“Imperfections are not inadequacies; they are reminders that we’re all in this together.” ― Brené Brown
White blossoms appear like smiles all along the street. After watching the news, I could use them. However, I am told there are too many tree blossoms. Invasive, like the flu. The Bradford Pear. It promises no fruit.
And I see sweetness anyway. For now. If only genuine beauty could overwhelm the land. I consider what I can give. What white blossoms can I share? What kind of pure white will invade despair and destroy it?
I sigh. Too lofty an ambition. Yet, a friend or two, or three, could use encouragement. Heck, a pleasant word at the grocery store can be a seed. A thank you has its unknown power.
While blossoms appear like smiles all along the street. For now. May I realize that imperfect is the norm in this continuing now.
“Children learn more from what you are, than what you teach.” –W.E.B. Du Bois
The Night of Delirium
A high fever told me I needed to rearrange the drawers in my dresser because the outside colors were wrong. My dresser was ordinary beige. Then, I needed to bring the dresser to school. The fever also decided I had to take the number one million and make it tangible before second-period math the next day. My darkened room gave me no answers; I went downstairs to ask my dad what to do.
I churned my arms as I spoke. One, two, three. Seventy six, seventy seven…lost my place, start over…My mother’s footsteps magnified the rhythm of my count.
“The aspirin. It should be in this cabinet,” she said. “No, this closet. Found it.”
“What is it?” I asked. Enough times to prove planet Earth and I had little in common.
“Aspirin. You are burning up. Listen to me for once.”
“I have to take the numbers one to a million and bring them to school tomorrow,” I repeated. My behavior set Mom into a panic.
Dad saved the moment and spoke to my delirium. “I’m good at math and at fixing things. Tell you what. I will take care of your dresser and put that million together for you. All you need to do is take the aspirin.”
I descended from planet-dangerously-high-temperature madness long enough to swallow the tablets. Then my father carried me to bed. Strangely, I remembered the insanity of the night the next morning. My fever had gone down enough for me to enter the real world again. Even if school wasn’t a possibility until after a round of antibiotics.
The year was 1963. I was a junior in high school. I could never thank my dad enough for that moment. I still do.
Meet your child where they are. That’s what I learned. It may take some guts and imagination.
Thanks again, Dad. I’m waving upstairs. Beyond the ceiling and roof. “If you didn’t make it to the top of the clouds, no one else has a chance.”
“Hey! This-thing-that-tells-us-who-called, went blank,” I call to my husband. “I unplugged it and plugged it back in and it didn’t work.”
“Your dad put that up for us years ago. I’m surprised it lasted this long.”
“Then I guess it’s lived a good life.”
And I realize I’ve been thinking about my father a lot lately. When I was in high school I had a high fever and he carried me to bed. As an adult, I wrote a song for him and he avoided listening to it. And I never understood why. I remember him in the nursing home. I watched him say goodbye to this world and hello to my mother. She was his world. How could someone so primary to my existence be such an enigma?
The entry below I published in 2011. It fits again today in a peculiar way.
Peace to all–as you are now and as you are in your memories.
Friday, December 16, 2011
Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself. ( E.E. Cummings)
Last year, during this season, the unheated hall upstairs was filled with painted glass and I was afraid it would freeze and crack. It didn’t. But some of the lovely, easy permanent paint-on-glass pens I bought were not so permanent. My paint didn’t make it through washing. I suspect that love isn’t that fragile; it doesn’t dissolve in the dishwasher.
This year I painted only a few items. One project may or may not get completed, late. It looked like I struggled through the job. My design went down the kitchen drain–too much on my mind this year. It showed. I would love to be the kind of person who can remain distant from the hurts of the people who are important in my life. I don’t succeed at that ploy. Perhaps if I did, I would become someone else.
I watched my father struggle.
“You don’t have to visit if you have a lot to do,” he said a day or so before he went to the hospital, and I was glad that I told him that I would always find time to see him. First things need to come first.
Now, buying becomes secondary, a lost opportunity. No credit cards. I am allergic to carrying a lot of cash. Gift-giving will be light this year. Maybe that baking I hoped to do really will happen. If not, it is all okay. Somehow. Perhaps, in this last week the final opportunities will appear. If not, Christmas lights don’t have to be strung in neat primary colors or brilliant white. They can appear when the right word or person appears at the right time. Right now, I attend to my father.
“Not the one who does not have an umbrella, but the one who does not like the rain, gets wet most under the rain!” (Mehmet Murat ildan)
PEACE ROSE
Jess stepped into the empty house. She owned it now. Or maybe it owned her. She didn’t know yet. Too many payments ahead. The moving truck carrying the bulk of what was left of her life had not yet arrived. She complained out loud about how she had ended up in this run-down neighborhood.
Sure, she had been living alone for years in a so-so two-family house on a mediocre side street, but her landlord had sold the building and the new owner wanted both floors. Jess wondered if this unmarried son who needed it was on drugs and would drop that second floor and his family into despair. She didn’t know and would never find out because she would now live across the street from a tattoo parlor and a thrift shop with uneven white misspelled lettering in the window: “uzed items, will close soon, cheaper than cheap.” Cheap was all she could afford.
At least her so-called new house had indoor plumbing. The front yard could have fit inside a child’s sandbox. The once-white siding sat on a smog-dirtied, heavily traveled state route. “I deserve better,” she muttered. The floorboards squeaked as she moved into the hallway; they mocked her.
The previous owners hadn’t left one curtain or blind on a window. At least a huge oak tree in the center of the yard saved her from an open view into the living room.
Her realtor had grown less friendly by the time the bank had closed on the buy. “The previous owners have re-glazed the tub, re-finished the floors, and done every inspection you requested. You got a fantastic price. There is no need or time for further changes.”
Jess had suggested that someone remove the jungle from the backyard. She didn’t know plants but thought poison ivy vines could easily hide in the tangled mass that climbed the back wall.
The moving van pulled up outside. On-time. Jess had the feeling that even after her furniture and rugs were settled, she could still expect some form of emptiness. Jess would sleep on the couch until her new bed arrived. A double, occupied by a single person—possibly indefinitely.
Even her eighteen-year-old daughter, Maura, had chosen to live with dear old Dad—a year after the divorce. Jess rarely saw Maura after that. Conversations with her daughter tended to be clipped and superficial.
“Refrigerator is here, ” a man, with a belly that mimicked the fifth month of pregnancy, announced.
“Around the corner,” Jess answered in the same curt tone. He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in weeks. She was certain her mother would comment later. Her mother had met the movers at Jess’s second-floor flat. Jess wanted to be ready at her new place before the truck arrived. She tried to sigh out memories of her original home: a family with a mommy, daddy, and a girl who grew up to be a senior in high school…without her.
The sight of the man’s belly triggered another memory. She wouldn’t let it rise to consciousness. Besides, the thought seemed out of context, bizarre. Why should I remember that now?
The man’s partner arrived. Slender, but smelling just as nasty. “Where do you want the rug?”
“Front room. Where else?”
“Suit yourself. By the way, some guy just dropped off a girl, said she was your daughter. She’s standing outside.”
As if Les couldn’t come inside before he left. I doubt his legs are broken.
She stuck her head out the door. “In here, Maura!”
“Be right there.” But Maura waved with enthusiasm in another direction, toward the yard next door. She had the kind of personality that made friends with a pit bull trained to fight. However, Jess couldn’t see where Maura’s wave was aimed, and she certainly couldn’t hear a bark.
Before Jess could go to the door to check out what was going on, the slender man said, “We got a couch, chairs, and a slew of boxes. So where do you want them?”
Jess thought she knew exactly how everything should be positioned, but the furniture didn’t fit. After they were rearranged, Maura sauntered into the house.
“So, who were you talking to?” Jess asked.
“The girl next door. Cousin of a friend.”
“Small world.” Jess’s tone could just as easily have said, pass the potatoes. Her voice was flatter than the wallboard.
“So, what do you want me to do first, Mom?”
“You can help me unload the boxes I have in the car.”
“As long as I don’t have to unpack your undies,” she whispered toward her mother’s ear. “By the way, Dad gave me some money to take you out for lunch. Later.”
“How kind of him,” Jess said allowing the sarcasm to rise as if it were water boiling in a too-small pan.
“Well, he’s trying.”
“Trying as a verb or adjective?”
“Mom, let’s just get you settled. I can’t make things right between you and Dad.”
“There’s more to it than you know.”
Maura leaned a box against the car and dropped her head against it. “Uh, too much information.”
“I would never talk about that!”
The moving men finished sooner than Jess expected. Efficient? Maybe, but she hated to think about how much this was costing her. She let out a long sigh. At least she could be glad the stink was out of her house.
“Dad said he could pick me up at six…or I could stay longer, if…”
“If what?”
Maura turned away as she opened a box marked kitchen items. “Mom, this gets weird. Do you know that? I hate feeling like everything I say could start an argument. That’s why I decided to live with Dad. A long time ago. But I’ve been thinking a lot lately. Remembering.”
Jess pulled a plastic silverware divider from the box. “Good stuff or bad? Or should I ask?”
“Great stuff. I had chicken pox the day our class was going to the science center. I’d been looking forward to that day for weeks. And you sat with me. All day. Played games. Read my favorite books. Then you traded off a day of work and just the two of us went. Your feet hurt by the time we got home from the center.
“Another time this kid in the neighborhood was going to give me a turtle, the biggest thing I had ever seen in my life. I thought it was part dinosaur. He told me to feed it some lettuce with my bare hands. You had just come out to work in the garden and heard him. Boy, did you ever give him the what-for. You got the broom, stood a distance away, and then took it and gently directed the handle toward the turtle’s mouth. It went for that broom as if that handle were course one at a turtle banquet.”
“The snapping turtle. Yeah. That kid was a mean hot wire. But that was a long time ago. How old were you anyway?”
“I don’t know. Before fourth grade anyway. Then something happened—you weren’t my best friend anymore.”
“Sometimes life throws you a wrench.” Jess opened another box. “But I’m sorry it turned out that way. Really.”
“Sorry. That’s not something you say often.”
“And don’t expect to hear it too many more times.”
The doorbell rang. It sounded like clapping seals. “Now there is something I didn’t think about checking before I bought this house,” Jess said.
“Maybe you can get a bell that plays ‘I hear you knocking, but…’”
“Who the heck could be at the door?” Jess asked.
“I’ve got an idea, so I’ll get it.”
Maura opened the door. A young girl of about thirteen and a tall man with dark hair stood outside. “Yup, I was right!” Maura said.
The man carried a box. “I noticed you didn’t have any curtains. These will work temporarily. At least they are clean. And my daughter and I brought you a housewarming gift. It’s on the front porch. I’d be glad to plant it for you, just show me where you would like it to go.”
“A gift?” Jess stood confused.
The girl opened her mouth, but the sound wasn’t clear. She and Maura spoke to one another using sign language.
“Come on out to the porch, Mom, let’s look.”
“Oh my, a rose bush. Yellow, moving toward a dark pink around the edges. Lovely. Please thank your wife for me, too.”
“My wife died two years ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Jess said. Sorry, twice on the same day. She looked at the back of her hands as if they suddenly interested her. She realized she really was sorry. The sudden turn toward softness took her off guard, a guard she had maintained for a very long time.
“If you would like I could clear out those weeds in the back. They’ve been there so long I’d bet the roots are oak tree deep.”
The girl signed to Maura again. “She’s saying these are Peace roses. I’m thinking we could use their vibes.”
“Well, I’ve got to go to a meeting,” the man said. “But here’s my card with my phone number. Call if you need anything. I understand my daughter and yours already know one another.”
“Yes, yes. Thank you,” Jess said.
“I’m not really sure what happened there,” she told Maura after they left. “Since when did you learn sign language?”
“I took it as my foreign language choice. I volunteer at a camp for kids with special needs, too. I liked it so much that I’ve decided I’m going into special ed. Eventually anyway.”
Jess touched one of the flowers with the tip of her finger. She’d missed her daughter’s life. Because she had chosen to live with her dad? Or was there more to it than that? “Hope I can keep this thing blooming. The thing is…” She sank onto the front step.
“Mom, what’s wrong?”
“I’ve been trying so hard to forget. But then one of the movers had this out-front belly. Then you say you want to go into special ed.”
“Forget what?”
“You know I lost a baby when you were ten, a little boy. But you don’t know the rest of the story. I never told you. The doctor told me I was lucky because the baby’s intestines were outside his body. His esophagus didn’t connect to his stomach. And he had problems inside his brain. The hospital staff tried to console me by saying life would have been horrible.”
“He had Trisomy-18?”
“You know what that is?”
“Yeah. I did a report on it for a science class last semester.”
“But I didn’t care. He would have been my baby boy. Dad agreed with the doctor. He said I was overreacting. We should start over. But then, within months, he decided one child was enough. So, I stopped talking about it. I stopped a lot of things. And everything around me turned ugly.”
Maura sat next to her mother but said nothing for a few minutes. “I’m spending the night. Got a toothbrush in my purse. All I need is a floor and a pillow. Maybe we can plant the Peace Rose tomorrow. Then again, we could ask a mighty tall-dark-and-handsome neighbor to do it for us. I mean, I know you can’t un-plant ugly memories overnight, but I could deal with a stepfather who likes rose bushes and makes my mama happy… Someday anyway.”
Jess swung and intentionally missed her daughter. She smiled for the first time in a very long while.
Never dull your shine for somebody else. – Tyra Banks.
REMORA MELANIE
I’m a remora, the sucker fish. No one else calls me that, but I cling to a shark named Kurt. Ever since I came to Ohio from Connecticut to live with my dad, I’ve held onto Kurt Remora-style. He pays attention to me, and I tell him the difference between a verb and an adverb, a fraction and a minus sign. I protect him from being in secondary school forever. He’s at least a year older than I am, but he hasn’t reached the depth of seventh-grade subjects yet.
He forgets the difference between your and you’re between the first and second cigarette. I can smell the smoke on his jacket hours later. Sometimes, on other days, I detect something else, too. A sweeter smoke. Amazing that I can notice anything over the scent of the same shirt he’s worn for a week. Red plaid, frayed collar.
“Want to try a joint?” he asks me as we sit on swings in a park across from the school, about twenty minutes before we need to be in our first class. “Whatever mood you are in, it will make it bigger and better.”
Since I usually feel like the inside of a clogged garbage disposal, an enhanced downer doesn’t appeal to me.
“No thanks. Some other time.”
Then he tells me about playing basketball with his uncle last week. “He’s really cool. Kind of funny that we get along. He’s nothing like what you’d expect in a cop.” He says cop with the same tone he would use to talk about poop.
I don’t ask him about it. We just glide along. There’s a dead bird under a tree two feet from us. I don’t want to talk about that and hope he doesn’t want to either, so I tell him about how my mom and I know spaghetti is done when you throw it against the wall and it sticks.
He doesn’t ask if my parents live together, and I don’t ask for details about anything in his life either.
Remora and sharks don’t bond; they coexist. Commensalism.
“Let’s skip school today,” he says. “Play arcade games at the mall.”
“Sure.”
I can fake my excuse by calling Dad. He’d never know where I was anyway. No big deal from my end. He’ll call the office and say I have a virus.
I imagine my father showing up and seeing me with Kurt—for the shock value. My dad’s out of town more often than he is home, although he would never let Mom have me right now. Not until she’s in remission again.
Who says I’m not responsible enough to stay to help her? I’ve been thirteen for three months now. I can cook any microwave dinner available. Then, I think about how I’m a remora—smart enough to know what it is, a fish that rides a bigger fish—not savvy enough to be a warmer-blooded creature.
Of course, warm-blooded creatures bleed bright red. I don’t want to think about the day Mom passed out and sliced her head. I called 911. Minutes before it happened, I’d argued that I wanted to get an expensive new phone. I couldn’t accept the fact Mom was less than the perfect giver she’d always been—making up for Dad’s distance. She got better, somewhat, but something called Multiple Sclerosis never goes away completely, especially not in the later stages.I’ve been told I have a high IQ. Unfortunately, I have a low tolerance for reality.
The next day Kurt and I show up two minutes before being marked officially late. I missed a quiz and then rush through it between Science and lunch. Kurt texts me as I’m getting ready for my last class. Meet me by the back fence after school.
I don’t get a chance to answer. I’m called to the office. Apparently, the guidance counselor wants to see me.
“You seem withdrawn,” she says facing the closed door.
An odd thing to say to a slab of wood.
“I’m okay.
“Okay as in you don’t feel like talking?”
“My grades are fine. Just not perfect.”
Her office has beige, almost colorless walls, with pictures on her desk of kids and a golden Labrador retriever.
She pats my hand, just once. I want to trust her. I want to ask if she knows anything about the remora of the West Indies. The Aborigines sang about them. I want to explain how sometimes you just need to latch onto the side of a shark and ride along, but the question sounds non-sequitur.
“Well, Mel, I called you in because you have a brilliant mind, incredible intellectual talent. Your grades have slipped steadily. I’d advise you to stay away from Kurt Blester. His parents could buy the school. But… well, I’m not sure how to say this. It’s just that you could be headed into more trouble than you want. I’m not judging Kurt. I’m saying he’s confused right now. Confusion won’t lead you toward the kind of life and career you were born to find. Do you understand the difference?”
I nod, even though I don’t understand at all.
My name is Melanie, not Mel, and if the secret about Kurt’s family’s financial status isn’t safe, my thoughts aren’t either. Or does she think I already know everything about Kurt? Because I’m with him so much. I change the subject and tell her I can’t decide which school to consider for ninth grade because I heard criticism about the math programs at both local choices. She doesn’t bring up Kurt again until I get up to leave.
“Right.” I wave goodbye without letting her see more than the side of my face. I can’t hold a controlled façade longer than it takes to get into the hallway.
“Thanks,” I call back as an afterthought, not that I follow her reasoning. I want closure to this conversation.
I have scarcely joined the crowd between classes when the fire alarm sounds.
“This is not a drill,” a voice from the loudspeaker announces.
Kurt is already outside. I won’t follow him—not so soon after meeting with the counselor. I do watch every move he makes. His hands clutch the outside of his pockets and then let go, in spasmodic motions, as if something inside the cloth could bite him. He shivers, although the air is warm.
The firemen and police arrive.
Kurt squeezes his eyes shut. He appears to be mouthing, no…no…no.
I think about what the counselor said about Kurt’s family. Are his parents like ghosts in his life, untouchable and unavailable? Or is it worse? I think about how I wanted my dad to see me with him, for shock value. Have Kurt and I been riding, or drowning together?
One of the firemen comes to a loudspeaker. “The cause of the fire has been determined. A lit cigarette in a trash can in the boys’ restroom.” He continues to talk, giving the usual lecture. The principal lets us know when we can go back into the building. Sooner than originally expected.
Kurt glances around so quickly that his head almost turns as far as an owl’s.
Don’t run. Please. Just don’t. They’ll know you did it.
My thoughts don’t reach Kurt. He bolts but doesn’t get far. He must have been running without looking where he was going. He lands directly in the arms of a police officer.
A gasp comes out of me like a small, popped bubble.
I move closer.
“Uncle Mike!” Kurt cries.
The policeman reaches into Kurt’s pockets and pulls out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. “Tell me the truth and I will do everything I can to help you.”
Kurt, the shark, stops swimming. He follows his uncle.
I wonder what happens to remoras who remain still. And alone.
Then the counselor comes up next to me and puts her hand on my shoulder.
I try to remember what it was like being with my mom. Before I became a fish.
“When infants aren’t held, they can become sick, even die. It’s universally accepted that children need love, but at what age are people supposed to stop needing it? We never do. We need love in order to live happily, as much as we need oxygen in order to live at all.” Marianne Williamso
A toddler wanders wherever his curiosity leads
while Mommy and older siblings caution him.
Greens, blues, and moving objects call
to his curiosity. Come.
This moment is alive
even if he doesn’t know language
or time. Grandma’s wrinkles intrigue him. He sees intricate gold on her wrist,
not the hours held inside her memory.
To Grandma this moment seems
as limited as the space Mommy
permits her son to roam.
Toddler snuggles against
Grandma’s cheek. She knows
that all moments face limits.
Yet love endures.
Any fool can know. The point is to understand. –Albert Einstein
Strawberry Pie Quatern
Your handwriting in purple ink
resurrects you ten years after
your death when a recipe card
falls from a forgotten cookbook.
Tart, sweet, secrets sneak through curves of
your handwriting. In purple ink,
with bold color, you claim knowledge,
if only how to bake a pie.
Mom, you were taught to stay hidden
in the background of a man’s world.
Your handwriting in purple ink
trembles to be more than pie dough.
I apologize years later
for asking so little of you.
I long to see your soul shared through
your handwriting in purple ink.
If you're to choose to paint your life today...What will it be? Remember, you're the artist, not the canvas. (Val Uchendu)Color. A celebration because I see.Can I discover what is insideeach treeflower, blade of grass, bird on a branch?
Darkness and light, or a lack of privilege?
I close my eyes and picture the scene outside my window, every leaf, every bendin the branches, dark and light greensdepending upon the favor of the sun.Color, simple yet complex.Complex, yet asking no morethan to exist.
The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected. (Robert Frost)At dawn and duskthe sun touches the horizonwith the same elegance.I celebrate evening.Not because nightdissolves the sky's brilliance.But because dayif livedbrightens midnight.
One more time. I will try one more time. Copy and paste no longer works. Highlighted text no longer becomes bold. No, I do not plan to turn my computer into electrical compost. I may need to change web servers after all these years of sharing. Sure, I will accept help. However, please remember that my age is the ancient symbol for the eternal, or completion, the number 7, listed twice.
I celebrate this moment and pray that the goblin inside the webpage can be removed without ceremony. I don’t want to frighten the neighbors. In the meantime, I am adding my quote for the day at the end. And hope this isn’t a final moment, at least in this forum.
Experience is the hardest kind of teacher. It gives you the test first and the lesson afterward. Oscar Wilde.
terrypetersen 