Wild Heart

The Memory of Heat

In summer, the song sings itself ~ William Carlos Williams

The parking lot stinks of melting tar as I step out of my car and into a snug envelope of heat. I swim through it to the automatic doors of Whole Foods and take a deep breath of cooled air. For about 20 minutes I shop for vegetables and pasta, balsamic vinegar and a roasted chicken. I'm making pasta salad later, grateful for the pre-cooked chicken so I don't have to turn on the oven. While I shop, I forget about the heat. I don't think about anything as I move from produce to dairy and up the pasta/rice aisle.

When I was a housewife many years ago, I believed that I hated grocery shopping, but really I don't, not now and not then when one baby daughter sat in the baby seat and the other baby daughter insisted on walking beside me, her eyes at the level of shelves that hold the off-brands. Even then I could lose myself tapping on cantaloupe or checking the dates on the milk, all the while chatting with the girls in that mindless way that is about as meaningful as humming.

One time in the local supermarket, I lifted a bag of ice out of the cooler, swung it toward the cart, and the bottom split, sending ice chunks skidding all the way from popsicles to frozen peas. A nice young man hustled over to help me, called for a clean-up on aisle 7, and offered the girls a cookie. Let's call him Timmy. Timmy was always around when I shopped at that market, and he always gave the girls cookies, and he always leaned in a little too close. I think he had a crush on me. Or maybe he just admired the kids, who really were adorable and never pitched a fit in public places. Really.

Now when I shop, the grocery store people smile and ask if they can help me and the clerks ask me if it's hot enough for me and how have I been. They're mostly nice people - and I am not a 25-year-old mother of two who weighed 110 pounds and wore mini skirts (it was the 70s). Now I see that I get attention because I have gray hair, because I walk slowly, because I remind them of their granny. At least that's the story I make up.

I came home from shopping, unloaded enough food that now my fridge looks like it belongs to someone who eats (I was down to condiments and feta cheese). Heat rises in waves from the hot pavement and my garage feels like a sauna. Tonight when the temperatures cool enough that I can open the windows to sleep, I'll hear the single cricket that sings from the edges of my little patio, and the moving fan will bring back my grandmother's voice rising in alarm, warning my grandfather, "Don't let that baby near that fan, Paul. Watch that baby!" In those days a kid could get her fingers whacked off in the blades of a fan. In those days there was no AC in the thinly insulated walls of the old house in Terre Haute where my grandparents lived, and their heat came with humidity and the earthy smell of honest sweat and a metallic tinge in the air that meant lightning.

I don't much like heat, but I've learned to find something in it that I do like, and that is the reminder of a self that is more - let's say - than the sum of my parts, a self that moves in a 66-year-old body and can still feel Lisa's 2-year-old hand in mine and can still see those sugar cookies that Timmy wooed the girls with. And I remember those summer visits to Terre Haute, entering a world so different from home in San Francisco, where it was always too cold to open a window at night.

Anything can come back to me when I am navigating a hot parking lot and meandering through a cool grocery store, and I see now that I like grocery shopping because I love the grand theater of the imagination that is constantly triggered by figures on a cereal box or the shape of a sugar cookie.

A Letter to My Sister Carolyn

Dear Caro,

Do you remember that day we were all hanging out in Dad’s garage in Indiana—it was the year he turned 80—and you turned to me and said, “Sometimes I feel jealous of you,” and I said, “What? Why?” What you said next so startled me that I was speechless. I felt flustered—and disturbed. You had been joking just moments before, but in that moment I knew you were sharing something very old, something you had harbored for years and were finally blurting out to me.

We were surrounded by family, all of us there but Connie that year, and so the moment passed and the few days together passed and I told myself that I’d call you when we all got back home again so I could ask what you meant and really listen to your answer. I did call, but you didn’t pick up, so I left a message asking you to call me. Two days later you died, just like that in the middle of the night, no warning, no goodbye, no chance left to tell you how much I love you, exactly as you are, in spite of all that has passed between us over 60 years of sisterhood.  I’ll never know what you were trying to share with me that day in Dad’s garage. What you said still haunts me, and you've been gone now for five years.

You and Dad used to joke about making contact with each other after death, and of course, Dad thought he would go first. After you died, Dad would call and say, “So. Have you heard anything from Carolyn?” I think he was half convinced that you would chat him up in the middle of the night, say, or more likely while he was working on his motorcycle or sawing boards to make something. I think he was disappointed that you didn’t contact him. It meant you were really gone. I’m still holding out hope that you’ll come to me in a dream and we’ll have a long talk.

Dad stopped joking about death when he got sick, when he finally understood that whatever was ailing him would be fatal. Turned out that the blood disease didn’t kill him—a tear in his colon did. I held his hand when he died, and the last thing I said to him was, “Tell Carolyn I said hello,” but you probably know that already.

I think of you both as being “up there,” that early version of heaven we learned at the church on Sutter Street still coloring my understanding of the afterlife. I figure you’re laughing a lot up there, you and Dad, and he’s telling you again in that loud whisper, “You’re my favorite. Don’t tell the others.” Down here we’re weighed by gravity and loss. We carry the heavy responsibility of staying alive for each other. After Connie died, Steve and Butch were joking about who would go next. I told them both that I would go next and I planned on being around for a very long time, so don’t even consider leaving. I often feel fear that another sibling will die.

We are five now, and that feels like so few. I wonder sometimes what life is like for people who have only one sibling. When we were kids, all of us girls sleeping in the same room, we used to fantasize about having no sisters or brothers and wouldn’t that be nice, not having to share anything, getting to have our own room, not having to put up with each other.

Carolyn, I’d do it all over again if I could. And this time we would like each other earlier in our lives. I wish we had’t waited so long. With you gone, I feel like I’ve lost an essential part of myself and a huge part of my childhood. When I’ve forgotten some piece of memory, I want to call you up and say, “Do you remember that old lady who lived down the hill from us in the projects, the one who paid us to read the Sunday comics to her? What was her name?”

“Do you remember the Dance-Me-Hilda dolls we got for Christmas one year?”

“What was the name of that game you and me and Butchie played under the kitchen table when we lived on Blythedale?”

See what I mean?

I see you sometimes in the grocery store, just a glimpse as you toss a box of Cheerios into your basket and turn the corner.  Today at the gym you looked at me out of the eyes of a woman named Dolly who smiled at me as she was doing laps on the track. Once or twice I’ve sensed you in the car with me, but as soon as I say your name out loud, you’re gone. Sometimes when I fall asleep at night, I think I am in the lower bunk in our room of the house on Hillside Blvd., and I hear you turn over in your sleep, and I whisper, “Carolyn?” You don’t answer.

Letters to Someone Else

A long time ago when I was barely old enough to call myself an adult, I worked in San Francisco and would take a bus to my father's shop on Pierce Street for a ride home. Dad's work was to clean old buildings that had been used for everything from living quarters to business offices to typewriting services and music schools. Sometimes he would find things that he thought one of his kids might like, and so I had my first fountain pen, an old Smith typewriter before Smith joined Corona, and once—a famous story in our house—someone had left geraniums in bloom in a window planter, so Dad carefully dug them up, leaving lots of dirt around the roots, wrapped them in a wet San Francisco Examiner, and brought them home. It was only when he was planting them in our yard that he discovered they were plastic.

Before Dad would bring anything home, he would try to return the item, often not possible. So one night when I was waiting for him at his shop, I saw that he had brought back an old steamer trunk like you sometimes see in old movies.

Who could resist such a thing! I unbuckled it, swung it open, and one-by-one I drew open the drawers. The only thing I remember from that trunk is the packet of ancient letters tied up with ribbon. I ran my fingers over the elegant handwriting (clearly written with a fountain pen), examined the stamps and postmarks, untied the ribbon, and read them.

They must have been love letters to have been saved that way, treasured in the drawer of a steamer trunk, but I don’t remember one bit of the content. I do remember the room in my father’s shop growing dark and that I had to turn on a lamp. I remember being afraid that Dad would catch me at this invasion of some unknown woman’s privacy. I remember longing to take that trunk home, hoping that no one would claim it and it could be mine, to savor the letters instead of reading them furtively in the semi-dark.

The owner must have claimed the trunk. It was gone the next time I stopped by the shop for a ride home. Dad never knew I had read those letters. In the almost 50 years since then, I have written many a love letter of my own, kept love letters from those deepest loves (and burned the others). I never wrapped them in ribbon, never stowed them in such an exquisite cache.

These days I suppose people send love tweets, sex texts, skype messages, email. I think of those messages as more temporary than paper letters, but really the opposite is true—they remain forever in the ether, publicly private, but without substance: no ink to smear a bit on the signature, no postmark to tell us the exotic or domestic where, no foreign stamp that had to be licked before it could be stuck, no postman’s hand dropping the letter through a slot in the front door and eagerly retrieved to be read from a wing-back chair next to a fire or from a pillow or from a barn loft smelling of hay and horse manure.

Back in the very olden days, mail was delivered more than once a day, and a person could write to a neighbor inviting her to tea that afternoon and get a letter of acceptance back in time to put the kettle on. I own several volumes of Virginia Woolf’s collected letters and several of her collected diary entries. By far the most interesting and revealing are the letters. Something about knowing that the words will be read changes the tone of the content, invites the reader in, either through the front door (by being the recipient) or by the back door (by being a voyeur). For this reader there is the vicarious thrill of knowing both writer and the recipient through the relationship between the two that creates that particular letter, one that could be sent to no one else.

I feel no shame about having read those old letters between two people who have long been dead, who may well have been dead by the time I read them. That discovery of letters stashed away and treasured came to me at a time when I was well on my way to being a dedicated letter writer myself, though I was yet to write the true love letters.

Over the years, I have had relationships with other writers, and as one of them said, “When two writers have a love affair, it is well documented.” No kidding! Where’s that steamer trunk when you need it!

A World of Time

Wherever a story comes from, whether it is a familiar myth or a private memory, the retelling exemplifies the making of a connection from one pattern to another: a potential translation in which narrative becomes parable and the once upon a time comes to stand for some renascent truth. This approach applies to all the incidents of everyday life: the phrase in the newspaper, the endearing or infuriating game of a toddler, the misunderstanding at the office. Our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories. ~ Mary Catherine Bateson

Last night was another pillow-puncher. I drifted in that twilight between awake and asleep, seeing bits of my past, like my third-grade classroom where our dioramas were displayed all in a row on the wall above the chalkboard. There was one of the Golden Gate Bridge, which I like to think was mine but I'm pretty sure it wasn't. But then, how would I know? What I have is a memory of dioramas on the wall, but even that may not be true. What I know for sure is that I have a class photo that shows them on the wall behind us, and maybe that photo serves as my memory.

 Lying awake in the dark, I float on time, and time is thick and slow and dark as mud. But each memory is a diorama in a bright flash of light, full of depth and color and layers of meaning. In that flash of memory last night, I was a child in San Francisco: one flash of memory = a whole world of childhood. I could go anywhere from there, skip to other memories and into a deep well of emotions and a whole city-grid of meaning - all in one image that serves as memory.

Here's what I'm trying to get at: Life is what we live right in this moment - it flows, not one moment indistinguishable from the next. And this is always true, whether we're in the middle of a huge life transition or we're doing the laundry, whether we're grieving the death of a loved one or laughing with friends. Then when we think back on any moment, we are no longer in the flow of time: what we remember is laid out like a row of dioramas. It's static. If the memory moves at all, it's in stop-action.

And that's where our personal stories come from, not in the moment but in the  memory. I think to myself, "Well, duh!" A story from this moment would sound like this: "I am at the computer and just typed the word 'computer,' and Oh! there I go again, typing the word 'computer.'"

When I'm staring at patterns on the ceiling in the middle of the night, I think about stories and telling stories. I think about how I have always written "pieces" rather than "short stories," and I remember how much I love dioramas, like looking into an unshaded window after dark and seeing a family sit down to dinner, or like going to the natural history museum in San Francisco when I was a kid and seeing  a large-as-life diorama of the early inhabitants of the state I grew up in.  The DeYoung Museum used to have rooms set up as they would have been in 1920, say, or in 1850. I would stand behind the velvet rope and imagine that I am left alone in the museum after it is closed and I would duck under the velvet rope and sit in those chairs and lie on that bed and pretend a world.

It makes sense to me that my stories are vignettes, little worlds that I can enter and where I can pretend, little worlds where time is whatever I make of it.

 

 

True Story

"And that's the truth! Pppffffthhhh." ~ Lily Tomlin as Edith Ann

I've been wondering what makes a story "true." I tell some true stories from my past and for all anyone knows, I made them up. I have a story from when I was five years old, and when I tell it, I'm the heroic little girl carrying her little sister and little brother across the hot railroad tracks to Aunt Vee's house, all of us barefoot, the tracks hot in the summer sun. When my brother tells this story, I am the villain sister who wouldn't carry him on the way back from Aunt Vee's and he stood there on the other side of the tracks and cried until Mother came running and scolded me for not taking care of him. I like my story best. And I had completely forgotten my brother's part of the story.

When I tell made-up stories, they are as true to me as any memory. I know the people, their habits, the place, the relationships, the intrigue, and the complexities of their lives. One of the nice things about made-up stories is that no one is going to contradict me. And that's the truth!

At The Grill

Picture the fried eggs at 7:00 AM and the people who can eat them at that hour. Picture billed caps that sit high on a deep forehead, shards of graying hair trailing to a leathered neck, neck bent for the mouth to receive the egg and toast, the slurp of coffee, hash browns trailing to chin.

Or don’t if you're one of those people who can't eat more than a slice of toast before 10:00 AM. Avert your eyes, tune into Pierre Rampal in your audio imagination, and when the early breakfast crowd at the Grill dissipates like fog on a boggy field, picture the back side of Cecil Duggan, the last one to let the screen door thump behind him before the bus pulled up from Mayfield Manor Assisted Living and first of the flowered ladies tottered a wheeled walker through the door.

Lyla watched Cecil start his pickup in the parking lot, shift to reverse, and turn left away from the square and toward home. She shifted into reverse herself, called to Dot that she was taking a sanity break, and stepped out back with a tall iced tea and a bad attitude. Some mornings were just like that.