It Hit Me

Music is like fiction.  It's all about tension and release.  Music isn't interesting if there is no conflict.  Even in Palestrina's music, harmonically perfect music, it's there.  You can't have music without the V, I.  You've got to have the cadence.  Conflict, suspension, dissonance, anticipation--all these things make music perfect.  

You can't have the relief without the tension.

Jane And Her Mother

She started biting her thumbnails again that day.  Her mother had long kicked her of the habit, she thought, but it crept back in as she paced in slow relay from the dresser to the bed and back again.  She was always slow, methodical, levelheaded.  Instead of ditching the bus with a cry and escaping to the mall after school like her friends, she came home to her mother and brother to pull weeds or set the table.  Instead of crying, she would steady herself and sit quietly on her bed until it passed.  She would do these things this evening after she told her mother she was pregnant.

She rehearsed in her head.

“Mom, I’m pregnant.”  Too direct, I shouldn’t start with the news, she wouldn’t even listen to me after that.  “Mom.  I need to talk to you.”  She’ll probably just continue watching the news and say, “…Yes…Yes?  Sorry, the news is on.”  Like I don’t know the news is on.

“Mom.”  I’ll sit down next to her on the couch and wait for her to turn the news off.

“Yes?”

            “I need to talk to you about something.”
            She won’t even raise an eyebrow, probably, since she would consider it proper of me to come to her with a problem.  She will probably feel proud of herself.  “What is it?”

            “Well…”  No, no, no, no stumbles allowed.  I can’t give her any chance to feel like this is her conversation.  “You know I’ve always been a responsible person, Mom.”

            She will nod but not say anything.

            “And it’s because of you, you know.  You taught me to be responsible and to take care of business.”

            A swift nod, probably.  At this point she is expecting the worst.

            “And you’ve always been there for me in times of trouble, you know?  You’ll help me through anything, right?  You’ll make it okay?  I’m pregnant, Mom, I don’t want to be but please can you just make it okay?”
            She stopped herself.  She looked down—her hands were clenched around her abdomen.  This is ridiculous.  She would never help me.  She didn’t teach me anything.  She didn’t teach me to be responsible and take care of business.  She would never be there for me in times of trouble.  She would never help me.

            She will hate me.

            She breathed in and out.  Walking downstairs, she didn’t hide her thumbnails.  She stood in front of the TV. 

            “Mom, I’m pregnant.”

This was an assignment on imagined dialogue.  Once again, I did it on my way out the door.  What is happening to me?  

Kaitlin

Uncle Rob

My mother’s brother.  He’s the one that would be missing at Thanksgiving some years, and the table would be a decibel quieter.  For years, he’d bring a friend to gatherings—Stacey.  We all loved Stacey as kids.  She was loud, inappropriate, wrestled with us on her hands and knees.  A perfect match for Uncle Rob.  He was all those things—except he didn’t wrestle.  He was aloof, sidetracked most of the time.  We realized when we grew up that he usually didn’t know what to do around the youngers.

He and Stacey would cackle together and she would chide him like a wife of decades, but no, they weren’t together.  My little brother asked her once, “Why don’t you live in Chicago with Uncle Rob?”  She and Gramma hooted and Stacey bent down, put her hands on his shoulders, and said knowingly, “Would you want to live with your Uncle Rob?”  Conrad’s nose squinched in his laughter, “Ohhh, no way!”

It was in our early teens when we were allowed to learn that Uncle Rob was gay, and everything made sense.  His elbow-nudge jokes with my mom that made her sob with laughter, the solid way his gut hung over his belt, his vowels and elongated s’s and emphasized t’s…of course.  We nodded solemnly to our parents as they told us to not to discuss it, Oh no, we would never.  And at that point, we never would—it was a satiating, correct puzzle piece to our secret, starved wonders about our Uncle Rob.  He had been a smoker for twenty or thirty years and spoke in raspier tones each Christmas.  He celebrated his choice of Fiji water that one year at the ranch and never passed up a fart-joke opportunity.  A conversation with my Uncle Rob was a kind of unholy privilege that you received secretly every two years.  It made sense that all of this unholiness would culminate in such a fact in our Catholic minds—Uncle Rob was gay.

And we loved him.  How could we not?  In spurts he would tell us jokes or hug us and absentmindedly give us candy.  There is a picture of us playing Monopoly that I keep in my journal.  I am about 5 and Uncle Rob is thinner.  The look on my face is crazily gleeful because Uncle Rob was there, playing with me.  He was my special uncle.  I remember finding this picture in a baby album a few years ago.  It was right before my mother and I were supposed to fly up to Chicago to stay with him during college visits.  I was nervous about the trip and about what kinds of things I would find at Rob’s apartment.  So I picked up the picture and stuffed it in a book.  Why I did this is still unclear to me.  My attempt, maybe, at creating a history with Rob, a loving, endearing childhood friendship that never existed.    

I know, I know, the last paragraph is weak.  I wrote this today right before it was due and I had to scurry to print it off and get to campus on time.  That is the worst way to work and unfortunately the way I do many things in my life.  Maybe this semester will be a turning point on that field for me.

Family Woman,

Kaitlin

Forward

The gang was trekking to Alaska.

Well, it was not really a gang, rather a gang of something, a gang of superiors, a gang of spirituals, a gang of the eclectic searching for experience.  They all wore backpacks, except for Lucy who wore a crocodile purse, and in them they carried tools.  Benjamin a hammer for the way he liked to make squirrel stew, Micah his mother's face on a coaster she had made, Gabe a recorder to summon the blessings of heaven.  Marge carried used loose-leaf because she could only brew her words on scrap paper, and Clint carried an old baseball from the days of his father.  Lucy carried weapons--a shark's tooth, a switchblade, a rifle.  The others whispered about broken glass and how the bag was a real crocodile in disguise.  They were all seeking souls, seeking fulfillment of a life, as they would find, that only allowed them to carry the selected necessities.  Of course, the necessities they carried now would change over time.

I really want to develop this.  I see Lucy here as a great character.  There are so many things left unspoken for in this blurb--what more about Micah?  Gabe's name connection?  Why the weapons?  Why the scrap paper (thanks Peggy)?  How admiring was Clint really of his father?  These things are all tools, but tools for what exactly?  And what are they really seeking?  A new beginning, perhaps.  And all because the instructions told me to write for ten minutes, mimicking Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried."  

Digging,

Kaitlin

A Phony Pose

There was a picture of my brother Dan on my old phone that always confused me.  The upstairs of our house looks like this: you walk up the stairs, and to the right is my mom and dad’s room.  Across from you is the bathroom my brothers and I share.  If you venture down the hall to your left a bit, the end of it splits into three rooms—my room, my brothers’ room, and the office.  I took this picture at Dan’s request.  I was standing in my room and he in his, and he stuck his head and nothing else around the corner of our two rooms.  The picture is merely his head floating in a sideways manner—not floating, maybe—rather, like the Romans defeated him in battle and stuck his head on a stake in the wooden trim outside their bedroom, as a warning to any foreigners and as a boasting to any natives.  I suppose, with the Romans, it could also work vice versa.  It doesn’t help that imagined battle cause that his tongue is stuck out and his eyes are googley.  Dan, at 11, ingeniously and unknowingly brought the ancient world into this piece of writing. 

He is always doing things like that—things that I have a hard time believing because he has been considered semi-dull-minded by my family and I (and his school) since his birth; things that probably aren’t even true.  Not that Dan’s knowledge of ancient Roman culture even has the merest possibility to be true.  But in that moment, through the savvy glimmer in his eyes and the placement of his tongue; the pale Sunday afternoon sunlight shimmering through the window of the office in the background; my brother’s illegal Myspace page pulled up on the screen of the desktop, or some other site equally forbidden to my brothers; Dan almost seems as clever as a college professor. 

I remember taking it and laughing at the ridiculousness of this pose that he threw together at the last second before the shutter snapped.  Ever since then I have always done a double take when I scroll through the pictures on my phone.  That phone is in the trash bag beside me now.  Soon the picture will be solely in my mind, but no less phony.

This was our assignment to describe an image we had in our minds in great detail.  I guess when I started writing this, it ended up a lot more substantial than I had planned.  I've never been able to write about descriptive details without pulling some sort of hidden meaning from them.  I can't wait to learn more about how to start a short story.  Off for a great weekend of camping!  I'm also hoping to do some writing out there.

Not laboring on Labor Day,

Kaitlin