Kirsten Oliphant

A lifestyle blog from writer Kirsten Oliphant. Celebrating the daily chaos of motherhood.

Civil Ignorance

Sixth period and I was still high on the smell of new school supplies: notebooks filled with blank pages, pencils with a sharp tip, and pens with fresh ink. I was in my desk early for Honors English, examining my thighs in the red and white dress I was wearing. If I crossed my legs, you could see the muscles I’d earned from soccer and tennis. But you could also see a tiny dimple where they pressed against the plastic desk chair. I practiced crossing and uncrossing as the class filed in, finding the perfect angle to showcase only smooth skin.

I didn’t notice her until the bell. One seat up, one row over. Her hair was black like mine, but in tight corn rows wound up into a bun. Her neck was stiff from effort, gaze fixed on the empty teacher’s desk at the front of the room, while everyone around her chatted, loose-limbed and easy.

I should say hello. But that would mean leaning forward to get her attention and I couldn’t think of anything smarter to say than “Hey! You!”  If I said something, maybe she would feel more welcomed. Or maybe that would just draw attention to the fact that she felt out of place.

I  knew three black kids at our school: Erin and Nikki, who were in some of my classes, and a guy named David who went to Young Life and was, according his friends, the whitest black guy in school. In his khakis and polo shirts, David walked straight by the area in the front hallway where the non-whitest black kids hung out before school, gaze fixed ahead as though he didn’t see them at all.

Despite having a Confederate soldier as our school mascot, there was no outright war between students, only a civil ignorance.

But I could not ignore the discomfort in the planes of the girl’s shoulders, a straight parallel to the black board. I leaned forward (with a quick glance to see how this affected the smoothness of my thighs) and had opened my mouth when Ms. Saunders walked in and began to call roll. I didn’t even break the girl’s peripheral vision.

After class, I thought, getting happily lost in names of the American greats like Hawthorne and Poe and Hemingway and Emerson. I felt satisfied by the way my print curled up the edges of the college-ruled paper, page after page. I was too naïve then to miss Morrison and Angelou and Douglass and Hughes.

The bell rang again and before I could jam my notebook into my backpack, the girl bolted for the door, coltishly quick. Her disappearance made no ripple in the room’s conversations.

Tomorrow. I can talk to her tomorrow.

But the next day, her desk was empty. Maybe the whole thing had been a scheduling screw-up. But I imagined her a few classrooms away, a smart girl hiding in a non-honors class, sinking comfortably into a desk surrounded by friends where she would study the same dead white writers and curl up the pages of a notebook just like mine.

___________

I’m linking up with a bunch of lovely writers over at Yeah Write who curl up notebook paper all the time, or at least get callouses from typing so much on their laptops. Anyone else have first-day-of-school regrets?

 

 

 

 

 

Alligators in Cars

I awoke to the sound of pooping.

Specifically, Cooper pooping. She’d had a rough go of it, straining and crying most of the day. Our doctor recommended prune juice and said she should go in thirty minutes. It took twelve hours. We were in the floor in the TV room, her on a towel because I was anticipating explosive poop, and me on the rug.

“Yay, Cooper!” I said, and she cooed and kicked, glad to finally be relieved.

Then I heard our car door slam out in the driveway.

It was 5am. Everyone was asleep inside. So who was in our car? I turned on the kitchen light, which shines through a window out at the cars. Then I realized this made me visible to anyone out there, but made them invisible to me. So I turned it off. After having the light on, now I could see nothing.

I went to get Rob and, because this is Texas, he went to get his gun. No one was in the driveway, but at this point it had been probably six or seven minutes, given our slow 5am reaction times.

Sawyer got up and wanted to know what was happening. “I thought I heard someone in our car, so Daddy went to check,” I told him.

“Maybe it’s an animal.”

“What?”

“Maybe someone put an animal in our car.”

“Yes….maybe so.”

Rob saw a suspicious car circling the block, so called the constable. In Texas, we have constables. I think they are like cops, but I’m not sure. I feel like they should just be called cops. It’s simpler. Sawyer even calls them cops.

“Daddy called the cops?” he asked.

“Yes, he did,” I said.

“Maybe it’s an alligator.”

“What?”

“Maybe Daddy saw an alligator driving around in a car. And the cops will come.”

“Yes…maybe. Let’s go back to bed.”

We didn’t end up catching or seeing real robbers and thankfully have nothing but trash, toys, and clean diapers in our cars. Which we will leave locked from now on.

Our life, which can be challenging as I wrote about earlier this week,  always still has moments of light and humor and randomness in it. You never know what this may mean. Sometimes? It’s early morning poops and alligators driving cars. That’s what is happening this week in our lives, and I’m so very glad.

Now, for more randomness, watch this poorly recorded video featuring Saw and Coop. No one ever told me to hold the iphone sideways while filming. I am SO high tech.

 

 

Foosball in the World of Men

foosball

I clutched the handlebars, the left– my goalie hand –twitching a little bit. Best to always keep the men moving.

We were losing 2 to 8 and my partner had cracked. I should have expected as much from Mike, a junior who had been trying to date me for months but couldn’t pronounce my name. Across the table, John and Greg smirked. I knew these looks, though it had been two years since I had seen them across a foosball table.

“We let you win because you’re girls.”

This was their line any time Ginny and I beat them our sophomore year. The foosball table had been a gift from the university to our small dorm. A present for not being last year’s residents who threw a party that almost burned down the building. We were a motley crew of born-again Christians, hard-core athletes, and straight-edge punks. Since none of us drank, we had only foosball.

There were house rules:  knock twice before dropping the ball in the chute; no scoring on the first touch; and no spinning. Ginny and I were a good team, but John and Greg were the best. John had a trademark shot: when your goalie blocked his shot, he would be waiting and slam the ball into the goal. It hit the back of the table with a sound more solid than almost any other. The John.

THWACK. Two years later, he was still using it. 2-9. This was the tiebreaker game in our school’s foosball tournament, $100 on the line for the winning team. Mike and I won the first game, which should have ended it, but John and Greg insisted it should be best two out of three. Mike hesitated and like that, they railroaded the tournament. Just like so many other things.

“Here’s your porn, Mark.”

John dropped an enormous box in front of my then-boyfriend in the dorm lobby. I tried not to look horrified and Mark tried not to look humiliated. The box, I learned later, belonged to the whole dorm. Mark was only the keeper, having an extra dresser, but had moved it to John’s room when his sister came to visit.

I felt sick at the sight of so much skin underneath the fluorescent lights, out in the open in front of ten other people. And at Mark’s face, stripped more naked than any of the women in the pictures. Without speaking, he threw the box in the dumpster outside and then locked himself in his room.

By morning, it was gone. I imagined the boys slinking to and from the dumpster like alley cats in the darkness.

THWACK. The perfect goalie shot alone could match the sound of The John. This was MY shot, my perfect shot. I lined up 8 more in a row to win the tournament while Mike, John, and Greg moved their men helplessly.

I could have saved the $50 check as a trophy to my win, but I bought new shoes instead.

______________
For other stories, perhaps of Love in the Time of Cholera, come join Yeah Write this week.

With Eyes Closed Or Open

Fifteen days stretch between us. His trip, then mine, then his. More than two weeks, the time has been slow and it has been fast. I remember his voice, the smell of his skin and the feel of the stubble that he grows when we are apart.

We are not the couple that speaks every day. Better in person, our phone calls are succinct. Texts are better, full of our code: love you mosts, breaking pickles, the Tchoucatabouffa. For me, missing is less an ache and more a transaction to be soldiered through til the end.

______

At the veterinary hospital where I worked during school, in addition to walking dogs, giving shots, and cleaning cages, I had the job of developing x-rays. We did not have a dark room, only a smallish closet with a tub for bathing dogs and cats. Light off and door closed, this was a job done in total darkness.

First I unclasped the back of the tray, then fed the thick plastic film into the humming machine. The hardest part was locating the right size of unexposed film, then fitting it exactly into the tray before swiveling the clasps closed once more.

The very first time, I was afraid. Of dropping the metal tray on my foot or of some horror-movie creature lurking in the dark. I fumbled and shook and dropped the tray (though not on my foot), but emerged with a perfect image of a cat’s fractured femur.

Later I discovered that I worked with my eyes closed.

Without realizing it, I would squeeze them shut against even the sliver of light coming from beneath the door. So I began to intentionally keep them open. I did not need my sight, yet I was surprised at what I could see: the faint outline of the hulking machine, the white laces of my Adidas gazelles, a glint of the metal tray.

I could complete this familiar set of actions without looking. But with my eyes open, the familiar looked different than I imagined.

________

I came home to an empty house: clean, trash cans by the curb, wine in the fridge. The dog’s backside wiggled wild and he even licked the baby, whom he usually ignores.

When we are gone for more than a day, the house forgets our scent. It smells like it did the first time we walked through with a realtor, as though the house loses faith in our return and reverts to what it knew before us.

Tomorrow Rob and the boys return in what will certainly be a joyous and chaotic reunion. We will all hug and kiss and exclaim and talk at one time, and then the boys will fight or whine and we will remember that life is not made up of the magic moments from fairy tales, but these moments: the ones we could see with our eyes closed. Or, if we choose, with eyes open instead.

Please go read more great writing at Yeah Write. Better yet, submit something! Be brave, but more like Merida fighting the bear and less like Taylor Swift writing about John Mayer being a dirtbag. Actually, I take that back. Either would be perfectly acceptable.

The Inheritance of Burning

(Originally published on I Still Hate Pickles November 28, 2012.)

Almost every morning, I burn a piece of toast.

Unless it can’t be salvaged, I stand over the trash can and scrape off the top layer with a butter knife, aiming most of the crumbs toward the trashcan. Underneath is perfectly good toast. With butter, you would never know.

I like to put things in the oven on broil. Then children happen, and you know how this goes. I could just get a toaster. I have a toaster oven with an actual toast feature that I keep in a cabinet. Part of the reason is that I’m lazy. The oven is already right there. I think every morning, This time I won’t forget. I will not burn my toast. Then I walk away to wipe someone’s face or let the dog out.Cue another dying slice of carbs.

But the real secret to why I don’t simply shell out $20 bucks for a toaster is that burning toast reminds me of my grandmother.

You see, by the time I got married, all of my grandparents were gone. I never met my father’s father who died before I was born, and through high school, one by one, all of my elderly relatives moved from apartments to assisted living to full-on nursing homes to hospitals to funeral homes.

It’s hard to know how to handle loss, especially when you’re a teenager. I feel like with each death, I froze a little more. The thought of returning again for a viewing or a funeral, making polite conversation in a black dress, or seeing the mechanical wench used to lower coffins around the edge of a freshly-dug grave–these things tightened up my chest, made me close off a little more each time.

Looking back, I regret so much. I wish that I knew my grandparents now, that I could have conversations with them that I never would have when I was fifteen. I could ask them about their lives and their memories, share what my boys–their grandchildren–did today. I was too young or immature or stiff from the thought of loss to connect or have the relationships that I would have now.

My memories of Grandma League: her laugh. Her skill at tracing the smurfs from my favorite books onto transparent white paper. The way she always said, “Is that right?” when I told her something about my life. A collection of cropped gray wigs that I sometimes tried on when she wasn’t looking. The curve of her bad hand, trapped in crooked fist by a stroke.  Her smile, before I’d even done anything to earn it.

Like me, my grandmother burned toast.

This is not my memory–it is one my mother shared with me. Growing up, my mom knew well the sound of a knife scraping across the stiff black top of bread. I know she misses her mother more than I could. I think of this when I watch my mom playing with my boys on the rug, thinking of how she must have watched her mother play with me when I was just a girl.

Tomorrow morning, I will leave the toaster oven in the cabinet. I will think about how that gift card to Target could get me a nice toaster. And I will turn the oven on broil and walk away, letting that piece of bread blacken under the orange electric coil.

Burned toast is my inheritance.