Every Day is Marne Gras

an old freewrite i found this week, maybe there’s something here. sometimes i just want my writing teacher or classmates to just say yes or no. and sometimes i ignore the voices in my head and type everything up because it makes me feel like a real writer.

tidbit of the week: pinocchio translates in italian as ‘pine head’.

back when snooping was an acceptable hobby i spent an awful lot of time hiding under sofas, flipping through old photo albums trying to find images of myself. so much time that the memories of the years contained in those albums collided directly with what the albums themselves looked like: 1995 was as much about red and yellow and purple watercolored flowers as it was about a fourth of july pool party at my neighbor’s house. 1994 was blue and maroon paisley the same way it was about girl scouts and my sister’s bad haircuts.

most of the albums were fair game, but given my entirely self-serving mission, i needed to crawl under a piece of furniture to feel safe. it pleased my mother to find me nestled under a chair, taking interest in our family. i did enjoy the evidence of my most recent birthday party, photos that had a glare when the tv was on because they were still so shiny, photos of my first elementary school band concerts. looking for one of my legs sticking out of the trumpet section, seated somewhere in the back behind the flutes. my real passion, though, was for albums whose status as public fodder for collective memories was questionable. they were already falling apart, the albums from the early 80’s, years before i existed that i associated with brown pleather, gold lettering, and a four box set of scaly maroon volumes, rather than george bush or the Rangers winning the stanley cup, or a particularly devastating hurricane. i liked to imagine my mother back then with the newly developed prints,
ordering, filing, and dropping them into their plastic slots in a thoughtful, playfully chronological order, photos that ended the year of my birth and resumed six years later, at the incidence of my brother’s birth.

most of my time under the furniture was concerned with this absence. Running my hands over what I liked to think was maroon snakeskin, looking for the record of myself, over and over again each time thinking some photos had gotten stuck together or fallen out. That i had missed a pull out leaf, that i had forgotten to pull out the third or fourth book in the series. That I would miscount and not notice myself in photos I had ignored in order to make a point.

There were so many others. My parents. My parents on a boat. in a car. My mother smiling in a bikini, my father reading a newspaper, flexing his muscles like a muscleman. My parents hugging in a dark, woodpaneled bar, drunk. Wearing sweatshirts, swollen apple cheeks, immortal. My sister. Screaming, crying, sleeping across my mother’s dark eyed swolled sleepy chest, covered in spaghetti in a high chair, in a baby seat on the playground, a bowl cut running naked through our grandmother’s house. Standing on a park bench in the rain, standing next to a clown, sitting on her father’s shoulders. Wearing garfield the cat facepaint, hanging upsidedown the three of them, endless portraits of the protofamily.

At the end of the fourth book I make my appearances. A newborrn asleep on a table. And then a two year old sitting next to my aunt, holding a newly born cousin, an amusing crown of blonde but big jewish curls. Smiling at my sister’s kindergarten graduation. A happy, smiling baby. Easy blue eyes, in no rush to talk or walk, a sleeper. a happy baby. There are never any other details. I asked often, for clues, an oral history– who was I? But even my mother remembered that time as one obfuscated by sister, colicky until the age of nine, and then a late term miscarriage shortly after my birth, and the ultimate arrival of my brother, sire to the throne, a ten year absence of sleep.

I was born to be happy with the fact of my own existence, an odd birthright. I was born from two people who barely stopped feeling like they were pretending to be adults, an august night drenched in potential, the mosquitos knocking into the window screens, hoping to find a way into the house they were renting near the racetrack. I was a long day of work finally over, a month without rain, a settling of ease into night after the baby finally went down. I was a moment on a porch swing between two people who could no longer remember why they had ever lived a life without the other, two happy people and their baby.

“Mom, why are there more photos of everyone else than there are of me?” The beginnings of politics, favorites, an iron forged identity (my seventh grade english teacher called me Hephaestus, the blacksmith of mount olympus), histories that would boil over and burn two decades later. A daughter eating eggs in her kitchen three thousand and twenty six miles away whom no one has seen in months, who has never remembered to send thank you cards, who didn’t fly in for the wedding.

And now I imagine who I might have been then. how they might have looked at me in the swing on the playground, a mid morning sun lighting up my onesie. what my first words might have sounded like on film, and how my stroller squeaked, damp with my baby drool. how they would have captured a baby with a personality all her own, like all parents say, bewildered that this child who cannot hold up her own neck yet can have patterns and thoughts and trademark looks and a reliably funny way of telling jokes. pictures of my best baby faces. I imagine what I might have looked like covered in cake on my first birthday. Or spaghetti, an oblivious mess, playing mr. magoo with my noodles. I hold out a small sleeve of hope for a still stuck together fold, a bias in my own vision, a family member coming home on a vacation with a cardboard box, here is the proof, this was you, don’t you remember?

But it is best to find myself, my earliest self, by imagining the night I was crafted. The moments of my conception where I was the cool side of a pillow. The blue of white bedsheets in moonlight coming in through the window. A babysitter asleep on a couch waiting for the parents to come home. When I was the unspoken promise of never dying. When I was the smell of someone else’s barbecue, the sound of a car parking on the gravel driveway next door. A winning ticket from the racetrack fluttering in my father’s shirt pocket, a glass of white wine with ice. When I was that more intimate kind of laughter that opens your chest cavity. When my cells were grafted with the summer just before it began to end, just before a chill surprised them, made them wish they had a sweater when they sat on the porch swing at night, rocking back and forth in each other’s arms, camera lying on the kitchen counter next to empty canisters of film.