Tag: memories

Legacy Writing 365:3

Is this a leap year? Should I be saying 366:3 instead?

For a time in my twenties, Lynne and I lived together with a house full of dogs and her cat. The guy I was dating lived about two hours away. He didn’t have a car, and sometimes a friend would drive him halfway; I’d meet them and take him back to our little town for the weekend. It was on such a day that I was idly walking through a big discount store that was a forerunner of Walmart. I didn’t intend to buy anything; it was just a way to pass the time until the friend and boyfriend arrived.

I absolutely didn’t intend to buy one of the kittens who was with a group of them in the back of the store. These days, I’d never buy a dog or cat when so many need to be adopted and when irresponsible breeders shouldn’t be encouraged. But as ignorant as I was about such things then, even I knew we didn’t need another animal in the household. Still, there was one kitten I couldn’t ignore. He was talking to me, not begging, but demanding, and I held him for a bit and talked back. Finally I returned him to the enclosure and started to walk away. When I looked back, he was hanging by his paws from the top of the metal, as if trying to follow me out.

So Kess left the store with me.

He packed a ton of hilarious personality and bad behavior into his tiny body. He pooped in the plants, kept me up at night, and tried to nurse my throat, meaning I had to sleep holding the covers firmly over my head. He bossed all the other animals around. He was noisy. But all would be forgiven when he’d be adorable and affectionate. When he’d curl up with the dogs for a nap. When he’d eat without a sign of finicky behavior. When he’d chase a toy or lie on his back working a piece of yarn or a ribbon. When he’d bounce around the house en pointe, back arched, slaying imaginary enemies.

And some not so imaginary. One of the features of the wonderful old house we lived in was what we called “well crickets,” probably actually camel crickets. If you’re not familiar with these, go check out this photo at your own risk. The horror of these things is that they look like spiders and jump like crickets. Seriously? A spider that can JUMP AT YOU? And will, because the little bastards NEVER jump away from you. Nothing could send me shrieking from a room like the appearance of what I dubbed “leapers.”

Wouldn’t that be exactly the kind of prey that would fascinate an inquisitive kitten?

I was sitting on my bed one night, working on a lesson plan, when I spied movement across the room. I sucked in my breath: LEAPER! My body chose fright over flight. I sat rigid, hoping it would hop its way out of the room. Kess saw it, too, and dropped to the floor to fix his gaze on it, his dilated pupils driving the blue from his eyes. It jumped toward the door; he stared and slowly crept after it. It jumped again; same reaction. The third time it jumped, it was outside my room! I leaned over and slammed the door. Kess gave me an exasperated look, reached a paw under the door, and brought it back inside.

Stupid cat. He finally killed it when it stopped amusing him, but by then I was another few years closer to thirty-five.

When I was accepted into graduate school, I knew I could take only one animal with me, and that was going to be my dog. Lynne would have kept Kess, but we had some friends who wanted him. He enjoyed a long, happy reign over two human slaves and two Great Danes who devotedly served King Kess. Not a bad life for a discount cat.

Legacy Writing 365:1

You may have noticed that my masthead changed with the new year. Since the Magnetic Poetry project has come to an end, I wanted to take on another year-long project. My conditions: It has to be uniquely mine, and it has to involve writing. My blog readers (and I thank EVERY one of you, especially when you take the time to comment) seem to enjoy it when I dip into my past for material. Since I have about ten zillion photos in the archives that include many of my mother’s photos as well as mine, and a seemingly infinite amount of memories, I hope to combine the two on my blog each day.

My relationship with memory has a certain poignancy. I have no children who will say, “Tell me about that time…” or “Not this story again…” as I often did with my own parents. They were both storytellers, so it seemed particularly cruel that both of them suffered diseases that rob the memory: my father’s Parkinson’s disease, my mother’s Alzheimer’s. However, though both of them had moments of confusion and disorientation, they could be gently guided into sharing their long-term memories until shortly before they died.

In a way, my novels are my children. They get sprinkled with bits of stories from my own life and the lives of people I know (or have known): meshed, reassigned, shortened, made better, made worse. Whatever works to breathe life into the characters. When these stories are read, they’re filtered through everything a reader believes, likes, distrusts, yearns for, laughs about, despises–the whole gamut of that reader’s experiences are sitting in his mind and heart.

In essence, all writing is collaborative. We write everyone and everything we’ve known or wished we knew. We work with editors and friends and critical readers to shape and refine our stories. And then our readers rewrite our stories to fit into their unique perspectives.

Over the past year, I’ve read a lot about the process of memory, and its accuracies and inaccuracies. I’ll try to be accurate with both the photos and what I remember.


When I was going through pictures to create the new masthead, I found this one. I correctly identified: SOFTBALL! I don’t know how my father, a good softball player on winning teams, produced me. The Brides and Kathy S try to get me to come to their games, and I always babble things like “softball trauma,” “junior high nightmare,” or a simple shrieking, “NOOOOOOOOOO.” I’m pretty sure there was never a worse softball player than my early teen self. Even after I was finally schooled on the basics–a base? a shortstop? a strike?–I was hopelessly inept.

Keep your eye on the ball? You keep YOUR eye on the ball and make sure it doesn’t come anywhere near me. I closed my eyes when a ball came from the sky when I was practically in the next county, which is where my “team” in P.E. sent me to get me as far from the game as possible. If a ball did manage to turn itself into a rookie-seeking missile, it went through my hands, through my legs, or hell, I don’t know, through the fabric of the space-time continuum.

And batting: OMG, the nightmare that was batting. You are supposed to stand there while someone hurls a ball at you! A ball that can hurt when it hits you! I just closed my eyes and hoped it would somehow dematerialize before it came near me. Needless to say, I never heard or felt that alleged satisfying crack of bat meeting ball. Or got to run to first base–though I think I may have walked a time or two. All of this, of course, to the taunts and jeers of the opposing team. And my own team. And possibly people brought in from biology or civics just to watch me. Which, praise the spirit of whoever is the softball equivalent of Babe Ruth, my father never saw. He never had to know the shame of fathering Jacksonville High School’s WORST Softball Player.

Kathy S looked at this photo and said they don’t make bats like this anymore. They do still make great softball players…I’ve heard.

Score

I’ve always been mesmerized by people who find money or other interesting things when they go through old purses, bags, coat pockets, and the like. I’ve never been one of those people–okay, except once, I did find a dollar in a blazer pocket many years after I last wore the blazer. Since I could remember tucking it there for specific reasons, I don’t count that.

Recently I was checking the various pockets of the case that contains my old laptop. I found a business card from my CR-V’s car dealership–obviously I’d taken my laptop with me when I got the car serviced. And folded up into a tight little square I found this piece of paper.


front


back

I have a couple of notepads at the house with scores for our ongoing games of progressive rummy. One is used when we play Lynne and her family, and one is used when we play my sister during her visits. I probably folded this up and stuck it in my laptop bag with a promise to add it to the notebook. We consult these old scores when someone says stuff like, “I never win,” “I always lose the last hand,” or “Laura cheats.”

The moment I unfolded the paper, I knew exactly when it was from–September 2005. It was the first time Tim ever went to Lynne’s house–when we tried to evacuate as Hurricane Rita moved through the Gulf toward us. Our plan to leave the state was thwarted by the gridlocked traffic–it took us five hours to go fifteen miles–and we finally got off the highway and rambled along surface roads until we made it to Green Acres in the northwest suburbs. Whenever I look at our photos from those few days at Lynne’s, I’m amazed how much has changed. Our main reason for trying to evacuate was concern about how power loss and flooding could affect my mother’s health. She died in 2008. Craig died in 2006, and Tim’s dog River and cat Lazlo, both of whom were with us, have died, as have Lynne’s dogs Greta and Sparky.

But for that little period of time, we were all safe together. Though we were sometimes without power, we cooked and ate scrumptious meals, sat outside on Lynne’s patio and talked and (some of us) smoked, kept in touch with friends by phone and computer to make sure everyone was accounted for–and played lots of cards.

By the way, in progressive rummy, the winner has the lowest score–and oddly, this paper shows that each of us won one game. Maybe that’s why I kept it: proof that nobody loses all the time.

I still say Laura cheats.

Magnetic Poetry 365:345

In October 2001, Tom and I joined Tim, Timmy, Jim, and many friends in New York for the release of the first Timothy James Beck novel, It Had to Be You. It was a strange time in Manhattan, but traversing the island together in support of the book, having dinner with our editor, and doing a few tourist things helped keep our moods mostly positive.

One place we went was Keith Haring’s Pop Shop, a boutique providing public accessibility to Haring’s art, as well as clothing and gift items bearing images of some of his most iconic drawings. (The shop was closed to the public in 2005; the link above is its online site, where merchandise continues to be available.) While we were there, I sneakily bought Tom a couple of Keith Haring ties that I later gave him for his birthday and Christmas. He liked them so much that a couple of years later, I ordered him another one. Among them, he had a favorite.

On Saturday, he came inside from doing some work around The Compound grounds to five happy dogs (Tim’s and ours). None of those dogs had silk hanging from their mouths or necktie-icide in their eyes. But Tom’s favorite Keith Haring tie must have slipped off the rack and been visible under his closet door, because Pixie and/or Penny someone had left it in the middle of the living room. And it looked like this:

I texted Tim, who agreed that the tie carnage sucked, but then he said, “Though maybe now a Barbie might get a Keith Haring skirt.”

Hmmm. But my Barbies are all packed away until after the holidays.

Except apparently Santa has a secret stash in the house, because here’s a new Model Muse, who I’ve named Shannon after a character in one of my early (never published) novels. And she’s got a fancy new silk dress and jacket.

Button Sunday

I can’t believe I’ve been doing Button Sundays for more than five years. About two–maybe three–years ago, Lynne brought over a box of buttons. At first I thought she was giving them to me, then I realized she was loaning them to me for use in future Button Sunday posts. I promptly put the box of buttons away and forgot about them. She probably has added “button thief” to “Tupperware thief” and “sock thief” on her list of my vices. So I finally photographed them all, will share them over time, and now I can return them to her.

Maybe.

Here’s the debut from what I have of her collection:


This one reminds me of trips we made to Six Flags with Lynne’s church youth group when we were youngsters. On one of those trips, a boy a couple of years older began flirting with me. A year or so later, he became the first person my mother (my father was overseas) let me go on an official double date with because he seemed like a nice, young gentleman.

For my younger readers, let me tell you what I learned from him.

BOYS CAN BE MUCH WORSE GOSSIPS THAN GIRLS.

I have no idea what it meant to “ring the bell” at Six Flags, but all these many years later, I could still cheerfully wring that blabbermouth’s neck.