User:Toriokyo

I am from rubber buckets, and dish rags. From the smell of Clorox bleach and Pine Sol. Mother was an obsessive cleaner and a compulsive perfectionist.

I am from a silicon valley track home of painted pink brick against a hot blue sky on a treeless cul-de-sac. A 60s urban expanse of unblemished sidewalks, wide dichondra lawns, and California palms. I’m from the boxwood hedge and blue hydrangeas in the shade. Neighborhood sprinklers choreographed to rise at dawn.

I’m from potluck dinners of pierogi and Jello salad. Uncles played pinochle with All In The Family blaring on the console TV. Aunts gossiped in the kitchen, drying dishes with tea towels. It was consistent but never comforting.

I’m from both sides of the American Track. Mother was the youngest of seventeen children, no twins, midwest blue-collar immigrants. Her father butchered pigs. Father was a ‘Greatest Generation’ statesmen from an ancient blue-blood clan of lawyers and engineers. Connoisseurs of executive privilege. Witnesses to the Gatsby-like rise, and then fall, of their own upper-middle class.

I am from the loud family where disagreement meant disrespect. Sunday services were a standard spiritual cleanse. Taboos and rules were plentiful. I am from “Sit still. Be quiet!” and “Don’t you dare talk back to me...” and “Because I say so.” I was not allowed to hide in my room so hiding became my guilty pleasure.

I am from a private Catholic school for girls and Jewish summer camp for all. From indoor ice-skating lessons at the mall. From the Purple Sharks swim team at the public high school pool, and from Willow Glen Girl Scout Troop 256. I was the fortunate child of a monochromatic neighborhood.

I’m the offspring of a teen beauty queen, impetuous and angry, exiled by her family and excommunicated from her religion for eloping with a mafia-connected casino mogul twice her age. It lasted a year, the memory lasted a lifetime. It was her dramatic theater, her f-you rebellion, her personal mythology. Marry for money instead of love since love would always disappoint, she said. Her Cassandra-like prophesies have somehow always come true.

I’m the offspring of the son of a state Supreme Court judge who secretly wanted to be a dancer. Instead WW2 became his legacy. Emotionally scarred by death and cruelty his body outlived his soul by 30 years. He was not the rebel he wanted to be. His life became a crumpled paper sack dancing in the updraft of choices made for him by others. His life ended in sorrow.

Their alchemy of opposites created me, a breathing contradiction, a Gemini bundle of anger and sorrow: of logic and emotion, of success and failure, of creativity and pragmatism, of magical thinking and despair. I have not found myself through their history, but their history is part of me.

My inheritance is a white plastic binder of Polaroids, faces and names I barely recognize. My history is a scratched wooden box lined with tacky green felt holding dead wrist watches and cheap cuff links. My faith is a small basket of scapular medals and tiny bronze religious charms that were precious once, promising salvation and delivering grace with mercy after death. I am still seeking who I am. I have not found what I want to be.