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I wore white high heels and a yellow skirt, a combination that, I was certain, said, "Don't hit me."
My two best friends walked on either side of me as we trudged down the street.
"We could eat lunch at my house instead," Michelle offered.
"I can take her," Tressa said.
"I don't think she'll give up if I don't show," I said. "We should just deal with it."
"It's ridiculous," Michelle said. "Nobody wants to date her brother. Why is she beating you up because you won't?"
"I have no idea," I said.
We continued down the street, noting the throng of students in the parking lot, far more than usual.
"Oh God," I said. "You think that's for us?"
"We can't go over there," Tressa said.
We walked so slowly now that we barely moved. I kept expecting someone to look up, to see us, and to shout, "Here she is!" But they all just meandered, a multi-colored clump in jeans and mini skirts and cowboy hats.
Finally, we hit the edge of the of the parking lot. People elbowed each other, parting as we walked through.
She leaned against a car near the entrance to the store. "You didn't chicken out?" she said, handing her coke to another girl. "I figured you'd run the other way."
She wasn't overly large, but easily the most athletic girl in our class. Her feathered blond hair puffed up with a breeze, like an angry rooster.
I didn't say anything. I didn't trust my voice to work.
"So you think you're too good for my brother?" She stepped forward.
I shrugged.
"You gonna say something?" she pushed against my shoulder.
"Ah, leave her alone," someone said.
A savior!
We turned to the voice, but no one stepped forward to claim the comment.
"Say something!" she said.
I cleared my throat. It might work. "Seems like this is between your brother and me, not me and you."
She crossed her hands in front of her chest. I had no idea why this was happening. Her brother had never even asked me out. He was considerably older than me, on his fifth year of high school while I was only a freshman. I did know, however, that he had been dedicating "Love Me Tender" and other Elvis songs to me nightly on some radio show.
"This is bunk," someone said. "Let's go." A couple people peeled off one side of the crowd and started walking away.
This seemed to signal a general disenchantment with our lack of aggression, and others started to leave too. Finally only this girl and I stood there, a smattering of our own friends looking on.
I shrugged again, and turned away, expecting her to jump me at any moment. I kept my back straight and walked neither too fast nor too slow. After a moment, Michelle and Tressa fell in beside me, and we walked back to school, skipping lunch, a casualty of war.
Nothing else ever happened. The brother failed to graduate, she transferred away, and I never thought of this incident again.
Until she emailed me the other day, breezy and friendly, asking how my life is going.
Time and the internet changes everything, and apparently brings us together. I haven't responded, still remembering the heat on my face, the swish of my skirt against my legs, and the fear that at any moment, a hand would connect with my face.
Oh, to look back on days that changed your life.
Most of them don't seem like much at the time. No racing pulse. No heart-thumping sound track. Probably not even a mention on your blog. I'd bet many red-letter days start out, and even finish, completely in the gray.
But on November 11, 2005, I arrived for the first time at a little coffee shop known as Austin Java. I didn't know anyone doing NaNoWriMo, but my life had taken a crazy and terrible turn in September, and I wanted to branch out, meet people, and figure out a way to re-engage with the world outside my problems. So I opened the big wooden doors and tentatively stepped inside.
Luckily, just to my left, a penguin sat on a table, the sign that the Austin NaNoWriMos were there. I sat down by two women, who let me know it was cheap wine night and to avail myself of a glass. They introduced themselves as Ivy and Audrey. "I'm trying to date her," Ivy said, by way of explaining everything. "But she isn't going for it yet."
A few minutes later, a fourth person, a 20-something guy who went by Fool, joined us.
The evening, greased by red wine and a sense of hilarity in trying to write novels on such a short timeline, caused us to laugh and joke and try to out-wit each other with ridiculous scenes. Audrey sang a song for us. When Fool came back from the bathroom talking about some poetic graffiti over the urinal, Audrey and I raided the men's room to check it out. This has led to a fine three-year career of leaving bits of poetry in bathrooms, and each time Java paints over our literary leavings, we put them back.
We all became tight friends, attending write ins together throughout the month, and pushing each other to make the goal of 50,000 words in 30 days. When November ended, we couldn't bear to part, so we formed the Austin Java writing company and have met every Monday night for the last three years.
This night has led to so many things for me. Continuing to write, for one, when I might have given up long ago. Finding several of my best friends in the world, including Audrey, Ivy, and Rebecca, who joined Java soon after. And teaching me about social circles way beyond my experience.
Next year I get the honor of photographing Audrey as she marries her longtime girlfriend in Canada, as well as Ivy also tying the knot with her girl. And the inspiration of all of them has led me to the novel I'm writing this year, Girl Crush, and pushing me to write comedy, which I'd never tried. But all this has also helped in retaining my faith that I am on the path I'm meant to travel--not safe, not settled, and not standing still. But moving forward, reaching out beyond my comfort zones, and always, following my dream to write.
That night I went home glad I had gone to a write in, relieved to realize I would not remain reclusive after all my life changes, and proud to be writing so fast and so well under difficult circumstances.
But I had no idea that the trajectory of my life had really fired off at that moment, that the testing phase was past and I'd grown into a far more relaxed, open, and freely expressive person than I had been in a very long time, and this would change everything.
I'm a little behind on NaNoWriMo and starting to get sick (plus seven photo shoots this weekend), so my Friday Flashback must be short.Last night my daughters and I rented The Muppet Movie. This was my favorite movie when I was 9 (it came out in 1979) and I had the LP to it. I even played the role of Ms. Piggy (though I refused to wear a pillow) in our 4th grade musical, singing "Never Before, Never Again." I felt strongly aware that my own daughter is 9, seeing it for the first time, and wondering if she would feel the same way about it, or if the changes in culture since then would have blunted her.
But I had not seen the actual movie for almost 30 years. I remembered certain parts: Kermit riding the bicycle with his spindly frog legs, Piggy and Kermit running through a soft-focus field of flowers, Animal and his crazy drum playing.
I had no idea how adult-funny it was, at least in the first 20 minutes. It defintely bogged down in plot halfway, and lost its comic edge, but the opening scenes are a gold mine of funny, riffing on religion "Lost? Try Hare Krishna."
And the 70s drug culture. "Uh oh. Zoot skipped a groove again." Even the ordinarily corny pun-jokes work at first: "Drinks are ON THE HOUSE!" (I somehow didn't see that one coming. I forgot the audience.)
But of course, there's Kermit's opening song. I had heard it since then, of course, and seen dozens of parodies. But I admit it, seeing him up on a big screen, in a swamp, singing with his banjo, I busted out bawling. But then, it's been an emotional couple of days for me. We won't even go into THAT...
If only more songs were like this.
If we could archive memories as well as I had preserved these dresses, we’d certainly all learn from all the mistakes in our personal histories.
And this dress had probably been a mistake.
I plucked it from a long row of 80s prom dresses residing in the back corner of a closet, sheathed in an oversized garment bag that held all my high school couture. I'd been invited to an 80s Dance Party, and it seemed fun to "truly" look the part.
I chose it not because it was the prettiest. I’d rather have worn my peach full-length dress from senior prom, which I had designed and my mom and I had sewn. But I could tell from the bust that my bust was going to bust. Even sliding on this black dress, which was more forgiving with a bit of elastic shirring in the back, turned me into something akin to Jessica Rabbit with her perilous décolletage.
But this dress had a jacket.
Wearing the dress again felt strange, the past rushing forward and sinking in. And when I got to the dance party, hearing Footloose and MC Hammer and Madonna, I could, for a moment, capture the girl I once was, before my life history became more past than present, more baggage than freedom, and more weighty than my really big hair.
But if I’ve learned anything in the decades that separated the two wearings of this dress, it's that life is what you make of it, and that night I might have been pushing 40, but I planned to party like it was 1989.
The tardy bell rang and we knew we were in big trouble.
I stood tucked inside a corner of the elementary school building, out of the wind. Patrick leaned toward me, but only our lips touched.
I couldn’t back away, so I shoved him in the shoulders. “We’re late for school!”
He withdrew a step, his peaceful expression clouding. “You said you didn’t care.”
“No!” I pushed past him and sprinted toward the back door. I heard the thud of his running steps behind me.
My jacket was unzipped and spread wide, the chill air making me shiver. Patrick caught up with me and snatched my hand and still we ran, laughing now, into the building.
Mrs. Smitson was pretty old. She had turned to the blackboard, her brassy hair bobbing as she wrote an assignment. Patrick and I slipped into our seats, carefully sliding our books beneath us in the cubby between the legs.
She turned, glanced across the room, and walked to her desk. “Time for math,” she said. “Turn to page 42.”
Patrick and I glanced at each other and smiled. We’d gotten away with it.
We were in second grade and in love.
It’s hard to keep a secret diary when you can’t spell “keep out.”
My six-year-old huddled over her new sparkly pink book, painstakingly sticking the tiny key in the lock. She popped her head up when I walked into the room. “Don’t LOOK!” she shouted. “It’s my diary!”
I raised my hands in innocence. “I have no plans to read your diary.” I worked hard not to snicker and passed through to the kitchen.
Moments later she stuck her head around the corner, blond hair falling on her cheek. “How to you spell ‘secret?’” she asked.
Again I stifled a laugh and gave her the letters.
“Not so fast!” she climbed up on the stool and spread open the pages to her book. I could see in big letters, the words “CEP OWD.” Below it she scrawled the letters to “secret.”
I know everything that she writes in there, not because I snoop (although she has me keep the extra key in case she loses the other – I am, apparently, safe) but because she asks me to spell everything.
So for this Flashback Friday, I tugged out my own first dairy, given to me for Christmas in 1978, when I was eight years old. The first entry is a microcosm of that entire period of my life:
New Year’s Day we all stayed at home, all except Daddy. Dad went hunting without us.
Later in the day, the water went out, and we had to go without water. When dad came home, he knew he would have to get some water soon. I could not go to school in the morning because we did not have any water, so I could not take a bath. I wish I could though. I LOVE PATRICK!
It’s all there, on January 1, 1979. You can read between the lines about my home life, and we how we barely could eek out an existence in the middle of the country.
What I do love about it, though, is how no matter how bad things got (and eventually they would get pretty bad indeed), I always counted on love. Still do.
Everything seems out of proportion when you are faced with giant Munchkins with spackled hair.
I first saw The Wizard of Oz when it came on one of the big three, a network primetime moment where families gathered around the television for the yearly viewing of the classic cautionary tale for the Stupid, Heartless, Ungrateful, or Chicken.
This would probably have been around 1978, when I was eight and greatly feared, if not actually being SHUC, then at least looking it.
I took the lessons seriously.
- When you get to a fork in the yellow brick road, gnash your teeth for, oh, about three verses, then blithely choose a direction as if it were no longer an issue.
- Don't be a pyro around flammable friends.
- Flying monkeys do not follow the body-to-wing-span ratio of ordinary flying beasts.
- Witches clearly are not like the rest of us, that is 60% water (Ouch, I'm bleeding. Wait, I'm melting...)
The movie was born of the tail end of the Depression, and the promise of a shift from sepia tones to rainbow saturation isn't too far from where we are today, the financial world collapsing like a witch's cape while the Checks and Balances slept in poppies.
Despite the intervening 70 years, the message held. I watched my daughters stare at the screen, wondering what they got from the film, if they were also creeped out by the Cowardly Lion's throaty song, or contemplated their own need for escape. They laughed in unexpected places, perhaps already too exposed to modern special effects to thrill to Glinda's bubble of light or the crudely painted Emerald City.
I can only guess what these Friday movies mean to them, what they'll remember from their childhood, or if the bits of culture that made an impression on me will be even a blip in their history. But if I want them to feel as if there is no place like home, I have to make this place home, not allow us to get too technologically separate, playing our computers and games and I-pods, but to curl up together on a sofa, laugh at munchkins, and imagine what we would do if faced with a choice between the familiar and a greener city at the end of a very long road.
