Robin Graham

I launched this website well over two years ago. It’s about time I started writing about my brothers.

In my family, I am the oldest of four children and the only girl. I have three brothers; we are all two years apart. Our mother had me when she was barely 19, and all of us by the time she was 25.

I have this memory of being taken to the hospital by my dad after one of my brothers was born. The rest of us kids were too young to be let inside to visit Mom and the new baby, so Dad walked us across the lawn and we looked up, up, up (it seemed so high at the time but the hospital was only three stories). I shielded my eyes to see her. There she was, leaning slightly out of the window and waving at us, a pin-dot in the sky. We waved back.

The only other memory I have from this period of my life is looking out a back door and seeing grass and, beyond that, thick woods. Everything was emerald green. In my mind this is Indianapolis, where we lived after Dad left the Air Force and got his first civilian job. Nowadays I wonder if I was really looking out the back door of the house my parents bought in Cleveland.

I was in my own little world during these very early years of our family. I suppose most young kids are. Once I started kindergarten my own little world burst wide open. I remember a lot about school — the smell of those big fat crayons, my teachers, pulling my underwear off with my snow pants in the coat closet — but I don’t remember much about interacting with my brothers. I do know, though, that some good seeds had to have been sown with them, because these days we are too close and like each other too much for that early period to have meant nothing.

People sometimes say to me, “I bet since you were the oldest and the only girl, you were like a little mother to them. I bet you kept them in line.”

My answer is always, “No. Far from it.”

My three brothers had a camaraderie that was special. It took root in the late 1950s and continues to this day. I was always in awe of it. They spoke a special language with each other; there were all kinds of inside jokes. They didn’t set fire to ants with a magnifying glass, but threw mashed potatoes and spaghetti noodles on the ceiling when Mom wasn’t looking. They sometimes stayed stuck up there for weeks.

My brothers dressed the dog in Dad’s clothes and chased her around the yard in them. They were great observers, and gave names to things that most of us aren’t even attuned to. On a family trip to Niagara Falls, they made up names for the front ends of cars like “Denny-Denny.” On trips to Pittsburgh, where our grandparents lived, a high-rise bridge along the turnpike east of Cleveland was the border between Ohio and Africa. They had names for each other like “Roast,” “Big George,” “Farmer,” “Skimp” and “Thip Stick.”

Pretending they were wearing giant berets, my brothers dashed around the house balancing the couch cushions on their heads, shouting, “I come from France!” They named the sound the swing-set made when someone swung on it too hard and it pumped out of the ground: “A-boochy-trail-ain’t-lousy-doom.” They referred to legs as “fat choppers” and hands as “meanos.”

I think that if you asked them how they came up with all these names, and all the others that aren’t even mentioned here, they would laugh and tell you they don’t exactly know. Or they might attempt to explain, then shrug, then laugh. The best creative concepts — pure imagination — can’t exactly be explained.

It might have been easy for an only sister to feel like an outsider to all this, but I never did. My brothers are smart, funny, and entertaining, and the things they say make me laugh. They made all of us laugh. They were, and still are, the reason family dinners were so much fun—and it wasn’t just because of the strand of spaghetti stuck to the ceiling by a thread over Mom’s head.

The older we got, the more at odds my middle brother and I became with each other. He was feisty and mouthy and liked to tell people what to do, and my attempts to check him backfired on a regular basis. I once wrote on the wall upstairs that I hated him, then taped something over it to hide it. When my mother found it, she gave me holy hell.

Years later, my middle brother and I realize that the reason we hated each others’ guts back then is because we were, and still are, exactly alike.

When I go back to Cleveland, I often stay with my baby brother. We have had the most amazing conversations sitting around the kitchen table. He is deep and soulful and even-tempered. He is also one of the strongest people I have ever known. He and my oldest brother are married to two of the sweetest women in the world, and they have given me two nieces and two nephews. When we get together, it’s as if we saw each other yesterday. I am immediately brought into the fold, and for this I am always grateful.

My brothers have been extraordinarily kind to the men I’ve brought home, even when there was no good reason to be. The first time they met John, they reached out and pulled him into the fold, and he’s been there ever since.

I think about my brothers every single day. I miss them very much, and more each passing year. There are times in Milwaukee when John isn’t around that I wish I could get into my car and go pay them a visit. When I was young, I used to wonder how my mother and father could go for a year or two without seeing their siblings. Now I am that person, and it bothers me.

The tradeoff for living a long life is that bad things happen. My brothers have loved, lost, survived, and started over, and so have I. The four of us are middle-aged now but our souls are young. I see it every time we get together.

Our worlds were rocked a few years ago when our mother died ten weeks after being diagnosed with cancer, and some of us have lost dear friends too. Life has taught the four of us that what we have at this moment in time may not be here tomorrow or next year. This is another thing that bothers me about being in one state while my family is in another. I’ve gained a lot these past 18 years by moving away, but I’ve missed a lot too. I want to soak in all I can. Before it changes. Again.

It always cracks me up when a reality star whose marriage proposal was just accepted says, “I am the luckiest man in the world,” or a character in a movie says, “I am the luckiest woman in the world” after she gets the gig. Although I understand the emotion behind the statement, I like to think that there are all kinds of other people in the world feeling just as lucky; there can’t be just one.

So when it comes to my brothers, I won’t say, “I am the luckiest girl in the world.” I will just say that I am unusually blessed to have not just one but three wonderful brothers.

I hope you are just as fortunate, in some kind of way. That is my fondest wish for you.

After 11 years of living on Milwaukee’s East Side, John and I decided to call it quits. We moved at the tail end of May, a few weeks after I last published here.

John actually lived there a year longer than I—twelve years—and he’d lived there once or twice before, in his younger years. When we met in 2003, I was living out in the country in a brand-new “luxury” apartment with its own washer and dryer, private garage and entrance, and the first walk-in closet and master bath I’d ever had. A stone’s throw away from a pretty little pond under high-tension power lines, the complex was still under construction in parts.

John was living in a historic Art Deco building on Prospect Avenue on the East Side. It was a regular stop on an architectural walking tour and had a view of The Big Pond: Lake Michigan. The first time I visited him there we sat among dozens of unpacked boxes, and made out on the only piece of living room furniture he had at the time: an overstuffed black leather chair.

I moved in with John in April 2004, four months before our wedding. I brought as many clothes and shoes as I could jam into one tiny closet in the old one-bedroom apartment; my grandmother’s old jadeite dishes; my most beloved books and CDs; and a few small pieces of furniture. We stuffed the rest into a rented storage space with a bright orange door.

There were two coin-operated washers and dryers in the basement, which we competed for with about 50 other tenants. There was a small courtyard out back. In order to park on the street day or night, we had to buy stickers for our cars. Finding a parking spot was as difficult as finding the washer and dryer not being used when you needed it.

The noise outside was almost constant: buses, drunk college students, FedEx trucks, ambulances, car alarms, all-night frat parties, firecrackers. Crews pulling all-nighters on ruptured sewers, crews hanging off buildings for weeks tuckpointing old bricks. Somebody hollering, somebody getting robbed, a woman screaming, loud pops. It was quietest in the very early morning around 5 a.m., and during the holidays, when three-quarters of all East Siders left town. They were heavenly, these times, these days.

We lived within walking distance of Milwaukee’s best restaurants, clubs, taverns, shops, boutiques, galleries, museums, and parks. We walked so much that we sold one of our cars, and began renting an off-street parking space for the one we kept. We rented garage spaces for our two motorcycles. I sorted through my storage space with the orange door and gave away some of my belongings. We moved the rest to a storage space in an old warehouse four blocks away, next to the Laundromat and the sushi place.

There were old people, young people. Professional people, working-class people. Some, not many, with strollers. Some well dressed, some you could smell as you walked by. There was a Mercedes parked outside our building and a rusty old SUV parked across the street. The police came on a regular basis to apprehend the neighborhood pervert, who exposed himself to women who passed by his front window; his car was a brown Ford Taurus held together with gray duct tape. There was the corner store where all the alternative kids worked, the Mob joint two doors up, the import shop torn down to make way for a Whole Foods.

There were the elderly you see before winter sets in, who aren’t there in the spring, whom you never ever see again.

And there was this—the view of Lake Michigan from our dining room.

I started taking pictures of things I found on the sidewalks everywhere I walked: graffiti, fall leaves, a magazine rack, angry notes to people who parked badly.

There were the tenants in our building: the 65-year-old bleach-blonde, overly tan chain smoker who lit up in the elevator and wore leopard-print leggings. Shortly after she moved out, she died of cancer. There were artists, musicians, ex-punk rockers. The owner of a legendary record store in town, a retired Navy officer. Lawyers. Professors. The woman who watched our cats when we vacationed. One tenant gave cello lessons in her apartment and played her baby grand piano in the middle of the night drunk. Another played French horn for the symphony and seemed to wait until I was on conference calls with clients to practice.

There was the French Canadian who stole the wreath on our door. The two chain smokers below whose smoke filled our apartment. The loud talker who lived there before the smokers. The unemployed carpenter who moved next door who ran saws and drills all day and night. His fiancé, who started playing her music and movies loud the day they moved in, who looked at us crazy when we told her we could hear it, who is still officially one of the biggest bitches I have ever known. The tenants who moved heavy furniture across bare parquet floors at 3 a.m. Who had parties after bar-close at 3 a.m. Who left the gas on the stove on when they moved out.

Our formerly spacious one-bedroom apartment grew unbearably cramped. Our two cats had nowhere to go; every once in a while we’d open up the door and they’d half-heartedly walk up and down the hallway, then come back in and crash on the bed. We had too many books. Too much furniture. So many dishes that we used our dishwasher for storage. Everything was coated with dust from the cat litter and dirt from the city. Every time I wiped the TV screen clean, it came back black.

The company that owned the building did not respect the building. Repairs were designed around getting the job done as quickly and as cheaply as possible, without regard for the integrity of the beautiful old place. When roofers accidentally cut into the wire that supplied our electricity, maintenance ran conduit all up and down and around the dining room to patch everything together, rather than hire an electrician. One of the tenants in our building was screamed at by a passer-by because none of the glass on the sides of the front and service doors matched.

“I know what you mean, lady, but I have nothing to do with it,” said the tenant.

Our building manager was wonderful. Then she got married, and her husband became manager by proxy. He was not so wonderful. We started smelling liquor on them in the elevator.

We had four different sets of next-door neighbors the last six years we lived there. The last was a short, bald forty-something guy who was around all the time. There was an out-of-town girlfriend who visited every other weekend, and a different woman every weekend she was not around. When the girlfriend visited, there was almost always some tearful exchange through our neighbor’s locked and closed door, during which she would pound on the door and wail over and over, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, let me in, let me in.”

Then it was fall for about two minutes—typical Milwaukee—then winter set in. That’s when we noticed the cigarette smoke.

Our building was not a non-smoking building. New tenants were encouraged by management to smoke outside as a courtesy to their neighbors, but our neighbor did not—would not. Because he was around all the time, our apartment reeked of smoke almost all the time.

We duct-taped where the old baseboards met the old floor. The smoke found other holes and cracks to come in. By the time we moved out, there was duct tape everywhere. The owner didn’t appreciate our complaining. “We can’t make him stop smoking,” they said.

Winter lasted a full seven months. At the end of it we said, “We’re outta here.”

Moving was a bitch. Packing up a severely cramped apartment and a severely cramped storage space was more than exhausting: it was insane. We decided we didn’t want to stay on the East Side and rented a small house with a big garage in a suburb by the ballpark.

It took us hours and hours to clean the apartment. Everything had to be wiped clean before it was packed. Water buckets instantly became dirty. The ancient wooden window frames, with their dried and cracked paint, were impossible to get clean. The walls were peeling in all the places where the rain got through the brick. The ceiling plaster was beginning to bubble again. We cleaned that which hadn’t been cleaned in years.

Before we left, I took one last picture of the lake. It was in what I referred to as its neutral state: solid dark blue, no waves, no clouds.

As if to say, “Nothing to see here. It’s OK to go now.”

We took one last look back at the apartment we had lived in twelve and eleven years before closing the front door for the last time. It looked grey and saggy.

This year marks, well, let’s just say a significant anniversary of my high school graduation—one of those reunions my parents used to go to that made me wonder, “What’s the point?”

This is among the questions I’m asking myself now, because my high school class reunion is at the end of July and I’ve got a decision to make. Upon first hearing about it, I wanted to go. But now I’m having second thoughts, and here’s why: social media has put a dent in the thrill of the class reunion.

In his December 2011 story “Remember Me From Yesterday?” published in The New York Times, Douglas Quenqua writes, “There are people for whom seeing old classmates in person will never lose its appeal. But the institution feels a bit deflated now that, thanks to Facebook and similar sites, nobody really has to lose touch anymore.”

One of Quenqua’s interview subjects, who’d recently attended his own high school reunion, puts it this way: “Social media has robbed us of our nostalgia.”

When I joined Facebook in 2009, I was finishing up graduate school. One of my best girlfriends from high school had emailed me to say, “Hey, a bunch of us just signed up on Facebook, you should join us.” I immediately complied, and in one weekend I was connected with a hundred people I went to high school with. It was glorious.

I rekindled friendships with people I had really loved but hadn’t seen in years. Some people I wasn’t close friends with but decided, “What the heck?” In their profile pictures some people looked like their high school selves, except older; others were not recognizable—the same kind of thing you contend with at an actual face-to-face high school reunion.

I became Facebook friends with my brothers’ classmates. Old boyfriends. Kids who’d moved away junior year. “Class of…” groups formed. Three or four women from my class emerged as the “den mothers” of all our high school Facebook groups, and all of a sudden high school felt cliquish again. “Mini-reunions” were organized: small gatherings in our old hometown at local bars and restaurants for whoever could drive or fly back for them.

On Facebook I met up with an old boyfriend. My last night in town for one of these mini-reunions, he took me out to dinner and I shouldn’t have gone. After he dropped me off and peeled out of the driveway, I got a weird message, then another, then another. Things got stalkerish. He started friending my friends on Facebook and continued sending me unwanted messages and emails.

To alleviate the situation I made the decision to disconnect with several high school friends on Facebook. I promptly received an eleven-paragraph message from one of the den mothers, in which she admonished me to just keep quiet and look pretty.

I will tell you, frankly, as a friend,” she wrote in a Facebook message, “that ‘un-friending’ people you [and he] may have in common looks over-reactive.”

By the sixth paragraph, she was in a frenzy:

I REALLY am getting more annoyed about it. You are almost forcing people to choose sides in some personal and psychological battle, and it is getting old and weary already.”

I dropped out of our “Class of…” Facebook group. She in turn blocked me from the group.

While back in Cleveland for my mother’s funeral in 2011, a friend told me that this same classmate—a fervent genealogy buff in addition to everything else—had posted in the Facebook group she blocked me from that she had traced back her family and my family, and discovered that we were related. She also posted my mother’s obituary there.

Upon hearing this, I sent her a message requesting that she remove the posts, for the sake of our family’s privacy. Her response:

Reminder… Your family published it in a PUBLIC newspaper. The information was already out there.”

On my family being related to hers:

Facts are facts. I don’t like the fact we are distant cousins either, even if true…”

Then this:

You consistently piss on people who only want to do nice things or say nice things about you. What is wrong with you? Yeah, I will take it down, though I can also explain to everyone, that even attempts at nice gestures and comments, and celebrations of you or your family, apparently upset you. I am sure they will all understand…”

(My father was livid about this when I told him about it earlier this year.)

Is it any wonder that part of me doesn’t want to go to my high school reunion?

It’s not just this person, it’s also the extreme-right conservative spewing hate on everyone’s timeline; the guy who demanded, and I mean demanded, that I meet him for drinks before my flight out of Cleveland and got vitriolic when I said “no”; the one who posted racist jokes; the guy who commented on a photo of me on my motorcycle, “This combines two fantasies of mine.”

I could go on. All of us who are on Facebook can. I really wish I could just put all this aside and go to my high school reunion, and keep quiet and look pretty.

But I can’t. I am a feisty, tell-it-like-it-is kind of gal, and not everyone likes it. But I have never seen the inside of the police station in my old hometown, and I am not about to start now. If I go to my reunion, there are people I will love to see there. But there will also be people I now know way too much about; whom I don’t want to know any more about; whom I don’t really want to see or talk to; whom I would prefer remembering the way they were in high school.

In a recent study at the University of Colorado–Denver, Christopher Sibona surveyed 1,077 Facebook users and found that “the most likely person to be unfriended is a high school acquaintance.” The most common reasons? The person posts “polarizing comments often about religion or politics” and “frequent, uninteresting posts.”

In another study looking at “the emotional impact of being unfriended,” Sibona found a range, from being surprised or bothered, to amused or saddened by being let go. When I unfriended several high school acquaintances during the stalker incident, one of the people I let go accused me of “having a screw loose for disconnecting with so many of us.”

When—and I know it’s when, not if—I see this person at my class reunion, it’s an understatement to say that things stand a chance of being awkward. Multiply this times the 30 other people I’ve also unfriended. Times another five for the fervent den mother.

My father recently told me, “I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t go to your reunion. The older you get, the less fun they are anyway.”

Maybe, maybe not. But I do know that I prefer remembering high school on my own terms, not through the lens of self-appointed, self-important den mothers or lost souls or anyone else for that matter. In 2009, I was a little too attached to the past, and I regret it, although I did learn something valuable: living in the present is where it’s at.

I say this, but I don’t consider myself very good at it. The older I get, the more nostalgic I get, and I can over-think the future into oblivion. But the former high school classmates I admire and enjoy hearing about most on social media are the ones who clearly live in the present. They are happy, doing good work, and continue to expand their worlds, even after all these years. They have no expectations of you, even when they discover that you started going by your middle name in the early 90s for professional reasons. My former high school classmates who go with the flow are un-phased by things as trivial as this.

Others want you to be who you used to be, not according to you, but to them.

Will I go to the reunion? I’m still not positive. I’ll get back to you on that.

Douglas Quenqua’s “Remember Me From Yesterday?” in The New York Times
Christopher Sibona’s studies on Facebook unfriending

None of the boys pictured here have ever stalked me. A few of them may have drunk-Facebook-messaged me though. 

We are exposed to the sting of betrayal by other human beings way before we really should be: for example, when two toddlers are peaceably playing and one steals the other’s favorite toy. Or when the third-grade classmate who sat with you at lunch yesterday is now laughing at you from across the playground with a group of students you don’t know.

High school is rife with betrayal, especially that of the boy-girl kind. Case in point: when you see your boyfriend with his arms wrapped around his old girlfriend in front of her locker, staring into her bright blue eyes. You were just on the phone last night and he’d said nothing.

Or the boyfriend who tells you he’s going out of town, but then you hear that he’s holed up at a poker game at a friend’s across town. You show up at the door and there he is.

There are the family members who betray, on all sorts of levels you don’t really understand and can never understand.

There are the betrayals that are perpetrated in the workplace, by both colleagues and bosses, and sometimes—although God knows why—by the people who are under you. The closest I came to having a colleague steal an idea of mine is a producer to whom I pitched a video concept to render an animated train that traveled through all the countries they did business in, to the tune of The O’Jays’ “Love Train.” She shot it down, saying it was preposterous, they didn’t have the budget to film a real train. She ended the conversation before I could correct her.

She left the company—and town—and all of a sudden a major beverage company is using “Love Train” and an animated train. You have to wonder.

I once had a boss—two bosses, as a matter of fact, in the same office at the same institution—who betrayed me. They were notorious throughout the organization for throwing their employees under the bus, and we all watched in fear as people in our office were betrayed, one by one. One day it was my turn. I was assigned a project that was not within my purview—I was a writer, not a traffic manager—and because one of the sheets of paper on which the project was printed was not folded the right way, I was ousted.

Betrayal stings no matter where it comes from, but it stings the hardest when it comes from friends—especially those you thought were good friends.

There’s the friend who drinks too much one night and turns mean. The friend who borrows money from you, who, when you ask for it back, says, “I didn’t borrow any money from you.” The friend who likes to control everything and when you finally call her on it, she wigs out on you and all of a sudden, you’re the bad person.

There’s the friend who sends you a long, scathing email after you’ve informed her that a friend you have in common keeps making unwanted contact with you. She sends you another long, scathing email a week after your mother dies.

The friend who is making unwanted contact is an ex-boyfriend you reunited with on Facebook. He reminds you about the time you caught him with his arms around his old girlfriend; that he followed her to another state after graduation; that she broke up with him; that he called you and said, “I’ll move back if you take me back”; and that my 18-year-old self said, “Hell to the no.”

(I am very proud of my 18-year-old self for that. In honor of her, I’d like to get all Mary Karr circa The Liars’ Club for a sec: Dude. Remember when you asked if I ever thought about you all these years, and I said “yes”? I was trying to be nice—a habit you helped break me of. I hadn’t thought about you at all. Thanks, though, for reminding me what a creep you were back then. Sorry that you’re still a creep.)

The most recent betrayal I’ve witnessed cut real deep.

For the sake of illustration, consider the case of what we’ll call a small, progressive start-up company. When the founder started the company, he asked his wife and three long-time friends to be a part of it.

Turns out that one of those long-time friends was a misogynist and didn’t want to work with a woman. Instead of saying, “I don’t like women,” he unleashed a torrent of old hurts on the founder on his way out the door. Both the business arrangement and their friendship ended.

New candidates were interviewed for various positions throughout the company. A few of them didn’t stick: the one who wanted to be part of a less risky operation; the one who said he had won a major award in his field yet couldn’t perform in that field; the one who already had four part-time jobs but said he’d squeeze you in when he could.

There was the associate who was tapped to be the star of the company, but who didn’t want to be the star. The one who checked his watch every ten minutes. The one who was always “too busy” and kept the rest of the company waiting as he finally condescended to show up for meetings. The one who showed up to work late and drank on the job.

There are the associates who are Zen, the level-headed ones who try to keep everyone, including the founder and his top leadership, grounded, but their efforts are more than off-set by the company’s two latest new hires. One you are not one-hundred-percent sold on, but decide to try anyway. She thinks she’s better than everyone else, and then you know you were right not to be one-hundred-percent sold. The other newbie wants to take over everything and has the temerity to continually challenge the founder of the company.

Both latecomers have been in the organization one hot minute—five months and two months, respectively. Together, they become the driving force behind breaking up the organization. Off company property, they tell the reluctant star what she wants to hear. The one that was “too busy” now all of a sudden has a spark in his eye and all kinds of time.

They call a meeting with the founder. They want a change.

The founder says, “Hey. This is my company. You’re either with me or you’re not.”

Things are quiet for a few weeks then out of the blue the founder receives an email the night before Thanksgiving that says, “We’re out. And we want the company name.”

A great deal of respect was lost and friendships destroyed, including one that went back years. In the aftermath of the company folding, pieces of it were pilfered and made off with in briefcases. The associates who created the schism are trying to build a new company that gloms off of the good reputation of the old company.

After the mutiny, the reluctant star emphatically stated in social media, “I one-hundred-percent believe in karma. If you’re not careful, it will bite you in the butt.”

To which I reply, “The great thing about karma is that it works both ways, boo.”

My friend Kathleen says that karma is best when you can witness it, and that it is possible to ask the universe for that opportunity.

In the case of the start-up, I don’t think I’ll ask to see it, but I know I’ll eventually at least hear something. When betrayal is the centerpiece of what goes down, you always do in one way, shape, or form. I still hear things about certain double-crossers that let me know karma is very much alive and kicking. That’s good enough for me.

In Langston Hughes’ short story “Thank You, M’am,” Mrs. Luella Bates Washington Jones tells Roger, “I have done things, too, which I would not tell you, son—neither tell God, if He didn’t already know.” I betrayed once—somebody I loved. It happened almost twenty years ago and I paid for it dearly. I have since apologized for what I did, and he and I are friends today, which means the world to me. The situation pretty much cured me of messing with another human being’s heart. 

My paternal grandmother’s name was Rose Marie DiNovo and she was an odd woman. She covered her upholstered furniture in clear plastic and was self-taught on the organ, which also had its own plastic cover. She insisted on playing for us within the first fifteen minutes of every visit. I can still see her, her back to us, starting and stopping, starting and stopping. It took her ten minutes to get through a three-minute song.

You would think a Sicilian woman would be a good cook, but Rose was not. She used her coffee grounds twice and boiled vegetables to beyond death. I don’t recall ever eating a single plate of Italian food at her house; our German grandmother was the one known for making great spaghetti.

Rose and my mother barely tolerated each other, and even as a small child I knew that the rift between them was long and deep. One time, while my mom went out with an old high school girlfriend, Rose, along with the girlfriend’s mother, babysat us kids and Rose said something very untoward about my mother in front of us. My brothers seemed oblivious, but I heard her. My ten-year-old self stared her down a little and she changed the subject.

Because my grandfather—his name was Mike—had heart disease, Rose did not cook with salt. To make up for it, she cooked with herbs she lovingly grew in a large garden just off the garage and alongside the fruit trees, which we kids spent a lot of time climbing. Rose grew things other than the standard tomatoes and cucumbers and beans in our garden at home, and I liked going up and down the rows looking at it all.

Although her cooking did not go over well with young children, my grandfather’s beer did. Mike made his own, in a small room with a dirt floor in the cellar. Every time we visited, he greeted us kids with “How ‘bout a shot and a beer?” and later, amidst Rose’s protestations, he’d take us down there and give us some of his homemade brew in tiny juice glasses.

Rose had a mole the size of a pencil eraser on her face. She was dark-skinned. When she started losing her hair, she a made a flat bun out of what she pulled out of her brush, and pinned it to the top of her head to hide her baldness.

She looked beautiful in her wedding picture. Everybody thought I looked like her, although I could never one-hundred-percent see it. One time I went to visit her at the mausoleum and my uncle was there, praying with his eyes closed. He caught his breath when he saw me.

“I thought you were Mom,” he said.

The day before Mike died, I drove from Cleveland to Pittsburgh to see him. He was in and out of consciousness. I sat at the end of his bed with my hand on his leg. At one point he came to; his bright blue eyes focused on me and shone like high-beams. He leaned toward me, arms outstretched.

“I think he thinks you’re Mom,” my father said.

I was well into my thirties and still had all four of my grandparents, which I came to find out was unusual, as most of my friends had only one or two left. I came to believe that it was a great privilege to be so old myself and still have these four eccentric and beautiful people in my life. They were a treasure.

Rose was our first grandparent to die. She hadn’t been feeling well and went into the spare bedroom in the front of the house, the one with the curtains made to look like someone had hand-painted scenes from China on them, to take a nap and she never woke up. Heart attack. Mike said that the moment she died, the anniversary clock on the fireplace mantel stopped. He never wound that clock again.

“This is how it starts,” I kept saying to myself. This is how it starts. Things will never be the same.

Rose was active in her church and made a lot of crafts there that she and the other church ladies sold in bazaars to help raise money for various causes around town. One time she gave me a doll she’d made out of a retired bowling pin; its eyes, nose, and mouth were drawn on with a black marker, and it wore a bonnet and cape made out of stiff gold velveteen.

When my ex and I married, Rose gave us a Jimmy Dean sausage cookbook (which incudes a recipe for sausage fudge) and several free recipe pamphlets that she’d written for from places like Quaker Oats, Snow-Floss Kraut, and the Beaver County Heart Association. She signed each one “To Cindy & Pat. November 14, 1981. Love, Granny.”

She gave me and my brothers eight-by-tens of my parents’ wedding portrait. I don’t know how she ended up with four extra eight-by-tens of our parents’ wedding portrait, but she did. When my youngest brother framed his and hung it in in the foyer of his house, my mother was pissed off to no end. She would have a fit if she knew I’ve scanned mine and put it on Facebook once or twice.

There were lots of people at Rose’s funeral, many of whom stayed afterward for a huge meal in the church basement. I kept thinking “I don’t have my grandmother anymore, just this stupid food” over and over in my head until I burst into tears and ran up the stairs into the sanctuary. This is how it starts. Things will never be the same.

After that the family went to my grandparents’ house and opened some wine. At one point my grandfather grabbed my arm and took me to the cellar, past the toilet in the corner and the room with the dirt floor where he used to make beer, into a large room I’d never been in before lined with metal shelves filled with boxes of Rose’s craft supplies. Mike took me up and down the aisles, showing me boxes of oilcloth, fake greenery, and floral ribbon.

One box was filled with large metal mixing spoons, the kind that cooks in a commercial kitchen might use. Except these were flimsy—their edges were sharp and they didn’t feel good in your hand. Mike reached in and grabbed two or three.

“Here,” he said as if pressing precious stones into my palm, “take these.”

Back upstairs, he walked from room to room with the box of spoons. “Would you like one? Would you like one?” he said to every woman at the house. His eyes were puffy and had the look of someone who can’t quite believe something he has just seen. Pretty soon there were women throughout the house who didn’t know quite what to do with their spoons. Some held them next to their wine glasses, others under their armpits. Later I saw one in the bathroom on the sink, and another sticking out of the corner of the couch.

I cried all the way back to Cleveland. Instead of my grandmother, I had a flower arrangement on the front seat of my car, and the spoons, which jangled every time I hit a bump on the road. I was angry that this was all I had of her anymore; I was scared because a significant part was missing from the only version of my family I’d known all my life. I didn’t even attempt to fix my face before going into the McDonald’s on the Ohio Turnpike. The man in line next to me looked at me with a sorrowful curiosity.

Within a month after Rose’s funeral I enrolled in classes at Cleveland State University, not knowing why exactly. Something was pushing me to it.

“Rose was a late bloomer,” said her obituary, and those closest to her reiterated this. “She was finally happy in her skin. She was coming into her own.”

My dear, strange grandmother and I were not close when she was living, but she has become one of the most influential people in my life since she died.

“I was really happy,” she seems to say. “You be happy too.”

At Cleveland State I finally figured out I wanted a bachelor’s degree in English, not for practical reasons, but for the sheer love of it. Upon graduation I was already a freelance writer.

When Greg died on March 14, 2010, he became another force. He tells me, “Put yourself out there. Don’t be afraid.”

When my mom Jo died in November 2011, it took her a little while but then she started saying: “I didn’t live the life I wanted. You should.”

I feel these three people around me all the time now, especially when I write, take pictures, and play music. There’s also a fourth: my maternal grandmother Dorothy, who loved me like crazy when she was alive, and who wrapped herself around me like a blanket of unconditional acceptance the moment she fled this Earth in 1997. Her atoms encircle me wherever I go.

We are at the point in the semester where Mizz G begins teaching “the writing process” to her English students.

We’ve actually been talking about it on and off all semester, because they’ve been writing and writing, for seven weeks now. Some of them have thrown off the cobwebs and are getting really good.

Part of that is due to the grammar brush-up I also teach in this particular course. But although we’ll keep referring to it, it’s time to let straight-up grammar recede into the background and let writing take over for the next eight weeks, when my students will be aggravating over and driven to near-tears writing the equivalent of four essays.

“Writing is a process,” the textbook and I tell them, “one that takes time and care. And if you take the time and care, it will be worth it in the end.”

To help drive this point, I use the “Whoop That Trick” scene from the 2005 film “Hustle & Flow.” The campus where I teach most often consists largely of African-American, Latino, and LGBT students, but no matter what their race or sexual orientation, they think it’s hilarious that a middle-aged white woman even knows about “Hustle & Flow,” much less says it out loud in class, and they hide their grins behind their hands.

By the time I utter the words “Whoop That Trick,” they can’t stand it anymore and burst out laughing.

All this aside, they quickly understand what I’m trying to tell them when I show them that the “Whoop That Trick” scene perfectly exemplifies the various steps in the writing process—any creative process—from brainstorming to finished piece.

In the film, DJay, a pimp, comes to the realization that he has a knack for writing rap lyrics—rhymes.

“My mode is crackin’,” he says, “[and] I can’t be stopped.” He dreams of one day becoming a rap artist.

These instincts burn inside of him and he begins carrying a notebook around with him everywhere. Every time he gets an idea, he writes it down in that notebook. He uses it so much that it starts to get a little ratty and dog-eared.

“This is some hard shit right here, trying to take what’s in your head, man, and put it into words that fit together like a puzzle,” he tells Nola, one of his girls.

DJay’s notebook signifies the brainstorming phase of the writing process. When something about one of his ideas strikes him, DJay takes it further and roughs out some lines. I liken this to the freewriting phase.

From his freewriting samples, DJay takes a selected few—rhymes he feels are really going somewhere—and finesses them, turning them into full-fledged first drafts with a beginning, middle, and end.

It is one of these first drafts that he shows up with the day Key and Shelby come to his house to do some recording in a homemade studio with McDonald’s drink holders (“poor man’s soundproofing”) stapled to the walls.

DJay wants to get high first (procrastination is part of the writing process, one of my writing professors used to tell us), but Shelby tells him, “No, man, we can toke up later. Let’s hear what you got.”

DJay presents his first draft, reciting the opening lines: “I bet you want to beat that bitch / whoop that bitch / got me actin’ buck and shit / hoes tellin’ me to calm down / but I’m like fuck that shit…”

DJay stops when he sees Key put his head in his hands. “What the fuck’s wrong?” he asks.

Key spurs the revision phase of the writing process.

“It’s just that we want radio play,” he tells DJay. “And you got a song called ‘Beat That Bitch.’ They might hear that and think that’s degrading.”

Shelby offers his input. “But that’s if you’re calling a woman a bitch,” he says. “Most of the bitches I know are guys.”

He turns to DJay. “If you had to say something different other than ‘beat that bitch,’ what would you say?”

DJay flips through his notebook and takes his own first pass at revising.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Stuff like ‘stomp that ho.’”

Key throws his hands in the air. “Who’s gonna play that?”

DJay makes a second revision. “‘Whoop that trick,’ ‘can’t trick’…”

“Wait, wait, wait, go back,” Key interrupts. “’Whoop that trick.’”

Shelby looks at Key. “That’s it,” he says.

Key suggests further revisions, including turning the line into a chant, adding the words “Get ‘im,” and arranging all the words into a rhythmic pattern. DJay chants along with Key—he’s so taken with it that he gets up out of his chair—and Shelby begins to lay down a beat.

“Find it, man, find it,” Key tells him. More revision. Another new draft.

Shelby adds a clap then more and more percussion. Key starts the chant and DJay joins in: “Whoop that trick / get ‘im / whoop that trick / get ‘im…” DJay picks up his notebook, referring to his other lines written there, and the real writing begins.

By the middle of the second verse, he puts the notebook down on the table. He is flowing now. Nola and Shug, who have been banished to the next room, hear that there is something special going on and come to the doorway. Key waves the women in. Everybody is up out of their seats and moving to the beat.

It’s all organic at this point; in this phase of the process, the song is practically writing itself, made possible by all the groundwork that has taken place before it.

When it ends, everyone in the room is breathless, spent.

“OK,” says Shelby. “Let’s go smoke that joint.”

I don’t condone weed smoking among my students, of course. But the metaphor is never lost on them: the ending stands for how they feel when they’re finally done with a college paper or essay, and they know they’ve done the best they can and that it turned out really good. “I don’t know how I did that,” they say. “I don’t know how I got from Point A to B to C.

“But I did it. And it feels good.”

Then they go crash on the couch for a little while, or throw a ball with the kids, or kiss their moms.

Then the process begins all over again the next time they have to write another paper. Like DJay, the more ideas they come up with, the more they rough out and rewrite, the better they get. DJay learns to write hit songs that make the charts; my students learn what it takes to write hit papers that make good grades.

***

Clips of the “Whoop That Trick” scene from the film “Hustle & Flow” don’t last long on YouTube—copyright infringement issues, I’m sure—so we’ll see how long the link I put here lasts. If you ever get a chance to see the movie, still a fresh take on the bildungsroman or “coming of age” story, I highly recommend it. Steve recommended it to me eight or so years ago, and it remains one of my favorites of all time.

I also use Skee-Lo to help teach subjunctive mood. We talk about how funny “I Wish” would sound if Skee-Lo sang it grammatically correctly: “I wish I were little bit taller” instead of “I wish I was…” There is indeed a difference between written English and spoken English, and one thing I try to convey in my classroom is that there are places for them both.

One day last year I was thinking about my grandparents and started missing them so much that I looked up their house on Google Earth.

I felt a certain thrill, a giddy anticipation, as the satellite shifted toward rural southwestern Pennsylvania, about twenty-five miles outside of Pittsburgh, then shot down-down-down. The closer I got to those foothills of the Allegheny Mountains, the ancient trees, the curvy two-lane highways, the white Cape Cod my grandfather built with his own hands, the tighter my stomach knotted—in a good way, the same way it did when I was a kid jammed into the backseat of my parents’ station wagon next to my two oldest brothers, on our way to see both sets of our grandparents, who lived on the same steep and winding country road about a mile and a quarter apart. After two-and-a-half hours in the car with no stops on the Ohio Turnpike, we were so pent up and excited that last mile of the drive in from Cleveland that we compulsively repeated everything our parents said.

Since our maternal grandparents’ house was first on our way in, it was always our first stop.

“Lift your feet!” our father hollered every time we pulled over the sewer pipe across the top of the driveway. It was a big bump to get over with six people in the car (my little brother sat on the crack of the front seat, sandwiched between our parents), and the low-riding vehicle almost always bottomed out over it. Complicating things was the fact that the driveway was at a sharp angle to the curvy, hilly two-lane road our grandparents lived on, where the speed limit was fifty miles an hour.

Our father went at the turn an inch at a time.

“Get off the road, James,” our mother would say between clenched teeth.

“Get off the road, Dad,” we kids would echo.

Our grandmother came out of the house, drying her hands on a dish towel.

“There’s Granny!” said Dad.

“There’s Granny!” we said.

He swung the car up in front of the garage, and the four of us kids flew out of the car before he could fully shift to “park” and ran to our grandmother, then just as spastically lobbed off of her into the backyard, which started at the top of a giant hill that finally leveled out a mile away at the Ohio River. It was a million times larger and wilder than our backyard in suburban Cleveland. It was heaven.

Since Pittsburgh was so close to Cleveland, we drove there at least twice a year, often more. There were times my mother went by herself “because I miss your Granny,” she would say. And I never doubted that, but now I also know she must have made those trips because we all drove her nuts. Pittsburgh was her hometown and her escape hatch.

Consequently, while Cleveland was officially home to my brothers and me, we also did a substantial part of our growing up in Pittsburgh. There are times I consider Pittsburgh more “home” than Milwaukee. I estimate that we kids made a minimum of sixty trips to P-A from birth until about age eighteen, when, one by one, we each went away to college and then moved away from home. Eventually, we were lucky if we visited once every five years.

The last time I was there was on a business trip in 2007. I drove my rental car north from the airport to Rochester, along the Ohio River and down the ridge from where my grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins on both sides lived, and down the boulevard from the mausoleum where my grandparents on both sides are now interred. As soon as my tires hit the grated steel bridge over the river and I saw the train yards and the old steel mills and the old Kaufmann’s Department Store, my heart was about pulled out of my chest, drawn like a magnet to that Cape Cod house just up the hill.

I wanted to go up and see the old house, but couldn’t; my client had booked me to fly in and out of Pittsburgh the same day and, as close as I was, I didn’t have the time. On the plane on the way home, I thought about my grandparents’ house. The back porch with the glider, which was later replaced with a swing. Our grandmother’s cooking. Her pots and pans. Our grandfather’s workbench in the basement. The way our grandmother decorated their house. (She had great taste.) The sound of cars and trucks whizzing past the house, day and night.

I think about the last time I saw my grandmother, at the bottom of their driveway, a month before I was due to move to Milwaukee. It was 1997.

“I feel like I’m never going see you again,” said my grandmother.

“Of course you will, Gran,” I said. “Don’t say that.”

She ended up being right. I moved to Milwaukee in February. That fall I was planning a visit to Pittsburgh when she was getting ready for a doctor appointment—she hadn’t been feeling well—and slumped to the floor up against the bathroom door. It took paramedics forever to get to her and by the time they did, she was dead. Heart attack.

The only other time I’ve been to Pittsburgh in the 21^st century was in 2001 to visit my grandfather. I had brought the man I was in a relationship with at the time, and things had not been going well between us at all. In retrospect I hate that he was in this house with my precious grandfather and me, acting all stiff and closed-off. It feels like sacrilege. My grandfather, who throughout his marriage to my grandmother was demanding and distant, sat on his couch and cried, he missed her so much.

He died in December 2003, of cancer. I did not find out until the day before his funeral, and it was too late to make travel arrangements. My cousin lived in the house for a while, I’m told, then the family sold it in 2005. And that’s it. It’s someone else’s house now. I can’t ever go back.

The memory of this house fills my being. It is as much in the tips of my fingers and my broken pinky toe as it is in my mind and in my dreams and in everything that is good about me. I can still see it, smell it and hear and feel the people who used to live and visit there. The way it felt to run down the hill as fast as we could. The feel of the vines that hung from the trees in the woods at the bottom of our grandparents’ yard, and the hollow sound of the path that led down to the Wards’ house. The old doghouse. The taste of wild berries that grew in the field next door, before a split-level was built there and someone with a monster truck moved in. The field on the other side where my uncle took us on rides in an old sun-bleached Ford, where the Wards later built their new house.

They are all dead now: my grandmother, my grandfather, my mother, and her oldest brother. Only my mama’s baby brother survives.

One person out of a vibrant family of five that I loved so very much.

And still do.

Two places we Clevelanders can never go to again:

A brilliant little film. (Although I’m not wild about the full-length movie trailer at the end. Fast-forward to 09:00 for final thoughts and credits.)

My love affair with The Flats predates the chronology of this video. It makes no mention of Pirates Cove, where I saw my first two music videos, the Clash hanging out after a show, and several brawls. The Cove also had the best sandwiches. 

The day after Christmas, John and I went out for a long walk in twenty-degree weather that culminated in stopping at our favorite German tavern for some beer and popcorn. We took seats at our favorite table and continued the conversation we’d been having while walking, which was really a long string of several short, separate conversations.

“Did you see this thread?” said John, handing me his cell phone and reading glasses.

It was open to a friend’s status update on Facebook, made on December 25: “Most horrible Xmas day ever,” it read.

John told me I should read the thirty or so comments that followed when I got a chance, which I did the next morning. They followed two tracks: “Spend your Christmas with us next time” and “Mine wasn’t so good either.”

Our friend’s dilemma got me thinking about my Christmases past, some that were brilliant, some that were dismal.

The Christmas I got my first two-wheel bike, a chrome and royal blue number with no bar in the middle, stands out as one of the good ones. So does the one when I got my chemistry set. My mother had a holy fit as I rode my new bike around and around our Early American dining room table, occasionally bashing into the backs of the chairs.

What I remember about the Christmas I spent in Florida are fake Santas in the sand, fake evergreen wreaths on the doors of manufactured homes, and palm trees with Christmas lights. The people I stayed with, relatives who were impossible to please, gave me a pastel pink sweatshirt with a built-in shirt collar and a knockoff of a George Foreman grill that weighed two tons. When it came time to leave, I didn’t have room in my luggage for the two-ton grill.

“I have to leave it behind,” I told the difficult relatives. They pitched a holy fit. I left the pink sweatshirt on the bed.

One of the best Christmases I’ve ever had was with John, when we packed two sleds, two sets of cross-country skis, our Christmas presents and our cat into his car and drove five hours to northern Wisconsin to a Finnish farm. We stayed in a cabin along a river with a fireplace and no TV, and took breakfast and dinner in the farmhouse and long breaks in a hot sauna. We skied, we hiked, we sledded, we read, we rolled around in the snow in our bathing suits after the sauna. Our cat played with a paper ribbon that had come off a present and took long naps in a window in the winter sun.

This year was also good. Still recuperating from our respective semesters, John and I decided to stay in Milwaukee and have our own Christmas. I did most of my shopping online at the last minute and wanted nothing to do with the Christmas cards; John signed my name and mailed them all. We did no wrapping. Our Christmas tree was the inflatable one we got at the secondhand shop last year.

Christmas morning we put all of our Amazon boxes and FedEx envelopes in a pile on the living room floor. We had no idea whose packages were whose, and we laughed when we got them mixed up. Our cats (we have two now) pawed at bubble wrap and jumped in and out of empty boxes.

John unwrapped two large snifters wrapped in brown paper bags and poured us some Drambuie, a gift from me to him. We watched “Uncle Buck” and “The Sopranos” and the Rolling Stones’ “Sweet Summer Fun: Hyde Park Live,” filmed in London this past summer. I cooked a small ham and sweet potatoes and Brussels sprouts.

It eschewed all kinds of tradition. And it was beautiful. With each passing Christmas, I grow less tolerant of the hype. It really bothers me that Christmas was only two weeks ago, but it feels like two years. That the day after Christmas the carols stop and the TV sets scream “Markdowns!” I can tell by the way the horns are honking on our busy city street that the good cheer has stopped. In the past week we have received three tax forms. When it’s over, it’s over.

You wouldn’t expect the Christmas that occurs a month and a half after your mother dies to be a good one, but that one was actually pretty nice.

The most heartbreaking Christmas I ever had was the year I left a bad relationship. It was 2002, and I was also estranged from members of my family because of an incident that occurred the Christmas of 2001 that I had the temerity to speak out against. It caused a very deep rift that was still going on a year later and as a result, I had nowhere to go for Christmas.

My brother invited me to stay with him at his condo in Ohio. Some friends in Wisconsin invited me to Christmas Eve dinner with them. I decided to go out with my friends then spend Christmas Day driving to Ohio.

Christmas Eve dinner was at a Chinese restaurant with dark paneled walls and red velvet drapes. It was the scene from “A Christmas Story” but with better furniture. And it was crowded. I liked that my friends had turned this into a tradition for their family. Their adolescent son regarded me tentatively, as if I were stealing some of the attention he’d normally get.

Despite being thankful for someplace to go that evening, I was also feeling desperately lonely. My brother would be at my parents’ when I got to Ohio, so he would leave the key under the mat. I had received an email saying that while it would be OK if I came for dinner, it would be better if I just came for dessert.

All right, I wrote back, see you at seven.

Christmas Day I received a message saying that I was no longer invited for dessert.

I let myself into my brother’s condo, unpacked my things in the back bedroom, and opened a bottle of wine I’d brought in my suitcase.

As bad as it felt to be alone Christmas Day, the eight hours it took to drive from Milwaukee to Ohio were sparked by unexpected flashes of love and light: four phone calls from six friends who were calling to see where I was and how I was doing. Who knew I was driving to somewhere and nowhere at the same time, that I wasn’t invited to Christmas and why, and that just five months earlier I had left an abusive man.

• One of the calls was from the friends who’d taken me to the Chinese restaurant.

• One was from a friend who was looking forward to spending New Year’s Eve with me.

• One was from a very handsome man in Wisconsin I’d had a few dates with.

          • One was from Jan and Greg, two loves of my life.

They told me they couldn’t wait to see me, that they loved me, and to be careful driving, they’d see me soon.

Our friend’s December 25th Facebook post struck a nerve. “I can commiserate” was the general tenor among the comments. “Friends always love you,” wrote one person, with a little heart at the end of the sentence.

Another person acknowledged that Christmas is a difficult time of the year.

However, he added, “If you don’t ask too much from it, sometimes it surprises you with more than you requested.”

If Christmas is bad for you, I hope you make the most of the next ten months before it all drums up again. I will be there for you next December if you need me.

For those of you for whom Christmas is good, I bet you are also the sort whose goodwill isn’t contained within two months of hype. May you be blessed for that.

Don’t player-hate, but for Christmas I asked for – and received – three CDs of old record albums I owned in my late teens and early twenties: Close to You by The Carpenters, Rumours by Fleetwood Mac, and Glass Houses by Billy Joel.

The first reminds me of high school, when I listened to Close to You over and over, fascinated with Karen Carpenter’s vocal range. Singing along with her was the first time I realized I might have some kind of voice.

Rumours was a colossal hit when I was in college a few years later. It was one of the albums I played as I, an art minor, drew and painted by the back screen door of the house I rented south of campus with three girlfriends.

Glass Houses reminds me of my first car, a 1978 glacial blue Pontiac Lemans with no radio. For a year I drove around with nothing but the sound of tires on pavement and my own thoughts in my ears. The following year I bought a Craig cassette player and a pair of Jensen speakers. After they were installed, my brother recorded several of his favorite record albums on a bunch of blank tapes and gave them to me for Christmas. He’d labeled each of the dozen or so tapes by hand on the white cards that lined the plastic cases: The Royal Scam by Steely Dan; Jazz by Queen; A Trick of the Tail by Genesis. Glass Houses was another. I bought a brown vinyl carrying case from Peaches to keep them in. I still have them all.

The other day I imported my three new CDs into iTunes on my Mac, something that at age 18 I couldn’t conceive of someday being able to do. I don’t know how we start out in this world so dependent and timid and how years later we realize that we can now find our way around the world without anyone’s help. I don’t know how I evolved to this point technology-wise, but here I am.

I  created a new playlist list on my iPod, named it “Old Record Albums,” and uploaded the tracks. I pulled on my boots, zipped up my hi-tech ski jacket, hit “Shuffle,”and left for a long walk along Lake Michigan in fifteen-degree weather.

I walked. And I listened. A few of the songs made me wince and others made me laugh out loud for joy.

And I suddenly wished that my mother had had an iPod with the songs of her late teens and early twenties: The Swingle Sisters; Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass; Andy Williams; Sam Cooke. And I wished that she had listened to it while taking long walks along a winter lake, her hands shoved deep in her pockets, her heart as light as magic.