Hamburger Helper

When I was nearly 13, my brother got high. Really high. So high, he wanted to fly. He was sixteen and well versed in the most popular ways to self- medicate in the 70's. After following our older two brothers into the drug culture, he had many resources to procure his drugs of choice. It was 1976, August, quite near my birthday.

Using an exterior roof ladder on this particular steamy Oklahoma night, my brother Mark climbed to the highest peak of a local junior college, somewhere between 3-4 stories high while he was simultaneously 3-4 Quaaludes high, and he jumped.

If nobody was there to see it, did he really fly?

My four best friends and I celebrated my 13th birthday just over a week later in a large, smelly tent in our backyard. The tent smelled as a tent should smell. I just don't happen to care for the smell of tent. I understand some people do. Just a hint of freshly opened tent smell can invoke fond childhood memories, a love of nature, visions of travel with the world stopping at the entrance of that smelly old tent.

We didn't speak of my brother at all that night in the musty old tent. We had cake and ice cream and my battery operated 8-Track with plenty of KC and the Sunshine Band tapes to keep us entertained. I don't remember what I got that year. I remember wanting a record player but it was probably too expensive, like the very first VCR's, fax machines, computers and so on. I had to wait.

As a little girl, Mark was always my favorite brother. He was gentle and shy. He didn't seem to want or need to be heard and most importantly he did anything and everything I asked him to do. Mom used to call him my little puppy dog.

The best of times were the shows I made him perform with me. We would practice for hours, prepare invitations, invite anyone who happened to be in the house at the time and actually charge for admittance. He was much too introverted to sing by himself but he happily accompanied me by doing the whistling part of Otis Redding's, Sitting by the Dock of the Bay.

Somebody had to do it. I couldn't whistle without laughing.

When it came time to perform, I would intentionally make him laugh during his big whistling part. It was fun for me and the audience ate it up. "Try again", they would scream! We would rewind the tape and attempt to whistle along but the great irony and sad truth of a happy whistle is that it is silenced by the slightest smile.

Eventually Mark grew out of his boyhood and out of playing with his little sister. He turned to the business of becoming a man but first, he had to survive our household. Before he jumped, I would find him passed out in the hallway, lying in an empty bathtub with bleeding wrists or standing next to my bed while I pretended to be asleep. It is difficult to understand but there was a potent mixture of fear, embarrassment and pity that kept me from telling on him. I can only recall it happening a few times before I learned how to defend myself by lying on my stomach or stretching and yawning to mimic a person about to wake up.

A month or so after Mark jumped, everything seemed to go back to normal. Mom and Dad got up very early in the morning to have coffee, read the paper and sit in the quiet for a few hours before heading off to work.

"God Dammit Joyce, are you making that mother-fucking, dried up, shit in a box, Hamburger Helper, again", Dad screamed as he walked in the door after work.

I could hear him from the sanctity of my upstairs bedroom and knew it would be one of those nights. He was not a drinker, he was unhappy, unfiltered and quite probably bi-polar. Being the only other female in the house, I took her side against my father. I often encouraged her to leave him. "Why do you stay with someone who treats you this way?" Didn't she deserve the opportunity to steal away a few moments of relaxation by skipping a step or two and substituting powdered cheese from a box?

I want very much to think of my mother as a strong woman but I can't get the word stoic out of my head. His mental beatings extended to my brothers and eventually to me. There were regular fist fights as soon as my brothers got big enough to take him on and our house was never without a series of holes punched through drywall, doors and even the occasional window. My mother was stoic through every last excruciating moment of it.

That night, after she was berated for her supper scenario, she never stopped to acknowledge him, she didn't look up from her one-skillet dish. She didn't glove-up and grasp the handle of that cast iron culinary weapon, searing him with boiling hot packaged noodles, as I would sometimes imagine her doing.

No, she finished dinner with her characteristic unflappable determination and asked me to wake my brother and help him into his wheelchair so he could sit down and eat with the family. Mark was unquestionably the most squeamish, painstakingly fussy eater that had ever lived. During a kitchen remodel when we were all little, my parents discovered what must have been two years worth of peas stuffed into the cushion of his assigned spot at the table.

But he loved Hamburger Helper like no other.

Can You See Me?

An Original Watercolor by ZenMama

Hidden in the corner of the layers of my life, nearly invisible as I descend into the earth.

Purple for the angry Oklahoma sky when it herds homes like an unmerciful shepherd amidst the pleasing prairie of golden wheat, whipped by the winds, stripped of its sins,

to an era past filled with red dirt and wrath.

Many years before, gold turns to grey

and the journey ended there with five tribes
arriving on a trail soaked with tentative tears.

The red dirt greeted them and opened up

to receive them as they lost their birthright

and could no longer do right in the light

of the lives left in unforgivable years.

In between as imperceptible as me, a hint or a glow

of a sunset trapped in a place where light meets dark

and the tall grass and Heather once touched by a 

daughter cannot begin to untether from the shadow

seizing the light or the light forbidding the dusk

and whether one is better or if one should ever

dare to question a sunset in the midst of their life.

Red



Orignal Watercolor Work by ZenMama

The trees are red and foreboding.
Stripped of their clothing,
exposed and unable to hide.


The river runs narrow.
A place to dream and clench
strength from the dirt
until your hands are hurt
and the labor lays your body down
as one, a fetter to the earth.


One breath held too tight,
Or released with a whisper blow
Downstream runs down
into the dark spiral all around
which comforts you only
in your fears as a home you know.


The sound of going under again and on again
until possible the last time before you sleep
When you give up the brawl and  the clash
And realize you must fall, over the fall,
waterfall, jagged and sharp, and splash
into waters still and painfully deep.



There are more trees laid red and bare,
compelled to grow without their voice
floating in a haze of washed out violet light.
Nothing to hold them to make them right,
without their sound, they can take to the night,
beyond the hazy violet light,
and fly above the wintery falls and blustery noise
of the one who failed to give them air.


Their colors change as elegant, brilliant glare
the God, the Mother, a higher power and holy son.
The place of golden orange I knew was there
I wished for it upon thousands of ones
where lovely trees who have come undone
can transcend into rapture without compare
and multiply limbs and leaves and color to share,
never again to be red, exposed and bare.

Tall, Tall, Tree House

My father was a handsome, ugly man

who visited me in my dream last night.

He tried to wish me well.

To lead me to higher ground.

He built a tree house in the sky.

Miles and miles high.

Enough to make the neighbor spirits gawk

and fold their arms while they pulled up a chair

to make sure they could see

when his beautiful, ugly duagher would come

to meet him there.