Archive for 2012

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Fowl Play in Phoenix



            It was a Monday evening, cold and wet, and the weekend seemed as distant as Mars. The winter nights had grown chill, even in our desert state. Samantha and I sat around the kitchen table and discussed how to bury the bird.
            Samantha was all for waiting until next weekend, and I for doing the deed tonight, but as good roommates we engaged in debate. Lamplight illuminated the table and we sat in its honey glow. The shoebox-turned-coffin rested awkwardly beside us. Inside lay Pigwidgeon, the bird in question. He had been a cheerful parakeet in life, and the house seemed strangely quiet without his chatter.
             We acquired Pig in our first year of college. A mascot for freedom and adulthood, his demise was tragic, though more for loss of symbol than otherwise. Our haphazard care was not enough to sustain him, and he dropped in a flame of blue-feathered glory one cold, winter weeknight.
            Our options were slim. The bird was in need of interment and we had hardly the time. Between college classes and evening shifts our hours were numbered. Poor Pig had picked an inconvenient time to die. Samantha and I came to the conclusion that the send-off must be that very night. However, the hard ground and late hour was proving to be problematic. It had rained the previous weekend, and the air was chill. The burial must be quick and easy. We wallowed in our predicament before happening upon a solution.
            We would cremate him.
            How difficult could it be anyway? We had a fire pit in the backyard and kindling to spare. It was the perfect plan.
            We were momentarily deterred when we discovered that the stock of firewood was damp from the rain, but we were not to be thwarted. Armed with a candle lighter and the latest edition of cosmopolitan we went on with our work. Soon we had a small fire smoldering beneath the stars. Samantha carried the cardboard coffin. Pigwidgeon rolled about uncomfortably inside. When the flames seemed hot enough we shook out our blue little bird into the heart of it and watched as his feathers began to blaze.
            We both said a few words, and Samantha suggested we sing his favorite song. A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes is not ordinary funeral accompaniment, but who were we to deny our pet his last rites? Before us the fire sparked and hissed; the bird burned like some occult offering. The flames died down and we went on with our night.
            In the days to follow Pig hardly crossed our minds. It wasn’t until the suggestion was raised that our magazine fire may not have done the trick that we returned once again to the fire pit. There Pig sat in the ash heap, wings folded close, like a torpedo hurdling through congested waters. He was barely distinguishable until we noticed the beak and a few moldering feathers still stubbornly hanging on.
            The cremation of our pet was our college hubris, a fatal flaw still haunted by the bones of a poorly interred bird.
            

leave a comment
Tuesday, November 20, 2012

upon giving up my childhood friend


Roxy,

            Here’s to all the nights you started out at the foot of my bed and we awoke to sharing the same pillow. To the home we both grew up in, the only place you ever felt truly comfortable. I miss it too.
            We’ve had a long run, you and I. Seven years will make up about half your life. It’s already a third of mine. I remember the day we brought you home, so small, a gift for Dad. It soon became clear that you were really mine.
            Maybe it’s because we’re so alike that you claimed me for your own. Mom always said you were me in cat form. You waited up for me and when I came home from work or school you were always right there by the door. You memorized the sound of my car locking, the way my footsteps echoed in the driveway. You waited faithfully.
            When I’d go out of town for weeks in the summer you were grumpy and upset. I’d come home and you’d be angry until I smothered you in kisses and held you close. You pretended not to like it, but I know you really did.
            It was music you loved the most. You’d sit beside me on the piano bench and tap the keys with your paw while I played. Whenever I sang you would find me and purr with all your might. Your purr was comforting. I would lay my head on your belly and listen when I was sad. You always knew when I needed you. You didn’t even mind when your fur grew wet from catching my tears. You would purr still harder and lick my face and hands.
            Do you carry the memories too? Can you, in your cat-mind, hold anything beyond knowing when I’ll feed you next and what kind of yogurt you like best? I know you’re only a cat but sometimes you seem nearly human and I can understand how we love those who are only quiet and faithful. Your utter dependence brings us joy. You are so special to me.
            I recall the long car rides to the vet and back. You became frightened and I sang to you to make you feel even just a little bit safer. You made me feel safe sometimes too. In the dark when the house creaked and groaned in the wind I would hold you close until I fell asleep.
            I started college and all the family moved away. You made me feel like something of home remained. When Zack and I married you loved him too, even though you are shy and love few. You were our first baby. When we sang together you’d find us and purr, kneading the pillows with your paws to show just how happy you were. That usually made up for all the times you threw up on the carpet and we stepped in it.
            Your odd quirks made us laugh. Knocking my clock off the desk every morning, opening cabinets, pushing your paws under the doors, babying anything that sat still long enough to lick. Many pets came and went over the course of my childhood, but you stayed always. Faithful.
             

leave a comment
Monday, July 30, 2012

My Mother, the Missionary


It's mid-morning in Maryland, and the day is clouded and dull. The air hovers thickly: heavy and rain-scented and electric, evidencing the stormy weather we've been subject to all week. We lounge in the family room, my mother and I. The ruby shadows of a red lampshade encompass us; without sunlight filtering in through the bay windows or the stained glass, artificial lighting is necessary even in the morning. The happy jumble of noise from the kitchen suggests that the rest of the family has communed there, while the dog’s tail thumps exuberantly from her place on the carpet. All about lies the evidence of a home lived in: books, shoes, DVDs, and guitars are strewn around, encircling us two. My mom leafs through a stack of old film photos, their edges rounded. Some are shaped into circles, some as squares, as though they had once been featured in an album or book. Whatever their original status, they have now made their way out from a grubby plastic ziplock. Yet, my mother touches them tenderly. Her eyes glimmer as she thumbs through the stack, well-worn images flashing through her fingers, triggering long gone memories. She carefully searches the faces, pausing to smile or sigh. The year was 1988, and the photos don’t lie. My mom, twiggy and permed, dressed in oversized T’s and shorts. My mom holding crocodiles, leaning out of a grass hut, so different from the manicured woman who sits beside me now. She picks out three photos for me to see, but we end up talking about just the one.
It's a darkened room she stands in, but my mom assures me it was early morning. Another morning, twenty-three years ago. A different hemisphere. A time worlds away. “It was called Irian Jaya then,” she tells me. Papau: An island peopled by the primitive. “The Dani tribeswomen used to come to us, the missionary hospital, to give birth and then go home.” She tells me of these village women, their nakedness and strange strength so unlike any other women she’d seen before. The photos depict them grinning, hugging the missionaries close, kneading out their sago paste. One of these women had traveled from her village to the hospital to birth her child in the cool hours of the night. I ask my mom if the woman brought anyone with her, for support or comfort. “No, they don't have girlfriends,” she laughs. Without her husband there beside her, in the midst of these white-demon strangers, the Dani tribeswoman birthed her child in the dark hours of a new day. It was the first birth my mother had witnessed. The photo depicts a room crowded by a bed and a few medical supplies, my mother cradling the wide-eyed baby, swaddled in a white blanket, a shock of black hair crowning his head. She stares down at the infant, her expression tender, comfortable. Perhaps she thinks of one day cradling her own child in her arms. Perhaps she will treasure this memory as she carries me, her firstborn, a few years later. The tribal woman would give the child a title of her own, one that would fit his place in the village. But to my mother the tiny newborn would forever be Benjamin.
My parents married when they were in their mid-twenties, fresh out of Bible College and anticipating missionary life. Together they ministered to the poor immigrants in the slums of Chicago. That summer in Irian Jaya had been a precipice for my mom, a hill from which she could see her life spreading out before her. Now, two years later, she and my dad began to understand that God laughs at the plans of men. I was the product of their first year of marriage, and my sister arrived soon after. Unforeseen joy entered their home as their many plans ebbed away. We left our tiny yellow house in Wheaton, Illinois for a new home in Arizona. There, beneath the expansive desert sky, my brother was born. Their missionary dreams slowly faded. This previous life, this ministry life, was foreign and forgotten, abstract and distant to me. The stories that defined their former endeavors were no more than amusing legends of my parents’ youth. I never realized that the pictures portrayed something real, that the images reveal a part of their person I never knew.
I stop short at this concept and pause to inspect it. My mother was a missionary. There is a part of her that I do not know, kept safely in the confines of a plastic bag. I think of my goals and aspirations, and the impending arrival of parenthood. What part of me will I lose when I become a mother?
I step out of my reverie as my mom stares deep into the photograph and grows silent, holding it cupped in her hands. I ask her what the picture means, why she chose it. She thinks a moment, studying the image, and explains the feelings of awe and amazement at seeing new life ushered into that dark room. She remembers the quietness of the Dani woman, the crude scale made from what looks like fishing nets. “I wasn't there to perform medical procedures.” It was an opportunity, unexpected. A special memory. My mom is quiet as she remembers, and then laughs as she speaks of my Dad's incredulity at discovering that his squeamish fiancĂ© was present for this birth and other procedures. Unexpected indeed.
She smiles, and I ask her if the photograph brings back fond memories. “Oh yeah,” she replies. “It's a very special memory.” That summer was filled with new experiences, but she places this one as a specific highlight of the trip. She describes the mission trip as being “like National Geographic, but in person.” And assuredly, the photos she took of Papau seem magazine-worthy. Swarthy and wild men standing beside their dugout canoes, grass huts, a dark man peering in through an open window hole, a great grin on his face, bones puncturing his nose and lip. These photos are the foundation of the many stories of my mother’s summer in Papau: the fruit bats startling thumps in the night, the shock of discovering that the friendly natives were cannibals only twenty years before, the wild pig that ran through the camp and interrupted the Jesus film. They were the anecdotes passed down to us children, the stories of this previous life. Mythological; we could not understand that our parents had been people before we arrived.
I peer over my mom's shoulder; she looks at the photo in her hand. “It was a life changing summer,” she tells me. Because of the novel experiences, the things she witnessed. I look at my mother now, three children later, a woman who went to school and prepared for years to be a missionary to far off places. A woman who instead raised a family in Phoenix, stayed home with her children, who never did return to the darkness of Papau's jungles. And I picture her thinking back to the life worthy of National Geographic as she nursed babies and raised children. Did she miss it? Did she pine for the wild intoxication of “unexpected opportunities?” I wonder if she ever wished to be back on that precipice, immersed in strange and foreign cultures, dizzied with love, anticipating a life of this. Does she wish to have raised us up in the midst of the natives? To have birthed us in the dark rooms of a missionary hospital? To have been the necessary woman, the healing woman, the white-demon missionary woman? To be the woman she intended to be? The woman I never knew.    
And then I think of the many photo albums of my childhood, the photographs lining the halls, the frames that inhabited each nook and shelf with our images: my sister and I as toddlers, our choir photos, school pictures, family portraits. The piano serves as tribute to the musicians who once lived here. Our art graces the walls. Above the couch we sit on now hangs an ornate frame, holding our most recent family photograph, and in our hands are the faded memories of Papau, unearthed from their forlorn storage.
I don’t wonder anymore.
There stood for many years a model canoe houseboat on our bookshelf at home. My sister and I imagined the type of men who would operate the boat, we pictured the women in their huts making sago paste, the little tribal children singing praise songs in the missionary choir. Images furnished by the videos of Papau village life we watched. But before this day I had never heard of Benjamin. I didn't know that my mother witnessed his birth, held him, asked for a photograph of the moment. And where was he now? Living in some primitive village, eating sago, spearing fish from his dugout canoe? Perhaps his own mother told him stories of his birth: the dark room, the woven scale, and the white-demon woman who held him close. He is twenty-three years old now, a year younger than my mother when she witnessed his arrival, two years older than I am now. He exists worlds away from us as we tell his story, worlds away from the photograph of his birth.
The light begins to grow dimmer as we converse on the couch. Raindrops trace trails down the windows and we pause to add some extra lighting. I ask my mom if she has changed much since that summer in Irian Jaya. She notes that she's had three children of her own in the past twenty-three years. She's moved to three different states, changed churches and theology, grown to understand their faith as the reformed men of old had taught. She schooled us, mentored us; she was our chauffeur and our coach. My mother mothered many. My parents never became missionaries. Life was not what they had expected. Is it ever?
My mom was twenty-six years old when she became a mother. She received her college diploma over a protruding pregnant belly. She and my dad decided against finding out the gender of the baby before the birth. A surprise. They waited those nine months impatiently, somehow sure of a son. They brought boy's clothes to the hospital. There, beneath the bright lights my mother gave birth. Surrounded by shining white surfaces I was born. They named me Sarah, “princess”. But had I been the boy they were expecting, my name would have been Benjamin.
Our conversation dwindles, and we look through the pictures, lost in thought. Soon enough it is not just the two of us looking over the memories anymore. My brother and my husband are intrigued, and can’t help but make their way into the living room. They kneel before the coffee table, heads knocking together above scenes of Irian Jaya. I can’t help but grin as my husband leans in closer, brother to my own brother; my mom glowing happily as the stories begin to emerge. The wild pig interrupts again the Jesus film, and lo and behold, the tribesmen were cannibals not so long ago. A dark and naked man grins through an open window, his neck entwined with a necklace of bones, the sago is mashed and pulsed in rhythm, the little children stomp about and sing. Papau as I knew it. And here we are, telling stories of this former life from the recesses of the living room. God knows we love this life. I catch my husband’s eye and smile, glad for this moment, for this epiphany. Glad for him to see my mother as the person she used to be. Who will we become?
            My mother was a missionary. She never returned to the jungles of Irian Jaya, never saved those souls. The memories were bagged away in a battered ziplock. My mother had three children and taught them at home. My mother raised us far from tribal villages; she birthed us in bright rooms. She surrendered her expectations, forgot the woman she intended to be. She became something better. My mother was a missionary to us, her children; she forged a way into our heathen night and brought with her a great light. She entered the heart of darkness and saved the souls of young savages. She shaped our minds, our lives; poured out herself unto us and became foot-washer to her little natives.
My mother, the missionary.

1 comment
Friday, May 25, 2012

An Unorthodox Remembrance of September 11th


          “Where were you when . . .?”
           Such a tired question, so commonly asked that my tongue languishes in the attempt to to say it. Am I really making use of the query? Shame! And on my own husband no less.
          It's the classic, over-chewed filler for when the topic comes around; like commenting on the weather when outdoors, or asking a teenager when they will graduate high school.
        “Where were you when . . .?”
         But you know you've used it before. Who hasn't? This filler is thin and threadbare from ten years of overuse. Like some ancient relic purported to be the shroud of Christ or the veil of Mary, the masses feel obligated to touch the topic again and again, until the original meaning is gradually worn away. Only some sad rag of the former substance remains.
         The event has become nearly clichĂ©. Poor films have already sprung up, featuring the smoke ringing horribly, beautifully, round collapsing towers. And heroic measures being taken by firemen, police forces, and random strangers collectively. The coffee-table book of photo spreads came out in time for Christmas.

***
         Has ever an event, historical or otherwise, been known by merely a number? Nine-eleven. Nine-eleven. You say it, and the world knows.
***
         I want to tell you of the black smoke pouring upward from those thousand foot crematoriums, and of the screams of horror, and the blare of sirens, and the lives forever expired. I want to tell you of bravery, and good-bye phone calls, and children born without fathers. But all I remember are the silent eyes and wordless mouths, open and frozen and shocked. There were no tears here, there were no screams. Only mute disbelief, and the childish excitement that accompanies any singular event.
         Children do not distinguish between horror and wonder easily. Those planes that were executioners, and those towers that were tombs, they were removed and fantastical. There was a sort of romantic beauty in the chaos. Something exciting was happening during my lifetime! The hysteria that stemmed from the television screen was electric, sending currents through brain and limbs, lighting up my eyes; my heart grew wild and frenzied. Abigail, in blue-eyed fright, woke to my yelps of bombs and attacks and America gone. Would it be gone? Were further attacks looming? Were dark men in dark beards, crowned in turbaned glory flying over our painted deserts and blue mountains, prepared to set the Phoenix Hyatt on fire? The compass restaurant spinning slowly, luxuriously, wreathed in flames. A dreamlike quality held the day for me.
        Please do not think that I was a callous child. I was so lost in the fantastical places of faerie tales and fictitious lands that this world was oft exchanged for them. When something so gloriously new and different entered via jet engines and exploded into multifaceted rainbows of steel, I was not terrified. I was charmed.
        Something possessed me that morning to record such events.
       “This is history, right?”
        Something in my childmind recalled Anne Frank. Years from now, some futuristic archeologist might find my purple Pooh Bear journal, and futuristic children might be required to read my memoir in their history classes. I wrote with a no.2 pencil on spiral-bound pages about wicked men and falling planes and a fear that was imagined in some romantic dream. I wrote that paragraph of history on wide-spaced lines, on the page next to an entry about a rabbit, who often visited our backyard, and the trap set to catch him.
       “Carrots. Bunnies like carrots, right?”
       “Mommy, how do you spell 'Muslim'?”

***

           Morning light falls in patches through windows lined with nose-prints. The perpetrators nap in purring ecstasy, and I watch and struggle with a fogged mind and stupid fingers, thanks to a poorly timed cup of coffee yesterday night. Muddled minds are not best for remembering to water the tomato plant, let alone a day ten years ago. Drifting in stupor, I attempt to remember, but all I can wonder is why does it matter?
           Why so commonly referenced is the tale of four planes fallen from the sky, two towers become mass graves? An yet we are nonchalant. I hear casual allusions to the catastrophe daily on the radio. Another hyped up and disappointing film was released a few short months ago. Do we remember the mute mouths and wrenched souls, the momentary unity in anguished cries to God? Or do we remember the coffee-table book spread of photographs and the romantic fears we dreamed?


***

           I am a volunteer Teacher's Aid for first-grade children. While clearing out the bulletin board on which they hang their projects, I recently noticed their tribute to the ten year anniversary of nine-eleven. Although I wasn't there to witness the actual drawing of their posters, I have seen enough of their art-making to imagine it. They are between six and seven years old; small, wide-eyed, determined. The kids color earnestly, recording history with crayons. They look up expectantly for praise over their artwork. The happy firemen, heroically rescuing trapped civilians with ease and a smile. Dead stick-figures lie gently in the streets, cradled by black scrawled asphalt. Smoke is represented by swirling loops of gray. A few birds fly lackadaisically above the chaos.
         And the children are pleased with their artwork.

***

        While driving today, I was obligated to turn around and take a new route. A deep green car sat peacefully on the sidewalk bordering the road, nose softly set into the wall. Palo Verdes surrounded, dripping blooms in yellow serenity.
         I heard the sirens today.
         Fire trucks and police officers gathered, passing cars were thrown off course, and concerned people milled about. After worrying for the passengers momentarily, I was soon more pressed to find an alternate route, and eventually continued on my way down a different road.
         Everything was normal.
         Del Taco's and pawn shops sat quietly in strip malls, and tanned strangers shaded their faces from oppressing heat. A family of immigrants wilted beneath a bus-stop. Maybe someone laughed in the crosswalk. Maybe someone bounced their baby, whose face grew red as he wailed. Maybe a dog pissed on a clump of the dried and yellowed grass that grows between the sidewalk cracks in the less posh areas of Phoenix.
         Normalcy exists for others while our own worlds are crashing down.

***
 
         September 11th, 2001.
        How much is from memory, and how much from T.V. screens and the photo book on our coffee-table? Mom bought it that day in the mall, when we were walking on grimed tiles without stepping on the cracks and suddenly she was no longer beside us, but elsewhere, returning with bag in hand. Dad asked something to the effect of “why did you buy it?” and she replied with something between a want and an absolute need.
      Nine-eleven. The day was normal, besides our T.V. staying on until bedtime came for us, and then probably longer until my parents could no longer worry about futures and keep disillusioned eyes focused on the screen. Television viewing was completely a matter of loyalty that day. Each channel broadcast the same exact footage, and could only give out the same information as soon as they came to know it.
       Our loyalties lay with NBC.
       Matt Lauer and Katie Couric canceled the various segments planned for the day, and shots of burning towers were swapped intermittently with those of smoky streets through lenses of shaky, hand-held cameras. Fluttering walls of missing persons were erected and shown on-screen. Reporters broke down. The screen screamed fear and disbelief. But here, we ate lunch, we ate dinner, we went on with our day. Normalcy reigned.
       After that day of nothingness, we went to cross-country practice. And for some odd reason this is the event most clearly remembered from that day. Why? I do not know. I was not particularly good at cross-country, and being the only non-public-schooled children on the team, we were somewhat set apart, if unconsciously so. Thunderbird mountain is sprawling and of a humble height, though to my young mind it seemed statuesque and brooding under monsoon skies of dark clouds and heavy air. By September the majority of desert summer storms have exhausted themselves, but the evening seems velvety in my memory.
     Tessa was there, with brown eyes and a constellation of freckles that mapped her whole body with stars. While our mothers gathered knowingly in hushed tones and somber nods, we spoke excitedly of the day's events. According to Tessa's teacher, something awful happens in history during every child's tenth year. Her teacher had witnessed the Challenger tragedy when she was ten. Tessa was ten. Today was September 11th. And I was nine and eleven months. We were struck by the anecdotal evidence, and stared at one another in the silence that accompanies one's first profound thought. It didn't occur to me until much later that the logicality of the statement was severely lacking. Who cared? The romantic dreams were alluring in the way that reality was absolutely not. Practice ended and the dark descended. We concluded the evening in the dull hum of buzzing excitement, somewhat less electric than how the day had begun.
***

      When I viewed the nine-eleven photo and video project, a tribute to the ten year anniversary put together by a collaboration of artists and journalists and more, I was at a loss to identify with others' remembrances of that day ten years ago. Other people woke that morning to the startling news broadcast, and did not meet the day with excitement and awe. Other people did cry and break and mourn. Other people lost other people.
     Those towers falling and those snowflake ashes, they were not only a romantic dream? But the Hyatt, it still stands! The Compass still spins! Testament that not all of the dreams were true. But somewhere thousands of miles away, two towers do not stand anymore, and the ashes there are of more than just wood.
     I want to tell you of the tears that day, and the grim nods and shaking heads with disbelief. But I do not know them. They live not in my memory. I can only tell you of photographs that bring realization, and the anniversary stories that beckon tears.
     “I love you, I love you, I love you,” they said, mantra-like, as she recalls. The woman sits before a white background, speaking to the camera about the last time she spoke to her husband. That final phone call that cannot even be described as a conversation, as his plane sailed calmly, so calmly, to earth. And her eyes search upward for a way to stem the tears, and her bleach-blonde styled hair threatens to come undone and reveal that beneath the airbrushed makeup and peachy lips she is only a broken, widowed mess. And I join in her grief, though I have nothing substantial to grieve. Only the imagined fear of losing my own love, and the realization that all we have must be held with an open hand.

1 comment
"As for man, his days are like grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourishes. When the wind has passed over it, it is no more, and its place acknowledges it no longer. But the lovingkindness of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear Him, and His righteousness to children's children, to those who keep His covenant and remember His precepts to do them." (Psalm 103:15-18)

Such is Life...

Followers

Powered by Blogger.