quite unique. But which story was the biggest one of the day?

We first had the story about the economy which confounds the average citizen and that includes me.

Followed by the withdrawal of Fred Thompson from the GOP presidential race, which could have been his if he wanted it. I can’t help but think that the worries that some of us as Democrats had when he announced and it faded into an abyss of woulda, coulda, shoulda. It may be the Tennessean coming out of me with this observation. I saw a Twitter from Brittney Gilbert in San Francisco say that his announcement didn’t impact anyone in her news room in San Francisco which I think is probably about right.

And then the death of actor Heath Ledger.

In rooting around the Internet yesterday, as I was a blogging fool for about five different websites, the most response I saw about all of the three stories was about the death of the young actor. It was the story that made a lot of people sit and and listen and talk. It even broke Nashville is Talking for awhile.

If you are a member of Twitter, for about four straight hours yesterday, Ledger’s death was the one that had people pondering what had happened, why a young man with a great deal of talent had died so unexpectedly. Was it a suicide? Was it an accidental drug overdose? The nation is apparently enamoured with watching Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Amy Winehouse, but the good actor with the big future was off the radar. It was a surprise.

I had a boss once tell me in news that there are always three big stories. 1.) Kids, 2.) personal issues with money and 3.) the unknown/death.

There is a great deal of validity to all three of those observations.

I thought Ledger was talented. He took chances. And there will always be the mystery of how someone so young could die. His death completely annihilated the other two top stories of the day off the top fold and on key posts of everyone major news organizations’ websites.

The story taking top placement isn’t surprising. And the immediacy of the conversation regarding his passing online wasn’t either. I’m just more connected now than I used to be in online entities.

Am I being analytical? Yes.

I feel all of my age this morning because the first thing I thought of was it’s sad that this kid had to die. But young people die everyday. They die in war, they die in reckless car crashes, they die from disease. But they are not famous they are just our people and we mourn.

And for some reason, we are connected with the instant loss of life because I think it targets some of our most primal fears.  And for the news industry, the other stories take the bottom fold because people want to know about the world of celebrity and watch from a safe distance. That includes me, I assure you.

This is a very powerful post and one of the strongest ones I’ve seen in a long time. The backstory is over there, but I just want Heather to know that after meeting her and seeing what a lovely soul she is that there are many of us who feel her pain.

Because it is about loss and wanting to understand things where there is no answer.

Pain has no color, no politics and no gender. It knows no bounds.

It just is.

Beautiful. She was absolutely one of the sexiest women in television ever if you ask me.

I was surprised to hear she died during the night.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the Bob Newhart special on PBS and she, of course, was one of the main folks who talked about her time on the show. When I was a kid growing up, she was on my weekly television schedule and it was to see her as much as Newhart.

And in the movie The Birds, I really wanted her to get Rod Taylor instead of Tippi Hedren.

The voice, man that husky smooth as molasses voice.

You’ll be missed, Suzanne.

Theresa Duncan committed suicide in July.

But on New Year’s Eve, five months after her death, she updated her blog.

Maybe I’m morbid, but I can’t look away.

Yeah, my normal stuff is by the way side this very cold, yet balmy, yet confusing evening.

I’m writing about a love affair of mine that is passionate and filled with so much desire I cannot stand the tingling I feel.

It’s filled with craving of things I cannot write, but I admire.

I love Richard Matheson. I like horror novels like I Am Legend so this is up there with one of the best. It was written 11 years before I was even born and it is extremely timely for the world we live in.

You don’t know him? Yeah you do. Have you seen Duel, the first film of Steven Spielberg?

There is so much more. You may not know his name, but YOU know him.

He wrote I Am Legend in 1954. Yeah, you get the picture. In my second month of blogging, I talked of this of my extreme joy of reading this book. Matheson, Jack Finney, Harlan Ellison …

I adore you.

I defer to my younger self:

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson – If you like horror novels, and I do, this one rocks. Who is the bad guy in this novel? Sort of reminds me of what’s going on right now in the world, the isolation, need for social grounding and the fact that nothing appears at it seems.

What I didn’t say almost two years ago is how that this novel deconstructs the vampire myth in a way that, if you like horror novels, will make your throat clench. How it throws away the Romanticism of the undead and knocks it on it’s head because it’s not about eternity, but about survival is just … sweetly horrific.

It’s more than about the undead, it’s about changes in evolution.

It’s about the death of a society, of a generation.

And, it’s about things that wipe out the planet. The Ebola Virus, Aids, War … it’s about the annihilation of our planet  due to things we have no control of.

And how one man must survive.

The claustrophobia in this book, written more than a half a century ago, will make you retreat into your darkest place.  Because it’s just damn well scary.

Man, I’m sure that non-fans will scoff but how sweet, how exquisite I’m making this out to be, cut dangit, it is.

How evil, yet not. See, that’s what this is about. It’s about the human condition during fear and loss of control. It’s about changes in this world. Oh, Richard, you are my idol. I’m so serious.

The novel is about how the one man’s isolation against the apocalypse. It’s about evolution of our species. And, it’s about sometimes we are right.

Then sometimes we aren’t.

Oh, dear, this is sweet. And I’m looking at this novel as we speak.

Now, I haven’t seen the latest movie, but I will say that Vincent Price’s The Last Man on Earth was very much a Vincent Price movie.

Charleton Heston’s The Omega Man was not bad, but not great.

I’m so hoping, Will Smith, because I dig you and I think you are groovy. Please, let this be good. Third time is the charm.

I AM LEGEND.

Yes, the book is delicious. Will the third movie honor Richard Matheson’s work?

I hope so. Because Robert Neville is the Holden Caulfield for those of us who love the horror genre.

Mr. Matheson, thanks for changing it up. You are inspirational.

I’ve gushed enough. Whoops.

Now, go here if you are bored by my love of the horror genre. Yeah, I know, I know.

Remember a few months ago when I told you about the cannibal guy from Mexico.

Well, he is no longer with us.

A Mexican man accused of murdering his girlfriend and eating her body parts has been found dead in his prison cell.

Jose Luis Calva was found hanging by his belt in the jail in Mexico City after apparently committing suicide, the department of corrections said.

Mr Calva was arrested on 8 October by police investigating the disappearance of his girlfriend, Alejandra Galeana.

Of course, he told police that he had cleaned and dismembered her to feed her to the dog.

This story just gets weirder and weirder.

Ivy, in one of the most beautiful and honest posts I’ve read in a long time, talks about her grandmother who died a couple of months ago and how her life is moving forward.

It’s a reminder of how bitterness can poison your heart and take other people’s hearts with you. It’s a reminder of how when your spouse cheats, you need to either cut them loose or forgive them with your whole heart, because living with the bitterness is Not. A. Good. Thing.

Why did this speak to me? Because I understand. My mother died and I also put her up on a pedestal. Time healed some things, gave clarity to the pain and the loss and I can remember clearly the day in 1999, months after I stood in a hospital room and saw her take her last breath when I realized that my mother, whose name was Jacqueline, was human. That she made mistakes. That although I did a bit of the hero worship that I had forgotten that she was just as flawed as I sometimes can be.

And as for bitterness, she’s right. After a very long year, in the past month, I’ve had to put some bitterness behind me, much of it given to me on a silver platter but also a great deal of it that I brought on myself. Realizations are hard things to go through. Even when you know you participated in your own pain.

Ivy, great post and a huge reminder to us all that although we grieve when we lose those people that we love and those things that didn’t work out the way that we thought it might, it’s up to us to deal with the bitterness and to embrace our own humanity, as that is all we have.

Is it wrong to want to pull my hair out and gnash my teeth.

I’m a child of the 70’s.

The Wide World of Sports was the big deal when I was a little kid, which means the Evel was the man.

He was pretty groovy in his Elvis outfits and the fact that he was the face of fearless when I was a little kid. I was nine when he did the whole Snake River thing.

Wow.

Evel Knievel died Friday after 69 years, which is more than twice as long as it by all rights should have taken him. Knievel, who had been in poor health for years from conditions including diabetes and hepatitis C, was best known for his death-defying jumps on motorcycles (and other vehicles) in the 1960s and ’70s. But really the stuntman, born Robert Craig Knievel Jr., was best known, and loved, for his crashes.

Man, the crashes were amazing.

So, Evel, thanks for the fun, the laughter and the tears. You have been missed for 30 years, but when you were in your prime, you were fantastic.

I miss those crashes. These kids on reality shows can’t compare to Evel.

He was the man.