A Rolling Start
When I was very young and my family was quite poor, my dad was a welder who made service calls to clients whenever they had various welding needs come up. But, because he had little money, he could not afford a good pick-up truck for his service calls. Instead, he often ran them in a rusted-out Chevy pick-up that my granddad owned.
This Chevy was so old and in such disrepair that it had to be started on a hill, nose facing downhill. Whoever last used the vehicle (my dad, his brothers, or my grandad) would place large, wooden blocks in front of each wheel before parking it on the hill (the brakes also were failing). Then, when they came back to use the truck, they first had to start the truck, leave the driver’s side door open, swiftly remove the blocks from around the truck wheels, then run alongside the truck and leap inside the truck cab. The truck, as it coasted down the hill, usually then coughed fully to life, and they could drive it.
I usually did not accompany my dad on his service calls. But, every now and then, when my mom had had enough of being alone in a house trailer with three children aged three and under, he would take three-year-old me along with him to narrow down the number of fractious ankle-biters to only two.
“Hop in!” I remember him saying to me. And I would timidly climb into (what felt like to me) the enormous Chevy cab.
I remember the splutter of the keys in the ignition and my terror as I waited in the cab as my dad removed the blocks from the wheels, and I hoped the truck wouldn’t drive off down the hill before he jumped inside. But he always managed the jump.
Still, my terror did not subside. The floorboard of the truck was significantly rusted through, and I could see the road whizzing by under us as we noisily traveled to whomever had requested my dad’s handyman services. Being very young and learning about the world, I had minimal sense of my true size and was convinced that I would fall through the cracks.
This sense that I might fall through literal and metaphorical holes and cracks in life is one that I struggled against as a young human.
In my childhood, another place that became significant to me and reinforced the sense of potentially falling through crevices was my grandfather’s empty poultry house. Earlier this winter, I wrote a poem about that particular trepidation:
As a child, I had a fear
Of slatted things.
The long slatted platforms
In my grandfather’s
Chicken house where the
Hens clucked and clustered
While the roosters stomped
Out their dominance with
Crowing, “Er, er, er, er, er! I’m
The biggest rooster here!”
The same slats across which
We children playfully ran after the hens
And roosters had been shuttled
Away in crates to their foreordained
Slaughter. Though I ran, I felt certain
That I would fall through the slats -
So I ran faster still, laughing in defiance
At my perceived possible demise.
As my sense of self and spatial
Awareness grew, I knew that I could
Not fall through the slats - my body
Was too large to fit. And my mind was
Growing as well, until I knew the whole
Universe was inside me,* and nothing
And no one could make me
Fall through the slats of time and reality
And be lost, for I both was and belonged
To time and to the universe itself.
*idea gently borrowed from a Hindu legend of Krishna
When this year began, I thought I had a good idea of where I was going this year: more art, more poetry, more doing things that I love and seeing where that took me. But, last week, I learned that my forty-year-old sister is having a baby. My sister already has four children and recovering from birth always takes a long time for her. In the past, my mom always looked after my sister and her children during the birth and recovery process. But, our mother died four years ago. My youngest brother lives near my sister, but he and his wife have three children of their own, and their oldest child is scheduled for her facial restructuring/cleft palate surgery right around my sister’s due date. What to do?
As the only single sibling with no child-rearing complications of my own, it is obvious that I am the best candidate to go support my sister. I am good at taking care of people and anticipating their needs, but I am sad that I may need to let my artistic life fall through the cracks yet again. It seems that something always comes up.
And yet, maybe this is how it needs to be.
A few of my nieces and nephews have artistic leanings as well. Maybe they need someone like me to be there in this time of transition for their whole family, and the Universe knows this?
Maybe the art won’t fall through the cracks but instead will grow larger and larger until it makes up the whole Universe for all of us.
For now, I am in the dangerous truck on the hill. Life has yelled, “Hop in!” I am in for the journey, and, while I have had concerns about the holes in the floorboard and the road-worthiness of this vehicle before, I will try to enjoy the scary view and see where the ride takes me.