Personally, I would have stabbed somebody if I couldn’t take my little ones to story hour when I lived in Chesaning. On purpose. I would have deliberated and planned it and then done it. And a jury of my peers would have said, “That seems reasonable.”  I’m not suggesting that people get stabby, but I am suggesting that they call their township supervisor and harass yell at cry at let them know that it’s quite ok if they put this issue up for a vote so you all can decide if you want to pay less than 1 mil on your tax bill in order to have a FRICKIN’ LIBRARY. It’s a library. It seems like a no-brainer.

Oh, look! A list of township supervisors. With phone numbers and addresses! Just for you:

Albee Township Supervisor: Leon Turnwald (989) 770-4387  3395 W. Birch Run Rd., Burt MI 48417

Brady Supervisor: Ron Gasper (989) 845-3450  16172 Baldwin, Chesaning MI 48616

Maple Grove: Kevin M. Krupp (989) 845-6789 6352 Ditch Rd., Chesaning MI 48616

Edited to add: I forgot about New Haven! (thanks, Aunt Angie) New Haven Township Supervisor – Don Dickinson – 989-729-1043

Chesaning  and Chapin are both in support of the library, so send these guys some chocolate. Or your panties, whichever you think they’ll appreciate more. Bob Corrin used to be my neighbor. I don’t think he’d want your panties, but you never know. People change and I’ve been gone a long time.

Chesaning: Robert Corrin 429 S. Chapman St., Chesaning MI 48616

Chapin: Robb C. Maynard 19650 Fenmore, Elsie MI 48831

And to the school board members and township supervisors who are against even putting it on the ballot, this is what people say about  your town behind your back, and it’s all your fault:

h/t for the video goes to my friend Schmarol (not her real name because she might not want me to mention her in this post).

I’m busy and maybe I’m still in mourning. I don’t know. I paint stuff and take the kids to the pool and think about Michael Jackson and Walter Cronkite and run and play variations of hide-and-seek, but blogging hasn’t been on my to-do list.

We’re heading to Michigan today (not Cluck & Tweet’s Michigan, but still). My sister and I will beat my my nephew’s girlfriend and my niece in tennis on Saturday morning and then we’ll spend the rest of the day gloating about that while the kids swim in the pond and play with their cousin Riley. Sunday, there will be an Aldrich family reunion, and then a childless trip home as the kids are staying a few days in order to camp with my inlaws. What will we do with no children? Paint, of course. I’m going to paint 14 hours a day for 3 days. I hope I finish the whole house. After  my 14 hours of painting, Bryan and I will eat at restaurants and maybe go to Zoombezi Bay one night. Who knows? We’re crazy kids, we could do anything! ANYTHING! As long as the painting gets done, I mean. The painting must get done. I will miss the children because they rock, but they’ll be in good hands and they’ll still rock when they get back. And the walls will be painted. Yay!

Oh, and new toilet! Monday! Plumber!

As usual, don’t break in while we’re gone and make sure you cry because you miss us. If you could videotape yourself crying and post it on Youtube, that would be a bonus. I’ll give you bonus points. (You didn’t know I’ve been giving you all points all this time? I won’t take away any points for that).

My first concert. My first bedroom poster. My first celebrity letter-writing experience. My first fan club. My first cassette bought with my own money. My first reason to stay up late to watch Friday Night Videos. My first reason to carry a portable tape player around with me. My first reason to dance in front of the mirror. My first love.

The first thing I ever won was tickets to the Jackson Victory Tour. Packy’s Pizza in Chesaning had a drawing and very late one night while my sister and I were babysitting, we got the phone call. I don’t know who called, but my sister answered the phone and had to wake me up to tell me. I was too tired to be excited, but I think I shit myself when it finally sunk in. I went to the Silverdome with my dad and I didn’t even mind that it was all the Jacksons. It was the shit, man. I still have this picture disc and it’s never been played:

The first time I scraped together my very own money with the intention of buying something specific besides candy, I bought Off the Wall on cassette. I already had Thriller and Victory and I was at the point where I needed MORE! I had the glove, I had all of the pins, I had a concert t-shirt, I had his new music, I fiercely coveted the red leather “Beat It” jacket and tried it on every time I went to the mall. There was nothing else to buy, so I bought Off the Wall. And I carried my first portable tape player around and played it outside until I knew all the words.  And then I put Thriller back in and danced on a picnic table in front of a window until my neighbor saw me and I got embarrassed.

I remember fighting with my cousin over the words to “Beat It!” She said it said “funny,” when clearly it said “funky.”

I remember watching the news and learning about an old celebrity who had died. I don’t remember who it was, but my parents were both kind of like, “NO! I can’t believe he’s dead!” I very clearly remember that seeing my parents react like that made me realize that Michael Jackson would die some day and it would be on the news and I would be an adult and I would be so sad.

I loved him in the maniacal way that 8-year-old girls love celebrities and I don’t think even my love for Eddie Vedder compares to how I felt about Michael Jackson. Nobody compared to him back then. Even my brother, with his heavy metal leanings, learned how to do the Moonwalk and then taught me and my sister. And today I’m teaching it to my kids.

1. We didn’t have a phone even though my dad worked at the phone company.

My brother ran the phone bill up talking to his girlfriend. His Ecuadorian girlfriend. She had been an exchange student and when she moved back to Ecuador, my brother called her a million times until we owed $500 or something like that. That’s $500 in 1987 money. This was pretty much right exactly when my dad moved out. Some people might say it was my brother’s fault my dad moved out, but I won’t go that far. Anyway, we owed my father’s employer $500 and we couldn’t pay it. And, in fact, never paid it. That’s a little embarrassing. And trashy.

Some time after we moved to the apartment, my mom decided to just see what would happen if she tried to get a phone in her name.  I think she thought that because she and my dad weren’t divorced, the phone company wouldn’t allow it, but they did! Anyway, she didn’t tell me her plan, but there was a phone attached to the wall in the apartment and one day, it started ringing! I’m not kidding when I tell you I just about shit myself with joy. I was 15 by then, and had been using  payphones for at least 3 years.

2. I thought the Rathskellar was a restaurant, not a bar. It happens.

After my parents separated, my mom spent a lot of time at the Rathskellar, where I would occasionally meet her for food and drunken conversation. Her sister was a waitress there and sometimes we would get free drinks and snacks. This was before the days of the computers in restaurants. God bless the “human error” aspect of keeping a bar tab. Anyway, I always thought of the Rathskellar as a restaurant and it wasn’t until I was much older that Bryan heard me refer to it as a restaurant and he said, “That was a bar, not a restaurant. Just because you could get nachos there, doesn’t make it a restaurant.” I said, “Well, we always ate there when we were kids.” And he said, “Were there ever any other kids eating there after 5 pm? No? That’s because it was a bar.” Know-it-all. I still think this point is debatable, but because most parents wouldn’t have taken their kids to the Rathskellar, I will cop to the fact that the fact that it was my favorite restaurant as a kid might add to the trashiness.

3. At a certain point, none of my friends were allowed to spend time at my house anymore.

My friends’ parents always said, “No, you can’t go Abby’s house, but she can come over here.” There’s a lot of reasons for that, but I think the very last time I had a friend over was when Jenny V. came over and her parents came to pick her up earlier than expected. We lived in a 2-story house in town (walking distance to the Rathskellar of course). When my dad moved away, we rented the upstairs out. At this point, one of my brother’s friends was living there and he happened to be having a party. Mr. and Mrs. V. came to pick Jenny up and accidentally went to the door that lead to the upstairs instead of where my mom, sister, and I actually lived. (Had they gone to the correct door, they would have seen a note, written on a paper plate and shut into the door that said, “At the Rathskellar!” which, in their very stable minds, maybe wouldn’t have been any better than what they found when they went to the upstairs apartment). So they went upstairs to look for 12 or 13-year-old Jenny and there were all of these teenagers and maybe some young 20-somethings drinking and smoking and probably getting high. Mrs. V might have flipped out a little bit and I’m pretty sure my sister accidentally called her a bitch for harshing her mellow or something like that. My sister feels bad about it, but she said, “I might have been a little tipsy,” which totally makes sense. After that, Jenny couldn’t come over anymore.

3a. We used to write notes to each other on paper plates and shut the paper plate in the door. That’s low on the trashiness spectrum, but still. At any given moment, you could find a paper plate note shut in the door that said, “At the Rathskellar!” or “Chicken patties in the freezer!” or “Do the dishes!” or “Stop taking my wine coolers!”

3b. Our upstairs tenant grew pot in my baby cradle.

It wasn’t the cradle that I used as a baby, it was a cradle that my parents made together when they had a folk-art business in the 80s. It was wooden and it had my name stenciled on it. And it was a perfect spot to grow weed. Apparently.

4. One of our porch steps had a great big hole in it, which we covered with a couple of pieces of wood (that’s not the trashy part). One of our porch steps had a great big hole in it, which we covered with a couple of pieces of wood, and that’s where I hid my wine coolers (it gets better). One of our porch steps had a great big hole in it, which we covered with a couple of pieces of wood, and that’s where I hid my wine coolers when I was 12.

*cough* Moving on.

5. I liked Debbie Gibson. (Maybe that doesn’t prove anything, but it’s still embarrassing).

6. I used to drive our Chevette to school when I was 14 or 15.

By then, we lived in that apartment up above the stores and my mom worked at one of those stores, so she never needed the car during the day. I made a bunch of copies of the keys to the Chevette so every time I got caught and my mom told me to “Hand over the keys! All of them!” I could safely hand her 3 copies without running out. Trashy, but clever. Maybe the most clever thing ever!

7. Our family car was a Chevette.

You guys, I could go on and on, I swear. You have no choice but to agree with me. I had a good perm that may have covered up the smell, but I was a bit trashy.

I stole this picture from flickr user oldbrushes. I asked permission, but I haven’t heard back. If she wants me to take it down, I will, so enjoy it while you can.

When I was just a wee little girl, waiting for the school bus in the wee hours of the crispy fall mornings, far off in the distance I could hear the sound of Farmer Peet’s wee little pigs squealing at the slaughterhouse. At least, that’s what my brother and sister told me I was listening to. It was definitely the sound of pigs squealing, but I don’t know if they were actually being slaughtered at that moment in time.

On a related note, pork is my favorite meat.

The pigs were at the Peet Packing Company, which is no longer around thanks, in part, to Denny McLain and his thieving, but I very rarely eat pork without remembering that sound. It’s oddly soothing, like jingle bells at Christmas. If you lived in Chesaning and had a job that wasn’t on the family farm or in one of the family-owned shops and restaurants back then, it’s very likely that you worked for Farmer Peet’s. Or GM. Or maybe you were a teacher, I don’t know. My dad worked at the local phone company and my mom worked at one of the family-owned shops. Bryan’s dad worked at GM and his mom worked at the same shop that my mom did, but lots of my friends’ parents worked at Peet’s. Anyway, it was a huge bummer when they closed.

Chesaning was lovely when I was young, and sometimes I think I would kill a person in order to have a blueberry muffin from the Heritage House. Why were they so yummy, you guys? Because I was white trash, I never ate them at the Heritage House. I ate them at the Heritage House’s basement bar, The Rathskellar, or at the Carriage Shoppe, which was an antique shop behind the Heritage House.

From the time I was 12-15, we didn’t have a phone, which put my popularity at risk, so instead of reading books and embracing my solitude, I walked to the nearest payphone to be in the loop with my friends. That phone was at a “mini mall” called Market Street Square, which was next to the Heritage House/Rathskellar/Carriage Shoppe lot. On the way to the phone, I would stop at the Carriage Shoppe and buy one of those magic muffins for 50 cents! I would have paid a whole dollar. Besides the great payphone, Market Street Square had a bunch of cute shops and a yummy deli, none of which are there anymore. Well, it looks like Market Street Square is still there, but now it’s a church and Christian bookstore, with plans for a deli and resale shop to be added later. But it’s not the mini mall from my childhood. And I think my sister told me that the local phone company took the payphone out of there.

The pigs, payphone, and muffins from my childhood might be gone, but the dominant sounds from my teenhood aren’t. By the time I was a teenager, my parents were divorced and my mom and I lived in an apartment up above a row of shops and bars in downtown Chesaning. Sometimes on summer nights, we would wake up to the sound of drunk people leaving Dave’s Bar and Farmer’s Inn after last call. Drunk people are funny. One time we saw one get hit by a car. He wasn’t hurt, so it was extra funny. He just kind of bounced off the car and then yelled at it as it drove away. We saw a couple of fist fights, but mostly we just eavesdropped on drunken, “I love you soooooo much!” conversations. Farmer’s Inn isn’t there anymore, but Dave’s still is. Dave’s will never die. Never!

During the daytime, there were (usually) no drunks for entertainment, so I had to pass the time by watching the security camera feed from one of the shops underneath our apartment. Do I have to tell you that this shop is no longer there? I didn’t think so. The shop had a camera in the make-up aisle and our tv would pick up the feed. I didn’t have cable so my friends and I would naturally watch the security camera channel sometimes. Or a lot. One lucky, lucky day I saw a girl who was a year ahead of me in school browsing the Bonne Bell display. I was just about to turn it off when I saw her turn her head to the left and right to make sure no one was watching her. That piqued my interest. I thought I was totally going to see her steal a Dr. Pepper-flavored Lip Smacker or something, but she surprised me by picking her nose and then her butt in quick succession. It. Was. Awesome. Way better than cable. Unfortunately, I still didn’t have a phone by then so I had to run to the nearest payphone to call all of my friends and tell them. If that happened today, I totally would have tweeted it. Well, I probably would have missed it because I would have been watching actual tv shows instead of security cameras. Even white trash kids get to have cable and high-speed internet these days. Not like when I was young and only the rich kids had it.

Maybe all of the landmarks from my childhood are gone, but I still have my memories. And Dave’s bar. When one or both of those go under, then it will be like I was never even born.

Yes, the baby is fat, but look at that bathroom! Isn’t it gross? But still, I turned out ok. Sort of.  I say this because we’re buying a house with awesomely dated bathrooms. Maybe. You never know until you actually close. We have a closing date (March 19th), time, and location, so we’ll probably close. But still. It’s a great house, great location, just a little dated. The bathrooms are especially dated, with seashell-shaped sinks in one of them. The other one has a dark brown toilet. And those bathrooms always make me think of that old bathroom in that picture up there.

Oh, and! There’s a Florida room. My friends and I get to play Golden Girls in it. I get to be Betty White because she always had a story about back in St. Olaf and I always have a story about back in Chesaning. I’ll let those of you who know Lynne, Kristen, and Dawn guess who gets to be lusty Blanche, straight-talking, offensive Sophia, and steady-eddie Dorothy. It’s hard to pick because they’re all so slutty and offensive!

Anyway, I’m packing. All the time packing.

And we, along with lots of  help from our family, worked on it for 5 years straight in this order: 2nd floor, 1st floor, outside. Most people would do the outside or 1st floor first, but we knew if we did that, we’d get burned out and we wouldn’t finish the 2nd floor. A few years later, it looked like this:

And then we added a garage and it was done and we relaxed for a whole summer before putting on a 2-story addition and then, hahahaha, we moved to Columbus and rented. For four years. Because an experience like that scars a person.

The kids were looking at The House photo album with me and when they came to this series of pictures of the 2nd floor bathroom and hallway:

Liberty said, “ZOMG, where did you live when the house looked like that?” She couldn’t fathom that we would actually live on the filthy 1st floor, but we did:

I didn’t tell her that one very special day, three months after buying the house, the furnace guy was late for his appointment with us, so she and Lena were conceived in the midst of that filth. From the look on her face when she saw the above pictures, I think that knowledge would only add to the trauma of her birth story.

Oh, hello sexy. Wouldn’t it be a great idea to get pregnant with one or two babies exactly 44 days from the date this picture was taken? After all, we have a house, let’s put some babies in it!

And that’s what we did. The 2nd floor was finished the day I came home from the hospital, but I couldn’t do stairs, so we still slept on the 1st floor in what would later become this:

That’s all paint, not wallpaper. And it looks a bit dated already, but I guess that was seven years ago. I wonder what we would be doing to it if we still lived there today.

The 1st floor was completely finished right after Lena and Liberty turned 2, then we started on the outside. So we lived on the 2nd floor with them for a couple of years. I don’t remember it being as hard as it sounds. Maybe because Bryan worked steadily, so there was always progress to keep me excited. The 1st floor was painted over the course of I have no idea how long, but I remember a long stretch of time where Lena and Liberty’s naps consisted of me sneaking out from under them to do a faux painting technique or stencil or whatever. I totally got out of painting the 2nd floor because I was on bedrest in the hospital. I was so smart. Our relatives were excited for us because of the house and the coming twins, so we used them all up. I bet once the babies came and the fog cleared, they were like, WTF were were we doing? But whatevs.

So there were walls to move, hallways to make smaller in order to make a bathroom bigger. The electrical and all that crap had to be done. The kitchen was moved from one room to another and we knocked down a wall to open it up into the dining room. The roof, the siding, the drywall, the everything. It was hard. We don’t ever want to do that again. Watching HGTV sometimes gives me panic attacks. And that’s one reason we’ve reveled in the freedom of renting for the last 4 years. REVELED in it. Yes, it was super sad to leave that house, but it was definitely freeing to move into an apartment and not have that sense of ownership and pride because those senses make us work super hard and it’s always easier to work less hard. But now we think it’s time to re-join the land of grown-ups. We’re looking at houses again. With great fear. And excitement. Mostly fear. We’ll never do a rehab to that extent ever again. Probably. But we’re ready for something. Maybe.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! My brother is 40. Don’t tell my sister, but she’ll be 40 this year too. In about 11 months. (My parents thumbed their noses at silly things like birth control and abstaining from sex for 6 weeks after the birth of a baby. “Pish-posh” said they, and then they had 2 babies in the same year. Dummies).

I like to tease my brother and sister about being born in the 60s since the rest of us (meaning their spouses and Bryan and I) were born in the 70s. My sister protests and thinks she’s as young as we are because she was born a mere 2 weeks before 1969 ended and her husband was born only 3 weeks into 1970, but the protest doesn’t stand. It was the 60s. Everything was different back then. And things that were around back then are old now. I didn’t make the rules.

My 40-year-old brother lives all the way in West Virginia now, but our grandmother saw fit to die yesterday* so her favorite grandson would have an excuse to travel to Chesaning so he could spend his 40th birthday at Dave’s bar playing Setback with his dumb ol’ buddies. Why yes, I did just spend 12 days in Chesaning, during which time my grandmother was in the process of dying and, yes, she actually did wait until the day after I arrived back in Columbus to die. Par. For. The. Course. Mikey was always her favorite. And for that, he’s a douche.

]]> http://sundayswithstretchypants.com/index.php/2009/01/my-brother-was-born-in-the-60s/feed/ 7 http://sundayswithstretchypants.com/index.php/2009/01/already-failing/ http://sundayswithstretchypants.com/index.php/2009/01/already-failing/#comments Mon, 05 Jan 2009 13:20:26 +0000 Abby http://sundayswithstretchypants.com/?p=489 I haven’t read more books than usual, I haven’t watched more movies than usual, I’ve written less than usual, and I don’t even own a cowbell. *sigh* I should’ve known better than to make resolutions. They never work out. I’ll try again next year.

Back to life in Columbus. Bryan and I think it’s unfair that we had to wake up to an alarm clock today and eat fibrous cereals instead of sleeping in until 9:00 and waking up to doughnuts. So many doughnuts! Do you know the thing about doughnuts? If they’re there, we’ll eat them. They taste good with coffee. And they taste good with ham.

I’ve written about my love of ring-shaped pastry before, but I’ve never actually succumbed to the seduction of Buckeye Donuts’ evil delivery system. In Chesaning, though, there are doughnuts to be had without even ordering them because my inlaws are extremely generous people and if they see you eat one doughnut, they will lovingly provide piles of them for you on a daily basis. And they won’t believe you when you say, “No, really, you don’t have to buy any more doughnuts.” Come to think of it, maybe they just couldn’t understand what we were saying with our mouth full of doughnuts. It’s hard to talk that way. Seriously, though, my body doesn’t know what to do with granola anymore. Here’s a hint, body: digest the shit out of it. Literally. Please.

So, I guess I hope I have a better year than the Parshallburg. Happy New Year! And happy birthday to my historic mother who turns 60 tomorrow.

I found the video here.