The journalistic recountings of Ruth J. Flowers, born August fourteenth, in the year of Our Lord one thousand nineteen hundred and eighty-seven. Part one: the beginnings.
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Oh, dear. I am not certain how to begin. The King says to begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end, and it is sound advice, I know; but the trouble is, I haven’t the mind to know where the beginning is. I was always did have a hard time figuring geography.
Common sense tells me to begin with the details everyone wants to know; or, if they don’t care too terribly much to know them, they at least suspect they are the details they ought to know. I was born Ruth J. Flowers at two-thirty-three in the afternoon on August fourteenth, in the year of Our Lord one thousand nineteen hundred and eighty-seven, which was a Friday, and one that broke all the records for high temperature in our little town in middle Ohio. My father likes to kid that the heat burnt all the straw in all the barns that day, and that is why my hair is dark. He and my mother have fair hair that comes in wisps, mine is heavy and brown, almost black. My father cracks his joke at least twice a year, I think it is his little way of being nostalgic. And so also at least twice a year, my father reminds me, unwittingly, perhaps, but always dependably, that I was born an anomaly.
The “J” in my name stands for Jane, after my mother’s mother. I think it is a nice, classic name whose niceness is lost on people quick to assume Jane is plain and everywhere; when, in fact, mothers don’t christen too many Janes anymore. Jessica Doe or Emily Doe would be more in line with what the statistics tell. But I suppose people still have an ear for the poetry of a monosyllabic Jane, and I can’t complain about that.
My favorite poet is Theodore Roethke. I heard an old man reading “My Papa’s Waltz” on the radio when I was in fourth grade. It was short and beautiful, and I looked it up in a book at the library the next day and memorized it. The discovery gave way to many more short and beautiful poems, some longer ones too, and each day I worked at putting the lines in my head, so I would have some nice things to think about when I got stuck in line at the drugstore or daydreamed in class or tried to shut out the yelling that filled up our house. It occurred to me sometime that if we pass the hours with nice thoughts, even if they are the melancholy kind of nice, the world becomes unfathomably fair, and something to wonder at.
The library where I found Roethke is two streets over from the house I have lived in all my life. It is winter now, and the snow comes up over my knees at parts, and I am not always willful or chivalrous enough to make the walk. Partly it is that my mittens do not match, and one is thin and striped and lets in the wind, and my fingers turn purple wearing it. I do not mind so much, but not minding saps a little strength from me. In the summer, though, I amble through the neighborhood, singing Broadway songs and jazz standards and hymns from church, in a fairly loud voice too, and stop in to the library three times a week. I know the bar code on the strip of my orange library card by heart, it is thirteen digits, which is six past the average human digit span, add or subtract one. It is not such a feat, though. I think lots of people know their numbers offhand. I notice a lot of regulars coming in, in any case. Except roughly half of the regulars come to use the computers that sit in a cluster by the children’s corner, and they rarely bother to look at the books on the shelves. Computers are certainly nice and all, but the whole thing still makes me a little sad.
When I was ten my bicycle was stolen from outside the library doors. We filed a police report and did what we could, but my yellow bicycle was lost to the ether. It was for me one of those small incidents that is jarring in spite of its smallness, and it jiggered the way I understood people and what could be taken for granted and things like that. It was not only the bicycles. It was the kids sitting on top of the bicycles and peddling fast with them into the traffic lane, or else the other kids looking after them like rag dolls, small and helpless and limply protesting the disappearing act. I began to lock my bicycle with a heavy lock every time after that.