Something happens when your husband has a week-long business trip the same week that your boss is on vacation. That thing is called NOT BLOGGING.
More next week!
"See? There are the angel wings."
She gestured to two white marks stretching out from either side of the back door where the fire bit the house.
They woke to smoke. Within five minutes, they were all outside and there was no going back in. Not for the twenty-five years of original scores written by her musician husband. Not for photos or flowers or mementos. The windows exploded as their neighbors banged on the house, yelling for them to get out.
She told us the story as we picked our way through the gutted house, stepping gingerly over caution tape pasted over holes showing us the basement below. I tried not to look down, my arm curling protectively around my daughter as she, too, avoided seeing how little floor it takes to hold up a person.
The woman showed us the path of the fire, how it darkened the beams on either side of the untouched bookshelf housing her husband's musical scores, the wood still white and the only stick of furniture left in the house. It reminded me of the story I heard in my twenties of a woman who'd come upon my grandfather after his fatal car wreck and laid her hands on his chest and told him it was okay to go right before he died. That feeling of a record scratching somewhere out beyond Saturn, out where things get decided, far from us.
We'd come at the request of a friend, who told us about the fire and asked us to come help transplant the flowers from the side of the house to the back so they wouldn't be lost in the rebuild. The fire was set by kids playing a prank that went way out of hand. Not an accident.
The fact that everyone inside the house lived is nothing less than a miracle.
We were there for two hours, a little piece of a glorious fall Sunday afternoon. We started out mostly strangers, a group cobbled together from my friend's various social circles. I found myself discussing parenting with one of the other moms as we dug up hostas from a sidewalk we'd never seen before.
The woman showed us her wedding dress that had somehow received only smoke damage despite the line of fire on all sides. She said she wasn't that sentimental about her dress, but there was no logic behind why it was spared except for God just showing off.
I asked about the kids. I think it will be hardest for them.
She was giving one of the beds to someone else who was starting over with nothing. Starting over with nothing is the story I heard from a new acquaintance a few weeks ago at lunch, a woman who told me about her old house with a marble floor a short jaunt from New York City, how quickly it had been lost in the collapse. How she'd been on the trading floor that day.
You hear a lot of stories about what was lost, but not as many about what was spared. I was touched by the hope and faith in the voice of the woman whose house stood before me, a black shell of what it had been. A house I've probably driven past hundreds of times, located as it was in my old neighborhood. Her life and mine probably never would have intersected, but it did, and because it did, my family and I saw the power of acknowledging what was spared. We transplanted twenty or so plants out of the path of the machinery that will rebuild the family's house from the bottom up. My daughter played in a treehouse outgrown by the woman's adult children and black like the main house with smoke damage. As we pushed our wheelbarrow in the narrow gap between city houses, the broken glass from the windows sparkled like mosaics in the dirt, like they'd been put there on purpose.
Transplanting the flowers let us focus on what was spared. My new friend told me her favorite grandmother's name was Rita. As we prepared to leave, I passed out bottled water that we bought weeks before even though we never buy bottled water, and people I'd never met before nodded their thanks.
We left happy that we'd come and aware of how differently that story could have ended.
The winner of my Rafflecopter giveaway is Rachel Spring! Congratulations, Rachel! I will be in touch! Thanks to everyone who participated in the YA Scavenger Hunt. I thought it was really fun.
"Mama?"
"Mmmm-hmmmm?"
<insert question I didn't listen to>
"Mama?"
"Mmmmm-hmmmm?"
"How come every time you're not really listening to me you say 'mmmm-hmmmm?'"
"Because right now I'm trying to manage my emotions."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm mad about something, but it doesn't do anyone any good for me to be mad, and I can't change the problem by being mad about it, so I'm trying to just process the mad so it will go away. It's okay for me to feel mad but not to act on it. Do you ever feel that way?"
"You mean like when I got mad about Tiny? And then you got mad at me for acting mad?"
Yup, exactly, kid. Modeling desired behavior fucking sucks.
Perhaps we should've gone earlier, or not at all. Every year since she was tall enough to ride The Octopus, we've taken the little angel to Worlds of Fun for roller coasters and barker games. She's nearly fearless when it comes to eye-popping drops that scare adults. But we never went after the Halloween decorations went up before.
The little angel didn't make it through the first Harry Potter book or The Lord of the Rings movie. She was existentially scarred by a P!nk video. I thought we could detour around most of the scary stuff at Worlds of Fun, but at one point we exited a coaster into a brightly lit area with resting fog machines and extinguished strobe lights ... And baby dolls splashed with red. She saw them before I directed her to look at the cement while I led her through it. She couldn't look at the scary part at one-tenth intensity.
She heard the theme song from Dr. Demento while eating dipping dots by The Mamba, her favorite roller coaster.
They're coming to take me away, ha ha!
I'd never heard it before, but I hated it. It's a little chilling, especially when you're aware of very real mental illness. She mentioned several times how scary that song was, and inside, I agreed. I take no pleasure in imagining losing my mind.
She wanted to play the game where she won Tiny the giant gorilla last year. We had to set Tiny out for the trash man after the room in the basement where he was flooded, and he got saturated. There was no choice. He would've molded. I think in her head all she had to do was get back to that game and play again, even though the game is so impossible that the only prizes available are taller than a kindergartner, even though it was a fluke of life she won the first time.
After her first round, she cried. I'd given her a budget and she blew through it in ten minutes, the last few throws as reckless as a sports fan up too late in Vegas, playing the spread with the mortgage. When it was over, I saw on her face how very hard this reality was to stomach, like when she found her baby teeth in my closet and buried her head in my shoulder at the loss of the Tooth Fairy.
She cried for a long time, tried to blame me for the loss off Tiny, for her inability to win another, making us that family fighting in public. We shut her down, and it was a long and silent ride home.
She couldn't get to sleep for an hour and a half tonight. She appeared downstairs and asked for my help. As I smoothed her hair, she told me she kept seeing those baby dolls, but it wasn't just the dolls. It's how hard it is to grow up. To love the coasters and be scared of clowns with sharp teeth. To want to dress up but jump at things that spring out at costume shops. To ask yourself, as I see her asking herself, if you should be able to hack this stuff now and knowing in your heart the answer is "no." I know because I keep asking myself the same thing as we careen around this corner of childhood and see adolescence as the next exit on the freeway.
I told her to imagine touching the creepy dolls when they popped into her thoughts like she does the games she plays. Imagine them turning into kittens when she touched them. I am running out of tricks as she gets older and begins to see things I can't explain away. Sometimes people do things that are ugly. Sometimes you see a trailer for a scary show while you're watching something innocuous. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, you run out of money without winning a giant gorilla. I can't change that.
"What if I run out of kittens?" She asked, tossing and turning as the sheets twisted around her sweaty face. It's that weird, in-between season when it's too cool for fans and too hot for blankets.
"You can never run out of kittens," I said. "Haven't you ever seen the Internet?"
It took another half hour before she finally fell asleep, but she didn't say anything more. I lay there, waiting for her to find peace in sleep and hoping I was doing it all right.
But I watched it anyway. Best six minutes of my day.
The days float past quickly, benignly. I am bored without being bored. It's not the painful boredom of childhood but the foggier boredom of a hospital stay. I try to tell people what happened in my day, but nothing is really that important, and rehashing it feels unnecessary. It was a day. Pleasant. Nice weather. Yes. I think about watching television, but most television is stupid, and only when I am truly bored does this knowledge really bother me. I look at the covers of magazines when I go to pick up my prescription and know the angle and ending of every article without turning the pages. It's all so predictable. Maybe this is aging? It doesn't hurt so much as annoy me. I binge book after book looking for a new ending. For a surprise.
I am not sad about the boredom, because I know it will end soon. I can remember spending periods like this in my past, and they never last long. I can feel myself floating in it, this nothing-space, when I don't have much to contribute nor do I feel the need to take much in. My days are like the end of a Prince song, or the laser part of a Grateful Dead show, when you realize twenty minutes in that holy shit, it has been twenty minutes and I've just been standing here staring at that tree.
I leave my house only when necessary. I jog the same routes and realize as I'm coming back up my driveway I barely remember turning around at the halfway point. I find myself walking around my kitchen, shuffling items until they slot back in their proper places. We are hovering, the house and I, waiting for something to change. The leaves, maybe, or my mind. Until then, paused.
I wrote about something that almost happened today that would've changed my whole world.
The billboard flashed by from the side of the road as I struggled with the glare of a dusty summer and using leftover diaper wipes on the inside windshield of a top-down aging convertible.
CHIEFS.
There is a guy I pass sometimes while jogging in my neighborhood with silver on his temples. He runs wind sprints up this hill in a way that makes me wonder if he didn't used to play.
CHIEFS.
He waves at me as I shorten my strides to get up the hill without walking. He's nice.
CHIEFS.
I've never played bat or ball sports. I don't know what that feels like, though I've competed in nerdier capacities. But the things I've competed in have always been very nebulous and subjective. No clear right or wrong.
In the instant when that billboard flashed by, it occurred to me people like sports because it's always so clear, the rules.
There might be bad calls, but there is a right way to pull a lay-up, a right way to clear a hurdle, a right way to achieve first and ten. Not like Syria. Not like healthcare. Not like how to stop the increasing gaps between the haves and have nots.
Instead, there is Sunday afternoon.
CHIEFS.
Someone wins, someone loses, and there are rule-based reasons why. In a world with only the haziest of bottom-line driven boundaries, there are brackets.
In brackets, we can feel safe.
In tailgates, we can identify with our communities without worrying whether we share politics.
Sports are the last bastion of black and white in a global world.
I get it. I bought Beloved tickets to the US vs. Jamaica in soccer this October, partly because he's turning 40 and loves soccer, and partly because it might feel refreshing to cheer GO USA without there being a war attached that I don't agree with and can't support.
I've spent my whole life not getting it. But the world has always been ethically complicated, and it's taken me until my fortieth year on this planet to realize how strong the temptation is to turn my head and run wind sprints up the hill. I think that neighbor of mine used to play. I may not like the game, but maybe I'm starting to understand the need to watch.
CHIEFS.
Don't even get me started on the origin of that name. It's a post for another day.
If you are currently participating in the YA Scavenger Hunt, my page is located here.
In a few weeks, I'm going to be participating in my first ever YA scavenger hunt with sixty other young adult authors. Each of us is offering a book, so you could essentially win an entire young adult library doing this thing. Here's the explanation from the organizer, author Colleen Houck:
I'm very exited to reveal to you the 60, count 'em 60 authors that will be featured on the Fall 2013 YA Scavenger Hunt! That means that not only do you get access to exclusive bonus material from each one, and a chance to enter so many contests that it will blow your mind, but there is also an opportunity to win an entire library shelf full of books because each author will be giving away one featured book as a prize. -
Here's the line-up:
THE BLUE TEAM
ANN AGUIRRE
AMBER ARGYLE
ANNA CAREY
SHELLEY CORIELL
KIMBERLY DERTING
TARA FULLER
CLAUDIA GRAY
TERI HARMAN
KAY HONEYMAN
AMALIE HOWARD
SOPHIE JORDAN
ALEX LONDON
DAWN METCALF
ELIZABETH NORRIS
KATHLEEN PEACOCK
KIM BACCELLIA
CARRIE RYAN
JESSICA SHIRVINGTON
APRIL GENEVIEVE TUCHOLKE
JILL WILLIAMSON
_______________________________
THE RED TEAM
GENNIFER ALBIN
GWENDA BOND
RACHEL CARTER
JULIE CROSS
DEBRA DRIZA
MICHELLE GAGNON
SHAUNTA GRIMES
RACHEL HARRIS
P.J. HOOVER
TARA HUDSON
JESSICA KHOURY
KATHERINE LONGSHORE
PAGE MORGAN
AMY CHRISTINE PARKER
AMY PLUM
C. J. REDWINE
OLIVIA SAMMS
J. A. SOUDERS
CORINA VACCO
SUSANNE WINNACKER
_______________________________
GOLD TEAM
RITA ARENS
JESSICA BRODY
TERA LYNN CHILDS
TRACY DEEBS
SARAH BETH DURST
COLE GIBSEN
CYNTHIA HAND
LEANNA RENEE HIEBER
COLLEEN HOUCK
MICHELE JAFFE
SUZANNE LAZEAR
MINDY MCGINNIS
LEA NOLAN
FIONA PAUL
LISSA PRICE
GINA ROSATI
VICTORIA SCOTT
ELIZA TILTON
MELISSA WEST
TRISHA WOLFE
I'm still familiarizing myself with how this works, but it's going to be really cool. It runs from October 3-6. I'll be preparing some bonus material for THE OBVIOUS GAME, as will the other authors, and I'll run a giveaway here as well as the main one. Lots of fun! I can't wait to read some of these other books, too.
I'll use this URL and update this post and push it up to the top when more info is available, so if you want to participate, you can bookmark this page. More soon!
DJ Nibbles loves YA.