My whole house smells like pies. Like the magic of flour, butter and food processor performed by my lovely little kitchen alchemist. For those of you fortunate enough to have eaten her food, feel free to envy me, and stop by for pie tomorrow if you're out and about. For those of you who are not so lucky, you have my sincere sympathy.

What am I cooking? All that stuff tomorrow. Bird, stuffing, spuds. Today I just cleaned the oven so we can avoid the flambe of years past. Avoiding the flambe of last year is the most important item on the agenda, and to that effect the guest list has been trimmed to just people I want to see. Not people I have to accommodate, apologize for, etc. Occasionally I flash back on the Thanksgiving that was so wretched that I actually left my own home for a couple of hours. I'm not ever doing that again.

It's been a stupid year. It started with maddening stupidity in November, and continued through my brother's failing kidneys, my downsizing, general despair, anger and hopelessness. At some point when I wasn't looking, it all started to resolve.

I got my job back, better than before. I am very thankful for that.

Kids made me proud over and over all year long, all three of them earning degrees and honors and awards, which is fantastic but really, it's who they are that really makes me proud. They are intelligent, kind, determined, beautiful, talented, hilarious young women. I am thankful for what they do, but I am more thankful for who they are. I lucked out in the kid department, somehow I have everything I could have ever wanted in my daughters, and I am profoundly thankful for that.

My brother made it through a day of surgery that started at 8 AM and ended at 5:45 PM, leaving him gastrically rearranged and shy one kidney. But despite cancer and dialysis and against all odds, my brother is here, strangely skinny but undeniably vital, laughing and connected, the lines of illness erased from his improbably youthful face. What can I say? How do I even begin to express my thankfulness for that?

I have a deep and abiding gratitude for my life. For the circumstances of where and how I live, this lovely house in this great city, and everything that goes on which makes this possible. I am profoundly grateful for the people in this life who love me, and who accept my fierce blasts of love when fired off in their direction.

I am thankful for all of it, for every minute of frustration and every trill of laughter. Happy Thanksgiving.

I was older when my niece was born than my mom was when my oldest daughter was born. Mom was 45 when she became a grandmother. I was almost 47 when I became an aunt. Not an aunt for the first time; my nephew was born when I was in my late twenties. But being an aunt to him has been fraught with guilt, frustration, and the difficulty of maintaining a normal relationship with a crazy part of the family. I tried (not hard enough) and I failed (spectacularly) to build a close bond with him.

I don't think this is going to be a problem with my niece.

She's a long little one, 99th percentile for height, 25th for weight, long-legged and narrow-bodied. My kids were always armfuls. Lifting my niece is like lifting a bird--one readies oneself to lift and finds that the burden has no heft to it. She flies up onto my hip. Her face is impish, snub-nosed like my little brother's, with brown eyes and long wavy brown hair all streaked with gold. Oh, and she loves to talk and laugh. "We have circle time at my new school, Auntie Karen." "And what do you do at circle time?" "We sing songs and have sharing." "Does the teacher sit on the floor or a chair?" "On the floor." Does this sound riveting to you? I guarantee you, it's riveting to me.

We have enjoyed our times together. Usually when she comes to visit, there's a baby trap set...a special snack and drink on the antique school desk from South Dakota that's been in the family for generations, sometimes a little toy. Today it was a stuffed horse. She looks for that baby trap, she knows there's going to be something. Once they dropped by without any warning and she came in and looked around, a smile on her face. She sort of did this funny, exaggerated walk like she was hunting things down, and said, "Where's my Happy Birthday? Where's my Easter Candy? Where's my present?"

I might be spoiling her just a little.

We play with the rubber animals I saved in my "someday I'll be a grandma" box, and I read her a lot of books. She's fond of rhymes, which is delightful to me, that she'll patiently listen to the archaic rhymes in the stacks of old books from not just my girls' childhoods, but from mine. You know how some kids are hard to have in your lap, or next to you? Squirmy and poky or heavy and awkward. Not my niece. She just settles in like a kitten and listens to me read, and points and laughs and repeats the best of it. We draw pictures. We take walks. We watch Thomas and Yo Gabba Gabba. We go to the store. She is amazed that I can drive for some reason. "Auntie Karen, you're driving!!!" We hang out in the bathroom while she accomplishes important business in there. That's fine, I have all day, whatever it takes.

She loves my gigantic bed, and is always trying to get me to go lie down in it with her. "Auntie, I want you to lay in the big bed with me and tell a story." So we go in there and she climbs up via the old steamer trunk at the foot of the bed and steps across the big fluffy duvet and throws herself down in the piles of pillows, pretending that the round gold pillows are giant cookies, (g bites!) arranging small divans of brocade and satin and silk, settling in to hear the stories of Peekaboo Kitten. Haven't you heard of Peekaboo Kitten? That Peekaboo Kitten is naughty. Maybe someday we will share the ever-growing epic that is the adventures of Peekaboo Kitten and her little friend Mousekin, but for now it's a story that only the two of us know about. Her favorite part is when Peekaboo Kitten has gotten herself hopelessly entangled in some mischief and here comes Mom Cat to rescue her naughty little kitten and scold her and straighten her out and take her back home where she can have some milk and clean her whiskers. No matter how crazy it gets, Mom Cat always makes it right.

Today, she took a long nap and I cleaned the kitchen, and as always, when she woke up she was happy to see me. We cuddled on the couch and watched some Thomas together, and then her mom and dad and sister came back. They'd been at a matinee, and she was not happy to see them. She's never happy to see them when it means goign home. "You said two hours!" she wails, even when she's been here for five. It is really really hard to go. But she put on her funny hat, and we talked about the next time she'll be here, and what we have to look forward to in the next couple of months. Christmas trees and Thanksgiving and all that. Uncle Steve has written a Baby Tiger song and we're all looking forward to hearing/learning/singing that over Thanksgiving. Lots of things to look forward to, no need to be sad about going home.

Sometimes, when she's leaving and saying good-bye, she puts her arms around me and asks me to "come with." Oh my. My heart, my heart.

At a computer class today, during break, I was thinking the guy sitting in front of me was trying to see what book I was reading.

Then I decided he was just transfixed by the beauty of my bookmark.

Which was a Breath-right (snore strip) wrapper.

Sexy times, that's me.

Watching Mad Men, I can't help but think about at time when identity was something you could escape. I'm also working on a story set in the seventies, when this was still the case. You could live and work under an assumed name, you could open a bank account without a social security number, there wasn't a net oc computers connecting every city, county, state police database. In fact there was no such thing as a database, not for any practical purpose. I have watched this all come into being in my lifetime. It is so pervasive that even though I was alive, sentient and working when it was different, I have a hard time remembering that.

I used to work in the records department of the medical school here in Portland. I was a file clerk. I made, I think, 3.36 an hour. The office was the old Oregon Telco building, which is no longer called the Telco building, and it sat across the street from the downtown Denny's, which is no longer the downtown Denny's. I was part of a battalion of women (and one creepy dude) who retrieved and returned file folders, all day long. This office concerned itself with billing, and the people who worked on the billing issues would fill out a large card with the name and file number of the case, and bring their stacks to the central file area, and hope for the best. We'd take stacks of these big cards into the aisles an aisles of files, and use those cards as placeholders when we pulled the files. Then we'd put the files in stacks in a certain place, and the requesters would come take them away and sit at desks and analyze all those pieces of paper, using calculators and graphs and  charts, taking notes, making phone calls and writing letters. This seems so unbearably quaint to me, now. They should have been wearing green shade eye visors and sleeve garters, and typing on big manual typewriters that dinged at the end of the line and required pulling back that big chromed lever for the return bar. Then they'd bring the files back, and some of these folders were eight inches tall, and we'd put them away.

There were two types of women who worked as file clerks. There were young women who had a lot of boyfriend troubles. I was one of those. And there were women in their forties, or "old women" as I called them back then," who were returning to the workforce. Women named Patsy and Jane and Lucy. We were all supplied by temp agencies, and overseen by a ghastly woman in her fifties named Pauline who wore her hair up in a beehive. In 1980. And she was not a fan of the B52s. Pauline despised me. I was bored out of my mind at that job. I'd draw pictures on the request cards, assign alternative identies to all the other file clerks, organize drinking lunches. There just wasn't enough there for me, if you know what I mean.

There was one special function you could perform, which was to be the file clerk on call. That meant if one of the people out in the office needed a file right at that moment, he or she could come to the edge of the files and call your name. We all took turns. And you'd stop what you were doing and take the request and go find the file right at that moment. A woman named Jane worked there, and on the days she was clerk on call, whenever someone stepped to the edge of our world and called "Jane," that Starship song would erupt in my brain thanks to my musical OCD. "Jane, you're playing a game, you never can win girl. JANE, Jane. JANE. Janie Janie Janie Jaaaaane." Yes, I hear it now, and it makes me want to tear my ears off.

What's my point? I always have a point, don't I? My point is that those file were filed by case numbers, and those case numbers were assigned by when the patient first sought treatment. Seriously.  Those files, believe it or not, didn't have the social security numbers of the patients being treated. In 1980, that wasn't part of the deal. This had changed by the time we were up there in 82 to get our daughter's medical stuff sorted out... she was assigned a case number using a computer. But she still didn't have to have a SS number to be treated.

Everyone is so afraid of identity theft now, thanks to computers, ss numbers and centralization. Yes, it's a concern. But can you even begin to understand the capacity for identity fraud that existed before computers? You could re-invent yourself. You could go somewhere else and live out your life with absolutely no one the wiser. What freedom was offered back then, the freedom of a fluid identity. Yes, it was often criminals eluding capture, I know that, it was the bad guys taking advantage of this. But those were old-school criminals... bank robbers and revenge killers, not the modern criminal, which seems to mostly be a sex offender who sets up shop in a new neighborhood because no one cares enough to lock him away. No, these were a different breed, the men and women who had graduated from the school of "hard knocks," who wanted a "fresh start," who moved out west and grew mustaches and wore hats and took up cattle punching or bartending. Their personal histories had a drop-off, like a Minnesota lake, a point beyond which things were a deep and cold and best avoided in polite conversation.

This, at least, is how I imagine it. I'm trying to imagine it right now for a story, and even though the man I'm writing about is frightening, I love this idea, this Don Draper feeling I get, that oh my god, this man is living as a stranger from his original self. What would that be like? To not live as yourself. I love that movie, "Catch Me if You Can." I have watched it three times and each time, I think, yes. This is how it should be. If your mind is this crooked and resourceful, then you should be able to live like this, you should be able to walk up and out of the mundane and live like a superstar, pretending to be a doctor and having multiple wives and all that before you're 25. I watched "Public Enemies" and tried to understand a world in which a criminal would be safe if he reached a state line. Sometimes he only had to reach a county line. A county line. I could rob a neighborhood bank and be safe if I made it over to Portland city limits, because then I'd be in Multnomah county. And where would I go? I already live way out west. And this is what the west looks like. I guess I would hide out in a Stumptown coffee shop, drinking lattes made from ethically harvested coffee beans until things cooled down back here in Tigard. Powell's would be full of desperados.

No, instantaneous communication has wrecked all that. it's a miracle, but it's a burden. No one can slip the traces of who they are.

Dear Reverend Al,

I won these tickets from KINK a few months ago. I know it won't mend your broken heart to hear this. I know you think we ought to stay together. But thanks to you, Craigslist and a guy who met me at Backspace with a hundred dollars cash, I'm now a much richer person. Perhaps not as rich as I would have been after an evening spent in your honeyvoiced, soulful company, but still. It's cash.

Plus it's raining and the concert was at Edgefield.

I'm just saying, Reverend Al.

Love from a true believer,

Karindira

...I have finally gotten my hands on a copy of The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You.

I'm expecting it to have much in common with the video posted below.

Today, there was an overwhelming hot funk in that room, and a big puddle of water on the black-painted floor in front of the sink, with bare footprints leading away from it. This means one thing and one thing only.  A quick turn at the sink to refresh the girl-business. In other words, a ho-bath.

And people accuse me of overreacting to the horror that is THE BATHROOM OF THE FAT STRAW!!

ETA: says Felicity: "It does have a certain Barton Finkishness."

You Are Minestrone

You are a spontaneous person. You don't make or follow rules. You just go with your gut. You're eager to go wherever life takes you. If something doesn't work out, at least you've learned. Nutrition and eating healthy is very important to you. You eat your veggies. That being said, you're not a picky eater. You like all foods.

I nominate this as most stupid blog quiz of all time.

I can't stop laughing. I hope you'll all take it.

If you do, I'll never stop laughing.

COME ON PEOPLE. WHAT KIND OF SOUP ARE YOU.

So, I don't like hyped books, I get tired of reading commerically successful women's literature in one of my book groups, I was irritated because they sent all the notices for the last meeting to an email address I haven't used in five years for some reason so I missed it, and they picked Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout and I thought, yeah right whatever, isn't this book available at Costco and wasn't it an Oprah book?

It's FANTASTIC. INSPIRING. FUCKING WONDERFUL. FABTASTICRATIONWONUCKSPIRING.

I tell you.

Today, it's made creepier by the following:

A fan that rattles as loud as a helicopter prop, with a squeak.
Additional dust on the baseboards. At least, I hope it's dust.
My noticing that I'm so tall that I can't see my face in the mirror over the old vanity in the anteroom. I AM DECAPITATED!!

...Youngest got her driver's license today.

I am most proud. Not at all terrified. Probably in denial. And delighted to no longer have to drive her around, since her dad has provided a car.

www.crappytaxidermy.com

One hardly know what to say. But really, the photos say it all!

It seriously makes me feel vaguely violated to go in there. The pea soup wall color, the way the toilet faces the other wall in a violation of every rule of potty feng shui, the way that badly painted black vanity with the missing knob jams up against the wall, the gross carpet, the empty soap bottle, the icky bathroom garbage that's overflowing.

I think someone was MURDERED there.