Music and Cats

I’ve been trying for several months to write about my experience of Paul’s first battle with cancer: how it felt to be twenty-one and madly in love with a man who appeared to be dying; how my family history and psychological makeup affected my reaction to his illness; how I failed to find the psychological help that I needed, and was failed by those whose help I sought; how my pain and fear eventually led me to run, both emotionally and physically, from the one person in the world to whom I felt the closest.

I begin by writing about memories that are clear - people, places, events and sensations that I’ve revisited many times. As I venture past the boundaries of these well-worn memories, I run into huge, dark voids where nothing is clear. There is nothing, save for the awareness that horrible things happened. I resort to questioning Paul, attempting to mine his memories of those times as a path to my own. His memories are as fragmented as mine, have just as many dead ends.

Driving down the east side of the hill where I live, I am stopped by the flagman at a construction site. I sit impatiently for a moment, tapping my fingertips against the steering wheel, then turn to watch the earthwork. Yellow John Deere excavators crawl across the broken ground, scooping up massive shovels full of damp black soil, which they empty into waiting dump trucks. As the dirt tumbles into the truck, I catch glimpses of stone. Some are smooth, as if polished over years by a river; other are ragged chunks, shorn perhaps from a faraway mountain by the terrible weight and movement of a glacier. When the flagman waves me on, I drive slowly past the dump truck, watching for the next shovel of dirt to tip, waiting to see more exposed stones.

I arrive at my therapist’s office on the edge of the Mercer Slough, a wetland tributary to Lake Washington. The lake level has been high, so parts of the parking lot are flooded. I find a dry parking space, and run up the steps into the building.

I’ve been seeing Dr. F for several months. He has helped me climb out of the well of depression into which I tumbled following Paul’s recent cancer surgery. I look forward to the hours that I spend with this slight, silver-haired man in his quiet corner office. Settling into the soft brown leather chair by the windows, I tell him about the difficulties that I’m having with my writing, particularly with my memory.

“When you try to write, you’re coming up against your repression,” he says. He knows that I have a degree in psychology, and am no stranger to this concept. “Your mind is protecting you from memories of an extremely painful time in your life, when you thought Paul was dying.”

“I know I’m repressing,” I sigh. “I just don’t know how to get past it.”

“It’s normal for the mind to repress painful memories.” He sips his tea and continues. “When a memory is repressed only in the conscious mind, the subconscious memory can wreak havoc in your life. However, when a memory is completely repressed, it doesn’t tend to cause problems.”

“I want to write about that time. I want to understand what happened.” The frustration I’ve been feeling comes tumbling out. “If I can’t remember, how can I understand? How can I write? I want to know what’s different now - how I’m different, how my relationship with Paul is different.”

“If you really want access to those memories, we can work on them,” he says carefully. “But, if your mind lets you become conscious of the memories that you now recognize only as voids, you’ll have to deal with all the feelings that those memories evoke. You have to be prepared for how painful that process may be.”

This stops me short. I pause for a moment, thinking about the past year. “Are you suggesting that I not go looking for more pain right now? That I’m dealing with enough already? That ‘because I want to write about it’ isn’t a good enough reason - at least for now?”

He smiles slightly. “Did I say that?”

I smile back at him. The here-and-now of my life holds sufficient challenges. The past will wait, will still be there when and if I’m ready to go digging.

At the end of our hour, I walk out into a beautiful afternoon. Water stands, still and dark, over half of the parking lot. A female Mallard paddles slowly in the middle of the ersatz pond, quacking softly. Eight fuzzy gold and brown ducklings form a shifting pattern around her, their shrill voices responding to her call.

I stand for a minute, watching the duck family. Turning toward my car, I notice a long, narrow crack in the asphalt paving, running twenty feet along the edge of the water, only inches from my feet. The crack had not been here the previous week. As I watch, bubbles form along the crack and burst. The pavement has been damaged by the weight of the water. I imagine that, when the water recedes, workers will dig up this area of paving, repair the subsurface damage, and roll on fresh asphalt. If they are skilled, there will be no trace of the repair.

Tonight was the reading for the students in the memoir writing classes that I just finished at the UW Extension Writers Program. For the reading, I reworked a piece that I wrote early in the year. Before taking this class, I had trouble writing multiple drafts. My teacher, Laura Kalpakian, and my classmates have, through their regular critiques of my work, helped me learn about that part of the writing process. Here’s the piece that I read this evening:
——————————————————————————————-
When Paul and I married seven years ago, neither of us knew this sad truth: I can’t make a decent latte. Early in our marriage, Paul demonstrated, more than once, the process of transforming dark- roasted coffee beans and cold milk into a steaming, foamy, caffeinated treat. Standing by my side before the black and chrome contraption, he patiently guided me through the process of grinding, filling, tamping, steaming and pouring. The lessons did not take. Oh, I made a latte or two, but my lattes hissed and spit out of the espresso machine either too weak or too bitter. The barista who served me such a latte would not have been tipped.

One morning, when I requested Paul’s assistance with the espresso maker yet again, he exclaimed in frustration, “I don’t understand why you can’?t do this. You’?re good with machines… hell, you understand how most things work without reading the instructions. Do you have some sort of a brain injury?” This question, from the man whose pet name for me is Brains, struck me as absurdly funny. I burst out laughing, and Paul joined me. We stood in our kitchen, hugging each other, giggling.

My supposed ‘brain injury’ became a recurring joke. Paul would marvel that my injury had impaired only my ability to tamp grounds and steam milk. I would nod in agreement, and comment that the workings of the human brain are not fully understood by modern science.

Once my condition had been identified, Paul shouldered barista duty at our house. Each morning he would bring me a latte in bed. One of the small daily pleasures of my life was waking to the sound of my husband walking into our bedroom, singing this short verse:

Coffee drink delivery service
Coffee drink, if you are nervous
About how you’re going to wake.
Have yourself a coffee break.

In January of 2004, Paul was diagnosed with an oral cancer at the base of his tongue. The surgery to remove the tumor would be long and dangerous, the lasting effects on his speech and swallowing uncertain. A few days before surgery, Paul expressed concern about my morning lattes. “You won’t have coffee drink delivery while I’m in the hospital. What will you do? How will you wake up?” While his tone was light, I heard the dark thoughts and real questions beneath the surface of his words: How are you holding up? I’?m sorry I’?m putting you through this. Are you going to be OK?

I could answer the surface question easily. Finding coffee in Seattle is simple. The espresso bar in the hospital lobby could meet my needs while Paul was hospitalized. We have five coffee shops within as many blocks of our house. I would not suffer from lack of coffee.

I had no answers, simple or otherwise, for the unspoken questions. Too many unknowns waited on the other side of Paul’s surgery. Would he survive the surgery, and the cancer, or would I lose him? What toll would his illness and treatment take on him, and on our relationship? I believed that I was coping well, but I knew that might change. I didn’?t know whether I would be OK.

Several weeks after Paul’s surgery, I woke, feeling cold, in our still-dark bedroom. Pulling the down comforter up to my ears, I turned to snuggle up to Paul. The hand I extended landed not across his shoulder, but on soft, warm fur. In an instant, I went from half asleep to worried. Why was Paul up so early? He had been out of bed long enough that our cats had claimed the warm spot against his pillow. Was he feeling ill?

I was about to call out his name when I heard footsteps on the stairs, and caught a whiff of coffee. Relaxing under the comforter’?s warmth, I waited. Paul’s singing wasn’t elegant that morning, but it brought tears to my eyes. The latte was the best I’ve ever tasted, the love with which it was made almost visible in its foamy top.

If you were to scroll down to near the bottom of the May author events page at the University of Washington Bookstore’s web site, you’d see this:

Tuesday ? May 31 ? 7pm
Laura Kalpakian’s Memoir Class Reading
University District Store
Tuesday is the first night of Laura Kalpakian’s UW Extension Memoir class student readings. Come see what they’ve been up to all semester.

The listing has gotten several things wrong. Of course I’ll tell you what they are; otherwise I’ll be bothered by them. It’s the only night of our class readings. Whatever we’ve been “up to,” it has been all year. UW doesn’t have semesters; it has quarters… and this is our third one.

So what’s this all about? As the “final project” for our certificate program, my classmates and I will be reading 4-5 minute excerpts from our work for anyone who wants to come and listen.

My classmates’ memoir topics vary considerably. A is writing about working with Washington’s first openly gay state legislator, B about her lovely, loving family, and her journey to become a female, African-American doctor, C about her Peace Corps experience in Mongolia, D about post-traumatic stress… and those are only four of nineteen. The writing styles vary considerably, but through the course of the year, each person has come to “sound” on paper more and more the way that they sound when speaking; everyone’s voice is becoming much more clear.

I’ve been puzzling over what to read at this event. A 4-5 minute reading is about 1 manuscript page, 12 point, single spaced. Most everything that I’ve written for the class has been much longer than that, and I’m not sure how to edit specifically for this reading. We’re going to talk about that very thing at next week’s class; I hope to have a better idea about this a week from now.

If you’re going to be in Seattle on May 31, and don’t have any plans for the evening, come on over to the UW Bookstore. It should be an interesting evening.

I did not write the “Where I’m From” below, but there is much there with which I am intimately familiar. The woman who wrote this has known me her entire life; I have known her for all but 12 1/2 months of mine. She is as much a part of where I’m from as are all of the people and places about whom and which I wrote last week. That she did not figure in my poem, nor I in hers, may be because each of us was digging into our early lives, and our early relationship was both too close and not close enough. That she was the first person with whom I wanted to share my poem is an indication of how our relationship has grown and matured.

Last week I emailed the “Where I’m From” exercise to my sister, Melanie. This morning, she emailed me hers… then three revisions in quick succession. (We are from perfectionism.) Then we spent a while (Texan for longer than my lunch hour) on the phone talking about the process, and our childhoods, and writing additional poems that would start after childhood (Where I’m From leaves home), and whether or not to send this exercise to all of our relatives. We both want to know what our one living grandmother (Verda, who raised my father to be a good husband rather than a good son), and our parents, aunts and uncles, would write about where they are from.

Melanie sent me a fourth revision and a fifth after I posted this; I will revise until she is done.

Where I’m From
by Melanie

I am from warm towels,
from Crayola and the kitchen table.
I am from skylights, terrazzo and sliding glass doors,
spare, modern, my face distorted in gleaming chrome.
I am from the buttercups and onion flowers
and emerald clover cool beneath my naked feet.
I am from blueprints and bread,
from Verda and Lamar
and the Scotts that may have been royal
if only in southwest Arkansas.
I am from righteous indignation
and the virtue of being bright.
From mind your manners
and I love you muchissimo.
I am from Jesus loves me
and good girls don�t.
I�m from Houston swelter and Little River stones,
Black-eyed peas and gingersnaps
and pecans shelled during Sunday football games.
From the gas mask that delivered my grandfather
to the elves that washed Bubba�s dishes at night,
and momma tracing my face with her fingertips
before she turned out the light.
I am from the photographs,
the crimson dress in the closet
that whisper the family secret
and my inheritance,
a legacy of matriarchs.

Last May, Melanie started a mommy blog. She writes primarily as a record for her sons, Max and Reed (aka Boo). She writes very well. Many times during the past 10 months, her stories have made me laugh out loud on days when I had little other reason to laugh. Mr. Max and Boo has been tucked discreetly in my sidebar since Music and Cats began. It now shares pride of place with Paul vs. the Squamous Monster, the story of my husband Paul’s second battle with cancer, and Ratiocination, Paul’s political blog. By blood and by choice, these are my people. They are where I’m from now.

A couple of days ago, Melinama at Pratie Place wrote about a lovely poetry exercise based on George Ella Lyon’s poem Where I’m From. The exercise was originally from this post at Fragments from Floyd; it includes directions for the exercise, as well as a template of sorts to aid the process. Here are my first thoughts:

Where I’m From

I am from picture books. I am from Fiestaware and cut glass salt cellars. I am from tape measure, T-square and sawdust.

I am from the mid-century modernism of white walls, cool terrazzo floors, and expanses of glass to which small green tree frogs clung on summer mornings. From Bertoia and Knoll, and the smooth black leather of an Eames lounge chair.

I am from fast-moving thunderstorms, and fireflies at dusk above a field of daylilies.

I am from a dictionary open on the table and the first gray hair by eighteen, from Reed and Roberta, now bridge partners forever, and from Ettric, a Viking who made Scotland home.

I am from a passion for education and not talking about feelings. From don’t let the cool air out, and you can do anything you put your mind to.

I am from lace dyed with tea for the collar of a small handsewn dress, and a hand-me-down violin.

I am from dour, predestined Presbyterians, mellowed over time and by the times, singing let there be peace on earth, arms entwined. From Jesus loves the little children and we exist to let others know they matter to God by showing them that they matter to us.

I’m from the steamy Texas Gulf coast and the stormy sea between Ulster and Scotland, from cornbread dressing, homegrown tomatoes and jars of homemade bread-and-butter pickles on pantry shelves.

I am from the man who gathered medicinal plants in the east Texas piney woods as his mother had taught him, the woman who believed in raising a boy to be a good husband rather than a good son, and the boy who decided to become an architect when he learned what the word meant.

In the top drawer of my parents’ sideboard are envelopes and albums filled with photos. The star sapphire ring on my finger, a gift across three generations, is older than any of them.

I don’t know that I’m quite finished with this one yet… it may change over the next few days. Would anyone else care to play?