Sandra Stephens's Open Salon Blog

my late lazy daisy valentine

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 03:02:50 -0500

If a daisy grew every time I thought of you with a smile, all the houses in the world (or at least, in Norway) would have roofs thick with daisies. There would be daisies crowding together in the sidewalk cracks and curling up out of the sewer grates and over the curb, watching us walk by.

There would be daisies mixing among the roses and the Redwoods, their smiling nodding white heads carpeting lawns and gleaming dimly from the shadowy floor of the forests.

When there are too many to fit on the ground they will take to the air, pollinating the robins and the starlings. They will eventually find their way into every bouquet ever presented to someone's love, and they will even someday dot the sky at night, giving the stars a run for their money.

Sophia and the Polka-Dotted Mistifyer

Wed, 8 Feb 2012 19:02:55 -0500

Last Saturday you took a sort of entrance examination for sixth grade. There were 70-some odd kids applying for about 15 spots. As part of your day of tests and participation, the kids were asked to come up with an invention, and explain how it would work.

"So what did you invent?" I asked.

"A transporter," you responded. "So I wouldn't have to get up early for school. I could just be transported in two minutes before the homeroom bell rings."

"I don't like getting up early," you said matter-of-factly, a sentiment I sympathize with - I an not a notably early riser, myself.

"A transporter would be pretty handy," I conceded.

"Only, it's not really a transporter. It's a Mystifier."

I liked the sound of that, even better after you explained the etymology: "Because people would dissolve into a mist, then they are transported, and reappear like mist."

I liked Mistifyer even better, but you weren't done yet.

"It's the Polka-Dotted Mistifyer, and each dot represents a place you can program it to go."

A concern had been voiced that your invention - more specifically, it's reason - might be interpreted by the powers that be in charge of admissions to reflect a lack of motivation, but we needn't have worried - you don't imagine things so much as engineer them, and whether it's a picture you've drawn or a story you've told, there's always a reason for everything you've put in the frame.

I've always liked that about your imagination - never reliant on someone else's input or prompts. The stories you tell yourself unfold like a Dr. Seuss staircase, the kind that meanders up into the sky, seemingly all directions at once, with a twisting and turning, cheerfully accomodating kind of logic that that is both fantastic and eminently sensical.

The conversation that followed reminded me how little we get right when we think we know the why of what children think, and say - mostly because we forget to suspend our disbelief, something that still comes as naturally to you, at age 9, as thinking itself.

"There won't be any more airplanes so we won't need any more gas to fly them, and the Polka-Dotted Mistifyer can be made from old airplane parts," you explained.

"The airline pilots will do all the testing," you added, "So they'll still have jobs but even more fun ones."

The thought of beta testing a transporter reminds me of a science fiction story I read - I think by Ray Bradbury - in which the narrator is the father of two, with a young son who is brilliant - the kind of math and science whiz kid that aces applications like the one you just completed. The family is in the waiting area much like an airport, but it's for a new machine - a time travel machine. Not a Polka-Dotted Mistifyer, but close.

In the story, the father explains to his ever-curious son the history of how the time travel machine was built. He withholds some of the gruesome details of failed early versions of the machine - some really gross stuff happens to the testers, such as arriving at the destination inside-out, or drooling and unable to speak - until the inventor figures out that the transportees have to be unconscious.

Fast forward to the glorious future and people are time traveling by the thousands, with nothing more required than taking a light hit of laughing gas in Seattle in order to wake up a few seconds later in Nigeria, or the moon.

As is so often the case, telling a kid some of the truth while withholding important details didn't work out so well. The son holds his breath during the administration of the gas so he can see what it's like to time travel, and when the family wakes up at the destination, the kid has gone white-haired, and is quite mad, with a face gone ancient as a lizard's, screaming "Longer than you think, dad! It's longer than you think!" before clawing his own eyes out.

I decide not to mention the dangers of being a test pilot for the Polka-Dotted Mistifyer, at least, not until we have a working prototype.

"Will it be expensive?" I ask.

"Well, not for my family," you say in a practical voice.

"But yes, it will have to be, because if you're going to London, instead of twelve hours, it's just two seconds."

You paused. "But all the poor homeless people can go free, because after all, you only have to push a button. It's not extra work to send more people."

Can the whole family go together, or just one at a time? I ask.

Everything that fits into the Mistifyer can go, you say. You pause again, considering.

"You could lay all the luggage on the floor, and everyone can sit on top of it, since it's about the size of an elevator."

I remember in the movie The Fly (the Vincent Price version is better than the Jeff Goldblum version); the time travel machine that the scientist creates mixes up the DNA of the scientist with a fly that somehow found its way into the capsule. The scientist emerges with a fly head; weeks later, the bereaved wife hears a tiny voice in the garden; bending close to a spider web, she sees a tiny fly with her husband's head - now very aged, screaming "Help meeeeeeee!" as the spider moves in for the kill.

Your time travel machine doesn't evoke these fears, however -- maybe because of the brand name you have chosen. Polka-Dotted inventions just sound safer, and the worst thing I can conjure is an elevator door opening to reveal people genetically jumbled up with one another and their belongings - a woman with a purse for a head, a boy with a portable dog kennel for a body, a man with a newspaper face, a stuffed animal with a little girl's pigtails.

My teacher said that of all the inventions, mine is the one he'd buy first, you say shyly, and I have to agree - the Polka-Dotted Mistifyer is one of those 'everyone must have' things, for sure.

"Sign me up," I say, and your answer is, again, a reminder of how little I understand about how much you understand.

"Sure!" you say. "But only after it's tested."

The Be-All, End-All Force of the Universe

Thu, 1 Dec 2011 14:12:11 -0500

Monday the h turned 46 and because most people like a little fuss, even people like the h who don’t really like a fuss, we made a moderate fuss, declaring it birthday weekend, with gifts and cards and attention and cake doled out in serial fashion across Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

We drove to Tahoe, possibly the h’s favorite place, just me and the h and the little one and our newest pack member, everyone’s favorite, the one, the only, the chocolate Jake, who was also celebrating a birthday – six months and fifty pounds of well-meaning puppy enthusiasm. We love him a lot, our Jakey-roo. Sometimes you just get so lucky you can’t believe it.

We all love Jake, but Jake loves the h with a pure, unblinking and depthless devotion that makes the word love seem puny and inadequate. The h was an early disciplinarian, swift and stern and undeterred by mournful puppy yipping (very unlike me, I might add) and this has bred in Jake an unwavering confidence in Dear Leader (as his eyes have so clearly named the h) as the Be-All End-All Force of the Universe.

The rest of us are tolerated, even cheerfully liked for our ability and willingness to provide food, water, entertainment, walks, interesting experiences, and a place to rest his velvety chin, but no one gets the same level of hopeful-soulful puppy regard that Jake bestows on the h.

The arrival of Jake has enlivened the ghost of my lost little man, whose small, loyal form still seems to shadow me at times, especially when I sit alone to write, or read. Sometimes I cry, but less and less – Jake’s frantic clowning to get my mind off whatever is making me sad is too touching not to reward with anything but total success. Before you know it I am telling him, Sure, I’ll throw the ball (or duck, or raccoon, or unicorn).

I bought all of the h’s gifts at Cabella’s which is a huge outdoor sportsman’s retail paradise in Reno. They have everything, from tents and camo to guns and ammo. Probably they have camo ammo, which is no more unlikely than pink rifles, which I saw with my own eyes. It would have been hard to miss actually – the gun counter was the busiest counter in the store, with customers standing shoulder to shoulder along all 100+ feet of it.

They were selling guns by the dozens and I wondered if I asked each couple - because they were almost all couples, the he of the duo outfitting his she – why are you buying this gun, and under what conditions would you shoot it? - would they all say something similar?

The h and I will sometimes shoot trap in a place we know on the north side of the lake. To get there, you park your car, climb the barrier gate and hike in, the tarmac giving way beneath your feet to a wide trail rutted by regular snow run-off.

Off trail is brambly and dense; bear tracks were visible, as huge and distinct and startling as the palm print of God there in the snowpack that was melting into big dirty white jigsaw pieces on the Alpine floor.

You walk in a half mile and there is something like a driveway cut, and you walk in there, and the space opens up around you like a theatre, only instead of chairs side by side it is boulders of all sizes. There is a rectangle clearing like a deserted parking lot that sits in the more-or-less center of the boulders, forming a sort of stage for the shooter, who aims at targets propped up the hill.

The boulder field stretches uphill for a few hundred feet up beyond the shooting theater. It is littered with rocks and the remains of exploded targets – coffee cans lacey with rust, cloudy 2 liter plastic soda bottles, the occasional brown shards of beer bottles.

There is an odd patch of grass here and a gnarled bush there, but mostly it is rocks that rear and pile everywhere, rocks of all sizes, their backs white and mottled and bleached from the snow and the sun. The boulders and rocks seem to sit sentry but there is no sense of security in that, just an odd sensation of being watched in the quiet that is somehow thick.

The backs of the rocks poking whitely out of the thin soil remind me of a line in a poem I read once. They are like the once-buried skulls of children breaking through, or the cairns of the dead, fallen with time… or perhaps some other force has done that.

In my head I have fallen into the habit of calling it the Gallery. It is a spooky word, as watchfully suggestive as the silent, charged air of the place itself. My mind turns to it at odd moments, toying with the image of a girl standing at the center of those boulders, seemingly menaced.

This is what I think of as my pre-writing phase. I’ll keep mentally revisiting that image until I figure out the story that led to it, and of course, what comes after – always the best/worst part.

In addition to the Tahoe trip we had a weekend in Florida, where the h’s mom got married. The day itself was clear and cool and crisp and the bride looked radiant in strapless cream colored satin standing in the grassy backyard sloping down toward the lake, surrounded by her mom, eight children and their spouses, more than twenty grandchildren (and two great grandchildren).

The bride and groom held hands and included all of us in their vows. The graying groom got misty when he wished to be 40 again for the pleasure of more time with this, his last and best love, and then the bride said in reply “I so admire your amazing heart”, a line that flashed with all the brightness of the sun on the lake behind her as we gathered for pictures, the light of late afternoon slanting all around us.

In the midst of this scene I remembered our own wedding, the h and I and the girls and the h’s mom standing knee deep in freshly fallen snow which fell thickly from a sky whose gray color blended indistinguishably from the air, our vows leaving our lips in balloons of cold vapor.

“Love as the roof of the universe” I had written that night, and these words occurred to me again there in the chilly Florida sunshine, love as a roof, a place to shelter, a thing you know with the liquid-eyed certainty of a loyal dog to be the Be-All, End-All, Force of the Universe.

My Father's House

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 14:10:08 -0400

As adults, we often assume that the celebrations with the prettiest décor, the fancier food, the higher priced liquor and the nicer people will be the celebrations that are remembered best, most frequently and most fondly.

But kids have a calculus all their own, and what seems strained or miserable to a grown up can be remembered as great fun for a child who remains safely ignorant of the tension and unhappiness that crisscross the room like those infrared laser alarm systems, the ones that are invisible until you put on the infrared goggles and see the thousands of glowing virtual tripwires trapping you in a glowing spider web so that there is no way to move without triggering the alarm.

Growing up, Christmas Day was spent at home surrounded by my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, all of my mother’s side. Our house was small, with everyone mostly crowded into the dining room, living room and kitchen – surely no more than 200 square feet total. The house bulged with noise and heat, and the movement of children frothing amongst the adults like river water around rocks.

It should have been by far the best day of the year, and in many ways it was, what with dad’s raised voice directed at someone else, mom too busy to comment on the stringiness of my hair, the aunts’ generous compliments making me feel that pretty could be safe, and did not always have to cost what I couldn’t afford.

Christmas Eve was reserved for my dad’s side of the family. We went to Grandma’s house, which crouched, small and dark, at the end of a Dickensian lane that featured some sort of power station, a small square brick building that made your fillings ache if you got too close to it.

Even full of family, the house was always cold, the air that seeped off the screened in porch snaking its way into the boxy living room. Winters were colder and snowier then, and frost would frequently accumulate in a thick scrim just inside the front door, where we would print our names and draw snowflakes.

Though I know many things now that I did not know then, things slowly revealed after the death of each aunt and uncle and, finally, Grandma, my mind stubbornly presents me with the evidence of memory: we thought Christmas Eve was a blast. We ate sloppy Joes, a sensationally messy sandwich that printed our faces and hands with orange grease.

It was noisy, but in a different way than with my mom’s family, whose conversation resembled large colorful soap bubbles that drifted around the room banging into one another, sometimes denting, sometimes exploding with an iridescent pop.

At Grandma’s house, the adults spoke in sharp pointy voices that flew across the room to hit their targets with a thud. Comments muttered under the breath rolled randomly around the hillocky linoleumed kitchen. The moldy, hoppy smell of beer hung wetly in the air. When we sidled up behind mom or dad’s chair to ask if we could have a Christmas cookie they nodded and waved us off, their eyes never leaving Uncle LeRoys red face or grandma’s grim, thin lipped face.

Can we have two? Three? We’d ask, pushing it, and they’d say our names once, warningly. We’d grab the basket and run upstairs, delighted to be away from the adults. The cookies were always sugar, always frosted, and always included, mixed in with the snowmen and stockings, an Easter rabbit or chicken. Grandma’s forgetful, dad would say, to which my mom would snort. I didn’t care – the snowman had red hot buttons, the rabbit had red hot eyes. I thought Grandma was the cat’s pajamas.

We ate our cookies and played with the train set under the tree, and Grandma never told us not to touch anything. We sat on the porch and rocked wildly back and forth on the ancient glider and Grandma never told us to keep it down in there. We piled in the center of the big oval shaped green throw rug n the living room and then hauled it around, pretending it was a lifeboat being tossed about by ocean waves, the last person on the rug the sole survivor.

We heard the adults voices raised downstairs but never thought to listen in – we were too busy playing with Grandma’s dominos game, or examining her collection of ceramic salt and pepper shakers that all came in pairs: the little Blue Boy and his Blue Girl sister, the Mr. and Mrs. Snowmen, the toasters that somehow seemed like man and wife, the blue salt and yellow pepper umbrella, the spotted salt dog and the pepper hydrant. “Don’t’ break them” was Grandma’s only comment, and we were reverent in our handling of the shakers.

I loved the lights on Grandma’s tree – big fat ones in blurry primary colors, some of them with the paint chipped off so you could see the white light shining through. They seemed so much more generous than the lights on mom’s tree, thin and white and orderly and pointed.

The tinsel was better too, long strands draped carelessly on the branches seemed much more festive than the carefully scalloped garland that wove its symmetrical way around my mom’s tree.

Most of all we loved that grandma’s tree was real, even if it dropped needles, even when it dried out and crackled warningly. Mom had a fake tree, a good value made even more realistic with its bendable branches and occasional fake brown needles.

Everything about Grandma’s house was enclosed, the rooms small and low-ceilinged, the cellar-like kitchen, even, somehow, the tiny dank bathroom that had a curtain instead of a door. The only books in the house were located behind the toilet. Grandma was illiterate, and didn’t like for anyone to read in her presence – if you did, she’d turn off the light.

The bathroom had a bare bulb with a string, so you could read in there, for awhile anyway, as long as you made bathroom noises to cover the sound of pages turning.

The single bedroom door was always shut. We were drawn to that door simply because it was closed; we were too young to be curious how a family of five was raised with just that single bedroom, a room we knew without being told belonged to grandma. We never asked my father where he slept, and he never showed us, never wanting to help us picture his young self in this place.

It’s just as well, I know now – there were no warm stories to tell about sleeping on the floor next to the furnace, nothing cozy about reading in a miasma of sewer smells. He kept silent, and we ate cookies dotted with red hots and remained blissfully ignorant of what it was like to grow up in that house, with that mother.

A house where only the master bedroom was heated, where no books could be read, where lights could not be burned for schoolwork, where a dime was school lunch money, where a boy once went partially deaf from an ear infection due to neglect, where the children were tossed out at age sixteen to sink or swim, with the hope of sinking palpable in the grim mouth and stone eyes that watched to see what would happen as if it made no difference.

We knew nothing of the woman with hair the color of iron and the cold dark house she ruled, the boy hidden in his basement. We knew only the freedom of wandering the rooms, eating as we pleased, playing unchecked, a respite from a strict father, a freedom to do as we wished that we thought was love, and wouldn’t know differently for many years to come.

last call

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 15:10:25 -0400

He calls me his love.

My love! He says, smiling. And, more quietly, his eyes on mine: my love.

Some of those people, that eleventh day of the ninth month of the first year of the new century – some of them died right away, vaporized. But I always think of the ones who called. How urgent the thought: answer, please answer, please please answer.

What would I say to you? Thinking of this, I picked up the phone once, the way a pagan might handle a crucifix. I imagined you on the other end and what I would say to you in the dust and fire and smoke, and the only thing that came to me was: my love. My love, my love, my love.