Well this just sucks. I don't even know what happened but the past week and a half I'm like a cat that someone put cat repellent on. I'm utterly sick of myself but I wont go away and leave me alone. Its very frustrating. Even the expression on my face is irritating. Like a smashed asshole.
I am blaming my hair.
Its nice to have something to blame other than my self and my assholey face. My hair. It has had a distinct personality for as long as I can remember. I think it started to really get out there and do its own thing quite young. It was rebelling, and rightfully so, from my Mother's afro puffs on the top of my head and my Grandmother's copious amounts of spit to make kiss curls on my cheeks.
They even had a poem.
There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good
She was very very good
But when she was bad
She was horrid.
Blatthhhhh. Still makes me gag.
Those two are a great pair. Some of my most hilarious memories are of humiliations at their hands. Over the top stuff like dressing your half breed daughter like a squaw straight out of central casting, feather in the back of my head and all, for Halloween. Mom made the whole thing herself out of brown polyester, beads and construction paper. That's love.
She also made me a Micky Mouse cake for a birthday and painstakingly used icing and pointillism to make his face. I rewarded her by putting on my pajamas and refusing to participate. It was passive aggressive retribution for the poem.
My Nanny is a classic. She's done it all with humour and tons of love and fun and is adored by everyone she's ever met. Her sisters, also fantastic. Her children, ditto. There was a great big white and gold mirrored bar in the rumpus room. She took sly joy in serving Sex in a Pan at her Tupperware parties.
She would have been in heaven if one of her girls even tried out for Miss Canada. She swears up and down my Papa's weird dog Spunky was part chihuahua and part fox. Who's the daddy there? I was always fascinated by that mating.
She also loved nothing more than to see me perform. She would put the tape recorder over her shoulder and chase me around with the microphone urging me to sing. Oddly suggestive 1940's "standards" such as Kiss Me Goodnight Sergeant Major.
Some days I was more cooperative than others. I clearly remember obliging and even doing a little dance but the performance on tape involves begging & pleading on Nanny's part and muffled yet violent refusal from inside a closet on mine.
The happy chaos and over all festive atmosphere was great to live in. The more I think about it these episodes were key to my ability to laugh at myself and just about everything else. Some of my earliest memories are fart jokes in Nanny's kitchen.
Even in the face of family tragedy I never recall an absence of laughter. I remember being aware of loss and illness and some other adult goings on but I would never have assessed our family as anything but happy.
Odd, but very happy. To this day we are ecstatic to be around each other. We can go from hysterical laughter to moments of profound shared grief. We always start laughing very soon after. It seems so easy to pick something out of the tragic that is worth celebrating when we are all together.
Maybe my Nanny was able to transfer some of her party spirit into us with her spit. She used it on all of us for whatever reason, right down to the great grand babies. Its pretty potent stuff that Nanny spit. I would not doubt it has magical properties.
One thing for sure, it has probably been about twenty-eight years since she put a kiss curl on my face but let me tell you I have never used a styling product with hold like that.
I should bottle some for hair induced blue balls. Maybe then I could at least look good when I'm bored and cranky instead of like a bumhole with a fro.
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