May 2006
may 3
I go to a church meeting that's in a hospital or school. I'm the third person there. The others are two women, one of whom has a small child with her. We each are to get a prayer rug, and I choose a plain pink one. The woman with a kid has two, a zebra-striped one and a blue one. The rugs are all rectangular with a fringe on one of the shorter ends to signify the front. The room starts to get crowded and I find a spot near the back where I think I won't block anyone, but another girl gets set up behind me. Her rug is covered in pink sequins. The meeting gets started and the leader - a man in his early fifties with gray hair, glasses, a plaid shirt and jeans - is talking about how this is their last meeting in this place, after six years of being there. The meeting starts by him going around and touching the top of our heads and saying a blessing in another language. I'm the second person he goes to, and he says something extra while touching my arms. When that is done and it's time for the discussions to start, he asks if any of us want to be in a separate group with this red-haired woman from Texas who's in the area to give a talk at Deer Valley. She goes into a smaller room and I follow, as do six or seven other people. The room is so small that another girl and I have to sit on the steps leading into it. I put the prayer rug on the floor and keep my feet there, but the girl on the steps next to me says we have to actually sit on it so I do. We start passing around these plastic placards with simple pictures, like elementary children would use in school. On each one is a word that we have to remember the definition to. One of the cards says "Cinnamon," and the picture is a bunch of small chocolate kisses surrounded by petal-shaped fields of little yellow things. I think to myself that it looks like a sunflower. The meeting gets disorganized, with everyone going off to do something or talking amongst themselves. I keep getting pictures passed to me, and I put them on the rug of the person to the right of me, who has gone off somewhere. On the floor, I find a purse with a clear, plastic front compartment. There's a folded-up paper inside written on with (purple?) marker, mostly numbers. I ask a woman there what it is, and she doesn't want to tell me at first but finally laughs and says it's a "purse of hate." She says it in Spanish, but I understand her because the words are so similar to the French. You use the purse to put a curse on someone, but you can never keep it in a place where someone lives. I say that my grandmother would know what it is, but she would never talk about such things. A little girl and her friend come up to another woman in the group, a blond lady, and the girl says she's sick and wants to take a break from her job (watching the smaller children?) and the woman says she can't. We're at the old house and my brother is trying to drive the van. I get in the backseat and pretend to be busy cleaning because we're going to be taking a road trip. I gather up at least three newspapers as my brother tries to move the van, and parallel park it. I tell him that's too hard to do. It turns to night and this random woman is driving the car, and I'm getting nervous because she doesn't have the right headlights on. I finally get to drive, and we're on the freeway but I seem to know it well so I'm not nervous. It changes to a tunnel that we're just walking in, and on the other side it's daylight.
may 8
I'm at my house, and I have different brothers and sisters. They are all much older than me, in their fifties and over. One of the sisters has found out something about a brother who had died fairly young, that he had grown up in a different house. I don't really care but some of the others are upset about it. Before our meeting, they were watching "Franklin" in the living room and want to change my TV to that also, but I tell them no. They all leave except for one of the brothers, who turns on the radio. I change the station to 103 (the dial only goes between 98 and 104) and Live's "All Over You" is playing, and I start dancing. It's Christmas, but it's also Monday when I have Creative Writing. My mom is re-wrapping a bunch of presents for me - mostly little, sparkly jewelry pieces. She's wrapping them in my room, kind of hiding but not really in the corner by the closet, but I see them all and say she should just give them to me. She insists she has to wrap them. One gift I already have is a little statue of a puppy. I have it on a shelf and it can talk and move. It's raining hard outside and a bunch of people are in the living room talking, the puppy also moving about the room. My grandparents, uncle and my godmother all leave at once. I give my grandma a ceramic vase that looks like a bouquet of flowers, and there's a baby doll in the middle. The vase is wrapped up in just a plastic bag. She thinks we should keep it, but I insist that she take it. I wrap it up in a cloth like a baby as a hint to what is inside. Everyone is gone, and a bus parks at the end of the street and a bunch of children come out. At first it seems as if there are at least 100 kids, all lined up, the first kid being on the sidewalk right in front of our house. I run to my mom and ask what we should give them, as they're out collecting candy and whatnots. One of the first little girls in line has a small silver bowl, with a lollipop and chocolate chips inside. We ask the kids to wait while we find something, and the only thing we can find is some kit with a cream vaccine against some disease (AIDS?). I put on the "sterile" gloves inside the box, which are pink and kind of fuzzy. I look through the box for the cream but there is only one application in a wrapper similar to a band-aid. My mom said the rest of the applications must have gotten lost or ruined since the box was kept under the sink. In the box, there's a picture of a little girl on a beach, carrying a bucket and standing next to a dog. My mom tells the kids that my dad will scan the picture and make stickers for all of them. The teacher - by now there are only about 30 kids - thinks this is really nice.
may 12
Rose, her sister and her mom are visiting. It's the last night they're here and Maria is also staying over at my house. In the morning, Rose wants to go see a movie but the rest of us are trying to tell her it will take too long. Rose and I are walking around my old neighborhood, and there are an awful lot of cats around, most of them black cats. Some are walking on top of the fences and we see two that get into a fight. We get back to my street and on the corner, one house has a big sign that says to keep out, but the house can be found on IMDB. The poster is a blue-tinted picture of a man wearing a hat and sunglasses and I think it looks Big Brother-ish. I say "They think they're so great because they have a famous house... I wish I had a famous house." In my front yard, we have to walk over this big cement square and I fall because it's slippery with dirt. Rose's mom laughs at me and I say these things always happen to me. I've been out with my grandparents and my mom, and we are saying goodbye in a parking lot. I'm drawing pictures on bookmarks of cat and dog faces. My grandparents leave, and my mom opens the passenger door for me, and the back door for Pepe who is with us. I close the back door and let him in the passenger side when I get in. We're going to Kohl's and my mom asks me what departments we should go to. I say I always go to all of them, but she says it will take too long so I decide we'll only look at clothes and accessories. I'm walking on Sand Creek as if I'm a car, and so is everyone else. It's getting dark so I turn on my "headlight" which is just a flashlight attached to my waist. I get to the bypass and someone in actual car goes through very fast, at least 60 MPH. He doesn't hit anyone. A cop on a motorcycle follows him a few moments later. When they're gone I turn left onto the bypass, saying hi to the people coming from that direction. I'm with my husband (early 40's, dark hair, glasses) and we're going on a school trip to Poland. The teacher of our class is named Dr. Alexy. There are two different flights to Poland, one at 10:00 and one at 1:00, but we're not sure which we're supposed to be on. It's after 9:00 so we go ahead and get in line for the 10:00 flight, and we manage to get seats in the front row. I'm looking around and I don't see anyone from our class, so I tell my husband we must be going on the later one. A blond flight attendant is talking to another lady about the later flight and says the class is going then. I raise my hand to get her attention and she says, "Well, you're on the right flight, then." My husband and I go talk to her about getting our luggage off so we can take it with us on the correct flight at 1:00, but she doesn't seem to care. We try to find someone else to talk to, but every door leads us out of the plane and into the airport. I find the blond again and tell her, "I know we'll only be arriving three hours later, but I don't want to leave my luggage alone that long in a foreign country." I add that I wouldn't want to leave it alone in America, either. Finally she says she'll see if there's someone down in the luggage area who can bring ours back up.
may 28
We're living at the old house, and we have a tenant who stays in one of the bedrooms. He's a guy about my age with brown hair. We're all at home (Rose is there too) when he comes back from school. He goes right to his bedroom and puts his backpack away, then comes into the kitchen with some little appliance (either a coffee grinder or popcorn maker) that makes loud noise and plugs it in as my mom is on the phone. We all yell at him to turn it off and he won't do it. Rose and I start screaming especially bad things at him. I call him an asshole, a motherfucker, and even a cocksucker. Finally he leaves, but he comes back later that night and stands outside, throwing big rocks through each window and breaking them. As I move through the different rooms of the house he follows me. After he breaks the windows of the laundry room I go into a small hallway with no windows. It's weeks later, after the guy has spent some time in a psychiatric hospital, and he's coming to live back here. My mom says she feels sorry for him and that we should be nice to him. When he comes over to me we hug, and stare at each other really intensely before kissing a few times. It's the Christmas season and we're living at our current house. There's a small shed in the back and I'm out there trying to talk to Maria on my cell phone, but the reception keeps getting messed up. My mom thinks I'm getting mad because I like Peter and I'm trying to get him on the phone, but I yell at her that I don't like him. I call Dana, who is at a rehearsal for some Christmas play where she's playing Santa. I ask her that will work since she's so small, but she says that everyone agrees she's "jolly enough." She asks if we've sold our house and I say "Not as far as I know." She says she was reading the Brentwood Press and read a notice that said "1___ T_______ sold by owners, who are moving to Miami." Still with her on the phone, I go into the living room and find the right section of the paper (The Daily Herald, it says on the front) and start looking for the notice. My mom admits to me that it was part of something they did to get more money for Christmas. Dana says that it's tax fraud, and my mom quickly interjects that they didn't actually go through with whatever it was. Later on, we go to a neighbor's party in their huge yard. It's set up kind of like a mini-carnival or fair. The wife is wearing a jester outfit and juggling. I help two little girls set up these long karate mats next to the side of the house for them to play on. One of them, the girl who lives there, has several Barbie dolls in fancy dresses that she has me set up on the ground to be their audience. The yard has turned into the beach and so I set the dolls sitting up in the sand. I'm wearing black shorts and I'm walking towards the water, getting my bare feet wet and squishy, and unsure of how deep I should go into the water, if at all. My parents are sitting in lounge chairs and relaxing under a yellow umbrella. I have a sheer black top I want to wear, but it's long-sleeved so I take it into the house to make it short-sleeved. My dad is in there now and I tell him that a girl in my PE class suggested I should change my clothes and general style. I fold the top in half vertically, hold the sleeves together, and make a perfectly straight cut.
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