After

I thought going to the service would make things better, ease the cold dull pain inside.  Instead, it tore open a wide giant gash and poured the burning salt of reality into the wound.  My cheeks burn as that salt oozes from my body in tears.  My soul burns as that salt drips into a stalactite dagger of anger that I didn’t know I could have, that I become all the angrier for having.  For someone whose entire life was full of love and giving and perseverance, these are the wrong emotions to have, the wrong emotions to be left with, sadness and anger.  But they are here, and they are real.  And I do not know how to make them go away without distraction and time.

When are memories not enough?  When are they ever enough?  The best memories exist to be re-lived, and when they cannot be recreated, they must be retold.  I want to tell stories; I want to hear stories.  But how, and where, and who?  I do not know in what way to begin.

The stories I remember, the ones I could tell, I cannot tell them well.  They would quickly turn into inside jokes, and she would not like that.  She was all about inclusion, always about making sure no one was left out.  She passed that trait on to her children.  And, I cannot tell you how grateful I am for that.  I am going to miss her so much, but I am very glad the best parts of her live on in them and in everyone whose lives she touched.

She gave us the gift of her light, and more importantly, she showed us how to share our own.  Mine’s hiding under a bushel of anger and sadness right now.  She wouldn’t like that, but she’d understand.  And she’d probably tell me to light that bushel on fire and let the glow burn even brighter.

Hide and Don't Seek

I missed my legs.  I have them; they’re attached to me.  But, I was feeling like I hadn’t seen them in a while and I missed them.  It’s winter—season of warm and woolly.  I’ve been wearing knit tights, long skirts—sometimes ankle-length—and NineWest wedge boots that don’t set off the metal detectors at work.  I missed my stilettos.  And my legs.  The clip clip that punctuates the air and the lines that punctuate the space.

So, I put on nude stockings and my strappy black & white stilettos—and I quickly remember why I’d stopped.

Except, I’m not sure I knew that’s why I stopped when I stopped.  But now, now I’m sure.  After the first stare—the stare I tried to move behind but the staring eyes were attached to a rotating neck and a twistable torso.  After the first car horn and rolling down window I quickly turned away from as though my back cannot hear beep-beep.  After the first attempt at a “hey there” met with a curt “hello.”  I knew.  I hated this.

This, this drives me into piles of woollies and clunky wedge boots, even as I give myself other excuses: it’s cold outside; it’s cold inside; I don’t want to take my shoes off to go into work; my favorite coworker is amused when I look ridiculous.  Plenty of excuses, legitimate reasons perhaps, but excuses all the same.  The truth is, I’m hiding.  Hiding my body from the world just as I did when I was 13.  Except then, I hid it because people didn’t like it; now I hide it because they do.

Big t-shirts, 18-sizes too big if they’ve could’ve been.  Drowning.  “Hey, goldenrail, what’s flatter, you or a board?”  A sinking log.  The Heckle brothers living up to their family name.  I just wanted to get home, to walk down the sidewalk without yells from across the street.  I just want to get home, to walk down the sidewalk without yells from across the street.  Why is this always too much to ask?

Always too much, unless I’m hiding.

I nearly started to cry, realizing how much of my life I’ve spent hiding.  I hate it.

And tomorrow, I will hide.

But I don't wanna say goodbye

It’s 1am.  I should be asleep.  But I’m not. My mind is busy, playing through memories.  Playing through memories that I don’t want to be old or forgotten, unable to be duplicated, unable to be replicated, replayed, relived.

As I’ve gotten older, I feel like death has become less real to me.  It should be the other way around, where death is more real than when I was child in a world where magic existed.  I think it’s because the people leaving are people I don’t see daily, or even regularly.  It’s easy to forget they’re not there, wherever they usually are, until you see someone or hear a voice or a laugh, and for a split second, you think it’s someone you know and love and care about.  And then you remember.  You remember it cannot be them, they are gone.  Or maybe it actually is them, in those moments, a fleeting, twinkling, dancing, laughing moment to say hello, to say “remember me?”, to say “remember me.”

I almost had one of those moments today.  On my plane.  A voice, a voice I almost knew.  But the news was still too raw to be caught in a foolish forgetful hope.  Yet that timber, that tone, while uttering some other words I didn’t hear, still said, “remember me.”  And now I lie here, awake in the dark, obeying the command, remembering.

It is that shining gleam in her eyes when her daughter was crowned Junior Miss that makes the tears flow hardest.  She was so very, very proud.  Always proud of her children, their achievements, her own children and those of us she’d welcomed in with open arms and southern hospitality.

It is her insistence, against her eleven-year old daughter’s attempts to assert “friend-girl” as a thing and three teenagers’ clear awkwardness, that it was so wonderful for her son to have his girlfriends over for dinner that brings choked-up giggles spilling from my throat, morphing into sobs and back to giggles again.  Sobs.  Giggles. Sobs.  Sobs.

It is knowing she’s cheering loudest and hardest from the stands, waving a pompom and hooting and hollering as we snap our horns down that makes me feel a warm giant hug though surrounded by thin air alone in my cold apartment. 

It is that broad, joyful smile that makes the corners of my mouth turn up to smile back even as my lip quivers and my heart crinkles into the deepest frown. 

It is plates of eggs and bacon, folding chairs on lawns, red pew cushions, and a big blue easy chair that unleash a booming, echoing, “so, what’s going on with you?” bouncing around inside my head, waiting for an answer. 

And it is realisticness compounded with a firm resolve that reminds me that within my memories of this wonderful woman lies a superhero’s cape—those who believe can do anything.  Even while acknowledging the mountains that need to be climbed along the way, the hurdles that need to be jumped, and the rivers that need to be crossed.  “Well, there may be a big mountain and eight lions on this path, but I think there’s a real possibility he can do this if he just...”  That was so often her attitude; it may be tough, but there's a way.  And of course, she always had plenty of input on what that way was, too.

It doesn’t matter that the station agent gave us a schedule and we’ve been standing on the platform watching the train come in; I’m still mad it arrived.  Mad it didn’t delay more.  Mad it was even on its way already.  It’s always too soon when people you love go, but sometimes, it really is too soon.

So. I’ll let the memories play, until life goes on enough to bring one of those twinkling moments.  And then, I will obey.  I will remember her.

Cultural Popcorn

I received my first Christmas card of the season today, from my high school World Cultures teacher.  World Cultures was one component of a course called “Humanities.”  It included, aside from World Cultures, Speech and English class as well.

Looking back at that course from my life now, I’m almost tempted to laugh.  A sad, somewhat disbelieving, somewhat awed chuckle with a hint of mirth.  She taught us so much, tried to teach us so much more.  She was herself quite cultured in the world and endeavored to share all her experiences with her students.  We were not cultured, our blue-collar town on the edge of a decaying manufacturing giant, a city with ethnic lines left from immigration patterns a hundred years ago, a place where we could tell the difference between those with German, Polish or Swedish heritage, but not between the first-generation Chinese, Vietnamese or Laotian immigrants.  A classroom full of students the majority of whom, I can say from my last high school reunion, were not destined for four-year college or moving out of the state.

It was the 1996-97 school year; she tried to teach us about the Rwandan genocide.  The facts were learned, but nothing really sank in until last year when I saw Unexplored Interior at Mosaic Theater here in D.C.  Her teaching had put a seed in my head, but not like a bean seed to sprout and grow gradually, like a popcorn seed that exploded with meaning and awe as I started to understand just what she had taken on in even trying to get us to understand something so inconceivable to our young minds even while the world was still seeking to understand how and why and what.

She brought in couscous for us try on a world food day.  I’d never heard of it before; I don’t think any of us in class had ever had it before.  I liked it but went home and ate my potatoes and veggies; for the next dozen-some years couscous remained an exotic dish to come across in the fancy instant-food section of the grocery store where very salty little just-add-water cups of soup and grain appeared.  Now, there are 6 tubs of couscous in my pantry, owing to my inability to properly manage my Amazon Subscribe and Save subscriptions, or my ability to accidentally order massive quantities of things I don’t need---however you want to view it.

She organized and chaperoned a group trip to Paris---she was also the French teacher---giving us opportunities to see places like Versailles and Monet’s garden up close.  Again, places I wouldn’t even begin to understand until much later, until some other experience of life connected dots she’d drawn on my brain.

There are probably many more seeds sitting in my head, waiting to pop, many more dots on my brain waiting for life to draw the connecting lines.

I thought of her last week, standing in Switzerland, looking at artistic Christmas cards written in French, wondering if she could have imagined this 20 years ago, imagined that I’d be standing there, in Geneva, yards from my ridiculously fancy hotel, in a suit, on official travel, staring at tiny paper birds adorning a script “Meilleurs Voeux.”  She always saw so much more in us than we could possibly see in ourselves.  She challenged us to dream beyond our classroom walls, our snowy streets, our giant lake.

She taught us about far-off places I thought I’d never see and tried to get us to see the same in the differences, the us in every them.

I am so very thankful for that, and thankful that my Christmas season has begun with a beautiful card from her and a thoughtful note that continues to emphasize the us in every them.  

The Commute pt. 2

I looked up from my book, through the glass pane.

There was a woman staring at me.

Not quite middle aged, but grown.

She looked sophisticated, yet with a roughness showing at the edges, as though someone had tried to fix a scratch in marble with 50-grit sandpaper.

She stared straight ahead.

“Where did she come from?” I wondered.

In my head, I’m still the gangly 13-year old with wild hair and a crooked half-smile.

AMAZING!!!

When Alfred and I were little, we had a couple of cassette tapes that we absolutely loved.  Somehow, Mommy seems to now hate the one that was mine yet still enjoy the one that was Alfred’s, but I digress.

One of the fabulous songs from Wendy’s Little Brown Tape, which has made it into quite a few blog posts over the years, was “Mr. Computer Man.”  Mind you, this is on a cassette tape. This song was written, at the latest, sometime in the early 80s, when few people had computers in their homes.  It’s about how super smart computers are.

Alfred being a computer man.

There’s the computer, Mr. Computer Man, who probably would have talked like Stephen Hawking if Stephen Hawking had talked like that back then, and was a robotically clipped, stern male voice.  And then there were all the super impressed children who asked him questions.

“Mr. Computer Man, how much is two plus two?”
”Four.”
“AMAZING!!!” the kids would all yell.

Mr. Computer Man puts up with the kids’ questions for awhile, and then he starts getting smart-aleky.

“Mr. Computer Man, how do you spell Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?”
“With Letters.”
“AMAZING!!!!”

And of course, in a sort of Mr. Roboto fashion, a machine cannot be truly human and we must distinguish ourselves from the machines.  Human concepts cause overload.

“Hello, Mr. Computer Man, my name is Jenny.  I have a question for you.”
”Wait, Jenny does not compute.  What is your number please?”
”Number? I don’t have a number. I’m a person.”
”A person? A person?! AMAZING!!!!”

It’s difficult to spend more than a couple of days with any combination of me, Mommy, Alfred or Munchkinhead without hearing someone say “AMAZING!!!!”  not to mention answering questions with smart-aleky responses like “a heck of a lot.”

If I ever get one of those smart phones with a personality in it, I’m totally going to say “AMAZING!!!” to it every time it answers me.

Pool Time!

Daddy loves us so much that he always made sure we had fun things to do outside.  He put up a swingset, or 3.  He built  a sandbox, or four.  And each summer, he’d put out a swimming pool for us.

When we were very little, it was a plastic, put anywhere and fill with water do-dad.  When we were older and moved into the new house, it was maintaining the in-ground swimming pool that came with the house.  That was a lot of work.  But the ones I remember most fondly were the couple of small above-ground pools he put in the backyard at the old house.

Munchkinhead and Alfred in the pool

He had to start by clearing out a perfect circle in the grass, leveling it and laying a base of sand.  - I just put all the super hard work in one sentence like it could be done in a day. – Then he’d unfold the crazy, floppy, vinyl pool side and he and Mommy would fight with whatever other parts went with it to get it into a circle shape on that flat, sandy base.  I think the only easy part was filling it with water once it was up.

I loved that part.  I loved splashing in the first rush to come out of the hose.  The water would feel so nice and warm, heated from the sun.  It would quickly turn cold and the full pool, on it’s first day open, was often quite chilly.  It would warm as the summer went on, well theoretically.  Alfred and I splashed so much, the pool needed to be topped off frequently.

We had so much fun playing in those little pools.  Daddy taught us how to make whirlpools.  How to get the water going round and round where we could lift up our feet and be carried away by the currents.  He taught us how to float and how to dive for things that sank – or at least reach down and pick them up.

My favorite part of the pool was when Daddy would come for a swim.  Or rather, a sit.  He’d take up almost the whole pool!  Stretched out across the middle like a diameter line, a barricade of Daddy down the middle.  He’d relax with a large cup of ice tea and a newspaper while Alfred and I would use him as a shield in splash fights or something to jump over.  And by “relax,” I mean sit there until it was impossible to read or sit or do anything other than get wet and go deaf from squealing girls.

We were so lucky.

Green!

When we were little girls, we rode in the car with Daddy a lot.  He took us most places we needed to go, especially to Grandma and Grandpa’s house.  Even when Mommy was going somewhere with us, too, Daddy drove.

Daddy had magical powers when he drove.  He used to show them off at the intersections on Howard Ave, particularly Whitnall and Howell.  Daddy could make the lights change.

We’d be sitting in the car at the intersection, stopped at a red light.  Daddy’d ask if we were ready to go.  He’d pause, he’d smile with this twinkle in his eye, and then he’d command “Green!”  And the light would change from red to green!  “Daddy! How’d you do that?” we’d exclaim.  Daddy had very magical powers indeed.

Eventually we realized that Daddy was just watching the lights for the cross traffic and knew how long the delay was between when the cross lights turned red and our lights would turn green.  Still, it was quite neat when Daddy would appear to make the lights change.  And it hardly hurt Daddy in our esteem when we stopped thinking of him as magical and thought of him instead as very clever.

When I sit at traffic lights with one eye on the cross-lights, waiting for the lights to change, I hear Daddy’s voice in my head, “Green!” Occasionally I say it out loud, too.  Green!

A Moment for a Birthday

Does everyone have those relatives they wish they’d gotten to know better?  I suspect that’s a yes, but maybe there are some people out there who are lucky enough to be able to say “no.”

Today was my Uncle Tom’s birthday.  I don’t know how old he would have been, but I know he would have been having a great time.  He was always in a good mood, at least always in a good mood whenever I saw him.  That could have something to do with the fact that I always saw him at fun family gatherings, holidays, birthday parties, swimming parties at Grandma and Grandpa’s. 

As a child, I think I was afraid of him.  He seemed like a huge giant to me and his big bushy beard and tattoos made him look like he’d walked right out of one of my fairy tale books.  But he was super nice beneath all the fuzz and his hearty laugh would fill the room.

When I was young, he would let me sit near him at the Sheepshead table and kibitz to me about what everyone was doing and how to play the game.  When I was older, we would toast with our glasses of Jack Daniels.  One of my strongest memories of Uncle Tom is from my going away party before I went to Zambia.  We had a very well-stocked bar that night and my book from bartending.  Among the bottles in that well-stocked bar was a tall bottle of Galliano.  “What are we supposed to do with this?”  “Make Harvey Wallbangers!”  Uncle Tom was thrilled; it’d been ages since he’d had a Harvey Wallbanger and it reminded him of when he was in the Navy.

I think about that a lot these days.  Several of my younger cousins are in the Navy now.  I wish Uncle Tom were still around so they could all share stories together, connect.

For me, I feel like we lost him just as I was getting old enough to actually know him as a person instead of just my aunt’s husband or my cousins’ dad.  Now he’s watching down on them and his granddaughters, and I bet sometimes, he’s out there on the lawn, too, laughing as the girls roll down the hill.

The Duck that Never Flew Away

It’s funny, the things that stay with us, the things we remember throughout our lives.  When I was in elementary school, sometime between 2nd and 4th grade, we made paper mache ducks in art class.

We built the ducks’ bodies on styrofoam meat trays, added toilet paper tubes for necks and a wad of newspaper at the other end for a head.  When the paper mache was dry, we painted our ducks and glued on orange construction-paper beaks.

We were Wisconsin school children, raised in the great Midwestern woodlands.  Even though we were all city children, we had seen ducks, at park ponds, at the zoo, in general Wisconsin-y things.  Woodland ducks, mallards with their deep green heads and necks and brown bodies.  We painted our mallards.  Most of us.

There was a girl in our class whose family had immigrated to the US from Laos.  She did not paint her duck like a mallard.  Her duck was a white duck with little blue feathers on the wings.  In addition to her art skills being far superior to mine, her duck was completely beautiful.  I was vey jealous.  How come she got to paint her duck to be pretty?  Why did hers get to be different?  Why did she get to be creative?

Every time I see a picture of ducks in a Heifer or World Vision catalog, I think of the girl in my class.  Those ducks look like her duck.

Someone, maybe even me in my head, muttered, “doesn’t she even know what a duck looks like?”  We were the ones who didn’t know.

 

Grandpa

I miss my grandpa.  He passed away about thirteen years ago.  My great-aunt passed a week or so ago, but I do not miss her.  She would not share enough of herself for me to know her well enough to miss her.  Instead, her passing has made me miss her brother more.

Munchkinhead and I spent hours sorting through old family photos that we had never seen.  Photos of my grandpa and great-aunt as young children, frolicking in the yard, dressed for church, in graduation gowns and Indian costumes.  Photos of their parents as a young couple, of their mother as a young girl, of their aunts and their uncles and their grandparents.  Photos of a history we could only attempt to piece together.  I wanted to hear Grandpa tell us stories about it all.

Grandma and Grandpa used to take care of me and Alfred when we were little.  Alfred and I would run amok in their big house while Grandma quietly supervised from the dining room table where a puzzle or game of solitaire was spread over the dark wood.  On special days, we would walk up to the office to visit Grandpa.

As we got older, and they got older, Grandma couldn’t care for us anymore. Grandpa would pick us up from school or take us out to lunch.  Sometimes it was in his little red Datsun, sometimes it was in his giant blue boat of a car.  I think it was an Oldsmobile.  It had a very loud blinker noise that I remember distinctly.  A sort of click-clack, click-clack.  Betty’s blinker makes the same noise.  It makes me smile; it makes me think of Grandpa. 

Grandpa would tell us stories, make animal noises and explain why he would never patronize Hardee’s but would always be loyal to McDonald’s.  I don’t remember what we talked about most of the time.  What do children talk about with adults?  But I do remember that we always had fun.  I may not remember particulars, but I remember love.  And I miss that love.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I am very lucky.  Everyday, I sit in Grandpa’s old office.  I believe a piece of him is still there, and it’s comforting to be around that.  Comforting to see his desk and his knickknacks.  Comforting to think he’s near.

Sticks to Your Ribs

When I was four, my parents put me in 4-year-old Kindergarten, half-day, with Mrs. B.  I think Mrs. B went by that because she  figured four-year-olds couldn’t pronounce her long, presumably Polish last name.  Judging by my school picture that year, I didn’t like 4-year-old Kindergarten much.  But I don’t know if that’s really the case.  Maybe my dress itched or I was having a bad day.

Even though I went every morning for an entire school year, I only really have one memory from 4-year-old Kindergarten.  I loved the paste we used for art projects.  It was delicious.

Elmer's, in a white tub with an orange, screw-on lid that had an applicator stick attached to the underside.  The paste was thick and white and had a bit of a nutty flavor.  I looked forward to art projects so I could nibble on the yummy goop.  The teacher’s assistant, however, did not share my joy of this exquisite delicacy.  She reprimanded me – and I think I even had the paste taken away from me.  Now there’s a reason to pout.

Eventually, I stopped eating paste.  We stopped using it on art projects.  We used rubber cement – stinky and awful, snotty texture, like okra – and glue – too bitter.  Now, I use double-sided Scotch tape when I stick pieces of paper together, and that doesn’t even look appetizing.  Maybe someday, I’ll have a 4-year-old of my own (or borrow Alfred’s), and we can share some paste together.

Airplane Tetherball

My sister, Alfred, and I were very creative with the games we’d play growing up.  Often, we’d make our own version of some toy we wished we had or that our school or church had.  My post about our attempts to bungee jump is one example.  We even made our own tetherball, sort of.

Our shared bedroom had a little alcove in it with a lower-than-average ceiling.  - The alcove I wrote about in Don’t Shoot, I’m Not a Real Princess! – The ceiling was low enough that if I stood on my bed in the alcove, I could touch the ceiling.  The ceiling had a light fixture on it.  A round fixture with a round, bulbous frosted glass cover.  The frosted glass cover was held into the metal fixture by 3 screws.  The screws were evenly placed around the fixture and held the frosted glass cover in place by the pressure the bottom of the screw placed on the cover’s rim.  This meant the screws were not screwed in tight such that there was space between the screw head and the fixture rim.  This is relevant, just wait.

Alfred had a toy airplane.  A plastic, Fisher Price airplane that had little round-hole seats in it for passengers and a pilot.  The plane was rather large, probably about a foot long and a foot in wingspan.  It had wheels and coming off the nose was a long yellow plastic cord so that the plane could be pulled along.

For some reason, we decided this large, heavy, plastic airplane would make a great tetherball.  So we took that yellow pull-cord and tied it to one of the screws on the light fixture.  The cord fit perfectly in that little space between the screw head and the fixture rim.

Then, Alfred stood and I kneeled on my bed and we batted the plane back and forth at each other, ducking to dodge hard swings and smacking it back at the other person.  It was all great fun.

It was all great fun until the one time we were playing with it and the round, bulbous frosted glass fixture broke.  Broken frosted glass all over my bed.  Pooey.  The airplane didn’t hit the glass.   We didn’t really know why it broke.  Even looking back, I’m not sure.  Perhaps the screw with the plane on it was twisted just enough to put too much pressure on the cover’s rim, maybe it was tweaked at an angle that pierced the glass and caused it to shatter, maybe the screw came loose and the cover fell out and hit something on the way down.

I also don’t remember getting in trouble, but I’m sure we must have.  We certainly didn’t play airplane tetherball again.

Chuckie Cat

Munchkinhead had a lot of noisy stuffed animals when she was little.  There was Barks, the large Pound Puppy who, you guessed it, barked whenever you squeezed him or made a loud noise around him.  There was Humpty Dumpty, who made a crashing noise if you launched him across the room.  There was the baby doll – I don’t even know if she had a name – who, when you hugged her giggled and said, “heh heh heh heh Momma, Momma heh heh heh heh.”  And then, then there was the Chuckie Cat.

Chuckie Cat played music and moved his little arms as if playing with an invisible ball of yarn.  Like the others, he could be set off by squeezing or by loud noises, but unlike the others, he could also be set off by motion.  There was a little sensor on his tummy.  At least, those were the three things that were supposed to set Chuckie Cat off, touch, sound and movement.  But Chuckie Cat didn’t play by those rules.  Chuckie Cat did what he wanted.

We’d all be downstairs, eating dinner or sitting in various rooms, and someone would hear music.  “What’s that?”  Chuckie Cat.  No one nearby.  No one nearby to touch him, no one nearby to make noise, no one nearby to move near him.  Chuckie Cat, playing away.

Munchkinhead would go up to room for bed.  Before she even got to the top of the stairs, she’d hear Chuckie Cat.  She’d go in her room and there he’d be, playing, moving his little arms, his plastic eyes staring right through her.  He’d stop.  She’d turn the light on and off a few times, trying to get him to play again.  Nothing.  She’d leave.  She’d be in the bathroom brushing her teeth and she’d hear the music again.  Chuckie Cat, playing, moving his little arms.

In the middle of the night, when everyone was sleeping, there’d go Chuckie Cat again, playing, moving his little arms.  “Maybe we have ghosts and his sensor can see them.”  We’d hide Chuckie Cat under baskets and boxes and blankets, attempting to block his motion sensor.  No matter, there’d go Chuckie Cat, playing, moving his little arms, wiggling the blankets. 

I’m amazed Munchkinhead was able to sleep with him in her room.  Alfred or I would have thrown him down the laundry chute, playing and moving his little arms.

Don’t Shoot, I’m not a Real Princess!

The thing I remember most about my childhood is being afraid.  I had – and have – wonderful, loving parents who did everything to keep us safe.  I had no reason to be afraid.  But, I also had a very active imagination.  I could turn anything into a terrifying situation.

I was afraid of monsters and ghosts and death, burglars and murderers and wild animals, escaped prisoners – in 5th grade I couldn’t sleep for a week because I was afraid of Jeffrey Dahmer, after he was arrested – you name it, it probably scared me.  Disney movies, closets, basements, stampeding cattle in my bedroom, the bathtub drain, things Daddy got from estate sales because they’d belonged to dead people who might be angry I had them now, streets with tar lines, swimming pools – there might be sharks! – the dark, bathrooms especially with mirrors – Blood Mary was very popular at my school in 3rd grade – my sister dying in her sleep, my parents dying in their sleep, me being murdered in my sleep by those burglars/murderers/escaped prisoners or because I was a princess, like Lincoln.

Wait, wait!  It totally makes sense in princess child logic. 

The old house, as Alfred and I still call it, had a large yellow bedroom that she and I shared most of the time we lived there.   It was bright, happy room with orange carpeting and a rainbow wallpaper border around the top.  The room had a special nook area in it where the ceiling was lower and sloped down to short walls.  This nook wasn’t yellow like the rest of the room but instead wallpapered in a fun primary color plaid/stripe type design.   There was a scalloped white, wood edging around the slanted entrance to the nook. You can see the nook and a bit of the edging off to the right in this picture of Mommy and Alfred.

At some point, we didn’t use the beds as bunkbeds.  My bed was in the nook, head against the back wall, feet sticking out towards the entrance.  It made me feel like a princess, being in this special area with scallops coming down from a point above my bed, with the ceiling sloping down from a point above my bed, it was like the drapery around the princesses’ beds in fairytale movies.  I was a princess!  And I was terrified.

Princesses are the daughters of Kings and Queens.  But in America, we don’t have Kings and Queens, we have presidents.  And being President is dangerous because people may want to kill you, like they did Lincoln.  Lincoln was shot and died in his bed because he was President.  I’m like a princess now and a president is the closest thing we have to that, so I might get shot in my bed, too.

Never mind that Lincoln got shot in a theater and then carried to the White House and died in a bed because that’s where they put him.  I didn’t know any of that.  Never mind that Lincoln was shot for more reasons than just that he was President.  Never mind that a princess is really nothing like a president and never mind that I wasn’t a real princess.  In my young mind, the logic was solid, and I was scared.

I was very glad when Munchkinhead moved into the yellow room and I moved into the nook-less blue room.  Then I only had a giant closet to be afraid of.

The Road to being Stuck in Your Room is Paved with Good Intentions

It was June, the summer after 6th grade.  My sisters and I had some sort of fake slumber party on the hide-a-bed.  I don’t remember the details.  The middle of the day on Saturday, Mommy and Daddy had gone out for a walk.

My sisters and I wanted to make Daddy something for Father’s Day but we needed supplies.  There was a JoAnn’s not too far away; Alfred and I rode our bikes there frequently, just over a mile.  Munchkinhead was too          Us, a few months later
little to  ride that far; she was only about 3 years old.  We decided we’d walk.

We cleaned up our slumber party.  Sort of.  Figuring we’d want to play again later, instead of folding the hide-a-bed back into the couch, we made the bed up and tucked all our stuffed animals into it. 

We cleaned anything else we’d been playing with.  We left a message for Mommy and Daddy in the living room, checked that all the doors were locked, took our house key and set off for the store, pulling Munchkinhead in the little red wagon.  We took an umbrella with us in case it rained while we were away.

We were pleased with ourselves, feeling we had remembered to do everything we were supposed to do.  We were having fun together and excited about making something nice for Daddy.  How were we supposed to know Mommy and Daddy hadn’t taken a house key with them?

They couldn’t get in.  They couldn’t get our message.  They didn’t know where we were.  And, it had started raining.  Apparently, these circumstances make parents freak out.

Mommy and Daddy found us with the little red wagon, next to the McDonald’s, heading out of the Plaza parking lot.

I don’t remember what Daddy got for Father’s Day that year.  It couldn’t have been good because I remember we spent a lot of time looking at puffy paint supplies.  I know what I got though.  Grounded.  For being irresponsible by not anticipating the facts I didn’t know.  And for making my sisters go with me.  They didn’t get in trouble at all.  “They’re too young to know better.”  Harumph.  And yes, 20 years later I am still bitter.

But I’ll tell you this much, as a grown-up, I’m pretty darn good at anticipating a whole lot of “what-if” scenarios and preparing for most of them.

Guardrail, 10. Alfred, 0.

“Here, I’ll test it for you, ok?”  I leaned the guardrail against the wall.   My little sister, Alfred, and I were the kinds of kids who turned everything into a jungle gym, even our grandfather.  Our bunk beds  made a much better jungle gym without that pesky safety guardrail on the top bunk.

--  The beds had been my father’s growing up and so were quite sturdy.  The guardrail was a long piece of solid wood with thick grooves for sliding onto the head- and footboards. 

  When Alfred and I wanted to play on the bunk beds, I’d crawl up onto the top bunk or stand on the side-rail of the bottom bunk and carefully, and slowly, lift the heavy guardrail off the bed.  It was unwieldy and difficult to move, being so heavy and long.  I’d prop it against the bedroom wall, where it would lean, towering over us, twice the height of Alfred.

And then it would fall on Alfred.  No matter how carefully I leaned it.  Now matter the angle I put it at.  No matter what, it would topple over onto Alfred the minute she stepped near it.  I’d place  it on the wall and walk back and forth in front of it, testing it, seeing if any floor boards would creak and knock it off balance.  I’d stand in front of and jump up and down.  I’d go across the room and run past the guardrail.  It would stand still, perfectly still against the bright yellow wall.  --

With trepidation, Alfred took one step, two steps, nearing the guardrail.  She just had to pass it to get to the bunk beds.  Three steps.  Almost directly in front of it.  Four ste—CRASH!  The guardrail came tumbling down on her.  Poor Alfred; she couldn’t win.

My friend, Crystal, on the bunk beds without the guardrail.

Munchkinhead on the bunk beds with the guardrail up.

 

 

The only sliver of wall where I could lean the guardrail.  Facing this spot, the bunk beds are at 8 o’clock.

 

 

Picture up top: Alfred standing where the guardrail would fall, a little older than when it would fall on her.

It’s a Bird, It’s a Squirrel, It’s Goldenrail in a Tree!

“Ba Nchimunya, mulaputa,” it was a common refrain on my family’s compound, about as common as my mother saying, “get out of that tree, you have a dress on.”  But I love climbing trees, and so puta-ing* or not, up I go.

Heels or bare footed, dress or trousers, those branches call my name.  Long arms and long legs make for great climbing.  Don’t worry, I have pantaloons to wear when climbing trees in dresses.

When I was growing up, we had an excellent climbing tree in front of the house, on the strip between the sidewalk and the street.  Lightning hit one of the lower branches one year, and Daddy had to remove the branch.  That made the tree a little harder to climb, but I still managed.  Luckily, I was tall enough by then to reach other branches.

In Zambia, there was an excellent mulberry tree right outside my first hut.  My climbing that tree led to the mulaputa accusations.  It’s branches were small but sturdy.  And climbing it meant access to mulberries that the children hadn’t been able to get.  

The family I stayed with in Nigeria had a beautiful lemon tree directly outside their kitchen window.  I startled the maid one day by suddenly peeking in the second-story window from the tree.  The family’s young daughters decided I had a great idea in getting into the tree and learned to climb it themselves.

Africa seems to be fully of great climbing trees.  At a party for some of the girls’ friends, I found the perfect photographing spot high in the branches of a nearby tree.

That particular climb was extra great because I had on one of my favorite pairs of shoes for climbing.   5” wedges with a very flat ball and toe area.  The small wedge was great for, well, wedging into branch joints, and the flat front flexed with my foot and allowed for good traction on the tree bark.

I’ve climbed trees in other heels, too.  On my first trip to Mr. Trizzle’s home, I attended one of his friend’s birthday parties.  It was in a park with a great climbing tree.  So up I went.  One of the party guests was so impressed that I was in a tree in heels, he kept taking pictures.  Sadly, I don’t have any of his pictures.  But there are plenty of other great climbing trees in the Bay Area, like this beauty at Cordornices Park in Berkeley.  It provides a great view of the basketball courts.

 

Maybe someday I’ll stop climbing trees, but I doubt it’ll be anytime soon.

*kuputa roughly translates as to be playing with something you’re not supposed to be playing with

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

“But if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need,” continue Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ lyrics.   And sometimes, it takes a long time before you realize you got what you needed instead of what you wanted.

When I was in high school, I had a huge crush on this guy.  I’m pretty sure everyone knew it, too.  He was tall and cute and our intellectual sparring rivaled Elizabeth and Darcy.  I wanted to date him so badly, that when he started dating someone else, I joined the track team just to stop myself from being depressed.  I never liked running.

It wasn’t until fairly recently that I realized although what I wanted (and our family and friends expected) for most of my teen years was to date him, what I needed was to not date him.  I didn’t get what I wanted, but I sure as heck got what I needed.

He was, and still is, one of my closest friends.  We’ve been on lots of adventures together and through a lot of growing pains in the 20+ years we’ve known each other.  He’s a great guy.  He also has a very strong will, stubborn temperament and red-headed Aries fury. 

As a young girl, had I gotten my wish of being in a relationship with him, he would have totally controlled me.  Not because he’s a bad person or anything like that, but because I would have let him. 

Most teenagers are still figuring themselves out, and I was as naive and impressionable as any of them.  My world would have revolved around him, and he would have let it.  It’s just the way our personalities were then.   I would have missed out on a lot of my own growth.

On the simplest level, there would be no varsity letter on my jacket.  More deeply, if I ever did find my current ability to stand firm against peer pressure, it would have taken a lot longer.  Most importantly, I may have wound up losing him as a best friend.

Looking back, I’m very glad things turned out the way they did.  He has a wonderful wife who is absolutely adorable and a very good match for him all around.  And we still have our friendship, with a ton of great memories.  The current reality is well worth all those teenage tears.  That makes me smile.  It’s also very helpful when dealing with current tears.  I may not always be getting what I want, but I’m likely getting what I need.

Bungee Fun, or Not-So-Fun

There was a comic in the paper the other week that made me chuckle quite hard; one of those ones that’s super funny because you see your own experiences in it.  It was from Baby Blues by Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott.  Mom and Dad are in their bedroom trying to figure out why their pajama and sweatpants  are missing the elastic from around the waist.  Hammie and Zoe, their son and daughter, are in the back yard.  Hammie is high atop a ladder with a string of elastic tied around his waist, wearing a football helmet and saying “I’ve always wanted to bungee jump.”

We tried that once, too.  Only instead of stealing the elastic out of our parents clothes – which as someone who sews, I can tell you would be a lot more trouble than it’s worth – we got a bunch of bungee cords from the garage.  We climbed onto the top of the large monkey bars in the back yard and hooked one of the bungee  cords’ metal ends through a hole for the swing’s S hook.  Then I held onto the other end and jumped.

Monkey bars and S hooks for swings.

It didn’t work.  The bungee cord hook came out of the S hook hole.  *Thud*  I hit the sand hard. 

Luckily, the swing set wasn’t that high, only about 8 feet or so, and we fell and jumped off it so often that it didn’t hurt.  Well, it hurt, falling 8 feet hurts, but we didn’t get injured.

Alfred jumping from the swing and missing the monkey bar grab

Next, we tried making bungee swings by putting bungee cords into the swing S-hook holes and hooking the other end of the bungee cord into the swing’s chain links.  That sort of worked but wasn’t nearly as much fun as it seemed it ought to be.  In the end, we decided the swing set was far more fun without bungee cords.  Now I only use them for moving furniture.