Excerpt from 'Face, A Memoir,' Part Three

This is Part three from Face, A Memoir, which I am serializing in posts on my blog. Here are Parts One and Two. The memoir is about my struggle to come to terms with a childhood trauma that haunted me well into middle life. It has taken me many years to write this, and I am revising it as I post pieces of it online. I welcome your thoughts and feedback.

Part Three

July 6, 1961 - Surgeon’s notes: Patient—a five-year-old girl—presented in the emergency room on June 17 with severe lacerations and subdermal abrasions on the left side of the face and upper chest. Primary concern was stanching blood loss and saving the left eye. Emergency closure of facial wound required pulling together tissue from both sides of the cheek. Pressure bandages applied. Loss of upper left eyelid and portion of lower left lid required fashioning of tarsorrhaphy to protect the eye.

I wake and I can’t see. My face itches. My ears itch. I am desperate to scratch my ears. I can’t move my arms! Why can’t I move my arms?

My mom’s voice comes to me. Soothingly, I hear her say: “It’s okay, Marcia. It’s for your own good.”

Every day for five weeks she came to the hospital and sat by my bedside, waiting for me to wake, enduring my fearful tears when I did, watching the nurses give me shots and adjust my bandages, listening to my screams when the doctors changed the dressings. Did she retreat? Crawl into a cavernous place of grief – perhaps denial – to deal with the shock, the pain?

Mrs. Medema and several neighborhood girls took turns babysitting the other kids while she was at the hospital. At the end of the day, she’d go home to her three other children. I know friends and family members helped out. But what was it like for her to watch me cry, seeing me bloodied and bandaged, knowing I was terrified, knowing I suffered, knowing there was nothing she could do but try to soothe me? Then going home to three young children who also needed her attention. She was overwhelmed, emotionally and physically. And still she came and sat. Sat with her knitting, absently crossing needle over needle, moving the yarn from left to right, right to left. I see her deft hands, her pointer fingers crisscrossing each other with each stitch, her mouth a set line, her brow furrowed. The ball of yarn unfurling.

Over time, she shut down. Sat and patted my hand as they pulled stitches from my face, or placed another needle into my arm, or held me down for another change of dressings. Emotionally, she left. Pushed her feelings to a deep place so she could manage daily life. How could she not? But it didn’t start with me.

His name was Patrick, Ricky for short, their second-born. Cherie was two and Ricky eight months when my parents were invited to go away with another couple for a weekend of sailing. Their friends Barb and Harvey Nedeau offered to take care of the kids. When they dropped them off, my mom was fretting. She wanted Barb to make sure Cherie had her blankie at night, that Ricky got his bottle at five and again just before bed.

Barb reassured her.

That night, Barb set up a vaporizer near Ricky’s crib so he could breathe easier. Sometime in the middle of the night, he pulled the cord and the vaporizer over into the bed, scalding his body with boiling water. The Nedeaus raced Ricky to the hospital. My parents rushed home. Ricky died two days later.

 A year and a half later, my mom was expecting. It was winter and the streets were icy. My grandmother was driving with my mom and Cherie, heading downtown to shop. As she negotiated the slippery streets, my grandma noticed a large spider above her head on the visor. As she watched, it dropped down near her face. She swatted at it, and as she did the wheel turned to the right and the car left the road. As Cherie bounced in the back seat, the car ran up the guy wire of a telephone pole and overturned. Mom was thrown out of the car. Cherie and my grandma were unhurt, but Mom suffered skull fractures and ended up in the hospital for several weeks. The baby, Robert, was born several months later, but died within hours. Mom knew she would lose him, because she hemorrhaged through the rest of the pregnancy.

The boys are buried together in the Muskegon Catholic Cemetery.

Before I was released from the hospital on July 23, my mom and dad gathered Cherie and Chuck in the living room.

“Marcia is coming home this afternoon, and she looks different than she did,” my mom explained. “You shouldn’t be afraid when you see her. She’s still your sister. She’s still the same Marcia.”

But I wasn’t.

(Part Four)

An Excerpt from 'Face, A Memoir,' Part One

“I know well what I am fleeing from but not what I am in search of.” ~ Michel de Montaigne

As some of you know, I was severely injured as a young child and ended up having to endure twenty surgeries from the time I was five until I went off to college. I wrote a memoir about that experience—Face—and finished it three years ago while doing my MFA at Antioch University LA. I am in the process of revising it, but want to share it with you as I do. So, today’s post is the first part of Chapter One. I will be posting pieces from the book in serial fashion throughout the next few months. I welcome your feedback and thoughts.

Face, A Memoir

CHAPTER ONE

June 17, 1961

I had a brand-new bike, cherry red with chrome fenders: my first two-wheeler. Did my dad teach me to ride it? Did he run along beside me as I pedaled, holding the back of the seat until I found my balance, tipping from one side to the other, then finally discovering that middle place where you know you’ll never fear tipping again? I don’t remember. But I know it was a Saturday, the first day of summer vacation, because after breakfast my older sister went around the corner to her friend’s house instead of to school.

The heat and humidity of a Michigan summer already gripped the day. As I went out to the garage to get my bike, I could feel my blue t-shirt grow damp and cling to my back and stomach. When summer takes hold in Michigan, moisture settles near the ground, sucking everything down with it. By late afternoon, people would be sitting immobile behind screened porches, praying for the whisper of a breeze.

Mom had shooed my brother and older sister and me out after breakfast. We lived in downtown Muskegon, where neighborhoods were arranged in blocks of small clapboard or brick-faced houses, with alleys that bisected each block. The narrow streets were lined with tall maples and oaks, which scattered acorns and, when the temperatures dipped, dropped leaves like graceful magenta and citrine flags signaling the coming winter.

Our neighborhood was filled with kids, and it was never long before a dozen or more would gather. Soon there’d be a game – Hide and Seek, Hop Scotch, Tag – it didn’t matter. We’d play for hours, coming home only for meals. Adults didn’t worry.   

My new bike had a white basket on the front handlebars and red streamers that fell from the hand grips. I had finally mastered riding on my own and was anxious to show off for my friend, Annie, who lived across the street. But on the way, I ran into our neighbor, Mrs. Medema, who was sweeping the sidewalk in front of the apartment building next door.

“What a beautiful bike, Marcia,” she said. “And a two-wheeler! Wow. I noticed your dad was helping you balance on it. When did you take off the training wheels?”

“Yesterday!” I said, and smiled proudly. “I can ride all by myself now.”

“Well, that calls for a celebration. Want to come up for some cookies and tea?”

I liked Mrs. Medema. A widow, she lived next door and often babysat for us. She always wore a dress under an apron, stockings and thick black shoes. Her gray hair was cut short and curled. Three other widows lived in the brick building, but only Mrs. Medema paid any mind to us kids. She lived on the second floor, and her apartment was cozy and bright with sunshine. I parked my bike on the sidewalk in front of her steps and carefully set the kickstand. Then I walked up the narrow stairs with her, holding her hand.

The smell of freshly baked peanut butter cookies filled the apartment. My mouth watered as she took a blue-and-white ceramic plate from the cupboard and put four warm cookies on it – two for me and two for her. She reached for her blue bone china teapot above the stove, poured hot water from the kettle into it and filled a silver tea cylinder with loose Earl Grey leaves. “We’ll let it steep for just a minute,” she said. “Let’s go sit at the table.”

She carried the teapot and the plate of cookies over to a small table near the window, then turned back to get two tea cups and saucers that matched the cookie plate. She placed one cloth napkin beside each cup, and poured the tea.

“Is your mom busy this morning?” she asked.

“I think so,” I said, lisping. I had lost my two front teeth just a few weeks earlier. “Molly is crawling all over the place. And Chuckie keeps trying to break my toys.”

She laughed.

“Your dad at work?”

I nodded and bit into one of the cookies. My dad, my grandfather and two of my uncles owned Meier Cleaners. Dad worked every day but Sunday, when we walked four blocks to St. Joseph’s for Mass and saw my grandparents and most of my aunts and uncles and cousins. After Mass the families would linger in front of the stone-faced church, catching up on the week and exchanging the latest gossip. The monsignor, Father Stratz, would wander through the crowd in his colorful vestments, nodding and smiling at the adults. I didn’t like Father Stratz. Short and squat, he had a full head of gray hair, a thick German accent, and he scowled at the kids who ran between the adults.

A slight breeze came through Mrs. Medema’s screen as I bit into a cookie. I could see my friend’s house across the street, and then I saw her in the front yard.

I took a sip of the tea and ate the second cookie quickly.

“Thanks, Mrs. Medema,” I said through the gap in my teeth. “I have to go now.”

I ran down the stairs, grabbed the handlebars of my bike and pushed up the kickstand with my toe.

At the corner, I carefully looked for cars before crossing. I started into the intersection, where there was a four-way stop. A man and woman in a tan sedan had stopped at the corner. I was halfway across the street when he began to drive forward. I was so startled I stopped and watched. I didn’t understand why he didn’t stop. I shrugged up my shoulders and turned my body as if to fend off the blow.

Roscoe and Muriel Benn were driving home from the market. I imagine they were in a rush: Their children and grandchildren were coming that evening to celebrate their grandson’s fourth birthday, and Muriel was anxious to get home to clean and prepare.

They drove down Fourth Street to the stop sign at the corner of Fourth and Mason. As they approached the stop sign, Muriel was fussing.

“Can you go a little faster, Roscoe? I still have to make the cake and get the roast ready to go into the oven. You’ll have to help with the potatoes. This darn arthritis. I can’t work the peeler anymore.”

Roscoe pulled to a halt at the stop sign, paused, then drove forward through the intersection. Muriel heard a strange scraping sound. Then she noticed people on the sidewalk yelling at them. What were they saying? She rolled down the window. “Stop,” they were screaming. “Stop!”

Roscoe braked and the car came to a halt about halfway down the block. People were running toward them, surrounding the car. Muriel didn’t understand what had happened. 

“You’ve hit a child!” they yelled.

Muriel looked at her husband of forty years. His face was the color of fresh Michigan snow.

(Part Two)

Solstice—Dark Unto Light

Solstice—Dark Unto Light

As we move toward the darkest day of the year—the Winter Solstice—I’m mindful of the light to follow. I think that might be the theme of my life, at least over the past few years.

It’s been almost seven years since my life fell apart—lost my mother, my marriage, our house, the writers conference. It seems a millennium ago. And yet, the lessons are so present with me today. That loss and grief give way, eventually, to light and hope. That trusting in yourself and the goodness of others will always turn out right in the end. That friends and family are treasures beyond reckoning. I am surrounded by light and love.

The last time I wrote on this blog was almost a year and a half ago. So much has happened since.

As some of you know, I decided in June 2014 to move to Santa Fe. After almost 30 years in Santa Barbara, I sought a new life in a new place that called to me. I love Santa Fe. Love the warmth of the people, the arts community, the architecture, the mountains, the snow, the extraordinary light. So I started to make plans and to pack, with a target date for moving of mid-September.

I found an adorable short-term rental with a woman artist named Bonnie Coe and made arrangements to stay through November, just to make sure I wanted to put down roots there. I planned to put everything I owned into a storage container and pack my belongings and Chevella, my dog, into the car for the trip across the country. Then….

In late July, I went to a benefit concert for Youth Interactive featuring Michael McDonald (LOVE the Doobie Brothers), and there, at the end of the concert, I met a man. He invited me to dinner that night, at the Lark around the corner. We had a lovely time, and, of course, I mentioned I was moving to Santa Fe in a month or so. He gave me his business card, and I sent him a nice thank-you email that night. I didn’t hear from him. Odd, I thought. So I texted him several days later just to make sure he’d received my thank you. He called that night and we talked for twenty minutes or so, and then hung up. And I didn’t hear from him again. My sister said, “Well, of course not; you told him you’re moving to Santa Fe.”

One evening a couple of weeks later I had a couple of glasses of wine and decided to text him (this is not advised, by the way). I wrote: “Hey, I haven’t heard from you, and I’m guessing it’s because I told you I was moving. That’s okay if it is; just tell me.” And when I didn’t hear back that night, I tore his business card into six pieces and threw it away.

The next morning he texted me and said, No, it wasn’t that. He’d just been really, really busy (his office was in Pasadena) and he hadn’t had a moment to call. Could he call the next afternoon? And what time?

I texted him back and said, yes, after 2 the next day. I fished his business card pieces out of the trash and taped them back together.

And then…he didn’t call.

I decided that was that. Went on with my life, packing, planning the move, saying goodbye to friends.

On Labor Day, he emailed. Some lame excuse about dropping his phone in the ocean and losing his contacts and he’d finally found my first email and if I was still even willing to talk with him could he call me?

Honestly, I had to think about it. He’d already failed on two occasions. Yet…something made me say yes.

He did, and we went out that night and talked in a sweet little restaurant for five hours. A week later he brought me roses and took me to the El Encanto for dinner, and we walked on the beach.

I left for Santa Fe six days later.

But, you know what? He came to visit me two weeks later. Then I visited him in California three weeks after that, and we went back and forth two more times before he asked me to come home for Christmas. And why didn’t I plan to spend a couple of weeks here?

I did, and we’ve been together ever since.

We’ve gone back to Santa Fe to visit, and in September and October we went to London and Ireland for three weeks. My life is gloriously wild and madly uproarious. Back and forth between Pasadena and Santa Barbara for almost a year, he’s finally moving up here full time in January. He makes me laugh every day, and it feels like we’ve just met yet been together forever.

So much change, so much transition, so much newness and joy. I think back on past years and all the heartache, and I am thankful for all of it, and for all the light that has come to be. This new life, this wonderful man, this exhilarating love. His name is Rob.

May this season of hope and new light bring you peace and joy. And may gratitude be the guiding force in your heart and life, as it is in mine.

Review - Thrive, by Arianna Huffington

Arianna Huffington’s latest book, Thrive, the Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-being, Wisdom and Wonder, is the Huffington Post founder’s effort to get us all to stop and smell the roses.

Huffington decided to write this book after she collapsed from exhaustion in 2007, two years after founding the Huffington Post. She realized, she writes, “my life was out of control. In terms of traditional measures of success, which focus on money and power, I was very successful. But I was not living a successful life by any sane definition of success. I knew something had to radically change.”

Thrive offers Huffington’s advice on how to do just that, working through what she calls the three metrics of Well-being, Wisdom and Wonder. In the section on Well-being, she recounts copious research reminding us to get plenty of sleep, eat well, and slow down. Our succeed-at-any-and-all-costs culture is killing us, she says, and burnout, stress and depression have become worldwide epidemics. She recommends daily meditation, walking or some kind of daily exercise, and getting a full night’s sleep as first steps toward countering burnout.

Her sections on Wisdom and Wonder offered deeper insights into living a full and balanced life, exploring spirituality and faith, death, and the development of an inner life that allows one to really thrive. Ultimately, she reminds us that giving to others is the way to give to yourself.

Anyone who struggles with today’s constant barrage of doing more and consuming more would benefit from reading Huffington’s story of how she was forced to put down her smartphone and pay attention to her inner world instead.

(Disclosures: I have known Arianna Huffington for many years as a friend and colleague. I received this book from Blogging for Books for this review.)

Review - Anne Lamott's Help Thanks Wow

My God box

Anne Lamott’s new book, Help Thanks Wow, The Three Essential Prayers, is a sweet, moving guidebook to what Lamott considers the three most important prayers one can utter. I love Anne’s books. Her Bird by Bird has been on my bookshelves for many years, and I especially enjoyed Traveling Mercies. One doesn’t have to be religious, or even particularly spiritual, to appreciate Help Thanks Wow, as Anne mentions in the introduction. You only have to believe that something is bigger than you, and that if you ask for help and express gratitude, things will happen in your life that will make you say “wow.”

What I love about Lamott is even though she is a firm believer in Jesus, she also knows that neither she nor Christianity (or any other organized religion) has the answers. In fact, she says, no one does, and if they try to tell you they do, they’re delusional.

Anne Lamott's Help Thanks Wow

She had me close to tears with the first section on “Help,” because what she describes is so perfectly the human condition. We all go through difficulties, and most of us will not be spared life’s harshest experiences. But, she says, just uttering the simple entreaty, “help,” can shift things within us, can allow us to give over the suffering to something bigger than we are, and that can make all the difference in our ability to handle whatever we face.

“Most good, honest prayers remind me that I am not in charge,” she writes, “that I cannot fix anything, and that I open myself to being helped by something, some force, some friends, some something. These prayers say, ‘Dear Some Something, I don’t know what I’m doing. I can’t see where I’m going, I’m getting more lost, more afraid, more clenched. Help.’”

And then, she says, let it go.

Lamott says she has a “God box” that she puts her prayers into, then closes the lid and lets whatever universal power is out there take care of it. It could be anything, a glove box, a crayon box. I like this idea.

For my birthday last week, a dear friend gave me a lovely wooden box with the tree of life and birds carved into the top. I have made this my God box (I just mistyped God as Dog – that works, too).

I also especially believe in the second prayer, “Thanks.” Gratitude is a powerful emotion, and I can attest to its ability to shift perspective. Every day I mindfully say thanks, for everything, and more often than not something even more serendipitous or fortuitous comes into my life. 

The final prayer, “Wow,” is a wonderful expression and acknowledgement of how wondrous life is.  Look around. You will always find something, even if it’s just a tiny hummingbird flitting around a bottlebrush tree – to be amazed about. Wow.

Help Thanks Wow is a slim volume – I read it in about an hour or so – but it packs a powerful message. And with the world we have today, it’s a message many of us need to hear.

A Wedding Wish

A little over a week ago, the daughter of my dear friends Tom and Joan Bolton was married, and they asked me to speak at the wedding. I thought I'd share with you what I said.

I was so honored and delighted to be asked to speak today. Watching Laura, in fact all of our kids, grow up has been a richly satisfying experience, even through the inevitable ups and downs of adolescence. Our families spent a lot of time together when the kids were younger, and for many years did a family camping trip to Fiqueroa Mountain every spring. I have an especially fond and vivid memory of all three – Laura, Tim, and my daughter, Kendall, who is a year younger than Tim – splashing through a nearby creek, hunting for pollywogs.

As parents, we have so many hopes for our children. That they will grow up happy and whole, that they will find meaning in their lives and have opportunities to learn and express their creativity, that they will find love. I am so happy that Laura has done all of these things.

As I was thinking about what I wanted to say today, I remembered a William Butler Yeats’ poem, called “Prayer for My Daughter.” I won’t recite the whole thing, because it is long, but I want to share a few stanzas that I thought were particularly apropos to the occasion today.

In the poem, there is a raging storm outside, and Yeats is in his infant daughter’s room, gazing at her in her crib, and listening to the rain beating against the windows. In the poem he mentions a linnet, which is a small bird in the finch family. He writes:

May she be granted beauty and yet not

Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,

Or hers before a looking glass, for such,

Being made beautiful overmuch,

Consider beauty a sufficient end,

Lose natural kindness and maybe

The heart-revealing intimacy

That chooses right, and never find a friend.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree

That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,

And have no business but dispensing round

Their magnanimities of sound,

Nor but in merriment begin a chase,

Nor but in merriment a quarrel.

O, may she live like some green laurel

Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,

The sort of beauty that I have approved,

Prosper but little, has dried up of late,

Yet knows that to be choked with hate

May well be of all evil chances chief.

If there’s no hatred in a mind

Assault and battery of the wind

Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

We all hope our children will never be torn from the foundations we build for them, and here I will betray my own feminist leanings and say, yes, we especially want to protect our daughters from the world and its vagaries. We ardently hope they will find someone to love who cherishes them beyond their own selves, and who will be partners who allow our daughters to continue to grow and create and become the women they are meant to be. I believe Laura has found that person in Rick, and I am so happy for both of them.         

Congratulations,  and may you enjoy many wonderful years together.