Stories Live Here

Aren't we the cutest kids ever?

Stories live here.

It's the last day of my trip home to my dad's house.  When I moved into my first apartment in college, I ransacked my bedroom furniture and, consequently, no longer really have a room of my own here.  None of us kids do.  Our rooms are now shells where things accumulate.  I'm currently spread out in my cocoon, a king-size bed at one end of my dad's basement that was shifted here after he had the house redecorated and purchased a new bedroom suite.  Technically this used to be my brother's room.  My room has an air mattress purchased to make sure we all have enough sleeping space at Christmas, the one time we are all home together.  The air mattress, like this bed, is an accumulation, something that has crept in after we crept out.

This is the part of the house that doesn't get used much anymore.  My dad lives, always has, almost exclusively on the first floor.  The 1960s style wood paneled basement was the domain of my mother (laundry and craft room), me (family room=play room with blocks, Legos, and K-Nex sets strewn everywhere), and whichever kid was old enough and, in theory, responsible enough to earn a basement bedroom space.  I was the only kid who didn't break curfew and climb out the basement windows after bed-time, so I was technically the only kid who was ever responsible enough to be down here, but that's a different story.

There are so many stories enclosed by these walls.  Since my mother's passing, I have joined my brother and sister in moving on to other lives away from here.  As a result, the basement has become a catch-all for lives that used to be.  There's my giant wardrobe, the only piece of bedroom furniture that I didn't abscond with on my way to grad school.  There's the bookshelf with a set of encyclopedias long since outdated.  There's my violin and Poseidon's trident from my freshman year Greek mythology project, a no-longer-but-may-be-soon-needed-by-someone microwave, a waist-high wooden case for old VHS tapes, an antique lamp whose glass shade bit the dust and hasn't yet been repaired, boxes of family pictures sorted by my mother in ages past, my old desk with the disks for an early 2000s version of Paint Shop Pro, my first college computer, a costume from an Illinois College Follies performance, Banana Republic gift boxes from last year's Christmas.  The list could go on; all of these are accumulations.

And these accumulations accumulate naturally, like dust.  The floor plan is the same.  The furniture, while not the same as when I was a child, is in the same basic arrangement.  The picture of my siblings and me is still hanging in the same spot.  The effect is comforting, a gradual accumulation of life gathering like layers of sediment.  If you sift through them, you might discover a stack of drawings and find yourself in 1999 watching a young Marc Malone sketching floor plans of ships while watching the Discovery Channel.  You might travel to Paris via a bag of waiting-to-be-scrap-booked memorabilia from my study abroad experience.  Your eye might fall on a pile of antique Crayola tins and see a parade of Christmases where my mom always got one as a gift.  These things are everywhere you look.  And each thing is a story.

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Tonight, as my dad let the dogs out before bed, I sat at the dining room table and picked up a copy of his Alumni newspaper.  We started talking about a high-rise dorm that was recently demolished, and before I knew it I was hearing about college, about my mother who lived, only briefly, in that now-demolished dorm with a woman who was "not bad, but the polar opposite of your mother" (I remember my mother referring to her as a "wild child" while shaking her head, her eyes locked in disbelief on the empty space in front of her).  I heard about my mom's method of coping with this roommate:  "Every night she would come over from her dorm and hang out with [her brother and me] until bed-time, and on some nights she traveled home every night.  But I probably wouldn't have met her otherwise, so it was a good thing in the end."  Then I asked about my dad's experience living with my Uncle Bobby, my mom's brother:  "It was interesting; he was a minimalist.  He had six shirts in his closet hanging next to six pairs of pants.  He probably had six pairs of underwear, too.  When I went off to college, my dad harped at me for filling a trunk with things.  I had one of those compact vacuum sweepers--'Well what the hell do you need that for?!  Don't you have maids to clean your dorms for you?'  No, Dad, we certainly don't..."  The conversation eventually bled into my college experience and I thought about how I did have a maid in my freshman year dorm room and how a suitemate and I joined the Orange Crush, a student cheering organization.  I also remembered how I was one of the only ones who used our in-apartment kitchen, and I wasn't great at remembering the dishes.  "Fred didn't care, but Stephen and David did."  Then we talked about me moving home and cloistering myself in a small, private school, about whether that decision was the right decision and why it was or wasn't.  The whole conversation was a high-speed trip through thirty some odd years of family history, and there was something magic about it.  There will be a time when no one, and I mean no one, has access to that part of my family history.  It can only be passed through stories.

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 Earlier today I asked my dad if he is excited for Christmas.  "No," was the simple answer.  "But why?  It's the best time of the year!"  He thought for a moment.  "Christmas is stressful for me.  The shopping, the menu planning, the trying to make it special and rarely succeeding."  I tried to insist that it always ends up special, but I don't think he believed me.

The truth is that stories live with family, and inside the ancestral home, like no place else, we don't have to go in search of the stories.  They live in the alumni newspaper accumulating on the dining room table.  They live in the quilts pieced and sewn by my mother.  They live in the Crayola tins and the Follies costume and the pictures lined up everywhere.

Stories live here, and that's what makes coming home the best place for a quick end-of-summer vacation.  It's the getting away from the current version of "real life" long enough to reconnect with all of the past lives.  And that's why I don't need, now or at Christmas, extravagant dinners or fancy wines to make it special.*  I just need some stuff--some accumulations--to stare at and some family to explain it to me.

*Dad, if you are reading this, the extravagant dinners and fancy wines are nice, too.  So, you know, don't feel like you have to skip them, you know, just on my account.

Metaphors and the End of Semester Panic

Ronald Wallace's words toward the end of my own undergraduate river--"For Marc--Good luck at Iowa State--keep writing sestinas!" 

Writing isn't always about pretty things.  Sometimes it is about the monsters, the little things that go bump in our subconscious and send us flying from task to thoughtless task, like a spider who finds all points of contact vanishing mid-spin.

This morning I woke up while it was still darkish outside and cursed my internal clock for not understanding that, for the next three months, we no longer need to wake up before the sun.  After I had turned over a few times, I decided to approach my day with some vigor.  I did dishes.  Then I had some breakfast.  Then I unpacked a bag of books and read some poems from a Ronald Wallace book and remembered fondly the day he signed it for me.  Then I retreated to my bedroom for an hour or two of morning reading.  I made it through one full paragraph before I remembered I needed to order checks.  So I did that.  Then I paid a bill.   Then I was on my computer checking stats on my summer class.  Then I checked that all the items are still present in my Amazon shopping cart--I won't commit to buying them for a few more hours, even though they are essentials, not frivolity.  Then I checked my untouched-for-months blog.  Then I read some blogs.  Then I realized that I was panicking.

This happens every Spring semester.  I don't know how to do the ending of school.  I don't know how to do the ending of most things, but school is that one thing that pops up on repeat, once a year.  Sure, there are summer classes and before that there was summer studying and before that there was summer working, but the actual end of the regular academic year has always thrown me for a loop.

This year the loop seems, at least in the current moment, to be jolting pretty roughly.  All week I've been in a bit of a stupor--no more classes, must grade, must grade, must assess outcomes, must administer final exams, must say goodbye to students, students, students filing past my desk.  Must go to lunch, must watch students pile possessions into cars and backs of trucks.  Must watch the campus empty, must hear the hallway shift to silence as the students retreat off into life.  Must see graduation pop up around me, must put on regalia and a happy face, must process and smile and nod and clap and recess and shake hands and congratulate.  Must wake up the next day with not one clue how to not see students every day, how to say goodbye to the stories that we teachers collect of these lives that pass through our lesson plans and our hearts because, as much as we construct course policies and put on the face of the enforcer, as much as we tell ourselves to keep a distance, to use the course outcomes as a barrier between our souls and theirs, flayed out bare in a paper or in a speech class or in a creative writing workshop session, we can't.  And then they leave and we know, I know, how delicate humans are at 19, 20, 21.  And all I see is the whole promise of humanity shining behind each cap and gown.  And I'm afraid that life won't be kind because life can be that way sometimes.  And I'm afraid I haven't taught them enough, that they haven't learned enough from the institution I do my little part to represent.

And then I think of all the times in class when Student A sat off to the left, and I could see his chemotherapy port poking out under his shirt, forcing memories of mom and of feeding tubes and of the holding of hands and the forever stopping of breath.  And I think of the times I saw Student B acknowledge the scars of the past and heal himself through the spinning of new words, forcing memories of the pills and the car and the friend behind the back tires, trapping me between the curb and his flesh, forcing me to stick it out until I could figure it out.  And then I thought of Student C poking that peculiar oddity with a pencil, walking around it, taking notes, encapsulating, creating, triumphing as she locks one more mystery of life behind words, forcing memories of learning to isolate, analyze, understand the past and then tap tap tap out a new future in writing.

And here I am today, isolating, analyzing, understanding, and tap tap tapping out what I've learned.

And here is what I've learned:  I worry because I doubt.  And behind it all, I'm afraid that when I plunge headfirst each year into the river and pull myself out when it reaches the sea, they won't remember the ripples I made.

And here is what I've learned:  I don't ever want to feel totally calm as the students wash out into the surf.