Telling our stories

During our annual weekend in the mountains, my friends and I are good about giving each other space. Quilt Artist will go out to the deck to write in her journal. Makes Bread will find a chair by the lake and settle into it with a book. Signing Woman will grab her binoculars and look for birds. I’ll go off for a walk with my camera.

But it’s definitely not a silent retreat. Our main activity is talking. Even when we’re hiking to a waterfall, or walking a trail, or stripping down to swim in the lake, we get into the kind of deep conversations you can have with friends who know you well.

Saturday afternoon, Beautiful Hair and I decided to find a patch of sun by the lake where we could relax and talk. As the sun moved, we kept moving our blanket, keeping our bodies in the warmth, knowing that it might be months before we’d once again feel the sun on our skin. Gradually, our friends joined us, the conversation continuing as the shadows deepened, until finally it was time to go indoors for hot bowls of homemade soup and a crackling fire.

Photo taken by Beautiful Hair.

Off to the mountains

Nights are getting cooler and leaves are beginning to look yellow around the edges. It's October. I spent all last weekend grading papers (seriously, I did nothing but grade papers) so this weekend, I deserve something more relaxing. I'm heading to the mountains with a bunch of women friends for our annual retreat.

We're traveling to the beautiful old summer place owned by Signing Woman's family. The lodge has a fireplace, a full kitchen, and floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the lake. It's near hiking trails and a labyrinth. Most importantly, it's got the kind of peaceful atmosphere usually found in monasteries and retreat places. I'll be back next week, renewed and refreshed.

Forget about your worries and your strife

Since Shaggy Hair Boy has classes during the day and does his schoolwork in the evening, it’s often fairly late at night when he sits down at the piano. Most nights, I fall asleep to the sound of jazz music reverberating up the stairwell. Since my father and his friends used to jam together when I was a kid, I learned long ago to sleep in the midst of music.

The other night, my husband woke me. “Listen,” he said. “How can you possibly sleep through that?”

I sat up in bed. It did sound like a wild party going on below. But when I listened closely, it was really just two voices, Shaggy Hair Boy and With-a-Why. They’d found a book of Disney music and decided to do some recording. When I walked downstairs to get a glass of water, they were both at the piano. Shaggy Hair Boy’s hands were moving fast and he was laughing while he played.  With-a-Why was standing at his side, his uncombed hair hanging in his face, singing into the microphone.

“They’re having fun,” I said to my husband as I got back into bed. “They’re bonding.”

I fell back to sleep right away — I can sleep through anything — but the next time I woke up, I noticed that my husband was gone. He’s a light sleeper compared to me. The raucous singing and laughter was still coming up the stairwell. I could make out the words from the Jungle Book: “The bare necessities of life!”

This time, I recognized my husband’s voice.

I looked at the clock. It was 3 am. I came down the stairs to sit on the couch and watch the performance. Shaggy Hair Boy’s hands were still moving like crazy, half following the music and half improvising. My husband and With-a-Why both leaned to sing into the microphone, making up words whenever they didn’t know them.

Family bonding in the middle of the night.

The scary Jesus barn

During the roadtrip I took with Artist Friend this summer, we drove through the midwest: lots of flat farm country. When we passed a scary Jesus barn, I insisted he stop so I could take a photo. I'd never seen anything quite like it.

Trapped

I was sitting at my desk this morning, grading papers, when I heard a thumping noise. The sound came from upstairs. I took a bite of chocolate and another sip of hot tea. Then I moved to the next paper. When I’m grading, I try to ignore the sounds of the household. 

The thuds continued. I figured it was probably Boy-in-Black doing his exercises. He’s got this whole routine he does before he takes a shower. When he jumps rope, it’s pretty loud. I graded another paper. Then I heard Boy-in-Black’s voice, yelling from the living room in an exasperated way, “Hey, what the fuck are you doing up there?”

There was no answer from upstairs. But the noise continued, loud bangs as if someone was kicking the wall. I stepped out of my office and looked into the living room. Boy-in-Black was on the couch, doing something on his computer, a laptop that’s bigger than most people’s desktop computers. It looks like something you’d see on a spaceship. Shaggy Hair Boy and Smiley Girl were squeezed together on the red chair; they both looked sleepy.

I went back into my office and graded another paper.

The thumping noise continued. It sounded a bit like someone hammering. I glanced out the window but my husband’s vehicle wasn’t in the driveway, which meant he wasn’t even home. I graded another paper.

It was my daughter who finally went upstairs to see what the thumping noise was. I heard her yell from the top of the stairs. “Hey! With-a-Why is locked in the bathroom!”

What? That got us all up from our chairs.  

We crowded around the locked bathroom door. “Why didn’t you yell something?” I asked through the door.

“I did,” he said. “You must not have heard me. I’ve been banging on the door forever.”

I grabbed a screwdriver to start removing the door handle.

“I can’t believe we all just ignored it,” Shaggy Hair Boy said.

“Why didn’t you use Morse code?” I asked With-a-Why when he finally emerged from the bathroom.. “Why did we bother learning it?”

He looked at me. “Like any of you would have paid attention?”

"The thumps were too rhythmical," said my daughter. "They didn't sound frantic. But then I thought, I wonder why he's kicking the door like that."

“I better I could yell loud enough to make you all come running,” said Shaggy Hair Boy. So we tried it. We locked him in the bathroom and all went back downstairs. Then he let out a high-pitched scream that made it sound like one of the cats had put her claws into his throat. 

Yep. We would have responded to that.

Piano music and apple pie

“When are you going to start making pies again?” With-a-Why asked last week. Local apples are ripe, and temperatures are cool enough to use the oven. More importantly, my older kids have been living in their apartment near campus, and homemade pie will give them an incentive to stop home.

So Wednesday I bought apples on my way home from work, and then I rolled out crusts while I talked to With-a-Why. He was supposed to be cleaning the living room, but instead, he began playing the piano, which is how he avoids his chores. He plays so beautifully that I can never ask him to stop for something as mundane as cleaning. I’d rather hear classical music than the vacuum cleaner, no matter how messy the living room is.

“Hey, send everyone a text to tell them I’m making pies,” I called out. My fingers were sticky with flour and shortening.

“Already did,” he said without even looking up from the piano.

By the time I pulled the pies from the oven, the house smelled like cinnamon and apple. I put the pies on the kitchen table and flipped a laundry basket over them to protect them from the cats as they cooled.

My husband arrived first; he’d been at the gym, working out. My daughter was next, her hair pulled in a ponytail in the manner of a grad student who has too much work to do. Then came Boy-in-Black, looking like he hadn’t had much sleep. “I spent all day grading physics exams,” he said. Shaggy Hair Boy and Smiley Girl were chatting happily with each other as they came in. Those two never seem to run out of things to talk about.

“I know we’ve got vanilla ice cream,” With-a-Why said as he rooted through the freezer. It’s crowded with quart-size bags of frozen tomatoes.

It’s a busy time of year for all of us. But we sat around the table, drinking hot tea and eating warm pie, talking as if we had all the time in the world. “Almost as good as Grandma’s pie,” Shaggy Hair Boy said to me, teasingly, and he moved to the piano, where he began playing jazz, the music weaving in and out of our conversation.

Intersection

At the traffic light, I glanced in my rear view mirror. Behind me, a rusty blue pickup truck had come to a stop. I remembered the vehicle from the gas station I’d stopped at just a few minutes before. Mostly, I remembered the proliferation of bumper stickers that suggested that the owner had very different political views than I did.

As I waited for the light to turn green, a burly man stepped out of the truck. He approached my car. He was walking right down the yellow line, in the middle of the road, which didn’t make sense. I rolled down my window apprehensively.

But he didn’t come up to my window. Instead, he leaned over as if to open my backdoor. He didn’t even look my way.

I heard a click.

Suddenly I realized what he was doing. He’d screwed on the cap to my gas tank. I guess I’d left it dangling after filling up at the station.

I leaned out and said, “Thank you!”

He looked up and grinned, then gave a wave as he jumped back into his truck. The light turned green.

Naked Thought

The naked man in my hotel room climbed up onto the stuffed chair and looked out at the clock tower we could see in the distance.

“That’s perfect,” I said. “You look like a sculpture.”

“I had Rodin in mind,” he said. The thinker pose fit his personality: I’d only known him for less than 48 hours, but already I’d noticed that he was someone who listened closely, made careful observations, and thought deeply about topics before speaking up in a conversation.

I snapped a few photos of his silhouette and then looked again through my viewfinder. Wait, something was weird about that silhouette.

“You didn’t take your socks off!”

He looked back over his shoulder and then down at his feet. “Oh, I didn’t think you’d see my feet.”

“You have to be totally naked,” I explained. “That’s part of the experience.” So he reached down and obligingly stripped off the socks, then settled back to tell me the story about the tattoo on his shoulder. 

Yes, the naked photo tradition has continued. My conference friends have gotten used the tradition. When I bumped into Vegetarian Guy With Cool Tattoos in the elevator between sessions, the first thing he asked was, "Have you found a victim yet?" 

This conference was interdisciplinary — a mix of scientists, artists, writers, and literature professors — and almost all of my colleagues had something to say about the naked photo project. (Yes, somehow it has become a “project.”) We’ve all studied the body in some way, whether we’ve sketched it, or learned anatomy, or looked at sexual symbolism in literature. In fact, the art show at the museum where some of the sessions were held included interactive exhibits in which the viewer’s body became part of the artwork she was viewing.

One thing I’ve discovered through this project is that everyone has stories about their body. Ask a naked man about his tattoo, and he’ll tell you what was happening when he got that tattoo, often when he was at a transformational stage of his life. Ask a woman about the scar on her belly, and you’ll hear a story. That’s still the valuable part of this project: not the photographs, but the stories that people tell me when we talk about the project. The stories don’t end up on my blog because they aren’t my stories to tell.

On Saturday night, conference attendees gathered for a dance. After three days of intent discussions and serious presentations, it’s always fun to watch everyone strip off their blazers and gyrate to the music. As I looked around the room of sweaty conference folks, I thought not about the intellectual ideas they’d brought to the conference, typed into laptops or scribbled onto yellow pads of paper, but the stories written onto their bodies.

(Readers who want to know the history of the naked photo tradition can check it out here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here. )

Talking between the talks

After a month of classes, long weekend events with students, and all the busyness of fall semester, it feels good to sneak away for an academic conference in Country to the North. I’ve been enjoying the conference life: going to sessions, listening to talks, and eating meals with colleagues. Yesterday morning at an animal studies session, a group of us got into such an intense conversation during the question and answer period that we went to a nearby coffeehouse to talk some more. Artist Friend and I were actually continuing an argument that we'd started at a conference last June, but now other conference friends chimed in with their perspectives. We sat in comfy chairs in front of the fireplace, balancing mugs of coffee and tea on our laps, all of us talking at once. The best part of any conference is the space between the sessions, where we have time for long, in-depth discussions.

New bike!

“I am so excited!” Little Biker Boy kept saying, as he yanked my arm and hurried me through the store. “I keep thinking this is a dream. I'm worried I'm gonna wake up.”

We walked through to the back of the store, where the racks of bicycles were. Within seconds, Biker Boy had picked out the bike he wanted. 

“See? It’s got pegs!” he yelled, pointing to the wheels. “It’s a Mongoose. That’s the one!”

Tall Salesperson adjusted the seat while Biker Boy jumped up and down next to the bike, talking fast. “Can you move the handlebars too? Can I have that little tool? Can you take the tags off? Can I try it now?”

“I’m going to teach you how to adjust the seat,” said Tall Salesperson. He knelt down on the floor and patiently showed Biker Boy how to adjust the seat and the handlebars.

“I love bikes!” said Biker Boy.

“Me too,” said Tall Salesperson. “I put this one together yesterday.”

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” said Biker Boy as he rode the bicycle across the linoleum. He turned at the end of the aisle, circled back, and stopped to throw his arms around me. “I love you! I love this bike!”

I felt embarrassed by his gratitude. All I had done was drive him to the store to buy a bike I could easily afford. My husband and I had stopped at the store the day before, and we found out we wouldn’t even have to assemble the bike. We just had to walk in and buy it. Biker Boy’s gratitude was way out of proportion to the effort I’d put into the gift, but it was fun to see how enthusiastic he was. Tall Salesperson smiled at me as we watched Little Biker Boy ride in circles.

We paid for the bike and drove to a nearby park, where Biker Boy tested the bike out. He pedaled across the pavement as fast as he could, then circled back.

His last bike had been orange. He’d found the bike in our garage a couple of years ago — it had belonged to my son Shaggy Hair Boy when he was younger — and he’d adopted it. He and the orange bike had been inseparable until a few weeks ago when it was stolen from his front yard.

The new bike was blue and black, and it was just the right size. “This bike has to get used to me,” Biker said. “Just like my old bike was used to me.” He grinned at me and pedaled off again, yelling with excitement as he went.