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I’m borrowing the title of this blog entry; it’s a title of an unpublished essay written by my Oldest Friend.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.

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!

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

"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.

A Pity Party In Self Importantville

Last week was a busy week for me. Between working on tedious nursing research projects and shepherding The Beav from one place to another, I was having a midlife pity party. Not the most productive way to spend my time; if I had any sense it could have been a midlife crisis and I would be sporting a new pair of Jimmy Choos or a driving a new car or driving a new car in a pair of Jimmy Choos. Some premenopausal women have hot flashes, insomnia or memory issues but not me. Nope. I have crying jags. Better yet I have--according to a dear friend--existential crisis’.

All of this was precipitated by catching a glimpse of people I went to school with thirty years ago, messing with my shaky self confidence and tottering self esteem. Those beautiful girls still look the same. Perfect hair, perfect faces, perfect teeth. Perfect. And don’t get me started on how gracefully the men have aged.

Going to school in North Texas during the 1970’s was almost Hell for me because at almost six feet tall, leggy (not in a good way) skinny, with scraggly thin hair and glasses I was the antithesis of the ideal: 5'5, an over abundance of fluffy hair and the body of a goddess. Fortunately, I found a niche at school and all in all had a lot of fun as a girl. But last week you would have thought I was the school’s whipping girl, always alone, too weird for friends. So weird even the teachers made fun of her. I probably was too weird for friends but luckily my friends didn’t realize it. (Maybe they did and they were just being altruistic and kind…hmmmm) But because I am terribly shallow, the adolescent experience of being average looking left a little scab on my psyche. So I took the opportunity last week to pick at the tiny scratch until it was a big festering, oozy wound. Given the tearful email I sent to Oldest Friend and the phone call I made to Best Gay Boyfriend, you would have thought my life was over because those Texas Women are still drop dead gorgeous, thin with Pilate's bodies and from what I can tell wildly successful and happy. In fact, I text messaged one of my --wildly successful, gorgeous and happened-to-be-vacationing-in-Paris--friends from high school:

“ When r u home? Feeling antifabulous surrounded by the beautiful peeps from 1979. Im the only 1 old and fat. The rest of u are beautiful! Oxo, ugly betty[*]. Srsly if u txt me u hkd up w/ jdepp I will cry myself 2 sleep.”

I think that text message just raised the bar for pathetic, don’t you?

But wait, there’s more: OF is farmed out to New Zealand because the state of academics in US is so piss poor English professors must outsource themselves, and their families, to island nations all the way around and upside down from the US. OF is mostly miserable, she can’t find a job, not too fond of the very expensive NZ and feels removed from the rest of her family. But because she is my OF she doesn’t tell me:

“Get. A. Fucking. Life. Please! Email me with real problems rather than worrying about the wrinkles on your forehead, you too short hair and trying to find new glasses that don‘t make you look like a bull dyke gym teacher.”

(she would use the word “fuck” in that context. Years ago, I had to turn the Net Nanny off because it wouldn’t allow me to read her emails) What we did have was an engaging exchange discussing how brutal our culture is on older women. OF was funny and sweet with her reassurances that I would not allow myself to devolve into Blanche Dubois; laying around and crying about all I have lost. If I'm going to dissolve into a dysfunctional middle aged woman, I think Little Edie is a much more interesting choice.

And who better to call when you are having an ugly and/or fat day than your Best Gay Boyfriend (BGB)? I sniveled and sniffed my way through the whole story about feeling fat, old and ugly, never bothering to ask him how he was doing. BGB is such a sage, this is what he said and he said it because he knows where I live: Self Importantville:

”Oh dear, you are having an existential crisis! There isn’t anything I can say or do to make this better, is there?”

Au contraire BGB: you just made it sound so important and meaningful! I’m not having a hormonal breakdown! Or the most facile person on the planet. No no no no no no! I’m having an existential crisis. Emphasis on the “crisis”. I felt infinitely better after talking to BGB. He turned my frown upside down into a crisis! That he was kind and supportive speaks volumes for my choice of BGBs, especially since the last thing he wanted to listen to was some middle-aged woman nattering on about her lost looks. As we were talking, BGB was multitasking and in the midst of winnowing out most of his worldly possessions trying to decide what he could live without in order to preserve a roof over his head. A day or so later, I winced when I thought about my emotional conversation with him. I felt like Paris Hilton, walking up to this woman : “Um, does this bag clash with my shoes?”

Fortunately, my existential crisis ended after twenty-four hours of self flagellation and carb consumption. It also helped to make an appointment with Nurse Poison for some Botox. A birthday present to my loved ones so they don’t have to hear whining about the lines etched over my face me.

What really shut the party down was when an old friend called and left me a message that started: “Hello beautiful. . .”

Because I am shallow like that.




*For the record, I thinkAmerica Ferrera is hot and Ugly Betty is adorable.