pantoum's Diaryland Diary

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

LOVE THY SIBLINGS

Three of my dear friends and I have dubbed ourselves the Fabulous Four. We get together every few months to catch up on each others' lives, eat good food, share some vino, celebrate our fabulous selves, discuss the trials and tribulations of hot flashes, and check in to make sure we are all thriving emotionally. I love these women—Musicgrrl and Operagrrl and our wild Cajun French pal BeeBee— dearly and really enjoy our gatherings.

Tonight we met at an Italian place that serves roasted garlic in olive oil alongside their scrumptious bread and I probably had fifteen cloves with dinner, so watch our vampires! I also had chicken piccata (capers with lemon, mmm), a nice salad, and some good chardonnay. The food was delicious but our laughter was even better.

We were in a room with a large group of sixty-something-year-old women who call themselves the Red Hat Society. They all wear purple outfits and red hats (in honor of the poem "when I am an old woman I shall wear purple with a red hat that doesn't go and doesn't suit me") and get together to be outrageous en masse.

I held my digital camera over my shoulder and took a surreptitious picture of them that wound up being a nice shot of one woman's ass, so I said to my friends, "when I am an old woman I shall wear purple on my large ass that doesn't go and doesn't suit me," which cracked everyone up.

Somewhere in the course of dinner, we realized that, this time last year, three of the four of us were in long-term relationships that have since ended: Operagrrl's six-year relationship with Jane, my ten-year relationship with the Ginger and Musicgrrl's nine-year relationship with Coolio are all past tense now. And yet we're mostly thriving, seem wounded but moving into happiness.

Musicgrrl joked that she loves long-term relationships—that's why she's had three of them. And BeeBee—the last of us still in a long-term relationship, grilled us:

So Bird. Tell me about your fuck buddies.

As if! I grinned wickedly and said she should really be asking Musicgrrl about HER sexual exploits (which she did), and then we described who Ms. Operagrrl should be bedding now that she's been single over four months. It was really fun being this silly together.

July 25, in addition to being the birthday of my dear friend and ex Tree, is the day I found the Ginger with Dickboy and then he smirked at me from the tub in which he was hiding and I knocked that smirk right off his smartass frat-boy face.

(And yes I am still glad I did that, BTW.)

The Fab Four decided that we need to perform some sort of cleansing ritual this year and perhaps we should but at least I am more deeply seated in who I am, more me, again.

We also discussed forming a house-project work group that, maybe once a month, gathers at our different houses to tackle big projects together—stripping and resealing decks, painting, caulking, that kind of thing. And Musicgrrl said that Coolio has a tall enough ladder that I can borrow to climb up to my second floor and put screening over my gutters.

(Now really, who besides shrinks would put a thirty-year-guaranteed, top-of-the-line anti-fungal roof on a house but fail to cover their gutters?)

My sister Penelope had a hysterectomy today, so she is minus one uterus, one ovary, and two cysts, one of which was the size of a grapefruit. Eep! She seems to be recovering fine but I'll call tomorrow, make sure she still doesn't want me to come down and help out for a few days down in golf-course gated-communitylandia.

Talked with my brother Lad too. He's getting married in August and said that he hates, really hates, just can't stand our sister Glittergrrl, whose six-year-old daughter CeeCee is now living with my mother, and he is glad that she's gone into the Army so that our family can have some semblance of sanity again for a while.

Apparently, this loser guy Glittergrrl was dating—the one who stole her car last year, then totaled it, then beat her up in front of my mother, which damn near got him killed by both of my brothers and, really, the entire family—stole her car AGAIN and totalled it the day before she went into the Army. Only he told her that it got stolen—really?—and gosh what a surprise that they found the car run into a bridge and totalled. (Hence my mother's request that I come up with the funds required to buy her a car.)

Former prisoner loser dude and Glittergrrl apparently got a marriage license right before she enlisted too, only he didn't show up for the actual ceremony—which can only be good for her in the end.

Loser. I hope hope hope she gets some confidence in the Army and tells him where he can go with his loser self because I refuse to be civil to him if I ever find myself in the same room with the man. (Actually, he should hope that that never happens, because I outgrew the need to be a polite Southern woman some time ago and he does not want to see the side of me that's going to come out if we ever actually meet.)

Meanwhile, I am exhausted and must head to bed soon, but want to include this bizarre obituary that ran in our local paper first. My pal Operagrrl calls it the Love Thy Sibling obituary.

DOROTHY GIBSON CULLY
On June 3, 2005, at 10:45 PM in Memphis, Tennessee, Dorothy Gibson Cully, 86, died peacefully, while in the loving care of her two favorite children, Barbara and David. All of her breath leaked out.

The mother of four children, grandmother to 11, great-grandmother to nine, devoted wife for 56 years to the late Ralph Chester Cully and a true friend to many, Dot had been active as a volunteer in the Catholic Church and other community charities for much of the past 25 years.

She was born the second child of six in 1919 as Frances Dorothy Gibson, daughter to Kathleen Heard Gibson and Calvin Hooper Gibson, an inventor best known as the first person since the Middle Ages to calculate the arcane lead-to-gold formula. Unable to actually prove this complex theory scientifically, and frustrated by the cruel conspiracy of the so-called "scientific community" working against his efforts, he ultimately stuck his head in a heated gas oven with a golden delicious apple propped in his mouth. Miraculously, the apple was saved for the evening dessert. Calvin was not.

Native Marylanders and longtime Baltimore, Kent Island and Ocean City residents, Ralph and Dot later resided in Lakeland, Florida, and Virginia Beach, Virginia. Several years after Ralph's death, Dot moved to Raleigh in 2001, where she lived with her son, David.

At the time of her death, Dot was visiting her daughter, Carol, in Memphis. Carol and her husband, Ron, away from home attending a "very important conference" at a posh Florida resort, rushed home 10 days later after learning of her death. Dot's other children, dutifully at their mother's side helping with the normal last-minute arrangements—hospice notification, funeral parlor notice, revising the last will, etc.—happily picked up the considerable slack of the absent former heiress.

Dot is warmly remembered as a generous, spiritually strong, resourceful, tolerant and smart woman, who was always ready to offer help and never judged others or their shortcomings. Dot always found time to knit sweaters, sew quilts and send written notes to the family children, all while working a full time job, volunteering as Girl Scout leader and donating considerable time to local charities and the neighborhood Catholic Church.

Dot graduated from Eastern High School at 15, worked in Baltimore full time from 1934 to 1979, beginning as a factory worker at Cross & Blackwell and retiring after 30 years as property manager and controller for a Baltimore conglomerate, Housing Engineering Company, all while raising four children, two of whom are fairly normal.

An Irishwoman proud of and curious about her heritage, she was a voracious reader of historical novels, particularly those about the glories and trials of Ireland. Dot also loved to travel, her favorite destination being Eire's auld sod, where she dreamed of the magic, mystery and legend of the Emerald Isle.

Dot Cully is survived by her sisters, Ginny Torrico in Virginia, Marlan Lee in Florida and Eileen Adams in Baltimore; her brother, Russell Gibson of Fallston, Maryland; her children, Barbara Frost of Ocean City, Maryland, Carol Meroney of Memphis, Tennesssee, David Cully of Raleigh, North Carolina and Stephen Cully of Baltimore, Maryland.

Contributions to the Wake County (NC) Hospice Services are welcome.

Opinions about the details of this obit are not, since Mom would have liked it this way.

•

And on that note, I notice that it's 12:45 a.m. already and here I am still awake, so I am going upstairs now to run a nice warm bubble bath and then crawl into bed.

Good night.

•

(Wednesday) Can't seem to wake up this morning and am slowly slipping back into half-caf lattes, which I better stop or I'll be addicted to caffeine again and going in for those lumpy-breast follow-up mammograms that always scare the living beJebus out of me.

I forgot to say that, when the dental assistant knocked my implant out on Monday, the dentist put a big fat bruise the shape and width of his thumb on my chin, and I do believe that everyone in the building has now commented on the fact that my face is bruised. Bleah!

Today, at three, I cave and get bifocals. Sigh. It's hell getting old.

SINGING IN SHOWER: This morning I sang Chrissy Hyde's (?) song about going back to Ohio and discovering that it has turned into a series of strip malls ("way to go, Ohio").

READING: Carole Maso's Aureole STILL, because it's so sexy that I don't want to finish it, so I'm been savoring every word.

SELECTED SPAM: Goodbye to the thighs.

9:17 a.m. - 2005-07-13

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

previous - next