that's mrs. mediocrity to you

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What would it have been like if your life had turned out
the way you wanted when you were a kid?

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Early in the morning, and sometimes late at night, this is the chair I sit in. A strong chair, as the Cowboy Junkies song goes, one sturdy enough to hold me in place while I write or dream or drink tea and stare out the window. A chair strong enough to keep me grounded. And so I sit here pondering this question, trying to remember all the things I wanted my life to be like when I was a child.

It’s a hard question to answer at my age, hard not to filter my response through everything I’ve learned since then, hard to remember what I really thought when I was seven, or ten or fifteen.

I remember that I wanted to be a photographer. I remember that I was painfully shy and awkward and what I wanted most was to fit in. I remember that I always felt different, and what I wanted instead was to feel special. I remember that there was always this strange ache in my heart that I could neither define or relieve. But that makes it sounds like I wasn’t happy, and mostly, I think I was.

I don’t remember wanting to be a poet. One day I just started writing. But I didn’t really think about it, I never thought about growing up to be a writer. I just wrote when the poetry was there, like an impulse or a bodily function. I wrote through all my fears and awkward years, my first heartbreak and my tears, all that angst and lost girl floundering.

In school, I wasn’t the artsy type. I was a nerd. A full-blown geek, one of the smart kids who dressed like a dork and got almost perfect grades. For a while, in high school, I tried harder to fit in, I bought designer jeans and permed my hair, I got contacts and the same shoes that all the girls wore: docksiders and clogs. But I never even managed to fool myself into believing that I was like them. They knew too many things I didn’t. They saw the world in a way I couldn’t. They knew how to do their hair and apply their makeup, how to flirt with boys and get asked to the prom, how to sneak out for parties, how to run with the crowd.

I was never that girl. By the time I was a senior, I stopped trying to be. No, I stopped wanting to be. I dressed like a hippie (when this was so NOT in fashion). I let my hair grow long and straight and parted down the middle. And mostly, I kept to myself. I was waiting. For my life to start. I hadn’t yet figured out where I wanted to be, but I had figured out where I didn’t want to be.

My guidance counselor tried to talk me into going to college for engineering. I had the grades, but absolutely no inclination. And I admit that there are times now, in moments of bill-paying, when I wish I had. When I consider how my life could have been if I’d walked down that path. But my soul would have been miserable. I knew that even then, though I couldn’t have put it into words.

Ultimately, the real answer to this question is that my life would look almost exactly the way it does now. If magic existed and I could change things, there would be slightly more money and lots more windows.

And I might be driving a ’67 Mustang.

But other than that, I’m good.

I have this chair and a pencil and these words and some stories.

And I love life.

It can’t turn out any better than that.

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this post is part of the scintilla project. see more here.

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Tell the story of how you got the thing you are going to keep forever.

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I have a house full of things. Being a very tiny house, the truth is that it is filled with too many things, despite all my efforts at discarding.

But the things that I’m going to keep forever live in a closet in one small box marked mementos.

This tiny matchbox-size sewing kit, made from construction paper and containing a piece of felt, some thread, and a couple of needles, lives in my desk drawer. It has been there since my son made it, probably twenty years ago now.

I’ve actually used it once or twice, to sew a button on or mend a hem, but that was a long time ago. Before I’d learned the value of something so small and tiny and unassuming.

Now, I understand.

And I keep it where I can see it, almost daily, to remind me.

There are no things that matter. There are no things we get to keep forever.

There is only love.

And if you have something that contains just one tiny
little piece of someone else’s heart, well,

then you have everything.

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this post is part of the scintilla project. see more here.

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Post a photo of yourself from before age 10.
Write about what you remember of the day the photo was taken.

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For my fourth birthday, all I wanted was a Jane West doll. Jane was a cowgirl, yes she was, and that’s who I wanted to be. The day came and I put on my blue party dress and waited, anticipation running through my mind like Flame, Jane’s trusty horse. Presents were opened, no Jane.

Still, I waited. At long last, my Nana handed me a box. I ripped the paper off, and there she was. Or so I thought. It was indeed a Jane West box, but inside was a new… outfit. My birthday balloon instantly burst. I’m pretty sure there were tears.

After all my gifts were opened (still no Jane), an old paper bag was placed in front of me, crumpled, unassuming. I peeked inside, and there she was. And there were smiles, and laughter all around. Was it a cruel joke to play on a four-year-old? Perhaps. But that was my grandmother, a strong, flawed woman who raised eight children practically by herself, worked full-time as a nurse, and had a slightly twisted sense of humor.

I believe, now, that she was trying to teach me lesson. I had talked non-stop about Jane for months. My grandmother came from poverty, a place where you made do with what you had, or didn’t have. I think, looking back, that her intentions weren’t as cruel as her joke. But I still remember the sting of that misguided betrayal.

Fast forward eight months.

My family, along with my aunt and her six kids, went camping for summer vacation. Three adults, ten kids, one large canvas army tent.

And here’s what happened: It rained. All week. The old tent was not waterproof, if you touched it from the inside, water would begin seeping through. Which my dad made the mistake of telling us. So we all had to test his theory, and he was right. As soon as you touched it, just a little fingertip…a drip would form, and then another, and then another. Pretty soon it was as wet inside the tent as it was outside.

That was our week.

On the last day, we packed up our soggy camp, planning to attend a birthday party on the way home. I put on my blue dress. On our way out of the park, I asked to use the bathroom. My parents stopped by the side of the road and pointed me in the right direction, there, across a field of grass. (You could do that back then). I took off running. Somewhere between the car and the building, bam! I went down, face first into a puddle hidden in the grass. When I stood up, I was literally covered in mud from head to toe. But no one in the car had seen. I ran into the bathroom, bawling my eyes out. My party dress! Ruined.

I stood inside the door, sobbing, no idea what to do. A girl, 13 or 14, approached me and asked if I was okay. I’m sure I bawled out some sort of unintelligible response. And then she took paper towel after paper towel and wiped me as clean as she could, and walked me back to our car.

Most girls her age would have laughed. She did not. And I still remember the comfort of that small act of kindness.

Same dress, different day.

A blue party dress that taught me, at age four, a little bit about life, expectation, the hurt that only comes from those you love, and the kindness you find when you least expect it.

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this post is part of the scintilla project. see more here.

this story was also my first contribution over at Vision & Verb a few years back, but it fit this prompt so perfectly that I decided to re-post it today.

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Sometimes we wish we could hit the rewind button.
Talk about an experience that you would do over if you could.

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This could be the kind of list that goes on forever,
filled with things like:

the time I yelled at you for not picking up your toys

the time I forgot your birthday

the time I turned left instead of right

the time I threw a book at you

the time I messed up the banking and left you
stranded at the checkout

the time I scratched your brand new tub
while cleaning the fish tank

the time I said the words I knew would hurt you most

the time I burned you with a match-tip
because I didn’t do the joke right

the time I sat with my friends instead of you
at the concert

all the times I bought something I didn’t really need
instead of saving my money

all the times I didn’t take the time to spend with you

all the times I said no when I should have said yes

all the times I said yes when I should have said no

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But really, this is the only one that matters:

all the times I didn’t say I love you
when I could have.

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this post is part of the scintilla project. see more here.

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Talk about where you were going the day you got lost.
Did you ever get to where you meant to go?

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truth be told
i get a little bit lost
every day

drawing your own map
makes living with questions
the only direction

but somehow
i always find my way
back home

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this post is part of the scintilla project. see more here.

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Talk about a time when you were driving
and you sang in the car, all alone.
Why do you remember this song and that stretch of road?

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It was a beautiful day, the sun beat down, I had the radio on, I was drivin’

Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever is one the few albums I’ve ever purchased immediately after hearing one song on the radio. (Counting Crows August and Everything After is another,  and more recently, just last year, Sean Rowe’s Magic was added to this short list.) All of these albums quickly wove themselves into the fabric of my life, becoming part of my personal tapestry.

But back to Tom Petty… I was young when this album came out, the same age that my son is now, 27.

My little boy was three at the time, and my first marriage was struggling for its last breath.

I remember exactly where I was when I heard Running Down a Dream for the first time, just a few miles from my house on a back country road. And it WAS a beautiful day. I had all the windows rolled down, (my tiny Toyota Tercel did not have air conditioning) and I pulled the band from my ponytail to let my long hair dance. I turned the volume up loud, I put the pedal down, and for those few minutes, just as the song goes, I was flyin’.

Later that year, I packed up my tiny car with a weekend bag and all my favorite cassettes. (Yes, I said cassettes.) It was mostly Dylan and Joni Mitchell, along with Mozart’s Requiem, and of course, there was Full Moon Fever. I drove myself to the Adirondack Mountains on Friday night after work. I had no reservation for a place to stay, no idea what town I would be stopping in, and no cell phone. None of these facts phased me in the least, but that is the blessing of being 27. I had a full tank of gas and a stereo, plus chocolate.

Late that night, after what I admit was a brief period of panic in which I realized it was quite possible that I had messed up and wouldn’t be able to find a place to stay in these sparsely populated mountains during off-season, I came upon The Melody Lodge. In a town called Speculator, which, in my rush past the sign, I read as Spectacular. Perfect, right?

The Lodge was the old-fashioned kind, the rooms didn’t even have their own bathrooms, everyone had to share the one down the hall. But I was there and it was dark and it was late and I wasn’t about to try a better place. And in retrospect, it was perfect. It was cheap and it was warm and the people working there were friendly. And I had all these blank notebooks just waiting for my words. I wanted to be a poet.

The next morning I got in my car with my music and I spent the entire day driving through those mountains, all the way up to the northernmost corner and back again, all the while playing an endless rotation of my favorite songs.

I was running down my own dream in the only way I knew how.

The day after that, I drove myself back home, back to my life, the one that was broken, and back to my son, who was not. And I knew that somehow, there would always be something good waitin’ down this road, and I would always be pickin’ up whatever’s mine.

I’m still running down a dream, still workin’ on a mystery, still goin’ wherever it leads.

And I’ve come to understand that I always will be.

Because anything is possible.

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this post is part of the scintilla project. see more here.

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What’s the biggest lie you’ve ever told?

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It’s simple, really,

and it always goes like this:

I can’t.

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I’ll probably tell it again

a million times,

but I’ll refuse to believe it

until the end.

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this post is part of the scintilla project. see more here.

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Tell a story set at your first job.

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My very first job was cleaning a church. Every Saturday, my whole family (my parents and four children) would spend the morning dusting and sweeping, washing and vacuuming, emptying trash and scouring sinks.

Okay, I admit, my parents did most of the work while the four of us ran around in what can only be called the coolest playground ever. We played endless games of hide and seek, as well as seeing who could make the other one jump the highest by sneaking up behind them and yelling, “Boo!” This is where I learned to internalize my scream, never wanting to give my brother the satisfaction of hysterics.

We each had a job or two, and mine was dusting. The smell of Lemon Pledge can take me back there, to my childhood, in an instant. My mom Pledged the crap out of every piece of furniture we owned, pretty much daily, and the church got a good weekly dose as well. We had to dust all the pews. There were a lot of pews, especially if you counted the main sanctuary plus the chapel, and then there were two large, formal sitting rooms filled with big antique furniture with lots of scrolls and nooks and crannies. A duster’s dream. Or nightmare, depending on how you look at it. It just so happens that I like to dust. (And you be quiet, Mr. Mediocrity.)

There was also a grand piano in one of those rooms, with a large photo of a couple hanging in an oval frame above it. I have no idea who the people in the photo were, but I do know for a fact that their eyes would follow you wherever you went. Sometimes we made a game out of that, moving to every possible location to see if they were still staring us down (they always were), but other times, when I was alone in the room, it would really creep me out.

There were a lot of creepy places in this labyrinth of a building, lots of hidden rooms and dark corridors. The organ pipe room was the stuff of Saturday afternoon horror shows, but the creepiest place of all was The Tunnels. Down in the basement, way in the back of the boiler room, was a door that was always locked. Behind that door was a series of tunnels leading I don’t know exactly where, lined with stone slabs. It looked more like catacombs than anything, the kind of place you would expect to find old skeletons. The story went that it had been part of the Underground Railroad, and the slabs were used for sleeping and hiding out. That always shut the four of us up for a little while.

And there was the bell tower. We didn’t go up there often, though I think my dad went every Sunday morning to ring the bell. But he took us up there sometimes on Saturdays if we pestered him enough, though none of us had enough weight to actually budge the thing. That bell was heavy. Still, we had fun trying.

Later, years later, my parents finally decided to retire from the church cleaning job, and my uncle took it over. And then he hired me to work with him for four hours every Saturday, for $60 a month. You can laugh, but back then that was pretty good pay for about 16 hours of work, especially for someone who wasn’t yet 16. By the time I did turn 16, it was time to find a “real” job to pay for the gas I needed to put into my 1967 Chevy Impala, a car big enough for eight people, a car I paid $200 for.

But I still look back on those church cleaning days with fondness. When you clean a place, care for it, it becomes yours, a little. And for a while, that church was ours.

I haven’t been back there in a very long time. But that’s okay, I visit in my memory, often.

And there is a story about a mouse, but it’s a sad one.

I’ll just leave it at that.

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this post is part of the scintilla project. see more here.