:her soledad:

father. time.

2006-04-18T16:11:00.000-07:00

I see him there still, mostly when he lets himself smile, lets himself believe that after all these years I am really there, really back and still his.

....................................................................................................

My father was a player, a party boy, a beautiful dirt brown slickster. In 1983 he had hair as think and long as a gorgeous young woman’s and a walk that plucked second looks from passersby. The rhythm of his voice gave the impression of confident nonchalance and those eyes, my eyes, are what people remember most certainly about him and about me. My memory refuses to call up whether he was big or small before he went away but I do know that when I saw him in the hospital some weeks after the accident, propped up and barely conscious, he looked tiny and abandoned but like he intended despite that, to be fully brave.

Five or six months later in a Tehachapi State prison visiting room, he looked huge and imposing; broad shoulders, thick neck, prison chest. But something quieter yet more profound had also changed. His gaze was curious and distant, as if he had slipped off of the plane of everyday living and onto something more perilous and difficult to manage. He announced with no particular emotion that the doctors said he had high blood pressure “Cause it’s real crazy in here.” He was twenty eight.

During that same visit he asked me questions about school and teachers, neighborhood friends and church, my mama, my step-daddy and if I was keeping contact with his people. He smiled occasionally but it was painted over with sadness. He even laughed once but I could tell it hurt.

We did this daughter-visit-daddy dance again in 1987 over a long weekend in a prison trailer. A lean, severe corrections officer escorted him to my grandmother and me and all weekend he walked around asking me thousands of run-of-the-mill questions, cooking, watching television, but never feeling free. At thirty two years old his health was no better and so we were careful with the salt at dinner. Before bed he took pills in front of the sink in a tiny bathroom with no mirror.

I remember interrogation type lights that illuminated the entire grounds so that it seemed daylight never quite went away. For good measure an officer came to the door three times a day. They made sure that no one with the name Jackson made the mistake of thinking our lives had in any way changed. I don’t recall how we got food or if we ever left the trailer but I remember feeling that we were all exhausted from the effort and just wanted to get back to lives in which we could breathe easy.

I tried one more time to see him at age sixteen but got turned away for a wrong bra or a faulty form. Something. But I didn’t fret and they didn’t have to worry because that was it for me. I said my sayonara in the parking lot that late morning and for the next five hours flirted and fell for a boy whose status as convicted felon at age seventeen, kept him from visiting his mother’s boyfriend too.

Now, in 2006 with many years behind us and nothing between us, I see so much more change; more than I imagined and in truth, slightly less than I had feared. At forty nine he is not big, but not frail, grey but not terribly aged, wounded but not broken. He was a bit guarded but not distant and overall perfect considering the circumstances. Sitting beside him, knee to knee, he was a strange kind of bud, blooming in slow motion before me over coffee, watermelon, talk, and too much time gone by.

so many men

2006-03-29T10:27:00.000-08:00

Going through my box-o-things last evening I was reminded that I have received my fair share of correspondence letters from California Department of Correction inmates. There is of course Daddy, then there is my older brother, my cousin (one of many, many), my brother’s friend M, my friend E from the church choir (who went in for the murder of an old woman. A crime I can neither believe or comprehend) and an ex (again, from church), K.

As I’m reading these missives to the young-girl me, I’m wondering what my parents were thinking when prison mail was arriving for their daughter at fourteen, fifteen, seventeen and eighteen. I’m wondering now, as a mother sitting in this pile of sorted memories, if they ever thought to shield me or if they even knew. I imagine that when I got this mail I felt special. I always did when someone (especially men) paid even small bits of attention to me.

The messages were pretty much variations on the same theme. Daddy would always ask about school and whether I had talked to my grandma (his mom). Whether I was still pretty and always whether I still loved him. Because he still loved me.

My brother, only two and a half years older than me, sounded distant, either perched real high or tucked down too low; regretting in one particular letter, a life barely begun. His friend M said he would follow me to Georgia since that’s where I would be going to college. Although I recall vividly being in love with him (the way only a sixteen year old could be with a 21 year old), I don’t recall offering or thinking this was good.

Both my church friend and ex wanted love letters, time, attention; things that no teenage girl with her own gaping holes can afford to frivolously spend on far-off men.

My cousin, he just wanted to say “Hey”, to anybody, anywhere and on that week’s mail run, tried me.

I can not imagine being in a physical prison; the bricks and the bars, the cots and the cuffs. But somehow between the dates those letters were written and the day they reached me, a thread was formed. Maybe after all this time I still have these letters because I felt like those boys - those men – somehow knew me, and that together, even though we would be no less alone, when we pressed pen to paper, we would feel much less lonely.

like origami

2006-03-27T08:33:00.000-08:00

Sometimes these memories are too intricate to unfold.

my life in letters

2006-03-24T10:00:00.000-08:00

Saturday November 5, 1983

Hi _________, how have you been? Daddy’s been thinking about you every day but a lot of things have been going on here. How is your little brother? What is he doing right now? Have you been good? Daddy’s alright. He’s just trying to get out so he can be with you. You are going to be a big girl one day, do you know that? And I hope you are a pretty girl too. Tell your mama to help you spell the words when you write back. There are a lot of things I want for you and to show you, and I will as soon as I get out. Are you doing pretty good in school? Do the best you can okay. That’s all you can do is your best. Daddy loves to be around you but it seems like I’m never with you; this has got to stop. Do you know what I mean my little one?________ daddy is so glad that he has you and _______ because you are all I’ve got and I want to show you the world. Be good baby. I will write you again ok. Love, your daddy.

This was the first letter I received from my father from Tehachapi State Prison.

There is a chill that spreads slowly through a little girl’s limbs when she gets that first one. And the longer he’s gone, the deeper it sets until at last she fears she might never thaw.

After I read this first letter from my father I folded it back as I had found it, placed it in its envelope and thought, “Oh daddy, please come home. Please daddy, hurry up and come home.”

at 8

2006-03-22T22:49:00.000-08:00

I remember being sure that I was beautiful. I remember being oblivious to whether I was the right height, and weight. I remember knowing I was the perfect shade of soft soil brown. I remember loving a cool dapper mama’s boy named James. I remember calling out “daddy!” I remember him smiling wide in reply. I remember motorcycles and women loving my father – women that weren’t my mother - as much as I did. I remember being tiny in long, shiny cars with big wide seats. I remember the yucky, loving act of my father licking his thumb and wiping my cheek. I remember words like “baby girl” and “hey there” falling like now & laters from my father’s lips. I remember “give daddy some shuga” meeting me in the air just above his head. I remember going home and not being able to wait to see him again. I remember the heat of an August morning. I remember Fair Oaks Avenue. I remember a sea of grey-blue carpeting. I remember a cool new boys club. I remember silence despite the sound. I remember a boy I thought I liked. I remember his sandy brown face and “good hair”. I remember his eyes too big and wild with excitement. I remember his voice screaming “did your daddy kill somebody?!” I remember being shocked. I remember walking past him (refusing to look back) and wondering how I ever liked him. I remember another boy. I remember this other boy being his brother, maybe. I remember him racing right up to my nose. I remember his voice. “your daddy was drunk and kilt this dude last night!” I remember spinning, but only my head. I remember wanting the spinning to stop. I remember wanting to disappear. I remember wanting my mommy. I remember wanting to cry. I remember not crying. I remember the loud crinkly sound of the newspaper. I remember it being shuffled too close to my face. I remember voices shouting “look! look!” I remember looking. I remember reading. I remember thinking dead, dead, dead, next to Jackson was wrong. Dead next to Jackson was bad. Dead next to Jackson was true. I remember knowing that anything in the newspaper was right. I remember being so confused. I remember the crowd around me growing big. I remember growing small. I remember wanting to call my mother. I remember wanting to disappear. I remember wanting to fight the tears. I remember a grown-up rescuing me. I remember thinking it was too late. I remember pleading to call my mother. I remember knowing that if she came there, it would mean everything had changed.

a strange kind of bedroom community

2006-03-22T16:40:00.000-08:00

In order to get a visit at the facility that is housing my father in this twenty-second year of a fifteen-to-life sentence, you need to be 1) determined 2) adaptable 3) a bit unhinged. And when I say unhinged I mean this in the most respectful way, as I am now keenly aware that having a loved one in prison, with all of its politics and trappings, rituals and requirements, can make the people waiting on the outside as frantic as the people on the inside.

So I was advised to be there early. Really early.

When A and I arrived on the grounds at three thirty Sunday morning, we read a sign that warned all visitors off the property until 6:30 a.m.

“I don’t get it. The ladies on the site said to be here between one and four.”

Because he was tired and hungry and more nervous than me, he didn’t say that he knew that didn’t make sense, but I could see his expression under the soft orange lights above us.

As we were turning to leave the grounds and go god-knows-where, an officer pulled up. “We’ve never been here before,” I said immediately, because I felt like he needed to know that.

“You here for a visit?” he was nicer than I expected and I said this to A when we finally pulled off, but first I said, “yes” and told him that one of the regular visitors told us to be here at this time.

He smirked some and pointed, “Over there. Across the overpass.”

“The overpass?” The direction he indicated was dark and far away.

“I know, believe me it’s ..” but he stopped himself. Maybe he understood that whatever he was going to say about them, he was also going to be saying about us. “Just drive to where you see that white car. You’ll see the rest of them.”

We pulled out and crossed the 101 overpass headed for the white car.

There were no words for the quiet organized picture of more than fifty cars lined bumper to bumper. Waiting. A silent, sleeping, motorized community of ladies-in-waiting. One or two cars with a steady stream of exhaust puffing from its muffler while the rest slept; the cars and the women inside of them, until it was time.

what I will do: revisited - part 1

2006-03-21T11:15:00.000-08:00

I will keep my mind on this.

I have not stopped thinking about my father since I left Soledad. I am smiling because I think he has on him what I kept detecting – slightly – on so many random boys/men in my life; false detections which led me to so many useless relationships and heartbreaks. Except his is authentic, the real thing; that "New Boy Smell". Thinking about him makes my heart race. I want to be there for him in every way because he was there for me in the only way that matters to me now: in the making. His absence and the circumstances surrounding it, were central to the prcess of shaping and molding the ‘me’ today. So, from now until the day he is no more, if it is the only contribution he makes to my life, I will be forever grateful.

I suspect though, that contributing to my birth will not be the only thing that he finally has to offer. He was full-speed-ahead trying to teach me all of the things a father teaches a daughter between the ages of age eight and thirty. We talked about stranger saftey and the importance of keeping tight connections with family members and how to open a checking account and establish good credit (this right after I told him I had just bought my first home!) He is so eager to parent me; show and tell me things. I could feel his urgency to get it all out, to get me up to speed with the facts-of-life and in return I wished that I could, just for a single fairytale moment, gently take my heart out and show him how hard it was beating in response to him and all of his love.

What I did learn in that impossibly small five hour window that I spent with my father, is that good daddies do everything they can, when they can, with whatever resources they have available, for their daughters. I was certain from sitting there next to him, listening intently to his words and watching carefully his grave yet tender expressions, that if any one of those C.O.'s would have escorted him back to his cell so that he could go under his bunk and bring me back the whole world, he would have.

to be continued…

Amazing Truth and Gratitude

2006-03-20T10:38:00.000-08:00

I am grateful for grace, experience, faith and abiding joy.
I am grateful for the gift of fathers.
And the truth that time is no match for love.

Soledad update:
It went great.
He is amazing.
Love between fathers and daughters is amazing.

my soledad

2006-03-18T18:37:00.000-08:00

*Exile as Boon

If you have attempted to fit whatever mold and failed to do so, you are probably lucky. You may be an exile of some sort, but you have sheltered your soul. There is an odd phenomenon that occurs when one keeps trying to fit and fails. Even though the outcast is driven away, she is at the same time driven into the arms of her psychic and true kin, whether these be a course of study, an art form or a group of people. It is worse to stay where one does not belong at all than to wander about lost for a while and looking for the psychic and soulful kinship one requires. It is never a mistake to search for what one requires. Never.

And so I’m off to find what I have been , for so long, searching and searching and searching for.

This is me, finally getting free.

*Excerpt fromClarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run With the Wolves

okay, so....

2006-03-18T07:52:00.000-08:00

I'm on the telephone early this morning calling to see if all is clear to drive the 300 miles to see Daddy. BTW, all is really never clear until you are sitting in the visiting room and see him walk in because apparently they can lock down at any moment. AND I guess they can terminate a visit at any moment too, but I digress.

I did the call circus; call one number - incessant ringing. Call another number - voicemail. Call a third number - dropped call (on a land line, mind you). Call the visitors hotline only to get the following message:

Regular visits for Alpha and Bravo. No contact visits for Charlie. To schedule a non-contact visit please call xxx-xxxx. Regular visits for Delta and Echo. I repeat, Echo is back on regular visits (these families must be giving them hell) but Delta 1,2 and 9 are on administrative visits only. Call xxx-xxxx to make an appointment.........

What the #@!$ is all of that supposed to mean?!

Because A was a Marine, I am going to assume it's the same logic. This Alpha, Delta business is about phonetics and clarity over the phone. Daddy's in D and there is no 1,2 or 9 in that number jungle you have to remember in order to send him mail, so I'm going up. Whew!

Two things to note here: This is all just too damn much and worth every precious minute.

surfin'blogs and tappin' my fingers

2006-03-17T23:05:00.000-08:00

I am too damn nervouse to sleep. It is 11:02 p.m., my A is not home and something in me feels like if I go to bed, the moment will be that much closer, come that much sooner.......

Rational ME: It will be as close as it is and come as soon as it's going to come even if you stay awake until Sunday, silly.

waiting for soledad

2006-03-17T20:55:00.000-08:00

On Sunday March 19, 2006, I am going to visit my father in Salinas Valley State Prison for the first time in nearly fifteen years.

He does not know that I am coming.

I wished on a galaxy full of stars that the weekend would arrive because this week has been full of stress in the highest order; filled with thinking about seeing him. How will he react? How will I? What will the drive up be like? The drive back? Will I run into any snags? Will I run into any people I know? (this just popped up but I guess the possibility certainly exists) Will it rain? Will I be cold (I always am) and will this make me seem like I’m uncomfortable?

I have been admonished by good friends and women of reasonable sensibility, to relax, take a deep breath; they are sure it will be fine. Me too. But that doesn’t work for whatever this thing is in my belly, doing the manic jump-around all on my nerves.

I brought myself a nice black shirt because one of the wives on Prison Talk said I couldn’t go wrong with that (there are so many things related to attire that can get you eighty-sixed, that much I do remember from my childhood visits). And while I was shopping I got that queasy feeling you get when the anticipation of a thing is at levels so high, you are sure you will either faint or fly away. It’s like the day before the first day of school, or Christmas eve or that feeling you get when the report card with an "F" and three "D"’s shows up in the mail - you know that ass is in for it. Like that.

After I brought the shirt I was on my way out of the mall and I did a thing that surprised me – I thought, “I need something pretty. I want to look pretty when I see my daddy.” And so I went into Forever 21 and bought a bundle of beaded bracelets tied together with a shiny satin bow. I put it on my wrist and thought, “Now I’ll look like his little girl.” Really.

But I have discovered in these last few grueling and tiresome days, that the desire to be that little girl has been there all along; itching in her red tights, hopping from foot to foot, waiting -rather impatiently - to be seen.

what i meant to say when i was silent

2006-03-17T16:16:00.000-08:00

I can see why prisoners use love song lyrics in letters, they’re better.

Dear daddy,

Maybe I didn’t love you, quite as often as I could have.
Maybe I didn’t treat you, quite as good as I should have.
If I made you feel second best, I’m so sorry I was blind.
You were always on my mind. You were always son my mind.

-Fantasia, You were always on my mind

to sleep is to dream

2006-03-17T09:21:00.000-08:00

3/16/16
8:30 p.m. [in bed]

There is no one to call. No one to call and tell that I am so tired. That I am running so fast in my head that my actual body is exhausted. I have imagined the scene from so many angles. In one, I faint. But I’m panicked because if I faint, will they rush him away? Will the make me go home when I wake? In another, I climb in his lap, lay my head on his chest like I can never really recall doing. But it’s a prison and they will never allow that and I am thirty and decorum will never allow that. The little daughters are so lucky. Then I see me driving so many miles just to be turned away again. This makes me want to sleep, forever.

remembering a soledad song

2006-03-16T18:38:00.001-08:00

Just now, I’m driving home from Dominos, getting pizza for dinner because my nerves are too bad to cook, and I hear it. That smoky tone; a strange mix of playful and dead serious, and I am overwhelmed. I am thrown back to that visiting room so many years ago, (too much time having passed yet again) watching him walk towards me, tall and beautiful brown. Although I am thrown off briefly by how much he has aged, I am stung with a child’s disbelief which is surely plastered all over my face. A great big smile is on his. He approaches me slowly. Pauses. And says it. “Hey baby girl, how you doin’?”

If I wasn’t in my car, my daughter strapped in the rear in a car seat, I would have allowed myself to black-out on the Avenue from the sheer bliss of remembering the sound.

greetings from soledad

2006-03-16T12:38:00.000-08:00

"Did your father send you a birthday card?"

I can hear her now although I haven't heard it in years. My mother would ask me this every summer since the summer after he went away.

At first I was delighted that he hadn't forgotten and then I was ambivilent and around thirteen or fourteen I can recall thinking, "Yeah, so, why?"

I am sure now, that it was all my father could do to get that card made and sent so that it was delivered to me on time. It was always very ornate and colorful. Maybe he paid someone to draw those very elaborate pictures of balloons and clowns and whatever other things appeared there in any given year. But eventually nothing in me cared. I would leave it unopened for days and she would ask me if I was going to read it. If this went on too long her tone would change and she would admonish me to read it. I would. I would think it was silly, too bright and busy and nothing a teenage girl wants from her father, no matter where he is. I did not write him back to thank him.

Then one year I didn't get a card. There are no words beyond this.

soledad math: the difference between today and yesterday

2006-03-16T12:23:00.000-08:00

So frustrated yesterday at work when I couldn’t remember the address and all of the numbers you need to include on the letter. Who can remember all the damn numbers?! She can, but that’s because her love is there; the man she intends to spend the rest of her life with. But I am a daughter who needs her numbers remembered; her birth date, her graduation date, her wedding date. All of those numbers and dashes between numbers are too much to remember when you are trying so hard to just forget the whole thing.

I have the address today, the stamps and the nerve.

visting daddy:a retrospective

2006-03-16T09:54:00.000-08:00

it is terrible and everything you dream of, all at the same time.

we are nowhere

2006-03-15T21:33:00.000-08:00

we are nowhere.

yet we are everywhere.

when i was a teenager i would see us, me, them, there in the visiting room, forlorn and uncomfortable, sad and exhausted in our hearts. but when I am looking online, out into cyberspace for all of the boys and girls tunred men and women who waited for endless hours to spend 360 minutes seeing their daddies, i see no one. is no one talking? is no one telling? did no one make it out. except me?

on the verge

2006-03-15T19:12:00.000-08:00

On the verge of tears on the way to work.

On the verge. I have been here for so long.

facing soledad

2006-03-14T23:59:00.000-08:00

Today I missed work because I could barely move my limbs. My head felt enlarged and my eyes swollen from crying about this thing that I can only recall crying over a total of four times in my entire life; two of those times in the last 6 months. As I am thirty now, mother of two, wife twice and so many other things I wanted to be when I grew up, now it is time to be A.J.’s active, aware, present daughter. Doctor Valerie said today, not so much for him but for me. I have donned the fatherless daughter dress for so long that it has gotten to be a bit of a costume. It is time to go to my father – as an adult, without a grandmother or auntie escort – and get to know him. Leave “fatherless” to those who still need it.

I was afraid on and off all day that I couldn’t do it. And then maybe I wasn’t afraid, maybe I was just so used to feeling like afraid was enough of an excuse to not to do it, that I pulled it out like a kitchen knife - a silly, useless defense.

“I am my father’s daughter. I am not afraid of anything”

This is favorite line in my favorite movie, Elizabeth, and yet.

I called his counselor today after hours of being put through, to dead lines or incessant ringing or random voicemail systems. He was friendly enough. Enough to stretch my hope just a little bit further. Enough for me to book a room at the Soledad Best Western and find suitable sitters so that I can take a trip that is long overdue.

I can’t allow myself to think about it. I will go no matter what. I will sit there until he arrives and I will lay my eyes on my father for the first time in over 15 years; I will cry them out.

where to begin

2006-03-14T23:56:00.000-08:00

Not doing it hurts. Running to the page is like energy. Like sunbursts. Like I’m crossing the finish line with every word and not doing it hurts. Holding off stings, cracks, bleeds, scabs over but never heals. Writing the story out heals. Keeping time and keeping up with the world in my head helps heal me. I did not know I was so hurt by his absence. So sliced open by the void. So blank where he belongs. So sad he’s gone.

My father has been gone for more than twenty years.

If I had a Pasadena Star News I would be able to say exactly how many seconds of absence I have experienced, piled one on top of the other, since he plowed his late model Lincoln or Cadillac into a couples only son, splitting him and me in half.He died. His family has had to live with that grief. And I have had to live without mine.

There is no way to carry the grief of an absent father when you are trying to fit into your cliques and bras and skin. There is no clear place to put it so you sit it down. It gets shuffled around until it’s firmly under your step-father’s suspicion. His suspicion that you have lost your mind for slipping his home number to more boys than you can see futures with. But you haven’t lost your mind. You have lost your father; your way, your safe lap. And so you search laps from Pasadena to Muskegon and like that traveling girl with the golden locks, discover that so many of them are too big or too small, too warm or too cold. They are not kind or true and so you swallow the losses; the things you have to leave as toll; currency for the exploration of nothing. Nothing just right. Never. And so “never” is your new song. Never love. Never trust. Never fall for it. Never care. Not ever. But “never” is a kind of paralysis. Never move. Never cry. Never try. Never paint. Never write. Never share. Never help. Never give in, until the absence throws you up like so much bad fruit. And so you swing to the worse; “always.” Always call. Always do. Always cry. Always give. Always believe. Always burn, seethe, peel, tear, never heal – and back again. Spend it all on love (read:sex), then clothes, then books, then therapy, then gas - $2.98 a gallon to drive to a sprawling Lancaster prison and search his face for all of the tiny pieces I need in order to put it together; to fix and fill my life.

what i will do

2006-03-14T23:50:00.000-08:00

I will keep my mind on this.

I will not forget.

I will not shove it aside.

I will write.

I will call.

I will put money on his books.

I will get to know my father.

I will tell him I love him - to his face.

I will visit him.

I will take my children to see him.

I will tell him that I am not, and have never been angry at him.

I will find out whether the above statement is really true.

I will face him.

I will face this.

I will be okay.

I will be okay.

I will be okay.

her soledad

2006-03-14T23:46:00.000-08:00

This is the story of her soledad.

my soledad.