Facts

I left home when I was 17 years old and finished high school while living with a woman I’d met through babysitting her children.  She served as a mentor to me in many ways, some good, some not so good and eventually I met a man who wanted to get out of New England as much as I did.  We traveled down the East Coast and across the South, waitressing and bartending as needed until we landed in Albuquerque where, on an otherwise average Monday, we got married at City Hall.

I wrote my parents with the news and they wrote me back, congratulating me and including a check for $1000, the money, they said which had been put aside for my wedding.  My elopement, they called it, rendered those expenses unnecessary so take this and use it to start our married life with.

Ron and I took it and went to Hawaii and accidently started a fire in our hotel room that spread to several others before it was extinguished.  The Manager of The Ilikai Hotel encouraged us to leave both the hotel and the island.  Our clothes and all our money were burned up, as were our arms and legs and hands.  We borrowed money from people we knew in Honolulu and left Hawaii, returning to Vermont where he felt certain he could find work quickly.  We both went to work at Basin Harbor Yacht Club, a summer job where we could live on the grounds and take life easy. 

One month later I found out I was pregnant.

Memoir

 At 20 years old, can I gently say that while the basic ingredients were there to be a good person, they had not yet blossomed.  I was a wild child – a whirling dervish of Don’t Tell Me What To Do.  My idol was Janis Joplin.  My best friend was a 40 year old big hearted but essentially whiskey swigging husband stealing barfly who toted me around as bait under the auspices of showing me how to get along in the world.  She made me clothes to strut my ample stuff and off we went to seek our fortune – mine coming in the form of a 6′ 5″ banker with a vicious sense of humor and a taste for gin.  He also had a big dick.  These all combined to plant a baby where I had been told no baby could grow – ha ha Ron said and then next he said what-the-hell-do-we-do-now.

   His response was all the chance I needed to flounce my way out of the ratty life we had built together and I hitchhiked my now fertile hips down the road, eventually landing, for the last two months of my pregnancy, back at my parents, the ones whom I had been at war with all those years.  

We did our best.  They must have drawn on every ort of love they had for me.  I worked for my dad; he taught me how to do bookkeeping and I did his payroll and his receivables.  Had I known how to embezzle at that point in my life I no doubt would have, but ignorance still had some advantage and we all survived.  I took up crossword puzzles and learned to play the organ.  My mother and I had toast and coffee in the morning, a smell I still treasure, and then we went off to our respective duties, hers being the raising of my two brothers, mine being a combination of managing in-house arrest and planning my next move.  

   Karen was born in a blizzard.  She wrestled her way out just as she had wrestled her way in – she, at 38, is that kind of a girl.  We grew up together; both bear the scars to prove it.  She taught me about love, I taught her about forgiveness.  She taught me about commitment, I taught her about self-reliance.  She gave me a reason to try and I gave her the ingredients to work with.  I have never doubted that she saved me though I have worked to lessen the burden of it on her as she has gotten older.  That said, she is still my finest achievement and so I have also had to learn some humility in that my finest is not really mine but truly a work of the universe.  

Fiction

The morning Holly finally leaves is quiet, late March in Vermont being the time when spring has yet to let go of winter trappings.  Snow covers most of the ground with patches of gray grass foretelling of the coming thaw.  Fog adds gentleness to the morning light and makes it easier for her to slip out of the house without waking anyone.

I will not raise my kid in this town – she mouths the words as she closes the door behind her…