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Indigo Vales

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Indigo Vales

Monthly Archives: July 2016

Healing The Hero

17 Sunday Jul 2016

Posted by Kristine in Uncategorized

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Tags

amwriting, healing, woundings

“Does this pen write,” she begins in her journal with purple ink, finepoint faint and scratchy.

She lifts her eyes from the page to watch a young man walking back to his apartment, face upturned to the skies. He looked like a man in the middle of a heartbreak needing to hear the answer, and hear it now. She watches him retreat into his apartment, slamming the door.

“Does this pen write,” she asks of her journal once more.

She posits on the page that it’s not a compelling tale unless Bambi’s mother dies.  Nobody wants to read that once upon a time there was a good queen and a good king who raised a perfect prince, that nobody lied and nobody died. Where’s the grit in the reader’s teeth for characters they love to hate, turning pages in hopes it will all work out in the end?  Is our need for grit what drives some literary imperative that the tale must be tragic—or worse–have an ambiguous end where the reader gets to decide?  “Well is it,” she demands her journal answer. It remains silent; a rock instead of crystal ball.

“Does this pen write,” she asks her journal one morning, but the answer was unclear.  There’s a movie reel playing in her head that hisses and skips, showing her flashback scenes from the bad old days that reopens old wounds, and sometimes it plays so loudly it drowns out the world.  It’s what bleeds through the books she’s trying to read, her thoughts as she walks alone. It leaves wet fingerprints on her eyes. Now she wants to know if her Daddy ever read to her because she does not remember.  “Did he ever read to me from a little pink book, soft words that rhythmed and rhymed, trickle tumbling like rain on the pane? Did he ever want his Daddy to read to him,” she asks her journal in black. Silence.

She’ll never know the answers now, but she’s got plenty of time to wonder. She considered making up answers to stop the bloody flow of questions, but what difference would it make in the end if he did—or did not?  She reminds her journal in blue that it does not matter today if Daddy thought she was good enough, and that he’s not here to read the best poem she’s ever written, polished to a nub, and marked with postage. She sorrows to know that no one is coming to wash the sins from her bones, untwist her heart, or bring home some kind of happy ending. Only she and her pen get to decide the hero’s end, and she smiles because she knows it would make her Daddy proud that she just finished the damned thing at all.

“This pen is microscope, it is centrifuge.  It threads the needle to write the story and heal the wound,” she notifies her journal before closing it.  Her journal approves.

Because I am A Mother, And It Rains On Us All

08 Friday Jul 2016

Posted by Kristine in Uncategorized

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Tags

evolving, mother, turnturnturn

Once upon a time, I drove a 1977 Volkswagen Rabbit because that’s all I had.  There was a hole in the exhaust so it was loud on takeoff, but tolerable at higher speed, or so I thought.

Once upon a time, I grabbed my boyfriend and we headed towards a nice hiking spot we enjoyed, tooling up the mountain in my ’77 POS.  Did I mention we lived in a really small (predominantly white) town, and most of us young people believed the cops delighted in stopping us for any little thing, busting our chops, giving us a hard time, and we learned to never EVER speed anywhere (even on the fringes of town) because it seemed all small town cops had it in for us teens?   So on that fine sunny day as I headed up the mountain I got pulled over. Rolled down my window. I had no idea why on earth I was being stopped, there was no way I was speeding and I hadn’t committed any moving violations.   I felt perplexed, pissed, and entitled to an answer.   He said, “license, registration, and insurance card.” I asked him why he was pulling me over. He said, “license, registration, and insurance card,” and I asked him again, what did I do, what’s going on?  He said, “license, registration, insurance card, or I will place you under arrest.” I was like, holy fuck, I guess I better produce.  By this time, another police car came up behind me and I felt like I was being SWAT-teamed. I gave him my stuff and he was gone a long, long time. Those minutes stoked my rebellious, foolish, hard-core, female ire.   He came back and produced three tickets (taillight out, loud exhaust, insurance card expired), and then I proceeded to open my young, inexperienced, stupid mouth, asking him things like don’t you have better things to do than harass me?  And he told me about all the drunk drivers he’s caught because of taillights being out, and I said, “Yeah, well you missed one.”  From that moment until the time I had to present my unapologetic ass to court and prove I replaced the taillight, my insurance had always been current, and patched the hole in the pipe, I fumed, preparing a speech to tell the judge about how unfairly I was treated, it was ridiculous how young people in our town are targeted, and so on.  Everything happened so fast in court, I had no chance to speak my mind, got gavelled, and the next case was called.  Buh-bye.

My mother, at that time, was a uniformed volunteer policemember. She was a flag-waving, hand-t0-heart, law-abiding, A-1 citizen, and when she found out how I behaved she verbally kicked my ass. She told me I should shut my mouth, keep my hands on the wheel and comply:  “What the hell’samatter with you??”  I learned the lesson the hard way, times four.

I have a hard time letting things go, so it took me a long time to see the light. A long time to realize that the police have a job; it ain’t fun, it can be dangerous, they’re not perfect, I’m not perfect, and there are rules both of us have to live by. Because we are human, we don’t apply the law equally.   It took me a long time to learn I was wrong and what to do better next time. And it took me a long time to learn that if my skin was not white, things might have gone really, really badly for me. My cynicism hasn’t changed, but my behavior has. That doesn’t mean I don’t give a shit. It taught me to keep seeking answers.

My heart is breaking today, all day, and my understanding began with Trayvon.  So now everyone can moan, roll their eyes and say I’m a whiny Black Lives Matter, white apologist, without regard to the dangers our persons in Blue face every day.  Yeah. Go on. You can throw that at me.  Don’t think for a minute I’m not aware of what every domestic disturbance might turn into because I saw it tumble out onto my neighbors lawn, I saw that shit firsthand, responding to car accidents, watching human lives expiring on the ground.  The stress of being a person in Blue weighs on me, don’t doubt it for a second.  My MOTHER instilled that in me.  What I am is a woman with a teenager whom I love with all my heart, thinking about how I would feel if I lost him because he was shot to death for running his mouth off to The Man, like that white woman on a sunny day once did.  I’m living in a place where there’s a shooting every other day, most non-fatal, and most not police related.  The longer and harder I listen, the more I realize we don’t have a gun problem. We have a people problem.  All of us, on all sides.   This is one country, but we are divided, and I didn’t see it until recently.  And we can’t fix this mess and heal it until we start listening, HEARING, and wanting to try and make it right.  All of us. And we can’t blame EVERYTHING on guns, or police, or race, flawed laws, mental illness.  It’s far too complicated for one pat answer. We can’t flip the light switch and make it right, people.  Human beings are not black and white. Our needs, wants, loves, fears, behavior, art, beliefs– NOTHING is black and white. We are so complicated, and our responses will be just as complex.  I just hope to god and the universe we decide to work through the complexity and find a way to  make it right, to find peace.

Please consider what you might be able to contribute to humanity to make it a better little place.

Thank you for listening.

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