must have been the roses

There are roses in my car this morning. I can't find a vase. Running late for Amelia's school, running back inside to grab a notebook, running down to the fumes and there are a dozen roses, a cantaloupe and three Grateful Dead stubs stuck in a card - June 21, 22, 23, 1993 - Deer Creek Music Center. 7 p.m. Rain or Shine. The purchase date, bottom left on the tickets, May 22, 1993. Who could have seen down this road from there?

Summer 1993. Been all week listening to '93 summer shows trying flush out memories. Buckeye Lake. Soldier Field. Deer Creek. Richfield. The Palace, did I do Auburn Hills that year? There was an electrical storm at Soldier Field? Why don't I remember being wet? Sting opened those shows? Did I go inside for Sting? Lighting bolt crisp down into the stadium, thunderheads over Chicago skyline. I have those crackle flashes of it. And that's all. Selling gourmet grilled cheese made-to-order after the show. Driving straight on through the Midwest night to Noblesville and daybreak sleep.

Nothing about any of it feels so real as those old tickets in my hands. Funny how a murderous prison riot can alter the course of a life. Really, that's why I ended up getting Deer Creek tickets early on a Saturday morning in May and not in the mail a month earlier. The longest prison riot in U.S. history. There were two ways to get Dead tickets - actually, there were many ways to get tickets - but two ways sanctioned. You could go the traditional stand-in-a-long-line waiting route or order directly from Grateful Dead Productions, mail order. I preferred mail order.

Two reasons. 1. Interesting tickets that looked more like this than standard issue black type on blue and white paper. 2. No camping out for hours on a sidewalk to get them.

Mail order was it's own precise art form. Everything had to be addressed and assembled exactly right, and postmarked the day ticket sales started. Deer Creek mail order opened on day seven of the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility uprising. One hostage, a guard, had been hanged the day before. Another hostage, a local guy who's story I'd been covering at work, was freed. Supposed to be my day off. But I stopped at the paper to check on something and Tony Demons was freed and suddenly I was working late. The order was not postmarked on the day mail order opened. No tickets in the mail.

A month later Scott sits down behind me in line. He offers me a slice of cantaloupe that I take, even though I think I hate it. We talk, smoke and talk, talk, talk about nothing for hours until the ticket window opens. Then I go to change for work and he goes home.

On weekends the newspaper is dead. I'm putting away mail to entertain myself and listening to the police scanner for something better to do. There are only a couple of us in the newsroom on Saturday's and when the phone rings it's for me. My friend B, a photographer I went to college with comes to tell me I have a call.

"Hi, this is Scott from in line this morning," the voice says and I smile. All over smile. His voice is sure and unsure. "Um, you left before I had a chance to ask your last name, or your phone number, or what you are doing tonight. So, I got yesterday's paper out of the garbage to find your byline."

B. Asks me who called and I laugh, tell him it's the guy from this morning in line. He looked up my name in the paper and called to ask me out.

"You're going to marry him," B says. Laughs.

"Yeah, whatever," I say. "He's moving to the west coast at the end of the summer. But, he could be fun for a while,"

"No. You're going to marry this guy."

Summer 1993 blurs out from there. Mostly what I remember is sun, heat on my skin. Camping and music and suddenly I'm in love with my summer fling - the guy I wasn't getting attached to. Sometimes the songs that we hear are just songs of our own. And, he's moving to Spokane.

***

I soak in the tub every night because it's the only space that's mine. It's starts when I move in. Hot until my fingers and toes tingle baths; dark, steam, candles. Everyday and sometimes twice. At first it's about the water, this bathing. Soaking it in and soaking it out.Then it's about a habit, nightly ritual, some kind of normalcy, the only way I care for myself. Now it's about the space, the change of scenery. Just someplace to be out of the living room. So I can leave one room and be in another. It's crazy-making living all of life - eating, sleeping, working (sometimes relaxing) - in a single room.

The roses are in a spaghetti jar on the table, still can't find a proper vase. Fourteen years down this road. My girls sleep in the bedroom while I count tiles around the tub. Cream bordered by thinner black. Ten high by five deep. Who could have seen. That's the problem, not that I didn't see this. That I didn't see anything.

Watch the seasons change out that bathroom window. The line of oaks are all colors, then all bare. Puffy, wet buds that push out tiny bright leaves unfolding into bigger, darker summer. Just as I find the rhythm of one season the rhythm changes - odd time signatures - and I'm scrambling to recalibrate. Again. On still nights the trees look plastic bathed in halogen. Remnant from a long ago journey.

He says: "I can't believe I could have driven you so far from me. I hurt you so much you'd rather live in a one-bedroom apartment. You love the bed. You hate not having your own space. You HATE it."

I watch the door close, go into the bathroom and stare out the window.

That tight feeling of angry, isolation, smallness,trapped is gone. Can't remember how it was in my body, my head. Sure, I can rattle through a great string of insults and psychological injuries. But how was it under my skin? I can list the tangibles but even as I type them they feel petty. They don't feel.

How's this one: I get home late from work, 11:30, Midnight, the house is wrecked. I say "can you help with the living room and dishes so I don't have to start tomorrow in mess?"

He says: "If you spent half the energy cleaning it yourself as you did nagging me about it, it would be done already." Sounds horrible, but it doesn't feel that way anymore, it's just me telling. Like I can tell about casing the house, seething and screaming inside my head but there's nothing visceral left of it. Those body feelings - knowings from the inside out - evaporated into lingering caution. Why not go another round. Why?

Summer 1993. Been all week listening to Summer '93 shows. Buckeye Lake, Soldier Field, Deer Creek, Richfield. Never had such a good time. In my life before. I'd like to have it one time more. One good ride from start to end. I'd like to take that ride again. Lay on the lawn looking up at stars, boys in long hair and girls in long skirts. All of them spinning. Side by side so our arms and legs run along each other. I want to go back. Just for one night I want to go back. As long as I don't have to get from there to here again - I want to go back.

There's just all of summer and I can't put the details in place anymore. It's one long day spread over weeks, months. It's other consciousnesses and I can't reconstruct those either. I can talk about elastic time falling apart, bending and expanding. A day's journey that stretches over a single minute. Dissolving. Right there on the tip of my tongue, but I don't have the feeling. These stories are are just tellings.

*italicized lyrics borrowed from Robert Hunter.

dude, where's my car: Part II

OMG. My car is gone ... again. I think my glasses are in it. I can't put in my contacts in for another 5 hours b/c they are in a dissinfecting solution.

WTF? What's the lesson I'm supposed to be getting here? Becuase, I think I handled this with very good humor last time.

I'll be on my couch, blind, if anyone needs me.

wide awake in america

The latest jones is You Tube. Pair it up with Google Earth and go screaming through life, backwards. Mutlimedia memory guide. Rewind.

In 1985 I understood Bono's hair absolutely, but the lyrics to this song? Not so much. Twenty-some years down the path everyting spins itself, cirlces. The words are perfect, but that hair? Oh so stuning. Define stuning anyway you want. It's a multipurpose adjective.

What resonated then was rhythm of words. Words becoming the music itself. The gorgeous light of words with words. So powerful you could "get it" all the way into the bones. Reverberating through every cell, indefinable. Understanding transending understanding. Formless form. Quivering.

Bad - U2
If you twist and turn away.
It you tear yourself in two again.
If I could, yes I would
If I could, I would let it go.
Surrender, dislocate.

If I could throw this lifeless life-line to the wind.
Leave this heart of clay, see you walk, walk away
Into the night, and through the rain
Into the half light and through the flame.

If I could, through myself, set your spirit free
I'd lead your heart away, see you break, break away
Into the light and to the day.

To let it go and so to find away.
To let it go and so find away.
I'm wide awake.
I'm wide awake, wide awake.
I'm not sleeping.

If you should ask, then maybe
They'd tell you what I would say
True colours fly in blue and black
Blue silken sky and burning flag.
Colours crash, collide in blood-shot eyes.

If I could, you know I would
If I could, I would let it go.

This desperation, dislocation
Separation, condemnation
Revelation, in temptation
Isolation, desolation
Let it go and so to find away
To let it go and so to find away
To let it go and so to find away

I'm wide awake, I'm wide awake, wide awake
I'm not sleeping
Oh no, no, no.


Where were you on July 13, 1985? I was on the scratchy plaid love seat, in the air conditioning, all day looking out on summer through the sliding glass doors, MTV and Live Aid!



Know where I was then and know where I am, here and now. Wide awake, I'm not sleeping. Oh no

tin soldiers and nixon coming

My first political memory is all wrong.

It's Kent State, but not the massacre that happened 37 years ago today. No way could it be that. I was 6-and-a-half months old on May 4, 1970. I don't remember the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. I don't remember angry students burning the ROTC building or Gov. James Rhodes calling in the National Guard. But I remember Kent.

I remember driving out to Kent, mid-70's, about 45 minutes from my house through Ravenna, past the Ravenna Arsenal, where Ohio turns from flat to beautiful low rolling hills. We were going to visit my cousin and ice-skate, me on double blades in the rink. The wounds at Kent hadn't fully scabbed over, students were still hurt and pissed-off, and doubly so because all the talk that spring was about a new recreation center slated for construction on Blanket Hill above the commons - right over top of the ground where those kids were killed. As we drove through campus in the light blue, wood-panel Country Squire wagon everyone talked how it was dis-respectful to break that ground so soon. Other people were thinking it was time to move on. And, the sooner the better.

I got that four kids had been shot to death. I got that. But I didn't get the context so my mind filled in the blanks. I can still show the the picture it drew. Four students sitting on a blanket - Blanket Hill - having a picnic, bottle of wine. It's dark and out of nowhere a sniper comes by and picks them off. That's it. Funny. I can't figure out why I'd come up with that scene. I mean, I grew up eating dinner to the nightly news. I must have known Vietnam and protests and body counts and I don't remember any of that. I remember my first trip to Kent and my own vision of four kids killed drinking wine on a picnic blanket.

Kent State is HUGE in my memory. Near the top of every childhood fear. It goes Wicked Witch of the West and then Kent. The place still spooks me. Wicked was all the therapy I needed to finally find compassion for Elphaba and let go of that witch. Somewhere inside I knew that was just a story, too. Pretend. But Kent, Kent State was for real.

Kent State was right next door. It was the sixth grade teacher who, in 1980, 10 years after the shootings, told us she was so thankful for having cut class that day. If she had been where she should have, she'd have been crossing the commons at noon. She'd have been crossing the fire.

Kent State was the bullet hole through a sculpture outside of Taylor Hall, the journalism building. It was a trip to campus 1988 to see The Alarm sing Spirit of '76 in a lecture hall. I went with my first "real" boyfriend, Mark. We walked the commons and he showed me that bullet hole and I came home with a black t-shirt with the outline of a flower sticking out from the barrel of a gun and the words "Flowers are better than bullets" Allison Krause, May 3, 1970, printed on the front. On the back it said "We will not forget."

Across a row of dorm windows "National Guard 4, Kent State 0." We we're both students at branch campus that spring. Both living at home. At 18 I would have followed Mark just about anywhere. Anywhere but Kent. In fall 1988 he went there and I went to Columbus.

Kent State is the Memorial dedication and annual candlelight vigil I covered for my student paper in 1990, 20-years after the shootings. Walking just behind one of the victims' family.

Kent State is the re-occurring backdrop for my dreams and nightmares, popping back up in the strangest of places. Still. It's me in a dream in college running trough the memorial, lost and looking for my mom. Dark. It's a dream I had a few days into my first pregnancy, Amelia. In that dream Scott and I are going to visit someone in the hospital. We're driving through Kent's campus. Across a row of dorm windows, in pink block letters: "It's a GIRL."

I know the context now. I know the images. I know that the tragedy is not just the kids who should be grandparents now, it's also the guardsmen - kids themselves. Earlier this week, finally, proof. It was not an accident. It was not one frightened, itchy trigger finger that sparked 67 shots in 13 seconds hitting 13 students, four of them fatally. It was a command.

This week the evidence. A reel-to-reel tape recorded out a dorm window caught the command "Right here! Get Set! Point! Fire!"

We will not forget.

Write Now

Everything I know about me I find when my fingers press the keys. Everything I know about life comes out in broken sentences, fragments of a dream. Everything I know about love comes in every side of every circle where everything is everything. Everything I know about fear is this: is the door to truth is the door to freedom is the door to everything.

Everything I have to say to Jennifer Lauck and all the women Writing Life around her is Thank You, a hundred times, thank you all.

Jennifer has four workshops scheduled in three states on two coasts.

Go with an open mind.
Go with an open heart.
Go with a story to tell.
Just go.
The rest will just keep coming.