Onions

This is the beginning (at least that's where it goes right now) to some writing I am doing, perhaps as part of a novel. This is all autobiographical, but I envision adding much more fiction to the mix eventually. I wrote this the other night at about two in the morning when I couldn't sleep, the result of taking a decongestant too late at night and getting the lovely sleeplessness listed in the fine print on the label.

I may share more eventually, but a lot of it is really personal. I don't know yet if I can share it--it may just sit on the computer till "parties" involved in it are no longer around (which hopefully will mean a lonnnnnnnng time.) But it makes an interesting blog-- better than yesterday's, and still not ready for the "mysterious" info I'm not quite ready to share with everyone yet.....

Memories

What memories I have of my father are like strange, overexposed photographs taken, flash-frozen, in the dark. There aren’t very many of them and they have weird color, like the pictures I see that were taken in the 70s– the yellows seem dull, the edges blurry. The surroundings are unimportant backdrop– you can barely see them because they are out of the range of the flash. Eyes squint black no matter what color they really are. Blues fade into white and clothes seem to fit more tightly. My parents are skinny and gaunt and old before they should be. In these pictures, they must be in their twenties. Everyone in pictures from then seems older than twenty today. I can hardly believe the children I look at who are twenty, twenty-five. They seem like infants. Infant me looks round cheeked, just on the edge of crying. Frowning at the cameraman who offers toys and tongue clicks. My mother later explains the boys’ moccasins I am wearing along with a purple frilly dress by saying that my father expected a boy.

I see my father cooking something– I must have been a toddler because I am standing in what seems to be a baby playpen. The kitchen is yellow, and a bare bulb hangs from the ceiling. In the next snapshot of memory, we are fishing, and I am yelling and splashing in the water. He scolds me that I will chase away all the fish. Then he is surrounded by electronic equipment in various states of repair: today I know this is the job he holds at the local university– he teaches electronics repair, and I attend the campus dayschool where a snotty-nosed little boy torments me, bites me one day to leave blue indentations in my arm. I also see my father with makeup and costume that make him Frankenstein at the local TV station’s Halloween haunted house. He grabs a little black girl’s ankle and she wets herself in fear. He is somewhat of a local celebrity; famous for his local TV show. “Admiral Murf” the TV cartoon kids’ show personality who shows Bugs Bunny and Popeye cartoons while wearing a blue captain’s hat. Mr. Bananaman is a man in a gorilla suit who hands out bananas and gestures wildly. One of the last childhood memories is of a red car, me sitting on a merry go round in a park after we have been to Dairy Queen. I see him driving away.

My mother, of course, is more layered. Like the onion as you peel– you never find a center, just more onion, layers on layers slimy and paperthin. Peeling it doesn’t answer any questions, and each layer is similar to the last only thinner, smaller, more tender.

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Fiction? Memoir? Who knows the difference. Things always get left out, things always get added to make the story more interesting. All of the things on this page are true. All of them are lies.

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AAAAAH! CLIFFHANGER.....