more about things left unsaid

I thought a lot last night about the childhood incident I am leaving out of The Strega's Story. Another reason I am leaving it out is that I am not ready to write about it in any detail--I actually wrote a short story about it years ago (which wasn't fiction at all, I realize now), but that story is lost (I tended to write things back then and just metaphorically toss them to the wind eventually, probably a good thing). I find I haven't adequately processed it yet, and it may remain one of the many stories about my life that may have to remain untold. I am sure that it was as horrible for my parents as it was for me; they weren't monsters, just immersed in alcoholism and, in my mother's case, a struggle with mental problems that was, in all likelihood, unbelievably difficult for her. In fact, both my parents get a fairly glowing portrait in The Strega's Story (as well as a couple of my siblings--I'd really like to let it rip about some things regarding that, but Ms. Strega has to watch out about turning into Ms. Bitch--or, as evidenced by some things I said before I knew more about James Frey, Ms. Loudmouth).

Still, the point is that I'm leaving something out of my memoir that I can't really handle writing about--but I'm not creating my Italian family out of thin air or creating some weird and utterly false persona for myself (though all memoirists create a persona, I think), for then I would Frey, and I don't wish to. Any fudging or supposition I have to make in my book is to try and bring myself closer to the truth--even just my perception of the truth--of my family's lives (even the points in which I break into narrating the story in my grandmother's persona), to try and present an authentic picture of how they lived. Maybe leaving out the child abuse incident is altering the truth somehow, but my family isn't presented as the Brady Bunch, and, as I said before, I'm not writing a linear autobiography. And I do wish that, at times, my mom, grandma, and other female relatives had refrained from telling really weird stories in my proximity when I was little (but hey, I sure listened)--but that, too, is what happened and I can make sense of them now, even though they generally served to scare the crap out of me then and further my belief that the world was a scary and dangerous place.

As a detour from this subject (which Ms. Strega, I know, needs to shaddup about), we had the strangest experience today. Mr. Strega went out to walk Rubio, then called me out of the house and said, "Take a whiff of the air." I did--the air was permeated with the smell of what my Mississippi-born dad calls "them funny cigarettes." Wacky tobakky, ganja, weed, Herbal Essence, chron, Magic Melody Maker, whatever you want to call it, it wuz pot--and not just a whiff, but a veritable Chernobyl nuclear cloud of fragrant marijuana. I felt calmer and hungrier just from standing outside for five minutes (and wow, all my nausea from my lupus-meds just disappeared)...kidding...hee hee....

Of course we suspected (for a second), the teens in this house, but they swore it was not them--in fact, they told us they were in their bedroom, having a horrified discussion as to whether Mr. Strega and I had finally thrown in the parenting towel and were now blazing up a big fat doobie in full sight (and smell) of the entire neighborhood. We finally came to believe that a marijuana farm (not acres, but the kind that are probably in the hills 'round here) of some kind was being burned by local law enforcement--the pot smell alernated with some kind of fuel smell, and it was all over the neighborhood, not just this house. But Lord, life in these here woods can be...interesting.

Coda: Mr. Strega called the Sherrif's Dispatch to find out if they knew anything about the Marijuana Mushroom Cloud (Mr. Strega made the dispatcher laugh by telling her that it smelled like Bob Marley's lifetime stash was going up in smoke all at once). She had no idea what it was all about. Our theories now run to my usual silliness (someone buring the plants in their fireplace to add congeniality to household heating), to even greater silliness (people trying to get the entire neighborhood high, on the level of the rumors in the 1960s that EVIL HIPPIES were plotting to put lsd in the Los Angeles water supply). We don't know, but since I live in a small town, the truth will probably come out, and it could be even weirder than we think.