Reflections

I remember the day. Kind of. It was a Sunday, in the middle of summer. I was ten years old. Give or take.

But it was definitely a Sunday. Definitely.

It was a big yawn of an afternoon. You remember how summers were as a kid…like one, streaming reel of scratchy boredom, spliced with short bursts of flaming freedom. I was lying in bed, still in my nightgown, reading a book I wasn’t real thrilled with. Stuffed animals crowded my elbows. I stared at my reflection in the closet mirror, feeling vaguely dissatisfied.

And then I had an idea.

I would remember this moment. As in, forever. I would remember my disheveled hair on the pillow. The restless bobbing of my foot. Sarah Beth, my favorite doll (yeah, I was getting too old for dolls), looking on with her pert, eternal smile. And in remembering these small details, the moment would be staked down. Given a weight, and definition, that it didn’t really deserve. A photograph, filed.

Me . . . bed . . . summer Sunday.

At the time, of course, I wasn’t exactly thinking these things. I probably just did it on a lark (I don’t actually remember my motivations). Maybe the idea of carving something meaningful out of nothingness appealed to my nascent writing self. Who knows? I don't, anymore.

But I worked at recalling this memory. And I succeeded . . . sort of.

As a result, I have a glimpse into a typical day of my youth. Which is kind of cool. It’s usually the big moments we remember (or think we do—our slippery brains fool us often enough). But let’s face it—our lives our mostly comprised of the everyday, banal moments like the one I chose to honor. If our present selves are quilts of pieced memories, these kinds of moments would be the dark, vast backgrounds against which the precious, colorful memories can pop and dazzle.

And yet, it’s not a very satisfying memory. Its surface is fuzzy. The details I recall don’t say a lot about the person I was. And isn’t that what we want memory to accomplish? To resurrect ourselves in some way, and feel the thread of time connecting past to present quiver. To find out why we are who we are today, and how our past experiences feed our present desires. To reach some understanding, touch some elusive meaning.

And yes, to share those revelations with others.

Stuffed animals and messy hair don’t offer me much today. But there is a connection I feel to that summer Sunday, and the girl who looked in that mirror.

The desire to remember. To hold tight.

And its mirror.

The fear of loss. Of oblivion.

Grandma

Braiding the fringe of the bed's throw, I squeezed between my sister and brother, as Grandma told us that story of catching the paddleboat waves with her canoe. Her salty (read, inappropriate) language always made us giggle, and I breathed in the sharpness of her arthritis ointment as my chin chittered against my chest. Inching closer to her, because I happened to like the smell of Ben Gay. And the way she slung her hand behind her head, revealing that pale, papery skin on the underside of her arm. Even the reflux spasm in her throat—like a constant clicking—became the soothing background noise of those lazy, summer mornings.

Yes, we have to love our grandparents. But how I liked her, too.

Grandma was a fierce protector of those she loved, and fearless in general. When a restaurant didn’t hire my sister as a waitress, she refused to ever eat there again. We made fun of her for it. But she was dead serious. I was once harassed by a mime (yes, a mime) at an amusement park, and she gave the guy such a verbal smackdown that I don’t think he could have talked, even if he’d been willing to break his code of silence.

Sometimes, her intrepidness embarrassed me. As a girl, I’d hide inside a clothes rack in the department store as she argued with the salesperson about an expired discount, or some such thing. Humming slightly, to drown out the agony of such brazenness.

But mostly, I just thought of how much fun it would be to be like her. Bouncing and screaming with her twin behind that boat, as its paddle slapped at the Ohio River. Graduating from college after having her only child, my mom. Celebrating Christmases with my grandfather in Mexico City. . . why not? Feliz Navidad!

She died in 2002. At 91.

And slowly, we forget these details. So many meticulous brushstrokes fade into dull impressions, some warped by the bitter shades of old-age afflictions. And so we point to loved ones’ photographs in albums, telling our kids, That was your great-grandma. She would have loved you so. They look on, only slightly curious, at this stranger frozen in time. And then, because we cannot explain a person’s life in so few words, with so little time, we flip the page. The lump in our throat all packed away.

But last night, those precious details returned. I felt the slickness of her palm pressed to my own. That familiar hand, all veins and joints. We walked together under a starry, museum sky, and she told me that she loved me. Or I told her. I can’t quite remember, but the word love stamped itself inside my head. And was bursting from me when I awoke.

So today, that lump in the throat has free reign. Not because I lost her again. For even while dreaming, there was the awareness that our time was fleeting. But because I received the bittersweet gift of knowing her again.

And this chance to keep her alive a little bit longer.

--

Dedicated to Elinor Luttrell: Grandma, anti-mimeite and wave rider.


I am myne owene woman, wel at ease

--Geoffrey Chaucer

The Impossible Dream

Its shadows reflect the absence of water.

The last time they took it out was…what?

1988.

July.


He’d taken her fishing on her birthday. She had resisted long enough. Grandpa stocked his pond with trout, some carp. One could baptize them, their numbers were so few.

Squeezing her eyes shut, she baited the hook. And still heard the worm scream behind her eyes.

Not much was said.

Your jump shot is coming along.

Jen never passes me the ball.

It will come. Just keep plugging away.

Once, their silk lines tangled like a morning spider web. The accidental contact embarrassed her, and she fiddled with the reel.

Her pretending not to notice the skin cancer on his ear.

His eyes avoiding new breasts, arrived at that year.

Their boat a tiny island. Unshared.

Swollen with the insects’ persistent plea, she almost confessed that she didn’t care about jump shots. Basketball.

Stupid sports.

But no.

They floated in a blue haze, until she snagged a decent trout. He helped her bring it in, anticipation stretching the old rope of his muscles.

But that surprised mouth, and dumb stare. Instinct unleashed a squeal, as she tossed the slippery thing into the air.

The splash of adrenaline hooking her giddy side. The imagination.

Look at the little sucker go! Let’s call him Don Quixote, Grandpa—

But his gaze sagged to the empty cooler by his feet.

Dragging the boat onto land, and flipping it over, she understood the outing to be a failure. She had hurt him, because of herself.

He climbed the hill with some effort. With her tennis shoes squelched in the muddy bank, she watched him go.

Tears leaked from her eyes.

She called them allergies. All that white pine.



There is a distance that’s longer than years.

But she climbs into the two-seater, anyway.

The fish are still there.

La Vie En Rose

Give your heart and soul to me
And life will always be
La vie en rose

--Edith Piaf

Do you remember Paris afternoons?

When there was the impression of contact
as we lapped at a lazy sorbet,
and I pointed to the sky, saying,
That cloud looks like a Rodin
as dreamed by Monet.

You with your chocolate,
me my strawberry.
So when lips brushed lips,
we tasted of Valentine’s Day.

On a Paris afternoon.

Gazebo

He couldn’t nap with her hands gone from his skin.

So he grabbed a replacement light bulb—a ladder, too—and followed the path to the gazebo. Past the shore of the lake, where a shameless bullfrog bleated for a mate, and beyond a troop of evergreens, limbs loose with amber light. Wheezing slightly, he stumbled into the bridal structure and planted the ladder’s legs onto the timbers of its floor. He sagged against the metal trunk for a moment, as his heart recollected its rhythm and age.

The crack of an overhead jet rattled the joists as he mounted the ladder's steps. The lamp moaned and swayed, while vibrations crunched the arthritis in his hips. An aftershock jounced him as the heavens ripped open, and, drunk in the knees, he seized the lamp’s chain with both hands. The need to pee was urgent upon him, while something darker licked at his loins. His intention scattered like feathers, even as he detached the bulb from its thread, and paused.

Spider webs whispered under the roar, while shadows stretched and swarmed.

He looked up. Into a splinter of light.


She came to him a little wild.

He was neither wise nor tender.

Their mouths and bodies laid open and panting, like the ruby throats of baby birds.


His hands reached out to touch her hair.

Falling backward, and then down, he glimpsed a face in the pointed gap between rafters and sky.

He smiled as the old bulb shattered like so many eggshells on the gazebo floor. His eyes closed while a man-made bird blazed past sight and sound.

Somewhere, above the clouds.

City pool

Screams smack the water,
and whistles scold divers,
but it’s the low, rhythmic
slup of waves against breast
that delivers you from
braised shoulders, chlorine eyes

And the sun of your youth
charms forgotten old pennies,
as you push through a
blue-drunk oblivion,
enthralled by anemone legs,
grinning like Jaws

[Like an idiot, I forgot my camera
when we went to our city pool. So this
photo is snatched from here.]

The Elgar: Third Movement (The Wife Who Would Remember)

[Sorry for the long break in this series. If you need to reacquaint yourself with the previous installments, Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here.]


“She fed him my tongue.”

Nobody but the girl responds. And she sounds sad. Always so sad with that one. A sad clown’s leaky balloon.

“Pfffffffft.”

The spit bubbles pop. She giggles, and searches the opera box for an audience.

Why did he bring her?

“Mrs. Donovan?”

It’s more than the poor thing should bear.

Her pale blue eyes float without anchor above a sea of ninnies below. Notes shadow her ankles like silver fish, but she walks on water (he says, he says), and will not permit them air.

“Papa?”

The scrap of bone and hair beside her pats her hands and whispers, “Mrs. Donovan, your husband has just stepped out for a moment. You’re at the concert hall, Mrs. Donovan. The concert hall. It’s the Elgar tonight. Marvelous, isn’t she?”

She snaps back her hand, fingering the opal ring Mother lets her wear on special occasions. “I know where I am, Uncle.”

Dirty old man. Serpents for hands.

“Snakes can’t smell without tongues,” she says. “And sirens can’t sing.”

“All right, Mrs. Donovan. Let’s not worry yourself about such things.”

This thing gags her. She must escape.

Scurry, scurry hermit crab
Look for food that you can grab.
Search for shells that fit just right
Hide in them when it is night.

Dipping forward to grab the umbrella he extends to shelter her, a heart pours out yesterday’s water.

Bobbing to its waves, her mouth spills open. Milky eyes track the sea’s shifting lights. Until they are upon her. Until she glows within their timeless grace.

Don’t work yourself up over a silly girl’s machinations, Penny.

Her tongue licks the sea salt from her lips.

There is nothing to it, my love. Just let it go.

Let it go.

And so she had. And so she—

“Mrs. Donovan?” the voice insists. “Penelope?”

Surfacing, she gasps for air, scanning the dark skies. The gaudy chandelier burns softly now, like a mariner’s distant galaxy. The girl’s notes wobble, so far from the hearth of home.

There is salt on her tongue. Is.

She rises.

“I thought she cut it out.”

I did, I did?

“And fed it to him.”

I did, I did.

“Of course, Mrs. Donovan. Won’t you have a seat now? This movement is almost ended.”

The blue umbrella explodes like birds’ wings, and she lifts it above her head, ready to set sail.

“But now I don’t know,” she says, staring down at the girl—this ancient child—with the opal in her cello. “I really couldn’t say who—”

A few in the audience look up as she drifts near the rail.


To be continued...


[Cello: Jacqueline du Pré; Conductor and husband: Daniel Barenboim; video courtesy of markvogue]

Forget Me Not

When my spine is but a scar in the earth,
body broken of all toothsome need,
let some blood-germ of its longing
swamp white roots with this blue ballad

So when rigored beneath a bone moon,
my starry one might pluck a
hail-mary constellation,
inhale its light-years heat, and

remember

[Thanks to my favorite blog couple for
recommending the film, Somewhere in Time.
Its music is theirs (and Rachmaninoff's). Photo of
forget-me-nots in my "movie"
courtesy of Pete Harlow.]

The Elgar: Second Movement (Flight of the Hummingbird)

Part 1 is here


She had noted his backwards flight.

And softens her forward thrust.

Her mind disengages as the bow arm flirts and hovers like the wing of a hummingbird. The membranes of her muscle pulse across this movement’s petals and thorns, while not far below, darkness jaws. She relishes this suppleness from herself, and others. Athleticism rouses her from a digital bolero of play, and repeat.

Her heart is a pump.

Her heart. Is a pump.

Her heart—

She ran from the cottage until she reached the water’s edge, his baton a white flame in her fist. The afternoon heat marinated the cut grass, while the lake drank deep from the sun’s nectar. Spring is the season of miracles, someone had once told her. But all she believed in was the mud sucking at her toes, the cool breeze impaling her breast, before she thrashed away.

Positioning the baton between her teeth, she turned to confront him.

“Did you call her, Catherine?”

His color was high, his voice a broken string.

“Did you tell my wife about us?”

She spat out his stick in her hand.

“I did.”

He seized her by the shoulders, and shook. For a brief, ecstatic moment, she coveted his fury. Aiming the baton at his heart, she started to lunge.

But flesh is so fond of surrendering, even during a blood charge.

Her legs collapsed, and he sank into her like a man falling on his sword. She watched the baton sail from her hand, and find its measure of rest. She rested, too.

And the dandelions sloughed their seeds as two bodies swam up one another in a current of silence.

And the scent of lilac chloroformed the air.

And a bird dropped to earth, in search of sticks for a nest.

But she was deaf to earth and sense and time.

When her eyes opened, there were tears on her cheeks, though her own eyes were dry. The war drum in her chest reminded her, with its imperfect beat, that only death survives such sweet, terrible silence.

And so the woman who did not believe in miracles pushed her lover away. Cruel enough for him to remember his wife again. So far that his tears might swamp a lake.

She stood to track a bird with a baton in its beak.

Straining for it to conduct her in birdsong.

Her heart is a pump.

Her heart is a pump.

And so, she thinks, as the hummingbird finally falls dead, this fluid staining my cheeks must be blood-red.


To be continued...


[Cello: Jacqueline du Pré; Conductor and husband: Daniel Barenboim; video courtesy of markvogue]

The Elgar: First Movement (The Man Doomed to Love)

A conductor tenses his baton. A cellist draws her bow.

In an opera box, the man doomed to love checks his breath.

The initial thrum only shocks the spine, but there is a next—and a next—and a next—all plucking at and plundering the white nerves within. He seizes, his knees splay, the clean line of him shredding underneath her assault. Leads sweat, and spark. Vision blurs. An aging body slathers itself with the heat of Pavlovian memory.

The Elgar. Their concerto. Of some twenty, muted years.

He twists the leather glove to restrain his hands from conducting her, from molding her, from beseeching her for that final encore. The fierce abstinence bulges and quivers his neck like the slim reed between her fingers. Those instruments of torment, slashing across his back and chest. How she had bruised and bludgeoned him.

In her pretty dress.

With her pretty, pretty song.

Scars split their seams, and the liquid adagio of a sluggish heart courses into his autumnal skin. Blood surging faster than notes. Sweet delusions, the speed of light.

Their first concert.

Applause like firecrackers.

Her hot kiss on his ear.

The dressing room after.

A crashing of cymbals.

The long reverberation.

An orchestra throbs its gorgeous agony.

He is on point. Vibrato.

Her writhing stokes a golden frenzy about her shoulders as she rocks and inflames the wood between her thighs. A house of longing straddles her strings. She opens her worldly eyes. And smiles at her maestro.

The man doomed to love bites hard on the leather.

And tastes her skin.

Crying out, he lurches to his feet. The cancer of his need wrests him back, back. Back past his wife with her chorus of tears, back past his friends with their requiem faces, back past the velvet shroud . . . back . . . back . . .

Back to somewhere before.

Some time.

When he was his instrument.

And she was his song.


Find the Second Movement here.


[Cello: Jacqueline du Pré; Conductor and husband: Daniel Barenboim; video courtesy of markvogue]

D.C. al fine

I know there are coils

still to be sprung from the

Rhapsody of Time, but

this nostalgic bow of

mine can only hook,

and slide


[Family photo, Summer 2004]