Because we all have to start somewhere.
(Re: my previous post, I’m not really here. Consider this a 2-minute creative warm-up to start my writing day. Or a friendly wave hello.)
photography
Ring-a-ding-ding
Ring out the old, ring in the new
Ring, happy bells, across the snow
The year is going, let him go
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
This was my personal note from The Universe today:
| I want you to know, Mary, that I’ve ordered up another year for you.Think I’ll call it 2014.
I’m going to put most of the same people from 2013 in it, since you all think so much alike. But there’ll also be a few new, very cool cats coming to play – give them some time to grow up though. And I’m going to have things start off pretty much exactly where they left off in 2013, for continuity’s sake. Flips folks out too much when I don’t. All in all, 365 more days in paradise… and only one request of you: DREAM BIGGER. Coolio? Let’s do this, |
Dream bigger. That sounds good to me. I like that I get my own little note every day from The Universe. I wake up to them and they always make me smile. It’s like getting a text from a friend every morning that says, Wake-y, wake-y, you gorgeous creature, you! And you have to believe it, because a friend like that would never lie to you.
Notes from the Universe is just one of the oh-so-many interesting things I discovered through the internet this year. There are blogs out there, writers who lift me up or break my heart with their words, music–OMG!–the music being played, spoken word poetry, photography, art. I feel like I spent most of the year in a chair. Only to discover (on the internet) that sitting too much will make you die.
So it goes.
Last December 31st I blogged about choosing a word for the new year. One word that I would keep as a source of inspiration, to think on when I needed it. I chose, RISE. I like how that worked out for me. This year I’ll take the word DARE along for the ride.
I have big plans for 2014. There are adventures waiting for me. After a full and satisfying year of blogging, and discovering kindred spirits, I am going to take a break from all things internet-related in order to write. Non-stop, seat-of-my-pants, finish-my-damn-book writing. It’s time. Look for me in about a month.
Before I go, though, I want to add my voice to the happy throng wishing friends and family well. May 2014 be your best New Year ever.
Cheers and love, people. Always, the love.
The perfect tree
This is not an ordinary Christmas tree. This tree (though you may not be able to tell at first glance) is perfect. It is our tree, the one that grew to just the right size and then waited for us to find it. Every year there is one and only one tree for us, and we always find it, we always do. And it is perfect. Every year.
See those little red bows, like the notes of a perfect song, scattered over the branches? Those bows are from our first Christmas spent in this house, which was newly built with purpose and unfailing energy, and mostly by our own hands. I made those bows from a fat spool of ribbon and some gold thread that I bought at the Christmas Tree Shops for practically nothing, because we had so little money that year (the house had eaten most of what we had). And though, they’re hard to pick out in the photo, there are the wicker ornaments, swirled in strands of red and green thread, that we got on our belated Mexican honeymoon just weeks before.
Our life together hangs on that tree. The Boy’s first dough ornaments; the clay ornaments I made; favorite friends Pikachu and Woody (who still swings his lariat from one of the branches); tiny lockets that hold our Boy’s sweet face with forever smiles at ages two, and five, and seven. The places we’ve been and the things we’ve seen. All of them carried home to remember the fun: The Pinocchio and nutcrackers with movable legs; the crowns and the stars and the snowy white owl; a streetcar emblazoned with the year we saw San Francisco. A clown on a unicycle found in a shop that we’d stepped into to escape the frigid Montreal air.
Our family and our friends, the ones still living, and those who have gone, are there. In ornaments hand made and store bought, given in love and accepted with gratitude.
Our tree is perfect because it reminds us of what we have and what we’ve shared. When the Boy was small, the bedtime ritual once the tree went up, was to turn off all the lights, save the ones on the tree, and then the three of us sat together and admired the tree. My husband and I still do this some nights, though the Boy is gone to a place of his own. We sit sometimes, in the glow of the lights, nostalgic as parents of grown children often are. And, even in that there is perfection.
We are blessed.
May you all be, as well.
Shine a light
My brother and his trusty Bic lighter.The boy in the photo above is my brother Tom. My mother named him Thomas, but we all called him Tommy. At seventeen he dubbed himself Tomas (pronounced toe-mas, accent on the second syllable). He took to wearing sunglasses and being quietly mysterious. It was the first of many personas he would try on for size while looking for how he fit in the world.
It wasn’t easy for him, figuring it out. He had a handicap from the start: Youngest of seven; born colicky, and needing a lot of soothing in a busy, boisterous family. He was often lost in the fray.
At two he fell through the heating vent in the bedroom floor, bumped accidentally by another brother as they jumped on my parents’ bed. He landed in the dining room below, barely missing the table. Astonishingly, other than scaring the hell out of us, and knocking the wind out of himself, he was fine.
When he was three, I dumped scalding hot food on him. Also an accident. A pressure cooker containing what was meant to be our dinner exploded when I tried to lift the lid. Tommy was standing by my side. I was blown backwards, while lava-hot meat and potatoes shot straight up from the pot and rained down on his back. I can’t remember how long he was in the hospital, but I do remember feeding him ice cream there. The scars never went away.
After that he managed to make it through the rest of his childhood and adolescence with only the usual bumps and scrapes. But he was always kind of quiet and a little aloof. He liked to climb trees where he would sit for hours looking out at the world. I asked him a few times what he thought about up there, but he wouldn’t tell me. I think he was dreaming what life could be.
Tommy lived with me three times in my life, beginning when he was Tomas at seventeen. I lived in Colorado then. He wanted to finish his last year in high school somewhere other than where he was born. We joined the local Y and worked out together, ran around the indoor track together, then went for donuts afterwards. He wore his sunglasses and skipped classes and shared falafel with the homeless guys who hung out in the park. At the end of the year he went back to my mother.
The next time he came to live with me I had just moved to Rhode Island. He slept in my basement and got a job as a cook in a nursing home within walking distance of my apartment. Eventually he met someone, and moved in with her. He got a job at Electric Boat and learned how to weld the seams of atomic submarines. In his down time he helped my husband and I build our house.
He had a baby with the woman he lived with, a boy who looked a lot like him. He took photos and put them in an album where he wrote things like from father to son and, a man with song and dance not to mention poise across the pages. Then the woman took the baby out of state and had Tom sign a paper relinquishing his paternal rights. He signed it because “it was what she wanted”, but it broke his heart to do so. He never saw his son again.
He tried to fill the hole by being a fabulous uncle to his nephews. He took them for walks and held their hands and watched cartoons with them. He listened to their dreams and understood.
The last time Tom lived with me his life had begun to unravel. By then he’d been diagnosed with a disease that would increasingly stiffen his spine and cause him pain. A few days after he moved in with us, he simply stopped going to work. He was tired of smacking his head on the insides of the submarines he was welding.
When I turned 35 Tom told me that I was old, being just 5 years from 40, as though 40 was near to the end of it all. He must have believed that, since he took himself out of the equation at 33. I’ve written about that choice in a more oblique form elsewhere on this blog.
Today is Tommy’s birthday. By his thinking he would be old. To the rest of my siblings–Amy, Kathy, Jaime, S.K.–and myself, he is still and will always be the youngest, the most fragile of us all who, nevertheless, keeps us buoyed and connected to one another by the memory of his life.
Happy Birthday, little brother. Tonight the light in my window shines for you.
Uncle Tommy with my Boy, taken two weeks before he died.Who do I think I am?
Like my Family Tree – old, propped up, but still growing strong.
My maternal grandmother was full-blooded Mohawk and a devout Catholic. She wanted to be a nun. On her way to that vocation she met my grandfather, a tall, handsome white man who was also a state trooper trying to catch her mother in the act of selling whiskey. It was Prohibition, and Agnes, my great-grandmother owned a speakeasy. My grandparents fell in love, got married, and my grandfather gave up being a trooper to join his new mother-in-law’s business. Not exactly a propitious union. Nevertheless, it produced three daughters. Only my mother, the youngest, survived childhood. I was named Mary for that grandmother, though I never got to meet her. She died when my mother was three.
My paternal grandmother went without a name for weeks after she was born. My great-grandmother, having recently lost an infant son, wanted to wait and see if this baby survived before handing out a name. Finally, one of great-grandma’s sisters looked down at my poor, swaddled grandmother and said she looked like a little pearl. And that’s the name they slapped on the birth certificate. No middle name, just Pearl and her surname, which was Crawford. It embarrassed my grandmother, not having a middle name. When she married she began using the initial from her surname as part of her signature, to legitimize the oddball she always felt she was, as though just the initial of a pretend middle name would make her just like everyone else. It didn’t, and she wasn’t. And that was okay by me.
I’ve never looked farther than three generations behind me. I know nothing besides a handful of family stories that may or may not be true. I might be related to Franklin Pierce, 14th President of the United Sates. I might be related to Daniel Webster, statesman and Massachusetts senator. There might still be a castle in England somewhere with a Stanfield still living in it. I don’t have a pedigree to tout. I know that among the generations whose lives I’ve been told something about, most came from England, Scotland, Ireland, and one at least, from France. Or, like my namesake grandmother’s side of the family, they were already here.
I think a lot about family, about where I come from, and who I am. When I was about seven or eight, I would stare in a mirror and experience a complete disconnect with the image looking back at me. Who was that person, I used to wonder? The face, the stuff behind the face? Was I real? I had no clue. (What a strange child I must have been.) When I got a little older I searched the faces of my parents and siblings for family resemblances, something that would make me feel like I belonged, but there was such a grab-bag selection of this nose with that jaw and those teeth or eyes, hairlines, cheekbones, hand and foot size that not one of us looked much like the other. (Later my siblings and I would joke about the possibility of a milkman or two being thrown into the mix. Except that we bought our milk at the store.) It still amazes me when I run across families whose members look so remarkably alike that there’s never any question of relatedness.
Like my grandmother, I have also felt like an oddball. Within my immediate family I used to think I could have been a changeling left on the doorstep by trolls. The feeling has abated somewhat in recent years. But, sometimes I still feel a little out of sync with the people around me. What I’m passionate about, what I think about, what I like and don’t like, what I dream.
And I think about the list of ingredients that went into the soup that made me:
A grandmother who thought she’d be wedded to Christ, but chose marriage to another man instead. She left behind a daughter who was raised by so many other people it took her eighty years to find a place where she feels like she belongs.
Another grandmother who, for want of a middle name, thought herself so much less than she actually was.
Bootleggers, gamblers, drinkers, farmers, a failed blacksmith who played the fiddle, house painters, steel workers, bookworms, librarians – dreamers, all.
And something else. I look back and see more than just the sum of what they did with their lives. I look back and see qualities like tenacity, hope, and a desire to be better and farther than from where they began. All those things are good in soup.
DNA is like a magic show. I know that sleight of hand is involved, that the trick isn’t really magic, and sometimes I even know how the trick is done. But it’s still strange and thrilling to observe. How do geese know to fly south? How did they know that there was a “south” in the first place? There are all these questions I have. In my next life, I think that I’ll study genetics.
Or maybe I’ll just learn to sing.
This post brought to you by the DP Weekly Writing Challenge.
Lost
My father threw me in a river once and said, this is how you learn to swim. I don’t remember if I was scared. Only gliding through water so clear I could see everything the world might be made of.
The weightlessness thrilled me. And the cold that warmed me the longer I wore it. I glued my legs together with the wish for a fish tail and propelled my mermaid self through uncharted waters and forgot all the things I thought I knew.
Quiet night, ghostly light
This is what happens on a clear night when I cannot sleep, and the moon is full. I prowl through my house in the dark with a camera. No tripod. Just my own unsteady hand.
It’s playtime.
I prop myself against a wall and shoot, trying to capture the lamp-lit windows of my neighbors’ houses. The shutter stays open for an eternity. My camera weighs a ton. I am not steady enough. The lights look like flames. The reflection from the window throws itself across the room to where I am standing; the moon is a big white puddle on my floor.
The den has a pair of windows and an atrium door – a little more shimmering light. A patch of green appears beyond the balcony. Proof of spring. A tiny voice that whispers, I’m here.
In this room a window placed too high; a mistake I regret making now, but too late to change. A cabala of lights beyond the trees seems to agree. What WERE you thinking they ask.
My studio is a room with four windows and no curtains. I used to paint here. Now I write. The room has been overrun by books. And words.
I love this skulking around the house in the dark, while my husband sleeps, completely unaware that I am up. I feel like a child guarding a secret that no one knows but me.
You must promise not to tell.
A fool and his folly
This is the photo of Stonehenge that set my grandfather’s heart ablaze.There are variations of my grandfather’s story, but I prefer this one. Mostly, because it came from my great-aunt Sophie, and she never said anything that wasn’t true. Or at least, true enough. She was the keeper of our stories. From births to deaths, weddings to wakes; new jobs, new homes, new dreams, if it involved a Webster, Aunt Sophie wrote it down. That job fell to me a few years ago when, at the age of eighty-two, she fell off her bicycle, hit her head, and died.
(Let that be a lesson for you — You are never too old to wear a helmet. Aunt Sophie would back me up on this if she could.)
This story began fifty years ago when Grandpa Webster had a dream. In it he dreamed that his ancestors had been druids, and this pleased him immensely. The whole wise man, mystical nature thing. He thought it might be true. But, when he told others about it, they said — Don’t be daft, you fool. It’s just a dream. So he shut up about it.
Still. A wisp of the dream remained.
Shortly after that grandpa bought a box. He was fond of auctions, and even fonder of bidding on blind boxes – blind in the sense that you had no idea of the contents but were willing to chance that there might be something of value inside. In this instance, the thing of value was the tinted photo of Stonehenge you see above.
How that photograph took hold of my grandfather. He kept it on his nightstand. It was the last thing he looked to before he closed his eyes, and the first thing he saw upon waking, his wife coming in a poor second. But she was patient because she loved him. And she knew about his druid wish. For even a wisp of a dream carries a sweet, smoky odor that a good spouse can smell. She went to the public library and brought back a book — The Stonehenge Myth — and set it next to the photo on my grandfather’s side of the bed.
My grandparents owned a small farm at the time. Eighty acres on which they grew corn and wheat and raised chickens, sheep, and some dairy cows. (My father grew up on this farm and knew before he was eighteen that he wanted something else in life, but that’s another story, for another time.) Four months after his finding the Stonehenge photo, six months after the druid dream, my grandfather dragged home his first big rock, a four foot by two foot slab of stone that he slid off the back of a flat-bed trailer at the end of the sheep field. The neighbors wondered what use could be made from a stone that size, but my grandmother had an inkling.
Over the next six months, my grandfather brought home twelve more boulders and stone slabs of various sizes. He paid his four strapping boys and their friends to help him arrange the stones in a circle. He borrowed a backhoe and a front end loader. He carried the Stonehenge photograph in his shirt pocket, and when people asked him what in blue blazes was he trying to build, he pulled out the photo and handed it to them.
This, he said. I’m building this. It’s iconic.
Some people thought he said ironic.
Over the years, my grandfather and his folly became legend. There were stories told that he danced drunken and naked in the moonlight among those stones. Aunt Sophie said that wasn’t true. She said that he simply found comfort in sitting in that stone circle while the sun rose or set and he could think about the day ahead of or behind him. It brought him peace.
For my father and his brothers, it brought them something else. There were more than a few times when they and their friends dared one another to strip and whoop it up around the rocks. For them, it was a level of coolness others didn’t have.
We were the only kids with Stonehenge in our back yard.
Fifteen years ago, as my grandparent’s fiftieth wedding anniversary approached, their sons wanted to gift them with a trip to England, to see the real Stonehenge, they said. My grandparents turned them down. Why spend all that money, when they were happy with the one they had?
I’m no fool, my grandfather told his boys.
It was the truest thing I ever heard him say.
The Webster family Stonehenge standing in the sheep pasture on the farm. The stones are not as big as they look, certainly not like those at the actual Stonehenge, but they’re good enough for dancing around in the moonlight.n.b. This is not a true story. It is fiction. I wanted to see if I had a photo that was iconic to me (for the Weekly WP Writing Challenge), and then make up a story to fit the picture. Also, I have been to the real Stonehenge. I wasn’t allowed to dance around the stones, though, naked or otherwise.
Hark, a buzz . . . and then a light
I am a back sleeper. A plank. I don’t move in my sleep or thrash about, even in the midst of dreams. And I do dream. A lot. I am dreaming now, of a sound. It’s the sound of an angry bee somewhere very nearby. I am terrified of bees. I have never been stung, but I know it will hurt. In fact, I am quite sure that I will die. But right now, I can’t find the bee, I can only hear it, and the fearful part of my brain that is not ready to die from a bee sting becomes more shrill than the buzzing noise. It shrieks at me: Wake up!
Then I open my eyes and see a light.
How much time does it take to realize that the light emanates from my cell phone? And how much more to comprehend the source of the buzzing? Nano seconds, perhaps. It feels longer, but I know it cannot be. I reach for the phone and push the on button, wondering who could this be? There are no words in the text. Only a photograph.
In the darkness and the silence, the photo glows. A sphere of dark shapes are surrounded by swirling colors – yellow, pink, blue, and green. Who sent this to me, and why? Is it a mistake? The number is not one I know.
It is impossible to think rationally when pulled from dreams and presented with a puzzle. I try to go back to sleep. Instead, I wonder about the person who sent a photo without explanation at 2AM. A stranger reaching out to someone else in the middle of the night. My head is filled with thoughts of wrong numbers and missed connections. I think about strangers, about all the people there are in the world, and how we are most of us strangers to one another. Stranger danger . . . Danger, danger, Will Robinson. We teach our children to run away.
Somewhere a clock is ticking, but I cannot sleep. My head is crammed with thoughts of strangers. Of long ago hook-handed madmen who lurked in the dark waiting for lovers to park. Of boogie-men and nightmares that carry us away; of drowning, falling, flying. Of noises that bother, unexplainable and irksome, buzzing, buzzing, and then once again back to bees. . . .
Beware the sound of a vibrating phone in the middle of the night. If it wakes you no good can come of it.
You have been warned.
There are so many things I should have been doing today. This was too good a challenge to pass up.
We can’t always be good
I used to be a really picky eater when I was growing up. I liked spinach (which is weird, I know, for a picky eater), mac & cheese (homemade, not a box), pork chops, and pretty much anything that had lots of sugar. That was about it. My tastes broadened as I grew up, but I still leaned heavily toward a fondness for cake and pie and all things chocolate, and when I was feeling especially low – banana splits. Eventually my body reached a point of sugar overload and told me, Quit it, will you?! I decided it was best to listen.
Another thing about me, is that in times of stress and fatigue, I feel like crying.
I’ve been really busy of late. I’m revising a novel that has been a labor of love, but consumes a lot of my time. I’m also co-director of an annual writers’ retreat that is coming up next week. So, in the interest of writing efficiency and mobility, I decided to buy a laptop. And I wanted it to have touch-screen technology. I got online, found the perfect model and ordered it.
When the laptop arrived a few days ago, I unpacked it and went through the process of setting it up. It was zippy and sleek and Windows 8 was actually not bad – BUT <—- (big but) – the display was NOT a touch-screen like I ordered.
Bugger, hell.
It took me two days of phone calls and waiting on hold and emailing and waiting for responses to my email, and then calling and holding again, before I finally had a prepaid UPS label to slap on that sucker and send it back.
It was the last phone call that did me in, though. After establishing (with the third person I talked to) that it was, indeed, the wrong item, the returns rep asked me if I would consider keeping it if they gave me 5% off. I said, “No. It’s not what I ordered!”
And then she asked, “Would you keep it if we give you 10% off?”
I knew I was in trouble. My eyes welled up, and my voice took on that quavery underwater tone. “No! I just want to return it.” I felt like I was begging.
I finally found what I wanted locally and for $170 less, so my misery wasn’t all for naught. But by the time I brought the right laptop home, I was feeling battered and fragile, and I needed, REALLY NEEDED to listen to my mood and tell my body to just shut up for the time being.
And my mood was saying, Give me sugar!
So I did.
Chocolate ice cream, enrobed in fudge, and wrapped in Belgian milk chocolate. Because sometimes you have to have something bad for you, so it might as well be good.
And in the wise words of Robert Frost . . . that has made all the difference.
A Wilderness of Words 