Where Hummingbirds Lose Their Magic
I issued an edict last summer. If the vertical living rooms blinds are to be opened, they can never be drawn. I dubbed the main floor living room as my “reading room”. Abbey and I spent hours in there both reading and writing. Last summer when I found myself reading or writing in there, I would often hear a small “thunk”, and then run outside just as fast I could. I inevitably would find a jewel colored hummingbird lying amidst the dirt and pine needles, for all intent and purposes, dead. I would gently pick up the humming bird, and begin stroking its limp body. The kids would always gather around me and lament his condition and then ever so slowly, the rise and fall of its breast would become more apparent. I would continue to stroke the bird until it became more animated. When the bird was then able to stand on its own, I would take it to the backyard and set it on the roof of the pool house, always looking for a spot out of direct sunlight. Suddenly, the bird would float off into the air and back into space that is familiar. It was magic.
I soon found myself checking the front window even when I didn’t hear a “thunk”. I had become paranoid that one of those beautiful hummingbirds would hit my window and that I wouldn’t be there to rehabilitate it and send it back into its familiar space. One day to my horror, that fear was realized. I found a beautiful amethyst breasted hummingbird without a head. No amount of stroking or love would ever again help that bird to take flight and make the world just a little more beautiful.
I can’t help but to think of those birds when I think of my Abigail. It seems that since the moment she was born, I directed all my attention to putting her in a cocoon to protect her from the world. I issued edicts for blinds to never be fully opened all throughout her life. The girl was afraid to walk two houses down the street at the age of nine! I never in a million years dreamed that I would have to protect her from herself. All of the visible blinds in the world did not keep my daughter from taking her own life. I now wonder if the magic of those hummingbirds somehow grayed the finality of life and death in her mind. Did she think that I would be there to stroke her beautiful face and bring her back into familiar space? This haunts me. It will always haunt me
Happy 10th Birthday Maia Marie
It will be ten years ago this next Monday that you impatiently pushed your way into this world. It was 7AM on the morning of April 13, 2009 when the cramping in my abdomen announced that you would be arriving that day. I patiently drew myself a bath and insisted to your dad that he could go to work and that I would call him when I was ready.
As I washed and soaked in the hot water, the contractions became more insistent. I decided that I had better shave my legs because everyone would be looking at them as they sat on display in stirrups, rather than my birthing canal, right? Your daddy began to pace that small bathroom, begging me to hurry up. He was much more nervous than I was, after all you are number three and I was a seasoned pro.
I remember feeling that need to push at the last stoplight before we reached the hospital. Your daddy nearly had a stroke. Thankfully, I was able to hold you in long enough to have you delivered by someone more qualified than Daddy. You came into this world fifteen minutes after we had arrived at the hospital. You were a big beautiful round baby, with a head full of black hair, and lungs with the capacity of a tenor.
You cried from 10PM at night until 3AM in the morning for the entire first three months of your existence. I would have never guessed that you were working out your angst as a newborn to make way for the ray of sunshine that would become your personality and disposition in life. I still can’t get over how happy you always are. I can be in the deepest darkest place and your ready smile is always there to light up my heart. That is your gift.
Together, you and I experienced the scariest most unfathomable event of our lives, but I want you to know that there are going to be so many other experiences in your life that will be happy and wonderful and that they are all something to look forward to. I want to be there to hold your hand through the best and the worst of those experiences. All of them have value, even those that are not so pleasant to go through.
You have been a bulwark to me lately, taking care of me when it is my job to take care of you. I love that you caress my face like a mommy and tell me how important I am to you or how “cute” I am. It helps me to look outside of my grief and put my presence back with the living. You are so grown up. My commitment to you is to be present as a mother and to ensure that you remember your childhood as a happy one filled with hot Cheetos, hikes in the foothills, snuggle time and Club Penguin. I love you always, Mommy.
March 6, 2009
I am writing a lot more than usual…to maintain my sanity. As usual, writing is my life line. I am not blogging everything that I am writing, for obvious reasons, but below is an exerpt….that being said, I also know that each of you worries and cares about me, or else you wouldn’t land on my blog at all, to that end I want you to know that I am doing okay, and in this entry am sharing what I can at this moment in time. Much love, Catina
37 Days
It has been a few days since I have written, probably the longest stretch of time since Abbey passed and I started writing down my thoughts….hoping to anchor to anything that keeps me grounded in life and reality. It’s so difficult to find that anchor. I feel more and more lethargic lately. It never gets any easier. I know now that she is not coming back, that this is not a vivid dream that will make me breathe in a sigh of relief when I wake up in the morning. This is my life now. This pain in my chest that often hijacks my mind, it’s not going away. Another mother advised that I would have to just pack it up in my backpack and learn to carry it with me. That sounds so wise.
At the moment, I am still swimming in my grief and more often than not drowning. I can’t see the shore. I find myself wishing I were dead, when the pain is so excruciating that I cannot see a way through it. I did not realize that I had voiced these feelings aloud…not exactly wishing that I were dead, but vocalizing that I didn’t think I could handle it. Maia heard me. Tonight she was extra affectionate, making sure to tell me that I am and awesome mommy and a cute mommy and that she just loves me so much. She asked me if I would ever leave her and I told her “no” and I meant it.
As awful as I feel inside, as much as a part of me is dead, there is much that is alive and that is needed by all three of my children. As I read through Abbey’s poems and journals, I see that she too is very much alive. As long as I keep her alive through her writing and my memory, she does not go away, any more than does my love.
Yet, I feel so strongly that desire, that need to have my baby near. I reach such bottomless lows, lows that only a mother who has lost her child could ever fathom. The reality of it all is still debilitating to my whole system. I have moments of normality when I am lost in my work. I have moments of peace when I am next to my children. I know for them that I must live, I must make peace with Abbey’s death, because only then can I honor her the way I should. I am a long way from that place, but I can see it as the objective. I wonder if this will help me in the end. Everyone says how strong I am, yet I have never felt so vulnerable, scared and shattered
Entertaining the Absurd
Nineteen Days. Everyone was gone this morning…it’s always my biggest test. Antonio and Maia had spent the night at my cousins and Chris had gone snowboarding with his friends. Alone time has been my greatest challenge…trying to dig deep within myself to find a reason to peel myself out of bed. I couldn’t find a single reason this morning. At around noon I received visitors who were bringing us dinner for this evening. It was a reason to drag my sorry butt out of bed to be gracious and thankful. I promised them before they left that I would take myself for a run or a hike in the foothills. After they were gone, I dutifully got dressed and walked up to the foothills. There were a gazillion cars at the trailhead and I was grateful that I lived close enough to walk.
I headed up towards Taylor’s Canyon, alone with my thoughts, some of them bordering on madness. I climbed up to the trail, wanting to be on the highest trail and found myself wandering at the bottom of the rock spills. I had gone too far and was slightly lost. I’m the only person in Ogden who can spend all summer in the foothills and still manage to become lost when I am on my own. I found a huge boulder to sit on and catch my breath, and cry and pray for a sign. Yes, a sign. I’ve been entertaining the absurd a lot lately. I honestly convinced myself that Bambi would come up to me while I was sitting on that rock and talk to me and tell me that Abbey is okay and that she loves us and knows that we love her. Bambi never came. I thought, maybe a big serpent will slither out of the cracks and rocks and tell me what a shitty mother I am and have been and lay into me with venom and culpability. The serpent never came.
I wandered around the boulders and hidden crops of wild onions, trying to figure out how to get back to the trail. I never actually saw any onions but I could sure smell them. I thought to myself that maybe it was Abbey sending me a sign, but I couldn’t recall any occasion when her smell had reminded me of wild onions and trust me, I have been a maniacal hound dog these past nineteen days. I walk around her room, picking things up and inhaling them deeply, trying to find her in anything. I even took to smelling her shoes. I never smelled onions in those either.
I wandered until I found a wash that was free of scrub oak and boulders and slid down in my tennis. I thought of the Buttschards and the Osguthorpes briefly and wondered if they had laid the branches in the wash to prevent people like me from trashing a regrowth area. …I felt badly because I was sure they had, and here I was, lost again in my own foothills. Finally I saw a runner pass below me, and I made my way back to the trail. I put one foot in front of the other and made my way towards the canyon. One foot in front of the other is as much as I can concentrate on lately. One minute after another, one foot in front of the other. I started making lists in my head. I started with the things I was grateful for. I tried to make that list long and tried not to pick out too many things for my “life is shit” list.
I saw that a small bug had landed on my arm. I gently nudged him off and wondered if my Buddhist teacher would be proud of me. I put my Buddhist classes on my things I am grateful for list. I thought briefly about how I have always wanted to flex my muscles while a mosquito was feasting on my flesh and see if they would really explode from the overload of blood being sent into their greedy little needle mouths. I decided to put the exploding mosquitoes thoughts into my list of things that are not very Buddhist about me.
I came upon a couple who were picnicking in the trees. They had a radio, a jug of water and a huge art canvas. The young man had a shock of bright red hair and that made me smile. I love red hair and beg my children on a regular basis to marry a red head so I can have red headed grandbabies. I put red hair on my list of things that I am grateful for.
I felt a tickle on my arm and as I went to scratch it, I felt a small bug’s body pour its fragile wet guts onto my arm. Life is so very fragile and sometimes fleeting. I had just cancelled out my good karma. I made it to the canyon, took a cursory glance at the waterfall and headed back towards Taylor’s Canyon.
I passed all of the same people I had passed on the trail before. The red head and his girlfriend were lying down so I didn’t get to see his red hair and that made me cry. I tried to cheer myself back up by convincing myself that there was still a chance of being approached by Bambi, or a talking lizard, or anything that would make putting one foot in front of the other easier.
I saw some kids bouldering on a trail below me and heard music coming from their stoop. I was irritated for a moment that they had their music so loud….violating the gentle chatter of nature. Then, I realized it was the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Maps. Abbey loved that song, so much in fact that I had put it as the ringtone on my cell phone. I wondered if this was finally my approaching Bambi…hearing the lyrics “Wait, they don’t love you like I love you, Wait, they don’t love you like I love You.” I marveled in that. Marveled in it like you wouldn’t believe until I felt the vibration in the pocket of my pants. There was no radio with the kids climbing the boulder, there was no sign, it was in fact my phone…ringing.
My cousins were at my house dropping off my kids. I had wanted to stop at the little pond, but I put one foot in front of the other and made my way off the mountain and walked towards my house…towards those little people that give me a reason every day to drag myself out of bed and make it through the next minute.
Thank You
There is a finality to “Thank You” notes that I have not yet been able to face. You see, for two weeks, I have harbored some sense of the implausible thinking that I will still wake up and that the death of my beloved Abigail will be some horrible dream. With each morning that I wake up without her, with each visit to the cemetery, that implausibility becomes more implausible and reality starts to take root in unwelcome, untilled soil.
Nevertheless….we have not gone through this alone. There has been Jeanne who mobilized an entire grief effort to make sure that my daughter had a funeral befitting a princess. There has been Shane/Angie and Hillary/Curtis who left gallons of coffee on my doorstep every morning. Coffee, being the comfort substance from my childhood was the only substance that I was able to keep down that first week. They don’t know it, but they sustained me.
There has been Lisa D-S, one of my dearest and best friends since childhood, who has dragged me out of bed every morning, despite my protests and desire to sleep and wake up to better circumstances…and the Norvell’s who filled Lisa’s shoes on those mornings when she didn’t make it down the canyon. There is Wendy who has shared my grief right along side me like the best friend that she is…feeling what I feel…showing up at my doorstep when I refused her company but she knew better.
There are the many neighbors and beloved internet friends (Nadolski’s and many more) who have brought us dinner every night…ensuring that my family was fed when all I wanted to do was hide in Abbey’s room or under my comforter.
There has been our families, who have literally put their own lives on hold to make sure that the rotten business side was taken care of while making sure that we were taken care of and our kids were taken care of and that shoulders to cry on were taken care of.
There has been our coworkers and our employers, even our former employers who made sure that they knew that they were there and that we are loved.
So many to thank…and I will….I will. Reality is setting is…and as painful as that is, we have to move forward with some sense of normalcy for Antonio and Maia. We have to. Thank you Shane for the beautiful tribute that you stayed up all night putting together for Abbey’s funeral. Jeannie…thank you for everything….everything is all inclusive and too numerous to define. Thank you Tia Carolyn for always being my mother whenever I need a mother most. Thank you Jamie and Nicole for being here at the drop of a hat even though you are far away. …..thank you to my husband, my soul mate for being strong for me when I welcomed losing my mind and my will. Thank you to my kids for giving me the strength to retain my will.
Amidst this terrible terrible event, we have found that we are most blessed and loved. Thank you.
How?
How do I wake up every morning knowing that I cannot change yesterday?
How do I go on living this life without drowning in the “What Ifs” that consume my mind?
How?
How do I reconcile the confusion, the fright, the darkness that threatens to swallow me without the slightest care or deference.
How do I look at the other two and assure myself that my failure will not again result in demise.
How?
How?
Why?
Warm embrace, Big city
I walked into the train station in somewhat of a frenzy. I had missed the 9:04 am train I had intended to board, and David thought that the next train didn’t come in until 11:00. The fault was mine. I was reading email on my laptop and it did not register that the time I was looking at was Utah time. I noticed an older woman with an elegant Anna Wintour style bob reading the newspaper with shopping bags at her feet. The years have done nothing to diminish the woman’s beauty. I dismissed all the talk about Chicago being populated with only rude and unfriendly people and asked her if she knew when the next train into the city would be departing. She replied that the express would be arriving at 9:40 am, or approximately 20 minutes. A man pointed to the Saturday schedule on the wall as if to confirm what the older woman had stated.
The man asked me if I would be going to the Auto show downtown and I replied that I was meeting with friends. He was eager to engage me in conversation but his voice was almost inaudible and he had a tendency to talk to his shoes, further blurring any audible clips that spilled from his lips. He continued to make conversation and I listened and gave the kind of response you give when you are trying to appear both polite and uninterested. After about fifteen minutes the older woman looked up and said that she thought she could hear the train’s arrival. The man and I followed her outside the station and onto the platform. The man continued to talk as I turned my attention to the approaching train. I nodded politely to the man and followed the woman closely as she boarded and asked her if I could sit next to her. The train was half empty, empty enough that all of its occupants could have sat alone, but that’s not my style.
I have no expectations of having deep conversations with strangers but when my soul becomes sick and bruised from the constant platitudes in my life, it will reach out of its own accord and find for me a deep and meaningful conversation. I need this, I suffer without it and eventually everything around me suffers as well. Joanie assured me that it was alright for me to take up the seat next to her. As she adjusted her bags and belongings, I heard something fall to the floor. She looked around wondering if she had lost something, but didn’t see anything in the visible space around her. I tucked my head under our seats and found what looked like a small stone at first but was a much worn oval of acrylic with an angel floating inside.
“It’s my guardian angel!” said Joanie. The smile on her face was warm and kind and she was happy to have her angel once again in her possession. Joanie was headed to the city to meet her daughter, who would pick her up and take her to her home, which was another 45 minutes outside of the city. It was Valentine’s Day and Joanie had gifts for her three grandchildren. She had not seen them in several months and she was so excited to be able to spend the day with them.
Joanie had just recently retired and moved into assisted housing for senior citizens. She would like to see her kids and grandkids more often but doesn’t have the confidence or the eyesight to make the long drive and risk coming back at night. She has also timed today’s trip so that she will arrive back to this very station before it is dark. This gives her a total of three hours to spend with her grandbabies after having spent as much time travelling.
She worries about her daughter who has just given birth to a baby with a chromosomal defect similar to Down’s Syndrome. Her daughter has a good job but the daughter’s husband is trying to make it big as an artist. Joanie obviously finds this frivolous. She is a woman who was forced into practicality when her own husband died at the age of 42 and she was left to raise their children on her own.
We talked about her son who lives in San Diego and how her other daughter would like to go back to school and become a teacher. She says that at 36 (I’ll be 36 this year) she is too old to start a new career. I tell her that being a teacher is hard work and later I will regret not telling her that it is never too late to begin a new career, especially one that holds your heart and your passion. She wishes I could speak to her daughter to tell her how difficult teaching is.
Joanie tells me about how she really needs a knee replacement and how she is finding it harder and harder to get around on her old knee. She worries about how being laid up will prevent her from being able to buy groceries and take care of herself, something she hasn’t had to worry about since she first became a widow. I tell her that she should have one of her children come and stay with her for awhile, but she assures me that they have their own lives and their own worries. I wonder what kind of children any of us are when our own lives and worries trump providing a service to our parents that they themselves provided to us even into adulthood.
I feel slightly melancholy as we pull into Union Station in downtown Chicago. Joanie insists that I walk out of the station with her so that she can point me in the right direction. She hobbles, more noticeably to me now, on her bad knee. Her daughter has not yet arrived and I ask her if she would like for me to wait with her. “No, no go on, I’m going to just have a cigarette until she gets here.” We embrace and part. I wish that I could check in on her and make sure that she has that knee surgery but she is only a first name with a warm embrace in a big city.
Gay Teens in Utah
It’s interesting to me to read the stats on how people land on this website. Keywords used in search engines are particularly interesting and they range from funny to creepy to downright sad. I get a lot of hits for people looking for information on “gay teens”, a good chunk of visitors actually. It’s probably because I’ve often mentioned my involvement with OUTreach, a cause that I believe so profoundly in.
As I was nerdily looking at my stats last week, I saw someone had landed on the blog using the search words “how to act straight for gay teen”, and it honestly broke my heart. So to that kid in Pennsylvania who landed on my blog, I want you to know that there are those of us who love you just as you are, and I hope that you too will learn to love you just as you are.
Why am I involved with OUTreach? I wanted to become involved when I learned about the ghastly statistics on gay teens in Utah. Gay teens are four times more likely to commit suicide than non-gay teens and the suicide rate amongst Utah gay teens is the highest in the nation. Honestly, how could anyone still believe that homosexuality is a choice when kids are taking their lives in droves because they cannot change who they are? It makes me so angry. Anger unfortunately is not going to create tolerance or prevent kids from taking their lives. An afterschool program that is welcoming and accepting of gay teens, however, might just save lives….which is why I decided to become involved. I’m not gay, but I certainly recognize bigotry when I see it.
If you are a gay teen living near or around Ogden. Please know that the OUTreach Resource Center is there for you. You don’t have to pretend at OUTreach, we accept and love you for who you are. (www.ogdenoutreach.org)
My love and acceptance for others comes from here:
When I think of my grandmother’s old bedroom, I think of her bureau and mirror. Its contents never changed and neither did my curiosity in those contents. There was the antique tray mirror that held an assortment of perfume bottles, a brown clay compote that held jewelry, mostly rings with huge stones and a few religious medallions that had long ago lost their chains. There was also an old black and white photo of a young woman sitting on a stool, smiling. She wasn’t really sitting on the stool, but posing against it more or less. It was one of those 50’s style pinup type poses.
The girl must have been about eighteen when the photo was taken. She wore her hair in big curls, reminiscent of the brunette NormaJean that morphed into Marilyn Monroe. The woman wore denim capris and a button shirt tied in front, almost turning it into a mid-drift. She wore red lipstick and a beautiful smile. I would stare at that picture for hours. Sometimes I would ask my grandmother to tell me about the girl in the picture, hoping to glean a new detail about her short mysterious life.
My grandmother would begin with, “That’s my sister BettyJean. She was the baby of my family and your Aunt Ann and I raised her. Their mother, Margaret, had died while giving birth to BettyJean and so my grandmother and her sister, being the oldest of the fourteen children and married, had helped to raise the baby. My grandmother would tell me about how BettyJean and drowned and died at the tender age of eighteen and sometimes she would throw in other details about BettyJeans’s life but she would always end the story with “and she was a lesbian!”
The connotation was never “can you believe she was a lesbian?”, but more “Betty Jean was bad ass because she was a lesbian!” She said it as though it was just brilliant that BettyJean dared defy the times and come out loud and proud as a lesbian. My grandmother was never a woman of conformity and the sheer audacity of her sister made her beam with pride, I could see that.
I’m sure that I didn’t know exactly what a lesbian was the first few times I heard the story, but I imagined that it was something cool, like being a skydiver or a movie star, because that is the way my grandmother would say, “and she was a lesbian!”.
Another time my grandmother told me that BettyJean was raped by an uncle who was a drunkard. I imagined that it happened while they were still living in New Mexico at La Casita, and that BettyJean was alone at her father’s house when it happened. The drunk uncle probably went to visit his brother and found the young pretty BettyJean alone, and raped her. Her life was short and tragic, yet she had managed a pretty pose and smile in this old black and white photograph.
I know that my grandparents, my Aunt Ann and most of their family were living in San Jose, California at the time of BettyJean’s death. I still picture her, wearing those same clothes with her red lipstick, playing in the surf, trying hard not to get her pants too wet. Her girlfriend watches from the safety of the shore, clapping her hands at laughing at BettyJean as she tries to keep her balance in the waves. BettyJean is reckless and goes out further into the sea until the water is waste high, and lapping violently at her stomach as she holds her hands in the air as if praising the Lord. Suddenly a big wave knocks BettyJean off balance. Her girlfriend holds her breath, waiting for BettyJean’s head to pop back up above the water line, but she never resurfaces. A lifeguard that looks like Frankie Vallie runs out into the water with his floatie tucked under his arm to save, but it is too late and he drags her lifeless body to the shore.
I don’t know what happened to that old picture. When my grandmother moved out of her old house and into Joe’s, I was careful to pack all of her pictures and take them with me to my house. That was one picture that I have never found. I can’t forget the tragedy of BettyJean’s life, or the way she died and might have lived. My hope is that OUTreach is the lifeguard that makes it out to the surf in time, pulling out drowning teens and pulling them to safety.
**UPDATE** I found BettyJean’s Photo!
Urban Blight – A Short Story
“You’ve come a long way baby”, I said to myself as I drove through my old neighborhood. Dirty snow was piled next to driveways and gutters making it look more depressing than I had remembered. More houses were boarded up than the last time I had come to town to visit my family. There were more “For Sale” signs, tattoo parlors, paycheck loan store fronts and carnicerias than I had remembered as well. The tall mountains that always stood as sentinels to the west were the perfunctory saving grace to the dismal aesthetic of this old crappy neighborhood.
When I thought of this neighborhood from my youth, I always pictured it bathed in the colors of sunlight and lemonade with Easy E booming from open cars and our boyfriends playing basketball in the park. Not the bleak grays and dirty whites of winter, which is strange considering the shortness of summers that grace winters that seemed to never end.
Waiting for it, waiting for it, ahhh…there it was, the corner market that sold the best greasy potato wedges in the world. They were called “potato logs”, large wedges of potato, breaded and deep fried. You dipped them into small containers of sour cream that used to cost five cents extra, but now went for fifty cents a pop. I never came to town without stopping there at least once, to get my carb-grease fix until the next time I was in town.
The neighborhood dynamics had changed little in the past twenty years, including this market. It still had the monopoly on groceries for this very poor neighborhood, where people walked or used public transportation out of necessity, not because they were worried about carbon footprints. Those worries are for the educated and the gainfully employed. Here they worried about the fact that they paid fifty cents to a dollar extra for a gallon of milk because they had no way to get to the Albertson’s tucked safely into the suburbs. Yet, there the neon sign gleamed, like a beacon of colorful kitschy light amidst the tawdry gloom.
I drove my Volvo wagon into the parking lot, finding a parking space as close to the door as I could. I double checked the locks on my car and firmly tucked my purse under my arm. These were my old stomping grounds. You could take the girl out of the ghetto but you couldn’t take the ghetto out of the girl. My upbringing had served me well in my career. As an urban developer, I had experienced firsthand the machinations of poverty as well as the long hard climb out of poverty. I had seen my old neighborhood in states all across the country. Some were worse and some were better, but most of the problems were repeatable as were their solutions. These were the working poor, with some non-working as well.
I patiently stood in line in front of the food counter, waiting to place my order. Suddenly, I was self conscious about my expensive black slacks and high heeled shoes. I stood out like a sore thumb in my London Fog amongst thick flannel jackets and cotton hoodies. I turned my head to the door as a very loud party of three came into the market, two young men and a girl, early twenties I thought. Both men wore heavy flannel jackets and the girl wore black cotton pants with a dirty black hoody. One of the guys had tattoos all over his neck with three tattooed teardrops under his right eye. I noticed that they all had blood shot eyes and that one of the men was shaking nervously. They stood in line behind me and I stealthily adjusted my purse to be more in front of me than on the side of me.
It was my turn to order. “Food stamps or Cash?” the cashier asked. He was a big boy, as in obese. He was wearing a market shirt that had not changed in color or style probably since I was born.
“Um, do you accept debit cards”, I asked right back.
“Yeah, what can I get for you?”.
“Four potato logs, two chicken breasts and an extra sour cream”.
“Six-fifty”, he responded and I handed over my debit card.
He swiped the card and handed me a receipt and a pen. I quickly scanned the amount to make sure that it matched what he had told me. I signed the receipt and gave it back to him along with his pen, wiping my hand on my pants and cursing myself for not having remembered to bring some hand sanitizer.
The cashier handed me a foil bag with my dinner and possibly breakfast.
I moved out of the way quickly to allow hickey neck, tattoo and tweeker to place their own orders. As I was tucking my debit card back into my wallet, I ran right into a man who was making his way to the food counter line.
“Oh! I’m soooo sorry!”, I said as I looked right into the face of an old boyfriend….Jerry. His name was Jerry.
“Holy shit, Jerry! How are you?”
“Hey….Rosie, right?”
“Yeah, it’s me, Rosie. It’s been a long time.” And time had not been kind to Jerry. We were both only thirty years old but he could pass for fifty. He was thin and gaunt and his face was scarred from the use of meth. I knew the signs. I had seen a million Jerrys in my job.
“So what have you been up to?” I asked conversationally. I had thought about Jerry every once in awhile over the years. He had been the best looking guy in our neighborhood and I had dated him for two years, right up until he had started smoking crack and became violent. Soon enough he had dropped out of school and spent most of his time in juvenile detention. I had heard from one of my cousins that he had been in and out of prison. This guy was a real class-act and I was so morbidly curious about him that I just kept on asking questions, you know, to keep the conversation going. He got into line behind the three stooges.
We asked each other about jobs and family, skirting the obvious things about his life, while hickey neck placed her order. The cashier’s questions varied not an iota. “Foodstamps or cash?” he asked hickey girl. “Foodstamps” she replied, handing him what looked like a credit card.
Wow, that’s different I thought. How lucky was she that she didn’t have to use the ridiculously colorful money that came in little booklets. I remembered how I had once had to ask Jerry to drive me to the Albertson’s to get some milk and cereal for my mom. I begged him to stay in the car so that he wouldn’t see me use the food stamps. His mom was on welfare too, but knowing that didn’t make me feel any less embarrassed or ashamed. I blushed at the memory, but Jerry didn’t seem to notice. He was telling me about how that “fucking bitch Nadine, would never let him see his son”.
I watched as the cashier swiped the girl’s food stamp card. He did it twice, and both times it was apparently rejected.
“It ain’t working. You going to pay with cash?” he asked the girl, irritated.
“I fucking know it gots money on it, do it again”.
The cashier smirked and ran it through again, and again it didn’t work. He gave her back her card and asked “Cash or cancel?” The girl looked pissed and I worried that maybe she, tattoo, or tweeker might have a gun and start shooting us all. I hoped that she wouldn’t ask me if I had any money.
I watched as tattoo reached inside his flannel jacket to a hidden pocket and pulled out his wallet. He pulled a very large roll of twenties out of the wallet, making sure we all had a good look, and threw a twenty onto the counter. The cashier didn’t even blink; he just rang up the sell and gave the man his change. Hickey girl grabbed the two foil bags filled with chicken and logs. I hoped that some of that food was for her kids and not just for her boyfriends. I remembered my own mom feeding her revolving door of boyfriends like kings when her food stamps came in the mail. We would eat well too, for about a week…and then we would eat like mice for the rest of the month.
Jerry placed his order and pulled out his own food stamp card to pay. “It’s my old ladies, he said to me with a small laugh.”, nodding his head as if to say…”Women!”
Um, yeah, I bet it is, I thought. I told him it was great seeing him again and turned to leave.
“Hey man, can you could gimme a ride home?” he asked me. ”I just live four blocks away, but it’s fucking cold out there.”
I hesitated for a moment, before I said “sure”. What the hell, it would be my good deed for the day, helping out an old friend in need.
We walked out to my car together and I unlocked it with the remote on my keychain.
“Just go to Simpson Street and turn left” he said.
“You know Jerry, you could always go back to school so that you could get a decent job to get out of this neighborhood. You have the power to make choices for yourself.” I had given this talk to poor kids in schools more times than I could count. I was a true believer in education and I believed that it was the cure for all the social ills in blighted urban communities. It was my mantra. “Education equals choices”.
“I know man, I been asking my PO to help me get into the tech school so I can learn a trade. I got my GED when I was in jail. What the fuck else can you do in the pen except sleep and try to keep punks in line? So I started going to school and I finished. Man it felt good. My mom still has the paper that shows all my credits. Other punks were lifting weights while I was taking care of business, getting my education.”
It was the most words I had heard him say. “That’s so awesome! See what you are capable of? It doesn’t have to stop there; you can do so much more. Once you have an education, you get to have choices about where to work and where to live”.
“Fuck yeah man. Turn right here”.
I turned onto a half street with small wooden houses that reminded me of Snoopy’s house. Only three of the houses looked like they were lived in, the other six or seven were boarded up.
“Right there, that blue one,” he said, pointing to a small house with chipping blue paint. It had yellow shutters that had obviously been painted yellow with spray paint. The painter had not bothered to tape off the area that he had not intended to paint.
I pulled up next to the curb. “Alright Jerry, take care of yourself, it was nice to see you again.”
“Yeah, you too. Gimme your purse and get out” he said.
I started laughing. “Funny. See you around”.
He started laughing too, as he reached behind him and pulled a small handgun out of the waistband of his pants.
“Hey man, I’m glad you’re doing so good. I ain’t going to hurt you, just give me your fucking purse and get out.”
“Are you serious? Why are you doing this I asked?”, my voice was shaky, and I was afraid I was going to start crying.
He sighed, and reached across me to open my door.
“Get the fuck out” he said, handing me my bag of chicken and logs.
I grabbed the small foil bag and climbed out of the car, watching as he expertly slid across the gear shift and into the driver’s seat. He pulled the door shut and without giving me a second look, he flipped a U, and drove away.
“MOTHER FUCKER!!!!!” I yelled at him as he drove away. I stood there for what felt an eternal three minutes before I remembered that I had my cell phone. I pulled my Blackberry out of the holster hanging on my pants and called 911. As I waited for the police, I tenderly nibbled on a potato log. Damn those things are good!
Resolved 2009
Career – I have a few long term goals for this one. I still want to spend my forties and fifties teaching in various universities. To that end, my career goals are substantially tied to my education goals. Must. Get. PhD.
Education – As some of you may know, I took the GMAT last year and scored about 15 points under what I needed to get into Weber State’s MBA program. GMAT is more difficult than GRE, so I’ll be able to use my same study materials more or less. So my goal is 5 hours of study a week. I’m going to take all year to study and take the GRE next January. I love my current job and am in no hurry to make any changes. Post PhD, I want to teach in Spain and possibly Italy. I want to get the hell out of Utah for awhile. The kids will all be off to college by then, so it will be possible.
Marriage – They are always works in process aren’t they? The same as every year….get to know each other all over again, force him into having frequent, meaningful conversations. Make more time for sex.
Reading – I’m going to read 52 books this year. Some will be respectable literature and some will be downright trashy. This year I will read at least 10 works of non-fiction. I thought about finishing Ulysses this year too…but the thought never completely gelled…maybe next year. I’ll try to write book reviews for a majority of them…even the trashy ones.
Blogging – Wouldn’t it be great if I updated my blog at least once a week? I use so much writing mojo up at work that there is often nothing left for the poor weblog. I’ll try to be a better blogger this year..and maybe even update the template.
Fitness – I don’t love getting up early and exercising….I simply don’t. It’s so much easier in spring/summer/fall…when I can get my exercise in from a good hike. I’m not going to be specific about how I will exercise on this goal, I will only shoot for exercising for one hour every day….whether it’s at the gym or for a walk around the neighborhood in snow boots. I hate winter. Truly. I collect fat like a squirrel collects nuts…only the fat stays long after the squirrel’s nuts are all gone.
Friends – I’m a crappy friend, no doubt about it. I need to spend more time with W and Em…amazing friend that just might go away if I don’t nurture what we have. I could always use more girlfriends…so this year I’m going to buy a road bike and go biking with the girls once a week.