The pavement was slick and there were potholes and too many trees by the side of the winding road. The first to go were two juniors who were cutting school, doing what teenage boys do, driving too fast, maybe drinking or passing a bowl while the tires screeched and the car fishtailed. They ended up upside down in the creek that snaked by the road. They died. There were others in high school who died in car accidents, too, though at this point I mainly remember the names of the survivors (thanks, Facebook, with your updated images of people from the past).

Since my grandmother died, I’ve developed a strong sense of mortality, of my own, of other peoples’, of the various cats and dogs that have been in my life. Sometimes it hits me more than others, generally when I’m feeling low and isolated, when the sun hasn’t been out in weeks. It doesn't help that I've been spending an hour or two a day writing out the details of illness and death for my novel manuscript. And I’ll have dreams about these people, the dead from high school, usually as represented by David Anderson, the last one to die, the one who made it into the yearbook, a ghost by the time the book was printed.

There are other “deads” as my son calls them, like Carolin, a friend from college who had some sort of birth defect that we never discussed. She’s been gone for seventeen years, sometimes still visits me in my dream version of our college dorm. My grandfather shows up less and less now as I deal with the past, though I am sometimes reminded of how much there is to deal with (another nod to Facebook, where people who knew me peripherally during one of the darkest times in my life show up, and I remember just how bad it was and I want to die with the memory).

As I was wrestling again with that long-ago past, something that I keep thinking should be a “dead” itself at this point, as I was having a good cry after washing the dishes Thursday night, Nora, our Russian squirrel hound, came clicking into the kitchen. She likes to comfort the sad and inexplicably lonely, especially if it involves a pat or two for her. I knelt down to stroke her chest and was struck again with memory. There I was, ten years old, in what used to be my grandmother’s room, petting Greta the miniature schnauzer. Greta's fur was warm and soft. She groaned as I scratched behind her ears, reached out a paw as if to say "Don't stop." At the time, I was struck with the exquisite transience of it all, the way a heart stops and the lungs give out, the vulnerability of our soft bodies and delicate skulls. Disease creeps in. A car slams into a tree and then into you. You ignore the deep cough until it is too late. No matter the trajectory of the story, we all know how it ends.

Greta was killed by a hit-and-run driver when I was in seventh grade, about six months after we left my grandfather's house for Wilmington. He let her out when he was getting the mail. As he limped to the mailbox, Greta trotted to a neighbor's yard. She was halfway across the street when a car came tearing past and knocked her into a ditch. Either the driver didn't see her or didn't care to stop and my grandfather caught only a glimpse of the car's tail lights. It was the violent conclusion of Greta's brief story.

I knelt in the kitchen, my arms around Nora, and added up the dead. I felt their hands in mine, the touch of a gentle paw, the sound of a meow. Greta and I sat together in the dusty sunlight, her eyes brown and serious, her heartbeat strong. Sidney played a game of capture, batted at the pencil I pushed under the door. Louise curled up on the dining room table, a dog pretending to be a cat. I brushed against a boy in a hallway as he ran by, late for class. And my grandmother croaked out "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" while I giggled from the swing that hung from the maple tree. Even the tree is gone now, but like the rest it exists in my memory, in the stories I tell.

I held Nora tighter, tried to appreciate the moment, knowing I would think about it when she was gone. And the sweetness of it almost killed me.

Top photo by Jane Underwood, Writing Salon mistress and photographer extraordinaire.
Bottom photo by Mr. T from Nora's first week with us in 2003.

After writing this prompt and struggling with various versions of it for the blog, I got out my senior high school yearbook (theme: "A Unique Blend." I had forgotten that high school yearbooks had themes), just to check on some of the facts. There was David Anderson, still in with the living seniors, but at the front of the book was a dedication to three other people from our class who had died, two of them in car accidents: Pat O'Donoghue, Rob Klaczkiewicz, and Joe Lombardino. There were others who died while I was at school, specifically those upperclassmen in the first paragraph of this post, though I could have some of my facts wrong about the accident. They died in the mid-80s, well before our lives were digitally monitored, before you could have a Facebook page even after death. The fact that there was no trace of these young men made me sad. It was almost as if they had never existed.

Tags: Facebook, Death, Pets, NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, school, car accidents, dying, grandfather, isolation, Round Robin, writing prompt

My writing desk sits in our guest room. It is a lovely, large room, with viridian walls and a set of French doors that lead out to the deck. There is enough space for a queen-sized bed, three bookcases, my battered oak desk, and an antique armoire with a mirrored door that was one of the first things my husband and I bought when we moved to Washington, DC together.

We lived in that first Adams Morgan apartment for five-and-half years. It was a stately, if somewhat shabby one-bedroom with a working fireplace in the living room and an ornamental fireplace in the eat-in kitchen. The ceilings were high and the front wall had three windows set in a subtle, pleasing curve. Just off the kitchen was a sliver of backyard space that I planted with impatiens and elephant's ear that first summer, before we figured out that the upstairs air conditioner dripped on our heads, left the small landing permanently damp, and that the dryer vent above would sometimes let loose flurries of lint. There was also no coat closet. Shortly after signing the lease we remedied that by buying the armoire at an antique shop around the corner on 18th Street. So the armoire was first. The dog, the marriage, the kid, they all came later. The apartment saw it all.

The one-bedroom was on the bottom floor of a four-story townhouse and the family that owned the house and lived in the floors above us had two girls and a pug. They weren't overly noisy, didn't have loud parties or screaming fights, but since our space was separated from theirs by a only couple of thin interior doors, we heard everything. There were pounding footsteps and scraping chairs, the sad howls of their dog when they left her alone over long weekends, fourth of July firecrackers set off three feet from our bedroom. Once the baby came along, the baby that slept like an insomniac, whose sleep we were desperate to encourage, we left the apartment for larger digs in Alexandria, Virginia, though our son was sixteen months old by the time we finally moved.

Moving to Walnut Street brought us full circle. The drafty three-bedroom house had a fenced-in yard, two floors, and a second bathroom and was on the very same block Mr. Trinkle and I had lived on when we first moved in together in late 1999. But it was temporary from the beginning: as we were packing up our DC apartment, we got a call that led to my husband's current California job. In the end we lived in Alexandria for only six months. I remember that time through a haze of rain and snow, of grasping grayness and cold feet. We were a 25-minute Metro ride into the city, but felt very far away from our cozy, familiar neighborhood in the heart of DC. My husband often didn't get home from work until after our son was asleep and we no longer had our occasional babysitter. I tried to keep sane, joined some mom's groups, bundled up the boy to get into the city when I felt up for dragging a stroller on the Metro or schlepping our 25-pounder on my back. Just as spring was beginning to dab the trees green, to coax flowers out of the soggy ground, we moved again, to Berkeley.

And it was tough. The first year here was lonely. Our son hated playgrounds and other children in general and I knew no one. Mr. Trinkle was grappling with a new job situation and I was grappling with an unacknowledged past. It's hard for me to believe now that up until the summer of 2007, I wrote nothing. Nothing. Well, maybe the occasional whiny journal entry, at the rate of one or two a year, but that was it. I started writing and Mr. Trinkle and I started repairing and then I found a friend or three and a writing group and a good place for the kid to go to preschool. And then Mr. Trinkle finished his dissertation (I could be calling him here "Dr. Trinkle," but he nixed that one), something that had been hanging over him, over the two of us, for our entire relationship.

We've been talking about what is next. It could be a move from here back to there, back to the center of the policy universe with its wonks and its humidity and beautiful houses. If we lived in Washington, DC, my family would be geographically closer. I have long-time friends there that I miss, and there are those cherry-tree lined streets and majestic buildings. I just don't know if it's home anymore.

Home. DC used to be home. It felt that way from the beginning, from the day I moved there at nineteen. It was all about the houses, the formal public architecture, the restaurants and street people. I took pride in living in the center of a very specific universe, the place where people would gather to march and protest, where the federal government would slowly crank out laws, regulations, and decisions. Even the wonks, in their rumpled suits, walking with a sense of purpose or the wide-eyed look of the permanently distracted, were endearing to me. (The K Street lobbyist/lawyer types left me cold.) I still feel truly alive wandering the neighborhoods there, sludging through summer heat or pressing my boots into the slush. However, I've never lived in DC without a shield, a barrier between myself and other people. The town was made for shields, all that talk about policy and none about emotion. The emotions go underground, are sublimated by intellect. It's so ... male and macho, in an über-rational sort of way.

Berkeley's architecture does nothing for me. My general reaction when I walk around our neighborhood is "meh, bungalows" though I do enjoy getting up into the hills where the air is rarefied. It's the people and the philosophies here that I love, the crunchiness of it all. Berkeley is where I had the freedom to come clean and to become a writer. I don't feel (much) of a need to explain myself here, to talk about why I don't have an outside job, to stumble over the "what do you do?" question. And I've made some real friends here, too, women that I want to know even better, that I want to have years with, so that our children can be lifelong friends, too.

Home is eucalyptus-scented. It's juicy local strawberries all year long. It's hills with bay views and streets with devoted bike lanes. It's where my son is making friends and where I am, too, friends who don't know me as a librarian but as a writer and a mother, a woman with a past who isn't defined by that past. This feeling, of home and openness, is fresh and delicate. I don't know if it will survive a move.

Ask me next week, though, and I might be pining for marble and brick, for trail runs in Rock Creek Park, for fireflies on June nights and snowstorms in January, for dinner with friends at Lebanese Taverna or Oyamel. I'll tell you that I can maintain those new friendships, can adapt to life back in the District, that proximity to my family will make things easier, will give my son the safety net of an extended family.

I'm split. We'll figure it out soon enough (I hope) and I'm sure you will be reading all about it.

Upper image: View out kitchen door, Washington, DC, Winter 2005?

Lower image: Our sidewalk, Berkeley, 2009.

Tags: Berkeley, CA, friendship, Washington, dc, home, homesickness

Peter was only after the blender.

I was working in the college bookstore, propped up on a stool behind the register, when he came in to buy something small, a pack of gum, a used book, a cassette tape, I don’t remember. As I passed his change over the counter, brushed my fingertips across this stranger's calloused palm, Peter said “I know you from the newspaper. You told it like it was.”

A month earlier I was one of five or six people chosen to answer a question for The Elm: what did we think about the proposed student fee increase? Below my photograph was the statement “I know nothing about it. I have no opinion.” Ignorance and flat honesty prevailed. It was my statement, my stand on nothing in particular that got me the boy.

Or maybe it really was the blender. After asking my name and relationship status, Peter went straight to appliance ownership: if I had the blender, he had the basil. He knew where to score pine nuts and a fine wedge of pecorino romano. Peter wanted to come back to my place, make a little pesto.

The blender sat on the stained linoleum kitchen counter in the small college apartment I shared with my roommate Martha, right beside the coffee percolator that she filled with Folgers each morning. Martha bought it with plans for soup-making, warm vichyssoise in winter, refreshing gazpacho during the humid summer months, but in reality we used it make frozen drinks. After the Piña Colada incident the appliance went fallow, gathered cooking grease and flour dust.

Peter's basil source was a garden across the Chester River, a plot of rich soil courtesy of his employer, Anthony's Landscaping. We rode there one sticky June night, pedaled his tandem through a landscape defined by moonlight and shadow, moved our legs in time to the percussion of crickets. The basil had formed a moat around a pair of tumbledown beefsteak tomatoes. Rabbits and groundhogs had ravished the rest. As I smoothed my fingers over the soft leaves, pale in the semidarkness, the basil sighed, let out a breath of spice and earth and warm sun, a promise of pasta sauce and anise-tinged kisses.

When you are 18, most of the world is still a mystery, or it should be. I already had a boyfriend, and Peter knew it, but something about his earnestness – his habit of tossing rocks at my window for midnight bike rides, the fact that he was as aimless at 24 as I felt at 18 – made him irresistible. He was an English major whose literary mind had been muddled by deconstructionism, an Estonian-American who later taught me the best places to go in Washington, DC for Ethiopian food and the blues. Peter liked to pass things on. It was insider information: the slightly off-kilter notes of Thelonius Monk; the tuneless pounding and punk bands of d.c. space; the Biograph movie theater; linguini with pesto sauce.

His pesto obsession was endearing. And it was an obsession. In circa 1988 Chestertown, Maryland, pine nuts were an exotic foodstuff. Without a car, Peter had to finagle his way 75 miles and back to DC to procure one expensive cupful. He arrived at our place on the appointed night, clutching two bouquets of basil, a greasy paper bag half-filled with pine nuts, and a crumbling hunk of cheese. Martha and I had already peeled the garlic, purchased a good-enough olive oil. We had wiped down the blender. In the kitchen, I started grating cheese while Martha opened beers. Peter began tossing pine nuts and knobs of garlic into the machine.

The blender turned out to be an inferior pesto-making tool, or perhaps it was all in the technique. Crammed in the bottom, the garlic and pine nuts slowly turned to paste, while the basil calmly refused to be pulled into the fray. Peter finally grabbed a wooden spoon. The high-pitched whine of the blender was interrupted by a thunk as the bottom of the spoon splintered against metal blades. Too late to go back now. He picked out the shards.

Twenty minutes later, Peter offered a fingerful of the final product. Eyebrows raised in anticipation, I kept a cheerful expression, gazed past the green film coating his glasses to look directly into his eyes. The pesto tasted of garlic and more garlic interrupted by a heady nip of basil and the punch of sharp cheese. Raw pine nuts, resinous and rich, just barely kept the other ingredients in tune. As olive oil ran down my chin, I carefully deflected a splinter with my tongue, a little kick from Peter's secret ingredient.

(First image: Me, Chestertown, MD, Summer 1988, taken by "Martha." Companion picture of Martha not included. Second image: Basil plants, from Vultus Christi.)

Tags: pesto, basil, blenders, pine nuts, College, cooking, gardening, naivety , cooking mishaps

Dirk was the outlier. We hooked up on a sticky summer night, an inauspicious, fumbling beginning to a relationship that didn’t really take off for another two years. After that, love came on schedule, always in spring, with the first signs of life and greenery. It came with the tulips and the flaming branches of forsythia.

The daffodils were just starting to droop, to turn brown along the edges, when J, my second serious boyfriend, the one who still shows up in cruel attempts at seduction in my dreams, for whom no pseudonym works, asked me out. That first April date kicked off a sweet season of mixed drinks with cute but somewhat foreboding names – Dirty Irishmen, Black Russians, Dark and Stormies – as well as watery draft beer. Sex took on a religious quality, became a sacrament. The chemistry kept us limping along as summer eroded into fall and the relationship thinned at the edges.

Impatiens on the front steps.

Then there was Mr. X, my future ex-husband, another April romance. After his estranged wife finally agreed to a divorce, we leapt into commitment. Mr. X brought me a bouquet of stolen lilacs, fragrant and in full bloom, along with a homemade tape of the band Squeeze. We ate thick chunks of asparagus over al dente pasta, moved on in summer to goat cheese, basil, and sundried tomatoes on seeded bread from Strawberry Fields. Those first six months were a bacchanalia of Berghoff bock and bacon, of homemade hollandaise, of chorizo burritos as big as our heads. Because he was not yet divorced, we tried to hide our relationship, played footsie under the table at the weekly library school happy hour. It only added to the excitement, to the feeling of being so lucky and in love. Chosen.

Mr. X is to blame for my love of gardening. After we moved to Ohio, he introduced me to seedlings and compost, to the pleasures of growing our own food. Our second spring together we planted a garden in the shared backyard of our downtown Columbus duplex. I couldn’t get enough of it, kept on putting flowers in here and there, wanted to grow eight different kinds of tomatoes. Unfortunately, our shaky relationship didn't survive past the fourth spring. After we moved to DC and his new job turned out to be untenable, he returned to Ohio State. He left six months after we moved, coincidentally on the weekend of our second anniversary, though it was not intended to be a separation. Distance brought perspective. One cold March day, I decided on divorce.

With that April came ... love. I'd been friends with D (now Mr. Writing to Survive), a coworker, for months, but suddenly our relationship shifted. It was a mixed-up, uncertain time. I was suspended between two lives. Mr. X and I had to come to an agreement over the house, divvy up our possessions, and fight over the dog and cats. D's mother, thousands of miles away in Southern California, was dying of cancer. My own mother, having left Kevin temporarily, was living with me.

But D and I were deep in the process of discovery, our minds tousled with passion. There were memorable evenings, late night dinners at Lebanese Taverna, sitting by the Lincoln Memorial in the pale pink of sunset watching the cherry trees turn into blurs of white, nights spent just hanging out talking, developing our shared sense of surreal humor. My mother liked him, too, and would smile when he told her "Goodbye, Mrs. Casey!" upon leaving the house. He was like the polite high school boyfriend I never had. One wind-whipped day, the weather damp and cold, D and I drove to Ocean City. We couldn't stop laughing, in part at ourselves for taking a beach trip on a day that was a holdover from winter.

It was the spring we started building the foundation for our lives. It was also a spring without a garden, when I let the lawn dry out and the dirt harden. Without water, the young azalea bushes that bordered the house died. I could barely cook a potato, let alone take care of plants.

Basil plants.

Spring returns, and with it the renewal of lust, the desire to stroke new greenery, run my fingers through the dirt. It is the beginning of love all over again, to join with my husband and make things anew.

It takes over everything, this garden lust, takes over my brain and my time, pushing everything else out. My writing has gone to seed and I haven't been visiting my blogging friends, choosing instead to sink my hands into the soil, to fill up pots with new seedlings, to transplant root-bound herbs. At my last count, we had over thirty pots filled with vegetables, herbs, and flowers. One plant remains, a sugar pumpkin that will go by the back fence, will eventually wrap its tendrils around a trellis, and that's that.

It is about time that I resisted temptation, maintained fidelity to the plants already in my life. I must avert my eyes from seductive seedlings.

Tags: gardening, optimism, spring, love, weeding, metaphor

This installment is less about Maureen, more about the time and place (and Dirk). I'm not sure what the next installment will bring, or when I will post it. These are hard to write and take time to do properly, with the pull between the macro approach, overviews of the time, and the micro approach, focusing on those pivotal moments. For example, next time I might want to overlap with this post and write about the night a neighbor saw Dirk and Rudy leaving the Little House. What are you interested in reading more about?

And -- this is written a year after I posted this -- rereading this makes me feel uncomfortable, like I've presented a story that isn't fully processed or finished. But it is mine and there is a truth to it.

Click here for Part 1.

As I pulled the wheel of the John Deere tractor to the right, the mower, wide and low to the ground, hit rock and screeched as it scraped the edge of the flower bed. Palms damp, grip tightened, I put the tractor briefly into reverse, then hit the gas and forged forward. Shit! The magnolia! I quickly swung around the tree, barely missing the azalea by the front door. Suddenly there was a clear path ahead of me, a gleaming expanse of green. The mower shot across the lawn, cutting another inadvertently serpentine swath.

"Jenny! Got a minute?"

My grandfather was gesturing at me from the kitchen window, summoning me in the usual way: by screaming out a nickname I hated and asking me a question for which yes was only answer.

I cut the engine and surveyed the mower's wobbly wake. Three uneven rows occasionally interrupted by jagged patches of ragged grass; a mangled forsythia; two scraped river rocks; several crushed marigolds. Not the cleanest job. The air smelled green and bitter with freshly cut grass. In the maple outside of the kitchen, a blue jay and her mate traded a series of rusty squeaks, rustling the leaves as they hopped from branch to branch. Some other unfortunate up the street was wasting a perfectly brilliant Saturday on yard work. Their mower sounded wonky, chugging in fits and starts.

Here’s where the moment slows down, where we cue in Duran Duran’s Hungry Like the Wolf. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a boy on a bike whizzing down our street in the direction of the river. College aged, tanned and blonde, wearing a black t-shirt and ragged cut-offs, he glances at me. His long muscular legs propel the bike forward and I can just make out the checkerboard Vans on his feet. The moment passes, the bike and passenger become a blur and disappear.


Documented: Dirk's Vans, Little House, 1986ish.

In a place where I know almost everyone, a place I’ve been a part of since before I was born, this person is totally unfamiliar. Cut the music.

Who was that guy?

"Jenny!!"

I hop off the tractor and go into the house.

It is June 1984, the beginning of a summer of new love for my mother and Kevin, the beginning of my time in the Little House. Back in Wilmington, I have a part-time job at a daycare center, but most weekends I end up at my grandfather's place at Hollywood Beach. It will be a year before my mother buys a cottage down the street, less than that before I become pregnant (in the Little House. Sorry, parents. That wasn't my story then, but it's the truth). Come spring my friendship with Maureen will end here, too. "Everything happens in the Little House," Maureen and I used to say, and that was before I gave birth there.

So this warm mid-June weekend kicks it off. Maureen's mother drops her off to spend the night and we immediately douse ourselves with baby oil and lie out in the sun, with no worries about wrinkles or skin cancer. Dinner is simple, pepperoni and mozzarella on Italian rolls. When night comes we get restless and decide to take a walk, to kill some time before Saturday Night Live.


Recent picture of Hollywood Beach. Looks like the old benches are gone.

Maureen and I walk about a half mile to the Elk River, down the shoulder of a barely two lane street, past little shacks and cottages built in the 40s and 50s, some expanded in later decades. The beach has trucked-in sand (the actual river bottom is mucky), with a small swimming area marked off by buoys and lines. Several benches face the water. The old folks hang out here at sunset, smoking their cigarettes and admiring the view. Behind the benches are sycamores and a grassy fenced-in area with swing sets, a merry-go-round, and shuffleboard courts, all dating back to the early 60s. The small parking lot has a single street light and a soda machine.

The soda machine stands against a small white clapboard building, the clubhouse, used for community events, the Men's Pancake Breakfast, the Association Potluck. Before the accident in 1966, my grandfather called Bingo here on Saturday nights. Back then he was handsome and charming, unfaithful and dissolute. I played the same game in the 70s, would come down to the clubhouse on a Saturday night with my grandmother. Skeeter Haines, a tall man with a shiny bald head, would call and I'd concentrate on my board. Sitting next to Mom-mom, I would kick my legs underneath the table, rest a hand on her solid muumuu-ed leg. I haven't been in the building since her death in 1979.

Tonight there are a couple of cars parked by the street light. A small crowd of guys are hanging out, leaning against the fence and talking. Someone is playing Led Zeppelin, Heartbreaker, and the not-yet-familiar smell of burning marijuana wafts our way. We walk up and greet the crowd. Rudy, the nineteen year old brother of a school friend introduces us to the boy on the bike, Dirk Nieubaur.


Interior of a '67 Chrysler Newport Custom.

Before we go on, I need a delusional interlude, a nostalgic montage of the future past that comes with its own soundtrack. It’s a hot summer night two years later and I am sliding across the wide seat of Dirk’s 1967 Chrysler Newport Custom, admiring my legs in the dashboard light. The sinuous strains of Ted Nugent’s Stranglehold are coming from the eight-track and I know that a Budweiser is waiting for me outside. Or we’re tearing down Town Point Road in that same former family car aka “The Beast.” Dirk has just restored it to its Motor City glory and wants to see how fast it can go on the straight pass between cornfields, before the road twists and turns through the woods. He steps off the gas at 100 mph, slows it down right before that first curve, ZZ Top’s Manic Mechanic blasting from the new tape deck. That’s us, kissing in the Little House to the White Album. He's thrown over his other girlfriend for good and the moment is sweet and warm, comforting.

OK. The former teenager in love hidden away within me is satisfied now.

Here’s the darker version, the pre-bliss. Two nights later, alone, I go down to the beach to join the crowd. Dirk walks me home, holding my hand, pushes his bike alongside us. Did we kiss down at the beach, did he offer his mouth to mine? Did I breathe in the memory of pot smoke and too many Budweisers on his breath? These are the moments that are supposed to be marked in our minds forever, first love and all that. But there were so many similar nights, nights when he traveled in a haze of drugs and alcohol, when his breath was smoky and beer sweet, that this one no longer stands out.

"Everything happens in the Little House." I let him in, into the house, into me. It was my first time. I thought that casual sex was the way of twenty-year olds. They just did it (though perhaps not with fourteen-year olds, even particularly mature ones). I went along with without joy or desire, let the boundary be crossed without note. Before this moment, I had joked with my friends about the possibility of nuclear war, the potential Armageddon to come. Could you imagine dying, I'd ask, could you imagine some The Day After scenario in which some of us have been obliterated or are radiation-sick and dying, having never had sex? It turned out that sex was much more complicated than I knew, even in its apparent simplicity, the basic equation of one plus one. I wasn't ready.

After that night, Dirk and I became a strange sort of late-night item (in part because he is also dating Rudy's sister, Anne). He shows up at 1:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m.. I fall asleep watching late night broadcast television, awaken to his knock on the door. Maureen begins seeing Rudy. We start to drink the beers that are offered. I bring jars of gin, siphoned from Mom and Kevin's endless supply, with me to my grandfather's house, hide them in my massive pocketbook. Sometimes a jar springs a leak and I wonder if anyone else on the bus to Newark can smell it too. But nobody says a thing and my grandfather doesn't seem to notice when he picks me up at the bus stop.

When a neighbor friend reports to my mother that he saw two men leaving that Little House at 1:30 in the morning, saw Maureen in Rudy's arms and me giving Dirk a final kiss, I get a lecture, maybe even a cooling off period of one weekend away from the beach. But nothing changes. More importantly, my mother doesn't say a thing to Maureen's parents, though in retrospect I am not sure why. There is nothing to stop us from picking things up where we left off after my brief time away.

At the end of the summer, Dirk goes back to college. Mom and Kevin continue their relationship, with the threat of catastrophic storms to come. And I start tenth grade. Everything is different, from the music (cue in the Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies, the Dead Milkmen) to the make-up (from none to fluorescent stripes on my eyelids) to the cloves I've started to smoke. And it isn't going to get better any time soon.

To be continued.

Tags: alcohol, The Little House, friendship, Music

Tammy glanced over at Julie’s hair, wrinkled her face in disgust: was that a louse crawling around? Yes! Using thumb and forefinger, she plucked the imaginary bug and tossed it into the tiny invisible skillet in her opposite hand. Sizzzzzzle. Sizzzzzzle. Flip. Sizzzzzzzle. Tammy hurled the fresh-cooked louse into her mouth with lip-smacking relish. Maureen and I, however, preferred to let our fantasy lice live in peace. We wanted them to intermingle. So we built a bridge, connected her lank hair to a frizzy extension of mine with rubber bands. Sixth grade was an unironic time. I’m not sure if anyone knew we were joking.

Maureen, hanging from a tree, 1982

We stayed after school that day, dismantled the lice bridge and went to the playground, squished our Docksiders against spring-rain damp turf. The middling March air was cool against our faces as we ran to the swingset. In warmer weather the game was to fling off our shoes to see who could kick them the farthest. Today we passed a hairbrush back and forth, hurtling through the air on wooden seats, trying to make the other person drop it or chicken out.

“Want to play Space Invaders? Let’s go down to the Hole in the Wall.”

Maureen’s grandfather owned a bar by the canal, a basement space in a building from the late 1700s. In the afternoons it was quiet and we were allowed to play pool or a video game while her father got the bar ready for business. The walk from Chesapeake City Elementary School to the bar took us past the funeral home, white and windowless, past boarded up storefronts and ramshackle houses tumbled against the sidewalk. The Eastern Shore town was not yet thriving, was a decade away from becoming a boutique village. We decided against stopping at Pyle’s, a small convenience store that sold things like Push Pops and sticky Bubble Yum and Dixie cup ice cream that came with a wooden spoon. There was plenty of non-nutritious crap awaiting at the Hole in the Wall, cheese curls and barbecue-flavored potato chips and candy bars. I’d get to mix the drinks, sugary combinations of Coke, 7-Up, and orange soda over ice. We called them “Suicides.”

The tendency – or my tendency, at least – in writing about childhood is to make it sound either impossibly idyllic or like a living hell. So here is a list of the good stuff: Hanging out on Maureen’s porch swing after Canal Day, holding a 20-inch sparkler in full glimmer as we watched a line of cars heading for Route 213. Playing Atari games – Asteroids, Adventure – while eating junk food. Dancing around to “Flying Purple People Eater.” Eating an entire meal without using our hands, “like cats.” Annoying her sister by making Three Stoogesesque snoring noises as she was trying to get to sleep. Organizing slumber parties with shrieking and séances and morning-after pancakes a la James Beard.

Behind the idyll? Turmoil. Children are the unwitting passengers in the lives of others. Best friends only offer so much protection. I felt like a freak, too smart and too quiet and odd, living in an increasingly uncomfortable situation with my mother, grandfather, and soon-to-be stepfather. This was the year I actively threatened suicide, when I kept track of my thyroid and asthma medications in preparation for an overdose. The year I carried around an Ouija board, desperate to get in contact with my dead grandmother, the year when the girl wars were beginning and teasing about one’s physical development or lack thereof was common (“We must, we must, we must increase our bust!” was the recess refrain.)

Anyone who thinks that childhood is all carefree is delusional. Or an amnesiac.

But I didn’t kill myself and our friendship survived my seventh grade move back to Wilmington. Outside of the machiavellian middle school environment , Maureen and I became closer, with frequent overnight visits and some very funny correspondence. She wrote me weekly. I was so proud of her letters, of her sense of humor, that I would bring them into school, my address carefully blacked out so that no one would discover that I lived outside of the school district.

The weekend my mother told my stepfather to pack up his things and leave, I had plans to visit Maureen. I still went, though I was not in the mood. Yes, Tim was an asshole (since reformed, apparently), but he had been a part of our lives for eight years. We spent holidays with his family. We needed his income. And I hadn't seen the break coming. What was going to happen to us?

DEATH at moment of reading! Envelope from February 1983 letter.

I sludged through that October 1983 weekend, trapped in a quicksand of worry. On Sunday, I was surprised to see Tim waiting for me at the usual rendezvous point, the Newark Howard Johnson's. Maureen and I hugged, I waved at her mother, and slipped into the Cutlass. Tim and I were unaccustomed to making small talk and there wasn't much to say. He was staying with his parents, had hopes of repairing the marriage, though I doubt we talked about that. He didn't linger in front of our inner city rowhouse and I didn't look back as I unlocked the door.

Inside, Mom was sitting in the living room reading with Frank the cat on her lap. She looked up when I came in, glanced around the room and asked "Notice anything different?"

"Sunlight."

One of the first things she had done upon Tim's departure was to open the living room shutters. They had been closed since our move to the house, a bizarre cost-saving measure. The room seemed unnaturally bright. Light bounced off of the white walls, pooled in the corners. Our other cat, Liz, was basking in a patch of it. She held our a paw and trilled. Could you get more symbolic than this, darkness transformed by light, a closed off room now open? A little foreshadowing, a portent of good things to come?

House in Wilmington during the Tim era.

Don't be so gullible, so easily blinded by the sun. Sometimes a patch of sunlight is just that and nothing more. An open shutter can be closed again.

The end of the Tim era did turn out to be free and glorious, five months of mother-daughter bonding. We enjoyed the sunlight. Bought 100% orange juice and name-brand yogurt. Mom acquired a moped and zipped around town picking up freelance writing work and groceries. I arranged rides to and from games, kept up with my studying, memorized lists of German words, puzzled over teutonic grammar. Maureen and I continued as best friends. For Mom's 34th birthday I got her a card with a guy in drag made up to look like Elizabeth Taylor: "Birthdays are like husbands – after a while you stop counting!" Ha Ha.

Adolescence, the process of pulling yourself into burgeoning adulthood, shakes the seemingly solid foundations of identity. The sweet boy, lover of plaid shirts and belted khakis, suddenly starts dressing in black, from hair dye to nail polish to skirt and shoes. The athlete takes up drugs and loses motivation. Best friends drift apart. I started ninth grade in pastels, a nondrinker, a German-studying, Duran Duran-listening cheerleader. I finished the year close to that, too, though internal changes were taking place in preparation for my metamorphosis.

The shift may have happened anyway, it might have been destiny, but I can't deny that there was a catalyst. He moved in down the street that spring. Kevin the poet-carpenter. Kevin with his plumb lines and his radial saws, with his collie and his poetry books. My mother met him and dropped everything.

By May I was essentially on my own.

Next installments: The Little House, demon rum, Dirk, and a friendship that doesn't survive.

Tags: family, friendship, sixth grade, step-father, suicide, ouija boards, alcohol, Dirk

DATE: May 1981

OCCASION: My mother's second wedding.

LOCATION: Eastern Shore, MD.

PERSONNEL (from left to right):

Mom: Barely 31 years old. Obscuring new husband's mother.

Grandfather: Looking pleased. The bridegroom had a reputation as a good guy. Even though he had spent the year before the wedding happily unemployed, lifting weights in the Little House, and waiting for my mother to come home from work and make dinner (though perhaps this view is a little one-sided).

Me: Eleven. And a half. Wearing my mother's dress

Best friend (from ages 8 - 14): Total support. Very funny. We went from childhood to rebellious adolescence together, from dancing around her living room listening to "Goofy Gold" to sneaking cigarettes and chugging 7-oz Budweisers. I miss her.

Cousin: Seven years old. Now an Episcopal minister. I haven't seen or spoken with her since my first wedding in late 1995. Our mothers don't speak either.

Oh, and I almost forgot. Here's a better look at ...

The car: Then-stepfather's 1968 (?) Oldsmobile Cutlass, permanently awaiting a paint job. I hated that #%*& thing, though it did get us from Point A to Point B.

Yeah, I've been going through my boxes of life detritus, old photos, letters, embarrassingly boy-crazy journals. The process has has brought up thoughts about friendship, loss, and connection. This picture stuck out, less for the time and situation (which, wonderfully, have lost their power for me) but for the strange posed/not posed quality of it, and for the relationships that have slipped away.

There's the next post, though I'm not sure where I'm going with it. And hopefully fiction will be returning when my writing class starts up again next month, or even sooner if I can pull it off.

Tags: family, grandfather, friendship

By the time the lease ran out, I was barely speaking to Joan and Alistair. I owed Alistair money – someone in a group of kids I brought home from d.c. space had landed on the coffee table in a dramatic drunken loss of consciousness, permanently bending the metal frame. Post-fall, the table sat with one leg propped up on a thick paperback, its glass top tilting slightly to the left, a reminder of my dissolute ways. I started hiding out in my room, emerging only to eat and use the bathroom. Then Joan didn’t invite me to their spring engagement party, bluntly telling me that I had to find someplace to be when Alistair's wealthy Westchester County, New York family met her working class Baltimore clan. When it was time to move, I looked only at studio apartments, determined to live alone this time.

Capitol Plaza Apartments

The studio at Capitol Plaza Apartments was cheap and within easy walking distance to Union Station. On the first floor of an eight-story building, it had a large window overlooking the basement roof and a hemmed-in view of surrounding structures. Small and dark, with parquet floors and “apartment-sized” appliances in the not-even-galley kitchen, it was a cozy cave, the right place to hide out for my final year of college. I moved in August 1991.

To pay the bills, I took out more student loans, got a better paying part-time job working in a library at a high-profile law firm. That’s where I met Chas.

Chas had recently divorced and was trying to figure out his newly single life at 39, the house gone, his routine changed. I was a loner 21, a strange combination of vulnerable and shuttered, talking more to the homeless men who bivouacked on my street than to my fellow college students. We were both in love with DC, with its high crime rate and crack wars and the insane mayor-for-life Marion Barry. The brick rowhouses, the policy wonks, the strange political celebrity, the feel of it all: It was home.

Chas had left Columbus, Ohio in the early 1970s and headed straight for the District. He would tell me stories of growing up the city, where his large family lived in a massive brick Victorian. It sounded exotic in its blandness, the spread-out burg with the solid architecture. “They just don’t make houses here like they do in Columbus,” he would chuckle, and I'd smile as if I knew what he was talking about. Chas got his own apartment at 16, a few years before he moved to DC. Since I’d been emancipated from parental supervision from the age of 14 or so, he felt like a kindred spirit, another concealed soul, self-protective and insular.

Most of our conversations took place on my early evening library shifts where there was no one else in the office to interrupt us. He would discuss the pursuit of church ladies (they were a tough bunch), explain his theories on electromagnetic radiation, how the destructive energy fields from power lines were spreading cancer and causing miscarriages. We would stare out the window at the office building across the street, watch the after hours workers work or not work, watch them watching us. There was one man who was always talking on the phone, standing with his back to the full-length window glass, earpiece pinned between head and shoulder. It was a performance just for us, the man’s hands swooping and slicing the air as though the person on the other end would be persuaded by gesture. On the street below, commuters dallied or rushed, flagged down taxis, spilled out of the Metro station on the corner.

A lone wolf on the streets of Dupont Circle.

I told Chas all about my former roommate Martha, my escapes to visit her in Chestertown, where our evenings at Andy’s were blurred through multiple glasses of Dark and Stormies, a potent mixture of Goslings Rum and ginger beer; he’d get the details of the Bass Ale-soaked nights we had at the Irish Times or the Dubliner. Sometimes I would give him sanitized versions of barhops with Abe, an old friend from Delaware. Abe and I usually mixed our liquor, beer, wining and cocktailing it to the final rounds of Long Island Ice Teas. These evenings generally ended in an argument over something petty. We screamed across disco lights and crowded dance floors, tossed barbs in the back alleys of Georgetown, only to do it over again a month later.

In none of these conversations did I tell Chas about my drunken flirtations, about the Marines Martha and I dragged back from the bar one night, about the make-out sessions with Eastern Shore acquaintances, the booze-fueled pursuit of contact. Alcohol always uncovered the chasm, brought the need for other people to the surface.

In between the pickups and the throw-ups and the work and the studying, I’d occasionally see my faraway half-boyfriend. But most weekends were quiet. “Friday night drinking night?" the corner liquor store owner asked me during one regular visit, to which I gave a weak nod and smile. I’d drink, study, write papers, maybe catch the PBS Saturday night movie on my crappy box of a television. The Capitol Building was close to my apartment and I would walk around its lit-up beauty at night in all kinds of weather, braving bracing November winds, floating through the incredible sweetness of spring, when the cherry trees and azaleas were in bloom. (“I am alive, I am alive” I would think as I walked a path of fallen pink petals, feeling the joy rise up in me).

The week before Martha drove me out to Illinois in a battered U-Haul truck, Chas and I went out for one last round of beers, a temporary goodbye. I had every intention of returning to DC immediately after graduating from library school. But then I met a guy who got a job and we moved to a new town together: Columbus, Ohio. We started to build a life, adopted some animals, and finally bought a house. It was a four-bedroom brick Queen Anne in the Old Towne East neighborhood, a steal at $125,000. When I gave Chas the address, he was quiet for a moment.

“That’s the same block I grew up on,” he finally told me. Almost exactly across the street from our new house was an empty lot, the location of Chas’s childhood home.

Franklin Avenue house and neighbor (we never had a flag up and the neighbor will have to be a story for another day). Photo from Old Towne East Neighborhood Association.

It was a strange coincidence. What were the odds?

Tags: College, friendship, coincidence, DC, roommates, alcohol, Columbus, loneliness, isolation

Some weeks are golden. The sun has been out, the sky has been blue, the kid hasn’t threatened to behead me and roll my noggin around like a soccer ball (I remind myself that he is three and doesn’t really understand what he is saying; we just made it through two weeks of attempts at hitting and melodramatic preschooler threats without much incident). I’ve gotten a chance to talk to other grownups besides my husband, even went out for a drink with a friend. There is a lot of good in my life.

About a month back, a new blogging friend, Melinda, wrote about saying her gratefuls. That’s what I’d like to do today, focusing specifically on this strange and wondrous virtual universe, the blogosphere: I am eternally grateful for the recognition and support of my fellow bloggers.

Last week, Karen of The Pitfalls of Life passed two awards my way.

and

Karen has another blog, Five Little Kids Named Larrow, where she writes stories about a very difficult childhood with an amazing clear-headedness, capturing the child’s innocent point of view. I think she's courageous, too, as well as a fine writer and photographer. Through the struggles of the past and present, she always finds a way to rise above. Thank you, Karen. You really are a good friend.

Also last week, Dori of A Yellow House in England passed the I Love Your Blog award along. Dori’s blog is about her adventures as an American expat married to a Brit. Written in a breezy conversational style with tales of little towns she visits and other stories from her life, A Yellow House is a fun read with some nice photography as well.

Finally, Susan Helene Gottfried of West of Mars not only received a bunch of awards (no shock there!), but she also gave a shout-out to blogs she enjoys reading, including writing to survive. Go to her blog to read her always-engrossing fiction, to peruse book reviews, or just to join in on the conversation.

I’ve been in a bit of a blogging slump lately, not feeling creative or chatty enough to leave comments. I’m getting tired of dropping my Entrecard all over the place. I haven't had much to post about. Even in my current ennui, I recognize that this virtual universe has helped bring me back to life. Blogging and the support of fellow bloggers can take a large part of the credit for connecting me with the world again, not only after a hard year in a strange place, but also after many years of keeping most people at a polite distance, years of sitting on my secrets and keeping my mouth shut.

This wasn't even the point of starting a blog for me initially. Building a community was far from my mind. I just needed an impetus to start writing. In that sense blogging has helped me connect back to myself, has helped the words flow.

I’m not sure where I’ll be going with this space. Starting next month, I will be taking a writing course in which will entail writing every day, including holidays and weekends. I hope this little push will not only help me find a local community but will also propel my writing forward. It doesn’t mean I’ll stop blogging or commenting, but it does mean that I will have to cut back. Or maybe I'll bring you all along with me on this new venture with updates and postings of my half-baked work. I don't know exactly how it will work.

What I do know is that I am grateful for my blogging friends. You have supported me on my journey and I look forward to having you along for the rest of the ride.

Thank you.

Tags: Awards, Comments, writing

If I couldn't prove it, why should I believe?

There was no other conclusion. I couldn't believe in God. This wasn’t a question of whether or not he existed, but was a question of my own belief. No proof was sufficient and I had no faith, no religious background, no desire to hide behind the wimpy safety of Pascal's wager.

Shortly after I reached this conclusion, a product of a paper I wrote on God’s existence in a Philosophy 101 class, I dropped out of college. It was the middle of the second semester, sophomore year and for a while I kept it quiet, kept on accepting my father and step-mother’s checks, which were enough to cover my half of the rent. My roommate, in shaky recovery from an eating disorder, was working as a waitress. As the money dried up, she got me a job waiting tables.

It fell apart. We drank and drank, put ourselves in dangerous situations. I was moving to DC, she didn’t want to come. She slept with my longtime boyfriend, I abandoned her for an Eastern Shore boy who lived with his brother in a place called the Sugar Shack. That fall, my mother drove me and the cat to a small rowhouse in NE DC where I was renting a room. I was starting a new life as a sophomore at Catholic University.

This was the atheist’s choice? Catholic University? I was thinking of majoring in education and Catholic had a good program. The school was located in Washington, a city I wanted to live in. My decision was sealed during the interview, when my interlocuter -- Miss DC 1988! -- told me I was in. But on that first day of school, I jettisoned education for philosophy. It was the most interesting thing going.

Amy, my housemate, was 30 years old to my 20, a Peace Corps survivor. Amy counted her potatoes and onions, and even recorded the shape her peanut butter was in -- the knife slashes, the peaks and valleys and indentations -- before she put the lid on the jar. I found her tallies of produce, her vivid peanut butter descriptions, recorded in tiny script on a piece of paper hidden in the pantry. When I moved in, she had envisioned late night bull sessions with her new gal pal. What she got was an unhappy, underage semi-alcoholic, quiet and removed. She coped by counting her vegetables, a safeguard against (non-existent) theft.

I found salvation on the second day of classes, while taking notes for the History of Ancient Philosophy. N., a Basselin scholar, started up a conversation with me and his fellow Basselins joined in. They were men my age, in the seminary and on the road to priesthood, in addition to being philosophy majors on steroids. If it weren’t for N., who pulled me in, supported me, got me a job when I was desperate, and on occasion gave me food "donated" from the seminary kitchen, I’m not sure I would have survived. He was -- and is -- a good friend.

N. is happily married now, to a kind-hearted, amazing woman. They have five kids. He and his wife have accepting of me, of my quiet atheism. They approach me without judgement.

But am I still an atheist?

I don’t have faith, but I am not as slavishly devoted to proofs. For those who believe, God is real. As for me, I’ll have to be content with not knowing.

Tags: College, God, Philosophy