In Jewish mythology, a dybbuk is a malicious possessing spirit believed to be the dislocated soul of a dead person.  This is was my nickname growing up.

We made it to Eugene in the late afternoon. The quality of light in Eugene is very unique and all these years later I can still feel the way the light looked in Oregon when I was a kid. That late afternoon light was cool and deep blue in the shade of the Douglas firs at the end of the street, and clear and golden in the sky. The scent of Douglas fir was always faintly noticeable back then especially in the cool of their shade.

In those days before the advent of the GPS Dad turned right instead of left to our new house and was headed up a steep hill in the old metallic sage green Dodge Dart with the U-Haul and all our worldly possessions in the back. About halfway up, the car decided it didn’t want to pull that much.  In fact it just decided it was done and it was time to relax and we started skidding backwards.  Just plain sliding.  Dad swore, as he does when the driving goes awry, low, with clenched teeth, getting louder with each repetition “Son of a bitch!  Son-of-a-BITCH!!” The car skidded back to the bottom of the hill. My New York dad enraged, scared and exhausted from days of driving with a dog and precocious toddler, and a little embarrassed turned around  in the  narrow street and finally pulled up to our little house on the corner of Whitaker Street.

And to think this was an improvement over my parents’ previous car. That car had been a stick shift – and it had a habit of stalling if it stopped moving.  Dad had started graduate school at Princeton where he had a full ride, but couldn’t abide the pretentiousness as a kid from Flatbush among the blue bloods. Mom was putting him through school.  They lived in a little trailer, and had some old jalopy to get around in. So when they drove through toll booths on the New Jersey turnpike, my dad would slow down well ahead of the booth,yell “Sharon! The change! Get it ready!”, and throw it into the funnel, or to the attendant, and would just keep driving whether the change made it where it was supposed to go or not.  Was it the clutch? Or was it that they were kids at 20 and 21, just terrible New York drivers who grew up taking buses and the subway and learned to drive in New York City?

As soon as we pulled in the driveway, Mom and Dad started schlepping the bags and boxes into the little yellow tract house. It felt good to move. We had been cooped up in the car for days. But it was boring for me to watch them carry things in and I was too little to really be helpful.  I started exploring the yard.  It was a quiet neighborhood.  No traffic. All streets ended in cul de sacs or in the woods. It was safe. There were pretty camellia bushes with bright pink blossoms in the front of the house.  They climbed up a little trellis on the side of the house as well.  There was a steep incline at the edge of the back yard.

Mom and Dad were busy unpacking when they saw several people walking toward the house.  They were really touched.  The welcome wagon!  How nice is that?!  And then they noticed that everyone was looking up.  They walked outside, dad’s hand extended to introduce himself and shake hands. There was a mixture of bemusement and anxiety on the neighbors’ faces.   I can’t imagine the paranoia in my parents’ minds.  They were in the land of chimeras and gorgons west of New York City after all. Do we look weird?  What’s with these people? They turned to see what everyone was looking at, and clutched their chests, just like terrified characters in silent movies.”Oh my gwahd!” There I was, with my blond curly top dancing on the roof.

The corner of the house where the trellis was was pretty close to the ground, but the distance between the ground and the roof increased as one went to the other end of the house.  It hadn’t been hard at all to climb up- just like a jungle gym. It was fun up there. I felt perfectly secure.  I was probably the most coordinated three year old in the country in 1967.  I was always in motion. Even when I was an infant.  I was so active my mom would put me in my pink snowsuit and let me crawl several blocks to the park just to let me work off some energy.  There are no pictures of me sleeping. All pictures of me in the crib show me looking back. I haven’t changed.

But this was amazing. I liked to dance, I was on a high stage, and I had an attentive audience.  I also remember the look of terror on my father’s face.  “Debbie!  Debbie!” he yelled with some desperation in his voice. (They hadn’t been in town for an hour and their baby was about to break her neck – easy prey for the savages.) “How did you get up there?” he said as he edged under the eaves to catch me in case I fell.  I pointed to the trellis with one hand on my hip. “Come back down!”he said motioning toward the trellis.  I probably said something about it being fun up there. I thought he was being silly. I didn’t want to climb back down the trellis.  “Debbie! Climb down right now!” he said with his arms out sidling closer to the trellis where roof was lower. “I’ll jump Daddy!  It’s easy!” “Debbie!  Don’t jump!” Oh why not?  Climbing down is such a bore when I could just hop down. I imagine myself leaping to the ground. “Tuh Duh!” He says I climbed back down the trellis. I really had no fear in me, but I wasn’t disobedient.

Considering my dad’s high-strung personality, and my impetuousness, it’s amazing one of us isn’t dead already.  Maybe I should have been a smoke jumper!   I did become a fierce gymnast though. I was able, once upon a time, to do handsprings and aerial back flips on the balance beam without so much as a thought. “Rubberband – Exhibit A” was my nickname. I could bend backwards, put my head between my legs and push up to a handstand. I looked for lines – lines on the gym floor, the gap between sidewalk sections, the edge of a rug, and was compelled to practice flips landing on the line. All the time. I never missed.  It was no different on the beam.  You just had to nail it the same as you did on the floor. But Mom and Dad couldn’t bear to watch it.  Too nerve-wracking.  There are literally no pictures of me doing gymnastics even though I qualified to compete in the state meet at age 12.  They just couldn’t watch.

Dad somehow made a joke of my antics on the roof that day, the neighbors shook their heads and chuckled, and the crowd disbursed. The neighbors must have thought they had a real bunch of winners next door. We both lived to see another day.

This summer there was a terrible storm which blew down the turbine on the roof vent when Val was away.  I climbed on the roof, recalling those days in Eugene, my days on the beam and flipping around the uneven parallel bars. How hard could it be? I’ll just stick that thing back on, and hop down. The roof isn’t very high on this house either. But it was hot that day, and the roof was scalding.  Daughter Rachel stopped by, and I asked her to hold the ladder.  No big deal climbing up, she handed me the turbine.  But then the scalding shingles, and the big round metal thing was heavy and awkward to carry up, and oh shit. I need tools!? Why the hell didn’t I know that before I got up here?  I sit and assess the situation trying not to touch the roof with ANY part of my body, covered or uncovered to avoid a blister.

I’ll just stand up and walk down to the ladder! Vertigo. Nope. Not gonna happen today. And oh my god the ladder is so flippin’ far away, and when did my roof suddenly become a ledge on Mount Everest? I’m without ropes or a Sherpa. I inch down the slope of the roof on at least three limbs. And my legs are so short, I can’t reach the rung of the ladder AND bend my leg enough to reach it. I’m squatting by the ladder, stuck up there for a while.  Rachel kept offering to climb up and help me down. No handsprings off the roof.

One of my first good friends in Eugene was a boy I called “Erik the Viking” because with his white blond hair, blue eyes, and brawny big boy body he was already looked like a Viking. We were in kindergarten together. He liked me because I didn’t act like a girl.  I liked to climb trees and play with trucks and play ball. Our favorite pastime was to climb up on a balcony on the side of his house and swing like Tarzan from a rope tied to a branch of nearby tree. Totally unacceptable by today’s parenting standards.  Where were his parents? But ohmygod it was fun.

It was embarrassing when a friend came over and just hopped up, put the turbine on the roof vent and hopped down. I cannot imagine my father’s terror seeing me on the roof of our house.  I can simultaneously remember the feeling of invulnerability as I thought of jumping to the ground, even as I obediently climbed back down the trellis, and yet I am not be able to reproduce it now.  And my parents who grew up in homes where not wearing a sweater could  cause you to “catch your death”, had to adjust to a child who thought she could just fly off the roof and land on her feet and could do handsprings right off the balance beam.

I still see lines on the floor and have that compulsion to land a back flip. The long hallways at work look like the perfect spot for multiple aerial back handsprings all the way down. Obsession. Muscle memory. But now fear and self-doubt have crept into my mind and prevent me from taking some of those big leaps.