oh, my god, it has been a month.

This never happens. But my life! It was all maelstrom-y and this website was the last thing on my mind. And then occasionally I would think I should really write something and then I would think I don’t want to write just because I feel like I SHOULD write something and then something else would hit me across the back of the head and eventuallly—gasp—I opened up a tab and logged in. It feels so unfamiliar; the colors changed back on the first of April but there hasn’t been a new post since then. I want to get some use out of this preppy pinkness before I change them again.

But then: what to say? Part of the difficulty is that the maelstrom-y topics are not blog fodder. I feel the need to be a little lighter right now, to be pink and green instead of dark. And so, though I have a migraine kicking at me from behind my right eye like a bastard, I asked myself what I wanted to tell you. And then I remembered that way back before Scintilla started, Tracy asked me a bunch of questions, and I never did answer them. And how fair is it for me to expect people to answer questions that I ask but then not to return the favor?

Not fair at all.

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1. What is your earliest memory?

My earliest memory is in a corner of a house that we lived in for a brief time; I was somewhere between two and four. I had a small table with a durable gingham print on top and metal legs that were painted with shimmery blue paint. I remember sitting at that table and drawing on it with crayons, and noticing how the crayon could move into a beam of sunlight and change color a bit. I hope it’s a real memory and not a shred of dream; I want it to be something I lived through.

2. Name one scent that brings back a very pleasant memory from your past.

Honeysuckle. It reminds me of walking with my grandmother over the hill on hot days, and nectar on my tongue.

3. What song gets you tapping your toes or dancing around the room without fail?

I don’t have one of these. I like music a lot but I’m more likely to respond to what is being played than by selecting a song myself.

4. You are in a crowd of people – you could totally fart and they would never know it is you who passed the nasty stink bomb. Do you do it? And HAVE you?

Well, of course I have! I’ve been six. Would I do it today? I would do everything in my power not to. I’ve been in that crowd and been the victim.

5. Where/what is the most embarrassing place/situation you’ve had an attack of the giggles?

There was a day in eighth grade when Michelle and I started laughing—I can’t remember what started it. All I know is that we started laughing during science class, and it continued through literature class, and then into choir. And I mean it was uncontrollable.

6. If you won a five minute shopping spree at ANY store, what store would it be?

I had to think about this a lot because there isn’t anything I’m really jonesing for right now, so why don’t I just scoop up everything I can at a jeweler’s? Yes, definitely. I’m not into jewelry but you didn’t say that I couldn’t sell everything. Five minutes would be plenty.

7. What is the one article of clothing you have in your closet that you cannot bear to part with even though it is old, outdated, worn out, etc…? (wedding attire doesn’t count)

I don’t have anything like this. I throw clothes away with joy.

8. What is your one television viewing guilty pleasure – if you have one?

I’m not guilty about any of the television I love! In fact, I am feeling the urge to have a weekend-long Doctor Who marathon.

9. Cake or pie and what flavor?

Cake. Spice cake! Oh. Or really, I would give your right arm to have a slab of Vanilla Malted Cake from The Grit.

10. Name your favorite Captain and Tennille song!!

“Love Will Keep Us Together”!

11. What is the one movie you absolutely cannot and will not watch and why?

Anything really gross and torturey, like the Saw movies? Or with Tom Cruise; I guess that’s the same thing.

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Well, I feel much better now. What’d I miss?

23 people I want to have over for dinner: #scintilla

Write a list of 23. (23 things to do, 23 people you owe apologies to, 23 books you’ve lied about reading, 23 things you can see from where you’re sitting, 23 ten-word hooks for stories you want to tell….)

1. The lovely person who contacted the city last week and told them to oil the very noisy very bad very terrible swingset hinge at the park out back.
2. My Grammy, who is on a restricted diet and will grumble when I follow it to the letter.
3. Italo Calvino, although I wouldn’t understand a word he said. But we’ll seat him next to Grammy at this table, because they might just hit it off.
4. Miss Fedorovich, the first teacher who really got me.
5. Someone with an unerring gift for dream interpretation who will also bring a towering coconut cream pie even after I promise that she doesn’t need to bring anything.
6. Dominique, who will also bring dessert (probably a pan of her famous brownies) but who will pass them to me in secret so that we can eat them later after everyone else has gone home.
7. My friend Holly, who taught with me on the reservation, a mom of five who can use a night off from cooking.
8. and
9. and
10. are Mel, Dan, and Phil, who were there when I threw my first dinner parties.
11. Tracy, who would get as big a kick out of Phil as I always did, even though they might get in great fights, too. (You’ve gotta give us something to gossip about the next day.)
12. Angela Chase. No, not Claire Danes.
13. A cabinetmaker who smells lightly of sawdust even after a shower, who understands meditative hard work, quiet, and beauty.
14. Roxanne, who also understands these things.
15. A photographer who will spend the pre- and post-dinner time capturing the evening for us, one with the gift to see all these lovely people the way that I do.
16. Annie Dillard, who does not have time for all this foolishness but oh, if she did, if she only did, what stories.
17. Noël, who says more in a hundred words than some people say in a lifetime.
18. Stephen Fry, because, really, who needs to explain wanting Stephen Fry at your table?
19. Debbie and
20. Danielle, who are also responsible for the evening’s playlist.
21. And then there will be Onyi, who knows that calories do not count when you eat them in a foreign country and 
22. Onyi’s Mister, who can talk about football and politics and chess to 
23. Myron, who will raise a glass at the head of the table and toast to friends old and new.

well, well, well, my Michelle

This woman knows me better than just about anyone except Myron.

sorry about the picture-of-the-picture—scanning isn’t working today. I think this was 1992.She lives too far away from me, in the house where her grandparents lived when we were kids. I do not see her nearly enough, but the minute we are in touch with each other, miles and time melt away. She knows what I am made of, and when you are with someone who knows your building blocks, you breathe in a deep, effortless way that you cannot at any other time. I have never had to say to her Please be happy for me. It’s her default. Even when I dated someone she still calls Sonic the Hedgehog, she was happy for me.

She has often apologized to others for what I’m made of; she knows it isn’t actually as nice as it should be. “You don’t have to apologize for me,” I would say. She did it just the same. It’s because of the way she loves, which is one of those all-or-nothing loves. I never seem to issue those of my own volition; people have to drag them out of me with heavy machinery. Michelle did it with the phone.

In my childhood bedroom (another Scintilla post I have not written; blame a migraine and everyone else’s great posts which I can’t stop reading), my mother installed a powder-blue slimline phone. She mounted it on the wall and it had a shortish cord, so I had to stand up near my bedroom door to talk. This is not an ideal situation for a thirteen-year-old girl. But my mother did not think like a thirteen-year-old girl, and I was expected to be grateful for any bit of telephone I had. 

Michelle called. Did I have the homework? Did I see what X was wearing? Did I have a crush on anyone? What was I going to wear tomorrow? Did I like Bon Jovi?

Girl loved her Bon Jovi. 

I answered her questions, said Igottagobyeseeyoutomorrow, and hung up.

Years later, she laughed. “I tried! I couldn’t keep you on the phone!” I didn’t know how to have a conversation. But I put in the time in person. We did things with Girl Scouts, with choir, on our own. We laughed once for two class periods straight, uncontrollably, in tears and gasping for breath. Somehow none of our teachers sent us out of their classrooms. We double-dated; I’m still not sure which one of us was actually stuck with the guy who looked like Cousin Itt. We grieved and got drunk and stayed up too late bothering her Nana until three in the morning, sometimes all at the same time. We watched Dirty Dancing (a hundred times) and The First Nudie Musical (once was enough). We made peanut-butter rice krispie treats and pastitsio and we wore matching French maid costumes, and fought with each other while wearing them. We used our criminal minds to get away with murder all through school. We walked around the high-school track late at night singing The Mamas and the Papas and watched meteor showers from her front yard. We edited a yearbook that brought tears of pride to our adviser’s eyes.

Fourth grade, with much smaller hair. Evidently it was a Blouse Year.She shared her family with utter selflessness. During the summers I spent weeks at a time at her house, coming home for clean clothes and to prove to my mother that I was still alive. I did chores and ate meals at her table and babysat with her. We played B94 and sprayed Sun-In in our hair and sprawled on beach blankets in the sun. I basked in the love of her parents and the energy of her siblings. But it was always Michelle who gave the most, who loved hardest, who side-eyed me when I handed out bullshit, who made me feel like I was just fine as myself (even if she had to apologize to others in the process). When my brother died, it was Michelle who picked me up at the airport when I flew home, who held me and demanded nothing. When my mother was dying, she did the same. And when I got married, she drove all day to come here and stand at my side, bearing my mom’s charm bracelet. She’s family, in a way that no one else I’m actually related to can be.

At the end of Stand by Me, the adult Gordie writes: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” And no, I never did. I have had fun with other people, and shared secrets, and loved with what my heart had to give, but the love you give when you’re a child is different than any other love, wider and stronger and less judgmental. It depends on nothing and generates its own power like a star. You can apologize for it and let it collect dust and even put it away, but its power can do anything. Thirty years is nothing to a star.

(And she will know why I chose Guns & Roses for this video.)

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The Scintilla Project, Day 8: Who was your childhood best friend? Describe them—what brought you together, what made you love them. Are you still friends today?

it's a sin that somehow light is changing to shadow: #scintilla, day 3

After a day off from the project yesterday, I am back with Day 3’s post “Talk about a memory triggered by a particular song.” I wrote this post in 2004, during my time on a short-lived blogging site called scribblejournal, and I’m reusing it because I want to spend more time reading others than writing here today. It is a little purple at times, but other than that, I am sentimentally attached to it, which is quite an accomplishment for eight-year-old writing. It was in response to this prompt: something you finished too late. I almost never write about this topic, and never have in this depth under my real name. And maybe it was not finished too late at all.

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Those were days when I traded and hoarded mix tapes that were made for me. By now they’ve all gone thin and snapped, except a few. An older brother of an older friend had made a tape for me that fall, complete with artwork on the liner and with all the solemnity that comes from a thirty-year-old man making a tape for a girl who’s nineteen and professes to love Pink Floyd. The tape was laden with the obscure songs I hadn’t heard on my midnight drives home on DVE, when I’d stay out later than I even wanted just so that I could come home with the Floyd Fix.

At the time I thought I’d go to culinary school or commit suicide. The previous twelve months I had destroyed almost everything I touched. Things were coming for me in just a few months, but I didn’t know it then, and I spent my days selling 4x8 sheets of plywood and wet red bricks that smell like something you don’t talk about to your little brother. I preferred my silence and my Tanqueray Sterling for those days, and you were still a little boy with a crush on Danielle Fishel.

The car was a little slip of a thing, made for a girl; it didn’t drive fast enough to make my mother nervous about me taking you around in it. The night I bought it, my first brand-new car, I drove you around in it, through our hometown, playing music and talking to you as though you were someone my own age. Almost ten years younger than me, you weren’t yet old enough to be the asshole you would pretend to be later, and you were one of the few things in my life that I didn’t treat with detached coolness. Your eyes were better than any other eyes in our house; they looked like a green and gold glass vase that had been shattered on topsoil after a thunderstorm. I couldn’t look at you without seeing a wonder who called all his friends by their first and last names, as though I couldn’t keep track of them, as if knowing that someday you’d have too many for anyone to tally. I learned how children learned to pronounce things by watching you; I learned the way people learned to think. I learned how new words got stuck in your head and I learned the lyrics to “Just Me and My Dad.” I wanted to give you something, to be that sister.

Along the road to Victory Hill through the township, I pointed out where my friends lived and I played you the mix tape. Amid all those obscure never-on-DVE songs he’d thrown in “On the Turning Away.” It was quiet in the car, and the silence behind that voice brought us to silence ourselves. “It’s sad,” you said. “It gets less sad,” I said. Could you have understood those lyrics back then, so small I put the seat belt on you myself, never ever thinking that a seat belt would have saved your life six years later? A fucking seat belt. Fabric. It would have kept you here, maybe having momentary twinges when you heard Pink Floyd, remembering your sister driving you around. After that one, I played “Wish You Were Here.” You couldn’t pick up the words to that one. Years later our brother would play it for me on his guitar, slowly and precisely, and it would echo in his tiny apartment. It was a too-on-the-nose moment, looking back, but when your heart pours out from you there is no such thing as too-on-the-nose.

I never finished with you. You never finished anything, except winning seasons and probation terms. Even your destruction isn’t finished; I know its waves can be detected from New Mexico and Georgia and the damn Crab Nebula. We took you once to the hill by the cemetery, and the three of us talked like friends instead of siblings, but I never got to tell you anything important, not ever. I waited for you to get older, thinking what we would become when you got your teens out of your way, when you wanted to hear someone else. Instead I would never see those greengoldbrown eyes again; I search for their liquid light in photographs of you, but it is never there. I didn’t know that you weren’t getting any older than you were that day on the hill, that we would bring you to the cemetery soon after carried on the shoulders of your teammates, and that the only thing I’d finish, because the grieving doesn’t stop, would be the story about the day we cruised through the Valley and we played Pink Floyd.

rites of passage: #scintilla, day 1

They tell you not to overload your work with backstory. Nobody needs it! No1curr! But I will tell you that in the days before this story I was in Kona and Honolulu with friends and crush-objects and all that wind and sand and water and a million million t-shirt shacks. I browned in the sun for hours and grew up in ways I could never have expected. The day I came home, I slept for almost an entire day, and when I woke up my mother handed me a very official envelope that had come in the mail while I was gone.

Inside that envelope was The Card. You took the card to The Office and stood on a piece of tape on the floor, and when it was all over and done with, you had your driver’s license. It was 1990 and I was sixteen.

It took me a long time to get up the nerve to drive. My mother and stepfather both scared me for years about getting into wrecks… not so much for the damage I could do to my person, but for the expense, the humiliation, the idea that I would never be allowed to drive again if I did any damage to their cars. We had even been in a pretty bad family car accident once when I was a tween; a young woman went through a stop sign and destroyed our old Celebrity. So if they weren’t afraid of being hurt in a wreck, I was. I knew what happened when people weren’t careful.

By the time I was fifteen, though, both of my parents were ready to stop driving a carful of teenagers everywhere we wanted to go. Neither of them trusted me with their cars, so they paid for private driving lessons, during which a bored older gentleman taught me the three-point turn in a parking lot. For six weeks, I overcame the fear, driving slowly through a wealthy neighborhood with curvy, wide roads. I learned that sometimes, you hit the bunny rabbit to avoid hitting another car, and that you never forget what that sounds like. I turned sixteen in August, but I didn’t pass my test until March of the following year. I was in no rush.

When I woke up after that jet-lag coma to find The Card in its very important envelope, I pulled on a black t-shirt that I’d picked up from a tourist trap in Kona. My mother grimaced. “Don’t you want to dress up?” Her driver’s license pictures were glam, silky tops with ruffles around the collar, a blazer, liquid rouge and eyeliner and eyeshadow and earrings and tall tall permed curls. But I could still feel the ocean in my muscles and the salt in my hair. I still felt like I was in Hawaii. To appease her, I consented to a quick round with the curling iron on my bangs. (I say it again: It was 1990 and I was sixteen.)

I took the keys and drove a few towns away to The Office. It was the first time I had driven alone in my life, but no one wanted to go with me, and I’d passed my test weeks ago. I turned on the radio, used my turn signals and mirrors, melded with the flow of traffic. I felt tanned and capable and well-traveled and adult.

It was a weekday, a workday, and the street in front of The Office was a one-way with metered parking on each side. A block or so away from The Office was a parking lot, but a space opened up right in front of the building. Of course I can do parallel parking. It was on the test. I smoothly pulled up next to the car in front of me, backed into the space with grace, put the car into drive, and stepped on the gas too hard, smashing into the car in front of me.

If you have never hit another car, you are amazing. For the rest of us, we know the cold flood of panic, the way that everything stops until you’re sure of what’s damaged and what’s fine. I said “Oh God Oh God Oh God” a few hundred times. The pertinent facts filtered in: Not only had I caused financial expense, I hadn’t even gotten hurt enough to elicit sympathy and fear in my parents.

Screwed. I would never drive again.

An older woman tapped on my window. “I think you hit my car.”

Oh God Oh God Oh God.

That woman was a peach. She patted my shaking hand and then examined her scratched and dented rear bumper. “It’s not that bad, honey. We probably won’t even need the insurance company.”

I said, “I can’t give you my license because I don’t even have it yet!”

“You’re underage?”

“Oh. No. I just—” I waved at The Office and wailed. “I was supposed to go get my picture taken!”

She handed me a piece of paper with her information. “Give that to your mother.” She walked to her car and opened her door.

“Wait!” She turned around. “We have to wait for the police! We can’t leave the scene of an accident without the police!”

I wish I could remember her name, but I was still trembling so hard and all I could remember was her kindness and her patience. “We don’t need the police for a little old thing like this. Just give that paper to your mother and tell her to give me a call. Go get your picture.”

She drove away and I walked to The Office. When I looked back at the car, its plastic front bumper barely scratched, I could see that I was still parked about eight or ten inches away from the curb. And then I went inside, and a few minutes later I stood at the tape line and smiled.

I am still this bad at parallel parking, even today, although I manage to get closer to the sidewalk these days. Every single time I have to do it, I flash back to that lurching feeling as I stepped on the gas and felt a car—an expensive death machine—going out of control. But look at me. Just look at me. Even then, I knew that you could be scared out of your wits, your body refusing to listen to your mind, and still put a smile on my face.

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Scintilla Project, Day 1 (prompt b): Life is a series of firsts. Talk about one of your most important firsts. What did you learn? Was it something you incorporated into your life as a result?