Taking part in the Ann Dee Ellis 8-Minute Memoir Writing Challenge. This is Day Six.

My knee-jerk reaction? I don’t like games. I have good memories of playing card games with my grandma, and I did enjoy a good game of hide-and-seek with the neighborhood kids when I was little. I have one particularly happy memory of playing Kick the Can when my mom and aunts joined us. Other than that, I really don’t like games. I am about as non-competitive as it gets. I just don’t care about winning- I’d rather curl up with a book, or have a discussion about philosophy or song lyrics, or Rilke or Stephen King. I’d rather cook some delicious food or organize the filing cabinet. I’m not even kidding about that last one. I never played a sport. I never understood the desire to compete- it just made no sense.

As I grew up the games moved from the dining room tables and front yards into our heads. That was even more perplexing- why would anyone say or do something they didn’t mean? Why would a person be passive-aggressive, or dishonest, or disingenuous, or give someone the silent treatment? Not only did I not understand it, I didn’t know how to play, and like the other games, I usually opted to sit that one out. A book was a much better companion. The drama was at least contained.

As a grownup, this still perplexes me. While I have moved beyond the playground games and adolescent circus, I still am baffled when I encounter other adult humans who do not take responsibility for their own actions or feelings. It’s exhausting interacting with a person who insists others do their emotional lifting. I am not interested in relationships with people who play games. Full stop.

At least attempt to know yourself. Try and understand what you are seeking and need, and then find a way to communicate. Owning your own perspective doesn’t mean disregarding kindness or manners, or being dogmatic in your view.

And I eye my book on the table longingly…

Taking part in the Ann Dee Ellis 8-Minute Memoir Writing Challenge. This is Day Five.

Tucked away in a lavender-scented wooden box, amid letters and curl-edged photographs, is an antique cotton hankercheif with a crocheted edge. Folded up carefully in the soft cotton is a woolen star, hand dyed in a gentle rainbow hue, with a small pocket. The pocket holds a tiny doll, no bigger than my thumb, crafted in the manner of German woolen puppin, simple and featureless.

Over time, the wool felt of the star has frayed, but the baby remains perfect, nestled in its pocket, wrapped in soft cotton.

No one looking at this would think it was anything at all. It’s moth-eaten piece of wool with a lumpy, nondescript doll. It’s meaningless. What is it? Is it a necklace? Is it a toy? Is it for a child?

I swallow hard. Yes, it’s for a child, but not a child you’re thinking of …

This is my memory alone.

Taking part in the Ann Dee Ellis 8-Minute Memoir Writing Challenge. This is Day Four. Write about a time you had an adventure. When you did or said something unexpected.

It occurs to me that I’ve had a lot of adventures. I haven’t followed a predictable path, except perhaps in it’s unpredictableness. I graduated young. I left home young (too young, looking back) and I moved to the beach. My first apartment was in a tiny beach town south of Santa Cruz, and my roommate was a one of the Beach Boys’ daughters. After that, I picked up and moved to Seattle on a lark, to go to art school. Some friends followed me and we lived as starving students in the Seattle where Nirvana was still playing small clubs. I couldn’t wait to get back to California after a year in the Seattle gloom and sodden skies.

I worked odd jobs, took some classes at the local college, and got a job as an art director. I flew back and forth from Seattle working for a company up there, and I followed the Grateful Dead for a while, bouncing up and down the west coast, hitting as many shows as I could – I only remember spending one show in the parking lot. Most of the time I got in. I had a boyfriend who rode Harley Davidson motorcycles, and one summer we packed up the bike and rode from San Francisco to Sturgis, South Dakota. And back. We camped along the way, except for showering in truck-stops. It’s not for the weak of heart, traveling that way. I never want to do it again, but I’m glad I did it once.

By my mid-twenties, it was time to settle down a bit. I got a real job working for a company in Palo Alto, and I lived alone for three years, ditching the roommates and practicing being a grown-up. It was a whole new adventure and a radical departure from my past. I worked for several years for a small company, managing importing toys and children’s goods from Germany. I learned a smattering of German, and even got to spend some time in Germany, where I traveled alone, made friends, and vacationed in Austria. I’ve snowboarded in the Alps, and had homemade schnapps made by an elderly war veteran while sitting on the side of a mountain.

My next adventure was bucking custom among most of my friends and getting married. I had three babies in four years, and then things got really interesting. That’s another story though. <insert all of Dandelion here> Against my liberal, hippie San Francisco roots, I joined a very conservative church, and have been struggling to reconcile my beliefs, which are deeply held and seem to inhabit different worlds, but which actually don’t have to, for more than a decade now.

I went back to school as a divorced woman in her late thirties with three children, and I did so surprisingly well at college that I got into one of the better universities in the country for graduate school. That was scary, leaving home, after the previous years, but I took a deep breath and leapt.

Years ago, I read something in a Joseph Campbell book- I don’t think he wrote it, but I think he was quoting someone else. “As you go the way of life, you will come to a great chasm. Jump. It’s not as wide as you think.”

Those words have been my draught of courage more times than I can count. And maybe my saving grace—it’s just a lot more fun when you’re doing it because you want to, and not because the land behind you has turned into an inferno.

So basically, I couldn’t decide which adventure to write about on the fly.

Taking part in the Ann Dee Ellis 8-Minute Memoir Writing Challenge. This is Day Three.

I have no idea where the hostility comes from in my resistance to “billboards.” I read the topic over and over, wondering what I was missing. Not only do I have a vacuum with billboards, but I am kind of pissy to be asked to write about something so seemingly random after two personal prompts.

Growing up, there weren’t many billboards in my part of the world. I don’t know if they’d been banned or we just weren’t in a target-rich environment- but my only memories of them are on long road-trips, and never (ever) in my town.

What we did have was a water tower that was painted like a vintage Libby’s can of fruit cocktail. I loved it when my grandma would drive past it. I didn’t actually like the fruit cocktail, with it’s insipid chunks of indistinguishable fruit and neon plastic cherries, but I loved the giant can towering in the air.

On family road trips, once we’d leave the safety of the west and head east, the billboards I do remember all told me I was going to hell. I was a heathen, and unless I embraced that billboard’s particular religious genre, I would burn, I would die, I would be in misery, and I had to be like them. It left a sour taste along the back of my throat, even as a child. Why would anyone spread messages like that, I wondered.

So I would avert my eyes, hope they were all wrong, and sing along with Alabama or Willie Nelson as my dad piloted our Volkswagen van, sans air conditioning, down the hot interstate. We were headed east over the sage-brush hills out of the safe haven of California, where no one ever told me I was going to hell or to prepare to burn for eternity.

Taking part in the Ann Dee Ellis 8-Minute Memoir Writing Challenge. This is Day Two.

I don’t remember much at all about Abby’s first year of life. And if I’m honest, there are large swaths of time missing thereafter, too. I remember small things, bright shining moments- I remember holding her newborn self, new baby smell intoxicating my sleep-addled brain. I remember someone else changing her and spreading baby lotion on her perfect skin, and erasing that new smell, and crying for hours afterwards. I remember the sense of loss, knowing deep in my soul that she was the last baby I would have, even though I wanted more so badly.

I don’t remember her first birthday at all. I don’t remember her first steps. I don’t remember her first words, but I know she was silent for a long time, and talked late. Everything from those years is warped and distorted by the lens of addiction and pain and loss and fear. When her age was counted still in weeks, her father floated away from us on a tide of prescription narcotics, and that wave swamped the whole family until my memory returns about three years later. I wonder at the trauma that is erased, I wonder what happened between the puddles of light memory. I know I cared for them, protected them, survived. We survived.

Not all of us survived. Their father is dead.

I don’t remember what it’s like to live in that kind of fear now. Those memories have been carried away, mercifully, on the waves as they went back out to sea after the destruction. I don’t remember the countless hands that reached out and down to help us up, but I have the profound sense of their reality, of their carrying, abiding presence, as I made my way over the jagged rocks with my three babies strapped to my aching body.

Maybe it’s enough that that’s all I remember.

Taking part in the Ann Dee Ellis 8-Minute Memoir Writing Challenge. This is Day One.

I remember when my grandma’s house smelled like Downey, and there was a tiny glass bowl of licorice candies on the end table next to the rough black and white tweed couch. Soft golden light would filter through the west-facing windows each afternoon, filtered further by the heavy gold drapes and filmy sheers of her formal window portieres. There was a gold crushed velvet chair in the corner. I always wanted that chair, and I still wonder what happened to it when Grandma’s house was shuttered, packed and sold.

There were always frozen grapes in the freezer, and the kitchen was accented in the same rich golds as the rest of the house- I guess grandma liked yellow, but she always wore blue. Even the push-button desk phone was harvest gold. I think that was the color. It was the 1970s. I think everything was gold. Try freezing your grapes sometime- or Bing cherries- they become divine little frozen juice-sicles and for me, bring back grandma.

We would sit at her round dining room table, covered in a bright yellow-tassled table-cloth (always) and play games. When I was little, it was Uncle Wiggly or Monopoly. It took me years to realize she let me win, and I wasn’t just an outrageous Monopoly star. (It wasn’t actually until playing games with my own kids that it dawned on me, as I threw yet another game to just get the interminable thing over with… Ohhh, there’s the ah-ha moment.) As I got older, the games became rummy, two-way solitaire, and canasta. The games were always accompanied by tall, cold Coke poured over crushed ice. Always crushed ice- you would stand at the sink with the metal ice-cube tray (the kind with the pull-up handle that would break the ice loose) and whap each ice cube with the back of a spoon.) Coke has never tasted as good in my whole life as it did sitting around my grandma’s dining room table playing canasta.

In her cupboards were a perfect set of Franciscan-ware apple-pattern dishes, no chips, no broken pieces, and like the gold mohair chair, I wonder what happened to them, too. There was whistling tea-kettle, and today I keep a whistling tea-kettle in my kitchen, not for any particular reason except the whistle reminds me of my childhood, of being safe, of being loved, and of golden light.

The smell of Oil of Olay and White Rain hairspray can bring me to tears. On the windowsill was a magnifying mirror, where grandma would pat her face with powder and carefully apply her poppy-pink lipstick. “Little old ladies always want to wear red lips, but that just runs in all your lines. Pink is better.” And she’d smile at me, while I sat on the floor in the bathroom and dug through the vanity drawers, even though I knew the organized, neat contents of every nook and cranny in her house.

Today, her jewelry box sits on top of my dresser. In the bottom drawer of the black leather, red-lined case is a tube of brand-new, unopened poppy-pink lipstick. It was in there when she died. You never knew when a company would change their formula and your poppy-pink might go orange on you, and finding the right lipstick was work. When I open the jewelry box— which I do use and keep my own things stored, mixed with grandmas—it smells like Downey, Oil of Olay and White Rain. Sometimes, I lean down close and close my eyes, breathe in gently, and I miss her so much it hurts.