Shoot that poison arrow - a note to my husband, never delivered

"Shoot that poison arrow", the song goes, and I always think of it about this time of year.  I hate Valentine's day.  I've had damn few good ones, and the bad ones always put me in a blue funk for several days.  It's stupid, I tell myself, to get upset over a fake holiday.  Then again, all holidays are man-made creations, so why single this one to get so upset about?


I guess it's because it's another reminder that you just don't understand me.  I make handmade cards.  I write poetry.  I give candy.  I cook, bake, and otherwise do things I know will please you (and the kids, too).  If I get anything, it's a store-bought card picked up in the last few hours of Valentine's day, purchased, no doubt, out of guilt.  The only poetry you have ever written, to my knowledge, is "Ode to a Jalapeño".  This makes me incredibly sad.


The grand gesture, long-stemmed red American Beauty roses delivered to work, a huge heart-shaped box of chocolates, jewelry in a little powder blue box, dinner at a romantic restaurant, that is all fine and good, but what really says "I love you" to me are the simple, inexpensive things:  a handmade card with red and white heart-shaped doilies like what you might have made in second grade, a short, heart-felt verse, a massage or even just a foot rub, spending the day together watching a movie or having a picnic.  Cook me dinner, brush my hair, SOMETHING!  I want the affirmation that I am special to you, that our love is unique, and that you are moved to do something other than dash in to Wal-Mart and pick up one of the few remaining cards without giving any thought to how it will make me feel.


I guess it's stupid to bitch about getting a dumb, ugly, store-bought card.  It's more than a lot of people get, I'm sure.  But I would just as soon you didn't buy me anything than buy me a card with a fat, middle aged, balding Cupid showing his ass and saying that  it's okay with you that I love you for your body.

Inge-Sandra

If she were still alive, my sister would be turning 49 today.  At home, we called her Inge, but at school and work, she was known as Sandra, so some people called her Inge-Sandra.  Originally Inge Alexandra Cline, then Inge Alexandra Sitton after my she was adopted by my father, she changed her name to Alexandra Elizabeth Sitton when she joined the Navy.  She met and married Michael Heath, becoming Alexandra Elizabeth Heath.  I can't recall if her headstone says Alexandra Elizabeth "Inge" Heath or Alexandra Elizabeth "Inge" Sitton Heath, but whichever variation of that, "Inge" was included because that's how many people remember her.  When I was a child, if I was mad at her, I called her Inge-pinga-dinga-linga.  But most of the time, I wasn't mad at her.  Aside from my best friend from kindergarten, Inge was my best friend.

We were three years and eight months apart in age, making her my closest sister.  We used to walk down to Dairy Queen together and get a parfait.  Sometimes we would brave Jacksboro Highway and walk over to the Lone Star cafe and have lunch.  I always tried different things off the menu, but she would always get an open-face chili cheeseburger.  When I went away to college, I would come home on the weekends to wash clothes and restock my pantry, and she would sometimes take me shopping.  Our favorite thing to shop for was underwear - pretty matching bras and panties.

Perhaps it was fitting that she was born on a Friday the 13th.  She was the middle child as well, and always seemed to have trouble fitting in.  She could have been a great writer, but dropped out of school, got her GED, and joined the Navy.  As soon as her time was up, she moved back home with her new daughter.  She tried once to reconcile with her estranged husband, but it didn't stick.  So she came back, bringing her daughter, but her husband had his mother's money behind him.  Inge said she could probably afford to fight him in court once, but he was determined to have the baby, so instead of putting the child through a long, drawn out custody battle, she let Mike take Lindsay back to Virginia.

After that, Inge seemed to go through a long bout of depression, but she managed to get a job as a pharmacy tech at JPS.  She eventually got her own apartment as was doing okay, it seemed.  But after coming down with a bad case of mono, she moved back home, into my old room, as I had just moved in with my best friend.  A couple of months later, Bill Chappell broke in the house and shot her, Mommy, and Pappy.  She died at the scene.  Mommy died two days later, and Pappy died two months later.  The papers later reported that Bill was shocked to learn that he had killed Inge and not me.

So of course, I have always felt a heavy burden of guilt about Inge's death.  I've had therapy, and it helped a little.  I can intellectualize the fact that Bill pulled the trigger, not me.  But I still can't seem to get over the feeling of loss and abandonment caused by the death of my closest sister (and parents, of course).  We had a very close bond.  I have two older sisters, and they seem to share something with each other similar to what Inge and I had.  But I am not as close to them as I was to her because I wasn't as close to them in childhood as I was to her.  They were always busy, out of the house, trying to get me to not tag along with them.

I have some very close friends -- closer than most people have, I've come to learn.  Friends who have been to hell and back with me.  Friends who couldn't bail me out of jail should I ever be arrested because they'd be next to me in the cell saying, "wasn't that fun??"  Be that as it may, I still have this hole in my heart that was caused by the loss of my sister.  I miss her doing things like whacking her hairbrush on the window of the car I was sitting in, kissing a boyfriend.  I miss her fixing me Hamburger Helper for Thanksgiving when our parents let us live on our own a mile away while they lived in our grandmother's house.  I miss her setting me up on blind dates with friends of her boyfriends and telling them I was a French exchange student.  I miss you singing into the curling iron to K.C. and the Sunshine Band records.

Inge always asked my opinion about everything, clothes, makeup, music, guys -- except when it came to her true love.  Inge fell in love with her Social Studies teacher, Mr. Castillo, in the 7th grade.  He finally went out with her when she was 18.  They dated for a while.  He attended her funeral, even though he was married to someone else by then.

I will always wonder what Inge could have done if she had lived.  I visualize her as going to college and becoming a writer.  Perhaps I will always feel a sadness for her untapped potential.  But I know that I'm not the only one who knows that Inge-Sandra lived up to the hope most people have of being a true, loyal friend. 

What Came To Pass

So, what all has come to pass since I last wrote in 2007?  Well, Herbie, Dave, and the kids stayed about 7 or 8 months in Argentina, but came back due to medical reasons.  Herbie had a breast cancer scare, but thank heavens it turned out to be a bad infection and not an aggressive form of cancer.  Susan and I dropped everything and picked Herbie up from the airport.  She then went to Oklahoma to be seen by a cousin of Dave's who happens to be an oncologist.  Herbie had to have several weeks of wound care every other day or so as an outpatient at Arlington Memorial.  It was a harrowing experience for everyone involved, to be sure.


But the biggest bombshell in my life was the fact the Logan proposed to me.  We were married on July 11, 2008.  He proposed while in jail, and we were married by proxy while he was in jail.  It was a spur of the moment ceremony in a friend's backyard with Logan's apprentice standing in as Logan -- kinda fitting, in a way, if there had to be a proxy.  In reading about this type of ceremony, I discovered that many royal princesses and princes in medieval times were married with someone standing in for either, or even both, parties.


Logan wound up in jail because he pulled a shotgun on a Code Enforcement officer.  They were never able to come to an agreement about what Logan could or could not have in the back yard, and in the end, of course, they won.  Render unto Caesar.  They ended up hauling all his blacksmithing tools away, along with a welder, air tanks, lumber, and metal stock.  The stuff was worth about 25K.  So naturally, this is all my fault, and of course, Logan is now without the means to do any blacksmithing.  Though physically, I don't think he's capable of banging a hammer any longer anyway, but one doesn't want ones tools and supplies swiped by paper pushers who were seen to put some items in their personal vehicles.  Of course, we can't find a lawyer willing to sue the city.  But at least while Logan was in jail, he had a light bulb moment in which he realized that "the man" could possibly kill him if he resisted them, and that that would leave me and the kids up a creek.


So it came to pass.  I now have full VA dependent benefits - medical, a monthly stipend of a couple hundred dollars, and access to any base.  The kids and I took full advantage of swimming on base this past summer and visiting the base library.  And Logan has discovered a benefit to himself:  since I can go on base, he doesn't have to go grocery shopping if he doesn't want to.

Out With The Old

Around the first week or so of a new year, I usually get around to deleting old emails.  I had forgotten, though, that I had set up subfolders of my main email account.  I went through them today, and deleted most of what had accumulated, but when I came across a particular one (which I had forgotten I had saved), it brought to mind the fact that I haven't written in many moons.  The email in question was a screenshot of an anonymous post someone made on this blog a couple of years ago.  The post, I immediately deleted because it was sheer vitriol.  So why did I keep an email to myself of the screenshot?  I am clueless.

Of course, I don't know who made the post.  Someone more tech savvy than me could probably figure out how to find the IP address and track down the person who made the digital equivalent of writing on the wall of a bathroom stall.  But should I even care if the person wasn't brave enough to confront me?  From the language of the post, I think I know who did it, but at this late date, should I really care?  And why did I let it paralyze me?  I asked a mutual friend of the suspect, and was advised to "Just delete everything. Anything that hasn't served any purpose other than to make you happy, bring you great fortune, or to at least make your day go a bit more smoothly has absolutely no redeeming value...unless it is your motivation for something greater. In which case, frame it and read it every day."

It certainly hasn't been a motivation for me, so I agree that I need to delete it.  And I will.  And this advice is like a swift kick up the backside.  I need to jettison everything that is holding me back.  Projects that have gone years unfinished are going to be donated to Goodwill.  Books I haven't finished reading will be returned to their owners, even if I don't finish them.  And I'm going to make it my mission to get my frigging house clean, if it takes me until this time next year.

Hoarding, clutter, and disarray are just symptoms of a mind in chaos.  The only way to overcome mental stagnation is to forcefully remove it.