Aprés Storm

We'll call this Thanksgiving The Thanksgiving That Cirsten Got Kicked Out Of Boarding School, that way if we're ever sitting somewhere together in the future wondering when exactly she was given the boot, we'll remember that it was Thanksgiving and we both met up in Portland, ate a large delicious dinner with the Stiers, then I put her on a flight to New York the next morning and didn't tell her she wasn't coming back. I don't pride myself on lying to my sister, but it suddenly and finally dawned on me that while honesty and openness are ultimately admirable traits, they are not always the best weapon against a very angry 16-year-old on the steepest downward slope since someone showed Ryan Adams a speedball. She said, "If you want me to be miserable for a year then just tell me now." I said, "If you're going to be miserable then it's your choice." She said, "Just tell me now so I know how long I have to be here and hate my life." I said, "If you hate your life it's your choice." She said, "So you don't have to be blamed for it?" I said, "So I can tell myself that I did everything I could while you made everything turn to shit." She doesn't listen to me any better when I say things like that, but I say them anyway.

This Thanksgiving is also the Thanksgiving I Broke Up With My Boyfriend and Got a Speeding Ticket While Visiting Dad Because Bad Things Happen in Threes (They Say). Sometimes I wonder if the triple-whammies are my momma's way of isolating what's important for me to worry about. Sure, break ups suck, but, gawd, what else is new? It's true that when I'm worried about my sister and my dad I don't have that much time to worry about me. I know that's an internal bomb waiting to go off, but I'll cross that ill-fated bridge when someone pushes me across it.

I saw a old woman today with patched silver hair strung from black roots remove one of her teeth and pass it from hand to hand like she was separating egg whites from the yolk. She treated it like a treasure, like she was about to run home and tell her mom she lost a tooth and stick it under her pillow for a dime. Never mind that she probably has no mother to speak of, let alone a pillow, and dime's a far more humiliating and difficult to come by. I feel like I honestly have to numb the parts of me that see homeless people in the city every day and immediately want to scoop them up and give them shoes and food and warmth. It's the part of me that sees my dad in every black homeless man. It's the part of me that wonders how people are that alone and it gets that bad. But the feeling is so overwhelming that I get scared I'll get lost in it and not know how to draw the line between fear and pity. Not that I or my family has a chance of becoming homeless. But, at the same time, we do.

When I'm feeling scared in my neighborhood at night I walk straight down the middle of the street like I own the place. Every man around here gets a wicked case of the lonelies at night and he'll tell you to your face that he wants to sleep with you and I'm sure in other ways too if you let him. People tell me I should carry mace for real and not just use it as clever alliteration in my blog title. I say, I'd rather not carry around a weapon that can quite swiftly and easily be turned around on me. Like it's not the easiest thing in the world to pry a plastic tube out of the shaky hands of a twenty-something girl and then spray that shit in her face. COME ON, people. While I'm at it, why don't I carry around my nun chucks and my lasso.