My Own Stories
Throughout the summer, I will share some of my own stories already written. Perhaps reading these “chapters” from an unfinished draft of a memoir, you too will think about and write some of your stories. The benefits of writing about your own lived story cannot be overstated or measured. (See previous post, “Notes to Self”)
The goal may not be publishing what you write, or even sharing what you write with anyone else.
Writing helps your heart process what the mind cannot.
Our friend Maggie Nelson painted this for the cover of my book, leaving space for title and author. [1]
Title: From the Backseat of My Mom’s Life
Chapter One
Lawn Chairs in the Desert
“In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person’s place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity.” C. S. Lewis
When I was in second grade, my mother would walk my sister Renée and me out into the desert where sagebrush grew and lizards skittered, dirt too dry for footprints to lead anywhere but away. An evening walk before sunset, beyond the trailer park where we lived among other transients, we awaited the arrival of a spaceship.
Mom told us to watch for a flying saucer, describing the shape and speed of a vessel that would carry us to another world. Mom hoped they would come to get us—the three of us—to take us to a better world. A better life, she believed, somewhere beyond the heat and the scorpions and the cockroaches and the turmoil of everyday life.
Some far away galaxy, I suppose. What had she been reading? Mom was always reading. Reading with focused concentration, she would isolate a single strand of hair, then she would either gather a few more strands and continue reading and separating, or yank out that one coarse hair.
Dragging a webbed lawn chair scraped a dusty trail as I watched for snakes and wondered, Is this a game or real? At school, while Mom was at work, I listened and paid attention to see if anyone else spent time staring up into the sky, watching for UFOs. No one mentioned such vast concerns.
My short walk to school crossed open desert, straight as if an arrow pointed from where our unpaved street ended to the fort-like elementary school. A cinderblock oasis amidst gray-green blots determined to grow into anemic shrubs, the school inched beyond the furtherest developed area of Las Vegas, Nevada. Above, the sky stretched thin and pale. Ahead, the horizon ran flat and open at both ends, dotted with scrimpy vegetation. My sister Renée attended morning kindergarten and we walked to school together. During my walk home from school, I scanned for signs we might have left behind from our evening ventures. Mirages in the afternoon heatwaves danced ahead, like beckoning fingers. The terrain all looked the same to me. Footprints gone. Feelings lingered.
Whatever Mom and Renée might be thinking, I sat in a chair humming and singing to myself the “Nevada State Song”––the song I had learned in school.
Way out in the land of the setting sun
Where the wind blows wild and free
There’s a lovely place, the only place
That means home, sweet home to me.
Home means Nevada, home means the hills,
Home means the sage and the pine.
Out by the Truckee, silvery rills,
Out where the sun always shines
Here is a land that I loved the best
Fairer than all I can see.
Right in the heart of the golden west
Home means Nevada to me.
Instead of “Truckee silvery rills,” I would sing “out by the trunk keys silvery bills,” not knowing then silvery rills described water flowing in the Truckee River that originates at Lake Tahoe. On my way to a life of literal interpretation, the words didn’t have to make sense because what I heard and imagined was home. Home mattered to me. Home, sweet, home. Home had to exist somewhere on this planet.
What was wrong with this world?
Taking in these moments, I saw ahead mountains that rimmed the horizon on one side––a short, explosive range that appeared deceptively close––and the land between stretched flat as a tabletop, framing this scene like a painting. The desert appears supremely beautiful at sunset and dusk. I could also observe the effect these walks had on my mom. She loved the desert. It seemed to hold magnetic attraction, pulling her back from wherever else she had wandered. I didn’t know that Mom had lived in Las Vegas before I was born. That revelation would come decades later.
iPhone 6, 6/3/2016
Mom believed each one of us had to think thoughts that would attract the aliens—creatures whom she referred to as Higher Beings. Frustrated, she made me believe it was my fault that spaceships never landed near us.
“Renée wants to go with me,” Mom said. “Why don’t you? They know you don’t want to go. They sense your resistance.”
And she was right. I didn’t want to go. And who are they anyway?
In a strange way, my imagination worked against me. Mom taught me to believe in and look for spaceships when I was in kindergarten at Hollywood Professional School in Los Angeles. Smoking a cigarette while she cooked supper, Mom offered acting directions.
“Go to the living room and come in again. Convince me that you have just seen a flying saucer,” she said. “Make me believe you, then I will send you to acting school.” Elated at the prospect and enthusiastic for an opportunity to prove myself, I could imagine myself in the role of a child who had encountered extra-terrestrials long before Elliot met E.T.
At the end of that school year, all hopes of acting school, auditions and screen tests had vanished. Mom moved us from L.A. to Ventura, for only a year (first grade) before leaving Southern California. She feared that an earthquake would cause California to fall into the ocean.
By the time we moved to Las Vegas, Renée was five and I was seven, and I began to question Mom’s outer space fantasies. Somehow, I could sense this wistful creature, my mother, longed to escape. Knowing that she feared leaving Renée and me motherless––the way she had been left behind when her mother died––Mom believed Renée and I would be better off with her, wherever she went, even if that meant relocating to another planet.
Renée held Mom’s hand, cooperative, trusting, led on a hero’s quest, seeking adventure. I lagged behind, inwardly protesting, confused, and unwilling to depart the tangible, if somewhat unpredictable life on this earth.
I knew I didn’t want to go, but I also realized I didn’t want to be left behind.
iPhone X, near Slaton, TX 11/10/2018
Readers, I have set aside several books to share with you about writing your story. Interested?
More next time.
[1] Maggie read the first few chapters of a draft before painting in oil the cover scene based on the description of the desert and my mother’s 1960 Studebaker Hawk. The print I have, like the original, is three feet by four feet on canvas.
Check out Maggie’s art at artsourcetx.com