Let’s go for a ride

~ Christi ~ 1 Comment

For one whole summer, he drove me everywhere. He had a little blue Mazda that he had named the Smurf. We’d pick up friends and drive downtown to get coffee at Louie’s bookstore or to wander around Fell’s Point laughing at the drunk people. Sometimes we’d go have enormous sundaes at the fancy pastry shop, sometimes we just drove to the park and made out on the grass.

For one whole summer, I was important. I was interesting. I was fun. We had our own silly, secret language to prove it. We were “Smurfing it,” and everyone knew it. We communicated in strange, archaic, made-up words and when we talked it felt like we had always known each other. How could four months feel like a lifetime?

For that summer, we were always together but never alone. Our friends were our witnesses, they were our audience, and they created us. Without their eyes on us, we would have been boring, bored. With them, we were everything. We spoke in imaginary words and made out under blankets, and they observed us on the outskirts, soaking up our excess energy.

Without our friends, we took a few trips together. Alone, we researched obscure authors. We fought. We crammed too much into that summer. Alone, we flared and burned out.

Two decades have passed and it dawns on me. Aren’t we all always waiting for someone to pull up in their cool car and roll down the window, point a finger, and grin? “Get in. Let’s have some fun.” And we would. Aren’t we all waiting for someone to notice us, to take an interest, to make us feel special? Don’t we all want to attract an audience? Isn’t that what our lives are all about?

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Question day

~ Christi ~ 9 Comments

Thirty-three words to follow Maggie Stiefvater’s quote from The Scorpio Races:

“It is the first day of November and so, today, someone will die.”

They queued up anxiously outside—beasts, nymphs, giants, wise men—each desiring to trade the damp gray of today’s reality for the mystical vibrancy of the next. Yet only one would be chosen.

Today I began working on Trifecta’s weekend prompt without reading very closely, and I wrote more than 33 words. I liked what I wrote, so here you go. Thanks for the inspiration, Maggie! My longer version:

They were queued up anxiously outside—rippled beasts, tiny nymphs with gossamer wings, leggy giants, cloaked wise men—each awaiting the opportunity for consideration. They each desired to pass through the gate from this life to the next and to trade the cold damp gray of today’s reality for the warm mystical vibrancy of the next. Yet the futility of it nearly stifled them. One and only one would be chosen.

They shuffled in the line, remarkably calm in the face of such excitement. The larger beings offered their shoulders to the fairies and their backs to the stooped wizards. The storytellers wove their tales of distraction while the crowd inched forward. Those with instruments played quietly. Each and every being would be interviewed on this holy day.

At the front of the line, the white-haired priestess gathered her white robes tighter as she smiled at the elderly wise man in front of her. “What do you want?” she asked kindly, the same question that she would ask of each and every one of the offerlings.

“I want to know myself, that is all,” the wise man answered thoughtfully.

“Yes,” the white priestess answered, offering him her gloved hand.

 

Three nightmares and a revelation

~ Christi ~ 2 Comments

Three nightmares:

A baby, a ladder, a criminal

The baby has a slit neck, blood oozing, gruesome.

A set of ladders, in place of escalators, in the center of a glittering shopping mall. I avoid the climb down.

The criminal invades our home. He sits with my daughter as she draws, chatting with her, influencing her.

It’s risky. No matter how difficult it is for me, it’s time.

 

 

Do you remember?

~ Christi

When I picked you up, you asked me not to touch you.

“I’m not a huggy person,” you mumbled.

I drove you to the mall and bought you a CD. I didn’t know that it was the wrong thing to do. How differently this story might have turned out if we’d gone to a museum instead.

Back at home, we made lasagna for dinner and watched a movie. Your laughter was like music.

You spent the night on our futon, and in the morning you refused our chocolate chip waffles.

“Too sweet,” you said.

You were what, 16? You wore girly clothes and sneakers. You already knew your limits well and stayed away from your fences. I admire your awareness.

I tried to braid your hair in a zig-zag pattern, but I wasn’t yet a mom. I had no clue how to braid. I’m sorry.

We drove you home and waved goodbye as you went inside, not touching, not making future plans.

I failed you.

Your fences felt like brick walls to me and I didn’t try to climb them. You had my heart but I was scared of your fear and your anger. Your not-hugs felt like punishments and I’ve never liked to be punished.

So years passed and I wished things were different. I still refused to learn to climb.

You’re older now and I think I see your bricks beginning to crumble. I see the glimpses of light showing through the cracks. Maybe you’re lonely inside those walls. I’m going to build a fence of my own next to yours, almost but not quite touching. I’m going to share your cracked brick wall.

Let’s not hug, just hang out. Let’s laugh some more. It will be fun.

 

A memory

~ Christi
This was written by my niece, my sister’s daughter. It means a lot to me to have some of her beautiful, heartfelt writing here on my blog. Thanks, S.

As much as I try to deny it and force it back, I find myself thinking about you more and more lately. I spent years suppressing any thought that had to do with you, where you might be, who you could be doing it with, if you’re even alive. What should have been my first indicator that something was not quite right.I don’t remember how old I was, because so much happened in such a short period of time, it all kind of blurs. For a lot of the time I was with her growing up, she was in bed, and I do remember times when I would try to get her up to play with me, while my dad was hard at work, because all I wanted at that time was to be with my mom, even if I was always more of a daddy’s girl. Why isn’t mommy getting out of bed? I never knew until years later, but it did upset me at the time, and I guess my brother did a good job of keeping me distracted while he could.

Either way, I did get some time with her, when she felt good enough to get out of bed. She would creep into my room in the middle of the night, and now, at nearly 30, knowing what I do, I’m not sure if she was completely sober and just wanting to spend time with her little girl, or high on something and needing a junk food binge, but she didn’t want to be alone. My brother never wanted to go, yet I was always willing to climb into the car in my night gown, windows down, music blasting. She would take us up to High’s, a convenience store that was open all night, and I could pick out the candy bar of my choosing. We would keep this secret between us, because, of course, it would upset my dad to know, and I liked keeping secrets at that age. Having the special time with my mom that no one else did.

We would sneak back into the house like criminals in the night, making sure not to wake either of the boys snoozing upstairs, and she would tuck me back into my bed, singing “You Are My Sunshine” to me, in a version she had altered, and I would drift back to sleep.

That’s one of the few good memories I cling to, because not long after that, things went downhill fast. Emotional trauma, divorce, living two separate lives in two separate homes, I don’t really know how I made it this far. Sometimes, I feel her sickness creeping into my brain, like we did on those nights, in the form of my anxiety and depression, on the days when I feel like I can’t leave the house. Does the apple really fall far from the tree, especially when the tree is withered, and the apple gets knocked around and bruised by every branch it hits on the way down? Life is funny that way.

My five-year old won’t talk to grownups (or am I a good enough mom?)

~ Christi ~ 3 Comments

My son started kindergarten a few months ago. With the start of school came a strange new habit. He refuses to talk to grownups at school. Now, Gabe isn’t shy. When he was one, he made friends with parents at his big sister’s preschool, waving and calling “Hi!” down the hallway like a movie star in a fourth of July parade.  At home, he is verbal and emotionally aware. He fills me in on every detail of his day. He sings. He is a chatterbox with his friends’ parents.

Then kindergarten began and he won’t speak a word to any adult at school. When a grownup asks him a question, he freezes and his eyes glaze over. It’s disturbing bordering on frightening. And worse, nothing helps him snap out of it, not a joke, a hug, nothing.

He spent one recess period in the principal’s office, coloring, because he wouldn’t tell the recess helper where he left his sweatshirt. He had an accident a few weeks ago, his first since he was two, because he wouldn’t ask to use the bathroom. When he spilled his juice at snack time, he took his teacher by the hand and led her over to his desk to show her. Great, he’s adapting.

I won’t lie, I am concerned. I want Gabe to be respectful of adults. I don’t want him to turn into the weird kid at school. But his teacher asked me to stay positive, to make a big deal about his good behavior and not say too much about his silence. So I’m trying to stay calm. I’m no helicopter.  And I like that he’s picking up new ways to communicate. I feel a little guilty about never teaching him sign language as a baby. Man, I am such a slacker.

It’s all cool. I want him to learn to how to function in the world on his own. I know it’s not easy out there. He’s making up his own rules. And at least if he refuses to speak to adults, he’ll never end up on some therapist’s couch, complaining about how his mom never forced him to use his words.

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Fruit salad is boring

~ Christi

This is a first world problem, I know. But I’ve been taking a long hard look at my life, and if I’m honest, there it is glaring at me from the counter.

I have a special bowl, a gift from my mother-in-law. Nearly every night before dinner I fill it, or Geoff does. Oranges, grapefruit, strawberries — always strawberries, otherwise what’s the point? — grapes, blueberries, whatever I can find. I hope the fruit salad is becoming a good, healthy, tradition for the kids.

I should like the fruit salad. Sometimes I do like it, but today I don’t. The fruit salad feels excessive and that feels significant. Somehow the necessity of the fruit feels like I have something to prove. It feels like more of an obligation than a gift. Everything is right with our home, our family, and the fruit proves it. That’s why we have to eat strawberries in October even if I have to go to three grocery stores to find them.

What can I do with that realization? Don’t some families just make due with a bunch of grapes or some apple slices? What if I — gasp — make the kids get the fruit ready? What about you, what does your family do?

I think my dad was Walter White

~ Christi ~ 10 Comments

My dad was a funny guy. He knew how to tell a story like his life depended on it, my mom used to tell me. She loved how he made her laugh. If he were still alive today, he’d make a great blogger, I just know it.

I never met my dad, but I really wanted to. The funny thing is that I think that he wanted to meet me, too. I’ve been reading some letters that he wrote to my godmother. His letters remind me of a Pynchon novel. In each one, he mentions me. He had an elaborate, secret plan to raise enough money for pay for my parochial school tuition. In fact, he did send me to Catholic school until he died when I was eight.

Let me explain. My dad was an alcoholic. He wore himself down with his drinking. In one letter, he guessed that he had eight more years to live. In reality, life shorted him three years. He didn’t have much of a career, aside from his job selling jewelry at a pawn shop. I gather that he sold random things to make money, but he was smooth about it. He loved to talk to people. He understood them. I don’t think that my dad would have wanted to deal drugs, but I do think that he would have been pretty damn good at it. He knew, better than most, how people become enslaved to their thoughts, to their pasts, to their hurts. He couldn’t have cared less about material wealth, except when it came to my education – and, I assume, his alcohol.

My dad cared about my soul. He wanted me to learn more than the basics, he wanted me to have religion. He thought that Jesus could offer me what he could not: love. He thought that his last few years were best spent peddling odd items here and there, raising what he could so I would be able to learn about Jesus and the saints. He died alone.

Look, my dad had a tough life and he fought more than his fair share of battles. He had his reasons to believe that he was no good for me. Maybe he was right, maybe he was wrong. What I do know is that a hug and a trip to the zoo would have worked wonders on my soul. Maybe he could have thrown in a joke or two. It’s kind of ironic.

Oh, I’m not sure if this is important, but my dad decorated his letters with doodles of four-leaf clovers. He said that he wanted to go to Ireland, his homeland, and never come back. I’ve never been to Ireland, have you? I think I might plan a trip.

I want a tattoo

~ Christi ~ 8 Comments

My sister pierced my ears for me. I was nine and I wanted a second set of earrings to go with the eyeliner and blush that I had just begun to wear. She was 27. I sat on a stool in her kitchen, dirty dishes in the sink, an ice cube stinging my earlobes. She used a sewing needle and it hurt. Afterwards, I felt like the coolest fourth grader on earth.

Kim was always an experimenter. Two years after the piercing incident, she taught me to shave my legs in the same kitchen sink, after I begged for the entire summer. A year later, she dyed my dark hair blonde on a whim. Long into high school, she would take me out to the secondhand shops and buy me drapey blouses and tie-dyed t-shirts. She wanted to help me invent myself.

Lately, I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a tattoo. I want to design it myself, and I want it on my back so it will show when I wear a tank top or a swimsuit. But I’m mixed. Geoff doesn’t like tattoos. He thinks they’re trashy and distracting. Maybe he’s right. It’s possible that I would get the tattoo and hate it, dread the sight of it in the mirror, and never be able to wear a sleeveless top again.

I think having a tattoo will remind me of Kim. She got several tattoos, in succession, around the time that she went on drugs. It’s funny, but she was about my age at the time, in her mid-thirties. I don’t remember what her tattoos looked like, but I guess they were your basic flowers and butterflies, nothing that extreme. Yet her body art starkly coincided with her turn to the dark side. It marked her as a druggie, a petty criminal, an abuser in so many ways. Her tattoos offered visible proof of her badness, and they scared me. I was seventeen, eighteen, and symbols seemed significant.

So I stopped seeing her. And I stopped experimenting. I passed a very difficult few years, where even a haircut felt like too much commitment, and I lived in fear of marking myself in any way. Kim had taught me everything I knew, and look what happened to her.

But – how can I explain this to you? After so many years of denying it, lately I’ve been thinking about how completely awesome it was to have a sister so much older than me. She was like an aunt, a second mom who taught me how to have fun. Kim was never afraid of messing up. I mean, she should have been, but she wasn’t. She tried things just to say that she had. She was bold. Even after watching her life crash and burn around her, I love that about her.

 

Do you like to read?

~ Christi ~ 6 Comments

What’s your favorite book? I’m talking fiction here, of course. Or sci fi, fantasy, mystery – whatever you like.

I’m curious, can you describe your experience of reading it?

For me, the best stories draw me in, steal me away from reality, drench me in otherness. I’m seduced by the characters, implicated by the plot. If the writing is good enough, I can literally feel the story.

Every single time I pick up Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, I am instantly transported back to that well, dark but for noontime and full of thought. I’m walking the streets of Sapporo and spending listless days sitting on a park bench.

Lately I’ve been reading the Game of Thrones series, in which George Martin spends copious amounts of time describing glorious settings, gorgeous clothing, and delicious meals. His plots are secondary, yet his words transport me to another time and place. I can honestly say that I have inhabited the world of Westeros, even if only for the span of his novels.

I think certain books appeal to certain people, appealing to their pasts, invading their psyches in some highly personal way. We may not even realize the effect the story has on us until it is too late, until the twists and turns are permanently lodged somewhere in our memory banks. Those stories change us. They fascinate us, filling a blank, offering a clue to some mystery. They fuel us. They give us a chance to step outside our everyday reality into something new, something unexplored and unknown. They let us meet people, know individuals whom in our real lives would remain strangers.

Have you experienced this? Do you agree that fiction can be transformative, even transcendent? Have you felt that allure of becoming an audience member, of possibly learning something new about yourself? Has a story ever reintroduced you to your imagination? Tell me, what book did that for you?

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