“Mom, come here,” one of us would plead, racing through our back screen doors with a slam.
It was the late 70s, early 80s, and few of our mothers worked, even fewer worked during the summers.
We had two or three moms on the street who were local school teachers. My mother did not work at all. Mostly, she could be found sewing on the quilt stretched across her quilting rack, pinning patterns to fabrics in order to make clothes in the dining room, or baking in our kitchen that lacked decent counter space.
If it was a Saturday, she was likely baking—probably an apple pie, or maybe sugar cookies, or, if we had a potluck at church the next day, then I’m sure it was broccoli casserole or something equally as distasteful to my young palate.
Coaxing one of our moms to judge one of our games was not easy, and if we could snag one, then they usually came in pairs. My mom and my next-door-neighbor’s mom would appear together.
Our reason for requiring such careful judging was a game—one of our most macabre. It was called Deader Than Dead.
As children, we had a variety of games: Capture the Flag, Kick the Can, Hide-n-Seek, Swedish, a wretchedly named game called Smear the Queer (The object was to not have the ball. If you did, everybody tried to jump on you and tackle you), Flashlight Tag, Ghost in the Graveyard, and, of course, a game we called Deader than Dead.
The objective of Deader than Dead was to look more “dead” than everyone else. This usually involved tightly closed eyes, the shallowest of breathing, and an Oscar-worthy pose. This required arms flung open, legs eschew, heads allowed to droop to the side, mouths open, occasionally tongues poking out—the more theatrical the location, the better.
Most of us ended up on the neighbor’s picnic table, brick backyard fireplace, or simply left to lie in the grass.
You had to seem limp, like you dropped right there on the spot. We did not often use props. Apparently, our staged demises were meant to be of natural causes.
As I think back, it was a horrible request we would make of our mothers. We were asking them to look at their “dead” children and decide which was the most convincing. But, as children, you do not think of things like that. I don’t know who invented this game, but what a dark game for us to play!
Dead things always seem to fascinate children.
For me, it started with our poor K-mart hamsters who we would wake up and find cold and hard tucked into the corners of their cages. Some only lived a few short weeks. It wasn’t due to poor care. They were petted, spoken to, fed, watered, given all of the comforts any retail store hamster could want. After a while, you stopped crying when “Cupcake” or “Carmel” didn’t move anymore. You just sighed and unceremoniously buried him or her in the backyard and began your begging for a new one.
Fish were actually more fun dead than alive. It’s hard to say why flushing a fish was so much fun, but it was; maybe it was the irreverence of the moment. A living thing had ceased to live, and we were simply plunking it into the toilet, like a piece of waste, allowing its body to swirl in the bowl towards fish heaven.
During elementary school, I remember passing a decomposing raccoon in the alleyway behind our house every day when I walked back and forth from school. I remember the buzzing of the black cloud of flies, the horrid stench. I watched the progress of the carcass as it became more and more a part of the earth, a natural erasure of existence—Life covering Death’s tracks by consuming the evidence. I would not even consider doing such a thing now. In fact, I would avoid walking by once I knew what was there.
As an adult, it seems that I am much more preoccupied by Time. I feel the passing of an hour or two. I am much more conscious that that swinging pendulum is shaving off seconds and minutes and hours that no time machine can recapture. I appreciate what time I have been given. Each tick is precious.
As a child, though, I seemed much more fascinated by Death, perhaps because as children we have just emerged from the Abyss—that alchemy of chromosomes, that delicate waltz of DNA. We have just awakened from the secret place where all souls will eventually return.
So much can be contained in a children’s game.
I don’t know if I ever won Deader Than Dead. There was some pretty “stiff” competition. What I remember most about the game was that our mothers did not like to judge it.
And, now, years later, on this bitter cold night in January, with so many losses and years of grief, in my memory still smelling that freshly mown grass, feeling the trickles of sweat from a humid summer day in Northwest Ohio, I finally understand why our mothers often denied us, and why I could never play such a game anymore.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Personal Effects
The smell of moth balls tied up in nylons hanging in most of the closets, Chantilly body powder, the hint of toast and Lipton tea, candle wax and book pages yellowing—these are the first things you noticed when walking into the house—that unmistakable smell.
This was a house with dozens of clocks, all ticking out of time. A room never seems so empty and quiet as when there is a clock ticking off each second.
When you are going through the house of someone who has recently died, those dozens of clocks—orphaned now from the frail fingers that used to wind them—stand in corners, hang on walls, sit on dressers and end tables with their mechanisms dutifully reminding you of each hour of loss.
You are so much more conscious of time after someone’s death. Each hour is another hour without that person and another hour you yourself can never reclaim.
As you moved through the house, you heard the grandmother clock in the front room, saw the chairs and bookshelves undisturbed. No one spent much time in that front room, not unless it was a holiday. That was how the white carpeting stayed so pristine and without the stains of use.
The kitchen was where you saw the clearest signs of life. This was where you saw the needle that measured her glucose every morning and evening, the little booklet with her neat, precise numbers recording the sugar levels.
You saw at her place setting the crumbs from her toast each morning—such an odd thing she did not brush them away and instead allowed them to accumulate. Such an interesting personality quirk for someone so otherwise orderly.
She sat down at her kitchen table to eat each meal, although she was alone and had not shared that table with her husband for over 27 years. A creature of habit. On the kitchen table was the little basket full of quarters she used to buy her daily newspaper. It was her one reason to leave the house each day, though the idea of her driving at 86-years-old seemed less and less like a good idea.
In the living room, there were novels with bookmarks stopping the words where the reader last paused. There were hand creams and lotions, knitting needles holding the yarn of a half-finished something (baby blanket, dish cloth, hot pad, so hard to know). Next to the phone, there was a notepad with unfamiliar names and doodles.
As you moved through the house, you could see her and smell her and hear her. The house sat in anticipation, waiting for the occupant to return and fill the rooms with life again.
But, her stroke happened in the garage, after a trip to the grocery store, and she never entered the house again. Things were exactly as she left them. You saw the clocks that Grandpa built, the pictures of relatives—some you know and some you probably never will—on the fireplace mantel.
The hesitation is gone now. You do not need permission. You can look more closely at the bookshelves. You can thumb through the books. You look at the items on her desk in her sun room. There are cards signed “love, Howard”—suddenly, your grandparents become more real and human—ironically, now, after they both are gone.
You run your fingers over the keyboard of her computer where she sat down and sent you so many emails over the years. There was at least one a week, signed the same way, always the same way, “So long, God bless, keep smiling, love, Gram.”
So many artifacts. A lifetime of things that are just things, but these are her personal effects. These are your family’s heirlooms now.
You walk down the hallway and stop for a minute in her bedroom, a place you rarely ever stepped. The bed is made. In the hamper are a couple of days’ worth of dirty clothes. She had just bought a couple of pairs of pants and now they hang in her closet, unused.
Going through someone’s personal effects after she has died is daunting. You want to keep as many things as possible to preserve that loved one you lost. The more you have, the closer she seems.
Beside me, now, is the grandmother clock from the front room. The words tempus fugit adorn the face. On my wall is an old picture that hung in my grandmother’s house and before that her parents’ house and grandparents’ house. I have many other things from Grandma’s house. They have begun to smell like her less and less; her touch has started to fade.
But these things are my personal effects now. As I look around, I think about the objects on my tables, the movies, CDs, books upon books, letters, papers—what would people learn about me that they did not know before, if they had to sort through my things.
A part of me and who I am and what I cherish can be deciphered by going through my stuff. Such an idea makes me think the time is coming to sort myself out and finally let go of a few of those dustier boxes.
This was a house with dozens of clocks, all ticking out of time. A room never seems so empty and quiet as when there is a clock ticking off each second.
When you are going through the house of someone who has recently died, those dozens of clocks—orphaned now from the frail fingers that used to wind them—stand in corners, hang on walls, sit on dressers and end tables with their mechanisms dutifully reminding you of each hour of loss.
You are so much more conscious of time after someone’s death. Each hour is another hour without that person and another hour you yourself can never reclaim.
As you moved through the house, you heard the grandmother clock in the front room, saw the chairs and bookshelves undisturbed. No one spent much time in that front room, not unless it was a holiday. That was how the white carpeting stayed so pristine and without the stains of use.
The kitchen was where you saw the clearest signs of life. This was where you saw the needle that measured her glucose every morning and evening, the little booklet with her neat, precise numbers recording the sugar levels.
You saw at her place setting the crumbs from her toast each morning—such an odd thing she did not brush them away and instead allowed them to accumulate. Such an interesting personality quirk for someone so otherwise orderly.
She sat down at her kitchen table to eat each meal, although she was alone and had not shared that table with her husband for over 27 years. A creature of habit. On the kitchen table was the little basket full of quarters she used to buy her daily newspaper. It was her one reason to leave the house each day, though the idea of her driving at 86-years-old seemed less and less like a good idea.
In the living room, there were novels with bookmarks stopping the words where the reader last paused. There were hand creams and lotions, knitting needles holding the yarn of a half-finished something (baby blanket, dish cloth, hot pad, so hard to know). Next to the phone, there was a notepad with unfamiliar names and doodles.
As you moved through the house, you could see her and smell her and hear her. The house sat in anticipation, waiting for the occupant to return and fill the rooms with life again.
But, her stroke happened in the garage, after a trip to the grocery store, and she never entered the house again. Things were exactly as she left them. You saw the clocks that Grandpa built, the pictures of relatives—some you know and some you probably never will—on the fireplace mantel.
The hesitation is gone now. You do not need permission. You can look more closely at the bookshelves. You can thumb through the books. You look at the items on her desk in her sun room. There are cards signed “love, Howard”—suddenly, your grandparents become more real and human—ironically, now, after they both are gone.
You run your fingers over the keyboard of her computer where she sat down and sent you so many emails over the years. There was at least one a week, signed the same way, always the same way, “So long, God bless, keep smiling, love, Gram.”
So many artifacts. A lifetime of things that are just things, but these are her personal effects. These are your family’s heirlooms now.
You walk down the hallway and stop for a minute in her bedroom, a place you rarely ever stepped. The bed is made. In the hamper are a couple of days’ worth of dirty clothes. She had just bought a couple of pairs of pants and now they hang in her closet, unused.
Going through someone’s personal effects after she has died is daunting. You want to keep as many things as possible to preserve that loved one you lost. The more you have, the closer she seems.
Beside me, now, is the grandmother clock from the front room. The words tempus fugit adorn the face. On my wall is an old picture that hung in my grandmother’s house and before that her parents’ house and grandparents’ house. I have many other things from Grandma’s house. They have begun to smell like her less and less; her touch has started to fade.
But these things are my personal effects now. As I look around, I think about the objects on my tables, the movies, CDs, books upon books, letters, papers—what would people learn about me that they did not know before, if they had to sort through my things.
A part of me and who I am and what I cherish can be deciphered by going through my stuff. Such an idea makes me think the time is coming to sort myself out and finally let go of a few of those dustier boxes.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Plans for the Apocalypse
Do you know you’ve come to the end when you crave a new beginning?
How does it all start: “In the beginning, God created…”? And, so we read about a formless earth, voids, and “the surface of the deep”—the start of a new creation.
People can debate that moment—God, vacuum genesis, alien fungi, etc, but the truth remains that all of this that we recognize as “life,” our world, our perceptions, our senses—this all had to begin somewhere at some point in Time before we became so inextricably bound by time, that soft tick, tick, tick.
You’ll never hear a louder sound in a hospice patient’s room than the thunk of a clock’s second hand. You want more time, but at the same time, you are reminded that you are waiting for an end to the person’s suffering, your suffering, the dread suspension.
Lately, it seems, whether it is the news forecasting ominous climate change, scientists warning of asteroids, or worldwide physicians proclaiming pandemics, the world is posed for some kind of apocalyptic change.
Here are some recent blockbuster films that seem to mirror our headlines:
Armageddon, Deep Impact, Knowing, 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day, The Road, I Am Legend, The Book of Eli, all of the Terminator movies, Escape from New York, Escape from L.A., Children of Men, 12 Monkeys, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Blindness, Waterworld, The Postman, The Mad Max series…
Of course, I did not add the films of the 70’s (Omega Man, Soylent Green, Planet of the Apes, the list goes on and on). The 1950’s were concerned with an alien threat, with worldwide destruction by atomic power—rightfully, since the US marred its own reputation and humanity by dropping these horrific instruments of death on two major Japanese cities.
The world was also trying to grapple with the Holocaust and the notion that such a mass murder of a people could occur. Those images haunt us. I don’t believe our psyches have fully recovered from it, nor should they. Human beings are capable of the darkest evil, especially when operating en masse.
As the decades advanced, presidents, other prominent world leaders, historic figures were assassinated, further destabilizing our realities, jarring our day to day lives with reminders of how change can come in one drastic flick of a finger.
Religions—not just Christianity—predict an impending end. Whatever has a beginning will eventually have an end. That’s just the nature of Nature.
At times, things do feel a little played out. Our knowledge of things is exceeding our own ability to control that knowledge. Ecosystems struggle to function in a climate of greed and excess. We are starting to genetically alter food, other creatures, modifying and monkeying with the evolutionary process which so many of these same scientists claim as our beginning. Call it playing God, or not. The fact remains that the delicate laws that keep balance in Nature are being transgressed. Where and when does it stop?
Freud claimed that dreams, on a certain level, are about wish-fulfillment. Many times, mine are exactly that. Good Sigmund also claimed that our creative endeavors—that dreamy space between sleep and imagination—function similarly.
Our entertainment lately seems to crave our own end. Because of the promise of a new beginning?
To me, this is a Genesis Fantasy. We want to start over. We want to do better. We want to reinvent the structure of these messy constructs in which we grow up so confined and shackled. The world feels like it’s in a rut.
We hear it all the time. Someone said it the other day. There are only so many plots from which to choose when authoring a story. Just look at James Cameron. How many times can he mine Romeo and Juliet? Instead of being trapped on a ship sliced open by an iceberg, now they are blue and cat-like—forbidden love gets us every time apparently. Being so brazenly unoriginal gets Cameron billions of dollars. But, what else do we have to choose from?
People say that there are also only so many notes in which to compose a new song. Look at each new gadget that comes out. One button now can do about ten functions each. We’re simply piling on without reinventing.
For that matter, we’re still stuck using the wheel. Nobody has found a replacement yet, have they? You can even still buy wooden mouse traps.
Perhaps it is millennium fever. Or, religious fervor. Or, just plain old weariness with the lack of originality these days.
Either way, the world is getting tired, craving any winds of change, even if those winds are prompted by an asteroid dropping from the sky, severe climate changes, or a manmade disaster.
Me? I’m just going to quietly stock up on bottled water and canned goods. It never hurts to be ready.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Every Classic Has A Suicide
Star-crossed lovers. Let’s blame Shakespeare. He retold the tale of young lovers who could not be together, so, in a burst of high passion, they poisoned and stabbed themselves—all for the sake of love, well, more like infatuation, but let’s not dampen their “poetic” ends.
And, so, it seems a genre was born. The romantic suicide.
I love you. I cannot have you. I must drown, or poison myself, or stab myself, or hang myself, or whatever else, so that I can prove that my love was “real” and that you will be “sorry” without me. My soul mate has been denied me, so, therefore, I must end myself, too.
I watched a movie the other night where the romantic lead drowns herself with all of her garments dancing about her in the water, so elegant, so ethereal; her dress was like bloated angels’ wings. Her love had double-crossed her, duped her, and sailed off with another. Instead of showing a stronger person, who would cry, eat a gallon of cookie dough ice cream, and get bombed on rum for a week or two, our fair lead chose what, unfortunately, has become the highest form of romantic end in literary fiction—she leapt into the chilly Thames and died with a smile on her face.
The current literary canon is a veritable homage to suicide: “The Awakening,” Anna Karenina (which I didn’t mind because 800 pages was simply too long for a literary character to live), The Sound and The Fury, Mrs. Dalloway, Hamlet, Othello, “A Clean, Well-Lit Place,” The Great Gatsby, The Bell Jar, Death of a Salesman, Sophie’s Choice, Oedipus Rex, The Count of Monte Cristo, Madame Bovary, Girl, Interrupted, The Virgin Suicides, A Tale of Two Cities (though I want to contemplate the fine line between self-sacrifice and suicide in another blog), and dozens and dozens of others.
Not to mention the authors themselves. If they weren’t stuffing rocks down their blouses and drowning themselves (Woolf), they were putting bullets in their heads (Hemingway), or gassing themselves (Plath). This does not include Anne Sexton, Hunter S. Thompson, David Foster Wallace, John Berryman, Jack London, Sigmund Freud, Hart Crane, and, of course, there are many others who attempted suicide. If we added artists to the list, we’d have to double or triple it.
Much has been written about the link between mental illness (“madness”) and so-called “genius.” As it stands, we have a literary canon of mental illness.
As a college student, I just remember sitting at my desk class after class, rolling my eyes at yet another suicide either by the author or one of their typically anguished characters. Either these authors were writing out of their own fractured experiences, or they had written themselves into a corner, or they honestly believed that such a death would be tragically romantic, or that true literary stories commanded such a bleak ending.
I remember being in a fiction workshop once, listening to people criticize one of my stories for its “happy ending.” We even had a discussion about whether a good literary story can have a happy ending. I am inclined to believe that it can.
Perhaps if more did have happy endings, more people might read them.
Having experienced a suicide in my family, I can say that I find the “high romance” status of suicide in most stories disturbing.
I’d rather read about the family left behind by the woman who decided to jump in the Thames because of her heart-break. How did they feel when they heard the news? Did they feel guilty? Did they wonder why she couldn’t have weathered such an emotional storm, like so many others do?
Lovers come and go, and guess what? Most people survive. After the pain, there is, as Cher believes, “Life after love.” I felt cheated by the ending of that novel—or at least the movie adaptation. It lacked imagination, originality, and, worst of all, it once again showed how a marginalized character (in this case a gay woman) had no place in society and, therefore, had to sacrifice herself to the Oedipal order of society.
I expected more from this particular author. The character’s suicide felt like a deus ex machina.
Certainly, not all rejected lovers need to plunge themselves into a river. I think this is why Washington Square left such a strong impression on me. She goes through a great deal suffering in regards to her love for Morris. But, she stays strong and survives in the end. The individual, the cornerstone of most novels and short stories, triumphs. She does not require a soul mate. She can find satisfaction in her own day to day existence.
Suicide in stories is a deus ex machina. A person creates this perfectly complex character with an impossible conflict and takes—pardon the cliché—the easy way out.
Perhaps one day, someone will write the story of Romeo and Juliet’s families. Perhaps one day, we can reconsider a canon that does not emulate suicide, self-destruction (a slew of alcoholics and drug abusers), and slip in a few stories with happy endings--the kind of endings that make you smile and realize that life, with all of its hurt and happinesses, is so definitely worth the living.
And, so, it seems a genre was born. The romantic suicide.
I love you. I cannot have you. I must drown, or poison myself, or stab myself, or hang myself, or whatever else, so that I can prove that my love was “real” and that you will be “sorry” without me. My soul mate has been denied me, so, therefore, I must end myself, too.
I watched a movie the other night where the romantic lead drowns herself with all of her garments dancing about her in the water, so elegant, so ethereal; her dress was like bloated angels’ wings. Her love had double-crossed her, duped her, and sailed off with another. Instead of showing a stronger person, who would cry, eat a gallon of cookie dough ice cream, and get bombed on rum for a week or two, our fair lead chose what, unfortunately, has become the highest form of romantic end in literary fiction—she leapt into the chilly Thames and died with a smile on her face.
The current literary canon is a veritable homage to suicide: “The Awakening,” Anna Karenina (which I didn’t mind because 800 pages was simply too long for a literary character to live), The Sound and The Fury, Mrs. Dalloway, Hamlet, Othello, “A Clean, Well-Lit Place,” The Great Gatsby, The Bell Jar, Death of a Salesman, Sophie’s Choice, Oedipus Rex, The Count of Monte Cristo, Madame Bovary, Girl, Interrupted, The Virgin Suicides, A Tale of Two Cities (though I want to contemplate the fine line between self-sacrifice and suicide in another blog), and dozens and dozens of others.
Not to mention the authors themselves. If they weren’t stuffing rocks down their blouses and drowning themselves (Woolf), they were putting bullets in their heads (Hemingway), or gassing themselves (Plath). This does not include Anne Sexton, Hunter S. Thompson, David Foster Wallace, John Berryman, Jack London, Sigmund Freud, Hart Crane, and, of course, there are many others who attempted suicide. If we added artists to the list, we’d have to double or triple it.
Much has been written about the link between mental illness (“madness”) and so-called “genius.” As it stands, we have a literary canon of mental illness.
As a college student, I just remember sitting at my desk class after class, rolling my eyes at yet another suicide either by the author or one of their typically anguished characters. Either these authors were writing out of their own fractured experiences, or they had written themselves into a corner, or they honestly believed that such a death would be tragically romantic, or that true literary stories commanded such a bleak ending.
I remember being in a fiction workshop once, listening to people criticize one of my stories for its “happy ending.” We even had a discussion about whether a good literary story can have a happy ending. I am inclined to believe that it can.
Perhaps if more did have happy endings, more people might read them.
Having experienced a suicide in my family, I can say that I find the “high romance” status of suicide in most stories disturbing.
I’d rather read about the family left behind by the woman who decided to jump in the Thames because of her heart-break. How did they feel when they heard the news? Did they feel guilty? Did they wonder why she couldn’t have weathered such an emotional storm, like so many others do?
Lovers come and go, and guess what? Most people survive. After the pain, there is, as Cher believes, “Life after love.” I felt cheated by the ending of that novel—or at least the movie adaptation. It lacked imagination, originality, and, worst of all, it once again showed how a marginalized character (in this case a gay woman) had no place in society and, therefore, had to sacrifice herself to the Oedipal order of society.
I expected more from this particular author. The character’s suicide felt like a deus ex machina.
Certainly, not all rejected lovers need to plunge themselves into a river. I think this is why Washington Square left such a strong impression on me. She goes through a great deal suffering in regards to her love for Morris. But, she stays strong and survives in the end. The individual, the cornerstone of most novels and short stories, triumphs. She does not require a soul mate. She can find satisfaction in her own day to day existence.
Suicide in stories is a deus ex machina. A person creates this perfectly complex character with an impossible conflict and takes—pardon the cliché—the easy way out.
Perhaps one day, someone will write the story of Romeo and Juliet’s families. Perhaps one day, we can reconsider a canon that does not emulate suicide, self-destruction (a slew of alcoholics and drug abusers), and slip in a few stories with happy endings--the kind of endings that make you smile and realize that life, with all of its hurt and happinesses, is so definitely worth the living.
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