Rocket Off!

It lived many lives.  At the jewelry store, my grandfather picked it out for my grandmother (she was dating someone else when they met, but Pop-Pop stole her away).  In 1943 they married.  In Brooklyn the family flourished as four completely different children filled their adult lives along with law and teaching, alumni sports, and eventually grandchildren.  Their love story slowed, but did not end, in 1984 when pancreatic cancer quickly claimed my grandmother.  Claire.  From 1984 to 2004, Pop-Pop stayed in the house alone, heartbroken, still dusting notes tucked in the sides of mirrors.  “My Dear Claire,” they all began, and “XOXOXO” they all ended.

In 2001, my cousin Chris used the ring to promise a lifetime of love and family to his girlfriend.  It was reborn in the personalization: “To Sarah, Love Chris 2001.”  Their wedding was beautiful; their marriage was not.  She reluctantly parted with the ring after the separation.  Aunt Mary, Chris’s mother and Grandma and Pop-Pop’s only daughter, became the ring-guarder once again.  Her notions of her sons using it in the distance, it was tucked away for years in a keepsake box.

Pop-Pop started to deteriorate mentally in 2003.  A slow decline, I think his brain finally broke as his heart did so many years ago.  Everyone knows that Pop-Pop ended all phone calls by saying, “Kisses!” and smooching the receiver.  Towards the end, he would forget that he had already done this, so he would repeat the declaration and kissing sounds over and over again, and the caller would be showered with affection before hanging up.

When he died a little over a year ago, it was twenty minutes after I left the room.  He was a consummate gentleman until the sad end.  Returning the next day to support my father in managing the services and his grief, my aunt pulled me aside and placed the ring in my palm.  I could not find words.

The ring is not modern in style.  The center of the ring features a half-carat round-cut diamond.  There is a chip in the diamond; only my grandmother had the strength to damage the hardest natural substance known to humankind.  It is held in place by soft claws that reach over each of the four corners.  When viewed from the side, it reminds me of the Chrysler Building.  Extending out from the center are three diamond chips beaded into place on both sides.  It is a modest ring, but it has more character than the popular rings today.  That my grandfather chose this ring for her meant that he knew her.  He knew what she liked and didn’t like, and he sought to please her with both the proposal and his acute ability to pick out a ring that suited her perfectly.

And it was perfect.  Except it didn’t fit my finger.  And it still had the engraving of the wedding past.  I married my husband in 2004, so my ring finger was already adorned with a simple band and engagement ring.  Should I wear this new treasure around my neck?  Should I keep it in my jewelry box and save it for one of my children?  Should I take the existing diamonds out and fit them onto my ring?  None of these options seemed to honor the memory of the love that brought the ring into our family, so I brought it to the jeweler uptown with a new plan for an old ring.

My grandfather’s last words were “I love everyone.”  He professed this before he went silent.  His eyes were closed for days so he could not discern the depressed place he was living in, a pit stop before hospice.  “I love everyone,” he said, and I believe him.

I had the ring resized to fit my ring finger.  My wedding band is surrounded by promises of love, as I wear it between the ring my husband gave me and the ring my family gave me.  The engraving now reads, “Kisses.”  A bit ostentatious, I don’t mind the curious looks people give my now-heavier left hand.  It gives me a chance to tell them about my Grandma and Pop-Pop, their lives together, and his legacy of absolute affection.

 1986

“Writing is not an amusing occupation.  It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth.  It may be…absorbing…racking, relieving.  But amusing? Never!”

–Edna Ferber

I was six years old when I got my first diary.  It was from G Willikers, the ultimate gift store for a girl between six and twelve years old.  My name was hand-written on the clear plastic bag, and purple and yellow tissue paper exploded out of the top, a visual promise of an incredible, life-changing present.  My visions of filling it with daily musings dizzied me with glee and I carried it around during the rest of my birthday party, clutching it to my chest in a hopeful embrace.

That night I opened it, the plastic crackling as the blank pages fanned out before me.  “Dear Diary,” I began.  I wrote briefly about my birthday party and then stopped.  What else was there to write about?  Nothing good—there were things I could write about, but they weren’t things I wanted to remind myself of as I aged.  They would not induce knee-slapping laughter or gentle smiles later in life.  Still, there had to be something …

Mildly aware that my only audience was my future self, I struggled with who “Diary” was and the purpose of recording what I not uncynically perceived to be a relatively monotonous life.  I was not connected to why I was writing or what difference it made.  The whole process felt fake, and given how excited I was to write, I was crushed.  After two days, I quit completely, unnerved by a self-imposed notion that to be a writer, I should at least be able to write in my diary every day without problem or complaint.  My first of many failures.  I hated writing.

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1986

“Writing comes more easily if you have something to say.”  –Sholem Asch

Something happened between the day I started hating writing and the day I decided to go back to it.  I was in kindergarten and we were asked to write and draw about dinosaurs.  I was hesitant to touch pencil to paper after my dramatic failure three months previous, but this time I had a decent catalog of facts and phrases from intense self-initiated study at home.  I drafted the piece, writing from an excess of knowledge and images.  We rewrote the pieces on special paper and our teacher, Ms. McElwin, mounted them on construction paper and bound them by hand in a book.  She read them aloud as we sat, mouths agape and rapt with attention, on the meeting rug, and she placed them securely on her desk for our parents to peruse on conference night.  It was official.  I was a published author.

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2006

“Every writer I know has trouble writing.”  –Joseph Heller

My students often assume that writing is easy for me, but I remind them to watch me while I write, reread, write another paragraph, reread, and so on.  My face betrays what I am really feeling: when I don’t like a word I have chosen, I scrunch my nose as if it smells bad, and I bite at my cuticles or tug at my lips while I agonize over it, willing a better word to come out verbally, if not directly from my brain onto the paper.  I squint as I imagine reorganizing my musings before committing to rewrite my entire piece.

Sometimes I catch people staring at me when I write in public, probably curious about the noxious odor that I seem to perceive. Sometimes after revising, the inside of my mouth is raw from my damaging deliberations.  Sometimes when I am trying to fall asleep at night, I regret that despite many revisions, I should have stuck with the third version of paragraph two or experimented draft three with the conclusion from draft four.

Writing is painful for me.  This awareness started to percolate during my undergraduate career and it became particularly self-evident during my pursuit of a Master’s degree.   From 2003-2006, I wrote many analytical essays on poetry—Victorians, Romantics, Moderns, I did not discriminate.  The grade I received on my final essay in my final poetry class was the best I received all semester, and it was accompanied, as usual, by poignant and insightful feedback.  My heart (and nose, and cheeks, and sleep schedule) cared little for the grade but for the single word the professor used to describe what she thought my writing process must be: “painstaking.”  In that word, she summed up, acknowledged, and validated all of my cheek-biting, lip-tugging work I had done.

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2008

“There’s nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”  –Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith

My problem is simple.  I am hard on myself when I write.  When I was six, I made the mistake of having expectations for my diary writings that were unnecessary, and frankly boring.  As an adult, I recognize the different stages of the writing process, so I allow myself freedom to think, plan, cross out and explore when I write.  Still, as Mem Fox says, I “ache with caring” about each word and its placement.  It is painful and annoying and frustrating.  But I can’t get away from it.

The writing process is recursive in nature.  I do few major revisions at the end of writing a piece because I have rewritten it eight times over by the time I have finished the first draft.  I experienced disappointment when I was six, but I returned because something drew me to putting pen on paper.  In every piece I write, the uncomfortable knotting of my stomach returns, but I go through it because at the end of the day, I need to cut off a piece of me and see it strewn across a page. 

And as Dorothy Parker concisely quipped, “I hate writing. I love having written.”

Please comment on this entry with your ideas for our HVWP SI ‘08 shirts.  I will compile the sugestions and we will consider them next week.

“Shut up and write!”

This is the second SI I have been a part of and I am incredibly excited to spend the summer with such interesting and intelligent people.  I am lucky and anticipate an amazing summer.

I returned home from work to empty the bathroom garbage, vacuum the futon the cats sleep on, wipe down the sinks, and begin cooking a midweek Thanksgiving dinner for a few friends.  Well, it was for a few friends originally, to kind of take the pressure off the whole holiday affair.  While having a dinner party for six people is no small order, it was meant to allow us to keep the holiday in perspective and set the tone for a decent, bearable, okay, survivable holiday season.  Two days after offering this, I realized it was a bit demanding considering it was unnecessary in the first place.  My week went from my husband driving the both of us to two Thanksgiving dinners on Long Island later in the week to a Tuesday night Thanksgiving dinner with various friends, and, out of the blue, my father, followed by my chauffeuring my husband and I to Long Island where I would be the relegated driver because he doesn’t drive stick shift.  The kitchen was getting hot and the impending stress was about to boil over with the water for the mashed potatoes.

“Hey, dude, how are you?” My dad asked, shuffling his way through the door as if he were twenty years older than he is.  And three hours early.  Again.

“I’m good Pops, how about you?” I call from the kitchen. 

Four tablespoons of butter, one teaspoon of salt, five cranks of pepper.

“Okay!  I brought you this wine.  You know, it’s really good even though…”

“I know; it’s not too expensive.”  I finish absent-mindedly.  My hands begin mixing the sausage stuffing, and the flesh and blood reminds me why I don’t eat meat.  Or like to prepare it.

My father ambles into the kitchen, off kilter due to the barrel of wine he brought with him and that is now weighing down his right side.  He is obsessed with one kind of pinot grigio, and insists on bringing a bottle to the house whenever he is over for dinner.  Invariably, he drinks two glasses, leaves the next day, and over one liter of wine is left to waste in my refrigerator until the day before he comes up the next time when I remove it from the fridge, pour out the contents, and the whole cycle starts over from scratch again. 

I meticulously wash my hands, cleaning under each fingernail with an unbreakable intensity.

“Katie, hey, Katelin - do you want a glass of it while you cook, sweetheart?” he asks, reaching for the bottle opener. 

“No, thanks, Pop.  I think I’m good for now.”  I reach behind the utensil bin and sip red wine from my stem less stemware, noting that in the past four years I don’t think my father has even actually seen me consume a glass of white wine willingly.  Not that anyone has been force-feeding me wine.

“Mmmm,” he concludes upon the first taste.  “It’s so good.  You know, I brought over a bottle of this the other night after Kaz and I played tennis.  You know, he beat me again, and it’s like, unbelievable.  I mean, when we first started playing, I like, dominated him and now I can only get a shot in every now and then.”

I finished quickly and efficiently peeling enough potatoes for six people and after slicing them in tetrahedrons, placed them gently into salted boiling water, careful not to cause any splashes.

Chris and Julie knock and walk into the house at the same time, bearing festive flowers and a bottle of red wine; Julie knows better.  Both Fordham graduates, I know that my father and Chris, despite their age difference, enjoy each other’s company.  The knowledge of this allows me to loosen my grip on the knife as I chop up the rest of the onions, tearless but pained.

“Hey, there, Kev,” Chris offers his hand and my father accepts it. 

“Hello, fellow Fordham Alum,” he replies, smirking, “Julie, how are you?”

“I am doing well, Kevin, and it’s good to see you.”

“Yeah, this is really nice,” my dad says as he looks around.  I cannot see him, I am back to preparing food, but I can tell by the way he says this that his head is kind of bobbing up and down as he looks from the left to the right and then back again, surveying the damage I am inflicting upon the kitchen for everyone’s benefit.  Matt almost tumbles down our stairs which seem to be built for a Nascar course. 

“Hey, who invited you?”  he asks my dad, who revels in attention this joke at his expense offers. 

“Ohhh!”  he high-fives Matt in return for his warm gesture.  God help me, I think as I return my attention to the chicken in front of me.  It is time to stuff the chicken. 

I exhale.

It is time to stuff the chicken. 

With two vegetarians present and another on the way, I think that next year we should have a non-meat Thanksgiving just for the sake of balance.

But tonight, now, it is time to stuff the chicken.  It seems the cast of my Thanksgiving show has absconded to the living room – even the meat eaters.  Nobody wants this job.  Messy is fine – I am okay with messy.  This, on the other hand, makes me feel as if I am violating the chicken and myself at the same time.  Ughhh.  Go to a good place.

I begin grabbing handfuls of chopped apple mixed with sausage, a God awful combination, and shoving into the carcass of the flightless bird.  I’m sorry, I think with each rhythmic motion.  Grab, squish, stuff, squish.  Grab, squish, stuff, squish.  Grab, squish, stuff, squish.  Done.

“Hey, Katie, do you need any help?”  my dad calls from the living room, sounding Thanksgiving warm and holiday jovial, a veritable Santa Claus in the next room over. 

“No, thanks,”  I yell back, I have already compromised the majority of my ethics for the sake of half the people here, and the meat-eater offers help at the point of absolutely no consequence.  I steam.

In the meantime, Mark arrived alone, strengthening the vegetarians in numbers.  After discussing, or arguing, the benefits of vegetarianism with my father, Mark gave up like I did two years ago, and two hours later, the Fordham Rams can’t even sustain my father and he turns back to me.

“Katie, can I say a few things before dinner?” he inquires earnestly.

Now, my family was never really religious.  My dad put aside the great devotion he had to the church when he left Seminary school – yes, the school that makes priests – when he met my mom.  My mom, one of nine, was the black sheep of her nuclear family.  She spread those genes onto the next family members: my brother and me.  Out of twenty-five grandchildren, (and more on the way, I am sure – I just memorized all of their names again and someone is going to mess it up by having another one) we are the only two who have only been cleansed of original sin and THAT’S IT.  I mean it.  According to our family members, we are teeming with sin like hospitals teem with bacterial infection.  Despite this, my brother and I are always the featured speakers at family wedding and funerals, and with our numbers we average at least one of each every other month. 

Anyway, when my father asked me this, I became worried that this secular feast was going to turn into a vehicle for my father to try to convert, convince, or confuse me into what made my brother and I so special for years.  Well, maybe the term special is not quite as appropriate as the phrase “stick out like a sore thumb,” which is how my grandmother describes how my brother and I look when we are the only two people in the sea of the Irish Brady mass who do not receive communion.  So yes, I was a bit apprehensive to answer my father’s question and it gave me pause.  Sometimes I stick out my tongue during these moments of pensive pause.

“Are you going to answer me or just stick your tongue out at me for the rest of the night?” my dad demanded.

“Oh, sorry,” I said, rolling my tongue back into my mouth.  After this, I knew I had to say yes or I would appear foolish.  Okay, I already appeared foolish; I didn’t want to look like an ungrateful daughter too.

“Of course, Pops.  That would be great,” I lied.  “In fact, I think we are about ready to eat.”  I made a beeline to the kitchen, downed the last of the wine in my glass, and carved the sitting chicken after reversing the stuffing process I described earlier, only with a spoon. 

The table really did look great.  Food poured out from every corner, appealing to the heartiest meat eaters and stingiest vegetarians.  Vegans would have had a problem but I try not to befriend vegans for just this reason. 

“This look great, Kate,” Matt smiled, and Chris seconded.

“Thanks, guys.  I’m half-starved and my dad wants to say a few words, so…” I trailed off, sitting, waiting for the only thing that made me grimace more than my father telling the “Everyone’s dying to get in there” graveyard joke – my dad invoking his pre-mom life through Latin prayer. 

He inhaled deeply.  “It’s been fifteen years since Annie and I got divorced,” he started.  Oh shit.  I closed my eyes.  This is the only thing worse than Latin prayer.  “I just wanted to say that despite the fact that I have spent a lot of time as a brother and son these past ten Thanksgivings as I went to my sister’s house, it has truly been a pleasure to be a father once again, even if it isn’t actually Thanksgiving Day.  Thank you all for having me.  I know this is my daughter and son-in-law’s house, but you all make it a home, and you have made me feel warm, welcome, and like a member of the family.”

I smiled, suppressing the tears that crept up with a cough.  Everyone fell silent, and my dad’s eyes revealed honesty and love over the dripping candles as we gathered at this new table.  Julie patted him on the shoulder gently, and Chris bobbed his head in a way my father often does. 

“Hey, turd,” Matt cut in, “You are a part of the family.  Now pass the potatoes and shut the hell up!”  We broke into laughter and passed the endless plates.  My dad went into the kitchen and returned with the pinot grigio. 

“Who wants some?” he asked.  We all lifted our glasses for the wine, and for him, as we redefined a holiday tradition and ourselves.

If you see trash pick it up and throw it away.  How do people just walk by?

I woke up with what felt like a boulder in my chest because I really thought I did it this time. I went into the bathroom and turned the light on hoping it would blind me into reality, but it only assaulted me into further confusion. After splashing water on my face and neck, I sat on the floor, grimy from laziness and ambivalence.

What kind of person has recurring dreams about killing all of his friends? The slumberous massacre I committ each night was beyond what I have read about or seen in slasher movies. These images are coming from somewhere else. They are coming from me. I am creating these deaths.

If I can get out of bed in the morning (I am averaging two or three hours of sleep at this point), I stop for breakfast before coming in late to work. For the past three months I have wanted to ask the girl who makes my coffee every morning on a date. I think I have the balls to do it today, but as soon as I open my mouth, I imagine what it would be like if she was at the end of a stainless steel long-reach machete. “Thank you,” I mutter as I leave, embarrassed and unsettled. It’s pathetic. And I am sure that after this interaction, I will have a sleepless night again.

I love having good secrets. The ones that make my stomach flip every time I think about them because I know I am not supposed to talk about them. It’s a nice contrast to the nauseating “your father will disown you if he finds out” secret.

I know that during the winter soups are fun to make.  I usually end up making a vat of it.  Contact a local church group or non-denominational organization, buy some cups to store the extra soup in, and drop it off so they can freeze it and have a stock of ready-made single-serve portions for people who come in hungry when they aren’t doing large community meals.

The heat showed its work on her mother’s nose. Mrs. James Beaufort reached into her purse and her manicured fingertips extracted a compact. She powdered her face quickly and discreetly before returning it to the purse where she felt for her bulging wallet. Three thousand cash. She was riding a bus with three thousand dollars burning a hole through her purse, knees and feet. She applied white gloves to minimize the shaking in her hands and concentrating on the red stitching encircling her wrists.

Molly looked at her mother’s visage, already beading with sweat despite the defensive powdering, and wondered how the two could possibly be related. She fingered the scab on her left knee, then caressed the bruise below, swelling her shin. Several barrettes restrained her scraggily hair while adjacent to her, her mother’s bold hat complimented her shiny, abiding locks.

Mrs. Beaufort slid forward and lifted her gloved hand to the stop line. As the bus slowed, she stood, taking her daughter and purse in hand. They descended the stairs at the back of the bus. Molly stood on the curb, scratching her elbow as her mother smoothed the front of her tailored navy blazer and matching skirt. Abruptly, she took Molly’s hand and walked north on Lincoln, her eyes fixed straight ahead, her other hand clutching her purse.

“Mom,” Molly began, “Why are we walking so fast?” Her mother’s heels clipped in rhythm to her heart. She glanced down at her daughter, who had bloodied her arm while attacking the mosquito bite.

“For the love of-honestly, Molly. Can’t you maintain yourself for five whole minutes?” Molly looked at her sneakers as her mother bent down, tissue in hand, to wipe away the blood. She couldn’t help it that the bugs liked the way she tasted! Her eyes met her mother’s during the rough wipe down, and she in them saw a mixture of determination and fear. “Let’s keep moving, now.”