My eight year old says, Mama look! My Barbies’ve been fighting again!
i look and one of her Barbie dolls has been bound with a lanyard. Her hard plastic hands are raised above her soft plastic head and tied. i find this a little disturbing, but only a little. And didn’t these things used to have names? Esther? Lulu? i can’t remember. Now they’re just “Barbies”. This disturbs me more than the fact that she’s knotted her toys hands.
This reminds me of a story i wrote and deleted in the Moronic Purge of ‘07- a massive delete session i mourn more and more each day- i’m drama -about how my sisters and i played Barbies. No Kens. Driving skates. Sustaining serious injury, scarred with teeth marks, cuts and burns. Serious and long falls. Terrible haircuts and many lesbian love affairs. They were soldiers, cops, assassins and still managed to be prom queens. i also wrote about how my younger daughter seemed to love and loathe Barbies for all the right reasons, how hers whupped on the Iron Giant and dreamed of a horse… And i miss the story.
i miss a lot of myself. Because it is deleted.
The sun came out yesterday. i pinched myself to make sure that i wasn’t dreaming and to remember that i was alive and that sun is good. And again today it shone. The sky was blue blue. The clouds kept her distance in the west. i lived another day. But yesterday, it wasn’t just the sun but that smell, that smell- the grass across the street, the dampness of Wagner Creek, purple irises, hay and pine and cows…
i came downstairs after making beds and my beautiful daughters were on their bellies on piles of blankets and pillows reading. Their heads bent together- Ramona Quimby Age 8, Summer of The Traveling Pants. i like watching them this way. Beautiful girls on a beautiful Sunday morning.
And here’s the random:
democratic primary
organic
hope
bedlam
cliché
black
rejoice
taxes
faith
immigration
surge
stimulus payment
flew
$3.49 per gallon
Darfur
civilians
love
mosquitoes
died
i don’t know
running
(copyright 2008) c A Hughes
04.28.08
15 is good times, Mayna.
God bless and remember-
kissing boys is super gross-
so don’t do it!
Happy Birthday!
~chrysanthemum
died i don’t know running– i love an interrupted succession. the violent femmes, for instance.
“I take one one one cause you left me and…
seven seven for no tomorrow and
eight eight I forget what eight was for and
nine nine nine for the lost gods..”
i forget what 8 was for. i can’t stand how clever that is, and still, not as skillfully done as your “i don’t know”.
my malibu barbie. all i can say is ken never stood a chance with johnny west, gi joe and steve austin in the house. she didn’t borrow joe’s knife or johnny’s horse (or jane’s for that matter
), but she launched from the roof more than once in steve’s rocket. i ventured a little outside conventional paradigms, but i hadn’t/haven’t the ability to explore as far from the boundary as your daughters do, as you did.
thought. imagination. creativity. what wonderful legacies for you to’ve passed on…
i. love. that. song.
Whenever i hear it- i sing that part very loud.
i saw them when i turned thirty.
They were great.
That was my very first concert- Duran Duran, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Cure and The Violent Femmes. (Thanks Taryn!)
And about the barbies, i never thought anything was weird about how we played, never thought about how we played at all until i watched Mommy Dearest for the first time.
There’s this part where Christina Crawford is sitting in her room telling her dollies what very naughty children they’ve been. Joan (played smashingly and disturbingly by Faye Dunaway) overhears, gets pissed because Christina is mimicking her and takes the dolls away. It was then that i thought something must be wrong with me, who am i imitating? what am i becoming? i had these thoughts at 11 years old! This is a whole other post…
~c
oh. also? your literary purge was a dark day in history. i scrambled to recover anything of yours still in the internet cache when i heard the news. if you want, i’ll see if i can find what i found…
It is terrible when i think of it.
i’d have a book of short stories to shop.
Also if i’d just believed in myself…
But no, my blesséd friend.
*Let them.
**i did what i did and it’s done.
* & ** are really notes to myself.
i gotta quit bringing it up.
Thank you for being my friend.
~c
I miss those deleted posts too. I am glad that you are carrying on and not keeping the good stuff to yourself.
Ah yes, the lesbian barbies. Those were the days. And I identify with so much in your random list.
Yeah, it was going to be phrases and words that if i heard again i would just bang my head on something hard. But as i typed the list, some things came to me that i’d like to know more about- but the truth. TRUTH. Not “truthiness” or spun or used for someone’s gain but just the whole, simple truth.
And those posts to which you refer are safe on Microsoft Word.
The Great Purge of ‘07 is another horrible event, a thing i did to myself, stories and hundreds of poems that i’ll never get back because i’d something to prove and that is that i. Am a moron.
Barbies can be cool, if one knows how to play with them.
~c
I love the smell of fresh cut grass. Not so much cows, though.
I never did play with Barbie. I prefered GIJoe and He-Man.
Mom’s family was a dairy family.
My uncle owned a dairy about ten miles out of town.
We’d visit quite often.
My mom would roll down the windows and take a deep breath and say
she loved the smell of cow shit.
Ew.
But after being there a while, you just didn’t notice it anymore.
And when we first moved to Talent and the snow thawed, R & i were like, “What is that smell?”
It was stinky but not stinky.
Now i get it a little.
And it’s not the waste, but the hay and the waste and the trees- the mix of it i guess.
i can’t explain it. The best i can do is that it reminds me of breast feeding.
i know, right?
Also, once when visiting Uncle Ron’s dairy, my Uncle Mike (who was more like a brother,
being only 3 years older than me), my sisters and my cousins made a slide on the side
of a manure mountain.
We rode cardboard down the cow crap mountain for about three solid hours.
My Aunt Debbie was livid.
We had to get powersprayed in the milking barn.
i don’t know which was more fun!
~c
Im laughing tears here .. the cow crap mountain .. hahahahaaa!
Fun times!!
i tell my girls the story and they fall out every time.
Only now do i think back, now with my hand scrubbing and searing hot, germ killing showers, and think how absolutely gross that was.
But still, i remember laughing my head off, almost peeing my pants, sliding down that manure.
That’s why it’s easier for kids to have fun.
They just have it.
~c
Hey ChicA-chIca,
I love that your girls make their barbies such awesome urban super-heroes. My kind of girls.
Ah…sunny in Oregon, a rare pleasure indeed. In the few weeks I spent there I saw the sun not too often. But yes, the smell of the place is divine, heady even in its deep green scent.
I don’t know either….
Annie
Yesterday was a beautiful day.
Today it’s cloudy.
i’m pretty sure this time last year, warmth & sun were pretty consistent.
Now…
Still, i love it here.
i want to get a pair of cowboy boots.
But i won’t listen to Country music, that’s where i draw the line.
My girls do though. It’s cute.
~c