Get out of town
In the meantime, take a look around, maybe check out the best of the blog. Or read one of my most popular posts, Procrastination, B-52 bombers and ball turret gunners. Google sends people to it for the images, but I hope they stay for the writing, are pulled in by the words. I hope you are, too.
See you next Monday.
Image: The kid, December 2009.
What my body is telling me
Stop eating so much cheese. Eat more nuts. You’re never too tired to brush your teeth. I’m beginning to sound like a bully, aren’t I, full of advice on what not to do, telling you what you should be doing? So let’s get contradictory: there are no shoulds. And we’re not going into what that means. Not enough time.
What are you doing well? How can you keep up the good work? You do exercise, get that heart rate up and jump around like a maniac at least four times a week. You’re writing. That’s good for our mental health, though I think you could do more of it more consistently. You generally eat well, whole grains, good veggies, yada yada yada. Your fruit consumption is pitiful, but that’s how you’ve been your whole life. Not a fruit eater. And while I believe you could probably make more friends, you seem to be have a healthy relationship with your husband and son. Thought you could never pull off that one, huh? Yeah, well, stop thinking that way. Have some confidence in yourself, woman.
Here’s the thing: I can’t promise you a lifetime of health, even if you take care of me. Things happen. Cells go awry, brains leak memories. Try your best (please: I want to be here as long as I can), but don’t get angry at us if it doesn’t work out the way you expected. How does the song go? Hold on loosely, if you cling too tightly … well, the comparison falls apart from there, but I hope you get the idea. You should. We are one and the same, know each other intimately, cheek by jowl as we are. We’re on the same page, read from the same book, are cut of the same cloth.
Yes. Yes. Clichés all of them. Sometimes we’re lazy. But you already beat yourself up enough about that one.
Image: Me, as recorded by my computer.
From the prompt: what my body is telling me.
Mixed up muddled up shook up world
Now for the grouse-inpiring news: I have to match up each set of Haloscan comments with the proper post, which will mean that I have to go through almost two years worth of saved comments one by one. JS-Echo is still problematic--some people can't comment, there is no easy way for commenters to provide a link back to their web page, and most of my posts still have a double comment link at the bottom. The house needs to be cleaned for the house/pet-sitter. I still need to get a few Christmas presents for my father and stepmother (don't ask). I have been so wrapped up in the commenting problem that I haven't been stopping by many blogs. And even worse, I've barely had time to write or think, since the little brainspace I have has been devoted to blog trouble-shooting.
I hope to get another post out before we leave on Monday, something that will have nothing to do with colors or comments or cats (though I will return to cats). In the meantime, here's a little Kinks for you, the song that I stole a line from to title this post.
Image: Our front fence with plants.
Cat from the past
Twenty-four hour party person
With the change, I also implemented a new commenting system, Disqus, in the hopes that some of the issues readers were having with the other system would go away. Unfortunately, it appeared as though the comments I imported into the system were not linking to my posts. I was also not thrilled with the location of the completed comments, which appeared down at the bottom of the page. So I've switched back to JS-Kit Echo, except that as of Monday night all of my old comments were floating around in cyberspace, unattached to the posts that prompted them. I apologize if one of your comments is out there, either from the brief reign of Disqus or the somewhat spotty ongoing commentship of JS-Kit Echo.
Everything else has changed, too though the language has stayed the same for the most part. Take a look around and leave a comment or email me to let me know if something works or doesn't work for you. You might also learn something new about me, discover another reason why I'm here.
So here you go. I hope you like it. I'm sure I'll be tweaking things over the coming weeks.
Image: Big Skully as angel, December 2009.
Edited 22 March to reflect change in commenting interface and to add all sorts of other stuff, too.
I carry the heavy water
People tell me that they would like to know more about my mother. Yes, she really wanted to be a horse when she grew up. She writes poetry, makes pots, gathers detritus for ornament. She put herself through school when I was small, owned a house on Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay, was involved with men who were interesting in divergent ways. In a neighborhood of tight short grass, she let her front yard become a meadow and spent one carless year getting around on a moped. She has always been left-leaning, was even briefly a Communist in the early 1970s. When I was a teenager we would remove real estate signs from former corn and soybean fields in a vain protest against development, would fishtail down country roads with these huge signs sticking out of the back of her battered 1973 Corolla station wagon. Other times, I would roll my eyes when she pulled over at the sight of mayapples in the woods. Fuming in the passenger seat, worried that someone I knew might see us, I would wait for her to dig up a few plants for her shady backyard. After my stepfather moved out of the house, Mom and I traced the outlines of our celebratory forms on the walls of his workout room, poses of joy and freedom, and shared a laugh at imagining how the drawings would mystify him. He wouldn't have known happiness even if he was bench-pressing it, but we understood: happiness was being on the run.
She was an unconventional parent, loving when she wasn't blinded by circumstance or her own sadness, and supportive when she wasn't worried that I would disappear into an unsuitable life. But she also had a fiery temper and a tendency to neglect. Our past together comes in shades of grey, from the light mist of early morning fog to the dark moment before your eyes adjust to the blackout. Would I have chosen a stable, boring parent instead of her? No. After being out of her house for twenty-five years, long independent from her moods and moves, it's easier to say that. I've written through most of the pain, have decided to show the scars of my childhood to the light.
Without those experiences, without my mother, would I be writing today? Is there value in being scarred, in the bittersweet ache of having survived relatively intact? I have forgiven my mother. I still work on forgiving my father. But the largest task is grappling with the effects of their behavior. Sometimes that old pain of abandonment feels a part of me, impossible to escape, something that flows through my veins and arteries and regenerates in my marrow, the cell memory of neglect.
I'm working on it, I'm writing it out. I'm giving it a voice. And slowly, slowly, it's working.
The scars sparkle like broken glass. The light makes them golden, supple, gives them a hue that I never appreciated in the dark. These are who I am, who my mother and I were, what we were capable of, and I’m here, I’m here, I float above the earth. I’ve known life and death. I carry the guilt, I carry the heavy water. I shine with the brilliance of knowledge of the grave.
Image: My mother and me, December 1982. Isn't being thirteen with braces just wonderful?
Most of this is from a recent prompt, Gold.
Before the day eases into dark
We choose the plants that will live and those that will die based on our ideas of what is beautiful or can be contained. For the last year, my husband and I have let these weeds flourish in the area between the sidewalk and the curb, have let the thick green stems crawl across the stones, carpet what was meant to be bare. To be honest, the idea of weeding a place where I can’t plant anything is annoying. Why should I care? But it looks messy and we might be moving soon. The task is satisfying, a pleasant way to spend an afternoon in the sun with the boy.
I stepped out of the house with a bowlful of vegetable scraps for the green waste and paused to look at the sky, to remember the night. Dusk is my favorite time of day, a tease of relief after the dragging afternoon. The light was melting away and the darkness, with all its potential, stretched and beckoned. It stirred up feelings of anticipation, of portentous beauty, of a time when every night was filled with possibility. For a moment I could pretend that my night wouldn't end in fitful interrupted sleep after five minutes of reading, that I wouldn't wake up at 3:00 a.m. to dreams of pursuit and capture.
I returned to the house, stepped back into the contained air where the dishes and evening routine awaited me. But in my mind, I wore the flowing dress, I let my hair loose, I walked barefoot into the grass. I breathed in the coming darkness and waited for the stars to emerge.
Image: Cornfield and woods behind my grandfather's place and the Little House, some autumn in the mid-1980s. Technically this is a picture of the tail end of sunset, of not-yet-dusk, but it's close enough and all mine. I like how some of the trees look like ghosts. And after almost two years of using this software, I finally figured out how to fit an image into the text.
Wild horses
Summers when I was a little girl we would drive past the horse farms owned by the Duponts, would pull our rusty Datsun over to the side of the road and tiptoe up to the fences, holding hidden handfuls of Dominos sugar cubes. Two cubes in each flattened palm, we would wait for the horses to whinny and walk over, for their soft lips to graze our hands as they picked up the sugar.
The memory is faded now. I hold the fact of it rather than any sensation, and what I see are long grasses and dark, tall fences, a blue sky with clouds raked across it, the vague sense that we were getting away with something.
Image by Jane Underwood. The image was the prompt.
Drum-tight heart
Sitting in a cold doctor's
office on a sunny morning, looking at
my Moleskine
notebook, discovering old
writing ideas that I will never use.
Please steal them. Give them life. Some of
them have been trapped in my little
notepad for years.
First the concepts
angel-in-residence
ritual explosives
liquidity of memory
drum-tight heart
fill it up with Ethyl
Then fill in
the gaps
Message on our answering machine,
2003: Giovanni's got a
package for you.
Conversation on a dry, dusty day at
Children's
Fairyland:
Father, very angry, to toddler:
You got my
shoes dirty right after I cleaned them!
Grandmother,
placating: You
know
how funny
he is about his shoes.
Finally, the
Moleskine
Good luck reading my
writing. I can barely decipher it myself. And
I've been drawing the same doodles since I
was twelve.
This post is written in homage to koe
whitton-williams of the
half-life of lineoluem
and
if the
walls could talk. I've chosen to go
almost all
lower-case in this paragraph, but I
could be wrong. I'm working without a
stylebook.
Next post: a return to narrative.
Images above: Me,
waiting, waiting, for the doctor or,
err, the nurse-practitioner
Images below: What I wrote in my notebook
while I was waiting
Sweater dress logic
That's me up there, in our
office/guest room/exercise space, dressed in
full stay-at-home mom regalia. Baggy cropped
pants? Check. Shapeless long-sleeved t-shirt?
Check. Hair in desperate need of a cut or at
the very least a comb? Oh, yeah. And then of
course, there is the room itself, the armoire
mirror obscured by smudges, the
partially-made bed, the pillow propped on my
desk chair so that I don't get a backache
when I write, the old boxes in the corner
that my mother puts in the back windows at
night during her visits to block out the
neighbor's porch light (she likes to sleep in
near darkness). Welcome to my glamorous
world.
I don't tend to get dressed up during the
week (or ever), because what's the point?
Most mornings I sit around writing or letting
my mind go in four or five dark directions,
and afternoons are kid time. I'm not going to
put on my fancy spandex pants to go to the
library. Over the years I’ve worn many short
and form-fitting outfits, but since my son
was born I've apparently given up on looking
good. It isn't worth the bother or the
expense, and who am I trying to impress? My
husband finds even frumpy-mom me attractive
and I have no female coworkers to dazzle. The
game of dress-up, of wrapping myself in
appealing fabrics and styles, is no longer
familiar.
But feeling frumpy is depressing, so I'm
starting to think about what I wear, to
attempt to dress like I'm still in the game,
like I haven't given up completely on feeling
attractive. It takes work, sometimes it isn't
worth it, but I make the effort. I've started
to go shopping for clothes in person again,
not online or at outlet stores, but in resale
shops, places like the Crossroads Trading
Company, where I might find
funky, offbeat duds on the cheap, where
I'm likely to find interesting options in
small sizes.
This is where I found the sweater dress.
The dress was short, slate blue and
formfitting, with a princess waist and a cozy
turtleneck collar. It went well with a pair
of knee-high black leather boots that I
bought at the same store. When will I wear this
thing? I thought, but clothes
shopping often puts me in fantasy mode, a
sunny place where I shower seven days a week
and get my hair cut four times a year, where
I remember to brush my teeth hours before I
pick up the kid from preschool, where I
decide to put on cute dresses every day
instead of baggy pants. The dress was under
twenty bucks, so I went for it. I made an
investment in fantasy. My husband and I were
planning a nice dinner at Oliveto
to mark the
completion of his dissertation, so I had
an occasion.
On the evening of our
dinner, I laid next to the boy as usual,
waiting for him to fall asleep, for his
breathing to become even and light before I
tiptoed out of his room to change. Boy
asleep, dress safely on, I applied the
tiniest bit of makeup and pulled my hair
back. As I creaked down the steps, my husband
was talking in the living room with our
babysitter. She is freshly twenty-one,
effortless with both adults and children, and
as I came closer I realized that I was
wearing a
dress, that I was wearing
the
dress. It was
as though I had just put on a buttless
formfitting leather jumpsuit. I felt exposed,
like I was pretending to be something I
wasn't, a young person, a stylish
person, non-maternal.
I had brought a coat with me downstairs and I
whipped it on before the babysitter could see
me, then ran behind the magazine rack to put
on my boots. Indecency covered, I fluttered
out the door with my husband before she could
notice that I was dressed as an imposter,
that I was attempting to play the part of an
attractive, stylish woman. And in the cold
restaurant, I kept my coat wrapped around my
shoulders, covered my cheap disguise.
Did the blame for my discomfort lie within me
or was it the dress? Was I over-thinking the
whole thing? (Remember how
neurotic I can
be?) The dress had one
more chance to prove herself. We had a
cocktail party to attend.
The party took place in a typical Berkeley
house, a small two-bed, one bath, and it was
hopping by the time we arrived at 8:30. It
was my kind of crowd, mainly parents that had
escaped their kids for the night, a mix of
thirty- and forty-somethings. The women were
brightly plumed, showing off cleavage and
shoulders, wearing dresses in thin colorful
fabrics. The room was a tangle of bare legs,
and men in dark colors, of manicured toes
peeking out of exotic shoes. I felt
positively demure in my turtleneck sweater
dress with black tights and scuffed black
boots. The princess waist seemed too
youthful, like I should have had an oversized
lollipop in my hand instead of a beer. And it
was hot in there, so steamy that a bloom of
sweat broke out on my wooled-over torso. I
could have removed my boots and taken off my
tights, could have swung the tights
seductively around my head, grazed the faces
of the other partygoers before tossing the
hosiery out of an open window. But instead I
pulled on my turtleneck, looked enviously at
the bared collarbones around me.
Apparently clothes are all about context.
I haven't given up on my sweater dress or on
regaining my fashion mojo. But I might need
to start fresh, to begin with the foundation
garments. Next week I will jettison my
vintage underwear collection for a more
contemporary look.
You won't be reading about it here.
First image: Me, in
the office, this morning. The
frump-quotient has gone up since then. I
got cold and put on a fuzzy sweater and
socks.
Second image: Sweater dress.
I promise that, after two days of sunshine, I will smile
What is it about my son’s
illnesses that plunge my life into despair,
knock me into a pit for the duration? Four
days at home with a sick four-year-old, four
nights of not-enough sleep, his body
sandwiched between my husband and me in the
middle of the night, exuding heat, the
constant bark of his cough punctuating my
waking dreams.
“Just spit it out, cough it up and spit it
out,” we told him Wednesday night as he
hovered over the sink. His coughs have been
from the center of his body, deep and hoarse.
He let loose a fishing line of spit, coughed
again, and threw up into the basin. It was
very matter-of-fact, but he was concerned.
"Will I need to go to the doctor now?" he
asked. "That's not the bad kind of throw-up,
is it?"
“I used to cough until I threw up when I was
a kid, too,” I told him as I rubbed his back.
“It happened to me all the time.” It did. I
had a bum pair of lungs and was prone to
bronchitis and middle-of-the-night asthma
attacks. It didn’t help that my mother and I
lived in a series of mildew pits, that I
slept hemmed in by cats drawn by my little
girl warmth. I was allergic to both mildew
and cats and probably the cigarette smoke
that twisted through my grandparent’s place.
Used tissues would pile around me like snow
drifts. I had a lot of “melodramatic”
coughing fits.
The doctor said the asthma was nervousness or
hysteria or some such nonsense. I remember
turning it over in my mind, that these
terrifying attacks, the desperate quivering
of my lungs for breath as I sat up in the
dark, were emotional. They were my fault, or
maybe my mother's, for being a single Mom,
for being a bit of a hysteric herself.
The unfortunate thing about running on fumes,
about being stuck to the side of a sick boy
for four days – I have no perspective. I wish
I could tell you of the helpful doctor who
helped me manage my asthma, who held out her
hand for mine. There was no helpful doctor,
though I did at least get an inhaler.
The truth is, I've never wanted to be helped,
except maybe in my secret inner heart, and if
you don’t want to be helped people generally
don’t help you. Maybe it’s safer this way,
but it’s also a drag, and when you’re in a
funk it only drags you down further.
But give me two days of sunshine and maybe a
week of health for the boy and the rest of us
and I will leave the funk behind. I promise
you that everything will be different, that I
will smile back at strangers, will embrace
friends and acquaintances. After the long
gray winter, spring will come again and I
will be filled with warmth and perhaps
something resembling happiness. Or
contentment. I'd settle for contentment, the
absence of grayness.
Image: Kid in between
colds, disguised as a mummy.
Prompt: Write about a
time someone helped you
Can't comment? Let me know.
About a month ago,
Haloscan, the company that provided the
commenting interface for this blog, went
under and I switched to something call ECHO
by JS-Kit.
It isn't working very well. Some people have
been unable to comment, either because the
commenting box doesn't show up or because
they are told that their comments are too
long (even though they aren't). Sometimes the
comments don't load for a long time, which
slows the loading time of the blog.
Unfortunately, the blogging software I use is
only compatible with ECHO, but I am actively
looking for other platforms that might work.
In the meantime, if you would like to comment
but can't or have been having problems,
please let me know at
writingtosurvive(at)gmail.com or fill out
my contact me
form. I
apologize for the hassle and hope that I
can come up with a solution quickly, or
that the folks at JS-Kit can help.
Image: My mother and me on
a non-windy day in December at the Berkeley
Marina.
What's new, pussycat?
My husband and I have
always thought this was a funny picture of
him, very 70s, very huh?
When I posted
it on Facebook, where the photo on the screen
was larger than the original Polaroid, I
finally really looked
at the lion.
Here was this a wild animal lying on his side
like an overgrown house cat, napping while a
seven-year-old boy straddled him. This was
not a full leonine life. Even lions in zoos
get to pretend they are wild occasionally,
get to roar and faux-stalk the
sunscreen-scented tourists.
Then the comments for the picture started
coming in. They were variations on worry,
about putting one's child on an actual living
lion, no matter how moribund and perhaps
drugged (and most likely toothless) the big
cat was, with a chilling mention of Dave
Egger's novel What is
the What: An Autobiography of Valentino
Achek Deng. Deng was one of the
"Lost Boys" of Sudan, one of countless
children separated from their families or
even orphaned, "beset by starvation,
thirst, and man-eating lions on their
march to squalid refugee camps in
Ethiopia" (Publisher's
Weekly review as quoted on
amazon.com).
In a few hours, the picture had totally
changed for me.
But I still feel bad for the lion.
For the k.d. lang version of What's New,
Pussycat?, click here.
Image: Mr. T at Magic Mountain, 25 February
1973.