I grew up in a home with an abundance of resource– some inherited, some cultivated.
It was years before I understood this as rich-people-speak. It means my family was a hybrid of new-rich and old-rich. In fact, it was decades before I used the word “rich” in the context of wealth.
Soil is rich. Chocolate is rich. Money is private. Where are your manners?
My parents had complex childhoods, especially by American standards, and felt it was important for me to connect with the less fortunate in a meaningful way. The rest of my friends would have percentages taxed from their allowance for a roulette of random and well-known charities, but my parents took it to extremes. I was required to donate time. Time, of course, being the most precious of resources in my community. I was required to listen to those I donated to, research causes, and follow up.
Despite all that, I didn’t really understand some things. There’s an education to fear, remorse, poverty, and powerlessness that I wouldn’t experience first-hand for many years later.
I remember my parents staying up all night, heads pressed literally together. They had the same color of hair, just like me, except my mothers was straight as a pin, and my father’s was a riot of curls.
If wasn’t for that little difference, you wouldn’t be able to tell where one started and the other began.
They were working on fund allocation for what amounted to an inner city, though I had seen firsthand how the projects in our area weren’t nearly as forlorn as that of other states.
The kids in the city were busting up the fire-hydrants, to run through them in the summer. It was expensive and the city didn’t have the money to replace them. My parents were debating as to what finances they could pull from a thriving city without much debate. I suggested educating the children– with posters, and maybe a mascot.
It was an innocent enough suggestion, and though my parents were usually kindly patient with all ideas, they laughed till they cried. Or perhaps it’s best said that they cried over their laughter.
Somehow, my mother said, despite all their best efforts, they had raised a doll-bringer.
I heard about the doll-bringers, growing up.
It was a dark winter when my father– a mere child at the time– was locked in a hut with his entire family, because the outside was uninhabitable after a natural disaster. They watched from the single window as a troop of missionaries made their way to the top of the mountain, knocked on the door, and came in to gift them with dolls. Not food, not clothes, but dolls. The families inside fed the guests, as was customary, and watched as they trudged away– patting themselves on the back, and carrying days of precious supply in their stomachs.
My mom had a similar memory. A different country, a different disaster, and probably different people. She remembers being so dehydrated that she would close her eyes just to keep the moisture in. She remembers licking the sweat off her own arm because it kept the hunger pains at bay. And she remembers the educational pamphlets and dolls that were brought to her, explaining how licking sweat was detrimental. No water, no food, just dolls.
Decades later, they witnessed the logic behind the efforts with their own eyes. Surely, I explained, if the kids understood how they were putting their homes at risk, they would stop damaging city property.
The next day, my dad took me to go meet the kids in question. Sitting in the house smaller than my kitchen, stacked on another house, my silk dress was ruined by my own sweat, while we talked. I made mention of it to a kid my age who looked remarkably like me, and she said it’d wash out. When I told her that silk doesn’t wash, she laughed till she choked.
Why would someone wear a fabric that doesn’t wash?
We went outside to play, and she taught me new words– most that have been unfit for any conversation I’ve had since– and some that I knew but would eventually taste with the same bitterness. Rent. Tax. Police. Abuse. Power. Privilege.
I’m broke, the kids said, as if they were taught at birth to say those words– born without the ability to ever have any money. I tried to explain that they shouldn’t say such things. They should prepare for greatness because a positive mindset makes way for serendipity.
Most of the kids laughed. They got by just fine, they said, and didn’t need or want my life. But my doppelgänger was intrigued. She asked me lots of questions. She asked if there was a word for the opposite of serendipity, and so I asked my dad.
There is, apparently. It’s zemblanity. It refers to the inevitable discovery of the things we’d rather not know.
The girl and I became friends as my parents walked around the neighborhood, seeing where they could help. I showed her my prize possession: my diary. I read to her from some pages and somewhere in the middle, she said she was glad I had a good life.
I wrote the experience down there, in front of her, so I wouldn’t forget it– and suddenly it hit me.
She was worried about me. I found zemblanity in my written words right then and there. Zemblanity, exhaustion, world-pain, embarrassment, shame.
This girl wasn’t breaking hydrants because she wasn’t educated. She was busting them open because she knew my parents or people like them would find a way to fix a hydrant. She was busting them open because she didn’t know what it was to not sweat through an outfit, and because it was a safe place for her brothers to play, and because well– in heat like that, it was bliss.
I read to her what I wrote, and she asked me why I originally thought they were breaking hydrants. I told her that I didn’t think she knew it was dangerous. What were fire fighters supposed to do when they needed them? She gasped with laughter, reaching out for my hand. She told me not to worry, but that if her house set on fire, the whole neighborhood would be gone before the fire fighters even made it out to them. If they bothered at all.
“To them, there ain’t nothing to fight for here,” she said with a shameless grin.
But her hand was on mine, and our color was the same, as was the length of our fingers, and the darkness of our knuckles. If hers weren’t so dirty and inexplicably splotchy, and if mine weren’t so manicured– you wouldn’t know where one hand started and the other began.
She asked if she could keep my diary because she was going to be rich one day and she needed my insight, and I gave it without a second thought. She smiled mischievously at how easy it was, and asked if she could have my dad’s Rolex, too– then followed me as I went to go ask him, begging me not to ask.
I asked anyway.
He took it off and handed it to her, and she said she didn’t take charity. He patted down his pockets and said that he forgot his wallet, but he wanted to pay her for babysitting me. He said he had heard about kids getting broken and busted up worse than the hydrants, and she stood straighter than I had seen her stand and grabbed the Rolex without another question.
My dad talked business to her for a moment, and I swear I heard something about fences, while I pondered the smiles on the faces of the kids around me. I grew up sheltered, but I had good instincts, and this area felt safe. They were motley, but they were like family to each other.
I asked if she really scared off the kids that might give me problems. With another grin and an arm flex, she said– of course, who do you think is busting up the kids who don’t play right?
Gosh, I’m glad I didn’t bring dolls, I said aloud, and then we both laughed like maniacs, rolling around on the burning pavement, careful not to dirty the area of the sidewalk that the kids used to cook eggs on hot days.
“You learnin’,” she said. “You learnin’.” And then with a perfect imitation of me, added, “And I am learning, as well.”
I wanted my diary then. I needed to sort out my thoughts. I asked if I could write in the diary that now belonged to her, just so I could make sense of things. She agreed, and asked if I wanted to be a writer– famous and stuff, meet the president, and make money without standing for hours on end.
The answer was no, not at all. I grew up in a home with an abundance of resource. Recognition was just one of those resources. It had never occurred to me that I needed to do something to meet the president. I had already met him twice. I also never imagined a world where making money and standing were somehow linked.
I didn’t need to write to be recognized: being born gave me that chance. All I had to do to exploit it, was maintain it.
But of course I didn’t. I lost it all.
Decades later, I ended up living in an area where the kids all knew the meaning of eviction before they could spell it. I ended up getting the tell-tale marks of malnourishment on my hands that I had seen on hers years before. I wrote through it all. I kept belief in serendipity in my heart– but I faced the zemblanity of my writing– the inevitable things I’d rather not know about me, the world, and circumstance. I learned how the privilege of recognition actually stays with you– in society, and in your heart– even when you lose everything around you. I learned how it is when you know deep down that you’re the only one who will fight for the things that are important to you. I learned how to smile when the doll-bringers come, no matter how ridiculous they seem, because their kindness comes from a good place.
I learned, I wrote, and I lived until the two pieces of me meshed together and I couldn’t even tell where one started and one began. I know my reasons for all those things, deep in my heart, as well as I know my reasons for any of them.
None is for recognition, though I admit to the comfort of community. Hotbox houses in the ghetto even feel cozy when there’s a community around. But ultimately, I blog because I type faster than I scribble, I share because I have a vantage that others sometimes never have a chance to see, and I write because, well, despite my exhaustion from racing over the learning curves of life… I learnin’.
I still learnin’.
__________________________________
Inspired by a once-upon-a-time project girl, a Buick in a Land of Lexus. Not the girl I had met so many years before, but one with shameless smiles who writes of hydrants in burning temperatures and how perhaps everyone writes for recognition. (Not everyone does, beautiful Samara. Some of us write because we have a long way to go before we catch up to the stuff you were born knowing. *mwuah!)
For the rest of you, I highly recommend checking out the links to the posts I referenced above, and also this one from The Daily Post about repetition in writing because I just realized how often I depend on that as a literary tool.