“Kitchens are cool, either way. If we use them to eat well, or to just get by. Spoons, in a jar, on a counter become a love-o-gram. The hand-crafted cherry trivet; an ode to joy, or to a time when your mother shopped to please her eye. Before Walmart, around the time of the dime store Kresge, or Woolworth’s. But my mother had a thing for the Scandinavian aesthetic. More sensually proportioned than items contrived in her native England, perhaps; but also practical and well-built. There was one such store in town, owned by a man named “Gregoroff”, who would follow you discreetly, as you browsed his fashionable inventory. As children, we knew to be scared of him, for as quick as he was to chat up your parents, he would swat you, or nearly that, making sure you didn’t go anywhere near his vases, or glassware. I don’t blame the guy. My father would imitate his accent, to sort of scare us, at home. It went something like a Boris Karloff routine: “24 pieces of MAH-valous furniture” but would make you scream and run for cover. I was scared of a lot of things back then, including my father. So it was a win-win, for the powers of evil, who lurked in the shadows of our over-sized, turreted & slate roofed mini-castle. Often left to my own devices, I had free reign over the vines and dismal brooks of my neighborhood, bordering on fraternity houses. I did things in the bushes, and pulled many a stuffed animal, overland, using a simple pulley system, in those days. I haunted the wood’s edge below the houses, looking for students, as if I were hunting wild unicorns. Remember, I was five. The fraternity had a big dog, I longed to ride. I vaguely remember some frat boy placing me on the back of a Newfie, & holding me there to feel the power of size and the cozy wilderness of animal love. It kept me returning to the trees along the fringes, where our land found theirs, where I would pine for that fine dog, and the attention of young men. It doesn’t all square up now, in my mixed up memory, yet there it remains, like a fossil, or an unrequited affair. And the one time I ran away from home, it was towards the woods, and the dog. But must have veered off, to traipse the road, a gravely, steep, infrequently traveled cow path, the kind old Volkswagens could still be seen, disappearing into. Past the old babysitter Mrs. Kupper’s house, which I knew, and then looping back round in return, heading for the only home I knew, sobbing my way. My life filled with tornados, and other large things, so non-stop that I couldn’t distinguish from what was physical & what was psychically hurled, with fatal accuracy. What wounds us in innocence, goes unnamed for a long time. And the families we’re born into, & even possibly the families we create, may not recognize us at all. They don’t understand, well, how could they. About how we had to run. Because we were alone, and could only run back to our abusers.”
