Who Are You? Who who! Who who!...

Identity seems like such a simple thing, but today I'm pondering it. Just this morning, I have identified my Self as Sparklefish, Joni the Barbarian, Mrs. Soandso, and Mr. Soandso's wife with no first name. Then the pharmacist called me Ms. Soandso and had to revert back to calling me Toni to get my attention.

Who the hell am I? Who are you? Who ar-are you, who who who who, I really wanna know!!! Seriously. First I was Bill and Jean's daughter, the youngest. This is Joni-in-training wearing brother, Glenn's combat boots.

Then, suddenly there I stood, eight years old, in the pink crepe paper skirt with the shiny face smiling innocently at the camera. The time in between was just time, and now excellent blog fodder. Years fly.

At twenty-one, I became Mr. Premature-ejaculator's wife, Mrs. Premature-ejaculator. You think this looks bad written here? You should have seen it printed on checks and in azure embroidery on an L.L. Bean bag for Christ's sake. What a four year stretch THAT was. Phew-whee! He very quickly became someone else's problem, having strayed to another's bed before officially leaving mine. (I hope it was the best ninety second sex she ever had...) Some years later my former wedding photographer gleefully informed me that ol' P-E's new bride was sick all through the pre-wedding pics. She then puked down the front of her wedding dress at the reception. Bad omen, anyone? (By the way, this is the only pic I saved with both me and P-E in it because I loved the expression on my face, the crumple and flow of the antique Irish slipper satin, and the joy with which Great Aunt Whozadingy was tossing the rice. And you can't see P-E's face.)

Okay, so then I'm just Bill and Jean's kid again, little Miss Nobody, until the guys at the Great Falls Post Office in Auburn come up with the nickname, "Toni the Ten." I was such a rube I even challenged them on it, questioning them about their sanity. They stood "firm," as it were. I was so innocent, even at 25 years old, I just passed it off as nothing, but these guys were jonesing for me bad. Men = penises with cars and money? I still haven't decided how to define them as a species and it's been a lifetime. My husband says "Even a hundred year old man wants to f--k." He's such a poet. Brings a tear to your eye doesn't it? I think he's channeling James Joyce...although James would proffer,

"Men are governed by lines of intellect - women: by curves of emotion."

(Right. "Lines of intellect" is man-code for "their peckers." That's how Jimmy rolled, dawg!)

Friedrich Nietzsche said, "The 'doer' is merely fiction added to the deed - the deed is everything." That reminds of Stephen King's repeating incessantly that "only story is about story." People, like books, are all about the story they create from what they're given; what they make of themselves by what is accomplished in the very short span of less than a hundred years. Status, wealth, and beauty fade into obscurity and vanish forever, but story remains.

Bit by bit, you're getting me unbound, funny and unfunny. What may seem blithe is measured well, unlike my earlier work. The comments I receive about being brave in sharing my pain, shock me a little because I don't feel brave or even honest writing about my life. It's my story, that's all. As my guts spill, I get stronger and lighter; my writing life becomes more and more real.

So who am I? I guess we'll find out together.

The Pink Album

I'm currently reading Stephen King's, On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft, as my walking-on-the-treadmill book. The book begins with his high praise for Mary Karr, and her novel The Liar's Club. He writes with shades of awe and envy for the "totality" of the recollections of her childhood being "an unbroken panorama." As a prelude to the story of his own childhood, which he says was "herky jerky," it seems to me self-preservation had a say in his choice of memories.

This first part of the book he says is "not an autobiography" but calls it the "C.V." He gives the reader snapshots of his life. After reading all about his childhood and his early struggles to write and succeed, I felt this was an author I never knew much about, only that I loved his work. By the time I reached the passages describing his mother's death, I was bawling and howling for the pain it laid before me. I just kept walking, sobbing, with my head down, tears falling on my sneakers and the black "ground" moving ever backward.

"Forget your personal tragedy. We are bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt, use it - don't cheat with it." Ernest Hemingway.

The word "snapshots" reminded me of a project I've launched headlong into. I started scanning hundreds of photos from one of our oldest family albums, "The Pink Album." Making sure everyone in the family has access to these pictures on CD as real film degrades, pictures are lost, torn and fade, is important to me as the youngest child of nine. It's one of the little things I can take care of, seeing how I'm "aimless and fiddle-diddling" on the computer all day anyway. Picture five hundred eighty-eight or so has hit my hard drive with a thud and I'm looking forward to being done. I've four more albums to conquer yet. Wish me and my hard drive luck.

When I began the project I didn't expect the head trip it would take me on, filtering through memories - - The Pink Album Time Machine. This album starts back when my folks were in their mid-thirties, 1950-something. The black and white film does great justice to the time, way more than color film could have. There are pictures that make my parents look like something from The Grapes of Wrath, sans the dust storm. They were certainly as hard-pressed, poor and struggling, with too many kids.

Each child growing up, picture after picture, there's an evolution of each happy kid to teenager. Then some change would occur in each one. It was the sixties then the early seventies, the hippie days with alcohol, marijuana and worse. You could almost see the moment when the times and some "thing" overtook their lives. From one Christmas to the next, a once great, smart kid turned drunk or drug-addicted, or somehow now despondent, or uncaring about themselves. Then they'd just stop being in the pictures altogether. The older siblings then gone from the house, away on their own. They were either running off across county to escape responsibilities or desperately wanting to simply be gone from a small mill town. The worst of all? Getting married to cover the cost of a life carelessly tossed like a coin without first checking to see whether it landed heads or tails. All of us girls did that, me included.

"Memories may escape the action of the will, may sleep a long time, but when stirred by the right influence, though that influence be light as a shadow, they flash into full stature and life with everything in place." John Muir

I remember in these photos my parents turning from what I understood to be loving and responsive to no more pictures together, and no more kisses good-bye in the morning. Each picture showing how far apart, the body language now so obvious to my seeing eyes. A picture of our old kitchen reminds me of the day Mom threw a plate full of breakfast and an orange and white coffee cup at Dad's head across the room and missed. I loved that cup. It was iridescent when held up to the sun, all shimmery like an eggshell with orange stripes. I might have been five and I just couldn't understand why. She was always doing things like that, but there was no one to make her stand in the corner for being naughty. Dad never gave up but he knew when to walk away.

All the screaming and yelling was nothing compared to the silence, when I'd hide under the dining room table until Dad got home. I was so little at the time, I fit in the small space where all the inside legs came together, maybe eighteen inches square. Fear was a big part of my life before I started kindergarten and my days became filled with something other than soap operas. At this point in time, my oldest sister would frequently visit Mom with her children in tow. She always had a slap for me like I was her kid and not Mom's, and I hated her for it. She always had a lie to tell, too, and she and Mom were perpetually on the outs. Perhaps if she'd realized I'd become a writer, she might have thought twice before laying a hand on me and lying her ass off? Too damn late now.

"Your memory is a monster; you forget - it doesn't. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you - and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!" John Irving

This album takes me through my entire early life and family history as I look at the snapshots. Experts on family dynamics say that the youngest child does not have the most accurate memories of events. Mine may not be accurate, but they formed who I am today. These memories are where I live in my head and what sets me howling on my treadmill. They are why I write.

"It's surprising how much of memory is built around things unnoticed at the time." Barbara Kingsolver.

Still Waters Run Deep; Babbling Brooks Don't Mind Their Keep.

What is the most fearsome thing? Is it the deep, dark stillness you cannot see through or get to the bottom of? Or is it the never ending turmoil you can't stop, limit or change the course of?

(Don't let your dingle-dangle dangle in the dirt, but always let your preposition dangle when flow matters more than "correct" grammar. And it always does...)

Leeches and other dark, slimy things abide in still water, deep or not. My Dad, the Prophet of Welchville, warned me about this very thing many times. I paid attention but thought perhaps it wasn't always true. Nothing's always true, every single time. Right? (He also told me not to play on the sprucewood car rack that was temporarily on the ground because I would get a splinter. I paid no heed, that is, until I drove a very robust three inch splinter into my five inch little girl hand from tip of middle finger to middle of palm.)

As a young child, sitting on a rock at Wild River, I once dangled my feet in the warm, still water that was so soothing after paddling in the unforgiving frigid, whitewater outflow from the White Mountains. After a few minutes, I found to my horror a shiny black leech overtaking my little toe, otherwise known in our family as "Achy Pea." (The line up from smallest to biggest is: "Achy Pea, Penny Rue, Rudy Whistle, Mary Tostle, and Old Man Bumble." Oh, ayuh.)

I ran screaming to my mother, who after eight other kids was non-plussed. She plucked it off, did little to assuage my heebie-jeebies and offered me into the care of one of my older sisters. Wild River was more than an hour's drive from home and my savaged little toe bled the entire way. It was a real life lesson for me at age five to avoid still water at all costs from that day forward.

Forty years later, I continue to avoid still water for the leeches I know live there, both real and imagined. People who seem mysterious or who are not at once likeable in any small way are also avoided because I know there's a leech in there somewhere. I would summarize my feelings as "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me." Or, as our ex-president, George W. Bush so eloquently said,

"There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.".

Right now, I'm just howling with laughter because I pulled this quote off YouTube and watched the video of him saying this. Oh my GOD!!! I need to take a pee break!!!! Phew, I think I'm done laughing for now. Whooo doggie! Will Rogers said "The problem with practical jokes is that very often they get elected." Poor Georgie boy, the bumbling, bubbling brook, always off course, while his pal, Cheney, the indiscriminate shotgun-toting leech, slithered around in silent deep cover making a lot of terrible stuff happen. Both very dangerous men for very different reasons in my naive opinion.

So for me, the babbling brooks of this world that ferret and swirl don't give me a moment's worry. I accept that change is the only constant, as my resume will reveal. Only now, this lack-of-career move makes sense. I kept trying to resign my Self to some mainstream thing, a normal career with a normal paycheck, benefits, vacation time, insurance coverage and it never worked for me. Now I know why.

I finally did the right thing, launching headlong into the eddy, in my pajamas and diamonds. (I really need to sit down and write some lyrics for that song, "Pajamas & Diamonds." )

"All you need to do is hold on tight...and believe." Stephen King.