Thank you, May 27th

I’m alone downstairs in the quiet relative darkness of our home, thinking about May 27, 2016. Today. Versus May 27, 2009, the day I was told that yes, the lumps in my breast were cancer.

It’s a beautiful night tonight. There’s a slight breeze, with silhouettes of swaying trees barely visible against the dark sky. The oppressive heat of earlier has dissipated; the air conditioning units are also quiet, gone to sleep for the night, too. Fergus lies across the room on his bed, vigilant, watching me type, likely wondering why I’m not already in bed. It’s because I’m thinking. Trying to remember what this night is like compared to the same one seven years ago. 

The comparison lies in the weather. It was a beautiful night that night, too. I was at a friend’s house for the evening with a large group playing a mindless game called “Bunko.” My head wasn’t in it, so thank goodness the focus was on the social; but then again, my head wasn’t in that either. I was waiting for news I already knew wasn’t going to be good. Not that I was being negative. I wasn’t. I just knew. Knew from the two weeks of concerned physicians, intense ultrasonographers, hurried tests, and general quiet. Everyone and everything had become suddenly quiet.

So that part is the same, too. The quiet. But back to the weather, the hush. The night air when I stepped outside Laura’s house and onto the porch when the surgeon’s late-night phone call finally came. The breeze as I sat on her front steps, trying to absorb every word he was saying but not knowing what anything he said meant. I didn't know the words. I didn't know the future. The trees swayed as he spoke.

The contrast of seven years'  time lies inside. I gladly celebrate going to bed in gracious peace this evening. Seven years ago, I am quite sure I didn’t sleep on May 27 nor many of the nights that followed for quite some time. Tonight, my family rests around me, and I am grateful for their comfort and the ease in which they breathe softly, soundly. Sunflowers brought by my best friend, Katherine, bloom in water to my right, open to the night and still bright as the dark clock ticks somewhere behind them. Seven years of memories I didn’t know I would get to make, share, and discover will dance in my head as I crawl under the covers and repeatedly give thanks for time, precious time.

Fear is a whisper tonight instead of a scream, and I’m thankful for that, too. 

So here’s to another May 27th I am so very blessed to see. Its greatest gift this time around: quiet. Quiet great and small.  

Grown Ups Have Bad Days, Too

I'm feeling needy today.

Maybe it's because of the back-to-school crud I caught from the kids. I get down any time I spend too much time sitting in one spot or, in my case last night, lying on the couch watching Monday Night Football. The crud has rendered me immobile for most of the past two days, so I've been grumpy.

Or maybe it's because I've had too much time to think. Too little on my mind (what with not moving and all)? The dark-gray, heavy-clouded day probably hasn't helped, and the steady rain patting on the windows does little to inspire. Even Fergus seems overly mellow, his mood off a bit. Because I tutor this time of year, I'm super busy in the evenings and weekends; days are thereby a little tediously filled with straightening up this and that and this and that, as well as doing the blah, blah, blah dishes, and catching up on the (yawn) email.

But needy? That's different. Perhaps enhanced by all of the above nuances, but not really a result of them.  I don't like feeling needy, because it seems a gargantuan waste of my time. Nothing can really help.

I'm forty-five years old. What am I going to do when I'm feeling needy? My husband works hard and travels often, and tonight he even has a class. My kids express a surprising lack of empathy at all-things-mom's-sentiments. They're teenagers ager all, and their world is THE world, and I'm sure deep down inside they do spend a millisecond of consideration if I don't seem my normal dorky, happy self. But they're not exactly experts at "fixing" things these days . . . not the piles of towels on their bedroom floors, not the broken shower curtain liner in their bathroom, and certainly not the emotional earthquake rumbling through their naggy mother. I could reach out to a friend or two (I've got some great ones), but really, yuck. Why bring them down? They've got their own mama-crap going on.

My grandparents, all five of them (divorce equation) used to be a phone call away when feeling down;  although they could not necessarily fix anything, they could tell me enough random stories and tales of the obituary to distract me long enough to help. But they're no longer a phone call away. I could call my dad, but Fixing Everything is his super-power, so he'd well meaningly jump right into action telling his "Baby" what steps to take immediately, followed by a cautionary tale of "don't worry so much." On days like this, I become acutely aware that I no longer have a mother on the planet. That. Is. Hard.

So, it's me and my dog, Fergus. It seems I've become the crazy middle-aged woman who not only baby talks to her dog, sneaks him bits of pumpkin scone, and snuggles with him on the couch when freaking out over an episode of Breaking Bad, but also truly looks forward to seeing him when she comes home. He is, after all, happy to see me in ways that few people are these days. Tail wagging, he greets and licks, and my heart kinda jumps a little bit.

When the girls were little and would come to me with eyes full of tears, I used to hold their hand, listen to their pain or frustration, and say, "I know. It's hard to be five." "I know, honey. It's hard to be seven." They used to nod and wipe their eyes, and I would cross my fingers I had done at least the tiniest thing to make their tough day a little better. One time, Cammie, curls bobbing lightly, sniffed deeply after spilling the story of a long day at preschool and said, "You wemembuh. It's just hard to be fwee, mama."

Somedays, it's hard to be a grownup. On a gross day like this, when the Netflix screen shuts down and Fergus is asleep next to me, it's just me and the rain again. Needy. Wanting something impossible to define but knowing it'll pass like most middle-age ennui does, dark and stormy, rolling onward to make room for the bright and crisp autumn days ahead. Ones that hold warm apple cider at the orchard, my girls wearing homecoming dresses (with curled eyelashes, shiny gloss, and flat-ironed hair), the swish of tennis racquets, and maybe even a few hugs along the way to make everything better.

Ink, Oasis, and Trader Joe's

The Richmond Trader Joe’s sits approximately 1.7 miles from my suburban, manicured neighborhood. The thousand or so brick-front houses that surround mine all sit feet from each other and resemble each other subtly, like siblings and cousins at an overcrowded family reunion. It’s a planned community, with an impressive new high school across the street from an adorable elementary school. These are equidistant from the four-pool-and-tennis-court complex (dotted with screaming children and forty- and fifty-something moms who still look amazing in bikinis and tennis skirts), and the strip mall, replete with all essentials for today’s American family: a McDonald’s, a vet, a Subway, a grocery store, a neighborhood pub, a Mexican restaurant famous for Dollar Taco Thursday, the necessary Starbucks, and more. 

What I love about my neighborhood can best be summed up on cool, dusky evenings, when the pristine sidewalks flood with families chasing tricycles, jogging dads, gossiping moms, Indian women slowly meandering in vibrant saris, silver-haired couples holding hands, and dogs of all breeds pulling owners along. Within the homes are, primarily, good, kind people, with the mandated crazies thrown in here and there. I tell myself it’s a good place to be, and mostly I believe myself, too.

What I don’t love about my neighborhood is harder to define. There are too many rooves and not enough land shaded with canopying trees, for one. Perhaps it’s the “cookie-cutter” sameness that shoves vibrancy off the streets.  Families seem interchangeable, predictable even. Make their homes here, raise their children here, pull in and out of identical driveways. Go to work. Go to school. Go to soccer, go to dance, go to lacrosse. Sleep. Wake up. Repeat. Suburban monotony. I can’t possibly be the only one dragging under its weight. Can I? 

One afternoon recently, I took time for a good, existential look around the Trader Joe’s. I realized a couple of things right away. One, I’ve never seen the store not buzzing with people. The same streetwise local harried carpool chaos pushes down the aisles at just about any time of day. Two, parking’s a bitch. It’s life or limb, and it’s your civic duty to make sure you’re not running over small children or rolling avocados. 

Why, I wondered during the drudge of my own grocery shopping routine, do these four walls of a small, boxy retailer represent such a gloriously urban oasis in the sea of suburban sameness? The same families who I share life with, and thousands more with whom I don’t, must feel the same way. We flock to Trader Joe’s for its bargain prices and because, well, it’s Trader Joe’s! Everything there is delicious. And easy. Labels say “organic,” and even the processed foods have a relatively short list of pronounceable ingredients. It’s the cool place to be.

On my recent trip, as I contemplated the above and soaked in the atmosphere, a Trader Joe’s team member sauntered by in his red Hawaiian shirt. He interrupted my reverie by asking if I needed help; standing stock-still between the quinoa-black-bean-chips-of-heaven and the all-natural-life-changing-probiotics, I must’ve looked that way. It was his deep voice that helped me realize: It’s them. The employees.

I know from previous conversations that my neighborhood friends love the nearby Trader Joe’s employees. Together, they represent urban hipness transplanted into a 1,000-sq-foot hub approximately 13 miles from Richmond City Proper. And I am lucky enough to have an additional propelling force: my brother, who also happens to work there.

Adam is the perfect representative of your basic TJ employee all rolled into one: scraggly hair that could use a good cut (or even a comb). Semi-manicured beard that now ventures well below the chin. Jeans that sag around a hidden tush. Sad, wrinkled hole in an earlobe, where the giant plastic disc used to be. Piercings of some kind, some where. Birkenstocks. Happiness.

Genuine grins, ready to transform to casual conversation at the beep of a register. General devil-may-care swagger. “Hippies,” fellow suburbanites call them with tamed awe but what I realize now is clear envy; after all, they are “The City” and all things cool. In some intangible way, maybe they represent the road not traveled, or, more to the point, the road that currently seems infinitely out of sight. In the routine of everyday life, I believe that appeals to many of my friends. 

When I walk in, I feel the same, especially when I see my brother chatting it up with a customer. Adam stands as described, except he’s a bit different. When I say that he works at Trader Joe’s, my friends ask, “Oh, which one is he?”  “He’s the short one,” I say begrudgingly. I don’t want to describe him that way, and yet, amidst all of the beards and piercings, that’s his unique identifier. Adam is 5’1” tall, noticeably short for a man. And, at 5’8” in flats, I’m noticeably taller. I hate his height for him; and because it’s a result of chemotherapy throughout his youth, I hate it even more. The unwieldy souvenir from the suckiest vacation ever.

Like the other employees, he’s all of the above rolled into a tiny, smiling man. And a microcosm of tattoos.

He collects tattoos the way I collect trinkets, cheap art, things to decorate our home. I don’t put anything on walls or shelves that doesn’t have some sentimental significance. Same with my brother’s body. He decorates himself with meaning.

It started years ago, in his teens, when he kept two, then four, then who-knows-how-many hidden from parental eyes under tee-shirts and board-shirts at the beach. With his tongue piercing came a bold sense of “Who gives a shit,” and he started broadcasting his ink and collecting more in earnest. He may have twenty by now . . . perhaps more in places sisters don’t see. 

I used to be of the old school and believed all those tattoos made him look rough, angsty. Defiant, even lazy. After all, I don’t “believe” in tattoos for me, and struggle to understand the appeal for others. So I offer the usual arguments of people who just don’t get it (which includes meddling, know-it-all big sisters): What will all of that look like when you’re 80? Do you have to have so many? How will you ever get a real job? But as time has gone on and expectations evolve with the years, they have become a part of who he is. Each new tattoo a new piece of my brother.

I feel like I should know each of them. I should know their significances, their purposes. But I don’t. Somewhere, there’s a creepy skull, a souvenir of a darker period in his life. There are artsy scrolls and swirls here and there. I do know one on his right forearm (part of a “sleeve” he’s been working on for years). It’s a giant ship, on blackish waters, clearly moving forward and out of rough weather. It represents his cancer freedom, and features the date the doctors gave him the all-clear. 1984. A few years ago, after mom died, he added a tattoo to his left bicep as a tribute to her, its enormous size emblematic of the space she continues to occupy in his heart. I should know what that says, too, but all I can remember seeing is a rose. He chose red, instead of yellow--her favorite--because he was told the color would fade. I’m glad he did, because the yellow would be too hard to look at. 

A few years ago, he added a new one. It’s on the inside of his left wrist and is an enormous pink ribbon. Beneath the ribbon, in neat, perfect cursive is the word, “Sisters.”  Knowing him, even as little as I do, I know getting that tattoo was the only thing he felt he could do to share the pain that my sister and I felt as we both discovered we carried the BRCA 1 gene mutation. We each had to have quick double mastectomies--my sister prophylactically and me to remove the multiple tumors growing within. It was a dark time in our family’s life for sure, and after we were through the roughest of it, both he and my sister got the matching tattoo as a tribute to survival. A reminder of family.

Oddly, it’s a gift to me. One that he keeps, but I cherish.

Adam is somewhat foreign to me; we are just now getting to the point in our relationship in which we hang out and discuss things like adults, not pick at trivialities and hurry past topics like teens. I love that. Perhaps I should look more at his ink, not just through it. I know this, though: Underneath all that color is a gooey, emotional man whose love for family is as fierce as his looks. He melts for my girls and celebrates the smallest of successes with relish. One of our only commonalities through the years has always been music: we both would drop just about anything to see live performances or listen to new albums. When I’m lucky, we go together to shows. Other times, on a night off, he’ll tag along to a neighborhood picnic, always the good sport and sincerely happy to be with my friends whose name he’ll never remember. He laughs at stupid “boy things” like prat falls and the Three Stooges, and I laugh at him for laughing at them.

If I could change one thing, I would wish he had more love in his life. He is single, but he lives with a roommate who is, in his words, “like a brother,” and is content with the love of our small immediate family and his growing group of groovy friends. He drives twenty minutes from his city house, from his urban, cool, craft-beer tasting, music-jamming, cornhole-tossing life to work in my suburban world because he loves it. He and his coworkers don’t do it for the customers, I’m sure. Insecurely, I acquiesce that they don’t share the admiration their customers hide. They are ours to ogle, ours to study. We, the middle-aged envious anthropologists, daydreaming, quieting screaming toddlers as we stroll. The employees do it ‘cause they can; we watch them wishing we could. 

I’m quite sure even my brother doesn’t make the commute, stock the shelves, lay out his best customer servicing, work the brutal early morning hours for me.

But sometimes I like to pretend he does. 

White Lightening

A silly little ditty from an in-class writing prompt (5 minutes of writing): "Write about an ordinary place in your life (your home, a room in your home, your yard, your car, etc.) and how it transcends the ordinary into something more meaningful to you." Of course I wrote about you-know-who.

My bright-white Honda Odyssey minivan is, without a doubt, the nicest thing I have ever owned. White Lightening, as he is known on the streets and as he zooms teenaged girls around town, joined the Lynch family on February 29, 2012. He's a Leap Baby, and my baby he is.

Long ago, I accepted the fact that, as a driver of a minivan, I no longer turned the head of any man. Of any age. At any stop light. Ever. I've since given in completely to the decidedly unsexy vehicle I call my own. To me, White Lightening is perfect. In his console, I keep his feather duster, so his dash is always sparkling. "Grab your trash!" I sing each time the girls exit the super-fancy, smooth automatic doors. White Lightening's sound system is stellar, and he practically bounces with joy when six teenagers rock out to Katy Perry or, in my rare moments alone, I cruise to the bass-throbbing Fiddy Cent.

Mostly, though, I love my little White Lightening because he reminds me how far I've come since Kibbles and Bits, my 1980 faded-yellow, overly dented, unairconditioned Subaru station wagon that was my faithful first car. I loved Kibbles (as only I called him), of course, and yes, my arms were rockin' thanks to the absence of power steering and windows. But White Lightening . . . well, now, that's adulthood. That's good fortune and a tiny symbol or reminder to be thankful. That's a commercialized, materialistic, groovy blessing parked right in my driveway.

Ink

I am beyond blessed to be attending University of Iowa's Summer Writing Festival. For my weekend class, which involved writing about family without making them hate you (I paraphrase, but barely), today's prompt was "Write about someone in your family who has a collection." An additional requirement: the essay had to include some sort of list and also a contradiction, small or large. All this in 250 ish words . . . For a first draft, I sorta like what came out.

Ink

The Richmond Trader Joe’s sits approximately 1.7 miles from my suburban, manicured neighborhood. It’s a planned community, with an impressive new high school across the street from an adorable elementary school. These are equidistant from the four-pool-and-tennis-court complex (dotted with screaming children and forty- and fifty-something moms who still look amazing in bikinis and tennis skirts) and the strip mall, replete with all essentials for today’s American family: a McDonald’s, a vet, a Subway, a grocery store, a neighborhood pub, a Mexican restaurant famous for Dollar Taco Thursday, the nearest Starbucks (there are five more within a three-mile radius), and more. 

These same families and many more flock to Trader Joe’s for its bargain prices and because, well, it’s Trader Joe’s! Everything there is delicious. Labels say “organic,” and even the processed foods have a relatively short list of pronounceable ingredients. Like everyone else, I adore this urban oasis in the sea of suburban sameness. I’ve never seen the store not buzzing with people. The local harried carpool chaos pushes down the aisles at just about any time of day. Parking’s a bitch, besides. But still, I love going to Trader Joe’s. 

Why? My brother works there. He is almost forty, but the sight of my baby brother behind the register most certainly pulls me out of this suburban life I don’t quite belong to and brings me home. 

My neighborhood friends love the Trader Joe’s employees. Together, they represent urban hipness transplanted into a 1,000-sq-foot hub approximately 13 miles from Richmond City Proper. My brother is the perfect representative of your basic TJ employee all rolled into one: scraggly hair that could use a good cut (or even a comb). Manicured beard that now ventures well below the chin. Jeans that sag around a hidden tush. Sad, wrinkled hole in an earlobe, where the giant plastic disc used to be. Piercings of some kind, some where. Birkenstocks. Happiness.

“Hippies,” suburbanites call them with awe and clear envy; after all, they are “The City” and all things cool. Genuine grins, ready to transform to casual conversation at the beep of a register. General devil-may-care swagger. In some ways, they represent the road not traveled, and in the routine of everyday life, that appeals to many of my cohorts.

When I walk in, I feel the same, especially when I see my brother chatting it up with a customer. He stands as described, except he’s a bit different. When I say that he works at Trader Joe’s, my friends ask, “Oh, which one is he?”  “He’s the short one,” I say begrudgingly. I don’t want to describe him that way, and yet, amidst all of the beards and piercings, that’s his unique identifier. Adam is 5’1” tall, noticeably short for a man. And, at 5’8” in flats, I’m noticeably taller. I hate his height for him; and because it’s a result of chemotherapy throughout his youth, I hate it even more.

Like the other employees, he’s all of the above rolled into a tiny, smiling man. And a microcosm of tattoos. 

He collects tattoos the way I collect trinkets, cheap art, things to decorate our home. I don’t put anything on walls or shelves that doesn’t have some sentimental significance. Same with my brother’s body. He decorates himself with meaning.

It started years ago, in his teens, when he kept two, then four, then who-knows-how-many hidden under tee-shirts and board-shirts at the beach. With his tongue piercing came a bold sense of “who gives a shit,” and he started broadcasting his ink and collecting more in earnest. He may have twenty by now . . . perhaps more in places sisters don’t see. 

I used to be of the old school and believed all those tattoos made him look rough, angsty. Defiant, perhaps even lazy. After all, I don’t believe in tattoos. So I offer the usual arguments of people who just don’t get it (which includes meddling, know-it-all big sisters): what will all of that look like when you’re 80? How will you ever get a real job? Do you have to have so many? But as time has gone on and expectations evolve with the years, they’ve become a part of who he is. Each new tattoo a new piece of my brother.

I feel like I should know each of them. I should know their significances, their purposes. But I don’t. Somewhere, there’s a creepy skull, a souvenir of a darker period in his life. There are artsy scrolls and swirls here and there. I do know one on his right forearm (part of a “sleeve” he’s been working on for years). It’s a giant ship, on blackish waters, clearly moving forward and out of rough weather. It represents his cancer freedom, and features the date the doctors gave him the all-clear. I should know that date, and I can guess at it, but I don’t. After mom died, he added a tattoo to his shoulder as a tribute to her, its enormous size emblematic of the space she continues to occupy in his heart. I should know what that says, too, but all I can remember seeing is a yellow rose, her favorite flower. It’s hard to look at. 

A few years ago, he added a new one. It’s on the inside of his left wrist. It’s an enormous pink ribbon. Beneath the ribbon, in neat, perfect cursive is the word, “Sisters.”  It was the only thing he felt he could do to share the pain that my sister and I felt as we both discovered we carried the BRCA 1 gene mutation. We each had double mastectomies--my sister prophylactically and me to remove the multiple tumors growing within. It was a dark time in our family’s life for sure, and after we were through it, both he and my sister got the matching tattoo as a tribute to survival. A reminder of family.

Oddly, it’s a gift to me. One that he keeps, but I cherish.

Adam is somewhat foreign to me; we are just now getting to the point in our relationship in which we hang out and discuss things like adults, not pick and hurry past topics like teens. I love that. Perhaps I should look more at his ink, not just through it. But I know this: Underneath all that color is a gooey, emotional man whose love for family is as fierce as his looks. He melts for my girls and celebrates the smallest of successes with relish. One of our only commonalities through the years has always been music: we both would drop just about anything to see live performances or listen to new albums. When I’m lucky, we go together to shows. Other times, on a night off, he’ll tag along to a neighborhood picnic, always the good sport and sincerely happy to be with my friends whose name he’ll never remember. He laughs at stupid “boy things” like prat falls and the Three Stooges, and I laugh at him for laughing at them.

If I could change one thing, I would wish he had more love in his life. He is single, but he lives with a roommate who is, in his words, “like a brother,” and is content with the love of our small immediate family and his growing group of groovy friends. He drives twenty minutes from his city house, from his urban, cool, craft-beer tasting, music-jamming, cornhole-tossing life to work in my suburban world because he loves it. I’m quite sure he doesn’t do it for me. But sometimes I like to pretend he does. 

Ode to May 27

Comings and goings. Invoking memories, or nothingness. 

Passive: One’s comings and goings. Go to work. Come home. Go run an errand. Come back to church. Go there, come here. Reflexive almost. Your legs, your minivan, your lives moving without your brain’s input. The passive comings and goings add up, piling on top of each other until they’re a mound of weekdays and weekends and hours and minutes without margins, blending together in a heap. A colorful mass of blurry mess.

Active: Being a part of it all. Go to your daughter’s dance recital. Come home to a surprise meal. Go pick your daughter up from the nurse; she’s sick, and wants to come home to her bed. Come here, you yelp to the puppy. Go on a luxurious vacation, not believing your luck. Come away with me, my friend. Go away, you silently shout at the rain. Go get some food truck deliciousness. Come to my house with bells on. Come visit, family, we miss you. Go on!, you laugh and laugh.

Blessings come into our lives if we listen, watch for, breathe them. People go whether we want them to or not.

May 27 has come and gone six times since the day--the instant, the milisecond--everything changed. The day life became “after,” and “before” had to go. The thing about life-changing moments is that you actually know your life is changing right THEN, in that second. The time-space continuum slows tangibly, and you become hyperaware of some of your surroundings and completely oblivious to things like where you are or what you should be doing. I remember the thickness of the May evening air, heavy with the scent of suburban potted flowers. Now, I can recall the precise feel of the warm bricks under my ass, the sound of laughter ebbing and flowing behind me. But in that moment, I was concentrating so deeply, so intensely on what my breast surgeon was saying, the diagnosis and new strange words that were coming into my life, that I hardly had a chance to watch my old life go.

But I felt it. The before became the after right there in my lap.

After the phone call, when I sat for an eternity with my head in my hands, someone came outside to leave, to head for home. So stunned that someone else has penetrated my night, my thick air, the end of my old life, I jumped, surprised to see another human where they didn't belong. After a mumbling of excuses, I left for home, but just drove around and around, ending at a friend's house before beginning in my home . . .  beginning the process of telling those I love that my old life just ended on a front porch and my new life was about to begin.

That was May 27th. So it is today. The air around me is fragrant, carrying me with it to memories that thankfully are lodged too deep to fully grasp.

What have been the goings these six years? Fear of conformity. That’s gone. Worry that I’m not good enough as a mother, a friend, a wife, a daughter, a sister. Gone? Not entirely, because worry is what I do. But gone is the self-loathing that once consumed me. Gone too is the phrase, “I’m busy.” I simply won’t say it any more . . . I’ll either make it not so, or pour myself into what I’m doing to bring happiness. 

Gone too, however, are losses too tragic, too soon, too sad. Friends to cancer, neighbors with hearts that broke for real, a mother to addiction, the childhoods of my daughters whispering past before I can breathe them in.

What has come into this new life, this Life Number 2? A collection of treasures, of memories, this time around with sharper edges, in focus, appreciated in the moment and cherished as often and as deep as my middle-aged mind will allow. Not a mound of mess but a armful of love. Exploration. Laughter. Tears. Fun. Embracing messiness, because it happens, and it happens often. Learning. Always learning.

Realization that next steps may lead to unexpected bliss. And that I am not afraid to take them.

Anything is possible.

Every day I look at the sky, say a prayer of thanks, and hope that I remain on this earth to make more comings than goings. 

22: Taking a Swing

1. I'm back. Really
2. I refuse to abandon Project 360. I dig it. I'm going to catch up, dammit.
3. Below is a piece of writing I submitted to Valley Haggard's Life in 10 Minutes. (Go check it out!) Valley is a local writer whose work and overall outlook on this here life I've admired for a lonnng time. I decided to cross-post my somewhat-awkward first attempt here. Part of what stops me from writing sometimes is ironically not writer's block; it's actually the opposite. Too many things come to mind, too many experiences, laughs, heartaches . . . the stuff that life is made of. It's hard to know where to start.

Anyhoo, Valley's site is a good place for me to make a re-start. The goal is to write for 10 minutes. Simply live a piece of yourself for 10 minutes. Here's what came out . . .

The one and only time I got in a fist fight, I didn’t actually throw any punches. That’s a technicality, though, I choose to ignore when I see some hunky, sweaty actor punching an obnoxious drunk across a bar. Or when, up on the movie screen, a hurt hero loses it, just loses it, quick enough to send “ooohs” through the shocked crowd eating their popcorn below.

Didn’t see that coming, they think. 

I didn’t see my make believe fight coming either. In 1981, I was more focused on neighborhood kickball rules and the colors of my new braided barrettes to worry about adding angst to my world. That would come years later as my teenage years usurped my emotional stability. As the bell rang for the first and only round, I was an 11-year-old lanky, gawky girl--all legs, which stood firmly planted in the cul-de-sac gravel, the place where I felt most at home.

Then what’s-his-name came along and messed it all up. He knocked me in the shins with his stupid words, and everything, for a fistful of minutes, changed. I’ll never forget the feeling of the anger that rose into my throat, finally exploding out of my mouth, raining bile and fear all over the road.

He looked at my brother. My brother, tiny, age six, outside and free, ready to play with the big kids. But it was the big kid who threw his punch: “Look at the baldy standing there. Bald like an old man. Baldy!”

The words hit my brother hard, but me harder. They took the wind out of me, and within the five seconds it took me to throw my imagined punch, I managed to picture all of needles, the burning of my brother’s veins, the vomiting on the side of the road from drugs designed to kill the beast inside him. The radiation table that sucked him up away from me, the pain in my parents’ eyes. It was too much. 

I lashed him with the only weapon at my disposal: words. 

So it wasn’t a punch I threw at the knock-kneed idiot on his ugly dirt bike; more likely, it was every piece of me that had been trapped inside for too long. I hope it burned. I hope it scarred him so much that he’d think twice before ever again throwing his own punch and anyone else forever and ever.

Movie punches. Cul-du-sac punches. Sometimes you just don’t know what else to do. Even if you are only eleven.