Process

It was the summer before tenth grade when Purple Rain came out in 1984.  I sat in my chair on the left side of the theater watching the screen, pretending not to notice my friend making out with her date in the seats next to me.  Today I wonder why had I been invited to tag along and why had I said yes?  It is not hard to put myself in my room at my parent's house with the telephone in my hand, dialing the the push buttons and waiting for my old friend to pick up.  We hadn't seen as much of each other since my parents had moved us across the intercoastal waterway and North up I-95 to the town of Palm Beach Gardens the year before.  I'd probably called her and asked her what she was doing that weekend.  Did she want to hang out? Maybe she felt sorry for me.  Maybe that's why, when she said she had plans to go to the movies with her boyfriend, she said I could come along.  Maybe I said, "Okay," because I wanted any little bit of my friend I could ...

Every year we took a rafting trip down the Nantahala River on one of those big rafts with inflatable sides.  I'd tuck my tennis - shoed feet under it, in the hope that it would prevent me from being flung into the icy cold water.   My big brother thought it would be hilarious to send us down the rapids backward, removing all chance of steering ourselves as we'd been instructed under the cover of the Nantahala Outdoor Center's educational shelter.  Before loading up on the old school buses to be shuttled to the put in site, we'd sat on wooden benches listening to the do's and don'ts of the trip.  I'm pretty certain we were not instructed to go down the rapids backwards and pretty certain we were instructed to avoid the eddy on the right side of the rapids in front of a large rock because if we fell out, we could pulled under and into a washing machine like vortex which would spin us around and around under the water and may even be drowned.  Did I mention t...

That day in high school when I took out my No. 2 pencil and filled in the bubbles on the career aptitude Scantron sheet, the last word I expected to see on the paper which came in the mail was the word, "nun". What the fuck?  That is what I would have thought had that been in my vocabulary in 1986.  ++++ I didn't write during the recent long holiday weekend.  I didn't listen to the Creative Nonfiction Podcast and I didn't think about where my story was going.  As I drove to my neighborhood Starbucks I didn't acknowledge, though I felt the presence of a hitch hiker I'd picked up somewhere along the way.  The hitch hiker named, Doubt.     I'd had a rotten night sleep.  My dog, Ike, kept jumping on and then off the bed at 5:30 am, just close enough to my 7 am alarm that the pressure I felt to get back to sleep quickly, made it impossible to do just that so it wasn't surprising that I argued with myself as I approached the tur...

Jessica sat facing me in her green armchair with a mug of water on the small table next to her, the one that held the Kleenex and the small clock which faced her. I sat in the middle of the couch and looked at the floor trying to get up the nerve to spit out my words. I had decided that this would be the day that I would tell her but now that I was there the words wouldn’t come out.  It was like like the time my mom stopped me in in the hallway.  I was naked with a towel wrapped around my little body. Perhaps I just felt naked or perhaps I’m remembering the black and white snapshot of me, naked and bent over sideways with a towel wrapped around my shoulders, and have inserted that snapshot into this memory.  I had just gotten out of her bathtub and was making my way down the hall to my room when my mom called to me from behind.   “Were you the one who left the heater on?” she asked in a tone. You know the one.  It's the tone that says she already kno...