"Deals" I learned From My Grandma, Queen Irene

Queen Irene B. Lesh

My Grandmother was an amazing lady. She raised five children, she was a spy for the government during the depression, and she could rock a pantsuit like nobody's business. She also rarely used the word "thing,"  hence my title. My Queen B Grandma, instead, used the word "deal" for virtually everything. "Sarah, can you you hand me that "deal" over there?" or "What was that "deal" on the news about?"

She spoke her own language, and created a rather hysterical way to go about life while still maintaining her lady-like grace. Here are a few of the funny little "deals" she taught me. :)



1. Chocolate is a basic food group. Always hide Mars bars close at hand.

2. Lipstick is the only cosmetic a girl really needs. But she must own 700 tubes of the same color.
3. A lady doesn’t yell, a lady whistles. Never raise your voice, simply learn to whistle loudly. 

4. There is never a mess unless you see it. So stuff those closets and hide everything with a dust ruffle. 

5. French kisses are for sluts. If one must DO them, one must never be seen DOING them.
6. A good dinner should always be followed with pie! 

7. Wear a bra at all times, you will be able to brag that you have 30 year old boobs when you are 75. 

8. If you are going to say you are collector, you should own it. Fill every room with scary dolls and be proud. 

9. When a visitor comes to stay the night, stick them in the guest room full of scary dolls so they never return again. 

10. A refrigerator is never full until you can no longer shut the door. When this happens always have a spare refrigerator available, and pickles last for at least 40 years.









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SEX And Mens Funny Looking Parts

I was never having sex! No way, no way, not ever! Sex was loud, and sweaty, and gross. I’d seen The Blue Lagoon!

I was certain that no one I knew had sex. My Grandmother certainly never had sex. She may have bourne eight children, but no hanky panky had been involved, and my parents would never even dream of it, ewwww.

At this age I didn’t even know what sex was. I watched a PBS documentary that showed a man and woman rolling around in the sheets as it described the ins and outs (no pun intended) of creating life. The sheets were blue and that was about all I took away from the documentary. So I guessed that when you had sex you just rolled around in sheets, but they had to be blue to make a baby. Seven year old logic is always spot on.

When I got to school the next day I, of course, told my extremely interested friends all about those yucky-blue-sheeted-sex-people. They all squealed in disgust between games of horses and princess fairies. All, except one little girl Kristin who, being the proud big sister of a new baby, was sure that she knew better than me about the birds and the bees.

“The man puts his stick in the lady and then they wiggle,” she told me. “And they have to do it in the shower to make a baby.”

What was she talking about? I mean I was the one who had seen the video! I had proof on my side.

“I think you should ask my mom,” I rolled my eyes at her. “My mom is older than your mom.”

This secret sex talk became our recess ritual for quite a few weeks of second grade. Everyone had their own ideas, but none of us seemed to agree on any of it. The only thing that we were unanimously convinced of was that sex was entirely nasty and that because of this fact we were all planning to adopt babies when we grew up.

The years rolled on and games of horses turned into hours spent on the telephone. I was lucky enough to have my own mauve phone in my room, how cool was I? The sex talk became more about “Johnny is so cute and when I’m a cheerleader in highschool we’re going to dance like Janey on Jeff did in Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and I was even planning to wear rolled up sweat pants just like Janey (AKA Sarah Jessica Parker).

I still had no clue whatsoever about sex until I read Flowers In The Attic by VC Andrews. This book was shocking and eye-opening and perhaps my naive twelve year old self was just too young to read it, but read it I did.

Oh My God Kristin was RIGHT! I was flabbergasted. I was shocked. I was appalled and I actually decided that I needed to ask my mom.

“Mom, how do people have sex?”

She didn't seem surprised or grossed out by my question.

I then proceeded to tell her everything. I told her about adoption and sheets and showers and Kristin and babies and Flowers In The Attic. She looked thoughtfully at me, smiled and said, “Honey, men have funny looking parts, but eventually you will learn to like them.”

And, you know what she was right.

The Birthday Girl, Authoress Shannon Celebi

Author of Small Town Ghosts age 4

It is not everyday that one turns (3x12)+1. Today, my beautiful-shiny-sister-Shannon turns a whopping 13,515 days old.

So far, in her illustrious life, she has done some amazing things. At the gentle age of one she said her very first word umbrella, and since then she has learned many more words and even mastered the English language. I am sure that by now you must all be astounded!

Reigning supreme in the land of Shannon’s life story is the famous tale of PUNKY PIE. When she was four Shannon ate quite a few pieces of pumkin pie. Later, in a state of over-eating-awfulness Celebi said the now famous phrase, “me no like punky pie.” Her profoundness, even at an early age, was quite notable.

When Shannon was seven she drove a speed boat at such a tremendous velocity that the boat almost capsized. Luckily, everyone on board was returned to shore safe and sound, however Shannon has never been able to live the horrific incident down.

Shannon began her stellar writing career at the age of birth, perhaps even before birth she might have been dictating graphic scenes of horrific peril from the womb. At age five she was able to put pen to paper for the first time and the world has never been the same.

Happy-happy-happy-happy birthday Shannon Celebi, marvelous mother, stupendous sister, wonderful wife, all around great gal, and awesome authoress. May your day be gluten free and perfect in every way! I love you.




Below is a sample of one of Celebi’s earlier work. It was published in The Poetry Expess in 1984. The poem is a tale of woe, sacrifice, strife, and eventually love. Enjoy.......

The Busy Beetle 

The busy beetle exercised 

To see him there 

I was surprised 

He did jumping jacks 

And leg lifts too 

He worked so hard 

His face turned blue 

He tried and tried 

To do something new 

He wanted to lose weight 

To impress Lulu 

Lulu was the cutest bug 

You ever did see 

She had blonde hair 

And the cutest beetle knees

Out-going authoress center, with her two besties Krissy and Mandy

The 80s And Utter Lack Of Political Correctness

I wasn’t exactly Paris Hilton, thank God! No diamond tiaras adorned my head or hung from the edge of the my dream canopy bed. I didn’t have a horse or one of those fabulous battery powered Barbie cars that kids can ride in, although I did long for all of those things. 

What I did have was an imagination and an amazing mother who let me express it. 

“Mom, can I cut up the Halloween costume you spent hours making so that I can reenact Michael Jackson’s Thriller video?”

My mother's knowing smile. “Sure honey.” 

“Can I rearrange the entire house and put the living room furniture in the dining room?”

My mother’s puzzled look. “Umm, why?”

“I want to pretend to do Barbara-Walters-like videos with my Cabbage Patch dolls and the windows in there have the best light.”

The knowing look again. “Sure, but you have to put everything back.”

There were limitations of course. She was livid the one time that I pushed all the furniture against the computer room door locking her in there with no means of escape. 

My childhood, was always dramatic to say the least. Wether I was pretending to be Olivia Newton-John and making the neighborhood sit through the entire lip-synched concert of Olivia’s Greatest Hits Volume One or choreographing an epic dance number for all the kids to perform during our annual super-bowl party my dreams of putting on an awesome show never ceased.

Naturally, our house was the house to hang at. No one else’s parents would allow complete monopolization of the family home or a double birthday party with my little sister where we all dressed up like characters from the movie Clue and played a murder mystery game, complete with butler and candy cigarettes. Oh, the eighties were fun with their utter lack of political correctness.

There was always (except for the locking her in the computer room incident) fairly good parental supervision. A lot of the time these things would take place while my mom was visiting with her best girlfriends. We were just trusted. We weren’t going to give away the family dog or burn down the house, and we cleaned up the mess ourselves. It didn’t hurt that we lived on a really good sized piece of property with large trees for pretending we were on Endor and lots of room for creative playing.

The eighties weren’t the days of Leave It To Beaver where you rose at dawn, left the house and your parents didn’t worry unless you weren’t home by six sharp for dinner. Nor were they like how it is today, where kids have to stay in there own yards and carry their cellphone at all times so a pedophile doesn’t grab them. No, there were plenty of pedophiles around in my day, I just thought they were these super friendly people who really thought kids were cool that your parents told you to stay away from. 

It’s a scary thought to me now, but back then I didn’t have a care. I knew that I needed to always be within shouting distance of the house, which meant I lived in a rather noisy neighborhood, but I was lucky enough to live on a country block with lots of kids and therefore lots of parents looking out for me.

I rode bikes up and down these really steep hills all day with all the neighborhood kids and we took turns roaming each other's yards and houses. One time I convinced everyone to weed our garden by paying them all a penny for their hard work and in the end no one hated me. It was amazing, and our garden looked like a giant pile of dirt. I guess we did too good of a job.

I never did grow up to become Barbara Walters, but the blessing is that when I was little I thought that I could be, the future was limitless and I was fortunate enough to believe that nothing was impossible as long as I used my imagination and moved some furniture around.

I Never Said Goodbye

When I was ten my mother picked me up from school in her little blue Mitsubishi Mirage and told me that she had cancer of the liver. She was wearing a very ugly tee-shirt with turquoise cats on it and as she said those life changing words to me I was fixated on those crazy blue cats.

Liver cancer is a very slow growing cancer as far as cancers go, but she’d had it since I was born. She’d been told that she shouldn’t have anymore children, but she had my sister, who is two years younger than I am, anyway. 

My sister and I fought in our early days like any other sibling team.

“She’s stealing my friend,” either of us could be heard saying whenever we had play-dates, which was usually every weekend.

The cancer news really brought us together though. I could look at my sister and know that as much as I might be pissed that she was wearing my tank top, deep down she got me. We were on the same journey.

No one else I knew had a mother who spent hours a day giving herself holistic treatments like coffee enemas or reading books on reflexology and naturalistic cancer treatments. Macrobiotics became our life. We no longer ate yummy homemade chili and meatloaf. Now we lived on leak soup and barely cooked fruits and vegetables. I began to look forward to the weekends when we would head into the city to go to Kaiser Hospital. The city visits meant McDonalds and Grandma’s good cooking. 

My dad was an eighties commuter. He worked all week in the city at the San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner Building. He was their chief engineer and he worked hard to make his money, but it left very little time to really know each other as a family.

So in part my parents lived very separate lives. My mom stayed home with us kids in our lovely mountain home shooting herself full of interferon to shrink those bad cancer cells and my dad, bless his heart, lived in a tiny camper shell that was meant to fit on the back of a truck that he rented from my grandmother, not ideal to say the least. It couldn’t have been very much fun for either of them, but they did this, for the most part, so that my sister and I could have an amazing education.

My dad created a tiny utopia to come home to on the weekends. He made himself an archery range because he is an avid bowman. He busied himself growing tomato plants over bricks and inventing crazy contraptions. He has a brilliant mind that doesn’t really ever turn off. He builds cars from scratch, and windmills, and has a music library that could be worthy of a museum. In many ways he is amazing, but he was often missing from our daily lives.

I imagine that my mother must have been pretty scared. She was a thirty-four year old woman living alone with two young girls and she was literally dying. I used to get so angry watching her gasping for air as she walked up the stairs into our house. I thought she was faking it, just seconds before she’d been belting out Sweet Baby James in the car and now she didn’t have enough energy to walk up the steps. I didn’t understand the congestive heart failure that came with her cancer was what was really killing her. Slowly creeping up, sucking her life and air out one beat at a time.

My mom had always been a big German woman, strong and competent with a sweet gentle save the world mentality. The cancer was making her tiny. Tiny and yellow and lost. 
When the holistic approach failed to work she threw herself more and more into prayer. Our lives then became about bible studies, and speaking in tongues, and following cars because she felt that God was sending her a sign. Some of it was fun. Some of it was crazy. And some of it was terrifying. Thank God I had my sister with me through all of it, the good and the bad. The weak body and the slipping mind and the grasping at anything you can find to hold onto because the thought of leaving your two babies alone in the world is just too much to bear.

Most of the time I tried to pretend that everything was normal, but there were many times that my panic attacks would send me outside of school to the pay phone to call home just so I could make sure that she was still alive. I didn’t really talk about her dying out loud to anyone, but I always knew that she would and that it wouldn’t be too much longer. I would try to imagine things like prom or my wedding and my brain would never let me imagine her into the scenario. There was always a black void where my mother should have been.

It soon came to a point when my parents realized that two pre-teen girls couldn’t take care of a dying mother and a dying mother couldn’t care for two pre-teen girls so we all moved to a rented house in the city. It was a hard adjustment. I was too used to running the show by this time and my dad was too used to being alone. We butted heads about everything. I was mouthy and creative and opinionated and he didn’t understand anything about me.

My mom cried a lot.

My sister hid from the world in her stories and her music.

I on the other hand, yelled and screamed and fought. I wanted to be heard in all this craziness. I wanted to fix everything. Heal my mother of her cancer, reteach my almost fifty year old father too be present, and mother my thirteen year old sister. The thing I hadn’t quite realized was that I was only fifteen and I hadn’t figured any of those things out for myself yet.

The very last day I saw my mom, she was hardly there, her body was present, but her mind had already left. She lay yellowed and limp in the hospice wing of the hospital and I was preoccupied with planning a shopping trip. I never got a chance to tell her goodbye.

The call came at five o’clock the next morning and sadly my sister answered. My dad had already left for work that morning.

When my sister woke me up to tell me I felt like I already knew. “Mommy is dead,” she said as she crawled into bed with me. “The hospital just called.”

The rest of the day was a daze filled with lots of relatives and Grandma’s house. A day that was crazy with a hectic love and even joy.

It was good to know that she wasn’t in pain anymore, it was good to understand that one small life could effect so many people. My mother was loved, and she is still remembered as the woman who sang crazy songs, and took care of the world in her own special way.

She taught me the true strength of a woman and that every obstacle in life could be met with some anger and fear, but pushed through with a lot of laughter and even more love.

I find that I’m glad that I never got to say goodbye to her, there is no goodbye because she will always be with me.