Archive for the ‘Piece of Mind’ Category
Bicycle Ann
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011
Her bicycle is the place where she is the happiest. Like other little girls her age, she has discovered online computer games where she can design fashions, create a new identity for herself – including the choice of hair color, eye color, body type, career interests, places of habitation – and the Disney Channel where girls not much older than her act out real life dilemmas that she’ll soon be facing, like the important choices of boyfriends, how to deal with pets who’ve lived long lives but now face the end, and parents who are separated. These girls on television are known both for their roles and who they are as people, and like other little girls my daughter knows both their actual and stage names, and yet somehow is able to forget the pay these teenagers make and what real pressures they must face with competitive parents, and agents, and blossoming careers that take care of everyone.
Last year, she was given a bicycle as the weather was fading from deep fall toward dead winter – not her first, but one much larger than the one on which she’d first learned to ride. I wheeled it into my apartment for her and left it parked on the kitchen tile, blocking the way through the back door. The pink chassis, the white tires, the streamers from the hand grips on the handle bars, the reflectors in the spokes and under the seat all clean and not caked from the terrain that would be ridden, and a pocket-book type contraption on the front crossbar, not quite a basket but more like a purse that says “Slumber Party” in bursting-fat pink writing. Around the letters are lady bugs, as plump as the scrawl, big and colorful, with no connection whatsoever to the concept of having friends sleep over. But they are pictured nonetheless. (more…)
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This is a story I found in some old e-mail tonight (sometimes I write notes or paragraphs and email them to myself … and forget that I ever sent them.) I wrote this last summer and I can’t help but feeling that I do my best work when I’m traveling. I touched this up a bit and I might revisit it at some point, when it’s ready to be something bigger than it is.
The breakfast table sits at a window with no breeze. Nothing of the Pacific winds pass through the courtyard because the space is so small that the ground level apartments are blocked by outdoor stairs and walkways to the upper units. The table is only a couple feet wide and deep enough for one person’s legs, and it fills about a third of the kitchen. Outside the back door, the painters have set up scaffolding that keeps the door from opening more than eight inches, and by 8 a.m. – sometimes 7 – the workers are out climbing on the rattling metal and bending boards.
I sit at this table with her when I stay on the weekends. I only stay when I can afford the plane flights. We sit and drink coffee and look out onto the landscaping beneath her window. When the work crews are out, we close the blinds and smile at each other when a voice outside is particularly loud or the Spanish comes so fast it’s hard to believe there is someone on the end who can understand what’s been said. (more…)
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The Last Year
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010
The last year so I have been writing in spiral-bound notebooks. I went back to the beginning, where I was three years ago before my writing got lonely at the dining room table, writing before the house filled with light. The children were asleep upstairs, the dogs in their places in the living room, and I was married at the time.
Then my writing voice wanted its own space and I started writing for local magazines. I took my work and my private writing sessions public with this blog and invited people to look. I invited you to read over my shoulder while I wrote down stories, character sketches, poems (some disguised to hide identities), interviews, thoughts, feelings, and that was fine when it was all about the words, not the happenings. When some changes came to my personal life, I didn’t feel as though this blog was serving its purpose: people were reading for the details, not the sincerity in them. I was comfortable enough yet to handle the questions that came when inadvertently welcomed people into my life, so I took the blog down.
So much can change in three years, and now it’s just me half the time, me and the kids the other half, and a mostly quiet apartment in a plain apartment complex. But there is also more time to write, to read, and to study. I’ve gone back to the beginning, where I was at 8 or 10, when I’d write in my secret journals and push them up into the dust under the bed so no one would see the stories. I was more awake to the world, then.
In the last year, I’ve been gathering material. I’ve been living life. Sun-lit tables in little trendy Spanish restaurants (not me), exploring the ocean and tide pools (me), back to my roots and a midnight drive through the old neighborhood that isn’t safe to walk at that hour. I’m back, this time with a water-wrinkled notebook and and internet connection to relay my new words. I expect you will find the writing better, eventually. And, I expect you to find someone different here.
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The cave is a 30-minute swim from a small enclosed beach in the La Jolla Cove. The salt water is thick with big leaves that come undone from long seaweed strings and they bob up ended all the way out to the cave – the stems protruding as though they were snorkelers who needed and were breathing air. In the open water, orange-golden fish swim just beyond the oar strokes from kayakers and the other swimmers’ kicking feet, the fishes’ colors so brilliant in the cloudiness, their features blur.
“Oh … are you not going to look at the fish?” Mary asked me, the disappointment showing in her face but even more evident in her voice.
We were 50 feet out from the beach, just beyond the arching line formed by the recreational swimmers with their back to the sea. I was using all my concentration on staying afloat and familiarizing myself with the water. I hadn’t yet begun to focus on the leisurely aspects to the swim, and I doubted I’d need the goggles she handed me. (more…)
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Tags: Ocean; La Jolla
Roswell
Tuesday, April 27th, 2010
The porch and backyard lights were lit in the same places as though the familiar neighbors who lived on the street 20 years ago were still there, not dead or dispersed, the properties not taken over by their children or new proprietors. The lights though bright gave off a small glow compared to the sulking black night, warding off the shadows and all the impending doom that can befall a suburban neighborhood. The hills follow the houses up an incline so that each one has dense trees overshadowing the rooftops, creeping over the angles above the attics. The dirt is closer to the backs of some homes than others, and those closest burn the night lamps brightest. Whatever animals there were in these hills, aside from the birds and owls, the squirrels and opossums, fled along time ago when the railroad used to run through the hillside. Not far from the Missouri River, the train cars carried coal to the power plants and the dense steel locomotive engines burned their own coal, and dumped it here so that when we played as kids, we’d unearth rusted rail ties, the tops still flat and the edges rough from where they’d been hammered into the ground. The dirt was rich with burned coal, orange-burned at the edges as though it was still fiery, while other pieces were black and pocked, like lost moons that had fallen unnoticed into our backyard Eden.
One summer, when my ability to remember was staring to come to me, I went out to the backyard and ran up the hillside, unexplained, into the tangled tree branches and slopes, and there was a small steep, narrow gulley near the main trails’ start where I laid in the rivulets. The morning sun shone through the bare spots in the shimmering leaves. I looked up. Throughout the branches, a net that had been woven, and I remember it being thorny, connecting the little spot together like the underside to an umbrella, and I felt safe there. I always did, on the hill as we cleverly named it. I laid there and looked up at the thorny-netted rooftop, free here from my parents, in a place that never intrigued my older brother, beyond the backyards and the points of care from the neighbors, and between my neighborhood and the farm a long way behind us and next to it, a flower nursery that used train cars as working stations and places to store flowers. At one time, I knew every inch of it, every fallen tree branch, every bird’s nest.
I drove up the street, the night less ominous and instead beginning to nestle the street and houses and trees together and yet still be haunting. When I was a boy, the city went gradually into decay, and in the span of three years went from a livable neighborhood where you could sit out on the porch with neighbors deep into the early hours to a place where you weren’t sure what was going to step out of the night. On a Wednesday, close to 1 a.m., no one was out. The night was warm, and the bar I’d just left kept the door open, but it had gotten cool enough that it should have been closed. I was cold as I steered by my old house, and stared at the two cars in the driveway and the one out front. We never had more than one car in the drive, usually none. The house looked the same. I looked at my old bedroom window where I used to sleep in a small, square room with carpet with alternating red, blue and yellow strands tightly woven together so that the carpet looked like fire. The walls were sunshine yellow, and then when I was in high school, I wanted it all gray. Gray walls, gray carpet, no color. I remember lying in bed afraid that the arms of the plants in the flowerbed that tapped my bedroom window were actually kidnappers, and I slept for a year or more with a pillow partially covering my head and the sheets pulled up to my chin.
On a night like this, I would have been scared. The plants would have come rapping on the window screen for me, and I would have forgotten how much I loved about the old house until I’d gotten older, and come back to see how colorless my life has become.
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