Wednesday, June 24, 2009

three word wednesday~wrinkle-fickle-sparkle

Mirror, Mirror



Using her index finger, Sparkle pulled the skin taunt around her left eye, trying to see how she’d look if the area was smooth once more.

She’s spent her youth swearing she’d never go the way of The Establishment; that fixation on youth and the status quo. She’d never married the fathers of any of her children; Seagull, Creek nor Bishop. Later, she was shocked when they changed their names to Rose, Henry and Bob and became a stock market broker, a teacher and an engineer, respectively. It was too much for her to watch them happily blend in with the rest of the bourgeois. After all, she’d raised them to be free thinkers, to love nature, to find the commune a way of life...lessons they gladly abandoned as soon as they started high school. By college, they were far away from her way of thinking and living, and it was with a sigh of relief they all parted ways.

Sparkle had been swept up in that last wave of hippidom...she grew up in a time when protesting was a way of life, free love a way to live, rebellion something you strived to help accomplish. Her generation remembered Laugh-In and the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate and read Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time soon after it was published. She’d started life with the name Susan in Cleveland, and became Sparkle in 1978, when she ran away to San Francisco, too late to catch the full impact of the Haight/Ashbury crowd, but in time to catch crabs from a guy who told her he’d once slept with Joplin. He took her virginity, leaving her with the aforementioned crabs and a ruby ring, that she later pawned to buy a bus ticket to Oregon, to live with a group there who were still searching for love, happiness and a way to live without working.

It was there she had her children in a teepee, letting them run naked with others of their age. She gave them names that linked them to an event in her life, names that set them apart from the children they met in public school, where all of the group's children were forced to go by Social Services. That started them on the road away from the place they lived; set them to yearning to be seen as ‘normal’. The status quo became their Holy Grail.

Time passed, people changed, the group disbanded, and Sparkle found herself living in a trailer park in Yuma, Arizona with a man named Grey whom she’d met in a biker bar in Phoenix. They stayed in the life of hipnoids--those people who never really accepted that the 60’s were over--going to Rainbow Family gatherings, growing their own pot in hidden fields, and making a living by selling handmade articles at Renaissance Fairs and various other events that catered to their kind.

It was finding Grey flirting with a much younger woman who had stopped to buy one of their stone pipes that put her where she was right now--in front of a mirror, pulling on her eyes and thinking about asking Creek if he would front the money for her to get a face lift, just a little one... wondering if her kids had the right idea about life after all.

17 comments:

  1. Sadly beautiful. Resonates with a lot of truth here.

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  2. Indeed, it is sadly beautiful.

    Quite well written.

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  3. Proof here, I think, that we are never the person we were a little time before.
    Very perceptive.

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  4. you just described three quarters of the population of my little rural town in northern california.. and you did it eloquently..

    i am so glad i stopped by...

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  5. This is beautiful. It's scary that I can relate to her. I don't have any specially named children or anything, but I too often disagree with the idea of "normal" and the like. I wonder if I'll end up looking in the mirror years from now and seeing what she sees...

    Happy 3WW I played too!

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  6. interesting, someone who grew up but never quite mature, guess it's hard to leave the pass behind but the mention of wrinkles is certainly something we all relates to

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  7. ....and the love generation ages. This short piece is so perceptive, so "right on".

    Glad to see a fellow New Orleanian doing 3WW. Did you move before or after K?

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  8. This story rings with passing time, changing views and the fickle marks of life. Nice.

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  9. This was sad and so beautifully written...people always want what they are lacking, and even this free-spirited woman finally conforms to the society whose rules she has always rejected. Wonderful read.

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  10. i like your writing. Great story with a lot of detail.

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  11. Living within walking distance of the Haight-Ashbury, I've seen too many of these people that time forgot. Nice story.

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  12. This was captivating !! really nice :)

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  13. Loved the way you made it full circle.

    You can call me Sparkle henceforth.

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  14. i m glad i came here and this is something i loved!

    totally!

    My 3WW

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  15. I must say you have a great writing skills. The complete post was engaging and reflected the truth of life :)
    Nice work.

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  16. I love how this is “engineered”—starting with the eye skin-pulling, sliding into history and back to why the eye-skin pulling—and how smooth and easy it reads. Pure enjoyment : )

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