My New Meme: 20 Simple Facts About Me

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do you know that:

 

 

• I live in the town I grew up in.
• But not before I moved away for almost twenty years.
• My husband and I had our first date right down the block.
  
• I can almost reach out and touch one sister's house.
• And the other two are a five minute ride away.
  
• With my mom living two  minutes farther.
  
• Sometimes,  I drive past the house she was born in order to get to her apartment.
  
• And right past the cemetery where Daddy lies with his parents, sisters, brother in law, and nephew.
• And through the adjacent one where her grandparents,  great grandparents,  aunts and uncles, and her sister rests.
• I sit on the porch in the chairs that friends gave to my parents for their porch 40 years ago.
• And each time I drive past my childhood house I curse the day I didn't buy it.
  
• And that is  why I had to leave town for so long to become an artist and writer.
• And conversely,  why I became a lawyer
• Instead
• Of who I should be
• Of who I AM
• But before I could become who I am, my marriage paled in the California sun and I stayed underwater in the pool and floated past the sago palms, drive by shootings, and Monopoly houses built in a valley as flat as a sheet of paper and as dry as my heart
  
• Until the carousel flung us off again into a Cat On a Hot Tin Roof house, where Tennessee Williams brought donuts for breakfast each morning and Faulkner presided at the dinner table, and Mama's Family was always preempted by the latest crisis in The Deep South
  
• Which caused parts of me to fall off right onto the floor of the dairy aisle at the Piggly Wiggly, and under the wheels of all the Suburbans in the carpool line, and all over the Carrera marble of the two-story foyer floor, to the point where the only thing I had left was the smallest, flintiest, ugliest, truest shard of me that I clenched in my fist and wouldn't let anyone pry out of my hand despite a thousand million weeping tears that I had to wipe away in order to hold the pen and the paintbrush
  
• And I wear a size 8.5 shoe.