Rock Me Like a South Bound Train

I forgot that trains, like memories have pulses and heartbeats that do not always run in sync with mine.
I forgot that memories like trains have hidden conductors and engineers. I don't know how memory works, I don't know how trainswork. I just know that they work but there can be accidents and they can be devastating.

Yesterday, I found a handful of birds swooping around my back yard picking off the yellow jackets for a late afternoon snack. It took me back to Oakland and bee keeping right off telegraph avenue, shoved up between whole foods and gentrification. A group of us rented a house from an old Berkeley hippie who was heading south, the agreement was to at least care for the bees, if we could not come to love them. I remember standing on the back porch one warm afternoon watching Oakland pigeons do their ghetto version of murmuration and I noticed swallows swooping into the yard and snagging bees as they came and went from the hives. I remember calling the home owner panicked. She told me that it was okay, the birds needed a little protein and this is the way of the birds and the bees, she told me that the birds would not take more then they need.

I need to remember not to take more than I need.

I need so much lately. I think I have been a smoker to chase a need that can never be fulfilled. It's really not about the habit, or the nicotine, it's trying to fill a hole, or maybe it's several. I feel like a shooting victim, riddled with holes and the bullets are memories laying on the floor, still and dead and difficult to find among the carnage. I am trying to make my self whole again. It's not just cigarettes or trying to fill all of the holes by swallowing fire, it's a need to consume. Some times it's cigarettes, sometimes it's coffee or french fries and sometimes it's booze. I feel so empty, with my memories littering the floor.

This feeling of being in pieces, clings to me, it's become a residue that can never be washed off. It makes me think of my father and how he came home from Vietnam with the residue of war. A residue that we call Schizophrenia. He will never be free of his residue, and what I want to know, what I need to know--- will I ever be free from mine? Can I be whole again?

I read somewhere once that "nothing important is learned; it is simply remembered." I constantly change my mind about whether I am chasing my memories or running from them. I want so badly to remember more about my mother, I want to understand why I cling to her. A few weeks ago I was moving her old sewing table into my studio space. I was gearing up to make the transformation from a useless piece of furniture to a wedging table and I opened one of the drawers. I found a needle and thread, a tin of laxatives and a receipt from Lucky's grocery store dated 1987. The items on the receipt are as follows; 2 packs of Marlboro reds, a box of Oreo's and a diet coke. These three items are the only things I have ever known my mother to love.

Some times I can remember a lot. The color of fluid in my mother's IV bag, my fathers eyes, addresses, the flowers of the magnolia tree that hung so lazily next to my Grandmothers old house. Some times I can't remember my phone number, birthday or social security number. I never can quite seem to remember who I am. But I always remember the calm that my sisters voice had on me when she would sing. Whenever we were scared she would sing. Sometimes it would be songs my parents loved. Something by Tracy Chapman, or Frank Sinatra. Sometimes it would be from Disney movies or what ever was on the radio. My sister and I both learned early that art--art is something one clings to, because everyone needs to cling to something-- and god had stopped listening.

There is this feeling in my memories, this sense of a search. A shared fabric though them all. I am looking for home, looking in every moment, breath,trip to the corner market. It's not exactly myself that I am looking for, it's a place in my heart to call home. And it's been right here all along-- not the random hotel outside of Portland, or in the rains, or in a tiny house in Rainier Beach. It's in words, it's in writing. This is home, this is where the train fueled by my memories has brought me.

Home. To writing. To me.

I am the conductor, the engineer and mechanic of my own memories and every story is a beat in the heart of my life.