Letter to Louise

Dear Grandma Johnson,

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you, but not a day has gone by where you haven’t stayed with me.

There’s so much I wish I could tell you. I wish I could sit at your kitchen table again while the smell of cheeseburgers fills the air and cats start gathering outside, waiting for their nightly feast. I can still picture you, scraping the dinner scraps into that old coffee can every evening and mixing them with canned food before stepping outside to feed your feral crew. They’d come running down the hill like a little army of ghosts, wild and hungry, but you never flinched. You treated them with gentleness, like they mattered. And they did. Because to you, everything with a heartbeat mattered.

You once told me you can always tell someone’s character by how they treat animals. You were right. You lived that truth in every way. You showed kindness to the overlooked and the discarded—not just animals, but people, too. Especially me.

When I think back to my childhood, so much of it was cold. Quiet. Missing the things that should’ve been automatic—hugs, kind words, someone to notice when I was hurting. But then there was you.

You called me Sweetie. You wrote me letters that told me I was special. You told me you loved me, and you meant it. You made me feel seen when I didn’t even realize how invisible I felt everywhere else. You didn’t just hug me—you held the parts of me that were breaking before I even knew they were broken.

Your house was magic to me. Not just because of the candy bars and the cooler full of forbidden sodas—though, let’s be honest, those were amazing—but because it felt like walking into a different world. A world where I could breathe. A world where love didn’t have to be earned by staying quiet or being good. It was just there.

You died when I was still a teenager, and it felt like the one person who truly got me disappeared. But you didn’t, not really. I carry you everywhere. I see you when I feed my own herd of misfit animals (although it is a much larger and more diverse group).  I remember your strength, your softness, your way of loving without condition—and I try every day to live up to that.

Some nights, I dream of haunted rooms. Of voices in the dark that sound too familiar. But I think if you were still here, you’d sit beside me in those dreams. You’d hold my hand. You’d say, “It’s okay. I’m here.”

And I’d believe you.

I hope wherever you are, you know how much you meant to me. How much you still mean to me. And how everything good and kind and warm in me has your fingerprints all over it.

Love always,

C.

Tubi, You Beautiful, Free, Underrated Masterpiece

So, let’s talk about something that makes absolutely no sense in this world: How is TUBI—a free app with commercials—beating the crap out of Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime when it comes to actually having things worth watching?

Seriously. Hulu Live ++++++++++++ is over here charging more than my monthly power bill.  Amazon and Netflix aren't as expensive, but to get one good series every three years is not really worth it. (The "kids" in Ginny & Georgia were sophomores from 2021- 2025!)  Much like the popular trope, you spend more time looking for something to watch on these three streaming services than actually watching anything.

Meanwhile, Tubi? It has categories for every mood. Every decade. Every genre. I’m convinced they have a secret pact with the spirit world because they even know which Lifetime originals you forgot you loved. You want ‘80s slasher? It’s there. ‘90s rom-coms that still hold up? There. Obscure documentaries about cults, sharks, or cults that worship sharks? You bet your binge-watching behind they’re there.

And can we talk about that catchy little tune when the app boots up? It’s like a tiny dopamine hit to let me know that, yes, I am about to waste hours of my life in the best way possible. Thanks, Tubi. You’re doing the Lord’s work.

I don’t know who’s running things over at Netflix and Hulu, but maybe they should sit down, take some notes, and stop acting like we’re lucky to be paying them to show us “Because You Watched a Dog Show Once, Here Are 40 Cooking Shows.”

Tubi doesn’t need to flex. It just shows up, quietly being awesome, like that friend that shows up at your doorstep with a cake batter shake offering to clean your house.

Moral of the story? If you stream often, but don't stream Tubi, why are you even streaming, My Good Sirs?  You can keep your overhyped originals and endless price hikes. I’ll be over here watching weird forgotten thrillers, sitcoms that aged questionably, and everything else I never knew I needed—without paying a cent.

The Grief Monster Comes for Us All

 I experienced a lot of funerals as a kid.  I can't put a number on it, but I remember going to quite a few.  My parents weren't old, but they had me in their mid-thirties and they had some family members that were on the older side and it just seemed like people were always dying.  My paternal grandfather died before I was born and then my step-grandfather died when I was like six.  Great grandparents went as an adolescent and grandparents were gone in my teens, with my last one passing in my early twenties.  Then I was exposed to tragedies like a middle school nurse dying in a car wreck, a friend in high school committing suicide, a friend in my late twenties committing suicide... I think that the way I learned to handle it was by just reminding myself that death was part of life and never thinking about the people again.

Sounds easy, right?  Of course it's not possible, we know this.  Some are easier to forget than others.  Some you never forget.  Some remain burned into your memories and haunt you at the most inopportune times.  Then comes the big death- the death of a parent.  I have not experienced the death of a child, and I hope never to have to.  I have a friend that I have recently seen experience this and I can't even fathom her pain.  But in my case, I finally experienced the death of a parent.   One of my best friends lost both of her parents at a young age and she was very close to them.  I went to the funerals and I have seen how hard it has been on her.  But I didn't think it would be like that for me because I didn't have that kind of relationship with my parent.  

But then when my dad started to get sick, one of my therapists worried because she said that people with borderline personality disorder experience loss differently if we have unresolved trauma.  She told my husband that I was going to take it hard.  I told myself that she didn't know me as well as she thought because I would accept it like I did every other death in my life.  Okay, so maybe I was wrong, and maybe she was right.  My sister-in-law once told me that I should have a "come to Jesus" moment with my dad and tell him how I felt about how I was raised.  I disagreed.  I thought it would put an undue strain on our already strained relationship.  Why say unkind things to each other when we clearly are two different people who think completely different things?  Those would leave memories that could never be taken back.  She said if he died having never unburdened myself I'd regret it.  I'm glad I didn't listen to her.  Like I thought, I would never have wanted my dad to have died knowing that I felt the way that I did.  Instead, the last memory I want him to have of me is the text I sent him telling him that I loved him.

What will I have?  Grief.  But just like with all those funerals I went to as a child, I'm trying to tell myself that death is a part of life.  But then it raises questions about my own mortality that I don't want to think about.  And that's a topic for a whole 'nother blog- or therapy session.

(See, I told you I'd make another post!)