• thisisby.us writing
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    • Driving West II
    • Driving West III
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    • Only in Your Dreams
    • A New Kind of Nieve
    • With Your Artist Hands
    • Unwilling to be Told
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    • In the Dark
    • Party of One

Daughter of the King

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Daughter of the King

Monthly Archives: July 2009

Boy Voices and Choir Songs

25 Saturday Jul 2009

Posted by lbcarizona in Uncategorized

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Can't Hurry Love, Christian, Diana Ross, family, God, Hiawatha, singing, youth camp

Way out West, where I’m living for the summer, on a train climbing up a 14er at a 25% incline, my visiting little brother says that we can’t sing. Dad is singing Diana Ross to my squirming little sister and Mom’s laughing like she always does at Dad. Tim is sure that our family’s genetic code for song has been mutated beyond repair, and he’s not ashamed to say so, while Dad moves into the second verse of “You Can’t Hurry Love” and our train chugs up the mountain.

Way up North, almost across the border into Canada, on a small, private lake deep in the Hiawatha National Forest, oak cabins spread out across 32 acres of paths and fields filled with feet. Music plays from speakers in the treetops to herd hundreds of tennis shoes and flip-flops from softball sand to supper. In services, eternal things dig their heels into soft and stubborn hearts alike. It’s a youth camp. And everyone on staff, except the sound man and including me, sings in the choir.

The madness for this summer’s staff begins on a Saturday. They’ll rake leaves from forest to forest, drag nets across half a mile of sand, and haul picnic tables down the hill. It’s all to awaken the campgrounds from a long winter of hibernation under heavy blizzards, and after two weeks of 7-11 years olds this work-week will seem like ages ago. I used to be on that staff. It’s where I learned how to sing.

When I was a child, my grandparents lived down the block and would call often. I always ran to the phone when it rang, but there was something wrong with my voice. When I screamed in excitement or surprise, it wasn’t high-pitched and airy, it was low and guttural. It didn’t sound like a sound my little body and bouncy blonde curls would make. It sounded too much like the boys in the neighborhood; too much like my brother.

When Grandpa called, there was a pause,
“Hello?”
“Well, hello there…” and more often than not he thought I was “…Tim?”
“No, Grandpa. This is Linda. Do you want to talk to Mom?”
“Of course! Linda!” He’d say, as if it’s what he meant the first time.

But this went on daily for years. It was funny until I grew up a little and was made fun of some. Slowly, it became unfair from funny. It became “Why don’t I have a girl’s voice?” Without a girl’s voice as a starting block, I had no chance at singing. Outside of the shower curtain, this mouth did a whole lot of talking, but never carried melodies. I found some tapes I’d recorded as a girl with my Fischer-Price tape deck and microphone. I had to throw them out after listening. It hurt my ears to hear my own voice sing along with kid’s songs. I had no concept of notes; I only knew how to make words longer.

When I first got to camp, no one told me that the staff is also a choir. There was no audition. No interview or talent show. If you were holding a Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir book and standing anywhere within shouting distance of the auditorium, you would sing in the choir. Haunted by Fischer-Price cassettes and Grandpa calling me a boy, I cried every summer during the staff’s first choir rehearsal. It was too unfamiliar and I was scared to even try. The thing about choir for me is that I don’t sing.

But I remember the first time I did. My peers were buried in their choir books, reading music I didn’t understand. I wouldn’t have known a pastor’s kid from a bum on the street, much less an eighth note from a Bflat. I knew I was in trouble, but I also knew that I couldn’t mouth “watermelon” every night for the entire summer. So I leaned in and listened to the sound of the girls voices around me. My first attempt came out as a squeak. The notes were too high and I couldn’t make them with my throat, as much as I’d wanted to. Soon, it would be back behind the shower curtain for me.

At some point in my silent catastrophe, the choir director sensed my difficulty and moved me back one practice pew with the boys. He confidently said,
“The tenor should be easier for you.”
“Alright,” I whispered, unconvinced.
And for five years I’ve stood on the platform, my girlfriends a step below singing notes I’ll never reach. And I sang and sang famous choir arrangements in my boy voice into the microphone.

Maybe I wasn’t born with a Billboard Top 40 voice. Maybe Tim is right that we are one family who should keep our lips sealed. Let Diana Ross sing Diana Ross songs. Or maybe every voice does have something to offer; something beautiful to give back to a world that would be silent without us. Maybe somewhere, the master Choir Director sits, facing the singers He’s nurtured and guided, waiting for us to offer our boy voices to Him. And He’ll wait and wait until we do.

King S(oo)per(s)

24 Friday Jul 2009

Posted by lbcarizona in Uncategorized

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chicken soup, Colorado, grovery, shopping, sickness

The grocery store here in Colorado Springs is a Kroger-affiliate called King Soopers. Every time I drive past the sign, it bothers me that “Super” is misspelled with two oh’s and that it’s plural. Even with their struggling English, they have the best deals around. Being poor as I am, my resolve to buy only items on sale and nothing else certainly fits my budget.

The King Soopers card is like gold. 33 cents for a lemon to flavor my hot water and soothe my throat, 17 cents each for chicken flavored Ramen noodles, 40 cents for a normally 86 cent Campbell’s chicken soup on Mom’s urging, and a splurge on a 79 cent navel orange landed me at $1.88 – my cheapest King Soopers bill to date.

Being sick doesn’t exactly break the bank but it sure takes its toll. I’ve watched 4 ½ movies from the couch in my living room in my 10 most recent waking hours. Between more pains than I’m used to feeling, I sprawl out with frozen broccoli on my face, trying to soothe my headache which may have been caused by me grammatical grievance against King Super, or Soopers – whichever.

Outside of Four Hours

10 Friday Jul 2009

Posted by lbcarizona in Uncategorized

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**The following is a piece I’ve been working on.  Maybe a poem, maybe a chunk of prose…  Comment with one image or detail that doesn’t quite work.  Much love.**

Number of:

Relationships she’s had with Mexicans since her first boyfriend in the fifth grade: 0

Relationships she imagined having with greedy-eyed Latino lookers while south of the San Diego, CA border: 9

Months spent in one particular intimate bilingual interaction, actual, not imagined: 3

Rings slid onto her finger by tanned hands — a symbol of marriage, she knows, in a culture that operates in and through symbols, she finds out: 2

Rings of hers that he still has: 1

Cell phone rings she heard, broken English interrupting Spanish symphonies while she made footprints in wet Tijuana sand, cell phone in her purse, his number waiting on speed dial: 47

Times he’s changed his cell phone number: 4

Phone number’s she’s ever had: 1

Practice conversations she had with him, with herself in the rearview mirror of the car, before she last called: 4

Digits actually dialed, to his current out-of-area line: 11

Hang-ups before the second ring: 1

Minute-or-less calls in three-syllable questions and one-word answers in which he asked her to go dancing: 6

Minutes it took to change into her salsa dress, even tying the halter ribbon behind her neck, in the back seat of his friend’s window-tinted suburban: 7

Glances she took over her shoulder, his hand on her back, at the curb where the car was parked, watching the street lamp above flash out and sizzle in the shadow: 3

Calls from a nervous ex-boyfriend offering a safe ride out of that neighborhood: 3

Minutes spent declining these offers, outside the glass doors, the safe suburban blocks far out of her sight: 13

Dollars off the Mexican employee gave to her dirty blonde hair and bright blue eyes at the check-in of the Latina bar, South Chicago, Ladies night: 25

Bartenders, aching for her crisp singles, while she drank water through a straw: 9

Coronas he bought, one after the other, lime in the neck: 9

Sips she took from his bottle, squinting, pursing her lips, quenching a thirst not for drink: 5

Words spoken in English on the dance floor, him or her: 1

Inches of fabric between his hand and her leg, twice: 0

Seconds their lips pressed together, breathing heavy and labored: 0

Intersections of his lips and her neck or shoulder, her declines drowning in garbled and mixed pieces of language: 12

Years she studied Spanish in secondary and elementary school: 9

Tears she cried in a corner of the club, near the bar, when he grabbed her shoulders violently, unable to understand any of her languages, schooled or not: 1

Scenarios is which she pictured trying to actually be with him: 19

Doubts she had about staying at the club, quieted by his firm hand around her wrist or her waist: 6

Graffiti artists on a beach hundreds of miles and 7 months away from this night, buzz cuts and goatees like his, carving huge letters in the wet sand while she leaned over the boardwalk to tell a pastor from Tijuana about su familia: 3

Stories she loved hearing about his familia on fishing trips: 2

Missed calls she would have three days later, all within one hour, from a women he says is not his girlfriend or baby girl’s mama: 16

Girls playing in the Tijuana sand, near the waters of the salty Pacific, that were innocent and light skinned like his daughter could have been, the little girl that he never did admit to having: 5

Hours she powered down her cell phone after accusing and thickly foreign voices from an unknown number demanded that she was his novia and that she knew something about the little girl: 24

People that think he is her novio: 4

Stutters she has tripped over in conversation, hesitating, deciding what to call him, them: 2

Hands held while they waited for the valet driver, solo amigos: 1

Miles from these city streets, trains screaming overhead, until home: 21

Miles left to traverse in this chasm between two beautiful languages, two clashing, incongruent cultures: 1,906,314

Drunk drivers, telling her to get her stuff from the suburban or to climb in: 1

Seconds she held his eyes with hers, waiting curiously for him to say the right thing, anything: 3

Two-thirty AM phone calls to her ex-boyfriend, asking for a ride home: 1

Times Hector called out her name through the window in his language, Leenda!, as he drove away in the suburban, sitting in the back seat without her: 2

New salsa moves, feet now able to chkchk across the wood panels in heel sling-backs, dress corners flirting with air pockets, tremoring in and out from her thighs: 5

Hours she stayed awake replaying these four hours: 4

Close Encounters

02 Thursday Jul 2009

Posted by lbcarizona in Uncategorized

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Tags

adventure, Colorado, hiking, mountains, rock climbing, Rockies, Rocky Mountains, section 16, trail, west

Click this flickr link for a few photographic updates.  I started at a trailhead called Section 16 yesterday evening and realized that it connects with a whole web of trails that go on for miles and miles.  The five I hiked were more than enough!

No adventures too out of the ordinary to report, although I did momentarily stand just about nose-to-nose with a white-tailed deer.  I had my headphones in; my beginner’s backback housing a protein bar, sunglasses, and my camera; and I since I hadn’t seen another hiker or biker for about 15 minutes, I was singing Athlete’s Outsiders at the absolute top of my lungs.  I could hear my voice from the inside of my ears, like listening to sound from a long hollow wrapping paper tube.  But I could not hear the hoofs of this deer coming down a steep incline to my right. 

The soles of my shoes stuck to the sticks they were crushing on the forest floor and I tugged my earbuds so they fell to a limp sway at my waist.  Hadn’t read a thing about deer – I wasn’t sure if he would charge at me or run scared.  Did he think like a rattlesnake – that quicker movements increased the threat to his safety?  I stood very still.  His eyes were huge and moist.  They blinked to life twice while he stared at me, which is something the deer heads on my Grandfather’s wall that I used to pet when I was a child never did.  His tail flicked to the side and he turned and ran up the incline, leaving me stunned and laughing on the dirt path. 

I directed some bikers, who wore the full spandex edition and helmet with visor which was hardly necessary, to a canyon trail I had passed a quarter mile back.  I hiked inconsequentially to a dried up waterfall and back to my car, where I mostly collapsed into my front seat.  Close encounters, no near-death experiences.  Happy hiking.

Pages

  • thisisby.us writing
    • Driving West
    • Driving West II
    • Driving West III
    • Your Own Cadence
    • Celebrity Death Pool
    • Riverwords
    • Only in Your Dreams
    • A New Kind of Nieve
    • With Your Artist Hands
    • Unwilling to be Told
    • Email
    • No Sleeping Here
    • Only Mom Sleeps at Home Tonight
    • Students Over Security
    • TRaNSiT
    • Cycles of Freedom
    • She Said
    • Heartbeat for Africa
    • Driving in the Right Lane
    • In the Dark
    • Party of One

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