recycled: dreaming of summer

Summers (June 2006)

6: The window frames the sliver of orange candy moon and insects flap their hard shelled bodies against the screen all night. We lay on top of the covers and wait for a breeze that never stirs. The adults play pinochle around the kitchen table and eat coconut cream pie. The underbellies of our pillows are cool and smooth when flipped. Finally we fall asleep.

10: I find an old Reader's Digest under the guestroom bed at Grahamcracker's house and cry my way through the story of a young girl who dies of leukemia. Cataloging the girl's symptoms -- the purple-blue bruises appearing for no reason, the aching joints -- I notice that my own elbows and knees feel as though someone is banging at them with a wooden mallet and convince myself that I'll be dead by August. Is that a bruise on my arm? The secret weight of my imminent death colors the summer a shade more poignant than usual. This might be the last piece of watermelon I eat. Soon I'll be too sick to go to the waterpark. When I'm gone they'll be sorry they sent me to bed. At the end of the summer I'm a good two inches taller and need new pants for the fall.

14: I give in and read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time. For months now my dad has suggested it and I have ignored his suggestion in favor of bb gun wars or eating kakigori in the matchi with Philip. Finally, in a cabin on a mountain by the sea, far away from Tokyo, I pick up a ragged old copy and fall into immediate, desperate love with Jem, Atticus and Scout. A new thing starts to grow inside me as I read. Probably this thing would have emerged on its own one day; but lying there on the top bunk, it was shaped profoundly by Mrs. Dubose's camellias and the pale, wispy courage of Boo Radley. It is a baby ache at the sudden, small understanding of it all--the bigness and smallness of humans, and the way that goodness, courage and tragedy sometimes can't be separated into their own neat, little boxes.

18: Dot's older brother Leighton was a prisoner of war to the Japanese. After his ship was torpedoed in the South Pacific, he drifted in the warm briny waters but it was really my mother's prayers that kept him afloat, Dots says. She would iron and pray and sing hymns and that is what kept skin on his bones when there were more rocks than rice in his bowl. She digs out a picture of a thin, handsome man in a uniform who could be anyone's great uncle. You know, she says, I swore that if I wasn't married by 25, it would never happen. I met Vern the day after my 25th birthday. She still has some of the letters he wrote and a picture of the two of them kissing on a velvet sofa, the skirt of her polkadot dress spread around her. At the end of the summer she gives me this picture and I pack it in with all the other things to take to college.

20: The months stretch out ahead, hot, muggy and lonely. I take a job chasing tough kids around a sweaty gym. On trips to the monuments, my co-workers sneak off for cigarettes and the kids steal hot dogs from the street vendors. They boy who broke my heart emails out of the blue. The days drain by in an uneven rhythm. Somehow, I move forward.

24: Is it better to know or not to know--to labor away under your own silly predictions, pieced together from bits and observations, small flashes of insight that might really be the glare of a mirror? You could drown in these thoughts, even as you lay in the hot sun at the cool water's edge. Throw the weight of suspense off your back. Keep walking. Wait and see. It's going to be okay.

heart monitor

I have spent the past weeks reading about the human heart, cramming my brain with facts about this fist-shaped organ tilting slightly forward & left. I can tell you about the way coronary arteries fill in the space between beats, the danger of watery blood. Did you know that laid out end to end, the vasculature of the human body could spin a thin red line so fine & long you could wrap it twice around the Earth before tying it in a bow? Think of that gallon of milk you carried through the snow 2 miles home from the store this morning. Now say a prayer of gratitude for your uncomplaining heart, which will have pumped 2000 gallons of blood through your strong body by the time you lay your head down to rest. So, drink a glass of red wine. Laugh. And for heaven's sake, lay off the salt! Don't worry if the lights go out, for the heart makes its own electricity. And even lonely hearts have four chambers.

Tonight, I will lay in my bed and feel for new pulses in the dark. Behind the knee, the side of the nose, and if my head is positioned just so, I can actually hear the small scratch of my carotid artery against the cool crispness of the pillowcase. So much happens in a single beat, and yet I'll gather 82 per minute as I rest -- yet another way to measure out life in coffee spoons. When I close my eyes I'll see the mountains and valleys of EKG strips. The peaked T waves of hyperkalemia, the jagged teeth of atrial fibrillation -- or my favorite, the disobedient schoolboy Premature Ventricular Contraction, who jumps to the head of the line in his unruly excitement.

All this science & learning and my mind still can not fathom such a rational, dedicated little machine living in my chest. If the handsome cardiothoracic surgeon spread my ribs he would surely find a crude, red, little bucket coursing with longing, overflowing with love.

roommates

My friends moved back from California and invited me to live in their basement. Josh is thoughtful, quirky, enterprising, and effortlessly smart. Amy is sweet, tough, handy, insightful, capable, wise. Together, they are hospitable, fun, funny, concerned, solid -- all those qualities you'll never find in a craigslist roommate.

We are in flux right now, the three of us -- transitioning into new careers, relationships, phases of life. We ease the way by taking care of each other. Amy buys me a fancy cup with the letter K and nurses me through my cold. Josh takes out the trash & brews coffee in the morning. I dry the dishes and put the kettle on for tea.

The house is old, drafty, slanted, crooked, cold. Our home is warm, open, lovely, ours.

Peter

Little Rat turns twenty today. He will probably spend the day, as he spends most of them, behind the deli counter at Safeway. After he gets off work, he will drive his car home, hugging the center line the whole way, and watch cartoons for an hour before getting up to go feed the dogs, unload the dishwasher, and set up the coffee pot for tomorrow morning. Little Rat requested Red Robin for his birthday dinner; so rarely does he expresses a preference for anything that we will gladly drop our busyness to drive an hour for an evening at the mall with him.

When he came to us, Emil was as wild as any feral animal. He'd ball his fists up and shove them deep into his eye sockets, rocking back and forth and drawing so far into himself that I couldn't see how he'd ever find his way out. Thirteen years later, Little Rat won't even hear of letting me do the dishes after I've cooked dinner. It's okay Kathy. I can handle it. You just go relax.

Little Rat loves to call me Kathy and pat me on the back. Do not be fooled by his sweetness -- he is no saint or martyr. His ability to get under my skin rivals even that of my sister (who he calls Frosty the Snow Meg. HA!), who can still make me burst into tears at 28. When it comes to our parents, he gets away with things the rest of us would've walked the plank for saying. He delights in the same worn out jokes time and again simply because they make me crazy. When Little Rat says You can live and Kathy, you're such a Kathy it drives me up the wall. I tell him that I'll pull his hair right out of his head if he says it once more and he looks at me for a second. I'll take that as a remark, Kathy. And then pats me on the back and scampers away to clean the kitchen.

If I write about Little Rat more than anyone else, it is because he is his own fairy tale, a happy ending that has nothing to do with the girl finding her prince. Despite the hope that I profess, I mostly pitch my tent in the realist camp. Over the years, I've found it helpful to keep my expectations low in life, to see the redemption in the single, tiny, bud and be thankful. Virtue is its own reward; we adopted these boys because it was the right thing to do and that would be enough to get us through. But somehow, where a wild, stunted, broken little child came to us, a composed, engaging, gentle, kind person now occupies his seat at the table. My tall, skinny little brother is a blessing beyond anything I could've imagined for my family. The plot is so full of redemption and Little Rat is the most compelling character I know.

See: Litte Rat, Birth to find out how he got his name.

Proposal

I will write all Christmas letters, thank-you notes,

and pick out birthday presents for our parents,

if you iron your own shirts, my skirts

(or at least take them to the cleaners)

and unscrew the lids from jars I can't manage.

Feel free to make more money

and have a hobby suitably removed

from the day to day to day pattern of our life.

I, naturally, will bear the children

and pray they come by your good sense,

my ear for languages, honestly.

Like my mother, I will want to paint

often and buy shoes, a new dress for a party.

Unlike her, I am willing to drive in the

city, at night, and through the dust and nothing

of Texas (when we move to be near your

aging parents). My driving might

make you nervous but it's a standing offer.

I'm willing to cook, but if you'd rather, standing in

front of a sink filled with warm soapy water

suits me, too. Please remind me that clouds

are a shaky foundation, of the danger of

drowning in a pool of my own whimsy. Because

I love you I will remind you to be kind

even when you are tired, to suffer fools gladly.

answer & some sentences

I was born in this small, scrubby town in the part of Washington that is never green. The air is very dry, the river is very wide, the sky is very big, and everything else comes in shades of very brown. The county fair is still a big deal. There are no good restaurants or traffic jams.

I have not lived here for years - and most of my growing up, my formation - took place in other parts of the world and country. Even so, there is something about this place that is coming home.

To: everyone who has ever asked.

This is where I'm from.

&&&

When I was a small child I hated when the bottoms of my feet felt hot, dry, or dusty like the desert. I thought it meant I was sick and going to die, like maybe a rattle snake was about to strike. I still get this feeling when I read books or watch films about the Civil War. It is the reason I can't stand to look at pictures of President Lincoln.

&&&

My grandfather always had parts of the newspaper spread around his easy chair. I feel newsprint and think of his whiskers, his undershirts, and the way he would lick his thumb before flipping through the deck thwap lick thwap lick thwap while playing solitaire. I love Louis L'Amour in his honor.

&&&

My cousins, siblings and I can sum up our entire collective existence using lines from You've Got Mail, The Royal Tenenbaums, White Christmas, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

I think you have a gift for it. That's the perfect blend of poetry & meanness.

We are getting this emblazoned on our family shield; it is the matching tattoo on our hearts and tongues.

&&&

We put on lipstick and met at the back corner table. Over a bottle of wine and calamari we talked about our grown up problems, which are neither earth shattering nor insubstantial. The little things add up: bills, broken hearts, fights, malfunctioning body parts, big choices and little information. The usual. You have a stack, too, I'm sure, staring up at you from your own plate.

Ten years ago we would've killed for a night on the town, some autonomy. We were bursting out of our skin, so eager to grow up, to step into the glamour awaiting our certainty & confidence. We sat on our grandmother's bed, chafing under our parents' restrictions while they played cards in the living room. We yearned for last night.

And then someone hit fast forward and last night showed up at the door. We put on lipstick like movie stars and met at the back corner table. We ordered red wine and ate calamari, and my cousin told me about her grown up problems and I told her mine. It was perfect, exactly what we ordered. And I couldn't wait to go back to my grandmother's house, where she peeled me an apple and sent me to bed.

&&&

I've memorized the signs and symptoms: clubbed fingers, dyspnea on exertion, orthopnea, hypertension. I know what to look for and I don't want to see it. So I close my eyes and listen to her stories instead.

It is too late now on the East Coast, so I resist the urge to call my own mother. Tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next -- ad infinitum -- I'll tell her how much I love her.

&&&

Our fathers come from wild, raucous people on both sides, but our grandmother took them to church and out of the chaos and rebellion, God delivered her a circuit preacher and an itinerant teacher. A generation removed, we kids are respectable now, if not exactly settled. There's no use in denying our stock, though. We still move in bands and ride our figurative horses bareback. The dust doesn't settle beneath our boots.

&&&

Even though I would've been blind and had a smile full of crooked teeth, I'm the sort of girl who would've made it from St. Louis to the Willamette Valley with you. Sitting atop the buckboard seat or walking beside the wagon, I won't complain through the months of snow or the showers of arrows. This may be where I'm from, but I know how to be a family on the move; what it takes to make a home on whatever claim we stake.

absit iniuria verbis

Nursing school has made my hands useful and I am thankful for this. In college, I hopped around between disciplines, trying to find the right balance of poetic & practical, a way to meld an inclination toward language with a compulsion to make a tangible difference. Chemistry was too academic, English too indulgent, so I settled on politics and its implicit room for negotiation. After college, I slowly drifted back towards words, burying myself in paper. I could look beyond my computer screen and see how the sentences might rise off the page, walk up the Hill, and maybe someday change things for someone somewhere. It never seemed immediate enough, though, and left me fidgety and empty handed at the end of the day.

Now, I can walk into a hospital room, right into the very heart of it, up to the rawest parts of people and their problems and do something. Even when it's only adjusting a machine or changing a bandage (which it often is, in these early days), the situation changes and it's usually for the better, if only marginally. I walk in and wash my hands. And then I put them to work.

I have high hopes for this last semester of nursing school. There is still so much too learn about the human body, about the ways to manage illness and tend the sick, how to size up both small and gaping needs and then meet them. Tonight, though, I hang up the phone and then sit still for a long while. My friend -- my lovely, kind, funny friend -- is in terrible pain. And there is nothing for me to do, no words to speak that might make it better.

***

She is allowed to call me Katie because she's known me since I was born and because there are some battles that aren't worth fighting. There are ten of us cousins, like stair steps, a jumble of comings and goings, laughing, eating, fighting and jostling, so it's always you kids or Meggie, Andrea, I mean Katie when she needs just me. I don't mind, even when one of the boy's names gets thrown in: Hannah, Ethan, what's your name...Katie! But today when she hollered for me from her bedroom Sherri, Ellie, Kathy! I almost, but not quite, threw my tightly held respect for elders out the window so I could set my grandmother straight about my name.

***

When you don't know what to say
how to string the words together
and then match them up
with your own roiled thoughts

if too much time has passed, sorry
sticks in your throat, or the nervous
syllables shrink and retreat
back down to the safety of your belly

sometimes it's best, the only
way really, to go with that
tried and true old standby

hello