sweetheart redux

Hello! Here is the first chapter of a long short story or short novella I wrote. Wild Animals She was mine and I was hers Gambled hard and split the purse A patient and her patient nurse She was mine and I was hers       1 Wild Animal Some of the damage caused by my mother, Gloria, scorched the earth, and sometimes those who adored her wished we’d never known her, wished we’d never even been born.  I adored her, but to adore her, one had to figuratively roll one’s eyes at about half her declarations, especially when they were slurred.  One had to figuratively shrug one’s shoulders in a gesture like “That’s our Gloria,” though only in response to a benign destruction.  Only when she was just telling white lies or asking to borrow money while joking that she’d never pay it back. “I never, ever imagined myself with kids,” she said once.  “I know, you hate it when I talk about having you -- you think I sound too object...

I work exactly across the street from the school I attended in Kindergarten and First Grade.  Another biographical fact is that I used to live with my mom in Pasadena on the weekends, and with my dad and Stepmom on the Westside the rest of the week.  Mom was poor so I lived poor on the weekends too, giving “You wanna start something?!” scowls at people in line at the grocery store who sighed exaggeratedly as she fished out wads of food stamps from her pockets.  The rest of the week, when I was middle class, and happened to be in a grocery store, I always made sure not to scowl at people in front of me in line  when the fished out wads of food stamps from their pockets; I always tried to make it seem that I wasn't noticing anything. Some people think it’s nice to go out of their was to smile and fuss over someone who is feeling embarrassed, but I usually find it's kinder just to act like whatever disaster they’re undergoing is the most natural thing in th...

Everyone I’ve ever spoken to about the movie Wizard of Oz feels like they own it to some degree, like it is an artifact from only their own childhood.   For my own part, when I was a kid, the Wizard of Oz used to air on network TV once a year and it used to happen near my birthday, so it was a birthday tradition for me, my mom and her two best friends named Bill (Young Bill and Old Bill) to watch it together on TV as part of my birthday celebration.   This is a particularly poignant memory for me because I loved both Bills, and one I haven’t seen in years and am unable to track down on the internet, and the other one died of cancer in my mom’s house a few years ago, and also, of course my mom and I can't regain the closeness we used to have when I was young enough to get excited over the big deal a network station (I forget which one) made about showing Wizard of Oz.   So this memory of watching Wizard of Oz with them every year is one of those painful poignant stabb...