What We Were

My mother called on a Tuesday night to tell me my dad was dead.

I can't say with certainty it was a Tuesday. It may have been a Thursday. At any rate it was a night I'd made quick plans with friends. I made them before the announcement and kept them even after. In fact, I was on the elevated platform at Damen, waiting on a Blue Line to take me into Logan Square - to the California stop. A squalid area of town, over trodden by gear-less bicycles and remnants of scattered street gangs.

Courtney had called. She was broke and thought to order chinese. She asked me three times what I wanted to order and discerned the exact amount due, down to the prorated delivery tip. She'd be there with Tyler and Jason, additional friends who had become my friends by default. Their gang of three was how I'd spend most weekends.

We drank a lot, most weekends. Sometimes I lost track of entire evenings. I'd often awake, on their sofa, too-early for notice and would leave amusing notes on their refrigerator door. I never really had much to say to them, nor they me, but we kept each other company, for what felt like half a year, the year I returned to Chicago, following my college graduation and the impending death of my father.

I suppose I should speak of my anger. Not the anger that surfaced then, but the bottom-heavy, spit-fire rage that surfaces now. It’s now six years since that night, and I'd all but forgotten the set-up. And I can't attribute some bad memory to this instant recall. Rather, Jeff, a friend of late, made mention of how he was leaving for the weekend to attend a friends' father's funeral.

“That's a good thing to do,” I said.

“I don't know what to do. I hope being there will help.”

“That's a good thing to do,” I repeated. “You are a good friend.”

This was recorded on online chat during the early working hours of a Tuesday. They say memory is what you make of it, but I refuse to believe it, because if I could make what I would of it, I'd make it lovely. I'd surround myself with comfort. I'd charm with witticisms and seek condolences from thoughtful friends.

But instead I arrived, swollen eyed and lost. No one knew what to do. Jason and Tyler were entertaining further guests. Courtney tried to talk, but found little to say and only succeeded in apologizing for asking this, “but could I pay her for the chinese?”.

I ate nothing and left every grain of rice in its box at their house.

Paying for the chinese I left, with little fanfare.

Jeff really got to me. Being so present. Being attentive. But he also reflects the we of five years later. I don't know that he would think to act as he did, were he in that dingy Chicago apartment with a forlorn friend who poked at her fried rice aimlessly in silence. What would he have said, to the father-less me? Could he have comforted me? I'm not so sure.

The gang of four quickly dissipated, but only in my exit. The three still commune, attend one another's weddings and probably, if need-be sit in on respective family funerals. The notion is consoling.

But then, what of this anger? I could compartmentalize, make sense of this flood of feelings, but really, what's the point? I miss my dad, yes, just as I miss the nights I drank to forget his illness. I don't know if that changes with age. Perhaps Jeff is just wise. Or maybe I've soured. Still yet we can consider this an inconvenient recall, and reinvent the narrative. Which might also bring some joy.

The Poetry of Guilt

Guilt is a poetic emotion.

As poetry is about balance, about light and dark, about giving and taking

As is guilt.

Guilt

From action
From inaction

For not providing someone an opportunity
For stealing another’s opportunity

For not being good enough
For being better

For hurting another
For hurting yourself
For not being hurt at all.

Guilt is directly connected to empathy. If we cannot put ourselves into another’s shoes, if we cannot understand their pain – we cannot feel guilty about causing said pain, or failing to relieve it. Guilt makes us human.

Holding on to guilt beyond a natural cycle of intellectual analysis and stages of emotional change, will make us sick. Rot us from the inside. Make us anxious, depress us. It weighs us down, it causes sleepnessness – guilt itself becomes dangerous.

But a lack of guilt is also dangerous. The lack of guilt is an identifiable characteristic of a psychopath.

If time travel were an option we could return to the moment of action (or inaction) and start over. Make a different decision. Be not in that place at that time. Or be there, but let it be someone else who walks away with guilt.

But we cannot look back. We cannot take back past actions.

There is only one direction in which to move.

We learn in yoga to let go of anything that does not serve us.

Letting go does not mean forgetting, but it does mean moving forward.

Poetry is complex, difficult to understand and slow to process.

As is guilt.

The Books

At the beginning there were no books.

The books were still in boxes, with most other things.

The books had been torn from their shelves like cotton in summer’s high heat, taped tightly into cardboard containers -- disorganized. In the rush to leave DC, without another tear soaking the burr burr carpet, the books were packed according to size, Tetris’ed into tight spaces for conservative packaging. These books were not used to sharing mixed company.

Hughes and MacLean were in tight quarters, which may have not bothered Hughes, but most certainly would have prompted an adjustment in the pacemaker of MacLean. Conrad and Greene brushed Hearts, but they had done so enough times before that the close proximately provided solace. Heller and O’Toole did not find each other as entertaining as one might think, and DuBois and Hawthorne were equally as unimpressed.

Together they took a long journey, though, secured among dressers and chairs, picture frames and pencil sharpeners, in the back of the orange branded UHaul truck. Before, before they had been in the truck, before they had been in boxes, they had learned to share shelves with strangers. Mostly women, many aggressive, some silent as the night. They were not impressed with the thought of finding new shelves, after they had finally settled into the warping warm curve of the built ins of the basement apartment.

Starting over is not the forte of paper people. It is not the forte of people made of flesh, for that matter.

When the truck had unloaded, when the tape was pulled back, and the books transplanted to new milk-crates and vertical domiciles, they shuffled a little. They shuffled and sighed and settled. They found comfort in being back with their categorical comrades, and looked fondly upon the tiny tears in their pages brought on by the journey they had survived.

Birds once Bees

Eleanor used to say, “Now we're cooking with gas”, and Ray “that'll be the day” again and again in everyday conversation. They would say it in tandem. Ray would speak over El, El over Ray and their propensity to anticipate each other didn't stop with movie catch phrases. If one watched television, the other turned a radio dial. When disciplining one child, another was sure to hear hell. They had a natural buoyancy unsuitable for anything outside the realm of elastic love. So that when El complained, Ray atoned. When El lamented, Ray purchased. When El thumbed through a photo album of Ray making memories and spoke of her happiness for the first time in years, Ray died.

All I ever knew of my grandparents were their differences. Blue and pink, coffee and tap water, brick and linen. We would play a game of conversation tennis. Anyone other than my grandmother and grandfather would lob their head from one side to the other whenever they spoke. Arguments weren't heated, nor were they controlled. They lobbed up and down like strokes of a wave. So it never felt threatening. No one anticipated a divorce or a scandal. We all sat, seasick in our seats, waiting for one or the other to do one thing so we could witness its opposite. Ray would tend to the cherry tomatoes. El would read the diary of her youngest daughter.

I had asked my mother what she considered the opposite of death when I received the news. She opened her mouth and said, “birth”. She said it clearly, using its one syllable naturally and with good ease. She always wore her shoulders high and lifted her chin in ways they teach graduates of Ivy Leagues. And my father, who could lift a chin himself, was known to follow suit. I could ask him, but he'd say “birth” too. My mother would knot my father's tie. My father would pick lint off my mothers blouse.

Hands held they ushered me to the car. But they fought the whole ride in. Less peaks and lulls of tides and more atom collisions. I pushed back on the soft upholstery of the car seat and longed for the wind to tangle my hair. So I turned the radio up, so loud it drowned the very synchronized voices of my parents. And I asked again.

Post Apocalyptic Suburbia

Re-experiencing the places of my youth feels surreal on a crisp afternoon the first week in November. It is far too warm and exceptionally quiet. It feels like I'm in a movie set and not just a visit to my childhood home. The music from my headphones plays too loud for me to hear my footsteps as I cross streets without fear of collision, the way a rising soundtrack erases the cacophony of the characters on screen during the climax of the film. A sky so blue and a sun so bright seem abnormal and fake, and even eerier because I’m alone. I traverse the neighborhood with no company. Like the Truman Show. Like the Rapture Came. Like I was Left Behind.

In this fictional moment of present day, where I am a character alone in suburbia, I experience a montage of emotional images as I approach the pond by which I spent most of my outdoorsy growing up. From my solo standpoint, my possibly post-apocalyptic perspective, I see with different eyes.

I slow.

There used to be a tiny island in the middle of that pond, complete with its own tiny desert-island-style tree. When my pony tail was so long and knotted, when my sneakers were worn paper thin, when my tan lines were of short sleeves and knee length shorts, I used to sit at the edges of that pond and devise plots to reach the pond. It wasn't far from shore, but swimming and boating weren't allowed and rule-breaking wasn't my thing. Maybe I could come at night, maybe I could Huck-Finn myself a raft; maybe the water in this man-made suburban pond was not as deep as I feared. I just needed to get there.

I stare.

If the pond was man-made, than the island was, too, and now, with the intelligence of maturity, I wonder what that developer imagined as he diagrammed the burgeoning town’s future pond complete with a tiny island; inspiring the imaginations of young children already dreaming of their escape from the American flags and basketball hoops of Edward Scissorhands suburbia. All these years later, after the apocalypse, the setting has changed. The pond remains the same, but the island is gone now. At some point it began to tilt and dip, and eventually it disappeared into the dark water.

It was swallowed by the pond.

I escaped into the city.

Measuring Pain

After six days of lying immobile on the living room floor, watching Tyra Banks, getting sicker and sicker from a mysterious flu-like illness, I was dragged to the ER against my will. In triage, the nurse was kind as I explained my ailments. Looking down she gestured small slips of paper taped to the side of a filing cabinet.

"Can you tell me, using this scale, how much pain you are feeling right now?"

My eyes traced the children's scale first and I thought about the children too young to explain their pain in terms of numbers, pointing to the frowning, crying face in hopes someone could make their pain go away. Feeling sad for sick kids, I moved my eyes to the numbered, adult pain scale asking me to rank my hurt from 1-10.

Looking at the numbered scale, barely able to think through the pain I was terrified I had let progress beyond repair; I couldn’t help but think about Eula Bliss’ non-fiction piece “The Pain Scale". Thinking about “The Pain Scale” reminded me that I was missing class. At that point, the pain of obligation, or the pain of possible failure was greater than the dull cramp in my back or the searing slice through my head when I moved my eyes. I pictured the worlds of "Grey's Anatomy" and "House" and all the death, surprise tumors and incurable illnesses each show featured weekly. Last year the Washington Post reported that between 20 and 25 million Americans tune in each week to watch the sex and drama filled "House". If those 20 to 25 million Americans were also in the ER, waiting to hear the cause of their Tyra Banks filled days of pain, fevers and chills, would they also be thinking about the fictional Seattle Grace Hospital and Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital of TV fame?

I refocus on the scale. I can't think of what kind of pain would cause me to point to the 10. I can’t think about what a “high tolerance” means. Over the course of my illness the pain gradually grew and each day I had accessed the pain by comparing it to other pains: Getting my nose pierced. The tattoo on my hip. Food poisoning. Getting my heart broken. This doesn’t hurt that bad.

Because I was thinking about "The Pain Scale", Grey's Anatomy, my tattoo mile-markers, bad Chinese food and broken hearts, and not solely my current discomfort, I pointed to the 3.

The Mower

Alice had a thing for manicured lawns. Tight cross-hatch patterns to be precise, and she tried everything to emulate the downy green runways of the nearby neighbors. But she couldn’t seem to steer it the same way Christopher’s father could, with his valley of grass six blocks over. She tried a mower of old, with its loud belt and wheel rotations. The one’s that backfire and masticate the green threads until a home’s focal point, the show and tell of an entryway, appeared flat and finished. Roadway paint. That was in part the look she was going for, which she could achieve, but she wanted the coarse, imprinted lines of manual achievement. Mr. Adams’ lawn had lines in perfect symmetry; in and out loops that inspired confidence in invited guests. She was adept at the task. The home was maintained. There were patches of flowers, crude cross-bred bouquets she purchased pre-grown, and tall trees that were sheared some, when necessary. But the blade running lines were never visible, or misaligned or terribly out of focus. So they switched to a modern model, at Christopher’s behest because Alice had too many times since nicked her ankle or shin, enough to warrant worry and once requiring three stitches. Their new make performed much the same way and Alice took to blaming the elements; the mud, sod or soot that was procured to produce the grass. It was an easy argument to make, and one of Christopher’s own coaxing so that the chore itself would be less demanding on her.

There were points of procedure to her mowing. Her mother had lupus, and, as such, was always in hat. Alice learned to thwart the sun at a very early age and grew in the habit of wearing an oversized sun shade, usually loose and drooping in the summer seasons and at most points outdoors. Her hats made her visible, as she pushed the machine across the yard. There was a ketchup stain on the front brim, slightly sticky, from their morning breakfast. Christopher made an omelet. She, hating omelets, and even more their nausea inducing egg scent, shook some frozen potato patties onto a cookie sheet for when she finished mowing. She started early to escape the smell of egg, but in so doing, hurried past Christopher who was just then shaking the ketchup bottle. There was a smear of the viscous paste above her eye. She also hated ketchup.

“It was an accident,” he said, still shaking.

“It smells like shit in here.”

And she started up the mower for the third time that week.