Upon Visiting the Old House

My tears were not a cry, but a song

The song of today devouring yesterday –

Equal parts lamentation

And celebration.

I cried because I could again

Sense the pulse of my first kiss

Taste icicles plucked from the patio roof

See the snowman stand sentinel

Beyond my gossamer curtains

Watch my dreams bounce playfully

Atop bright allium balls

Along the garden, stopping now and then

To chase hummingbirds among the lilies

Of the valley of my youth

Start a fried chicken food fight, fling

Mashed potatoes on the freckled face

Of my first friend

Prick our thumbs with rose thorns

Blood sisters

Smile hello all summer to so many

Red cheeks

Gapped teeth

And sun-peeled

Shoulders

Comrades in walnut wars

And hopscotch battles

I swore I’d never forget

(But did)

I cried because I missed my tomboy knees and caveman soles –

I missed my soul –

There is no childhood

Like a barefoot one.

Spring Cleaning

Yes, I have put away childish things,

But haphazardly, hastily,

As if preparing for houseguests,

Stuffing old fears and tears in drawers,

Monsters shoved back under the bed,

And wayward wants inside my head,

So that my life now resembles

A poorly stuffed pillow,

Little clumps of softness

Finding holes in the hems

And sometimes breaking free.

PS - Whitney Houston

She was one of my idols. As a kid I spent countless hours locked in my room, passionately belting her hits to a rapt stuffed animal audience. I'm not usually affected by the deaths of celebrities, but tonight I feel as though I've lost a childhood friend. This week people will gossip about Whitney's drug use, her failed marriage to Bobby Brown (whom I also adore without shame), and speculate about the scandalous lifestyle that surely caused her death. But I will think about how Whitney taught me to sing, to dance, to deal, and to dream.

The American Woman - Her life in foods with funny names

The life of the American Woman may be understood as a series of foods with funny names:

She begins her days sucking Similac from lovingly sterilized bottles left by Mom with instructions for the fourteen-year-old sitter to ignore.

Her first real trauma involves her graduation to pureed beets and Brussels sprouts. After her infancy she never willingly eats them again, except when she has her own child and tries in vain to convince her that blood-red beet pulp is “really yummy! Num-num! Get ready for the airplane!”

The American Woman’s happiest memories are marked with milk mustaches and palms sticky with the remnants of cream-filled friends: Twinkies, Ho Hos, Ding Dongs, Zingers and Whoopie Pies. When she is older, she abstains from those decadent, individually wrapped treasures that once made daily appearances in her Scooby-Doo lunch box. She is told that Little Debbie and that nameless Hostess are monsters who seduce healthy innocents with their trans-fatty S’mores and Zebra Cakes and steal their girlish figures.

 Yes, the day comes when Suzy Qs and Sno Balls lose their place at the table to more sophisticated foods with funny names. The American Woman’s shiny new chopsticks swipe and squeeze at insipid cubes of tofu and gaudy cylinders of sushi. She acquires a taste for quinoa and couscous, and only privately wonders why one should ever want to acquire a taste for something that tastes bad.

As fate would have it, in the twilight of her life, the American Woman would kill for bulgur-stuffed bell peppers or sashimi and tempura or – fuck it; it’s too late for her figure anyway – a delightfully squashy Twinkie. But she can only dream of delicious memories now, while she stubbornly purses her lips in futile rejection of the nursing home menu of pureed beets and Brussels sprouts.

The Lie

How many lives you have been complicit in tarnishing, perhaps even ruining? How many lies have you told? How many rumors, however outlandish, have you been all-too-eager to embrace and perpetuate?

For years, my childhood friends and I were terrified of Old Man Tim, the ancient (at least in our eyes) hermit who lived in the corner bungalow on our little tree-lined street. None of us had ever spoken to him, and hours of spying through the man’s window never yielded anything more controversial than his awful taste in daytime television. Despite our enormous lack of proof, we felt certain that Old Man Tim was a pedophile. We made up stories so convincing that we soon bought them ourselves. Eventually enough of us believed our scandalous tales that our parents did as well, and the poor man became a pariah.

The years raced by in front of Old Man Tim’s living room window, as did the block parties births deaths skinned knees fireworks love affairs heartbreaks tulips marigolds falling maple leaves snowmen. When he died, no one in the neighborhood attended the funeral. Many in the neighborhood rejoiced to see him go, still firmly believing that the old man was a child molester, though in truth, no one had ever spoken to Tim, and no one could claim to have been victimized by him.

In all likelihood, Tim was simply a lonely widower, all but forgotten by his children and grandchildren, who only ever called on Sundays to make sure he hadn’t fallen down the stairs or drowned in the bathtub. But with the brutality that is so typical of childhood ‘innocence,’ I helped make Old Man Tim a monster.