Writing From Space

Carmen Advises Her Cousin Flor on Getting a Job at the Nursing Home

10/24/2015

Sobrina mia, this one woman at the nursing home, the activity director, she is crazy. Let me tell you what she did last Christmas. She gave guns to the old men and big baby dolls to the old women. Si! Verdad!

The guns were plastic. From Wall-Mart. Machine guns that shoot bubbles. The dolls had big heads como melones, blue eyes that followed you up and down the hallway. Soft white bodies, pink hands and feet with tiny toes. Dios mia! They were girl Chuckie dolls! I think they were dolls from the devil.

The old men with guns--they started shooting anyone who came into their rooms. They shot at the nurses who stick the catheters into their old wrinkled pinas; the pobrecitos who empty the bedpans. Pretty soon they were shooting their sons and daughters who came to visit, cursing them for living.

When that one viejo put the gun into his mouth and tried to kill himself with bubbles, they had to pump his stomach and take him to the ICU for a week. Well, the big honcho, the director, he was worried they would get sued. He is sleeping with the activity director, so she didn't get fired. But they took away the bubble guns--pronto.

The old women hated the big baby dolls. They threw them on the floor. Except one old lady. She loved her crazy doll. She sat in the hallway in her wheelchair until they day she died, holding her doll, crooning to the back of its bald head. We tried to smile when she sang, "See my beautiful baby, rockabye beautiful baby." The doll watched us, grinning como la cabeze de la muerte.

Si! Verdad! This is a true story. Some day when you work here I will take you to the janitor's closet. In the darkest corner, you will see a wheelchair and sitting on it is the Chuckie doll.

None of us will touch it.

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Getting Stuck

10/7/2015

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You may think I caught hell for getting a tractor monumentally stuck. I didn't. My dad wasn't that kind of person. He knew I didn't know what I was doing. He probably felt responsible in the first place for putting me on the hay crew.

In 1957, the summer after my sophomore year, we moved to the Marble Ranch headquarters halfway between Elko and Wells, Nevada. My dad, general manager of the outfit, put me and my California cousin to work in the hayfields driving buckrakes.

After the mowers left windrows of hay, the buckrakers combed the hay into piles or took the hay to the haystack. I thought it was fun. The meadow along the Humboldt River was fairly flat. You could lift the rake with a lever and race your city slicker cousin to the far end of the field and the next row of hay.

I got stuck taking a shortcut across a slough. I should have stopped the tractor, gotten off, and inspected the swampy swale. Instead, I shifted into high gear and sailed into the wet depression, sinking the tractor halfway up the tires and wedging the rake into the embankment.

In the process of trying to get me out, two of the hay hands got their tractors stuck. The foreman had to stop what he was doing, go back to the ranch, get the stock truck and tow chains. It took all afternoon to undo what it took me ten minutes to do.

I don't think the men cared. They got paid the same whether they were haying or hauling the boss's daughter out of a ditch. I'm sure they had a good chuckle at supper that night. They probably swapped their own stories. In 1957 on the ranch, everybody had a story about getting stuck. In the back of every ranch truck were chains and a shovel. If you got stuck, there was no phoning the home ranch. You got yourself out.

I got stuck and caused a fair amount of trouble one July afternoon a long time ago because I didn't take the work seriously and I didn't take myself seriously. I wasn't paying attention to the lay of the land or to the piece of equipment I was operating.

I understand my actions could be interpreted as youthful carelessness--regardless of gender. However, in 1957 it wouldn't have been ladylike for me to be too much at home on a hay crew. I was a girl playing at a man's job. Dad quietly sent me back to the house and my boy cousin back to California.

We talk about "getting stuck" as a metaphor: stuck in a lousy job, stuck in an unhappy marriage, stuck in the house all day with the kids. For many years, I was stuck wanting to write but not thinking of myself as a "real" writer. For many years, I didn't believe I could or should learn the writing trade.

Granted, my coming of age was in that time between the Fifties domestic expectations for girls and women's liberation of the Sixties. But there is a fine line between a reason and an excuse. I can still hear my dad saying, "There's no such thing as a good excuse." It took way too much time, but I'm no longer stuck in that particular rut. I think of myself as a writer. I am willing to do the work.

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Carmen Advises Her Cousin Flor on Getting a Job at the Nursing Home

Getting Stuck

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