Mahoganie’s Sunday Soliloquy

In the past, when it came to my online journal entries I tried to be as transparent as possible. I’m not exactly sure why this is, except to say that writing was (and always has been) therapeutic. So, selfish me saw it more for myself than for anyone out there who dared to read. Exposing all my flaws along with goodness wasn’t all in fun and games. Sometimes it was difficult to write at least an ounce of what I wrote, but the encouraging  and negative feedback and even radio silence kept me moving.

When it comes to this particular virtual space, I’ve been trying to stray away from too much of the personal in order to bring informative “speech” mostly in regards to writing in the journalism and creative realms as I’m diving deep into both. The journalist in me wants to remain as professional – while a bit playful – as much as possible. In other words I want to present the “Tiffany” to you. Yet, the stronger creative side of me – the “Mahoganie” – wants to come out more often in order to be open, transparent, raw and just out there as it transpires into art. The Mahoganie is the exhibitionist in me; the storyteller for sure.

I say all this to say…to let you know…..for real….I don’t even feel like being the polished Tiffany right now. I’ve been in the emotional trenches hard this past week or so. From discussions with friends, my vivid dreams and a talk with a friend about those dreams, it’s been one interesting week.  It mainly boils down to helping to care for my 78 year-old grandmother. A month ago my grandmother suffered a head injury due to a fall. She required immediate surgery and after spending three weeks in the hospital she has shown great strides in recovering. Still, in considering her age along with the injury, the recovery process is tedious as she pretty much needs constant care.  She’s home, spending this current time with my parents and myself. The energy is there as we all spread the duties, but the energy wears thin, especially as my energetic 4 year-old daughter floats around the house in her own world clashing with our reality. Oh to be a kid…..

For a creative person, something like this can inspire or block you. It’s done both to me. I’ve cried, I’ve cursed (not directly at anyone), I’ve been loving and doting. I’ve had feelings of selfishness and thankfulness. I’ve felt sad and frustrated. I feel honored to be helping to care for woman who means so much to me. Caring for a loved one is a no brainer. It’s a LOT better than having them in a haphazard nursing home where lackluster care is given.Yet, the feelings of frustration comes in when I have that moment of creativity and can’t necessarily escape to attend to it; obviously for me… that’s writing. Then there are moments when I can tend to it, but my brain and body is too tired to give it my all. So I shut down.

Priorities are shifting to home and family. I know it’s the right and loving thing to do, but the selfish me wants to abandon ship; untie and free myself from such. I wish I was the kind of person that could handle and do this with ease, without blinking an eye. But I’m not made of such steel.

A brink of inspiration came late last night. I took a few notes and started to mentally plan something in my head. In the midst of that, I thought about a short story I wrote around the start of the millennium and revised a bit in 2006. It was a short story loosely based on my neighbor. She was a barely a teenager when her grandfather suffered a stroke. I used to watch and talk with her while wondering how was she handling it, especially since she is close (and lives with) to her grandparents. I simply titled it “Thirteen,” as I milled over what her past – before she lived with her grandparents – was like and wondered about her ability to cope with her family life post her grandfather’s stroke.  I haven’t looked or touched it since 2006 until….well…now.

This is for you….us….and our loved ones…..

Photo take by Mahoganie Jade Browne March 2008 at the U.S. Botanical Gardens in Wash, DC at annual orchid exhibit.

Thirteen
Rough Draft #2 (2006)
By: Mahoganie Jade Browne

A tall, sweet potato-brown skinned lady with honey-colored dreads sits and looks at me from across the room. She calls my name and asks me to bring her the small pitcher of ice water that is on a wooden table by the window. I retrieve the pitcher from its perch and see that it is sweating from the double duty of blocking some of the sun’s rays as they make their way through the Plexiglas. I hand the lady the pitcher and wait as she pours herself a whole Dixiecup full of the now not-so-icy-water.

Before she can even return the pitcher to me, a pale but happy-go-lucky woman in a white lab coat calls my family’s name, and announces that today’s rehabilitation session has come to a close. Just then, the lady with the honey dreads stands up while fumbling for her coat and purse. She and the woman in the lab coat leave the waiting room while conversing about mobility skills, medication and possible private home care. As the two of them walk toward the geriatric ward, I immediately take my place back near the window and stare into the world of the living. I can’t help but to ask myself if this is how my life is going to be from now on.

I begin to reflect back on my childhood and realize that I don’t remember much about my earlier years. Maybe that’s because my life has been a bit rugged, and I somehow subconsciously blocked out the so-called trauma that happened to me then. What I remember is that I did use to live in a house. I’m guessing it was in suburbia Maryland, because there were grass and trees everywhere. Even though there are yards within the city of DC, they are nothing compared to the suburbs in Maryland, especially in places like Waldorf, Bowie and Fort Washington.

I remember playing hide and seek with my parents all of the time in our yard. There was a tree that I used to hide behind. I’m not sure what kind it was, all I know is that it had a huge, thick trunk. The branches seemed to have reached all far corners of the earth. Every summer, my father would make corny jokes about how the tree looked like it had an afro that needed a good trim. To be honest, I don’t even think my father climbed that tree once to trim it or at least even paid someone to do it.

As I sit here in this waiting room, I find it funny that while I’m reminiscing about my parents, I still I don’t remember much about them or my old home. I just know I lived in a house with a huge tree in the backyard and I lived there with a mother and a father. What I can remember about them seems to bring a stinging and burning pain to my insides.

As a small child, I would have frequent nightmares. I would become scared, because there would always seem to be a ton of voices yelling and screaming, but yet I couldn’t see anyone. It was just dark. The voices sounded like my parents, but I couldn’t be sure. The yelling and screaming would grow louder and more aggressive. I could hear crashing noises as if things were breaking in my dream, but there was nothing to throw because it was just total darkness. Whenever I woke up crying, my father would always come rushing into my room.

One morning, I got up for school, and went downstairs. I turned on the television in the family room and switched to Woody Wood Pecker. My father came down, just when Chilly Willy the penguin was about to be shown. He kissed me on the forehead and proceeded to fix me a bowl of cereal. I didn’t ask about mommy because I assumed she was upstairs sleeping.

When I came home from school, oddly I felt a sudden feeling of emptiness. Something didn’t seem right. I asked about mommy. Daddy looked at me and told me that she went to visit her mother in Texas and that she would be gone for a while. However, my mother’s absence continued on for days like a mind numbing, hypnotic looped beat. I don’t remember how long my father and I were alone. I suspect it wasn’t that long, because before I knew it I was alone. My daddy left me.

One morning he dropped me off at school and told me he would be back at 4-0-0 sharp. Daddy had a way of breaking things down so I could understand them. I didn’t know much about time then, but I knew enough to know each top of the hour. My father never showed. A tall man who liked my father, but bearing a salt and pepper colored beard and wearing a suit with a Darby on his head, came to get me instead.

Before I knew it, I had to move in with this man, his wife and their daughter in their home in the southeast part of Washington, DC. It was a row house, with no real yard space. I couldn’t even play my favorite game of hide and seek.

One Saturday morning, instead of letting me watch my Woody Wood Pecker cartoons, they dressed me up in this ugly pink frilly dress. I tried to put up a fight, but when they mentioned that I would see my father I wasted no time in getting ready. I missed my father badly. We were picked up in a nice blue limo. It was my first time riding in a car like that. I was excited because I just knew the people I was staying with were like those people on the show, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Everyone was all dressed up, but they were all in black. They matched the inside of the limo. Even though the dress I had on was ugly, I was thankful that I added a splash of color.

Next thing I knew, we arrived at the place were I was to see my daddy. There were a lot of people around and when I asked about them, I was told that they were there to see my father too. When the limo came to a stop and the door opened I stepped across everyone and ran inside this chapel like building. I didn’t know what the occasion or fuss was for, but I was anxious to see my daddy. I wanted to know what my daddy had done to deserve such an honor.

However, when I saw my daddy, my stomach started feeling funny. It was daddy, but he looked like he was sleeping. My heart was racing and then stopping. He looked different. He didn’t have his natural color. I felt something gathering in my throat. I saw people touching my father, but he didn’t flinch not once. Whatever it was that was gathering in my throat it was reaching a point of no return. I looked around and noticed that just about everyone was in black. I felt like I was reliving my nightmare all over again. Nothing but darkness. Daddy wasn’t waking up. I threw up. After that day, my daddy and that ugly pink dress were no more.

The years that came after seeing daddy lying there asleep seemed to go by quickly. The years passed, I grew older and never gave a moment’s thought to my past. I have been receiving all the love a child should be given by my father’s look alike and his family.

His daughter is actually the closest thing to a mother that I have. She has taken my friends and I to places around the city. She is the one to discipline me. She talks with me. She even has those “motherly suggestions” when mothers volunteer their children in activities without consulting the child. People often question her motives for living at home with her parents, because she is an unmarried woman in her late 30s. She simply feels that her parents and I need her.

My new family molds me in a way I think is good. They are big on education. They have a strong religious foundation and they often encourage and support me in all that I do. They have always been there for me. Yet, at 13, I think the tables turned on me too soon.

Photo take by Mahoganie Jade Browne March 2008 at the U.S. Botanical Gardens in Wash, DC at annual orchid exhibit

Most 13 year olds find themselves at a crossroads in life. It is a time when your body is telling you that you are becoming an adult, but your mind still yearns for those activities that seem childish. With me, I had no choice but to be an adult. I was never given a chance to contemplate over it. The day that I turned 13, I became an adult.

Last October, my family and I were getting ready one evening to attend a fall revival at the church. I had been made aware of the fact that the congregation was planning a surprise birthday party for me afterwards. I was prancing around the house all evening and singing the beginning lyrics of 50 Cents’ “In the Club” aloud.

“Go Shorty, it’s your birthday. Go Shorty. It’s your birthday. We gonna sip Bacardi like it’s your birthday. We gonna party like it’s your birthday.”

Normally, any kind of rap lyrics irritate my father’s look alike, but on that day and as loud as I was he didn’t say a word. His wife was in the dinning room balancing her checkbook and his daughter had to be the one to tell me to hush and go get ready for the evening. There are two full bathrooms in the house and I had occupied the one upstairs. The second bathroom is in the basement where my father’s look alike spends most of his time.

I had just gotten out of the tub when I heard a “thump.” I thought something had fallen over in the living room, namely the parrot statue that was posted on a pole. Once in a while, if people aren’t careful and bush up against it, the parrot falls over. I continued to get dressed, but not before I heard my name being called. I was told to call 9-1-1 right then.
My father’s look alike had a stroke while in the basement bathroom and was in the hospital for several months. He wasn’t home for Thanksgiving, Christmas or New Year’s. Each holiday, his wife, daughter and I brought the holiday to him. His condition wasn’t too bad. He lost feeling throughout the left side of his body and in his right hand. His speech had slowed, but he was still comprehensible. After showing signs of improvement, he was released the first week in February.

Now as each day passes, I find myself in the whirlwind of helping to care for him. During the weekday, his wife cares for his needs until her daughter and I come home and can take over. Their daughter works full-time as buyer for a boutique downtown. She picks me up from school and we rush home to relieve her mother.

Photo take by Mahoganie Jade Browne March 2008 at the U.S. Botanical Gardens in Wash, DC at annual orchid exhibit

Everyday I cook the meals, clean the house, and attend to my father’s look alike needs. The bathing and dressing is left for his daughter and wife to do. Somehow I still find time to do my school work, attend choir rehearsal at church and to have brief phone conversations with my friends. My friends are my only connection to the reality of being 13, but now I can’t relate to them anymore. I spend so much time with my family that I don’t have time to be 13. Conversations between my friends and I are cut short because when they go on a tangent about this boy kissing that girl, or the roller skating party at this or that rink, all I can come up with are stories about the motor skills of my father’s look-alike.

I try to keep it together on the outside, but on the inside I’m crying. It’s at night when I really break down. Lately, my past haunts me. I’ve been able to see my mother’s face so clearly that it is as if she were in front of me. At night I cry for her. I yearn for her and yet I’m angry that she left. Perhaps if she had stayed, I would be living the life of a 13 year-old in the comforts of suburbia Maryland.

***

As I look away from my reflection in the Plexiglas and turn towards the waiting room threshold, I see my aunt’s honey colored dreads approaching. She will call to me and tell me to come along. She will give me a brief run down on what to do for my grandfather in helping him get into the car. Then she will tell me of all the stops we have to make on the way home. She will tell me what my grandmother would like for me to fix for Sunday dinner. My aunt will kiss me and tell me thank you. When I finally get to my grandfather, he will attempt to clutch my right hand as a gesture to say “help me.”

While this scene will unfold in this manner as it has for the past six months, I will only become like a robotic fixture performing monotonous actions. All the while, I will be longing to be a child again, playing hide and seek and watching Woody Wood Pecker.

Tagged: african-american, creative, creative writing, writing

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