The Noble Hoarder

I once hoarded excuses like some people hoard cats.  I indulged my dark defenses and let them prowl unfettered through my days until they had stained every fiber of my soul with the withering stench of squandered time.

Mistaking my pet concessions as something noble, I stroked them with firm hands of rectitude and fattened them on bowls of milky piety.  When it seemed they were growing bored with my need for them and wanted their freedom, I let them lie in beds of soft oblation hoping they would stay true to me.

Without these daily but feeble mitigations, I would have to confess that I was lonely and a coward, balled up in the corner of everyone else's idea of contentment.  For most of my adult life it was simply easier to clean up after litters of feral denials than to banish them from the house.

One day, worn to reason by the fetid swell of regret after my millionth cleansing, I walked out the front door of my home and of the life I had groomed and fed for thirty-two years and never returned.

Three years later, still bruised from a bias I am resolved to shed, I have begun to unravel the life I had long claimed as mine but once lived as a barn cat would; with little more than a passive acceptance that this is all there is and an insensible determination to outlast the elements.

And just for the record, I am a dog person.

Write Something

“Write something.” He says. “I so wish you’d write again like you used to when I first met you. I really believe it will do you good.”

“He” is The Scholarly Renegade, a fellow writer and dreamer, on whose farm I have sought solace and healing for the past six months and who has endured more than his due of my conflicted persona for having made the invitation.  I suppose that for his heroic endurance alone, I should not deny him.

‘At the advanced age of fifty-eight I ran away from home.  After thirty-two years as a back-burner participant in a lopsided marriage, coerced into consonance and disavowed of respect, I left the building.  Had I waited another six months, I might have left like Elvis. What a waste.  

It was a sudden, hastily executed leave-taking, and whether I believed I was running away from the grave dysfunction that coated my days or towards an existence more authentic and kind, I am only now, six months later, able to partially discern.

Well, that is a start but honestly, although you may characterize this writing exercise as cathartic, it is still a dangerous precipice from which to emote. The thin crevice between holding firm to the present moment and being emotionally incinerated as I revive the deed word by word is a gap still not wide enough to accommodate a dime.  It could thrust me guilt first back to that stony patch of self recrimination at any moment because even after all these months, I’ve yet to completely sharpen my defensive resolve or give myself a full pardon.

Giving oneself permission to find happiness and forgiving oneself for the steps necessary to do so is not something one can do just for the wanting, you know.  Not if one has been steeped in the Catholic mindset that it is more noble to suffer in silence than to disrupt the sacred constancy of marriage and renege on one’s vows whether justified or not. Right now, One is feeling screwed and slightly tormented by images of Hades. 

“Just write a short personal essay.  Write what is on your mind, what you’ve experienced.” He says.

‘It was late evening last November when we pulled off the gravel road onto the drive of the farm two miles from the main thoroughfare.  Of the five and a half hour drive I spent trading terror for tears from the door of my urban home in Kansas City to the grassy threshold of the Iowa farm that was to be my fortress, those final miles shrouded in dust were the most surreal. 

The gritty hail of road against the truck chassis battered my senses awake to what I had just accomplished and with that realization came panic. My husband would now be discovering my absence. He will find the note I left on the dining room table. What will he do?  What have I done? I just know I’m going to hell when I die.’

I don’t really know how deeply I want to delve here.  I mean, that night and the preceding two days between when I decided to leave my crushing life behind and the afternoon when I ultimately did still remain raw and incite a spasmodic and painful tangle in my brain so blinding that I’m not certain I can accurately recall the details nor am I certain I am ready to. 

“Don’t talk yourself out of it.”  He says. “Just write.”

‘I had not planned this action long in advance. Had I done so, I am certain I would have allowed the ghosts of every sin I’d ever committed to convince me that my penance mandated whatever suffering and discontent I was presently enduring nigh unto my death, which I routinely wished would come prematurely.  The tension was ever present, the strife, even more so, and the fine line between pretending that all was survivable and the cresting awareness that my life as it was, amounted to little more than a slow death steeped in practical denial had long since been eroded away by repeated injustices. 

The time had arrived for me to face down every excuse that bound me to that stifling redundancy and take a leap from the small window of ‘otherness’ just recently opened. My children were grown, my once loaded charge of maternal imperatives had long since downgraded to ‘standby only’ and the routine misgivings that fettered my days for three decades were now simply a choice.  It was time to jump into the arms of my best potential or die trying. 

For two days and nights I made my anguished apologies to my husband salted in tears, said my quaking goodbyes buffered by the leaden truth that unbeknownst to him, my exodus was imminent; marshaled the only thin crust of resolve still clinging to the walls of my uncertainty and on the third day at noon, I walked out the door.  

No one believed that after all this time I would ever leave and until the moment I followed my feet from the familiar landscape of my tiled front foyer and into the alien confines of The Renegade’s truck parked like winged Pegasus in my driveway, neither did I.

Of course, no matter what I do now or how deeply I rationalize this radical act there still remains the risk that I will go belly up from the delusion and that even without the shackles of sadness strapping me to the nail bed of self denial, I might stand to become little more than a different kind of stranger to myself.

Unfortunately, this time my estrangement will come sans the honorable and noble martyrdom of self-sacrifice and long-suffering, those valiant characteristics that cause angel’s to sing and would also guarantee me a spot On High reserved for those saintly souls who stayed the ragged course resigned to their suffering, drudgery and pain with other worldly courage.

 This is becoming too intense.  I need to shift my focus.

“Write about your impressions of the rural life.” He says.

‘Pretense is nonexistent in a world where one can eviscerate livestock and diaper a newborn infant with identical dispatch and where the hard-earth stoicism such a lifestyle demands restricts empathy to a level no deeper than civic responsibility and logic naturally demand.

Appearance, intellectual curiosity, style, culture, wealth, hygiene are all of little consequence in the lives of men and women whose preordained axis rotates the farm and the hunt exclusively and who, I believe, would slaughter anything that has never eaten at a MacDonald’s or cannot qualify for a Ducks Unlimited membership card.  

For most, tobacco reigns as the preferred pacifier and alcohol, the anodyne of choice.  It remedies boredom, despair, sore bones and anger as well as its converse function: a lynchpin in all celebrations.’

 Rather than be affronted by these coarse realities, I try earnestly to hold them forth as another of the liberating aspects of living in an area of the country where no one notices just how dirty your fingernails are until the fourth or fifth meeting and even then they don’t care. 

Having lived the entirety of my years either in or no more than a twenty-minute drive from the heavily populated and bustling metropolis’ of New York City, Scottsdale or Kansas City; I find it difficult to imagine that I could confine the many startling and massive differences between urban life and the stark, unpopulated expanse of this Iowan landscape to five-hundred words or less.  It is the antithesis of anywhere I’ve known, a state hosting more cows than people, more corn than cars, silence over sirens, pollen over pollution, hunters over shoppers, feed stores over restaurants and barns over bars. 

“Pick a small detail or two and elaborate.” He says.

There are those of us gentrified, city folks who do not so much ‘write’ as we do ‘bleed’ and a blank page may as well be a tourniquet.  Living among all these country stoics, tourniquets are not as readily available as say, a blunt needle and cat gut; neither of which I want anywhere near my Bloomingdales’ heart. In that respect writing has now become somewhat of a risky business.  It remains as solitary a pursuit as ever, only executed sans the comforting white buzz of traffic to remind me that I am not truly alone. 

Perhaps I should just chronicle those early weeks after my stunned arrival when simply eyeing the corn-stubbled expanse around me sent me into spasms of concern that I would never again see a Yellow Cab or a street vendor or a car wreck? 

‘In spite of the ample herd of cattle on the adjacent farm, the quiet here can be suffocating. The first morning I woke I swore I was dead. No sound came from any direction apart from a light ‘whooshing’ as the wind spun it’s way through the brittle grass on the ridge along the gravel road that passes in front of the property. 

Gravel is everywhere.  It nests in the dark tread of the requisite thick-soled boots (mandatory footwear if one is to remain upright walking the furrowed fields and uneven roads) and by consequence, finds its way inside every house where it becomes a necessary ritual to brush small piles of pebbles and grit from the bedsheets before retiring each night.       

I have come to learn that gravel is the preferred surface for rural American byways where speed limits are generally arbitrary and kicking up a cloud of dust with your four-wheeler, flat-bed or full-sized Ford is an inspired compulsion - if  for no other reason than as partial justification for having turned your back on civilization in the first place.

Of course, the dust that is churned by every passing vehicle blows like a sandy mist through any cracked window or screened door and is so excessive it should be instituted as a dietary staple, a condiment adding texture to all food groups and will, as a bonus, inculcate your tastebuds against desiring anything more refined than newly slaughtered cattle or root vegetables.  Sushi, be damned.’ 

There is no place for the squeamish in this outpost.

Yet in spite of my ongoing struggle to reconcile my decision to walk away from my former existence and my loss as to just where I fit into this one, I hope to inherit the grit it will take to thrive here without losing the grace needed to forgive it.  To accept the endless quiet as a balm, not a bane and to allow the fallow nature of time to transform my stale and wasted suffering into acres of ripe language and inspired images. To learn to love outside the constraints of the world and perhaps even outside of myself.

Out here in the wide open where endings collide with beginnings and no one is ever without something worthwhile to do, seeking purpose should not be that difficult.’

I will show this to the Scholarly Renegade and he will say, “Great job!  Now, don’t you feel better?” 

 Of course, he will be right and mustering all of my urban humility I will reply, “Yes. I think I do.” 

Missing Persons

On the morning of February 14th I went missing.  My first thought was that this would be a temporary disappearance; the kind of sensorial vanishing that often accompanies the fallout from a striking epiphany or a grave shock.  So I continued in my daily routines with conditioned fortitude and watched for my return like an anxious commuter awaiting the next train.

Unfortunately, after an exhaustive search over many weeks, I have yet to be found; and although none of my alter egos has had the temerity to say so directly, the internal consensus is that I will not be coming back.

All it took was that one phone call.

Before my son called home from the penitentiary to tell me that because he had violated several rules, he would be spending thirty days in solitary confinement, I had been having a good morning.

For the first time in a long turning from bad to worse, I was beginning to glimpse better. I had even begun to sustain laughter for prolonged periods and to believe that at some point in my future life, I would be able to reclaim the joy I once felt knowing that I had done a good job as a mother, along with the attendant pride in knowing that other people could see that, too.

Instead, on the morning of February 14th, I followed my son into the hole. It was not a literal hole.   This was the retributive kind endemic to prisons and medieval novels of torture and bondage; the kind that shuts out the buzz from every distraction apart from that of your own mind and holds you inside of yourself until the voices in your head sing like a chorus of wayward angels heralding your own personal apocalypse.

Of course, mine was a theoretical confinement.  I was still able to go to the grocery store and stand in the gently greening backyard to watch the dogs play.  Books were available to me, if I chose, and so was television.  And even though my level of grief and distractibility made it very difficult to do so, I could also communicate with other people.

I just wasn’t able to leave the choking confines of my own sorrow.
Clearly, I had not anticipated this measure of worse.


Nine months ago in my initial, blind scramble to find redemption and then to somehow normalize and infuse hope between the shame and sadness of my son’s latest internment, I had told myself that because this was the worst of his hard lessons, it would surely be the last of them; that he would finally learn and would do all he could to be a model inmate and  prove just how sincere and anxious he was for that second, third, fourth chance.

After all, this was not just another jail.  This was prison.

That morning, fingering the edges of the receiver I tried to distill his voice through the roaring in my ears as the blood drained from my skull - picking out a word here, a syllable there - I stared hard into the white porcelain surface of our small kitchen table, attempting to establish a cadence to my breathing that would not betray my disappointment - or my terror.

After the bald revelation of this dark, new circumstance, the air that surrounded me became alarmingly thin and unbreathable; and when he said good-bye, I felt the last vestigial scrap of hope; the bit I had safely stashed beneath my heart, break loose and disappear with him.

Very soon thereafter, I went missing.

Exactly what he had done to deserve this harsh requital was never fully explained, but having endured the fallacious nature of his troubled, drug-addled soul for the whole of his adolescent and adult life, I am used to such evasiveness.

However, now, in the wake of this grave pronouncement, I struggle to court the naïve conviction that once enabled me to believe with absolute certainty that he can change.

He has always been a sweet young man.  Sweet with words, sweet with promises and I do still believe, sweet with intentions.  But there seems to be a failed connection between the greatness of those qualities and an awareness of the consequences for not upholding or for acting against them; and it is in this in-between where he is often trapped and becomes mildly predatory and highly manipulative; the exception to every rule, the guy who will say or do almost anything if it enhances the moment or advances his aims.

For twenty-nine years I have chosen to ignore this.  I have strangled my discouragement and turned my heart to face only the very best in him.  I have justified his continual lags of conscience as the unintentional by-products of his diagnosed A.D.H.D.; and as they grew more sinister and more frequent with age, I blamed them on his drug abuse.

He always seemed so alone.  I wanted to make certain he knew that he was not, and I stood by him resolutely.

The first time I scolded him, he was not quite two years old.  I remember standing in the hallway chastising him with all the requisite guilt, insecurity and sadness of the young, first-time mother that I was.   I had never before played the role of disciplinarian but expected that at any minute he would begin to cry, tell me he was sorry and curl into my arms where I would fully and achingly forgive him.   Instead, he looked up at me, turned away, slowly toddled into his nursery and gently closed the door behind him.

As a small boy, he did not like to be held, cuddled or carried; although every night he asked me to pat his head and sing him to sleep. So, before the world let go of his restless mind and stilled his sturdy bones came the lullabies:  To Dream The Impossible Dream and The Rainbow Song.

Often this took over an hour but finally, drowsy from the childish labors of his day, he sleepily promised me that he would do great things in the world when he grew up.  I believed he would, too.  Sitting on the edge of his small bed in the warm dark of his room of picture books and toys and plastic imaginings, I stroked the coarse curls feathering his head and wed my heart to those promises and to his brilliant mind, fine humor, perceptive nature and curious ways.  This was my chance to bond with this lovely but unusual child of mine - Perhaps my only chance.

Rarely would he ask to sit on my lap when he was a toddler.  I have a photograph of he and I sitting on the raised flagstone of our fireplace; he at one end, myself at the other.  This was where he chose to be.

“I suppose he is just a very independent little boy.” I consoled myself.

Even today I cannot look at that picture without experiencing a grief so large I could journey across it for ten years before reaching the other side.

Yet he remains my beloved son whom I adore and in spite of the great difficulty he appears to have in reaching the sort of love, morality and empathy that we identify as empirically noble and true, I cannot shut him out, deny him or send him away.   I cannot abandon hope.

But with that phone call on the morning of February 14th and from a desperation so malignant I was not certain I would be able to survive the day, I was forced to tally the current facts against his years of destructive behavior - replete with deception, manipulation and rampant self-interest - and when I was done it, became obvious that one of us would have to go.

That was the last time I saw myself.

These days I fill my body selectively, allowing only the highest functioning ghosts of my soul to return.  I cannot afford to be brutalized any longer by the soft maternal blindness and relentless optimism from natural breeding that encouraged me to pluck out normal from the broken shards of dysfunction and pretend that this was good enough – that it would make me good enough.

Today my son was returned to the hole; another infraction, another punishment.  And just as I did the last time, I will write him every day and tell him of my love for him and of my sure faith that he will make his way to a better place one day where he will fulfill the promises from his boyhood and do great things in the world, and I will do my best to believe this.

I will tell him that one day he will find himself.
Perhaps when that day comes, I will find myself, too.

POINTE of DEPARTURE

My younger sister always ran in first, her delicate fingers tightly scrolled around the flimsy handle of the patent leather case that held her change of clothes:  A flounce of pink tulle, black leotard, tights and the soft, leather sippers that made no sound against the polished wood floor of Miss Hertha's ballet studio.

Like most of the other little girls our age, we spent many of our best days draping our tender frames in sequined castoffs from our mother’s wardrobe then prancing about the house with the dramatic carriage of immured aristocracy awaiting rescue by the Prince.

But lately I had begun to detect unfortunate disparities between my awkward deportment and the sweeping grace of Sleeping Beauty or Cinderella; and on this afternoon, at six years old I would be told something that would inform my self-perception for the rest of my life.

"Watch where you're going, Suzi!"  I heard the mild concern and frustration in my mother's voice calling out from the car in the parking lot as she grappled to release my infant brother from his car seat.

“How many times must I tell you to stop looking down at your feet when you walk?  You'll develop a hump!  Now hurry inside or you'll be late for class!"

Looking up I watched the winsome flock of diminutive dancers enter the building ahead of me in an animated flutter like a covey of black and pink sparrows; and with one exception they were all exquisitely dainty. 

The exception, a larger, black-haired girl whom I suspected was also a bit older, was a sweet but rotund cherub of a dancer with enormous cheeks and dimpled elbow’s, whose hefty steps even the soft, calfskin of her slippers could not adequately muffle.

“Whatever else I’m not, at least I’m not her,” I considered in mild consolation, as I removed the orthopedic shoes I wore to correct my knock-kneed alignment.

As always, Miss Hertha stood in the vestibule dressed to perform, her gray hair pulled back against her scalp with theatrical precision folding into a tight chignon as smooth as polished silver at the base of her long neck.

We regarded her with awe; how her pale, seasoned arms wafted above us in greeting like the dual fronds of an exotic palm caught in an extraordinary breeze and the way her toned back bloomed up from her slim hips with only the slightest arc. 

This was the poise we sought and the excellence that set her apart from other women.

Even our mothers whose bodies, broadened by childbirth and weighted by the drudgery of domestic life, outwardly displayed their indelicate compromise with perfection in spite of their hope that we would aspire to more.

Along one side of the dance studio on a small platform affixed to the wall was a bank wooden chairs in which our mothers, siblings, or other guardians would sit and observe the class.  The facing wall accommodated a large mirror and the ballet barre, both extending the length of the room.

At the beginning of each class, Miss Hertha would position herself at the front of the room next to her accompanist on piano; and as the music began, she would call out our names one girl at a time.  This was our cue to dance across the room to our place at the barre from where we stood in front of the seated spectators - arms raised, palms facing in, toes pointed.

I waited my turn, anxiously observing the winnowing dancers before me, hoping as I did every week that I would measure up.  

“Excuse me, little girl.” I heard a voice at my back.

“Little girl,” a woman said tapping my shoulder with her thick fingers.

 “Your tutu is not fastened.”

I turned and saw the wide outline of her broad face from her seat behind me; a pearl necklace sitting high on her throat wedged neatly between generous folds of powdered flesh. 

Drawing me backwards with a sharp tug she zipped up my costume and began to hook the small clasp at the top when she stopped abruptly, chuckled and said, “My goodness!  We are a little chubby for our tutu, aren’t we?”

WE ARE?

In that instant my lumpish reflection appeared in the mirror across the room and I now saw clearly just how unlike my fellow troupe members I was.

I was horrified, and as Miss Hertha called out my name, I was certain she must also regard me with disgust, and all I could feel was the hot color of failure burning to the surface of my skin while the grim connotation of those words continued to sear my reality like lye. 

And as I struggled to raise my arms above my head - arms that suddenly felt lubberly and graceless, I made what proved to be a terrible mistake - I believed her.

It is a sad but curious fact that we often let casual remarks or incidents have so much power in our lives.  We let them define us rather than the other way around.  This was so for me that day.  My desire to belong, to fit in, to excel, and my hypersensitivity regarding every perceived flaw and inadequacy led to years of eating disorders, drug abuse and other destructive behaviors.   

Of course, my days with Miss Hertha came to an end that afternoon.  I petitioned my parents for other options and refused to return to ballet; and while my father held fast to his argument that, "All the best athletes are broad-shouldered, knock-kneed and pigeon-toed." this was clearly an advantage that did not apply en pointe, and I no longer wished to shove my square frame into that particular delicate, round hole.

Fifty years later I see the obvious absurdity of that moment and of the thousands of other innocuous moments I vested with corrosive power.  I’d like to think I am much stronger and wiser now.  I’m still rife with insecurities but no longer to the point of destruction or abnormal despair.

In fact, most days I am quite content and happy.

Just don’t ask me to dance.