'Gas Is High' deserves a better explanation. Cousin Sherry has written so many songs in the last nine years or so that I have lost count. If I went and counted the jewel boxes of both homemade and then semi-professional, and at last one professionally mastered CD, I would have something like two dozen. Each saved and guarded for posterity, and because each is a gift from my dear cousin.

A little more about the CD cover. John Askins - who is a friend like an adopted family member - actually created the artwork of the gas pump. My beloved son-in-law Nathaniel Ginsburg created the rest of the CD presentation - the lettering, and format. I call myself the art director for taking Sherrys' concept and pawning the work off on John and Nathaniel, knowing both have skills to do this really professional job. I don't, by the way. Not putting myself down, don't worry, I go by 'artist', I just have different kinds of skills. So after reading what I had written rather late at night - ignore the 'post times' given, they are all incorrect. I usually write around ten or eleven PM - I realized it made little sense. But if I were to attempt to delete any part of the story, I would lose the picture, which took me all too long to upload. (Operator problems, and a HUGE file).

My thought is to upload the same image - of the CD cover - in case this post covers the other one. I have so many duplicate images by mistake, here is an intentional one...

In way of an insert of history here, Sherrys' mother and my mother were sisters. They were even more than sisters, they were best friends by the time we knew them, and had some very -to us- precious oddities. We respected those or were known to run for our lives, in a manner of speaking, all in great good humor. Because these were silly things, based on the fact that my Aunt Marion and Uncle Jerry, along with Sherry and her older sister Lynn - another entry or two of her very own if we are discussing special - spent close to every weekend with us during our early childhood. And in the summers, we added in our Aunt Mollies' & her kids, not as 'regulars', and rented a falling down cottage at the CT shoreline, where we had the time of our lives. My long in the future hubby turned out to be at a camp down the road, by way of 'it's a small world'...

Not all of our activities met with parental approval. My yearly snail collection generally was discovered by the 'snail police' after I had forgotten to 'water it'. P.U. Made the whole cottage stink for days. Better, we all were fine with the fathers, who only showed up on the weekends. We walked down the dirt road, as close to the main road as allowed, and waited and watched for them. OH OH OH - they are here. They stop and pick us up. Do they take us back to the cottage filled with mothers? No, they take us for fried clams, oh we adore the daddies/fathers so much. Our mothers wouldn't dream of filling us up with such trash.

But here again, I have wandered. You have to know this, it is so funny. We had tired mommies who wanted to sleep in. They were on their sort of vacation and we were on ours, which began at about five in the morning. The few hours until, say about eight AM when they came to their senses was eternity. And there were strict rules. Which were broken all the time, and not exactly on purpose, but if they happened to be awake anyway... Rule 1. Don't wake us up. Rule 2. Don't talk to us until we've had a cup of coffee, and a cigarette, which sent us gagging and running anyway. Rule 3. No nagging about getting to the beach, or no going to the beach.

Best thing is, I can still smell the ocean, and remember my mother telling me where to sprinkle her with my little watering can to cool her off. I'd run back and forth to the water, and fill the can up, taking forever, because I was afraid to go out in the 'deep' water where I could just submerge the can to fill it. Nope, I just waited for each wave to fill it a bit more. By the time I got back to my poor mother, she would need two more watering cans - hey, I just realized this very moment that she was keeping me busy so she could chat it up with my Aunt(s) in private!!! That isn't fair. And if I was in earshot, they would just change to another language, Yiddish. Oh, they had so many ways of keeping secrets from me. And I for some reason was always so curious about their conversations. Are all kids? I shall ask my granddaughters when they are older.

My mother also let me bury parts of her in the sand, is another thing that I just remembered, and what I remember most is this: it took me forever to bury her. She lay right down with a towel under her head and I used a little trowel and pail and dumped and patted and patted and dumped until she was a nice mound of sand with a face sticking out. She smiled at me, and said: OK, I have to go in now, and she got right up, as soon as I finished, with mountains and buckets of sand everywhere. She was nice, she loved those summers. We had a little pull chain shower outside, so no one had to track sand into the cottage, which was highly frowned upon. But thinking back, even harder, this is thinking back 50 years - I don't know, I also remember sitting on the front steps trying to get all the sand off of my feet. Esme and I both have that issue with sand. Yucky.

Well hey, there were no mothers' helpers. I don't even think they existed for people like us. I know we - as in my brother and I - had a babysitter one time - and we were so naughty, that was it. I remember, we jumped on my brothers' bed until it fell to pieces, as far as we could tell. We couldn't fix it at all, and that babysitter sang like a stuck pig when our parents came home. Oh boy, the tongue lashing alone was enough to set us back emotionally several stages. But we survived, we always do. And we only did the bed jumping thing one more time. The second time the punishment was nothing other than a look of disgust. As in, maybe we should sleep outside in the barn, but there was no barn.