CHRISTINA HUNT WOOD'S VISIT TO AND DECAMPMENT FROM LATCHKEY TOWNSHIP

Excerpts from the book LATCHKEY TOWNSHIP.

handpainted keys from Latchkey Latch Hook Township by Jacinta Bunnell

ANOTHER VOICE FROM THE LAND OF THE LATCHKEY

I first met Christina Hunt Wood at a brunch at a friend’s house. She made me laugh immediately, and my heart gathered her vibrancy. She was someone who grew up as feral as I. Started rural. Stayed rural. She was intrigued by strange and real art, was never pretentious. Never once asked me, “When did you move up here?” a question I seemed to field every time I left the house lately. The NYC-to-Upstate Pipeline had transformed our small towns, and the pesky assumption that I moved here from New York City fueled a storm inside me each time.

My second meeting with Christina was also a brunch. I didn’t know what brunch was until I was 23. People like me didn’t do brunch. We woke up late at friends’ houses on weekends and scraped some different cereals together in bowls from A&P. We ate cold pizza out of the box in the morning every time there was a pizza the night before. We snuck out of high school cafeterias with driver’s permits to buy chicken sandwiches with extra mayonnaise from Burger King. We had supper and fruit pies at our grandmother’s every Sunday with all our cousins. Definitely didn’t have brunch.

Christina and I, as un-brunchable as we might have once been, now had two brunches behind us and were becoming friends. I was absorbed by her stories of the foster care system and family betrayal. Her family tree was as filled with divorces, step-parents, addicts, and half-siblings as mine. I strove to focus on every detail of her stories, but a too-much-brunch migraine was quietly and painfully drowning out the world around me. I began a slow crawl to the bathroom, where I ended up in a fetal position. The room was spinning. I was unbearably nauseous. Christina was compassionate and sympathetic, though she barely knew me. I said goodbye to the brunch, left with a bucket between my legs, and was driven to an emergency room. In that hospital, I first learned what a meningioma was, alone and cold, deep into the night during a pandemic when no one you love can hold your hand. You just get dropped off into a wheelchair and hope someone advocates for you behind the automated glass doors.

A soft-spoken physician assistant relayed the news to me in a dimply lit room that was not a friend to sleep. She was standing over my hospital bed, touching my arm. The words she spoke and the person screaming about their IV next door were wholly disquieting, but she herself was not. She asked me kindly if I would like her to call any loved ones on my behalf to explain what the CT scan had disclosed: a typically-benign growth on the outer covering of my brain. She knew how to say the words without sounding alarming. She had practiced this in her rotations. We called my partner together as I swam in a sea of disassociation. She said all the words. I cried. Michael came to pick me up from the hospital, and I left her care and went to his. That night marked the beginning of a journey that would eventually land me on a surgeon’s table at the NYU Meningioma Center, a place I never imagined existed.

My recovery confined me to months and months in bed. Christina sent me snail mail art that read like radical care greeting cards. Like friends I had known for decades, she tracked my progress and checked in. When I was ready to be creative, we met on video calls to make art together. I was usually lying down, and she was among the platoon with linked arms propping me back up again.

mail art by Christina Hunt Wood

When I had completed a large body of work, mainly made while reclining, she graciously invited me to be part of an art show she was curating. She attended the art opening in elegant clothes and tall shoes, but I knew the kind of sweatshirts she wore over Facetime. She was careful and thoughtful in her curation, the exact opposite of an experience I had recently had with an art gallery that left me quite shaken when a curator called and texted to berate me on multiple occasions, told me I had stupid ideas, and then ignored me for weeks at a time when I asked for details regarding the opening I was to be part of. Christina was an antidote to this kind of poison on more than one occasion. She was steady, reliable, an incredible ally to illness, and superbly easy to work with.

WHO IS CHRISTINA HUNT WOOD?

Christina at The Day is a Book We Keep on Reading opening at CANO

Christina is one of the only other people I know to have secured a highly-coveted Creatives Rebuild New York Grant. I will be receiving this grant on an ongoing basis for a total of 18 months, a gift that has been life-changing for me as an artist. As part of the CRNY Artists Employment Program, Christina founded and now directs the Living Archive Project. I used my grant to build a kingsize playhouse out of latch hook rugs.

Christina was prompt and ready when I asked if she would contribute to the book LATCHKEY TOWNSHIP. I immediately loved the format she chose for her account of growing up as a latchkey kid. The list as poem. I love lists for their succinctness and unexpected meter. So much of what she documented was part of my story as well: tossing objects at cars from secret hiding places because it made you feel off-the-record powerful. And vengeful. Even if your young mind hadn’t figured out why you were even seeking revenge — or on whom. Steve Miller Band in the background of everything you did. Prank calls turning into something else…something frightening that makes you run up the stairs to hide in a closet.

And now, without further delay, here is Christina’s contribution to LATCHKEY TOWNSHIP.

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HOW TO GET A DOZEN ROSES by Christina Hunt Wood

Way too young to be left alone…

Eating carrot and sugar on white bread sandwiches. Riding bikes to the woods or to Stewart's for treats, or to the video rental store and arcade to play Galaga on loose change and bills found in the crumpled laundry of the missing adults. 

Writing sad country songs and hours of drawing imagined friends in high fashion.

Once waking up in the night with no adults around still. Scared, screaming, and crying. Neighbors came into our home to calm me.

Testing cigarettes from butts at seven. 

Christina, on the night of her spring concert with a pineapple in lieu of a bouquet of flowers.

Cooking eggs: sunny-side up for me, scrambled for my brother.

Playing hide-and-seek in the neighbor's orchard after school. It's said there was a mean bull in there, but we never saw it. 

TV. 

After-school cereal with sugar on top.

Still too young but older… So. Much. Super Mario. 

Learning to party with other kids with seedy weed and Southern Comfort listening to Steve Miller Band. 

Calling a man named Maynard, a Vietnam vet, who was seemingly always intoxicated. Prank called him once and then called back several more times for conversations that were more complicated (one part prank/one part voyeurism/one part concern). 

Tossing snowballs at cars from a covert location. Being found out and chased by angry vehicle owners. 

Trying desperately to make out what sexy thing was happening on Cinemax's scrambled screen.

Calling into telephone chat lines with friends, lying about my age. One man sent a dozen roses. I told him the address to send them to. Later, my mom asked where the roses came from. I lied. 

My mom and her boyfriend called it latchkey, but sometimes it was straight-up unbridled neglect. Where's the line?!

Christina in first grade in Schoharie County.

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Order the book to read the rest of the stories in LATCHKEY TOWNSHIP.

Over the next year or so, I will be sharing stories from some of the other latchkey passengers I picked up along the way. If you enjoy what you are reading, I invite you to stay aboard.

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PRIDE FAMILY PICNIC

I will read from my book A More Graceful Shaboom at the OPUS 40 Pride Family Picnic on June 4. Because my book came out in the beginning of a pandemic, and then I had brain surgery, this is the FIRST IN-PERSON reading I will be doing! There will be delicious food, a sliding scale entry fee, fun vendors, and drag queens.