Bridging, recollecting, redefining, and delivering my being to others through words and deeds.
Thursday, March 26, 2015
Openers 101
I knew I wasn't in America anymore, as I burst into a loud rendition of Billie Holiday's Summertime, followed by Vlad throwing me down on the cobblestoned street saying, "They'll arrest you for drugs singing this loudly late at night in Beograd. You'll have no lawyer and they'll take your passport. You have the wrong last name!"
The octopus looked deep in my eyes, while I stood in hip deep water in Christiansted Harbor trying to remove it from the New York woman it thought was me, and I knew it was scared to death. It came to me slowly and I took it back to the empty engine block it called home, where we first met. I never saw it again; I like to think it moved farther out the channel to a lobstery grotto, but I'm afraid it succumbed to extreme emotional shock.
Some people see Scotties on their decks, or pirates coming over the transom. Me? I saw tankers on the tops of the mountainous waves as we rode over them hove-to for days and nights on end.
Crossing the Knife Edge was a right of passage; I first climbed Katahdin in PF Flyers when I was 6, but didn't make it across the Knife Edge until I was 12, and the last time I crossed it I was 28.
I was born one of two, later became one of eight and lastly one of fourteen; The Brady Bunch had nothing on me.
We were racing down the cellar stairs, we both coveted the last green popsicle, so I gave my sister a nudge to pass her, but instead she started to fall and then fly to the bottom of stairs landing on glass bottles full of ammonia which broke and produced large, long lasting scars on her knee for which I still feel guilty almost half a century later.
That look. Before the elevator door closed she bit her lip as her smile slid into a worried glance. The doors shut. I asked my father, why she bit her lip and looked down, as I'd be seeing my grandmother again in just six weeks. He replied, "Perhaps she's afraid she'll never see you again."
Three weeks later she permed her hair, as she thought her hair looked best three weeks after the process. Two weeks after the perm she insisted that my father know that she intended to give me a certain sum of money for my honeymoon. You see the big deal surrounding my next visit was she'd meet my fiancé. My grandmother and I were very close. She called my father again to say the amount and it was for the honeymoon. My father assured her he hadn't forgotten. My grandfather, who I also adored, had died a few years earlier, and my father as the only child fielded all such requests. The next night my grandmother had a stroke in the middle of the night, made it half way across her bedroom, where she was found and taken to the hospital, where she remained in a coma. My sister and her boyfriend, myself and my fiancé flew from SF to Maine to see her. My fiancé said hello to her in a coma. I said good-bye to her in a coma. She'd always made her wishes very clear; no heroic measures if she was going to be revived and not be herself. After she died, I had to stop mid-dial oodles of time, when I wanted to call her; to share, rant, confess or just talk. But I'll never forget that look.
I dreamt of my Nana in the hospital the night before she died. In my dream, I kept asking the Doctors if they were sure she wasn't still alive. My dream did not include my mother, but it should have. Nana had gone in for a routine procedure. Post-op she was having some lunch, soup, in her hospital bed while my mother visited with her. Nana started to choke, Mom went to get a nurse, they medical staff raced into Nana's room and kept Mom out. When they opened the door again, they told Mom that Nana had died. One minute she was eating soup and catching up with Mom and the next minute she was dead. No warning, no premonition; except my dream.
Now I must dream......these were just a few openers I thought I'd give a spin around the x's and o's.
Good Night, Hook/line/sinkers, G'night!
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