Emotional Braille

A few days ago I typed the words that I didn’t want anything for Christmas and I didn’t want to give anything to the kids. I meant that when I typed it and I mean it now in that I don’t have a burning desire to run out and ply the girls with anything specific and I don’t long for the money to buy them what they can’t have, on the contrary I could buy them what they want. This year I am just neutral about it. They will have a nice Christmas but not a ridiculous one, not one mortgaged on next year’s car payment like so many children in so many homes. What is ironic about having written about that is this; my mother is dead and now Christmas is gone and my girls didn’t get much. The actual holiday for girls was great. It would have been great for me, too if I’d gotten my gift a day late. To say that my mother and me had a tenuous relationship would be a polite way to get started. To know fully that your mother hates you if even for a moment changes the way see everything about yourself and everything you see in the world. To ever want more than to change her opinion of you, to have any higher aspiration seems pointless and when you realize that she is unyielding makes you for a time see that everything is pointless. Before my mother died we did come to terms with one another and she did finally find a way to embrace me fully and make me feel it. In the end my mother did love me again, more, better and harder. We always loved one another. Just hard.

Her beautiful lake house in Greenwood has been empty for a few years as my father remarried his ex-wife Sally a half a year after my mother died. Since he remarried my half-brother Sean’s mom and since she’s a decent person I didn’t protest. Now I wonder if I was just in shock because when I first saw Sally and first found out about her she was walking out of my mother’s house.

I visit my mom’s about every five month’s or when it’s nice enough to fish. My mother had a garden that would rival any in Southern Living. Sadly it withered right away, so only the hardiest flowers remain. Each time I arrived at mom’s house something would be different, removed, changed a piece of her more gone, more dead, even more dead somehow. I don’t know how to explain how your mother could be more dead, but when you have been loved, abandoned, rekindled, aborted, and taken up again it is very hard to take your tangible mementoes disappearing. I made the same rounds I would make with my mother when I would come down to visit from Virginia, she would on those occasions show me new flowers or new purchases or new projects in the garage.

In one of her fits of unrest my mother burned every single photograph she had of me even my baby pictures. My mother disowned me several times for reasons that were sometimes mine and sometimes hers. She stopped speaking to my aunt because she hosted my daughter’s baby shower. My mother hated as passionately as she loved. Does this sound familiar to anyone? My mother is one of the few subjects I am both the most qualified to discuss and I am left utterly in the dust of a mystery about. If my mother is a mystery then my father is the elusive carrier that delivers the riddle and slips away. I know so little about him or his family I am not even qualified to ask questions. My brother is the thinnest strand of a bridge and I cling sometimes too fiercely to him. In many ways I fear that my mother’s past and her life hold keys to my future, hints to what may come. There are many holes. Entire years in her life that are missing or do not make sense with the rest of her life. I wonder things now and am convinced that at times she left me because she had to, because it was the better thing to do. I see her differently than the way I have been told. I look from an older, more knowing perspective. She revealed to me some things I did not know before she died but not everything. What I look for when I go to her house is not written on a piece of paper or captured in a photograph. It will not fall from the page of worn book or come from the pocket of a coat. Peace is not tangible. It is not a commodity.

I certainly will not find it in my father’s living room. That became clear today.

When I go to my mother’s furnished but empty house that we’ve been told to use for fishing, swimming and weekends. I open the silverware drawer to see that the forks have the same pattern. I look to see that the plates are the same unimportant brown ones that held pork chops and rice and gravy. I open all the drawers to see that her socks are not there, that her gowns are not there. I look to see if there is a page in a drawer with her signature, her handwriting on the top sheet of the page in the drawer. I do not dig. I just look. I smell the closet but it doesn’t smell the same. I go to the garage. During the first visits after her death I would put my hands on her paint brushes and her sponges and her paper plates and her other art supplies. I would reach into the neatly obsessively labeled rows and drawers of nuts and bolts and screws. I would touch all of the tools as if they would speak to me in some system of Braille, some genetic memory language of organization. I touched everything in some intuitive hope that it would tell me unknown things about myself or confirm an un-given message left by my mother. I was always quite rhythmic and systematic about the way in which I listened for my mother on these visits. I waited for my mother. I wanted to feel something. I wanted to feel something other than loss other than sadness. I wanted to feel comfortable with what was happening. It was my intention to continue that ritual until I felt at peace. I took the same steps each time through the house, through the garden, through the garage and then down to the dock always alone. By the time I made it to dock I was usually just tired and needed to rock. A few weeks ago I was making the familiar rounds and John happened into the garage perhaps that is why it happened. He distracted me and I turned around. My aunt Sandy had mentioned that my mother had saved my baby book. I had never even known or seen my baby book. I looked up and noticed something I had seen as a child but hadn’t seen since. My mother’s Army foot locker was in the rafter of the garage. I just instinctively asked John to bring it down for me. I opened it and there was a mangled squash of cheap Christmas garland mashed down in on a few boxes of ornaments. Under that mess however was a pale blue seventies style book. I touched like it might be rigged with electricity or have Charlie Bucket’s golden ticket hidden inside. I was amused my baby book was blue. If I know my mother that meant it was probably on sale. I asked John to put the trunk back in the rafters. I went inside to sit and look at the front of my baby book for a long while. It took me an hour to get up the nerve to open it. John forgot to put the trunk back. I will not describe the night looking through photos and reading names in my mother’s handwriting. I could write for hours about that experience but that’s another time it is enough to say I was excited and sad. The anniversary of her death was a week away and I had just left her house – I’d been back in Greer about thirty minutes when my father called me to demand an explanation for why I was rifling through his house. He wanted to know what I was looking for. It was only time he’d ever talked to me in that tone of voice that I could remember as an adult, he might have been mildly upset with me or Sean as kids but this was shocking. So I could not make the explanation I made here about my blind fingering search for peace. I could only mumble something about a rumor about my baby book. He told me he knew exactly where it was and would have given it to me. I apologized and hung up. I didn’t meet my father until I was sixteen. He couldn’t have even seen the book before then. I still don’t know which of my parents put in the rafters. That was the last time I talked to my dad.

He called today and told John he missed me but he didn’t know what say to me that he never knew what to say. He said that times were tough and we just shouldn’t exchange gifts. Times are not tough at my house or his. I bought gifts for them when I was on vacation. So the notion of not wanting anything for Christmas the other just gave me a high karma karate kick.

I went to see my dad after that phone call just to talk. I stayed about fifteen minutes and couldn’t really do more than make small talk.

He came over on Christmas with Sally and brought gifts for the girls as well as a gift for me and John and came in with a big box for me. He told John on the way in not to let me open it because it would make me cry or upset me so I waited until they were gone. It was a box of photo albums with some pictures of my mom’s students and her teacher of the year award and some other photos of my two other step dads in California and some pictures of her in the Army. I really wanted these pictures and am glad to have them. It was really not good timing though.

Dad called to talk and I wasn’t home so told John again he didn’t know what to say to me. John told him I love him very much and I do. When I heard for the second time he didn’t know what to say to me, for the second time I got in the car and went to my dad’s house hugged him on the way in the door and told him I love him. I wanted to talk. Sally sat down right away and I realized I was not going to talk to dad alone without directly asking her leave. I didn’t want to be rude. I should have been rude.

She asked if we were still going to buy a house. I told her about the plans to go to Costa Rica and wondered to myself why dad hadn’t mentioned it since I had told him last week. I said I had heard that he had more of mom’s stuff for me and I explained if he had stuff I wanted it all at once, in one lot, not piece meal because though I wanted all of it, it was exhausting to process some of it. I wanted to grieve and then enjoy it. He then asked me if I found my baby book and essentially all hell broke loose.

All I wanted to do was explain and apologize. Apologize for any misunderstanding and explain that I was not snooping in the house and Sally had to keep chiming in. Then she had to shout that it was not my mom’s house that it was HER house. I’ve never been shot from a cannon but I can imagine now very clearly what it might feel like because that is how I got to my feet. A person I am utterly unfamiliarly with took over my body and I watched her look at my father and focus solely on his words and when he said, “That is the law.” My mother was finally dead. The full weight of her little dead body and my body slammed into me. She wasn’t in the house in Greenwood. Her dead body wasn’t in the truck that he drives where she slumped over dead. Mother wasn’t in any ashes he sprinkled at beach or at the lake house. My mama was made more dead by my father saying “that is the law.” If my father couldn’t give my mother the respect and reverence of her own empty house that she helped him build board by board then surely she was dead. Not in the ground, not in the sea, just gone. Gone away. Completely utterely dead and gone. My father asked me before I got married if I loved John more than I loved him and mama and I couldn’t imagine such a thing. I couldn’t imagine loving someone more than my mama. My father said if I didn’t I should get married because the person you marry is who you have to live with. My mama was gone.

I stood there locked on my heals, afraid of the consequences of moving. I told my father I didn’t care what the law said or what Sally got when he dropped dead that the house was my mother’s and I didn’t want to hear anything else out loud. Whether she said it again, I am not certain, because all I could imagine was grisly and not fit to write or think or hear and all I could do was focus on not moving and staying on my heels. My father told me something about his will and everything going to me, Sean and Kevin and he wanted to know if I wanted to see it. I told him no and I didn’t. If he said it, it is true but he fails to understand that most men die before their wives and then I would have no rights to what my mother worked all her life for. Though we weren’t on the poverty line, there were times when we hovered just above in that awful place where just make a bit too much to get any help and my mother spent a good deal of her time paying her other husband’s child support payments. I never got to live in the suburbs. I never even got to live in a neighborhood. Though I don’t envy Sean for it, a swimming pool or private school or a child support payment might have made an incredible difference for me. It also seems to me that Sally is living my mother’s dream, in my mother’s dream house. So why is it that she is so prickled by the notion that my mom could keep one house in name only– isn’t hers enough – or does she need everything? How dare her be offended.
She has no idea, no idea what kind of lobbying I have done on her behalf.



The day she walked out of mama’s house I could have turned my shoulder and never spoken a word to her. But – MY MOTHER – asked me – ABOVE ALL THINGS PUT YOUR DADDY FIRST- so I didn’t do or say what I wanted to. I was very conflicted because part of me thought that my mother would have me do something quite different.

A real gift would be to know something about the Crocker family or to have them know something about me. I thought Sally might one day be able to share information with me and Finley and Riley. Dad doesn’t share many stories; he doesn’t talk [naturally] openly about his past like Uncle Fred.
I am disgusted that what was my attempt at an apology and explanation went so awry. I will not however stand in the presence of someone being so openly disrespectful of my mother’s memory or her belonging. I’d rather see it at the bottom of the lake then laid claim to by blasphemous ingrate that doesn’t know when to keep her mouth shut and accept an apology – had she done that I would have gotten to point where I said “if it bother’s you so much I just wont go back.”

pink and green aggitation act

Agitation – stir, rouse, move – cause to act.

If I have caused you to hate me I don’t mind. If I have caused you to be disgusted I don’t mind. I have caused you to be unsettled I don’t mind. If I have made you dislike me I don’t mind. If you never want to see me again I don’t mind because it means I have agitated you enough that you are now in such a state – and for whatever reason and for whatever purpose I caused it. I made you do something. I like to make people do things. Especially things they thought they wouldn’t or couldn’t ever do. I am great at that. A very smart man once told me that my true gift was the mastery of simple chaos. Making a hurricane appear in a soup-bowl and then riding the surfboarder’s lip of that storm while everyone else tries to have Sunday lunch.

Awaken – know that I do what I want in a perpetual whirl of whiz bang boom and then cool deflate float swirl and if I bump into you and you are roused or bumbled into action by me then welcome into my world for a moment. However please understand that because I told you I love you does not mean that I love you anymore than in thirty second increments, that would be a lie, you see. I do really mean it, and deeply for thirty seconds. I fall in love with bark on the trees and the particular way a stain on bus boy’s apron looks like a Dali face propped up on stilts. But telling you, any of you, anything about love or hate or devastation or sadness is really silly. How could anyone tell anyone how they feel? I can not use black shapes on a piece of paper to make you imagine some of the things I have felt and felt compelled to do to people and to do for people. Words are just little shapes that make you think of sounds in your mind and how could I make those things make you feel what counting a man’s freckles from across a conference table in full view of coworker’s, or murderous rage so rampant that you spill you own blood in fury over a confused look, how could these little words make your hands tremble or your mouth water or your heart pound? I can not make you smell the copper film of lobster bubbles evaporating into nothing the way it always does after lobster flavored bubbles melt in your mouth, kissed away by the man satisfied by the favor of it all. Words are stupid. I am stupid with them. I wish I could upload selected images, good ones, make movies of good moments. A man in a blue suit in July. Standing under this twisted oak tree. Being out to sea on the deck, rigged for dark, no moon. Having a heavy baby sleep on my chest. Making plans.

I dreamed of what love was every day of my life and every few days I find it. Mostly in my house or around my house in some small kindness; or some exhaustive effort of friendship the likes of which I hear few stories to rival. My best friend is not an anchor to which the ship is tied to, he is not a stanchion on the pier holding the anchor – if I had to make one dumb inadequate description of a simple symbol of what my best friend is. It is this. He is the very earth, sand, salt and water that holds the pier in place for the fleet to come home. He is the shore that my hurricane breaks against. He is the dry earth that soaks me up and the wet sea that washes me off. He is the salt that knows the salillum in me. He is the cold hard ground with bits of mica I must bare down and see myself in. Really see the gritty pieces of myself. The only real mirror. All of my other mirrors, all my other friends held at odd angles, odd times, odd wonders, off but incredible. You are held at whispers away, lips close, arms length or half a world away; some I pull to and some I push hard away. But he is the true mirror. My best friend. John Patrick Stansfield - He can tell me no, he can tell me to be still, he can tell me to be quiet, he can tell me. Only he can tell me anything. Everyone else asks. Or doesn’t ask.

I have sent odd packages to my friends over the years. In twenty years there have been green apples wrapped with silver string, atomic fire balls, nine phone books and a compass, a rubber chicken, all manner of liquor & beer, various books – Jitterbug Perfume went out to few that I really cared about.

In return I received some strange things from my friends. I received the ugliest flower arrangement ever delivered, black & red flowers with rotten beets. I laughed and cried at the same time – the quarterdeck watchstander wanted to know if I wanted to call security. When I said no and kept the smelly thing it solidified my position as the craziest sailor on the base. I arrived at work one morning to find approximately five thousand atomic fire balls littering the parking lot entry door. I was both so touched with love and devastated with the prospect of loss of contact that I stumbled at the door and had to feign tripping as a coworker was coming out the door. I picked up one of the candies and rolled it as if it were a magic token to the quiet day I got to spend with litterer. He taught me patience and gave me another opportunity to demonstrate loyalty. You all get cards and flowers. I get secret messages from friends in secret languages. Isn’t the inside joke always the funniest?

So if I have made you, anything. If I have made you anything you didn’t want to be – I will not say I am sorry, I can only say I’d probably do it all over again. Knowing what I know now, coming upon my birthday in a few weeks I’d probably have done bigger, scarier, faster, louder, nicer, funnier, more outrageous stuff way earlier in my life. I would have stolen all the cool things I’ve heard from your lives and done them at fifteen. I love the idea of running onto a public transportation vehicle and discharging a fire extinguisher! I still might do that. Maybe for my birthday? That was just one of the cool things all of you have done. I would love to list my friends but they are too many, too far, and too wide. Some come and go. Some are gone forever. Salute. I have loved you all in our own way. You know. I know. Look out world I started telling my girls all your stories for bedtime stories. Training. Grooming for the ultimate as controlled as possible chaos filled existence, ready at a moment’s notice to stop what their doing and really live and to certainly shoot you or cut your throat if stepped within a frog’s hair of out-of-bounds. My twelve year old daughter can drive my six speed, shoot my nine millimeter, prepare napalm with orange juice, survey a target a close range, long range, knock on your door and ask you to buy cookies. She is anonymous. She is a child. She doesn’t mind pulling the trigger from behind the sites. She is not yet ready with a knife. We are working. Have you been rude to a stranger lately? Have you ever wondered how a person happened into the life of the mentally ill? Have you ever wondered how a person ended up on the news? Being rude usually has a good deal to do with it. Manners are the key to civilization. I know this to be true.