What to do with that

I guess I'll just begin again. I went into the Army because they were going to train me to be a mechanic... the recruiter said they would... and my life had been going nowhere. I was living in Bitter Falls with a girl named Jamie who already had two kids, and working maybe two days a week at her uncle's shop, just running parts for them. I was twenty-two and the only friends I'd had who'd left Verona County had just graduated from college, one in New York and one in Florida, and the friends I had who hadn't left town were all married to women who had kids by different dads, and I wasn't sure what depressed me more.

Jamie didn't want me to go in the Army, but it wasn't like she was doing a lot to keep me here. She spent half her money on beer anyway. When I left for Afghanistan I told her I'd come back to her, but even then I didn't mean it. And I'd probably stopped thinking of her within a week of being out there.

The first week my unit had two IEDs to deal with. I didn't realize they were that common. Maybe I'm stupid but I didn't think we'd be over there if it was that dangerous. Just that it would be the Rangers or something, not regular troops. If it was that bad. I was just getting used to things a little when the explosion went off that day under our truck. The next thing I remember was the hospital in Germany, and then all those days my mom visited at Walter Reed.

The thing about traumatic brain injury is that you're not yourself anymore. Not that you're in a bad mood; that you're literally not the same person. Like you're this stranger with a different personality, different likes and dislikes. A stranger to your family and to yourself. There was a lot that I hated about what happened to me and a lot that I cursed out God for and even cried about, some things that were really bad, but this was just strange. I don't know if I'm supposed to be upset about it or not.

Today they had a party for me and I felt like I was at a party with strangers. But what do you do when you're at a party and you don't know anyone there? Just party even harder, right? I thought I was going to be one person at twenty-four, and instead I'm another person. Still trying to figure out what to do with that.

(Googled "I guess I'll just begin again" and went off this picture.)

Figured out

He had it figured out. He could keep living alone if he built a big ramp into the kitchen. He could build a big ramp if he lowered the table saw to a height where he could work it seated, and re-hung all his tools so he could reach them from where he was sitting. He could lower the table saw if he rigged a harness for himself so he could stand and lean without any risk of falling. The harness could be suspended from the ceiling of the garage. Somehow, he'd have to get up there on a ladder, but he'd figure that out.

They told him there was a chance he'd be able to stand without a walker again, but that to be safe he shouldn't--that his balance was so bad, even after the broken leg healed he ought to keep using it, shuffling around like a frail old man, whether or not he actually felt like he might fall. Since he hadn't felt like he was going to fall the first time, he was inclined to listen. He might be stubborn but he wasn't stupid.

No, he was too smart to try to go on living the way he had. But damned if he was going into one of those nursing homes. Anything a man could think of to build, he could build. And he'd do it. Slings to help him get out of bed, one of those chairs on a rail to get up the stairs, a higher toilet seat, a post he could strap himself to while chopping wood so he wouldn't fall. Because a man's got to be able to live on his own. He might choose to live with others. But he's got to be able to do it on his own, because relationships with others that aren't based on choice aren't worth anything at all.

Googled "He had it figured out" and went off this picture.

But of course

She was the last one left. We hadn't wanted to get a Dachshund--Gary said a German Shepherd was a dog, a Dachshund was a type of rat--but we had come already decided we'd be taking home one of the rescue dogs, so we did.

This dog was one of the rescues from the Jersey flood. They told us she'd been found on top of a snag of trees in the middle of Ketchum, one of the towns that was inundated. Her owners had never come forward. It was hard to believe--she was about as cute as a button, with little brown "eyebrows" that always looked worried, and tiny ears. At the shelter they said they thought she was less than a year old, and would get a little bigger, but I was hoping she was a miniature Dachshund and was always going to stay so tiny. Small enough to ride in my backpack as I biked around the park.

We named her Daisy. That fall, Gary lost his job, and I first started experiencing the grinding exhaustion that would be diagnosed 2 years later as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I missed a lot of work, and Gary was home when he wasn't at the library. We fought a lot. One of my clearest memories of that time was of Daisy sitting between us looking back and forth at us, her tiny eyebrows giving her the most fretful, vigilant expression.

I wish I could say that she became my comfort during those long months when Gary moved out and then we split entirely just as I was becoming unable to work. But by then, Daisy was gone. It was the oddest thing. I had been worrying about everything--about Gary, about how I was going to support myself, about how I was going to take care of the dog when I didn't even have the strength or energy to take her for a walk most days. And one day I let her out into the yard, and she never came back to scratch at the door. And I, God forgive me, didn't even notice until she'd already been gone for over 24 hours.

I don't know what I could have done. I suppose if my neighbor and I had gone out driving around the neighborhood sooner we might have found her, but I have to wonder if Daisy knew what she was doing. If leaving was her way of trying to help me.

When I thought of that I thought of her, alone, on that snag of trees surrounded by flood waters and how her owners never claimed her, this cute little thing. I wonder if she'd left them in order to make their lives easier, too, somehow. Of course I miss her and her funny little expressions. But of course I was relieved, too, when I realized she wasn't coming back.

Googled "She was the last one left" and went off this picture.

Untitled

If I could do it all over again, I would wait just two more minutes at that door. And then leave, just like they told us in training. But it was my first house call and I was nervous. So I did the next best thing: I walked around to the side of the house to peek in the window and see if I could tell whether anyone was home.

What I saw in that window can never be unseen.

There was a very white man with a very saggy butt on his hands and knees. The black apron hanging off his body hid absolutely nothing. Standing close to the window, facing away from me, facing him, was a very slim young black woman in stiletto heels and a black corset. Her hair hung to the middle of her back and she had a riding crop in her right hand.

I was so startled I dropped the box of Pyrex® Sexy Sixties products I was carrying onto the garden stones, and the high pitched tinkling on impact told me I'd just lost at least half of the $400 investment I'd made in the brightly painted, heat-resistant bakeware. That was my seed money, the money I needed to turn a profit on, so I could buy more and better bakeware, and make more money, and eventually progress to holding Pyrex® Sexy Sixties parties in my home, and soon be raking in the $1000 a month the other independent representatives said they were making in their spare time.

Nobody at the training had said anything about this.

At the sound of the shattering glassware, the tall woman turned around. She looked at me through the window. She had purple mascara. She had red red lipstick and long red fingernails. The corset did not... contain her. It seemed to have been cut specifically to expose her feminine gifts. Below her and to the side, the very white man also looked up over his hairy shoulder. There was something round and red in his mouth.

The woman crooked a finger at me.

I turned to run and tripped over the box, then stepped in it, the violent shattering of an avocado-and-cream Amish Butterprint four-piece nested mixing bowl set ringing in my ears. I was into the car and halfway down Center St. before I even became conscious of what I was doing. At that point I was faced with a choice: go back and see if anything salvageable remained in the box, or go home.

I went home. To this day I refuse to imagine what they might have done with the box of glass shards I left them.

Googled DP's inspired starting sentence of "If I could do it over again, I would wait just two more minutes at that door" and went off this picture.

World's only SuperBall xylophone band

Someone could have stopped it. In Flagstaff, in La Jolla, in Eugene. By the time they got to Portland there were only three of them left but the tour wasn't over, and it seemed a shame not to finish in Seattle like they'd planned. They eased the van into a gas station north of town and pulled some cardboard out of a dumpster. Pete got a Sharpie. Dave got one of xylophones out and set it up on the cracked asphalt. Ben went in to use the bathroom.

"We're going to play here?" Pete asked.

"Man, what the hell else are we going to do? We could be here for a long time."

It was chilly, but Dave blew into his fingers and worked his hands open and closed in between pulling SuperBalls out of a cardboard box and testing their bounce against the inside floor of the van. Pete was writing, in skinny block letters:

PLEASE HELP US GET TO SEATTLE

NEED GAS

WORLD'S ONLY

Dave jogged across the parking lot to toss a red SuperBall in the trash, then came back to look over Pete's shoulder.

WORLD'S ONLY SUPERBALL XYLOPHONE

BAND

The word "band" didn't fit on the same line. The dumpster cardboard wasn't long enough.

"All right. Warm up?" said Dave.

"Put this over here. Put your hat under it." Pete propped the cardboard against the back of the van. Ben had returned from the gas station store.

"Guys, I think I have dysentery, or something."

"Can you play?"

"Um." He sat down on the back bumper of the van. "I think I need to go to the hospital."

Pete had taken three balls and was juggling them downward against the keys of the first xylophone, experimentally. A few random notes sounded and then the strains of "Mary had a little lamb."

Dave put his hand on Ben's forehead. "You're sweaty, man."

"How are you going to afford a trip to the hospital, dude?" Pete clutched the three balls in one hand now and reached into the box for another.

Dave turned around. "How is he going to afford it? I don't know, you tell us. How much money's left in the emergency fund? The one you said we could restock if we started eating out of dumpsters. Huh?"

Pete shrugged and began bouncing the balls against the keys to the tune of "Oh when the saints come marching in," sustaining the long notes with multiple strikes like a mandolin player.

"I'm not sick. You're not sick. We're doing fine. He'll get over it."

"Well if he doesn't the tour is over. I'm not chasing after balls. It won't work. And nobody's going to pay to listen to you play the same three songs you know how to do by yourself over and over."

"So don't drop any balls." Pete didn't look up, now.

Ben was doubled over now, his blond head between his knees. Dave knelt beside him. "Look, man," he said quietly. "Go lie down in the van. If you still feel crappy in a half an hour we'll get you to the hospital. Don't worry about it." Ben nodded and Dave helped him up, around to the side of the van where he slid open the door, turning the painted SUPERBALL XYLOPHONE WORLD TOUR into the condensed SUPER HONE WOR.

"K, Pete," Dave said, dragging the box beneath the instrument and reaching in for a few balls. "I don't think either of us is capable of playing through all of, say, Stairway to Heaven without dropping at least once." He bounced his balls on the low end of the xylophone, tapping out "Hava Nagila" with stiff fingers. On the last note he missed his pickup and knocked the ball to the ground with the back of his fingers.

Three of the people who had been getting gas were now standing in front of them, looking from the instrument to the van and back, hands in their coat pockets. A teenage girl in heavy mascara leaned in and put a five in Dave's hat.

"Wanna bet?" said Pete.

"Yeah," said Dave. "I do. If I play with no drops, we take that five and put gas in the van and get Ben to the hospital. If you play with no drops, we take the gas and start heading up to Seattle."

"What if we're both perfect?"

Dave looked at their audience of three. "If we're both perfect, you guys are gonna shower us with dough, right?"

They chuckled. "I have a fiver," said a man.

"All right," said Dave. "If we're both perfect, we split the ten dollars. You get the van and I get Ben. If you're so damn good you can go to Seattle on your own. Me and Ben will figure out how to get back to Jersey."

"Fine," said Pete, so quiet the word registered more as a drift of misty breath in the cold air then as a sound. He lifted his arms a foot above the xylophone, ready. "We go on three."

Dave blew on his hands.

Note: Googled "Someone could have stopped it" and went off this picture.

It wasn't like he needed permission

It wasn't like he needed permission to go out. He didn't need to ask her. And it wasn't like he needed permission to have friends over, either. She'd always told him he didn't need to ask.

It was more like nobody wanted to come over anymore.

That Friday night, Jessica and her friends took up all the seats in the living room. They were on their third bottle of wine. They were so loud Mike could hear half of what they said through the closed study door. He heard "That's why they call it brainwashing!" and "No Washington bureaucrat man is gonna tell me abortion is good for women."

Mike had the Colbert Report turned up so loud it was hurting his own ears, but his wife's meeting still came through in the silences. It was like being back at school, except instead of blasting Credence to cover up his neighbor's New Kids on the Block, he was blasting politics. He was just as embarrased as ever, though, for the person on the other side of the wall.

He sank lower on the couch, holding a pillow over his chest. This wasn't his fault. Was it? This terrible mismatch. He had had no idea. They'd been together six months before Jessica had said a peep about the second amendment. Or baby-killers. He wondered if he was crazy, if perhaps there had been signs he'd been blind to in his infatuation with her energy and humor. And her lips.

What about when she told him that of course she'd shot a gun before? Or the time she got on him for making fun of rednecks? At the time, he'd assumed she was a true liberal, somebody who really believed in equality and open-mindedness rather than just preaching about it. Now he wasn't sure if the mistaken assumption was more to his credit or to hers.

He could list the things he loved about her, sure. There were a thousand things. The problem was that none of them was big enough to get over... this. How can a person seem so sane when talking you through the reasons you should start your dream business and so crazy when talking you through the reasons why conservative feminists are the real feminists?

Mike turned the TV off before the show was over. He stood up and listened at the door for a moment, then opened it. None of the women looked up at him. They were howling, half in amusement and half in rage, bright-eyed, wine glasses in hand.

When the noise died down, he opened his mouth. He spoke and then there was a sharp and engulfing silence in which he realized that although he'd meant to say, "Abortion does not increase rates of child abuse," he'd somehow said, "I want a divorce."

The relief was instant. Mike blinked once and then walked to the hall closet to get his coat while every woman turned her head to watch him. This was satisfying. This was the silence he would have liked to achieve with a well-timed and cutting argument about abortion. He couldn't have, he knew now. They weren't interested.

But they sure were interested in this.

The silence still hadn't been broken, but lingered round and full and complete and perfect, by the time he closed the door behind him.

Googled "It wasn't like he needed permission to go out" and went off this image.

Because it was Rome

I lost 32 pounds during that time. Now I remember it as being very dark, but in my pictures it's sunny every day. I was a student living in Rome. I'd gone to Rome because I loved language, loved art, and wanted to be as close to these things as I could, language and art. (I knew both of these things existed in Minneapolis, but at 18, I wanted a lot more than what I could see around me.) I was so sure I'd love it there I didn't even bother looking at year-abroad programs. I signed up for four years at a little school in Rome that took a lot of American students. As I got off the plane into the sun I was so excited I was actually shaking.

After one day of immersion classes I was ready to quit. Twenty years later, now, I could do it, assuming I wanted to. But at 18 I was possessed of the powerful notion that as I had had a 4.0 in high school, had taken eight AP classes, had been captain of my volleyball team, I ought to be immediately good at anything I put my mind to. I sat through one class not understanding a thing, and felt a mild irritation with myself. After two classes I was nearly in tears. I'd been off the plane for 36 hours and all the things I'd loved or was up to that point had vanished as the world narrowed to the singular, overwhelming and deep-seated conviction that I could not learn Italian.

I have a picture of the Colosseum, taken, I suppose, during welcome day, when the new Americans were bused around the city before we were left to find rides to the apartments we'd managed to reserve a room in while still in the States. In the picture, the sky is washed-out and the structure looks oddly two-dimensional, as if it were a stage set that might blow over in a high wind. I have another picture of the interior of the little cathedral near the school where I spent so many hours. It also looks oddly washed-out, almost like a black and white photo someone had gingerly colorized. This is not what anything in Rome really looks like. In person, every piece of dirty marble is so real and full of character it's impossible not to touch them.

I struggled badly that first semester. My classes were about art and literature and history, my best subjects, subjects I'd already learned past the level of what was being taught here. But with each day that I failed to understand more than a few of the instructor's words, I became more convinced of my failure, and spent less time studying and more worrying. All of my hours outside class I spent either at the cathedral or in Lisa's noisy apartment. Lisa and I would never have been friends back home, but here she was the only person I wanted to be with, to get away from my Italian roommate whom I couldn't understand, and who was--I was sure--constantly making fun of me with the skinny boys she always had over. They would say something and then look at me, look at me and then say something to each other, until my ears were burning and I would leave.

Lisa didn't know where I was when I wasn't with her. Over the holidays we drank a lot and managed to visit a few of the sights the bus hadn't hit when we'd first got into Rome. I didn't think about Spring classes until I got into them. After the second day I stopped going to class and spent all my time in the cathedral, in a pew in the back row, watching the tourists come in and out and trying to pray. I would pray that God would make me stronger, braver, smarter, more capable at this monumental thing I'd taken on. Mostly I'd pray for the strength to go back to class.

I never went back to class, but it wasn't until the last day to sign up for Fall classes that it even occurred to me that I didn't want to be here another year. That I could go home. I'd spent hundreds of hours in a pew in a little cathedral and only a couple dozen in class, and yet all that time I'd held the idea in my head that I would simply press on. Because I loved language and art. Because it was Rome.

The plane ride home was the worst thing I'd ever experienced. I hadn't eaten in two days, had gotten no sleep the night before, had a sinus infection, and was convinced everything was over. My chance to live a great and rich life were gone. But then I saw my family when I got off the plane, and that Fall I was at the University of Minnesota, studying English and playing volleyball, and by October I wasn't thinking about Italy at all.

People have strange ideas about things. Everyone does, but if we're lucky, we grow out of them. I've never been back to Europe, and mostly, people are surprised when I tell them I spent a year in Rome. I tell them it wasn't for me. People need to hear that sort of thing. Kids need to hear it. I say it as often as I can.

Googled "I lost 32 pounds during that time" and went off this picture.

The way that works for me

Not everybody does it this way, but I do. First, take a single match and a very sharp knife. Place the match down on a piece of wood and slice it lengthwise, carefully. Now you have two match halves.

You have wood, you have kindling, you have tinder, but make sure you have very small pieces of twigs. This is the most important thing. Pick up the smallest things you can find that are actually twigs. They should be thinner than the tine on a fork. Thinner than... what am I thinking of? Thinner than a piece of string.

Take your small sticks and lay them in the firepit in any way you choose. The sticks that are as big around as your finger. Some people like to make a tepee, or a lean-to, but I always make a log cabin, because you can make it every time and it's not dependent on the size of the sticks you have at your disposal. Two things are very important: Make sure you have a hole you can slide the match into, and Make sure you have more holes for air.

Once you've built it up a couple inches, I like to make sure the final sticks at the top are close enough together to lay all the tiny twigs across without them falling in. And do so. Before you get your match, put increasingly bigger sizes of twig close at hand, because you'll want to add them on.

Then take one of the match-halves and strike it, and get it under the tiny twigs. Once they start to burn, put slightly-larger twigs on top of them. Then once they burn put some larger ones. Soon your fire will be going, no doubt about it. But if something goes wrong, use the other match-half. Be very careful about wind.

That's how you start a fire on one match. I've been doing this since I was twelve and I still win the contest every year. My dad taught me and like I said some people do it other ways, but this is the way that works for me.

Googled "Not everybody does it this way, but I do" and went off this picture.

This crazy ocean

Third time's a charm. I bought another boat in January and in April I made it here. Standing under the pier watching the waves come in and out. My first thought's I wasn't wrong, it's still the same dream blue and white, the colors so strong that was how I could think I'd had it wrong for the past year, just like I thought I had it wrong last time. You did things to me, I always thought. Like you made everything brighter and warmer and stronger. Miami and Junior's and our little green boat. Except I guess Cayo Bravo doesn't need it. Cause apparently it's still part of a dream, even when you're not here.

But it's still different from the second time I came back. The second time I was still in love with you. I cried right here, right into the ocean. Everything was blue inside me and out. We were tied up here for five days waiting for Octavio to come take the load off our hands, and every day was torture. Because the memory was so strong. You and me here one year before, you in your panties at the wheel, blonder than the sun, tying up I was so happy I was dizzy that we had this whole island to ourselves and our hash and we were in love. Had so much sex there wasn't hardly any time to smoke. I remember the white sand sticking to your skin like you were covered in sugar, just a big donut out of the oven, warm and ready to eat. I remember that more than the real things we did.

You wouldn't have sold me out in San Juan. If you'd been there we would have found another boat, gotten out. I tried to call you from the jail cause I didn't know you were already gone. Don't know what you would have done for me except make me think everything's all right, I guess. It was all over anyhow. Took me almost a year to get out of that place and get back in Miami. But it took me a lot longer than that to feel better. Seems like I just couldn't get myself together.

When I had to come back here last year with the crew it just about killed me. I was shooting up, then, nobody was stopping me. Right where we rolled around under the pier. Five days here trying to make it all go away.

Things must be changed now though because I don't feel like throwing myself into the ocean anymore. Or getting high. The drowning feeling that made me feel like I was choking just standing here is gone, all there is is this sweet blueness inside and out. You left a big hole. But I can smile because it's all so sweet now, thinking of you and me here two years ago. I wanted to come here a third time because I had to fix how the second time was and because I had to say goodbye. And I wanted to know, I guess, if it was really over. If I could be here and not want to kill myself. It's over. So our love affair is over. So I guess I can let go of everything now, the drugs and Junior's, get out of Miami and do something else with this new boat. And I'll just know that it always looked like this, it wasn't me being high or high on how you made me feel. Someplace there is a place that looks just like this. This crazy ocean.

Googled "Third time's a charm" and went off this image.