1. Two work colleagues and I piled into a taxi to head out to lunch. The driver, a recent immigrant from India, was unfamiliar with the restaurant we directed him to and asked us to tell him how to get there. Although we were diligent in guiding him at first, we got lost in conversation and were soon enough lost on the road. Despite picking up and extra person who seemed to know the area, we ended up far from where we intended to be. I could not recall the name of the restaurant but, certain that I knew how to get there, I began telling the driver what road to take, where to turn, etc. Our party grew to a small convoy when another car responded to our appeal for assistance by saying, “Follow me.” One of the people in the cab claimed to be about to faint from low blood sugar and asked could we please stop at any store and pick up something small, like a bag of chips. Our driver pulled into a seedy looking corner store in a tough neighborhood. There was little in the store other than sugar—candy, soda, ice cream—and we declined to buy anything, preferring to soldier on to the restaurant. We got back in the cab and were immediately surrounded by young toughs who began beating on the roof and hood of the cab, taunting us for not spending money in their store. I said, don’t worry, they’re making fun of us for being white. The apparent ring leader heard this and started to laugh; he thrust a 40 through the window of the cab and I took it, drank some and passed it to the others. We spent much of the afternoon surrounded and drinking.
2. After obtaining a medical marijuana Rx and a license to grow, a woman in my building began cultivating plants on the roof and, after a few crop rotations, discovered she had an aptitude for producing incredibly strong ganja. Soon, the grow garden on the roof became a small farm that employs a handful of people at harvest time. Unfortunately, the woman’s profound attraction to abusive men is in direct, if inverse, proportion to her aptitude for producing splendid spliffs. As hindsight is universally recognized to be 20/20, we might reasonably argue that she should have seen trouble coming when her crop could be measured in bushels as opposed to plants. After the most recent harvest, one of her helpers stopped by for a brew. Though the harvest was a home grow for personal use, it was not hard to see it as a cash crop worth big money. Another beer and this chap had dollar signs gleaming in his eyes. My neighbor is spunky and when her visitor challenged her for the pot, she put up a fight. That’s when things got very bad. They fought hard and dirty. The woman was battered quite severely but this was not the first time she'd been attacked by a man she trusted. As she was being pushed against the counter, she had the presence of mind to grab a pair of scissors she’d been using to trim the plants and stabbed her assailant in the nuts. Hard. Later, the police were able to gather DNA evidence from the blood on the floor.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Gift of God
I want to talk about my mother. No, no. Not the anguished confessions of therapy, more of a wake. I want to boil twigs and leaves to make a steaming mug of dirt brown tea, wrap up in a blanket, sit out on the chilly deck, under the dark blue night salted with white stars, and open up the faucet on my stream of consciousness. I want to reach deep into my chest and pull my mother forth—her cigarette in one hand, the gray smoke curling away, a flaming hot cup of coffee in the other; her beat-up Keds gripping the fleck-patterned linoleum in the kitchen. I want her in her forties when she thought she was no longer young and was no longer thin; wearing navy or tan Bermuda shorts topped by a plain, sleeveless, cotton shirt primitively laundered in our old tub washer and gruelingly ironed throughout the endless, flaming-hot summer that was my childhood; purple, blue, and green varicose veins tracing her stark white skin and making her legs look like road maps—the kind we kept in the glove box of our mammoth mint-green Buick.
.
Although she was born in Indiana, Dot’s vocabulary and mannerisms suggested the south. Her father built Highway 51 running from the Gulf of Mexico up to the top of Wisconsin. Construction started in New Orleans the year Dorothy was born and ran north as fast as forty men could go working mule teams, digging road bed, and laying asphalt. My grandfather died when the crew reached southern Wisconsin and my grandmother put down roots in what became my hometown.
.
Our town straddled the Wisconsin-Illinois border and, toponymistically, if not geographically, offered a demarcation of sorts between north and south. Illinois town names are southern: Centralia, Decatur, Vandalia—names that spoke of long, hot, dusty dry summers, a by-gone era and women named Blanche, as was my grandmother. Wisconsin, the complete opposite, was a land where Indians in loin cloths, stepping silently from the woods, met at the confluence of broad, green rivers to trade for skins with French trappers wearing coonskin caps and moccasins. Wisconsin towns follow the beds of its many rivers at evenly spaced intervals—as far as an ox cart could travel in a day—and bear French or Native names: Eau Claire, Prairie du Chien, Fond du Lac, or Menominee, Winnebago, Potawatami.
.
Dot grew up going from town-to-town as her father pushed 51 north. My father claimed that when they first met, he couldn’t understand a word she said but they married. You may argue that the southern appellation is a stretch and I’ll listen but it does account for some of my mother’s foreignness; for example, calling pound cake Johnny cake, cantaloupe was muskmelon, and corn bread corn ‘pone.’ She loved Hoppin' John though she made it only rarely. I make it every New Year's Day, for luck as southern tradition dictates. I never heard Dot use “y’all” except in jest, but the remainder of the Southern lexicon was standard in our house, especially when Dot spoke to her mother but even my father adopted many of the phrases he once ridiculed. Dot preferred biscuits for Sunday breakfast and made them from scratch, pushing the rim of an empty juice can into the sticky dough and then hitting her wrist on the edge of the counter to free the paste-white disc from the barrel of the can.
.
I was their second child. Between my alcoholic, army sergeant father and my mother who simply had to have been bipolar, I learned a rich and arresting vocabulary that not only shocked my teachers but to this day causes me grief. “Shit a meat ax.” I actually said that in kindergarten; it may even have been the first day. My father used it constantly. It was his way of expressing that he was unhappy. At four and having little experience with the outside world, I thought nothing of working these expletives into my vocabulary. It was in this same way that I first called my brother an asshole. He had brought the epithet home from the schoolyard and taught it to me. I’d already become a handful, largely because no one was paying any attention to my random acquisition of language and behavior.
.
“Shut up or I’ll cram your teeth right down your throat,” was how my mother would settle our increasingly frequent arguments. I heard her bark into the phone, “You can stick that right up your ass and nail a board over it” so many times when she was working something out with my father that I thought it was a standard form of discourse; something of a non-endearment. It was only when I arrived in elementary school and began to meet other children and their families, that I realized how peculiar was mine. My mother had a narrow bandwidth for normal. She couldn’t stay “in the paint" too long, as they say in round ball. She was frightening when depressed; we held our breath thinking the least disturbance would finish her off. When she became manic, she was utterly terrifying.
.
Her depressions had a southern gothic shading to them. Dot confided in me, when I was eight years old and she was about to leave us to go on one of her long, internal quests to find Eurydice and bring her back to the living world, that she never wanted children; had even wished, after each of us was born, that we would die so she wouldn’t have to take care of us. My most enduring memories of her, however, are both from her manic phases.
.
I was still small—yellow seersucker pajamas, damp and sweat-tangled from a nap, clung about my legs; my baby fine hair was matted to the back of my neck—when she came bursting out the back door waving a frying pan in one hand and an egg and me in the other arm, shouting that it was hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. “I’m gonna show you,” exclaimed my mother’s bright red mouth with an enthusiasm that stretched her smile too thin, startling and worrying me because it felt so wrong. “You stand right here and watch me.”
.
I stood as instructed; staring down at the sidewalk where a glob of white grease was melting in the center of a pan struck full force by the sun. My mother crouched low to the ground and pushed her hair out of her eyes, then cracked the egg against the sidewalk. “Never crack an egg on the edge of the pan or the bowl, Claudette; you get a cleaner separation when you strike a flat surface.” She pulled the white oval open to let the clear snot and yellow ball drop slowly from the perfectly broken shell. On landing in the pan, the yolk slid forward as though it had been hit from behind and fell, skidding on its chin. Gradually, under the fierce sun, the clear part of the egg clouded to white and thickened. My mother grabbed me by the arms, swinging me into the sky above her head. Spinning me around faster and faster, she shouted, “See!” jubilant and red faced. “You didn’t believe me, did you? But I was right, god dammit. I was right!” And she laughed loud and wildly, swinging me in wider and higher circles, letting my arms slip through her hands until she was barely holding my small wrists and I grew sick.
.
That manic gaiety was what stuck with me. As Dot cycled through her ups and downs, her mouth was the most important visual signal as to who I was dealing with—bright red lips pulled tight across lupine teeth meant trouble. But, and here is where it was so confusing, before getting there—and I mean the rise up the slope of the sine wave to manic—as she rose from depression and became more voluble, my mother was fascinating and I thrilled to be in her company. The best times were when we would start some large project that consumed our attention and bonded us where love could not, as when we tore up the backyard on a whim one day to plant a stand of birch, my mother delivering a discourse in canoe building as she swung a pickax into the dark earth of early spring.
.
Even after accounting for the tendency of mourners to say only good things at a funeral, my cousins’ eulogies at Dot’s service stunned me. Who were they talking about? Who would fold her arms around them and pull them up onto her lap? Who always had time to listen and an encouraging word to offer? Who taught them to knit? Who, for the love of god, made sock monkeys for every other child in the universe?
.
Just after World War II, when new siblings and cousins were arriving annually, my maternal grandmother marked our births by making for each of us a red, felt Christmas stocking. Each stocking bore a heraldry of sorts. All stockings ended with a Christmas tree at the toe, blazing with beadwork candles and garlands. The boys’ stockings featured a yellow star and white drum over a rocking horse, while the girls’ symbols were uniformly an angel accompanied by a blue bell. One stocking, however, was so completely different, so anomalous from the others it always invited mocking commentary—mine.
.
Mine was the only stocking to bear the completely secular image of a blue bird whose spread wings, at their apex, were about to push down hard; almost as though they knew from the start that I was destined to fly away. Shortly after my mother’s funeral, I dreamed of a birch stand where a blue bird sang sweetly to me. I walked toward it and extended my hand but it remained on its branch, singing a dream tune of almost unbearable sweetness. I was awakened by the phone; friends calling to invite me to golf.
.
Waiting on the first tee, a western blue bird swooped down from the high sky to land in a nearby tree. The western blue bird is almost extinct. People have lived their entire lives in California and never seen one. Even more amazing, of all the variety of trees lining the tee box—fir, aspen, liquid amber, Japanese maple—the blue bird landed on a birch bough and began to sing. I walked slowly up to it and came within five feet of the branch. We looked directly into each other’s eyes for several seconds before it darted away. It followed me the entire round; from branch to branch, from one hole to the next. And for the next twelve months or more, whenever I played golf, a blue bird would arrive at some tee box and stay with me for a while.
.
You may call it what you like. I know that bird was my mother.
.
Although she was born in Indiana, Dot’s vocabulary and mannerisms suggested the south. Her father built Highway 51 running from the Gulf of Mexico up to the top of Wisconsin. Construction started in New Orleans the year Dorothy was born and ran north as fast as forty men could go working mule teams, digging road bed, and laying asphalt. My grandfather died when the crew reached southern Wisconsin and my grandmother put down roots in what became my hometown.
.
Our town straddled the Wisconsin-Illinois border and, toponymistically, if not geographically, offered a demarcation of sorts between north and south. Illinois town names are southern: Centralia, Decatur, Vandalia—names that spoke of long, hot, dusty dry summers, a by-gone era and women named Blanche, as was my grandmother. Wisconsin, the complete opposite, was a land where Indians in loin cloths, stepping silently from the woods, met at the confluence of broad, green rivers to trade for skins with French trappers wearing coonskin caps and moccasins. Wisconsin towns follow the beds of its many rivers at evenly spaced intervals—as far as an ox cart could travel in a day—and bear French or Native names: Eau Claire, Prairie du Chien, Fond du Lac, or Menominee, Winnebago, Potawatami.
.
Dot grew up going from town-to-town as her father pushed 51 north. My father claimed that when they first met, he couldn’t understand a word she said but they married. You may argue that the southern appellation is a stretch and I’ll listen but it does account for some of my mother’s foreignness; for example, calling pound cake Johnny cake, cantaloupe was muskmelon, and corn bread corn ‘pone.’ She loved Hoppin' John though she made it only rarely. I make it every New Year's Day, for luck as southern tradition dictates. I never heard Dot use “y’all” except in jest, but the remainder of the Southern lexicon was standard in our house, especially when Dot spoke to her mother but even my father adopted many of the phrases he once ridiculed. Dot preferred biscuits for Sunday breakfast and made them from scratch, pushing the rim of an empty juice can into the sticky dough and then hitting her wrist on the edge of the counter to free the paste-white disc from the barrel of the can.
.
I was their second child. Between my alcoholic, army sergeant father and my mother who simply had to have been bipolar, I learned a rich and arresting vocabulary that not only shocked my teachers but to this day causes me grief. “Shit a meat ax.” I actually said that in kindergarten; it may even have been the first day. My father used it constantly. It was his way of expressing that he was unhappy. At four and having little experience with the outside world, I thought nothing of working these expletives into my vocabulary. It was in this same way that I first called my brother an asshole. He had brought the epithet home from the schoolyard and taught it to me. I’d already become a handful, largely because no one was paying any attention to my random acquisition of language and behavior.
.
“Shut up or I’ll cram your teeth right down your throat,” was how my mother would settle our increasingly frequent arguments. I heard her bark into the phone, “You can stick that right up your ass and nail a board over it” so many times when she was working something out with my father that I thought it was a standard form of discourse; something of a non-endearment. It was only when I arrived in elementary school and began to meet other children and their families, that I realized how peculiar was mine. My mother had a narrow bandwidth for normal. She couldn’t stay “in the paint" too long, as they say in round ball. She was frightening when depressed; we held our breath thinking the least disturbance would finish her off. When she became manic, she was utterly terrifying.
.
Her depressions had a southern gothic shading to them. Dot confided in me, when I was eight years old and she was about to leave us to go on one of her long, internal quests to find Eurydice and bring her back to the living world, that she never wanted children; had even wished, after each of us was born, that we would die so she wouldn’t have to take care of us. My most enduring memories of her, however, are both from her manic phases.
.
I was still small—yellow seersucker pajamas, damp and sweat-tangled from a nap, clung about my legs; my baby fine hair was matted to the back of my neck—when she came bursting out the back door waving a frying pan in one hand and an egg and me in the other arm, shouting that it was hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. “I’m gonna show you,” exclaimed my mother’s bright red mouth with an enthusiasm that stretched her smile too thin, startling and worrying me because it felt so wrong. “You stand right here and watch me.”
.
I stood as instructed; staring down at the sidewalk where a glob of white grease was melting in the center of a pan struck full force by the sun. My mother crouched low to the ground and pushed her hair out of her eyes, then cracked the egg against the sidewalk. “Never crack an egg on the edge of the pan or the bowl, Claudette; you get a cleaner separation when you strike a flat surface.” She pulled the white oval open to let the clear snot and yellow ball drop slowly from the perfectly broken shell. On landing in the pan, the yolk slid forward as though it had been hit from behind and fell, skidding on its chin. Gradually, under the fierce sun, the clear part of the egg clouded to white and thickened. My mother grabbed me by the arms, swinging me into the sky above her head. Spinning me around faster and faster, she shouted, “See!” jubilant and red faced. “You didn’t believe me, did you? But I was right, god dammit. I was right!” And she laughed loud and wildly, swinging me in wider and higher circles, letting my arms slip through her hands until she was barely holding my small wrists and I grew sick.
.
That manic gaiety was what stuck with me. As Dot cycled through her ups and downs, her mouth was the most important visual signal as to who I was dealing with—bright red lips pulled tight across lupine teeth meant trouble. But, and here is where it was so confusing, before getting there—and I mean the rise up the slope of the sine wave to manic—as she rose from depression and became more voluble, my mother was fascinating and I thrilled to be in her company. The best times were when we would start some large project that consumed our attention and bonded us where love could not, as when we tore up the backyard on a whim one day to plant a stand of birch, my mother delivering a discourse in canoe building as she swung a pickax into the dark earth of early spring.
.
Even after accounting for the tendency of mourners to say only good things at a funeral, my cousins’ eulogies at Dot’s service stunned me. Who were they talking about? Who would fold her arms around them and pull them up onto her lap? Who always had time to listen and an encouraging word to offer? Who taught them to knit? Who, for the love of god, made sock monkeys for every other child in the universe?
.
Just after World War II, when new siblings and cousins were arriving annually, my maternal grandmother marked our births by making for each of us a red, felt Christmas stocking. Each stocking bore a heraldry of sorts. All stockings ended with a Christmas tree at the toe, blazing with beadwork candles and garlands. The boys’ stockings featured a yellow star and white drum over a rocking horse, while the girls’ symbols were uniformly an angel accompanied by a blue bell. One stocking, however, was so completely different, so anomalous from the others it always invited mocking commentary—mine.
.
Mine was the only stocking to bear the completely secular image of a blue bird whose spread wings, at their apex, were about to push down hard; almost as though they knew from the start that I was destined to fly away. Shortly after my mother’s funeral, I dreamed of a birch stand where a blue bird sang sweetly to me. I walked toward it and extended my hand but it remained on its branch, singing a dream tune of almost unbearable sweetness. I was awakened by the phone; friends calling to invite me to golf.
.
Waiting on the first tee, a western blue bird swooped down from the high sky to land in a nearby tree. The western blue bird is almost extinct. People have lived their entire lives in California and never seen one. Even more amazing, of all the variety of trees lining the tee box—fir, aspen, liquid amber, Japanese maple—the blue bird landed on a birch bough and began to sing. I walked slowly up to it and came within five feet of the branch. We looked directly into each other’s eyes for several seconds before it darted away. It followed me the entire round; from branch to branch, from one hole to the next. And for the next twelve months or more, whenever I played golf, a blue bird would arrive at some tee box and stay with me for a while.
.
You may call it what you like. I know that bird was my mother.
Friday, October 1, 2010
Why I Write #2
I come from a family so challenged that, were we a Ronco Popeil slicer ad in which the amazing contraption faithfully shreds and tears as “Quick!," “Effortless!," and “Guaranteed!” urge the buyer on, the words flashing across our screen would be “Suicide!” “Alcoholism!” “Homosexuality!” I mean only to say that I did not have a good rapport with my mother. It is like running headlong into a minefield to write about our mother/daughter relationship, so suffice it to say we didn’t laugh much. “Suffice it to say.” That is my mother’s voice pulling me into her slipstream where I ride along behind her into the orange western sunset. Safe as a bug in a rug. There. See what I mean?
.
“I’m going to rip your arm out of its socket and beat you with the bloody end of it!” “How'd you like a sharp stick in the eye?” “Judas Priest!" Pronounced: JUDE assed preeeeeeest. These were some of my mother’s favorite expressions. She could turn a phrase better than anyone else. Even when I was being beaten and she was screaming abuse at me, I would reflect with pride on how the things I heard my mother say, I never heard anybody else say. I believed she could talk the blue down from the sky and I was intensely in awe of that. Is that when I first wanted to be a writer?
.
My mother's name was Dorothy, the inverse of Theodore. Both names mean 'gift of god;' one forward, the other in reverse. I loved listening to my mother. Those mornings before I started school and her friend Clara would come for coffee, I would pretend to play quietly nearby but secretly, I was listening. I wanted to hear the stories, hear her voice change as she confided a secret or again when she told of a betrayal. I learned that she believed the most outrageous things. Pranks too idiotic to be believed by any but the most gullible had become certified urban legends by the time she got hold of them and still she fell for them.
.
I once overheard her talking with a woman from her PTA. They were discussing Betty Bonette whose husband was a salesman and traveled quite a bit. Casting a sideways look at me, which I knew to mean she was speaking in code, the PTA woman began telling my mother about Betty's 'lady problem.' My mother said she'd talked to Betty. She swore the source of Betty's problem was yellow toilet paper; dyes used to make toilet paper match your bathroom walls rather than plain white. The way her friend looked at her made me realize my mother was insane. Yellow toilet paper was all Betty had to explain herself to the world. It was good enough to sucker the woman who raised me.
.
There was another story about a friend of a friend of someone’s cousin who bought a coat made in India. It was the end of the season and the woman put the coat away, placing it in a box and sliding it to the back of her closet. When the chilly season arrived again, the women pulled the box from the dark, warm back of her closet and slipped it on. Immediately, she felt it squirm as though alive. She died when the poisonous vipers just hatched from the eggs that had incubated for months in the lining of the coat devoured the first food they could find. I love that story. My mother actually believed it. She would just swallow anything hook, line, and sinker.
.
One of the last times I saw Dot, I had just returned from Italy. I was showing her pictures of Roman catacombs. Even though she tried to be appreciative, I could see that she was growing more upset with each new view of stacked skulls and crossed arm bones. I asked whether it was too macabre. She looked at me without comprehension, as though I were speaking Urdu. What then? "It's just. . . well, how will these people find their bodies on Judgement Day if their bones are all mixed up?" I looked at her as though she were speaking in tongues. "What will they take up into heaven with them?"
.
My mother’s voice is always with me, absorbed into the very fabric of my psyche where she broadcasts a show 24/7 on the internal station of the superego that Annie Lamont calls radio K-FUCKED. She died in April, my mother, the month Demeter trades places with her daughter Persephone in hell to renew the world. On the day of mom's funeral, in Wisconsin, the sun shone fiercely against the crystal clear late winter ice. Then it snowed, the wind came up, it rained, washing the snow and ice away, lighting split the sky, and lilac bushes exploded in ecstasy behind garages and along fences everywhere filling the air with an aching desire for another chance at life. The service had nothing of my mother in it; only her ashes, the charred remains. She had already been sucked to the underworld.
.
When I write, Dorothy returns from Hades and gets to work subverting the narrator. I have the story arc, but mom has the voice. It’s not like hearing her voice inside my head. What happens is that I begin to see the world the way she saw it and the only way I can capture the images that unwind when I write is to use her language. I sometimes suspect the only reason I write is her voice. To hear it again.
.
Aside from the engineering satisfactions of the craft, the major reason I write is that the time I spend working through a story is the time my mother and I have the most civil conversation of our lives despite the fact she has been dead for years. In an imaginary space where I can reinvent her as I need her, we get lost in each other. Lulled by our temparary truce, I operate comfortably in my own skin, feeling safe enough to be like her, to adopt her expressions and manner of speaking while she, like the good witch in a fairy tale, sees and speaks what is in my heart.
.
“I’m going to rip your arm out of its socket and beat you with the bloody end of it!” “How'd you like a sharp stick in the eye?” “Judas Priest!" Pronounced: JUDE assed preeeeeeest. These were some of my mother’s favorite expressions. She could turn a phrase better than anyone else. Even when I was being beaten and she was screaming abuse at me, I would reflect with pride on how the things I heard my mother say, I never heard anybody else say. I believed she could talk the blue down from the sky and I was intensely in awe of that. Is that when I first wanted to be a writer?
.
My mother's name was Dorothy, the inverse of Theodore. Both names mean 'gift of god;' one forward, the other in reverse. I loved listening to my mother. Those mornings before I started school and her friend Clara would come for coffee, I would pretend to play quietly nearby but secretly, I was listening. I wanted to hear the stories, hear her voice change as she confided a secret or again when she told of a betrayal. I learned that she believed the most outrageous things. Pranks too idiotic to be believed by any but the most gullible had become certified urban legends by the time she got hold of them and still she fell for them.
.
I once overheard her talking with a woman from her PTA. They were discussing Betty Bonette whose husband was a salesman and traveled quite a bit. Casting a sideways look at me, which I knew to mean she was speaking in code, the PTA woman began telling my mother about Betty's 'lady problem.' My mother said she'd talked to Betty. She swore the source of Betty's problem was yellow toilet paper; dyes used to make toilet paper match your bathroom walls rather than plain white. The way her friend looked at her made me realize my mother was insane. Yellow toilet paper was all Betty had to explain herself to the world. It was good enough to sucker the woman who raised me.
.
There was another story about a friend of a friend of someone’s cousin who bought a coat made in India. It was the end of the season and the woman put the coat away, placing it in a box and sliding it to the back of her closet. When the chilly season arrived again, the women pulled the box from the dark, warm back of her closet and slipped it on. Immediately, she felt it squirm as though alive. She died when the poisonous vipers just hatched from the eggs that had incubated for months in the lining of the coat devoured the first food they could find. I love that story. My mother actually believed it. She would just swallow anything hook, line, and sinker.
.
One of the last times I saw Dot, I had just returned from Italy. I was showing her pictures of Roman catacombs. Even though she tried to be appreciative, I could see that she was growing more upset with each new view of stacked skulls and crossed arm bones. I asked whether it was too macabre. She looked at me without comprehension, as though I were speaking Urdu. What then? "It's just. . . well, how will these people find their bodies on Judgement Day if their bones are all mixed up?" I looked at her as though she were speaking in tongues. "What will they take up into heaven with them?"
.
My mother’s voice is always with me, absorbed into the very fabric of my psyche where she broadcasts a show 24/7 on the internal station of the superego that Annie Lamont calls radio K-FUCKED. She died in April, my mother, the month Demeter trades places with her daughter Persephone in hell to renew the world. On the day of mom's funeral, in Wisconsin, the sun shone fiercely against the crystal clear late winter ice. Then it snowed, the wind came up, it rained, washing the snow and ice away, lighting split the sky, and lilac bushes exploded in ecstasy behind garages and along fences everywhere filling the air with an aching desire for another chance at life. The service had nothing of my mother in it; only her ashes, the charred remains. She had already been sucked to the underworld.
.
When I write, Dorothy returns from Hades and gets to work subverting the narrator. I have the story arc, but mom has the voice. It’s not like hearing her voice inside my head. What happens is that I begin to see the world the way she saw it and the only way I can capture the images that unwind when I write is to use her language. I sometimes suspect the only reason I write is her voice. To hear it again.
.
Aside from the engineering satisfactions of the craft, the major reason I write is that the time I spend working through a story is the time my mother and I have the most civil conversation of our lives despite the fact she has been dead for years. In an imaginary space where I can reinvent her as I need her, we get lost in each other. Lulled by our temparary truce, I operate comfortably in my own skin, feeling safe enough to be like her, to adopt her expressions and manner of speaking while she, like the good witch in a fairy tale, sees and speaks what is in my heart.
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