What I didn’t tell you

I wrote a piece about a trip to Italy taken 20 years ago. When it was finished I realized how much of it couldn’t be told. So many of the things that I had noted, but not elaborated upon, in my journal couldn’t be written out. Did I know that then? At a distance of 20 years I see the story lines that could be pulled out and built up—someone else’s heartbreak, the death of a bird, differences of opinion, a failure of nerve, a mysterious case of bleeding—and the other things that were tinged with them. Maybe these stories were unremarkable because they were too familiar. That is a problem with writing or fiction that grows out of your life experiences, unless you find suitable replacements for those things or delve into them from an artificially altered point of view or declare a clinical and forensic interest in your own affairs so that literary truth illuminates the darkness and you tell the people closest to you that there is some higher purpose to your betrayal, there is much that cannot be said in the way that you might say it if you lived in a world without consequences.

I woke up one morning from a dream that involved the awful discovery that, in spite of an elaborate drawing on the calendar day, and lots of preparation, we had missed the deadline for my 7th grader’s college applications. All of her classmates would be moving up to 8th grade/college and she would have to spend a year making applications over again and biding her time and through no fault of her own. The applications had been made, she was looking forward to the acceptance from the college of her choice, but it suddenly dawned on us that no one had actually mailed the application. It was all my fault. And in the dream she was very nice about it, but it was a crushing disappointment and it injected the day to come with a sense of the ominous.

When I came downstairs, in my real life, I found the front door to the house was open. It was still dark outside and the outside coldness filled the room. Cat and dog were in place and there was no indication of theft or possums, just the icy floor. Moving through the semi-darkness I wondered what the day had in store for me. It was to be a long day, with a lot of places to get to and, as with writing out of your life, there will be things left unsaid that hover at the edge suggesting themes and a sense of purpose or meaning.

My car was running low on gas and I pulled into a station on the way to my daughter’s school. I was going to have to do this soon anyway. I am a person who dies a little as the needle falls towards empty, whose spirits are lifted by the full tank, which always shows as being a little more than full for longer than you’d think possible. Then suddenly it is less than full and moving toward the halfway mark. I understand that this is sad and that the reserve tank is bigger than I think it is, but this is who I am. I need gas. I am being efficient.

The pumps were a little different and pulling out I saw a large sign for diesel, which filled me with dread and had me driving the short distance to the school with the steering wheel between my fingertips waiting for the engine to utter hideous death throes as I cursed my own stupidity, that one moment of efficiency had contorted itself into a costly ball of hell. Only it hadn’t. The people at the garage were very nice about it and it cost only time. And if I were a person who understood cars and gas stations it would have been embarrassing, but I don’t, so it wasn’t.

The day continued in that vein, skirting disaster, containing joy mixed in with the ticking clock, bad news, surreality and so forth. But what more would I have written of that day in a journal? Why do we need to remember any of it? What day of reckoning is marked on the calendar, the box all colored in because it’s special, that kind of day when the college applications are due from 13-year-olds? This is the exam dream for mothers of teenagers. Their lives are testing you.

“I have Chekhov on my phone,” I tell my husband as we drive away for the weekend, not having packed a book.

“You’re such a loser,” he says. “You’re lucky I don’t have a blog.”

(Wait until he reads about the diesel!)

Everyone has one

I mentioned my garage project to two of my workmates and both of them said, yes, I could photograph their garages. Their initial reactions were as you might expect: You’re what? Really? Why?

Because garages are cool, I said. Or something to that effect. And after they explained their own garages, they told me about someone else’s.

There is a garage in California that contains antique furniture from a house twice its size. The collectors had moved from the UK to the US, from a large house to a medium house and the furniture that didn’t fit filled the garage. And then there was a divorce.

And in Louisiana, a man who lived through the Depression had saved everything in his garage, aluminum cans, plastic bags that bread came in, and the walls all around where the car just barely and precisely fit were packed with stuff. He collected timber that lay on the floor between where the tires would go. And then Katrina brought six feet of flood water to clear it out.

Garage stories. Everyone has one. What’s yours?

Please may I photograph your garage?

Over the next year, I would like to do a photography project on garages. I am hoping that my friends and acquaintances here in Huntsville will invite me over to see their garages in their natural state and I hope they will tell their friends, and their friends will let me come over, too.

How are you using the space? Do you have plans for your garage? Does your garage have potential? Are you ashamed of it? Proud of it?

What do you do in your garage? Do kids still play drums in there? Somewhere in our neighborhood a man was sitting in an easy chair in front of his. I would like to take a picture of that.

This is an amateur, labor of love project, so there’s no money in it, but I will give you digital copies of the photos. I think it will be fun and, if a bunch of people actually let me photograph their garages, it will be an interesting project for all of us to look at.

I’m not going to identify the garage’s owners or vehicles (unless they want that). I’d rather photograph the space without a car in it, if possible.

If your garage is willing to participate in this project, please email me at “the.wertis AT gmail.com.”

Hello, it’s us

In the darkness two or three of them are  hunkered over the glow of their phones, like flames cupped in their palms. It appears they are wearing hoods. They are visible in outline form only, waiting while the leader confers with someone who has happened upon them and is trying the assess the situation. What are they doing out here on the landing, separated from the rest of their people? They could be Bedouin tribespeople holding candles, not American domestic teenagers at a sleepover, on the way to the kitchen for salty snacks.

The younger daughter is having a sleepover party. After dinner, before cake, the girls, had arranged themselves in pairs and threes and peered into each others’ hands. There is the tinny buzz of music. No one uses headphones. That would be antisocial. Even the younger daughter, alone in her room, eschews headphones/speakers. There is no desire for a stereo or better speakers, larger sound. What would you put in a stereo anyway? What’s a stereo? Do we even need a house phone or cable? It’s all on your device. It’s like we are walking around holding our brains in jars of phosphorescent fluid.

There is a hum of industry as they view and tap. I want to say “freeze” and have each of them declare her task: I am listening to this music video. I am texting a boy. I am showing her videos of herself from the bus trip two weeks ago (because when you are middle school one falls so easily to reminiscences; remember how we were last month?) but worse than writing about it now would have been to have asked them about it then. Mostly, I am told, they are on Instagram.

And while the girls are networking, I am texting with one of the mothers. I, too, am caught in this web of communicative white noise. Right after college, friends of ours had an apartment by a loud highway and there was talk of a sublet or a vacancy in the building. A white noise machine in the bedroom made it possible to sleep or do your art. To be in the apartment with the constant stream of sound and have it not drive you mad required generating your own noise-canceling noise.

We are in the Piggly-Wiggly and my husband says that tabloids like the National Enquirer are suffering. Guess why?

The internet? Because as soon as it happens it’s on Twitter?

It’s the internet, but not for the reasons you’d think it is. When people are at checkout, they are on their phones.

The covers of the tabloids fill me with despair. It’s a death I can handle. Better we should be scrolling the headlines of our friends’ lives than to be learning which celebrity is too fat or too thin or dumped. I can only hope that the IGing teens are affirming each other as funny or liked more than they are tearing each other apart. The scrutiny of teenage girls, scrutinizing and documenting, and passing it on. We wrote on each others’ notebooks, signing our names in a distinctive hand. I was here. We are friends. You are with me. We are together. We like this band, this code word for that thing that happened, but now everyone can know everything in real-time, realer time. As you are saying it, she hits share. That was so funny.

At a sleepover party in 8th or 9th grade, I remember going out with one of the other girls for french fries in the middle of the night. The party was in a residential, single-home neighborhood in Brooklyn. It was fall, mild weather. Earlier in the evening there had been boys and music and pizza. Had everyone else gone to sleep? Was one of us feeling the need “to talk.” That was the thing about being in a large group, within that group there was always the pairing off, the smaller conversations within the larger, the awareness of those conversations taking place. Suddenly the others would fall silent and listen in. Then it was a big conversation again.

We just need to talk. You’d go off into the corner, another room. That might be a pivotal moment in your friendship. A new insight into the contradiction of character, the way girls got a glimpse behind the social front they maintained even to each other. She seems like she doesn’t care what people think, but she really does. You saw how people were constantly being misunderstood or misrepresented. And sometimes, as maybe had happened at the party, you wanted to have a different experience from the group and so, sitting outside with an order of fries wrapped in tin foil, we had achieved independence.

Back at the party, anything could be happening. Did they know we had gone out? Would they all be asleep? Was it about them or us? We must have told someone or left a note. If this happened now you would stay in touch, it would be the two of us together but still with the others, unless we made a point of silencing our devices, cancelling out the white noise.

They can’t turn it off now. It is always with them. It is like the inside of their heads are in constant broadcast mode. In some ways being a teen is just being a teen. There are constants, but the way they are together and apart and with people they’re not with, is very different. It is like one’s own teenage sense of simultaneous omnipotence and inconsequentiality come true. It’s real feedback on who you are but as you are trying to become whoever it is you will be.

They are in the pantry eating sour cream and onion poppadoms. They could be telling the people upstairs about it as they finish the bag and tiptoe back up the stairs. You guys? You guys?

Equality rocks

My friend in New York City called one day last fall to say that she was thinking of moving here. I think it was because of a picture I had posted on Facebook of a local apartment complex: clean, modest and mid-century fabulous.

Why am I taking grief from people in this crazy a place when I could just go somewhere quiet and affordable? is how one’s line of thought goes in NYC. I don’t need this. And so begin the fantasies of cheesemaking in Vermont or moving to a small city in the South.

When we lived in New York, people were always threatening to leave. The irony? I was never one of them.

Two weeks, a family friend said, was how long it would take to reacclimate if we moved back from London. When you were back, people weren’t too concerned about where you’d been (true of people everywhere). The city you returned to, like a self-absorbed friend, had its own issues and needs. Whatever exotic little habits you might have picked up from wherever were swept away by some new trauma about how they didn’t have that same particular muffin/soy drink/bartender at that place you always went to.

My friend is picturing a university town and thinking liberal and I’m saying not so liberal. International, yes. Educated, yes. It’s… conservative, I tell her. I mention one thing that had taken me aback when we arrived, Choose Life car tags. When I had last lived in America, your license plate said your state and maybe the state slogan, but not your college or your social or religious beliefs. Maybe other states all do this now, too, but I hadn’t seen it before. There was a pause. She was like, I’m going to have to think about this.

That pause, that slamming on of mental brakes, told us that one should not rush out of Manhattan. Maybe it was right to toss out something a little scary, like a test, but I reeled back from the force of the detail as it rebounded.

When we were looking at houses here I was shocked by a gun cabinet in the family room. There are a lot of ancient people driving beige Mercury sedans. Our area has a high incidence of tornadoes, low crime, most people own dogs. Do we base our decisions on statistics, observation or anecdote? We say that we have weighed up the pros and cons, but really we liked the way the color of the leaves went with the color of the paint, very Prada, very college housing, and we figure the people that go with this idea must be here, too. And they probably are, but so are people who use their cars to advertise lots of ideas you don’t agree with.

Do you remember the prophets of doom in the NYC subway, in those vast corridors between platforms at the 34th or 42nd Street stations, passing out slips of paper with densely written bits of scripture or poetry. Most of us did not share our beliefs or art so readily. There were men in signboards with the same close text inscribed, back and front, who held megaphones through which they foretold of the apocalypse, of our sins, at busy intersections, so we formed a river of the unrepentant that flowed around them. Your need to use your car to tell me who you voted for and why reminds me of them.

It is easy to imagine your life, simplified, in a bungalow or, as I imagine my friend’s life, minus the expense and hassle of the city, in a river-view apartment, on a floor that is three times higher than any building in this town, with space to think if not to move. There could well be a bicycle on the wall, a too-full closet, or things packed tightly under the bed. But I hear only a charming symphony of horns from overheated taxis and imagine a life decadent with choice and Shakespeare in the Park, overheard gems, parties at restaurants, readings at independent bookstores.

She does not move to Alabama. Not yet. Months go by. A bumper sticker makes me laugh: six zombies—two adults, two children, dog, cat—and the words, “Our family ate your stick family.”

Now come the Supreme Court hearings for the Defense of Marriage Act. A meme strikes. People are changing their avatars to show support for same-sex marriage. I support same-sex marriage, but I have my initial bumper sticker reaction to the avatar change.

In an article in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell is quoted saying Facebook activism is for people who aren’t motivated to make a real sacrifice, on the other hand, the idea with the avatars is to show that there is popular support for equality in marriage and to make the abstract personal. As a person who grew up practically on Christopher Street and then attended college at Ivy League Whorehouse, one would not be surprised to find me sporting the red and pink equal sign avatar but, as a person living in the deep South, it’s more important to represent my region and in this region to stick up for what I believe, if only quietly and abstractly.

Alabama has red dirt and it is an agrarian place where people believe in the land. I placed some pebbles in the tire tracks of a red dirt road and made my own avatar. It’s indigenous. And, like choosing who you love, it’s natural and it’s personal. Like my friend grasping the social significance of the Choose Life car tag, symbols have power. Adopting a meme for your avatar is not much in the face of a much more profound issue, but there is a force in the aggregation of these images. Looks matter. One turquoise wall could contain a portal to a new life. Sitting in our cars, scrolling through Facebook, we notice these things, these small but telling details that could change your mind in an instant.

Cat outta Leytonstone

He was a cat out of Leytonstone. We found him through the classifieds in the London Loot and I brought him home in an apple box on the tube.

Until recently, we would joke that he was the honey badger of cats. He don’t care. He could fix you with a belligerent stare that said Feed me or That’s my spot, Dog. He was black and white and comical. He had a big head and in his prime he weighed over a stone, about 16 pounds, but when we took him to the vet yesterday he was just under 7 and there was a mass on his spleen and so we did what we had to do.

It is the first day of spring, after unseasonable biting cold, the air is soft and you can feel the warmth of the sun. This seems unfair that he has made it through the winter and missed out on the first evening he could have sat out on the deck.

He was really old. We were in our 20s when we got him. He sniffed the Moses basket with the baby. The girls staggered under his weight as they carried him around and posed for photographs. The older daughter fell asleep holding him in her arms the night before he died, after we had told them we thought his end was near. I came back from tennis and found them both asleep on the living room floor. She was still on the beanbag and he had gone back to his spot on the rug, lying in this facedown posture he had adopted as part of his decline. The thing about pets is that you sign up for this. That kitten or puppy you bring home will get old and die. They teach us about death, I tell the younger daughter after school, before we go home.

The ground around our house is stony and filled with roots. It is an effort just to plant a bulb, the tip of the trowel immediately hitting a dense network of fibers. A box with a cat would be impossible. You would have to dig a deep hole, because of the wildlife, and you might make a good start and hit a rock and have to start all over again. It would take all weekend and be grotesque, like a scene from a National Lampoon movie.

We chose the group cremation and scattering of ashes in the woods or farm of a man who was in the vet’s office that day, who we glimpsed through the door, who wore a fawn colored corduroy coat.

I will not bore you with the charming details of his life, his fear of a certain 70s pop song or his love of chèvre, his last meal, and asparagus; the way he liked to lie on my chest; how kind he was to the second cat or the time he got his head stuck in a can and I thought we were being burgled. It was good of you to read this far, even if you were only skipping ahead to the punch line, the realization that animals are brave because they have no choice.

Something black and rubber with a good fit

I have a nail in one of my tires. I call Costco because you will not be taken advantage of there. At Costco, you are all tools together, with your big fruit platters and your this and that. There, you are duped into buying many things of relatively good quality at a fair price. It’s nothing personal.

“What size tire?” the guy in the tire department asks.

“You know, car-sized. For my car.” Well I don’t actually say that, but I’m thinking, there are different sizes?? I have fallen at the first hurdle. He tells me to look at the sticker inside the door and call back.

Spring clothing ordered online has arrived. The younger daughter is opening boxes and examining merchandise. She’s not sure about the fit of her sandals. “Can I put an extra hole in the strap?” she asks.

No, I shake my head at her. At what age do they comprehend the whole on the phone/can’t talk to you right now thing?

They don’t have my car-sized tires in stock and it will be 3-5 days before they would get them so clearly I will have to make calls. This, I think haughtily, is no way to treat a Member.

I call a tire place near our house and when the guy asks me what size, I’m like, I know that one. He can get it by tomorrow morning and it costs the same as Costco. Result.

My husband enters and I tell him about my tire problem and how I have sorted it all by myself. “What kind of tire is it?” he asks.

“What kind of tire is it?” I ask him. “It’s one that will fit my car.”

He confronts my ignorance with an analogy he knows I will grasp: shoes.

“You wouldn’t walk into a shoe store and just buy any pair of shoes because they were in your size.”

“No, but that describes how you buy shoes,” I point out. Buy them and get out. And get out fast.

Black, rubber tires, I am thinking. Yuck. Boring. Hassle. Actually, I’m not even thinking about the tire as a thing in its own right, but as the solution to a problem. All of those ads for tires where they show children snuggled up in the backseat in their pajamas have not served their purpose for me as a consumer because I remember the ad, but without brand affinity, and the message to me is Don’t have car trouble because it’s scary.

I call the tire place back and ask what kind of tires they are while he chortles. The brand is something neither of us have heard of. “But they are the same price as the ones at Costco.”

“Why do you think Consumer Reports rates tires?” he asks.

“Because there are people who like to read about that kind of thing?”

I want the problem to go away as fast as possible and for my children to be safe in the backseat. My husband is furiously typing away at the keyboard and calling around.

The younger daughter has the audacity at this point to mock the name of the tire I was about to buy. “Who’s ever heard of that?”

I wheel on her. “You are in no position to say anything. You are know even less about this than I do. Name three tire brands.”

She names the brand I was offered at Costco, the brand she mocked and then she’s stumped. “Oh, oh,” she cries, “the marshmallow man.”

“Michelin,” I say, “well done, but no more out of you.”

“No,” my husband says on the phone, “I don’t want to buy the cheapest tire you have.”

In less than 10 minutes he has located a name brand tire that I can have fitted the next morning.

The younger daughter’s spring sandals that we ordered online have arrived. She is not sure about the fit. “What is your gut feeling?” I ask her.

“That they’re cute,” she says.

I’m on my own with this one. The husband’s work is done.