Little Weirds(3)

I was born with a ticking clock inside of me that chirped and rang out many years later and its gears lowered my mouth open for a French kiss and made my skirt light up like a lamp with a shade saying “Someone’s awake in here…come see who it is.”

I was born in a Shirley Temple, and I came out with the stem of the cherry in my small, strong new hand and I walked that cherry like a dog. I was born ready to care for a pet and be a pet too.

I was born like that.

I was born happy but when anything that is large, alive, and wild gets hurt and confused, I feel so sad, and I notice that I wish I could nurse big scared things. And it is worth mentioning that “big scared thing” is one way to describe how my heart often feels. My heart can feel like an elephant who is feeling dread and has an exceptional memory and naturally possesses something valuable that might be hunted, poached, wasted.

I was born in the Atlantic Ocean, and I pray to goddesses that look like whales and waves and I make tons of wishes. I was born in the day, right before lunchtime, and I arrived with a full appetite and it hasn’t settled down at all.

I was born with a fatal allergy to both subtext and traditional organization techniques and I will tell you I have really had a few near-death experiences. I was born two years ago when one of my friends described me as “the least able-to-be-controlled person that I know,” and I started living right away.





Fast Bad Baby

When I was a baby I was fast and bad. I was born and my mother says I started walking around right away and she had to put bells on my feet so that she would know where I was going. I was born and I started moving around the space because I wanted to whip around in this world. I never wanted to go to sleep and my mother says I didn’t have “first words” but instead I just started talking one day and I’ve never been able to be very quiet since then. Even in my dreams I talk and make a commotion. In the past, I was a baby and I was running around and my mother didn’t know what to do because her baby was so rowdy and speedy compared to other babies she knew. She couldn’t lock me up or tell me to slow down because I didn’t know why I should listen to her and I just wanted to go fast, so what happened was that she put the little bells on my shoes and that way I was free to roam and she could hear me as I ran ringing through the house. With a bad and fast baby like me, the really worrisome thing would be when the jingles stopped. One time, before she put the bells on to track me, I climbed a dresser, using the drawers like stairs. One time I took a door off its hinges. One time I picked up a wild baby rabbit before it had a chance to run. One time I ate a thermometer. If you let me onto your land, I might be very wild, and I will not be able to totally change myself, but you can always track me by the tinkle of my lively clamor.





My Mother

Last summer, toward the end of a long walk, my mother went to the side of the dirt road and showed me a plant. I am used to having a rhythm with her in which she shows me something interesting in nature or architecture, and it’s like a test: Do you know what it is? And it is very pleasing when I tell her what it is, and then we both enjoy that we both know.

Sometimes I don’t know, and she likes the situation of me being “stumped” and she likes that she does know and can tell me what she knows. This is also one of the first ways that I perceived power in another person: Information about art and nature feels like the best stuff to have, and if you have it, it is powerful and excellent to pass it on. That is an act of power, showing what you know, giving it to another person, realizing that as you spread it, you get to keep it but watch it grow, and by watching others have it, you learn new things about the original thing.

I told my mother that the flower she showed me was a honeysuckle. I knew from the little conical, trumpet-shaped blooms. She nodded and we both knew that we knew. She picked a flower off and smelled it. Then she gave it to me to smell, and I sniffed in its honey-floral petal cone. It smelled like a fancy candy, and even though I’d smelled honeysuckle before, its scent pleasure-stung me anew, and I laughed a bit and said, “Unbelievable.” She knew I was talking about the gentle shock you can feel about how straightforward nature is in its generosity, its dizzyingly intricate offerings.

I looked at my mother and asked her, “Do you want to smell it again?” But she shook her head and so I held the very small flower in my two hands and the position of my hands was like when Christian children say their bedtime prayers and I thought to start to try to make a prayer for this flower cone, but I also thought, This is what makes my mother my mother. She loves the flower and she wants me to know this flower, but she will only smell it once, and then give it to me for unlimited sniffing pleasure and she will be happy about it all.

I knew this to be true, and that the power of the flower had not just been its astounding smell or that I thought to create a prayer for it and consequently felt myself glow a bit, but that because of what happened between me and my mother and the small flower that we named and passed between us, my thoughts about how I saw her became an instantaneous prayer of gratitude and awe for her style of motherhood and unique humanity. And inside of myself, I knelt down in honor of this style of care that is her brand of nurturing, care that urges creativity and thinking, that is selfless and classy. It says, “The more you give, the more you have, the more new things you are a part of, the more you are truly alive.” I held the fragile flower and made my footsteps the same level of noise as hers so that I could be with her like we were one entity. We walked on toward our house.