Keeping aware of these difficulties takes vigilance and awareness. I know, at least intellectually, what my habits are and even what the stakes are if I don’t break them, but I’ve learned about it the hard way, the slow, painful, by-making-colossal-mistakes way. Is there any other method? I’ve figured out enough to know what I need and want and keep trying to get it, but it’s a tough thing to do when you don’t trust your heart. I cannot afford to forget how wrong my heart once was.
The trust she would’ve naturally had for the voice in her head will be absent. You will have taught her the voice is amiss.
My sister seems to be much the same sort of creature as I.
Hold out a hoop and we’ll jump through it, hoping to prove our value and praying not to be abandoned again. We always think we’ll be abandoned again.
She will become a lopsided, cockeyed perfectionist, attempting the mental and emotional equivalent of running a marathon with no feet and relying on the stumps at the end of her shins.
But here’s the proviso just to confuse things further—if we don’t receive enough notice for our efforts, we become disgusted and then we’re the ones who leave. We dazzle, earn devotion, then depart when we become hopeless about another’s ability to meet our expectations of emotional reparation and their lack of willingness to jump through the hoops we hold out for them.
She will then let things slide.
Add to this that we have been sure to pick people who can’t help but fail us in everything but assisting in the fulfillment of our prophecy—we engineer it all to stay safe, to keep the familiar, to ultimately end up alone. What a fucking mess.
In the beginning of love, every one is the last. Every love is the most important. Every love is the one that will complete us and make us better. We are in the front car on the roller coaster ride, arms up over our heads, looking for the exhilaration at the top of the curve. Chaos is king.
She will think nice people are boring.
It isn’t easy to take the ride with us, except for when it is. When it is, it’s fun, thrilling, even breathlessly passionate. When it isn’t, I’ve seen the look on more than one face that’s told me it is shockingly hard, scary, and they want out of the amusement park, never to return or again hear the strains of the wicked calliope.
The thing is, everyone fails everyone. We’re human and we’ve all got holes in us. We are beautiful but we are fragile. We are all too weak, all too unforgiving, all too hurt, all too busy trying to preserve ourselves and in the process end up losing, never knowing when we have enough and forgetting that the best way to fill your own empty is to put someone else’s ahead of your own.
Inheritance. Reverberation. Lamps through windows, puppies against trees, thumps to the head. Adrenaline, surprise.
I don’t want to be in the front car anymore, if I ever did. I don’t think I ever did, it’s just where I was taught to sit. I can finally seek calm and quiet. I’ve found it suits me better and I want to be more cautious. I want to be gentler, mostly with myself. I pray for the best for my sister in her search for more evenness. I’d probably try to do her work for her if I could and, hell, I’ve even tried. I can’t protect her from the blowback, though, any more than I could’ve saved her from that beating Daddy gave her in her bedroom of the trailer, but I won’t hide and only listen any longer. I won’t be willfully blind. I look for reasons why I’ve chosen those who were different versions of my father and why I asked them to repair what he tore up when they were the most ill-equipped to do anything but exacerbate and even worsen what he began. I simply didn’t know any better.
Lord, what we get taught to do.
How much you weigh now? 140?
Stand here. Sing these songs. Look this way. Don’t be too loud.
I want to move on now, but it’s not as easy as that, there’s still work to be done. It will never be done. There’s no recovering if I stand still in the tunnel. I move, if only at a snail’s pace, toward the end of it, eyes on the light even if I know I’ll never reach it, cutting off the spewing hydra heads all the while.
I pray that I still have a chance.
Compassion.
SISSY IS TINY, ABOUT THE SIZE OF A THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD BOY. She has always been small, but is becoming more so as the years do what years do. Mama was petite, but my sister is less woman than sprite, her light physicality balancing out the heaviness inside her somehow. It’s as if she knows she can’t afford to have both the inside and outside be too big. She travels with a heavy cashmere shawl. I notice that she fits underneath it as she sleeps, hands tucked underneath her chin, on my couch.
I walk from my bedroom into the living room on my way to the kitchen to start the day. I see her there, curled up into a ball beneath that shawl, and wonder if she’s dreaming, if she’s even asleep at all or only keeping her eyes closed against the light of the lamp she knows I’m about to switch on. It’s still dark outside. Has she slept at all the night before? Sometimes she doesn’t. I make coffee. She stirs and I take a cup to her after I get my first sip.
She is sleeping on my couch—I can’t afford an apartment with a guest room—so that we can talk to reporters from magazines and newspapers, so that we can be photographed and filmed. We’ve finally recorded an album together—another culmination of things—a finish line of sorts. We’ve both wandered musically as well as emotionally, but have landed here, together for now. She is my harbor and I am hers, musically and beyond. She now seems to feel safer making music with me instead of on her own. I, too, feel more secure with her voice to lean on. I need her too. I have always needed her. However, it isn’t simple beyond that.
She is fitful and angry.
She will not know where her oppositional behavior comes from—and she will above all be oppositional—unless she spends years in analysis.
She is ashamed that she is not a bigger commercial success. She calls herself a loser. She loses sight of her accomplishments.
She will live her life carrying shame on her shoulders. It will weigh her down. It will keep her from believing she deserves anything good or whole.
She never makes a note of music that is not something she can be proud of—she is a singer’s singer and brilliant, a true star—but all she sees most days is failure.
She will never think she is good enough for anyone, anything, or any place. She will still try desperately to prove that she is until she gives up. She will overachieve. She will bend over backward. She will be pissed when no one notices.
All she knows is music, all she wants is music and the way it makes her feel—the way it allows her to feel—but she has become scared of once again asking the world for acceptance and approval of the art she makes. She is sometimes at loose ends. I remind her of who she is and what she has done with her life, tell her that she can get better and find peace, think more clearly, be happier and more content if she keeps working. I struggle through my own clutter and confusion on a daily basis. But I feel like her protector now, and want to repay her for her protection of me. To most, it would seem that an artist with so much great work to call her own wouldn’t struggle through disappointment, but most would have to dig deeper than the television appearances and magazine covers that have left her sort of empty to understand. Most just don’t do that.
She will give herself away and will mistake admiration and infatuation and sometimes even abuse for love.
She’s still the same ten-year-old girl who tried to make spears in Daddy’s workshop to shoot cowbirds with and then hid the evidence when she cut her fingers for fear of getting in trouble. That’s partly what makes her so unbelievably good. She’s still vulnerable.
I want her to be more careful with herself. I want us both to be careful, to stop running from whatever we think is chasing us. Time is growing short, and there’s none left for lack of mindfulness or any amount of carelessness. We need to conserve ourselves now. We’ve still got a lot to do. There is, these days, sometimes a glimpse of getting life done in the most gracefu
l, most harmless way possible. If we can’t tear down the walls we’ve built, we can move around them. I am thankful for those glimpses when they come, but she is sometimes unsteady. As we all are. As I am.
She puts her hand over her heart a lot as if it hurts, and it stops me in my tracks.
Her heart will be shattered.
I think of her telling me one day on the phone that sometimes she wishes she’d just have a heart attack, as if she has no more fight in her and can’t stand the world anymore after feeling alone for so long and wants to leave it.
We talk about the past while she’s here, the faraway years we lived with Mama and Daddy. We talk about Petromale’s—a real, authentic pizza joint owned by real, authentic Italians in Silas, about twenty miles from Frankville—where we used to play the jukebox with the quarters Daddy would give us. We’d go sometimes on Friday nights when he was in a good mood. We played “Sail On” by the Commodores and “I Love You” by the Climax Blues Band, some Little River Band. We heard enough country in the car and at home and were always looking for new tunes. We can still sing those songs note for note, guitar solos and all, and we still do, laughing and crying our way through them. So many memories we share and purposely keep well-oiled. We keep them alive even if they hurt us and suck up all the air in the room. They are all we have of our folks and the family we were, so we want to keep them alive. There were good times that are fun to remember, and a relief to remember, but so much grief, too, that still takes the wind out of us, so much unfinished business. The songs and the singing get us through. I dip when she dives, I go under to catch her, she hovers above to lift me. We are the other’s haphazardly knit safety net. We know how it feels to reach out and have no one reach back, so we have agreed, mostly tacitly, to always reach back to the other. My sister will not fall as long as I can catch her. I realize I might fail and she could slip through my fingers. I feel her slip along the way even now, but she keeps coming back. I wonder if she worries about me slipping?
That’s the price of love, isn’t it? I look at her and think of Mama and Daddy, most of the time being fearfully aware that at any moment we can all just be gone. We will all just be gone someday and sooner than I want to recognize. I fight the urge to withdraw so that I might protect myself from the weight of that feeling. I want to tell her to stay no matter what. I don’t. That’s her choice.
Inheritance. Reverberation.
Not everyone can seamlessly put their needs behind the needs of their child and always consider how their every action will affect her. Maybe they even shouldn’t. Who can say? I can’t say that our daddy never made a decision with us in mind, for I do not know that to be true and am quite certain that it isn’t. But I will say that he was unhappy, an addict, in pain, even diseased. He must’ve known, in some way, that he wasn’t okay. I don’t know why he wasn’t other than the obvious reasons I’ve given in these pages, but I do have empathy for him and some days I try to leave it at that. It hurts me to know the pain he was in. It hurts me to know the pain Mama was in for him, for us, and for herself. It hurts me for us all. There’s only so much digging I can do, though. Sometimes one just has to try to clean up as much of the wreck as possible instead of spending so much time on the sequence of events that made it all go in the ditch. I do know I can’t spend all of myself on it, for there are, with any hope, a lot of days left to be reckoned with, work to do, real love to be learned about, and a son to raise.
A son to raise.
The photograph shows more about the three of us, the only three people on the planet who carry the combined blood of Vernon Franklin and Laura Lynn Smith Moorer, than I can write on this page. The image washes around in my mind softly, like dusk falls, and has since I first saw it. My dear friend Sarah caught the moment on a Saturday morning at Sissy’s house in Los Angeles. John Henry and I had arrived the night before so Sissy and I could do a little more recording—a few more songs and some cleaning up of the ones we’d done the previous July. We had decided to call the record Not Dark Yet, the name of a Dylan tune we did. We tossed around a few other titles but that one kept inserting itself back at the top of the list—it holds the most hope and we like hope, we need hope, even though we sometimes won’t admit such a thing. I think hope might like us too, as it keeps appearing.
I am sitting on the floor beside Sissy’s bed, holding a guitar, legal pad with lyrics written on it near my bare feet, as close to camera ready as I can get. I am grounded and looking up at Sissy while I teach her a song. Sissy is standing up, looking down at me, the tongues of the military-style boots she has her jeans tucked into poking out animatedly as if they have something to say. A messy ponytail on top of her head and no makeup, her body in motion even though she stays in one place—she is a ball of kinetic energy, holding a coffee cup in her hand and looking like she could fly off at any minute, though she is making eye contact with me and singing harmony to my lead. John Henry is between us, his back to the camera. He is walking toward the back porch, the bottom of his left foot perfectly shown in the frame. The porch is full of that beautiful Southern California light—the kind you don’t see anywhere else. He hasn’t stopped to listen to us sing the song we’re about to record, he hasn’t stopped to pay any attention to what’s going on between us. He, instead, has headed toward that beautiful light, looking as if he is leading us out of the moment we’ve been stuck in all of our lives.
John Henry is the least codependent person I’ve ever met. Sometimes I wish Daddy could’ve known him, for there is nothing not individual about him. He is a lover, but I’ve never seen him adapt to or mold himself around another’s needs. He knows his own mind and is strong-willed. He sees something he wants and he goes straight for it, whether it’s a cherry tomato on someone else’s plate, pretty light outside on the porch, or a mud puddle he’s dying to stomp in after the rain. He knows how to access joy, has no compunction about doing so, and doesn’t care who likes it or not. He loves music, movies, hugs, dogs, and most people. He never misses a thing. He fascinates me with his cool confidence even though he’s surely taking in the world as a sensory onslaught. I have no idea what’s going on in that mind of his, but I can’t wait to hear about it all.
I often find myself looking to him to decide the tone of the day, not because I think he’s a genius or some sort of seer, but because I know his spirit is surely more pure than mine and I can learn from him which way to go. He twirls and seems to lose himself—with seemingly not a care in the world—and I wonder how long it’s been since I twirled. Did I ever twirl? He jumps in the fountain in the courtyard of our apartment building and I think about how free one has to be to jump, fully clothed and shod, into a fountain and not care who sees or bears an objection. There are less wonderful parts of his autism that involve no control over bodily functions, incredible sensitivities, and my absolute terror over an exceptionally limited communication system, but I will get to those another time. Those things are not the point of my writing about my son here. I mostly want to say that if I can be thankful for anything about his having autism, it’s that he doesn’t seem able to take on the family disease. Maybe he took it upon himself to stop it. Maybe I did too.
John Henry will not grow up knowing how to run for cover because there’s a fight going on in the house, how to disappear because he feels that’s the only safe thing to do, how to have to worry about the emotional temperature of the room or what’s going to happen next. He will not wonder if he is loved just for being him. He will not grow up the way I did.
My teacher. My greatest artwork. The end of inheritance.
Art always reveals what I cannot see otherwise. Songs have shown me what I feel when I’ve been too numb—going through the motions of life without stopping to hear my own heart, whether on purpose or not—to get to the center of things any other way. I didn’t even mean to start writing songs; I only wanted to learn how to play guitar, which I taught myself to do after I got out of college. I moved to Nashville—at twenty years old, the d
ay I took my last exam—to live with Sissy and sing background vocals for her on the road. She had the B-25 that had belonged to Daddy. I bought a Mel Bay chord book and started to teach them to myself on that guitar. I learned some basics and within a few weeks I’d written my first song. It was bad, really bad, but it showed some promise and showed me a path.
Art continues showing me the path. These pages show me the path out of the confusion I’ve swum around in for so long. The task I assigned myself can’t be completed. I’m just starting to see that. Seeing something new is the gift of creating anything. Wrestling around with material puts it in an order sooner or later. Standing back from it may not reveal something you even like, but it is work done, and will show some kind of result, even if it’s just the way to the next thing you have to do. Over thirty years since I’ve seen my parents breathe air, and these sentences have made me recall details about them that bring me to tears as if they had walked in my door and told me it was good to see me after all this time. These sentences show me my path and show me my heart. The photograph that washes around in my mind shows me what is left and where to go. John Henry is showing me, and my sissy, the way to the beautiful light on the porch.
Singing
It calms us—the vibration in the body, the resonance rumbling through—there’s a reason lullabies put babies to sleep. To sing is to pray, to meditate, to speak the unspeakable, to let go of what has been kept silent. To sing in harmony is to share those things, to wrap one voice around another and fall in love in some way, to become alchemists of notes and create mixtures of soundwaves that magically put the feelings in order, even if it has to rile them first.
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