The Earth, Further and Further.

Maria Taylor - Lynn Teeter Flower

This is a recording made by Maria Taylor’s father when she was a little girl. After she sings her little song, she says: 

Maria: “Thank you very much! We’re gonna have some more tunes and um, and we’re not gonna stop!”
Mr. Taylor: “Let’s stop and listen to that.”
Maria: “Ok. Uh, wha… what?”
Mr. Taylor: “Let’s just stop for now. We’ll do it again later on.”
Maria: “Oh. We’re stoppin, Momma.”
Mr. Taylor: “I think we’ve gotta hit there.”
Maria: “We’ll do it later on.”
Mr. Taylor: “Let’s take a listen on that one.”
Maria: “Yah.”
Mr. Taylor: “Maria’s a blues singer. I just knew it all along.”

In this 2008 interview, she explains the track:

My dad had a friend name Lynn and he had a flower shop called “Lynn Teeter Flowers.” That recording was just me when I was little—I’d always sing and make up words to songs. And the story behind how I chose it as the title is that I had finished the album but didn’t have a name for it. I was with friends and we were trying to figure out the title really late at night. Then my dad e-mailed me the song and said, “Look what I just found!” When I heard it, I thought, “There it is! There’s the title.” I just thought it sounded cool.

I wish the interviewer’s next question was: Wow, so was your childhood a perfect embodiment of magic and joy all the time? I wish I could know how it feels to have been a little kid whose parents delight in her so much they not only encourage her to sing the heart out of her silly songs, but record them, and love them!  

My childhood was like sitting next to a miserable, loud, complaining couple in the booth next to me in a Denny’s. And even when the food was actually pretty good, I still had to eat it in the fucking Denny’s. 

How was it possible, I a father
yet a child of my father? I
grew panicky and thought
of running away but knew
I would be scorned for it
by my father. I stood
and listened to myself 
being called Dad.

How ridiculous it sounded,
but in front of me, asking
for attention—how could I,
a child, ignore this child’s plea?
I lifted him into my arms
and hugged him as I would have
wanted my father to hug me,
and it was as though satisfying 
my own lost childhood.

I was just rereading the first entry I ever wrote in this blog. In it I wrote “I don’t remember the first boy whose hand I held.” And then, suddenly, I did! His name was Lee, he was tall and Jewish and a friend of Ally’s. She and I met him and a friend to see a school play, it wasn’t our school, maybe it was his, maybe it was Cranford High School. I sat on his left and Ally on his right. During the play I held his hand, I don’t remember the details, except that it was thrilling. It was the first time I ever felt intoxicated on anything: a first handhold! Then I noticed in his right hand, was Ally’s hand! I only cared a little - I was high. I didn’t move my hand. At the end of the night he kissed me; (he did not kiss Ally.) That was my first ever handhold and my second ever kiss.

My first kiss was disgusting, and worth telling about. (It is also about to teach me a life lesson, but I’ll save that for the end.) My entire childhood I held out for a magical first kiss. Oh how I dreamed about it! The perfect first kiss, a story to remember forever! Yes, I was one of those little girls hooked on the Prince Charming shtick, whose inevitable disenchantment either leads her to convert to cynicism like a woman should, or become unsavorily neurotic and eventually depressed from chronic disappointment. (Oh what we girls are set up for!) Anyway, due to my devotion to the fallacy, I always refrained from participating in games of spin the bottle/7 minutes in heaven/etc… Namely at D.S.’s backyard birthday night party. Relative to our ages, that party was sick! Relative to our ages, there was a lot of sexual experimentation. I remember watching a girl who had just had her ear licked on a dare glowing and stuttering. I recognized the feeling I was after.

But I didn’t want my first kiss to go wasted on childish games! Instead it went wasted on M.W., a drummer from band class a grade older than me. He was utterly terrified of me, except of course in chatting over AOL (3.0). After one of the band concerts we all went to the Galaxy diner. A “friend” (fucking bitch) dragged us both outside and demanded that we kiss. I remember the sight of her chubby legs scurrying back up that diner wheelchair ramp. We walked awkwardly for a minute and then stopped by a dumpster behind the building. I was standing against the wall, he was much taller than me. I remember seeing his eyes close as he swooped down and came in, and then all I felt was wet and sloppy. I opened my eyes, my arms fell limply to my sides, my open mouth froze as his tongue slopped up my face like a basset hound on a bowl of beef stew. I was stunned! rendered semiconscious by the fall from romantic idealism and idealistic romanticism. When I came to I was a neophytic cynic. The conversion took.

The life lesson mentioned: There’s always something better, and then it never is.

I am obsessed with little-kid-me.  This is not a figure of speech, “obsessed.” My mind is continually and obtrusively preoccupied with thoughts of childhood. I just opened up my kindergarten-1st grade sticker book and scratch-and-sniffed an old sticker and closed my eyes to relish the olfactory memory. Amelia’s Notebooks changed my life. I look back at the things I wrote and drew as a little girl, the things I did, I remember how I felt about that sticker book, I remember studying every inch of those Amelia books, admiring the illustrations, wishing I could be so cool. Trying to be. I was lovable. I was adorable. But I felt so unloved and so unworthy. 

I believe that this adulthood obsession with my own childhood is an effort to comfort the little girl inside me. She is worthy of love, someone does love her - I do! I love little me, at 7 and 9 and 11. I feel pangs of sorrowful pity for 14 and 15 year old me. It’s not self-pity, it’s not victimization, because it’s not a feeling for myself. It’s a feeling for her, who just happened to be me at some point in the past. I’m compensating. I’ve taken their responsibilities into my own hands. It’s comforting, albeit awkward. It’s necessary I think, to not overcome, but to cleanse such a determining, psychologically detrimental personal history. There is no forgivable excuse for a child feeling the way I felt. But placing the blame is unavailing - I spent five years learning that lesson. If only I could have understood then. 

Digging it all up, the old notebooks, the old thoughts and feelings, perhaps is an attempt to return to the unknowable with an explanation. I’ve made dedicated efforts to comfort a ghost. The rumor goes that ghosts stick around because of unfinished business, and once they accomplish whatever that is, they can pass peacefully. I have one of these, she’s just an innocent child, and I will absolve her. It’s not that I feel haunted, it’s not that at all, it’s not painful or scary. But there is something unsettling that I must pacify, some patient clue I’m meant to solve; answer the riddle to cross the bridge. And I think I’m doing a good job with it. I’ve at least discovered that there is a bridge! I don’t think most people (that I know) have these feelings, and if they do they don’t have the wherewithal to take active responsibility for them.  But I don’t want to live with these uncertainties and outstanding insecurities, so, I’m not going to.

As a child I was never empowered, I was appeased. And I have a feeling I’m not the only one. My parents handled my feelings with throttling hands, and if they were too tired after a long day’s work, the gag of outright neglect was always within reach.  

(A story: I had a strong sense of environmental consciousness from a very young age.  I remember that my elementary school cafeteria used styrofoam trays for lunches, and knowing how awful such material can be, I wanted to take my knowledge of the o-zone layer to the principal himself, arguing for more environmentally friendly dishware.  I settled for the vice principal, Mr. Lukeschevitz.  I remember, so specifically, his closed-lip smile, which at the time seemed so goddamn patronizing, which I now know was sincere and stemming from thoughts of “how cute.”  But I wasn’t trying to be cute, dammit, I was pissed in the name of positive change.  I spoke in my most grown-up voice with valiance, and was effortless dismissed with the words “Well, the dishwasher is broken.” If I only knew. I left the office without much of a fight, as I wasn’t as confident nor as informed as I wished to be in my single digit years of life.  

The thing is, I was supported (which is different from encouraged) by my mother. She told me I should go ahead and talk to whomever I wanted to.  But when I came home after doing so, tail between my knobby knees, she was unmoved. Though I felt like such a failure, chicken cutlets and Saved by the Bell forced distraction. Then some time later, perhaps days or weeks, when she was picking me up from school, waiting on the playground, my mother bumped into that Mr. Lukeschevitz, and they had a good chuckle about how cute I was, my mother cackling with contrived charm over how caring I am about things I’m too young to understand.  What betrayal! But from the height of mother’s hips I only felt shame and embarrassment.)

Why is it that adults treat children’s feelings as completely invalid?  I am writing this as a 22 year old woman, and I feel so appalled and so hurt by the way I was passively trained to handle my feelings.  Dismissal, diffusion, the parental methodology raising me required either coaxing or screaming away any feeling I expressed.  Because, of course, a child’s thoughts and opinions are immature, and thus expendable. 

But what is childhood if not learning how to experience emotion?  It’s magic is rooted in its newness, and we inevitably grow habituated to our own emotional centers, or controlled by them.  My parents left me with nothing but resentment towards them, and a struggle to permit my own mind to cultivate its limbic roots.  I was once told that “it’s okay to have emotions, but not to wallow in them.”  This word, wallow, every time it appears I remember that coarse aphorism. I want to wallow, dammit!  I want to crawl into my amygdala and unquestioningly course down its mecurial zigs and sensational zags, with feral exhilaration like a child down an amusement park flume! 

I’ve been tamed improperly; who among us hasn’t? Suburban domestication has thrown its rocks and litter in my ride. There is no flow.  At most there is babbling when a surge of powerful emotion cascades the polluted floor of gross umbrage and indignation. There is no gushing!  

It is THEIR fault! Damn them, damn them!  But, no. If childhood is learning to experience emotion, adulthood is refining that education. And refine I will, purge pollution, revive the ride, demand dialysis of the mind! Nothing can be clean without cleansing. 

I get so horribly lonely. I feel friendless but only because I hate my friends. It’s not their fault. I’m unnecessarily criticizing, irrationally critical of the words and choices of genuinely good people who care about me. I hate them for imaginary reasons and then I just feel lonelier and lonelier, with a biting pressure to strengthen weak and distant relationships, their equivocal nature lending itself to the rose color tint of farsightedness.  Oh, they’re perfect with their backs towards me and indifferent smiling profiles blurring into the most beautiful carrots I am determined to obtain.  (I love you, mediocre acquaintances!)

I can’t escape my parents. They have set me up to feel lonely forever.  The people who tell me they love me (those liars) will hurt me, they will leave me, I had better fast find reasons to hate them before that inevitability.  I know my own psychology but it doesn’t alter its despotism.  Childhood as despot, I like that.  For all the worshipping of childhood I’ve committed, it only takes one pensive cold autumn night to realize it is crude destiny.  At your most vulnerable and most unprepared do you become the fate of your own future.  Once you leave the impenetrable universe of childhood does everything that ever happened within it become the tyrant thwarting every “freedom” offered outside of it. But you have to leave the nest. Our whole childlives we are proselytized to adulthood, when we should instead be trained in agnostic self-awareness: While it is harmless to wonder what exists outside of me and now, it is vain to dedicate one’s life to it.  

It’s not uncommon for me to find myself on nights like these reverting to that old tonic fantasy.  With the world open to my passport wielding hands, why should I not set off to Paris or Belfast or Istanbul? I’m five years old and threatening to run away - then they will miss me! I don’t know what I want outside of a reaction, that is all I’ve ever wanted, five and crying and ten and crying and fourteen and crying and crying and now I just sit here and write, I’ve learned better than to make a sound and instead smile to myself at the thought of simply slipping away into the six billion degrees of love me so I can leave you first.