Here we are again

Dear February,

In twenty days you'll christen me a bright shiny twenty eight.

I feel so young.

I am so young.

Twenty nine Februaries: good name for a boy band, and then it pretty much stops there.

Now, to the nineteen year olds I share a classroom with; I'm a three headed dinosaur.

Well, guess what ya long legged Christians, I read the spark notes and,

People live forever now a days.

The bitches.

I write four checks a year in the amount of eighty two dollars and fifty cents.

So do the three distant siblings on the east coast.

This is Linda's life insurance policy.

She cannot make those payments.

She has nothing.

She lives in low income housing for the elderly.

She can get a hot lunch in her building every day for one dollar.

That's all she eats.

That and coffee.

The latest problem is something with her bones.

When I googled the medical terminology for said problem,

the one in sibling #1's e-mail,

the one that sounded particularly cold,

I got a lot of post menopausal garble,

and a life size portrait of sally Field.

Or was it Jamie Lee?

Linda's middle name is Lee.

But, Linda Lee is not at all how she appears to the outside eye.

She's best described as Veronica, or maybe Violet.

By the time she was twenty eight she was married with two kids.

She never went to college.

But, occasionally some nursing classes get caught in her web of compulsive lies.

Sibling #1 is a registered nurse.

Very successful.

She used to take care of me.

She does that.

By the time I was nineteen all of this had already happened,

But, I didn't yet know that I could write.

The east coast halves, I should say, are,

well,

remarkably present,

and easy to hug,

despite all the elephants, distance

and pain.

I do wonder, kind of, what all of them might be doing on February the twenty.

Or, even, dare I say, what they were doing on February the twenty in 1982.

But, that my friends boarders on pity, or something closely akin.

Something out of season three of Party of Five.

And if you'll notice, I wear mostly pants and hooded sweat shirts.

And between the Asians and the fakes I'm practically rich.

Bitches.

Truly,

Skin and Toast

P.S. Katherine Hepburn came up on stage the other night. And I put my head down. Because, in the slide show of my spaghetti stained youth, Linda and Kate are the same person I think. And it's kind of as good as it gets.