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Enlightenment at Cross Town

May 14, 2019

By Brian Michael Barbeito

All the orange crates are scattered, at the Safeway Supermarket in the rain.
–Van Morrison, St. Dominic’s Preview, It’s too Late to Stop Now.

I didn’t have a mind then. I should have perhaps had a mind by then. I was in kindergarten. I went to a school called Our Lady of Fatima, which as I think about it, is nice enough, because later I became on my own terms a sort of Marian devotee. There was a church adjacent to or very close to the school. At midnight mass I would look up and there was for some reason I can’t discern, a ceiling painted with noodle designs, like macaroni and cheese before the cheese is added. I just stared at the noodles. For more than an hour. Midnight mass, which means Christmas Mass for the uninitiated, is longer than an hour. Or at least there is it ran longer. A feeling of depth or spirit was around, but it didn’t have so much to do with the church. Or maybe it did. I didn’t call it ‘A feeling of depth or spirit,’ because I didn’t know what those words meant, and I hardly, if ever, really spoke. They thought a bit earlier on than that, that I was deaf, or partly deaf, and that maybe that was why I didn’t speak. But I was tested by the doctor, and came out all right. So it wasn’t a physical thing. Before that, I had an apgar rating of 9, which is not bad. And a slight heart murmur, not unheard of either. So I checked out. Who is to know? Who can see the whole of any of us, cosmically speaking? One time they took me to a daycare or after school place, and I remember someone saying, He doesn’t talk, and the lady that ran it said in a kind but confident response. He will learn to talk here, as he will have to, because there are other kids and he just will.

I never said a word while I was there.

But the school and the playground and Cross-town. There isn’t much I remember, but there are some things. There was at the playground races to the fence and back, and there was a kid named Johnny who used to run it pretty well. I did okay, but was in the middle of the pack. He was always first or second. I said in my mind, If Johnny can do it, I can. And I kind of trained myself to get better and better. It worked you know. Man. I really got up there through the time. I could lie and say I beat Johnny, and I was a hero or something, but that didn’t happen. I do know I tied him once, and it wasn’t that anyone really noticed, but I showed myself some inner and outer stamina.

I always remembered that.

Somewhere, anyhow.

Years later I changed high schools, from a wealthy area, all the way back to that area, which was not affluent but not poor, but a kind of middle-regular place. That as they say is another story. But when I was there this guy called me over to a table a little time in, and he was with this pretty girl, but the girl was not to become a good friend of mine, but an acquaintance. And the guy a sort of friend, just a bit on past an acquaintance, but not a friend-friend-friend. So I say, What? And the guy comes with this,

I and my friend are having a bet. She seems to think that she remembers you from Kindergarten class, and I say maybe, but aren’t sure. I know this sounds funny but she brought in our class picture and we were discussing it. She says yes, that this person here is you, and I say maybe. Could you tell us if you went to school with us?

So I looked at the picture and saw myself. I said that it was me. And the thing was that he was Johnny, and I told him so, and he remembered that. I had no recollection of the girl, who would be considered gorgeous. It turned out that she spotted me in the picture, but also spotted me for a Big Mac combo at McDonalds one day, and I promised to pay her back. But days went on, though four out of five days I had money in my pocket, it seemed like the days she reminded me to pay her, were weirdly on the exact days I had no money. She became angry, but contained, and thought I was a kind of player or something. Since she didn’t really know me, there was no way to have her know me. So she just began to see me as a liar, which I was technically. But I am not like that. A few years ago I ran a writing group and this poor guy kept coming and so I bought him, (you can’t write this as they say, I know I can’t), a Big Mac Combo each time afterwards, and the other person that ran the group never ever offered to pay. Technically the bill could be split. Gurdjieff has a saying; Nothing shows people up more than money. But yes, the friendship didn’t work out with the girl. She was more mature though the same age, but it also affected her, as in if someone says, She is pretty, and the other person says, Yes, but she knows it.

Going back to kindergarten. I waited after for my grandfather to pick me up. It always seemed a bit overcast, with opaque clouds making up the firmament, and the world seemed grey also. It couldn’t have been like that every single day. But the days I remember were. There was kid with dark hair, and he was singing the lyrics to We Will Rock You, by Queen, and not the chorus, but the beginning lyrics. I remember this. I would much later become a fan of Queen, but at that time I had no idea what the hell he was saying, and he was so intense about it. He was clear and enthralled and intent, sitting on a swing swaying back and forth just a bit while he sang,

Buddy you’re a boy make a big noise
Playin’ in the street gonna be a big man some day
You got mud on yo’ face
You big disgrace
Kickin’ your can all over the place

I think that song must have just come out and he had an older brother or father that had to have played it over and over. The other kid I remember was blonde, and I can picture him perfectly, but don’t know why. He wore a jean jacket with something yellow on the shoulders, like an intentional patch, and he said it was a disco jacket. He was very proud of this. I for certain didn’t know what disco was. Already the very few people I came into contact with knew much more than I, if even about anything at all.

I just stared into space and waited.

For something.

Then.

I guess for my grandfather.

And in high school.

For what I don’t know.

And even now.

For what I certainly absolutely don’t know.

Because my grandfather is long dead.

But I am still trying to get to Cross Town as it were. At least here. See…sometimes my grandfather when he would arrive (I think he was a little bit late sometimes because he moved slowly), would take me before going home to his house, to a set of little stores at the intersection just down from the school and the church. From what I can remember, I have to bet these were places where they had cheap wares, but good things still. Plates, forks, knives, spoons, cloths, cups, saucers, blankets (not a high thread count but not terribly low either), a set of napkins, a holder for a hardboiled egg, some old pictures of pastoral scenes and a blue sky and a white whimsical cloud and a red barn and maybe a stream and a big boulder there, of course little key chains and maybe there was a guy that cut keys in the back and maybe not.

But I didn’t then see these things like some great or even good observer. I couldn’t register them. I was just there looking at dust motes in the air, or maybe the reflection of light on a counter. And many people are like this, especially in childhood. It is nothing so special. It’s just that that is where we were, in Scarborough, instead of say, Illinois, or St. Petersburg, China, Bahamas, The Yukon Territories, Switzerland, Morocco, South Asia (where the DNA science says I am really from), Key West, Africa, or anywhere else the universe could have placed us.

Quietness inside the door and the store, inside of me, even though the soft sound of winter traffic passes by on Victoria Park, or from St. Clair, the intersecting street.

Windows somehow more on the side of dirty, run-down, but not disgusting or dangerous.

I want to think of cloth, fabrics, and utilitarian items and artifacts.

A worldly person knows what things are for and what they do.

To me, they are then if anything, just worlds of metal, copper, some colors, ceramics, frames, maybe plastics, – yes plastics, there are plastics there somewhere,- red, green, maybe they are parts of cheap umbrellas or rain jackets.

All this under a vague light yellow and a dull light that comes in from the windows.

It’s always like late dusk sad there in a sense, no matter what hour a clock would say.

The world is before night, about to blink off, but it never quite does.

I sense now I think also that something tragic is about to happen,- as if we are on the edge of a car accident, or receiving bad news, witnessing or being in a fire, a flood, a war, even a death of some kind.

But nothing really happens like that and one step is taken then the next and the world goes on.

Nobody ever bought me anything then, like a toy car, a key chain, – something, anything, – but I never wanted anything or thought of it. I was a simpleton, a visitor that didn’t really appreciate the wares one way or the other.

The street soon, – and the signs, and so many cars by the dirty, dirty snow with bits of mud and old leaves. Newspaper boxes, people. The world is so normal to everyone it feels like an alien planet to the young boy.

He doesn’t know lyrics, disco, exactly where he is or what he is.

I looked and looked then back at the stores at Cross-town. I was, not because I was special, but because I was not interfered with or talked to that much, in touch with something. It wasn’t a vision of an angel. I wasn’t a message. It was just Source. There is something when there is no mind yet, and that is what the search for full blown enlightenment is after, that nothingness and everything-ness that is there, always there, that we are, but that is obscured by the mind, even though the mind is by definition part of it because it is all One-Thing never begun and never ending. I smelt it, but not with my nose. Maybe it’s like touching the toe nail of God.

How would I explain that to the pretty girl, who bought me McDonalds and thinks I am simple moocher?

I can’t even remember her name anyways.

I wonder if her Grandfather ever took her to Cross-Town.

Brian Michael Barbeito is a Canadian writer, poet and photographer. His recent work appears at Fiction International from San Diego State University, CV2 The Canadian Journal of Poetry and Critical Writing, and at Catch and Release-The Columbia Journal of Arts and Literature. Nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and one Best of the Net Award, Brian is the author of Chalk Lines (Fowl Pox Press, 2013, cover art by Virgil Kay). He is currently at work on the written and visual nature narrative titled Pastoral Mosaics, Journeys through Landscapes Rural.

Jen’s book ON BEING HUMAN is available for pre-order here.

death, Family, Grief, Guest Posts

New York Times Crossword Puzzle Book #50.

January 18, 2015

By Sonia Greenfield.

Three summers ago I found myself socked into my grandmother’s bed with my infant son sleeping next to me in his Pack-n-Play. The old, dusty air conditioner churned and wept down the slumped front porch, but the room was cool. The groan of this window unit was the only sound, this and the click and scratch of my mechanical pencil as I filled in the book of New York Times crossword puzzles I picked up at the airport in Seattle. All around me I saw the sad accumulation of old age—pill bottles, ointments, stained sweatshirts, and a thick layer of grime—but underneath these mounds, if I dug deep enough, I could find the gold piping and flounce of my grandmother’s stylish years. This is why I felt socked in. Nothing was ever thrown away; it was just buried. The new on top of the old, which was really like the old on top of the less old. And this made my grandmother’s room, her whole house, a bit of a burial ground with nothing more than narrow paths to travel between the heaps of purses, VHS and eight track tapes, old make-up, shoes, costume jewelry, books, newspapers, diabetic snack bars, and so on. There was something about retreating from the emotional to the cerebral, something about shrugging off the weight of lost years, of lost youth, that made me fill each puzzle, turn the page, and start the next one. What’s a seven-letter word for “tremendous” beginning with m? The answer was massive.

I received the call— well, calls— a few days before. My stepfather who lived in the upstairs apartment with my mother found my grandmother unresponsive in her bed, which was the same bed I was, by necessity, sleeping in just a few days later. Even though I spent the last half of my childhood in the second story apartment with my immediate family, there was no room for me, for us, now. I got the call in Seattle from my brother’s cell phone while everyone was gathered in my grandmother’s room at Hudson Valley Hospital, and I was put on the phone with my grandmother, who could not talk or move most of her body, who could not swallow or smile, who could not respond when I began to cry in her ear. I was told, though, that tears ran down her face, and that she bit her lip on one side as I said how sorry I was that I could not help her. Even when you know that the cruel discomforts of old age will be alleviated, when you know that death is inevitable—especially for an eighty-three year old woman who has been in decline for years— it does not mean that when the time comes, a cool stoicism will settle on you. It does not mean you will feel relieved. What’s a six-letter word for “smooth” ending with e? The answer was stroke. My Nana had a massive one in her bed, and my baby and I flew out for what I came to understand was a vigil as we waited out the two long weeks it took her to die. My grandmother’s name was Rose. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts

Setting Free The Bears.

March 5, 2014

By Maggie May Ethridge (who, truth be told, Jen has a total girl crush on.)

When life is hard, then harder, then fossilized into a shell over your skin so tight and so fragile it breaks with the smallest tapping of the new thing trying to be born, then there are things that must be done. Firstly, right yourself. Are you sleeping enough? Your mother told you. Your doctor told you. Even your Uncle Alfred who farted and belched loudly after turkey dinner told you – you must sleep enough, or simply nothing works just right. Your brain is your gateway to reality. If you close off the energy force the gateway will not work, and your entire perception of reality will be tilted, see- just so – just enough to make you slightly wonky. I’m already wonky on my own, born and bred, and need no help in that direction.

Next, are you eating healthy? Every meal should be protein, veggie, healthy carb (nothing white, but brown rice, multigrain breads). Eat in intervals that feel natural to your body. Drink water. You don’t like a shrively pruney lemon looking face, do you? Well you don’t want your brain this way either. Drink. Then there are the essential caretaking measures: shower, shave, scrub your pits. If, because of lack of hygiene, you happen to randomly and repeatedly catch a whiff of your own sour stench repeatedly during the day while trying to interact with other life forms, you might find you like yourself a little less. ‘ Anyone worthwhile, ‘ you might think ‘ would not smell like pig ass when they have a perfectly available and working shower, equipted with the latest modern miracles like razors and soap. ‘ Shower. Lather. Make large, ridiculously cheerful bubbles, and sing. I recommend singing a rap song in operetta. I do, and it makes me happy.

Also, don’t forget to wear clean clothes that fit well. Now you are fed a nutritious meal, showered and shaved, dressed and standing tall. Let’s begin by setting the mood. Music Please… and

Flowers. Pick some, buy some, just get em, anyway you can, and spread them around your places. Your places are usually work, home, maybe a lover’s apartment, or your psychotherapist- wherever you spent a lot of time. Put them there.

Also, while I’m on the subject, be Naked. Often. Get in touch with your body, as a living breathing beautiful form, not just as a clothes hanger or food hamper. Have Sex.

If you have no one to have sex with, have it with yourself. Do something
that feels good, and feel good about it. See? Your 8th grade Religious Studies
teacher was wrong about masturbation, because I have neither 1. pimples nor 2. scales on my hands.

Take every opportunity to Dance * yes dance, dance i said, not only you sexy people, all you sly muthas, just get out there and dance- Dance, I Said!* Salt and Pepa knew. So should you.
I dance in the shower ( not while soaping and singing. that might get tricky. ) I dance in the car. I dance at work, to the amusement of my co-workers ( Yes you, Stephanie and Heather ) I even hurt my right butt cheek dancing to Michael Jackson in the sun room two days ago.

Remember White Nights? How could you not want to tap and leap your way into life!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haBZCrBHMm4

Now we are somewhat refreshed. Here is where we begin to think of how we can be of Service to one another. To the people around us. I had my son at 19, and learned one of the greatest lessons of my life in his birth: acting in behalf of another human being is one of the greatest healing actions available to us. Not the daily ‘allowances’ that we make for one another- these things that we confuse with service to our friends and family but really are only small ways to drive ourselves crazy- the constant yes when no is meant, the answering of phones at any occasion or time, the need and demand for availability ( IM, Chat, Facebook, Phone, Cell, Email), this kind of thing. To care and love in a healing way means that we keep our eyes open for the person who needs and desires it. This is stopping when a flustered, near tears elderly lady cannot find her money and paying for her coffee, taking on a mentor role in a young person’s life, volunteering an an Assisted Living Facility or Pediatric Unit at the hospital, making dinner twice a week for the family of someone undergoing cancer treatments- these and million other actions are what unite us as a people and bring peace and meaning to our lives.

Then there is the indomitable Spirit. As a writer and poet and passionate person in general, I have only once in my adult life felt disconnected from my spirit, and I fought tooth and nail to regain my whole. I believe that literally the act of holding your head up is a physical way to pull the strings of the spirit. I will NOT look down at the fucking ground. Everything we do to nourish our spirit is reflected back eventually. I am a huge believer in taking positive action even when you cannot see the results. The lack of results is a facade. Holding your head up, repeating marching orders to yourself ( you will be able to do this, yes ), reading about the particular issues you have in life, talking to friends, a therapist, service – it all becomes part of the gust of spirit that will eventually blow through you and lift you back up where you belong. So,

finding what nourishes the Spirit is an important part of growing up. Am I grown up yet?

Can I Set Free The Bears?

Next time we will discuss:
Drinking
Vacationing in ill-mowed and unkept squares of green (otherwise known as my backyard)
The in-house prescription for cheer
Sticky notes of love (not what you might think)
Animals and their furry hairy magic
and
Children make good clowns, there for your amusement.

Maggie May Ethridge is a novelist, poet and freelance writer from the deep South who has lived most of her life in San Diego, CA. She has an Ebook coming out in January with the new publishing company Shebooks ” Atmospheric Disturbances: Scenes From A Marriage ” and is completing her second novel. She has been published in magazines both on and offline in places like Diagram, The Nervous Breakdown, Equals Record and blogs regularly at Flux Capacitor.

Jennifer Pastiloff, Beauty Hunter, is the founder of The Manifest-Station. Her work has been featured on The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown, Jezebel, Salon, among others. Jen’s leading one of her signature retreats to Ojai, Calif. over New Years. Check out jenniferpastiloff.com for all retreat listings and workshops to attend one in a city near you. Next up: South Dakota, NYC, Dallas, Kripalu Center For Yoga & Health, Tuscany. She is also leading a Writing + The Body Retreat with Lidia Yuknavitch Jan 30-Feb 1 in Ojai (2 spots left.) She tweets/instagrams at @jenpastiloff.

Guest Posts, Sex

Children’s Toys.

June 24, 2014

Children’s Toys. A Short Story by Fiona George.

It doesn’t feel right, having him here. Doesn’t feel right to call him by the same name I screamed in bed, now that he’s my ex. Doesn’t feel right to call him by any name, not yet. We’ve only been apart two weeks. Apart isn’t the right word, because he’s here with me on my couch. We’re apart like we’re not fucking, like we don’t say I love you.

People always asked how I loved him. How a little doll of a girl loved a big, fat man. It was never hard. When I fell out of love, it wasn’t because he was fat. I outgrew him. He was my giant teddy bear, the kind of overstuffed, oversized teddy bears people buy their girlfriends on Valentines Day. His eyes, big blue eyes glossed like the plastic eyes of stuffed toys. But I never knew a teddy bear to down almost a whole bottle of champagne.

He brought the bottle to share. I only got a little. But that’s okay, an empty stomach and a lack of sleep fill in the blanks of my drunk. Give up love, and I give up food and sleep, too.

We both knew my love would run out, I never had enough love to stagnate in our own sweat and saliva and cum and call it happily ever after. It was only the first time I fell in love, that pulse through me saying nothing can be better than this, even though I knew better. But he’d been there. Done that. He was in it for forever.

Then I changed my mind.

No, I didn’t change my mind. My heart went and changed on me. It’s my mind that keeps changing now, got no idea what it wants. It’s my mind going back and forth that’s gonna yank us around tonight.

All the love I ever had for him isn’t enough for my heart to change back. Not enough to call him by his name, or even look him straight on, to look anywhere but at our reflections on the blank TV screen in front of us. He’s got his black leather jacket on and it makes his body disappear on the black screen. All there is on the couch next to me is a floating Cheshire cat head. Red lips and his teeth, straight and white except one snaggle tooth in his front top. His smile too big. I don’t remember what one of us just said to make him smile.

But there’s a lot more of him than his floating grin. The rest of him takes up half the couch. All the way up to the crack in the cushions, the line between us. My unspoken rule, he stays on his side and I stay on mine.

The weight of him makes a valley on his side of the couch. I have to hold on to the arm on my side if I don’t want to slip, slowly, into it. I almost want him to stay over, but I don’t want to fuck him. But without those big blue eyes on me, all their adoration at every little thing I do, I feel worthless. I want to slip into his valley, the same way I did when he used to make that valley in my bed.

“Do you want to stay over?” I hear myself ask, my words weak, thin and slow as I feel.

His face, his eyes. I finally turn to look. I haven’t looked into his eyes since I broke up with him. His features so big, blue eyes, red lips, his nose with a little bit of a bump near the bridge. But it’s always been his eyes, those big pale blue eyes that always got me. They’re empty now, empty and happy like a teddy bears should be.

I want him to leave.

“Never mind,” I say, “I shouldn’t have asked. It would be a bad idea.”

His face doesn’t move, but it’s all different. Like a snapshot of when he was happy for a second, eyes extra glossy with tears. If you pull his string, he talks. Says the words he said when I left him. Prerecorded nicknames, prerecorded love.

“Whatever you want, buttercup, I just want you to be happy.”

Words that sound like the end of the conversation.

It wasn’t the end then, and it’s not the end now. His face right in mine, his bar breath of cigarettes and booze fill the space between us, his recorded words soaked with champagne.

“But what if, and feel free to say no,” He says, “what if I just cuddle with you till you fall asleep?”

Just what I want, all the comfort and none of the sex. But I know I’d wake up sticky with him, a couple glasses of champagne burning in my stomach like undeserved adoration. He used to light a fire in my panties, I couldn’t tell you why. Maybe those eyes. But for the last year, sex had my little sacrifice to his self-esteem. I’d do it again if we were in the same bed.

“I’d have to wake up to lock the door anyway,” I say, “you should probably leave.”

His knees creak to lift all his weight, all that might seem like soft fluffy stuffing is so much heavier. When he talks again, he faces the door and his words don’t sound recorded, the little voice box at the end of the string crushed and it’s all my fault.

“Fuck, fine.” He says, “You asked me to stay. But whatever.”

I don’t leave the couch, I pull myself into myself. Knees to my chest with my hands clasped around them, head on my knees. Small as I can be. I wait for him to leave so I can cry. He doesn’t leave, he’s back in front of me, his leather jacket zipped up like he’s ready to go. Me, small as I can be folded in on myself, his jacket would fit all of me.

He doesn’t leave. The pop pop of his weak knees when he bends over me. All I can see is him. Right now, he could lay down on me, fall on me, smother me, crush me. I wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing.

His voice is a recording again, sing song sweet and all fake.

“Can I get one kiss before I go?” He asks, “Just a peck, I promise.”

I want to tell him no, but I want him to go. Maybe this one bit of affection will be enough and he’ll be out the door, happy to get what he did. So I bob my head in voiceless consent.

He holds himself up with one hand on the back of the couch, the other is drunk hot and sweaty on my cheek. He leans close, closer, his plushy soft red lips on mine. My knees between us, push into his chest. His stomach curls around the little rock I’ve made myself, swallowing me up. I feel safe, like the last two weeks never happened.

That was just the peck, and if he left right then that would be okay. I might even miss him.

But that isn’t it, his tongue pushes past my closed lips, my brick wall of teeth, reaches down deep in my throat for the part of me that still wants him. He runs me over, three hundred pounds of him crushing my bent legs into me until I can’t breathe. Hot hands reach into the little rock of me to my breasts beneath a pink sweater.

He steps back and stands up straight but not to leave, to pull my legs out and apart. I let him. I don’t fight. He has me opened he wants me naked, naked as I am under all my pink. My sweater gone and so am I, close my eyes and imagine someone else. But there is no one else, no one I would want to do this. But I’m going to let him, I’m going to fake one more orgasm for him, scream everything but his name.

Then maybe he’ll leave.

His hand on the back of the couch grips my hair, the other moves down the naked top of me. The humid hot of his palms. Chubby-soft fingers feel hard. His nails unclipped on my breast, he pulls to hurt, to bruise the softest part of me. Pop pop means he’s on his knees, both his hands go to the elastic top of my sweat pants. Fingers slipping in pants and panties pull both down in the same motion.

My eyes, closed in a black nowhere trying not to let tears leak out when I feel two chubby fingers. Two of his drunk hot fingers inside me with the word he’s said so many times in two years, the word that used to get my panties wet and make my heart do circus tricks. Now all it does is bring the champagne in my stomach to a boil. His low smokers voice, that one word that held all his power.

“Mine.”

Two years, all the time he’d called me his, two years of my body as his. Two years and I would never say no, because I didn’t want to say no at first, then because I didn’t want to hurt him. All that time. Wasn’t until right there on my side of the couch, the other side of the line he crossed. Wasn’t till I was stripped with two of his big fingers in and out of me and his mine that I knew I had my one word, too. My word with all the power.

When it comes out, it’s almost a whisper.

“No.”

Almost a whisper, but he heard me. He stops. His fingers still inside me but they don’t move anymore. My eyes open and his plastic eyes up at me. He doesn’t take his hand out, more like it falls out. His hands, his face, fall down. Each word out of his mouth, one little tear drop.

“I’m sorry,” He says, “I just want to be close to you, I’m sorry.”

Kisses at my thighs, lips gone soft. I’d never seen him look so weak, and all I wanted to do was kick him in the face. I don’t kick, I run. Pull my legs from where they’re spread around him, into small as I can be again. I roll onto his side of the couch, spread myself out in a jump off the couch, run to the only door in the apartment that locks.

Behind the fake wood bathroom door before he can lift himself off the ground. Maybe he’ll leave, he can’t get to me behind the door, so maybe he’ll leave. But just seconds later his knock on the door bounces off bathroom tiles, into the cold white porcelain tub I’ve curled myself up in, small as I can be. This door between us, sounds hollow. Breakable.

My tears, fill the bathtub one drip from my chin at a time. He screams from the other side of the door, the only thing I hear is selfish slut, everything else just sounds like anger, like hurt and tears. I’m crying loud in my head, bite my lip to keep silent. He won’t hear me cry. Tears run into my mouth, bite my lip and taste salt and iron.

All I want right then is my giant teddy bear, to roll into his valley and be wrapped in warm, soft first love. To lay on top of him, feel okay about ever loving him. But he isn’t my teddy bear anymore, he isn’t mine. I’m not his.

He shakes the apartment, the stomp stomp stomp of heavy footsteps.

He’s gone.

The slam of the door.

He’s really gone.

Fiona George is a non-collegiate high school dropout who loves to learn, especially when it comes to writing. She is conquering a fear of her own words and putting them out in the world. She’s had one other story published in Nailed Magazine. She feels lucky for the opportunities she’s had to learn from writers whose presence makes her a little nervous, in Tom Spanbauers weekly Dangerous Writing workshops, and in The Writers Voice workshop with Lidia Yuknavitch and Suzy Vitello, where she met Jen. (Jen thinks she is the most badass 20 year old she knows.)

Jennifer Pastiloff is the founder of The Manifest-Station. Her work has been featured on The Rumpus, The Nervous Breakdown, Jezebel, Salon, and more. Jen leads her signature Manifestation Retreats & Workshops all over the world. The next retreat is to Ojai, Calif over Labor Day. Check out jenniferpastiloff.com for all retreat listings and workshops to attend one in a city near you. Next up: Seattle, London, Atlanta, South Dakota, NYC, Dallas, Tucson & The Berkshires (guest speaker Canyon Ranch.) She tweets/instagrams at @jenpastiloff.

Next Manifestation workshop is London July 6. Book here.

Guest Posts, Relationships

Crossing the Threshold

March 29, 2024

The bridegroom carries his new wife over the threshold to start a life together and we all sigh at the romance! But I have crossed more than one threshold in my life. In some cases, like the birth of my son, they were new beginnings filled with joy. Others, like the death of my husband, left me in despair. At times these thresholds were decision points, but others were crossed before I even understood what I had done. That was the case with my retirement and a move across two states.

My husband died in 2010 and for the next six years I immersed myself in my job as a school superintendent. I spent two Christmases at my son’s house and loved being with my grandsons. Retirement and a move to their town started looking very attractive.

Signs that this transition might be a challenge popped up one Thanksgiving a few years before I moved, when we all gathered at my sister’s house for Thanksgiving. I joined my son for breakfast at their hotel the day they were leaving. I brought up Christmas and assumed I would be joining them again. He studied the menu and then scrolled through his phone, not looking at me. Still scrolling he casually announced, “We don’t want you to come on Christmas this year. Why don’t you come after Christmas.” I sat there, mute for a few minutes, then I got up and left the hotel in tears. The atmosphere was tense when we said our goodbyes at my sister’s house several hours later. Never one for outright conflict, I tucked this memory deep in my brain’s filing cabinet.

***

A recent blog on retirement statistics announced: “On average, 10,000 baby boomers reach the average retirement age every day.” In 2016 I was one of the 10,000, retired, widowed, and living in a new town, where my son and his family also lived. I have often wondered if this move was a good idea. I justified it to myself as a favor to my only child. When I get older and need assistance in daily life, I won’t be a day’s drive away. It may be more honest to say I was lonely without my job and without a family.

Navigating this new life has been a challenge. The big stuff happened, as it usually does, in relationships.

My son was in high school the last time we lived in such close proximity. Two- or three-day visits and sporadic phone calls have been the norm since those days. That fact did nothing to quell my expectations that we would spend the rest of my days in a loving, close relationship.

One evening a few weeks before I moved, my son and his family had dinner with me at a local restaurant a block from their house. The place is a beloved Greek eatery with a deck, umbrellas, and picnic tables. I chose a spot facing my daughter-in-law who looked as lovely as she always does. I thought: “This is what I’ve been waiting for…a family dinner in a favorite spot…” My mind took off, imagining Sunday dinners at my house……my son stopping by after work for a drink…babysitting my grandsons. Heaven!

My son got up to greet friends and acquaintances in the restaurant and my daughter-in-law focused on helping the boys decide what they wanted to eat. Her long blond hair draped over her shoulders, onto her fashionable black maxi length dress. She began to tell me about the news from her large extended family in the Delta of Mississippi, not far from Oxford. Several sorority friends from college stopped by to say hello and they all talked over each other excitedly.

“Don’t you look the cutest”. “I love your hair that way”. “How’s your grandmother, she’s so funny!!” Her infectious laugh drew smiles from nearby tables, and she was the center of attention at ours.

My son, who had been quiet during our meal, gathered up the boys after dinner and they started home. My daughter-in-law and I lingered to drink our wine and chat. The buzz around us got louder as the deck filled up with diners.

“…..worried about you moving here….. doesn’t know what to expect”. Those words found their way through the noise.

“ Who?”

“R—”

“Why?” My stomach tightened.

“What’s he think I’m gonna do? I’m not gonna butt into your lives!”

We stopped to pour more wine…She continued to tell me what she apparently thought I needed to hear.

“We’ve got our own traditions and routines, Ruth. And you need to make your own.” I thought, “you are one tough cookie” and I grudgingly tipped my imaginary hat. I said, “I am glad you are being honest. Part of the tension last year around Christmas happened because R___ was given the job of telling me I wasn’t welcome on Christmas Day. It might be better if you and I talked.” I mimicked the blunt way he had blurted out the news.

“Oh, I didn’t know that”. Heightened emotion and the wine tinted her porcelain cheeks. I ruefully noted to myself “She would be quite a formidable opponent if I chose the competition path.”

As we walked back to their house, she unexpectedly remarked,” I feel so much better”. I realized it had not been easy for her to tackle the boundary issue with her mother-in-law. I had plopped myself into their pond and the ripples seemed threatening.

I had bought a house, moved my furniture, and there was no going back now. Somehow, I needed to build a new life and accept that it would not look like a Norman Rockwell painting.

A prayer written by Reinhold Niebuhr, the great theologian, eventually became the famous serenity prayer, a staple of all the 12-step programs. It became mine.

“God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.”

This became my daily and sometimes moment-by-moment prayer over the next seven years.

My son was chairman of the school board during the COVID mask controversies. He rebuffed any advice I had as a former school superintendent. Serenity prayer.

The mythical Sunday dinners that took enormous effort by an inadequate cook (me) lasted 45 minutes because everyone was busy. I gave away the dining room table and created a study nook for myself. I took them out to eat when it was convenient for everyone. Serenity prayer.

My grandsons, 7 and 9 when I moved, enjoyed coming to my upstairs floor full of their video games, board games, and order out menus. It dawned on their parents that this was a safe place for the kids to be and it afforded them some free time. Serenity prayer.

I deliberately found volunteer activities that used my skills and enthusiasm, involved myself in community organization that focused on building better government, and made many friends along the way. I took control over what I could do and let go of what I could not make happen. Serenity prayer.

I ask my son to lunch one or two times a month and he has started suggesting it himself sometimes. That is the only time I am with him by myself, and it has taken seven years for those conversations to become more personal. He is married to a strong woman, has a law practice, is maneuvering the teenage years of two boys, and I am not his top priority. Serenity prayer.

And then one day, during a family trip to Ireland, my daughter-in-law sought me out to talk about a personal issue that was troubling her. Somewhere in the time we spent together that day, I heard: “I love you” and “I trust you”. Serenity prayer.

Ruth O’Dell is an emerging writer with a previous publication in Atticus Review. Ruth is a retired educator living, loving, and writing in Oxford, Mississippi.

***

Wondering what to read next?

This is not your typical divorce memoir.

Elizabeth Crane’s marriage is ending after fifteen years. While the marriage wasn’t perfect, her husband’s announcement that it is over leaves her reeling, and this gem of a book is the result. Written with fierce grace, her book tells the story of the marriage, the beginning and the end, and gives the reader a glimpse into what comes next for Crane.

“Reading about another person’s pain should not be this enjoyable, but Crane’s writing, full of wit and charm, makes it so.”
—Kirkus (starred review)

***

The ManifestStation is looking for readers, click for more information.

Guest Posts, Adoption, Books

The Lonely Doll Made Me Feel Seen

May 26, 2021

By Megan Culhane Galbraith

As a little girl I’d lie flat on my back and pour over The Lonely Doll. It was an oversized picture book with a pink gingham cover that featured a black and white photo of a doll sitting on the floor holding an open book. The author, Dare Wright, posed her Lenci doll, “Edith,” in various scenes inside her own glamorous New York City apartment, the park, the Brooklyn Bridge and beyond. Like Dare, the doll was pretty, blonde, with bangs and a high ponytail. She seemed a charmed life, but there was one problem. Edith was terribly lonely.

Wright was an amateur photographer and The Lonely Doll was her first book. The Lenci doll that represented Edith was the doll she’d played with as a child. Edith was Dare’s doppelgänger. In the book Edith’s parents are never home and she is essentially orphaned, wandering the huge apartment, staring out the window, hoping for friends to play with when suddenly two friends show up at her door, Mr. Bear and Little Bear.

I loved Edith, but what saddened me was her expression. Her eyes seemed searching and vacant. Her mouth was pursed in a way that implied a smile she wasn’t capable of giving. It’s no wonder Wright’s book influenced my work in deep ways. We were both searching for how to belong.

In my memoir-in-essays, The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Baby Book, I recreate and photograph scenes from my baby book in my dollhouse similar to the way Wright did. My visual art project, The Dollhouse, became a lens through which I could safely question my personal history and interrogate the myths of adoption and identity. As an adopted child, I’d felt like a thing to be played with––a doll––instead of a person with her own identity. I’d felt looked at, but not seen. Playing in the dollhouse helped me reconstruct my identity after feeling invisible for many years. It helped me build a safe home within myself because for a long time I’d never felt truly at home anywhere, not even in my own body.

Children play to control the world. When I was a child, I wanted to control my world because as an adoptee I felt I had no control. I created small universes in shoebox dioramas in grade school, and built tiny natural habitats for the mice that lived in the field behind my house. I loved to create and explore new miniature realms. It was empowering to make all the decisions, so I imagined myself into another life. It didn’t matter that the stage was tiny. These were worlds into which I could disappear.

Dolls have no agency; they are objects to be acted upon. I didn’t play much with dolls as a child. I hadn’t been given dolls as a girl––no Barbie, or Baby Alive. My parents gave me Legos, a rock tumbler, and a frog hatchery, all of which dazzled me. Each Christmas, Mom gave me one Madame Alexander doll, which I was urged to keep pristine in its box. The one doll I remember playing with was Holly Hobbie. Holly had flat feet and a flat chest like me, and her dress was reminiscent of what Laura Ingalls wore in “Little House on The Prairie,” a show I watched religiously every Sunday. Holly’s tagline was “Start Each Day In a Happy Way.” She had a huge head, oversized eyes, chipmunk cheeks . . . and no mouth. She couldn’t have spoken if she’d wanted to.

I hated her.

One day, after cutting her hair so short it stuck straight up from her head, I tried to decapitate her. I held her flat feet and banged her giant head against the corner of my desk. When that didn’t work, I grabbed her head and tore it off with my hands. I realize now how angry I was that I couldn’t express my fear, or loneliness. It was there, living inside me all along but I didn’t have the words. I felt sad, emotionally fragile, and invisible when all I needed was to be held and comforted.

Years later, I began playing with a tin dollhouse I’d found at a local antique shop; A ’60s-era Louis Marx “Marxie Mansion” of the same time period in which my birth mother had been sent away to have me. That set the stage for what would become the basis for a visual art project called “The Dollhouse.” I staged the dolls and babies in household situations and photographed them from the outside looking in, just like Dare Wright did in The Lonely Doll. It was a voyeuristic way of seeing a situation from an angle of removal. It gave me the space I needed to examine my adopted life through a different lens. Thanks to those dolls I began to reconstruct and reclaim my identity.

“No one gets a dollhouse to play at reality,” said the child psychologist Erik Erickson, “but reality seeps in everywhere when we play.”

The New Yorker deemed The Lonely Doll “The Creepiest Children’s Book,” and it has a cult following, but I don’t find it creepy at all. There’s a controversial scene in the book. Edith is thrown over Mr. Bear’s knee and spanked for being “naughty” for trying on her mother’s lipstick. Keep in mind it was Little Bear who provoked her to wear the lipstick and who wrote, “Mr. Bear is a silly old thing” on the boudoir mirror in that same lipstick.

Adults project eroticism on to that spanking scene (because adults ruin everything), but it was more about punishing a girl for showing her feelings than it was about kink. Why was Edith being disciplined for expressing a feeling and trying to connect with her absent mother? It was Little Bear who deserved that spanking. In my child brain I thought, “If a doll could get spanked for doing something “naughty” like expressing her feelings, then surely I’d better be a good girl and not make anyone angry.”

Writing this essay sparked a memory of my Dad coming into my room one night. He sat on the side of my bed and without introduction said, “Your mother and I have discussed it and we’ve decided you’re too old to spank anymore.” I don’t remember what prompted him to make that announcement, or what he said afterward. I just remember feeling mute and wanting to pull the covers over my head.

It wasn’t until years later, trying to write about my own numb loneliness as an adopted child that I returned to The Lonely Doll and realized its vast influence on my work. The cover of my book is also a doll—she’s my doppelgänger, Little Megan. She was given to me by my friend Elizabeth and had been part of her mother’s collection when she’d been hospitalized for a year with polio. The dolls kept her company.

As I considered the structure of my memoir-in-essays, I needed to tell my story in a fractured way, which is the way we adoptees get our information, either filtered through the fog of someone else’s memory, or obfuscated by secrets and lies. Dare Wright was telling her story through her doll Edith too. She was asking to be seen, truly seen, beyond her beauty and beyond what looked outwardly like a glamorous life.

D.W. Winnicott, a British psychologist, called the dolls, blankets, and stuffed animals children often have as “comfort objects.” These objects helped a child manage the stress of the mother not being there and allowed them build the confidence needed to become independent.

In The Dollhouse I created a world where women rule on a 1:12-scale. It became a portal to imagine myself into my birth mother’s life and her into mine. Playing with these dolls was also a way of managing a thorny relationship with my birth mother while grieving for my long-dead Mom. Comfort objects, indeed.

“Children are innocent before they are corrupted by adults,” said the child psychologist Eric Erickson, “although we know some of them are not and those children––the ones capable of arranging and re-arranging the furniture and dolls in any dollhouse––are the most dangerous of all. Power and innocence together are explosive.”

The Lonely Doll helped me feel seen. It was an influential book that gave me a window into the loneliness brought on by my adoption, and the feelings of numbness and invisibility. I realize now that I don’t need to apologize for my existence.

My greatest desire is to be fully seen.

Megan Culhane Galbraith is a writer, visual artist, and an adoptee. She is the author of The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book, a hybrid memoir-in-essays published by Mad Creek Books. Her work was Notable in Best American Essays 2017 and her writing, interviews, and art have been published in HYPERALLERGIC! Severance Magazine, ZZYZZVA, Tupelo Quarterly, Parhelion, Hobart, Longreads, Hotel Amerika, Catapult, and Redivider, among others. She is a graduate and the Associate Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars, and the founding director of the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont Young Writers Institute. Follow Megan on her website or facebook. She can also be found on Twitter as @megangalbraith and on Instagram as @m.galbraith and @the_d0llh0use.

Buy The Guild of the Infant Savior: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book at Bookshop.org or Amazon.

Check out the Lonely Doll book here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Megan Galbraith is a writer we keep our eye on, in part because she does amazing work with found objects, and in part because she is fearless in her writing. Her debut memoir-in-essays, The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book , is everything we hoped from this creative artist. Born in a charity hospital in Hell’s Kitchen four years before Governor Rockefeller legalized abortion in New York. Galbraith’s birth mother was sent away to The Guild of the Infant Saviour––a Catholic home for unwed mothers in Manhattan––to give birth in secret. On the eve of becoming a mother herself, Galbraith began a search for the truth about her past, which led to a realization of her two identities and three mothers.

This is a remarkable book. The writing is steller, the visual art is effective, and the story itself is important.

Pick up a copy at Bookshop.org or Amazon and let us know what you think!

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Anti-racist resources, because silence is not an option

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Click here for all things Jen

Guest Posts

She & I… (& Rheumatoid Arthritis)

September 1, 2015

By Melanie Bates

haven’t been able to bend my left pointer finger for the last six months. It moves far enough to form the shape of a claw. No farther. It’s as if I’m perpetually pointing at everything in my path. Look there. Go there. Over there. Right there. It’s pink and resembles a crooked sausage. The corrosion is crawling into my palm.

She

types seventy words per minute, opens mason jars, and lifts mozzarella-laden lasagna out of the oven. She can scrub her hair and push down the pump of her favorite perfume. Her hands are beautiful and slim and her fingers rest together, straight and aligned. Perfect.

follow behind my boyfriend when we take our walks. I’m ten feet back. Limping. My right foot will no longer take my full weight. I just have to manage Chloé because I only have the one fully-functional hand. I watch him run through the grass with So-Kr8z and Sancho to get their pent-up energy out. My pent-up energy rests inside me like a ball of unrisen dough.

She

runs alongside them. She’s still really fast. In tenth grade her P.E. teacher singled her out for the track team. Asked her to join. This same teacher watches her now from the sidewalk as she runs through the grass with the pups trailing along behind her. The teacher nods, approving of her speed.

want to connect with my guy later that night. I’m on top and I ask him to hold on to my forearms so I don’t have to use my hand. I’m a lover in traction.

She

is an acrobat. She digs her fingers into his chest. She only feels pleasure.

try to remember the jump rope rhymes. What were they? My niece, Adri, and my boyfriend twirl the rope so I can show her how to jump in while its moving. I count one… sway forward and back… two… forward and back… GO. My bum foot hits the ground and crumbles underneath me, the rope burns as it stops against my calf.

She

doesn’t count. She knows the rhythm. She’s in. She jumps and jumps and jumps. Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, Turn Around. Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, Touch the Ground. Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear, Touch Your Shoe…

decide hopscotch will be easier. I grab blue glitter sidewalk chalk and draw the outline, I make the boxes and write out the numbers. I find the perfect round rock and toss. It lands on six. “Watch me, Adri.” I make it to four. I stop. I try to show her with my words and direct her little body down the board.

She

hops—two feet, one foot, two feet, one foot, one foot. She picks up the rock one-footed and completes the course, hop-twisting her body to go back down. Showoff.

travel to Pennsylvania for my week-long master’s residency. I stay at a beautiful bed and breakfast where Sister Renata greets me with one of the best hugs I’ve ever received in my life and says, “Welcome home.” After a full day of classes and thesis readings, I sprawl on the floral bedspread at 7:00 pm, exhausted. I fall asleep as soon as possible, so I can keep going the next day. I haven’t drank since my thyroid was removed in 2011 except for three solitary sips of wine and a single taste of limoncello. Continue Reading…

Binders, Guest Posts

Dendrochronology (The Study of Rings.)

February 28, 2015

By Gayle Brandeis.

The first boy to give me a ring, at least part of one, was Timmy Murakami. He left an “I like you and I hope you like me” note in my third grade locker, a note that suggested we go for a walk by Lake Michigan together. Along with drawing little YES and NO squares for me to mark, he had folded the bottom left corner of the wide ruled notebook paper into a sharp triangle, and had tucked a little yellow plastic heart inside, clear and pale, like lemon candy. It looked like it had fallen off a ring, prismatic like a diamond, a bit of adhesive still on its back. I never replied to the note—too shy—but sometimes I would set the gem on top of my ring finger and feel a rush through my body I couldn’t quite name, an admixture of quease and thrill.

The first thing I ever stole was a Chicago Bears ring. I didn’t mean to steal it. I had tried it on in the gift shop at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare, where my family often went for Sunday brunch, a lavish spread of ice sculptures and lox and tiny fussy desserts, live piano music accompanying the hiss of butter from the omelet station. My sister and I loved to go to the gift shop and look at the snow globes holding the Chicago skyline, the activity books that came with invisible ink pens, the bins of candy and playing cards, the Buckingham Fountain keychains. I forgot the ring was on my finger when we left the store to get another plate of tiny, fussy desserts, didn’t notice it until we were back at home and my shirt snagged on it as I changed into my pajamas. My heart started to hammer. It was an ugly ring, the Chicago Bears logo huge and garish. I hated football. It was not a ring I ever would have asked my parents to buy for me. I had no idea why I had even chosen to try it on. But here it was. I was a criminal. There must be some badness in me I hadn’t known I possessed. I felt guilty, but also slightly excited, maybe even a little proud—a good girl like me getting away with theft. I yanked the ring off my finger and hid it deep inside my underwear drawer, where only I could feel its shameful glow. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, No Bullshit Motherhood, parenting

The Lesson Leaving Taught. (No Bullshit Motherhood Series.)

October 8, 2016

Note from Founder Jen Pastiloff: This is part of my new series called No Bullshit Motherhood. Raw, real, 100% bullshit free. If you have something to submit click the submissions tab at the top. You can follow us online at @NoBullshitMotherhood on Instagram and @NoBSMotherhood on Twitter. Search #NoBullshitMotherhood online for more.

By Chris J. Rice

My ten-year-old son stood beside his father in the front yard of my now empty house. My son had a scowl on his face. Looked away from my packed car, down at the ground.

Dark-eyed boy with a skeptical furrowed brow.

“Come here,” I said. Called him over to my driver-side window.

He stuck his head in for a kiss, and I whispered in his ear: “You’re going to miss me. And that’s okay. It’s okay to have a dream. Never forget that.”

He nodded as if he understood. “Bye,” he said, then turned around and ran back to stand with his father.

I put my Datsun in reverse and took off. Moved to Los Angeles to attend graduate school. And I didn’t take my child along. I left him with his dad for the duration. I told them both it would only be a few years, though I knew it would be more.

I sensed it would be forever.

A formal acceptance letter came in the mail and I made a decision. Put my books in the post, my paint box in the trunk of my yellow Datsun B210, and drove headlong into whatever came next. Sold most of my stuff in a big yard sale: the vintage clothes I thought I’d never wear again, the leather couch and chair I’d bought dirt cheap off a moving neighbor.

I didn’t have much left after the divorce.

I said it. My ex said it too. I love you. But he didn’t mean it. And for the longest time I didn’t get that. Just picked up the slack. Made things happen. That’s how it was. Okay. Just okay. He would get angry. Couldn’t seem to manage. Fury popped up like every other emotion. Yelling. Disparaging—things like that.

I missed my son like mad. We talked by phone regularly. I flew back on holidays. He came to visit on spring break, and for a few weeks every summer.

Seven years passed. Continue Reading…

Uncategorized

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

October 5, 2011

Yesterday I entered a parallel universe. I shall call it “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.”

Yea, you know the film.

7 a.m. I wake up.

7:15 am. I have coffee ( with a ~~little~~ lot of almond milk.)

7:30 I repost Emily Rapp’s Little Seal blog on my site so people can read her profound and heartbreaking words.

7:45 I vow not to overpack.

8 am: I overpack.

10 a.m. Arrive at LAX for 10:50 American Airlines flight.

10:15 I am through security with ease. This is going to be a breeze! 90 minute flight to Santa Fe! I have some time to kill so I decide to stand in the world’s longest line to get a bottle of water and maybe a coffee. I don’t really want or need the coffee but I think Hey! I will treat myself since this airport experience has been so awesome so far! No hassle deserves caffeine!

They don’t have any milk I will drink so I go hard-core and drink it black. I can handle this, I think. I’m tough.

10:25 I am at Gate 44 looking for my own Gate 44H. Huh. Where is it? When did LAX get so confusing? Thankfully I have time and everything has been so easy today. (Insert foreboding music here.)

Where the FU*K is Gate 44H? I ask myself while dragging around my ridiculous amount of things and piping hot black coffee. Then I ask it out loud. Nobody knows.

Oh, apparently I have to take a train. Or a bus. Or something that is not my own legs to get there. WTF?!

10:30 I enter an elevator. I get out on wrong floor.

10:32 Panic sets in.

10:35 I find the tram or train or shuttle or bus or whatever the thing is that whisks me to the other side of the airport for gate 44H. What does H stand for? H as in Hell? H for Happy-you’ve- entered -the-Twilight Zone?

Woman next to me assures me I will make it. I want to trust her. I really do.

10:39 Walk up to Gate 44H(ell) to a man with crossed arms. I no longer trust woman from tram.

“Hi, I am here for the Santa Fe flight.”

“Closed.” Arms still crossed.

“What do you mean, closed?”

Looking at his watch with the stoniest face mine eyes have ever seen, he says “Gate is closed. It’s ten minutes before.”

I start to cry.

No wait, I shouldn’t lie to my readers.

Have you seen Terms of Endearment?

Have you seen the scene where Shirley Maclaine is in the hospital demanding that they give her daughter, played by Debra Winger, her shots! She was a veral madwoman.

That was me.

I stood there at that gate begging and screaming to the man with crossed arms at the gate, to everyone in the airport. ” Please, somebody help me get on that plane! I must get on that plane! I will be on that plane!”

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnxfDuxaRzA]

There were two other women who missed the flight and he wouldn’t budge. The plane was still right there. I could see its wing. I wondered if I could run out and grab onto it.

He could have opened the door. At what point did I completely abandon all my yogi-ness, I am not sure, but indeed it happened. I went postal on crossed-arms man.

“A baby is dying! I need to get there! Open the door! It’s a baby! A baby! Do you have children? What’s your name? Manny? Manny, do you have kids? ”

At this point Mr. Manny puts his hand in my face. ” Ma’am.”

Oh. No. He. Didn’t.

” Call security, I don’t care. Get me on that plane. Just open the door!”

There is only one flight a day to Santa Fe and I am only staying until Friday morning. My time with Ronan is limited. Everyone’s is. I am now a certified madwoman. You would have thought Ronan was my son. Something snapped in me. I became a Mama Bear. (I have no children yet, not of my own anyway, but just so you know, when I do: Dont Eff with me.)

I wanted to claw his eyes out with my bear hands. At some point, the little tiny plane to Santa Fe took off, with what I later find out, seven people missing because the gate closed too damn early and since Mr. Manny was the gatekeeper, we’d all been screwed.

” We can reroute you to Dallas. Three hour layover and then connect you to Santa Fe.”

Apparently I have no choice unless I wanted to leave tomorrow or fly there on my magic yoga mat and neither option was viable so I was going to Dallas. Yay!

11:40 As I get on plane to Dallas, they decide to take my carry- on away because I had too may personal items.

Of course they did.

2pm : I have bloody Mary on plane. It tastes of tears and pepper.

5 pm : I arrive in Dallas and my very expensive leather purse breaks in half so I am carrying it around like a child.

5:15 I get on a train to take me to Gate B like Boy only to get off at Gate D like Dog and then to get back on and go around and around. And around.

5:50 I find a cafe. I decide to treat myself to salmon even though it was $30. Fish in Dallas is expensive! I don’t finish it all but I wrap the very expensive fish to go.

6:45 I decide to walk back to my gate even though flight is at 8:10 because Lord knows at this point I would miss my flight again and get sent to Little Rock. From there I might never return.

The Following is a Scene from the Actual Film Planes, Trains, & Automobiles:

Neal: What’s the flight situation?

Del: Simple. There’s no way on earth we’re going to get out of here tonight. We’d have more luck playing pickup sticks with our butt-cheeks than we will getting a flight out of here before daybreak.

Neal: I guess we’ll find out soon enough.
Del: Yeah, but by the time the airline cancels this flight, which they will sooner or later, you’d have more of a chance to find a three-legged ballerina than you would a hotel room.
Neal: Are you saying I could be *stuck* in Wichita?
Del: I’m saying you *are* stuck in Wichita.

7:40 I get on plane. If you want to call it that. It was more like a can of beans or a small Datsun. I am not sure I will ever make it to Santa Fe.

I drop my to go box and my fish falls on the ground.

8:50 10 hours later I arrive in Santa Fe looking like an ex-con on crack who hadn’t had a haircut in 5 years.

But I made it! I made it! I am here with Emily and Rick and sweet Ronan. Please stay tuned to the blog for updates. He is pure love.

You know what? He was worth every tear, every second in Dallas, every rude gatekeeper, every broken purse strap, every bump on the plane. Or train. Or automobile.

I’d do it all over again.

I love you Ronan.

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