The Daily Write: Today's chief complaint (August 31, 2013)

Writing Prompt: Today's chief complaint

 

I can't tell who to believe, or how much context is missing. This potential strike on Syria - is it the right thing to do? As a friend pointed out today, killing a dog for fur to line the collar of a coat and calling it fox doesn't make it more bad than using real fox fur. Because it was a chemical weapon and not a bomb, or shower of bullets, is that reason enough for our country to kill more people, possibly families, in pursuit of some sort of justice? Are we just trying to assert our ultimate authority on the world stage?
  

Part of me thinks, "yes, we have to do something." But you know, that part of me knows nothing of war (thank god). "Doing something" sounds a lot easier when it's in the abstract. But there is nothing abstract about murder. I heard NPR reporters interviewing people yesterday who said that the UN inspectors had solid evidence that chemical weapons were used. They said over 1,400 people, including over 400 children died. This is unconscionable. But why are we intervening in Syria and we left Sudan alone? What about The Congo? There have been mass genocides going on for the last decade, for years, forever really. Why are we more likely to "intervene" (bomb) Syria than Sudan? What do they have that we want?
  
My chief complaint is that I can't trust the chief. I can't tell who is telling which half truths and how bad the lies are. I can't recognize the lies, but I know they are being told. If there's one thing I've learned as an adult is that we are never told the entire story by politicians, and leaders, and those wielding a great deal of power. In fact, it's so bad that the level of deceit is hard to fathom. It calls into question all the principles I was raised believing.
  

I wish I knew the truth, and how to speak truth to power, and how to stop the continual atrocities humans wield upon each other.

The Daily Write: What I know about Wolves (August 30, 2013)

I told my daughter that I didn't know what to write about tonight as she sat at the table eating a slice of red velvet cake she cut herself. She said I should write about the fish she's getting this weekend and how excited she is about that. I would like to say that I, too, am excited. But we have two kids, two dogs, a bird and now fish? I really don't think I can bear one more creature to whom I am beholden.

  
My partner tells me that my daughter will take care of them. Have you ever seen a seven-year-old effectively clean a fish tank? Me neither. I say I will have nothing to do with the fish. I have to lay down the law, be firm, set expectations.

The thing is, I like fish. I've kind of always wanted fish. I find them beautiful and relaxing. I am a water Leo, liking the sun ever so much more when there is water nearby, feeling truly content in the dark of a winter rainstorm. So fish make sense to me.
  

But time passes quickly. One moment they will be new, in a pristine environment. The next it will be filled with murky water and algae and where will she be then, the parent who said yes to the fish?

A friend's family had fish they brought home after the end of the third grade "creeks and rivers" unit. Those fish lasted for two years and had lots of new little fish. Then his family went on vacation and the aquarium bulb got too hot. They came home to fish stew. I wonder who cleaned out the tank.

  
One problem, among others, with this scenario is that being right won't get me anywhere. Being right means I will end up cleaning the fish tank because no one else will get around to it soon enough. Do not envy me tonight.

The Daily Write: A spoonful of butter light (August 29, 2013)

Writing Prompt: A spoonful of butter light

When I came from school, or the park, or the pool hall, or Dunkin' Donuts after an all night cup of coffee and pack of cigarettes, I was famished. But our house was not one full of food. Not like my best friend in California whose mother stocked their kitchen with homemade cookies in a ceramic jar in the shape of a Siberian Husky, and who kept fresh layer cake under the skirts of a porcelain skinned doll with dark Victorian curls.

Our house was sparsely appointed with things that didn't make for very good snacks: miso paste, top ramen (yes, you can eat the noodles dry), a perpetually half-unthawed can of frozen orange juice. There was also always a giant jug of Grade A maple syrup from  New Hampshire, where my grandfather taught at a college during the school year before driving out to Oregon each summer loaded up with tree sap for the grandchildren.

Sometimes I would find the order form from the milkman and steal it away to fill out and leave for the next week's delivery without showing my mom. I marked the boxes for bags of popsicles, extra cartons of chocolate milk and ice cream. My mom didn't like it when I did that; it was expensive and I ordered food that made me fat

Other times, I would scrounge around the little kitchen with dark plywood cabinets and worn faux gold knobs looking for something delicious. I did this much in the way I searched under the beds and through the drawers of people for whom I babysat hoping to find porn.

Although we didn't have snacks, we almost always had butter and cheese. With these two staples I could make a complete meal of savory and sweet. First I grated the Tillamook cheddar into shreds, trying to keep my knuckles from turning bloody on the rusted metal teeth of the grater. Then I would heat up our prized non-stick skillet and spread the cheese around until it covered the entire bottom, like an orange moon. With the electric burner bright underneath the pan, I watched until the cheese melted, bubbled and then turned to a molten pancake of oily crisp dairy. 

For dessert I would mash up cold butter in a bowl with fork until it became soft, then mix in brown sugar pulled from the back of the cupboard above and to the left of the stainless steel sink. Plus a little vanilla. It never tasted as good as raw cookie dough, but in a pinch, which was most days, it would do.

The Daily Write: I need three things (August 28, 2013)

Writing Prompt: I need three things

If I were to redo my own junior high experience, I would resist authority less. I'm not sure why I bucked up so hard against the teachers and administrators. It was the rules, all those rules. The rules themselves, before I even started acting out, made me feel like a bad kid, like it was inevitable that I do something wrong. I think the rules propelled me to a life of delinquency and misery. They taught me things. They opened up a world of possibilities to me that I had not known were options.

In elementary school I behaved. I knew that was what expected of me and there was no getting out of it. I understood and did not question the consequences. I toed the line. But in junior high, there were so many lists of the potential bad I could enact that, like an afflicted child with OCD, I felt compelled to do them. It was some sort of reverse conjuring magic that resulted in my inability to make it through one entire day without mouthing off, taking off, lighting up or getting into a fight.

My son started middle school today, 6th grade. He's 11 going on 12. He and I both had to read through a long list of rules and sign them saying we understood. Here are some of the bad choices that read almost like suggestions:

• Assault or attempted assault
• Inciting others to fight
• Possessing, selling or furnishing firearms, knives, explosives, or other dangerous objects
• Possessing, using, selling or furnishing controlled substances and intoxicants
• Committing or attempting to commit robbery or extortion
• Causing or attempting to cause damage to school or private property
• Possessing or using tobacco or nicotine containing products
• Committing an obscene act or engaging in habitual profanity or vulgarity (including "pantsing" and "mooning") 
• Selling drug paraphernalia
• Disrupting school activities or otherwise willfully defying the valid authority of school personnel
• Knowingly receiving stolen school property or private property
• Possessing an imitation firearm
• Committing or attempting to commit a sexual assault or battery
• Harassing, threatening or intimidating a student who is a complaining witness or witness in a school disciplinary proceeding

For the love of god, what happened to not putting bad ideas into peoples' heads? No wonder I was a ticking time bomb in junior high; the chances of me not fucking up were minuscule. I'm just glad it didn't mention murder.

I'm going to the next PTA meeting with a new list of rules. If my kid is going to be treated like bad news waiting to happen, lets at least make him a revolutionary:

The following activities can lead to disciplinary action up to and including expulsion:

• Inciting riots
• Staging sit ins
• Standing up for the teachers union and organize mass walk outs
• Rebelling against standardized testing
• Defending for the underdog
• Resisting the abuse of power
• Defacing falsified US and world history textbooks
• Organizing alternative anti-war pep rallies
• Producing false ID for the purposes of becoming tattooed

The Daily Write: On the bedroom floor (August 25, 2013)

Writing Prompt: On the bedroom floor

I had a mission. I was made for that job. Everything up until that moment pointed me in that direction; the years of being an outcast; going to an alternative college where people like me learned to be more like ourselves and less like everyone else; the dinners with monks on long peace walks when I was a teenager; my co-coordination of the Lesbian/Gay Resource Center at school; my mom living on a commune. If not me, then whom exactly?
 

I had never applied for a "real" job before. I'd done stints as a nanny for two different families, uniquely awful in their own ways. I had delivered pizza for Domino's, unaware of their right wing politics and unable to turn down the money even if I had known. I worked for Burger King for a month or two, and a Danish Bakery, both while I was on a strict liquid protein fast (there are multiple ways to damage yourself, not just the obvious ones like cutting or drugs).
 

I babysat. I counted screws and nails during a hardware store's biannual inventory. I cleaned houses. But I never worked in anything where you had to fill out a long application with essay answers to hard questions. I'll admit, it freaked me out. I wanted to work there so badly, I was perfect for the position as a youth organizer for LGBT Quakers, but what could I say about my commitment to non-violence that didn't relate back to what I characterized as my pacifist upbringing? Having an aunt and a mother with gurus for spiritual leaders and being anti-war suddenly didn't seem like quite enough.
 

I was intimidated by the application and didn't have a typewriter to make my responses look neat. Instead I borrowed my roommate's typing machine with a one-line text display in an LCD window like something you'd see on a calculator. It was compact, complex and easy to lose one's work. I struggled to write coherent answers to questions that were far too specific for a general background like mine while learning how to bold, underline, backspace and save work, only successful some of the time.

Everything I wrote felt wrong and I struggled for two days and nights trying to make it a good application while crying, getting so frustrated I begged my roommate to be a reader and editor. Finally, an hour after the deadline passed, I drove up from the country outside Olympia to Seattle, searched for the center in the dark past midnight, and slipped my clumsy application under the door in a too-thick envelope.

I didn't even get a call. I may have been naive, but they were too closed minded. Or so I consoled myself as I waited in line at the food bank, no job in sight.

The Daily Write: It cannot be undone (August 24, 2013)

Writing Prompt: It cannot be undone
  

When I turned 10 we rented a funky old roller skating rink with bumpy, uneven floors that made you careen rather than sail across the distance between one side of the curved wall and another. There was a popcorn machine and drinks and all us hippie kids skating around, laughing. In the photo you see me standing in my "Foxy" tank top next to Melissa with her long hair and bright cheeks. She came from Takilma, an exotic sounding place somewhere in Southern Oregon. She lived rogue, like the river, with her siblings and parents and dogs. They were country people, down a dirt road so long it felt like going to another planet getting to them, hidden, in a meadow, near the woods.
 

Melissa's mom served drinks in jars and made grains she pulled from reused plastic bags. They had one car, an old Volvo station wagon, and a pick up truck that had seen better days. At the end of summer, visiting Melissa and her family felt like the best adventure ever. I was jealous of her life. She didn't have to pretend to be like other kids. She didn't have to have a big house or wall-to-wall carpeting to fit in. She was free. Or so it seemed to me. But I was only just 10 and what did I know about freedom?

She told me in the winter they had to walk that 7 mile dirt road, covered in snow, to get to and from school. I couldn't fathom it. She told me she loved me and that we'd be friends forever. I wanted her to be right. But she lived so far down that road, and I lived so far away from her world of rough-hewn wood, scrap metal and tire swings that it didn't seem possible. I loved her like a sister even though we only spent one summer together. I loved her so much that when I came home with lice, I didn't care. At least I had gotten a taste of her adventure. At least there was that.

The Daily Write: The Teacher (August 23, 2013)

Writing Prompt: The Teacher

Mr. Carr was white with a grey afro and glasses and a horrible, depressing suit he wore every day. He taught math. For us, it was bonehead math. You know, the math for the fuckups who skip school, or come to class high and late. We were the losers, some cooler than others, some smart, some not so much. I was smart, but not in math. Not in 1st grade when my teacher scolded me for not understanding the assignment:

Fill in the blanks

1 __ 345__78__10

I had no idea what to do. I was 6. I had been late to class. The papers were already on the desks and when I got there she told me to figure out what to do. There were no instructions, I had no clue. I asked her and she just told me to figure it out. Figure it out. Figure it out.

One summer when I came up to live with mom and my brothers for a couple months, she put me in special math tutoring. It was at the Easter Seals school for handicapped children which I loved because the math tutor and I met in a huge room with a ramp and giant balls and all kinds of cool toys. After we worked together, she let me play.

But it didn't last. I didn't remember how to do math when I got back to California.

By the time I had Mr. Carr, I was on my way out anyway. I rarely went to school and when I did I was self-conscious and angry. I felt embarrassed to be there, to be seen, to be in that stupid class with that freaky teacher, to not know math, to not be capable of knowing math.

So yeah, I told him to fuck off. And then I ran out of the classroom, out of the school, down the blocks to the park where I looked for someone to save me, get me out of there, get me into a van without side windows where I could hide and get high and wait to grow up. I just couldn't fucking wait. I just wanted to be a grownup in control of her own life. A life where I never would have to do math again. I hated fucking math.

The Daily Write: You can't afford it (August 22, 2013)

Writing Prompt: You can't afford it

My mom was supported by my grandpa, and welfare plus odd jobs. We were on WIC for a long time which to me felt glamorous in the same way of food stamps. To me these were magical talismans representing the golden times with my mom and three brothers in one of her many tiny places. For me it was summer, for her and the twins, it was life all year round. I was a visitor to her world of patchouli and bare feet, wild hair and sprouts growing in jars on the windowsill over the sink.

Going from our dad's cold, undecorated house in California, where we lived fairly simply compared to the rich kids in their giant mansions with pools, from the wealth and superficiality and meanness of those kids all hell bent on conforming, to the world of laughter, dirty feet, unbrushed hair and talk of the revolution yet to come was like going to a magical place. Or maybe it mostly felt that way because I was with her again. On the best nights, the babies would stop crying, my little brother would go to sleep, and she would cuddle with me while singing, the smell of her body like being at home.
 

Bad days and nights were dominated by her boyfriend, who was in and out of the drunk tank, who had bloodshot eyes and long dark hair. He wore a worn leather hippie cowboy hat and shit kicker boots. He put a bottle right in the middle of the midnight birthday cake one year. And he kicked me out in the rain when I was too young to be on my own. I got in his way and he hated me for it. Not my little brothers though. Them, he adored in a cloyingly drunken way that made me so angry. They weren't his kids and he didn't do a damn thing to support them.

His life story was terrible and his looks good. My mom told me he was an artist when he was sober. 

The famous story goes like this:

Little girl and her brother, a year and a half younger, return for the summer to live with her beloved, missed mother and baby brothers.

The neighbor friend tells the girl what happened when she was gone,

"He chased your mom down the street with a butcher knife."

An image I never could get out of my head.

"She ran up the stairs and into my baby's room!"

Something the neighbor friend could never forgive.

The Daily Write: Those Voices (August 21, 2013)

Writing Prompt: Those Voices

There's things I just can't say out loud, or even write, for fear of having them come to pass. Or for fear of stating something so happy that the opposite happens next and bad rains down upon me and my family. Which is to say, I was thinking today about how my daughter has had a mother for an entire 7 years with no interruption except for my occassional business trip to Europe, or the Philippines or NYC. I was almost envious. How strange to be envious of my daughter for having me.

 

I didn't have a me much when I was a kid. My mom split when I was 4. Just took off one day with her old man. She left me and my little brother at daycare. Didn't pick us up. We had all been living together with  my aunt, her husband and her weird friend. Or rather, I think that was the era when my mom lived at that house with all of us in the backyard in a tent with two men who were good friends. Wayne was the darker skinned and bigger Afro'd of the two. He had a coffee house with stained glass and wooden geometric light fixtures hanging down from the ceiling beams on rugged chain. The wood was dark like Wayne, and the stained glass lit from within. He and Carl wore dashikis as was the proud African heritage style of the late 60s. My mom probably wanted to wear them, but didn't. But who can remember such details?
 
I do remember her not showing up. I remember crying wishing for her to hold me. I remember tapping on a black and white television screen trying to get her to turn around and look at me. And later, after she resurfaced, but when we had been moved by my father to live with him, I remember him having me dial her on our push button phone to tell her I started my period. I was deeply humiliated and when she congratulated me I wanted to scream.
 
I don't know what it's like to have a mother. Not really.

I feel sick writing this.

The Daily Write: Wet (August 18, 2013)

Writing Prompt: Wet

I had a new best friend every few months. Debbie was nice, nicer than some of them. She didn't try to intimidate me to get me to do what she wanted. I remember how white her hair was, white and dry like tinder. And her skin, pale almost to the point of translucency. She lived across town. Her parents, like so many of my friends' parents, disapproved of me. I never knew exactly why. Maybe it was our differences. That was probably it.

One time she convinced me to go out for a job picking strawberries in the fields. Poor teenagers - white, Indian, Mexican, and farm workers, only the names we had back then weren't so congenial. We took a school bus out to the strawberries, row after endless row of plants down close to the ground. You had to sit on your knees or crouch down or bend over to pick them, and you had to go fast if you were going to make any money. Hot sun, no shade. This, and the tiny little blisters the size of pin heads on Debbie's lobster red back later, blisters that wept like tears in a line as your ran your finger across them.

-------

Sticky. Head to toe, especially head. My hair, already so fucked up with tangles and frizz. How in the hell am I going to get it clean now? Fucking Debbie has to start laughing, make it worse, grab some from her bucket and get in on the act. Who the hell came up with this ritual hazing?

Shampooed. That's what I got. Debbie too. Only my mom won't notice cause she won't be home when I get there, probably didn't even know I was out in the fields today. Or maybe she was just relieved to have me gone. We haven't been getting along lately. Not since I turned 13. I think she hates me. No for real, you should see the way she looks at my stomach. I think she thinks some alien is gonna pop out and eat her face. She's a fucking bitch, always late to get me, doesn't give me any money, doesn't help me with school, expects me to watch the kids.

Fucking .40 cents a flat ain't gonna cut it either though so those stupid bitches did me a favor. My shit is all stained red and my hair is a tight ass clump of sweet mess, but Debbie, she's gonna suffer. Maybe that's why she's laughing rubbing dirt on top of the strawberries. She's got nothing to lose. Her ass is gonna get whupped, she won't get to see me for a while, and they'll send her back out to another shitty job.

She says she's gonna go work at the cannery as soon as she turns 16. Minimum age and your parents still gotta sign you off - make sure they told 'em it was okay to work in all that noise and misery.

I ain't ever been to juvie even though I'm afraid every day that's where I'll end up, but I'll tell you what. One time me and Debbie went with Judy to visit her sister on the swing at the cannery and those fucking bitches in the lunch room looked like they were going to kick our asses. They were hard cold mean. Miserable. Squinty eyes under all that smoke. Everyone got to smoke just to make it through on breaks. White hair nets. White jackets. Yellow teeth. Hard ass faces.

I don't want to work there. Debbie will be lucky if that's where she ends up though. Anything to get away from her house. I get bad feelings when I'm there. Bad feelings.

The Daily Write: On the sidewalk (August 17, 2013)

Writing Prompt: On the sidewalk

Oof, so heavy. Dark. A shoe falls, no crushes, me. It's the fat man with the big shadow. He comes every day at this time, and then again at night which is sometimes dark and other times light depending on how hot or cold I feel. His shoes change too, but not his thumping gait. He is a monster of a man. Not like the light little tapping lady that skitters along after him. Her heels are delightfully clicky. She brings out my glitter, makes it sound better. And her little prints are so pretty. She has a lot more of them than him. Her shadow is a lot shorter.
  
I don't like the gum. It feels thick and it never comes off, instead it wares into me until it is mistaken for something more solid. The only good news is that once in a while the person with the huge heavy tail that squirts water washes it off. That's the best really, when all the patches of people, their weight, clicks, clods and shadows go away and it's just the one with the water, sloughing off everything that isn't genuinely me.

The Daily Write: "Look at it this way," he said (August 16, 2013)

Writing Prompt: "Look at it this way," he said

Standing beside the fridge, the plastic semi-opaque pint container with a black lid in front of me, another night, another non-dinner. Gluten free pretzels dipped into Trader Joe's tzatziki. I made my son a grilled cheese. My daughter went with friends to The Rainforest Cafe and then a sleepover. My partner was off with a new friend and me, standing in front of the mottled brown granite counter, colors more golden than when we saw the house three years ago, before we painted the kitchen warm glowing orange gold. Everything looks better in a warm glow, except the things that look better cool - like the white hot houses trimmed in cobalt blue on the islands of Greece, or a beach house perfectly rustic and empty in an old issue of Martha Stewart Living, before her name took a secondary place on the masthead.

I pry off the black plastic lid. Damn, an inside clear plastic protective film. I hate those - you have to cut them off, they don't make them with graspable pull tabs. Slimy, I carefully fold the plastic in half so I am gripping only the clean side and throw it away in the garbage under the sink behind me.

The smell transports me to the campground in Ioannina, the campground in Olympia, the campground in Delphi at the edge of the aquaduct that curves down the hillside toward the olive orchards. It's 1988 and I'm sitting on a rickety threshed chair, the four posts holding the seat pushing painfully into my thighs. Ripping bread from a fresh loaf and greedily dipping it into the thick, slightly sour, garlic and cucumber infused yogurt. Greece with grape vines over campground arbors, women stirring huge pots of tomato broth filled with giant white beans, and the shell of a cicada left clinging to a fabric seam on the inside my tiny hot blue tent.

I came to Europe a vegetarian, not a great way to visit new countries. Bread, tzatziki, beans, cheese - these are my staples, until Athens where I discover the most sublime gyros shop. The proprietor doesn't speak English, I don't speak Greek but we both know a little German. "Zwei gyros mit kein fleish" I say and repeat, aware of how strange my request must seem, proud that I dug some German out of my past.

Oh my god, the bread! Not like pita you find in the States, thin and cardboard in nature; this is puffy crisp soft bread basted in the juice of the gyros meat, like fry bread from a pow wow back home. I get one, then two, then tree with no meat, plenty of pungent tzatziki, the perfect accompaniment.

Do you know I still have sleeping dreams about Greece and her gyros 24 years later?

Dinner isn't so bad after all.

The Daily Write: The boss (August 14, 2013)

Writing Prompt: The boss

He walked around the restaurant checking in with the clientele, doing what needed to be done if the servers were busy, and otherwise creating an air of mastery. They called him The Captain, although he wasn't alone. There was a captain at every fine dining establishment from San Francisco to Paris to Milan and beyond.

On his downtime he was less fastidious, although you could hardly have guessed that from observing him at work. He slept in boxers, woke up, and without putting anything else on, opened his door to the luxury apartment building hallway and grabbed the paper, itching his crotch and sometimes picking his nose. Slovenly except for his building had a doorman, a unique luxury in San Francisco, which was by no one's accounts, New York, not even on the best day.

He wasn't an unpleasant man, but he had no time for behaving properly when not constrained by the expectations of Robert, his longtime boss. It's true, he sometimes ate Kentucky Fried Chicken while sitting in front of the TV. He also liked to drink at the dive two blocks over and two blocks down at the corner of lonesome and dangerous.

Although he had done well for himself, running the front of the house in a Michelin rated venue for years, and with no family to suck away his funds, he had no desire to be anything but real when he was off duty. Charlie instead of Charles. Sweatpants or loose old jeans instead of pressed fine fabric slacks, a simple gold chain around his neck instead of the finest silk tie. A real contrast between on and off if he reflected on himself.

Even Robert knew this, and they sometimes joked about it, but never when the staff was nearby. For the staff the expectations of perfection, reverence and efficient silence were in order, unless speaking with the guests. For the staff, Charles and Robert put on quite the show of disciplined excellence.

She noticed all this without telling anyone. She frequented the establishment, and happened to live in his building. He thought of her as a benign presence, having no idea that she studied him day in and day out. Even she wasn't quite sure why she bothered. She supposed it gave her something to do in an otherwise privileged but massively dull life.

The Daily Write: Albert taps a cigarette from his pack (August 13, 2013)

Writing Prompt: Albert taps a cigarette from his pack

A tall black man with a French accent and short braids, great smile, knowing gait. Exactly what the stuffy, if delicious, restaurant needed. True, a restaurant, unless constructed from food, can't be delicious. And true "restaurant" seems a cheap word, almost common, which is what this place was anything but.

The fabric gathered into a cathedral at the center, drape upon drape, fold upon fold. I think it actually made her a little bit nauseous, the cloistered decor, the polite monied client dinners and old school gray haired set.

Next to us an Asian man in his mid-30s, no doubt a millionaire, or man behind the next big start up, slurped his wine pretentiously. He seemed nice enough, even when talking into his ear piece in this sanctified establishment, located in San Francisco since the late 50s. But god, the slurping. I mean, how much aeration does one guy need? Did the wine taste good? Check. Did he know what it tasted like after the first two sips? Check. So knock it off with the noises from hell.

It made for funny silent lip mimes from me to my date, "oh my god! I can't take the slurping." Try to read that out of someone's mouth from who breath and sound barely escape. I made up for it, of course, by spilling the chocolate sauce and asking loud naive questions about the food. I can only fake it so long, and being quiet and straight backed, proper, is really not my thing, never has been.

Our waiter was a woman. White, wavy brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. She wasn't portly, but neither was she thin. I wanted to like her but:

a) she had no sense of humor
b) she seemed like someone I would have met in college

Later a gay waiter in his 40s walked by, winked and mouthed "happy birthday" to me. This made me happy. Why? Because they always like the queers in those places, especially the unlikely butch/femme couple like us.

The Daily Write: Write about a time you retreated (August 9, 2013)

Writing Prompt: Write about a time you retreated

There's a fine line between telling my own story and telling the story of my mother. In some moments I feel like I own her story, after all, didn't it create the conditions of my life? Therefore, don't I have a right to it? On the other hand, many years ago my partner became impatient with the way I seemed to romanticize her past and asked me to stop asking her so many questions or retelling what was hers to tell.

So, I vacillate between what I want to say, what I think I should say and what shouldn't be said. It's a fine line, a tiny bit less awkward given the fact that I don't yet have an agent. But that will change soon. I am destined to be a storyteller and writer, and then surely it will all come out.

Honestly, there's so much that will come out that I can clearly never run for political office. I could do a stint as a rock star, no doubt, because their lives are nothing without secrets revealed.  But is ones background and growing up time their own to share or does the story start with the first time on stage, or on the road?

Did you ever see the movie Almost Famous? I resonated with those characters - the eager journalist, the beautiful groupie, the egotistical rock god. Or how about Laurel Canyon? I loved that tough/loose mother and music producer played by Frances McDormand. I cried wanting to be there, in the hot wind of an LA enclave.

I grew up between worlds, between states, between parents and siblings. I grew up on the edges of extreme wealth and hippie poverty. My childhood smelled like patchouli and grass in the summers and hot stifling normativity during the school year. My worlds conflicted, as did my allegiances and no one knew the whole me except me.

When my mom moved to the guru's commune, my story became more colorful, at least in tones of a red orange sunset. Only it wasn't me who lived there. I was, as I had always been, on the outside looking in, sometimes with envy, sometimes with curiosity, usually feeling left out.

The Daily Write: Quirky (August 8, 2013)

Writing Prompt: Quirky

When my son was a baby I needed to feel good. It was a hard birth, he had a hole in his lung that made him sound like a migrating goose when he cried and we were broke. I had midwives that made me livid, one of them reading my copy of Prodigal Summer while I suffered in back labor in my kitchen, and the other who told me to stop listening to my "monkey mind" after she overheard me telling a nurse in labor and delivery that I had a hard pregnancy. My home birth didn't work out. I didn't feel like an accomplished earth mother with every contraction. I wasn't able to produce milk (something the midwives made me feel was my fault "for not trying hard enough").

To feel better, after his lung was healed, we were home and my partner was back at work, I listened to Desi Arnaz and Frank Sinatra. I couldn't tolerate modern music or anything that felt sad. I held my big baby against my shoulder, patting his back and dancing him around in our funky small kitchen, moving across tattered brown and yellow vinyl flooring and cooing into his ears. I sang and danced and smelled his beautiful baby head, so full of hair that by six months he had his first hair cut.

My little baby boy, big of eyes, small of nose, tiny of hands. Us together, dancing in the kitchen to the music from the past, from an imagined less complicated time. I would take any illusion I could get to feel less worried about his future, about his life, about the amount of time I would have to be with him as his mother.

The Daily Write: Tell us about Abigail (August 7, 2013)

Writing Prompt: Tell us about Abigail

She had a short bob, Dorothy Hamill style, black, shiny and enviably straight. Her eyes were big, like a Kewpie doll, accentuated by the white face mime makeup. She wore white wide legged pants, a tucked in black shirt and rainbow suspenders with a big fake red rose pinned to the left strap just below her slight shoulders. Not tall, but leggy, Abigail had all the moves. And she smiled, a lot, which made her eyes appear to pop out of her head without seeming grotesque.

I'm not sure how I knew her real name, since her moniker for the disco dance class was Salt, her husband, Pepper. He was a taller version of her - same outfit, dark hair. There were some other differences. He had curls and a busy mustache, for instance. And he wore no rose.

He flung her around, a flying buttress of airborne sinew and pantomime moves. And together they enthusiastically Hustled back and forth, clapping, tapping, spinning and then telling us to do the same.

We were anything but smooth faced - 10 and 11 year olds approaching puberty with awkward self-conscious moves and fits of embarrassing giggles.