Snippets of my early life on a silent video...

In 1987 I was 10 years old. My Mamaw was 49 and turned 50 that summer. She still had brown hair and was younger than my Mother is now. I watch a video shot on the shoulder of the only man I ever looked up to as a child – my Papaw. He filmed hours and hours of my early, awkward pre-teenage years. The footage brings me back to moments I haven’t thought of in years; roller-skating at the Boone’s Baptist Camp during my Kentucky summers, crushing on my step-first cousin whose dad was my aunt’s new husband’s brother (insert banjo riff here).

It began when I was born and these strangers played with me and cooed at me and loved me even though they had no idea who I was. I was blessed with a blue and white teddy bear and a soon-to-be-broken family. Bright lights and camera and action surrounded the first days of my life, facilitating a certain egocentric, selfish lifestyle. My Mother’s sweet hands fed me and held my bottle to my lips. Don, by which my father became known to me after the divorce a year later, wore trucker hats and pretended to love having a baby girl by the age of 22.

Grinning people rejoice as a Budweiser hot air balloon ascends into the skies of 1977. I am a newborn, seeing all for the first time, scratching itches for the first time, clinging to my grandmother’s fingers before they would become gnarled in the late 1980s from factory work.

My hot young mom swings my fat pudgy feet lightly over the surface of my baby pool. I am fat and frequently fall over in one fast uncontrollable movement. The sun shines in Missouri and my mother loves me so much; she smiles and exudes radiance. I am sorry for any moment of pain or grief I have ever caused this woman; I am now older than she who appears to me on a videotape three decades later.

Trucker-hat-Don plays with me on occasion and only when the camera is rolling. His fat baby girl giggles joyfully as he tickles her face with a yellow felt blanket.

A miniature Schnauzer does tricks for a stupid human. I crawl on the same floor; a trucker hat is tossed onto my head by an unidentified adult human, probably Don. I look into the camera begging for someone to understand.

My walker is the color of Dijon mustard. A fiber optic lamp sits atop a huge speaker as I scale the walls of my playpen. Grandma Niswonger plays with me, shows me my new doll. I am amazed. I am nine months old.

I chew on a pickle and Papaw comes to the rescue as the father figure in my life. I begin watching t.v. at a very young age. I take my first steps on shag carpet. I love my Mom.

Grandpa Niswonger held me and played with me 25 years before he got the Cancer that would eventually take his life.

Laura’s mom tied a bonnet to her head only weeks before bailing on her, condemning my cousin to a life of abandonment. We celebrated our first birthdays together then did not see each other for 13 years.

I later have my own special first-birthday party. I wear a Pepto Bismol pink colored dress and adore my Raggedy Ann cake. I wear a pink plastic barrette in my hair to designate that I am a girl. I am wearing a gold band on the ring finger of my right hand, it shines through the pink sludge that was once my Raggedy Ann cake.

As a toddler I have a fat tummy. I don a two-piece floral print bikini anyway because I haven't yet learned that women should strive to be "flawless."

A very young Aunt Lynette gets something so big for Christmas that she cries and hugs Papaw in delight. I get a sock puppet and a Pink Panther who I will later marry beneath my white gauzy curtains in a 19th Century home that will eventually be torn down to construct a roadway into Section 8 housing.

An adult in the corner graciously pretends to drink the imaginary tea I pour into my new cups. It looks like Uncle Tim before he turned into the devil. I wear a cone shaped snow suit and play in snow behind what would now be a vintage Dodge pickup. People with whom I no longer identify pull me on a sled.

I turn two years old and marvel at the panda-bear-shaped cake Aunt Lynette made me. She let me bite off one of the ears before anyone else gets to taste it. I received a pink and turquoise stuffed bear, a velvety sheen like toys won at a carnival game. Even though Mom and Don had split, both the Wileys and Niswongers attend their granddaughter’s second birthday.

I turn three years old and this year I am graced by a beautiful young lady whose skirt is my birthday cake. Young Will, who will later become my Dad, plays with a wind-up toy. I pretend to know how to jump rope, holding three fingers up to the unknown cameraman documenting my early life.

I romp and play in the yard with a Beagle puppy that by now is dead and a fluffy white kitty, one of several consecutive cats named "Cotton," all of whom were hit by cars.

I play silly little girl games in my collapsible pool. My neighbor Missy and I twist and turn like tornadoes in the pool.

The video rewinds to a vacation taken to Disney World only I am not there. It is Mom and Will (Dad) who are in attendance with his mean-spirited family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Mom prances around in her sexy little outfits of the 80s. Disney characters dance in the street, scaring little kids like me in my worst nightmares imaginable.

I see people on this video who may now be dead. They are anonymous to me; faceless, nameless. The dog on the surfboard is now dead, but I do not know about the dolphins. I wonder what the life span for dolphins is. What are dolphin years?

As a child I saw dolphins regularly. Not many people can say that.

I then see a Doberman named Cajun who spent a few years with us in Kentucky. She and I played in the snow. I wonder if she remembered me and the good times we had on Main Street in 1982.

All life leads to eventual death; I want to live mine to the fullest.

haiku

Rain slicks each window

She longs to taste the cold drops -

It is you she wants.

The storm brings solace

To a cold and lonely world

Without you, she stands.

Tales of a Rear View Mirror

Today I saw in my rear-view mirror a family in their all-American sedan ready for the Easter weekend. A middle-aged couple and their two boys – the baby in the back seat, center and the pre-teen with his white-socked foot resting just to the right of his mother’s head. I saw him wiggling his foot and wondered if his feet were stinky and if the mom could smell her son’s feet so close to her face. Then she turned and saw the foot and gently grabbed it and held it – the way only a mother could love a stinky pre-teen foot.

Today I saw in my rear-view mirror a young couple – the man was driving and the woman was looking at him longingly. He turned her way and they spoke words to each other – words I will never know and they probably won’t even remember. I wondered what language they were speaking.

Elixir

In a beautiful land where meadows swim in golden sunlight, you stand overlooking the valley, longing for her return. Your wretched heart aches until you think you will die, bursting into a million pieces of vacant flesh.

Little gnomes in treetops play flutes for your sorrow. They rain gumdrops from the highest boughs and you drink in the goodness of their sweetness. The sweet kisses of candy on your lips bring comfort and joy and you float into the clouds, peering down to see cows with wings and sparkly tiaras, lips painted red.

Bounce, bounce, bouncing across the puffy white clouds. Taste them, taste the light airy sweetness of the white clouds and the heavier almost leaden taste of the gray clouds.

Fall into a brown chair, cold and hard against your naked flesh, alive and polished from frolicking in the clouds, feel yourself fall backwards through the clouds, in the chair, flipping and flopping toward the earth at break-neck speeds. Your head is heavy; your eyelids are dry. A piece of your hair has adhered to your eyeball and you can’t move your hands to remove it, for they are fixed to the edges of your chair, beneath your thighs. You find yourself falling with no way to stop…but wait!

A large and invisible hammock catches you and you flop around as though on a trampoline

and you jump

and you jump

and you jump

and you fly up to the sky again – past the cows with their diamonds and ruby lips, past the sweet white clouds and the bitter gray clouds and you find yourself inside of a large white ceramic bowl, lying in a spoon the size of a bed and it is so comfortable and you are surrounded by warm, sugary liquid which is plentiful and makes you alive and young. Almost granular in texture, opaque, almost the color of a dusty pearl you drape your arm over the edge of the bowl and swirl your finger to make the sign of infinity and your toes become warm from the sugars.

Your lips are coated, dripping with the sweet juices, the nectar of youth and you see black sky and brilliant stars above but long for the comfort of the clouds, even the sad clouds. Even the thin clouds that remind you of generic cotton balls or worse – toilet paper stuffed into the toes of a woman’s dress shoe that smells sour and never loses its dampness.

You approach the edge, the circumference of your world draped in stars. The distance is great but your longing is greater and you perch yourself just over the edge and imagine that you are a puffy fat bird, bright yellow and spilling over with courage. Skinny toothpick legs scarcely look strong enough to carry your weight, you swing your legs once, twice and three times and you jump!

Your skin begins to tingle, the nectar of youth sloughing off the years of undue stress. Feathers pluck themselves out – only pleasure, only freedom, no pain. Elixir of life. Sugar. Puff. Dry. Wet and writhing and bursting with flavor and joy. You are falling and falling toward that thing you have always longed for. Will you make it?

You will never know unless you try.

Aged WhoreMoans

Hunching over the community stair-climber,

She thinks about the new guy in the complex.

Fresh meat.

Good stuff.

Better than her last husband, surely.

Must quit smoking

He may not like smokers,

And besides, her lungs feel like they are going to collapse

With each step

As the machine drones on...

Quick! There he is, outside!

Her oversexed mind says Go to him; get him before one of the other tenants does. Hurry.

She sprints out of the gym, tripping over the doorjamb,

knocking her elbow on her way out.

“Hi. I’m Margaret; I’ve seen you around,” she pants.

Must quit smoking.

(Please don’t notice that I stopped working out just to run out here and throw myself at you).

Awkward pause

“Hi,” he says, shifting his eyes from right to left.

(This must be the one they warned me about).

She thinks he may find her sexy, standing there,

One plump roll hanging over her snug running shorts

And her breasts sagging in a battered sports bra that once may have fit.

Her pores exude desire.

Sweat thickened by rampant hormones that scream

“Screw me, screw me!”

She traces one crooked and slightly wrinkled finger

Over the excess skin of her neck

As though this drives him mad.

Panting, she desperately fumbles through conversation,

Peppered with niceties,

Unreciprocated by the new guy in 4A.

She wants to take him to bed.

He wants to leave.

Maybe the plumber down the hall won’t turn her down again.