Stuck in the ’70s — It’s About Time You Came Back!

Once upon a time, there was a Mom who was only 45 years old. She bore two sons.

The Mom spent every moment of every waking day for 20 years tending to her two sons. The world revolved around them, and rightly so.

Then came Thanksgiving, way back in ’08. It was unusually warm and clear. The oldest boy had been out of Mom’s home for almost two years now; the youngest sentenced to solitary confinement at a poor public school in Memphis.

Mom didn’t know what to do. She was beside herself. She knew that Thanksgiving was coming. There was no stopping it. Black Friday was upon us and the work hours sucked. The Macy’s Parade was about to begin. There were no sons present.

The furnace kicked on, which meant it was less than 60 degrees in the house. Diablo el Gato insisted upon some attention. He clawed at the Mom’s wrist, pulling it to his neck and forcing her to scratch him.

It was almost 7 a.m. The parade was going to start. The Mom’s head felt heavy. The Old Man, behind the scenes till now, stirred like the Cracken.

Mom finally threw up the covers around 7:10 a.m. and aimed that remote at “Good Morning America.” What? The only two networks covering the parade were CBS and NBC. Used to be CBS had the parades from Philly, Detroit and Honalulu. Meanwhile, NBC would always stop the damn parade and feature some singing routine from the latest Broadway musical.

Now … that’s all we got. Mom was dismayed. The Cracken was disturbed.

Thanksgiving had officially kicked off, unbeknownst to the Hawkins Street crew. Mom grabbed the cell phone and called that oldest son. “Hull-Oh?” he said.

“Did I wake you?” the Mom inquired.

“I worked late and I’ve got to go in early,” mumbled the Golden Child.

“You work till what?” the Mom asked.

“4,” replied Goldilocks.

“Then you’re going to Memphis?”

“Yes. I’ll call you after work on my way to Dad’s.”

“Don’t you call me in the traffic. You call me when you get there,” said the Mom.

“OK”
The Youngest Son phones up his Mum.

“Hey,” says he. “What you doin’?”

The Mom is saddened things didn’t work out, and the Youngest Son didn’t get to come home over for Thanksgiving.

“We’re on our way to Grandpa’s,” she says, trying to disguise her emotion. “We’ll do it next year. How’d it work out with those Asian chicks? The ones who have wheels?”

“I think I’ll meet them for Black Friday at the Galleria. There’s people all over Macy’s spraying shit on you and hitting you in the face with powder puffs.”

“Sounds good to me,” says the Mom, enthusiastically. “You check out those sales for me. Are you eating?”

“No, we’re still waiting on Vincent,” the Mom understands through the mumbles. “He went back to sleep because he had overtime, and now he’s holding us up.”

Life is good for the Mom. The Mom spent the day before Thanksgiving riding down to Pine Bluff to visit the Mom-in-Law and Sis-in-Law and taking the scenic route home. Now, on Thanksgiving, she got to visit with Dad and Brother – and take the scenic route home.

The Mom realizes things were perfect for Thanksgiving. Like it’s not been within recent memory. It’s been at least 5 years, but definitely more. It’s been since before 1997 when Mike came to visit the Ozarks for Thanksgiving.

The parade offers lots of new balloons. They’re recycling helium. Ridiculous. There are numerous teen-age singers and boy bands. They all sound exactly the same.

It’s the First Childless Thanksgiving. Let us give thanks for that.

Julie
20:35 11/27/08

Howdy,

We’ve come up with a fun new Thanksgiving tradition. I got the idea from my favorite British comedian, Ricky Gervais, who has the funniest blog on the internet. Take a picture of yourself looking surprised.

We put the digital camera on a tripod, put it on self timer and hit the shutter release, with 10 seconds counting down to look surprised.

Attached are the results. I did my own first. When I got back from the bathroom, I set the tripod up for Don to do his. After I changed my drawers, we went to Mountain View where Dad donated his surprised expression. Mike topped it all off with the funniest yet. Then, we went back to Batesville with a plate for Don’s friend, Aurby. I twisted his arm, and the results are priceless.

Let me know what you think. I’m gonna put them on my blog, and please send me your pictures of you looking surprised.

Happy Holidays!
Julie

I can’t believe it’s almost Thanksgiving. And how much has changed in the past five years.

Sunday, Nov. 23, 2003, my mother, Earlene Marie Biddison Fidler, passed away. Now, I know as a journalist, we don’t normally use the phrase “passed away.” It’s not AP style. People die. But, I can’t bring myself to word it like that.

Like this coming Sunday, Nov. 23, 2008, it was the weekend before Thanksgiving. Mom was really ill, and although I knew she wouldn’t feel like eating turkey and all the trimmings, let alone cooking the whole mess, I said I’d be over early Thanksgiving morning to cook up something small, and we’d have Thanksgiving. Instead, we had a funeral the day before.

A whole lot has gone down in these past five years, not all good, and thank God, not all bad.

Used to, I published The Fidler Forum. It started out as a Christmas newsletter, snail mailed (before e-mail) to all the family and friends. Then, it grew into a quarterly and monthly publication, complete with contributing writers across the country. Mom wrote a column, “Mom’s Corner,” for many of the editions, especially around the holidays. I’ll be featuring a couple of those here in the coming month. My friend, Jill Reed, hung onto her copies of the Forum, and snail mailed me the columns, which I had misplaced. Thanks, Jill!

What all has happened since then … Let me ponder aloud chronologically.

2003 — At the same time I lost Mom, I hooked up with someone with whom I was entirely incompatible. Everyone saw it but me. I was in some sort of vacuum-like shock. I knew I had to marry the guy, because that’s what I thought Mom would want, rather than me “shacking up.”

We struggled through the holidays, not really observing any of them.

2004 — I married the doofus on May Day. One of my dad’s brothers ended his own life the next day. I quit a good-paying job I hated for one more likable that didn’t pay and wouldn’t last. That September, Dad was diagnosed with bladder cancer. Things got even worse in the marriage, and I tossed him out in December and filed for divorce. Dad recovered from a surgery that removed his bladder and various other nearby organs.

2005 — My brother, Mike, came to Arkansas in February and moved in with Dad to help him around the place. In June, I went from the low-paying job to take a job as an “appliance specialist” at the local home improvement center being built in town. I met “the paint guy” and fell in love. I’d never met anyone like him. My divorce was final in July and his in October. We began seeing each other just before Thanksgiving and dated through the holidays.

2006 — In January, the paint guy and I decided to “enter into an official partnership.” He moved in, and we agreed we couldn’t imagine being with anyone else. For Valentine’s Day, he tattooed my name and a tribal design on his arm, wiping out the name of a former partner. In April, I flew to Florida for a job interview for a copy editor’s spot at a newspaper where my friend Sarah works. They offered me the job. After weighing out what it would mean to take the job — uprooting my two teen-age sons and moving them 1,000 miles, leaving my dad and brothers behind and forcing my man to find a job in Florida, a place I was not familiar with — versus the amount they were willing to pay me and the cost of living in that state, I decided against it. I got Don’s name tattooed over the heart above my left breast.

After that, I made a huge mistake and took a job with a small trader paper that was just trying to get off the ground. That didn’t work out, and I was jobless from August until November when I took a minimum wage part-time holiday job at JCPenney hanging clothes on racks before dawn each day. Just before Christmas, I was lucky enough to get hired back at the home improvement place in the same position I held before.

While I was working at Penney’s, just before Thanksgiving, I got a call from someone at the home center, saying my man had been taken to the emergency room. They thought he’d had a stroke. Ended up, it was an aneurysm, just behind his eye. We went to Little Rock a few days before Christmas for brain surgery. Again, we made it through the holidays.

2007 — That year, we prepared for my oldest son to graduate from high school. However, I didn’t get to see the ceremony because my youngest son broke his arm the afternoon of the graduation and spent the whole evening in the ER. That summer, we helped Number One Son move to the college campus and said goodbye. The old man and I got to know each other better. The rest of the year was fairly uneventful, but far from prosperous.

2008 — In April, I went for a big job interview in Springfield, Mo. I blew them away. I was under the impression I had the position. I was sorely mistaken. Mike and Don (the brother and the man) worked their feathers off fixing up the house while I packed boxes in preparation for the big move. I let the cat out of the bag at my current job because I was so excited. And it didn’t happen. In May, we bid farewell to my youngest son, who was moving to Memphis to live with his dad and stepmother to finish out his high school years. He’d been having a lot of trouble in the school system here. That made it awful quiet around here, and I began suffering from what I call “premature empty nest syndrome.” Then, the bone spur on my right heel became more and more unbearable to where I couldn’t function properly. The doc called for surgery, and I spent July 15-Aug. 24 on my couch, unable to do for myself. Thank goodness I had Don & my buddies, Sherrie and Cynthia. Toward the end of that six weeks, we took a fun float trip on the river. In July, I signed away all of my parental rights to Son Number Two. A few days after I went back to work, we got a phone call that my sister-in-law had, age 51, died on Labor Day evening. That couldn’t be right. But true.

Mike, Dad and I went up to Illinois to comfort Bob and remember Shar for a couple days. We brought Bob back down here for a week and had a nice time. The day Bob left, Dad started having irregular heartbeats. One week later, he was having open heart surgery in Little Rock, and I was missing work again.

It’s been a rough fall, and this brings us full circle. But wait, it gets better. On Nov. 10, the old man and I observed what I refer to as our third “anniversary.” That is to say, on Nov. 10, 2005, we had what I like to refer to as “our first date.” What that means is, he came over to my house that night and watched my DVD of “Napoleon Dynamite.” Gosh! Earlier this week, we were told Don has been chosen for the promotion to supervisor over the contractor services desk. All right. Way to go, mate. I’m so proud of my man. Now, I’m shacking up, and even Mom thinks it’s OK.

So, back to Thanksgiving. They’ve been pretty rough since Mom’s passing. But, I can see the light, and it’s fixin’ to get a lot better, man!

Have a nice day,
Julie M. Fidler
Nov. 20, 2008
17:55

Getting ready for work … day 3 of 8 in a row. Dad is doing really well. He’s out of the hospital and even able to walk down to the mailbox and back on a good day.

Thanks for all your nice comments. Don’t mean to be such a downer at times. Things are good now, and I’ll write again soon.

Julie
10:39 11/14/08

Wow. President Obama. Now I can come out of the closet here in the south. I dared not speak his name amongst my peers for fear of being ridiculed. Now, we can all move forward.

Julie 12:22 11/4/08