Dear sirs....

Have you ever had a day or six months where you just feel like you need a pick-me-up? Something that's not crap that makes you smile?

Well, here it is folks.

This is a letter my mom wrote to her parents when she was nine or ten years old.

Enjoy.

Dear Sirs,

I don't like to say this persnol because I'm a little shy when it comes to money. I was wondering if I could have my allowance raised because it is time to get xmas presents for the family and cousins. The most I want is 10c more.

Your loving Daughter,

Gwendolyn

- H

You think you have problems?

Have you ever found yourself inspecting your navel for lint, thinking your life is in a shambles? Maybe your hair didn't turn out right today. Or if you're like me, you have adult-onset acne. Or your neck is stiff. Or your new shoes hurt your feet. Oh my God, I'm talking about myself.

Yeah. You know you've done it.

A sweet co-worker of mine was recently diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer. Metastasized to her liver and in her lymph nodes. She's my age.

Here's her story, if you're one for praying or positive energy thoughts, please visit her site and send her some well-wishes.

- H

My hairdresser, by Binnie

Hi Intranets. I'm Binnie, my mom's dog. I kindy took over the computer today cause I got a real special story to tell about my friend June.

I'm just a little dog. They say I'm a Yorkashire terrilor mixed with somethin else but my dad kindy escaped identification and my momma died when I was only one week old. My brothers and sisters and I were taken to The Pound where two kindly workers took us home and raised us on up on a bottle. My mom says losin my momma so early has set me up with some problems later in life, but I'm alright.

I'm goin on eighty years old, can you believe it? Mom says I'm eight but she's got no idea how long that is for a small dog like myself.

I want to tell you about my friend June. She's my hairdresser. I never used to get my hairs cut and then one day I musta got into sumpin cause mom got all mad and drove me up to Petsmart where my veterinarian Dr. Schwartz works. I hate his guts. But luckily we walked past his desk and into the Salon where Miss June took me back and worked her magic on me.

I left there smelling like a rose, 'cept without the rose smell cause it makes my mom sick.

Ever since then, June and I been real tight. If mom tried to do the private stuff Miss June does to me, I'd prolly try to kill her. But Miss June's alright.

Just this past week, she got some great news from her veterinarian, too. He called to tell her she kicked her third bout of breast cancer, kicked it right in the buttocks! Mom and I were real happy to hear that. Miss June's a fighter, you can tell it. She's goin nigh on eighty years old like me, but she's as spry as a sixty-year-old and real good at what she does.

Just look at me! Don't I look good? I think so. Plus, I haven't had to have my teeth done by Dr. Schwartz since June started with me. She's good with the brush.


I'd like to give a big shoutout to June, my hairdresser. What would me and my mom do without you? Thanky, ma'am. Keep on kickin.

binnie

An interview with my brother {with pictures!}

Remember my post from yesterday? The one where I told the story of how my brother got lost in the forest of the Swiss Alps and hitchhiked home when he was seven or eight years old?

[This is us. Brett is on the right. Obviously, he was much younger in this picture but I thought it was cute. Plus, you'll see it again in a few days when I post a near lookalike picture of my son Griffin.]

Well, I sent him some interview questions about that adventure, and following are his answers. It seems both mine and my mom's memory of the story are somewhat (or completely) different from Brett's. I guess that's what happens when you let thirty years go by without writing down the details, huh? If only there were blogs in the seventies. Then we'd all be set.

Without further adieu, here's my bro:

Do you remember this story? I mean, do you really remember the episode?

Yes, I remember the story very well. Some parts were like they just happened, the feel of the wheat when I walked through the field, the Citroen car. But then some parts were, are, hazy and I either blocked them out or I was so emotional (read: crying, wailing and balling) that I didn't have the mental capacity to remember those parts. Like how I got from the business in France to our house on Impasse de Mon-Idee.

No kidding, I don't recall how old I was when this happened. I'm guessing 8 but it was anywhere between 5 and 9, as I turned 10 upon our return State-side.

[I'm assuming this picture was taken the winter either before or after this adventure. Nice how my brothers both looked totally rad while I am decked out in a freaking tulip snowsuit??]

Whoops, getting ahead of myself and as I see the questions you've submitted to me, I think I need to fill in some important parts. It started out as any other day where my stay-at-home mother shipped off her two oh-so-well-behaved boys and Heather to a day camp in order to save her sanity -- looking back and having kids myself, I better understand that mentality. The camp would then bus us to the foothills of the French Alps in France. I recall it being a very short bus ride, so I guess I assumed it wasn't that far away distance wise, not that a elementary aged school boy would remember details like time, distance or spacial relationships when goofing off with his friends on the bus.

So it was like the second week at camp and we'd managed to make an awesome fort out of a fallen pine tree across a little gulch with branches [interruption by Heather - I totally remember that part about camp], leaves and some junk found on the side of the road near a farmers pastures with cows. We even had a forbidden fire that we'd start when we got there in the morning and put out when we left for the day (read: left burning itself out most likely).
That particular day we'd gotten busted for the Nth time that week so the counsellors decided we needed to do something with the larger group as a whole because our Lord Of The Flies camping was getting out of hand.

So that day they split up the entire group after lunch for Capture the Flag. I was on the side that stayed put and the other 1/2 went down a ways in the wooded area to setup their flag. I don't recall, but I'm guessing the counsellors gave them a 5 minute head start and we started playing. Being the young Patton that I clearly was, I decided a wide right flanking maneuver would be best, so I made a huge right-to-left banana bend attack at where I assumed their flag would be stationed.

I walked and ran. Ran and walked. I kept going and going, knowing that my flanking move wouldn't have been protected by these novice Capture the Flaggers. I went about ten minutes at top speeds to capture their flag, end the game and get back to our fire! Yes, I was a pyro back then. [Another interruption by Heather - We were all pyros back then! I don't know why, but us kids really liked fires and firecrackers.]

Then I realized my ten minute attack was a bit too far and I may have outflanked myself, so I tried to turn around the way that I came although when you're young and in the forest, the trees all look the same and they were also my only landmarks I'd used, for example "that huge tree with green moss on the base back there", except for the fallen trees that I'd crossed occasionally which I'm guessing I figured were unique to that area of the woods in France. See how confusing and disjointed that last sentence was; same for my land navigation skills through woods back then!

I was now only walking but it'd been about ten minutes and I assumed I'd return to where we started but nothing looked right. Keep in mind, I hadn't seen anyone since they shouted "Go!" to start the game. So I kept walking 'cuz maybe I was close but just didn't go quite far enough.

A few minutes later I came to a clearing where there was a wheat field that slopped down to another patch of trees and what appeared to be pasture land off in the distance. But looking to my left -- again, thinking that my right hand flank was still in affect -- I noticed that the wheat field disappeared back up into the woods so I was going to head that way, cut into the wood, STILL capture their flag and we'd win.

By the time I walked maybe the 200 yards to where the field turned uphill to meet the woods, I ran across a fence stopping me from re-entering the woods. It was now that I stopped thinking about capturing their flag and being the hero of the camp. But thankfully I was still too naive to understand what was going on.

My plan was now to head down through the wheat field to the road on the other side of the patch of trees I thought I'd seen, follow the road up to where the buses drop us off & pick us up and I'd at least be back in camp. Panic had now begun to slowly creep into my mind because I remember running through the wheat which was about my chest height at that time of year and ran towards the trees thinking I had better hurry up or I'd get in trouble for quitting the game.

The trees were thicker than were we started playing capture the flag -- blasted stupid game, who invented this f*ing game anyway at this point in time -- and I had trouble getting through the thick brush, and I was getting tired, so I turned ninety degrees to my right to skirt the edge of the tree patch on my way to the road and the camp. But when I went halfway around what I remember from 20 minutes ago when I first saw the patch of trees, I was assuming it was the road, it turned out to be more wheat fields, so I decided that at this point walking down slope was much easier than sideways to get to the blasted road and camp...oh how I just wanted to get back to camp.

Who knows how long I walked before I finally hit a road, although I remember crossing a few dirt paths that farm tractors had created. When I hit the road I was now okay to find my way back - young logic at it's finest! But not knowing which way I should walk, I walked away from the mountains towards Geneva and home. Possibly because panic had completely set in and I was tired of walking and downhill was easier than uphill, I don't recall.

When cars would zoom past, I would stick my thumb out in the hopes of hitching a ride to base camp. Yeah, it was the mid-70's and hitching was still an option for the wanna-be hippies and dropouts....probably not suitable for kids my age, but I'd seen plenty of them during our trips around Europe, so what the heck. Did I know where I was? Nope. Did I know how to speak French well enough to ask the locals how to get there? Nope. Didn't matter, I was a little kid from the day camp and in my thinking, since I knew about the camp site, everyone in the area knew about it too.

A couple stopped in a Citroen car and picked me up. They only spoke French. I spoke English and a few words of French - but knowing "where's the bathroom?" or "check please" or other survival language skills were no match for their fast foreign tongues and my young American ears. So I resorted to tears - out of frustration, exhaustion and fear. But they put me in their car and drove me to safety -- not hitching on the side of the road. It wasn't far and I had hopes that by now they'd have heard of the American kid lost from playing Capture the Flag and they'd return me to my house. Almost with a "ta dah!" type of ending in my mind.

Alas, they dropped me off at some business near Geneva but still in France, in the little town across the border called Annemasse (could be just about any other small town across the border, but I remember Annemasse from my days of buying fire crackers [legal in France], shoving them in my sock & shoes, and then crossing the border back to Switzerland [very illegal to have firecrackers there]...good times, good times!

The business had a back office with a sofa where I sat and cried and cried and cried. I gave them my phone number in English AND French and even my address. The street address numbers now escape me in my old age, but I remember XXX Impasse De Mon-Idee, Thonex, Swiss.

[If you zoom into the map, you can see where our house was and where the border says France/Suisse. They have a pool in our backyard now, that would have been nice.]

View Larger Map
They called the number and it just rang, rang and rang (so I'm told). The three or four people there were nice but on a scale from 1 being crumby to 10 being awesomely nice, none of them could have gone beyond a 5 because they weren't speaking English!! That alone would have earned them 5 points without saying or doing anything else. I was so mortified and I just wanted to go home. Yes, they were nice but not communicating in English and they were not taking me home.My fear now got the best of me and it's foggy, nah, blank in my memory. Or who knows, I was tired and fell asleep.

Next, I was home and in my bed resting. Good grief that was a long day, but I was home and all was good now with the world.

When you stopped at the lady's house, did you speak French to her? How many people did you call?
Don't remember stopping at any lady's house. Might have been what I thought was the business. All they called was the one number I knew; home. It was the only number I knew. No one answered and it rang and rang and rang and rang. Eventually, the Anderson's cleaning lady came over and answered our phone (????), found out what was going on and 'fixed' the situation. I don't know. That's a question for adults who hopefully pieced this all back together when I was safe and sound. Mom?

What did you tell the truck driver who brought you back over the border?
One word: Fuzzy. No clue to the who, what, when, where, why or how I crossed the border. I could make crap up but I won't. Maybe in a fiction book I plan on writing someday, when I get around to it.

Did the border guards ask about you at all?
No clue. Hopefully they were understanding and knew that detaining me and my French or Swiss or whomever saviours were would have caused an International incident and roughly fourteen months of paperwork, press and investigations within the sleepy crossing on Rou de Mon-Idee. He was a young kid and the adults paper's were all in order, let 'em through.

Where did you go once you got off at the border? Mom said you went to Andrews' house?
I'll buy that for a quarter! Don't know. I thought the story went that the housekeeper came into France to get me. I don't recall. Maybe time for hypnosis at the Comedy Club to see if they can pull it from me.

If what you're asking is true, we lived about 50 meters (when in the EU, we used metric baby!) from the border, so I could have managed that walk without a problem.

Why did Andrews' housekeeper know what was going on, did the French lady call her?
My story, which at this point is very suspect in my mind, is how I described it above. She was concerned -- not just Wisteria Lane Desperate Housewife nosey -- that our phone rang and rang and rang for very long durations. Apparently the windows were open and she was a kind soul worried about the constant ringing.

I'm sure that mom can fill in more information, but that's what I know and how I remember that day. Much like falling from the tree in France into the creek border with Switzerland, I'm hazy on the good parts and remember the boring stuff like it was yesterday. Maybe my survival skill.


***********
So that's the story. Or wait, that's a completely different story than the one I told yesterday. So let this be a lesson to all of you who don't blog. You better start doing it or the important stories of your lives will be lost with the inevitable memory loss of time!

[This photo I included because I've always thought it was cool. Venice stinks. Literally, it smells kinda poopy. But it's super cool and you have to see it someday before it sinks into the ocean. Brett is on the right.]

If you're like me, your brain went to mush during all the walking and running and running and walking and wordy words. But it's still a great story! I hope he prints this and lets his kids read it, that would be cool.

Thanks for reading!

My brother is lucky to be alive

My older brother Brett is the middle child and by far the easiest of the three of us.

He's nice.
He's responsible.
He was an officer in the Marines.
He saves money.
He's a great dad.
You know, the kind of child a parent wants to have.

Except for that sticky part about how he was constantly trying to get lost or killed while we were kids. There was the time he was two and my mom was pregnant with me and he fell out of the car and lost all his hair. And the time he was eight or nine and fell out of a three-(or four)-story tall tree into a creek bed that luckily had ten inches of water in it (else he'd be a gonner). But this one's my favorite. Come back tomorrow, I have an interview with my bro in which he clears up and totally confuses many parts of this story, so that's cool!

The Incredible Disappearing Boy

When we lived in Geneva, my mom didn't work. She did Other Stuff. She taught English to students and au pairs who lived with us. She traveled with my dad occasionally and by herself occasionally. You know, she was busy. She had three crazy, busy little kids. My dad travelled almost exclusively for work so he was not there much.

In the summer, our parents sent us to Camp. In Geneva in the seventies, this consisted of a fairly Hippie-style experience, and one that included bus trips up into the mountains around Geneva {we affectionately like to call these mountains the Alps} to a campground where we'd play in the woods and go exploring.

I have vague memories of these days in camp. I'm sure my brothers have stronger ones. The most vivid for me were the two Swiss camp counselors who were clearly...um...dating, and who would show us how to french kiss and tie cherry stems into knots with their tongues at the same time. Kinda gross, huh?

Anyhoo, back to how my brother was trying to off himself. You know middle children. They're happy go lucky. Or at least my brother was happy go lucky. He'd go along with anything. My oldest brother usually looked out for him and I'm not exactly sure why he fell down on the job on this particular day except they were in different age groups.

The bus took everyone up into the mountains to the campsite. They played, ate lunch, got into trouble, explored, and loaded back onto the bus to go back to town. Everyone but Brett, that is. Brett was playing hide and seek with some friends and was hiding. Seriously, they loaded the kids onto the bus while he hid. They miscounted the heads while he hid. His friend Jeffrey told the counselors that Brett wasn't on the bus, but they didn't' listen to him. They drove off down the mountain back to the city while he hid.

I guess he finally figured out they'd left him at some point, and he came out of hiding.

Can you imagine? You're eight years old. You speak English but you're in the forest in the mountains of Switzerland...alone. The school bus with your counselors, your older brother, little sister and all your friends has left you behind. What would you do? Brett just did what Brett would do. He tracked back out to the road and started walking.

He stopped at the first house he came to and asked the woman who answered the door if he could use her phone. We guess that he spoke French, and he was able to tell her he wanted to call home.

So he dialed our number....it rang...and rang...and rang. Mom was at the grocery store. Nobody answered. Mom says he tried to call Andrews and maybe their French housekeeper answered the phone or maybe not, we aren't clear on the details of that one. Either way, he wasn't able to get anyone on the phone, so he left her house and started walking down the road again.

Guess what he did next, this little kid all alone in the forest of the Alps? He flagged down a truck and hitchhiked to the French/Swiss border, where he got out and came home. You see, our street was Impasse de Mon Idee and was right next to the border crossing in Thonex. In fact, the neighborhood kind of wound around behind France, if that makes any sense? So he was able to tell the truck driver he lived in Thonex and the guy let him out at our street.

Thank God for the truck driver who gave the little American boy a ride down to the border crossing.

Thank God for the Swiss woman who was frantic that this little American boy had taken off by himself and was lost. She kept calling our house and the Andrews until she got a hold of their French housekeeper and explained the situation. By then my mom was home. Shortly after that, Brett walked into the house. You can imagine how relieved my mom was to see him after hearing that her son was at this woman's house and hitchhiked with a truck driver!

My mom called the camp and they said they realized Brett was missing once they got back to town, so they had dispatched a driver to go back up to the campsite and find him. She was livid. Jeffrey had told them Brett wasn't there and they didn't listen. I guess the counselors were really shaken up, too, so that's better than not caring. Right?

So anyhoo, that's the story of how my brother Brett got lost in the forest of the Swiss Alps and hitchhiked home.

Crazy, eh?

So yeah, stop back by tomorrow for the awesome interview with said brother in which the details of this story become even more exciting and confusing and I even post some pictures of our childhood home and its proximity to the French border. Awesome.

A sad footnote: Jeffrey, Brett's friend, died in high school from a skiing accident in Vermont. He was a racer and was an excellent skier, but he hit a patch of ice in a race and crashed into a tree. So sad, so young.

Here's a sad story cause that's what everyone needs on a Monday, right? CORRECTION! Today is Tuesday.

I'm sorry for doing this, friends. I just have to share a story that my friend Angela shared with me last night. I couldn't sleep last night and I thought about it a lot. There's a new button on my right sidebar, for the Cora Paige Playground Project.

Please take a minute to read Cora Paige's story, and give your kiddos a giant squeeze and kiss today. No mommy or daddy should have to lose their baby so young. My heart aches for them, and for anyone who's lost a baby.

I promise my next post will be cheery! And zippy! And happy! But I thought this was important. So check it out. And if you're crafty (and you know you are), think about what you might be able to contribute to the Cora Paige Playground Project.

Hmmm...I'm crafty. I wonder what I should make?

Psst... I've gotta remind myself how to crochet... check this out...

Someone Else's Story, Volume 1

Remember I posted a teaser earlier this week, whereby I will finally be writing down all of the interesting stories strangers tell me about their lives? These aren't people I know very well, although this first edition actually is someone I've come to know. These are stories I hear in passing.

I think there are a lot of people out there that just need someone to listen to them, someone to talk to. So if I find myself sitting next to someone for ten minutes, chances are, I've heard their story. Or at least part of their story. Now I'm going to share them with you, because that's what I do. I share. And because I have nothing else to write about tonight.

*****

P's Story

I've known P for a while, maybe even as long as five or six years? She does my nails at the salon I go to. I've always known she was Chinese, and somewhere in the back of my mind I knew she came to the States from Vietnam. It wasn't until recently that I asked how she came to live here, and she told me her incredible story of the journey she and her family took. As she sat and told me her story, my mouth gaped open.

P is a little older than me; I think she's 38. She comes from a big family of eight kids, and she falls near the top. Her parents are Chinese, but shortly after she was born the family moved to Vietnam to escape Chinese oppression.

Then the Vietnam War started, and things got really bad. Her parents and extended family had to make a decision, and they chose to try to come to the United States by way of a boat. Her dad bought the boat, and together with his immediate family of nine (wife and eight kids), he loaded up extended family and some strangers, basically anyone who wanted to pay for passage to the U.S.

They set off for freedom from poverty and war. I guess things were OK for a while, or at least as OK as they can be on a boat with a hundred people in the middle of the ocean.

Shortly into the trip, some people started to get sick. Her uncle, who was mentally retarded and had other health issues, died on board. P doesn't really remember why he died, she was just a kid, maybe nine years old? They had no doctor on board, no medicines other than over the counter things like aspirin. They were weeks, possibly months from shore. So they did what they had to do. They laid his body on the water and let him go. P says she remembers watching his body bob away on the waves, until she couldn't see it anymore.

Shortly after this, the boat started to leak and take on water. They sent out distress signals, flares, whatever it is they could do to get help.

The Indonesian Coast Guard (at least that's what my faulty memory remembers) came to the boat just as it was sinking and rescued the passengers, but because they were refugees of Vietnam and they were in international waters, they weren't allowed to go to Indonesia. Instead, they were taken to an island specifically designated for refugees. She said there were thousands of people there waiting for assylum from various different countries, living in filth, camping.

They lived on this refugee island with no running water, with tents as coverage from the elements, for a year. Finally, their application for visas to the United States came through. They were only able to obtain visas for their immediate family, P's parents and their children. So they left behind the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, who would eventually make it to freedom on their own.

From Indonesia they were flown to Atlanta, and that's where the family initially began their transformation into Americans. Hotlanta! Can you imagine? They lived in a one bedroom apartment, both parents taking whatever jobs they could find. P and her siblings learned to speak English by watching television. Some of her sisters still live there, although later on most of the family moved here.

P met and married a Vietnamese man whose family still lives there. She's an amazing woman. She speaks four languages - Chinese, Vietnamese, French and English. She is one of the hardest working people I know. She's pretty, smart, and talented and you'd never guess it by looking at her that she came to this country by way of a leaky boat out of Vietnam.

And I think I have struggles!?