I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(39)

I couldn’t see myself, though, so I didn’t know what I looked like. The only people who did were the ones who could see me—the adults who opened their doors and saw a tiny, tattered, gory, chocolate-toothed clown, standing under their front porch light, grinning and holding out two bloody hands. Good evening, folks. I’ve come to eat you alive.

When I was eleven, I dressed as Muammar Gaddafi. I made the costume out of a khaki outfit, aviator sunglasses, black boots, a liberal dusting of bronzing powder, and a very real-looking fake gun . . . which I carried with me to the festivities at school.

What was I thinking? I don’t know. I remember deciding that the irony of scrawny little me going as an anti-imperialist, militant revolutionary with ties to terrorists was riotously funny. And I know it fit my habit at the time to base a good bit of my elementary-school comedy routine on current events I saw on NBC Nightly News, which I watched religiously because I was in love with Tom Brokaw.

Anyway, I decided that’s what I would be, and nobody suggested it was a bad idea. Not parents, not teachers, no one pointed out that my costume was about a dozen kinds of offensive and totally inappropriate for an eleven-year-old and for school. It was a different time, what can I say.



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My first Halloween in Nashville working at the bookstore, just a few years ago, I dressed as the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I wore black leather and dark lipstick and moto boots and generally channeled investigator/assassin Lisbeth Salander impeccably, right down to the giant black, red, and green dragon an artistic friend drew across my shoulders. I felt dangerous, sexy, and completely unlike myself until the next day, when the semi-permanent markers ran in the shower and left me looking like the Girl with the Terrible Bruise for the rest of the week.

Obviously, time has not improved my costuming skills, but I still love trying on a different persona every now and then. It’s a thrill to look in the mirror, blink your eyes, and see the glittery eyelids of a different person winking back. It makes you think, for just a second, Who are you?—which is a useful question to ask yourself from time to time. If you don’t check in every now and then, you might not realize that the answer changes. So if you’re feeling unsettled, I highly recommend getting a different haircut or outfit or eyebrow pencil (or guitar). It’s fun. And who doesn’t occasionally long to walk through the world as someone else for a while?



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Playing guitar didn’t transform me into a rock goddess, but man, it was fun. On and off for about a year, I took lessons with Robert. We moved from heavy metal into classic rock. (Turns out we didn’t share much in the way of musical taste.) Eventually, our mismatched schedules made it harder and harder to book time together, and without actually meaning to quit, I stopped going, thinking I’d find another teacher with more availability. But when I stopped going to regular lessons, I stopped practicing. And when I stopped practicing, I stopped getting my guitar out of its case and smelling its weird vanilla smell. The calluses on my hands softened, then disappeared, my fingertips becoming tender again.

I still have the guitar. It mostly sits in its case now, although I do move it from room to room sometimes. When I look at it, I remember all the hope I placed in this instrument, how I whiled away so many hours with it, distracting myself with any music I could make. I remember thinking it might turn me into someone else. And I remember how good it felt to be in the presence of a believer—someone who said if you’re going to play, you might as well take yourself seriously.





No Safe Place


“I love lifeguards,” I said to my friend as we watched our children splashing in the pool.

We’d recently joined a swim club not too far from our neighborhood, and I was happy for the kids to have a place to cool off during the blazing Atlanta summers. The pool also fielded its own swim team. I dreaded sweltering evenings waiting for my kids’ races to come around, but I felt great peace knowing they’d have a daily swim lesson for a month each summer as part of team practice. They’d grow up to be safe around water.

My friend and I, mothers of kids the same ages, stood on the first step of the pool cooling our feet in the ankle-deep water. Though I wouldn’t think of taking my eyes off my kids (ages four and seven) while they swam, the presence of a lifeguard added an additional layer of security. So much security, in fact, that on this day I wasn’t even wearing a bathing suit. In white shorts, a loose yellow shirt, and a giant floppy straw hat, I felt I could keep watch from the edge just fine. The hulking lifeguards—young men home from college looking to make some money during the day before their restaurant shifts at night—sat on ten-foot-tall chairs patrolling each end of the pool: red swim trunks, red foam rescue tubes resting across their laps in case they needed to offer emergency flotation, their heads turning slowly this way and that, scanning the water constantly.

If I miss something, I thought—if I turn away from one child for a second to look at the other—the lifeguards are watching.

“Will you send them to day camp next month when swim team is over?” my friend was asking. I’d been watching my daughter bounce up and down a few feet in front of me, holding her breath to crouch under the surface, then pop! out of the water like a jack-in-the-box.

“I forgot to sign them up,” I said.

Bob, bob, bob she went, a little farther out, to a deeper part of the shallow end. Pop!