At any one time, I work on three to four poems about Corrie.
I have a memoir essay called “Lessons Home Economics Forgot to Teach” about Corrie.
Then there is the memoir, Corrie’s Season.
How could I have so much to write about with one child and five and a half years?
Corrie was a beautifully complex person. Each member of our family faced some sort of challenge. When I came home stressed, my little girl always hugged me.
I hope through writing to portray Corrie, her life and the obstacles we overcame together.
Over the last week, I wrote a longer poem called “Be Kind, Rewind.” It is a narrative poem that goes back to when my parents had to take us to the video store to rent a movie:
Dad pulled into a parking spot under
the dark blue block with the rental store’s
name. My friend and I got out. I was dressed
in bell bottom jeans because they were a
type of pants that fit the length of a tall girl
like me. We rushed in to look through the
rows, and I went away from my dad and friend
to look in the Family Section because
at fourteen, I still put on the animated movies
about princesses and lions that became kings.
This is from a later verse:
“Hey, you need to see this one,” she said as she
took off down another aisle with the horror movies. Friends had laughed at me for never watching
movies that made some scream, but most often, made them laugh. She said, “You need to see this,”
as she pointed to a movie with a man
with a blade and mask. We opened it
before we rented it, and read the phrase,
to “Be kind, rewind.” We were supposed to
do this before we returned it to the store.
I go forward to a time in the future when my daughter, Corrie, would be a teen:
Decades driven down the road, and I asked my teen daughter to hand me the remote. I took off
her movie, and told her about the rental store
with the block sign and yellow letters
that had closed. “Be kind, rewind,” became an
almost extinct phrase. My daughter
disbelieved every word I said as she
pulled out her phone to look it up,
but I took it from her hand. She
tossed a pillow at me, and I blocked it,
so it flew back in her face. Corrie, my
girl, smiled and said, “Mom, if I don’t
have my phone, I can’t contact you.”
Then I close with the realization of what is real and what is not:
The vision of a teen girl arguing with me
over what we would watch disappeared
before my eyes because it was a scene
Corrie never got to play. The sound of
her laugh stopped at five, and fifteen was
the family fantasy video I wanted to see.
And “Be kind, rewind” never did exist.
I got the movie with a tumor in
disguise. Only I did not laugh.
The reason I do not share the full poem is because it may be one I try to get published. It is also a longer poem. I had the phrase “Be kind, rewind” go through my head for days after she died because as four weeks becomes fove weeks I still can’t go back to a place where she is physically next to me.
Poem by Rebecca T. Dickinson
Corrie's Season 