I'm sitting outside this morning, in the cool air in a vintage circa 1960's folding chair that R found on our street where most of our furniture has come from. We live close to Cal and when the students move they throw out everything that's not an apple product. Beds tables books mirrors letters text books plates and baskets full of stuffed animals and costume jewelry. It reminds me of when I was a kid and living alone with my mother and we found a nice high back chair in the hallway of our building and I helped her quietly sneak it into our apartment. I wish I had memories of what it was like inside but I don't. Just that moment of the found treasure and the adventure of getting it inside unseen. I suppose she was ashamed. I was too young to know the why of the whispers and the shh but I had learned from birth to listen to the shh and not question it.
There were times when staying quiet was deadly serious when noise or crying got you bad hurt and times that were more like a secret important mission. Another place we lived in I can't remember clearly except it was either a small box shaped house or a large first floor apartment was when we used to have to hide from the bill collectors. I don't know what year it was just that it was before I was nine and I remember the lights going off and the shhh and how I would crawl low to the floor to get to the TV to turn it off. Then the knocking on the door and sometimes pounding. Sometimes they yelled I know you are in there. We just pretended that we weren't until they gave up and went away. I was part of a secret army. I had a mission. I could help keep us hidden from the enemy. I think my mother was ashamed and angry. I'm not sure. Part of what I did was distract her by being funny. Like I did later with my kids when the lights would go out.
Some of my best memories in my little handful of them were when she was afraid or sad or standing in a pool of shame. Because I got to be the hero in those stories. I was strong and capable. I could convince her everything would be alright. I was the surrogate husband when her husband was gone again. I was her partner. I had a purpose and it was to keep her safe and make her happier. I say happier because no-one could make her happy.
It's ironic that my best memories came with the sour stomach churning ones I've always had. Things I've always known that I can't bear to think about. Things that don't make sense to me because she was relatively sane then. She was unusually kind when I wet the bed and sleepwalked into the closet each night, with a blanket. She'd wake me up sitting upright underneath the blanket, clutching the pillow, my pajamas soaked. She always told me it was alright. Which in itself was scary. That was not the kind of thing my mother ever thought was alright. Messes were always wrong. She wasn't drinking, she was less crazy. And yet...
I keep asking myself when you will get the joyful writing. The big round smooth pretty words. It happens sometimes. I just never know when. I wonder if I write these prompts later in the day when the night is farther away and my dreaming mind is long forgotten will things be sunnier on the page. I want to write you different things. I keep thinking on how to make that happen. If I write from right where I'm at in the morning you get these uncolored shadow prompts.
Emma always teases me about being a dark writer. Dark writers, com she will say nodding. We will all wear black and be goth and we will write our dark stories together. I laugh and at the same time, totally picture it nodding myself. Yes that would fit me. Dark writer.
It's all of a piece for me. Just like those inexplicably dark moments when it was just my mother and I. When I got to help shape our story, when I was the husband and could make her happier for a moment and the worst things happened when the lights went out. But we still laughed. And I found my beauty in the city. I was my mother's child husband and the city was my everything. Best friend, full of tall buildings that made me want to fly and little thrift stores full of books and that musty smell of old things and endless possibility.The city was my playground, all of it. The street cars and the people were a giant storybook I walked through waiting for the next adventure and telling myself stories everywhere I went. I always made up stories about the people I saw. The man who looked sad in his frayed brown, fat lapelled jacket. His wife left him for someone younger. The old woman who was hunched over and looking down at her swollen feet in slippers had gotten lost and was watching the ground for clues to find her way back. I remember this ache of wondering. This big lonely for these people, the strangers in my city I would never know. I couldn't stand not knowing them, not knowing what their stories were. I'd stare hard seeing if I could figure them out. When I couldn't I made them up.
There were the Sundays. I walked by myself to the bakery to get the donuts. Just me in the quiet street, thick fog that was mysterious and comforting and smelled like the ocean, the smell of good dough frying in real fat when I got to the right block. The baker was so kind. A fat man all in white with a big smile.Those donuts were the best tasting thing in the world. I am always hopeful when I encounter a donut. They always disappoint me. I've never found one that is even close to those beautiful, still hot donuts, a little steamy in the white paper bag I carried so carefully home. They were sweet but not too sweet. There was the flavor of the good dough and the fresh real fat too. It didn't taste like a bunch of stale sugar and grease.
Those mornings were joyful. My mother read the Chronicle without a hangover. I read one of the books that I used to get at the thrift store for a quarter. I read the good ones over and over. She didn't have to go to work. This is all blurry and besides the absolute truth of the donuts I can't tell you whether I've fictioned that peaceful reading of paper and books. I don't remember what the inside of where we lived looked like. I can't remember the door. I don't actually remember eating the donuts when I got back. Just whatever the baker gave me just for me that I ate on the way back. I remember the bakery and the street and the fog and how my feet felt in my white keds walking down the street.
Turns out the red keds I always write about were most likely make believe. In the pictures I found my keds are always white. I must have wanted red shoes badly to paint them that color in my memory. There are no pictures of me between babyhood and nine. Are the pictures among the important things that burned in the fire? Were there pictures at all? I don't know. I'd love to have pictures. I like looking at the ones I have now that I've broken through the terror barrier and trying to remember the houses we were in, or the days they were taken. I like to see myself because I get how strong I was when I see those pictures. I had a strength I can see in them, even though my hair is longer than I wanted it to be. Even though I was wearing clothes I never would have picked. Even though I lived in my own head to escape the white walls and make believe and dark corners of my family. You can see it in my eyes. Strong. I'm grateful for that.
This writing feels like a pile of slowly pulled dead yellow teeth I've slowly piled up for you. I hate it and want to start over. I want to write about the things I read yesterday instead. I want to write you a story where there are balloons flying and children are running through the sprinklers yelling on a hot summer day. I want to write about how good the red koolaid tasted and how it felt to run so fast it felt like I could run straight off the earth and into the sky, flying. I want to tell you the places where my imaginings made whole countries of safe, where girls were boys and boys were wolves. The places where there were no adults, not one. Just the children, brown and strong from the sun in the days before sunscreen, where the trees were our sheltering mothers and the moon was our truth. The places where safety was real and bad things only happened in stories around a fire at night where we ate burnt sticky marshmallows and stayed up all night only if we felt like it and slept safely tucked into the earth all night long if we were tired and if we were sleepless we had the comfort of the burning stars to count, waiting for nothing more dangerous than the turning of the earth to the daylight.
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I want to write about...
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We made our own happiness out of...
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This is what joy tastes like...
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I want to start over. This time it goes like this...
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She listens for the sound of...
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This is not the perfect poem. But it is what is in my head today. Sherman Alexie is one of my favorite writers. I like this poem and the day is pulling at my sweater with it's demands so I send this off to you, imperfect but what I have in my hands today.
Dangerous Astronomy | ||
| by Sherman Alexie | ||
I wanted to walk outside and praise the stars, But David, my baby son, coughed and coughed. His comfort was more important than the stars So I comforted and kissed him in his dark Bedroom, but my comfort was not enough. His mother was more important than the stars So he cried for her breast and milk. It's hard For fathers to compete with mothers' love. In the dark, mothers illuminate like the stars! Dull and jealous, I was the smallest part Of the whole. I know this is stupid stuff But I felt less important than the farthest star As my wife fed my son in the hungry dark. How can a father resent his son and his son's love? Was my comfort more important than the stars? A selfish father, I wanted to pull apart My comfortable wife and son. Forgive me, Rough God, because I walked outside and praised the stars, And thought I was more important than the stars. | ||
I hope this day has some joy in it, some space for you to dream a little. Some time to write.
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