I’m working on a 2008 wrap up (because that’s what everyone does right?) and then got into a debate with the dude about some ALLEGED video clip of my being a wild woman at one of the BBQ fests in M-town.  A clip that he says, SCARED him and made him think I was some WILD PARTY ANIMAL.

Well I can not find that clip - but I did find this one.

Turtle and Kara-tay from Tracee Smith on Vimeo.

“Why do you want to take Karate, Turtle?”

“Becauthe - I yike too...”

I love him now… and he’s so much fun - but there are times when I do miss baby Turtle.

Scene:  Turtle and I driving in holiday traffic Monday afternoon

Turtle:  I’ve been thinking about my list to Santa and I want to make a revision
Cat:  Oh?
Turtle:  Yes.  I want an iPhone.
Cat:  {makes face} That’s an expensive gift
Turtle:  {turns to look at me from the passenger seat} Well what difference does that make if Santa is bringing it?

And with that - Merry Christmas! 

Thursday of this week, I was going through my email and wading through the almost begging like messages from JCrew, Sephora, and Anthropologie (please!  Don’t you miss us!!  Come buy something!  Anything!  We’ll ship it free!).  So happy with the delete key was I, that I almost deleted an email from a person that I would never have thought I would have heard from again in a million years.

Fans of the old blog will remember me mentioning a guy by the name of Indy and if you don’t remember his story, then I’ll repeat it. 

After dating busts with Lo-Cal and CFG (crazy filipino guy), my friend Kel decided to set up a meet and greet with a guy who she said “would be perfect for me.” And indeed, he was.  Outdoorsy, rough around the edges but cute with some stubble, educated with two Masters degrees (one from St. Andrews) and had been accepted into a PhD program for the fall, goofy sense of humor, loveable, and even tempered.  Ours was a courtship that lasted around four months and we saw each other constantly.  I was mesmerized by his line of work (underwater archaeology) and he, at least pretended, to be interested in tales from Corporate America.  He would be going to the tip of Africa for a dive involving a sunken ship in late summer and we had discussed my going along.

Enter the month of February - specifically the day of birthday.  He had made secret plans and would tell me nothing other than he was picking me up at 7 p.m that evening.  During the day, while I was at work, he had watched his cell phone diligently to see when it had a strong enough signal before calling 150 miles downstream on the MIssissippi in a boat to wish me happy birthday (which to this day, might be one of the sweeter things that a guy has ever done for me - not the sweetest but close.)

I was excited and later on, had taken great pains in getting ready for the BIG DATE!  I looked stunning - seriously - and that’s coming from a girl who never compliments herself.  So wasn’t it a kick in my teeth, when 30 minutes before showtime, I get a call from him telling me that he had to cancel - ‘stuff’ was going on and he was ‘really sorry’ and we would ‘talk as soon as he was able.’

OMG, I thought.  What is going on?  Has something happened to his mother?  Did he lose his job?  Was he involved in some illegal activities I knew nothing about?  Had the refrigerator fallen on him keeping him from going on this date with me?????

Next day, the 13th, no word.  Valentine’s...I call - leave a message, tell him I’m concerned and that I have a Valentine’s gift for him which I could bring by or leave in his mailbox, but to please let me know that he was okay.  (So so so stupid the Cat was).

Never got a call back, so decided I would just leave the gift in his mailbox.  Pull up at his house and see his truck.  Wow, I thought, he’s home.  Wonder what is going on.  (Again… stupid stupid stupid) I knock on the door and he actually answers and behind him, I see a girl on his sofa wrapped up in a blanket. 

He’s ‘sorry’ again.  He got a call late Friday (my birthday) from his ex asking him to meet her for a quick drink before he picked me up.  Yadda Yadda Yadda, looks like they are getting back together.  THEN, he proceeds to try to lean over and kiss me to which I was all like, hell to the no and did the duck and swerve motion before getting back into my car and managing to drive far enough to be out of view before breaking down.

And that my friends, was one of the SHITTIEST things a guy has ever done to me.

But a week or so later, I get a phone call.  I let it go straight into voicemail, but then quickly dialed into it to listen to the message.  Again with the ‘sorry’ business.  Wouldn’t ‘blame me if I never spoke to him again.’ But he wanted to ‘explain’ things.  He really ‘cared’ for me and was ‘really confused.’ He hoped to hear from me.

Well what can I say, I fell for it.  Called him back, let him splutter around and apologize for a good 20 minutes.  Listened when he said he still wanted to see me - still wanted to give ‘us a shot.’ And I told him I would consider it.  (STUPID STUPID STUPID)

A week went by, I get an email from him.  Fairly innocuous - how was I, he was busy with some projects on the Mississippi, was I going to be at the deli this weekend, he sure hoped so because he’d like to see me… etc.

And it went on like that for about three weeks.  No asking out on dates, just… hey… maybe we can run into each other. 

I finally grew suspicious and asked Mr. K his take on the situation.  And God love him - you may not like what he has to say, but he rolls straight.  We were working side by side at the time and he looked at me over the half wall that split my cube from his and was like “Why are you still talking to this guy?  Seriously, tell him to fuck off.”

So basically I did and since then have pretty much adopted that stance with the vast majority of my ex’s.  It’s just cleaner that way.  I don’t need any more friends - I’ve got plenty thanks.  Just move along.  We’ve got some nice parting gifts for you.  The exception to this has been Mark, but hey… we have a kid together.  That sort of thing tends to make a - oh I dunno - permanent bond between two people whether you want it there or not.

Anyway - turns out, he and the chick move up to PA where he starts on his PhD and like a month or so later she packs her bags up and moves back to M-town.  HA-HA!  How you like THAT!?  Karma’s a real bee-yatch isn’t it?  Plus - she was a fatty and ugly.  And I was hotter - all your friends told me so.  Nyah.  Loser.

But since Indy there have been others and by the time the dude came into the picture, Coach had put me into the game quite a bit.  I had had lots of practice, so when someone who was normal and actually put up with me showed up, I was surprised.

Let’s go through the entire cast of characters just for kicks, shall we?

Lo-Cal
CFG
Indy
Sideshow Bob
Guitar Boy
Lunchbus
Adboy

And that brings us up to the dude - who also has done sweet things for me and has also done his fair share of putting his foot in his mouth.  But I love him all the same and what hasn’t torn us apart has certainly made the relationship stronger. 

Do you ever feel as if you have travelled out of a large dark tunnel… and when you make it through to the other side, you turn back and look at that tunnel and you wonder why you had to make the journey so hard on yourself - when all you had to do was put one foot right in front of the other.

That’s sort of the way I feel about my relationship with him.  Betsey would always tell me that ‘we only accept the love that we think we deserve.’ The right people tend to come into your life when you stop letting yourself be a doormat.

So yeah - back to the email.  Of course it was from Indy.  He was still up in the northeast finishing his last year on his PhD.  What was I up to?  He had just completed another dive in Africa last month.  I could find the pictures here (insert URL).  What were my plans for the holidays?  Was I still working on my house?  Best, Indy.

I sat on that email for a few days, stewing over whether to reply.  And also, why in the hell was he contacting me since our last email exchange had been in January of 2004.  What did he want? 

All of these questions made me cranky and also made me don the ‘Mean Cat’ face which is to say, I have spent a great deal of the past three days squinching up my nose and wrinkling up my forehead.

Plus it didn’t help that my company was preparing for a major announcement all week.  Maybe you guys heard it?  PS - I seem to have lost 5% of my salary, so if you find it, would you mind picking it up and just shoving it in a drawer for me?  Thanks.

Yesterday, I think, what the hell.  I’ll write you back:  Hello Indy.  It’s a surprise to hear from you.  Glad to hear that the expeditions on the sunken ship are still going well.  I see from the pictures that (name redacted) went with you.  How is he doing?  I am doing well - engaged and moving to DC in the spring.  Still working on the house and hoping to see it sell quickly.  Talk soon, Cat

Not one hour later, I get a reply.  Cat:  I was just going through my email account and saw an old email from you so decided to write and say hello.  Give everyone in Memphis my best.  Happy Holidays Indy

And my response?  It was a good twenty minute belly aching laugh on my sofa. 

Dumbass.

As the year winds down, I’ve started thinking things like “This will be the last Christmas I spend in this house...” “This will be the last Christmas card that I send with this return address...” “This will be the last Christmas pageant I will attend at Turtle’s current school...” And it’s made me sort of nostalgic.

This past weekend (and I want to preface this with ‘I never do this’ ), I drove to the cemetery to visit the graves of my grandparents and my great grandparents - people, who I would have wanted the dude to meet and try to imagine the conversations that would take place and what impressions would be made.

My great grandmother (my mother’s mother’s mother) has the only tombstone in Memorial Park cemetery that does not have the year of her birth.  I know this, because when she died my uncle spent a great deal of time arguing with the cemetery staff when they told him that it was totally against policy not to have a birth year.  He tried to convince them that it was one of my great grandmother’s dying wishes - and besides, we never really knew how old she truly was anyway.

That’s not really what makes the tombstone look foreign to me.  It’s of seeing her name spelled out in full - and there’s no ‘loving grandmother’ etched there… no ‘granny’ in italics.  We never were allowed to call her anything but her last name, Gatewood - later shortened by my brother to just Gate.  My mother and her siblings were never permitted to say they were her grandchildren - and it was only until she moved into assisted living and would take me to the dining room for a club sandwich and bingo, that she would tell people that I was one of her great grandchildren.

That age thing again.

I have been compared to her both favorably and unfavorably by my aunt and my mother and I wonder what the dude would have thought and if he would have been like all my other boyfriends and scared to death of her.

Gate left home at the age of 14 (or so that was at least the age she most consistently stated when telling this story) and hopped in a boxcar on a train headed to Chicago.  There she would wait tables and eventually meet and marry an Italian immigrant.  My grandmother, the one for whom I named after, was born when my great grandmother was either 15 or 16 and was sent back to Memphis to be raised by her grandmother.  (As a side, my grandfather, Gate’s son in law, would always tell me that Gate would have told me that she had had my grandmother at 8 if she thought I would believe her.)

After divorcing the Italian, she moved back to Memphis and later would marry the man that I would know as my great grandfather, John Gatewood - a humble cotton farmer from the Delta.  I think about that now - I suppose the stability is what attracted her to him - this wild woman who had spent her twenties in Chicago partying around.  Maybe she had missed the south and her daughter and wanted to move back. 

She was a complex, opinonated woman who did what she wanted, when she wanted and how she wanted.  She loved an afternoon libation and one time told me, after she had had a few and I had had a fight with my now ex-husband, to get a grip, go home, put on some heels and some lipstick and be nice to him because men were far more fragile than us women.  Men took themselves too seriously.

When I was a freshman in high school, she encouraged me to accept a date for the homecoming dance with a geeky boy who was a year older than me and someone that I was not interested in.  She told me to consider it ‘practice.’ And then later, after meeting him when he picked me up, admitted that he seemed like a dullard. 

I wish now that I had been the one to write her obituary instead of the one that my mother, aunt, and uncles had managed to string together. 

And what would I say?  She found Memphis boring.  She was an excellent bridge player.  She never missed an afternoon old fashioned and introduced me to the beverage when I was 15.  She liked Anna Karenina, but thought War and Peace was tediously political, and she stayed abreast of current fashion into her eighties, and chastised my mother for embracing the trend toward wearing exercise clothes at all hours of the day.  She also told me that I looked like a peasant when I tried on a dress from Laura Ashley in front of her.  She always wore bright red lipstick and had ‘her hair done’ every Saturday morning, even when she was on her deathbed.  She was not exactly your typical affectionate grandparent type - but I always found her absolutely fascinating.

Whereas my family has a tendency to minimize emotions for social pleasantries - preferring small talk over a person’s feelings - Gate met you head on.

She was shocking, acerbic, and wordly.  She was - though my mother would never admit this - exactly what this family had needed.  She introduced scandal to us through the spoken word - never shying away from telling you exactly what she thought of things.  And you?  Well you were going to listen.

I imagine she would have liked the dude - found him refreshing with his own opinions, some of which differ drastically with my family’s.

And the dude… I’m not sure what he would have thought, but perhaps it would have given him a frame of reference for dealing with me.

Why can’t one of my friends marry Paul Rudd?

I mean seriously… just so I can watch him dance like this at the reception: