Promenade.

Twelve years ago I was the prom queen at my junior high school prom. I wore a short black velour dress that I borrowed from my friend, and black and white plastic beads that I borrowed from my mother. I gussied up my feet with a pair of black patent leather high heel Mary Janes that I bought for $10 at Payless in the Burlington University Mall, and wore with a pair of black nylons that I either borrowed from my mother or got on sale at the time of purchasing my shoes. While I didn’t care so much about the dress, the beads, or the nylons, I despised the shoes. I called them “pig shoes” because the toes were neither very pointy nor very round but somewhere in the middle like the hoofs of cartoon pigs. I’d looked in the store windows of fancy shoe stores, looked longingly at shoes that were $80, $90, $150. They were beautiful shoes and ones that would have lasted for years. If I walked into prom with those beautiful shoes on, perhaps I’d feel better about the rest of me. But I had only $10 to spend on prom clothes that year and thus, I had to stick to my budget and get what I could. In fact, when I was trying on the Pig Shoes in Payless, I looked up just in time to see a beautiful girl about my age and her stunning boyfriend strut past the store front. The girl had blonde hair and it was long, lying lustrous on her shoulders in the way mine never would, no matter how long I would grow it. Her name was probably Tiffany. As we caught eyes, and as I fastened the patent leather strap around my ankle, I saw her look at me and giggle, heard her whisper to her boyfriend, whose name was very likely Todd, “Oh God, what awful shoes.” I think she even gagged. I lowered my head to look at my shoes again, embarrassed, and feeling for them a sudden distaste, a sudden resentment. The Pig Shoes were the symbol of my knowing I wasn’t the picture of beauty and wouldn’t be anything close to glamorous at the prom, because Tiffany had gagged when she saw them. My $10 pig shoes and borrowed clothes were a far cry from the couture I’d be seeing my own school’s Tiffanys wearing at the prom, and I became ashamed of how my feet showed how I myself was a far cry from being a Tiffany.  In high school, there is nothing so awful as not fitting in, and it was as clear as my pig shoes were shiny that I was not fitting in. But it was my junior prom and I had a cute boyfriend whom I adored, and we were going with my closest friends and I knew I’d be in good company with them.

I write about this today because tonight I am going to the prom. Twelve years after my first prom, I am attending a second. The junior class is hosting the dance and from what I’ve heard it’s a fancy thing. So with twelve more years of living behind me, a slightly more forgiving budget, and tremendously more forgiving sense of self, I am off to pamper my hair and nails, don a red dress and strappy gold heels, and will dance the night away, on one of my final weekends of my two year Brazilian adventure. 

As time passes, we change. I look back at the junior year Gina and I see her bend down with shame to remove the ugly black shoe. I see her reluctantly bring the box to the cashier and place it on the counter with her ten dollar bill. I see her put that same box in her closet and not open it again until the night of the prom where she spends most of her time crossing and uncrossing her feet to cover up her shoes that she knows are hideous. And when she has to stand with the rest of the prom court—-the Tiffanys, the Todds, the others so beautiful and refined—-to have the King and Queen announced, I see her stand nervously in front of the group of students and I know she is thinking of her feet. When her name is called as the Queen, I see her face light up with surprise. The tiara is placed upon her head and it is clearly much too fancy for her outfit, the little diamond gemstones shimmering much too gaudily against the darkness of the rest of her outfit, clashing with the plastic beads around her neck. But in the moments when she dances with her good friend, the King and Queen together in their official royal dance, she is so happy and forgets, if just for an instant, about the ten dollars and the pig shoes, so happy she is that she spins around the dance floor posing for pictures, smiling so hard it hurts. Her boyfriend who she adores stands off among the crowd smiling easily at the spectacle and she adores him even more for that generosity. Later, she goes home and puts the tiara on the living room hutch where it stays for years, the tangible memory of that night.

I’m not prom queen material, I know most people think of me: I’m not refined, I’m not proper, I’m not a girly-girl. And so they are surprised when I let them in on the fact I was once a prom queen. And while it’s true that we change over time, some things remain the same: This year’s prom dress, like the other one, was a steal—-a Nicole Miller dress I found at Marshall’s for thirty-five bucks three years ago—-and I’ve had the gold strappy sandals for years. I’m wearing gold earrings, simple dangly ones with a tiny red bead at the ends, and no necklace at all. Not much has changed in that respect. I’m still very plain. 

But when I tell the story of the year I was prom queen, I say it with a blush. It may seem like I’m admitting an embarrassing secret. But that’s not the case at all. People raise their eyebrows and look at me like, “You?” But when I tell them the story of the pig shoes and the plastic beads, the Tiffanys and the diamond tiara, I think they sense the thrill I felt at having triumphed over my idea of myself. For once I felt alright, even amidst the others in their dresses and fancy shoes, their hair just so. I’d like to go back to that time and tell myself that being so concerned with others and looking like the others was not a big deal. That being the prom queen meant nothing. But that’s just not the case. It was an important moment for me because it meant I was alright just the way I was. That I was a likable girl. And that I shouldn’t let a Tiffany in fancy high heels tell me otherwise. 

Tonight I’m off to the prom. I’m getting dressed up because I want to, not because I need to, not to put myself on display, but to celebrate. I’m celebrating not just my two years here but a twelve year journey of self-discovery, one that gets more purposeful and fascinating as time goes on. I’d like to go back in time and tell junior year Gina that everything’s going to be alright. But I know she’ll figure it out for herself. All in due time. 

 

Dust and rain.

It is finally raining. It’s been so long since it rained that I can’t even remember the last time. Maybe some time in April, but I can’t remember. And it’s cold. So even though I have to stay here for an after school club, the only thing I can think of doing is going home, wrapping up in some heavy blankets, and sipping hot chocolate in front of a movie. Sounds divine, no? Yes.

We are needing the rain here, though. It’s been so dry and the fields have been burning and the scent of smoke in the air and the piling up of ash on the horizontal surfaces in my apartment have become too much to handle. It’s so sad to live among so much dust and no matter what I do to combat it (which is truthfully not so much) it just keeps coming and layering and collecting. I’m glad for this rain, however chilling it feels now. It’s good for the air.

Timeline: 11, 12, 13 (EDITED.)

I’m eleven years old when I get my first pair of glasses and it’s not until I am sitting in Mr. Pedrin’s math class at the back of the room and not squinting that I fully understand what “clarity” is. My frames are thick, clear, round plastic, and the lenses are just a fraction of the thickness they would later be. They are a new and vital accessory and I feel strangely cool for needing them. They make me feel wise and old and I am proud of this feeling, too. I treat them, at first, with such care, always looking out for them, always cleaning them with spray and with special cloths. I store them carefully in my little black eyeglass case and keep them near my bed so I can put them on when I wake up first thing in the morning. I think of them as doctor’s gloves or a stethoscope: a special tool necessary for completing a special task and I think of them as if they were made of pure gold. My first summer at Camp Arcadia, in an afternoon of goofing off with the other campers, my glasses get knocked off my face and one of the lenses pops out, falling unscratched and perfectly intact onto the cabin floor. I scream as though my arm has been ripped off of my body and I don’t stop screaming until a counselor rushes in to help me put my sight back together. It’s only then that I realize my glasses are indeed plastic and, like all things, impermanent. From that point on, my obsession with glasses began and I begged for new frames at every opportunity believing that each visit to the eye doctor’s warranted a new pair of frames in a different color. My parents heartily disagreed.

That year my father retired from being a guidance counselor. A retirement party/roast was held for him by one of his colleagues at a lake house on Lake Champlain and, not having been able to find a babysitter for me, my parents brought me along. My memories of the evening include raucous laughter, darkness seeping in around the edges of tall pine trees at sunset while candle light and loud music illuminated the dark spaces, and this grand roast. I’d had no idea what a roast was and, expecting a large BBQ, I sat around patiently waiting for it to happen. While I imagined potato chips and well-done hamburgers were on their way, what came instead was, in fact, a large piece of plywood with three bras stapled onto it. A very large bra at the top (with cups larger than my eleven year old head) had beneath it the plaque “Cha-boobs.” Below it, a medium sized bra (of more moderate proportions, I thought, but still quite large) had beneath it the plaque “Cha-bubs,” and finally, a wee bra was labeled “Chubellinis.” (This last one I figured I might be able to grow into someday, and while this display was stored in our basement for the next decade or so, there were times when I thought it would be alright to unstaple the thing from the plywood and wear it, though I never did because it just felt wrong to do such a thing.) This display made all the teachers at the party, including my parents, keel over from laughter. I realized it must have been an inside joke, some crass thing my Boston-Italian father had shared with his colleagues over his years at the school, and while I’m sure I giggled at the sight of everyone laughing and of the three bras stapled to plywood, for the most part that night and for the years that followed, I mostly was afraid that I might one day have Cha-boobs myself, and I secretly hoped for something a little more in proportion with the rest of my little body. However, if I knew then that my body would never grow to more than 5′2″ tall, maybe I wouldn’t have prayed so heartily and instead asked for something in the Cha-bubs category. Ask and ye shall receive, and all.

Along with Cha-boobs, Cha-bubs, and Chubellinis came another C-word: Cancer. By the time my middle school years were over, my father would have had several major surgeries, one of his kidneys would be removed, and he’d have undergone chemo and radiation, had two stays in Hospice, and a couple visiting nurses. During that time I’d had my first kiss, suffered from any number of acne breakouts, and a terrible haircut that the stylist swore made me look like Demi Moore in Ghost but really only made me look like a twelve-year-old boy, all while my father was back and forth between Brigham and Women Hospital in Boston and Vermont, in and out of radiation treatments, and in and out of wheelchairs. It was not an easy time and I’d be lying if I told you I had many memories of it. There’s not much I care to remember, though, because I can’t say that radiation maps on my dad’s back, or the sound of him in pain, or the smell of disinfectant in our living room, or the sight of a walker or even the temporary ramp my uncle built and attached to our front steps are things that make me happy to think back on. That time was marked by a silence in the wood shop downstairs, the dying of the tobacco and sawdust smells I’d come to know as my father’s, and a separation of the three of us who lived in our house—a floating off to different spaces for us all. I was too young to grasp the spinning of the world and my parents knew it. Had the tables been turned, I would have done the same. How’s a thirteen year-old to know what it means to say goodbye?

November, 8th grade. I am a thirteen year-old co-captain of our undefeated basketball team. We are playing a home game and we are on the offense. Never in my two years of playing have I sunk a basket, though not for lack of trying. I’ve been playing basketball since fourth grade and have attended all the practices and followed through with all the drills. During practice I’m alright. During games is a different story. I’ve come to be a very good passer. To fool our opponents, our coach has taught us to call out the name of the drill we’re going to run: “capice” in keeping with the C-words, I suppose, and with the Italian. “Capice!” the point guard calls and I jump to my place. Before I know it, I receive a pass and without regard to where I am or what Capice instructs me to do, I jump up, aim, and release the ball from my hands. I stand to see where it goes and for a moment I know it will do what it always does: hit the net and float beneath the backboard and out of bounds. But this day is different because I see the net grow full having swallowed the ball and I turn to the crowd and to my coach, my mouth wide open in complete disbelief. While many in the crowd may think I’m cheering because I’ve just scored two more points for my team, I’m really just amazed I actually scored anything at all. 

This would be a moment of triumph. And while the other girls, those who regularly scored 20 or 30 points a game continued to do just that, it would be a moment I would remember not for my skill, not for the team building, but for my mom and for my coach. My mom would tell this story to anyone who would listen and we would understand the relief we both felt at my finally having scored a point. And my coach, that same Mr. Pedrin in whose class I sat with my brand new glasses in fifth grade, awarded me the MVP for the game, realizing that year I could use all the support I could get.

****EDIT****

Last night after my mother read this post, she left a voicemail for me. In it she reminded me that the basketball game in which I finally scored my first points had been recorded by someone, I’m not sure whom. That the basketball game was recorded was not important on its own, but that it was broadcast on our public access channel was, as it was a rare thing to see middle school sports on this channel. Although at the time of the game my father was in a hospital bed in our living room and thus unable to attend the game in person, he was able to watch television. And so it was that my dad saw my only basket of my sports career, on the television, in our living room. Long after the fact, of course, but he saw it for sure.

All this I had forgotten until my mother’s voicemail. How thankful we should be for other people’s memories, when ours become so clouded with forgetfulness. How thankful I am tonight for this bright light slicing through the fog of those years. 

 

*********************

More timeline pieces:

Six through Ten

Birth to Five

 

Self and Soup.

I am sitting on the orange couch, balancing a bowl of soup on my leg. Self plops herself down heavily next to me, almost spilling contents of said bowl onto freshly laundered yoga pants.

Me: Heh! Waw -ih!

Self: Ooh. Sorry. I’m exhausted! You know I have been wide awake since 1 o’clock this morning?!

Me: Mee oo.

Self: Oh right. Yeah. [looks sidelong at Me.] Hey. Why are you talking like that?

Me: I bunt mah hung.

Self: What’s that?

Me: I BUNT MAH HUNG. Onna soup.

Self: You burnt your tongue, you say.

Me: Uh-huh.

Self: Ouch. Sucks. Is it good at least? The soup?

Me: I own no. 

Self: Why not?

Me: I cann hase it.

Self: Mind if I try?

Me: Go ahead.

[picking up bowl and stirring contents.]

Self: What is this? Glue? It looks like snot, Gina. 

Me: Sir it!

Self: I am stirring it. What’s…what is this? Noodles? Are these shell pastas? They’re the smallest pastas I’ve ever seen. And they’re…all…stuck…together. … Are they even cooked?

Me: Sorry. I led it boil over.

Self: I guess you did. And then you ate this? 

Me: Yeah. But I bunt my hung.

Self: So I see. Where’d you get it?

Me: The store. 

Self: Let me guess. It’s soup in a bag.

Me: Uh-huh. 

Self: What else is new. [shaking her head in shame.] Gina, Gina, Gina. You can’t cook soup in a bag? It’s soup. In. A. BAG. for crying out loud. All you had to do was open, pour, and stir. 

Me: I forgot to stir.

Self: No kidding. [still stirring] Seriously… This is like trying to stir a brick. 

Me: I forgot to stir! I was on the phone!

Self: What, for like an eon? It’s petrified already! Look, there’s little tomato and chive fossils. You actually ate this?

Me: I was hungry!

Self: You don’t have a knife or anything, do you? Seems like I could cut the soup and turn it into some kind of building material right now.

Me: Shut up. 

Self: No? No knife? A screwdriver then? Maybe a jackhammer?

Me: Are you finished?

Self: Honestly. I have never seen anyone screw up water and vegetables quite like you do. [shaking head, whispering under her breath] Open. Pour. Stir. 

Me: So I won’t cook for you anymore. 

Self: Honey, I don’t know whether that makes me feel sorry for you or happy for me. But I’ll stick with happy for me. 

Me: I told you. I was on the phone. With Dennis. Grant me that.

Self: Open. Pour. Stir. That’s all you had to do.

Me: But–!

Self: That’s all I’m saying.

How I’m Spending My Summer Vacation.

I’m going to learn how to be a yoga teacher.

I got accepted to the program I applied to. 

And that’s how I’ll be spending my summer vacation. 

Samba and saudade.

This week is a short week at school because of the Corpus Christi holiday, so it’s Thursday morning and I’m on my orange couch sipping coffee and catching up on blogs. I’ve done the dishes that have been staring at me for a week and now I get to relax the next four days away. I’m thinking of going to Sao Paulo for a bit. Starbucks is calling my name, as always, but what’s more is that Sunday is the SP Gay Pride parade, and last year it brought more than 3 million people to Avenida Paulista. I want to see what it’s all about this year. I’m not all that psyched about being with that many people, but the city already has something like 17 million people in it, so maybe another 3 million people won’t make that much of a difference. (But 3 million people on a single street? That’s something I want to see.) So, who knows what I’ll do. I’d really love to go. It might be really fun.

To celebrate this long weekend, some friends and I went for coffee caipirinhas and dessert right after school. We sat and talked until the sun went down and after a quick stop at home to catch up on phone calls, I went to a free samba show nearby with one of my friends. First, nothing makes me happier than close, free shows. I dislike going all the way to the middle of nowhere because I’m dependent upon people for rides and when the feeling for escape floods my system I like to be able to leave without messing anyone else’s schedule up. The fact that this show last night was right around the corner from my apartment was perfect. The fact that it was samba was perfect. The fact that another teacher at school was in the show was also perfect. And so, it was the trifecta of perfection and thus, I knew I was in for a good time.

The Centro de Convivencia is a beautiful place. It doesn’t look all that beautiful from the outside, and in fact it looks like a giant 1960s minimalist concrete monstrosity, but on the inside it’s quiet and dark and the seats are all close to the stage so virtually any place you sit you get a great view of what’s going on. It was there at the CdC that I saw modern dance (and left thinking, WTF?), the Campinas Orchestra, and African drumming. Our seats last night were in the third row and so we got to see all the action. In addition, the seats in the theater are big comfy chairs, not the chairs where the seats fold up. These are full-on living room chairs. (Almost. But you get my drift. We’re talking comfort.)  So it was shaping up to be a beautiful night.

What I didn’t expect was the wave of emotion and memory that washed over me halfway through the show when the group was performing their seventh or eighth samba. I sat in the theater, leaned back in my chair and remembered my first weeks and months here, when I spent time with Cat Head and listened to samba at Tonico’s in Centro. I remembered listening to him talk about the music with such reverence, watching him watch the band members and the dancers. I remember watching his eyes fill with watery emotion as he spoke and I remember feeling so moved by his emotions that I absorbed the music into my skin and hoped one day I might feel the same.

It hasn’t come to that, though. I haven’t learned to love samba in the same way he has, but I’m okay with that. To Cat Head, Brazil means something entirely different than it does to me and therefore, what he hears should be different from what I hear when I listen to samba. Last night, listening to the group, I thought of dancing samba in Lapa in Rio. I remembered the crowded corner bar my friends and I found, where we twirled around with strangers late at night, popping in for one song and then throwing ourselves out onto the street laughing and sweaty, off to find more dance floors. I remembered the Cooperativa where I went to dance Forro; I remembered Ilha do Cardoso where a hundred bodies packed a run-down floor laughing and spinning through the night; I remembered watching a musician play a guitar on Morro de Sao Paulo as I sat with my friend sipping beer in the rain. I remembered seeing O Teatro Magico in the old church on the night the electricity fell, and still their voices and guitars penetrating the darkness while all of us together sat and listened and were amazed. I remembered sitting in Cat Head’s apartment listening to vinyls of Baden Powell and Bola Sete. I remembered the songs from the church across my street drifting up and into my living room, and the groups of a cappella singers whose voices lifted up and came to me as if they were in dreams, ethereal and familiar. 

Samba hasn’t been for me what it is for Cat Head. It hasn’t been the be-all end-all of music in my life and my experience here. But last night I realized, as I sat in my comfy theater chair, that samba can be the trigger for all those good memories of music and friendship here. Samba is Brazil, and when I hear samba—the drums, the accordion, the guitars, the sad clear voice of the lone woman singing about love—I will forever think of this place and of these people. 

E com certeza, vou ter saudade deles. Com certeza. 

Album.

I thought I was being a dutiful and loving daughter by helping my mother set up her first blog. But now it appears she’s gotten it into her mind that her goal is to use the blog not just as a coping mechanism for her illness, but as a platform for sharing my baby pictures as well.

I have never known another person on the planet (besides, perhaps, the head librarian at the Library of Congress) who maintains a larger collection of photos than my mother. As a child, I remember staring at the rows and stacks of colorful photo albums that lined the bookshelves in our living room. Each was labeled with a number, and the earlier albums even had a table of contents on the inside cover. After I was born, however, that stopped because the albums thickened with photos and spoke for themselves. My mother documented every minute of my life and stored them neatly away in an album. Some of my clearest memories are of her sitting in that living room with photos spread across the table and an album open to a fresh shiny page. She would begin by placing the photos on top of the page to get their proper positioning (and proper sequencing) and then slowly, painfully slowly, she would lift the clear film, the plastic softly removing from the sticky paper, and mount the photos carefully onto the page, replacing the clear film over the photos and pressing down to stick the plastic to the page. This was the age before digital photography, when the lifting of a photo and pressing onto a page seemed to carry more weight, more memory, more thought than the simple clicking and zooming of our cameras these days. In my mother’s simple action of placing a photo onto a page, she was retelling our family’s story.

Through fifty or sixty albums she did this same thing, viewing, sorting, pasting, placing. Through fifity or sixty albums she went through with her hands and told our story. And then, with as much care as she took to build the story with photos, she told our family’s story again and again to anyone who would listen. On all of our family vacations, she carted stacks of albums around (the most recent 3 or 4) and showed them to anyone: people who had opened their homes to us for the weekend, complete strangers on the beach, hotel employees. (You can deny this last one, Mother, but even though I don’t have concrete evidence that you did this, it’s exceedingly likely you did.)

And so today, when I saw my little self up on my mother’s blog, waving to her as she clicked the shutter of her old camera shut, I thought about how that blog was like the ultimate chance for her to tell our story. You are the ultimate audience for her because she can talk and not be interrupted. She can choose whatever pictures she wants (except for the naked ones, Mother! You know this already!!) and write to her heart’s desire about them.

And the way I see it, that’s pretty good therapy.

I may have been gone too long.

True story:

My friend Rachel left me a note on Facebook today about yoga. She said, and I quote, “I need a yoga mat reco–something light and portable.” 

Reco?

Friends, I cannot tell you how this word puzzled me. No, “puzzled” is not the word. “Frustrated the shit out me” might be more accurate. Reco? What is a “reco,” I wondered. Was it some new yoga mat accessory that’s come out in the past two years? Was it a new name for the blocks we use during class? Was it, perhaps, some kind of clip to hold the mat down or a blanket to put under the mat? Seriously, I was all over the place and I’ll tell you I felt stupid and inadequate in ways I haven’t felt in years, perhaps ever. 

I even Googled it. A “Yoga mat reco” delivered someone’s Twitter page that never fully loaded so I never got to read past, “Anyone have a yoga mat reco?” And that didn’t answer my question because that kind of was my question. If anyone had a yoga mat reco, I wanted to see it.

I then Googled a different phrase: “mat reco” because maybe a “reco” was a thing not confined to yoga. Maybe it was a type of platform used to practice any kind of physical activity on, and if my friend needed her “reco” to be “portable and light” then maybe I’d be able to find one of them at a sporting goods store, which is where Google led me. But alas, no recos there. I was pissed. All I wanted was a picture and then maybe I could help my friend.

Google also led me to a site where I learned:

NOBASIL MAT RECO is the rolled product from mineral wool composed by artificial resin. The mat is sewed on. one-sidedly through RECO glass thread.

I thought I was onto something there, what with the fact that there was a description at all of what a reco might be. But alas, nothing that looked remotely related to yoga. 

One more rephrasing led me to search “yoga reco” and there I came upon a site entitled, “Yoga/Pilates reco’s for a beginner?” It was as if this page were made for me. If ever there were a beginner reco-ist, or reco-er, I was it. And so there I clicked and came upon the epiphany of all time:

“Reco” means “Recommendation.”

I had no idea. No clue whatsoever. Rachel, thank you for pushing me toward rediscovering my own language, to appreciating its dynamics, and for keeping me occupied for longer than I’d like to admit. (Also something I’m not crazy about admitting, but will do so nonetheless: it took a lot of guts not to title this piece, “What the hecko is a reco?”)

I have really been away too long. I think it’s time to come home.