love

Love is Blind

~ TheCobblersDaughter ~ 2 Comments

Love is Blind

When my father met Vickie, a bleach blond
hourglass in a red plaid dress cut across her thighs
and red platform heels, my brother and I
were tucked away like out-of-style clothing.
Vickie was 16, my father 26, and she moved right in,
pranced around in halter-tops, bending to reveal
the quarter-moon of her breast. My father took Vickie
to fancy dinners and movies, while my brother and I
stayed home with babysitters in tie-dyed T-shirts,
who smoked pot, drank Budweiser, touched tongues.
We watched R-rated movies like The Great Texas Dynamite Chase:
heavily made-up women with silky hair, skinny
arms and legs, writhing under the covers on either
side of a spindly man with feathered hair and a mustache.
And Beyond the Door, where the devil impregnates
the woman from Nanny and the Professor. She eats garbage,
throws up green liquid, has a baby with no mouth—
if only that would have happened to Vickie,
whose every other word was “fuck,” insisted we call her Mom,
drove us to her ex-boyfriend’s house, had us wait
in the car while she vanished for an hour doing who
knows what. There was nothing my brother and I could do—
our father, in a leather vest and bell bottoms, zip-up
boots, had his ears turned off, brain shut down,
eyes pecked, sockets cleaned out, leaving two black holes.

Poem for my Brother, 1966-1987

~ TheCobblersDaughter ~ Leave a comment

The Prankster

You’d just turned 21, bought us the Beck’s Beer
we sipped while we waited for the drop-off

at my place, listened to the Stones. You had
silky hair like Mick Jagger, wore a leather jacket

from Dad’s shoe repair shop, dingy white Pumas.
We laughed about our childhood, how you played

tricks on me, like saying you were adopted or
that the shell tasted better than the egg.

We planned to run Dad’s business until we died.
You left to buy one more six-pack, Ruby Tuesday

playing on the stereo, and I was happy to wait
for you. You patted my shoulder, said, I’ll be back,

three words that became a broken promise—
Hours later, after I guessed you’d caught up

with a buddy, forgot to call, our uncle phoned
to say they found you one block from the store,

motorcycle mangled, brain stem snapped in two,
you never felt a thing. Eighteen years old, grief

dropped over me like a veil. I took a cab to our
grandparents, thought of when we were kids:

you made a noose out of plastic, tied it around
your neck, pretended to hang yourself–head slumped,

eyes bugged–from the top bunk. When Dad came
in, he popped you on the head with his knuckle.

I sit at our grandparents, watching the door,
waiting for you to waltz in like so many other
times to tell me that this was all a joke.

Missing My Father

~ TheCobblersDaughter ~ 2 Comments

Since You’ve Been Gone

I stand in the kitchen, pour olive oil
into a warm pan on the stove, then garlic,
the aroma rising like yeast, making me
want to call you—as I did during
the decades we lived apart—me
in the navy in California, you at your
hotdog stand in Florida. If you answered
drunk, I’d make an excuse, “Someone’s
at the door,” so I could hang up quick.
But if you were sober, you might tell me
a story: like when you were a kid, riding
beside your buddy in the back of
DiRienzo’s Bakery truck, bringing
bread to the neighborhood folks, your
spaghetti-thin frame, the inhaler
in your jeans pocket, all those loaves
still warm from the oven on the shelves,
you took one and packed it like a snow ball,
and as the driver skidded around
corners, you took bites from the dough.

You’re not there anymore to answer
my call, but I have your recipes, and
your grandchildren, each with your skinny
arms, they sit at my table, pasta filling
their plates, fresh bread in their hands,
they bring the red sauce to their mouths.

Childhood Injuries: Who Hurts More?

~ TheCobblersDaughter ~ 4 Comments

When I was 13, while skipping stones before a lake with a dozen of my classmates, I bent over to pick up a rock when someone accidentally hit me in the face with a boulder. My left front tooth broke in half, which hurt like the dickens. I started bawling and ran back to the cabin where we were all hanging out for the afternoon. The dentist fixed my tooth, and many years later my father told me, “When I saw your fat lip and tooth hanging, I started crying.”

When my daughter Jessie was four, she was bitten by a white German Shepherd. I rushed her to the E/R where she had to get four stitches on her lip. That night, I pored over the pages of her baby book. As I stared at her beautiful photos, all chubby cheeked and pig tailed, I cried. What a terrible mother I was–leaving Jessie alone with my mother-in-law and that crazy untrained dog. Of course it bit her! I didn’t deserve such a beautiful daughter.

My second daughter, Josie, is a bit more self-destructive. My husband, daughters, and I were all living in Bellingham, Washington, when Josie ran into our duplex and said, “I just stepped on a nail.” I’m a Gen Xer, okay. So, all I could think was, tetanus shot!!! One of my grad school buddies said “calling the fire fighters was cheaper than calling 9-1-1-” so we called the fire station. Turns out it’s not the rusty nail that causes infection, it’s the bacteria from the bottom of the shoe going into the skin. But later Josie told us, “I wanted to see what it would do.”

Nothing comes close to Kid #3, my son, whom I love to the moon. He’s allergic to tree nuts. In the last ten years of his life, he’s been to the E/R five times.

1: Age one- Grandma makes cookies with walnuts. Vinny eats one and then pukes. Breaks out into hives. Left side of his face swells. Dad gives epi-pen because of peanut allergy. Takes Vinny to the E/R.
2. Age five- Teacher gives Vinny cookie from grandma of classmate. Vinny pukes. Breaks out into hives. Dad gives epi-pen. Takes him to E/R.
3. Age six- Vinny eats toffee with almonds. Lies to family and says allergy was caused from COOP bread. Mother throws fit at the COOP and threatens to notify the local media. Gets them to install allergy signs on all foods. (yay)
4. Age eight- Vinny’s best friend makes him a sandwich with “nutty bread” containing “almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts and Brazil nuts.” After Vinny complains of a burning sensation on his tongue, Eric comes and injects Vinny with epi-pen, but Vinny spends the night in ICU and needs a ventilator. His entire body is covered with hives.
5. Age ten- Vinny’s home from school because of a cough. He makes a frozen dinner with vegetarian ravioli, not knowing it contains walnuts. He takes one bite, says, “I have that nut feeling.” After we read the ingredients, mother gives him epi-pen and rushes him to the E/R.

I called in at work, spent most of the day in the E/R and ICU watching Vinny get poked and injected full of Benedryl. He says his vision is blurry and that he feels weird. All I can think of is what his life will be like as an adult–when his father and I am not around. When he’s negotiating his own life–no mother or father policing his decisions, looking for dangerous foods. I start to cry.

When You Know It’s Love

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Part of being creative for me means having an overactive imagination. When I was a child I was terrified of the dark. I hated horror movies, because the images stuck with me, and I believed Michael Meyers would spring from the bushes to kill me or that Jaws would erupt from the drain in the local swimming pool. As an adult, I watched the Blair Witch Project and was chilled to the core. Part of my overactive imagination also involves having vivid dreams, in color, where I can feel textures and smell odors.

Recently my best friend and I were at a scrap-booking retreat sharing stories about people who’d pissed us off, especially during pregnancy and post-partum depression, and how we’d contemplated murder. While we laughed, “Stacy” sorted the piles of photos of her pale-haired, hazel-eyed son who was born prematurely. I was embellishing a page on my scrapbook of my father the cobbler, who had thick brown hair and a large nose, like an Italian Dustin Hoffman.

That evening, I dreamt I was a serial killer. There was no rhyme or reason to my killing, and each murder was clean and quick. I propped the dead body in a wheelchair and hid them in a bathroom stall. (The retreat was at an old ski lodge). My last kill was none other than Dustin Hoffman. (For argument’s sake, let’s ignore the Freudian implications.)

So far, I had not been caught, and I was trying to pin the murders on a squeaky clean friend. In the dream, I was suddenly back at my house with the friend and no evidence to convict him. Cops were on their way, and I knew I was going to jail.

My two daughters were in the other room. My son was at his father’s house. My lab/pit bull was nowhere to be found. I turned to my Black lab/newfie Gus and said, “Momma has to go away for a long time, Gussy.” I patted down his ears. “I love you.”

When I woke at the lodge the next morning, I told Stacy about my dream. Then I told her sister and her mother and our friends. Everyone shook their heads. I said, “It has to be all that talk about murder and the barrage of photos of my father.” But what got me was my going to Gus–the first dog I’ve ever owned. Not my two daughters. It must be love.

Good Grief-What a Month I’m Having!

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I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t wait to say buh-bye to 2015. It was another year of being single, working my butt off in production more so than writing, and selling the home I had lived in for almost a decade with my former husband and our kids. I spent some time free-lance writing and even submitted work to journals. In April I participated in the poem-a-day movement, and in November, I spent a wonderful weekend with two of my best friends at a writing workshop in Port Townsend. But as Christmas songs played in the dentist office, gas stations and department stores, my optimism fell like a snowflake.

New Year’s Eve was spent with my ten-year-old son Vinny and another best friend, my sister from another mister, Aimee. I’d had a daughter disappointment right before the New Year, which I’d rather not disclose, but believed that 2016 would be a better year! But not long after my holiday vacation ended, I had a personal disappointment. Normally I don’t let life get me down; but when it rains, it pours, and I have lost my umbrella.

Suffice it to say, a blog is a safe space to share. But part of me thinks no one wants to hear my problems. And others tell me that I am the only person who can control my life. I need to make changes. I need to read self-help books. I need to let things go. I need to be honest about my needs. Saying those things and doing them are as different as heat and cold.

And I don’t want to be negative. I want to offer life-affirming tips for dealing with everyday disappointments. But right now, all I have is advice from others. I write to understand my life, so I’ve been working on an “after the divorce” essay and several poems. I’ve been talking to every friend who will listen. I’m sure I’m a real treat.

Last week, after hearing of my so-called disappointments, I turned into a Peanuts character, walking along the street with my head down. While kicking a stone, the toe of my boot stuck to the sidewalk and I fell face-first on the concrete. I cracked the glass on the front of my iPhone and my ego. It was the perfect end to a perfect week.

On a bright note, I finished a book called What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love and Marriage by Amy Sutherland. What a pleasure it was to read. Sutherland talks about positive reinforcement and rewarding behavior–stuff from psych 101, but with real life examples. She observed aspiring animal trainers that work with predators, ones that can tear arms off or kill people with a bite to the neck.

Basically I learned to ignore bad behavior, a daughter screaming in my face, or a client criticizing my brochure, and reward good behavior: Thank you for picking up your dirty socks, Daughter, and Thank you, Client, for your feedback. I’m writing this in its simplest form, but feel free to check it out yourself. I’m going to reread the book.

My plan moving ahead, and you know I have one, is to dress for success, support, not enable, my daughters, and build character in my son. I will breathe deeply before walking into a difficult situation, smile when I don’t feel like smiling, and write as much as possible. Let’s hope February is a better month.

 

Happy Halloween with a Throwback Photo

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I will return with a blog post with real words after I return from my writing workshop in Port Townsend next week. But until then, enjoy this photo from my fifth grade Halloween Party with a bunch of really cool people. Dan Mollen, Bob Ferber, Sandy Wagner, Amy Coutant, Eve Wolyczyn, Ann O’Rourke, Diane Stetz, Paul Mahoney, Mark Coleman and me.

Ever Play A Scary Childhood Game?

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Food Contest

It was more of a game that you half-invented–
half-stole from a show called Wonderama.
You blind-folded me, told me to hold my nose
at the breakfast bar in the kitchen, and guess
which food you’d shoved into my mouth. You were my
older brother, my first friend, and I would have
followed you right over a bluff into murky water
infested with piranha. . . I still played after the hot
pepper brought me to tears, the spoonful of baking
soda left me gagging over the kitchen sink,
the cucumber slice so thick with salt that my lips
puckered like an ass. But even I had to quit
after you laid the used match from dad’s ashtray
full of cigarette butts right on my tongue.

What’s More Important Than to Love and Be Loved?

~ TheCobblersDaughter ~ Leave a comment

My ex-husband Eric and I met 17 years ago at an airport bar in Lewiston, Idaho. He was the cutest man I had ever seen in my life. He asked me to dance to “Summer Lovin'” from Grease, and I said “No,” three times before I finally gave in. While we danced he kept smiling, wide and earnest, with a gap between his front teeth. Later he told me he kept falling out of his flip-flops.
While we chatted later that evening, we learned that I was 29 and Eric was 19. His fake I.D. said his name was Steve Williams (AKA Stone Cold Steve Austin) and his address was 316 Austin Street in Clarkston, Washington. Even though we kissed, and I saw skyrockets, I refused to give Eric my phone number or let him take me home, because I was sure he was going to be some immature “dude” who would use me, toss me aside and break my heart.
Long story short for the sake of the blog, I called Eric ten days later because I couldn’t stop thinking about that smile. We started dating, fell in love and got married in 2001. I already had two daughters from two previous marriages–one ended in divorce, and the other in widowhood.
After seven years together, Eric and I had a son. I can say without hesitation Eric was born to be a “Dad.” He was a pretty good husband, too, although my being an extreme extrovert and his being an extreme introvert may have helped lead to our demise, along with my fear of getting too close to anyone.
We have been divorced for three years, and I still think he’s the only guy for me. The older I get, the more I learn, is there anything better in the world than L-O-V-E?