Bringing bragging rights as the black sheep on each side of my family every last branch expresses its cracks, weighted by its nuts. Never resting on our laurels, good people, we're the standard setters. My pop blew his top Easter Sunday evening, April 11, 1982 with a rifle rather than resume his extended stay-cation at a psych unit (a holiday from his unplanned one) inside Lourdes Hospital of Paducah, KY, the Atomic or River City depending on which postcard hangs on your fridge.

     Fifty years prior, same day, same town, my mom's grandma Vivian slid her upset noggin into a '32-abouts model gas oven like she'd often threatened, proving some talkers do jump, and vice versa. That left my stern, regimented grandpa Frank and his fragile little brother Bill motherless. Vivian's youngest wound up in the same funny farm as the lead in this slice-of-life, Dad's girl-cousin. Hell, they might've known each other, even Biblically maybe. Weirder has happened, experienced passengers like Vivian, Bill, Dad, and my paternal grandma's captivating niece Elwanda in this psychic damage insurance claim all knew first hand.

     Midsummer 1980 had me dumped on poor old Aunt Dessie two whole weeks. My parents were over their only brats break from middle school, so to this kindly humpbacked widow my chunky tuckus got took. Pitifully easy who you need feel the worst for here. First was an extinct class: silver-headed, real clothes daily, prayer book cracked nightly, Baptist church attendant any time those doors opened. Too, she could make ANY food or drink, even a common-as-dirt lunch meat sandwich supernaturally tasty. This late 60-odd widow and lifelong resident of Arlington, her teeny hamlet un-exaggerated made TV's "Mayberry" seem like Chicago only thought herself ready for a visit from a meddlesome, mischievous, and surprisingly swishy TV sitcom junkie.

     To that point, the lil' portly prince was under a moratorium on loud, fat ladies of color. Post-Easter '82, I sunk elbow-to-hiney-hole in Nell Carter, Marsha Warfield, Mabel King, and the Crown Jewel of Sapphires, Miss Shirley Hemphill from "What's Happening?". My old man was kicking cartwheels in his casket over my strained eyes a foot from our Curtis Mathes set. That brand you can't recall because they went extinct by natural selection in under 3 years like Edsels. Mastering sass sessions he died canceling, quitters don't win, Young'ns. This junior food Hoover was here to shatter her Lawrence Welk one night, Bible study the other six serenity.

     Least sympathetic was a tubby 10-year-old toting a pile of comics from Huck's filling station in nearby Bardwell pored clean through before pulling into a pea gravel drive beside her humble house lacking cable TV which left the Stone Age '70's network trio of ABC, CBS, and NBC. Emerging from that era with the damages I packed with me to prison at 45, had the internet existed in 1985 no doubt I would've been dead in a strangers van at 15 by the time our modem hit 5 bars.

     Not one single same-aged pal but a pack of Hicksville zombie-flick extras. Hoo-rah. Party night meant icy Coca-Colas (glass bottles, Bitches!) and a Rook deck on a folding table in a living room frozen in time, decked with deliciously hot 1950's mid-century modern furniture luscious as a wake-up kiss from 2026's Justin Bieber. Attending this rager were Mizz Margaret and Walter Lee from up the road (Methodists, but we like them anyway) who thought I was the stuff. Goldfish attention span eased my delirium. Guaranteed a day-in trying not to fall and break her back slipping on comics sprawled across the low-pile, the least of three evils option-wise to me but utter Satanic smut to the Lady of the House: "Days of Our Lives" blaring from her colossal cabinet set, singly-swigged Coca-Colas clogging all vistas, and short-order cook requests every ten minutes had the poor thing about ready to rustle up a noose, a pistol, or a belt of rotgut after about 65 years without every day the following 14.

     Mee-Mee's (pron. "Mimmy's" - my dad's mother's) big sister's boudoir had it's own dope furnishings: a gorgeous dark lacquer fourposter bed with its husband, a dresser topped with vintage photos in frames since they were took. This dark-eyed bombshell with an electrifying smile, pearls on a swan neck, and an ornate top showcasing decolletage, not cleavage, class illuminating black and white was the showstopper. After making my rounds multiple times with a pitstop at that pic every one I conducted an ID check assuming its subject was a foreigner or gone for good, alien to me. Dessie gentle as ever gave her sweet smile saying "Oh, that's Elwanda".

     Can the balloon juice, lady, no way THAT'S Elwanda. She's somebody who comes over here to eat with Aunt Polly and Gloria looking like she got drug off the bed and didn't hit a comb on the way with brown teeth off that cigarette she always "hot boxes" even while she eats, guzzles coffee constantly, has bugged-out eyes like her big toe went under the rocker, says about five words all day, and never picked up smiling. Pardon me, ma'am, but Elwanda my wide white butt.     

     Out loud came "Did you say ELWANDA?", her retort was it was taken long ago. Checks out, Marple. Absence of Kodachrome and the whole voodoo-curse-by-a-Disney-villain schtick saves me ringing the Yard.

     Then ten, it hit my brain things could go to bad from good then stop there for somebody. This was new, a curiosity about someone else's experience. It was permanent, too. Question: what became of that gorgeous ghost in the frame? Answer: worse than I thought, me not knowing what tragedy meant yet. Truth: it wouldn't take much longer, under two years til Easter of 1982.

     My quieter than a mouse's fart cousin Gloria was my senior by three years, but decked out around 50. Wearing her hair in a "set" (think Honkey-granny afro) like Mee-Mee and Aunt Polly she sported the latest polyester pantsuits of the senior set. Aesthetically, anybody could see she was growing up over a gap generationally by sweet, simple Pauline, a clone of my grandma missing her cosmetic energy. Elwanda was Gloria's mom turned sister and Polly's child turned patient, dealt nut-pills by the pounds preceding Prozac Nation over a decade, deluding America into thinking meds slayed all daily dragons.

     That clan's single-wide was property of Polly's second husband Renny, a sharecropper who seemed more like her dad than spouse. Looking like the toothless country cousin to a fella you'd see munching a meal off a trash can lid, he had B.O. capable of disabling passing jets. Bless his old heart, this unimposing, impoverished gent never met a boy he wouldn't donate any quarter in his pocket to. Mee-Mee barely concealed her contempt for Polly's spousal selection. Dessie's was clearly there too but being an "if you can't say something nice..." type, at bimonthly affairs she hosted politely passed the passive polecat a hunk of ham with her tiny blue-rinsed head turned, eyes squinted.

     Polly's people occupied a single-wide trailer in an overgrown lot around Bardwell. That entire West Kentucky region for me becomes an amorphous blob missing defining features like stores or restaurants anywhere. Arlington had two things: a truck stop answering only to that title with grub almost as exciting. Then Hocker's store, a quaint grocer sized like the most basic kind of gas station. Beyond positioning Renny across from the fan, planning supper spreads for Dessie meant her daily jaunt downhill to "town" had extra duty, a list of any special orders like oysters or foot-longs. 2016 that tiny trading post hit a centennial celebrated by WPSD Paducah's news I saw on the single TV of a 30-man pod in their county jail/mausoleum I lived in a year en route to my present prison.

     Elwanda's given dad was Laurence Pirtle, who Mee-Mee cited as a doppelganger for Alfred Hitchcock. For this reason she couldn't stomach the sight of the Master of Suspense. This made "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" verboten at Saturday night stays, even with him occurring only interstitially. Glaring and "hate-smoking" at me for trying to slide a mystery by, she'd not take her head away from the banana-yellow corded phone keeping her chained to a chair surveying the miniature living room. Of note: around first grade I sneaked into her boudoir, slapped on a round brown wig, face-full of makeup, and a cute top while obliviously she yacked. Past my spate of Little League mirror-modeling drag I hit the loo, scraped the war paint off, downed probably 9/10 of a bottle of St. Josephs scrumptious Orange Baby Aspirin, then shut down my show with a bubble-bath. Observing the ripples from those sleepovers is easy as pie. Ironically, Juanita was most fragile about my adult persona. Unapproachable, despite being its biggest enabler. Returning from my junket she was still blabbing up a blue streak. Deep details about nothing to motormouth Mary (who'd upset me greatly as a teen, getting her nose deleted post-cancer), she'd probably done lunch with that day before she quit using PATS (Paducah Area Transit System) to bus herself down and around town. Budget cuts required switching vehicles in routes, my Dad's mom refused adventures with potential errors besides marital infidelities.

     George, my Pa, did construction weekdays on the road suiting Madame Mee-Mee marvelously. During WWII which they hitched months before, George fell prey to "the Jody Grind": lingo for two-timing American gals with guys overseas. He was in several spots. Her too, I gathered. They'd met barely past high school. She was the baby of 7 whose pop split upon her arrival. Branded a deadbeat dad our days together - "Daddy run off and left Mama with all us kids", all 39 years, I learned from Mee-Mee's niece/nemesis Linda at her funeral Mr. Todd's exodus wasn't what she'd painted. Unable to feed his flock on a barber's wages the poor guy broke into a barn, copping a cow. His felony got found out and the penalty locally then was a noose. Running into the night to save his life, older kids Argie, Sytha, Dessie, Pauline, Bob, and James traded Arlington High for work while Mrs. Minnie took in the washings for Arlingtonians in her Baptist congregation. Mean-mouthing the man til her dying day, she refused seeing him when he tried, instead ruining his rep in the aftermath. Did my dad die at 32 unaware his grandpa wasn't that monster Juanita and maybe Minnie made the man? More mysteries amassed.

     With her family broke and struggling, baby Juanita never knew poverty. All 4 sisters and 2 brothers, Dad's "drunkles" - roustabouts guzzling themselves dead before my consciousness kicked in, kept candy and clothes coming for what became the spoiled apple in their cart. Class of '38's raging fox was the lone Todd to graduate. Her high school yearbook included categories like "Ugliest Boy/Girl" to my disbelief, particularly that its winners showed for Picture Day. I'd be in my mid-20's before the lady whose voice scared me at 6 when I heard a grownup cadence not her high-pitched coo the first time, an alike confusion hearing actress Jean Stapleton interviewed without her "All In the Family" Edith Bunker affect, was diametrically opposite to the image I accepted.

     On Old Mayfield Road, a connection of our region, Hendron/Lone Oak's suburb to downtown, and her home til I hit 30, Dad curbed a codger in a Cadillac, yanking hysterical Juanita from his passenger seat. This while Pa was off on construction before returning on Friday to Mrs. Hiett standing by the door, shopping lists in hand, ready for her big night out (with her husband this round, to be clear). Blotto on bong blasts in the 1990's I recalled that twisted lunchtime drive, as she shrunk into our backseat beside me bawling but keeping it cool for a confused kindergartner, my lens backing up. George died early, or "was drove to" a heart attack parallel Pa-Pa/drinking buddy Frank believed, bothered and bewildered by Juanita's actions during Pa's funeral. As attendees passed, shaking hands or hugging her she sobbed "what's gonna happen to ME now?".

     She and big sister Pauline (not sensible Dessie) had a bizarre habit, mispronouncing Gloria's name "Glo-ruh", about driving me at 11 to drink. Worse, my ragdoll-passive cousin caved on correcting it. Mee-Mee and most of the Todd tribe (Juanita's maiden name where the given middle one I answer to comes from, in prison replaced by "Batman" because sometimes I'm played by the actor Robert Pattinson) yanked my nerves too many ways for me to kvetch when I realized Glow-ruh was another drip in an ocean of oddities. Juanita crapped on God's English with laser precision. Ravioli-O's architect Chef Boy-R-Dee became "Chef Boy-D-Yay", Metzger's Meats of Paducah begat "Mettzer's", naive got bombed sky-high to "knave": "Glow-Ruh's too damn knave, that's her problem" - verbatim quote, her Hiett pronounced properly "Hite" but from her the hotel chain leading me to mispronounce it until Mom corrected me around 10. Dad swore she did it to piss the world off.

     I'd never bash humble Polly, though, despite a few flaws: her desire to compete in a Man's World by trying to best Renny at armpit funk. She wasn't as pungent, but his sleeveless arm-waddles weren't hugged up to my mug. This had the single-wide permeated into chili cook-off pungency, me paradoxically starved and disgusted. That with her refusal to drive over 25 MPH being the designated driver for the community, all five packed in a banana-colored Cadillac which during an era of casual racism I'll let you figure out what Pa in horrified embarrassment said about that, and irrational fear of dopers - nobody could leave the grounds after 7. Irony being Elwanda "Courtney Love" Pirtle downed downers by the fistfuls. My concern became that Bic-flick illuminating the crack beneath her boudoir door overnight. Remains of a torched trailer with the fat fried from my bones from a zombified nod-out kept me anxiously awake after Gloria guilted me into a sub-stay at Chez Renny. In hindsight, sweet little Dessie might've manipulated that side-trip.

     Speaking of those, they're what Mee-Mee gave me, leading to Nowhereville. Anecdotes about dance-dinner parties omitting the raunchiness that undoubtedly occurred, trying to wring good dirt out. Hours of straining to hear her TV over this is my culpability, too young to figure out the stupid questions are those we don't ask. Her yarns' best features were the names these stick-dwellers got stuck with: brothers "Hugh Ray and Whirley-Jewel", or couples "Cracker and Nan", and "Chicken and Anna (Mee-Mee's conspirator from high school, the other fox whose old lady knockers seriously defied belief like steroidal watermelons)" were regulars. They sound like a pack of prison yard walkers with their lady-boy "trims". As for Elwanda, my first paydirt was a gold nugget. Seems a rep from the Coca-Cola Company coasted through Arlington (?!) one day, and spotted Polly and Laurence's lovely daughter from the picture I saw. At that 1940's moment, Coke's calendar was then's Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue and this man wanted Elwanda Pirtle on it. When Laurence's excited offspring broke the news to her household she got dealt slaps and punches. Repayment rendered for attempting to whore herself across America.

     Apparently she and baby brother Jimmy got this treatment on the regular. Aside, Jim had a son, Neil, who when I was six looked spot-on the singer for Cheap Trick with long, straight blond hair. Walking me up Old Mayfield to the Belt-line Bridge Minit Mart to rustle up some comics I developed a "Roosevelt" pre-pube cousin-crush on this affable, angel-faced teen. Not long after he and his girlfriend got dead from carbon monoxide exposure off a running motor, discovered on a Sunday morning. Always I've hoped he went out with a "bang" and not some creepy pact. More mounting mysteries, and with this crowd nobody can be sure.

     During a breakthrough with Lil' Dr. Batman, Juanita said when Polly and Laurence lived with his folks, the senior Mr. Pirtle emptied his skull at the supper table with a rifle. Surely Mrs. Pirtle's cooking wasn't THAT bland. If that's your new benchmark for backwoods beastliness, a week later his lady stepped into the front yard, doused herself with accelerant and lit herself afire. This makes the only peacetime monk-less case of self-immolation I'm hep to. Whatever the angst mechanism was in that place, in prison parlance, it must've been "one bad motherfucker", way past some joker repeatedly putting one swig of milk back in the fridge. Despite wearing the label "violent felon" I'll take the time to point out I'm not blood kin to those folks here.

     Mid-1950's Pauline ran from Lawrence to avoid permanent damage to her kids, proof driving wasn't where slow stopped with her. Eventually she hooked up with deodorant-snubbing sharecropper Renny, likely a knight who saw a damsel with a busload of distresses. Approaching womanhood Elwanda did a flip in mental status, growing despondent and dissociative. Pauline was encouraged as a last resort into admitting her to Western State Hospital in nearby Hopkinsville. Checking in on his fellow-patient wife, a visitor began clandestine hijinks with Elwanda resulting in a surprise pregnancy. Like you'd imagine, that, along with her impregnator splitting the scene drove Elwanda into further debilitation. Polly brought her back to Bardwell single-wide dummy-dope devastation, a zombification like I suffered in lockdown my first five-flat from Risperdal before a wild connective event in her life hit the Fall of 1981...

     With Gloh-Ruh rounding 14, a daddy she didn't know came to town to collect her and Elwanda, ergo her mom's rampant recovery. Overnight, a smiling, shiny, animated version of Dad's cousin came to Mee-Mee's living room squeezing the daylights out of me and I recognized the angel in black and white behind some weathering that day. An earnest miracle in a fashionable violet sweater with dangling matching earrings he must've taken her somewhere to shop for, I decided. Usually I was a mentally unavailable TV-raised ADD brat some million miles away, but that scene had my attention 100%.

     It took a week before that inevitable other shoe landed. Glo's dad who reminded me then of a smoke-damaged version of a dinner jacket wearing entertainer like Tom Jones, Englebert Humperdinck, or somebody else too grownup for me to give a rat's ass about ditched Elwanda at a gas station, kidnapping their daughter. My quiet cousin was a manhunt object. It took two weeks for her to slip out, buzz the fuzz at a strange house, and get expedited from Alabama.

     Back to being a 50-year-old 8th grader with her over-medicated mama in a trailer caked in human scent. What went down with her dad is beyond me. Everyone assumed the worst. Maybe misunderstood and he came with good intentions, saw the squalor his kid was in and Elwanda was past his power to help? Who knows what was learned on that long car ride. He might have been trying to rescue Gloria. Hell, how would she know what better looked like, and who would this stranger be to decide? This could be Stockholm Syndrome for that poor girl, or a sex-fiend took her off to a rape-den. Like all things Todd, its an "Unsolved Mysteries" marathon. Juanita's go-to for tough conversations was "let's talk about nice things" despite every train wreck she'd endured, survived, or incited. Betting my last Ramen noodle (the preferred currency of this establishment), nobody asked Gloria a thing about her unplanned daughter-pop expedition. Not somebody at school paid to do it, no friends, and certainly not a house where emotions went down with a tumbler of tap water and a mess of meds. No way my Mee-Mee or pious Aunt Dessie would offer the recently abducted anything better than "glad you're back, Hun". This made two beautiful women with those dark eyes, wavy brunette manes, and mysteriously Mediterranean complexions heaping more mysteries onto the pile of on top of their carbon-copy coquettish grins, noiselessly numbed off-road in that trailer. Silent sirens in the middle of nowhere, passersby deaf to their wails.

     Gloria's senior year she met a hulk of a boy named Tommy. Fiery hair with matching temperament, missing manners, and stinking of abject future failure, naturally, my cousin fell madly in love. In him Aunt Dessie met the only one who broke her "say something nice" policy, begging Gloria to rethink romancing this knuckle-scraper. Her response was a pair of beautiful babies of both genders. Tears at the small service for those necessary nuptials had nothing to do with glowing Glow-Ruh. "He's an asshole, but he's HER asshole she can't shit without" my late friend M. Tracey Harris said and tattooed onto my grey matter 40 years back. My belief is he made her feel safe, an impetus that backfires on women at a staggering rate.

     1995 Aunt Dessie gained superstar eyesight via LASIK surgery she declared a miracle. Two weeks later, carrying groceries after coming up that hill from Hocker's, she tumbled down the four-step back stoop entering the kitchen of the clapboard cottage. She laid on the pecan-covered lot shaded by the twenty-foot tree that put them there with a shattered hip, there 'til Methodist buddy Walter Lee spotted her down the gravel path between their homes. This setback left her non-ambulatory, beyond family care, and Mee-Mee had to make decisions now.

      Allow me to interject what that meant. In the weeks before my dad decided to die, he told my mom, Betty Jane, should anything happen to him "don't get stuck with my mom". For the half-year leading up to his finale, Juanita Frances was in the throes of ecstasy with "Stormin' Norman" Krueger, Kirby Vacuum Cleaner salesman and my hands-down winner for Ugliest Boy upstaging whoever-the-Hell won in that 1938 yearbook by a country mile, Brother. Like a scarecrow with the air sucked out by those things on infotainment ads for storage. Said by her partner-in-crime Sally Poole to my mom "Girl, she says he's good in the BED!" in a shamed whisper. She owned Sally's Mexican Shoppe where Mee-Mee worked a minute. It had a handwritten sign - "We break, we cry, you break, you buy" and where I got my Popeye piggy bank. Sally was married to Maynard Poole of Poole HVAC until he called her to a cabin after a "work trip" then surprised her with a penis-prosthesis with pump. Apparently OK with the equipment she bred a baby off, she fled screaming, ending their marriage.

     As Dad became an emotional disaster, crying uncontrollably, he became a version I liked better because he was affectionate at least, unlike the red-faced rageaholic typically running and ruining our house. Still, being unable to deliver his duties for Union Carbide, the nuclear facility that poisoned Paducahans by the payload proved problematic. Cancer claimed copious community members almost including Mom's baby brother Robert, whose larynx was removed turning him to this day the loudest whisperer ever to appear in a political ad for a politician who kept his family from losing everything after this egregious rape. Dad entered a psych unit of the hospital in the highly stigmatic 1980's. He went from confident man's man to terrified child overnight. His order to Mom: don't call my mother.

     Coming out for the weekend, his mood was relaxed. Sunday was surrealistically picturesque. Blue sky, breeze, warm not hot, and shiny. Two houses, Mee-Mee's and Pa-Pa's place with Mammy, her polar opposite. Mother to six including their toddler who was killed, her head crushed in the driveway by an idling milk-truck releasing the parking brake. Industrious, Mammy gardened, canned, sewed, cleaned, and cooked with aplomb every waking second until passing out in her rocker with Pa-Pa in the opposing recliner to whatevers on the set. My grandpas bonded and Frank was called to George Hiett's bedside before he died by hours. They understood each other. Spending days with two girl cousins, their mom, and my grandmas, men disappeared in my sleep, returned drained daily, often at bedtime. Mostly I disliked/distrusted them. Dad was authoritarian, punishing with "the belt" across his lap. As many leather licks he felt my crime earned. His mood ran our home with upturned tables and Mom's belongings broken. Before I became aware he smeared a dirty diaper in her face. She fled, and both grand-dads returned to our apartment. Mom's dad, a pipe-fitter for Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) held him while his dad punched his face repeatedly.

     Leaving Mee-Mee's that Sunday, he said he loved her twice and the 55 year old lady never minus ruby lips, heavily penciled eyebrows, her set coif jet black, kissed him bye with a quivering voice. All day I fought a cold, and we left Pa-Pa's crew early so I could crash. After an hour I woke improved, heading out to play. Dad stopped me in the hall between our bedrooms, telling me he'd be gone before I came back. Burying my relief, I said goodbye. He wanted a hug before I left, given with little gusto. Still I was more enthused about his upcoming absence, despite his recent behavior. Too much, too late, I reckon. Walking off, I caught disappointment in his face but left anyway.

     Not thirty minutes passed before basketball got nixed by sirens, Oaklawn saw ambulances the first time, I got tackled by a total stranger into a ditch, and Mammy passed out in the street hearing the name "Juanita". Jerry Beyer, our coroner who Mom rang out weekly at her Gore's Supermarket cashier job lied while hugging her so he could snatch press telling the Paducah Sun and our city my dad shot himself. Shirley, my same-aged subdivision block-mate and "lyin' little fatass" (Dad said daily) Sean's mom who straightened up toys at Woolco Department Store gave me a hug so tight I realized the first time how precious a gift those are sometimes. Big night, all-in-all.

     My mother learned lots but taking good advice? Not so much. Our bombastically brown central living room wound up swapped to percussively pink, and Mom renaissance-ed herself from frumpy to fabulous. Turned her two-weeks in at Gore's then hit the big-time, checking people out at The Limited, the best boutique at the spanking new Kentucky Oaks Mall. Collecting Social Security checks for the pair of us, basically Dad's demise got us a raise. Taking a certification course from Rhythmic Aerobics®, she side-hustled women into shape with a rental space at Paducah Community College. Her Olan Mills studio portrait with tights, lady weights, and leg warmers is 1980's iconic sex. She got so much right, except giving her Vietnam vet-deadbeat dad brother five grand for remodeling our patio, and hearing the sagest thing Dad said to her, which she ignored and lived to regret.

     Repeatedly I reminded Mom of what Dad said before killing himself, maybe DUE TO my grandma. If a hearty thanks with tears, her being told she's the daughter Mee-Mee never had, and a bushel of roses are what she wanted, she'd be sorely disappointed. It didn't make me feel good being right. My mother's hollowness began the last time Mee-Mee spoke to her, complaining about Mom coughing in her hospital room, lasting weeks after the anticlimactic funeral. Claiming to "worship the ground I walked on", she knew less about me than anybody in my orbit. My favorite person as a boy, resource to grab cash from as a teen, depressing chore to visit in adulthood, and a complex fixture no one cried at the burial of is our shared bio. Sometimes I regret that, realizing me now could have broken the wall between the world and Juanita.

     That is why the decision of Dessie's care left to Mee-Mee is meaningless. 100% like everything my mother had to tackle it. An old folk's home with rehabilitation capabilities near her home was what she needed. Despite Mom's huge heart and love for Dessie, the place she got put would cause any rational being to thank the generous Lord they were born past 1968. One horror image I've carried these decades was a woman with a handsome husband, sitting in a chair staring into space clearly demented. She was a victim of Toxic Shock Syndrome from tampons, a situation from then. You could tell they were a perfect couple once and now she was stuck like that. Couldn't decide which one to feel worse for.

     Whether it was being brought to Misery Manor, the poorly-timed fall following her vision restoration, or the cruel combination, Aunt Dessie became a dramatically different dowager on the dime. Our darling aunt's immaculate nature got negated, as she refused to brush either her teeth or hair. She stopped being verbal preferring physical, battling bathing nurses. Worse, eating was gone from the equation, too. Living in Lexington, Mom told me in disbelief on the phone about her "other grandmother's" odd decline. By bus, Greyhound, I headed home in blizzard conditions. Linda, Mee-Mee's archenemy and beloved niece told Mom I'd "enjoy the adventure", which amounted to it capsizing overnight in Bumfuckt, KY. Terrified, a Black homeless lady somebody gave a ticket to in order to get her out of their city ran screaming into the woods. Often I've wondered about HER adventures as the latest transplant to a tiny town bordering nothing, and likewise its occupants. How Hollywood runs out of ideas astounds me.

     Amounting to 5 minutes maybe a mime resembling Dessie in a frightwig was overjoyed to see me. Then it was back to being obnoxiously foul, like a 3-day drunk coming down. Linda and her Woo-Woo Crew from Indiana showed, getting her worked up in an effort to get her out. With stupendous melodrama, Linda threw a fit Meryl Streep would hate her for. This, by the by, was mostly money motivated. Dad was Dessie's heir besides "Baby" Juanita. Linda was out to upstage and overthrow. Taking the lion's share from Mee-Mee and ME, Dad's written replacement, citing Mom's cruelty, who worked a full-time job in Intensive Care 45 minutes down the road unlike Elwanda's sister-in-law Rose, a nurse, 35 miles nearer. My mom did, as per usual, the best she knew to. Linda generously decided to move her mob into her "favorite wonderful aunt's" diminutive domicile to care-give. Dessie, speaking in silence said "bull-SHIT you will".

     Those Indianan Todds were chain-smoking single sister Carolyn, Jimmy, her salesman son with a hair transplant who tried hooking my mom a moment as those tasteless Todds cosigned that crap. Plus they lugged whatever woman off the turnstile Jim was set to lose while he showed off whatever he had, watch, boots, Scotch, or whatever else nobody cared about. Jimmy's sister Tina was a doll with a hubby Roger, and both had the good sense to keep away. Visiting once when I was four, Tina told me to add ketchup to scrambled eggs. Doing this deliciousness 53 years since, despite not seeing her about that long I recall her every time I squirt it there. Carolyn also had a daughter, Bobbi, whose wide form before our obesity outbreak, and over-blossomed "bosom" was gaggle-gossip even from sainted Dessie who'd never cop to such a charge. Linda's posse had adventures too, vacations to hot-spots like Hawaii and rolled in like the circus biannually 'til the funds from Mee-Mee's dead brother and bride dried up. Now Linda who rang up groceries like Mom once did looked like she was worried regularly.

     Three weeks beyond my bus-trip, Sister Dessie died. Prior to passing, her head cleared. Telling Mom she had no idea why she behaved as such, she also said something my mother needed said: "People forget us and sometimes don't do right, but not Betty! She never left us, did she, Juanita?". Which I'd rather have seen, Mom's getting awarded by the surrogate grandma who didn't gas herself, or the look on my miserable grandma's face, is a tough call. Hopefully Mee-Mee gave grace, sending Betty a spoken seconding. Quick and quiet nodding is which I'd bet on, though.

     Arlington's humble funeral home was packed to capacity. As would be expected all Pirtles present and accounted for. Ancient as he began, Renny looked like not a nanosecond passed despite a 15 year gap between spottings. Aunt Polly also, preserved perfectly down to her pantsuit. Elwanda was her typical tragic, this time finishing the service without a giggling fit unlike Stormin' Norman's when a preacher of questionable credentials blabbed 45 minutes about astrology, showcasing more spunk than I'd seen outside the day her daughter's dad drove then dropped her off a decade before.

     Lastly, Glow-Ruh was there with Barney, a Baptist co-congregation-ist and followup act after first hubby Tommy's time-bomb detonated once too often. Barney was a bearded blimp, grey under the chin, undoubtedly him Renny to her Pauline, rescuing Gloria with those two kids matching her grandma's premarital predicament. Their thing that day was Shaklee, a line of products I'd call Amway ripoffs if my provider hadn't sworn me off oxymorons. With them was a man one step over them on an pyramid undoubtedly rivaling the size of any on the Dark Continent. Why he attended this approaching-85-in-age lady's funeral still is unclear, other than to make everybody else there look like a wall at Halloween Express. Nothing appropriate was happening in my head upon seeing this blond, blue-eyed, built beautiful creature who charmed the brakes off me. I wouldn't sell my mama up the river for this man, but her sisters would be fucked. Gloria's hair was now a mane of rivulets, cascading to her shoulders. She was "packed tight", not fat, but not to mistake for thin, and wearing the style of the day, more or less. Smiling as always with a dazed but soft and gentle voice and affect. There's a love I have for her that's transcendental. In total I've spent under a week with her. There's something about blood. Her pain is mine too. What's broke, that breaks my heart to think of. Funny too because I barely know this woman.

     Thankfully the minister of this was a young guy who'd come to the teeny township lately. He saw what I did: victory. Someone who lived a long healthy life free of loud regrets. Nothing to mourn, this is a life celebration. For me, the Mecca, with a nice bonus check en route, too. Cute dude there to flirt with, good things around the bend, and I was feeling myself. Until that boy in a suit and tie talked about his piece of lemon icebox pie. In my head clear as a bell was the tin with the clear lid and red handle, piece of masking tape that read "Brent". Celebration called off when I awoke at the funeral for that tiny lady with the bent back. She tried with her might to love all the time, my top Bible verse from Jesus to his people before the execution he knows is coming, including Judas who betrays Him - "That ye love one another as I have loved you, that ye also love one another". Hiding my selfish face, sobbing into my hands, I split with barely a word said. To this day, I think about Dessie and my scant Arlington time often. For somebody around also quite little, her presence was felt a lot. She herself springs to mind my other favorite scripture: "Keep on loving one another as brothers and sisters. Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing so, some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing so."

     Polly passed not long after Dessie taking Renny with her, but left Elwanda behind. Luckily a pair of parishioners from that same congregation that bore Barney took the deserted daughter into their household. Exacting a time-tested therapeutic approach Polly hadn't the heart with her broken lamb, Elwanda was told "get up off that ass and get to workin', Girl". And so, Elwanda went on like Dessie and nutjob-who-lives-by-the-train-tracks big sis Argie, to draw pension from the Deena Lamp Factory of Arlington.

     Gloria and Barney split after 15 years, as it seemed he accused her of cheating. Mom ran into my cousin at Walmart, who sheepishly said "He was probably right". With incredulity, she also reported in 2022 as I talked tethered by a metal cord to a prison wall that Glo-Ruh was living with still-ticking Elwanda. This, despite Olympic-level chain-smoking putting the seasoned to shame. Mom after retirement from 25 years working ICU theorized those years of psychotropic-nullification wiped so much stress out, along with her responsibilities and culpability for so long she'd outlive everybody. This proved somewhat accurate far as I know because my beautiful, vibrant mother contracted a lung infection and died the next year.

     Hearing that news on the same style phone brought a feeling back from being 3, lost in a place called Wonder Market where she drove me twice a week before I started kindergarten to see the giant star in their parking lot. That day I ran screaming and crying, aware of what alone meant the first time ever. Keeping composure this time, had I not been in a building with 600 convicts my reaction would've matched.

     Hearing about Elwanda, hope springs eternal, and better living through chemistry, too. Maybe I'll take up housekeeping with those ladies upon release. We can swap horror stories, killing coffee and coffin nails. I must insist on a double-wide, though.