Taken thirty years ago, this photo slipped and fluttered out of an old journal of mine last week. Not sure what to do with it, I’ve kept it sitting on my desk for the last ten days.
I’m seven years old here, during a family trip to Shaver Lake, where we stayed in a secluded cabin with another family. It was probably the last trip we took all together, as my parents separated later that year.
Jessica Dofflemyer – all rights reserved
I remember the experience – the beauty of the woods and sunshine through trees in wide fields. Freedom in wandering dirt paths embedded with quartz crystals. An open meadow with tall grass and a zip line pulley we could hang from. At night, a brown sleeping bag with soft, lime green lining.
And puppies. Not ours. The other family had brought the little dogs that follow behind me in the photograph.
I kept this picture out because in it, I am the same age as Jeb. Jeb’s greatest wish (now that touching snow has been accomplished) is to have a dog. In Jeb’s world, I am the force of reason that stands as barricade to his canine companion. It’s not for my lack of love of furry friends. I love them so much, I want them to have the best upbringing possible, and for me right now, raising a dog is more than I can undertake.
So I wanted Jeb to see the proof that I, like him, had a love for dogs too. I understand his longing.
When I show him the picture I remember that the two puppies really didn’t get along. They would start to play but inevitably their fun would turn to attack. I tell Jeb about the time I was petting both of them in my lap. They suddenly lunged at each other and when I put my hand in the middle to stop them, I got bit.
Thirty years later, this memory I had forgotten comes flooding back with ease.
“Did you bleed?” Jeb asks, holding the picture in his hands while I make breakfast.
“Yeah, actually, I did.” I look down at the spot on my right hand that still holds a slight scar from the incident. Though I see my own hand every day, I hadn’t thought about the origin of the spot there in years.
“Did it hurt?”
“It did. Not horribly, but it surprised me, for sure.” I touch the scar on my 37-year-old hand and am amazed that there is still a faint, tender feeling in the fleshy layers below the surface. As if the cells and nerves still remember a distant story that my mind had long forgotten.
“What are you doing with your hand?” he asks.
“I’m just touching the spot where it happened.”
“No, in the picture, Mom. What are you doing with your hand?”
“My hand?”
I walk over to him and glance again at the photo. Jeb sees what I hadn’t. I realize I’m holding my hand in the picture because I just got bit by the puppies. The moment forever captured when soft fur and innocence collided with a sharp, toothy snap.
“You’re right Jeb. That’s the hand I’m holding. It must have just happened when they took the picture.”
Jessica Dofflemyer – all rights reserved
In this past week, a different aliment has had my focus. I’ve continued seeking opinions about alternative ways to dissolve this ovarian cyst. I’m surprised at the woo woo advice I receive from well-respected physicians. I’m looking for possible diet alterations, herbs, supplements. Something biological, scientifically proven. A prescription or formula.
But instead I’m told “Use your intuition. Your answers are within.” Or “Tune in to your 3-7 year old self. Give her a voice and let her express her feelings.”
I truly do not think the doctors that made these recommendations are incompetent (or crazy). Short of surgery (which hasn’t been deemed necessary at this point), the medical field says nothing else can be done. Three different doctors from three different areas of expertise have all turned it back to me. This strange and unusual cyst calls for strange and unusual measures. I guess I’ll take the hint. I’m willing to try woo woo.
As I’ve been digesting these suggestions, the photo sits on my desktop. I search for something in this picture. What does this girl have to say? How does she feel?
This purer version of myself was short on experience but closer to senses. Porous to forest sunlight, the smell of puppy breath and the shadow sides of love and play. Moving through grasses in a borrowed coat. Too young and full to put words to the depth of feeling, soaking every cell.
I’d been dreaming of escaping the land locked San Joaquin Valley since I was in grade school, collecting shells in jars at the age of seven. By high school graduation, I’d been accepted at two colleges but my long-time boyfriend (one year ahead of me) was not at my school of choice. Tearfully, I chose to forgo the giant Redwoods along the ocean, so I could stick with him in the asphalt apartment complex of Bulldog Lane Village, Fresno, California, USA.
image courtesy of Fresno State University
I knew it was a gamble, but I was willing. I tried to make the best of it. Got a job at Naturalizer Shoes in the mall, grateful for air conditioning in 108 degree heat, especially since I was donned in the required pantyhose. I even hooked my boyfriend up with a job at the same shoe store in the neighboring mall, which was the beginning of our demise. Romance struck when he bonded with the goth-fashioned clerk down the way at Waldenbooks. He broke up with me and started reading “Geek Love”
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courtesy of Wikipedia
I was devastated and stuck in Fresno.
Around this time, I found myself in a Political Science lecture where the professor reminded the class, “Throughout history, all empires have fallen. Who is to say that the United States is any different?”
The suggestion shattered the bedrock of a foundation I had never questioned.
Still needing to finish up the school year, I took a short story fiction class, read Chekov and met a fellow student and brilliant writer (and, by chance, the son of the Political Science professor). I still remember that first story I read of his. A man and woman, oranges and chocolate and plenty of pregnant pauses. I was enamored. He took me to San Francisco where I wore red lipstick in the day time. We ate Vietnamese food, perused bookstores and I bought a copy of “That Which You Are Seeking is Causing You to Seek.”
I tried to make the best of my Fresno time. I wrote a lot in my journal. Found off-the-path nooks on campus where I’d sit in the shade of a big tree and read about the act of peeling a tangerine as meditation. Saw Ramblin Jack Elliot perform at a small bar in the Tower District with my father.
One weekend I took a road trip to Humboldt with my girlfriend, where a kind, handsome man in Buddy Holly glasses read me Richard Brautigan poetry at 2am in his studio by the railroad tracks. I swooned to the sound of
“I want your hair to cover me with maps of new places…”
Foundation had been shaken. The light was spilling forth. Back in Fresno, I was standing in the displays of white, soft-soled shoes reading “Death is a Parked Car Only” with skipping heart beats. I would no longer be confined to used peds and Orange Juliuses. I would not end in Fresno.
Richard Brautigan
“You joyride around for a while listening to the radio, and then abandon death, walk away, and leave death for the police to find.”
Sometimes the greatest gift is to lose the thing you wanted. That which I was seeking, was causing me to split. I finished that semester, left Geek Love and the Bulldogs behind, and headed for the ocean.
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