Lessons in Flight

I was at my mom's last week and she forced me to clean out the closet. Like I was twelve. Granted the closet was filled with my stuff--and not clothes mind you--no, the closet of my childhood was filled with books and letters and boxes upon boxes of photos and snippets and bumper stickers and quotes cut and gleaned from the pages of other people. Which is probably what most childhood closets are filled with. Which is why the task of sorting them, and organizing them into some kind of logical semblance is daunting and unmanageable and when asked to do so produced a twelve-year-old-esque protest. But because my mom insisted, and because I had happened to drive up in my Saab Stay-Way (south shore slang for station wagon), I eventually did it (I mean after she threatened to recycle all of it if I didn't). And I found something. Okay a lot of somethings. And I'm not talking about notes written on pink paper penned in silver ink passed in the seventh grade, carefully folded into hearts and arrows and houses. I had those, and they now sit stacked in a plastic crate in my garage, much to Jesse's horror. But what I found in addition to all that, in the sifting and sorting, were seven things that all amount to someone I used to be, whom I very much want to be again.

First up: an e-mail from Jenn Stroud, back when she was still Stroud and wrote e-mails from a "minnow.ME.Berkeley.EDU" address Dated Tuesday April 6, 1999 with the quote:

"Fredrick Exley's talking about an English professor and 'an observation he had made on Hemingway in Paris during the twenties. He said that while he and others tried to talk their novels out in sidewalk cafes, Hemingway was locked up in a room getting on with the business of his life, that although he did not know Hemingway, he knew of him, as all the young Americans in Paris did, and that Hemingway proved a constant provocation to them, like a furious clarion that books do not get written on the Montparnasse."

Exhibit Two: a note punched through with a whole, written on a "Bradbury Press" pad that says: "It's like I breathe the air first to see if it's okay for her."

Three: Yellow legal pad page, folded a gazillion times with the title: When Water Misbehaves.

Four, Five and Six: photos of me at a pay phone in Europe. Shouting. (pre cell phones); a photo of me in a leopard print hair scarf doing laundry in Barcelona; a photo of me at twelve, taken by my cousin and then developed in a high school photo lab, so it's grainy and lopsided and perfect.

Seven: a poem called "Character" by Taslima Nasrin

Character

You're a girl
and you'd better not forget
that when you step over the threshold of your house
men will look askance at you.
When you keep walking down the lane
men will follow you and whistle.
When you cross the lane and step into the main road
men will revile you and call you a loose woman.

If you've got no character
you'll turn back,
and if not
you'll keep on going,
as you are going now.


In short, the closet at my moms house is clean and can be filled with clothes again. And my south shore garage is full of who I used to be. Which is good, to have her so near, again. But maybe is also why I should fly when visiting my mother.