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The Opening of My Memoir, If I Were To Write One

The intersection of my creation is an interesting one, and one that was, inevitably, meant for destruction.

My father is an oilman. He works to fund the signature consumption that is America. A land of plenty.

He drills for oil and as an engineer, woks to get out and get at what is below the Earth. He orchestrates the clawing at the earth with metal, and with machines, and with men to oversee them.

My mother sells land. And houses. She has worked diligently, obsessively, as long as I can remember. Like the houses she oversees and the deals that she initiates, she is a careful nurturer and a woman of people. She sells to people, helps people buy homes, helps people plan their futures.
She builds.

This junction – the junction of the drilling, and the building, the disunity of the downward and the upward - is where I made my start. I would forever look to a way to keep at level ground, and fight for a sea-level existence in a storm of fury, a tempest of epic and life-changing proportions.

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Like most baby boomers, my parents did and still to this day define themselves by their professions. My father does well with math, and science, blueprints and computers. He can schmooze and fake it till he makes it. But his dream would be to let his mind roam with oil blank sheets of paper and a calculator.

My mother worked seven days a week when I was growing up. A house is nothing until someone has lived in it. It is a signature of a family, and identity, something that people create for the generations to come. And that is what we were – a mother and two daughters. She created dreams for other people and helped them find their nests, while singularly shaping and forming our own. A single mother, building on shaky ground.

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I can only remember a few things about my father from my childhood; I remember hearing his tetris game in the bathroom at all hours of the night, in there to sit on the pot as a respite from my mother. And I remember how shiny his shoes were when he would be on his way to Washington, to meet with other men about the slimy substance that consumed his life.
They had shoes just as shiny and as black as their business.

Oil is made, and sold, and spent. It goes up into the air, disappearing from sight. From consciousness.

This is what happened to my father.

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When I was three, I remember looking into the kitchen from the doorway to the living room. And watching my parents scream at each other. What they were talking about, ti matters not much now. It could have been any number of things- my father’s infidelity, his lack of attention to my mother who dedicated her life to him, the children that he barely knew, or the mistress that he was about to leave her for.

But I remember the pot of beans she was cooking, the way her hair looked and smelled, the way she was dressed, to go to a party for one of his business events.

Posted by Clarissaag on 2008-04-22 22:57:13 | Rating: