i just read the obituary of a friend's dad
who died.
this friend and i shared childhood together.
the real childhood....the neighborhood stuff.
the pretending and playing and singing and
growin' up. the early stuff...
i remember him singing a cigarette jingle
in my friend's garage. i can still see him
singing it......
i remember him having a baked potato for dinner
and being stunned that he was allowed to just
have that....how cool that was to me.
we knew each other from when we were six
years old. i'd been in house, knew his parents,
and hung out with him.
and when i read his father's obituary, i was
stunned. i didn't know any of the stuff in there.
not any of it.
well, of course you didn't, terri.
you were a kid.
what were you gonna say? tell me your life story?
okay. so there's no beating up on myself about that.
of course i didn't know.
but what it makes me think of is all the life stories
that surround me now that are waiting for me to
hear and listen to....
how many do i really know?
time to listen, i think.....
2 comments:
Terri,
I just came from a small shop in downtown Harrisonburg, VA, where I discovered your art/words and I wanted to tell you how much they affected me. Your prints, "She built her cathedral from the splinters of her shattering," and "She didn't just survive... she became," described PERFECTLY what I am trying to do with my life since my divorce. I consider myself a writer but I've never been able to sum up my feelings quite so well as you did. Thank you!
I think I know you. It feels as if you know me because so much of what you say seem like I could say it too. My friend's father was fun and cool too, but he was also a stranger -- a grown up, and that felt like a world away from mine.
I guess it was.
I try to keep that connection alive with the friends/children who run through our lives. But it is a tenuous thread at best.
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