Roads Memoir – Page 2 – Roads on Her Face

Roads On Her Face #40: All I Ever Wanted Was Room

My diary tells me all I wanted was my own room. A place that didn’t move. People who knew me, boys who looked at me and wanted me and asked for my number. Only I’d never had a number. The only telephones we used were pay phones, at a corner behind the casino in Winnemucca while the dust blew by and the clouds settled in, while Dad played cards and drank somewhere inside and we sat outside and tried to be still and patient, tempers growing thin and us fidgeting, hungry. In front of a Bashas’ grocery store in Parker, Arizona, from the safety of a grocery trip that got Mom and I away from the desert on our own for a whole day to civilization, ice cream, the library. She’d check in on Granny, call her friend back in Georgia. Let them know we were still alive – did they wonder how long? But she’d made her own choices, they’d say, shaking well-coiffed Southern heads and not even trying to understand. She always was a little wild, that Mary. I didn’t know the wild Mary existed. All I’d ever seen was a sweet cowed woman that loved us more than anything.

Kids don’t know any better. They’re programmed to want to conform, to fit in, to survive in the herd and not be noticed. If I’d continued on the road as a teenager, if we’d kept going while I decided who I was going to be I would never have been able to stop. I know it in my bones. They say “You’d still be on the road, baby. You’d be somewhere in South America by now. On your way to China.” And I ache to be that person that I might have been. The person that I am feels hollow, too light to pull myself free from the clay of the earth and the roots growing round my feet. I imagine the flutter of leaves breaking free from branches, the flight of each one flashes of tiny freedoms and bursts of joy.

Roads on Her Face #39: The Silver Bullet

The old Airstream settles on Don’s land, her tires sighing out the breath pumped into them 20 (goddamn!) years ago at some far away rest stop- Nevada- maybe Oregon air, seeping out of tires no longer hard and young. Happens to us all.

I see her aging, flaking, and I know her and my destinies include me making her new again. I have to, I’ll rip out her insides and make her mine, strong and road-worthy again. Not young, I don’t have that kind of magic. But youth is not everything. I’d rather have her history, her wisdom. I don’t care how long or how much it costs. We will travel the road again together. But there won’t be 6 of us packed in there again.

The Airstream will be 26 feet of pure minimalist modern luxury when I’m done. Light and bright inside, and light on the road. I wish someone could buff me up and take out the nascent wrinkles before I reach her state of tired.

Walking into the trailer, our old home, brings back Needles where we first lived encased in her well-kept confines, the relative luxury of running water and electricity, of Karl’s borrowed showers, and his desperate want of my mother. I see that most in retrospect, don’t know if it was true and only assume.

Clackamas and Mt. Hood National Forest, where the rain drummed on the taut aluminum body, until we had to leave, avoiding the rust and must that would surely follow. The previous owners, a sweet Canadian couple with their road-years behind them, carved wooden coyotes and saguaros into her bulwarks (the faces of interior cabinets, and my made up ship-name for them). Crude art, that I don’t like but am loathe to take down. So much love in simple art, mine included.

As most good things, she became ours when Dad wasn’t around to fuck things up. Mom asked Granny for the loan. $5 thousand? $8 thousand? I remember we all took turns holding the check because it seemed like a ridiculous amount of money. The most we’d ever seen.

As the only material thing Mom held on to, I’m glad it was this piece of the past. And I’m honored to take her and make her right again. There’s never been a doubt she was a she- mother, protector, road-ship. All vessels are female, the holders of everything important.

The smell inside, of old must books and wood long un-loved makes me want to scrub and scrub all the neglect away. Make her, and the past, belong to me.

When Life is a Writer’s Block

Yeah, this isn’t a whiny post about why I haven’t been posting, or blah blah blah. Just an honest one- it will be a year tomorrow since my momma lost her happy ending. It put me off the story of us, of her, of me because it wasn’t the arc I had been writing, on to a generic upbeat ending about how life was better, about how we’re off the road now and mostly wish we were back on its endless curves, its excitement; where you don’t know what it means to be bored.

Life don’t work like that, kids, life is a shitty bastard that likes to kick you right in the guts when you are expecting sunshine and flowers. I won’t go into details, I’ll save that for the story that I’m back on track with now. It just took a year to realize that was the way it was, and there is more tragedy now. And I am a writer and that’s just another kind of story.

Roads on her Face #38: Grandpa

I did go visit him partly for self-serving purposes, partly because I might could write him onto a page and feel as if I understand him better, give him a more real place in my life and in my story. One visit won’t do that, of course, and so I will go visit him again. He’s 90, living now in a tiny town near the Arizona/Mexico border, a town with one restaurant and a fast-food joint and a whole hour from his VA hospital. I can easily imagine myself in his shoes, all alone and waiting to see which year of the next 10 will be his last. Which of these breaths will suddenly stop? I know how quickly I will be there looking back. I hope someone will visit me then, and I partly go to build up stock in my karma bank for when I’m old too.

But visiting him was a wealth of surprises and feelings, stories I’d never heard and someone else’s explanations for things that were wrong. The more explanations I hear the more I feel as if I could draw a thread out of all of them that would be closest to the true beginning of the cloth, the one true explanation woven of pieces of all explanations.

I remembered him as a smiling presence, a husky soft laugh like my dad’s, vague memories of him taking out his false teeth and clacking them at me, liquor on his breath and that ha, ha, ha; Grandma with her louder cackling laugh and smell of cigarettes, all of them laughing at these teeth and me looking at him with no expression the way I often did. I always liked him well enough.

I decided to visit Grandpa since I’m living close to him again, for a few years signed on to the ebb and flow of the desert, the way it brings me closer to the younger me, to the family we had that passed for nuclear, to the traveling and the moving of my dreams each night. To the empty howl of a train, the night sounds of crickets and whippoorwhils and the dark silhouettes of saguaros against brilliant jewel-toned Arizona sunsets. To what passes for home.

I called him once and got the answering machine, leaving him a message that I’d call him after work. “This is- this is your granddaughter. James’s daughter,” I said, picturing him knitting his brows on the other end and trying to pick out which of his 50 grandchildren this could be. When I called later that afternoon, he picked it up right away as if he’d been sitting beside it staring at it, willing his hearing aide to work.

Ahhh…2014, you snuck up on me. Plus, the real Safari Photo

So, ahem, yeah- what happened to this little blog of mine? I guess I have to get my ass in gear, kinda.

For your viewing pleasure is the actual photo from Roads on Her Face: The Safari Photo. Her very nice note on the back indicates that any of suspicions I had about her were most likely wrong. I mean, I AM usually the one making things up about other people.

Mom let me take it and scan it, barely- I think it’s one of her favorites. Note: Me, perpetually with a book in hand- and Soph with a fistful of dollars from somewhere.

To the Mountzes, if you’re out there- I hope you don’t mind me putting your name on the interwebs.

Love, Alanna

Roads on Her Face #37: A State of Being

Does it make any sense to speak of the road as a place, as a state of being? Long-haul truckers will recognize the feeling. Bus drivers recognize their office. The vagrants and vagabonds of the world know. It is a constant state of flux, of change passing outside the windows of your sealed-off little universe. It is the thrum of tires underneath you, the ticking of miles rolling through the odometer. The smell of gasoline, French fries, dirty clothes. A stiff, sore butt. It is the feeling that any second you can get back in the car and drive, to anywhere, for as long as you want. It is unmoored, exciting, and frightening. I feel complete ease only when driving somewhere, anywhere, my thoughts at their clearest and my emotions at their most known.

As a kid all you want is to be like everybody else, desperate to fit in and be accepted. I would imagine other families, my face pressed close to the glass of a car window as we passed some evening, the red sun sinking behind skylines of cities that we wouldn’t remember.

The people in those families, pulling up chairs around a dinner table, everyone’s rooms waiting for them after they ate. These unknown people with their normal lives, with friends and phones and parents with a plan. My parents’ planning involved maybe knowing where we would stop for the night, and a rough sketch for the next couple of days. The man with the plan, had a plan to have no plan. Planning was for dipshits, for all these sheep. He wanted to be the wolf among them. Momma’s plan was to take care of her children, to keep them fed and hope they might have some kind of life when all of this was done. Because she knew, somewhere down the line, it would be done.

Roads on Her Face #36: The Safari Photo

There is a photo that sits, dusty and generally unnoticed , over my mom’s bed next to mementos of her travels and souvenirs brought back from mine and others, family photos, and “art” pieces made by her children out of clay or popsicle sticks over the years. It’s the cover of a pre-made greeting card, and there’s a note inside from the photographer saying she had enjoyed meeting us. We had few visitors at Jim’s Place in the desert outside of Parker, Arizona, and when I try to imagine what they thought when they arrived I smile. Did Jim and Bobbi Jo bring friends out there to show us off, like a circus attraction? Did they prove their generosity by parading the family of vagrants they had living on their desert land, marvel at our hard life and self-sufficiency? I don’t know. I know this woman who took the photo was moved by us, these hardscrabble little desert rat children in the middle of the punishing heat of the Mojave. We are in a posed group, the four of us, on white plastic chairs or standing. We look scruffy, and so very young. My sister, the youngest, must have been 2 or 3. We wear torn and dirty thrift store clothes, and at least one of the boys wears a once-white baseball cap with the velcroed-on shade flap for the back of his neck, patented by my mother’s brother as one of his frequent get-rich-quick schemes that never quite panned out. Our smiles are shy but proud, as if we never considered that others would look at us as people to pity.

I don’t even remember if the woman and her husband were friends of the landowners or people who happened to be driving by. We could hear vehicles coming almost as soon as they pulled off the highway onto the dirt road, 40 miles away. It was a hum in the air, a faint change in the atmosphere before we could hear the sound clearly. The county road was about ¾ of a mile from our trailer. We could be at the turnoff to Jim’s Place to meet visitors long before a vehicle traversed the miles from pavement. Did Dad sit out there with a chair and a beer, creating a figure that the curious would have to stop to inspect? Or did he meet them in Parker at a bar or the convenience store? I’ll ask my mother, and see how her memory as an adult differs from my perspective as a child. I will ask her if she was embarrassed for people to see her this way, if she worried that others might think she wasn’t caring for her children properly. She kept us as clean as you can keep active kids in the dirt of the desert, kept us clothed and fed and healthy. But she’d lived in “normal” society, in a house with two working parents in a neighborhood in a town where others watched how you behaved, judged you by how you dressed. She must have felt a kind of shame knowing how others might think of her. If not how other perceived how she cared for her children, did she consider what they thought about why she put up with the domineering treatment of the man she’d chosen to share her life with? It was apparent even to strangers that my mother was a second-class citizen and not a partner, blatant in Dad’s gruff commands to fetch him a beer, in the way he talked down to her and told rather than discussed.

I imagine this stranger with her clean clothes and fancy camera asking to take our picture, and us gathering around as if it were a fun occasion instead of a wildlife safari opportunity. I’m sure she was a mother, and tenderly gathering this trophy as a vacation highlight instead of as a hunter of photos of the disadvantaged. I myself, now, from the comfort of my middle-class life, would have taken the same photo of us or of children in Africa with flies at the corners of their eyes.

Mom Speaks: About Her Boyfriends

Where were we? Talking about your boyfriends.

Gene Benton from first grade.

Go ahead, talk about Gene.

Oh..it. It was first grade boyfriend. Laughs. What is there to say?

I don’t know what that is. I never had a first grade boyfriend.

Well, it’s just, you know…it was just a title. First grade boyfriend. Wasn’t anything to it. Let’s see- I think I got my first halfway serious boyfriend in sixth grade. His name was Mark Faulkner, and his best friend Buddy Aldridge, was my next boyfriend and I ended up marrying him right out of my second year of college. I stayed married for about a year and a half, and of course I was 18 when I got married, so we just grew apart. We were just kids.

Were you guys married from sixth grade, or?

Umm…no, I had a black boyfriend in between that time. Laughs again..

What was his name?

Joseph Hipp.

How did that happen?

It, just I was being rebellious. We had just integrated school in about the eighth grade, and some of the girls were interested in some of the black guys. So I just got involved with some of those girls, and they got me involved with a black boy, and that didn’t go over very well cuz then the whole town found out about it. The principal said I was “struck down in the prime of my life.” Laughter.

Wow. Who was the principal?

Old…white-haired man. I can see him. Uh…Mr Baloo. Yeah! His name was Mr Baloo.

Did he tell you that, that you were struck down?

Yeah. Yeah. It was the day that everyone (interrupted) that the whole school found out, because the, the black boy that I was going out with, his sister was pissed off at one of the other white girls cuz she was going out with her boyfriend. So she told the whole school and it was a huge deal so the principal took a couple of us girls home, during school that day, to get us out of there I guess.

Roads on Her Face #35: Winter is Coming

Ahh fall…the time of endings and beginnings both, lovely saturated colors and sleeping in too late, coffee and hoodies, crisp nights and short days. I get the urge to travel in the fall and spring more strongly than the rest of the year combined because it was our habitual move time. It was about to get too cold somewhere and just right somewhere else, and it usually meant floating away to the next spot like dandelion fluff. It gets a little easier each year to stay put, as I grow older and more settled. I hate saying older and settled. Those two words were never part of my life-view. I wanted change, constant excitement, wandering, new experiences, never-stay-put and a hundred different loves. I still want all those things except for all the loves. It makes me too scattered and takes up too much time. I’m happy with my one, and 10-20 non-person-type loves, like beer and pizza and Halloween.

Is it just that we settle for less as we grow up? Or is it that we are more content with life as it is right now? I like to think it’s the latter, but who the fuck knows. Settle for too long and all you end up with is dead.

I had a lot of friends – Mom speaks

He was a good guy.

Yeah. He was a good man, my dad.

Did he treat you any differently, as a southern only daughter?

Oh yeah. I was probably spoiled rotten. Daddy’s little girl, I mean he took me everywhere with him. Going to town, to Monticello, because he was a very sociable person. So he’d go and visit his friends, Mr. Glover at the furniture store, and at the barber shop Billy Ray Tyler, he’d go see him and I’d go with him. Just, all around town and he’d take me with i\him.

How big was Monticello?

Probably no more than 30,000.

It is a very southern little Georgian town. What did you think about the community, how did you feel about the people?

Uh, I had a lot of friends. It seemed like I knew most everyone in town. I liked growing up in that little town. I liked leaving there.

Just a pretty blonde little southern Monticello girl. Prom queen, homecoming queen?

No. I wasn’t any of that, but I was in the clique. The popular clique.

A lot of boyfriends?

Mmm…no/

How about friends?

Yeah, I had a LOT of friends.