Running in the Family

The following mix of thoughts and visions and images was inspired by Michael Ondaatje's book "Running in the Family". I've started using things I'm reading to inspire writing excercises. The following written material is basically an excercise to re-invoke the past. To see the more essay-like impression I had of Michael Ondaatje's work, go here.

There is a file in my drawer that I haven't looked at since last year. I've been holding off. I don't know how to approach family history. I come from Sweden, Ireland, Scotland, Bavaria, and Croatia. How can I try to understand those pages that describe my lineage, linking me, this piecemeal American to those distant parts. I can still recall the brittle dried out thistles, feel them scraping on dry skin in the summer and smell the grit of dust that would rise up from our driveway when my dad raced his pick-up home after a long day of work. Inside, he'd unhinge his feet from his work-boots and strip off his faded blue jeans to go wash off engine grease from his hands in the downstairs sink before stepping into the shower. I could hear him blow his nose, even through the sound of running water, from the kitchen. The summer in Spokane has always been both maddening in its boredom and glorious for its piercing hot days and warm nights that enable you to scavenge through the woods for ghosts in the shadows. In the summer, one always knows that hidden stickers might cling to your toes in the grass if you step too absent-mindedly with bare-feet, stabbing pain into the nerves like a hidden insult. I remember waking up so early one morning at 4:30am. I couldn't sleep and I couldn't yet play the piano because I would wake up my parents. I decided to go watch the sunrise through the pine trees in the front of my house, sitting on the cool cement walkway. The colors of the sky in Spokane are crystal tones that cut like razors over your eyes. The light there flares so crisp it haunts.

But I only remember in faded colors. Distant as fog makes things seem. I only remember through gauze. With each new memory, a thin sheath of gauze rolls across the others, placing them back, back into a hall of mummified imagery, sounds, smells, and the numb feelings that belong to them. The things my mom used to say that would make me angry have shriveled into dead corpses wrapped under layers and layers. To say she was and/or is that way limits her, makes her real, makes her true, and bred of nightmares. Give us the stock footage of natural disasters, and we'll make mummies out of them. But with the colors, the vivid colors, I long to lift the veils. All of them. Spin the reel.

I tried to paint my Dad's Cessna 210 in Arizona. The crinkle of the red-rock in the background looks like toothpaste plastered onto papier mache. I'm no Michaelangelo. And regardless of how juvenile my painting appears, I know what it is and for whatever reason, it lifts something up from the recess. Dad, the pilot, the man who rarely failed to remember about testing for water in the gas and yelling "CLEAR PROP," or filling up the cabin with the smell of lysol, from cleaning both the inside and outside of the wind-shield. Up we went. Lifted out of Newman Lake, Washington, out of the Spokane Valley following South along the Snake River towards Boise, eventually Reno, then Las Vegas, Death Valley, and at last, Arizona. The houses were mere pebbles from so high up. Scabs on a cross-section of divvied up land. I would count the pools and dream of which house I would live in some day, or pick which house in each of the neighborhoods was my favorite. I'd point out the biggest, most ornate buildings to anyone of my family members who would listen, usually this was Grandma, although she was hard of hearing. And the noise of the prop often blotted out any communication anyway. We learned to thrust our voices over and beyond the decibel threshold of the engine and make our thoughts heard, our needs met. Powerbars. Mom brought bulk Costco-boxes of Powerbars and when the hunger crept up, itching out of the noise, it was met with the grainy, chewy, pasty texture of a Powerbar. This kept me awake enough to read and at that time, I was reading about Oz. Without knowing that all of my memories of those airplane rides would one day be jumbled together, thrown into a pile and shaken, scattered, rearranged, and blurred. My future is often turbulent, and I have no safety switch for my memories, to smooth the transitions, hold them in clear precision.

Thanks to my sister, my precision is not necessary. She re-writes history to her own liking. Because she articulates set of facts, figures, dates and names with more conviction than me.