Just under two more years before I'm dead*. *(physically. The spiritually and emotionally ships are already sailed.) Just under two more years to become something less an asshole. It's not looking too promising.
I have fond memories of childhood, some. Wearing bathing suits under church clothes and then going to the beach directly after. Sitting in the back-back of the station wagon and looking at a disappearing world. Being outside summer nights, mesmerized by my long shadow under the streetlight, moving deliberately from light to light just to watch it elongate and then shorten again. How tall could I become? Catching fireflies at our cousins house. Going to the apple orchard in the fall to pick apples and get fresh squeezed cider. Watching the machine through the long display window making it. Ice skating in the winter. Playing with neighborhood kids and the mystery of their parents. Lots of football in the street. Hanging out at the creek. It was a different generation, we went out in the morning and came home for dinner, largely unsupervised in between. It wasn't rural, it was suburbs, generic. Lots of memories with my brothers, fewer with my parents; still some were good.
I was a sickly kid. I threw up a lot and there were many long nights of diarrhea, now a single memory. Me on the toilet, my father sitting opposite me in his robe, waiting. Never my mother. In later years I realized he'd had to get up the next morning to go to work, sleepless. Waiting for my ass to explode and empty one last time for the night to wrap.
I'd had exploratory surgery as an infant to determine the source of my heart murmur. I'd be in my late fifties before my father ever told me he'd had a similar issue and spent 6 months in bed one year in his youth. I asked him what came of it. He said he got bored and got up.
But the childhood trauma also happened, the bookends of it and all the moments in between. Is one stronger than the other? I carry both, equally. I think.
I have a Venn Diagram of stories with a blank space in the convergence field. The absence of any productive life choice whatsoever leaves plenty of time to parse the various sets in search of the sum: me. I've never had any idea who I am. Does anyone or am I just laden with narcissism? Still. What am I, if anything, beyond the summation of two sets of genes? Is there a me that isn't them? I want to know.
I've been trying to know for years. It is my life's diligence. The one. So that for years I excavate and examine, turning over every scrap for a clue, over and over until I find the singular shard that fits into the next fragment. Many fragments, the work is painstaking, and sometimes it pays off. Like the year I learned everything. That one is in a museum, it's a magnificent find.
I've carried through my life two activities, painting and riding a bike. And because I live solely to parse the depths of my naval of course that this is is its own curiosity. What of my arrested development hung onto these two items for the duration? Why, what did they do for me that I had to keep them?
I've told the story before. One day deciding I would learn to ride the bike. I have no memory of bike prior to this day. I carry no lineage towards it. Did I ride a bike previously with training wheels? Did I WANT to ride the bike?
I was four years old. It was in the garage. It belonged to one or both of my older brothers. It rested against the wall. I don't recall them ever riding it. I do recall staring at it. I don't recall what I thought while doing that. I don't recall having a single concept of what riding a bike was. But I would stand still and look at it. I would do this more than one day, one moment. I would do this. And then, one day, no idea why, it would be that day. Had I asked to be taught how to do that and turned down? Was I jealous of watching them riding it and being left out? No idea. Me staring at the bike against the wall.
How did I even know what to do, how to start? I remember going back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the house. I fell, more than once. A knee bled, something between a scrape and a gash. I ran inside, my mother put on a band-aid, I went back outside and continued the task. I learned to ride that bike that day.
And then no memory more. Not for years. About 10 of them before the Sears Free Spirit. Which I asked for, and maybe even chose? Or did I ask for a bike and it was a Christmas gift? Again, missing pieces of memory. What made me ask for it?
We'd just moved from the east coast to California, circa 1975. The bike racks in front of the school were many and laden. It was definitely to ride to school, so maybe I was simply taking my cue. I recall no problem reconnecting with how to ride it; it was like riding a bicycle. But I didn't just ride it to school, I rode it. Something now understood it could be used beyond the utilitarian. Or maybe what was utilitarian shifted. What are now condos were then lemon fields, and riding through them was magnificent. Winding around, connecting roads and dots, first generation shards. I still love doing this. With roads and my naval. Poking around to see how things connect. Discovery is a payoff. Stupidly satisfying.
Four years old, the year of the first bookend of the trauma I would never shake. I disconnected that day, unanchored. I stopped. It was the day I knew I was not in a safe space, no one had my back. Which came first that year, the trauma or the bike?
I am 61 years old. And maybe I will die in just over two more. I want to finish things, just in case. I want to be able to lay down, finally, in a way I never got to live. I want to know things of a life mostly unknown. Like what, if anything, I might be separate from their collective 50%'s, and why, in this stumble through a mostly failed life, was I driven to carry with me the two items I did, painting and bike.
Connecting shards is careful and painstaking, this is not the stuff of haste. Was the bike the first time I understood my own autonomy, me separate from the collective 50%, me as me? The bike, like painting would come to be, would evolve into the space I got to be me-as-me. Didn't know it then, still learning it now, but something held onto it, something smarter than I ever got around to being. And made sure that space would be bookmarked for me to breathe and exist, outside, beyond, the genetic nightmare.
