The First Taste

We all know fear, of course. By the time we are adults it is something that we are quite familiar with. I sat for a while last night trying to think of my first experience with fear and one memory, in particular, kept coming to mind. I have no idea if it was my first taste of fear or not, but it is certainly a memory that I associate with that word and have relived it in my mind many times over the years.

I honestly don’t remember how old I was, I must have been pretty young still because Dad still had that old black pick up truck. Anyway, it was summer and it was hot. We went to the scrap yard so you could pull a part for something. Well, you went to the scrap yard. I sat in the truck in the dirt parking lot next to the office, it was like being on the beach looking out over a sea of dead cars. “Wait here, I’ll be back in a few minutes,” you said. And then you went, tools in hand, into the office and a moment later you came back out, waved at me and disappeared among the cars.

The windows were all rolled down, but that didn’t really matter in this kind of heat. I sat there growing hot and sweaty. The sun beat down on the roof of that black truck and baked me to the red vinyl seats. I remember you would always put a towel down on my side so I wouldn’t stick to the seats in my shorts. It didn’t really matter today. I was drenched with sweat in a matter of minutes. There was no breeze, not a lick. I was uncomfortable and growing impatient. I remember watching the horizon of beat up cars in their untidy rows, just waiting to see you. I reminded myself that you said you would be back soon. I watched other trucks pull into the lot and saw other men go in and out of the office and the sea of cars. When they started leaving I began to get nervous.

The worry crept in slowly, when I was bored of spinning the knob on the handle that rolled the windows up and down. In the distance, I could see the thin line of the river. Maybe my dad fell in and drowned. How long would I sit here before someone thought to check on me or go look for him? Crusty old men smiled at me on their way into the office, none of them stopped to ask if I was okay, despite the silent tears slipping down my cheeks. I was too afraid to call out to them. My mother’s voice sounded severely in my head, “Never speak to strangers.”

I’m not entirely sure what happened next. I honestly don’t remember if someone passing on their way to the office said something to someone who worked there or if eventually, I was more scared of my dad dying than my mother’s warning words and I went in and said something to someone. In any case, my dad reappeared with one of the men that worked at the scrap yard reading him the riot act for leaving me in the truck. This was long before the days when you called the police for this sort of thing.

I cried and hugged my sweaty dad and said, “I thought you had died.” He chuckled and seemed baffled and slightly annoyed at the idea.

Now I look back on all of this calmly with the understanding that comes from adulthood. I can see that my father loved me. He got me. I can see that he felt bad for causing me duress. My own knowledge of old, rusty cars leads me to believe that what was supposed to be a quick job of pulling a part led to breaking frozen bolts and parts that had rusted together. (And knowing my father a lot of cursing aloud while he was at it, a penchant we both share.)

Maybe my own understanding has nothing to do with my age, but rather my own journey of healing and self-acceptance. Dad loved me. He still does. He just absolutely sucked at the parenting part of being a parent. It was beyond him. He had no clue what he was doing, and so he left a few scars. At the end of the day though, he is only doing what he knows. He is only doing his best. He is no more flawed or broken than I am.

Reaching back into the past any words of comfort I might have given to that child fall silent. She’s here, she’s doing fine, she knows she is loved. I might have whispered in her ear to take her mother’s words with a grain of salt, all of them. No, if I went back to that day it would be to tap my absent-minded father on his shoulder and remind him that a hot, and sweaty kid who had to pee was waiting for him. It would be to give him another sweaty hug and to say that yup, this is going to leave a scar on my heart, but it’s okay. It will help to connect us later. It will remind me of my own flaws and shortcomings as a parent. It will remind me to do better. And I would tell him that I forgive him.

 

The Love Story of the Pencil and the Eraser

This is a story. It’s mostly true. Some of it is just wispy memory, which as we all know has a habit of diminishing the bad and enhancing the good. Some of it is filling in the blanks with what I imagine happened. It is not the Love Story of the Pencil and the Eraser. I honestly don’t remember that story, but my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Potter, remembered it. She told me so years later when I had a daughter of my own. Instead, this is the love story of a seven-year-old child and the voice inside her. It has a happy ending because I said so.

Growing up I was ‘that’ kid. Before the days of Ritalin and IEP’s and student aids, before ‘that’ kid had a medically prescribed label, I was ‘that’ kid. I couldn’t sit still in class. I talked too much. When I wasn’t talking, I was off in my own little world. Very rarely was I doing what was expected of me in class. When I was following instructions, I was so absorbed in getting everything just right that I would run out of time before I finished my project.

Everyone else would have a half-assed construction paper pilgrim hanging up on the back of the classroom wall for Thanksgiving. My pilgrim would be among them, cut out carefully, glue applied with precision, limbs and hat positioned naturally, its eyes colored in carefully, but it was missing shoes. My pilgrim had no feet because I had run out of time. A footless pilgrim. How’s that for a metaphor?

My mother who lived a quiet life thank you very much, had landed herself with this bizarre child. Having no grand dreams or aspirations of her own she wasn’t quite sure what to do with me. And now here she was, a single mother working late to keep food on the table, called in for yet another parent-teacher conference. This time I was going too.  I knew I was in for one of Mom’s long talks when we got home. The kind that thinned her lips, the kind that made me so nervous that I would laugh out loud, which of course would just piss my mother off even more. I suspected it was because it would make her laugh too even though she was “serious, Tracey Lee Besemer!” I knew I was in deep shit for sure.  It was bad if you had to go to the parent-teacher conference too.

Mom and I walked into my classroom. I remember thinking how odd everything looked with the dark pressing in from the windows and all of the little desks empty. My teacher, Mrs. Potter, welcomed us. Mrs. Potter taught second grade. She was brilliant. Everyone, parents and students alike, prayed they would be in her class. Mom and I sat across from Mrs. Potter in chairs pulled up to the big desk. While my mother and Mrs. Potter talked I kept hearing words like “discipline”, “bright”, “imaginative”, “focus”, and “talkative”. I watched as mom’s mouth grew thinner and thinner. I was screwed for sure. Mrs. Potter was showing my mom a paper on which I had not done the prescribed work, but had instead written a story all around the margins, including little stick-figure illustrations.

My mother looked at the paper. Mrs. Potter smiled at me and looked back at my mom. I looked up hopefully at mom as well. Nope. She had pressed her lips into a tight line of disappointment and annoyance. And that’s when Mrs. Potter struck. She spoke to me, ignoring my tight-lipped mother.

“I want to make a deal with you. You have to do your work, you do. It’s important, but so is this.” And she pointed to the writing on the paper in mom’s hands. “If you can stay focused and complete your work, I will let you share your stories with the class.

I was dumbstruck. Apparently so was my mother. Mrs. Potter had just cancelled the lecture I’m sure mom was already cooking up in her head.

“I can tell a story”, I repeated, “to the class.”

“If you can stay quiet and focused and complete your work, you may use the extra time you have for this.” Again, she tapped the paper in my mom’s hands. “Then at the end of the day I will let you read it to the class.”

I sat silently for a moment thinking about this strange offer. This was not going the way I had expected.

“I think I can do that.” I said.

“I know you can do that.” Mrs. Potter said pointedly and folded her hands together resting them on her desk. Mom set the paper down on Mrs. Potter’s desk and we left. I still got a lecture on the way home, but I barely heard it.

Suddenly counting by 10’s, the food pyramid, the life cycle of the monarch butterfly, they all had a purpose. No longer were they instruments of torturous boredom, but rather the gate keepers to creativity. They bought me time to write. The next day I worked quickly, not even bothering to chat with my two friends who sat on either side of me. I quickly cut out each picture of a different stage of the butterfly, labeled them, and then glued them on another paper in the correct order. I pushed the completed task aside and pulled out a nice, clean sheet of notebook paper from my desk. I picked up my pencil and glanced up at Mrs. Potter. She nodded her head and smiled. I bent down over the paper thinking.

What to write about? I looked at the pencil in my hand then to the eraser on my desk. It was red and shaped like a cow. I had bought it at the book fair with my milk money. Giving up chocolate milk for the day was a small price to pay for such a cool eraser. I poked it with my pencil. What if they fell in love? The eraser, the pencil. What if they fell in love and ran away together? A pencil in love with an eraser, how funny would that be?

Looking back on this now I am quite sure that as a young girl I was incapable of fully realizing the metaphoric significance of a pencil and an eraser falling in love. I just wanted to write a funny story for my classmates. I also know that Mrs. Potter would be the last teacher who would see my distraction as a gift. She saw me in a way that my own parents were incapable of. She saw potential, ability, a natural talent. She saw a little girl who was too smart for her own good and instead of trying to change me, she made a deal with me.

With each grade, there would be more exasperated parent-teacher conferences. More of my mother’s lectures. She would be disappointed, she was always disappointed. I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed. Bull-feathers. She was mad too. Later a step-father’s voice would join in saying I needed to work harder and get my head out of the clouds. My own father would be telling me I lacked stick-to-it-iveness and he would marry a woman who to me was as cold and distant as the moon. I would be surrounded by a litany of voices telling me that the stories that came bubbling out of me were silly, foolish, and insignificant. I would forget Mrs. Potter’s words, “It’s important, but this is too.”

Eventually I would stop listening to that voice inside me. We would grow distant. Friends who moved away from each other. Occasionally I would hear from my voice. It would resurface to plant an idea in my head. I would poke at the idea, but the voice and I were estranged so the story would fade into nothing.

The funny thing about a pencil and an eraser falling in love is that whether it’s ridiculous or whether it’s the most natural thing in the world is in how you view them. If you view a pencil and an eraser as two separate things, one creates, the other takes away, of course it seems ridiculous. One is always undermining the other. On the other hand, if you see them as a whole, a pencil with the eraser on top, both a part of the same brilliant tool…their being together is the most natural thing in the world. You wouldn’t think about one being without the other. They work together to create, each relying on the other for balance.

Mrs. Potter saw me and my gift as a whole. She saw it and encouraged it. My family, my other teachers, even I, after many years, saw it as a thing apart from myself. It was a distraction, taking away from more important things.

Do you want to know the true love story of the pencil and the eraser? A pencil didn’t fall in love with an eraser, nor did an eraser fall in love with a pencil. One day a little girl woke up in her thirties and realized she was the pencil and the eraser, whole, one brilliant tool. She realized she was supposed to be that way.

The Date

Listen, I know we don’t talk much anymore and that’s kind of why I wanted to take you out. This meal, this tasty craft beer, this time set aside, these are my gifts to you. We are celebrating you. Slainte. That Neopolitan stout, right?

Don’t look at me that way, smart ass.

I just wanted to say thanks, you know, for sticking around all these years. You’ve always been there, granted most of the time I shove you back into the shadows, but you’re still there. Waiting. Quietly, sometimes not-so-quietly. God, how many nights have you kept me up while I listened to you stomping around in my head?

Still. I would have given up and left ages ago. You didn’t. You’re still here. Still demanding my time and attention. And something is always getting in the way. You do know that it’s me and not you, right? No, I mean it, look at me. It’s me. Not you. Anyway, that’s why I invited you here today. I set aside this whole afternoon just for us. No distractions, well except picking out the next beer to taste.

I want to apologize.

I hear you. I acknowledge your existence. I acknowledge your importance in my life and I don’t want to ignore you anymore. I’ve signed us up for a writing workshop. No, not that kind, don’t worry, no one’s going to be poking you and trying to change you. It’s, well it’s more like couples therapy for you and your writing voice.

Shut up.

And don’t roll your eyes, this is a big step for me, for us. It’s clear that you are a very special and very real part of me. Let’s take the time to heal this relationship so we can create together.

Fuck, do you remember how close we were as kids? Mrs. Potter’s class, yeah, oh god. That poor woman. She had to make a bargain with me: stay focused on your work, and at the end of the day you can tell the class a story. Do you remember that? The Love Story of the Pencil and Eraser…god that was awful. Well, it was!

We used to spend hours together. To the point where it would get me in trouble! What happened? Something happened to me along the way. I stopped listening to you.

I’m sorry.

I don’t want to ignore you anymore. I want to deal with this fear, this always wondering what the hell I’m supposed to do with you. I want to tackle this thing head-on. Some guy named Jeff Brown is going to help us. I listened to the first audio session and I have to say, I think he’s the real deal.

What do you say?

I trust you. I’m committed to you. It’s scary as hell, but I have this gut feeling that if I just stop gripping the damn steering wheel so tightly and let you drive that something amazing is going to happen.

Yeah, I know. Look, you have to understand that’s a part of me too. What can I say? I’m a giant, shmoopy dork that geeks out over things that go vroom. I don’t know how, but it feels like all of us are supposed to work together. If I can make time for college I can certainly make time for you too. More time. I want you to be first, even above my dream of going to university. I just feel like it’s you. You first. Look…it’s taken me damn near 30 years to realize you might be the most important thing that makes me…me.

What do you say?

Really? God, I love you too.

Thanks for staying.