It was a pickup truck, dirty blue, with a gash in the driver’s side door from some other angry episode. We pulled into the gas station right after he’d hit me harder than the usual. I heard a thunk inside my head, followed by stars and the weird hot metal smell of an iron heating up. There was a little whitewashed clapboard church across the road with yellow flowers in front. There was also a pool hall within running distance on my side of the truck, but those flowers got my attention. When he went to pay for the gas, I grabbed my bag out of the back and ran across the road to the church. I slipped inside and crawled under one of the front pews while two old ladies cleaned around me. I was only there a minute before he stormed in. One of the ladies, bucket and mop in hand, asked if he was looking for Jesus. Since even he wouldn’t hit an old lady in a house of God, he shuffled out, I wished I’d seen it, and soon enough I heard the pickup gurgle as he drove off away.

One of the ladies said I could come out, the other offered me ice tea. I climbed a ladder to wash the windows they couldn’t reach and that night a biker chick I met at the pool hall let me sleep on her sofa. In the morning, I hitched a ride home with a bug-eyed hillbilly driving a big truck who must have done 100 the whole time.

He was from the New Orleans crew who ate at the restaurant where I was the waitress. There was also a gang of Texans who looked like peace and love hippies. And a bunch of badass pot growers from Alabama who drove souped up Caddies that could out run any sheriff’s vehicle. These were not bumpkins, and I fit right in with my lipstick red hair and elaborate silver and turquoise jewelry. When I moved in with him, I hadn’t even started to unpack before he yelled at me. He ran hot or cold, I never knew which he'd be and I spent most of my time trying to stay one step ahead of him, it was exhausting. When he moved out, he left some of his furniture behind and stuck me with the bills. I pushed his stuff out on the porch; when he came to pick it up and saw what I had done, he shut off the utilities with a monkey wrench. Later, I was bad mouthing him at a bar saying I wished his new house would burn down when the woman next to me leaned back and there he was. The room froze, just like in an old western movie; we glared at each other for a cold moment before I walked out. That same night, his new place did burn to the ground along with his truck, which was filled with what he’d rescued earlier from the porch. He got out just in time, he swore I had cursed him and caused it. 

Odd, I dreamed about him hopping around barefoot in front of a bonfire when it was actually happening.

Early on, when things still looked good with him, he took me to Mardi Gras. He told me bayou ghost stories as we drove along the Mississippi with spooky Spanish moss swaying from the trees, and on the day of the big parade, he wrote the address of where we were staying on my arm in case I got lost. Which, of course, I did. We were dancing with the crowd and suddenly he was gone. I bobbed around trying to find him until I saw a cop and showed him the address on my arm; he walked me to the bus stop to make sure I caught the right one. I showed the address to the bus driver too and when I sat down, I realized my shoes were missing. I thought I loved him at the time, I do know he didn’t love me. Years later, I heard he was born-again and preaching to his own congregation. He was the first of the three blond Irish-American men I’ve been with who’ve tried to wreck my life; you’d think once would have been enough to learn my lesson.

During the summer break between my junior and senior years in college, when my parents were living on a US Army base in Germany, my mother took me on a bus tour of Italy. She had said it was the only thing left she wanted to do, see Italy, and the way she said it scared me. It went well, although she’d have kept me on a leash if there’d been one handy, especially in Venice. But by the time we reached Florence she calmed down and I managed to escape her clutches long enough to trance out in front of Botticelli’s Three Graces. We had heard a howling dog outside our hotel window the night before and she, a big fan of Barnabus Collins on the soap opera Dark Shadows, asked the breakfast waiter about vampires. Confused by the question, he stared blankly at her until she made fangs with her fingers. Shrinking back in horror, he sent another waiter with our coffee. Thinking this was hysterical, she told the story at dinner to our table mates on the tour. Then I talked about my theory that angels are really aliens. The other tourists on our bus avoided us from that point on.

After I was back at school, two months later, she killed herself.

Just before I returned to the States, she took me for a drive along the Rhine. We stopped at an ancient church at the top of a hill and sat on a wooden bench just inside the door while a wedding was going on. The bride insisted we eat with them afterwards at the banquet table they had set up in the courtyard. Later we parked beside the river to watch the barges go by. A family was playing ping-pong on one while their dog barked at the mother who, her hair pinned up in rollers, was hanging out laundry. The sister and daughter of sailors, my mother declared that living on the river would have been a perfect life. Still eating our sandwiches from the wedding banquet, we got out of the car as a pair of swans, so small and pretty on the water, swam towards us. My mother tore up her sandwich and tossed the pieces at the swans. Their shiny eyes locked on the food as they plucked it from the water. I handed the rest of my sandwich to my mother as the swans clamored ashore. Marching over to us, suddenly enormous, the male snatched the bread from her happy hand as the smaller female, she was as tall as me, studied my buttons before turning to her mate hissing and snapped at the food in his beak. Splashing back in the water without even a second glance, they glided off with the current. Speechless, my mother stood for a moment before driving us home as the green hills of the Rhine valley rushed by our car windows. Three days later, there was a terrible moment when my father demanded she and I say our goodbyes at the house because she might make a scene at the airport. He had his own agenda for wanting me alone, which led to an airport scene between the two of us much worse than one my mother would have ever caused; but as she waved goodbye from the kitchen doorway, I knew I’d never see her again.

He buried her at the military cemetery in Arlington even though she’d always said she wanted to be cremated and have her ashes scattered over water. He also lied to her brothers, saying it had been a car accident. She did, in fact, die in the car, after locking herself in and washing a bottle of pills down with some of his gin before turning on the exhaust. He remarried a few months later and tried to bribe me into keeping his secret from the rest of the family. I choose not to speak to him now, but I know he has two grown sons I’ve never met because that’s the way I want it.

Shortly before I left New York for Cape Cod, I visited an old college friend in DC and we spent a couple of hours at the Arlington Cemetery. After a search of the records, we found my mother across from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. I tucked my AA anniversary coin, it was for 21 years, which is how old I was when she died, into the dirt that edged her stone where nobody would see it. I’d like to have her exhumed once my father’s gone and honor her request to be cremated and scattered across water. There are lots of ponds here, or maybe Herring Cove.

Do swans ever swim in the Provincetown harbor?

          

Haven’t written lately, life keeps getting in the way – at the moment I’m sitting in a cold dark store while an electrician works next door with the power off as I wait for FedEx to deliver a shipment. Luckily I brought my notebook since I’ve been waiting for five hours now.  So far, I’ve done both the New York Times and Boston Globe Sunday crossword puzzles and today’s LA Times Suduko. Too bad I forgot the tedious Elizabeth of York biography I’ve been trudging through, but it'd probably make me sleepy. So I’m stuck with my workshop assignment. The past few weeks our facilitator has been sick and we’ve been writing on our own, although last week instead of a prompt we read from our various projects and ended up having a conversation about our processes. We all do it differently, and the conversation led to this week’s prompt.

I’m a pen to paper kind of girl because of my painting background; I’m all about mark making. I’m also big on layers and will write something repeatedly until I feel like I’m done before I type a draft that will get revised until I’m satisfied. If it’s for this blog, I’ll copy and paste it to the site and then fiddle with it so it sits nicely between the margins. On the other hand, the novel I am currently, and hopefully, in the final edit of, has been rewritten multiple times. Originally it was told by the main character and done by hand in the grid paper notebooks I’m partial to. Then, and this is the process, I went back through that version and rewrote each page on the one facing it, the back of the previous page, and made whatever changes I felt necessary. Then I transcribed it into a fresh new notebook. Often this involved literal cutting and pasting, or more accurately, taping, whole sections in other locations until I had a version without anything scribbled on it. Then and only then did I type it into the computer starting with the opening of the story straight to the end. Once it was done and spell checked, I sent it to a friend for proofing. But before I got it back from her, I decided the three other characters should also speak, which meant writing the story over in each of their identifiable voice, and in their own individual notebooks, with a complex outline to keep the timeline moving naturally. We’re talking stacks of grid paper notebooks, several rolls of tape, and an entire box of the micro-ball pens I like. This all got typed up too, and revised of course, until eventually I was ready to have people look at it. Which was also about the time I joined the workshop and started reading it out loud to the group. 

And yes, revising it even some more based on the feedback that I found helpful. Sometimes this feedback was about the structure, but usually it had to do with distractions or flow. Both of the people who’ve finished this version have said not to make any big changes because they like it the way it is. Because, really, the book is finished, I just need to tweak the typos and get better at presenting it to the public. Nit picky, just like the way I paint, but I don’t understand going with a first draft. I want perfection; and since it’s me, I’ll copy this again before I type it.

The assignment at this week’s writer’s workshop was to compose a letter to a contemporary of the same age and gender with a similar background who lives in Afghanistan. This was for a possible book the group might put together, Greetings From Provincetown, that sort of thing, but alas, after some Internet research that only confirmed what I already knew, I simply would not exist in Afghanistan. I am older than the life expectancy for women there, it’s sixty-one, although the average age of death for them is closer to fifty given the high childbirth mortality rate and the undisclosed number of honor killings.

I never had children, but I did get divorced and earned a college degree. I’m also an artist and obviously a writer, and have supported myself for over forty years. None of which would bode well for me in Kabul, but what most certainly would have done me in was my sexual behavior as a younger woman. I’d surely have been stoned in my promiscuous twenties, or perhaps later for shaming my family or community by being the victim of a felony assault that involved both a knife and a gun. And if I survived into my forties, my brush with cancer at forty-three could have killed me since I wouldn’t have received treatment or seen a doctor in the first place.

More likely, I’d have been forced into marriage at twelve and promptly beaten to a pulp or thrown myself off a cliff. Instead I was lucky enough to grow up a white girl American with the privileges and luxury problems attached to that status. I may not make as much money as my male counterparts, but I can vote and choose to live alone or how to dress regardless of what other people may feel about my choices. 

So. No Afghani contemporary to correspond with; no letter written, addressed or sent. But not an exercise in futility either, it was more one of gratitude, because I am grateful for my health, my opportunities and my life. Which was probably, wink wink, the point of the assignment to begin with.

This Tuesday’s prompt at the writing workshop was a little embroidered felt yurt ornament and a small ceramic box shaped like a lighthouse that might have held kitchen matches. There were some interesting responses from the group, poems, a bit of fiction, a limerick, but I was too caught up in my taxes, don’t ask, to work on it until now. My first thought was about the Tibetans I had met while living in New York. They're the most beautiful and generous people, both physically and spiritually, I’ve ever known. There was one in particular who had lived in a yurt with his yak herding family until he came to America to make money to support them. He arrived not speaking a word of English and immediately had to learn to navigate the subways to get from the room he shared in Queens with another Tibetan to his job as a janitor at the store where I worked in Manhattan. Imagine. Not only did he have to deal with the noise and dirt and turbulence but abrasive New Yorkers as well. He'd just smile and nod and push his broom, he was the essence of gratitude.

I also thought of writing about the Tiny House movement because I'm fascinated by it having lived in a few tiny abodes myself. The Arkansas shack I mentioned a while back, and my first apartment in Soho that was 14x14 feet with the ceiling and walls all painted park bench green and felt like a forest cave. The cabin I had my first summer here was small too, it was half the size of my current living room but very cute.

But it was the ceramic lighthouse box that caught my attention. It was probably made in China, I didn’t look for a label, and no doubt had been bought in a tourist trap only to end up being sold again at a flea market or yard sale from a collection of knickknacks that decorated a kitchen shelf. Someone, or several someones, had taken the time to design and make it, then someone or several someones had bothered to buy it. And there it sat, along with an embroidered yurt ornament, on the table upstairs in the library where our writing workshop meets in front of the big windows with the view of a real lighthouse out in the harbor.

We have three lighthouses in Provincetown. The one you see from the library is called Long Point, another at the west end of the harbor is known as Wood End, and the third at Race Point is on the ocean side beach off Herring Cove. All of them are picturesque and show up all the time in paintings and photographs of Cape Cod. They’re our Statue of Liberty, beacons, symbolic; although my favorite is the lighthouse is in Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard because you can walk right up to it on the beach. I did it on a frigid gloomy February afternoon almost ten years ago. I’d gone there for a job interview and was so sure I had the gig I had put a deposit on a funny attic apartment, but it was not meant to be. I was heart-broken when it didn’t happen, but I've got over a hundred pictures I took that day, and the knowledge, at least now, that if it had happened I most likely wouldn’t have found my way here – how sad would that be?

Continuing the heritage vein, my mother's parents, he the Ulster Presbyterian Christian Scientist convert and St Lawrence Seaway steward, she the Isle of Man Anglican, were strictly lace curtain. He was the grandfather who died when I was a baby during the time my mother and I lived with her parents while my father was away fighting in the Korean War. I have a clear memory of their house with its dark floral patterned wallpaper and the Jack Russell I was terrified of. There was the stone birdbath in the front yard and Canadian geese that ravaged the back garden. We were in a car accident, maybe in the parking lot after visiting my grandfather at the hospital, nothing major, no serious injuries, just another car ramming into ours from behind. I saw it coming through the rear window as I leaned over my mother's shoulder while she held me in her lap in the front seat; I tried to warn them, but I was too young to speak. Here comes the bump; all shook up. Uncle Paul must have been driving because my grandmother was in the back. He wasn't actually blood related; he'd been my grandfather's best friend on the boats and spent all his winters at their house even after my grandfather died because he had helped them pay for it. I loved his tattoos; my favorite was a hula girl on his forearm who wiggled when he clenched his fist. When I got my own tattoo in 1980, I was thinking of Uncle Paul. The night he died, he woke me up by sitting on the side of my bed and saying goodbye. He blew one last kiss in the doorway as the ambulance pulled up outside because, in fact, he was already dead. My first psychic experience, my communing with the ghost of Uncle Paul, I talked about it over and over, this was before my father came back from Korea so I wasn't even two yet. I doubt it bothered my Isle of Man grandmother, but my mother would say later she was afraid I’d inherited the Manx talent for such strange things, and I had. Especially as an adolescent, there was the incident where I woke up one night and saw the child of our neighbor swinging in the old rubber tire her father had hung from a tree only to find out in the morning she’d died, again, at about the same time. A few years earlier, when my family was leaving the States to live on an army base in Germany, I remember being very upset saying goodbye to my paternal grandmother because I was convinced I’d never see her again. All the adults laughed at me, but in a few months she was dead as well. I saw things, it was simply information, and usually my mother was in some way involved, if only as a conduit since she said she didn't believe in ESP. Once I stood with her and watched two deliverymen bring a sofa up our stairs and I knew they were going to fall. So when they both slid back down the steps with the sofa between them, breaking one of their arms, I already knew it would happen and said so. One of them said something about me being a little witch. And perhaps I was, although this questionable skill would more or less stop when my mother passed while I was in college, but that’s another story.

Always in a hurry, I was born on the way to the delivery room and then walked at eight months. This was confirmed by my mother's memory of me toddling around at her father's funeral although I can't remember it. Or him either, he was an Ulster Presbyterian from Belfast who became a Christian Scientist once he moved to America. His wife, my grandmother, was Isle of Man Anglican; in other words, they were strictly tee-totaling lace curtain, and one can only imagine how upset they were when my mother got mixed up with my Mick father. I have friends who have either a single black or Jewish grandparent and say that one quarter of their heritage makes them who they are. This was how my father's father's Catholicism affected the family. Not so much about the church, but politics and patriarchal rage.

Legend has it my paternal grandfather stowed away on a boat leaving Cork while the Black and Tans were looking to hang him for blowing things up. He supposedly jumped ship in Nova Scotia, swam ashore and then wandered around Ontario until he met my grandmother who was there on vacation. She was Irish too but came to the States as an infant with her mother after her sailor father drowned in a fishing accident. Her mother got remarried to a Michigan farmer who adopted her two orphan daughters and raised them as strict Methodists. I believe that my Methodist grandmother made my Catholic grandfather take the Pledge not to drink before she married him. Either way, he was a very angry man who had no tolerance for children. I learned quite young to gauge his mood by how much English he was speaking. The thicker his brogue the angrier he was, and Gaelic meant all small children should get out of the house. He stabbed me with a fork once for having my elbow on the dinner table.  My brother and I didn't eat with my parents since our father had an aversion to small children too, so our table manners were not the best.

But I loved my grandfather; I still get a thrill when I hear an Irish accent. Besides being Sinn Fein, his siblings were horse thieves and prostitutes. Not a lot of job skills there, so there was not a lot of money to be had either, especially during the Depression when my grandfather is said to have been running booze across the frozen Great Lakes gangster style, although he was working as a mailman by the time I knew him. Which is probably why a whole other family from across town showed up at his funeral and introduced themselves to my father and his sisters saying they were his children and grandchildren too. I met one of them once, those long lost half cousins, in New York, in a bar, who insisted I looked like his sister and that we were related. I ignored him, we’d both been drinking and I didn’t trust him, but he had too much information for it not to be true.

Ah, the luck of the Irish, I wore green on Tuesday – did you?