Memoir and Interiority
In which I discuss fragments, internal musings, flashbacks, and the metaphorical/physical movement from East to West.
“Fragments” is one of the most important words in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and in my own memoir. My memoir proceeds by way of fragments of memory, anecdotes and stories pieced together through time and retro-/introspection.
“These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
About a year after my brother and my father-in-law died, I lost my job in Kansas. No, it’s wasn’t one of those “ooops, where’d it go?” moments of misplacement. I was fired, unduly so, in a conspiracy at least 6 months in the making. In deciding what to do next, my ex- suggested we move to California, further away from her mother in Virginia and much closer to my own in Los Angeles. Both of our mothers were widows at that point. We settled on San Diego, the place where my ex- found a job first.
In telling the story of moving West, I take the opportunity to describe the changing landscape, from the golden fields of Kansas wheat, freshly harvested to the yellowing cottonwoods along the Rio Grande south of Albuquerque, to the dry warm deserts of Tucson, Arizona. For me, it was a psychic move back home, to the West where I am originally from. I wasn’t moving back to my hometown or into my childhood home, but as a child of the West, my homing beacon was on. I had lived in San Diego for three semester while finishing college, so I had a bit of familiarity with that sleepy city, even though it had been 20 years before.
At the time, I had some motion sickness and a strange sense of vertigo. I tried to drive the large truck we rented to tow our Rav4 and haul what belongings we had remaining after selling almost everything. But I didn’t feel comfortable driving that big truck without going at a turtle’s pace. So my ex drove the truck the whole way. I was normally the driver, so I took this opportunity to gaze at all the scenery I had driven through many times before and to think on where my life had been and where it was going.
So traveling West also provided me the opportunity to travel deeper into my own psyche about our life, about my life.
Chapter 18 - In the Violet Hour depicts our physical move from Ozawkie, Kansas to San Diego, California, a 3 1/2 day drive in a big yellow Ryder moving truck, towing our black Rav4 on a tow dolly.
I describe the landscape I witness in our movement westward, as familiar to me as the veins in my hands. The descriptions alternates with flashback, a different kind of travel - traveling back in time of my memory - to capture how we got to this moment in time, our life uprooted, the spiral of tragedies beginning to circle into the monstrous vortex it will become.
This alternation, between exterior physical description and the inner workings of my mindscape, covers miles, those charted on the physical road and those uncharted within my memory. This is a conscious writing technique similar to Steinbeck’s intercalary chapters in The Grapes of Wrath, as the Joad family moves from Oklahoma to California.
In The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr writes, “Carnality may determine whether a memoir’s any good, but interiority—that kingdom the camera never captures—makes a book rereadable. . . . Interiority moves us through the magic realms of time and truth, hope and fantasy, memory, feelings ideas, worries. Emotions you can’t show carnally are told. Whenever a writers gets reflective about how she feels or complains or celebrates or plots of judges, she moves inside herself to where things matters and mean” (pp. 91-92).
Interiority here pins, like a wriggling butterfly, exactly where I am in my life. The external elements (passenger in a vehicle, witness to the landscape, moving from east to west, moving homeward, jobless, a year after my father-in-law’s death, 6 months after my father’s death, a year after my brother’s suicide) serve as counterpoint to the interior life that I’m trying to keep alive, that I catalogue. It was also my birthday. We arrived in San Diego the day before my birthday so that my first full day home in southern California was on my birthday. Of course, I didn’t know then I would be writing about these events - but they all merge together in a confluence of meaning.
I have not set up a paywall, but in order for me to continue to offer content for my memoir, I encourage you to support my work as I seek to build an audience for traditional publication. Thank you so much for your support.
Here is a selection from Ch. 18 - In the Violet Hour. Enjoy.
18 – At the violet hour
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song (l. 183)
On a winter evening round behind the gashouse
Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck
And on the king my father’s death after him (lines 190-192)I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and bring the sailor home from sea (lines 218-221)
These fragments . . .
The truck bounced in every pothole, the late summer repairs necessary preparation for the hard plains winters after the buzz of cicadas had died away. We slowly inched toward California, middle-aged, starting over, nowhere near having a life better than our parents. Both of our families had flown too close to the sun.
* * * * *
Lynn refused to officiate my wedding with Kathy, wanted to counsel us beforehand, didn’t approve of our living together for five years before marriage, said he couldn’t attend the wedding because Jody was eight months pregnant. It sounded like excuses. He sent his oldest, his teenaged daughter Anna, to represent the family. His rejection occurred only a few months before his first suicide attempt.
In my earliest memoires, my grandmother bragged that she would dance at my wedding. When the time came, she was in a wheelchair. My parents worked, and Gramie Charlotte was my caregiver until I was seven. She was also the most unstable person in our family, notoriously difficult and petulant, a valium addict. During the reception, she wheeled herself to the dance floor and stood up. “I’m ready for my dance,” she announced in her best Norma Desmond. Everyone gasped. I swayed with her three times before she whispered in my ear, “Put me down.” Everyone clapped. A month after I moved to Kansas, Gramie Charlotte died. I found out three days afterwards on a routine call home. I told Dad I’d fly home immediately. “No, son,” Dad said, “Your mother is having a hard time and doesn’t want you to come home.” I stared at the mirror, trying to grieve, trying to understand why my eyes were dry.
My mother’s cousin, Jimmy, called me a few months after the wedding, “Jeff’s on the run again. If he asks for your address, give him directions to Timbuktu.” I called my mother, “Mom, what does that mean, ‘Jeff’s on the run again’?” Mom explained that Jeff was having a breakdown, an out-of-shape 36-year-old man traveling across the country trying to wrestle his way into the Olympics. It was a repeat of a breakdown he had in college in which he shot his dog, made his roommate get on the floor while he held a shotgun to his back and then peed on him and stole his wallet. He robbed gas from a gas station. The authorities finally caught him at the Atascadero State Mental Hospital, sitting on his truck, shooting out the parking lot lights.
My brother, Gramie Charlotte, and cousin Jeff inextricably tied to me during the first few months at the start of my 14 years in Kansas.
* * * * *
We didn’t stop much. We no longer ate cheap diner food and didn’t need to stop for smoke breaks as I had quit smoking three weeks before I was fired. It was smooth turnpike until Wichita and then two-lane SR-54 and the barren landscape and the dust and tumbleweeds in the panhandles blowing across the road and shaking the truck. We rolled up the windows before we passed the slaughterhouses, the gagging stench, the cows crammed together lowing in the stalls, tricked to get in line as if for an amusement park ride. The yellow sun dipped near the horizon covered by wispy clouds in the big Southwestern sky. Construction zones closed lanes, three curved arrows diverting us onto temporary spans so crews could build bridges and washes. Flagmen stopped traffic while a pilot car led one line of cars one way and then the other, slowing our forward progress . . .
* * * * *
After a leave of absence following my divorce and moving in with QT, I returned to teaching and shared an office with Mary, another Ph.D. student. I returned home a little late one night after grading. QT pounced, “Who is Mary? Are you fucking her?” I was dismayed, having never crossed those boundaries with any co-workers or students. “No, QT. Where is this coming from?” The jealous fights began.
* * * * *
I Tiresias, throbbing between two wives …
The move took three and a half days. The diagonal through the panhandles was long. We rode from southern Kansas to Tucumcari on autopilot, the slow fifty-five mile per hour road flat and sparse, gas fields and cow pens, dust and tumbleweeds, the wind never stopping. I searched the horizon for the mountain with the big T on it rising from the plains floor. At Tucumcari, we turned due west, a straight shot into Albuquerque.
Albuquerque was filled with memories of Kathy for me, where we lived for five years and cultivated a devotion to green chiles, the Frontier restaurant, and Sadie’s Nw Mexican food. But it had become customary for QT and me to stop in Albuquerque on our travels, a ritual through the scenic landscape paralleling old Route 66.
I-40 into Albuquerque is lined with pines and scrub bushes, scrabbled rock of the hills, shacks on the side of the road with old pickups in the yards, here and there new construction, elaborate getaway houses away from the city, rattlesnakes in the yards during summer, coyotes howling at night. We grew closer to the land I know, California sharing more with the desert southwest than the desert southwest shares with the panhandles and plains. Where is the line of demarcation, what denotes the change from one landscape to another - in my mind, on the earth - in this act of westering . . .
* * * * *
One night we’re heading to bed and she’s taking some time getting there. I wrapped myself in a towel in case Denise was snooping from the loft and saw QT at the kitchen sink sneaking a drink . . .
“QT, if you want to have a drink, you can. You’re an adult. I’m not Butch or your father.” We’ve started this refrain already, learned in counseling. “I’m not your father” is code for when she’s arguing about something with me, but she’s really arguing against the paternal control of her childhood. It takes the counselor and me time to unravel all the thoughts like a knotted ball of itchy twine to distinguish what ghosts she’s fighting vs. what’s going on in the present, which is different from how things went with Butch #2 who didn’t like her drinking and worked long hours and ignored her most of the time, so she said, and then it took some time to figure out that she wasn’t hiding from me, it was just plain hiding, because that’s what alcoholics do, and I poured all the liquor out one night when she was hiding her drinking again and she looked on unapproving and said, “that’s such a waste.”
* * * * *
I Tiresias, throbbing between . . .
* * * * *
I had no feeling for San Diego. QT drove the whole way, and I lost myself in the scenery and in my thoughts. After the last mountain ridge, I-8 Kumeyaay highway from Alpine was a downhill glide over graded foothills into San Diego, rolling hill after rolling hill, like one of those giant, beach racing slides. We would reach the Pacific Ocean with the setting sun.
It had been 20 years since I had lived in San Diego. We passed my alma mater on the left, San Diego State. My life had changed since I had graduated. Lynn and Dad were dead, Gramie was dead, Gramps and Irene were dead. Mom was ill. Kansas had gotten into my blood and I felt a bit resentful, at the divorce, the abandoned degrees, getting fired, the constant fighting and inept counseling, the interference for my grieving--Mary erasing Lynn’s message on the answering machine, mom not wanting me to come home for Gramie’s funeral, not being able to wake Dad and say goodbye in the hospital, and not being given the choice to see Scout.
In the last couple of years, before Lynn’s death started this spiral, I had found some peace. QT and I had found a way to balance our fetish explorations and the rest of our lives. I had discovered a peace that I hadn’t known before, when I rode the lawn mower in the late summer heat and lined up the rows on the grass, or when I watched the birds in the birdhouses with my binoculars from the window or even on that cold night when we cut down a cypress for our Christmas tree. Now that peace was disturbed. and I didn’t know what I was heading toward, as if the horizon shifted over every hill so that I could never catch sight far enough down the road.
Along this desert highway, something unsettled rode along with me. It had been just over a year since my brother had jumped, but I still sensed his pacing presence in the woods behind our house. His way was not my way.
But what was my way? I didn’t know how to find my way except to know that I was going home, or close enough, Southern California. I never thought I’d return. It was time for something new, a new adventure, a new life near the beach, near the ocean. QT was ready, we both were ready for a change. I had always believed that together we could do anything.
QT drove into town, red brake lights glowing as we entered the suburbs of El Cajon, La Mesa, and then San Diego proper. As we got closer to our new home, she looked over at me with a calm, sure smile on her face.
Tomorrow, when we awakened in our new apartment, the promise of a new start in a new city, it would be my birthday. My smile concealed the trembling fear deep within. Without a job, 42 years old, starting over again after years of fighting, I had never before been this scared in my life.
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Fall is here and the rain is back in Seattle. The days are still mild though colder air is on its way. Wherever you are, bundle up and take time for the loved ones in your life.
As for me, I’ll . . .
Just keep writing!