beautiful, funny, sad & true

My older niece is in fifth grade, and every time we talk about school, I feel the need to bite my tongue a bit, because fifth grade was such a rough year for me.  My teacher, Mr. P., was horrendous, and mean, which I suppose is common enough, but that was also the year in which my parents got a divorce, and we were dealing with all that crap at the same time.  School work, naturally, got pushed to the back burner occasionally, as we were shuttled back and forth between Mom’s house and Dad’s new apartment.  My teacher sent many an angry report card home with me for my mom to acknowledge and sign, but I don’t think she ever saw any of them, because I would forge her signature and dutifully bring the cards right back to school with me the next day.  While I was in Yakima a few months ago for Stepdad’s funeral, Mom gave Brother and me each a box of our childhood stuff.  My box, which I now have here in my basement, was and is crammed full of school papers, drawings, my license plate collection, and even the slightly tattered blue blanket I used to carry around when I was really young.  Sure enough, mixed in with the forgettable mountain of school papers, I found one of those forged report cards.  I find it a bit depressing that with of all the important things I wish I still had (like my cassette tapes, and my toy cars!), that piece of hilarious minutiae somehow managed to survive the intervening decades.

But Niece doesn’t have to know about any of that for quite a while, as far as I’m concerned.  I don’t want to burden her with that knowledge, or to use the influence I have over her (as the ‘cool’ uncle) to sway her in that negative direction.  I want her to have the best school experiences she can, for as long as she can.  School’s hard enough without your uncle telling you how crappy it is.  But I do think about it from time to time, and I feel like fifth grade was the first real low point in my life, and that’s when something changed in me forever.

In sixth grade, I had a teacher with the very unfortunate surname of Growcock.  On the first day of school, he would quickly tell the students, “Call me ‘Mister G’.”  Thankfully, he was one of the best, nicest and most memorable teachers I had during elementary school, which helped bring me back from the shell shock of the year before.  He was always quick with a joke, but we knew to take him seriously also.  Each year, he would take the entire sixth-grade class to see a Harlem Globetrotters game in the nearby college town of Ellensburg, which was a tradition that all the younger kids looked forward to.

On Valentines’ Day that year, all of us kids made cards for each other, boys and girls alike.  That was the last year we did that before we all hit puberty the following year, which meant that valentines were out of the question.  One of those valentine folders survived in my childhood box, too, but I’m not sure if it’s the one from fifth or sixth grade.  What I do remember about that day was the folders we all made.  We cut out construction paper and drew a bunch of designs all over it – usually hearts or poems or whatever – and then we taped them to the side of our desks so that people could come around and place cards into them.  One kid, M. Reynolds, wrote a poem on his folder that quoted a popular commercial of the day:  “Reynolds Wrap:  the best wrap around.”  M.’s writing skills were a bit lacking, however, so he misspelled the word ‘wrap’, which meant that his Valentines’ poem was proudly displayed on the side of his desk, in huge bold letters, for all to see.

“REYNOLDS RAPE, THE BEST RAPE AROUND.”

My desk was right next to M.’s, which meant that I got to see that gem in progress before anyone else did, and I knew that it might get him in trouble if anybody else saw it.  I wasn’t necessarily a friend of M.’s, but I felt that I should mention it to Mr. G., and somehow stick up for M. at the same time.  When the bell rang and everyone else, including M., ran outside for recess, I walked up to Mr. G.’s desk and told him I had something to show him.  “I’m sure this is a total accident, since M. isn’t very good at spelling, but I thought you should see this, cause it’s funny.  I don’t want him to get in trouble or anything, though.”  We had a good laugh, and he told me he’d take care of it.  When the class came back inside from recess, M. had crossed out every instance of ‘rape’ and replaced it with the correct word.

Incidentally, I’m sure Mr. G. knew how lucky he was that he taught younger kids, because with the last name Growcock, teaching any older age group would provide decades of ridicule for the poor guy.   Maybe he consciously chose to teach lower grade levels for that very reason.  One of my current friends, who was in Mr. G.’s class at the same time I was, recently joked, “Man, I’d be changing that shit to Smith.“  I couldn’t agree more.  I did a quick search for Mr. G. online, and it seems that he’s still alive and living in central Washington state, although he’s almost eighty years old now.  I hope he continued to enjoy teaching, and I hope he’s had a good life.  I probably owe my sanity that year to him, although I promptly lost it again the next year, as soon as I entered junior high.

Like most kids, I spent the first decade or so of my musical life listening to my parents’ record collection, which consisted almost entirely of classical music, with the barest minimum of rock (The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Mamas and the Papas, etc.) thrown in for good measure.  My dad’s rare ventures into so-called rock included easy listening stuff like the Carpenters, which made my brother and me cringe.  By the time I was about twelve years old, I finally discovered that I could have a radio in my room, and that radios had stations that could be changed.  I quickly found out about NPR, because they played a radio version of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I still think is one of the funniest and most brilliant books ever written.  I also found out about heavy metal, which was popular at the time, and which changed my life forever.

There was a late-night (ten o’clock is late-night when you’re thirteen years old) show called Metal Shop, which introduced me to a whole new style of music that I would call my own for the next few years.  The show has a newish online presence, albeit without the original host, but it will give you an idea of the kind of bands they played.  The ones I that knocked me out early on were Dokken, Ratt and Twisted Sister, but I eagerly devoured most of what the show offered up each week.  My brother dutifully followed suit, and before long, we were listening to all the metal masters of the day.  I got my first electric guitar a month after my fifteenth birthday, and this is about all anyone saw of me for the next two years.

I’m happy to have a scanner, finally, so that pictures like the one of my brother in Kiss makeup can finally see the light of day.  I’m sure he’ll be thrilled about this.

I’m sharing it here because A) it’s priceless and I love it, and B) he’s standing in my doorway, so you can see that I had corkboard panels covering my wall, and the entire thing was covered with pictures cut out from magazines like Hit Parader and Circus.  From the top down, they are pictures of Aerosmith, Ratt, the Scorpions, Eddie Van Halen, and Kiss.  You’re welcome.

All of this presented a problem for our mom, who was becoming more and more conservative as the years progressed.  She was worried about the state of our souls, and she would give us books by Christian authors like Bob Larson, who was most famous for his theories about the supposed practice of the ‘backward masking’ of hidden Satanic messages that only appeared in songs when the songs were played in reverse.

Bob is still around and doing his thing, and his focus these days seems to have shifted from the evils of rock music to the exorcism of demons, but back in the day he would spend all his time decrying heavy metal and playing song after song while he did so.  He would compare the supposed innocence of the regular version of a song, but as soon as he played the record backwards, its subversive and insidious ‘real’ meaning was revealed.  One of the most famous examples was “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen, which said, upon reversal, “Decide to smoke marijuana.”  Or DID it?

The best times on the show were when he would open up the phone lines and take callers.  He would argue passionately with the ones who found his claims ridiculous, and he would ‘save’ the ones who felt they needed to repent, right there on the air.  It made for hilarious and riveting radio.   When a caller would say, “But, Bob, [insert famous musician’s name here] wears a cross all the time,” Bob would reply, “I bet he doesn’t even know what that cross means.”  Our favorite quotation of his was about the leather-and-studs clothing that Judas Priest introduced, which was quickly adopted by a lot of the other bands.  Bob made it very clear that “leather and studs are symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community.”

Who’d have thought at the time that Rob Halford of Judas Priest (in the picture above) would, in fact, come out of the closet and announce his homosexuality a decade or so later?  Who’d have thought that he spent much of his free time in gay S&M clubs, and that he would fashion the entire look for his band after the style of clothing that he’d seen and worn in the clubs?  The mind boggles.  All I can say is, when my brother and I were young, ideas like ‘the symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community’ would never have crossed our minds if it wasn’t for Bob Larson.  We liked the music enough that we didn’t really care what people looked like, with the possible exception of Vinnie Vincent, who looked even more feminine than most of the other glam rockers at the time, which put him up against some serious competition.

At some point, I’ll have to write a separate entry about Vinnie Vincent, because his is a very interesting story, and a bit of a rags-to-riches-and-back-to-rags one, too.  That’s neither here nor there, at least for the purposes of this story.

It was never our intention to emulate the rock-and-roll lifestyle; we were mostly well-adjusted kids who just wanted to listen to the music.  One day, however, our mom decided that she’d had enough.  She marched into my brother’s room, where he had a large poster of Poison on his wall.  The bass player, Bobby Dall (I didn’t even have to look that up!), had a cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth.

“That’s disgusting,” my mom sneered.  “Take it down.”

“What?” my brother asked.  “No way!”

“Yes,” she said firmly.  “Look at that; he’s got a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.”

“So?  You think I’m gonna start smoking just because he does?”

“Well. . .maybe.”

“Oh yeah, right.  Why do I have to take this down?  Come here.”  He ran into my room and pointed at a huge poster of Yngwie Malmsteen dressed in black, wearing a huge cross around his neck.  “Look,” he continued, sarcasm dripping from his tongue, throwing Bob Larson’s quotations back into Mom’s face.  “He’s wearing a cross. . .I bet he doesn’t know what that means! And all these guys are wearing leather and studs, which are the symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community!”

At that, Mom came bursting into my room, saying, “WHERE?”

I collapsed into laughter, and my brother was still consumed with rage, but after a few seconds he started to laugh too.  He wasn’t about to take down that poster, though, especially since I had an entire wall devoted to all the same people, and I certainly wasn’t going to take anything down.   Mom stood and stared at my wall, seemingly for the first time, and she didn’t like it one bit.  The symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community were everywhere, and so were the symbols of hedonism and satanism.

“I want this garbage taken down,” she said.

“No.  Why is this such a big deal all of a sudden?  These pictures have been up here for two years.”

“Well, take them down now.”

“No.  I like them.”

My brother and I won that particular argument.  I suspect that Mom realized it was a phase we were going through, and that we’d grow out of it soon enough.  Or maybe she just gave in.  Either way, we won, and the posters stayed up until we moved into our new house a couple of years later, by which time they had been replaced by world maps and posters of the Beatles.

In my experience, if you tell somebody they can’t have something, it only makes them want it more.  When I was in college, there was a pathetic demonstration of some sort (I don’t even remember what the issue was) that involved people waving signs that warned other people not to burn the flag.   One of my friends said, dryly, “I never wanted to burn a flag until they told me I couldn’t.”  Also, I worked at a record store during the time that 2 Live Krew’s Nasty As They Wanna Be came out.  That turd of an album sat untouched on the shelf for months at a time, and we couldn’t pay people to take a copy of it.  As soon as it got banned, however, we couldn’t order copies of it fast enough.  People who didn’t even like rap were buying them just to see what the fuss was about.

The point of all this, to the extent that there is one, is that kids turn out fine most of the time, and the music they listen to is the least of their problems.   Pick your battles, parents, and stay involved with their lives, but be careful not to make mountains out of molehills.  If you do, you’ll only make the kids more likely to rebel, which will exacerbate the issues you were trying to eliminate in the first place.

By way of a denouement, here’s a classic Bloom County cartoon I had on my wall back then, from when Apple introduced the first Macintosh computers.  I figured it would tie in nicely with this particular discussion.

2010 has been very strange.  At the beginning of the year, I was still on blogging hiatus, so it took a while to get back up to speed.  Springtime was crazy, with lots of great musical endeavors and memorable trips.  By the summer, both my life and this blog went into overdrive, when I really started writing again, and found my full stride while sharing a bit too much about my childhood.  Suddenly it was October, which is the month of my birth, but this year was also the month of my stepdad’s death, which has sent everything into a tailspin since then.  A surreal trip to Yakima for the funeral was followed by multiple trips to Seattle, both for gigs and for family functions.

There were some standout moments from this last year that didn’t manage to make it into the blog, for various reasons.  For example, here’s a video of a particularly interesting recording session that I was lucky enough to be involved with, albeit in a small way.  A local singer-songwriter, who is also a friend, put the word out on SocialNetwork that she wanted to create a cacaphony of 50 pianos, all playing an F chord at the same time.  I jumped at the chance.  She rented a piano showroom downtown, and my friend and I (and forty eight or so other people) joined in to participate.  I brought my camera to capture a bit of the action.

Another memorable moment from this last year was Trek in the Park.  This theater group gets together every year to re-create a famous episode from the original Star Trek television series.  This year’s was Space Seed, in which we meet the infamous character Khan (who returned in the movie The Wrath of Khan).  It was a very well-done production, with live music and everything. . .and it was all free of charge.  Here’s the climactic fight sequence between Kirk and Khan.

IrishBand released our self-titled EP this year, as well as an amazing animated video that a friend created for us.  I would post that here, but our band name is very unusual, hence the pseudonym.  To celebrate, we went to Port Townsend, Washington (the hometown of three of the band members, and an adopted home away from home for the rest of us) to play a CD release party and catch the Rhododendron Festival and parade and everything.  It’s always a huge party weekend for PT, and this year was the tenth reunion for PT High School, which included Violinist and a bunch of other friends, so I actually went to the reunion barbecue in Chetzemoka Park during the afternoon, since I knew so many of the people there.  (God forbid that I actually go to any of my own class reunions; I haven’t yet.)  I also performed in the parade, in disguise, as an honorary member of Nanda.  I’m the guy with the Mexican wrestling mask, playing the bass, miming along to the dance music that was blaring from the speakers in the back of the truck.

I had the opportunity to see the Oregon Symphony perform many times this last year, with some pretty big-name performers.  Violinists Midori and Hilary Hahn, violinist Pinchas Zukerman and his cellist wife Amanda Forsyth (who, incidentally, gave a cello master class at the Old Church that afternoon, which I also attended, even though I’m far from being a cello master) who performed Brahms’s Double Concerto together, and a number of others.  This month, I have a ticket for pianist Emanuel Ax’s concert, which I’m very much looking forward to.  Yo-Yo Ma performed here a month or so ago, but his concert was sold out in the spring, only a few weeks after tickets went on sale.  Curses.

So it’s been a good year, overall, but I’m really hoping that 2011 is better, or less confusing at the very least.  I have lofty goals for the upcoming year, which include finding a job, finding love and a real relationship, taking care of some things that have been dogging me for a while now, and producing more CD’s.  I have a bit of news on the music front, actually.  A friend of mine hurt her arms a year ago, and has since been unable to play the piano, but that hasn’t stopped her from singing, or from writing lyrics and melodies, or from having tons of ideas.  She e-mailed me at some point to ask what people in her position do in the music business.  I told her I don’t know about ‘the music business’, but I’d love to give the songs a listen, and that maybe I could put music to them.  She sent me some mp3’s, and I instantly felt like I knew where the songs should go.  They felt familiar without being predictable, which is always a good sign.  That was about two months ago, and we already have five or six collaborations in the works.  Pretty awesome and exciting.

In other news, December is the fourth anniversary of this blog, so it seems appropriate to have a little birthday party, no?  Come on, let’s have some sis-boom-bah.

So anyway, on to the Best Of.  Here are the lists of what I consider to the best entries BFS&T has to offer from this past year, which naturally includes a list of the most interesting dreams, as well.  Enjoy!

THE ENTRIES:

SteamCon – the steampunk convention in Seattle in which PolishCellist and I played, and had a total blast doing so

tragedy – the death of Stepdad

struggle – the early aftermath of the death of Stepdad

sitting here thinking about the Holocaust – one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard on the radio

folk festival fun – Portland Folk Festival, starring IrishBand, Dan Bern, Roll Out Cowboy, etc.

I’m kind of an a-hole – see for yourself

birthday present – prostitute schmostitute

the unicorn code – love it, learn it, LIVE IT

no one’s laughing – a peek into our family dynamics

d̩ja vu Рwhat it feels like, and a friend who claims to never have experienced one

the truth is out there – interesting UFO story, I promise

it’s not for shaving – Occam’s Razor, and how it applies to recording music

what if it is? – a very memorable and touching moment from the show Six Feet Under

THE CHILDHOOD STORIES:

shuttlecock

love and curiosity

he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother

the final innocent tryst

synchronicity

THE DREAMS:

lights, camera, dream

festival dream

shape shifters

inimitable and imitable

subconscious and libido

this needs a name

frozen

Just in case this wasn’t enough for your insatiable appetite for blog entries, here’s the Best of BFS&T 2009 entry, for your gluttonous pleasure.

Thanks for being here and reading all this, and for supporting this blog for such a long time now.  I really appreciate it.  I hope we all have an excellent New Year’s Eve, and Day, and that 2011 allows us to learn, and to grow, and to change for the better, a little bit each day.

Happy New Year!

I’m not really sure what to write about the last week.  I started about ten different sentences, and all of them seemed inadequate.  This may be a long entry.

The week was a flurry of activity, and much of it was either painful or surreal.  Mom’s friend was with her overnight to hold her hand and get her through the worst of the tremors and fits of sadness that woke her in the middle of the night.   The phone would start ringing early in the morning, and it wouldn’t stop until late in the evening.  The three of us (Brother, Mom’s friend and I) screened all the calls and relayed the messages, but after a couple of days we let the answering machine do what it was designed to do.  Everyone was very sweet and wanted to offer their condolences, but it was too much for Mom to deal with, so we handled them as tersely and courteously as we could.  We made sure that one of us was with Mom at all times, because she had occasional meltdowns, and whoever was around would go and wrap their arms around her while she sobbed.

We each had a thousand different feelings about this whole situation, and we spent lots of time discussing them.  We talked about the good things Stepdad did for us, the predicament he left Mom in, the personal quirks he had, and the mountain of tasks that lay ahead.  Brother started going through her finances, and luckily she was well taken care of in that respect.

In his note, Stepdad said that he wanted to be cremated, and that he didn’t want a graveside or memorial service.  “Cheap everything” was what he specified.  I’m glad that Mom decided to have both services, though, because it’s been hard enough to make sense of it all, even after seeing him at the funeral home.  In fact, when we arrived for the viewing, the woman asked if we were with the family, and we said we were.  I stepped up to go in first, and the woman motioned for me to walk down the hall.  I was expecting a chapel or something, with a little room on the side, so when I walked in to the tiny viewing room, I found myself right in front of the coffin and was very much caught off guard.  Stepdad looked like himself, and they did an excellent job of restoring him, especially given the nature of his death.  When Mom was able to go in, she made a point of touching his hair on the ‘natural’ side of his head that had been unaffected by the gun shot.

There were lots of family gatherings, as you would imagine.  They went surprisingly well, despite the fact that some of us had not seen each other for many years.  Times like those were when I felt the most estranged and uncomfortable, because some of the people there were ones I’ve made a conscious effort to keep a safe distance from.  I have a pretty low threshold for intense socializing anyway, but I had to ignore my impulses to flee and had to just tough it out.

Stepdad’s daughters scanned a ton of pictures and made a great slide show for the memorial service, which was very touching and honest.  They also had some pictures enlarged and placed on the table in the entry of the church, along with some things of his to remember him by, like his fishing equipment and tool bags that he took everywhere. That was a really nice touch.

The pastor of the church was friends with Stepdad, and he knew him well enough that the service felt genuine and unforced.  The church belongs to a very conservative denomination, and until very recently, they believed that when someone commits suicide, they are instantaneously banished to hell.  Thankfully for Stepdad, that belief has been tempered by modern knowledge of depression and mental illness, but I’m sure that some of the older folks in the congregation will be struggling to reconcile that.  The pastor said that this was his first time dealing with a suicide, and he was very candid about the fact that he did some research and found that the banished-to-hell idea came from Constantine instead of “from God”, so he felt very sure that Stepdad was where he wanted to be.  He spoke a great deal about depression being an illness that Stepdad struggled with, and that it wasn’t the work of evil forces or anything.  The previous pastor spoke a bit as well, and there was a lot of talk about Satan and evil, in a way that left a bad taste in many of our mouths.  That stuff is fine for a church service, but not for a memorial.  Incidentally, I still remember the last time I went to that church (we sort of went along with my mom for a while), and the theme of his sermon that day – “We Think Too Much” – was diametrically opposed to my spiritual ideologies, which were (and still are) tenuous even in the best of times.  The nicest part of the service, I thought, happened when they had an ‘open mic’ time for family and friends to share their memories.  There was just the right blend of laughter and tears, and it was very beautiful.  Brother read one of the Psalms earlier in the service, and I played cello during the slide show.

The rest of the week was spent taking care of Mom and of her house.  We all pitched in to do some of the things that needed to be done, and Brother’s Wife spent a bunch of time cleaning the house thoroughly.  We’d spent so much energy planning the service, and making the programs, and all the zillions of things that you have to deal with during the worst possible time, that by Friday, we were feeling a bit claustrophobic and needed some time apart, so Brother and I asked if we could have the evening free to meet up with a friend or two.  She readily agreed, and we gladly took the opportunity for a night out.  Brother and I went back to our respective homes on Sunday.  My drive home was pretty scary, since northwestern Oregon got hit by a particularly heavy storm that night.  It was so hard to see the road that I stopped in Cascade Locks to eat a veggie burger and calm my rattled nerves.

Since then, we’ve all been struggling to make sense of everything.  It still doesn’t seem real.   Both Brother and I have been feeling a distinct lack of motivation.  I had a few things that were planned already, and I’m doing them all, but I’m doing them on auto-pilot, and I feel like I’m having an out-of-body experience a lot of the time.   This is Halloween weekend, too, so there are a thousand parties and things happening, but my first inclination is to give them all a miss.  This would ordinarily be a week of celebration, since my birthday was a week and a half ago, and the previous few birthdays have all been stretched out into two-week extended parties, but I’m just not up to that right now.

There are more things, good and bad, that I may add to this later, but I wanted to write a little bit and start the process of focusing my thoughts again.  This kind of thing never makes sense, though, and many questions will always remain unanswered.

My stepdad committed suicide yesterday morning.

I got the call from my mom yesterday afternoon.  She asked if I was sitting down, and I told her I was.  I expected to hear that one of the dogs had died, or that one of her elderly friends was suffering from cancer or something, but she said that she came home from exercise class and was surprised by some notes Stepdad had left for her, then she went into the garage and found him dead from a gunshot wound.  None of us had any reason to see this coming.

He’d been suffering from a subtle chemical imbalance for three decades, and it had been well-managed the whole time, but his illness had taken a turn for the worse during the last couple of years, and he’d been unable to slough off his hopeless and obsessive thoughts.  He would sit listlessly in a chair, with a book in his lap, and stare off into space.  It was heartbreaking to see him at such a low ebb. He felt guilty for things he’d done, and for things he’d left undone, and for things that were outside of his control.  A year or so ago, his doctor had found a medication that seemed to work, at least for a while, but for the last few months, none of the various medications had taken hold.  Two weeks ago, the doctors discovered that he had low levels of testosterone, so they added some new medications to the anti-depressants they’d already prescribed.

I have to be honest; our relationship was challenging and difficult, even in the best of times.  We were about as opposite as it’s possible for two people to be.  When I was in high school and college, we could barely speak to each other without arguing.  Once, he even pushed me backwards down the hallway after a particularly ridiculous argument.  When I walked out the door that day, I knew I was saying the harshest and most shocking words his conservative Christian ears could hear:  “Go to hell.”

Over the last ten years, things have been much better.  He and I have mellowed with time and age, and my mom has been very good about creating bonds, as well as family events and traditions, and Stepdad and I became much closer.  But, as is the case with so many families, it’s never been easy.  That being said, he’s made great strides (and so have the rest of us) and I would say that this branch of our strange family tree is definitely the better for it.  He was the strong, silent type; always quick to help in whatever way he could.  He could fix absolutely anything, and he had an uncanny intuition for the way things worked, even if he’d never set eyes on them before.  It didn’t matter whether the things were cars, washing machines, or fruit trees; he somehow knew exactly what it took to make them flourish or perform at their best, which is an amazing gift.

I can’t help but think that the solution to his chemical imbalance was a mere week or two away, and that if he’d been able to hold on for a short time longer (or if he’d used pills instead of a gun) he’d still be here, and we’d all have that much more time together to sort out the medical issues.  For the last few months, he was gamely going along with the regimen of pills, and checkups, and everything that goes along with that sort of thing.  The e-mails and phone calls from my mom have been hopeful and promising.

I don’t know what else to say.  I can’t imagine what my mom must be going through.  I’ve had a couple of friends who have attempted suicide (both of whom are thriving now, thankfully), but Mom and Stepdad were married for almost twenty-five years, and they have countless links and ties to each others’ lives.  Luckily, Mom has people she can turn to for support during this terrible time, and she has a close friend who’s staying with her until my brother and I can get up there and be with her too.  Brother is heading over tonight, and I’m going tomorrow. Sister-in-Law and Niece will be joining us later in the week for the funeral service.

Please send some good thoughts (it’s too soon for phone calls) in my mom’s direction; she’ll be needing them.  And for God’s sake, if there’s someone in your life that you appreciate, do them a favor and let them know it.