Getting the Power Up

The scene is this: it’s the day before Thanksgiving, 2008. A Wednesday, naturally. Over the four days prior to this particularly dreadful day, my heart and mind had been trampled by a vast array of assorted traumatic events and emotions: having potentially lost one of the most important people in my life, dealing with new breeds of stress at work, trying to decide whether to stay in grad school or not, several family issues cropping up here and there. And in dealing with this, I found sleep impossible. So Tuesday night I took my standard three over-the-counter sleeping pills. Long story short, by the next night I no longer trusted myself to be alone. So a benevolent friend invited me on a short road trip the next night and my immediate mental reaction was “Of course I’ll go. That increases my chances of being hit by a large truck.” Sharp as she is, friend made me take one of her kids in the car with me. Good call.

Grateful for the change of scenery and happy to see this friend’s sister for the first time in ages, I was already feeling a tiny bit better by the time we got to Columbus. I hauled my overnight bag into the guest bedroom and friend and I collapsed across the bed while her two kids piled on top of us. The oldest (7), snuggled up next to me as I stared at the ceiling fighting back tears. He looked at me, took a deep breath and said, quite randomly:

“Hey, Leslie, you know how when you’re playing a video game the first level is really really easy? Then the next level is still easy, but not as easy as the first one? Then the next one is a little bit harder than the second one? And then the next and the nextandthenextandthenext….”

“Yes, Sean, I know…”

“Well, they do that on purpose, don’t they?  They make the first level really easy so you’re ready to do the second level, then the second level is a little harder so that you can handle the third level. So each level is just like practice for the next level. So if you can get through this level, you know you’re ready for the next one.”

Then he got up and ran into the kitchen.

I remained there for quite some time after my friend, too, departed for the kitchen, ceiling-staring and thinking about what Sean had said. Either he’s very intuitive and perceptive or totally random, or I’m reading way too much into what he said. Regardless, I stayed still, trying to imagine what level could possibly be worse than this, and the last of the tears I had for that situation fell from my cheek onto the nondescript, guest-bed comforter. Then I wiped my eyes and stood up, shook it off, and followed the crowd into the kitchen.

I beat this level, but not without sustaining some pretty major damage. But that’s okay. I’m taking time to heal, and when I’m powered up again, I’ll get back in the game. Significant health already restored, prognosis promising. And as much I hoped that week would be the hardest level I’ll have to get through before beating the game, I keep in mind now that it’s just practice for the greater challenges that lie ahead.

Dealing With Ambiguity

Keys are funny things. Is there anything that we lose more often? Take for granted more often? Forget or overlook or toss aside more often?

Though not a secretive man,

My father understood combination locks and keys

Oooh, he was a Yale man

And he had a love affair with brass

And he had a key rack as organized as the

Writing on the label of each key was neat

It was the same angel that made him

Label and date butcher-paper wrapped leftovers

In the freezer with Christmas-present creases and hospital corners

And little notes with possible suggestions for each leftover’s use

“Turkey scraps, November 23; Yummy treat for the d-o-g”

Secured with -count ‘em – two rubber bands

One for snugness, the other just for symmetry

We barely notice their presence until they’re not where they should be when they should be there. Until they’re not hanging by the back door, until they aren’t stuffed in the bottom of your purse, until you realize, with dread and despair, that they’re gone.

But there’s an art to labeling keys

The key to the neighbor’s house across the street

Cannot say on it “Neighbor’s house across the street” in Maine for all of May

Similarly, “Gun Rack,” “Burglar Alarm,” “Spare Set of Keys to the Saab in the Garage”

These are not labels you will find in our house

Instead, my father wrote in his own argot,

In a cryptographic language of oblique reference

The key to the burglar alarm he called “That Siren’s Song”

The gun rack, “That Infernal Racket”

The neighbor’s house across the street was called “The Farm in Kansas”

Victor was the Volvo, Henry was the Honda, and Gabriella, the Saabatini

Then we begin the hunt. We search everywhere. Places we’d never think to look for keys, and places we probably didn’t leave them. And maybe we find different keys along the way. But the keys to the desk at work won’t lock the apartment. The keys to your locker at the gym won’t start the car. Perfectly good keys, for what they’re meant, but not what you need, not what’s right for you, not the perfect fit that you need.

For security of the mind, no doubt

And not so much precluding burglary

As much as offering a challenge to the industrious burglar

As well as evincing from my brother and me

Something in the way of loving parody

Such as the key to the side door, which we labelled

“Not the Key to the Side Door”

“Destitute Neighbor’s Hovel Far, Far Away from Here”

“Nothing to Steal”

“Boathouse in Djibouti”

Eventually you give up on ever finding the keys you need. You start blaming circumstances or other people for having lost them in the first place. The anger and bitterness sets in as you begin to plan what to do next. How to get by in this dark, empty world without those keys.

But among the neatly-labelled keys

Some to cars we no longer possessed

Such as Potempkin and Gerald the Ford

There was a brass ring called “Keys to unknown places”

Little metal orphans, they had all lost their locks

Or rather, their locks had lost them,

Misplaced them all on the same ring

Which is a sadness that no bolt cutter can cure

Even the key that says simply, “Hartford”

Hartford

Somewhere, there’s a door, a box, or a closet full of secrets locked

And the only thing I know about it, knowing my father

Is that it’s probably not in

Hartford

And then, suddenly, when you’ve stopped looking so diligently, you find them. Right under your nose the whole time. Familiar, comforting, and wholly content in your hand once again. And there’s a closure to that, a feeling of finality and certainty that you’ve found what you needed, and that you can finally stop looking. It’s the same peace that is released when any uncertainty is resolved. The peace of knowing that two things that need each other, have found each other.

But I keep them all, jingling and jangling

Turning the tumblers of the past

Who knows when I may not be in Hartford again,

And have such a need for such a key?

And who here knows nothing of the magic that escapes

Every time a key that should open a door

Does

And who here knows nothing of the magic that escapes every time a key that should open a door. . . does?

The Days Go Marching One by One

I have very few memories of childhood, especially before age nine, but the ones I have are vivid as daylight. My mother kept the sugar in the largest of five porcelain graduated canisters shaped like mushrooms. The second largest held flour. The middle one held old necklace chains, reading glasses, and other miscellaneous items that needed repairing. The second smallest was always stuffed with the bright pink packets of the artificial sweetener that my mother dumped into her coffee in pounds, back before saccharine caused cancer. The smallest was perpetually empty.

In the largest, the sugar mushroom, there lived a small bluish-green plastic teacup from the tea set that my mother played with as a small girl. I remember it whole and complete, but when I found the cup recently, now safely ensconced in the large Tupperware canister full of flour in the fridge, it was torn down the side, soft and pliable and irrevocably discolored. I felt myself frown at the state of disrepair in which I discovered this relic of my youth while a thousand fragmented memories tornadoed through my mind with startling clarity as I slid a finger along the tiny broken handle.

When I was a little girl, very few things delighted me more than feeding the colony of ants that lived underneath my grandmother’s flower box on our front porch. I remember doing this well into my teens but my mother says that I began around five or six. As she narrated, an image flooded my mind’s eye: a five year old version of myself, with lighter, platinum hair, the same chunky thighs and endless curiosity. She would have carefully maneuvered a brown steel chair away from the kitchen table and leveraged her entire body weight to shove it over to the counter that remains, to this day, covered with bright orange Formica. She would have awkwardly climbed onto the chair to bring herself to enough height to lean across the counter to reach for the largest mushroom canister and life the lid. Knowing better than to plunge a tiny, germy hand into the whole of the sugar, she would have artfully scooped up a heap of the stuff and poured the entire contents directly into her hand, most of it simply overflowing and landing back in the canister, germs and all. Then, she would drop the blue/green teacup and clench her chubby fingers around her prize as she jumped from the chair with more confidence than she should have and ran, trailing sugar from her eager fist, all the way out the door and to the flower box on the front porch.

From there, I filled in the images with real memories from the later years that I can recall. I would deposit the loot in a small pile near the bottom of the flower box and then lie on my stomach, prop my chin up on my hands, and wait. On the best days, the sun would drizzle down as a warm, buttery glow that would cast a cool shade over me as it set behind the house. The bobwhites would coo and I would think about my grandmother, who simultaneously taught me to braid my hair and imitate the bobwhite in one afternoon. The mild summers were clean and comfortable, leaving the air so weightless that nothing stirred. Soon, the ants would discover the unbidden abundance and the fascinating ritual would soon follow. I would watch them for hours on end, each one carrying one single grain of sugar back to his colony. Often I would fall asleep there on the cool concrete and in the still air and wake up when my mother would call my name at that magical moment just before day becomes darkness. And all the sugar would have gone.

Those were good days.

As a sad smile played on my lips, I scooped and measured two cups of flour for the recipe in progress. Before I put away the canister, I turned the teacup over in my hands a couple of times. I looked at my mother and considered the gray that would fleck her hair if she didn’t fastidiously combat it with color and the lines that grace her face and the resigned mixture of sadness and wisdom in her eyes. I wondered what she remembered when she touched this cup.

Along with the cup, I put away thoughts of woebegone memories and rooted myself back in the present. In this life, a million miles away from the girl whose greatest happiness was feeding the ants, and in this world where people don’t live on curiosity alone. Glancing at my flour-covered hands, I started toward the sink to wash them. Then stopped. And dusted them off on my new jeans instead.

There are still good days to come.