What I Remember

(Warning:  The word "remember" is used a lot in this post!)

I started thinking about this several months ago: I can't remember a single birthday party from my childhood.

I quizzed my siblings about it and they had a few memories, but most of them were things like I remember when my eyelashes caught on fire from the candles, I remember that Mr. Pennisi was missing one year (a friend who was murdered), I remember friends being mean to me. They also remembered good things, certain people who were at the parties, and that my grandmother made the cake.

From trying to remember my birthday parties, I've been really concentrating on what else I don't remember, but then of course I can't think of those things because I don't remember them!  But when I put together a list of what I do remember, it looks like this:

I remember when my grandmother pointed to a freckle on my foot and I was embarrassed.

I remember when I fell off my bike and slid down the hill on the side of my face. I remember going to school the next day, being in the cafeteria and very self-conscious of the bandage on my face.

I remember eating black construction paper in kindergarten (I was a paper addict) and the teacher jerking me off the swing, making me swish out my mouth with milk and how she called my mother to come get me.

I remember being afraid to go to the school store in first grade to buy a pencil and how my school birthday party got snowed out.

I remember being very homesick at my grandparents house and my aunt getting mad at me for it.

I remember eating cheese doodles and drawing with crayons and eating a crayon instead of a cheese doodle.

I remember the dark room where my sister and I went to Bible School at Carolina Beach.

I remember crawling on the floor looking for a needle that my mother dropped and it sticking in my wrist. I remember my mother trying to pull it out (only the thread was visible) and how I sensed her panic.

I remember standing on a stool and it tipping over.  The leg hit me in the stomach and knocked the breath out of me.  My grandfather said, "I told you not to do that."

In short, a lot of the things I remember about being a very small kid aren't the great birthday parties that my mother planned for days or the raft of toys under the Christmas tree.

I do remember a lot of freedom, especially when we were at my grandparents' house at the beach.  We could walk just about anywhere, even as young children. I remember my grandfather rocking me and singing "Red River Valley." I remember my aunt listening to records. I remember looking up to my older cousins. I remember watching the peacock's tail turn colors. But I had to pull those out of my memory, and the others came easily.

I'm not a psychiatrist, so I don't know if we tend to remember the negative and shelve the positive. How about you?  How do your good memories tally up against the bad ones?

Most Loved

(I'm posting in-between times this week because I missed last week. I promise to get back on the Wednesday schedule beginning next week.) 

Today I'm sharing the first draft of a piece I wrote today in honor of Valentine's Day.  It's a little longer than my usual post, but I hope you'll stick around to the end. :) 

It's all too easy to think of February 14 as Lovers' Day instead of Day of Love. Maybe my words will inspire you to think of the day when you felt the most loved.

Most Loved

Hopeless.

That word circled my mind as I listened to my friend talk about her love affair with a married man.

On a trip they took to the coast, lying in bed in a hotel room overlooking the ocean, he told her he adored her. 

“He adored me,” she said, her face pink with love, a small smile unable to be contained.  “No one has ever told me they adored me.”

I think now, this week of Valentine’s Day, of the time when I felt most adored.

We sit on a flowered sofa, my great grandparents and I. There is cake; it is my first birthday. My great grandmother stares straight into the camera, a forkful of cake on its way to her mouth. Her head is wrapped in a scarf and the ties hang over her ample bosom. Black socks and shoes angle on the floor over her bare calves. Her glasses reflect the flash of the camera.

My great grandfather and I are the stars of this photograph though. I am leaning into my great grandmother, a smile lighting my face, my hands playing with each other in that way that children have when they’re so excited that even their hands get into the action. My feet are in motion too and there’s a tiny circle around one of them—from the flash? Today with my new-agey spirituality I might say it’s an orb, an energy ball, a symbol of angels or spirits.

My great grandfather leans away from us, pipe in hand, plate with a slice of cake in his lap.  Black suit—his Sunday suit?—over a tie-less white shirt, hair thick and silver. He stares down at me with the most delight. He adores me, his first great granddaughter on her first birthday.

Their last name was Brown and that’s the color I associate with them.  The brown sugar cookies she used to make, the first thing we’d smell when we walked in their house.  The brown walls and floors, worn with many footsteps, a few blackened places still remaining from a fire that caught up in a bedroom.  The brown boats my great-grandfather used to make.  The print in their kitchen of the little girl holding a brown hen that they always used to say was me.

Of course I don’t remember that day of my first birthday.  But in my father’s things we found many jewels, including old negatives.  The photographs must have been long sent to relatives or put in albums or cleaned out of drawers because we never found them.  At the time I was taking a darkroom class. My own attempts at black and white photography were mediocre so I took the old negatives into the darkened concrete room of the community center to discover the treasures they held.  When I put this negative in the light and saw the three of us on the flowered couch I knew that this was no ordinary occasion, not just a birthday, but a moment in time when I was truly loved.

I understand now, looking at the photograph on my desk, the reasons that my friend doesn’t want to give up this feeling of being adored. I feel lonely for the moment captured on the couch, a moment that I cannot remember.  I don’t blame her for wanting to hang on to it, this unabashed admiration of her lover. I can’t tell her to let it go.

Remember

Today I remember a friend who should have turned 60 today.  We lost a lot. 

He left a lot too.  An incredible legacy of music and art and an example of how to face adversity.

You can honor him and carry a little piece of the beauty he left by ordering this amazing recording of his original music.

Aging, Writing, and Rock & Roll

Today is my birthday, and I've been celebrating in one form or another since Friday night. I think I'm entitled to a whole weekend at my age, don't you?

All week I've been receiving cards from friends and family. And today I've heard from them by phone. My brother's family sang (as did others) but he accompanied the singing on his guitar!



Friday night my husband's band, SPOT, played for a going-away party. There were more people than usual and the crowd was happy and dancing. Now you know that when I quit drinking, I quit dancing, but when Frank Gordon started in on the Ramones' "I Wanna Be Sedated" I had to shake a leg. And then the other leg started shaking and my arms joined in! It was a great night, but I only got four hours of sleep that night.



Yesterday, I went to a workshop facilitated by author Peggy Payne called, "Get Your Ganges On" and it was great. The title of the workshop came from Peggy's own India experience and her feeling that the river is her writing symbol, or the companion on her writing journey. I decided that mine would be a butterfly, a symbol that comes up often around my writing. A butterfly "takes off" in the same way that I would like my writing to do, and it is so beautiful that people often say, "Oooooh" or "Whoa, how gorgeous" in ways that I would like to hear them talk about my work! Here is a doodle I did of a dammed river:



A few of the tips that I got yesterday:

1. Drop the self-consciousness around my writing.
2. Continue to learn the craft of writing.
3. Manage my time in a way that enables me to think of my writing first instead of after "everything is done".
4. Keep my hands in the writing sandpile, touching base with my work often.
5. Connect with my higher power and see my writing as a collaboration between me and the Great Energy. (I loved this!)
6. Learn to recognize resistance in all its forms.

As the day started, I began to notice that certain words came up over and over. And oddly enough, they all began with F. I thought of them as the f-words of writing: Fear, focus, flow, fire. I order them this way because they reflect the order of the writing process: First we are afraid to write, so we focus on the craft and lose our self-consciousness, soon our words begin to flow, and finally we are on fire!

If you ever have a chance to work with Peggy, take it. She wrings good stuff out of me, and leaves me worn out but motivated and excited to carry on.

This has been such a good birthday weekend that next year I may try for a birthday month! At my age, you know....