Writerly Things, Reflections: Eddie's Place, Crofton & Back in the Day

This man I loved greatly died in the winter when I was 19, about to be 20. It was January, something like the 18th or 19th when he went. I found out on Thanksgiving only two months before, his son Little Dave told tell me Kel, dad's got cancer. I was standing in the basement at mom's getting ready to leave for some kind of impromptu day after Turkey Day family thing like bowling or whatever somewhere in the county with one of the aunts or uncles and cousins. Little Dave showed up, walked down in to the basement with the weirdest smile on his face. You always remember where you are the moment news like that hits.

Eddie was Little Dave's dad, and he owned the pizza shop I grew up working in. The whole time my dad was living in Cali, and my mom and I were fighting like blood and daggers, and my dad and I not speaking unless we were hating and yelling, Ed was a Pop to me. Teasing me, hugging and smiling and also yelling and scaring the shiz out of us and keeping me right, best he could for us anyhow, keeping his look out.

A month later it was Christmas, I was at the community college, had just started waiting tables at a fancypants joint in downtown Annapolis cuz the GM from Jersey came down and fired me from Applebee's, which is what happens when you cuss out a customer. It was before gentrification and the uptown yuppy parts of Naptown weren't there yet, same like Baltimore and the Harbourside condos and three and four star restaurants--none of that was there, just projects and ghettos and old abandoned warehouses no "revitalization," yet.

I was trying to not touch drugs anymore because two things happened when I picked up: I was likely to spin out and go a little crazy, and simultaneously once I started I could not stop smoking or sniffing or popping or whatever else it was I had to do to keep using once I started, no matter what the hell was going on with my body and mind. So it was days before Christmas and I went to Eddie's house, with a poinsettia for him and a letter mapping it all out. What he meant to me.

It was the last time I ever saw him. When I left I smoked a joint and circled the Crofton Parkway, and all the Christmas lights clean and glowing, and how could all that be going on normal, all these everylive's, and Eddie's gonna be dead. My mind mindlessly looping I drove the backroads Underwood to St. Stevens and on and on and back and back and Eddie was gonna die you know when the cancer's got someone like that you can just tell and lemmee tell you, I was young still, and fucked up. About three weeks or so later I pulled in to the parking lot of the restaurant, Eddie's Place, for a Sat night shift because I'd volunteered to take shifts again when he got sick. And one of the teens that worked the kitchen like I did when I started a sub girl came running out and said, Did you hear? Eddie's dead.

I was mad at her because she didn't know him like I did and how could you just drop the news like this out here in the parking lot under the grey eyeless sky? She hadn't been there all those years. Soon Maura was there and Mark and I think maybe even Cuddy and Kristen, too, then Billy came up, and we all cried a lot and didn't know what to say it just all happened so quick, then Little Dave called me, and asked me to give a eulogy on behalf of all us, Ed's restaurant kids.

The day of the funeral, or memorial service which is more what it was, I had to miss the first day of my first creative writing class, ever. When I showed up on the second day my heart was locked heavy with grief and little did I know, my Prof Susan, soon to be my first writing mentor, assigned to me a key and essentially said, go ahead, unlock. Unload. We had to turn in a memoir at the end of the semester, an autobiography, responsible for a large part of our grade. The first page of mine was Ed's eulogy.

What stands most out to me that spring was this compelling energy, this literal river that felt real and loving and natural as gold and that I could feel, all the time, like a channel just moving along through me. All I had to do, my only job, was to show up in my boat and then be willing to go. I didn't even need an oar in hand.

I wrote like I'd never wrote before, every afternoon, sometimes starting at 11 in the morning when class got out and not stopping until well after mom had gone to bed. I wrote, and wrote and wrote. It was the easiest, and also hardest thing--when it got to the pain-parts, like wringing an already rung dishtowel sometimes--that I'd ever done. And it was easy, because it was so natural. I just showed up in my boat, like I said, and off I went.

Later, Susan wrote a recommendation letter to Washington College for me, and helped me prepare a selection of writing samples. By the fall of that year I'd moved to Chestertown--hellooooo Eastern Shore, and life of Acadamy, and Institution, again--and then well you know...Here I am and So it goes, so it goes....

That was 11 years ago and all I've ever wanted was that river again. A huge part of the power of that river is merely trust. Trusting the river, but you can only do this if you're strong enough to trust yourself, and your boat, too.

In Chestertown I got sober, and lost a lot of the gleam of who I am. The radical starry-eyed sassy warrior grl I'd always been. I let her go with sobriety because, like the first line of Ed's eulogy says, My name is Kelly, though most you of may know me as that crazy girl from Eddie's Place and funny as this was, it was also true. There's always been a stigma for me of crazy associated to life prior to getting clean because of, well, because of the plain and straight experiences of literally and totally losing my mind. Drug related psychosis and figuring out if it really was cuz I was mentally ill, and the long hard battle all that was back then.

Bit by bit, year by year, I've tried to rectify it. Time and distance and maturity account for a lot.

The Duende is scary because death and crazy are scary. And it is painful, because only the artist knows so intimately the mid-wifing required of creative growth. To have to confront these, to have to be willing to confront it if you want to be brave enough and strong enough to do the work you secretly think you're capable of. And is anything really worth that hurt?

This morning, I was lying in bed and thinking about trust. I thought, you lived like this once, in 98, and again in 02 for that teeny little bit of time til you shut it down becasue of shame. And then, why fight it, this pacing coursing energy you actually feel growing and growing these last weeks, why fight who you are? I started to get up, to come write more on my novel, and then my room, my living room with my bed in the corner so that my bedroom could actually be my writing space, stilled. I stilled, in a moment of discovery which I guess is just acceptance, again, on yet a deeper level.

Acceptance of self.

The gold channel, the river, there it was. There I was, in my boat, on its shore. A small little click of peace happened, or not a click, just more like a feather floating softly to land even less than breathlessly, on the ground. A quiet soft sweet motion of getting my feet wet. Of stepping in.

My river is back. My gold channel is here again, refound.

I've keep looking at my hands and I can't keep from crying these wonderful hot tears all morning long.

"You think you can't write....

...but the truth is, you can't tell. the problem is, no one likes a snitch." ~betsy lerner

so, i'm writing a book.

it's fun, and also very weird. i've written two other ones, both were for college and back then in the face of institution the facts were that i never really gave a fluck. which means i've got in my catalouge one memoir from community college (responsible, simultaneous to a guy who used to drive a red chevy truck and broke my heart, for my very impulsive choice to go to washington college and Write--o love, o sacred music, o one who hears those bells and cries and cries and draws sweet meaning by and by.) that memoir was a virtual tell all of suburban funk and foolery in the eyes of a just barely finished teenager, one who by all definitions partied down and clearly was armed with the arrogance of honesty that a young one without knowledge intuitively calls upon. i had NO inhibitions and for the purpose it served me well. the second was fiction, was my thesis at wac, a novella written a year in to my sobriety and full with the demons and pain of addiction and most particularly the loss of my good friend and homie fannon to the lifestyle. my advisor back then just kept saying how it was very raw it was.

it was, those wounds were fresh and beaming as gold.

it's been seven years since then, almost eight if you count the fall that i first gave vision to my advisor of that fiction. lately i keep thinking about a quote i read by salinger, back when i used to teach in the jail. "there will be a story you want to tell for no better reason than because it matters to you more than any other. you'll stop looking over your shoulder to make sure you're keeping everyone happy, and you'll simply write what's real and true...one day a long time from now you'll cease to care anymore whom you please or what anybody has to say to about you. that's when you'll finally produce the work you're capable of."

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

i've been locked-up, put-out, broke-up, raving-mad contemptously sad a wise crazee earth womyn lost a hella bunch angry as a wasp and at times sharp as hell. i've made and kept and also lost some phenomenal fucking friends. i've run around in circles where i've actually been known as "spiritual kel". i mean, cmon. when it finally comes down to telling the truth, the real truth is there's not a damn thing you can do to keep your soul from practically forcing it all the way out...

for a person like me in fact, it's the only way to make it through

my friend lara once wrote this excellent piece about how just a few moments of writing after a self-imposed dry spell and she can actually feel her muscles melt loose away from her bones. now, that's it, isn't it? that's fine, fine showing and that for me is just the way it is.

which DOESN'T make it easy, not at all. it just proves my point about how some of us, no matter what, are at the end of the day simply compelled by the Call. and should we refuse it, take no note of that inner longing or worse work to deny our most divine, most sacred hunger? well i know, this i know for certain: there is no misery more severe.

so. tell the truth tell the truth tell the truth.

i will flesh out my experiences now, or shall continue. shall flesh out the Me i hold most dear...

what i'm listening to now, cuz i woke up with it playing in my head:
dylan's ring them bells

Detours, windows, doors & light: this week around kent county

Well, so i got a job. it all happened very fast and i am not feeling, say, fluent in the language of my new life just yet. and yet, it seems so right, so somehow as if i am finally, after a long long detour, stepping in to the facts of my life as if my soul just snapped open like an old 1980's blind and windowed me in on things: this is how it is meant to be--these are your moments, 'writ in eternity'....

i was of course waiting tables--slinging grease is what always goes in the back of my head when i say that, which is true regardless the level of white linen affair in which one is involved. it's all grease, it's all over you at night's end, it's all always in your hair and lingering not so much as a coating on your skin as a smell, or a sense, or a flavor of the over-processing of your life that ends up going with you, that you end up carrying around with you and wearing like a form of yourself not so true but also that you quietly can't seem to rid.....
it is the function of this life, no? to carry these skins of us on our back and at once deep within, and to try not to struggle when they are slow to come off, and try too not to force the transmutation...?

oohhhh, so i am an intake counselor, a liason for students of Adult Ed once again. but now sooo far to drive to my new job each day, so far to drive from my home. yet this feels so good to me, exhilerating and also stunning at the very same time.

ohhhh! and my eight pairs of ohsogorg trouser pants some wide-legged some high-wasted all so demurely chic and debonair hanging there on the new love affair i have which are my legs... literally make me quiver. that's right, i got hired by 11 and was shopping shopping shopping and remembering my body by 2....

in other not as fashionable news, but good to remember--authentic and just as true: coming out of my detour this week coincidently corresponded w touching down on so many lovely parts of our home land here in kent and queen anne's county...

sammy g

sammy g, bran and i were out on the chester monday eve. ran in to timmy p and greg down at ben's dock taking a swim before pearl creek's band practice. this is where we all go for relaxing dips, down the very end of blue heron farm lane--i wonder does ben know how often the all of us, at varied times, are there swimming even if he's not around?

our swimming hole at ben's dock

tuesday nite was ladies nite out--laura leah and i surprised brooke, who's getting ready to move, on her own, back in to her historic 13 bedroom unfinished hotel-house outside tolchester w the brand new wrap-around porch. we went out and about in naptown, our way of saying go on grrrrrl and also each quietly getting to remember that we are none of us ever alone...

brooke, laura, leah

then, thursday nite we all potlucked at mark and andrea's place out to rock hall. (you love the vernacular i know go ahead and sweat it) mark is this funny easy too come across as shy guy but so quik w the dead-on sharpheaded wit once you've been around him enough that you literally get moved to cry w your laughter...i know, it's happened to me way more than once. and andrea is his baltimore-living girlfriend who weekends it at their work-in-progress farm house here on the shore. he's a wash coll alum, so is she, like many of us. he's working now for the college on oyster restoration and other local sustainability grant and projects, taking whatever is handed to him and going along with it in his steady kind of mark walk-run. he, too, worked at the resteraunt w me. we quit the same week.....















mark's front porch & stairs, under construction

mark and andrea

their way cool bathroom door, handcrafted by mark!!

(probably i should have taken more pictures of the finished rooms--their lovely warm kitchen or the study upstairs. but guess that's for another potluck....)

and lastly, this morning, in our bedroom. how very good, still and clear the light can feel sometimes...

Sarah Ban B & Sacred Spots

I have this quiet place where I go. It's in my room. (Yes, Brandon and I, in addition to our bedroom, have our own rooms.) (This is probably the only reason that we've lasted as long as we have.) This idea of a quiet spot, which I actually refer to as my sacred spot, is not original. It came to me from the book Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach. I was 21 when I got that daily meditation book for my birthday in March of 98. And by the Fall, when I was moving my stuff in to the slant-walled wooden-floored attic-apartment on Washington Avenue in Chestertown, to start my first semester at a real four year school, I was sold on the ideas that Sarah Ban shares about personal sacred space. But my translation, back then, of seeking bliss within included bong hits to catalyze that written about state of quiet and rapture. In my first Chestertown apartment I sat on a big stuffed maroon pillow from Wal-mart in the center of my bedroom with my little pink "daybook of comfort and joy", a gratitude journal, and my Cabbage Patch lunchbox with the pink plastic bong and insence in it rested by my side. I sat cross-legged, lotus style like I'd seen all the hip wise ones do, and tried to tap open those doors of consciousness I'd heard so much about.

By January, 1999, my mom re-handed me a copy of the same book she'd gotten for Christmas. I was so out of my mind on script tranquilizers that I most strictly associated myself with a big amoebic blob. I felt sludgy and goopy and like I just sort of melted across the floor towards whatever I direction I was heading in rather than actually using feet to walk. And the floor was heavy: it weighted me down. My face felt large and pulled at the same time. The rest of my body felt spinny and without actual confines. And worst of all, I didn't really know it. My consciousness was so numbed I couldn't tabulate any vision of my real reality. Meds are like that, or can be, anyhow.

I was two or so weeks out of the mental hospital and heavily overmedicated. I was diagnosed with a mental illness, a severe one, and put on gnarly doses of anti-psychotics, anti-seizures and anti-depressants to tackle it, to tackle "me". I swarmed around and around inside of me, sludging along on the outside. I dont remember much. But I do remember sitting down in the living room trying to read that book again. And it did not click. Those meds left my brain neurons, and all that life juice, just about two steps behind.

I dropped out of my second semester at Washington College to stop there at the Ward. One institution to another, how I've always looked at it. Is it dramatic to say the two aren't too terribly far apart? I'll never claim non-drama. So I didn't really have a room at my mom's then, when I came out of the hospital to recover. My room was vacant, in my little spot on Wash Ave with the pillow and scuffed hardwood floors. Which is why when I again went looking for a sacred spot, a place all of my very own, where I could celebrate me and relax and give permission to and better know me, I found myself crouched down on the floor next to the old pleather covered toy box that still sat in the corner in my brother's old room. And I took one deep breath and bowed my head there. And I whispered something--to something? I dont know what on either accounts but I am almost sure that it had to be something like help me. And then I heard mom's footsteps on the stairs, and I quick got up and zipped, or anyhow sludged away.
It was years before I was off the meds. And by then I had learned, from my own self and much due to regular daily pauses of reflection and time within, which just means true honest time with me, that I was not mentally ill but quite chemically sensitive--or in other words the medical definition of a drug addict. And who cares the nature of the drug--street or pharm--they all affect me different.

That book changed, or maybe saved, my life. To this day when I am funked I guarantee you it's because too much time has passed since I got to sit down a while with me. I had a great sit-down this morning. And a decent enough one with me yesterday, too. It had been a while. Again. Try it sometime.

Me, in my Sacred Space or "Meditation Spot" on Wash Ave, Spring 2002, sans bonghits, booze & most of all my "ideas"