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Everybody Else Is Doing It by Regina Tingle

The following is an excerpt from one of my current projects.  

 

We all struggle with happiness, wouldn’t you agree?  I struggle with how I feel about myself and I’ve learned that how I feel about myself seeps into most other areas of my life.  I don’t mean how I feel about the pudge on my belly (okay, well, not really)—pudge isn’t something I can really add into the mix of “How I Feel About Myself” because the whole thing would just be too much.  What I mean is, what are the things I do that are in my control to make me feel good about myself and my life?  For example, if I get up by 7am and give myself plenty of time to write, I feel better about myself.  At the end of the day I’ve done something I want to do and I can rest knowing I did what I could.  If I don’t get out of bed, if I sleep in with the excuse I’m exhausted, I wake up later regretting it.  I regret not going to the gym, I regret not getting up to write, I suddenly regret everything I’ve ever slightly doubted doing or not doing because I’m irritated with myself.  Because I’m irritated with myself, everyone else becomes a source of irritation to me as well.  

Two days ago on the Stansted Express train on my way out of London, on my way to the airport, I walked through three or four cars before I found an empty place for my me and my suitcase.  It was one of those four-seaters with a table in the middle—the kind you always end up having to awkwardly share with strangers.  I sat down, catty-cornered from what you might consider your typical anglo-Englishman (probably just shy of retirement) wearing all stripes.  (Every time I go to England I see men wearing striped suits and purple ties.  This man confirmed it for me:  black pinstripe suit and pants, blue and white vertically striped shirt with a white collar, and a purple and blue diagonally striped tie, the English love stripes and purple ties.  They also have no rules when it comes to stripes, which makes me wonder where they get their reputation for being reserved and refined in their taste.  Certainly this generalization does not come from how they dress.  No, Kate Middleton, you're exquisite and radiant, I'm not talking about you).

His table was among the first empty available seats I'd come across, so I sat down by the window and watched the countryside stream past me backwards.  (I don’t mind sitting the opposite way the train is going.  I think it’s sorta cool because you can’t really sit like that in a car or on a plane, unless it’s the seventies and you're a kid in the backseat of a wood paneled station wagon or you're on board your own private jet like the ones you see in the movies where the seats are made of tan leather and there's a fancy phone attached to the wall with a direct line to the captain.)  I look away from the quickly passing countryside and over at stripe man and see that aside from stripes, he is also wearing glasses, reading the paper.  Aside from his stripes and glasses, the one feature about him that I notice the most is his bottom lip which is glistening and shiny with saliva.  It’s huge and protruding like a fish.  As a kid I once saw this movie my mom talked me into renting in the dollar section of the movie rentals of our local IGA, it was about this man who loved his pet fish so much he turned into one.  He wore glasses as a human and so when he turned into a fish, cleverly, he also wore his glasses.  (It’s how we knew it was really him; the Clark Kent/Superman of the aquarium.)  

Turns out, Fish Lips Striped Suit (his would-be Indian name) also has a bushy mustache.  When his phone rings, the ring tone is set to muted classical music.  He answers, telling the caller that Yes, yes, he is indeed on his way but that he’s running a bit late because he’s had some trouble with the trains this morning.  His British accent validates the words he speaks in a way my American accent could never authorize, and not only: it obviously fully excuses him for his tardiness.  Trains, he says to his caller on the other end of the phone, Who can control them?  He says the last part of the question more like a statement, as if he’s done this more times than he'd like to count, as if the caller knows exactly what he means and, yes, yes they do.  As he’s on the phone he picks at his mustache and I see that underneath his whiskers he has very dry skin which is now peeling off in large, white flaky clumps.  As I try not to stare out of the corner of my eye at the sudden fake snowfall, I can’t help but wonder the old chicken/egg dilemma: does he have dry skin because he has a mustache or does he have a mustache to cover up his dry skin?  I resign to the sad fact that I'll never know.  

At this point I am grossed out but thankful I had not actually planned on eating anything at that table so close to so many dead skin cells.  As I look out the window across stoic green hillsides and Britain's colorless royal sky, I think to myself: If this guy can do it, so can I.  Do what? You’re asking.  I mean GET UP.  If this guy can get up--(not to be mistaken for getting "it" up, a thought which I will now banish from our minds' eyes).  I mean, if this guy can actually get out of bed in the morning when his alarm goes off, with his big, slobbery fish lip, put on his clashing stripes, not comb his mustache, run out of the house frazzled, almost forgetting his briefcase then probably almost forget his mobile phone and arrive at the train station only to have to wait due to delays; if he can do all that and sit there on the train with a cup of to-go coffee in hand, casually reading the paper, picking at his dry skin well then I have no excuse.  Because on any given morning, I don’t even have to do any of that.  I just have to get up, put on my dorky polka-dotted fuzzy robe, turn on the heat in my chilled loft apartment which never gets warm not even in summer, make a pot of coffee and sit my ass down to write.  Seems so simple, yet it's not.  I assure you, staying in bed is the easier (or so I say to myself while still horizontal and warm under the covers) more tempting option.  Whether or not you believe me, well, I'd tell you to try it, but I probably don't have to.  We can all agree, can't we?  Staying in bed all day is definitely probably the answer to leading a perfectly easy life.  It really would solve almost everything; traffic, delayed trains and pretty much all else that is not within the small little realm of our (perceived) control.    

Indeed.  Life is hard for everyone, especially those with big lips and crusty mustaches.  Yet isn't it amazing that (almost) every one of us gets out of bed anyway?  Like the woman in blue sitting calmly on the train with her two young, well-behaved children, both under the age of five.  I admire that on so many levels.  They are dressed so well and her hair is perfectly combed, not a strand out of place.  Yet she doesn't fool me.  I know getting up was hard for her, too.  She probably had to smack her boys silly before they ever even woke up.  She probably had to drag them out of bed by their feet and yell until she was hoarse before she got them to cooperate.  I admire the Indian man walking backwards (!) down the aisle of the train, dragging a cart, selling hot tea that nobody seems to want to buy.  I admire the pregnant woman and her husband across the aisle from me, exchanging pleasant conversation.  How do people do it?  How do people get themselves going every single day when life, as we all know, can throw so many proverbial spokes in our wheels!  I put an exclamation point at the end of that sentence and not a question mark for a reason.  I know you get it.  Trains!  Who can control them!    

I'll tell you how people do it: they get up.  Everyone (or almost everyone) takes the first step, which is probably also the hardest and the scariest step: the part where you actually have to get out of bed.  Knowing we have no way of knowing what awaits us—late trains, dry, crusty skin or the three pimples—like the mamma, papa and baby zit family who all showed up on my neck unannounced this morning.  When I see other people, like Fish Lips, doing it, it makes me want to do it better.  It gives me a whole new reason to do it in the first place.  (Get your mind out of the gutter.)  Why?  Because, really, there’s no reason not to.  And because (don't tell my mother I said this) everybody else is doing it.*


*Note we are all actually ON the train, not throwing ourselves in front of it.  I'd like to think that is the part that matters.  Right, Mom?  In fact, when I look at it that way, I feel pretty good about myself.  I'd even go so far to say I'm happy.    

January 13th, 2012

you were born on a cool summer day in a quiet place in the countryside.  your mother knew she would have you at home, under that tree out back.  she made a nest there, underneath that tree way out in the back corner of the property and she made that nest from leaves, lost socks, lint, old newspapers and magazines as well as chunks of her own blonde hair taken from her own hair brushes over the nine months you were gestating.  she felt it was only appropriate.  when you were born the wind suddenly stopped and everything became even more quiet than it was.  in the air there was a scent of turpentine and sawdust--at least that's what your mother said but it was probably just her hormones.  you cried for awhile because it's just hard to be here like that, dripping in blood, so new and naked.  you felt like you were intruding.  but then a leaf fell from the tree, without the prompt of wind and you noticed its intricacies -- the veins inside so very much like your own -- and decided that even though it was hard being here, it might be somewhat worthwhile.

Everything We Aren't is Perfect by Regina Tingle

Out of the eight Christmases I spent in Houston, they all blur into one: Christmas, Houston (1988).  It was the year my father rented a video camera to record us wandering sleepy-eyed down the brown-shag carpeted hallway on Christmas morning.  We stormed the living room like little elves; me in my long, red and white candy-striped nightgown, Jess in her rosebuds and Jenny in her stocking-footed pajamas.  There at the end of the hallway, we found a camera on a tripod looming in the living room, the blinking red light recording our every move and expression.   

It wasn’t until years later that we watched the video, when my father eventually (finally) purchased a VCR.   Since it was the only tape our family owned (my parents didn’t see the point in purchasing movies when you could just rent them), my sisters and I watched the video countless times, the images of that day embedded into our brains from endless repetition.    On the tape’s wide white label, you can find “The Best Christmas Ever” scrawled in a combination of my and Jess’ juvenile handwriting.  This title sounded great at the time but it’s one I now find funny: we obviously had no way of knowing how to rate one Christmas from the next.  We had hardly experienced enough Christmases at all in order to distinguish a good Christmas from a bad one, much less a Best Christmas from a Worst one.  If you watched the tape now it'd be long and shaky, over three hours.  Yet still Dad didn’t manage to get everything on camera.  Like when Mom tried to make Jenny, our youngest sister who was three at the time, renounce her vice of the pacifier.  Mom tried to coax her into giving it to Rudolph’s new baby reindeer.  Mom made a big deal out of this idea.  She and Jenny concocted a mixture of reindeer food made of birdseed, sunflower seeds and I think popcorn.  Jenny was only slightly reluctant and the whole thing was turning out to be a near-Christmas miracle until midnight when Jenny was yelling out “I WANT MY PASSY!” from the confines of her crib.  (Mom was no fool, she had a “back-up” hidden in the cupboard.) Needless to say, it was a good effort that did not turn out as my mother would have planned.

The Best Christmas Ever turned out to be the first and only Christmas Dad filmed.  But I don't need to have everything on film to remember the repetitive things that would always happen on Christmas.  Like my mother constantly reminding us of our manners before we tore into wrapping paper of sparkling snowman motifs.  “Remember, girls.  If you don’t like it, just pretend you do and say thank you.  You can exchange it later.”  Her request went beyond her desire for us to be polite.  My mother was trying to preserve some Christmas dignity and grace.  Slowly we came to understand her gesture.  Despite being young, we intuited the holiday’s importance and how something about it demanded to be perfect, if only for one blasted minute.  Even if that meant pretending, for Christ’s sake.  (Literally). 

Not every Christmas can be The Best Christmas ever.  Ours certainly weren't.  Braised meats sometimes burned, lists were not always followed and we didn’t always get what we wanted.  After Christmas 1988 there were many imperfect Christmases in fact.  One that stands in particular was the year Jenny found out about Santa.  Christmas 1995: I was fifteen which would have made her ten.  (By then Jenny had gone seven years without her pacifier.)   

She wanted moon shoes.  It’s the only thing she asked Santa for.  Moon shoes were popular shoes with big huge springs on the soles.  In her mystical kid-imagination, (and as the commercial suggested) whoever donned the shoes became bouncy and weightless. 
At that point in her life, at the tender young age of ten, Jenny was trying hard to stand up to the rumors that Santa was not real.  Of all three of us girls, she proved to be the boldest and bravest—she had the guts to come right out and ask my mother, point-blank.  My mother’s response was always the same for all of us; if you don’t believe in Santa, he won’t bring you any presents.  Still, Jenny had her suspicions.  She could sense it.  We could all sense it:  1995 would make it or break it for her.  It could mean the end of an era.  Jenny wanted two things: to walk on the moon right here on earth and to continue to believe in Santa.  Those were the two things that childhood, for her, required. And in many ways, we wanted what Jenny wanted too.

Christmas morning, 1995 we all made our way down the white-carpeted stairs, in the white-brick house my parents built in Dallas.  Santa’s presents were identifiable because they were the only unwrapped gifts under the tree.  But that year under the tree, there were no moon shoes.  Instead, there was a pogo stick with a ribbon on it.

Jenny went through all the stages of Santa-grief in one split second: first denial, then disbelief, shock, horror, anger then outrage.  My mother’s rule of thumb when it came to Christmas politeness went out the window.

“I said I wanted moooooooooooon shooooooooooooooeeeeeeeeees!”  Jenny cried, stomping out of the living room, leaving us with our mouths agape.

Nana was the first to say something, “Lynn?!  Why didn’t you get her the MOOOON SHOOOOES?!” 

 “I TOLD you!  They were OUT!  I couldn’t find them anywhere!”

It was all a bit melodramatic, which is of course why we laugh now when we look back.  My mother knew what Jenny’s tantrum was about—it wasn’t at all about not getting what she wanted.  It was about the heartbreaking disappointment of realizing your suspicions are true, that feeling of displacement when what you thought you believed was true actually isn’t. 

My mother did not know what to do or how to say it and so she let someone else say it for her.  She gave Jenny a Christmas card which included the editorial piece written in 1897, “Yes, Virginia, there is a SantaClaus.”  After Jenny read it, she was even more confused as she was before, the point was a little lost when wanted to know who Virginia was.  Jenny didn’t understand what my mother was saying and it took her ages to get over the grudge she held against my mother.  But eventually she survived the disappointment.       

Disappointment followed by forgiveness equals growth. 

That is what I feel to be the theme of Christmas in my family—both remote past Christmases as well as more recent ones.  In all its unruly slight dysfunction, there is a brilliant glory in holidays spent with my family.  It’s messy and often uncomfortable (with four women in the family my father says someone’s always bound to be upset about something).  But it’s in the imperfections where our best memories can be found.
 

One last unrecorded memory of Christmas 1988: I played one of the angels in the nativity scene at our parish.  My mother made me a flowing white gown and my father made me a halo.  But my halo was nothing simple.  He insisted on making this wooden contraption that attached around my waist.  He ran a coat hanger up out through the back of my gown’s collar which was supposed to hold the halo above my head, give it a floating effect.  Only the wood contraption looked like a medieval chastity belt and caused my gown to ride up higher than my ankles, making it too short, showing my tennies, which were less than angelic.  I remember my mother trying not to laugh as she ushered me into place alongside the other perfectly dressed angels in the nativity scene who wore uncomplicatedly cute headband halos.  Upper lip stiff, I went on stage with my lumpy waist-line and bared ankles, mortified.  But my halo was floating.  And that was the point.

In fact, I think that is the whole point of Christmas.  We always expect Christmas to be one way and then, like most expectations, things just don’t turn out the way we planned or hoped or would have liked.  Sure, we all gather around for the purpose of celebrating one thing, Christ’s birthday, but ultimately we celebrate things of which we are barely conscience.  Tragically imperfect humans, we are celebrating the birth of a deity, and what is a deity if not everything we aren’t?  Everything we aren't is perfect. And yet still, everything we aren’t is perfect. 

Christmas 2011: It has been some four or five odd years since my family has gathered, at the same table for Christmas.  My sisters and I are spread out over the globe, in three different countries; Jenny in England, Jess in Manila and me in Italy.  Over the last half-decade, our family, like many others, has undergone trauma and loss, endured separation and divorce and survived joblessness and even a recent heart-attack.  Being in the presence of my family is a luxury that distance often does not allow for.  Now that my family is separated, geographically and otherwise, we are forced to reconcile ourselves into something new, something bigger and something stronger than what we once were.  And that “something” is not perfect.  Never was, never will be.  But it is only because of that---life’s uncomfortable halos and missed out moon shoes, that I’ve learned how to look beyond the imperfection and to extract the meaning of such dramatic disappointments.  That, in a roundabout way, is just what I’ve always wanted.
Shame we couldn't have gotten all that on camera.  

This blog was part of a Holiday Blog Tour, initiated by a fellow Goddardite, Icess Fernandez of Writing to Insanity.  Thanks, Icess, for all your organizing and for asking me to be a part of it! 
 

HOLIDAY BLOG TOUR WRITERS

Dec. 2 Julia Amante

Dec. 3 Radames Ortiz

Dec. 4 Deborah Grace Staley

Dec. 5 Zoraida Cordova

Dec. 6.Danielle Klenak

Dec. 7 Lupe Mendez

Dec. 8 Natasha Oliver

Dec. 9 Maria Ferrer

Dec. 10 Sidney Williams

Dec. 11 Toni Plummer

Dec. 12 Mayra Calvani

Dec. 13 Kristy Harding

Dec. 14 Thelma Reyna

Dec. 15.Sylvia Mendoza

Dec. 16 Regina Tingle

Dec. 17 Teresa Dovalpage

Dec. 18 Mirta Espinola

Dec. 19 Kim Brown

Dec. 20 Gwen Jerris

Dec. 21 Paula Altschuler

Dec. 22 Caridad Pinero

Dec. 23 Teresa Carbajal Revet

Dec. 24 Icess Fernandez Rojas

Graffiti art in London - 2011

Spider Vision

Let’s say you smash a little red spider this big:

.

You smear its blood accidentally on the page and when you do, you think about clucking notes on a guitar, you think about how the blood of these little red spiders is orange.

How they have eight eyes.  

What if you touched your tongue to the place where you smeared it?

You could drink a spider’s blood.  

 Or at least taste a smashed spider.  

You don’t, of course.  That’s gross.  

But if you did, what if you could see what its eight eyes behold? 

Threshold of a Page

Remember pink margins on a wide-ruled page?  I used to shy away from those.  I'd write away from the margin. 

I'd start my first sentence at the top of the page,
touching the pink line  (if it were a letter, "D" in "Dear" would be flush with the margin)
from there I would gradually drifter further and further away from the margin. 

My teacher, dear Miss Welker (we called her Miss even though she was a Mrs.), would write                     reminders on my page, telling me to write uniformly            

down
           the
                    page.

I wasn't bold or rebellious enough to think about writing outside the margins, I would not dare, not unless it was absolutely necessary to finish
a word (without a hyphen),
or a sentence which
I was not yet ready to drag down to the next line.
I tried to stay away from that red straight solid wall that was a threshold not to be crossed. 
It was an interruption, the place you had to always come back to again, even if you weren't quite yet ready to do so.

(I wonder what my pages would look like today had Miss
                       Welker not so kindly reminded me to conform to my page.

                                I hardly believe the page itself cared.)

People in Italy write on graph paper like all daily doings can be reduced down to a mathematical equation.  It's disappointing that grocery lists, doodles, address books and school notebooks are lifeless pencil marks on tiny-grid graph paper.  I hate graph paper.  It's my pet peeve.  It boxes me in.  It pushes my mind into tiny convulsions.  Graph paper triggers bad memories from my childhood, forces me to recall my numerical ineptitudes.  Just looking at it makes me feel as though I am doomed, trapped in a prison.  What can possibly fit into that small box?  Who can read all the lines that slice through the words, all the words that jar through the imposing lines? 

I prefer unlined paper, imperfect in color, off-white in tone.  It helps me feel more at ease with my thoughts.  It helps me let go of the pressures of perfection.  It is one place I do not feel forced to conform.  If ever I get queasy staring at a blank page, a blinking cursor, I conjure the thought of graph paper, a margin.  Sometimes I begin on the middle of the page in a new notebook, because I can.  I don't let the page determine things that it does not know.  It feels illicit and luxurious to let the words decide where they want to go on the page.  It feels like something expensive, something I can't afford. 

When I write in these notebooks of mine, it is not absolutely necessary to finish anything.  The only requirement the page asks of me is a beginning.  A commencement of sorts.  And that feels like a responsibility.  Heavy heavy heavy.  But if I can just get past that point, the beauty eventually comes when I've begun to press the tip of my pen to the page and let go.  Every time I get the guts to do it, I remember that it's an act I can't afford not to do.