I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(10)

I learned how to write in complete sentences—I’d known how all along, really—and I started using them at school, but only when I had to.



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In seventh grade, we were instructed to keep a journal for two weeks. We could “journal” (as a verb) about anything at all, the teacher said. Anything! The point was to write every day. So for two weeks over Christmas break, I chronicled the plot of every episode of The Young and the Restless. When we returned to school and took turns reading our journals aloud, everyone read about their feelings and their daily activities. I read about how Nikki and Victor were fighting again and no one knew if Danny and Cricket would ever get back together.

My classmates laughed (which I liked) and said, “I can’t believe you wrote that” (which I didn’t like so much). Why couldn’t they believe it? We were allowed to write anything, right? Why was my thing weird? For that matter, why didn’t anyone else write about TV?



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In eleventh grade, my English teacher gave our class a pop writing assignment in which we were to write a story that began with the sentence she wrote on the board. The sentence was something like, “The lobsterman looked out over the water.” I don’t recall exactly, but the word lobsterman was definitely in there. I remember thinking really hard about this character and what a difficult life he must have being half man, half lobster.

He’s the most human-like of the monsters, and the most monstrous of quasi-humans. He walks on two legs and doesn’t have superpowers. He can’t shoot flames from his eyes or breathe underwater. He is almost totally normal, as people go, but for that one little thing. . . . Where other people have fingers, which they use to hold on to coffee cups, to wave in greeting, to clasp each other in love, he has a hard, sharp pincer that would crush human bones if he tried to shake hands. He wears oversize sleeves sometimes, so his difference isn’t always immediately noticeable, but everyone figures it out eventually.

He can’t carry open-weave crocheted shopping bags. The holes catch his claws and snag. He has lost too many groceries this way, oranges and cans of crabmeat rolling across the sidewalk.

But on the upside, he can remove the crimped metal tops from beer bottles without a bottle opener.

He sunburns easily.

He has a real name, maybe Melvin or Jake, but no one remembers what it is because everyone around town calls him Lobsterman, but only behind his back, because most people don’t talk to him at all.

Poor Lobsterman. Out there living among regular men with regular hands. Misunderstood. Impaired. Shunned.



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I found out after turning in the paper that a lobsterman is a person who catches lobsters, like a fisherman. How did all my classmates know that? We lived nowhere near the water.



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When my son was three, my spouse and I sat at another lima bean as his preschool teacher told us that he was failing to complete tasks that involved cutting, because he was unable to hold a pair of scissors. She asked why we hadn’t taught him this basic skill. “Wait,” I said, “aren’t we supposed to be keeping sharp things away from him?”

I thought I’d been such a good parent, creating a safe, blade-free environment for my toddler. The other parents were teaching their little ones to cut, I guess, while I was snapping up all the scissors in the house, going, “Nope, not for you!” Why didn’t I know?



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In school we’re taught to do our best, but we’re limited by the bounds of what we understand to be right—and “right” looks different to everyone, apparently. Maybe we all walk around assuming everyone is interpreting the world the same way we are, and being surprised when they aren’t, and that’s the loneliness and confusion of the human experience in a nutshell (er, lobster shell).

I wonder how many times my children will find themselves in a lobsterman-story scenario, where they’re doing one thing only to find out later that everybody else was doing another? And how many of those will be because I lobstermanned something as a parent?

Quite a few, probably, and there’s no way to see them coming. But tell me this: Which would you rather read—a story about a guy who catches lobsters or a story about a guy who is a lobster?





Mermaids and Destiny


Every now and then, a school will ask me to come speak to a group of students, and each time I do it, I get a little nervous. I always wonder what I might possibly have to say that teenagers want to hear. When I ask teachers what they expect me to talk about, they say, “Tell them about your life path, your career.” I suppose this is because the job market is garbage these days and kids need to know there are lots of ways to make a living, even by cobbling together a hodgepodge of part-time jobs and creative projects. Maybe they want students to see that if their real dreams don’t work out, they can always draw cartoons. I’m not sure, but I want to prove myself worthy of the invitation, so I try to leave them with something useful.

I start by showing a picture of myself in second grade: In the photo, I’m caught mid-jump, throwing a basketball that’s clearly headed about two feet short of the basket. I’m wearing soccer cleats (to play basketball) with a T-shirt tucked snugly into the elastic waist of my shorts, just under my armpits. I’m grinning like I think I’m really nailing it, and my hair is tied with white bows in two pigtails.