Head Up For a Moment

<p style=”clear: both”>It’s one of those memories with dream-like clarity so I hardly trust it, it might be a composite, the site where my father is working on a house for someone with enough money to buy land where there are no close neighbors. We would go to where he was working I think bringing him a meal, a picnic, like Little House on the Prairie, or maybe he would take us when the work day was over, show my mother so she could picture where he was spending his days, the construction site safer for his little girls when they wouldn’t be in the way of wheelbarrows of adobe bricks and the hoisting of vigas. More, I remember the joy of clambering up stacked lumber, playing king of the hill on enormous piles of dirt, scrounging for the trimmed ends of electrical wire that could be twisted and made into things, the wandering of houses with walls only up to our knees or houses with window openings but no ceilings, doors, or floors so that they seemed more fantasy than house until the moment when the balance changed. I remember mesa sunsets and being warned to look out for rattle snakes, for poisonous spiders, though none of the memories are fearful. There are moment memories and memories over time, that a house would emerge under what seemed like my father’s hands alone though I remember other names, Javier, Guillermo…

One memory brings along another and I am startled at how it does come back. Questions in the last week that I have asked myself in my journals include whether it is better to have good experiences or memories of good experiences and whether a memory we are too fond of cannot grow dingy, over-fingered, creased and faded until it’s nothing. But how can I plan to retrieve a memory that I cherish too much to handle regularly? I plan elaborate smell-related retrieval systems, only I am stymied by how hard it is to find unusual enough smells to link to a memory that one could still access on demand.

The building sites where my father spent my early childhood constructing adobe houses for wealthy people are a memory that has come entirely unbidden, and so I suspect that they are like those meaning-obvious dreams, envoys from my unconscious with a message about my life right now. I wonder now if it was good practice in seeing, in believing in what was not there. I try to do it now. It’s the third day the boys are back in school and I have hit my word count for the morning , can practice the violin, exercise, shower before it’s time to be the mother again. I lock myself away in a room without internet. I am not comfortable talking about this, except I feel a little guilty that I am going to be a terrible correspondent for a while, and I had promised all sorts of people I would be better at being in touch when my kids were back in school when I could have a thought that wasn’t punctuated by somebody asking me for something or somebody telling on someone else.

Only right now I think the pattern of my days is going to be like this, that I drop my first grader off and he rushes away without the litanous “I love you so much I’ll miss you have a good day see you at 3:00″ with which he would send me off every morning last year and I come straight back to the studio and wrestle to get a threshold number of words out after which I can fit in whatever music and time exercising and showering and laundry and prep work for meals before I rush to pick up the child and come home and do the various drivings and practice supervisings and so forth they need until they’ve been read to and tucked in and I collapse myself.

I don’t know if I’ll ever stop feeling like a complete poseur, honestly. I, may in fact be a completely poseur, which is why I am focussing on word count rather than on whether what I am doing has any redeeming quality whatsoever because quantity over quality at least shuts up the mean voices in my head.

But if I am not calling you and you were hoping I would, you should know I am also not watching television, not reading, at least not the way I had been reading all this year, I am not having the conversations that are my favorite thing in life — seriously, how come people never list conversation as an interest or hobby? And you are not missing very much not talking to me because all of my energy is pretty much going into seeing something that is not there.