Hygge=Cozy: The Best Feeling in the World

The classical music is playing. The snow is falling and my Frankenstein Herman Survivor Boots from 1986 are calling to me. I have my dayglow sweatshirt that I fished out of a dumpster and washed. It fits me and matches the public works guys.

My former neighbor Ernest "Slim" told me his dog was hit by a garbage truck when he was 11. Slim was 80 when he told me. I miss Slim and Lil' and Marcel and Terry. All of the my old timer neighbors who would chat about cabbage rolls and milk truck crash on our street and dogs. Lil gave me 8 bags of clothes, that Bill and I still wear. That was 15 years ago. We have a clothesline in the boiler room so our clothes last 30 years. My jeans wear out from walking miles and miles. The inseams become gaping holes. Luckily we have a new source for clothing for nickles and dimes, the Saint Teresa's Thrift Shop open two hours a week. Tuesdays 9-11. It's a food pantry filled with beans peanut butter soup and crackers, too!! Too many of my elderly friends are in trouble on a fixed income. When a month is 31 days. They run out of food.

One of my favorite things to do is write about Transmit Mode and Receive Mode. This is my language for cyclothymia, mild bipolar. Nearly all of my artist musician writer and athlete friends are cyclothymic but they are too scared to face it. Sadly they become drug addicts or alcoholics. I am lucky because I was fighting for my health since I was a kid. I was a MUNCHAUSEN'S by PROXY kid. Look it up. So I fought like mad to teach myself how to be healthy. I made granola, yogurt, wheat soy sesame bread and ran away from home. Amen!

CYCLOTHYMIA is a kind of BIPOLAR. It has taken me 56 years and decades of therapy. Okay, I've said it. Now HOLD IT AGAINST ME. Why not? My FAMILY DID. But they were very sick, my childhood therapist actually said that to me. Mr. Brown. He said "Your mother is sick, your sister is sick." He smoked cigars and wrote in three colored pens and had three clocks in his office so he didn't have to turn his head. He was an adult psychologist with no doctorate and no toys in his office. Just NYER magazines which I loathe to this day even though my art has appeared in it.

I would go every week and tell Mr. Brown which books he moved on his bookcase. I had a touch of the photographic memory. One week I said you got new glasses frames and he nearly fainted. "They are very much like the old ones, a very subtle difference," Then he scribbled madly in his notebook file on me, a file that was 2 inches thick after 8 years of weekly visits and twice a week make up sessions when school vacation cancelled the visit. Little did he know he had a 7 year old Sherlock Goldilocks Holmes on his hands. My mother had a huge fight with him and invaded his library of books in the hallway of his apartment. She would read his notes and pick fights with him. I kid you not! She thought she was smarter than him. Sonia (my mother) took me out of there for good I was 15. He was onto her and began asking her to meet with him and I waited in the foyer hoping and imagining that she would love me when she came out. Instead she would be in a rage and take it out on me. She would blast the radio if I tried to converse with her on the 45 minute drive home. She ran every red light HONKING because "it's legal" that way. She saw herself as above the law. Just like our new President who I despise and loathe. He has gecko eyes and lizard skin. Back to my story. As a supreme narcissist Sonia bucked and snatched me up from Mr. Brown's office. "He just wants our money," she said and bought me a pair of Tony Lama black cowboy boots on Central Ave show store to shut me up. "I had to bribe you, by buying you the boots you wanted," she said years later. She accused me of making her buy a country house The one she locked me up in ALONE for three months. But that's another story for another day.

Resist! resist! resist! My grandparents get all the credit for nurturing me and genetically donating their COURAGE.