My Father Never Told Me
by Mary Agnes

The Dancing Warrior Manitoo
       
                        (*A manitoo in the Algonquin tribes is a spirit)

My Father never told us
We come from a tribe.
My uncle said “We’re Miq’mac.”
We laughed –”Big Mac”?
My Father hung his head.

Now we learn the stories
We were never told,
Seeking our songs on the internet,
The myths and tales we could never get
From silent fathers.

“Dancing Warrior Manitoo.”
A wise elder gives the youngest son
A box. Inside, a tiny warrior dancing,
Dancing so much he was sweating
(My ancestors noticed that.)

“What do you want of me?”
The dancing manitoo would ask
When you opened the box. He would do
Anything you wanted him to.
Why wasn’t I told this?

There’s much more, but I stop there,
Feeling the story beat in my blood,
My manitoo lost.  I grieve.
He could do anything from his box but leave.
I know him.

Joy - My Father Never Told Me

 

 

  

My father never told me that he was the best one of all. He didn’t cheat or hit or drink or lie or fail. Not ever. He occupied himself with things that mattered to him from sun-up, stopping only in the evening for a hearty meal and an hour or so of precious nothing-doing before falling into the heavy sleep of those who spent the day changing the world somehow.

 

 

 

 

My father never told me he was faithful to my mother — not because of a devoted, undying and lasting love between them, but because such moral defiance would never cross his mind. He didn’t need to tell me such things, and I didn’t need to ask. He wouldn’t leer at or flirt with young women the way many of my friends’ fathers and fathers’ friends would do – still do – with me. He didn’t tell me that his integrity was suspended high above that of most mortals, and therefore I came to expect that everyone possessed such character. My father never told me I couldn’t trust everyone.

 

 

 

 

My father never told me why he worried about me, why he was over-protective, why he had so many silly rules, why he wanted me safe and close. He only told me that he wanted me near, he only asked me why I felt the need to spend every night out with my friends, or later, when I’d moved out of his house, when the next time would be that he’d see me. My father didn’t tell me we didn’t have a whole lifetime to spend together.

 

 

 

 

My father never told me he would disappear so quickly, completely, and without warning, with so much left unsaid. But he did, somehow. He did tell me. Because I never doubted that that was the precise moment in history he was supposed to go. He told me clearly that it was the best thing he could have hoped for – cashing out hastily, before age or infirmity could even slightly compromise his strong hands, his sharp reflexes, his analytical mind, his strength in the eyes of the world.

 

 

 

 

He’d never told me things so clearly as he did from the other side, from the moment of his passing – comforts and assurances that fortified me so that I could be there for those who did not hear him and could only feel the void of his absence. And when later he told me to leave them, that I’d done what I could and now it was time for me to go, to live my own dreams thousands of miles away, I could leave with a mind that was clear and open to whatever was to come – just as I’m certain he did.

 

 

 

 

My father never told me why he clung to me so tightly in this life, and even when I came to understand I never told him, never thanked him.

 

 

 

 

Here we are now, though, my father and I, dimensions apart and suspended in perfect understanding, perfect freedom, perfect love.

Barb: Bathrobes and PJ’s

 

Bathrobes and PJ’s are my havens in cloth.  Warm, accepting, and free of responsibility, they are also free of ironing and timetables. Flannel doesn’t care about day jobs or mid life crises.   I am home savoring the delicious quiet and saddened by my waning freedom.   There is currently no one I have to play with or take to the potty.  I can nap undisturbed if I wish.  I am pregnant and have not embraced the joyous anticipation that many feel.  A part of me wonders, ‘What’s wrong with me?’  This is no different from any of my other 39 years, only the circumstances have changed.  Perhaps life has proved too precarious these days to think beyond today.

 

 

 

   The relief of not having to leave my house is palpable.  A dear friend suggested that the reason I’ve been feeling an urge to hide was because I felt as though I had been attacked.  Losing my job, my father, and a baby made functioning as normal like walking through thick muck. It was too much for the space of eighteen months.  

 

 

 

  Like swamp gas bubbles on the surface of my brain, I fight the flare ups. Your new job is a nightmare, how are you going to fix it?  Are you sure you’re safe?  What if you get robbed?  This house isn’t ready for a baby, when are you going to get started?  ‘DOES THIS SERVE YOU?’ asks a voice, finally: Reason.  I try to focus on what’s in front of me right now.  Why is it such a struggle to remain uncluttered?  Eat your elephant one bite at a time, cut yourself some slack, I tell myself.  Giving my brain the day off seems to be yet another lofty goal. 

 

 

 

  There are other havens.  Sometimes it takes the physical embrace of my spouse to squeeze out the chattering in my head.  Other times it takes the sound of rain, or the ocean, or even the calm of a warm shower to help.  I escape my committed profession and dip my toes into writing.  There is unquestioning comfort the moment pencil touches paper.  I am far from Hemmingway but much closer to home in this pursuit than my daily grind.

 

 

 

  I bought oil from a yoga center I visited.  I hope the scent will remind me of a place where I felt peace wrap around me such that even my frightened self could not deny it happened.  To wear this serenity like a robe of armor everywhere, that is my dream.  I wonder how I can hang on to the feeling of calm when I have to face my external reality.

 

 

 

   I am forced to live in the now, to enjoy the quiet while I have it.  This “now” which forces the catastrophising beasties at bay, quelling the daymares of what could happen if I just leave my house.  This is my respite, and the warm, fuzzy embrace of the flannel lets me finally calm down.  The beasties can wait another day.  I am no longer in a bad job, no longer frightened of the changes coming, and no longer frightened of attack.  Right here, right now I am warm, safe, and home.      

Rajka: PAJAMAS AND BATHROBES

 

I am walking through majestic halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, looking for a special exhibition of European clocks.  Entering the exhibiting room the first object that catches my eye is a “Grandfather’s Clock” very much like my own.  My grandfather gave it to me as a wedding present.  I am waiting for a fat couple to move so I can read about my Grandfather’s clock.  To my surprise I learn that the

pendulum was discovered by Galileo Galilei in the 17^th century.  Ever since the

pendulum is beating in its own rhythm marking the passage of time.

 

 

 

I do not feel like seeing any more exhibitions. Instead I will sit on the steps in front of he museum.  Outside is a slow moving, unpleasant humid afternoon promising to stretch for ever.

 

 

 

 I know that as much as we would like to stretch or shorten the passage of time to fit our needs, we cannot.  We have to accept certain designated time periods:  Morning, noon, afternoon, and night, adding up to, what we call, 24 hours a day. That is it.  Nothing you can do about.  You keep looking at the clock deceiving yourself that you are in control determining “how much time” you have “left” to do something. The pendulum is ticking in annoyingly steady precise movements.  When you are in a rush, you keep glancing at the clock more and more often .You are getting more anxious and feel like taking that clock and throwing it out of the window.  You know that it would be stupid and change nothing.. “I am running out of time” you say.  What an illusion.  It is not time that you are running out of but your acceptance of real time.  You have no choice but to succumb to men- made time slots for most of your “daily” activities.

 

 

 

“Can we help you with something?”  The voice cuts through my musings.  This time I am not daydreaming.  I am trying to concentrate on something else but myself.  Looking up I see an odd looking couple.

 

 

 

She is short, long curly chestnut-color hair and slightly plump.  Not overweight, just pleasantly plump. A kind of plumpness that makes you want to squeeze her and pinch her cheeks. 

 

 

 

He is everything she is not.  Tall, skinny, with a crew cut.  You would probably just walk by him without any desire to do anything with him.  Yet they are standing above me, holding hands and smiling.

 

 

 

“No, thank you.  I am just waiting for somebody.”

 

 

I look at my watch. The long humid afternoon was only 45 minutes long.          

 

 

                                

The museum is closing.  I feel foolish just sitting there. It is time to get up and not wait any longer.

 

 

 

I am going to make myself coffee with a touch of brandy.  Then I will cuddle up with my pajamas and warm bathrobe and read about Gallileo Gallieli’s  discovery of the pendulum. There is only one unpleasant thing: I do not like the color of my bathrobe: sage with green, blue and brown polka-dots. I will take my favorite soft blue blanket and wrap myself and the ugly bathrobe with it and listen to the time as it goes by, announced every quarter of an our by the pendulum’s swing.

 

 

 

 

Word from Nance - the next topic is - “My father never told me”

Mary M. - PJ’s & Bathrobes - Group 3

Lamby Pajamas

O, how I loved my “lamby” pajamas with their flock of little white cotton ball lambs dancing across a pale aquamarine field of flannel.  It was a time in my life when I would indicate how old I was by holding up two fingers, a time when everything had to have a name, a time when pajamas were friends.

 

 

I sobbed when they were gone.  It was one of my earliest memories–non-verbal, and gut-wrenchingly physical.  I didn’t have an abstract category, “Things one wears to bed.” I couldn’t separate reality from imagination.  I lived in a mythical world where every thing around me was real and alive because it touched me and was part of my world.

 

 

Lamby pajamas were warm and soft.  They smelled like me, my crib, and a bit like my Mother.  They were the good part of the scary night when I had to go to sleep and it would be dark and moonlight would slice the dark (What child is afraid of moonlight?  I was) … when car lights, in dizzying yellow squares, would slide silently around the walls of the room and out the window as a car passed our house.

 

 

I was afraid of little white “eyes” of light that would lock a small, shining circle on the inside of my bedroom door, reminding me that the door was closed, reminding me it was dark.  My only comfort was my lamby pajamas.

 

 

There was no ritual for the release of the lamby pajamas, no saying goodbye.  One day they were there and the next day they were gone.  My new pajamas, striped pink summer seersucker, were stiff and crinkly and the sleeves were short.  The color was completely wrong.  Pink was my sister’s color, not mine!  I was blue. I hated them, these usurper pajamas, stiff and unloving, and I was cold in them.  My lambies were gone. I was bereft.

 

 

It was like the deaths happening in my family at that time.  Old relatives would be there and then they would be gone.  No one would tell me what happened, except to befuddle me with words that didn’t explain a thing:  “Dead.” “Heaven.”  “With God.”   Since I was afraid of God, too, that last one was not a good idea.  I simply hated the fact that things around me were there and then not there.  When I was a toddler, my Mother was taken from me, hospitalized for nearly two months during a pregnancy–there and then not there.

 

 

In my family, no one told children things.  They felt that we wouldn’t understand, that it was better that way.  But leaving a child to a lonely imaginative field of terror is worse.  As a child, I used to have nightmares where I would put the people and clothes that I loved in a dresser drawer and when I’d open the drawer they would all be gone. 

 

 

There and then not there.  Pajamas taught me about death.

Kathy M. - PJ’s

 

 

He wasn’t wearing pajamas when he stood at the screendoor ~ standing in his boxer shorts instead.  I was in first grade.  He had heard the screech of the school bus tires, and jumped out of bed, my mother told me, to make sure his daughter, me, was alright.  The kids laughed at my Daddy in his underwear and boarded the bus.  I was ashamed for him.  Norman never wore pajamas.

 

 

 

            Neither did my stepfather, Herby, who also used to stand, in his boxers, sipping his morning coffee and shoving a needle full of insulin into his leather hide arm by forcing the syringe against the handle of the freezer door.  His scrawny, scarred hockey legs sticking out of his boxer shorts while I tried to keep my eyes averted from the slit in the front of the material threatening to open.

            Mostly we avoided talking.  Not because we didn’t like each other (love is too strong a word), but because neither of us were morning people.  We were comfortable enough to sip our coffees in silence while my mother slept.  He, standing in the corner, no pajamas, ~ just coffee and insulin ~ and me, sitting at the table, just coffee and insolence.  I couldn’t help it, I was fifteen after all.

 

 

 

            He was my step-father for eighteen years, from the time I was twelve, until he died when I was thirty.  Eighteen years, and if I’ve ever missed him, I’ve never noticed.  Where is my heart?  Because I loved him, I did.  But we were not close.  He didn’t meet a single one of my emotional needs.  He was just there, married to my mother, paying my college tuition when my father wouldn’t.  And me, oblivious.  When  I was young,  I accepted the parade of characters who came into my life without question. And I loved, though in a superficial way.  Except for my father.  For him, I longed.  For him, I grieved ~ this man who in my fantasy, would be the one person to understand me, if only he didn’t live out of state. 

            Norman, dead for thirty three years, is a presence to me still.  Palpable.  Like the lingering scent of a cigar.  The feel of a black and white movie from the 40’s with a nostalgic sound track.  He is memory deeper than memory.  Desire and dread. 

            We were outside on a summer’s night, with neighbors.  He lay sideways on the grass, relaxed, legs out.  Handsome and inviting.  I adored him.  He made me nervous.  Playing with clover.  He, smoking a filtered Tareyton, engaged in the grown-up laughter with Dick Curley.  I was jealous.  He never laughed like that with me.  Why not?  The magic of fireflies ~ spotting them twinkling in the grass ~ catching them in an empty jar.  Delicious to be up past my bedtime.  I wanted the grown ups to keep talking and laughing, so I could stay out under the stars, with my father, who was, for a change, happy.

            On other summer nights, my mother would hear the bell of the icecream truck from inside the house, and flash the front light on and off, so the driver would know to stop, like a traveling Dairy Queen on wheels.  We got hot fudge sundaes with soft serve vanilla icecream, real whipped cream, chopped nuts, and the cherries, my own, and theirs, given to me.

            Why don’t I have more memories of my childhood?  Deficient brain?  I remember Bonanza and the Chevrolet commercials and the Sunday night blues.  Being afraid to walk down the hall to my bedroom, but noone said, “I’ll go with you, sweetheart.  Don’t be afraid.” 

            I had matching pajamas in those days.  In the picture I am wearing blue flannel pajamas and red corduroy slippers, smiling for the camera, and holding her hand.  She is ready to crawl down from the black, nubby swivel rocking chair.  Freshly bathed, with a wet finger curl coiling up from the middle of her head.  She was wearing yellow footed pajamas.  I need to find that picture.  Me at eight, she, my baby cousin, at six months.  That picture was a moment in my life, and I think I remember the moment, but perhaps I only remember the picture?        I’m frustrated with my memory.  I want all of them back.  I want to be able to feel, taste, smell, recreate the scenes.  My mind is like swiss cheese, filled with holes and I grieve for what I can only partially recover.  Like almost re-uniting with a lover, close enough to embrace, but not embracing.  The loss of my memories feels like the loss of myself.  As if I am a partial amnesiac victim who has lost her history.  The best writing I could ever do would always be about restoration.  I was there.  I do remember.  Digging through memory on an archeological dig, I have refigured the bones. See how I have recovered them, so that it can never be lost again?  But, oh, that isn’t possible.  Only the first time around is the experience, whole and pure.  Everything after that is shards. 

            I loved the little girl who was me, but not well enough, and now her life is half over, and like a parent who realizes she has been neglectful, I want a second chance to be conscious, even if it hurts like hell.  I want someone to shake me awake, one memory at a time.  Let me be grateful for even the dimmest recollection, murky and mysterious.  Let me celebrate what is excavated, not mourn what is lost forever.  Let me trust that what I have is always enough for now.  Each whisper of memory is filled with infinite love.  Can I rest in that? 

Toni L. - Pjs& Bathrobes - Group 1   

There are days I want to stay in my pajamas.  Is that so wrong, every once in a while to just keep on my baggy flannels with the sheep jumping over fences on them?  On the way to the kid’s school, I see some of the 7^th and 8^th grade girls wearing plaid pajama bottoms with the mandatory footwear of their age: Uggs.  I would have liked that at 13, to wear pajamas to school without anybody thinking I’d suffered  a brain injury during the night.   

The thing here is, though that I don’t mean I want to wear my pajamas outside the house, what I mean, is I’d like to wear them inside the house and without feeling the tiniest bit bad about the fact that I’m not waking up, throwing on my workout clothes, getting the kids ready for school, getting myself over to the gym,coming home, taking a shower, food shopping (aren’t you at the market  too much when all the grocery baggers  know when you’re getting your period), checking my e-mail, doing whatever work & school volunteer projects I have, cleaning up the kitchen (which even after I clean it, seems dirty one minute later—perhaps I am the new David Blaine?), throwing in a load of laundry (which, let me tell you, is a whole Mickey Mouse Fantasia situation—the more wash I do, the more dirty clothes that appear), host three eighth grade girls that my 7^th grade son is now bringing home to play guitar hero with (in hopes that one of them, one of them will say yes they will “go out” with him, which by the way, is now defined as talking on the phone and computer-cating through facebook, but does not include doing any actual live activites), picking up my daughter and getting her to a) voice lessons b) soccer practice c) drama class d) e) basketball practice e)to buy another fucking eraser for her fucking eraser collection that she cannot stop talking to us about, pulling together a dinner, cleaning up after said pulled together dinner, and promptly collapsing on the couch to watch the news, while nagging my son to finish his homework, and my daughter to stop talking about her fucking eraser collection.     

I would like to not be sick, not have an irritated back that would make it ok and acceptable to be in my pajamas for the day, but to be well, to feel great and stay in my pajamas and laze around the house without worrying that I am not doing all the stuff I do in my normal day.  I would like to just stay in those cozy pj’s without the everyday list of chores and errands and work obligations I need to accomplish, or any of my back-up-think-about-it-everyday-but –never-have-time-to-do-it stuff haunting me, like cleaning out my third floor closets, jammed with the kid’s school work (like, all of it, not some of it, BUT EVERY PIECE OF IT FROM EVERY GRADE) and old bedding I’m saving for my summer house (which I don’t have) and all the ads I’ve ever written, photos I’ve ever taken, words I’ve ever committed to paper.  Or the nagging daily reminder of having to (or wanting to) clean my office, which is overflowing with past work, present work, wrapping paper, ribbon (I have a gift for wrapping a nice gift) card making supplies, advertising and writing books, and stuff that I don’t have a place for because I don’t know what the hell category it even falls under.  And there’s always the nagging and persistent problem of organizing my actual closet, where the clothes I wear outnumber the clothes I don’t wear, by like, 1,000 to 1.      

Yeah, I’d like to stay home in my pajamas without thinking about anything more than eating pancakes with butter and syrup and watching good movies and reading bad magazines without feeling like the FBI productivity unit is going to come over and bust me for not filling up every moment of my day.  I feel bad about myself when I’m not overwhelmed with a to do list, like I’m a lazy slacker, an unworthy person.  It’s good old fashioned guilt, and I ought to know about guilt, being half Italian Catholic and half Jewish. Guilt like an irritating drip, drip, drip in the bathroom sink that makes you want to move into a hotel in the middle of the night, like a papercut on your finger that gets caught on everything, like a nasty, August sunburn you worry will turn into a questionable freckle in five years.      

I’d give up my favorite worn pajamas, for just a day without a  list, without a must, without a hint of guilt that I’m not channeling the energizer bunny. For just ONE day, one relaxing day, in my pajamas.