Puts me back in mind of that Saturday morning, yonks ago now, that I reversed the car back, inadvertently, as I know you'll so entirely appreciate, over that rucksack I'd packed, so carefully, in anticipation of a long and as ever cathartic Saturday drive out to get to yje start of a hike, with friends and neighbours across the road, in our street.
Didn't hurt an unseen kid or any other kind of passing human being. Only impact was on the aluminium water bottle: still carrying and drinking from it, banana bent as it be, to this present, passing, occasional small walking out and about a bit day.
Didn't hurt but could've done, and so easily. Doesn't bear thinking about. That particular near miss, being just a salient one, sticking in the gullet of my mind, amongst so many. None of them can I bear thinking about. Not a one of the incidents that I was responsible that last year. Yes that last year; the one before I opted to submit my vows and be admitted to living life, here, in this silent community.
In case you feel yourself getting ideas of a prosecutorial nature don't make the mistake of thinking that the words you - think; maybe to the point of being convinced - are seeing before your eyes now will be there, should you care or be driven to come back and look, this time tomorrow. Truth is the story, whose rabbit hole you've inadvertently - albeit without yet realising as you descend headlong - fallen down, is going to turn out a whole lot more complicated than any of us yet realises.
"C'est la vie" says Dante.
"Must go" I say, "can't risk being late for such a very important date."
Nah. Sad to say I only recently arrived - thanks to reading some of novel and all of movie - Where the Crawdads Sing' after the carpet bagging swampland snapper uppers had been and, having done their tying folks up in profiteering string, departed (supposedly).
Not to worry overly, you and I both know, there's silence where the clover grows!
Oh I love the rhythm of this, on a phrase level, yes, but structurally and on a voice level most of all. The voice's rhythm sounds perky to me, which makes it funny and tragic all at once. Well done. Well done.
I love the blazingly memorable detail of "throwing a bathing suit into the trash" - just somehow so specific - and then too, how a non-specified thing can give such a feeling of intimacy or immediacy - reader right in the middle of this already - with 'you did that thing with your finger'!
It was the year I left. My city, my state, my childhood. I had finally earned and saved enough money from painting houses that I could afford to cross the country in the old mustang I bought, that looked cool but was so undependable I had to park it facing downhill every night, in case I had to jump start it the next morning by rolling it and popping the clutch. Sometimes by running along side to get it rolling then jumping in to the drivers seat before it got away from me. Very dramatic and sort of par for the course in an 18 year old's life of dramas large, small and imagined. But it worked. The plan that is. I made it to California, to the other ocean. I parked there at the beach, listening to Bruce Springsteen wail his heart out on the car stereo I had rigged up with my high school buddy, which was something we all cared a lot about during those years. I was free. Free to be lonely as hell while I lived on a couch in somebody's shitty apartment, waiting for my life to start and listening to a new band called Dire Straits (how fitting.) I waited for the rest of my life to start at Berkeley. It was the year the mayor of San Francisco was murdered for being gay and the cult members of Jonestown drank the kool aid, giving the world a new catch phrase for buying into dumb shit. It was the year I left that couch and moved up to living in my own makeshift bedroom, created by hanging blankets in a dining room, in a house packed with other students. Less lonely but still out of place. It was my first year at a the university that lured me across the country and that I am heading over to teach at three days from now. It was the year I found my place in the world, even though it took me many more years, decades really, to know this
Oh does this bring me back! I once worked at Moishe’s Deli on Shattuck. Maybe I made you a sandwich. So many lives we’ve lived. So cool that now you teach there!
Kurt, I loved your essay. I too fell for the lure of Berkeley in 1968. I stayed through law school but left for my first job because Wall Street paid the highest salaries and my mom was ill with cancer in New Jersey. Four years later, I returned to practice law in Mountain View. I bought a house, a car and a dog. But I was desperately lonely. My Berkeley friends were gone. The days of lazing at the pool at Strawberry Canyon in the past. Nine months later, I married a man I'd met in my first job and moved to Connecticut. Raising children saved me. I'm grateful for that.
I really like the way you ended this. So many things that we only realize in hindsight. There’s a line in the movie “she’s having a baby” where someone says to their best friend right before his wedding , “will I be happy?” And the friend says, “yeah you’ll be happy. You just won’t know it.” Something about your story reminded me of that:)
I had exactly the same routine with a VW window van. If I was lucky I parked on a hill. But if not, it was light enough I could run and push it with the driver's side door open, and just jump in after it was moving and pop the clutch. In the east salted roads and rusted vehicles were the bain of the impoverished, and when the accelerator cable broke or froze, I rigged twine from the driver's vent window outside all the way to the engine ( in the rear) and tied it to the accelerator lever. I think the twine stretched, because there was a delay between pulling, and desired acceleration. I don't remember how that situation resolved.
Knopfler. Was he, some might suspect and even say, your real muse and lure to Berkeley Kurt?
When you went driving way out, on and on and on (I imagine) ever West?
Were you, could you, just possibly, have been inspired by some sixth sense that his 'Sailing to Philadelphia' was going to be dropped, lets say at some future barricade that would be required overcoming in order to get across the still, rapidly flowing, contemporary Rubicon and into our shared and present breaking and slowly emerging future Transatlantic culture?
Beach Boys' 'Surfs Up' hot some sweet resonant spot with me long, long before I managed to ship up in taking a fly drive vacation on America's Pacific Coast. Long, long and lengthening time ago now but the memories resonate this evening, every bit as much as if it were only a yesterday ago.
He was recently the guest on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. Here's the link https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0021q4w I don't know if you can pick up on this programme Tod but if you can I think you'll find it an enjoyable, synoptic listen. No side to the guy, just talent, modestly aired and shared over his long career.
Watched it. Thanks Rob. I've seen many interviews with Mark. One recent one with his guitar collection before the auction. What a gentleman, always self effacing with this warm humor. Love the music on the album he did with Emmy Lou Harris.
That was the year we were going to travel the country. We quit our dead-end jobs, bought a used VW bus with what was left of our funds, packed up our paints and paintbrushes, and opened the I Ching to chart a course.
The I Ching said, “Opposition.”
Dave said, “Fuck that.”
I read on, “Opposition means misunderstandings.”
“Let’s try a different one,” Dave said.
“It doesn’t work that way,” I said.
So we spun one of those game-spinner arrows that we’d found somewhere, and headed west.
A few weeks later, we were drawing portraits for tourists in Nashville when the guy who ran the campsite we parked in came running up to us, waving a piece of paper.
Somehow, my sister had found us. My mother was in the hospital in Seattle. She would send us plane tickets.
“Look, we’ll still be traveling the country,” I told Dave. “Just in a different order.”
“We’ll never get another chance to do this,” he said.
That was the year I spent taking care of my mother, drawing sketches of her getting paler and thinner. Coaxing her to eat. Helping her learn to use a walker until she fell and refused to try anymore. Making endless cups of coffee. Translating her slurred words to doctors when only I could understand her speech.
That was the year I spent reading postcards from Dave, each one from a different city, or town, or mountaintop. I saved them all in a cardboard box. I composed replies in my head, but I had nowhere to send them. His postcards said, Here’s what you’re missing. Mine, unsent, said, No, I’m just missing you.
At the end of the year, the postcards stopped. The last one was from Taos, but when I called the one friend we had there, she said Dave had left without telling her where he was headed next.
That was the year I painted his portrait from memory. It’s still hanging on the wall of the apartment I inherited from my mother.
I love this story! It made me think how sometimes we end up on a path we didn't choose and somehow end up wiser for it, even with the melancholy of seeing paths we never got to tread. It also brought back of a memory of my dad's last months with Parkinson's. I was the only one who could understand him so I did a lot of translating - for doctors and for my mom. It was partly that I got used what the sounds meant, but also that I got to know his needs so well I could intuit what he might be saying. It always made me feel good when I could be his voice, especially when there was nothing else I could really do for him. Thanks for your story!
Visceral. Etched. 'Portrait a Young Him'. How's he aging now? Hopefully stoic, never going to claim any kind of care, when he couldn't recognise 'The Importance of Being Carer'.
Reference to postcards put me in mind of reading 'Postcards' E Annie Proulx's first, and great, novel.
Thanks Masha. Such a stimulating story to read, both within and without itself it stirs the creative pool of this reader's imagination, deeply.
It was the year I moved four times. My first move took me from a suburb of St. Paul to an expensive South Minneapolis duplex. You were still there, like a chair or sofa. Unmovable. You didn’t say a word when my sister asked what to do with your stuff, so I said, “Just put it in the garage at the duplex.” She looked at me with that mom look. A look of disdain and frustration. “We have to move his stuff,” I said. “It’s my house and I just sold it.”
A few days after that move, you disappeared. You left a scratchy note on the dining room table. “I need to find out my part in this.” That was it. I settled back in to my single life. Eventually, you wandered back to me and your stuff, vowing to “try again.” Magically, I found a more reasonably-priced duplex nearby and we moved again, hoping for a change. My sister didn’t come to help us move this time, but my friends came, warning us it was the last time they would move that comfy, but heavy sofa bed with the reclining seats. I found a bottle of rum in your desk drawer.
Just as we were beginning to settle in on Labor Day weekend, my daughter was in a serious one-car rollover accident in Utah. My computer wasn’t set up yet, so I used your computer to book a flight. That was when I saw your email message to her. It was right there, just sent, waiting for me to see it. I breathed in and focused on Lizzie. She had been airlifted to a hospital in Grand Junction. I spent a week with Liz, whose right side was broken. Broken arm, broken ribs, broken heart. Her boyfriend had been drinking.
Once she was safely in recovery, I returned to our new little bungalow, a bit broken myself. I did try. And try. Then, winter arrived. We were out for dinner when I looked over and saw her with her family. Husband and son. Okay. It was time for you to leave. You refused to move out... so I moved again.
Six months later, I got an email from the landlord at the duplex. “Are you still interested in buying the duplex?”
I loved the sentence, "I found a bottle of rum in your desk drawer." It painted a picture for me of a hidden life that then unfolded in the rest of the story. Thanks!
You said I'm all in, and how could I but agree with you. We danced naked to the music of the moon, swam in the wine of Lake Como, and slept in ice huts amidst volcanoes.
The year we tried our best you lost your mind and I learned to pray. Mostly we wept, begged and crept on our bellies before the God of Fertility. Nothing worked.
It has been a very long time since anyone laid eyes upon a griffin fox. Give it another forty years and they'll have eased their way out of the living memory altogether.
Time was you'd see them all around London. More often you'd hear them, chasing each other over the rooftops, loosening the odd slate here and there, the displaced tiles crenelating the guttering.
When an animal is so fast or furtive that you seldom, if ever, see one in repose, to me that's a sign that they're on the way out as a species. That's the way that it went with the griffin fox. The blur of a tawny mane, reminiscent of a lion. A whining call, a bark stretched thin like a piece of crooked wire. In the Royal parks, leaping from branch to branch in the leaf canopy of the tall trees, a permanent scuffle in the low dappled heavens, scattering the horse chestnuts; acquiring a sudden and unexpected grace in those moments when they pirouetted upward, legs dangling flat against the body, eyes astonishingly half-closed as they snatched some poor unsuspecting bird from the heavens. They went after cats too, which people didn't like, and, it was often rumoured, made off with a few babies. After the Second World War, the exterminators soon had the measure of them. All of that new battlefield technology now brought to bear on enemies closer to home. The last documented sighting was in the winter of 1965; a cleaner at Buckingham Palace, watching from a window on the second floor, observed one limping across the empty garden.
The last genuine sighting, that barely anyone knows about, happened three-years later in 1968, sixty miles south-east, in Ashford, Kent. A widow named Mary Jewell, who was 82 years old and who would not see another summer, saw, from her kitchen window, a male griffin fox nosing its way between the collage of wet autumn leaves, across her un-mown lawn, as if engaged in some mundane errand – a search for food. It disappeared into some rambling border hedging that had gone wild through neglect. After that, its kind were never seen again.
Here in the PNW we have a relative of the griffin, the less sophisticated ( of course ) Bigfoot, aka Sasquatch, who has no known attributes other than exercising a certain type of imagination and spawning speculation, and product lines of touristy paraphernalia like decals, statues, and whatnot.
It was the year the wind came down like the wolf on the fold, out of the northern snows beyond Spitzberg, the great frozen sea-mass, unshakeable, absolute, as it was in those days. The sky was like iron. The ground froze hard as stone. Young trees cracked and split. Old trees gritted their teeth and held on. We'd never seen weather this cold. This wasn't deep-cold country we were in.
It wouldn't last long, we said. Just a cold snap, be gone in a couple of days. A river of Arctic air, the radio said. It didn't say how many days.
The old farmhouse hadn't been lived in for years. We'd asked if we could rent it, and we ended up by reaching a deal. Nice fairweather place, air circulating through the cracked panes and the skew-hung doors. You could live half-indoors, half-outdoors. The current owners, peasant farmers, were tight-lipped about it. They had once lived there, but they hadn't built it that way.
We made up our own version, plausible but with no proof. A story with death in the trenches and a sale after WW1. If there were any ghosts around, they seemed happy with our tenancy. No bad vibes, no knocking spirits.
The river of Arctic air flowed on unhindered. Little polar bears hid in the fridge to get warm. Remember when you told me to fix the fridge and I found them? We covered the car in the barn and started her up twice a day. The water pipes were deep enough not to freeze. Inside the house, they froze. We drew water once a day, filled pans and bowls. Shook the butane bottle often. Slept in the kitchen. Kept a wood fire going in the big fireplace. Watched the evening cold come down the chimney and sit on the rising heat. The fire didn't draw, smoke filled the kitchen. We just climbed into bed and buried ourselves under a hundred blankets, and did things calculated to keep us warm.
Remember how we laughed? OK OK we'd had enough, but we laughed too.
Outside to the north where the cold wind blew, the figtrees that bore great glossy purple figs in season died in one night.
and the polar bears live to see another day. "They had once lived there, but they hadn't built it that way." Love the way you throw in a little mystery to warm us up. I hate being cold.
They flew in on the wind. Our shattered window-panes were a boon to them. They tried to find shelter in other houses, but no luck. They wrote us a nice thank-you letter afterwards.
What I remember from the year I turned eight was not the Kennedy assassination or my father’s death, it was my mother going to work and the terrible independence I acquired.
Overnight I became responsible for folding our laundry, and grocery shopping which meant going by myself to Gristedes the neighborhood market six blocks from our apartment.
Listen. I was a city kid. Every day I crossed two streets all by myself to get to PS 9. I’d been going to Levy brother’s toy store by on Broadway alone since I was six.
But Gristedes was far.
I was used to trailing my mother as she checked off her long list. I’d never really paid attention to where things were on the shelves or even in what part of the store.
My mother handed me the list on her way to work
“Good luck.” She called as the elevator door closed.
I was a good reader. The best in the whole 3rd grade. But there were words on that list I had never seen. What for example was a sanitary napkin?
The walk itself turned out to be okay. Crossing six streets was the same as two streets times three.
Once in Gristedes I took my time exploring the different sections. Meat, produce. I found paper products. There was toilet paper, paper towels and several different brands of napkins but none said “sanitary.” Maybe all napkins were sanitary? I decided they must be. I put a pack of napkins with a nice floral border into the cart.
I wheeled to the checkout stand where a young woman with green eye shadow waited.
I held up the package of napkins
“Excuse me, ma’am but are these sanitary”
“Are they what?”
“Sanitary napkins?”
She had me repeat the question. Then she held up the napkins and called to the girl in the next stand
“Baby wants to know if these are “Sani-tary napkins”
“Oh girl!”
“Baby girl who sent you with this list?”
“My mom.” I answered. Why were they laughing? I was burning with shame but I didn’t know why.
Several customers had overheard and they were laughing as well. I ran out of the store leaving my cart behind.
That night I screamed at my mother for the very first but not the last time in our lives
I hate you I told her. When she laughed at the story
That was the year I graduated with my B.S. in advertising.
That was the year Professor Pierce, the department head, took his top students to a celebratory lunch.
That was the year Professor Pierce told us tales of ad guru David Ogilvy, and the heyday of advertising in the sixties. “I envy you kids” he said, “The Ad game is a great life. I love teaching, but I dearly miss agency work.”
That was the year (decades before “Mad Men” made its debut) Professor Pierce told us the secret to success in advertising: “The single most important thing you need to know, he said, “the real secret to success and client relationships is—The Three Martini Lunch!”
That was the year, right on cue, a waiter appeared at the table with a tray of icy martinis and placed one in front of us each.
That was the year, after our second round of martinis, I felt imbued with a sense of purpose that I’d never felt before.
That was the year, after the third round of martinis, I was all a-glow with the conviction Advertising was the right profession for me.
That was the year I hurled my "secret to advertising success" all over Dr. Pierce’s wingtips.
That was the year I had my first and last martini.
That was the year I started working on Madison Avenue.
1984. Everything changed. An ad ripping off George Orwell promised a new way to compute, or, a way to compute, because most of us had not yet computed. I still wrote with a pen that made a sweet scritch as it moved across the page, and then spent a lot of time typing, then retyping, on my electric machine that could actually remember five or so words in case I wanted to get rid of them (we didn’t delete then).
But a month or two before I first touched a mouse I lost courage and quit my workshop and made a burrow and crawled in. Doesn’t matter why I quit; let’s just say I recognized myself and didn’t want to. I found it more comforting in my burrow. So I quit (although for the longest while it was just a pause).
Could Orwell, or Jobs, have foreseen how Apple would rebuild entire industries, publishing, say, drawing in all kinds of people, people on the run, people searching, people wasting time, at least one of whom had never thought of being a book designer?
Somehow, shortly after the great quitting, I found myself hired on as a mouse jockey (let's hear it for the passive voice!). I was soon pointing and clicking my way through book after book after book, textbooks and picture books and novels and histories. So many words. So many books, my name in many of them, on the copyright page, usually in 8 pt type. Parents so happy. But, a friend or two who knew what I had quit asked, didn’t I want my name on the cover? Well, books! I’m making books!
2024. Yes indeed, a blink. Everything changed. I end self-employment, close my small business. Then I futz around and, while I’m twiddling my thumbs, what I had quit came looking for me. It had been there all the time, only a little annoyed as it lived through all those words and books by other people. It was, I think, in a burrow just above my own.
It was the year of the ice storm. We’d been in our house for four days without electricity. No heat. No TV. No computer. No stereo. No phone. We were freezing in the cold and out of alcohol and getting low on food. We couldn’t leave because the roads and sidewalks were covered in ice. We had no one to talk to, except each other and neither of us was good company. You went a sort of mad, stuck inside. Inside the house. Inside our marriage. Inside your head. When the ice finally started to melt, you left in our car by yourself. Gone for a whole day. I felt that it was entirely possible that you simply wouldn’t come back. And then, when you finally came back, around midnight, I didn’t feel relief. I felt rage because you didn’t even bother to bring me something to eat or drink.
No. It wasn’t. It was the year we rented the cottage on the coast. There was that small earthquake the first night. Just enough to shake us awake. I fell back asleep, but you didn’t. You stayed awake, sitting on the deck, watching the sea lit by the full moon. All night, you watched the waves convincing yourself that a tsunami was imminent. You went, not a sort of mad, but full on crazy. When I woke up, the tide was on its way out and you were hysterical. Inconsolable. Convinced that the water rushing away from us now, would come roaring back in a few minutes in a wave 100 feet high and sweep us into the deep. You screamed and cried and hit me when I said that we were going to be fine, that low tide always looks this way, that if a tsunami was coming, the sirens would be going off. You ran away from me. Got into the car and drove away without me. Leaving me wondering whether I’d convinced you that we were safe, and you decided to leave me, or whether you still thought the wave was coming and you wanted me swept away. I can’t even remember now what I thought when you finally came back that afternoon. I expect, however, that I too felt rage.
Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter now. At some point, it just doesn’t matter.
Mary, these stories and poem are so exquisite that I'm intimidated giving this prompt a go! Thank you again for these beautiful examples.
Ok, so here is my shot at it:
It was the year I was supposed to move to New York. That Big Apple, which was a bite too big for my father, but just about right for me, his daughter, who had the habit of “stealing his dreams.” I had already mailed my application to HB Studios, in which I wrote enthusiastically about acting and the studio that trained the likes of Liza Minnelli and Harvey Keitel. I didn’t know if a Hungarian girl like me stood a chance in the Big Apple, but you never know these things, unless you try, so I did. I needed a change of scene.
It was the year I fell desperately in love. Of course, you had to complicate my plans. And I remember being so pleased with myself when I arrived at The Royal Court Theatre that evening in my red coat and pink trainers and my trademark jeans and white top. I was carrying my shopping bag from Tesco with croissants for the next morning, because that was the year I lived in Dulwich. It was the year that The Royal Court staged Sarah Kane’s final play 4.48 Psychosis, of which I remember nothing, except our knees touching, and the feeling that shot through my body like an electric shock of the likes I hadn’t experienced before, and haven’t experienced since. It was the night I was so giddy with happiness – which is strange, I know, considering the theme of the play was suicide – that I forgot my croissants at the theatre and followed you to the tube. We were too shy to exchange phone numbers, but you found my email on the theatre’s website (it was the time before social media).
It was the year I lost my virginity, and I’m happy it was to you. It was the year I was accepted to HB Studios with a welcoming note that said that they were impressed with my application. I no longer wanted to move to New York, but my father was going to kick my ass if I didn’t. I was hoping you would ask me to stay, but you didn’t. I cried on the flight and vowed to forget you, but I didn’t (I couldn’t). It was the year two planes crushed into the World Trade Centre and the world, and us, fell apart.
(And it would be wonderful to work with this some more)
It was the year I lived in 15 minute increments. 15 minutes to grow a third arm. 15 minutes to sleep an entire nights worth of dreams. 15 minutes to extract yellow fluid out of my nipples. 15 minutes of piercing shrieks from the aliens in the bedroom next door. 15 minutes to wash the vomit and slime off my body. 15 minutes to find all of the cheap plastic crap needed to go for a 15 minute walk. 15 minutes of idyllic family time when the manic aliens play peacefully together followed by 15 minutes of blood-curdling violence followed by 15 minutes of zone defense followed by 15 minutes of crying. 15 minutes to stuff mush into the bird-like peeping mouths. 15 minutes to clean the mush and the layer of sticky slime off the floor. 15 minutes of silence lying on the floor of the closet in the dark putting the shards of my mind back together again. If I can survive the next 15 minutes, and the next 15 minutes, and the next 15 minutes, then maybe I can survive this year.
Ditto what Mary mentioned - about this repetition really conveying the exhaustion wonderfully! And I love how your playing with time this way gives such a particular feel and rhythm - it feels like it contains the seed for many more possible prompts!
It was the year of living duplicitously. Later I couldn't understand why I had to pretend. Actually, that's not true, I understood all too well.
I'd shown everyone the photographs. Of Mum, Dad, two brothers and a sister. They asked which girl was I. I pointed, said I'd changed a lot. I'd bring the photographs out most weeks, each time an elaboration, the older brother now at Princeton; the sister, a contributor to the Chicago Review; the dad who had a share in the winner of the Preakness.
Then I met Jake, got very drunk and told him about the convent they'd found me outside, the children's homes, the failed adoptions, reform school. He said, 'Wow'. And, 'Boy, do you have a fertile.' He meant imagination but Jake had an economical way of speaking. As well as economy with words, Jake was as sweet a peach as you'd find in a box of sweet peaches. So I clung on tight, Jake did too.
He was right about fertile. Oldest boy is off to Yale, his sister writes leads for the Beast. I've had to tell the twins, beautiful girls, they're too young to sign up with an agency and the youngest has a wonderful singing voice. Jake - his investment fund was a real winner - is away at present, at Keeneland, says he's going to buy a contender.
It was the year I graduated from college, the year I moved to a city after over two decades of small towns. A cheep apartment in a sketchy part of town, on the edge of Roxbury, where someone told me, they throw rocks at you and bury you. Grandmaster Flash's "The Message" thumped from every other car stereo and boombox. The year of stupid jobs and lots of bad weed and a bad roommate, oh yeah, take that shortcut where they're building the new Orange Line. A teenager claiming he had a gun in his jacket pocket wanted my wallet but I just ran away in fear. The three days of working in a phone room, barely getting paid, hating every second. It was a year when I wondered if I'd made the right decision, but I must have, because I've never go back to living in a small town again.
It was the year of the garter belt, mine, that is, a sleek slip of silk to hold up my hose, although I didn’t call my stockings hose back then. After seven years in California’s sun, bare legs, alternating sandals for six months and then knee high boots, I didn’t own a pair of stockings, not even tights. That California year when I grew out the hair on my legs, breached it blonder than my hair, a shimmer that said hippie with a touch of class. But that was a different year. In this year, the year of the garter belt, I worked for a Wall Street law firm, where going bare legged was not done (although I dared that too in the summer months.) A garter belt in worn under panties. Otherwise, you would need to remove it to go to the bathroom. If you wear bikini panties, you can color coordinate—black panties with black garter belt. But it’s far more interesting to do a color block—black belt with salmon colored panties, say, so that each stands out against the other. In the year of the garter belt, only a few men knew what was underneath my business suit, the lucky few, the few who got to fantasize when I walked down the hall, striding to the library, the conference room, the elevator. Even fewer got to unbuckle the small garters that held the stockings back and front, ease the stockings down my legs. There were later years, of course, years of raising kids and carpools, when undergarments lost their luster. I still have a garter belt in my bureau drawer. My husband, one of those lucky few back at that law firm in 1976, sometimes pulls it out, dangles it enticingly before me. Reminds me of the year of the garter belt.
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Ouch!
Puts me back in mind of that Saturday morning, yonks ago now, that I reversed the car back, inadvertently, as I know you'll so entirely appreciate, over that rucksack I'd packed, so carefully, in anticipation of a long and as ever cathartic Saturday drive out to get to yje start of a hike, with friends and neighbours across the road, in our street.
Didn't hurt an unseen kid or any other kind of passing human being. Only impact was on the aluminium water bottle: still carrying and drinking from it, banana bent as it be, to this present, passing, occasional small walking out and about a bit day.
Didn't hurt but could've done, and so easily. Doesn't bear thinking about. That particular near miss, being just a salient one, sticking in the gullet of my mind, amongst so many. None of them can I bear thinking about. Not a one of the incidents that I was responsible that last year. Yes that last year; the one before I opted to submit my vows and be admitted to living life, here, in this silent community.
In case you feel yourself getting ideas of a prosecutorial nature don't make the mistake of thinking that the words you - think; maybe to the point of being convinced - are seeing before your eyes now will be there, should you care or be driven to come back and look, this time tomorrow. Truth is the story, whose rabbit hole you've inadvertently - albeit without yet realising as you descend headlong - fallen down, is going to turn out a whole lot more complicated than any of us yet realises.
"C'est la vie" says Dante.
"Must go" I say, "can't risk being late for such a very important date."
Rob in a silent community. You got some swampland you want to sell me?
Nah. Sad to say I only recently arrived - thanks to reading some of novel and all of movie - Where the Crawdads Sing' after the carpet bagging swampland snapper uppers had been and, having done their tying folks up in profiteering string, departed (supposedly).
Not to worry overly, you and I both know, there's silence where the clover grows!
Oh I love the rhythm of this, on a phrase level, yes, but structurally and on a voice level most of all. The voice's rhythm sounds perky to me, which makes it funny and tragic all at once. Well done. Well done.
Appreciate the, what I'll choose to call maybe less than appositely, 'technic-forensic' comment on Mary's post Niall. Thanks.
Thanks so much, Niall!
I love the blazingly memorable detail of "throwing a bathing suit into the trash" - just somehow so specific - and then too, how a non-specified thing can give such a feeling of intimacy or immediacy - reader right in the middle of this already - with 'you did that thing with your finger'!
Thanks, Danielle!
Great sneaking-up-on-you pace where the accidents become less and less…accidental.
thank you, Janet!
It has a great rhythm— agree! Plus it’s juicy.
Thanks, Sea!
hah love peeing in the hot tub,
i promise not to pee in yours
Some people are accident-prone... ;)
Exactly.
The year of the train wreck! Love all the accidental incidents.
Thanks for reading/commenting, Angela!
It was the year I left. My city, my state, my childhood. I had finally earned and saved enough money from painting houses that I could afford to cross the country in the old mustang I bought, that looked cool but was so undependable I had to park it facing downhill every night, in case I had to jump start it the next morning by rolling it and popping the clutch. Sometimes by running along side to get it rolling then jumping in to the drivers seat before it got away from me. Very dramatic and sort of par for the course in an 18 year old's life of dramas large, small and imagined. But it worked. The plan that is. I made it to California, to the other ocean. I parked there at the beach, listening to Bruce Springsteen wail his heart out on the car stereo I had rigged up with my high school buddy, which was something we all cared a lot about during those years. I was free. Free to be lonely as hell while I lived on a couch in somebody's shitty apartment, waiting for my life to start and listening to a new band called Dire Straits (how fitting.) I waited for the rest of my life to start at Berkeley. It was the year the mayor of San Francisco was murdered for being gay and the cult members of Jonestown drank the kool aid, giving the world a new catch phrase for buying into dumb shit. It was the year I left that couch and moved up to living in my own makeshift bedroom, created by hanging blankets in a dining room, in a house packed with other students. Less lonely but still out of place. It was my first year at a the university that lured me across the country and that I am heading over to teach at three days from now. It was the year I found my place in the world, even though it took me many more years, decades really, to know this
Oh does this bring me back! I once worked at Moishe’s Deli on Shattuck. Maybe I made you a sandwich. So many lives we’ve lived. So cool that now you teach there!
Thanks Mary. That pendulum really does swing back...
Kurt, I loved your essay. I too fell for the lure of Berkeley in 1968. I stayed through law school but left for my first job because Wall Street paid the highest salaries and my mom was ill with cancer in New Jersey. Four years later, I returned to practice law in Mountain View. I bought a house, a car and a dog. But I was desperately lonely. My Berkeley friends were gone. The days of lazing at the pool at Strawberry Canyon in the past. Nine months later, I married a man I'd met in my first job and moved to Connecticut. Raising children saved me. I'm grateful for that.
Thanks Christine. You get it....
I really like the way you ended this. So many things that we only realize in hindsight. There’s a line in the movie “she’s having a baby” where someone says to their best friend right before his wedding , “will I be happy?” And the friend says, “yeah you’ll be happy. You just won’t know it.” Something about your story reminded me of that:)
Nice! Great line. Thanks Jeffrey.
I had exactly the same routine with a VW window van. If I was lucky I parked on a hill. But if not, it was light enough I could run and push it with the driver's side door open, and just jump in after it was moving and pop the clutch. In the east salted roads and rusted vehicles were the bain of the impoverished, and when the accelerator cable broke or froze, I rigged twine from the driver's vent window outside all the way to the engine ( in the rear) and tied it to the accelerator lever. I think the twine stretched, because there was a delay between pulling, and desired acceleration. I don't remember how that situation resolved.
Twine snapped while driving uphill? (Hope not).
Broke a few times. Tied the ends together.
Knopfler. Was he, some might suspect and even say, your real muse and lure to Berkeley Kurt?
When you went driving way out, on and on and on (I imagine) ever West?
Were you, could you, just possibly, have been inspired by some sixth sense that his 'Sailing to Philadelphia' was going to be dropped, lets say at some future barricade that would be required overcoming in order to get across the still, rapidly flowing, contemporary Rubicon and into our shared and present breaking and slowly emerging future Transatlantic culture?
Beach Boys' 'Surfs Up' hot some sweet resonant spot with me long, long before I managed to ship up in taking a fly drive vacation on America's Pacific Coast. Long, long and lengthening time ago now but the memories resonate this evening, every bit as much as if it were only a yesterday ago.
I drove as far as I could without drowning. And it was Philadelphia from which I departed!
Mark Knopfler is one of my favorite musicians to this day.
He was recently the guest on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. Here's the link https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0021q4w I don't know if you can pick up on this programme Tod but if you can I think you'll find it an enjoyable, synoptic listen. No side to the guy, just talent, modestly aired and shared over his long career.
Watched it. Thanks Rob. I've seen many interviews with Mark. One recent one with his guitar collection before the auction. What a gentleman, always self effacing with this warm humor. Love the music on the album he did with Emmy Lou Harris.
This was beautiful Kurt. I could really see/feel the impact of this year, and that last line...
Thanks Imola!
I love "I was free. Free to be lonely as hell"!
That was the year we were going to travel the country. We quit our dead-end jobs, bought a used VW bus with what was left of our funds, packed up our paints and paintbrushes, and opened the I Ching to chart a course.
The I Ching said, “Opposition.”
Dave said, “Fuck that.”
I read on, “Opposition means misunderstandings.”
“Let’s try a different one,” Dave said.
“It doesn’t work that way,” I said.
So we spun one of those game-spinner arrows that we’d found somewhere, and headed west.
A few weeks later, we were drawing portraits for tourists in Nashville when the guy who ran the campsite we parked in came running up to us, waving a piece of paper.
Somehow, my sister had found us. My mother was in the hospital in Seattle. She would send us plane tickets.
“Look, we’ll still be traveling the country,” I told Dave. “Just in a different order.”
“We’ll never get another chance to do this,” he said.
That was the year I spent taking care of my mother, drawing sketches of her getting paler and thinner. Coaxing her to eat. Helping her learn to use a walker until she fell and refused to try anymore. Making endless cups of coffee. Translating her slurred words to doctors when only I could understand her speech.
That was the year I spent reading postcards from Dave, each one from a different city, or town, or mountaintop. I saved them all in a cardboard box. I composed replies in my head, but I had nowhere to send them. His postcards said, Here’s what you’re missing. Mine, unsent, said, No, I’m just missing you.
At the end of the year, the postcards stopped. The last one was from Taos, but when I called the one friend we had there, she said Dave had left without telling her where he was headed next.
That was the year I painted his portrait from memory. It’s still hanging on the wall of the apartment I inherited from my mother.
Wow. What a story! "Here's what you're missing." The ending really killed me because it seems the woman had it in her heart to forgive him.
Maybe she did. Or maybe she was just keeping him in one place.
I love this story! It made me think how sometimes we end up on a path we didn't choose and somehow end up wiser for it, even with the melancholy of seeing paths we never got to tread. It also brought back of a memory of my dad's last months with Parkinson's. I was the only one who could understand him so I did a lot of translating - for doctors and for my mom. It was partly that I got used what the sounds meant, but also that I got to know his needs so well I could intuit what he might be saying. It always made me feel good when I could be his voice, especially when there was nothing else I could really do for him. Thanks for your story!
Thank you!
Visceral. Etched. 'Portrait a Young Him'. How's he aging now? Hopefully stoic, never going to claim any kind of care, when he couldn't recognise 'The Importance of Being Carer'.
Reference to postcards put me in mind of reading 'Postcards' E Annie Proulx's first, and great, novel.
Thanks Masha. Such a stimulating story to read, both within and without itself it stirs the creative pool of this reader's imagination, deeply.
Thank you, Rob.
Moving Out:
It was the year I moved four times. My first move took me from a suburb of St. Paul to an expensive South Minneapolis duplex. You were still there, like a chair or sofa. Unmovable. You didn’t say a word when my sister asked what to do with your stuff, so I said, “Just put it in the garage at the duplex.” She looked at me with that mom look. A look of disdain and frustration. “We have to move his stuff,” I said. “It’s my house and I just sold it.”
A few days after that move, you disappeared. You left a scratchy note on the dining room table. “I need to find out my part in this.” That was it. I settled back in to my single life. Eventually, you wandered back to me and your stuff, vowing to “try again.” Magically, I found a more reasonably-priced duplex nearby and we moved again, hoping for a change. My sister didn’t come to help us move this time, but my friends came, warning us it was the last time they would move that comfy, but heavy sofa bed with the reclining seats. I found a bottle of rum in your desk drawer.
Just as we were beginning to settle in on Labor Day weekend, my daughter was in a serious one-car rollover accident in Utah. My computer wasn’t set up yet, so I used your computer to book a flight. That was when I saw your email message to her. It was right there, just sent, waiting for me to see it. I breathed in and focused on Lizzie. She had been airlifted to a hospital in Grand Junction. I spent a week with Liz, whose right side was broken. Broken arm, broken ribs, broken heart. Her boyfriend had been drinking.
Once she was safely in recovery, I returned to our new little bungalow, a bit broken myself. I did try. And try. Then, winter arrived. We were out for dinner when I looked over and saw her with her family. Husband and son. Okay. It was time for you to leave. You refused to move out... so I moved again.
Six months later, I got an email from the landlord at the duplex. “Are you still interested in buying the duplex?”
“Yes, if it’s empty!”
That was my last move.
Love that final line and its finality. And that turn: "saw her with her family. Husband and son." Really nicely done.
Thanks, Mary. I was up to 400 words, so I had to summarize, but it worked! ❤️❤️❤️
I loved the sentence, "I found a bottle of rum in your desk drawer." It painted a picture for me of a hidden life that then unfolded in the rest of the story. Thanks!
Thank you! Sometimes we don’t notice those themes until they unfold before us!
It was The Year we tried our best. . .
You said I'm all in, and how could I but agree with you. We danced naked to the music of the moon, swam in the wine of Lake Como, and slept in ice huts amidst volcanoes.
The year we tried our best you lost your mind and I learned to pray. Mostly we wept, begged and crept on our bellies before the God of Fertility. Nothing worked.
I remained childless the year we tried our best.
This is heartbreaking but also strangely hopeful, as we don't know anything about the years that followed this one.
It has been a very long time since anyone laid eyes upon a griffin fox. Give it another forty years and they'll have eased their way out of the living memory altogether.
Time was you'd see them all around London. More often you'd hear them, chasing each other over the rooftops, loosening the odd slate here and there, the displaced tiles crenelating the guttering.
When an animal is so fast or furtive that you seldom, if ever, see one in repose, to me that's a sign that they're on the way out as a species. That's the way that it went with the griffin fox. The blur of a tawny mane, reminiscent of a lion. A whining call, a bark stretched thin like a piece of crooked wire. In the Royal parks, leaping from branch to branch in the leaf canopy of the tall trees, a permanent scuffle in the low dappled heavens, scattering the horse chestnuts; acquiring a sudden and unexpected grace in those moments when they pirouetted upward, legs dangling flat against the body, eyes astonishingly half-closed as they snatched some poor unsuspecting bird from the heavens. They went after cats too, which people didn't like, and, it was often rumoured, made off with a few babies. After the Second World War, the exterminators soon had the measure of them. All of that new battlefield technology now brought to bear on enemies closer to home. The last documented sighting was in the winter of 1965; a cleaner at Buckingham Palace, watching from a window on the second floor, observed one limping across the empty garden.
The last genuine sighting, that barely anyone knows about, happened three-years later in 1968, sixty miles south-east, in Ashford, Kent. A widow named Mary Jewell, who was 82 years old and who would not see another summer, saw, from her kitchen window, a male griffin fox nosing its way between the collage of wet autumn leaves, across her un-mown lawn, as if engaged in some mundane errand – a search for food. It disappeared into some rambling border hedging that had gone wild through neglect. After that, its kind were never seen again.
Beautiful. I can picture that fox now--you’ve brought that creature to life!
But they must still be out there somewhere.
Here in the PNW we have a relative of the griffin, the less sophisticated ( of course ) Bigfoot, aka Sasquatch, who has no known attributes other than exercising a certain type of imagination and spawning speculation, and product lines of touristy paraphernalia like decals, statues, and whatnot.
This is beautiful. Well done!
So lovely.
It was the year the wind came down like the wolf on the fold, out of the northern snows beyond Spitzberg, the great frozen sea-mass, unshakeable, absolute, as it was in those days. The sky was like iron. The ground froze hard as stone. Young trees cracked and split. Old trees gritted their teeth and held on. We'd never seen weather this cold. This wasn't deep-cold country we were in.
It wouldn't last long, we said. Just a cold snap, be gone in a couple of days. A river of Arctic air, the radio said. It didn't say how many days.
The old farmhouse hadn't been lived in for years. We'd asked if we could rent it, and we ended up by reaching a deal. Nice fairweather place, air circulating through the cracked panes and the skew-hung doors. You could live half-indoors, half-outdoors. The current owners, peasant farmers, were tight-lipped about it. They had once lived there, but they hadn't built it that way.
We made up our own version, plausible but with no proof. A story with death in the trenches and a sale after WW1. If there were any ghosts around, they seemed happy with our tenancy. No bad vibes, no knocking spirits.
The river of Arctic air flowed on unhindered. Little polar bears hid in the fridge to get warm. Remember when you told me to fix the fridge and I found them? We covered the car in the barn and started her up twice a day. The water pipes were deep enough not to freeze. Inside the house, they froze. We drew water once a day, filled pans and bowls. Shook the butane bottle often. Slept in the kitchen. Kept a wood fire going in the big fireplace. Watched the evening cold come down the chimney and sit on the rising heat. The fire didn't draw, smoke filled the kitchen. We just climbed into bed and buried ourselves under a hundred blankets, and did things calculated to keep us warm.
Remember how we laughed? OK OK we'd had enough, but we laughed too.
Outside to the north where the cold wind blew, the figtrees that bore great glossy purple figs in season died in one night.
and the polar bears live to see another day. "They had once lived there, but they hadn't built it that way." Love the way you throw in a little mystery to warm us up. I hate being cold.
So happy to see the bears again.
They flew in on the wind. Our shattered window-panes were a boon to them. They tried to find shelter in other houses, but no luck. They wrote us a nice thank-you letter afterwards.
In Maine it was a given cold weather builds character. There are lots of characters in Maine.
Couldn't it be seen as a self-serving "given"...?
It's like someone on the equator saying heat builds character.
(Disclaimer: I have nothing against the people of Maine or people having lived, at one time or another, in the state of Maine.)
That’s great John
Thanks, JD
Here we go
What I remember from the year I turned eight was not the Kennedy assassination or my father’s death, it was my mother going to work and the terrible independence I acquired.
Overnight I became responsible for folding our laundry, and grocery shopping which meant going by myself to Gristedes the neighborhood market six blocks from our apartment.
Listen. I was a city kid. Every day I crossed two streets all by myself to get to PS 9. I’d been going to Levy brother’s toy store by on Broadway alone since I was six.
But Gristedes was far.
I was used to trailing my mother as she checked off her long list. I’d never really paid attention to where things were on the shelves or even in what part of the store.
My mother handed me the list on her way to work
“Good luck.” She called as the elevator door closed.
I was a good reader. The best in the whole 3rd grade. But there were words on that list I had never seen. What for example was a sanitary napkin?
The walk itself turned out to be okay. Crossing six streets was the same as two streets times three.
Once in Gristedes I took my time exploring the different sections. Meat, produce. I found paper products. There was toilet paper, paper towels and several different brands of napkins but none said “sanitary.” Maybe all napkins were sanitary? I decided they must be. I put a pack of napkins with a nice floral border into the cart.
I wheeled to the checkout stand where a young woman with green eye shadow waited.
I held up the package of napkins
“Excuse me, ma’am but are these sanitary”
“Are they what?”
“Sanitary napkins?”
She had me repeat the question. Then she held up the napkins and called to the girl in the next stand
“Baby wants to know if these are “Sani-tary napkins”
“Oh girl!”
“Baby girl who sent you with this list?”
“My mom.” I answered. Why were they laughing? I was burning with shame but I didn’t know why.
Several customers had overheard and they were laughing as well. I ran out of the store leaving my cart behind.
That night I screamed at my mother for the very first but not the last time in our lives
I hate you I told her. When she laughed at the story
I hate you
oh, this is too sweet and hilarious. "Baby wants to know..." Love that!!
I love this.
Terrible independence
That was the year I graduated with my B.S. in advertising.
That was the year Professor Pierce, the department head, took his top students to a celebratory lunch.
That was the year Professor Pierce told us tales of ad guru David Ogilvy, and the heyday of advertising in the sixties. “I envy you kids” he said, “The Ad game is a great life. I love teaching, but I dearly miss agency work.”
That was the year (decades before “Mad Men” made its debut) Professor Pierce told us the secret to success in advertising: “The single most important thing you need to know, he said, “the real secret to success and client relationships is—The Three Martini Lunch!”
That was the year, right on cue, a waiter appeared at the table with a tray of icy martinis and placed one in front of us each.
That was the year, after our second round of martinis, I felt imbued with a sense of purpose that I’d never felt before.
That was the year, after the third round of martinis, I was all a-glow with the conviction Advertising was the right profession for me.
That was the year I hurled my "secret to advertising success" all over Dr. Pierce’s wingtips.
That was the year I had my first and last martini.
That was the year I started working on Madison Avenue.
Hahaha! Yeah, I think I might have done the same--one glass of wine and i'm already a goner.
Wine I can handle. It’s my day job.
1984. Everything changed. An ad ripping off George Orwell promised a new way to compute, or, a way to compute, because most of us had not yet computed. I still wrote with a pen that made a sweet scritch as it moved across the page, and then spent a lot of time typing, then retyping, on my electric machine that could actually remember five or so words in case I wanted to get rid of them (we didn’t delete then).
But a month or two before I first touched a mouse I lost courage and quit my workshop and made a burrow and crawled in. Doesn’t matter why I quit; let’s just say I recognized myself and didn’t want to. I found it more comforting in my burrow. So I quit (although for the longest while it was just a pause).
Could Orwell, or Jobs, have foreseen how Apple would rebuild entire industries, publishing, say, drawing in all kinds of people, people on the run, people searching, people wasting time, at least one of whom had never thought of being a book designer?
Somehow, shortly after the great quitting, I found myself hired on as a mouse jockey (let's hear it for the passive voice!). I was soon pointing and clicking my way through book after book after book, textbooks and picture books and novels and histories. So many words. So many books, my name in many of them, on the copyright page, usually in 8 pt type. Parents so happy. But, a friend or two who knew what I had quit asked, didn’t I want my name on the cover? Well, books! I’m making books!
2024. Yes indeed, a blink. Everything changed. I end self-employment, close my small business. Then I futz around and, while I’m twiddling my thumbs, what I had quit came looking for me. It had been there all the time, only a little annoyed as it lived through all those words and books by other people. It was, I think, in a burrow just above my own.
"It had been there all the time." So much of life is that, right there. The thing we lose or search for and it's alway right where we had left it.
quite a relief!
Love this. So much time passes and yet that thing you wanted - and the thing I wanted - comes back looking for you.
It was the year of the ice storm. We’d been in our house for four days without electricity. No heat. No TV. No computer. No stereo. No phone. We were freezing in the cold and out of alcohol and getting low on food. We couldn’t leave because the roads and sidewalks were covered in ice. We had no one to talk to, except each other and neither of us was good company. You went a sort of mad, stuck inside. Inside the house. Inside our marriage. Inside your head. When the ice finally started to melt, you left in our car by yourself. Gone for a whole day. I felt that it was entirely possible that you simply wouldn’t come back. And then, when you finally came back, around midnight, I didn’t feel relief. I felt rage because you didn’t even bother to bring me something to eat or drink.
No. It wasn’t. It was the year we rented the cottage on the coast. There was that small earthquake the first night. Just enough to shake us awake. I fell back asleep, but you didn’t. You stayed awake, sitting on the deck, watching the sea lit by the full moon. All night, you watched the waves convincing yourself that a tsunami was imminent. You went, not a sort of mad, but full on crazy. When I woke up, the tide was on its way out and you were hysterical. Inconsolable. Convinced that the water rushing away from us now, would come roaring back in a few minutes in a wave 100 feet high and sweep us into the deep. You screamed and cried and hit me when I said that we were going to be fine, that low tide always looks this way, that if a tsunami was coming, the sirens would be going off. You ran away from me. Got into the car and drove away without me. Leaving me wondering whether I’d convinced you that we were safe, and you decided to leave me, or whether you still thought the wave was coming and you wanted me swept away. I can’t even remember now what I thought when you finally came back that afternoon. I expect, however, that I too felt rage.
Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter now. At some point, it just doesn’t matter.
So intense! I love the way you went from the first paragraph to the second with "No. It wasn't." A great response to the prompt.
Mary, these stories and poem are so exquisite that I'm intimidated giving this prompt a go! Thank you again for these beautiful examples.
Ok, so here is my shot at it:
It was the year I was supposed to move to New York. That Big Apple, which was a bite too big for my father, but just about right for me, his daughter, who had the habit of “stealing his dreams.” I had already mailed my application to HB Studios, in which I wrote enthusiastically about acting and the studio that trained the likes of Liza Minnelli and Harvey Keitel. I didn’t know if a Hungarian girl like me stood a chance in the Big Apple, but you never know these things, unless you try, so I did. I needed a change of scene.
It was the year I fell desperately in love. Of course, you had to complicate my plans. And I remember being so pleased with myself when I arrived at The Royal Court Theatre that evening in my red coat and pink trainers and my trademark jeans and white top. I was carrying my shopping bag from Tesco with croissants for the next morning, because that was the year I lived in Dulwich. It was the year that The Royal Court staged Sarah Kane’s final play 4.48 Psychosis, of which I remember nothing, except our knees touching, and the feeling that shot through my body like an electric shock of the likes I hadn’t experienced before, and haven’t experienced since. It was the night I was so giddy with happiness – which is strange, I know, considering the theme of the play was suicide – that I forgot my croissants at the theatre and followed you to the tube. We were too shy to exchange phone numbers, but you found my email on the theatre’s website (it was the time before social media).
It was the year I lost my virginity, and I’m happy it was to you. It was the year I was accepted to HB Studios with a welcoming note that said that they were impressed with my application. I no longer wanted to move to New York, but my father was going to kick my ass if I didn’t. I was hoping you would ask me to stay, but you didn’t. I cried on the flight and vowed to forget you, but I didn’t (I couldn’t). It was the year two planes crushed into the World Trade Centre and the world, and us, fell apart.
(And it would be wonderful to work with this some more)
Oh, yes, you should definitely work on this some more. I can feel you are just getting started here.
Yes! First, quick creative response. But there is definitely more to explore. You are the best promoter Mary!
I loved the sentence, "of which I remember nothing, except our knees touching" Thanks for sharing this!
Thank you Jeffrey. It is the essence of the ‘story’. Will develop it some more
It was the year I lived in 15 minute increments. 15 minutes to grow a third arm. 15 minutes to sleep an entire nights worth of dreams. 15 minutes to extract yellow fluid out of my nipples. 15 minutes of piercing shrieks from the aliens in the bedroom next door. 15 minutes to wash the vomit and slime off my body. 15 minutes to find all of the cheap plastic crap needed to go for a 15 minute walk. 15 minutes of idyllic family time when the manic aliens play peacefully together followed by 15 minutes of blood-curdling violence followed by 15 minutes of zone defense followed by 15 minutes of crying. 15 minutes to stuff mush into the bird-like peeping mouths. 15 minutes to clean the mush and the layer of sticky slime off the floor. 15 minutes of silence lying on the floor of the closet in the dark putting the shards of my mind back together again. If I can survive the next 15 minutes, and the next 15 minutes, and the next 15 minutes, then maybe I can survive this year.
Phew, I feel you! Great use of repetition here to bring home the absolute exhaustion of it all.
Ditto what Mary mentioned - about this repetition really conveying the exhaustion wonderfully! And I love how your playing with time this way gives such a particular feel and rhythm - it feels like it contains the seed for many more possible prompts!
Sounds like you must have had triplets!
Twins and a two year old. Oof
It was the year of living duplicitously. Later I couldn't understand why I had to pretend. Actually, that's not true, I understood all too well.
I'd shown everyone the photographs. Of Mum, Dad, two brothers and a sister. They asked which girl was I. I pointed, said I'd changed a lot. I'd bring the photographs out most weeks, each time an elaboration, the older brother now at Princeton; the sister, a contributor to the Chicago Review; the dad who had a share in the winner of the Preakness.
Then I met Jake, got very drunk and told him about the convent they'd found me outside, the children's homes, the failed adoptions, reform school. He said, 'Wow'. And, 'Boy, do you have a fertile.' He meant imagination but Jake had an economical way of speaking. As well as economy with words, Jake was as sweet a peach as you'd find in a box of sweet peaches. So I clung on tight, Jake did too.
He was right about fertile. Oldest boy is off to Yale, his sister writes leads for the Beast. I've had to tell the twins, beautiful girls, they're too young to sign up with an agency and the youngest has a wonderful singing voice. Jake - his investment fund was a real winner - is away at present, at Keeneland, says he's going to buy a contender.
Cross my heart.
how i love an unreliable narrator! Well done!
It was the year I graduated from college, the year I moved to a city after over two decades of small towns. A cheep apartment in a sketchy part of town, on the edge of Roxbury, where someone told me, they throw rocks at you and bury you. Grandmaster Flash's "The Message" thumped from every other car stereo and boombox. The year of stupid jobs and lots of bad weed and a bad roommate, oh yeah, take that shortcut where they're building the new Orange Line. A teenager claiming he had a gun in his jacket pocket wanted my wallet but I just ran away in fear. The three days of working in a phone room, barely getting paid, hating every second. It was a year when I wondered if I'd made the right decision, but I must have, because I've never go back to living in a small town again.
The big bad world--it's not so bad, I guess. But it's big (and bad). I lived in a small town for 20 years and i miss it. But have I moved back? (No.)
It was the year of the garter belt, mine, that is, a sleek slip of silk to hold up my hose, although I didn’t call my stockings hose back then. After seven years in California’s sun, bare legs, alternating sandals for six months and then knee high boots, I didn’t own a pair of stockings, not even tights. That California year when I grew out the hair on my legs, breached it blonder than my hair, a shimmer that said hippie with a touch of class. But that was a different year. In this year, the year of the garter belt, I worked for a Wall Street law firm, where going bare legged was not done (although I dared that too in the summer months.) A garter belt in worn under panties. Otherwise, you would need to remove it to go to the bathroom. If you wear bikini panties, you can color coordinate—black panties with black garter belt. But it’s far more interesting to do a color block—black belt with salmon colored panties, say, so that each stands out against the other. In the year of the garter belt, only a few men knew what was underneath my business suit, the lucky few, the few who got to fantasize when I walked down the hall, striding to the library, the conference room, the elevator. Even fewer got to unbuckle the small garters that held the stockings back and front, ease the stockings down my legs. There were later years, of course, years of raising kids and carpools, when undergarments lost their luster. I still have a garter belt in my bureau drawer. My husband, one of those lucky few back at that law firm in 1976, sometimes pulls it out, dangles it enticingly before me. Reminds me of the year of the garter belt.
It's still mysterious to me what women wear underneath the clothes you see.
Well, Tod, that's the way it should be. If a lady starts taking things off in your presence, keep your eyes tight shut.
John! Too funny.
Hahaha! Not much, Tod.
Garter belts--so sexy! Love that tidbit about your husband. Gotta keep the love alive.