Saturday, June 28, 2014

No Imagination

Last week - played with some writing on the flight home from Hawaii (!!). Experimented with a circular (spiral) format where every paragraph begins with the word or phrase that wrapped up the previous paragraph. Not so sure about this - on rereading a week later, it seems disjointed and jumpy. On the other hand, I felt free to let the writing wander. A different take on writing structure.

           I have no imagination. I cannot invent a story to save my life. I tried lying once and immediately regretted it; my sorry lopsided grin gave all away. All I can tell you is what actually happened; all I know is the truth.
            The truth is a fickle bitch. She presents herself as firm, unwavering, neutral. She pretends to virtue when in realty she seduces. Truth is good, worth telling, or so she says. So I try to tell the truth and find myself on an unstable foundation, a tricky balancing act between what I know and what I thought I knew: the shifting sand of memory.
            My brother’s memory is much better than mine. When we play, “Do you remember the time…” he can always trump my recollections. This worries me because my mother, only 19 years older than I, is already suffering from dementia. What I remember may be only part of the story, it may be embroidered or ragged. I assure you that I have no imagination, and yet, only parts of what I tell may be true.
            I insist that I am telling the truth even as I feel memory slipping away. I feel an urgency to get it down, to get it all down quickly before I forget. How ephemeral the computer screen, the circuitry where I lodge my stories. Paper tears, disintegrates. Last week I tossed a box of computer floppy disks in the trash – I had no interest in the once-precious information stored there; even if I had wanted to sift through the files, I had no way to read them. This is 2014. Everything is stored on the cloud.
            Clouds drift below the airplane’s wing, soft fluffy clouds with endless blue sky above and endless blue ocean below. The blue planet spins below me at 11,000 miles per hour. It spins east toward the sun and I am flying along at 500 miles per hour. How can this be? How will we ever reach Oregon?
            I came to Oregon at 25. Today my children move freely from state to state—Wisconsin, Ohio, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Washington, Alaska, New Jersey, Kansas, Idaho, Texas—but in 1979 it had never occurred to me to move from California, even though I held no love for the constant brown smudge of aerial excrement that stained the Los Angeles sky. I did not belong in Los Angeles. I was fiercely proud of my upbringing along the central coast, but pride didn’t pay the bills, so Joe and I and our two daughters were getting along in L.A., where Joe worked for Times Mirror Press. It was no place to raise children.
            Children have such funny ideas. I was a strange little child. Somehow I had the idea I should pray, probably something I picked up from occasionally attending the Christian Science Sunday school. My parents did not attend with me. They dropped me off wearing a starched dress and white gloves with a nickel tucked inside the palm for the collection plate. The teacher asked the children to find the word “God” on the Bible page. My white-gloved finger followed the lines of print: G-o-d, G-o-d, G-o-d, six or seven times. I have no idea what doctrine I was learning, but at home, alone and secreted from my parents, I prayed, “Please God, bless everyone in the world except Barbara Couch.”
            Barbara Couch was the freckled child with straggly brown hair who lived next door with her grandparents. Years later, when I confessed that childhood prayer to my mother, she remarked, “And no wonder. That girl had problems.” So much for Christian kindness. However, except for my antipathy toward poor Barbara, and the unfortunate incident when my brother, Maury, and I dug a 6-inch pit with a teaspoon and covered it with a white handkerchief, hoping to booby-trap innocent Judy Munn, who lived across the street and who’s parents were wealthier than ours and who, as an only child was always just a little too smug—or more probably a little too shy and lonely—except for those two things, I was generally a happy child. My parents were loving and consistent, my brother was a reliable friend, and we lived in a small community on the coast, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
            But I am only telling the truth by halves. It is also true that Maury and I had frequent, pitched battles throughout our childhood. We called a brief truce during adolescence, then resumed our resentment as adults. He was my first friend and my first great heartbreak, and I have not yet entirely forgiven my sister-in-law for her intrusion into the family. School was a mixed bag for me. I loved my teachers and loved being a student. I could sit still and the academics came easily. It was the extra-curricular part of school that gave me difficulty. Because my father was a recovering Christian Scientist, I had been spared the pain of my baby shots, so I endured the humiliation of standing in line at school, crying, as a big 2nd and 3rd grader to finally get vaccinated. At age eight, I had not yet heard the word, “introvert,” but I knew that I preferred reading in a corner of the playground to subjecting my person to the willy-nilly capriciousness, the downright visciousness, of a tether ball. My report cards carried comments like, “Kathy needs to socialize more.” And the other part of the truth of my “stable” childhood is that we moved. Frequently. I never asked my parents about it at the time, but I knew we moved more than any other family I knew.

            Most of the time we moved to different homes in the same community, Morro Bay. By the time I was fifteen, I had lived in fourteen different homes, but I had been to only four different elementary schools. The moving was supposed to be an adventure. It was supposed to prove that we didn’t need a lot of extra “stuff” in our lives. We were efficient and portable.

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