Family

Unfathomable

I remember when 1 million seemed unfathomable—the number of zeros strung along after the 1, as well as what they signified, impossible for me to envision.

I remember people telling me things were supposed to be awkward during what they called my awkward years. I’m not so sure I ever grew out of my awkward years, although I am no longer gangly and my teeth managed to grow in straight.

I used to run away from everything by climbing up a tree or running along an overgrown path to one of many hiding places. It’s not so easy these days to run away.

As soon as I think I’m good at something, someone comes along and reminds me I am not, then tells me the reminding is for my own good.

They tell me I know what I want to say when I write, but that I don’t know how to say it. They tell me my writing is uneven, slightly wrecked. Of course that’s the case, since my writing reflects my life. How could it be any more together than I am? And what’s better: writing that is even and predictable, or writing with a pulse—albeit sometimes weak and irregular—writing that moves under its own control and in ways you, and I, could never anticipate?

For a time after my mother’s death I forgot how little I like people. I thought it was her I disliked and that her death had freed me from that feeling. Turns out it had not.

I went to the grocery store yesterday to have a cheese sandwich. I looked around as I ate it. I had no idea what anyone was doing or why they were doing it. Not one person in that store made any sense to me.

We are all wasting our lives in so many and varied ways.

Writing is just another way to waste time, but at least it allows me to keep a record of how I’ve wasted it. I will always know that yesterday I had a cheese sandwich and took a nap. I will always know the sadness I feel right now, even if one day I manage to move through and beyond it to something else—something that at this moment feels unfathomable and that I can’t yet see clearly.

El Camino

I don’t remember a time in my life when I could look at an El Camino and not immediately think of my father.

I have the hands of a 77-year-old man. That is to say, I have my father’s hands—the ones I imagine he would have if he were still alive. It’s like they started aging at a rapid pace the day he died so I would always carry part of him with me.

If you write as if you are a writer, you’re self-conscious. If you write as if you aren’t one, you’re disingenuous.

These trees are missing their arms.

And that was the moment the thought-ghost spirited away all my good ideas.

I want what I want, and I will hold my breath until I get it.

It’s been raining so long I can’t see the rain. When I look out my window, I only see dull sky, sometimes hope of sun.

Truth be told, I don’t like the rain right now. It’s messing with my dreams—has brought my mother back from the dead three nights straight. She’s like her old self, only kind and apologetic. The two things I wanted from her when she was alive.

When my father died, it rained and rained and rained, five days in a row without letting up, or at least that’s how I remember it. It was atypical weather for Oklahoma, not at all like the water rationing that forced my father to put in a well so he could water the lawn or wash his car whenever he damn near pleased, not just for a fixed amount of time on alternate days.

My mother couldn’t stop crying in the days following the funeral. She wailed to him in her bedroom, on her knees. She begged him to tell her why he’d left her. And she moaned about the rain. She didn’t want rain falling on his grave. I think she imagined the new soil being washed away, imagined him unable to settle into the earth. I’m not sure exactly what she imagined.

Doesn’t all the rain bother you, she asked me.

No, I answered.

He was dead. How could I be bothered by the weather?

For years, I blamed my mother for the nightmare I had a week or so after my father died. I was at the cemetery. It was raining, deep mud everywhere. My father rose from the mud that covered his plot and began walking toward me. He had no skin. There was nothing holding his bones together, so they wobbled back and forth with every step. Almost like dancing.

There has been good rain, too. My first all-out thunderstorm in Kansas City, rain carried by wind nearly parallel to the ground, drenching my giggling friends and me and sending our inside-out umbrellas to the air. Jon and I, soaked, running through an Iowa cornfield after having sex. Swimming in the rain before I knew it wasn’t safe to swim in the rain.

At least six more months of rain here in Seattle. And days as short as a memory or a dream.

Will all this rain bother me?