Just Carrie

(To hear audio of author reading this selection aloud, go to https://dimestories.org/uncategorized/san-diego-dimestories-august-spotlights/ )

People asked me daily, hourly, “What did you think of the movie?”

I had no answer, I purposely avoided seeing it until finally some friends and my husband said, “Come on, we will go with you.”

So yes, I’ve seen it now. It is a masterpiece,  and true as far as I know.  But I was a child, a little pixie, fixated on horses. What did I know of hearings and Communists except those cars parked mysteriously in front of our house.  Men with suits, white shirts and black ties. 

All I knew is that my father loved Frank and Jackie. That was enough for me, and Frank rode a horse better than anyone I have ever seen.  Jackie laughed and swore and brought out the best in my mother.

Frank’s frizzled hair, balding, smoke encircled him wherever he paced.

He and my father were a pair.  Irreverent, they loved to brew up trouble, loved to talk, over Jim Beam into the wee hours of the night. 

Dad and Frank got so wrapped up in my brother’s science fair project, that my brother, exasperated, went to bed and let them finish on their own . . . both on precarious ladders, ball bearings and feathers dropped from the ceiling, proving Newton’s Second Law—and tempting the law of gravity, two drunk men on ladders at the height of a fourteen-foot ceiling.

Frank gave me binoculars and a little knife, he let me use his  saddles—used in the years they were hiding, far from Senator McCarthy’s reach, in the high mountains of Southern Colorado near Mount Blanca. 

We rode together, Dad and Frank and me, through the foothills of the Rockies near Boulder, cutting fences and trespassing on rancher’s lands. We got shot at once, but they just laughed, experts at re-wiring the fence cuts so the cattle couldn’t escape. 

Dad and Frank played flute duets, both wept into the finger stops.  They argued politics, Dad practical—it ended the war . . . Frank a dreamer, almost a mystic—it will end ALL  war.

Dad died when I was fifteen. Frank and Jackie stepped in.  Long hours at the Exploratorium, working as an Explainer.  I learned to make holograms with red laser light in the dark.  Sometimes I worked with Jackie in the gift shop, one evening at a fundraiser, we hid  on the floor behind the counter, the two of us drinking scotch out of one bottle.

And I guess it was inevitable that my mother married Frank after Jackie ‘s cancer.

Yes, I met Robert.  Yes, I met Kitty, but they were peripheral to my life with dogs and horses and staying alive after my father’s passing.

So, I’ve seen the movie, I did, but it didn’t touch my memories, my grief, my gratitude, my bewilderment, my yearning to have them all back again—me hiding under our grand piano listening to flute duets.

Injury hangs like weighted shrouds,

cloaked, hoarded,

maintained, worshipped in secret.

Curtains drawn down in defiance with darkness.

Injury materializes through years.

Through mother’s milk,

Through father’s shaky hand.

It transcends generation . . .

Sticking its nose in

Where everyone has forgotten

Injury needs a summit,

A reckoning. It needs

To be reopened, stitches torn

A gash here, a breach there,

A gnashing of teeth and snarl.

Injury needs to bleed its bile,

needs to scour its wound with pumice stone.

To lie in the stifling air, to desiccate,

to be picked to the bone.

It needs to feel the deluge and the thunder.

But we, we keep it nice.

Smile when spoken to.

Swallow the raging vomit.

Keep the curtains closed and drawn.

Inflict more damage to

our collective entrails

And weep alone, in bitterest darkness.

Straight, wispy blonde hair
blue eyes, large, best feature—
healthy limbs, muscles that
defined themselves on a Schwinn bike,
on monkey bars, in Charles’ Trees,
bareback on Rebel or Venus or Big Red.

Shorts sets–—striped short-sleeved tees,
pull-up elastic-band pants in matching solid—
Nothing frilly, nothing pink, no looks in the mirror.

Teeth, buck, often reminded
by beautiful siblings,
all of us islands in our ocean
at home.

Legs—summer brown, scarred.
Covered with
mosquito bites, over scratched.
Winter, wrapped in ski pants,
gliding up and down, up and down
Rocky Mountain slopes.

A broken finger, stupid trigger
on that air gun.

Perfume—Eau de Horse Hair,
Dog Slobber, Cat Musk, Sand,
Pre-Puberty Sweat.

Born homely
Born lonely
Born sad
Born anxious.

As though
prescient of what lurked
on the murderous edge of the time.

It’s our daughter Alissa’s fortieth birthday. My first impulse was, “That can’t possibly be true!” My second was to remind myself that it will be my seventieth birthday this year. My third was to sit down and stew. All the cliches about time flying whizzed through my head. I didn’t like that most of my reactions could have been written on a Hallmark card. I wanted mine to be unique and all my own.

I still remember that moment when, in the hospital during a tropical storm in New Orleans, I gazed at her for the first time. And you guessed it–love at first sight. Her cries were something new, something never before heard because they were the cries of my child in my arms, hers, her very own. I know that at 2 a.m. when she started letting out a racket that could wake the dead, I wondered indignantly, “Someone ought to take care of this baby,” and then I suddenly realized that someone was actually me and I better step up to being a mom, not a kid anymore. Someone else was taking my spot.

There are glimpses of memories of her giggling, learning to sit up, learning to crawl, learning to walk. Her little behind wiggling in her diaper. I can see her dancing and singing into her toy microphone, blond hair flying, big green eyes full of everything new, full of first times, full of potential and future.

Then the divorce, the sadness, the realization that no matter how I tried I could not protect her from the shit life throws at you. But her resilience astonished me, her drive for a good life, her acceptance when I dropped a new dad and three brothers in her lap. I wish I could go back and make that easier, too, wish I could have had more time, less stress, more money, shorter work hours.

So many things I would do differently, so regretful of mistakes I made.

Then I suddenly sat up straight with an epiphany. That baby, that day in that tropical storm, she survived it all with grace and humor and ambition and kindness and love and anger and hard work and strength of character because she came like that, into the world; I got to watch her grown and be. She became a mom herself, and she is shouldering that new role as she has always done, with, “This challenge is here, let’s get busy making the best of it.” I relaxed finally and felt a release. It is her turn now, mine to just watch and applaud. Mine to smile and clap. I felt a shift, a moving over, resignation, an acceptance that my job is done and that I must have done something right.

She is the evidence.

End ings

Sometimes endings happen without fanfare,
it's just over.
     
     No celebratory toast
          no gold watch
               no kiss goodbye.

The electric door swishes open. 
Two steps 
         
      it's done.

You inside, me outside.

      No awkward goodbye,
           no promises we know we won't keep
      
      just done.

The air is different, thinner.
I float ahead on zero gravity.
     
     Connection broken,
          gentle snap of heart strings -  
               no blood, no pain.

You inside, bustling, busy.

Me outside with nothing pressing,
     no one expects me. 
     
          I might soar away 
               like a helium balloon      released 
                    by a willful child.

So easily severed, this bond,
     like cutting a raspberry with
          a sushi knife.

We don't even turn back to wave goodbye.

You on to the next task, the next headache.
     Inside, through the window
          you button your jacket
               against the air conditioning.

I face the sun, relish it’s warmth.
     Life's ties so easily broken.
           Laugh, at this cruel joke.

               I skip away     elated 
                     no longer      related.
    

I want to simplify my life to have more time to do things I love…

Hmmmm…

What things are frivolous enough to drop?  Is it the minutes watching goldfinches fight at the feeder, no, hardly that.

I’m compelled to witness tiny black wings battle the crowd, an eternal combat for enough nyjer to survive another day.  And I am their quartermaster filling feeders, scooping black sunflower, millet, and safflower in great piles as the chickadees watch from swaying branches. 

So, I must do that. 

Well, what then, what should be stripped? Is it tending to terriers? Three sets of eyes fixed, anxious, waiting…waiting…waiting. The squeak of pleasure when I give in, set the computer aside and scratch behind their ears.

No abandoning that.

Should I expunge my hours writing? If so, this bit of text would never emerge on this page, in this dawn light at my desk.

Forego time with my grandchildren…their pink faces growing every time I turn my back?

What should I erase? Is it reading lovely novels? Is it plumping the pillows on the couch?  Maybe I could resist the smell of homemade bread, whole wheat with sunflower, honey, and flax?

Should I flake out on my glorious hour of yoga…delicious shavasana at the end? No Namaste?

What do I delete? How do I choose? Do I cut loose beloved friends, wash my hands of foremost family?

Where is the manual, the guide to live an uncluttered life?

Do I kick my hiking through wildflower-strewn-meadows to the side? My husband? He of many intimate years?

Is it podcasts that need to go?

Or should it be my loom?  Should I pack its warp and weft and throw it over?  Stop caressing the soft wool as under-over it emerges into a living marvel? 

What is it that I can sacrifice for efficiency, peace of mind, and order?

Then the revelation, the circle…

What would I do with extra time found in a trimmed-down life? I would observe the chickadees, scratch the terriers, write, frolic with my grandchildren, amble with my husband, chatter with friends, devour a novel, lose myself in podcasts, I would dream weave on my loom.

And I’m right back where I started…how do I find time to do the things I yearn to do? I’ll go watch the goldfinches, have a slice of warm buttered bread, and chew it over.

• 

            This Sad Spring arrived, daffodils, lilacs, baby squirrels, peonies, grass growing.  I admit to a renewed amount of energy and relief that the sun is out longer and vaccines are in more and more people’s arms.  But along with the child-like enthusiasm for the temporal yellows, purples, reds, blues, and verdant greens, I have a lingering sadness, a loss that twists around my life like a wisteria vine. 

            Even Spring herself isn’t as whole-hearted as usual, she arrives sotto voce, as though compelled to apologize for her flamboyance; she keeps herself in check. She slips in, bridles her dervish energy, no super bloom, only allows a quiet, dignified, slow evolution from darkness to light.  This year, spring breezes wear a black mourning band.

            How many of us are gone? How many lives now vapor, now a forgotten photograph, now stardust? Some close to me; I hear their voices still, see their hand stroke the dog, their mirth at catching me in a gaff.  They wore their hopes on their sleeves, now rent and turned to ash.  And there are thousands I do not know, but all, all their departures generate a vortex, a contrary spinning gust that uniquely chills this season.

            There are other things I mourn, not deaths per se, but loss nevertheless.  Gone is the naïve belief that “It can’t happen here,” that “Common sense will win out,” that empathy is universal.

            I once believed that if a man couldn’t breathe – all my countrymen and women would rush in to feverishly fill him with our glorious air.

            There is a theory in sociology that we all are surrounded by a Phantom Community which includes all the people who have influenced our lives for good or evil, even though they are gone. It’s as if their influence never leaves us, that we act and respond to what we believe they might say or expect of us.

            My Phantom Community is vast now and they whisper when I least expect it, when my guard is down, when I hike through the wide Engelmann oaks or the creosote bush, or the Coulter pines.  I scramble up over a rock and I hear my father’s advice, my acting teacher’s put-downs, my baby’s dying cry. They guide my hands as I plant the iris bulb from Boulder, feed the birds like Grandma, when I steal a view of Mexico, when my mind drifts to Albuquerque, to Youngstown, to Gunnison, to the relentless statistics on the news. 

            Sometimes I rush to shut them out, tell them to take a rest, to relax, I can handle it on my own.  I look to the future, to examine the baby-blue-eyes wildflower, to laugh and shake the dust out of the rugs, to prune the roses, to watch for the return of the black-headed grossbeak…and stubbornly, every night, I fill two bowls for my pair of feral cats though one has disappeared.