The boys sporadically invade and conquer parts of the house that are normally off-limits to them. Lately, they have been finding bits and pieces of terrible poetry or short stories that I had stashed away between pages of books. Every day this week they have brought me something new. Finn looks up at me, and into my eyes as if to ask, “Why, Mother? Why?” I have no answer for him. Not a good one, other than, “Well, when you are an English major and you are bored in class, what else are you gonna do?” It isn’t as though I had the ability to text anyone, or shoot off an email. Back then, laptops weighed at least 50 lbs.
It’s almost as if they are turning under the fields of text, forcing me to use or discard the bits and pieces. But all of this bad turning up-iness has lead to my contemplation of Birthdays, both encroaching with a rabid rapaciousness, and those passing with the heavy slink of a monster having just consumed a meal larger than itself. The passing ones are the messy kind; at least, mine are. They leave behind a stomach-turning slime-trail, that smells of defeat and wasted time…at least, mine do.
Yup, every year, another one recedes and another one looms, and the process never ends. Just like my written words…always there, always more, just sitting around…causing clutter…being found and demanded explanation for. And what will Prucilla do to mark the passage of this year? She doesn’t know, but there had better be cake, for surely that will make this year’s stashings of bad poetry/glurge less offensive. Well, it will at least curtail a little of the home-rage from which her family is currently suffering.
The bad poem I posted to the suckmonkey happened in the margins of a book, in the margins of an undergrad class I was talked into taking (oh so long ago), which turned out to be the class from Hell, with an honest-to-Satan Daemon of a professor. Did I learn anything that semester? Yes. I learned that lots of young girls do indeed hike their skirts up and bat their lashes in attempts to redeem grades. I also learned to listen to my own instincts and to present myself as a humble supplicant but also to have courage and a good pinch of “confidence,” or at least a veneer thereof. As a choral conductor often told me, “If you are going to make mistakes, make them loud!”
I at least hope that my mistakes are interesting, or worthy of a snicker. Finn continues to shake his fingers at me when he finds my notes in the margins of the books. Maybe that will be his bad penny…all of my writings turning up everywhere he looks. He likes things neat and organized, unless he is making the mess. I am suddenly feeling a mixture of sorrow/empathy and joy/elation over the text-messes my children will be left with.
Bad Penny Pru
