Memory, Final Week

Fear Inventory

My greatest fear in third grade was hell. Not fitting in, a close second. When I said "God damn" on the bus, I said it because I was tagged as a sweet, quiet little girl, the bus driver's pet. But as soon as I uttered those two irretrievable syllables, I was seized by consequence. I thought it was blasphemy. The unforgivable sin. I felt the devil suck away my inheritance, my peace. I had crossed the line. Mom always said that cursing God was blasphemy. And the preacher always said blasphemy was unforgivable.

I couldn't ask my mom if I was going to hell now. It would break her heart to know that her little girl was doomed already. I couldn't ask the preacher because that's the same thing as outing myself. So I turned to my Bible concordance, collecting blasphemy references I didn't really understand. Sometimes I found relief, if I could tweak my perception enough. Cursing God, I learned is forgivable. Speaking against the Son, also forgivable. But blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is not forgivable "neither in this life nor in the life to come." I hadn't cursed the Holy Spirit, so I decided I was safe enough. But that took a bit of denial. I had to believe that God, Jesus, and the Spirit were three different beings, that sinning against one wasn't the same as sinning against all. I had always been told they were one. But I don't think "God damn" is blasphemy anymore anyway.

I might call hell tangible if I could see it. Now, though, it seems abstract like my fear of it. Rivers scare me too, and I see them all the time. Even though I know it won't happen, I imagine myself facing that fear, tracing the river from the bridge into the ominous unknown where there aren't any houses, only snakes and unharvested trees. The closest I've come was when I turned off my headlights while crossing the Tallapoosa river one night. It doesn't make sense, but I thought if I crossed the river in complete darkness that it wouldn't scare me anymore. I had a fudge brownie cake from the Dairy King in my hand at the time. It was all over my pants when I finally found the lights again.

The first time I remember being petrified by anything tangible, the nearest water source was the toilet near the playground at Folsom Elementary. Just beyond the door trapped between the tips of my black knee-high boots and a pair of tennis shoes belonging to Stephanie Foster stood the biggest, furriest brown spider I'd ever seen. I've not seen one bigger since. But I'm bigger now, so proportion might be to blame. I wasn't afraid at first. In fact, I was poised to stomp the life out of the beast when Stephanie shouted her wisdom. "My mama says spiders that big can bite you through the bottom of your shoe."

Memory, Week 7

Note: This one takes an uncomfortable turn, but it's because the writing brought me back to a few questions I keep returning to in life, to a sort of rhetorical dilemma. Something, I guess, I just needed to unload.

Tough Enough

When I was ten, an emergency room doctor admitted my father to the hospital with kidney stones. I decided to play nurse. If he yelped with pain, I pushed the button for someone to bring medication. When it took too long, I went looking for staff with access to a pain pill or a shot. My grandfather tried to stop me, succeeded actually, by telling me that some people exaggerate pain, that some handle it better than others. I accepted that. He's one of those people, I thought. He just needs to toughen up. I hate to admit that I thought that. But at age 10, I knew all about that concept. My father told me to toughen up all the time. The pills and shots still came of course.

I heard much later, years later I guess, that a man passing kidney stones is the equivalent of a woman giving birth, at least in terms of pain. Who decided that, I wonder? A man with kidney stones estimating the pain of childbirth? Or a mother passing kidney stones? When I was 21, I went to the ER with severe back pain, nausea, and a fever of 103. Four kidney stones were trying to pass at once, and there were ten others waiting to strike at some unknown future date. My father was there to demand Demoral on my behalf, and I who hated needles, begged for the fastest relief, shot or no shot. To help with the analogy, and speaking as a mother of three, I prefer childbirth to kidney stone delivery.

The wholly physical pain of stones in the urinary track forces the host to break routine. Housework goes on hold, employers get notified, driving waits for another day. The line between well and unwell clearly marked, the unspoken “man down” a given. Nobody expects business as usual when you're flat on your back, doped up on pain killer, the x-rays your proof, a tangible sign of your physical excuse.

Emotional pain works differently. When I was a junior in high school, one of my classmates was admitted to the hospital for a week of rest, a victim, I heard, of stress, a victim on the verge of a breakdown. How, I wondered, does one recognize the “verge of a breakdown?” Later, a friend of mine who taught kindergarten students for ten years was diagnosed with a stress disorder related to her job and given an early retirement with pay. She was only 35 years old at the time. I'm not discounting the emotional and mental pain of these friends. I know that pain well and I relate to the need, the desire, to be removed from the stressors, the sources of pain that won't show up in radiology. And, for me, that's the crux. I sometimes wonder if I've passed my mental breaking point or if I really can take more. There's no hard evidence, no clearly marked line I can say I've crossed. Am I sucking it up or am I really not broken yet? Of my closest women friends, I only know one who hasn't been prescribed a mood enhancer for either short- or long-term treatment of anxiety or stress, the idea that if we face our demons with a better attitude, none of the stressors need be dealt with. The medication equivalent to a mantra I picked up somewhere: "You are the master of your emotions."

I once visited a friend who'd just given birth, and looking at her in her white hospital gown I thought not of the baby she was now responsible for, not of the nine months leading up to the birth, not of the delivery itself, but only of that image of her resting in her hospital bed, her food prepared for her, her job on hold, her duties delegated. And I was jealous. That's an odd thing to admit. But that's what I felt. I wanted a few days of bedrest, a break from kitchen chores, time off from my job, time off from chauffeur duty, time to stop pretending that everything was okay, that I felt like keeping up my routine, that I didn't have hidden hurts or repressed desires, that I was up to sucking it up.

On a good day, I crashed into a solid glass door at the Kapalua Maui Resort, thinking for a good 15 minutes that my nose was broken. When it stopped hurting, I knew an x-ray was unnecessary. I know, too, that on that day, heading out to ride horses and tour a pineapple plantation, my emotional health was in tact. At the plantation, my assigned horse, Harrison Ford, took off from the path at a trot and I squealed, one of only two things our tour guide told us not to do. She and Fabio caught up to us, calming Harrison down and reminding me to gently rein him in, to stay calm, should he stray again. Later, I saw a baby pineapple, learning that it takes a full year for the fruit to mature. Back at the hotel, I paused at the glass door, a little disoriented by its sheer invisibility.

Stress, heartache, debt, suffering loved ones, hopelessness, the blues. They're all invisible, too. Maybe you'll cry and that's visible. Maybe someone says, “You've got an anger problem” or “you're overemotional.” Maybe you never say a word, only squeeze yourself into a ball in the dark, wondering if tomorrow you will really stand up again, brush your teeth, wash your hair, make the coffee, drive to your part-time job, apply again for a real job. Or will you wake, find yourself unable to rise, and get the diagnosis that mandates your withdrawal? If standing when the moment comes, will your knees buckle, your body landing helplessly on the concrete like others you have known? Or, if no diagnosis comes, will you say anyway, finally, I'm not tough enough?

Memory, Week 5

The Stanley Transplant

An unnatural respect for John Deere tractors gets you an honorary uncle title in my mom's family. We don't have a guidebook to family inclusion or an official ceremony of any sort, but experience shows this to be the case. We adopted Stanley, a country-solid lover of green farm equipment he never uses and the polar opposite to my Aunt Nora, the proper anecdote to unsightly manners and dirty boots. Stanley came to Christmas gatherings, once deducing "that ain't no shop vac" while manhandling a freshly unwrapped box clearly labeled "Shop-Vac" but housing rather facetiously John Deere salt and pepper shakers and a matching hardback picture book.

Once, on our way to surprise Uncle Hughey preaching at Highlands United Methodist Church in downtown Birmingham, our car in the lead, Stanley caught up to us, his head out the passenger window, his arm wildly waving a two-way, informing us that Aunt Nora needed coffee. It was a cruel prank of my mom's to put Nora and Stanley in the same car, Nora's lips pursed, her eyebrows perfectly painted, her consternation conspicuously awkward.

I remember Nora's outstretched manicured hand, the starched dollar bill poised to pay for her java, followed by Stanley's large labor-marked counterpart forcing hers down to her side. "Put your money up. It ain't no good here, woman."

Later during church service, Stanley went missing, returning a good half hour later with a steaming vessel of Starbucks between his palms, scooting back to Nora's side, her guardian for the day. I later learned he had offered to bring her a cup back, which she politely refused. Church concessions, I suppose, being too avant-garde for her taste.

Memory 2, Week 2

Catching Pop Flies

My brother Dan and I still argue over which one of us got shot in the butt with a bb and which one did the shooting. I think I pulled the trigger and got in trouble afterwards. He says it was me who got shot. I was maybe ten, so Dan was either seven or eight. I remember a large woodpile next to the propane gas tank in our backyard, the firewood thrown in a disheveled heap like there might be a bonfire later. I want to say that the wood was stacked one log on top of the other like an unsafe stairway, lower at the ends and capping out in the middle. But that's not how I remember it. I think it took up a considerable chunk of our backyard.

I didn't take a direct shot at my brother. I was aiming for the woodpile. My mom had warned me not to shoot at the wood, saying the bb could ricochet and hit me, hurt my dog Knuckles, or crack a window on the back side of the house. I don't think I believed her. Plus, maybe I saw a snake or a rat and that's why I took the shot. The bb ricocheted, beaming my brother on his right cheek. At least according to me. I wasn't allowed to play with the gun after that when Dad was away. Dan says what happened is that he shot me on purpose, that we both lost shooting privileges. He says it was to get me back for pinning him down in a wrestling move when our cousins Chris and Mike were over.

My dad warned me all the time that Dan would get bigger than me one day, that I would pay for bullying him. Dad wouldn't let me forget my genetic weakness. He fought hard against it, arming me with bb guns, pellet guns, baseball bats, bows and arrows. And fishhooks. I remember baiting hooks with earthworms I had dug up by hand from the damp soil in the pasture next to the creek, the way those slimy brown bodies writhed as I hooked them in sections, making each one into an 's.' Dad said earthworms might still live even if you break them in half or in sections. He said they have seven hearts and don't need them all to survive. And I think I do remember watching halved earthworms wiggle along different paths after being split apart. Minnows were baited differently, the point of the hook entering through the eye and coming out the other side of their thin heads.

My dad and I played catch, too, and not just for fun either. Dad insisted I not flinch when he beamed the ball at my worn leather glove, suspended between my chin and sternum. "Don't close your eyes. Watch the ball and you won't get hit."

When I dodged the ball, shifting to the left or right, he yelled at me, "Don't be afraid of the ball!" So I learned precision, snagging balls on a path with my face, my shin, or the propane tank behind me. I thought he was training me for something. I thought I might get to play on a team. So I sucked it up when he made me pitch til dark, refusing to go inside until I landed a fast pitch straight into his stationary glove. If he had to, he'd make me angry on purpose. He said it made me throw faster. If I was mad enough, I'd go in for dinner certain that the dull thud of cork against leather had stung his palm. Happy it might have hurt a little.

I stopped playing catch with my dad when he forbade me to try out for the baseball team. It was an all boy's team, he said. Still, when I was older, I volunteered to catch pop-flies for my brother when he practiced at home between game days.

*couldn't verify whether pop flys, pop fly's or pop flies is correct -- none of them seem right. :)

Memory 1, Week 2

Backwards to Thirteen

I once answered the phone "I love you" by accident. It was a multi-tasking snafu. I'm not an "I love you" whore. I might be a little loose with "I'm sorry," but confessions of affection aren't my vice. So when I turned from consoling my daughter Emily to profess love instead to Garan Mason, our youth pastor at the time, I followed with "I'm sorry! I'm so sorry! I meant hello."

I've briefly loved a few doctors. David Cummings, a balding dentist, saw me through a painful ordeal with a wisdom tooth. And Dr. David Kline, a barely thirty urologist who saved me from fourteen stones blocking the right side of my deformed horseshoe kidney, I loved best of all. The half drunken "I love yous" were helped along by narcotics and gratitude. Dr. Cummings, I still see twice a year.

Once, at the end of an exhausting telephone exchange with my ex, I unwittingly tapped the template "I love you," the one reserved for my mom, my husband, and my kids--my only regulars. And God I want to say I hate him. But I've been brought up to say instead that I hate how he makes me feel.

Hate was like a swear word at my house. Nowadays kids have the swear jar. Say a bad work, put in a quarter. Done. There was no magic glass into which I could deposit my sin. I kept my quarters and my guilt.

I once said "I hate you" to my mom. I didn't mean it. I hated what she was doing, insisting I stay home on a Saturday night where the only things to do were write love poetry in my room or watch reruns about a magical island where recurring nightmares finally get resolved. My mom eventually gave in, though, and let me spend the night at my friend Sandy's house, where Nora, Claire, and Tori practiced french kissing with mason jars. Later, Sandy's cousin Little Don, fifteen I think, would judge their progress. I didn't play. Little Don said I was acting like a girl priest. And he said I looked like one too, my white ruffled collar buttoned all the way to the top, my glittery socks reaching way past the hem of my gold knickers.

Memory, Week One

My Last Steak

Dinner out meant steak or seafood. I chose steak. A ribeye, I'm fairly sure. I can't say that slab of well-done meat looked pretty on my plate. A charred measure of brown and black against the backdrop of overcooked broccoli and a microwaved potato. The smell, though, like fried butter, evoked backyard parties. Communion. Family night. Sometimes still, the scent wafts into memory, taking me back to a time when steak meant steak, not cow. I miss that.

And the taste? Something like sweet smoke, but with substance. A little chewy, but no blood. A tradeoff. Slicing away my third, maybe fourth bite, a thin string recoiled like a friendly snake caught by surprise. I put my fork and knife to work, attempting to bypass the offending reminder of life. A fruitless attempt.

Jeff, a little distracted by my shift from eating to disecting, offered comfort. “It's probably just a vein. You know, a blood vessel. Or a tendon. Just eat around it.”

A vein. A tendon. He said that out loud. I placed my fork, still warm from its foray into cow flesh, in a discarded napkin. I asked the waitress for a clean one and finished off my potato in silence.