amy loves books

k-mart birds

Not long ago, I took one of those multiple choice personality tests.  I hate those tests.  I hate them, because you always know what the bad answer is.  The mentally unstable answer is obvious:

True or False
I receive messages that tell me what to do.
Most days, I find it difficult to get out of bed.
I feel like I am being watched.

I usually feel confident that most of my answers are going to fall in the “normal response” range.  I try to answer honestly; I figure that one “yes” to the question: “I cry easily”,  is not going to flag me as unstable.  Surely, the test makes allowances for minor personality quirks and eccentricities. 

But then, I got to this question - and I knew I was screwed:

I identify with lost and broken objects.

My answer to this question was the “wrong” answer.  My answer was yes.

I identify with lost and broken things.  Things that are cracked and rusted feel familiar, like an old friend.  I love their strange, sad beauty.   I have always been drawn to them.      

This is why it is strange that George and I were such good friends.  George was nothing like me in many ways. He was not introspective, and nothing ever seemed to bother him.  I had a total of two long, deep, serious conversations with George during the year that we were best friends.  He just did not talk about things like that.

For George, life seemed easy, and simple, and fun.  I was awfully lost and broken when he met me, I'd left one school for mental health reasons; I was on academic probation; my grandfather (and last remaining grandparent) had just died. George was kind and protective of me - but he never talked to me about it.  He was just always there, and he always had a plan for something fun that we could do.  Although I sometimes doubted that he really understood me, I never once doubted that he loved me.  And I do not doubt that his way of looking at the world was a gift.  In many ways - he quite literally saved me. 

The difference between George and me becomes clear when I think about K-Mart birds. 

Birds in parking lots make me sad.  They have always made me sad. In Florida, the parking lots are full of seagulls.  As a child, I would look at those seagulls and wonder how they lost their way.  I would think about them trapped in a hot, dirty parking lot when they were made to live at the beach.  They should have been free.  They should have been flying through air that tasted like wind and salt, not getting gray from car exhaust and heat.  Instead of living with a view of sky and water, they were confined to street lamps and oil-stained asphalt.  They ate the crumbs from discarded bags.  Litter.  As a child,  I would listen to these birds, and their cries would sound like hopelessness.

I grew up this way, being sorry for the seagulls in parking lots.  When I moved to Georgia, I found that the parking lots are full of small, brown birds.  I don’t know what kind they are.  George just called them “K-Mart birds”.  He had this beautiful British accent and when we went  places, he would always point out the birds in the parking lot and laugh at them.  “Look!”,  he would say. “More K-Mart birds.”   He would shake his head: “Stupid birds”. 

George was always looking for K-Mart birds.  He pointed them out no matter where we went - in the parking lots at Waffle House, Target, downtown Athens, everywhere.  He was fascinated by them.  They made him shake his head and laugh.   

Once, I asked him about it.  Didn’t they have birds in parking lots in England?  He said they did, but K-Mart birds were different.  K-mart birds actually lived in the parking lots.  I did not like it that George laughed at the birds.  I thought that calling them “K-Mart birds” was offensive,  like a bird-version of a racist joke. 

“They are not K-Mart birds.”,  I told him. “They are some other kind of bird that got stuck in a parking lot”.  I told him that these birds made me sad.  I told him about the lost seagulls in Florida.  I hated thinking about birds living in parking lots. I hated seeing their nests tucked in the letters of a K-Mart sign.  I told George that he should feel sorry for the birds - that he should call them sparrows, or wrens, or whatever kind of bird they really were. 

George just laughed.  He assured me that he was right to call them K-Mart birds. “There are trees across the street”,  he said.

I thought about it, and I realized that George was right.  There were trees just few hundred yards away. For some reason, the birds were choosing  to sleep inside a sign and eat crumbs and scraps of trash. They were free to live on either side of the street, and they had picked the K-Mart side.  I never thought of it this way before.  It had never occurred to me that parking lot birds did not have to be parking lot birds. 

As we were driving home,  I conceded that he had a point in calling them K-Mart birds since K-Mart birds were what they chose to be.  George just nodded, turned up the radio, and sang along to the Pogues.  He said we ought to go downtown because he wanted me to meet some of his friends.  When I started to look sad, this was always his answer: Turn up the music.  Go downtown.  Come on, it will be fun.

And it was.

 

George was the best friend I ever had.  He was always by my side, and he made me feel safe.  The way he loved me was completely unselfish.  Still, I always felt a little bit lonely when I was with him.  There were so many lost and broken places in me.  I am grateful beyond words for the way George took me by the hand and made so many things better, but there were places in my heart that he never fit inside of.

I identify with lost and broken things; I know the language of asphalt and crumbs.  This is why I sometimes fail to give the right answer on multiple choice psychology tests. 

George thought that the birds were silly because they lived in parking lots.  And, in some ways, I suppose he was right.  But I also think that parking lot birds are brave. 

Brave, and sad, and beautiful.  My heart understands them.

I know what it is like to try to make a nest in the hard neon angle of an unkind blue letter. Sometimes, cages have bars that only the person inside the cage can see. 

I want to learn the real names of the small, brown birds.  I want to tell them that they are not really K-Mart birds.  I want to remind them that they have better names.

I want to tell them that it is okay; there are trees right across the road.

  They can find a better kind of free.

 

wonder::twins

My husband gave me two DVDs for Christmas: Escape to Witch Mountain and Lost in Translation. I love both of these movies because, to me at least, they are about the same type of relationship. I have been thinking lately about friends and family - specifically about how friends can become like family (sometimes even more so than "real" family). One relationship I have always wished for is that of a twin brother. I never wanted a twin sister: a mirror image that would dress like me and confuse my name. Instead, I wanted a brother.
Someone who would like the backside of the coin that was me - different, but still, somehow, cut from the same mold.
A sibling without the rivalry.
An encourager.
A shelter.

The first chapter books I ever read were the Raggedy Ann and Andy adventures by Johnny Gruelle. The best thing about Raggedy Andy was that he always had Raggedy Ann's back. She seemed safer with him around. I don't remember if it was Raggedy Andy that made me long for a brother, but I know that my fascination with the idea of a twin only grew from there.

When the first Sanrio carts began to appear in the girl's section of department stores, they featured only two characters: the Little Twin Stars and Hello Kitty. Hello Kitty went on to become the cornerstone of the Sanrio company, but the Little Twin Stars were eventually replaced by a little green frog, and they slowly faded into obscurity. I never really understood the appeal of Hello Kitty, but I loved the Little Twin Stars. I collected everything I could: the palm-sized plastic case with a miniature pencil and set of tiny notes and envelopes, the toiletries kit with its washcloth and snap-on toothbrush cover. I had Little Twin Stars stationary, and I used it to compose poems and stories about the pink girl and blue boy. I knew there was something perfect about them.

In elementary school, I woke up early every Saturday morning to watch Super Friends, because I was in love with the idea of the Wonder Twins. I would sit on our yellow shag carpet, with my folding metal Dukes of Hazzard T.V. tray and bowl of Lucky Charms over my knees, and watch my beloved Wonder Twins escape danger and save the world. Jayna and Zan had matching purple wonder suits and the power to transform (Jayna could become any animal and Zan could become any form of water). When Superman and Wonderwoman needed help, the twins would smack their purple gloved fists together with a battle cry of "Wonder Twin Powers Activate!", and help save the day. Afterwards, I would beg my little brother to play Wonder Twins with me - but he never really understood the game. I always had to help him figure out what to transform into, which defeated the whole point of pretending to be a Wonder Twin. A twin brother would have known what form of water would compliment my choice of animal in order to help save the day. I would not have had to explain myself.

At some point, I stopped trying to find someone to play with me, and I started just imagining the stories in my head. I talked to an imaginary brother. I played in the woods, ran like I was being chased, and always kept my invisible twin at my side. I would hold my arm out and imagine that my brother was holding my hand as we escaped together. My favorite movie was Escape to Witch Mountain. More than anything, I wished that I could have a twin like Tony - someone that was a fellow castaway, trying to find a way/place to belong. I loved the idea that they could talk to each other without saying a word. They heard each other in a way deeper than words. They just listened, and they understood.

A confession:
I don't think I have had a single friend since then that I have not tried to send silent, telepathic messages to - just in case. Perhaps this makes me a complete loser, but I can't help thinking that one day, it just might work.

stolen poetry

The best reason that I ever had for deciding to go out with someone: He wore a Sherlock Holmes hat to school.

The best reason I ever had for breaking up with someone: Stolen poetry.

I had a history of being the not-chosen one. Of taking hand-me-downs from girlfriends I could never match. Of being told, “Yes, very nice - but what I want is not you”. And it was always someone who was there first that haunted me. That I was compared to and found lacking . I was always just not big enough to take her place.

The first boy I dated seriously in college had an ex-girlfriend who he had loved so much that he put her initials on his license plate. He had followed her from Maine to Florida when she went off to college. She had been the prom and football games and holding hands in hallways and yearbook pictures and sex when the parents were not home. The memories of high school and the hope of invincibility - the conviction of sixteen-year old immortality - all this was tied up with the memory of Krista.

I hated her.

I always had this thought: “I am not the first girl”. He had loved someone else before me. Being not first seemed to make me less. It seemed to me that I would always be held in comparison, since there was someone to compare me to. I was pretty sure I would fail the comparison.

I mean, seriously, in high school this girl had been a popular cheerleader. My boyfriend at the time, a star soccer player. They had been a golden couple; they had enjoyed a kind of existence that was completely outside of my frame of reference.

But I tried. I tried to carve out a place for myself. I tried to tell myself that I was deeper than this girl had been. I tried to believe that he would see this. That he would see that the way I loved him was so much deeper and real than her.

I wrote him a poem. I thought that this was one thing that would be mine. I would be the girl that wrote him poetry. My poetry. I would give him my poetry.

He read it and thanked me. Then, he told me that Krista had written a poem for him once. My heart sank. I had always believed, secretly, that there were two types of girls. There were girls that were cheerleaders, and girls that wrote poetry. It was either/or. This was my belief. I depended on this belief.

He took down a box and found a worn, folded piece of paper.
The Poem.
The poem she had written.
The poem that he carried in his wallet for two years. He unfolded the paper.

I read the first line. Please God, I thought. Please just let this poem suck.

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)

Suddenly, things became very clear to me. I broke the truth to him.
She did not write this poem. This was a poem by e.e. cummings. She had stolen this poem. Krista was a poetry thief.

I was angry. Furious in a hell hath none type of way. This girl, this other girl had the nerve to steal a poem. And not any poem - an e.e. cummings poem. She put her name on it and let him carry it for two years thinking it was a glimpse of a soul that in reality did not exist.

I expected him to be outraged. She was a poetry stealer! He had to hate her now. It was a lie. She was a lie. He had to see this. He had to.

But no. He folded the poem back up. He put it back in his box.

So I left. I left and did not look back.

I went home and wrote my own poetry. Imperfect, unpublished poetry. Vulnerable, secret, heartbreaking, and hoping poetry.

Poetry that was mine.

lost and found

When I was almost five, my parents decided that West College Avenue was not a good place to raise children. During the previous year, Ted Bundy had left a trail of fear and shock across Florida State’s campus. I had a baby brother and was getting ready to start kindergarten. The decision was made to move to a house in a more family friendly neighborhood.

I had one request. I wanted a house with a ditch. There was something mysterious and adventurous about ditches. My mother has always had a propensity for pointing out places and situations that resulted in the death of some unfortunate child. One of the stories that made the biggest impression on me was the story of two children who got caught in a huge ditch during a flash flood. These dead children and the instrument of their deaths took on a sort of mythic quality to me. I knew that I really wanted a ditch. Not one big enough to drown in, but one that I could master.

And so, we moved. We moved to a neighborhood with lots of kids. I started a public school, with lots of kids. It was the first time I had ever been around other children. I was used to the hippies. The hippies treated me like an equal. The hippies loved to join in my imagination games. The hippies engaged me in philosophical conversations. Is it even necessary to say that kindergarten did not go well for me?

I viewed the other girls with a mixture of longing and terror. I could not do cheers or those little slappy-hand rhymes all the girls did. I talked to trees on the playground. I named them and made them cakes out of dirt and leaves. I had a tendency to break into song. I already knew the alphabet. I was already reading. I hated staying in the lines. I missed my hippie friends. I really missed my hippie friends. I started to run away from home.

The first time I ran away from home, I ran to the house across the street. A retired couple lived there. The man kept model trains in the garage. Their house seemed too big for the two of them. My mother got a phone call from the woman. She said that I had knocked on the front door and asked if I could take a look at the spare room. I was sent home. My mother gave me the look I hated, the look I saw whenever I was upset. The look that said I was the great disappointment of her life, that I was difficult ; the look that said, "Why do you have to be so dramatic" ?

In addition to the ditches, at my new house, there were drainage pipes that went under the driveways. These were generally very small, about the right size for a cat to crawl through. Up the street, however, there was a place where the drainage pipe went under the road. It was a long pipe - the light at the other end was just barely visible. It was big enough to crawl through. I would spend days trying to work up the nerve to crawl all the way through this pipe. It was scary, with the sound of the cars overhead and the spiders in the middle. I would crawl really fast, and eventually I got to the point where I could make it all the way. Before long, I started running away and hiding in those drainage pipes.

I don’t know how many times I ran away. Alot. My attempts always ended the same way - I would wait and wait and wait for someone to come looking for me. No one ever came. After a while, the spiders would start to get to me; even though I would brush off the space in the ditch where I was crouched, I would begin to imagine that I felt them crawling in my hair. The dampness of the pipe would soak through my shorts and every car that stopped at the stop sign over my head would shake the pipe and I would imagine that it might just collapse at any moment. I would start to think about my mother's cautionary tale of the dead kids that got washed away in a ditch. I would crawl out, and walk home. My mother would greet me at the door. She never said a word. She never asked where I had been or if I was okay. She pretended that she hadn’t heard the slam of the front door, hadn’t heard my threat to “run away and never come back”. She just looked at me with her hard judgment of my failure to adapt, with her eyes that looked at my loneliness and hurt and labeled it fiction. Drama. Always Drama. Too much Drama. I filled her with contempt.

Eventually, I gave up. Since, obviously, no one would come looking for me, I stopped hiding in ditches. I locked myself inside my room instead. I found better ways to disappear. I read books with doors that opened to hidden worlds. I fantasized about being swallowed by holes that opened underneath me. I created a universe, underground, where I could imagine I lived. I talked to my reflection. I would close my eyes and stretch out my hand and try so hard to imagine my way through the mirror, try so hard to reach the other side. With my eyes closed, my hand reaching, my heart would skip a beat because I would think that surely I should have hit the glass by now, surely I would open my eyes and find that it was true after all - that I had found a way through the mirror to a better place. Then, my hand would hit the cold glass and I would open my eyes and I would look into my own eyes with disgust, because I had believed it would work. I really did believe I would be able to step through - and I had failed.

I do not know if my mother did me a service by trying to tame my tendency to run away. She got me to stop hiding in drainage ditches and appealing to neighbors for shelter. She taught me that if I ran, I would not be looked for.

What my mother did not do, was teach me how to be found. I eventually stopped running, but all throughout my childhood and adolescence, I never really stopped wanting to be found.

**************************************************************************************

About a year ago, I was with my daughter. She looked at me and said "Mommy, did you know that I am inside your eyes?" She had seen herself reflected back when she looked at me. I told her that I did know, that she was always in my eyes. She told me to look at her. "Are you inside my eyes too?" she asked. I looked into her eyes. "Yes," I told her, "yes, I am".

mean season

the hurricane story

Every August, the Tallahassee Democrat ran a front page article urging residents to brace themselves for hurricanes. In school, we were shown ominous movies that documented the destructive force of tropical storms. The movies usually followed one family who, foolishly, decided to ignore evacuation orders and weather the storm. Afterwards, our teacher would stand and repeat the warning: Never sit out a hurricane; the storm is stronger than you are. Evacuate. Always evacuate.

On Labor Day, 1985, Hurricane Elena hit ground at St. George Island. Tallahassee was directly in the path of the storm, and the hurricane, and tornados she spawned, downed trees and destroyed houses all across my hometown. School was delayed an entire week. Roads were closed, and we lost power and water for days.

Ironically, I have good memories of this week - of being stranded with no electricity or way to leave the neighborhood. To me, the hurricane was an adventure. I spent the week with my best friend, Gwen, and we climbed over the trunks of fallen trees, and invented games and stories to amuse ourselves.

I met Gwen the first week of high school , and for two years, she was my best friend. We talked on the phone for hours every day. Gwen was a brilliant, beautiful writer. Our friendship passed from palm to palm in the form of folded notes. Each class period that we were apart, we would write three or four pages of notes, filling each other up with words.

Gwen and I met in the ninth grade, and we bought scented Swatch watches and listened to Wham and A-ha and Corey Hart - but only for a very short time. Pretty soon, we found The Cure, Bau Haus, The Smiths, and The Dead Kennedys. Gwen dyed her red hair black and got a mowhawk; she started reading Sylvia Plath and Anne Rice. She cut herself with a straight razor. She smoked pot, which lead to acid, which lead to Ecstasy. When I spent the night, she would make me promise that if she died, I would make sure her diaries got published. I promised. She was serious. So was I.

Gwen’s parents met in college in the late sixties; they had both joined a cult, and their marriage was arranged by one of the elders of the church. Despite the fact that they did not know each other very well, they obeyed the command to marry. The cult believed that marriage and procreation were religious duties, and within a few months, Gwen’s mother was pregnant. Five months later, Gwen’s father had a religious breakdown. He admitted to his wife that he was a homosexual. He left the marriage, and he left the church. This is how my friend Gwen came into the world: born to a young, single mother; conceived in obligation, not love. She was a reminder of betrayal - regret in the form of a child.

My friend’s mom never really recovered. When I met Gwen, her mom was still searching for what had been lost. They moved all the time, and had their electricity turned off before almost every payday. Her mom was in and out of bad relationships. Most nights, she did not come home. In some ways, it was thrill to spend the night at Gwen’s - because there was never any adult to tell us what we could or could not do; but there also was never any food, and it was dark, and so many things stayed packed in boxes.

Labor day weekend 1985, Gwen’s mother had a new boyfriend and went out of town - so Gwen spent the weekend with me. We did not really believe that the hurricane would reach us, but it did. My parents woke us in the middle of the night and ordered us into the hallway. It was terrifying, like being caught under the wheels of a giant locomotive. The house shook from the force of the wind and the rain, and we the hallway was hot and dark. My father held a flashlight and a battery-powered radio that was tuned to the National Weather Station. We listened to reports of tornados, and we prayed that our house would be spared.

Eventually, the winds quieted, and then stopped completely. “This is the eye of the storm”, my father told us. We all walked outside in our bare feet and pajamas. The sky was the color of coal, and the air was unnaturally still. There were no cicadas or frogs. No birds. No stars. In the neighbor's yard, we saw the heavy shadow of a fallen tree trunk. We did not speak. I remember thinking that all around me, there was this horrible storm - and that the calm was not peaceful or comforting. I wondered if we should have evacuated.

The next morning, we heard the extent of the damage. School was closed. Gwen and I went outside, where it was light, and carefully rationed songs on my portable tape player. Once the batteries went dead, we would be cut off from our music. In between songs, we invented a game. We would think of a musician we admired - like Morrissey, or Robert Smith - and we would try to name what kind of food they would be. What sort of candy bar, or soft drink, captured their essence? The game stretched on for days, even after our batteries had gone dead and we were without music. We made lists. What kind of meat? What kind of chip? What kind of bread?

Gwen’s mother was gone for four days. She never called to check on her daughter.

Eventually, electricity was restored and Gwen’s mom came to pick her up. The next weekend, I went to her house, and Gwen and I, still giddy from our hurricane game, wrote all of our strange food choices on the little grocery list that her mother hung on the wall - but never actually used. A week later, I called Gwen and she told me that I had to come over. Her mother had purchased every item on our mock grocery list. That weekend, I stayed at Gwen’s house and we feasted on Zero bars, shrimp, IBC root beer, pumpernickel bread, and creamy deluxe frosting - our favorite musicians made edible.

I never minded that my friend was a mess. I understood Gwen; I loved her. Teachers and counselors would pull me aside and ask about the scars on her arms and legs. I always defended her. Eventually, they sent her to an alternative school. I tied to get sent there too - but the guidance counselors turned me down.

In the end, it was my fault that our friendship ended. I had my own scars and invisible ways of cutting myself. I was the one that failed. I always doubt myself; I find it easy to convince myself that people want me to go away. I tend to assume that people who know me would like to trade me in for something better. It was in this mindset that it occurred to me that Gwen never called me on the phone. I always did the calling. We talked every single day, but when I thought about it, I could not recall a single time when she had called me first. I began to worry.

What if she did not really want to be my friend? A true friend would make an effort to call me first - at least sometimes. I decided to test her. That afternoon, I did not call. I waited for the phone to ring, but it never did. Days went by. She never called. At first I was sad, and I wanted to call her; I held the phone in my hands and longed to hear her voice. Then, I got angry, and forced myself to stop feeling. Heart to stone. Just like that.

Our friendship ended without a word - a phone that simply stopped ringing. No argument, no explanation. It was an evacuation route that I decided to take. I told myself I was smart and safe this way.

A year later, I saw Gwen at a party and we talked. She told me about overdosing, and crawling in the back seat of a car to wait to die. She told me about losing her virginity. It had been with a boy she had been secretly in love with for years. He had broken up with his girlfriend, and taken her out. They went to the land co-op and got drunk and stoned together. Then, in a field of tall grass, under a full moon and cloudless canopy of stars, she had sex for the first time. She said it was wonderful. Perfect. It was not awkward or weird; it was like something out of a movie. She fell asleep happy, feeling safe, beautiful, and loved.

A few hours later, she woke up thirsty and disoriented. She heard a sound like rustling and sat up in the damp grass. About a hundred feet away, in the moonlight, she saw the boy she had fallen asleep with on the platform of the community pavilion. He was having sex with his ex-girlfriend. Gwen said that she wanted to scream, or cry. She wanted to make a scene - but she realized he was her only ride home - so she laid back down, and pretended to sleep until morning. She told me this story and a part of me broke. I wanted to put my arms around her and cry. I wanted to tell her that I would find the asshole and kick his face in for her. She should not have been alone when something so horrible happened. I wanted to tell her that I never should have stopped calling her.

Instead, I did nothing. I said something stupid - like, “Gosh, that is terrible”. I could not even look in her eyes. We never spoke again.

To this day, I regret that I let her go - that I ran away. I wish I had been braver, stronger, and more able to give. If I could go back to the middle of that Labor Day night, I would stand outside in the eerie calm of the storm and tell Gwen that I promised. I would tell her that, no matter what, I would ignore the public safety messages and my addictive urge to evacuate, and take her hand, and sit out the storms. Always.

But I can’t go back, or undo, or make it better. I can only hope that she found the kind of Grace that I was too small to give.

speed

Everyone called my grandfather by the name Speed, which was a joke that went over my head as a child. He and my grandmother lived in a two bedroom, one bath house in Gulfport, Florida. It had windows that cranked open and no air conditioning. The unpaved alley behind their house was lined with broken bits of shell. My grandfather had dug a garden in the yard, planting seeds in the power-soft grey sand as if it was dirt, as if he still lived in Kentucky.

As a child, it never seemed as incongruous as it was - my grandfather's vegetable garden planted next to a tropical banana tree. I did not like vegetables, but I admired the bananas and asked for them. He always refused to get one down, and stopped me the one time I tried to knock them by throwing grapefruit like Gilligan would have done. They were up too high, he said and I sensed something like contempt in his voice - a disapproval of the fruit growing wild near the telephone lines. He silently walked the rows in his garden, barefoot and shirtless, like a chief. He harvested fat purple eggplants, thin green onions, sweet corn, and sturdy beans that my grandmother paid me to snap the ends off of. I sat on the concrete steps with a metal colander in my lap and longed for dusk or lightning, anything that might crack the shimmering surface of the heat.

Each year, we visited for a week in the summer and three days over Thanksgiving. In November, we carried wrapped Christmas gifts with us. Each year, we bought my grandfather the same gifts: the latest western by Louis Lamour. a box of ribbon candy that looked magical but tasted like medicine, and a carton of discount brand cigarettes. My grandfather drank beer and smoked cigarettes, two things that were not allowed in my house. Once, he offered me a taste of the forbidden drink and I lifted up the plastic cup and allowed a tiny sip of the lukewarm liquid to slide past my clenched teeth. It reminded me of feeling trapped, of sweat and urine and my grandfather's ashtrays. No matter how many times I have tried to drink beer since then, no matter how ice cold or imported the bottle has been, I've never been able to force myself to consume more than a few swallows.

In the evenings, my grandfather sat in a fake leather recliner and watched baseball games on a small television set. Every now and then, he would let me climb onto his lap and he would sketch small pictures with a ball point pen on a legal pad. He drew wild-eyed men, hairless and bare-chested, clutching lizards and snakes in their hands. He gave them vowel-laden, Cherokee names and told me that he knew these creatures when he was a boy. He'd give me the drawings as a gift, and later, my parents would take them from me and remove them from the room so that I could sleep as they reassured me that his stories were make-believe. Sometimes, my grandfather would sing a song for my brother and I, inserting our names in his rhyme: A-my Miller ain't no good, chop her up for kindlin' wood. I always understood that he meant it affectionately, but it still made me walk backwards when I left the room.

My grandfather had been a house painter. As a younger man, he had taken the leftover cans of paint home and used them to paint pictures. He stacked the portraits in the garage, because the combination of colors gave them a slightly nauseating effect. Skin held a discomforting undertone of the Pepto-Bismo pink that was a popular house color in 1950's Florida. The blue contained a hint of neon. His art was painted with the colors of signs and shops, not people. When he died, nobody could bring themselves to keep the pictures.

I remember my grandfather shirtless, skin tanned deep to the color of dark red clay. I picture him outside, watering his vegetables that grew because he knew to add fish heads to the foreign earth. I see him sitting in the fluorescent kitchen light, playing cards at night. I remember his black vinyl chair - the end table at the arm that held a used ashtray and cup, and the space beneath that held a book of crossword puzzles and paperback westerns. Cowboys and Indians.