Watching all the cutting, sewing, and even making a dress from Twizzlers reminded me of my college days when I would buy tons of second-hand clothes, often with the intention of altering it and making something fabulous. Of course the extent of my alterations was usually just cutting the legs of overly-long corduroys and slitting them slightly on the bottom for a flared effect. I bought most of my stuff at Domsey’s, a huge warehouse where most items were under $10. For $5 you could get a velvet jacket, a pair of pants, or an old quirky dress.

I remember one gorgeous spring day when D and I had first started dating. We piled into D’s old Thunderbird with a few friends, put on some Sublime, and headed out to Domsey’s. I think D was really just amusing us since the whole concept of second-hand clothes from a store creeps him out. But the girls were really there to pick through stuff and a few of us ended up getting dresses that we knew we would never really wear but, hey, they were five bucks so why not. When we got back from the store, we put on our dresses and talked D into putting on his dad’s old coat and hat:

The girls were crazy princesses and D looked like an elegant pimp or an extra in a Run-DMC video. At one point D even jumped on the Thunderbird and we all gathered around him for more pictures. Then we went back to D’s place, changed into our regular clothes, and went back outside. As we started walking I saw two cops talking to a neighbor who lived a few houses from D. She was pointing at D and at the Thunderbird. I didn’t think anything of it as we got back in the car and drove off. Then D told me that he heard a bit of the conversation and pieced together what happened. Seems that this woman (a nosy old bitch according to D) thought that we were some hoodlums messing with someone’s car so she called the cops. Of course the cops got there right on time to see us getting into the car, meaning there was no evil-doing going on. I wish I had seen her the look on her face when D took out his car keys and opened the door.

P.S. - D just pointed out that you can see the woman on the right side of the photo, dressed in red, watching us from her stoop.

Also in this folder are a few emails from my little sister, who missed me terribly while I was away. These emails make me laugh and break my heart because they capture her nine-year-oldness perfectly. Here is my favorite one:

“I miss you!!!! I am fine. Happy ST. Patricks day! What’s up? I got a 98 on my science test. When I was watching TV I saw Sublimes wife and child. We have voice e-mail. What does nonetheless mean? Today was dressup day. I wore my long skirt, blue shirt, vest, and my Dr. martins. Lucy wore every thing green. Having a fun time? Mrs. Petrizzo is getting meaner and meaner. I think about you everyday. I really miss you. I can’t wait till you come home.

Love always, little sister”

We have always been extremely close and my sister had always looked up to me when she was a kid (and maybe still does a bit now?). I used to wear Dr. Martens all year ’round and she was thrilled when she finally got her first pair. She listened to my CDs since she was a toddler - especially Sublime and No Doubt - and was probably the only five-year-old to know who PJ Harvey is.

Yeah, I get nostalgic for those days and sometimes wish that I could freeze those moments of simple beauty in time.

Throughout my childhood they had always been a united front; my sister likes to say that they share a brain. If I had to guess as to the secret of their success, I would say that they found the perfect balance between the things they like to do together (riding their bikes, camping out in the Adirondacks, and traveling) and the things they like to do on their own. My dad can get caught up in one of his never ending projects in the basement while my mom gets lost in a great book or film but they will always make sure to spend quality time together.

And they remember to have fun:

Emer’s parties were also Cupid Central. We saw so many couples get together, though they would usually fall apart soon after. But some of them stayed together. One of our friends from the informal writing-circle met her future husband - who was visiting from overseas no less - at an Emer party. Not to be outdone, I also found my future husband at Emer’s party. Well…maybe found is not the right word since D and I went to the same elementary school and, through mutual friends, got to know each other better in high school. But we did arrive at the Frying Pan as strictly friends and left glued at the lips. I don’t even know what was happening around us, since for at least three hours that night we were doing this:

Ultra finally found us on a wooden bench behind a table and decided to immortalize our first moments as a couple. (That’s her boot in the photo - the boots in which she won the Go-Go Fuck Yourself Go-Go Boots Contest that night, the prizes for which were signed copies of More Bread or I’ll Appear and Wee Girls. It may have been a night of debauchery, but it was literary debauchery.)

I was determined to have a pet, even if it wasn’t a dog. My next choice was a cat because it somehow made sense in my young brain that “cat” followed “dog” on the scale of pet desirability. That, and the fact that my best friend had a cat and I always wanted what she had. But my folks nixed that idea right away - I seem to recall that dealing with kitty poop and hair shedding were the official reasons. So I took it down a notch to hamster and almost got them to agree until they saw a friend’s hamsters in action and realized that there was a good chance of little hamster poops getting all over the house.

I honestly don’t remember whose idea the parakeets were and how my parents agreed to them. I think a friend of my mom’s had parakeets so maybe my mom figured that if I wanted pets so badly this was a good compromise. Just the fact that they had agreed to one was insanity but two at once was Earth shattering. I remember going to the pet store and being so excited. There was a huge cage with a variety of parakeets inside and I was pointing out the ones I wanted to the man in the store. The first parakeet I chose was blue and green and easy-going so that the man had no problem taking him out of the cage and putting him in the cardboard box. The second parakeet was yellow and absolutely wild so that the man had to struggle to catch her and put her in the other box. I also got a cage and a swing made of two plastic hoops, one hanging below the other, with a bell attached.

I named my birds Fluffy and Sunny - not exactly original, but hey, I was about 11 or 12 so that’s my excuse. I was so excited to have them. I was planning how I would train them to go on my shoulder and do other tricks. My enthusiasm however was not long-lived because the parakeets proved to be not as exciting as I had expected. Fluffy remained very relaxed and calm and he did eventually learn to go on my finger and even allowed me to take him out of the cage on my finger, but that was the extent of his tricks. Sunny remained completely wild and untamed and would go completely bonkers whenever I tried to touch her. She would squawk, fly around in little circles, and try to bite my finger. I soon realized that she had other issues as well. The first time that I let them out of the cage to fly around the house she darted out of there like a bat out of hell and flew as fast as she could straight into the wall. I stood there staring in horror as she smacked full force into the wall and fell to the floor. I freaked out because I was convinced that she was dead. Luckily, she just seem to be dazed and eventually started flying again only to do the same thing. We finally decided that the only explanation was that she was suicidal blind. She was also very vicious and would occasionally attack Fluffy, especially at night, so that when I woke up the next morning I would find blue and green feathers all over the floor and blood on Fluffy’s wings.

As they got older, Sunny did become less violent though she never got used to me or let me touch her. Fluffy remained very sweet and continued to go on my finger though I could never get him to go on my shoulder. As soon as I tried to place him there he would fly off. But despite the fact that I couldn’t train them or get them to speak, I loved them very much. I loved them even though they were a whole hell of a lot messier than I thought they would be. I loved them even though they scattered seeds all over the place, requiring me to sweep or vacuum every day. They were my first and only childhood pets and they will always have a special place in my heart.

There was however one other negative aspect of the apartment that we could not do much about - the roach problem. The place was literally a roach motel. There were roaches poking out from every corner, on the walls, in the cupboards. Our oven was the kind that you had to light underneath with a match (which I was terrified to do, even when I was old enough to light matches, because I was convinced that the whole house would blow up). Whenever my mom or dad lit the oven and it started to heat up, the roaches would come scampering out from behind en masse. That was probably the grossest it ever got, an exodus of brown buggies running for their lives.

The roaches came in four sizes: small, medium, large, and extra large. Yes, there were also jumbo sizes but those were water bugs which thankfully were very rare occurrences. The extra large roaches scared me a bit but mostly just completely grossed me out so I killed them with slippers and rolled up newspapers. (Oh yes, I was on a mission to make our apartment roach-free one roach at a time.) The large roaches just annoyed me and I would squash them with the palm of my hand. Not that I absolutely loved bug guts on my skin, but I did love to see the look of horror on the face of anyone who saw me do it. The small and medium roaches didn’t bother me too much, but since I was on my bug-killing mission, these roaches would die pressed under my finger. And so the Roach Wars raged on.

Well, one day on an episode of Sesame Street (or some such show) I was introduced to the flea circus. One of the characters had made a tiny circus which had a trapeze, a tightrope, and other high-flying entertainment staples. Fleas were performing tricks at this circus, or so the character claimed, as the props in the tiny circus moved about. This intrigued me to no end because, though I wasn’t sure if there really were fleas performing or not, I had never thought of bugs as being anything but a nuisance. And here they were - circus stars. Now, I had no way to get me some fleas (which I’m sure my parents were grateful for) but I sure had plenty of roaches.

I was a girl with a plan (and apparently a subconscious desire for a pet) because I decided that I would train the small and medium sized roaches to perform for me. I figured I’d start with some basics before attempting to use props. I would lay my finger flat in the path of an oncoming small roach so that it would get used to me and learn to climb on my finger. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, in hindsight) the roach would always do an about-face and scurry away as if terrified. I kept trying but it was always the same result. I tried sweet talk - “come on roachie, you can do it” - but that was no help at all. Finally, I gave up because it was clear that being a circus master was not in my future. It was back to being a ruthless bug assassin as the ceasefire in the Roach Wars came to an abrupt end.

It was taken probably in ‘78 or ‘79, as evidenced by my parents’ funky bell-bottom jeans and matching canvas sneakers. I love this photo for many reasons: I love how cute my mom and dad look, I love how my dad has his hand protectively on my shoulder, I love my beret and overalls. I love our Fiat 126 which was meant to seat up to 5 people even though it was tiny. So tiny in fact, that when my 6-year-old cousin came from the US to visit us, he asked his mom,”Could you buy me that toy?” And speaking of toys, the one in my hand was one of my favorites. It’s a Mickey Mouse that does gymnastic flips when the two white buttons on the sides of the base are pressed. What can I say…we were stylin’.

P.S. - I color-corrected the photo. Check out the quasi-sepia-toned original below: