When an abuser dies.

 Grief is a puzzle -- and not just when it's a Wordle solution. 

This was Friday's puzzle. Don't @ me.

Something had been banging at me to resume looking into my family history, so early last week, I succumbed and signed up for a free trial of Ancestry. I started building out my tree with my nuclear family, as one does, and was bopping along, entering stuff I knew, when Ancestry offered me a hint about an obituary for Lawrence Cantwell.

My grandfather? I wondered. Dad's father was named Lawrence; he died when my father was nine years old. My brother was named after him. So I clicked through.

Nope, not my grandfather. My brother, who died in March of last year. This was the first I'd heard.

When I wrote my memoir Mom's House, I knew the story wasn't finished. To recap: My brother had been verbally and emotionally abusive to me since I was small. When my mother died in 2008, she left our family home to both of us. I wanted to sell the place; my brother tried every manipulative trick he could think of to keep us both owners of the house. Finally, I filed a partition action against him to force a sale. We came thisclose to mediation before he agreed to buy me out. That was in early 2018. Later that year, I published the memoir.

I hadn't heard from him, or anyone else in his side of the family, since. If it hadn't been for Ancestry bringing it to my attention, I still wouldn't know he was dead.

***

People go through a whole range of emotions when someone they know dies, and adding abuse to the mix makes those emotions more complicated. This website lists many of the feelings abuse victims might have to work through: fear and anxiety, depression, guilt, loneliness, shame, helplessness, relief, disbelief, and anger. The site also mentions a phenomenon called disenfranchised grief, which can happen when, say, an abused person is upset when an abuser dies. Friends might wonder how the victim could grieve when the abuser did such horrible things to them. But an abused person can both acknowledge the horrible things and be sad about losing the good times. The abuser may have orchestrated the good times to keep the victim on the hook, but that doesn't mean the victim can't miss those good times and be sad that they're over forever. Humans are a bundle of contradictions.

But if the abused person expresses anger at the death of their abuser, that's also not okay, right? We're supposed to forgive those who trespass against us, and not forgiving someone who wronged you is bad for your own mental health, or so they say. And then, of course, we're told not to speak ill of the dead.

My opinion is that "don't speak ill of the dead" is horseshit. And alert hearth/myth readers already know my views on blanket forgiveness. Basically, I believe that forgiveness must be earned -- and frankly, my brother never earned my forgiveness. There was only one time that he came close. I wrote about it in Mom's House:

It came during the trip we made to Mom’s house in the summer of 2012. He cornered me in the garage for a chat. After a discussion about this and that, he gave me a serious look and said, “I know I was rough on you when we were kids.” And then he proceeded to share with me some personal revelations, most of which I won’t go into here. The key takeaway for me was that all through my childhood, he had been jealous of me. “They wanted you,” he said.

What I left out, when I described the scene in the book, was the vitriol with which he said it. He was still jealous of me. Fifty-five years later, he was still mad that his favorite sister had died and I'd come along to take her place. As if any of that had been my fault.

***

It's been almost a week since I learned of my brother's death, and I don't seem to be feeling many of the complicated emotions that abuse victims feel when their abuser dies. It's not that the abuse didn't happen. That's not in dispute. I think what's going on is that I've worked through these feelings long since. 

There's a chipper little Wikihow page for coping with the death of an abuser. Among the suggestions: Accept your feelings, however complicated; find ways to channel your anger; make a list of ways to give yourself closure; and so on. 

I gave myself closure by writing and publishing the memoir. I wasn't surprised when I lost contact with Lar and his family -- I knew it would be the result before I hit "publish" -- and I'm not surprised they didn't contact me when he died.

Am I relieved? No more -- and no less -- than I was when I got the settlement check. The house was the last thing we shared -- the last way he had to keep me on a string. That's a big reason why I wanted out from under it.

I'm sure I'll have complex feelings crop up from time to time; that's how grief works. But here's one feeling -- or goal, really -- I'm holding onto now: The guy who spent decades haranguing me about my weight and my health died at 74 -- relatively young, given that Mom lived to be 93. If I make it another ten years, I will have outlived him.

***

Two more things I've discovered since learning about my brother's death (public records searches are a wonderful thing): 

1) In late 2017 -- long after I'd filed suit, but a few months before the settlement -- Lar and his wife bought a house in Florida. I have to think he was pressuring me to move back to Indiana for his own benefit.

2) As of the beginning of this month, Mom's house was still listed as owned by my brother...and my mom.

***

These moments of WTF blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe, everybody!

The gaslighting of Ukraine.

Vasudevan Kumar | CC0 | Pixabay

Have you ever had a feeling of deja vu while watching a congressional hearing? Probably not. I don't think it has ever happened to me until this week.

This was on Wednesday, during the testimony of Gordon Sondland, the US Ambassador to the European Union. Sondland had already changed his story once. He testified to the House Intelligence Committee behind closed doors -- and then after reading about the testimony of some other witnesses, he "corrected" his own original testimony. So his public testimony before the committee last week was his third attempt to tell the truth.

While he was flinging his co-conspirators under the bus left and right, he said something that caught my ear. The comment came under questioning from committee chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA). Schiff was asking him to confirm that the US was withholding military aid and a White House meeting with President Trump until Ukraine agreed to look into two things: a Russian talking point that Ukraine, not Russia, meddled in our 2016 election; and an investigation into corruption involving Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy exploration conglomerate, where Joe Biden's son was on the board of directors.

SCHIFF: He had to get those two investigations if that official act was going to take place, correct?

SONDLAND: [Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky] had to announce the investigations. He didn’t actually have to do them, as I understood it.

Under further questioning, Sondland explained that the conditions for the announcement kept changing. At first, a statement from the government would be enough. Then the statement would have to come from a Ukrainian official. Then the announcement had to come from Zelensky himself. And he would have to do it in public. Trump wanted Zelensky "in a box," Sondland explained.

I've been in that box.

So this is a story about Basement Guy. You may remember that nickname from Mom's House, as I mentioned him in passing. I had met him in grad school.

When I was still in broadcasting, child care was a constant worry. I worked nutty hours -- often different shifts around the clock in the same week, especially after I went to Mutual-NBC Radio News -- and traditional child care just didn't cut it. I was always having to patch together something in addition to before-school care and after-school care. An au pair would have been perfect, but I couldn't afford to hire one on my salary.

When Basement Guy moved in, I asked him sometimes to watch the kids for me. His son was close in age to my daughters, so I figured it wouldn't be too heavy a lift for him. But he always balked (which in hindsight was a good thing, as he turned out to be a sociopath).

At last he came up with an offer: He would watch my kids for the summer if I'd buy him a truck. A used truck was okay. He was going to spend a couple of weeks in Costa Rica to do research, he said, so I'd have time to find him one while he was gone.

The offer appealed to me because a) I needed the help and b) he'd been using my car. So I said okay. I even asked a friend who had a friend who frequented auto auctions to keep an eye out for a truck for BG.

But then his request kept changing. He didn't just want any old truck -- he wanted a Ford F-150. It had to be black. It couldn't be any older than a certain model year. It could be a work truck, but not too beat up, and the seat shouldn't be all sat out. And he told his son about how cool it would be when I picked him up at the airport in his new-to-him truck.

In short, he was setting me up to fail. He'd boxed me in. The odds of my finding the specific truck he was looking for were slim to none. The friend-of-a-friend's report confirmed my misgivings: There were no trucks like that at the auction.

So I picked up BG at the airport in my car. He insisted that he drive, so I moved over and let him take the wheel. On the way back to my place, he said, "I guess you didn't get me a truck."

"No, I didn't," I said.

He was silent for a few moments. Then he said, "Well, I wasn't going to watch your kids this summer anyway."

Which is how I know in my gut that Trump was never going to give Ukraine the military aid, and he was never going to give him the White House visit. There would always be one more condition put on the things that were so valuable to Zelensky -- one more "favor to ask, though."

The only reason Ukraine got the military aid in the end is because of the whistleblower. The one who uncovered Trump's scheme to gaslight a foreign government in order to get dirt on a domestic political rival. The one Trump wants to meet face-to-face.

I hope that whistleblower is already in witness protection.

***
The NaNo project continues apace. I got behind this week due to having a life (how dare I!) but I caught up a bit yesterday. I'm less than 15,000 words away from winning, which is totally doable, given I'll be off work starting Thursday for Thanksgiving.

In fact, let me get on that...

***
These moments of bloggy deja vu have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends and fans!

Grown women aren't girls.

Copyright dimaberkut | Depositphotos.com

Few things get me worked up quicker than hearing a man call a woman a "girl."

I even wrote about it in Mom's House. On this occasion, my brother was mad at both my mother and me because of something that had happened earlier in the day. He felt the need to retake control of the situation, so first he needled Mom about her clutter, and then he declared we were going to the grocery store to get boxes in order to pack up some of her stuff:

So we all rode in Lar’s car to Al’s at Karwick Plaza. “You girls stay in the car,” he said. “I’ll go in and ask.”

I bristled. “I know you didn’t mean that,” I said warningly. He pretty much ignored me.

Later, Mom asked me why I was upset about Lar calling us “girls.” “We’re girls, aren’t we?” she asked. I just stared at her, speechless. How to explain thirty years of women’s liberation to an eighty-seven-year-old woman? 

I know there are women who, like my mom, don't see a problem with grown women being called girls. But trust me when I say that in this instance, my brother was not using an endearment. He was emphasizing that because he was the man, he was therefore in control -- something we had no business trying to be.

I bring this up because this has been an extraordinary week for the U.S. Congress. For the first time ever, 102 out of 438 members of the House of Representatives -- nearly a quarter of the membership -- are women. Eighty-nine of these women are Democrats; of those, 35 were elected just this year. They are diverse. Two are Muslim; two are Native American. And one is under the age of 30: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

Perhaps you've heard of Ocasio-Cortez. She stunned politicos last spring by staging a primary upset, upending the career of a Democrat who was rumored to be in line to become Speaker of the House. Then she went on to win her seat in Congress. She gets a lot of criticism from the right, and when it happens, she claps back hard. She's more than capable of handling her trolls herself. But I saw red on her behalf when I heard today that GOP strategist Ed Rollins had called her a "little girl" with a mouth on her.

Rollins is 75 years old. He has had a long career in national politics dating back to the Reagan administration. In short, he is just the sort of old, white guy who would see a young, smart, popular woman as a threat. And it's clear that in this instance, he did not use "little girl" as a term of endearment.

Ocasio-Cortez wasted no time in responding. She tweeted, "If anything, this dude is a walking argument to tax misogyny at 100%" and followed it with a winking emoji. I'm glad she can laugh it off, but I'm tired of making excuses for men who are old enough to remember Women's Liberation but would rather ignore it.

Stop with the misogyny already. Grown women aren't girls. Knock it off.

***

These moments of furious blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Transcendence giveaway winners! And some news.

I have been hard at work today on the new series which still doesn't have a name. I got started on it last weekend and then realized I didn't know where I was going with it. So I took a few days off, did some more research, wrote my typical rough outline-ish thing, and went back at it.

This new series is going in a slightly different direction than I originally thought. There will still be river gods. The rest is morphing -- for the best, I hope.

But enough about a book that's not even been written yet. I know you're all here to find out who won the contest. And I am here to tell you that the winners of the paperback copies of the Transcendence trilogy are Cassandra Darensbourg and Suzanne Given. Congrats, ladies! I've sent each of you an email. Please check your spam folder if you haven't received it. 

Thanks to everyone who participated. I can't tell you how happy I am to be getting these books out of my house.

***

Quickly, some other news:

* Mom's House is getting some recognition. I had two positive reviews that I forgot to mention last week (bad author! No donut!). In addition, this past Thursday, the memoir was featured on Book Doggy for 99 cents. Hint: it's still 99 cents through tomorrow at Amazon's US site, and also through tomorrow, it's 99 pence (that's how y'all do it, right?) at Amazon UK. So if you haven't had a chance yet to pick up a copy, now would be a good time to do it.

* I keep forgetting to mention that I'm going to be at an author signing event in Las Vegas on November 8th from 3pm-5pm. I'll be one of 100 authors in the same place, signing books and meeting readers. This is a free event for fans, and you're welcome either to bring your own books or purchase some in person (although I won't have a ton of inventory, so bringing your own copy might be better - just saying). Three lucky fans of all those who attend will win a Kindle Paperwhite!

The place is Sam's Town, 5111 Boulder Hwy, Las Vegas, NV, in the Sam's Town Live! room on the main floor. If you live near Vegas or if you happen to be in town that day, come on by. Hope to see you there!

***

These moments of promotional blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. (Vegas, baby!)

The #escapevelocity trip.

My Facebook friends may recognize the hashtag in the title of this post. Over the past several months, I've occasionally posted a status update having to do with my plans for retiring from the day job. (It's 544 days 'til I'm eligible, for those of you following along at home, although it's more likely I'll stick it out for 752 more days.) Hence, #escapevelocity.

Of course, I'll be moving to Colorado. But where? The state is so big and so breathtaking that I knew I'd have to simply put my boots on the ground, so to speak, in a number of places and see which one felt like home. So a couple of weeks ago, I set off on a clandestine trip to spend a few days in a several cities to see where I felt most comfortable. 

The candidates: Longmont, north of Denver; and Buena Vista and Salida, two towns in the "banana belt" of Colorado, which means they're up in the mountains but thanks to a geographical quirk, they don't get a lot of snow. (I know, I know, I'm a wuss. But it's been decades since I lived anywhere that got a lot of snow in the winter, and while I'm sure I could adjust again, why not make it easy?) I briefly visited all three locales last year -- I had lunch with a friend in Longmont and drove through Buena Vista, and while I stayed overnight in Salida, I didn't like the place I'd rented and thought the town deserved another chance.

Also last year, I drove through the tiny village of Twin Lakes, about which more later.

Longmont is a small city of about 93,000 people. It has all the common comforts you typically find in an urban area -- public transit, restaurants, movie theaters, Target, a lovely little yarn shop -- but it's nowhere near as crowded as, say, DC. Plus the city has a state-designated Creative District. It even has its own symphony orchestra. I stayed at the Thompson House Inn and loved it. I could totally see myself settling in Longmont.

Copyright 2018 Lynne Cantwell

Salida has maybe 6,000 people. This time, I stayed at the Palace Hotel, a boutique hotel in the historic district, which was fun. My suite was lovely and a fellow in a chef's toque delivered my continental breakfast every morning. Salida also has a state-designated Creative District. And it sits on the Arkansas River, which is well-known in whitewater rafting and kayaking, plus it's picturesque. 

However, the town is lacking in a lot of things that would make day-to-day life easier.

Buena Vista is about a half-hour north of Salida. It's even smaller -- maybe 3,000 -- and it also sits on the Arkansas River. Tourism is this little town's bread and butter; it's pretty much the gateway to the Browns Canyon National Monument, which is all about whitewater. You can't beat the scenery: besides the river, you have a bunch of hot springs nearby, and the snowcapped Collegiate Peaks (which include Mt. Harvard, Mt. Yale, and Mt. Princeton) to the west. And the people were friendly and welcoming. But I'm not a rafting person. And alas, if a town of 6,000 didn't have enough amenities for me, you can imagine how I would feel about having to drive an hour and a half from Buena Vista to get to Target. (Walmart is much closer -- there's one in Salida -- but to be honest, being in a Walmart makes my teeth itch.)

So it didn't take long to exhaust the stuff in Buena Vista that I'd come to see. As a free afternoon stretched before me, a little voice in my head said, "Let's drive up to Twin Lakes." So I got in the rental car and headed north.

Twin Lakes is a bend in the road on the eastern downslope from Independence Pass. It has maybe 200 people. And it is not in the banana belt -- it averages 116 inches of snow every winter. But it's got the lakes and the mountains. When I drove through last year, I thought to myself, "This is pretty."

This year, I got out of the car, toured the tiny historical area, walked a little way up a trail, surveyed the landscape, and...well. That's the place. Totally impractical, hell and gone from everything, and my spiritual home.

And this is a bad picture.
Copyright 2018 Lynne Cantwell

There are a bunch of reasons why I wouldn't want to settle there permanently. For one thing, the county won't let you put just a tiny house on a piece of property, let alone live in it full time. So I'm good with just visiting for now. And anyway, I've got 752 days to sort it all out.

***

All this talk of whitewater rafting got me thinking, though. While I was on vacation, I sketched out an idea for a new series. River spirits figure heavily. I'll let you know if anything comes of it.

***

I was hoping I'd be able to tell you this week that Mom's House was available in paperback, but I've been slacking since I came home and only got around to uploading the manuscript to CreateSpace today. I'm sure I'll have more news next week.

***

These moments of bloggy boots on the ground have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Mom's House has been released - almost.

I guess I should have picked a release date for the memoir sooner. Mom's House: A Memoir is now available for pre-order. If you sign up now, it will be delivered to your Kindle bright and early on the morning of Thursday, June 7th.

The cover. Copyright Lynne Cantwell, 2018.

I haven't talked much about the subject matter, other than to say it's a memoir. Basically, the story covers the period from early 1998, when my mother was first diagnosed with cancer, through her death in 2008, and the final resolution of her estate and the family home early this year. The main characters, if you will, are Mom, my brother Larry, and me; and the story is about our relationships, which are as messy as most other families and which include verbal and emotional abuse.

The house is the MacGuffin: the thing that drives the plot. Mom lived there until she died; afterward, I had to take drastic action to get my brother to buy out my interest in the place.

I see Amazon isn't providing a "look inside" during the preorder period, so here's a snippet. This one is about the kitchen, which could be considered the hearth -- however quirky -- of our home.

***
The kitchen work area was in an L-shape. The fridge was along what used to be the back wall of the house, with the sink bang up against it. In the crotch of the L was a rectangular counter that ran alongside the sink and extended to the stove. That eighteen inches of counter space between the stove and the front edge of the sink was the sum total of the workspace in the kitchen, excluding the dinette table, because on the other side of the stove was a squat 30-gallon water heater in a counter-height, sheet-metal cabinet. Mom could have used the top of the water heater cabinet for food preparation, but she didn’t – it was a catch-all space for mail and other stuff.

Mom had two floor cabinets and five wall cabinets in her kitchen; the wall cabinets over the stove and fridge were half-height, and the cabinet next to the sink was half-width. There was a single drawer for silverware between the stove and sink. And that was it.

Mom reduced her puny kitchen workspace even further by stacking a bunch of junk on the one working counter: a breadbox that held junk instead of bread (the breadbox that actually held the bread was on a stand-alone wheeled cart, halfway into the family room), a coffee canister, and a pile of salvaged food containers which she used for leftovers. Mom contended that she wouldn’t have had so much junk out if she had more cabinet space; Dad said if she had more space, she’d just fill it with more junk. And so it went, on and on, year after year.

As I got older, I figured out that no matter how the bickering between my parents started, it always ended up being about the kitchen cabinets. I called them on it once as they were getting warmed up: “Why don’t you just cut to the chase and start arguing about the kitchen cabinets now?” I said. “It would save you a lot of time.” They laughed in guilty acknowledgement. And then they argued about the kitchen cabinets.

Dad eventually relented and bought more storage units, which he sort of scattered about the family room: a metal shelving unit, six shelves high; two sheet-metal cabinets with drawers; a huge double-door cabinet with a Formica countertop and two drawers. He had Uncle John come back and build another wall cabinet above the washer and dryer, and hung a doorless three-shelf cabinet next to it. Mom filled them all with stuff: cake mixes, canned goods, cookie sheets, spare sets of dishes we never used, more salvaged food containers. And still she complained that she didn’t have enough space.

Yes, Mom was a packrat. Dad used to threaten to buy another house for us to live in so that Mom could use ours for storing all of her junk. As I got older, I’d sometimes wonder whether I’d open the newspaper one day and read one of those stories about some little old lady that the county had to get after because her place was stacked floor-to-ceiling with so much trash that it was a fire hazard – only this time, the little old lady would turn out to be Mom.

I’d tell her this, and she’d laugh at herself. Then she’d save more stuff. At one point, she had a dresser drawer full of the red plastic handles that used to come on a gallon of milk, back when gallons of milk still came in waxed-cardboard containers. “I’ll use them for a craft project,” she said. What craft project, Mom? She had no idea. They were just too nice to throw away. “Save it!” she would say, making fun of herself. “It’ll be good someday!”

That’s what growing up in the Depression will do to you, I guess. Dad saved stuff, too, but his collection was out in the garage.

***
If that whetted your appetite for the e-book, click here to pre-order. There will also be a paperback edition, released on or about June 7.

And with that, I'm taking a one-week break. See y'all back here Sunday, June 10th.

***
These moments of homey blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Mothers with feet of clay.

In case social media somehow missed out on informing you: Here in the United States, today is Mother's Day. What started simply as a day to honor all mothers has become ridiculously commercial. Hallmark started it with Mother's Day greeting cards, but soon the florists, restauranteurs, and spa owners got into the act. Nowadays, you're not supposed to just tell Mom thanks for all she's done for you -- you're supposed to gather the family to wine and dine her and shower her with gifts.

I'm not the sort of person who would turn down flowers and a meal I don't have to cook. But I'm mindful of the folks for whom this is kind of a lousy day: women who want to be moms but aren't, for whatever reason; women who are no longer in contact with their children; women whose mothers have died; and women who have learned, or who have come to realize, that their mothers weren't exactly the Hallmark ideal.

It's late enough in the day that we can talk about imperfect mothers, right? Brunch is long since over and the grandkids have gone to bed. It's just us grownups. We don't have to sugar-coat the holiday tonight. We can admit that not every mother is perfect.

My mother died in 2008 at the age of ninety-three. She was born before the Depression, one of six kids in a family headed by parents who were immigrants from what was then Czechoslovakia.

As a child, of course, I thought she was perfect. Then I got older, and became certain I would raise my own kids differently than she had raised me. But she was still Mom to me.

Then I had kids of my own, and yes, I did a lot of things differently -- but not everything. And now she was Grandma as well as Mom -- but I still didn't think of her as anything else. I had long since stopped considering her to be perfect and I got annoyed with her a lot, but it didn't occur to me to think of her as a person apart from the relationship I had with her.

It wasn't until she began losing her memory in her final years that I could see her as a separate person. A woman. Human. Imperfect. A product of her time, yes, and of the family she had grown up in -- and of ours, too. All the things she had experienced in her life had made her who she was. And then dementia began to take them away.

Given time and perspective, I think, we are all capable of reaching a point where we realize that everyone we meet is doing the best they can with what life has given them to work with. It may take us longer to realize that about some people than others.

So today, I can say, "Thanks, Mom. I know now that you did the best you could with what life gave you to work with."

That's not a bad epitaph, all things considered. I hope someday my own kids will say the same of me.

***
Speaking of families of origin: Progress on Mom's House, my memoir, has been suspended since we began packing for the move. We're in the new place now, and while we still have some stuff to wrap up at the old place, I am just about ready to pick up the book again and -- at long last -- get it out the door. Look for the launch in the first or second week of June.

***
These moments of familial blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

We may have a book problem.

There's lots more where these came from.

You may have noticed that hearth/myth took a break last week. Frankly, I didn't have the energy to write a blog post; we'd spent several days driving around town, looking for a new apartment, and made the final selection last Sunday.

Go us! Right?

Except now we have to move. Which means packing. Which is not my favorite thing to do ever.

Back when I was in radio, I moved approximately once every two years -- and not just to a different house or apartment, typically, but to a different city. I traveled a lot lighter in those days.

Over the past ten or fifteen years, though, I've only moved a couple of times. And then my mother died and I ended up with a bunch of her old stuff (although not nearly as much of her old stuff as I could have taken -- that woman was a packrat from way back). In any case, packing for this move is likely to be no fun at all.

In particular, my daughters and I have gone kind of crazy collecting books. We took nine boxes of books to our favorite used bookstore this afternoon and brought the empty boxes home. Those have now been refilled, and another sixteen have also been filled with books (and some DVDs). And we aren't done.

A lot of the books I'm keeping are mythology-related. I collected a whole bunch of material for the Pipe Woman Chronicles and I'm not quite ready to part with it. I mean, if I follow through on my threat to move into a tiny house when I retire, I'm going to have to cull the herd again, and a whole lot of those mythology tomes will have to go. But not yet.

One thing I may cull shortly is my inventory of paperback editions of my own books. I stocked up some time ago, intending to do a Goodreads giveaway or several, but never got around to it. Now that we're moving, though... Hmm. Watch this space next week.

***
I'm getting pretty close to being done with the memoir. We take possession of the new apartment a week from tomorrow; it sure would be nice to have this project out the door before then, but I do need to pack. So we'll see.

***
These moments of herd-culling blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

My Ghibli education.

Update: It turned out the USB Pet Rock I talked about last week was, in fact, an April Fool's joke. It's just as well. I'm not sure I need more tchotchkes.

***

I suspect if you mention Studio Ghibli to most Americans, you'll get a blank look in return. But the movie studio is famous in Japan, as well as among American fans of Japanese anime (pronounced AN-ih-may). Founded in 1985 by directors Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, it has released 21 animated feature films. The studio went on hiatus a few years back when Miyazaki retired, but he has since come out of retirement to direct a new film called How Do Your Live? It's due for release in 2020.

However, this past week, Takahata died at the age of 82.

My daughters Kat and Amy have been fans of Studio Ghibli's work since they watched My Neighbor Totoro at a friend's house when they were kids. Recently, they've been purchasing Blu-Rays of their favorites, and since I'd only seen a couple of the studio's films, I've been watching them along with the girls.

Although Disney has the rights to release these movies on disc in the United States, these are not Disney-type films -- and not just because of their distinctive animation style. Some are kiddie movies -- My Neighbor Totoro and Ponyo come immediately to mind -- but in many cases, the story lines are richer and more complex than your average Disney flick. And while the protagonists are often youngsters, the movies can certainly be enjoyed by adults.

Tonight, for instance, we watched Castle in the Sky, Studio Ghibli's first movie, directed by Miyazaki and produced by Takahata. A young girl falls falls from the sky into the arms of an engineer's apprentice. The girl, Sheeta, wears a magical crystal that protects her. That crystal is the McGuffin that everyone is after -- the military, a family of pirates, and a shady fellow who may or may not be working with the government -- because it's a link to a legendary floating castle called Laputa. Lots of hair-raising action ensues, much of it high in the sky. Think of it as a cross between Indiana Jones and steampunk.

Studio Ghibli's movies are decidedly Japanese. The Wind Rises is about an aviation engineer who designed the Zero fighter plane that Japan used in World War II. Of course, he was a hero in Japan -- not so much in the US. A lighter example is the No-Face in Spirited Away, a stock character from kabuki theater whose cultural relevance I'm still trying to figure out.

We have a few more Studio Ghibli Blu-Rays to see, including their version of Ursula LeGuin's Tales from Earthsea. I'm looking forward to seeing them.

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One more update: My memoir project is moving ahead. Mom's House went out to my editors and beta readers this weekend. Stay tuned for more updates.

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These moments of animated blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. 

A taste of memoir.

I've been slaving away over a hot keyboard all day, finishing the cut-and-paste job on the memoir. It's going to be called Mom's House and it covers the period from January 1998, when my mother was hospitalized with colon cancer, until a couple of weeks ago, when the hassle over her estate and her house was finally resolved.

I mentioned last week that I've been writing this thing in bits and pieces as events unfolded. That's been very useful; as the details were fresh in my mind when I wrote everything down, I'm reasonably sure that my recollection of events is accurate. But I'd also included some stuff that, in retrospect, won't push the narrative along. So it hasn't been a straight cut-and-paste job -- I've had to edit as I go.

And then there were the little stories that I'd forgotten about until I ran across them in the journal entries. Here's one tidbit. It takes place during the summer of 1998, after my mother's second cancer surgery. I'd taken the summer off (thank you, Family and Medical Leave Act) to help her with her recovery and to drive her to radiation appointments. My daughters had spent the first month of the summer with their father, who was living with his new wife in Buffalo, NY.

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Aquilitan | CC0 | Pixabay

In the midst of the radiation treatments, I had to pick up the kids.  I drove from Michigan City to Buffalo in a single day, stopping in Cleveland for a couple of hours to visit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  I stayed overnight in Buffalo and planned to pick up the kids the next morning and drive back to Mom’s.  Somewhere along the way, I concocted a plan to make the trip fun for the girls: I decided we could go wading in each of the Great Lakes.

Bruce and his wife were civil to me; they were giving up on Bruce finding a job in Buffalo and were moving back to the D.C. area as soon as his previous employer hired him back. The girls said goodbye and piled in the car, and we were off.

We drove all over downtown Buffalo, looking for a spot to put our feet in Lake Erie (something I wouldn’t have tried a decade or so before, for fear that pollution would have left me with no feet). Finally, we found one. We got our feet wet and I took a picture. Then we drove to Niagara Falls and stopped for a look. The girls had visited the Canadian side earlier in the summer with their dad, his wife, and her kids; they described going up to the top of the CN Tower to see the view.

We crossed into Canada and headed for our next target, Lake Ontario. This one was easy – we drove right past a little neighborhood beach and parked long enough to stick our feet in and get a picture.

Driving across Ontario, the girls fell asleep. I hit a blinding rainstorm and a road construction detour at almost exactly the same time; I spent a nerve-wracking hour or so following the tail lights of an eighteen-wheeler and hoping he wasn’t leading me off the road.

Eventually, the sky cleared and I could relax. We made it to Sarnia and Lake Huron at dinnertime. The beach was closed because the storm had created an undertow, but the lifeguards let us put our feet in and get our picture. We stopped for dinner at McDonald’s, marveling at the Happy Meal bags in two languages. Then we got back in the car and kept driving, getting back to Mom’s safely, if late.

Nailing Lake Michigan was no problem. We walked down to the beach and got that picture sometime before the end of the summer.

Unfortunately, I had never put film in the camera. So the pictures of our wet feet live only in our memories.

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It's going to be a while before the book comes out. It's still in pretty rough shape, and I'm not talking just about story continuity. I didn't know as much about formatting then as I do now. The early entries have a ton of tab stops and extra spaces after periods, and they are all going to have to come out. But at least the heavy lifting is done. Now, maybe, I can relax.

Relax? Oh haha. I kill myself sometimes.