Swamps and Snakes and Alligators, Oh My

I will never forget the first time we stepped out of the cool, air-conditioned airport and into that heady and muggy summer noonday: Miami, Florida.

It seems like a lifetime ago. Even the lens here gets a bit thick.

I'd never experienced a sauna, and it was not until later in life that I was able to grasp and wrap my mind around this most perfect analogy: stepping out of the airport and into Miami for the first time was like literally walking into a sauna. Of course, at the time, my 9-year old body had never experienced such an assault. Accustomed to the dry, desiccating heat and alpine altitudes of the rockies and Northwest, it just didn't know what to make of this sudden sea-level elevation and humidity. My body did the only thing it knew how to do: attach an extremely vivid association to the moment.

When first learning that we were moving to Florida, I remember thinking that I didn't know what to think. I pictured a literal jungle: a thick, dense jungle of overgrown vines and tall trees. . . swamps and snakes everywhere. Alligators in waiting. I pictured living all camped out, next to a riverbed, hammocks swinging in the breeze. . . I thought for all practical purposes, that my siblings and I might actually be attending school in an open-aired straw hut.

Stepping out of the airport building and into that noonday, Miami was heavy. It was nothing like I'd expected, my soon-to-be fourth grade eyes were wide with wonder. This was a city. It was a giant, living and breathing city.

The summer that followed was whirlwind: once over sky, then over trains and automobiles, my family and I became very well acquainted with the Sunshine State.

After stepping out of the airport into that Miami noonday, I remember noticing the sky. The palm trees. The birds. The scent of salt and sky. The giant, sweating city of Miami. And everything was so green.

We stayed in a motel that was fairly near the airport for a couple of days. There was a swimming pool, which my siblings and I enjoyed. Since we carried almost no baggage, travel was easy, and later that week, after taking a variety of transportation methods (the most memorable of them being a train), we ended up in Homosassa Springs.

Although I am not certain, I'm pretty sure we visited this wildlife preserve. It was the first time I'd ever laid eyes on a manatee. Being the curious child that I was, I had many questions. What did it eat? Why did it have whiskers, like a cat? Why was it so fat?

After a couple of weeks, my parents bought a van. Room for six. This was a van with curtains and nice seats, one where I wasn't practically sitting on my siblings' laps during transportation. It was a nice change.

As the summer neared an end, we somehow ended up in Jensen Beach, where we finally settled into a small white stucco house. This house was on a hill, and I remember thinking that if there were ever a hurricane with floodwaters that my house would be a good place to be.

Party of Six

Third grade. By this time, my family had grown; instead of two little brothers, I now had three. Benjamin was born in the same fashion as we all had been: on the floor of a house. Again had my mother given birth with no midwives and no doctors and no pain medications. I was getting older, barely beginning to comprehend the huge responsibilities of being the big sister.

In late March of that year, school had just been let out for a long Easter weekend. For some reason or another, I was never one to run straight home from school. Often did I linger, staying afterward with my good friend Angela; we'd hang out with our teachers and stack chairs on desks or bang erasers on the sidewalks, making little white and pink geometric designs on the concrete. We were almost never in a hurry to get home. Although we rarely had homework, I always wanted to bring home my science book, to have something interesting to read over the weekend.

Angela and I had a lot in common; our parents were of the same generation. Sometimes they'd even socialize; sitting in a circle, in a cloud of smoke, doing what they did back then.

She lived with her mother and brother. Her house was close to the cliffs, nestled into the morning shadows cast by the rising sun. Many a weekend did we have sleepovers, either at her house or mine. Sleepovers almost always meant we'd wake up with the sun to go explore those cliffs, up the trails, up to the top of the H hill, looking down upon the valley. We built huts and forts (balanced plywood) in the field behind my house, we surreptitiously stole matches and made rock-rimmed campfires in little secret spots near the creek. We gathered fruits and nuts from the trees behind my house and stockpiled them. Our little tomboy girls club wasn't exclusive: we made friends with the neighborhood girls *and* boys.

Hurricane Elementary school was only a few blocks from my family's house, and I always walked home from school: down the long sidewalk, past the little Chums shop which would often have left out by the curb a box or two of their prototype tye-dyed beaded creations. My siblings and I had friends on every block, friends with whom we'd play Kick the Can or Tag.

Third grade. School had just been let out for a long Easter weekend. I was carrying a sack of candy; Easter approaching meant that the Easter bunny, of course, would soon be on his way. As usual, I lingered on my walk home. . . stopping to poke through the Chums, checking the structural integrity of the fort. Finally, finally making it upstairs into that little brick house.

And from that day forth, nothing would ever be the same. Seared onto my memory like a red-hot branding iron, that day marked a turning point.

The Spelling Beehive State

In 1986, Hurricane, Utah was a smaller, quieter version of the community it is today. On the outer fringes of Zion National Park, it was also giving birth to what is now Chums International. My family rented a two-bedroom house on Main Street. By this time, my mother was with child again.

Main Street was, of course, one of the main attractions in this dry, dusty community. Along with Main Street, attractions also included a grocery store, a drug store, the state liquor store, a hardware store, a drive-in theater, a burger joint, an elementary school, a middle and high school. Most of the allure of the city was indeed its proximity to Zion National Park, and its nearness to canyon desert trails and wild.

First through third grades were spent here, and if I were to sum up my memory of this time of life, it would be in a word: "Wild." This would not be not the "wild" associated with rebellious teenagers, but the wild borne from lack of discipline early on in life. As the eldest, I was always testing boundaries; I learned quickly that with my parents, boundaries were almost never reinforced. If breaking boundaries of acceptance went unnoticed, then I would please my parents by being a stalwart good kid. I therefore continued to excel in school.

One of my first impressionable memories of life in Hurricane was the first grade Spelling Bee. There were two outstanding spellers in the class, students who would remain standing at the end of the in-class bees: a blonde girl with too-big hair, and me. In the run-offs, I always out-spelled her. But when the actual day came for the official showdown, I was nervous. In fact, I had never been so nervous about anything in my entire seven years of life. My nervousness could almost certainly be attributable to the fact that this time, there was a trophy.

The day of the Bee arrived, and down, and down to the end of the line, it was: I stood as one of only a few students remaining.

"Freeze," said the moderator.

Or perhaps she said: "Frees."

To this day, I think this is one of the most unfair spelling words in the universe.

Because "Freeze" and "Frees" are indeed two words that sound exactly the same but that mean completely different things; of course, I do not remember first grade spelling bees being so advanced as to give the speller of a word an option to request a definition, or to request a "please use it in a sentence," like they do when Spelling Bees get more advanced in middle and high school.

So freeze I did. Thinking back to that day, standing there with all those curious eyeballs on me; they were all so silent, waiting, and my body was frozen while my brain was running at 100 MPH and blond girl over there was still standing with her triumphant smile and her perfectly coiffed blonde hair that had been specially "done" and hair-sprayed, while mine was probably an unbrushed, wild mat. And so as the seconds ticked, my brain decided to nuclear-fission my two seven-year-old understandings of the spellings of the word that sounds like both "frees" and "freeze"

"F R E E S . . . Z E ?"

"I'm sorry," she said.

Crestfallen, I made my way back to my seat to sit down. Distinctly do I remember not even being able to make it through the rest of the spelling bee.

Blond girl won the trophy, and I'm pretty sure I cried for days.

Ash

 

It is either the scent of a memory, or the memory of a scent that I associate with that charred, black rubble. The December sky was always gray, and it was so odd to be standing in what used to be our cozy, dark living room underneath that gray sky. Inside outside. The outside all burned up, some of the inside left, if singed, around the edges.

We poked among the snow-dusted rubble. Any salvageable item would be carefully plucked from the charred black, placed in a pile. The scent of the memory was heady, almost sticky. Every salvageable item we'd find would have this cloying scent, the scent of a fireplace, almost sweet. The most impressionable image burned into my five-year old mind: the melted gaping maw of the glass and plastic television.

We moved across town, where I had to start finishing Kindergarten, attending a new school. We made new friends -- they lived in the apartment by ours, and some of the ornaments were re-done.

My memories of the days and months that followed were, in a word, weepy.I remember my weeping mother, boxes of tissues, weeping about the house plants and the kitties and the books and her crochet work and the pictures: the life we'd had in our small yellow house. She especially mourned the house plants: the spider plants she'd lovingly nursed from shoots.

Some time between the time I completed kindergarten and started first grade, we left Alaska. It was another change: back on the road again, back to the lower 48.

Northern Lights, Down in Flames (Part II)

A couple of years later, it was time to start going to school. I attended North Star Elementary, and from the very beginning, I loved school. Those hours of Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers, being read to and taught by my mother, had prepared me well.

In mid-December of 1985, things were going about as well as they could for a five-year-old. After all, I was the oldest, going to school. I was a hot-shot, for a Kindergarten kid (weren't we all?). My dad was in Las Vegas, working to earn money for the holiday, but that was okay since he'd be home for Christmas in a week or so. It must have been right after Turtle magazine had arrived in the mail, because I was in the bedroom of my parents, away from my pesky siblings, to read my favorite magazine.

And then I heard my mother scream my name like I'd never heard her scream. And again. I'd never heard her say my name quite like that before.

So I peeked out the door, entered the hallway.

In a flash, I saw the smoke and my mother, her eyes wild, literally dragging my two siblings by a tangle of hair and arms.

Before I knew what had happened, she had dragged me, too, and we were outside, across the street, watching our little yellow house being lapped up by smoke and flames. Hours later, when I finally emerged from the daze, I realized that the only thing I had escaped with was my clutched Turtle magazine.

The newspaper, Anchorage Daily News printed a photo of the rubble along with a small caption reporting that firefighters had taken over 45 minutes to arrive on the scene, by which time the house was a total loss. It also noted that a woman and three children had escaped unharmed, and that two pet cats didn't make it.

Fuzzy and Punky died in the fire.

Northern Lights, Down in Flames (Part I)

By the early 1980's, my dad had several years of experience in construction and was about as well-respected as one can be in that business: he worked for a contractor, hanging sheetrock on a number of the now-famous Las Vegas resort hotel and casino properties. Since Las Vegas is all about building up to tear down and build again, he rarely had a shortage of work. After awhile, he was doing well enough to upgrade our yellow VW beetle to a brand new, shiny, red Toyota Corolla station wagon.

Perhaps it was the new car, the wanderlust, hippie nature of my parents not wanting to raise a family in Las Vegas, or something else entirely -- I was too young to ask and will never know for sure -- but after three years, they decided it was time to move on. Where? Somewhere about as climatologically different from the hot, arid Las Vegas desert as can be imagined. In the summer of 1983, we packed our bodies and a meager amount of material belongings into the station wagon and hit the road for Anchorage, Alaska.

We rented a small yellow house on Cheechako St. Our yard was blooming with dandelions, "fuzzies," we'd call them when the season would change and the yellow flowers would turn to ripe-for-the-wind seed pods. We would purse our lips together and be like the wind, blowing the seeds off the stems, watching them lazy, drift on the air.

Soon thereafter, we also got our first family pets: two cats, Fuzzy and Punky. Fuzzy was named, undoubtedly for her fur's resemblance to the "fuzzies" in the yard. She was either a poofy or a fat, gray cat with extraordinary patience for children. Punky was a sassy little calico kitten, thus named after our favorite colorful television personality, Punky Brewster.

My mom was quite talented with a crochet hook and yarn, and she would watch us from the steps while making amazing things: dolls, ornaments for our tree -- snowflakes and snowmen and Santa's twelve reindeer, angels and elves -- for the upcoming holiday. Distinct memories of summertime: Fuzzy and Punky tearing after strands of yarn that my siblings and I would run around in circles in the yard of bursting dandelions.

My dad continued to work in drywall, but Anchorage, Alaska wasn't exactly the fastest growing city in the US then, so he'd fly back to Las Vegas, periodically, for work. Three children and times were tough.

My mother stayed at home with us. Days and nights were either long or short, depending upon the season. We had black garbage bags stapled to the windows, and I don't have much memory regarding sense of time or season on the indoors. During the harsh winters when the field of dandelions turned to white, days were filled with hours of PBS -- Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers -- and learning, reading, crayons and paper, being read to. We at a lot of Ramen noodles. My first magazine subscription, Turtle magazine was had in the small yellow house. Every time a new edition came in the mail, I was thrilled. I loved staring at the words, trying to figure out how to pronounce them, what they meant.

The periodic absence of my father was especially difficult for us, financially. Because he was in construction, a drywall hanger who worked for a contractor, he received no benefits or health insurance. Sometimes, when things were tough, my mom would take us to go stand in line at what I believe was the welfare office, though I can't be sure. It's strange how sometimes distinct memories can remain -- we were bundled up and up and up, until the layers of shirts and sweaters and coats and hats and scarves and gloves were deemed satisfactory to be subjected to the elements. The four of us would venture out into the cold, foggy Alaska morning with its eerie light, walking. My mom would have invariably packed hot chocolate and graham crackers for these trips, where we'd follow the streetlights and arrival meant we could finally open that warm hot chocolate, which was like steam from heaven underneath buzzing fluorescent lights.
Part II

There's No Place Like . . .

Most people are able to look back on their life and see a particular place as "home". Some part of their existence has ingrained itself into a geographic locale. Everybody has somewhere they "go way back," and no matter what happens they can close their eyes and imagine it in their mind's eye.

In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is able to return home to Kansas after clicking together her ruby red slippers and wistfully saying: "There's no place like home. There's no place like home." The whirlwind may have taken her away from her familiar place, people, comforts, but it didn't destroy her idea of home; she had it in her all along. Dorothy had a pretty good idea of what she was asking for so wistfully when she clicked those heels together: Kansas was and is all she knew.

Dorothy never knew how lucky she was.

Growing up, I never knew that feeling of "home"; the tornado was metaphoric. My parents were hippies, of a generation that technically didn't and couldn't "know" any better. My dad was born and raised in Southern California. Although my grandmother did her best to raise him with the Mormon Pioneer values she'd grown up with, she was essentially a single parent as my grandfather was serving his country. My dad was the second-born, a mischievous child who grew up as a friend of the Beach Boys.

My mother was from an East coast family. As a young woman, she was a cheerleader who'd been crowned "Miss New London." But something (the 60's) happened to turn her flower child. She roamed with the wind, attended Woodstock and followed the Beatles around London.

They met in Las Vegas.

In true au nautrel hippie form, my mother gave birth to me at home, on the floor of our home in Las Vegas. There were no midwives, no doctors, just her and me. It was a Sunday morning, and my father had to leave to get white thread to "cut" my umbilical cord. As the story goes, he couldn't find white thread, and when he got back home with the only kind of thread he could find, I was already born.

The first three or so years of my life were spent in Las Vegas, during which I acquired two siblings -- brothers. I don't really have any memories of that time of my life, but there are a few pictures: in nearly all of them, my mother is with child, and we are all smiling, happy. There was one particular photo of me and my little brother, Steve, we had our arms around each other, and lets just say that not all of our house plants in the background of that photo were entirely legal.

Movement: the Depth of Space between Adjectives

One of my online friends once asked me why I have so many blogs and journals all over the Internet. Thinking about it, I realized I like to keep strict separation controls on my writing, building a barrier of contextualization with which I can do free-writing and association for certain types of writing: some serious, some for fun, some experimental, some that I might as well, or have been, gushing blood or sweat or tears or potentially broken bones during composition.

Anyway.

Aside from my online journals, I have (rather had) a notebook journal that was gifted to me via a "Secret Santa" thing that from an online writing forum I frequented some time around Y2K, when started using a particular online pseudonym for writing and coding. This notebook/journal has been stolen. I think about it sometimes, like . . maybe somebody has read it, all my secret private thoughts and such -- makes me very uncomfortable.

This digital gypsy has a new muse these days; the depth of space between adjectives.

Mourning

I'm in mourning.

Deep, deep mourning and sadness and I cannot even begin to describe the sense of loss and emptiness I feel. I'm in rage. Various profanities have poised themselves on my lips and I must fight them because they want to lash out and curse the bastards who smashed out the window in my car and made off with the most precious collection of belongings I've ever owned.

Ah, but they're just belongings.

Perhaps to some people, a box or a few boxes of books might be "just belongings," but not to me. My book collection is indeed the most precious thing I've ever owned, and it's gone. Stolen. Violently ripped from my vehicle and probably lying in a dumpster somewhere. I know my books are not what the thieves were after because several books were left, carelessly tossed aside and in disarray lying among the not-sharp shards of busted-out car window glass.

And it's all my fault for being such an idiot. It's going to take me a very long time to get over this, and I might never be able to fully forgive myself. Here's the story.

My place of employment had an official End of the Year; Yeah, We Know it's the Beginning of the Year, but We Were Just Lazy Getting Around to Throwing It party last night. I attended this party, because as newbie/temp-to-hire employee, I had been specially invited and figured it would be a good idea to attend.

Whether or not it was a good idea is relative now, in hindsight.

Staying with friends in the Potrero district in the great city of San Francisco, I walked to the brewery where this EotY,WKitBotY,bWWJLGAtTI party was being held. I had left my vehicle parked back where I was staying, and as the night wore on, I proceeded to dine and drink with my most friendly co-workers.

Some number of hours later, I've learned that my place of employment is quite happy with my work and has more or less told me that they want to hire me as a full-time employee.

Yay! I head "home".

Fast forward to this morning, and I venture outside into the cool, brisk San Francisco morning with the intention of going to get a newspaper. My eyes come to rest on my little car, and immediately notice the busted out window and the broken glass on the street.

My car is _empty_

Empty, as in null, VOID of the belongings it previously contained.

My car is empty as in Empty.

I've been robbed.

My car is Empty as in EMPTY, and it slowly begins to dawn on me. I attempt to assess damage control and remember where and what it held, but to no use.: letters from my now dead parents, keepsakes that I'd acquired from my life of small trinkets . . . all gone. And the thieves made off with most of my books. Boxes of books, the only things I found necessary to haul with me across the Sierras.

I guess this is how California welcomes people.

(This post ends with me and my housemates pouring hefty glasses of brandy. At 10 AM)

Martinez, Revisited

'Tis been not quite ten years since my initial visit to Martinez, CA, and I can genuinely say I'm just as (if not more) enchanted with the town now as I was then. It especially helped that today was an incredibly gorgeous day in terms of weather. I've never really considered anywhere "home" and this return to Martinez as more or less full circle for something maybe symbolic or representative of home. To me, at least. The scent of foods on salty, brisk seaside air: hot foods, spicy foods, ethnic foods, greasy foods, sweet foods and the ocean, all mixing and mingling together in a euphoric olfactory . . .

Finding decent/free Wifi spots on this journey has been an enormous challenge. I can never be sure if the places that advertise their "free Wifi" are actually going to deliver on the promise. I don't like hanging out at places of business without being a customer, so I usually end up purchasing something non-expensive. I haven't at this particular place of business just yet, though, and I've been here well over an hour. Noisy college football game : A&M 10 Cali 28; 7:27 or so left in the 4th, like I care :)

Perhaps I shall exit before I'm noticed.