Frame-Full

September 24, 2016

For the first time in 12 years I have an office and I have shelves, and I have placed every folder and file and notebook containing my writing onto these shelves.

I plan to sort through this vast collection over the winter, burning the things too hilarious and horrible and unnecessary to take up space, filing away the sentences and paragraphs and hurriedly jotted down ideas that might, if I give them a little water, grow into something worth keeping.

That stuff is gold to me: the random firings of my imagination, collected on paper for the last 27 years. Absolute gold. 

May I ask, what is your gold? We all have some. Some people have a lot.

If you think about it, you'll know what it is. 

The other day I cracked open a notebook - literally, like, the pages were stuck together and all of them hard as paperboard - from what might have been my first creative writing class at Carolina. 

Something caught my eye. A first line. It was an interesting first line. So then I looked for the point of this exercise and found it, scribbled to the left. The exercise is entitled “Writing Exercise/ Picture Inspiration.”

It is dated February 4, 2002. 

It might as well have been 1945. That's how far back it feels. 

2002 was a different world and I was a different girl. The whole universe has shifted since that moment. Entropy has happened. Our planet has, I don't know, tilted. (That's what the Inuits say.) The oceans are dirtier. 

I've been married for 12 years and I've birthed four babies and lost one since then. My oldest is 9. I'm a mother to a NINE YEAR OLD.

 I moved half-way across the country. I've lived in seven houses. 

I've owned businesses. I've helped people write books. 

I can make a mean Whiskey Sour. 

Can I even remember her? That girl who filled up that notebook with so. many. words.

Do I want to? 

It was my second semester at Carolina. I was very glad to be there. I remember that much about my life at the time. I remember that it was also very busy. Full of drama and pain. And laughter and people that I loved very much. 

And I had not yet lost an irrepressible well of creative thought and desire and hope. Because, my life had hardly started. I didn’t know who I was going to be. Anything could happen to me. Anything was possible. I was 20 years old.

Holy hell. I can hardly focus in on that number.    

It was a Pause, sitting there, holding a notebook from 15 years ago. That was a different girl writing all of those words. I don’t remember writing them.

It might as well be someone else's notebook. 

Where did I sit when I wrote in it? What was I wearing? Did I even have a cell phone? (Probably. Because my mom was always worrying we were all dead in a ditch.) What did I think about? What did I eat for lunch?

What did I care about? Who did I care about?

I have to think, really really hard, to remember what I did every day, what my internal world was like, what my wants and desires were...what preoccupied all of that space inside. 

I can though.

If I get very still, if I think really hard, I can flip back through my mental folders and even pull out my journal from that year and I can FEEL it all again.

I’m still not ready to feel it all again. 

About eight years ago I started working on a collection of short stories based on my adolescence. Because, let's be for serious, my adolescence was equal parts horrific and like, LAUGH UNTIL YOU PEE YOURSELF funny.

But, I had to stop. I couldn’t do it. It was still too close, too awful, too beautiful.

Maybe when I hit my 40’s I’ll be able to go there. Yesterday my hairdresser said that the 30’s are a shock, they’re a freaking shock to the system, but it’s hopeful because the 40’s and 50’s are supposed to be the best. You’re Yourself and you’re Ok with it.

Well, I'm almost there. 

We lose touch, don't we, with the 20-year-old us? And the 15. And the 5. They're other people who lived other lives and we look at pictures from the past and it's a strange feeling, like you can remember being Them but you aren't anymore. You aren't. 

It's good, to grow. But it's also necessary to remember. 

I held that notebook from Carolina and I read the exercise and I laughed out loud. 

I wasn’t laughing at my writing, which I could have. I wasn’t laughing at my grammatical choices because, hell, I still make them. (I Grammar the way I would Tell.) I wasn’t laughing at my content or at the remembrance of my period of obsession with Minnesota and Wisconsin, which I absolutely could have. (And, um, side note, what the hell was that all about? Weird.)

I was laughing at my sadistic sense of humor. I had forgotten that I used to torture my writing teachers, purposefully, by vomiting out in spades whatever it was they were asking for.

Now, in my defense, I only recall doing this in my writing journals, not on assignments that carried more weight for my grade. (I was very serious about being at Carolina.) I kind of hated and loved keeping writing journals. I don’t remember why it bothered me so much. I found it tedious, I think. So if the assignment was “Create a picture,” then I was going to use so many descriptive words the reader’s head would explode. 

And my mother would say, "That sounds like Kristianna." Have I mentioned how I STILL like to plague her with mischief? No? Well. Another time. 

And now I am going to share this gem with you. Because, why not?

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you a ghost from my creative writing past. 

Frame-Full

There’s a house down the road, on every road, in every town, in every state of the Union, in which live Erma and Eugene Garkenbanks; their names vary from place to place, but they’re always the same people and the house is always the same.

Forlorn white clapboard, run-down sagging porch, like the floppy arms of a 70-year-old housewife. Gutters collapsing under the weight of seven new mutated species of mold, thriving into trees in the fertile substance of 17 years worth of decaying autumn leaves. The windows seem empty; the shutters were ripped off by Bud Bradley and his crew of young hooligans, back in the 70’s.

The ground is dry, the fields barren, vegetation resembling front yard shrubbery is sparse, stunted. Trees, huge and ancient, creak in parched wind as brittle leaves detach themselves like withered sighs, leaving a thirsty trail of crumblings behind them as they shatter upon the ground, broken.

Porches with solitary rockers, dusty bins of dusty nothing, single old shoes missing a lace. Loss. Sorrow. Empty. Neglected. The owners of these homes are elsewhere, caring for something else.

Caring for Bingo. 

“Bingo!” The roar of false teeth clicking, unsealing, chattering, combined with the rhythm of tapping canes, stomping walkers, hoarse old voices raised in a chorus of “Cheater!” echoed and echoed throughout the fire hall, Petersville, Wisconsin. 

“Chevy Jackson, you sonabitch! You ain’t got no damn G5!” Eugene brought his scepter down with so much force the floor of the stage scuffed in a long black streak. 

Chevy rose unsteadily to his feet. “Who in hell say I don’t, Garkenbanks? You lookin’ over my shoulder? See anything from up there on your high throne?”

 “Yeah,” Eugene was suave, "the top of your baldin’ head, boy.”

Chevy flicked off his neighbor of 50 years, grinned a toothless grin and sat down. 

Ms. Peach waddled through the rows of fold-up tables, filled with the old and dilapidated of Petersville, hoarsely hollering like they always did at their weekly Bingo gathering.

Ms. Peach had an urgency and hurriedness to her intention that was impossible to translate into actual physical movement. “Now, now, boys, I can do a little investigating and work this out,” Ms. Peach said. She leaned forward. And forward. Bosom fell over Eugene's shoulder.

“Oh my. Sorry Eugene, he won fair and square.” She smiled widely, her hand resting on Chevy’s other shoulder, her fat pink lips reminding the old man of swollen earthworms after a rainstorm. He shuddered and shrugged her hand off. It took a few shrugs.

Ms. Peach’ stood. Her obscenely mauve dress, checkered and starched, groaned under the stress of her preposterous bulk as she squeezed past him. 

Eugene saw Chevy’s irritation and whistled through his fingers for the Court of Royalty to begin.

Chevy snickered in his chair, his chain smoker snicker, and collected the packages at his feet, marching resolutely up the aisle, left leg swinging wide from whatever it was that had happened to him in Korea. Under the heinous fluorescent lights he presented Erma and Eugene, 17-year reigning King and Queen of the Bingo Hall, with their Valentines.

“Thanks now there, Chevy,” Erma said, “we accept these gifts in all gratefulness, appreciating your faithfulness to Bingo.”

The crowd roared.

Ms. Peach moved forward, swollen ankles protesting, to snap a photo before the Garkenbanks unwrapped their boxes. 

 Erma and Eugene froze, dutifully, faces expressionless. 

The flash popped, leaving images of white in the eyes of the photo’s subjects and an impression of gigantic fake capes, askew crowns, 1960’s glasses with their thick frames, polyester suit, cheetah mini dress, thick legs, cheesy scepter, and folds of sagging flesh in the film of the camera. 

The ludicrous silk and fur, hideous colors, garish bare fire-hall, bustling coordinator lady, furrowed brows, clip-on earrings slipping off of loose ear lobes, all of these minute details, false teeth, legs, eyes, breasts, decaying bodies, souls, would all have been lost had Erma opened her box, activating the bomb encased within by a a sadistic social worker.

But instead she set it aside and, forgotten, it was later thrown away, to the dismay of the staff at the nearest landfill, who were shocked to have their dump blow up at 5pm the following Thursday, releasing a long bottled geyser of trash, putrid and stinking, into a fountain large enough to rival Old Yellow.

“Bingo!” Another game had begun. And the houses would remain lonely.