Source: topteny.com

My Real Memoir

Open doors. Every year, as winter faded and spring approached, it seemed a new door would open, leading me from a darkened room into a new one bright with possibilities. Two years previous, I’d gone into the studio with my band to record my first album. One year earlier, I’d staged my first play as a writer-director-composer, and watched in happy disbelief as the audience stood and cheered, the last scabs of a lingering depression falling away.

But this year, like a badly listing ship, on the wake of plummeting grades and empty pockets, I’d drifted home to Mommandad, bringing my dog Ginnie with me. Mom loved Ginnie and was happy to see me. But every conversation with Dad had subtitles: “Why would you adopt a dog when you can’t even take care of yourself?” You know that performing arts degree you’re getting is worthless, right?”

So I avoided him as I drove off each day to finish my worthless degree, leaving him and Mom to watch the dog I shouldn’t have adopted. And every night I’d come home from play rehearsals and look into Ginnie’s big, affection-starved eyes, hating Dad for being right and myself for failing to prove him wrong.

I had talent, right? Maybe. I took Advanced Play Directing to try new things, and colored way outside the proverbial box. For an assignment in “anti-realistic” drama, the other students directed plays by celebrated European existentialists. But I wrote and directed a bizarre variation on Pinocchio, featuring a drug-tripping Flakey Frogmother (Fairy Godmother) and Lewis Carroll-ish narrative: “So, Wold Ed (Geppetto) sent the little bastard Nobody (Pinocchio) off to the big, red drool horse (big red schoolhouse) at the end of the rainglow.” After Nobody tells a lie and his, ahem, “whistle” grows larger, Wold Ed sends him to a convent. Two of the three profs who team-taught the class gave it an F. The third said it showed “signs of genius.”

Screenwriting was my favorite class, and my only “A” that semester. The professor, bless him, called my full-length version of the little monster movie buddy Jeph and I had started in high school, “Brilliant!” and added, “You have to make this movie!” So I did.

45 years later.

But those few bright spots vanished when I learned that, after slipping out of the house several times, Ginnie had gotten pregnant. “How do we handle this?” I asked.

“We don’t,” said Dad, “you do, either by moving out and taking your pregnant dog with you” (with no income, three months before the end of my senior year), “or by taking her to an animal shelter.”

Heartbroken and defeated, I found a “no kill” shelter. After walking Ginnie to a cage just like the one I’d rescued her from the year before, I told her I loved her, rubbed her ears and kissed her face, and tried not to hear her whimpering as I walked away. When that shelter door closed, it felt like every door in the world was closing. Forever. And on the way home, some invisible dam inside me broke. Unable to stop seeing Ginnie’s face, I wept for the first time…

Since I was a boy.

My Real Memoir is a series. To read the next one, click here.