Clarity at 6:31 Still Comes Too Late

(I wrote this during summer 2010 with the NYC Writing Project, a branch of National Writing Project. That amazing group of writers/educators still inspire me to try and write every day.
I experienced this GodSmack that summer.)

“Clarity at 6:31 Still Comes Too Late”

I had turned my alarm off last night, because, sweet Saturday, I was planning on sleeping until I slipped from slumber.

Didn't happen.

6:28am: the apartment buzzer squawks.

?

Could it be FedEx already?  Who has a package?  Probably for Sharon downstairs.  Ugh, I hate when they mix up our buzzers.  Let me just - let me untangle myself from the sheets and see if I can see anything from the front window.  Holy cow, the living room is stifling.  Oooh, shut the bedroom door; don't let the A/C out.  

Wobble, wobble, swerve, oof. My foot stubs into the floorboard like a sloppy kiss.  The morning stumbles have me careening like a cliched drunken sailor. I lunge toward the couch, arms outstretched to catch myself in case depth perception tricks me.

Hmm.  Can't see a truck out front and can't see directly down to who's...

SQUAWK!
Again?

I go to the buzzer box.  I do not stub my foot - an indicator that I am cresting consciousness.

"Who is it?" (Can the person downstairs hear the edginess I have purposely peppered onto these three words? I have been awakened against my will!)

A woman's voice. "Sorry to come by so early but I have some murmurmrrmmmrmr bbbmmmrm."

"You have what?"

"Oh my, I'm just getting static on this end," she says.

Huh, you're going to get a lot more than that in a second, I think. I poke the buzzer with bullying intention.

"YOU. HAVE. WHAT?"  
That'll show her.

"Mrbbbrrm mrmrbbrr  I'll just leave it blpppblp brrrp.."
She is speaking a mishmosh of real words and humming consonants and I don't understand. That is a ridiculous thing to do.
To teach her a lesson, I'm now going to ignore her.

I release myself from the buzzer box and skip a little. Oooh!  Bedroom feels good.  Oooh, bed feels niiiiice. Snuggle, snuggle, snuggle.

SQUAWK!!!

(She's joking, right?)
I bang my fists on the mattress.
I am not getting out of this bed.  
I am not.
I am not.
I am not!
My heart's knocking.  
How dare she?  This is my Saturday and it's... it's now 6:30!  It's 6:30 and I should not feel my heart knocking!  I should be fast asleep!
I am not getting out of this bed.
BUT
Someone needs to tell her a thing or two.
You don't just go around ringing buzzers and talking in consonants whenever you feel like it.  
This is a society- there are RULES.

Look what she has made me do!  I am out of bed and scrambling for the scrunched up skort on the floor. I am back to the blast of the hot air, fly-falling down the three flights of stairs, flinging open the front door and -

She is petite and perfectly manicured.  This beautiful deer has obviously been up for HOURS and looks fresher than I will be able to muster by the afternoon today... maybe ever. She blinks her saucer eyes in such surprise.

"Oh,” she gasps, and her mouth is a perfect circle. “Oh my.”
(Only as I am in front of her is she now using all her vowels)
“I’m really sorry to disturb you so early,” she rapid-fire hyperventilates, “but I have big bags of clothing to drop off and - "

And I think I understand.

"You want the Reverend's house next door."

The saucer eyes widen to full dinner plates.
"Oh, I am so sorry.  I am so sorry!"
"It's all right," I say, but I make sure she knows it's not.
I turn from this woman with such annoyance and disgust
because she woke me up with a squawk, ripped me from cool dreams, and spoke in a language I couldn't understand.
I close the door with every bit of disdain I can muster.
I have been inconvenienced and it is a shameful, egregious act that has been committed upon me.

I fling myself back into bed and force myself to relax and return to bliss.  
I WILL RELAX.
I WILL LET GO.

Stupid lady.
Stupid generous lady.  
Stupid generous lady, donating clothing to people in need.
That's just downright inconsiderate of her, being so loving at 6:28am.
That's just...

oh.
...
...

OH.
Now I am the one with the wide-open eyes.
...

I get out of bed.

I am finally,

fully,

AWAKE.




(Smack.)

The Joke That Slipped Away

Your material can be great, your timing can be spot on, but if you don't have the audience,
ya got nothin'.


Ten years ago...

It was afternoon rush hour in early fall.  I was crossing New York City's 5th Avenue at 42nd Street.  In the middle of 5th Avenue, I swear to you, I slipped and skidded, almost landing flat on my rump.  I jerked up, looked back and what did I see?


A banana peel.

I actually slipped on a banana peel.  I lived the perfect joke!  Who gets these kinds of moments?

Problem was, everyone around me was too busy to acknowledge it.

I held my arms out, imploring to the rushing masses.

"Come on, really?  No one saw that?" I turned around, trying to find a pair of eyes to meet mine. "NO ONE is gonna laugh at that?"

No one would even look at me, let alone crack a smile. The intersection of 42nd and 5th had never seemed so quiet.

What's a girl to do?

I stood alone in the middle of the street, threw my head back and laughed.  I laughed like a hard summer storm. Life gave me a banana peel and by God, I was going to appreciate it.

It sure would have been nice to share the moment, but my audience of one sufficed. Sometimes there are moments that you must embrace for yourself, by yourself.  The material was great, the timing was spot on, and I was all I needed.

I laughed heartily... but quickly. Let's remember, the traffic lights aren't timed for comedy, and those cabs, they'll smack a girl.

What Would Picasso Do?

or "Artist Spends Birthday Party In Solitary Confinement"

It was my 8th birthday party.

When I was 7-going-on-8, I was creative. Yes, I used to be creative, before society slapped it out of me.  Right before my big transition from 7 to 8 years old, I had been toying around with marshmallows, toothpicks, and little metallic-looking sugar pearls. (Did you know that they're called "dragees"?)
After painstaking minutes of working with these materials, I created little marshmallow robot men, and naturally, I fancied myself an artist.  I mean, face it, my work was extraordinary.  Do you know any kid that has made a marshmallow robot man with metallic dragees?  Right; you don't.  Not one.  No kid you know has ever done that. Well, I did it unassisted.  On my own. No mentor or guide for me. I was a lone wolf, like Picasso.  P. Cass. Oh!

And that's exactly why I knew that my birthday party guests would positively prefer my special prizes over the store-bought junk my mom had bought for the party.  Seriously, what 8-year-old girl wants a decorative hand mirror when she can have an edible work of art made exclusively by the guest of honor?

But mom ruined everything.

Here's how it went down.

We played a game.  I think it was Kathy Goodall who won. (She was so lucky!)
Kathy got to pick her prize, and Mom held out the options.  In order to speed the process along and to help Kathy make the right choice, I elbowed my way in and shoved that mass-manufactured crap out of the way.  I presented my precious marshmallow robot men, knowing that anyone with half a brain and a fraction of good taste would make the right choice.

Kathy hemmed.
My mother hawed.

Kathy may have mumbled that she wanted the hand mirror. Okay, let's face it, Kathy Goodall was still 7 and her taste wasn't so good.  That's why she needed me as an older and more worldly friend to help her make good choices.  Some of us have that gift, and it's our burden - nay, our responsibility - to share it.  Kathy had asked for the mirror and my mother, not understanding the gravity of the moment, the moment of introducing someone to the world of ART, tried to hand the mirror to Kathy over my marshmallow robot man.

This is where it gets a little fuzzy.

I'm pretty sure that I grabbed onto the mirror and yanked it out of Kathy's hands.  I'm pretty sure I thrust a marshmallow robot man into that void, that artless place that needed so desperately to be filled in Kathy Goodall.  What a good friend I was!

But then, I remember my mother doing the unforgivable.  I remember her performing a reverse grab and yank.  She grabbed that soft, white, heavenly piece of art out of Kathy's hands, yanked the mirror back from me, and switched the two before I could say "Picasso."

I may have started to yell.
I may have had an (artistic) tantrum.

Next thing I knew, my mother sent me to my room.
I got sent to my room at my own birthday party.


An artist leads a lonely existence, my friends.

SMACK.

There are no losers? HA.

There are no losers?  HA.

Devoted Readers (all four of you), a story:

I began playing league softball in spring of 4th grade.  Our town had Lassie League, an all-girls community league of teams named after Native American tribes.  (How interesting that our middle-upper class Connecticut suburb named sports teams after those nice Native American folks. Celebrating diversity in a place that had none! Future story awaits.)  Anyway, lucky for me, my best friend Laura and I ended up on Cherokee together.  It was our first year of the organized sport, so our coaches had us split the (fake) position of shortfield, the (imagined) spot between first and second base.  There wasn't a whole lot of action there, so it was a good (fake) position for beginners.  Laura usually played four innings and I struggled through three. My friend took to the game quickly, and by the next year, she was playing shortstop on our new team, Sioux.  I, on the other hand, was bumbling, awkward, and inconsistent. I hoped to deflect negative opinion of me by working the team with funny bits and stupid impersonation voices, and generally, I got teammates to laugh.

A score is a score, dear readers.  This lesson has stayed with me my entire life.

At the end of the season, our coaches took the team to some fun spot like Playland.  We ate junk food, threatened to vomit on each other on the roller coaster, and lost money trying to win cheap toys by playing cheap games.  The day was good, but then came the cookout and the official awards ceremony.

OH BOY! I was bursting for my award.  I knew it would be great.

Everyone got one.
Julie Johnson was MVP.  (Duh.)
I'm pretty sure Laura took Best Back-up.
The coaches went through our entire roster and gave out softball-related awards:
Most Home Runs
Best Fielder
Best Pitcher
Most RBIs
Most Improved
Best Arm

And finally, they got to me.  My award?
Friendliest.

Friendliest.

Actually, the bright gold foil paper medallion says "FRIENDLIEST!" (exclamation point). I still have the ribbon; it's here to my right, tacked up in the computer armoire, so I'm being exact. Check it out for yourself.  I just figured out how to add a photo to my blog post.

Now, I have always been someone who believes that leveling the field and taking away all sense of competition is a bad idea.  There are winners and losers in life.  There are.  Sometimes I've been really blessed to be a winner, but more often, I've been blessed to be a loser.  Losing has taught me far more than winning has.  Yay for losing!

So, what are we doing to children, pretending that life is fair and equal?  What kind of fall are we setting them up for if we always allow them to win?   Shouldn't we teach them that sometimes there's no award?  Sometimes you just don't deserve it.  You didn't earn it.  Nope.

I had no business getting an award for softball. Shouldn't my coaches have left it at that and left me empty-handed?

And yet, here's the fish-smack. I didn't get an award for softball.  My coaches highlighted something else about me that day.  I was a loser at softball, but that didn't mean I had to be a loser.

I am firmly committed to this idea that not everyone gets to win all of the time, but I am so grateful that my softball coaches let everyone win that day.  At the time, I really thought that FRIENDLIEST! was a great award.  By God, I WAS FRIENDLIEST!  I was a mediocre-at-best softball player, but who cares?  In the big game of life, I got an award that would take me a lot farther than lame ol' Best Arm.  So, even though I was a loser, I didn't feel like one that day, and it was a great thing.

You've Come A Long Way, Baby?

Before I was a teacher, I was an actor.  It’s something I usually only share with students when I know that they have a particular interest in theater themselves.  Early in the year, my after-school intervention group expressed an interest in doing literacy through acting and scene work.  The small cohort asked questions about my theater past, and I sprinkled them with answers, and that had been that.

A month ago, our school’s house decided to really celebrate the performing arts.  Each teacher was asked to choose a musical poster to hang outside the classroom door. I chose Miss Saigon, because I had been in the show on Broadway on on tour.  Many teachers put up a blurb explaining why they chose their poster, but I put up a photo from one of my performances.  One student noticed the photo and asked me about it.  I told him about it in passing.  But information travels fast through 7th grade, and it wasn’t long until I had inquiring minds at my classroom door, looking for answers of their own.

“Ms. Douglas, that’s you in that picture outside?”

“Yup.”

“You were in the show?”

“Yup.”

“When?”

“Back before I was a teacher.”

“That picture is really you?”

“Yeah, here...” I went over to my bookshelf and grabbed a folder.  My Miss Saigon press folder is a sleek, glossy thing with various programs, articles, and photos from the show.  I also keep old headshots from over the years in it.  After passing around the photos from the show, the students pointed to my headshots and I spread them out on the table. 

“When was that?” Chayanne asked, pointing to the most recent shots.  

“Oh gosh, 12, 13...14 years ago?”

The boys leaned in. The three photos showed me at my very best.  They were seemingly effortless shots, but in reality were attained through a few hours with a professional photographer, a makeup artist, and several wardrobe and location changes.  As an adult, I’d never looked better... or paid more to look that way.  But as I looked at the photos with them, I felt a certain amount of pride for that period in my life, and for being that woman in those pictures.  

Chayanne looked across the pictures for a long time.  He traded several glances between the photos and me before he spoke.  

“Ms. Douglas,” he finally said, “No offense, but... what happened?”

Smack.

The first post is the hardest, right?

The first post is the hardest, right?

Right?

I created this blog over a month ago, and the reason was two-fold.  I wanted to familiarize myself with blogging so that I could use it in the classroom with my middle school students, but I also wanted to use it to resurrect my own sad, neglected writing life.

My blog is called GodSmacked, and it's a little play on words. (How clever!  I love this blog already!  Honey, come look at this witty woman's words.  Oh, my~)  GodSmack is a riff on gobsmack, which means "to utterly astound."  Being gobsmacked is like being hit in the face with a fish.  I  feel that way on a regular basis.  The difference for me is that I think there's someone on the other end of the fish, holding it by the tail and smacking me right across the face with it.  Yup, I think it's God.  We all have different ideas of what God is, and let me clarify that this isn't a blog with a religious or spiritual bent.  It's just that I think that God keeps me in check by figuratively smacking me across the face with a fish, and it's almost a daily occurrence.  Some of those moments are pretty darn funny, and some are poignant and sobering.  Regardless, I think they are all moments of real clarity for me.

So, I'm hoping to share these moments here: these humbling moments that usually happen when I'm feeling pretty solid - almost cocky - about myself.  Let's just say, God can put a mean smackdown on a girl!

And away we go...