Saturday, January 14, 2012

"Here I Am!"

--> Okay, here's just a brief "snapshot" from my own story. An early version was originally posted on a now-defunct private blog last summer.

Here I Am!

From the Boonies
April 27, 1966


Elizabeth Rasche Gonzalez has invited me, her teenage alter-ego, to join this weird blog. Hey, I am only 17, but if it's existential, I'm in, Ladies -- I really dig Camus.  Sartre? Not quite so much. Simone and Jean-Paul actually lived together out of wedlock! I wonder if I would would ever have the nerve. The Colonel (my dad) would have a stroke, and I might have a stork. No, seriously, I know all about sex thanks to Margaret Meade and Lady C.'s Lover. I also read Dr. Marie Bonaparte, but I didn't get the bit about the 2 kinds of female orgasms of which one is the "immature" kind. Was she for real? Was she just trying to get in the boys' psychoanalystic frat? That was some weird book.

So, is that the kind of thing you are going to talk about here, sex and existential malaise? My girlfriend Sharman and I started a literary magazine at school, and Sharman wrote a poem for it called "nada." It was very deep. We love our existentialism, Sharman and I. Sharman has abstract art she painted on the ceiling of her bedroom. We always wear high heels to school. When we walk down the hall, everyone thinks the teacher is coming. We are both on the same diet. We went to the pancake house for dinner last week and ordered the boysenberry pancakes without the pancakes, and would you believe they threw us out? Sharman does not get along with her mother either, mainly because she is dating a very nice boy on the basketball team who is not her race, and Sharman's mother is prejudiced. (Sharman's family is from Australia, for what that's worth. But we have plenty of bigots right here in Alaska, U.S.A.)

I am not dating anyone right now because Roy and I got serious and Roy went to talk to the priest about it and the priest told him to forget about Protestant girls. Last May Roy and I were just 30 minutes late getting home from the junior prom, and who should be pulling in right behind us, in the Ford Country Sedan, but the Colonel! He was actually out looking for me! (OK, so it was pretty late at night,  but it was broad daylight because this was May in Alaska. I ask you, what can any two kids do discreetly in Roys' parents' Rambler station wagon in broad daylight?) The Colonel said he was worried that something had happened to us, like an accident. He had me when he was extremely old, 42, so he is more like my grandpa -- a total Victorian-Edwardian mentality. I am a senior now, and I am still mortified.

I can't wait to get away from this place. I will meet mature men and will smoke Viceroys to my heart's content without anyone giving me the business, and I may read some Kierkegaarde. Meanwhile, I have to get through a semester of endless ennui up here in nada. I am not a happy girl, I tell you. I mean, I am happy because I am down to two peaches for lunch every day and my size 7 skirts are baggy on me. But I have a few little problems, like crying for hours and hours at "that time of month" and wondering if anyone will ask me to the Senior Ball. I am starting to hate all these bourgeois rules and conventions, like wearing a damn girdle to hold up your stockings all day and sleeping on brush rollers and being thought weird if you want to do anything other than be a nurse or a teacher or a stenographer or a mommy. I love to write stories and poems, and I love to go to play rehearsals because they take me out of my trivial meaningless life for a few hours. I play Anne Frank's mother and Mike Grube plays Mr. Frank. We rehearse in the auditorium on the actual set, so every evening I get to lie on a real bed right beside Mike Grube. He is so cute in a dark academic way -- a very serious boy, just my type, but I doubt if I am his type. I am no one's type. But you know that poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, "and if the man were not her spirit's mate/Why was her body limpid with desire?" I'm telling you, I get limpid ever night at those play rehearsals, lying so close to Mike. I don't know how much longer I can take it. No one in this school knows me. They think I am so nicey-nice and a total prude, and if they ever got inside my head they would be shocked out of their gourds.

I am doing a zillion things to keep myself occupied, including teaching Sunday School. Last Sunday one little boy came in so somber, the son of our Sunday School superintendent on the Army post. (My parents go to the log cabin Episocopal Church downtown on Second Avenue, but I like the nonsectarian services on post.) Anyway, our unit that Sunday was on missionaries, and I was asking the kids if they knew of any countries where there were missionaries, and the sad little boy piped up and said "Vietnam?" I said, "Wow, what made you think of Vietnam?" and he said, "Because my dad just went there." It all happened overnight. It was a "secret" troop movement, no advance notice -- the Major, our Sunday School Superintendant, must have just driven 20 miles down the road with the others to Eilsen AFB and been flown out to Vietnam, just like that. I can't tell you why exactly, but I was so messed up -- I had such a bad, sad, deep dark feeling about this. I could not stop thinking about it. I am even having creepy dreams about it. There is something hidden going on in this world, and especially in our country, and I do not understand what it is, but something tells me I am going to be finding out real soon.

It won't be long now. I'll be going off to school in the lower 48 and having a real life and finding out what is actually going on in the world. I wonder if I will have great adventures. I wonder if I might someday live with someone, maybe even out of wedlock? Maybe I will finally be free to dress like a truly chic woman and a sophisticate. They sure don't make that easy up here -- you can get your clothes from a couple little out-of-date shops or the minuscule Northern Commercial department store or, if you're totally desperate, the Wards catalogue. Well, at least I can wear "normal" clothes now. Thank God I got that blasted surgery out of the way and got cured of my scoliosis.


I have to go write a composition for Mrs. Kozlowski on my beloved old Olivetti tyewriter, and then I think I will listen to Eve of Destruction for a while.

Take care,
Fairbanks Liz

Flatback Handbook Still in the Offing

There's been a bit of a delay in the definitive Feisty Handbook. I'm afraid my timeline was overly optimistic in view of budgetary constraints, glitches in contacting certain key contributors, etc.


I am also considering a major structural/thematic/"genre" change: Concise facts interspersed with stories. As Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, argued so persuasively in her 2005 NPR interview with Krista Tippett, We are our stories. Our lives, our world, are made up of stories, not facts.


I have made a provisional decision to use this blog as a kind of laboratory for scoliosis/flatback stories. Please feel free to share yours!