Memoirs of a Frequent Flier
It was in the spring of 1953 when I first realized that I could fly. It had been coming on by degrees—first in dreams, where I would hold my arms straight out, crucifixion style, and then pump them straight up and down until I rose from the ground to float through the air, feet hanging straight down below me, swimming through the air propelled by those pumping arms.
In the dreams, no one ever noticed me. Not the other kids playing “New Orleans” in my yard below me, not my dad out mowing the grass or my mom hanging clothes on the line. Birds flew by in their usual manner without changing their course, whizzing by so close to my ears that I became convinced that I was invisible to all nature–man and beast.
I was never stung by mosquitos when I was in flying mode, and for some reason, even during that long summer two years later when I was eight years old and flying every day, it never rained when I was flying. A few times the first raindrop fell just as my feet came into contact with the ground and I had to shift my mind to remember how to move my legs to propel myself and avoid getting soaked to the skin by one of those July rainstorms so dreaded by farmers trying to get their summer wheat crop combined before the heavy rain, or even worse, hail.
Hail! What would happen if it were to hail while I was flying? Would I be able to soar above the hail—to watch it fall to the earth below me–a wall of white water stones creating themselves just inches below my toes and falling straight down away from me? Could I see them forming? Turning to ice where seconds before there had been nothing, each one of millions a little miracle in itself?
I don’t remember how old I was when I stopped flying. All I can remember is one day remembering that I used to fly, long before, and wondering if the whole experience of that long summer when I was eight and less frequently in the years afterwards were just memories stitched together from dreams. Like so many other things, I can remember clearly when they began but have no memory of when they stopped. Perhaps they haven’t. Perhaps only the memory of this talent unique to me has faded, daily, as soon as my feet touch earth.
But I wonder, in these days of drones so easily and cheaply purchased on the internet, if flight such as mine has become an impossibility. With more people looking up at the sky, what is my likelihood of avoiding being noticed and if I were noticed, what effect would it have on my life? All the news agencies would call. Then Oprah and perhaps even the president. Perhaps Donald Trump would call wanting to make me into a reality show. Perhaps I’d be encouraged to launch a blog penned from above. How high up does Wi-Fi go, I wonder, and would I have to attach a Wi-Fi antenna to a beanie on my head and post the blog orally as both hands would be necessary for my flight, to prevent my plummeting to earth?
No, better that this miracle of flight be left behind with other marks of my adolescence: pimples and wet dreams and all those insecurities of coming of age. Perhaps they were what prompted my need to raise myself above it all. Now that I am well past being fully matured and in fact have embarked on that course that will eventually result in my sinking back into that earth I once rose above, I can make do with pleasures of that earth—chocolate and fresh ripe figs and a 5 o’clock Martini enough to raise me above the norm. And that truth that once I was unique is enough to assure that I still am—here in my Barclay Lounger with my New Yorker Magazine, my feet up on the step stool and commands that I can give through air simply by a push of the finger via remote control. Checking in to Oprah to see who she has found to fill my place this week. Keeping my secret. Knowing how thrilled she would have been. Rating my potential story against theirs. And in my own mind, I know that I would rise above them all.
Closets
The signs of my leaving were clear. Closets were open in every location of the house where clothes could be stored, for gradually over the years, as each family member in turn left our house, they left not only a space in my heart, but also an extra closet for me to appropriate.
The front bedroom, which had been first Jodie’s room and then Chris’s—stepchildren now gone on to new lives—was now the guardian of my heavy winter coats, extra robes and the too-flamboyant clothes of my thirties. In the basement closet of what had formerly been a guest bedroom, then converted into my metalsmithing studio, I stored sizes 10 through twelve, suggestive lingerie from my past, Halloween costumes and spring jackets.
My “fat” clothes, unfortunately, were presently residing in the closets of the master bedroom–size 14 through 16 in my own closet, sizes 18 through 1X hanging like abandoned lives in “my” portion of Bob’s closet, his clothes having been culled by five of his kids and their spouses and girlfriends who, just weeks ago, had gathered for his funeral. I wish I had taken a photo of them as they stood around the nearly empty TV room, each of them in a pair of his wild pants or one of his t-shirts or both, wearing their recently departed dad or near-dad like a skin. He had been a wild dresser. Red suede sneakers, drawstring puffy-legged pants we’d had made from batik in Bali, Guatemalan shirts.
Now, beside his few remaining garments, hung mine. It was like a major filing system spread throughout the house. Unfortunately, clothes seemed to migrate from closet to closet–my hot pink suede cowboy boots walking over for a visit with my old office clothes or my winter capes winding up mysteriously amidst teddies and feather boas.
So it was that closet doors all over the house stood open as I searched for items that would cover climatic necessities from thirty below zero to tropical.
The floor was covered by my big suitcase and my small suitcase, peeled open like bananas awaiting their stuffing. Around the suitcases, the floor was littered by various personal items that had spilled out from a dropped cardboard box. I lay belly down now, my hand swinging out in arcs in search of the flashlight which had rolled under the bed when it tumbled from the box.. Like the Halloween “body parts” game wherein in a darkened room a peeled grape became an eyeball and cold spaghetti was reputed to be intestines, my hand skittered over various small objects. A dust ball that felt like a small mouse, hairpins, paperclips, a missing black sock, before finally settling on the flashlight .
I tossed it into the front zippered compartment of my canvas suitcase. I believed in being prepared for any contingency in travel and so I carried a mini drugstore that would cover emergencies from scorpion bite to constipation as well as a small tool kit, flashlight, book light, alarm clock and mini umbrella all tucked into the front two zippered sections of my suitcase that I had dubbed my “utility” compartments.
“You won’t need all that stuff,” Jayson had told my as he surveyed my knitted muffler and mittens and winter coat. “Isn’t it pretty much hot all year round in Mexico?”
“Yes, but I have friends and relatives in Wyoming and Minnesota. I might visit them. Or take that trip up the west coast of Canada to the Northwest Passage that Bob and I always meant to take. No need to have to buy new clothes. And the Mexico house has lots of closets, too.”
Surreptitiously, I slipped Bob’s Mudcloth African shirt ornamented with the x-shaped metal studs into one of the boxes, along with a pair of Bali pants the daughters-in-law had overlooked, and his “Art Can’t Hurt You” T-shirt that I had thought would be cremated with him, but instead had arrived back intact with his ashes, along with his red suede sneakers, another pair of batik pants and his metal dental crown, complete with fake teeth. I packed them, too, setting aside his cremation urn, for which I had a special place. The family would all come down to Mexico in the spring to help my spread his ashes in Lake Chapala. In the mountains above it was the beautiful domed house we had meant to make our retirement home, but we had waited too long to find it. Now I would soon start the long journey down to it, from Boulder Creek, CA to Mexico, where I would fill out the closets of a new home.
I folded my Mother’s Japanese cotton kimono jacket and slid it into the box. It had been an old man’s housejacket, my Japanese friend had told me, and please not to wear it when I met her family. But, my mother and I had loved it when we found it in Nobu, a Japanese shop in Santa Monica, and she had worn it for years before dying just three months before Bob and I left for Mexico to find a new home, buy it, and return to California to sell our home of 14 years. Two months later, although we had not sold the house, we had sold most of its contents. We had packed most of the van—mainly with books and tools, reserving packing our clothes to the very end, thinking we could perhaps stick them into the cracks between other items–– before discovering, during our last-minute medical check-ups, that he had cancer. He lived for three weeks.
So, I’d be moving alone to Mexico, but would always have the option to be surrounded by my dearly departed. My closets would be full of my own past and present selves, but one small portion of them would carry Bob and my mother with me as well.
This is the last group of photos I took after Yolanda and I worked on the studio all day long to get art supplies inherited from my dear friend Gloria incorporated into my already-full studio. It felt wonderful to be able to even get in the door again and the doggies ended up spending the night with me there, too. When I finally noticed what time it was it was 5 a.m.!!!!
I hate it that I made a huge mistake while editing photos. I saw a small version of several that looked like they were mistakes and omitted them.. only find out while i was editing the others that something was missing. When I tried to pull a brush out of the tall glass I had all of the brushed in the first photo in, it wouldn’t budge… nor would any of them! It turns out that the glass I put them into was full of glue.. don’t know how this happened… but all of them were imbedded firmly into it! I finally got them pulled out en masse but had to cut off the ends of all of the handles to free them. I took photos of them stuck in the glue and also as I was cutting them of with heavy-duty gardening shears. So disappointed in my flub.
For Bushboy’s Last on the Card prompt
The Royal Poinciana trees are blooming all over town. My favorite tree! I mourn the loss of my tree two years ago and need to find another place to plant one as the soil around it they say is infested with a fungus that will kill it again.
These glorious trees are still blooming all over town. I want to stop and photograph every one I see, but usually resist.
For Becca’s Sunday Trees prompt.
I think I said recently that I have just published my 10,000th blog during which I have written 1 or 2 poems every day for thirteen years making use of up to 6 prompts per poem.
A week and a half ago,I read a number of those poems to a large writing group I belong to and one comment was that I should vary my line length and not have all the poems rhymed and metered. It then occurred to me that given one poem at a time, this wasn’t obvious, but listening to them 12 minutes at a time might not be as effective. Then I imagined an entire book of them… and started thinking about the four completed but unpublished books that have been sitting in their folders on a shelf all these years along with hundreds of essays and short stories and other poems written earlier and realized that it was the 11 to 13 hours I spent online everyday that were keeping me from seeing these projects through.
So, I spent the rest of the day looking up and rewriting some of these chapters and essays and poems and I’ve decided that instead of doing the prompts for the next 13 years, I am going to publish on my blog some of the edited chapters and essays and stories and poems from the past. I will be interested in your thoughts about this. I imagine my readership might fall off since I won’t necessarily be linking them to the usual prompt sites, but I hope some of you will hang in there with me and let me know what you think. Yesterday, I had my hair cut for the first time in a year, so when I found this essay on my computer about a haircut 21 years ago, it just seemed to fit. So, here goes:
The Haircut
He clicked the scissors twice. On the first click, my stomach clenched, but on the second, I felt something break––like a tight rubber band. I didn’t look in the mirror to see the first lock fall to the floor, but by the second cut, I was ready to face facts. I looked to the floor where two eight-inch-long tendrils curled cozily entwined, spooned like lovers on a bed.
What was he removing from me, this pert young man in tight pants? What if my power was in my hair, or my sexuality? When he went to answer the phone, I bent over and picked up one of the strands, trying to read it like the rings of a two-thousand-year-old tree. This inch nearest the cut was probably growing out of my head, just making its first appearance, during Bob’s final months.
How much pain had that hair been infused with? How much silence? How many words unwisely spoken? How many words held back? Why was that inch not curlier and thicker? Why didn’t it display the strength I’d found in myself during the period of his dying that I hadn’t even known I possessed?
As Alejandro returned from the phone and resumed his task, I let the lock fall to the scuffed floor. The raised grain of the wood and flecks of paint gave an aura of age to the pile of locks which rapidly grew to blanket it. This was the hair I’d pinned to the top of my head as we labored together to empty our old house, to close down our studios and to pack the van for our move to Mexico.
Bob had liked my hair long, uncurly, natural––matching his own wild mane. When I was young, my hair had been my glory, and by keeping it, I’d tried, perhaps, to keep my youth. But now it was as though each snip snipped off that many years. Snip went the exhausting months of selling off all of our household goods in preparation for our move to the house we’d bought in Mexico. Snip went the dismantling of Bob’s eighteen-foot steel sculpture as his oldest son carried it away. Snip snip snip. Onto the floorboards fell a houseful of memories sold off to become parts of other people’s lives. Snip. The long-maned hand-carved wooden Rangda mask we’d bought in Bali. Snip. The last of our handmade lamps. Snip snip, the mask from the Berkeley flea market. Snip. The studios full of tools, the bins of screws and nails. Snip Snip the twelve-foot-long diamond saber saw made by Bob’s own hands with castoff parts from Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. Snip. A lifetime of papers cast on the dump heap: old teaching files, tax forms from the seventies. Boxes of chapbooks, journals, old letters.
Snip went the slow loading of the van with the remaining possessions that would go with us into our new life. Snip went the doctor’s hard news just days before we would have made our escape from our past life and our journey into our new life in Mexico.
Snip went those weeks of single-handedly nursing Bob at home. His death. His memorial. The long drive down to Mexico with his ashes in the toe of his kayak still lashed to the top of the van. Snip went my first year alone as I labored to repair and fill the empty house I’d thought would be ours.
Finally, Alejandro puts down the shears and begins to blow dry my hair, running his fingers through it to the roots––the most sensual experience I’ve had for a year. He turns off the dryer and I look in the mirror at a woman twenty years younger.
“I must have you,” I tell this woman, “I must have your carefree demeanor, your unencumbered life. Your freedom, your simplicity.”
“You done,” says Alejandro, clicking off the dryer and spinning the chair to give me a better look in the mirror, cutting me off from the past. Giving me her.
I couldn’t help myself. I had to check out the links and it turns out that one of them could have been the prompt for my story. It was “short-short-stories“
The photo, by the way, is of yesterday’s haircut, not the one 21 years ago!
For Cee’s FOTD
I answered a prompt for a quatrain about maps on dVerse by submitting a poem I’d written entitled “Roadmaps.” Although no one objected, it bothered me that I’d just fulfilled half of the prompt, so I decided to transform the poem into three quatrains. It only meant adding a few words to each stanza. Here is the rewrite. I don’t know if I like it better, but at least it follows all the rules:
Road Map
I’m held captive by your wrinkles, dear, enraptured by your ripples.
I love your freckles and your moles and all of nature’s stipples.
They are sacred landmarks. When I find one that is new,
I give thanks to nature for adding more of you.
Sometimes, dear, with the dark night around us rich and deep,
my mind goes on a walkabout as you lie asleep.
The road map of your body is the terrain that I pace—
the slight knolls and the gullies and your face’s fragile lace.
Some folks bemoan the changes that nature brings about,
and they bring a different beauty. It is true, without a doubt.
But as I trace each special feature of your body and your face,
I am sure that nature’s carving instills a deeper grace.
To read the original poem go HERE. Which do you prefer? This illustration and the original poem are from my adult coloring book entitled When Old Dames Get Together and Other Confessions of a Ripe Old Age. Available from Amazon HERE.
For the dVerse Poets prompt. Go HERE to read other poems to this prompt.
Credo
It’s the opposite of sinecure, this writing of a blog,
but it’s my distinctive effort and my chosen cog
infrangible and constant in the spinning wheel of life,
it is my way to join the world with minimum pain and strife.
There may be repercussions, for you may not agree.
You may not shelter thoughts that coincide with me.
For sure, great fame and fortune are not slated to be mine,
but spending hours a day at this seems to suit me fine!!!!
That’s Ollie and Roo, a few years ago. They thought I didn’t know they were hanging out back there until I pulled the computer screen down to see why it was shaking back and forth as they wrestled.
This time I did something different and wrote a line in sequence for each prompt word before seeing any of the other prompt words. It is a fun game. I challenge you to do the same and link to this blog. The best way to do this is to favorite the six websites below. They all give daily words and you can click on the site, establish the link, write the line and go on to the next. It’s easier than you think once you establish the favorites. Or, just use the words below but look at one at a time and write your line before looking at the next. With my memory, it is easy. I could write down all six and look at the first and immediately forget the others if I don’t concentrate on them.
Prompts for the day are sinecure, distinctive, infrangible, repercussion, shelter and fame.
For Cee’s FOTD
A shrimp is a camaron in Spanish. I don’t know why they think this flower looks like a shrimp, but as in most things, I accede to local custom. I’ve said before that this is one of the hardest flowers for me to shoot. I’ve tried many times. This one works better than most. I’ll keep trying.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 