My earliest given name was rice. Bambi, one of my mom’s old friends, who was a wild card and an artist, checked in on my mom at the beginning of her pregnancy, when I was the size of a grain of rice. The name stuck for a while, even when I got much bigger. Now I am the same height as a six foot high pile of rice. Thousands of grains I bet. Bambi died many years ago, but I remember her being so beautiful and so alive and so kind.
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Strange forces brought me here, and they keep giving me more days, and more nights, and sometimes even years. I don’t know if time passes or we do. As the earth approaches the position it was in when I got here, I get the urge to thank some of these forces, namely, my mother.
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She was in labor for 26 hours before I finally emerged (christ), 11, 686 evenings ago. I took a lot of work, still do. I arrived on my due date—adhering to the predictions of western medicine. As I child I thought this was a real badge of honor, though it feels less so now.
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The other day my mom asked me where I’m storing my bike in my new place, I told her at the end of the hallway under the stairs. That’s good, she said. Where it can stay out of trouble. And this cracked me up. And maybe I could stay out of trouble too, I said. And we cracked up together.
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Morgan Bassichis reflects on their creative work in this way: “I often, sometimes think about like an instrument. Like there’s strings that are taut. You can, if they’re taut between reverence and irreverence, you can play a good tune. But if they’re not taut, right, if they’re not taut enough…you…can’t make any music…..I’m holding deep reverence and deep irreverence at the same time. And I feel like each, the work is trying to kind of calibrate to a piece, the moment, a space, a time, and towards allowing us to be with our complexity and our brokenness and this and the simultaneity of the good and the horrific.”1
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I was wondering why I loved our exchange on the phone so much, and I think it’s because of the mischief of it, the gleam in the eye of it, the pluck. If you don’t know, plucky is showing courage or spirit in trying circumstances. My mother is living through trying circumstances, and so am I, and I bet you are too. And it feels okay on this day, because these circumstances also bring forth this insistent humor, dignity, grit.
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I’ve been feeling the pluck, more and more. My mom jokingly called me pluckalina when I told her. She then asked is pluckalina gender neutral? Or for a girl? We decided it’s trans. She’s still laboring toward my life, in ways large and small; in ways instrumental.