Places Called Home

“We had come home and if home was not what we had expected, never mind, our need for belonging allowed us to ignore the obvious and to create real places, or even illusory places, befitting our imagination.”Maya Angelou

Her husband worked at the hospital around the block from my house and said there was no such thing as a Lesser Cathedral District and she chided me for having given her faulty information as we sat having coffee. Looking out the window at passing traffic, I reflected: I knew it existed; I lived there. The neighbors all lived there. John lived under a porch there. Lorie walking through with all she owned in the bags she carried about with her was acquainted with every stray kitten there. We all knew it was so. I thought about trying to convince her that what I knew to be so was so, but – instead – I let it be. We had our coffee and she told how she once took plywood, cardboard and a steak knife and built a fireplace where there wasn’t one before. It occurred to me that a woman like that would figure out what was so on her own; she would know it was so when she saw what had been made there for herself because faith is, after all, a very tactile thing at times.
S.P.M.

A Grandmother's Eyes

“She had that spontaneous quality of aliveness which illuminates people who have already done a lot of their dying, and I think I am beginning to understand the truth of that.”
Madeleine L’Engle, The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

From the first moments that I can clearly remember, where ever she was – and that was usually the house at 3910 Smith - it felt safe. She is gone, after a fashion, but I will always remember: A house near the river that smelled of popcorn and clean laundry in the winter and lilacs and fresh-cut grass in the summer, the sounds of the evening news and passing trains and – always at the center of all – her blue eyes and warm smile. I have never gone back to the house after it sold; I suppose that way I can believe nothing has changed.
S.P.M.

Holiday Strength Prozac

I was thumbing through my coffee table book of New Yorker cartoons recently and saw a drawing of a huge pill bottle with a label reading, “Holiday Strength Prozac.” It was funny. So I smiled. But, seriously, where can I get some?

The holidays are upon us and with them are bourne so many emotions that it is often impossible to sort, identify or trace one before the next is tugging at us for attention. Case in point: I found myself yesterday standing in the middle of a wide empty room at a client’s holding a green christmas ornament in one hand tearing up for no good reason.

It suddenly ocurred to me for about the thousandth time that Christmas was coming and something was missing; I felt that I was in a taxi on the way to the airport and knew I had forgotten something critical to the trip without knowing what it was I had forgotten. Then I remembered: My grandmother was gone.

She died a few years ago, but – somehow – the coming of Christmas without her still causes a catch in my throught and tears in my eyes at the most random moments. I stood there marvelling that life could go on so seamlessly without her, and, at the same time, felt like a child who woke up in the middle of a bad dream; it took a minute to get my bearings and find my place in life and that moment again.

I find the older I get, the less I seem certain of anything and there are days when life is reduced to its most primal needs written on a wheel that never stops turning: Work. Food. Warmth. Fear. Yearning. Love. There are no words to quantify these things in real time; they are known by face, form and feel alone and if one of them is fractured we become totally disoriented.

Disorientation can be overcome, and I have a friend who, very sensibly, cooks when she is not feeling up to competing with the world. So, some weekends when everyone else is busy about things for themselves, she can be found at home listening to country music, sipping a glass of something, and turning mounds of various ingredients into a refridgerator packed to bursting with enough labelled packages to feed her staff and random hungry relatives for the next week.

They read like post-its your mom would leave in your lunch box, those packages, but grown-up: Smashed potatoes like you never imagined! Aparagus sauteed with bacon. Special shrimp oriental stir fry especailly for Linda! Turkey noodle soup with extra thick noodles. Really wild rice. The best stuffing in the world. She calls it her therapy and I know she takes comfort in the fact that through feeding people she is needed.

Everyone needs to be needed . . . almost more than anything else – more than to be fed, clothed, admired or loved – we need to be needed. But sometimes even being needed cannot fend off the lurking, malignant feeling that we are superfluous. We are extra. We are disposable. So what, then?

I don’t know, and this sometimes scares me. I feel I might disappear entirely if I let go for a second the carefully compsed image that is myself. There are moments like the one yesterday – ornament in hand – when I feel as if I were holding myself confidently in my own hands like a soapy dish that suddenly, inexplicably, slips from my fingers and falls into dangerous fragments at my feet before I can catch my next breath. I look about to see if anyone else has noticed, pick up the fragments and pretend that everything is fine, but I still know that something elemental has changed and I am a little less certain than I had been.

The days that make up November and December are like a great sink of soapy dishes waiting to be dropped while attempting to prove to others that I am worth enough to be among them and to myself that I am needed. So it’s a good thing that the holidays require so much cooking, after all.
SPM
(Note: Lori passed away aver a year ago, but this piece, written in 2007 originally, demonstrates how she just comes to mind everytime a large meal is prepared or a holiday looms.)
 
 

The Stairs of Home

Our house was not prepared to offer us a home when we met it about a year ago. With all first floor windows and the front door boarded over, the vestibule was almost black and most of the building’s nakedness was semi-concealed.

The only sounds in the house were the wind whipping down the street and thin flakes of plaster and paint falling now and again from the water-damaged ceilings to break with a sound like old eggshells on the dusty oak and maple floors.

The library to the left once had a detailed window part way up its main wall, but that had been stolen by looters, as had been the detailed columns in the living room opening to the right. All that was left of either were a ply-wood covered hole on one side and a wide sagging arch on the other with prints in the old shellac of bases and capitals to hint at what had once been there.

The living room ceiling had settled into a crackled grid with odd little pieces laying on the floor. The fireplace wall with its green tile looked very bare since the mantle had been stolen and someone had tried to remove some of the tile hearth resulting in a jagged edge looking a lot like teeth broken in a bar fight.

Pocket doors – miraculously remaining – led from the living room to what was once the dining room with another missing window in its bay and a Lazy-Boy-sized patch in the ceiling where the bathroom above must have caused problems in the past.

In the kitchen there was no stove, a sink in a rusted metal cabinet connected to nothing and drywall sagging from the ceiling because it was screwed up with no respect to joists.

The dust and grime of an empty house were everywhere as you headed up the stairs to the bedrooms and bath on the second floor, but at least there some of the windows that had been only cracked had been patched using acrylic sheeting and silicone so some sunlight broke into the rooms.

The bathroom had yellow-green tub connected to nothing, a toilet that had shattered from cold and a sink that had to be re-plumbed.

The house had been so long empty that even mice had moved elsewhere and scattered all through the house – mainly painted a much-grubbied flat white – were scrawled profanities, references of love to a girl named Felina and notes to a personage named Joel who was to stay out of the kitchen and bathroom.

The only space under that was possibly tame was the attic, and that possibility was only visible after tapping into the fort-building skills of a creative childhood. So we tapped. And hauled and rearranged until we were to be found squatting in our own attic. Since the budget set for the house by our broker didn’t go as far as he’d hoped before he passed away, it would be another seven months before the house had working plumbing beyond a basic toilet and it will be this Christmas before the kitchen is functioning.

But this year has been an interesting one in the development of our concept of home. Living on the third floor of a house set one-half a floor above ground meant a lot of stairs. Up from the back door to the kitchen. Up from the front hall to the bay in the landing. Up from the bay to the upper hall. Up from the hall to the attic with its pine floor, walls and ceiling.

A sofa and chair. Coffee table. Bookcases and mountains of books. Art supplies. Our make-shift dining table. Boxes of china. Paintings tucked wherever they would fit. A bed in one corner. Dressers in the back dormer. Everything involving home meant hauling up and down seemingly endless stairs to a space that was an odd hybrid of Rapunzel’s tower, Swiss Family Robinson’s tree house and Anne Frank’s annex. Home became all about stairs and waiting the winter out so we could begin expanding into the rest of the house.
SPM

A magical year.

Ken (now Ben) Fremer descended upon Bay City and told me that he had been more crazied than wronged – an incredibly astute statement – and said that he saw in me all the evil that rocked his boat. I decided to take the statement as a compliment and not miss anything at all because there seemed a special quality in the people and the air about that time – the better part of a year – that began with dancing under trees named The Sisters in Bay City between the park and the DoubleTree.

Mandy trotting down the sidewalk in a pouring rain holding twigs over her head as if they were an umbrella. (I have one of the branches still.) Roderick and I walking almost every night down to Caroll Park and talking there until the small hours of the day. Random midnight pizza at Brooklyn Boyz with Dan (who cannot see to drive, but is guided by the loops of energy that radiate from all things), Meredith (whose personality was as wild as her fabulous hair and whose uncle Ray was an ex-carnie), Jon Rigg (who was pale and cadaverous and whose clothes always looked as if they’d snagged on him as they blew by and whose look could only be described as heroine chic), Jen (who will one day realize her greatest art are the grafitti drawings she doesn’t have to think so hard about), Schultzie (Damn, the boy can look nuts when he wants to), and sometimes Amandrew.

Amandrew…watching Amanda and Andrew become the kind of couple that quirky novellas are made of was a once-only thing to see. Spontaneous road trips to Iargo Springs and unplanned but perfect evenings with scrounged suppers and foreign movies. Happy Hilfiger (Chris has had a sartorial awakening since that summer and has now – I am happy to report – entirely recovered from the experience of being home schooled) and his love of sushi and air guns. The end of the summer had Warren off to Interlochen and Nick out of the closet and firmly established as an adopted brother headed to Detroit to learn this thing called life.

In the autumn, the trees clung to their color almost three weeks longer than the year before as if trying desperately to slow the coming of winter and we all looked upward into the branches and grinned appreciatively.

Winter was brought in with a dancing of our group in the intersection of Saginaw and Center late the night of the first swirling, fluffy snow. And then it was over. Somehow, suddenly, everyone was boarding buses, packing cars, finding new adventures and life began to look different. But it still happened, that year, and we are all better for it.
SPM

Scratching posts and Baby Boys

October 18th, 2009 11:18pm

I looked out the window and watched as nineteen cats of every possible ancestry (or incestry?) prowled all over my front porch, lawn, the alley next door and meandering across the street to use the newly planted trees as scratching posts. Several had planted themselves in a row in what was left of the O’Keefe carriage stone as if governing the assembly. I watched them and thought of another odd October night Some years ago.

My mother became pregnant when the family still lived in Norway and our move back to Houston landed at the extreme end of her last trimester and our flight was on British Airways. The in-flight movie was "Batteries Not Included," and our row of seats was the last in the no-smoking section. We arrived in Houston, found an odd house, and my mother began labor just after closing on the house.

I sat up that night waiting for a baby and reading “The Time Machine” from cover to cover. The book is still a favorite. And the baby wasn't so bad in time, either.
SPM

The tight-wire act that is the universe.

“And then there was this shift in the universe and his texts, like, just about dried up altogether.”

Granted, she was about seventeen years old and trying to force down a double espresso at Starbucks because it had sounded like an elegant thing to order ("cool" she would probably say cool.), and her universe probably didn’t take much to rattle it, but she got me thinking.

Tiny things can rattle the universe and some of those tiny things aren't in the hands of superheroes, but, instead, in the paws of very average folks who can choose small things at every turning. There is no comittment to the level of choice taken...could range from how and where one buys produce or shoelaces to the amazing trick of looking into another human being’s eyes – even those of a total stranger – and draw from them a smile without saying a word and reminding them that they are not alone. And - knowing they are not alone - perhaps they make a tiny choice that changes someone else's day, and with that day an entire life.

Imagine what a hug or a random, but carefully considered phrase could do fifty years from now. So there’s really no excuse not to create a shift in someone’s universe today.
SPM