Speaking of me....

I decided the other night that I wanted to write something meaningful. Meaningful to me anyhow. When I was a teenager I wrote with such urgency. Teenage angst can be useful in this way….I used to scribble for hours. Nothing terribly interesting, though. It has been years since I perused over those beat up, sometimes duct taped spiral notebooks. In a way, I am kind of ashamed of them. There is nothing out of the ordinary or overly disturbing, I’m sure. I’ve never really gotten a second opinion. Don’t really want one. No, nothing to worry about. But I do know that I have a big, hot ball of shame that is associated with those books, and the idea that someone may read them makes me want to crawl under a rock. I’m not sure why. I must keep them, however. To throw them away would be a crime against myself. Maybe when my own daughter joins the ranks of the angry, desperate, dangerously anxious teenagers I can show her my notebooks and she will believe I was a real person one time, long, long ago. Or not. When I was a teenager, words poured out of me. I feel like I had far more to write about. I wanted to identify with someone so badly, I often wrote to a nameless, faceless, sexless person in my mind. After all, someone had to read it. The shame came from my phantom reader, who without a word was constantly critical. Which makes sense when I remind me that I am the phantom reader. So the notebooks sit as a reminder of the time when I felt so alive that I could create. Is mental anguish the only fuel that will feed my fire? I think that it may be so.
I was born in Phoenix, Arizona, in the spring. My mother met my father in Billings, Montana three years before that. She had run away from my grandfather and his abusive wife when she was eleven. My grandmother worked three jobs and just couldn’t be there enough. My grandma is by far the most positive person I have had in my life. Like my mother, I was a fiercely independent child, and my grandma never turned her back on me….but I’m getting ahead of myself. My mother had hitchhiked to Montana with a friend from the job corps, and met my biker gang papa at a kegger. How cliché. She was 16 and he was 23. She needed someone older and wiser to make her feel like she could stop running, I guess. My dad taught my mom how to add, subtract and multiply. She is a very intelligent woman, but had never gone to school. Their relationship is a mystery to me in a lot of ways. I don’t remember ever seeing my parents sit on the couch and cuddle or kiss each other hello and goodbye. ( A couple months later I tell my dad this and after a thoughtful moment he confirms it. He looks kind of sad. It makes me sad. I kind of hoped that maybe I just didn‘t remember). My dad was born in South Dakota and raised in Billings his whole life. He was the third oldest in a family of seven kids. They lived up in the hills of Billings back in the Fifties. They didn’t have running water and had to have a weekly bath night just like Little House on the Prairie. Fun, huh? My dad’s parents are still together, and living in Montana. I’ve only been to see them twice. Once when I was nine and again at thirteen. I have guilt associated with that now. They are getting older and I feel I have a responsibility to present them their great-granddaughter. It is always lack of funds, every year, that keeps us from going. And doesn’t that just sound pathetic? My dad is a no bullshit, sometimes painfully frank kind of guy. He does not believe in banks or doctors. He is a very talented welder, well known in his field. He makes shitloads of money but drives a couple old beaters and buys poor people food like ham hocks for dinner. Now being a poor person myself I would like to say that ham hocks and beans are very good, I eat them all the time, and I certainly have not forgotten where I come from, but I only think that after all his years of back breaking, blistering work he would renounce ham hocks all together and eat the more expensive cuts of meat. But there’s my mentality on money for you.