Giraffes

The second of my memories with Mcartny.

I love the zoo, though it breaks my heart to see the animals in their concrete habitats. I ache with the beauty of these powerful animals in their long-suffering under hot suns, and I love them. Their spirits we don’t understand.

Today I am at the zoo with my aunts and cousins. Mcartny is five. And sassy. And impatient. She does not want to stand overly long to see the animals. They fascinate her long enough for her to know they have stripes or spots. Long enough to know they swing from trees and trumpet from their trunks. Then she moves on.

When we get to the giraffes, we do not want to leave. We stare at the mother and her baby in a way that would embarrass us if they were human. We admire the variance in the colors of their coats. I say “Did you know their horns are actually made of hair?” We watch to see the subtle shifts of the muscles in their thick necks. The curve of their backs. Their lashes—so long. The proportion of torsos to legs. Their bubblegum tongues. Their eyes are brown—slow and peaceful.

Mcartny pushes her mother to move on, pulling and pouting. Her mother says, “Hold on. I want to stay and watch the giraffes. I just can’t get over how beautiful they are.”

Mcartny commands, “Well get over it.”

My laugh is only stifled by the sad implications of her statement and the longing for the day when, like giraffes and the other animals her brown eyes will be slow and peaceful, beautiful in long-suffering, stopping to admire the giraffes.

Jars of Honey

I close at the night,

petals folding inward

on a picked-over heart--

the exhausted nectar

I refuse to share

anymore from my lips,

you drank with a thought-kiss.

The dark and fragile petals protect me from

Your honey for my pain.

Crown Burger

We’re at Crown Burger again—my older brother and I. Our little brother is with us. We just got out of being stuck in traffic for hours, and I’m late for work. Despite being tired from sitting in a car for so long, we are all in a good mood, laughing, teasing, joking. My brothers are trying to see who can insult the other one best. They have just used their favorites: “butt-sniffer” and “If I had a dog with a face like yours, I’d shave its butt and make it walk backwards.”—both of which they have stolen from the film Sandlot. No matter how crude they get, they think they are hilarious. As usual, my little brother cannot stop laughing. He struggles to stand up or walk straight as we walk into the restaurant. As we are eating, my manager calls me to find out where I am, and I tell her I am almost there. I shush my brothers quiet with a hand and wide eyes. Hopefully, my manager thinks the background noise of order numbers over a P.A. and music are only from a car radio. Still, my brothers are laughing. Today, I am not the sister who goes away and returns to interrupt their lives every summer. Right now, we are laughing, laughing, laughing—so tired, we are silly.

Bourbon Lake

My father and I have gone camping. Us two. Together we drive away from the suburbs. Sometimes talking. Sometimes silent. We hike the same trail we hike every year, careful not to catch our fishing poles on branches or bend them on rocks. They are all colors, the rocks: gray, red, dun. They are like the dead with their secrets. Never talking, always silent. Geologists say their lines are a history book in stone. But I know these rocks aren’t telling. They sleep, silent bellies of the mountain rising from the dirt. We climb over them, their cool roughness presses against our hands. I feel them breathing; we keep quiet with them.

The mountain levels and lifts the stream, her finger, to her lips and beckons us to a nearby pond. The little pond bubbles beneath the sky and mountain, her fish untouched for months by passing fisherman looking for the larger lake. Ripples mean the fish are hungry. Again and again we see them risk open air for a fly.

Raising my right arm into the sky, I swish my pole back and forward—watching, hearing the line slide through the air, I pull the yellow cord greedily with my left hand. Amidst a spectrum of green from the deep color of the spindly pines to the just-a-touch green of the grasses reaching past my ankles, I perfect my technique, looking for the perfect “s” shape of the line to swim through the sky before it hits the water.

Secretly, I do not wish to catch any fish. Or if I do, I secretly wish they will get away before I can bring them into shore. I do not like to touch their seizing, panicked bodies. Do not like their eyes on me in confusion, asking why, their gills—how they shudder in the terror of not being able to pull oxygen from the air. I am afraid to touch them.

A few do not get away and I must call out to my father, across the pond, to come remove them from my hook while I hide my eyes.

Reunion Over Good-Byes

Today, I learn why my brother will sometimes say to me “Ciao, Juan” pronounced "zh-whan"-- one syllable.

Years ago we were friends—me sitting in his room, talking to him, he driving me to school every morning.

Four years away, we are like those friends again. He has taken me to his favorite restaurant/fast-food joint—the one where, man of simple tastes, he says he wants to have his wedding reception. Crown Burger, it is called. He brought me here to say good-bye, before I leave and it is as if we are not friends again.

Tired for reasons I don’t remember, I say to him “Tell me a story” over my veggie burger and onion rings with fry sauce.

“What kind of a story?”

“A mission story.”

These years are the lost years—the years we became not friends. Those years we “grew apart”—literally growing up 5,000 miles from each other. Today, I ask him to tell me about those years.

Though he does not know it, my brother is an excellent story-teller, and soon I am encapsulated by different air—warm and sprinkled with salt. The booth where we sit flickers like a lightbulb and becomes a cobbled, Portuguese street, the urbane adjacent to the antique. Even his words are laced with the promise of a distant countryside and culture I never knew.

He tells me stories of Juan, the man who acted like a boy, who always hung around. The man whose father left him on a street corner, whose brain he used as a pincushion for drugs. My brother saw him so often saying goodbye to Juan became a reflex. Now, when he says good-bye to me in Portuguese, he cannot help but say “Ciao, Juan.” Though Juan’s story is sad, we are laughing because he is funny for reasons I do not remember.

We are just laughing, and the booth comes back. Now we are two friends laughing in a booth, so hard I fear fry sauce will come out my nose like peach snot. Right now, those lost years don’t matter anymore. We are two siblings, friends, laughing over stories and peach-colored snot.

The Angels are Melting

The first of my memories with Mcartny.

This is Mcartny’s second winter. Walking, still a little wobbly, she says to me “Play? Snow?” This is before prepositions. All words are new. A master of intonation, she only needs to use a few. Her question becomes a chant. Her baby-fat cheeks ask “Play? Snow?” on repeat. We gather sweaters and socks. Put on coats, boots, gloves. In the backyard we make a snowman. I teach her how to make snow angels. The backyard becomes a choir of them. A cherubic children’s choir in the snow. Sniffles from a cold nose drive us in. We step between our winged imprints to not disturb their song.

Memories for the Afterlife

For my both my honors and my senior theses, I spend what is probably an unhealthy amount of time thinking about death.

I'm also incredibly lazy and think watching films about death can be considered "research."

When I first heard of the Japanese film Afterlife, I was a little hesitant, unsure of what I could expect--thanks in part to the website WTF Japan, Seriously?!. There are some things about the Eastern cultures that Western minds don't quite understand, hence this website. I didn't want to watch a film that turned out to be just one giant WTF. However, the premise sounded interesting:

Over the span of a week, twenty-two souls arrive at a way station (which looks like an old junior high school) between life and death, where they are asked to choose just one memory to take into the afterlife. (Synopsis c.o. fandango.com becaused the imdb one was lame.)

I knew that I was at least interested in the idea of a liminal space--the way station--between life and death, a common theme in A LOT death scenes depicted in both literature and film , so I decided to give it a shot.

I was not disappointed. First of all, the film was visually beautiful. Obviously, a lot of attention was paid to the parallels between color palette and plot/theme. The simplicity of the sets and shots imbued a sense of humanity into this film where everyone is literally dead. The acting was subtle and restrained--the kind of restrained that bursts emotion and secrets. And even though the acting gave some secrets away, there were still at least two plot twists I wasn't expecting. And the more I thought about the premise of this film, the more I began to rethink my thesis. Of all the things I have read and watched, I think that this has perhaps had the most influence on my thesis's actual plot.

Besides the influence on my work, for weeks, I've been thinking about the premise of the film as it applies to my own life. If I could only choose one memory from this life to relive for eternity, what one would I choose? I came up with a "short list" of memories before finally choosing one. I don't personally believe that I'll only be able to have one memory in the afterlife, but if I'm wrong, at least I'll be prepared.

The list of memories included:

Three with my cousin Mcartny

One with my mother

One with my father

Two with my brothers

and one from W&L.

While making the list, true to form, I decided to use the memories as a writing exercise--recreating them in words chez my latest Sam Shepard read Day Out of Days because the style is a stretch for me, and I want my writing muscles to all be well-toned.

I understand it's a bit of a tease to talk about these things without sharing them. Most importantly, I think they prove an important point--one the movie also highlighted--The most poignant memories don't come from life's big events, but from cross-sections of everyday moments, exposing the cells wherein our existence hangs in suspension.

Therefore, I present my latest series: Memories for the Afterlife.

Memory with my Mother

I’m in grade school, and my mother is driving me into town in our green Isuzu Rodeo. At the stop sign in front of the capitol building, my stomach drops in anticipation. We turn right onto a downhill lane protected by a web of tree branches. The sun shifts past breaks in the leaves—lace reflecting off the asphalt. We cry out “Wheeeee” the whole way down, like we’re on a roller coaster.