The next three weeks I will be in So. Korea, visiting my son's family: Greg, Jinny, and my grandson, Noah. But before I go:
Here's another prompt for you writers ready to write but stuck, or you writers writing but ready for some fun, or just you writers:
#4 - Write two pages about a physical characteristic you are proud to have inherited and passed on. (Abigail Thomas, Thinking About Memoir)
Here's my effort (NOW WRITE AND POST YOUR OWN):
My father left me his flat, hairless chest, his big bum, and his balding crown. Which of these I am most proud of I can’t say, but I have passed them all on to my son, Greg, and, in truth, I am proud of that: Whereas all three have made me self-conscious, they have made him humble.
I became conscious of my lack of bosom in junior high school, as I saw buds beginning to bulge on my girlfriends. By the time we showered en masse after high school gym class, I was painfully aware of the fulsome, pendulous, and swinging breasts all around. They filled my peripheral vision as I hunched my shoulders, bending inward like a closing book to hide my blank pages.
My mother came to my rescue with a bra – not the training bra I had been eyeing at Kress, but a full-sized monstrous thing, padded with foam so firm that when I put it on I suddenly had the Wasatch Mountains on my chest. This gargantuan thing I wore through high school and college, attracting admiring and slavering gazes from the boys, and no small amazement from the men I slept with when, on the first encounter, they reached to grasp these cups of flesh and embraced instead a springy, lumpy, or hardened ball of foam, depending on the age of the bra or, worse, nothing but a wrinkled raspberry nipple on a plate.
My bum was equally problematic, hanging on behind me like two koala babies riding in a back pouch. Pants that fit my bum cheeks were long in the leg and wide at the waist. Mother to the rescue again girdled me in a tube of elastic so tight I developed diverticulitis and weave lines on my abdomen that remained in my flesh like birth marks. “Good for having babies,” she soothed, but since she never really explained the process of birth, I thought I was pregnant in the bum.
These sartorial disabilities I discarded (along with makeup, high heels, tight clothes, and styled hair) when the women’s movement freed me from artificial beauty, and I proudly wore my chest and cheeks as outward signs of inner beauty. When I began to jog, I reduced my posterior gallon jugs to half-gallons, and winced for those unlucky women trying to run with twin sacks of flour flapping on their chests.
The balding I don’t care to discuss except to say that I certainly understand those pitiful men who so lovingly take the few strands of hair left and pull them across the entire pate, as though these strings will cover up for the viewing public the shiny pink globe beneath. We do what we can.
My son has been a great teacher to me. He happily exposes his hairless chest as though he is the lucky man unburdened with all that sweaty hair. He elegantly wears his pants as though pleased with the extra room in the legs which the bum-fitting slacks bequeath him. And when we talk on Skype, he bends his head right in front of the computer webcam; so there I am in Salt Lake City, looking at his balding circle in Korea. He laughs and says “Look what you gave me, Mom. More to appreciate every day!”
That’s what he has taught me: appreciation. “It is as it is,” he says. And to that I might add, “It isn’t as it isn’t.” And for that, we should be grateful.
