i've been reading a lot of life stories, lately, fictional and non. i spent today on the deck reading me by Katherine Hepburn. and then i moved on to Having Our Say by the Delaney sisters. befor e either of those, We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates.
so it's probably the literary influence that got me thinking about my own life from the outside. at 28 it's rare that one steps out and looks from the outside of one's own life. at 28, you're still making up life as you go along. caught up with the success you've found, the family you've started, or (like me) scrambling around looking for whatever it is you're supposed to be doing. waiting for your life to really begin...
i drove out to where my grandparents used to live. i hadn't been out there in years. maybe i drove past once or twice after pop died and gram moved out, to see what my cousin chris had done with the place. but since gram died, not once. the bushes shielding it from the road are gone, so i pulled to the side and stopped to look for a minute. the house is different. darker siding and hunter green shutters. too far away to see much, to see if the door was still intricately carved, dark walnut. but the driveway curves the same, and just next to it, the chain link backstop stands in the field, rusting. further back, the basketball hoop, the perforated metal back ancient even when i was little.
and while i was looking from the road, it was as if i was seeing from different points of view, layered one over the other like tranparencies. bleeding into one another. the backstop from the road, and the backstop stretching so high over my head and my brother's face on the other side as he climbed it. the back of the basketball hoop from the road, and the front as i shoot baskets from the back of my dad's baby blue pickup truck (i was too short). the field itself, overgrown in front of my eyes and full of jumps for my cousin's dirtbike. but in my memory, green and mowed and full of sunlight, while my cousins (all older by at least ten years) played softball at family picnics.
it's a strange way to see something, both as it is and as it was. stranger still because what was feels so much more real than what is. in my summer memories the grass is vivid green and the sky is intensely blue, and everything is a little yellowish because everything is flooded with sunlight. what is it about childhood that we feel things so much more intensely then? i knew every inch of that field, where the best raspberries were, where the ground was lumpy from the mole colony. the best climbing rocks. it all looked enormous.
so anyway, while memories are suddenly coming up, i thought i'd do a little writing on them. and that's where you come in, gentle reader. there isn't really any organization to my thoughts right now. so i thought that i'd set a little challenge. go on over to the guestbook or the notes, and ask me a question. or questions. about my past. and i'll do my best to answer them as thoughtfully and with as much detail as possible. if you have a question that's not about my past, that would be ok too. i need a little push to get back into this whole writing thing, and that might be just the nudge i need.
so how bout it? fire away.
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