So my cousin Erin posted this really great piece last night over at Infinite and Endless. She is a dream. Here is a story:
It was end of June and I was eight-years-old an age still young enough to not really know time. Therefor June equaled one thing and that was Summertime which equaled one thing and that was Infinity. Long days of playing with the neighborhood kids and the hot melty tar of the driveway burning our feet.
Or, the beach. The beach the beach the beach, hot sand on my tender feet and the cold at night in my parents room under the window air-unit that made my sunburned aloe-face feel so smooth and cool. Satiation: when all is right with the world. How salt and sand for me have so much to do with this. We lived in the summer in a house crowded on the floors at night by the blow-up mattresses of all my aunts and uncles. My Pop, "The Colonel", was still alive then and these were the very ends of days that I did not know then were instructing me. Filling my life with my own inner quest for understanding of who I am. And how, for some very few of us, when we live the definition of something ambiguous as identity the knowledge of the details of this at once fulfill us, and challenge us. It's like the more I gain awareness of my outline the more I consistently find that the very next step, for a person like me, is to expand it. So I'm 8, it's summertime 1985. My grandparent's house at the shore is overloaded with family and we are loud, throat-pitched people and game-players and story-tellers every one. The nights are full with poker and smoke and though I am close at 8 to too old I still want to sit on dad or Uncle Kevin's lap if I'm allowed when it's late enough that they talk that funny low sidetalk out of their mouths and I get to laugh like I get it with my eyes on the ice melting in their glasses. In the daytime I have Barbies which I'm also near grown out of by now and also this glorious little baby cousin Esther she is fatcheeked and nubby with a scrunchy diaper and laughs when I retrieve her pacifier for her only to throw it across the room again and again. And also, there is electric in the air that reminds me of ice cream: the babies. The babies are coming, the babies are here.
Esther was first, in September, which made her near a year that June. And then Jackie, oh Jackie. My Grandmother's high-pitch panic sound when they brought her through the front door of the beach house in the car-seat Uncle Bill carried with both hands. That beam of his, definitive deliciousness of a face light-up specific to Uncle Bill: the light and flash around his broad teeth and Irish eyes. It was a surprise to Gram that they were even coming with the new baby so young, and like everything new Grammy took it loud and wrong at first. When I looked to the adults to understand what was wrong: in a hush from woman to woman, the secret. Jackie's only two weeks old. As if this should have explained everything. To this day this is the way of the McMullen. The unspoken drama that enwrapped certain things, the look in an eye over glasses or the intone of the fold of the words. The subtle emotional infliction that went with the late nights, the crowded kitchen mornings full of food, natural as all other parts of who we were: the seriousness of Life, edged as it could be with tragedy. That whole old-world post-immigrant thing, protective of the what-could-come and the unseen. That pigshit way some of us have that rebelled in the face of such unspokens. Existent today only in sighs or flickers in the eye, or if you're like me in a flash that reads Challenge.
So Esther and Jackie have arrived, not just to the Pop and Gram's beachhouse at The Pines but to the world! And too, the excitement of the Mary's: Uncle Tim's wife, pregnant-out-to-there, so you could see her belly-button buckled out from all the pressure through her shirt. In the kitchen, on the cool linoleum Tim's Mary stood back of Uncle Paul's Mary, redhead of curls down the shoulders of Paul's Mary and those big oversized rose glasses and that smoky husk of her laugh there even then. The power of her, that energy that used to surround her--and Katie, the baby inside who would come in October, already outsized like her mom.
It was barely a week or so later that Tim's Mary went. We were home now, respectively: all the Aunts and Uncles and kids tucked away in their plastic-sided houses in their burgeoning suburbs splayed out this way and that from Grammy and Pop's South Baltimore--Church Street--home. Making it. It was July, the first week, and hot so that my legs stuck to the grey leather of dad's caddie in the little bit of time it took to open the backseat door and get my seatbelt clicked. We were on our way to Tim and Mary's house ShadyHillLane. I remember even then the magic that surrounded the very words of that place. Maybe it was the pine trees that put a softened haze over the bricks of their house and muted out the rest of the world. Whatever it was,whatever it is, their house still has a magic effect on me, one of peace, to this day. And here is what I remember, walking in and the muffled sound of adult and adult talk, then dad saying to me you can't go up right now sis you're Aunt Mary's breastfeeding. And then the softness that for Uncle Tim has always passed as his way, uncharacteristic, of pride. No, it's ok, Kel can go up.
And walking in, and seeing Erin being drawn away from Aunt Mary's swollen chest, the baby so tiny and wrapped she was barely there, and then her being offered out into the air to me. Their big high bed so tall to me then, the nights and nights of giggles and laughter my brother and I had shared with Tim and Mary tucked in those sheets. How it all seemed so different in that moment as they settled me in against the pillows: the curtains pulled so that the room was with a subtle roseyellow glow. The warmth, the pure delicate coziness of the those sheets and that bed. Getting pulled in to that, encirlced by that wonder, that fine gentle bliss of moment to moment allure: awareness of fragility, ohh, of Life and tender birth. And holding her, my little cousin, for the first time. I was eight years old, wispy blond often red-faced bossy but so easy to be embarrassed and extra sensitive, and also a wee thing, bony and small. And the baby, Erin a little-bit of a thing, so small, so small! The perfect size for me, she melded right in to my arms and against my heart and close in to my chest. This was, for the first time, what it was to be inside of something so very big that even then I realized bigness has to do with being small.
Anyway, Erin, if you don't mind a public post rather than a comment in response to your blog: I feel you, sister. This call towards Life, this inherent sense that we should be enlarging the nest. And at once this conflicting perplexed sense, uncatagorized, a nameless feeling of unquenched calling. So potent it's as if it's of our blood. Yes, how it strangely seems to come from that very same nest. So it goes my sister, my friend. So it goes!!
Amen amen amen.
It was end of June and I was eight-years-old an age still young enough to not really know time. Therefor June equaled one thing and that was Summertime which equaled one thing and that was Infinity. Long days of playing with the neighborhood kids and the hot melty tar of the driveway burning our feet.
Or, the beach. The beach the beach the beach, hot sand on my tender feet and the cold at night in my parents room under the window air-unit that made my sunburned aloe-face feel so smooth and cool. Satiation: when all is right with the world. How salt and sand for me have so much to do with this. We lived in the summer in a house crowded on the floors at night by the blow-up mattresses of all my aunts and uncles. My Pop, "The Colonel", was still alive then and these were the very ends of days that I did not know then were instructing me. Filling my life with my own inner quest for understanding of who I am. And how, for some very few of us, when we live the definition of something ambiguous as identity the knowledge of the details of this at once fulfill us, and challenge us. It's like the more I gain awareness of my outline the more I consistently find that the very next step, for a person like me, is to expand it. So I'm 8, it's summertime 1985. My grandparent's house at the shore is overloaded with family and we are loud, throat-pitched people and game-players and story-tellers every one. The nights are full with poker and smoke and though I am close at 8 to too old I still want to sit on dad or Uncle Kevin's lap if I'm allowed when it's late enough that they talk that funny low sidetalk out of their mouths and I get to laugh like I get it with my eyes on the ice melting in their glasses. In the daytime I have Barbies which I'm also near grown out of by now and also this glorious little baby cousin Esther she is fatcheeked and nubby with a scrunchy diaper and laughs when I retrieve her pacifier for her only to throw it across the room again and again. And also, there is electric in the air that reminds me of ice cream: the babies. The babies are coming, the babies are here.
Esther was first, in September, which made her near a year that June. And then Jackie, oh Jackie. My Grandmother's high-pitch panic sound when they brought her through the front door of the beach house in the car-seat Uncle Bill carried with both hands. That beam of his, definitive deliciousness of a face light-up specific to Uncle Bill: the light and flash around his broad teeth and Irish eyes. It was a surprise to Gram that they were even coming with the new baby so young, and like everything new Grammy took it loud and wrong at first. When I looked to the adults to understand what was wrong: in a hush from woman to woman, the secret. Jackie's only two weeks old. As if this should have explained everything. To this day this is the way of the McMullen. The unspoken drama that enwrapped certain things, the look in an eye over glasses or the intone of the fold of the words. The subtle emotional infliction that went with the late nights, the crowded kitchen mornings full of food, natural as all other parts of who we were: the seriousness of Life, edged as it could be with tragedy. That whole old-world post-immigrant thing, protective of the what-could-come and the unseen. That pigshit way some of us have that rebelled in the face of such unspokens. Existent today only in sighs or flickers in the eye, or if you're like me in a flash that reads Challenge.
So Esther and Jackie have arrived, not just to the Pop and Gram's beachhouse at The Pines but to the world! And too, the excitement of the Mary's: Uncle Tim's wife, pregnant-out-to-there, so you could see her belly-button buckled out from all the pressure through her shirt. In the kitchen, on the cool linoleum Tim's Mary stood back of Uncle Paul's Mary, redhead of curls down the shoulders of Paul's Mary and those big oversized rose glasses and that smoky husk of her laugh there even then. The power of her, that energy that used to surround her--and Katie, the baby inside who would come in October, already outsized like her mom.
It was barely a week or so later that Tim's Mary went. We were home now, respectively: all the Aunts and Uncles and kids tucked away in their plastic-sided houses in their burgeoning suburbs splayed out this way and that from Grammy and Pop's South Baltimore--Church Street--home. Making it. It was July, the first week, and hot so that my legs stuck to the grey leather of dad's caddie in the little bit of time it took to open the backseat door and get my seatbelt clicked. We were on our way to Tim and Mary's house ShadyHillLane. I remember even then the magic that surrounded the very words of that place. Maybe it was the pine trees that put a softened haze over the bricks of their house and muted out the rest of the world. Whatever it was,whatever it is, their house still has a magic effect on me, one of peace, to this day. And here is what I remember, walking in and the muffled sound of adult and adult talk, then dad saying to me you can't go up right now sis you're Aunt Mary's breastfeeding. And then the softness that for Uncle Tim has always passed as his way, uncharacteristic, of pride. No, it's ok, Kel can go up.
And walking in, and seeing Erin being drawn away from Aunt Mary's swollen chest, the baby so tiny and wrapped she was barely there, and then her being offered out into the air to me. Their big high bed so tall to me then, the nights and nights of giggles and laughter my brother and I had shared with Tim and Mary tucked in those sheets. How it all seemed so different in that moment as they settled me in against the pillows: the curtains pulled so that the room was with a subtle roseyellow glow. The warmth, the pure delicate coziness of the those sheets and that bed. Getting pulled in to that, encirlced by that wonder, that fine gentle bliss of moment to moment allure: awareness of fragility, ohh, of Life and tender birth. And holding her, my little cousin, for the first time. I was eight years old, wispy blond often red-faced bossy but so easy to be embarrassed and extra sensitive, and also a wee thing, bony and small. And the baby, Erin a little-bit of a thing, so small, so small! The perfect size for me, she melded right in to my arms and against my heart and close in to my chest. This was, for the first time, what it was to be inside of something so very big that even then I realized bigness has to do with being small.
Anyway, Erin, if you don't mind a public post rather than a comment in response to your blog: I feel you, sister. This call towards Life, this inherent sense that we should be enlarging the nest. And at once this conflicting perplexed sense, uncatagorized, a nameless feeling of unquenched calling. So potent it's as if it's of our blood. Yes, how it strangely seems to come from that very same nest. So it goes my sister, my friend. So it goes!!
Amen amen amen.
Me and some of the cuz's, Nov 08, or as cuz Pat calls us: The McMafia
2 comments:
this is beautiful, thank you
lol as usual you have made me shed a tear. this is great! and thank you for writing it. much better than a blog comment lol.
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