Why I'm So Boring

If anybody wonders why I've been so boring lately, and why I haven't posted very often this week, here's the reason: I have a bad cold.

[A chorus of "Ooooh, poor Merrie."]

Yup. I know I caught it from those aliens who abducted me last week. By the way, my memory has been coming back in bits and pieces. An image here, a piece of conversation there. I have a feeling that in a couple of days I will know where I went.

And look out, because when I remember, I'm tellin'. No alien is going to drag me off like that again.

THE DEEP END

Summers were filled with a bright outside, layers of concrete and sunshine; and dark shadowy insides. My mother would sleep, shades drawn; grey on grey shadows filtered from room to room as a fan thumped stale, humid air out onto city streets. I would leave our apartment in the morning and walk to my best friend's house while it was still cool. Together we made the journey over steaming sidewalks to Tenth Avenue.

There, a midwestern paradise reigned. Damp wet concrete tunnels housed the changing rooms. A horrid lack of privacy, a bank of public showers, then a wide stairway led toward filtered light. The smell of chlorine and the wet smack of bare feet on rough cement.

And then a brilliant glare.

A bright white-hot sun ate the heavens, washed away all color. All that remained were white and aquamarine. Now you could taste the chlorine in the air, mingled with the soft fragrance of Coppertone suntan lotion.

Water splashed. Children yelled. Mothers and teenagers lounged on carefully spread towels.

My best friend and I entered a magical world. A world of liquid imagination. Here we could float away from the reality of the blue-collar working class. The stench of machine oil and factory dust evaporated. Gone was the feeling that I didn't fit in with the rest of the two-parent world. I walked through crystal water and everything changed. Fairy tales came to life as we imagined we were princesses; my black hair transformed to platinum and like a mermaid, I wore crowns encrusted with aquamarines.

Light played on the water, on the surface that was our skin.

And always, as the day progressed, I grew bolder. Crossing rope boundaries into ever-deeper water. My friend would protest, but I would swim, heedless, under the rope—from the shallow end, where we could easily touch the bottom, to the middle, where we could barely stand on our tiptoes. And then finally to the deep end, where the bottom was legendary, a mythical kingdom where the water changed color, where the water grew cold.

And then, when I had had enough with diving below the ropes and reaching new limits, then I would climb up the ladder. I would pad my way to the diving board while my friend watched.

I would get in line behind the other kids, my heart thumping, my arms wrapped around myself as I shivered. I waited. And waited. Moving a foot at a time. Then finally I would stand at the bottom of the ladder. Here it was impossible to tell when the person at the top had jumped. I had to wait. I had to get the message from someone who could see.

Go! Jump! They would say, as soon as the person above me had left the board. Even before I heard the splash, I was scrambling up the ladder, rungs slippery, hands reaching for the sky.

When I reached the top, everything changed. All the shouting and laughing turned silent. Everyone and everything became small. I could only hear my own breathing.

The board stretched before me, narrow and long. It bounced as I walked. There was always a moment when I stood at the very end that I wondered why I was here. Why had I agreed to climb up here?

But a horizon of water called to me from below. Deep. Cold. Challenging.

A bounce and a jump.

Falling. Lightning quick. Holding my breath.

A splash. Then silence. A turquoise world. Falling down. Farther and farther. One toe touched the bottom. Deep blue. Icy. Then I pushed off with one foot and I would shoot to the top. Lungs screaming. Arms pulling.

Another splash and I was on the surface. Gasping. Flailing. Pretending that I knew what to do. I only knew a little bit about swimming and now I had to do my best imitation. If the lifeguards saw me struggling, they would kick me out of the deep end.

And I had to stay.

It was a point when I was out of control; I was literally in over my head, pushing every boundary, pretending to be something that I wasn't. At that point in my ten-year-old life I had just mastered an awkward dog paddle, a stroke that could barely keep my head above water, as long as another kid didn't make a huge wave. I drank chlorine by the mouthful, coughed and choked.

And I always kept my eyes on the ladder. My goal.

Sometimes I feel like I'm in the deep end today. When an unexpected challenge looms ahead. It's funny, but I'm not as brave as I was at ten, back when I only had my life to lose. Things like getting lost on uncharted freeways or flying across the country seem much worse than not making it to the swimming pool ladder.

But back then, risking my life was always accompanied by a moment of peace.

Under the water, all sound disappeared, everything slowed down; it became another world, my body changed into something amphibious. Breathing stopped. Thinking stopped. It all become a wondrous gelatinous moment-of-being, separated from everything and yet surrounded by everything at the same time. Light filtered down through rippling blue. Bodies flew past like we were in outer space, like we were all flying in slow motion, like we had all entered another dimension.

Like we were created for another world. And for one fraction of a second, we all acknowledged it was true.

The Privilege of Color

I fell in love with color at an early age. By the time I reached grade school I coveted it, in fact. That was when I discovered that crayons didn’t just come in boxes of 24. Looking around a room filled with wooden desks and unknown faces, I saw that a privileged few owned the rights to a full range of 64 prismatic shades. Hues with exotic names like Thistle and Orchid belonged to an upper echelon, a cliquish group of Jills and Janes with sassy blonde curls and even sassier attitudes.

It wasn’t until junior high, when I graduated past the limitations of crayons, markers and chalk all the way to paint, that my passion for color met its equal in my desire to become an artist.

The days were never long enough for me back then, as I filled every free moment with painting and poetry. The creative world became my cocoon. During my turbulent teens I subconsciously transformed my bedroom into a womblike retreat, painting everything—floor, ceiling, walls and furniture—with vibrant, glossy red paint. My older sister thought that I should have included an accent color somewhere, a white table or a bedspread, but I vehemently disagreed.

Red was the color I wanted, the color I needed, the color that brought energy and healing and inspiration to my soul. It was water in my adolescent desert.

Throughout the Mid-Western twilight—that season of darkness that descends every October and oppresses all the way through April—I lived in the center of a flower that never dies. I woke up to walls that glowed like the inside of a hearth. I read e.e. cummings, Ray Bradbury and J.R.R. Tolkien while nestled in an enclosure as cozy as any owned by the myriad Jills and Janes who lived up the hill in brick houses; they came home every night to dinner on the table, a matched set of parents and who knows how many cars in the attached garage. I came home to a room the color of love, and it held me sheltered in its tight-knuckled fist; fiery brush strokes on a plaster canvas that somehow helped me ride out the explosive tidal wave known as the ’60s. During that murky and moonless horizon of pubescence, I woke up to the embers of a luminous red sunrise. The sun never set, the fire never went out in my sacred sanctuary.

For me, color will always be a thin veneer that foreshadows the world of the spirit, a supernatural essence that stirs the world of emotion. I have loved color from a very early age—its awesome power and its creative possibility. But I think most of all, I have loved the very privilege of having it in my life.

Kaleidoscope Kiss

I didn’t expect to see him at the party. He was older than us, this tall handsome man with the dazzling smile. Like a dancer, he moved through our underground culture, teaching everyone the new steps, peddling the new music, the new clothes, the new ideas.

We should have run, I suppose. But we couldn’t. We were his flock of baby lambs, following him, longing to drink from his well of western culture.

That night the Illinois summer rolled out in all her glory: a magic carpet of starlit skies, sultry clouds of fireflies, a thick sticky humidity that drove us all outside.

Smoke wafted, strong and pungent, from one cluster of teenagers to the next.

My skin chilled as my best friend and I walked over dewy grass, crickets competing with the dark, pulsing drone of In A Gadda Da Vida. Midnight blue shadows disguised faces. Lawn chairs sprawled over a gentle hill.

It was there that this mesmerizing creature of the night swooped my friend into his arms, caught her in his trap for the evening. She curled on his lap, drank kisses mixed with red wine. His pretty lips curved in a grin and when he spoke everyone listened. He was more experienced than we were.

He was married.

He told a story that burned in my 16-year-old brain.

He was lying beside his wife, he said, caressing her swollen, pregnant belly one evening. And then, without warning, he placed a tiny tab of LSD on her lips. They both poised, waiting, this kaleidoscope kiss pressed against her lips, this deadly temptation.

Like a baby bird, she opened her mouth. Expectant. Eager.

He held the tab, just beyond the reach of her tongue.

Was there a quiet cry in that moment? A silent scream from her womb? Did the heavens rip, from top to bottom; did swords flash as dark sinister shadows fought shimmering white beings?

He held the tab above his wife’s mouth, ignored all the warnings of the maimed, the armless, the malformed. He teased her until she begged him to give it to her, and then he took the temptation away. He took the acid himself.

He ended the story with a laugh and none of us could tell whether he was the hero or the villain. He leaned down in that instant, enveloped my friend in another wine-drenched kiss.

The worst part of it all was that, despite the awkward hush that fell over us, his tale didn’t diminish his beauty. It didn’t loosen his hold.

We all sat poised like baby birds with our mouths open.

Waiting. Hoping.

Longing for his kaleidoscope kiss.

The Silent Yes

I grew up in a family where yes was said too often. Sometimes the yes was silent, but it was still yes. Always yes.

Up the hill, the Janes and Jills lived in brick houses, had two parents and multiple cars that waited patiently inside ample garages. In my house, there were two parents and four girls and two boys—in the beginning. By the time I was eight, this had been whittled down to one parent and two girls. To this day, I sometimes think that if I stand still long enough, everyone around me will melt and disappear. They will blow away like dust on the brittle wind and I will wonder if they ever truly existed.

Alcohol ran like a raging river beside my house. Both of my parents grabbed buckets and ran down to its rocky banks, where they freely drank. Sometimes they stumbled home together. Not always.

This was all normal to me. Not good, but normal. It wasn’t until I walked into someone else’s house, one of those brick everything-is-perfect-here varieties, that I felt the dirt beneath my fingernails. Fortunately, all my friends lived in wooden houses. All their parents had secret maps that led them to the river, and they all took turns drenching themselves.

Some people have fragrant memories of family vacations and birthday parties. For me, my childhood comes rushing back in a stomach twisting lurch whenever I walk past the open door of a tavern.

Somewhere along the way, at a very early age, I became an artist. It may have been my path of escape. It may have been a means of expression. I don’t know. For me it was as important as breathing. It was survival. Drawing, painting and writing were the fingerprints I left on the world; they were the way I touched, felt and comprehended everything. Reading was the vehicle that transported me to another world, a safe land where all the bad things happened to someone else. My art was the thing that allowed me to stay human, that gave me the ability to feel when I should have been numb. It was what gave me hope and it was the thread that led to my future.

When my friends dropped out of school and went to work in one of the many soul-eating factories, I clenched my teeth and said, “Not me.”

I wish I would have had more as a teenager—we all long for more, it’s part of our nature—I wish I could have known God intimately. I wish I could have ridden the waves of adolescence with Him.

But that wasn’t what happened. I didn’t meet Him until later. Much later