Four Kisses (Homage to Mary Karr)

I just finished reading Mary Karr’s memoir, Cherry.  The book (in Karr’s trademark gorgeous prose) chronicles the years between The Liar’s Club (reflections on her dysfunctional but uniquely loving family) and Lit (her struggle with alcoholism/old demons).   The first half of Cherry zeroes in on the author’s awakening sexuality, a la the teenage years.  Karr set out to address this sensitive subject in a way that would be neither titillating for the reader nor evocative of Nabakov’s Lolita.  To my sensibilities, she succeeds.  Employing mostly second-person narration, Karr makes the reader complicit.  It’s not only the young Karr who is kissed by dreamboat John Cleary, it’s “you.”

Reading Cherry put me in mind (to use Karr’s Texan phraseology) of kissing.  So, in light of time constraints, a short homage to Karr and to four kisses (with which I’ll make you, reader, complicit).

You are eleven and infatuated with a boy named Bobby Mally, a sandy-blond too shy to be infatuated back.  His best friend is Andy, Andy whose dad looks like John Denver.  (Because of the look-alike thing, you and your friend, Tish, share a mild crush on Andy’s dad — who you recall now with resurfacing curiosity, calculating your age difference, realizing that ten years later you could have more-enjoyably kissed him instead of Bobby).  You and Bobby have set a date and time to kiss.  Actually, Andy and Tish set it but so what.  You’re in 6th grade and count down the days — tick marks on the back of your Pee-Chee folder — until a Friday finds you and Bobby and Andy and Tish descending the schoolbus’s steps (you, with a flutter in your chest that hasn’t yet found its way further south).  It’s a spring day.  (Of this you’re fairly sure now because it’s sunny, warm not hot, the asphalt not yet pocked with shiny, melted tar.)  This is to be your first kiss beyond random pecks a la Truth or Dare … and you’ve imagined it for a week.  Though you’ve heard of “frenching,” the idea of a boy’s tongue in your mouth is about as appealing as eating a slug … and you know Bobby enough to know he won’t try it.  It’s the meeting of lips, soft and chaste, that has played out via your imagination as you’ve sat near Bobby in the cafeteria, him smelling of bologna and mustard.  A block from the bus stop, you reach Andy’s backyard, his dad conveniently at work.  This is the place, the time.  You don’t remember, now searching your memory’s film, the minutes before the kiss except that Bobby won’t look you in the eye and seems, instead, to study his Adidas.  When the big moment comes he curls his lips over his upper and lower teeth … so your lips don’t meet his lips at all.  Instead, you wind up kissing the cleft beneath his nose, the space above his chin, which he’s pulled tight, sucked in hard against his teeth.  Like kissing a fleshy turtle.  The big event lasts all of one second and leaves your, if not unsatisfied, perplexed.

~

You are twelve, almost 13, and in love.  Not “puppy love” but the real deal.  You can say this, even 38 years later, with certainty because time has proven it.  You met him in first grade.  He was gone for awhile (changed schools) but moved to your neighborhood (and back to your school) a year ago, 1975.  His hair is longish, auburn, curly – rock-star hair, you think.  He is lean, the muscles in his shoulders and arms are long and move beneath his skin when he grips his BMX bicycle’s brake. When you walk home from the bus stop together, he tells you funny stories in an Italian accent he borrows from his dad.  In June he asks you to “go steady” while everyone in your neighborhood watches from across the street.  When he does this, he gives you a necklace he made with your named spelled out — etched in black onto small white beads — and you are his.  And now it’s July and you’re about to go on vacation with your family, Lord, two weeks away from him seems impossible.  You and he are behind the Slater’s garage, hiding.  Hiding because you’re playing Kick The Can with the rest of the neighborhood kids and because Kick The Can is a good enough excuse to be alone together, hidden.  It’s there, behind the garage, that he tells you he loves you and you say it back.  It’s there that you feel his close breath, catch a change in the way he looks at you, witness — for the first time — the fusion of intensity and vulnerability you didn’t know existed in a boy.  You are awed by this, moved nearly to tears, weakened and emboldened by it.  You know the kiss is coming, soften toward it, watch in slow-motion as his lips move toward yours.  You keep your eyes open because you want to see everything (which is, maybe, why the memory is still so vivid).  Also, Jasmine must have been in bloom because if you catch a whiff of it now, you’re taken back, leaning against the wall of Slater’s garage.  You’re sure, now, that you imagined this kiss a hundred times before it happened but you don’t remember the imagining.  Maybe because the reality was so much better.  He doesn’t try the “frenching” thing (won’t for another year or so) and you’re glad.  It’s just fine the way it is.  Soft and warm and close and languid and thrilling and new and so much more than enough for a suburban tomboy.

~

You are 23.  He is double that only you don’t know it because he looks younger and, frankly, you never asked.  You have worked with him, day in and day out, at a large corporation where you are a secretary and he, a manager.  You’ve become friends because he makes you laugh and (though you don’t know this is the reason) you make him feel young.  He is black and you are white.  This shouldn’t matter but, given the times and certain geographies, your friendship is frowned upon by some and anything more than friendship would be taboo … which, of course, endows the notion with gravity — more pull from him than you at first, but that will change.  Early on, when you orbit him, you do so blithely.  You appreciate his help with Algebra.  You’re flattered when he sends flowers to your desk for no particular reason.  When he wants to cook you dinner, you say no thank you but then, after he tells you he’s fallen in love with you, you say okay. You go to his house for dinner because you’re falling in love with him, too, or maybe because you don’t want to hurt his feelings or maybe because you like being loved by an older man the way girls with daddy-issues sometimes do.  Probably all three.  Once there, you wonder if you should stay or leave.  You wonder if there’s some workable blend of both .  You wonder.  He talks about Paris and art and music and society’s ills … and this makes him, in your eyes, wise as an oracle because guys your age talk mostly about beer and trucks.  Still, you wonder.  He tells you he’s never felt this way before.  You wonder.  His lips brush your cheek.  You wonder.  He calls you baby.  You wonder …  but then he takes you firm up in his arms and he kisses you and his kiss is a different thing altogether.  It takes you and all of your thinking into it, pulls the whole of you like a tide … until you’re upside-down and sideways and head-over-feet, tumbling and adrift and malleable like so much seaweed.  In his kiss, you are exposed and safer than you ever have been.  You you are lost and found and falling and caught and, willingly, done for.

~

You are nearing 26, washed up on the shore.  He is 27, churned out by other seas.   But, in each others’ eyes, you are (both) somehow new.  Radiant, even.  You are wary of love now, so when he uses the word you figure he’s confused or infatuated or naive.  Still, there’s something in the way he looks at you, into your eyes deep and long and searching.  Or maybe it’s the way he lets you look into his … like he’s opened holy gates to something he’s shown nobody else … so you feel privileged.  He reads you his poems, takes you to brunch on Mother’s Day when everyone else pretends to forget, beams when he holds your hand.  And you?  You aren’t ready and you tell him this and he says he will wait.  He will wait and so will you, though you will notice the way his back splays out like a cobra’s (years of swimming), the way his brownish, sun-bleached hair brushes the tops of his bare shoulders when he plays volleyball.  Together, you reclaim pieces of yourselves that you’d believed gone.  You hike the mountains, the seashores.  You paint together on large sheets of watercolour paper which, later, will hang in a gallery.  Slowly, you let yourself love again.  And, when he kisses you the first time, it’s at your doorstep, his lips parted just slightly, soft, a moment of lingering, then a brush of his hand on your hair before he turns to go.  And you remember it now, though it was neither passionate nor tepid, because its tenderness rendered you, somehow, innocent.  Maybe even reborn.  You remember it, too, because it was the beginning of a kiss that has lasted, so far, twenty-some-odd years. A kiss that (some months after the doorstep) will find you lying on his bed, fully-clothed, for hours — still kissing, nothing more — until the windows are steamed and you taste (with gratitude) the salt of his sweat.  This years- long kiss that will ebb, flow, expand, contract, fall and rise again.  This kiss you will rest in.  And he, giver of this kiss, will learn to employ it to slow your mock-speed mind.  He will see you mid-bill-paying or post-parental-caretaking or pre-job-interviewing — the crease between your brows fretting itself into a crevasse — and he will kiss you.  A peck, you think, as you shift, begin turning back to your worry du jour.  But he will linger there at your lips.  He will linger until you realize he ain’t goin’ nowhere … and your shoulders will fall down from around your neck.  And you will tell yourself I’m here now.  Here and loved longer, more tenaciously than I dared imagined I would be.  Here, loving back this man whose lips I know as well as my own.

Hollywood Nights – Part 1, 1981 (memoir)

Until last week, I hadn’t been to L.A. in 30 years.  All those years ago, when I left Hollywood via a Greyhound bus, I swore I’d never return.  Never say never.

1981:

I’ve just turned 18 and am descending, courtesy of Delta Airlines, toward the Burbank airport.  Looking down on the city, northwest of L.A., I remember Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In — how Gary Owens used to open the show with “Live from beautiful downtown Burbank…”  From the sky, it’s anything but beautiful.  It’s a flat, seemingly treeless, bleached-out square – a faded postage stamp of a place. From the ground, it won’t look much better.  And nearby Hollywood?  The gleaming star-paved sidewalks?  Filth and kitsch await me there.  To see celebrities’ star-etched names, I’ll pass dingy storefronts and alleyways where ragged men will emerge to offer me heroin.  To see one star — maybe it was Marilyn Monroe’s — I’ll have to squat down, squint through a patina of urine and spilled cola. But none of this will matter.  I’ll be too busy being cool to be disillusioned.

I’m going to visit a friend who lived in my neighborhood for only two years.  They were pivotal years — the ones that held 7^th and 8^th grades – spreading out the summers after each, so that the hot days and nights seemed liquid.  We had only to float from one to the next.  My friend (I’ll call her Lisa) didn’t want to move but she had to follow her mom and stepdad … who followed their guru … just before Lisa’s freshman year.  For her, the move would be a shift into fast adulthood … a good full lap or more ahead of me … largely because of this:  Lisa’s mom was a tad nuts and her stepdad, more than a little unkind.  Without various kids knocking on her door by day, escorting her .out of her bedroom window by night, Lisa would have no refuge.  As it turned out, she wound up spending the better part of the next four years running away, living with various relatives, finally landing in a halfway house on Hollywood Boulevard … wherein she emancipated herself and finished high school early.  Now, in ’81, Lisa is a free girl — working, taking a college course at night, and living with her boyfriend in a bonafide apartment, nary a parent – nuts or otherwise — for miles around.  I’d actually been stunned that my folks had let me go … but I shouldn’t have been.  By then I was scarcely a blip on their radar.

So it is that for two weeks (that seem like years) Lisa shows me what’s to see when you’re 18 and broke and free and in a place where everything’s supposed to be … more.  I meet her buddies, one who I become fast friends with.  He lives two blocks from The Boulevard and has constructed, in his bedroom, a bureau-sized day-of-the-deadesque diorama in homage to a recent breakup.  He’s funny and smart and unclassifiable by my suburban standards.  Not a jock.  Not a stoner.  Not a prep. Not a punk.  He works as a courier at Warner Brothers Studios.  We hang out there a fair share over the next two weeks, at the studio, where we ride cruiser bikes around the lots.  I see that The Walton’s house is actually quite small and surrounded by pavement rather than The Blue Ridge Mountains.  The iron gate from the T.V. series Hart to Hart does not lead to a mansion but, instead, to nowhere.  In Hollywood, illusion abounds.  I just don’t know how much … yet.

We smoke menthol cigarettes (because the air is already bad, we say) and we contemplate the way smog makes for exceptionally purplish sunsets.  We listen to X and The Dead Kennedys, drink too much and, otherwise, indulge in what L.A., circa 1981, has to offer.  One night finds us at a big, old house near Griffith Park.  The place is inhabited by members of a punk band and the living room is scattered with pots and pans of various height and girth (of course, there’s a keg, too) – each which various guys with spikey hair play like drums.  This pan menagerie, at the time, makes perfect sense to me … as does this:  I sit in the large house one night … on a bar stool … at a counter.  On the counter is a stack of flyers for the band’s next performance.  Printed on each flyer is a black and white photo of the band member’s faces.  I take a flyer in my hand, study it, then employ the lit end of my cigarette to burn out the mimeographed eyes of said band members … methodically because, after all, I’m an artist.

That’s bloody brilliant!  One of them — maybe the guitarist — says (or some other bit of Brit phraseology to indicate Heineken-fueled satisfaction).

Really? I say … because, as I finish up, the whole eye-burning thing seems creepier than it did when I began.

Do it to all of them!  Now the Punk is calling his bandmates over and they’re nodding and smiling and carrying on about my artistic prowess.   The way I’ve managed (intentionally, of course) to capture the band’s vibe.

And so I spend the evening chain smoking and burning holes into a Punk band’s flyers.

The rest of the trip goes a lot like the flyer-burning night.  Mayhem and providence meet up the way they do only when cluelessness passes for insight.  The days are different from the liquid ones of 7^th and 8^th grade.  Different from the regimens and rests of high school.  And the nights aren’t solid, not dense with the perfume of new walnut leaves and cumquats and creek algae and sweat and the exchange of close breath.  Hollywood nights are fractured.  Amidst them, we’re constantly moving because over there or there or there … something even bigger might be waiting.  A more pungent beer, a longer line, a cooler song, a purpler sunset, a bigger wave.  And breath, in L.A., seems not so much shared as it is held, as if the smog might suck it out permanently and take it into the purple sunset.

This is autonomy, I figure.  When you’re on your own, when you’re all you’ve got, you take in what you can and you forget about sharing.  You accept, too, that things aren’t always what they appear to be.  Adulthood, it seems, is an even stranger place than the one I’d landed in via the 727.

By the time I return home, I’m using words like “barch” to imply smoking, I know who Elvira is, I know why Malibu Barbie is orangish-brown, I know the “winos” on Hollywood Boulevard by name (because my diorama-making friend has introduced us), I’ve seen the hookers on Sunset, I know that “Valley Girls” are the enemy, and I’m ready to turn in my long-loved bellbottom jeans for straight-leg 501s.  My youthful body has, daily, purged itself of various toxins I have put into it.  I try on a little cynicism but am not good at it.  Still, Hollywood’s got nuthin’ on a girl from the Northern California suburbs.

Ascending out of Burbank, I look through my oval window and down on the rooftops and streets that are fast morphing back into the faded postage stamp.  I know that the place I’ve been stretches beyond the edges.  I’ve walked beyond the stamp … to The Boulevard, where my bare feet skimmed dirty stars.  From my seat now in the plane, I strain my neck, look east toward the Hollywood sign that’s hovered above me for two weeks.  I can’t see it but so what.  Hollywood has taught me that seeing something doesn’t mean it’s real.  I know the sign is there, on the other side of the ridge, because I touched it.  Drank Heinekens alongside one of the “O”s, wrote my name there in black ink.  Nevermind that the big white letters are kind of flimsy, propped up from behind.  So what if they aren’t white at all but covered in colored graffiti.

Though I’ve become privy to facade on a grand scale, those of a subtler nature will continue to dupe me.  In the years to come I will first trust too much.  Then I will not to trust at all.  Then, because life is becoming short and I have seen the “great and powerful” fall away from many an Oz, looked into the eyes of little men behind curtains, into the eyes of my own little man behind the curtain … I will try on trust again.  It will be of a different brand … still … trust, nonetheless.  But all of that is far away from a girl on a plane who knows only this:

She is 18, leaving L.A., and there is no irretrievable damage.

~

(to be continued)

Protected: The F-Word … an Evolutionary Tale (somewhat explicit)

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Doorbell Ditch, By Proxy (or My Early Days as a Codependent)

I should have known I was in trouble, emotionally, when we neighborhood kids got together to play doorbell ditch.

If, somehow, you’re not familiar with the game, it amounts to ringing someone’s doorbell (preferably someone who has scolded or bossed you) and running away.  That’s it.  Meaner kids, we’d heard, added a flaming bag of dog crap positioned on the would-be door-answerer’s welcome mat.  That seemed over the top.  We figured rousting someone from their All In The Family rerun was badass enough – right up there with Is-your-refrigerator-running?-You’d-better-go-catch-it prank calls.

The idea was that whomever answered said door would (a) question his or her sanity at the prospect of a rung-doorbell minus a visitor or (b) believe that a phantom had, in fact, rung the bell and now stood (invisible) before them on the porch.  I.e.  Old man Jorgenson opens his door, scratches his head, looks left then right, cocks an eyebrow, and mutters, “By gaw, I’m sure I heard the doorbell.  Am I goin’ nuts or …  wait a darn minute …  is that an invisible phantom on my doorstep?”

The fact that nary a doorbell-ditch victim responded this way did not dissuade us.

Our entire neighborhood, 8-to-15 kids depending on the night, played this game … which is to say 8 to 15 kids were already at a full run, halfway down the street, while I rang the chosen doorbell.  This is my first memory of taking the hit for someone else, 8 to 15 someone elses, in order to be liked.

Who’s gonna ring the bell?  Sheila Colton would say.

Well, I guess I could again, I’d shrug.  But only if you guys stay on the lawn behind me this time.

We promise we will, right everyone?  Right!

And so it went for at least two summers.  After the first few times, I knew they’d all run away before I even pressed on the doorbell du jour but it was the price I paid.  Aside from Walter, who moved in after 5^th grade, I was the latecomer, arriving just before kindergarten started.  Since then, it had been a Lord-of-the-Fliesesque uphill battle to ascend the social hierarchy.  I hoped to gain a respectable rung, eventually — sans a beheaded pig.

Doorbell ditch, as it turned out, didn’t provide the hoist I’d hoped for.  I got caught on my 12^th birthday.  And when it happened, I took the rest of the girls down with me.  I was having a sleepover and had been building it up for weeks.  We’d stay awake all night and greet the sunrise, I’d vowed.  This proved tougher than I’d have imagined.  By 4 am, bored and dozy after repeatedly putting the sleeping Jenny Curtner’s hand in warm water (in hopes of making her pee to no avail), we figured a brisk pre-dawn doorbell ditch was in order.  “We” being about half the neighborhood.  Girls only.

By then, as party hostess, I’d exhausted my best ideas.  We’d tried a séance (for some reason, we always tried to get Edgar Allen Poe to show up).  Aside from someone swearing they’d heard “a rapping” on the door, neither Ed nor his bird manifested.  We’d tried “Light as a Feather,” which involved a group attempt to lift one girl, each lifter using only two fingers per hand.  Again, fail.  We’d watched Night Gallery until the TV station played The Star Spangled Banner and faded to static.  That had lasted only an hour.  We’d eaten popcorn, talked about boys, and played Truth or Dare.  A little cool morning air might be just the thing to help me make good on the sunrise thing.  If they wanted doorbell ditch, I’d give them doorbell ditch because, God forbid, word got out that they hadn’t had a good time.  So, in our nightclothes, we crept out my front door and into a night that was finally becoming morning.

By this time I fully embraced my role as doorbell ringer.  Rather than follow, I led the girls to a particularly mean lady’s house.  Her name was Charlotte and she wasn’t a real grownup.  She was only 19 or so, “shacking up” (as my mom called it) with an older guy.  Because of this, she bossed us younger girls like she thought she ranked with our mothers.  Once, when she babysat my sister and me, she undressed to her bra and panties and jumped in our pool after my parents said no swimming.  She said I’d better not tell and I never had.

I can still see the nondescript door of the place she lived with the older guy.  It was sort of a detached- garage-conversion without a real yard and, thusly, was devoid of flora that may have offered up shadow in the bluish breaking dawn.   I knew, even as I reached for that particular bell (it looked like a small black piano key), the whole morning-doorbell-ditch thing maybe wasn’t a good idea.  But, by then, all the girls were looking at me from various spots along the street and I figured, with only a few hours left until their parents picked them up, I’d better pony up some excitement.  I pushed the small piano key.  By the time I turned from the door, my fellow ditchers were merely a fading amoebic shape rounding the corner back to my house.

Back in my living room, satisfied with my party-hosting skill and ready for a little shuteye, I nestled into my sleeping bag alongside the other girls.  Dad was away on business and Mom, presumably, asleep in her room at the other end of the house.  Jenny Curtner had stayed behind, steel bladdered, out like a light with her hand still resting in a pan of water.  She’d slept through the whole thing.  About the time I began to doze, I heard the phone ring.  Next thing I remember is my mother.  She is standing in the living room, tight-faced and none too pleased, telling us that Charlotte had seen me, the police were on their way, and just what did we think we were doing down the street in the middle of the night, anyway?

I figured she was bluffing about the cop.  I’d seen kids do way worse things than doorbell ditch without the the law showing up.  Then, out our front window, I saw the black-and-white pull up our gravel driveway … real slow.  By the time the officer knocked on the front door, all of us girls (including Jenny) were up, trembling at attention in various states of disarray.

Mom let the cop in, presented me to him as the ring leader, and we waited for the allocated punishment.  We’d all heard about Juvenile Hall.  Juvie (pronounced Joovee), we called it, figuring the casual reference made us sound tough.  Truth was, the thought of it scared the shit out of us.  We knew what girls did to other girls in Juvie.  We’d seen Linda Blair (post Exorcist) get a broomstick shoved up her privates in Born Innocent.  My friend’s older sister had been in Juvie for awhile.  For shoplifting a pair of Dittos jeans, she’d told me.  How much worse was it to wake grownups up before  5 a.m. on a Saturday … even if Charlotte wasn’t a real grownup?

Poor Jenny Curtner was in tears at this point.  Part because she’d been an unwitting accessory to our crime and part because she feared her dad finding out.  I didn’t blame her.  He made my dad look like Ward Cleaver.  I can see Jenny there in my old living room.  I can see all of us there and wonder what we must have looked like to the cop.  A lineup of barely-pubescent girls in oversized JAWS tank tops or Morris-the-Cat T’s .  At least one girl, who shall remain nameless, rocked a homemade shirt that said “I’m a John Denver Freak.”

Actually, I know what we looked like to the cop – exactly what we were:  little girls partway to being big girls, standing gawky and tenuous in that fleeting space between the two.  I know this because it was all the officer could do not to bust out laughing.  The poor guy did his damndest to give us a serious talking to about curfew and vandalism and various runnings amok but a certain mirth in his eyes betrayed him.

One of us asked him if he was going to send us to Juvie and that sent the corners of his lips up enough so dimples pressed his cheeks.  At that point, it was all my mom could do not to break from her this-is-serious-business face.  By the time the officer walked out the front door, we were all but rolling around the living room laughing.  Mom included.

We briefly tossed around the idea of calling Charlotte, pretending to be gruff-voiced deputies, telling her that those lawless girls had been hauled off to Juvenile Hall.  Of course, I’d make the call on behalf of everyone else.   But my mom put the kabosh on that notion.

~

I’d like to say this marked the end of my risking life and limb for acceptance … but I can’t.  A sampling of the next, oh, 30ish years.

Hey Terri, how ‘bout testing the rope swing to see if it rotted over the winter?

Okay.

Hey Terri, come over and help me babysit but jump out the window into the rose bushes when the kid’s parents get home.

Okay.

Hey Terri, tap on that biker-guy’s shoulder at the 7-11 and see if he’ll get us any beer.

Okay.

1980s:  Hey Terri, fix me and my buddies up a prime rib and work some overtime without pay.

Okay.

1990s:  Hey Terri, volunteer your time for this and this and this and give us some of your artwork for free.

Okay.

2000:  Hey Terri …

I may have to think about it but, probably, okay.

2005: Hey Terri …

Here’s why I probably can’t do that …

2010:  Hey Terri …

No.  Well … I suppose … well,  actually, no.  Maybe.

2011:  Hey Terr …

No… ish.

2012:  Hey Te …

Maybe next time.

2013:  Hey T …

No … well … No.

2014 Goal:  Hey …

No.

Dear Readers

Dear readers (what few of you remain after my hiatus),

As some of you know, I’ve been on blogging/blog-reading vacation … if you call relentless “day-job” hunting and surgery a vacation.

So it is that, after a series of queries to The Universe in the last year — as in “I’m applying for this, this, and this day-job (74 of them), Universe, do you want me to have any of them?”– the answer appears to be “no” … or at least “not right now.”  (Dang, I really wanted that last one working as a Family Peer Coordinator for a national mental health organization.  Was a top candidate but, alas, it required lots of driving.  I may become part of their speaker’s bureau.)

Likewise, the universe has been calling me in the following way:  Feel that, Terri, that’s your gall bladder.  Get it out.  Now!  (I did, in February.)  How ’bout this, yeah, this is the neck and shoulder that you’ve tried to ignore for the last 5-to-10 years.  Yeah, getting kind of hard to, oh, do anything that requires looking down or sideways, isn’t it?  Getting tough to sleep, isn’t it?  Remember the car accident in 1982?  Remember how they said “in 20 or 30 years … “  Well, guess what?  BTW, this is your stomach/intestines calling.  Time for the scope you’ve been putting off.  And I know this one scares you but, seriously, Terri, you’re too young to have a broken vajayjay (remember, 50 is the new 30) … so get thyself to that doctor in L.A. — yeah, the only one in your state who fixes “mesh issues.”

And, yes, in the midst of this people I love are still growing more frail/ill/bed-ridden by the day and it will get worse before it gets better.  

Why do I  bore you with this?  Because the gods of blogging tell me that my readers want to know this sort of thing … as it pertains to what I’m here to do:  write whole forms, present visual imagery, and write about the creative process.

What does this mean per this blog?

It means that, at least until my next surgery, I’m going to be re-investing time toward these ends.  I may even rejoin Twitter.   (But, oh, Lord, the noise there … the ceaseless inane chirping … how does one heed the call of fine, winged creatures in that flock while blocking out the flat chorus of ruddy blue jays?)

~

Before my hiatus, I noticed a few things about my blogging.

A)  It was getting somewhat self-indulgent to my eye.  Fewer rounded-out stories and more commentary.  That’s not what I came here to do.  So, back to my original intent:  short personal narrative stories, photo essays, poetry/Haikus/varied prose, and other creative fare.

B)  It was taking me away from my WIPs.  To this end, I’ve had to re-assess the irons in my fire.  Too many.  For now, a couple are shelved.  Simplification is the order of the day so, per WIPs, I’m attempting to focus on a book (maybe handmade, maybe not) of Haikus and photographic images.  In essence, they will offer readers a means of daily meditation.  Included will be a bit on the meditative/spiritual nature of both mediums, history, etc.

C)  I was getting sloppy.  Though this blog originated with, essentially, freewrites (stream of consciousness, unedited writing), typos are distracting to readers, are they nott?  Though I am very “process oriented” in my teaching style and writing philosophy, a blog post is a “product.”  Thus, it needs to be easily readable, free from distractions.  Like many writers, I have a bitch of a time proofing my own work.  Your errors I can see right off.   Typically, with a newly-generated piece of my own writing, it takes me a week before I can see what’s actually there on the page/screen … rather than what I intended to be there (i.e. if I meant to type “or” but actually typed “of”).  I will try to be more careful … which means waiting longer than five minutes after writing to push “publish.”  (Because of time constraints, I am going to publish this right away so forgive me if I immediately revert.)

~

I leave you (or rather, rejoin you) with a meditative morsel:

In the swelling tide
each small thing becomes a jewel.
Notice, for ebb comes.

~

Breathe in.  Breathe out.  And have a wonderful day!  Oh, and please tell me what you’d like to see more of here.  Added:  If you follow me on Twitter, I promise not to bombard you with banality.

Terri

A Man and a Woman Fold a Sheet

“How ya doin’ over there, honey?”  A man, early 70s, lays down his newspaper, looks across the couch at a woman, late 60s, who holds the corners of a bedsheet.   A bedsheet that the woman’s daughter washed and dried and tossed on that same couch, along with pillowcases and socks, half an hour ago.

The woman looks at the man who has called her “honey.”  She looks down at her hand, the corner of sheet she’s been holding since its arrival on the couch, then back at the man again.  “I was folding this sheet,” she says, smiling in an oops-I-forgot-that-I-was-folding-this-sheet way.

“You need a little help?” asks the man with a tenderness reserved only for the woman.  A tenderness, pierced with illness and loss, that comes and goes now like bits of Morse Code. His gesture now more dash than dot.

“Yes, it looks like I do.”  The woman smiles a smile that is half child’s, half crone’s (because, somehow, wisdom has survived the brain injury where layers of cognition have not.)

Another woman, late 40s, stands at the kitchen sink, five or so strides away, rinsing dinner dishes.  It is through this dishwasher’s eyes that you, reader, are seeing the man and the woman — her parents.

The man lays down his paper, strains sideways on the couch.  Then the two of them, the man and the woman, do something that sends a splitting ache into the dishwashing-daughter’s chest:

The man and the woman fold a bedsheet.

With her free hand (not the one that’s been holding a sheet corner for twenty minutes) the woman finds the other corner, then lifts both until her end of the sheet hangs like a wide-raked U.  The man, hands trembling, digs through the remnant white folds, untwists them until he finds a U to match.  He holds his end up and looks across it at the woman, his wife, who looks back at him, her husband.  This process, the corner-finding, has taken a good five minutes.

The daughter pretends not to notice.  Rinses another dish.

The man’s hands and sheet corners meet those of the woman and it appears, to the daughter, from where she stands in the kitchen (unable to see below their waists) like her parents are performing some Baroque dance.

Wordless, the husband and his wife turn the sheet clockwise and repeat this motion, this dance, once more before the wife takes the squared-up sheet onto her chest, gives it one more fold, and nods at her husband to signal completion.

It has been 15 minutes since they began.

The wife smiles to her husband.  The husband chuckles back to his wife.  They used to do The Jitterbug, the woman understanding through the slightest tilt of the man’s hand, whether to twirl out or move in close.

The daughter, leaning to set the dishwasher, feels the ache in her chest widen toward her throat, her belly, her shoulders.  She has glimpsed — in that 15 minutes, five strides away — the marrow of a 50-year marriage.  The secret center between her parents, a man and a woman, a husband and his wife.

The man and his trembling hands go back to the newspaper.  The woman’s eyes return to a T.V. show, one raucous enough to sustain a broken brain’s attention.

The daughter, now wiping down the counter tops, wonders if she has judged these two, her father and her mother — their love, their manner of folding — too harshly.  For too long.

Semi Wordless Wednesday: Physics Lesson

I.

Time is illusion.

Einstein thought so, anyway.

Separateness is too.

II.

Things are becoming

other things, always.  Stardust

finding the garden.

III.

A camera’s shutter

left open half a second

reveals our blurred edge.

IV.

Stillness?  No such thing.

Even darkness moved across

the face of the deep.

V.

We sit in Lotus

while the earth spins us and light

taps on our eyelids.

IV.

Darkness.  Light.  Motion.

Time.  You.  Me.  Solid and edged.

Open the shutter.

Photographs and Haikus by yours truly.  Please don’t reproduce without written consent.

 

Good Friday for The Uncertain

Judas, Jesus, Mary Magdalene – Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar.

~

I grew up a religious mutt.  Mom was a fallen Catholic and Dad, a backsliding Southern Baptist.  “Let her come to her own conclusions about God,” they said … though mom, on occasion, went to confession and Dad, in a pinch, could quote Revelations.

Throughout grammar and high school, I went often, with neighbors, to the local Catholic church.  I loved the way the place smelled — like incense and old wood.  I loved all the ritual and mystery and stained glass and standing-sitting-kneeling-standing-sitting-kneeling.  My friend, Anna, used to laugh at me because I wouldn’t say the parts of the prayers I didn’t believe.  Even at 11, I couldn’t bring myself say The Apostles Creed in full.  Too exclusive, I figured — all that “We believe in one Holy Catholic and Apostolic church” stuff.  Not to mention that I didn’t know, with certainty, that Jesus’ mom was a virgin.  And I couldn’t say, with certainty, that a few of the apostles, on that third day, didn’t get together and say, “Hey, let’s get him out of that musty tomb.”

I used to look around and wonder if everyone else was as sure as they seemed … or if they had doubts they didn’t dare admit to.

Sometimes when I was sitting (or kneeling) in the pew, I’d stare up at the statue of Jesus on the cross, his eyes turned toward the ceiling, his mouth drawn open in anguish.  (Back then, oddly enough, I didn’t question the statue’s porcelain-white skin.)  I’d seen the image so many times by then I wasn’t shocked by it.  Instead, it filled me with guilt.   At 11 years old.  Guilt.  Not just my own but that of my fellow human beings.

On Good Friday, at Saint Mary’s, the priest would tell the story of Pontius Pilate, how he’d tried to offer Barabas to the bloodthirsty crowd.  Barabas who, in any movie I’d seen on the subject, had always looked like a bad guy.  At some point in the service, the priest would have us read from little mimeographed scripts, playing our part as members of that awful crowd.  “Crucify him!” we were supposed to say, with gusto.  “Crucify Him!”

I couldn’t say it.  It was bad enough, I figured, that others already had.  I was sure that, had I been there in Jerusalem, I’d have been with Mary Magdalen, another unvirtuous woman wailing at the foot of the cross, begging somebody to take the poor man down.

Worst of all when it came to the Good Friday story, I couldn’t reconcile some of Jesus’ final words, translated to: “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?”

Despite all of the explanations I’d heard given for those last words — that Jesus was, himself, God feeling human emotion or that, at that moment, he’d taken on the sin of the world … the whole thing smacked of abandonment.  The ultimate abandonment.  A father abandoning his son.  God abandoning a dying man.  God abandoning … God?  Scary stuff for an 11 year old.  Scary stuff for a 90 year old.  What’s “good” about it?

Because of Good Friday, I was never comfortable with the Jesus Story.  But, like many good stories, comfort was never the point.

~

In college, I read a short story called “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall.”  Perhaps you have, too.  And maybe, like me, you’ve been haunted by it ever since.  An old woman who, years before, was jilted at the altar is dying, moving in and out of consciousness as she lay in bed waiting for Jesus, waiting for a God that, according to the story, doesn’t show up.  It’s a well written story, fascinatingly narrated.  So well written its in most college anthologies. It’s also disturbing.  Reading it, I couldn’t help but compare it to the Good Friday story.  Jilted.  Abandoned.  By God.  So upsetting was “Granny Weatherall,” to me, that when required to read it again in another college class, I refused, opting to read another story in its place.  I think I chose “Yellow Wallpaper,” which is no picnic either.  It never occurred to me to re-read the Jesus story as simply that: a story.  A story that doesn’t end with Good Friday.

Most people would no longer call me a Christian.  I don’t call myself one anymore, though I think Rob Bell might.  I attend a Buddhist Sangha but don’t call myself a Buddhist either.  Nor do I call myself a Hindu, though I found much that resonated in reading The Bhaghavad Gita.  I’ve worked the 12 Steps but have no standard definition for my “higher power.”  I’m a little like Pi Piscine in Life of Pi.  When it comes to religion, nobody quite knows what to do with me … which is okay.  When it comes to God, I’m learning to live in ambiguity … which sounds better when I call it “mystery.”

If I were forced to choose, I think metaphor is the closest thing I have to religion these days.  And, like Pi, I find myself asking, this Good Friday, which is the better story?

Jilted or embraced?

Abandoned or met where we are?

The story with or without the  tombstone rolled away by forces unknown?

The Story where the disciple with the most doubt places his hand into the resurrected Jesus’ wound or the story where a man simply dies a meaningless, horrific death on a cross?

The story that ends, finally, with love and unity and transcendence and surrender to something bigger … or the story that ends with hate and isolation and defeat … where human logic reigns supreme?

This Good Friday, this uncertain woman chooses the story with ambiguity and mystery and something that, in the end, promises we are never left alone.  The story that was never intended to make an 11 year old feel guilty.  The story that says sometimes we are surprised by or unable to recognize strange, illogical, inexplicable … goodness.  The story with something bigger.

Because I believe in the truth of that story, that universal story, those elements … whether they arrive via fact, fiction, or some unknowable space between.

Mindfulness – 4

“This whole thing, is it a statement about the American Indian?”  The father of a blue-mohawked punk rocker says … from our TV.

“SLC Punk” is the movie.  CC’s latest pick.  The punker-son says something about being 18.  About the fact that he can now say to his parents, “Fuck You!”  He flips dual birds.  Lifts them above his head.

Is CC trying to tell us something?

It’s warm in our living room, thanks to a gas heater/fireplace that takes awhile to heat but makes the space feel cozy, like a cabin.  Outside, it’s so dark that the picture window is behaving like a mirror.  In it is a muted replica of our living room pierced, diagonally, by our neighbor’s still-lit Christmas lights.  The old fashioned kind, colored bulbs the size of cumquats.  There’s something melancholy about Christmas lights after Christmas.  In the neighborhood where I grew up, a string of them hung on the eave of a house where a couple fought so loud we often heard them from the street.  The house where Hams beer cans spilled from a garbage can.

What is it about off-season Christmas lights and beer cans?

I imagine the day that lights of this ilk are hung.  Their jubilant stringer calling to his wife.  The two of them leaning close, gazing up, smiling, inviting the kids out for a look.   What happens between this scene and the dangling-from-rusty-nails-chipped-colored-paint-pierce-your-neighbor’s window Christmas lights?

A hundred good stories, most of them sad, that’s what.

Ah, but I’m thinking – see how my mind works – rather than remaining mindful.

It’s warm in our living room.  Two people and a dog that I love sit on the couch, a plate of cookies and jug of milk between them.  They don’t need the cookies.  Nor do I.  Still, there they are, peeled from a Pillsbury package, baked, and offered up as “homemade.”

Punk is CC’s latest phase, though she gets mad when I call it a “phase.”  Insists she likes all music, which is true enough.  She wants a Monroe piercing, the kind that looks like a beauty mark above the lip.

“When you can afford your own insurance and are in school full time,” I’ve told her.

Not the answer she was looking for.  In her head, I’m certain she has flipped me double birds.

Husband sits alongside her, his reading glasses atop his head.  When did he become a middle-aged man with a graying beard and reading glasses?  When did CC become a young woman who shows us movies about Punk Rock and understands the film’s central message:  To dedicate one’s life to rebellion becomes its own manner of conformation.

Ah, but my thinking mind has again kicked in.  See why I’m a writer?

It’s warm in our living room.  The wood floor, where Calli used to sit atop her towel, is discolored.  Dog urine does that, eats away the thin layer of varnish that coats the boards.  We’ve left it that way. Haven’t revarnished.  None of us talks about why … but I suspect we’re not ready to cover what traces of her remain.  For now, the discolored patch of floor is Calli’s space.

Dis-colored? Is there such a thing? Amberish brown, the color of Calli’s patch of wood, is — after all — a color.

Yet, not one of my neighbor’s bulbs is the color of Calli’s spot.

Why is it that, in 2013, Christmas lights retain such a limited spectrum?  Why not bulbs that are the color of wood?  Of a wheat field?  Of a frozen-over lake?  The color of alpenglow against The Sierra Buttes?

Ah, there I go again.  I’ve moved away from our warm living room.  Look how far this time:  To wheat fields.  Lakes.  The Buttes.

It’s warm in our living room.  On TV, the Punk Rocker argues with a hippie.  What does life boil down to, the argument goes:  Chaos or order?

Both.  There is chaos in order.  Order in chaos.

Sometimes beer cans spill from garbage bins … but, eventually, someone will pick them up.  Get 5 cents for each one at the recycle center.  The cans will be processed, melted down, honed into their next incarnation, set out on conveyor belts, marked with identical labels.  Nobody will know which piece of metal held the drinker’s first beer or his last.  The one that made him jovial enough to hang Christmas lights or the one that made him say screw it, I’m not taking them down.

And sometimes a neighbor, inside of her warm house, will see those Christmas lights … the way they pierce her front window.  They will make her remember Hams beer cans, a couple who fought so hard she could hear them from the street.  She will put them all – the rogue lights, the couple, the beer cans —  into a story.  Structure them in words.  Words, one letter after another, in orderly lines, the way she was instructed by her 1^st grade teacher.

In the beginning — before even light, it is said — was the word.

Thinking again.  Thinking …

It’s warm in our living room.

Responding to Mary Oliver

The call:

The Journey by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do –
determined to save
the only life you could save.

~ Mary Oliver ~

(Dream Work)

The response:

The night has, for too long, been late and wild.

And, yes, the whole house has trembled.

And my voice, though bold on the page, remains faint in my heart.

Am I willing, finally, to cup my ear?

To step over what’s fallen?

To lay down the last trees I’ve carried on my back?

To stand alone amid what will be called ruin

and pay mind to the thin voice that,

from the depths of that weary. beating muscle,

calls me whole?

 

~