Now, 235 years later, looks like an American Theocracy is the Republican Right’s cure for what ails the country. I have to agree that executions are far cheaper than imprisonment.

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘Press On’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

Or, as Woody Allen said, more succinctly:

Eighty percent of success is showing up.

 Several months, now, I’ve been in a long dry spell — kept up only with things that demanded it: grading student work, laundry, refill the larder — tasks which, when neglected, cause me deep financial and/or physical inconvenience. Can you say: Unemployed w/o insurance — Stinky, in extremis — and hungry?

Dunno where this is going, but when Tom Selleck (of all people) rolled out that Cooledge quote in his recent Tavis Smiley interview, I was gob-smacked. It is nothing I haven’t heard since I was a pup — nothing I haven’t said to at least a thousand of my students — nothing new, at all.

Fact is, I haven’t written much since I realized I can never compose poetry that is as moving and brilliant as W.S. Merwyn; what I do write, I don’t publish out of fear of rejection. This results in: why write? The answer to that is, I write because I have to — that thing that ferments, pushes me, wants to express  [you know what I mean if you are a writer] will not allow me to “not write.”

My choice then is to show up, for my own life. Think I’ll take Woody’s advice.

     I do like lists, though. I like making them, often move items from high on the list to lower down – scratch  off a task, errand, or person, sometimes with remorse.  I’ll tell you more about that last bit.

     A task needn’t be urgent to make that list. It simply wants doing and when I write it down, that’s a commitment — me promising myself that I’ll do it — and I know it will hang over my head. To get scratched off, the deed must be satisfactorily finished. Over with. Kaput. Errands, on the other hand, are not concrete. They’re just reminders: grocery store, bakery, cleaners. Go by the bank.

     There are lists, then there are LISTS. My Christmas card LIST is legendary. When a person has made it to my list, all that needs to happen is: I met them more than once and still like them; late November arrives and I still laugh at what they have to say and have their home mailing address — businesses or organizations have no place on my Christmas card list — people only.  Pretty much, if you’ve ever made it to my Christmas card list and a December comes you don’t receive one, find out where to send flowers: I will have died.

     Then, there’s the Never-Again- Visit-This-Restaurant LIST: once on, the designation is permanent. My favorite burger joint recently made this one: Johnny’s. After 10 months’ successful weight watching, I treated myself to Onion Rings and a CaesarBurger at Johnny’s – the original. Minutes later, in the car, I felt an unpleasant sensation in my mouth: lard-coated teeth. Eewww! Before turning onto the street, an MSG-reaction started and lasted 45-minutes.  Hard to make this list, but it, too, is permanent.

     How do people earn a spot on my LIST? This one is the hardest of all.  I like people. Talk to strangers; invite them home with me; give them advice; swap contact information with strangers, yes, I do.  Don’t care (much) what they look like (OK, I’m slightly superficial. I’ll give you that.) But for a person to make the Never Again In a Hundred Years LIST, they only need to prove themselves cruel and toxic. (You know who they are.) People who suck the oxygen out of a room, who show little true regard for another’s tastes, politics, or preferences (in foods, drapery fabrics, wines, or sexual partners), and expect the rest of us to play well with others (meaning: bend to their will.)

     Since you might be a stranger, I’ll give you some free advice: If you have people in your life whom you honestly, deep-down-in-your-heart know are detrimental to your quality of life, put them on YOUR list. Like olives in a bottle, the first one is hardest. Unlike olives, though, you won’t miss ‘em.

Warts and all, her characters weave their flaws into plots and sub-plots fraught with surprise. At times, I noticed I was holding my breath and glad I wasn’t out on that limb.

It is so easy to imagine THE HATING GAME as a film or made-for-TV movie; it would definitely be a “Girls night out” film, but guys would enjoy seeing women as they/we really can be.

Loved it and can’t wait for the next one. One day soon, we are all going to be able to say, “I knew Talli Roland when … “  She’s that good. 

Download at Amazon.com or order a print edition.

<a href=”http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5201074-girl-fren”>View all my reviews

</a>src=”http://tinyurl.com/474p6lp” /></a><a href=”http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8246804-the-hating-game”>The Hating Game</a> by <a href=”http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4021730.Talli_Roland”>Talli Roland</a><br/>
My rating: <a href=”http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/157727129″>4 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />

I define it as “a private, personal list of things I want to do [read: have, accomplish, see, taste, own, etc ].  Online, others define it:

• a list of things to do before you die. Comes from the term “kick the bucket.” -Urban Dictionary
• Bunny McNipples [I didn't make that up.] posted, “Bucket list” is a list you make with friends of things you always say your [sic] going to do and don’t. Not before you die…just for fun!” With a name like that, my guess is her/his list involves pouring booze directly into the stomach via a bong.  Worse definitions are available, but — not for now.
• CBS News reported, “N. H. Centenarian Dies After Earning Degree – Teacher, 100, Checked Final Item off Her “Bucket List” a Day Before Dying.” http://tinyurl.com/yefm373  [Note: in the early 20th century, a 2-year degree from a Normal School was the required education for teachers.]
• Squidoo suggests, “… maybe you’ve even avoided doing what really matters to you because you didn’t want to admit to everyone that you’ve got a hole in your blessed bucket. On the other hand, maybe you’ve just convinced yourself that, by some miracle afforded by the fountain of youth, you’ll never have gray hair or lose it, or ever have to “kick the bucket”.”  Ouch! Ya sayin’ we’re not invincible?

(India’s going to smack me for starting with this, but, aw, Hell –) I’m the kind of person who is: given to soul-searching; a chronic malcontent; a list maker. I make grocery lists, to-do lists, mailing lists, lists of addresses — I like lists. Actually, what I like is the little sense of there! Did that! which comes from marking through a listed item.

What do you suppose tells us it is time for a bucket list?  Do you have one? While waiting for your feedback, I’ll go first and share the top two things on my list:

1. Find my old friend John Webster. He is the one old friend I still yearn to see; he’s the only person who got me, as a young woman. He didn’t mind my theatricality,  that I ‘made things up’, laughed at my constant hyperbole. John was real, an artist, a person who didn’t hold back or lie; he wanted only my friendship. I loved him in a way I can’t describe and want him in my life.
2. Purchase a specific suit. Caveat: not larger than size 12.

… more to come …  I look forward to seeing your list. If you don’t have one, start now. You’re never too young or too old to know what is truly important to you and set about making it happen.

“Dear Mother:                                                                                     May 1999

              I can’t call you Mom any more, because the word implies an intimacy we didn’t have.  I wrote one of these to Daddy—it’s around here some place—and it brought me, to use a tired word of the day, closure.  (Cold word, that.)  It brought me to my senses.  Writing that one last letter to Daddy put him just where he belonged all the while: in his place, in perspective, out of my way and my mind. 

                  I’d like to do the same for you.  For myself. 

        This letter is not going to be about YOU.  That’s what the whole fucking burden was about:  YOU.  I wore your disappointment inside me like a flak jacket, like a full metal jacket, like a strait-jacket:  ME never good enough. Our relationship was always about YOU. 

                  Before I go on and leave you completely behind, let’s talk about me.  Yes, I was big and awkward—in the same delightful way colts and Great Danes are–in the ways my Granddaughters are.  They are tall, leggy, long-torsoed, graceful, wonderfully-made children.  They are like my grandsons in all of these spectacular ways.  I could never see myself until I’d gained some distance and saw the artifacts of my life:  my children, my grandchildren.  Fully being themselves.  One way or another, fully me.

                Maybe it is like when you looked at me, maybe you saw yourself: pregnant at 18, married at the point of a shotgun to a man who was made to marry you, but would not live with you.  Did you see yourself—baby boy farmed out to some family member—with another guy in the only intimacy you knew—legs in the air in the back seat of his car, only to become pregnant again?  When you looked into my oval, slightly cross-eyed face, did you see your failures—your flaws—your moral deficiencies—and find a place to place the blame?

              You can see, can’t you, that my life, my value, my being is not about you?

              Yes, I’m different.  I’m not whatever it is you idealized.  I don’t want to be that—although I bought into your psychopathology for a long while—hating myself because I wasn’t whatever you wanted—because I wasn’t the template you laid over me, then found me lacking—it was easier to cave in, to agree that I like the mythical her more than the actual me.

             How do you know that I’m not the mythical “SHE”?  You don’t know me. What makes me laugh? My favorite color?  Was I afraid of the dark?  Did I sing myself to sleep, as a child?  Rock myself?  Did I suck my thumb?  Can I wear wool?  Am I allergic to chocolate, or feathers?  Do I like to read?  When I was late in learning to read, was it because I was dumb and “stubborn as an ox”, or, as I discovered when I was 35, was it the fixation disparity that prevents my eyes from focusing together, that caused the problem?  Am I creative?   Do I like to paint, to write, to sew?  Are my chocolate-drop eyes too much like my father’s?  When you looked into them, did he look back?

        The deep cut on my hand while washing glasses when I was 12–did it leave a scar?  Did all those nights spent on oak pews, the slow fan blades spinning up in the top of the sanctuary peak, did they bear fruit?  Did I come to Jesus?  Did Jesus come to me?

        Do I still have freckles?  Did I learn to swim?  Can I speak a foreign language and balance my checkbook?  Do I have memories worth thinking about, or do they make me flinch?  Do I have good taste?  Could you have had something of my father by loving me?  Or, maybe, something more of yourself?

           Sorry; you made your decisions uninformed.  Before all the players were even here, you had decided Butchie was your blue-eyed boy, meant everything to you.  You decided that Gary and I were excess baggage.   Now that all of the men you threw open your legs for have come and gone, as it were; now that all of the men at whose jokes you threw back your auburn head and heartily laughed have had the last laugh and are gone;  now that your cleverness, your tight skin and firm body, your self-assuredness are long gone, might you like to revisit those decisions?   Now that your beloved only child came to your aide when your 4th or 5th (?) husband died, hoodwinked you into signing over your house, your car, your bank account and moved his neo-Nazi wife and her unstable children into the home you spent your life earning—now that he forbids contact with anyone who might incite you to reclaiming your life—now that you are sagging, colorless and old—what do you think now?  You see, Mother, we need all the love we can get in this life.  This surely must be a sad realization for a woman who repeated behaviors, expecting a different (read: better) outcome each time.

            I won’t get over having you as a Mother, but I need to move on.  Spending my life sorting out yours isn’t what I want to do.  That would mean that my life was an extension of yours, just as you thought. It isn’t.

                   From this  point forward, my life is all about, ta da, ME . 

              No, I did not suck my thumb. I did learn to comfort myself with food, which eventually I unlearned. At night, I put my thin little foot on the pleasant cool of the iron bedstead and, setting a rhythm, pushed ever so gently until I rocked myself to sleep. I did that every night.

             My earliest memory is a happy one: I am a baby sitting upright in a flannel-baby-blanket-lined cardboard box, right in the middle of things.  

             I remember being carried on Granddad’s shoulder through a snowstorm the winter after my first birthday; we were catching the bus to California up at Raymond Graham’s drug store where the Greyhound Bus Line stopped. 

             I remember my fourth birthday.  A watermelon chilling in a #3 washtub full of ice blocks and water. I cried for a cake with my name on it—where did that notion come from—Uncle Junior pulled his pocketknife out and carved my name and Happy Birthday into the melon’s slick green skin.

              I loved running.  Running until I almost didn’t need to touch the ground, making great, long strides so I was carried swiftly forward, the way a rabbit runs cross a field — more flying than touching.

              For years—when we lived in Wellston—I was 8, 9, 10, 11 or 12—hundred of times, I had a recurring dream that a German Police Dog was snarling, throwing slobbers, snapping—and I could fly just high enough that he couldn’t reach me if I pulled my legs up against my belly in a tight ball.  Then he would catch the ties of my dress and try to pull me down.  It took all my strength and will to urge myself higher and higher, just out of reach so he couldn’t kill me.  Then the dream would be over.  I slept, exhausted, night after night.

             I loved singing and talking.  Loved listening to family stories around Grandma’s supper table where I learned telling stories and tales.

            I still do. I take no pleasure telling this one.

            My children are wonderful—not only the one you took time to know—but each of them.  Mitch is the constant older brother, taking care of everyone—a good son and father and husband.  Doug is a gentler spirit, but with plenty of backbone.  A patient father and long-suffering husband, he writes music to ease his soul, loves poetry.   He is careful with detail.  However, he’s an awful packrat.  Christopher loves to organize and sell:  loves talking people into doing what he wants them to do.  He, too, is a good father and is good to his father.  He wants what I’ve always wanted:  cash in the bank, blue skies, chicken on Sunday, and someone worthwhile to share life with.   India is complex—and fragile—and for all the doubt I had about her marrying Jason, he does ask  a lot of her. Who knows, maybe he isn’t a worthless bastard.  She is loyal, as are they all, devoted, affectionate.   She is everything to me that I longed to be to you.

         Nevertheless, healthy people seek healthy environments; meaning: places they are safe and will grow.  I am not safe with you and your only child; I’m sorry for the choices you’ve made; but it’s still goodbye.  Goodbye to what never was.  I don’t need or want anything you have.  I’m sorry your life hasn’t been better.  It’s unfortunate you didn’t let it.

         It turns out, then, that love is a decision and I decide to give my love to the people who inhabit my days—my family, the poets and other writers whom I’ve come to love and who have insisted I give my best.

         Equally, happiness is a decision—and I decide to be happy with the funny-looking, too tall, funny-boned, smart, generous, compassionate person I am.  I decide to be happy with the man of my youthful days, David—deciding that his flaws, if he has any, are his concern.  Not mine.  He snores.  That comforting night music of long marriage helps me find my directions in the dark.

         In putting you aside, I wish you well.  My benediction asks that you receive a greater mercy because you have greater need, that God–if there is one–will shield you from what you have missed so your final years will not be years of regret.  I pray something will protect you from your beloved son and give you peace.  Moreover, that I will forget that I was never what you had in mind.  Until we are in eternity, when we see whatever eternity turns out to be, 

Good-bye.

           Your once and future daughter,

 Kate”

A few updates:

• Mother died in 2005. She was buried in an undisclosed location.
• Her only child, Raymond Lester Qualls, Jr., died 2010, friendless.
• Jason did prove a worthless bastard. India kicked him to the curb and has since married a man who adores and deserves her. Bravo
• Chris has remarried. He & the woman of his dreams have given us FOUR more tall, delightful grandchildren (see previous description). Luscious.
• I’ve grieved NO MORE for either my father or mother.
• Life is good!

             Junior said “No.”

            Without a word of explanation, several months later Sharlene married the red-haired guy who drove the Tulsa-to-Oklahoma City Greyhound bus line and moved away. Uncle Junior took a job at  Brache’s Candy Factory in the city, where his eldest sister worked in a Defense Plant and they lived in her basement apartment for the balance of World War II.

            He came home on the bus every-other weekend.  After supper those Friday nights, none of us kids went out to play.  We knew the grown-ups would talk and laugh, tell stories, and someone would have a letter with real news of the war; Junior would describe the picture shows he’d seen in the city, talk about work, then out would come the candy—bags and bags of candy—from the corner of his brown, Alligator-embossed cardboard suitcase in the front bedroom.  Like dogs slinking around a fish-fry, we fidgeted as Grandad read The Daily Oklahoman and grownups talked.  My youngest aunt and uncles, almost kids like me, might get up a game of “I Spy” or “Poison.”  Sometime later Uncle Junior would slip outside for a smoke then dodge into the bedroom on his way back in; the rustle of cellophane and soon we kids were lost in the bliss of chewey strawberry Kewpie doll-shaped candy, chocolate Scottie dogs and vanilla rabbits. Wise enough to distract us first, he would quietly slip the special candy brought just for his momma—chocolate covered peanut clusters.

            Now grown, those chocolate covered peanut clusters still carry a meaning for me firmly tied to those moments when we were all together, beneath my grandfather’s roof, in the morning of life.

I do garden a wee bit, though, on the patio. In pots. Twice this summer, I’ve emerged from my air-conditioned cocoon to find my pot-full of split-leaf Parsley reduced to a few hundred bare, green stems.  WTF?

  Stealth and luck solved the mystery this morning: Ah-Ha (see picture). One fat & happy cutworm wriggling around the pot’s rim, his friend heading for the exit.  A close-up through my Leica lens, however, had me firmly in a delimna: these are Childrens’ Storybook Worms, pretty and green, funny, loveable. We snuggled at bedtimes to read Eric Carle’s The Hungry Caterpillar, and, a few years later, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, illustrated with lovely, color drawings featuring these wiggley, giggley, adorable CUTWORMS!!

If an All Points Bulletin goes out to law enforcement of the dual-murder of both Hungry and Very Hungry by person or persons unknown, I’m hoping they won’t look for a cute grandmother with a flyswatter.

             I’d hear the murmurs rise and fall. The mixed cadence of voices around the kitchen table—our favored gathering place. A woman’s low alto would begin. A quiet baritone might interrupt; provide the year or the name. On it would go. Until I lost my way and slept.

              Soon, though, the leaving day came. Grownups hugging—that odd sight I never grasped—hugging and crying. Uncles, unnerved by tears, would quickly remind “the girls” of last night’s laugh-till-you-cry-and-begged-him-to-stop story and again laughter. Moist-eyed laughter. Long back-patting embraces. More tears.

               Today I understand. We must love until it hurts. We must laugh over shared stories until we cry, watch them on our inner movie-screens; be good brothers and sisters and, interrupting, correct the name or place or year or occasion. We must ache over the good-byes to have done our jobs well as human beings.

              I am old, now, the child I once was alive and well. At last, I understand my grandmother’s weeping for days afterward, washing dishes, laughing then crying, hands slipping deftly over each plate, rinsing beneath the scalding cascade that matched her, tear for tear. Granddad tightening the vise bolted to his workbench, blinks back tears and blows his nose. It’s the love, the laughter, the known sweet agony of hello and goodbye.

                We know we are eternal, or believe it’s so. Until we love enough to laugh until we cry, cling to one another and pat backs one-two-three—seven times—reluctant to turn loose, only then are we fit to leave life.