Theater of the Soul

I’ve mentioned several times here that my parents died when I was fairly young. My father died when I was 13 and my mother died when I was 17. This March will mark 20 years since my mother’s death.

Since I own a business and am also a student, I get an obnoxious amount of junk mail. I’m talking ENORMOUS amounts of junk mail. Credit card offers, insurance advertising and home improvement flyers top this list. I’ve gotten fairly good at instinctively knowing what is actual mail and what’s junk mail. So on Monday afternoon, while sorting through the mail delivery for the day, a large white envelope passed through my hands into the trash pile. Then I stopped and picked it up for a closer look. It was from an insurance company that I had never heard of before and something told me to open it.

The first thing that caught my eye was my mother’s name, along with my maiden name (I kept my married name after the divorce). Strange, says I, and I proceeded to read on. The first line of the letter said, “We would like to extend our deepest condolences on the recent death of your mother”.

Truly one of those “What the fuck?” moments.

Anyways, the letter informed me of a life insurance policy that my mother took out on me when I was 14. This is news to me. Anyways, I called the company and apparently I have to get a copy of my mother’s death certificate and send it in, so that ownership of this policy can be switched to me. Fine and dandy.

But what really makes me curious is: What other insurance policies am I uninformed of? My guardians (not the most responsible people in the world) took care of my mother’s estate after she died and I recieved a $10,000 life insurance payout on her from one policy when I turned 18. I’ve since broken off contact with these people and would really rather not re-establish contact with them in order to find out about my mother’s financial records or will, but I have NO clue where to even begin looking for the lawyer that set up her will. Would her lawyer even have those records? And how the fuck did this insurance company find me after all these years? I’ve moved so many times since I was 17 that even I can’t recall exactly where I’ve lived and when.

Anyone out there ever tried to get estate information on a long-dead relative that can point me in the right direction? I don’t even know where to start.

It’s all so very strange and surreal.

Only a Biker knows why a dog sticks his head out of a car window.

Damn ain’t that the truth. TheEx has a gorgeous Harley that he bought when we were together and I swear to God, after all these years, it’s the only thing I miss about him sometimes

I’ll be taking advantage of this cool spell that we have going on here and taking the heathens camping with friends this weekend I think. I usually prefer to camp during the fall so that I don’t have to deal with the heat and the bugs, but this weekend looks cool and breezy so far.

Once upon a time, all of our camping trips consisted of copious amounts of booze, a guitar and a tent. Now that most of us are married/divorced with children, things are quite different. We have to actually PREPARE. We have to dig out GEAR. We have to pack CLOTHES. We have to remember to leave room in the coolers for FOOD, of all things.

Back in the day, we could look at each other on a Friday afternoon and say, “Let’s go! Someone grab the tent” and bolt out the door. We could hike 2 miles into the woods and live for an entire weekend on the lake on beer and fish and a 5 pound box of hot dogs if someone thought to pick one up. Sunday afternoons would see us emerging from the woods, tired, hungover and smelling of stale beer and woodsmoke…but happy and content, swearing that it was the BEST TRIP EVER.

Nowadays, we emerge completely sober, stiff, cranky, out of patience and swearing to God that if we hear “Mom” or “Dad” or “Uncle/Aunt Whoever” one more fucking time….

Bah. Who am I kidding? I can’t WAIT!

I went to lunch with a friend of mine yesterday. D is a public housing inspector for a HUD agency in my area and she also manages a small portfolio of investment properties. She deals with a lot of dysfunction inherent in the low-income services arena and has many war stories to share.

I already had a table for us by the time she arrived, looking harried and out of sorts. It seems that she had recieved a phone call yesterday morning from the state police crime unit, asking her to come identify the body of one of her clients. This man had, very unfortunately, met his untimely demise at the business end of a shotgun; self-inflicted by the looks of it.

Poor D. She was obviously still a little bit in shock and sick to her stomach, so she didn’t eat anything…the images still being burned into her brain and all. I half-heartedly nibbled on my lasagna and salad, but my stomach just wasn’t up to the task. By the time we parted ways, she was steadier and had regained a bit of her humor.

I’ve cleaned up my fair share of nasty messes, left behind by tenants. Maggoty garbage and floors caked in pet feces top the list. But I’ve never been called upon to identify the body of a tenant, much less one that has splattered their brains all over the room. Did you know that there are ‘crime scene cleaners’ out there that will come in and clean up things like that? These are the kinds of things that I just do NOT want to know about.

There’s not enough money in the world that would have gotten me into that apartment to identify that guy…OR clean up after him.

I complain a lot about living in the country. There really is no other place I’d rather be, but there are times when the lack of shopping plazas really just gets on my nerves. I’ve got to travel 45 minutes to go buy a package of underwear, and sometimes that really just pisses me off.

But then I take the kids out hiking or fishing and don’t see another person for hours and it restores the balance and I realize that I don’t care that I have to travel so far for basic necessities. That will change soon enough now that our town has a Super Wal-Mart in the works. I expect once the traffic problems come to our tiny little town, I’ll be looking to move further into the woods.

Today marks the beginning of fair time in the area where I live. Between now and late October, pretty much every weekend there is a fair/carnival/old home day within driving distance. We don’t go to all of them, but I take the kids to enough fairs that we will be able to get our fill of cotton candy, fried dough and carnival rides for the next year.

I’ll be dragging the boys’ lazy summertime asses out of bed soon and we’ll head out to our town’s fair for the day, before the weekend crowd hits. Let us hope that the ride operators are sober and that the grease is hot enough to kill whatever germs are lurking on the hands of the guy who makes the fried dough.