Monday Listicles: 10 Things I Have Done to Make a Living

Well, it's Monday, so it must be time for Stasha’s Monday Listicles again. And today's topic came from... ME!

And, it seems, I'm being late to my own party. (And not for the first time, I must admit.) You would think with my having known the topic for, oh, two weeks, I would have had this post written long ago and ready to pop up at one minute past midnight, be at the top of the link-up over at Stasha's.

Well, think again.

It's been a rough beginning to the new year is all I can say. And my ADD is acting up something fierce. So anyway, it's still Monday here (barely) and will be for a few more hours in at least some parts of the world, so let's proceed shall we?

Today's topic (as chosen by moi) is:

Top Ten Strange (odd/unusual/funny/interesting) Jobs you have held in your life.

#1.  Well, to start with, when I was a baby my father was an advertising photographer and sometimes he needed a baby for a shoot or for his portfolio. So, for a very short time, I was a baby model. He also was a fine art/documentary "street photographer" (with work in Life magazine, etc.) and took loads of pictures of me for that, too.  Wanna see?

Jim Steinhardt: "Girl with Balloon (ME!) at Central Park Zoo" 1963

#2. Then my Dad realized he hated advertising and got out of that business, bought an art gallery and frame shop on Long Island and it grew into an international and American crafts gallery of some renown. And I grew up in the family business, spending Saturdays and many of my summer days at the gallery.

I couldn't even tell you exactly when playing there became working there, but I distinctly remember setting up and helping to serve drinks at show openings from about the age of six on. And I know that from the time I was twelve I was selling in the store and working as a buyers assistant, accompanying my parents to big national craft fairs like Rhinebeck and the wholesale showrooms in the city.

Holiday time was always busy, and as a teenager I worked full long days every Saturday in November and December, and then when the "blue laws" were repealed (yes, I'm old enough to have lived when NO businesses outside of restaurants were open on Sundays) Sundays in December, too.

When I was 15, I ran the gift wrap "department" (me & a friend of mine) on the weekends for the holiday season. To this day I can eyeball any unusually sized or shaped object, instantly figure out what size box it will or won't fit in, and wrap it neatly with nice ribbon bows to boot.

My most memorable sales interaction with a customer? It was the day before Christmas, when the desperate men who hadn't a clue would arrive, and you could sell them practically anything. He was buying jewelry. Three nice pieces. One for his wife, and one each for his two "girlfriends." He wanted to spend about the same for each. Wrote lovey notes on gift cards to be included inside the boxes. Had us put a little code on the bottom of the wrapped boxes so he could know which was which.

How much did we want to "accidentally" mess up the code for him? The whole staff was abuzz with wicked plans to do this while his gifts were being wrapped. In the end of course, we didn't. A customer is a customer, and he was a good spender. (Times 3!) But we talked about him for years to come.

#3. Away at college, through friends I fell into a summer job as a founding member of the Sunflour Bakery Collective in Bar Harbor, Maine. Of course, first I had to learn how to bake bread, which I did in a hurry that spring.

This was not a typical "job." We all lived together, communally on the uppermost floor of the building which was not in any way set up or zoned for habitation, while the landlord conveniently looked the other way. We each made little nests for ourselves using odd materials found on the second floor of the building, in what had been a woodworking shop at one point. My "chair" was an ornate antique toilet stuffed with my sleeping bag to make a cushion.

We often took in like-minded (i.e. hippie) folks who were passing through town and let then "camp out" on the second floor and share meals with us for a few hours of work in the bakery.  It was all very whole grain and natural (naturally), and actually quite delicious. I think I ate better that summer that at any time in my life before or since.

#4. The following year, I spent my summer in Cambridge / Boston with a combination of 2 jobs to keep me afloat: showing up at 5 AM on the weekends to be the breakfast chef at the very vegan Golden Temple Emporium Cafe (yes, run by people with big white turbans on their heads). Can you say "scrambled tofu" anyone?

That was combined with my weekday job of slinging the greasiest of burgers and fries (while wearing hot pants!) to a lunch crowd of finance guys at The Saint, which happened to also be the local lesbian bar at night, which I frequented... frequently. And the irony of all this was not lost on me, I laughed about it constantly.

#5. Then I landed in California for a few years. You may have heard me mention this one before, but yes, in 1981 I actually WAS a Bean Sprout farmer in the wilds of Mendocino county.

We were a womens collective on 160 acres on a ridge with a number of odd buildings on the flat land at the top, and among them 3 geodesic domes. One of these was given over to the business of hydroponically growing bean sprouts that were sold to restaurants and in health food stores in Northern California.

My tasks included washing the sprouts daily, cutting them when they were the right length, bagging them, and assembling the "mixed sprout" salads. Also driving up & down the coast for delivery. And yes, we had to remember to put shirts on when driving off the property.

Looking back, I don't think we had a license and can't ever remember a health inspection. But those were different, looser, freer times. And I don't THINK we ever gave anyone salmonella poisoning.

#6. Also in California, now living more conventionally in Santa Cruz, I became the assistant manager of the Polar Bear ice cream shop in Capitola. And my right (scooping) arm became twice as strong as my left. I was living with a woman who had a 6 year old daughter who was THRILLED to be able to come in and order anything she wanted for free.

And no, I wasn't stealing. The owners wisely gave us a monthly allotment of free ice cream, which kept us all honest about what we ate or took home or gave away. And made us very popular with our friends.

#7. Back on the East coast and back in college, I found occasional work as an artists model. Yes, nude. And people this is HARD work. Holding a pose that seems just dandy at 2 minutes will feel like torture by minute 10 with your muscles screaming for release. And, totally exposed, if you twitch, they will see. And yell at you to keep steady.

#8. My main job while in college was at the local pottery gallery (using my family business talents at last) but on the summers, to not lose me during them, the gallery owners - who were 3 potters themselves - had me come out to their studio to do odd jobs for the seven potters who worked there and shared kilns.

I was not a potter, and it quickly became clear that my natural talents did not lie in this direction, but everyone found things for me to do to help out that did not require actual potting, including wedging clay (great anger release), packing orders for shipping (I still have nightmares about plastic peanuts), and, most terrifyingly, carrying precious fragile pieces to and from the gas kiln which was outdoors, out back, DOWN a little hill. No, I never dropped anything, but did have daily palpitations, thank you.

#9. 1988. Out of school and back in New York City, while working my way into jobs in the film and television industry and also directing and stage managing plays and performance art off-off Broadway, I landed a regular gig with the brand spanking new World Financial Center as an assistant stage manager for their arts and events program, including a month of opening galas.

As I was a bit more mature and put together than a lot of the kids they had working for them, I was usually assigned to babysit the talent, including escorting them to the "stage," which was always rigged in different places and often far, far from the holding areas.

This also meant that I would be seen in the "front of the house" and had to work evening events in formal wear and heels. On miles of marble floors. (Ouch!) Highlights included: a frantic search for one of the coconuts of Kid Creole & the Coconuts who had decided to go look for a friend in the audience, minutes before their call and watching Grace Jones go into makeup and be transformed into... Grace Jones.

Best of all was escorting Cab Calloway up onto the stage itself because he was rather elderly and unsteady on his feet and the steps didn't have a handrail.

This was also the first time I was given a newfangled "cell phone" thingy - about 8 pounds of equipment with a handset connected to a rectangular box that hung from a shoulder strap - this was 1988, people!

1988 Cell Phone. Really.

#10. Fast forward many, many years (see the calendar pages whirl by) and come to my current occupation: Autism Mom. I am an amateur neurobiologist, behaviorist, teacher, translator, pharmacologist, allergist, gluten & casein-free chef, and deep hug giver. In my 9th year of an ongoing experiment in radical sleep deprivation.

Definitely the strangest "job" I have ever had. But the most fulfilling. Worth every minute of it.

And, believe it or not, (believe!) I could go on and on. But I'll stop here at ten.

See y'all next week!


Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

Crash

Driving in Italy, July 2000

It was our honeymoon. In Italy. (The last time I used my passport, a long time ago.) My husband is a native of New York City, not naturally at home in cars, so I had been doing the driving around Northern Italy: to Lake Como, through Bassano del Grappa and the Valdobbiadene wine region, up to and back from Cortina d’Ampezzo at the edge of the alps.

We were on the last, short leg of the driving part of our trip, about to surrender our rental car to spend our final honeymoon days walking and being ferried about Venice in the vaporetto waterbuses.

My husband had witnessed my driving for a week and declared himself ready to take the wheel, now that we were on the flat lands and relatively wide roads of the southern Veneto.

We were entering a traffic circle, or so my husband thought, and, as we had been specifically admonished at the car rental counter that in Italy traffic in a circle ALWAYS has the right of way over traffic entering, my husband was looking exclusively to the left, at the other traffic in the circle, and ahead to where we would be exiting.

He did not look to the right, no need in a traffic circle. But, ah, we were not in a simple traffic circle, but rather a traffic circle BISECTED by a highway, which, naturally, had the right of way.

So my husband was not looking to the right, did not see the tiny “yield” sign, nor the semi bearing down upon us at full speed from that direction. It missed us. But the small car behind it did not.

It happened just like in the movies, the slowing down of time and our reflexes; the ear-shattering crunch, the bone rattling grind, the grand clashing and crashing of it all. Fortunately for us, the impact point was well behind the front seats we were sitting in, the empty rear of our car sustaining all the damage.

We pulled over, shaken but unharmed. There is a long story here of all that happened next, too long to tell in this flash moment, but I will say this:

Everyone was uniformly kind to us, from the young woman driving the (totaled) car that hit us, to the car’s owner, her boyfriend’s father who stayed with us to help translate to the Carabinieri. Well, It didn’t hurt that I would waggle my finger back and forth between my husband and I and intone the one phrase I knew well in Italian “Luna di Miele”(honeymoon) as the Italians are quite a romantic people.

And also? In Italian, the term for car accident is “incidente d’auto” – “incident” in English, versus our “accident” conveying a vast difference in attitude. Accidents require responsible parties to be determined, blame to be laid, while incidents… just… happen.

In due course, the Carabinieri and tow truck from the rental company arrived. There was much standing around, and then retelling of the “incidente.” By the time we arrived at our hotel in Venice we were bone weary and famished, but happy to be alive.

In a vaporetto in Venice on the last day of our honeymoon, July 2000

Maybe the saddest part for me is that we lost a roll of pictures (yes, children, this was back in the old days of cameras running on film) as I had stashed our most recent shot roll in the glove compartment and forgotten to retrieve it in the aftermath, so a few days of our honeymoon disappeared from the photographic record forever.

A small price to pay for escaping from the crash with life and limb intact, nothing lost but a few hours of our time, our insurance deductible, our dignity, and... the notion of my husband ever driving in Europe again.


This post was inspired by a prompt at Write on Edge. This week's RemembeRED assignment was to write a post inspired by the word "Crash." It was supposed to be a 10 minute flash writing exercise, but I must confess I bent the rules a bit. I have never written any of this story down, and I just really needed to tell more than 10 minutes worth. Sorry.

Please click on the button above, go to the link-up and read the other wonderful posts you'll find there.

Also linking this up to Love Links #34

Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

Fuchsia

(Photo from Pinterest via Write on Edge prompt, click for source)

I went to college in New England. Specifically: Western Massachusetts. Amherst. A quintessential New Englandy, uber-collegey college town.

New England exists for Autumn.

The Summers are hotter and more stiflingly humid than you would think, the Springs often mud bogged and shockingly brief. Winters too cold and long, of course; weeks of gray February skies that bind the soul in melancholy.

And then there is Autumn, New England’s glory and redemption.

Maple covered hills wait all year for it. Sun warmed days and crisping breath-visible nights, the air crackling clear enough to cause humbling by the plenitude of stars upon stepping out into the night, on your way home from that final beer at the campus tavern.

There is always one day. One day that astonishes, when the chlorophyll has given up the ghost and called a mass retreat.

One morning, my first college fall, I woke up and looked out the window and thought “No, I am still asleep and dreaming that I have awakened, because this is not planet Earth, as trees just do not come in that color.”

They were hot pink. Fuchsia.

All of them.

As far as I could see.

All as deep and bold and saturated a pink as the wedding dress I had bought to marry Dan in, that my friends told me I simply couldn’t wear and made me exchange for the cornflower blue. (But this is yet years into my future; unimaginable to my college self.)

I went right up to the window, cocked my head left, looked to the mountains, beyond the bowl of fuchsia surrounding. I could see reds, oranges, golden yellows and ashen browns; spots of green, deep and piney, too. Autumn.

Illusion broken. Earthbound, I remained.

But breathless, nonetheless; in awe of nature’s unnatural day-glow splendor, and magnificent, yet ephemeral, beauty.

This post was inspired by a prompt at Write on Edge. This week's RemembeRED assignment was to write a post about Autumn, and in 300 words or less (yikes).

I'm also linking with "Just Write" because this really flowed. And they're both on Tuesdays, and I can't pick just one... And so I'm a two-timer.


Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

Childhood

I miss my childhood, sometimes, when adult life weighs heavily upon me, the constant needs of others, mostly my children, threatening to drag me under. 

When I am on hands and knees cleaning up a bathroom floor thoroughly splattered in one son’s vomit while my other son calls out to me complaining of the smell, begging me to come to him because he does not want to lie alone in the odoriferous dark.

I miss my childhood most when I am ill, yet still taking care of little people, instead of being tucked into bed myself, steam from the bowl of chicken soup my mother has carefully placed on the rickety metal folding table wafting up, salty pretzels and ginger ale rounding out the prescriptive meal for a nasty strep throat.

What I miss from my childhood are moments: running wild in the Daktari sandpits with my cousins; bouncing on my bed for hours with a friend while eating dot candy;  crashing through the waves with my father at Jones Beach on a hot summers day; sitting, mesmerized by the fireplace at Sacks Lodge on a frigid winter night; falling asleep in the back seat of a long drive home, my head in my mother’s lap, breathing in her Shalimar and the night air; my first real kiss.

And also the era.

My childhood is the 60’s. 

I turned 8 and 9, those seminal kid years, in 1968 and 1969; years which were also seminal to modern culture, when so much changed, happened, emerged, transformed: Woodstock, the assassinations (MLK, RFK), moon landing, Laugh-in, the Tet Offensive, Prague Spring, Andy Warhol, heart transplants, Charles Manson, the Chicago Seven, The Beatles, UNIX, bell bottoms, Sesame Street…

An era I have layers upon layers of thoughts and feelings about. My now adult understanding of it above all, but underneath?  That childhood glow surrounding times lived through, golden and suffused throughout, the images crystalline, sharp-edged while simultaneously encased in amber.

I miss my childhood, sometimes, but there is mostly so much I am glad to have broken free of, from my childhood.

Do not get me wrong, my childhood was not doom and gloom. There were certainly many joys; there were those thousand brilliant moments; there was laying in fields of wildflowers baking in the sun; lobster birthday dinners eaten with hedonistic abandon; I was - and knew I was - well loved by my gentle parents.

But what I do not miss is my childhood self: anxious, awkward, isolated, painfully shy, over-sensitive (SPD), easily overwhelmed, un-centered, uncomfortable in her own skin, cocooned in fantasy, brilliant but clueless.

That is not me now, has not been me for so long I must cast far to remember it.

I miss my childhood, sometimes.

But mostly I revel in my children’s childhood.

Creating the memories with them that they will suffuse with their own golden glow upon recollection; me the mother, whose Tea Rose they will breathe in with the night air as we travel the long way home from our adventures.


This post was inspired by a prompt at Write on Edge (formerly The Red Dress Club). This week's RemembeRED assignment was to write a post beginning with the phrase: ”I miss my childhood".

Please click on the button above, go to the link-up and read the other wonderful posts you'll find there.


Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

Breakers

We have gone to the beach, my children and I, finally this summer, in mid July.

Our toes slide past the shoreline’s tickling foam fingers with hours and hours of traveled anticipation at our backs pushing us further and further into the crashing waves.

The first slap of ocean upon sun warmed flesh a shock delicious and bracing, and as familiar as breathing to me, thrown suddenly way back to my beach-washed childhood.

They want to go deep, my sons. Beyond the breakers, with me.

"Swim, mommy! I want to swim!" Jacob has been chanting over and over, impatient through the processes of establishing our beachhead; of blankets unfurled and corner weighted, towels piled at the ready, glasses securely stowed away.

He will not be denied.

We stand thigh deep in the churning foam as I test the ocean’s resolve to push us under, pull us out. The waves are dramatic but not demonic, the undertow manageable. It’s a go.

This first time I must take them out together, as neither will countenance being left behind, shore-locked and waiting.

When I was their age I was out in the deep on my own, body surfing the breaking waves as my father had taught me.  But these are city boys, our forays to ocean beaches few and far between. Once or twice a summer season. (Last year not at all, to my heart's sorrow.)

And I, after an urban beginning, was raised an Island girl, the south shore beaches my constant summer's terrain.

It was a casual thing for our family. Once a week, sometimes more, we'd toss our towels and a couple of peanut butter & jelly sandwiches into a bag and we’d be off to the beach. And then as a teenager, I would venture alone with friends on the Jones Beach bus.

With my sons, however, it's an outing, a sojourn, planned, scheduled, only attempted when the stars align and circumstances are just right. Like last Sunday.

They want to run headlong into the surf but I hold them back, an old hand at this game.

“Do you want to get trashed by the waves?” I ask them.

“Noooo!” they howl, seeking to be spared this indignity.

“Then wait for my signal, move when I move, and fast!” I instruct.

I stand looking seaward, study the waves as they collapse upon the many small sandbars that carpet the ocean floor here, engendering a complex pattern, difficult to properly time our approach.

I watch the ebb and the flow, making sense of what looks like chaos, and slowly the patterns emerge. There are occasional rogue waves coming in from the right, but basically these big waves come on: one, two, three, and then a little lull, one, two, three and then the lull, the outgoing wave canceling out the incoming one, creating calm, the appearance of stasis on the surface when below there is a swirling pas de deux.

“Now!” I yell, hoping I‘ve got it, that the wave I see beginning to swell out beyond the red ball buoy is going to be small, shallow, cresting once we are well beyond it. And indeed it is.

“Jump” I shout as the wave passes, rising us up with it, nowhere near ready to crash and crush.

(Yes, I’ve called it right.)

We bob and sway with the tide. Our faces split open in joy. You wouldn’t know which twin is autistic out here in the deep, both boys happily treading water, calmly following my instructions.

“Over, over!” I yell, and we rise up together, laughing into the spray. With Ethan tightly gripping my right hand and Jake my left, I am sincerely hoping my nose does not start to itch.

Occasionally a wave rises up and up, curls over us ominously, and our strategy changes. “Under!” I command and we dive below, surfacing to the screams of those being crashed upon, further ashore.

A double wave catches us by surprise, causing me to drop right into its crest, expecting a lull. As I snort some ocean water, I feel my feet starting to cramp and realize I have hit the point where my body is tiring of this constantly alert state. Time to head in.

The boys howl in protest, would stay out here all day, rising and falling in the swells with Mom. But I am the grown-up here, know when I am reaching my limits.

“It’s not safe anymore,” I tell them, “I'm getting too tired to keep you safe.”

“Nooooo!” they wail. But I am the Mom.

I turn my body toward the shore, but my head and gaze swivel back to watch once again the patterning of the waves. I want us to travel with them, to use the waves’ energy to bolster our flagging reserves, riding them shoreward.

I am trying to describe my process to Ethan, trying to teach, to pass on my knowledge; but this is hard, making explicit what is inside me mostly a feeling.

There are so many variables, chaos theory in action. There is my mind, calculating, looking at the swells: how high will they go, how fast are they traveling, how long it has been since the wave before, how fast it is being chased by the next, when and where and how large is the wave returning from shore to meet it?

But what is happening in the ocean at any moment is more than the sum of these parts. There is a gestalt to it, a knowing of the ocean, a sensing of her mood.

I can’t even say how I know what I know, but I know it. I feel it.

I have spent hours, days, years in the ocean and been trashed maybe thrice. Not in years.

And so when I yell to the boys “NOW! Move with THIS wave, let it carry you in!” I know it HAS to be this one; that hesitation will bring disaster, our timing off, the pattern all wrong and a wave will crash at our backs before we are far enough in, possibly throw us down, pull us under into a total sand-face-mash-up.

Not the end of the world, these waves too gentle for real damage; but still, a scary incident, a glimpse into the dark side of the ocean’s magic that I am not ready to invite yet into their sweet lives.

But lo, the boys listen, they move with me and the waves, let themselves be carried in.

And as our feet hit the sand we run, slogging fast towards shore. So the waves catch up with us too low to pull us under, a sandy tickling caress only.

We splash around in the shallows for a while, not quite ready to leave the salty sea. And as we drop onto the sand happily spent, let the receding tide tickle our feet, we look out at the noisy ocean and laugh. How we laugh.

They like to go deep, my sons.


This post was inspired by a prompt at The Red Dress Club. This week's RemembeRED assignment was to write about a time that rhythm, or a lack thereof, played a role in your life. And don’t use the word “rhythm.”

Please click on the button above, go to the link-up and read the other wonderful posts you'll find there.


Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

M is for Movies

M is for Movies.

I grew up watching them.

My parents loved movies.

But more importantly? They loved film, cinema, the real deal.

I was taken to important films from the time I was young.

Oh, we went to the blockbusters, the kid flicks, the fun things.

But also? Serious films. The ones that meant something, opened you up, pulled you apart, turned you inside out, put you back together differently.

You don't think a film can change you?

Then you've been watching the wrong movies.

When I was eight years old, on the 4th of July?

Instead of fireworks (which still frightened me a bit at that age anyway) my parents took me to the movies.

Zeferelli's Romeo and Juliet.

It was rated "M" for Mature audiences (in 1968 there was no R yet, no PG-13).

I still remember the beauty and lyricism of Shakespeare's words. And Romeo's naked butt.

My parents loved classic films. I watched hundreds of old black and white movies on the TV, was no stranger to Bogey and Bacall; Katherine Hepburn my idol. 

My mother loved musicals. And I loved Barbra Streisand passionately. Hello Dolly and Funny Girl, of course, but also The Owl and the Pussycat where Barbra plays a sometime hooker who drops the F-bomb (the first time a female star ever uttered that word in a Hollywood picture).

(At the time, I had no idea why I loved her so much. But looking back I can clearly see she is the only star who looks anything remotely like me, Jewish and significantly shnozzed and all.)

My parents took me to foreign films. With subtitles. And we watched them fervently on public television.

I remember being very tired in the mornings for a whole month of the 11th grade because Cinema 13 was hosting a Japanese film festival nightly at 11 PM.

This was in the days of broadcast TV.

There was no cable. There were no VCRs.

If you wanted to watch something? You had to show up. You had a date with your TV for when it was being broadcast.

And we really wanted to watch Kurosawa, Ozu and Teshigahara. I was the only 15 year-old I knew whose favorite film was Woman in the Dunes.

(Until it was eclipsed by Bergman's Persona the next year.)

We loved Woody Allen. He was ours. (The uber-New York Jew.)

We loved Robert Altman (no explanation necessary).

We loved the actress Ruth Gordon and quoted lines from Where's Poppa? and Harold and Maude as part of our private family patois.

Films informed my whole life.

I studied film in college, became a film and video maker, made my living in a branch of the business.

Studying film was delicious. I got to watch so many wonderful films, as well as learning how to make them.

There were times I would become a bit... obsessed with certain films.

Watching them over and over, finding truths in their flashing frames. A string that would vibrate in my soul every time a moment played out, an image seared into my brain, imprinted, that my eyes wanted to see.

Over and over.

Like these films, among many others...

Hiroshima Mon Amour (Possibly my favorite film of all time. About memory. And love. And everything else.)

Dr. Strangelove  (First seen as a child on New Year's Eve, with the end-of-the-world mushroom cloud explosions perfectly timed with the stroke of midnight)

Diva (If you have never seen this film? I don't know how to describe it, nor to adequately convey how consumed I was by it when I first saw it, and then watched it again and again and again. Yes, obsession was the operative word here. Yes. I have not viewed it again in years, don't know if it holds up, am almost afraid to find out.)

The Lion in Winter  (This moment... Katherine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine says to her jewelry: "I would hang you from my nipples but it would shock the children." Perfection.)

Stealing Beauty (Whatever you think of Liv Tyler, this is Bertolucci and a luminous film. Do not let your teenage virgin daughter watch if you want her to stay that way.)

Burden of Dreams (A film-making friend of mine was obsessed with this film & pulled me into her obsession, making me watch with her, over and over. It's a documentary made by the filmmaker Les Blank, who was in turn obsessed with the obsessive nature of Werner Herzog while making Fitzcarraldo, a film about a man obsessed with a  boat. Sensing a theme here? At one point Herzog says, "I shouldn't make films anymore, I should be in a lunatic asylum.")

Blade Runner  (I know you're thinking: Wait. What? That's a big blockbuster film, a genre film from a commercial director, not a personally meaningful work from an "Auteur." Where did that come from?

Well, a great film is a great film. And I have always loved Science Fiction. And this film? Was something else. Something new. Ever since you laid eyeballs upon it, you cannot picture the future without either referencing or refuting this film's vision of it, so completely did it create that world.

It is in our psyches. Permanently. And I wouldn't have it any other way.)

When I was a young girl, my parents business, an Art Gallery, was located on the main street of our suburban town, right next door to the movie theater. On the other side of the theater, physically part of the same building, nestled into a little chunk of its side, was a delicatessen and candy store.

I went to work with my parents on Saturdays, as did the Deli owner's daughter, Diana, a girl my age. We were friends.

And because her parents were friendly with the movie theater's owner? We got to see the Saturday matinee movie every Saturday. For free. Even the popcorn was free, if we brought our own paper bags to put it in.

My parents didn't have much money back then so the free part was wonderful for them. And it took me out of their hair for two hours or so. Win.

And I? Was in movie-loving heaven.

The matinees were movies for children. Occasionally classics like The Sound of Music or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but often pure kid fodder like Island of the Lost or With Six You Get Eggroll. We didn't care.

This was of the time before multiplexes, before theaters resembled nothing more than rectangular boxes with another glowing rectangle up front for you to fix your eyes upon.

This theater was old, it had nooks and crannies. A vaulted ceiling, cherubs. Deep red, velvety wallpaper softening the walls.

And a loge, where we sat, week after week, my friend Diana and I. Sucking on rock candy from her parents store, slipping fistfuls of popcorn from brown paper bags, grown greasy, into our hungry mouths.

We were there to be transported. Even drek like Destroy All Monsters called forth the magic. It didn't matter, for we were learning to see.

To see in the dark.

And now, what is it my autistic son Jacob loves more than anything else in the world?

Movies.

He loves movies.

He is learning about the world though them; he is learning to see.

To see in the dark.

This post has been inspired by and linked up to Jenny Matlock's Alphabe-Thursday writing meme. And isn't "M" is such a lovely letter? Shaped like a mountain, it is.

I'm also linking this post up to Maxabella's I'm grateful for...  because I am grateful that my life has been enriched by the existence of wonderful movies, and most especially for the parents who taught me to love film.


Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

The Cube and I

I am sitting crosslegged on the sofa, ignoring the cat batting at me, attempting to wrest the Twinkie from my hand. She sprints to the living room’s windowed wall, fantasy-stalking the birds flitting about the feeder, newly filled by my mother.

Their hungry chirps an invitation to come outside and play before this winter afternoon’s blue light fades to black.

Though the huge nor’easter was two weeks past, there are still deep piles of snow out back, making odd, lumpen shapes out of our backyard’s buried furnishings: picnic table transformed into igloo palace.

But the pull of something else bears a stronger seduction: an ugly square box with golden antennae perched atop. Curved glass holding shifting ghosts of black and white.

It’s 4:30 PM. Sunday afternoon. I am watching TV.

And after today, February 23rd, 1969, my brain will never be the same again.

I am, as is common, alone; my parents busy, elsewhere…  Mom in the laundry room perhaps, Dad in the darkroom.

I turn on the TV set. Channel 4, NBC. OK, why not?

Something comes on. Something I have never seen before, and, for many years afterwards, am not sure I had actually seen then, not just hallucinated:

“The Cube.”  

I see this...

There is a man alone in a small white room.

Perfectly square.

A cube.

Each wall, floor, ceiling made up of a 4x4 grid of white squares, in turn.
 
The man is searching, questioning: What is going on? Why is he here?

People begin to enter the cube, interact with the man.

But no one gives him answers.

They only draw him into their own dramas.

The mystery deepens.

Existential angst engulfs.

People talk:

“None of us are real, he’s not real, we’re all projected.”

“Well, as I interpret what you’re doing here, this is all a very complex discussion of Reality versus Illusion. The perfect subject for the television medium!”

Reality shreds, hangs on by a thread, disappears completely, appears to return, and then? Poof, in a whiff of strawberry jam, it is gone…

What remains?

The Cube.

So yes, at age eight and a half, I had my already precocious mind completely blown by a bit of TV.

Produced for NBC Experiment in Television, directed & co-written by Jim Henson (yes, that one).

This will be hard for those born into the cable-TV-10,000-channels-that-must-be-filled-at-all-times years, but this aired exactly twice.

Once, the day I saw it, February 23, 1969, and once again in 1970.

Then it disappeared.

When I would describe it to friends, with a few rare exceptions, they would look at me as if I had three heads, shake their own heads and declare that nothing that strange had ever appeared on television; I must have made it up, so fantastic did it sound.

But oh, it was real. Very real.

If you have never seen it (and I am guessing this describes 99.9% of you) you must.

Here:

"The Cube" a tele-film by Jim Henson (& Jerry Juhl), 1969

Now imagine yourself a hyper-sensitive, highly intelligent not-yet-nine year old girl with an over-active imagination and a developing penchant for getting stuck in the revolving doors of her own mind, watching THAT alone on a long ago February afternoon...

Anybody have any questions as to when the seeds were planted for me to become a student of avant-garde filmmaking at an experimental college at 17? A hippie, lesbian, college-drop-out, bean-sprout farmer living in a primitive geodesic dome on a ridgetop in Northern California at age 20?

And then, at 33, a married, Manhattanite, globe-trotting corporate video producer with a closet full of suits?

I thought not.


This post was inspired by a prompt at The Red Dress Club. This week's RemembeRED assignment was to write a post about a TV show from your past. 

Please click on the button above, go to the link-up and read the other wonderful posts you'll find there.


Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

Sweat Memories

Spring has now surrendered herself to summer’s sultry heat. As I stretch my loosening limbs and feel the sweat trickle, tickley, down my slick armpits, I get thrown, always, back through time's twisty tunnels: summers past rushing by, swirling their memories around me, tantalizing snippets.

Sense memories all, sticky, sweaty summers full of swelter and promise. One stands out, recently plucked from the memory box…

Summer of ’77. High school graduation; beginnings and endings, all rolled up into one.

Or maybe more like this: a constant tumbling head over heels of endings and beginnings, chasing each others tails, a blur of old and new and old and new; the wheel, spun again and again, the endless yin and yang of it, as I tried to make a 16 year-old's sense out of my life.

My parents loved me dearly, cherished me fiercely, but were often clueless. They didn't attend my high school graduation ceremony. I had been ambivalent about attending it myself, and by the time I decided to show up after all, they had made other plans; important plans.

Not nearly as callous as that seems, I'm sure they had asked me at least three times if I’d minded that they weren’t there.  And I'm sure I'd reassured them that it meant very little to me and I was OK. But I also know at some deeper level I was disappointed, feelings were hurt, a disconnect widened.

As a mother, I have learned to listen beneath, to the waves below the words; to discount, at times, the surface, the brave “I’m OK”s from little boys who aren’t. My mother never did, needing reassurance more than truth. Pity.

At sixteen, I was so very young and clueless, though I'd thought myself sophisticated, a worldly woman. I was sorting through so many things in my mind, and developing just about zero practical skills for negotiating an adult life in the actual world.

Navels were for gazing, and I did, how I did.

New York City (suburbs). 1977.

It was the summer of Sam; and Star Wars.

I remember waiting hours for tickets on opening week, the first time I had ever done that, with my last high school boyfriend, Ben. Sitting on the roof of his Black 1963 American Rambler in the parking lot of the Huntington Mall cinema, we were trying to catch a slim breeze as we waited for day to wheel into night and the movie's magic lantern to begin.

I have since seen that film dozens of times, but will always remember my first, seen with a last. Beginnings and endings tumbled together, wearing each other smooth like the rocks in the rushing river we camped beside, on the sweet and wondrous weekend road trip we took together that summer.

That summer of last high school boyfriend, while I was also quietly falling in love, unrequited, with girls right and left; my head and my heart in a tug of war (along with some select other parts).

I did not even have my plans solidified for the fall, having missed the drop-dead dates for completing college applications, my parents once again useless here, being "no pressure" individualist hippie types, never realizing that a sixteen year-old girl might need a little guidance, a little pressure to make things happen, barely knowing her own mind, leaf-tumbling through life, lucky beyond all knowing that life never tossed evil into her hapless path.

And the soundtrack to all this mayhem? Somewhere between Patti Smith’s Horses album on my stereo, Springsteen’s Born to Run blasting out of a jukebox, John Prine being strummed on my boyfriend's guitar and Abba’s Dancing Queen wafting in from a somewhere distant radio.

If the smell of being thirteen was Coppertone? The smell of sixteen turning seventeen for me was sweat; the intoxicating scent of fresh sweat, honestly earned.

And the salt taste of it, the startlingly metallic and musky tang of it, on my hungry, awakening, clueless tongue.


P.S. If you want to see me on the day of my High School Graduation? Go here: I Was a Senior Feminist-Hippie-Hottie  

This post was inspired by a prompt at The Red Dress Club. This week's RemembeRED assignment was to write a post about Graduation. 

Please click on the button above, go to the link-up and read the other wonderful posts you'll find there.
 


Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

Dunia

Asked to picture my grandmother in her vital days, before the stroke that laid her low, creating the shadow who hovers dimly in the background of my later childhood years, this image comes:

Dunia, in her kitchen; yellowed light from an ancient ceiling fixture suffusing everything with a sulfuric glow, wiping her hands on her ever-present stained apron, a cigarette stuck to her lower lip, as if by glue and not mere spittle, the red edge of a pack of Pall Malls peeking up out of the apron's torn pocket.

Moments before, her hands were furiously busy with wooden bowl and gleaming blade, chopping up the eggs, onions and chicken livers whose frying smell hangs close, blends with the cigarette smoke to create a thick haze in the kitchen: the smell of Grandma Dunia's house. (I have that chopper now, passed down the maternal line, its metal handle still retaining a hint of the red paint that once caught my eye, there in my grandmother's kitchen.)

Outdoors the air is fresher though also strange, dank, loamy; her yard deeply shadowed by old tress, old bushes grown tall and feral. The lilac that stands by our own garage door comes from these here, my flower-loving mother happy to have a piece of home with her. But somehow, here, even the lilacs seem dour, moody, menacing as they tower over me, the smallest, palest thing around for miles.

The old swing-set in the backyard is miraculously still standing, and I push the upstairs tenant's twin toddlers higher and higher to their squealing delight. At eight, I am the big girl, enjoy watching the little girls' flashing smiles, marvel at the many tiny pink-barretted braids it must have taken their mother hours to tame their hair into.

I do not know this will be my last visit, that my grandmother's days of independence are swiftly numbered. I will miss spending time with these little girls, the only young, new things in this creaking old house.

Finally the gloaming completely engulfs the yard, a perfect background for the fireflies dancing delight. But it is time to head inside, the night being no time for young girls to linger outdoors in this now rough neighborhood.

Smoke swirls through all the rooms of this house, as my grandmother lights one cigarette off the dying ember of the previous, a chain that will, by necessity, end the soon-coming day she keels over.

My mother, once a smoker too, now quit, waves her hand in front of her face to clear a small circle of air, hoping to breathe freely.  She knows better then to ask her mother to stop smoking, in spite of the wheezing it now brings on. She knows better than to ask her mother for anything, empathy and generosity running decidedly short in this house.

We do not visit often, but when we do I marvel at how different it is here than in my home. Her ancient standard poodle skulks like a ghost from room to room, large and silent, its one eye turned milky strange, a frightening apparition to a child used to frisky cats.

The television is round at the edges, encased in a huge wooden cabinet, almost unrecognizable to me, but for the comfort it provides; the familiar images appearing therein reminding me that I still inhabit the same solid world, though the frame has shifted.

While I watch TV, the grown-ups talk and talk. I do not try to listen in. When my grandmother tells a joke, though the telling is in English, the punch line is always in Yiddish, a language I do not understand. Even the laughter here bears a sharper edge, a tang, is not easy and light. 

When it comes time to leave, my mother comes to sit in the back seat with me, her lap my pillow, a sleepy girl's fondest wish. The car's windows are open, inviting night's fresh air to rush all around us, and we gratefully inhale.

She strokes my head, her hands ever gentle with me, as her mother's never were with her.  And I drift off, knowing I will wake up in the arms of my strong father carrying me from the car, bringing me home.


Curious about my unusual Grandmother? I have written about her before: here, and here.

This post was inspired by a prompt at The Red Dress Club. This week's RemembeRED assignment was to write a post inspired by this photo:

Please click on the button above, go to the link-up and read the other wonderful posts you'll find there.
 

Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

Coppertone

I slip into the bluemercury make-up store with my cousin Annette and her two daughters, one poised on the precipice of teenhood. We have been strolling languidly down Broadway popping into stores willy-nilly as the fancy takes us.

I have stolen an afternoon from my tightly pressed life to pretend for a moment that I am a lady who lunches; to bask in the girlyness of my cousin and her daughters, my dear nieces that I have spent precious little time with, absent the testosteroned clatter that is my twin eight year old sons.

We know we're not going to part with any money in this bastion of expensive make-up and skin care products, and the salesgirls know this too. But it's a way dead Thursday afternoon and the staff is bored to tears, so they happily indulge us and make-over the girls to their giggling delight.

I glide past the perfume cases, pick up a bottle that looks interesting, open it up and am transported... somewhere, way back in time.

Not a smell I associate with perfume, but rather hot sun, AM radio blaring Crocodile Rock, my scrawny bikini-ed body with sand stuck to it in all the uncomfortable ways and places sand sticks, especially since I'm slathered in... COPPERTONE!

That's the smell! I look up, questioningly, at the sales girl and she smiles. "Is this... ?"

"Yes" she says, "it's been created to smell like vintage Coppertone." Emphasis on the "vintage."  Like me. It's two days after my 50th birthday, she didn't need to rub that in.

She holds up the bottle. That's when I pay attention to the fact that I've just sprayed myself with something called "Beach."

I take the bottle from her, cradle it in my hand for a minute, knowing I'm never going to spend $45 to smell like my thirteen-year-old Jones-Beach-loving self.

But for just a moment I contemplate it, sniff my perfume sprayed arm; close my eyes, feel the sun-sweat start to pool between my just budding breasts, sway to the beat of Loggins & Messina telling me that my Mama don't dance and my Daddy don't rock & roll.

The seagulls keen and try to steal our gooey peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  The waves crash in the background, drowned out by the cacophony of dueling radio stations around us.

My friends slather Coppertone on each others backs and keep one eye out for the boys, who will never speak to us, but we like to think know we're there for them.

We are a young thirteen, filled with longing for things we are nowhere near ready for, cannot even fully imagine, but know that it has something to do with the faintly tingling feeling between our legs whenever they come into our midst to retrieve a tossed football gone astray.

And then the tinkling laughter of my nine year old niece breaks through.

She and her twelve year old sister are cavorting through the store, showing off their glamour to my cousin, who smiles the indulgent smile of a mother of daughters, fondly remembering her own first forays into the world of make-up, and all things grown-up and semi-forbidden.

Cousins attempting glamor, 1973

And then we are back out in the street, onto our next girly mini-adventure.  Something involving chocolate.

All too soon it comes to an end as I drop them off at the subway station. I race back home to meet my autistic son's bus, hoping that someday, maybe someday, he will be able to find himself on a beach playing ball with his friends, buoyed up by the admiration of sweaty, giggling girls he is so carefully pretending to ignore.


This post was inspired by a prompt at The Red Dress Club. This week's RemembeRED assignment was to write a post about a sound or scent that brings you right back to your past.

Please click on the button above, go to the link-up and read the other wonderful posts you'll find there.
 

Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

Cheryl

Asked to write about Kindergarten, my usual free-flowing memory fails me.

I spent just one year in that school. (We moved the summer after.)

And of that year? Nothing remains.

The memory box is empty.

Of the building that I entered daily? There is nothing, less than nothing, not even a shadowy pseudo-memory, mocking me with its vagueness. Just... a blank, a black hole.

Of the classroom where many hours were surely logged, I get... nothing. Almost nothing. A feeling that the walls might have been green. The smell of thick paste and finger paint.

I think my teacher's name began with an "F."  Mrs. F... nothing.  I have been told that I loved her, that I looked forward to school each day.

This is inconceivable.

I am someone who has memories of laying in her crib. I have sketched the layout of the city apartment my family inhabited from my birth to age three and a half, accurate to the utter astonishment of my parents.

I remember elevator rides from a two year old's perspective, buttons frustratingly, impossibly high, mockingly out of reach. The shock of a Central Park orange creamsicle to my toddler mouth on a summer day.

I remember. Everything.

But that whole year of my life?

Astonishingly. Nothing.

Except this: a person.

One girl.

A friend.

Brown pigtails. Blue dress. Brown eyes. Brown skin.

Big smile, just for me.

A friend.

A best friend.

Cheryl.

Inseparable.

Until we moved, that afterward summer, to the other side of town. Across the divide: Old Country Road.

A different school, a different, "better" school district. Decidedly paler.

Separated.

Somehow, improbably, our friendship remained intact, though we became occasional friends, different than schoolmates.

Of Cheryl, much remains.

Games of hide and seek with her older brothers Darrell and Victor that always involved basements and crawl spaces, delicious in their slight danger.

The sulfur smell of cap guns mingling with burning leaves on crisp autumn days.

Watching "The Birds" on the little TV in her bedroom and scaring ourselves silly.

The smile that broke across her handsome, dignified, Doctor father's face in the presence of his children.

Her southern raised mother, calling me "Sugar" and melting my heart.

Her mother's home cooking attempting to put some meat on my then skinny bones.

A love pervading that house that was ceaselessly demanding yet unconditional. A rare combination. The sense, always, of high expectations for those children, including the brother with Cerebral Palsy. An example set, which I have never forgotten.

Sleepovers.

Late night whisperings, gigglings. Eventual sleep.

Riding home from a sleepover in her father's strange, wonderful car. The intoxicating smell of sun warmed leather rising up from the seats.

Our neighbors wondering who the hell we knew who drove a Rolls.


This post was inspired by a prompt at The Red Dress Club. This week's RemembeRED assignment was to write a memoir piece about kindergarten.

Please click on the button above, go to the link-up and read the other wonderful posts you'll find there.
 


Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

The Last Room

The Room

There was nothing particularly special about this room. In fact, what stood out most about it was its lack of outstanding features, defined, by default, by its utter ordinariness. 

Boxy, square, white walls, one wide window with white venetian blinds. Rented, transitory, stripped of all but the increasingly bare necessities:

Bed. Dresser. TV that is no longer turned on. Nightstand where books had once piled high, reading glasses at the ever handy, now filled with supplies: tissues, non-latex disposable gloves, chucks, Depends, Vaseline, bandages.

The room my father spent the last three months of his life in.

Home. But not really home. The assisted living facility my parents had moved to a scant nine months before.

My father, he who had traveled the world, danced in tavernas on Greek isles, hiked the terraced rice paddies of upland Bali, swam with dolphins in Caribbean waters, now lived, or rather existed, in about 150 square feet of white room.

When first home from the hospital, he would leave the room occasionally, shamble out to the living room to perch on the sofa, briefly.  Once or twice he made it into the second bedroom, the room filled floor to ceiling with his life’s work: his photographs.

Shelves overflowing with boxes of negatives, prints; once ordered, now haphazard and random as his brain. A worktable splayed with his astonishing black and white images, waiting in vain for his hand to turn them once again, leaf through, arrange, plan books, shows, a future.

But in the last, his final month, there was no more walking. There were no more words. Up until the very end though, he would still, on occasion, stand.

It was impossible. He had no muscles left in his legs, no strength, no breath, hardly any blood coursed through his desiccating limbs.

Yet stand he would, and, for a handful of heartbeats, gaze out the window into the vast brightness.

From the 19^th floor, looking west from the east, there were mostly rooftops, a glass and steel high-rise or two looming above, piercing the sky, proclaiming the cityness of this cityscape view.

Busses rumbled below. Pedestrians well bundled in their winter wraps. Dogs being walked, children being strolled.

But my father did not look down. He looked out. And up. Into gray wintering skies. I have no idea what he saw, what beckoned at his horizon.  

And then, at the very end, his domain shrank again. No longer inhabiting the room, he instead inhabited the bed. A rectangle, roughly six feet by five. Covered in the soft mauve comforter I had purchased for him when he came home from the hospital. 

My mother hated it then, wanted her old down comforter back, resisted the truth of the need for machine washability and fast drying. Now she loves it, runs her hand over it, thanks me for buying it. Not remembering why.

We would all take turns laying beside him, ever so gently stoking his back. Because only with the reassurance of touch would he rest, sleep deep.  Like a colicky baby that needs to be held and rocked 24/7, so too was my father at the end of his life.

After he died, and a little time had passed, my mother moved to a smaller apartment within the building.

It was my job to pack her, to move her, and then to slowly go through all of my father’s many things, to dismantle his workspace, parcel out his photographs, his life‘s work, for cataloging, storage, posterity.

At long last I was done. And as I left their apartment for the last time, I needed to stand in that bedroom once again. Empty this time, truly, but for faint ghosts.

I stood at the window, looked out, up.

The Window

A moment froze in time. I took a photograph. I cannot say what I saw, felt.

I then looked west, towards my home, towards the schoolbus that needed to be met, the dinner made, the homework supervised, the bustled life lived in our too full, overflowing rooms.

I left, closed this door for the last time.

I went down to my mother, waiting in her apartment, twelve stories below, to sit with her in her widow's lair and look out together on the city, a little bit closer to the earth.


This post is linked up with the memoir prompt over at The Red Dress Club.  To see the prompt, click here.  To go to the link-up and read other posts, click on the button below: 

Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.

In my Grandmother's House

Memory is tricky.  There is the memory of childhood events and the telling of these events.

The older the memory and the more frequently retold, the less distinction exists between these two, the fuzzier the line between actual, visceral memory and mere story, until I can only guess what was my direct experience and what has been told to and by me and now feels remembered.

But tonight I shall attempt to trick the trickster, to carve back the lacquered layers of an oft-told tale to find the little girl hidden within…

 *****

It is dark.  And I hate the dark.  I find it very frightening, the quiet and the shadows.

I see things in the shadows, always.  The swirling shapes that menace, the snakes under my bed, the things I cannot name, that I know intend me harm.  Light vanquishes them all, and I long for light.

Yet here I am in the dark, forgotten in this forgotten room in my grandmother’s house.  In here, there is darkness, but not quiet, for the sounds from the living room, from the commotion without, still flood in.

When I was hustled into this room and bade to stay still and quiet, the door was pulled closed, but not completely, so there is a slim rectangle of yellowed light brightly rimming the doorway through which the world continues to exist.

As my eyes adjust to the darkness I see that the shape in front of me is an ancient cot, folded up like an inchworm humped in mid crawl.  I crouch down behind it, lean my face in, seeking comfort.  But its sprung wire cage presses harshly into my soft six year-old cheeks, so I retreat, sit on the wooden floor and warily wait.
 
The musty smell of things long unused overlays the cigarette smoke drifting in from the living room, which has itself mixed with the usual scent of the house, a heady blend of fried onion and old dog.  But then a new tang wafts in, tinged with something odd, metallic.

Watching occasional shadows flicker through the yellow rectangle, I listen for clues, cues as to what is going on and why I am here.

First there was a guttural male voice and high pitched female screaming, then police sirens wailing closer and closer, doors banging, more voices, male and female, talking, shouting, talking again.  And through it all, the soft sounds of a woman sobbing.

I almost drift off, but for the churning in my gut, the fear I have been forgotten, will remain here, always. 

Then, eventually, someone remembers - the child! - and comes to get me.

It has been a long time.

It is over.  This is the aftermath.

There is still a policeman, a doctor.  In the alcove, between the doorways of the unused bedrooms I see a young woman in a short dress with bandages covering her legs, arms, face.  She is talking to the police, shaking her head.

The doctor is putting on more bandages.  There are many of them.  They look pale against her warm brown skin, and some are starting to turn crimson as the blood leaks through.

I fall asleep on the sofa, and wake in my mother’s cradling arms, being carried out to our waiting car, their evening out cut short; my father, somber, at the wheel.

I never sleep over my Grandmother’s house again.

*****

This is what I believe I have actually clearly remembered from that evening. The rest of the tale, cobbled together from memory bits and what was subsequently told to me over the years to become part of my memory, is in my repertoire of colorful childhood stories, and goes like this:

When I was six years old, my parents were going out and asked my grandmother, my mother’s mother, to watch me.  As it was Saturday night, the night of a regularly scheduled poker game, she didn’t want to, but reluctantly allowed my parents to drop me off to stay with her for the night. Naturally the game went on as scheduled and I was left to entertain myself, as I saw fit.

When you think of the term “Grandmotherly,” the soft, warm, nurturing indulgent presence that implies?  An image of my grandmother will not come to mind.  She was anything but.  She did not like children.  My mother’s childhood?  Not particularly happy.

On this particular evening the poker crowd was large, so card tables had been erected in the living room, with maybe a dozen players gathered round.  There was much smoking, probably a fair amount of drinking, though that really didn’t register to my six year-old self.

They were having a jolly time.  I was sitting in the pushed to the wall sofa, playing with my etch-a-sketch, oblivious, when the trouble started.

One of the card players was a young woman who had recently broken up with her man, and he had not taken it well.  His mind had turned to a decidedly “if I can’t have you then no one will” bent, and he walked through the front door that evening with a knife, intent on ruining her beauty.

I did not see this.  I heard a door bang open, a male shout, a female scream.  And then I was swiftly picked up and deposited in that dark, musty, unused bedroom turned storeroom.  As it was just off the living room, I heard everything, but made little sense of it, having no context.

They really did forget about me in there for the longest time.  When I came out there were police taking statements and a doctor bandaging up the girl.

I was told what had happened was this: The ex-boyfriend had come in with a switchblade held high.  The crowd had attempted to keep him from the woman, but he got to her and began slashing away.

Someone had procured a baseball bat at about the same time the police arrived.  So whether it was because he heard the sirens or wanted to avoid the bat, he bolted out the back door, vowing to return with a gun, finish the job.

My grandmother got a hold of my parents and told them to come get me, which they did rapidly and with great alarm.

We were told that this man did indeed come back later with a gun, but the police were laying in wait, and apprehended him at the door.

My grandmother continued to live in that house and play poker nightly with that same crowd until she was felled by a stroke some four years later, to live out her remaining years in a nursing home (where she stripped all the other old ladies of their nickels daily in gin rummy).

The stroke came upon her during a poker game, and the rumor was that she finished the round before she keeled over because she had held the winning hand.

Somehow, I believe this to be true. 


This post is linked up with the memoir prompt over at The Red Dress Club.  To see the prompt, click here.  To go to the link-up and read other posts, click on the button below: 

Looking for comments? To read or leave a comment, click on THIS post's title, or HERE, to bring you to the post's page view. Comments should appear below.