I had the honor and privilege of being part of a special Big Words, Etc. reading last night. I’ve read at Big Words a lot, and every time I do, it’s wonderful. Stacey and Jess have created one of the warmest events I’ve ever participated in. Last night was special because it featured several teen writers from a school in Colorado and a teen writer from a program for QTPOC at the Brooklyn Museum. What a gift to share the stage and a little of the hanging out time with such excellent young people.
As always, the evening had a theme: End of an Era. And also as always, I couldn’t get anything written until yesterday. I started my piece before I brushed my teeth, wrote during lunch, finished it on the B45 bus on my way to Prospect Heights to the reading, and gave it a quick revision as I sat waiting for the reading to start. This is a bad, bad, very bad, terrible habit I have with Big Words, writing something new that I’ve only just finished in time for the reading.
I suppose I’m ending a teenty tiny era by coming back to my blog after more than a month away. While I finished my 30 poems for April, I didn’t follow through on posting them daily. Alas. But I’m back … and right in time for Slice of Life Tuesday.
Writing up until the last possible moment really is a bad habit, but Big Words always comes through for me, always pulls something out of me that I’m glad to have written. Here’s my piece:
Missing My Carefree Carelessness … or, Not Such a Fool Anymore
I used to be alarmingly casual about my safety, putting myself in questionable situations, in situations that sometimes proved to be quite dangerous, going off with random people, failing to pay full attention to my surroundings, never checking for an alternative exit.
Certainly it’s true that the most famous period of this casual care was when I was in my 20s, in my early 30s. This was the era during which I earned the reputation among my friends’ parents of being flighty and irresponsible. Quitting jobs to go on vacation, taking paid vacations and overstaying, calling my bosses to let them know not to expect me. I compounded my bad reputation by hitchhiking, by meeting strangers and allowing them to put me up for the night (I really don’t recommend this. Really. I mean, just like Eric Clapton and Keith Richards aren’t good examples of why you shouldn’t do drugs, I don’t make a good spokesperson for not doing the things I’ve done as I’ve clearly survived them all. But still. Don’t.)
I have never been flighty, but I have definitely been quite irresponsible. Not the way my friends’ parents imagined, but yes.
My inattention to my safety isn’t some kind of death wish but more a belief that evil won’t befall me. When my sister and I first moved to this city, we sometimes found ourselves in questionable or full-on dangerous situations. Fox, my sister, would always look at me and say, “Mommy didn’t have us to die like this.” And, by our own interventions or those of others, we were always okay in the end. Fox’s voice often sounds in my memory when I find myself in a bad place: “Mommy didn’t have me to die like this.”
This is crazy, of course. Everyone who dies miserably would surely have said their mother didn’t have them to die that way, and yet … So yeah, Fox’s true but entirely irrelevant and meaningless proclamation may have comforted me, but it certainly didn’t foretell or guarantee anything like safety.
So, in my 20s and 30s I wasn’t taking good care. Don’t imagine that I suddenly made cautious life choices in my late 30s, in my 40s. I didn’t. I wasn’t hitching anymore, but I was still putting myself in situations that could have ended badly. This continued into my 50s. Starting in my mid-40s, for example, I lived for ten years on the ground floor of a house where I almost never locked the front door. This fact drove my family insane. But there was a big, locked iron gate that someone would have had to come through before getting to my front door, so I just didn’t see the point. (Again, I don’t really recommend this. I’m just saying it’s what I did.)
I think if Covid had never come to town, maybe I could have maintained my casual attitude about my personal safety until the ripe old age of whatever, but no.
Something about the isolation of quarantine, living behind masks, the subtle and not-at-all subtle changes in the temperament and behaviors of other people, the desperation created by the recession, and the stoking of intolerance that has been fostered and fueled by political divisions have all come together to make me a wary person.
I am more watchful of strangers now, more on alert for violence. This isn’t a way I enjoy being, in my city or anywhere. It isn’t what I want, but I’ll acknowledge that my heightened awareness has proven useful. I left my subway late-late one night and was instantly aware that my bag had caught the eye of a man who began to follow me. I focused on him and got myself safe. On my way into the subway one Sunday morning, I registered that the man watching me approach the station was angry, unwell and fully zeroed in on me. I turned up my attention and was neither surprised nor unprepared when he came down to the platform shouting about tearing my head off for stealing his energy. To my great relief and happiness, he made the decision not to attack me, but I was ready if his choice had gone the other way. (“Ready,” not in the sense of ready to fight because I don’t know the first thing about fighting, but I’m reasonably strong, and my backpack is heavy and would be good for slamming into the head of a worrisome person.)
I appreciate this discovery of my Spidey senses, but I’m saddened by the need for them. I miss my days of basically skipping through the world trusting everyone. As far as “eras” go, however, this one had a phenomenal run. I was 56 when Covid upended the world, so to have had that many years of running around believing I had a divine safety net is a little amazing.
I used to tell my grandmother stories about the crazy things I did. My sweet, quietly-snarky paternal grandmother, the one I look like. She always smiled when I was done and said the same thing every time: “God takes care of children and fools … and you’re not a child anymore.” Definitely not a child. I guess it was high time I stopped being a fool.
In 2017, I took up Vanessa Mártir’s #52essays2017 challenge to write an essay a week. I didn’t complete 52 essays by year’s end, but I did write like crazy, more in 2017 than in 2015 and 2016 combined! I’ve kept working on personal essays, kept at my #GriotGrind. If you’d care to join, it’s never too late! Find the group on FB: #52Essays Next Wave.