I interrupt this blog series on beautiful women wearing nice dresses to bring you perhaps the most meta blog I will post.  And maybe the most narcissistic.  Truthfully, I am having terrible technical difficulties that inhibit me from doing what I want (which is the next installation of the Overdressed series).  That is perhaps something I choose by a life of touring with finicky and sparse internet connections.

But, since I started this blog 11 weeks ago, I have been determined to post each week, regardless of how prepared or adequate or generally stable I feel.  Like a practice in self discipline.  Or a practice in finding something to pour all of my dread into each week.

I have since encouraged my pal, Scott Tyler, to buy into the dread of blogging, and he snarkily replied by writing a blog of pictures he’s taken of me taking pictures.  And as much as he wanted to believe it was just a way to laugh off his own urge to write, the truth comes out that he is a very good writer and has particular insight into the curves and bogs of the creative process.  Not only does he engage in it on a regular basis, but he also witnesses and takes a vested emotional interest in the creative lives of others.  He, as the only other member of our band, has also become the primary subject matter of spare film over the last couple years.  A very gracious sort of soul that also happens to be extremely photogenic.

He has begrudgingly sat on this blog for a couple of months.  And I used the same pushes he pushed me with all these years, and he has finally posted the first installment of what I think will be a long and engaging series of his strangely God-view-esque perspective on the creative life.

All that saying, you should read it.  Now.  Go!

Bethany was, at that time, a woman caught between two lives.  Or a woman caught between a series of lives.  In the least, she was a woman caught between two marriages– years from one that took her old soul like antique lace to a flame, and weeks away from one that has replaced reams of her life’s fabric.  This is not to describe Bethany in relationship to one man or another.  This is just to say that Bethany did not choose her old wedding dress for this project, nor did she violate the Sacred Rule by pre-wearing her new one.

The 11-year-old J. Crew A-line cotton white dress was bought for her christening at the Eastern Orthodox church– and she just can’t let it go.  Not because of her devotion to orthodoxy over a decade ago– she has since disengaged with the church.  It’s just that the dress, at the time, was so damn expensive.  Buyers blues evidently can have a startlingly long trail.  But judging by the faces of the occasional icons on the walls, casually placed among the photos of her four children and fiance, the dress isn’t just a guilty pleasure.  It isn’t an anchor to history masked with denial, either.  It is a snow white declaration of re-purposing what she has to tether a long rope into a future made of better things– as Bethany described, the value of the love of self over the art of suffering.

“I have extracted all the good parts and left, traveling down this road alone, now.  Just like everyone needs to.”

Add in a bucket of paint, and you have one of the prettiest metaphorical ropes in history.  Her house is divided by color, but united by the lived in and tenderly cared for.  A house that has the vibration of regeneration– one that held her when she wanted to leave, and forced her to paint small patches each day to help forget about the old life and marriage, “I would buy something small every day with my 50% off coupons at Michael’s to recreate the space.  Little steps.  Every day.”

While I was surprised and delighted that she didn’t choose a wedding dress, it was apparent she chose a dress of renewal– which surrounds her every day– because she actively pursues it.  Her curtains are her grandparents dresses and tablecloths.  There is a wall of heroes who, I swore, moved Harry-Potter-painting style as she lightly tapped each one and described their importance.  And that bucket of paint.  It sits now with two brushes between the kitchen and the laundry room, resting-in-wait of the next old memory to be painted over new.  The house is mystical with the energy of a woman who has taken careful time to be brave and keep working.  Even her two black cats– Dusk and Dawn– spend most of their time beneath her feet, bewitched.

Who I met that day was not who I would’ve met seven years ago.  Probably none of us are.  But some people– like Bethany– are able to wear their past selves remarkably well, without shame, and know that the transition is where most of their life is squeezed in.  And it is her responsibility to proclaim those times as starting new.

Also, I’ve never seen anyone eat cereal so elegantly in my life.

 

Maybe I should have taken it as an indicator– a subconscious plea to make an exit, a turn around.  What woman meticulously plans to have a wedding dress made under the specifications that she will be able to wear it again after the big day?

I had called on a local artist friend in the Asheville area to weave it: an A-line, heart topped, knee length thing with off-white vintage warp and silver (it sparkled!), orange, yellow, and burgundy weft.  After each fitting, the weaver would describe to me how to wear it after the wedding was over to make it less bells-a-ringing and more dress-up-party-down.  It was possibly the cheapest bill the entire wedding, and simultaneously the most well thought out.

I’ve worn it twice since.  Once to a dinner party to prove to myself that I would wear it again.  A second time for a photo shoot for the band, and as dress up rules apply, doesn’t really count.  All of my I-never-want-to-have-dead-real-estate-in-my-closet-when-someone-else-could-use-it’s are now best intentions, and the dress sits in the same place it does for many women: under an internally lit sign that says, “Not Yet.”

The compulsion is not just with wedding dresses.  Last year when I visited a friend and former college roommate in Louisville and admired her dress collection, she instinctively welcomed me to try them on.  And, of course, I did.  When I reached a particularly sleek, gray-nearing-drab-but-perfect-for-professional-or-winter-day-activities one, I was smitten.  Liz insisted I take it.  But then that thing happened:

“But if you get it home and ever stop wearing it, you have to bring it back.”

I’ve worn it three times in a year, but it weighs heavy in my closet.  Have I done it justice?  Should I keep it to prove that I will wear it enough? Should I return it just to rid myself of the pressure?

Of course, Liz never mentioned the dress again– even when I met up with her in Boston last week.  Likely, it never crossed her mind.  My neuroses is the only one still fixated on the dress.

As I was going through the early stages of divorce almost exactly a year ago, I made a trek to Ohio to find solace in my closest friends– who also happened to have been my bridesmaids.  We spent the days watching zombie movies and The Prime of Miss Jean Brody, eating anything that contained both chocolate and peanut butter, and considering each break in the rain as an invitation to walk the neighborhood.  We talked about what-went-wrong-what-will-I-do-what-about-everything-I-haven’t-thought-of-yet… and the dress.  What will I do with that dress?

Well, I would keep it.  It wasn’t a representation of all I had lost, it was a representation of artistry and care and beauty.  And it may be the only good thing I take away from this mess.

A few weeks later, I returned to Ohio, and found that my friend and former professor had done some life purging of her own: she was getting rid of her old dresses.  She used explanations of I’ll-Never-Fit-in-it-Again-Anyway and This-Will-Never-Be-Back-In-Style, but there was a resoluteness about her.  She was parting from a 20 something life she couldn’t return to and choosing, instead, to embrace the life of almost 50.  But not without a fair fight.

She offered the dresses to me, taking care to remove each one from its plastic sheathing, and explaining the importance and value of each one: where she bought it, where she wore it, why she stopped wearing it.  It was a fantastic assembly, as each dress bowed to its previous owner and waited expectantly for me: are you my new mother?  I chose a couple I knew I would wear, some I would alter, and some for the value of her story.  Her first date with her now husband suit was taken, not because I would wear it regularly, but so that someone would care for it the way she had.  She didn’t need the expectation of history staring her down every morning, anymore, but also couldn’t throw the over 20-year-old piece into a pile for Goodwill.  As I packed it up, that thing happened again:

“If you get home, and you decide you don’t want it anymore, I have first right of refusal.  You’ll have to bring it back.”

These attachments we make, I’m sure we all realize, are not to the dress itself, but the memory.  The day that changed our lives.  How we looked in that moment.  How much money we spent on it then, and how we still can’t forgive ourselves for it.  The hope that we will feel as happy as we thought we did when we wore it then.  And when we give it up, it’s always with The First Right of Refusal.  Here, you carry this in your closet for a while.  Prove its worth.  Validate that what I believed was true of it still stands.  Then I can let it go.  Maybe this is why mothers hand down their own wedding dresses.  Maybe it’s why some don’t.

As part of my homespun therapy, I spent a couple of months this year photographing five women in my immediate vicinity.  Mostly, I needed a friend– a whole gaggle of them– to pull me out of my embarrassed-to-be-seen-post-divorce hibernation.  Partly, I needed something to keep me busy– something good and present and focused.

I prompted each of the five women to choose a dress– any dress– that they have that they will likely never wear again, but absolutely can’t get rid of.  Then, I asked each of them to wear that dress in their home, and let me photograph them– one roll of color and one roll of black and white– as they perform their run-of-the-mill tasks  What resulted was five interesting and beautiful women with five interesting and beautiful stories that I am delighted to leak onto the internet over the next five weeks.

I gave each of them First Right of Refusal before I shared.  They declined.

Ricky got drunk again.

Last week I saw him in the daylight.

A renown nocturnal acrobat

would not remember an audience like me.

His finest act yet:

the double backwards somersault

balance upturned vodka

(rare and Russian)

He’s got a .45

and the talent of youth.

Pallid Ricky-of-the-Day,

gray and working

for the famous

Ricky-of-the-Night.

While I am trying hard

to not remember what I can’t remember

A black, long haired, lanky dog

trots up the northbound ramp

of a Nashville highway.

Collar swinging,

Head set forward.

Someone will miss him.

I twist a poem on to his trot.

When I resume

the not remembering,

I slow to a stop.

A breakfast clementine rolls,

suicidal,

from the passenger’s seat to the floor.

I tap the eulogy

of the dog’s trot,

and leave the fruit be

with last November’s leaves

and the other things

dying not to be remembered.

 

Fluffy-Snowball-Wigglesly-PinkNose-Kitty-Puppy-Princess earned her reputation as the fiercest in the kingdom of my bedroom shortly after that one vomit incident that landed her in the washing machine faster than I could pick her name for the week.  Or his name for the week.  The process of naming the white stuffed cat was difficult enough without also having to consider its gender.  And for a girl who believed she may have accidentally had her own gender swapped at birth, who was I to base my sex-assessment on the creature’s delicate whiskers and powder pink nose?

My allegiance to Fluffy-Snowball-Wigglesly-PinkNose-Kitty-Puppy-Princess was a quiet one, squashed somewhere between my family’s reputation of we-drive-only-Fords-and-love-only-dogs and my Grandma Graham’s intense phobia of cats, which weighed down the family compound’s air with a magical thickness that averted every stray cat in the neighborhood.  And if that spell didn’t work, they were methodically executed.

There was order in my animal kingdom.  Lists and schedules were in place to ensure that everyone from Izzy the Plastic Lizard to Thomas the Overweight Walrus With the Missing Tusk had equal Going Out time.  As the youngest, equality was extremely important. And yet, for a creature I had such mixed feelings for, unable even to settle on a name, Fluffy-Snowball-Wigglesly-PinkNose-Kitty-Puppy-Princess found herself tagging along more than her fair share.  This often caused minor revolts among the Plush, leading to heartfelt speeches explaining that it wasn’t that I loved her more, it’s that…

But I couldn’t explain it.  I really didn’t like Fluffy-Snowball-Wigglesly-PinkNose-Kitty-Puppy-Princess more.  I wasn’t even sure that I liked her at all.  They sensed my uncertainty.  I paused too long.  I was overcompensating.  Brandon the Blue Smiley Man sneered.  Soda Pop Dexter the Dalmation sniveled.  Mutiny!  And before I could stammer an adequate apology, even the balcony of Beanie Babies turned away in disgust.

If I learned nothing else from The Neverending Story, it is that having a pet dragon would be ideal.  And also, the importance of naming things.  While authors and artists will tell you that naming things dispels fear and creates a brighter world, the art of naming and remembering those names is tricky business.  It is the commitment to something more chaotic than our brains find manageable.  Or it is accidentally loving a certain white cat I know I have been genetically predisposed to hate.  A stalwart in time and space is established, and the name can be loaded up with memories and the sorts of feelings and judgments it didn’t bargain for.  If I didn’t pick and remember a name, I didn’t have to care that Fluffy-Snowball-Wigglesly-PinkNose-Kitty-Puppy-Princess was dangling precariously from a second story window with a leering 10-year-old boy holding her by the tail.  I could casually pick her up from the mud, you know, whenever, and no one would suspect my secret-traitor-cat-liking tendencies.

Only three animals remain, none of which are Fluffy-Snowball-Wigglesly-PinkNose-Kitty-Puppy-Princess.  None of which are even from my childhood.  For reasons that are beyond me, I still take them off my bed every night, and place them back on every morning.  I get mad when my dog tries to chew them.  I guard them like I guarded my Plush inner circle– back when they spent nights in my bed and days playing on my floor, instead.  And I named them, definitively.  Doris, a cheap, lightweight bunny with a pink bow, became mine the day my mother picked me up from the psych ward in seventh grade.  My mother pleaded me to squeeze her instead of cutting myself next time I felt overwhelmed.  Lion, with his bean butt and his tousled mane, sits center.  He was purchased by my mother as a surprise from a play we traveled all day by bus with her church to see.  He was the beginning of the end of my religion, and the end of the start of leaving home.  Moose-Moose, all white and wearing purple earmuffs, was given to me after that five-year-secret-relationship-with-that-guy-who-should-be-in-jail-because-he-is-14-years-my-senior ended.  My mother presented Moose-Moose to me as a consolation for the bruises on my arms, and as a hopeful re-institution of the teenage years I never had.

They spent most of their time in the bottom of my closet during my three years of marriage, while I took on someone else’s name.  When I got my name back, they got their place back, too.  And now, a bullmastiff named Butter joins them in the carrying the secrets and weight of what I can’t always hold on to at once.  They are a difficult crew to keep tagging along, but at least they are remembered because they are named.  That’s more than Fluffy-Snowball-Wigglesly-PinkNose-Kitty-Puppy-Princess ever got.

It is not so much what the name is, but the the remembering of the name.  The uneasiness of remembering names is the uneasiness of knowing something or someone so well.   We can group them and break them apart and reassemble them under a different blanket that is still as functional as the first:

Chair = Red Chair = Furniture.  And we sit in that comfortably.

But name the chair Harold, and suddenly our ears prick and the room becomes a little more confusing and full of this presence: Harold.

We know chairs.  Red ones and blue ones.  We’ve met comfortable ones and cold metal ones, but we’ve never met a Harold Chair before.  So we commit to remembering the parts of the chair that make it distinctly Harold.  And we wonder how many other chairs we have mistaken only as chairs.  We’ve spent all this time stereotyping and grouping, and now with Harold erupts chaos.

So we forget his name.  It’s easier.  And when we see him next, we can uncomfortably sit and squint our eyes and find a way to casually ask, “And what was your name again?”

But Harold won’t answer.  He’s only a chair.

The suspense of the final night divine begins at the first meandering piano plunks.  Behind every kind face is a growing anxiety, with stomach knots that raise like baking monkey bread and feel like Christmas fruitcake in April.  And, for the singer and the audience, there is no going back.  When O Holy Night begins, the sanctuary sways, the bricks that once held us in a small Western Pennsylvania town cease their hold and we are a ragtag crew beneath the well-meaning, but often ill-equipped captain.  The accompanist, mute in the crow’s nest, looks diligently ahead– the only one who can warn us of our impending future as the glacial freeze creeps up on every stained-glass apostle– and she is silent.  So are we.

By the time I was 10 years old, we had been let down by every willing-and-able old lady and young man in the congregation who attempted to swoon us with their rendition of O Holy Night.  That soaring, beautiful, climax of a tone remained in tact as the greatest myth in caroling history.  As the song rolled forward, we watched the sweat building on the forehead of our latest attempt, the panic permeating through the room as every radiator popped its sneer.  O night!  O shit—!

Sometimes they aborted mission altogether.  It was easy to tell whether this was premeditated, as their shoulders relaxed and their eyes communicated to each face, “It’s okay!  The waters are calm!  I, your fair-weather captain, will politely drop you off in exactly the place you find yourself now.”  But the sonic nutritional depletion that was met with a last second abandon left a freeze in the spine that rested squarely between the shoulders through the end of the sermon.  We were failed.  Brave is the one who dared us, shame on the one who spared us, the old congregational sea song goes.

As I remember it, we were required to outsource her.  It was a particular point of pride that she just-so-happened-to-be-related-to-me-somehow.  Cherie’ (said Sher-ee, like something fancy– not like the usual peasant names) entered into that December Sunday morning like a spring time songbird, nestling herself toward the front of the wood-and-paint sanctuary.  In my remembery, she was silent until she took stage, preserving this great gift– her personal mission to this congregation, who was starving for the final diviiiiiiiiine! as an octave– in tune, as it was written in the sacred hymnals and forever it shall be, Amen.

When sweet, kind, angel of God Cherie’ finished, every clogged spinal chill that remained from every other rendition released within those seafoam green walls.  Even the radiators remained silent in reverence.  It was true.  It could be done.  And we were the long-suffering, deck-swabbing witnesses.

I remained stunned through the sermon and the obligatory closing hymns.  I hated them.  I hated that these impossibly ungrateful beggars could themselves stand and pollute the soundscape with their haggard voices, after the miracle that had just come through and washed years of failure away.  Why was this woman not being hoisted onto our shoulders and marched around the building in a celebratory and accurate reenactment of Jericho?  Let these walls come down, for Godssake, for they will never again bear witness to the phenomenon we have heard today!

While the rest of them filed out and politely thanked her for her time and talents, I ran out of the building and to my family’s Barney-colored minivan.  What did I have to say to this holy presence, this sacred songstress?  What could I possibly tell a woman who has freed us from our enslavement of sour-note finales, Christmas season after Christmas season?

I replayed the performance as we made the short trek home.  Sometime after we got off of the new highway (it’s has been called the “new highway” since it was constructed sometime in the early 80’s), I heard an argument reaching its own finale.

“…but she’s being so loud!” my brother wailed.

“Leave her alone,” was my father’s reply.  “Let her sing.”

Let who sing? I thought.  That’s when I realized it.  I shut my mouth.  The operatic timbre that had been roaring in replay through my head stopped.  It was me!  I caught my father’s eyes in the rearview mirror, his ears raising from a smile.

“Keep going,” he said.

I was at the last divine.  This was the moment– mine.  Before I could lose momentum, I charged the octave with the ferocity of mother bear–

If I didn’t nail it, I must have blocked it out.  Either way, I’ve never had the gumption to do it again.  At least not in public.

My father’s look in the mirror is what I remember best.  Even Cherie’ and her eternal-praise-be-to-God performance has loose ends and creaking floorboards that have been lost in the account (forgive-me-for-I-have-sinned).  But his face is the face of someone who doesn’t understand, or understands better, and wants the thing– the thing!– that is happening to continue to happen uninhibited.  The restraint it must take for a forty-something father of four, with the yelling and bickering and bangs and bumps– the orchestra of unappreciated sounds and squabbles that come from the creatures you have made and you have raised– and above all of them to have the squealing 10-year-old belting in her best opera voice, inciting more angry mock opera voices from more of your spawn.

And then to respond with let her sing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I effing love Jesus.  Probably not in the way my mother wishes as she and my dad pray each night for my soul.  And not in a way that a good Catholic should.  Mostly because I am not Catholic.  In fact, as a kid, being Catholic was perhaps the second most obvious way to send yourself to Hell.  Premarital sex always trumped Catholicism.  Murder had a flexible You’re-Going-to-Hell placement based on intent and whether or not that guy was actually on your property when he was nailed by your hunting rifle with surprising accuracy.

Since I did not grow up in sin pits like LA or New York or Canada, I– like most others I knew– was raised on a healthy diet of meat loaf, potatoes, and praying before every meal.  Church was Sunday, Sunday night, Wednesday, and sometimes an extra Friday night youth rally or Saturday morning getting-volunteered-to-volunteer.  Throw in Vacation Bible Schools, church camps, a father as an elder, and a mother who was not only in choir and the children’s leader, but a minor in-church celebrity with her quirky no shoes policy and expert church dinner culinary concoctions.  Halos hovered just above my mother’s casseroles and pies and the things we called salads (but were actually made from Jell-O and marshmallows and pretzels) at congregational potlucks, with every seething old biddy internally trading her salvation for that recipe.

The familiarity was thrilling:  the thick red carpets, the stained glass windows that turned my hands black when I swiped them, the heavy wooden doors that stood between myself and the important men who would decide important things like what color the hymnals should be.  But the best of these church-hold items were those gilded-and-framed portraits of Jesus: Golden Jesus with the dazed and distant blue eyes, Jesus-Loves-to-Fish on a boat with his pals, Jesus-Loves-Animals with his sheep and goats and children.  This was fantastic!  I love animals!  I love to fish with my friends!  I love to gaze out of frame for hours on end thinking!  Except for his historically accurate blue eyes to my brown eyes, Jesus and I were practically the same.  And, as I dutifully learned, this dude could go anywhere with me.  In fact, he was currently sitting beside me, my teachers explained.  So I took to the habit of putting him in my pocket and taking him home.

Having my own personal Jesus caused a little guilt.  Certainly, as I learned in evening slide show presentations by visiting missionaries, there were more deserving and needy children out there who could use a pick-me-up from my holy hang-around.  So when I sensed Jesus was tired of playing the mom in our game of house, I– as the dutiful head of the imaginary household– released him to Africa or Haiti or Jamaica, telling him to return around bedtime before my apocalyptic nightmares set in.  He would spend time playing cards with the untouchable Father in Heaven while I finished up homework, and politely waited to be invited on my long walks in the woods where we would uncover secret treasures that he himself planted under mosses and inside rotting tree stumps.

When my friends would talk about their own personal time with Jesus, I would smile kindly and nod, but I pitied them.  These poor, delusional kids with their emotions running wild, mistaking the rustle of leaves for Jesus himself.  I didn’t doubt it was something holy, sure.  Maybe an angel or Father God or one of the less personable types that spent their time on clouds and stars and authorized modern day prophets to rewrite the Bible to accommodate new archaeological discoveries.  Jesus was mine, bitches.

Just as I was conditioned, I grew into my teen years with the religious zeal of a fiery prophetess, taking every Sunday morning to plead guilty and make promises to work harder.  Not even the wandering hand of that 30-year-old worship leader to my 15-year-old body could sway my eyes-on-the-heavenly-prize.  Not even the sexual manipulation of that blonde-haired-blue-eyed-Christ-complex pastor’s kid who took his father’s hatred of women as a divine example could push this 19-year-old gal from the straight and narrow.  Nope.  There were still sunsets that blazed just as I happened to be driving into them, and exactly one of my favorite donuts left with no one in the house to contend with, which meant Jesus was still loud and proud to be my fan.  And there were golden mansions and silver lakes waiting for me if I just kept believing in those sunsets.

Somewhere after college graduation, in the midst of picking up smoking and learning to take my whiskey neat and a failed marriage before the age of 30 and the awareness of the general sexism that exists in the church and reading books that weren’t my Bible, I did stop believing in sunsets.  It was probably the cigarettes.  But I didn’t stop believing in everything.

On an evening last year as I was entering a friend’s house to escape my own one-bedroom-complete-with-a-screaming-husband home, I had packed an extra set of clothes and some breakfast fruit on the off chance that I would be stuck sleeping in my car again before work.  As I was removing the grapefruit and mango from my oversized purse, I realized they had landed themselves precisely in the cups of my bra.  There are few things more cosmically and comically arranged than the old fruit-in-a-bra.

When my surprise turned to delight, and my delight to everyone’s attention, I argued the moon and the sky for the odds of this happening to me.  This is when my favorite Irish-Catholic-turned-maybe-athiest-punk-music-loving-Jameson-drinking-softy-of-a-guy friend shook his head and said, “I sincerely believe that you believe that the universe has set up these fun, quirky situations that were created just for you.”

It never occurred to me to think otherwise.  Years of Jesus-is-Mine had conditioned me.  So I began keeping a log of those fun, quirky situations to prove to my obstinate friend that the universe– while it does not revolve around me– takes special delight in my delight.  Or something in the universe does.  Like how I find a penny every day.  Or the light that comes under my door at exactly the time I need to be awake.  Or getting a package from a friend at the end of a long day of waiting in a jail for my now-ex-husband to be released.  20’s of red birds who plant themselves in my tree.  A herd of elephants marching downtown Nashville.

And, my favorite, the Jesus pictures.  I’m not sure what they mean, or what I even really think of the religion.  I haven’t been to church willingly or without trying to please my mother in over two years.  In fact, most of the time, I feel like I’m going to vomit the moment the sanctified pulpit dust hits my nose.  But each of my journals have a designated page for these photos of Jesus that end up in my path.  I tape them in and give them names.  There’s Bob Marley Jesus and Check This Shit Out Jesus and Jesus H. Christ and Whoa! Back This Train Up! Jesus.  I don’t talk to them or play house.  I don’t really pray or feel guilty.  But for all those years that Jesus took special interest in me, the least I can do is take a little delight in his varied face popping up in unlikely situations.

 

 

There is a side effect to never locking your doors in Western Pennsylvania.  It is a common condition, and often incurable while remaining in those few county perimeters.  When the business of others is accessible with the simple twist of a knob, you can turn yourself nebby in 2 seconds flat.  Variations of this include becoming a nebnose, a busybody, or– on particularly difficult cases– a nebshit.  Outsiders often comprehend the term as gossip; but there is a finesse and a furrow of the eyebrows that will land you in the true and unsavory condition of nebby.

As a kid on a compound of family members, where each house was built by two generations past on the backs of horses and grandfathers and great uncles, nebby just meant that Grandma dropped in during dinner to make gagging sounds at the plate of bacon in the middle of the table.  Nebby also meant that an afternoon could go from playing on bulldozers and train tracks alone to Pap Pap pulling up in his blue Chevy ready to take you downtown to the soundtrack of Johnny Horton and Dwight Yoakam.  And nebby also meant that all of Pap Pap’s friends would ask you more questions than you had time to answer and give you Chinese finger traps and tell so-and-so’s secrets in low tones when they think you can’t hear them while your fingers are stuck in paper.

Never locking your doors on our compound would also welcome a blonde-haired, brown eyed kid, who was often already talking before she even turned that knob.  And every house had its assortment of familiar treats, that– though she was taught better than to ask– would inevitably end up in the hands and belly of this doe-eyed, tan lined girl.

In a choose-your-own-adventure sort of way, much of after school and summer was spent passing through other people’s doors.  Grandma Graham’s house in back meant sliced pickles, TV shows mom didn’t let us watch, candy dishes that rotated among gum drops, homemade hard tack, and peppermints, and the faint smell of scratch made dumplings.  Great Uncle Paul’s place was least frequented, as the overwhelming smell of tomatoes and chewing tobacco was enough to curl a kid’s toes backwards.  The candy selection was often anise inspired, anyway, and a few vegetables from his enormous garden.  Great Aunt Mildred and Uncle Pete– the ones still there alive and well and in their original home since the start– always requires a quick knock.  But only for the distinct pleasure of hearing Uncle Pete call out, “Hallo! Come in! Nobody here but us chickens!”  And then the rewards are long stories and the only jokes I can remember and cookies so good that, even the mention of his name, will cause locals to begin salivating at his master selection of lady lox and buckeyes and nut horns.

Cancer teaches some people to lock their doors.  At least when Grandma Graham gets cancer.  Maybe it’s to keep death out.  Maybe it’s to keep the disease in.  And with locked doors come hushed tones, and the hushed tones are whispering change for those that stand closest to the locked doors.  Grandma’s locked door told me to go find one that was open, and being just a kid, I found that Aunt Mildred’s door-next-door could occupy me for the time being until Grandma’s door reopened.

The smell of death seeps into some people like a peaty old Scotch: it changes them, makes them draw hard lines and form allegiances in secret back rooms with stale thick air.  And when they leave these rooms, they enter the daytime with the smoke still burning their eyes, and booze still tilting their brains, and find nothing but enemies for miles as they squint down the sidewalk.  I was the one waiting outside the small back room door when my older sister stumbled out and told me I had betrayed our grandmother by spending my days in Aunt Mildred’s house, that I was the least grateful of all of her grandchildren and that she didn’t want to see me, anymore.

Every door grew a large question mark in the shape of a knocker that day.

It doesn’t last forever, the door locking.  In North Carolina, where I lived two years in a post-college-sort-of-commune, I learned that locking my door meant missing out on the joke.  It could mean leaving out the one person who also learned to be scared of closed doors.  When you walk in, or allow someone to walk in, it decides that formality is a waste of time and let-me-get-you-a-drink-how-are-you-really-doing?  There are more easy-breathing ways of keeping death out.  Likely, those ways won’t work either, but it’s better than fermenting behind those latches.

Maybe knocking isn’t such a bad thing, either.  Practically speaking, I’ve likely discouraged many-a-burglar with this novel tactic.  And if I knock, there’s always that special idea that someone from the other side could holler, “Come in!  Nobody here but us chickens.”

 

 

I wasn’t raised to believe in none of that hippie dippie shit.  Recycling was as far as it went.  And treating our dogs humanely.  And occasionally hearing my mom sing “Give Peace a Chance,” except replacing “peace” with “peas” before serving them up for dinner.  A rifle rested next to my parents’ bed for the ease of shooting groundhogs from the bedroom window, and all the area school districts didn’t bother holding session on the first day of deer season for lack of attendance.  By the time I was in high school, my mother had burgered, steaked, sweet & soured, stir fried, chili-ed, and kabobbed venison with the mastery of Van Gogh– if Van Gogh only had one paintbrush.  And the paintbrush was made from dead deer.

I learned to be a closet tree hugger too late, and was harassed accordingly.  My Great Aunt Mildred loves to sum up my bleeding heart condition by telling every boy I bring home about the time my father shot the baby rabbits on the property, to which my 6-year-old self cried, “How would you feel if someone shot your babies?!”  My flare for the dramatic didn’t help my cause, and my pleas were ineffective.  So I stopped.  And then things got weird.

Maybe it was the over viewing of Pocahontas, being the youngest of four with siblings who equated the idea of playing with me to eating their brussel sprouts, and spending nearly every weekend at a cabin on 80 acres of land and not a TV for miles.  All that time in the woods can make any kid into a supernatural being who can communicate across time and space to the creatures that once inhabited the dead carcasses I came across.  And there were always dead carcasses.

If I had to live in a world where a deer head was being hauled back home in the same vehicle as my library books, hung on the same backyard maple branch I climbed, and put in my stomach in a matter of days, the least I could do is try and explain this very complicated matter to the glazed, unseeing brown eyes of the slain.

I began dutifully watching early in the process, as animals were hung by their necks and slit longways, seeing, as my dad affectionately calls them, “the gut bag of a deer” fall on the ground.  I pet their heads and asked them if they heard the one about the three guys who were going to the desert, touching their sides in hopes of still feeling them warm.  I waited by the window to see signs of the blaze orange coats coming back around lunch time, and met my dad in the back woods ready for service.  I learned to pierce the breast of a grouse without cutting the meat, and stick my fingers through to pull apart the feathered skin with a small popping sound, revealing the bright, shiny pink and white future New Year’s Eve dinner.  And before we threw the rest of the deflated bird, I would take its little head between my fingers and stroke its cheeks and tell her she did everything she could.  But I would never be part of the hunt.

There is a slight possibility I developed a teensy, unhealthy obsession with dead things, I’m sure my future therapist will tell me.

Something unmistakably otherworldly happened for me in those moments: getting to look at something so close, that was moments ago breathing and romping in the same woods I do, and have it not move or stare back or make me feel stupid for staring.  To get to cuddle the things you ordinarily can’t touch, or even look at, as long as I want.  And to believe that I was communicating in a language no one else could hear, and that these creatures were hearing it and appreciating it and taking it with them to the other side, where they’ll build an animal kingdom that I’ll find when I pass through, too, and they’ll greet me with high hooves and feathers and throw a raucous party where we all eat acorns that taste like butterscotch and speak the same language.

It’s easy to believe the best in creatures when they don’t talk back.

I gave up the ghosts, eventually.  I learned to shoot guns just like everyone else, added bacon to my burgers, and even feigned a brief interest in getting my hunting license.  It’s my heritage, after all.  It didn’t occur to me to become vegetarian until my mid twenties, and even then, it was for health over the love of animals.

Still, there is something about a dead robin on the sidewalk that will give me the same sad-happy nostalgia.  And just for good measure, I wish it well.  I would hate to neglect my future welcome wagon.