Tags: writing prompt, Round Robin, Easter, childhood ritual, grandmother, religion

Tags: writing prompt, Awards, A prompt a day until the Round Robin goes away, Round Robin, grandmother, making mistakes, guilt, self-blame, Death

Tags: writing prompt, Loss, grandmother, Death, Therapy, Round Robin, A prompt a day until the Round Robin goes away

Tags: The Catcher in the Rye, grandparents, child abuse, childhood, childhood worries, Hell is for Children, sixth grade, grandmother

When we wake up in the morning (he thought), it's the first task that lies ahead of us: the separation of the true from the false. We have to dismiss, to erase the mocking kingdoms made by sleep. But at the close of the day it was the other way round, and we sought the untrue and the fictitious, sometimes snapping ourselves awake in our hunger for nonsensical connections. Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow

Insomnia is boring and insomniacs are dullards, their minds fried by too little sleep, their anxieties focused on what will happen in the middle of the night, the flip flop, the ceiling stare, the wandering mind. My last knock-down, drag-out with insomnia lasted months and was a byproduct of underlying life issues. And it went away. The insomnia went away.

The bitch may be back, but I still eventually returned to bed. I wedged myself between my son and the edge. I warmed myself against him. When we woke up this morning, both of us still trying to separate the true from the false, to wipe the dreams clear with daylight, he said, "Mom, tell me about when you were a kid."

I'm glad he didn't ask at night, when all I could give him would be sad half-truths, the bad bits. Instead, I left those out. I talked of the days when my mother and I lived in Hollywood Beach and had four cats, two birds, two rabbits, a dog, and a gerbil. I talked about the hamster my grandmother gave me, Happy Easter, and how I would make him squeeze through the smallest apertures possible. I talked about the time Liz had kittens in a bureau drawer, how they were orange tabbies. "Orange? Like my favorite color?" he asked.

But the best part was telling him about the tents I used to make in the backyard, four blankets pinned to a clothesline, a quilt for a floor. I spent half my summer nights out there, alone or with friends, reading by flashlight, letting the dampness of the night cover my sleeping bag. In the morning, I'd wake up to a dewy world. Inside, pancakes awaited, delivered to the table by my mother as my grandfather sat in the living room in a cloud of smoke.

The cigarettes remind me. It all feels so very long ago. The memory is washed out like an old photograph, part of it has burned away, and I choose to focus on the good, the stars above the yard, the safety in the dark, the old man in his wood shop working the lathe, a Pall Mall dangling from his thin lips, lost in the dust and the ash and the smoke, occupied for the moment. Real as anything.

Tags: insomnia, grandfather, childhood, Pets, grandmother, grandparents, Martin Amis, cigarettes, smoking

real, down to a sprinkling of brown on a banana or a jaunty fabric leaf still attached to an apple stem. It was a testament to the illusory power of plastic. As a grownup, I wonder what sort of thinking (if any) is behind fruit as decoration versus fruit as actual food. Why not mix the two and put out stuff you can eat? I don’t remember biting into many fresh grapes or bananas or pears at my grandmother's house. Instead there were syrupy fruit cups, ice cream Dixie cups with wooden paddles for spoons, greasy Cheez-Its straight from the box. Lunches materialized out of powder, water, and starch. Dinner fell from a box or the freezer or was handed to us via the drive-thru window at Big Elk Mall McDonald's. My order never wavered: hamburger, French fries, Coca Cola.

Two years after my grandmother's death, there were still TV dinners in the old utility room freezer. When I missed her I craved salisbury steak in a thick mushroom gravy or fried chicken with crisp battered skin, wrinkled peas, potatoes whipped into paste and crumbly apple cobbler for desert. In her life, we celebrated modern technology, the power of the deep freeze, the effects of dehydration on vegetables. After her death, I was subjected more often to my mother's diet regime, which was all about freshness and sauteing in olive oil or real butter, about the taste of a peach.

Over time, I moved closer to my mother's approach to food. In 1995, I gave up most meat (though I still eat fish). Almost ten years later, I attended a cooking school where we cooked with whole grains and natural sweetners. Though my son does occasionally eat macaroni and cheese from a box, he has never tasted McDonald's french fries. I make almost everything from scratch. The freezer in our house contains blueberries, veggie sausages, loaves of bread, and ice cube trays. We have two bowls of real, edible fruit within easy kid reach. Apples, pomegranates, and persimmons intermingle with cooking ingredients, onions, shallots, garlic, with the odd squash or two. The kid may only eat pasta with butter and cheese for dinner, but he also loves fruit, thank goodness.

My grandmother died of a heart attack when I was nine, probably in part because of her chemical, salt and fat consumption, though the smoking didn't help. I wonder how she would interpret my adult self, my diet, my liberal ways. We were so close (I lived with her on an off until her death and she took care of me during school and summer vacations) – would my rebellious teenage years and outsider adulthood have turned her away? If she lived would I never have gone pescetarian? Would I still be ordering hamburgers and French fries crisp with fat?

And if not, would she have loved me anyway?

Tags: grandmother, cooking, food from childhood, family, tv dinners, meals, plastic fruit, food and memory

The house meant safety and comfort. It was predictable, constant, the place my mother and I returned to when life was falling apart, where my grandmother would take care of me when my mother was working or needed the time.

Then, when I was nine years old, my grandmother died. She collapsed in a chair in the kitchen while I stood watching. With my grandmother unconscious and my grandfather unable to use the phone, it was up to me to call the ambulance. My grandfather and I waited for the Volunteer Fire Department, a long, horrible wait. We watched the men struggle to lift her substantial body onto the stretcher. Would things have been different, I wondered, if I had gotten the cat off the chair sooner, if had understood my grandmother's gasps and flapping arms more quickly?

Sometime between the card games (solitaire, spit, go fish), the many phone calls to friends and relatives, the shopping trip for a burial dress, blue just like she'd wanted, and the wake where an uncle pulled out a cousin's loose tooth, the family decided that my mother and I would move in with my grandfather. In less than a month, we were out of our one-bedroom student housing apartment and back in the house at Hollywood Beach, my unemployed future stepfather along for the ride.

My grandfather’s house was cigarette smoke and chemicals, sugar and coffee, sawdust and mildew. It was porn magazines next to the candy in a cabinet in my grandfather’s room. It was my stepfather’s workout den in the unheated guest cottage we called the Little House. It was séances and Ouija boards, the yearning for a sign that my grandmother was still watching over me. Sometimes it was fights around the dinner table, arguments over food or housecleaning. It was nights in tight spaces, me in the sleeping bag under the bedcovers, in the attic with the pull-down steps, on the inflatable raft under the picnic table. It was sadness and anger and grief, the knowledge that I was on my own.

They sold the Hollywood Beach house in 1990, but I still visit it in my dreams. It stands for itself, it stands for part of me. The dreams used to be yearning, worried, guilty. I forget to take care of my (dead) grandfather. My mother and I bury body parts in the front yard. My uncle and aunt show up and I hide from them. Then the dreams changed, got a little better. My grandfather and I coexist in the house. We have a companionable sit at the dining room table. I leave before my aunt and uncle arrive. Interestingly, the Little House is never featured in these dreams, despite its importance in my own personal history.

Last Thursday night, I had another house dream. It was a beautiful summer day and various neighbors were busy with yard work or socializing. I felt comfortable, a part of things, visible and connected. My mother and I were discussing the renovation and eventual sale of the house, reminiscing about good times. I worried that the foundation would need to be redone, but she thought it was sound. My aunt and uncle arrived and went to work moving furniture from the house out to the lawn. Thinking this was a yard sale, a large crowd gathered in the grass and started dickering over the furniture. I yelled that it wasn't a sale, just the preparation for renovation. Suddenly I was happy about it, the prospect for an improved house, the same house but better, remade. Maybe we didn't have to sell it. Maybe we could add another floor, tear out the mildewey carpet, put up drywall where 70s embossed paneling had been, and come back to this house to live. It could be itself, a summation of memory and experience, and it could be something new at the same time.

What to make of it? The house is me, I am the house. The house is what it was, a place where things happened and people died, a holding place for my memories, a symbol of false security. My childhood was difficult, full of moves, losses, and bad men. Once my grandmother died, I had no adult advocate, and so I constructed a framework for myself, one where I made sure to rely on no one for my emotional needs, where I took care of my physical needs on my own as soon as I was able. I've let go of some of this. I have friends, a husband, good relationships with my parents. But I am still self-sufficient to a fault and quick to mistrust others. The framework gets in the way. It feels as much a part of me as my bone and muscle, organic and necessary to my existence. But perhaps I can work around it, make it into something new. The old house needs renovating. The foundation is sound. I'm ready.

And I'm not nearly as melancholy about it as Morrissey:



Image: The old house, undergoing renovation a year and a half ago. The Little House is to the left, obscured by the digger.

Tags: grief, houses, dreams, grandfather, grandmother, The Smiths, prolonged grief, grandparents, Death

I pedaled down to the river;
it wrinkled dark and green.
A kingfisher caught a fish like a silver comma
and flew into a sycamore tree.

-- Kevin Sheehan, excerpted from poem published in Slow Dancer (North American Edition), No. 29, Spring 1993. Full text here.

Where I'm from the water is vast. Salty. It's twisting miles of mucky rush, river bottom composed of leaves and mud. Children swim with sleek eels and glimmering fish, fight the pull of container ships in the channel. Traffic gets backed up on 50, on 213. Bridges fling cars over the C&D Canal, the Chesapeake Bay, the Bohemia River. Below, fishermen hook rockfish and net crabs.

We spent summer holidays at Ocean City, basted ourselves with tropical coconut oil before stretching out on blankets anchored to sand, begged Mom-mom for quarters for skeeball. Aunt Mildred, who wasn't really an aunt but some sort of foundling my grandmother's parents took in, had a trailer on Striker's Gut, a brackish strait that fed into the ocean. At least once every summer Bert, Lucy, and I looped chicken necks with string and dangled them in the water, a bushel basket waiting for our catch.

In college there was the house on Smith Island, 50 feet from the water. Kevin spent one foul humid summer building a gazebo and dock, my mother the sunburned helper. He'd grunt and hammer, a thin muscular man with an inexplicable pot belly which later revealed itself to be a sign of his swollen spleen, a symptom of myelofibrosis. When the dock was complete, I tethered a raft to the end of it, careful to keep my limbs out of the water where the jellyfish pulsated, ghosts with shaggy legs. At night, midges got through the screens and we yelped and growled, our hands throwing shadows by candlelight.

But most of my memories are of the Elk River, the walk down to the beach, tar staining the bottoms of my feet, the line of benches, somebody's grandparent always sitting there, cigarette shedding ash. Depending on the heat and the tide, I would either wade in until I couldn't stand the feel of the muck or dive and swim out to the raft. The houses were beach cottages built in the 1950s and '60s and the landscape rolled with cornfields and small tracts of woods. Everything was green or brown or white or black. My grandparent's house was cigarette smoke and mildew, creamy coffee, sawdust, the sound of the tractor cutting another swathe of grass.

I was Vi and Allen's granddaughter, willful, brown as a berry by September.



Image: Elk River, Hollywood Beach, Spring 2009 (picture taken on our trip to the East Coast last year).

Some of the names have been changed, some of the facts moved around.

Tags: Elk River, MD, grandmother, grandparents, Smith Island, crabbing, river water, Nostalgia

If it wasn't frozen, processed, or heavily laced with sugar, my grandmother didn't cook it. I have her old recipe box, which includes many selections from the "Kitchen of Duncan Hines," as well as things like Pow-Wow Sandwiches, English Liver Bake, and salad molds, recipes that are products of the sixties and seventies. My grandfather made the box, designed it to hang between the refrigerator and the stove in the kitchen at Hollywood Beach. We use it to hold keys now. One of the first things I do when I move to a new place is to hang it by the front door, a reminder of a past so long gone that it feels like fiction. I may look through the recipes, but I never feel an urge to actually make any of them.

When the corn and tomatoes are at their peak, however, and I steam a dozen ears to eat for dinner alongside a salad of freshly-picked tomatoes, I feel a tug on the line that connects me to those long-ago meals. Corn on the cob with butter sits at the intersection of food, love, and memory for me. It has the power to bring me back to a time before I was born, to Hollywood Beach in the late fifties and early sixties when my mother and aunt were still children, before my grandfather was injured in an industrial fire. On late July and early August evenings when my grandfather was working late at the plant, Mom-mom could be persuaded to abandon the freezer and let the canned food gather dust in the cupboard. She would prepare farmstand corn and sliced tomatoes for dinner, maybe add some sliced bread on the side. Perhaps she was feeling as lazy as Ludlam's dog, unwilling to turn on the oven or chop loads of vegetables, happy with simplicity.

It's the only meal she made that my mother and I still talk about. When I was a kid, my cousin and I were given weekend corn shucking duty, sent outside with paper bags to do the messy work of removing the husks and cornsilk. We would sit on the white-washed metal lawn chairs out front under a canopy of maple leaves, kick our heels against the grass. After passing the naked corn to my aunt through the side door, we would wait for the moment at the table when we could smear the cooked kernels with squeezable Parkay. I was fascinated by the prongs, shaped like tiny ears of corn, that Mom-mom stuck into either end of the cob, and studied them between bites, felt the neat rows of miniature kernels like braille against my fingertips. We ate until we are too full for anything else but a thin slice of tomato.

You probably have summer food memories of your own, can bring back an evening lit by fireflies, your lips stained purple by blueberry cake. Your parents didn't care how late you stayed up and you got to light a sparkler even though the fourth of July had been over for days. Or maybe you remember your mother, already unsteady on her feet, placing a platter of swaying Jello on the picnic table. You swirled the first bite against your gums, pushed it between your teeth before swallowing and then refused to eat any more. After dinner you and your brother played tag in the dark while the grown-ups drank bourbon on ice and talked in voices too low for you to understand. When you slipped in a pile of dog shit, they laughed until you started to cry.

Image: Recipe from my grandmother's collection.

Tags: grandmother, summer memories, recipes, lazy as Ludlam's dog, corn and tomatoes, family, salad molds, summer cooking, Jello, Cape Code Cranberry Salad Mold

This is the sensory soup of childhood. It is a mix of family and location, of bad luck and lucky streaks. We continue the pattern with our own children, begin the silent lessons, mark them with heavy hands: this is who you are, who we are. Whenever my son smells oatmeal pancakes or plucks a plump blueberry from a glass bowl, the past will live. "You Are My Sunshine" will conjure up a darkened room, my soothing cuddle against impertinent wakefulness. He may spend years in therapy trying to get my voice out of his head, only to find that same voice coming out of his mouth in middle adulthood.

I can only hope that his experience is as painless as growing up can be. Sometimes my best won’t be good enough.

I remember being seven, lying on that flowered couch in my grandparents’ family room, my hand sunk into a plastic bag full of cherries. Cold from the manufactured air, goose-pimpled, I clutched a pillow for warmth. The television, which was as much a piece of furniture as an entertainment device, was showing Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat.

That night I would have another asthma attack, whether it was because of mildew, cat hair, cigarette smoke, or my own melodramatic emotions is up for debate.

Image: Me and my grandmother, Hollywood Beach, 1973.

Tags: soup of childhood, drama queen, family, grandmother, grandparents, meals, Nostalgia, Therapy, imprinted by family, parental guilt

Tags: The long goodbye, writing prompt, blogging, Joe Jackson, faction, blogging break, grandfather, grandmother, burn injuries, friends in the blogosphere

Part of the front page of the notebooks my grandmother kept after my grandfather was burned.

After my grandfather was burned over 80% of his body in a flash fire at the Dupont Holly Run paint plant, my grandmother started keeping a diary. I have the copies, four small looseleaf notebooks with her remarks on his hospitalization, dating from the accident on 11 June 1966 until his release from the hospital on 24 February 1967. There are tallies of blood transfusions (38 pints of blood between June and December), of skin grafts (26; the last one is on 22 December, with the note "last - if all take"). I'd missed the fact that he actually had four operations on his right foot before they finally amputated it (28 September: "Little toe came off in dressing.").

It's slow going. Mom-mom's handwriting is hard to read and the first six months are a roller-coaster ride of medical emergencies, infections, and mourning for what was lost. Doctors gave him a 50-50 chance of making it. No one knew that the fire wouldn't kill him for another 24 years, when he finally succumbed to skin cancer at the age of 78. The "girls" -- my aunt, 20 at the time, and my mother, 16 -- don't get much mention. What it was like for them? I may ask my mother, but don't expect to get very much information and it might not be necessary for my purposes.

I'd love to talk to my grandmother about that time for her, too, though the notebooks conjure her up. Ultimately, though, I'm looking at these books to get a better understanding of my grandfather, who went from being an active man in his fifties who loved jazz and waterskiing and driving fast in his '65 Mustang to a dependent, almost-deaf burn victim. He didn't get behind the wheel of a car again until 1981.

During his hospitalization, he suffered, really suffered. Being burned is painful, but so is the treatment, borrowing healthy skin to graft onto exposed flesh, having your raw body immersed in a whirlpool once or twice a day. Even the necessary turning ("Dressings wet. Al begged not to be turned."), which probably happened at least four times a day, sounds like a horror. And then there is the debridement, the sloughing off of dead skin and muscle that had to be done on a regular basis. Things surely have gotten better for burn victims since the 60s, but there is no getting around the pain. It's no wonder that my grandfather was scared of his hospital bed in those first six months. It must have seemed like a torture chamber.

Pop-pop and Greta in 1978, 12 years after the industrial accident.

Pop-pop suffered and hovered close to death, lost his hearing and a foot. His once-smooth skin tightened and scarred. Then he got out of the hospital, had a home nurse for another nine months, and went back to work (a desk job this time). He retired and taught himself how to build furniture and make Canada goose and mallard whirligigs to sell at Nickerson's Fruit and Vegetable Stand. He built the Little House and put a new wood shop on the beach cottage, as well as a new family room. His interest in model trains intensified and the old wood shop became the setting for a huge train set with two separate tracks, a couple of tunnels, and a tree-covered mountain range. It was the kind of thing that neighborhood kids and grown-ups would come over to admire, though he would always remind me that these small trains weren't toys.

I'm working on a piece that is about him, but not quite about him, fiction informed by imagined experience. I want to figure out what was forged by flame.

Tags: grandfather, Dupont, Holly Run, Newport, Delaware, grandmother, fire, 1960s, burn injuries, notebook, diary, hospital

Mom-mom, 1934.

My obsession with ghosts started in the sixth grade, though it had its roots in my grandmother’s death two years earlier. We were in the kitchen, putting groceries away when she suddenly clutched at her throat and started gasping for air, frantically motioning to the kitchen chair. I stood there, confused, scared. Finally, I moved the cat, and Mom-mom collapsed into the empty space.

It was up to me to dial 911. We waited 40 minutes for the ambulance to come all the way from Elkton. She was dead or close to it by the time it arrived. Congestive heart failure. In a couple of weeks, my mother, her boyfriend, and I moved in with my grandfather and tried to cope with her absence and our new living situation.

I’m not sure where the Ouija board came from. Maybe it was a Christmas present. I started carrying it around with me, taking it to school, begging my friends to help me contact my grandmother. They went along with it and I believed everything. Mom-mom had a friend named Sam up there in heaven. Everything was all right, and she was watching over me.

My mother took the death chair out of the kitchen, eventually storing it in the attic space over the garage. I was into sleeping in tight spaces, under picnic tables, in tiny tents I set up in the backyard. One night I convinced my best friend to spend the night in the attic with the chair. The space was hot and smelled of cut wood and roofing tar. I kept staring at the empty chair, waiting for my grandmother to appear.

Over the years, through neglect and hard times, I kept on waiting. When, as a teenager, I moved to the Little House adjacent to my grandfather’s place and felt totally alone, I wished for a sign of her presence, a sign that someone was watching over me.

Now I know that such hopes are false.

Tags: grandmother, Death, ouija boards, ghosts, grief, writing prompt

1978-79 was the first year of court-mandated school desegregation for the Wilmington city schools. We were bused 34 miles roundtrip from suburban Newark, a predominantly white, middle class community at the time, to an elementary school in the middle of the inner city. It was the fourth school I had attended since kindergarten.

The dark, institutional halls smelled of ancient gymnasium mats and cafeteria pizza. Because I didn’t like sandwiches, Mom would pack things like crackers and cheese or the occasional hard-boiled egg, cooked until it was sulfurous and the exterior of the yolk was green. I’d display the egg to my friends and toss in the trash can to a chorus of ewwwws.

After lunch, students were herded over crumbling asphalt to play outside on ancient metal jungle gyms and rusty swings. Murals with selected scenes of black history covered the exterior walls. At night the surrounding neighborhood leaked into the schoolyard; people left behind their bottle caps and broken glass, empty lighters and plastic bags. The atmosphere became more unwelcoming when I acquired the nickname “Kermit,” a name given after I came to school in a kelly green, polyester, three-piece suit (worn with white turtleneck!). Think Saturday Night Fever meets Annie Hall meets the Muppets, a well-meaning gift from my grandmother, who had become accustomed to choosing my clothes.

The teachers weren’t happy either and went on strike from mid-October through most of November. Much of that time is lost to me. My third grade teacher brought me back to Chesapeake City Elementary for a day or two; I read a lot of books from the small children’s section at the University of Delaware library, spent many hours staring at the ceiling of the Malt Shoppe. The ending of the strike coincides in my mind with reports of the Jonestown massacre, images of children lying on the ground beside their parents, as still and peaceful as if they were asleep.


April 1979

By early March, 1979, my grandmother was dead and Mom, Jim, and I had moved back to Maryland to watch over my grandfather.

Our grand experiment was over.

Tags: grandfather, Delaware, grandmother, Muppets, Kermit the frog, step-father, school, desegregation, Mom

This is where my power of description seizes up.

Really, I’m on the road to forgiveness, and I don’t want to rehash the past in angry diatribes here.

But – the inevitable but – I am in the midst of the never-ending stillbirth story, attempting to write about my time in the Little House, a companion piece to my biological grandmother’s experiences and as I try to get my mind around it I find myself asking: WHAT IN THE HELL WERE MY PARENTS THINKING?

When reality broke through, when my pregnancy became apparent and ended a month later in a stillbirth, in dramatic labor occurring in the Little House, when it became clear that I needed parenting, WHY DID NOTHING CHANGE?

These are not new thoughts, but the underlying feelings have changed. My anger before was mainly self-directed, anger at my family turned inward: what evil in me brought on their rejection? But now I am reaching a different conclusion: my mother and father had so little respect for themselves, for their power as parents, that they gave up, figured I was fine on my own, or maybe even assumed that they would only make things worse. My mother stopped parenting; my father never even started. They deserve my compassion. It's no use getting angry at those who don't see their own worth.

Now I have to work through the feelings, unpack the meaning of the Little House, dense with suppressed emotion, so much a part of who I am. I’ve left it almost completely out of most other versions of the stillbirth story because it feels like an emotional bomb. As I try to get back into that time of isolation, loneliness, self-hatred and anger, my self-protection (or something) kicks in.

It is time to control the explosion through language, to capture the shards of the experience on the page.

I'm scared. But if I don't go back, the experience controls me.

Tags: writing, existential angst, grandfather, grandmother, The Little House, teen pregnancy

When the six weeks are up, Aunt Ruth, a go-between, my adoptive grandmother’s sister, comes to take the baby. Waiting in the home's entrance, the young mother frantically bounces her silent infant, dreading the break. Finally, Aunt Ruth appears, says her hello, and waits.

“It’s time.”

The mother hands over the baby. It is as clean as a guillotine strike.

Before she has time to reconsider, she races inside to the central staircase and runs up two flights of stairs to her room. Her breathing is contained, shallow, a precaution against tears. She’s been trying to memorize every inch of her daughter, the moon face framed by white-blonde hair, her blues eyes, dainty toes and impossibly tiny hands, but already the image is fading. She reaches her room and slips inside, leans against the closed door taking short, sharp breaths. A glass baby bottle sits on the bedside table, a remnant from the final feeding. The girl eyes it, finally reaching out. Then, the satisfying sound of glass irrevocably broken, the implied threat of jagged shards.

Taking several deep breaths, the young woman calms. She begins to push the glass into a pile with her shoe and decides to find a broom and dustpan.

There will be no tears.

Tags: Mom, adoption, grandmother, family

Tags: grandmother

Tags: grandmother, grandfather, step-father