Today a middle aged man asked me if I needed a ride. He had a mustache and a belly, and a big bad car and enough passenger space to go around. I suppose he thought I was hot, which I was, and I suppose he thought I was tired, and that's true too, but I also suppose that he thought I was younger than I am and his SUV screamed pedophile and I shied away. I walked away. People who ask you if you need a ride rarely have your well being in mind. No one has ever stopped and asked if they could walk with me. I wonder why.
I walk. I walk. I walk around town. I walk up hills and down hills. I walk when it is hot, and it is so damn hot. I walk when it is cold and I do not like the cold, but the more you walk the more you warm up and so if you are out in the cold you might want to walk a little further. I walk further. I walk miles, I walk acres, I walk leagues. Sometimes when I walk it begins to rain, and sometimes the sun shines too bright on my face. I walk through parks. I walk across parking lots. When there is heavy rain the street down from my house floods and I have forded that stream. I will wade, I don't care. I jump over curbs, I trip over curbs. Sometimes I fall down. I hear the birds. I smell the flowers. I know where all the secret fruit is. I see it, I see it, I walk.
When I was sixteen and got hit by a car while walking to school it did not make me afraid of walking, it made me afraid of driving. Far more frightening than getting hit by a car is the idea of taking someone else's legs, taking someone else's life. It happens in a sneeze, it happens in a cd change, it happens when the phone rings, these cars are far too big to be tossed so casually through our towns. But still, I have a car. I do.
I like my car. I like my car for the freedom it represents, for the tiny home it can be if need be. If you want, and you have no kids, you can get in your car and go. If it rains for too long and you get tired of rain you can drive your way out of it, even if it takes 500 miles. Even if you are up near Canada and it does not stop raining till you hit San Francisco, you can go in a car. I know you can, I've done it.
And I understand tired, and I like my car when I am tired and hungry and the store seems so far away, or I have to get laundry detergent and kitty litter and a bag of grapefruit, yes, I like my car. Then there are children, I understand kids, they need a place to sit and not be herded down the street like so many ducks. I understand old, I understand broken, I understand sick. But I can walk. I walk because I can.
I walk and I am so aware that one day I will not be able to walk anymore. One day, without knowing it, I will have my last slice of cake. One day I will make love for the last time. One day I will kiss a baby and then never kiss a baby again. One day I will sit down and I will never get up. I hope that day is the day I die, but death or no that day will come. But not today, today I walk.
I love it so the movement of my thighs, I love the ground under my feet so sure and the sky above my head. I love the air that always moves as long as I am moving and the shady parts and the sunny ones. I love the secret garden glimpses, the broken blue and green glass sparkles, the forgotten toys, the half buried marbles. I love the photographs I find, the half eaten cookies, the love notes that lay rain stained and hopeful on the ground. I put them in my pocket. I'm always finding treasures.
When I walk my mind is busy and then it slows down and that is when I think my deep thoughts and tell myself the best stories. The one where I save the world! The one where the boy sings so sweet! The one where the little girl is born away into the mountain and a stick doll left in her place! The awfulest death! The grand revenge! The truest love! Or if not stories I think of the world, of the people's fish-eyed faces as they pass so quickly. They look so tired. They look so bored. They don't even think that they might sneeze and change some one's life forever. That is a story right there.
I think of the oil that gushes into the Gulf. I think about the pod of dolphins that surrounded my parent's boat the last time they were out there and I wonder where they will go and if they'll be alright. I think about the tiny creatures out there that will die and then the larger creatures that eat the tiny creatures. I walk and I think and I look at the people in their cars, so many times just one person in these giant machines that we love to carry us around.
I think about obesity, and fast food, and drive-thrus and how they won't let you walk through the drive-thru, you have to go inside and open that door one more time, let out the air conditioning that needs to run to cool the air over all those friers, over all those grills. I think about how we are set up to want the food that tastes so good that is so cheap and want it fast and want it the same way every time in every city we go to. How we are taught that we deserve a treat, a snack, a fourthmeal that comes to us shipped across the country in giant trucks from slaughter houses where the workers are paid so little, where the land is cleared to make room for the animals, where it takes so much energy to make these cheap and easy meals that cost us so much in our health, and I do not have an answer for this. People must work. People must eat. We are all on a timetable. We are all tired, we are all hungry. And who am I to say that people should walk?
It is obesity. It is oil. It is money. It is all connected, and when I am walking I can fit it all together in my mind so that it works and seems so obvious. But. But see, I love to walk. I have these legs that work and feel so good. I have this strong back, these hungry eyes, these endless ridiculous stories. I have time to walk because walking is part of my life that I love. It is not a way to get from here to there, it is an action that calms my anxiety and quiets my mind. It is one of my good good things.
I have never walked so far that I fell down, unable to go any further. That must mean that I can always take one more step, and one more step after that. I am amazed by that, by what my body can do. It is wonderful to be amazed by small things.
I do not judge people for sitting still, and nor would I ever think that anyone should be more like me. I am just glad that in this way I am the way I am. I walk. I walk. I will keep on walking, as long as I possibly can.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Sunday, May 23, 2010
The day I was born, slipping wide eyed and shocked into this world, I was pissed as all babies are. I was pissed to be pulled so rudely from the red velvet room of my mother's body and tired from the endless smashing journey of the birth canal and I squawked and I squarreled my rage and disapproval. Fortunately, though undeserving as I was so freshly made, I was born to a woman whose face was so beautiful that peace overtook me and I quickly found this world to my liking. My mother's face was my first sunrise.
I learned that day that though there will be pain and I will be bewildered and often angry, I could expect to find marvelous surprises that would soften the sharp of life outside. Smoked mullet was a revelation. A lemon wedge would blow my mind. A fondness for breasts would never leave me. A brother is a genius thing. There are books.
And so we are the same today as we are the day we are born, only not babies and therefore not as cute. Not babies and not as cute, but Mama stays the same. Her face, her arms, the tightly packed packages of her calves, her heartbeat, her life-giving bosoms. She turns and her smile is still the sun.
This crazy mad life, what a wonder I exist! I am an accident of bone! I am the only me there is! How absurd! How grand! All this and dancing too! and lace and cakes and slime and Edgar Degas who loved the ballerinas! All this created for me simply because my mother loves me so.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Time Out For Tears
I will be thirty-two come Monday. I suppose that makes sense. Monday is moon-day, Lunes, and I have been so mad and moonly lately. There is no help for it, I change with the tides.
I have been crying, and I will let myself cry. I am happy, really, to be here my thirty-two years. I am not where I thought I would be but I never had much of a plan to begin with so that is not the cause of my tears. Thoughts of success in life don't bother me none. When I am 102 and I pass in my sleep, or from a fall down the stairs after I've tripped over one of my many ornery cats, I only hope that they will say of me that I loved. That is success to me.
But here, on the day I was born, my Aunt Lynn took care of my brother and braided her long blond hair in two braids, because that is how my mother wore it and she wanted him to have something to hang onto. My Aunt Lynn, her name like a note, her face like the sun, is as much a part of my birth-day as I am and she is not here, and that makes me cry.
And then there is the oil pouring up from the earth and out into the Gulf of Mexico, which is an abstract thought now but soon will wash up into our reality. It is not the fact that something terrible and irreparable has happened to something so beautiful and vital to my world that hurts so much, it is that we stupid humans did it. We are all the time forever destroying the beautiful places, and so much life, for nothing. For money. For money, which is so insane it tears my brain. We made money up, it doesn't even exist. That makes me cry.
Another one, a conversation with my girl friends about how free we used to be (though one of us never was) and the cold walls we've built up to protect us from boys that hurt and boys that lie and boys that use and leave behind and they call us crazy but all we've done is try to love them as best we can. And now, the three of us so young and pretty and bewildered are afraid to trust. Me and my best girlfriends going home to empty beds, that makes me cry.
Really my tears make me cry. I just have a sad heart right now. But I love my heart, I wouldn't trade it for the world. I am so lucky that way.
I have been crying, and I will let myself cry. I am happy, really, to be here my thirty-two years. I am not where I thought I would be but I never had much of a plan to begin with so that is not the cause of my tears. Thoughts of success in life don't bother me none. When I am 102 and I pass in my sleep, or from a fall down the stairs after I've tripped over one of my many ornery cats, I only hope that they will say of me that I loved. That is success to me.
But here, on the day I was born, my Aunt Lynn took care of my brother and braided her long blond hair in two braids, because that is how my mother wore it and she wanted him to have something to hang onto. My Aunt Lynn, her name like a note, her face like the sun, is as much a part of my birth-day as I am and she is not here, and that makes me cry.
And then there is the oil pouring up from the earth and out into the Gulf of Mexico, which is an abstract thought now but soon will wash up into our reality. It is not the fact that something terrible and irreparable has happened to something so beautiful and vital to my world that hurts so much, it is that we stupid humans did it. We are all the time forever destroying the beautiful places, and so much life, for nothing. For money. For money, which is so insane it tears my brain. We made money up, it doesn't even exist. That makes me cry.
Another one, a conversation with my girl friends about how free we used to be (though one of us never was) and the cold walls we've built up to protect us from boys that hurt and boys that lie and boys that use and leave behind and they call us crazy but all we've done is try to love them as best we can. And now, the three of us so young and pretty and bewildered are afraid to trust. Me and my best girlfriends going home to empty beds, that makes me cry.
Really my tears make me cry. I just have a sad heart right now. But I love my heart, I wouldn't trade it for the world. I am so lucky that way.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
My Lady Day
I know a girl who is sad but sad is not all she is she is quick to laughter. Her eyes that see so much and turn away from more fill and heavy with tears, her hands clutch thighs and then air and then thighs and I do not know her well, but I watch her.
She is worth watching. She is beautiful. I love to look at beautiful things so much, that I feel sorry for the most beautiful people because they cannot see the beauty that they are. They live inside their faces and their bodies and if they are the most beautiful thing in the room, they have a less beautiful room to look at. She is one of those, so pretty, yes. And yes. But she is also one who loves beauty, who knows its importance, how it is vital to a soul and beating heart. She gathers it around her, it follows her down street corners and into alleys and in and out of buildings. I brought her a gardenia and she put it in her hair and wore it all day long, even when it was done being creamy perfect loveliness, even when it hung its head, because the smell, the scent of lemonly honey still floated around her. She was her own garden today. She knows lovely is in the nose and in the hands just as well as lovely to the eyes. And oh she does love lovely.
She is a room with red curtains. She is a bath poured hot. She is a sip that burns. She is a ribbon on the ground.
And what I love about her is that she is real. She makes mistakes. She break a heart. She take your book. She make a joke. She dance like crazy. She sweat and smell. She will not trust but trust the wrong ones and in doing so she breaks her own heart. She is her own joke. She may fall and blush, and fear what people think. And right she is, I think, to fear what folks may say because folks tear down the pretty ones and god forbid you miss a step, oh they love it when you miss a step. Part of her thinks, I think, that when she falls or jokes fall flat or her too drunk just proves that she is not as fine as she could be. But it is her blush that makes her fine.
She sees too much and feels too much and takes that back inside and worries it worries it worries it. To get the answer out. To get the honest out, the real thing, the key. But she is not that serious. But yes she is. But she is both at once and that is the true thing.
I don't know why she compares herself with perfection except that we so many people do it. Once I said of myself that I knew that I was pretty, I was just not my taste, and perhaps that is how it is for her. I do not know, I don't watch her that closely. It's not my place. I admire her, that is all.
Monday, April 19, 2010
I woke up dreaming about the beach, or rather, about the drive to the beach, the drive to St. George. I was thinking about the blue store in Carabelle where we stop to pee, and how there used to be a Greek restaurant across the street and an old broken down house right next to it and one time I looked at that house all covered in palm fronds and lizards and thought I could hide out there sometime and right at that moment a great horrible cloud of insects, a plague of locusts rose up out of it, hovered, and flew off into the sky. This morning I couldn't remember if that Greek restaurant is still there, if the house exists, I couldn't remember the last time I drove to the beach. It bothered me.
I could be wrong but I think the last time was the trip to Panama City for my brother's birthday in June, which doesn't seem right but I can't recall another trip so there you go. A sin against God, I think. To live so close to all that heaven and not drive there more often than once a year.
That trip I rode in the car with a young man named Shane because we had a couple of cars going and that was the smoking car. I got to ride shotgun while two pretty girls sat in the back and talked their girl talk and blew smoke out the windows. We drank sodas and one thing I remember about that is Shane's use of the word "duke" in reference to shit and I thought "poop-a-duke" and I hummed "Duke of Earl" the whole way.
That was a good trip, a fine trip to the beach, but still. It wasn't St. George and it was only the one time. There was a time for a few years that whenever I would go a little crazy I would take the drive. It was when the pressure in my head would start to build up, like when school was too much and work was too many hours and whatever boyfriend was there was either too heavy or not around and the crazy would just start closing in around me until I felt like I could only see but pinpricks of light through a round and focused darkness and I'd turn those blinders south and drive like hell to the gulf before the light disappeared altogether. It worked somehow. I'd start to feel the pressure lessen as soon as I got on the bridge and by the time I made it, flying through all that sky across all that blue and sparkling water I could breathe and the breath I pulled in with great relieving thirsty lungfuls was wet and salty and tasted faintly of shrimp.
My mother always said the saltwater could heal wounds and if we were cut or injured in some way we were encouraged to go in and let the waters curl all up against us. She took me to St. George after I'd had a bone graft taken from my hip and put in my leg that had been broken in an accident. The leg wasn't healing well, it had been something like six months since they originally put my bones back inside my skin and there were still gaps where they had to take out the smaller broken bits. After the bone graft my leg was doing fine but the incision along my hip bone had become bloated and infected and had burst magnificently at prom, yellow custard streaked water cascading down my leg and into my borrowed black boot. I'd stuffed napkins in between my dress and the wound and went on with the dance but still, a hole had opened up in my side and that would not stand so the next day Mama took me to the ocean.
That summer she rented a tiny cinderblock apartment on the island and pretty much stayed there with the little girls. Daddy went down on the weekends and I came and went as I wished because I was older and I had friends to be with in town. I was trying to train myself out of my limp and so I put bells around my ankles so I could listen to the rhythm as I walked, and I remember the sound as I walked from the apartment to the water. Jingle...JINGLE! jingle...JINGLE! all the way to the water's edge. Then silence.
I still go crazy but now with one thing or another I don't end up going to the beach. It's better when I do. People keep telling me not to isolate so much and that I should reach out when I need help and for the past couple of years I've been trying to do that and I guess it's helped more or less. I'm still out in the free world, still working, still paying rent and the lights are still on and I'm not drinking. People tell you to reach out and then they feel good about helping you and they get to give you advice and they walk away happy because hey, at least they aren't as crazy as you are. I know, I've been on the helping side too. It's good to touch crazy every once and a while. To be helped in that way does calm you down. But it's like putting a bandage on and sending you back out into the fight. Here you go, try not to bleed on anyone. Stuff some napkins in your prom dress and get back on out there. It doesn't wash you clean.
When you get in the ocean, when I get in the ocean, I can't help but feel how small I am. I wade into the water and sink down into the waves, and my knees go weak and my muscles go slack and this great and powerful thing, this monstrous god-belly of water just holds me and rocks me and doesn't ask questions. All that is busy in my head goes as flat as the horizon and what enters me is the birds that fly over head, the sand that brushes over my feet, the water that doesn't leave me alone and I am not one person I am soup, I am salt, I am sky. My broken mind and heart become the same and as beautiful as the broken shells on the beach and I grow at once entangled in the world and unencumbered by it. Pain falls away. Heartache falls away. Worry falls away. I become mind clean. And when I climb out and come back into the thick of daily life some of all that stays with me for a while and holds me separate and stronger. But with time, like anything, that drifts away too. Water never stays in one place for long.
When I was a child I thought I would grow up and go live at the beach. I'm all grown up now and I can feel that child in me stern and disappointed. I would do it but I wonder, if you live at the beach where do you go if you go crazy? Do you then dream of desert? I lived in the desert once, it was barren and dead to me. I felt like the sun wanted to kill my bones.
I don't know if I ever will live at the beach. Some people live their childhood dreams and some people just live and dream, and I dream I dream I dream. I have shells on my shelves, I have cornflakes on my floor, and a cat that sleeps and I love her when she sleeps. And I have crazy in me that will rise like a plague of locusts around my head and because of that I know I'll take that drive and wash in those waters and get flat and quiet and small. This summer will be hot as it always is and the bugs will scream in the high grass and the sound will remind me inexplicably of dirty boys in cracker shacks doing drugs as it always does and the waste of it, the shimmering heat and the waste of this town with it's roadside beer cans and ragged women will get heavy in me. When it does I'll drive south, I'll stop and pee at the blue store, I'll open my windows and taste the air as it changes. When you live so close it is a sin not to go. We make excuses to stay in our craziness and all those excuses mean nothing, not when beauty is right there. Not when all you have to do is step away, and you can turn your face toward heaven.
I could be wrong but I think the last time was the trip to Panama City for my brother's birthday in June, which doesn't seem right but I can't recall another trip so there you go. A sin against God, I think. To live so close to all that heaven and not drive there more often than once a year.
That trip I rode in the car with a young man named Shane because we had a couple of cars going and that was the smoking car. I got to ride shotgun while two pretty girls sat in the back and talked their girl talk and blew smoke out the windows. We drank sodas and one thing I remember about that is Shane's use of the word "duke" in reference to shit and I thought "poop-a-duke" and I hummed "Duke of Earl" the whole way.
That was a good trip, a fine trip to the beach, but still. It wasn't St. George and it was only the one time. There was a time for a few years that whenever I would go a little crazy I would take the drive. It was when the pressure in my head would start to build up, like when school was too much and work was too many hours and whatever boyfriend was there was either too heavy or not around and the crazy would just start closing in around me until I felt like I could only see but pinpricks of light through a round and focused darkness and I'd turn those blinders south and drive like hell to the gulf before the light disappeared altogether. It worked somehow. I'd start to feel the pressure lessen as soon as I got on the bridge and by the time I made it, flying through all that sky across all that blue and sparkling water I could breathe and the breath I pulled in with great relieving thirsty lungfuls was wet and salty and tasted faintly of shrimp.
My mother always said the saltwater could heal wounds and if we were cut or injured in some way we were encouraged to go in and let the waters curl all up against us. She took me to St. George after I'd had a bone graft taken from my hip and put in my leg that had been broken in an accident. The leg wasn't healing well, it had been something like six months since they originally put my bones back inside my skin and there were still gaps where they had to take out the smaller broken bits. After the bone graft my leg was doing fine but the incision along my hip bone had become bloated and infected and had burst magnificently at prom, yellow custard streaked water cascading down my leg and into my borrowed black boot. I'd stuffed napkins in between my dress and the wound and went on with the dance but still, a hole had opened up in my side and that would not stand so the next day Mama took me to the ocean.
That summer she rented a tiny cinderblock apartment on the island and pretty much stayed there with the little girls. Daddy went down on the weekends and I came and went as I wished because I was older and I had friends to be with in town. I was trying to train myself out of my limp and so I put bells around my ankles so I could listen to the rhythm as I walked, and I remember the sound as I walked from the apartment to the water. Jingle...JINGLE! jingle...JINGLE! all the way to the water's edge. Then silence.
I still go crazy but now with one thing or another I don't end up going to the beach. It's better when I do. People keep telling me not to isolate so much and that I should reach out when I need help and for the past couple of years I've been trying to do that and I guess it's helped more or less. I'm still out in the free world, still working, still paying rent and the lights are still on and I'm not drinking. People tell you to reach out and then they feel good about helping you and they get to give you advice and they walk away happy because hey, at least they aren't as crazy as you are. I know, I've been on the helping side too. It's good to touch crazy every once and a while. To be helped in that way does calm you down. But it's like putting a bandage on and sending you back out into the fight. Here you go, try not to bleed on anyone. Stuff some napkins in your prom dress and get back on out there. It doesn't wash you clean.
When you get in the ocean, when I get in the ocean, I can't help but feel how small I am. I wade into the water and sink down into the waves, and my knees go weak and my muscles go slack and this great and powerful thing, this monstrous god-belly of water just holds me and rocks me and doesn't ask questions. All that is busy in my head goes as flat as the horizon and what enters me is the birds that fly over head, the sand that brushes over my feet, the water that doesn't leave me alone and I am not one person I am soup, I am salt, I am sky. My broken mind and heart become the same and as beautiful as the broken shells on the beach and I grow at once entangled in the world and unencumbered by it. Pain falls away. Heartache falls away. Worry falls away. I become mind clean. And when I climb out and come back into the thick of daily life some of all that stays with me for a while and holds me separate and stronger. But with time, like anything, that drifts away too. Water never stays in one place for long.
When I was a child I thought I would grow up and go live at the beach. I'm all grown up now and I can feel that child in me stern and disappointed. I would do it but I wonder, if you live at the beach where do you go if you go crazy? Do you then dream of desert? I lived in the desert once, it was barren and dead to me. I felt like the sun wanted to kill my bones.
I don't know if I ever will live at the beach. Some people live their childhood dreams and some people just live and dream, and I dream I dream I dream. I have shells on my shelves, I have cornflakes on my floor, and a cat that sleeps and I love her when she sleeps. And I have crazy in me that will rise like a plague of locusts around my head and because of that I know I'll take that drive and wash in those waters and get flat and quiet and small. This summer will be hot as it always is and the bugs will scream in the high grass and the sound will remind me inexplicably of dirty boys in cracker shacks doing drugs as it always does and the waste of it, the shimmering heat and the waste of this town with it's roadside beer cans and ragged women will get heavy in me. When it does I'll drive south, I'll stop and pee at the blue store, I'll open my windows and taste the air as it changes. When you live so close it is a sin not to go. We make excuses to stay in our craziness and all those excuses mean nothing, not when beauty is right there. Not when all you have to do is step away, and you can turn your face toward heaven.
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