You Little Angel, You

Forget what I said about being over it-- after I wrote that I went and had me a big ol' breakdown, tears and pijamas and all, in front of Harry and my sister and everything. Harry couldn't have been more perfect. I felt hideous. At least it's out of my system, though. I can't explain what not-writing does to me. Or why I couldn't for so long. A poet I know once wrote a line about walking down the street with ghosts in your head, screaming inside, being told that a hundred dollars will buy your sanity back. It's an amazing poem. This same fellow edited my competition entry. I reread it last night, and what struck me about it was that when I wrote it I had some idea of who I was. I want to recover that.

Anyway, since I'm sure you're all thoroughly fed up with teen angst by now... I'm still taking CD requests, as I haven't started burning yet, so send 'em in! And I realized after what I wrote yesterday that I forgot to blog about Abbey, despite my promise, so here goes. Hope she'll forgive me.

Abbey Bender knows more music at thirteen than I'm sure I will at twenty. This is partly because of her father, a music savante and a brilliant English teacher at Dalton, and the fact that the walls of her house are lined in bookshelves of music. And not just jewel cases, either-- spindles. The kind you buy blank CDs in that hold fifty or a hundred albums, one on top of the other. There are vinyls, concert DVDs galore, and zebra-striped pillows in every corner. In the bathroom there's a red toothbrush as tall as a small child, and over the kitchen sink there's a sprawling Buddha and an eclectic collection of mugs, figurines and jacks and bits of string. The fridge is COVERED in fortune-cookie slips, photographs, magnets, and Frank Zappa quotes, to the extent that I'm not sure what color it actually is. On her bedroom door is a hand-drawn Christmas card from Sean Lennon, a signed picture of Bart Simpson, and one of Harry's sketches that reads "Be cool! Kill babies!". The hall is lined with signed vinyls from anyone you can imagine and plastic daisies, and a signed Keith Haring poster sits gently framed over the sofa. The Benders are responsible for about half the music I own, and for my obsession with Bob Dylan, and, lately, Thomas Pynchon.

I've sidetracked. Abbey is thirteen and a little shy, with big brown eyes and a soft smile, and has an impressive wardrobe. (It's not Abigail, or anything simpery like that, either-- just Abbey.) She's all about Eat to the Beat, the Ramones and Karaoke Revolution (sister software to Dance-Dance Revolution). She reads with considerable frequency and draws tall thin women with interesting outfits and wide smiles. I percieve sometimes that she doesn't have as much self-confidence as she ought to, doesn't realize how cool she really is. She's deep, too; I'm not sure she realizes how deep she is relative to the people around her. (Relatively? I'm not sure.) She sports a mod shoulder-length bob that turns out at the ends and frames her face nicely. When I met her, she was "Renata's Friend," so I put her through the typical drill of playing a Billboard album and quizzing her on the musicians. She got every single one right, even songs she'd never heard before, from the sound of the band, and I knew she was something special. She's grown a lot since I first met her; so have I, for that matter. She's lost some weight, and holds herself with more poise. Watching her grow has been delightful, although I'm not sure she'd like to hear me say that. She's becoming a little more like her mother, which isn't a bad thing, as her mother is very warm and very beautiful and a lovely painter. She's a little punk-rock and loves shopping at Trash & Vaudeville with Renata and me, and owns the most amazing collection of Converse, including some aquamarine-colored ones with Jackson-Pollock-style paint splatters that were her mothers' in the eighties and always make me smile. I've never met any of her friends, although she does have a curly-haired buddy named Harry who's interested in a girl named Miranda, and every time she says his name I laugh. She doesn't have a blog because her parents don't like them, but we're working to get her petition passed, so to speak. Perhaps this is more exposure than she'd like. In any case, she's very lovely and very bright, and some day she'll have men at her feet like royalty.

I must say, I really love the Benders. Between the incessant music talk and the political Sedars ("... and to continue to banish darkness, you can visit... Abbey, that's your cue..." "Oh, right... MoveOn.org, daddy.") and the monopoly games and the days spent wandering the village and St. Mark's, we've all come a long way and have come to love each other very dearly. It's a beautiful friendship.

Sorry about the excessively long posts, you guys. I guess I've got a lot to say suddenly. You can retaliate by making me burn albums.