Thursday, June 20, 2013

A Juxapostion of Lifetimes

My father struggles with the worst storm he ever traveled through. The heavy unforgiving rain beats down and the freezing-cold water makes it hard to breathe. My Dad is late for his shift, fumbling with his rain suit, unwilling to go out in the storm unprotected. The thunder and lightning are dangerous to anyone on the deck but they are moving through a lock and that makes work unavoidable. He pulls his feet to the exterior door pulling on his rain suit, one leg at a time when the whistle blows, loud and angry. He flies out the door half dressed. The rope is tied to a post on the deck, a huge potentially catastrophic mistake. This all-important rope holds the ship to the walls of the lock they are currently moving through and the water level lowers but the boat does not. The heavy tugboat is literally suspended in the air; this will not last for long, the ropes they used were strong but not that strong. My dad curses out the man working before him and quickly unties the rope giving the line some slack, chocking on cold water, his breathe labored. The ship lowers.


I sit in my high school math class staring up at the white bumpy ceiling. The sophmores and juniors around me talking, yelling, playing, the epitome of high schoolers,  as I think about my father’s stories.
Mr. Surver snaps me out of my daze with the start of class. I sit up open up my notebook expecting class to be chaos as usual. Logarithms, awesome. I see Mr. Surver’s blue squiggly handwriting on the Smartboard turn into the blue-green Illinois River as my father stares out at it from the deck of a towboat. I see the tow attached to the barges with ropes and cables pulled as tightly as they can just like my father told me they would be.
I can almost hear the cables snap myself as my father turns around to see all the deckhands curse out the boat that bumped them. The barges push down the river past the tow all on their own.
            “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” says someone, maybe Snake, my father’s roommate. I would kill to know a guy named Snake.
            The cables snapped because another ship bumped into them and the tow had fallen apart. It was a miracle no one had been killed. Cables that thick, moving at that speed, could cut a man in half; it was sheer luck that they were all still alive.
            There was work to be done. All the barges now floating on their own, with no ties to the boat, would have to be caught and reattached. The merchandise in those barges was their paycheck.
            It was only my father’s second trip on the towboat since he had gotten the job in November of ‘82. They were headed towards New Orleans on the Illinois.

In the face of adversity my dad sought out adventure. I think in some ways I looked for adventure in taking extra college classes. To be perfectly honest I’m not really sure why I started. I have the lies I tell other people; college credits, to escape the boredom, to stop being treated like a child. Maybe it was adventure I was looking for.  
           
            “Frances, FRANCES,” Mr. Surver yells, my little trip to dream world suddenly obvious to the entire class. “You want to join us?”
             I sigh, hold up my pen in surrender and wrote down the notes on the board. But a minute later my thoughts slip into the world of daydreams.
            How different my father and I are. I always compared myself to him. I could talk to my mom but I always saw myself as more my father than my mother. But now that I know what he’s been through, what he’s done I can’t help but feel I don’t know him at all. Once again I flashed back to that afternoon when he had told me of his time as a deckhand.

            My father’s job as a deckhand started a year after he graduated college. He had finished his last archelogical dig for the summer and although he had ignored it all summer he knew furthering his education in anthropology would not lead to a job. My great aunt, who lived in St.Louis at the time, suggested deckhand school having connections to the Huffman Towing Company. Coming from an East Coast wealthy family, her idea of towboats was a little romanticized. I think her and the rest of my father’s family were picturing some version of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn. In reality there was even more profanity and a lot less romance.
            But he needed the job, or rather a place to go and figure out what to do next. So my dad traveled from Ohio to Arkansas to a deckhand school. The test taking part was easy considering most of the deck hands that came through were not college educated. The physical component was a little harder. He learned to fight boat fires, tie complicated knots and throw heavy rope onto bollards, short metal posts on which rope was attached to a dock a ship. Twelve weeks later he was on his way to St. Louis.

            The bell rang and everyone made their way out of the classroom and into the noisy hallway. The loud noise of two thousand talking students breaks into my thoughts, I quickly pack up my notebook, tablet, and folder, plug my earbuds into my ears and ignore the look of judgment from Mr. Surver as I shuffle out the door.
            I walk through the hallway and into the busy commons, Mat Kearney blasting in my ears drowning out the sound of happy teenagers on their way to fifth hour. I head to the west entrance, flash a smile at the Para at the desk and walk out of the school.
            The brightness of the sun make my eyes blink and dilate, not used to natural light after four hours of florescent light.

The bright light floods through the circular window and my father groans trying to remember the events of the previous night. Snake groans from across the room.
“Dave what the fuck? Close the shades.”
The memories flood back from last night. Snake had woken him up with a plan to sneak of the boat, a forbidden but luring idea. If they were caught they would be fired but the boredom of the same face, hallways and rooms was getting to him and the rest of the crew. I see them sneak past their supervior’s corriders, a league of trampling men whispering and tiptoeing behind my father and Snake. Up the stairs and into the night air, from there they step off the ship and on to land for the first time in weeks. Most of them stumble when their feet hit solid ground, their centers of gravity missing the rocking of the boat.
They weren’t caught, a miracle to say the least. Most of the men came back drunk, even more buoyant versions of themselves, louder and with fewer inhibitions to get in the way. Each man was returned to his room. The smell of beer would take months to leave the ship mixing with the heat of the summer.

I climb into my stifling hot car. I had forgotten to crack the windows that morning, still adjusting to the nice weather. I plug my iPod in, put my broken shades on, put the car in reverse and escape.
Once I am a comfortable distance from the school I roll down my windows, let my hair out of the tight bun it had been confined to and exhale.
As I stop at a red light I thought about my dad’s stories. Will I have stories like that to have my childern? Not the way my life is going right now. Another year of part time high school, part time community college. Three years of nursing school. Maybe a spring break trip abroad. A job, an apartment, bills, adulthood,  everything moved so fast. I had never been brave enough to try new things, with the one exception of becoming a PSEO student but that just meant more school and more stress. I had always been a planner, an organizer. Would I ever be able to run away to Arkansas and become a deckhand?
The light turned green and I turned onto highway seven.

I see my father’s boat turn as it docks in Mississippi, this time with only one piece of cargo to unload, my father. Maybe he hugs some of his shipmates, maybe he hugs Snake, his roommate for the last year. He waves to the boat as it leaves him behind. A plane picks him up at the airport and he flies home. His time as a deckhand has come to an end, a little bit closer to where he is supposed to be.




Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Rewriting Fairytales: Cinderella
            Once upon a time there was a young girl whose mother had died and father had remarried. Soon after the marriage the young girl, named Cinderella for better reason except her parents were cruel and they thought it sounded “romantic”, was left alone in a large house in the suburbs with a stepmother and two twin stepbrothers she had known for all of five minutes. Her father was off on a fishing trip with “the boys”. So Cinderella or Cindy to her friends hid up in her room with her laptop watching Netflix and browsing on tumblr. Soon there was a knock on the door. And by soon I mean four hours later, you know how time flies when you’re watching Netflix.
            “Oh Cindy,” the stepmother called. “Won’t you come out and spend time with your family?”
            “Uh sure,” Cindy replied still annoyed at her stepmother’s new found habit of using the nickname usually reserved for people under the age of eighteen.” I don’t know if you really qualify as family,” she muttered.
            “I heard that!”
            “Whoops.”
            The stepmother stormed through the door barely bothering to open it and snapped the pink laptop from her hands.
            “Hey.”
            “If you’re going to talk to your mother like that then you’re not going have this.” She held up the laptop and stormed out her footsteps booming on the linoleum floors.  
            “So, no more family time?” Cindy called after hers.
            She flopped down on her bed, still covered in the horrible floral pink bedspread chosen by the stepmother when she heard she was getting a “daughter”.

            “And you’re not my mother.” She muttered defiantly as she drifted off to sleep.
Iphigenia:
            Humans seem to think they're indestructible, that they are the only ones. That their solar system is the center of the universe and that if there are other worlds, other “peoples” they are no threat.
            I’m here to tell you that you are wrong. There are others and we are watching. We are learning, quickly. We see how you live and abuse the time and space you have, we’re here to take it back from you.

            Your language is much different from yours. So I’m not sure how my name would translate. You can call me N; it stands for Neptune, the planet from your solar system atomically closest to ours. I am part of one of the first expeditions into your solar system. We came to observe the only other uniforms we have found almost as intelligent as us. I must warn you, our leaders have seen your oceans, beautiful and deep but they also have seen how you abuse them. They will not tolerate much more. We weep for your world and its end is closer than you think. 
Untitled

he’s old and mean and he has no heart
the man down the street
that is
he lives alone
with no company but
his old hollow chest
and when the tweens come rolling by
on skateboards, bikes, and scooters
he retreats inside
and ignores their squeals and screeches               

but the mean old man
he has a story
like  every other neighbor

once upon a time
he was a soldier
with friends
a wife
and kids

then the day came along
when a choice was made
and he lost his love forever

so now he sits
alone
in the dark
abandoned by the world

afraid of loving
of feeling
of knowing
that pain
all over again

and the kids
make fun
on Halloween
of his old “haunted” house

little do they
know
the only thing haunted
is himself

so they giggle and laugh
and dare each other
to go as far as they can
up the drive way
up the steps
ring the doorbell

no one answers

no one answers
the knocks or the rings
or the police
no one answers when they
bust down the door

and they found him there
with a hole in his chest

‘cause after all he had no heart 
3 pm on a Tuesday:
            I looked at my watch. 3 pm. An hour early, of course, I seemed to perpetually early. I sat on the plush grey chair looking at the adults around me. No one else was sitting in the chairs. Awkward.  I checked my backpack for the fifth time: mint blue binder, check, grey polka dot pencil bag with colorful pens, pencils and post-it notes, check, homework planner, check, all five of the books required for the class, check. Dorky blue target backpack, unfortunately check.
            I was sixteen and it was my first day of college. Well, community college. Well, community college through my high school.
            I was sitting in the first college library I’d ever been in wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into. I wasn’t ready for this. I couldn’t handle actually college classes. I couldn’t even handle advanced chemistry. Holy shit could I still drop out of classes? Take high school instead. That would be easier, boring, but easy. I wasn’t an overachiever. I was a slacker, a procrastinator.
            But that would be so awkward to drop out, return my books, tell people I had chickened out.
            I was stuck.
            3:15 pm. Forty five minutes early.
            I grabbed my iPod and ear buds and planner from my backpack to make it look like I was doing something. Other people were doing things. Did they already have homework on the first day in college? I thought it was always just syllabi and name games.
            Wow they people looked old. Not just eighteen old but like I have two kids and a wife old. Look at that guy he’s got to be sixty. His pants go up to his chest. Why are you here? Retire. I’m going to be the only one under the age of thirty. I can’t relate to these people, I have no life experience; I haven’t even been off the continent. They’re going to think I’m stupid, young, native. Calm down.
            3:25 pm. Only ten minutes? That felt like an hour. Holy shit I’m sweating and its freezing in here.
            I got up, packed up my stuff, mentally said a goodbye to the weird old library people. Maybe all college libraries had old people in them. I don’t know.
            Posters and artwork lined my walkway.  Notes and Messages from the previous year still up reminding me once again how much I did not belong. This wasn’t my world and who was I to try and force myself into it. Just because maybe I didn’t fit in, in high school didn’t mean I should be able to choose my own new world, that’s not how it works. Why did I think it was?
            3:40 pm. Twenty minutes.
            I was not on the third floor searching for classroom 3119. Of course I knew where it was because I had printed out a map weeks ago in preparation. Still the school year snuck up on me and all of a sudden I was in a school again.
            3116, 3117, 3118, 3119.

            3:45 pm. Still early. Perpetually early. 
A poem written during Hamline's Young Writer Workshop with Evan:

The assignment was to use the eight words chosen through free word association in a storyline poem. 

Our words were 
you
jail
evil
leave
theft
hell
manipulation
batman

Our poem:

you extremity of evil
leave gotham alone to die for itself
your manipulation caused the theft and fall of the city
demonic possession is not an excuse for reckless acts
and jail is not good enough for you
go to hell, batman