femme forte aka candace's Open Salon Blog

curious timing: an elephant writes to craig

Wed, 30 May 2012 16:05:44 -0400

Dear Craig:

Tom and I were watching the news on TV the other night. A cemetery somewhere had been opening old graves and moving bones to a communal pit so they could resell the plots. A woman whose grandfather’s grassy space now held Someone Who Is Not Grandpa was furious, screaming and crying. Turns out she wasn’t close to the old guy, in fact, had never even met him, but she hollered on and on about the indignity he had suffered and that his holy resting place had been desecrated. I said something to Tom like, “The con the cemetery pulled is awful, selling the same thing to two – or even more – sad and grieving people, but I just don’t see the desecration bit. I mean, the guy’s dead. Even if you believe in a spirit, that’s not there either. What difference does it make?” Tom said quickly, “A lot of difference.” He won’t say when I ask him (since he’s pretty sure he’s never going to die), but I’m guessing he isn’t going to opt for cremation. We see death, each of us, from a different hilltop.

When Dad died, I went to the mortuary and signed for what was left of him after the cremation: a cardboard box, both larger and heavier than I expected, wrapped in heavy paper and sealed with strong tape, far too large, we discovered, to be shoved out the stingy window opening of a private plane. Remember when you opened the package to divide it into smaller containers and spilled some of Dad on the tarmac? You scooped it up with your hands and told me later it felt like grit from a shell beach, sharp shards and little kernels of baked bone, not like ash at all. You’ve decided that’s where you’re going too, into the oven, then a box, to be emptied at Lake Powell without fanfare later this summer. Fine choice, you loved the place. I’ll raise a glass from over here on the west edge when they crack the tape.

There’s an artist named Sally Mann (no relation to us, sad to say), a famous photographer from rural Virginia. One of her exhibits, now a book, is ”What Remains” (photoeye link), a collection of photographs of dead things, whole and in parts. It is fascinating, haunting, beautiful work. When asked if she has plans for her own dead body, she said she didn’t care what happens to it, “just leave it out in the woods and let the little foxes get at it.” That would work for me – drop me outside the snake wall for the coyotes and crows to make short work of and save the $250 for the baked gristle and osseous chunks in the cardboard box. Leave my decomposing old carbon as fertilizer for the Sally Holmes roses. Clip a silver curl off my head, tie it with a turquoise ribbon and put it in the envelope of my baby hair that our mother, in a rare sentimental moment, saved.

None of us from California will be at your official ash-scattering in Utah. Maybe some of your grit will make its way downstream to the mother ocean where single-celled floating bumper cars first waved antennae at each other. Dad’s bits are out there and Marge’s; maybe some of yours will be nearby someday. That would be nice.

You’re going to think this is really strange, but I wish they would give me a bone or two before the rest of you goes into the flames, maybe three or four of those odd bones from one of your wrists. All cleaned and sun-bleached as a desert cow skull, they would sit in my palm like chalky pebbles, clicking softly to each other. But I’m not asking; everybody thinks I’m weird enough and, besides, they’d say no.

All irreverence aside, I wish I were an elephant. Here's how the story would end if I were a relative of Horton and we lived in Botswana:

You die. Your body rests outside for months in the sun and wind and rain, and the meaty bits feed other creatures (who die and feed other creatures) until only bones remain, your outline on the ground with little grasses pushing up around it: those long femurs, the skull that held your big brain with a triangular jack-o-lantern hole for your big nose (couldn’t resist one last time), your musician’s hands: two thumbs and eight fingers, three long, thin bones each except that right middle finger missing its end (crushed to pulp and cut away years ago though it never slowed down your finger-picking) – your jaw, the spine of your neck, all the cancer cells gone with the feasted flesh, vanquished, irrelevant. And here comes your sister, the old matriarch of the local pachyderm family who throws her weight around when she needs to, plodding slowly, purposefully, to the skeleton of Craig. She has dozens of scars from thorns and fierce battles on her legs and sides, white jagged lines like lightning. Her skin is cross-hatched with wrinkles, it sags below her ears and above her elbows. Dust collects in the folds.

She waves her trunk over the bone pile, sniffing the air, smelling for you. Lowering that big head, she touches your stitched skull, rubs it and then the birdy shoulder blade, the long arm bones. She pauses, then picks up a vertebra from the curved line and holds it for a moment, shifting her weight from right to left, swaying with the bone in her trunk, her eyes closed. She puts it back – exactly where it was – and picks up another circle of backbone, puts it back, then another and another, all the while quietly rumbling something that might almost be a song. Her head moves from side to side and then stops. She stands finally still and heavy, a mountain of a sister, humming good boy, good boy, goodbye.

I love you more than all the shooting stars.

Your big sister,

Candy

brown bedspread fort

Sat, 26 May 2012 11:05:32 -0400

I place the 14^th item on the express checkstand conveyor and wait for the queue to move before pushing my cart any farther. My iPhone chirps, making me flinch and my skin go cold, but it’s just Stacie with a new time for yoga tomorrow, so I text back “7:30, see you then.” The tiny Asian woman ahead of me stands next to some bagged apples and a green cabbage book-ended by batons that form a trapezoid on the belt. The guy ahead of her decides to sign up for a coupon game promotion, so we shift our weight to a back foot and lower our chins. Two, four, six … I count my items again. Not over the limit. A young mother wheels in behind me with an infant in a baby bucket up by the cart handle and a small, curly-haired boy hanging off the side of the basket, swinging a leg. The Express lane is at a quiet, slightly tense, ebb.

My brother, Craig, is very sick now. He will die quite soon, though it’s easier to see that when you’re not trying to find platinum among the spare change. I understand – now, only these last couple weeks – that he tells me and Amy truths that are close to the bone and Swiss-cheese versions to almost everyone else. We are the flinty, hardass women. For all our drama and tears, these eyes will slice your lie right open, see through your puff. He knows I promised him even more exquisite pain is coming because I love him, because knowing will make it easier, because sugar-coating the bad news is not what we have ever done.

::thud:: The boy’s heel whacks my shin, and I say “Ow-w” without thinking, raise my starfish hand like a crosswalk cop. His mother hauls him off the cart: “I’m so sorry. Luke, say you’re sorry to the lady,” and he mumbles “Sorry” as he frowns his eyebrows against her thigh and curls his shoulders around his vulnerable heart. “It’s okay,” I say as I shuffle off the ache, “Don’t worry, it’s okay.”

This seems to have unlocked the line: the coupon card is bestowed and the man heads off, the belt moves, the Woman of Few Items hands over a bill and scoops change from the germy coin dispenser, and I offer three reusable bags – black with red Japanese characters – and my Albertson’s Preferred Membership Discount Card to the dark-haired clerk with the sweet smile and the elaborately decorated acrylic fingernails. The mother hangs back, letting me know her boy isn’t within striking distance. “How are you?” asks the checker, “Did you find everything?” “Good, yes, I did, thanks,” and I smile and slide my MasterCard, touch Credit on the screen and scrawl C-something without looking up for more than a nanosecond, my shin stinging.

When Craig was four, about the age of my grocery-store assailant, and I was seven, we started making forts in the dining room of our little tract house. A worn chenille bedspread the same color as Yogi Bear covered the table, and we’d pull the chairs back up against the vertical blanket walls to serve as towers. From inside the brown cave, the one who was on lookout duty would slip under the spread and up into a chair, peer from under an L-shaped hand to see if there were bad guys out there, then slither back. We always meant to stay a long time but got hungry. There was peanut butter on toast, careful not to drop it goo-side-down; there were Twinkies. I hadn’t started baking yet. We drank milk from the carton with the fridge door open, never brought glasses in there, though Craig ate cereal – Kix or Rice Krispies or Kellogg’s Corn Flakes – and milk from a turquoise bowl sometimes, slurping. It got hot in there pretty fast, so we’d yank the blanket off and chase each other around the house, the one who was It trying to throw the spread like a capture net over the escapee. He was a strong, fast little kid, didn’t whine or cry. I was a ferocious tickler and had schooled him; we rolled and wrestled, grabbing at those best spots – knees and armpits – until, breathless and sweaty, we’d lie on the floor, hooting like owls.

“You saved three dollars and twenty-nine cents.” I take the receipt she hands me and say thank you, turn my grey head and smile at the mom and boy and winding-up-to-cry baby behind me. I wonder if it’s a girl, if the boy will have a sister. Sunglasses go on. Two hands on the cart, and it’s four steps to the door that whooshes the wall open between the chilly, bustling market and the late-afternoon blinding sun, the slanting tree shadows of this day that’s May-almost-June in this year a half-century later. That’s a lot of years, fifty years and more, but it isn’t enough.

This piece was originally published on my website and was there entitled "hey, i know! let's build a fort!" It can be found by clicking on Adobe Soup: the Unzipped Life of Candace Mann and scrolling down the home page.

general femme a la crayon - heron's drawing call

Thu, 24 May 2012 20:05:55 -0400

Maybe when I was 20 years old and blonde??

living (and dying) gracefully

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 21:04:57 -0400

You can choose.

To be happy, to be an optimist. Or not. To see clearly or to leave the oily smudges on your glasses. To be grateful for your good luck and proud of your hard-won successes or to complain only that it was a lot of work and there were boulders in the road. To do whatever your old body is still capable of, to stretch and push it to its diminishing limit or let it dissolve like candle wax, settle and fold into shackles on your wrists and ankles, a tight band around your chest. To live – or to die – in as graceful a way as you can devise, loving fully those who deserve it, savoring each bite, each moment. Or not.

The wind has died and the shallow bay is calm, wavelets lapping against the sand. They sound like small kisses. I have left my pareu under the umbrella with my book and walked naked to the wet sand, careless of sunburn, heedless that someone could be watching from a distance, and lain where dry meets wet, ears at the tidal edge, feet under water. I imagine I was washed here from a shipwreck or that I am a female Gulliver or a tired seal, that I lie in the single place on this island where I am safe and struggle is unnecessary, where the salt water washes my wounds and carries the tiny threads of blood away, doesn’t try to drown me.

The tempest is over, the storms blown far to the east, and there will be no more on the western horizon because summer is here, bringing only blue skies and a breeze. The Tempest, remember when we had to read that in school? Furies and storms and passion, Shakespeare’s “little lives,” a phrase that floats to me now. Shakespeare, witches, Hogwart’s, wands. I am still taken by sorcery, wish I could weave a spell, make a potion, command an inanimate thing to life: dishes would spin, dogs would fly. An arcing wand, a quick flash and that man I’ve long wanted would love me like he does in my imagination, his lips warm on mine, his whispered devotion filling my ears. I can’t see him; I can’t see anything; the sun is steady and hot and my eyelids are crimson, scarlet, backlit by the nuclear fire, minute veins mapped and dense.

I am old. No one sees this body in the light but me. I haven’t been naked under the sun in decades. A boy I knew from high school surfaced on my computer screen a few weeks ago – are males in high school boys or men? – anyway, there was his so-familiar face. We were a teacher’s terror then, deviling her, irreverent, brilliant. Now he remembers this diner we all went to; I only remember wishing I were sitting next to that Other Boy (whose name I don't even remember), his thigh against mine. Tuna sandwiches on white bread, pickle chips, soda fountain Coke on rock-crystal ice. Giggling with a hand cupped over my lips, eyes down. I can smell him, the boy who sat in my row, his maleness, his gym class sweat.

My dying brother's slope is steepening. I haven’t seen him since our Big Chill weekend in November, and it’s almost May, more months than most of us thought he would see. Since his voice disappeared, there are no phone calls. We email – pages have become paragraphs, now with days between them. I try not to imagine what a struggle it is for him to type or when they will cease to exist except on the planet where unspoken words live. I saved a recording of his voice from my phone; I will always hear him; he was picking up ice at the store.

We have had story spirals, usually Craig and Gary and me. One of us will remember a day or a prank or an injustice or a person who was an asshat or a gem from eons ago and send a message to the others, prompting. The next person riffs from there and then the next, like musicians. Three good storytellers, trying for laughs, admitting failings and humiliations, the innocent buffoonery of kids and cereal jingles. I shake my head at things one of us doesn’t remember – how could you not, I think. We are the keepers of many of each others’ secrets and we love each other despite these truths. You can’t embarrass yourself with someone who loves you this much.

There were snake stories and horse stories and musician-on-the-road stories, old girlfriend and boyfriend stories. We avoided religion and politics as only the best friends can do. Craig told Weird Cancer stories like the one about his cell phone alarm. He had set it to remind himself of a new medication schedule – every eight hours around the clock – but either the morphine or the cancer demon mistakenly changed noon to midnight. When it woke him in the dark, playing the ringtone from The Jetsons (who does that?), he hurried to the living room before it woke anyone else. But, because it’s Craig, he had to take the last few steps to the phone pretending to be some weird combination of Rosie the Robot and Frankenstein and then do a little robot dance, laughing soundlessly the whole time, before he pushed the button. He tells us about all the fabulous (his word) things he can swallow – ice-cold root beer, a strawberry smoothie, orange sherbet – as though he were reading from a four-star menu. Long after solid food had left the lists, he crowed that he had a hot dog for lunch to celebrate the start of baseball season. I tried not to wonder if it had to be pureed. I don’t know how much weight he’s lost, pictures have recently been banned, and, frankly, I try not to think too carefully or too long about any of the details. For months he had been trying hard to spare me this knowledge; I fought and fought but have finally agreed not to know. I acknowledge by these words and my original signature affixed hereto that he was right.

He has steered his canoe out of the Sea of Denial and is taking enough morphine to stay ahead of the pain and to relish the brilliant opium dreams. He finally has his arms around the idea that it’s good to be comfortable when you die. He is trying to lessen our pain, we who love him, by getting us to agree not to come, not to watch. We either have or will. He has made his choices. His grace is enormous, is the sky, the highest mountain.

I am, at last, happy to float in this amniotic ocean, to feel the sand swirl against my neck and settle between my toes and fingers, the sun on my belly, even if it’s only a place I go in my mind. The tide won’t rise or fall in my make-believe bay; I won’t get hungry or pruney and have to go inside; I can stay as long as it I need to, as long as it takes, until there is nothing left but peace.

This piece was originally published on my website and was there entitled "choosing wisely." Recent posts can be found by clicking on Adobe Soup: the Unzipped Life of Candace Mann and scrolling down the home page. Thanks for reading - either here or there.

the road to the rock

Tue, 3 Apr 2012 09:04:55 -0400

I've just posted the next leg of this road trip on my website. It's a photo essay of the area between Santa Barbara and Morro Bay along California's Central Coast. If you'd like to see it, please click on the link below, then click "Back" on your browser to come back to Open Salon. If you do, thanks for reading.

xoxo

femme/candace

Adobe Soup - Road Trip Day Three