Missing

I was home sick from school the day she went missing.

I was faking it, really, just a little sick. A police officer came to our house around supper time with serious questions about where I had been that day and if I had been with her. My mother confirmed that I had been home sick, never left, that we had not seen her, and I nodded along. I was terrified that the police had come because they somehow knew I had faked being sick so I could stay home from school, and woo boy, was I in trouble.

She sat next to me in school. We shared the same first name and our last names started with the same letter; for the first few days some people misunderstood or misheard and thought it was I who had gone missing. Seating arrangements followed a traditional format in Mrs. McGregor’s classroom, although later in the year she went wild and rearranged our desks from neat rows into pods of four and five. I wonder if that was the only way she could cope with the desk that sat empty next to mine for weeks.

Most of us kids were too young to understand what was going on beyond the notion that someone took her away, but things changed regardless of our ability to comprehend. Our parents were immediately sucked into a shared hell and our teachers joined them there. The innocence of our idyllic community was taken with her. We weren’t safe anymore.

“Stranger danger” became a regular topic of conversation which we endured with the same enthusiasm we’d have for a lecture from our parents. Police officers spoke in every class room. Teachers, guidance counselors, administrators, and school nurses were all on constant alert. They had to because we all continued to be the chaotic bundles of self-centered energy that children are supposed to be.

Day-to-day life looked the same but you could feel a tightness. Parents spoke in hushed tones and cried when they thought the kids were out of earshot. With terror straining their vocal chords, they shrieked and hollered at us kids when we dawdled on the walk home from school. Neighborhood moms started taking turns driving us to school in the mornings, much to our delight. We didn’t know it was because they were grasping at anything they could control. We didn’t know we got those rides because it was on the way to school when she had gone missing.

The older kids were far more in tune with the chaos that followed. A girl in my neighborhood lied and said she had information when she didn’t, which got her whole lot of attention she didn’t plan for. Her grab for attention initiated a whole new round of visits from the police explaining to living rooms full of neighborhood kids why it was so dangerous to give false accounts. That girl’s parents, in their fear and embarrassment, whooped her something fierce.

A mysterious, dark blue van was allegedly seen around town the morning she disappeared. And just like that vans became the enemy and a powerful symbol of danger. Neighborhood kids made childish threats and taunts about The Blue Van like they would the Bogey Man, when it was really just the the only thing our community could point to and call “monster” in the aftermath. Everyone tried to sell their vans. Pickup trucks became the vehicle in demand for tradesmen. Owning a van labeled you a pedophile, made you a suspect, cost you work.

Investigations were carried out, but no evidence was ever found that pointed to her location or what might have happened to her. Intellectually, I know she is presumed dead, but the child within me that struggled through multiplication tables next to her in school just can’t abide the thought that she will never, ever come back.

In my mind, I can only call up two images of her. One is of her sitting to my left at our desks, head down, concentrating on what she was writing. The other is her school portrait on the thousands of MISSING CHILD posters that were hung all over town and beyond. Decades later, that same wide smile shines out from a curtain of pin-straight brown hair and surprises me sometimes in the post office or town hall. People talked about it less and less over time. Many who live here now don’t know that girl in the posters or the significance of her name.

Not long ago, I dreamed I was wandering lost in my elementary school. There were entire wings I didn’t recognize or remember, and I was the only person roaming the halls. I could see classes in session and hear the teachers giving their lessons but the doors were all locked. I didn’t want to disrupt anyone so I just kept looking for an open room. I came across Mrs. McGregor’s classroom and it was empty. There was no indication of where her class had gone.

My developing psyche had no language for the trauma of my classmate being kidnapped. It was just a thing that happened and lived in my memory. The lives of the families in our community eventually found a new equilibrium and my friends and I grew up into good, morally upright citizens - the best I think our parents and our teachers could have ever hoped for.

But a gnawing feeling persists, ever reminding me that children are taken. Our society is heaving with tragedy and I can survive it because the worst happened and we carried on. I learned how to turn off my heart and keep showing up when something horrific and inexplicable happens, because it never stops happening and no answers ever come. My life is always watching for The Blue Van, afraid to walk anywhere alone, never trusting strangers, forever wondering what danger may lurk.

***

The above is a personal account of actual events surrounding the kidnapping of Tammy Belanger in 1984 and was submitted to the Yeah Write Super Challenge essay contest in July 2016. Please support the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

An open letter to my Amygdala

Hello! How are you? I am doing well tonight, thank you. Thank you also for taking the night off this fine Tuesday. I wanted to tell you that you and I, we are okay! I have confirmed with reputable sources that we are in fact NOT being chased by a bear! Isn't that terrific?! I know I am certainly relieved.

Thank you for all the hard work you do keeping things real. The ability to operate on pure lizard instinct is thrilling! I am glad that when we work together I can survive all kinds of exciting and dangerous events, such as Going To The Movies, Avoiding An Animal In The Road, Speaking In Public, Turning Left At The Supermarket Traffic Light, and more!

However, at this time, we are cool as cucumbers. We are slicker than shit through a goose. Bob Marley himself would encourage you and say not to worry about a thing! Please enjoy a nice rest from protecting me from catastrophe while we coast through a series of uneventful day-to-day life events. I will for sure call you when I think your services would be helpful; I've got your number on speed dial. I may need you again soon for important survival moments, such as Am I Allergic To That, I Slept Through My Alarm, and I Can't Find My Phone.

You work so hard. You've earned a break! Go take care of YOU, pal.

Fondly,
TuRBO

Too much salt

Typically, I am very stingy with the salt in my cooking. I don't enjoy food that is overly salty (unless we're talking about Lay's Original potato chips - that is a sacred thing), so I normally prepare food to a more neutral palette and let everyone salt their dish to their preference.

I made a dish a few days ago of rice, beans, corn, peppers, grilled tilapia, and roasted chorizo. Because I was bringing this to a potluck, I got nervous that it would be bland and threw in a bunch of salt at the last moment. And now, finishing off the leftovers of this dish, I'm struggling to enjoy it because it's too salty for me. I love each component's flavor and texture on its own, but combined with the salt, it's just too much.

While eating it for lunch just now, it struck me how fitting this is when taking me on the whole. On my own, I like the marriage of my various ingredients, the aspects of my personality and character that make me who I am. But when it's time for me to put on a public face, to share some part of myself with others, I tend to overcompensate for what I perceive as my own shortcomings, lay it on too thick, and just become too much. Then I am embarrassed, privately critiquing my own composition, fearful that everyone is silently judging me for being too much, or worse, not enough.

Dusting this thing off

Well, the time has arrived to dust this thing off.

October has been a busy month in every arena of my life, and I'm teeming with excitement at what has been accomplished and put away, what is still in progress, and whatever comes next.

Next month I'll be participating in National Novel Writing Month for the first time, and attempting to write a novel! It's shaping up to be a murder mystery/drama, and it's really hard to shut my mind off and do other things as my imagination runs wild with story ideas! I strongly recommend that you check out NaNoWriMo for yourself, whether as a writer, a supporter, or just a fan of writing, books, and words.

I've been clearing away a lot of loose ends in preparation for NaNo, where the goal is to write 50,000 words in the 30 days of November. That's about 1,667 words per day. Recent experimentation has shown me that I can write about 500 words per hour, with research time, a little Facebooking, and dawdling thrown in there. So I'm thinking ahead to 2-3 hours of solid writing per day, on average. Considering that I have commitments every Wednesday and Friday night, plus a full-time job and a stellar boyfriend that I really love spending time with, this is going to be an interesting exercise in commitment and time management.

So I have finished other personal writing projects, balanced my checkbook, done all the laundry, cleaned my car, bought some groceries, and stocked up on my daily medications. Stellar boyfriend and I are taking a long-weekend road trip in a few days, which will be a nice break from routine to relax and have some fun after a couple of high-intensity weeks at work, and before the fingertip-grinding typing of 50,000 words starts on November 1st.

Local friends, there will be a gathering of NaNo participants from the area on November 1st at the Barnes & Noble in Newington at 7pm. Bring a laptop, tablet, Moleskine, granite & chisel, tattoo gun, whatever you need to write with. It's going to be amazing.

Holy shit - I'm behaving like a writer.

It's going to be amazing.

Bicycle Eve

One more sleep.

Tomorrow is the day I pay for and take home my new bicycle. To say that I'm excited is a hideous understatement -- I am beside myself.

My birthday is in a few days, my roommate came home from her convalescence, tomorrow night is a bonfire birthday party, and my sister is joining us for the weekend.

And I'm sitting here in my pajamas wearing my bike helmet. Breaking it in, like you do.

It feels like Christmas AND my birthday all at once.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow I ride.

Hot Wheels

 Soon.













SO SOON.













With massive thanks to +Giles Cooper at Alternative Bike Shop for the photos.

Confessions of a Devastated Pragmatic Romantic

I like to imagine myself a very pragmatic gal. I deal best with order, rules, systems, and analysis. Math, logic, details, patterns; all very stoic left-brained shit, right? I actually test as middle-brained, so I'm generally quite good at integrating the order, rules, systems, and analysis of the left brain with the softer side of life, or the right-brain functions, like philosophy, an understanding of symbols, focus on the future, compassion, listening, imagination, and ideas.

I usually try to hide the fact that I'm a devastated romantic because romance and romanticism are just so wildly impractical, but I'm just so wildly enthusiastic and expressive that everyone who knows me knows better. My iTunes library betrays me to myself and I'm perpetually caught up in the emotion carried over a system of rhythmic patterns, melodies, harmonies, and major and minor tonality. Music is the greatest joy of the middle-brained mind.

Even this blog is a betrayal of my forced self-perception as über-composed, resolute, and unflinching. The combination of emotional/personal expression with the rules and order of language and grammar excites and titillates my middle-brained-ness. Most of what I've posted so far is rooted in deep emotional experience. It's the academic and intellectual pieces that are sitting in draft form, unfinished, being researched and pecked at, outnumbering the published posts. [Poetry from a self-proclaimed pragmatist? Who does this gal think she's fooling?]

So what typically happens in my brain is this:

Right Brain: "We have an idea!" or "We have a feeling!"

Left Brain: "What does it do?" or "What is the feeling?" or "That's great, RB, but what do you want me to do about it?"

Right Brain: "Let's make an art thing!" or "It's this electrifying combination of passion, excitement, and fear! We're incredibly enthusiastic about it; in fact, we are really into this feeling!" or "How are we supposed to know what to do with it? We're too busy painting stars on rainbows and crying into this cup of tea!"

Left Brain: [annoyed] "Well, we need to DO something about it. For the love of God, stop carrying on, it's keeping us from creating a strategy and plan of action."

Right Brain: [ignores LB, imagines what everything in room would look like if it was made of glitter] "Sorry! Too busy entertaining 47 possible outcomes! La la la!"

Left Brain: "Okay, seriously. Pull our shit together."

Right Brain: [exasperated] "FINE." [scowls in the corner, knowing it will be back]

Left Brain: [sighs] "Finally. Some quiet around here. Now let's plan and organize ALL THE THINGS."

Right Brain: [jumps out like the bogey man] "A-HA! Here, have some FEAR, LB! Let's see how you do with THAT! HA!" [laughs and claps maniacally at its cleverness]

So, as you can see, neither one is getting much accomplished in this rivalry.

The sometimes painful truth is that I am an utterly devastated romantic. I want to believe in everything: love at first sight, overcoming the odds, philosophy and spirituality as tools to greater understanding, love conquering all, happy endings, art, beauty, simple gestures resulting in profound emotional response.

This passion for the potential beauty in all things leaves me frequently disappointed. The bitter reality of the ugliness in humanity breaks my heart. I am human, too, and fall short. I hurt others, or they inadvertently hurt me. Fear runs everything, and moments compound to years wasted in worry. Sympathy and empathy gut me. I spend eons in private, tormented lament.

And then, just like that, I exclaim with joy over some adorable antic of the cat or dog, swoon over the backlit fog settling over the centuries-old stone buildings I admire from my porch or bedroom window, brighten with happiness at seeing a beloved friend, melt with the enjoyment of beautiful food, explode into dance when the greatest song of the moment is playing, come alive and acutely alert in my skin at the simplest human contact, and laugh like my life depends on it.

I don't know where the balance lies. But I know that the many facets that comprise my spirit are all valid and good. I just wish I wasn't afraid of my own heart.