The Big House is officially under contract. Three months, a bit of staging, a lot of closet cleaning and there she goes. The folks from Seattle want to close on May 23, which gives us four weeks to find a new house. Oh sure, we’ve already gone and seen 98% of what’s on the market in the neighborhood we want to land in, but nothing we’ve *loved* so far. Well, except that house with the pool. We don’t need a pool. Not in Atlanta during a drought, not really. Not us. Too high maintenance.

So this weekend we’ll look until our eyes begin to bleed and the acid in our bellies eats a hole through our abdomens you can put a Plexiglas window in later to watch us in the act of digesting our liquefied meals because we’ve been grinding our jaws in our sleep and have no teef left.

The Mc? He’s well. Happy about the sale price and training for his first traithalon next weekend. He ordered a Mini that’s on a boat somewhere on its way to us him. He’s ready to be intown, me thinks.

That’s hardly enough right? What with the looking at land in North Carolina every twenty minutes and trying to agree on/finalize the cabin plan?

Nah.

So how about if we move our offices across town while we’re at it? I mean really, what’s a little more upheaval when you’ve got that other little stuff going on along with a cold and the threat of a root canal? Oh, yeah, and when you’re rockin seven games of Scrabulous at once, three knitting projects that never end, trying to find a grandmother in Scotland to fulfill an obscure request for a friend (my favorite), rekindling old friendships and forging new ones, immersing yourself in photography in hopes it will some day rescue you and in general being a good recycling water conserving herb growing person with an uncle recovering from a stroke in Omaha and an Auntie in Wales recovering from a ruptured appendix and an Auntie in SF you really need to visit PERIOD after her scare with cancer last year and that other painful thing this year that I can’t do a damn thing about.

In the end, I sit. I sit on the porch right now this very minute and ignore the overly dramatic expressions of the kitties in the window as I’ve just refilled the birdfeeder but neglected their poor “Mom I’m staaaaaarrrrving look at me I’m disappearingggggggggg” faces. Allow me to change my physical direction to avoid the silent guilt trip and instead enjoy the wee breeze and the bugs and the birds singing and the shade and the not warm enough to want to peel my skin off but not cool enough for long sleeves temperatures. There’s the train in the distance and a rustle in the bushes twenty feet below that gives away the whereabouts of scavengers of bugs and woodland snacks.

Yeah. Life is good….but I still miss having time to write.

I hope you miss me, too. Cuz sometimes, I wonder. Are you still there?

I’ve been down for five days with a bug. It’s not just any bug - this is the post nuclear cockroach king. The kind of bug that makes you wonder if you have the plague. If you are patient zero. If you’re going to show up in a history book one day or maybe just be the root of an urban legend : “Did you hear about that woman in Atlanta last year who literally coughed up her lung? No seriously. Google it.”

Man, do I ever write anything other than what’s ailing me anymore?

I hope you’re feelin’ groovy enough for both of us.

Waiter, there’s a gnat in my ‘rita.

It must be spring.

Driving home from dinner and ritas with Kel, the windows are cranked down, I’m listening to some funky wannabe bluegrass-ish music, and as I turn down one (of the many. effing. roads.) to home, the bugs were screaming so loud I could hear them over the audio distraction and feel them over the hummmmm of the subwoofer buried under the console of my right elbow.

I was suddenly seventeen again.

I was sneaking out of my house with Tony and Jason in the middle of the night to meet up with Julie. For what? Who knows. We were seventeen. Mailbox baseball? A night chatting in the graveyard? A trip to Gravity Hill?

She never showed up at her window, and we spent the rest of the night on a spontaneous scavenger hunt, trolling around Anchorage in the spring/summer twilight plucking pink flamingos and sunflower windmills from front yards. We even managed to find an unsupervised toilet in the yard of a house under construction - and since we were oblivious then as to the impact on homeowners - shimmied that somehow into the trunk of Tony’s orange mobile.

We subsequently left the assortment decoratively organized on Julie’s lawn.

That was the night I came home and found the window I’d crawled out of had been closed and locked.

That was the night I climbed the porch stairs and found my father waiting.

That was the night I went back to live with my mother.

Last week Friday during my day off work and day on running errands, I found myself in a familiar haunt: my old neighborhood bookstore. It’s one of my happy places, where I can spend hours pouring over shelves of disjointed genres, entertaining and tickling different parts of my thoughts/memories/imagination that have been neglected.

Drifting up and down the aisles pressed against the wall of the store allocated for books on spirituality and religion, I passed a young man engrossed in a book. Slouched down in his temporary sanctuary of a chair that struggles not to be too inviting.

I made mental notes about him, many of which have long since been crumpled up and thrown away. There’s still a faint scribble about his body language blasting an all points bulletin that he was both smart enough to chill there and probably too cool to be there.

He seemed to be positioning the book he was reading in such a way that no one would see.

It was “Making it on Broadway”, and wonder if he’ll try.

I hope he does, but with those mental notes now in a landfill or on a barge off the Jersey shore or the trash vortex, I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.

My dad’s oldest brother suffered a stroke late last week.

Though Paddy and I have never been especially close, I took the news hard. My sister says sometimes these things hurt more than we think they should because with every loss or near loss, there’s an echo of every loss or tragedy experienced before them.

I agree with that. I can feel it…with compounded interest.

Maybe it’s because the first thought I had was the memory of finding my mother on her bedroom floor the morning of midterms my senior year. She’d suffered a misdiagnosed mini-stroke days before, and had apparently suffered another that night. She didn’t come back home after that.

So when I got the news about Paddy I thought of mom, and dad, and the too damn many friends I’d lost before my twenty-fifth birthday. I thought about my namesakes: my grandmother and my auntie. I thought about how lucky I am to still have the family I do and I a spent a lot of time this weekend mulling over my memories of Paddy - which are too few.

*************

Dad told me a story of he and Paddy as boys back in Ireland. They’d ride their bikes all over then – to see friends and run errands for their mom and to just get out of the big stale bank house they lived in. They had a favorite hill they’d climb up, to see how fast they could get going coming back down. They had fancy little bikes with hand brakes and those two boys were always very competitive.

There was a day, dad said, that he got going too fast and hit the brakes…but instead of slowing or stopping he went “ass over tea kettle” - flying over the handlebars.

Seems Paddy had switched the cables for the front and back brakes.

I always thought that was a good one, and made my father tell me the story more than once.

*************

Paddy came to visit us in Anchorage once – I must have been six or seven years old at the time. He drove to see us from Nebraska, all by himself in his big red truck with the camper shell. I remember two things about his visit that summer.

One is was when he pulled into our driveway, and the crunch of the earth under his tires. We must have asked a million times when he’d get to us, in that time before cell phones and handhelds and I can only imagine my parents said something like “any minute now…why don’t you go outside and wait for him?”. I believe we did.

We rarely got to see family in those days. Auntie Kay visited a few times, but she owned a travel agency and that made it easy. Charlene and the kids came once, but that was just after Tommy died and they needed to be around family.

We were just too hard to get to, and it was expensive to get in or out. These were the days of recorded tapes being sent back and forth, because long distance calling was so costly.

So Paddy came all the way up to see us, and that was huge.

The second memory is actually not a memory of his visit at all - but the ghost of his visit and the shadow it cast. At some point during his stay, he swatted Kevin. I don’t know if it was a dap to the back of his head or a more hearty swat, Kevin would have to tell you that.

What I do remember is that my father and his brother didn’t speak for years after his visit. In fact, to the best of my recollection, they didn’t speak until my father found out he was dying and chose to make amends.

I was twenty two then.

*************

We had a family reunion in Omaha eleven years ago. It was the 40th anniversary of our family immigrating to America. Dad wasn’t there - he’d passed a few years before - but the four of us kids and dad’s wife Suzanne represented.

I have a picture from the big dinner the first night we were there. It captures Paddy and Danny giving a speech – reading newspaper clippings documenting our arrival, standing in front of a map of Ireland and some other bits hung on the wall behind them. My brother Kevin is in the lower left corner of the picture with his hand near his mouth in what someone who doesn’t know him would think a thoughtful pose.

But I know him, and I can see the subtle way his face contorts when he has watery eyes.

We’d all forgotten how much Paddy looked like dad.

Princess Diana died the second night we were all in Omaha.

*************

Every couple of years now I manage to see Paddy – at a wedding or a funeral or Thanksgiving at my Uncle Danny’s in Tampa.

We kids get a kick out of Paddy’s serious but child like ways and innocent lack of fashion sense. Usually it’s just the western wear, which is nothing to mock, but with each meeting we look forward to his inevitable donning of the baby blue one piece jump suit complete with attached baby blue silver buckled belt.

*************

I don’t know why Paddy drives everywhere. I never asked him. I imagine, now that I’m considering it, that it has to do more with control and less about heights.

He’s been building a plane in his backyard for years now, and last year underwent elective heart surgery to repair damage he’s had all his life. This so he could pass his physical and get his pilots license.

I don’t know much about the plane he’s built, other than he tied it to a tree to test the engines and wound up yanking the thing out of the ground and scaring the crap out of his neighbors.

*************

Things are looking good for Paddy, now. His lovely wife got him to the hospital immediately, which is key to recovery in the case of a stroke.

My Auntie Kay relays a tale from his wife that when he woke his second day in the hospital and was asked if he was hungry, he responded with a request for eggs, a steak and a six pack of beer.

I think he’s going to be just fine.

*************

Snap of Paddy at Kevin’s wedding in Anchorage (which he - of course - drove to). He was a dancin’ fool and wore out most of the bridesmaids.

A little over a month ago I went to the dentist. After the deep root planning last year, which marked the first negative dental experience I’ve ever had, I was expecting the worst. More lectures. More threats of sharp instruments been jammed between my teeth and the thin layer of tissue that holds them in. Hints at worse things to come and disapproving glances.

Instead, I spent twenty minutes with a very young and entirely gentle hygienist. So gentle I wasn’t convinced she’d actually done anything until the grape flavored buffing creme was being applied.

I shouldn’t have been so excited, because karama was watching and decided to come kick my ass in a dance off.

In came the dentist. The one who said I have an old filling made of mercury that needed to be replaced. The one that said there was a gap at the edge of it where germs could sneak in under the cover of night and make baby cavities right there in my mouf.

Let’s do it, I said, and we set the appointment for a few days later.

That day, she was late.

By an hour.

She was apparently having work done on her house and a contractor showed up early.

Fine. I watched TV. Worked via Blackberry. Waited.

She showed up and proceeded to drill and drill and drill until the skin on my face felt like I’d been at the beach and tripped after one too many fruity drinks to land face first in a sandcastle.

Fine.

I went back to work, drooled on myself and tried to make the best of it. Days later, it still hurt to chew and was waking myself up every night because I clench my teeth in my sleep, and the height of the filling was wrong (too short) so there was pressure on a tooth that wasn’t used to it. When I’d run my tongue along the little one that had been drilled on, it wasn’t even the same shape as it used to be. There was a grit on the surface my tongue bumps up against and I swear to you I could *hear* my teeth moving as a result of one little dude being out of line.

I called the office, was entirely too nice given the things that I was doing to the dentist in my minds eye, and went back to see what she if she could make it better. Stronger. Rebuild it.

She didn’t. She blah blah blahed about how she didn’t see anything wrong, that annoying film thing you bite on didn’t “show” anything and then proceeded to put a drill in my mouth again anyway.

Totally ohmahgawd NOT fine.

Now with 23% less tooth, I’m going back to my old dentist. The one I was with for eons before I broke up with him and his practice for something less GU.

Shame on me for trying to do the easy thing (not drive an hour to a dentist) instead of the right thing (staying with a practitioner I trust).

Wish me luckage, and please send good thoughts out to the universe to encourage people to do their jobs and do them well…because I also have yet another story about the Jeep I’m struggling not to vent about out here.

Positive thoughts. Clicking heels. Looking for Toto.