Angie Kinghorn

Call me

Blondie’s “Call Me” had been number 1 on the charts for over a month when she was born, so naturally her teenage parents named her Deborah, after Deborah Harry, the band’s lead singer.  Which would have been fine, except they started calling her Blondie while she was still in the hospital nursery, and once their friends got word of it, there was no stopping it.  It stuck.  For life.

That left her, a natural redhead, saddled with the moniker Blondie Abernathy.

Middle school was not fun.  When her high school contacted her begging for alumni money, she considered telling them she’d be happy to donate a plaque reading, “West Bolton High: Dante’s 7th Circle of Hell.”

Freshman year of college she tried to start over as Deborah, only to find out that after 18 years as a Blondie, she really wasn’t a Deborah, no matter what her birth certificate or driver’s license might say.  So she’d tried to color her hair blonde–a futile effort at matching her life to her name, but she couldn’t find a hairdresser willing to bleach her natural red.  “This is color women would kill for,” one of them explained.  “I just can’t do it.  It’s not right.”

And then something amazing happened: all those single guys out there remembered the redhead named Blondie.  One of them couldn’t seem to forget.  She stood out in a sea of blonde Melissas and Jens  and Amys, and waves of brunette Jills and Julies and Ashleys.

Halfway through her freshman year of college, Blondie had not only come to accept her nickname, but to embrace it.

Nobody could forget her and she could never hide in a crowd.

Even when she tried.

One night, 10 years after graduation, Blondie was ensconced in her favorite chair with a novel and a glass of Malbec.  The phone rang, and she picked it up without looking at the caller ID.  One of the perks of an unlisted number was not having to screen calls.

“Hello?”

“So you are in DC.  Did you really think I wouldn’t find out?”

The glass slipped from her fingers and shattered, red wine streaming across the floor like blood.

**This is a fiction post is for the online writers’ group Write On Edge.  The prompt: discover what song was number 1 on the charts in the United States, England or Australia the day you or your character was born, or any other special day in your/their life, if you prefer.

Listen to the song(s) and let it inspire you. In 300 words or less.

Mixed messages

Ever since I’ve started participating in iPhone Photo Phun, it’s like the craziness has come out of the woodwork, begging, “Take my picture and post it!  Puhleeze!!!”

And for some bizarre reason, for me, this craziness tends to come in the form of bumper stickers.  I cannot explain it.

Anyway, these are the gems I found this week.

 

You’d expect to see this kind of sticker on the Honda you drove in high school, covered in Grateful Dead bears and on its 10th owner, but not on a late model Acura.  I saw this one while driving, so of course I tailed the car to a stop sign and got a picture.  iPhone Photo Phun has me freaking out drivers all over metro Charlotte.  Seriously.  And yes, I tweeted it.  But not while driving, of course.

Next up:

Braking for moose.  Not all that much of a gem on its own, but let’s zoom out a bit, shall we?

 

Why, yes, that IS a McCain/Palin sticker above the “Brake for Moose” sticker.  Perhaps my memory is hazy, but I seem to recall Palin bragging in 2008 about being the only Presidential candidate who was able to field dress a moose.  I’m no hunter, but my understanding of field dressing is not that you put clothes on a moose in a field.  It’s more of a knife-wielding thing.

So what message are these two stickers sending?  I’m confused because first, you don’t get a lot of moose in North Carolina.  Assuming you were to encounter one, though, I think the owners of this minivan want you to slam on the brakes and swerve.

So they can get out and shoot it.

 

iPhone Photo Phun

Afterbirth

image source

The song still makes me tremble.

I’ve tried playing it in small doses to get used to it, musical allergy shots, if you will, but the violin pulls my heartstrings out and flays them bloody every time.

It was playing on my iPod when my mind and body, already bruised and fragile, cracked wide open like an egg.

Do you remember
When we thought we were immortal
And the games we played always had a happy end
But in the game of life all the roses wither
And time writes its lines upon your face *Vertical Horizon’s Lines Upon Your Face, from the album There and Back Again, 1992.

No part of me was whole as I sat there rocking back and forth in the darkened nursery letting the music pull every dark thing out of the deepest recesses of my head.  The memory of the traumatic birth was fresh, and I was literally being held together by threads.  The experience of birth brought forth thoughts of its twin, death, and the music unleashed images of my father in pain, coming to the hospital to meet his grandbabies the day before he started a clinical trial he hoped would buy him a few more months.  I was paralyzed with fear that his inevitable death would be as painful as my grandfather’s.  The babies were sleeping, and over the music in my earbuds I could hear the whooshing of the hospital grade breast pump as it sucked milk and life and joy itself from my cracked nipples.

It’s three A.M. and he’s been feeling lonely
Work’s been hard and the city’s hard too
He picks up the phone and halfway across the country
A brother listens to his blues he says *

With each verse another of the tiny fissures I’d sensed in my head since late pregnancy burst.  Darkness, terror, panic, dread, and despair flooded from them, covering me.

I didn’t understand.  This was why I started taking Wellbutrin again three weeks before the babies were born.  This wasn’t supposed to happen.  How could I fail motherhood as a novice when I had a safety net in place?

My body poured out more tears than milk, so many that my hands-free pump bra was soaked and I didn’t even bother to reach for a Kleenex.  I sat rocking in a stupor, letting the pump run long after my breasts were emptied.  The mental and physical pain melted together into something so red-hot, heavy, and sharp that it was all I could do to breathe.

Mark came in some time later and that’s how he found me.  In pieces.

He couldn’t put me back together.

I’m not sure you can ever put all the pieces back in the right place after postpartum depression.  Even if you eventually look whole from the outside, you’re forever changed by the damage.

Putting me back together took a psychiatrist using 450 mg of Wellbutrin XL and 300 mg of Zoloft, as well as Valium.  Then, when the panic attacks started, Xanex.  I went to one support group meeting for mothers of multiples with postpartum depression.  We talked about our meds.  Most of them were only on about 50 mg of Zoloft.  When I shared my medication regimen with them, they stared at me in mute horror, as if I would burst into a murderous or suicidal rage any minute.  I was the outcast in a group of broken women who all felt like outcasts.

I never went back again.

That meeting taught me that if any activity was causing me to crack further, it would only make things worse.  It was vital for my family and for me that I put myself back together.

What else did that take?  Weekly visits to my therapist and countless calls he was kind enough to take off duty, plus a husband who had known postpartum depression was a big risk but wanted to have children with me anyway.  A husband who knows I’m broken but loves me anyway.

Sometimes I wish
That we all were immortal
And the game of life always had a happy end
But I know it’s not true oh time keeps passing
But I’m just glad to spend my time
With you. *

*Vertical Horizon’s Lines Upon Your Face, from the album There and Back Again, 1992.

This was written for the online writers’ group Write on Edge.  The prompt: One person’s Humpty Dumpty is another person’s omelet. In 400 words or less, write about a time when something was irrecoverably broken and the ensuing scramble.  I’ve obviously exceeded the word limit, but sometimes your omelet turns out bigger than you planned.

What should really scare you about the election

Super Tuesday is upon us, folks.

Well, not here in North Carolina.  Here, we get to wait to vote until May while the rest of you duke it out and determine which candidates stay in the race.  Am I bitter about this?  Perhaps.  Enough to wish I lived in New Hampshire and were subject to a political siege every two years or so (because, let’s face it, election year lasts way more than a year in those early primary states)?  Definitely not.

At any rate, this primary race has been nothing short of spectacular people watching and fear mongering.  Some of it legitimate, some whipped up by other camps in the usual political fashion.

But I’m not going to talk about that.  Nope.

Ok, well, I’ll talk about it briefly.  Obviously if I’m concerned with primaries in an election year with an incumbent Democratic President, you can conclude that I’m a registered Republican.  You would be correct.

However, I’m not completely sold on any of the options available.  At all.  Romney’s plans for health care scare me, Santorum’s views on women’s reproductive issues make me want to deliver a good old-fashioned metaphorical (you hear me, Secret Service? METAPHORICAL!!!) throat-punch to his sweater-vested self, and IMHO, Gingrich is un-electable in a general election.  Ron Paul doesn’t even deserve mention.

And being a fiscal conservative, I’m not an Obama fan.

So while we bide our time until the convention, let me tell you what should really frighten you: your electorate.**

Having spent the past 5 years largely in the company of people who only talk to me in monosyllables and shrieks, I’ve been people watching (and listening) more intently than usual.  My conclusion is that you should have the heebie jeebies about the people who will be flocking to the polls.

 

 Meet your electorate

 

Pickles

One sunny day Mark and I had a fast food craving and hit the drive-thru at Wendy’s.  We had all our windows down and were enjoying the sunshine.  We paid for our order and had to wait for it to be prepared.  In the meantime, sitting there at the window, we could hear the guy in the car behind us as he placed his order.

“Uh, yeah, I’d like two hamburgers, two fries, and a single with cheese, eighty-six the pickles.”

The girl working the register asked him to repeat his order, which he did.  Then she turned and shouted into the kitchen, “Tanya!  Some fool out here wants 86 pickles on his burger!”

“What?” Tanya yelled back.

“I SAID, some fool out here wants 86 pickles on his burger.”

“I don’t even know if we have 86 pickles.”

Mark and I were shaking with laughter, trying desperately not to look in the window.

“Should I tell her?”  I hissed to him.

“No!” he whispered.  “No way!”

Inside, register girl kept yelling at Tanya.  “I mean, why’s he got to have 86 pickles?  Why not 85?  Why not 80?  Does he really want us to count out 86 pickles?”

Tanya hollered back, “I’m not counting out 86 pickles.  I’ll just give him all we got.”

I bet they vote.

 

 The GI bug

Recently, when I was sitting in a doctor’s office waiting room, I found myself near a woman and her daughter.  The woman was leafing through a medical magazine and they were idly chatting, but she caught my attention when I heard her ask her daughter,  “Hey, do you know what a GI bug is?”

“A GI bug?  You mean like GI Joe?”

“Yeah, see, that’s what I thought.  Somebody told me the other day Sammy had the GI bug and I thought that was strange, because Sammy ain’t in the army, so he go gettin a soldier bug?  But it turns out that the GI bug is just a stomach bug!”

The daughter looked perplexed. “Why’d they call it that, then?”

“I don’t know.  Damn stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” the mother responded.

 

 My autopsy

My father practised oral surgery for many years, and he always had a great story to tell.  The one that’s stuck with me the most, though, is when his secretary came into his office one day and said, laughing so hard she could barely speak, “Mr. Smith just called.  He said he needs to cancel his autopsy for tomorrow.”

My father, ever the pragmatist, said, “Well, what did you tell him?”

“I told him we’d be happy to reschedule his biopsy when it was more convenient.”

 

The scary thing is that there are plenty more where these stories came from.

So I’d like to know: what do you think of our electorate?  Has anybody given you 86 pickles on your burger recently?