Author and Columnist
The original entry
I've been kind of busy. I was directing my play today. It is still going to be on the 5th of June, so far.
The play was The Zombie by Tim Kelly. He made a career of making it cheap to put on his many hasty plays, which is admirable in retrospect. Nowadays, AI reading b-movie scripts could generate them.
You were not a great director. You did not know how to be. Tou did not want to buy into this fully when the other option was seeing your girlfriend. You just wanted to have an improv club in your high school so you could do theater games. Like with the Mid-Hudson Pagan Network, someone tried to give you more authority and responsibility. You did the best you could given your uncertainty.
Was it enough? Likely not.
The play did go off well, though you didn't help as much as you might have. Troubles and difficulties beset it, in part because, almost to the dress rehearsal, people didn't want to be there. You included, but those who did want this play to go off overruled those who were reluctant. This is literal. They put it to a vote when things were not going well and decided the soldier on.
Dezi, who made the art for the xeroxed tickets, makes you an award calling you "The Phantom Director." You take this as the criticism it was intended.
Oh, I got a raise at the museum. $6 an hour. Not much, but something. I didn't even formally ask for it, I just asked who it was that I was supposed to ask to get a raise. And they gave me one.
Ah, the Children's Museum. It was not the worst first job one could have. You said you would only ever take jobs whose titles seemed brag-worthy. You largely succeeded, having been a jewelry seller at a Renaissance Fair, a tutor for inner-city youth, a library jack-of-all-trades, English faculty at a boarding school, wearer-of-many-hats for gifted children at Vassar College, tenured English teacher (and much else) at a juvenile detention facility, and established author.
Until your original supervisor left because of her pregnancy, the museum was sometimes even fun. Coworkers would take three-hour lunches on slow days, there were stretches where no one came into the museum, you played that damned Freddie Fish game through so you could help kids who got stuck. Plus? Mall food for lunch.
This is also where you will meet Eileen, who is briefly important to your life, at least as an object lesson.
Also? $6 an hour was a pathetic wage even then, barely above minimum wage then and only around $9.41 as I am writing this. I am certain your coworkers who did the same work as you were making far more, but you wouldn't have thought to ask. The management adored those girls and thought that they could do no wrong.
I've wanted to quit for a while, but I just never got about to it. No better opportunities.
You should have been more proactive in your life, but you were anxious about making such a large change.
The new management decided that teenage boys had no business working around children. They would give you every demeaning chore they could come up with to encourage you to quit. You suspected it even then. Following men who came in without children (pedophile duty), emptying the diaper pail--though they acknowledged this was something the janitor did--and mopping piss out of the bubble machine were notable examples. It will be microaggressions until you finally leave, leaping into a student aide job at the campus library. This will be the first of four libraries at which you will work in different capacities. That you became a teacher and not a librarian is surprising.
Well... did I tell you that my mom's friend succumbed recently to cancer. So my mom moped, then bought a weeping cherry tree and commanded me to get a buffalo.
Ellen's illness was long, and it drained my mother. My parents had a friend who died of cancer, Wayne, when I was much younger. Then they had another when you were only a bit older, whom they called Bruce even though his name was Turk.
I remember Bruce better, remember him losing his curly hair and goofy humor when he knew that he would not recover, when the chemotherapy made every movement nearly impossible. I don't remember Wayne well. He exists as a sort of vague Jesus stand-in with a wheat-colored beard. Bruce was a family friend, someone whom I might have treated like an uncle had he lived longer. I knew Bruce was absent, I knew he was dead, but I was too young to understand the import of that. I didn't know to fear death, but cancer was a nightmare, no matter how my parents kept from me exactly what "cancer" meant.
I didn't get to know Ellen well. Had I been any younger or older, we may have known one another, but I was in my self-involved late teens. I was never a package deal with my mother. I could recognize Ellen, though, though almost as a stock character: long brown hair, an angular face that cancer did not help. She seemed to be the same model as Joni Mitchell, though less of the hippie bend. There is a picture of Keilaina (who will be crucial in your life, Younger Thomm) that reminded my mother of Ellen. That has further skewed what Ellen looked like.
There were jokes--or not quite jokes but we pretended--that Ellen should horde her painkillers and take them all at once. That isn't what happened, but it should have been. Ellen was miserable at the end, starving and nauseated. Having control of when it would end would have allowed for closure.
Once, when my mother visited her at the hospital, they went out to the bus stop. Ellen took out a joint and lit it. My mother, worried, questioned the wisdom of sparking up in public. Ellen shrugged, saying, "What are the cops going to do to me? I'm dying of cancer." She wasn't wrong.
I was home the night my mother got the call that Ellen had died. She collapsed there, phone to her ear, cord dangling, and I rushed to hold her. We fell from our stereotyped roles--sarcastic mother, flighty son--as I tried to help her through the immediacy of her expected tragedy. I didn't know what to do or say beyond that, so I held her on the floor of the kitchen and let her cry into me.
I'm sure she told me she was fine, though how could she be? That is what she had to say then, so we could move back into our roles, so she could begin to figure out how to cope.
For years, the Ellen Tree grew outside the kitchen window. Under it, we interred some of Ellen's ashes beneath the clay buffalo. We scattered the rest of my mother's portion in a creek by my house. My mother and she would be driftwood someday. The reincarnation could not take hold if we didn't give some of Ellen to the water.
Until there was a good rain, I walked by that spot and saw her bone chips, too dense to have floated away with the ashes. I did not find it morbid, knowing that no one else passing this spot would know what these were.
My mother would lose other friends to cancer, more friends than seems probable short of meeting them all in a support group for former radium girls. The other deaths affected her, but never as much as Ellen.
A decade later, my mother cut down the Ellen Tree to plant a different garden.