211

I was always envious of bands that shot to stardom.  Comics who landed on Saturday Night Live.  Actors who won an Oscar on their first movies.  Assholes.

I realized later that these "overnight successes" weren't really.  These were people who worked and slaved unrewarded for years, decades before finding fame and glory.  The "sudden" part was only my perspective.  I began hating instead people who made home videos that went viral, lottery winners and fortune inheritors.  Those were the undeserving twats.

I mostly hated them while I was in my slaving away years.  Who every knows if your unpaid work will ever pay off.  A creative art isn't like working your way up in a company.  In a company, you get paid no matter what you do.  When you're working in a creative art, you practice and practice and work at your craft completely unpaid and unrecognized without any inkling if it will pay off eventually at all.

Standing in my crappy apartment surrounded by crumpled notes and a beat to hell drum set I was the asshole.  All my parents' disheartening advice was sneaking back into my brain, this time betraying me even more by using my own voice to say it.

210

Angel Harrison was my best friend and she was the toughest, most independent girl I knew.  We were four.  During naptime, we'd edge our nap rugs closer and closer to the toys on the floor until we were playing, heads close together, whispering behind the wooden dollhouse.  The nursery school teachers would shush us, and I'd pretend to sleep, but Angel would keep playing.

The next year, in kindergarten, we were in the big school--the elementary school--down in the round rooms at the far end of the building.  Three rooms opened off of a round, central play area that held the big toys: climbing bars and mats and slides and balls.  It was in there that Angel announced to me that she was leaving.  "I'm leaving," she said.  I protested because that was how I was.  "You can't!  It's school."  As if that were explanation enough.  Angel's fat, black braids swung and clicked their beads together as she shook her head.  "Nope.  I'm going, and I'm going right now."  True to her word, she headed for the door and was down the hallway before Mrs. Panagopoulos raced to drag the five year old back.  What I will never forget is Angel's small figure, standing tall in her floral, little girl dress and Mary Jane shoes, walking confidently out that door.  "Wow," I thought.  "I could never do that."

I found out later I could, but it wasn't for another three years, and by then, Angel was long gone.

209

The silence of the warm evening after driving for so long ran in their ears, and the natural cacophony of crickets and frogs slowly became discernible, as did the clarity of the night once the lights from the car went dark.  Soon, the lightning bugs were the brightest points in the dark.  The stars above shining brighter and brighter as their eyes adjusted.  They picked their way carefully into the field, he tucking the car keys carefully into his jeans pocket; she carrying the picnic blanket.  Silently, they agreed upon the spot, and helped each other lay the blanket over the tall grasses.  Their bodies flattened the blanket into a square room, walled and roofed by nature.

208

Time flies.  Time crawls.  I feel it like a wind on my skin, getting under my clothes and lifting my hair.  It gives me goose bumps and, sometimes, it pushes me, makes me hunch against it and draw up a collar or button a coat.  Then there was the day I sat, and I controlled time.

207

Shirley created a life sized reproduction of Stonehenge in her backyard.  It was by no means approved by the community planning board.  Her neighbors whispered nervously over hedges and fences, wondering what was going to come of it.

206

Living on a street like this in a fast-deteriorating part of a declining city was less difficult than those not acquainted with the neighborhood would think, but it was more disturbing.  Sheila's house had been broken into twice, but nothing had been stolen.  The first time, the man left when she screamed, and she thought maybe he was a squatter rather than a burglar.  The second time, she came downstairs, baseball bat in hand, to find the burglar passed out in a puddle of vomit on her kitchen floor.  Sheila made coffee, working around the man's snoring form, and sat, watching him, baseball bat across her robed lap, until he woke.  He cleaned up his mess, had two cups of coffee, and left before dawn.

205

How dry, how dreary, how hopeless it is to see the same view day after day.  No, I revise that.  It is only hopeless to those who wish to see a new view.  Those who wish sameness and consistency and predictability revel in the same view and come to cherish it.  Those who wish to view alternative vistas, however, are slowly killed by sameness; their hope drained away, and replaced by a cold death: resignation.

To pluck oneself from the sameness takes greater and greater effort as the dreary days drag on.  An object in motion tends to stay in motion, while objects at a standstill need greater effort to budge.  Or something like that.  Sameness ossifies.  Consistency creates deeper and deeper ruts.  I will be dried, stiff and buried before I am medically dead.