Okay, I'll admit it...I haven't posted lately. You probably haven't been able to see me, but I'm here, although buried a bit deeply under a mass of paper. I've fallen down the veritable rabbit hole that lurks in every writing teacher's life, a rather long and dark vertical tunnel created by a classes that must be prepared and papers that must be graded. Those of us in this profession start each semester well, confidently nudging our colleagues with an "I've got this" elbow in the hallways. Sometime in the dead of night about four weeks in, a hole begins to erode beneath our feet. Before we know it...WHOOSH!...we start to fall, and our surprised faces are soon covered with layers and layers of paper.
Recently, a friend shouted down the rabbit hole asking me to join him at a fundraiser for the Corner Cupboard, a food bank in Greene County.
"Will you read?" his faint voice wafted down the many miles I'd fallen.
I was able to pull myself up from underneath the mass a bit. That's right, I thought...I used to write sometimes. Well, yes. Yes, I think I will read.
And, so I climbed out of the rabbit hole for a bit. My husband bought me a large coffee on the ride to the reading. I think he sensed I might disappear without the caffeine. Afterwards, after so many beautiful words and songs, after a moment of suspended beauty when the lilting notes of Chopin floated up and through the big-windowed church sanctuary, he took me to Eat 'N Park for a club sandwich. Nothing has ever tasted so good.
We have a tradition in the Sunday house. When we pick up our weary travelers at the airport (or sometimes when they make the long climb up and out of the rabbit hole), our children who have moved and/or traveled to parts far from home, we stop at Eat 'N Park for a bite. We go even when it's 3 a.m., even when we aren't hungry. I guess there's always room for a Smiley cookie.
Before the bacon and turkey, before the Chopin, I read a newly revised version of "The Earthquake Kit," previously published in
Connotation Press. Here's the new version:
The Earthquake Kit
When my youngest daughter Rachel was about
seven, she began to worry about the weather. The worrying part she got from me,
the weather-watching part from her father. We were a beach vacation family in
those days, and some of her earliest memories must surely involve late-night
deck sitting, where we witnessed red lightning cracking above the smudged line
of dark water. One year we drove into Corolla, North Carolina on the windy
heels of Hurricane Bertha, stopping once or twice to drag away splintered branches
blocking the single lane blacktop which led to Atlantic Avenue, just off of
Highway 12.
A random assortment of pine needles, bark,
and murky sand covered the driveway of the house we’d rented that year, a
certain sign of things to come. Nature had been vigorously shaken, and we were
in the midst of the fall out. On our first sunny day, trekking back from the
beach, we stopped en masse at the outdoor shower. We were a family who never used the inside
showers, even the littlest ones preferring the fresh air tickling their skin,
but this time, we backed out-- a formidable wall of Sundays—scurrying away from
the aggressive encampment of big-headed, spindly-legged spiders that had taken
refuge there from unforgiving winds. Later that week, we were treated to a
gathering of tree frogs, leaf emerald in their greenness, their sticky pads
sucked tight to our glass door. Coming for the insects that had been drawn to
our inside lights, the frogs’ tongues spun out, darting so rapidly that the
insects seemed unaware of their fate. We watched transfixed, spellbound by this
little life and death drama played out before us on a vacation house storm door.
Later, we were all awakened by our oldest
boy’s shouts. We’d had rain all day; the fury that had been Bertha was long
gone, but another hurricane was pushing up the coast. We’d tucked our two
youngest in, whispering reassurances against the pounding rain on the cupola
skylight, but now a steady torrent of water forced itself around, under, and
through the skylight seal, an angry waterfall pouring into the open center of
the house, pooling on the first floor where the Godzilla marathon the boys had
been watching still flickered on the screen.
Rachel learned about the ugliness of
nature during this and other beach trips, slapping her hands at fat black sand
flies, shielding her eyes from the piercing sting of wind-borne sand, overturning
turtle shells all but scraped clean of red meat, watching the glassy green sea
whip itself into an angry gray threat.
On our way south, we often drove through wild storms, once caught in a tornado
on the beltway around D.C., once driving into West Palm just minutes after a
tornado touched down, sideways pelting rain and van-rocking winds having
unnerved us all.
“Maybe we shouldn’t stay,” Rachel repeated
in a kind of litany, rolling her worry between her fingers like beads.
We looked at the broad palm leaves sheared
in ragged segments lying around the pool. “It’s over, honey. We’ll be fine.”
That trip marked the beginning of Rachel’s
sojourn with the Weather Channel. While the tornado was indeed over,
unfortunately the remainder of our vacation week was fraught with the kind of
hazy heat and pressure that were often followed by brooding afternoon thunder
storms. Rachel sat rigidly in front of the television several times a day
listening for the word tornado on the
Weather Channel. Any mention of impending rain heightened her panic.
“I’ve got to see the Local on the Eights,”
she’d say as we rounded up our children for application of sunscreen.
“Come
on, Rach. If we don’t get to the beach soon, the clouds will start building.
Let’s go get some sun.”
“Do you think it’s
going to storm today? Maybe we shouldn’t go to the beach today. I want to go
home! Can we please go home now?”
And so it went, her tone becoming more
insistent after we’d run up the beach walkway seeking shelter from the
inevitable storm. I wonder if the confident young woman she is now remembers how
she cried that week, her blue eyes widened with the fear of waiting for the
worst to happen.
Another summer, we hurried the short
distance home from the community fair, after hearing a tornado warning
broadcast over the loud speakers. “Don’t worry, kids,” I said to my four and
two young friends. “Tornados don’t usually come to Pittsburgh. We are just
being careful, that’s all.”
We sat playing games in my family room
until a strangely orange sky shone through the front windows. The glow was
unnatural, eerie, and I was a bit undone.
“Let’s go guys--time to play in the
basement.”
Smiling
while I boosted them up into the crawl space, I joked about being a crazy
worrywart, praying all the while that the walls would hold. I held my breath while I sat guard on the
cellar steps, waiting for the ghostly sound of the rushing locomotive. When we emerged, our local news reported
downed electric lines, fallen trees, and lifted rooftops just a few miles away.
Rachel is mostly grown now, a leggy blonde
with a wild sense of humor and a no-nonsense attitude. A fierce “what of it” glint rises easily in
her eyes if push comes to shove. Seven months ago she moved 2,577 road miles
away from home to Moraga, California. When we packed up her suitcases in
August, I checked St. Mary’s “Things to Bring List.” Reading the list aloud, a
part of my brain eliminated the required Earthquake Emergency Kit, perhaps
pretending that she wasn’t going quite so far, that she wasn’t my youngest, that
I hadn’t quite reached this stage of my life. What bag of tricks could possibly
help during an earthquake, anyway? What could I possibly buy to keep my girl
safe?
Earlier this week, I noticed a link posted on
Rachel’s Facebook page: “Signs of California Quake to Come.” Below was Rachel’s
comment: “Just in case, I love you all.”
I tried the explanations out
in my mind…the geologist doesn’t know what he’s talking about…it’s just dead
fish and a low-hanging moon…earthquakes don’t happen where you are…I promise
you will be safe, but all of them felt like so much dust on my tongue.
Everything I knew about
earthquakes came from an exhibit called The Great San Francisco Earthquake
Experience my parents took me to on a trip to the Bay Area the year I turned
14. While we rode cable cars, visited Alcatraz and ate cioppino that week, my
memories of that trip center on the 360 degree screen that showed life-sized images
of the catastrophic 1906 earthquake. On that circular screen, reliable cement
and asphalt bent until split, and people fell screaming into the center of the
earth.
When I talked to Rachel,
after my husband tried to distract her with humor, I asked her “Are you
nervous?”
“Promise me you will get a
memorial tattoo of me if I die in the earthquake. Use the picture of me
standing on the bridge with Heinz Field in the background.”
I have a mental picture of a
large, intricately-inked tattoo stretching across my 55- year-old back.
“Promise me.”
“Okay. Sure. I promise, but
you are going to be fine. You aren’t right on the fault line, and no tsunami
could reach you because you are too far away and too high up on the hill.”
“Just in case, I’m sending a
goodbye text to everyone I know tonight.”
“Rach, you are going to be
just fine.”
The truth, though, is that things
don’t always work out for the best, and, even in the sweetness of her youth,
Rachel understands. In third grade, on a classroom monitor, she watched planes
fly into skyscrapers. She’s seen the footage from Haiti, and wars have always
been part of her evening news. She’s walked into my mother’s hospital room to
find the rigid contour of a lifeless face against the pillow. She’s heard crystal
splintering, angry voices bouncing off of sharp glass shards glinting on a
leaf-patterned cloth. She’s picked up her phone to hear really bad news
emanating from the earpiece, news that she hadn’t invited, dreamed of, or
wished for at all.
The real truth is that Rachel comes from a legacy of sadness, just a
breath away from shoddily hidden grief-- from someone who knows quite well that
a ringing phone can’t be trusted, from a mother who has so desperately wanted
to create a pocket of safety for her children, but who is sometimes irrevocably
lost to the day when her brother died from a bullet to the brain.
Rachel made herself an
earthquake survival kit, just in case. She filled her black and yellow Vera
Bradley backpack with snacks, Sarris chocolate, bottled water, a flashlight,
and her Tide-To-Go pen.
I have an earthquake kit too, but Rachel probably
doesn’t know that I started mine many years ago, long before she left me,
perhaps on the day I stood in the funeral home, feeling the wax slug filling
the ragged entrance wound near my brother’s right ear.
Sometimes the kit does work.
I wish I could share its logic with her and my other children, providing them
with a checklist for survival, a nicely printed list of circles to fill in with
a sharp number two pencil, but part of the process is that each of us must
confront impending disaster alone, gathering chicken bones and feathers to ward
off that which might harm those we love.
My kit is a ragtag collection, including, but not inclusive of, spastic hopes,
lopsided prayers, and improbable deals made in the dead of night. Yesterday, I
added my promise to Rachel, praying that my vow will be enough to keep her
safe, that I’ll never have to lie under the buzzing tattoo needle, feeling her
“I love you all” worked black drop by black drop deeply into my skin.
