Kaya Part 2

April 10, 2015 by Leave a Comment

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The dog and I had a rocking summer. I was looking down the barrel of a senior year of college and despite the cushy liberal arts ticket that I had to ride, I didn’t let myself off easy and there was a load of work to do, so I took that as entitlement to fuck and run, twist and shout, drink and wander. The dog was, more often than not, a passenger on my right forearm, nigh 9 pounds, boarding metro busses and secreted into greasy falafel joints, neon-bloody dive bars, friends’ cars and the occasional dance club without any trouble. Mostly the dog and I lolled the first half of days around my best friend’s apartment where the dog stalked the roommate’s cat, a pair of cartoons without a musical score.

 

But I left her at my pop’s house if I was bound for something that struck me as irresponsible for a tiny pup to attend. My younger brother often rolled in during the tiny hours and worked through the end of his ecstasy by cuddling the dog in the climbing penumbra of day, and my father could be counted on to care for her in the evenings. There is a reel of film that I can no longer locate but the content of which is seared onto my brain, given all that came next:

 

Our three-legged 14 year-old lab-pit bull mix, Sky, is not pleased with the puppy’s identification of her as mother figure. Sky, though, cannot step off the carpeted runner that stripes the kitchen and living room, as the wood floor dependably kicks one of her legs out from under her and sends her into an undignified sprawl. So my puppy belly slides across the wood floor, getting as close to the Sky’s grayed, snapping pit jaw as she dares, then flipping over onto her back to bare a bright pink belly to vehemence of her elder, who can’t quite bring herself to actually disembowel the baby. Sky snarls and snaps and stumbles, drool flying inches from the vulnerable flesh of my puppy’s center, but not once does she make contact. Eventually, when she tires, the puppy gets as near as she can, propping her jaw on her tiny paws, staring with endless adoration at her rejecting mother, punctuating the depth of her feeling with sharp yips here and there.

 

Nineteen months later, the fishbowl has spun again. My brother lives in Barcelona, studying at some American school and plenty more in the gothic alleyways full of fiesta. I live in North Carolina with a taciturn, sassy, gorgeous Persian woman and teach and study creative writing, and my father is preparing for his first trip back to the southern hemisphere since his plummet from the Costa Rican cliff five years prior. It is no big surprise when he calls to summon his sons home to put down Sky, which we do with no lack of ritual in our living room, breaking and rebuilding together around the void of her. It is a surprise that this ceremony is the last time we see my father, as he’s felled by an errant bubble in his blood—his broken arteries the last legacy of the earlier fall—his first night in the outskirts of Quito.

Filed Under: clearly now the rain, Dad, Kaya, love, Memoir, North Carolina, Seattle, Uncategorized

Kaya, Part 1

March 20, 2015 by Leave a Comment

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The interstate was jammed with broken heroes, or at least that was the track that my father hummed along with as he maneuvered the Subaru up the onramp. Maneuver might be too generous, or too precise, because of his imprecision, which arose with the euphoric haze that the little pills kindled in him. I’d learned to white knuckle the armrest and speak loudly and suddenly—about anything that came to mind—when I suspected he might be dozing or spacing. I knew I shouldn’t let him drive and I knew that his ego wasn’t ready for the damage that announcement would cause. So I buckled up and gripped leather.

 

Mount Vernon sits 90 miles or so north of Seattle and there was occasion for me to wince through the outer bands of Seattle and then through the basket of Skagit Farmland. Dad was elated at this excursion, a real-deal father and son kind of outing that he could manage—since his nine story plunge from a cliff in Costa Rica, and the seven surgeries, the hardware screwed into his spine and ankles, he wasn’t going to be leading me on any hikes or to throw the football. But he could, he was sure, navigate us an hour and a half north to get me a golden retriever puppy before I returned to my last year of college.

 

In the backyard of the down-low breeders’ property, a gorgeous and frantic red-coated golden sprinted on a cable run, back and forth, back and forth, barking a metronome that was equal parts joyous and desperate. At the base of a crooked staircase, the two runts (two of eleven) tumbled—the boy was lazy and tubby and mellow; the girl was fierce and enervated, nipping her brother from five angles as he pawed at the cobalt blue sky with a tiny tongue poking sideways. I gathered up the female in my arms and she chomped at my ear and scrambled to escape with nails as sharp as her teeth and I pressed my nose into her fur and nodded at my cane-propped father, who fumbled three Benjamins out of his front pocket. The dog behaved much better for him—even snuggling into a brief snoring spell in his lap—as I drove us decisively and fast, back to the city as the sun clawed at the sky in death.

Filed Under: clearly now the rain, Dad, Kaya, love, Memoir, Memory, Seattle

CHOCOLATE GRASSHOPPERS & IMPLICIT MEMORY

September 9, 2013 by 2 Comments

 

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Saturday afternoon at Café Racer, my son tasted a chocolate covered grasshopper, proffered by David George Gordon.  I tried to take this as evidence that he was growing up, finding new stores of bravery for the art of experimentation and adventure in the world. 

 

___

 

Dr. Daniel Siegel is a giant of a thinker, theorist, researcher, psychiatrist and therapist and you can’t attend a single course in applied psychology or family therapy without hearing the instructor make reference to him and in many cases take you on a glowing oratory tangent.  He’s impossible to hate and so far as I can tell, he’s impossible to question.  He’s on the cutting edge of neurobiology, memory, child development and about six other related fields.  Also, for the record, he writes for the layperson so anyone can scoop up one of his fascinating books like The Whole Brain Child.

 

One of the things that Dr. Siegel writes and speaks about consistently is “implicit” memory.  To put it simply, these are memories that happened before we were conscious and able to develop “explicit” memories.  You can’t call up an implicit memory by sheer cognitive ability.  There are ways that implicit memory gets called up or “triggered.”  Many people don’t understand this but it can govern your emotional life, nothing less.  Have you ever found yourself inexplicably furious or inexplicably sorrowful at the drop of a hat?  Chances are that something triggered your implicit memory: a dead cat on the side of the road, for example, or a father reading the paper at a restaurant where his young daughter sits across from him clearly waiting for his attention.  And it doesn’t have to happen instantly—you could glimpse something like this and not be walloped by it emotionally for hours, or days. 

 

Since learning something about this, I have found myself gaining a great deal of ground.  I was extremely fortunate in that my education around this coincided, more or less, with the birth of my son.  Because everybody gets knuckle-balled with implicit memories when they have a kid and if they aren’t aware of the way the brain works (which most are not), they are going to be baffled and scrambled by their emotional life for a while. 

 

So when my infant son cried out at night and my own chest got tight and anxiety went up, I understood: I was left alone to cry myself to sleep when I was his age.  When my son gets pushed around the playground, my rage is so hair-trigger that I start looking for a dad to fight: I was a sensitive kid told to “use my words” and was not the Lord of any Fly.  So as the time approached for Pax to start preschool (today), I was not as confused as I would have been about my emotional state—but I’m still struck by the intensity of it. 

 

Pax told his mother the other day, “I’m going to cry so much they won’t let me stay at school,” which made me want to hyperventilate.  My own mother’s response was amusement that he had learned to be “manipulative” already.  My mother did step up and offer herself as the courier to preschool for the first week, which was tremendously kind.  What my mother did not do was actively recall under what circumstances she left me alone in a preschool classroom.  I can only assume from my own anxiety and blues during the days preceding Pax’s entrance that I was terrified and felt abandoned.

 

My son left the house with his grandmother this morning in a shark-print raincoat twirling and chattering.  He came back dirtier but in a similar state.  I don’t know if my mother is executing a “re-do” of her own style of parenting 33 years wiser, but she’s doing something right.  I doubt that Pax will lose his breath when his own child’s lower lip quivers at the notion of striking out into school—or anything else in life. 

 

But maybe each time he sees an insect eaten, an implicit memory of his father will warm him from within?   

Filed Under: Dad, Memory, Parenting, Philosophy, psychology, Therapy, Uncategorized

#clearlynowtherain #launched! @ #EBB

June 24, 2013 by 1 Comment

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All due respect to the various kick-ass indie lit stores in Seattle, we all know where the mother ship is—well, you know if you haven’t been living elsewhere and missed the headline that the mother ship is no longer docked in drafty, desolate Pioneer Square and is now a crown jewel in the hipster crown of Capitol Hill.  Yes, I’m talking about Elliott Bay Book Company, the mecca of memoir, the coffee table of coffee table books, the real story of the novel, the palace of poetry, etc.  My good friend Amanda Carr’s parents founded the store some indecent number of years ago (I say indecent only because I just creaked out of my 35th year yesterday and am feeling it), and I don’t know if they knew what they were creating, culturally speaking.  I read at the original EBB in 2006, from my first book, Falling Room, and was daunted and humbled by the proverbial size of the stage I took. 

 

 One might think that seven years later, I’d be less daunted and humbled by taking the stage again, but that wasn’t the case.  The great Benjamin Percy was the last person I saw sit a folding chair in the soft glare of those track lights.  So when I got there Saturday and schlepped my pounds of beer and ice and sausage and cheese and wine through the underground catacombs and into the cavernous and cinematic reading room, I just sat up there, quiet and alone for a few minutes, looking out and trying to channel the poise of Percy—but I was already feeling the churn of emotion that I knew this evening would bring me. I felt incredibly grateful when Emily Holt, my colleague and friend from Pongo Teen Writing arrived and we started sitting that space together. 

 

It is one thing to pack the house for any literary gig (especially on a sunny Solstice eve), but it’s quite another to pack it with people from nearly every realm of my life: childhood homies, my late father’s employee-friends, my grandmother-in-law, my clinical internship instructor, my co-interns, activists and allies from social social justice work, family of blood and choice, kick ass writers of all genres, babies and toddlers and even if a few curious strangers!  And it’s another thing altogether to have all those people uncross their arms and lean in and show not only interest, but deep love and solidarity. 

 

I don’t want to make it sound like this reading was a therapy session, of course.  It was much better than that.  It was the launch of a love story that I’ve carried around carefully for many years.  And it had to happen at Elliott Bay Book Company. 

 

Thanks.

 

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Filed Under: clearly now the rain, Dad, Memoir, Pongo, self-promotion, Writing

COLT 1911: A Partial Timeline

June 5, 2013 by Leave a Comment

 

Part Iimages

 

Colt (n.):

 

young male horse;

inexperienced young person

 

The M1911 is a single-action, semi-automatic, magazine-fed, recoil-operated pistol chambered for the .45 ACP cartridge,[1] which served as the standard-issue side arm for the United States armed forces from 1911 to 1985. It was widely used in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. The M1911 is still carried by some U.S. forces

 

[Patented April 20, 1897, September 9, 1902, December 8, 1905, February 14, 1911, August 19, 1913, Colt’s Pt. F.A. Mfg Co, Hartford, CT, USA, United State Property No. 1138164, M1911 A1 U.S. Army]

 

***

1943

 

The man-boy is slope-shouldered and a very long way from central Illinois.  He walks the battlefield with a gait that would be considered leisurely if he were barefoot on a beach or even sneaker-shod on his suburban block back home, strolling to a cheerful country store for this or that staple.  But the slow scissoring of his legs now navigates him through trenches, disappearing his sodden boots in muck and gore.  He moves across charred ground, between and over corpses in some cases still smoking from the heat of their end.  These are Germans—Krauts—and he is American—brave and righteous—but I imagine that he glimpses the features of other human boys fading like the cordite clouds wafting around him.  I imagine that he has drawn the 1911 and grips it like one might the bar of a roller coaster or the armrest of the seat on a turbulence-tossed jetliner.  I imagine that he spools through his marksmanship training in his head, sees pumpkins on some Midwestern range, orange planets burst against the horizon by his rounds and tries to take comfort from that.  I imagine that at least once a body not fully finished with the grisly kinetics of this world jerks and that the boy fires an unnecessary round into a thigh or shoulder or face.  I imagine that there is something of both unveiling and of disguising in the macabre work he begins to do: plucking two pound steel swastikas from around the necks of the gone boys in the mud, tugging away helmets that despite his gentleness retain a lock of bristly hair, the more familiar and mechanical unholstering of Luger pistols that he then slips into his belt on either side of where the 1911 will ride when he can afford to release it from his ready grip.  I imagine that taking these things is, for a soldier, bittersweet vengeance and ritual, but that in this removal of Nazi symbols, he is also returning these boys to boyhood, hiding them in the mass grave for innocence he and his generation were digging faithfully.  I imagine that this disrobing of the accoutrements of war is, to him, a counterpoint to what he has done, does, will perhaps have to do, with his 1911.

 

I imagine that this is what my father imagined of his own father; it’s what I remember seeing in my mind, more or less, as a result of the words my father spoke about this.  But my father is dead and gone now and my aunt chops down my version with a brief email correction even as I type the last line.    

 

My father was first commissioned into the army as an officer. He was transferred to the Navy as Lt. JG and serviced on the ship the “Normandy.”  He was assigned to the ship’s store and as far I know, he remained in that capacity until the end of European invasion in 1943 (?).  He reached the rank of Lt. Commander. 

     Your version would make a better story, but his war memorabilia was acquired through his shipping connections.

He was quite a collector.  I think it was his curiosity and the love of documentation taught by a beloved aunt. 

     He was a Delta Kappa Epsilon with its incumbent appreciation of aromatic spirits of the beverage variety.

 

I must have imagined the traumatic traipse of another man across some savaged dirt of France. Perhaps my own father did, too. Maybe I’ve written pure fiction about the original journey of the M1911 Colt—then again, given the truth of that memorabilia in my basement, how pure could it be? 

Filed Under: Dad, Guns, Memoir, Philosophy, Politics, Uncategorized