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Martie
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since 1999-09-21
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California

0 posted 2000-01-07 06:03 PM





                    Somersault in Time
                              
    
    
      Sara held a pink satin slip.  The kindly nurse at the hospital had given it to her. "Go home," she had said, "and get some sleep."  But she couldn’t sleep.  She had been wandering around her mother’s bedroom, touching bottles and jars, even smelling the scent of her mother’s hair in the brush on the dressing table.  As she rubbed the soft material of the slip against her cheek she remembered Noel wearing it as she sat in front of the open window, "writing my memoirs," she had said.  The room had been like ice.  Sara has been worried.  She had moved back into this shingle-sided house of her youth to be close to her mother, Noel.  It seemed like all Noel did was sit in front of the window for hours just looking out.  When she’d asked her what she was doing, Noel had said "I’m remembering"-- meandering was more like it.              
    Sara put the slip to her face and caught a faint hint of Nivia skin lotion mixed with the floral fragrance of the old sachet in the underwear drawer.  She glanced at the chair and saw the notebook that lay on the floor. I am a
snoop, she thought, as she sat down and picked up the book and opened it to the first page.

               Just Meandering-A Memoir                
                
     It’s funny how things turn around and around--the world, the seasons, life and death and rebirth.  What was, is again.  "Mom, your meandering," Sara always says when I
do that somersault in time.  She is like a mother to me now.
     She calls it meandering when it’s actually remembering and I’ve been doing it for a long time.  It’s just that now
she notices more because she thinks I’m getting senile.  There’s a reason why I sit here by the window looking out that Sara doesn’t know.  There are just some things that a mother can’t tell her daughter.  Some things are private.  
     Sara worries about me too much.  She doesn’t trust me.  Sometimes I think she doesn’t know me at all.  I don’t like to be treated like a child or thought of as a forgetful old woman.  When do daughters change rolls with mothers?  Somewhere between menopause and the blue-veined, thin-skinned eightieth year, I think.  
     I wish I’d started earlier to make the mental effort to imprint important times in that notebook of my mind.  It’s like a favorite dream.  When you first wake up you’re sure you will always remember its flavor because it tasted so good, but you don’t.
     Now, I’m going to write down my memories.  This will give meandering more importance. "I’m writing my memoirs,"
I’ll tell Sara.  Doesn’t that sound important?  Like some hoity-toity celebrity?  
     The first time I started thinking about consciously remembering was one rainy day when Sara came home from school, wet.  I saw her through the kitchen window.  She walked slowly, with her head held up and her mouth open.
     "I like to have a rain bath and a rain drink," she told me as she dripped a water bath on the floor.  Her normally glossy black hair was splayed across her forehead and down her back.  A drop dangled from the tip of her nose.  Her gold and green eyes danced like a cloudless day.  She threw her arms around me and a puddle started to form at our feet.  
     "Your body feels like ice," I told her.  I was a mother, but I knew better than to say "You’ll catch your
death", or "You’re going to make yourself sick."  She knew the answer to those inherited mom concerns.  
      She would say, "Mom, colds are caused by germs, not by rain," or snow or drafts or going barefoot.  Sara was smart.
     "Mom, guess what?" she said that day as we stood in the puddle on the floor. It was right then that I realized that what she said was not important.  What was important to remember was the way her colt legs pranced back and forth as
she talked and the way she looked racing down the hall later.  I remember, it had seemed as if she were running away from her youth and away from me.  I wanted to take a picture of the way my heart felt-—so big with love that it hurt at the sight of her slender back, gracefully moving past the time of little girl things.
                      ***  
     Sara glanced out the window.  Jasmine climbed the trellis; the heavy fragrant breeze fluttered the paper.  
Noel, Sara thought her mother’s name.  Sara had teased her when a child; "You’re like the first Noel," she’d called, laughing her little girl laugh.  
    
                       ***
    
     My life has gone by so fast.  When I think of all the different forms of life, from the simple ameba to complex human being, I wonder at the miracle of just existing at all.  Take the butterfly.  It goes though four stages and the last is the most beautiful to me.  Then what?  The gold and green flying flowers of spring become dust in the wind.  I wonder about the next stage.  There’s a butterfly on my bedroom window sill now, fresh from a cocoon.  Its wings are still wrinkled and stuck together with the glue of beginning.  
      It’s raining.  I keep the window open for the perfume of wet soil.  It smells brown like the delicious fragrance of planting in soft dirt.  
     In the mirror, my long, silver-streaked hair glistens like the threads of rain that stitch the sky to earth. I
don’t look too closely at my face these days.  I tilt my head sideways and slightly close my eyes, so that what I see is blur and outline.
     It’s easy to pretend youth.  After all, I can still touch my toes, almost.  As I sit here in my pink satin slip,
my slender hand moving across the paper looks like the graceful tentacle of a sea creature.
    It must be eleven A.M.  I have given up keeping time with watches and clocks.  When I see John, I know what time it is.  He is walking down the street now.  "John the Gum Man," is what the children call him.  He sets time to my day, jaunting down, then up the street, for Campbell’s soup and the paper.  He’s eighty-six years old and straight backed slender.  He has one arm; lost the other to a long ago war.  The children in the neighborhood used to call out to him. "Hey, John!  You got any gum?"  He always did.  Mothers who didn’t know him, feared his intent. Dirty old man, they thought.  A policeman who had known him all his life, tried to tell him why he couldn’t give the children gum, but I can still see the question on his face.
     John is wearing a yellow rain-hat and slicker.  He wears the same shoes each day, white deck shoes.  I have a picture of him young and handsome on a ship, the wind
ratting his hair.  The picture was taken when he belonged to the Merchant Marines.
     I think a lot about John.  My heart still flutters when I see him look up at my window and smile.  He was my lover thirty years ago.  His brown, sun lit-face, his big hand and
long hard back--Oh, how he could excite me.  He has such beautiful sea green eyes.


                             ***
     Sara picked up the picture nestled in an envelope and tucked in the crack of the notebook.  There was young John with a brown, sun-lit face and the shirtless muscles of
physical exuberance.  John had been a part of her life since Jana was little and she never known.  Why didn’t you tell me Noel?
                            ***
     Sara was passionate about everything she did.  It exuded from her in the way she walked--tall and straight and confident, and talked--her hands and arms dancing around
her. Of course she was passionate in love.  She was seventeen when that happened.  When I fell in love with her
father I was eighteen.  The feelings I had for him were soft and warm, like springtime.  It seems like yesterday that the
spark dimmed in Mark’s brown eyes, and then went out, click, like a light bulb.
     When Sara fell in love she was totally obsessed, caught in a spiral of new longings that manipulated her total being.  When gray slipped in at night to paint my hair,
years after Mark’s death, John came into my life and I knew how Sara felt.

    She charged into love, exploding into a woman whose hunger ate at her core and would not be satisfied.  She wanted to be with him all the time.  When she wasn’t with him she was on the phone with him.  They would sit in the
car out in front for hours.  I could see their arms wrapped around each other and their lips either talking earnestly or
melting together.  Sara called it "making out."  I know, I was a snoop in the dark living room of worry.  
      She and Tony decided they were both going to the same fancy university.  It seemed countries away from me when actually it was in the same state.  "This is my life, not
yours," she said, jerking her head at me in exclamation points.  
      After she left I realized how much I relied on her for companionship. I was lonely.  Since Mark died I had been too
wrapped up in her life. I think I must have had that look about me-—open, vulnerable, ready, something, because it was at this time that I met John.
     He lived right up the street from me, although I didn’t know it at the time.  He wasn’t at all like my Mark.  He was full of color.  He twinkled with enthusiasm about flowers and sunsets.  We met on a park bench.  He actually picked me up.  I was sitting there alone and lonely when he looked right at me, as if he could see into my heart and said, "Are you lonely, dear girl?" and that was that.  It was as if I had known him all my life.
      We started out meeting each day to feed the pigeons and talk.  We talked about our families, but mostly we talked about feelings and philosophy.  He was older than I was, retired from teaching archeology.  His dream had been
to follow his heart to far-off places in search of ancient things but he had found love instead in lighting fires in the minds of his students.  
     I tingled all the time and the first time he took my hand it was as though he opened a place in my body that had never been touched before.  I felt like a virgin.  

                          ***          
     Sara thought about that time in her life.  She had been in so much pain, and was so confused.  She hadn’t given a thought to her mother, hadn’t called-—nothing; and while she was engrossed in her own misery, Noel had fallen in love-—she had fallen in love with John the gum man.  She could hardly believe it. How selfish the young are to think that they own love.
     She remembered the times he gave her daughter, Jena gum.  All the children loved him even after the police read him his "gum rights."  That’s what Noel called them.  She remembered how hard her mother had worked to talk the other women in the neighborhood into believing John was harmless and how passionate and sure she had been.  Now Sara knew why.  Everyone still called him John, the gum man, even though the reasons had been forgotten.  What other secrets do you have Noel?

                            ***  
     During that first year at college, Sara got very sick and came home to recuperate from pneumonia.  I think what she had was a heart-ache.  She wasn’t the same Sara.  The spark was gone.  She laid under white sheets and the pink
quilt that Granny made, curled up and pale, her dark hair unwashed and unruly.  I sat beside her singing the lullaby she’d loved as a baby.   "Go to sleepy little baby," I sang and then her breathing became the sleep breathing of my little girl again.
     After Sara went back to school I was glad to be able to resume my relationship with John.  He was married.  He told me right away, but I chose to ignore it.  I just couldn’t picture him with someone other then me.  We always went to my house.  I didn’t know he lived right up the street until later when I saw him walking down the street from my bedroom window. I didn’t ask about his wife, but he told me that she was a good woman and he loved her.  
     This room, this window and yes, this bed were our universe.  Sara’s always saying I need a new bed, but I feel
part of John still lies here in the gentle curve of the mattress; right there is where he would tell me wonderful stories about his escapades on the high seas. It was
traveling that got him interested in ancient things, until he lost his arm in World War II when a German U-2 boat opened fire on his ship.  That was the end of his travels.  
     It was hard for John to be deceitful.  I guess I always knew we wouldn’t be forever.  After all, I was the other woman.  I had to let him go.  I wandered in the park each day, seeing him in every shadow.  I’d go to the park and end up sitting on the same bench where we’d met, wearing the green scarf that he said made my eyes look like the ocean, and playing the song that was on the radio the first time we kissed.  The feel of the pain made me feel alive and young.
    The next month Sara flunked out of school and came home with something more than bad grades; she came home pregnant with Tony’s baby.
     When she told me what had happened I wished I could protect her from the heart-break of living, but my own fresh wounds told me that heart-ache is living.
                                
                          ***
      Noel’s words brought back the memory of Mexico and the cold sheets of the abortion clinic.  A woman in white had been pouring cold water between Sara’s legs when she yelled,
"No, you can’t have my baby!"  The woman did not understand her and kept saying "no comprendo" and "no habla Ingles" and
she couldn’t move because her legs were strapped into the stirrups.  She finally took hold of the woman’s hands and looked at her, and yelled "no."  
     When Jana finally made her entrance, I experienced the same joy as when Sara was born.  Mark’s brown eyes were now Jana’s and nothing had been lost or forgotten.
     Sara inherited much of her momminess from me.  She couldn’t bare for Jana to be out of her sight and she
worried.  She wrapped her in blankets against my old enemy, "the cold."  It was I who finally convinced her that Jana
could lie naked on a blanket outside with the drafts and watch the branches on the trees dance.    
     The sun has come out.  I see spring in this butterfly opening and closing on my window sill.  Do butterflies fly into the sun when they die?  Are they the specks I see in
this sun-beam across my room?  Or, do they build themselves a death nest, high in a tree, where I cannot see?  I had a collection of butterflies when I was a child.  I caught them in my net and killed them with insect spray and pinned them
very carefully to an old cigar box and left them in the attic.  Sometime later, I went to look at them and they were gone.  No remnant of antenna remained, only a fine layer of dust and ten pins.
     John is coming back up the street now.  It must be noon.  We have not spoken since he left all those years ago, but we do connect each day at this time in a meaningful way that only love can explain.  
     Sara just came in to check on me.  I know that’s what she’s doing.  She stood there, black hair shining, gold and green eyes dismayed and said, "Mom, you’ll make yourself sick sitting there in your slip, with the window open."  
Remembering is important.  I remember, I was once like Sara, I worried and I was a snoop.  Now it’s Sara’s turn.
     I want to say "let go, Sara.  This is my life, not yours," but I don’t.  Letting go is the hardest loving act
to accomplish as beginnings become ends and ends become beginnings.
                          ***                
     Sara held the notebook to her chest.  She sat looking out the window for a long time.  Finally, she looked at the papers on her lap and said to the pages that seemed to contain her mother’s soul,  "You’re not gone yet, Noel, not by a long shot.  You haven’t finished writing your memoirs."


© Copyright 2000 Martie Odell Ingebretsen - All Rights Reserved
Christopher
Moderator
Member Rara Avis
since 1999-08-02
Posts 8296
Purgatorial Incarceration
1 posted 2000-01-08 03:01 PM


Haven't quite hit that "eightieth" mark yet, LOL, but I still find myself "meandering" at times. Memories are important, and these are well written!
Marilyn
Member Elite
since 1999-09-26
Posts 2621
Ontario, Canada
2 posted 2000-01-09 08:25 PM


This was a wonderful read. We do not see the life led by the elderly. If we took the time to listen and learn we could visit the world through their stories. We could live a life of love lost and lives touched. Why do we seem to take these things for granted when we are young?
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