Control

The Bus from Chicago. I checked that book out so many times. I knew exactly where to find it in the children's library where Mom let me hang out while she looked for her books.

I loved books, but I was also sort of terrified of libraries. They were just so enormous and intimidating--so many books on so many shelves and all you could see were all the spines. I never liked the word or idea of poky spines anyway. Not a very friendly place at all. I wanted them to lay the books all out flat, show me the covers, let me open them up, touch them. And that whole business of sliding out too far the next book to remember your place was just too tricky. What if I put it back on the wrong side of the sticking out book? The stress was just too great.

To this day I prefer bookstores, who lay things all out for you, display things for you as if to say with a kind smile, "Here! Look! Touch! Put it back any old place. We'll take care of it." I find the books I want there and then go check them out at the library--the Big Scary Library that dares, "Go ahead, take a book, if you can find it! Bwahahahaha!"

And what's with the blasted Card Catalogue and the Dewey Decimal System? I was destined never to read. Not to mention that I was eating way too much Spam, Kraft macaroni and cheese, drinking far too many bottles of Coke and living in a house pretty much devoid of any routine or organization to grasp such complex concepts as classification and categorization. Although, I'll tell you, I longed to. I wanted so badly to have order and organization in my life.

My room was my domain and, until high school when a temporary apathy took over, it was insanely organized. I had a TV tray that served as a dressing table on which I carefully arranged my purple brush, purple comb, three Avon perfume bottle dolls and a butterfly magnet mirror that played "You Light Up My Life" and made the butterfly flit around. The brush and the comb had to be parallel to each other and to the edge of the tray. The dolls had to form an arch in the right corner. The mirror balanced out the left corner at a precise angle. It had to be exact before everything was right in my world I could begin the day. This probably amounts to obsessive behavior, but nobody ever saw me do it, so it doesn't count. Oh, and the bed had to be made, tucked in without ripple or wrinkle. Then I was free to leave the room and face the day.

People ask me why I don't want to have kids. I sometimes ask myself why being married is so hard for me. I think I have my answer (one of many) right there. Because someone would be forever in my space ruining the order I try so hard to create every day.

I can see that my early obsession with order was an attempt to control what little was under my domain. There was so much criticism in that house growing up. Nothing we ever did was right. One time my dad asked me to scratch an itch on his back, then berated me for not having long enough fingernails. Didn't I know that no one would ever marry me if I didn't stop biting my fingernails? So my friend, with long fingernails and clearly of marriage material, scratched his back instead, but he screamed out, "What the hell's the matter with you? You trying to kill me with those claws?!" There was no pleasing him. I learned right away not to trust myself or my thinking. In school I was smart and did good work, but I couldn't raise my hand or speak up to save my life. What if I was wrong? And I was learning at home that I always was.

We didn't have family meetings as I've since learned some families have. My brother and I were just told things. Like, "Your father's going to live somewhere else for while...In a trailer near your grandparents...You can call him anytime you want...His number is...You can visit him every other weekend...You didn't do anything wrong." Or we were not told. Suddenly he was just back again, but that's when the fighting started--the fighting they should have been doing all along. Except it wasn't the "fighting to heal" kinds of arguments my husband and I were counseled to have to save our marriage. These went more like this, "Well, you never..." "Well, you always..." "Now look what you've done. You've made your daughter cry. Ya happy now?" "You gonna hit me? Go ahead. Just go ahead. That's all I need and I'm outta here."

In the 8th grade that I decided, just decided, to not be shy anymore. I knew it wasn't me. I wasn't shy after that. I keep discovering new ways to push through that shyness to see myself more clearly.

It wasn't until college when I had a beautifully organized roommate that I really began to learn to how to organize things. I watched how she organized her sock drawer, her notebooks with perfect tabs and labels, the clothes in her closet according to style, length and color. I knew I could never reach her standards, but I could try. Just try. Something about it made sense to me. Something in my brain locked into place like some mystical ancient puzzle and everything started to make sense. Right then, at that time in my life, something in me relaxed, loosened its grip in just the smallest way and I began to breathe a little more deeply.

The Bus From Chicago

This is my first favorite book about travel from an "exotic" place. The Bus from Chicago by Annie DeCaprio, illustrated by Cal Sacks. I loved reading it over and over again. I was about six. It seemed hard to pronounce. I had a hard time getting my mouth around the words, but it was intoxicating in its rhythm and repetition.

This is the bus from Chicago.
This is Mister Gonzago,
who drives the bus from Chicago.

From the very first page I was mesmerized. The first picture shows us that the bus is headed for New York, where I was from, which made it even more exciting.

This is the grandma with boots on her feet,
getting ready so she can meet
the bus that Mister Gonzago
is driving along from Chicago.

I was living a million miles away from The City, practically on a different planet. I was no where near Woody Allen or Hannah and Her Sisters or Alan Alda and The Four Seasons. I was up in the woods along the Catskill Creek watching Little House on the Prairie and Hee Haw and Smokey and the Bandit.

This is the subway under the ground
that goes along with a loud, loud sound
to take the grandma with boots on her feet
to the bus station so she can meet
the bus that Mister Gonzago
is driving along from Chicago.

I had never ridden a bus that wasn't yellow and didn't take me to school and that had grown ups on it other than Joanne, our bus driver, who I asked one day, "Did you always wanna be a bus driver when you grew up?" I didn't understand why she thought that was funny. In fact, no, she said that she'd wanted to be a nurse. I asked her why she wasn't a nurse and she just sighed and said, "Well, you know, that's just how life is." I didn't know about how life was, but I did know that something seemed familiar about the subway under the ground and the bus from Chicago. Something good and comfortable, but that I couldn't really explain. Something in me knew what Chicago was and how far, at least that it was out there in the middle somewhere, but not that far really from NY.

This is Bill and his mother, too,
going to meet the grandma who
was in the subway under the ground
that went along with a loud, loud sound
to take the grandma with the boots on her feet
to the bus station so she could meet
the bus that Mister Gonzago
has driven all the way from Chicago.

It has a momentum that I still find exhilerating! And it ends with the cover picture of the boy and the grandma finally reunited. Very satisfying.