There was girl that lived one block over from me in high school. She was a year younger, but way more mature then I was. Or rather more mature looking. If you know what I mean. (And I think you do.)

She came from a family of a million kids. They had a kid in every grade at my high school. The family lived stuffed inside their three bedroom house. They were poor. And yet, she always dressed super trendy and cute. She had the perfect cinched waisted GAP jeans (this was the early 90’s, remember) with huge belt and baggy top. Her hair and face always looked pristine. I never understood how she could look so hip and yet, be so poor. One day I learned her secret. She had an older, richer cousin who lived in California. Apparently this older cousin sent her bags and bags of trendy hand-me-downs every summer. Just in time for the new school year.

I had other friends with this same mythical older, well-dressed, cousin. My best friend Marci had an older cousin who would hand-down her formal dresses. I dreamt of received garbage bags full of new hand-me-downs. I longed for the day that my cousin would ask me if I wanted all her used skirts and tops.

The thing is I was the oldest girl cousin in my family. I didn’t have anyone to hand their clothes down to me. There wasn’t anyone in my life to share their wardrobe bounty with me.

Not even an older aunt.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve been the proud recipient of an overabundance of a quite divine hand-me-down maternity wardrobe courtesy of my good friend Marci. And let’s not forget the hand-me-down goodies that Mrs. Squirrel has sent me over the years. I’m talking shoes and skirts and sweaters.

I know some people don’t like hand-me-downs. Let’s make one thing clear; I’m not one of those people. I love having something new-ish to hang in my closet and wear to work. I love knowing that my new favorite skirt was once loved by someone that I love. It just makes my heart feel good.

My little family had dinner over at some friend’s house last Friday night. They served us a glorious artichoke and chicken soup with the yummiest salad I’ve ever had. And bread. And ice cream. Not to mention the lovely conversation and fun kids for Babboo the play with. It was just a good night with people we love. At the conclusion of the night my friend asked if I wanted to go through the boxes and piles and bags of clothes her son had recently grown out of. She was planning on donating them the next day.

I tried to hide my excitement as I told her I’d love anything she had to offer. She took me upstairs and I was giddy when I saw the piles of winter pajamas. Babboo has needed some bigger and warmer jammies, but I just haven’t been able to justify spending all the money just yet. It just hasn’t been cold enough. Yet. My friend put pajama after pajama in a pile for me to take home. Before she was done I had more pajamas for Babboo then I’ve he’s had in his entire life. The kid is set for the next two winters. And I couldn’t be more grateful.

Last night I was folding all of his new jammies after getting them out of the dryer. Babboo recognized that they were new clothing items and kept asking me, “Mommy, what that jammie?” I explained to him that his friend William had been nice enough to give him all of these new clothes. Babboo got excited and proceeded to call them all “William Jammies” and requested to wear the firetruck “William Jammies” to bed last night.

I have a pile of clothes Babboo’s grown out that I can’t wait to pass on to his little friend “Cabub”. It’s like a piece of my baby that I’m passing on and I want them to go to a good home.

So tell me, what has been your favorite hand-me-down?

I’d have to say mine was the gray maternity shirt Marci gave me. As seen here when I was just barley pregnant with Babboo.

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Holy crap, I’m guest blogging for Amalah today over at the Advice Smackdown.  This is like my wildest fantasy come true.  Head over to read about my favorite drug store products and make sure to leave a comment about your favorite drug store products.

And also, check out my latest New Thing. I tried out some new make-up, but only because I had a $5 off coupon.

I tired to be all smart and crap in high school. I really got into art history and visiting museums with my friends. We would go out to JB’s restaurant (one small step up from Denny’s) and sit and talk about books and poems and art.

During this time I also go into visiting used book stores. I loved buying books that had been read and loved previously. There was something extra special about reading a copy of “Gone with the Wind” that was covered in coffee stains and notes in the margins. To me this just felt more like the way a book should be read.

I would visit the used book store and come home with piles of paperback books to fill my time with. I read the classics as well as books I had bought solely based on the cover and the wear and tear. One visit to the bookstore ended with a hardback book I picked up because the description on the book sounded interested to “pretending to be smart” teenage Isabel.

The story traces the travels of six young people who tour Europe and Africa in the 1960’s searching themselves and a meaning for their lives in a world where they have no control in their own affairs.

I fancied myself somewhat of a hippy, so a book about hippies sounded right up my alley. And so I bought “The Drifters” by James A. Michener and started to read it. From the first chapter about Joe, a Vietnam draft dodger, this book captured my attention. It’s actually quite odd that I loved this book as much as I did. There was nothing similar between my life in small town Utah, as a devout Mormon, to the characters in the book that traveled around Europe experimenting with drugs and having random sex.

They were truly hippies and I truly wasn’t.

So the book follows this group of kids from all over the world. They each have their own story and reason for ending up in Torremolinos, Spain. But that’s where they end up, at the Wilted Swan bar in Torremolinos. James A. Michener writes about Torremolinos like it’s some kind of magical place for people who love life. The front of the book had a map of all the locations in the novel. I studied where Torremolinos was in Spain and just assumed it was a mythical location that had been dreamt up for the sake of the novel.

Meanwhile I lived in Utah, where it snowed all the time and the only beaches were ones near salt lakes and chemical filled lakes.

Over the next years I read and reread “The Drifters” any chance I got. I wrote a paper about it for my high school English class as well as one of my college English classes. I tried to talk my friends into reading it and often quoted passages to boyfriends.

As far as I recall I never convinced anyone to read it.

Until about three years ago when I loaned my paperback copy to my BFF May. (My hardback copy has since been lost.) I’m not sure that I really believed she would read it. And if she did read, I wasn’t sure she would like it.

But she did read it. And she did like it. She also asked me how in the heck 17 year old Isabel had gotten her hands on that book? She understood that it really wasn’t the typical book a 17 year old who is stuck lives in Utah would read. I agreed with her and recounted the story of just finding it in a random used bookstore and being drawn to it.

And yet I never got online and looked up anything about the book. It was like this little gem of a secret that was mine alone. I took it with me when we went on vacation so I could read about these kid’s travels while I traveled.

(Mexico 2005. Reading “The Drifters” on the beach.)

And still, I never really thought much about where the book was set.

That is until The King and I were driving to our destination outside of Malaga, Spain and I saw this sign.

I freaked. The King was all “I told you this place existed and that we’d be driving through it!”

I was all “I don’t remember!! HOLY CRAP!”

And then I freaked out a little more.

I sat in the car trying to channel my teenage self. I pictured myself sitting alone in the bedroom of my youth, reading “The Drifters” and dreaming of far away places. Places that I never ever for one second could have dreamed I would one day visit. I wanted teenage Isabel to know that I was there.

I was in Torremolinos.

Days later, on our way back to the airport to fly to Formentera, we took a little detour and drove around Torremolinos. I didn’t see a bar called the Wilted Swan. I didn’t see anyone that looked like Joe or Yigal or Gretchen or Cato.

But I was there. I was in Torremolinos. And that’s all I cared about.

Teenage Isabel was happy.

So tell me, what book local would you like to visit? And why?

An E-mail thread between my younger sister, who lives in Utah, and me yesterday:

Sister: Do you have tomorrow off from work?

Isabel: Why would I have a random Thursday off?

Sister: My husband has it off. I thought maybe you and The King would too.

Isabel: (confused at this point.) Yeah, we don’t have it off. We’ll both be working on Thursday this week. As per usual.

Sister: But it’s the 24^th of July tomorrow.

Isabel: You’re right, tomorrow is the 24^th of July. And today is the 23^rd of July. So what?

Sister: The 24^th of July is Pioneer Day. Remember?

Isabel: Now I remember. But you realize Pioneer Day is strictly a Utah holiday. And more importantly it’s strictly a Mormon holiday? Nobody outside of Utah has any idea that the 24^th of July is a real holiday.

Sister: So you don’t have tomorrow off from work?

Isabel: (shaking my head as I type out my response to her!) Yeah, I don’t have it off from work.

Sister: And The King?

Isabel: Yeah, he’ll be working too.

(Lil Isabel on Pioneer Day, 1978)

Happy Pioneer Day, bitches!  And to quote my friend Becky, “remember to thank your ancestors for coming here today!”

Will do!

I’ve had the same older brother since I was born. I’ve had my same younger brother for twenty eight years. My baby sister? Well, I’ve had her as my sister for almost twenty six years. When I think back to my childhood, there are very few memories that don’t have one of them as my co-star. And if they weren’t staring in one of my memories, they were there as supporting characters or maybe even a member of the choir.

I spent the first twenty five years of my life living within a two hour drive of my parent’s house. I never went more then a week without seeing some member of my family. When my older brother moved three hours away to go to college, I would drive out to see him once a month.

I wouldn’t say that my siblings and I were particular close, but we were around each other a lot. Especially since both my parents worked full time and the older siblings (me) had to babysit the younger ones. A lot.

As a teenager I don’t think I could have imagined a time when my siblings wouldn’t play a major role in my life. They were just around and I assumed they would always be there.

I’m thirty three now. I talk to my sister on the phone, probably, every other day. We e-mail numerous times during the day. While we have nothing at all in common, she’s one of my closets friends. I talk to my younger brother on the phone every few months. It’s not that we don’t like each other. I think we don’t talk more simply because he’s a boy and I’m a girl. When I do talk to him I love it. But neither one of us makes the effort to talk more. My older brother lives 4 blocks from our new house. It takes less then five minutes to walk to his apartment. I’ve seen him twice in the last year.

When I stop to think about this I get sad. How can these people who played such a major role in my life make only sporadic guest appearances now that we’re older? Is it because they are the one who know my secrets? Do I not talk to my younger brother more often because he’s one of the few who can remember all my slimy boyfriends? Do I distance myself from my older brother because he knew me when overalls were the crowing moment in fashion?

My dad is one of nine siblings. He’s one of the older siblings, so when his mom died he and my mom ended up with five of his younger siblings. They raised the two youngest brothers from the time they were eleven. While they were all born in West Virginia eight of the nine siblings live in Utah.

And yet, there are some of my dad’s siblings that I’ve never even met. I wouldn’t recognize most of them if I passed them on the street. I might be able to name most of my cousins, but I’d never be able to pick them out of a line up if my life depended on it.

My dad’s been trying to get his siblings all together for the past six months. Last Friday five of them met at my parents house. They sat under the tree, eating BBQ and sharing stories most of them had long forgotten. All of them showed up with a few precious pictures from their childhood. Most of the pictures had never been shared. They passed the pictures around while they laughed and cried about the years long gone. My dad scanned every last picture and made a disk for all of them to take home. He’s mailing me my own copy.

I talked to my mom last night about the family reunion. She said it was magical. Some of them hadn’t seen each other in over thirty years. Four of the nine siblings decided not to show up for the reunion. When my mom called one of them earlier in the week to remind him to come, he told my mom he was happy in his life and didn’t feel the need to mess with that. She understood. Another one is too sick and frail to travel. One said she would be there, and then never showed up. And one of them, well, nobody’s heard from him in over ten years. They assume he’s dead, but they don’t know.

I can’t imagine not seeing my brother in over thirty years. I don’t want that. I want Babboo to know the wonderful people that I lived with during my younger days. Heck, I want to know them too.

I guess that means I need to pick up the phone and make more of an effort.

So tell me, what are your thoughts on your relationship with your siblings?

Like most of you I use the interweb for many numbers of things. My list looks something like this (in no particular order):

• Blogging
• E-mail (oh how I love thee!)
• Stalking old boyfriends
• Shopping
• News
• And by “news” I mean “reading gossip”
• Song lyrics

That’s right, I’m constantly googling the lyrics for all my favorite songs.

Remember back when we had to buy CD’s (or better yet, cassette tapes)? I used to get extra excited when the CD included lyrics in the liner notes. I totally remember that Bon Jovi’s “New Jersey” had the lyrics included, but that very few of my Beatles albums did. (I chalked this up to The Beatles being all deep and wanting you to figure out the lyrics for yourself.)

I don’t know what it is about being me, but I have to know what a singer is singing about. The times when teenage Isabel didn’t have access to the liner notes (and long before the interweb was invented), I used to keep notebooks of the lyrics to my favorite songs. I would sit in my bedroom, starting and stopping my tape deck while I frantically wrote out the lyrics to my current fave song.

Some songs were easy to figure out the lyrics to. Some were harder. Especially the long ones. Dude, have you ever listened to Don McLean’s “American Pie”? It’s like a 6 minute song with all sorts of confusing lines like “And while Lennon read a book of Marx”, which totally didn’t make sense to my 14 year old self.

And let’s not even get started on Arlo Gunthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant”. That song is like 20 minutes long. (And yes, I totally have it all written down in some long lost notebook in my mom’s basement.)

(And we wonder why I didn’t date much in high school. I was busy sitting in my bedroom keeping notebooks of song lyrics.)

(Yeah, I guess we don’t wonder, do we?)

Sometimes it wasn’t until I’d hear one of my friends singing along that I’d realize I’d misheard the lyrics and had it written down all wrong. I’d have to listen and relisten to the song to try to figure out how I’d managed to hear it all wrong. Most of the time I couldn’t decipher the correct lyric and wasn’t sure how my friend, brother, or aunt could hear it differently then I did.

It’s been as I’ve gotten older and listened to some of my old music that I realize not only did I have the lyrics wrong, but I had the whole meaning of the song wrong.

While visiting my family in Utah a few weeks ago my dad commented on the song that’s my current ring tone. “Question” by the Old 97’s is, clearly, a song about a a guy proposing marriage to a lady. Clearly. But my dad was all, “I hate that song. It’s all about this guy trying to trick this girl isn’t having sex with him!” My mom and I both started to laugh and I began to assure my dad that wasn’t the case at all. Of course he wouldn’t listen to me.

The best one was when my friend said he realized the Bullet Boys song wasn’t really about a girl named Maginia, and was in fact a song called “Smooth Up In Ya”. As an 11 year old boy he just assumed the song was called “Smooth Maginia”, because really, “smooth up in ya” meant nothing to him (yet).

So tell me, what song lyric or song meaning did you totally have wrong and how did you finally figure it out?

(And also, who in the crap is the Bullet Boys? I had no idea who sang the song “Smooth Up In Ya”. Thank goodness for google.)

Like most college aged girls I spent most of those years making out with loads of different fellows. As in every weekend I was macking on a new boy. This is totally normal, right? And totally fun, right? And totally how every girl should spend her pre-married days, right?

When I say I was “making out” with these boys you understand that I mean “kissing”, right? I was, by no means, doing anything more with these boys.

Simply, innocently kissing.

(Okay, maybe “innocently” isn’t the right world. But you get my drift.)

During this time I felt the need to tell my mom about all the fun I was having away at college. I would call her and tell her about the latest weekend fun with the latest new boy.

“Mom, I totally got with this cute boy from the drama department on Friday night. His name was Jim and he was blonde. Dreamy.”

“I’m glad you’re having fun Isabel.”

And then we’d talk about something else. While I may have been dumb enough to tell my mom about making out with boys, I was smart enough to not give her details. That would have definitely been crossing the lines.

The next week an identical phone conversation would take place:

“Mom, I met this cute Hispanic boy and we totally got together this weekend.”

“Oh lovely. I made pizza for dinner tonight.”

And so the story continued like this. For years. I would call and tell my mom about my latest kissing partner and she would offer support and then move on to a new topic.

Eventually I got older and wiser and stopped making out so much with random dudes. And I got married. I was now an adult and could have real live adult conversations with other adults. Like my mom.

One day we were discussing how silly I was when I was younger and kissing all those different random boys. My mom looked at me with shock in her eyes.

“You were only kissing those boys?!”

“Yes mom! Only kissing! What in the crap did you think I was doing with them?!”

“I thought you were having sex with all of them!”

“FOR THE LOVE OF PETE! I was only kissing them.”

And then my head exploded.

What kind of Slutty McSlutterson did my mother think I was?  Dude, no girl would have been sleeping with the amount of boys I was kissing.  Really, the number is astounding.
It was bad knowing that my mom had thought her daughter was ultra-loose for so many years. What made it even worse was the fact that NOT ONCE did my mom ever say, “You know, I’m really not comfortable hearing about your sexual escapades.  But, are you using protection?  Are you being careful?”

Dude, she totally just blew the whole thing off.

FOR YEARS.

I don’t know how the rest of you were raised, but where I come from we do not have sex before we are married.  We just don’t.  It was probably bad enough that I was kissing so many boys.  There was no way I was sleeping with all of them.

Holy crap, mom.

I’m sure my mom worried and fretted about the state of her daughters eternal soul.  And yet, she never talked to me about this.  Heck, she never even wrote me a letter discussing her concern.  (She didn’t even send me an anonymous card with a copy of some scriptures.  Or a pack of condoms.)  Nothing!

I’m not sure what I would have wanted my mom to say to me back during those days.  I wish she would have said something, just so I could tell her it was all a communication problem.  That would have saved her years of fretting and worrying.

Or maybe, she wasn’t worried.

Crap. That might be even worse.

So tell me, what’s the worst communication problem you’ve encountered?  And, like me, did it involve your parent being a dumb a@@?