Dog Years, Blue Moons & Blackouts

I galloped and hurtled all the way home because of that headline. Now let’s see if I can remember why

I think it started with Daisy being suddenly so old when she used to be so young.

In between we were the same age for an instant but now she’s like 97 if you apply the 7 year thing and then I started thinking about how blue moons and dog years are similar and then I started thinking about my age and how I could fuck with it and decided if I don’t count the blackout birthdays I am in my twenties.

A little frazzledand/orbewildered-looking for my twenties maybe but you know what they say: Age is just a number.

So’s my bank balance, waist circumference and IQ and they’re all shockingly similar

Other things I was thinking on our walk this morning – and it’s still very early, the sun is very sideways blasting through the window right at my left eyeball – were things like:

• oh fuck is that the garbage truck I hear

• the story I just finished I got her name wrong so listen, Mary-Sue, let’s pretend it was to protect your identity

• why am I only wearing a sweatshirt

• there’s yesterday’s slip streak and there’s my bum print

• should I make brownies

Also was thinking that at the end of every blog I’m going to put a story if I’ve got a fresh one to put but I’ll never go back to old stories because I believe in forward motion only.

And while we’re on it (just kidding we’re not and sorry for galloping) it’s a fucking struggle isn’t it staying away from the sweet stuff and what do people do with ugly bananas but make mañana bread (Spellcheck knows something we don’t) and did you see all the twinkly cute leftover Easter chocolates at Shoppers for like practically nothing?

So anyway there will be a story at the end of these posts more often than not probably because I am writing like a fiend who doesn’t have a job these days and the stories are just coming at me like the sun is right now sort of like I have a window open somewhere and I’m writing the right kind of stories I dig, you know, ones I am happy with and you know what? Unlike the age is just a number adage or whatever it is, write what you want to read really is the truth because I’m always on the lookout for these kinds of stories – short and pulsy, usually set in the 60s, a little tainted or tragic or twisted – but I can rarely find them so I write them.

And I write them just as fast and gallopy as I write these blogs and funny things is when I read my own stories they surprise me which is fucking amazingly beautiful like opening a present you’ve always wanted and when you look see who it’s from it’s from you.

So if you like these kinds of stories, here you go, and if you don’t, here you don’t go:

Blue Skirt Yellow Blouse

Say lunch was delicious, put your plate in the sink, when you leave say thank you for having me loud and clear.

So it was all an act you see but I could never talk to them, my friends’ parents I mean, because there just wasn’t a single word available to me and it got hot and weird and I’d almost always slink away leave my crusts on the rattling plate and the rattling plate on the rattling table and when I left, I only whispered or mouthed or thought the thank you for having me part and then I’d sort of shed the discomfort on the way home and tell my mother it was a nice afternoon, thank you for asking.

Not like the way my friend Sarah told all grown-ups what they wanted to hear and then some, toying with them, a little flirty in a for-a-good-time-call-Sarah kind of way.

My sister Laura was good with grown-ups, too, but in a stern, reassuring, mature way and she got most of the babysitting jobs while Sarah got the second most.

Laura always checked the mother over for a smudge, an unhooked eye, a stray thread, once an owl sticker on the back of a high-heeled shoe, and just before they brought themselves to ask, like the way you have to take the milk off the heat just before it bubbles up, she’d say you look lovely a little wistfully like she hoped she’d be them one day not too soon but one day, Cinderella.

So while Laura and Sarah got all the babysitting jobs, I got better at being furtive.

Once I went with Laura to the MacDonald’s because they owed her babysitting money and I know Mrs. MacDonald thought there was something wrong with me because sometimes people trade shy for forlorn and then forlorn for odd and maybe odd’s acceptable now but back then you wanted to be normal or at least appear so because before you knew it odd snapped into weird or strange and that’s a fucking ball of wax I’m still trying to climb out of if you can believe it.

So imagine how it was today I ran into Mary-Ellen MacDonald and to picture her think of the girls in Back to the Future or American Graffiti or even Happy Days if you didn’t get out much, in a skirt and button-all-the-way-up blouse and you might as well make her blonde while you’re at it and give her those dimples so deep it looks like she understands everything.

But she didn’t always understand everything.

I was the youngest – did I mention three older brothers besides Laura and two steps? – and it was like they didn’t actually pick on me but I was their fodder from just being younger I think and not knowing all the shit they knew so I guess you could say they made fun of me a lot and they’d probably be surprised that there’s still a kind of waxy residue from it although I pretended to take it in stride, you know, like a little fucking champ.

Anyway one time I babysat Mary-Ellen MacDonald when Laura was last-minute ill and what I did was totally convince her that blue was yellow and yellow was blue and I think about that now from time to time. I mean I had her tearfully at first but finally so convinced it wasn’t funny, really it wasn’t, but by then it was too late to go backwards.

When I saw her today she was wearing a blue skirt and yellow blouse or was it the other way around for her I wonder.