This is My Body, This is My Blood

Cocoa Wheats

I stood in the cereal aisle the other day, studying the multitude of choices displayed on the shelves before me.  It was much simpler when I was a child.  You had three choices: Cheerios, Corn Flakes, or Rice Crispies.  Unless it was one of those special days when your Dad made Cocoa-Wheats.

Lying atop our saggy mattress, entangled in my sister’s legs, I listen to our dad bumble around in the kitchen below us.  The smells wafting up the stairs are a mix of coffee, burnt toast, and Cocoa Wheats. I'm about to drift backward into the netherland of blessed sleep, when  “BANG! BANG! BANG” he raps a yardstick at the foot of the stairway, piercing the silence of breathing.

“Rowshmellum!” he yells, which means "Get your ass  out of bed this minute!” in Welsh, I think, and continues to swat the wall until he’s sure no thing can possibly be asleep.

L, eighteen months younger than me, tumbles out of bed,  blond locks framing her cherubic face like a baby-jar star.   I lay in wait for my lanky body to cooperate with my sleepy brain and when I finally sit up, my pixie hair sticks out every which way like straw.

My sister and I descend the stairs holding hands, our fingernail fight from the previous night all but forgotten--if you don't notice the scabs on our arms.  Dad is running the show in his baggy briefs and loopy undershirt.  The outline of his belly button protrudes against the thin cotton like when my mother is pregnant, which she usually is.  Four times before me, three times after

He carries the pan of cocoa wheats around the red Formica table, plop-plopping a spoonful into each of six bowls.  As usual, the cereal is lumpy.  If I complain I’ll get a lecture about all the starving children in India so I quietly spoon out the lumps and hide them under my bowl.  My  sisters  are all doing the same thing as we roll our eyeballs at each other.

I miss a lump and dry heave as I bite into the squishy ball of uncooked mush.  Shoving a slice of peanut buttered toast into my mouth, I follow it with a gulp of milk, then wipe the drips with the back of my hand. When nobody's looking, I wipe the back of my hand on my clean dress.

Dad is busy scraping the darkest parts off the next batch of toast, as if they won't still taste like charcoal.  The sink is coated with blackened crumbs that I secretly worry he’ll try to use in a casserole. When Mom wanders in wearing her faded blue nightie and sits glassy eyed at the table, Dad kisses her warm, sleepy cheek and sets a cup of coffee in front of her.  She smiles at us from very far away.

I moved past sugared-this and frosted-that to the hot cereals, and found the familiar box of Cocoa Wheats.  As I dropped it into my cart, I thought about  how hard it must have been for my dad to manage seven children when his wife was sick, which she often was.  I have no doubt  he made us that hot chocolate cereal to help make our ordinary days feel special. Did I ever tell him how the smell of Cocoa Wheats has brought with it the memory of his love when I cooked them for my own children? Does he know I'd give anything to share a bowl with him, lumps and all, just to tell him that?

Rain Man

He tried to sneak in the back door, between second and third helpings of rainpuddles and matted clumps of wet dog hair, but I pushed a pile of soggy towels under the dryrotting crack. Crouching under a muddy sky with clouds bursting from its many secret pockets, he poked holes in my roof until the ceiling bowed.When I made a slit in the drywall to relieve the darkwater pond, let it spill, then plunk, plunk, plunk, into a dirty white bucket, he left spores of mold in the attic to march up my nostrils during the night, now blocked by a sliver of silver duct tape stuck over the opening.

 

Failing an above-board attack, he slithered into the crawl space, taking eight inches of water with him, just high enough to cover the electrical box that serves my washer and dryer so I'd have to bag up all those wet clothes and feed shiny quarters into somebody else's machines.

While I was at the laundromat, he huffed and puffed until the tarp I'd planted on the roof in the howling storm lifted at the edges, forcing me back up the rickety ladder to batten it down again. While I was up there, I found all the leaves he'd stripped from nearby trees and planted in my gutters, causing the water to back up and spill into my tenant's light fixture. He laughed as I struggled to clear the damn, bloodied knuckles, my eyes covered with strings of wet hair, but I beat him. Standing at the peak I raised my fist, cursed him as rusty water found its way through trenches and raced down the driveway toward the street to become one with the rain.

He said nothing, but I'm sure it was his laugh I heard as I reached for the handle of my camper to retrieve massage sheets, felt the surge of electricity charge up my arm and down my bare feet before making it's way to my brain. Let go.

 

For three long weeks he hounded me, tried to break my spirit. He blew out a transformer, took out my phone lines, flooded my apartment, and terminated my broadband connections, yet I refused to let him take me down. Not this time. Not this year. Sure,I was shaken, weakened to the brink of S.A.D. but I held out, knowing my Savior would return, and I was right. She showed up two days ago, kicked Depression's dark and dreary ass to Kingdom Come (or perhaps the east coast from what I hear) and kissed me awake. Hand in hand, we walked outside where she led me to the chair by the pond in the back yard and tenderly wrapped her arms around my trembling body until the color came back into my pale cheeks. While I basked in her holy presence, she sucked the moisture out of my house, my yard, my soul--replaced it with dappled light. We spent the whole day together and then she danced on my walls at sunset before saying goodnight and promising to return tomorrow and the day after that for as far as the weatherman can see.

 

Last night I dreamed of His return, the cold, damp eyes and heartless rendering of wicked winds. I woke in a sweat, breathless, shaking. From the windowsill I heard a whisper.

"Let there be light," she said, and there was light.

And I saw the light; that it was good, and that it divides the good days from the bad. And together we named the light, Bliss and the darkness we called Depression.

And the evening and the morning were the first day of recovery.