emlocke

Category: In Retrospect

  • This is too “Wheels on the Bus” for me

    The new thing on my block is the school bus that pulls up to a building across the street and down a bit from mine every morning at 8:04. The driver honks five times; shave and a haircut. There’s another attempt at 8:05. One morning I heard the ditty thrice and on that day, last week, I looked out the window in time to see a kid come outside holding—honest to goodness—a red apple. He gets a hand up into the bus and his mom waves from the stoop.

    Where I come from, we couldn’t see the bus stop from our house. We waited outside, rain or shine or snow, trying to guess which would show up first: the bus or the sun? If we weren’t at the bus stop when the bus came around the bend, it wouldn’t even come to a complete stop. We were lucky to get all of our limbs clear before the door shut!

    These Park Slope kids have it easy.

    I don’t need to have flashbacks of road races after The Big Yellow when I’m running late for work.

  • The greatest leap of all is the one you almost didn’t make

    Last Leap Day, I was in Puente Hornopiren in southern Chile, about to launch a sea kayak down the Pacific coast. Hornopiren was the official starting point—notable only because it’s the village that was named in the Outward Bound course catalog, which I read nightly for the month leading up to my trip.

    chile04.jpg

    I remember posing for this picture. I hesitated before I asked German, one of two Chileans among us, to stop with me next to the sign. I didn’t want to be the one to hold up the group on our way out to sea. We were about to leave the landmark behind when a thought occurred to me, one that tickled on a phantom limb throughout my time in Patagonia.

    After barely a moment, I would depart from that spot for good. The signpost would stand there beside the dirt road, beneath rolling clouds of mist on some days and endlessly blue skies on others. The mossy hot springs and the frigid cascadas in the Fiordo Cahuelmó, the keenly lit market in Chaitén, and every crest of pebbled beach somewhere in between would forget my footprints. With time, my memory would weaken and Chile would once more seem too remote to comprehend.

    I wanted a photo that would remind me of that day and of that rare patch of the planet and its very existence. I didn’t want to look over my shoulder just before the next bend in the road and miss what I had already left behind.

    We tramped on toward the harbor. At the very last second, almost impulsively, I stopped short and handed my camera to German.

    While he framed the shot, I bounced on my toes, feeling sheepish. Such a tourist. But I thought, “this is your only chance, and you’ll regret it if you pass it up.” I coach myself with that phrase and I rarely look back to see if it’s true. Of course, I can’t know how much I would have missed this photo if I hadn’t taken that pause; I only know that I’m glad I did.

  • I was just getting warmed up

    I came across the very first mixed CD I ever burned for myself. It is called Emily’s Mix #1. I wonder what number I would be on now if the iPod hadn’t come along.

    Here is the playlist:

    1. Crazy by Britney Spears
    2. American Pie by Don McLean
    3. Take A Picture by Filter
    4. Baby, I’m Amazed by Lonestar
    5. Angels by Robbie Williams
    6. LA Song by Beth Hart
    7. Bye Bye Bye by *N SYNC
    8. Genie In A Bottle by Christina Aguilera
    9. Inside Out by Eve 6
    10. I Try by Macy Gray
    11. Rhythm Divine by Enrique Iglesias
    12. There She Goes by Sixpence None the Richer
    13. Little Black Backpack by Stroke 9
    14. Meet Virginia by Train
    15. Brown Eyed Girl by Van Morrison
    16. Enough of Me by Melissa Etheridge
    17. American Woman by Lenny Kravitz

    I searched and searched but couldn’t find an MP3 of American Pie. I was adamant about having the song on this particular CD, so my dad brought his record player and set it up next to the computer with a nest of wires connecting them, the old turntable that smelled like oiled wood and rubber and the whirring, clicking CPU that smelled like static electricity.

    I clicked ‘Record’ and my dad played the record. We listened to the song, grinning in awe, watching the words on the album label spin around and around.

  • Am I the only one who thought his pants were too short?

    One coworker affronted me on Post-Super Bowl Monday: “E. Locke! Did you watch the game?” “I watched the last second of it. Which lasted for about twelve minutes. So, Go Giants?” Then another coworker asked who had watched The Puppy Bowl. “On Animal Planet? Anybody? Em?” YES. Now we’re talking. About puppies.

    Though I am impressed by The Giants, no Super Bowl will ever compare to XXVII, when Michael Jackson performed at halftime. I was a third grader with no interest in sporting events or beer commercials, but I remember when my mom called me into the family room at halftime to watch the King of Pop in his breezy white shirt and black pants that looked too short. He sang a medley of Billy Jean and Black or White (my favorite, favorite song at the time, second only maybe to Say You’ll Be There from the Free Willy movie) and then Heal the World.

    These were the days before I’d ever seen a music video. I experienced all of my MJ through the headphones of my Walkman, in which I played and rewound and played and rewound the Dangerous cassette tape at every opportunity: at the bus stop, on the way home from dance class, while I waited for my family after Sunday School.

    I didn’t know all the words; I couldn’t make a lot of them out and I didn’t have many reference points to help me put them into context. What I couldn’t decipher, I made up, and then I listened to the tape and “heard” those lyrics so many times that I won’t ever be able to learn the songs another way (“I ain’t scared of your body”—I’m just never going to let that one go because it makes sense.)

    Then in January 1993, he appeared on TV, amidst a cast of choreographed dancers and thousands of children—it was the pyrotechnic pop remix of It’s A Small World. With strobe lights.

    I still remember getting chills over one of the first “live” performances I’d ever seen, and the realization that I wasn’t the only person who liked Michael Jackson or Dangerous or Black or White. When all those kids held up their cards to show that giant mosaic picture in the stands, it seemed like that was the whole point of the game.  I remember thinking that the Super Bowl might be an event worth watching after all, because those twenty minutes were pretty exhilarating.

    And then the second half of the game started and, oh, wait! Nope, it’s boring again.

    And has been, ever since.

    Eventually, I retired my Dangerous tape. Next went the Walkman.

    But puppies have never let me down.

  • ‘Inside my skin, there’s an empty room’ and no MRSA

    My mom works at a public school and a couple of weeks ago, she forwarded to me and my brother a general notice that had gone out to all students, families and staff members about the risks and prevention of Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. MRSA is a mutated variation of a very common and usually harmless bacteria that has become resistant to antibiotics and can cause fatal infections. My first instinct was to roll my eyes. My second instinct was pure pride because my mom is a totally awesome guidance counselor.

    My third instinct was to diagnose myself with a potentially life-threatening bacterial infection.

    I’m not a hypochondriac by nature. Only if I’m really not feeling well and worrying about it do I become susceptible to the power of suggestion that leads some people to believe they’re suffering from medieval ailments or Kennel Cough or something. But for some reason, I spent the better part of the day absolutely convinced that I had MRSA.

    I had a blemish on my shoulder that was sort of red and sore, but not at all abnormal. I cleaned and covered the spot and in the morning, it looked much better. I took that as a sign that an incurable infection was diving from the surface of my skin and soaking into my blood stream. I freaked myself out so much that my face and neck started to flush, the first sign of a fever that would have me hospitalized for sure.

    Plucking at the last thread of logic in my fraying mind, I took an extra multi-vitamin and applied another band-aid. At the gym that evening, I wiped down the machines before and after I worked out. By the time I got out of the shower, my skin was clear, my imaginary fever had broken, and I declared myself cured.

    The whole thing reminded me of a project I did for my Graphic Design class when I was a junior in high school. We had to design album art for a fictional band or a compilation CD. I put together an “Angsty Girl” mix and based my design on images of stained cells under a microscope lens. In my mind, “angsty” female artists broke down in their music, exposed their wounds and flaws and mutations, became small and then magnified themselves.

    I borrowed cell slides from my biology teacher and scanned them into the computer. The dye colors were electric and appealing. I had glassy lavender human cheek cells, fresh green plant cells with vacuole polka dots, bacteria outlined with dramatic red membranes.

    Nobody understood my project at all. My teacher asked, “is angsty a word?” I had really hoped that my metaphor would impress this one guy in my class. His talent made me envious, inspired, and a little turned on. Despite the fact he must have thought me a complete flake, he was so patient. He just kept asking me to explain it again—”okay, so why the cells?”

    Oh, whatever. No one even buys CDs anymore.

    What’s so amusing about looking at these now is the playlist. My “Angsty Girls” included Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco Alanis Morrisette, Sarah McLachlan, Jewel (all arguably appropriate, but so totally cliche); Edie Brickell, Patty Griffin, and Marry Me Jane (surely selected because I didn’t think my peers would have heard of them).

    And the “angst” I tried to express—if the guy whose respect I’d wanted to earn had patted my head and said, “Oh, how adorable,” I would have deserved it. I know my favorite lyric in Silent All These Years was “what’s so amazing about really deep thoughts?” even though in the very next line, Tori Amos is practically threatening not to get her period so the guy with the jeans will know that she’s pregnant. That’s like the difference between “oh, I’m so angsty with my emotions and my deep thoughts” and “your deep thoughts are nothing compared to my DEEP THOUGHTS.”

    Even though Jewel might be the least angsty of these angsty girls, I used two of her songs: Barcelona and Absence of Fear. I was still playing this CD in college, listening to Barcelona on long drives: “Won’t somebody please, hold me, release me, show me the meaning of mercy, let me loose”; and Absence of Fear when it rained or if I couldn’t sleep: “There is this hunger, this restlessness inside of me.”

    So maybe angsty isn’t a real word, but the sentiment has endured. The same lyrics still stand out when I play these same songs. And I still think my cellular metaphor is fitting.

  • The lines of communication are open, if blurry

    I don’t know when my home town school system started issuing e-mail accounts and web space to the staff, but by my junior year of high school, probably about half of my teachers had set up class websites.

    They were all pre-formatted on a generic template. Clip art graphics at the top depended on the subject: the wobbly line drawn globe on the social studies pages; chalk and a slate for math classes; a test tube emitting glassy bubbles for Chemistry; maybe the globe again for Earth Science. The illustration options were limited.

    On down, students might find course-related links, the attendance policy, the date of the first test of the year (or the previous year, in some cases). More than a few featured that stick figure construction worker and promises of “Coming Soon!” Zealous teachers added edifying quotations about hard work or knowledge, or the emblem of their favorite sports team, copied and pasted into pixelated distortion. And everybody threw their school district e-mail address up at the end of the scroll.

    The point is that all of this was very experimental. Teachers dabbled in web presence the way most people tweak the e-mail font and signature settings on their first day at a new job. You mess with the text size and color. You pick out what will go at the end of composed messages and what will go at the end of replies and forwards. You either make it easy for others to figure out how to contact you by phone or you figure out how to make it nearly impossible. You might even scroll through those “stationary” styles, just to see what an e-mail would look like inside a circus tent. And then you’re like, “interesting idea, nice to have the option—not for me.”

    Not surprisingly, a lot of public school teachers had a similar reaction to their new webmaster roles. “Interesting idea, nice to have the option—not for me.” Only they had already referred students to the website and it remained active, if orphaned.

    One weekend, I sought out one of my AP teacher’s contact information via our class website and e-mailed her to ask a question about an assignment. I never heard a reply, so I improvised my way through and then approached her about it at our next class. Not only did she criticize the way I had opted to complete the project, she was also completely flustered, even offended, by the fact that I had sent her an e-mail about it.

    It got around soon after that she had gone to someone in the administration and complained about having to use an e-mail address at all. It made her uncomfortable because it gave students too much access to her personal life or something. It was a violation of her privacy. I still wonder if anyone, before then or since, clarified the concept of e-mail to this otherwise fantastic teacher, or . . .

    Who knows.

    That incident was pretty much the best indicator I ever had that I was ready to graduate high school and go on to college where I could e-mail professors at all hours of the day and night.

    But in the last six months, it’s become clear that what I was really ready for, all the way back in 2001, was my current job. What started with that errant e-mail to my teacher has ended with a steady stream of text messages between me and my boss.

    I forgot my cell at my desk one evening during my first or second week. He heard it beeping or buzzing or something and sent me an e-mail so I wouldn’t worry over its whereabouts. I thought, “How nice of him!” and then, “Terrific. Now my employer knows that I can’t keep track of my personal items, and also, that my cell phone is pastel pink.”

    He hasn’t held either against me, because my pink cell phone is filled with messages like: “Not feeling well. Can you go to launch?” “Did you see my sunglasses @ the booth?” “Put a cold compress on your forehead and feel better!” “Quick theater question. Check your email.” And “Halloween marshmallow peeps!!!”

  • I am a person who is writing about coffee and chocolate milk

    All summer, I’ve been brewing coffee before bed and leaving the silver pot in the refrigerator overnight so it’s chilled by morning. 

    The sputtering gurgle of the coffee maker and the steamy, earthy smell has come to instill corporeal quiet every evening, late, right before I realize how much I need it.  That coffee scent emerges from the kitchen and pushes its way down the hall.  It finds me wherever I am in the apartment and rests its warm weight on my eyelids.   I lures me back to the kitchen.  I switch off the coffee maker and put the hot coffee pot on the top shelf in the fridge.

    By morning, the aroma will be lustless.  Just cold.

    It is a ritual based on the weather and my temperature sensitive tongue, but there is something unexpectedly empowering about making my coffee at night.  When I push that button and the red light clicks on, I think, “that’s right, because I said so!”  I’m not just drinking stale-ish, artificially sweetened coffee every morning, I’m choosing to be a person who drinks stale-ish, artificially sweetened coffee every morning.  (And I’m a person who drinks the whole 14-ounce pot.)

    I keep the coffee filters in a drawer in the kitchen.  I use my thumb and index finger to peel the top layers off the stack of filters, and then I blow down gently on the edge to separate just one.  Every night, this makes me think of milk money. 

    Each student in my kindergarten classroom had a white envelope with a milk carton sketched on the front and their first name and last initial printed on the back.  The letters were drawn with polka dot serifs. 

    My teacher, Mrs. Robertson, taught us to puff air across the top of the envelope to open it without risking papercuts on our tender little fingertips.  Every morning, a different pair of buddies got a turn to carry the bin of milk orders to the cafeteria.  At snack time, a lunch lady would return the envelopes, emptied of their change, alongside a crate of petite milk cartons. 

    On Fridays, my mom gave me a quarter, a dime and a nickel to drop in my flat paper milk carton and told me to put it in the stack of 2% milk orders.  Some kids ordered milk every day.  Some kids ordered chocolate milk every day.  A lot of kids ordered chocolate milk on Friday.  I ordered milk once a week.  Friday only.  2%.  No chocolate.  Mom said.

    Once, though, I blew down across the top of my envelope and dropped in forty cents and then I added my envelope to the stack of chocolate milk orders.  When the lunch lady rolled her cart into our classroom, I plucked a brown and white carton from the plastic crate. 

    And I became a kid who drank chocolate milk through a skinny red straw at snack time on Fridays.

  • Grandpa Scoobie

    I don’t have many grandfather stories to tell. My memories are strung together, mostly from photographs that I’ve studied and home movies that play in my head like someone else’s memories and a handful of second-hand stories. My paternal grandfather had a swimming pool surrounded by cement that snagged the bottom of my swimsuit when I sat down to slide into the water. The backyard was full of people and I didn’t know anybody except my mom, so I doggy paddled toward her in my floaties and grabbed at the straps of her wet bathing suit. Everybody was nice, but I didn’t feel like talking. I shook my head whenever someone offered me a soda.

    Later, Grampy had lake and a boat, Lulubelle. I slid cold, cooked peas on fishing hooks and panicked when I found that the pea had been replaced by a cold, scaly fish. He told me it was okay if I wanted to fish without the hooks so I sat on my knees on the dock and dropped peas one by one into the lake. I watched the sinking orbs glow neon green against the shallow, inky murk. Shadows of fish swam by and sucked up the peas with a kiss. My grandfather liked to drink Coca-Cola out of glass bottles. When he passed away, my dad brought home a couple of Grampy’s old cameras and tinkered with them in the basement. I wonder if my dad inherited his affinity for busy hands from his father.

    I never met my maternal grandfather. I know him best through a photo taken at my parent’s wedding reception. He is smiling, maybe laughing. Not looking at the camera. He appears peaceful, cheerful, even tickled. There is something about the crinkle beside his left eye and the curve of his top lip against his teeth that resembles David Letterman. Until I was a teenager, I imagined my grandmother married to David Letterman, who lived in her town at the time. David Letterman drinking coffee at her kitchen table. David Letterman mowing her lawn. David Letterman eating M&M’s or Easter SweetTarts out of the candy dish in her family room. I wonder if David Letterman likes ketchup on his scrambled eggs, because my grandfather did.

    So do I. But that’s all I really know. I am as familiar with the brassy finish on the frame around an old photograph as I am with the subject himself. Just looking at him in that picture makes me feel a little shy. I feel like a little girl in floaties in a backyard full of friendly strangers. Like I should look at my mom for permission to have a soda.

    I’ve always been a little shy around men of a grandfatherly age, but a few have given me a sense of patriarchal comfort that I missed in my childhood. Scoobie, the camp handy man, proclaimed himself to be “old as dirt” and carried a toothbrush tucked in his sock. He drove up to camp every summer because he had time off from his primary job–school bus driver. If Scoobie had been behind the wheel of my school bus, I might have started walking to school. He terrified me. I could hardly look directly at him.

    But every night at 10PM, Scoobie wheeled out the cereal carts and unlocked the milk cooler. I had listened to my counselors slip out of the cabin to get Scoobie Snacks every night for six summers. When I finally got my own blue staff shirt, I also got a surrogate grandfather. Scoobie adopted all of us and spoiled us with sugar cereal. He looked the other way while we poured chocolate milk over a mixture of Cookie Crisp and Cocoa Puffs. He sat by himself at a butcher block in the kitchen, his haggard back to our tables, either squinting at a newspaper or, more often, listening to opera with his eyes closed behind his enormous protective glasses. He hardly ever dozed off, and if he did, nobody bothered trying to break into the walk-in freezer. The man was practically deaf, but he had a sixth sense about those hidden Klondike Bars. So don’t even think about it. Just eat your Cookie Crisp. And have some Lucky Charms. The kids’ll have to eat Raisin Bran in the morning.

    Last call came around 11. As we filed out the back door, ready for bed or ready for mischief, Scoobie shook the doormats out behind us, hollering a reminder to brush our teeth.

  • It’s all fun and games until it’s just really, really not anymore

    “And as the bombshells of my daily fears explode, I try to trace them to my youth.”—Indigo Girls, Galileo

    The hardwood floors in my childhood home were good for sliding. There was a slippery, bare strip between the edge of the living room rug and the wall just wide enough for my brother and me, pajama clad, to drag ourselves and sometimes each other, along the length of the room. I pretended it into a runway and modeled beach towel super hero capes and evening gowns in a Happy New Year tiara from 1988. More often, it became the stage for musical and dramatic productions, usually written and directed by and starring Emily Locke White.

    There were impromptu productions, too. I don’t think I’ve ever been immune to stage fright, but improvised performances don’t make me so nervous.

    So it was that, one evening before dinner, I called my mom out of the kitchen and set the stage: the widest patch of bare floor was a lake, and I was going to drown in it. She was to watch me from the carpet, as if it were a distant shore.

    I wriggled along the slippery surface, pretending to splash and fight for air. As I flailed closer to her, she reached with both arms into the hazardous water, across the fourth wall, and pulled me out. I collapsed in her lap, my little feet still dangling over the edge. I tossed one arm across my forehead (where did I learn that?) and, legitimately exhausted, gasped out, “It’s too late; I’m dead.”

    And, scene.

    But my mom followed her own script, in which she was not the lone member of the audience but the mother of a drowning child. She shook me gently, but insistently, stage-wailed and began to act out resuscitation. On my back, across my mom’s knees, with her soft, pink cheek close to my hair, my imagination got the better of me and my game lurched to a halt. Something had gone terribly wrong. An invisible string knotted around the lump in my throat and yanked me forward on to my knees. I scrambled up and I stood across from my mother, folding my body in on itself. I wanted to be back in her arms, I wanted to press my face against her shoulder and breath in her familiar scent. But I couldn’t bring myself to look at her.

    “I don’t want to play anymore.” Every time I have woken from a nightmare in the last fifteen years, every time I’ve had a dream so frightening that my ears burn around the edges and my feet turn to ice, I have felt the same chilled dread swell up between my lungs and creep across my abdomen just underneath my skin. Every time, the sting of cold sweat reminds me of the hardwood floors in my childhood home and my mom sitting on her knees in the living room and my own small voice saying, pleading, I don’t want to play anymore. I didn’t want my mother and me to lose each other and my imagination had brought me too close to the possibility. It was much to real to pretend.

    I guess, in the most basic sense, it was the first time I was conscious of the widest boundaries of my own comfort zone. I had been afraid before, of course. I was shy around dogs and strangers. I didn’t like to go to the cold, dark laundry room by myself when the washer was running. Being on stage made me anxious. But I knew, instinctively, that I had tread into a different sort of fear, and I had to come to terms with it on my own. It’s one of my most vivid memories of that house; my first taste of fear.

  • Semantics

    In college, I had a series of therapy sessions with a doctor who “specialized” in child, adolescent and adult psychology. The text on his business card was very crowded and his office was littered with Legos and puzzles, teen magazines, and a modest collection of mutely-colored Mexican artifacts. Every appointment felt like a 50-minute identity crisis. The doctor had clearly prepared himself for a patient with multiple personalities, someone who signed their checks “Mr. Louis T. Cooperstein” but, some days, answered only to “Baby Louie.” I sought counseling for a largely unremarkable case of depression and anxiety. I’m not sure he knew what to do with me.

    Every time I sat on his couch, I had the constant impression that his mind was wandering elsewhere, that he found me a complete and utter bore. As a chronic people-pleaser, I tried my best to engage him. Once I started dropping the names of syndromes and disorders that I had learned in AP Psych in high school, trying to bait him with the chance diagnose something extraordinary. “Maybe I have mild this…or severe that…or advanced something complicated by late on-set something else.” His rare responses were always very critical and eventually I gave up and we sat across from each other in unresolved silence. He gazed out the window, his posture and expression conveying such detachment that I felt like I was the doctor trying to draw in a lost patient.

    In what would be our last meeting, I managed to capture his attention with what was fundamentally a dispute about grammar. Our unresolved silence had become so irritating that I began a rambling monologue just to drown out the clock’s audible ticking. I must have started one too many sentences with “My happiness,” because, without warning, the doctor looked at me, inched his chin forward, and poised the tip of his gold pen, which had been folded limply beneath his palm, above his legal pad.

    “You say ‘happiness’ as if it’s a thing,” he said in a tone that he may or may not been meant to sound quite so accusatory. He shifted his left leg across his right knee and lowered his jaw onto the heel of his right hand. His movements reminded me of a street performer playing statue, pouring body parts like wet plaster into a pose and holding absolutely still, wordlessly daring passersby to poke him to see if he is made of stone or skin. 

    “Well, ‘happiness’ is a noun.”  We bickered for a few moments about whether or not I could I reduce my emotions down to semantics before he poured himself back against the other arm of his chair and resumed indifferent surveillance of the street outside.  Meanwhile, I experienced a brief wave of envy for buskers who paint their bodies bronze and spend their days performing for an audience of fleeting strangers.  If only that would bring me happiness.

    According to the OED, the definition of happiness is: The quality or condition of being happy; good fortune or luck in life or in a particular affair; success, prosperity.  This is not the first time I have looked that up.  My conversation with the dour doctor always comes to mind when I find myself defining indefinable things as a means of coping with them.  Linguistically, happiness may be a noun, but what a fleeting, fragile one it is.  It is unfairly elusive.  Like a limb or a muscle, you aren’t aware of its presence until it has been compromised. 

    There is one other phrase that I will always associate with happiness—the word itself and all that it represents.  My friend Lily once wrote to me in a letter, “One of the most frustrating things my mom ever said to me was, ‘no one ever guaranteed your happiness.’  Unfortunately, it’s true.”  When I am depressed, truly, deeply unhappy, that seems like the most paralyzing, punishing philosophy, no matter how true it may be.  I can think of a few instances in my childhood when I wailed the patent slogan of outraged little girls, “I never asked to be born!”  There are particularly brutal times when the realization that happiness is not a birthright is enough to make me want to throw that tantrum again. 

    But at other times, at most times, I am in that expansive space between desolation and delight.  Then, Lily’s mother’s wise words sound more like a good-natured challenge, even a dare.  Happiness isn’t a promise.  It is something to be achieved.  Perhaps happiness is something that must be exercised, like limbs and muscles.  To get there, to get through both the largely unremarkable doldrums and the singular hardships that everyone endures and achieve happiness, that would be something extraordinary.Â