Monthly Archives: April 2012

Ten Wonderful Things

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I had a tequila sunrise in a bowling alley for brunch.

 

This movie:

Fresh basil is growing in the garden.

My daughter danced with me and didn’t want to let go.

A grandmother took a broken piano from my garage; when it’s fixed she’ll teach her neighbor children how to play.

There is chocolate in a cigar ashtray shaped like a cat.

 Brian Jay Stanley wrote an essay from which I want to quote every line, notably, “Each person is a misfit and minority in the zoo of humanity. No one is out of place, because everyone is.”

I will go to sleep tonight knowing the ground is wet, the grass is deep Wisconsin green, and my children have lived this long without heartbreak.

For thirty-seven years I have not worked hard enough, but I’ll start again tomorrow and again tomorrow after.

There is music. There is always music.


 

 

Love Wraps Round a Wrist

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By Lisa Marie Brodsky

Dedicated to my mother, Sheila (1954-2006) and Aislyn, Gabrielle, and Atrus – most definitely, my kids

I didn’t notice until it was already happening: such a simple gesture which had such monumental meaning. She had no idea what it meant to me and I don’t know if she ever will. Perhaps if she ever experiences a huge loss she can understand. Today, though, she is eight years old and she merely fingers my bracelet, the one I’ve worn for years.

It is not a fancy bracelet; it doesn’t sparkle or catch a jeweler’s eye, but it is so simple in its beauty that I get generous comments: “Oh, what a beautiful bracelet,” someone will say. “Is that tiger eye?”

And I answer, “It was my mother’s.”

Besides her wedding band, this is the only piece of my mother’s jewelry I own. I wear it every day; I never take it off. My three stepchildren look at me, their mother-figure for the past three years, and they don’t see my much-missed mother who passed away two years before I met them. No matter how much of a lost child I may feel like inside, they see an adult mother-figure and I just hope that they love me half as much as I loved my mother.

A stepmother’s role can be very confusing. Do you step in or let Dad take care of it? If “Mom” is in the picture, how much mothering do you do for the children? In my case, we find ourselves having to unparent a lot of damaged parenting that went on. There are fights, crying, yelling, struggle, but the thing I try to remember is this:

There are moments like that above, where my 8-year-old girl (yes, I call her my girl) lovingly touches and discovers my mother’s bracelet. She sits on my lap and snuggles close. I can smell the fruity shampoo scent wafting from her hair. I kiss her on the top of her head and watch her intently investigate this bracelet – so nondescript and ordinary, yet something intrigues her. What is it? I wonder. Can she sense the generations behind this bracelet? Can she sense the love that my mother had for me and the love I had for my mother? I imagine she does.

I feel comforted imaging that.

So on days when kids cry and scream and we yell and grunt, I picture again and again my kids touching generations of love wrapped around my wrist. I imagine my mother touching her grandchildren, never meeting them in the flesh, but definitely, most definitely, loving them through me.

***

Born in Chicago, Lisa Marie Brodsky is a published poet with several books of published poetry and one about her mother’s death forthcoming from Salmon Publishing. Her poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, always focusing on the semi-autobiographical, has been nationally and internationally recognized and published. She received her B.A. in Creative Writing from Loyola University of Chicago and her M.F.A. in Poetry from University of Wisconsin-Madison. Lisa forgetfully blogs at http://memoryspeaksintongues.blogspot.com, but you can also find her a bit more regularly at her faith blog, http://dovechronicles.blogspot.com. Lisa is the Wisconsin Director of the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project (http://alzpoetry.com) and works as a Job Coach for disabled adults, a true honor. In 2009, she married and became an insta-Mom to three stepchildren, ages 13, 8, and 5. She and her family live in Evansville, Wisconsin, the first small-town Lisa has ever lived in. The holiday parades down Main Street amaze her.

Check out more Fourth Monday action with flash fiction by Jillian Kuhlmann in Roadside Attractions and original music by The Kate Morrissey Band, now playing on the Music Stage. Also, remember to keep updated on all Fourth Monday activity by subscribing to V’s Place or submit your own work to e.victoriaflynn@gmail.com.


At The Intersection Of Heart Attack and Vine

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image by Vlado

It’s an easy accident. Just a bump really. The kids hardly notice over the sing-song gadgets snuggled in their laps. Even so it’s a call to the police, a jam in the schedule, a later night to bed then planned.

Then it’s a meditation on the habits of being human. Namely, love.

“Why did you call Daddy?” Ivy asks. I say it’s because I want to let him know what’s happening, but when I think about it, long after the girls have gone on to deeper subjects (think Shrek in the bathtub), I realize it has more to do with us at large.

Relationships form patterns. Their own cadence and expectation. Who do I call when something doesn’t sit right? My husband. He knows how to talk me down or chill me the fuck out. I’ve known him for more than half my lifetime and I honestly don’t know what I would do without him. I made up my mind a long time ago I’d probably go it alone. People are everywhere, but they’re incredibly hard to find.

Your turn: Who matches your pattern?

 

 

No Man’s Land

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photo by foto 76

This is important. I don’t want you to talk me down. This book I am writing, day by day, word after word, is not going anywhere. It is coming out of me and that is all I need from it.

I am not in love with the memoir, though I did only last week bring home a stack to lean against my bed for safekeeping. And I opened and am reading Eat, Pray, Love and have found I want to be Elizabeth Gilbert’s new friend. I find her engaging and humble in a way I hadn’t expected. To be honest, I thought this book would compare to the last memoir I finished and I was terrified to break into it, which is why I started Gilbert’s book before Naked; I was working backward.

The ineffable They say to read the books you want to write. I read a lot of fiction; I’m an escapist at heart. With the exception of Frank McCourt, Dave Eggers, Stephen King (I honestly don’t know if On Writing counts here), and Natalie Goldberg (in a manner of speaking) memoir writers haven’t held my attention. Elizabeth Gilbert has grabbed me in the sense that I have been in her berserk world of self sacrifice and holy hell and I want to know how she manages to break out of it. Also, as I said before, I think she’s a friendly.

(Here’s a side note: NOT to downplay women writers, but I just realized that every memoir I have read written by a woman puts a certain amount of attention on one or another form of God. This can’t always be the case, but maybe my list is shorter than I think.)

So anyway. What am I trying to accomplish if not some amazing work of literary brilliance with which to stun and electrify millions of unknowing readers?

Focus.

Every day I sit down to write. Every day this word focus lights up, blinking frantically across the page like midnight neon in a Tom Waits’ song. Focus. Focus. I need it bad. The only way to get it is to do. Enter: the memoir. Easy peasy. Or not quite. Whatever. We’re in this for the long haul and I’m not going to bore you with every highlight and lowlight that comes along; I just want you to know, no pressure. We’re taking this one word at a time.

Before you go there’s something that has been nagging me about memoirs and I really would love to hear some opinions on this. All along I’ve had it in my mind that memoirs are written currently about past events, but now I’m noticing a trend in writing events as they occur. Somewhere I read an explanation of a diary as opposed to a memoir, being that a diary is recorded as events unfold. What do you think? Am I being too nit-picky? For the record, what I am writing crosses over from present to past and back again, though I call it memoir for lack of a better word. Hit me up.

 

 

Fact or Fiction

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In a strange sort of way things have been intense. I gathered all my eggs from a novel-laying chicken and out popped the first lines of a memoir, the memoir I’ve been working on for nearly three years and all but abandoned come last fall. There were no more tricks left to avoid the project; the owners of my childhood home had come back into the country and opened their doors to me. I spent two hours in August juxtaposed between past and present and came away cloudy. Then I started writing fiction.

Like a new love affair I fell passionately for fiction. I dreamed it backwards and forwards. I kicked the memoir out of the house. “Enough with you, you old, boring life,” I said. “I’m the one creating worlds now.”

The thing is, good lovers know how to be patient. They recognize phases and can tap at an inner core when you feel hollow. Then they come back and they bring gifts.

Today I don’t know the whole story that is being written, but I have found an organic structure underneath a series of events that is slowly reveling itself to me as it tap-tap-taps out its chords, leaving me to record its moody rhythm.

 

 

Maybe it just took this long to process events.