Nostalgia

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Vision Quest (1979)

  She shows me where the barn was and the baking kitchen and the outhouse. Dad and Bert and Grandpa are standing where the cemetery was. It had three graves, Lola says: my other uncle, whose .22 is mine and kept for me by Grandpa Harry, and my great-grandmother and great-grandfather. They were moved to the New Kettle Falls cemetery before the water rose. Dad and Uncle Bert come back and tell her that Grandpa is all right. They stay with me while she walks out through the mud. They act strange. Dad turns me around and points up on the forested hill to a bare spot where they used to go sledding in winter. Uncle Bert points way up near the top of the mountain to where his dead brother, Bobby, shot his first deer. I turn and see my great-aunt holding my grandfather and patting his head like he’s a little kid. Soft-hued in their cotton and flannel, fat good old people, they stand in my memory, clinging and shaking, sinking imperceptibly into the mud of Lake Roosevelt. Sometimes this experience comes back to me in reverie and sometimes it comes back as a real dream. It’s changed a lot since the night of the picnic when I first dreamed it and when it got stuck maybe forever in my memory. I guess it’s become what I need it to be rather than what it really was. I don’t even remember exactly how the day went anymore. I do remember that Grandpa Harry was very quiet when he came to eat with us after they winched his jeep out of the mud, and that in the evening he took me across the river and up on the mountain to his cabin to shoot the .22, and that we watched the fireworks from his porch until Dad and Mom came to take me home. Grandpa Harry’s in a lot better spirits these days. He had just retired from logging then and I guess he couldn’t handle that change in his life. The guy gets better as he gets older. And the less he drinks. Even though it’s a sad memory and has the power to depress me bad sometimes, I still like remembering it. It’s the only look I’ve ever gotten into my family history. Beyond my great-grandparents on Dad’s side who came to the Columbia from Oklahoma Territory, I don’t know anything about my family. I ask, but nobody seems to know where anybody came from. I’m looking into the darkness and feeling Carla incredibly warm beside me. It’s very quiet. I think about that day on the river and wonder what was really said and thought out there in the middle of all that mud. It’s five thirty and time to “rise and shine,” as Dad says when he can get up before I do. I feel good and ready to get moving. There’s plenty to do.

• From Vision Quest (1979)

  It was a mellow talk we had that night. I sat and thought what it would have been like to live a hundred years or so ago. I wondered if it was more fun to die of smallpox or cholera than emphysema or cancer of the colon. I looked up at the pines and through them at the stars, some of which probably burned out when my dad was a kid and when his dad was. The Columbia was a river then and Kettle Falls was actually a falls and not just the name of a little town. And I thought that in a few months the greatest time of my life would be over and I’d have to go somewhere and become more responsible and make a new time the greatest of my life. Kuch wiped the front wheel of his racer with a greasy napkin. “I found out about my headaches,” he said. He’d been having awful headaches since racing started in the spring. “It’s my braid,” he said. “Your braid?” Kuch’s braid still falls ass-length. “Yah,” he said. “I went to a doctor after the Wilbur race. He takes one look at me and grabs hold of my braid. ‘You put your helmet on over this?’ he says. You wouldn’t believe how much better my helmet fits with my hair unbraided.” Kuch drove me home through the park so fast the wind pulled tears from my eyes. There wasn’t much room on that little racing seat, so I slapped a tight waist on him and hung on for all I was worth. It was so late the eastern horizon had begun to gray and the birds had started singing. I was fast becoming sick. Carla found me retching in the basement laundry tub. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Baarrrrrrrrrff!” I replied. “Are you okay?” she asked again, a little more concerned. “Fine, thanks. And yourself?” I gummed, having taken out my partial plate. I’d broken a plate once before by throwing it up in the laundry tub. “I’m fine,” Carla said. “You look like a folding bear hanging over the washtub that way. You’re going to hurt your tummels-tummels.” The folding bear was the first of her animals to whom I was introduced. “My tummels-tummels already hurts,” I said, running the water. “What’s a folding bear?” “A bear that folds over things, especially when he’s happy,” Carla explained. “I’m not happy.” “I could tell right away you weren’t really a folding bear,” she tittered. She was a little drunk herself. “You have a very muscular boom-boom,” she continued, pulling off my pants. I hung parallel to the floor, perpendicular to the tub edge, balanced on my “tummels-tummels,” my head wedged under the faucet, my legs waving my pants good-bye. “How did you get so muscular?” Carla asked, toweling me off. “God’s will,” I replied. “You’re not one of them, are you?” she inquired, leading me to the davenport.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  Or Kiowa teaching a rain dance to Rat Kiley and Dave Jensen, the three of them whooping and leaping around barefoot while a bunch of villagers looked on with a mixture of fascination and giggly horror. Afterward, Rat said, "So where's the rain?" and Kiowa said, "The earth is slow, but the buffalo is patient," and Rat thought about it and said, "Yeah, but where's the rain?" Or Ted Lavender adopting an orphan puppy—feeding it from a plastic spoon and carrying it in his rucksack until the day Azar strapped the puppy to a Claymore antipersonnel mine and squeezed the firing device. The average age in our platoon, I'd guess, was nineteen or twenty, and as a consequence things often took on a curiously playful atmosphere, like a sporting event at some exotic reform school. The competition could be lethal, yet there was a childlike exuberance to it all, lots of pranks and horseplay. Like when Azar blew away Ted Lavender's puppy. "What's everybody so upset about?" Azar said. "I mean, Christ, I'm just a boy." I remember these things, too. The damp, fungal scent of an empty body bag. A quarter moon rising over the nighttime paddies. Henry Dobbins sitting in the twilight, sewing on his new buck-sergeant stripes, quietly singing, "A tisket, a tasket, a green and yellow basket." A field of elephant grass weighted with wind, bowing under the stir of a helicopter's blades, the grass dark and servile, bending low, but then rising straight again when the chopper went away. A red clay trail outside the village of My Khe. A hand grenade. A slim, dead, dainty young man of about twenty. Kiowa saying, "No choice, Tim. What else could you do?" Kiowa saying, "Right?" Kiowa saying, "Talk to me." Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story. On the Rainy River

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  The war was over and there was no place in particular to go. Norman Bowker followed the tar road on its seven-mile loop around the lake, then he started all over again, driving slowly, feeling safe inside his father's big Chevy, now and then looking out on the lake to watch the boats and water- skiers and scenery. It was Sunday and it was summer, and the town seemed pretty much the same. The lake lay flat and silvery against the sun. Along the road the houses were all low-slung and split-level and modern, with big porches and picture windows facing the water. The lawns were spacious. On the lake side of the road, where real estate was most valuable, the houses were handsome and set deep in, well kept and brightly painted, with docks jutting out into the lake, and boats moored and covered with canvas, and neat gardens, and sometimes even gardeners, and stone patios with barbecue spits and grills, and wooden shingles saying who lived where. On the other side of the road, to his left, the houses were also handsome, though less expensive and on a smaller scale and with no docks or boats or gardeners. The road was a sort of boundary between the affluent and the almost affluent, and to live on the lake side of the road was one of the few natural privileges in a town of the prairie—the difference between watching the sun set over cornfields or over water. It was a graceful, good-sized lake. Back in high school, at night, he had driven around and around it with Sally Kramer, wondering if she'd want to pull into the shelter of Sunset Park, or other times with his friends, talking about urgent matters, worrying about the existence of God and theories of causation. Then, there had not been a war. But there had always been the lake, which was the town's first cause of existence, a place for immigrant settlers to put down their loads. Before the settlers were the Sioux, and before the Sioux were the vast open prairies, and before the prairies there was only ice. The lake bed had been dug out by the southernmost advance of the Wisconsin glacier. Fed by neither streams nor springs, the lake was often filthy and algaed, relying on fickle prairie rains for replenishment. Still, it was the only important body of water within forty miles, a source of pride, nice to look at on bright summer days, and later that evening it would color up with fireworks. Now, in the late afternoon, it lay calm and smooth,

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  Or Kiowa teaching a rain dance to Rat Kiley and Dave Jensen, the three of them whooping and leaping around barefoot while a bunch of villagers looked on with a mixture of fascination and giggly horror. Afterward, Rat said, "So where's the rain?" and Kiowa said, "The earth is slow, but the buffalo is patient," and Rat thought about it and said, "Yeah, but where's the rain?" Or Ted Lavender adopting an orphan puppy—feeding it from a plastic spoon and carrying it in his rucksack until the day Azar strapped the puppy to a Claymore antipersonnel mine and squeezed the firing device. The average age in our platoon, I'd guess, was nineteen or twenty, and as a consequence things often took on a curiously playful atmosphere, like a sporting event at some exotic reform school. The competition could be lethal, yet there was a childlike exuberance to it all, lots of pranks and horseplay. Like when Azar blew away Ted Lavender's puppy. "What's everybody so upset about?" Azar said. "I mean, Christ, I'm just a boy." I remember these things, too. The damp, fungal scent of an empty body bag. A quarter moon rising over the nighttime paddies. Henry Dobbins sitting in the twilight, sewing on his new buck-sergeant stripes, quietly singing, "A tisket, a tasket, a green and yellow basket." A field of elephant grass weighted with wind, bowing under the stir of a helicopter's blades, the grass dark and servile, bending low, but then rising straight again when the chopper went away. A red clay trail outside the village of My Khe. A hand grenade. A slim, dead, dainty young man of about twenty. Kiowa saying, "No choice, Tim. What else could you do?" Kiowa saying, "Right?" Kiowa saying, "Talk to me." Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That's what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story. On the Rainy River

• From Shunned (2018)

  It seemed like the right time to speak about Grandma, to hear some of the family lore, so I asked Dad and Uncle Jim to tell their favorite stories about her and whether they thought she was a strict mother. They both smiled with the wistfulness of bygone memories and started talking over each other. According to my dad, he was always running from the strap, while Jim got away with murder. “It’s true,” Jim said. “Mom and Dad spoiled me rotten.” “The youngest always gets away with murder,” Lory said, looking at me. Uncle Jim pushed back from the table as he and Paulie excused themselves to go home. They were the only people that night who asked for our phone number, for use if they happen to pass through the Bay Area. The front door closed behind them. It would have been a natural time for us to leave, too; it was almost ten o’clock, it had been a long day, and everyone was exhausted. But Mom invited everyone to sit down in the living room. “Maybe for a few minutes,” I said. “I was hoping Randy would return before we left.” Bob sat between Dad and me on the couch. Lory and Ove sat across from us on the stone shelf of the fireplace. Mom kicked off her shoes and rested in the wingback chair near the television. Her intensity lessened, the way a fountain ebbs down to a trickle. I figured we had twenty minutes tops; then we’d need to go, not because I felt unwelcome, but everyone was winding down. Bob would leave whenever I was ready. We’d come this far. No sooner had Mom sat down than she was up again, bringing framed photographs off the walls of the back room, two at a time, and showing them to Bob. There were baby pictures of Lory and Randy, born eighteen months apart, and one of me in fourth grade, wearing a bright yellow jumper, ponytails protruding from each side of my head like branches and tied with fuzzy green ribbons. “Those were her innocent years,” Mom said to Bob. Bob was alternating between sips of wine and respectful nods at each photo. I felt an even larger love for him in that moment, my patient wingman. Mom went back to the room to exchange these photos for another round. A car pulled into the driveway as she returned with a fresh stack of picture frames in her hands. This batch was of Sheena and Tyler from infancy to teens and adulthood. I’d never seen any of them before. Randy, Marlene, and Tyler walked through the front door. A partition at the foyer made it difficult to see their faces. I’d wanted him to arrive and exclaim, “Good, you’re still here!” and join us. Instead they offered a feeble hello to everyone as they walked through the living room and straight to the kitchen. I could hear the refrigerator opening.

• From Shunned (2018)

  Ross would have called them “dragon nails.” “We’ll land in Chicago in about three hours.” I ordered a cup of black coffee and flipped through my book. The chapter that caught my eye was titled “Learning to Stay Open in the Face of Fear.” Chapter 3 To thine own self be true. —William Shakespeare A few months later, on a Sunday afternoon, Mom and I met for lunch at McMennaman’s, a restaurant that was equal distance from our homes. The warm sun and cloudless sky allowed us to dine on the outdoor patio. We met like this every few months, just the two of us. Sometimes Mom came downtown to meet me at my office and we walked to the Bijou Café in Old Town, or, if we were in the mood for stained glass, mahogany, and hot turkey sandwiches, we headed to Huber’s, one of the oldest restaurants in the city. Given my increased travel schedule and Mom’s indulgence of her grandchildren, our lunch dates had become less frequent. My brother and his wife had moved into a house two blocks from my parents, giving Mom and Dad frequent and joyful access to their children, Sheena and Tyler. To her credit, as much as Mom loved being a grandmother, she had never put pressure on my sister or me to have children. Thanks be to Randy for filling the void. Since Ross and I had married so young, we had agreed to postpone children until we were in our late twenties and had bought our first house. Having children was never something I felt strongly about, but Ross wanted to create the idyllic nuclear family he yearned for and had never had. In our community, postponing children was considered virtuous, an acknowledgment of where we were in the stream of time. But if Armageddon took longer than expected and you ended up pregnant, well, who could blame you for succumbing to the natural order of things? The waiter brought our check just as Mom removed a plastic vitamin case from her purse. The action caught his eye, but it was a routine I had grown accustomed to. Mom pulled out her supplements and popped them into her mouth two at a time, dousing each round with a gulp of water. Her hands were soft and capable, whispers of dirt from the rose garden under her nails. At least fifteen years earlier, she had frightened us all when she had discovered a grapefruit-size tumor in her abdomen. That was when she stopped frying Sunday bacon and started reading Prevention magazine. She was a proud and determined ovarian cancer survivor. “One day,” my father would say, “she’s going to choke on all those vitamin pills. That’s what’s gonna kill her—just you wait.” Now she sat before me, a few weeks past her fifty-eighth birthday, strong and vibrant.

• From Shunned (2018)

  For all my talk of loving big-city life and embracing the concrete jungle, I noticed how much I missed the intense green of Oregon, white-capped Cascades touching heaven, the tree line of noble evergreens pointing upward. There was a sameness and stability here; any changes were slow, imperceptible, lacking human contrivance. We found the house as always, in quiet repose, the blinds pulled down like resting eyelids. We broke through the silence with one turn of a key and began our habitation routines. Everything was as I’d remembered it, barstools lined up in an even row under the tiled kitchen counter, macramé wall hanging over the river-rock fireplace. I set a few decks of cards and poker chips on the long wood dining table and then followed my dad through the sliding glass doors leading to the back deck. He stopped still and took a deep, satisfying breath, then walked over to open an outdoor cupboard to the rear of the garage. I joined him there, and, without a word, he handed me several cushions. Together we laid them on the empty patio chairs like pieces of a puzzle. We went inside and joined the others to finish settling in. I avoided the upstairs bedroom Ross and I used to share, choosing instead to sleep in one of the smallest rooms, tucked downstairs behind the kitchen. Because it had twin beds, it was usually reserved for Sheena and Tyler. Without the children, the house felt empty, and without Randy and Marlene there were whole rooms left unattended, which made everything feel off kilter. Returning to the kitchen, I found Mom putting away the last of the groceries. Ove was already in the garage, pulling out the bikes. We all went for a short ride through the area, past familiar homes and vistas. It felt good to move, to get my heart pumping, shaking loose the odd awareness of being there, knowing what faced me, what faced us all that weekend. I wanted to capture each moment like an emotional photograph: the lighthearted mood, the genuine goodwill, the ease born of familiarity, the love. Part of me was relaxing, but another was vigilant and intent to soak it in, to remember every nuance. Ordinary things, like chopping vegetables with my sister or doing dishes with Mom, were potent with a bittersweet melancholy. I wondered if they felt it, too, the small stone in the pit of my belly. Friday turned to Saturday, and the time unfurled like ribbons in a gentle breeze. Breakfast slipped into pool time, which naturally led to another, longer bike ride, which naturally led to lunch together on the shady deck—cold fried chicken and potato salad. With full bellies, we settled in for a lazy afternoon.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  For instance, I thought that all people in Africa still lived in ancient tribal bands and that people in some parts of England still traveled by horse and buggy and wore eighteenth-century clothes. My view of American family life was similarly skewed. Although I had spent the first six years of my life living outside the commune and I had clear memories of that time and had watched TV shows epitomizing contemporary culture, I somehow conjured in my mind a 1950s dynamic of American nuclear family living. In my imagination most women were housewives, creating domestic havens for their husbands and children, an idea I loved. I wanted nothing more than to live in a house with my mom, cooking alongside her and working on needlepoint projects during my free time. In my fantasy I was enrolled in a regular public school and had long, flowing hair. Synanon was a distant memory, a strange blip in the blissfully normal life that I imagined. My Synanon education lacked in other ways as well. I had no sense of geography and didn’t know where one country was in relation to another. I’m not sure I knew what a continent was, nor could I have pointed out California on a map had someone asked me to do so. I still struggled with telling time from a clock, and although I wrote and read incessantly, I had not learned even simple grammar. My ignorance of narration and punctuation in my writing led to pages of words all run together in one long, confusing string of events. After another month or two, the next wave of children came to join us on the Ranch compound. Having grown accustomed to the smaller group, thoughts of my other peers had dissolved into the recesses of my mind. For the most part, I did not miss them. Yet when they arrived, the second group merged seamlessly with the first. Within a few days it was as if we had never been split. One of the boys, Chris Waters, did not arrive with the second group, but showed up much later. Like the other children, I had not thought about him and was surprised when one day I stepped from the playroom and found him standing in the small courtyard between the play building and some of the dorms. He’d grown several inches and stood with his hands stuffed in his pockets. He seemed out of place. “Where have you been?” I asked, realizing for the first time that he had not been part of our group for some months. It startled me that I’d forgotten him so easily, even though I had never really liked him. He’d been one of the kids who’d liked to taunt me, but the mischievousness that usually lurked in his blue eyes was absent, replaced by a solemn and shadowy stare. “I was away,” he said. “Away where?” “Shh.” Chris grabbed my arm and pulled me farther from the entrance of the playroom.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  Title : Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult Author: Wittman, C.A. ASIN : B073RHQPB2 [image file=Image00001.jpg] Synanon Kid: Book OneA Memoir Of Growing Up In The Synanon CultC.A. WittmanFor My Mother ContentsPrologue Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 A Short History of Synanon Synanon Kid Grows Up: Book Two Chapter One Chapter Two Acknowledgments About the Author Also by C.A. Wittman PrologueC hildhood is convalescence from being dead for all eternity and should therefore be gotten over as quickly as possible. —CED (Charles Edward Dederich, founder of Synanon) Nature roots herself firmly in my childhood memories of Synanon. Rustling hills of tall blond grass scenting the air with subtle sweetness. An afternoon picking blackberries, so many that crimson juice stains my hands, face and clothes, the sticky residue gumming up between my fingers. My dark, sun–kissed skin muddied with Indian red. The creek, a wide rushing torrent of water taking all in its path, roars out a warning of danger. In the summer, deep, still pools, afterthoughts of brisk winter business left scattered along the banks, invite a swim, that first dip so cold it chokes the breath. The people are secondary, melding into the background; forgettable adults, their features wiped clean in my mind of any defining characteristics. Some stand out, the cruelest ones; the mean, unwanted children housed in bland dormitories, and the sterile “demonstrators.” Hate is a feeling to curl up with, a comfort in the sort of childhood that one longs to shuck off as quickly as possible. Chapter OneI nduction It was evening when I arrived at Synanon with my mother and her friend Mary Ann. I was six years old and tired from the long bus ride. Having lived all my life in South Central Los Angeles, I found nothing familiar in the country environment in which I found myself. It seemed as though I’d left somewhere and arrived at a place that felt like nowhere. No one greeted us. After we retrieved our minimal luggage, we walked in silence along a gravel road devoid of cars, the small stones crunching beneath our shoes. A sheet of white clouds covered the sky, lending an austere, colorless look to the shed-like structures that hunkered down on the dusky land. Within minutes we traversed the buildings, the road snaking through a natural setting. Dry, brittle-looking hills sprouting mushrooms of stunted, tightly clustered trees ringed the property. My mother, whose hand I held, was nearly a stranger to me.

• From The Things They Carried (1990)

  The war was over and there was no place in particular to go. Norman Bowker followed the tar road on its seven-mile loop around the lake, then he started all over again, driving slowly, feeling safe inside his father's big Chevy, now and then looking out on the lake to watch the boats and water- skiers and scenery. It was Sunday and it was summer, and the town seemed pretty much the same. The lake lay flat and silvery against the sun. Along the road the houses were all low-slung and split-level and modern, with big porches and picture windows facing the water. The lawns were spacious. On the lake side of the road, where real estate was most valuable, the houses were handsome and set deep in, well kept and brightly painted, with docks jutting out into the lake, and boats moored and covered with canvas, and neat gardens, and sometimes even gardeners, and stone patios with barbecue spits and grills, and wooden shingles saying who lived where. On the other side of the road, to his left, the houses were also handsome, though less expensive and on a smaller scale and with no docks or boats or gardeners. The road was a sort of boundary between the affluent and the almost affluent, and to live on the lake side of the road was one of the few natural privileges in a town of the prairie—the difference between watching the sun set over cornfields or over water. It was a graceful, good-sized lake. Back in high school, at night, he had driven around and around it with Sally Kramer, wondering if she'd want to pull into the shelter of Sunset Park, or other times with his friends, talking about urgent matters, worrying about the existence of God and theories of causation. Then, there had not been a war. But there had always been the lake, which was the town's first cause of existence, a place for immigrant settlers to put down their loads. Before the settlers were the Sioux, and before the Sioux were the vast open prairies, and before the prairies there was only ice. The lake bed had been dug out by the southernmost advance of the Wisconsin glacier. Fed by neither streams nor springs, the lake was often filthy and algaed, relying on fickle prairie rains for replenishment. Still, it was the only important body of water within forty miles, a source of pride, nice to look at on bright summer days, and later that evening it would color up with fireworks. Now, in the late afternoon, it lay calm and smooth,

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  The caretaker, Patrick, and his wife, Melissa, graciously took me, three of my children and their significant others on a tour of the property. This was the first time I had been back since I was eleven years old. It was surreal, to say the least, and disorienting, as many of the buildings had been torn down and in some instances new buildings erected in place of the old. The property has been turned into an outdoor science camp for elementary school students and is also rented out as a conference center and for special events like weddings. There had been much rain over the past year, and the hills were a lush green, not the dry golden grass that I remembered. An old barn, which I thought might have once been the play barn in my youth, still stood. Inside it was much smaller than I had remembered, which is often the case with childhood memories of places. We spent a few hours trekking through the property and Patrick told me that every so often someone drives up claiming to have lived there as a kid when it was Synanon. Patrick said he usually takes them around and listens to their stories. One man once told him fondly, “We kids used to have the run of this place. We roamed where we liked. It was fantastic.” About the AuthorC.A. Wittman grew up in Northern California. In 1993 she moved to Maui Hawaii where she raised her children. Synanon Kid is her second book. Currently she resides in Los Angeles with her husband Frank. Join my reading group at cawittman.com https://www.cawittman.com/ contact@cawittman.com Also by C.A. WittmanSynanon Kid Grows Up: A Memoir of Learning to Live Outside the Synanon Cult The Visitors

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  When Lecia’s turn comes, she meets me in Denver, renting a vast sofa of a car that I wheel through mountain passes while she turns pages. The child-abuse tour, she jokes it is, for my agenda is to double-check my words against the old landscape or school records or anybody we can drag up. But to say she’s skimmed over events I couldn’t forget is an understatement. She knows what happened enough to verify scenes, but it’s all been packed away. She didn’t have to go into therapy, she’s always claimed, because I told her the insights that my own therapy had routed out. Keeping the volume down made her the brave one, the unflinching one. In the mountains while Lecia reads, we revisit the town that held the summer cabin neither of us can find. We stand alongside the falling-down ring where our horses ran a gymkhana. We find the house where Mother left us with the stable owner’s family when she ran off to marry the bartender. There’s the phone booth alongside a trout pond where we once called Daddy sobbing because we’d forgotten Father’s Day. Each time we recognize a spot, it’s like some book’s clear overlay page falls across the old landscape, the green scene rising up articulately around us—a 3-D pop-up. We get littler at those times, standing closer like we used to as kids, and the hoots and hollers we’ve been making to stay brave—those dwindle down. We dwindle down, two women almost gone into girls again. In the car, Lecia slides on her sunglasses, saying, I almost thought I’d dreamed this place up. But you’ve gotten down every dot and tittle. She cheers the manuscript with all the big-sister praise she brought to my first step off the high board, and that pat on the head matters more than any review I’ll get. I’d only really wanted her and Mother not to be pissed off. Midafternoon, I steer the car across the Rockies to the town where Mother’s bar was and where we went to school. That place left the most shadowy specters in Lecia, since it’s no doubt where she gave up being little once and for all. The day she called Daddy collect and announced to him that he had to buy us plane tickets to get us out of there, some light in her clicked off. Doing that meant bailing out on the mother she’d spent her whole young life courting and placating. We flew from there wondering if we’d see Mother again—alive or dead. There was no visitation plan, no schedule of phone calls set up. Just my ten years’ sister with the round-eyed, glassy gaze of an opium addict, as she set the big black phone in its cradle before telling me we had to pack.

• From A Greek-English Lexicon (Liddell-Scott) (1957)

  ἠρῖνός, ἡ, dv, (7p) ἐαρινός, Solon 12. 19, Pind. P. 9. 82, Eur. Supp. 448, Ar. Av. 683, Xen., etc. :—reut. Adv., in spring, yn τ᾽ ἠρινὸν θάλλουσα Eur. Fr. 318. 3; ὅταν ἠρινὰ .. φωνῇ χελιδών Ar. Pax 800. ἠρίον, τό, a mound, barrow, tomb, monument, ἔνθ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ᾿Αχιλλεὺς φράσσατο Πατρόκλῳ μέγα ἠρίον Il. 23. 126; ἠρία νεκύων, ᾿Αἴδαο Theocr. 2. 13, Nic. Fr. 21; εἴσατο βωμόν... ἠρίον ὄφρα γένοιτο Ο. I. 4284; cf. Epigr. Gr. 214. 1., 574, al.; also in Prose, Dem. 1319. 27, Dinarch. 107. 16 (so Vales. for ἑερά), Lycurg. ap. Harp., Plut., ete—Cf. Nike Opusc. p. 176. (Acc. to Harp. and others from ἔρα, and in Anth. P. 7. 180 we have κατὰ χθονὸς ἠρία τεῦχον ; but that it was a raised mound appears from Ap. Rh. 1. 1165, Call. Fr. 251, etc.—It has the digamma in Hom.) ἠρι-πόλῃη, ἡ, (πολέω) early-walking, then, like ἠριγένεια, the morn, dawn, Anth. P. 5. 228, 254. ἦρι- σάλπιγξ, (ὙΎος, early-trumpeter, name of a bird, Hesych. ἠρίστᾶμεν, ν. sub ἀριστάω. ἠρίστριον, TO, a spring-garment, formed like θερίστριον, Hesych. τὩρμένως, Ady. part. pf. pass. of αἴρω, loftily, Poll. 9. 147. ἡρμοσμένως, Adv. part. pf. pass. of ἁρμόζω, fitly, Diod. 17. 19. ἠρο-άνθια, τά, a feast of the Peloponnesian women at which they wore spring flowers, Phot.; ἠροσάνθεια in Hesych. ἡρο-ελεγεῖον (sc. μέτρον), τό, a distich, consisting of an hexameter and a pentameter, Gramm. ἡροϊκός, ἡ, dv, in late Poets for ἡρωικός, Manetho 1.13, Epigr. Gr. 279. Tpoa, v. sub ἀραρίσπκω A. ἠρύγγιον, τό, ν. sub ἤρυγγος. ἠρυγγίϑ, ἴδος, ἡ, of or belonging to the ἤρυγγος. Nic. Al. 577. ἤρυγγος, 7, a plant, the eringo, Nic. Th. 645, 849: more commonly as Dim., ἠρύγγιον, τό, Theophr. H. P. 6. 1, 3 (ubi male ἠρίγγιον), Diosc. 3- 24, Plut. 2. 700 D :—also Apvyyn. ἡ, Plin. 22. 8, Phot. II. H. A. 9. 3, 3 ἤρυγγος, 6,a goat's beard, Arist. ἤρὕγε, ν. sub @ ἐρεύγομαι IL. ἡἠρύκᾶκε, v. sub ἐρύκω. ἥρῳ, poét. dat. sing. of ἥρως: ἡρώειον, τό,--ἧρῷον, 4.ν. ἥρω- ἴαμβος, ὁ 6, a poém consisting of hexameters and iambics, Tzetz. ἡρωίζω, to write heroic verse or an epic poem, Eust. 4. 1. ἡρωικός, 7, dv, of the heroes, κατὰ τοὺς Hp. χρόνους (Vv. ἥρως 1. 1) Arist. Pol. 3.14, 11; 7 χλαῖνα Hp. φόρημα Id. Fr. 458, etc. 2. of or for a hero, heroic, φῦλον Plat. Crat. 398 E; ἀρετή Arist. Eth. N. 7.1,1; ἡρωϊκὰ φρονεῖν Luc. Amor. 20 ;—Adv. --κῶς, like a hero, τελευ- τᾶν Diod. 2.45; Comp. ἡρωϊκώτερον, Theophyl. Cf. ἡροϊκός. II. metrically, np. στίχος the heroic verse, the hexameter, Plat. Legg. 958 E; μέτρον Arist. Poét. 24, 8; εἰς THY Hp. τάξιν ἐπανάγειν to bring into an Epic poem, Dem. 1391. 22. ἡρωίνη [1], 7, fem. of ἥρως, a heroine, Theocr. 13. 20., 26. 36, Call. Del. 161, Dion. P. 1022; contr. Hp@vy, Ar. Nub. 315, Anth, P. app. 51. 55. 2.4 deceased female (cf. ἥρως τι. 2), C. 1. 2259.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  These enlightened words and a soft hug were all that was needed to forever transform the deranged creatures into beings of love and generosity. After reading Raggedy Ann for a few years, I decided I wouldn’t hit other kids unless they hit me first. I imagined Raggedy Ann somehow knew about this promise I made to myself and smiled up from the pages with approval. I blew through the Ramona Quimby books and everything else written by Beverly Cleary. I strongly related to Judy Blume’s coming-of-age stories, and The Chronicles of Prydain , a fantasy series by Lloyd Alexander, had me reading into the early-morning hours. I also discovered Roald Dahl’s stories featuring authoritarian schoolteachers and cruel caregivers and other books with similar antagonists, like the headmistress in The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett or Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase . In these stories, little girl protagonists were kidnapped and shut away in a school run by mean-spirited women who forced them to keep their hair short. The children always escaped their circumstances and won out in the end. I read these books over and over. It was, however, the Little House on the Prairie books in which, like the television show, I found the greatest parallels to my life. Living on a ranch easily lent itself to my imagining what Laura Ingalls Wilder’s pioneer life had been like. In Synanon, adult members often hunted deer. The heads of the bucks with their crowns of antlers were saved and mounted on buildings all over the ranch property. The bike-shed walls were also lined with heads, their glass eyes glittering in the dim lighting. In the Little House books, Pa kept a pig or two all year for slaughter in the fall, and Laura remembered with fondness being given the pig’s bladder filled with air for use as a kind of balloon that she and her sister Mary played with. The pig’s tail was roasted and given to the girls as a crackling treat. Every year in Synanon we slaughtered our own pigs. Sitting on the fence of the corral, I watched as each got a bullet in its head, its neck slit and its body hung on a hook for bleeding and gutting. Later in the morning, we children were fed fresh sausages. Laura Ingalls rode horses bareback with a cousin, galloping over the hills and through the meadows, the wind in her hair and a sense of freedom that thrilled me to imagine. The commune kept horses, and learning to ride them was mandatory. Laurie, who still went by the nickname “Spike,” sometimes had the chore of searching for stray horses in the hills and bringing them back to the corral. After reading about Laura Ingalls’s thrills of horseback riding, I asked Laurie if I could go with her one morning to scout out the horses. “If you want,” she’d said.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  You must have been about six or seven months, and I said, ‘Celena, did you say ‘Book’? “You just kept looking at me with those big eyes. You had great big eyes like a Hindu baby. So I said, ‘Celena, what’s that? Is that a book? Book?’ Then you said it again. The same little voice: ‘Book.’” Theresa always told this story as if it had just happened the day before. She’d get worked up at the punchline, her eyes shining from the memory. It seemed fitting that my first word had been “book” because books provided the ultimate escape from my anomalous environment. Other than an occasional field trip, usually to the supermarket or library, we children rarely left the Synanon properties. However, I found that I could go anywhere, whenever I liked, through books and later my own writings. The shelves of the playrooms were well stocked with books for early readers up to young adult novels. Some of the picture books were typical for children. They included Goodnight Moon and The Run Away Bunny, both by Margaret Wise Brown, Horton Hears a Who and other books by Dr. Seuss, Mother Goose Tales and the like. Then there were the cartoonish informative guides to sex and puberty: Where Did I Come From? and What’s Happening To Me? both by Peter Mayle. Where Did I Come From? begins with the narrator announcing, “We wrote it because we thought you might like to know exactly where you came from, and how it all happened.” A few pages later, we see an illustration of a man and woman, the definitive parents, standing naked in a bathtub with bright cheerful smiles as the reader is taken on a tour of their reproductive anatomy and shown the distinct differences between them. This soon leads to the main action: Daddy, rosy-cheeked and on top of Mommy, enthusiastically pumping away. We had already been informed on the preceding page that when Mommy and Daddy are feeling loving, they like to kiss and then Daddy’s penis grows big and hard in preparation for entering Mommy’s vagina. The narrator assures youthful readers that this sequence produces pleasurable sensations like a “tickle” in both partners. Daddy repeatedly rubs his penis inside Mommy until the sensation is so pleasant that something called semen spurts out into Mommy’s vagina. The next page shows smiling sperm that look as if they might burst into song, swimming up a kind of tunnel that represents the inside of the woman. The mission is successful for one of the tadpole-like contenders, and a sappy romance between the sperm and egg is played out in what looks like a sudden formal dinner party. The sperm has donned a top hat and sports a cane. He is in jolly suspended animation next to the egg, a blushing massive white blob of a thing with fake eyelashes. The two join forces, and voila! We have the beginnings of life.

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  There had been much rain over the past year, and the hills were a lush green, not the dry golden grass that I remembered. An old barn, which I thought might have once been the play barn in my youth, still stood. Inside it was much smaller than I had remembered, which is often the case with childhood memories of places. We spent a few hours trekking through the property and Patrick told me that every so often someone drives up claiming to have lived there as a kid when it was Synanon. Patrick said he usually takes them around and listens to their stories. One man once told him fondly, “We kids used to have the run of this place. We roamed where we liked. It was fantastic.” About the AuthorC.A. Wittman grew up in Northern California. In 1993 she moved to Maui Hawaii where she raised her children. Synanon Kid is her second book. Currently she resides in Los Angeles with her husband Frank. Join my reading group at cawittman.com https://www.cawittman.com/ contact@cawittman.com Also by C.A. WittmanSynanon Kid Grows Up: A Memoir of Learning to Live Outside the Synanon Cult The Visitors

• From Synanon Kid: Book One: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Synanon Cult

  knew the caretaker of the property and after looking into it, informed my daughter that indeed it was. The caretaker, Patrick, and his wife, Melissa, graciously took me, three of my children and their significant others on a tour of the property. This was the first time I had been back since I was eleven years old. It was surreal, to say the least, and disorienting, as many of the buildings had been torn down and in some instances new buildings erected in place of the old. The property has been turned into an outdoor science camp for elementary school students and is also rented out as a conference center and for special events like weddings. There had been much rain over the past year, and the hills were a lush green, not the dry golden grass that I remembered. An old barn, which I thought might have once been the play barn in my youth, still stood. Inside it was much smaller than I had remembered, which is often the case with childhood memories of places. We spent a few hours trekking through the property and Patrick told me that every so often someone drives up claiming to have lived there as a kid when it was Synanon. Patrick said he usually takes them around and listens to their stories. One man once told him fondly, “We kids used to have the run of this place. We roamed where we liked. It was fantastic.” ABOUT THE AUTHOR C.A. Wittman grew up in Northern California. In 1993 she moved to Maui Hawaii where she raised her children. Synanon Kid is her second book. Currently she resides in Los Angeles with her husband Frank. Join my reading group at cawittman.com https://www.cawittman.com/ contact@cawittman.com ALSO BY C.A. WITTMAN Synanon Kid Grows Up: A Memoir of Learning to Live Outside the Synanon Cult The Visitors

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  In a mind shift, I’m a schoolgirl again in summer, and my half-Indian daddy has just come in the back door at dawn with grime under his nails from a double shift. How carefully he draws five one-dollar bills from his weathered billfold to give Mother for two pairs of school shoes—one for me, one for Lecia. While I wait for her to bring the car around, he slips off his shirt, showing a chest pale as paper where his worker’s tan runs out. He steps out of his khakis, and jutting through his baggy boxers, his legs are knobby and thin. One thigh’s pronounced hunk of shrapnel is royal blue. The long scar up his right shinbone where a horse he was breaking threw and dragged him looks freshly scabby. He sits down on the bed’s edge, staring at his brown forearms. Daddy, I whisper, and that greedy call for him snaps the connection to the past. The voltage drops, and he’s gone, reabsorbed into the shriveled form in my mother’s house, tended days by a male nurse we can’t afford, nights by Mother, who resents it. In an instant I’m back in the Whitbreads’ library, and Daddy lies uninsured, half paralyzed. On the mantle, sits a recent Christmas snapshot with all the siblings before the fireplace, glossy-haired and tidy. They actually match like the gorgeous silverware. Not resemblance but precise replication. I think, Tiger One, Tiger Two…(I’ll come to believe that the WASP genetic code imperially squashes the other parent’s contributing DNA in offspring. My own son, blond and blue-eyed, will bear so little of me that ladies in the park will think I’ve been hired to push his stroller.) Just as we’re saying good night, Mr. Whitbread inquires whether, as a Texan, my father’s in oil, and I tell him he was, adding—wittily, I think—up to his elbows twelve hours a day. Which fact they take with a preoccupied air. I could speculate on what they thought, but they’re unreadable as granite. That night, lying in Warren’s narrow bed, where I’ve sneaked from his sister’s flowery boudoir to make love, I ask him, How’d I do? He cups my face. I love you, he says. Leafy shadows move over us. (How young we were.) Do you think they heard us just now? Don’t be silly, he says. I doubt they’d care. Their room is in another wing, which includes—among other mysteries—Mr. Whitbread’s own dressing room, padlocked from the outside. Not even the maid is allowed to clean in there. Warren is lying on his back, and his face mesmerizes me—the patrician nose, Germanic jaw. Do they like me? I say. You want everybody to like you, he says. You don’t? I say. Only you, he says. And Tiger. Not Sammy? Sammy’s common, Warren says, referring to something his mother said about a cousin’s wife. I’m common, I say.

• From Lit: A Memoir (2009)

  Sometimes when I walk the New York streets, I find in the occasional pedestrian’s face my long-dead parents. An Indian garment worker in overalls ferries a bin of Chinese silk—the bright rolls at different heights like pipes in some candy-colored organ. Beneath his baseball cap, his eyes glance off mine, and it’s Daddy for an instant. Or gliding off a shopwindow, I see Mother’s winged cheekbones and marble complexion that halt me in my tracks. But it’s only my face impersonating hers, and if ever I miss her broad, sharecropper’s hands, I have only to look at my own, growing from the ends of my own arms, which are replicas of hers. Good days, I see myself in others, and I know—in my bone marrow—nothing we truly love is ever lost, no matter what form it assumes. There are days when through fear and egoism I shake my fist at the sky, afterward feeling silly and worn out as a toddler post–temper tantrum. Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we’re formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only to lure us into our full potential. Usually, the closest we get is when we love, or when some beloved beams back, which can galvanize you like steel and make resilient what had heretofore only been soft flesh. (Dev, you gave me that.) It can start you singing as the lion pads over to you, its jaws hinging open, its hot breath on you. Even unto death. Mary Karr 2009 Pax Christi ACKNOWLEDGMENTSFrom conception to forward, Courtney Hodell practiced her extraordinary midwifery, birthing this book from my obstreperous psyche. Without her and Jennifer Barth of HarperCollins and my agent, Amanda Urban, I’d no doubt still be writhing on the delivery table. My sister, Lecia Scaglione, and her husband, Tom, helped me through innumerable hard stretches; so did Rodney Crowell, Don DeLillo, Dan Halpern, Robert Hass, Brooks Haxton, Terrance Hayes, Brenda Hillman, Ed Hirsch, Patti Macmillan, Mark and Lili Reinisch, George Saunders, Case Scaglione, J. W. Schenck, Mark Scher, Kent Scott, and Donna Zeiser. My consigliore and champion, rabbi and homeboy, was and is Michael Meyer. Readers vetting pages to keep me honest include my ever-patient family plus Joan Alway, Mark Costello, Doonie, Deborah Greenwald, John Holohan, Deb Larson, Thomas Lux, Patti Macmillan, and Tobias Wolff. Special thanks to Elizabeth Auchincloss and Patricia Allen. Spiritual guidance came from most of the above as well as Uwen Akpan, S.J.; Father Joseph Kane; Sister Marisse May; and Matthew Roche, S.J. Writers granting the right to excerpt their lit’rary works gratis include Don DeLillo, Nick Flynn, Louise Glück, Robert Hass, Brooks Haxton, Terrance Hayes, Sebastian Matthews, Heather McHugh, George Saunders, Charles Simic, Chris Smither, Franz Wright, and Dean Young. Other permissions were valiantly rustled up by Chris Robinson and Jason Sack.