On Father’s Day 2019, I discovered that my ancestry and DNA quest had not been in vain: I found a sister (or we found each other), one whose existence defied any possible expectation. We didn’t meet initially – and then the pandemic struck. We both survived 2020. So, ironically, we met for the first time on New Year’s Day. While y’all were eating black-eyed peas, I was meeting a reflection of myself and wondering about the spectacle of life and how decisions made five decades ago continue to reach forward. Unlike other parts of my life, this has been a reward, one welcomed by both of us. How we got here was the result of other people’s decisions. We still have questions, though one of which is no longer what we might be like in person: Carolyn is as kind, witty, and outgoing as I could hope.
When Carolyn arrived, I discovered that I had met my match for the longest hug ever. I’m also not the baby of the family any longer. I kept telling her that I saw Aunt Barbara is so much of her mannerisms and look, which compliments everyone involved.
It’s incredible how good-looking we both are, isn’t it? 🙂 Due to Carolyn’s presence next to me in the pictures, I realize how much of my Dad’s devil-may-care attitude is reflected in me. I’m still wondering how it is possible that Carolyn is my sister.
I also met her youngest son, who tolerated our hours of catching up on 48 years of missed lifetime as we sat, talked, and pondered into the night.
When I was younger, I suspected that I might have family in the world. I’m still amazed that I kept the hope into my 50s – especially to find someone who seems to be a bit like me, even if she got there from an opposite path.
This strange, strange world holds a few surprises still.
Carolyn and I are the two truths; the lie is that love and truth can be concealed, even in a world convoluted by people’s inability to tell their stories due to fear, shame, or for some other human reason that eludes definition.
Though it isn’t a contest, I am convinced that I won the New Year’s Day contest for the most rewarding.
P.S. You might wait until we hear Carolyn’s opinion; you’d have to be crazy to accept mine without corroboration.
I am still surprised that most people’s minds aren’t cluttered with a million observations about the people and places in their days. There’s not enough time to consider them, repackage them, and appreciate them. Even with the virus, the one that supposedly slowed the world’s spin a bit, I find myself accelerating toward a crucible that I can’t quite define.
I don’t get writer’s block and I even find myself not understanding how a musician runs out of ideas, lyrics, and brilliance. While watching the new “Selena” series, I rolled my eyes at least 50 times as the musicians struggled to find ideas and inspiration. If we are blocked or stifled, all we have to do is open ourselves up to the great people we have around us. We all survive by collaboration; it’s worth your time to stop struggling and listen to people as they live their lives. There’s enough story here for a thousand books and a library of music.
There’s too much life out here with so many people inhabiting our world in a way that deserves recognition. Humor, love, tragedy, and even the moments when you find yourself organizing your kitchen cabinets on Saturday night all carry weight.
I wish y’all could get ICS too. We could flood the world with our stories. Love, X .
I’ve written about a range of topics on this blog. I started it to share my life and to give anyone interested a chance to see me. (I’ll skip over the revisionists for now.) I’m not a great writer, but I am a constant one.
Instead of jumping in with a post that follows the course of this post, I’ll start with this one as a ‘heads up’ for everyone.
We all have thoughts, ideas, and beliefs that might not withstand scrutiny. It’s a rarity to find someone who can dish it out without regard to where it lands. That’s in part because we find ourselves trapped by the lives we lead. Words we say can leave love and understanding. They can also leave confusion and hurt. The best writers with the best intentions often wound the people they love. Imagine being a hack like me and wanting to express what feels like eloquence only to discover that I’ve scattered sand into someone’s eyes or clouded their heart.
We all do this in the course of our day. Usually though, it’s spoken and fleeting. Writing this way solidifies the reality of whatever is being expressed.
I know I harm often already. I know I do. I apologize. It’s safer to say nothing, to leave no trail behind, and to play it safe. Much of our lives is predicated on doing this each day. It’s part of the social construct. It’s folly to argue otherwise. It is also why so much of our lives get lost; we’re afraid for people to know us intimately or beyond the limits we impose on ourselves. While many people might know slivers of us, there’s just no way we’re going to be enlightened enough to feel unburdened.
I am going to venture out onto a few limbs. A few of them are going to break. I don’t bend them with malice or arrows designed to hit targets. People are not targets. They have their complexity. I don’t try to wound those on my overlaps. It still remains that my story is mine to tell.
Before venturing further, remember that you’re reading voluntarily. Something I’ve written must interest you because you come back to read more as I share it. I value the idea of you, whoever you are, in my head by consuming these words. You’re likely going to get uncomfortable with some things I write – and maybe get an unfamiliar feeling associating the words I’ll write with who I am. I understand.
And so it begins.
In the future, you’ll read a wider breadth of things about me. I will provide adequate warning on each post so that you easily avoid being uncomfortable, if such things are uncomfortable.
I routinely go through my colossal draft lists and discard troves of ideas and actual stories. I’d discard the computer, but they get expensive. When I was writing several of my Elm Springs stories, I kept skipping over the “Man Parked In Pond” account due to the incongruous absurdity of the title.
What might amuse you more is that I’ve seen several cars in ponds in my lifetime. Both stupidity and drinking were involved in all cases. I think there’s a universal truth to that last sentence. I can proudly say that I was in the car on separate occasions while BOTH my Mom and Dad drove into ponds, ditches, or swamps. It’s one thing to go into a small pond, but if you’ve ever seen how deep and snake-filled some irrigation ditches and swamps can be, you’re not enthusiastic about getting into one. At night. Snakes do not like to cuddle.
I am not afraid of snakes until they get into my underwear. Call it a phobia if you have to.
When I first worked at a nursing home in Springdale after high school, I often ran home before I got my second car. My first car, a great one given to me by my brother Mike as he shockingly went into the Army, was stolen by my Dad and sold on my cousin’s car lot. The irony is that I worked on the side at my cousin’s garage to earn credit toward the next car.
It was only 7-8 miles home from work. Those runs were interesting as hell at times, just as they were when I started from home and ran elsewhere. It was different back in the day. People drove drunk a LOT. Country roads were littered with cars at night. Saturday morning and Sunday morning was a great time to see the places on the road where people were probably driving too fast. Or drunk. One of the neighbors near where I lived often stopped and “borrowed” things from the cars he found on the side of the road at night. Thinking back on it, it was impossible for him to get caught. This is in part due to the visibility of approaching lights and the failure of most drunks to inventory their possessions, much less know for certain that they are driving their own car home at night.
Note to civil engineers: if you want to reduce unsafe and drunk driving, put a buttload of stupidly sharp curves in the road. Or a five-mile stretch of road that is 100% roundabouts. The Arkansas educational system didn’t adequately prepare most people for sensible traffic devices.
If you’ve driven the side roads from Springdale to Elm Springs, you’re aware of the sharp turns everywhere. Many of those turns sit next to barbed wire fencing. Or worse, ponds. While I didn’t see the accident when it happened, I was running home when I heard brakes and skidding, followed by sounds that didn’t make sense to me. It was after midnight, so I couldn’t imagine who or what had crashed. As I ran along a sloping S-curve, I saw taillights. As I neared, I could see that the barbed wire fencing had been torn open. The truck that went through the fence went a few feet into the pond. While I was sure I was going to try to help, I didn’t know how exactly. I heard someone drunkenly mumbling. In today’s terms, it sounded a lot like Kenny Chesney singing any of his Top 40 hits.
I remember being glad it wasn’t my Dad. He’d traversed many a fenceline while driving drunk. More than once, with me in the vehicle. Good times! After one particularly bad accident through a cow field, he kept repeating the same joke: “I was looking for a good steak.” His sense of humor was legendary when he wasn’t trying to kill someone.
The man in the truck managed to get the door open. He was cursing in drunk language at that point. Though I couldn’t see much, I realized he was trying to get into the truck’s bed from the cab so he wouldn’t step into the shallow water. I waited. Sure enough, a huge splash followed as he fell off trying to get over the side of the truck. He set the world record for putting the lord’s name in vain for the next couple of minutes. He staggered out of the pond.
“Who the f### are you?” he asked me.
“The ghost of drunks future,” I quipped. I wasn’t scared at all to mock any drunk I didn’t know.
This tendency got me into some precarious predicaments through the years, including one incident when a drunk tried to throw a mostly-empty pitcher of beer on me, and I yelled, “Ball 4!.” My shout made him angry when it dawned on him that people in the bar laughed. I had reluctantly accompanied my roommate Ray to go shoot pool at a bar that now no longer exists in the Midway area. When the drunk acted as if he would chase me, I dashed to the back door, opened it, and then slammed it. I stepped out of sight into the filthy supply closet near the back door. The drunk ran outside, thinking I went out first. We laughed our asses off about that for a long time. The best part of this story is that he didn’t remember getting mad or running out the back to chase me upon his return.
We didn’t have cell phones back then. There was a payphone at a small store a couple of bends of the road away from the pond. But I wasn’t going to accompany a drunk for that kind of walk. “Go knock on that door,” I told him and pointed to a brown house a couple of hundred feet away. “They’ll help you.” I waited, and eventually, he stumbled his way in that direction. I left out here that the owners of the pond and the house were the same people. I ran the rest of the way home, amused at my cleverness. I found out that the owners made the driver completely fix their fence and make restitution. Had I not run by that night, I don’t think he would have. And I wouldn’t be able to brag I watched a grown man drunkenly try to climb over the edge of his truck and then fall into a pond.
And so, I leave you with “Man Parked In a Pond.” It’s not Faulkner or Conroy, but it amuses me.
If you want to try a show that I think should be universally loved, this is the one. Each of us will discover something about what we think we know as we watch.
A few years ago, I watched a show that defied me to dislike it: Rectify. It’s still available on Netflix. As many said, it was the best tv show that no one was watching when it first aired.
“It’s the beauty, not the ugly, that hurts the most.” As wounding as this quote was, I laughed when I heard it again this week. Laughter emanates from the recognition of at least a kernel of truth. Though I was prepared for The Stranger scene in Rectify, the wallop it hit me with caught me off guard. If this quote seems strange to you, it is because you didn’t visit the emotional world created in this tv series.
When Daniel violently taught Teddy a lesson about his ignorance of assault, I laughed at that too, even though the lesson was graphic.
Like other shows such as Six Feet Under, Rectify tore through me like a tornado. It uses language and emotion so close to my own inner monologue that I felt like someone strip-mined me a bit to create this show. I learned more from SFU during the second viewing. Rewatching Season 1 of Rectify both amplified and soothed my past life for me. For those not exposed to brutality, it may seem counterintuitive to find redemption in seeing someone else suffer to find it.
Along with books like “The Prince of Tides” or “A Prayer For Owen Meany,” I add “Rectify” to the list of great works that line the perimeter of the sublime for me. If you watch “Rectify” with a keen eye, you will see bits of me hidden in there.
Watching the show again, I must admit that a couple of the scenes almost led me to burst into tears. I think it’s because I recognized the beauty in the struggle. We’re never the same person twice.
Here’s a link from something I wrote a few years ago:
A December moon at 4 a.m. is so substantially dissimilar and divergent from all others in part because we, as beholders at that hour, see ourselves differently. Our approaching day waits without burden, even if we’ve borrowed our troubles from the previous day and packed them inside today’s purse. This year, more than most, brought unwelcome problems and made somnambulists of us. Oddly, it also brought a duality for some of us, ushering in a fierce determination to be the person inside our own heads.
Someone possessed with an uncanny soul took the picture and shared it with me. That she was up at that hour surprised me. It was her first message to me for the day.
She stood in the kitchen and recognized something ethereal, authentic, and beautiful in the shadows that formed on the floor under her. Most might snap a picture of the moon itself; I think you might agree with me that the echoes and reflections of beauty in our lives often outshine the source. It is a gift to glimpse something previously unseen in the midst of the familiar. I’ve known a few people whose lives sparkle with the ability. They all radiate the same force that hides in the moonlight. Such radiance is difficult to discern by looking directly; we have to turn our heads and observe the consequences of their presence.
Whether she sometimes tries to control the radio or stomp the floorboards too often, she radiates.
She, of course, doesn’t see it.
I whisper words of grace for her, ones petitioning a clear mind and the kind of sleep that few of us find at our easy disposal. Meanwhile, I return these slivers of moonlight to her.
“Time seldom approaches with a wild machete. It creeps from behind with a small, concealed knife.” – X
But Mel Brooks said, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”
Someone more creative than me pointed out that the sand in an hourglass imprisons itself, as glass is made from sand. Don’t you wonder if we aren’t the same, becoming our own prisoners? There’s no emotion or problem that we can’t complicate, escalate, or initiate.
Noted philosopher Coco Chanel said, “Don’t spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door.” She obviously never worked a real job or dealt with people who have few laughs in their hearts.
My scars insist that time is real, but in the quiet moments, I wonder. I used to assume that most people had these thoughts. It was disappointing to discover that many people can’t imagine that Aslan or tesseracts are real – or walk in an imagined world where they might be the figments of a greater creature’s imagination.
“There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.” – Bill Watterson. I was equally surprised in later life to find people who deny that sitting in a quiet room can sometimes be better than a vacation. All good lives start with a quiet room. Add your preferred levels of crazy for a great life. Subtract what takes you further from the quiet room. It might be that simple for many of us.
“Why is that I never heard these words: ‘Let’s gather by the river, drink moonshine, and tell jokes and the stories of our lives.’ But I always hear stories of obligation and things that don’t linger in the minds of others.” – X
If you’ve never read “The Time Traveller’s Wife,” you missed this quote by Audrey Niffenegger: “It’s dark now and I am very tired. I love you, always. Time is nothing.”
Haruki Murakami said, either comically or seriously, “For a while” is a phrase whose length can’t be measured. At least by the person who’s waiting.”
Hippocrates (assuming it was the father of medicine and not the hockey player of the same name), said: “Healing is a matter of time, but it is sometimes also a matter of opportunity.”
We all wonder about 2020, which ends in about a month. We look forward. Where were we a month ago? The difference between comparing now to then is a question of knowing what lies in the interim. It requires no faith. With what lies ahead, our imaginations seize us. Whether that imagination is fueled by the dread of what will come or the expectation that we will find a way to be who we need to be is our choice.
This is my New Year’s post, written a month early.
If you can’t feel time slipping up behind you with that knife, that is okay. There is no defense against it except to live a good life. You only win by yielding.
One last wise quote: “Time is a great healer, but a poor beautician.” -Lucille S. Harper
After six weeks+ of not biting my nails, I can say that my fingers feel alien to me in a way that a normal person would not find credible. I’ve not gone a week without biting my nails. For my entire life.
Several weeks ago, when I turned the switch off mentally about food, I just decided that I no longer bite my nails. Despite nothing else ever having worked for my nail-biting, not even public shaming or a global pandemic, I just knew I could do it. While my cuticles look odd, I don’t recognize my fingers. I’ve had to adjust a lot in my life for something so simple as suddenly having fingernails. From not using my hands to stir mud and potting soil to avoiding scratching ANYTHING and EVERYTHING. At night, I find myself touching my fingernails with my front teeth. Until you bite your fingernails for fifty years, I don’t think you’d believe me if I accurately describe how odd it is – as if someone put thimbles on each of my fingers and asked me to play the piano.
It occurred to me that if I were sufficiently crazy enough to do so, I could get a manicure. It’s important to note that I don’t know what proper nail care looks like, having gnawed on my talons like The Bachelorette bites the neck on her first date of the season. (Note: I’ve never watched the show. I put that bit in to trick the manicure-crowd into believing I might have.) I have promised my fans I’m going to learn to paint nails properly, though. I’ll let y’all know when I have my first nail-painting party.
I’m not looking for an attaboy. I should not be complimented for no longer doing something that is honestly pretty stupid to begin with, especially after 50 years of it. Much in the same way, it would be imprudent to congratulate me on no longer shooting black tar heroin into my eyeballs. It’s just a bad sign I started to begin with.
That’s my cat in the background. He’s nervous I might start scratching him.
P.S. There’s a link to a post in below, one I made several years ago. It’s stupid – and that’s why I think about it more than I should.
For many, the tradition of holiday cards is a dying custom. I don’t envy people for their interests or habits. It’s not a good recipe for living to feel obligated to follow the old ways. For me, though, there are times when the opportunity to send cards brings out the part of me that lives in a vast world full of billions of souls, each wanting a little bit of spectacle and magic. Oddly, even those who’ve scorned social media are as likely to have given up writing letters or sending a holiday card to friends and family. It’s a dying custom.
It’s hard for me to send a simple card. I have to make it complicated and personal!
I don’t send out cards in expectation of reciprocity. That, too, is a poor way to live one’s life. There are times when I put in a little bit of effort and then am surprised when I hear nothing in response, though. That’s part of the bittersweetness of sending unsolicited bits of fun and zaniness out in the world. People don’t have the time – or always make it – to let you know they liked it or hated it. Static sometimes fills the air. It’s a gift to be able to tune it out when you put out some creativity in the world. A good response is to keep sending them cards regardless of their interaction.
A couple of years ago, I created a complex and custom birthday card online and sent it to an acquaintance. I made the card from social media pictures. It was a work of art, if I do say so myself. I used another return address to conceal my identity further. Since the company which printed and mailed my creation sent it, there was no postal marking to identify its origin. My acquaintance was genuinely perplexed and spent DAYS vainly trying to discern who might have created the artwork cards. So great was her interest that she finally posted on her social media page to beg for help figuring out ‘who.’ I was surprised that no one immediately connected the dots to me, given the work’s detail.
In a tradition I don’t always follow or do in the same manner, I send several personalized Christmas cards to people and families that I’ll never meet. In a few cases, I found pictures of LinkedIn, yearbooks from long ago, or social media. I downloaded them, and in some instances, photoshopped them before creating the custom cards that went to each of them. I chose a person at random from a yearbook for one of the lucky recipients I’d never seen before and researched them sufficiently to discover their new life. I also used ancestry to find a distant cousin and pieced together clues to figure out their real identity from the anonymous one used on the ancestry website. Using an inmate website, I found a person’s name and I.D. number and then sent him a glorious card and words of encouragement.
Though it might paint me as a bit of a weirdo, I find it challenging to explain to others how much fun I derive from sending total strangers a holiday card, especially when I personalize each with their pictures.
In each of these cases, I enjoyed each recipient’s imagined scenarios in my head, as they puzzled the personalized card from someone they didn’t know. In some cases, I used fake identities and addresses. In others, I used my real name, which might not necessarily allay concerns. “X” seems more like an accusation in some cases.
Of course, I also sent a few cards to people I do know, without using my real name and address, hoping to give them a bit of yuletide joy as they vainly attempted to figure out who had sent them a card. All those cards were customized and were a pleasure to create. I also sent a few to people using other friends and family members as the sender. I love living in a world wherein it is possible to convince people that someone else sent them a card, no matter how they might deny it.
Likely, I’ll never hear any of the stories that resulted from most of these custom cards. That’s how it works, though. Not knowing is often more rewarding than discovering the mundane answers.
Many people received Xmas cards over the years without knowing the person they thought sent it had nothing to do with it. Also? People don’t always look closely at the pictures. You wouldn’t believe the people and things I’ve edited into images without anyone noticing.
I can imagine several of the recipients scratching their heads in bewilderment, wondering who, what, when, and where – all without an answer. They may half-expect a repeat this year. Because I used an online address book for most of them, I could go back and send them another card this year. That would get them thinking.
Because much of our modern lives are now redirected by technology, the old ways provide another road to have a bit of fun.
P.S. If you are not familiar with Postable, it’s a great way to have some of the fun without needing to do the actual creation by hand. Postable – Create and Send Custom Cards You can upload pictures and design custom cards. They’ll also put it in an envelope and mail it for you – using any return address you might dream up. If you want to do Christmas or holiday cards, I highly recommend that you give Postable a try.
P.S. Parenthetically Speaking 