Growth. Over.

I'm sorry.

Why is apologizing the first thing I did when I had to tell everyone I had a tumor?  "I'm sorry," I said, like I failed them.

This is how I die.

Some people fight, but why am I ready?  I haven't even felt sick.  "This is how I die," I told myself, before there was even a prognosis.

I haven't finished.

Regret?  Drive?  Or just a statement?  "I haven't finished," I told the universe matter-of-factly.

I'm sorry.

The Past is Always

I am compelled to find things of my past.  The older I get, the more I seek those images and items that remind me of my childhood.  The more I lose the items and the people I once had, the more I long to see them and be reminded of the feelings of comfort and safety and love and mystery and adventure and potential and of hidden worlds where everything that ever was still is.  A nubbly sofa.  A red, round chair.  A green carpet.  Wood ceiling.  Quietly, they wait inside me.  The feelings bubble up and my Daddy is there.  My Mommy is there.  My home is still Home.

Memory Scents

Sheets folded in neat piles in the linen closet.

A squashed snake in the road.

Incense on clothes hung together.

Play-Doh, Crayola, Silly Putty.

Fresh cut grass.

Water from the garden hose.

Dandelions.

Fresh baked chocolate chip cookies.

Chocolate chip cookies inside a Ziploc bag opened at two in the morning.

Learning the Limits

As a child I learned the limits of my personality.  The limits I had for expression.  The limits I had for patience.  The limits others had for me.  I learned quickly that I should be quiet and think before I spoke.  It took me much longer to actually be quiet, but at least I knew I should.  I expressed instantly and passionately and had my foot in my mouth more often than not.  I learned socializing meant agonizing about it later, so I began to avoid socializing.  I thought I had enormous patience, except with myself, but it turned out I have zero patience with people who are false or who try for attention or who aren't living to the tops of their intelligence.  Others couldn't seem to tolerate me very well.  I learned my personality was too big, too loose, too unpredictable, too weird.

Highlight reels of my social transgressions play at night.  No matter how distant the experience becomes, it replays to torture me.  I try not to add to the reels, but, even as an adult interacting with other adults, it still happens.  Only now, I know instantly when a moment will become A Moment.  Shame, guilt, embarrassment, regret, self-loathing churn in the gyre of my mind.

Is You?

The answer to, "Is you a good boy?" is always yes.  Yes, you are a good boy.  "Who is my little buddy?" also has a standard answer: you is.  You is my little buddy.  Fluffy head, wittle paws, damp wittle chinny chin-chin are all possessed by the same good little buddy.

Douglas G.

Douglas died in 1995.  Twenty-six years later, a former elementary school classmate tried searching his name again on the internet.  If you had told Douglas at any point while he was alive that someone in the future would be using a computer to search worldwide records for his name and picture, he may not have believed you.  He would have been fairly certain, however, that his obituary would be written by then.  By then, he was dead for three years longer than he had been alive.

Jessica thought it likely that he wouldn't have even remembered her.  After all, the last time they had seen each other was 5th grade.

Homeless Homeowners

It is possible to own a home and be homeless.  We're about to do it!  Here's how:

We do not have enough money to get a decent mortgage for a decent house.  We were also too poor to carry cash to a city tax auction and compete with contractors and "investors" for dregs.  We are, however, clever enough to dig into the system and buy a city tax auction house outside of the auction so we could prepare and get a personal loan to pay for it.  We are also persistent enough to make it work!  However...

The city said the house was in "normal" condition.  It is not.  The city said they had NO inspection reports, they said they did NOT go inside, and they could not tell us anything about the property.  We can tell them that there is no plumbing, no heat, no doorknobs, a roof that needs complete replacement, and a back porch that is dragging off the back of the house.  We have also found out that the only reason the home was boarded over was because of neighbors begging for it--for years.  Lesson learned: the city knew the condition of the house, they let it get worse, and they had the nerve to ask for any money for it.

We love our house!  We spent all our first months, from September to December, cleaning out the garbage, attempting to get contractors to give us estimates, and bringing over boxes of our stuff we won't need right away.  We tried to apply for the grant that would get us just about everything we'd need to fix the house and live in it, but you have to live in the house to get the grant.  ?!?  After a HUGE struggle, we got special house insurance for a house that was being fixed up that was cancelled after a month because they said the house needs to be fixed up and we need to live in it.  ?!?

So we're now renting our apartment, paying for a personal loan, and paying taxes on our house.  We haven't been to the house in over a week because temperatures are less than 10 degrees, and, as you may remember, we have no heat.  The struggles of low-income people to make it out of their low-income living conditions is real.  Really real.  Because what happens when we can't afford to rent?  We use up all the money we've managed to save for fixing our house.  We can't move in if we can't fix it.  We can't get a home equity loan or house insurance or a grant until we live in it.  What do we do?

The plan: visit the department that manages the grants and tell them we're about to become homeless homeowners unless they put us on the grant waiting list (yes, there's still waiting!)  We look to rent a scary-cheap apartment in the same city as our house.  We wait until the temperatures go to above freezing, go back, keep cleaning, keep moving, try to fix more windows, try to remediate the basement ourselves, and maybe even try to dismantle the back porch ourselves.  In the meantime, keep plugging along, trying to increase our income.

Homeless with a home.  In 10 degree weather (lows below zero.  Fahrenheit, in case you were wondering.)  How does it happen?  People like us struggle to get up.  How will we make it work?  Through ingenuity and persistence, like we've always done.

Ultrasound

The ultrasound room is dim and has the low, gentle hum of equipment.  The exam table is covered in cloth, not paper, and patients get a pink cloth gown.  The technicians are soft-spoken and reassuring.  They also have no news to give because the images are sent to a doctor to read, somewhere, in an office.  It is warm, comfortable, and quiet.

House Hunting Discoveries

When you look at houses for sale in our price range, which is low, you can see how people live in poverty.  Most of the houses are rental properties being sold by the landlords.  The descriptions include phrases like, "Investor's Dream!" and "Money Maker!"  Often they tout how much the tenants are paying, how much they would love to stay, and how much more you could charge them for the privilege.  My "low price range", by the way is less than $50,000, and usually much less.  If it goes under $20,000, however, tenants are usually no longer in the pictures, and you rather get description phrases like, "Ideal Fixer-Upper!" and "Choose Your Own Walls!" and still, "Investor's Dream!"

Looking at the pictures of these houses, aside from the trickery and outright lies realtors and homeowners are trying to push, you see the lives of the poor who are living in a house that may soon be yanked out from under them.  You see chairs surrounded a space heater whose vent has blackened the wall.  You see kitchens and bathrooms crammed under the eaves of the attic because there's another apartment crammed into a space that should have been for storage.  You see stoves in front of doors and windows.  You see futons or just plain mattresses for beds.  You see cheap metal and plastic clothing racks tilting with hangers.  You see fourteen toothbrushes in mugs in the bathroom.  You see four loaves of bread, ten boxes of cereal, and six bags of various cookies on the refrigerator, the microwave, and the counter.  You see cheap, hollow-metal tube furniture.  You see a 50" television covering the front window, and the TVs are always on Maury.  You see painted paneling.  You see grey indoor/outdoor carpeting in every room.  You see sloppily painted tan walls with grease marks at head and hand level.  You see gap-riddled, cheap, plastic flooring made to look like wood.  You nearly always see words on the walls: "Family", "Love", "Dream".  The toilets are open.  There are tubes and jars and jugs of personal products on the dressers.  There is laundry in every room.  Plates with food in the kitchen, on the coffee table, and in the bedrooms.  A slightly surprised child staring into the camera, wondering what it means that this person has been photographing their home.

How to be Poor and Buy a House

Cash-poor people can buy a house.  It's a struggle, and many routes easy for those with money are closed, but if you can be patient and be okay with a house not-quite-of-your-dreams, you can do it.  I know because we finally did it ourselves.

I've read plenty of "inspirational" stories of people with "no money" flipping houses and getting rich, but their version of "no money" is not really no money.  They have a house they sold, or stocks they sold, or money they could borrow from family.  We had no house to sell, no major savings, and no family who could lend to us.  We pursued several avenues to a house, and while any could have possibly worked, only one finally did.  We tried:

• City auction
• "Homestead" housing
• Traditional bank lender
• Specialty "low-income" lender
• Asking to be given a city-owned house

Each of these paths had problems, but sometimes they have worked for other people so we tried them all.  To see how you match up with our personal version of "no money", you need to know our details:

• We make less than $25,000 a year and we need just about all of it to live (rent, food, gas, utilities, etc.)
• We have approximately $5,000 in money we can liquidate to cash (not IRAs, which I refuse to touch!)
• We have no debt--no credit cards, no car payments, no loan payments of any kind.

I understand others may be in more dire financial straights than we are, but you can see we are not in a position to lay down big bucks, nor do lenders offer us much in the way of a mortgage.  In the end, it was the "simple" use of huge balls of brass that got us a house, and even more gigantic balls that helped us to make it habitable.  The only way we got our house was by asking to have it from the city.  It had no plumbing, missing radiators, a leaking roof, and a back door that was wide open.  It was filled with garbage, including a stairway used as a feral cat litter box.  The first floor toilet was broken--in half!--and the iron fire escape was pulling free from the back of the house.  The sofits were see-through with rot and it was in a questionable neighborhood.  We asked for it.  We got it.

We cleared out the garbage, secured the doors and replaced broken windows, put a tarp on the roof leak, and lived without water or heat.  We couldn't afford to rent and fix a house, so we had no choice.  Our relatively low rent was to go to repair savings, and in the meantime, we were on a one-year waiting list to get a repair grant that could fix our roof.  We polished up our brass balls and started asking for free to cheap renovation help.

Obedience

She didn't know how old he was, but he was in school, so he was older and knew things.  He wanted to play doctor in her tree fort, and she loved to play doctor so she went with him.  He had his "doctor's tools", which were a couple of dark grey landscaping rocks from around her house.  She was good at following directions and was proud of it.  She lay down on the wood floor of the fort, only the top of her blonde curls to be glimpsed through the doorway, should anyone look.  Her brother was friends with his brother and they lived just a few houses down.  As directed, she pushed her shorts and underwear down to her ankles and lay still, arms at her sides, while the examination began.

Meth Lab Arson

Sirens by themselves tend not to disturb us anymore.  Now it takes a combination of sirens plus the rev of multiple engines, or our living room being bathed in alternating colored strobe lights.  We finally paused our movie, an early 1970s futuristic German movie about computers where there were long shots of people not looking at one another and faces reflected in mirrors, to look outside.  The alley behind the houses across the street was bathed in headlights, which was the only reason we saw a plume of dark smoke.  A house that faced the alley was burning, which was enough for us to put on actual clothes and shoes to go look.  It seemed like the whole neighborhood had waddled down to ogle the destruction.

Abuse Dynamics

I swore I'd never be the kind of girl who ran behind her boyfriend, crying.  Where the boyfriend stomps on ahead, brow lowered and thrust forward, lips compressed, dropping the door on the girl as she stumbles along, begging for him to stop and just talk for a moment and she's sorry, even if she doesn't know why, and if he would only give her a chance.  The kind of girl who would sob that she wished he would stop and talk, while at the same time knowing and secretly dreading his dead-stop and one-foot pivot, rounding on her like a bear, pointing his finger or even raising his fist.

Loving Siblings

"What makes you think I don't love my brother?"

"The way you talk about him."

"And what way is that?"  She finished pouring and set the kettle back with a clunk.

"You're always telling me stories about how awful he was to you.  How awful he is to you."

"Yeah, and he's my brother, so I can say he's a jerk and still love him, can't I?"

"I wouldn't have thought so."

"Well, I do.  He is a jerk; he is my brother; I love him.  You, however, can have no opinion."

Wilson on Erie

The sea of grasses stretched out to the real sea, invisible beyond the line of curving trees, but sensed with sound, and smell, and taste.  The grasses mimicked the sea waves without the finishing roar on rocks, crushing them into sand.  A gull cried above the hissing rushes and circled away.  Lena watched him disappear.  She watched the grasses undulate.  She stood as still as one of the grave statues behind her.

Weird Kid

When I was a kid, I wanted to have some sort of debilitating disease, like polio, so I could wear leg braces and have those arm-cuff crutches.  I drew pictures of myself in a little memo book, the kind small enough for a pocket and with a plastic spiral on top.  I drew myself wearing a numbered jersey, a thing I never owned, legs strapped into braces, arms locked into crutches, and smiling hugely.  What did my therapist think of that when I confessed to it?  She thought it was because I wanted to be pitied and coddled.  I stopped seeing that therapist because that analysis was so very wrong.  I didn't have any psychological training, I was the one who cracked up at work, I was the one who drew myself as a cripple when in reality I was physically normal, and even I could psychoanalyze my childhood daydreams.  I wanted to have a debilitating disease not so I could be pitied, but so I could overcome that disease.  I wanted to be heroic.

Common Ground 1

The phone ringer was on too loudly, but Claire didn't want to miss the phone call she didn't want to have.  Claire and James both startled out of their nap, but she was on her feet and answering even as James groaned and rolled over.

It wasn't the call.

Claire felt sick anyway and pushed memories and sadness and worry down deep again as she hung up on a telemarketing robocall, cursing them for scaring her.  Irrationally, she wanted to write to whatever company it was to tell them it was cruel to call her uselessly and make her think her father may be dead.  She pushed the thoughts away again and concentrated on blissful ignorance.

Inspiration #12

One of the most heart-wrenching situations is to be a person with a dream and the drive to be a clown, with absolutely no talent.  Not even the talent to be a talentless clown, who can elicit laughter through bumbling.  Only the kind of clown who is confused for a homeless person, who elicits only pity, and who frightens the very young.


First line inspiration from "The God of Dark Laughter" by Michael Chabon: "Thirteen days after the Entwhistle-Ealing Bros. circus left Ashtown, beating a long retreat toward its winter headquarters in Peru, Indiana, two boys out hunting squirrels in the woods along Portwine Road stumbled on a body that was dressed in a mad suit of purple and orange velour."

What would you name your town if you could rename it?

We lived in the city when they first started experiencing sewer problems, like the sinkholes.  I remember Main Street being blocked for repairs, and we even walked by one further up, in the nice neighborhood.  I would stand as close to the curled down blacktop as I dared and try to peer inside.  I even hopped on the edge a little, hoping I could get part to fall in.  Though every day the hole expanded, I couldn't get it to move with my body weight.  Knowing now what happened, it sure was foolish of me to jump near a hole.  I get chills when I think of how ignorant I was, we all were, before the collapse.

Assuming that you one day become a parent, what one thing do you hope to teach your children?

I am shadowed by the ghost of my unconceived daughter.  She was never born, nor even a glimmering.  There was no opportunity, nor time enough, nor even retrospect opportunity.  She wasn't, except in my wishes for myself and for her.  Her name is Alaura.  She is my daughter who never was.  She missed all that I would teach her, and I missed all that she would give me.  My body is unchanged, except by time.  My legacy is mine and mine alone.  I will not create life to remember me.  I am only here to remember.  And I remember my daughter who never was.