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Suicide

Earlier this month, I had a garage sale and got to meet some of the elderly neighbors from down the street, people who have lived here for a thousand years and can tell you the history of every house and every family that lived in it. One of the gentlemen I met, a retired widower who spends all his time fixing up old cars, told me all about its prior owners, first a local judge, then a couple of professors that fought famously bitterly every night, and then the family that lived here before us: a married couple and their two children. The other gentleman, a retired pharmacy professor who is hard of hearing and is fighting cancer, came later, and unceremoniously told me some news that I have been trying to avoid since we moved in.

I can not reveal too many details because I don’t know who reads this blog, and any local who does a little research is easily able to identify who I’m talking about. The short version is that the wife killed herself in the house after a long battle with severe, debilitating depression. It was a terribly traumatic event for the family, as can be expected, but it was especially so for the children who witnessed their mother’s final act.

But the gentleman that told me was so matter-of-fact and macabre about it, and gave so much grisly detail that I, cringing, tried to focus on the strangers picking through my unwanted things until he got bored and went back home.

I knew about it before we moved in. My mother tried to talk me out of this house, worried that it was bad luck. I told her that was a load of crap — I had loved this house so much from afar that when it went up on the market it was practically serendipitous. Over the years, people who knew the family tried to tell me what had happened, but I stopped them. I didn’t want to know. I met the former owner once, when I found his wedding photo album pressed against a wall in a rarely used closet, and called him to retrieve it.

But occasionally, I wondered why there were so many renovations done to the house at once. One bathroom was redone very hastily while another was built anew — quickly enough that a bedroom window was walled off into the interior of the house. Was that paint on the floor in the basement? Dark things. Darker things. Sometimes I wondered whether my mother’s superstitions were well founded.

And then there was my neighbor in the driveway revealing the secret with so little reverence: it was Mrs. Peacock, in the Kitchen, with the Gun. How long it took them to “clean up the mess,” and “the children were there,” and “planned it ahead of time so they’d find her,” and “such a nice lady, she spoke a little Italian and sometimes she’d come over and practice with me.” Had our surroundings been any less absurd, I’d have wanted to drop to my knees and cry.

I’m familiar enough with the legacy of suicide, how it is preceded by it’s victims, their suffering, crescendoed with the losses of the living. (Shortly after I wrote that post, we lost three more friends and family members to suicide.) I won’t lie and say that, in my battle with depression as a teenager, I didn’t try it. It runs in the family, in my husband’s family — the way I say it, it sounds contagious. In my experience, depression sometimes is. You don’t catch it from a house though.

Sometimes we get their mail. Today we got a newsletter addressed to the previous owner as a reminder that September 6th is the beginning of National Suicide Prevention Week. I thought I might remind you too.

Goddamned Students Are Back

Every year they’re gone just long enough to get used to the quiet. And then they have to come back and ruin it.

Get offa my lawn.

UPDATE: Goddamned kids.

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No More Zombie Movies

…especially right before bed. I just had my first zombie-related bad dream (that involved Shaq and Morrissey) that actually makes me afraid of going back to sleep.

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Ass PAC

So we were cleaning the house in a fervor yesterday afternoon when the phone rang, and I was greeted by the Ass PAC that’s been calling everyday for weeks.

I was already irritable after the bank appointment, so I launched into the lady, asking her to take us off their calling list.

“Well, in all due respect to Chef,” she said, with about as rich a condescension as I myself can generate, “may I please speak to him to make sure that he wants off our action list?”

Oh, sure. CHEF, DO YOU WANT THESE PEOPLE TO STOP CALLING US?

Who?

THE FUCKING CITIZENNNES, THE FUCKING SACTION, SITTIZENNS, THIS FUCKING, GOD DAMN IT TAKE THE FUCKING PHONE AWAY FROM ME.

Please take us off your list. Thank you.

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But Maybe LiLo Reads My Blog

Noooooooooooooooooooo.

Vacation Woes

We’re going camping on the same weekend that Doug E Fresh, Whodini, SWV, and Sugar Hill Gang are performing in Indy. For an $8 entrance fee. WTF.

And camping was my idea.

Tomato Sandwiches

We got our first real, if small, harvest of fresh vegetables this week, zucchini and green beans galore. The herbs have been exploding, especially the oregano and thyme, to the point they don’t even look edible anymore. It’s all delicious.

I’m dying for a tomato sandwich.

I had my first tomato sandwich when I was pregnant with Ethan, about six months along and into the cravings stage. All I wanted was fresh produce and hot dogs then, and that’s about all I ate. I’d sit down with a package of hot dogs and a crate of fresh strawberries and eat until I was full. (I can tell you ten ways to make a hot dog without even thinking about it.)

Swimming at a friend’s house, impervious to the idea that pregnant ladies in bikinis are either a) gross and inappropriate, or b) totally hott, I developed once of those gross pregnancy cravings that couldn’t be satisfied. First I had some strawberries. Then some carrots. I rummaged through her parents’ fridge looking for anything fresh that could be shoveled into my mouth as easily as possible. Rattled with my culinary fervor, my friend threw a couple of slices of bread in the toaster, cut a tomato into thin slices, buttered the toast, layered the tomato on the bread and cut it in half. Fresh, decadent, and one of my favorite summer meals to this day. I think I ate another four before I left her house.

Daily I stalk the garden looking for red fruit.

Having mentioned my longing for tomato sandwiches every year since, I’ve discovered a cadre of folks who think my tomato sandwich is heresy — but I can’t understand what kind of person would ruin a perfectly good tomato with mayonnaise.

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Hee!

Because I’m a bad person, I’ve been messing with some poor guy from some citizen’s action committee who keeps calling us when we’re eating dinner to donate to some anti-water company action, which, while I’m sure this is a legitimate and positive movement, I’m totally uninterested in hearing about. (Please don’t call the grammar police on that sentence.)

So they call asking for Chef, whose name is pretty clearly a dude’s name, and I answer with, “This is she. May I ask who is calling?” Or, “She isn’t home right now. Can I take a message?”

There is always a pause at the other end, while the poor guy at the end of the phone — and it’s always the same guy — must mentally shift from “sirs” to “ma’ams,” something I take great joy in engineering.

I finally told him to stop calling.

Staycation

Sweet: One week of vacation ahead, with one short regional trip planned, and little to do other than getting the cat shaved.

It’s going to rule.

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