Write a 300-500 word essay in the format of the This I Believe series ran on public radio. This international project has been continued on line at http://thisibelieve.org/
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I believe in licking the top of the yogurt container.
ReplyDeleteSure, the insides of the container are good. You use your spoon to get out
the majority. But there's nothing like peeling off the top and licking it.
It's like you're cheating the yogurt company. They think you'll just throw
it away, without thinking, consuming less. The walls of the container too.
They think I'll give up, but no, I take that damn spoon and scrape as much
as I can.
I believe in licking your plate too. If you like something enough you should
get all you can. My dad grew up as the second oldest of nine and if it was
dinner time, you got to the table and ate what you could, and you didn't
waste food. You had to fight for it. And I'm fighting the yogurt company.
When you had good food, desert of spaghetti or whatever, you took whatever
you had. In the case of spaghetti it may be bread. But you always have your
tongue. I don't care how ridiculous you may look or how faux pas it may be.
Goddamnit if you want to do it then do it.
My aunt had a dog, Lady, and when we were done eating, if there was
something on our place then we put in on the ground and Lady ate it. I used
to think it was gross that she would lick the plate clean. Dog saliva was
gross. Heck I used to hate letting things touche on your plate. But they
washed it so it was good.
My mom was a Lady of sorts. If there was something on my plate that I didn't
want I would give it to her to eat. She liked anything really.
I believe that you have to fight to get what you want. That you don't get
gipped out of something. And that small satisfaction in getting that last
bit of yogurt out of your container, knowing that you got your money's
worth. It makes it taste so good.
I believe in licking the top of the yogurt container.
I believe in falling.
ReplyDeleteI believe in the dream that everyone has where you fall into a void, down stairs or a cliff. The myth that if you hit the ground you die, I believe in that too.
So I've died threes times.
I remember the first tie I died. It was an early teen age, not sure which. I was falling off the stairs in my old house, the one that has long since been demolished. I walked up the stairs which had been made more vertical. It was more like I climbed. The green astroturf-like carpet remained as I made my way up, like the animated McCauly Culkin in the Pagemaster. It's like I climbed forever. I reached the top, looked over and jumped. Or fell. I don't know
I continued falling. I fell past the steps, all the green carpet, all the work. I fell and fell and fell.
I hit the bottom. And I laid there. I was looking on myself in the third person the entire time. And in first person too. I was looking up from where I landed and looking upon my body too. And I laid there until I woke up.
I fell again in a dream of the grand canyon. Or a canyon. I fell forever then hit like Wiley Cayote. And the same thing happened like the last time. I fell a third time with someone else too. In an elevator. One that actually went up 4 stories but fell for atlas 20. Out of the rubble I climbed. Alive. And I woke up each time, alive.
Not scared.
I believe in the falling. The state in between the top and the bottom. Going one direction. Down down down. And accepting that when you land you land. No control of the direction anymore, weightless. Wind rushing past, or you rushing past the wind.
I believe in death.
ReplyDeleteI believe in walking down the funeral home red carpet at the ripe old age of 6, or 5, who really knows or cares, and walking up to the casket and seeing my grandmother laying in the coffin at peace. I remember walking in the hospital to her room; I even remember the exact room and can walk you there to this day, the hospital that was transferred from downtown to a municipal building, which had somehow been transformed into a branch of Appalachian Regional Hospital from the local hospital that my grandmother, Florence Brooks Murray, and my grandfather Hershell Baynes Murray, had founded. I remember the story of how my grandfather had graduated from the University of Louisville and had given birth or saved or somehow unofficially adopted a child by the name of George Bellamy, who he influenced to go to U of L to become a doctor on my grandfather’s dime, who would take care of my grandfather’s wife. In that room that I remember. I remember her perfume and her pink house robe and her pimento cheese and coffee and all the things that came rushing back when I think about her. But I remember her death.
I also believe in the death of James Perry, the President and CEO of Commercial Bank. I remember the story of how he gave my father a job and kept him in the county. How he changed the course of my family more than I know. I remember the stories he told, and how he smoked all of his life. And I remember the rasp of his breath and the mechanical hum of the breathing machine to which he was attached. And the feeling of being bound, of a young man in an old body, a limitless individual who now was limited. By his own actions. And I remember pressing the button in the ER room that he would have to go to for the last time, the button that stopped the beeping of the machine when his blood oxygen level dipped below 80 percent. And giving him a sip of water if he asked for one. The last words I said to him. Seeing him in his casket. Helping make sure the after funeral reception at his house was okay and the food was out and everyone was doing well. And feeling like breaking down.
I believe in the therapy that I started before that, and that continued after that. About me complaining about my life and wanting to kill myself. Thinking that death was better than life. Feeling guilty that I thought that. Hating myself for that and other things. But I remember thinking about walking up out of calculus class and walking to the home-economics room, asking for a knife to cut a cake and then slitting my wrist in the hallway for everyone to see. Blaming everyone else as I died. Thinking how stupid that was. How these people died living long lives and changing things for so many people, for me.
(see below for continuation)
I believe in death. That you should not be afraid of it, that you should accept it when it comes but not seek it out. I believe in living not in fear of death but in joy of life. I believe in the death that keeps us human, one thing we all share. Reminding us that nothing last forever. Looming there. Beautiful, dreadful. Wonderful, magnificent. Powerful, weak. I believe in the lives of these two people, of so many more people, who lived and died and made a world that we inherit. And that we pass on in our lives and in death. That they teach me to live and to help and to know and learn and breathe and speak and think and talk and create and maintain and encourage and cry and laugh and love and be. And most of all to die. Die nobly. Die in our beds, due to our own causes or to the world that we create without knowing it. Die with our friends, our family. Of a stroke or renal failure. Falling off a boat and breaking your neck. Fishing. Doing what you love. Or being what you love. Who you are. Knowing or not knowing all you have done. But living knowing that all of this will happen in due time, and that time is your friend and foe, and that you have to take the moment and spend it. For good or bad. But it must be spent. And spending life on the living causing the living to remember the dead.
ReplyDeleteI believe in death.
“Because I could not stop for Death/ He kindly stopped for me; / the carriage held but just ourselves/ and Immortality.”
I believe that all things are connected.
ReplyDeleteI realized this in the shower once, after my mom had called me and told me that my cousin and his wife were getting a divorce. I had been in Chemistry class and was thinking about the production of things. I started thinking about ink. In the bathroom stall before I took a shower I thought about the farmer that grew the plant that made ink. Or the manufacturer that made it synthetically. The people involved in getting the ink out of the tub or plant. And refining it. And putting it into cartridges. Shipping those cartridges in plastic or metal pens. Those pens going to different people. Going to municipal buildings which paid people for them. Those people getting money from the driving company to deliver them. And taking that money and buying food at the store. And that store worker who has cancer going to the mobile lab. And getting help from a technician. Who gets paid by the hour. Who brings those wages into a starting relationship and uses them to purchase a marriage license. And a different truck driver bringing more pens, taking them to the same judge who is paid to sign specific papers, signing a divorce one instead. This ink changing lives. Coming from an impersonal factory or a personal farmer. It doesn’t matter. It came from somewhere that didn’t know where it was going.
It even came from the pen. The pen that didn’t ask for the ink nor did it ask for it to leave. It just was. The pen that changed the lives of two people. The pen that broke up a marriage. That caused my cousin to be single, to meet new people, the find a new girl, to start dating again. That girl who had him think differently about life. Who gave him a different thing to love. The girl who made me think to write this thing. This thing that you are reading right now. Written on a computer made in a place different from where I am now. That money that was given to the manufacturer of my computer which was given to the workers. Workers who bought food and clothes from a convenience store, that store who paid it’s cashiers to give money and take money, the cashiers who had to have their eyes checked and the optometrist who needed new tires, the repair man who had a thing for musicals, the theatre light designer who wanted to buy a ring for his girlfriend. That Jeweler who wanted to sell a ring so he could fund his other business, a server business. The one hosting a website that linked you too this blog. Or that paid you or made something you purchased. Or made something someone else purchased from you.
(See below for cont.)
The infinite connections between all things and the specific connection that can be tied between all things. The thought that comes between this, if we think about it. How we all really are dependent on one another no matter how much we try to avoid it.
ReplyDeleteI once heard from a friend about how you could find traces of cocaine on money. Money that I handled in church even. He heard it from his cousin. Who may or may not have made it up. But my dads a banker. He touches all kinds of money. Cocaine money. Flower money. Butter money. A link. One example of the link between to people, the things exchanged. Much like pens and marriage. Things that can be counted and recorded. Traceables. And the untraceable that we don’t notice. Until we think about it. Until we realize that we all live on the same rock and are connected to the grain of sand on the furthest beach in a place you have never even heard of by a painter of a painting in the 17th century who sold a sculpture to your great grandfather who somehow someway caused you to be. Maybe. Or maybe not.
Also, I ate an apple one day. It grew somewhere. Touched by many things to get to me. Touched by sun. Created from atoms from the beginning of time. A teacher once said to me that three stars had to die in order for you to exist because it took that many reactions for the elements in your body to be formed. And now I’m telling you. I’m telling you all this so maybe you’ll realize that we’re all different. And all the same. Everything is.
Or maybe you’ll just go buy a cup of coffee, oblivious.
I believe in coffee shops.
ReplyDeleteI believe in asking the barista “do you ever stop working” and getting the response “sometimes.” Seeing her every time I come. I wonder if she ever remembers me; she probably has tons of customers. But I like to pretend we’ve formed a make-shift family, bonded by tips and orders. Not orders, but requests.
I know that some people remember me. As must as I remember them. Coming to a show by a musician that frequents this place as much as I do. Becoming fixtures. I request the song about abortion after he goes around asking names. He’s like “You’ve been coming here as long as I have” and I’m like “Yeah.” I believe in the first time I saw him, thinking he was a tool for acting all artsy, and thinking about how much of a tool I was acting at the time for being elitist. I believe in mapping our respective growths.
I believe in the communal attitude of Open Mic Night. Making a ritual of coming with friends that I love for going on three years, stopping and starting with different groups. Doing homework. But more importantly having discussions. About boys that won’t come out, about boys that suck and about friends that won’t stop bitching. About the difficult of Transy. About how stupid it is to complain because we’re sitting on computers at a coffee shop listening to music with electricity and doing better than about 93% of the world. About changing the world, making bucket lists at age 20. About talking about talking, language, art, music, life. The big questions, and recognizing how small we are.
I believe in seeing other people doing this to. Or thinking that they are at least. Watching first dates happen, seeing people in discussion. To hell with isolation. And being jealous of them too. And then having those experiences of my own. Usually failing. Like the guy not texting me back after a first date. I guess that was the last date too.
I believe in the taste and the aroma of the place. How all of the different things here make up what it is. And how the people make that up to.
I believe in the night I drove my cousin down to a party with her friend from High School so she could drink and I could drive her back. It was an all girls party so I went off and did my own thing. This was the summer before college and I wanted to explore the city. The friend of my cousin, who is also my friend, suggested Common grounds that is just down the road from her house. I came here and had a Strawberry milkshake. And I fell in love. I wrote thank you note for graduation gifts and thought about life and the coming year and frequenting this place and all the things that could happen. All the possibilities. A place becoming a staple of my life and becoming one thing that defines who I am.
I believe in coffee shops.
I believe in loyalty.
ReplyDeleteI believe in coming from a small town in Eastern Kentucky and having a father as a loan officer in the local bank. A bank that had a rival bank, Bank of the Mountains. Mine was Commercial Bank. Both banks were founded by members from the same family. The Perry family had four children. Different groups of children founded two different banks due to many different reasons. But who you banked with determined who you were in the community.
I believe in being told when 16 which gas stations you could go to and which you shouldn’t. Because of who each gas station banked with. And getting your oil done in town at a local start up for oil changes because they were funded by Commercial Bank. The Bank. How the money you gave them came back to you, and how you both benefited from one action.
I believe in going to the same stores, growing to like them. Establishing connections. Supporting people because they support you. Creating a bond that doesn’t really exist but does at the same time. Something unspoken.
It’s a patron-client relationship. Only both are both and really both are neither.
I believe in having an Uncle Larry who really isn’t my Uncle, and an Aunt Rhonda who really isn’t my Aunt. They were married, well are, and have two children who I grew up with. Who in some ways I consider siblings. Our parents became friends in before we were born. Uncle Larry grew to bank with my dad and we went to Uncle Larry for dentistry. Uncle Larry had come back and apprenticed under the husband of Aunt Gladys, a lady who wasn’t really my aunt but watched over my real mom and Aunt when they were younger and who went to church with us and was friends with my grandmother. Maybe this was how we knew Larry. And my parents were friends with his first wife as well, and they are still friends. But we would pay at a discount rate, or maybe not pay at all. I don’t remember. Quid pro quo. But we are a family not united in blood but in bond.
I believe in Aunt Gladys’ pies. The apple ones made from scratch that couldn’t be beat. And going to church and both of us singing Victory in Jesus because it was our favorite song. I can still sing all three verses as found in The United Methodist Hymnal. I remember the night we got home after coming back from somewhere. Aunt Gladys was sick, and I knew she might die soon. Oh we were coming back from Morehead from Stacey’s house visiting her kids. She was a friend of my mom’s via work and we would go to her for physical therapy- I have hamstring problems and she would help me. And I remember feeling a change in life at a particular moment during the ride and then coming home and getting the call that she had died.
I believe in carrying this over into friendship. I believe in providing for my friends, loaning out my car or money or time. Usually with no expected return. And knowing that one day when I really needed to talk to my RA, who was more my friend than my RA, about boys and my mental state and life and the world that I could do that as friends and not as just an RA. Due to a history. Due to Sonic limeades. Due to theatre. Due to a connection.
I believe in loyalty.
“He loved me ere I knew him, and all my love is due him. He plunged me to vict’ry beneath the cleansing flood.”
There is something missing nowadays. Actually there is a lot missing. It's not the same anymore. I see it more here than there, but it is slowly becoming evident everywhere. It is a sad shift that will never be reversed. Thank God I lived it. And now I swear by it.
ReplyDeleteBack, not so long ago, there sat a house on a hill, a tin-roofed farmhouse that remembered times before Lincoln. The setting was perfectly staged - green slopes of openness, the back woods, an abandoned barn paralyzed by time, a pond full of cattails, algae scum and bullfrogs that croaked me to sleep on stagnant summer nights. There were no budding neighbors, but a zip-line tying the back to the front and a tree house minus the tree. There was room to roam.
We played outside. We caught bugs, snakes, fish and frogs. We played Annie Annie Over and Indian Ball. We roved the woods in search of Gonk-Snocklers and ended up knee-deep in Muck-Muck Swamp. We built huts and forts and fought off the ever ensuing Pumo-Chumos. There were battles to be won, trails to be lost and adventures to be led.
This was a time when God made dirt, so dirt don't hurt. A time when if you stepped on a crack, you broke your mother's back. A time of sticks and stones.
We played outside. Every tree had been climbed and re-climbed to new dangerously dangling heights. Boxes were added to skateboards to create downhill derby racing machines. Scratches, cuts and stings were healed by home remedies, duct tape and rare steaks.
This was a time when families ate together, when 5:30 meant grub on. This was a time when ook-liak-li-ick-lio was a standard dish in the weekly rotation. A time when grandpa still referred to himself as granddad and fixed us bullfrog in-a-cup.
I believe in bullfrog in-a-cup.
I believe in the story my friend told me about his Great Uncle. I’ll call him Bob. Bob told his wife one day that he was going to go hunting. He gathered his stuff to go hunting, got in his car, and drove out. He never came back. Weeks and years passed and the family never heard from him. No one really searched for him. They accepted it and moved on. But my friend’s dad hunted him down. He flew to his house and walked up to the door and told the man that answered the door that he was Bob’s nephew. I don’t remember the rest of the story but I think he came back. But Bob had gone away. He started a whole new life. Had a new wife and kids I think. He just vanished.
ReplyDeleteI believe in my friend Laura. She feels sometimes that she needs to disappear. So she does. She texts no one. She lets know one where she is going. She just drives. Later, she comes back, like it never happened.
I like to do this too. I get in my car and drive. Around the city. In circles. Back and forth. Away. Away from whatever it is. To a place that doesn’t exist, a place where I am not. But wherever I go, I’m always there. I escape them, but I can’t escape myself.
I think too much. I know I do. My analytical thoughts cut me to the core. Thinking about the lady that build my computer in India and how her children are doing and if one day they’ll grow up to cure my grandchild of a disease. Or how ink is made. Or if there really is a right or wrong. Or how fucked up everything in my life is. Even thinking about thinking about thinking.
At some point I put on music. Especially when driving. I drive and I sing and if it’s a good song I dance. I put on shuffle on my iPhone and click next until the song tells me that I want to listen to it. I get caught up in the song. I go away, But eventually I come back for I’m not brave enough to leave entirely. And actually, I don’t want to leave forever. Just for a little while.
I believe in getting lost.
Katie Brewer
ReplyDeleteI cannot even begin to express the fear that grips my heart when I walk into that room.
I stay strong at all other moments – particularly for my mother. “You do understand what you’re getting yourself into, right?” She asks as though I am blinded to the sight of her. As if I do not see what lay right before me, right inside the door of that sterile room.
I cannot even begin to describe the worry I feel when I walk into that room.
You would imagine intensive care to be quiet, especially late at night after a four hour drive. You would expect to see a peaceful scene, sleeping, healing.
It is not quiet. The room buzzes with electrical activity, machines fill the spaces where the bed and chairs do not. The ventilator that keeps my grandmother breathing makes the most noise. It causes the most fear. I watch it as it pushes air in; I see her chest rise with the forced onslaught of oxygen. I watch as her chest falls – unnaturally. I hear the artificial breaths; try to convince myself that they are actually being made by the woman with whom I still have not spent enough time.
I sit by my mother. I move across the room. I grab tissues.
I cannot stay still within those walls.
I cannot even begin to express the fear.
Her body lies broken and bruised upon the sheets and pillows. She looks so fragile, as if she could slip away from us at any given moment.
I walked in this morning, just now. She was awake and that gives me some hope.
Her eyes were open. Her eyes looked through those tubes, wires, monitors. She looked at my mother and I – and she saw.
Mother and daughter, mother and daughter.
She gripped my hand as I held hers.
My grandmother has been through breast cancer, through countless falls. She’s a fighter.
Despite my fear, despite that room,
I believe in my grandmother.