Autumn sunlight on our walk.
Reading the poet Mary Ruefle, who once lived in the Strode home for a brief writing sojourn, always sets me before a blank page, dregding the creek-bed for memories. Sometimes I find a few.
For example, I remember being crushed to find that I could not audition for the part I wanted to play because it was a “boy part”. My pointed comments on Shakespeare’s cross-dressing met with glazed stares. New conventions are born every day.
I remember knowing that the first man I kissed would be the one I married. Then I remember the kiss itself- on a moonlit, muddy path, the crushed steel of braces and the burden of a new language to learn.
I remember some of the specimens that wandered between that kiss and my wedding ten years later.
I remember walking through the halls of my school between classes, reading a book poised just below my first rib. All those hours wasted in school for ten minute intervals in which the knowing took place. Sometimes I bumped into other students without looking up because to look up is to begin the social procedure of mild apology and each social procedure, every single comforting smile extended, eats time from the minutes allotted for my eyes to lick the words from the page. People have been worth less than pages to me.
I remember knowing that God was nothing like the books or the sermons. I kept this secret for so long that it turned into a callous. Sometimes my faith caused me to limp.
I remember that summer in Bordighera. A tiny graveyard perched at the top of a steep hill with aquamarine ocean all around. No one buried there knew death- elevation, the precipitous climb, the vertiginous landscape dimmed the remaining horizons.
I remember the cold, gelatinous skin of my grandmother’s forehead when I bent to kiss her in the coffin during a Romanian Orthodox funeral at Bellu. My family mustered a collective frown but I knew how she appreciated my hovering. My dress was too tight, hiding a four-month-old baby boy not hidden enough for public taste. Bunica died before my baby was born. How, then, is it possible that I know she was delighted?
