Sowhaddidyoudo?

That picture is worth about 500 words. My weekend has been busy but not crazy busy because I don’t do crazy busy at home because my job is 98% of the time crazy busy. And to continue multi-tasking at home is a sickness as far as I'm concerned.

I really don’t have that much to say because it was just mundane busy stuff, nothing exciting. I made two gallons of infused oil. Perhaps the most involved project I’ve done in a long time. It's involved because of the harvesting, cleaning, grrrr-ing the herbs and prepping the jars and oil. It doesn't help that I can't stand our food processor. It's terrifically complicated and the first time I used it, I spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to get the freakin' top(s) off. Breaking into Fort Knox would have been easier than opening the damn food processor. It's like a four step process and drives me wild after about the third repetition. But the best part of the oil project is when I get to clean up all the oil I've sloshed and dripped and spilled all over the kitchen. I'm a pro at spilling. (To further digress, the first time I typed this I wrote: "spelling" and we all know I aint' no kinda pro at spelling)

As I went about each one of these tasks first on the back porch and then in the kitchen my brain felt like that photograph: all muddled with eight things going on at once while I was trying think of something to blog about and everything I came up with was boring as Hell.

The most exciting thing that happened this weekend was Kipper went for coffee with us and didn’t make too big of an ass out of himself whining and yipping at other dogs. He loves other dogs and resembles Sonny the coo-coo bird when he sees one.


(thanks youtube)

It’s rather embarrassing and people probably think we keep the dog chained to a rock in a tiny backyard completely isolated from people, food, and other dogs. Either that or he doesn’t have two brain cells to rub together. I'm thinking of hanging a sign on him when we go out with him that informs people he is a few bulbs short.

Yesterday Beav wanted to spend some of his birthday cash and wants to keep it old school with CDs so I took him to two of the used record stores I know about. We ran across a couple more but didn’t stop because he has his “Back-To-School Cold” (why can’t we all just wash our hands?) and wasn’t feeling 100% and we were both hungry and on our way to a little taqueria I know which has some of the hottest green chili ever and it was just what his cold needed. Spending most of yesterday with him one on one was good and made me realize he is becoming a young adult capable of adult conversation on far ranging subjects.

But he’s still a kid, today he mouthed off at me when I told him to slow down in a parking lot. “But I’m a guy, and guys like to go fast! I’ve got the ‘guy gene’.”

Oh what the fuck ever, I’ve got the keys to the car and you might not get to drive until your 25 and your frontal lobe has developed a little more. And then it‘s gonna be a 1981 Honda Civic four banger.

But I resisted saying that and just gritted my teeth and dug my fingers into the side of seat. Praying we made it home before I tore open the upholstery or chided him while hanging on for dear life.

Waiting For The To Go Signal

Seven thousand years ago in the early ‘90s Nora Ephron said something like you could be in the room next to your children attempting suiicide but if you are engaged in something you love chances are they will need something of you. I botched the quote but you get the idea.

Anyhow, I had one of those days yesterday. Friday night at 10:30, I said good night to Beav and he announced to me: “I have Frisbee Golf in the morning.” Good Mother would have said, “Oh honey, that is so neat you are doing that again and I know you had a great time last year!” I was Good Mother earlier this week when I asked if he was going to play this year. But the other night, Bad Mother put her hands on either side of her forehead and let out a big Oscar worthy sigh and said: “Al-right. What time? It better not be crazy early because I’m really tired and have been up at 5 every morning.” As the words were leaving my mouth, Good Mother was whacking me over the head with a bossy stick: “What time do you think your little darling was up every day this week? Just sixty minutes after you, is what!” After Beav metaphorically patted me on the head and assured me it was at ten I was placated and took myself, Good Mother and Bad Mother to bed.

So guess what time my eyes popped open and refused to shut again. Just guess.

Uh huh. Six-thirty.

What am I 80? And incapable of sleeping past seven?

So after laying in bed for about an hour, I got up, fed the dog, and messed around on the net, sent The Girl an LOLcat text from Kipper about the RABBIT we saw eating blossoms off the butterfly bush; and looked several times at the menacing pile of receipts I need to sort through only to look away from them again in a futile attempt at denial that my checkbook needs to be balanced.

About an hour after Beav’s alarm sounded and thirty minutes before we needed to leave so I marched upstairs, dressed, put my scanky hair in a twist and marched across the hall to Beav’s room.

knockknockknock “It’s a little after nine, time to get up.”

“mmmrrfffff mmmmrrrrfff ffrfmmm ffmmfmffrr“

“Are you going? Cuz if you are we need to leave in about 30 minutes.”

“mmmmffrrffmm“

So I marched downstairs and tried to decide what I was going to do. Repeatedly attempting to get him up for Frisbee Golf did not make the short list. Or even the long one.

1. I could go out for coffee. I was dressed. Mind you dressed just a hair’s breadth away from ending up on the People of Walmart site but I wasn’t going to Walmart so it didn‘t matter…Besides the second I sat down with a trashy magazine at my favorite coffee place someone would call me all wild voiced demanding to know where I was because “I have to be somewhere REALLY IMPORTANT AND YOU AREN’T HOME.”

2. I could work in the garden. The flowers needed to be trimmed up, cucumbers inspected and the fact I don’t have red tomatoes on August 21st--a troubling and tragic situation--needed to be fussed over. I also needed to smile over my cheerful zinnias.

3. I could balance the checkboo---OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD NO! TURN AWAY FROM THE LIGHT JUNE! TURN AWAY FROM THE LIGHT! [don’t worry Dad, I know how much money I have and it’s enough]

4. I could clean the kitchen. But there’s a yucky pan I don’t feel like doing and that would be noisy and wake the little darlings up which would then probably interrupt my cleaning because someone would need a ride somewhere. And then I would complain about having to stop what I was doing…which could lead to the two part harmony song called: “If I Had A Car” (sung to “If I Had A Hammer” it’s a real catchy tune). Which then leads to me reminding them if everyone had a car no one would have food or light because we would all have to sit quietly with our hands folded neatly, trying to forget the hunger pains we were experiencing in the dark because our monthly auto insurance bill would preclude us from paying the electric bill or buying groceries.

5. I could write. Because I must. And people at my house want me to write and enjoy what I write so they don’t interrupt me and if they need me they say so and give me a few minutes. I’m not sure how this respect came about but it has and I am very thankful. I know it didn’t come about because I would grumble at them or snarl. One day, Wally was lurking around and I was fiddling with something. I looked up at him and was all wild-eyed: “I know! I know! You want to go!!” He got this Dali Lama look on his face and said: “Mom, I know you’re writing. I can wait.”

After I got back from taking Wally to his friends’ house I searched high and low for the pod.

I just hate holding patterns. I would rather they breathe down my neck when I’m doing something than wait for them to start breathing down my neck. Waiting to see if they need me. It’s an odd state of being and I think only being a parent allows you to understand what I mean. It’s one of the many things about mothering that makes me twitchy and impatient with myself. But I managed to get all Dali Lama on myself and so I:

Made myself coffee, deadheaded the flowers, pulled the weeds, harvested a cucumber and fussed over the not ripening tomatoes, sighed over my festive zinnias, cleaned the kitchen and wrote a little something.

But I did not balance the checkbook because this Puritan girl’s work ethic only goes so far.

Musings From The Back Porch or No, Really I'm Writing Today

This is my last day off of five, a mini vacation at home (I refuse to use that stupid computer generated word that begins with an “S”). I did manage to accomplish a few things and had some fun, too. Just this minute I’m on the porch enjoying our unseasonably cool day, reminiscent last year. I’m also contemplating ways to legally kill the squirrels that are knocking all the apples off my tree. This is the first year we’ve had apples and now most of them are ending up, green, hard, sour with the seeds picked out all over the ground. Have I mentioned how much I loathe squirrels? When we lived near a large city park, the squirrels almost outnumbered the people and they were bold and aggressive. I would cheer if I almost hit one and then when the boys were older and into a gross out stage I would act like I was going to hit them if they were in the road, just swerve a little and tap the accelerator. I’ve never actually hit one, though. Don’t worry, I’m not running up the street to Walmart for a small rifle so I can shoot the buggers. Having never shot a rifle I would probably kill the dog or a neighbor aiming for a squirrel. Wally’s a pretty good shot; he could do it for me. . .

Anyhow, the gardening is done; I’ve battled the dandelions and weird groundcover succulent looking things today. I contemplated taking a machete to the Bee Balm that is threatening to eat the front flower bed and our living room but TG likes it and so I’ll pull it out in October. I also harvested more carrots and two, TWO small golden beets. I’m waiting for TG to come home for lunch so we can have them with a salad of mixed greens and a vinaigrette I invented this morning. I’m very proud of this dressing: its balsamic vinegar, my herbs d’Provence infused olive oil, fresh pepper, garlic, a mixture of ground tarragon, chives, and oregano, topped off with a dollop of honey and yellow curry. This is an epic event because I really don’t like to cook and Kraft Mac-n-Cheese feels like a lot of damn work. My lunch was a roasted tomato drizzled with the dressing and topped with a sprinkling of Swiss cheese. Again, an epic event because the tomato didn’t come in a package or from a restaurant or as a result of The Girl. Not that I want a cookie for fixing lunch (although a cookie would be nice right now). I must confess I do like working with the fresh ingredients that come from our garden. It’s immensely satisfying to walk outside and pick things to eat. Which is why I am very excited our city has changed the zoning and is allowing people to keep chickens and pigmy goats in their backyards. Wow! Maybe someday we can have a Yard Cow and an elephant! I love elephants and fed one in Cambodia last month. Made my life complete! And when I stop foolin’ around and actually write the novel living in my head, there will be a yard cow based on a story I heard from an old friend of Ward’s.

I hadn’t even heard of a pigmy goat until we were in Texas last April. My stepmother’s brother (Step Uncle?) is a rancher in south Texas and told us during the drought people got rid of their cattle and started raising these goats. I asked him if he had become attached to any of them. He gave me a curious side long glance and quietly said: “Up until I take them to slaughter. “ Yeah, just as I suspected, he thinks they are adorable, too. Probably names them, worries after them like pets if it’s too hot or too cold or too rainy. They are cute little things, and always look at you like you’ve just said something wise which had never occurred to them and could you please elaborate on your philosophies and ideas. In other words, these little animals looked intrigued. My guess is they have an IQ lower than the average retarded dog but they still look intelligent. I’m not sure what we would do with this goat. Probably tie it up just on the other side of our fence in the green space and let it graze on the weeds. Little Goat would also eliminate the need to mow. Hopefully if the coyotes carried it off they would have the decency to eat it far far from the back fence so I wouldn’t have to clean up a carcass. Or listen to the crows as they fussed with one another over the carrion.

The coyotes are the most compelling reason why I haven’t found plans for a tiny chicken coop. Well there’s that and the dog. I have a hard enough time wrangling a wily old dog much less a clutch of chickens. But we could get those pretty little hens with the fancy feathers and free range them in our backyard. The poo would be great for the garden, too. Too bad I would be fighting the dog for the eggs and ultimately probably the chickens. So my adventure in urban animal husbandry is going to have to wait until the dog is dead.

This could be sooner rather than later because I’m going to leave him out for the aforementioned hungry coyotes if he doesn’t leave the damn trash can alone. I would like to blame his naughty behavior on the fireworks this past weekend but the fireworks are over and the behavior continues. Because I would actually miss the old goofball dog, the only other solution we came up with is just strewing the trash on the kitchen floor because that’s where it ends up anyhow. So last night before we went out for an hour or so, I put the trashcan on the back porch. TG thought she was pretty freakin’ funny when she calls downstairs to me: “Well the dog didn’t get into the trash but the squirrels did…Not really!” If I printed what I said before she alerted me to her joke, everyone’s net nanny’s would go “ping”.

But the idea of chickens has enormous appeal to me. When we heard this fortuitous news the other night, TG just looked at me and mouthed the word: “NO”. Butbutbut she is the one who in a moment of tropical fever or tequila induced insanity told me she would like to move to Mexico and raise chickens in the jungle a few miles from the coast. And then this spring we discussed the goats in everyone’s yard along I-10 in south Texas and again the idea of chickens was raised. I suppose wintering the chickens here would be an issue. I’m not too keen on the idea of leaving one of the cars outside so they can stay in the garage. The health department would look askance at us keeping them in the basement. Another dream dashed against the rocks of reality.

I suppose I’ll just buy my eggs at the store like most people. And mow the lawn. And dream of an elephant of my own.

image found here

The Invisible Distance

. . .surely grace flowed between us as we flung away certainty, and said yes to the unknown, out at the edge of light, where it ends, or becomes more brilliant. --Andre Dubus

I’m borrowing the title of this blog entry; it’s a title of an unpublished essay written by my Oldest Friend. The Dubus quote opens it and I thought it was fitting for my own story of migration. Something that’s been on my mind a lot lately as I see the end of school years looming ahead on the horizon and we can decide, without a need to consider anyone else, where to live. I was relating this to OF a couple of weeks ago and her exquisite answer was: “Would you really leave. . .after Beav graduates? I don't think you realize how rooted you might be there. No doubt the long winter has worn you down. I remember in Kearney having to cut all the spring flowers in bloom because of a freak late frost. I have read these lines over and over and my answer is simple.

I don’t know but I think. I think I want to find out what it means to migrate rather than run away. I want to see if the light is more brilliant on the edge of the unknown just like my oldest friend has done. Oldest Friend lives terribly far away from me but she is--in these ballyhoo technological times--a phone call, skype or email away from me. OF migrated a few years ago to New Zealand. A big brave move on her part. NZ is so incredibly far away so when I told her we would be visiting Cambodia early June I realized I would only be a quarter world away from her rather than half a world. She feels like people have forgotten her but she is never far from my thoughts. Now she is working on a PhD exploring migration. This process is an academic migration for her to and she is setting out in the wilderness of different disciplnes vastly different from the comfortable enclave of Creative Writing. We met when I was nine and she was almost eight. OF’s family migrated all over the world and now she herself is one prone to migration. Both our families had reluctantly moved to Albuquerque for the sake of Dads’ career. It’s just what you did in the 60’s and 70’s if you were climbing the government ladder. OF lived across the street from us and I’ll never forget the day she came over to see if I would like to play. Her mother had sent her over and when I look back on this; how ballsy of her to just show up. What if I hadn’t been interested in books and ballet and dolls? What if I had been some sort of Tomboy or a psychopath who tortured kittens? If that had been the case, our migration story would have never unfolded. She would have stayed at her house avoiding her mother’s vodka infused wrath, reading books and writing stories; while I played ball with the boys or hid in my closet safe from my sister’s mood swings, venturing out only to torture kittens. Divine providence for me, I loved to dance and make up stories and use my imagination over and above toys; as did she! OF made those three years on that wind swept and naked mesa bearable. Later, she made my early days of motherhood bearable and the last year of my marriage survivable. Once my sister and I were laughing about Albuquerque---that fake laugh-so-you-don‘t-cry-laughter--and Mom stepped into the conversation: “Oh girls, I think those were the best years of our lives! Your dad and I felt like we had made it!”
“Where the Hell were you living? Dad worked all the time, Sister suffered her first major depression and we lived in the middle of a terrible desert that was either too hot, too cold and always without fail, windy.” My mother’s cluelessness took my breath away. Since that time, one of my beggy prayers is the boys let me know just how crappy their lives are, if they are crappy.

I spent half a semester in a writing class exploring those years and how and I spent a year in therapy trying to figure them out. I remember telling my therapist it was like someone had taken an atom bomb to my family; Sister--in her defense--found herself dropped from a fairly backwards small town school in the South into a progressive school in the West. A recipe for rebellion that had the added flavor of the social upheaval of 1970 sprinkled all the way through it. But over and over again, the one thing that surfaced in both my writing and my therapy: OF was the anchor that tethered me. Rather, she helped offer me an escape from the terrible arguments between Sister and Mom; Mom’s own depression, Dad’s necessary absence, my own feelings I had been dropped into the wrong family. I know I was her life line as well; her family was in a greater disarray than my own. When I look back on those years, it makes me cry to think about OF’s own Mother and the losing battle she had with alcohol. J was such an intelligent and talented woman but she was sick and her sickness became the fulcrum of the family’s malaise. Being so young I was only becoming aware something was deeply wrong with her shortly before we moved back to Texas. A few years ago, I wept over the memory of an afternoon at OF’s house and J’s unspeakably humiliating behavior towards her children. I can’t remember what happened afterward this particular episode but I’m sure we left in a confused rush and tried to lose ourselves on the mesa: a place I hated because of its emptiness but loved for its refuge. The winter of 1971-72 was particularly difficult at my house: the arguments between Sister and Parents were at a fevered pitch; mom spent a lot of time on the couch. It was dark and snowy. One afternoon, I’m not sure why, but me and OF decided to walk into the mesa and were going to see if we could get lost. We walked away from our back wall (we were still the last street in the city at that time) and into the mesa towards the foothills. I remember stopping almost a mile from the houses, at the base of a road which ran from one side of the mesa to the other--Tramway Road--and still, despite snow that was blowing and swirling, I could see that stupid house. It was hopeless, I couldn’t leave them, and they would always be there in the distance.

Years later, I purposefully moved away from Them and yet I could still see and feel them in the distance. Always. That’s the amazing thing about migration. You take bits and pieces of that first family with you, no matter how intact or fractured it might have been. Just like the people who have migrated from us via death, they live with you. That home lives in you. I have a mesa that lives in me. Whenever I’m stressed or overwhelmed I dream about the mesa. Sometimes it’s the prairie outside of Lubbock and other times it is the mesa in New Mexico. As an adult I have learned to appreciate and embrace the inherent spirits of those vacant mesas outside Albuquerque and love the sage filled mesas of Taos County which have become almost a spiritual refuge for me. Hindsight has taught me it was a gift to live on the edge of suburbia because we had that magnificent wild place to spin our stories and create separate different lives for ourselves. We spent entire days in the mesa, exploring arroyos, catching horned toads and shouting into the wind. Before Albuquerque, my wild space was the Big Thicket near Houston Texas the antithesis of the vacuous mesa. I believe William Gass wrote an essay many years ago about the importance of wild spaces in children’s lives. I feel like a poster girl for such theories because I know spending the day in the woods or on the mesa helped my imagination fly. As much as I hate to admit it, rediscovering the mesa, albeit in Northern New Mexico, taught me there was a lot of there there. So much that I can’t stop writing about it or thinking about it or finding new ways to frame the experience of discovering the first member of my tribe: the woman who helped me mold my imagination; challenge the exploration of my gifts; and make me think about and learn from the Big Medicine lessons in our lives. Migration is Big Medicine.

I contemplate and dream about migration whenever I feel stagnate in some aspect of my life and sometimes its my children or my career that throws me into a rant about selling everything we own and leaving without a forwarding address to just get the Hell away from this place; ninety nine percent of the time I am that Thing blocking my path. Travel serves as migration away from the things which frustrate me about my life which is probably why “re-entry” is hard for me. Because when I get back: the same things wait for me. A career that no longer delights me and teenagers which are threatening to bleed my soul through my right ear. I have only myself to blame for these two things which makes it all the more teeth grindingly difficult to face all over again after two measly weeks away from my daily routines.

Sometimes migration, forced or voluntary, physical or psychic takes us to ourselves: our true selves; not the person Mommy or Daddy or society wanted us to be. That happened to me years ago as a young adult. But usually, migration is simple movement because in the immortal words of Buckaroo Banzai: “No matter where you go, there you are.”

Waiting For Anne

I’ve been sick for what feels like a week when it’s only been for a few days so I haven’t been writing like I usually do. I did spend most of Sunday in the yard and gardens. It was so immensely satisfying to clean up my lovely plants so the new growth was revealed. A few things didn’t make: a couple of relatively hardy things which really surprises me when meanwhile my Pinks wintered over and a couple of delicate hard to grow perennials are thriving. The fruit trees have started to bloom and Wally even noticed how beautiful they were on his run this afternoon. We are leaving for Texas on Thursday and when we return it will be just the right time to clear mulch and prepare soil for the expanded veg bed. I’ve ordered golden beets and English cucumber from Burbee along with the usual suspects: Cosmos, Zinnias and Hollyhocks. My friend, Charlie, has a small green house and has started our heirloom tomato plants. Sometimes, I’m not sure what I’ve done to deserve such generous friends. I will gift him and his wife a large tin of my special herbs d’Provence blend and a couple bottles of tarragon and rosemary oil. I’m already looking forward to playing with the herbs. I swear, the weeds are worse this year and I spent two hours pulling stupid little weeds out of the rocks and out of the garden. It seemed like they would sprout up behind me as I walked away. If I were really talented I would do a CAD piece a la where I’m walking away as dandelions sprout up behind me. The dogs (Buddy was visiting Sunday while his mama went on a ski date) enjoyed each other’s company while I worked. Those two yard apes crack us up. They charge the fence whenever a dog walks by (frequently on a warm weekend afternoon) and act like they are going to kick some dog ass any minute. After they have finished “taking names” they run around one another in a sort of victory dance. If they were people, I swear those two would be trash talking at the fence and then doing airborne chest bumps like a couple of fraternity brothers on a bender. I must say, spending the day in the yard was a two-edged sword. The sun was good for me but the pollen, not so much.

I actually called in sick to work not one but two days. I never call in. My paid time off is too precious and is really just for vacations, right? Screw using it for actual sick leave! Had there been someone to replace me on Thursday I would have stayed home sick that day, too. I slept most of the two days I was supposed to be working. On Friday I resurrected myself from bed just in time to pick up Beav from school and managed to pull it together and go to Annie LeMott’s reading at the our big and famous indie bookstore. A couple of times I just wanted to slide off my chair and curl up on the floor for a little nap. Not feeling well saved me from spending any money. I sat on the floor in a corner waiting for my number and wrote in my journal. Writing in public makes me feel extremely pretentious and a little fake. Complete projection on my part because I think most people who sit and write in public are completely fake and pretentious. Writing is a private act and in order for it to be work worth reading it must be preformed in quiet isolation. So no one can see--at times--my desperation.

The reading was at the downtown version of our well known indie bookstore for the reading Friday night, plopped on the floor with my notebook out and head buried deep in my own thoughts and almost oblivious to the people around me. I felt like a “wadded up piece of paper” and really didn’t want to engage with the other LaMott fans. Besides, this bookstore intimated the Hell out of me what with the uber librarian type clerks. It’s not like they treat those of us from the suburbs like a hick at the Saks jewelry counter they are nice and helpful folks. The customers are mostly well-heeled “downtown types” equally intimidating to me. My assumption is all the customers and all the clerks hold a couple of MS degrees and a PhD or two so I feel like I can’t intellectually keep up with them and I just duck my head and go to the back of the line and sit on the floor with my moleskine and scribble madly hoping I don’t look as goofy as I feel. The other night as I was scribbling, I realized when Anne LaMott wrote Bird by Bird she didn’t have a degree. I’m not sure if she does now, either. This cheered me because there isn’t anything that makes me more discouraged than the back flap of a book lauding the author’s work at University Of Iowa, Princeton or Brown. So I it gave me hope that a college drop out was READING at this fancy bookstore and I was going to hear her read. Finally after six years of admiring her from afar.

I found LaMott late, I didn’t read her blog at Salon nor did I read Operating Instructions Wally is just a year younger than her son, Sam, and I didn’t read books about babies when Beav came along. But a few years later, I did read Bird by Bird and it changed my feelings about my own writing and made me realize, just like nursing, I am called to write. And all you have to do is read the archives of this blog to see how I feel about LaMott’s Christianity and her idea of Grace. I was very nervous about even speaking to her if I had the chance. My biggest fear is I would have some sort of fan girl melt down resembling a ten year old girl at a Jason Bieber concert. The notebook was my shield against getting all worked up with the people around me. Because the people around me, were complete fan girls and it was a little embarrassing.

As I waited for the reading, I started reminiscing about the other signings I had attended. The first one was Rita Mae Brown and I was mesmerized by her. Of course, the book was forgettable but it was still a big experience for me to hear her soft accent intoning the details of her fictive universe. Next up was William Least Heat Moon. I was so crazy about Blue Highways I carried a copy of it around with me for a few months and talked Ward into taking a small dirt road off a highway near Missoula Montana because a placed named “Rivulet” was at the end of the road. I wanted to see a town called Rivulet and it felt like something Moon would have done. Rivulet was a ghost down with a few shacks but the road through the deep forest was worth it. Besides, Rivulet is one of my favorite words. A few years later, Velkram Seth read from his book which followed a A Suitable Boy and it was a delightfully personal experience. There were very few people there and he had conversations with each one of us. He was completely charmed by my story of cutting his 1400 page novel into two pieces because the hardcover edition I had was just too heavy. His disappointment I didn’t bring it to be signed was endearing. My least satisfying experience at a signing was Joyce Carol Oates. Such a strange little woman who seemed to work at appearing affected and otherworldly. Oh if you are so utterly precious and ethereal spare us your drama by staying at home.

I do like to watch the people at these things; despite not wanting to engage with them. My fears of being an overwrought fan girl were in vain because the very idea of carrying on like a couple of the women who had been there since lunch time (it was six-ish) to be the first in line made me want to reach for a vodka martini with a Xanax garnish. The woman sitting next to me was in her seventies and terribly elegant: tall, willowy with her lovely white hair pulled into a chignon. She moved and looked like a dancer. She was sweet and did try to talk to me a couple of times but I wasn’t forthcoming. Mostly because at that moment a wave of malaise had swept over me and I wanted to lie down on the floor in the fetal position and sleep. I imagined this ballerina beside had once been Balanchine’s mistress; never fully recovering from the brief but passionate affair. When the affair ended, devastated, she left dance and moved to Marrakesh where she organized the first micro loan group. Sure, we would exchange phone numbers and after one coffee date she would realize I was too ordinary and offered nothing to her life and would then find it necessary to spend a few months avoiding me while I continued to try and set things up with her, blind to her disinterest in a friendship with me. Behind me were the quintessential 30-something housewives, over earnest and over thinking. These women make me wistful that I didn’t enjoy my children when they were little; they make me wishful for my youth. These women were way more self-confident than I was at they age, too. Not one single hand wringing comment over preschool. The last woman to enter the room had the most self-assured and thoroughly together continence I’ve ever witnessed. She was like Harrison’s character Dalva in the flesh. Her hair was wildly curly and swept back in a simple pony tail and she had on the hottest red Frye cowboy boots I’ve ever seen in my life. Had I not been sick I think I would have tackled her and stolen her boots; forget the reading.

Surrounding this crowd of adoring women and the few men who were good sports were pictures of the writers who had read at the bookstore before. The first picture my eyes landed on was of David Sedaris. Of course. Because I want to be the lesbian version of Sedaris. Regrettably, I’m almost the lesbian version of his mother sans cigarettes and alcohol. I do have terrible fantasies about just letting myself go, drinking gin out of a white coffee cup and locking my kids out of the house in the snow so I can be alone. I’m not sure I’m qualified to be the lesbian version of Sedaris because my childhood wasn’t messed up enough either. Nor did anything funny like the Miss Coppertone contests happen. There was not a photo of Raymond Carver, one writer I regret discovering shortly after he died. Carver is the reason why attending readings by favorite authors is important to me. The tenuous quality of life is one of the lessons I’m learning this year. It is becoming important to me to seize opportunities when I can do and see those things which matter to me. Seeing LaMott read is one of those things.

I am happy to see I didn’t cry or squeal or say something asinine or stalker-ish which has resulted in a restraining order against me in Marin County when she approached me (as she did many people) and asked if she could sign my book. She looked me straight in the eye and fully engaged with me for about thirty seconds with a presence that seemed natural without pretense or force. I could feel her pray a silent prayer for me. She was probably begging God to please not let me breath on her.

"Fire Bad, Tree Pretty"

picture source

March seems to be about continuing my intellectual break: between the Jersey Girl bounty hunter novels on vacation last month and overdosing on Buffy The Vampire Slayer via Hulu this month I’m thinking my brain has called it quits on thinking/sussing out/deducting/inducting/ or figuring out anything beyond blood sucking demons or bad guys in Atlantic City. I’m not sure if it’s all the crap swirling around me and happening to my family and those I love or if menopause is eating my brain. I’ve been meaning to blog about menopause but I keep forgetting to and then when I remember I just get all choked up about it and grab a cookie instead.

But I have to confess, Buffy is making me happy. I didn’t watch Buffy in the late nineties when it came on television the first time. I wish I could say it’s because I was busy making Dinosaur Dioramas for a third grade project or cupcakes for a preschool. But no I was a Xena girl. Not enough time in my life thirteen years ago for two chop sokey camp-a-thons television shows. Ward blamed Xena: Warrior Princess for the questioning I did about my sexual orientation while I was in therapy eleven years ago. Um…yeah, cuz teevee shows make people gay that’s why everyone who watched Will and Grace have thrown aside their real lives and are in New York City looking for Karen and a cocktail. I wonder if I had watched Buffy all those years ago if I would have gone to a therapist wondering if I were a vampire slayer or a watcher? Good thing I didn’t, my blogging would be from a small room in a quiet hospital.

A padded cell sounds good about now. I managed to ruin both of my sons’ lives last Wednesday before 0730 in the morning! It was awesome! Because everyone knows I live to ruin my kids’ lives: I told Wally he had to get his shit together or he was losing the privilege to drive my car and then I explained to Beav he was going to his dad’s house after school rather than my house (where the PS3 lives). Wow, you would have thought their lives had just become Shakespeare meets Brecht in the level of tragedy I had inflicted upon them both. If I had that kind of power I certainly wouldn’t be exercising it on the likes of them. Hell, I would have sent my favorite president to hate--W--and his little friends up into a roaring puff of smoke about the time Sunnydale was swallowed up by the Hell mouth.

Menopause seems a likely cause for my lackluster intellectual leanings is that it took me AN ENTIRE SEASON of Buffy to figure out the extremely droll irony of a Hell mouth existing under a high school. I had to put the episode on pause so I could laugh and laugh and laugh again when the irony finally sank into my withering gray matter. Then I was halfway through season two when the light bulb went on: Whedon didn’t take the vampire stuff seriously and was poking fun at a genre, himself, and the fans.

I are very smart.

Or maybe I’m taking a brain break because life feels really hard lately. I’m exhausted by a series of bad events taking place in the lives of people I know and love. I’m really tired of worrying I’m coming home to or waking up to a dead dog. I’m sick of nagging a kid about cleaning up after himself or nagging to help around the house (just pick one and I’m nagging at him); I’m sick of the patients who--on some days--feel like Whedonesque demons with bad latex faces and glow in the dark eyes holding me down and sucking my soul out of my open mouth. I think its winter. It’s been dark and gray this winter and we haven’t had as much sun as we usually have. Add a child who feels like a failure at the ripe old age of 19 (Dude, save that for 30 years from now, ok when you‘ve really made some boneheaded mistakes) with a dollop of frustration surrounding the continued disinterest in his sons exhibited by the Asshole I Was Stupid Enough To Breed With, and ice all of that with ever fluctuating hormones and you have the makings of a really hard winter and looking for a friend in Mr. Stabby. Too bad things like a child preceding a parent in death, stage 3 cancer and broken hearts aren’t vampires a slayer could stake in their hearts so they dissolve into a pile of gray ashes.

"Whatever is causing the Joan Collins 'tude, deal with it. Embrace the pain, spank your inner moppet, whatever, but get over it." -- Cordelia

Day Light Savings time has helped tremendously. It’s a pleasure to be sitting here at 1815 and the sun is just beginning to wane. The second Saturday in March springs us forward to summer. Springs me forward to all sorts of things like working in the yard and spanking my inner moppet.

Getting The Facts Straight

image from Creative Commons by jag64551 "Peek-a-boo"

Yikes!

I pride myself on telling the truth on my blog so of course getting facts wrong calls for an immediate correction. I received an email from Dad this morning, it was beautiful note and one I will treasure always. He told me how much he had enjoyed reading my blog from start to finish but he did have a bone to pick with me. It seems I had always had the story of how M and Mom had become friends all wrong for...um like my whole life. I have included a cut and paste of the truth, names have been shortened to protect my family's privacy:

One critique....M didn't stand with us at our wedding. That was R and RK, who have long ago divorced and gone their separate ways. . .M's husband R and I also worked together at ---- and played sports together. Your mother and I met M the day before we got married. Both ladies had to have blood test and physicals before we could get a marriage license. R and I were spared that because we were in the AF....We met M while waiting in the Doctor's office. We were married on April 2 and they were married on April 5. We were immediately "adopted" by M's family. Her mother was a jewel, and had the greatest sense of humor. She loved to tease me.

Ok, so they didn't witness one another's weddings so I guess I can use that detail in a future novel because it didn't really happen. But you have to admit it's still very dear how my mother became life long friends with a woman she met in a doctor's waiting room.

One Wild and Precious Life

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
--Mary Oliver


I can’t remember the first time I read Mary Oliver’s question but this week when I rediscovered her poem I remembered how much I love these lines. What do I plan to do with my precious and wild life. It’s a little overwhelming to think about it in the big broad sense of years and years so I think that’s where I get hung up and then paralyzed. Maybe the way to the paralysis is to focus on tiny increments of time. Like the AA “one day at a time“. I can attest the One Day…One Minute…One Second at a time thing works because it’s the only reason I’m not puffing on a Marlboro light (that and it’s no degrees outside and smoking in the house was absolutely verboten).

All of this “life what does it mean to me” naval gazing I’ve been doing this week has vividly remind me of a pivotal moment in my early twenties. The summer just after college graduation was an amazing time in our lives: some of us had just graduated from nursing school and were beginning to negotiate what it meant to be a Nurse; others of us had just graduated from medical school and now after years of school Real Life was about to begin. We were poised on the edge of everything and when you are that young and brash The Edge Of Everything was so terribly Important and everything we thought and felt was so Terribly Important. I can still see myself that evening, sitting next to my friend Cliff--the one of us who was actually working and engaged in a Real Life--we were sitting close to one another, intwined and if you came upon us we would be mistaken for lovers. I remember pulling away from him and looking squarely at him as I intoned my fervent desire: “I want to lead a remarkable life.”
I’ll never forget the amused look Cliff shot at me with his wizened twenty-eight year old eyes when sagely remarked: “Shit, June of course you want a life like that. No one wants to be remembered for banality.” Fabulous, I was actually ordinary in my striving to be out of the ordinary. In the moment I hated Cliff for his remark; now it makes me laugh because his retort was dead on. I was a pompous git.

My life has had it years of banality but the last decade has been anything but banal. Now that I’ve got all the growing up and putting on and throwing out bits over with, it’s time to do something with this person I have become. But I am is dangerously close to becoming complacent as I simply place one foot in front of the other. I’m not discontent. Yet. If I allow myself to become existentially stuck I will become complacent. The complacency I speaking to is when I do what I’m supposed to do because I’m supposed to do it because that’s just what I do even if it makes me miserable and feels like my soul is being sucked out of the side of my head. I don’t mean a sort of Peter Pan reaction: “I don’t want to grow up! I always want to be a boy!“ I’m speaking to just keeping my head down and doing what is deemed right and correct by others rather than what my heart is asking after. When I get to points like this in my life I picture myself walking down a sidewalk, my head down; missing the houses and buildings and flora off in the distance because I’m concentrating on my feet. But it’s equally tempting to look way way off on the horizon and I forget to notice the cracks on the sidewalk forming their own microcosmic road map. The key is changing my gaze every few steps; remembering to look at the horizon and then down at my feet. Rob Brezsnky addresses this in Capricorn’s horoscope. Not my sun sign but it’s just damn good advice. (Most horoscopes are just that: sound advice)

"I am a man of fixed and unbending principles," said American politician Everett Dirksen, "the first of which is to be flexible at all times." That's the kind of playful and resilient spirit I urge you to aspire to in 2010, Capricorn. I think you're most likely to have a successful year if you regularly explore the joys of improvisation. The more empirical and less theory-bound you're willing to be, the better you'll feel. Practicing the art of compromise doesn't have to be galling, I promise you; it may even turn out to be more fun and educational than you imagined possible.

It’s impossible to plod along staring at one’s feet if you improvise now and then. A spontaneous act now and again always serves to enhance my contentment.

Luckily I’ve stopped beating myself with a stick for taking so many years to figure out that a principled, stable life doesn’t equal a banal life. Mary Oliver’s sense of the word “wild” has more to do with the “amazing or incredible” sense of the word. My favorite definition of wild is: “to grow unchecked: and I think “fanciful” is the most evocative for Oliver’s ideal of “wild”. This past year, I’ve come dangerously close to allowing my old friend Fear and her henchman Indecision to limit my growth. I picture fear as a bully who comes up behind me and grasps me by my coat collar, preventing me from running away until I can slip from my coat and stumble forward. Life doesn’t have to be scary in it’s uncertainty. I believe it’s the Zen Buddhists who believe uncertainty is an absence of faith. And didn’t C.S. Lewis attest when there is a lack of faith there is a lack of joy? Fear is certainly the big buzz kill in my life. I love to blame a lack of time or money or intellect but that’s a handy excuse for fear.

Brezsny’s predictions for my sun sign made me wince and squirm a little because “deluded rationalization” is another expression of my fear.

The philosopher Nietzsche said there was no middle ground: You either said "yes" to life or you said "no." You either celebrated your vitality, enjoyed your power, and thrived on challenges, or else you practiced constant self-denial, hemmed yourself in with deluded rationalizations, and tormented yourself with indecision. I'm not so sure it's always as clear-cut as that. While I'm usually in the "yes to life" camp," I've gone through "no to life" phases, as well as some extended "maybe to life" times. What about you, Pisces? Whatever you've done in the past, I hope that in 2010 you will take maximum advantage of the cosmic rhythms, which will be encouraging you to give life a big, resounding, ongoing YES.

It’s time to say yes. Time for me to live like I’m dying. My ipod gave me this song yesterday while I was thrashing my knees running on the treadmill. Tim McGraw’s song is sound advice even if you aren’t staring 49 in the face or shaking hands with a dire diagnosis. He sang to me about a man who discovered what it meant to live each day like a special gift and all the things he was doing with his life as a result of knowing he was dying. This man was going to “love deeper. . .speak sweeter. . .gave forgiveness I’d been denying. . .“ And he jumps out of an airplane, climbs a mountain and rides a mechanical bull (it’s a country song, of course there is a mechanical bull involved, duh) If I had been given a dire diagnosis I can assure you the chorus to my song would not include healthy activities like mountain climbing or fishing. Nope it would be a ballad to smoking cigarettes, dropping acid, maybe eating mushrooms and a sex club in Manila. (Ok, maybe not a sex club in Manila) Because a lethal prognosis calls for outrageous acts of previously unforeseen stupidity and danger. Because really? What‘s the worst thing that‘s going to happen? You might…I don‘t know…die? (you all think I’m joking don’t you.)

When McGraw got to the last few lines I had to stop running on the treadmill because I was about to cry and about to make an ass out of myself in the middle of the gym. I do not want to close out 2010 kicking myself in the ass because I’m not any closer to having the life I want simply because I am afraid to articulate and then act upon my heartfelt desire.

"And I took a good long hard look,
"At what I'd do if I could do it all again,
"And then:

Like tomorrow was a gift,
And you got eternity,
To think about what you’d do with it.
An' what did you do with it?
An' what can I do with it?
An' what would I do with it?



The question isn’t really all that hard; allowing yourself to act upon the answer is the challenge.

My resolution for 2010 is separating the can’ts from the won’ts.


Happy New Year!

Stopping in the Bar on a Snowy Evening

Last night--

I was waiting at the airport last night, sitting in a bar and text messaging with one of my dear friends from high school who couldn't join me for our reunion this weekend. Next to me was a nice looking man, about my age maybe a scosh younger and the woman sitting next to me was a bit older. All three of us were engaged in our blackberries or--in my case--mobile phone chatting with people far removed from the bar rather than chatting with one another like in the good old days of fleeting airport lounge connections. Technology has changed all of that. In the past we would have maybe exchanged a few words, lightheartedly discussing the baseball game on the television. But nowadays we are exchanging disembodied Tweets or texts. Thankfully, text messages have made things a little quieter and I don't have to listen to someone else's intimate details. But it's now so quiet we forget to interact with one another and we have become a small planet of strangers. It occurred to me to break the silence of the tapping fingers but I didn't really want to talk to either person near me aside from proving the art of small talk between strangers in the airport on a snowy evening is not going the way of print journalism or civility.

Happy Birthday!

My blog is a year old this week, hence the really scary cake. And what the Hell is that cake trying to communicate to us? I love it! Just ridiculous enough for me to say, yup that looks like my kind of gif! (the freeze frame doesn't do it justice, see it here)

I don’t have much to say today except thank you to my invisible friends, real life family and real life friends who stop by my blog and read it. I’m honored and touched every time someone says,”Hey, I read your blog this week and I thought. . .” I do the Sally Field thing in my head: “they like me they really like me!”

It’s been a weird week: I got it in my head I needed a break from the Chaos of the Fifth Circle Of Hell and worked a couple of night shifts. Just enough to screw up my circadian rhythm and make me appreciate I don’t have to work nights. It didn’t help that after Night 2, Bob the builder was crushing concrete about 30 feet from the side of the house, shaking the house and my precious perennial garden. I didn‘t bother to go to bed until about 4:30 that afternoon. Once upon a time I could sleep through anything: including having a roof installed directly over my head while I slept off a night shift. But that was 22 years ago. I seriously slept through our bungalow roof being stripped of shingles. The noise was steady enough it became white noise. What I couldn’t sleep through, nine years later was a two year old poking me in the forehead with his wet thumb saying: “Mommy UP! NO SLEEPING.” The Beav is still a post night shift buzz kill. He called the second I shut my eyes Monday evening to lecture me about NOT taking something to the post office.

I’m pretty shy about telling people I keep a blog. When they ask me what it’s about and I say ’stuff’, I get the baffled blink. What I should say, “It’s a place I can vomit my feelings and insights and goofy humor without being interrupted.” Sometimes that‘s all this place is, a big ole’ vomitorium. aren’t you glad I didn’t find a gif for that? I confess I looked for one but my 48 year old brain shushed the 12 year old so I didn‘t post either of them. Besides, I couldn’t decide which would be less offensive: Stan from Southpark just sort of letting bile run out of the corner of his mouth; or a smiley that turns to the side, pukes what appears to be a piece of bacon and then turns back to face the reader flashing us a big smile. Which is actually hilarious is you’re a nine year old but I hope there aren’t any nine year olds reading because my sailor mouth gives this blog a NSFW rating. I could change the title to Edgyjunecleaver’s Vomitorium. Or not. Because, ick.

I’m probably not going to blog next week because I’ll be working until the minute I leave for the airport for my high school reunion. I’m pretty nervous about going: I’m not the same person I was ten years ago. About the only thing that’s the same is my gender and my political affiliation. But if it’s boring or I am overwhelmed with shyness I’ll just hang in my hotel room or go home to Dad’s. The last two reunions have been a blast and completely without drama (as far as I was concerned if you experienced drama at either previous reunion, for the love of god, email me and dish about it!) This trip to Texas is going to be bittersweet because Dad has decided to sell his house and move to a different part of Texas. Except for a semester of college and the summer after I graduated I never lived in that house but it still remains the place I call “home”. Which is ridiculous because I’ve lived here for twenty-two years and haven’t lived there since 1984! I suppose it’s home because it’s where my parents lived. So now a different part of Texas will be home? But it won’t be because I haven’t lived there since I was four. Oldest Friend has written several essays which deal with feeling homeless and wandering. She was an army brat and her parents continued to move every few years after her father retired. She refers to herself as a wanderer and she has indeed continued to wander as an adult; living on the other side of the globe. Her parents last home was the city where we met. It’s a place that haunts me because this is the place the façade of my safe little family began to erode. According to OF, our “raw suburban houses were without soul”. Twelve years ago, I returned to the neighborhood after her mother’s funeral. The trees had grown and the edges were softened but the souls acquired were sort of desperate and sad; like the mesa that once surrounded them. That the city is perhaps one of the ugliest on Earth doesn’t help with the whole emotional subtext, either. The only other place more repulsive than Albuquerque is Lubbock Texas. And I can’t get away from Lubbock because I dream about it. And I’m dreaming about I more because I’m working a story set in Lubbock. It is rare I dream of Albuquerque. Thankfully my parents didn’t settle there; I would have felt without roots long before now.

I can’t imagine how my father must have felt this past year; his house being a sort of monument to my mother. Gah, I would have sold it last November but he is sensible and waited to be sure he was ready. The only reason I’m not ready is I’m hopelessly sentimental. It’s just a simple house in a quiet and humble neighborhood. It isn’t like they lived there from the time they were married until my mother died. My family wandered until the early seventies and I in turn wandered for ten years until I settled--purely by default--where I am now. I know the attachment rests in the fact my adolsesnce was spent in North Texas with all those rights of passage. I guess my definition of home is where the most important rights of passage occurred. My only right of passage in San Antonio was my birth. (insert groan or guffaw here, your mileage may vary on the pun)

We are planning on moving back to Texas after Beav is finished with high school but this sentimental bent to my personality leads me to waffling about ever leaving here. I’ve been here almost half my life and I’m contemplating leaving late in mid-life to start another life. I’m compelled to leave because I despair over winter and the cost of living is much higher here than it is in Texas. But are my sentimental feelings cloaking a fear of making a decision? I’m not one of these people who travels in a big posse of friends so it‘s not like the going away party would be at a hotel with caterers to accommodate all the well-wishers and friends. Trust me this absence doesn’t bother me because the idea of a huge posse of friends exhausts me on a core level. But I do have enough history with this city I can experience three degrees of separation. It’s a cozy feeling for me when I‘m out with a friend for coffee or whatever and we run into someone we both know who knows someone one of us knows but the other is meeting for the first time. However, this kismet is something I’m likely to miss out upon if I leave because I’m just introverted enough it has taken years for me to achieve this sort of thing. Besides that, the place I live is a small town wrapped up in a big city package. Where I want to live is much bigger. My other consideration is my boys. If I moved would I be taking the roots with me? Would my sons feel homeless if I left here? Fortunately, I have four years to beat this with a stick. I just hope my tiny cadre of readers comes along for the ride.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for being my friends. Happy birthday blog!

Last Call

The lingering party guests are milling about; conversation wanes as they look one to the other and glance down at watches; calculating and planning their exits. It’s late and time to leave until everyone reconvenes for next year’s celebration. Most will be welcomed back to the celebration in my flower beds and garden; unfortunately, some of my garden guests were unruly or troublemakers. Like this thing: It’s The Four O’clock That Ate The Flower Bed.


I was a little horrified to take it out because it’s so huge and came from a tiny seed...and I have never grown anything so huge from a tiny seed... Anyhow, The Girl cut it down with the big lopping thingies used for tree branches but she couldn’t dig out the root because it has adhered to the stone wall. Hopefully it won’t return and repeatedly require being cut back. I want to put something smaller in that spot. I must admit it made me smile or laugh whenever I pulled into the drive way. Yesterday, before TG made the first cut I was reminded of this book. The scene I recalled, Beloved was sitting on the porch in a diaphanous white dress, the rest of the family stunned at how large she had become. Sethe sacrificed her family as she cared for Beloved. Beloved soon expands and grows as she existentially consumes the family and the delicate infrastructure is destroyed. Fortunately, the 4 O’clock didn‘t do this to my family; we’re actually doing ok despite a weird summer and my propensity to piss off Ward and create waves and drama. My weird leap to a novel I haven’t read in seventeen years was probably owing to the delicate and old fashioned blossoms which remind me of Victorian tea gowns.

The other unruly guests were the sun flowers. They weren’t specifically the unruly ones; in fact they were statuesque and elegant and they created nice shade. However, their hanger ons followed them. The naughty birds and despicable squirrels knocked the blossoms off and left a big mess and rotting stalks. Sadly, the sunflowers won’t be asked back because of their rowdy entourage. To add insult to injury they haughtily refused to turn to the north and never faced the rest of the garden’s guests.

How lucky we were the squirrels and birds were distracted by the sunflowers and didn’t notice the yummy vegtables. I think we were able to rabbit proof our garden with the ugly chicken wire and making sure the fence was without big chinks or holes. One morning in early June I was surveying my patch and I saw a large hole neatly excavated into my onion berm. I ran over to the garden saying something like: “Oh no you did int!!” and reached for a hoe a la Farmer McGregor; like I actually possessed the courage to bludgeon a rabbit to death. Ewww, that would be messy and cruel. I just wanted to scare it into leaving the yard. They aren’t afraid of the dog because he’s a bit challenged mentally and physically. The rabbit had left the scene of the crime without consuming all of the onions and we managed to fix the fence. The enclosure came about because Kip loves tomatoes and we didn’t want to lose our entire crop to the greedy dog. We were very fortunate our crop wasn’t a victim of Blight which destroyed tomatoes on the east coast. It was certainly wet enough this summer.

Indian summer is proving to be a textbook example of what Indian summer is supposed to be. Every day has been dry and temperate beginning with early morning ground fog and mist burning off by lunchtime. Today we went for a walk in one of the many large and older parks near downtown. Surprisingly, the trees aren’t beginning to turn there but some are almost completely golden as you go to the east of the city. The sun has shifted to a different place and I am driving to work in half light. I knew this would happen; summer would not stay forever. In some ways I’m glad for this; I would not want the Ground Hog Day syndrome; perpetually nursing Beav after he had his wisdom teeth out with the odd but not unheard of Fentanyl reaction of inconsolable crying; repetititively calming my oldest son after his father told him he was no longer welcome at Alexis house; nor do I want to constantly revisit the tumultuous emotions of a child leaving home for the military. Hell, I don’t ever want to do any of those things again. But always, everyday the backdrop to these changes and these emotions was summer. The Girl told one of our friends this summer possessed the “best weather I have ever experienced!” I had to agree with her; we had a summer which mimicked a July in Seattle. The upheaval would have been unbearable in triple digit heat. Indian summer is God’s gift to me before I am handed the short days of winter. I remember when Wally was about two; I called A, tears in my voice because it was 4:45 and I had to turn on lights because it was so dark outside. Now it is a ritual for me to note the time lights are necessary afterDecember 21st as a way to usher in hope for summer.

A few weeks ago, I pondered the whole back-to-school feeling this time of year gives many of us. I think this man says it best. The desire to grasp onto September is great but if I hold onto September Wally would never finish in Georgia or come home to us for a few days in December. For the first time I can ever remember I am looking forward to Winter.

Trivial Pursuits

Steam Reassures Him

My husband is watching me iron,
Steam reassures hm. The hiss of starch
The probing slide around each button of his shirt
Speaks to him of Solway Street in Pittsburgh.
As for me, the wicker basket is a reproach.
There is last summer’s nightgown,
And several awkward round tablecloths
Which refuse to lie flat.

My house specializes in these challenges.
Bags of mail I did not ask to receive
Choke the floor of my linen closet.
A photograph of me, holding a baby on a beach.
But which beach and, for that matter, which baby?
A Japanese chest whose bottom drawer has irresponsibly locked itself,
And who can remember where I put the key?

That night, waiting for sleep, I whisper,
I did only trivial things today.
And he asks, Why aren’t you painting?

Elizabeth Pierson Friend 1933-2003 ("Japanese Box" was painted by her in 1982 and taken from her website)

A few years ago, after I read this poem, I immediately sent it to Oldest Friend, no doubt in an email titled something like: "Because I was ironing your shirts, Dumb Ass" Stupid husband, she was running household with all it's drivel and he is hounding her to paint. Why wasn't he doing something to help so she could paint! Like...um...I don't know...iron his own shirts, look for the key, read the mail? I just knew OF would completely get the angst of this poem because she had been there so many times with her husband(s). I will never forget her first husband asking her when she was getting a job because all she ever did was write and that wasn't really much of a contribution. Mind you, she cooked, cleaned and laundered while she was working on her thesis. What he missed was WRITING WAS HER JOB. Over the last few years I have lightened up on the husband in the poem and have sat the responsibilty squarely on the shoulders of the woman. It wasn't like he said: "Too bad about that painting, today, cuz you're one talented little lady, y'know. So did you get them shirts all ironed for me, or what?" Now I read his tone as sympathetic and he does recognize the importance of her art to her essential self and her wellbeing. That doesn't mean I think the inequality between artists who are spouses is a thing of the past. Frankly, I think silencing the wife in these marriages is due to a fragile male ego. OF has run against this ego time and time again with her husband who is a writer. One would think he would get it...But again, writing is not her "real" work. Who is to blame for this blindspot? As much as I would like to place a broad stroke of blame over the entire male population on the planet, I can't. Women need to take resonsibility for claiming their creative selves and the act of making art is tangible work. However, we simply reaffirm this creative process isn't real work when we turn the other cheek and scuff our toe in the dirt and say things like: "well I guess I don't have time to make that picture or write that sonnet because I need to sew a button on a jacket or make lunch." To be succinct about this: Ishould take responsibility for claiming the value of creating. I don't even have a man telling me ironing takes precidence over writing.

I do need to clarify that I am the only person in my life who gives me the message "your writing isn't valuable". I am fortunate to be fully supported in my endeavors and this support is not feighed hairpatting or half assed. Given this, it is now up to me to make my art real and declaring it an important focus in my life; not something which amuses me after the ironing is completed. Last night, when I reread this oem, I read it as an internal dialgue between my higher self and my lower self:

"Why aren't you [writing]?"

"I don't know. Perhaps I'm frightened. Perhaps I'm frightened what I have to say is uninteresting and people will read and then laugh in all the wrong places for all the wrong reasons. Perhaps I'm afraid I'm wrong and I don't have anything of merit to say. Maybe it scares me that I will never write literature as meaningful and evocative as LaMott or Niffennegger."

"So you aren't writing because you are certain it won't transcend time and have great meaning for many? Great excuses. But the icing on them is this: you don't want to write unless it sings out like LaMott or Niffenneger? Because everyone knows Time Traveler's Wife was published in first draft form. Egomania much, June? Well I guess this takes care of the whole writing thing. If you don't write, you won't fail. You won't succeed either. It's a good thing great writers have never failed...sheesh just shut up and write."

I litter my life with so many things in lieu of sitting in front of the screen that giving the people I have conjured becomes secondary. Trivial pursuits are my excuses. I have filled the last four days with more or less trivial activites rather than fulfilling a self made promise to write a few hours each day I'm home. Not only are my actions avoidance behavior but they also reaffirm this whole writing hting isn't real. I mock myself when I ask: "Why aren't you writing."

Late summer is here and this is the time of year I kick start projects or reach big decisions. The transformation I'm seeking this August is creating the discipline of writing. It wasn't enough to say, "on my extra day off this summer, I will write." The days I have worked at my writing--over and above the blog--have been deeply satisfying, and to put it simply, fun. I need to own this feeling and recognize the special value writing has for my life. Hell, even if it's just a hobby that doesn't render it meaningless.

Leaving behind my excuses is problematic in some ways. If I leave them behind, someone will need to tackle the sack of mail, the mysteriously locked cabinet and the misshapen table cloth. I have a story to tell.

Sitting On The Fence

photo by Jeff Greenburg date unknown


This week my horoscope mentions

It's a ripe time to revise and rework your past, Pisces. I'll trust you to make the ultimate determination about how best to do that, but here are some possibilities. 1. Revisit a memory that has haunted you, and do a ritual that resolves it and brings you peace. 2. Return to the scene of an awkward anomaly that remains unsettled, and finally do a duty you neglected. 3. Make your way back to a dream you wandered away from prematurely, and either re-commit yourself to it, or put it to rest for good. 4. Dig up and contemplate a secret that has been festering, and come to a decision about what you can do to heal it.

I spent at least five figures in therapy so I’m not haunted by memories; I haven’t a clue what he means by an “awkward anomaly”; I don’t do secrets, so the only thing festering is what I’m giving TG for Christmas next year. By process of elimination, my job this summer is revisiting a dream and moving aside the fear of putting together a fiction written in no less than three notebooks and one dream journal over the last twenty plus years. I have wrapped months of energy around my fears.

The first and foremost fear is the whole thing sucks and I’m wasting my time with this old idea. Next out of the basket is I subject my closest friends with readings and they feel bad when they have to tell me it sucks. Years ago, I participated in a disasterous workshop with part of this piece. The writer guy--a real Bukowski type--hated it; thought it was a piece of crap; basically told me this would be on the list of things he is condemned to read in Hell. The criticism was particularly painful as he salivated over the other woman’s piece. She was one of those wispy women prone to wearing long flowing scarves and equally long flowing hair; her voice soft but emphatic when she read. Her piece was a story poem, a phantasmagorical fruit salad of magic realism meets surrealism meets Jane Austen. I thought it was a mess against my straight up piece of narrative. I think it was just a few months ago, I realized Bukowski workshopped with his dick. Perhaps he would have liked my story better if I had been more like Jori Graham‘s disciple: young, pretty and eager to get stoned with him. In hindsight I can’t believe I let this sorry old man wannabe Beat poet take away my pen and my notebook . Leave it to me to be silenced by an old and lecherous hippie.

Aside from this blog, emails, Facebook updates and random chat on Table Talk (link) I don’t write much. I can use the time sucks as excuses. I can use my kid as an excuse. I can use the house and the endless chores as an excuse. But I’m out of excuses. The only thing Beav needs me for is my driving, banking and cooking skills; the big house projects are done (!) and the nuts and bolts of house work takes maybe four hours a week.

My other excuses rest in the end product. This will all be a waste of time because print is dead and the only people being published are writers like Nora Roberts and that chick lit Shopping/dating/I’m a fabulous wreck of a Gen Y woman. This will be a waste of time because ultimately, it will suck and no one would read it anyhow. Ok, my family might read it and say: “Well at least you tried hard” or some such platitude which ultimately means: “don’t quit that day job cuz you need to eat!” Finally, why would anyone give a shit about this yarn I‘ve been spinning in my head. But my very favorite excuse: someone wrote a lovely book and used part of my title(link). The title I've imagined for twenty years. People will see my title just before her’s on the Amazon list and will think: “That woman copied Azar Nafisi’s lovely title!” (as if it’s already published, see excuse number one)

The fence was already getting uncomfortable before Rob told me the stars were aligned just right. Before the star’s blessing I had promised myself the next four months of habitual writing. Not daily, that’s a recipe for disaster. The only things I do consistently every day are brush my teeth and whine. Rather, I have set aside time three days a week to write in four hour blocks. If our patient census remains low like it did last year, I’m devoting my call days to writing. Writing what could be a doomed novel is more productive than sitting on my hands waiting to be called into the hospital. Hell, with all those notebooks to combine, I have enough material to edit this summer without generating any new ideas.

September I will evaluate if it’s time to put this dream on the shelf or proceed onward. Years ago, during my other lifetime, I read Canfield’s The Aladdin Factor and I learned an exquisitely simple formula: If I ask for something there is a 50/50 chance the answer will be yes. If I don‘t ask, the answer is always ‘no’.

It’s scary to ask for what you want. Much like standing en point atop a picket fence.

photo by David Street 1998

To Be Continued

I've developed the habit of writing while I'm waiting. I keep a stack of index cards in my bag--Moleskins too fine for the likes of my hackery--and free write either what I'm observing or things weighing on my mind. The Beav graduated from the eighth grade yesterday and I was actually early for something so I seized the opportunity to write.

The Beav has successfully graduated from many things like sucking his thumb, sippy cups, diapers, kindergarten, lying about taking baths and the fifth grade. Today is another graduation referred to as a "continuation". This is my fourth continuation and Wally cheated me out of an actual graduation because he didn't want to be "bothered" with the ceremony and "sitting around just to hear my name". I feel alien to this White Mommy Daddy world so gatherings at the boys' schools make me a bit anxious. I am seated alone and not bothering to save places for Ward and Alexis especially after last night's Saga Of The Pants.[Ward was supposed to buy Beav some new pants and didn't. I got to do it at 8:30 on Monday night after a very stressful twelve hour shift which evolved into thirteen hours. Needless to say the conversation we shared was colorful]

The people around me are dressed in a sort of upscale casual and one woman in particular takes this continuation thing seriously, donning a lovely geen and white halter dress more suitable for an evening wedding. I can't image what she wears to weddings. Sparkles? But it suits her, she of the blond carefully exercised set. The type I see talking in a quick clipped cadence on wee phones as they pause between the hearth breads and chocolates at Whole Foods. Her resplendent dress is a relief, I thought I was overdressed in my flowy black linen dress, the sort of thing worn on a patio sharing drinks and sailing stories with people named Mimi and Biff.

So many familiar and well known faces in the gym this afternoon; many acquaintances for the last two decades a few of them were even friends. But having fallen out of their orbit they have forgotten me. Pity this, I'm a lot of fun to know and interesting company. Many of the mothers are easily ten or more years younger and this is probably their second big milestone with their kids. Most of us are watching from the jaded seat of having done this a few times before and know the real pay off will be when they graduate from high school.

I recognized one mom of a boy Beav played with when they were kindergartners. I still remember where I was standing and what I was doing when she called to tell me her boy was no longer allowed to play with Beav at my house. My first conclusion was she had heard via the grapevine I was lesbian. She gave me a self-righteous speech about how she didn't want Little Darling playing at a divorcee's house in the city. I was polite and gave her a canned speech about how we would miss Crown Prince. I wanted to ask if she was she afraid the ennui, dissatisfaction and final despair I experienced would jump onto her boy like a cold germ and then rub off on her hands as she scrubbed away the wretched city dirt after his playdate? Or was she already infected and couldn't risk further exposure in an effort to keep all the bad stuff dormant? "Is denying you are unhappy easier than admitting failure like I did?" Most of my days as a young mother were marked by unhappiness, frustration and helplessness. Years ago, Dear Abby poised the question "if you had to do it all over again, would you have children?" My resounding answer would be no. I have too much baggage to visit on defenseless children and I am far too selfish to be a good mother.

But this particular emotional mud puddle won't keep me from milestones like a Continuation. My regret and insecurity won't stop me from feeling joy and pride when Beav's name is called as an honor student. Beav is my pay back for watching the heart wrenching struggle and defeats his brother experienced in school. Regret doesn't prevent me from feeling cheated I'm not watching Wally walk across the stage after spending so many years symbolically dragging him through school.

Milestones like this lighten my dark and heavy heart because I have succeeded in continuing as a mother when so many days I just wanted to quit. The darkness doesn't dampen the joy I feel when one or the other succeeds at something, nor does it quiet worry when I see them making decisions I perceive as ruinous. Last week, Wally proved I had done something right. Nestled in the thorns of all of my bad parenting he has found his path . Wally made a life altering decision completely independently from me or his father. Isn't this what we ultimately want for our children the second they leave our bodies? Isn't independence the goal? But when I heard he had stepped away from the Navy and joined the Army I was angry. Over the thunder of my helicopter blades snapping the air as I lectured about commitment and seeing things through. Now I can see the root of my anger rests solely in not being consulted. My eldest is continuing without me. As it should be.

Image by Blake Flynn

"the dimension of stillness"

Ezra Pound/1916 photo by Alvin Langdon Coburn

THE GARDEN

Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anemia.
And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.
In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.
Ezra Pound (1916)


I love poetry and whenever I discover a “new” poem I get a bit obsessed by it. This is my current obsession, likely because my theme this winter seems to be all about becoming a crone. A crone in the post modern sense of the word. Not the hooked nose-brewing up poison for unsuspecting maidens-sense of it.

“In her is the end of breeding”

When I read this poem the first time a week or so ago, my first conclusion was firmly rooted in an old school feminist lit criticism: Pound saw women who can’t breed as useless. Middle-aged women are useless, better off invisible…blah…blah…ageism…blah (Let’s all raise a fist in solidarity. . .)

After I finished my self inflicted eyeroll, I reread the poem and took a lighter view of it, one actually more in keeping to Pound’s sensibilities. In 1916 he was writing imagist pieces and finding inspiration in the Pre-Raphaelites. With this in mind, she is the symbol of a Goddess too perfect to breed. A bit more sympathetic but a stretch: “like trying to cross the rim of the Grand Canyon on a suspension bridge made of dental floss” (my favorite literature professor wrote that in the margin of a particularly terrible paper I wrote promoting some harebrained deconstructionist screed.. It made me laugh out loud and still does)

My final and favorite interpretation is a literal one: Pound observed a beautiful and genteel young woman walking through the park and their eyes met. She improperly held him in her. As he was about to speak to her; she suddenly turned away, raising her nose, sniffing at the idea he would dare speak to her in public. My interpretation is heavily influenced by all the romance novels I’ve read. Very simplistic and almost crosses into the realm of “precious”. I manage to back away from the preciousness by insisting on the feminist reading: By virtue of her sex and gender, this lonely woman is “dying” as a result of her independent and private leanings which are in opposition to the expectations placed upon her by virtue of her class. She was further a symbol of how society was changing and how women were changing. Big shoes for a little poem to fill.

I’m actually not a big fan of Pound. His Cantos string together beautiful and memorable phrases--like the title of this blog from Cantos XLIX--but I don‘t think I ever fully understood them. I remember attempting to understand the Cantos ions ago when I returned to school. It’s a big mess of a poem and some feel it was never completed. He draws on imagists, troubadours, economics, politics, his bitterness about the futility of war. Granted it’s very long but he tries to do everything in this poem and it makes my head hurt. Pound was also a vocal about his anti-Semitism and spewed his opinions on Italian radio during WW II. Once, I was chided by a Pound lover (see the professor from above) for failing to separate the artist’ politics from the art. At the end of his life, he expressed great regret for his political views during the war. Having just learned this a few years ago, I relaxed my knee jerk reaction of: “Ack!! It’s a poem by Pound, so it will be dangerous and hateful political ravings couched in weird images and nonsense! “ Now my reaction is: “Ack!! It’s Pound, I won’t get it!“ I’m relieved I didn’t get the Pound Brain Freeze when I stumbled on "The Garden".

I wish I were one of these people who reads a poem and immediately understand what the poet is trying to say. Most of the time I can’t interpret poetry without the aid of a PhD telling me what they think it means. Poems must be verrrryyyy simple and straightforward for me to grasp their meaning. Or they must be abstract and the art is simply the way the words are arranged and sound together. I can do that. I can suspend my hamster brain for a few minutes and just enjoy words and the images evoked for the sake of art. My wise and well-educated Oldest Friend told me she thinks unintelligible poems aren’t necessarily good poems. Of course I agree with her because it bruises my delicate ego when I can’t interpret a poem.

All of my feminist mumbo jumbo aside, I have imagined interpreting this poem through another artistic medium by setting up a picture: Huge piece of brightly colored sari silk blowing against a dirty graffiti covered wall. I think it would be interesting if the graffiti said: "Her boredom is exquisite and excessive" Maybe in Italian as a tribute to Pound‘s years in Italy.

I do know I never want to feel "exquisite boredom" especially if it is anything like exquisite pain. I wonder if Wally would be marked down for "poor usage" in his composition class if he called boredom exquisite?

Sweet poetry: the literal meanings of word are suspended for the sake of art.