March 21, 2007

• Life and Other Diseases

  I've been reading again.  Annie Dillard this time.  Every page I think, WOW this is GREAT I want to share it, but before I call my sister or my best friend or drag one of the kids over to listen "Oh Mom" my eye slides to the next page and there you have it. 

  I'm reading this book strangely.  I don't read this way but I'm jumping around, I'm reading pages backward, and I'm just experiencing the words in different and more playful ways than I usually allow myself as a reader. 

  I'm gonna just share one little passage and then I'll move on.  I am opening the book at random ... to page 79 ...

  At The Church of The Nativity in Bethlehem ...

     A fourteen-pointed silver star, two feet in diameter, covered a raised bit of marble floor at the cave wall.  This silver star was the x that marked the spot: here just here, the infant got born.  Two thousand years of Christianity began here, where God emptied himself into man.... here, now, the burning oils smelled heavy.  It must have struck many people that we were competing with the lamps for oxygen.

     In the center of the silver star was a circular hole.  That was the bull's eye.  God's quondam target.

     Crouching people leaned forward to wipe their fingers across the hole's flat bottom.  When it was my turn, I knelt, bent under a satin fringe drape, reached across half the silver star, and touched its hole.  I could feel some sort of soft wax in it.  The hole was a quarter inch deep and six inches across, like a wide petri dish.  I have never read any theologian who claims that God is particularly interested in religion anyway.

     Any patch of ground anywhere smacks more of God's presence on earth, to me, than did this marble grotto.  The ugliness of the blunt bumpy silver star impressed me.  The bathetic pomp of the heavy, tasseled brocades, the marble, the censors hanging from chains, the embroidered aspergillium, the crosiers, the ornate lamps -- some human's idea of elegance -- bespoke grand comedy, too that God put up with it.  And why should he not?  Things here on earth get a whole lot worse than bad taste.     __ Annie Dillard, For the Time Being

   

  Maybe you'd like to read something that I've written?  I've been told by different people that this is either wonderful or completely baffling.  So what do you think?

   

  Cinderella’s Laces

  They cut the strings off your robe, that’s the first thing you need to know if you’re gonna have a breakdown.  You know, those little satin strings on the inside of your robe where you tie one side to the other side so you don’t accidentally expose yourself?  They cut ‘em off.    

              I’m gonna put it on eBay, you know?

              No, not the strings.  I’m gonna write one of those little books, you know, like a pamphlet except it’s an electronic file. It’ll be all about how to pack for your breakdown.  That’s information a woman really needs to know. 

              I know this woman, can’t even spell.  But she wrote this thing about how to win beauty pageants and made like a thousand dollars.  That’s not bad. 

  I could write; I have a degree.  You don’t have to print nothing either, from eBay you just send the buyer a file and zip, you’re done.  Yeah, that’s the way.  No overhead. 

              Who me?  Yeah, I always have ideas. 

  I don’t guess you have a cigarette, do you?  They won’t let you go outside unless it’s for a smoke break. 

  That’s the second thing to put in the paper.  Start smoking.  You need a pre-breakdown checklist because once the breakdown starts things get a little busy and you might not have time to start smoking.

  Of course I know why I’m here.  You start chewing pills like you’re sampling jelly beans, you get a one way ticket to the crazy house.  My room isn’t like they show on TV.  I thought it would be white walls, you know, something cool and antiseptic; unprovocative.

  Hell, yeah, I find that damn sea foam provocative.  That’s not a color found in nature, no matter what they call it. 

  Why does there have to be a why?  Look, I went a little crazy, I ate some pills.  They pumped my stomach and now I’m here.  But I’m not gonna do it again, and I don’t see a point in talking about it.  You don’t know me, I don’t know you, and we’re not fixin to sit down with daiquiris, so I don’t see why we gotta act like we’re friends. 

  The outside?  Well, I miss my kids. 

  One of each. My boy, he’s twelve now.  The girls are starting to notice him. 

  My little girl, I keep seeing her face.  She’s seven and she was there when it all went down.  She was scared. 

  I saw her and it didn’t mean anything to me.  I was crying, and Mama was calling the ambulance, and there was all this noise and she was watching.  I have to talk to her.  I may not have to tell you, but sooner or later, I know I’ll have to tell her what happened to her Mama.  I just wonder how she’ll look at me then. 

  That’s something else for the paper.  Think about who you’re gonna have to talk to later.  How many points is that so far?  I need to take the notes so I don’t forget what to write.

  My Mama?  She tells me things like, “It could be a lot worse; he doesn’t hit you; better to just keep it all in.”  I don’t know, maybe that works for other women.  Maybe that’s worked for all the other women in my family all the way back to freakin’ Eve in the Garden, you know?  But it don’t work for me any more.

  You sure you don’t have a cigarette?

  It’s been inside me so long, I’m bloated and rubbery.  I don’t know my own shape.  Maybe I don’t even have a shape.  I don’t look in mirrors.  Maybe I look different after every person I talk to.  You know, some people press and some people pull and it’s a wonder that the next person in line recognizes me cause everyone shapes me different.  

  Yeah, I saw the poster on your wall right when I came in.  I notice things.  I guess Virginia wrote something other than the letter about Santa Claus.

  It was a joke, I know who Virginia Woolf was.  I read it in college, “A Room of One’s Own,” something like that.  Right?  She saw how it was, and I remember how she imagined it would be a hundred years later, but it hasn’t changed as much as everyone tells us. 

  So I have my own room now, anyway. 

  Women are supposed to have come such a long way.  We do it all, ‘bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan …’

  Yeah, well, it’s a good idea.  But, you know?  It’s like that scene in Cinderella when she comes downstairs and the stepmother says, “of course you may go to the ball.”  And you know it’s gonna be bad. 

  She’s not going to the ball because first she has to perform these impossible tasks.  And you know, even when she gets ‘em done, she still ain’t going to the ball.  It don’t work that way. 

  Women are the worst.  No man ever said to me, “well, of course you knew what it would be like before you had those kids.”  Women don’t give each other a break. 

  My boss, she’s a woman.  Christine.  Christine asks me to stay late and finish up the paperwork.  Christine tells me how important it is for me to be a team player.  But my son plays baseball, and if I leave early enough to take him to a game, Christine talks with me about my priorities. 

  I’m tired.  I’m tired of working and working and smiling when she hands me that paycheck and I know that it’s less than Joe is making.  His desk is right next to mine; I’ve been there three years longer; he makes more money. 

  I enter the numbers.  You’d think that maybe since Christine has me doing payroll, she’d think about a little thing like the fact that I’m gonna know that she pays him more, but she does not care what I think.  I think if Christine starts seeing it through my eyes, she has to realize that it could have been her in my shoes.  But, if she can say it was all me, that I made bad decisions then she feels safe.

  David?  He’s all right, I guess.  Like Mama says, he doesn’t beat me or anything.  He makes more money than me, too.  I have a Bachelor’s in Accounting, he works in a factory, and he makes more money.  But it’s not about money between us, with us it’s all about time. 

  He goes fishing, and hunting.  He takes our son to the ballgame, but if I say I want to do something, he makes a big deal about how I owe him for the babysitting.  I owe him?  Like they aren’t his kids, too?

  Yeah, I’d like to do something different with my life.  I have ideas.  But there’s this box all around me.  Everyone has something they want from me.  By the time they all get what they want, there’s nothing left.  And every year, the box gets a little smaller and there’s no room to do anything except what someone else expects you to do for them.  You’re a bad selfish person if you do anything just for yourself.  I know.  I’m bad and selfish. 

  One day you come home and your husband bought a new truck.  Didn’t talk to you, didn’t ask about the budget or the finances.  Just bought it.  And he says to you, “Well, you work in a bank, you’ll figure out the payments.”  And it’s too much.  It’s so much that all you can think about are those pills in your Mama’s cabinet that make her feel so happy.  And maybe, if you take enough of ‘em, you won’t ever feel bad again.

  You don’t think about anybody else.  You just think about what you want, and how more than anything you want it to all go away.

  Maybe it’ll be easier now ‘cause everyone knows about this.  That’s the up side to the breakdown.  No one can expect me to fix anything, ‘cause I’m broke. 

  I feel better now.  I should have got broke a long time ago.

  You know, when they take your things and make sure you don’t have anything you can use to hurt yourself with, they take your shoe laces, too.  Like I’m gonna what, hang myself with shoe laces?  Even if I could figure out how to tie the things around my neck, what would I hang from?  There’s nothing in that room to attach ‘em to.

  I know.  Not cause I want to hang.  Gross.  But once they took the laces, it made me think.  So I looked.

  I found out they burnt ‘em. 

  Yeah, they burnt my shoe laces, nobody else’s, just mine.  They told me they could smell foot odor on ‘em even when they were locked away in the cabinet.  So they took ‘em out and burnt ‘em.  I got no strings on my robe.  No laces on my shoes. 

  I can’t hurt myself, anymore. 

  Is our time up?  We haven’t talked about anything important anyway. 

   

             

   

   

  • 6:20 pm
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