"Before" the accident was living; "After" became a metaphor, it feels like...   Access to memories became more difficult, and the past became a story even to me.  Memories felt almost third person. 

(scientific explanation of Compartmentalizing here)  Writing this memoir, diving deep into experiences, has helped reconnection with "This is who I am.")

The Best of Them

I took after my father more than my mother; she made sure to tell me. He was introspective and sensitive, self-reliant. Raised in Seattle, my dad’s aura was steeped in Northwestern reserve: unassuming, capable in wilderness surroundings, always wearing the same patterned wool cap. A Drafter, Architect, Carpenter, and certifiable genius, he designed and built entire post and beam cabins by himself from concept to pencil to hammer. While I was growing up, there were so many different homes he fixed up, in different towns. Each smelled like sawdust, new drywall, and paint.

My concept of “Dad” was more of a presence than a parent though, as he rarely spoke with me. I most often saw him reading. Standing in front of the tall rectangular wall heater, reading. Sitting in his sturdy mission-style antique chair, reading. I mimicked him at the heater, unaware the back of my sweaters were toasting a little off color as I struggled to read his favorite Tolkiens. On rainy days he tolerated my skateboarding inside, after I had linked boards end-to-end throughout the small apartment, on the carpet to allow the wheels to roll. It must have lent the atmosphere of a zoo with a hyper little wild-thing pacing the confines. Repeating the circuitous figure-8 through the house, I stopped behind his chair to tickle his bald spot tanned from roofing. It is a rare memory I have left of tenderness between us, one of only a few memories left of him I can even count.

Sometimes he spread out eight-foot long scrolls of Moody's stock chart reports on the floor, reading. I remember I had been eight or nine, chin on both wrists studying with him, as I tried to decipher the tiny seismic cardiac lines strung with symbols without interrupting him. I ventured a question. “What is this?” pointing to a small cross on one random tiny zig-zag.

He asked, “Would you like to guess?”

Glowing in his attention, I pondered and said, “The end of the stock day?”

And he replied, “You're pretty smart.”

The compliment warmed me all the way to the next day. Wanting to repeat the rare approval, I duplicated the scene again the next evening, venturing the same question since it worked before. “What’s this?” pointing to the same little cross.

This time he said, “You asked that yesterday”, and continued his studies while I was mortified to a tiny spec. Maybe he thought I should have been smarter to remember, but I was thinking I should have been smarter to ask different question. We had both agreed on one thing though; I was not good enough.

He was a misplaced transplant in this hot dry cowboy town, where he was in charge of a project building a school. To re-ground himself, he brought his family, the four of us, on hikes in some close-by mountains every weekend. Sometimes longer hikes would take us off the trail, so during breaks he would unfurl mysteriously large topo maps and read. Our last hike together explored some rocky mountainous crags in a forest. The wind and elevation gave me a headache, and probably with a bit of exasperation at my whining, he poured a small cup of Crown Royal for me to drink. This new sensation of smoky alcohol burned my throat and warmed my stomach, feeling like a rite of passage.

He met Mom when they were both older in life. She was a fine artist, classically trained at a museum art school. Four years on a scholarship, she was a genius in her own right. After graduation, she hitchhiked throughout Europe for months by herself. Decorating the house with her sophisticated oil paintings, the back studio rooms smelled of turpentine. She was fascinated with politics and craved intellectual conversation, but she had become a homemaker raising two children, a boy and a tomboy, cooking and cleaning after two ruffians. When she was well, she baked bread and insisted on healthy meals. Banning Wonder Bread, Oscar Meyer, and Twinkies, not even Trix was allowed to no avail of our pleading.

Once, she took my brother and I to the San Francisco Symphony, trying to instill at least one experience of sophistication. She splurged on a fancy hotel suite for two nights. Every time I came back there, with its wondrous bathroom and Cinderella like filigree on the ceilings, it felt like trespassing. Even though I was only 11 and my brother 12, she let us roam about the hotel with its 40 story glass elevator, and then we even embarked unattended throughout the city on our own adventures for the day. Back then the cable cars actually functioned as mass transit, more than a tourist ride. We would hop whichever car passing by, going miles into different neighborhoods: the pier, Chinatown, Haight & Ashbury. We had to study the maps to get transfers back.

Granted, she could never have been the Dear Abby Mom, but her Catholic saints and martyrs did give me a curiosity for the sacred. She nurtured creativity and artistry. Saving dozens of milk cartons, they became bricks to build child-life-sized castles to burst out. She was from Oregon, so she too loved the outdoors and planned camping trips. Too poor for a tent, we put garbage bags over the ends of our K-mart sleeping bags to keep the dew from soaking through the cotton. Drifting to sleep shivering by an alpine meadow stream, only my face peeked from the bag breathing the frigid air. Under heaven's brilliant night sky heavy with starlight, my field of vision was bordered by pine tree silhouettes pointing up to the Big Dipper, midnight-black ringed around infinite black. In the morning, we woke to small deer hoof-prints surrounding our heads in the soft loam. The gentle animals had walked softly grazing right by us in pre-dawn quiet while we dozed dreaming. Mom had brought plaster-of-paris of all things on a camping trip, so she made plaster casts of the hoof-prints to keep, imbedded with pine-needles.

Most of the time their parenting style was hands-off, but was that so bad? If Dad were to build a tree-fort for my brother and I, what would we have learned? Anything an adult could construct wouldn’t be worthy of mint toothpicks at a truck stop compared to the one our gang built when I was nine. We couldn’t draw straight lines back then to plan it, but it was perfect. My parent’s to-do-list to help? Look away when a framing hammer snuck out of the tool box, leave a pile of scrap 2x4’s in back of the truck, and don’t ask too many questions when I returned every afternoon with blistered palms and a mulberry stained chin.

It was our gang’s headquarters, three levels covering an old scrubby oak in a dry ravine. One tough kid had somehow pilfered a stack of plywood from a neighboring construction site, one sheet at a time, so yes we were almost juvenile delinquents. The fort began with a ramp style entry that crossed a moat (a dry ditch) to the first flat plywood level. I loved using the hammer, a reminder of dad nailing in shingles on the roof with two hits, one for rhythm, then the next nail already. And how did he get a big nail into stud walls with only three hits? It took me ten or twenty; but I really knew how to straighten it back up or take it out if it bent on the way in. Nails and tools made ideas possible. Small boards nailed up the trunk led to the second floor, tipped with the pitch of the branches it lay on, offering a little more vertigo and a prime spot to hurl acorns at kids below. Another scramble up led up to the third floor retreat, with a couch-like seating area and two shoulder high walls that swayed in the breeze. Stirred leaves were just at arm’s reach up there. The next tree over was taller: the look-out. It was nothing but nailed boards in a ladder all the way up a straight trunk to where the view opened out of the ravine. When the wind blew, it gave merciless lessons in facing any fear of heights.

Across the street was a small shallow stream winding through some willows with branches straight enough to fashion rudimentary bow and arrows. I lived in imagination; the various kids deciding how our self-governance would play out Swiss Family Robinson meets Lord of the Flies. How could one live off acorn flour, almonds, and mulberries, crafting small pots from creek clay, spearing frogs? I tried starting a fire like the Indians did: a bow, a string, a small hole in a some wood, all to start a spark. Nada. That failure made me realize the scale of my vulnerability. What if …

Mom and Dad had let my brother and I live our own childhood. I know we carried their hearts in our young chests, but they were teaching us to live bravely, and they were brave enough to let us do it.

It is understandable why my parents were initially drawn together, speaking a similar creative language. Otherwise, opposites attract. Where he was introspectively pragmatic, a neutral atheist; she was an outspoken, icons-on-the-wall Catholic. Only two times a year, he reluctantly attended mass with us, Easter and Christmas. he quietly endured the service, with his long legs stretched under the pew sitting the whole time. Perhaps they had both tired of loneliness and married, but that is just supposition. It is true though, that their strengths became their weakness and got the best of them.

It was such a precarious balance of extremes, keeping the home fires burning. Home was a nest of shared family happiness and occasional crisis, a shelter of random extremes. Our small family of four had moved away from relatives, moved many more times, and became an isolated island stranded into an unworkable situation. Children are so much more perceptive than given credit, understanding but not judging parents' hearts since DNA speaks the same language. It was an unspoken fact, Mom's needs were beyond medicine's capacity to cure. It was a pattern every four or five years, a line would be crossed and mom would have to go for an involuntary stay at the mental hospital, lasting a few days or a couple weeks of Short Doyle. (footnote, definition) One of my first memories was when Dad brought my brother and I to an older hospital building. The lifelessly sterile tile halls smelled strange, with grit in the corners and bars on the staircase windows. Mom lay in a strangely bare room, on a gurney with thin sheets. While she was gone, Dad had to cook breakfast for us kids alone, after waking us up alone, the kitchen oddly quiet with the disruption of routine.

He felt trapped by a circumstance where nothing matters, where all options are no options. His wife’s occasional descents into tangled reasoning and hatred would drive him away for days at a time. Kids overhear arguments behind doors anyway. One time I heard him say, Its either the kids or me. Hurt comprehension pushed my childhood away and replaced it with adult reasoning. He was correct; the woman had no right to raise children. If she recognized her own incapacity, it meant that she had to accept the extent of her illness, and the unreliability of her sometimes wayward logic. All or nothing so she denied all of it. Fighting the ambulance drivers taking her out of the house, fighting the doctors holding her down for the shots. They are all in on it. But who would be there if not Mom? Whose side to take, even having to take sides? Mom was well enough a good part of the time. I used to think, If the fighting could all just go away… When they fought I wished him gone so that sad relief could be relative peace when he did leave. Somehow, the few days gone erased the memory of fighting, and I felt better when he came through the door. Some sort of priority for his family always brought him back. Even now, I wish sadly for his sake I could have been more welcoming.

Where Mom’s demons sometimes flew about the house for all to see, Dad’s were introspectively burdensome, a despair he had to carry alone. I overheard Mom’s quiet discussion with the police, when they found him in a wrecked car at the bottom of a snowy mountain road, an empty bottle of liquor, a failed suicide attempt. They had brought him home and he stayed in bed a few days. I went into his room one afternoon and sat in the chair by the bed, sensing something was terribly wrong. But he was not one for conversation; the silence spoke for me. I stayed for twenty minutes, then got up to leave, was not smart enough to think of what to say.

It would be the last time I saw him alive. He left again, and a few days later I answered the door to two policemen. I just knew. They asked to speak with my mother, and I retreated stunned to my room. Falling into a sea of confusion, an immense tsunami of grief approached, but a selfish relief lifted me from inundation, and I held it all back with anger. I wished I had known what to say to him, what might have saved him. Yet at the same time, that helplessness about the fighting was over. The feeling of failing him linked to relief became a chain weighted with guilt, a chain I would carry a long, long time, that I didn’t know was so heavy until I could finally break it.

Given a week off school, most of those days were spent roller skating around the apartment complex; the same loop a hundred times, attempting each 90 degree corner faster, stooping lower with the speed, until the skate clamps could not hold the force and my shoes peeled away, sending me scraping off the sidewalk and into the thorny bushes. I would get up, key the skates back on tighter bending the sole, and face the same approaching danger at the corners, daring to skate faster. I had to summon the fear, to learn how to overcome it.

Without Dad, Mom began one of her slides into her own world again. It was impossible to persuade her back to this reality; logic or anger couldn’t do it either. Just like the schizophrenic cliche, the movie scene of a slow entrance into their sacred space: a dreadful comprehension....

u n h i n g e d.

“Mom, these eggs aren’t poisoned, there is no way the government knows which ones you are going to buy... Lets just get these ones. I promise, they will be ok.” And the eggs would be just fine for the sandwiches Mom would make for school lunches.

Of course I loved her, but I was on the fence about her being the Prophet stuff. I mean, what a mistake I would be making if she really is the voice of God's wrath, but, I don't know.

“Mom! Are you throwing rocks at the neighbors again? Aw, c’mon!” And to the neighbor, “I'm Sorry…”

My role as a daughter was stolen, having to be so mindful of my mother’s moods and needs, like rubber bands wrapped around a razor blade. Mom could switch from intelligent and caring to, “Mom, Jesus! don't burn the table! We need it!”

“Where are my new shoes, the ones with heels? You threw them on the roof? They are not whore shoes!”

My brother managed to find a way out of the house, staying with a friend much of the time. I tried to pull my mother away from the illogical, but it all doesn't matter, one can't reason with insanity. I knew she did the best she could and I tried to be on her side in a world that is crazy too. All I know is, how could anyone but God have known that keeping her world together would teach the patience to reconstruct the pieces of my own?

But it was a one sided deal.. The reason under it all, why she threw my new heels on the roof, she was worried I was growing up. Anxious about my impending independence, she wouldn’t sign the release to let me work after school. She let my brother learn to drive the car, but wouldn’t sign the release to let me learn. It came down to a deciding moment of my mutiny when I opened the refrigerator door to practically empty shelves. Hungry, I was looking at one apple left… which mom said is surely poisoned. Just then all my connection with Mother snapped away, love dissolved to antipathy, sympathy faded into disdain, family obligation disintegrated to selfish disregard, and I ate the damn apple.

The whole circumstance was a just nuisance for that small town, as Mother delivered cryptic, paranoid prophecy or damnation to whoever she felt deserved it. After I discovered she had sent a telegram to one of my schoolmates, “Are you telling all my friends to stay away? They will now.”

At a college-prep high school, I could still maintain straight-A’s in the advanced courses, memorizing things like “Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles…“ At church I learned words like “ostracized.”

There came the morning after a long night when two ambulance drivers came and loaded Mom on the gurney, and a policeman gave my brother and I a ride to the convent. From there, they brought us to an 1800’s three-story brick dorm building, unused and empty but for deserted furniture from a couple decades past. That weekend, we two explored the abandoned echoing place, finding names, graffiti, childish poems scrawled into antique desks and walls of hidden cubbies. A kindly nun stayed with us at night. I chose my own bedroom, one picked from the many. We ate down the block at a hospital cafeteria while Mom was at the other one across town. From the stainless steel line, I'd pick out a single-serving box of cereal, the kind she never allowed in the house, and pick out a box of milk from the pile of ice. Sitting wordless with my brother, I cut the box open on the dotted lines to make it into its own bowl, bent the straw, inserted it short side into the carton, lifted up the carton and sucked on the long end, starting a syphon to pour milk into the box.  After breakfast, we walked to school down the block.

A few of those school-nights, I did homework by myself in the empty activity room, the TV on for noise. I was surrounded by so many empty huge outdated vinyl chairs, surrounded by so many empty halls of old linoleum. The small circle of light and noise created a fence against the large darkness at my back, haunted if I imagined it so. I sunk further down into the big chair for safety from the ghosts as I watched TV. Even this, an adventurous independence, was a two-week respite from home.

I enjoyed hanging out with a geeky group of boys, playing the new game Dungeons and Dragons like a poker game till all hours. At times we went to the local college computer lab after school, pretending to be older. Infiltrating the primitive security system, we each sat at computer stations tucked between carts stacked with keypunch program cards and played Star Wars I. Hooked on the game for hours, we wouldn’t leave for home until dawn, the sun rising on the drive back. Mom didn’t mind; understanding I wasn’t the type to get into trouble.

A couple years later, when my grades fell from As to Ds and my attendance dropped, the situation was still too complicated for anyone to help; everyone else has their own problems. Enough, I thought, and finally steeled up enough courage to walk into the school guidance counselor's office.

Sitting down, I pronounced, “I don't care what you do with me, I'm not going home.”

Next Chapter: ch 3- Love is a Myth, Home is a Hospital