Two Valentines

For some reason this post disappeared from the Moose Knows blog, so I'll put it here.

I.

We had to give valentines to all the kids, even the ones we didn't like. Somebody in the family said store-bought ones were tacky, so I ended up staying up far past bedtime cutting out construction-paper hearts. Pasting heart-shaped doilies on them. Fingers worn completely sore by the scissors. Stuck together with glue.

No namby-pamby glue sticks when I was a kid. We used Elmer's. Man's glue. Named after a man. Or a steer. Grins at you from the bottle. "Hi, I'm Elmer the steer. They boiled me to make this glue."

So you used Elmer's manly glue to stick together valentines for the other boys in the class. Kind of strange. Do boys give the other boys valentines now? I suppose they've done away with the whole thing in school, just like Halloween. Offensive to fundamentalists to give out valentines, or maybe because of Billy's self-esteem.

Rules of the worst self-esteem-destroying activity: Valentine dodge-ball. The class lines up. Two kids, by popularity vote, choose sides. Valentines are distributed. On either side of the gym the kids aim red rubber playground balls at the heads of the kinds on the other side. You get to take all the valentines of the kids you hit. At the end, the kids with the most valentines get to leave for recess first.

So. You try to make the valentines for the boys boy-like. Happy Valentine's day, you big galoot! Put a truck on there, or some helicopters shooting aliens. Meanwhile, you also have to give them to the girls. Eesh. Maybe it's a good thing the fundamentalists have gotten rid of it. Witchcraft connections? No. It's because the little fat kid with the wings and the arrows is naked. If my kid sees a fat, naked baby with wings and arrows, he's going to ask me questions. And the last thing I want is a kid who asks questions.



II.

Lisa's boyfriend gave her a cat heart in a jar for Valentine's Day. She pretended she liked it. Thought it was a good joke. None of the mushy romantic crap. But secretly she wanted the mushy romantic crap.

Ellen said it was important to get boys to do mushy romantic things and then say no. Thanks for the flowers. Bye. I have to wash my hair. I have to polish my cat. I have a lot of homework. I'll just give these to my mom. She loves flowers. Bye!

Lisa kept the cat heart on top of the refrigerator. First as a joke. Then to remind herself what a dork Jared was. Her mother moved it every week. Said, "Lisa, could you keep this someplace else?" The joke became to sneak the jar back up there and see how long her mom would go before she noticed.

Then Eric knocked the jar off one day when he opened the fridge. He pushed all the pieces underneath and didn't say anything about it. Turned out the thing hadn't been in formaldehyde or anything. Just sitting in water where Jared had stuck it at the end of anatomy class. For a week or more no one could figure out what the smell was. They thought one of Eric's gerbils had escaped again, had crawled into the heating duct and died like the last time.

Eventually the smell went away. It was ten years before the new people moving in to the house pulled out the refrigerator and found the little dried-up thing. They threw it in the trash, but all night long they heard a little pit-pat, pit-pat. And their boy thought he saw a pale cat wandering the halls. But the next day the garbagemen came, and the pale cat never came back.

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Welcome Writer Friends

Missing all my Louisa Cafe writers so much. I start this blog for all to contribute, so I can keep track of your travels, your dreams, your mooses and Morgan, your novels, story outlines, and memories.

Melanie

Zingerman's Cafe,  Nov 11, 2009

 

I found splat here in Ann Arbor, far from my friends at Louisa’s with their pens and pads and curious moose-filled minds. Away from their angst and their dreams and loves and losses, deaths and betrayals that we shared on Tuesday and Friday over a 1/16^th square of brownie and cups of mint tea.

I found splat here in Ann Arbor where I can’t bear the loss of all that was my norm, the daily, boring taken-for-granted roads and grocery stores.

I found splat here in Ann Arbor leaving behind my entire identity, along with everyone who knew my name.

I found splat when I broke my heart with loss. I miss my couch and staring into the window in the rain and waiting for the phone call that came and said, come to Michigan and start a new life.

I found splat in the two suitcases- all that I brought with me- filled with clothes and books on story structure, a fountain pen but not the ink bottles to refill it.

I found splat alone, hands wide in a circle of emptiness, waiting to be filled.

I found splat in the abrupt edge that I leapt from in Seattle, and the jagged iceberg that rescued me from the freezing water.

Here, in Ann Arbor, splat is the loneliness of a Michigan prairie with the rising moon and a few cicadas left from summer thunderstorms. Splat is the feeling of friends carrying on their routines and the holes left from my place at the table. that vacuum filled by fellow writers at home but not here, not in my new world, where I hold this empty place at a table of ghostly writers to accompany my empty writing practice. No voices to hear my words. No voices to share their words. Invisible. My life carries on without me and bob told me I’d need to start a circle here and be the elder teacher.

I am at splat here in AA, homesick for the whole person I was.

I found splat in AA along with a better piece of everything I need. I row in calmer water, and everything will work out eventually, like in the movie Shakespeare in Love when they say it’s a miracle. We don’t know how but it will work out.

Yet, I am stressed to the max with adrenal shock. The newness at every turn. Where’s the grocery store, the library?  Will I find food, how do I get to work? Now, my car is here, my computer is set up. A semblance of normal. My dishes here are not mine. I find splat here every morning when I wake and face a day of complete unknown. Stranger in a strange land.

Yet the tools I brought work well here. My slippers work well here to keep my feet padded and soft and warm, just like at home. Writing is the same not so pure as by Stewart’s heart and cup of tea plied me with in trade for transport, but still I write, my brain gone soft from lack of shared writers to read with and anxiety heightened without the therapeutic release of my pen to paper.

What happens past splat, Stewart? What was it we were supposed to find? Is Splat the goal?

What is it we were to find past splat? Past is the unbearable pain we bear, the break into 3, the start of the third act where your heart is broken and all is lost. One step past the dark night of the soul, and there, in every story is the redemptive renewal of the indomitable human spirit. The dig-deeper to find meaning and put precious pieces back together of this broken cup, never to hold water again but now renewed in some new form. Mended into a new creation. Repeating what the creator invented in his first word. The first creation we repeat here in this moment past splat, where atoms collide and a new world is born in darkness and begins to sing.

Here in this moment past splat, the vacuum of empty. The vacuum of all that is vanquished, the empty energy of all that is in potentiality. The keyed up racer at the start of the race, muscles taught and carbo-loaded. The finish line in his sight, the race already won. The end in the beginning.

Stewart I miss the scratch of your wizened hand on paper, Bob as he wipes a tear while he writes, and Don, pacing after 15 minutes, restless. I miss the sharing and I want to hear the continued saga of Morgan. Today I am writing about…I tell the kids at this new table. Don’t think, I say. Thinking bad- writing good. They look at me quizzically as I looked at Bob so many years ago. And now it is me. I don’t recognize in the mirror the old crone to the generation with apps of story structure on their iphones, typing on phone keyboards.

Cycle. Cycling in and out of splat, up to that great wall and crashing on waves thru the emotion to the story on the other side. Riding waves of story structure. The conscious mind to guide the hands into subconscious emotion, where daylight descends into untraveled canyons of terror and oblivion. And why is this boy next to me talking? Writers write, I told him. Pulled out into their world. This moment again where I am not home, not in my comfort zone, not with my writing buddies but here in a strange café walls the color of my living room at home.

 One of the few ties to the loss and broken torn ripped place, like Ed who wrenched his suit at his dad’s funeral, ed, so impressed, wowed by his big brother who ripped his suit jacket and not the small black fabric patch offered by the rabbi. Until Ed expressed his admiration and his brother shrugged. It’s dad’s suit. It’s easy to rend in grief what is not yours, what has no meaning, but when it’s yours, that tear runs deep and the threads can never be realigned.

In that space grows the tenacious plant. Like the weeds in the crack of the sidewalk that defy cement and walkers and insist on their rightful place in the sun. This is beyond splat. The confidence shot from the cannon confidence of speed into the unknown. Speed into purpose. Tumbling into a forward thrust that ends god-knows-where. Propelled away from the vacuum, away from the fear that held its sticky fingers, held us back. Now splat shoots us out the other side and into the fresh air of unknown terror and unlimited joy.

I miss my Seattle writers, wise to the process, willing and grateful to give themselves to the pen and the tear. The joy and pain. The shared place.