Christmas shoppers in a northern Toronto IKEA were startled when they saw a monkey wandering down the aisles dressed in a stylish shearling lined suede coat.

There are pictures.  The monkey has a nicer winter coat than I do.  It was buttoned up to the neck, but it would not have surprised me to see a cashmere sweater set underneath, or some leather gloves in the pockets.

Personally I oppose exotic animals as pets, but the monkey was dressed for the weather, so I am hoping that it is an indication that it is well cared for.

Pet wardrobes are big business.  Pocket piglets and teacup poodles alike are blinged out  with dresses and coats and hats to rival fashion week.

The miniature well-dressed pet is the new arm candy.  In Beverly Hills and New York, some dogs and cats have formal attire to rival the red carpet regulars.  Bedazzled with real gemstones and faux fur coats, they wear their owners like their accessory as they strut down Rodeo Drive and 5th Avenue, more than willing to commit their fashion “faux paws”.

At home in their exclusive gated neighborhoods and doorman buildings, they sleep in tiny canopy beds and get their toenails painted and their teeth cleaned and brushed.  Their paws rarely touch pavement as they are carried to the limousine for their ride to day care.  They have birthday parties and play dates, even weddings.  It is not unusual to see them seated at elegant dinner tables and allowed to sip from fine crystal.

Cut to the four dogs that I have right now.  They could have posed for the famous picture of the poker playing dogs.  They live outside on my farm and sleep in the barn.  If they had a wardrobe, it would consist of flannel shirts and doggy tattoos.  Seating for dinner would be at a picnic table where they’d burp down beer and chew at ticks and fleas.

My dogs are rescues…animals no one wanted.  While I don’t dress them, they all have human names, an homage to their personalities.  Oden weighs in at 135 pounds.  He is a mastiff lab mix that someone abandoned at the dump.  His head is the size of a gorilla’s, and his shoulder stands at my hip.  I’m certain he was left because they couldn’t afford to feed him anymore.  He’s the size of a small pony.

The day we met, it was pouring rain.  He was sitting next to the dumpster, his paws crossed in front of him like a proper gentleman.  My son opened the pickup door and he  stood up, yawned, and climbed in like he had been waiting for us all along.  A gentle giant, he has been with us ever since and has never once wandered off.  If I were to dress him Hollywood style, it would be in a top hat, vest and monocle…like the guy from the Monopoly game.

Mabelline, a Great Pyranees mix, was found out by the dam.  They called to see if I would come and get her.  Seems she didn’t like men.  She forged a bond with my ex-husband, who didn’t like dogs.  Though neither acknowledged each other, they were inseparable.  If I dressed her, it would be in an old moth eaten fur coat, a lace collar, a string of pearls, and a tiny derringer tucked in her pocket.

My daughter “found” Jemimah on the side of the road as a puppy.  I found out years later that she was being given away out of a box in front of Walmart.  I always had my suspicions.  She is needy and whiney and always pushing to the front of the pack for attention.  She’d be dressed in bad jewelry, showing too much cleavage, with her skirt hiked up way too high.

Bella came to us as a puppy after her stray mother was hit by a car.  She was only a few weeks old when we got her and she insisted on running with the big dogs.  She is street wise and quick and would definitely rock some leather and motorcycle boots.  She probably wouldn’t make it through a metal detector.

Our dogs are just not fashion forward.  My mother did have a chihuahua who sported a sombrero trimmed with ball fringe that she wore when she went outside in the sun.  The little monster would turn herself inside out if you tried to put a collar or leash on her, but she stood perfectly still so her sombrero could be tied under her chin.

Though my dogs are living au natural, I did put a Santa Claus hat and beard on my daughter’s cat Buster last week for a holiday picture.  We had to stop him from contorting backwards out of the Christmas collection by wrapping his arms in a blanket.  He was less than thrilled.  I am guessing another pose with the elf hat and collar are out of the question.

Humanizing animals is nothing new.

The hieroglyphics of the great pyramids depicted animals adorned with precious metals and gems, given human and godlike stature.  They were an indication of the past and a foretelling of the future.

Or maybe that was just the desert version of Rodeo Drive and 5th Avenue…it gives “paws” to  wonder…pun totally intended.

Surely in the centuries to come, visitors to my cyberpyramid will understand that only certain dogs and cats and monkeys in the 21st century wore designer clothes, sunglasses and diamond necklaces…that it is simply a reflection of the silliness of privilege and in no way an indication of the state of our being or a prediction of our future.

Surely.

Day 346…big enough to admit that I’m totally jealous of the monkey in Canada with the shearling coat.

Cynthia Neilson

Friday morning, December 14th started the way most mornings do.  Some were slow to get out of bed, and others were already on their way to work before the sun came over the horizon.

I was too impatient to wait for the frost on my windshield to melt, so I drove down my road peering through a three inch hole in the ice that my wipers created.  The lid on my coffee cup was on crooked and it leaked all over my console.  Annoyed about nothing but little inconveniences, I remember thinking, “This day keeps getting better and better.”

And then I turned on my radio.

Today I am putting a stone in place on my cyberpyramid that no one will ever be able to make sense of…or rationalize…or understand…or forget.

On December 14, 2012, in Newtown Connecticut, a young man named Adam Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary School and made decisions that took a piece of each of our souls.

Yesterday we all watched in disbelief, holding our breath, as the horrifying news trickled out, confirming the worst…that this young man had shot and killed twenty seven people, including his own mother, before turning the gun on himself and taking his own life.

Twenty of those lives lost were young children.

The sadness and ache across our nation for all the lives that were lost is palpable.  But the loss of all those children is unfathomable.

As a parent, the privilege of having a child to love is the greatest joy there is.  All of us pray to never know what it is like to have that joy ripped from us so unexpectedly.

This morning we will feel a little catch in our throats as we swallow the sorrow for the families who won’t be able to wrap their arms around their children and hug them a little tighter, like we can today.  Secretly we will all say a little prayer, thankful it wasn’t our child in that school Friday morning.

The children lost were still shiny and new.

They were not tarnished by the rust of life.  They had not had the time to learn real disappointment.  They trusted and believed.  Their minds were wide open…there really could be a Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy.

For most of us, the hollowness that resounds with their loss will be filled in with time and life will move forward.  For a while we will think about how precious life is and this crime against humanity will force us to look inward at our own anger and blame.  For a brief time, we might even live a little better, kinder, quieter…maybe softer.

We will look for the heroes.  Like life preservers, they keep our chins above water so that sorrow doesn’t suck us under when our hearts are heavy enough to sink us.  Heroes give us hope that there can be some good from tragedy.  Goodness and hope are the fuel of our lives, for without it there is no will to survive.

The shooter took his own life, so the families will be spared a trial.  His was a personal hell to have committed to the choices he made.  We need not show empathy.  We need not understand or forgive his actions.   But we do need to reach within ourselves and show sympathy for his desperation…otherwise, his evil wins and destroys what innocence we have left.

Yesterday our hearts stopped and our breath came up short as we were so abruptly reminded of how fragile and brief life is.  There is no time for pettiness or regret or procrastination.

We need to pay attention and reach out to support each other and love each other.  Life does not come with the guarantee of a second chance.

Now, like an unfinished masterpiece, the world will forever be denied the wonder of what those twenty little lives would have brought.

Yesterday each and every one of us lost.

Day 350…We can all live better.

Cynthia Neilson

We don’t get to choose when or where we are born or who our parents are.  We are solely dependent on those who bring us into the world.

The balance of how we learn to live and love hinges on what we were taught.  Done well, it is a staircase…done carelessly, it is a slippery slope.

Life is random.  We can’t predict the twists and turns.  Most of what happens around us is out of our control.  The beauty of life is in its constant change and because of that we are never fully formed.

Where you start in life does not dictate where you will go.

I am the oldest of six children.  I was four, my brother was three and my sister was two when my mother had twins.  She didn’t know she was having twins and they came two and a half months early on April Fool’s Day.  When my father called everyone to say my mother had twins they all thought it was a joke.  (When I was fifteen my mother found out she was pregnant again.  She thought it was a joke that time.)

We lived in an apartment complex which I found out years later was really the projects.  It was full of young families just like ours with too many kids and too many bills.

I was a hard child to keep entertained.  I could read at a very early age and was what my mother would like to call a “progressive thinker”.  That was just her way of telling people to stay ten steps ahead of me…or else.

My mother recognized early on that I needed to be distracted.  She made sure there were  books around and my nose was always in one.  There was a lot of noise in our house and reading was a way for me to drown it out.  I loved the way the ink smelled on the pages and the feel of the paper.  I remember how excited I was when my mother started buying encyclopedias at the grocery store, one volume at a time for a dollar…with a twenty dollar purchase.  That set stopped with the letter “T”.  I always thought it was because u v w x y and z just weren’t that interesting.  It simply never dawned on me that my parents couldn’t afford to keep adding to it.   There were not a lot of days when they had the twenty dollars to spend and an extra buck to spring for the next letter.

We didn’t know we were poor.  It didn’t matter.

Early on, we didn’t travel much.  We didn’t even have a television.  I remember all of us piling into the station wagon and rushing to my Aunt’s house.  She had gotten a color television, which turned out to be a piece of cellophane stretched across the screen with a blue stripe on top, a yellow one in the middle and a green one across the bottom.  We all sat and watched Ed Sullivan.  It bothered me that the top of Topo Gigio’s head was blue and his face was yellow.  My first experience with color television was a big fizzle.

In my books I could travel page by page.  I wandered word by word and I taught myself about things that my parents could only dream about being able to give me.  Books opened my imagination and were my adventures before I could start making adventures of my own.

Right before I started kindergarten, we moved to a real house in the suburbs.  It was a single story three bedroom ranch with one bathroom.  A mansion.  My two brothers slept in one bedroom and my three sisters and I slept in another, two of us on bunk beds.  I had the top bunk.  My mother took down the ladder because it was too tempting for the twins to climb.  I used the end rails to get up to my bed.  To this day I can climb like a monkey. After my youngest sister was born, the single bed was replaced by another bunk and all four girls shared a room.

My mother was called in for a parent teacher conference a few months after I started kindergarten.  It was March and our class had colored pictures of St. Patrick.

I colored St. Patrick a deep chocolate brown and then made him three dimensional by gluing a tissue on his nose because he “had a cold”.  The teacher was not amused that I made St. Patrick black with a snotty nose…and so my parent teacher conference series began.

I wasn’t a difficult child.  I didn’t cause trouble…I just wanted to learn more and make things more exciting.  I liked my world big and struggled when I was presented with limitations.  I was funny and quirky and way way too smart.  I was always very respectful of adults, and had the vocabulary to match.  The grown ups referred to me as a fifty three year old midget.

I was different.  It wasn’t until third grade that I found my stride.  We started to do shows.  I had a song to perform in the Christmas show.   It was a duet.  The music started and my partner threw up backstage.  I marched to the front of the stage and belted out the song by myself.  The crowd clapped enthusiastically and I decided on my own to do an encore…twice.  The teacher had to come out and lead me off the stage…my arms thrown out, still singing.

A ham was born.

There was no money for dancing lessons or acting lessons.  My mother would drag out her sewing machine after we were asleep and make costumes for all of the plays and skits that I wrote.  I had a built in cast with all those brothers and sisters.

My creativity has never stopped because I was never told that my imagination had any limitations.  It is the most precious gift that my parents gave to me and is one that I hope I’ve passed down to my own children.

From that time on, I have done everything that I have ever really wanted to do.

While it has not always worked out the way I wished it would have, I learned to step in front of the scaredy cats and take chances.

I am still flying without a net.

My name is Cynthia.

I said I would be a famous actress and work in the movies.  While the actress thing hasn’t panned out fully…yet, I moved to New York City with $250 in my pocket.  I became a casting director and then a stuntwoman…falling down stairs, hit by cars and set on fire in many television shows and movies.

I always wanted to live on a farm and have a horse.  I live on 236 acres and have ten horses.  Or they have me…just depends on how you look at it.

Though I never pictured myself as married, I have two ex-husbands.  I still remain easily distracted.

And while I wasn’t planning on being a parent, I have two of the most amazing children who graced me with being their Mom.

I don’t waste time fretting about disappointments.  They make me appreciate the littler victories more.

Turns out I am a talented bad dancer.  Who knew that I’d be so bad that I am now a really good bad dancer.

I will find humor in most anything.  If I cry, I want it to be from laughing too hard.

I like to say that I am interested and interesting.  I have surrounded myself with people who have made my life richer for knowing them.   I have met some who have taken energy, but so many more who have added to my joy and enriched my spirit.   All of them have taught me something.

I continue to learn.

This is one of the last few stones in my cyberpyramid.  I hope that visitors in the years to come will enjoy brushing their fingers across the face of it…feeling the words in the stone.

I am…and so are you.

Day 354…Imagination has no limitations.  Take chances.

Cynthia Neilson

The day of the great Mayan prediction is upon us.  According to their calendar, on December 21, 2012 the hourglass will tip on its side and time as we know it will cease…bringing about the end of days.  It isn’t specific to the actual hour, and since they are well into Friday on the other side of the planet, then there are only a handful of hours to consider the “what if”.

What if we are out of time?  What if there are no more chances to make a new start?

Time is always changing speed.   A minute, in the wrong situation, can seem like an eternity…an day can go by in a flash.

If we knew there was precious little of it left, how would we spend it?

Or what if it’s just a huge cosmic joke and those crazy Mayans were just messing with us?

I’m counting on the sun coming up.   But just in case it doesn’t, I’m spending the day thinking about what is most important to me.

My daughter was born on a blue moon in the Year of the Dragon.  When she was three months old we were working on a Mountain Dew commercial in Lake Placid.  We went to eat dinner at a local dive.  The waitress looked like Mama Cass.  She had a gray braid down the middle of her back and was sporting a two inch long chin hair.  She was wearing peace beads and a long skirt with sandals that looked like she made them that morning.

She asked me when Carly was born and I told her.  Her jaw dropped and she asked if I would mind if she touched my baby.  Uh….well…okay.  She touched her gently on the cheek and told me that she was destined for greatness.  Because of her astrological chart, she was gifted and would lead an extraordinary life.  She told me that she felt privileged to be in my child’s presence.  At the time I was thinking she had a little too much wacky weed out in the alley on her break.

But her prediction is unfolding exactly as she said it would.

Carly was a very social child.  It wasn’t unusual for me to see her holding court surrounded by the other kids in the play yard at preschool.  I later found out she usually had a dead spider or some other kind of bug tucked in her pocket for her schoolyard show and tell.

Back then, her father was a stunt coordinator and second unit director and I was doing stunts.  The two women running the preschool knew that we worked in the movies, but not in what capacity.

One morning they asked if they could speak with me about Carly.  I sat down in one of the little chairs and they placed a picture she had colored in front of me.  It was a man setting a lady on fire.

“Carly says her Daddy sets you on fire.”

They didn’t think it was too funny when I started to laugh.  They would have been horrified to see her wandering around our shop with her miniature Freddy Krueger doll or one of the various body parts we kept for explosions tucked under her arm.

The first time she rode a bicycle she refused to have training wheels.  She was mad that  her father was holding onto the back of the seat.  She told him to let go and peddled off down the street.  We both looked at each other in shock and then realized that she had peddled around the corner.  He had to run after her.

The first year I let her pick her own Halloween costume she told me she was wearing all black and going as a mouse hole.

When Carly was nine we moved from New York to Tennessee.  She had picked up a Brooklyn accent from the preschool teachers but liked the Southern one better so after about a week in school she began speaking with a Southern Brooklyn accent.  It was hideous.  Thank goodness it didn’t last long.

When she was in elementary school she started playing basketball.  She was a chubby kid and not very fast and not very good.  If she wanted to play in high school she was going to have to up her game.  She spent the summer practicing with a private coach and developed a work ethic like I have never seen.  She shot five hundred shots a day until she could put up a three point fade away like a guy.  She began playing on a intramural team for her private coach.  She played hard and one day slid under the bleachers and hurt her hip.  I noticed her limping after high school practice.  An X-ray and MRI later revealed a broken hip…which she had been playing on for three weeks.

Rather than riding the pine and watching everyone else practice, she shot foul shots.  She rarely missed.  She recovered and spent hours in the gym after practice shooting until she could put up three point shots with her eyes closed.  She became a post player because she was the only one aggressive enough to do it, even though she is only 5’4″.  She was a thorn in the side of many of the bigger girls because she was all over the place.

She worked for hours with the younger girls.  It was great practice for her and even better for them.  Their parents had nothing but praise for her and the time she took with their girls.  She lived, ate and breathed basketball.

By her senior year her father and I separated.  Our charmed life changed.  Her brother was openly devastated.  She struggled silently.  She gained weight and got slower.

Her high school basketball coach never liked the fact that she got private coaching even though she never challenged him about his techniques.  She did it to be a better player.

He had a history of punishing his senior girls and he turned on two of them, Amanda and Carly, even though he knew she was going through a rough time.  Basketball was her only solace and he made her life miserable by trying to destroy her love for the game.

During one particular game, Carly and Amanda were not allowed to start.  They were put into the game during the last quarter to play with the freshman girls because we were so far ahead in points.  The other parents were stunned.  I could feel their eyes on me.

I made eye contact with Carly.  She tapped her heart…our signal that it was go time.  I sat and watched as my daughter and Amanda schooled those frightened freshman girls out on the floor, telling them where to move and throwing them the ball so they could shoot.  Our coach sat with a scowl on his face because they made a fool out of him.

The rest of the season went pretty much the same way.  From starter and First Team, ranked 14th in the state for three point shots, she became a bench rider.

She loved the game more than she hated him and even if he only played her for a few minutes, she was playing.  It was enough.

She cried at night.  I heard her.  I showed the greatest restraint of my life.  I wanted to beat the living daylights out of him for humiliating these two girls.  But that is not what she wanted.

She shot for hours after regular practice, like she always had.  Her last game, she took the floor for warmups and looked up at me and tapped her heart.  That night I cried.

After the season was over she gained a lot of weight.  She struggled with depression and I was helpless to fix it.  But like she always has, she fought her way back.  She started to train in Crossfit, which is a radical exercise regime.  She became a certified trainer and developed a program for a group of women who were recovering from cancer treatment.  She is currently developing a Crossfit workout for a blind woman.

She lost ninety pounds and can dead lift more than most men.  She did it for herself.

She spent most of this past summer nursing me through cancer recovery…pushing me and pulling me through the worst of it.  If she was ever worried or scared, I only saw a flicker of it.  She is the strong and kind and funny and beautiful.  And she could kick her former high school coach’s ass from here to California if she wanted to…but she won’t…because she has places to go where he can never dream to be.

She was born on a blue moon in the Year of the Dragon and she is extraordinary.

My son Cody is two years younger.  He prefers to be called PC now…so I call him Mac.

He never crawled as a baby.  He was sitting on the floor one morning and just pulled himself up by the coffee table and walked across the room.  He was eight months old.

Keeping him in a crib became moot.  I would hear a thud over the baby monitor and I knew Cody was up and out of the crib.

We got bunk beds and he slept in the bottom bunk at nine months old.  Gates were useless…he just climbed over them.  We taught him how to go down the stairs on his rear end.  He had a little Ninja Turtles chair which he would pull up in front of the television.  Sometimes the television would jolt us awake in the middle of the night.

There he was, downstairs in his Ninja chair, in front of the t.v.  He was the only one who knew how to use all the buttons on the remote control.

Cody didn’t talk until he was three.  He only said one word…Dad…and he called everyone Dad.

One day he just started speaking in complete sentences.  He was sitting at the table with a giant loaf of Italian bread in his hand and he looked at me and said, “I want some spaghetti.”

Carly and Cody have always been close.  They have their own language and their own life between the two of them.  When Cody was about two and a half, I put him in the preschool that Carly went to for a couple of hours two days a week.

They did a little program at the end of the year.  Carly was doing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and Cody was the spider.  The morning of the show he didn’t want to do it and sat on my lap with his arms around my neck.  The music started for Carly’s song and Cody jumped down from my lap and ran down to the stage in his spider costume, all eight legs flying.  He stole the show and he has been doing it ever since.

He loves movies…has since he could first operate that remote control.  He has a tremendous recall of film detail…a headful of useless information…and is usually right.  The only time his sister ever tripped him up was when he insisted that Mickey Rooney’s name was Mickey Maroon.

Movie sets are second nature to my children, as they have spent so much time on them.

So it is no surprise that one of them would get the acting bug.  Cody is my actor child.  He has the gift.  I believe he developed it as a defense mechanism.  He’s a big kid, but a gentle giant…and was bullied through most of school.  Although my kids have traveled all over the world and enjoyed great privilege, they are very humble, so I have to assume it was because of jealousy, coupled with the fact that he wouldn’t fight back.

The smarmy son of one of the teachers in the school was the worst bully of them all.  And they pretty much let him get away with it.  I told Cody to knock his lights out…he was about ten at the time.

He looked at me very seriously and said, “Mom…if I hit him then they will put it in my file and then I will never be able to be elected the President of the United States.”

He’s no longer interested in being President…though he might like to play one in a movie.  Just as well…politicians are the worst bullies of them all.

When the kids were in elementary school I put on plays that I wrote.  They were huge productions with costumes to rival Broadway.  It was my therapy.  Cody was only in third grade when we did the first one and he was in every scene.  He had his lines learned by the second week of rehearsal.

The bullying continued through high school.  Cody took mixed martial arts.  He is really strong.  At any moment he could have crushed one of their skulls, but he doesn’t have that in him and never will.  He just dealt with it.  It killed his soul and it crushed my heart.

Cody joined the drama club.  I cringed because I knew it would up the anty and would give them more ammunition.

But something happens when he steps on stage.  He takes control and he holds the audience in the palm of his hand.  He changes like a chameleon and his bravery is incredible.  And they clapped.  He could make them hear him…he could make them want to listen.  When he is acting he has no sense of fear or failure.

The divorce was hard for him.  I don’t think he has ever really gotten over it.  He believes in fairy tales.  He can believe in them for as long as he wants to.  I won’t ruin that for him.

He never felt like part of the “gang” at high school and when it was time for graduation, he decided to skip the ceremony and go to visit his father in Vancouver where he was second unit directing one of the Twilight series “New Moon”.  They had a graduation ceremony on the set, complete with cap and gown and a New Moon diploma.

None of the rest of his graduating class will ever have that experience.  He goes to a performing arts college in Los Angeles now.  One day his former classmates will say they knew him…but they never did.  And he doesn’t need them now.

He was taking a summer session at school when I got sick.  It was just as well.  If he saw me then he would not have gone back to school.  He would have felt he had to protect me and take care of me.  He was that kind of kid and he is that kind of young man.

He got made fun of for being polite…for holding doors for ladies…and saying please and thank you.  I never heard him say an unkind word to anyone, even when they were being less than kind to him.  There was one boy who thought he got the best of Cody.  He’s in jail now.  Cody is one year from college graduation.  He lives in Los Angeles and is the resident in his dorm.

His father is a director and extremely critical.  He went to Cody’s showcase a couple of months ago.  I was not yet well enough to go.  It was the first time I missed one of his shows.  I waited to hear how it went.  The phone rang…he was blown away by his son’s performances.  I was not surprised.

My  children are kind and generous and brave.  They are interested and interesting…they get knocked down and they get up again and take another chance.  I got lucky.

This stone in my cyberpyramid marks the end of my blog…writing about a year that according to the Mayans, was going to be our last.

When I started it, I had no idea that I would have to deal with a life threatening illness.  I already faced the possibility of the end of days for me…so I’m not really worried about December 21st.

I am writing about the two most important people in my world…so if the Mayans are right, and it is the end of days…then my last thoughts will be of love beyond compare.

I hope that someday explorers from another galaxy dig up my pyramid and read about human beings…how we’ve lived and loved and laughed and cried…how we’ve hurt each other and saved each other…and never stopped believing that we could fix the problem.

It is two o’clock in the morning…and the dogs are barking.  The coyotes are howling back…just like they do every night.

Those crazy Mayans…what cutups…

In the words of “Annie”….

The sun’ll come out tomorrow

bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow….

there’ll be sun

Tomorrow is only a day away.

Day 356…We’re still standing.

Cynthia Neilson

The sun will rise in New York this morning at 7:17 a.m.

I am putting the apex in place on my cyberpyramid.

Construction completed on 12/22/2012

Think of today as a new beginning…

or a second chance.

That’s a lot more exciting than saying it’s just another day.

Today is the best day.

Day 357

Cynthia Neilson