Dandelion Bouquets

W.O.W.

10/14/2011

Television, of course, offers everyone the illusion of friends, more so now even than when Friends was in its heyday. That not being enough for some, Twitter now extends the illusion to actual followers. And while surely I’m not the first to have observed this, it doesn’t matter, because blogging has given me the illusion of readers. A temporary self-deceit, at best.

As my home page here attests, I still believe, however, that somebody is watching. And apparently Somebody sometimes sees when we might need a little encouragement in life. In my case, at least, and I hope everyone’s.

Such encouragement once came to me in the form of a dimpled high-school boy with thick brown hair. We’d gone to school together forever, and I still have some of our class pictures, documenting the abundant mane, the depths of those dimples.

By high school the dimpled boy was nowhere on my radar. I must have passed him in the hall a thousand times, and I’d like to think I at least nodded, but I really don’t remember.

Then, one day, as classes were changing, he stepped out of the crowd and stopped me in the hallway. He began introducing himself, and I interrupted to smile that of course I knew him, but he seemed to have no interest in reminiscing. Instead he mumbled: “We had to print business cards in Shop. I couldn’t think of anything, so I made you these.”

He handed me a long box and a small, red card. In black ink, it read:

KATHY HILL
WOMAN OF WONDER

I stood blinking. Me? A Woman? Of Wonder? The implied existence of an actual future AND unfathomed personal power? I had some questions for this boy.

But he didn’t want to know. He seemed to want to get away from me as fast as possible. Whereas I was charmed to the point that I’d have married him on the spot.

“There are five hundred of them” was all he would say instructively, before disappearing again into the crowd. Like the high-school girl I was, I prayed he was merely very shy and hadn’t been suddenly repulsed.

To this day that boy--who ducked me in the halls thereafter--has no idea of his impact on my life, how he shifted the choices I’d make and the way I thought about myself.

Patient, nonexistent reader, can you imagine? Can you imagine if EVERY girl at a crucial, still-tender age received such an inexplicable gift? If every boy could be assured he was a MAN of Wonder?

For the next few years, with some new acquaintance, I’d imperiously offer “my card,” staring straight-faced and then laughing.

But secretly my cherished cards and their unlikely message were far from a joke to me.

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Famous Almost-Last Words

9/18/2011

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I once walked in on a conversation about a woman who was afraid to go into a house said to be haunted.

“Ha!” I scoffed, no doubt charming all. “I wouldn’t be afraid! I’D stay in a haunted house ANYTIME.”

This, as you should know from the movies, is exactly the kind of thing you should never say. You don’t want to provoke the universe, kids, because -- trust me -- it hears you.

Within a year, I met a family who lived in a cool old farmhouse with a big barn. They were boarding my goats for awhile, so I’d pitch in with various chores from time to time. I’d muck the barn, no problem. Babysit, no problem. Take the kids on hikes with the goats, no problem.

Then -- you can see this coming -- they went on vacation. Asked me to house sit.

No problem, I said.

They had a huge, beautiful backyard, with a swimming pool surrounded by fruit trees and a soaring view. Have a party if you want while we’re gone, they said, no problem.

Cool, I said.

So on the first day, a perfect summer day, I had a beautiful party in that beautiful setting. Friends, and friends of friends, were everywhere -- grilling, swimming, relaxing. One couple even brought their pet birds, setting their cage up in a pear tree to eat the fruit. Everyone seemed perfectly content.

Until dusk came on, that is. Assuming you’re reasonably law-abiding, I doubt you’ve ever seen a party clear out as suddenly and completely as this one -- INSTANT exodus. Everyone there suddenly remembered something urgent they had to do, apparently anyplace else. And no, I hadn’t managed to somehow offend the entire crowd -- they’d been too spread out for a feat like that, even with my deft antisocial skills.

As if parties after dark were suddenly outlawed, they just left. Left the food, the grill, the pool, the private country setting with the spectacular view. Poof, party birds and all.

I stood there alone in a kitchen full of food wondering at the strange turn of . . . event. Had they seemed almost . . . scared? How could that be? I put the food away and in no time, it was dark.

When I went to bed that night, I found myself spontaneously adding to my usual routine. First, I used a nightlight. Second, I said prayers at the bedside, in a way I hadn’t since I was little.

And third, I didn’t sleep. Not for three whole nights.

Instead I kept watch as the bedroom door unlatched itself again and again -- no matter how firmly I closed it -- then swayed as if in a breeze. But there was no breeze. And the door was snug against thick carpeting. Yet sway it did. For three whole, sleepless nights. I went to work every morning as tired as I could be.

One evening, I sat reading. From the basement, right below my chair, came an impossibly loud crash. Yet there was no shaking, my chair didn’t move. I somehow understood it couldn’t have been real -- nothing in something even the size of that entire house could have made a sound as loud as what I’d just heard.

Now, I shook bodily for some time, but I knew enough -- again from the movies: DON’T GO INTO THE BASEMENT. I didn’t care what the family might find down there when they got back. I knew it'd happened but ignored the whole thing.

By the fourth night and after, I slept. There seemed some kind of acceptance, a mutual peace. Maybe it was all the prayers. Maybe “they” just got used to me.

When the family came home, with a nice little gift for my services, the mother asked me, “So, ah, did you have any, ah, spirit activity?”

I stared at her. “Whyyy . . . ?”

“Oh, ha ha, didn’t we mention the house is haunted? We told you that, right?” She and her husband blinked at each other. ("Is she buying it?") “Oh, I was sure we did. . . .”

I was sure you DIDN’T.

Then, for twenty minutes, they cheerily related a long series of ghostly encounters from their years in that house. All the ghosts were peaceable, they said, even rocking the baby sometimes at night.

And thus the universe turned the tables on me and my little boast. Fair enough.

And as for the couple, I did get them back. It wasn’t deliberate -- they hadn’t told me not everyone was in on the state of things at their address.

On our next goat hike, I was curious. I asked their kids, “So, how do you like living in a haunted house?”

“WHAT?” they said, suddenly bug-eyed.

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Fire Extinguisher

9/9/2011

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Amid the percolating chaos, there was a lot of emphasis in my family on toeing the line. It could all get very boring and made for a lot of unnecessary issues over the years. It would have been easier had they let us kids see that our individual “spiritedness” had a history.

But no, you had to catch them in the act.

Long ago now, my grandmother rented part of her triplex to a wizened lady much older than herself. It was always quiet over there, except when the woman’s grandson was out of prison. And since he was always in prison for the same reason--arson--my grandmother felt a justification and an urgency about keeping track of this decidedly low-brow young man.

As it turned out, she was adding her own special flare to the mission.

On more than one afternoon, I discovered my grandmother dialing the telephone and giggling. There would follow a barreling rumble from the other side of the wall, traveling the length of the house. Just as it stopped, she’d hang up, by then gut-laughing as silently as she could manage. Through the wall there’d be a groan, the sound of a phone slamming down, then another long rumble in the opposite direction.

Uh, Gram . . . whatcha doin’?

There have been casualties in today’s world of infinite apps, things you just can’t do anymore because of everything you can do. Case in point: my grandmother knew that whenever his grandmother was away, the young con-arsonist would “entertain” a girlfriend upstairs. Unfortunately for the amorous couple, the walls were thin enough that my grandmother would always know the exact worst moment to place a call--to the only telephone in their apartment. Downstairs.

Amazingly, whenever the phone rang, the not-so-grand son would extricate himself from his audible activity (excusing himself, one hopes) and run downstairs to answer it. Every time, despite the innumerable previous hangups. And--possibly addled by sexual frustration--he never once thought to accuse the old landlady next door.

Whenever someone remarks that prisons aren’t filled with criminals so much as they are with the stupid, I think of that guy.

And of how many fun-filled afternoons he unknowingly gave my grandmother.

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The Talk

9/3/2011

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Some other mothers on our block--the cowards--elected mine to enlighten their daughters about sex, the Big Secret that defined being in the know in those days. I’d been bugging Mom to spill the beans on the mystery for a long time, because whatever it was, it was causing gaggles of giggling girls (sorry) to torment us clueless types (well, me) in the school bathroom. But my mother had said no, my sister was still too young. Insensitive to my outcast status, she intended to have the conversation as infrequently as possible--apparently even if it meant renting a hall.

Finally, one summer afternoon, we were gathered around Mom at our kitchen table--several neighbor girls, my sister and I, the last people on the planet not to know. Ever the charmer, I delayed the moment by whining mightily that since I’d had to wait so-ooo long, my sister should be required to leave the room, shut her ears tight, and stay in the dark until she reached my age as of that day. And not a day sooner.

Hmph. Overruled.

But I was proud of my mother for being the brave one in the neighborhood, and I felt a little sorry for the girls who weren’t learning it from their own moms, hiding in their own kitchens. That is, until my mother got started. Whatever great news she was building up to, something about men and women (and even I’d gathered that much), she was telling us--more often than necessary, it seemed to me--that something, no matter how disgusting it was going to sound at first, felt really, really good. Really good. She was transported, her face taking on a look I did not recognize and did not want to see again--especially not with my friends around.

Feeling? Good? Mom, please . . . the entire concept of a woman feeling good in that era began and ended with a TV commercial for bath salts. Besides, why couldn’t the various repressions I’d been dutifully enduring from her be a two-way street? But no, there she sat, regaling the gaping neighbor girls and my cheater sister. My mother, out of control.

Finally, out she came with the briefest possible specifics.

“I knew it! I knew it!” I yelled. I hopped up to get in neighbor-girl faces, strong-arming my hapless witnesses into assenting to this vital fact, which so obviously overshadowed the actual revelation itself. Attempting to relate how I’d come to form my brilliant if unvoiced best guess, I conjured my TV-black-and-white mental image of how a man and a woman--doubtless in some bare, 1950s hotel room--could walk naked toward each other. Note if you please, neighbor girls, the aligning positive and negative spaces, so that, if they kept walking . . .

But no-ooo, apparently only my mother was allowed to talk about it--and she was done talking.

If only I’d been confident enough to have posited my theory in the school bathroom, but again, no. Beyond the obvious social risks, being wrong would have posed a graver danger: giving the world an idea that people would otherwise never have thought of on their own.

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Pre-Internet Innocence

8/26/2011

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Poor luck for the optimist/schmuck who one day called the phone booth that usually sat silent in our high school hallway. A survey about our cafeteria food, you say? Boy, bub, good thing for you that I answered . . .

Leading with the fact that I never actually ate the cafeteria food, I kept that schmo on the phone for at least 45 minutes, ranting away on such urgent topics as the horrors of Beef Pinwheel -- a cafeteria standard about which, fortunately for him, I had a whole theory.

But why stop there? I had opinions for days in those days, and he -- the dope -- sat through them all. A partial list of my usual complaints back then involved enforced pep rallies, enforced typing class, enforcement in general, and the dearth of vegetarian options.

And did you know they keep us trapped in here ALL DAY?

Eventually Mr. Lucky interrupted with a sigh. “Don’t you have any goodie-goodies I can talk to?”

What?

“You know, good girls.”

Oh man, I assured him, there are tons of ’em in here.

“Let me talk to one,” he said.

The halls were filling as classes changed. I stretched the phone receiver temptingly outside the booth, pointing at random girls I didn’t know. “Some guy wants to talk to you.” They veered away from me as they passed.

I went back to the phone. “They don’t want to talk to you.”

Deciding finally to make do with what he had, he let loose with something smutty.

More surprised than I cared to let on, I screamed a laugh into the phone just to split his ears a little and hung up. Then I went looking for another audience, possibly even to class.

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Tooth Fairy Princess

8/15/2011

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And so (continuing from my previous post) I went to bed that night with a record cache of baby teeth under my pillow and accordingly high expectations for the Tooth Fairy. You’ll think I only dreamt what happened next, but I know better.

I was asleep, when suddenly my father appeared at the foot of my bed. He was somehow a smaller version of himself by at least a foot; he was also uncharacteristically . . . happy. Tweaking my big toe through the blanket, he whispered urgently, “Wake up, wake up! There’s someone here to see you.”

And I woke up right then, no question.

I turned my head toward the hallway and into the doorway slowly stepped a glowing fairy princess of full, adult height. She was dressed very much like Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz, with a smaller crown. She held a wand that went all the way to the floor. She seemed to be made of light and sparkled from head to foot, and I could see through her.

As my father smiled and retreated, I lay there gaping at -- well, who else could it be but the Tooth Fairy? Apparently she’d make herself known for a high roller like me, when it was a matter of multiples under the pillow.

She turned to face me, and spoke, directly to me. But something was wrong. Just as with the schoolboy’s scribbling, I couldn’t understand what she was saying. She continued on, talking rapidly in some kind of language, or level of my language, that was completely beyond me. I lay perfectly still for some minutes, trying and failing to grasp even a word.

It pains me still to recall what happened next.

I (ouch) spoke.

“What did you bring me?”

Instant regret.

The presumed Tooth Fairy startled, looking at me as if seeing me for the first time. Without another word, she turned into the hallway and floated out of sight.

I was mortified. Selfish, selfish!

And when -- after a rough night of self-recrimination -- I found two dollars (a veritable fortune then) under my pillow, it might as well have been blood money to me.

I’d have given anything, for many years, to have been able to take those child’s words back. People have suggested since that she might have been some kind of well-dressed spirit guide, there by coincidence, communicating with my “higher self,” some part of me that would have understood had I been, as she may have assumed, asleep. Maybe so. All I know is that I understand why people talk about their inner child, or used to. Sometimes it’s the only way to contemplate forgiveness for yourself. Because how many chances are you going to get to say “sorry” to somebody like that?

Yet there was more that night: whoever she was, seconds after she disappeared, a beautiful ball of gentle white light floated in from the hallway, crossing slowly in front of me and out through the wall. I knew it was her.

It's possible she wasn't even angry with me at all.

Of course, being six or so, I immediately jumped out of bed and ran to my parents’ room, shouting for my father. “She was here! She was here! The Tooth Fairy was here!” But my father, not happy to see let alone hear me, had somehow contracted amnesia. His brief happy-go-lucky personality had disappeared, and he had the crazy idea I’d just had a dream.

“But you were there -- you woke me up! You saw her before I did!” I insisted.

I’m pretty sure we both shook our heads over each other for a few days after that. If not a few years.

I was conscious that time, I swear.

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First Love

8/15/2011

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Sometimes I try to imagine what my parents must have thought about everything they had to put up with. Especially when I remember -- and get a chance to regale some sweet-hearted, fairy-princess-loving little girl with -- this tale. And I swear every word of it is, to my best ability, true.

The story of this day ends with a fairy princess alright, but it starts with a baboon. The kind with the bright red behind that is just too much for some kids to take -- a primate who would have had a very hard time of it in grade school, let’s just say.

Well, I’d hopped in the car for a very special, unexpected, get-out-of-school, go-out-with-Mom-and-her-best-friend trip to the ZOO.

Yay!

Of course, I wound up at the dentist. Curses, foiled again.

And what a trip it was. Apparently I was a bad little brusher, as the dentist and his minion came at me with that smelly mask and -- continuing our developing theme -- knocked me out cold.

Ha. That’s what they thought.

Alone, I wandered in a technicolor nightmare, walking amid weird horizontal lines like an old television on the fritz. Lost, terrified, trying to think what to do. Finally, the only answer came.

I took a big breath and screamed with everything I had.

Cleared the waiting room, they said.

That was nothing compared to what I dished out to the “big liar,” my mom, once I escaped. Don’t know if they really had planned on a zoo outing after all that, but boy, we went.

How anyone touring a 1960s zoo -- and seeing what passed for “creature comforts” back then -- could have stayed in a funk of self-pity, I now wonder.

Then I saw, sitting inside the bars of a sorry cement pen, a baboon, who clearly had more to complain about than I. I had run ahead, and so the baboon and I were alone. We regarded each other awhile, and then somehow he (or she, I never knew) let me know we could play. I’d do something silly and she (or he) would copy me. Wiggly, waving little girl hands, wiggly, waving baboon hands. Jumping little girl, jumping baboon. Astounding! Joy! Connection. Heart.

Sudden, completely new understanding of a fellow creature, and through him or her, all of them, all of us. If my mother hadn’t finally dragged me away I never would have left that baboon, my new friend, on my own.

As you likely know, when you pay attention, animals show you how deep your heart is, how deep love goes, until you realize it’s bottomless.

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Back to School

8/4/2011

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One advantage of a wandering mind is its availability for less-conventional input. Such as the time I sat in high-school English class and found myself slipped into a rushing recollection, accidentally recapturing another “iconic” moment.

I had just died. Seconds before, I had been in the midst of some passionate struggle, my heart given over in a fevered intensity. Something really mattered ...

But as I entered a peaceful, enveloping mist, I suddenly remembered an entirely different reality. All at once, something else really mattered ...

“I can explain everything!” I shouted at whoever would hear. But I knew it was hopeless -- I had already had the lesson of the mist, in some other in-between, and I’d gone down there and forgotten. Again.

I had killed, again. Wrong.

But it was really important, I argued feebly. We were fighting for our freedom. I tried to convey the hell down there, of not living free.

It could not have mattered less to those in charge. There were no excuses, no arguments, no exonerating clauses.

It was back to Mist-ery School for me, before yet another try.

Years later, a psychic told me that in a recent life, I’d lived in Haiti, where I and others had stormed a government building, fighting for our freedom. I’d killed, she said, and was killed in return.

I’m sure you’re right, I told her.

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"Bonnie"

7/31/2011

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Possibly you’ve picked up on this, but socially I had a rough start. I was stone bald for my first few years, long enough to get my baby self a nice little complex. And my ears stuck out. So there were years of teasing.

But there was also this problem: no one would call me by my name. I’d follow my mother around asking, “What’s my name again? How do you spell it?” (Not that I could write yet -- apparently I was thinking ahead.)

The inevitable, inexplicable, impatient answer was: “Your name is Kathy, but we call you Bonnie.”

Bonnie? Somehow I knew it wasn’t the name I’d contracted for when I made my whirling portal entrance not that long before. My parents insisted “Bonnie” was a nickname for my given name (though I’ve never since met anyone who’d heard that). Thus I grew up with the mistaken notion that we were part Irish.

I hated the name Bonnie because it wasn’t mine, but also because it caused a father in our neighborhood to bellow out, “My BON-nie lies O-ver the O-cean . . .” whenever he saw me. I loathed that so-called song, which only made him bellow it more. I’d scream and flee, too young to adopt a protective indifference.

By kindergarten I was on a personal campaign to banish Bonnie and be called -- was it too much to ask? -- by my actual name. My efforts eventually worked, except with the bellowing neighbor -- and my quirky grandfather, who called me the somehow far less offensive “Benny” until he died.

Anyway, by the early days of my inadvertent career I was a ripe little mess, who saw the working world as a chance to meet new and interesting (ideally non-teasing) friends. And by far the most interesting, even fascinating, new friend in my sights was named Debbie.

Debbie was younger than I was, married with two little children. This alone amazed me, because she seemed completely unfazed by these accomplishments.

I impressed Debbie right from my first day, when I overheard her say she’d fallen asleep watching a movie the night before, missing the ending. The movie was Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? -- which, fortunately for her, I’d stayed up for.

I presented myself at Debbie’s cubicle with a big smile over her good news. And with many a dramatic, bug-eyed flourish, I reenacted the entire ending then and there. She politely tried to stop me, but I kept on, insisting it was no problem and really worth it to her.

Debbie was casually one of the funniest people I’d ever met. Her mother, Doris, worked in the same office, and the two were like a comedy team. They told the story of Debbie’s birth, how a panicky intern had tried to hold Doris’s legs together until the doctor could get there. After a pause for effect, Debbie rubbed her head thoughtfully.

“To this day I can’t wear hats,” she said.

I loved those two, and I was determined to make Debbie my friend. But it wasn’t to be. She was too busy to hang out, she told me, between the job, the kids, the husband. Now I’d gotten married myself recently, though I hadn’t planned on it affecting my social calendar, but I let it go and continued to admire Debbie from relatively afar.

That immediate fascination with someone was unusual for me, but in this case it turned out to be just the thing, possibly even hereditary. Because one day, Doris, who’d (somehow . . .) never been especially interested in me, came in to work looking as if she’d seen a ghost. And, in a way, she had.

She approached me and stared.

“Ah, hey, listen . . . did you by any chance ever go by the name Bonnie, maybe when you were little?”

She looked faint when I told her I had. How did she know?

Still in shock, Doris told me that she’d once been my mother’s best friend. She said that my mother -- who’d died 15 years earlier -- had somehow kept her up nearly all the night before, whispering excitedly to her about me. “That’s Bonnie!” she’d said, again and again. “It’s Bonnie!”

Doris then revealed a glossy, page-sized photograph. In it, she and her new husband were running down church steps, dodging the classic hail of rice. And there, in the crowd that lined the steps, was my mother, beaming in a shimmering dress.

Doris let me make a copy, and I have it still.

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A Question of Good

7/21/2011

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I made a mental note of my first “sin” and my age at the time: eight. I’d looked across the street at the house of a troublesome girl my age and spontaneously whispered, “Bitch.” (Had I only thought the word -- thoughts were so hard to rein in, they couldn’t possibly count -- I might have given myself a pass.)

I considered myself blameless for anything that might have occurred previously. With that forbidden word, I’d turned a corner, my path was chosen. I would go forth and live my life an acknowledged sinner.

What I was really acknowledging was the futility of trying to remain pure in this lifetime, the expanse of time ahead being just too great, too uncertain. Who’d know some moment wouldn’t simply require a sin? There had to be some leeway, some room for discussion.

I’d just have to take my chances.

It would be a lifetime before I’d realize I never really freed myself, never abandoned my quest for personal innocence. Consciously or subconsciously, I’ve always wanted to leave this weird world either slightly better than I found it or at least unharmed, nothing broken, no mess that could be traced back to me. I just hid from that self-expectation, regardless of any evidence before me.

Of course, I didn’t hide it that well from anybody else.

When Billy Matthews sat next to me on the low wall that bordered my front yard and asked if he could kiss me, while the other kids hid and peeped, giggling, I wondered too. Can he kiss me? Am I old enough -- at ten -- for such things?

Our audience -- and Billy -- seemed to expect an instant answer. How would I know? It was certainly a good question, something I’d want clarified for future reference.

“Let me go ask my mother,” I said. “Be right back.”

I left Billy gaping and ran to the house. By the time I got to my front door, the yard was a roar of jeering little onlookers, Billy shrugging at them in disbelief.

“Can you what?!” my mother said. “No you cannot! Where is he?”

You had to give the guy credit for still being out there. The other kids, of course, weren’t going to miss it for anything.

Billy hung in sheepishly for his scolding, as the other kids mocked me openly. He, understandably, never asked again.

It didn’t really bother me. I had my answer, and it was good to know.

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W.O.W.

Famous Almost-Last Words

Fire Extinguisher

The Talk

Pre-Internet Innocence

Tooth Fairy Princess

First Love

Back to School

"Bonnie"

A Question of Good

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