For Dee

Dee would hide behind the curtain on our sliding glass door while the four of us hummed the theme to the Johnny Carson show.

Da dada dee dum dadadadadadadaaaa da dum dum dum

Then Cliff would try to suppress laughter while saying "Ladies and Gentlemen, heeeerrrrre's Deedee!

Dee would fiddle around, trying to find the end of the curtain. Finding success she would emerge, throw her chubby arms out and flash a row of pearly white baby teeth while we all laughed and clapped and generally encouraged her to believe she was the center of our universe.

She really was.

I'm the youngest of the older four and Dee is eight years younger than me besides. She was all of our baby to share, fight over and pass off.

We would alternately treat her like her much abused Elmo doll, making her play "bewilder baby" where we would throw pillows at her toddling body, trying to make that faint crinkle sound babies create when their diapered bottoms hit the floor, and then we would treat her like our own personal baby genius and applaud her attempts to say "biodegradable".

She would sing snippets of Saturday's Warrior, she would cry and tell us that we treated her like junk. She would call us names like "big bird stop sign" when she was angry. She kept growing up as we kept growing out of the house. I would get her ready for school in the morning.

In many ways she was my baby, but I was not her mother. I was her snot faced sister.

I'm still haunted by my fourteen year old self pulling Dee out of bed, sometimes by her hair, when she wouldn't wake up. She was just a little kid. I should have been better, and gentler and more motherly. I was not sensitive to her tender head while I did her hair in the morning, although I will say that I did try to go the extra mile by giving her Heidi braids piled on top of her head and clipped with a lacy bow because that's how she liked it.

I moved out. I got married. She moved in with me during my first year of marriage and my parents last. She was so confused at ten, and I couldn't tell her that I was just as confused at eighteen.

She moved back with Mom, then with Shelly, then with Mom and Jay, then when she was sixteen she came back to me. Dave taught her how to drive. We went out to dinner and played Nerts. She was in Madrigals. She sang beautifully, she was funny, even with such a gap in our ages we were all pleasantly surprised that our personalities as Brown children must be locked somewhere in our genetic code, because without the benefit of having had us all close to her chronologically, she's completely one of us.

I also wanted to kill her, because in many ways she was my baby, but I am not her mother. I'm her over bearing sister.

She's twenty one now. Now it's all of us who wish we heard from her more often, but I like that. I think she deserves some time where we are all a little bit longing for her to be more of a presence in our lives. I think that's exactly how you should feel in your early twenties. Like after being youngest for an eternity everyone suddenly wants to know why you never call, what's going on in your life, how work is - it's very Cat's-in-the-cradle-and-the-silver-spoon. She has pink hair and a boyfriend I have only met once. But he seems nice, and her pink hair is actually pretty cute. I hope she is living an amazing life and is having an amazing time, and I hope that in quiet moments she still wants to play Nerts with me.

Because she's not my baby, and I'm not her mother. But she is my sister.

The Demon Spawn of Hell... or...Spellcheck

" Seek the truth, speak the truth, be the truth" - Frank James

It turns out the truth is ugly.

If there is one virtue that I am pretty good at emulating, I hope it's honesty. I am fairly overly sensitive about dealing with people honestly, and having them be honest with me. Lies are such an enormous waste of time when the truth is always surmountable. But there is one area in which I have converted to the inky black realms of the untrue.

Spellcheck.

I have always felt that spell check really messes with intellectual integrity, if you can't spell you should learn, otherwise you should proudly display your lack of spelling prowess as one of those things that separates out the true hearts (who will find your poor spelling adorable, like your weird pinky toe nail) from the false ones (who will see the form rather than the substance of the thing and make fun of you behind your back).

I have had many a good natured argument with both family and friends over what was once my firm anti spellcheck opinion. I have been told that it probably aids proper spelling more than it enables, also that it is considerate to the reader for whom one writes. I used to wave these arguments away as one more small cave to one more little technoloical pest ...and it's all fun and games until one day those little pests become so powerful they start keeping us in plexiglass wombs living only a cyber reality. That's right. I saw the Matrix, and it scared the crap out of me. And it all starts with Spellcheck.

Then, one day, in a moment of weakness, I tried it.

Oh no.

I am an idiot.

and now everyone knows it.

And now I'm hooked because, you see, there is no gateway drug to spell check. It's like going from nothing to crack, I was completely unprepared, but now I can't live without it. How long had I been spelling thier wrong? Was I really that far off in spelling miscilaneous? It was like I had just discovered my own nakedness for which I had previously been blissfully unashamed.

But I still never correct my poor grammar, obviously. I have to keep it a little bit real.

*No misspelled words were harmed in the making of this post.

Happy Birthday, Dad

I yell "I'm not angry! I'm just... emphatic."

I have become my father.

I remember crying when he would try to show me how to clean my room, or do my homework. I was sure he was angry, but now I know, as I bend over my son, whose trying not to cry as I attempt and fail to teach him fractions, he wasn't angry at me. He was just emphatically trying to teach me the concept of multiplication.

"Dad, what does five times five mean?"

"It's five, five times."

"What?"

"It's five, five times"

"Dad, I still don't get it."

"What's not to get?! It's five, five times!?!"

When we would clean our room he would wait until we thought we were finished and then get out the broom. I hated that broom. He would sweep everything out that had been stashed under beds, wipe everything off the tops of our dressers and pull out any clothes that had not been folded, but just stuffed into drawers. He'd tell us to do it again and we would stare at a job that was twice as big as it had been when we first started.

But it didn't matter, I was still his shadow. He would take me to the hanger where he worked and my sister and I would crawl around and play in all of the planes and helicopters. He showed me how to do woodworking projects. I made a baseball bat rack for my brother. We would paint wooden name plates made with his Dremmel tools.

My Dad has been an actor, a rodeo clown, an army guy, an outdoor wilderness man. He's missing the top of his middle finger and has mottled brownish spots up and down his body from both grenade shrapnel and the horns of a bull. When we were little he would turn up his long eye brows at the arch and chase us around the house as a mad professor and we would scream with delight.

He sliced his hand open once. Soaking dishrags with blood, laying on his back, with his hand raised in the air on our back porch I asked him why he wasn't crying, I'd have been crying if I cut my hand like that. "Would crying make it any better?". I was about ten, it was the first time it had occurred to me that crying maybe doesn't make things better, but I quickly disregarded this as crazy talk from a man who was losing a lot of blood.

The funny thing was that crying over a chopped up hand was a waste of time, but my Dad will cry at the drop of hat, if you set dropping your hat to Hallmark commercial music.

He was a hard man to live with and far from perfect, but whenever we sang, or had drawn something, or acted, or wrote I knew even then that he was proud.

Time is such a funhouse mirror. Turning people into things that don't remotely resemble themselves from one moment to the next as you look through it. I remember being scared to death of him, of hearing the coins in his pocket jingle as he came down the stairs. Now I see a big man, who still hugs me so tight my eyes bug out a little bit. I see sour kraut and milktoast. I see a mad professor.

A few months ago Viv asked me how to multiply.

"It's just the amount of times you count by that number."

"What?"

"It's five, five times."

Worst. Lent. Ever.

I'm not very bright, to be fair I do only have an eighth grade education, so hopefully my lack of sophistication has more to do with ignorance rather than sheer native stupidity.

I bring this up because I just discovered from Lisa on the Apron Stage, and mind you I am almost thirty, just discovered what Fat Tuesday or Shrove Tuesday, or what have you, and Lent are. I also just learned that they have any relation to Mardi Gra.

For those that don't know, Lent is essentially a forty day fast from your favorite sin. I have a pretty religiously inclusive view of eternity and found this to be wonderfully in keeping with my Mormon beliefs - very "I would give away all of my sins to know thee". Also a great way to keep in mind, as was noted by Lisa, that while we sacrifice, Christ made the ultimate sacrifice, which is much more observant of the Atonement and Resurrection then my traditional ritual of crying over Easter dresses I'll never finish and then binging until I'm in a chocolate bunny coma.

But here's the kicker - the day before the start of Lent, Fat Tuesday - and New Orleans' Mardi Gra, is the observance of the fact that you are about to do without for forty days, so why not start with a little oomph to usher you in, or, depending on how you look at it, it's time to get your forty days into one night -very "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die".

I don't know if you can guess which one I'm better at. Hint - it has the word "Fat" in it.

Last night I had a party sized bag of Mini Eggs.

Today I gave up sweets for Lent, for twelve hours. Eight of which I slept through.

It turns out that my religious inclusivity mixed with my absolute inability to keep commitments has me feeling like a failure in two religions. And I was so wanting to feel Southern (aka interesting).

Oh, fiddle dee dee!

I have long suspected that I am a misplaced Southern Belle that, like Lambert, was dropped off by some incompetent stork into the lovingly blind arms of another species, in this case Mormon Northerners. While I am pretty sure I ended up much better off where I landed something about the South calls to me in a native croon, and I'm pretty sure it's two most appealing notes are big hair and addiction.

That darn addiction part got me this morning.

So I've decided I need to enlarge my idea of Lent for those of us sitting at the kids table, spiritually. The Lent Mulligan. I'm just going to look ahead and keep trying.

After all, tomorrow is another day.

I ran into a friend from a couple of years ago the other day at the movies. She was a super hot, super sweet, gallery owning wonder divorcee when I knew her, but at the movies last week I got to meet her new husband.


They were the perfect couple. She runs an artist's retreat in Italy for a couple of weeks every year. They met there. They are clearly in love, he clearly feels lucky to have her, and she was at a very attractive level of modesty in accepting it.


I know I should spend more time focusing on the ideal, but I can't. Things broken and rebuilt are the most beautiful to me and I love, love, love when divorced people find love again. It makes me hopeful. Things gone terribly wrong in act two can find in act three their right.


My parents are a prime example. Is it sacralige to say I'm glad they are not together (forget I asked, better to ask forgiveness than permission, especially when that honestly is how I feel and no amount of pretty lies will make me truly righteous about it.)? I see them with my step parents and feel that we are at the end of A Mid Summer Nights Dream, things were extremely turned around, one or more parties might have indeed been an ass, but everyone found their proper place in the end.

My Dad and I just got off the phone. His wife (my Step Mommy) has put him on a diet. He is so excited to tell me "we have turkey bacon, and you know what? We barely notice a difference!", they go shopping for healthy meals, they have lost thirty lbs. each. I know that they must have their own problems, but they have enthusiasm that they share together. They tell us about their favorite places to go, why we should watch The Amazing Race, the home remodeling and hunting and fishing expos they attend. They are in love. Hope springs eternal. All is right with the world.

My Mom and my Step Dad are the same, they improve each other. They work in the temple, they go on long road trips, he tries to make her more punctual and she tries to get him to eat different foods. She laughs at cats on Youtube and he laughs at her laughing at cats.

I'm happy for them, I'm happy for me, because there is nothing so bad that life stops, it keeps moving, it keeps changing, there are always chances left to take, there will always be opportunity for heveanly respite after terrible storms. There will always be turkey bacon left to discover, both actual turkey bacon and the metaphorical, undiscovered tukey bacon in your soul.

They are both delicious.

Things Big and Great

I have lived in a kind of self imposed state of claustrophobia for a little while. I am actually a little bit surprised that I have picked up writing at this brief stage of my life, because so rarely do I feel like myself. I often feel like I'm myself under glass, like the things that should be touching me I can see, but just can't quite touch. I don't know if I'm coming back out, but I feel hope bubbling to the surface of my skin. I'm seeing things open up.

I'm seeing the sun shine of friendly faces. Old and new, the possibility of things that are warm and inviting. I am feeling tiny urgings, to cook (repent now, I'm pretty sure that a Traci cooking is one of the first signs of the Apocalypse), to maybe ask friends over to dinner, to play games and to dance and even clean. I think showering and doing my hair might take more prominent roles in my future.

I am hopeful.

I am hopeful because there is a life of Big Things waiting for a prodigal me. Those big things, I think more often now, are probably things I will witness rather than do. And that makes me happy. I don't know if that can sound as happy as I feel it. I have love to feel. I have people to watch and wonder at. I have God's beauties to behold. I am taking feeble steps at being bounteous in spirit again. I don't have a lot to give, but it's getting to be more, and I think I am on the mend.

I was in Disneyland last week. It rained the whole time. On the up side, the lines were very, very short. If you are an old hat at Disneyland like I am you know that when the crowds are small it's time to hit the most beloved of all rides-Peter Pan.

I prepared to board my pirate ship when I noticed the gals ahead of me. Two eighty year old women, silver halos of curled hair, no grandchildren in sight, loading up for a ride together.

I imagine two girls, maybe sisters maybe friends, laughing and whispering into the wee hours. Hair tied and in rollers and mutual fascination with dolls, then horses, then marriage, then boys and then marriage again. I think these women must have had their hearts broken given their age. Either by boys or husbands or children or dreams, things that pass by so fast and you spend the rest of your life wondering why they were was so slippery, why you couldn't just hold on.

Did they carry the hope that you start with, the disillusion with which you throw it all away, the resignation you wear as you tote your burdens, the grim acknowledgement of hardship and finally the light at the end, the understanding, the surrender?

I think I am seeing these women at the point of surrender. I imagine they have returned from a long journey into a time wear there is no time, no time for silly stories, fairy tales, and rides not made of magic, but fiberglass, cardboard and paint. They have traveled through that strange land of adulthood and are returning home with all of the wisdom that comes from a long trip abroad.

The mechanics of the ride give a shudder and start and I watch two silvery heads peeking out of a pirate ship, returning to Neverland.