This is nothing but today.

Mother's day is coming up. I have been having anxiety dreams. I haven't quite figured out yet whether those two things are related.

You may know, if you've followed me a while, that my mother died in January of 2011. Mother's day last year was when we scattered her ashes. So Mother's day may be a bit problematic for me. If you're like me and you find the need for a bit of a defense mechanism against all the Mother's Day ads, I recommend my technique: respond to the ads mentally (or verbally) with a good "yerMOM". Example: Ad email I just received: "GIVE YOUR MOM WHAT SHE REALLY WANTS." Response: "I'll give YOUR mom what she really wants!" (Bonus: works for Father's Day too! "Give your Dad something special!" "I'll give your MOM something special...")

Defensive silliness aside, I thought on the anniversary of scattering her ashes, I'd write about her a bit. Because I've written about the disease, the dementia, the loss... but I never wrote much about herself. (I hope it doesn't sound like an obituary. I already wrote one of those.)

My mom was hilarious. She was a giant goofball. Out of the blue she'd bust out with things like "Well, you know what they say, don't you?" "No, Mom, what?" "I dunno, I was hoping you knew." Or she would randomly sing bits of conversation to the silliest tune she could think of or to a tune she made up, or as if it were a dramatic movie score. "She's goinggggg... to cleeeeean... her ROOOOOOOOM!" Or in a bit of banter with someone-- the kind of situation where you'd jokingly tell a friend "oh shut up already"-- she'd sing, to the tune of the Hallelujah Chorus, "UUUUUUP your buck-et! UUUUUUP your buc-ket! Up your buc-ket! Up your buc-ket! Up your BUH-UH-UH-UC-KET!"

She cracked us up a lot. And she had this great laugh, like she was just laughing all the way down to her toes. She was especially hilarious when she swore, because she didn't swear often, so whenever she did it was kind of adorable. And she'd sort of lean back a little bit whenever she said "fuck", as if blown back a little from the sheer force of the word. I'm pretty sure she did it on purpose.

My mom was beautiful. That didn't really register when I was a kid-- I mean I just never thought about it, even though I heard people say all the time how pretty she was, and most especially how much younger than her age she always looked. She went silver-grey in... maybe her late thirties or early forties I think, and people said if she'd dyed her hair she could've looked much younger for much longer. But she just didn't care. I didn't think about it when I was a kid, but when I look at photos now, I think, my goodness, she was pretty.

(I went looking for some photos to go with this post, and found the memorial site that her good friend and drummer made. A lot of the photos I had in mind are there in the photo collages and "A Life in Photos" video that he made for the memorial service. There's also audio of her own songs, her cover tunes with one of her bands, and her a capella quartet with my dad and best friend's parents. There's also video of her on Australian TV with the vocal jazz group and a local deaf children's choir, and a couple of other performances, and photos and video of the memorial service itself. Whew. (WARNING: contains 1970s. You may encounter behbeh!Vixy. Also sideburns. (No, not on me.)))

My mom was a musician. All her life. She never wanted to do anything else. She had a BA and MA in Music Education from the University of Washington; she told me once that she'd been offered the full scholarship for the Master's degree when she was finishing her Bachelor's, and she'd asked her dad whether she should take it, since she hadn't planned on going to school more. He told her that you should never, ever turn down free education. So she went straight into grad school from undergrad at the same school, which I hear they mostly discourage these days.

She taught music at every grade level at different times in her life. During most of my childhood she taught at Bellevue Community College (they've dropped the 'Community' now) and was accompanist, assistant director and then director for their vocal jazz group, Celebration, and toured Mexico and Australia with them multiple years. Eventually she directed BCC's concert choir too.

Part-time at a community college didn't really pay enough for a single mom with two kids though (my parents split when I was 6; my dad helped a lot, but he only had so much himself) so she made money other ways; she directed one or two other independent local choirs, gave private voice lessons in our house, and she performed solo and with other musician friends anywhere and everywhere: weddings, funerals, and a wholllle lot of nightclub gigs. My bedroom shared a wall with the garage, so some late nights I'd stay awake until I heard the garage door open and knew she was home. In later years she mostly worked for churches, directing their adult and/or children's choirs, and writing an awful lot of original music for them to use.

She wrote hundreds of songs. I still have her demo tape of original songs that was recorded in our house by friends who had a studio; I barely remember, I couldn't have been more than seven or so, but it was such happy chaos. The VAST sound board was in a Winnebago parked out front, with cables snaking in the front door; the main recording area was a forest of mics in the living room; one of the guitarists was in an improvised sound booth aka the downstairs bathroom ("Ready for another take, Roly?" *flush* "Yeah!"); there always seemed to be crowds of people, and we all provided backing vocals and percussion on a few songs.

That's what life with mom was like most of the time-- full of music and musicians. There were always some of her college students around the house, one or two renting our spare rooms and some rehearsing and some just hanging out, and there was pretty much always someone making music. I wrapped cords and carried mic stands and music stands at Celebration gigs. The amp and the giant Pevey speakers and the mic stands all lived in the living room with the upright piano and the electric keyboard and the four-track reel-to-reel Teac and the big ol' stereo. There was a box full of percussion instruments, claves and güiros and triangles and maracas and I forget what all else, that Mom called "the toy box". There were sing-alongs at every family gathering, and a lot of nights I fell asleep to the sound of the a capella quartet rehearsing, or one of the smaller vocal jazz groups rehearsing, or just someone sitting around noodling on an acoustic guitar.

I learned pretty much everything I know about singing and performing and songwriting from my mom.

My mom was creative and talented in other ways too. She painted with acrylics; I still have one of her paintings, and photos of a few others (I wish I had more of her originals). She loved doing arts & crafts with us kids-- papier-mâché, baker's clay (aka "dough dolls", which we'd paint with her acrylics and sometimes make Christmas ornaments out of), Shrinky Dinks, Fimo, whatever we wanted. She did theatre; my favorite was the Village Theatre production of Godspell. She learned to tap dance from her father, and how to cut hair (sort of). She raised a vegetable garden for a few years, and after she no longer had time for it, we still had the raspberry bush and the strawberry patch that got bigger every year. She made a whole lot of my clothes when I was little, and would sew me any Halloween costume I could dream up until I got too old for trick-or-treating (and sometimes sewed costumes for my friends too).

My mom was brave. I didn't realize that until a lot later. I know now that she was terrified of being alone, but she pulled herself together and headed our family because it just had to be done. She played a lot of nightclubs and bars alone, serving as the mostly-background entertainment, and I remember her explaining things my sister or I would need to know if we were ever going to try that work, like how to handle heckling, how to deflect inappropriate song requests, how to refuse men who would inevitably proposition you for a drink or more after your shift.

One time, one of the college students who rented a room in our house had an ex-boyfriend who turned angry and violent. I remember him pushing the front door open trying to get into the house, and my mom physically holding the motherfucking door shut against him while yelling for one of us to call the police. I was petrified but I think either my sister or the college student (who became one of Mom's best friends) made the call. I remember mom held the guy off until he went away, and I remember how calm she was explaining what happened to the police when they came.

She tried not to transmit her fear of the world to me. I picked up on some unconsciously, I'm sure, but she tried to teach me how to live on my own. You know those stories of kids going away to college for the first time and having no clue how to do anything? No kid of my mom's! I remember being eleven or twelve or so, and her explicitly teaching me to cook some simple things, do laundry, unclog a toilet, "come here, you're going to need to know this." One or two of the years that she was on tour with the vocal jazz group and my older sister went too, I got to stay alone in the house with my best friend (with friend's mom checking on us every day). Mom left me signed blank checks and taught me how to fill them out and mail them when the bills came, because she was going to be gone during some of the due dates. (I was SO EXCITED to be PAYING BILLS LIKE A GROWN-UP OMG. I think I was maybe thirteen.) She insisted I get a checking account when I got my first job, and insisted I get on the pill when I got my first boyfriend, and talked to me like an adult about drinking and drugs and sex and abortion and trusted me to make reasonable choices once I was as well-informed as she could possibly make me.

One of the turning points for me in dealing with Mom's death was when I thought back to how brave she'd always been-- mostly quietly, mostly in hidden ways. When something had to be done, even if it was something that terrified her, she sucked it up and just fucking did it. My mom was not very physically powerful, but in life terms? My mom was kind of a badass.

My mom was loving. One of my earliest memories is of my mom sitting me down to tell me: "Now remember, sometimes people get mad at each other, and sometimes they even yell. But even if I get mad, no matter what happens, remember that I always, always love you." That might not sound like much-- it might even sound obvious-- but after I started encountering adult after adult in my relationships who thought that if someone got mad and yelled it must mean that someone didn't love them anymore, I stopped taking that particular moment for granted.

I grew up thinking that your mom's job was to believe you were the best one in the chorus, the dance troupe, the band, the play, the game. No matter what happened, she thinks you're the best and the prettiest and the smartest, because that's her job. When I was in high school I kind of went "aw mom geez you always say that" and dismissed it, but she never stopped, and I learned pretty soon after how lucky I was, and how much I'd always relied on that from her. I've met people whose parents thought they should "toughen them up" or teach them that life will be hard or whatever. My mom's opinion was, fuck that. The world will do that to them soon enough. Home and your family should be where you can go for a respite from the world, where you can go for comfort and reassurance and support and belief in you no matter what you do. I could always count on my mom. She always said she was our biggest fan.

My mom wasn't perfect. She made a lot of mistakes. But on the whole? She was pretty awesome.

So although it was absolutely golden and gorgeous yesterday, it's been raining a whole lot lately.

Some of my friends, mostly the Californians, are often at pains to send me that one Oatmeal comic. Some of them send it to me repeatedly, every so often, I think just to hear me growl. I tend to have two reactions to this (and to people bitching about the rain in general), one of which is "look, that's actually not true" and other of which is less coherent but is usually along the lines of "Jesus Christ, if rain makes you actually wish for death, then why the fuck do you live here? GO LIVE SOMEWHERE ELSE or SHUT UP ALREADY."

*sigh*

Then I remind myself there are lots of reasons why people can't move out of the city where they live even if they want to. Finances, school, family, spouses, job, lack of job, being under eighteen and forced to live wherever your parents want to (which was how I found myself in southern California for a few years), etc. So instead, to stop growling and add something a little more pleasant to the world, I decided to list for you the reasons why I love the rain!

(Don't get me wrong. I love the sunshine too. Ask my close friends; I'm definitely a solar-powered vixy. How do I manage to be a solar-powered vixy while living in Seattle, you may ask? Because it doesn't actually rain as goddamned often as that. But I digress!)

Why I love the rain! by Vixy, age 40.

* The scent. Oh my heaven, the scent. Or rather, the variety of scents. The baked dusty smell of summer rain falling on really hot pavement. The green mysterious smell of spring rain falling hard. The washed-clean early-morning smell when it's just stopped raining and everything's still wet. The wet wood and gasoline smell when it rains down by the lake on the docks. Wet pine needles. Wet spring flowers. Even the mud, sometimes. (And its cousin, the smell of snow on the air when it's wet out and really cold. I don't know how else to describe it when it's not snowing but the air smells like snow, but once you've smelled it you always know it.)

* Watching it fall. Just watching it against the evergreens. When I was little I could spend just hours curled up in the big green rocking armchair, watching the rain. It's beautiful and quiet and contemplative.

* The sounds! Oh there's nothing like the sound of heavy rain against windows. Especially when it's windy. I've always found that thrilling. But even when it's a calm rain, it's soothing and delicious. Hearing that sound is perfect when curled up with a book or working on an art project or staying up late when everyone else in the house is asleep. Or that particuar whoosshhhh of cars driving by on wet pavement. And oh, there's nothing like making love to the sound of heavy rain.

* Summer rain, when it's warm enough to have the sliding back doors open (when I had such a thing). The sound and the sight of it falling combine and it's like you have your own private room that's outside, like a sunroom with walls of water and light instead of glass, with the sound going "hushhhh."

* Umbrellas! I love umbrellas. I have many, of different pretty colors and fancy prints, and I want more. I love walking in the rain with umbrellas. I'll open my umbrella at the least excuse, even when it's not really raining hard enough to bother, just because I think they're neat. It's kind of that same feeling as with summer rain; it's like my own little portable private room. And again there's a particular sound that goes with it; it's like walking around inside a secret.

* The peace of it. Now, I love sunny days, but they always feel to me like I should be out! doing! exciting! things! Can't waste a beautiful sunny day! For the most part I hate going to movies during the day, or watching movies or TV during the day, because I hate wasting daylight. But not if it's raining. If it's raining out, then curling up on the couch watching old movies feels justified. Rain makes staying in feel just right.

* Playing in it! Staying indoors is all very well, but playing in the rain is FUN! If you never knew the joy of splashing around in puddles or damming up curbside gutters as a kid, then you have my pity.

* Walking in it. Look, I don't care how cheesy the love songs are. Walking hand in hand with someone in the rain, running for a bus or kissing in a half-sheltered doorway... hey, sometimes things are tropes for a reason.

* Feeling it on my face. There's just a certain kind of chill... and there's something about laughing at it, in a defying-the-gods kind of way. If you're ever caught in the rain, try it sometime. Instead of hunching over and hiding your head, try turning your face upwards, feeling it falling in your ace, and laughing. Just trust me.

* The way everything shines. Again, some things appear in songs with good reason.

* Seeing it from far away. When it's not raining where you are and you can see far enough to see a rainstorm in the distance, looking like someone took their paintbrush and smeared the clouds downwards... that's just one of the most gorgeous things I've ever seen.

* Sun against rain. Also one of the most gorgeous things I've ever seen. Where I live, sometimes we get bright golden sunshine against a backdrop of deep charcoal-grey come-to-Mordor clouds. It is the coolest-looking thing ever. Even better than that, sometimes we get bright golden sunshine while it's raining hard. Usually when sunset is sneaking sideways under the cloud layer. Every drop lights up and it's like the sky's on fire.

* The way it makes everything green green GREEN! I've lived where most everything was dusty brown with a touch of green, when it wasn't on fire. I prefer to live where most everything is green and growing. Years ago an old friend put it best; this place *just* *says* *life*.

...heh. Appropriately, that's thirteen things. :D (Though some of those things are actually a whole bunch of things listed together.) And I'm sure there's more. But I've spent the last couple of days pondering what to include, and these are the things I've been daydreaming about mostly while falling asleep.

I'd love for everyone to love my city as much as I do. But if you can't, I hope you find a city that you love as much as I love mine.

See you around. :)

Streaming right now.

It might make me a big dork but I'm *so* excited about this. This is just so cool!

When I was in high school, my junior year, I remember my English teacher talking about JFK having a poet laureate speak at his inauguration. She actually got starry-eyed talking about it... and about how what it meant to her was the bringing of culture to the White House.

This is how it makes me feel. I'm remembering Mrs. Harriman and understanding how she felt. After eight years of fratboy nonsense-- we have a leader who is making a statement that the arts matter.

Go watch.

Ironically I have to leave now, but I'm hoping maybe one of the radio stations will be playing it too. So y'all have to go watch for me and be my proxy. :D

So we're watching an MST3K episode called Teenage Caveman. (Yeah, I've already worn out all the Who jokes. Out here in the fields... I hunt for my meals...)

So one of the riffs was, when all the cavemen are running off together, Joel and the bots yell "OOGA CHUCKA, OOGA CHUCKA, OOGA OOGA OOGA CHUCKA!"

So I pause to explain to tfabris that I originally knew that sound as a sound effect from J.P. Patches (if you grew up around here, you knew J.P. Patches!) from when he opened the closet (basement?) door. I was in my twenties at least before I ever learned that it was a song (I didn't really watch Single Female Lawyer Ally McBeal on a regular basis, but I did catch it sometimes, and I'm pretty sure it was then that I saw that meme and went "wait... why are they using that sound-- wait, why is some guy singing??")

So anyway, I started searching for clips to see if I could show J.P. Patches to Tony, and I learned that just this past August, he and Gertrude got a statue dedicated to them in Fremont! Aw man! I would've gone to the unveiling if I'd known about it!

It makes me giggle that it's not far from Waiting for the Interurban and is called Late for the Interurban. And is right by Tony's work. I need to go down there and see this now! Damn. How did I not hear about this? Hee!

Better late than never?

"Then there's a god of landscapes, who supervises the making of grass, trees, mountains, and so forth," SkyMaker said. Emir nodded. He remembered to be very polite when he met the gods, but he was also, understandably, quite excited. He got so flustered when everyone gathered around that he backed up too far and almost lost his footing.

"Don't brush up against that sky. It isn't dry yet," SkyMaker shouted. But it was too late. Emir got so upset at SkyMaker's booming voice that he stumbled, turned too quickly, and brushed his arm against the very lowest part of the painting where the horizon touched the ground.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Emir cried. "Did I ruin anything?"

"No. I can touch up the painting," SkyMaker said. "But I'm afraid that you're going to carry a bit of sky around on your arm for the rest of your life."

Emir looked down. There on his bare arm was a patch of bright blue, a good two inches long and an inch wide. "But you can wipe it off, can't you?" Emir asked. "Or hasn't paint remover been invented yet?"

SkyMaker shook his head ruefully. "Nothing will remove sky," he said. "I use living paint. That's a patch of real sky on your arm. Small, it's true. But most likely it will develop its own tiny moon and stars. It's like a living tattoo. You'll just have to get used to being a boy with a patch of sky on his arm."

--Jane Roberts, Emir's Education In the Proper Use of Magical Powers

( Lotsa photos of the AMAZING TATTOOED LADY. Also, veryverylong post. You've been warned. )

I have a confession to make to my comics-loving friends. (This was not actually moved by rollick's confession, which I didn't see until after I'd typed this out. But it could be said to be related.)

My first, and formative, encounter with Spider-Man, was none other than... The Electric Company.

Yup. The little live-action skits with Spidey! The one where the Mad Scientist threatens to give him the measles or something, and emphasizes that the torture of this will be having to stay in bed in a dark room, with "no books... no newspapers... NOTHING TO REEEEEEEEEEEEEEAD."

(To this day I have no idea why the measles would mean you have to be in a dark room.)

And the one where there's a Yeti running around loose (my first encounter with that word!) and they lure him (it?) with ice cream cones, which he sits on.

And the one where someone is going around stealing the cheese out of pizzas. Sliding this big yellow rubbery circle out from underneath the toppings like a tablecloth trick.

This random thought brought to you by my making peanut-butter-crackers to eat, and thinking of the line: "I ordered an extra-large pizza, and what do I get, a giant cracker? WHERE IS THE CHEESE???" (Edit: Come to think of it, I think of that almost every time I eat crackers.)

I had no idea he existed anywhere else for a very long time.

Sorry, Marvel or DC or whomever he belongs to.

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

A very big, burly bearded guy just walked by on his way to one of the other offices. In one hand he had a plate with a little teeny piece of cake with candles in it. In the other hand he had a little teeny bouquet of yellow flowers.

CUTEST THING EVER. Whoever he was taking them to, I hope they're pleased. :)

Okay, so. About a month ago, I posted a comment in rollick's livejournal about Silent Football. What, she asked, was that? And I kept meaning to answer, but it's a looooong answer.

So long, in fact, that it won't fit in a comment. So, I figured what the heck, I'll give it its own post. So here, for no reason at all, is a description of the game Silent Football.

( What, she asked, is Silent Football? )

Another something random that I wonder if anyone's brain does besides mine...

When you read, where do you set up house?

When I read fiction, ever since I was a child, the setting described almost always-- well, very often-- ends up as a version of somewhere that I already know. My brain puts people in a familiar house and makes minor alterations depending on what's described. It's not really conscious. That's just where they go. I get enough of a description to know what kind of place it is, and then the characters go find it and move in. Sometimes they knock down walls, sometimes they tear up the landscape, but if I really think hard about it, the places are almost all recognizable still.

A Wrinkle In Time and its sequels all take place in a condo on Whidbey Island where I spent a lot of my childhood. Modified to be a free-standing house (which it almost was anyway) and with a lot of grassy green field where the beach and Puget Sound usually are. And the star-watching rock oh, about where the low-tide mark was.

Cat in the Mirror takes place in my best friend/next door neighbor's house. Later that house grew an extra floor or two, sprouted a fireplace in the middle of a blank wall, flattened the surrounding houses into grass, and became the Weasleys' house.

A whole host of Agatha Christie novels take place in my grandparents' old house in Greenlake. Lots of books take place in that house. The professor's mansion in the Chronicles of Narnia is kind of that house enlarged. Even the abhorsens' ancestral home in the Garth Nix books borrowed the dining room from there.

Prior to my brief stint with Santa Barbara Civic Light Opera, all books that take place in theatres took place in the theare at Buena High School in Ventura. Since then, they all take place at the Granada Theatre.

cadhla, I bet you didn't know that Upon a Star takes place at the Republic (my old house on Capitol Hill). Except the house and street got picked up bodily and moved from Seattle to somewhere near Buena High. Oh, and a park in Bellevue got thrown in.

adamselzer, How to Get Suspended and Influence People takes place in that house too, actually, except it got moved over by Tyee Middle School in Bellevue.

When the book calls for a type of building that I haven't got, I do build one. But then all the other books follow right in. I read my first murder mystery when I was around 10: The Red House Mystery, by A. A. Milne (yes, that A. A. Milne). No, it's not a children's book, though I'm sure whoever gave it to me assumed it was. It was my first English country house mystery, too, and is probably largely responsible for my love of them. Anyway, the house I created for that, a central hall with the rooms all around and the bedrooms upstairs, an awful lot like giant Clue board, is where nearly all other English country house mysteries now take place, at least if they're set in a large mansion.

Strangely, I can't call to mind a single book at the moment that takes place in my childhood home. I'm sure I'll think of one...

Last night I entertained myself by going back and rereading all my bank teller blues entries.

That stuff's a whole lot funnier to me now that I don't work there. :)

(A lot of 'em are locked because I didn't want to get in trouble for talking about work, or for even the remote possibility that someone might figure out a bank customer's identity. I'm mostly too lazy to go unlock 'em. Sorry about that.)

Recently I re-created a place that's in my head.

There have been others, they exist still, but I'd forgotten what that feels like. The creation, the translation to something perceived by others, and inviting people to enter and share. "This is where I go," I said.

I think you know, you who were there, what it meant to invite someone into a place in my head. Into one of the rooms in which I live in my mind. You've seen inside me now, not too far, but you've seen, and you're welcome to come and stay.

Tread lightly. It's a thing I treasure.