Indecisive Peach

There might seem like there is little left to chance when a person sets out to create their own identity. You rebel. You experiment. All either in utmost calculated reverence of immortality or in the piercing light of chaos, but still you race toward, or you fall into, or you amble onto creating the person that will interact with all the identities created in this world.

There is a distance that is sometimes declared: I am not my parents; their genetic imprint are only building blocks for my frame of reference, my establishing values, my sense of impending self.

Somewhere, sometimes, you might flit by the idea that perhaps the motions of your life were set in direct action by your parents. And with all the horrors that can come from that, perhaps sometimes there needs to be gratitude and remembrance.

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I’m sitting here contemplating cleaning my room. Sadly, it’s just the contemplating part and not the actualizing part, which I hear in self-help circles is the way to go.

Still haven’t unpacked. Dirty clothes flung in one pile. Clean ones are still in the basket. Shoes are everywhere. Papers have migrated from desk to floor to bookcases. My keys have a bowl they sit in; they’re laying next to my computer. I have a spot for my phone - it’s on top of my wallet. Somewhere.

Cables for every tech gadget I own are creating their own slithering patchwork of horror on my desk.

I get in a tizzy when my room gets like this. It’s fun for about a day or so. Oh, I think, I can be the hip girl that is just too damn cool to organize her room. She just swirls in and out of her room, like the wind, retrieving things at random and look at ease with the Zen of it all. She reeks of a patchouli and all the skirts that she owns are in pools of graceful piles all over the floor right on top of her skinny jean and vinyl Dylan albums. Her make-up is a gross experiment on the window sill, but she still looks amazingly well done even if her gaze is far away and detached.

With the same reality in where I cannot pull off the bed-head look, this figment of a girl is unobtainable to me and it’s probably better that way.

It’s been decided that next year I’m going to complete the arcane process of A Grand Tour. The yuppie translation, and a probably more understandable version, became the rite know as Backpacking Through Europe. I will be washing my hands of grad school in May and perhaps actually embarking toward learning something of more use.

I will be without job, and likely without prospects, and my Mom most likely will be returning to Germany to make a better life for herself. The thought arose first that I should take a few weeks to see my grandparents and help my Mom settle in. I’ll become nicely plump with all the potatoes and meats and, well, I’m not a fan of beer, but my grandparents have one swell liquor cabinet.

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I spent my high school years living in small town America, and on a smaller scale, the “better” side of town. When I now watch suburban dramas like Desperate Housewives, I think back to where I used to live, my parent’s street, and only imagine what special brands of crazy lurks beyond the surrounding adobe coloring, the lawn that is just so, and the immaculately cleaned cars. And then I wonder about the times when it spills out onto the streets.

I helped sell my Dad’s truck yesterday, leaving be what that means, I did resolve a longtime mystery. After having the truck parked next to a bigger street overnight, around 10 o’clock the next morning we got a flurry of calls.

Driving out there, my Mom and I seal the deal with a fresh-faced boy, too clean to be a cowboy, yet with too much grit to be a jock. His very first vehicle purchase as he heads into high school, accompanied with his mother and his father, a county sheriff deputy.

As we make the arrangements for payment, the boy is to follow us to our house after he gets a deposit for the truck from the bank. The deputy pulls out a notepad from the beige pocket below his badge. I quickly write down the address to the house and hand it back to him. His eyes widen as he looks at my writing on the sheet.

“Oh that street,” he says with a bit of amusement and disdain. “Us cops do know that street. That’s the street we had to keep arresting that old, naked lady.”
My Mom and I flick our heads toward each other and murmur, “Ahhhh…ha!”

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