Miss Tina

As soon as she opens her eyes, she knows it’s going to be a good day.

                It’s not always like this.

                Some days, she wakes to a medication fog she’ll never really wake from all day. Some days she wakes after never really having slept at all. Her doctor gave her a new drug recently. It’s supposed to help with pain but it keeps her awake at night, sends spasms of movement through her arms and legs till she has to get out of bed. “It’s like a seizure or something,” she says, with that half-shrug—“like a seizure” isn’t exactly new to her. She’s matter-of-fact, discussing all this. “Like a seizure” isn’t the worst thing.

                But today isn’t one of those days. Today the stairs are stairs, not Mount Everest, and that’s good, because she’s got plans. The 4H club she runs at City View Charter school is going to meet today—they’ll build greenhouses out of plastic bottles, create art from found objects, learn respect for the world and for each other. “Did I tell you about Mr. Ryan?” she says, and then she does. “I met him in the hallway yesterday…” Mr. Ryan, it turns out, isn’t one of the teachers—he’s a kid who thinks he’s the only person in the world. “But I ran into him yesterday and he said, ‘Good morning, Miss Tina, how are you?’ It was a miracle. He actually acknowledged another human being.” She laughs. “I’ve only been hitting him over the head for a year…” She says it’s a little thing. No one’s going to notice that this third-grader has finally learned to ask “How are you?” But in her eyes, there’s also a hint of pride.  

                So today she won’t think about the diagnosis, the nerve disorder called fibromyalgia that’s going to be with her the rest of her life, that weighs her down some days like a ton of bricks or maybe just her body exploding. To the 4H kids she’s loud, fun, crazy Miss Tina, as generous with praise as she is quick to flare up, to shout across the playground, “Hands off each other, now. I said NOW.” To the regulars at the Goodwill bins, her next destination, she’s the woman who buys shoes for resale and always has time to tell a quick story or listen to someone else’s. She’s a footwear expert, a creative mind, a mentor for kids, a writer. She goes until she crashes. When she crashes, she buys fast-food and spends the whole day in front of the TV, or she doesn’t get out of bed at all. Some days, she doesn’t know where it’s all going.

                “I’m all over the place,” she says. She’s standing in her basement room, overflowing with art supplies, shoes for resale, dirty dishes and stale food that have been down there for weeks. Half-finished projects cover every surface, interspersed with knickknacks—“It just looked so cool!”—that she’s picked up at the Bins.

 “What I fear most is that people will think I’m ridiculous.” She half-shrugs again. “Am I?”

Let's Talk About Dance--Or Not

They’re in the dance studio, talking about tongue piercings.

            Ethan says, “Mine fell out.”

            “Oh my god! That’s what I’m always afraid of.” Tasha pauses to tie up her hair into a ballerina bun. “Did you swallow it? I always feel like I’m going to swallow it. It’s like you have this little piece of candy stuck to your tongue all the time. Or like when you’re swallowing pills—Tylenol—you feel it in your mouth and you’re like, oh my god, I just swallowed it.”

            Ethan’s putting on his ballet shoes. He dumps his sweatshirt on the pile of backpacks, shoes and other belongings on the carpet next to the dance floor. “Yeah,” he says, and sticks out his tongue for inspection.

            “There’s no hole. You just let it close up?”

            “You can see it. I can see it. You have to know where to look. The back like fell off so I couldn’t put it back in.”

            Annabelle’s sitting on the floor, tying her slippers. “Why would you even do that?”

            Ethan shrugs. The mirrors behind him reflect his gesture: expansive, grandiose. “I can’t believe it fell out. Like, I got it a couple months ago.”

            “Did it hurt?”

            “I was sore for, like, days. It sucks. You can’t eat anything. Can’t eat shit.” Ethan hops across the dance floor to lean on one of the barres. “And oh my god the itch!” He writhes, hands to his mouth, makes a face like he’s coughing up something awful. “And you can’t get in there…”

            “My tongue swelled up. It was disgusting,” Tasha says. She’s at the other barre now, stretching. “And it gets all tingly, like numb or something. Like tattoos?” She has tattoos. Her pink ballet slippers half-cover up the writing on her feet.

            “I’m gonna get another,” Ethan says. He lines his feet up parallel, puts his hands on the barre, gets ready for the first dance of the day.  

Talking to a Future Professor at a Utah Dinner Table

            The woman sat down next to me at the round banquet table, tucking her skirt under her and placing her punch glass on the table as she sat. She wore her dyed-blond hair gathered up at the base of her neck. Round dark earrings glinted in her ears. She wore a dressy white blouse, nice without calling attention to itself. Her lipsticked mouth looked a little hard, till she smiled.

            “I’m Rose,” I told her.

            “I’m Harmony,” she said, and held out her hand.

            She settled herself at the table. It was the opening night of the National Undergraduate Literature conference at Weber State in Utah, a banquet featuring readings by a one-time Poet Laureate. Harmony didn’t see nervous though. She sipped from her punch, surveyed the room, listened to the conversation of the three girls sitting across the table. She listened.

            Harmony’s in her thirties, older than most of the students in the room, though certainly not the oldest. She started her undergraduate degree ten years ago in Madison, Wisconsin, but the campus was too big and she became a number there, not a student. She left college and got married instead. Now she has three kids. Her face changes when she talks about them, a smile lingering at the corners of her mouth as she lists their ages and names. The smile stays when she mentions her husband.

            She is a fiction writer. She plans to be a professor. She already has the confidence, the poise. She still has another year to go before she graduates, she says, but she’s already started looking into grad school. She wants a school where she can get both her Masters and her PhD. She doesn’t want to move the family more than she has to.

            “They’ll go with you, wherever you get in?” I ask.

            Her husband will relocate to wherever she needs to go, she says. The kids haven’t quite put it together. “They know I’m looking at different schools, and they know these schools in different states. Right now, though, I commute to school from home. I don’t think they’ve realized I won’t be able to do that if school is across the country.”

            A long-term program, then, it had better be.

Carried By a Vulture's Wings

            The first turkey vulture sighting means spring is on its way, at least to me. Those silver-black wings bear a birth, a beginning. This isn’t a new idea. In ancient Egypt, the word “Mut” or “Mwt” was the name of the mother goddess—a protector, a nurturer—and also the word for vulture. Queens wore a headdress reminiscent of a vulture to symbolize their role as caring guides. The dead, souls freed at last from bodies, took the form of birds when leaving the world of the living. Often, this bird had a bald head, broad wings, and the ability to eat and digest almost anything. Often, this bird was a vulture.

            I wouldn’t mind that, I think, if my soul when I died could spread silver wings and fly. They’ve reached a state, those circling vultures, they’ve come to some understanding. Up there, they know there’s no reason to hurry. Up there, there’s peace in the sun. I would feel the wind in my feathers, if I could. Become part of the air, and fly.

            In the mountains of Tibet, the monks and villagers do not bury their dead. The earth is stone, and little wood grows with which to build a funeral pyre. The dead are carried up to someplace remote, between the earth and the sky, where vultures tip and soar on outspread wings. Vultures know these things. The sky fills. A blade is raised above the body. The ceremony is private, solemn, joyful. Someone opens the chest of the deceased. The vultures descend to take the offering. They leave no meat, only bone. In Tibet, too, vultures bear souls away, carry them into their next life. Sky burial, it is called. Because the ceremony is performed so high above the earth? Or because the physical flesh has literally been transformed, and given wings?

 A body is a gift from the earth, to the earth. A body must not be wasted.

            It is not true, what they say, that if you die in a dream, your living breath will stop. I dreamed death once. A river flowing upward, the water forgiving and warm. Death was beautiful, and death was the silver color of a vulture’s wings.

            I woke up smiling.

On Voluntary Earlobe Mutilation

At times when traveling via public transit, cringing becomes a necessity. The problem is not the vulgar language or the high-volume cell phone conversations. These are so ubiquitous as to have virtually no effect. Even the shrieks of children and the stench of perspiration rarely perturb me now. No, my issue rests with those people who step onto the train seemingly unaware that they have a gaping hole in their ear. It disturbs me.

            I can understand the desire to pierce, though it is an affliction I’ve never suffered from personally. I find earring appealing—I enjoy the idea of having some changeable, potentially symbolic jewelry that doesn’t necessarily announce itself, simply sits subtly in one’s earlobe tastefully hidden behind hair. I would never allow a sharp piece of metal to puncture my skin so that these delicate decorations would have a place to rest, but I can understand why an individual who places more import on physical beauty than I do might put themselves through such an ordeal. An earring, after all, is somewhat desirable. An ear hole has no such redeeming merits.

            On my first viewing of such a voluntary distortion, my initial thought was to wonder what form of surgery the unfortunate victim had been subject to, that they were now bereft of a portion of their anatomy. Realizing, however, that the individual, a young, physically fit male, had no apparent medical condition, I understood that the inch-wide plastic hoop surrounded by stretched skin was in fact an adornment of his own choosing. The object held a certain fascination for me, though at the same time I was somewhat repulsed by the sight of the unnaturally distended flesh of the young man’s lobe. A pencil, I meditated, could be passed through said opening without ever coming into contact with plastic or flesh. The ring would make an ideal handle were the youth ever subject to movement by coercion. Worse yet, the young man might travel through a heavily wooded area and find himself abruptly held up, some osier or twig having hooked his ear, suspending his progress. As my mind pursued ever more extreme paths, I forced myself to avert my gaze rather than open a pathway for similarly distressing scenarios to manifest themselves in my head. Those hideously stretched lobes, however, continued to draw my eyes until the inflicted individual disembarked the train.

            Inflicted, I say, because this man, like many others, was nothing more than a victim of cultural fad. Fortunately for the health and respectability of all our young men and women, the perceived attractiveness associated with this form of mutilation is going down, and fewer of our youth are deceived by popular culture into subjecting themselves to this form of physical punishment. I am confident that in the future our descendants will look back on this time as one riddled with misconceptions of beauty, false ideals that led the young of our nation down many disturbing and twisted paths.

On Vultures

This weekend, driving with my mom down highway 101, I knew it must be spring. I’d just seen my first turkey vulture of the season. Actually, vultures. They were “kettling”—the term used to describe a group of raptors, but especially of vultures, all circling together on the same thermal, wide wings sweeping round in every intersecting paths. It’s hard to see the bald red head through the windshield of a car. The chalky white feet—chalky from the birds’ own antibacterial urates—are invisible. Instead the sun catches on outspread feathers, turns black to silver as finger-like pinion feathers shape the wind.  

            I used to know a vulture personally. Her name was Clyde (vultures don’t come in pink or blue—gender’s a guessing game, till the bird lays an egg). Clyde lives at the Oregon Zoo. If you’ve ever watched the bird of prey show in the summer, you’ve seen her—she’s the one who went out of her way to brush your hat with her wingtip. Clyde likes to fly low. She likes to buzz people. She likes to get away with things. Mischievous: yes. Intelligent: vultures come third, after parrots and those pesky corvid crows. Clyde knows her handlers, knows the show commands, knows exactly what Tupperware containers hold (you don’t want to). She doesn’t know how to be a wild vulture. She was abandoned by her parents before she could learn to fend for herself or find food. Unlucky, but lucky to have been found and rescued.

            I think of Clyde, every spring when the vultures come back from California, from Mexico, from even farther south. Bald-headed, barefooted, they can’t winter here. Every fall Clyde gets restless as her wild relatives head south. Her handlers have to take a little more care to pull up their thick leather gloves. She gets a heat lamp in her “mew” but it isn’t quite enough. The keepers give her delicacies—raw herring, rat guts—to make up for the freedom she doesn’t have. In the wild those musty-smelling feathers of hers would be spread in the wind. She’d put her bald head to use. Have you ever tried, after all, to eat without hands? To eat, say, a plate of spaghetti? You wouldn’t want hair (or feathers) on your head either. Especially if that spaghetti was a carcass. Especially if the parts you most wanted to eat were right down inside. After eating, Clyde would spend the sunny California winter sitting with her wings spread wide, letting the sun bake bacteria from her feathers. The food she’d just consumed might have made another animal sick, might have begun the spread of an epidemic like anthrax. Vultures are cleaner than we think, and they clean things up for us.

             I said goodbye to Clyde a year ago. I couldn’t go to school full time and work both days of the weekend. She’s still there though. Soon her trainers will start prepping her for summer shows. Driving with my mom, I crane till at last I lose sight of the vultures. Clyde’s probably craning too, waiting for spring.

What They Don't Tell You About Writers

What they don’t tell you about writers is that sometimes they’re not all there. You’re talking to one. She’s nodding politely. You think she’s listening to you. Actually she’s not. She’s miles away. I’ve been writing a lot of short stories recently. That means coming up with a lot of characters in rapid succession. I need names, alright, so I was in class (not this class, I swear) and someone just mentioned the name Emma, and I thought, that’s perfect. Ordinary but with some character. I like a name that doesn’t stand out unless the character who carries it makes it stand out. I like really weird names too, but that’s a different story. So, I thought, Emma, and then I thought, who IS Emma, what’s her story, she definitely has freckles on her nose and she cuts her blond hair short and she likes…bananas. I’m not sure what the next topic in class was. It was probably very educational. Anyway.

            What they don’t tell you about writers is that sometimes more than one of them is there. This past week I’ve been about four people. One of them is a fifteen year old boy named Bobby. I’m obsessed with baseball and sort of oblivious to the fact that my sister Molly thinks she’s conversing with aliens. I’m also a young guy named Jonah who lives in a sort of medieval Wales type setting. I’m obsessed with music and writing songs and I’m falling in love with a selkie. I’m also Jonah’s friend Gwen who sings and slaps sense into people and has a bit of an alcohol problem. On the side, I have this life as a college student (do you call that a life? Or do you call it a prolonged homework session?). Sometimes, if you pay close attention, you can tell which me I am. For instance, sometimes I get really spacey and walk into the ocean in the middle of winter so I can anoint myself with saltwater and wait for a mysterious seal to appear. Bobby days are good days but they don’t happen very often. If I’m looking at you with a glazed expression in my face and my eyes are bloodshot and I show zombie-esque sings of deterioration, you’re probably looking at the “real” me.

            What they don’t tell you about writers is that they didn’t choose this. Maybe they’ve tried to quit. Maybe one year they barely wrote a word, and it was the most miserable year of their life. They don’t tell you that writers hurt, that some days every word on the page feels like another messy drop of blood that no one was supposed to see. They don’t tell you about the words that just have to come, the way thoughts on paper are like breathing and when you take away the paper, the thoughts are gone too. They don’t tell you that sometimes writing saves the writer’s life, that there’s days when a writer can’t open her eyes or get out of bed or face one more day in this body so she slips into another one, and that’s how she makes it through. They don’t tell you that a writer is a writer, they way a cat is a cat or a mother is a mother. They don’t tell you about the writer who gets up at five in the morning, before the robins start to sing, so she can steal a precious hour at the keyboard and for one short part of the day, really live.

My First Cup of Coffee

I drank my first cup of coffee in a one-time Ecuadorian monastery. Trays of bread and plates of tropical fruit graced the table, and steaming eggs I couldn’t eat. I flipped over my little white ceramic teacup, oval saucer, spoon-formed dent in the rim. “Té o café?” the waitress asked. I hesitated a second. “Café.”

            She poured it, black. The scent was my grandma’s house and my best friend and bagel mornings with my aunts. It was also a little bit of sin. Sin burned when I drank it, that fire sip of steam. Sin tasted just like it smelled.

            Good.

            I should mention that this scene happened just over a month ago.

            People ask me why I don’t drink coffee. If I know them well enough, I tell them. It’s addictive, for one thing. And I get addicted. One of my addictions is avoiding addictions. If you don’t know what’s missing, why start?

            And if you can avoid a beverage that involves the destruction of rainforests, why start?  

            So was it ironic that I was sitting there, my first trip to a tropical country, finally drinking the drink that’s been such a destructive export? I looked around the table at my fellow classmates, mostly biology students—the people, the class I’d be with for these next two weeks. Yeah, a bit ironic; yeah, maybe my tongue’s burned-numb bite really was no accident. But I wasn’t eating the eggs. I wasn’t adding milk. And a skinny vegan in Ecuador had to take sustenance where she could find it.

            I lifted the coffee to my lips again, and this time tasted it slow. If I closed my eyes I probably could have seen my grandma’s apartment outside of Oakland; I could have been eight again, waking up on her living room floor to the sound of the coffee grinder and that big rainbow poster of the Beatles up on her wall. I didn’t know they were the Beatles back then. There were a lot of things I didn’t know.

            If you don’t know what’s missing, why start?

            I didn’t close my eyes. I looked around, took in this room, low ceiling, stone windowless walls. Over dish-clinks and wandering snatches of talk I could hear the fountain in the monastery courtyard—the first sound those monks would hear, maybe, on their way down here to mess. I didn’t know these people; I didn’t know this place. I barely knew those Spanish words that had slipped from my tongue. Café negra, por favor. No milk. Just give me memories.

            Something to stand on in this new journey. Something old in something new.

             

Laying Down the Lie--For the First Time

No one was looking. That wasn’t something that should have mattered, but it did: no one was looking, and on the kitchen floor was a gray-pink chunk of play dough the size of the last digit of my thumb. Doughy, salty, slightly gritty—I barely remember the taste now, but at five or six years old it was a well-known if seldom pursued pleasure. Usually samplings consisted of the dough that clung around my fingernails, the residual taste after playing with my brother before I washed my hands. My mom must have known I ate play dough. I knew I wasn’t supposed to. Here, though, was this delectable piece, and nobody was watching. 

                Only somebody was.

                I didn’t realize my mom was there until I’d already scooted across the flower-patterned kitchen linoleum and popped the play dough into my mouth. Then I looked up. And up. She stood in the middle of the kitchen, dark window behind her. She must have just come into the room.

                “Did you just eat play dough?” she asked, or something to that effect.

                And I told her, “No.”

                It’s the first lie I remember telling—the first time I consciously considered the fact that was I was saying was not true. The immediate shame I felt afterwards has blotted the taste of that particular piece of play dough from my mind. It wasn’t the deed in itself. That salty morsel didn’t matter, and neither did the fact that the play dough was used, the floor semi-clean. I wouldn’t be punished, not more than a scolding, I wasn’t afraid of that. But something felt wrong. I’d broken a trust. I was not supposed to eat play dough, and I’d snuck and done it anyway.  

                She knew, of course. Probably she’d watched the whole thing: my cautious slide from the play room to the kitchen, the quick shooting out of my hand. She could prove nothing, though, and I don’t think she tried to. She let the lie stand: unchallenged, but not unpunished. Because that feeling stayed with me, of having used words against one of the people I loved most in my life. I’d covered something up; she, so I thought, had not seen through my cover. I, then, was a lesser person than she thought me. There was something in me she must never see.  

My shame now when I tell a lie is much less than it was then—and that in itself is, I think, something to be ashamed of. I’ve gotten used to the idea that, inside, I’m not the person whom others assume me to be. I have to remind myself sometimes that there is that moment of choice. Show the world the face you want them to see? Or admit you ate the play dough—and live with yourself afterwards?  

To Tell You the Truth...An Early Memory

I was in awe of Katherine. I was three and she was--five? Seven? Old enough, anyway, to seem all-knowing. She was one of three regulars at the daycare my mom ran from home. She was tall and smart and she could stand on her head. I tried to stand on my head, but even with my feet up on the wall, I couldn't get very far. My shirt kept falling down in front of my face and no matter how long I stayed like that the world still didn't look upside down, the way Katherine said it should.

Somehow though the fact that I worshiped her didn't prevent us from fighting. We were in the room I shared with my five-year-old brother Nick. He was there too, and probably so were Russel and Sammy, the other daycare kids. The two beds--my brother's big wooden one, mine white metal, small--had become a sultan's palace and a magic carpet. We were being characters from the Disney movie Aladdin.

Unfortunately, there could only be one Jasmine.

"You be Jasmine's tiger," Katherine told me, or something like that. So I was for a while, but Katherine, jumping from bed to bed, was obviously having too much fun. I'm not exactly sure what form the argument took. I don't think I ever got to be Jasmine. The boys looked on as both of us girls ended the day in tears.

Part 2:
This was difficult. Most of my earliest memories are about three seconds long, and don't really make much of a story. For this one, I'm not sure if all these events actually occurred in one day. I'm not sure exactly what Katherine said to me word for word, but I know the gist of her message. My memory of the room's layout is vague--I know those were our beds, but the mental image I have of them comes from later memories, not this one. I think though that if I were to use this in a memoir, I wouldn't have a problem with calling it Creative Nonfiction. I'm pretty sure the bones of the story are accurate. I might reinforce my uncertainty a little for an actual memoir--stipulate that I really don't know exactly what was said. Overall though I think the memory is fairly accurate--and the details I might have gotten wrong aren't details that matter, either to the story arch or to the people involved.

As for Joan Didion's claim that "if you remember it, then it's true": I do believe that the essence of a memory can sometimes be more important than what actually happened. At the same time, I have some memories that I've intentionally blocked, and now, if asked to revisit them, I think large portions of the truth would be missing. So I would only take Didion's claim so far. If you remember it, it's true for you. Sometimes it's also true for the rest of the world, and sometimes through your truth you can help others reach a deeper truth than they would have with "just the facts." I think personal truths like Didion's are valuable, sometimes more valuable than a surface truth about which everyone can agree. But that's different from saying, "if you remember it, then it's objectively true for everyone."