The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": shopping with teens

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Shopping, Teens, Jeans and Challenged Lives

The other day, my birthday boy needed pants. Now, if I needed pants, I would put it on the never ending list of things that need to get done like planting bushes, buying a new couch and picking up some pants. But he's a newly minted 15, and he needed pants RIGHT NOW.

I explained to him that I was exhausted, that I haven't had a spare minute since last Friday, and it was already past 8. He wasn't buying. He had to have jeans RIGHT NOW. So I agreed to go, but only if he would listen to me explain how impulsivity was one of the major themes of Romeo and Juliet which he is reading right now. Or rather, that his class is reading and he is learning through the process of auditory osmosis.

Anyway, I drove to the near mall, not the one he likes that's half an hour away. I stopped in front of KMart.

"You're kidding. I'm not getting out of the car. Drive away. I don't even want to be seen in the parking lot."

"They have jeans in there. Or in WalMart."

"Mom, you have completely lost it. They only have jeans like you wear in those stores. Wranglers or whatever."

"What about Kohl's? or..."

"I thought we were going to the real mall. The one with the good stores."

I sighed. I bought milk and cat litter in KMart (which is one of the reasons I like stores like that) Philip slumped in the car, hidden from possible surveillance and resigned to waiting for the weekend.

The last time I shopped with his brother, at a good store, Christopher looked through racks of pants while he kept standing further and further distances from me. He explained, in a kindly tone, that I was wearing "Mom Jeans" - the kind that give you a butt in the back -- and in the front, the kind they sell at KMart. (I bought them in Penneys btw) A lot of teens were in the store so I took the hint and asked him to text me when he had made his selections. He came out almost immediately after.

"What's wrong? You're so pale."

"Let's just go."

I looked back before leaving and I saw the problem: about six or seven little people had entered the store. (I'm pretty sure that's the correct term now)

Now my boys were raised in a diverse environment, but there is something about little people that completely freaks them out. Completely. So a few weeks back, I asked them to watch one of those BBC documentaries on people with challenged lives, and it included little people, people missing limbs, and twins attached at the head.
I thought it would help make them more compassionate.

Philip watched, put a pillow over his face at times, and shouted things like, "Oh my God, why are we watching this? What's wrong with you, Mom? Normal families don't do this!!!"

Christopher, more mature, looked at me at the end.

"See," I said as I stood there sagely in my Mom jeans, "you guys have nothing to complain about. Not a thing. These people have real problems. Don't you think?"

Philip shot from the room. Christopher looked at me and said, "We saw this film in science about this like 150 pound toddler. He lived outside of London."

"Imagine how difficult his life is. You think you learn things from watching about other people's lives who are challenged?"

Christopher nodded. "Yeah. I'm never going to Britain. That's where they all live."

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

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