I grew up in a broken family, as most of you know.  My dad married three times, had seven daughters, and my mom married three times and had three, including me.

My dad had a little brother named Jack, who grew up to do many great things, such as teeach, tutor and act as guidance counselor to both young students and inmates at Riker's Island.

My Uncle Jack married young, the first time, and his marriage didn't work out, and he felt badly about that.  So when he made his second marriage to a lady named Jane (I kid you not, his own Lady Jane), he felt happy.

He tried to emotionally adopt her two kids but they were hers, with another father.  We all know how that goes.

So when he and Jane got pregnant and had their daughter Jackie, it was a big thing.  To him and his wife, and to the rest of our family, it was a big thing.  Finally, to see Jack happy.  Finally, to see Jack being a loving daddy, and to be loved by someone who called him "Daddy".

And he was a loving daddy.  And he was loved.

"Here's your cousin's picture, Littlebit.  Here's Jackie and her Betty Grable legs",  he said to me as he proudly showed off a picture of his chubby and adorable little one-year-old daughter.

I met her when she was a toddler, Jackie.  And yes, she had sexy legs, for a baby.  And yes, she was adorable.  And yes, she was the apple of her daddy's eye.

And then I moved to California and stayed out there for 11 years.  And so I missed seeing Jackie grow up.  I missed out on how smart and clever she was -- smart enough to win a scholarship to Oxford at the age of 16.  And I missed how she made an impact with her own fellow students at school, giving them a voice through being a very outspoken and smart young lady who questioned everything, and missed nothing.  I missed everything about her, while I was 3000 miles away.

Until I got a phone call, out of the blue, and it was my sister and she said, "Jackie is in a coma.  It looks really scary, but we're praying".

My dad had been living overseas at the time, but he was home during Jackie's coma, and he, unreligious as could be, even he asked me to pray for her.

I asked:  "How??"  "Why?".  All I could remember was the pretty toddler with Betty Grable legs.  It didn't make sense.

I was told:  Jackie, like a number of our family, suffers asthma.  She was using inhalers and having to go the hospital a lot when the inhalers didn't work.  So Uncle Jack and Aunt Jane found a specialist for her, so that she could live like a normal 16-year-old girl.

She would go to a doctor, once a week, and get a shot, and she would no longer get out of breath or need an inhaler.  And she could continue playing sports, and she could to to Oxford on her scholarship, and all would be well for her.

Except that, on the day she fell into her coma, which was a day just like any other once-a-week day, she went to see her doctor to get her normal shot in the arm, and afterwards she got into the car with Uncle Jack, and put on her seatbelt just like always, and they took off towards home, and then.....suddenly, so suddenly, Jackie grabbed her arm and yelled, "Daddy!  It hurts!!"

And Uncle Jack pulled the car over to the side of the road, and said, "What hurts, honey, what's wrong??" and she passed out.

She passed away about two weeks later, in a coma, with kidney failure.

My Uncle Jack and Aunt Jane donated everything to science.  That was their wish. 

They did not ask why, they did not sue the doctor who gave Jackie her shot in the arm, they did not want their daughter's sudden death to become a freak show in the media.

They held a very beautiful ceremony at her high school wherein the statue of Rodin's Thinker was added to the school grounds in her name, and they kept a small statue of Rodin's Thinker in their home.  They also kept Jackie's bedroom untouched, for years, so that by the time I got home from California for good, the room was stale but still untouched.

My uncle personally opened the bedroom door for me, without my asking him to, and proudly showed off Jackie's highschool yearbooks, her ribbons, her pictures, and her dollhouse.  It's a tour I will never forget.

My uncle has since passed away, recently, and so did Jane.  Within a few weeks of each other, in fact.

Rodin's Thinker thinks and ponders on.

I wonder to myself, sometimes, should they have questioned further the reasons for their daughter's sudden reaction to her normal, weekly, asthma shot?  Should they have tried to find out further what happened?  They were not the sort of folks who jump at a lawsuit.  They only mourned the loss of their daughter.  And they were told it was a freakish reaction, so the drug their daughter was given was usually not so much a killer, if at all.

No one in my family blamed them or tried to talk them into finding out more.  Why, or how, could we?  They lived in depression from the day she died, until the days that they died. 

And Rodin's Thinker thinks on.

This was for Clear Thinker, and for me.  I did not write this to help my cousin, nor her parents, who are all passed.  I write it for me and for Clear Thinker (because I owed him the story), and I write it for anyone who has to deal with death, drugs, and love.

My cousin, my aunt, and my Uncle Jack are missed.  None of it makes sense, but there it is.

Your thoughts are welcome.  Clear Thinker has his answer, and I have said my piece.

I was named after my grandmother’s best friend, Aunt Bess.  Well, my sisters and I called her Aunt Bess, but her true name was Elisabeth, and she preferred Bess for short.  Unlike me, she didn’t have a surname that starts with B, so her name didn’t sound silly.  If I, on the other hand, was to call myself  Bess, it would sound silly.  BessB.  Sounds too much like “Best Bee”.  (And that might almost sound as if I was in competition with my friend workerbee, but, I digress.)

Aunt Bess used to have an old Scots saying, “Waste not, want not.”

My mother adopted this phrase whenever I left food on my plate, bought another LP or Atari game, or found myself needing a personal loan from her.  I’m thankful for my mother, and my Aunt Bess.

Waste not, want not.  To some it’s a fun phrase because it’s easy to remember, to others because it rolls off the tongue so easily, and to yet others because when you say it three times, real fast, it sounds like Charlie Brown’s schoolteacher’s voice:  “Wa waw, worh wongghh…wa wahw, wohng waangh, …wae wung waaa wonnh.”  So fun and easy is it to say out loud, that one sometimes forgets the true meaning of the phrase.

Don’t waste, and you won’t need. 

That’s the true meaning of the phrase.

And the phrase belongs to frugal people everywhere.  The old saying belongs to people who have grown up not only hearing it, but heeding it.   I won’t go all Charles Dickens on you, but you all know of people who really do scrimp and save every single penny because they have to.   These people have heeded the lesson of this phrase because every last scrap of anything is, to them, a necessity, and not a rat packer’s indulgence.

I haven’t always heeded it, and I have not worked for a company yet who understands the meaning of the phrase.  The places I have worked at, (except for a certain bakery that was family-owned for roughly 100 years until it was bought up, chewed up, and regurgitated as the same old, same old, but on a higher budget and therefore with not-as-well-baked goods that are now sold at  a higher price by a national firm that had “acquired” it), do not understand the phrase “waste not, want not” when it comes to spending money on “Image”.  Oh, sorry….now they call it “Brand”.   Thanks to “Branding”, no frivolous expenditure is frivolous if it’s under the guise of  “Networking”. 

“What?  We weren‘t out partying that night, we were ‘Displaying the Brand‘”.

“The Brand”.  As if the market were nothing but cattle, waiting with baited breath for the hot branding iron to fly down and hit its vulnerable ass.

Funny, though, that it’s all the big wigs at the company who are marketing “The Brand:, while all the worker bees (no offense, workerbee) couldn’t give a rat’s ass what the brand is as long as the boss hasn’t fired them for yet another week straight.

But, what corporate America has to remember is that the low-man-down-on-the-totem-pole employee in every company sees the waste, feels the waste, and wants their company , too, to feel the waste, and doesn’t really know how to make that happen yet, other than to kvetch about it over a forbidden smoke break, or send an email or IM to the person in the cube next to them, knowing full well the company computers can monitor and report and playback and hold against them in court the full contents of whatever frustrated and acid-filled and  worthy-of-losing-one’s-job-over flame job the low-man-down-on-the-totem-pole happens to be guiltily sharing at any given point in time.

Seeing a CEO, and his or her upper cronies, jet about the country and write-off whatever he or she can get away with, with abandon that seems almost chaotic, all the while struggling to pay one’s own rent and car payment at the same time, can get to a person. 

So seeing our own government do it to us in the same manner should get to a country.

Therefore, the way I see it, we can start big, and vote for change this year.  Or we can start small, and start asking for more equality and less wastefulness in the workplace, this year. 

Starting small sometimes works.  But starting big makes starting small one hell of a lot easier.

Why waste a change election year by starting small when what we really want is to change big?

Waste not, want not.  Vote big, get big.

I’m just sayin’.

Half of what I say is meaningless
But I say it just to reach you Julian

Julian, Julian, freedom of speech, calls me
So I sing a song of loons, Julian

Julian, open eyes, snarky smile, calls me
So I sing a song of love, Julian

His posts of angry freedom are shimmering, glimmering
In the sun

Julian, Julian, TPM watch-guard, teach me
So I sing a song of recipes, Julian

When I cannot stop the spam
I can only speak my mind Julian

Julian, waking cut, silent paste, teach me
So I sing a song of truth, Julian

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/profile/Julian%20Smith

(Forgive me, John Lennon, forgive me, please)