The familiar crash, rattle, bounce of the bus as it hit a pothole on the New Jersey Turnpike was like music to my ears -- even as it jostled me awake from a surprisingly deep sleep. I was wedged awkwardly in my own makeshift seat, sitting backwards with my behind resting on the equipment case I was using for a suitcase. My legs were splayed wildly – one resting on the edge of the seat where the draft from the window had frozen it numb and the other stuck precariously in the division between the two seats. My shoulders were trapped beneath the reclined seatback in front of us and the cold interior of the bus. Nestled safely in a mess of blankets and sweatshirts was Natalia. She startled, throwing out all four limbs and letting out the tiniest murmur of a cry before resuming her sleep. The rest of the bus shifted and muttered a moment before, like my baby, settling back to sleep. But I was awake, recognizing something in the darkness outside the bus, something that told me for sure that I was almost home.
I allowed myself to doze in and out of sleep, imagining that I was on the band bus coming home from some gig or another, awake while the boys slept off the booze and the music and the thrill of the crowds. The smell of beer, sweat, and cigarettes would hang like clouds in the air, wafts of it passing by me like the occasional smell of the ocean off the shore. I breathed in deeply, trying to smell that smell again. by Lonely Acrobat | (0) commentIt was warm and dark, with red and gold patterns of light swirling around me like flames as I drifted aimlessly, turning and swirling in an ethereal spa. Sounds, muffled and distant, swam before my bleary eyes as well, in waves of purples and greens. There was nothing to contemplate, nothing to do except open my eyes and close them again, breathe in the warmth around me, and drift.
I think being born must have felt like drowning. Being sucked down deeper and deeper, farther away from every place I’d known, away from the safety and serenity of that peaceful place. No way to run, no way to fight, only to struggle haplessly until I was out in the cold, cut loose – all that air threatening to smother me.
You’d have to grab onto something pretty fast to survive such a thing, probably the first thing you could get – a piece of cloth, a gloved finger, a warm breast. Anything to endure the relentless pull of all that space threatening to suck you deeper still. I don’t know what I grabbed onto during my first days of life. Whatever it was, it must have turned to vapor in my small, wrinkly hand, because the next time I opened my eyes I was lying in my brothers quivering arms, hanging on for dear life.
by Lonely Acrobat | (0) commentWhen a baby is born it doesn't know who it is. Or what it is, or even that it is. It will have to wait, until it figures out a few things about the world and about other people and about itself before it can finally know the answer. I think that takes a long time for a lot of people, though some figure things out sooner than others, like me. It can become an odyssey full of twists and turns, red herrings, missed opportunities, villains and heroes, but ultimately events so unexpected yet so significant that it seems I should be able to halt the world's turning and establish, right then and there, at that very, very moment, that I AM. Yet those moments have come and gone enough. If I have learned nothing else about myself during this journey from heaven to hell and back again, I do know that I am equally ineffective at making the world stop and take notice of my life as I am at making sense of my life myself.
"I am, I said." Neil Diamond said that in a bad pop song years ago.
"I am I said.
"To no one there
" And no one heard at all,"
and in the next line he took a dive because he would have to find a phrase that had six distinct beats and ended with a rhyme for "there" because that's the way Neil Diamond defines himself as a song writer. And that's another thing -- while Neil Diamond and his many devoted fans may have chosen to define him that way, is that really who he is? Is that all he is? Can any one of us be reduced to a single word or phrase or title?
And how this ended up being about Neil Diamond is beyond me. I can't stand that stuff.
by Lonely Acrobat | (3) commentIt was lucky for me that Jimmy’s movie club order arrived on the same day that I got the letter. The mailman rang the doorbell and I opened it, wiping my hands on my apron. He put the mail right into my hands. I saw the envelope immediately. It was right on top of the stack, addressed in simple block letters written in plain blue ink. My mother must have thought that a non-descript letter had a chance of slipping past Jimmy’s inspection. It wouldn't have, but for once that wouldn't matter.
Two year old Sandy had followed me to get in on the excitement. While she flirted with the mailman from behind my leg I slipped that precious envelope into my apron pocket. Sandy would remember this rare visit from the mailman, but not the envelope on top of the box. For good measure, I called Jack to come see the mail truck. I would need witnesses.
by Lonely Acrobat | (0) comment
On Sunday afternoons when I was small. my father would take my brother Gary bowling. Mom would fall asleep on the couch with the newspaper in her lap -- her head tilting back unnaturally, mouth open and snoring -- and I would lie on the floor in the patch of sun that blared through the picture window as the sun moved down across the sky. Sometimes I read the funny papers, sometimes I found an old movie on TV, but the day I’m thinking about right now, as I lie here like my 8 year old self – curled with my knees to my chest, one arm crooked under my head, I held a dog-eared copy of A Field Guide to Birds against the hardwood floor, a pen hovering over a notebook in the other.
It was a nickel tablet my mother had bought me at the grocery store. I had been meticulously taking notes from the "birds of prey" section, writing down all the facts I thought were important. The sun felt warm against my back and I was fighting the urge to doze off. My face had fallen closer and closer to the book as I drowsed, putting me nose to beak with a sharp-shinned hawk. I was letting my eyes go in and out of focus and contemplating the way the light glared off the shiny pages when the doorbell rang, which had never happened on a Sunday afternoon before. Startled, I jumped and whacked my head on the edge of the coffee table. My mother snorted.“Look out, Rubes,” she said as she heaved herself noisily to her feet. The doorbell rang again. “And get the damn door, wouldja?”“Mo-om!” I protested, “I’m reading!”
With a frustrated sigh she sent the newspaper fluttering all over me. “For crying out loud, Ruby,” she said as she stomped to the door. The door opened and I heard somebody speak, then everything went quiet. Totally quiet.
Barely breathing, I peaked under the coffee table. I remember feeling like a spy h by Lonely Acrobat | (5) comment
It is my house now. And as I look upon it today, for the first time since I watched it vanish behind through the rear window of a police car ten years ago, it is at once as familiar as it is strange, as comforting as it is haunting. Abandoned and empty, the shrubbery around it has grown unchecked, blocking the lower windows in shapeless mounds. A single vine coils itself neatly up the clapboards to the roof, which has buckled and sagged, leaving the house looking strangely like a masked bandit. The woods where we used to shoot at squirrels and tin cans have closed in on the modest house like arms sucking it deeper into the darkness. I’m wondering what is left in there of my life, of my family. It is my house now. Starting today its fate is in my hands.
Stepping out of the feral landscape, I pick three burrs out of my pants and reflexively brush down my legs, though there is nothing to remove. The cement stoop seems solid, but I lose my footing somehow and grab for the railing that isn’t there anymore. Instead I catch a sturdy but thorny vine. Regaining my balance, I let my eyes follow the vine down to into the overgrowth where a pink flower is trying to bloom, then back up again and around as it wound it’s way through the dense shrubbery, covered in buds. My mother planted a rosebush when I was a child. For all the attention she lavished on it every summer she’d never gotten more than a rose or two and the bush had sat there looking exposed and pathetic. Now here it was growing wild and leggy out of the wreckage. I reach for the doorknob but stop to bring my hand to my mouth and suck off the blood. I wipe my hands on my jeans, pressing my thumb into the spot that won’t stop bleeding. A dog barks behind me and I turn to see my old neighborhood spread out in front of me. The McEwen’s house across the street boasting a new family room over the gara by Lonely Acrobat | (2) comment