We will not cast people out for their choices in lip color, hosiery, language, religion, or the lack thereof. We will try to be “with it,” but not too with it—if you know what I mean.
We make chocolate into money and gamble for it with our dreidels. If we are very lucky we get many Gimmels. Gimmels are for great—a great miracle happened here. Of course I’m right—I just won all the chocolate.
Carole was amazing. She was beautiful—curly jet black hair, a luscious little body and a fiery temper and wit. She was smart but she wasn’t all dried up like those college girls my buddies married. She was full of life and love—really sexy, not just dolled-up. She would talk to me about what was happening in her life. She needed someone to talk to and someone to appreciate her.
He is ten years older than me with dark hair that is already thinning. His dark eyes make him look serious and kind at the same time. But he is quick to laugh at my Father’s jokes. That is a good sign. His laugh is a rich, warm sound. This is a man who can forgive and forget. Mamma says that is the most important and I think she is right.
After all those years pushing away my parents, the marks are indelible: love; resentment; avoidance and dismissal. Now at 50 I want to know–How did the world slash that breast, that hand, that heart, that mind and how did those wounds confabulate to mark me?
I revisited a piece I wrote years ago–Love in the Ether–a tribute to a period of steamy email lust (and amazing disregard of corporate back-up systems. Egads.) Good email is almost a nostalgicism, isn’t it? I have bowed to texting but I’m much too old to find it erotic. Maybe when I come back to this world as a teenaged boy. Oh but by that time text too will be so last whatever.
When I said the word it felt like a live fish in my mouth, like I’d never heard it, never knew what it meant, like maybe I never said it before. How could that word be about me? It blasted my ear like a tumble from a front loader.
So today, when “run away” flashes though my mind, it’s not just fear of the creative, it’s not just the special vulnerability of having to create art and knowing it just might be shit. No, I’ve always hoped someone would save me from the moment, the task, the possibility of foolishness, uselessness or failure.
Of course it’s the favorite stuffed animal that takes the most journeys and therefore increases the odds of disappearance. And face it, how long will a kid cry when she loses the toy she didn’t really care about? I don’t think my four year old lost the bear. And while I tend to misplace things, I always find them. The disappearance of Yellow Bear still mystifies me. Yes, I blame myself.
I need to know, how did it go for you? How did you do it? How did you negotiate all the unknowns? How did you discover and tame your feelings? How did you learn to live with sadness and fear? How did you take care of yourself? I want to know with all the intimacy we’ve never had, that I never knew was possible, that you never allowed maybe anyone.