“What we remember from childhood we remember forever – permanent ghosts, stamped, inked, imprinted, eternally seen.” ~Cynthia Ozick
My mother who is kind of not into children except for her own, read this to me and Garrett almost every night before bed. She read Caps for Sale with great enthusiasm and exuberance. She interspersed this story with stories from growing up in West Virginia (a tractor ran into her house) and Queens (the day she almost drowned and when she got home she was hit by a car and was wheelchair bound for the rest of the summer). This is the book I give to all of my favorite kiddos. Am I a total nerd for being that faux-aunt who would rather give books instead of clothing?
I mean clothes are cute and all but their clothes cost the same as big people clothes and last for all of .035% of their lifespan. I’d prefer to give the gift that keeps on giving.
Four
“One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.” ~Hart Crane
While my mother was away frolicking around Martha’s Vineyard to fashion shows, movie screenings and a wine and cheese event – yes, the same woman who has to be forced to have a glass of Prosecco at a wine bar – I was sleeping in her bed. I have been bed-less for the last two weeks. For the first week I was all “I can be bohemian and rock out on the mattress on my floor” and then I realized that no matter how much Lithium I ingested to force myself into rapid eye movement I couldn’t sleep so close to the ground. You know…near the mice.
Not that there are mice in my apartment or if there are I’m blissfully unaware but – and this takes deep breaths to even discuss because It’s like one of those awful memories that you try to suppress way into the deepest recesses of your mind only to have it rear it’s ugly little (mouse like) head at the most inopportune times. But this is a real phobia I tell you. A severe unrelenting oh my God, I will never sleep again type of phobia and I’m paralyzed with fear just calling it up from way back in my head so I can get it out there.
You see many years ago – like three – I had a mishap with an Ikea bed. It didn’t involve throwing an alan wrench out the window and cursing the Swedes. But close. It involved losing screws into the metal frame and then having one of those dumbass wooden slats breaking in two. So I said fuck it and I went without an actual bed and slept on a mattress from the end of August until eternity because my money would be better spent on Yellow Tail than on an actual bed. I slept on that mattress until one Friday evening in January when out of the corner of my eye I saw something move. Of course I had to be seeing things because nothing would be moving in my bedroom in the dead of night. Right? I remained still for a few seconds holding my breath in case there was something moving and it was a teeny tiny murderer out for blood.
Then I saw it again.
I held my breath and quickly flicked the switch only to see a mouse scurrying across my bedroom floor and into my closet. The way my heart felt in my chest reminded me of when there’s terrible turbulence and the plane sometimes does a quick drop. It’s often nothing but that drop that happens and my heart ends up somewhere near my spleen but this time instead of being 10,000 feet above ground I am on the fucking floor and there is a mouse coming after my head.
I did what any rational adult would do; I called my mother who said, “just ignore it, Heather Lynn”. I swear this woman has phenomenal maternal instincts. Meanwhile I’m tears and barely breathing and my heart is moving from my spleen to my sternum. So I did the second best thing I could do which was to call Kris who only lived down the street at the time. Kris didn’t answer. She never answers. I could be like, Hey Kris, I’m pregnant and you’re the father and she still wouldn’t pick up the phone to call me back. She’d text me with a simple ‘oh shit’ and then want an explanation via text message. Regardless I remembered that she was camping or something else that probably involved beer. But oh! I had a key to her house! So I did the third rational, adult like thing. I got my ass out of bed and went straight to break into her house. Eureka!
I spent the remainder of the weekend camped out on her sofa where I was pretty sure there were no mice because she has like seven cats. That Sunday I drove to Ikea like a bat out of hell. Purchased a bed. And spent the long 72 hours waiting for the bed to arrive by building a fortress around my mattress with a suitcase, a copy of the Bible and a copy of Little Women. I slept curled into a tiny ball with my head covered and didn’t even allow air in.
And that is why I won’t sleep on the floor.
Eventually my time at my mother’s house was up this week so I was forced back to the mattress at my own house. You all, it was awful. Every noise, creak, random feeling that I got I feared for my life. And by ‘feared for my life’ I feared that a mouse was coming to eat me alive. And there I would be all eaten up by a mouse with giant pointy teeth and no one would be none the wiser. The only people who actually have been to my apartment and know where it is are my father’s girlfriend, Garrett and the United States Postal Service. The former is currently on vacation with my father and Garrett wouldn’t give a shit if a mouse ate my face. Garrett would just shrug and say that he always wanted to be an only child. And The United States Postal Service isn’t exactly known for it’s efficiency. So I’d be dead with ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ playing on repeat and no one would ever know.
I seriously have spent a good portion of the last week on high alert. Anytime my cat stopped licking his butt long enough to stare intensely at something my heart did that dropping thing. Since he is a cat and cats are anti-mice I allowed him to sleep with me twice in the event of a near death experience by massive mice teeth. The first night went fine. The second night, he (the cat) spent the entire night stepping on my head. It’s hot as hell in there and I’ve got 30 pounds of fur trying to get comfortable which involved biting my foot every so often and then settling between my neck and my shoulder only to get up again and walk over my chest to the other side to knead my stomach. Rinse and repeat every hour until 4 AM. The next morning he had the audacity to look tired and sleep on my fucking bed while I was getting ready for work as if he had spent the night being stepped on. I swear one of these days I’m going to bite his foot and see how he likes it. And then maybe lay across his face in the heat of August so he realizes just how fucking spectacular it is to be me.
That’ll show that little shit tired.
While I had been camping out at my mother’s house though (and my God, let’s pray that she never reads this because she told me NO CAMPING OUT, HEATHER LYNN. And I was like, “yeah, of course not” and then I spent five nights there camping out and if she finds out she’ll change the code to the garage door. At least she would if she could but she doesn’t know how and she’d never remember it) (but I digress) I was looking at photos of me and my brother in our youth. Behind a photo of me in overalls she had written down my stats when I was four years old. I was 40 inches tall and I weighed 41 pounds.
I went to Twitter to see if that was like, normal, and Twitter assured me that it was completely normal to be that big which is good because since then I have grown up to be a rather large adult and not all that average. I mean hell, immediately after asking Twitter about my normalness, I went on to organize my books by color for two hours and since that was so taxing on my brain I had to nap for three hours.
Anyway it was when I found that paper where I was labeled as a perfectly average four year old that I looked at the calendar to notice that this website turned four on Monday. Which means that four years ago, on August 10, 2005, I wrote a post where I quoted Grey’s Anatomy and discussed my relative adult hood. Four entire years have gone past where I’ve told story after story about my family, my life, my friends, my wine, my shopping and my fear of mice.
So I guess this is just a really long way of saying thank you for putting up with me for four whole years. Four whole years of loquaciousness, relentless hyperbole and excessive use of the ‘f’ word.
Here’s to four more.