Category: Memoir

Let’s try to have some fun

When you swing in the tire swing

make sure your socks are off. You’ve forgotten, I expect,

the feeling of feet brushing the tops of sunflowers

– if you get there before I do, by Dick Allen

I’m going to try to be positive about summer. I know how much you guys love it.

Generally speaking, folks seem to really love it when the wet, chilly spring slips into the sopping hot days of summer. You feel free, untethered, perhaps? You have more time to do the things you love, maybe? The weather cooperates with your hobbies, probably? You like the longer days, I think?

You’ll notice the prevaricating1 because I don’t really know why people love summer so much.

Summer: Great for Thee, Sucks For Me

Summer is a time of immense anxiety for me. I can hear you groaning, but stay with me here. I’m going somewhere good.

Some of the stuff that I experienced in my otherwise wonderful childhood have made me inconsolably anxious when summer comes. These are the kinds of things that other people didn’t struggle with, or that didn’t cause anxiety in them. I think this is important to note because I want to be clear that I know how odd it is to be upset over a season (and one that is so universally loved, at that).

Water, for instance. Specifically, bodies of water. I don’t like them. I was terrified of deep water for most of my early childhood. I never really reckoned with that, so as an adult, I never enjoyed water-based activities. I would rather have avoided them.2

The old fear lingers, in the narrow spaces between anxiety, shame, and pressure from my father, who swam daily in the river as a child and didn’t understand how I couldn’t enjoy it as much as he did. I’m not sure he saw my fear as a weakness, but the shame I felt was magnified.

Shame is a big theme in my life. My father and shame are like that meme from Predator with me in the middle. I can’t think about one without also thinking about the other.

Anxiety is my constant companion. Anxiety is as much a part of me as anything else. This will come as no surprise to dedicated readers, as I have mentioned the word “anxiety” in 10 of the newsletters I’ve written. I probably mention it more in person.

I have struggled mightily with the social variety of anxiety, dismissed by many (including me!) as “painfully shy,” which, while accurate, didn’t do much to help me get to the root of the problem. I know that the grown-ups in my life wanted to help me, but lacked the vocabulary. This was 1989. We barely knew what anxiety was.

My Father Died

I understand why people use language like “passed” or the dreaded “moved on” to describe when someone dies. The word “died” sounds so finite, brusque, sudden, unpleasant.3

He died around 8:30pm on May 3rd, a day after my birthday. He was 80 years old, and it was 129 days after his.

It’s hard to nail down an exact time, because the hospice experience was holistic. There were no beeping instruments measuring his vitals. There was no need for them, because his decline was obvious and inevitable.

One minute he was breathing, the next he wasn’t. My mom and sister, who had been by his side for days, noticed that he was gone. It wasn’t dramatic. My father died like so many others do, quietly. He lived quietly, too, so it’s fitting.

I’m not going to write about him a lot here, because there’s a longer piece about him in me. I’ll leave it with a story about the last few months of his life to illustrate my feelings without digging too deeply into them.

Here’s That Story

When we stopped to visit him, he never had much to say. He never, ever, had much to say, so it wasn’t unusual. One way a patient with dementia tells on themselves is a change in their conversations. The things they say don’t make the same kind of sense they did before. For somebody who doesn’t talk much, it’s harder to notice. We had to suss out his decline in other ways, and they made themselves apparent. Eventually it was impossible to ignore, and impossible for family to manage, so we could visit him in pleasant surroundings where people took care of him.

Whenever we would visit, my siblings always gave him a hug. I found it hard to hug him sometimes. There was too much of myself in the way, and there was too much of my memories of him in the way, and they crowded at the entrance and I couldn’t get through. So I often left those visits without hugging him. The closer he got to the end, the easier the hugs came, and I was eager to close the distance between us. Too little too late, maybe.

If there had been a person in him who could understand such things, I could have made him understand. He would have, in years past. But that’s not the guy I couldn’t hug anymore. Still there, but different. I still don’t have the right words, so I won’t rush them and make a mess of it.

I read about some of the things peoples fathers did to them, and it was never as bad as those. But we had our own kind of difficulties, and he carried an enormous weight very quietly and where nobody else could see it, but when people carry really heavy things and don’t have the vocabulary to talk about them, it makes itself known to the people around them anyway, and it’s clumsy and hard for everybody.

My childhood was happy, full of laughter, and I was always fed and sheltered, and loved. I have siblings and I love them, and my mom is the kindest most generous person who ever lived. But I had a complicated relationship with my dad, and that’s where I’ll leave it for now.

The Long Staircase

When somebody is dying, they’re walking up the stairs to a door. You can talk to them while they walk, but they never stop to chat. The last few steps are slow but certain. They go up when they’re ready. They might linger with their hand on the knob. After they go through that door, they close it behind them, and you can’t talk to them anymore. Well, you can yell through it, but they won’t answer you. Maybe they hear you, maybe not.

Don’t worry, you’ll go through that door some day, too. If you’re lucky, you will help a few people through it first.

Sometimes people run up the steps and dash through the door like they can’t wait to see what’s on other side. Sometimes people go through it before the rest of us are ready, and they do it when nobody’s looking, before we can stop them.

“I’m not ready for you to go yet,” we say, to the door that slammed behind them.

There’s a lot of metaphors for death, and I’ve written more than my share. I expect I have a few more of those in me, too.

“‘And what would humans be without love?’”
‘RARE,’ said Death.”
— Terry Pratchett

The Summer Scaries

Anyway, back to summer. My social anxiety and fear of the water converged at Linsly Day Camp, when I, weeping and screaming, was dragged into the pool by an upperclassman. I was 11 or so years old.

I remember the feeling of his skin against mine as he pinned my arms to my side and heaved us both through the water of the shallow end of the pool (which I refused to leave) and into the deep end. I didn’t have that kind of intimacy with anybody, not my family, not my friends, certainly not somebody I despised.

He let go of me and I scrambled to the wall. Even the bullies, taunting and laughing before, were stunned by my cowardice (or at least they were in my memory).

It’s only now, with he 35 intervening years between me and that scared kid, that I realize that my early fears of intimacy could have at least partially come from that feeling, that closeness, that anger and rage and shame. What emerged in me as another panic attack or source of anxiety very well could have begun in George Sokos’s arms.

My father hated unstructured time, and that passed to me as a deep, desperate anxiety. Summer, the season of unstructured time, was, in a word, fraught.

While the anxiety over intimacy and closeness and romance is mostly gone, it comes back when I least expect it. Brain stuff is like that.

This Was All 35 Years Ago

I know, everybody has stuff that happens to them when they’re younger. Everybody has stuff that happens to them. Everybody. Nobody gets through life without Stuff Happening. Get real, Foreman. You’re not special.

Okay so I’ve told you why I hate summer, but what does that mean?

Think of the things you love about summer. I probably don’t like those things. I listed a few of them above, but “summer activities” also includes a whole constellation of activities, sensations and experiences that I just would rather not participate in. I don’t really need to name them all. If you associate a certain kind of activity with summer, I probably don’t like it.

Fireworks don’t thrill me, though I admit I enjoy them when they happen. I like being close to them and feel the bangs and the smell the crackles. Fireflies are good, too. Riding bikes around my neighborhood was fun. Running through sprinklers. Playing outside. Getting a dog really stirred up and chasing each other around the back yard.

That’s not a comprehensive list of things I enjoy about summer, but it covers some of the fundamentals.

So you dare the plane to crash
Redeem the miles for cash
When it starts to dive
And we’ll dance like cancer survivors

Andrew Bird – Near Death Experience Experience

Things I’ve Historically Blamed For My Summer Hibernation

My reaction to the summer scaries is often sublimated into other areas of my life that are only tangentially related, or somewhat related. I label them as “historical” because they’re usually only somewhat accurate, and are artifacts of earlier ideas of myself. My current idea of myself is based on the most recent information I have gathered through therapy (twice a month) and a constant, ongoing internal assessment.

– the weather (hot, humid)

– bugs

– sunlight

– longer days

I don’t like any of those things. I used to avoid them, but I’m trying to avoid them less. I always have more fun that I expected. I’m trying to remember that more often.

Get more of this right in your very own inbox! Isn’t it lonely in there with all the coupons and forwards and stuff?

Autumn Brings My Favorite Things

I have no idea whether I like these things because I have always hated summer (for the reasons I noted, above), or because I like them on their own merits. As I round first base on my forty-sixth year, I don’t think it matters, because this is the life I have. My favorite things about autumn:

– the weather (cold, crisp)

– smells (cruncy leaves, campfires)

– Halloween (spooky and dark and candy)

– coziness (cuddling close to our people and our creatures)

I love the longer nights, too, because I simply always have. I love nighttime. I’m most alive when the sun is down.

I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.

– Sarah Williams4

You might read all of this and say “so what?”

I’m kind of ashamed that I ever felt so much shame.

I Had a Dream

I had a dream that I had a giant notebook. It was just a big, blank page. I drew a big “H” in one corner. I don’t know what that H means or what it stands for, if anything.

But I know better than to ignore my dreams. They have omens and stuff in them, right?

So I went out to the art supply store, which I love (I love the smells and sights and sounds, and the pregnant promise of so many things to make other things with), and I bought a couple of giant notebooks. I picked the one that felt right and I opened it and placed it on my favorite desk in my favorite spot in my apartment and put on my favorite headphones and used my favorite pen and drew a big H in the corner exactly like the one in my dream.

The words came out. I wrote.

After I was finished, probably an hour later, I felt hopeful. I have started things before. Let’s see where this goes, I thought. Good start.

The next day, I wrote more. It didn’t stop there. It continued into the days that followed.

I had a breakthrough. The dream foretold a recipe. When followed, the words stopped up behind the blockage came forth.

The notebook now has hundreds of words. Maybe I’ll make them into something. It doesn’t matter.

They didn’t just come out there, but everywhere.

The thing about me is that I’ve never not written. Very little of it has been published, but I have been writing it nearly every day for decades. I call myself a writer not because of what I’ve published but because of what I’ve written.

I occasionally send it out for somebody else to read and they publish it, but most of it is in notebooks and files. Nobody ever reads it. I’m going to change that, but it takes making myself uncomfortable at times when I would rather be comfortable, so I just gotta kind of make myself do it.

I have to work now
At things that used to be like breathing
– It Was Not Natural by Wye Oak

Jim Shorts

Oh children
Poor old Jim’s white as a ghost
He’s found the answer that we lost
– O Children by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

I’m going to start writing more of these, but they’re going to be shorter and more frequent. So get ready for that. I’m trying a new feature (new to me, at least) on Substack5 that lets you create new verticals within the platform, which, to you, just means you’ll be hearing from me more. At least, you will if my plans match my actions. They don’t always.

1

I just realized that Substack supports footnotes, and the Pratchetterian in me is giddy

2

the thing about avoiding stuff you don’t like is that you miss a lot of good things, which is why I am approaching uncomfortable things more directly, these days

3

I’m tempted to divert into the history of words, because that’s what I do when the feelings get too big, and talk about how “passed” is more gentle and preferred in the same way that English speakers say “beef” instead of “cow” when describing the meat from the animal, and how that came from a similar desire to diffuse the language into more palatable words, but I’ll save that for a future Short Foremania, coming soon to an inbox near you.

4

this quote was on a print my aunt posy had, and it always makes me think of her, another person who ran up the stairs.

5

I’ve decided that footnotes don’t really work on the web, so I dunno if I’ll use them. I mean, are you supposed to click on the little number and go read something and then scroll back to where you think you were? Pain in the butt, if you ask me.

June 25, 2023