I Must Have Been Hiding Under A Blanket


There are five children in my family of birth, four girls, Mary Grace, Michele (Me), Margaret and Martina and then my brother, Mark. Notice our names all start with the letter M. Our last name begins with an N. So my parents would sign all the holiday cards Laura, Tony and the 5 M&N’s. Cute huh? We also have the family shorthand of calling each other by our initials. Mary Grace became MG. I’m MT because my middle name is Teresa. Margaret Caroline is MC. ML is my sister Martina Laura and by brother Mark Anthony is MA.

I love that Mark’s initials are MAN. When he came to visit me in San Diego once, I took a picture of him outside the Museum of Man. But that’s another story.

MG, MT (Me) and MC were spaced three years apart. Then my mother took a break from birthing babies and ML didn’t appear until five years later, with MA to follow. This little gap in the line-up always offered a bit tension in the sharing of family memories. The fact that we moved from Delaware to New Jersey when ML was a baby and my mother was pregnant with MA, offered an additional split in the childhood stories.

One time when ML was about five maybe six years old, MG, MC and me, were telling tales of our Delaware days. In frustration of not being able to join in, ML announced, “Well I must have been hiding under a blanket.”

That phrase became a family classic to pull out whenever someone was feeling left out in the conversation. I, personally, of late have extended its use to when I feel I wasn’t fully present to what is going on, or when my shortcomings embarrass me.

This leads me into my chosen life focus of late, writing. I am a terrible speller, the rules of punctuation often evade me, and I mispronounce words on a regular basis. Just the other night when my friend Jennifer, helped me set-up this blog, we were reading how to post pictures. One way is through using a program named, Picasa. I don’t even want to say how badly I butchered that simple word.

In times such as this the dialogue in my head opens with “And YOU want to be a writer!” But I’ve gotten to the point of acceptance to where my cheeks will flush to blush red not full on crimson, I accept correction in pronouncing words, I ask others to read my writing for punctuation (some stuff still slips by), thank the computer geniuses of bygone days for Spell Check and I am willing to increase the muscles in my arms by lifting my huge dictionary.

But when the full grip of fear comes on me and I can’t seems to stop the critic in my head, I pull up from the bottoms of my feet a good guffawing laugh and announce, “when they taught that in school, I must have been hiding under a blanket.”

Metaphor n. [MET uh for] a figure of speech comprised of a word or phrase that transfers its meaning to another, use as a means of illustration. Analogy, likening, image, simile, trope, symbol.

Roget’s Super Thesaurus

By the Sea
I have taken a plunge after nine years of employment and left my position as a massage therapist on staff at the Hotel Del Coronado to skinny dip in the sea of Words. In the past I have stuck in a toe, played chicken with the incoming tide on the beach and walked in up to my knees, but now I am declaring myself a swimmer ready to immerse in the lap of the letters, wave of the words and surf of the sentences. I chose the image of the sea to describe my leaving because I am also a teacher whose subject matter is the therapeutic value of water. And because the “Grand Old Lady” herself, the Hotel Del Coronado, sits on an island between the San Diego Bay and the Pacific Ocean. The website http://www.ecoronado.com describes Coronado as: “A small, tree-lined beach haven. Coronado is about a mile from downtown San Diego and is linked to the city by the Coronado-San Diego Bridge. Crown City, as it is called (Coronado means "crowned one" in Spanish), regards itself as a friendly, small town of wide leafy streets lined with Victorian homes and Californian bungalows.”

Each day on my drive to and from work I crossed the Bay Bridge. On the way toward Coronado, I watched the sparkle of the sun upon the water, boats bobbing in the marina and the Hotel Del off in the distance, with her majestic red circular roofs sitting like a magic castle on the edge of the sea. Returning, my view was of downtown San Diego, its grid like streets, mass of skyscrapers, squat warehouses, the Convention Center with its sail-inspired roof and Petco Ball Park. The Laguna Mountains appeared as the background to this landscape picture. On a fog lifted afternoon, range after range stood like pointed green and brown tempera painted peaks on a kindergartener’s easeled picture.

But now I choose instead of crossing over the water, to dive in. I am in search of my metaphor, the one to describe the passages in my life. Today it is the Sea. The wide expanse of the churning, life filled waters that hold stories, secrets and a history of our planet. After many years of steady employment on the safety of the beach, I shed my clothes to dog-paddle in the chill of the waters of words. Will I sink or swim?