Prolifically Raw: Monday: Fresh Writing

Monday, September 13, 2010

Monday: Fresh Writing

Presented live at Powell's on Hawthorn in Portland, Oregon, on Sunday, 9/12/10.

Thanks to all who turned out.

The original essay is contained in the collection of essays by Hawthorne Lit. Arts, September 11: West Coast Writers Approach Ground Zero.

The View of 9/11 From Holland

I walked the uneven stones of a cobbled lane back then. Underfoot the ground was high and low and I was careful in my sensible black loafers but I was also careless enough to be multitasking—that is eating fries (called frittes) from a cone of white paper rolled tight. Greasy, salty and savory soft but also crunchy—each finger sized potato was like a lover on my tongue and savored with sounds of pleasure I couldn’t contain.

It was Amsterdam, the fall of 2001 and I was five months into gestating my second child. Obscenely pregnant. It looked as if I had stuffed an August watermelon under my top.

People would stop me on the street to ask if was about to have my child, or perhaps they were twins. One man even offered directions to the nearest hospital. Just in case.

"No!" I'd say. “I have four months to go.”

I never felt offended. It wasn’t their fault. It was me. I was just happy and big and celebrating all the time—French fries, Ruben sandwiches dripping with cheese, malted milkshakes—chocolate. I was a mountain of a mother. I was as big as a continent.

To be a woman, savoring the pleasures of the body in its ultimate creative expression wasn't something I was going to deny or edit or even worry about. Why? I was alive and I was making a baby—my own baby. A daughter.

I had been a daughter myself and had been relinquished at birth. Relinquished is what they call babies like I had been—the secret babies, the ones gestated in shame, the ones who were given away in the hush of the night. My mother had been too young, they said, it was a damn shame she went bad like that, the only solution was to get rid of the baby and forget the whole thing.

But you don’t forget making a baby and nine months of secrecy and shame and you sure don’t forget the mother who gives you life—no matter what they tell you—it’s a damn lie.

So I was keeping my daughter. I was giving her a name she could count on—Josephine Catherine.

Nearly done with my cone of frittes, I found myself at the canal that cut through the city and I walked along the edge of the muddy water as I savored my treat and swam in plans for Josephine and me.

~

The bell rang as I opened the door to the small flower shop. The ding ding ding announced a customer had arrived. As the door swung closed at my back, I saw a man sitting high on his bicycle seat. He pedaled over a stone bridge where I had just been. His bike was painted black, like so many Dutch cycles I had see.

As the door closed, I wadded the empty paper cone and shoved it into the carpetbagger purse that crisscrossed my body and fell at my hip. I licked the salt from my fingers while I browsed brilliant pinks, blood reds, explosive yellows, sea shell corals, royal purples and creamy creams –roses, lilies, freesia, iris, tulips—everywhere tulips despite it being fall. The sweet smell invited me to close my eyes and just stand in the one sense—absorbing it as if there would be no other smell but that of flowers.

The sound of a television poured from the back of the shop, there was some “who-ha” of bad news gushing forth. I recognized the urgent sound of a reporter and the natural sounds that so often goes with live broadcasts. Around the world, it’s all the same, bad news translates into a choppy mess because everyone is in hurry when the shit hits the fan. Being in a hurry is the same as being scared. That’s why it scares people to watch the news. It’s all rush, rush, rush. News footage is never slick--like a commercial or a movie.

After working several years as a news reporter—I had turned my back on the investigation of all that bad news. I had left the worry and the hurry and the fear machine that sold you insurance during commercial breaks. It was another lie I didn’t believe.

The shopkeeper approached and was a small framed elderly man, thin and light on his feet, not unlike a dancer. He moved on his toes and did a two step forward followed by a one step back. He had that look on his face and I was sure his first words would be, “are you about to have that baby or it is twins?”

Instead he asked, “Are you an American?” His English was bent by his accent but not much.

“Yes,” I said but my yes came with reluctance.

Being American wasn’t who I was; it was a place where I got my mail.

Perhaps my sense of dislocation came from the circumstances of my own birth. I had been foisted into the arms of so called more worthy parents where nothing felt right and the smells, sounds, flavors and sights were unrecognizable and even frightening. Being an adopted baby was losing everything—land, home, memories. Mother. I was a refugee from the second I was born.

Or perhaps it was deeper than that. Let’s face it, being an American meant I hailed—somewhere in my line—from people who had swindled this land and committed mass genocide.

Even before I was born and swiped from my 17-year-old mother, I was a trespasser who had no right—a criminal.

The flower shop owner bounced on his toes and glanced at the back of his store. It was as if he was confirming, to someone I couldn’t see, that yes, here she was “an American.” He seemed worried and even afraid to say more and yet he also had a glint of urgency in his eyes. It was a metallic shine where the iris met the white. I could taste something important was about to come out of his mouth. The old reporter in me went on alert.

“Your country,” he said. “You have been attacked.” He said more about the Pentagon being gone and the twin towers leveled and all the airports closed around the nation.

And then we just stood there—strangers. The TV sounds kept coming from the back of the store and I shook my head like I didn’t get it. He might of said, “the ostrich will fly tonight,” or “cheese makes good furniture.”

Incomprehensible.

I wasn’t scared.
I wasn’t worried.
I didn’t even believe him.
I laughed like that was a good one—the U.S.—attacked!

He reached out as if to touch me and then he dropped his arm to his side. His feet finally hit the ground from heel to toe. Flat feet in old shoes. Brown loafers that looked well worn. The man was not laughing and he had a very gentle way. He seemed to be sorry to have to tell me the news. His eyes were watery around the edges. He knew about tragedy. That was clear.

We could have sat down, he and I, there on the canal and we could have taken a very deep breath—two people in the world—who seemed so different but weren’t different at all.

We could have shared a cone of frittes and stories of other disasters like the Nazi occupation of Holland and how the soldiers stole Dutch bikes in order to get around. That kind of thievery didn’t sit well with the Dutch, he’d tell me with a laugh. Maybe he would also share the story of how he hid Jewish children in his basement until the Nazi’s caught him and hauled him away to a camp—Dakau. He’d say it was okay to serve some time, it was worth it because the kids got away. He’d confess that he had helped more than one hundred escape before the German’s arrived.

And then I’d tell him about the 1.5 million American woman, during my time and before, who were forced to give up their babies under Nazi like conditions where they were stripped of their legal rights, lied to, shamed and shunned as if they had committed murder by having intercourse. I’d say these women, so many of them, didn’t know their own children even today. It was a big ugly secret in the land of so-called plenty.

We’d shake our heads over the state of human affairs, the way people treated each other shore to shore, no matter what language was spoken. We’d talk about courage and perseverance and how each of us had survived our tragedies to be better people—somehow—at least that is what we told ourselves to get through the darkest nights.

I’d ask him about his grandchildren and if they knew the story of his past and he’d show me photos of golden haired little ones with clean faces and bows in their hair. He’d shake his head. “No, I don’t like to burden them,” he’d say. “They are free now. It’s a better world than I knew.”

And then we’d look from each other and over to the TV and we’d wonder if it was true. Was it a better world or was it more of the same?

~

That conversation did not happen. Even though that present moment was all either of us had, I was a young woman and not yet wise to that truth. Instead I went with the flower shop owner, to the back of the store and did what I never did. I watched the news and absorbed the challenge of this generation.
I did not speak.
I didn’t know what to say.
What could be said?

Even now, nine years later, what can be said about vast tragedy that shoves us outside the day to day and presses us the edge of being?

I don’t have fancy words that make sense and if I did, I’d tell you not believe. I don’t trust confidence or bravado in the face of what cannot or should not be spoken.

I do know that everyone has something—some terrible woe that fills a backpack or a semi truck or even a aircraft carrier—and that, in the darkest hour, those woes have the power to shape the soul to be different than it was before.

Better? I don’t know.
Different is all I can say.

I also know that the rock becomes a crystal with enough heat and pressure.
I know lungs evolved from gills.
I know that feathers lifted lizards off the ground and that we call those winged creatures by the name “bird.”
I know my cells and your cells contain the dust of the universe—a million exploding stars.

I know my daughter was born two weeks past her due date, nearly ten pounds of sweet rolling flesh, who—that first night—slept all the way through and grows now to be a sweet and tender child who spins fast in her world of chocolate chip cookie sales, rainbow striped knee highs, friends named Marbella, Grace, Belle and Co Co—and me—her mother who loves her and believes that the sun sets wherever she lands.

I know I searched for and finally find that mother who gave me away and have sat down with her, along a lazy river to share a plate of something delicious to eat. We’ve talked about her tragedy and my own and dark nights and how we’ve each gotten through to the light of the next day.

I do know that I named my daughter after my mother—even though I didn’t know her name—calling her Josephine Catherine like I had planned that day in Holland eating those frittes. How did I know my mother—that stranger—was named Catherine and yet how did I ever believe I could forget?

We just don’t know—in this life. We don’t know what we know and what we don’t know. Life is a falling tower of confusion and a bundle of choppy lies raced into the airways to fill us with fear and it’s hot French fries covered with salt and served in a paper cone, it’s a riot of rainbow flowers at the corner store, it’s old men with pictures of grandchildren in their pockets. Life is a black bike stolen by a Nazi, children hurried to safety, a muddy canal and uneven stones that pave the way under our feet.