Thirteen

image from google 

Mary's Mixed Bag, at Imaginary Gardens With Real Toads,  has set us the task of writing to the number Thirteen. Mary gave us lots of choices: to write about fears and beliefs around Friday the 13th,  writing a rondeau, (a poem with thirteen lines), or the age thirteen, either ourselves or our daughters at that age. Thirteen. I remember.


I turned thirteen
the summer my father died.
Twelve was awkward.
It was all arms and legs 
and skinned knees,
from always falling down.
A pony-tail skinned back, 
freckles, pedal pushers,
gawkiness that
annoyed my mother -
a desire to be seen,
with no clue how to 
make it worth looking.

Over that summer,
somehow,
a transformation 
happened.
My father had died.
I was no longer
a child.


I learned how to
Do Hair,
sleeping at night on prickly rollers
with pincurled bangs:
(this was akin to the self-scourging
of the mystics, but with
only a sore scalp
in return.)

"You have to suffer to be beautiful,"
my mom always said,
smiling.
I learned how to 
accent the positive
with a bit of makeup,
huge round blue eyes
in the time when I still had eyelashes
(ah, youth!)


When cousin Charlie came 
for my father's funeral,
I was sitting in Grandma's living room, 
reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,
a book that was a revelation to me,
discovering Francie and I
had similar fathers. 
Charlie stopped short
on the threshold:
"Is that Sherry?" he asked,
dumbfounded.


Thirteen
was standing on the steps
of the church
at the end of the funeral,
looking out at the traffic 
on Bernard and Richter,
everyone going about
their ordinary summer afternoon.
It was my mom looking at me
and saying,
"We have a long row to hoe,"
me feeling like
her protector.


We did.
We had a long row to hoe.
But looking back 
down all those shambling years,
I can still remember
- exactly -
what it felt like
to be
thirteen.