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Archive for ‘Way Back Machine’

Savoring Italy

March 7th, 2009

This photo was taken in a house in Siena, late lazy afternoon. I think I slowed down in some fundamental way in Italy–yes, I was writing furiously every day, drinking in new experiences and landscapes, feeling the usual unsettledness that comes over me when I travel, but I also tasted things deeply, lingered over aromas (the smell of crushed herbs — chamomile? — in the lawn will stay with me forever), felt the lens of my eye opening wider. Today I went to a wine tasting at noon–unholy hour for wine–but it was so dramatically different from gulping a glass at a party for the fortitude to face strangers or mindlessly pouring a glass when I get home from work. Because we were sipping, I could take time to smell the ocean in the white wine from Italy, feel the sun and wind and earth of Tuscany. As one of the American wines opened up, its aroma shifted from a strong goatish whiff to subtle (sweat on the skin of someone you love) to sublime (an orchard of ripe fruit with drunken wasps reeling about in the summer sun). I’m sure that’s not how the winemakers would describe their bottles, but slowing down to savor stirred my sense memories on this ordinary Saturday afternoon and took me to so many places in my past and my dreams.

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Behind the Scene

January 28th, 2009

I don’t know when this was taken of my grandfather, my father and one of my brothers. The ’50s, judging by the car and natty suit my father is wearing. Our family portrait shattered soon after like a mirror that couldn’t hold any more lies. Years passed when I didn’t speak to my father or see him. Years when we ignored each other’s existence, because he was never father material and my mother was bitter about that for as long as she lived. A bitterness she passed on as part of our inheritance. She hated him and obsessed about him, and our loyalty to her demanded no less of us. So many years passed without him in my life that eventually I stopped missing him, lamenting only the loss of an idea of a father. And then my mother died and my father’s second wife died and he became a born-again parent. Eventually it became too much trouble to go on carrying the torch of my mother’s anger, to be pissed off about missing something that was just a shadow memory. My father was just a lonely old guy who happened to share my DNA, and it cost me so little to be kind. So why do I still feel like I’m betraying my mother whenever I call him “Dad,” or send him a card or check in to see how he’s doing? It has caused a schism in our little leftover family, with the brother in the photo refusing to speak to anyone who has dealings with our father. This small personal dilemma makes me realize how easy it is for nations, races and religions to hand on a legacy of hatred from one generation to the next. If my brothers and I can’t make peace, can’t separate our love for our mother from the tragedy that was her marriage, can’t lay down our arms, how much harder is it for countries to let go of ancient feuds and resentments?

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Messages from Another Planet

October 25th, 2008

Funny how I can remember the yellow tulips on this dress my mother made and I can barely recall what I had for dinner yesterday. This photo was taken at my grandmother’s house–see the clover in the grass? And just across the street behind those trees is an old cemetery where many of my family are buried and where I loved to play as a kid. I went back there this summer and it was actually much the same, not smaller as so often happens to places that we loved in childhood. The thing that was diminished was my capacity for wonder, awe and imagination. My sense that right around the bend in the road, where it turned from tarmac to dirt, an alternate universe would open up. Just over that next hill. Just on the other side of that high stone wall. As a child, I lived in an enchanted world that lay just under the “real” one. If I made a map of that wonder land, I’d include the bank of violets down the road–a pool of inky blue that made me want to lie down on it and become the essense of violets–only I didn’t understand that was what I longed for. I’d draw myself by the the lake in the cemetery whose dark waters were occasionally pierced by the dart of a red carp/koi–like a message about death, grief, foreverness seen for a moment, almost grasped by my little heart and then lost. I’d put an X on the grainy cement cistern top covered with tomatoes set there to ripen in the sun and make wavy green and red lines to indicate the mingled smells of fresh cut grass and fresh cut watermelon–so similar and so distinct. I’d show my grandfather always walking away toward toward a row of rhubarb by the fence. I’d leave space for the silences between adults that I never understood and the closed doors and raised voices. The shoals of mystery. The places on the map where a child can get lost for long years. I was reading Twitter messages on a friend’s blog today–minute by minute minutiae of what she was doing, cooking, eating, watching and thinking–and I thought how sad that we know everything now and it has turned out to be so little.

Posted in Fresh Ideas, Way Back Machine | 2 Comments »

Birthday Wish

September 25th, 2008

I look at myself in this photo and wish the adult me could be standing just out of camera range observing the girl that I was. The shadows cast by my parents across that lawn stretch across the years into my life today, a portent of the unhappiness that would darken their marriage and cast a chill on my growing-up years. And now there is no one left who can tell me stories about myself before that. My mother is gone, and my father is almost a stranger–a kindly older gentleman who likes to pretend he wasn’t absent from my life for decades. When this photo was taken, they had no idea of what lay ahead of them. Their real life together was just beginning after my father’s years away during the war. Maybe this was our last happy time together, but on my birthday, I’m just grateful they gave me life. And a sense of style–look how I’m rocking that beret!

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Oh Kentucky

June 10th, 2008

This is a photo of me with my grandfather in the tobacco field he sharecropped in Kentucky. He was indifferent and often callous to his 6 daughters, but I adored him and I think the feeling was mutual. I was a “town” girl who traveled 100 miles to the country every summer to stay with my grandparents in their house with no indoor plumbing, air conditioning or television. I loved every minute. Once when I was homesick, my stern, unemotional grandfather drove into the nearest town on his tractor to buy me fresh oranges. When I was a toddler, he carried me to the barn one night to listen to an owl. He convinced me it was talking to me and I still believe it. Can you say “princess”? My father was on a ship in the Pacific in WWII for my first two years so we never really bonded, and my grandfathers and my uncle were the only men in my life. When I was a baby, my uncle would come home from a night of carousing, wake me up, put “Brazil” on the record player and dance me around the room. I had a mostly absent and distant father all my life, but I had fresh orange juice, midnight dances and owls who knew my name.

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1961 Revisited

February 6th, 2008

In 1961, I was 17, young and dumb. In June of that year, I ran away from home in Kentucky with my high school boyfriend and eloped to Memphis on a Greyhound bus. Yesterday, I was back in Memphis 47 years later and discovered that the Greyhound Bus station, where we had our wedding dinner, is still standing, still in operation. Next door was a new Doubletree Inn replacing the hotel where we spent the night before we were married, so afraid the desk clerk would ask us for i.d.s, so afraid the police would call my mother. Yesterday, a friend took my picture in front of the bus station, and I thought, dear god who was that clueless 17 year old who wore her virginal-white high school graduation dress to her runaway wedding in front of a judge in some little Tennessee town whose name I no longer remember? I felt so tender toward that other me, and I thought how 11 years spent at the hands of a brutal guy can leave scars that still have numb edges after all this time. How, despite years of therapy, I’ve never lost my hunger for happy endings. (Don’t we all want Elvis to wake up in Graceland, drug-free, reunited with Priscilla and fit as a fiddle?) Little did I know that the long ride back home as “wife” took me farther and farther away from the girl whose tender spots could have been stroked and encouraged to grow instead of beaten and calloused over. And now all these years later, I have a big full-of-friends life and a wonderful job and creative work I love…but when I flew home tonight, there was a reunited couple at the airport who couldn’t keep their hands off each other — their attraction was electric–and I realized there was no significant other who missed me while I was gone, that years ago I bought a ticket to ride and it took me to some fantastic places but it also included a stop at heartbreak hotel and maybe part of me is still there, wandering the halls of the Doubletree Inn, wondering how to turn back time.

Posted in love, Way Back Machine | 1 Comment »

Protect Me From Myself

October 3rd, 2007

A friend brought me this amulet from Beirut and I need to dig it out and wear it until I come to my senses. I can always tell that I’m running away from something about myself or my life when I start fantasizing about my high school boyfriend. It’s an idiotic spell I’ve never been able to break completely, but when a boy teaches you to have an orgasm when you’re 14 and he’s 17, he’s going to have a hold on your psychic erotic imagination like Gorilla Glue. Especially when you’re a virgin and you meet on your first day of high school and you spend the next year parking and groping on every gravel road in the county after the Friday night football game where he throws the winning pass or whatever. And you get out of the car after a night of “Splendor in the Grass” almost-sex with your lips swollen and blood-flushed with that pent-up libido look that grown women pay to have injected in their lips long after it no longer fits. Throughout the years, we’ve hooked up and drifted apart, gone decades without a word, and eventually found each other again through relatives or mutual friends. The first phone calls are always like coming home, but it quickly ends in tears or mutual disappointment or a big shrug as we go on with our real lives. And it will never end any other way because we’re always just trying to find our way back to the first day we saw each other, to that tearing open of our virgin hearts that could only come once in that exact way, that wasn’t meant to deal with past-due bills, homework, ambition, colonoscopies, or morning breath. Because it was perfect just the way it was, when it was.

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Full Moon Saloon

September 28th, 2007

Tonight I revisited an old honky tonk bar by the light of the full but waning moon on the island where I used to live. Bert’s Bar on Friday night is a shadow of its former self, but I met myself coming and going. Gone the mushroomed hippies and carpenters, gone the raucous vibe when the Sensible Pumps played, gone our former younger we’ll-live-forever selves. But still…there was fried shrimp and fried flounder, French fries and cole slaw and a band tuning up in the corner. There were people I’d never met before, from Ohio and Boston, and that kind of feeling after the first glass of bad wine that they might be your new best friends and the realization after your second glass of bad wine that they won’t be, ever, never. And then you see ghosts of yourself out of the corner of your eye–there I am the night the crazy stalker followed me home, there I am in line for the bathroom with my best friend, there I am younger and less wise and so much wilder, over there at the pool table, never fearing a day-long hangover. The people from Ohio and Boston talked about the Pope and real estate values, and it was time to go home. Time to drive across the bridge off the island I used to know. Time to say goodbye to that, hello to this.

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