Tag: Fact

Fruit salad is boring

~ Christi

This is a first world problem, I know. But I’ve been taking a long hard look at my life, and if I’m honest, there it is glaring at me from the counter.

I have a special bowl, a gift from my mother-in-law. Nearly every night before dinner I fill it, or Geoff does. Oranges, grapefruit, strawberries — always strawberries, otherwise what’s the point? — grapes, blueberries, whatever I can find. I hope the fruit salad is becoming a good, healthy, tradition for the kids.

I should like the fruit salad. Sometimes I do like it, but today I don’t. The fruit salad feels excessive and that feels significant. Somehow the necessity of the fruit feels like I have something to prove. It feels like more of an obligation than a gift. Everything is right with our home, our family, and the fruit proves it. That’s why we have to eat strawberries in October even if I have to go to three grocery stores to find them.

What can I do with that realization? Don’t some families just make due with a bunch of grapes or some apple slices? What if I — gasp — make the kids get the fruit ready? What about you, what does your family do?

I think my dad was Walter White

~ Christi ~ 10 Comments

My dad was a funny guy. He knew how to tell a story like his life depended on it, my mom used to tell me. She loved how he made her laugh. If he were still alive today, he’d make a great blogger, I just know it.

I never met my dad, but I really wanted to. The funny thing is that I think that he wanted to meet me, too. I’ve been reading some letters that he wrote to my godmother. His letters remind me of a Pynchon novel. In each one, he mentions me. He had an elaborate, secret plan to raise enough money for pay for my parochial school tuition. In fact, he did send me to Catholic school until he died when I was eight.

Let me explain. My dad was an alcoholic. He wore himself down with his drinking. In one letter, he guessed that he had eight more years to live. In reality, life shorted him three years. He didn’t have much of a career, aside from his job selling jewelry at a pawn shop. I gather that he sold random things to make money, but he was smooth about it. He loved to talk to people. He understood them. I don’t think that my dad would have wanted to deal drugs, but I do think that he would have been pretty damn good at it. He knew, better than most, how people become enslaved to their thoughts, to their pasts, to their hurts. He couldn’t have cared less about material wealth, except when it came to my education – and, I assume, his alcohol.

My dad cared about my soul. He wanted me to learn more than the basics, he wanted me to have religion. He thought that Jesus could offer me what he could not: love. He thought that his last few years were best spent peddling odd items here and there, raising what he could so I would be able to learn about Jesus and the saints. He died alone.

Look, my dad had a tough life and he fought more than his fair share of battles. He had his reasons to believe that he was no good for me. Maybe he was right, maybe he was wrong. What I do know is that a hug and a trip to the zoo would have worked wonders on my soul. Maybe he could have thrown in a joke or two. It’s kind of ironic.

Oh, I’m not sure if this is important, but my dad decorated his letters with doodles of four-leaf clovers. He said that he wanted to go to Ireland, his homeland, and never come back. I’ve never been to Ireland, have you? I think I might plan a trip.

I want a tattoo

~ Christi ~ 8 Comments

My sister pierced my ears for me. I was nine and I wanted a second set of earrings to go with the eyeliner and blush that I had just begun to wear. She was 27. I sat on a stool in her kitchen, dirty dishes in the sink, an ice cube stinging my earlobes. She used a sewing needle and it hurt. Afterwards, I felt like the coolest fourth grader on earth.

Kim was always an experimenter. Two years after the piercing incident, she taught me to shave my legs in the same kitchen sink, after I begged for the entire summer. A year later, she dyed my dark hair blonde on a whim. Long into high school, she would take me out to the secondhand shops and buy me drapey blouses and tie-dyed t-shirts. She wanted to help me invent myself.

Lately, I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a tattoo. I want to design it myself, and I want it on my back so it will show when I wear a tank top or a swimsuit. But I’m mixed. Geoff doesn’t like tattoos. He thinks they’re trashy and distracting. Maybe he’s right. It’s possible that I would get the tattoo and hate it, dread the sight of it in the mirror, and never be able to wear a sleeveless top again.

I think having a tattoo will remind me of Kim. She got several tattoos, in succession, around the time that she went on drugs. It’s funny, but she was about my age at the time, in her mid-thirties. I don’t remember what her tattoos looked like, but I guess they were your basic flowers and butterflies, nothing that extreme. Yet her body art starkly coincided with her turn to the dark side. It marked her as a druggie, a petty criminal, an abuser in so many ways. Her tattoos offered visible proof of her badness, and they scared me. I was seventeen, eighteen, and symbols seemed significant.

So I stopped seeing her. And I stopped experimenting. I passed a very difficult few years, where even a haircut felt like too much commitment, and I lived in fear of marking myself in any way. Kim had taught me everything I knew, and look what happened to her.

But – how can I explain this to you? After so many years of denying it, lately I’ve been thinking about how completely awesome it was to have a sister so much older than me. She was like an aunt, a second mom who taught me how to have fun. Kim was never afraid of messing up. I mean, she should have been, but she wasn’t. She tried things just to say that she had. She was bold. Even after watching her life crash and burn around her, I love that about her.

 

Do you like to read?

~ Christi ~ 6 Comments

What’s your favorite book? I’m talking fiction here, of course. Or sci fi, fantasy, mystery – whatever you like.

I’m curious, can you describe your experience of reading it?

For me, the best stories draw me in, steal me away from reality, drench me in otherness. I’m seduced by the characters, implicated by the plot. If the writing is good enough, I can literally feel the story.

Every single time I pick up Murakami’s The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, I am instantly transported back to that well, dark but for noontime and full of thought. I’m walking the streets of Sapporo and spending listless days sitting on a park bench.

Lately I’ve been reading the Game of Thrones series, in which George Martin spends copious amounts of time describing glorious settings, gorgeous clothing, and delicious meals. His plots are secondary, yet his words transport me to another time and place. I can honestly say that I have inhabited the world of Westeros, even if only for the span of his novels.

I think certain books appeal to certain people, appealing to their pasts, invading their psyches in some highly personal way. We may not even realize the effect the story has on us until it is too late, until the twists and turns are permanently lodged somewhere in our memory banks. Those stories change us. They fascinate us, filling a blank, offering a clue to some mystery. They fuel us. They give us a chance to step outside our everyday reality into something new, something unexplored and unknown. They let us meet people, know individuals whom in our real lives would remain strangers.

Have you experienced this? Do you agree that fiction can be transformative, even transcendent? Have you felt that allure of becoming an audience member, of possibly learning something new about yourself? Has a story ever reintroduced you to your imagination? Tell me, what book did that for you?

I Don't Like Mondays Blog Hop

Maybe I had it right all along

~ Christi ~ 3 Comments

We visited her at the nursing home just a few days before she died. I was 25, yet I remember it so clearly. Geoff drove, and my aunt stayed back because there wasn’t enough room in the car.

Bubbie had sent instructions, of course: Bring Hershey bars. We stopped at Rite Aid on the way, but they were out, so I picked M&Ms instead. The nursing home was in a small, tidy building with a garden in front. The bright, colorful lobby felt almost cheerful. As we moved past the entrance into the patient area, we said hello to the patients lining the hall in their wheelchairs. Some responded but some were sleeping, their minds elsewhere. The intense smell of pee and beeping machines reminded us of illness and imminent death.

Bubbie waited for us, sitting in her wheelchair just inside the door to her room. I don’t remember why, but she couldn’t talk. Perhaps it was an effect of her recent stroke, maybe her voice escaped her body ahead of time. Nevertheless, I remember her mumbling for Rose Ann, my aunt, incoherently. My mom explained that my aunt had stayed back at the house. Bubbie also asked for my uncle, Norman; Norman who was her favorite child, who deceived her so coldly in the end, my uncle, who had fled back to his home across the country just days earlier.

So Bubbie made due with just us four – my mom, her sketchy but well-meaning husband, Geoff, and me. We kept our visit upbeat, chatting and laughing the whole time. Bubbie eyed us as though she wasn’t quite sure who we were. But maybe she was just angry at us, at me. I handed her M&Ms one by one from the package, hoping that my last-ditch effort would make her love me in the end. Who knows if it worked? She accepted the candy like a child, but still her face stayed as locked up as always.

Here’s the thing about having a grandmother who hates you, or one who at least withholds her affection for you even in the face of your own attempts at loving her: You learn how to handle others’ disapproval. You learn that you can’t ever control someone else’s emotions, even when you try. You learn how to seek your own approval from within yourself before seeking it from others, even from your family.

When you see your grandmother reject your achievements and reward your sister’s failures and illnesses, you learn that not everything is as it seems. No, sometimes love is hate and hate is love. When all that your grandmother offers you is anger and hatred, you learn that sometimes emotions are their opposite. You accept the paradoxical, the impossible, the ambiguous.

When your grandmother serves you a big plate of rocks instead of cookies, and when you are a good girl like I was, you eat up those rocks, smile, and pretend they are cookies. You just accept it. And years later, you might find yourself, as an adult, in a tough situation. You might one day feel broken down in some way, challenged. If you really focus on what’s going on inside you, you’ll feel those rocks still in your belly after so much time, and you’ll know for certain that everything is going to be fine.

If I could go back to that day in the nursing home with my Bubbie, I would thank her for always knowing how much I was capable of, for demanding the most from me, and accepting nothing. My Bubbie always made me work harder.

It looks like I have a secret admirer! Thanks to whomever nominated me for this awesome linkup.

Five Star Friday

 

Did you ever keep a secret?

~ Christi ~ 20 Comments

Honestly, this week I’ve been trying not to think about the past. I’ve been trying not to think much at all. I haven’t really felt like writing, either.

But if I did feel like thinking, like writing, I would tell you this story.

I got punished a lot as a teenager. I had a lot of terrible fights with my mom, and I often ended up grounded. I didn’t break a lot of rules, but I did scream at my mom a lot. And she screamed at me. I hardly remember what we fought over; it’s beside the point. Yet I did spend a lot of time alone in my room, especially on Friday nights. This was in the days before the internet, but suffice it to say I had no telephone privileges, no music. It was boring.

If you’ve been reading here a while, you might guess that I didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs. I basically stayed out of trouble. All that time spent grounded probably sounds like overkill. Trust me, it was. I was a good kid.

Except once. My mom was away overnight, helping my sister recover from surgery. I was sixteen. I had a boyfriend, I liked him but didn’t love him. Our usual dates were spent making out in dark movie theaters. Now, this was, I believe, the first night I ever spent alone in my life. So, the first thing I did? I called my boyfriend. He had his mom drop him off, and we spent a couple of hours making out on my couch. I took off my shirt. That’s it. That’s as far as it went. I don’t even think that he returned the favor. I wasn’t ready for more, and he didn’t press me. Nine o’clock rolled around and I put my shirt back on, his mom picked him up, and that was that.

My mom never found out. Good thing — I mean, can you imagine? I might not have made it to college. My mom would have overreacted, I’m sure. But even once I got older, even after I got married, I never admitted it to her. I’m glad that I never shattered her with the truth, that I spared her the inevitable self-examination that knowing would have caused. What’s more, I liked having a secret. It’s shameful, I know. I liked that one single — small — actual misdeed. It made all that time I spent grounded feel worth it. It made me happy.

Why do I want the impossible?

~ Christi ~ 1 Comment

When I was a kid, about seven or eight, before things began to truly fall apart, I believed. I believed that everything would always stay the same.

I was eight when my dad died, so it must have been before that. I was eight when my mom had a fight with Geoff’s mom and they stopped speaking. I was eight when my sister’s marriage began to fall apart.

When I was little, before I knew better, I thought that people always did everything right. I trusted my family to always be together. I thought that it was only a matter of time until my dad decided to answer my letter and be part of my life. I thought that any day he would walk through the door and whisk me away. Any day, he would love me.

When I was a kid, I thought that my big sister was the best. I thought that any day, she would get out of bed and clean up her house. I thought that any day she would do something interesting.

When I was little, before I learned just how much people can go wrong, before I realized how badly people can fuck up, before I learned to bury people alive, I believed that life would all be good.

When things first began to fall apart, I thought that I could fix them. I tried. I wrote to my dad, asked him to meet me. I cleaned up my sister’s house. I thought that if I just did everything right, I could stop bad things from happening. I thought that I could save my sister, make my dad love me. I thought that I would be just the right kind of daughter to my mom, the perfect granddaughter to my Bubbie. I thought that I controlled the world.

You know, I’ve always tried to do the right thing. It’s hard trying to amend so much wrong. I’ve always lived as though by doing everything right I could somehow redeem my family’s mistakes. I’ve tried to prove to myself that even though they could not make everything turn out right, I can.  I’ve spent so much time forging an identity in opposition to my family’s negative qualities that I’ve never experienced my own bad side.

Lately, though, I want to mess up. Oh, let me tell you, this is not good. Suddenly, I find myself – inconveniently – wanting to break my rules. I want to be unaccountable, or better yet unobserved. I want to do what I want and not think twice. I want to know what that would feel like. Somehow this experience feels essential to me.

I know it’s self-destructive, not to mention impossible. I’m an adult and I have a family counting on me. I know what’s at stake – I learned when I was a kid. But I finally understand what it means to say that history repeats itself.

And one more thing: Nothing ever, ever, stays the same.