emlocke

Category: La Familia

  • 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.

  • No Vacancy

    An hour earlier, when I’d pointed at a rest stop and said “Hey, there’s a rest stop,” my mom told me to hold it.

    Twelve minutes from the hotel, my brother’s girlfriend had to pee. I only grazed my head against the window as the family mini-van lurched into the first fast-food parking lot on our right. We hopped out of the car. Roxy looked like she was ready for a catalog photo shoot. I looked like an unmade bed. Against all better judgement and obsessive compulsions, I yearned for the refuge of the single-stall restroom. I hovered beside the cement door while I waited my turn.

    Through my mom’s open car window, I heard my parents discussing the handful of national landmarks that were visible on the horizon. The capital building, which I’d pointed out only moments ago to insistent hushing, looked two-dimensional against the grey sky.

    “Where’s the Washington Monument?”

    “Right here in my jeans, honey.” An unattractive dirty blonde – the dirty kind of dirty – in a greasy french fry uniform was leaning against the back of the restaurant, where the pair of public bathrooms were concealed from the highway. I rolled my eyes away from him, but not quickly enough to miss the grin he flashed at me, one full of teeth the same color as his hair.

    I don’t understand men. Or they don’t understand me. Or both. What is it going to take for all the skeeves in the world to finally learn: I AM NOT HOT. I’m cute. Like a pet. I’m sweet, when I feel like it. I’m pretty, in one of those unconventional ways, and only when I try. Yes, these jeans are snug. That means there’s only room for one in here.

  • Water Up the Nose


    Originally uploaded by EmLocke12.

    Easter weekend, eight years ago, we brought Maggie Zelda Mae home from the breeder and introduced her to life at the White House.

    That day, we began to introduce some new words and phrases into our vocabulary.
    1. Hurry up!: command. Spoken in a light and excited tone to encourage Maggie to ‘do her business,’ preferably in a speedy fashion. Synonyms: “In the pachysandra!” (My dog is very polite and dainty and likes her privacy in the pachysandra.)
    2. Pedestrian trip: noun. Spoken quietly and ideally without moving lips or even the subtlest gestures toward the dog or her leash. Introduced when the word ‘walk’ became a catalyst for mahem in the house and she also learned to spell the four-letter-word.
    3. Good girl*: endearment. Spoken in the most saccharine croon or the most tender whisper.

    In honor of her anniversary, my mother gave her a full-body baptism. Actually, she got a bath because she showed up at the backdoor with her fur full of deer manure, to put it delicately, and a big grin on her face. (*Note: “Good girl” is not always an appropriate term.)

    The poop roll is something we’ve had to endure more than once over the last eight years, but it’s been worth it for all the other things she has brought into our lives.

  • I Need A Ticket to Ride

    My family went to Disney World for the first time just about eight years ago, when I was in the 8th grade. It was Spring Break, right before we got our dog –we had to take the big vacation before we became so emotionally bound to a four-legged creature that we would never leave the house unless we could take her with us and we stopped wanting to go places that wouldn’t let us bring her with us anyway. If I felt like the oldest kid in the Magic Kingdom then, you can imagine how I would feel at age twenty when we went back.

    But it’s a good thing we weren’t one of those families who feels obligated to hit It’s a Small World as soon as their infants can focus their pupils. “Load up the car! She’s ready for her mouse ears!” Taking it all in as a mature and moderately well-adjusted teenager was hard enough. The lights, the colors, the displays, the backdrops, the fake plants, the real plants, the animatronic Beatles concert, the hundreds of other guests within eyeshot and earshot at any given moment (entertainment in itself), all the information in the tour book, the luxurious bathroom at the hotel, the food…

    We ate at this restaurant with a beach theme and great burgers and I have no clue what I ordered but I still remember the exact train of thought that came barreling through my head in the middle of dinner, “This is a great restaurant. I like the decor. Yum. Oh no! What if this is my favorite restaurant in the world? I’ll never get to go to my favorite restaurant in the world because it’s in Florida! On my birthday, when you’re supposed to eat dinner at your favorite restaurant in the world, I ever won’t be able to because my favorite restaurant in the world is in Florida and every birthday from now on will be ruined because I don’t think my parents will let me fly to Florida in the middle of February!”

    There was a lot to absorb and since I’m me, I felt it was my responsibility to absorb it all. I still remember having this feeling that was like “Who do you think you are, coming to Disney World and not seeing everything?” and that kept me from just living in the moment and having a little fun. And then, “Who do you think you are, coming to Disney World and not letting yourself have fun?” I still remember feeling jealous of kids who didn’t take Disney World so seriously, and then scorning them for not being good enough tourists, and then scorning myself because I obviously wasn’t being a very good tourist, either. Wasn’t this supposed to be a vacation?

    When I was home and unpacked and back at school, I wore my Mickey Mouse sweatshirt (the shoes, the shorts, the ears, the mouse) and thought about my brother and my mom wearing the exact same one because we all got them together, and when people asked what I did for spring break, I thought about my favorite part of the whole trip –riding Splash Mountain with my dad. That was the best. I couldn’t picture the petals on every single flower at Epcot, but I decided that I had catalogued all of those moments, everything I had seen or heard, in neuro-filing cabinets in my memory and even if I couldn’t recall each and every one at will, they were in there somewhere. If I needed one, it would just be there.

    What really mattered was that I remembered how it felt to sit in a giant log at the crest of the big drop on Splash Mountain, wearing a rain poncho, and peer over the end of our log, into the brambles, with my dad right beside me. I felt too scared and brave and excited to worry about anything else. There wasn’t time to figure out exactly what I should be thinking or feeling at that moment. And with my dad right there, with the same vantage point, in a matching poncho, testing out the same hands-in-the-air roller coaster pose, the pressure to absorb it all must not have been so strong. When we tipped forward, all I had to do was scream. And that part was easy.

  • Te quiero

    Couples and singles alike have been celebrating Valentine’s Day for more than 500 years. I have been celebrating Valentine’s Day for almost exactly twenty-two. My mom still has the Valentine heart that the nurses stuck to my crib in the hospital nursery, delicate and pink, with my new name printed on the front.

    In Mexico, February 14th is “Día del amor y la amistad,” the day of love and friendship. It is with the philosophy of Día del amor y la amistad that I get through every year without a Valentine, without a second thought to single’s angst.

    My best Valentine’s Day memory is of my mom, my brother, and a dark parking lot. My grandmother was due in on a flight and her ride fell through. My mom scooped up the heart-shaped boxes of candy and loaded us into the car to meet Grandmom at the airport. I don’t remember inconvenience, impatience or boredom. I remember the three of us waiting in the parking lot, surrounded by dots of fluorescent light, enclosed together in the car eating our heart-shaped SweeTarts.

    “I love you” in Spanish is te amo or te quiero. Te amo translates directly to “I love to you,” or “You, I love.” Te quiero means “I want you.” I want to love you, I want you to love me, I want every part of you, I want you close to me. For Valentine’s Day, I want all the people I love close to me, even if it’s in an airport parking lot.

  • Top (Only) 4 Reasons My Laptop Doesn’t Suck

    My mom was watching me type this morning. I’d compare the sensation to having someone watch you sleep, and freaking out when you noticed, but that’s never happened to me. Not in a romantic way or in a creepy way. So, she was watching me type and I didn’t even notice and then she said, “So when you tap it, that’s like clicking?” I wasn’t sure what sort of slang she was trying to decode (she works with middle schoolers, who knows what language those kids are speaking) until I realized she had been observing my keyboard mannerisms.

    My laptop, for all of its flaws, has a few great features. And since it would take forever to list all the things wrong with this paperweight, I’d like to discuss its merits.

    1. The touchpad responds to tapping and has a separate touch sensitive scrollbar. I almost never have to use the left- and right-click buttons.
    2. One-Touch buttons that can be linked to applications or even websites. I hit Thesaurus.com with the push of a button.
    3. Backlit buttons and touchpad. Once, someone sat down beside me to tell me something and was mesmerized by the lights. She said, “Oh, pretty!”
    4. External volume control and mute buttons, as well as backlit audio controls for CD and DVD playback on the front panel. I can play, pause or mute even if the screen is down.

    I’m so mad at my laptop right now that I’m unable to think of a fifth reason. That’s because the screen, the one that can be down and I’ll still have access to audio and playback controls, flickers like there’s a very little night club inside. Also, the power button, which is located right next to all of the One-Touch link buttons, that’s what I have to use to power the thing down. It goes through the whole shut-down process and would say, “Windows is shutting down” for all of eternity unless I stepped in and cut it off.

    This machine is very dear to me. At least, I can only assume that it holds a special, secret place in my heart, and that’s the only reason I haven’t dropped it off the roof yet.

    I knew there was a reason I set up the Whining category in WordPress.

  • We Always Sleep with the Dog In the Bed

    One of my favorite things about visiting at home on weekdays, when I have the whole house to myself, is not having the whole house to myself.

    I get to share with Maggie.

    She likes to squeeze into the cube of space under my desk right where my feet are supposed to go so I have to lean way forward to reach the keyboard. I prop my feet up on her back and scratch with my toes. Sometimes we get in bed and spoon.

    A while ago, Maggie stopped climbing stairs inside the house. She’s about eight years old, but she’s very active, her vet confirms that she’s in good health, and she gallops up the deck stairs from the backyard without a second thought (especially if you’re holding a treat at the back door.)

    Maggie has been an upstairs-and-downstairs dog for most of her life. After years of very moderately good behavior, stubborn persistence and ignoring the rules, she earned the privilege of sleeping on her own bed on my parent’s bedroom floor.

    At night, she turns in with my mom. She sleeps in the nude (you know, collarless) so her tags don’t jingle in the middle of the night. In the morning, my dad goes downstairs and Maggie trots out to get the newspaper with him. When he brings coffee up to my mom, Maggie scrambles up, too, and gets in the bed. She attends while my mom gets ready for work and then she sees her off (and gets a treat on the way out the door) and retires to the people bed for an almost all-day nap until my brother comes home from school and they romp a little.

    She mastered the tip-toe, but if I listened closely, I could hear her paws on the hardwood floors and know that she was making the rounds to secure the premises and taking her post. The best sound in the house is Maggie clattering down to greet you when she hears the back door slide open.

    So you can see how her sudden refusal to alight stairs was a serious hit to her upstairs-and-downstairs life. She became an and-downstairs dog.

    She wasn’t happy about it. She cried at the foot of the stairs at night. She barked if someone seemed to be ‘hanging out’ on the second floor unnecessarily -“can’t you do your ‘hanging out’ down here?” When we encouraged her to come up, she would put one or two front paws on the first step and howl a few times, give us a pointed look that said, “I would if I could, but you know I just can’t do that,” and hunker down like a speed bump against the flat of the first stair, slumped in body and in spirit.

    When Maggie’s spirits slumped, mine did, too. Visiting home wasn’t as cozy. I kept thinking I heard her tip-toe and I would listen for the clatter. I hated going to bed knowing that she wasn’t safe and sound, tucked in upstairs with the family. She moped at the foot of the stairs and we were all a little mopey without the click clack of her paws coming up and down the stairs to greet us, morning, noon and night.

    We tried coaxing, prodding and tempting. We tried leading her by the collar. We tried ignoring her. My brother even hefted her up the stairs once, her paws rotating like a boat-propeller once she realized what was going on. She snuggled down and he said, “I don’t get it, she loves being up here.” My mom and I even wrote to a pet psychic.

    Finally, my dad bought a roll of that grabby foam shelf-liner for dishes in cabinets and my mom lay out a strip on every step. It still takes coaxing, but now she has a little more traction and a little more confidence. She paces back and forth in front of the stairs, testing her paws on the first step a billion times like it’s a ritual before she gathers her courage and goes up.

    This morning I woke up with the sun in my eyes, rolled over, smiled, and called for Maggie. I heard her at the bottom of the stairs, but she didn’t come up. I called a few times, I even fake-whistled because sometimes that gets her excited, but I just heard her prancing around to the hesitation blues. I got out of bed and went to look down and try to talk her into it and she was looking at me like, “No seriously, I totally would if I could, but look, I just can’t!”

    The puppy-gate was up.

  • Skincare Regime

    “You smell good, are you wearing a different perfume?”

    “No, hand lotion tester.” Mom sticks out her hand for me to smell.

    “Mmm, nice.”

    “Your father will smell the same.” Sticks out his hand for me to smell.

    “Was that one of those sample sizes that’s more than a single serving?” Mom nods. Dad realizes that he’s been given the leftovers of a beauty product tester. “That’s funny because when I first smelled it on Mom, I also smelled beer, but I usually associate that with Dad.”

    “Why’s that funny?”

    “It’s nothing, it’s just the lotion smell, it’s a little feminine.” Dad considers this.  Mom tries to distract.
    “Well, it’s great lotion. I put it on before I went to the store and after shopping and making dinner and everything, my hands are still soft!” Sticks out her hand for me to touch.

    “Yeah, it’s really amazing how it stays on. I’ve watched through two football games!”