So I just did me some talking to the sun
And I said I didn’t like the way he got things done
Sleeping on the job
Those raindrops are falling on my head, they keep falling
– B.J. Thomas
Here’s a writing sample. One from my Big List of Memories, which I’m slowly but surely working through. Prefaced with a disclaimer that I’ll add to my book. Which, by the way, I’m starting to consider titles for.
The stories in this post reflect the author’s recollection of events. Some names, locations, and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the privacy of those depicted. Dialogue has been re-created from memory.
We lived in a ground floor, low-income apartment in Durango when my mom died. The kitchen was in the back. Dark, because there weren’t many windows: we always kept the light on. I sat in the middle of the living room floor around the corner on low-pile carpet, faded and worn by people in need of government assistance before me. I faced a wall of shelves filled with books and National Geographic and Life magazines stacked and leaning against each other like close friends sharing secrets. Nixon was in office *.
On one shelf was a turntable, spinning a record. Tall speakers projected the voice of B.J. Thomas singing “Rain Drops Keep Falling On My Head.” I listened intently, contently, my sister washing dishes in the background, silver clacking in suds. The fine silver leftover from my mother’s first marriage to a wealthy heir. Perhaps my brother was in the bathroom, slicking back his hair before leaving for his shift at Safeway. I know where C_____ was: on her bed, reading. C_____ was always reading. L____ was probably playing with dolls because L____ is forever maternal and M____ was the one in the kitchen cleaning.
I sat there, listening to this song over and over, convinced that B.J. Thomas was my dad. I’d seen my dad so seldom that I didn’t know his voice from any other man’s. The ordinary thing was that I was an American kindergartner with red hair sitting cross-legged on the floor. The extraordinary thing – the thing that decades later I still can’t wrap my head around – was that my father, a wonderful man by all accounts from people who remember him, had no interest in me. That he could go on as if I’d never existed. That the pretty boy, skiing beatnik never stopped to care or love.
A mother could never do that, given a baby is an inhabitant of her body, a literal appendage, whose cells reside in her maternal biosphere for decades after the baby is born. Whose cells circulate in her blood in some cases until she is dead. And even if she does manage to abandon her child, the act of abandonment is physically rendering, and those fetal cells live within to haunt her.
But for men, the act of creating human life is removed. An act of shooting out and away to the mother’s receiving in and close.
So close. So very, very close.
And abandoning is easy in comparison. So maybe I shouldn’t be that surprised. If a man only lusts but not loves the body a part of him is shot into, of course it’s easy to dismiss the body that results. The body with fair skin, blue eyes, freckles, a bright mind, and arms and legs soon to turn long and lanky. Which leads me to wonder: do men ever truly, deeply, desperately want children to the depths that women do? Or are the ones who do stay really just along for the ride?
* Nixon’s Uses, Abuses and Muses on the Supreme Court
The Inside Story of Richard Nixon’s Ugly, 30-Year Feud with Earl Warren
Richard Nixon: Impact and Legacy
Things That Nourished My Writing: September 27 - October 18.
HOME
Apple HomePods.
FOOD
The apples and pears that are now in season.
Sausage pizza at Delancey.
LITERARY
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
MUSIC
Speaking of Michelle Zauner, Japanese Breakfast.
PLACES
A place I go in my mind via the Ten Percent Happier app.
(EXTRA) ORDINARY PEOPLE
My BFF Laura. Twenty eight years and counting. She saves me, so many times.