Sometimes I start to describe a sad detail about my mother here but then change my mind because I am self-conscious about sounding like I think I have the market cornered on tragedy. Or on a certain type of misery, I should say -- the type of misery that so clearly interests me -- mother/daughter sadness and things that concern addiction. Also, I'm trying to save my details for the larger piece I'm working on these days. Last night I had a very vivid dream though, that a friend trained peacocks to leap impossibly high in the air and dance around on the spot where, in the dream, my Mom had died, a park that looked like Huntington Gardens, where we sometimes went. It was a beautiful dream that had me thinking extra-hard about her this morning and I remembered something that gave me an acute pang of sadness (and then a dull acceptance of how fucked up real life can be). I remembered how towards the end of her life, when I'd stopped picking on her al...