Stuck In The Middle

 

Daily Prompt: What is your middle name? Does it carry any special meaning/significance?

Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun1779/1788

Before I started Kindergarten, my Mom was sitting in the kitchen having cigarettes and coffee with her friends, and out of nowhere she called me over and said,

” Never, ever,  name your kids after your friends. ”

I think from that point on she used my middle name instead of my first name and so did most of my family. So from that day on, I was ” Marie ” The exception as most of the relatives from my Mom’s side of the family- I guess they liked her friend Anita, but my Dad’s side stuck with Marie.

My brother continued to call me ” Cheetos ” and he still does. And I’m still Marie to part of the family and Anita to the other.

So which do I prefer?

Well. I don’t like Anita because of the way most people pronounce it. It sounds like they’re saying ” Uh-nee-duh ” which is just clunky and ugly.

I liked Marie better and I really embraced ‘Marie’ when I learned about the doomed Queen of France, Marie-Antoinette.

I felt sorry for her.  In my kid’s  mind she was a girl  that nobody liked and  got her head chopped off which had to have been a horrific death.

I was a Doctor Phibes fan at this time so I understood Horror and monsters and I was sure that the people who jeered and tormented her on her way to her  death and the man who  executed her by the guillotine were pretty monstrous themselves.

Normal people don’t chop off people’s heads. They don’t even consider doing something like that and when they do, they ended up in a mental hospital or jail.

When I got older, I understood her death was a political execution but I still found it a hideous way to die and what she went through really did haunt me.

How?

Until I had problems with my thyroid, I used to wear chokers. I did that after I learned that during the French Revelation, women wore them in remembrance of people who had died at the Guillotine.

The women began wearing a political dress with red ribbons around their necks as a tribute and homage to all those who were slaughtered at the guillotine. This ribbon was worn in several different ways, around the neck like a simple choker, or tied around the back and shoulders to create an X.

So that is the story of my middle name and I’m going to follow this tag because I’m interested in other people’s stories about their sometimes neglected middle names.

 

dailyprompt-1871

Let’s Talk About It

Inspired By  RDP Friday: Satyr

A wreathed infant Dionysos sits astride a leopard, an animal sacred to the god. The tall satyr blowing his horn at the front leads the procession to the right in search of the next vineyard.
Etcher: Wenceslaus Hollar (Bohemian, Prague 1607–1677 London)
Artist: After Pieter van Avont (Flemish, 1599–1652)

 

In the Spring, Nature goes a little crazy

like a teenagers and adults who take a look at that one face,

brush up against that one arm in a crowded room

and their blood starts to boil in the center of their gut and goes roaring through their

veins leaving them breathless and flushed and wondering if there is toilet paper stuck

to their shoe or a wad of  ketchup or chocolate coating their front teeth, did their

underwear have rips in it, did their socks match?

And if it doesn’t occur to them in that moment but it will one day

this was the only time they ever felt lust and love at the same exact

second

and that they didn’t care how lost they were and that they didn’t care if anyone would

ever find them and bring them back to their senses again.

 

Cerbie

Daily Prompt: Describe the last difficult “goodbye” you said.

Woman in front of Setting Sun
Caspar David Friedrichabout 1818

In 2012 my dog Cerberus got sick- her stomach twisted and she required surgery to correct it.

The cost of the surgery was far beyond my means and the Vet didn’t do billing, but gee whiz for the low low cost of five hundred dollars they could ‘ let her go peacefully ‘ and I would get her ashes back and a paw print too.

So I let them ‘put her to sleep’ and I sat with her talked to her  through the entire process.

It’s not like I did not pay a price for letting my dog, who was the sweetest dog in the Universe and deserved a better end then the one she got.

I had no way of knowing it at the time, but my life truly went to Hell after Cerbie died. Maybe that’s the price I paid for not being able to afford to save her life. I don’t know. But you can’t let down a soul like Cerbie’s and walk away from it home free.

What I do know is she wouldn’t have liked me feeling that way, but I did.

On that day I was saying good-bye to my sweet little girl, but I refused to have that be the last thing she heard from me.

The last thing she heard me say was that  I loved her.

With my Cerbie – We didn’t say good-bye. I told her I love her. Those were the last words she heard- September 17, 2012 Lynnwood, WA