The reason why... because people cannot tell their stories
These days folks have a strange relationship with mirrors. I think it stems from mass partaking in making narcissism a part of the modern lexicon. Even the most lowly of people, if such a thing is okay to say now, knows and uses as a label, "narcissist". So it is practical, if not expected, that folks might have come to distrust and view the mirror as a sort of psychic symbol, a rather practical if not superstitious sign of the times.
But before this, and before there was any indication of the Corona Virus, or before the belief in politics guiding the way, while we were still peacefully sitting in our homes, not considering the future or who we loved, hated, or who could deliver us, regardless of the side by which we stand, there was me, in a large apartment in East Tennessee. I had my own room, and so did my three children, because public housing there is luxurious. And I had my great aunt's furniture, which had been mine since I was about 15 or 16. The antique furniture was passed down to me through my mother, through her mother, from my grandmother's aunt. I believe her name was Elsie. A large dresser with five drawers, a side table, a vanity and a headboard. I left everything behind when I moved from Tennessee to Georgia because I found a fortune in the bottom drawer that said giving is so important because people are in need. I miss that furniture so much.
Anyway, whenever I was bored, lonely or introspective, I used to sit in front of the mirror. I exercised in front of it, dressed in front of it, brushed my children's hair there before kindergarten, all things in front of this big round mirror. I said later that the mirror was my "Wilson" if anyone remembers that ball that Tom Hanks had in "Castaway".
I never felt as though my ego flourished there, although undoubtedly I had moments when I was able to catch myself dressed up or down and I am sure it made an impression on me. These days the most incipient thing taking the "evil mirrors" place would be cell phone cameras. I have found, like the mirror, that it can captivate you by revealing you to yourself. It may be worse. Because if you leave the mirror you may go and live without a memory, at least in my case. But these cameras? You cannot forget. Even a bad day is a red faced, misery phase collection of sad photos a way. Remember that day? How could I forget!?
I gave up selfies for Lent. Just one of a few things I gave up. I attended a mass in the Greek Orthodox tradition today and we had a procession around the church with Icons for a blessing. In church I considered the icons and the tradition of calling things, people, whatnot, "idols". I don't know when this tradition began, but I may need to read about these things again. At what point, since we read today in church about graven images as a result of this being icon day, did we make things, "idols", things like people? In other words, when did the golden calf get taken for your favorite celebrity golf pro?
The priest read an edict from some council which proclaimed that these things were not to be worshipped but venerated. And as I am familiar with doting on, loving and idolizing people, I understood the word of caution.
In the afternoon I spoke to my brother, he lives in the mid-west. When I started writing I had notes, tell stories about visits with Michael. I used to visit Memphis every year. Maybe I would go twice, it seems the older I got the more I enjoyed these visits. When I was there, my father who loved the movies would always take me to see films. My mother never did this, and it was a huge treat. He also had many films and music on cassette tape as well as albums. So at my father's house there was music and movies, and dinner and eat your vegetables. My mother was a bit take-out.
One year we visited Florida where my father's best friend lived with a woman (in a duplex :) out on a bayou down what seemed a short dirt road. Nice place, they had a an epoxy resin toilet seat with sand and shells, and a row boat amd a hammock by the water. The woman sold George Rodrigue prints. Beautiful, with signatures from the artist in silver marker. Our dog gave birth while we were down there.
Back in Tennessee my grandfather had a farm, which we brought the dog home to, and when I visited again later that year, the puppies were grown and living in a sort of chicken wire kennel. They were labs, but their mother was a golden cocker spaniel named Biscuit. And I gave her the nickname "Beekie" because names sound cute with an "ie" at the end, don't you think?
His farm was 18 acres, surrounded by similar lots, narrow and long. A good house on a little land is about an acre. We could walk back quite a ways to the back, through his Christmas Tree farming area where he really did sell the town their trees for a while, even my future husband who I met later in the opposite corner of the state. It was named for my grandmother, Mary Noel. Back in the back was a creek. I think I wrote a short story once about that creek, or imagined it in many places. (More stories than one), I remember my brother and I walking back there last when I was in my late teens or early 20s.
They had an apartment in the town, my father and brother. Once we walked to the arcade, it was named something French for "kids", Le enfants, and on the way there we stopped in someones very large backyard. Probably they had some acres like my grandfather, but it had tall golden grasses between the acres of mowed land and dirt road which remind me of some kind of strange oasis. I always want to visit these kinds of places, now that I am older and lived in East Tennessee for a while, and now that I am back living in the 9th largest city in the country with millions of people, back to those sunny days on the back of a strangers farm, where you could smoke cigarettes and talk about whatever.
It was a lot like in that movie "Dazed and Confused" there then, we would end up in these little parties of teens all over town, and in someones bedroom or garage turned hangout space (watching Can't Buy Me Love), by a pool (did we swim?), in the pool house (this is nice), just everyone being cool and it was great, so great to be alive. Falling in love with strangers! I fell for someone who hadn't turned around yet. He was playing video games on the end of his bed. Craziest thing, I guess you just get feelings about people. There was a bond fire one night and some of the other kids came into the woods with a dog and a flash light and scared us they were the cops, so me and some other kids ran away, and by the time we were in a clearing, down a dirt path, or road, (where do they put them these days?) it was just me and this guy I was in love with (imagine my luck), they were calling us back, just a joke. To me now, the joke was not staying there and making out with that guy under the stars. Lovely. Ahh, Memphis! What you might have been.
When that summer ended my dad moved to Los Angeles. I went the next summer, 1995, I was 15. When I got off the plane it was just Michael and his new friend Mo. This year was an extraordinary adventure, packed neatly into just a couple of weeks. I know now that to visit anywhere in a shorter amount of time is to taste, and to stay is to see. I saw L.A. on that beautiful trip. I went to Hollywood and heard Frank Sinatra on the radio, and my favorite Martina McBride song. We got locked out of Capital Records, sorry, we locked our keys in the car when visiting Capital Records, we did not try to enter the building. I believe there are stars on the sidewalk there, if my memory serves me correctly. But the other day I told this story and thought, that's so wild, why not write about that one out?
Anyone who knows me knows I like to drive a five speed. Or six, depending on my car, but I enjoy a manual transmission and enjoy equally that many people don't know how to drive them. My brother's friend tried to date me while I was there. He took me to UCLA and we rode on a raft in some pond, and afterward I learned to drive that car we were locked out of, his mother's boyfriend's white Honda, in the empty parking lot. School must have been out. It was a manual. I thought that was such a neat car, I bet that car looks so old to me now!
After this excursion, he took me to the beach late one night, where we did kiss under the stars, only I didn't have the same romantic feelings for him that I did for this other fellow, bummer. This is where the story becomes extraordinary. My father was so mad at my brother for allowing me to go with this boy to the beach late at night that he slammed his hand onto the table and broke it. Then as things escalated, my brother left angry and punched a window, badly cutting his arm. And when my father tried to tie off the wound, his hand was too broken to pull a knot.
Of course, me and Mo were there. The fire department came, too, but told us to drive him to the hospital. He lost a lot of blood. In the back of Mo's car, he bled all over my skirt and my legs, so that when we arrived at the hospital, they asked if I'd been shot. Then they saw him pass out behind me and remarked, "there's the problem".
Mo and I walked down the roads there in Brentwood. We walked by the guy's house who was "responsible" for all of this, but they weren't home. (The white Honda wasn't there.) I remember that my legs looked like the dried, cracked mud of the desert covered in blood the way they were.
From then on, Mo and I had to share the floor, he stayed over a good bit, so we made pallets of blankets on the wooden floor because Michael had to hold his arm up on him while he slept. He got the couch. I went with Mo to UCLA to see a play. But we were sleep deprived. This was the only time I ever hallucinated. I saw butterflies fly from my skirt. Same skirt. I gave him his first kiss on his 17th birthday. There was an audience. I really liked him, too. By then we felt as good of friends as Michael and him were. I dreamt about him for many years, or at least that I was in Los Angeles visiting and was trying to find him. Same dream every time. Now, I remember the dreams better than being there.
(Add some romance? I have only dreamt of my husband as much. In truth? Probably not, but I do have some seriously vivid memories of searching over those Hollywood Hills)
Did I write about the end of our relationship? It was the most important part, you see, it taught me a lot about men, (scorned!) especially in regards to me. Here we spent every day together, went to movies and drove around, and then he left to go to some film camp, or something. And when he called, my brother asked if he wanted to say hello to me but he didn't. He said no.
The next year when I went back, the very last time I saw him, we ran into them on Halloween outside their high school, Michael was at Santa Monica Junior College by now. And as we found them sitting on a curb, we said nothing that I can remember, and when they got up walking back toward school, Michael mentioned that he played a song for me that he and Mo wrote and recorded together, and Mo asked me if I liked it. But I turned my head away and pretended not to hear him.
The End
p.s. as an amendment. He asked me if my hair was my actual color now, before it had been black, now it was short and red. It was not. I'm a boring brunette.
up next...
the library in Tennessee. when you were reading a magazine about a woman whose dream died. As a mother? as a wife?
Rebecca, the movie.
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