Burt Reynolds Put Goop On My Hand

(Pa and Uncle Buck, circa 1970-something)

Baking has become a pretty significant part of my daily life. There is a slowness to it — the stirring, the watching, the standing in front of the oven waiting for something you simply cannot rush. I try to make it intentional. Hands busy, mind present, the whole nine. A moving meditation, if you will. But sometimes the mind has other plans and just quietly wanders off without telling you.

Which is how yesterday I burned the hell out of my hand lifting the lid off a Dutch oven without a hot pad. Rookie move.

I was still living la Viva Loca in Rose Park, Utah. My mother had just broken up with a police officer named Jan, who always creeped me out. I was never sure exactly why at the time, just a low hum of wrong that my nervous system registered. I would find out why a few years later at a party I was too young to be at, but let’s just say my instincts were correct, as they almost always were. What I know is that I slept better the night I heard he wasn’t coming back. That sixth sense, call it instinct, call it survival intelligence, had been running quietly in the background my entire life. It was what kept me alive, even when I walked myself directly into very dangerous situations, which I did with considerable regularity.

I was sitting on the front stairs of the fourplex. We lived upstairs, and those center stairs were my permanent perch. I would sit there for hours, watching the street, until someone wanted to talk to me, at which point I would leave. I heard him before I saw him. That sound, low and rolling and unmistakable, coming around the corner before the bike did. I was curious at first sight and didn’t expect him to stop.

But he did.

He looked like Burt Reynolds. Everyone said it. I couldn't look at him without thinking it. The mustache, the hair, the jeans and boots, and that Harley — loud and the coolest thing I had ever seen in my eleven years on earth. His name was Dave, but it could have been Burt.

⁂

He started coming around a lot. And from the first time I met him, something inside me completely relaxed. It was a strange sensation, unfamiliar enough that I didn’t trust it. I didn’t trust anything or anyone at that point, and I certainly didn’t trust that he was going to stay. So I wasn’t going to let myself get attached in any way, shape, or form. But the feeling was there anyway, quiet and warm and slightly alarming, the way good things felt to a kid who had learned that good things had a way of disappearing.

One day he showed up with a bicycle. Banana seat. Sissy bar. Absolutely the coolest thing anyone had ever given me. I waited for someone to take it away.

They didn’t.

Then he asked if I wanted a ride on the Harley. He told me to hop on and hold onto him.

Hold onto him.

I hadn’t held onto anyone, well, ever. But I did. And we went for a ride. The one thing he told me to be careful of was the tailpipe. “It’s very hot,” he said, with a slight but stern smile, the kind I would later come to recognize as the I’m telling you something because I care smile. And the one thing I did, you already know, was touch the tailpipe.

I got severely burned. I have never seen someone so distraught and worried about me, well, ever. It hurt like hell, and I said those exact words. He smiled when I swore.

He got me. Someone finally got me.

That was the first time in my life I understood what it felt like to be cared for. This is not to say my mother didn't care. She did. She just patched me together when needed. To be fair, she was single-parenting three kids and working two jobs. But this was something else entirely. And I had no idea what to do with any of it. Not the burn, the burn was fine. It was the look on his face. The distraught, worried, where does it hurt, how can I take that hurt away look that I had absolutely no framework for. Love that felt safe was completely foreign to me. It was as comforting as it was confusing.

I laid awake all night with my hand in a plastic cup of ice. Every time the ice melted and the water warmed, I got up to replenish it. And every time, I checked to make sure he was still there.

He was.

⁂

This morning I sat down for yoga nidra. It is a practice of yogic sleep, a guided meditation that takes you to the threshold between waking and dreaming, where the nervous system drops its guard and the deeper layers become accessible. I go to it when I need clarity. And some days, like today, I go when I need comfort, when there is too much happening and I need to find the floor beneath the floor. My teacher calls one of her recordings Safe and Sound, which is the one I sat with today. It asks you to bring in something, or someone, that makes you feel safe. Safe. I’ve been working on that one my whole life.

I have people in my life who love me unconditionally, to their bones, and in ways I am still learning to receive. People who show up, who stay, who hold me in ways that genuinely move me. But safe is a different word. Safe is specific and rare and not something I have found easily or often. I have spent most of my life being the one who kept other people safe. The strong one. The one who held it together when they needed to fall apart. It is a role I love and hold with enormous humility.

But there is Dave. He never left.

Dave (Pa) is eighty-three years old. When he wraps his big arms around me, I can still feel it deep in my soul, that same thing I felt at eleven, the night he put some sort of goop on my hand, wrapped it in a dish towel, explained about the ice, and stayed. When I see his face on FaceTime, or more often than not, the top of his head (bless his technically challenged heart), I still feel it.

(peace-out, man!)

These stories were dragged out of my mind. I stand by almost none of my decisions. Some names have been changed to protect the innocent. Mainly because I can’t remember them.

That’s what’s on my mind this week. Meanwhile, in the actual kitchen — muffins baking. Music on (Eagles are Pa’s jam). Pull up a stool. Recipe below.

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