Cornflower Sky

My father is gone now. He was 91 at the time of his death more than 20 years ago. He shed no tears over not living long enough. 

If he were frank with you - and he would be - he would tell you that the only good reasons for living this long were the people he loved – especially my mother, whom he adored, and his kids, the ones he defended from every possible terror, including those we weren't afraid of and wished he'd stop talking about.


He was an introverted man of books and beliefs. Many nights, when I was very young, he'd rock me in the living room rocking chair, lights out all over the house except for one in the upstairs hall. On every one of those nights, Dvorak's New World Symphony played on the hi-fi, its "Goin' Home" lyrics drifting from the speakers. As I rested in his lap, he'd stroke the side of my face, his palm hard, but the sound it made, passing over my ear, as soft as a whispered wish. My father sought solace in his family - even its smallest member. Even the one who thought the music was beautiful but way too sad. Even the one who'd pretend to be asleep, so he'd carry her to bed and turn the music off. 

My father could laugh - hard. He laughed until his shoulders shook, and he could barely breathe. Usually, my laugh is like my mother's - but my torso-wracking, rib-cracking, tear-streaming, wheezing, swearing I'm about to die laugh - was inherited from him. My brothers often laugh that way, too. 

My father had definite ideas about how a family should operate. He made it clear that in our house, family meant safety and that family never tore each other down. After a girl who lived up the street vowed to beat me up the next day, he knelt by my bed, thinking I was asleep, and whispered in my ear, over and over, that I was not afraid. 

As was its habit, the Universe would frequently and randomly stroll up to my father, shove a pie in his face, and walk away. Our family road trip to Tennessee was like that. It was spring, when everything should have been budding and green in the South.



If the success of this vacation could be predicted by how calmly my father packed the car, how efficiently everyone worked together, and how long it took to get everybody out the door, this one was doomed. Things were going wrong even after my father finally backed the car out of the driveway, which was when our vacations usually took an upswing. We stopped for the night in Covington, Kentucky. I don't remember that there had been any issues with the weather, but in the morning, my father was complaining about the rain of frogs and locusts sure to delay our departure from Covington. 

“And you watch, Phil!” He was pointing at my mother and almost yelling - not at her, but at the Universe, whom he was convinced would be along any minute with another pie. Now he was pointing at the window. “I’m going to open those curtains, and there’ll be two feet of snow out there!” When he pulled the cord, and the curtains opened, there were three feet of snow out there. Our car was buried, and the parking lot impassable.  

One night, in my early twenties, I made a naive choice that left me stranded miles from home. I called my parents who got up in the middle of the night and drove for an hour-and-a-half to come get me. My father and I stood outside the car. I told him I was sorry he and Mom had to drive that far. He said, "Honey, I’d drive around the world for you.” 

When portable in-car GPS navigators became available, my brother enthusiastically showed one to my father who was fascinated by anything navigational - maps, compasses, sextants, all those things. "I am so glad I'll be dead before I have to use one of those things," he said.

He died peacefully one March morning, a success at never having had to use one of those things and a success at more important things, too. When I left the nursing home, the sky was cornflower blue, filled with stacks of cumulus clouds, and it was unseasonably warm, a perfect spring day. The Universe denied him this day in Covington but blessed him with it on the morning of this much more important trip. 

Goin' home, to be truly goin' home, must have felt so good. He'd been away so long.

The Phobic Do-Gooder

 A Pause in the Workday 

An office building where I used to work is wrapped in tall, wide windows. One winter day, something hit the glass not 20 feet from where I stood. There was a loud thump, and when I looked, a dark shape fell.

Image, Teece Aronin

I hurried to the window and peered down. On the ground, a sparrow lay on its back, its head submerged in snow. Its little breast rose and fell, rose and fell, and if it hadn't been for that, I would have sworn it was dead. 

I worried that if the bird didn't right itself soon, it would suffocate, but I hesitated to help. I love birds, but I love them from a distance because I'm a little bit phobic about them - fish, too. I think my fear is that they'll flap or flutter in my eyes.  

One of my coworkers came over to see what I was looking at, and because she was famously tenderhearted, I asked, "So, Jean, what are you going to do?"

An Origami Bird

While Jean was off looking for a box and I kept useless watch over the sparrow, one tiny leg sprang up and then the other, as if an origami bird were unfurling in the snow. 

Next, the sparrow flipped right-side-up, blinked, and looked around. It wore a party hat of snow on its head and another, smaller one, atop its beak. 

Suddenly, there was Jean, gingerly traipsing up to the bird, cardboard box in hand. When she got close, the bird took off but fell again. Jean came closer, and this time, when the sparrow took off, it kept going, faster and higher until it was clear that it needed neither Jean nor the box, and certainly not me. It disappeared into the wild, gray yonder.  

I need to get over my phobias before they stop me from helping when there is no Jean around. The fact that something is different from us doesn't mean we don't share the world with it, and it doesn't mean we shouldn't help. 

Besides, maybe some of the things that flap or flutter have a phobia about me. 

I Was Just Resting My Eyes . . . for Four Years

COVID Sucked Steam - Bigtime

COVID-19 sucked the steam right out of my little demitasse, leaving its contents to cool for four years. I started the blog in early 2014 to capture "anything that crossed my mind and stalled there long enough." 

Before COVID, Chipped Demitasse was a combination playground, underwater cave, and space camp where I explored ideas that struck me for any or practically no reason, probing the recesses for treasures of humor and ethos.   

When I wrote Playing Games with Underwater Welders, the post before this one, it was March 2020, and COVID was dropping a big rock smack on top of the world's head. And the world wasn't wearing its helmet. 

Clicking "publish" on that post, I had no idea that would be it for years. 

This Little Light of Mine . . . Blinked Right the Hell Out

For six years Chipped Demitasse was a light I used to keep from falling in the dark, especially the pitch-black of divorce, sudden onset single parenthood, and my mother's death. It was a passionate pipedream whispering in my ear that I might write something astounding someday, something that helped people or righted a wrong. Even if it were a microscopically small wrong that no one knew about but me, I would be thrilled. Besides, COVID was microscopically small, and it was a very big thing. 

As the pandemic leaned in to savage the planet in earnest, I thought I was doing well - overall. I mean I was saddened by COVID, terrified of COVID, worried about my family and friends because of COVID, and grateful my parents had died before COVID. But I wasn't hit so hard that I couldn't keep writing the blog that was a coping mechanism and a joy - I thought. 

Still, my focus went elsewhere, toward building multiple income streams from freelance writing, marketing, and communications consulting. I love those things too - and in times that had never seemed less certain in my lifetime, they helped pay the bills. 

In the meantime, COVID ramped up its invasions of homes, schools, offices, work cubicles, and places of worship. It was a wheezing, hacking, spit-spewing blob that seemed to penetrate walls and ooze beneath doors. 

Fever Dreams Without the Fever 

And then there were the COVID dreams; you probably had them, too. In one of mine, my parents were alive. I was standing with them and my siblings on the beach at a blighted, deserted resort. The weather was blustery, and canvas beach umbrellas and cabanas flapped loudly in the wind. 

We were all wearing raincoats, and my brother's was long, gray, and drab as a tarp. My mother pulled two frilly black bras from a beach bag, passed them to me as though they were sandwiches, and explained that I should use them as masks. One of the cups consumed my entire face, and I remarked that they'd be great for glamour mask shots, proving that even in COVID dreams, I have a sense of humor.  

When my brother announced that he was off to find a restroom, I yelled, "Remember! Six feet!" at the wind-ripple-y back of his departing coat-tarp. 

Sometimes I Wasn't Dreaming

At the height of the pandemic, things you once thought only happen in dreams, happened in real life. When my daughter, Sydney asked if we could go garage sale-ing one day, my knee-jerk response was, "Sure!" I didn't think before I spoke, and when I saw how happy Syd looked, I didn't want to disappoint her. We masked up and ventured out. 

As I browsed dogeared paperbacks, grimy action figures, and laceless roller skates in some stranger's back yard, two people without masks stopped within a foot of Syd. I transformed into Donald Sutherland in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," pointed and yelled, "Syd, get back! Those people aren't wearing masks!" 

That happened during a particularly ugly early days COVID surge. Still, it might've been an overreaction on my part. I who had performed crisis communications during two public health emergencies - an oil spill and a heat wave - went apoplectic as two passersby at a garage sale strolled into my baby's personal space. 

Then there were the almost apocalyptic experiences, like when I drove past a house with a child's birthday party underway in the front yard. The yard was decorated with a banner and balloons, and revelers in party hats laughed and clapped - but the child was in one yard with her parents, and the guests were another family in another yard - across the street.  

Things that Are Frivolous but Deep and Neurodivergent and Loving It 

Chipped Demitasse never focused on one topic. It's not a travel blog or a parenting blog, or a history, finance, or health and wellness blog, although I've written about all of those things here. 

It does have a theme, though, which I touched on earlier: teasing out exquisite, moving, painful, meaningful, awful, zany, or frivolous things to see them in a different light. 

Last October, I was diagnosed with ADHD, meaning that I'd been cluelessly neurodivergent for more than 60 years. Most people I've told said, "I don't see it; you seem pretty low-key." But ideas for things to write, comics to draw, and paintings to paint ricochet around in my head all the time, and I have to keep my phone handy to jot them all down.  

Before my diagnosis, there were times when tedious things were harder than they needed to be. A boss once glanced at notes I'd taken and complained that they gave her a headache. I was the only one who would be using the notes, and they made perfect sense to me, but I know now that my loathing of tedium and my meandering notetaking can be traits of ADHD and neurodivergence. I've also learned that those challenges could be addressed and that my turbo-charged creativity and alternative thinking skills give me an advantage much of the time.  

My plan for this blog is to keep nudging it up the same path but to zhuzh it up a little (note the snazzy new subheadings). But most important: I want to share my new and improved world with others.

Different Flavors of "Expresso" All in One Tiny Cup

The forms of expression available to me through this blog are more reasons to bring it back. Writing ghost stories for Halloween and noir spoofs starring Sam Spayed, Dog Detective, and then swinging to the opposite end of the spectrum to write about grief and loss, feels freeing, although it might give others vertigo. And if any COVID-related flotsam washes ashore, I will place it gently on the sand and look for treasure.