Penny

Meet Penny.

When socks and library cards go missing, Penny took them. If the lights get left on or doors get left open, Penny is the irresponsible one. She occasionally opens the garage door in the middle of the coldest winter night, allowing the water pump to freeze, and loves to snarf down the last piece of strawberry pie, leaving a trail of crumbs and a sticky, bright red mess on the countertop.

Penny never flushes.

The Swine Flu hit our household this week, and Penny hid the thermometer. We heard her laughing about it early this morning, around 2:17am, as she went about rearranging the boxes in the attic above our bedroom. Then she silently made her way to my son’s room and turned off his alarm clock. The alarm clock he swears he set before going to bed last night. He nearly missed the bus.

Penny is dead.

The story of how we first learned about Penny – the day our suspicions were confirmed, if you will – is a bit unsettling. About two years ago, my wife was carrying a bag of garbage to the dumpster at the end of our driveway when an old man in a beaten-down truck drove by and stopped in front of the house. We live on a dead-end street, so we don’t get much traffic. The man leaned out the window and said, “You know you have a ghost in your house?” My wife laughed, but the guy didn’t. He said the ghost was of a 12-year-old girl named Penny. Then he smiled a toothy grin and drove away. We’d never seen him before, and we’ve not seen him since.

So we set to digging. And this is her story:

Penny Antoinette Irene Nelson was born during the waning moments of an early-Autumn storm in 1809. The local historian will tell you, with that smug countenance of the rumormonger plastered on her pasty-white and wrinkled faces, that it was this storm that spawned the hellacious tornado which leveled the area’s corn and soybean fields. It is that smug expression, with its tiny hint of a wink and an almost tangible plea begging the question, which leads one to inquire further for the rest of the story. And there is far more than leveled corn fields at the end of this story.

Or so I’ve been told.

It is reported that as the sun rose the next morning, struggling to penetrate the All-Saints’-Day-morning fog, the population of my small, mid-western town found their number decreased by fourteen. For found dead, lying buried in the rubble of their farmhouse on the southwest corner of Feightner Street, were the Strausbaugh family. The patriarch, one William Everett Strausbaugh, had been a shut-in for over a decade by this point. Years of plowing, planting, harvesting, and drinking had turned him into a cantankerous, scurrilous, hoary-headed bastard. But people will tolerate the reclusive sort where the scent of wealth is present, and Old Man Strausbaugh was loaded. Each year, to usher in the New Year and inaugurate its slow unwinding, he would host an elaborate party, inviting the locals over to gather around his ample hearth fires and drink his homemade sour mash whiskey. And each year, he would smooth talk some young female house guest into visiting his bedchamber for some festivities of a more lascivious nature. In late January of 1809, his willing guest was one Abigail Nelson.

Abigail settled in the region after nineteen years of wandering the highways and byways at the side of her aging Gypsy mother, Rosalyn. She saw in the fields of corn a chance to finally settle down and start a new life, but funds for seed were hard to come by. On that cold and snow-swept evening, over steaming glasses of spiked cider, Old Man Strausbaugh had made promises to young Abigail Nelson. Promises that tickled her ears. Promises he never intended to keep. He planted a seed of a different sort. And when Abigail told him that she was going to bear him a child, he cut her loose in a vengeful, threat-laden rage.

Rosalyn was furious. All those years of wandering, with not a care in the world and no ill effects to speak of, and it took them settling down for things to turn sour. So she cursed Old Man Strausbaugh. Cursed him good. And with the dawning of that aforementioned midnight hour, he found himself aloft and flying, exhilarated as though in the rapture of a dream, and then smashed back upon the ground with a dark finality. The curse had taken not only his life, but the lives of his wife and twelve children. And in their stead, a new life was born. As the fog lifted, Rosalyn the Gypsy smiled a knowing smile and settled back in her rocking chair cradling her granddaughter.

The funny thing about curses is that they seldom play out in predictable ways. Indeed, Old Man Strausbaugh and his brood were dead, but Penny inherited a bit of his wild streak. Penny grew into a beautiful girl. I’ve seen the pictures, and they are haunting. She had the most penetrating eyes I’ve ever seen, and I imagine her smile could charm the proverbial ice from the proverbial Eskimo. And from reports I’ve read, she too, after decades of sowing wild oats and no small amount of general mayhem amongst the locals, became reclusive. Each Halloween, beginning sometime after 1897, the year she locked herself inside and never came out again, neighbors would report hearing ear-splitting screams emanating from the attic of the mustard-yellow house on Washington Boulevard where Penny Nelson lived. And regardless of the weather conditions, great gales of wind would sweep down the street, generally around the midnight hour, bending the lilac bushes that surrounded the house low to the ground in their deafening wake.

And on the wind was the faintest smell of liquor.

In 1909, long after Rosalyn and Abigail had been carried away and the windows boarded up, from the inside, the house simply blew away. No body was ever found. The property, overgrown with crab grass and nettles, but with blossoming lilac bushes still firmly rooted around the perimeter, sat vacant until 2003. That’s when I bought it. And it’s where I later built my house. Upon the advice of my neighbor, the local rumormonger historian, I opted for a cream-colored siding as opposed to mustard-yellow. And I stay away from drinking. But the wind has been picking up lately, blowing the leaves across the property and piling them up at the base of the lilac bushes. We decided to keep them. And the forecast for Halloween? Stormy . . .

[photo credit]

Friend of Your Youth

What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.

~ Aristotle

Kay and I were friends. For two years, we sat side by side for an hour each day in drafting class, mechanical pencils and straightedges in hand, designing dream homes or drawing specs for bolts. We swapped erasers as often as we swapped stories about high school crushes and who we planned to ask to the prom when the time came. We airbrushed signs on whiteboards in honor of our favorite hair bands and talked trash about the fledgling basketball team, my job at McDonalds, or hers at a local pizza place. And then, in late May of 1987, during the senior picnic, having drawn all we could draw and said all we could say, having for a brief moment shared a blanket and some lunch on the high school lawn, we went our separate ways.

Jay and I used to be friends. In college, we hosted a Christian radio show together. Radio Free Jesus. Interspersed between vinyl cuts by Resurrection Band, Daniel Amos, Randy Stonehill, Petra, and the occasional Amy Grant – offered just to keep the natives from getting restless – we talked about God and relationships and Jesus Rock. He ran for some local political office as a staunch Republican and I helped him hand out buttons on street corners. He lost. Eventually he graduated, got married, and left me to solo the show. We crossed paths once or twice, back in the late 80s, before I myself moved on to another locale several states away.

Aristotle held true friendship in high esteem, for he saw within the concept a bond forged between two people whose sole interest lie in maintaining and exemplifying the goodness of the other. He wrote, “Friendship of this kind is permanent, reasonably enough; because in it are united all the attributes that friends ought to possess. For all friendship has as its object something good or pleasant — either absolutely or relatively to the person who feels the affection — and is based on some similarity between the parties.”

Were Kay and I really friends? Jay and I? I believe so. Are we still friends? We must be, for Facebook tells me so. She tracked me down. I tracked him down. I get to see pictures of their kids and know where they are headed on vacation or what they had for breakfast. I watch the numbers rise as I add more friends and feel the smile on my face widen with each accepted invitation. Each “How have YOU been?” message. This is what we do nowadays, search for friends and add them to our stream without giving much thought as to what kind of friends these people really are.

Unless you’re me, of course. I think about shit like this way too much. And wonder what it all means. To wit, I recently read an interesting passage in Robert Penn Warren’s Pulitzer-prize-winning novel All the King’s Men . . .

The Friend of Your Youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you. He sees in his mind a face that does not exist anymore, speaks a name – Spike, Bud, Snip, Red, Rusty, Jack, Dave – which belongs to that now nonexistent face but which by some inane doddering confusion of the universe is for the moment attached to a not happily met and boring stranger. But he humors the drooling doddering confusion of the universe and continues to address politely that dull stranger by the name which properly belongs to the boy face and to the time when the boy voice called thinly across the late afternoon water or murmured by a campfire at night or in the middle of a crowded street said, “Gee, listen to this–’On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble; His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves–’” The Friend of Your Youth is your friend because he does not see you anymore.

And perhaps he never saw you. What he saw was simply part of the furniture of the wonderful opening world. Friendship was something he suddenly discovered and had to give away as a recognition of and payment for the breathlessly opening world which momently divulged itself like a moonflower. It didn’t matter a damn to whom he gave it, for the fact of giving was what mattered, and if you happened to be handy you were automatically endowed with all the appropriate attributes of a friend and forever after your reality is irrelevant. The Friend of Your Youth is the only friend you will ever have, for he hasn’t the slightest concern with calculating his interest or your virtue. He doesn’t give a damn, for the moment, about Getting Ahead or Needs Must Admiring the Best, the two official criteria in adult friendships, and when the boring stranger appears, he puts out his hand and smiles (not really seeing your face) and speaks your name (which doesn’t really belong to your face), saying, “Well, Jack, damned glad you came, come on in, boy!”

“Sure, I’ll be your friend. We can catch up for a moment or two and share pictures and tell each other what we’re having for breakfast.” But eventually, this Friend of Your Youth gets lost in the feed, becoming nothing but a blip that gets shoved down the page as new updates pour in. And often, like Jack Burden, we’ll reach for our hat and head out the door, either disconnecting them or hiding them, wondering why we stopped by in the first place.

I’ve heard stories of people finding long lost friends and actually prolonging the reunion, reconnecting in ways that mean something so much more now than they did way back when. Romances have blossomed, hands-on physical contact taking the place of pixels and status updates. I imagine these are rare stories, however, rising to the top because we want all this to mean something. But distance and the piling up of years make any genuine connection with most Friends of My Youth impossible. And so we settle for this.

Maybe this is my “Great Sleep” rearing its ugly head, for I tend to pull away in the face of superficial contact. I find no pleasure in merely scratching the surface. To me, it seems more like pulling the scab off of a wound that could have healed long ago if I’d just refrained from pestering it so. Maybe I want more than what Facebook is giving me.

Or maybe I’m just thinking too much . . .

[photo credit]

Ron Jeremy, Garfield, and the Team Mars Perspective

Today, we’re talking about body image and how it affects your relationship over at The Real World: Venus vs. Mars. My contribution is here, so stop by and join the discussion . . .

The Wild Rumpus

The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.

~ Erma Bombeck

Back in the day, when that cruel taskmaster Time doled itself out in the intervals between diaper changes, snack times, stints at the office, and early-evening stroller rides around the neighborhood, when the house was a second-story loft apartment with one air conditioner in the master bedroom window, it was Will Smith as J, dressed in black and gettin’ jiggy with that slimy alien Mikey, that got the rumpus started.

Go ahead. Make your neck work. You know you want to . . .

Felt good, right? Damn straight it did. We’d jump on the bed, a tangled and bouncing mess of diapers and runny noses, a ganglion of giggles and squeals of delight. No pressure to get the moves right. Just wild abandon on a mattress that now, a decade and a mortgage later, sags in the middle.

As the years have passed, adding more and bigger kids to the mix, the rumpuses have moved from the bedroom into other arenas. There have been ball pits, parks with hunter-green plastic slides and cherry-red swings, fast food Playlands, bowling alleys with gutter bumpers and neon lights, glow-in-the-dark, indoor miniature golf courses, back yards cluttered with ruts, walnuts, and barbeque grills, and forest pathways lined with one-hundred-year-old oak trees, the crunch of fallen leaves underfoot. And water puddles, the kind that shimmer in the sun, their calm surfaces broken and sent skyward drop after drop by the intrusion of defrocked feet, leaving shins and calves sporting driblets of dried mud, the happy tears of a well-spent moment.

And movie theaters, for not all rumpuses need be raucous affairs. Not much beats the semiannual sharing of buttered and seasoned popcorn in buckets bigger than your head, sodas served by the gallon, chocolate covered raisins, and sticky red strands of Twizzlers. And then the refills, because that’s what The Wild Things would do, they would live it up while the living is easy.

Because, as Maurice Sendak reminded us a long time ago, and reminds us anew each day we are willing to remember, life is hard and rumpuses are rare and must be embraced with gusto, with hands weary from the toil and hearts weighed down and weakened by the strain of the stuff of life between the rumpuses. All of it is what makes us tick, and rumpuses lighten the load, each passing second a stone added to the lighter side of the scale. It’s a delicate balance, and it takes eyes and attitudes attuned to the deeper meaning of it all to keep things even.

So go ahead.  Rediscover the bond.  Unearth the thing that makes your neck work.  Find the time to let your own rumpus start.  Dinner will be warm and waiting . . .

[photo credit]

The Materials of Solitude

By pretending to have friends, maybe I could invent some.

~ Michael Chabon

I have myopia. Either my eyeballs are too long or my corneas are too steep. Maybe both; no one has ever really spelled out the specifics. Regardless, for several years now I have worn glasses when driving or watching television.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of both lately, lapping up Mad Men on DVD – much like my cat Meepo when he first discovered that he really liked the leftover mauve-colored milk from my morning bowl of Fruity Pebbles – in a mad-dash effort to get up-to-speed on all things Don Draper, and making the 6.8 mile trip up Homestead Road every afternoon to pick up my son from play practice. He landed the role of Ho-Jon in his high school’s staging of M*A*S*H. My son has long red hair, pimples, and mumbles in a very nasally, very Midwestern accent which, they’ll tell you if you bring it up, really isn’t much of an accent after all. He’s every kid. And he’s playing a Korean houseboy in less than a month. And I still have the third season to go.

So I’m going to need my glasses.

Only I took them off Saturday night in my garage, after watching the episode in which Peggy Olson finally gets her own office (prediction: she will be running Sterling Cooper before this thing wraps), and sat them down on the trunk of the car. Sunday morning, my wife ran to the store to pick up stuff to make potato soup. My glasses made it nearly two blocks before sliding off. This morning, we found the lenses along the side of the road, pockmarked and caked with Indiana clay. And in the “Wouldn’t You Know It” department, my script expired in 2005. “No, Mr. Thomas, we can’t just make you a new pair.” Curses!

Thankfully, I can handle reading. I’m in the middle of the fall semester and both of my classes are, for the first time in my academic career, online. For the record, this is a recipe for disaster for those of us who are chronic procrastinators. No weekly agenda. No lectures to attend. No hobnobbing face to face with the professor or my classmates. Instead, there is me, a pile of books, some documentaries on YouTube and PBS, Blackboard access, and tons of writing, with a journal entry here, an essay there, and midterms. Having pounded most of that out over the past couple of weeks, I now have the next few days to read and write about Richard Rubenstein’s When Jesus Became God: The Epic Fight over Christ’s Divinity in the Last Days of Rome. With heads bowed and eyes closed, an altar call . . . Who wants to join me?! Anyone . . . ?

What if I throw in something a little less mind-numbing? In the mix, between the bickering and blathering of Arius and Athanasius and their myriad men-behaving-badly minions, I’ve been dipping my toes into purer waters – the consistently stunning prose of Michael Chabon’s latest book, Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son. Few authors turn my crank as effortlessly as Chabon, whose Wonder Boys, Summerland, and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay are staples down the middle of my list of books that should be reread just for the sheer pleasure of doing so. In this book, his “first sustained work of personal writing,” Chabon doesn’t just share a story, he becomes the story. And, as should be the case with all meaningful memoirs, his essays dovetail with my own experiences, leading me to set the book aside occasionally and reflect on the connections we share. For example, in the very first chapter, titled “The Secret Handshake,” Chabon writes about his attempt, at the tender age of ten, to start his own comic book club. He fashioned a newsletter echoing the style of his hero Stan Lee, the brains, brawn, and balls behind the modern incarnation of Marvel comics, and, with the help of his mother, rented a room at the local community center, set up a table and some chairs, and hung up a hand-painted sign inviting one and all to join the club for the price of one dollar. One kid showed up, got freaked out by all those empty chairs, and left. He writes:

This is the point, to me, where art and fandom coincide. Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. Every great record or novel or comic book convenes the first meeting of a fan club whose membership stands forever as one but which maintains chapters in every city – in every cranium – in the world. Art, like fandom, asserts the possibility of fellowship in a world built entirely from the materials of solitude. The novelist, the cartoonist, the songwriter, knows that the gesture is doomed from the beginning but makes it anyway, flashes his or her bit of mirror, not on the chance that the signal will be seen or understood but as if such a chance existed.

And of course, as seems to be the case more than usual lately, especially during an online hiatus of sorts, I got to thinking about all this as it relates to blogging. We live our lives, experiencing the joys and sorrows, the ups and the downs, the times of plenty and times of need, the crowds and the quiet benches, and then eventually we sit down alone at our desks or on my our porch and craft these posts. We take what we see as we gaze at and engage with the grand panorama of life, and then pull our focus up close. Blogs like mine are the materials of solitude. And those of us who do this with no hope for immediate monetary gain become deliberately myopic, choosing not to focus on how far the words reach or on how broadly the ripples may spread, but instead are content with the nearness of the task at hand, the crafting of these invitations that we hang on our digital doorposts.

I admit that I often feel like that kid, sitting alone in the empty room, waiting for someone to come along, pull up a chair, and join me in dunking the cookies of fellowship. And into my little room you have come. This club is small, but it’s mine. I’m glad you’re here. And you can keep your dollar . . .

[top photo credit]