Above Endless Badlands

...That’s my spirit. But my soul, now she’s a different story.

When I was younger, I was a green gal. Not in the sense of innocent. That was much longer ago. But in the sense of colors that spoke to me. Pennsylvania, England, Ireland—I spent time in places that spoke to me in cool, wet blades of grass and leaves. And in winter, in the pines. Eternally alive. Eternally the same.

But 20 years ago, I moved to Austin, and I’ve become a brown person. (My friend Anya and her parents are laughing in my head as I write this: “No, chica, you’re still a white person.”) But what I mean is this: that as I flew yesterday above the desert Southwest, a place my green self felt vaguely terrified of, I was drawn in by the different shades of earth. By the wrinkles in the land that mean mountains, the dark specks that are scrub, by winding dark trails too black to be water, too oddly desultory in their meanderings to be road. What were those? And the round basins I saw, the ones that circle down, down, down into the earth, the shades of brown going blonde and brick and back to sandy. What were those?

 That sense of mystery. That longing for something larger than me, for something to hold my fascination long enough to change me. That’s what I found there, at 33,000 feet, above endless badlands.

So I know this is where my soul is. Where the heat parches. Where walking without water is a risk. Where scorpions and rattlesnakes thrive. I am learning a kind of co-existence with all that scares my younger self. A kind of respect for places where there’s nowhere to hide. Where watching and waiting can bring the coyote and lizard and snake in me to life.

 

Our story of stuff

Hi folks

Here's a rough piece that I just drafted this week; it's a new idea I have for my memoir, viewing it through the lens of "stuff." Comments? Thoughts? feedback? All welcomed. Thanks!
--kandace

For him, leaving his shoes in the living room was normal. He’d put them on again in the morning, so why make a fuss and take the extra effort to move them elsewhere? To my mother, that was a sign of disrespect, him not picking up after himself. The endless magazines and books that were to never ever be thrown away but coveted and stacked were another of the many “things” that drove a wedge between them. Mom told the story of an incident early in their marriage when she threw away a magazine that was a few months old that had been sitting around the living room for awhile. She did what most normal people would do—she threw it away. He had a fit, according to mom, and immediately retrieved it from the trash, explaining that magazines are never to be disposed of because of their inherently valuable information; he might need that information some day. And to this day, when he faces an intractable problem about a part or a piece of something that makes wheels move or heat flow or electricity travel, he goes to his enormous bookshelves or the large stacks on the floor of his den and pulls out a large handful of magazines, likely from decades before, that have some article about that some thing—that piece of ingenuity—that he needs to create a solution to the intractable problem. He’ll remember, for example, that one article about aluminum block engines that was published in the 1970s after a major shift in the industry’s knowledge or engineering of that particular type of material: he’ll flip through the stack of dusty magazines and find that article, and it will provide that missing link of data that will make the electricity flow or will contribute to the creation of a new and unique piece of metal or plastic or wood or wiring that will move the wheels or water or coolant or gasoline or whatever needs to be moved or kept still and pressurized or not.

Near the end of their relationship, his things sneaked into spaces that were once off limits to his ever-growing collection of useful parts, pieces, books, magazines, and gadgets. His expanding collection of watches was beginning to overflow the landfill-looking clutter of his dresser top, and a solar-powered watch had found a new allegedly temporary home in the windowsill of the kitchen where it gathered what might be the last bit of life it could muster after a rough existence under his care. As mom recalled it, she wanted it gone, back where it belonged, which was just about anywhere but cluttering her hospital-clean kitchen. He moved it to the sunny bedroom windowsill, where she also wanted it gone. There was a fair amount of continued nagging and cajoling until he lost control of his usual sensible silence that unmistakably demonstrated his bubbling anger. This was a straw for both of them, the camel’s back was at issue, and either way, the watch represented this larger elephant of space: its “appropriate” use. My mother had years of exposure to the cluttered way in which my father’s parents existed among collections, like skinny trees bunched up in southern forests, crammed onto desktops, window sills, and any other flat surface; they were like flat surface clutterers, and mom hated it. That visual gluttony countered mom’s austere and sanitary sensibilities, unwritten rules of cleanliness that thrived in uncluttered counters and an untenable 1950s minimalism. So behind closed doors she sighed and rolled her eyes when dad would bring home or someone would give us something to be dusted. She knew that my grandparents’ legacy was her legacy if she didn’t do something to stop it. The watch was symbolic in that struggle between dust and cleanliness, between control and complete loss of control. Keeping the watch in its place among the others and odds and ends on the dresser meant controlling or keeping at bay the monsters of clutter that genetically oozed from my father’s pores. Keeping it behind the closed doors of a cabinet would be an even bigger battle but one that she knew that she would never win; she never tried to push the elephant that far out of the living room. She never tried too hard to unmake my father from the tinkerer and genius that he is—tinkering and analyzing and fixing and solving and creating were the traits that made my father so likeable and so popular; to take away his tools of tinkering and analyzing and solving would be to take away my father. But that clutter—the extra parts and materials that he knew he’d need someday—was the engine of the power imbalance that mom perceived as a level of sexist disrespect that her 1960s preached to overcome yet her catholic Portuguese indoctrination pounded into her to accept as axiomatic, as genetic destiny. She wanted a partner that held up his end of the cleaning and household bargain, but she got a partner who dumbly went about his business as if she wasn’t even there, expecting clean laundry and prepared food and an orderly home but never ever demanding it. It just was, and he never ever complained or asked. Later he would say that he tried to keep up with her expectations but that her standards were too high. Later, she would admit that he was psychologically incapable of understanding the situation well/clearly enough to do anything reasonable about it; he was held prisoner by his mother’s coddling just as she was being held prisoner by her inability to leave them both trapped in a pile of increasing stuff. So the watch was a sentinel, an albatross that neither of them wanted to wear.

At the peak of their arguing about Mr. Solar Watch, my father’s trip wire triggered an explosion of anger that we’d never seen; he said, “you want it gone? Fine. It’s gone.” He grabbed his watch, with head down he stormed into the garage and grabbed a hammer, knelt down on the front step on the front porch and smashed the hammer repeatedly down onto the face of the watch until it wasn’t a watch anymore, solar or otherwise.

My father played the martyr role well and taught me to do the same. My mother hated it and thought that we deserved to be miserable when we did stupid things like smashing our own property or throwing little ridiculous fits about petty missteps or miscommunication. And it was usually about stuff, stuff being fixed or not fixed, stuff being held captive in the living room while awaiting a part from the mail or from dad’s garage laboratory, stuff being stashed helplessly in a communal place of the house where mom strove to remove constantly what dad brought constantly. It was sometimes as if he bred the things he brought and reproduced new things, new parts and pieces and new useless things to be stashed eventually in the basement or the garage. We had a warehouse and a factory for things, useless things except in those instances where the raw materials he needed to magically repair something that would otherwise be tossed would appear from the rubble and be transformed into something useful. Those moments, like my father, were magical yet grew to wear on my mother’s ability to tolerate the loss of control that she craved her entire life.

That control, she realized in her late 40s, was within reach for me but was only possible for her through a divorce from the things, a divorce from the man she’d grown to like but not love throughout their 20+ years of marriage. She said to me one morning so seriously through the haze of her cigarette smoke and morning coffee, “Kandy do you know that you can do whatever you want in this world?” In my teenage superiority, I said, “of course, mom,” realizing slowly as the words left my lips that she was for the first time learning it herself.

Starting!

Here I am just being the guinea pig to make sure the blog works. I will this week keyboard up what I wrote at our workshop and post that. I am not sure whether to post my writing all as one, or as separate posts (I lean towards that), but maybe whoever starts posting can decide which they want to do. Assuming this works, welcome, and start posting, and reading!