365 Days Ago
February 3, 2008
According to my diary, on Feb 3rd of last year, I was swimming with my mother in Florida. Today, I am not swimming with my mother in Florida and the only way I was able to contain my grief was to make a pot of soup. The soup she used to make for me when I had bronchitis, a yearly event from age 2 to 15. A sickly child, the soup propped me up for a few months as did the treasured week-long break from the torturous mundanity of a classroom. I was able to relapse quickly by sitting in a snowbank at recess without my coat or just plain willing my throat sore.
The luxury of bed, books and soup made even a severe strep infection tolerable. A bronchial pneumonia was easy. I was not forced to sit in a chair and listen to the monotonous high pitched voice of a tired teacher as she tryed to drill, drill, drill equations, historical dates, vocabulary, multiplication tables, periodic tables into my sore, sensitive, dreamy brain. A brain that wanted to read and write and be left alone. No such luck back then. After a few years my immune system betrayed me and I was unable to conjure up a legitimate symptom.
So, I started getting big pus dripping boils on my ass. Firey red, pulsing pores became cavernous volcanic explosions inside my underwear. Doctors made house-calls then. My mother would hold me down, face in a pillow, while the doctor squeezed and drained the white, thick pus. I managed to turn and look. He was squeezing a long ribbon of toothpaste out of my ass. I found it fascinating and felt special.
The boils lasted for weeks, one after another. I was sent to school with a gauze bandage on my bottom. The puss would soak through the bandage and onto my seat. I writhed and waddled. I was soon home again, in bed with a book. Soup on the stove. My mother, of course, knew that I was, in some way, pulling a fast one but school testing had revealed that I was “slow” and I think she felt sorry for me.
Today, I make the soup for myself. She is not here to share it with me and it cuts me deep to think that she had to feel sorrow because I was “slow”. But on some level she knew otherwise. She insisted I be kept in the advanced classes, with my friends, and not kept back, no matter how lousy my grades were. She didn’t know how to help me but she stood back and gave me the freedom to survive by my own wits and the skin of my pants. It was a tough dance, but I learned to leap and land on my feet. Even now, I do not know my multiplication tables and that is the least of it, but I can survive and I wish my mother were here to see it, especially now that I have been diagnosed and have begun treatment for ADHD.
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There is somebody in my house in Vermont. A nice man is renting my house and I am thrilled because that man is renting my house and sending me money so that I can rent an apartment in Providence. Now, wait a minute. Does this make sense? I thought so, a few weeks ago, when I was working here, singing, planning, organizing, hob-knobbing, but as of today, as I lugged a bunch of my crap up two flights of stairs on the East Side, all the while knowing I would have to lug the crap back down the two flights of stairs a few months from now— as of today, I thought to myself, “Gee, I don’t feel very good in my head” I sat on the stairs, dirty stairs, very dirty, and considered my situation. I blamed the town of Bridport , Vermont, for not having a Dunkin Donut’s or a Cafe, a bar or a nightclub, a college, tennis courts, health club, movie theater. Then I blamed myself for wanting those things. Then I blamed myself for having those things here in Providence and not taking advantage of them because I like staying home and reading in bed. Now, if I like staying home and reading in bed, why don’t I just move back to my own home, in Bridport, and wait out the winter with Charles Dickens and Mark Twain? Now that I have rented my house, I miss it. It is not available. That is why I was so sad today, moving into what I thought was a nice apartment on the East Side. It is somebody elses house and always will be, no matter how many knick knacks, rugs, paintings, books, personal items I stuff into it. Renting makes me feel insecure, more insecure than worrying about how to pay my property tax. It’s silly, because none of us own anything fully. Still, sombody is in MY house and i am in somebody else’s house, and it’s ridiculous in a way that I can’t quite comprehend and it is making me very very sad.