Passover, Part 1

We're waiting for layoffs. Confession -- I wrote this last week.

Right around Passover they announced that there would be layoffs in April. There was a first set, which was small and expected, but as they were doing round one, they told us that round two would be in April and that would be the big one. Rumor has it that our part of the company would not be affected by that layoff. Then they announced at a shareholder meeting that there would be a third round that would happen at the end of Spring or end of Summer 2023.

Morale is challenging sometimes. We were told to come back to the office and work there 4 days a week beginning in March. I didn't want to do this but held out hope that I would come to like it. And guess what? I started getting some stuff done that was super satisfying. And then more, and more. Heavy lifting stuff that I wasn't able to get to before, or was afraid to do. I feel energized. It's hard to be depressed when you are feeling a sense of accomplishment.

Tomorrow begins the second and biggest set of layoffs that may affect people I work with who sit at our factory but are employees of our parent company. Rumors are flying, and our parent company has let it be known that this set of layoffs will begin tomorrow and continue through Thursday. No layoffs on Friday. How's that for specificity?

The layoffs that my part of the company will be in are the next and final set of the year. They have been described as happening in the next few weeks. It's maddening to know and wait.

The other night I was reviewing a handoff to the archives from a friend who died. Two members of the executive team came over and we were figuring out how to deal with all of his hard drives he left behind. They wanted to help go through things, and it isn't practical -- they run the company (but also basically grew up with our friend who died). At one point I said "Not to put too fine a point on it but layoffs are coming and in four months we might all not be here. We need to think about whether this is the last thing the company wants us to do."

So here I am, trying to decide when the right time is to daub blood on the doorway. They even announced these layoffs right before Passover. Jeez.

Turkeys

Outside somewhere a turkey has woken up and is wandering the neighborhood, calling out to anyone who cares. Boy kitten seems interested. I'm interested but a bit triggered, as they say, by anyone's distress.

It's been an eventful few weeks. There are layoffs in our parent company which are a prelude to our own,  upcoming in a few weeks. Our sister-in-law died suddenly after years of bad health. A dear friend's sister died after giving cancer the finger for many years. And another friend's sister died suddenly in a car accident caused by a crazy person who drove the wrong way on the freeway and then took off her clothes after the accident and tried to get in peoples' cars. Our friend was killed immediately and her 14-year-old is in the hospital. The friend always seemed like a magical being -- sparkling, silly, gorgeous, friendly. You noticed her immediately when she entered the room. But things are never what they seem, and her brother who is our close friend, has been much better off since his estrangement from her and his parents. It's left me wondering what happens when you have a complicated relationship with someone who dies.

My mom has been tougher and tougher to deal with. She has long violent angry episodes. She lashes out. She is verbally abusive, and also physically abusive. We have been having trouble with weekend caregivers leaving her in bed and being pigly. The weekday caregivers find my mom lethargic and the place a mess. That makes them unhappy and we need them to be happy. There was a major showdown with a new caregiver on Sunday. Mom said she'd kill her if she saw her again, something that she repeated over and over during my visit on Tuesday. Mom's skin tears incredibly easily, and every time she saw the wounds on her hands (tears in the shape of her own fingernails) it would remind her of the caregiver and how she was going to kill her.

I have to steel myself for these visits more often now.

The Live 105 Boys

Day 15's prompt was to write a last letter to someone as if you were trapped in a burning building and would not survive. I find that so horrifying that I could not possibly. Instead I will write about being in a burning building.

My boyfriend (now husband) lived in the first floor apartment in a three unit Victorian building. He referred to his household as “The house of failed New Wave bass players.” There were two other bass players and my husband. I was spending all my time there so that would make it four bass players total. One guy was in the middle of moving out, and his tiny bedroom, which had a window looking out into the air shaft, contained only a few boxes of LPs.

The back yard unit in the building was occupied by the landlord. Nice guy. He was away for the weekend at the BWMT conference (Black and White Men Together) in Chicago.

The top unit was occupied by a group of “bros.” Super disgusting mouth breathing idiots. Go ahead. Accuse me of being judgmental. I am BEING judgmental. We called them the Live 105 Boys, cause they listened to that radio station really loudly all of the time. When they weren’t yelling stupid shit to each other or spitting into the air shaft, they'd watch porn (also loudly). We had to keep the windows to the air shaft closed because they made living our apartment super unpleasant.

Among their other fine habits, one of them liked to park on the sidewalk in front of the front door, pretty much blocking it. They only had one key to their apartment. If someone rolled up and wanted in, they’d yell up “HEY ASSHOLE!!” and someone would throw the keys down to them.

Have I never written this down before? Wow.

These guys had voices like Beavis and Butthead. As if moving their soft palate to make known sounds that convey meaning to other humans would be too much work. Yet they seemed to read, because they stole our morning paper every day. They did not recycle.

One night at the apartment we had a houseguest. A delightful New Zealand Marxist guitar player, employed as an archivist of the Methodist Church in Dunedin. He’d come to visit us on one coast, traveled all around, and was now staying with us as his last stop before returning to NZ with several cases of his newly pressed LP. A bunch of his friends gathered at a local restaurant as a send-off. We had a pitcher of margaritas, and then toddled back to the apartment. My boyfriend had a cold, so I gave him an antihistamine before bed.

Around 5 in the morning I dreamed about a loud blast of shattering glass. I later realized that this was the sound of the fire blowing out the back window of the third floor apartment. But at the time I remember hearing the Live 105 Boys mumble that there was a fire and registered that things had to really be out of control if they were willing to admit there was a problem. I heard them stomp down the back stairs and knock on the back door to let us know. I shot out of bed, and got everybody up. I was naked, but worried about everybody’s safety. I woke up my boyfriend last (margarita plus antihistamines!) and put on a robe and grabbed my wallet. The phone rang. I tried to answer, but nobody was there and I was in a burning building. As we ran out of the apartment we looked into our ex-roommate’s mostly empty room and could see the raging reflection of the fire burning into the air shaft.

For a while, we sat on the doorstep across the street and watched the firemen put out the fire. The Live 105 Boys hadn’t bothered to call 911. Nobody did. One of the firemen had seen the flames himself, from a few streets over, and let his team know there was a fire.

When the sun came up, a neighbor took us in and fed us coffee. The firemen interviewed us about the origins of the fire. Apparently someone had left a candle unattended. All those newspapers…and porn magazines.

Our friend missed his flight. And chose not to run back in and pull his records out of the apartment while he could. He wanted to show solidarity (his word, cute little Marxist) with the rest of us who might lose our stuff. Miraculously, there was some water damage and everyone had to relocate, but the only thing that got seriously trashed was the moving roommate’s Toto record. The sidewalk was littered with porn magazines, their edges singed like the fake treasure maps we’d make in elementary school. A poor iguana panted in his cage in the sun. One of the boys’ rich dads tracked the manager down in Chicago and made him give the kid his deposit back. Asshole. They’d burned all but the floorboards off the third floor.

We went out to dinner again, came back to the apartment, watched the finale of Twin Peaks, and our friend got on a plane with his records the next day. The friends who picked him up at a layover in Aukland said he smelled like a fireplace. So did we. Two weeks after the fire I broke out in crazy symetrical rashes -- things like red half moons on each inner wrist. Not long after, my boyfriend and I found an apartment and moved in together.

No basses were harmed in the recounting of this story.

 

Oz

Reposted from elsewhere, where the writing prompt was to begin with: 

“in a tree outside my bedroom window, I knew something lived…”

I could see the city of 7 hills I call Oz, jewel-like and tiny in the distance.

People flow in and out like the tide

Or they did until the world stopped and we wondered why we did things the way we did them

People live there in expensive houses and on stained sidewalks. So cold every day except for that bright one that makes tourists move there, increasing their sweatshirt collection threefold before the change of address has even been registered.

Oz wears a grey coat, and I don’t recognize her when she wears colors. I center my childhood in the grey. In the late summer, Oz turns her face to the sunset, giving us alternate facets of orange in her windows, lozenges of joy challenging the pink sky for our attention.

On the happiest of days, she hides safe and tight in a white ostrich plume cape, with only the pointy shrimp fork identifying her presence. Three generations of women have lived under this magical down that does not warm the chill.

Today she is unextraordinary, as extraordinary things must be in order for us to appreciate them. A siren calls, from near and not far, my eyes retreat across the distance back to an ordinary room, an ordinary chair, the sense of touch on that chair, an exhale.

in a tree outside my bedroom window, I knew something lived…

Easter 2023 or Why In The Hell Did You Come, Anyway?

For those who don't understand the reference, it's from Harry Partch's Barstow

Easter is not my favorite holiday, by a mile. As a child it meant ham, church, getting pointed into the sun to take photos that were never good enough. Being heckled about squinting while the sun is burning your retinas while the un-good photo is being taken. 

But at least there is candy.

Two weeks ago my sister asked if we had plans for Easter for my mom. I hadn't thought that far. She made plans to come out for the weekend, and asked our former sister-in-law if she could join us for lunch. I would make reservations for us in the public dining room at mom's facility.

A week and a half ago mom was having some bad days and my sister was waffling about coming out. 

Last weekend the one sister asked my other sister and I to tell her whether she should come after all. We told her we understood her desire to stay home, and that a visit later was fine.

After hearing from us she said she was coming for Easter anyway.

That's what I thought the plan was until I read the whiteboard in Mom's apartment. My sister was coming mid-week after Easter, putting Easter back on my plate. Oy. Because my sister had made a fuss over Easter, I felt I had to do the same, even though I know that my mom doesn't understand holidays any longer. I got a basket on my Buy Nothing group, bought 50 bucks worth of candy (and Depends) at the drug store, bought a bag of mini avocados (egg shaped!!) to also put in the basket, ordered sandwiches from our sandwich shop for pickup today. Then I spent yesterday afternoon dyeing eggs and worrying about whether they'd be an acceptable color. 

I had low expectations, but STILL.

I got to the sandwich shop and it is closed for Easter. And now I have to chase them down for a refund.

I pivot -- who else is open today? I go to the Japanese market and get shrimp, which she loves. Some salad, some sushi, and bowls for soy sauce. Make some nice plates in her apartment and...nothing. She's barely awake and not happy. Easter basket? No response. She was falling asleep, and sushi seems too complicated for her to eat now. She hated the shrimp (this has never happened in known history). Plus she wasn't really speaking to me.

As Harry Partch said in Barstow "Why in the hell did you come, anyway".

I asked the caregiver if it was too late to get lunch from the memory care dining room. My mom was asleep. 

I snuck away, swearing quietly to myself as I walked through the garage to my car.