10-year-old certainty

I still greet my dad with, “hey, old man.” It started as a joke sometime around graduation from college. As a military family we are Southern by inclination if not always location and respect was an expectation in any interaction with someone older than you. Hell, I’m almost 40 and I still pepper my language with “ma’am” and “sir”. 

“Old man” isn’t respectful, but crossing into true adulthood, where I’d pay my own bills and go my own way, it was allowed. The moniker was taken as I intended, a term of endearment, and a gentle jab. I didn’t really think my dad was old but he was older than me so…old man ribbing it was. 

His response was always, “better than the alternative,” a nod to the idea that getting old was better than being dead. I have to agree with that perspective. Dad has lots of thoughts on aging. When I chastised my parents for their inability to remember when and how long they remained engaged they both told me to, “go ask your aunt Sunday.”  At that point they’d been married about 25 years (now its 45 years and they really don’t remember).

“How can you not remember?” I asked, incredulous. “Keep living and you’ll see,” my dad responded with a smile.

He was right. There are any number of things I don’t remember now. Things I was certain there was no need to write down because – who forgets important things. Apparently forgetting runs in my family or maybe it is my age bracket; either way, if you ask me now what 10-year-old me wanted to be when I grew up I’m at a loss. 

The military brat within has to first do calculations about where we were living so that I can at least picture my life. It sounds silly to anyone who hasn’t moved much, but in my family we always start with “where were we?” as grounding.  At 10 we had left Florida and were living in Texas.  That means the Hinkle house. 

If we were in the Hinkle house than I was hanging with the Dudettes – a group of friends that for some reason that was a cool way to identify ourselves (whatever…we were 10). But that’s where I draw a blank. I remember sleep-overs and walking home from school. I remember my Girl Scout Leader and cutting my finger while chopping cabbage, and nightmares about my fourth grade teacher Mr. Phiester.  I do not remember what I wanted to be when I grew up. I’m not sure I thought about being anything other than a 10-year-old. 

Fast-forward a few years to when I was 12 or so and I remember wanting to be everything…I concocted a way to design houses using rooms that fit together like puzzle pieces so people could decide what their homes looked like, I had an advertising sketchbook filled with imaginary products and the marketing plan for each one, I constructed a paper “movie projector” and sketched out “films”, I considered child psychology, I wrote plays for me and my twin cousin to act out with our Cabbage Patch Kids, and I wrote poetry: 

the sun and the moon go to war each day and the one that wins is the one that stays;but he doesn’t stay long ‘cuz the other comes along and its war all over again.

I don’t remember thinking I was going to “be” any of those things. Not really. In my mind, I was those things. In my mind I was revolutionizing architecture and selling amazing (if fictitious) products and writing moving poetry. 

In my 10-year-old brain, as far as I can remember it now in my 40-year-old one, there was no need to think too heavily about what might be in light of what already was.

That differs greatly from where I sit now. 

Now I know architecture has a lot of math and, because I was math-phobic in high school and college, it vanished from my “could be” horizon. Psychology, especially of the child persuasion, struck me as depressing, and writing took a more utilitarian turn – I majored in journalism and had a short stint as a journalist through college. All of those things I was somehow faded away.

The work I do now did not exist in my 10-year-old brain. I didn’t know about non-profits (although my 10-year-old self knew about profit…I once made $22 off a box $1.49 box of brownie mix selling slices door-to-door) or international aid/development work. International development was my job until just a few years ago. And what I’ve transitioned to, working stateside in violence prevention, did not register at all when I was 10 because I didn’t know anything of violence. Lucky me. 

More than what I’ve chosen to do professionally in my adult life, the greatest differences between me-way-back-when and me-inching-up-in-age-now, is certainty. 

My 10-year-old self was pretty confident. The things I fancied doing I was certain I did well. So certain, that in my early days of writing I would cry big raindrop tears when given any critique on what I’d produced. And while I’m glad I learned to take critique as a tool for improvement rather than an assault on my talent, I do miss the certainty that what I offer the world is something it needs and will be better for having. In the absence of that certainty I find myself asking now what I never asked then, what the heck am I going to be when I grow up?

Courtesy of the DailyPost writing prompt:Ballerina Fireman Astronaut Movie Star.

Sparklebright

She had the brightest smile. Bright like whites in the summer sun. Bright like kittens purring against your hand. Bright like nothing bad had ever happened. 

It has been so many years I can’t tell you how we started talking, or what mental or physical state I was in when we did. It was after my accident. My head was bandaged but I don’t know how far into the AZT I was. I don’t remember how sick I might have been. Only that when I remember it now, through the gauzy haze of nostalgia and toppled into the memory pit of a time, I can see her smiling as bright as anything, laughing as lightly as dandelion fluff. 

My trauma was obvious. Written all over my face with bandages, spiky stitches, and the constant nausea for my post exposure prophylaxis (a precaution against the unknown origin of the hospital needles). And if it were later, and the stitches were already gone, then my trauma was still obvious, with a raw jagged line running through a patch of shaved scalp. 

Her ailment was her secret to tell. 

We sat on a bench I think, waiting for appointments? Lingering after appointments? Sharing the same bed and breakfast? I can’t recall details; only that we talked and shared and laughed.

I have a memory of her joyful description of her house in Malawi. Her washing clothes in the doorway. Even talking about the mundane chores of rural Peace Corps life seemed pleasant with her, not in the obnoxious way where you want to shove a sponge in someone’s face, but in the…hmmm, I should try it her way, kind of way.

We talked about her travels. About making friends and keeping in touch. We talked about the difficulties of having no shared language. This was before google translate or babblefish. This was us sitting in a country whose internet, I was sure, was run by a lone hamster dying of thirst on a rusted out wheel.

I don’t remember exchanging addresses. How could I remember that when I can’t remember where she fits between the first time I threw up (from the smell of dinner -it didn’t matter that I was starving -my body heaved in revolt and I remained famished) and lying on the floor of my assistant Peace Corps Director’s office, under the air conditioning for 8 hours at a stretch for the sake of cooling my nausea. She is in there somewhere- a shining beacon, a moment when maybe I wasn’t fixated on sickness or pain.

I returned to my village a moth after my accident. Thinner. Weaker. Skittish of loud noises and sudden stops. I made my rounds in my village. Reacquainted people with me, attempted to find my place in the now strangely foreign place that until weeks before, had been my home. 

Sometime later – in my head it is February but that isn’t right because I’d been home barely a week by that point- I got a package in the mail. Inside were bath salts “for my bucket bath” …sweet smelling reminders of home. Beneath those envelopes wrapped in plastic bags, was a bag of marshmallows. 

Sitting in the Peace Corps doctor’s office, comparing Malawi to South Africa, sharing the yearnings of youngish people so far from home tangled in with adventures and lamentations…she remembered. She remembered what I said I longed for so far away from familiarity and the comforts of home. 

Through the mail, across the miles, her so removed from the sub-Saharan life we had discussed and shared…she remembered me. She remembered me and mailed me a piece of home.

Fifteen years later, the thought of her still makes me attempt a smile as bright as hers.

Photo Graveyard

Photos are scattered across my living room floor. Piles, slightly askew, marking different places in my life- be they time or geography. Me with straight hair smiling and scar-less. Me as a toddler, chubby legs and the same fat cheeks. Me in South Africa, wasted down to bone after my car accident. 

Me post-accident, in Swaziland

I pulled them all out with the hopes of bringing order to the chaos. For years my mother has tried to coax me into making scrapbooks. She bought one for my high school graduation, I bought one when I returned from the Peace Corps. They both have strong beginning, they have pictures and journal entries pasted inside. But a few pages in, and the glue stopped, there are photos slipped between the pages with a hint of my intentions. And then at the end it all tapers off…first to a page filled with photographs without a common theme or message and then no photographs at all. 

I grow bored. I become irritated, limited by my horrendous handwriting and too lazy to transcribe everything to the computer so it can be printed neatly. So the books sit on shelves, a half memory of a time long ago.

My mother encouraged the scrapbooks because she understood I wouldn’t remember things forever. I scoffed to myself, how could I forget such important events. But important as they were, they have been crowded out by so many other things. Other events, other cities, other people. Hell, some of it was knocked clean out of my head from an accident – some blotted by a desire to forget.

My high school bestie

I pulled out the photos on my floor the day, and traveled back for a moment, into the space of the places that are captured in those glossy squares. The ones I remember clearly. The ones that hit me roundly in my nostalgia. Sitting with my head on the shoulder of my best friend in high school. We spent so many hours on that couch. More hours talking…about what…we have no idea now. 

There is a photo of me dangling by a bungee cord over the Zambezi River.  I remember the exhilaration of actually jumping off a bridge- ignoring every survival instinct in my body and hurtling myself, arms spread like wings, toward the horizon. I remember the exhilaration morphing to pain as the cord settled and I dangled from my ankles while I waited for them to pull me to safety. And of course I remember the Egyptian man who told me, as I walked back to the starting point on the bridge, “you have the most magnificent scream.” And I did.

There are so many photos, my first boyfriend hugging me close at New Year’s, 10 years after our first kiss, my college friends, my Peace Corps ones. My family. 

Staring at them I understand and don’t, why we take them. I love the moment of love and joy and even the tinge of sadness that is embedded in each one. The memories that shock me back in time and then propel me back to exactly where I am, sitting on my couch flipping through pictures.

I don’t know what to do with them all.

Arranging them into books feels so strange. I heard an article on NPR a few months ago that talked about how in a recent year we took more photos than had been taken in all of the years before. All of them. 

My grandparents, back when folks dressed for photos

We used to arrange our photos into books because they were select and special. We arranged them because they were, if not quite few, at least precious. A smattering of baby photos, some family shots on vacation.

Now I have pictures of a friend sitting on the beach, a bunch filled with sand dunes (trying to get the perfect angle), one of friends piled on a single chair for no particular reason at all. 

I can’t imagine who will look through these. I can’t imagine they will be cherished like the two black and white photos I have in frames of my grandparents. Pictures taken back when folks dressed for the occasion. Or like the school picture I have of my father when he was 14. We have so many pictures to choose from how will any of them stand out as special?

Partly I feel lazy. Some images I have seared into my heart, never to be forgotten even years later. There is no picture of me saying goodbye to Ess at the airport. But I can see it so clearly. Too clearly, it hurt so badly I can recall not just the image but the pain itself. Palpable. No camera was necessary.

But you can’t share a memory the way you can share a picture. The exactitude is lost in a sea of metaphors in speech and the pieces of the moment we tuck away and reserve just for ourselves. Photographs tell a seemingly whole story- even if it isn’t always complete. 

The reality is these photos will go back into a box. A little more orderly. Possibly with some notations of dates or geography, but back into the box where they belong.