Well, that's it. Summer 2013 will henceforth be The Summer of Death for me. It started Memorial Day weekend when a friend/former coworker died in a freak accident. Since then I've either received a "hey, did you hear ______ died" email/call, or a family member calling with bad news about another family member every 10 days.

Yep. Today I realized that I'm on a 10-day death cycle. I calculate Summer as 98 days this year (Memorial Day - Labor Day) so that's 9.8 deaths. So far the .8 is rounding down to 9 and I want to keep it that way.

Last month a very close older relative died. I've been in a grieving funk since her death. She was elderly and she lived a great, long life and it was "time." But. I'm sad she's gone and I miss her.  I was asked to speak at her memorial. Public speaking + grief = very difficult for me. Trying to encapsulate someone's life into a 5 - 10 minute speech is not easy, especially when it's someone you've known your entire life. Especially when it's someone with whom you've shared a lot of landmark experiences. Especially when it's someone who's a kindred spirit. Very often, at least in my case, we don't relate to relatives. She was one of only a couple relatives to whom I related. Unlike the nonsensical dissimilarity between most of my relatives and myself, it made sense that we were related. We're cut of the same jib. When I was a kid, she didn't treat me like a kid. She either didn't know or didn't care that I was just a kid. She always talked to me as if I had a functioning brain with the capacity to reason, learn and form my own opinions...and she wanted me, expected me, to express them. She was interesting and inspiring. And I miss her.

That was the most difficult death for me this summer. The others were sad, a some were surprising, and a few brought back old friends and long forgotten memories. I got The News, got in touch with old friends/coworkers, reminisced about the deceased, shared a few memories or stories, sent the sympathy cards or pitched in for flowers when appropriate, and grieved the way you do in these situations. In a few cases I keep forgetting the person died. I think of them in the present tense and have to remind myself they are now very much past tense.

I received a LinkedIn reminder for one of them...eeep, that was maddening and kinda creepy..."Endorse Jane Smith as marketing manager!" Uhhhh, okay, well, you know, I suppose it's possible Jane Smith has a new job in an afterlife of some ilk, but I am not qualified to endorse her abilities for that job. That made me think: I really should a) figure out a program/app that tracks obituaries and notifies social networks of deaths of members so that sort of thing doesn't happen and b) you know how they say it's "good" to write your own obituary? I need to write my post mortem social network profiles, something like: "Tricia McMillian has been promoted to creative services manager at Devil's Advocate, located in the 4th Circle of Hell."

A couple weeks ago I was visiting my mother in my tiny hometown. While there my mother received news that an elderly friend died. My parents were good friends with this older couple, my dad golfed with the (deceased) husband. They were always one of those "kindly older couples" in the community. The woman was going to be 100 next month and everyone was bummed out for her that she didn't hit the milestone. My mother wanted to go to the funeral. I was in town. My mother's widowed. Everyone hates going to funerals, and everyone really hates going to funerals alone. My parents' friends who also knew the deceased woman were out of town when she died. The obvious and polite thing was for me to accompany my mother to the funeral. After all, I've known this woman most of my life. So, what's the big deal? Take my mother to the funeral and pay my respects. Wellllllll, there's a bit more to it than that.

Unfortunately, the deceased woman is the grandmother to Beth and Renée. Yes, that Beth and Renée. The girls who tormented me relentlessly in school. They're cousins who made it their mission to ridicule, tease, start rumors about and occasionally spit on me. They stole schoolwork, toys, mittens (a big deal in Michigan winters) and gym shoes from me when we were young, they started a rumor that I was so ugly my parents took me away to Europe for 18 months to have head to toe plastic surgery. (In actuality my father was working overseas at the time.) As ridiculous as it sounds, there were kids who wondered if it was true and asked me about nose jobs, lip jobs, boob jobs etc. Even at the end of high school the rumor was still circulating, albeit diluted to whispers and pointing, "She had plastic surgery that didn't work..." Also in high school when rumors about girls being pregnant started circulating, Beth and Renée got a lot of laughs from our classmates by making jokes about me. "We know who's not pregnant, no one will ever have sex with Trillian, she's so ugly she's going to die a virgin." So I then became the Ugly Virgin. Every so often a prayer card of the Virgin Mary with ugly features drawn on her in ball point pen appeared on or in my locker or in my book bag or passed around the lunch room for everyone to see, eventually landing at my spot at the loser table. That's when I started working in the library during lunch hour. Instead of eating I got a study pass and hid in the earth science section reading whatever book looked interesting. By senior year I was an expert in geology and well on my way to anorexia. The bastardized Virgin Mary prayer cards still appeared, but at least the other dorks at the loser lunch table weren't subjected to the ridicule aimed at me. Beth and Renée started the uglied up Virgin Mary prayer card fad, other kids joined in the fun, but Beth and Renée were always the kingpins. At first I threw the cards away, but then I started keeping them. I'm not sure why. By graduation I had a large collection of them, about 100 or so. I had a ceremonial burning the day after graduation. Labeling Beth and Renée as bullies doesn't do justice to the pain they caused me for most of my youth. Their personalities were so different from their kind, compassionate grandparents' personalities that it seemed impossible they were descended from them. My parents knew Beth and Renée bullied me and it put them in a difficult position. They weren't particularly friendly with Beth and Renée's parents, but they were friendly with their grandparents. No grandparent wants to know their grandchildren are Satan's Henchmen.

I moved away to college, lived my life and try to never think about Beth and Renée. I put them firmly in my past the day I burned those prayer cards.

And then...their grandmother died and my mother wanted to attend her funeral. I knew Beth and Renée would be there. And yes, of course, the funeral is about their grandmother and no place for petty childhood issues. But the thought of attending the visitation or funeral knowing darned well they'd be there is not something I want to deal with right now. Or ever, really. Call me immature. Call me silly. Call me petty. Call me a coward. I'm guilty of all that and a lot more.

But let's keep it real. If my parents didn't know their grandparents I would not be paying condolences to their grandmother.

Let's keep it even more real: if I had my life together I would love to go and flaunt myself at Beth and Renée, be living proof that living well = revenge.

But.

I'm unemployed, unmarried, childless, losing my home and limping on a foot and ankle that are in desperate need of repair. I have hair that is way too long and shaggy because I go as long as possible between haircuts because I can't afford them. I have old clothes because I can't afford new ones. I look tired and weary because I don't sleep because of the anxiety and stress of my life situation. I look like crap. I feel like crap. My life is crap. I am exactly what Beth and Renée predicted I would be: An ugly failure in every aspect of life.

I didn't have to say anything about any of this to my mother. She told me she didn't want me to have to deal with Beth and Renée and that I didn't have to go with her to the funeral, she'd go on her own. And of course hearing someone else say that made me feel even more immature and silly and petty. And hearing my mother acknowledge the Beth and Renée thing was so awful that all these years later she didn't want me to have to be in the same room with them was surprisingly difficult. My mother was in the, "turn the other cheek" and "don't stoop to their level" and "just ignore them" schools of dealing with bullies. I always thought she didn't fully grasp how horrible those girls were to me and how the teasing and tormenting I dealt with because of them was brutal. I don't blame my parents - by the time we were in junior high school I stopped telling my parents about the teasing I got at school. I was embarrassed about it and didn't want my parents to know their daughter was such a loser she was being teased. I also thought I had to learn how to handle it on my own - I didn't expect, or want, my parents to come to my rescue. I knew that would only make the teasing worse, every kid knows that parents intervening in this sort of thing is just an open invitation for more teasing.

But apparently my mother knew it was more than typical schoolyard teasing because all these years later she didn't want me to have to deal with them.

In the end I went. My mother and I slipped in to the funeral at the last minute and sat in the back row. My mother said a few words to Beth's mother and we left. I don't know if Beth and Renée saw me or not, and I don't care. I was there on my mother's behalf and to pay respects to my parents' friend. That her grandchildren teased me mercilessly throughout my childhood and high school years was not a factor. I don't think I rose above anything. I didn't confront Beth or Renée, I didn't speak to them. I didn't even really get a good look at them. And I suspect they didn't see me, either. They may not ever even know I was there. So I was really just as cowardly as if I hadn't attended. In the words of my teenage self, "Whatever."

I was dealing with all the deaths and trying to squelch the drudged up memories of Beth and Renée and get myself out of the grieving funk, reminding myself to live. "You're still alive! Live!" When blam! the call you don't expect to get arrives.

I have cousins. But because my parents are the youngest children in their families, and I'm the youngest (by a lot of years) in my family, my cousins are all much older than I am, the lone exception being a cousin two years older than I am. Consequently I'm not very close to most of them. Far flung logistics play a huge role in our lack of closeness, as well. Some of us turn up at weddings and funerals. Some of us keep in touch with others of us and eventually news and life updates filter through the family's communication network. I suspect we're like other families in this regard. I'm not saying it's good, or even healthy, but it's how it is with a lot of families. When I hear about someone who is close to a cousin I look upon the relationship with curiosity. I'm not entirely sure what that relationship is like. Beth and Renée were cousins and they did everything together. They appeared to be best friends. Evil incarnate best friends. Consequently, for me, there's an air of something sinister about cousins who are close. (Thank you, Beth and Renée, for badly skewing my perspective on familial relationships.) So deep down I've always been kind of glad my cousins are older and far flung. No one forces relationships and no one pretends we're anything other than what we are: A bunch of people whose parents happened to be siblings.

But that's not to say we don't care. We do care. My oldest cousin had a long and difficult war with several types of cancer. At different junctures all of us cousins helped her in the ways we could. Visits, phone calls, cards, help with treatment care...from the oldest to the youngest, we were there for her. We do care, we do support each other. We're just...far flung, literally and figuratively.

Another older cousin, though, is a family legend. He's the kind of guy with just enough redeeming qualities to render his assholiness moot. He's so much older than I am that he's always been almost a mythical creature to me. If you read his bio you'd think it was made up. He was at Altamont and is captured in one of the famous (and infamous) photos of the concert-gone-wrong. He dodged the draft by living in Mexico working as an English speaking guide in the Yucatan. (His father, my father and my other uncles, who all did time in the military, all agreed that he was not armed services material and he wouldn't last a week in boot camp let alone in Vietnam...it was agreed that the US did not need someone like my cousin in its military ranks. It was also agreed that the US did not need to be in Vietnam, period, and therefore drafting the dodge was the only real choice and forgivable in their eyes.) He returned to (eventually) get a degree in architecture and worked his way through college as the lighting guy for bands in the '70s. He made a lot of friends in bands and amassed an impressive collection of guitars and clothes castoff from impressive music names. Speaking of names, he dated a Hearst. Yes, of those Hearsts. He went to Europe thanks to an offer from a friend in a band and lived there for a few years touring with different bands as the lighting guy, and, oh yeah, working on restoration and conservation projects at Versailles and the Louvre. When I was little he visited us for a few days. It pains me to admit this, but I had a castoff Beatles toy guitar one of my other cousins had long outgrown. I discovered the broken pieces in the bottom of my cousins' abandoned toy box and my aunt told me I could have it. My dad repaired the broken fret with glue and tape and replaced the strings with different weights of fish line so I could strum different chords. It also pains me to admit how long I played with that stupid thing. Anyway, en route to some adventure, my cousin visited us for a few days. He had a real guitar with him. In my childhood naïveté  thought he'd be impressed that I had a guitar, too, and he suggested that we jam together. I showed him my jumping off the hearth airborne windmill technique, and he taught me a few chords.

I know, you're thinking, "Holy crap! Trillian's cousin is either full of shit or the most interesting man in the world!" There's photographic evidence of all of this that lends credence to his tales. Every now and then he sent my parents a postcard or a few photos with a funny letter detailing his latest exploits. My dad used to read the letters aloud. They often contained a guitar pick for me, usually allegedly from someone famous. I was always fascinated by my cousin. The fact that we were related to him blew my mind. That we shared a gene pool was cool to me. I felt like I had a sliver of street cred thanks to him.

Eventually he settled down and got a steady job. And then there were some bad years, personal problems, marital problems...but he rebounded and was his old adventurous self. His holiday cards were hand drawn and hysterical. He chose a couple noteworthy weird news events from the previous year and mocked them, incorporating different family members in the drawing. He often sent me a guitar pick from some concert he attended during the previous year. Last year he sent me a pick from Wayne Coyne with a photo of him talking to Wayne Coyne. When I opened the card and saw the photo, I thought, "Huh?" but then all I could think was, "Of course he hung out with Wayne Coyne. Why wouldn't he?"

And then his sister called and told me he died.

After all his exploits and adventures, all his lapses in judgement and feats of daring, he just went to sleep and didn't wake up. Which is, of course, what we hope for everyone - a peaceful death. But not yet. He's older, but not old enough to say, "he lived a long life."

I know we're supposed to learn life lessons from death and blah blah blah. Two people, two family members I really liked, are gone. Of course I miss them, but the world is going to miss them, too.  They were the kind of people you want to meet in life - interesting and interested - and it makes me sad and mad that from here on out no one will get to meet them.

So, apparently one of my neighbors woke up a few weeks ago, looked in the mirror and said, "Well, that's it. I'm 64, I'm portly, I have a penchant for young Asian boys...time to start wearing caftans."

I always wondered what sort of man feels caftans are a viable apparel option. I assumed they were men who always had a caftan aficionado lurking in their soul yearning to be free and one day they give in to desire and don the fabled garment.

But now I suspect the transition into caftans is more impromptu.

Since I met him six years ago, every time I've seen my neighbor he's been very nattily dressed: Nicely tailored suits for work, neatly laundered and pressed jeans and polo shirts or sweaters for casual wear. He retired two years ago and since then he's maintained his neat wardrobe, even as his waistline expanded he was always impeccably dressed. No sweats for this guy. On Friday and Saturday nights he goes out with a crisply dry cleaned shirt, sometimes with French cuffs, sometimes with a tie, and jeans or nice dress slacks and Italian loafers. He's often accompanied by young Asian men who dress in ultra skinny jeans and Uniqlo shirts and accessories.

So imagine my surprise a few weeks ago I saw him in the hall wearing a linen caftan. How do you not say something to man who suddenly starts wearing caftans?  Lemme tell ya, it's really difficult to not react. I thought, "Maybe that's what he wears around home and he's just dashing down to pick up the mail." I didn't want to make him feel awkward so I pretended not to notice and kept the conversation to the usual polite neighborly topics. But it was an exceptionally long elevator ride.

And then it got weird.

He held the lobby door for me and followed me outside. He was not just dashing down to pick up his mail. He was standing in front of our building hailing a cab. In a linen caftan.

Then I thought, "Ohhhhh, it's probably some sort of theme party. A caftan party." I imagined him lounging on an oversized pillow sucking on a Hookah with friends also wearing caftans.

And then a couple days later I saw him returning from the library (carrying a library tote full of books) wearing a silk caftan with brocade trim.

The next day I saw him in our local grocery. He was in the cereal aisle reaching for a box of Raisin Bran. Wearing a different linen caftan, it was embroidered around the neck, cuffs and hem.

Huh.

That's something you don't see every day.

Nope. White 64 year old men wearing caftans is not something you see every day in he Midwest. Every now and then I see one of the Ethiopian cab drivers who live in my neighborhood wearing a tribal inspired caftan-like garment, and around Detroit you sometimes see guys at the airport arriving from exotic parts of the world, parts of the world where men wear caftans, but white guys who grew up in the Northshore suburbs of Chicago are not often seen wearing caftans, real caftans, in public.

I thought, "Maybe he just has the thee caftans, maybe one of his young men has a thing for older men in caftans and he's just obliging the whim of a young suitor."

And that might be the case. Love makes you do crazy things.

But.

I've seen him five out of the last seven days and he was wearing a different caftan every time. Linen, silk, trimmed in brocade, embroidered, plain...all manner of caftan. This is not a whim. A whim is one or two caftans. This is a full-blown wardrobe makeover. 

Apparently this is a thing, now. 

I mean, you know, rock on, be who you want to be, wear what you want to wear. I'm not berating or judging him. You wanna wear a caftan, wear a caftan. This is America. People have died fighting for our right to wear caftans.

But.

It would be a lot easier if there was some sort of protocol for what to say, or not, when someone you know starts wearing caftans. It would be even easier if he just acknowledged it, opened the conversation. Just a simple, "Oh, by the way, I wear caftans, now. I'll be wearing them to pick up the mail, to hail taxis, to the library, when buying breakfast cereal, and so on." That would be an all clear signal indicating caftans are an open topic of conversation.

Then you could say, "Yes! I noticed! They're lovely. Where does one find caftans in Chicago?" Or something like that. Maybe a, "My, that's a lovely caftan you're wearing today, Mr. Neighbor," on subsequent elevator rides.

But he's acting as if he's wearing his usual suits or fine casual wear. I suppose that's the proper attitude required for pulling off the look. The caftan look. You have to commit. And this guy has. Rock on.

But.

Today I saw him in a light blue silk caftan. It was a little more snug on him than the others. Which struck me as odd because I thought the whole point of caftans was a loose flowing garment that swooshes around the body creating a cooling breeze underneath, offering a bit of cooling comfort to the wearer. This caftan was too tight to swoosh. I doubt there was any cooling comfort.

And.

It called attention to something I heretofore had not thought about. What do men wear under their caftans? Well, I don't know about all caftan-wearing men, but my neighbor was either wearing a very thin banana hammock or nothing at all under his caftan. I know this because his buttocks and front-ocks were straining against the tight silk.

As his neighbor do I have any obligation to inform him that his junk is showing? This never happened when he wore finely tailored suits and natty casual attire. These caftans have catapulted me, and us, into an entirely new and uncharted area of neighbor relations. 

And it caused me to ponder about the source of the caftans. Where does he acquire them? Could it be that he's been collecting them for years and has just now decided to wear them? Perhaps the tighter caftan was acquired in his thinner days and he's still trying to squeeze into it. Or maybe he inherited a collection of caftans and that was the only ill-fitting one.

Caftans are one (albeit odd) thing, but an ill-fitting, tight, body revealing caftan is another matter entirely. He has heretofore exhibited refined taste, so I have to believe he's aware that all his stuff was on display through the thin, tight silk. You might think it's similar to a guy wearing really tight jeans. A little off-putting but no big deal. Uh-uh. This was nothing like that. This was borderline perverted and the whole visage was: Creepy old man. Or: Guy who escaped from the psych ward and robbed a thin Sheik and stole his caftan. There's just a Theater of the Strange quality to his appearance in the tight caftan.

Up to now, my stoner metalhead neighbor has been the worst thing I've had to deal with neighbor-wise in my building. And Caftan Man has been fighting that battle with me. Turns out he's been calling the cops on our stoner neighbor for years, long before I moved into the building, because our association board merely slaps a nuisance fine on the stoner and as long as they get their money, they won't do anything more about it. Caftan Man and I think the board likes having him in the building because it's a regular source of income for the association. As long as he keeps smoking putrid weed and listening to Metallica at wall-shaking volume, they get a nuisance fine payment. Caftan Man and I became allies in trying to handle the headbanging pot smoking a-hole on our floor. So, there's an established camaraderie between us, hence my conflicted feelings about whether or not I should say something about the peek-a-boo caftan. "Excuse me, neighbor, I don't quite know how to tell you this, but if it were me I'd want to know...your, erm, caftan is wedged into your butt cheeks." (Yes, this is something new I learned about caftans...I wouldn't have thought it possible to get a wedgie from a caftan, but if it's too tight apparently it'll wedge its way right in there.) And no, caftans are not worse than putrid pot-smoking metalheads, but since the tight-silk junk revealing caftan incident I am not exactly eager to see what Caftan Man will wear next. There's awkwardness where before there was none.

Maybe it's his goal caftan and when the scale said he dropped a few pounds and he thought he could squeeze into his smaller caftan. I find myself oddly intent on coming up with excuses for the ill-fitting caftan because I don't want to think of him as the creepy guy who lives down the hall.

I find myself yearning for the halcyon days of the other caftans, the looser caftans, back when I was merely trying to adjust to seeing him in caftans. Now the tight caftan hugging his body and offering me a good assessment of what's under the caftan is the image burned into my brain. If he turns up at our next tenant meeting in that thing...well...let's just say there are a few older, conservative tenants who have been quite vocal about his predilection for young Asian boys. This caftan thing, especially the tight, revealing caftan, will be more fuel to their fire. And their fire is that he's a pervert running a gay brothel. (I'm quite certain that's not the case. Frankly, he's too much of a rule-citing fussbudget himself to do anything illicit like running a brothel. The man has a library card and eats Raisin Bran. He's not exactly the madam/pimp type. Then again...maybe that's his cover...)

Bottom line, this caftan thing is causing me far more concern than it should. So if you decide to all of a sudden start wearing caftans, do your friends and neighbors a favor by having a frank conversation about it. Explain why you want to wear caftans and assure them you are not creepy. Be open to their comments and questions, build a bridge to understanding. Don't make them silently wonder and cringe and worry over you and the caftans.