In search of eleven

The age of being almost...

Before we begin

Think back to when you were eleven, what do you remember? Tell us a feeling, a memory, a story, an incident or even your favorite book, movie, TV show or song that you recall from your eleventh year. What did you want, fear, find funny? Or maybe you are witnessing eleven in a loved one right now in real time. What do you see, hear, sense as you watch them navigate this strange in-between year that straddles the threshold between childhood and adolescence? 

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In search of…

Photo by Marcel Eberle on Unsplash

I’ve spent all week trying to summon myself at age eleven. I’ve spent a good bit of the time staring at a screen, scribbling in my journal, going back through old journal entries and photos. I’ve combed the internet to see what I can find about eleven-year-olds in 2012, or now, or anytime. I’m writing a novel. One of my characters, Olivia, is eleven at the moment and I’m having a lot of trouble climbing into her skin.  

Part of me doesn’t want to. I can feel a wall of resistance rise when I try to recall my eleventh year. The resistance is not rooted in terrible memories or trauma. I feel a little protective of that child that was me. She can still embarrass me. She was one of those kids who thought she was more mature than she was, who hid her shyness and awkwardness behind thick glasses, a book, and when those failed her, a bossy demeanor. She wasn’t very good at sports, especially ones that involved teams and expectations of others. She was both terrified of adulthood and achingly eager to be older, to be recognized by adults as one of them. She had the feeling of standing on the edge of “almost” for what seemed like a very long time. I often wonder how she would handle being eleven today, in this world. I imagine this world to be far more difficult but, in truth, it might seem that way because of the age I am now. 

Eleven. Sandra Cisneros wrote a short story about it that captures in a few paragraphs the slippery sensation of being eleven. 

“What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one. And when you wake up on your eleventh birthday you expect to feel eleven, but you don’t. You open your eyes and everything’s just like yesterday, only it’s today. And you don’t feel eleven at all. You feel like you’re still ten. And you are—underneath the year that makes you eleven.” - Rachel, in “Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros.

I still carry my eleven-year-old self inside me. All the ages I’ve been before and since are “rattling inside me like pennies in a band aid box,” as Cisneros puts it. This week, after days of trying and failing to write an eleven-year-old girl onto the page, I decided to open that box and shake all the coins out where I could see them. Here are a few things I remembered when I went searching for me at eleven. There are more in there, just waiting for me to look.  

• When I was eleven, I slow-danced with the same boy who dunked me in a trash bin the year before, when I was ten. It was lunch time recess and the weather was bad so the teacher let us play records and dance. She did not mean to slow dance. But she never looked behind the coatrack in the gym so she never saw us.

• My friend Beatrice and I sneaked some cigarettes to smoke in the field behind the school until we got good at it. Then we quit.

• At recess, we all played Red Rover, Red Rover over and over. I dreamed of getting contact lenses. I took trumpet lessons and then begged to quit them when my lip swelled, chapped and bled and, I feared, made me look ugly. 

• I took ballroom dancing lessons in the summer and was four inches taller than almost every/any boy that danced with me. I longed to get my period. I dreaded it. 

• When our teacher read The Hobbit after lunch, I wanted her to keep going and going. Ditto for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. 

• During my eleventh summer, I spent a whole day fishing from brook to brook with my friend Deb. She caught 12 brookies. I caught one. I tucked it in the front pocket of my sweatshirt and then left the sweatshirt at Deb’s house where the smell eventually attracted her mother’s ire. Later that year, I helped Deb and her mother pluck the turkeys her mother had raised to sell for Thanksgiving. The big feathers were easy. The little ones took hours.

• I started saving my allowance for a shotgun. That Christmas my brother received a rifle for his present. I got a watch. I asked why, when “Santa” knew I’d been saving for a shotgun. My father said, “You’d already saved a lot of the money. I thought I’d be taking something away from you by getting it for you.” I failed to understand at the time. Now I do. The gun, a 410, cost $36. It was the first “big” purchase I’d ever made on my own. I used it for a few years to shoot skeet. I was terrible at it. That was the end of my relationship with guns. 

Please…

Help me understand all the ways eleven can look and feel. Think about your own eleventh year and let me know what shakes out of your tin box of memories. Or tell me what you’ve observed in the eleven-year-olds you know and love. Do you think eleven still means the same thing now as it did when you were that age? If you are eleven, maybe we should talk!

Sandra Cisneros: Eleven

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In honor of National Poetry Month…

Eleven Poems by Maxine Kumin including this one:

Appetite

I eat these
wild red raspberries
still warm from the sun
and smelling faintly like jewelweed
in memory of my father
tucking the napkin
under his chin and bending
over an ironstone bowl
of the bright drupelets
awash in cream
my father
with the sigh of a man
who has seen all and been redeemed
said time after time
as he lifted his spoon

men kill for this

A spine poem

Judy Reeves put this together in celebration of National Poetry Month. Inspired? Go ahead, take a look at your shelves and find the poem sitting there. Send it so we can all see it!

Speak to me of summer — but first, the spring

When I read this essay by Chevanne Scordinsky I kept coming back to it and the poem she wrote as a companion to it. Both are perfect for this month. They speak to the way plants bring life no matter where they come from or whether they are potted or wild. Chevanne writes The FLARE where you will find her fiction, nonfiction, and poems.

From her essay:

“My birthday is in the fall and I’ve always loved the toasty fall days with a light sweater that felt like being wholly in your body. The temperature is just right. But spring. Spring. Then summer. Speak to me of summer… My chlorophyll children would burst with shining joy and I’d watch them as bees gathered to sip nectar. I started treating myself a bit like a plant too, languishing in the sun with lunch or thudding music and a glass as sweaty as my skin.” - From Speak to Me of Summer: Everything in Bloom by Chevanne Sordinsky.

From her poem:

The potted
The kept
We call to them on butterfly wings
Through bee and beetle
And to their keepers
That they would return our family to the circle
To the shade and warmth of fern and paw
To the network of living lichen and song of soil

Return them

Return them

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P.S. And now, your moment of Zen…beginning and end

The brilliant life and gorgeous final days of a Gerber daisy that bloomed on Rae Francoeur’s desk in the frigid month of March when ice still covered the windows in her Massachusetts office where she writes and works. Both photos by Rae Francoeur.

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