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Whoopin it up!

Nick — Tue, 20 Oct 2020 09:22:58 +0000

Today, I crossed the field where the local Smithie girls play Ultimate Frisbee, noticing my feet getting kind of damp from the wet grass. As I stepped onto the sidewalk, my world abrubtly converged with a stranger’s.

She (the stranger) was riding along on her bicycle in all her short-haired, salvation army attired, messenger bag shouldered glory when, suddenly, some unnamed joy seized upon her so that just before we would enter each other’s visual fields, she belted forth a loud whoop…a hearty “WooHoooooooo!”, that she let arc out of her young, proud mouth.

For the briefest of moments, we were face to face, her head turned to greet me as I stepped out from behind the fence, and our eyes met and lit up, and our faces beamed acknowledging smiles at what had just been shared. Then she was gone, my bicycle messenger of joy.

(Image from www.vanillabicycles.com because this post is about the convergence of strangers, and bicycles and joy, and in my humble opinion Vanilla Bicycles are all about joy in the form of bicycles, and I suppose I could fit strangers in there too if I thought about it.)

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Photo Album

Nick — Sat, 03 Oct 2020 09:22:38 +0000

It is 1976 and my white hair falls well below my shoulders, skimming the floor and picking up dust when I lean under the bed to pull out the photo album. I run the pads of my fingertips over the front of the album, across the face of the foal pictured there. At 6, I’m a natural at wistful longing.

Inside are three pages of photos spanning a decade or so. In one, he leans coolly against a car, not smiling, but soberly penetrating the lens of the camera. This picture I took from a box of photos belonging to my mother and I imagined it was taken during their “dating” pre-baby years. In another, he is younger still, dressed in a military uniform. I retrieved this one from the same box and I know this was taken before my mother. She knew him after he was in the navy. That much I knew…that much and little else.

I stare for long moments, look into his eyes and try to figure out who he was, where he could be now, and why he didn’t love me enough to stick around and see me through childhood. I hated and longed for him simultaneously, the hate playing a much smaller part because it was dangerous to be too angry. What if there was a good reason? What if something had happened to him? No, it wasn’t ok to hate him. At 6, I knew that too.

I fantasized about him knocking on my door and scooping me up with a big smile, clamping me with strong arms and assuring me he never ever would have stayed away so long if he hadn’t been lost at sea, his pockets full of the letters he couldn’t send. I strain over the photos in the album, some fading, trying to piece together who this man was, my father, trying to remember his voice, his smell, his laugh. I remember nothing of those things, though I paint my own picture of him in my mind, glued together from the photos on the page.

(image: http://www.garderisettes.fr/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=15&Itemid=57)

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Faces of Strangers

Nick — Sun, 26 Jan 2020 09:27:44 +0000

From behind, which is how I first see her, she looks like any teenage girl. Dressed in pink fuzzy pajama pants with a striped hooded sweater, her hair curled up into a casual loose bun. She is the epitome of adolescent girl. But her face, oh my god, her face. She hears my footsteps approaching from behind her and turns toward me. I can only hope that my own face does not reveal the shock at what I see when she turns, because the truth is, I’m ill prepared and horrified.

It is a ravaged face of 40. A skin that has seen too many harsh winters. Eyes that are nothing more than portals into a shriveled dark hole that smells of putrefying memories. A mouth whose only and rare smiles are bitter. Her features are chapped, blotchy and abnormally swollen. All the pain of her life that might have made her young face look this way curls into my stomach, delivering a cold hard punch.

I am reminded of the faces of so many models in fashion magazines. Nearly pre-pubescent looking girls made up to look strung out. That’s fashion. Only there is no makeup on this girl’s face, and this is no glossy ad. This is real life run hard, and the only thing it makes me want to buy is a hot cup of coffee so I can stuff it into her chapped fingers and pray that it might contain some magic that will bring her soul back to her.

The thoughts all mothers think begin to rise up.

I want to protect this girl from more pain. I want to protect my own daughter from girls like her. I want to take her home and let her get a warm meal and a warm bed. I am grateful that my own daughter’s face, as angry as it can get, has never ever come close to looking like this. I want to find all the people that did this to her and make them pay. I want to run home and tell my daughter how very much I love her. I want to take her pain into myself and relieve her of it just long enough to show her a path out. I want to buy her a coffee.

I can’t. I don’t. My own children are waiting for me, waiting for their orange juice and milk. I know it’s not fair.

Image from http://www.vivagallery.org/exhibits/NWS_2006/powell.jpg

Artist Lonnie Powell

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He Shuffles His Feet

Nick — Thu, 25 May 2006 09:14:51 +0000

Driving this morning, I see him walking. Old man with a fisherman’s hat, walking slowly. Maybe it is because I am halfway to 70 that I wonder if I will love an old man someday. If I will find the stoop in his shoulders and the shuffle of his feet endearing. If I will kiss his thinned softened lips and still feel a little spark.

As it happens in imperceptable increments, will I notice him growing old with me? Or will we look at each other and see each other exactly as the day we met?

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Growing Down

Nick — Thu, 25 May 2006 09:14:49 +0000

He grew down instead of up. Sometimes people do that. It’s not that he didn’t try, but he built his stairs like a house of cards, only without grace and patience. It couldn’t bear the weight of his pain.

He found it easier, when the cards began to fall, to go down..gravity and velocity his companions. He tried to take me with him, grabbed my ankles as he fell, and God help me I almost went. But my resolve to live was stronger than his pain, stronger than the force of gravity.

I didn’t bother struggling. I slicked my ankles with vaseline, watched him slip, and said good-bye.

(Image from: http://abyss.hubbe.net/jeremiah/gallery/gfx/covers/jtv/lg/ep/s2/205-falling-lg.jpg)

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Fathers – 4/27/06

Nick — Sat, 29 Apr 2006 09:14:26 +0000

Pediatrician waiting room, 3 p.m. – He is soft…soft face, soft brown eyes, soft long hair, soft body, soft shoes. His body whispers of warm waters, composting leaves and earth, endless gentle streams slowly smoothing the rocks.

His son is a small version of him and he dotes after his baby sister, she a pink cheeked child of delight and eager wonder. The father watches his son rock his sister on a rocking horse. The son looks to his father as he rocks her…once, twice, and again…smiling, seeking reassurance.

It comes, it never wavers. The father’s approval is a beam streaming from eye to eye, unfaltering.

State Street, 4:25 p.m. – He is happy, happy, happy. His grin is almost silly, so full of happiness and pride. “Giddy” or “delirious with joy” come to mind as I watch him. Mom and baby on a bike in front of him, he takes up the rear where they cannot see the sparkles of love lighting up his eyes, brighter than the late afternoon sun that blinds me as I drive.

Lacrosse game, 6:30 p.m. – He has come straight from work to sit on the cold metal of the bleachers. The wind flaps at the bottom corner of his navy business suit. When he smiles, he is a movie star with his bright tiny pearl teeth flashing beneath black sunglasses. He is perfectly trimmed and perfectly proud.

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Letter to a Man

Nick — Tue, 26 Nov 2002 09:25:47 +0000

Dear Shirty McShirty,

Was it only yesterday that I met you? Is it a dream that I once fancied fantasies of becoming the perfect, serene and infinitely organized counterpart to your beautiful madness? No. It wasn’t just yesterday. It was more than a year ago. Funny thing, time.

It was, however, just yesterday morning lying next to your blanketed warm body that I had a dream of a man with a handsome face and a gentle light in his eyes. I was at a garden party, chatting with an old friend who I meet only in dreams now. The handsome, gentle-eyed man smiled at me and I was hopeful, in a dreamy way, that such a man could exist. I read into his face integrity, honesty, loyalty, a capacity for love.

Seeing that I was engaged in conversation, he turned away, not wanting to interrupt. It was then that I saw he was not what he seemed. On the back of his neck was etched a serial number. That neck was old, weathered, and destroyed by time and something else I could not name. The hair was thinned and tired. The clothes were not so polished and unassuming as they were from the front. They were worn, careless, and dirty.

I was just pointing this man out to my friend when I stopped, realizing his face did not reveal the truth. I stared, wondering how this was possible, that his front was so very different from his retreating back. My friend turned to look and I said, “Never mind. It’s not who I thought it was.”

When I woke you asked me with a smile if I slept well, and I told you about the dream but I didn’t have the heart to tell you that you were that guy. I think you knew anyway, and didn’t have the heart to tell me you knew. So now we both know and neither of us are telling. The trajectory of lives can shift and veer significantly in the passage of a year. Truths are often revealed in the soft light of morning.

I hope your day is as flawed and beautiful as you are,

Velvet Verbosity

Image from http://www.jetcityorange.com/barcodes/tattoos/tattoo_31.html

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Juice and gristle

Nick — Sat, 09 Nov 2002 09:25:07 +0000

She is beautiful. Radiant. She can’t possibly know her own beauty. Her skin speaks beauty, abundance and health. She sits, knitting, her brow furrowed in concentration, and I am mesmerized by the little repetitive dance of her fingers.

In the space of an hour she knits about 6 inches of something fuzzy, interwoven with pinks and purples. I don’t like these colors, but they suit her pink pink cheeks so for tonight I don’t mind pinks and purples. Suddenly I don’t mind them so much so that I wish she was knitting whatever it is she’s knitting for me.

It’s because I see her capacity for love, and the sadness that has broken her, and I want to be a vessel to receive what she hasn’t been able to properly give before. It’s because I wonder how she can be so radiant and so sad at once, and how much more radiant she could possibly be. It’s because I want the chance, just one chance, to help someone else shine so brilliantly that the whole lot of humanity goes blind with love. Just that once.

I wish it were some kind of surprising crush, but all desire is fueled by the want of something. It is not her that I desire, but what she is right now that I am not at the moment, maybe never will be again, maybe never ever was. I like to believe I was once a creature of flesh and sorrowful juices and radiant love. That I had beauty like that. My decaying bones and gristle want her life.

As we are leaving she comes up to me. She is so much taller that she has to arch her neck downwards toward me and her face is looming like a pinked moon just inches from mine. I feel vulgar next to her radiance, but I don’t turn away. I let her grace soothe me. I let my own spark ignite and burn. She is thanking me for something I said. “I really appreciate it you know”, she says, gently smiling.

Her heart aches through her eyes, and her love mixes with her sorrow creating tears that don’t flow out, but instead back down to her heart filling it up until it’s so large I can hear it beating in my own chest.

Picture Credit: I found this picture by doing a Google Image Search for “Juice and Gristle”. Brought me to a great little blog about “The Culinary Adventures of a New York City Lawyer”. Check it out. Tell him that Velvet Verbosity sent you.

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Velvet Verbosity is Going to California!

Nick — Thu, 21 Feb 2002 09:29:52 +0000

California…land of sunshine. That’s where I’m headed next week and I’m packing my sun-dresses and my bikini, though there won’t be much time for beaches since I’m going for WORK. I do have one day semi-free before I fly back so I let my friends on the West Coast know and made plans with one of them for Thursday. He called tonight.

Me: Hello?

K: Hey you, are you seeing the eclipse?

Me: Yep, I’m looking at it through my window.

K: It’s so beautiful, I’m standing out here on the deck.

Me: It’s too cold here.

K: It is?

Me: Yeah, so I’m staying inside. How warm is it supposed to be next week there? Warm enough for sun-dresses?

K: Uh. Yeah. Of course. Wait, where are you?

Me: I’m in Massachusetts.

K: OOOHHHHH. I thought we were getting together tomorrow.

Me: What? No. I meant next Thursday. Did I not say that?

________________________________________________

For more funnies, go here I say!

________________________________________________

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The Kindness of Others

Nick — Fri, 15 Feb 2002 09:29:20 +0000

“One good turn deserves another”. So I share a story of kindness. Last night, after being steeped in a painful situation for many months now, I reached out to a past lover and current friend. We call those people “friends” who can meet us halfway through the gaping chasm that often separates us all from one another no matter how close we stand or how much of each other’s exhaled breath we breathe. It is the friend who can stand on the other side of the earth and make us feel that we are touching one another through a secret portal in the time-space continuum.

Tonight, R did that for me. He reached across many miles, across digital wires, and held me, held my hand while I released the buildup of pain and anger I had been feeling. Right or wrong, I was feeling it. Everything I said, it was familiar to him. He could’ve written the script having had someone in his life so similar. “Don’t believe this”, he said, and while my head had been screaming it all along, my heart had become enmeshed so tightly in a web of confusion that I couldn’t sync the two.

“You’re a good woman”, he said, and I thought that thing in my chest had retreated too far to burst open and start beating again. I heard it in my ears, my own heart beating, my own mind returning to me, my sanity advancing and filling up the corners of my skull.

To be heard. To be nurtured, and held in someone’s care as I was hurting. It was a long cool drink of water after being in the desert. It was having someone put a soothing cream on a wound, touching me gently and murmuring soothingly until the tremors subsided. The relief, the sense of safety was profound. With each shared word, I felt my limbs return to life, I felt the blood coursing through veins along my bones, underneath my skin.

Sometimes you forget how much you’ve allowed deprivation to be the default. You definitely forget what sanity feels like. When so steeped in pain you don’t know which way is “up for air”, to have someone reach a hand out to you and gently say, “this way back to yourself” has to be the gentlest, kindest gesture from one human to another.

Thank you R for being that gentle hand. I owe you one.

As for me, it’s moving on. Wise words spoken from the heart should never be ignored

Image: http://artfiles.art.com/images/-/Christine-Ellis/Loving-Hands-Photographic-Print-C12153830.jpeg

Not to usurp the 100 Words on Bold submissions, remember to KEEP SCROLLING!

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