Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

mom

Ikea & e-tailing, the twin inflators of my revolving debt

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Inexplicably, we now seem to be in possession of lawn furniture for our concrete back yard. This is possibly linked to our cultivating what has now become a mid-sized container garden. (I found out that it’s just not chic to call it a pot garden. go figure.)

Being the son of “Elaine of the Black Thumb,” my experiences with gardening are limited to vicarious horticultural exploits with my father and grandmother. My father and I have the same way of needing to know everything about specialized or slightly obscure topics, and one of his major topics is growing tomatoes and peppers. At some previous point I seem to recall him having a pot garden in his basement, but I was always assured it was specifically for making superior quality rope.

In any event, i’ve managed to decimate a trio of strawberries, grow a tray of marigolds and eggplants from seeds, and keep alive a cheerily expanding blackberry bush that’s so cute that i might buy another.

Equally as inexplicable as my participation in the greenery, i am days away from being the owner of a brand new acoustic/electric guitar. I’m still not really sure how it happened. Something about having a day off of work, homemade cocktails, and eBay. I’ll report later this week on the results.

Ivory Towering

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At some point in an early childhood filled with US history flashcards and learning math from Monopoly my mother realized that i was just as precociously intelligent as she had hoped i would be when she started those Better Baby Institute classes as a pregnant woman just barely having her quarter life crisis.

As much as this development affirmed her tireless educational exercises (starting with painting my room with the B.B.I.’s specified shapes and colors), it also meant she would have to redouble her efforts for the future in making sure she kept me on a strict schedule of constant didacticism. Her two-pronged assault on my four-year old world was a holistic one. By day i was enrolled in a Montessori school, and by night i was intended to begin my instruction on the violin.

This latter initiative turned out to be a spectacular failure. My mother, lacking in any prior musical experience in her entire extended family, just couldn’t grasp what was wrong. She brought me to the lessons in some nice woman’s comfortable living room. She made the violin available to me at the prescribed rehearsal times.

What she could not comprehend is that i had no relationship with this instrument i was supposed to be growing to love. Why a stringed instrument rather than a wind, or why not enroll me in a boy’s choir since i was hopelessly enamored with singing along to Jem tapes in the back seat on long car rides? I didn’t understand why this awful wooden box full of shrillness had been imposed upon me then, and i still don’t. I viewed my lessons as thinly veiled torture for some unknown crime, and at home i would scowl at the instrument tucked away in its case above the china closet.

(Why was it above the china closet? What harm could have come in letting me play around with it (as, i believe, is suggested by current pedagogical theory)? Maybe i might have liked it.)

I remember the whole violin experience as snapshots right up through my last lesson, which i remember in silent 8mm verité. We arrived in the instructor’s homey living room, and my mother informed the woman that i would no longer be studying violin, and she clucked in disappointment. What to do, then, with this last lesson? She was clucking, but i already knew the answer.

Her piano, upright, against the wall just through the arch into the next room. At every lesson i would stare over the see-sawing of my bow as it squeaked out nursery rhymes at the stately wooden bench and covered keys. On this occasion the keys were uncovered (from a prior lesson?), and as she spoke with my mother i wandered over to the piano. So, my last violin lesson was my first and only piano lesson. As the frames of the memory flicker and fade i can almost hear her words, “and this one is called ‘middle C’. Go on, you can play it.”

The piano subject was oft-pursued with my mother from that day forward, but she always held the party line that it was too expensive a thing to accomodate given the chance that i might just carelessly give up on it, the way i did the violin.

I could be imagining it, but i recall a sort of cruelness beneath this reasoning – as if she was upset at her first failure in the path to rendering me a perfectly rounded child and refused to accept that i had some alternate plan for myself.

(The first in a long line of our stubborn standoffs, which are best exemplified by the time in ninth grade when i locked myself in our car so i couldn’t be taken to get a haircut, as i wanted mine to grow long.)

Playing our new digital piano all day today produced a bittersweet satisfaction. Here, two decades later, and i finally have a full-sized keyboard in my own home. Aged twenty-four and i am playing the same “Mary Had a Little Lamb” exercises i once bowed on my lap on that violin, but finally on the instrument i’ve always coveted and prefered.

Sometimes i wonder: what if somehow my mother conjured up a piano for me to play when i was four years old? Would i have begun lessons and quickly given them up as being too tedious, just as i did for the violin (and, eventually, guitar)? Or, would i have been completey entranced by the instrument, as i was today? Would i have kept at it? Did i have some natural, predisposed love and talent for music that would have ben unlocked then, rather than in some diminished form a decade later when i received my first guitar? Could i have perhaps eventually becoming my own Rufus Wainwright or Tori Amos, effortlessly mingling classical conventions with catchy melodies?

I am upset about that possible lost potential, but that alternate reality is one of my many schrodinger’s cat pasts, equally full of a virtuosic me and one whose skills are simply dead in the box.

As much as i like to think the best of myself, maybe it’s better not to glimpse into that world. Better to just believe in what i want to do, and to learn it the best that i can.

CarSeat Flashback

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When I was two and a half I learned that you only get credit for something you have the courage to do.

My mother contests my memory of this event.

I remember single frames of it almost more clearly than any other memory I’ve ever had. It was summer, and I was in the back seat, on the left hand side, in my car seat. The car was the Golden Nova, a two-door nugget of vinyl-seated glory from the mid-late seventies. We were at a gas station, but it wasn’t the Gulf station we always went to. We may have been in New Jersey.

It was hot. We may have been returning from a lake or pool. My mother, who does not like to pump her own gas (maybe because of this story), got out of the car to pump gas.

My mother, lest we forget, was only about two and a half years older than the mean age of my four favorite drinking buddies (i.e. she was pregnant at the age of my four favorite drinking buddies). What any of the four of them would do if they locked their two-year-old in the Golden Nova on one of the hottest days of the year I can’t say.

(That’s a lie. Two of them would McGuyver it open, one of them would have a panic attack and then do something highly logical, and the other one would helplessly flirt with someone who she suspected could open it for her.)

(I’ll leave the four of you to figure out who you are and which thing I think you would do.)

In any case, when mom got out of the car to pump gas she pressed down the lock on her car door before slamming it shut. Was it a reflex? Had she forgotten that tiny Peter was in the back, strapped securely into his car-seat, already beginning to die a slow death of asphyxiation?

It didn’t take her very long to realize our predicament. What had she done? I am missing the still memory picture to go with this part of the story, so have to extrapolate from the bits on either side. After yanking the door handle to no avail did she cup her hands to the glass, peering in and tapping frantically as if bothering an animal at the zoo?

I may have waved back at her as she peered into my vehicular cage. The whole situation was amusing to me – my mother now frantically seeking out a station attendant. Didn’t she know I could unbuckle own car seat and unlock the car door? Surely I had unbuckled my carseat in front of her before?

No, no, she didn’t know, because now she was back with a man who was wielding a curiously bent coat hanger. What was he doing with the coat hanger?

Never mind the coat hanger, mom. I tried to signal to her as she stood behind the attendant. Look at me! I was about to perform my toddler houdini routine, unbuckling the car seat strap and crawling up to the front seat to pull up the lock. How amazing a feat! Oh, the congratulations I would reap! She just had to watch… Watch, mom, watch.

I got her attention, I think, and I made a big show of reaching out to the lock, as if I was just working out in my toddler head that *I* could open the door for her. Yes, let her see the baby head wheels turning. Such a smart toddler. I would just have to… *gasp* unbuckle the car seat on my own! Could I? Dare I?

My chubby little fingers crept to the red release button on the car seat buckle, brow knitted in concentration. Would I be able to figure it out? Through the window my mother frantically motioned that I should release the buckle, though I studiously ignored her.

Then, there was a pop. The man’s wire hanger triggered the lock on the door, and the chipped metal knob had popped up into the unlocked position. Open went the door, the sticky outside air hardly a relief from the sticky inside air. My in-progress escape act quickly forgotten, my mother was all coo and apology for leaving me to suffocate alone in the Golden Nova on such a hot day.

To this day she insists I was too young to remember the story. I’m sure I’m making some of it up, though she confirms that it occurred. What I know to be true is that I *knew* I could unbuckle the car-seat and unlock the door, *knew* I could easily solve the problem myself.

But, I didn’t. I was too interested in making sure someone was looking on, as if only that affirmation would enable me to do anything. Having someone watch the process, though, wasn’t as important as achieving the result.

You have to be brave enough to try whether or not anyone will see you fail, because they will surely notice if you succeed.

Bless Me

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As i sneezed my eleventh consecutive sneeze on the 57 bus this morning, i wondered why i am so intent on suffering this allergic martyrdom.

Yes, there are a scant nine pills left in the same little orange bottle i’ve been refilling with allergy medication since 2000. One is a renegade percocet still in hiding after my tonsillectomy, so in actuality there are only four days of relief to be found beneath the cap, inscribed “push down and turn.”

Why there are only eight pills is the question. I have medical insurance, as i work for a company which excels at selling medical insurance. I have a long, well-documented history at sneezing at just about anything than can be found in the outside world. So, why no refill this year?

No refill because i haven’t actually used the medical insurance, which is costing me plenty per year to have its plastic calling card simply fill space in my wallet. I brought myself to go to the dentist, but the doctor… something just doesn’t sit right about it. Nothing’s wrong with me, other than the sneezing. But every attempted appointment, whether canceled by me or the mysterious “them” of every general practice i’ve tried calling, always has my the specter of my mother’s control looming over it – how she would have me go to a doctor only after she had seen him for something herself, and how she would come right into the room with me – right into the damn paper-gown room, because she was a nurse and it was all clinical and she needed to know what was going on.

Well, in my intense desire to not let her know what’s going on i have developed an altogether aversion to the doctors, any doctors, even doctors she has never met. And so in my futile quarter-life attempt to take back the meager amount of privacy and control i’ve never had until now, i’ve just doomed myself to sneezy commutes and snuffly workgroup meetings.

Ah, the price of independence, perceived and actual.

Mom would never let me go a day without allergy medication.

This Message Will Self Destruct…

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For a few years of my life I despised the phone, somehow convinced that picking it up could only result in unfortunate news (or telemarketing). I’m not so afraid of it now, but for a few minutes this morning I felt as though I was right back in that place.

The feeling owed to an emotionally draining weekend, and from this side of Sunday it seemed to me as if every phone message was a loaded gun waiting to fire a little bit of conflict or a touch of bad tidings – waiting to sidetrack me with more bad news or bad karma.

As a result, when my mother left me a message on both my cell and desk phones with terse instructions to page her without delay I was concerned. Not only was the lack of verbosity completely unbecoming of her, there were children screaming in the background all the while.

Where had she found screaming children, and what was I supposed to do about it? Naturally I imagined the worst. She had found a baby abandoned in a dumpster, and needed me to alert the media while she whisked it to CHOP to have it nursed back to health. She was trapped at gunpoint in a daycare center, unable to stay on the line for long. A school bus had overturned on the 95 South, and she was triaging the children until the paramedics arrived. She had to avert a national nuclear disaster in less than 24 hours of consecutive screen time, less commercial breaks.

I soon learned that, in reality, she was in Sears portrait studio, arguing with the receptionist because the software on their picture discs isn’t compatible with Windows XP (presumably holding up a line of screaming children all the while), and she called me to consult. As the anxious knot in my stomach quietly dissolved into an afternoon case of agita (odgida), I calmly explained that though the hopelessly proprietary software might not work on her computer, the pictures would probably be BMPs or JPGs scanned directly from the negatives, and that she would definitely be able to open those

I wonder if working in the hospital for so long has rendered her immune to the dramatic connotations of such terse messages. Is her day so typically filled with a string of human tragedy that she has lost the ability to discern the difference? Does she find everything to be tragedic? Or, worse still, is everything so commonplace that her emergent response is a tacit reaction?

I refuse to react to all things as catastrophic, or to live in the specter of fear – fear of the phone, or of anything else. I refuse to, unless that same fear can illustrate to me what it is I love so much about the moments after and before it. I am in love with walking, and with singing, and with loving, and with you, and I would not have it any other way.

So, call me.