Project Folksy

So how's that Seasonal Affective Disorder working out for you? Mine is peaking. I'm so totally stoked, as the Flying Tomato would say. Here's a little project that might help lighten those winter blues. Project Folksy is simple. Every day, pick one folksy saying that you've never uttered before in your life, and drop it on someone unsuspecting. Just now, I told my sister Brownie troop moms that picking up and sorting our thousands of boxes of Girl Scout cookies had been "a little slice of Heaven." I even gave them the extra folksy supplemental transaction wink when I did it. It was all I could do not to bust the thumb-and-forefinger bang-bang, but I didn't want to get maced. Anyway, doing this filled me with anticipatory vernal cheer, so I'm going to do it every day for, oh, let's say three more days. I hereby challenge you to join me.

Come up with a folksy saying that you've never spoken before, and have it ready. Then, use it in context with someone who doesn't know that you're a part of Project Folksy. Report back here with the glorious details. Don't get all ginchy with this...no fanfare, no giggling, no air quotes. Just bust it and smile. Or, look real grim if it's that kind of saying. Winking optional. You might want to prep the night before so you don't hit some sweet folksy opportunity first thing in the morning and you're standing there all "Uh, yeah, don't count your chickens or something," which you've totally said before.

Also, if you have any good sayings that I should unleash on Lexburgtonvilleshire, lemme know. But don't think that gets you off the hook for your own folksiness.

Good luck and Godspeed.

Ricky flew me to Philadelphia in his teeny weeny little plane. It's like a Toyota Celica that flies. If either Ricky or I were a little bit bigger, we'd need a bigger plane. We landed at a little airfield that was basically an airstrip behind some guy's house. We're coming in and Rick is radioing the "tower" (I think it was a prefab shed from Home Despot) about how he can totally see the field, but I can't see the field, and I'm all "Where?" "Where?" "Where?" and then I threw up a little. I should have worn a patch. I have patches, and I thought about wearing one, but then the little obstinate boy voice in my head said "If you wear a patch, you'll never know how bad it really was...you can wear a patch next time." So even though I don't think it was very bad, I know how bad it is. I will wear a patch next time. My wife says boys are silly, and she's right. So my sister met me at the little airfield and we drove to what used to be my mom's place. We loaded my share of the crap into the front of the U-Haul truck, and her share into the back, and off we went. We unloaded her crap, and then I drove the giant truck to the Epicenter. The first 10 minutes I drove the truck were in Germantown, PA, which has cobblestone streets which are just about wide enough for an ox cart. The truck was somewhat bigger than that. Plus, the steering wheel is just for suggestions. Every once in a while, the truck just starts moving in a direction in which it is not pointed. Perhaps someone thinks that's a feature, but not me. Oh, no. I think that's a bug. Especially when I'm trying to cross the Tappan Zee bridge which offers one inch of clearance if you're driving a 17-foot U-Haul. Also, there is no cruise control, and the accelerator pedal is four inches off the floor, so there really is no way to maintain a constant speed without incurring a huge cramp in your right foot. If I had marine epoxy, I'd have epoxied it down. Powerful stuff. You know how some commercial trucks have bumperstickers that say "If my driving sucks, call this number" or whatever? I think U-Hauls should have scrolling electronic signs that say "I've only been driving this truck for THREE MINUTES so you might want to give me a little room."

So now I'm at a dude ranch, my back is blown, and two really fat ladies (even fatter than me) just sat down on the next couch over and my Wifi signal strength dropped from 46% to 13%. Sheesh.

Double Reverse Survivor

OK. So it's possible that I'm too dumb to take a hint, but we're going to try this nutty writing contest/game show thing one more time. This season is going to be a little different. In past seasons, we've done one assignment per week, voting the best entry off each week until we were left with nothing but exhausted people with bad attitudes who hadn't written stuff that people liked. This arrangement appealed to the perverse Bert Convy side of me, but I don't think it appealed to anyone else. Time pressure + lots of effort + repeated failure = not so much fun. So this season, we're gonna mix it up a bit.

Here's my proposed structure for Season Six. First of all, it's "Double Reverse Survivor" because I'm re-reversing the part I reversed originally. The less popular writers leave first. Voting in each round will consist of every player ranking all the other players' entries. The rounds will be fewer. I'm thinking three, possibly four, if we get a lot of players. Let's say we had 20 players. In the first round, we'd lose the bottom five. In the second round, we'd lose another five. Third round, another five, and then in the fourth round, we'd sort the final winners group, ranked one to five. Maybe everyone who plays gets to vote in the final round. Maybe everyone who plays gets to vote in all the rounds. Haven't nailed that down yet. I'm thinking that I'll make the rounds longer, too. Three weeks seems like the right number to me, and then a week to vote and comment on each round. Take away the time pressure and excuses, and give people a good amount of time to noodle over which entries they like most and craft some devastating comments.

So now I'm asking for input on my proposed changes from anyone who might be interested in playing. Leave a comment here or shoot me an email. My goals for this are to make this season 1) more fun, 2) less hassle, 3) better written, and 4) able to accommodate more players, who I hope are not put off by the workload which will be smaller. I'd love to have RS veterans back, but I'm also keen to bring in some new blood. If you know anyone who might get a kick out of something like this, point them this way. If you don't know what I'm talking about, click the RS icon up there on the top of the right panel and check out previous seasons.

If I press seven, I'll never hear her voice again. It catches me off guard...my cell phone beeps that it has a message. When I dial in the pleasant female voice tells me that there are two voicemails marked for deletion. Would I like to review them? Sure I would. I'm all about reviewing things before I lose them. It's not a pleasant message...full of medical detail and anxiety. But it's her. Her full, sane, vigorous voice, the day she went to the hospital, the day after she closed the door of her apartment for the last time. Her voice still resonates at my core frequency with the same force it had 35 years ago. Maybe more. I don't even care what the words are, and I'm bawling, alone in the dining room, listening to the only seemingly living remnant of her I've got after 40 years together and apart. She doesn't know she'll be gone in a month and I want to tell her that I'll drive down right away and stay with her until the end. But the voice is just a collection of electronic dust in a corner of some server at the phone company. I don't even know where the server is, as if that matters. What the hell am I going to do? Call in every 21 days to save the message again? It's just a random recording...it's not a memory, not a keepsake, not a legacy. There's no soul there. Who cares if tomorrow that sector of the phone company's disk gets overwritten with some other guy's drama?

Still. I can save her.

My mom died last Wednesday. She'd been diagnosed with scleroderma, a chronic and often progressive disease of the immune system, back in 1992. We've known since then that there was a good chance that the disease would kill her if something else didn't first. She had ten good post-diagnosis years, more or less, but the last few were very tough. The form of scleroderma Bev had was systemic, affecting lots of different systems in her body. Her skin became tight and hard in places, her digestive function was compromised, shutting down entirely several times, and her circulatory system was increasingly unable to get sufficient blood flow to her extremities. It was this last issue that precipitated her death. She'd been having trouble with her feet for months, and in early January underwent a diagnostic procedure to determine to what degree circulation to her feet could be re-established. When the answer came back "not at all," she had a choice between having her feet amputated in the near term and probably her hands and more leg in the medium term, or calling it a life and entering hospice. There was never really any question in her mind or anyone else's who knew her which she'd choose. In the hours immediately following the diagnosis, my sister Megan and I wrestled with how to approach Mom with the hard choices that needed to be made. When Megan broached the subject with Bev it was clear that she was way ahead of us.

I spent the week before last in Pennsylvania, sleeping in Bev's apartment and spending most of the days with her. It was an experience I'll never forget. Students of the dying process say that people begin to make the transition long before the actual event. That was certainly my perception of what Bev did. There were moments of seemingly perfect lucidity, but they were interspersed with the most amazing journeys back through her life in the form of waking dreams. The pain meds may have contributed to this as well. My dad, Dick, who died in 1991, came to visit often, as did our dog Cokie, who didn't make it out of the 70s. At one point she exclaimed "Oh, look, Dick's here!" and then, "He just went up through the ceiling...I should have kept my big mouth shut!" I visited as a child, even as I sat there in real life as an adult. Apparently "Little Chris" was sitting on my own shoulder for a while. Mom's room became quite mobile, flying between places she'd lived or visited. Oddly, she knew these were hallucinations. We even joked about whose reality was real: the dreary one I advocated, or hers. It might have been easy to dismiss all this as the delirious rantings of a sick woman, but there was a certain undeniable logic to all of it that was both fascinating and a little unsettling.

Over the course of the week, we had the opportunity to wrap up some longstanding business. There were some issues that had been hanging over and between us for 20-plus years. She'd made some decisions for me when I was a teenager that I'd fought tooth and nail. She prevailed, and I said some stuff I wish I hadn't. She was right, by the way. Last week, I let her off the hook and she did the same for me. Perhaps ironically, it was Bev's urging that I say what needed to be said to my father years ago that helped me work with her to make things right last week. I think I was immensely lucky, thanks mostly to Bev, to have had the opportunity to say exactly what I needed to say to both my parents before they were gone. I don't mean to preach here, but I strongly recommend that you use the time you have with your loved ones wisely. You might not have as much time as I had. The smile Mom gave me after we'd said our pieces will keep me warm for a long time to come.

Jennifer and the came down to see Bev (and help preserve my sanity) toward the end of the week. I'd been worried that Mom would be out of it and the would freak out, but she mounted a herculean effort to be present and lucid. Sophie and Skye made huge pink posters for her room telling her how much they love her, and she was appropriately doting and grandmotherly.

I drove back to Massachusetts on Saturday, thinking I'd return to see her the following weekend. There didn't seem to be any particular hurry...our expectation was that eventually an infection would set in in her feet and she'd die of blood poisoning. Megan visited her the following Monday. Mom told Megan that she had to pack so she and Dick could go home. Wednesday morning she was unresponsive and her breathing became labored. She slipped away peacefully around noon with two hospice workers and her friend Eliza in the room telling her that Megan and I love her and that we said it was OK to go.

I don't know exactly what killed her. She didn't die of sepsis, like we'd expected. I'm thankful for that, as it's a pretty gruesome death, even with meds. I choose to believe that she'd finished her work here and was ready to move on. I have great respect for the way she lived her life and the way she ended it. I love her, and I'll miss her.

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