Post-Dated?

Fiorella found a page from an old publication of hers that dates back to her motherhood years:

Motherhood has given me a great deal of poise.  Nothing can happen to me in public that somehting worse hasn't happened to me at home, although I did get a little uneasy when we were in a check-out lane at Safeway and my eldest questioned me about exactly how the sperm got to the egg.
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When my seldest was an "only," I scrubbed his sneakers daily before he went to pre-school. My second and third--just nineteen months apart, were lucky if I could even find their sneakers.
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My mother and I are at different stages in our lives. She stops at an exclusive dress shop in Salado on her way from Waco to Dallas. I stop in Abbot and buy turkey wings.
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When I was a kid, my mother used to drag me around from store to store with her, and I hated it. Now my nine-year-old daughter drags me around from store to store with her, and I still hate it. Shopping must skip a generation.
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My teen-ager is growing up. With a patronizing smile, he now passes all the cereal premiums on to his younger siblings--except for the really good ones, of course.

If Fio's imposed any of these gems on you before, please just laugh and move on.

Confessions of Depression

Pulling my past out of overloaded shelves and drawers is like pulling out my guts. It's the good, the bad, the ugly--the things I wanted to remember but had forgotten, the things I wanted to forget, but now remember.
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I'd knock over a bank if I could get away with it. Money makes the world go 'round, and  I want some of it. In fact, I want a lot of it. I want to pay off my kid's student loans and set him and his family up in a house of their own, and I want to make repairs around my own house and, yes, I want to buy those expensive orthotics for my aching feet and get some Juvederm on the side so I'll look really good when I attend my family reunion.
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I want to use my GPS, but don't know how to. A woman at my doctor's office was going to show me, but not realizing a cell phone was necessary, I hadn't come equipped.
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Going through the stacks of papers in my office, I found a spiral notebook from years ago in which I had recorded about three weeks worth of dreams, dreams in which I was belittled, berated, ignored, or deserted. Dreams in which I finally realized I had to go it alone.
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I also discovered a complete copy of one of my first novels, The Virgin Vampire. It was never in the book stores, of course, because back then one had to have an agent and a publisher, and I had no idea how to attract either one. I love my story, but now the story is thirty years out of date. Maybe I'll ask that the manuscript be included in my grave goods.

More Than You Wanted to Know About Fiorella

Fio has done many dumb things in her life, and sometimes those memories jmmy open the doors of the past and tell her what an idiot she has been. But still she marches on--what choice does she have?
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Fio picked up one her romances and started paging through it. OMG--it's good! So good that she forgives herself for having her theater director say "practicing lines" instead of "running lines."

Fiorella has always known she was one who stood apart. Maybe because Mother preferred it that way, maybe because Fio was born that way. It doesn't matter. It is.

Fio has a full tank of false bravado that shakes and quivers when challenged. Maybe that's why she always felt safe on stage or behind a podium--because everything was choreographed and she knew her role.

Fio hopes that in the future, every unwanted fetus will be placed in a machine that will incubate it to term so it can be adopted by a loving family.

Fiorella Ponders

If all goes well, Fiorella is getting a workable GPS today. Minnesota Son gave her one for Christmas last year, but there was no  way to install it in her Miata, so when Son visited recently, he arranged for a friend of his to look the situation over. Scott Williams is making a whole new fitting to be able to to affix the mechanism to Fio's dashboard, which would mean means she could zoom down to the southern boondocks to visit her grandbaby any time she wants.
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The Georgetown post office didn't have any postcards in stock when the barrage of Paul Ryan's home address was scheduled so Fio had to drive down to Austin to pick some up--two weeks late. Hmmm... Why is that Georgetown is always out of postcards? Maybe because they've become the Resistance's weapons of choice, and Gtown bleeds red?
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To my children; Ever since the three of you were born, you have been the most important people in my life, but as you grew up, I became less and less important to you, which is how it should be. And when the time comes that I no longer recognize you, please love yourselves enough to  abandon me. I do not want to be a burden.
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The final thing Fio ponders is why she tries to write late at night. She's embarrassed at how much morning-after editing she's had to do on this post to make it readable. Apologies.

Poor Darlene

Fiorella told you about nasty Ralph, the boy who squashed her robin egg, but she didn't tell you about poor Darlene. Mrs. Lehman must have seated her second graders alphbetically because Fio sat at the next-to-the-last desk in the first row and Darlene sat behind her. She was blondish, spindle-thin and poorly dressed, lived in a WWII cellar house, and always flunked spelling tests. Fio felt sorry for her so one day she moved her own paper to the side so that Darlene could see over her shoulder.

Mrs. Lehman spotted the maneuver, of course, and thus occurred Fio's one and only school detention. She had to stay in from recess, a devastating blow because (1) everyone knew she had done something wrong, and  (2) she couldn't go out and lead the girls' gang daily charge against the boys' gang.

(Editor's note: for the sake of posterity, Fiorella is writing down every whisp of memory that floats through her addled brain. At least it's a break from her diatribes about DT.)

Experiencing

Despite being an artist, Fiorella doesn't get a kick out of sight-seeing.  Thus, when Fio and family visited Britain, she wasn't that interested in looking at Big Ben or antique castles.  Instead, she wanted to experience the country. To stand on top of Hadrian's wall and call on the spirit of her old Latin teacher, Elor Osborn. To stop at a British Safeway and go through the aisles, then buy sliced ham at the deli, to walk through the doors of Harrod's and check out every department, to drive down a suburban street and see how people lived, to be walking through the tunnel under the Thames at the same time a herd of screaming school children were running through it, to eat fish and chips under the awning of a store in Greenwich and again, in the rain, in a little park in front of the Assembly Rooms in Bath.  To be kept awake until after midnight by a tenor singing out a window in Edinburgh.

These are her fondest memories of Britain.

Sonja Wendysdottir

• I'm sitting in front of the dying fire and thinking about Wendy the Weimer tonight.  I remember the compliments our gray lady got from strangers as she pranced around the drive, how seductive she looked when she reclined like a canine courtesan on her princess bed, how amazed we were to learn that her cast-iron stomach could handle Kleenexes, paper towels, acorns--even mustard--before, at ten years of age, it finally turned on her, a common affliction of big dogs.

Wendy was part of the fabric of my life.  I burst into tears the morning after she died when I saw that her princess bed was empty and realized that there was now no reason to put my cereal milk on the floor after breakfast.

Four months later, we acquired Sonia, a mastiff, very different from Wendy, with whom we knew there could be no comparison, but we claimed Wendy as her spiritual mother and gave our new doggie a second name in the Icelandic tradition: Wendysdottir.

Sonia is my darling, but she is, indeed quite different from Wendy,  While she does like to walk around the driveway and will drink my breakfast milk, she is quite discriminating about what she eats, and she won't use the princess bed.

So, after three years, it's time to let it go.  I'll donate the bed to The Caring Place for another dog to enjoy, but not without a tear in my eye.
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Marching On

Fiorella is a well-meaning soul, but she's said and done some of the dumbest things imaginable, and at random times, voices of the past echo in her brain, assaulting her, accusing her, deriding her.  But there's nothing Fio can do to heal the past so she forges on, resigned to the fact that she's going to say dumb things and do dumb things in the future too. That's Fio.  Forgive her.

Another Early Memory

Fiorella was born in Ohio so she learned to skate on ice before she ever strapped on a roller skate.  By the time she was four, she didn't need to use the rail and was even trying to wobble backwards.

And that's how old she was when one night the phone started ringing just after the family arrived home from the ice rink.  It was Grampa.  Fio's maternal grandmother had just died.

Fio's paternal grandmother had died a year earlier.  It was a very hard time for her parents.  Fiorella remembers loneliness.

Haunted

This is one of those mornings when Fio's fiendish brain chooses to dredge up every stupid, idiotic thing she's ever done in her life--and there are plenty to choose from.

They date back to the time when she was three years old and grabbed the wrong woman's hand in a department store. Fio's has finally forgiven herself for that gaffe--mothers' hands all looked alike to her at that stage.

Then there are the ones when she was trying to help someone else, like the time a friend asked her to sing the high note at the end of the song with her, which Fio did--one measure too soon. 

And when  she was curious, like the time . . . .  But she's not ready to own up to that one yet.