The First Drop...
PORTALS to MORTALS
Our shared stories are the threads that bind humanity, and so many remain untold.
These sleeping memories can be sparked and awakened
by a song playing in an elevator,
the smell of burning leaves
or a simple string of words.
May this be a portal into those untold stories, the ones that often expose our truest selves.
Grandville Wilson, Age 85 – (Retold by Daniel Kramer)
The first drop of fuel leaked from a needle sized hole in the tank, no bigger than a gnat, the essential blood of the beast. I sat in the middle of the desert on a trek far off from anywhere, having made it on dirt road and traveled across treacherous terrain. A rock misjudged, and misplaced alignment of my steering. My gas tank grazed, just nicked, barely kissed by that sultry granite nugget. There, by and by, the needle on the gauge began to quickly drop into the red, and I realized my fuel was running out.
What was I to do? In the solitude of the 110 degree desert heat, one man and a pack of gum. A stick of gum, one by one, and then another, until five pieces had been chewed into a mass. I spread it thick enough to cover the hole, mixed with dirt and fuel.
In those days, there were no cell phones, no call boxes or satellite communication. All that a man was left to was his wits and what he could carry. This was the lifeline. My life was hanging in the balance by a thread of gum. The gum held for a few miles, and then the needle dropped again. More gum, and then some more, over and over, until the pack was gone.
With no more gum and no more gas, all I had left was one bottle of water, and a setting sun. It was a 20 mile walk to the nearest town. The distance seemed just a few short paces in the scheme of things. In the end, my life was saved by a pack of chewing gum.
Annaliese Mann, Age 12
The first drop of blood is something all women get. Not are all happy to see it. Some are even upset. It marks the birth of womanhood and puberty. Some celebrate it, some hide it. It is considered weird and fowl by some. No one fully understands it, but all women get it. Hormones fill the body in a rollercoaster of emotions. It is scary, yet completely natural, and full of awkward moments... like the time you’re purchasing pads at the store. Though you have to learn to embrace it, you might not always love it. To me it is a reminder that only my gender can contribute to society with children. That’s not always a good thing to know. The first drop.
Leslie Kramer, Age 41
The first drop in the pit of our stomachs comes right as we ascend the track, up to, not yet over the crest. Ready to descend. I glance to my right, her face beside mine - wide eyed and exhilarated. Awaiting the fall.
I can see an entire lifetime in this moment. This moment where hope and fear collide. This precipice where age loses its meaning, and all but the moment fades away. We are weightless and timeless in this eternal millisecond. From up here the salt of the bay still clings to the breeze. The salt bonds on the molecules of wind and floats into our smiles. The clouds that cover the sun unblind us. I watch her looking, gazing outward. I see her see the ground and the model cityscape. I see her picture from her own perspective. The doll people existing below.
This moment is life... rise, anticipation, descent. Hearts racing. Complete stillness – a silent cacophony. The chaos of being completely present. Observing. The total surrender of riding instead of driving. About to jump in. Theory becomes practice at this crossroad. We have read about these contraptions for months. The engineering masterpiece that is rollercoaster. We’ve negotiated our boundaries – no upside downs! We have contemplated, imagined, prepared, dreamt – but now we are here. At the top of the incline. The highest point. The creation of imagination come to life. Be not afraid of the fall, be joyful in the adventure little one. You are prepared for this. You are ready.
We grab hands – hers so small but so much bigger than before. She raises her other arm in the air. Fingers akimbo – touching every part of the sky she can reach. The fear is gone – just total acceptance of the gravity. I hold her hand with one hand and the lap bar with the other- I am the mother after all.
It is her turn to know freedom. And the plummet begins.
Gideon Kramer, Age 7
The first drop… I think of rain… snow. I think of lakes, oceans, rivers, waterfalls, tropical forests… a seed dropping into the dirt. Tears. Flowers that hang down, water, mist, fog. Sprouts, gardens, plants, trees, bushes- leaves and berries… Etna.
Danielle Frese, Age 37
The first drop of breast milk that came to my breast to feed Lindy. We were amazed! Floored. I stared in wonder as Michelle squeezed my nipple to show me. This sweetness was here to feed our girl, to sustain her, nourish her, help her to grow. It seemed like so little. How could this small drop nourish and grow a human?
She lost weight at first, and I felt pressure. Pressure for more drops to come faster, stronger. She lost weight, and then it turned around. She was gaining every day. The milk had come, and she was eating. The milk came more, and she ate more. Now she’s 15 pounds! It all began with one drop.
The power and strength in those drops blows my mind. It has made her eyes shine, her hair grow, her teeth come in, and her brain develop as she rolls, sits and crawls. These nourishing powerful drops did all of this before she had food.
Oh and the poop! These first drops made the sweetest and easiest poops. Curry soup, we call it. Sometimes there was no poop as the drops absorbed into her body. An incredible substance. No other substance maybe besides water does this. The first drop all from Nature, designed to perfection. Could humans ever create something so perfect?
Now I no longer have my drops. It was so painful and sad to make them stop. My hormones shifted, and we were not ready.
Yet such a gift at the same time, to have a community to pull together for us. We have a freezer full of breast milk. Incredible! From one sacred and beautiful first drop, to a freezer full of the community’s drops.
Tonia Brito-Bersi, Age 19
Inspired by my generation of lost souls and the song “Waiting” by What So Not, Skrillex, and RL Grimes. She called it Electronica, I liked the way the name sounded. Feminine and strong. I had only heard it called dub-step or edm. I had never experienced this new brand of fluid lyrics and synthesized rhythm. Until Jojo and I started taking night drives. When my sister started listening to the monstrous, angry beats of Skrillex and Purity Ring I would say to myself, “This isn’t music. Music is with instruments. If this is what’s new, I hate my generation.” Until I sat with Jojo as her car’s surround sound speakers were pushed to the breaking point. The town was quiet but we were drunk off friendship, and the empty streets were lined with flashing reflectors. Her stereo changed color with the beat. The mixture of sounds, echoes, beeps, and boops, rolling chimes and split second snip-its of voice. The pressure building, swelling, and filling the front and back seat with a power that made me feel on top of the world.
My emptiness was filled. I was lifted. Every part of my heart that contained longing was now following this beat and filled to the brim with elation.
Suddenly this feeling paused.
We hung suspended waiting for the drop. Goofy grins, arms waving back and forth with seizure like speed until our entire bodies lurched forward with a momentum that shook the vehicle. Voluntary spasms of energy sprung out of us. A drop. When everything is lifted so high until it is released to fall. Isn’t that everything we wanted? Release. We build and build until we fail ourselves. Letting ourselves fall. Giving ourselves that feeling the stomach and heart feels when we hear bad news.
What did I let fall when I followed that beat?
Ben Frese, Age 38
At first drop I knew my life had changed, and I could never go back. 12 years old, Outer Banks of North Carolina, my first surfboard, and my first surfing experience. Ever since this day I've always known that I cannot live far from the coast where waves can be caught, long lines of energy from thousands of miles away meeting me at the shore where I literally harness the energy and take a ride on nature. There's nothing else like it in the world. It was at this moment that I knew Ohio was not for me, and that there was an excitement in life that I had not yet tapped into that very much existed. The excitement and escape of surfing was like nothing I had ever experienced before.
One day when I was 16 years old I had been surfing for hours in the beating sun, dry salty throat, sunburn, arms that felt like jelly. I caught what I thought would be my last wave in, and a part of the wave broke in front of me, and I rode right up on top of it and over, back down into the wave again. I did my first floater! Before I could take one step toward the shore I was already paddling back out, ready for my next hour of surfing trying to capture that moment again. Sunburn gone, throat not dry anymore, arms strong as could be. The exhilaration and the energy that this experience gave me forged a relationship with the ocean and with nature for the rest of my life.
Back at home in Ohio, sitting on the basement floor, listening to Jimi Hendrix records and dreaming of the summer warmth and waves, I could almost feel the breeze on my face, smell the salt air, relive those summertime moments. By 17 I was planning college in California, about as far a state from Ohio as I could find. A magnetism that won't weaken glows on inside me. I continue to chase those lines traveling in from thousands of miles away to meet me along the shore. Life has never been the same since the first drop into that first wave. And when "The Wind Cries Mary" comes on, I can feel that warm breeze from deep, deep down.
Jessica Bersi, Age 46
My daughter was already a year and a half old. She hadn’t seen her father in 6 months. The courts had decided that even though I had left Hawaii with her in fear of him, that his following us to California only signified his love and devotion to her, and that reunification must happen immediately. We met at the sheriff's department for the first drop. Her brow furrowed when she saw him. Mine probably did too. Her legs hugged my hip, and her arms were entwined through mine, but I untangled her and handed her over.
Lucetta Mae Kramer, Age 4
The first drop. Once upon a time, the first drop of a garden- a carrot in the garden- the first drop of forever, the apple drops from the tree. A pomegranate, a salad. The first drop of cement on the road… that way… the milkweed seed pod- seeds drop- new pink flowers, that are not muddy, they’re washed off from drops of water, they’re big! The milkweed flowers, the caterpillars come to eat, the leaves get all broken, the caterpillars grow, and turn into a butterfly! The butterfly flies way up in the sky over the skeletons… the white ones.
Nancy Kramer, Age 36
“That roof’s gonna leak… flat roofs always do.” That’s what every person told us when my husband and I built our dream house on Bruella Road. “Not ours,” we replied smugly.
After months of design and construction, the roof was finished. Torch down, two percent slope, sealed grout, scuppers for overflow drains, internal drains and pipes. Gravity nor water would affect us. We would stay dry and conquer all the elements of nature in our indestructible fortress.
The first storm came. I was over nine months pregnant with our first baby, and Daniel was away for the week. Crashing thunder, down pouring rain- I lay in bed nervously wondering if our plans had worked, if the grout was sealed, if the angles were sufficient... if the warnings would come true.
Drip, drip, drip- echoing off the bare walls of our unfinished home. In the darkness, my eyes wide open in hopes to better hear, convinced that my mind was playing tricks on me. There was no mistaking the sound I had anxiously anticipated, the event I had feared as catastrophic... the first drop. I struggled out of bed and waddled into the living room. I looked down at the floor and then up at the ceiling. There was a growing puddle on the floor, and on the ceiling was a steady drip at the bottom of a swollen bulge in an increasingly thin layer of paint. I remember it looked just like a giant boob.
With my enormous pregnant belly, I cautiously climbed to the top of a ladder and poked the bulge with a knife. Water poured out all over me and onto the floor.
The ceiling had leaked. Instead, however, of sadness and panic, I felt a strangely overwhelming sense of relief... What I had feared for so long had finally occurred. Having a hole in my roof wasn’t going to be the end of times. In fact, having a roof over my head at all… was pretty lucky.
Elliott Kramer, Age 9
The first drop of dew I see on the tree, like a twinkling diamond- it sits there. It looks like a prism with the morning light. Drops of rain fall, fog covers the yard, but that one dew drop stands out to me. It’s like my spirit connects with it. It’s trying to make me happy by shining its rainbows. I watch as a warm morning breeze passes through my hair... I feel awake.
Energy flows though the tips of my fingers all the way through me.
Deborah Rosulek, Age 70
The beautiful Indian woman in a lab coat drew my blood. “How are you doing?” she asked. “Not well,” I replied, “I just found out, a moment ago, that I have breast cancer.” She looked at me and responded with a deep sincerity, “I will pray for you every day.”
Just a few years prior I had taken care of my sister-in-law through her losing battle with cancer. I thought I had been given a death sentence. When my doctor gave me the news, I gasped, completely taken by surprise. He told me, “Just because you have cancer, doesn’t mean the sun won’t rise tomorrow.” It felt like he meant the world would go on without me.
As my heart pounded and my mind raced, I saw the first drop of my bright red blood. The sight of my own blood brought me comfort. I thought of how well my body had served me for almost 60 years. I had danced, traveled and had babies. My drops of blood were a miracle. My only other wish in life was to live long enough to see a grandchild born, to know my blood would go on and flow through another being.
I imagined the medical technician putting my drops of blood on slides, examining my blood through a microscope to read what was happening in my body, like a map with directions for my healing. Ten years have passed since the day of the news, the beginning of a woman’s daily prayers and those first drops of my blood. There is no sign of cancer.
I now have five grandchildren.