I have no idea why we were never busted for living there. The government was sending no fewer than 12 Supplemental Security Income checks to that address — all of them for psychiatric disabilities. In truth, we were more like one huge day room than the artists loft we all envisioned. But I digress — let me get my head back in the oven.

I can’t remember why I had wanted to kill myself, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. I decided to tell my friend Flossy Nylons about my idea. I walked half a block inside the warehouse to his makeshift unit. The more we talked, the more the idea sounded good to him and he decided to join me. His main concern was that we not do it in the warehouse, as it would bring down the heat on the others. They might all get kicked out if it was discovered that people lived there. Flossy had a friend, Carl, who had a small apartment nearby. He called to ask him if we could use his oven.

Carl was hesitant, but finally agreed to go along with our plan. He was a big, tall leather queen who did not like women. He hated me, but he would do anything for Flossy. Carl was probably glad to see me die, so everyone was happy.

I had to wait about an hour for Flossy to go through several changes in drag; he just couldn’t decide what to die in. In the meantime, I kept taking pills and drinking tequila — God forbid I be any less down than I already was. Flossy finally chose turquoise lamé pants, hip-high black platform boots and a sparkling pink shirt. We stumbled over to Carl’s place.

We gave Carl the names of people to contact after our demise. Then Carl left us alone in his apartment. I was crying now, but knew that I would soon be out of my misery. I thought of my folks and decided that they would be better off without me. What’s one suicide in a large family?

We taped all the windows shut. Flossy wanted to go first, so he blew out the pilot light and put his head in the oven. I covered the rest of him with a pink blanket and waited. At some point Flossy decided to take a cigarette break, so he got out of the oven. We had to untape the window and stick our heads outside, since the pilot light was still off. We were far too stoned to realize that we could have blown up the entire building.

This is how the night went: Flossy would get in the oven and then become bored, so we would untape the window again to have another cigarette break. It was all taking much longer than we had planned.

At some point Carl returned to say that he had decided to join us. I said, “Fine” — after all it was his place — but I told him that I had to go second because he was too big for me to drag out of the oven. By now, Flossy was going nuts because it was taking too damn long to die. He decided to call the suicide hot line, thinking it could tell him how to go about suicide more efficiently. Carl left the room to change into more suitable clothes in which to die.

Flossy got frustrated with the people at the hot line, who were asking him questions when he only wanted directions, so he went back into the oven. At this point, Carl walked into the kitchen in his outfit. I had never seen Carl in anything but leather and swastikas. He was in the largest pair of Mary Jane shoes I had ever seen — they were shiny, black patent leather boats. He had the requisite lace-trimmed anklets, but it was his party dress that most impressed me. Shirley Temple would have killed for the dainty satin ribbon tied around his not-so-slim waist. He had accessorized the outfit with a large crucifix that hung from a silver chain. Carl no longer frightened me, but maybe he should have. I hadn’t worn anything as feminine since the Easter when I was 8 years old.

I began to laugh and could not stop. I pulled Flossy, now passed out, from the oven. He eventually came to, and once he remembered where we were, he asked why I’d grabbed him. I told him that I couldn’t kill myself now. I had to go back to the warehouse and tell everyone we knew about the outfit Carl was wearing. Flossy looked up from the floor and stared at the lace-trimmed panties underneath Carl’s dress.

Suddenly we heard sirens and realized that the suicide hot line had probably sent them. The red blinking lights stopped on the corner in front of Carl’s apartment. We heard people running up the stairs. I grabbed a groggy Flossy and half-carried him through the pantry to the back entrance. We made it down three flights of steps and eventually found our way to the warehouse. We both decided to go to bed.

I smiled as I went to sleep, imagining Carl in his pink dress trying to explain things to the police. He must have done a good job because nothing happened to him, except for the police and firemen finding out his secret: He wanted to be Shirley Temple.

I told everyone the next day about Carl’s outfit, and it did my heart good to make people laugh. I canceled my death plans. To this day, whenever I’m depressed, I think of Carl in his Mary Janes. It would kill him to know that he saved my life.

Let’s begin here: When my son, Jody, was about 10 years old we went to buy a tree. I got tired of waiting for the picky couple ahead of us who were monopolizing the attendant. I had found my tree with no trouble. I was ready to pay and go, dammit.

I decided I would just take the tree to the car myself, then come back and pay for it. Only I didn’t. Playing the martyr, like Jesus with his cross, I dragged the tree to my car and popped it on the roof. Jody caught the rope on the other side as I tied it on. I looked over my shoulder and saw that the lot attendant was still talking to the pain-in-the-ass couple. My irritation turned into something else, something wicked and a little fun. I told my son to hop in the car — no small feat, since I had tied the doors shut with the rope. But we both managed to get into the car and I drove off the lot. I had no idea what I would say if I was caught, but I didn’t think I’d go to jail. Nor did I think of the potential damage to my son’s morals.

Jody had a big grin on his face, much bigger than the smile he had the year before when we went to chop down a tree in the rain and my husband and I argued all the way home about how crooked it was. This year Jody was beaming like the star of Bethlehem. “That was so cool, Mom,” he said. We had bonded.

I guess my son held fond memories of that day, because his only request for the following Christmas was that we steal a tree again. And I went along with it because it was now this thrilling secret we shared. We looked forward to the adrenaline rush the way runners look forward to their endorphins. We were hooked. But it was going to be harder because I was a few months clean and sober, and knowing about the theft in advance made me nervous. I was afraid that without the spontaneity it wouldn’t be as much fun, or that we’d get caught for sure.

But we had just as much fun, and we didn’t get caught. I went to the store the following day and gave someone there the money, explaining that I had forgotten to pay the night before. My son was happy and I didn’t have any guilt.

By the third year, when Jody was 13, I had decided to nip this habit in the trunk. I told him we just couldn’t steal again. My usually stoic son was crestfallen. He had really looked forward to that year’s escapade because I had a Volkswagen convertible and he thought it would be cool to make our getaway in that car. So we got the tree. As we were driving down El Camino Real in the rain with the tree sticking out of the back, my son reached over and grabbed my arm, and with pure delight on his face, he yelled through the wind to me, “This is such a Hunter Thompson moment, isn’t it, Mom?”

My son is 26 years old now. This year I went out and stole the tree alone, in memory of Christmases past. But this really is the last year, honest.

They asked my uncle to get me a job at the Ford plant. This uncle hadn’t forgotten that I was one of the leaders of a huge demonstration at Ford World Headquarters during the Vietnam War. He got me a job in one of the toughest plants in Michigan. We made trucks, worked 10 hours a day, six days a week.

This factory was like my purgatory, a place where I planned to suffer until I had paid for my sins and decided what I wanted to be when I grew up. My family thought that the job would either help me or discourage me from returning home the next time my life went into a skid.

I was 27 chronologically, but a teenager emotionally. I still believed that the perfect man would come along, adore me, take care of me and actually move me into a home with a white picket fence and a huge wooden porch with a swing.

The only part of the fairy tale I’d managed at that point was a relationship with a gay man. I was at the stage of swearing off marriage altogether when I met Phil. He was 36, frustrated and bored in his first marriage. I recognized a few emotional touchstones there, but we definitely didn’t match.

He was (and still is) from Tennessee and his accent alone would normally have sent me in the opposite direction. He drank bourbon and Coke. I smoked pot. He wouldn’t see a Jane Fonda movie. I had been at several demonstrations where she spoke. He listened to Elvis. I listened to the Stones. Phil was a foreman for Ford Motor Company. I assembled trucks on the line.

While he ran the shop, I got stoned. He was neat. I wore my hair in a grown-out brush cut. I got out of working as often as I could, and even whistled at the men on the line. Half of me was still very San Francisco, the other part was working in a factory nicknamed “Little Kentucky,” partly because it was one of the last plants to hire minorities, including women.

I was missing wild nights dancing at the Stud on Folsom Street, and I was working in a plant that almost had to shut down the day Elvis died. (On that fateful day, I came to work and heard some people saying, “The King is dead.” I tried to think of which countries still had kings and why all these people would care if one died. People were calling in sick or having to leave the line to cry or faint. What’s the big deal? I’d already been through this with Jimi, Janis and Jim. I felt like I was in another world, a time warp or something.)

By the time Phil asked me out, I was a union gal and really into my newest incarnation — a proud proletarian. Nobody expected me to date a foreman. I had just broken up with my latest bad
choice of boyfriends, a relationship made in hell. My family hadn’t liked him much. I’m not sure if it was his bisexuality, drug addiction or his having been in jail, but this was one time when they were glad I’d screwed up another relationship.

They were not, however, prepared for Phil. When I was a kid, my parents never allowed us to use racial slurs, but calling someone a hillbilly was fine, and Phil was obviously a “billy,” as my mom used to call people from the South.

I decided to go out with him because I knew that he genuinely liked and respected women, which is a rarity anywhere, but especially in the factory where we worked. He never made passes or lewd comments. He made eye, not breast, contact and never patronized women. He was the only man in the place that didn’t seem bothered that women had entered this rough and greasy male domain.

When Phil showed up to take me out on our first date, I’m not sure what I regretted more, smoking a joint of killer weed before he arrived or promising my family that I’d bring him over to meet them before we went out.

Some surprises come wrapped in brown paper or cellophane. Phil was packaged in polyester, and I do mean polyester. Sure, it was the late-’70s, but I’d never been attracted to a man who wore anything but Levis, khakis or, at the very least, a material that occurs in nature.

He also wore pointed cowboy boots, long before they were in style. I thought I’d be embarrassed by them, until I saw his dress shoes. Prepped for a night out, he looked like everything I’d made fun of for most of my life.

He had on white patent leather shoes with gold buckle-like things on them. He was wearing white polyester flared pants that were a bit short and a black polyester shirt with white polka dots. I wanted to laugh because I was high and cry because I was bringing him over to meet my family.

I am one of five daughters and we’ve been known to crucify people without them ever feeling the nails going in. We were merciless. It’s a catty telepathy: Our putdowns often were screamed across the table with a silent look that only we understood. Our victims, otherwise known as dates, were unaware of being inspected and graded. And here I was, about to bring over another unsuspecting nice guy and he was dressed like this.

Miraculously, everyone behaved. I think that Phil’s outfit was beyond anything that my family was prepared to deal with. It would have been almost redundant for them to make fun of him.

Phil, in his typical, gentlemanly way, invited them to join us in the surprise he had planned for me. Everyone except my younger sister Annie declined. She was underage, but Phil let us know that he was connected at the club where we were going and he could get her in.

Phil was correct when he guessed that this date would really impress me. It turned out that one of Phil’s closest friends was an Elvis impersonator. His creativity was immediately apparent — he spelled his name without the “E.” Lvis also wore a cape and a huge belt. Unfortunately, we were late, and even though Phil was connected at the Blue Bonnet bar, we had to stand in the back. This was a shame because I could not see over some of the hairdos, men’s and women’s in this case.

You know how it is when you’re standing next to someone and both of you are laughing inside so hard that your shoulders shake? Well, this is what happened to my sister and me. And the more we tried to hold it in, the more our shoulders vibrated against each other. While Lvis was singing “Hunk of Burning Love,” he began to toss out hankies that his mother had embroidered. We ran to the ladies’ room to avoid wetting our pants.

The fact that we had a second date and that Phil moved in with me on the third is still a mystery. I was living in a flat that was decorated with some of my favorite items: a brass hula girl lamp in which the girl actually did the hula, three stolen plastic pink flamingos, a few beers and some cheese in the refrigerator and an electric train set. Phil’s house was like the ones I’d relieved of their pink flamingos.

A few days after he moved into my flat, he went out and bought a matching bathroom set; I’d never had one before. The shower curtain matched the cup, toothbrush holder and even the rugs. I was able to talk him out of the toilet seat cover, but he was disappointed. He wanted to buy things for me. He was going to fix things up for me. He was going to take care of me.

It still embarrasses me that I believed I was so much better than him.

Love didn’t blind me completely, however. I did have some minor changes to suggest for him.The cowboy boots could stay, but the pants needed to be Levis and a little longer than his other pants. (I had to call a girlfriend from the plant to ask her how to wash polyester, which he still wore to work.) I talked him into some cotton shirts (before I found out they had to be ironed). Western music was okay in moderation, and I found music that crossed over with rock and roll, like Marshall Tucker, Bob Seeger and Emmylou Harris.

From the beginning, Phil was open to whatever music I listened to and whatever clothes I wanted to wear. Unconcerned with fashion or correctness, he truly accepts people as they are. He is unaware of the packages people come in; he never knows if someone is rich, racist or Romanian. He did tell me early on that he liked long hair and I told him, sure, he might look cool with his hair longer. That was the first and last suggestion he ever gave me on my appearance.

He does wear jeans now, although they are still an inch too short and I suspect they have polyester in them — they don’t seem to fade over the years. I have even gotten used to the tape measure on his belt. I just figure it is my good luck that I am asked to ask my husband — every day if I want to: “Is that a tape measure you’re wearing, or are you just glad to see me?”

The white shoes are gone, but not forgotten.

If my husband is napping, but I want him to go somewhere with me, it
always works. If he’s just getting in after a bad day at work and I’m getting ready to go out with a friend, it’s “Drop ‘em, babe, I’ve got a 7 o’clock movie to catch.” We both enjoy the rest of the evening and he even gives me money to buy popcorn.

Some friends think I fail to please my husband by not preparing his
favorite foods, even using recipes from his mother. Each describes the
appreciative, loving look on her man’s face when he comes home to a table
laid out with these special dinners. Well, I’ve never taken photos, but I
can’t imagine their husbands looking any happier than mine. How many men actually moan over a rib roast? I’m a good cook, but my husband has never gripped the table and shouted, “God, yes!” about one of my casseroles. And my method not only pleases my man, but often gets dinner cooked for me afterwards.

Whoever said that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach was either a gourmet cook or married to a missionary. Even Martha Stewart would recognize the advantages of my entertaining skills:

1) Saves time shopping and cooking.

2) No flowers or candles to buy.

3) No cuts or burned fingers. (And, I don’t have to worry about dishpan hands.)

One of my girlfriends actually requested that I refrain from mentioning
my theory to her husband. Another was upset that I seem to be using sex for barter. True, but so is giving a foot rub, or trading an afternoon
watching football for a chick movie in the evening. What’s the
difference?

And some appreciate my advice. My favorite postscript came on a note
from a friend thanking me for her shower gift; her fianci added his thanks
for my words of wisdom at the shower.

Instead of thanking me, these men should thank Mark, my ingenious
boyfriend at 16. I told him I couldn’t have sex because my mom had
warned me about getting pregnant. He had a simple solution. We had such a satisfying relationship that when I wanted to really lose my virginity, he was the obvious choice. Under his photo in our yearbook it says: “Why is this guy always smiling?”

I can be quite romantic when the mood strikes, but I have a busy life;
my husband works long hours and I tend to be an expedient person. Sure,
it’s no substitute for honesty and hugging. I know that. This is only one
of the things that makes my marriage work. And this technique works when I’m broke or dieting or it’s that time of the month.

If nothing else, my oral advice makes for a lively discussion at a wedding shower and helps explain why my gift to the bride-to-be is a pair of those gardening knee pads instead of a blender.

What I find appalling about Littleton is that none of the parents of the dead
children could identify them until more than 36 hours after their deaths. No matter how hard I try, I cannot fathom how those parents endured the torture
of waiting. Yes, it makes sense that their children had to lie there, growing
colder by the hour on hard linoleum floors, in pools of their own blood. After all, there were several bombs planted, and this was a crime scene. Still, I guarantee I would have needed to be restrained and heavily medicated to keep me from barreling through the police barricades to find my child, to make sure he had no pulse. The parents of these 15 children had to wonder if their child might be alive, maybe lying there with a faint heartbeat, still able to be revived. My heart breaks when I hear of anyone losing a child, but I cannot imagine the horror of a parent left standing alone after seeing all the others reunite with their children outside the school.

When Luke and Laura found out about their son’s death, Luke reacted with anger and Laura with denial. Fifteen years ago, when my husband got a phone call from our son’s hysterical girlfriend, Laurie, he could not hear her say that Mike had drowned. Instead, he hung up the phone and rather calmly told me that Mike had had some kind of accident at a lake, and we needed to call the hospitals and the police. No one had any information. The accident took place in an unincorporated area near Stanford University under several jurisdictions. No one knew who was responsible for the terrible job of notifying us, so we slipped through the cracks. When we finally received a call from the morgue just after midnight, we had only one hope: that it was a mistake. On the longest 18-mile drive of my life I was sure that it couldn’t be Mike, but another boy who looked like him and had his wallet.

Maybe this was a gift, this not knowing. Maybe all of those parents in Littleton were blessed for an extra day and a half before they had to face the truth. But I don’t believe that. I believe that some of those parents had to be restrained because no bomb scare would keep a parent from needing to know the truth, to find and check, and to hold their child. It is a parent’s right to comfort our children, just as it is to expect that we will never have to bury them.

I lost hours Tuesday watching television to see how it was going to end. I cried when I heard teens describe grisly murder scenes, or writing good-bye letters to their family from inside a closet. I was especially touched when I saw parents hugging their healthy, whole, living children. At some point, though, I began to see a dad peering desperately over someone’s shoulders or hear a mom frantically asking if anyone had seen her daughter, and I became enveloped by their pain. I have no idea if the parents I saw that afternoon were the ones who lost their children. I only know that I couldn’t quit watching and wondering how the authorities persuaded these parents to sit tight. Even after finally going to bed, I awoke three times during the night and turned on the television to find out if the bodies had been released.

I did not have this reaction to the Oklahoma City bombing or any of the other
high school murder sprees that have taken place over the past few years; I was able to go on with my life. My husband was concerned about me, and I called a counselor this morning, who made time to see me. She told me I was OK and that some traumas will revisit us in strange and convoluted ways. She asked if I would take it easy and find some way to comfort myself, to allow room for my grief and not to feel crazy. Most of all I was reassured that parents who have never lost a child, parents who have never had a call from the morgue and people who are not even parents are horrified by last week’s bloody rampage in Colorado and appalled that those parents were left wondering about their child’s fate for more than a day.

As the parents in Littleton begin their grieving, not understanding that it will change (although it never leaves), I will go to bed and hope that when I shut my eyes, I will see Mike’s smile and not the green stain. I will try to remember what his life gave me rather than what his death took away. Remembering what was good is what I wish for everyone in Littleton.