Posted 10:33 AM by melanie

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Why I returned my Special Olympics Ribbon

I was thinking about a long time ago when I was around 18 and I volunteered to be a softball coach for the International Special Olympics. I had so much fun hanging out with the kids, too much fun, apparently, because some of the event officials kept thinking that I was one of them, and I guess I was, and people were hugging me like I was, and that freaked me out, but it was funny, and the real athletes all laughed too. I wandered over to the gymnastics competitions because I had been a gymnast in my early teen years and I sat with the athletes and talked and drank cokes and laughed; they were incredible people. At the end of the event they had a dance in the field house at LSU and the other volunteers sat in bleachers and gawked, but I like to dance, and my new friends were asking me to, so I got out, and I jitter bugged, and shimmied, and waltzed, and my mother who was an official ‘hugger’ kept getting compliments about her ‘special child’ and I did nothing to dissuade the rumor, but I did return the ribbon.

Posted 8:51 AM by melanie

Last Call

I seem to be playing phone tag this morning, because I can’t get in touch with the people that I need to talk to and I thought about a friend of mine who spent the last hour of his life making phone calls. He was calling different people and no one was home. He left messages on answering machines, but he never got to talk to anyone. He was calling from a hospital bed. I thought about him this morning as I was pushing buttons and hearing recorded messages, and I wonder what he was thinking while he was making those last calls. His messages sounded casual, and he didn’t sound desperate, he didn’t even say he was calling from a hospital room, and he even had the presence of mind to leave a joke on one of the machines. About an hour after that last call, they found him slumped over in bed, the top pulled off his margarine, his butter knife askew, and his bread still unbuttered, and the phone on his bed, next to his head, as though he were waiting for a return call that never came.

Posted 5:26 AM by melanie

(Sigh)

Months later, after her death, I have flashes, like lightening quick memories of tiny moments of knowing her during one of the most difficult times of my life. I remember her friend coming over and talking to me; me sitting cross legged, my head in my hands, in the middle of my living room rug, and him telling me that she was someone that I needed to know. He said that she wasn’t judgmental; she wasn't like that, and that she was good at putting people at ease, and that I needed to meet her and talk to her. He thought that she could make me feel better. I guess I looked like I needed an anchor, a friend, someone who would listen, anyway, she did come over to visit with me.

I can’t remember what we talked about that first day. I think something about us doing laundry together, and that she had the same last name as an acquaintance of mine in another state, and we discussed whether she might be related to him, and she said that she might be second cousins or something. I’m not going to exploit our friendship, that has never been the goal of my writing, although I do exploit myself quite a bit, but I deserve it, anyway, this bugs me, because I know, several years from now, I’ll be sitting somewhere and not thinking about this and it will all come back to me, and I’ll remember her vividly, all the way down to the kind of sneakers, the gray baggy shirt that she was wearing, and how her dark hair fell in big loose ringlets, damp with sweat, and the way her eyes smiled with her, in an intense, instant, Polaroid kind of way, in one big flash of recognition, and that she was like that, like the kind of person I try to be, petal to the metal, take no prisoners, strap on your seat belt and let's go, and I guess she did befriend me, and I know that she didn’t feel sorry for me at all; she just thought I needed to get up off my ass and do something with my life. She was a dynamo, someone who was out to save the whole planet, and she took time in her busy schedule to try and save me; to help out a depressed neighbor, someone she had never met before. What a sweet person she was. I know that I was very lucky to know her and I wish that I had told her that back then.

I thought about her, again, as I was riding up the Talimena Trail in western Arkansas, to the lodge on the top of Queen Wilhelmina mountain last Sunday. I was in a silver Mustang convertible, the sunlight was dancing off the hood, illuminating beads of rain, and changing them into every color of the rainbow, like a prism, a kaleidoscope effect on the windshield, bright beams of light, almost blinding me, and blending in with the gold, tinted shade of my wire rimmed sunglasses, with the wind flying through my hair, a storm cloud chasing, but not over taking us, and my son sitting next to me, chewing bubble gum as fast as he could, and him smiling so hard, it looked like it hurt his freckled cheekbones, and then I thought about her with the same kind of wind touching every strand of her being, and I thought about my deceased father, and his black, 1955 T-bird with the red wings, and about both of us laughing, and me by his side, us sailing by on the same pavement, and then I pictured all of us together for a single precious moment of life, and forever, finally free.

Posted 4:40 PM by melanie

The right to choose and welfare reform.

I am not abdicating responsibility for my self or my predicaments, but I’m not apologizing for them either. It’s just simply the way it was and is for my son and me. I once tried to argue with a young conservative republican about childhood nutrition programs using my own situation as an example. He wanted to know and I quote. “ Who is to blame? Who is at fault? And Who done you wrong?” I told him that my child was not a fault and that babies are one situation where two wrongs do make a right; a right to eat, a right to have shelter, and a right to choose, and to be able to make a decision that is not based on your lack of food or lack of shelter. You won’t find my soft and fuzzy logic in any algebra equations, or technical manuals. I think that is why men don’t understand and they continue to gut the safety nets that women like me need in order to survive and to make choices.

Posted 8:44 AM by melanie

Drumline: Ed and Ric's version

Well we’ve had two visits from the local sheriffs, so far in two days over my son’s drumming. It was before 10 pm last night when they arrived and I just shook my head and said Ok whatever. He wasn't playing the night before, but they said they were in the neighborhood. (What ever) Now, it’s morning and Ed is practicing, again. I’m relieved as long as he is on those drums and pounding away at his teen angst, then I know that he’s not out doing drugs, getting in trouble, or doing anything except hitting cymbals as hard and as fast as he can.

I remember his dad tried to start a band. We lived in a low rent apartment, the kind where people sleep in the lobby and you hand them an old coat to use as a pillow. One of those California neighborhoods full of over grown boys (oh excuse me, I mean Men) where the sign painter is a bass player, the mail man writes songs and plays rhythm guitar, and the apartment manager sings, and if they had been teenagers then they would have a garage band (probably did), except they were all in their 20s and 30s, and too old live with their parents, so instead they had an apartment band. Anyway, they practiced on the second floor in a corner apartment of a four-story tenement. We thought people would call the cops, cause man they were loud, instead we got knocks on the door, song request, and it all usually ended in a keg party. Wish it were like that here.

Boom, boom, bam, bam, crash, crash goes my Ed: I hope someone bails us out of jail, because I will not tell him to stop.

Posted 7:09 AM by melanie

Shoe Laces

You can study one person, and replay him, and moments with him in your mind, things that happened 20 years ago, and you realize that somehow you have memorized even his shoelaces, and the way they were tied on that one particular morning, but you can’t remember if you paid your water bill from this month. These are the tricks that my mind plays on me. And maybe the shoelaces were, frayed, dirty, and endearing, because one loop was larger than the other, and he always tied his shoelaces that way, haphazard, not paying attention engaged in conversation, adamant over something that his boss said, or something on the news that morning, and you don’t remember what it was, but you can see the three beads of sweat inching down his nose, the way one strand of hair flipped to this side or that side, as he became emphatic stressing his point, and you arguing just to take the other side so you'd have something to discuss, and the black soled tennis shoes, he wore that day stand out in your mind, (he was preparing to walk and hitchhike the 30 miles to town, to get to work, that evening/ he made it, but then he always did) and you wonder why it is important to you, to have these pictures in your head, home movies of your soul.

You remember the Amite river's brown water rushing outside your door, the early morning mist rising up obscuring the view of the other bank, the sound of splashes, and men working on some project, the current was swift and the water up, and it was a two mile hike just to get to the bridge and the highway. This was your favorite place in the world at the time, ( even though you barely had electric and the well pump was broken) and there was always a big rod and reel cast out to the middle of the river, trying your luck and hoping to eat something (anything would do), and the logs and snakes, and debris rushing by, and the way the road always flooded when it rained; if you had a car, you had to park it at the bridge, and walk through, knee to waist, deep murky, swirling water to get home, and you never minded dodging the water moccasins, they went their way and you went yours.

Posted 8:03 PM by melanie

Rainy days

I freak out when it rains. I used to not be like this, it always took a lot to get me upset. I’ve had guns held on me, shotguns, knives to my throat, you name it, and I’ve had it happen, and you’d never know it, to look at me, but my friends that have known me for a long time (the ones not dead or in jail), they know.

Now I hear a clap of thunder and my knees tremble, and if I’m on the road and my car hydroplanes, the least little bit, I have to pull over, and I shake, and I get panic attacks (imagine that) and don’t even mention tornado warnings, you don’t want to know.

Which is strange, because where I grew up, we used to party when the weather got bad, and we’d stand outside and watch pine and hardwoods, rock back and forth in the wind, their tops touching the ground, as the gust changed directions, and laugh when the trunks would finally crack, and land in some parking lot on top of somebody’s car, and we’d go out riding during the worst of it, mud running at the edge of bayous and canals, in and out, up and down, and the worse the weather was, the more fun we had, of course we were all drunk off our asses back then.

It’s strange that I can’t stand the weather these days, and I don’t know what happened to me, or when it started, but all of sudden there it was, a brand new neurosis, that I didn’t have before, but then again, since I am quite used to my own neurotic indulges, I just shake it off and go on. I wonder why?