Tag Archives: fear

Tough Love

1 Sep Highway Promises

When I was a little girl, my dad said wacky things to me like “Yeah I’ll take you to the waterfall and then I’ll push you over the edge.” I could hear him, but I didn’t know what he was saying in his hard-knocks brand of knowledge-through-metaphor.

What did he mean? I’d lay in bed staring at the ceiling, adding his mysterious quote to the many mysteries I turned over and over in my mind like acorns and pyramids, before my eyes finally closed for the day. After a while I thought maybe he was warning me not to trust him or anybody else. Maybe that was it.

Maybe he wanted to toughen me up so it wouldn’t hurt so bad if I ever found myself slipping off a cliff. I’d be prepared if the person who had stood there with me, side-by-side only moments before, talked themselves into turning around and silently walking the other away.

Maybe the waterfall was love?

This tough love training by way of metaphor certainly made me rebellious enough. I dismissed the fear or warning. I wasn’t looking to be saved anyway. It laid a foundation for me to look for and believe in love. Like an alchemist of ancient days, I’d use my instinct and fine-tuned senses, all six of them, to hunt down just the slightest whiff of it – of love, of real sincerity – and turn it into something precious. Even from him.

His tough-guy lessons taught me that love wasn’t always pretty, it wasn’t neat and tidy. Sometimes it was bruised; wrapped underneath ugliness, cruelty, cowardliness, and silence. Or worse, it could be a prisoner to circumstance, locked away by a villain who usually wears the mask of a victim. All those things like scar tissue, hiding the heart. I learned that sometimes love is so wild, it’ll walk right over any man, woman, or child just to get to its heart’s desire.

My family of six spent a great deal of time traveling up and down the East Coast when I was a kid. Many hard-knock lessons were imparted on those road trips. On a trip to Florida, while driving on one of those straight flat roads that criss-cross between the Atlantic and the Gulf, where you could see alligators sunning themselves on the roadside, my dad got pulled over.

I was sitting sandwiched between him and my pretty mom, and he quickly told me to act like I was sick, to go along with his story. The cop looked in the driver’s window and my dad explained his speeding was due to my unknown illness. I leaned my head back, shut my eyes tight for fear I’d laugh, moaned, and rubbed my belly on key. I went along with it because I had no choice not to but also because I was afraid if we sat on the side of the road too long an alligator would climb in the car. Having success with this, he asked me to do it once more. I got him out of two speeding tickets on that trip, never even knowing what a speeding ticket was.

On our way back from Maine we’d often stop at an Italian bakery in Connecticut that had huge wedding cakes displayed in the window. Once when I was ten we stopped and as I marveled at the cakes I said “Dad look at these cakes!” He turned and true to his I’ll-push-you-from-the-waterfall ways, he replied “don’t you ever expect me to buy you a wedding cake, pay for your wedding and don’t ever even think I will come to your wedding.”

Highway Promises

I stood there, motionless as he went to order his pound of cookies and a 1/2 dozen cannolis. I wanted to punch him in the gut, take a baseball bat to his knees and finish him off with a swift kick in the balls. To tell him that the next time he needed me to act on cue to save him from speeding tickets or similar that he could kiss my ass. I was pissed that although I was just making a simple comment, not baiting him to pay for a stupid wedding decades from then, he tried to kill something in me. It made me feel like a fool, like I should guard my enthusiasm. That to be enthusiastic showed weakness, that I wasn’t smart enough to keep my joy to myself.

I was used to this sort of harsh out-of-nowhere cruelty. I made a decision then and there. I said to myself “screw him, he wishes he could beam at the site of some wedding cakes on an ugly highway and if enthusiasm is something that puts people off or is worth murdering on-site then it must be very valuable.”

It made me think that inside me, inside everybody, we had precious emotions (like the alchemists metals) that had such value, that the world – even my own father – wanted to take them away. That I must protect them (honesty, enthusiasm, open-ness, kindness, love, compassion and forgiveness) and allow them air to breathe, and above all else never hide them.

Looking at those cakes I vowed to myself that first and foremost I wouldn’t ask or expect anything from anybody, even him. I would try to give instead, but more importantly this cruel way of talking was something I’d unlearn. He must have been taught the same stupid lessons in toughness.

This was much harder than I thought. I certainly can be just as mean with words as my dad, but I fight against him and generations of tough guys not to be. Many times, sometimes for years, I’d slip. I’d be lost in the shallowness of consumer culture or dull lifeless conversations about stuff, never feeling a thing. Forgetting that I had made myself a promise in front of those highway wedding cakes. A promise to feel things, to fight back against the control of every single goddamn cultural norm, tradition, person or persons who tried to kill my soul (that is who I’m talking about here). To not be tough, there was enough of that in this world already.

I don’t teach my kids tough love. I want to teach my daughters that love is infinite but it sits in us right up against fear and hate. I want to teach them it’s not limited to or compartmentalized to just the few people important to them. That to be protective or possessive, or the most hideous human trait of all – being exclusionary – is not loving. You gotta give it away. I hope they can hear me, that they don’t have to read between the lines.

I don’t travel like my dad, searching for answers. I search through asking questions. And every night as I get ready to end the day, after I think about what everybody else said that day, I ask myself “What do I believe?” I think that is the most important question of all.

I believe in love.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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MQA Hosts a Dialogue on Fear

20 Jul

This evening Mad Question Asking is hosting a discussion, a dialogue on Fear.

My friend Liz has organized the event and will moderate the discussion. I am only familiar with two of the participants and was excited and surprised to hear a Buddhist professor and a German philosopher will be in attendance. Meeting new friends and talking in the MQA living room is my favorite part of this project.

I’ve been preoccupied thinking about fear recently and how it controls some of my own actions or more importantly how it shaped my life. What paths did I turn from or follow because of fear’s influence? How connected are my personal fears to the fears put in place by society for the sake of communal control and order?

I realized a long time ago, that everything (every idea, every cultural norm, every tradition, every religion) EVERYTHING we do as humans is made-up. A childhood of playing tea party, doctor, or house that extends into a lifetime of grown-up oh so serious pretending. This notion of seeing the actions of the human race as made-up or playing pretend, if understood past intellect, is a dangerously irreverent way to see the world. It gave me great personal freedom in terms of what I could think or how I could see, but knowing it’s all made-up also highlighted how I am not very free at all. I have to play by some of the rules if I want to be apart of any society… if not, then I will be burned at the stake. Something (I am not sure what, maybe fear of existence) overwhelming makes most of us fall in line and follow the rules, rules we individually never set in place. Fear must prevent the lack of questions asked out loud.

I think questions asked, surfaced and articulated are the antithesis of fear.

It is my current belief that fear may be the greatest motivator in our emotional deck of cards that controls our behavior. (As a bona fide daydreamer, oh how I wish it was love.) I assume this may be to protect our precious egos.

I bet fear tells us to look cool or try to appear to sound smart. Fear nudges us to fit in somewhere. Fear motivates us to keep our mouths shut because we might say the wrong thing. What is hard for me to understand is… what is it exactly that will happen if you say the wrong thing, if you don’t fit in, if you don’t sound smart or look cool? Will your world fall apart? Are our mini, personal micro-cultures all fake self-worth, an ego-driven false image we create of ourselves? What are we protecting in ourselves, why do we give it Gollum-like (lord-of-the-mother-fucking-rings) power?

Are we all just a house of cards with no foundation to lean on and this is why we choose to allow fear to run the show the way we do? Is living safely – playing by the rules – is this sold to us as a gateway to the pursuit of happiness? I don’t see too much happiness when I look around. I see complacency, I see status quo, I hear about scheduled lives and anything that involves money but I never hear about love. I never hear anyone ever talk about love. Why? I suppose those are my biggest questions.

This is very heady business. I have a lot of unorganized, vague questions running loose on this page, in my mind, some are even in my heart, about this – about fear. I am looking forward to have the chance to sit in my living room and talk about it tonight, with new and old friends.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

PS – This is unedited. I didn’t ask Donal to look at it because a good unorganized ramble is sometimes essential to question-asking.

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Warren Zevon

28 May

I am in the process of getting divorced. I will say only this: marriage to me is very much like quickly getting your head stuck between two wooden balusters to peer down at some mythical ideal. Divorce is like it taking 1000 times longer to get your head from between those spindles, and 10 people to do it. You look like an ass with your head between two balusters, turned wood laying impressions in your neck. You can’t help wondering if every person you know well, or not, is thinking in their head about either the divorce or the marriage, “what the hell did you do that for?”, especially the ones who say you are brave to want to be happy. This sentiment, somehow, makes it all immensely worse. It reminds you of your obvious selfishness and disregard for the order and rules of a society that you never got a say in designing. Because really…who the fuck am I to be happy? I am THE last girl on Earth who’d read Eat, Pray, Love. I’d arm-wrestle that woman author for Oprah, whether or not she wanted me to.

The only solace that I have, that doesn’t read denial or vice for me in these bittersweet times, is music. Beautiful music. Loud with the windows down music. Soft and low music. Hug your pillow and cry music. Get down and dance in your room music. Wishing some dreamy guy would fix your record player that just broke music. Beauties like Fleetwood Mac’s album “Mystery to Me”. That is what I was listening to today. It reminded me of an old friend who was a sound guy at the TLA, a concert venue on South St. in Philadelphia around the turn of the century. That was when he landed me employment there, as a concession stand mistress selling popcorn and candy during concerts.

This is a story about Warren Zevon and fear.

I love uniforms. But this concession job hadn’t found itself important enough to demand one. So I decided that I would create my own, having a fetish for the order of a uniform. I wore a white, short-sleeve, cotton peasant-top, as crisp as I could iron it, and black twill double button slacks that bordered between flares and bell bottoms. I was working on South St. and, because of union rules, every show ended at 11 pm. By the time I got out it was midnight. I had to trek my way back north to my apartment in Olde City. To do this I had to get through Society Hill.

If you’ve ever been to Philadelphia then you know that, night or day, it isn’t exactly clear if anybody actually lives in Society Hill. It is a strange ghost neighborhood. At midnight, it’s a little scary. I never knew who, or what, I was frightened of; maybe just the rich people who bought these places, homes that clearly had no heartbeats inside. I didn’t want to blow what dough I made in tips on a taxi, so I wore a pair of Nikes every night and ran at top speed home through that deserted neighborhood.

Working a concession stand in a concert venue is like being a bartender in the way that a pattern became clear: the lonesome would wander while the show went on. Often, I would be engaged in a conversation where I found myself asking personal questions and then saying “Oh too bad, I’m sorry, I’m certain that will pass.” Lonely people are everywhere.

I always found the main act’s rider as fascinating as the “Lonely’s” stories I’d hear. A rider is a set of requests or demands that a performer sets as criteria for performance. They are most often ridiculous. I must say that Warren Zevon had a curious rider: a steak directly after he played; and while onstage he needed four one liter Diet Mountain Dews. This is not an easy drink to find, the size being the problem. When he was presented with four 20 oz bottles he demanded they be replaced with one liter bottles. I was sent in a taxi to a gas station, on Delaware and Spring Garden, to fetch him those four Diet Mountain Dews in the one liter bottle, this being the only place that sold them. I was happy to do it, but having had to leave my popcorn machine (from which I had just cleaned flax-seed shaped mouse poop) to get this ridiculous drink impressed on me that this man had terrible beverage taste. This sort of thing, for me, was unforgivable. I didn’t care what he wrote lyrically. What sort of person would put so much of something so gross in their body? Ew…

Any time you work with any sort of important person, there is a level of stress and anxiety in pleasing them, as if the world will fall apart and explode if their stupid wish is not granted by mere mortal hands. The ones in charge at the TLA waited, hands wrung, breath held, for four one liter Diet Mountain Dews to arrive. I returned, drink in hand, saving the day.

The show began, and so did my selling of soft drinks to the AAers and lightweights. I often didn’t care for the act, so only hearing a muffled version wasn’t a big deal. If it was slow I would sit on my stool, cross-legged, back straight, pouting, slowly turning my chin to meet my rising shoulder, pretending I’m a 40′s movie star. Crushed behind the back-lit glass counter of over-priced candy, I’d work on my long list of impressions I do for the sole purpose of entertaining myself (in case you are interested, I have been working on an impression of Larry David’s gait for like ten years, this one is all about pulling my shoulders down to weigh on my hips, long arms swinging).

As I sat there pouting, a fluffy dark-haired shapeless middle-aged woman wearing a drab raincoat wandered over and started to tell me about her decades long relationship, or “deep connection”, she had with Warren Zevon who was playing “Werewolves of London” at that very moment. It became clear that she was obsessed and delusional about her feelings but seemed, in appearance anyway, harmless.

She had a letter for him she clutched to her chest. I smiled persuasively and asked to see it. She refused. I could tell she loved my interest and hated me for being invasive, all at the same time.

I told her about the one liter Diet Mountain Dews and how that fact alone should be enough to inspire her to question this man’s greatness. I went on to explain that I, myself, practiced a beverage theory which was black coffee, water and red wine only (white wine was ok for parties but should be regarded pretty much as a pussy of a drink, like coffee with sugar and cream).

She wouldn’t hear it about the drink. She was obsessed with Warren Zevon. There was no reaching her. Her reaction was identical to when I tried to talk reason to a man (my own stalker) who was calling me every morning panting, asking me what I was wearing. I would try to tell him that these morning phone calls were no way to meet people. And…please stop the heavy breathing and panting. It’s simply impolite. He would always reply with “whatever…what are you wearing?” in this sweaty breathy whisper. Before hanging up each morning, my final reply was, slightly offended, “This is about me with clothes ON?”

I thanked her for sharing with me and said I had to go now, to grab Mr. Zevon’s steak. I turned my popcorn light off, stuffed my tips in my pocket and walked out the front door turning right onto South St. By the time I returned, the show was over and the lights were on. Warren Zevon was still on the side of the stage with his manager talking while the roadies packed up. Now, I am not shy, so I just walked up on stage and handed him the aluminum swan holding his requested steak.

I was about to turn and walk off stage when I overheard them anxiously speaking about a woman who could only be the letter-clutching, deep connection, fluffy-haired Angela I had met 30 minutes prior. I quickly understood that Warren and his manager were talking about the stalker and I said “Angela?” With lightning speed, Warren’s head turned to face mine, his eyes bulging, probably hopped up on all that fluorescent yellow caffeine. He looked terrified. “You know her?” I looked into the audience which was 90% gone. I saw her fluffy shapeless form, like a huge cloud of slow-moving black gnats and pointed to her. “She’s right there.”

Warren Zevon jumped, and screamed like a girl, looking very much like a cartoon. He ran back stage. His manager all but strangled me. Also looking like a cartoon he shouted “How could you! I’ve been hiding her from him for years! You ruined everything!” Apparently, this guy’s job as Warren Zevon’s manager also included hiding the physical identity of Angela, the letter writing long-time stalker, from Warren. I assumed this was to make her no more real for him than her words did.

Then he ran after Warren. I stood there on stage, bright lights above me, waved at Angela and smiled to myself thinking “well why the hell are you both still standing on stage then, dumb-ass?”

I was too lost in thought to run home that night. I was thinking about Warren Zevon’s fear of Angela and my own fear of the neighborhood I was walking through. Were either worthy of the stress they produced? Angela seemed as harmless as this ghostly neighborhood. Maybe he should have been more worried about the chemicals in all that Diet Mountain Dew?

Walking home, I thought about the ridiculous things my dad worried about for me. He’d often holler at me before I left his house, saying “Girl, somebody’s gonna pick you up and throw you in a van!” It never mattered how many times I tried to point out that I am almost six feet tall. “Dad, nobody is going to pick me up.” Or this gem he’d warn me about, “Somebody is going to take your picture, then put your head on a picture of a naked woman in a dirty magazine in Saudi Arabia!” These words chained together and the image they provided, along with his primitive cut and paste photoshopish knowledge, made me desperate to know what information or magazine formed this fear.

Do we all worry about the wrong thing? Is this why humanity doesn’t seem to advance that positively? Fear is a very powerful motivator. It may, unfortunately, be more powerful than love.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the last year questioning my own fears, stuck in the spindles, piecing stories like these together in my crappy time-line, trying to understand how I ended up here. Should I open my eyes wide-shut, turn the TV off, demand to feel something out of life and ask myself if the fear of hurting the people I love is really an expression of love at all? Seems like that’s the other side of the “Who the fuck am I to be happy?” coin…both sides self-important. Much like a rider at a concert venue.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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Love, Nudity and Chasing Cows

16 Apr brown cows

The land I grew up on was a former farm. New Jersey had lots and lots of farms before it had lots and lots of strip malls. We didn’t have a farm, but we did have cows. We always had cows, beef cows, and a windmill to give them fresh water which, to a kid, is a spectacular thing. To listen to its rhythmic creaking, sitting on top of a wooden board that my brother had nailed in place, 20 feet up a pine tree but 60 feet below the windmill’s blades, was magical; there was no place like it. That windmill once unearthed and pushed out a shark’s tooth for us. That’s right. A dinosaur aged fossil. And that board gave me a place to retreat when the going got tough inside.

The Windmill

The following is the story of a great escape made by a baby cow who I bet just missed her mother.

It was a brutally hot Sunday in August. I had a date that night with a good-looking Israeli guy who had a nice car that he listened to techno in. I’d never dated a guy with a nice car before. This was going to be me growing up. I would date somebody who had a good job and could buy me dinner. I was going to pretend that the techno was forgivable because he was foreign. I felt sick. I was betraying all the guys I’d loved as friends and as lovers, guys who listened to great music. Music that told me they felt things they couldn’t say but could hear, guys who played their own music and on whom I could pretend to faintly smell the scent of pine needles, as I imagined I smelled, all of us growing up, playing up under pine trees in this beat-up state.

I went and got my hair cut and blown out that morning; a let down. I didn’t want layers. I liked my hair very long and all one length, no dye, no blow dryer. But I was given layers and now had a haircut that was many years late, a longer version of the uninspired Jennifer Aniston look. I was starting to feel like I put myself on a makeover show to punish myself for not fitting in. Ever.

Deciding that the only way to fix this was to lay out completely naked in the sun, I stopped home, changed, grabbed a towel and drove to my mom’s. I took off my clothes in my old bedroom and wrapped my towel around myself. I walked in the kitchen, grabbed a huge glass of water, and told my mom I’d be lying out behind the bulldozer and to make sure she told anybody who came over not to bug me, that I’d be naked.

Maybe because I am half Norwegian, a first generation Norwegian-American, nudity is simply not a big deal to me. I was dropped off at my grandmother’s house in Norway for the summer when I was seven. That summer, not only did I repeatedly see the video for “The Safety Dance,” teach myself how to burp the entire alphabet on my brother’s command, break into a neighbor’s house to retrieve a pair of my sister’s sunglasses that I had left there before the family left for holiday, watch a public service breast exam infomercial that had an entirely naked woman in the shower showing how to check your tits for bad lumps, I also saw five moms at a kid’s birthday party, sitting on the deck, all with their shirts and bras off, sunning the parts of their bodies that were above their jeans. You know how little kids run chasing each other through a house party? I stopped and stood motionless looking at 10 boobs in a circle. What the fuck was this? My parents had a lot of nerve not letting me in on this country’s cultural norms so I could at least be prepared to see this before they disappeared for three months. I mean, the televised breast exam was one thing . . .

Back to the cow story.

I set myself up, hidden in the way back of the backyard, parked right next to a bulldozer, my glass of water on its giant tracks. I was surrounded by my dad’s construction equipment, trailers, rows of steel beams, and all sorts of salvage. There were acres and acres of trees; nobody could find me. No music nor book, just me and my mind thinking that love is one elusive element, like trying to catch mercury slipping on the floor from a broken glass thermometer. Where was the mythical True Love? All I ever saw was partnerships made out of settlement or security. I never saw love that blinded two people at the same time, just couples with banter of annoyance or control. This day, with the haircut and the techno I’d be listening to that night, was desperate. I was ashamed that my lonesomeness lead me to vanity; I had never taken a second look at anybody because of looks or money before. It felt like I was cheating on the man who I hadn’t met yet, who I hoped one day would love me like I was the only thing he ever saw when he closed his eyes.

My mood was shifting now—that thing that sun worshipping does—when I started to hear a bunch of commotion coming from the house. I sat up, turned my ear towards the house and listened; one of the new calves had gone missing. I wrapped myself back in my towel, slipped on my flip-flops, drank all my water, and hurried to the house.

I stood there on the patio, listening to my brother tell my mom that the police got a report of a cow sighting an hour back. This was not good. Poor girl could be anywhere.

I ran upstairs to get dressed. Shit. I did not have any underwear, the top or bottom kind with me. I hadn’t worn any on the way over. I didn’t even have an elastic to pull my hair up. To make matters even worse, instead of SPF 400 I had put on olive oil to attract the sun. I had only planned for an hour of body baking and it was easily 97 degrees out. I threw on a thin, cotton, cream-colored skirt with a 50s pattern of cherries, a tight black wife beater, and my flip-flops; I should have had on sneakers, a sports bra and biker shorts. This was the worst outfit for what I was about to spend the next two hours doing.

My mom, brother and me, we set off separately; they headed towards a corn field and I ran in my flip-flops across the street. I would run through a gigantic, empty (it was a Sunday) corporate complex. These places built up all around our creaky windmill, replacing farm after farm, decade after decade. I ran through a half mile or more of parking lots, circling huge mortgage and tech companies, and there she was, reddish-brown with white spots. At four months she weighed 300 pounds. I started to moo sweetly and ran towards her. This of course made her run faster. She left the corporate complex and ended up in the yard of a neighboring, small house that was there long before these corporate buildings were. She was headed right into a street with two lane traffic.

Brown Cows

I prayed for the second time in my life then and there. The first time didn’t help so I never did it again until then, and never since.

“Please God, do not let this calf run across the busiest road in my hometown and have an innocent driver die hitting her. Please, please, please God.”

I even did the sign of the cross I had learned about in Catholic high school, the same school my dad told me I could drop out of because I didn’t need to listen to that shit. I was terrified, making promises I would never keep with a God I never thought about. Timing is truly the biggest bitch of all, and it’d be just like her to have this cow and a car collide in perfect stupid union.

She crossed safely into a new, manicured, idyllic, middle-class, tract of homes, the street bent like a spoon, but she decided to get off the hot pavement and headed right into a backyard; one with a pool, that was having a party, the balloons telling me so. Cows run fast and don’t stop to shit. She ran right through that party with me behind her and took two huge craps that looked like two gallon’s worth of chocolate soft serve. I could hear “Is that a cow??” Some clever bastard said “Holy Cow!” and chuckled.

“I’m very sorry!” I shouted behind me, only about the poop. My newly layered hair flying like a tattered flag behind me, and this cow looking like a mirage on that still cloudless day.

Coming up to a fence, she weaved back onto the street. I passed two perfectly faux-goth 12-year-olds whose moms clearly picked out their clothes for them at Hot Topic, and I yelled

“Hey! Grab some of your friends and help me!”

They took off like the posers they were, on their nice bikes. Then, miracle of miracles, a cop car.

I was soaking wet in sweat, pissed I had to smell all that product coating my hair from the salon drip down my neck (I hate perfume or any manufactured odor with fervor only a genuine racist could match.) Breathing hard, heaving deeply, I ran in front of his car and put my hands up, stopping him, and quickly asked him to please call some more cops and help me. He told me that it wasn’t really the police’s problem. I went completely Annie Oakley on him, my gesticulating arms and hands, more effective than any weapon, doing most of the communicating. I reminded him that yes, it was his job to help me and he’d better get me some more cops, and, if not, I’d tell every crappy provincial newspaper around us a story how he, Officer Andrews, left me, a nice girl stuck chasing a reckless wild baby cow, helpless and alone. He conceded. I was taught early in life that the only thing above the law was the media and there it was; he bowed to my threats. I started after the cow again. I couldn’t lose her, even though I had zero idea how exactly I was going to catch her.

I realized she needed a name at this point. We had been getting cows in pairs or double pairs for the last many years and I consistently named them all Maybelline and Clementine each year. This was the first year that we had three cows and I was starting to think maybe that was this girl’s problem; maybe her grass grazing mates had made private jokes or turned their backs to her. It came to me quickly, along with Emmylou Harris and The Band singing along loudly in my mind; I named her Evangeline. And then I started to sing to her, after her namesake, a song so perfect. Evangeline was goin’ insane.

Three cop cars showed up 15 minutes later and, suddenly, I was no longer alone with this cow. My mom and brother had found us too. Evangeline had found her way into a backyard that was fenced in, with one exit, a four-foot gate.

There were maybe eight of us now. She was surrounded. The owners of this house stared from inside their home in what I assume was deep confusion as to why there was a cow in their backyard, as well as five cops. The cop that happened to be covering the gate, her only exit, decide to step aside casually enough that a polite “pardon me” would have fit, and let her pass when she bolted for the exit. We all made a huge collective “Awwwwwww!” We’d lost her and now we all started to chase her again.

She came up to the side of a house, huffing and puffing between the bushes that lined it. At this point there were five of us left. My friend John showed up. He was a hunter; I figured maybe he could help. One of the cops said he could call his sergeant and ask if he could just shoot her. We all paused and looked at him like he was nuts. She was just about to break away again when my brother did the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever seen; just as she turned, ready to split, he jumped on top of her and took her down, wrestled her to the ground. My brother was done; he was not chasing her anymore. I stood speechless. To this day, it is in the top five things I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. While he had her down, John hog-tied her legs. He switched places with my brother while he went to get the pickup. She seemed to finally start to relax while lying there, not trying to run, suddenly passive. It took John, my brother and one cop to load her into the truck and return her to the two other calves, both mooing and moaning for their mothers, standing under the windmill.

Driving home, I thought about that cow’s will to run and be free. I wondered how much of that will exists in every living creature, even weeds that demand to be seen, or circus fleas. I had felt the need to run fast out of my own life many times, sometimes permanently, but never had the guts to make one bold move, someone else’s feelings always trumping and quieting mine. In this past year I’ve come to realize that was my excuse; the good daughter, wife and mother, a phony mask of pat-myself-on-the-back principles, noble kindness concealing a coward afraid to risk what I safely had. It didn’t matter whether I was happy or felt anything in real-time. It was easy for me to be whomever anybody wanted or needed me to be. I was always retreating happily to the safety of living and breathing inside the dreams in my mind.

I was tired but I had a pretty good story. The Israeli called me and canceled our date. His friend’s wife had a baby; he was going to the hospital instead. I was dissed for a baby? With this good story too? Aw, fuck it. That’s as low as it gets. Maybe he had a nice car and a good job but, clearly, he had no blood running through his veins with any sense of hunger, at least none for me. I’d rather be alone with my good stories than cry over a case of “He’s just not that into you”, even if I felt a bit bruised from the diss. I sat alone outside on my porch stairs, leaning my head against the yellow stucco I’d painted the summer before, chin in hand, thinking and smoking cigarettes all night, listening to the crickets of summer, wishing that, someday, a beautiful, fucked-up man would show up with his own good stories, let me love him and want me just as much, that somebody would finally listen to my whole story and really hear me, out loud.

© Mad Question Asking – 2012 All Rights Reserved

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