A kiss to build a dream on...

Going to go on a bit of a ramble here.  You can try to figure out where I'm going with this, or what I'm referring to, but I promise that you'll probably be wrong no matter who you are or what your guess may be.  So good luck with that--analyze away.  It's just an exercise in writing anyway....

There are about a million references to kissing in our society:  You can blow a kiss, kiss and make up, or kiss the dust.  You can be kissing cousins, or kiss and tell.

You can follow Clark Griswold's directive in Christmas Vacation: "kiss my ass, kiss his ass, kiss your ass."
You can kiss off, seal it with a kiss, "do you kiss your mother with that mouth?" and kiss (fill in the blank) goodbye.

I worked with a particular young woman at Starbucks when I lived in New York.  She was incredibly cute, and had the most amazing smile.  No kidding--she lit up the room when she smiled.  I was instantly attracted to her, and was lucky enough to have a friend that advised me to ask her out (we'd both told this friend about the mutual attraction--saved a lot of time given how slow I was at asking women out).
So we went on our first date, something simple actually; I think we just had dinner and walked around for a while.  When I dropped her off at her house at the end of the night and she was getting ready to let herself out of my Jeep, when we should have that awkward moment people sometimes have of wondering if they'll have that first kiss, we actually just both leaned toward each other, and proceeded to completely miss each others lips.  Not sure I'd even qualify that as a kiss, honestly; more of a collision.  Our second try was better, by far.  I remember that kiss very fondly--it was one of the good ones.

My first kiss from a girl was when I was about 8.  My brother had come home from the playground at school and told me a friend of mine was there, so I went out to see him.  My friend wasn't there, but one of the girls from my class was there with one of her friends.  They cornered me on what we called the jungle gym, and the girl from my class kissed me before I could get away.  I went home totally grossed out, rinsing my mouth out and scrubbing my lips at least a half a dozen times.  That was one of the bad ones.  I think the classmate's name was Nicole, which probably isn't accurate.  Maybe it's better if it's not; change the names to protect the innocent (or guilty).
I would have preferred if it had been Tracy, the cute blonde girl that sat across from me in class.  I'd done the slow skate with her at Skate Land a couple of times, holding hands as we took the loop around the rink.  I'd have been happy to let her corner me in the playground, even at the ripe old age of 8.

I waited 5 years to kiss a woman once.  We'd gone out a few times, and I moved before I (or she) had made the move.  It was only when I saw her again that we kissed, and it was so sudden, intense, and passionate that I figured it must have been simmering inside me for that whole 5 years.  Didn't even know.

I dated two women a single time each, years apart from each other.  I'd gone out with each of them under some pressure from mutual friends far more than any interest on my part, and both times they kissed me in the car on the way home.  I appreciated the gesture, but it was like being 8 years old on the playground with "Nicole" again.  Only with tongue.

I was engaged once, and broke it off.  I don't remember the first time we kissed, or the last.

I was with a woman once that didn't let me kiss her the first time I tried, even though I'd been wanting to for years.  Felt like a damned fool afterward.  Hard enough to build up the nerve to do it--even worse when she turns her head away as you make the move.   Second time I tried weeks later, I didn't get shut down, and it was better than the 5 year wait I mentioned earlier--all the passion, love, and intensity of the wait, but this time I had known how much it had been simmering inside my heart.  That one was at the top of the list, by a mile.  Ironically, I remember many of the times I kissed her, but not the last.  Life is strange some times.

There's the kiss of death, or the kiss of life, a first kiss, a last kiss, a kiss from a rose on the gray, the rock group KISS, or Hershey's Kiss.

Some kisses are better than others.  If you're in the kissing cousins camp I don't want to hear about it.

Some of you reading this blog are referred to above--more than one, in fact.  All I'll say is that none of you are in the "Nicole" group.  Hope no offense is taken....


       

Milestones

I'm not going to bury the lead on this one. Today would have been my 12th wedding anniversary.

I really wanted to write something deep and profound about milestones in our lives--how significant dates can commemorate the good and the bad--but all of the thoughts I had seemed to be pale and weak compared to the emotions that were behind them, and I knew that whatever I wrote wasn't going to be relevant or even interesting to anyone but me anyway.  So I'm going to write this for my own sake.  No childhood memories here, or moral to the story at the end--just me getting some stuff off my chest because I want to say it, even if I shouldn't any more.  It's how I feel, and I've had enough of holding that back.

I was never going to be one of those husbands that forgot his anniversary; July 28th was as important to me as my own birthday, maybe even more so, because it symbolized to me that someone was invested enough in me as a person to commit to being with me "as long as we both shall live" and all that jazz.  I didn't always have the greatest ideas for a gift, or activity to celebrate the occasion of our anniversary, but I always remembered, and always did something from the heart.  So even given the new circumstances of my life, I have to acknowledge the date in some way.

I wasn't home on our 10th anniversary, because I had to be out of town for work.  I know it probably wouldn't have changed anything, but even to this day I still wish that I'd been with her that night.  It bothered me then, and does so even more now, knowing that it was a milestone in its own right, and one of the last we'd have together.

I won't get into all of the drama of what happened to us, or who was at fault--we both hold our own share of the blame, and some of my own has been revealed on here before.  I know I can't go back, or start over--the papers are signed, the deed is done, the die has been cast, blah, blah, blah.  There are no do-overs in things like this.  There are too many moments that I'd have to go back and fix anyway (they keep me awake at night), but if it was at all possible, I'd sure as hell try.

All I can do is try to move on and forward as she has/is.  I'm a little behind the curve when it comes to that, and truth be told, a huge part of me didn't (still doesn't--let's be honest) want to.  At least not when it comes to letting her go.  As much as we've hurt each other emotionally, it hasn't changed what's at the core of me.

I have and will always love her. 

Bleating Heart

It was dark and cool in the building, but it was far from quiet.  Among the rows of cages stacked two and three high, dozens of dogs were whining and whimpering with manic intensity as a rapid scratching came from one of the larger cages on the floor.

None of the cages could be seen—there were no lights on in the long, rectangular building, and any moonlight that normally would have filtered through the window of the single door at the end of the building was blocked by the dark clouds that were dumping a heavy rain onto the tin metal roof, thrumming over the top of the nervous sounds coming from the animals inside.  A monsoon that had moved into the area in full force had already turned the dirt floor of the desert into an ocean of mud.

Over the top of the sounds of the dogs, a baby goat could be heard bleating incessantly in the darkness.  The goat was not in a fully enclosed cage; instead it was inside a small, portable wire fence that had been set up inside the shed to keep the goat dry from the rain that poured outside.  The fence was 3 feet high, and lightly built.  The only thing that kept it standing up was the octagonal shape that it had been configured into, the angle of the corners acting as the sole support.

The scratching coming from the cage continued; a constant and rapid scrape-scrape-scrape-scrape that was punctuated by the rattle of a thin metal door as the head of the dog inside smashed into it on occasion while it tried to find purchase on the stainless steel floor with the long nails of its paws.  With each crash against the cage door, the semi-circle of the latches that kept it locked wobbled and shifted, loosening minutely with each blow.

The scrape-scrape-scrape continued as the bleating from the goat and whining and barks from the pack of caged dogs grew louder and more frequent, until, with a small snap, the lower latch of the cage popped loose as the vibrations that had been assaulting it finally took their toll.  The Doberman inside pushed its head through the small opening at the bottom of the thin metal door, still not able to make it through the gap, but now using its whole body to push and pull against the door, shaking the remaining latch with more and more intensity, until it too popped free. 

The door of the cage flew wide with the force, slamming against the front of the cage next to it as the escaped Doberman raced across the room, toenails now scratching the worn wooden floor instead of the smooth metal they had been scratching at moments before.  The dog reached the low wire fence that enclosed the restless goat, and slammed into one of the wire panels, knocking the pen out of the octagonal shape that had been keeping it upright.  The baby goat bleated again and again as the Doberman pawed and bit at it through the unstable fence, until the small pen collapsed under the weight of the dog. 

The goat tried to run, but had been tangled up in the wire of the fence as it buckled to the floor, and could not get away from the snarling, snapping jaws of its attacker.  Among the roar of barking from the full kennel of still-caged and fevered dogs, the goat’s bleating gave way to inhuman screams as the Doberman ripped it to shreds.      

Inside a small house that stood many yards away; the rain and distance prevented the sleeping family inside from hearing the frantic sounds emanating from the building that housed the animals.

          The next morning, a thin sixteen year-old boy slept in the top of the bunk bed in the room that he had until recently shared with his younger brother, who had moved out to live with their older brother.  The bedroom had been built by the sleeping boy himself, one of two additions to the previously one-bedroom home that his family had moved to four years prior.  The roof leaked into a bucket that sat on the bare cement floor, and the heavy, solid door to the room led out into backyard where a cinder pavestone path connected the bedroom to the back door of the main part of the house.

The door slammed open, smashing against the small shelf that held the teen’s stereo; a cheap shelf system with a turntable and dual cassette deck that he’d saved for years to buy.  The young man woke up to the sound of the crashing door, sitting up straight and staring wide-eyed at the doorway where his mother stood, yelling his name.

Even though he had woken quickly, his eyes were still blurry from sleep, and he could not see what his mother was holding in her hand as words were spat from her mouth; ‘cage, not locked, dead, stupid’.  He’d barely had time to register what she was saying, or what she was holding in her hand when she threw the object at him.  Shock and disbelief paralyzed him as the gory projectile came hurtling across the room toward him, landing squarely next to him in his bed.

He looked down into the dead eyes of the baby goat’s head that was now his bed-mate as his mother spewed another blue-streak of hate at him before slamming the door shut again.

The boy jumped from his bed, his bare feet landing on the cool cement floor, and quickly changed from his pajamas to a pair of jeans that he’d grown too tall for, and a t-shirt that had begun to wear thin in many places.  As he put on a pair of socks and the Red Wing boots that he’d been given for his Boy Scout hiking trips two years before—the only pair of shoes he owned—he forced himself not to look up into his bed, at the grisly wake-up call that he’d received….

                                                              *****

Author’s Notes:

I wrote this for two reasons beyond the expected cathartic benefit of getting it out:

1) I mentioned this event in a very vague way in a previous blog post, and felt like I needed to tell the story for that reason.

2) I simply wanted to try a writing exercise of building tension in a scene—hopefully I did OK.  I’m trying to develop my skills as a writer and storyteller, and they tell you to write what you know.  This was something I know.

I obviously wasn’t in the building when the dog attack occurred, but I had seen the very dog that killed the goat that night rattle its cage door loose in this same way before.  It was my “job” or “responsibility” during most of my teenage years to tend to my parents’ 30+ dogs morning, noon, and night, so I knew only too well how they behaved—it’s easy for me to imagine what happened.  And I don’t remember why the goat was in the building with the dogs, but the monsoon rains were usually the reason my parents did something like that, so it’s a safe bet.

My bedroom door slamming open and my mom accusing me of leaving the dog’s cage door open as she threw the head of a dead goat at me did happen, although I have to admit that I don’t recall the details of what she said, only the general content.  I also don’t remember what happened after I got out of bed and got dressed—at some point I’m sure I had to dispose of the goat’s head, but how and when are blocked from memory.

Neither of my parents believed me about the dog being able to shake its cage door open; just one of many instances of them not hearing the truths I told them.  Making up stories became easier--it didn't hurt as much as telling the truth and not having it believed or understood.            

"If everyone is special, then no one is." ~The Incredibles

So here's something that I've never told anyone before, ever. 

Not my ex-wife, not my best friends, not my counselor.  Nobody....

Alright, so it's not going to be that big of a deal--nothing earth-shatteringly revelatory--but it is something that I think reflects my thinking and expectations thru most of my life.  Truthfully I really haven't thought about this specific night for almost thirty years--not until the last six months or so.  Won't mean anything to anyone reading this, but I wanted to get it written down while I still remember it, and how it relates to how I've been feeling lately.

I was about ten years old; the only reason I know this is because I remember that the house I lived in when Return of the Jedi came out (this makes it 1983, for those non-nerds) is where the concept I'm getting to first hit me.

I had a bedroom that was supposed to be shared with my brother; it had been converted from the garage, and we had bunk beds built into the room, but never had the ladders to climb up.  It was kind of removed from the rest of the house, and most importantly we didn't have a TV in the room.  I didn't like to sleep out there, and very rarely did.  Not that these details makes any difference, except to set up the environment I was in.
We never lived in one house longer than a year from the time I was five until I was fourteen--I went to five different elementary schools by the fifth grade, and for the year or so we lived at this house I would sleep on the couch in the living room instead of out in the converted garage.  My family would go to bed around nine or ten every night, and I would lay awake on the couch, waiting for everyone to go to sleep so I could turn the TV on and watch Twilight Zone, listening to the occasional jet fly over the house on its path to Sky Harbor in Phoenix, and the clock we had tick its pendulum back and forth.  That clock in particular is a sound from my youth that I actually remember with fondness--you could really only hear it late at night when the world had finally settled, and I felt like I was the only one around to appreciate it.  There was an air of possibility in that almost-silence.

I don't know what got me thinking about this idea that night, maybe it was the girl I had a crush on at school, maybe I'd seen a movie.  Maybe I wanted to see the girl I had a crush on in a movie--who knows.  But I do remember very vividly what I was thinking.  I lay there on the couch, listening to the clock tic, tic, tic (it didn't make a tic-toc sound--it was a single note over and over again), and fantasized about rescuing a damsel in distress.

It was a very dramatic event to be sure--she would be my age, flying in a small jet over my house with her wealthy business-man father on their way back home from some very important trip and the engine would blow up.  I'd be lying on the couch, ready to fall asleep and I'd hear the explosion, so I'd run outside in my pajamas to see what was going on.  The girl, her father, and the pilot would all have jumped out of the plane to parachute to safety; only in the darkened sky she would get separated from the others, and would come down to land in my street without them.  But since I was the only one awake (the night was my home, and in my imagination even the neighbors were all asleep by ten), I would be outside to see her come to earth, and being the dashing ten-year-old hero I was, I would help her land without hurting herself and get out of the parachute before it entangled her in its fabric and chords.
We'd get inside, and I'd make her a hot chocolate in the microwave while she'd use our little yellow wall-phone to call her mom to let her know that she was safe (remember cell phones were a thing of science-fiction back then--even the big brick cell phones of the '80's were still far away).
And of course she was pretty, and grateful to me for helping her--we'd sit on my couch, wrapped in my blanket and drinking cups of hot chocolate while we waited for the fire department and her father to arrive.

We'd become best friends and be together forever after that.  Her dad would hire me out of high school (doing what I didn't know, and didn't care--as long as it wasn't raising animals for a living), and we'd live happily ever after.

                                                                          ****

So there are obviously some issues with all of that fantasy, and how it relates to the real world.  No doubt a psychologist would be able to dig into all sorts of things about me in that recollection.  Hell, my life in general could probably be someone's doctoral thesis in psychology.  

The notion of being the hero was born out of a life of reading books & watching movies where extraordinary things happen to ordinary people; men and women overcome insurmountable odds; the nice guy always gets the girl despite everything in the world being against him. 

I think maybe that fixing my mind from the age of ten on how I wanted my life to be filled with the amazing and fantastical had set me up for failure, so much so that I didn't realize it, or would forget when those extraordinary things did happen... when I did get the girl against the odds....

I watched a movie tonight (Special) where the lead character believed he had super powers, altho in the story he really didn't, and at the end he finally realizes it (sort of--watch the movie; I don't want to give spoilers).  Here's the quote as the main character narrates before the final scene:
"...the truth is, with so many billions and billions of people on the planet, most of us can't be unique or important in any meaningful way. We go to sleep, we wake up, we go to work, we eat, we spend time with friends, we watch TV, maybe we even fall in love, but we don't have any magical powers and we don't have any great battles to fight, no evil forces to defeat, and no mysterious men in suits chasing after us. We just have reality - and believing anything else is just... well, believing anything else is just crazy, isn't it?"

If my life were like a movie, I guess I'd be at that mid-point where the protagonist thought everything was good--until the antagonist killed the hero's partner or kidnapped his kids and he has to go and face the bad guy alone.  But I've never woken up being faster than a speeding bullet--more powerful than a locomotive--able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, and my antagonists are only regret & loneliness. 
In the grandest scheme of things, that's pretty pathetic of me given the real battles people in this world--people even in my own city--face on a daily basis; not having a job or food to eat, fighting disease or prejudice that could take their lives or those of the ones they love.  I get that. 

I never wanted to be famous or rich--I just wanted to make a difference in people's lives, to have what I do actually matter, and that's where feel like I've failed myself, those around me, and the world in general.       

Deep inside my heart and soul, I'm still that boy lying awake at night, wanting to save the day, but not knowing how.....  

    

Be merciful to me, a fool....

This pretty much sums up how I feel lately.

THE FOOL'S PRAYER
by: Edward Rowland Sill (1841-1887)

HE royal feast was done; the King

Sought some new sport to banish care,

And to his jester cried: "Sir Fool,

Kneel now, and make for us a prayer!"

 

The jester doffed his cap and bells,

And stood the mocking court before;

They could not see the bitter smile

Behind the painted grin he wore.

 

He bowed his head, and bent his knee

Upon the Monarch's silken stool;

His pleading voice arose: "O Lord,

Be merciful to me, a fool!

 

"No pity, Lord, could change the heart

From red with wrong to white as wool;

The rod must heal the sin: but Lord,

Be merciful to me, a fool!

 

"'T is not by guilt the onward sweep

Of truth and right, O Lord, we stay;

'T is by our follies that so long

We hold the earth from heaven away.

 

"These clumsy feet, still in the mire,

Go crushing blossoms without end;

These hard, well-meaning hands we thrust

Among the heart-strings of a friend.

 

"The ill-timed truth we might have kept--

Who knows how sharp it pierced and stung?

The word we had not sense to say--

Who knows how grandly it had rung!

 

"Our faults no tenderness should ask.

The chastening stripes must cleanse them all;

But for our blunders -- oh, in shame

Before the eyes of heaven we fall.

 

"Earth bears no balsam for mistakes;

Men crown the knave, and scourge the tool

That did his will; but Thou, O Lord,

Be merciful to me, a fool!"

 

The room was hushed; in silence rose

The King, and sought his gardens cool,

And walked apart, and murmured low,

"Be merciful to me, a fool!" 

 

 

A&P Redux

          So this is a writing exercise I did in college back in '99--we'd read John Updike's A&P, and had to write our own version of it.  If you're familiar with the story, it takes place in a grocery store, so it was a pretty easy for me to adapt to, having been in the grocery business for close to a decade at that point.  I dusted this off tonight, and realized that it's held up remarkably well, if I do say so myself.  I think I've changed a total of half a dozen words (usually adjusting for present/past-tense), and a couple of punctuation marks before posting on here.  Let me know what you think.....

Thank You, Have a Nice Day

           It was early, and I sure as hell didn’t want to be there.  Despite the cold and rain of a dark winter morning, I’d hesitated before walking into the half-lit warmth of the grocery store where I worked as a cashier.  As on most mornings like this, the obnoxious buzz of my alarm clock had come way too early, and dragging myself out of bed and into the shower was a fuzzy dream state.  The drive in hadn’t been bad; I’d spent so much attention to channel surfing, trying to find a station that actually played music at six a.m. instead of some morning show host yammering, that I’d pulled into the parking lot without even realizing that I’d even gone anywhere.

            So there I was.  I almost turned around.  I was looking at other jobs anyway.  I didn’t really want to be here, but I didn’t have any other jobs lined up yet either.  Not for sure.  But man I hated this place.  The people I worked with were cool, but god, the customers!  Resigning myself to the fact that I’d never quit without giving my notice anyway, and consoling myself with the fact that morning shifts were much more bearable than mids or lates, I manually opened the electric sliding glass doors and let myself in.  I should have just gone home and gone back to bed.

            I shook the morning rain out of the creases in my jacket and headed toward the back of the store.  I muttered a few hellos and good-mornings to people as I passed them, making my way toward the lockers in the back room.  Fumbling through the ten thousand keys on my key ring, I finally found the one for the cheap padlock on the #5 locker door.  The lock was purely for appearances; if anyone wanted into my locker all they had to do was pull down on the lock with a good jerk.  But, either nobody else had ever tried this or nobody cared about the contents of my little gray box, because it had never been messed with. 

            I fished in past the junk food that were my diet most days, and the name badges of former employees--which I had taken as some sort of battlefield souvenirs, and grabbed my folded up apron to put it on.

            As I finished tying the apron strings behind me, I walked back toward the front of the store, just as the lights started coming on.  Damn.  It was time to open already.  I rushed to get my cash drawer in the checkstand before the manager opened the front doors.  I managed to look like I’d been ready all morning when the first customer strolled in at 7:01. 

            The first half-hour or so was the usual crowd: cup of coffee, some donuts, pack of cigarettes.  People running late for work, kids running late for school, graveyard shift running late on sleep, and people in ugly spandex pants that had been just plain running. 

            Next came the interesting ones.  I’d watch them as best I could and make judgements on them.  Usually some of us that worked there would sit in the lunchroom and see if our assessments of them jived.  By 7:45 a great mix had already come in.  Down aisle 8 a white trash couple was arguing about money while they dropped beer into their cart.  The husband, a scrawny little guy wearing LEE jeans and a wife-beater T-shirt, kept yelling at his wife about the electric bill.  The wife, wearing sweats that looked about ten years old, argued back about the water bill.  With each exchange they got louder and louder, not caring that everyone in the store could hear them by now.

            At my end of the same aisle, a college kid looked up from the sports drink label he’d been reading, saw that the couple was heading his way, and suddenly decided that would be a good time to check out the magazine rack.

            I looked around to see if anyone else was watching the show, and caught Jeff on aisle seven, trying to mop up a broken bottle of pancake syrup that someone had done a hit-and-run on.  I nodded my head toward the white trashers, and Jeff pointed down to the mess at his feet.  He then turned and flipped them off from behind the safety of the shelves and went back to mopping.

            The others floating through the store were two old women that could be heard every once in a while jabbering about church gossip, a fat dude in a cheap suit and too much hair spray up by the Hostess snacks display, and a little hottie wearing a tight sweater and a really high skirt.  Legs. 

            I lost track of white trash, but could hear them on the back aisle somewhere.  The college kid was still over by the magazines, but he didn’t look too interested in them; he kept looking around like he was waiting for someone.  The cheap suit came and went pretty fast.  Cup of coffee and some Twinkies that he paid for with his credit card.  Thank you, sir.  Have a nice day. 

I didn’t notice which way Legs had gone; last I’d seen she was over next to college boy by the magazine rack.  Lucky bastard.  I headed over to aisle seven to ask Jeff if he’d seen her, but he was gone, a shiny wet patch on the floor and a bright orange cone warning customers not to fall and break their necks the only sign of civilization on the aisle.  I peeked down two more aisles looking for her, but all I saw were the two old women standing in the middle of aisle five, discussing recipes and pointing at boxes of Jell-O.

            College boy picked that moment to head for the checkout.  Mr. and Mrs. White Trash cut him off, though, as they popped out of aisle nine.  They drove right toward the register, and college boy went back to the sports drink he’d been eyeballing earlier, still sneaking glances our way every once in a while.

            Mr. and Mrs. Trash bought two half-racks of Coors, a carton of generic cigarettes and a ton of candy bars.  They gave me their check, which I figure will probably bounce, and told them ‘Thank you, have a nice day’ as they walked out the door.  I was so busy watching them argue as they got in their car that I didn’t see the college kid step into my checkstand. 

He had both hands stuffed into the pockets of his baggy khakis, and his forehead had little beads of sweat building up on it.  I wondered what he wanted, since he hadn’t dropped anything on the checkstand, and I was just about to ask him when he ripped his right hand out of his pocket, his fingers wrapped around the biggest damn gun I ever saw.  He glanced around a lot as he pointed the gun at me, and in a low, rapid, blur said, “All the cash right now, man, or I’ll cap you where you’re standing!”

I couldn’t believe this crap.  You’re supposed to rob stores at night, when they have lots of money in the tills, and the ‘cap you’ line just killed me.  I almost laughed out loud.  As I hit the No-Sale key to open the drawer, I did a quick guess of how much cash I’d made that morning.  It hadn’t been that much; a lot of people had paid by check or credit card, so most of what was in there was what I had started with.  I started stuffing money into a paper sack, and figured that altogether he’d get less than two hundred bucks.  I stared at him across the counter, even though they tell you not to do that in a robbery.  I couldn’t help it.  What a goddamn dork this guy was. 

I felt a smile just start to creep onto my face when we both heard something.  We turned as one toward the sound; Legs had finally shown up again, in one hand a fashion magazine, which she held in front of her face as she read it, and a Snapple bottle in the other.  She hadn’t seen us, and college boy took that as his cue to leave. 

Snatching the money-filled paper sack, he backed toward the door, the cannon in his hand still waving in my direction.  I guess Legs finally looked up, I don’t know, I was too busy watching college walk out the door, that little smile trying again to find it’s way onto my lips.

There was a sound of shattering glass and splashing liquid, the Snapple bottle, I guess, when Legs finally looked up from reading 20 Tips On How To Get Mr. Right and saw College standing there with a gun pointed toward my head.  He jerked at the sound, which was followed by a much louder one.  The smart-ass comment I was gonna make to the idiot in front of me was temporarily forgotten as the bullet buzzed past my head.  It sounded like some high-pitched bee on crack, and I wondered morbidly how close it actually came. 

I just barely caught sight of the dude as he ran out into the parking lot and jumped into a beat-up little green Honda.  I tried to get the plates, but the rain was coming down in buckets, and there was no way.  By then everyone in the store had heard the gun going off, and were bunched up around my checkstand gawking at me like I was Jesus Christ himself.

After two hours, and six times telling the story ( I counted ), everything finally started to calm down.  The cops had spent a lot of time trying to get me to remember the license number that I hadn’t even seen, and I could hear Legs trying to say the same thing to the cop talking to her.  They finally left us alone and went over to wrap things up with my manager.  Legs and I stood there together in silence, watching them as they all talked, and I couldn’t help but stare at her.  She looked like somebody you’d see on TV, her long blond hair looking just like the model’s on the cover of the magazine she’s been reading, and her clothes the kind you’d never see at Wal-Mart. 

The cops finally split, and my manager came walking over to us, his stomach pushing his shirt almost out of his pants, his polyester red tie sticking out at a weird angle as it reached the paunch around his waist.  He thanked Legs for sticking around and giving her statement, then all but told her to leave.  I figured he’d let me go home for the rest of the day--getting shot at seemed like a valid reason to me.  I started to pull my apron off, hoping I could catch up with Legs before she split, when he turned to me and said, “Go take a ten-minute break.  I’ll cover your register until you get back.”

I just stared at him, amazed.  Jeff paused from cleaning up the broken Snapple bottle a few feet away and turned to the boss, using the same look he’d used on the White Trashes what seemed ages ago.  Legs stopped by the exit doors and turned to watch. 

“I was kinda hoping to take the rest of the day off,” I said, trying to let it show in my voice that I wasn’t just hoping, but expecting to get out early.

“You can handle the rest of your shift,” he said, as if it was final.

“What a jerk,” I heard Legs mutter as she turned back toward the door and started to leave.

That was all I needed to hear.  She was right; the guy was a jerk.  I pulled the apron off, taking the name badge and tossing it to Jeff, who was obviously pretty cool with what I was about to do.  The grin on his face was a mile wide.  My manager just stared at me, the top of his head glistening beneath the few strings of hair he’d combed over from the side of his head to cover his bald spot. 

Dropping the apron onto the checkstand, I turned to him, the thought of what I had wanted to yell to College as he left flashing back into my head.  Smiling, I looked at my boss and said, “Thank you.  Have a nice day,” as I turned and walked out the door.

“Because everything up to now is a story and everything after now is a story.” ~ Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

I've had a gun pointed at me four times in my life.  Four that I'm aware of at least (it's a messed up world--who knows what lurks behind darkened upper story windows or grassy knolls).

That isn't very often in comparison to some people, I realize, but it's fairly significant for me considering just how incongruous that is in my life.  Anyone that knows me can say that I'm not a big risk-taker, and I've never really lived in the type of neighborhood where those kinds of things are a concern.

Even more ironic is that not a single one of those times occurred during the time I spent in New York (which I'll touch on briefly later).

                                                                     *****
Part I: The Perils of Youth

The first time was when I was about 15 years old.  Like any other teenager, I had a lot of events happen during those years that have influenced my life (read my "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" post for another one.)
But unlike most other American teens it wasn't school or girls that caused my problems back then.  I'll come back to that last part down the road--it will come full circle, so bear with me.

As mentioned elsewhere, my family lived in a rural area of Arizona at the time.  Most of the properties were 5-acre lots separated by barbed-wire or heavy field fence.  There was very little development--generally a single dwelling--usually a mobile home, and a handful of out-buildings, all surrounded by sage brush.  The roads there were all dirt, and washed out at least once a year when flash-floods would come through, leaving you stranded either at your house for days, or conversely, away from home if you were on the opposite side of the road when the rain came.

We lived on one of the 5-acre lots--our house and the pens where we kept all of the animals were on the front two acres.  The back three were filled with over-flow from an auto wrecking yard--my parents leased out the space to the wrecking company--and random scrap that we'd inherited when we bought the property.  We were surrounded by similar lots on all sides.

Since we were so far removed from any other real activities for a teenager who was not yet driving and therefore stuck at home most of the day, I would wander the back part of the lot looking through the cars.  Some had simply broken down and given up, but many had been thru traffic accidents of various degrees.  Usually the owners' possessions were still in the car.  People's whole commuting lives, and sometimes more, were there to be explored.  It was fascinating and sad.  The condition some of the cars were in, there was no doubt about whether the driver survived the accident or not.

So back to the gun...  As I was walking through the rows of cars I heard a buzz pass my ear.  Like I said, it was a remote desert area--I'd seen rattlesnakes, tarantulas, scorpions, etc all on a daily basis.  A large horsefly or bee buzzing past my ear was not an unrealistic thought, or even uncommon.  Then I heard it again.  And again.  Then I started to hear the plinking of something hard hitting the car bodies nearby.  The next buzz came past my ear so closely that I felt the heat as it passed.  The plink that followed hit a car immediately next to me on my right.  It was the late 1980's, and I'd seen more than my share of cheesy action movies with hyped-up sound effects--I knew what bullets hitting metal was supposed to sound like.

I hit the dirt.

I army-crawled back toward the front of the property, the buzzing and plinking continuing almost until I reached the back fence.  I didn't hear anything more, so jumped up and ran the rest of the way to the house.
My dad didn't work at the time (or most of my life, for that matter--another long story), so he was in the house when I came in.  My heart was pounding in my chest, and it wasn't from the belly-crawl or run, I can tell you that.  I told my dad what happened.  You have to understand that what he did next was VERY out of character for him, being the non-conformist, anti-establishment man that he was.  My dad called the police.

The county sheriff deputy arrived about 30 minutes later.  He took plenty of notes, and left again after 15 or 20 minutes of questions.  He came back again some time later--I don't know how long--with an explanation.  Turns out the guy that lived on the lot behind and to the right of ours had decided he wanted to sit on his back porch with a couple of beers and shoot his rifle, just for kicks.  The guy had no idea that I had been out there.

So that was it.  Nothing nefarious or dramatic--just a bored redneck neighbor.  And technically I never saw the gun that was pointed at me, but the last bullet that I felt pass my ear was enough for me to know that it was at least pointed toward my immediate direction.  And I don't know whether to thank God for the guy being a bad shot, or a good one. 

                                                                     *****

The second time was just weeks after my family had moved to Oregon in 1991.  We lived in another somewhat remote locale, only this time is was on the edge of the Willamette National Forest, and my dad had sent me out to pick up some tools that he'd called about in the local Nickel Ads or some such thing.  So I went out into the area outside of the small town we lived in, amid the ever-present rain of the Northwest, looking for the address among what was little more than dirt logging roads with houses built every half mile or so amid the numerous trees.  Keep in mind that this is WAY before GPS and cell phones were common.  I had to use a good old-fashioned paper map, and couldn't call for help.

I finally found the place I was looking for, and knocked on the door.  I didn't get an answer, so knocked again, and then a third time without any response.  I waited for several minutes, then got back in my car to leave.  Only when I turned the key in the ignition, the car just made a rapid clicking sound from under the hood.  The battery had gone dead from the time I left the house to the time I'd stopped.

I went back up the steps to the house and tried knocking again, without any more success than I'd had the first time.  So I started walking back to the last house I'd seen on the way up the hill, where I used the phone to call my dad for help.  Then I walked back up to my car to wait for him.  When I got back to the car, there was a middle-aged man walking around the driveway with a shotgun in his hand, which he quickly pointed at me as I walked up.  Naturally I stopped in my tracks, my heart thumping almost out of my chest.

The man proceeded to interrogate me on who I was, why I was there and had left my car, why I didn't knock.  He didn't believe me when I told him I that I had in fact knocked, several times.  Being called a liar by a man with a gun when you know you're speaking the truth is a strange state of mind to be in.

The guy finally lowered the gun, and my dad showed up shortly after.  We bought the tools I'd come out there to get, we got the car running and left.  And just like the situation in AZ, the local sheriff deputy showed up.  He was coming up the hill as we were going down, and he flashed his headlights to have us stop.  The gun-toting used-tool salesman had called him when he saw the strange car in his driveway.  It was a a short conversation as we explained what happened, and the deputy made the comment that sometimes people live away from the rest of society for a reason.  I've never forgotten that.

                                                                 *****

Part II: Pride Comes Before the Fall

Fast forward to Thanksgiving 2012.  My wife and I had been separated for many months as we tried to work some things out in our marriage, not the least of which was my inability to allow anyone to know that I wasn't perfect, despite every effort I'd made to appear that way.

My family life growing up did not encourage use of any support structure--it was all about self-reliance and always needing to be right.  If you knew the berating I received every time I made a mistake that my parents saw, you'll wonder that something like what follows didn't happen sooner in my life.  I'll tell you about the goat's head some day.  Horrifying.  (And like so many other life-shaping events, happened around the time I was 14-16).  So early on I got into the habit of covering my tracks on anything that I thought could be judged.

I thought I'd grown beyond trying to cover up my errors as I became my own person, but as I found myself making the types of big "adult" mistakes (jobs, money, etc) that are more far-reaching than those you make in youth, as well as falling back into a psychological addiction that had started, again in my teens, I started reverting to old ways of trying to hide what I'd done.  I hid it out of fear of the shame and damage it caused my pride, especially when it came to my wife.  I wanted her to only see the man I was trying to be, not the man I slipped into being at times.  The thing is though, she always knew or found out.  Always.  And that drove her crazy more than anything, because I couldn't show the trust in her to share what I saw as my troubles, my issues, my failures.  I tried to protect her from them, and all that did was pull us apart emotionally--the exact opposite of what I wanted to do.  We separated, the emotional distance becoming more formal.

Here's where the line earlier in Part 1 about girls not being one of my teenage issues comes back into play.  You see, I didn't really date when I was a teen.  In fact my first real, "take a girl out in my car and go somewhere" date didn't happen until I was almost 20.  Tough to ask a girl out when you're poor, and the only reliable car is a Ford Econoline van with a bed where the back seats should be.  Explain that to a high-school girl's parents.

So I didn't go through the break-ups and heart-ache, and emotional growth that comes with them, until later in life.  And even then, I only had a couple of relationships that were "serious".  One was hard for me--the first girl I'd really fallen for.  At the time I would have said that I loved her, but I think it was more the idea of her that I loved.  And she was fun to be around.  What kept me sane in that instance was that something really good came out of being in a relationship with her--I'd moved to New York for a brief time to be with her, and kind of "found myself," as cliche as that sounds.  Many of the best parts of who I am today came out of that time in my life.  And I made some very good friends there that I still talk to, even with 15 years and 3000 miles between us.  And if I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have gone to work at Starbucks when I got back, met my wife, had our son...  You get the idea.
The second one was a rebound when I got back to the Northwest from New York.  It was a whirl-wind relationship that led to a brief engagement which I happily broke off.  Nothing I regret about letting that one end, then or now.

I say all of this because as my wife and I were separated we'd hit these moments of lows where we'd be talking about the issues and reach an impasse, a stalemate in the conversation, and I would react not in a way that a 30-something with a steady job, good friends, and a family should.  I behaved like a petulant teenager who can't get over his first crush, or can't see the dangerous path they're going down.  I'd sulk, I'd rage, I'd spew mean and hurtful words that I didn't intend, but came from the child inside of me that was angry at the world for the situation I'd found myself in and didn't know how to correct.  Angry at my wife for asking me to change to fit her ideals, but not willing to meet me in the middle.  Angry at her for not being willing to stay with me while I worked through it.  So I took it out on the person I loved most in life.  Primarily because I felt like I wasn't living up to my own expectations of myself, let alone hers.         

Pride, anger, emotional immaturity--that was me for most of 2012.  Yes, indeed.

Over the course of the separation I'd had many friends offer to help, to let me talk to them and try to get me to work through some of the issues I was going through.  She asked me to seek out more help.  But I turned most of it down.  I still held on to the notion that I had to figure it out on my own, because some of the issues were biggies that I didn't think the world would understand, and worse yet, wouldn't be able to "fix" anyway.  I was too embarrassed to talk about them.  The things I'd hidden to protect her from having to worry about were the things that drove a wedge between us, not so much because they were in the open, but because they weren't.
  
So we'd been separated for a while, and Thanksgiving weekend she told me that she couldn't continue to try to work it out.  She told me that it was too draining, we weren't making any progress, and she couldn't handle getting back together only to find some future point that I'd hidden from her another lay-off, or the fact that my "addiction" had reared its ugly head again.  Ironically, when she told me this, many of the demons I'd been struggling with I had managed to overcome over the course of the previous several months, including my "addiction".  Sometimes having a therapist to talk to, someone who you know will be objective in their response, can bring clarity to things that seem impossible to understand or explain.  Especially if you find a good one, like I did.  Took me til I was 39 years old to let that sink in.  I can thank my dad (insert sarcastic tone) for putting the idea in my head at an early age that asking for help, especially when it comes to emotions, is a sign of weakness.

I felt like there were other factors in my wife's decision as well--outside influences of people reinforcing what she was thinking, or giving her things that she felt I no longer could.  I was angry at that too.  To me it seemed like the whole "for better or for worse, in sickness and in health" concept was jettisoned. 
It all fed into my notion that my self-worth was directly related to what people thought of me or what I did. Since I was already conditioned to think that I was never good enough, even when I was at my best, the smallest judgements of me or the way I did things were like being eviscerated.  Worse still was the feeling of disregard.  It would re-open very old wounds that had never healed to begin with.      
 
I was devastated when she told me.  When you spend a quarter of your life with your primary purpose trying to make someone happy, because you love them and they make you happy (the best thing to ever happen in my life up to the birth of my son), only to find out that you've failed....  It takes all of the wind out of your sails.  I recognize that getting love from someone else should not dictate success or failure as a person, but I'd attached my happiness & personal value to her love of me.

So the third time I had a gun pointed at me, I was doing it myself.

Gun metal tastes terrible.  I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, no matter how desperate you get.  And it hurts your teeth when it clacks against them as the sobs rack your body.

Feelings of failure in love and life had gotten me to that point.  Real, unconditional love brought me back out.  Love for my son and step son.  Love from them.  No matter how messed up I felt my life was, they are incredible young men, and I could not be more proud of them.  I was still a mess inside, but I could not do what I was thinking of doing, knowing the effect it would have on them.

                                                                    *****

I went through the 2012 holidays and first few months of 2013 in a blur.  I had taken a new position at work, and was covering multiple responsibilities, working 70-80 hours a week through February.  When we got to the point of finalizing the divorce agreement, I was tired, angry, and defiant.  And part of me--the romantic, the piece that still held on to what we'd had our first several years of marriage--that part thought that as long as the papers weren't signed by the judge there was still hope, despite everything that had happened.  

The fourth time is really an extension of the third.  It was last week.

Seeing without doubt that she had truly moved on from me and our marriage, the last inkling of hope I had that we would reconcile and come out of this was shattered like glass on cement. 

The thought of the boys brought me back again, but this time instead of bottling everything up and trying to cope with it on my own, I asked for help.  I saw my therapist, I called friends, I wrote things here to let my feelings out, regardless of what people may think of me.  I sobbed for hours on my kitchen floor and mourned what I'd had and lost.
And, I think most importantly, I stopped trying to fix it; stopped trying to change the situation that I no longer had any control over (and realistically probably hadn't for far longer than I realized).   There's another line from Fight Club; “It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything.”  It may seem like an odd choice of movie to quote from when you're talking about coming back from the brink of darkness, but I am Jack's commiseration.  If you haven't watched that movie or read the book, go do so--you'll understand what I mean.  It was liberating to let go, knowing that I had truly and completely hit rock bottom and was at my most raw, unprotected state.  I thought I'd been there before, last Nov.  I had no idea how much further down the bottom was.

How do I know I've changed?  How can I be sure?  The person that I was even a month ago would never have started a blog and posted for the world to see.  Even the "me" of a month ago when I started this couldn't have shared what I have in the last week.   If ever there was a time for my failures and demons to consume me, this last few months would have been it.  Not to say that I'm good.  I'm not that naive, but there has been a fundamental shift in me the last couple of days, so much so that I've physically felt it.  I've been to the edge of emotional hell and waved at the devil.  This time I'm flipping him off.  I'm a little crispy on the edges, but coming back to Earth.  

I found out that I'm not alone, even though I've spent the last several months--longer even--telling myself that I was.  Thanks to those of you who've read this and contacted me, or read and kept silent about it, but are still my friends.

I don't mind saying that I'm scared.  In many ways I'm starting my adult life over from scratch.  Despite the fact that we couldn't work through our mutual issues, my (ex)-wife is an amazing woman, full of talent and unlimited potential, and a wonderful mother.  I worry that I'll never find another woman that I'll feel that way about, and can love me in return.

I still wonder about not living up to my own expectations, but I'm pretty sure I'm done letting the voices of my past continue to tell me what is or isn't good enough.
  
All of this has given me a vastly different perspective than I've had the last few years, and my priorities have changed.  I have a bigger purpose in life than I've been living out lately, even if I don't know what it is yet.  Maybe it's as simple as being there for my boys and watching them grow.  I believe there's more, but that would be more than enough.            

If you've read this far and are thinking something snide or derisive, if you feel about me the way I used to feel about myself--I'll mourn that loss too.  Not as deeply as what I'm mourning now, to be sure, but I will.

If you've read this all the way through and we're still friends, I hope that we're even better friends for it. 

"Row, row, row your boat...."

This song was stuck in my head this afternoon.  I was outside pulling weeds in the backyard on a rare sunny and warm April day in Oregon.  I haven't heard the song in probably years, but I found myself singing it.

So why, you ask, was "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" rattling around my noggin?

When I was 15 years old, I crashed a nearby neighbor's car into the fence of their front yard.  We were living in a rural area with dirt roads and few houses.  Their son had come over to our place, and offered to let me drive back to his.  I did fine driving the 1/2 mile from my house to theirs, but I took the corner into their driveway too fast, and smashed their family station-wagon into the steel tube fence by their front gate.  It's the type of fence you see in horse stables, if you've ever been around one.  Heavy, sturdy, and unforgiving.  I didn't total the car, but it was bad enough that they couldn't drive it for weeks.  And I hit the fence hard enough that, as tough as it was, I still broke it in several areas.

Being profoundly short of cash--we pretty much lived paycheck to paycheck growing up--I had nothing but apologies to offer the neighbors.  I gave them every last dollar I had ( I want to say it was around 40 bucks--a fortune for me at that time), and promised to work off the rest.  And I didn't tell my parents what happened.  I went to bed owning some of the worst emotions of guilt & regret I'd ever had in my short life up to that point.  I woke up several times that night wishing that the whole thing had been a dream, but facing the realization each time I woke that it was real, and I couldn't change it.
Wishing that life was "but a dream" at that moment--a bad dream.

That's how I've felt the last couple of days.  I've become aware of things that are directly out of my deepest fears, my worst dreams, but are in fact very, painfully, real.  I woke up several times last night--truthfully I was awake more than I slept--with images playing in my head that I can't shake.  And like that 15 year-old me, I longed desperately for it to not have been true each time I woke.

So as I was pulling weeds and picking up fallen and dried out pine cones, wishing that life was "but a dream."  But nothing merrily merrily merrily about it this week.

I was partially responsible for crashing this "car" too.  I know that.  I hit a turn in life that I hadn't had enough "driver's ed" to be able to handle.  And the fence wasn't ready either.

The last few days have been probably the worst emotionally, personally, mentally, that I've ever experienced.  It's going to take me time to get past it.  Thanks to those I've already spoken to in the last couple of days, and thanks in advance to those that I know will help me if/when I do reach out to you.

 I'm going slower behind the wheel now, especially the last couple of months, but I still take some corners a little too tight, and do some damage.  If you're one of the fences I crash into--I'm sorry.  Please know I'm not intentionally aiming at you.  Just trying to learn how to drive better than the 15 year-old me.  




 

Life sucks...

...and then you die.

Stanley's family dinnner....

A little more of young Stanley's adventures after his run-in with the barbed-wire fence.  Be warned, there are a couple words not appropriate for a PG-minded audience.

I re-posted the first couple of paragraphs for anybody that's actually reading this, so you don't have to keep track of where you are. 

           

*****The excerpts from this story have been removed in order to qualify for publishing the full story....*****

Once And Future Stanley

As promised (for those paying attention or even care), here are some short excerpts from my most current work.  Just enough to give you a little flavor of the story, without giving it all away. 

I was going to do a much shorter (and more impactful, in my opinion) sampling, but after the events in Boston today, I didn't think the timing would have been so good on my part.  So you get this.

If you like it, say so.  If you don't, you can tell me that too--I've worked retail & sales for over 20 years--I can take it.  All I ask is that you be respectful either way.

And, K~
If you're reading this--I've tried to keep my mind off of today's date, but it didn't work....  Just so you know.

Once and Future Stanley

*****The excerpts from this story have been removed in order to qualify for publishing the full story....*****