Two of US |
Twins with a Spin Two different health insurances seperate them forever |
The original person loses absolutely nothing. You'd think there'd be some necessary mischief- a piece of ear gone from here and now pasted over there, some difference, like knees on only one of them or one less rib. But, nope, nothing's gone. Whatever precious pieces the replica booked with, the baby regenerated it all. I've lost teeth and nails, blood, sweat, hair, cysts, even my appendix. One thing I never would have guessed is that in the departing parts of me live complete whole tiny mes going to be as big as me someday. And Mom will love it best. Get me my toenail bak out of the trashcan, please. I'm serious. I've seen this. The baby created by the sperm penetrating the egg's membrane and fertilizing it is th spider plant Mom. Babies dangle from her arms, able to grow on their own if she lets go. And over here, on this corner, Spunky, soon to be right in Baby's face as their little room gets smaler and smaller. Spunky comes off Baby's blueprint like a process, silk-screen or limited lithographs, whereas Baby is an original, one-of-a-kind design. Was. oh, no , honey--baby just decreased in value! The printer has printed the page a second time before it could be stopped. Slide, snatch, whir, solid bang likre a roller coaster stopping and it's there, a copy nobody wanted. Mistakes happen. Four leaves on a clover, two heads on a calf, ulcer germs on your stomch--it's easier to grasp, and allow, a two-headed calf than the freeky fact of identical twinship. "A boy and a girl can be twins , too, " a redneck will say, looking at you like he knows you've never heard this one before.hat's the one that surprises him--boys being twins with girls. Being an identical twin is downrigght serious stuff. You can be divising, happily bouncing off into two people, when, as you guys are seperating at the face, the stuff stops. Like a frozen computer. You could be carrying a face in yours. Some twins don't seem to mind being conjoined and reject seperation surgery even with a good prognosis. In one example, two American children share two legs, two arms, one body with an extra wide chest holding two hearts and 3 lungs. They have 2 necks, 2 heads, 2 names and personalities. Two stomuchs, 2 gallbladders.They share some of the same digestive tract and nerves, and a uterus, vagina, bladder, and intestional tract and liver. They swim, bike, run, climb--and they refuse to be seperated. One could die, they explained. So the lower head is always curled into the neck of the higher head , and they go through school loved by all. One wants to be a dentist and the other a pilot and the dad laughs that Britty will be fixing someone's teeth while Abby steers the jet. Actually they's need to borrow each others' hands to do either career.No one knows better than they do what it is like to be in their shoes. If one has diarhhea. the other has to sit with her--sshe can't discretely go off and give her privacy. You can always imagine yourself thus joined to your enemy and be grateful.That may be one reason they are here. Does their degree of intimicacy cause hostilities? They must be very determined little girls to manage as two people sgharing a body, with no role models. They are aggressive, sometimes crabby, like any of us.We look at them like our late beloved Pope said, as serving a purpose, remindingus how fortunate we are that conception goes right. What's it like to be an identical twin? I'd have to know what it's like to not be one, to answer that, Because as an identical twin, not only is there another identical twin in your househo;d, but the person you've spent the most time with all your life is one. You mom has two, too, and so does your dad, and hers, Around your place, thet're about as unique as mosquitos in Florida. Everyone you know, for example, knows one. Any other perspective is beyond my comprehension. |
My little sister joined our family at 4:15 in the afternoon of April 22, 1954 on a crisp Michigan day , in a downtown detroit hospital, where dad and Mom and I were on hand to greet her. I paid no attention to my sister at all those first meetinds--didn't even glance her way. I thought only of myself. They named her Deborah marie. She was a little on the tiny side so they didn't bring her home right away. Which was a good thing because nobody knew Mom was pregnant with debbie and debbie had no crib or bassinette or layout or buggy or bottles waiting at home for her. Our parents did though have to go get her about 8 days after birth but by then they had hit on an easy solution--hey gave her my bed, my bedroom, and my everything else. Later in life when I tried to avoid her negativism she said I only existed because she had. She could be right. By then I was counting her fingers and toes, french fries and oxycontin and days to a liver transplant , but it hardly mattered. Or maybe it did. How mad could she stay at me for ignoring her at her birth? I was 15 minutes older. "Am I you, Dede?" Debbie said, the full contents of a weird message she left on my friend's answering machine in 2000. "Are you me?" While my friend saw cause for concern, I saw cause for concern in a different way--since we'd gotten to know our parents, we saw that they got everything confused. They'd be the last 2 people I'd trust to keep identical twins ID'ed correctly. To add an eerie edge to it, people 1600 miles from ever meeting Debbie, who'd never heard I had a twin or a Debbie in my life, would say after meeting me ,"It was nice meeting you, Debbie.." Asked how they got that name out of Deanne or Dede, they'd say they thought I'd been introduced or introduced myself as that, or that I loooked like a Debbie. What's up with that? Switched at birth? |
Over the decades you should have seen my diaries. I nearly always introduced her in a lampoonish way as an overweight dowager who dressed like a clueless schizophrenic and had a permanebnt bitch in her voice. She was mean and nasty , it seemed like all my life. One day I called to protest her outrageous lies to keep my parents and us from each other and my father elled at me that it was herthat was dying all along , not me, her that needed the transplant, while I got all the attention for it. Then he hung up. For a month he said she did not seem to want to talk to me because he kept telling her I called but she never called me back and could not walk to his phone (she had a cell phone in bed with her she was not answering to me.).Somewhere in that month I was on my knees finally for the first time in my life praying for this particular enemy--my enemy of enemies---my worse self. I knew she'd contacted hepatitis C as a teenager trying out drugs for abut a year. And now her legs werte swollen constantly, and her belly too swollen to fit behind a steering wheel. Well, its's about time she got medical attention and started on that liver transplant, I thought . She'd had to wait two years for Medicare after qalifying for Social Security Disability at the age of 48. Now she was 50. Once I had forgiven her for all she'd done to me, there was really no one left to forgive her, as she'd been a recluse who hadn't known anyone but her immediate family once she left high school,and two of them had died, our brothers Terry at 11 and Tony at 26, both to freek acccidents.. That left me, her hermit boyfriend of 34 years who was named Mike, my ex-husband and my 2 kids and my parents, who were also her parents.If her phone rang, she knew it was me if it wasn't my mother. Like that. I prayed and prayed for er life to be spared as did evveryone I know. She didn't think she'd last til September. The last time she went to a store it was a few days before Christmas, Dad pushed her around in a wheelchair, and she complained and whined continuously. It was awful. By February 5 she was a skeleton after going to hospitals some 16 times to be drained of fluids filling her abdomen up to her chest.She'd been in diapers since November, an could not walk since August.Nightly she screamed across the cold echoing house in oain while our parents slept on the opposite side of the building with their door closed so they wouldn't hear it. She got nothing for pain.Her black toes were kiling her and she was always freezing, having space heaters beside her along with the central heat of the house she lived in with our parents, and 3 or 4 blankets on her. She answered calls with an angry "What!" or , a serious wail, "hello?" like a lost little girl. "I don't want to die, Dede," she said.Or,"I'm dying! No one will help me!" Shands Hospital in Gainesville was to do the liver transplant. They gave her a list of tests she had to pass to qualify and slowly she and my dad beat back that list until they'd fulfilled it, getting side-lined many times by trips to ER to drain her and twice for infections she caught in the hospitals while being drained. Debbie's HMO said they did liver transplants, and that's why Debbie chosethem. It turned out she was their first, and they were prepared to battle the transplant facilities through her about the costs of the tests and needs for them, etc. They would not let Shands do any of the tests because hospitals in her area could do it cheaper. At least once, involving a heart function test, it turned out the local hospital offered it cheaper because they offered something else, not what the transplant center required. he transplant team's liasons told me they had to battle with Debbie's HMO about every little thing and could not make them understand. In January Debbie's primary carephysician made her cry 2 days long after telling her she wasn't facing reality --that she needed to face that she was dying and chose hospice.Debbie was insistant she was going to get a transplant. So were the people on her transplant team, who couldn't understand why her PCP would tell her that. On february 5 my dad could not wake Debbie up and she'd "crapped all over her bed"> Hecalled 911. At the hospital the PCP took over and removed Debbie from her HMO and Medicare and put her in a hospice , saying Debbie was neglected because two peopole in their 80s could not proerly care for her, her HMO would not send out a nurse , and she had feces on her at arrival to the hospital. (My dad says she must have gone more in the ambulance then.) What her HMO didn't know was that her boyfreind of 34 years was changing her, keeping her from bedsores, puttig lotion on her, staying all night with her, 3.5 weeks a month.It wasn't old people caring for her at all. Debbie awoke in the hospice and wanted out immediately so she could go get her transplant. The lady running the hospice gave her big doses of haldol and oxycontin within 2 hours after we got there. Can you imagine Lazarus walking out of the tomb to be bopped on the head with a mace? It was like that. I'm wonddering if she has her mind and memories and we are ( with a priest) giving her last rites and confession and communion and singing her songs and crying and getting her what she wants (apple pie from Burger King--she wolfed it down and almost choked on it;a TV Guide so she couuld see what was on; a pair of readers' so she could read)--they didn't even have a toothbrush in there for her, and she'd been there 3 days when we got there. The HMO had put her in a hospice 60 miles from me and 60 miles from our parents and I am so poor I never have the gas to go anywhere except the first 3 days of the month. They had no way to save her if she choked on my apple pie,nothing to revive her iwith f she had a stroke or heart attack, no IV lines---no one calls 911 from a hospice. You just go out with a blanket over you--it matters not how you die. It took 3 more days to get her out of there, the lady in charge tere swearing she was bnot the debbie we'd known and loved but a shell of debbie and debbie was in a better placve, as Debbie correctly named the day of the week, the month, and the state she was in. Shands quickly took her "to keep hospice frm killing her" , the head of the team told me on the phone. They put her on the list for a new liver. But she wasn't eating. She was grtting to weak to survive a transplant. Shands gave her a feeding tube but then her HM stepped in again. Although she'd dismissed them she had to remain under their care for the month after she did. So April 1 she was finally going to get free of that HMO. Meanwhile the HMO would not co-operate with anything.Shands sent her to a nursing home-rehab center to get stronger because the HMO wouldn't pay for her to get rehab at Shands. Onvce she got to the centerthe HMO said they would not pay a penny for rehab or exercixe until after the transplant. They would not even re-install the feeding tube,and Shands told me urgently to make her eat and exercize. I tried. She had an appointment to get a feeding tube April4 m, but if she'd needed it April 1 she could have gotten it in ER> However she died March 29. Her last food was 2 days before when we went for Holy Saturday, the day before Easter, and brought cupcakes she ate. We took her out in the parking lot and she sang campfire Christian songs with me for an hour, her voice sweet and clear compared to mine, and her remembering verses i'd forgot. We camcorded it. As we left she said wistfully ,"I wish I was going with you guys!" She died alone, and was dead for hours before they found her. Her mouth must have been wide open trying to breathe because they had to break her jaw, apparently to close it for the viewing. Two weeks later a car lot that is trying to extort my house from us came down hard saying I could stay here if I agreed to 13 months and then gave them titel for $26,000. I would lose Medicaid and SSI instantly i got the money even though I would need to spend every penny on rent somewhere else, I'd have to spend it all the same day I got it, paying rent up 2 years in advance. Social Security says I won't find such a landlord. Also rent for a 3 -bedroom home is over $870 a month which is our full income. And there's a moratorium on applying for section 8( reduced rent) housing.It's value now is $40,000, but it is invaluable to me and my daughters, 16 and 11, as a place to live another 5 to 10 years since we don't get enuf to pay rent anywhere.I get 15 calls a day from my free legal aid with offers from them. My chuch advises me not to accept any cuz their real estate lawyer says the contract is invalid. But he isn't around to ask what to do.At the same time my ex has a shadow on his chest xray and needs a cat scan STAT and Debbie I need you! jesus please help us --this is too much! Please!---Those were the words only God could have seen. I don't know about this idea of immediate sainthood for John Paul. Saints hearprayers. That means they know all the misery going on here. How can they be in heaven-- where you experience pure joy and happiness --hearing tearful calamities? So if it's a saint, it must be pretty miserably not yet in Heaven . I think John Paul deserves to be in Heaven. He's not the only Pope I've had but he's the only one I loved. |
Rules for Identical Twins Who Despise Each Other 1.Before calling her, ask yourself: does she drag me to her state of mind, or do I drag her to mine? is mine in a good place right now? 2. Don't break what aint fixed. 3. Everyday is so new and unusual it hurts--every tomorrow will be full of yesterday forever--a wrong done can be nursed vehemently and with an avowed permanence for such a short blister of time, a twinkling of the eye, as to render the illusion of evanescence, quickly forgotten or ignored or overlooked without overt resolution --but is in truth etched into identical places in identical brains under its own individually- assigned catagorizations to be woven into that eternal record of each entity's view of the other, as in the universe's view of its own mirror image 4. No one can bore her as much as you can, no one can hit your funnybone quite as hard as she can, no one willl forhgive yu more, nor hate you for less; your worst critic and fiercest defender, your God-given other Half that came with you all the way on this journey. |
Debbie had this on the back page of a theme book. |
The Family In A Portrait that's True and in the Closet God made me a house in heaven, a mansion as they sing and on a wall were photographs of all the people who helped bring me here and then I hear my arriving sisters cry in fear when they enter mansions near. "He's got those of the unborn here the eyes that follow us are dear to us except these few on folks we're sure we never knew Although they look like me and you." Most people on the wall are dead like these ones except instead of recognizing folks much loved you're seeing ones life never touched although they were sent to us from God. Are you ready for the day when it' is time to see those never finished because you stopped our Lord , said "Circumverted! Count more dead!" Little ones meant to be so sweet, so strong and replete with a very Christ-turned soul? Now in their eyes you see big black holes as they stare from the wall like the rest of your kin. "Im sorry," He says."But I loved them. " "Father," you might say,"I'd like us a meeting." But be glad you can't see His face while He's unyielding. |
Nun Meter copyright Deanne Young 1971 It began when an unmarried teen had an abortion because it had seemed the only solution to minds naturally narrow. She then became sterile. People everywhere lamented. Writers sat down and invented. In the middle they were converting speed freeks and pschedelic susies to be vigorous witnesses and they used hypnotists. In the end the churches went, crumbling in the dust. sacrifices were in vain, Bibles were all meaningless.. It was all over when they tore apart the cover and found out that the Holy Ghost now always wears a rubber. |
Debbie Anti-abortion poem written at age 16 |
Deanne's anti-abortion poem written at age 17. Neither of us ever knew what each other was writing--it was top-secret, I wrote this in Catholic boarding school 90 miles from where Debbie stayed, She never saw it. |
If i could write a book. If i had long enough to write a book. If I wasn't about to lose the medications keeping me alive, my pacemaker and my defibrillator and my heart transplant, due to a lying used car salesman who forged a contract to get my land adjacent to his car lot, (and free-and-clear home ) from me , I could write the book. How Debbie got the liver trouble (I have the whole scene in a 1976 diary), how she couldn't get medical til nearly dead, how she was going after the transplant, how they stopped her everywhere like a game of chess. How it made her die. I could write the book, if i could hang onto my house and thus my disability and Medixcaid. See, they ae going to want me to spend the $26,000 I get for the house on my needs like medical and electric. I need it all for a home to live in.I was suposed to be trading to a better home. The car dealer wouldn't let me talk to9 Social Security to see if I wouold be jeaopordizing it. They held me hosytage 5 or 6 hours with no phone calls allowed. I couldn't find out if their offer would kill me or be fine with Medicaid. They extorted my home leaving me with no home and no Medicaid. That's why I can't quickly get a book out telling you what Medicare HMOS are going to do to you. I'm a nervous ball of anxiety. I know if I see it as God's will the Holy Spirit will eventually give me peace and joy. But now I am a total mess. You want the very important book? Help me. |
After being dressed identicaly throughout our early years, and being called "Twin" or "Young" by every boy at school, none of them able to diffrentiate us, Debbe and I worked at being different people. Our tastes and uinterests seemed oppoites until she died and Mom and dad gave me a heap of her notebooks and diaries, I was like, How Did She Get My Things and Erase Al My Pages and Pages of tiny writing and remove every photo from my album and put hers in and fill my journkas and notebooks with her teeny tiny writing WHEN SHE'S SO SICK? I had to accept that her 1980s journals were the same choices I bought, same blank books she was scribbling in back then. And we got the same navy blue, trhick, photo-a-page album, maybe because it was the biggest Eckerds; had? --And we had the same notebooks we were journaling in at the end--thick, 4-colored pastel papers in a sprial book with holes, college-ruled, from Barnes and Noble with colored pencils on the cover. She also had some National geographics I had and altogether it looked suspiciously like a box ofMY stuff. Try as we might to develope individualities, on our own we panted over some of the same things, ended up fondly loving the same wor covers.Identical twins are downright weird stuff. She wrote this of me once; I just found it in a notebook that looks like the one I use now, as if she'd erased 300 pages of my tiny letters in ink and quickly wrote 300 new pages in ink::""Deedee called and left a real cool message on my answering machine that made me laugh, wonder and love her (the way only Deedee can do)." She never said she loved me. I had to guess. But she also left an envelope addressed to me I opened and it said this: "Dear Deanne, Just a note to let you know that my legal team has been delayed for one day on other business. Transmissions have been recievedfron Phoebe in Saturn's orbit which must be taken care of right away as I'm sure you will understand if you've been folowing the latest releases from NASA (or at least what the government will let you see!) Your funds will be disbused immediately upon our return to earth. Sincerely, Joe." Thank you Debbie, for making me laugh out loud in the middle of my psychiatric breakdown a month after you died alone, by having this letter in your effects. You touch my funnybone hard, in a way only you can do. |
I know at least 7 people who would love to write Joe's excuse , each letter acerbic. At least two would just say Deranne you are a smuck, Joe is one of those Christians who emails you a daily contemplation of a Bible voice and a prayer in the first person. So like if he is saying you aren't being straight with him the prayer wil be "please help me to value truth..". It's lie he picks out prayers to direct me and lead me,He's holier than I am, ipso facto. When II told him my sister was dying of liver ffailure he said she brought it on herself an he didn't feel sorry for her. I said Oh no she never drank in her life and he said say what you want but you don't just get cirrhosis, it's a life-style disease. And over and over as he promised me money and I said oh thank God--it's just in time to get her he real care she neds to get on the transplant list, he'd say he was not interested in her and in fact I was going to sign something saying I wouldn't give her any.I couldn't believe this person was calling me daily purporting to be my friend while holding such a nasty attitude toward my twin sister.With all those Daily Words or whatever they were called, stressing forgiveness and love. Didn't he read them? Debbie was the same way. Like Joe she knew the true meanings of Biblical scenarios because in her case she'd studied Hebrew and Latin. And for the record she disagreed with his interpretation of a camel going through the eye of a needle, which he said meant entering a walled city, where slender tunnels on each side were called needles, and when you visited, you stripped your camel bare to fit it through the narrow tunnel, then repacked it all, , to show what you were bringing in their city. "They have all kinds of excuses,"Debbie said,"Why they can rip poor people off and still go to Heaven." Ths is the fearsome fundamentalist Christian. Catholics are more toned down, having boiled everything down to love. Even if Debbie had been an alchoholic 15 years, the real Christian would have mercy and compassion and full love ,ready-to-die for her big.That was what she was all about all her life, studying Our Lord and His Word. Funny. We tried to be totally different but I ended up studying many religions and making art glass for their places of worship, while she studied the Dead Sea Scrolls. We had lots of preachers on our non-Catholic side of our ancestry and 3 nuns on our Catholic side. ... Debbie was very much, in every notebook (and there are 50) she filled, into God, heaven, God's Will. Except for with me and I understand completely, as to her I represented a half of her, she had a little mantra that basically went like this: we are all great that are honest and good to all we meet although we never get famous or known or seem to have done a great thing to better the world--if many many of us are good , fair, nice people we are a better world, we are the world He Wills. Each of us just has to be honest deep inside. I 've gone by that too, all my life, I used to clean the stalls in restrooms that someone else destroyed, knowing only God could see me and I'd never tell anyone else. Wipe wet seats, flush others' trash--- Debbie are you there? Can you pray for me? Mom says she prays to you. You expected that. let's all love and make that car dealer love....let's pray he goes to Heaven. That means he won't steal my house. |
God needed now urgently |
Debbie died thsame week as Terri Schiavo and the Pope. In fact the news was mostly all , on every channel, about terri and the Pope. After the three died I still tried to watch the news, you know, how you do some of the familiar customs while you navigate the slice right through your brain so you can try to step back from the precipice yourself even though you know a percentage of you has gone off it with your lost loved one. And the news was not at all the same. On every channel they were fishing arond, bobbing, treading the water, floating on their backs, trying tokeep us tuned in to nothing. It was all over. The people who'd flown into the area from around the ountry, and taken church buses, to protest Terri Schaivo losing her feeding tube, dissapated, drizzled back in their homelands to their private families , leaving the news cameramen packing up on a vacant street. There was a brief flurry of "The Life --" and "The Legacy of Pope John Paul the Second " and they were talking about raising sewer fees and cold murder cases being reopened by a special new unit--not things you'd turn the TV on for, the week you lost your twin. All the flurry and momentum of the palpably exciting news of the past two weeks had just vaporized, flown out a mouse hole in the fabric of our universe or something. It was like feeling a million and a half people's depression., seeing these previously excited reporters, now deserted by the flocks of foreign press who'd descended here to capture the Terri Schiavo story and excited them into wearing their best and dreaming of the greart Discovery of Me. The week seemed to have a triangle about it. Terri Schiavo, denied her feeding tube,the Pope, fitted for a second one, uselessly, reminding us gentlythat even getting one may not have saved a loved one--Debbie, denied everything by her HMO--feeding tube, physical therapy, and pain medication--as she died a very painful death. And in that way of triangles, you can draw a line connecting debbie to Terri Schiavo, but you may wonder how we connect Debbie and the Pope (who spoke out for Terri, his connection to her). Debbie and the Pope were anti-death sentence, anti-abortion, anti-hurt anybody. Even the new Pop 's belief system surprisingly was embraced by Debbie. She wrote herself , after glorifying all the protest songs and songs about love of our youth, that she followed some of that segment down to where it used drugs a bit, then quit. In a letter to my teenager she left for after her death, she wrote,how the music made us think the adults had it all wrong and the world was doomed. "And some ended up like me (I flunked my first four years of adulthood), hurt by the world, betrayed by God( we think, until we grow wiser and see that it is we who betray ourselves)...with more regard for the plight of self than that of all its others " Sheays,"More of us died on drugs than died in Viet Nam." "For me , taking drugs was experimental until my little brother terry died unexpectedly when I was 16.After that. maybe, drugs became an escape. The world of drugs and drugtakers and drugsellers definitely became a hell. Why anyone would want to escape to hell, I can't explain. Teeneagers aren't the wisest group of souls on earth, that's for sure. "Throughout my years on drugs I never stopped thinking about how messed up the world was...what I traded for the times I got high was not worth the price I paid. It's been over 20 years since I've taken any drug other than marijuana, but i have a souveneir--a liver that is being destroyed every day, and a horrible death to lo0ok forward to --I will not live to be 96 like my grandmother did, I'll be lucky to see 50, lucky to see you two girls graduate higfh school and get your driverrs' licenses before I die. I will probably not be here to see the children you will have, or to see weither of you establish careers.Note from Deanne: Join the crowd, sis. How do you think the parents feel? neither one of us has a chance of being here when Marina is 16. We are so worried foster care will make her give up home movies, photos, and ancestors' diaries--- "The drugs I took 25 years ago took most of my future away. "How could I have known? What if someone had stopped me right before I injected that ontaminated dose of heroin 23-24 years ago , and said "Don't do it--you will die in your 40's instead of your 90's?" Do you think I would have cared? I was just 16 or 17---I couldn't even picture me being 40--being 80 or 90 didn't even seem like something I'd want to do. They wore diapers---" Note from deanne : Debbie had to ear diapers her last 8 months alive, although only 50. Spo much for that theory... "I probably would have laughed and said "so what?" Now today I hate that stupid teenager who did this to my body. I want to be here in the 2000's, goddamnit! How dare I let a younger stupider version of myself take all that away from me! "Even marijuana is a selfish drug. It engages your mind in daydreams and drifting thoughts that float in and out untended, seeming important one moment and forgotten the next--and all the things you would have done (clean the fridge, write a letter to the newspaper,write a book, take someone homebound to the store--) fell by the wayside, and there you are sitting ands enjoying your daydreams while while around you people starve and kill each other and you do nothing." |
I happened to go home in 1977 and catch her in a drug house and I wrote it all down in mty diary because it disturbed me greatly. It may have been the day she got the Silent Killer.That's what they call hepatitis C. It is estimated that up to half the people who have it don't know it. Almost everyone who tried shooting up a drug has it, and many who sniffed it through a shared straw or rolled dollar bill. People who got their manicures in places without autoclaves got it. Nurses got it by the dozens as no one knew it existed until about 1992. The story of Debbie at 17 doing drugs in a drug house is part of this book about the loss of a twin. I'll link you to it soon. You know, Debbie couldv'e shared one of those 'remember when.."emails with me that would have been many pages longer than the usual one. You know, the one that says how great we had it and didn't know it---"remember licking Kool-Aid from the pack? " Debbie and I had a gazillion remember whens. remember going to bed while "Rolling rolling rolling, Rawhide!" was playing? remember when the Jetsons and Flintstones were prime-time shows? remember when candy was a nickel and Pepsi a dime ? The book in every third grade room saying at the end, "Who knows? Maybe you will be the first person on the moon."? Driving to Florida in the summer in a station wagon without air-conditioning and two of us riding in the rear-facing seat hanging our legs out the window from the knees down? Our uncle in the furniture business (Joshua Door, Joshua Door)? |
