Remember Your Heartbeats - Prompt from Andrea Balt

Ba-Boom – Ba-Boom

My heart feels like it beats in triple time. So fast it skips beats (sometimes it literally does – I have PVC – a heart arrhythmia). I’m speaking of the double-dutch, field of flowers, best news you’ve heard in a while kind of beat though.

As I dug through my old cedar hope chest the other day my heart did its too much kind of thing as I unpacked precious dowry.

Cards. So many cards. For every occasion. My mom and her cards. Continually caring for other people first.

Could be Christmas

Celebrating invention of litmus

or 4th of July

Could even be international day of the pie

You might be her daughter

Or the man she met at the alter

Grown niece or nephew

Or little Livy Lou

You could be sixty

Or thirty

You could be 2

My mom will always have a card for you

When I was overseas I think my mom sent me a card every day I was away. She has been curator, history holder, record keeper (in both senses of the word. I still have the Tina the Ballerina 45 she gifted me as a child). Everything dated and logged. I mean who else literally keeps a list of every gift you received on your first Christmas?! Thank you for the Red Velvet Dress Rose Bennett (whoever you are) and thank YOU mom. Thank you for seeing me, and hearing me, and keeping this all so safe through the years.

Bookcovers. My dad drew on brown grocery bags to cover our school books – I loved those drawings. Animals and cartoon characters. Always lots of color. It’s like his oddball energy gave life to the page. And now at 40 I frantically look for these old images, feeling an overwhelming urge to find them and frame them. Pandemics do that to people. Make us remember things. Pretty things. Innocent things. Things we love, but have long forgotten to display.

While I’m not as artsy as my dad or as organized as my mom, I have managed to save a few things Olivia has made throughout the years. Most of her art I turn into books, or display around the house, or scan and save digitally because I can’t stand clutter (somehow I’ve convinced myself that 8000 desktop folders on the computer and 8 different digital curation sites – most of which I don’t remember my password for - don’t qualify as clutter). I’ll never forget the time I threw some of Liv’s toddler art in the trash and when she saw it I tried to pretend a gust of wind had suddenly blown it from the counter into the bin. One of numerous mom fails along the way.

My namesake’s drawing. A brown bird caged in a broken frame. The bird is not particularly pretty, but it does appear driven, focused, ready as it stands perched on some rocks taking stock. What I like most about the picture are the families of mushrooms. They seem sheltered and safe.

Olivia just woke up, descended the stairs, and cozied up next to me on the couch:

Liv - Did I draw that?

Me - No. My aunt Chrissy did. I was named after her. What do you think that bird is thinking?

Liv - Probably looking after you.

Me - Why do you say that?

Liv - Look at it. It is standing up tall making sure you don’t get in any trouble.

I think she’s right.

Side note: My aunt was tragically killed when she was 13. This is the first I’m googling it and I just ordered the Ancestry.com DNA kit. I want to learn more about where I came from and what it might all mean.

Salem News Clipping

Pierre & Pussycat Newspaper. I have no idea what this is, how raunchy, how legal. But my dad is plastered all over it (no shocker there!) Also an ad for Madame Marie Teta –Gifted Reader and Advisor. I can’t wait to ask my dad all the deets! I keep saying I am going to record these convos. As soon as Rona moves the fuck along, I am rebooking my ticket to Florida so I can get my answers in person amidst laughter, and sunshine, and dominos .My mom and Grandma (Hottie Lottie) made the spread too.

A sketch. Done of me in the streets of Barcelona in 1997. The start of my international travel and my love affair with the world.

As I finish sorting through all the old letters, certificates, pictures, plaques, school programs…I’m left with a question.

Does this all matter?

Knowing that my first date of tooth eruption was Jan 13, 1981 for the upper left and Jan. 22 on the upper right (I wasn't kidding about my mom's recording prowess), knowing that my mom found it important to record that I had a “perfect set of lips” in her post delivery notes, or that my dad got the call that she was in labor while playing racquetball with Tony DeGeorge. The scores I got on my 5th grade Iowa test. The disciplinary notice from JCU that I was caught climbing out a window in the boy’s dorm. The diorama my sister made as a Christmas gift for me the year after I was married. The lock of hair from my first haircut.

The answer is both not at all and so very much.