Traceable

A fresh snowfall makes me conspicuous. Suddenly, my once invisible footsteps are evident, making my path easily traceable by the marks I leave. My size seven boot soles, fatly imprinted into the powder, illustrate my route and the slightly open stance of my gait, which I observe behind me, as if tracking a stranger in reverse.

The dogs leave their own distinct traces along the sidewalk as well, pristine dotted toe prints, perfect as any symbol for “paw,” wider and shorter distances between them based on leg-length. The wavy lines of their steps give away their tendency to veer, as they regularly curve off the pavement and onto lawns toward compelling scents. While I know from experience that walking a straight line is not their nature, it has never been so apparent. When they pull me, tether-bound, around a tree in a full circle, I laugh thinking what this would look like to others, our mess of footprints orbiting the trunk like a lopsided halo.

For once, I can see what the dogs “see” with their noses. They avidly follow a line of smaller, clearly feline, prints, and I wonder whether they are actually sniffing or looking, and guess at the former, as the power of our senses are opposite, at least to the best of my understanding.

I am pleasantly surprised when I recognize rabbit tracks: sets of two long parallel impressions followed – or preceded? – by two small, round, offset ones. I know the rabbits live here despite the somewhat urban setting. Occasionally, I see one scamper under the fence in our backyard or catch the flash of a white tail on a neighbor’s lawn. But it’s been some time since I had a good look at one, it’s round little brown body frozen still, pretending that it doesn’t know that I am having a staring contest with it.

I notice how many other dog prints are already here as well, along with the accompanying human prints, each in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. An odd sense of community comes over me, despite my lack of knowing who these steps belong to, and my being alone in the cold. The owners of these marks and I have a common habit.

Tomorrow, wind will blow the snow across our trails, rendering them invisible again. But tonight, the sidewalk tells stories.

January 13, 2016 0

The Idea of Christmas

There’s a little alleyway behind our house that runs between two streets, one sleepy and residential, the other a busy throughway. Sometimes, just for a change, I walk the dogs back there. They don’t mind that the view is comprised of mostly garage doors and trash bins or that, depending on the season, the alley has weeds growing out of broken slabs of asphalt or is littered with brown leaves or ice chunks. The sniffs are still good.

This time of year, the sniffs even delight me because, on the busy end, a Christmas tree vendor sets up in the small parking lot next to a print shop. Each day, regardless of weather, he pulls fresh trees from the back of his pick-up truck and places them carefully in stands – little coffee can-shaped things attached to long metal rails, so that the arboreal display becomes ordered and linear. A charming hand-painted sign beckons drivers from the street. Strings of white lights are strung above the trees making a glittering ceiling for his open-air Christmas market.

Before the dogs and I can even see the trees, we smell them. Or at least I do. The scent of those boughs makes me dreamily nostalgic for a kind of Christmas that hasn’t existed since I was eight – the time before my parents angrily split, my mom stopped talking to my grandparents, my brothers moved out of the house. The sweetness of the fir trees sends me back to a happy place that now lives only in my imagination, where during holiday gatherings, my family let me “play Santa” by doling out packages from under a towering fragrant tree, pressing them into the hands of smiling loved ones.

It’s an odd and old tradition, bringing a bit of the outside indoors during this time of year. Historically, the evergreen nature of these trees apparently brought some sense that life would go on during the darkening days of December. I get that.

But in addition to the dogs, we have cats. Cats that can’t be trusted with a tree. And we don’t have kids wanting traditional decoration, so there’s no pressure. But every year I pine for one (pun intended). I feel lucky to have this perfumed place to walk, at least. For a month each year, it turns a dirty lane into an enchanted pathway, reminding me what it felt like to be safe and happy and earnestly excited.

Besides, the tree guy is super nice. He also bakes his own dog treats, which is probably what Hank and Trixie are actually smelling. We create our own little family holiday ritual in the alleyway among the urban forest, the dogs crunching away happily as I breathe in the idea of Christmas.

December 9, 2015 1

Weird Rock Gratitude Post-Paris

Last Friday night after eating a mellow dinner together in the kitchen, instead of going to a local rock show like we did in our twenties, my husband and both went upstairs—I to the bedroom with my laptop to work on an essay, he to his studio to work on his new record. Forty-something party animals on a weekend night.

When I settled in, I saw that I had an urgent text from my coworker. I manage a number of social media accounts for work and had a bunch of stuff scheduled to go out automatically promoting a conference, and she wrote, with all going on in Paris prob not a big priority right now.

Like millions of people who were online at the time I imagine, I Googled the question in my head, What’s happening in Paris? CNN had brief statements set up with bullet points of what they thought they knew, but it was all very sketchy, all still developing, and all very alarming. A few seconds later, my coworker wrote again: Think we should not tweet anything else conf-related tonight? Paris everywhere.

Agreed. Done. I wrote back. I spent the next 15 minutes deleting Facebook and Twitter posts. Then my attention went immediately to researching the situation unfolding in France. I saw a headline that made me yell to my husband in the room next door, “Baby? Do you know what’s going on in Paris? Come here!! Did you ever play the Bataclan?”

My guitarist husband, Peyton, spent the first 15 years of our relationship touring nationally and internationally, with his band and a handful of others. Some years, he was gone half the time. I never worried about him cheating on me like some of my girlfriends did. I worried about the vans he traveled in, overloaded with amps and guitars and too many people driving dead-tired or buzzed after a show, crashing. But I never worried about guns or bombs.

Peyton and I spent the next two hours watching TV coverage of the newest most alarming terrorist act together with banners running across the bottom of the screen reading unreal things like, “They were shooting at us like we were birds.” It was just the most recent occurrence of tremendous violence that we heard about, special only because it took place in one of the most metropolitan places in the world, not because lots of innocent people were killed and throngs more were terrified and scrambling.

But it felt much worse to me somehow. It felt really personal and close.

I’ve been a fan of the Eagles of Death Metal for a long time because I’ve been a fan of Queens of the Stone Age and Crooked Vultures and anything Josh Homme-related ever since I saw QOTSA headline a show in Boston years ago when I’d really gone to see And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead… and they were subsequently blown out of the water by this band that my friend who took me to the show said I absolutely had to see. It’s been a love affair ever since.

So, like any fan, I was sad. As a concertgoer, I was freaked. Like anyone who likes to travel internationlly, I was stunned. But as the wife of a traveling musician, I was horrified in a very personal way.

While I knew we didn’t actually know those guys, they are just like so many people that we do know who could have been playing there. When I got really honest with myself, I realized that it could have easily been not just a friend, but my own husband in that club.

“What’s going to happen to these guys?” Peyton and I pondered from the safety of our sofa.

When I checked the Eagles of Death Metal Facebook page, I found the post: We are still currently trying to determine the safety and whereabouts of all our band and crew. Someone had made a comment that the wife of the drummer had heard from him and the band members were safe. I imagined exactly what she must be feeling, considering that it could just as easily have been me having to tell the Washington Post that the band was OK. Peyton had flown to the UK for a European tour on 9-11 and I’ll never forget the panic I felt.

The next day, like millions of other people, I decided to buy the new album, only to find it sold out. And every other Eagles of Death Metal album I looked at was sold out too. It was a rock and roll form of solidarity.

Two days later, Peyton told me that all wasn’t actually well with the band. Their merch guy had been killed. It was someone that he didn’t know well, but had met a couple of times, a good guy. Too close to home.

I read many reports in the couple of days following in which journalists had to explain that the band’s name is a joke, that they aren’t really death metal or about death at all. I sighed, exasperated for them. They never asked for this kind of exposure, where everyone’s grandma and her dog knows their name, and only in a way that will forever be tainted with bloodshed and fear.

I am so grateful in my selfish way that, despite never having the fame he deserved, my husband is at home on the couch not experiencing this kind of recognition. That I can hold him close and know he is safe in my arms, at least for this moment. That there aren’t media outlets all over the world writing pieces trying to parse why his band was targeted. That politicians and strategists aren’t talking about a project he came up over a beer with some friends in someone’s studio one night that was a helluva lot of fun for years until suddenly any mention of it was to talk about one of the worst things that ever happened.

November 18, 2015 1

Broadside Books

As an undergraduate creative writing student, I spent the majority of my disposable time and income at two independent stores in Northampton, Mass: Main Street Records and Broadside Books. I regularly took the Five College bus from Hampshire College into town and jumped off at the stop across the street from both for the sole purpose of spending time in these stacks and racks.

Hours were lost thumbing through records and craning my neck to the right to read the spines of books. I loved the smell of new paper and fresh ink, the hope of a brilliant new discovery. I made careful selections with my minimal cash, reading the back covers and first pages and maybe even a few middle pages of books, talking to the store staff about the latest and greatest new releases, placing special orders for items that weren’t in stock, reading posters and reviews. Sometimes, I came back at night for a reading by an author, where I sheepishly poured myself wine into a plastic cup and sat in a folding chair in the back row in awe. Or I listened to a singer-songwriter pour their heart out in front of an audience of twelve. It wasn’t just shopping; it was an entire cultural experience.

My now-husband and I moved to an apartment in Northampton after college, and we have always had an agreement that we will never give the other any grief about spending money on records or books, as we share a fundamental belief that a) you can never have too many of either, and b) they are the most worthy items to buy, as they give us as much nourishment as food. We continued to shop at Broadside Books, Main Street Records, The Globe Bookshop and Turn-it-Up! for all of our listening and reading desires. Then Amazon was born.

Suddenly, we could have any book or record we wanted shipped right to our front door for less money than buying it in town. The ability to search for hard-to-find albums and out–of-print titles, listen to clips and read passages right from the comfort of home made us lazy and comfortable. It wasn’t the same as browsing the stores, touching the hard covers or checking out the recommendations of staff we trusted, but it was great. So easy in our busy lives.

What happened next is that Main Street Records and The Globe shuttered their doors. They were just our local example of what Amazon (and Wal-Mart and Target) had done to independent stores all over the country. I felt personally responsible. And deeply sad.

It took a while, but I’m back to shopping at Broadside Books just as I’m back to writing being a primary focus. I always buy books there now, even ordering what isn’t on the shelves through their staff or their online system, waiting patiently for the friendly personal call that my title has come in, picking it up in person and paying a little bit more. That’s a luxury I can afford now and I feel good about helping, in my small way, to assure that a local independent shop stays in business.

I like to stop in when I have a free half hour and enjoy the smell of printing, the personal touch of a book seller guiding me to what I’m looking for, the discovery of titles I never would have found online. I often end up at the counter with twice as much as I came in for. My frequent-shopper card is getting stamped a lot. Soon, I’ll have earned $10 off a book—again.

It only pains me that I don’t get a second chance with Main Street Records.

October 27, 2015 0

Expectations & Interviewing

There’s something profoundly unnerving to me about reaching out to someone I don’t know and asking them to talk to me. Maybe it’s simple fear of the unknown. Maybe it’s because I spent the last year interviewing for jobs like it was my job. When you are talking to strangers and practically begging them to like you, to find you worthy and even desirable, knowing you are setting yourself up for possible (and even likely) rejection, it can make you a little neurotic.

When I reach out to a stranger and ask them to help me in some way, I feel tiny and nervous and undeserving. It was like this when, for an assignment in my MFA program, I recently emailed the managing editor of a publishing house to set up an interview.

Even though my professor had already done the hard work of talking to the press and doling out contact information to us, in preparation, I read the bio of the person I was to speak with, studied the titles that her publishing house had put out recently, Googled what it meant to be a managing editor, ran through interview questions with class and had my professor review my email request to Ms. Managing Editor, in which I mentioned that I happened to have a full-time job and be a full-time student at the same time and that it might be a teensy bit challenging to find a mutually beneficial time to talk. Or something more concise than that, I hope.

I received a response from my professor indicating that I should make this managing editor feel like the most important person in the room, which was totally fine and reasonable except that it made me worried that maybe she was too busy or important to be talking to me – because who am I? – or maybe that she was actually a horrible diva or a cruel person who would tell me I was a clown and wasting her time. Oh, and also, I had misspelled my professor’s name in the email. Classy.

The email I received back from the managing editor was friendly and accommodating. She said she’d be available a bunch of times I suggested and we were able to set up an appointment right away for just two days out. When the phone rang at the appointed time, I sweatily let it ring a couple of extra times so it didn’t seem as though I’d been anxiously staring at the phone for ten minutes with my questions in hand, and answered in my attempt to sound breezy, “Hi, this is Anne?” I always do this, sounding like I’m not sure it’s actually me, but rather as if I am asking the caller to reassure me that I am myself.

Forty-five minutes later, after only casually looking at my script here and there and letting the conversation unfold naturally, we were on a first name basis and laughing while I learned that a lot of the stuff I researched was wrong, at least for her specifically at this press. She was incredibly easy to talk to, patient with my questions and completely open to follow-up. She didn’t act in the least put out and provided me with incredibly interesting information. She was kind and engaging and supportive of me and the program. When I signed off, I said in all sincerity that it was a real pleasure talking with her. I believed her when she said the same in return.

I sent a quick ‘thank you’ email the next day to which she responded, “I’m glad I could help. Good luck with the rest of your semester.”

I keep having to remind myself that damn near everyone likes to talk about themselves. God knows I do. And that all you’re doing during an interview is having a scheduled conversation with a real person. Like most things in life, it is much easier with practice. And if they’re a jack ass, you can always walk out or hang up. But chances are, you won’t want to.

October 6, 2015 0

Running Head

The term running head conjures odd images for me. Immediately, I think in literal terms of a cartoonish, disembodied human head with disproportionately small legs fleeing a scene. Maybe a little like Mr. Potato Head if he were really on the go, though in my mind’s eye, he is always just standing around.

Running head also makes me think of racing thoughts, a chronic condition I suffer from. It’s got an anxious angle, this term – it sounds like too much on the brain plus rushing, an equation for stress. That reaction tells you a bit about me.

The actual meaning is quite different. It’s downright calm and very helpful: Text at the top of a standard book page that usually contains book, chapter or section title information. So “running” simply refers to ongoing—as in, happening throughout a book—and “head” just describes the positioning on the page. As a part-time graphic designer, I’m surprised not to know this term already. I’ve always called it a page header! But I’ve only officially laid out one long-form book, and I just made it up as I went along. Because I’m creative. Translation: fraud.

Anyway. Terminology. Upon further research, running head has poetic possibilities. One book design site refers to the “atmosphere you can create with running heads.” I love this, as any designer would, because it implies (correctly) that the look and feel of a layout, including font face and size, spacing, margins, location of page numbers, etc. all have an impact on how the actual text comes across. They help shape the way the story is presented overall.

Running head also plays a critical role in orientation. A reader often puts down a book, with or without marking his or her spot, and has to figure out where they left off when they open it back up again. The running head tells them in which chapter they have landed and maybe the section and page number too, and could include the author’s name and/or book title as well (just for reinforcement, I guess). It’s all kind of like a little icon on a map saying: “You are here.”

Running heads are not to be used for chapter openings, table of content pages and the like, because hopefully you know where you are at that moment from actual titles. (If you don’t, there may be larger concerns to consider.) Anything else, longer than one page, is apparently supposed to have running heads, if the body of the book is set up that way. There are rules.

So, running head is a marriage of form and function, one of my favorite things.

Lastly, and I really, really love this add-on from writer Joel Friedlander, “If you take the running heads off of your book pages, the pages are likely to look quite bare, like they went out and forgot to put their clothes on.” Talk about a vision of embodiment. Now I have stark naked detached heads on the brain. That’ll keep my mind racing.

Sources:
http://www.authorhouse.com/AuthorResources/BookPublishingTerms.aspx#R
http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2014/03/how-to-design-running-heads-for-your-book/

October 1, 2015 0

Hot Pepper Jelly

I came across a small jar of homemade jelly in the pantry a couple of weeks ago, the kind sealed with a silver Ball canning lid and ring, the kind grandmothers have used for “putting up” jelly, chutney, tomatoes and the like for decades. Like most, this one had a little sticker affixed to it with a decorative design around the edge and handwriting in the middle to remind me what the jar contained and when it was made: “Hot Pepper Jelly 8.11.”

I’ve been the lucky recipient of lots of lovely canned delicacies from friends and family over the years. Just recently I got spicy pickles from the neighbor across the street who grows her own cucumbers and peach salsa from a friend who belongs to a fruit farm. I’ve become obsessed with the exceedingly tasty apricot preserves a former coworker started selling and enjoyed my mom’s lemon jewel marmalade at Christmas. I find these preserved treasures with some regularity in the pantry, so I’m not sure how I overlooked this jar until now.

The handwriting is so familiar that it hurts to look at. It’s the simple lettering of my friend Kim, who died in February.

Looking at it now, I remember she had been canning all kinds of things that summer. We belonged to the same farm, which had produced a great bounty and we all had way too much produce to know what to do with. The same day she put this jar into my hand, she also gave me onion and blueberry jams, which were consumed some time back.

I’m not sure why the hot pepper jelly is still around four years later. I love pepper jelly, so maybe I was saving it – I’ve always had hoarding tendencies with things I like. Lots of people don’t know what to do with it, but Texas natives like myself know that if you need an excellent (and extremely easy) appetizer, you simply pour pepper jelly over a hunk of cream cheese and serve it with crackers. (We swore by Wheat Thins in my family.)

Kim might have given it to me for Christmas at my husband’s and my annual holiday party in 2011. She never went to any party empty-handed, and she went to a lot of parties. Usually she brought wine or cookies (or both), but that year, it must have been her homemade canned goods.

The pepper jelly made the move from our old house to this one two years ago. When I packed it up, I bet I planned to open it at the next holiday party and serve it with cream cheese and crackers so that she could appreciate it. But for some reason, she didn’t make it to the party the year we moved, and last year we didn’t have one.

2011 was the year after Kim and I stopped working together. We had been co-managers in the marketing department of a credit union for four years doing complimentary but very different jobs. She did the outward-facing work of “business development,” something we jokingly referred to as the politician-type job of shaking hands and kissing babies. I did the creative work – ads, newsletters, website, email – behind the scenes. To me, it was a work marriage made in heaven.

I am shy in big groups; Kim was the opposite. Petite and blonde with a cute turned-up nose that defined the word “pert,” she absolutely bubbled in the presence of others. Kim liked people in a way I don’t, always finding something interesting to talk about and laughing as easily as she breathed. When we went to an event together, I would huddle closely to her for safety and she would push me into the crowd insisting, “Go shake hands with three people you don’t know!”

When my brother died, Kim was bereft for me. She’d experienced plenty of loss of her own, including a dear boyfriend named Tommy early on, who died in a motorcycle crash. She told me how every time she saw a goldfinch, she thought it was Tommy. She offered me her unused vacation time when I got stuck out of town with my family longer than expected for my brother’s memorial. Her sympathy was what I needed and what I didn’t get from many others. Upon my return home, I was surprised by a kitchen full of dozens of multicolored paper hearts cut out of construction paper. Kim had broken in and pasted them up everywhere – on cabinet doors, countertops, the stairway railing – like the most glorious, loving, kindergarten project you’d ever seen. I kept them up for weeks.

When our boss got crazy, she and I both quit within two weeks of each other out of solidarity.

Last spring, she was working a new job with a mutual friend – a friend I made because of her – and he had a major stroke. It was terrifying for her, as she was the one he called after collapsing at home. She was the one who then called the ambulance, his wife, their boss, his friends. She called me and asked me to fill in for him on some design work. We were so afraid we would lose him, but amazingly, he recovered beautifully after some time.

Kim started having health concerns of her own a few months later. I knew her stomach was bothering her and she was having some tests done. The last time we met for a drink, she didn’t order a glass of wine, but had seltzer instead. I heard from a mutual friend that she landed at a specialty hospital in Worcester for a few weeks. I emailed her and asked what was going on. “Kidney failure,” she typed back. She was having dialysis.

That seemed rather dire, but when she emailed and texted me, she sounded so upbeat, so normal, so Kim. I asked if I should drive out and she said no. I asked if she needed anything and she said no. I thought we would just get together when she got home, and we meant to, we really did. But somehow it just didn’t happen.

Then the friend who had the stroke, the one we had been so scared of losing less than a year before, sent me a message late on a Sunday night in early February. He said, out of the blue, that he didn’t think she was going to make it.

It was so sudden and so devastating. In that moment, I realized that it never even crossed my mind that Kim could die. I had never met anyone so alive. She was 51. She had three vibrant kids and more adoring friends than anyone I’d ever met. She wasn’t even that sick, was she?? It didn’t make any sense.

I turned into a frenzied mess, running up and down the stairs, texting and calling her friends, crying all over my husband, going through a whole box of Kleenex, punching the pillows on my bed, panicking, sweating despite the cold, and needing to do something, anything, and it was all much too late. There was nothing I could do. I was told by her best friend, “it’s family time at the hospital.” I finally fell asleep that night. She never woke up.

I missed Kim a little extra on her birthday in June – we used to celebrate together since we were less than two weeks apart. A goldfinch flitted over me that day, strangely close, and I wondered.

All I have is this little jar of hot pepper jelly as a souvenir. I love that it is petite and spicy, just like she was. I wish I had more, just like I wish I had more time with her, but I’m grateful for it all the same. At this year’s holiday party, I’m going to get a big chunk of cream cheese and pour it all on top and serve it up with crackers – Wheat Thins – with a glass of red wine in hand, and I will toast her, my beautiful friend, the one and only, Kim.

September 28, 2015 0

Huffing Post

My dogs have those toe pads that smell like Fritos. That warm, corny scent is, for me, cozy and reassuring in the same way my baby blanket was when I was growing up. I sometimes put my nose right against their dirty feet, pressing into the fur that sticks out between their toes, and take a big huff of it. It’s like some crazy perfume that just makes me feel happy and safe.

I was a blanket huffer as a kid. I wouldn’t let my mom wash my blanket for fear of it losing the fragrance – surely made up of saliva and sweat and dirt and food – that I had worked so long and hard to cultivate. Occasionally, when I wasn’t looking, she would swiftly ferry it away and throw it into the laundry. When it was returned to me, it would look basically the same – possibly brighter due to its lack of filth – but was unrecognizable to me due to it’s All detergent scent. That blanket – baby blue (all my siblings were boys, so I assume this might have been based on chromosomal assumptions) – was crocheted by hand by my dad’s Aunt Isabel, and I was so attached to it that it earned me the nickname Linus, though I feel it is important to note that I was not a thumbsucker.
My husband thinks my love of what might be deemed “funky” smells is gross. He’s not wrong. But there is something far outside of my control about the way it works.

Our corgi Hank AKA “Stink-Um” likes to cultivate a whole body fragrance for himself. He loves to roll in other animals’ urine and on the best days, something dead, ideally with guts squishing out and an advanced level of decay. He makes my olfactory choices seem downright lovely. But you’d have to see the self-satisfied glee on his face to understand why I have a hard time stopping him. He identifies a scent and then turns his head to the right before launching his entire body into the smell. It starts cheek-first then he smoothly rolls over onto his back and, belly skyward, proceeds to wiggle back and forth over and over, his stubby legs bouncing as he grunts like a satisfied little pig.

He looks at us with pure devastation in his brown eyes as we lift him into the bathtub, just as I did when my mom returned my blanket. When he realizes we are about to wash away all his hard work, the selections he carefully made, the souvenirs of his joyful rolling, his demeanor becomes downright downtrodden.

After a bath, he smells fluffy, whatever fluffy smells like. Nothing changes the corn nut scent of his feet though, which I would bottle as Eau d’Dog Paw. It wafts over us as we snuggle on the couch, filling the air with the fragrance of comfort.

September 20, 2015 1

Anniversaries

There is something about anniversaries that seems to automatically set us up for disappointment, regardless of why the day is significant. The year marker of a lovely experience like a wedding, or a benign thing like a birthday, or an accomplishment like quitting smoking are wrought with expectation and memory:

What if he doesn’t remember?
Will I get the present I want? If not, I’ll have to fake being excited.
I quit the day my friend had her mastectomy. She died anyway, after all that.

Anniversaries that are/should be celebratory often still bring up doubts and questions, stress or judgment:

I don’t know why we’re still together.
I can’t believe I’m already 60 – one year closer to retirement/more wrinkles/less mobility/death.
What’s the point of eating healthy and exercising? There’s no guarantee that any of it will matter.

The anniversary of a death is, by definition, sad in most cases. But it also holds expectations, questions and hard reflections.

Yes! I am going to do a memorial hike!
What will I feel? Will it be appropriate? I will have to hold it together even though I’m falling apart inside.
What if I don’t think about him every minute of the day? Does that mean I’m over it or I have a hardened heart?
How can it be that he’s been gone for seven whole years? Life doesn’t make sense.

Thursday came and went without much fanfare, much to my disappointment. I felt I had to go to work (new job) and the weather was awful (90 degrees and 98% humidity killed my motivation), so the hike was postponed/cancelled. All I managed to do was send a brief email to my mom and a text to my brother, and pull an old photo off of Snapfish and post it to Facebook. It was a sweet picture of David and me growing up, but all my post did was make my friends sad for me and inform the acquaintances that didn’t know I’d lost a brother, so they were shocked and sad for me. Spreading misery – not what I wanted.

The story behind the picture might have been better:

In it I’m perched on a brand new bike, cherry red with the training wheels still on, my hands grasping the arched handlebars in a determined way, like I have places to go. I’m pretty sure I had just received it as a Christmas present, as there is still one of those fuzzy 70s ribbons tied onto it. I’m pretty sure I’m still all dressed up for Christmas given that I’m wearing a red and green dress plus patent leather t-straps (with socks!) and I was generally forced into dresses for special occasions against my will when I was growing up. (The fact that it’s a sundress doesn’t mean it wasn’t Christmas since I grew up in Houston and we were often in t-shirts in December.) I’m pretty sure I’m five in the photo.

That means David, standing behind me, barefoot, but wearing khakis and an Izod, would have been 17. We’re in the driveway at the house on Acacia and he’s ready to do something if I start to fall – I can tell by how he’s focused on me, not the camera. I can tell because of his active hands. I know because he was my big brother and would have been worried about me.

I remember him spending a lot of time with me in that driveway, helping me learn to steer and balance and pedal and finally move into the street. He helped me get the training wheels off – literally and figuratively. I owe him a lot. I owed him a better anniversary.

September 8, 2015 0

Seven years and counting…

This Thursday will be the first time that September 3rd falls on a Thursday in seven years. The cycle that bumps days of the week has made one full rotation.

It was on September 3, 2008, that my big brother, David, went missing. I remember it all too well.

It was on a mountain like the one in he’s standing on in this picture where he felt his last elation. I like to think he was as happy as he looks here for his last moment.

I can’t believe another year has gone by. I still miss him all the time.

August 31, 2015 0