Word of the Week - 146

From our grandparents one Christmas, my siblings and I each received a Steiff puppet: Jocko, Gaty and Witty.

Word(s) of the Week:  SISTER AND BROTHER

I use the word Christmas rather than holidays for it was Christmas that my family celebrated.  It is our tradition.  It is the past to which I return this time every year.  It is my personal version of the Twilight Zone where I know it will be the mid-1950s, where my sister will be around five or six years old, my brother around eight or nine and I somewhere between 10 and 12.  When our mother isn't looking, we will make compressed balls of the tinsel and toss them at the tree, rather than draping it strand by strand as she  instructed.  When the lights are on, we will lie on the floor with out heads beneath the branches, and let our wishing minds carry us away.

The three of us have spoken as adults of the brief interlude, perhaps only one year or at the most two, when our mother sought the short-cut of what we called the Ready-Pack Christmas stocking.  A dime store standard of scratchy red mesh with a festive, stapled image atop a bag of, well, stuff.  We were used to receiving one of our father's socks with a splendid orange in the toe and a handful of personally selected treasures to open in the middle of the wakeful night.  We fussed terribly about the indignity of it, though the Ready-Pack gave us a lasting tradition:  the Chinese finger trap, ever after one of Santa's constants.

The Chinese finger trap found its way into the Novelty Items Hall of Fame.

They say that the act of recalling an event changes our memory of it.  Physics may one day prove that remembering can alter the event itself.  What I know is that, among all the joys that Christmas continues to bring to my life, the most enduring times, the ones etched most deeply into my heart, my very core, are the ones when Laurie, Mike and I were young together, almost swallowed whole like Jonah by the impossible magic of those days.

Word of the Week - 120

Big Sur Coast, photo by Vern Clevenger.

Word of the Week:  NEPENTHE

The start of no other season transports me to earlier times in the same manner as summer.  As Los Angeles began to swelter on Saturday, my thoughts drifted to an A&W Root Beer drive-in, oasis in Paso Robles on the vacation road back to the coast.  On Sunday, when our little town was 103 at about 12:30, I recalled Nepenthe's deck above the Big Sur cliffs, our first Ambrosia Burgers with pink lemonade.  I also remembered our dad telling us the meaning of "nepenthe," an ancient remedy for banishing grief, sorrow or trouble by inducing forgetfulness.

I have not gone to check my archives but suspect I write nearly the same post every year.  Summer's hold on me is that tenacious and I always capitulate to its fierce, mad strength.  Not to mention its ability to cloud memory.

So much to contain, all those summers, how is there room for other matters?  Once I allow myself, there are multiple reveries over the light, the clothes, the movies, family vacations, Girl Scout adventures, crafts, weekly treks to the library, our series of wading pools and, best of all, free time, its own source of forgetfulness of the homework and autumn yard chores not too far distant.  Until then, my sister and brother and I could count on at least one family trip that took us eventually to the sea and included restaurant meals.  Pancake houses, Fisherman's Wharf, small town diners, even unfamiliar grocery stores that sold much better stuff than ours did.

More than a time of year, summer is a state of mind, one to which I happily return when prompted by changes subtle or brash.  There may yet be days of our June gloom (which does not require banishing), the cooler nights, less fire-prone conditions.  I suppose each of the seasons has a trickster aspect, leading us to expect its best and frequently getting conditions far different.  While there are odes to every time of the year, I think summer has the edge on endurable.  We can talk about rock and roll another time.

Keith Jarrett and the shoebox

The friend who gave the Keith Jarrett album and opened another door into music's vastness has been gone several years. Her memory visited me over the holidays, thinking of her caroling parties through the narrow lanes of a local foothill canyon, how we managed to increase our numbers with neighbors who grabbed their jackets, and a bottle or a violin, and fell in among us. Her name was Jane. We were reporters together, neighbors, and got ourselves tangled up in the drive to start a guild at our paper in a county, and a chain, that had no tolerance for organizing. Soon after, we slid over into advertising and public relations. At her memorial service we were each handed a box of Junior Mints. She occupies almost as much territory as real tinsel, hung a strand at a time, in the land of what Christmas once was.

There is a threshold over which we step and discover that not everything about the past still has the power to wound. Benign melancholy, bearable and casting an ochre-colored light over people and events, carries a warmth that doesn't deny loss but makes appreciation possible in spite of it. How much of life's sweetness is in spite of, rather than because of? Compare and contrast, as they used to instruct us on those long-ago essay tests.

Since the brain and heart, as organ or metaphor, do not require that much space within the body, I imagine all their contents fitting into shoebox. Tied with string for its creases and corners soon began to wear and droop, a shoebox was issued to each of us. Before we ever speak, we can tell our brethren by the battered parcel held close in the crook of an arm. There is comfort in acknowledging we have histories. Angella's post of January 6 introduced me to the characters from Showtime's Homeland, people whose pasts, it seems, are always with them.

If we were rocks, I think we'd be categorized as metamorphic. A simple sentence on-line tells the story: "Heat and pressure can change many things." Who we were travels forward with us. Where we've been and with whom somehow still leaves room in the box for what comes next.

Meanwhile,

My fiction writing teacher loathed what she called refrigerator words; words like big or heavy, small, long, far, close...HOW big? she would ask, HOW far? Big tells you nothing without comparison. And so they invented humongous; problem solved. Forgive me, Marsha, for the times I have allowed that easier, softer way to lure me. The ability to think in words and pictures cannot be a common one; finding the reasons why this is similar to that is the game we will be playing until our thoughts run out.

To be a writer is, for me, to be a life-long apprentice. How do you quantify mastery as a writer...do the words cause you to weep, give you goosebumps, send you reeling like a Monty Python fish slap? How it feels in my writer's heart is that fresh degrees of precision await, if I take the time to reach them. Within the writing world, there are measures of achievement - published books, stories and essays and opinions selected by periodicals of note - and yet it does not feel incomplete simply to have a self-assigned task every few days, more often if possible; a sampler of what I hope are my best stitches or the newer ones which I'm trying out.

My memory was once such that my family would quiz me on meals we had eaten in certain locations along the California roads we traveled. Some of the towns we never saw again; to others we returned at least once a year. Now I can remember favorite meals at a Mojave cafe but not the name of the coffee shop. With a map in hand to prompt me, I could at least identify places we stayed overnight. From that it might be possible to recall dinner or breakfast, but mostly the names of restaurants have faded.

Occasionally the specifics are essential to the story, and there is the accuracy death-grip that comes from reporting. Then, if you factor in the vanity of recalling minutia over so many decades (all yawning lapses of time and event notwithstanding), I am uncomfortable, though not every moment, admitting that some of the pieces are gone.

This, you have guessed by now, is tap dancing, stalling before I am ready to burrow back into the cave of the drooling carnivore that "Wedded" turned out to be. On the days when mumbling and shuffling are as good as it gets, I give thanks for whatever sound and movement can be mustered. With the fantods upon us, any sign of life is reassuring.