Abandoned is a place, and for a moment I hear these words in my head (as if from a Country-Western song): Abandoned is a place where I come from.
I remember taking a trip to Costilla with Dad, the first time I saw where he came from. We were with Uncle Nemey, Suzanne, and Kathy. I see us piling out of the VW van and walking in a line through a narrow doorway. The house is two rooms and a closet, more a shack than a house. I can tell you what I was wearing — blue shorts made of soft cotton and a striped t-shirt — yet I can’t tell you what we saw in the house. There’s a photo I took recently of an empty room with boards and building materials (an abandoned renovation job) and that’s the image I see when I think of the house Dad grew up in. Dark, small windows, empty potato chip bag on the floor.
There is a whole vocabulary having to do with abandoned places. Shattered, tattered, forlorn. Trashed and infested. Scarred, and here I think of the thing abandoned as a scar on the landscape. Vacant and alone, and is a vacant stare an abandoned one? Has curiosity left the building?
Abandoned is the dog that fell out of the closet when Dad opened the door in his childhood home. Short-haired, reddish orange, I do recall that dog and how we all jumped back. It had been upright, as if on hind legs, and when I think of it falling I imagine it crumpling in a soft slump. It hadn’t been abandoned all that long before we arrived, its body yet to decay (and there’s another one of those words). We didn’t move the dog from where it lay in a heap, heap of trash. I wonder now how it felt to see so much abandonment in a place that once meant something more. If I had been older I might have thought to put my arm on Dad’s shoulder, and all I can say is I’m glad he was younger then. I don’t think he could stand seeing that dog now.
When I started this practice I had a notion in my head. It went something like, Abandoned is not so much sad as it is intriguing. And that’s the part of me that wonders what happened in a place that’s been left behind. Did a man younger than I am now come home from loading sacks of potatoes onto trucks all day, sit in a chair and lament that he was working his heart to death? Did a boy watch his mother die of cancer?
I’m thinking about Dad’s old house again. All of us standing in that house and it seeming like the ceilings and walls were closing in. Dad said, This is where my mother died, and he pointed to a spot on the dirt floor. We stood in circle peering into nothing but dirt. No stained mattress or rusty boxsprings. I sat down on my haunches, the way I always did as a girl, and I imagined Dad’s mother becoming smaller and smaller, disappearing like a whirlpool in a bathtub or a funnel the sand lion makes for the ants to fall into. When Dad’s mom died, he and his brothers and sisters were left alone.
Abandon has a permanence to it, yet don’t abandoned buildings go back to the earth? Weeds grow through the cracks and walls crumble. Someone eventually bought Dad’s childhood home. They must have cleaned up the dog and the debris (another word). Dad got married, had a family.
Abandoned is impermanent. Abandoned is never alone. Abandoned is my toes, is my hair, is me at this moment shipwrecked on my chair, my empty, empty mind.
-Based on a ten-minute practice on Topic post, Abandoned
redravine.wordpress.com 
You know what struck me about this piece, was the dog, the way it fell out of the closet when you visited your Dad’s childhood home. That’s really powerful – a strong statement about the power of abandonment. It’s hard to believe that really happened. It’s a story in and of itself. And the way you wanted to take care of your Dad:
If I had been older I might have thought to put my arm on Dad’s shoulder, and all I can say is I’m glad he was younger then. I don’t think he could stand seeing that dog now.
The other thing that struck me was that there is a language around abandonment. A vocabulary has built up around it. I hadn’t thought of it that way before.
These sections were also powerful:
Dad said, This is where my mother died, and he pointed to a spot on the dirt floor. We stood in circle peering into nothing but dirt. No stained mattress or rusty boxsprings. I sat down on my haunches, the way I always did as a girl, and I imagined Dad’s mother becoming smaller and smaller, disappearing like a whirlpool in a bathtub or a funnel the sand lion makes for the ants to fall into. When Dad’s mom died, he and his brothers and sisters were left alone.
Abandoned is impermanent. Abandoned is never alone. Abandoned is my toes, is my hair, is me at this moment shipwrecked on my chair, my empty, empty mind.
You’ve got me thinking about the piece I need to write on the Topic. And it makes me wonder: is abandonment about the death of something? Or the transformation of it into something else?
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“Abandoned is the place where I come from.”
You have both the lyric and the heartache for a Grammy winning country-western song.
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Now if only I had the musical talent…Carrie Underwood, here I come!
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QM: I have that same question about abandonment. I always saw it such a negative thing, to be abandoned, to not have worth. I can’t say I no longer see it that way, but this practice did lead me to at least admit that abandonment, like everything, has more than one side.
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From the way you wrote about your dad’s house, I see the word abandoned as depending on a person’s perspective. A house is abandoned if you left it behind. But if you find an empty house, it could mean a new place to live. Hope.
The line that stands out for me is:
“Abandon has a permanence to it, yet don’t abandoned buildings go back to the earth? Weeds grow through the cracks and walls crumble.”
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I haven’t actually looked up the word “abandon” in the dictionary lately, but I just flashed on two terms that seem to capture these different (not necessarily opposite) perspectives:
“abandon hope”
“with abandon” (as in, doing something with abandon)
Ah, I have too much time on my hands.
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It’s been two days since I read this…I simply can’t get that dog out of my head. A very powerful image formed… one my fragile heart seems to cling to…
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My first visit to my Dad’s old house took place when I was about 9 or 10. That’s when the dog fell out of the closet. We got to see this same house about eight years ago, and it had been completely renovated. It was not even recognizable as the same house in my memory. In fact, when I picture the first visit, I actually picture us in a crumbled down set of houses that are about a half mile away from where my Dad’s house sits. It’s weird how memory does that.
Because I couldn’t reconcile that first visit with my more recent memory of the house, I had to call my sister Janet after I wrote the initial practice with the dog in the closet. I asked her if the house we’d gone to that first time was, in fact, Dad’s house and not some other abandoned house in his town. It was Dad’s house, she told me. Do you remember the dog, I asked her. Yes. Do *you* remember Dad telling us about the spot where his mom died, she asked me. Yes, I told her back.
I like to read my childhood-memory posts to her over the phone (she doesn’t do computers) just to make sure I haven’t got it all wrong. She’s six years older than me; she was around for a lot of those years that are most sketchy in my recollections. Some days I feel like nothing from my childhood has stuck with me. Other times, like when I wrote this post, I feel like it’s all there if I just allow it to come out.
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mariacristina: I saw that you wrote a story using the Abandoned topic as inspiration. That’s so cool! You don’t know how delighted both QM and I have been to see that these topics are useful to writers. I can’t wait to read it.
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