Category — Uncategorized

On Tuesday morning I had a story to tell, about a lack of plans and expectations turning into the best weekend I’ve had since Vegas. Glorious descriptions of all the best summer has to offer, with the recurring theme centering around a delightful respite from my usual work of holding the entire universe together with my mind. It was groundbreaking and poignant, still in that dangerous ethereal state.

My reverie was soon disrupted by the deafening slam and rattling shudder of my transmission rocketing into the next gear. With a deep sigh, I calmly pulled on to the shoulder of the on ramp and arranged a tow and a mechanic. The summer sun beat down on my face, arms and thighs through the windshield, and that post leaked from my pores like so much sweat and vodka as I quietly freaked the fuck out. After spending most of the day pacing behind the mechanic’s office, I was fortunate enough to leave in my sweet old car, but not fortunate enough to have the problem completely solved. They serviced the transmission and prescribed gentle driving to circulate the new fluid.

You want me to drive it like this?! On the interstate? And I won’t die?!

Just be gentle with it. You have no other choice. It works, it’s just dirty. Either it cleans itself out, or you need a new one.

Fifteen miles from home, I ran into a furious hard-driving rain. My foot began to shake on the accelerator; sheets of rain diluted visibility to a disorienting blur, slowing down meant having to suffer through more shifting, on old tires and poorly drained blacktop. When I’d passed through the monsoon and reached the end of the off ramp the transmission had improved remarkably. My adrenaline level had worsened about as much. When I put the car in park, my teeth were chattering.

After I had a bath, a nap and some pancakes, my acute panic cured into quiet dread. The unexpected expense, the possibility that my transmission is dying a slow death, all reminders of the precarious state of my security that provoke a toppling wave of guilt and shame. Doubt crept in overnight. I awoke to its harsh rasping. Failure, scorn, shame, rejection, death, pestilence, famine- it hissed from every dark corner, spitting if I turned the light on it.

So I’ve struggled with what to say here, how to bring perspective to the page along with my heart. Much of the joy we are able to find in this world is fleeting: stolen moments in a sea of bills that come faster than checks, broken cars and broken hearts, calamity and heartache, sickness and pain. The future remains frustratingly uncertain, a hazy horizon of ridges and valleys unknown. Lack of expectation and assumption, so delicious in love and leisure, prove harder to swallow in practical matters. Particularly when you have to hold the entire universe together with your mind.

Have you seen the girl who took this picture?

She’s needed at home.

Months ago, I lost my pocketknife to the TSA in Asheville, and my wine key to the good folks at the Empire State Building. One of the things I asked Santa for was a replacement; a pocketknife with a corkscrew. My cousin hadn’t been in my house two hours when she handed me a present from my Aunt- a shiny green pocketknife with a corkscrew. This is exactly what I love and admire most about her. She remembers the little things that are important to the people she loves, and she makes them important to her. She’s a mother of  four, enjoys a successful career and constantly has at least half a dozen projects in the works at any given time, and yet she still lights up like a Christmas tree when she comes across a pocketknife with a corkscrew.

So it’s no surprise to me that I officially fell in love with my cousin when we were driving 441 through the Great Smoky Mountain National Park and she pointed out a patch of wildflowers on the shoulder.

Our grandfather was married twice. He and his first wife Helen Eileen had my mom, and he had my aunt and uncle with his second wife, Sarah Elizabeth. My sister and I are named for both of our grandmothers, respectively (my middle name is Eileen). Grandpa was a man of his time. He had a sometimes hard shell that encased a loving softness, was old-fashioned and commanded the respect of everyone in the room. I was young when he passed, and what I remember more vividly than anything else was the joy he felt sitting at the head of the table and reveling in the warmth and laughter of his family. In those days we sat at the table for hours after dinner, the ranks thinning slowly through the night.

I’ve often wondered what he would say about the walls that stand between my Mom and her siblings, and I think he would have insisted that they lay aside the fear, pain and misunderstandings of the past, and that would have been that, because arguing with Grandpa was generally a fruitless endeavor. I don’t have to wonder what he would have thought about seeing his granddaughters take delight in each other for a full week- it would have had him bursting with pride and joy.

We are three intelligent and formidable women in our own rights, but that ancient whisper of common genes and shared history is as undeniable as it is mysterious and ethereal. Certainly, our love and respect for each other after a week together is spurned from genuine affection for the individual, but it is paired with a deeper meaning captured so perfectly by my cousin:

“And people that I barely knew love me because I’m a part of you…”

Precisely.

That’s why when my sister called me so long ago and asked me how I had a cousin that wasn’t her cousin, I took a deep breath and told her the truth, and when Daddy came to see me on the heels of my separation, I poured him a whiskey and told him the truth too. He told my Mom six months later. That, along with the day that she admitted to finding this site, are the two days that I clearly realized I had given her too little credit for years. I underestimated her pain and fear, the aching coldness of her isolation, and the motivation behind it: an absolute inability to tolerate even the perception of rejection- a demon I’ve fought all my days on this earth.

In a few short hours, I will retrieve my sister from the airport. She made her first visit in over a decade last week, and went back for a second helping this weekend. It is a homecoming for her, and she feels it in her bones. Mom paces nervously, unwilling to hope for what she sees as an impossibility: being welcomed back into the fold by her siblings with open hearts and genuine love. I have not figured out how to explain to her that she never needed to exile herself, that the very act of withdrawing is what inspires that same fear and pain in my Aunt and Uncle.

It isn’t for me to say what they should do, who should go first, what needs to be said and what can be left in the past.

What I do know is that our time on this earth slips through our fingers like sand, that all parties involved could use the comfort and joy the three of us bathed in this week, that they all want the same thing, even if there are disagreements and suspicion regarding how to get there.

So I can only repeat my heart’s refrain.

Tear down this wall!