Yes, ladies and gentlemen! You might be surprised to learn that, while you're standing there, yapping loudly into your cell phone while filling up your gas tank, the person sitting in the next car can hear what you're saying…

Before we go any further, let me tell you something, you wanna-be darlings of the fashion world: unless your name is Audrey Hepburn, you do not look good in capri pants. I do not care what you look like, who did your plastic surgery, or what company your grandfather founded. Unless you are Audrey Hepburn, yes, you look terrible in capri pants. On principle.

In fact, let me amend that statement. Even if you are Audrey Hepburn, you do not look good in capri pants, because you are dead and have been so for quite some time now, and this whole hopping-out-of-the-grave-and-dancing-around bit really needs to be kept to the better Buffy episodes, mmmmkay?

Did you ever have a family member whose antics were guaranteed to liven up any holiday gathering? Someone whose particularly-skewed ideas of fun and amusement were the subject of dinner-table conversations for years to come?

I wouldn't be posting if I didn't have one. Truthfully, I had several, but the one that comes to mind is Clint.

In my family, "mudding" is a verb. As in, "Clint's gone mudding. Who's gonna pull him out this time?"

He wasn't the first member of my family to get addicted to this particularly-rural pastime. My uncle, Keith, was the one whose antics that most of us remember most vividly. My sister, when asked to describe, said it this way: "On every holiday, Keith would take the biggest vehicle he could find and go out to the bluff and sink that sucker up to the axles in mud, and then we'd all have to go pull him out."

Clint was the same way.

While we were at the hospital, Mom asked me why I volunteered to turn my days and nights around so that I could stay up with Dad during the night. It was hard to explain why, exactly, but it had something to do with contrary nature and my need for solitude. When I tried to explain this to Mom, I think it all came out wrong, but I eventually managed to maneuver my words into the direction they needed to go: "It's not that I don't want to see the friends and family that come to see Dad during the day. It's that I just do better when it's just Dad and me."

Her "I don't understand but I'll take that weird answer and run with it" shrug told me all I needed to know. I've never claimed to be anything but the oddball of the family. Not a black sheep, but perhaps a grey sheep. Or a paisley sheep. Not rebellious; just different.

They knew me as the night shift for my family; the nocturnal daughter who stayed up at night in order to force her mother to get a few hours of sleep.

This was the tenth floor, the top floor, the no-man's-land. The cancer ward. Oncology, for those who knew the term. Well-hidden above such popular destinations such as the maternity and intensive-care floors, it was not a floor one journeyed to randomly.Even during the daytime, it was quiet. On most of the floors of the hospital, rooms marked "Oxygen In Use" were the exception. Here, they were the rule.

Those people journeying up to the tenth floor were more likely to talk to each other, more likely to be carrying suitcases. One, a careworn blond woman toting an overnight bag, gave me a compassionate look and asked, "Who are you here for?"

"My father. You?"

"My mother. Will he go home?" she asked quietly.

"No. Will your mother?"

"I don't think so." She looked down.

It is a matter of time, they say—yours and mine, and someone else's who doesn't even realize it at the moment.

I have been in Arkansas since early Sunday morning. How early, exactly? I don't remember; I don't remember when I crossed the Mississippi River, but I do remember that I was sobbing when I did.

We spent Saturday in Nashville with Dan, who was in from Michigan to help the UMich lacrosse team out (he videotapes their games). We spent an absolutely wonderful day there with him, and drove back in the early evening.

Jeff, Dan, Amy
by domesticat.
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There's a saying about happy and unhappy families which follows along the lines of "all happy families are alike, but the unhappy ones are all unique." It applies to more than just families. Major life events are like that, as well. After all, what's the fun in retelling the events of a perfectly normal and happy day?

No, we're much more interesting when events both bizarre and unexpected happen; we're at our most unique in the microseconds when we realize that life has just completely and utterly deviated from whatever predetermined plan we thought we were working under.

Most of my friends know that I have broken my right wrist twice, and most of them know that I broke it the first time while trying to fly a kite on a rainy day. Fewer know the story of the second break, despite the fact that it's a much more interesting and amusing story.