amy loves books

gargoyles in our youth

I met George in the fall of my junior year at UGA. He was working the security desk in in the lobby of mycollege dorm. He had a fantastic gargoyle impersonation. He would perch on the railing of the staircase and stick out his tongue and get very, very still. He was so cool. A lot of people go to college in Athens because they want to be cool. George was one of the few people who actually was that cool.

He lived in a legendary Athens house - a pink shack with a tin roof and a big front porch, not far from the shack that “The End of the World As We Know It” video was filmed in. It was sort of passed from person to person if you knew the right person. Supposedly, those chosen to rent the tin roofed house did so with the understanding that they had the responsibility to throw huge Bonfire parties on the property each semester. George lived in the house with four other people. He was not from America. He had long hair and steel-toe boots and a leather jacket. He smoked Marlboro Reds. He laughed all the time. He did not care what anyone thought of him. He was beautiful.

The year before, I had come off of a string of relationships that went from bad to worse until I woke up one morning and could not look myself straight in the eye with the knowledge that I had sunk so low that I had spent the previous evening actually watching the Super Bowl with a boyfriend that I, were I true to myself, never in a million years would have even considered being friends with. He was rich, handsome, and stupid. And I hated myself for sinking so low.

I had been “in love” my freshman year of college with a boy that used me and hurt me so bad that when he dumped me for a cocktail waitress named “Sage” (ruining Simon and Garfunkel’s “Scarborough Fair” for me forever, I might add), I snuck into his house and lit all the letters I had written him on fire in the middle of the floor. I watched them burn and then dumped a glass of water on the flame, scattering ash and bits of cardstock in a stain creeping across the wooden floor. I also gave all his clothes to Goodwill.

It was not losing him that hurt, it was having someone reject me so totally. It was hearing, “Well, it’s been fun - but what I really want is a poofy-haired cocktail waitress named Sage". I was desperate to be redeemed. After I was dumped, I went through three boyfriends in three months. Each of them represented a rapidly progressive compromise. When my dating criteria became something along the lines of “he has a nice car” - I realized that I had no idea who I even was anymore. I made a vow that I would never date again unless I thought I actually loved the boy. I cleaned up my act. I made peace with God. I rededicated my life. I attended Bible Studies. I was good to go.

So when I met George, I had taken myself out of the dating market. I was hardly the image of the model Christian with my prairie dresses and Dr. Marten boots and extensive collection of import albums. I was trying to fit into the “Bible Study” mold. Kind of trying at least. I mean, I attended Bible studies. I was trying to be good. I was trying to follow all the rules. Then, George invited me to come and hang out with him. I should say that I hesitated, but I didn’t.

On our first and only “date”, we snuck into the Botanical Gardens and went and sat down in a grove of trees. We talked. We kissed for the first (and last) time. Then, it started to rain. George invited me to come to his house to dry off and get a cup of coffee. We talked some more and then some more and it was getting really late and it was really raining. And George propositioned me. He knew about my whole “rededication-being- a-good-girl-not-wanting-to-date” vow and so he told me that his room was the attic bedroom and every time it rained, he would lay and listen the rain on the tin roof and he always wished he had someone to share that moment with. He invited me to stay the night - just as friends. This was definitely not in the rule book of acceptable young Christian woman behavior. But I believed George, and the sound of rain on a tin roof has an allure of its own. I trusted him. I think I already loved him. And so I fell asleep, fully dressed, on a mattress on the floor of the slant-roofed attic, by his side. The rain beat down and he did not kiss me; he just reached out and took my hand and held it in his.

From that moment on, we were inseperable. George escorted me into a world of people and parties. I was still struggling with reconciling my newly rededicated faith and my attraction to (and at-homeness in) the counterculture. I never did drugs or drank enough to get seriously hung over, but with George at my side I spent my days in coffee houses and my nights in pubs. We often got served our food and drinks free, because George invariably knew whoever was working at any given location. (I learned from him that all the punk rocker waiters and waitresses that worked at a certain 24 hour restaurant that was popular with the frat boy crowd as well as the 12am-5am hipster crowd would lick the plates when the frat boys came in).

George got me to start smoking, but I rebelled against the reds because I did not like the cigarette-taste that lingered in my mouth. Instead, I smoked cloves - which I knew he thought was a little wimpy of me - but I loved the way they made my tongue taste sweet and the way they burned so slowly. I wore his leather jacket. We would go and do laundry at 3 am at this laundromat that also showed movies and George would push me around in a rolling cart and we'd play the video game Tron. We would hit the Potter’s House thrift store and fill bags with clothes from the rag pile for 3 bucks a bag. We got morning custard and coffee at The Bluebird Cafe. George would try to order a bluebird for breakfast. We laughed all the time, stayed up all night, walked along railroad tracks and over bridges. We got our first tattoos together.

Unlike me, George wasreally wild. He drank a whole lot. He sometimes let himself get picked up by pierced and spikey haired bartender stripper girls and he would go back to their place and leave me to find my own way home - but I slept with the door unlocked and he always came back to hold my hand, not theirs, before the end of the night.

I know that people thought we had some sort of strange andvery open relationship, but the truth was so much more complicated. George and I never had sex, not even anything remotely close.

Every night, George simply slept by my side. If he had to work security, I would leave my door unlocked and he would eventually wander up into my loft and take my hand in his and fall asleep. Most nights, we slept under the tin roof in his attic room. We held hands. We always held hands - and it was more than enough.

One night, we went out to visit some bars because George was doing “research for a sociology project”. I was drinking a bit more than normal. When I drink, I get very content and passive - which is unusual for me. Especially the passive part. I was feeling really passive though, really happy. All was good and right in the world. We drove back to his house and for some reason, I was not wearing shoes.

I don’t remember what happened to my shoes, but I remember that when we got to the house, George said that he ought to carry me inside because the big bonfire party had been the previous weekend at the yard was still full of bits of glass. It was raining. George came around and opened my car door and carried me into the house. No one else was home so he told me to stand there with my eyes closed. Being in a passive and content state of mind, I complied. He lit candles all over the living room and he told me to open my eyes and when I did he had started playing the song “Singing In the Rain” on the stereo (from the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange) and he took me up in his arms and started to dance me around the room a la Gene Kelley.

It was one of the single most perfect moments of my life.

My friendship with George was much more than friendship; I loved him.

I think, like so many people, I had always confused sex and love in my mind. Sex was always linked to love. When I daydreamed about falling in love, it was always tied up with feelings of sexual longing. I had had boyfriends. I had had sex. Until George, I had never experienced actual love. We talk about friendship love as if it is less than "real" love. We denigrate it. We say to ourselves that friendship is nice, but it is not “true love”.

In the Spring, George and I shot a short independent film together. I wrote and directed the movie. It was called “maybe I used to love you”. The film was basically a backwards rant by a girl who had realized that her ex-boyfriend had never really loved her at all - had never even known the color of her eyes. And like all first novels or first screenplays, the girl was me. The boyfriend was a composite of all the boys in my string of bad and worse relationships. I finally got it. That thing I had had in the past in all my romantic delusion - that was not love. Love was patient. Love was kind. Love did not take. Love wanted the best for the other person. Love knew the color of your eyes. Love looked at you not as something to take and use, but as something to respect. I knew, at last, how to love and be loved.

While I was editing my movie, George told me that he knew the perfect guy for me. I shrugged his comment off. I was not interested in dating. He knew that. Unlike my previous conviction, this time I really meant it. I was perfectly happy just the way things were. I could have been happy with the way things were forever, but he insisted.

He lied to me finally. He told me we were going to the movies. He said he just had to stop by a party for a second to check on something. Because George knew me, he knew what was best for me. He introduced me to a guy that he called “Smiley”. And he was right, he had had the perfect guy for me, the one I'd go on to marry.

George taught me so much. He taught me to really laugh, and I laugh so much now. He made me bold. It prepared me well for marriage - but more than that - it has made me unafraid to really, deeply love my children and my small handful of friends. I buy them art and books that remind me of them. I can look people straight in the eye.

I don’t so care anymore about being loved back. In this small way, I am fearless. I have had someone really see me. I carry that with me always.

the boy with the sherlock holmes hat

My mother brought over a box of my old things. Among the photo albums and yellowed greeting cards, I found my senior yearbook. I am not a yearbook kind of girl. I never bought a yearbook until my senior year. I don’t know why I bought one then. I did not enjoy the school part of my senior year. I was actually not in school very much. I skipped at least two or three classes each day.

But, there it was- Picture This, the great class of 1988.

So, I dated alot of boys. Boys were the one thing I was good at. Extracurricular activities, not so much. Grades? only when and if I found it interesting. I never got along with other girls. Looking through my yearbook, I realized that I have forgotten 99% of the details about the boys I dated. With only a few exceptions, I do not even remember their names. I remember even fewer first and last names. What I do remember are snapshot-like moments, rich in imagery.

Instead of faces or yearbook-handsome sorts of important achievement related details, the memories I have stored away are small, random moments of beauty. A cream colored cable knit sweater. The taste of cigarette smoke on a rooftop. The welded junkyard metal sheeting on the floor a battered jeep. Driving too fast and spinning out on an abandoned red dirt road. A typewritten short-story. Small moments of feeling awake, and times of wanting to be a part of the world - to just breathe it all and hold the alive deep in my lungs. A feeling like being underwater and never wanting to surface.

I remember music, the passage of night landscape out the passenger windows of cars, driving anywhere but home. And I remember the boy with the Sherlock Holmes hat.

I remember every detail about the boy with the Sherlock Holmes hat. He wore a Sherlock Holmes hat to school, in 1986, in Florida. He was two years older than me, and he was the smartest boy I'd ever met. He made me care about getting into the National Honor Society; he was the vice-president and I just wanted to have a reason to be where he was. I figured that if I was around, he'd have to notice me - so I made good grades for an entire year just so I could inducted into his club and stand there in a white honor dress while he lit my little white drippy honor candle.

I remember the way his hair curled slightly at the nape of his neck. He was tall. He asked me out for first time while we were sitting in the bleachers of the Civic Center, right in the middle of the Billy Graham Crusade. We saw Crocodile Dundee. The movie sucked, but I did not care.

I remember his rust colored car, an older 1970’s model without bucket seats - that lovely expanse of front seat, the way you could just curl up like a cat in the crook of an arm is still one of the things I miss most about the world I grew up a part of. Why pamper life's complexities when the leather runs smooth on the passenger's seat? Charming indeed.

I remember talking and not talking on the wooden Florida pier at night, surrounded by woods and dark lake water. There were so many stars, and always the night air was like a womb, like the inside of a blade of grass, curling your hair and making everything damp. And I remember Bob Dylan.

THe boy with the Sherlock Holmes hat loved Bob Dylan. In the eighties, when everyone wanted Casio keyboards and razor thin ties to be like a MTV veejay, but he would play Dylan on an old tape player and the cadence of the songs would reach back to my earliest childhood memories: bonfires, and my bare feet in the sand, clothes that smelled like woodsmoke and flannel blankets, Kool-aid in styrofoam cups without ice, Maggie’s farm, and my blue-eyed son, and we're gonna fly down into an easy chair. His music spoke a language that I knew with memories deeper than words. I was going nowhere, but I didn't think twice because it was allright. Buckets of moonbeams in my hands.

He was the first boy that I really loved; the only one that I thought about for years afterwards with regret that I had been so, so young at the time - so completely not self-posessed.

Right before he went away for good, he took me out and we drove around. He was not a staying around sort of person. He told me that whatever happened between us in the future - he wanted me to hear a song. He wanted me to listen to the words know that, whatever happened, this song was the truth about how he felt about me. I sat next to him and he drove down the canopy roads between our houses and Bob Dylan sang - Emotionally Yours . I will always be, emotionally yours.

It was enough. In the end, I forgave him for every way he broke my heart. He remains, in my mind, incandescent.

Even his leaving was beautiful.

Come baby, find me, come baby, remind me of where I once begun.
Come baby, show me, show me you know me, tell me you're the one.
I could be learning, you could be yearning to see behind closed doors.
But I will always be emotionally yours.
Come baby, rock me, come baby, lock me into the shadows of your heart.
Come baby, teach me, come baby, reach me, let the music start.
I could be dreaming but I keep believing you're the one I'm livin' for.
And I will always be emotionally yours.
It's like my whole life never happened,
When I see you, it's as if I never had a thought.
I know this dream, it might be crazy,
But it's the only one I've got.
Come baby, shake me, come baby, take me, I would be satisfied.
Come baby, hold me, come baby, help me, my arms are open wide.
I could be unraveling wherever I'm traveling, even to foreign shores.
But I will always be emotionally yours.

the poet

I started dating the poet because he gave me a record. It was Christmas. I had been dating a neighbor of his. The boy that I had been dating was sort of an imagined victory for me. He was a cute, normal boy that everybody liked. I was the weird bookish girl who wore vintage dresses and brought fresh daisies to school. (I really did) This boy was cinematic; he had kissed me once in secret and then shown up a month later to wait for me to get off work outside of TCBY yogurt. When I did, he confessed to me that he just could not stop thinking about me and wanted to date me openly - class ring exchange and hand holding and going to the prom. Cue the John Huges soundtrack. A whole lot of normal girls wanted to date this particular guy and it felt really good to know that - poetry, prairie dresses, daisies and all - he picked me. So we went out and I tried to look past the fact that he really liked Elton John and wrote crappy notes and left little balloons on my car. I tried not to dwell on the fact that he used a whole lot of hair gel and wanted to be in a boy band. I tried to just enjoy the PERFECT HIGH SCHOOL boyfriendiness of him.

But then, on Christmas, this other boy - the poet boy - brought me a paper bag taped shut and left it on my desk without saying a word. I opened the bag, and inside was an album: the soundtrack to the movie Labyrinth.

For as long as I can remember I have been obsessed by stories of things lost and things found. Alice in Wonderland. Escape to Witch Mountain. The Secret Garden. I had loved the movie Labyrinth, but this was not common knowledge because I was a high school senior and Labyrinth was a movie with David Bowie and.....muppets. I stared at the album, speechless. I knew, suddenly, that I didn’t want to play at normal anymore. I knew that somehow, this other boy knew me in a way that nobody else did. I broke up with my yearbook boyfriend before the last bell rang that day and John, the poet, drove me home.

John was not like anyone I had ever been friends with. He was not a lovely, beautiful poet. He did not smoke pot or listen to Bau Haus. He did not draw pictures and was immune to great cinematography. Instead, he was pale, thin and angry, with the odd-for-a-seventeen-year-old countenance of someone who had spent the last ten years of their life in smoke-filled bars. His father was a cop that bootlegged VHS tapes on the side, and there was something unsettling about his house. It was always spotless; there were always lots of guns. He had three or four brothers, but when you walked in his house it was like walking into a museum. Everyone was hushed and poorly lit. It was as if one wrong move would set off the flashing lights and the alarm. I never once met his father. John was always in a hurry to leave.

John had a habit of driving fast. Too fast. Being with him was not like being with my friend Charles as we sat in the VW bug and lazily wandered through town with Cat Stevens reassuring us all along that “while the sinners sin, the children play”. When I was with John he mocked my hippie music. He insisted on playing hard music at a violently loud volume and he would drive so fast that the frame of his Ford Escort shook and he would look at me and dare me to tell him to slow down. He would dare me to be scared of him. But I never said slow down; I just prayed silently that we would both stay alive and I let him drive. I let him try to outrun whatever it was that he imagined was chasing him.

John was brilliant and dangerous. I had, up until this point, been a very good preacher’s daughter. I may have been an outcast; I may have hung out with drug addicts, but I, myself, was always just along for the ride. John hated this about me. He was constantly pushing me, making me feel inferior to him for my desire to be good, my longing to see the world as a beautiful place even in the face of his unfathomable rage and capacity for self-destruction. He said I was shallow, and it hurt. It hurt to be called shallow by the same person who knew you loved Labyrinth without you having to tell them - who saw that in you somehow. He got me to start smoking, but I just took tiny puffs and did not inhale. He kept daring me to really smoke and not just pretend. I told him I was working up to it.

One night, he took me downtown and lead me through an alley where there was a fire escape ladder. He lifted me up to the bottom rung of the ladder and told me to climb. We climbed onto the roof of the first building and he took me to the spot where you could hop across to the next roof, and the next fire escape. We climbed from roof to roof that way. The Florida night was warm and still and heavy and on top of the roofs, I felt like I was in a different world. It was breathtaking.

I looked down on the courtyard of a popular nightclub, and watched the patrons walk in and out with drinks in hand. I saw couples fight and dance and kiss. I gazed down at the beauty of an illuminated swimming pool on the lower level roof of a downtown hotel. I wished someone would come out and swim, I wished I could see a mother and child swimming in the water, the child clinging to her - its arms wrapped around her neck. I wanted to stay on the rooftops forever, looking down on the people living life below. I was stunned by it all -shaken silent by the beauty of being up so high where everything looked intentional and good.

John, however, was restless. I imagine for him, being up so high just made him have to fight the impulse to jump. He saw me doing my little wimpy cigarette puffing and he walked up to me, took my face in his hands, put his mouth on mine, and exhaled his own smoke deep into my lungs.

He took away the quiet beauty of the moment; he took away the romance of the kiss. This is how he left me: hurt, angry, and choking for air.

John managed to make a 1460 on his SAT back when 1600 was a perfect score - even after drinking an entire bottle of Vodka the night before and knocking on windows at 2am, totally wasted. He got “admission fee waived” applications from colleges everywhere. He never filled a single one out.

He wrote a bitter and cruel message in my yearbook. I gave up.

Two years later, I ran into him again and we became friends. He was drinking a whole lot, living in a tiny little apartment with a roommate that had eyes like a wolf. He was failing out of community college. I was very broken when I met him this time. I was getting ready to transfer schools and had just gotten permission to withdraw from my classes at Florida State for “mental health reasons”. Time had mellowed him; he was more sad than angry now. Time had broken me; now I was sad too.

For a few weeks before I left, we spent alot of time talking. Telling each other our stories. He apologized for having been so cruel in high school. He said that I was not shallow, that I never had been. And before I left, he gave me another present: a small glass cat with wings. One of the most meaningful gifts that anyone has ever given me.

The memory of him breaks my heart. I want to tell myself that he is okay - that just like me, he found his way out of the labyrinth.

part two: all we need to know of hell

I came home from the hospital unable to sit or walk without pain. I was taking two Percocet pills every four hours. My memories of those first days are, at best, fuzzy. I know that we took my son to the pediatrician for his check-up and found out that he had moderately severe jaundice. The doctor prescribed an at-home contraption called a "Biliblanket", it was like an ultraviolet heating pad that we wrapped the baby in. I hated it. It scared me.

Less than twenty-four hours after he was first wrapped in the electric thing, I changed my son's diaper. It was full of blood. Wait, not blood. Surely not blood. It just looked like blood. Maybe. I called the doctor. He assured me everything was fine, that babies just look like they are peeing blood sometimes because there are some sort of crystals in their urine. I was slightly hysterical. The doctor agreed to see us late that afternoon.

He looked my son over and said the baby was fine. I was unconvinced. He assured me that I probably only saw those crystals, or there was some bleeding from the circumcision - external bleeding if anything. I asked him to please check and see. They attached a little plastic baggie thing to my son's penis and I nursed him in the office and waited for him to pee. The bag was full of blood. The doctor took one look. "Oh my God", he said. "That's blood".

We were sent directly to the hospital. I was told not to go home, not even for a bag of clothes. They had no idea why my baby was peeing blood. He was obviously bleeding internally, but nobody knew why or where. They sent us downstairs to run tests. I rode in a wheelchair, with my son in my arms. In the nuclear medicine room, they covered me in an iron apron and laid my six pound son, naked, on the table. The technician was kind enough to tell me to close my eyes. When I opened them, my son had a needle and I.V sticking out of his forehead. The nurse explained that this was the easiest vein to tap into on a newborn, but it was brutal to watch a needle be inserted into a baby's face.

Through this I.V. they pumped some sort of radioactive dye into my son. On the monitor, we watched his insides start glowing as the medicine circulated through his system.

When the results came in, he was placed in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. He had Renal Vein Thrombosis, a blood clot blocking the vein leading to one of his kidneys. That kidney was getting no blood flow at all. It was dying. The clot was on the outside of the vein, which meant that it could break off at any time and travel to my son's heart, brain, or lungs. If this happened, Arden would die.

Renal Vein Thrombosis is extremely rare in infants. The pediatric specialists had never treated a child with my son's condition. Only a few doctors in the nation had any experience with a blood clot like my son's. As a result, there was no real consensus as to how to treat it. Surgery was way too risky. The best therapy seemed to be to administer the same blood thinner that adult's get when they have heart attacks. This therapy came with a huge risk, it could make the blood too thin. My son's brain could begin to hemorrage. Still, it was the best they could do. They would be very conservative, and give him the smallest possible doses. They needed my permission. Okay, I said. Yes.

For five days, they slowly increased the dosage, but there was no change in the size of the clot. The doctors me with me. They wanted to put an I.V into my son's thigh, so that the medicine was going straight to the clot. They wanted permission to jump from a conservative dosage to the highest dosage that had ever been given to a child my son's size. This would either heal him or kill him. It was the last resort. They sat down in the PICU waiting room and told me that I had to give them permission to increase the dosage.

I wanted to scream that they did not have my permission. I wanted them just to cut the clot out or something. I wanted everything to be okay. I wanted to go home. I wanted to wake up. I wanted to disappear. I wanted be the one with needles in my arms and legs and forehead. I wanted to fall asleep forever.

I gave them permission.

The next day, the blood clot had dissolved. A week later, we took Arden home.

Those are the facts about what happened.

In the beginning, I was aware that there was a schism between what I was thinking and feeling and what I was supposed to be thinking and feeling. For example, when the chaplain would come by to visit and pray with us, I thought that I hated her. I wanted her to go away. I wanted to tell her not to ever come back again. Unfortunately, my husband and father were both ministers (or ministers-to-be) and they seemed very appreciative of the chaplain visits. The minister from our church and people from my husband's seminary would visit. They always wanted to pray too.

I had an overpowering desire to tell them to fuck off. Or hit them. Instead, I stood in little circles and held hands and while everybody prayed, I felt my insides fill with rage like poison. I imagined that if you had placed me on the cold table in the nuclear medicine room and turned the x-ray on me, you could have seem it, glowing and greenish in my veins.

During the weeks I had been on bed rest, I spent time reading parenting magazines and books. Confined to the couch, I fulfilled my primal pre-birth "nesting" instinct by pre-ordering baby announcements. I had picked an announcement with a pastel illustration of Noah's ark, post-flood. The animals were happily disembarking, the sun was glowing, and a rainbow filled the sky. "God's Perfect Gift of Love", they said. I thought they were sweet. While my son was in PICU, the announcements arrived and my mother delivered them to me in the hospital. I could address them. It would give me something to do. I looked at the announcements and wanted to vomit. They were too sweet. They were all warm and cuddly and soft. I thought, if I mailed them, my son might be dead before they even arrived. "God's Perfect Gift Of Love" - a dead baby. What would I do then? Send a follow-up death announcement. "Oops. God Lied With That "Gift of Love Crap'. (And by the way, don't say you're praying for us because it makes me want to kill you)".

I knew that I ought to be praying for my son. I ought to be weeping and crying. I should fast or gnash my teeth. I should get on my knees and beg God for a miracle. I also ought to be spending every minute by my baby's side. If I were given a quiz about being a good mother, and there was a question that asked what a good mother would do if her baby was in intensive care - I would answer either a) never leave his side or b) never stop praying for his healing. I did c) nothing. I did not want to sit near my son. I did not want to be in the intensive care room with its cloud painted walls and quiet. I really did not want to pray. I knew I should, but, after all, David spent all his time begging God to heal his baby and it didn't do any good. If there even was a God, and I was not so sure anymore that there was, I honestly had nothing to say to Him.

At one point, I remember going home to get a change of clothes. Everyone else was at the hospital. I walked into my son's empty room, sat in the rocking chair, and started screaming at God. I was scared. I was scared of losing my son, but I was also scared of losing God. I had never felt the complete absence of God that I felt at that moment. I remember having a very clear thought that I was standing on the edge of Hell. "I'm looking at the inside of Hell", I thought. I know what it looks like now.

This is the point when I dared God to speak. I opened my Bible and gave him one chance to be real. The page I opened to was Isaiah 66 11-13. I knew then, that I had not lost God.

In the days and weeks that followed, I would not lose my son. But that year, I almost lost myself. The paranoia that began with pregnancy deepened and was combined with a frightening detachment during the weeks we spent in the hospital. I began to split in half. I kept the dark part as hidden as I could.

Weeks after we came home, I still had not sent out the birth announcements. It literally turned my stomach to look at them. They were hateful, lying little things, with their happy elephants and giraffes disembarking a toy-like ark in the sunshine. Now, I knew the truth. After forty days and nights in the storm, the animals would not have come off the boat all watercolor soft and sweet. They would have looked like hell.

the worst gumball machine prize in the history of childhood

After I orginally posted the blue dirt prize story, there were a bunch of people that asked what might happen to the worst gumball machine prize in the history of childhood (see post below) if I added water. There was speculation that maybe the dirt was fun with water added.

And so, I made a little movie:

Just Add Water

music by the roches

the truth about gumball machines

Growing up, we did not have much money. This became evident when we went grocery shopping. We shopped in warehouse-like grocery stores where we bagged our own groceries. I believed that a blue box of genuine Kraft Macaroni and Cheese was a luxury item. We bought one two-liter bottle of Coke per week. When we were shopping with my mother, she would bribe us to get us to behave (after having children, I believe that all mothers bribe for behavior in grocery stores). But rather than offering us a special treat from the grocery aisle, we were always lured by the promise of twenty-five cents for the gumball machines.

The temptation of a quarter was enough to put me on my very best behavior. I was obsessed with the gumball machines, because one of them advertised the chance to win a real, working, spy camera! The camera was displayed, pressed against the glass in all of its glory, the size of the palm of my hand, and just the thing to turn me into a neighborhood Harriet or Encyclopedia Brown.

Every week, I tried to win the camera. I peeked through the glass and located the plastic container that held the treasured prize. Slowly, as the machine emptied, the camera got closer and closer to the bottom. I tracked its progress, and pocketed my cheap, bendy metal rings and rubber pencil toppers with faith that each passing visit brought me closer to the coveted camera.

Finally, I prepared for THE day. I did extra chores to earn spare change. On our last visit to Albertsons, the gumball machine had been close to empty. I knew that a pocket of quarters would be all I needed to finally own the fabulous camera. When we got there, I rushed to the gumball machine and saw that the unthinkable had happened. Someone had come by and refilled the machine. The prizes that had been near the bottom - within grasp - had been pushed all the way back up to the top. The truth slowly dawned on me. Gumball machines are built to deceive. The prizes on the outside, the spy cameras that lure you to trade your money for a chance to twist the handle, will always remain just out of reach.

A few weeks ago, I was with my kids and they saw a row of gumball machines. They begged for a quarter so they could try their luck. I made an attempt to warn them. I told them that they would be disappointed, that gumball machine prizes are horrible. "Please", they pleaded. I handed them each a quarter.

My daughter got a bendy metal ring. My son got the worst gumball prize in the history of childhood.

"What is it?", he asked. I held the prize in my hand. "It looks like a baggie of blue dirt", I said. He was confused. "What do you do with it?" he asked. I told him that, without a doubt, he had received the worst gumball machine prize ever.

My son shook his head. "You were right Mom", he said reverently. "Gumball machines are a scam ."

Some lessons have to be learned the hard way.

the heart wants what the heart wants

Throughout my childhood, my family lived on a very tight budget. My father was a hippie minister and my mother did not work. I never thought about being poor; it never bothered me. It was always an adventure. Because of our limited finances, we did our grocery shopping at a “bag your own groceries” warehouse. Cardboard shipping boxes were cut open and placed on the shelves. It was dark, and a little creepy. Once, my brother and I saw a rat in the dog food aisle. We begged my mother to let us try to catch it and take it home as a pet, but she refused.

Every Friday, my father insisted on having a “family night”. We rotated activities. Sometimes, we would get dressed in our pajamas and drive to the Little Essex convenience store for hot French fries. Occasionally, we played Putt-Putt golf, or went to Mugs and Movies - the second-run theater - where a movie was fifty cents and we could bring in our own brown paper bags of popcorn. My favorite family night was grocery store night. My father would give us each five dollars and take us to the fancy grocery store. To Publix -where shopping is a pleasure. We were allowed to buy anything we wanted with our five dollars, and it was our special food than nobody else could eat. I always bought a two liter bottle of Sunkist orange soda (because I wanted those Sunkist good vibrations), and a box of fortune cookies. I shivered with excitement at the thought of an entire box of fortune cookies - of all those good fortunes - just for me.

And then, I always wanted a box of Cascade dish detergent.

I would take my selections to my parents and put them in the cart. My mother would look at the box of Cascade. She would remind me that we did not have a dishwasher and that Cascade was soap that only worked in a dishwasher. I always fought her. I wanted the Cascade. Couldn't we find a way to make it work? Couldn't we sprinkle it somehow? It had unique sheeting action. It sounded lovely. I really, really, really, wanted the Cascade.

She always made me put it back.

I would look at the green box on the shelf. The lovely, graceful hand holding a sparkling glass. I knew that this was the one thing missing in my life - this hand on the green box. Screw our lack of a dishwasher. I wanted a box of Cascade. I did not want to buy any more food with my five dollars; I wanted a beautiful, green box of Cascade.

When I moved out on my own, I found that my apartment had a dishwasher. The first thing that I did was take a trip to Publix to buy a box of Cascade. It had the same beautiful hand on the front, the same manicured nails wrapped around the stem of the same sparkling glass. I took the Cascade home along with a box of fortune cookies, and I ate every single cookie that first night. I lined up the fortunes on my kitchen table while the dishwasher hummed and swooshed and the Cascade used its mysterious sheeting action to miraculously clean all of my dirty pots and cups and knives.

how things work

Growing up, I was not allowed to wear a bikini. My mother told me that bellybuttons were a private part and should be kept hidden at all times. This may be part of the reason that, when I was in elementary school, I thought girls got pregnant by pressing their bellybuttons.

I decided that I would marry my friend Beth and we would have children - but I was told that it did not work that way. I put alot of thought into this. Since a person got pregnant by pressing their bellybutton, why couldn’t girls have babies with each other? There must be something I was missing. Eventually, I had the realization that (of course), a boy had to do the bellybutton pushing. And, you had to be married for it to work. I was very proud of the fact that I was able to figure out this big mystery all by myself. The bellybutton system worked for me. I was happy with it. I did not feel the need to ask questions.

I was in middle school before I learned about the vague generalities of sex. I was fifteen before I learned the specifics. I made an offhand comment to my mother and she realized that I did not have a very clear idea about the mechanics involved in procreation. I remember her telling me how it all actually fit together. I was very upset about this knowledge. Sex as she described it was so much more clinical and invasive than I had imagined it. Before this talk, I pictured sex in terms of metaphors and impressions - it was all based on things I saw in the movies or scraps of e.e. cummings poetry and song lyrics. Sex that came with a soundtrack and a fade to black. The things I cared the most about had been lost in her scientific translation: beauty, wonder, mystery. I felt sad.

Science has always just generally pissed me off. I hate it. From elementary school on, I never wanted to learn about things like gravity and atoms. I would have been happier not knowing that water and sky are not really blue - they just reflect blue; and that somehow there are not really colors - it is all just white light and frequencies or prisms or something. Science teachers start talking, and explaining, and I just want to put my head down and cover my ears. I don’t want to know. Really.

I don’t want to know about atoms and DNA and genes. I took botany in college and it was the only class that I ever failed. I just could not handle it. I took botany because of trees; I thought I would learn to name them and identify their leaves. But it was all science, and labeling parts, and how pesticides worked, and grafting plants together to make new plants. The professor got to the glow-in-the-dark corn hybrid experiments and I stopped going to class.

In high school, I was put on the AP track. I made it through the first semester of AP biology before I broke down. We were dissecting starfish. I thought I was going to die. Seriously. It was awful. I cut open the starfish and I started crying.

I cried, and I begged them to take me out of AP science. I did not want to dissect anything else. I did not want to tally up fruit fly deaths and births and count the ones with red eyes. I did not ever want to take chemistry. I wanted out of advanced science.

They ended up letting me take the general science classes, and I was happy. Instead of chemistry, I tool “ecology”, which was taught by a white-haired hippie that had a side-business making wooden dulcimers. He would bring his dulcimer to class and let us try to play it. I made a model of a solar-powered cabin. I did a report on recycling old buses and turning them into houses. It was the only science class I ever made an”A” in.

When I had to do science fair experiments, I always came up with topics that were basically excuses to get pet mice. I did one project on the effects of rock vs. classical music on mouse behavior. The next year, I put their cages inside of different colored boxes and recorded their behavior. Did the mice in the red box behave aggressively? Did the blue boxed mice seem sad? It was very scientific.

After two years of mice escaping from cages, my parents said that I was not allowed to do any more experiments involving animals. So, I did my last science fair project on ESP. My hypothesis was that ESP ability would decrease with age. I went all the way to state with this experiment- not because it was a well-done experiment - but because I was the only person in whatever category ESP fell under. I resisted actual science. I resisted learning about the way things work. I just wanted to know how things felt.

I understand that some people, science people , enjoy learning this stuff. It makes them happy (and if any science-type people read this site - God bless you). I just could not do it. I cringed when I walked into a science classroom. I wondered what mystery was going to be ruined for me that day. I tuned out. I wrote on the desks. I put my head down and fell asleep. I tried to block all the answers out. I wanted to hold onto the magic of it, to keep believing in oceans and skies painted blue by something too wonderful to explain. I wanted things held together by Love, not by protons and neutrons.

And so, when I found a coffee table made out of an old science desk - I fell in love with it. I think it is beautiful. Years and years of kids trying to escape science, and carving their names into the desk. I know how they felt. Scribbling frantic lines on the sides, where the teacher could not see. Trying to get the hell out there. Thinking about graduation, or who they loved. Writing song lyrics, or poetry. Using their dissecting instruments to dig words into the wood and black.

I bought this table. I am going to buy an Exacto knife and a drawing compass. When friends visit, I am going to ask them to carve their name.

I am going to make this table a reminder of everything mysterious and wonderful about the people I know.

I will look at it and smile. I will run my hand over the names and whisper prayers. I will wonder at the mystery of it all.

And I will say that we are not science. We are art. We are held together by Love.

Losing Tabitha

When I moved out on my own, I adopted a cat. I decided that I wanted a black cat, because I felt sorry for black cats and the way people considered them symbols of bad luck. At the animal shelter, I picked out a tiny, solid black kitten. I went to the front desk with the cage number and the attendant looked it up in her little card file and told me that I could not have that kitten because it was running a fever and they had already pulled its card to put it to sleep. I begged them to let me have the cat, and they consulted and said that as long as I agreed to take it to the vet before going home, they would let me adopt her.

I drove to the vet with the kitten in my lap, petting her and talking to her. By the time the vet checked her out, the fever was gone and he said that he felt confident that it had been caused by trauma and that she would be just fine. I took her home and named her “Tabitha” - after the little girl that Jesus raised from the dead.

Tabitha was the best cat ever. She would answer when I called her name and I could hold her in my arms and tell her to stretch and she would stretch out her entire body, backwards - trusting me to not let her fall. I adored her. Everyone who came to my house would comment about how amazing she was. She would climb on furniture and as I walked around, she would look for any opportunity to hop onto my shoulder. She curled herself around my neck and purred and slept while I walked around. She was the best pet I have ever had. I loved Tabitha.

In the middle of my sophomore year of college, I had an emotional breakdown. It was brought on, in part, by being dumped by my first really serious boyfriend. There were other reasons too.

It was a very, very, very bad time.

I withdrew from college after being diagnosed as “emotionally unstable” by the college psychiatrist. I later found out, that in order to get this diagnosis (which carried with it the opportunity for a refund of tuition), my case had to be argued before a panel. It was less than comforting to know that a whole group of people had discussed me and agreed that I was completely screwed up. I decided to leave town. Really, I had to leave town. I was going to go to live with my parents for a few months and then transfer to the University of Georgia. My parents had moved to Georgia while I was in college, so it was not like going “home”. It was just a temporary stop. Temporary shelter. I would put distance between myself and the past and search for a place to land.

I was all alone and I packed up everything I owned in my Ford Escort. It was packed so tightly that I could not see anything behind me. I put Tabitha in the car and drove to my parents house, through rural south Georgia with its two lane roads and unincorporated towns. I drove for a long time before I realized that I was not hearing Tabitha. I called to her. No answer.

I pulled the car over to the side of the road and when I got out, I realized that the trunk had popped slightly open. I started to panic. The trunk could be accessed from the car because part of the back seat folded down to make more space. I searched for Tabitha.

She was gone.

I drove back for miles, frantically scanning the side of the road. But I did not find her. I never found her.

I drove until I came upon a pay phone on the side of the road - out in front of a two-pump gas station and I made a collect call to my mother. I was hysterical. I had lost Tabitha. My only link to my old life was gone, disappeared out the back of a trunk that I did not even know was open.

And for the first and last time in my life, my mother cried with me. We just stood there. Me on a dusty red dirt driveway with a pay phone receiver to my ear, and her in her immaculate kitchen in a house that did not have a bedroom for me. We stood, momentarily together, and cried. For everything lost and dead and broken. We cried.

trains

So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can't prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with animals or the story without animals?

Mr. Okamoto: That's an interesting question...

Mr. Chiaba: The story with animals.

Mr. Okamoto: Yes. The story with animals is the better story.

Pi Patel: Thank you. And so it goes with God.

[Silence]

Yann Martel, Life of Pi

I come from a family that never put much stock in what actually happened. Both of my parents were born amid hills and railroad tracks. One generation back and there were dirt floors and unaccounted for children: nameless great aunts and uncles, cousins. I do not know my great grandmother's maiden name. No photographic evidence exists, no names are written down in public records. There are no yellowed letters home hidden in attics. You can not trace my ancestors back to anywhere: they simply stop midair and drop off into nothingness.

I used to believe that everyone grew up this way. It was not until much later that I learned that other families pass down things: names or albums or teapots or chairs. Unsmiling relatives behind glass, dates scrawled on the back of each picture.

Without these artifacts, we have done what we can. We have stories.

As a child, I collected these scraps of information and perhaps they got embellished even more in my mind and my brother's mind when we sat and repeated them. We retold them and nobody corrected us, there was nobody there to correct anything we said and we crafted things we heard and things we read into a story we told each other. There are things I believe are true, even if they are not, and who is to say now that everyone is dead and put in graves without gravestones what story is more real.

My father once preached a sermon on the importance of fairy tales.

I've never really believed that anything happens to my brother the way he tells it happened. Sometimes, I don't believe it happened at all.

When I was a child, we vacationed for a week each year at my Aunt Sue's cabin along the river. I would shoot tin cans out of the crooks in trees and wake up before sunrise to fish alone on the dock. I'd catch brim barely the size of my palm, and my father would filet them and fry them anyway. At night, I'd lay in the top bunk and imagine myself on a prairie. I'd listen to the rumble and whistle of a train somewhere in the distance and wonder where it was going. I did not yet realize that trains no longer carried people.

In the daytime, we would ride down the river. In some spots, the algae was so thick that it looked like pale green carpeting. Once, our dog jumped out as we stopped to fish thinking the boat was on solid land. My mother wore a red bandana around her head, the same one my brother and I wore when we pretended to be bank robbers. If we stayed on the river long enough, we came to a spot where a bridge started out across the river and then stopped, planks rotting and splintered, a gaping emptiness between the banks on either side.

Those, my mother said pointing overhead, are the tracks of the Ghost Train.

She told us that a train had been traveling across the river when the bridge collapsed, sending the passengers to the bottom. Even in the muggy Florida heat I shivered when I pictured the trapped passengers: pale blue faces floating up to watery windows, women with hair undone, men's top hats rising with water above their heads as they pounded doors and glass. I will always picture train passengers in long dresses with cameos at the lace throat. I always picture that the ground they hit drowning is wave ridden and sandy and shell-covered. Good-bye, Good-bye, Good-bye.

I thought to myself that the passenger cars would be under the water still. If I looked hard and deep enough into the lake, I might see something and I tried not to do it, not to look down.

After that day, I was scared to go under bridges in the boat and scared of going over them. I still hold my breath when I cross them. I still don't look out or down, only straight ahead.

Years later, I returned to the cabin and went past the bridge of the Ghost Train Tragedy. With adult eyes, I noticed that the skeleton of the bridge could have never supported train tracks: a small footbridge maybe, but nothing more than that. I realized that the water was not deep or wide enough to submerge a train. I called my mother and confronted her I saw the bridge. There was no Ghost Train.

My whole life, the Ghost Train has followed me. It is there whenever I lay in bed and hear a train whistle in the distance. It does not matter if I am not on the river, or in a different state all together; the Ghost Train comes back. I picture the conductor in his striped hat frantically reaching for the brake and the yellow light from the windows plunging into the depths of dark water. Always, for a moment, I can't breathe.