Way Back Machine « Fridaville

Archive for ‘Way Back Machine’

The Encyclopedia Man

October 8th, 2010

I’ve been reliving so many sad memories this week that I couldn’t help smiling when The Encyclopedia Salesman popped up in my mournful trek backwards in time. It was around 1970 and my husband had decided he didn’t want to be married anymore, leaving me at 27 with three kids (2, 3 and 5), tiny child support and zero self confidence in a city where I didn’t have any family or many friends. I only had a high school education at that time, so to make extra money, I babysat for other people’s kids. And there were plenty around. We lived in a row of rental townhouses, which were crawling with mothers who needed babysitters so they could go to work. I was too broke and beaten down by my marriage to be able to afford my own babysitter or go out, so there I was, no prospects for the future (except I was no longer being beaten and brow-beaten by my ex) and no experience of the dating world or the world at all. I had spent my marriage pregnant and passive, so being on my own was intoxicating and frightening. One summer night at dinner time, there was a knock on the front door, and there he stood–The Encyclopedia Man. Young and good-looking in a sleazy, Urban Cowboy, I-could-have-a-disease kind of way and of course, a smooth talker. He was working for one of those companies that hauled young people from town to town and dropped them off in neighborhoods to fan out and sell magazines or encyclopedias, picking them up at the end of the night and moving on. Even though I told him I was broke and there was no chance in hell of selling me anything, he talked his way into the apartment, ate dinner with us, waited til the kids went to bed and then seduced me on the living room floor. My first sexual experience after my husband left. And it was good, simply because it was illicit, crazy and impersonal. I refused to tell him my name, but he got my number off the front of the wall phone and used to call me occasionally “Person-to-Person to person.” I never saw him again, never wanted to and freaked out about it so much later that I got tested for VD…the only thing you had to worry about in those days. It was still the leftover age of love, I was a hippie and it never occurred to me that he might kill me, cut me or beat me up. So young and dumb. I have a lot of regrets and sorrow about relationships with men that I cared about, but none at all about The Encyclopedia Salesman. He made me feel beautiful, sexy and primal after being knocked around and put down by my husband for 10 years. It was one time in my life that I followed my instincts without worrying about the outcome or fantasizing about true love or making it into more than it was. It was only later, when I started falling in love with the men I slept with, that Trouble knocked on my door, stayed for dinner and refused to leave until nothing was left but bones.

Posted in Way Back Machine | 8 Comments »

Begin with Red

September 4th, 2010

The cushy lining of the uterus. The angry cry at being pulled loose. My favorite story of Little Red Riding Hood and the shivery feeling I get when the wolf steps into her path. Hell fire where I will probably end up unless I’m saved, which I am a dozen times at the altar of my youth by a trumpet-playing preacher. Twelve years old and yearning to be swept off my feet by Jesus. Until I meet David when I’m 13 and wearing a red dress and red shoes the first day of high school and he is leaning, lanky and broad-shouldered, against the wall checking out the new girls in the freshman class. “Hi, Red,” he says. And that’s how it begins.

Posted in love, Way Back Machine | 3 Comments »

Goodnight Moon

August 20th, 2010

I read today that the moon is shrinking and that Barnes & Noble is up for sale. I know there are more urgent problems in the world (like Sarah Palin’s shrinking IQ and expanding ego being in charge of our future), but I just cannot handle a diminished moon and no shelves of books to lose myself in on a Sunday afternoon. We’ve already lost handwritten letters, and printing out emails for posterity doesn’t have the same feel without the eccentric handwriting, different textures of paper, colorful stamps. I have a cigar box with a bundle of pale blue airmail love letters written by two different men from two different countries in a long-ago summer, and they still exude a bit of moonlight and wantonness when I come across them and open the lid. So I don’t want to think of the moon forever waning or sexting replacing love letters or books becoming museum exhibits — even though I’m the most gadget-crazy person I know. I still need the mystery of love and mysteries published on paper and a moon so full and ripe it renders me speechless with awe.

Posted in Inspiration, Way Back Machine | 3 Comments »

Sign of Times Past

April 9th, 2010

I love this pedestrian crossing sign near my house because it reminds me of the illustrations in the reading books we used to have in grade school, back when men went to work and women wore stockings and sensible pumps to shop for dinner. The man on this sign is carrying a briefcase and escorting a woman who is carrying a purse. I guess you could also interpret this as a mom wearing a pantsuit and escorting her daughter, who’s carrying a lunchbox, but that’s kind of a stretch. I prefer to see a couple crossing the street to get a house loan from Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life at the Bailey Building and Loan Association. Or maybe Robert Young and Jane Wyatt going to pick up Kitten from school or get Bud out of a jam in Father Knows Best. Every time I pass it, I feel like I’ve time-traveled back to a simpler, sweeter time, a fantasy of the paperdoll functional family I never had.

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I’m an April Fool

April 1st, 2010

Fourteen years ago today, I was in a hospital room waiting to be operated on for some unidentified foreign object in my lung. I woke up packed in ice with a chest tube and pump to be told by my surgeon that based on the biopsy they’d done during the operation, I had cancer. Bad news, right? But wait! After a few days of doped-up terror, an in-depth biopsy came back showing I did indeed have cancer but it was a “benign” kind called a carcenoid tumor. No treatment required except follow-up xrays–yay! For years, though, I lived with a kind of survivor guilt, always waiting for the other shoe to drop. Why was I so fortunate while other people I knew hadn’t been? After all, I hadn’t done anything to deserve that close that second chance. Recently I’ve come to accept that there’s simply no answer to why the Universe played an April Fool’s joke on me and let me go with just a lucky horseshoe scar stretching around my ribs and under my breast. A reminder not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but instead to whisper “thank you” in its ear.

Posted in Namaste, Way Back Machine | 1 Comment »

Empty Chairs

January 6th, 2010

When I go back home, the people and places I knew are like the heat shimmers on an August road. Something you think you can touch it until you get right up on it and then it vanishes. My mother, my husband, my son, all my grandparents, my sweet cousin, all my greataunts and greatuncles. My first love. My mother and father in law. All my aunts but one. The second cousins, the spinsters and distant branches of family whose names I can’t even remember. Best friends. Boyfriends who broke my heart. Teachers. The old brick school building in the center of town. The erasers I cleaned after class. The sounds of basketball games in the gym that no longer exists. The wrist corsages and back seats. The smell of Sunday dinner and reading the funny papers in front of the fire at my grandmother’s house. Summer afternoon shadows.

Posted in Home, Way Back Machine | 1 Comment »

My Happy Hour

September 7th, 2009

When I had lung surgery in 1996, I went right back to work after a couple of weeks even though though my body felt invaded and wounded. My one-woman office and apartment were both located on a little SC barrier island, and at lunch I would take a chair down to the beach and sit in the sun. My body needed to be kneaded by the sun and lathered with light. Between then and now, I’ve been back to the beach so many times, even after I moved off the island–spending Sunday afternoons with my friends, going skinny dipping with my book club, taking off my clothes and lying in the moonlight late at night. Recently, though, I’ve put the beach in my back pocket, shoved it to the back of the closet along with my old bathing suits, ignored the mute message of the beach chairs beached against the picket fence in my suburban yard. But this weekend, I packed a tiny bag with the NY Times crossword puzzle, a magazine, a zip lock with my iPhone and spf Fresh lip balm, a journal and pen, a lime green beach chair and drove to the beach. The first day I only stayed an hour, didn’t read, just sat and stared at the water. Maybe I had a tiny inkling of a panic attack at so little to do, nothing needed of me, only just sitting still with my thoughts. Today, I packed the same tiny bag, Vogue Living Australia, a bottle of water and headed back to Station 19, my favorite path to the water. Again, I sat, did nothing, opened my arms to embrace Vitamin D. Scraps of words torn from nearby conversations blew past me on the breeze. Voices were drowsy–bodies were slack, lazy, sun swollen.. I closed my eyes and saw a yellow bowl against my eyelids and wished I could make one on a wheel. A bird sang on the edge of my consciousness. A giant gray container ship rose over the horizon, massive as the heavy rain clouds coming in off the ocean. The scouring sand blew down the beach, reminding us that Tuesday comes. But until then, Unlabor Day is now and now and now.

Posted in Senses, Way Back Machine | 2 Comments »

The Way Back Machine

July 28th, 2009

My grandparents lived in a tenant house in rural Kentucky on a bare hill that was brutally, baking hot in summer. No A/C of course, maybe a fan (although I don’t remember one) and a tiny kitchen that almost shimmered from the heat coming off the cooking stove. Here’s my poor mother, suffering through an August due date, several years away from my father (standing next to her) leaving her for another woman. My beloved grandmother is sitting down for a change, but usually she was toiling like a mule — cooking and serving food to family and hired hands, teaching Sunday School, weeding and watering her huge vegetable garden, wrestling ewes ready to lamb, killing chickens, putting her shoulder to a metaphorical plow every single morning of her life. My dear cousin sitting on my grandmother’s lap would eventually die too young from breast cancer that might have been cured if she hadn’t ignored it. My grandfather in his hat with his Indian-ancestor cheekbones and aloof surliness. All of us caught by the camera in the blazing afternoon sun standing on an almost-dirt yard in the middle of nowhere. There together for one moment before we moved on to meet our future selves.

Posted in Truth Serum, Way Back Machine | 7 Comments »

My Old Kentucky Home

July 11th, 2009

When I was wandering around my hometown on a recent visit, I chanced upon folk artist Marvin Finn’s crazy, colorful chicken sculptures in the waterfront park. They remind me so vividly of my long-dead grandmother and her ongoing battle with her hens. She had a cantankerous relationship with them, because they were usually ornery and unmanageable and hid their eggs in the highest bales of hay stored in the barn. My grandmother was a devout and gentle Methodist, but she waged a lifelong war for her flock’s eggs and souls, all the while reproaching them for being a stubborn bunch of heathens and hussies. I hated reaching under an old biddy for an egg and getting pecked on the arms and hands, but even more I dreaded watching my grandmother chop off their heads for Sunday dinner. I still find it difficult to eat chicken without remembering the real blood and guts involved in getting it to the table. But these cheery sculptures also brought back the memories of fragile chicks keeping warm in a box by the kitchen stove, of the comforting cluck and shuffle of the hens as they went about their daily business, and of the ordinary beauty of their color and shapes. Returning “home” is always a similar mixture of warring elements for me–the blood and guts of the painful episodes in my life that took place there mixed in with the beauty of the landscape and the memories of people I once loved. I’ve finally given up trying to reconcile those two feuding family ties that bind. Like the chicken and the egg, the sweetness and the sadness are all part of the same dish.

Posted in Home, Way Back Machine | 1 Comment »

Slow Food

April 25th, 2009

When I was a child growing up in Kentucky, I ate tomatoes almost straight from the vine, and “love apples” are still my favorite fruit/vegetable. My grandparents had a wooden cistern top where they put all the tomatoes they picked to ripen. They were every permutation of pink, red and yellow, and the sweet citrusy taste of their sunlit flesh was summer incarnate to me. We ate them with every meal, and even now scrambled eggs seem naked without a tomato slice. This year I’m growing my own with great trepidation, because I kill everything I plant except bamboo trees. I ordered a Tomato Success Kit which comes with everything but the plants, followed all the instructions and have been tiptoeing around them as they shoot up like the plant in the Little Shop of Horrors. It was all so Whole Foodishly perfect looking. But today I tackled the double-decker cages, put them together backwards, cursed, took them apart, put them back together wrong again, got out the wine, read the directions, counted the parts, tried again. No luck. Finally I found some red and yellow plastic ties mean to bundle computer cables together, jammed the cages into the planters, bootstrapped them with the ties and poured a big glass of wine to celebrate even though they are decidedly cobbled together. They look like hillbilly tomatoes growing in my front yard–all I need is a refrigerator on my front porch to complete the picture–but I like to think I’m returning to my roots in more ways than one.

Posted in Way Back Machine | 3 Comments »