Thanksgiving … 5 Years Later
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
