Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Graf # 7

Things.

I kept a notebook for quite a number of years filled with secrets. Most of which were my own but some were the secrets of friends and lovers told to me in the strictest of confidences. I kept this notebook during my twenties and early thirties when I was trying to work out the world of Amy. All the anger of youth was stored in those pages. All the angst of self-betrayals and self made chaos and disaster. All of my most secret sins were confessed to the blue lines.

I filled the margins with quotes that I felt were applicable and that helped me in some way or another to see a different side of a situation that felt hopeless. There wasn’t a time that I wrote in that notebook that my eyes didn’t burn with tears or that my writing wasn’t slanted with the obvious mark of anger and disappointment.

I didn’t waste a page sweating the small stuff. I didn’t put a self-pitying word in it. It was all fact and written as though I were making a statement to some authority that would judge me. It was as unemotional as a court document read back by the court reporter. Just the facts, ma’am.

I don’t know that when I started the notebook I had any grandiose plan. My thought has always been “better out than in”. Writing gives me a chance to not only say things to myself but to have them read back to me years later in that same voice but with different ears. There’s a perspective comes with that.

I carried that notebook around with me for a long time. I’d jot down whatever I remembered when I remembered it, or sometimes as it happened. After my first son was born the notebook was moved to the desk. I had diapers and wipes and bottles and such. There was no room for a notebook and who had time to write that sort of thing anyway with a baby? Eventually I packed it away somewhere and forgot about it.

The summer before my 39th birthday my son and I moved to an apartment in downtown Bangor. I was sitting on the floor unpacking my “things” when I came across that notebook. I hadn’t looked at it for years. I sat right there and read every single word on every single page. And then I read them again. I thought about each and every sin for as long as I wanted. Hours passed. I thought about that girl writing in the dark of her fear (and that’s what all that was). She thought she was so tough, that one, and she was, in her way. I decided to keep that notebook out as a reminder of something. I wasn’t sure just what but it needed to be left out.

For a couple of days as I was still moving around busily making our place home I would see the notebook and think about what I wanted to do with it. I didn’t want those sins anymore. I didn’t want their record; I didn’t want their accusations. I didn’t need their atonement. I did however want to keep their lessons. How?

My son and I drove out to the lake one day. We played in the water and splashed and built stick figure castles in the hot sand. We decided on the spur of the moment to spend the night. Of course the tent was in the trunk. The tent is always in the trunk along with a few other essentials. I grabbed the tent and Aska’s bag and the notebook fell out on the sand beside me. Aska said he needed paper and put it in his bag. I finished unloading the things, built a nice fire, had more sandwiches and fruit for supper, went for a walk with Aska, got him settled into his tent for the night and went out with the notebook to sit by the fire.

As I sat there, I read every page, tore it out and put it in the fire. I can’t remember a time that I felt so free and alive. It was just a me thing, a my spirit kind of thing but it was a powerful moment in my life. When I was done all those hours later I crawled into the tent beside Aska and slept the baby’s sleep.

The next day as we were cleaning up to go I found the wire spiral of the notebook. I twisted it all up to put it in the trash and as I was just about to drop it into the bag I stopped and pulled it out.

That wire spiral sits on a shelf now like a knick-knack. It’s reminded me when I’ve forgotten that sins are not our definition. Our fallacies and our faults make us human and beautiful. The details don’t matter. What matters is that the lessons become so much a part of us as to be as unremarkable as the grays in our hair.

I’m ready to throw away even the spiral. I am the reminder. My life and my choices are the proof of the lessons. I don’t need a wire to know what I see every morning in my mirror.

Besides, that’s one less “thing” to carry around.

Monday, January 30, 2006

Graf #6

Unique

I’m an excellent cook when I’m motivated. I love poetry, philosophy and physics. I don’t like peanut butter and chocolate together but I like them just fine on their own. I drive a 1990 VW Vanagon with a Pink Floyd sticker in the window. I’ve moved more times than I could honestly count. I’m addicted to music and candles. I have a fierce temper but I only rarely lose it. (Maybe 3 times in my life.) In high school I skipped more days than I went. I get a high from a math problem that takes an hour to work out and fills more than a page. Lipstick makes me giggle. I have big feet but delicate hands. I worry about my mothering. I’m a little afraid of heights but I make myself get through it. I don’t like confrontation but when I choose a battle, I fight to win. I’m not afraid of the woods at night but a horror flick will have me up all night. I love peas but hate pea soup. I have a favorite coffee cup and I bum when it’s dirty in the morning. I prefer kids to most adults but I’m glad when they go home with their mothers. I’d eat seafood and salad every night if I could. My favorite books are my dictionaries. My sister is my best friend. My home is my sanctuary. I have more plants than I should. I rarely make my bed and I dip my toast in my oatmeal.

Friday, January 27, 2006

Prompt Week #2

Self Description - Third Person

She’s on the highway. Another state falls away in the rearview. The same song plays over and over filling the car and spilling out into the quiet of the summer twilight. It’s a song about trains and waiting and glass clocks that mark the passing of both. Every beat is matched by the gentle sway of her head and her fingers' tap on the wheel. She’s singing loudly. Her eyes close against the words occasionally holding them there for the reinforcement of her own feelings. She believes still in soul mates and love and in the concoction of these ideas in her reality. It is a time of hope and possibility not yet surrendered. It’s another time – a time once, but no longer. The possibilities faded like the states in her rearview. Somewhere out on that highway the song still plays but she’s stopped swaying to its beat.

Sunday, January 22, 2006

Graf #3

Blog Hunt Graf

I’ll admit it – I’ve become a blog addict. Rarely when I come in to work on my blog do I leave before I click on the little button in the right corner taking me to the next blog. I skip some, the ones about sports or music or books. Not that I’m not interested, but it isn’t what I come to read.

Last night while specifically researching blogs for this graf, I came upon one that is strictly a site for confessions. They have each of the seven sins categorized so that you can confess under the correct heading. That must be important to some. For others, there’s the miscellaneous catch all (like a junk drawer) when you’re just not sure where your sin fits.

I stayed at that site for a long time peering into the lives of others. It felt a lot like pornography in some respects. You see so much of a person in their confessions. Most were about cheating or wondering if partners were cheating. There were quite a few from lovers betrayed confessing their desire to inflict the same sort of pain on their ex partners.

I read for a while. I followed a few links to the personality profiles of the few that added their links (but signed their posts anonymously). I wondered about my fascination with looking into someone’s life and wondered too about their having left the blinds opened for me to do just that. I thought about my blog and what it says of me between all of those lines. Decided that it didn’t matter, their reasons or my reflection. What’s interesting to me is that I can move my mouse around in my own house, find a window to some corner of the world and see someone peering back at me.

Graf #4

Inventory’s Inventory

I took a drive today and as I drove I thought about this inventory. Although I did an inventory of the top of my desk it didn’t interest me so I doubted seriously that I could convincingly entice the reader in by my own description of what it says of me. I needed something more, something a little beyond what an inventory might imply.

I thought about pulling out my medicine bag and reviewing its contents but it hasn’t been opened for years. There’s something not quite right about using it for that purpose. No, I needed something different. I needed something that would piece together an image for both the reader and myself.

I wondered after who I am now. Would an inventory of my dreams and aspirations work towards opening me to the assignment? What about a personal inventory of the me that I am or the me that was left behind? Both of those seem too personal to be of any real use. The ideas were discarded.

I toyed with pulling the car over (safely) and doing an inventory of wherever I happened to be but frankly it was chilly outside and I was toasty warm in my car listening to some really good tunes.

I then considered an inventory of my car but who wants to hear about the car seats and the crayons? Every mother need only look in her own car for an inventory of mine.

Okay, then I said to myself. How about doing an inventory of the people in my life or the places? The problem with both of those ideas is that next graf, the descriptive third person view of the person that made that list. You’d have to know the people or the places to understand the me behind them.

I wasn’t doing well. Everything I came up with seemed either too trite or too far-fetched. I figured that when I got home I’d sit down and somehow figure my way through the assignment. Obviously, it hasn’t helped except as a diversion.

So now what? Shall I simply post the inventory (*yawn) of my big oak desk? Frankly the desk was just organized and would tell you only what I wanted you to see. That doesn’t feel very honest.

Here’s what I’ve decided. This is the inventory of my tossed out ideas for an inventory. This is an inventory of me in the middle of the writing process (at least the student writing process). This is the inventory of a day of thought about an inventory.

This feels the most honest of them yet.

Graf #5

Inventory’s Graf

Well there’s some nerve. She just turned that assignment around to suit her own self. Does she give too little weight to what the assignment asks of her or too much? What of the medicine bag? The fact that she has one indicates that if not spiritual, there is a spiritual nature to her. If only I could know what tunes she was listening to and the purpose of her drive maybe I could tell a little more about who she is. She’s a mother. That says a little of her but nothing towards her character. What she says of the people in her life- not being able to know her without knowing them again gives a glimpse but hardly enough to discern any true feelings that she has of them or her choice of them. And finally, does her decision to use the process of writing the inventory as an inventory speak of a creative but almost derisive attitude towards authority? I suppose that only the giver of the assignment can speak towards that end. For my money the girl is trouble. Best keep your distance or go in expecting nothing but prepared for anything.

Friday, January 20, 2006

Freestyle Week #2

I took Hagen into school with me today. It isn’t the first time. He’s a regular there now. Walks right in and acts as though he owns the place. He introduced Thomas the Train to one of my instructors, talked to two students that are in my class, drank water from every water fountain, counted the locks and named their colors. He jumped from red tile to red tile on the floor carefully avoiding the white ones and checked out the acoustics in each of the hallways (sorry about that to those of you that were studying). He annoyed the math and science department (they’re such a serious lot), entertained at the bookstore and caused backups in the parking lot. He ran and jumped and played and amused himself in every manner possible as we walked the halls. I watched the looks on people’s faces as we passed them. Most had a kind word for him or at least a smile but he caught a couple of dirty looks during his more rambunctious moments. By the time we left we were both exhausted. He fell asleep in the van on the way home.

I watch my older son Aska in his refined (ahem) teenaged years moving through his environment with a cool haughty air about him. He wouldn’t dream of running and playing anymore and looks at me in a disgusted way when I suggest it, which I do quite frequently. Sometimes I even make him.

The three of us went for a walk this afternoon. Hagen was running and playing in front of Aska and I yelling for us to run with him. “It’s fun!” he kept saying. Aska and I were talking about his role in this evening’s play and how lucky that the inclement weather of Wednesday postponed the run until Friday so that I could see it. We talked of algebra and imaginary numbers and suddenly, with no warning Aska punched my arm and cried “You’re it!” and ran away. We chased each other, the three of us for the rest of our “walk”, running and playing and remembering, each of us in our way what it was like to be a child.

Graf #2

Worst Teacher

“Can anyone tell Amy what she did wrong besides showing up this morning?” I stood at the board looking at the answer I had given. I thought that it looked right and, red-faced was trying to search out the mistake before anyone else could find it. The room was silent. Apparently they couldn’t find the error or were as embarrassed for me as I was for myself by Mrs. Connelly’s obvious disdain for my very existence. The problem was correct. All of the numbers were in the right place and the equal sign was surrounded by figures that made it a true statement.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with it, Mrs. Connelly.”

“That’s because you don’t have the sense of a mule.”

I walked out of her class. I didn’t bother to pick up my books or my bag. All I wanted was out.

Mrs. Connelly was my tenth grade Algebra II instructor for six weeks. She was 5’2” with a “distrust of tall women”. Those were her words, several times a day, at least every time I stood up. If, God forbid, I wore the boots with the 2-inch heels of which I was so fond the remarks were more caustic and the “tsks” never ending.

Things were different then, I suppose. I wouldn’t tolerate an instructor treating my sons in that manner but then it was an acceptable means of teaching. Perhaps a precursor to the “tough love” that was so popular in the late 80’s.

When I left her classroom that day I swore with my whole being that I wouldn’t go back. I did. I didn’t have a choice. I was given detention for 3 days and she smirked at me for the remaining days that I was there. Thankfully, at least in this case, we moved before she had the opportunity to humiliate me again in her class and before I could unleash the scorpion temper that I was known for in those days.

She’s dead now to be sure. I estimated her age to be somewhere in the 6.24 x 1022 range and that was in the late 70’s. I consider myself to be a fairly reasonable, forgiving person but there’s a part of me that hopes that in some little way, before her death she got to feel the sting of humiliation that she was so fond of doling out.

Monday, January 16, 2006

Graf Week #1

Hand Assignment

They don't even look like mine anymore except the scar on the right ring finger. I put my hand through a pane of glass when I was 8. I got tired of the yelling and there just felt nothing other to do but to put my hand through glass to make it stop. It worked. The focus changed. I never bit my nails. My habit is picking at the cuticles. You can always tell how stressed I am by the number of Band-Aids adorning my hands. Only once in my life was there ten. Three is about as high as I let it go these days. My skin is older. There are maps on my hands now. The places that I've been are hieroglyphically displayed for any one that cares to read. Boulder left a scar from the odd shaped woodstove with the door that didn't open all of the way. There's a permanent mark left by the IV of the last surgery. She was in her first week of putting them in and was obviously very nervous. I let her do it anyway and just smiled as she dug around for the vein. Bless her heart; she cried more than I did. The fingers are long. I played the flute because someone said when I was young that I had a flutist's fingers. I haven't played for years but I'll bet these fingers still remember. I have that forever bump on the middle finger of my right hand. My fifth grade teacher told me that I'd be a writer because I had one. I remember that as I walked away from her desk I was thinking that I already was a writer. I said at the beginning of the graf that they don't look like mine anymore. What I realize by its end is that they look exactly like my life.

Freestyle Week #1

The house is so dark. It's so rarely like this anymore. The only light comes from the computer monitor and the candle that is ever flickering in whatever room I happen to be occupying. What to do with this time is my only thought. It's minutes, only minutes before the bustle of evening rushes through the door bringing stories of adventures out there and the flurry of activity that always preceeds the return to work and school. Clothes have to be laid out. Homework checked and baths. But for now, this time belongs to me and now to you as well.

Another semester begins. In between the "housekeeping" comes the rush of excitement. One step closer. My very first official physics class. Assignments for writing. (don't tell Mr. Goldfine but I'd do this whether I was paying for it or not).

I like the way that school feels on me. I like the look in my eyes revealing a larger purpose...a deeper meaning.

I was talking with someone this weekend who is going into his last semester before graduation. He couldn't wait for it to be over and to begin his "real life". Having lived that "real life" for much of my 42 years I smiled at the thought of being in his position years from now. Walking up to receive my doctorate and beginning a career in something that I've been passionately drawn to for so long I wonder if I will feel the same. What point will bring that feeling of "oh I just can't wait for this to be over"? Will it be in the middle of my last physics class? Will it come wrapped and mired in the 5th math course that I have to take? At what point will I be glad that this is over?

Here comes the bustle. No time left to think about it. Barely time to end this before it sweeps over me pushing out my thoughts and connecting to theirs.

Thanks for the freestyle. It's nice to have the outlet and have it be required.

Until the next moment...

Prompt Reaction Week #1

A long intake of breath…

Time to get to it. Always so much that needs to be done and so little time for the doing. Long gone are the days of casual surrender to whatever mood struck my fancy. Days of turning pages and absentmindedly watching the fire’s flames have been replaced by need, theirs, not mine. Time was a cigarette and cups of coffee were enough to make a morning stroll into the afternoon. These days’ mornings last the few moments while the coffee perks before the kids and the man get up from their beds. I treasure those moments of quiet and fill them with soft thoughts and gentle ease.

I’ve thought a lot recently about days of yesteryear. I remember well sitting for hours with my friends by a fire or at the beach. Books were gathered between us, our talk was of things bigger and “more important”. I remember being able to close my eyes in the middle of the day for a nice long nap or just turning off the noise and letting my thoughts flutter about as they would. Peace these days comes only in the shower or in the brief span in the car between home and Doug’s.

A long intake of breath. A quick smile at my own luck in having a life so full now that a nap feels like a gift. Time to get to it. Supper needs to be cooked while the pink of sunset plays on the light dusting of snow outside my window. What luck. Here come the boys with their shouts and laughter to fill the quiet left in the wake of my long intake of breath.