Tag: riverside

Soup and Sandwich

On By Brigid H.In Alphabet Soup1 Comment

I’m a day behind schedule in everything this week, because of the endoscopy I had on Tuesday.  So here is Thursday’s blog, on Friday.

Yesterday I had lunch at my mom’s house, and she made egg salad sandwiches.  I contributed a can of minestrone soup to the equation, and truly all that was missing was a glass of chocolate milk.  Why?  Because that is the lunch of my childhood.

When I was small, we lived with my grandmother, Lois.  She took care of me during the day while my parents worked, and often we would take an outing.  Lois didn’t drive, so we would take the Metro bus to the nearest little plaza, the only one in the neighborhood.  There, we found three businesses: Super Duper, McCrory’s, and Your Host.

First, we would go to McCrory’s, which I can only describe as a sort of tiny Target.  The selling point for me was the pet shop it contained, with the talking bird that Kevin and I had befriended.  We would look at the fish and the hamsters, and then Gran would drag me over to the kid clothes and pick me out an itchy sweater or something.  We would walk over to Super Duper, the local grocery store, and she would buy milk or bread or whatever was needed, and always made sure that I got a slice of bologna from the deli counter.  I remember two distinct things about this market, the first being the long poles attached to the shopping carts that had wheels that ran along the celling and occasionally made sparks.  Also, this is where she bought me Honey Joe.

After the grocery store it was off to lunch at Your Host.  It was a little diner that had tiny jukeboxes on the table, and for a dime I could play Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York” for her.  We would order egg salad and minestrone and the best chocolate milk in the world, and we would listen to our tunes and enjoy our food before calling for a taxi home.  The cab would come and take us back to the house, where we would unload our goodies and settle in for an afternoon nap.

When I eat that meal, I vividly remember these mornings with my grandma, who left us when I was still quite young.  Mom and I don’t listen to Sinatra while we eat, but I like to think that she is there with us in that moment, enjoying a luncheon with her daughter and granddaughter.  I like to think that people who have passed stay with us in a way, and the feeling I get from egg salad and minestrone soup just strengthens that belief.

That’s all for today, just a little memory.  I have a project or two that needs working on, so I must bid adieu.  Enjoy your weekend!

Tragic Connections

On By Brigid H.In Alphabet SoupLeave a comment

I made a decision to try updating twice a week now, as I have three blogs ready to roll and six other ideas.  I’ve been forcing myself to write daily so it seems like the dam is cracking a bit and the ideas are gushing forth.  I will be posting on Thursday as well as Monday, or at least trying to.  Anyway…my depression kicked my butt this past week, and I want to talk about it, because it came at me alongside a real tragedy.

Firstly, I am a news junkie, and I particularly love local news.  I watch it morning and night.  I have a favorite channel (WIVB) and favorite anchors.  I even like the sports segments.  The point is, I watch local news a lot, as well as national, but they don’t really come into this story much.  Anyway, one of the super cute things about my husband is that he gets emotional at the fluff pieces at the end.  He loves a Vet on an Honor Flight, a Make-a-Wish kid going to Disneyland, or a cat being rescued from a tree by a local firefighter.  His rational is that there is so many terrible things on the news, that these little endcaps give him hope.  This makes him emotional, as he himself does not come from a very hopeful background. 

On the flip side, it’s the hard stories that get me. My life held plenty of hope (despite depression’s attempts to prove otherwise) and it is the painful stories that make me feel something.  Let’s use Philando Castile as an example.  At 9:06pm on July 16th, 2016, I was puking blood in the back of an ambulance and wondering what the hell was happening to me while he choking out his last words.  I didn’t know this until the news a few days later, which I watched from my hospital bed.  I clearly remember my EMT saying it was 9:06 when they picked me up.  I clearly remember CNN telling me it was 9:06 when Castile said “I wasn’t reaching for it.”  I burst into tears over this man that I did not know, dying so unjustly, connected to me only by one minute in the span of human existence.

Monday morning I wasn’t feeling so good.  I had not taken my Celexa for two days, as I was waiting on a prescription to be filled and totally miscounted how much time I had in which to fill it.  So, all weekend I was fine, because I have my other two psych meds going for me and I was keeping busy.  Then Monday evening, shortly after I picked up my pills, I started having brain zaps.

When one has been on a certain antidepressant for a long time, one experiences some fun side effects when off it.  Brain zaps may not be the technical term, but that’s as close as I can describe the feeling of my brain literally short-circuiting in my head.  It feels like your brain is vibrating, and there’s an actual “zzzz” noise.  This is followed by extreme and debilitating depression and anxiety.  See, Celexa is my wonder drug, and I’ve been on that or its sister Lexapro for over ten years.  So, a couple days without it can wreak havoc.  Tuesday morning, I was feeling better.  No zaps, no anxiety, no depression, until I turned on the news.

See, Monday morning there was a story that kind of touched me but I assumed would be resolved.  A toddler was found sleeping in a box on a porch on Potomac Ave. in Buffalo.  Sad to say, this isn’t the most unusual thing.  Over the past year I can think of at least three incidents in the city where a child was found wandering.  The police were hopeful that he had meandered off in the night and his parents would certainly come forward for him.  They were unable to figure out his name, and when asked his mother’s name he replied “mommy.”  By that evening’s broadcast, they had not received any leads, and no one had reported a missing child.

But then on Tuesday morning, there was a story about a burned-out car being found on Tonawanda St. with human remains inside, less than a mile from where the boy was found.  It was discovered the previous evening.  The woman who found the boy on her porch said he was talking about a car and fire: “The car was burning up,” he kept saying.  The police were looking for a connection.  Three women in Florida had contacted the police to say that they believed the boy was their relative and that his parents and him were on a road trip.  They had not been able to reach them.

On Tuesday nights broadcast, they showed the boy’s grandmother, who flew up from Florida.  She said that she hasn’t heard from his parents in over 48 hours and that they were on a road trip with a friend, likely to Niagara Falls.  She pleaded with CPS to return the boy, named Noelvin, to his family.  Still no leads on the car.

Wednesday morning, they showed the boy’s grandfather in Florida, praying that it wasn’t his son in the car.  They reported that the grandmother would finally see Noelvin.  This morning they reported that he has seen his family but remains in CPS custody.  Police say that it will be some time before they figure out who was in the burned-out car.

It’s a horrific story and I am so hopeful that the two are not connected, but I have a feeling they are, in the way that I usually have feelings that turn out to be true.  I cried over this poor little boy and his parents.  I felt that same connection.  This time it wasn’t blood and guts at 9:06, but I used to live on Tonawanda St.  I was a happy and carefree little kid on that street, playing at the playground, walking to the library, and visiting the shops that had dogs who came to work with their owners (there were several back then.)  It has changed greatly over the years.  Riverside/Black Rock, the area of the city in question, used to be a nice little immigrant neighborhood.  Then it became a little rougher.  Then it was a lot rougher, and we moved to the suburbs.  There’s some revitalization going on now, but finding a burned-out car ‘round those parts isn’t exactly out of the question.  I hate thinking that this horrible thing happened to this family on a street I used to love. 

I don’t know what the results of this story will be.  While they wait for forensics, the grandmother is trying to get custody of the boy, and waiting for answers.  I wait with her, not knowing her, not having any connection to this case besides a street I used to live on when I was Noelvin’s age.  Maybe it’s the little connections that affect me the most.

Update: After I posted this, on Thursday evening broadcast, police confirmed that the burned-out car did indeed belong to Noelvin’s family. There is video of two men with gas cans leading him away from the scene. Police have said the remains of two people are in the car, further deepening the mystery as there are three missing adults that were traveling with Noelvin. Police are looking for help in identifying the two men with gas cans.