Lay of the Land
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

The writing won’t let me go on good nights. Not every night is that way. I was up after 1 last night. I started in about midnight, hoping my thumbs could put together something beautiful on my BlackBerry. I felt I owed my handheld a little literary brilliance since I occasionally use it type out my thoughts in a way that would send my former writing instructors into therapy (What r u waiting 4?) Granted, I usually got through the trouble of spelling everything out, but on the rare instance that I butcher my thoughts with symbols that rival Prince album liner notes, those few instances are egregious enough to be made up. Before closing my eyes for the night, I came up with an idea to map my childhood, to literally chart the people and places where I grew up but without using a legend or latitude and longitude lines. Instead, I’d use words – describe the settings and told about the people the way they were then. Below is what I came up with in about 45 minutes. Largely unedited, you can see here what a decent first draft looks like (I hope.) Mozart’s first drafts were near perfection. This is certainly not close to that. (More notes follow this piece.)

On the west side, the houses hadn’t given in to their sighs of mid-summer. Mostly everyone’s house was well kept and the ones that weren’t, even their families mowed the lawns under the sagging eaves and drug out ladders with cob-webbed rungs to add fresh paint. The kids played in the streets making makeshift ramps from phone books and leftover boards, setting fireworks off at the edges of driveways in July, and in August, sitting on basketballs under shady overhangs just staring at the baskets and never breaking the heat more than two or three times to take a shot. One lawn was perfectly manicured – poisoned evergreen bluegrass, thick and Catholic lawn mowed and raked and the lawn mower and driveway washed extensively afterward by the holy man of sorts, the caretaker, Mr. Crandski, who’d waste gallons rinsing the dirty blade and clearing pavement. He’d smoke when he was finished with the yard and had the hose in hand, post coital almost, or maybe like he would after a big meal, the high-pitch and thudding all the same spray sound wash, wash, washing down the drive. We kids used to love him smoke and wash his driveway. His sons were good boys, older than us by just enough grade levels to separate our groups. They’d end up in the loudest, filthiest fucking arguments you’d ever heard in the middle of the day, the boys walking out in the summer sun on the clean driveway, yelling in adolescent voices right into their dad’s big sound, almost a roar. Crandski was a big man, with big lungs and good sized pants. His sons would walk off on him after they’d drawn the neighbors to the windows.

These fights were among the more interesting events of the summer. The others generally happened in the same place, down the street and up a hill, past the trees and chain-link fence to an old graveyard. The headstones were perfectly looped by a gravel road, and some more headstones were outside the circle, on the edges. The loop made a perfect race track for kids on bicycles, about 1 and 8 of a mile around. The races always started at the far end, the northeast corner. Someone would yell go, usually someone in the race and looking for a head start. Smooshed socks and worn shoes would kick the pedals down and after the first long, slow pushes, the feet would move faster, the pedals lighter, around the first corner and full speed down the straightaway. The first corner was the toughest. Some riders would lose it there, take it too hard. Their expressions would change. Smiles would turn to “oh shit” circles, like guppies, then the bike frames would waver, then a scream an actual oh shit, and that rider would go careening off into spaces between headstones.

The others still in the race never looked back. They kept on, pedaling fast, the third curve on a glide, then and all out break for the finish, the long strides suddenly back, the bicycle chains tearing through the teeth like loud coats being unzipped. Zuh-oom. Zuh-oom. The sound coming after every step. Zuh-oom. And there were almost always two bikes neck and neck. There was never a lone winner. But anyone could win there. I won a few times, but I don’t remember it. My friends did, too, and I would guess they don’t remember either. I was always the thoughtful one, who didn’t want to let go of the moment, even then, so it’s surprising I’d forget who won the race. I don’t know, maybe I didn’t win.

There was a place on the cemetery’s edge, a clearing overhung with 60-foot trees, where the older boys would take girls. We’d hide there on occasion, too, when it was clear, and throw rocks at the mailman who’d stop at the box through the trees at the bottom of the hill. I remember one girl, older, she lived a street over which might as well been a foreign country, which is why don’t remember her name, she was gorgeous, a perfect blonde with a tan and preppy clothes and the teasy feathered hair – could have been pretty in any era – she went up the hill with a boy her age, a plain boy like us, nothing special about him at all, and they laid down in the tall weeds in the shimmering light let into the bottom of the fishbowl by the tree arms, and nobody bothered them there. They were safe, it was private. No one wanted to spoil it for a boy like us. There was hope on the west side. We could be like this boy in the hope summer. We could dream and imagine, we could make the houses better than what they were and the neighbors into celebrities. No one made us into anything.

Funny, this might be one of the most personal additions I’ve made to this blog … but personal in a different way. I was actually hoping to get away from the extremely personal nature of what I’ve been writing lately, and by looking a little deeper, this did the trick. Sometimes I pretend I am participating in a junior college creative writing course and the instructor has written some opening words or a concept on the dry erase board – in this case, “Write about the place you grew using words as your map”. As the room fills with marker smell, I roll over the cover to a beaten spiral notebook and write in a flourish for 10 or more protected minutes (unprotected minutes must be the on-deadline words written for publication, exposed, like these, with thigh bruises and knobby, skin-scraped knees). Is there any time more sincere than the 10 or so minutes spent writing in class? Everyone has their head down and the most amateur writer can come up with something brilliant – the plain English that everyone is striving for – the perfect description of something, not poetry but exactly how it is. Beginners can do this because they aren’t trying to impress anyone. They are just trying to write from memory.
My junior year at Park University, a soccer player who had taken creative writing as an elective wrote a genuine piece about where he grew up during a morning free-writing exercise. He wrote a passage about a beach in the Bahamas. He described the long palm trees like straws stuck in the sand, the wind lifting up their arms so the sun could shine on the abandoned, imperceptible seashells on the slanted shoreline. He wrote something actually beautiful, though, that he lived, that wasn’t derived from a Corona commercial, a magazine ad or my own limited experience on beaches. Living it is the key. I’ve done more living than writing the last few weeks. But you can’t do one without the other. I’m starting to think that’s why I chose this profession. The living comes easy. Your work is only as interesting as you live, so it’s best in the few moments you have to write about it, you’ve done something worthwhile. I had a fun childhood. This piece was the beginning of a roadmap to the square mile where I once knew every unlevel sidewalk block, cut through and tree that could be climbed. Those were the best days of my life.

Tags: Childhood