Topic: New Years Eve

I’ve done a lot of different things for New Year’s Eve over the years.  I’ve had simple nights at home w family and friends, staying up to watch the ball drop on tv. I’ve gotten all decked out and gone dancing. The year I had food poisoning or some such thing ranks as my worst New Years ever. I’ve drank way too much and experimented w some mind-altering substances in my younger days. I’ve worked the night shift in a dementia unit on New Year’s Eve, which is not as depressing as it might sound.   

The one constant, however, is my New Year’s Eve resolution. Every year it has been my resolution, my goal, and my hope that this coming year will be the one in which I finally lose weight. Once and for all. This will be the year that I discover the magic diet, the magic plan, that will change me into a thin person. 

Last year I had already started my diet in November, and I stuck to it even at a fancy New Years Eve dinner out.  My New Years resolution last year was to stay on the diet till I got to my elusive goal weight. Sometime in the spring I hit a plateau and got tired of the plan. So I tried keto and then I went back to my original diet and then I tried to make my own hybrid version of the two. And then my dad got really sick, and we moved in with him.  I tried to eat my “diet food” during the day, but every night I tried to make dad all of his favorite foods. 

Calories, carbs, and fat grams, be damned-my father was going to have his beloved meatloaf with mashed potatoes and green bean casserole w the crunchy deep fried onion bits on top. 
 
I had watched both of my parents struggle with their weight off and on during their lives.  Dad still weighed 220 pounds when he died after his 2 year battle with prostate cancer.  He and I had gone to Weight Watchers together about a dozen years ago. He was pushing 300 pounds and I was well over 200 back then.  And all of us Dunn’s are short which doesn’t give us much space on our frames for a lot of weight. Dad had shrunk to 5’5 at age 78, and I’m still holding at 5’0” at 53.  Dad loved charts, and he meticulously recorded his weights over the years. The best weight chart he ever made was back in the seventies to accompany whatever diet he and mom were on at the moment. At each ten pound interval he had cute names to mark the accomplishment, cute names like “Macho Man” and “Foxy Dad”.  At his goal weight, 160 pounds, he had drawn a little crown and next to it were the words “Disco King.” 

In the last ten years or so of his life dad seemed to stop dieting, and ironically, he lost weight. I asked him back in 2011 what his New Years resolution was going to be that year. He said, “I’ve never kept a New Year’s resolution in my life, and that’s why I’m the way I am today.” It made me laugh. I even posted it on Facebook, I was so amused.  

I’ve never before even considered having a New Year’s Eve without my annual resolution to lose weight in the coming year.   I’ve never had a New Year’s Eve where I didn’t have my resolution hanging over my head that after the stroke of midnight I really needed to get it together and start working on getting skinny. 

When dad was the age I am now he was still trying to become the Disco King.  And now none of that matters. He is gone. He left us after Thanksgiving to a place with no diets and no New Years resolutions.  And as much as I’d like to be thinner I’m not making any resolutions this year, not this New Years Eve.  

This year for once in my life I’m going to give myself a break. I’m not thinking about the diet I have to start. Instead I’m going thank God I’m alive, that I made it through this God awful year. I’m going to count my blessings and kiss my man and see what a year with no resolutions feels like. Happy 2019, everyone. 

New Years

As I get older, I’m less about going out and partying.

Sure, I like to hang out now and then… maybe have a few drinks and some good food with friends, but I much prefer my own company in the comfort of home.

Last New Years I spend the day having brunch with friends at my house. It was nice having people over and, after a couple of hours, they were on their merry way and I had peace and quiet.

This year my brother-in-law is throwing a Masquerade party to make up for not having a Halloween bash. I plan to go, but I don’t know how long I plan to stay.

I’m sure it’ll be a good time, Marty’s parties always are, but it will be at odds with my innate desire to stay at home.

By, Jill Jackson

For me, the new year is kind of a time of contemplation. It’s a time to think about the past year and all that has happened, and to speculate about the upcoming year.

It’s a time to make plans for the future and reflect on the past. Stuff that’s best done in solitude.

I’d be just as happy (maybe even MORE happy) to sit with my glass of wine, and a nice book and let the new year slink in next to me like a curious cat. Or to make a list of things I want to achieve in the new year while watching the ball drop on TV.

But Chris thinks I don’t get out enough; that I don’t have enough to occupy my time, and he has a point.

So, I am going to make a point to be social this New Years. To connect with people and welcome the new year in the company of friends, family and acquaintances… and to have a good time – damnit.

And, if it gets to be too much, I’ll find a quiet corner to nurse my drink, and I’ll ring in the new year in my little bubble of calm against the chaos.

Topic: New Year’s

Author: Chris Dunn

“I just want to see the ball drop…”

Remembering very far back, so far back I wasn’t even allowed to stay up the whole night, my mother told me tales of the New Year’s Eve Ball falling at Times Square. “It’s New Year’s Eve,” she explained, “and at midnight this huge ball of lights falls. Everybody counts down, and when it hits zero, the ball drops.” My young mind had no trouble rationalizing this with all the other wondrous things I’d slowly begun to comprehend about adult life. A year had passed. There was a party to be had. People were celebrating in a square… Like Village Square? My face must have looked perplexed, because she continued trying to explain it to me. Lights, cheering, partiers, squares, ball of light and fireworks, it all made a grown-up sort of sense, but what continue to trouble me was, If the ball is so huge, won’t people be crushed when it comes down on the square? Why would they cheer instead of getting to a safe distance? “No,” my mother assured me. “It’s up on a pole, over the square. There’s a big sign and when the ball hits the sign, it’s the new year!” So many more questions… If the ball misses the sign, is it NOT the new year? Doesn’t the ball crush the sign? And why does the New Year fall in the middle of winter? I asked to stay up to clarify things, but I was too young. Even when I got old enough that they would wake me to see the event, my sleepy eyes could scarcely frame what they were seeing. Lights flashing, people singing nonsense, confetti. Maybe there was a ball. Can I go back to sleep?

“It won’t be New Year’s until I see the ball drop.”

Before my tenth birthday, I had gathered enough information that I no longer feared for the safety of the revelers at Times Square, and I even managed to stay up on the odd year to witness the event. My siblings and I would take to the streets and bang pots and pans together until the neighbors complained or our arms tired. Seeing the ball was like proof positive that you had beaten the year. Awaking on the couch to the sounds of sibling revelry, was the worst! I almost didn’t feel entitled to engage in our cacophonous displays of merriment. I still did. It was going to be forever before it happened again after all.

“Can we switch to NBC when the ball’s about to drop?”

Years later the Pit Crew began a yearly vigil and went to great lengths to maintain it, if you recall my earlier tale of The Craziest Thing I’ve Ever Done… We always tried to time it right so that the drugs would be kicking in right around the time the ball struck New Year. A brief gesture was made to the passage of time, and then we’d skulk off to our personal corners to see what wondrous visions the night would reveal. Dick Clark’s bones crumbled before us before eventually morphing into Ryan Seacrest and Jenny McCarthy. Sequined glasses tolled the passing years. Lights flashing, people singing, kisses, and horrible music acts continued to play for hours on the TV, while we bounced around from to room to room propelled by various intoxicants. In those days, I had little time to do more than stop in or sometimes simply call home, to wish them a happy new year, but it was nice to know, when the ball fell, we were sharing the moment together.

“I just need to see it…”

Last year, I asked my father what he was going to do for New Year’s. He said, he hadn’t really thought about it. So, since my Pit crew now all had wives and children and their wilder days were behind them, he and I made plans to spend the night together. He wanted very much to have a shot of whiskey, and I indulged him. Washing down the foul-tasting liquid with bitter beer, we shared the pre-show hours talking nostalgia while trying to avoid the sad topics of mother’s absence and his cancer. The whiskey bounced off the potent drug cocktail the man was already under, and he was a little bummed that he couldn’t find the buzz he knew, but then the countdown started, and the ball dropped. We cheered and hugged, welcoming in 2018 like we had so many years before it, knowing somewhere unspoken that it was very likely our last one together.

Topic: Christmas

Author: Chris Dunn

Whew! Another one in the books. Glad that’s over. Like always, Christmas comes to an abrupt end, an eruption of pure joy and ultimate release, like actually reaching the bathroom before your stomach contents hurl past your lips to splash mercifully in the toilet at a crowded party. For me this season isn’t one of joy, family love and camaraderie, it’s an agonizing laundry list of obligations, responsibilities and chances to disappoint.

It all centers around the giving of gifts. I take gifts very seriously and more than anything in the world, I would love to have the time to do a deep dive into the world of commodities armed with an intimate understanding of everyone I wish to please and come out the other side with  inspired gifts for all, that demonstrates how much each and every person in my life means to me, but there just isn’t time. And truly, that way madness lies. To put your heart on the line, to say you know someone well enough to find that special thing their life is missing, that tchotchke that they’ve always needed but never knew existed… “Oh, I’ve already got one of these…”

The other end of the spectrum is the gift card. What better way to say, I really have no idea what you like, and I couldn’t be bothered to find out, so here’s a little something. It’s like money, but it’s only good at this one place. Oh, and be sure to spend it soon, I hear they’re only honoring these things for a limited time now. Try reading small print on the back. Jill tells me, “It’s like giving the person the excuse to spend that money on themselves.” Couldn’t we all just keep our money and spend it on ourselves then? It’s like the interior from one my line of slacker Christmas cards. Outside: “Here’s a card…” Inside: “If we’ve exchanged things of equal value, it’s almost as if nothing has happened.”

But at least the gift card is an out. Worst of all are the people who say, “Oh, get me anything. I really don’t care.” Those words are like a punch in the gut to me. I can feel the bile mixing with the food and the stomach acid, everything suddenly surging in the wrong the direction. I’m adrift in a sea of uncertainty, unmoored and guideless. Do they really mean that? Could I stop by a gas station and grab them a pack of Swisher Sweets, and they would go, “Oh, that’s nice. Thanks!” If so, then what’s the point? How can you not want anything? No one, save the buddha, is that zen.

Every year, shortly after Thanksgiving, I make a list of all the people I want to get gifts for. And from that moment until the last ribbon is torn away, I exist in a state of nervous tension, worried I will forget someone. Or worse, I will give someone a gift and see in the eyes that they think hide behind their fake smile that the gift has, on some level, failed. That, I thereby, have failed, am a failure, on some level.

I know this isn’t very Christmasy, and it’s really more of rant than a story, and don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate Christmas. I love the notion, I love my family, I love my friends, I love spending time together and sharing food and music and joy. The whole season could be amazing and fun. Just please! Tell me what you want!

Topic -Christmas

Topic Christmas 
I still have my Christmas cup. In fact, I drank eggnog from it this Christmas morning. My mom gave it to me in 1972 when I was in grade school.  Mom didn’t let me use it for eggnog drinking until Christmas morning. Now I get all my Christmas mugs out the day after Thanksgiving and set them on one of her woven placemats next to my coffee maker. I use all the other coffee mugs throughout the month of December, but not the Christmas cup. When I got old enough to consider that I might actually want to give some gifts as opposed to just receiving them, Mom presented me with my Christmas cup. Every year starting the day after Thanksgiving she would offer cash for chores around the house. They weren’t glamorous-scrub the kitchen floor for $.50 or deep clean the bathroom for $.75, basically the things she didn’t want to do.  She’d deposit my earnings in the Christmas cup until I’d amassed enough cash to buy gifts for my parents and my two little brothers. Mom would take me shopping at Northgate Mall, just me and her. After we got gifts for everyone, usually a candle or some lotion for her, cheap toys for my brothers and Brut aftershave for dad, we would go to Pogue’s Ice Cream Balcony for lunch.  The restaurant was just like it sounds. They served ice cream sodas and sundaes and sandwiches, and the restaurant itself had tables that overlooked the mall below. Back then the mall was relatively new and featured a few indoor fountains. It seemed pretty fancy to my seven-year-old self. I remember thinking that the trip was worth all the floors and toilets I had scrubbed.  But I still had to wait till Christmas morning before I was allowed to drink out of that Christmas cup. And now I’m 53 years old and married with grown kids. I have lost both my parents to cancer in the past two years. Last night when I was making Christmas Eve dinner for our family, a task I that felt rightfully mine to do after mom died, I almost made myself a little jack and Diet Coke in my Christmas cup. It was just sitting there on the counter with the other Christmas mugs. I had been cooking and cleaning since early that morning and I think I heard my mom say it was “scotch time”. Who was going to stop me? But I’m the end I couldn’t do it.  I made my drink in the one of the plastic cups I’d set by the ice bucket. And I waited till this morning to drink from my Christmas cup. I waited because I find comfort in tradition but mostly because that cup taught me about delaying gratification and about hard work and the joy of giving.  
Sent from my iPhone

Topic: Stranded

Author: Chris Dunn

I’ve been to a Michaels store once in my life and it was not by choice. I wandered in hoping to find a phone I could use while trying to recall the procedure for using a pay phone to make a collect call and then wondering who I could even call. Who was around at 3:30 in the afternoon who could come get me? What if no one would or could? What if there was no phone? How far was the walk home? Crap, no one even knows I’m here! I could disappear and no one would ever know what happened to me!

Trace it back, Roger Bacon had a half day, and I was feeling adventurous. I was 17, nearly a Senior in high school. I could handle myself even if I couldn’t drive. I had a few coins to spare in my pocket. Why not make the most of my free time? Also, the bus back to North College Hill wouldn’t be coming until the normal time, so it was either be adventurous or wait 4 hours. Though I’m not typically one to strike out on a new trail, adventure does come before boredom in my personal lexicon. Plus, I’d done this trip once before in the company of my friend Karl. I could handle it on my own. I didn’t think at the time “What’s the worst that could happen?”, but you already know where the story ends up.

It shouldn’t have been a thing. Easy-peasy. Just hop on the bus that rolled from St. Bernard to Clifton, (I forget the number) stop in and buy some comic books (while stealing side-eye glances at the porno mags they kept mostly covered up) and find the 17 bus back home. Use a transfer and it won’t even cost more than the usual ride. It would be fun!

And it was! I got off the bus too early, but the walk down Calhoun was an empowering adventure in and of itself. College kids mixed in equal numbers with guys who got out early or were ditching their day at Withrow High School. The street wasn’t nearly as gentrified back 1985. There’s no way the Fantasy Emporium could afford a space on the strip as it is now, but back then it was a little hole-in-the-wall shop on a seedy side street with the windows covered over with comic posters lest natural light fall on the proprietors. I hope you’re all familiar with the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons. Let me say from experience, Matt Groening knew his stuff. Bearded, pale, misanthropic, and surly suits every comic book guy I’ve even known (except Leo, he didn’t have a beard). I fumbled around back issues of Xmen while trying to decide if I was getting turned on by a butt or a shoulder that was peeking over the brown paper barrier meant to protect me from my own libido. (In the end, does it really matter) Eventually, “You gonna buy something?” (Which is comic book guy for, “Can I help you?”) Served to put me on the road to home.

The 17 boarded right around the corner, and it came every five minutes. I hopped aboard, handed over my transfer, and settled down with an issue of X-men so old they were all wearing matching blue and yellow outfits. The story was a loss for me. I was really only going for the collector value. My mother had told stories about how they had thrown out old issues of Adventure comics and destroyed baseball cards that would be worth thousands in the 80s. She had instilled in me the notion that patience would let time turn junk into treasure. What I spent $6 on then would be worth $100s by the time I was 30. I believed her, but neither of us foresaw the digital age. The comic still sits in a box in my closet failing to appreciate in value, but still shielded by faith in my mother’s warnings from even being discarded.  

When I looked up from my comic, I knew something was wrong. These weren’t the familiar flanking corridors of Hamilton Avenue. It took a minute to place them from memory, but soon it became clear. This was Colerain! I was several blocks west of where I should be and getting further and further from home with each passing minute. Too shy to ask the bus driver what I had done wrong, I wavered in indecision trying not to panic as the miles rolled by. Compton, the last cross street I knew by name, came and went. Thoughts of getting off and walking from there, were beat down by memories of the graveyard on the hill and the seedy aluminum recycling station that I would need to pass. Not to mention the miles of walking all with no sidewalks. But when I saw Northgate Mall, I knew I had no choice. Beyond this point was no man’s land. The bus could drive off a cliff after that for all I knew. The mall was the world’s end, and as the bus pulled away, I tried not to cry while I considered my options.

Standing stunned by the moment and the brightly-lit isles filled with row after row of absolute junk (what is this store?!), I hear a familiar voice call my name. Looking up, I see Jan one of the managers from my work. “What are you doing here?” she asks. Things work out for me like that a lot. The way my mother always put it, “You could fall face first into an outhouse and come out wearing a pearl necklace!” (She said, this. I kid you not.)

Topic: Family

Topic: Family

I learned how to be a human being and how I fit in the world from my family. This week I am grappling with how to do life now that the two most influential people in it are gone. When my mom died two years ago somehow it seemed like she was still here in a lot of ways.  But since we buried my dad last week, I have been grappling with the reality that strangers will soon live in my parents’ house. I find myself taking stock of what remains.  I watched both of my parents die too young of cancer. When our family vacation home, our retreat in Tennessee burned down in 2016, the same year we lost mom, the same year dad got diagnosed w metastatic cancer, it felt like the Dunn family was being cast in some sort of Shakespearean tragedy. But much remains. 

What remains is me and my two younger brothers—and all of the family we have acquired over the years-the spouses, the kids, the grandkids, the friends that have become like family, the blood relatives that weren’t part of that family of origin but have become part of the modern day Dunn family.  And overarching all of it are the Dunn family values, the lessons that Chris, Marty, and I learned growing up. These are what I consider to be the top three rules for life as lived out by mom and dad. 

ONE. Follow your bliss.  My dad actually had a faded t-shirt with this saying emblazoned on the front.  My brother Marty told me that when he was a confused young man and he went to dad for advice on what to do with his life, dad gave him a handwritten list with bullet points.  I remember that one of the bullet points Dad shared was, “Say ‘fuck it’ often”, but the one that also stuck out in Marty’s memory, was to “follow your bliss.”  My parents spent their time and energy on pursuits that brought them joy.  Mom poured herself into community theater, bird watching, gourmet cooking, and making handcrafted items to sell in her Etsy shop.  She went to her grandkids soccer games and theatrical and musical performances. Dad taught himself other languages, collected stamps and coins, and met with a group of retired academics that called themselves “The Dead Philosophers” to discuss life and literature.  They traveled together.  They individually loved reading but at any given time they had a book that they were reading “together.”  Dad would read aloud to mom while she cooked dinner, and she would return the favor when he’d drive on one of their adventures.  They took disco lessons.  They hosted an annual Christmas party for over forty years with a guest list of well over a hundred people in its heyday.  Even as I watched them both fade away from their respective cancers and surrender to hospice care, they each pressed on.  The day mom signed up for hospice she made us promise that the cast of the show she had signed up to direct would be properly notified.  Dad was part of one of my brother Chris’s role playing game groups that gamed every Monday night.  When dad could not make the trip down to Chris’s house, they brought the game to him.  They followed their bliss till the very end. 

TWO. I’m okay, you’re okay.  In the late sixties my parents got this self help book called “I’m okay, you’re okay.” I remember them reading it out loud to each other.  I was raised in a fairly permissive and accepting environment.  I don’t remember having a strict curfew.  I was never grounded, mainly because my mom said she didn’t want being at home with your family to be considered a punishment.  A memorable punishment I did have was after a fight with my brother Chris. I had to write an essay about what I loved about him. They were big fans of letting us endure the natural consequences of our actions.  If, for example, I waited till 9pm the night before a poster was due at school, I would have to take my lumps at school.  Dee Dunn was not going to bail me out—that would have been doing me a disservice in her opinion. They treated us like adults.  It wasn’t a true democracy, but I felt free to express my opinion without fear of reprisal at a very young age.  We had regular family meetings, and we followed Robert’s Rules of Order.  We took turns being the chair person or being the taker of the minutes.  Chris and I usually schooled our baby brother Marty before the meeting to make a motion that we go to Frisch’s after the meeting.  When I was teenager I was allowed to say cuss words if the situation warranted and especially if it enhanced a joke or story I was telling.  What was absolutely unacceptable in our house was any form or ridicule or racism or sexism or any “ism”, anything that involved mistreating another human being or showing disrespect-now that could land you in trouble with my parents.  But saying “fuck it” often-that was cool in the Dunn house. 

THREE. Don’t take life too seriously.  An example of the kind of irreverent humor that we embrace in our family came up the week that my dad was dying.  He was non-responsive, had been so for days, but the hospice people encouraged us to talk to him anyway and to play some music that he liked.  We played spiritual hymns like “Be Not Afraid” and “On Eagle’s Wings”.  We played a lot of Mozart and Beethoven, but we also played Dire Straits and the Doobie Brothers.  At one point my brother asked Alexa to play “The Final Coundown” and he didn’t specify which version so she proclaimed, “The Final Countdown by the Duke University marching band from Spotify” We laughed and let it play on, knowing dad would have laughed if he could.  We got slap happy and played “Don’t Fear the Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult and “I Wanna Be Sedated” by The Ramones. I told the funeral director about this, fearing he might think it was in poor taste to play those songs for a dying man, but he smiled and said, “This is a pretty remarkable family.”  Now maybe he said that to all the families he worked with, but I like to think he was sincere.  At dad’s memorial the final song played at his visitation before starting the non-traditional service was “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge.  

I was raised by two remarkable people.  The messages they imprinted on us are so ingrained that I take them for granted. I grew up being told that I could do whatever I wanted to do with my life, that I could love whoever I wanted to love, and that I could worship however and wherever I wanted.  I was taught that I had value and that I had something important to say just by virtue of my being human. I never doubted that I was loved, never doubted that I mattered.  And that knowledge is the most important thing that remains.  

Thomas Dunn October 18, 1940-November 30, 2018

Dee Dunn April 11, 1941-February 14, 2016