"Bye bye Carolina"

"It's OK if you cry," he said.  And so I did.  I cried with my face buried in his naked back.  I cried while the moon rose and his breath evened into sleep.  I cried as I grasped his hand and as the garbage truck lumbered down Mt. Vernon street.  I cried as the street lights turned off and dawn broke across our bed.

Our bed.  The one we had shared since I was 19.  Our bed.  The one that had seen 3 moves.  The one we bought with money I got as gifts for my college graduation.  Our bed.  The one I would never again share with him.  The one, in a few hours, I would dissemble with the special tools LL Bean gives you and pack into the back of a Penske truck. My bed.

By the time he stirred I wasn't crying anymore.

"We are some of the worst drivers in the country but we do have a sense of humor;)"

The ice storm in 1998 hit Maine during Christmas break.  Home from college you and I were suddenly kept apart by mother nature herself instead of just distance.  Whose idea was it to flee southern Maine for the mountains?  Tucked together in my mother's green Subaru we drove snowmobile trails to avoid downed power lines and sang along to the radio, windows down. We arrived at Sugarloaf to find the resort all but abandoned and were able to rent a condo for nearly nothing.  It felt like some grown up dream.  As though you and I had a future together instead of series of short affairs in between other relationships and trips home from school.

We built a fire and held each other while the storm covered the state in ice so thick it looked like glass.  A reflection of what life might have been in the cards had been dealt differently.

"The teeniest tiniest jar of Vaseline I've ever seen"

This morning the sky was gray and the alarm was more startling then usual.  Pulling me out of a anxiety fueled dream that left me out of breath and feeling though I was forgetting something or had forgotten something and that either way there was nothing I could do now.

In my dream I was begging you to come how. Except you were not a singular person. Instead a composite of everything that had ended in failure. Everything that continues to end in failure.  And so even now, hours after I have woken and had coffee and spent time answering emails, the sense of impending doom sits of my chest like the elephant who won't leave the room.

"I have a spare for Parquet Courts tonight. Anybody?"

Remember in high school we had that fight and you walked away.  You were the first person I had ever told about what had happened.  It seemed safe because it had happened to you too.  When my mom picked me up from school I was crying and she drove me to find you and on the side of Route 1 we fought for another hour.  My feet were frozen in my sneakers and we ran out of cigarettes and I didn't understand why we were fighting since I was sure you were the only person who could understand me.

When you went away for two weeks a month later you wrote me 14 letters, one for each day you were gone, and I did the same.  Some puppy dog love attempt to stay connected over a period of time that felt like forever to our 15 year old selves. Do you remember the moment you knew it was over?

"Clam chowda with lobsta roll love New England"

I am standing in my kitchen trying to figure out why I bought shallots.  I haven't cooked with them in years.  Since I stood in a large kitchen with a black and white checkerboard floor and a marble fireplace.  There, I used them more then regular onions.  Maybe because Whole Foods charged more for them and so they seemed more valuable.  But they were always in my kitchen.  At the ready for dishes of roasted vegetables.  For steak marinated. For quiches and side dishes.  For a person I know longer knew.

And so it must have been instinct or habit that led me to put them in my cart.  I didn't even realize I had purchased them until I got the groceries home and unloaded.  There in my kitchen with laminate wood floors and a large breakfast bar, amidst the whines from my toddlers for lunch, I found them.  Tucked away with the string beans.  I hold them tight in my hand for a moment.  I roll them over remembering the feeling of them.  Of then.

Before I drop them into the trash.

"Oscar the grouch revisited."

He puts on Pandora.  Trying to fill the empty space of our home with music.  For him, it is background noise.  Something to break the hard edges of silence.  For me, it is the soundtrack of my life playing.  Every song conjuring a moment.

Songs that bring memories of mornings spent sobbing in the shower.  Trying to convince myself, that someday the pain will become something I can live with.  Memories of my CD Walkman headphones, walking up Revere Street so sure that where I was heading was where I suppose to be going.  Driving over the bridge, the city of New Orleans behind me, the East breaking through the sunrise and fog, cigarette burning, radio on loud.  The walk home through Downtown Crossing where every step felt like I was both running away and towards something all at once.  Broken dishes. Loud voices. Expensive wine. Sleepless nights. Sushi. Abandoned dreams. New Orleans, Boston, Maine, Savannah, Virginia, Manchester, Pensacola, California, Ohio.

Memories of the person I used to be, regrets of who I am and the knowledge that I can not change a thing. That I can never go back.

The song switches again.  I am 18, walking home drunk through the Boston Common.  Trying to convince myself that I wasn't doing the walk of shame.  That it has been my choice to leave your warm bed at 3am.  That everything was going to be OK.

"14 years ago. Wow. Check us out."

At night when darkness settles around her like a blanket, and the kids are nestled in their beds.  When her husband is asleep and re-runs of Law and Order generate a constant stream of chatter to fill the silence.  She sits alone in a room that has never felt like home. A throw with woven images of Bethel from a lifetime ago covering her legs and a laptop keyboard never far from her fingers.  She fights hopelessness with every key stroke. Answers emails with vision blurred by tears.  She clenches her teeth against the rising tide of anger that fills her chest. Swallows down the resentment. Not just of today or last year. But of years wasted.

Out the window the sky is filled with small blinking stars.  Without thinking she starts to say the old childhood rhyme..."star light, star bright..." and then she remembers that most of the stars she can see burned out thousands of years before.  And that wishes don't come true anyway.

"Good advice. Not something you can rush..."

From her well appointed apartment on Mt. Vernon Street in Beacon Hill she could see down Walnut Street to the skating pond on the Boston Common.  It was a Sunday afternoon and the pond was covered with kids while their parents sipped Starbucks coffee and tried to shake off the post holiday malaise.  The holiday lights and good tidings replaced by the monotonous gray of January.  She was seated on her floor at the foot of her Christmas tree meticulously removing, wrapping and sorting each ornament.

This one was hers, her mother had bought it for her when she was 10.  A wooden gymnast captured in perpetual motion on the uneven bars.  This one was his, the Star Trek emblem his mother had made him when he was a child.  Hers, the glass unicorn from her youth, his the Mickey Mouse made into a nutcracker.  Theirs, the glass ball they had bought in Disneyland Paris.  Theirs, the "Our First Christmas" heart hung on a red ribbon he had bought for their first Christmas together.  The year they spent tucked in the Kenmore Square apartment shared with two friends.

How do you divide memories?  Divorce papers not filed yet and her husband of 7 years seated in a leather recliner watching football, but they both knew.  Both knew what they could not say.  That it was their last Christmas as a married couple.  That the next time boxes of Christmas ornaments were opened they would not be together.  That years after this moment one of them would unwrap one of those shared ornaments and surrounded by new families, a new spouse they would pause before carefully re-wrapping the memory in tissue paper and pack it away.  That there would be no place on the new tree for it.

2016- Back to Basics

My attempt at character writing in 2015 was not a success.  Mostly because I failed to devote the time necessary to create what was in my head.  The idea has not been abandoned and I am determined to create the story and characters I envisioned a year ago.

In the meantime we are going back to basics.  I am returning the original intent of this blog.  Capturing moments and memories inspired by Facebook posts.

"I love the east for many reasons, but sunrises are definitely at the top of the list."

 In my dream I am driving a car that is not mine.  I think I am alone in the car and I am driving on a road I have never been on before.  It is dark and my headlights barely illuminate the road in front of me.  Suddenly the road is dirt and the road beneath me is bumpy and a figure seems to materialize in my headlights.  I feel in the bottom of my stomach that I should be afraid, but I am not.  In fact I am calm.  So calm that I roll down my window.  The night air is so similar in temperature to me that I barley register the breeze on my skin.  

The figure stops and turns and I smile when I see it is you.  You left us just a few days before, living well beyond the original estimates of your doctors.  You smile back at me, 

"Keep your headlights on me hun," you say.  And I do.  I drive behind you with the window down, your familiar gate leading the way.  It is slow going but I am not impatient.  After what seems like both forever and as though no time has past we reach a small house next to the dirt road and you go inside.  I stop the car and follow you in through the open front door.  The house seems to create rooms as you walk through them and after a few moments you turn to me,

"I think I will be OK here," you say to me.  And you smile.

"Do you ever feel like you spend so much time running in circles that you're going to wear out the ground and fall right through?"

Heather Morris was 17 and a senior in high school.  She had dark brown hair that she worked very hard to straighten in the morning.  Her parents had certain expectations of her... that she would get good grades, date nice boys, go to college, look nice.  She had grown up in the exclusive Windsor Heights section of town.  That was if any part of this town could be exclusive.  The houses were big and all of the them had gotten cars for their 16th birthdays.  Her parents were college educated and if they wanted a drink they drove to the nearby city to have one.  It would have never occurred to them to stop by the bar on the way into town.

But Heather liked her friends that didn't live in Windsor Heights better.  She liked to hang out at their homes while their parents worked.  To smoke cigarettes in their living rooms.  It was like breaking the rules but not breaking the rules.  She felt so much pressure to succeed...that people like Kaylee didn't seem to experience.    Like there was a peace that came with knowing you would never leave this town.   It was not at Heather wanted to stay here forever, she had dreams that would take her far beyond the town line.  But the pressure her parents put on her to leave was crushing most days.  If this was such a bad place to be then why did they move here?

"Yes. And on that note I shall shut my eyes and look forward to a better day tomorrow, a new beginning."

Kaylee was 16 and knew the way some people knew they would be singers or preachers or veterinarians that she would never leave this town.  Her mother rented a 2 bedroom apartment across the street from the towny bar on the way into town.  From the small window above the sink she would watch aging home town heros come out for smoke breaks.  Like a real live music video for that song that she could never remember the name of.  Was it Hero or Glory Days? When she would stick her head in to see when her mom would be coming home the regulars would say she looked just like her. Same auburn hair, green eyes, sad smile. She looked so much like her mom that no one could even remember who her father was anymore.  Was is Bobby, her mom's long time high school boyfriend. Homecoming king and football star?  Or Reggie the science teacher everyone was sure her mother had slept with. 

She searched these men's eyes for the truth of how she had come to be.  But in Bobby's sunken dark eyes, clouded with alcohol and in Reggie ' s hidden behind glasses so thick he must be blind she saw nothing.  When she had Reggie for biology last year the town gossip had gone wild, but he had never acknowledged her as anything but a C student.  She hoped her looks could land her a husband but her legs were so long they looked like toothpicks under her dress and it seemed the one thing she had not gotten from her mother was her ample chest.  She was clumsy, plain, and just smart enough to know she wasn't smart enough.

"Chill airs and wintry winds! My ear has grown familiar with your song; I hear it in the opening year, I listen, and it cheers me long."

Jay was turning 40.  His brown hair was still a deep chestnut with not a hint of gray.  His pale blue eyes , that if had been a teenager today he would been accused wearing colored contacts were just as bright as when he was young.   After a decade in Long Beach working at a surf shop he had come home to be closer to his family.  Bringing with him his common law wife and 3 daughters.  He was nervous about coming back.

He had talked to Abercrombie and Fitch before he came back and had his final interview to be an assistant store manger the day after he arrived.  The manager had told him he couldn't ask him how old he was but to let the staff know he was in his late 20s.  So he traded the sunlight and sand of the surf shop for the windowless, strangely lit storeroom in the old town library.  He knew his healthy tan would soon be gone.  And that by returning he would too.

"That is one happy boy!!"

Ida lived on the same street as the high school.  In the 50 years she had lived there she had seen a lot of changes.  When the weather was warm she liked to take her afternoon tea onto her front pourch.  In her house coat and slippers she would watch the school day come to a close.   Some students would walk by and wave.  More would rev their engines as they passed. The car models changing from sports cars to trucks from Ford's to Toyota's. 

The school had grown in the number of students and in size. She had lived through the construction of the new auditorium, the raising of the football goals.  And the fashions. ..from the bralsss dresses of the 60's to the bell bottoms, the big hair, grunge and belly shirts.  And all the while Ida wore the house coat and slippers. While she was on the pourch with her tea.  When went to the end of the driveway for the mail.  Destined to always be just on the outside.

Bliss.

Chris had always thought she would leave this town.  When she was 18 and thin it seemed  like there might be hope for her. But genetics and time had not been her friend.  And now this was where her kids went to school. Walked the same halls she had.  Took Chemistry from the same teacher.  While she struggled  to make ends meet with her job as a teller at the bank on Maine Street, and struggled to get ahead by taking classes online after the kids went to bed.

Her only relief was when she slept. Her amber hair fanned out behind her, streaks of gray reminding her that she is no longer young.  But when she dreamed it was of someone she had never met.  She met him when he seated her at a restaurant that had been created from a converted barn. She was sure she was in her home town but could not seem to place the barn in the geography of the town.  He was handsome but still approachable and she was sure that he was both above her and beneath her all at once.  She was eating alone and he had walked her back to a quiet table by a barn window.  She was wearing a skirt which was how she knew it was a dream...her waking self would never show her spider vein covered calfs.

In her dream through stolen glances and the touch of a hand she felt something stir deep in her gut.  A feeling so far removed from her normal life she thought it was indegestion at first.

When she woke the emptiness was greater. She could hear the kids making a mess of the kitchen and the dog scratching to go out.  Her only hope for the day was she  would see him again tonight when she slept.  That maybe on her drive to the bank this morning she might noticed a building she had never seen before.  That somewhere in this town was a man she could fall in love with.  Someone who could look past the extra 50 pounds and glasses. The stretch markets and GED.  That there was still hope for her.

"This was super thick fog! It was really weird, and beautiful!"

Colin worked on a lobster boat.  His tall, thin frame had slowly built up muscle in his arms and neck.  He had a perfect farmers tan from his time on the boat and he always had a perpetual white line at the very top of his forehead from his Red Sox hat he used to keep the sun off the spot he knows he is thinning on the top of his head.  He didn't talk as much as he had back in high school.  Losing his college scholarship and having to come back to this town a failure stood in too stark of a contrast to how he left as a hero.  He didn't want to be a boat captain, was happy to be part of a team.  Contributing when he needed to but filling the day hauling and setting traps.  At the end of the week he would tuck his earnings into a Folgers Crystals can.  A slit cut into the cop of the plastic lid.

He rented an apartment made from the converted hay loft of a barn that one of his friend's parents owned.  He spent the summer months with no shirt on and the winter months wearing a ski cap, but it was cheap and no one bothered him and it was home.  In the mirror he did not recognize the man who looked back at him.  He couldn't trace the path of his wrinkles from yesterday to today.  He would hang up his ball cap and rub the salt water out of his eyes and look again.  But the image never changed.

"How could I ever discipline this?!"

Ms. Yellow had been a teacher in the town for more than 20 years.  She had grown up in Northern Maine, went to college at the University of Maine, Fort Kent and had never been south or west of Boston.  She was new in town when she took the English position but had added friends and a husband along the way.  She had also added lines on her face, and spotty memories of students who seemed to come and go like dreams.

When she started she wore her blond hair in lose curls, held half up in a clip with her bangs curled and hair sprayed into a pompom poof.  But even though she came by being a blond naturally when she started to go gray she dyed her hair a light brown and cut it into a bob more suited for NYC then rural Maine.  Sometimes she would paint her nails a deep red and watch her fingers while she typed papers for the online Master's program she had enrolled in.  Sometimes she would close her eyes while she sipped her coffee and imagine that she was somewhere exotic drinking a coffee she couldn't pronounce.

What kept her teaching was not her success stories.  The straight A students who went on to escape Maine winters for colleges in places like Virginia, Miami and Southern California.  It was not the students who challenged her in class, forcing her to re-think her positions on things and pushing her out of her comfort zone.  It was the ones she failed.  The ones who came with so much promise and so much trouble.  The ones who carried scars behind their eyes and who she knew were screaming.  She had become a teacher to reach those students...but there was usually not enough time in the day and she could never seem to do enough.  It was them she tracked on Facebook or through Google searches long after they left school by dropping out or graduating.  The ones she could have done more for, but for whatever reason didn't.

"No phone till Friday. Yikes"

In high school Justin had a bowl haircut.  It was in fashion in the early 90's and was a good fit for his straight blond hair.  He had been the middle school king.  Tall, handsome and smart enough.  Dated the most beautiful girl, popular, a star on the soccer field, the basketball court and the lacrosse field.  When he looked back now he was pretty sure he peaked in 8th grade.  Things fell apart pretty quickly once he got into high school...an unplanned pregnancy, failing grades and so no one was surprised by him when he dropped out in 10th grade to go and work on a lobster boat.  His hands now rough and calloused from more then 20 years on the water.  From pulling traps and blistering sun.  His blond hair in a buzz cut and always kept under a baseball hat.

When he would meet up with his friends, most of whom he had known his whole life what surprised them most was how little regret he had.  The boy born while he was in high school, JJ was 21 now, and he had joined his father on the lobster boat.  They lived together in a 2 bedroom cottage home along route one.  An old motel converted into a series of small apartment rentals.  They would go together most nights to the bar on the way into town.  Drink a Bud Light or two while Sammy sloppily pole danced against a wooden beam and the Red Sox game played on in mute.

He only had one regret.  And it was the one he was pretty sure he was being punished for.  It was such a small moment when he left her in the back of the pick-up truck.  Later, when that band put out that crappy soft rock song "we were merely freshman" it would make his chest seize when it came on the radio.

"Broke down and hired a monthly house cleaner...and feeling pretty damn good about it!"

When Em returned to New Orleans in a few months she would move in with her boyfriend who had already secured them a small Creole house deep in the Quarter.  Em's family had been living in the area since they came over from France generations ago.  She was a shining example of southern wealth.  Everything about her was understated but yet old money seemed to drip from her.  Currently a senior at an almost Ivy League school hidden amongst the snow banks of New England her heritage was unimpressive to her classmates. No matter how perfect her black hair looked, how straight and white her teeth were, how well spoken she was.  Here amongst the Mayflower set she was a second class citizen.

She had learned in her 3 years at the school to quiet her voice.  Even though she did not have a southern accent persee, there was something in her tone that made her stand out.  She had joined a soreity that had deep roots in the south and it was here and only here where she felt as she belonged.   She had 6 months left of her senior year but her mind and heart was already living in that small cottage on St. Ann Street.  Where coffee came with chickery and she knew her place.

Facebook tells me that 2 years ago I posted a picture of Baxter "easing" into 2013 - I wanted to assure you that nothing much has changed;)

Sammy rented a trailer on the edge of town.  It wasn't in one of those fancy parks with cable hookups and community picnic tables.  She couldn't afford that luxury.  She had grown up here.  Her parents living in one of the expensive neighborhoods and then they left.  She still wasn't sure how at 35 she had ended up back here.  Her hair was long and blond like it had been in high school but instead of looking shinny and healthy it looked broken and frizzy.  Too much hair dye maybe? Too many years in the Florida sun?

Her fingernails were bitten to the quick.  Her eyes sunken and sallow. No one ever carded her when she bought her smokes.  She would like to blame her absent, alcoholic parents. Or the boy she thought she loved.  When the weather was nice she would sit outside the door to the pale green trailer and watch the road leading into town.  The makeshift ashtray made from a Folger can by her feet. A bottle of white wine between her knees. She had given up on using glasses long ago.

When night fell she would sometimes make her way to the bar on the road into town. Most nights it was the same crowd, the losers from her high school who back then she didn't give a second look to and now she would give bjs in the bathroom for a drink. 

"its that time of year again. don't let that stop you from paying a call, just don't forget your gloves"

James worked his whole life on the family farm.  His hair was gray around the edges and his skinned lined and leathery from the sun.  His hands scarred and calloused for years of work ached with early  stages of arthritis.    When he walked he preferred his right side. A suspicious fall from the barn loft as a teenager leaving him slightly lame.  He was at his best in a large group, telling tall tales about his farm, his life. 

He lived in an outbuilding on the far end of the bean field.  His parents still occupying the main house.  And when January came and brought the snow he would walk a half mile through deep drifts to the barn where he would catch a ride with one of the draft horses the rest of the way to the main house...and the driveway where his car was parked. 

2015- The Year of the Character

In 2014 I focused on writing short stories inspired by the Facebook posts of my friends.  It was a mostly fun, sometimes exhausting and occasionally illuminating project.  The challenge I have given to myself for 2015 is to write 365 character descriptions again inspired by the posts of my friends on Facebook.  I am seeking to place all of these characters in one town in Maine.

Like my work in 2014 these will be mostly short and will not be about the persons whose post I have selected.  Instead, in only a few paragraphs I will seek to bring to life a fictional character.  If I do it well you may feel as though you just ran into an old friend, or had a good laugh with the server behind the counter.  It is the challenge to, without the benefit of visual imagery or context of a story to create a compelling character that you wish you knew, are sure you are friends with or hope you never cross the path of.

Wish me luck!