Category: Things that Happened

The smell of humid dryer-air as I bolted from the laundry room where my mother was folding clothes. The cool rasp of galvanized steel as I hung from the crossbar of the clothesline pipes.

The grinding quarter turn of my sneakered heel in the sandy grass that was home plate, midway through a fully wild swing at an innocent, floating softball. The leather laces of my baseball glove, wet and chewy in my mouth, vaguely hoping for a pop fly.

The not-quite-painful metal barb of bicycle pedals on bare feet as we raced around in circles with whirring tires on parched sidewalks. Straddling the bike with the front wheel clenched between my thighs and yanking the handlebars back into alignment.

We twirled in the late evening air with clear-skied stars streaking above us and cool, damp grass and earth beneath. We waited for the lunar eclipse and got dizzy in thickening blue twilight.

My face pressed against the screen-window’s mesh, feeling the breath of mid-day moving in and out in hot languid waves, watching for kids to come out and play. Picking grains of sand from my skinned knee striped fleshy white and blood red.

The electric buzz of a light outside the kitchen table window way past bedtime learning to play chess with my father.

The instant drying bake of July-roasted cement beside the public pool’s shallow end, and the wet shadows of our bodies melting outward, sending rivulets back into the water. We vanished in shimmering heat.

My head double-weighted, hair pulled taut, laying too far back in the swing as trees and clouds and planes at thirty thousand feet flipped back and forth in brazen defiance of physics and reason.

Released from the summer-school bus at the top of the hill on crackling dry August grass and hearing the folding doors swoomp shut behind me. The belly rumble of the diesel engine; a few remaining kids framed by rectangular windows. Not quite the last stop.

String cheese, turkey sandwich, cool grapes, Doritos. Cereal with milk and sugar. Bomb pops.

Watching traffic backed up outside the fairground’s main gate; short-sleeved policemen with their thumbs squarely into belt loops tucked. Sunburned men in tank tops and fanny packs and families with strollers of sleeping, shrieking children.

Climbed the sledding hill to a spot where through branches I could see and barely hear fireworks above a spinning sliver of the Ferris Wheel’s lights. The mad random jubilant chaos of the midway just after dark.

Dinnertime. The sun is down. On the scratchy blue carpet in my bedroom the backpack’s neatly packed; still short two notebooks and a protractor.

Crickets. The light is off. Fifth grade tomorrow and for the first time in memory I can’t fall asleep.

The last day of summer.

Holy crap! This post is older than my children. Twice! Anyway, in honor of  Twins Opening Day, here you go:

I have always hated baseball. The standing around. The body-part scratching. The throwing and catching. Goofy socks.

There are so many ways to ridicule the game of baseball it’s difficult to choose where to start. Difficult, but not impossible.

As a kid whose parents were from South America, I grew up thinking fútbol was far superior. This despite the fact that neither my parents nor my Argentine relatives cared any more about fútbol than they cared about bais-bol. My parents considered it a sport for thugs. My mom worried about head injuries and tackling. Also drugs (Maradona, cocaine, etc.).

So I made a point of treating our national pastime with contempt. I decried it as a non-sport. It required no physical fitness, like golf or chess. It was the most poorly designed of  sports, in my mind, because the rules were strange and arbitrary and often self-conflicting.

So when the time came in gym class or on the playground to play what was, in the late 80s and early 90s, still The Nation’s Pastime, it was with glum satisfaction that I joined in. On one hand, I hated participating in that Sport Which Crushed All Other Sports. On the other hand, I could criticize to my heart’s delight, from the perfect vantage point: right field.

This happened throughout my childhood. Late summer nights spent watching wispy dead dandelions under the bright outfield lights. I even played on the neighborhood team in a ill-fated attempt at cultural assimilation.

In the short-term, at least, it didn’t work. I never fit in with the boys who collected baseball cards. They did it not because everyone else did, but because it was a fact of life, like breathing. These were kids who really did play catch with their dads in the back yard after dinner. My dad and I played multiplication tables.

But over time, baseball made a mark on me in a subtle, nearly undetectable way, like the sun on a painting hung on a south-facing wall. I remember running up the stairs the night the Twins won the 1991 World Series. We’d just moved into our first real house.

I remember getting my first fitted ‘Minnesota’ hat, now trapped in a grave of dust behind a dresser in my little brother’s room.

And I remember the sun going down over a slow freight train out behind right field. A reddish haze of gravel dust on my shoes and a gloved hand raised above my head to draw the gnats away.

There I stood; for all anyone knew I was waiting for a fly ball.

Somewhere between then and now I learned to love baseball. Not for the game itself, which still bores me to tears most of the time, but for the way it burrowed into my memory. Uninvited, unwelcome and out-of-place, baseball carved out a niche for itself in my life.

It is the end of summer. It is the Twins and the Braves. It the bright crack of a high fly ball, sailing into the summer sky.

Up, out, and into right field.

I am the king of unfinished things. I’m the captain of the Just Good Enough. I often know where to start but not where to stop.

I am a jack of all trades, or, if I’m honest, a 10 of spades. And “all” is meant figuratively. Secretly I yearn to be the joker.

I am the cabinet door left open. I have again forgotten to close it. I have made a trip somewhere to pick up one specific thing and have –  despite reminders by phone and text – returned home without it.

Where is my wallet? Where are my keys? Why is my car rolling away?

Oh. I left it in neutral.

I am texting while I drive. I am reading my e-mail. I am taking business calls on the toilet. I mute while I flush.

I am napping under a desk in an abandoned cubicle on the fifth floor of the corporate office building where I work. I am taking excessively long walks over my lunch break. I see a deer and her fawn in the woods behind the parking lot in the sunlight.

Let’s face it: I’m just rinsing most of these dishes. The sponge has long been out of soap.

I am overdue for an oil change. My wiper fluid is out.

My dentist’s receptionist has sent a series of e-mails. Polite. Concerned. Annoyed. Disgusted. I have missed many cleanings.

I did not wash that fruit. I told you I did, but I didn’t.

I did not wash my hands. I lifted the lever and ran the water for a subterfugeous second.

I am my keychain, left in plain view on my unlocked car’s passenger seat. Overnight. Again. I have been running on empty for over two days.

I am scores of dead houseplants, starved by neglect, then overwatered into oblivion.

I am thirty thousand undone sit ups coalesced and marching in formation back and forth across the sky.

Where is my phone? Where are those stamps? What is this letter from the IRS?

They have seen fit to get in touch with me directly.

I am the king of unfinished things, and I don’t know if it’s good or if it’s bad. I think I am trying to change it.

But I’m not trying very hard.

I know he’s still in here. He’s just crouched down on the carpet where I can’t see him. I hear sounds, and I can’t make them out. Is it a man moving around on the floor of my bedroom, or is it something else?

There are strange sounds at night and I can’t get used to them. The outside ones and the inside ones get mixed up. The warm air blower thingy groans and creaks. That elephant who blows steam from his face grumbles and rattles.

The Man’s arm is here, so the Man must also be here. But I can’t see him and this makes me furious. The arm puts the tiny rubber booby in my mouth. I love the tiny rubber booby, but not now, arm! I spit it out, and the arm puts it back in.

Monkey is here, too. I loathe Monkey. The Man forever tries to make me hug it, but Monkey just smothers me. Yesterday I awoke with his fluffy body suffocating me. I was so terrified. I did rolling and screaming – at the same time – to get him off. Then I struggled for half an hour to get to the other side of the crib. Monkey is immobile; he can’t follow me.

I keep the booby in for a while so the arm will leave me alone. My goal this morning, as ever, is simple: escape.

I dream about freedom. About the food chair and about the sweet potato purée and about grabbing it and rubbing it all over my forehead. But most of all I dream about the Lady, and her soft skin and quiet voice and her red hair.

I am distracted. I do push ups. I try to make my head go backwards. I have a mouth! I put everything in there. I try doing noises. I turn to my back.

This was my first big breakthrough, several months into captivity. At first the Man and Lady would only allow me to sleep on my stomach. And I was so enfeebled from the Very Long Dark Swim that I couldn’t turn over. But finally, after much struggling, I learned the kicky side roll. Most of my weight is in my head, and if I can some momentum going, it brings the rest of me along. Now I can turn over whenever I want, and the Lady usually lets me stay that way. The Man often forces me back on my stomach, but right now he hasn’t noticed (or he’s gone).

Now here is a pickle. The mobile has snagged my attention. I admit it; I’m a sucker for the mobile. It turns so slow! Will it speed up? Who makes it turn? How does it float up there? I grab my feet and try to eat them.

Do you know your mouth hole can make sounds? I knew my poop hole could make sounds, but then I saw the People moving their mouths all the time and now I can do two sounds: ‘da’ and ‘ba’. I practice putting the sounds together into long strings, doing them really loud, and then really quiet.

I try: “da-da DA! DA! daaaah d-dd-d-da DAAA! da d-um bum bu ba ba da YEAAAAAA!

I try: “Ungghghggh! AGGHGHG!”

The Man is back. He is standing over me with his arms crossed, looking annoyed. But there is some blue light now coming through from behind the curtains, just enough for me to see that he’s trying not to smile.

“A dah! A dah! A daaaah daaaah daaaaah DGHAAAAGHGHG!”

Now he laughs a bit. This is good. This is working. He begins talking to me. Praising my noises, presumably.

The door opens, and behind it comes the Lady.

I now flail, I believe the word is, uncontrollably.

The Lady is coming. She’s coming to get me. I am so close! I know what I need to do:

I open my mandibles extremely wide and bare my teeth. She can not resist them. She reaches down and picks me up, and I look at the Man with a victory glare I reserve for just these sorts of moments.

Now about those sweet potatoes.

Two little boys, legs askew, bodies tilted in opposite directions, about two feet off the ground. One wore a green down jacket, the other was dressed in brown with a red hat. Beneath them, the sled tracked their downward progress, ready to catch them again at the end of the short flight.

Except, of course, after all that mid-air rotation, when they hit the sled again, their bodies didn’t fit neatly in, as they had when their grandparents had packed them safely at the top of the hill. So one boy’s rear end hit squarely on the edge of the plastic sled, flipping the other edge up and catapulting the brother skyward. Continue reading “A Sledding Accident, and Death”

When I was a kid, my sister’s room had a splatter of glow-in-the-dark sticky stars on the ceiling. They had been put there by the previous occupants; college-aged tenants, since the house was a rental before we bought it. And the ceiling tiles in her bedroom were painted alternative squares of blue and white, except where they weren’t, because someone’s final exam had gotten in the way of finishing the job. Or maybe a girlfriend stormed in demanding answers.

Whatever the reason, the stars, constellatorily incomplete, and the half-painted tiles remained, unaltered, throughout our adolescence. Continue reading “Moon Shadows”

Try to imagine how awesome it must be to be two years old, sitting in a warm bathtub, playing with toys. Your parents are in the room (or nearby), and it’s night. Pretty soon you’ll read some books in your mommy’s lap and then go to sleep. You don’t know what time it is. You don’t know what’s happening tomorrow. You have nothing in the world to worry about. Continue reading “Bath Time”

Alicia went straight to yoga from work today, which meant I had Ayla from daycare pickup time (3:30) to bedtime (7:30). She heard me say the word ‘library’ in the car on the way home (why would I even say that word?) so then we had to go to there. There was really no discussion, as she even knows which highway exit goes toward home, and starts screaming ‘no hooome!’. There’s no way of explaining to her that the same exit also takes us to the library, so she’s pretty much inconsolable until we pass the turn for our street. Continue reading “Curious Ayla”

See? That’s why not writing on the weekends in dangerous. I totally forgot until now, 9:30 pm, that I have to write something in here today. Instead I’m watching Australian Open and scratching my head and eating ice cream with chocolate sauce.

This weekend was Ayla’s second birthday party. It was, in all respects, awesome. She knew exactly what was up, and could give you all the right answers to questions you might pose. “What’s today?” “My birt-dayaayyy!” “How old are you today?” “Chooo!” Continue reading “Oops. I forgot.”

Woah frantic Friday afternoon blog post! As usual, Ayla’s home with me today, which, despite my occasional griping about it, is an unparalleled blessing for which I’m really, really grateful.

We spent the morning (i.e. 6:30 – 9, because you can’t really do anything outside the house at those hours) crying and throwing little tantrums. Except I was fine, so really it was Ayla. She does this hilarious thing where she puts her hands up by her chest like a tiny T-Rex and then flails them up and down. But she takes offense if you laugh while she’s crying, and bows her forehead down the the ground and makes more gurgling noises.

Then I decided we’d go to my mom’s house for breakfast; it took me 45 minutes to get Ayla ready to go (‘No socks!’, ‘Only socks!’, ‘Pink hat!’, ‘No haaattt!’, ‘Onlnnmly socks!’) but we finally made it. After refusing to look at her grandma for a while, she finally cheered up after eating some scrambled eggs. Should’ve guessed.

Then we did groceries at Target and visited Ayla’s ‘babies’, who live in an open box on the third shelf of the babies aisle in the toy section, cost $2.53 each, and are perfunctorily diverse (light, dark-ish, darkest). The other moms there mostly just talk on their cell phones about last night’s episode of ‘Housewives’, which is either Desperate Housewives or Real Housewives of (Insert Rich Place Here). I’m assuming the latter, since, sadly, I’ve seen enough of it to take an educated guess. It was Kyle’s fault, if you’re wondering; she’s so mean to her sister.

I, on the other hand, take it as a form of meditation, in which I force myself to do nothing, zen-like, while Ayla gives different things ‘haircuts’.

I can’t decide if watching her play by herself in an empty toy aisle is depressing. If we lived in Europe, I think, we’d be at a public outdoor urban space interacting with other people and learning tolerance etc. On the other hand, any outdoor urban spaces around here are under a cold weather advisory, and wind chills of 25 degrees below zero aren’t that tolerant.

Still, I promise myself in summer we’ll skip the babies and hit the park instead. Though I doubt the skin tones there will be as evenly heterogeneous. Perhaps the overheard phone conversations will be more pleasant. Kyle!