ladyslipper's Open Salon Blog

Children

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 03:11:01 -0500

Four of them. One blond, a girl, me. And yes

I have to place myself first, in that dress

red, hand-sewn by the children's mother. In

stages of toothlessness they hold that grin

for the photographer. The wooden frame

made with care by the children's father came

from lumber scraps he found in his workshop

and working with a circular saw, cropped

just a hair of the white around the edge.

These children grew surrounded by a hedge

of lilacs, boxelder trees, attic rope.

They are oblong, a bar of Ivory soap.

One, two, three, four - and the third is a girl.

I place myself first. And the four unfurl.

The Lighthouse Ghost, Part II

Fri, 22 Oct 2010 07:10:33 -0400

Believe it or not, there are those who question my existence. As if one would doubt that iron ore was once extracted from these hills in vast quantities, enough to fill immense ships to navigate dangerous waters, necessitating the tall houses lining the shores and the men, such as myself, who tended their lights.

Kerosene. The endless polishing of the brass Fresnel lens. You've been to the historic sites, you know the stories. And the foghorn, so loud it kept our families awake at night on those nights when it didn't stop blasting for more than a few minutes or so. The wives up all night, with their tea and their letters to sisters, not complaining so much as resigned to the hardship. And grieving, in their own way, the loss of lives out there on the waters we couldn't always keep safe. That was what life was all about in those days, hardships and perils of all sorts. We were so isolated, that was the beauty for the keepers and the struggle for the families. Marriage. To women and to our lamp.

And now you climb these steps. Steps I've mounted thousands of times. Sometimes it seemed like a hundred times a day. You look out the portholes and see what you want to see. A beautiful October day. Believe me, there were very few of those. There were more days than I could count of bone-crushing cold, when the wives took the children to Duluth or St. Paul. They wouldn't have been able to tolerate it otherwise. And we lived like the bachelors we were at heart until they returned, waiting until ice-out, when the ships were able to make it through on their journey, with their ore and their timber, the riches for a few men on Summit Avenue. I've never seen those houses but I've heard of them. I wouldn't mind haunting one of them.

But instead I'm here, in a place where people spend a night and then eat breakfast, all for the a fourth of the salary I earned in a year. Fresh fruit, eggs, raisin toast slathered with butter, thick slabs of ham. And the coffee. Some electrical contraption they make it in, nothing like the enamel pots we had, where you mixed in an egg to settle the grounds. No flapjacks. No wood-fired stove, baking the two dozen loaves every day that were our staple food, along with potatoes and rutabagas from the root cellar. We had tinned meat, sugar, salt, cornmeal, hardtack. Staples. But it was a poor man's diet. The wives put up crabapple jelly and pickled beets and green beans that sometimes went bad, the lids bulging like carbuncles, and blueberries, and there was always plenty of venison, the deer were practically tame. We almost felt bad hunting them.

In each of the rooms, my room and the assistant's and the children's, is a journal in which they write about seeing me standing by the window or knocking on the door or rapping on the steamer trunk, trying to escape. Sometimes they try to imitate my voice, my diction. And every once in awhile, some fool decides to climb the tower at midnight.

Like that one lady last week. Silly woman. No flashlight and she left her key there on the nightstand and her husband asleep and thought it would be enough to leave the door to the tower wide open. She thought she could get a good look through the portholes but the lamp they've put up there, it revolves but it doesn't shed much more than symbolic light, cancelled out the view. And so I decided to play a little game with here. First the sputtering as if from a bad fuse, and then pitch black.

She didn't scream. She thought the lights would come back on within a few seconds or so. Hah!

When she realized she was there all alone in the dark, she had the scare of her life. She nearly tumbled down the top flight of stairs as she groped in the dark. And then she made it down slowly, slowly, one flight at a time, there were about twice as many flights as she remembered. It was an hour before she made it to the bottom, she was gripping the railing so tightly and feeling with her feet. And dressed only in the fancy bathrobe and slippers that the guest house provided. And when she got to the bottom, the door had been locked behind her.

So first she knocked politely. Surely someone was still awake, they would hear her.

Nothing.

She knocked harder.

No one heard her, not the man across the hall in his ridiculous nightcap or the other couple or her husband, who'd had a little too much brandy to drink.

She was getting cold. It was a warm October but the nights were clear, they did not hold the heat.

She pounded more desperately. She began to yell. "Let me out! Somebody please let me out!"

She was beginning to think she would die there, or at least catch hypothermia. She wasn't wearing her watch, and even if she had been she would not have been able to see the hands. She could not even see her own hands, which were beginning to freeze. Fortunately for her, the luxurious bathrobe had pockets.

So what should I do? I thought. She was only inquisitive, she meant no harm. I wanted only to give here a little fright, not send her to the hospital with pneumonia.

So after two hours or so, when she was weeping, thinking they'd find her dead in the morning, she tried the lock again. And this time the door opened.

How could that happen? She was sure it had been locked.

But she was so grateful to go quietly downstairs to the kitchen, to make herself a cup of fancy Earl Gray tea with its scent of bergamot, to warm her hands over the electric kettle, that she didn't question it. She sat at the kitchen table and sipped her tea and soon the shivers went away. She set her cup in the sink and turned to go upstairs and back to bed when there I was in the doorway and she collapsed backwards with fright and then I was gone.

And in the morning, after a breakfast during which she was unusually quiet while the other guests were hearty, she and her husband were gone.

And she had written in the journal, Don't go up in the tower.

The Boy, In Brief

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 11:10:31 -0400

When he was nine, he wrote poems that made me weep.

When he was ten, I found pornography in his room.

When he was twelve, the fistfights began. His grades dropped precipitously. He spent most of his time at school wandering the halls or sitting in the principal's office. He did not graduate with his his class; even the special-ed classes he attended to help him cope with the illness that was diagnosed too late did not help him achieve the grades he needed.

And now he is getting A's in college.

School and soccer are the two most important things in his life. He loves Barcelona, and has gotten me hooked on following Messi and Puyol and their astonishingly fine team. Watching them is like watching an athletic form of ballet carried out on a grassy pitch. Watching them, I can understand why the rest of the world calls soccer football.

His own pitch is a field full of stones and mud, with ragged nets through which the ball slips through and he must go chasing after it. He is the single player on either team: the manic team and the depressive. But that does not deter him. He runs. He struggles.

He once punched a hole in the wall because he had forgotten a payment deadline and had been dropped from the classes he had registered for. It is a hole the size of a man's fist. I think of him as a boy, but he is not. He is twenty-one years old.

And I suppose I must tell you that he has never held a job, does not drive a car, and has only online friends. But he sees his therapist once every two months, his nurse clinician every three months, and is compliant with his meds. He is a gentle, compassionate soul who gives what little money he has, the cash he earns from doing raking or mowing the lawn or washing the car for us and for the neighbors to earthquake relief and food for the poor.

I will mention that his school is a community college. Some people look down on such schools. I see it as an opportunity to grow academically in a safe environment, with a diverse but largely mature student population and a disabilities counselor.

You may judge me as you will. I am sure I have not been anywhere near the perfect mother, or the semi-perfect mother, or even the good-enough mother. I did not see his disease coming until it hit me like a Mack truck.

Of course I worry about him. I worry that he will be living at home at age forty, his life having stalled where it is. But I think that as he transfers to the University, as he is edged into what is known as "the real world" by some, things will change. I hope he will learn to cope with his illness. I see the meds at work, the therapy helping him come out of his room more often. I know how difficult bipolar disorder can be to cope with, having lived with it every day of my adult life and my adolescence and possibly my childhood as well. I push gently. I try not to nag. I am not the overachiever I hoped to be at this point in my life. But I take one step at a time, and I hope he can do it as well.

Barcelona lost to Hercules a couple of weeks ago, 2-0. I thought he would be upset, but he was resigned. It is early in the season, after all.

The Grinding Of Stones

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 07:10:57 -0400

You have been living at home now for six months and it has been difficult. First there was the pregnancy and then the breakup and the miscarriage and so much more and we chafed together over small things, two women sharing a bathroom or the last piece of pizza thoughtlessly devoured or the wrong kind of coffee prepared, caffeine or no caffeine, or one pair of cats bullying the other or the way objects placed in certain ways can terrorize the air surrounding them.

And today you told me that when you were five and had just gotten your ears pierced (oh why didn't we wait until you were twelve like the good parents did, even when you were so insistent, as no other child on the face of the earth could be insistent?) Grandma called you a whore and said only whores get their ears pierced. I was shocked, and I tried to tell you so and you said you knew that and I was in tears, saying no, I didn't, how would I have known that and you said I told you, over and over and what could I say without flat-out calling you a liar or delusional? Of course I knew what she was like, I grew up with her. But calling her only granddaughter a terrible name like that? Never. No way was I aware of it, and had I been I would not have sent you there. I would have severed my ties with the woman you call That Woman in a heartbeat. You know that's the truth, don't you?

And you said it was like when I was sixteen and you called me a slut. I couldn't respond, I was so shattered. And then finally when I said I never called you that, I have never in my life called anyone that name it came out sounding pale and washed-out, like weak tea. But it was the truth. How can you believe otherwise?

No, don't answer me. I can't talk right now, you don't believe anything I say. My heart was sore, it was hurting as it has never hurt before. And you said you're just having yourself a pity party.

A pity party. Is that what you see?

Here is how it was, then: you were not an easy child to live with. You were demanding and intense and sometimes we just had to get away from that, you were exhausting to be around and so we sent you to Grandma's thinking that grandparents act differently towards the children of their children, it's a different dynamic. And there were times when we wanted to work on the house, it was in terrible disrepair when we bought it and needed almost as much attention as you did. And there were times when we just wanted to do the things normal couples did, like go out to dinner, and there wasn't enough money for a regular babysitter, so off to Grandma's you went. I had no idea that she was harming you.

And when you were at the arts high school and your hair was a different color every week and you wore nothing but black I took it in stride, but I did not want you staying out all night, with me having no idea where you were. And yes I sent you to the therapist you thought was creepy and who put his hand on your knee but I never made you go back there and I never ever called you a slut. And when Grandma died, your hair was purple and I may have wished for another color but I never said a word. I don't believe I ever used that word, but if I did, I'm so sorry. I was crazy with grief.

A pity party?

What does that mean? I've heard the expression and it is so completely removed from the hurt that has clenched my heart that you simply cannot imagine.

If I were to take a picture of my heart right now it might resemble something that I found on a Lake Superior beach, something truly extraordinary: a small rock wedged into a larger rock. At some point the two had been jammed against each other, stationary for a very long time, as the Lake Superior waters made them inseparable. They are one entity now.

As are we.

North Shore: Good News Sunday

Sun, 10 Oct 2010 00:10:36 -0400

It was, in a word, sublime: three days along the North Shore of Lake Superior, up and down the coast from Duluth to just north of Grand Marais. Only a few pictures will play nice and upload tonight. I hope you enjoy them.

Overlooking Duluth.

A bridge between two states.

The fish were plentiful.

A delicate flower.

The grass is golden.

Sunrise.

The Brule River meets Lake Superior, at sunset.