May 2018: The Creek
I grew up with a creek behind where I lived. We lived in a row house on a block of row houses, and across the street, behind the houses, was a wide field with a creek at the far side. You could get to the field by cutting through the Shanahans’ backyard, if they were home, or you had to walk down to the end of the block, where the brick row homes ended and you could skip around the Basetti’s side yard and make your way over to the field. I never knew what an exquisite luxury a field - a plain field, no purpose, no definition - could be, but I think about it often now.
The creek was my favorite part. It was a creek that never got more than maybe three or four feet deep. It wound through a cove of trees, then straightened out and ran the length of the field, where the field dipped down to accommodate the cold water. Our block had lots of kids and we would often run around in a pack. We would roll up our jeans and wade into the creek. I can still remember how much I hated to put my bare foot on a mossy rock, slick and cold. I’d prefer to stand on the pebbles, or the rocks that were smooth but without any green on them. There was a rope swing someone had tied over the deep end, with a knot tied into the bottom so you could cling to it if you lost your courage to jump. Further down, under the trees, you could dig into the side of the creek and pull out hunks of clay, which we once carried home and made into little figurines and tried to fire in the Shanahan’s oven, but they just turned ashy and fragile.
When I was in the sixth grade, I didn’t run around in a pack of kids anymore. We had all entered our awkward phases. The boys I’d built forts with and chased in the field now hung out with my brother, all of them crowded in our small living room to play Nintendo. The girls on my block were older than me - my babysitters and their friends, teen girls who sometimes welcomed me to sit with them and let them play with my hair, but who could turn on a dime and dismiss me coldly. I preferred to be by myself. Around that time, my father had gotten a small tape recorder so he could record his assignments on the job. Often, he would leave it behind on his dresser, and I would take it with me to record things in the world. One day I took it down to the creek to record what the creek sounded like. I wanted to see if I could contain it, the bubbling and the crickets, the stillness. I was squatting down in the shallow end, my thumb jammed on the record button, when I heard someone behind me.
“Whatcha doing?”
It was Matt, and not the Matt from my block or the Matt from the next block. I didn’t know he lived around here. It was Matt, the cool kid. He was in my class and had shiny black hair, new clothes, perfectly crisp baseball hats that he would wear backwards at recess. My reaction to any new situation back then was to freeze in a web of fear of anxiety. I blurted out, “I’m recording what the creek sounds like.”
“Why?” he laughed.
Panicked, I said, “I’m going to write about it.”
“Like for Mrs. Brooks?”
“No.” I tried to sound cool, nonchalant. “Just, like, for me.”
Matt shrugged. Then he ran away. Once he was gone, I stood up and jogged back to my house, mortified that someone had found me in my private reverie. All night I worried about what Matt would tell people. He would say I was strange, he would tell everyone that I was a weird girl who played by herself. He would, god forbid, tell everyone that I wrote things not for school. I was not a popular kid, and this was only going to make things worse.
The next day, Matt called down to me from his end of the cafeteria table during lunch. Our class of twenty or so kids all shared one lunch table. I sat somewhere in the middle with the other nerdy kids. There was Barbie, who still wore bows in her hair, and there was Megan, who ate lunch with her neon pink retainer on a napkin on the table. There was John, whose mother had stuck a label on the inside of his lunchbox that reminded John to say his prayers. At the far end were the cool kids, well dressed, straight teeth, shrieks of laughter. When Matt swiveled from the far end of the table and called my name, I froze.
"Tell them about the tape recorder."
"What?"
He thumbed at me. "Yesterday I went down to the creek, and Courtney was there making a recording of what it sounded like. So she can like write something about it."
Blood pounded in my ears. It was like an out of body experience. This was a disaster. Then, Matt did the thing I still think about today.
"It was so dope," he said. "I wanna hear what it sounds like now."
I blushed hard. The other kids weren’t interested and started talking over Matt, but Matt had made it clear that he was impressed. I was shocked. It was bewildering to be seen not only in the literal sense, but that I could tell someone what I was doing and that they would be impressed. It’s a sliver of a moment that I think of so often, years and years and years later. Being in the crowded cafeteria that smelled like lunch meat and plastic, the constant anxiety I carried that my peers would banish me, the way I felt most like myself when in my own private world. How Matt - where is he now? - leaned across the table to shout down to me, to announce to our classmates that he had discovered me doing something different, something cool.
That moment of shock, I feel a pinch of it anytime I put something out into the world and people respond. That anyone could be interested in what I create is still a validation that reverberates back to that awkward adolescent girl squatting in the creek. Back then, before I put the tape recorder back on my father’s dresser, I kept it for one night in my room. When my family was asleep and it was quiet out, I took the tape recorder, rewound it, and played the sounds of the creek back to myself. I curled on my side with the covers over my head, so no one would hear, and I let the bubble of the creek come back to me, over and over. It made me want to create, to make magic, to try and capture everything I could, and then if I could open my palm and have others who enjoyed the magic, then that was an unexpected gift.
xo,
c
P.S. -
I wrote about my obsession with the literary how to for Electric Literature (more elementary school memories informed this essay).
This Mother's Day think about contributing to the Black Mamas Bail Out fund. There are tens of thousands of people in jails just because they cannot afford the bail. This is a great way to help your community and fight the injustice of our country's incarceration problem.