Robin Graham

I’ve been living in Milwaukee going on 18 years now, and every time I say it—or write it—I can hardly believe it’s been that long.

It was March 1997, and I was chasing “a relationship that is no longer,” as I tell people today. The only two folks I knew when I arrived in Milwaukee were the guy and a transcriptionist I worked with. I’d arrived in a one-way rental car stuffed with my laptop, a sleeping bag, French press, and my pet parakeet, along with everything I needed for the week it would take for the moving van to get there with the rest of my belongings.

Last week I watched the 1946 film “It’s a Wonderful Life” on TV with John, one of his favorites at this time of year. The first time I saw the movie I thought it sappy, but this year it spoke to me on a number of levels, and not just because Wisconsin was a blue state when I moved here and now we have a Republican governor and it’s purple. In one scene in his bank office, when Violet arrives to close her savings account and hightail it out of Bedford Falls, George Bailey tells her, “It takes a lot of character to leave your home town and start all over again.”

Character was far from what I had when I decided to leave Cleveland. My first marriage had fallen apart, and for the first time in my life it occurred to me that I could live anywhere I wanted.

A college roommate living in Atlanta said, “You’d like it here.”

I thought Chicago would be a good place to start over too. In terms of the relationship, it was a lot closer to Milwaukee than Cleveland, but still far enough away for me to be my own person.

“I don’t have anything keeping me here anymore,” I remember telling my mother on the back porch of my parents’ house, and that’s where the lack of character comes in. She blinked hard when I said it, and of course I knew right away that I had cut to the bone. I didn’t catch myself and I didn’t apologize—a part of me wanted to get her back for all the mean things she’d said to me over the years—but it was one of the least sensitive things I’ve ever said to another person, and I wish I hadn’t done it.

Here’s where else the lack of character comes in: I wasn’t brave enough to go to Atlanta or Chicago. I moved straight to Milwaukee, to the exact suburb where the new guy lived.

Five years later, after a cursed and torrid relationship that provided enough material for three and a half books, we split up, and I was alone.

Which was where I should have been in the first place.

I moved into a brand-new apartment the next town over and spent the first six months of my newfound independence sputtering out of control, dating several guys in a row and at one point two at once, thinking I might need to start a new career to get away from the old guy, who was also a freelance writer.

I landed a good job in a dysfunctional office at a large university, paid off debt, got a master’s degree, and met a man who didn’t want me to drop everything for him and become resentful five years later. I learned to rock climb. Took voice lessons. Learned to ride a motorcycle. Traveled to Europe, Puerto Rico, Canada, and almost all 50 states.

I learned to grieve the deaths of people I loved. Married a really good guy. Finally became a cat owner. Apologized to my ex-husband. Lived in the wealthiest county in Wisconsin; in a top-floor apartment with a view of Lake Michigan; in a Polish flat on the South Side. Became a better friend. Became a working musician. Got a really nice camera. Reminisced my childhood. Discovered my life’s work. Finally accepted myself.

And I realized: I thought I’d moved to Milwaukee to pursue the relationship with the guy. What I was really pursuing was a relationship with myself.

For that reason, I will always be grateful to the city where I’ve lived for the past 18 years. Even though I’m not from Milwaukee originally, no matter where I might go next, I will always consider it the place where I finally grew up and found my true self.

I realize that these things could’ve happened in Atlanta or Chicago or someplace else that I couldn’t have even conceived of 18 years ago. Could they have happened in Cleveland? Maybe, but I tend to think not. You know how it is when you fall back into old patterns with the same places and the same people. Sometimes, as Sheryl Crow says, “a change [will] do you good.”

So thank you, Milwaukee.

You took me in at a time in my life when I didn’t know who I was and what I liked and what I wanted to do. You gave me the time and space to find my way in a strange new place. You gave me the courage to make mistakes and learn new things and become who I was meant to be all along.

You gave me your arts scene, your music scene, your skyline, your neighborhoods, your culture, your people. I find you just as exciting today as I did 18 years ago.

I love you, Milwaukee. I always will.

Last month I went to Cleveland to visit my family and a few friends for the first time in a year.

I stayed at my dad’s house, my first time there since my mother died three years ago.

“We’re going to a Slovakian festival on Saturday,” he told me on my way in, “and an Italian festival on Sunday. I got you tickets.”

My first night in Ohio I stayed with Jan in her new house, with its view of Lake Erie. She’d sold the home she’d lived in for 36 years. She’d raised her two children in that house; it’s where she and Greg lived together as husband and wife; it’s where she kept his ashes after he died. Between all the parties in our younger years and all the times I stayed there when I came to town, while I may not have known every square inch, I knew many of them.

The morning I left Jan’s, we went to the lake. I almost didn’t go – I was antsy to get to the next place, an almost constant kind of pressure when you’re visiting home. But I did, and it was a thrill. Lake Erie is every bit a part of me as Lake Michigan.

In two days’ time, I saw so much of the city I love, from its East side to its West side, from the far South end to downtown. I also saw my father’s twin brother, whom I hadn’t seen in three years. Our time spent together was filled with good conversation, good food, good drink.

What I loved most about the trip was all the new things I learned.

For example:

• Other than adoring my paternal grandfather Mike, who was Rusyn, I never really felt a connection to my Slovakian heritage until attending the Carpatho-Rusyn Vatra. Watching the performers there, I was so overcome, I started crying behind the lens of my camera.
• “Vatra” is Slovakian for “bonfire,” which is the centerpiece of the festival. Dancers move around it and jump over it.
• “Halupki” is Slovakian for “cabbage roll.” Cabbage and noodles are “haluski.” “Perogi” is “pirohy.” Slovakian cucumber salad is delicious.
• Golden Pheasant (Czech) and Lomza (Polish) beers are also delicious.
• Accomplished Slovakian singer Hanka Servická is my father and uncle’s second cousin. They stayed with her two weeks ago on a trip to Slovakia.

I already knew that this is what I looked like when I was six months old:

I learned that this is what my mama looked like when I was six months old.

When Dad and I visited Mom at the mausoleum, he explained his reasoning behind including her maiden name on the front of the crypt.

“She is every bit that name as you are your maiden name,” he told me. “I wanted her to have that part of her identity.”

Putting aside the fact that in our culture most if not all women’s names come from either their fathers or their husbands, I consider this beautifully feminist thinking on my father’s part.

I learned that my Sicilian great-grandmother was married three times. Her full name was Augustina Badamo DiNovo Salvatore; everyone called her Christina. I have a vivid memory of being in her house when I was a little girl. She was making sauce and stomping around the kitchen and talking loudly in Sicilian, and I was both fascinated and scared shitless. I found out that this memory that’s lived in my head all these years took place in her house on the top of Phillips Street in Baden, Pennsylvania.

I learned that Cleveland has installed a giant chandelier in its theater district, called Playhouse Square, located at East 9^th Street and Euclid Avenue.

There’ve been times in the past when I visited Cleveland that the city seemed downtrodden. On this trip, all that had gone away. Cleveland has been power-washed. It’s bright, vibrant. Ready to go.

Part of this may be attributable to LeBron James’ return to the Cleveland Cavaliers. At the “Taste of Little Italy” event we went to the day after the Vatra, I saw a guy in a T-shirt that read “Cleveland is the City” and I immediately wanted it. I later found out that LeBron used those words when he announced he was coming back.

While in Cleveland, I learned from my uncle that a “Dopp kit” is another name for a shaving kit. Wikipedia defines it as: “a small toilet bag, made of leather, vinyl, or cloth, that is used for storing men’s grooming tools for travel. The name derives from early 20th century leather craftsman Charles Doppelt, a German immigrant to the United States, who invented his toiletry case in 1919.”

I learned that a beloved family member had come out of the closet.

Your papa just told me,

I texted.

I love you very much.

I learned that Jan’s things look great in her new house.

The older I get, the more people I love who die, the longer I am away from my family, the more I long for my Ohio roots. No matter where I live in the world, Cleveland will always be the city for me. I don’t yet know how to rectify these emotions I have about feeling separate from the place and people I love. About not being able to hop in my car today and go across town to watch the Browns game with my brothers.

But it pulls at my heart a lot lately.

Photo credit, T-shirt: homage.com

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.