Truth or dare
Maybe it was those dreams of French hackers who took over my Facebook account, adding me to groups on postmodernism and cooking, on philosophies of sophistry, on European pop groups and flexible sexuality. Maybe I was too hot last night. Maybe it was the stomachache I went to bed with that could have been the beginning of a night of anguish but was held off with pills. Maybe I expected too much. Maybe this is my protective carapace in action – just try to reach me through this hidden, hard shell. Go ahead. Try.
The house gleams, clean from floor to fur-free floor (with some exceptions). The day will be gray and blustery and I will conquer worlds from the filtered light of cloud cover. I have to-do lists. I have fires to feed. In my mind there is a heated swimming pool in a luxurious addition to a house I’ve never been in. The water shimmers, it moves slightly as if the earth beneath it is adjusting itself. I stand on the lip, feet wet, in my bathing cap and my bathing suit from seventy years ago (the fabric is heavy and the water binds it to my skin). I do not face the pool, but somehow I make the backwards dive, smooth, clean, triumphant, body sharp as a knife.
In the morning I drink coffee. In the afternoon, hot water. At night, beer and wine. When resourceful, present, I cook every night. I improvise, it’s like jazz or being on stage, and so what if the audience is small and my work, my art, hidden?
I am not supposed to be beholden to my moods, to let emotional whim control my day and how I see myself (it’s an Ennegram type four thing, and it makes sense). If I tie my stability to my every strong feeling, I am bound to implode. But there are days when I feel strong and confident, when I am open, and there are days when I feel strong and confident in a defensive way. I like to ride these feelings when I have them, even if I am shadow-boxing in the living room by the heat of a midday fire, alone except for the animals, making the air move around us, watching the raindrops on the window merge and take each other down.
My body and my mind are my own. I am sovereign over this land. Try and catch me, try and categorize me, take what you see and make it into something else. Go ahead. Try.
I dare you.
Image originally by Margaret Chute of Dorothy Sebastian and Joan Crawford (!) in 1927; scanned by Allison Marchant.
I feel better now.
Nothing to be frightened of
It was a relief to get those things off my head and out of my house and to mail them myself. Now I wait and try not to worry too much about what will happen or question my approach. I filled out the paperwork, added up the hours I’ve worked, gathered transcripts from four schools (so strange to see my transcripts from Washington College, with the classes I chose and then the series of Ws for withdrawal for spring semester 1989 – what a hazy, long ago time that was). I have recommendations from people who believe in me and know me. I have a résumé that runs the gamut from legislative librarian to stay-at-home mom. And I have this essay, which I know is well-written, it tells the necessary story, but how many people apply to graduate programs in part by writing about their personal struggles?
This is a place where I want to hang on to the anxiety, the protective, don’t-get-used-to-the-idea-that-you-are-changing-your-life anxiety. It’s a habit. So I’m backing off. I wrote what was necessary. I wrote what I had to. And I have nothing to be ashamed of anyway.
So. Sunday. The husband left for a business trip. The boy and I hung out, met up with friends at a local park in the afternoon. That night I stayed up late and slept hard when I did fall asleep. We got through Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I read most of Prince Caspian out loud at breakfast and bedtime. We kept up with his schoolwork and other reading and ate grilled cheese sandwiches one too many times, mine layered with dill pickles and Dijon mustard with a steamed artichoke on the side.
It has been hard to find the time and the mental space to write, so I leafed through my journal a couple of days ago, one I’ve been intermittently writing in since early last summer. My mind is in some form of neutral, not feeling inspired or poetic, just here. I was trolling for post topics, for something to write about. Obviously, I have not yet burned my diaries, though I have examined them for things that might confuse or cause pain to the ones I will someday leave behind. But sometimes I confuse myself, like in this somewhat enigmatic entry from a night in late November when I was still trying to turn my 2:00 a.m. anxieties into 11:00 a.m. pish posh:
11/29/11
So tired tonight + afraid of the wake-up, so I also took a sleeping pill. One might think tiredness could sometimes mean worries for a churning mind + I guess I am worried about that but not really. Not really.
Nonetheless, to wipe from my mind
the taste of honey
the taste of radishes (this could be radicchio and not radishes – my writing isn’t that good; in fact, radicchio makes more sense, as much sense as anything could in this context)
the unknown mixed with the too known
Then there’s the dark and slightly dense stuff from the days before my attempts to control my night anxieties with lists:
6/29
We believe that words don’t really matter, that they dress the corpse, the fading memory of the lost, the words lie, they control, and everyone knows it. We think that tears don’t matter, they water the crops, salt our salads and our eggs, the you intact under thin yellow skin.
I read this (and some other stuff from that time period, what remains, anyway) and I want to reach out a sympathetic hand to my six-months-ago self and say (affectionately), “Lighten up, honey. It’s not so bad. And why are you dragging everyone else into your mental landscape? Drop the we. Drop the attitude.”
But of course this was where my head was at the time, muddied and sad. I spoke to myself in runes, in multilayered metaphors as dense as lead. In the first part of the journal, I had written a fragment of a short story, something that just flowed out one afternoon when we were at Berkeley Family Camp. Maybe the words were ready; maybe the fact that there were no electronic distractions made it easier for me. Maybe I just needed to get my worries out onto paper, my projections, the image of a (fictional! fictional!) me at 61, with all the regrets and none of the joys of getting older.
I typed the story up yesterday, with some gaps where I couldn’t read my writing. But I don’t know what to do with it. It is well-written enough for a first draft. It has my distinctive voice, with the same old themes: self-sacrifice, regret, suppressed desire, guilt, the danger of deadness when deadness seems like the only way to stay safe or to keep others safe from my darker tendencies.
Maybe that is the problem, those themes, written into my life as though they were part of the framework, the structure, instead of being lousy additions. My life is a stately Victorian with a series of poorly thought out add-ons, boxy awkward things that cover up the fine bones of the original. The paint on them is peeling, their roofs leak, the wood has begun to rot. They no longer serve a purpose.
The time has come to remove them from the main structure, to pull away at rippled drywall, to pry the boards off, to reveal the beauty underneath, and to know this is something I am doing myself, not letting be done to me. I am in control of the process.
It's nothing to be frightened of.
A note on the title and the last line of this post -- it is also the title of a non-fiction book by Julian Barnes, a memoir and a meditation on the fear of death. It's a great book. I've just read his latest (Booker-prize winning) piece of fiction, The Sense of An Ending, which I highly recommend as well.
Image of a Los Angeles Victorian by Neil Kremer.
What good are notebooks?
What good are notebooks? They're a lot of good a lot of the time unless they leave you treading water inside your head. Writing this post put the song "Life During Wartime" (Burned all my notebooks, what good are notebooks? They won't help me survive.) in my head. It seems to fit.
Love carved into stone
I’ve always been a fan of what a friend calls the “Irish sports pages.” The people I read about don’t have to be famous. Their deaths don’t need to be tragic. It does help if the story is good and the details specific.
During the boy’s most recent illness, I read through a special feature of the New York Times online, The Lives They Loved, as he watched a movie beside me. The Times invited readers to send in pictures and stories about loved ones who had died in 2011. I read through all 290 of them (skimming some), sometimes crying quietly in response to something particularly sad – the deaths of children, of the parents of small children, or of those who were simply too young to die always get me.
Two things struck me about the stories. One – there were several people who died this past year who were elderly and had been married for a very long time, sometimes over sixty years (and often the husband and wife died within a short time of each other). Two – out of the 290 stories, two came from people who heard of an old love’s passing – and each person hadn’t spoken to the old love in decades.
These were two sides of the same coin – decades of love and apparent devotion versus the fantasy of what could have been without the difficulties of years and money troubles and miscarriages, of colicky newborns and midlife crises, of cancer and dementia and the surprise snap of suddenly brittle bones.
I could make it all up, affection, a life, the way we can look at old couples and think that all along it was wonderful, that the love that exists at 18 and 30 and 45 lives until death, that the physical need for each other lasted through economic stress and the snot-streaked faces of children, through the days, months, or years when there was just no way that they could be in the same room together without resentment rising up. I like the idea myself, that love can last, or at the very least grow and change, so that at the end of a long life together couples still hold hands and talk and joke.
Even if there were difficult times, you wouldn’t read about them in an obituary, no matter how open the pair was in life about the ups and downs of marriage. We don’t expect candor in a death notice (though I did like the one on a grandmother who could be cranky and who said in her late nineties "it's better to go in your eighties" -- there's honesty). And anyway, death smooths over difficulty, the stories of those who have passed become soft with a slight sheen, or maybe no one tells the stories anymore, happy that the whole thing is over, that the struggles are done.
But I also want to believe the fantasy of an everlasting love, simple and basic, with just enough struggle to make the ending sweet, a place in which those of us who are halfway through (or more) can project our hopes for what is in store for us, despite the internal snap of crisscrossed wires and the prickly closeness, the push-pull of connection, dependence, and autonomy. Yes, this is what got under my skin about both the glossed-over marriages of fifty years or more and the romantic yearnings of people for loves from earlier, simpler times. They appealed to my idealistic, romantic side, the one that leads me to unrealistic expectations, who hopes for complete understanding without difficulty, for a place that I can rest despite my internal intimacy alarm system.
I want love to be easy. I want all the puzzle pieces to fit together. I want each of us to be free and clear of problems, able to devote ourselves fully to another while maintaining our necessary separateness. I want love to have clear skies. I want something that doesn't exist, something movie-style, love carved into stone, yet as comforting and soothing as a beloved old chair, something you can sink into when you need to rest. Except I don't sink into anything, not easily at any rate.
Nothing is simple, nor should it be. Deep love doesn't come cheaply or without complications, each person with their past and history, with their expectations and their own life path. That's ok. It's ok. It's what makes it interesting. It's what makes it worth it. And when the journey is over, you look back at the entire trip, the narrative, the phases, making sure to honor the difficulties and to pay homage to love that persisted in the face of human frailty.
Image by Henry Gray.
The present of presence
It may not surprise regular readers to hear that I have problems with family and connection, that it’s easier for me to remain self-sufficient than to ask for help even from those closest to me, and that even though I have a small family of my own, it has been difficult for me to be present with them. This is something that has come up in various therapy work, how to feel like I am a part of things, how not to stay separate, how groupings of three are threatening, especially for those who have generally been excluded in such groupings (child, parent, parent; child, parent, parent’s love interest).
And you know what? It’s gotten better. Not perfect, but better. There is a thread of connection between us. I’m less absent (again, not perfect, but so much better) when we’re together. I didn’t want to run away from home on my birthday, though I thought about it a lot the week before. We have had times when all three of us could sit quietly in a room, comfortable in our separateness, connected, too, without fraught, silent history hanging over our heads. This was the first year that my husband and I coordinated on the boy’s Christmas and also worked out a Christmas Eve misunderstanding without me exploding (tough, especially when the house is full of people and I am tense with the requirements of it all).
I worry about my parenting and the worry gets in the way of figuring out what is good for me. Sometimes I imagine going up in a poof of smoke, the midnight disappearance, the running off to another town, just to be free of the potential pain that connection brings – the threat of loss (it is inevitable, no matter what), the future break between child and parents, the wrenching ache of death and abandonment. I’ve created a life of total submission to child and home, which only makes the stakes higher and the center of my life more fragile, which ramps up the anxiety, the feeling that the walls in my small room are closing in on me.
I’m figuring it out. I focus on the future, on the grad school path, while keeping an open mind. No matter the path to external happiness, to contentment, to self-sufficiency, I will not lose the connection. I will be present.
So this is Christmas … a holiday I don’t totally care for, one that takes over, all macho with its Christian origins and its focus on consumerism. Today I focus on the rest of it, the boy, the greenery, the lights, the feeling of gratefulness for my wavering yet strengthening ability to be here, and for my friends, those of you I’ve known for years and those of you with whom I’ve developed a friendship across the mysterious Internet ether. I am so lucky to know you.
I am grateful for family, too, for the spark of connection, the elusive silver thread. It's not a trap. No matter how things change and shift for me – how I make them change and shift – the connection will be there, the history, the shared, ineffable love.
Merry Holidays!
Image of the boy playing at the park yesterday.
Obviously, I was able to carve out an hour or two for writing -- it's one of the benefits of waking up at 4:30 in the morning!
Holiday vertigo
Unless I get a chance to steal away for a few hours, I won't be doing much writing in the next few days. Have a lovely holiday! I'll be back before the new year begins.
Image by Mr. T. taken at the Tilden Park carousel's Christmas fantasy, ummm, celebration? Tradition? Name of child (or, as Anne pointed out, possible ghost from the 70s) unknown.
Cobbled together moment by moment
It’s a melancholy, lonely feeling. I’ve waited to start writing until the boy and his father were out of the house, on their way to a swimming lesson, and I find that everything feels contingent, time-bound, stuck and ever-changing all at once, and I hope this feeling isn’t some sort of premonition, some kind of weird knowledge of the end because the end is near. Like my mind is controlling it and I’ll lose everything, every little bit of it, because I am not good enough, or I am too dark inside. It must be taken away. Or I must be taken away.
The image I have is of a wrinkled, spotted hand reaching out of the mist to pull me into some other world or to pull what would be left of me, the spark, the bit of light. It isn’t frightening and it isn’t soothing and so much of it is obscured, just the hand, the reach, and then I’m gone.
Maybe this train of thought has come about because of my recent discussions with my mother about Christianity and the survival of our individuality after death, something she doesn't entirely buy (I'm still on the fence). Why are we so attached to the personal, the us of us, surviving our bodily death? What do we become? What is death like? Or will we ever know?
Maybe it has to do with the book I picked up last night, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed , three long stories dealing with women “all past their first youth” (is there such a thing as a second youth?) and their struggles with aging and wayward children and spouses. I first read this book in my early twenties when aging was a myth, a theory that I never thought I would test. I am happy to be absorbed in fiction, something outside of hard reality, and terrified by what it may inform me about the future (I have always gotten too much of my information on how to live and what to expect in life from fiction; perhaps I should pick some more uplifting authors).
Maybe it has to do with where my head has been lately – it’s guilt, plain and simple, deep and wide, dark and bottomless. It’s the needs of the body versus the needs of the mind and the soul and it’s bargains with myself about what I can handle and who I am. It’s the tangle of contradictions and prickly intimacies all jumbled up in my heart, wrapping around my mind. It’s murk and mist and mud.
I want to revel in the ambiguity of existence, the way we slam into ourselves in the middle of the night, the little inconsistencies. I want to be human, to forgive myself, to let my mistakes be. I want to be reckless and free, unafraid, standing outside looking at the stars, being in the moment, being there, instead of stuck inside my head thinking about the unknowable and ruminating on the inevitable, thinking that my inherent badness will cause my death or the destruction of those glints of joy that sometimes appear in my life, little shining moments of luck and beauty.
That’s why I was pulling weeds out front earlier today, enjoying being active and in the sun, totally absorbed in a mindless task. It's why I sat with the boy on the couch two hours ago, enjoying his closeness, the fleeting moments of his cuddly six-year-oldness. It will all change, it is changing now, and I want to be here for it all as long as I am here, me, with all my contradictions and flaws, putting the inevitable out of my mind.
Getting it onto the page -- onto the screen -- always clears my head. So now, back to life, cobbled together moment by moment, living as if it will never end.
Image of me holding death in my hands. Or making a sugar skull for Day of the Dead. Pick whichever interpretation you prefer.
Consigned to flames
Because we were both on the outs, both kind of snobby, we could make jokes at the expense of the rest of them, together at the beach bonfires with their bomb Libya talks (this was the Reagan era) and other conservative blather. We were on the Eastern Shore and this is what it was all about -- say it with a light country twang -- beer, bosoms, barbecues, and burning.
I’ve been thinking about burning lately. Burning journals. About a month ago, writer Dominique Browning wrote an essay in the New York Times about why she tossed years’ worth of her diaries into the flames. She didn’t want her sons to read about the ups and downs in her life, to know her through the lens of despair. She wanted them to remember her as strong and resilient: “Burning those diaries, I realized I didn’t want my sons to know how profoundly I had suffered from the slides down the chutes, the tumbles through the holes that gaped open in the scaffolding of my life. That would be too hard for them. I wanted them to remember me as one who clambers back. That’s the person they grew up with. A person who picks herself up and gets going again.”
At first, this was a very disturbing idea to me. Can't someone who has tumbled multiple times also be someone who clambers back? Was this diary destruction a denial of self? Aren’t journals the places where we reveal who we really are, with all our anxieties and secrets brought to life? Does destroying them mean that we are ashamed of who we were when we wrote them? Don’t our children deserve to know the darker parts of us and don’t we deserve to live on as fully fleshed out human beings in their minds? What’s the harm in that? And if the journals contain anomalies, something not us, then who are they about anyway?
Then the scene popped into my head, the boy grown, going through boxes of my personal effects, attempting to decipher my lousy handwriting, his eyes widening at what he finds in my journals. It’s not so much the me-ness of me revealed as who I was at a certain time. Some times were better than others. Perhaps none of us need to be reminded about those struggles.
I have several of my middle-school/high-school journals and some from my twenties and thirties, before his arrival on the scene. The middle-school diaries, cringe-inducing as they are with their obsessive attention paid to certain boys, are period pieces. I used the words “barf” and "blah" a lot and was just starting to hone my currently well-developed skill of over-interpreting the male gesture. These diaries may come in handy some day, perhaps when the boy is going through his own 12-year-old hell, to give him insight into just how dopey everyone is in middle school. (Of course, at that point he would probably want to burn them as well: who needs to be reminded at 12 that their parent was a kid once?)
But the rest of it? Does he need to know? Do I need to remind myself? Sometimes it’s helpful to see how far I’ve come, though that took years and there is a lot of repetitiveness, a lot of whining. Maybe it’s better if neither of us were able to look back, if the parts we focused on were the good bits, the end of the struggle. The final product may matter more than the process once the process is over.
I haven’t burned a thing yet. I’m considering it, though, consigning the former me to the flames. I've already been burnished through fire, transformed. I'm on the other side, a new creature built on the remains of the old.
For my Eastern Shore friends: Beer, bosoms, barbecue and burning are not really what the Eastern Shore is about, of course.
Writing this made me think of that tattoo I will eventually get, sometime in late 2012 when my appointment with Amy Justen at Sacred Rose Tattoo finally arrives. Still thinking about a phoenix, a la this, but probably much smaller.
Image by Chris Nixon.
The threshold
So who wants to get back to that? Certainly not me. You won’t find me doing that here. Not anymore. Still: it’s hard not to return to the shtick, isn’t it? And last night, maybe I returned to some of the shtick when, before getting ready for bed, I lit one of the emergency cigarettes I keep stashed in my desk. For the first time in a very long time, I inhaled. I finished about a quarter of it before the smoke irritated me. Suddenly I got the point of nicotine, the effect so different from the days of high school and the smoking court or the quick light up under the oak tree outside the Little House. This wasn’t rebellious. It was relaxing. Or maybe it was a bit of safe rebellion, a smoke screen to hide behind, the habit I will never really pick up, but can return to as a safety valve.
Because I know why respectable people with sensible shoes and perfectly coiffed hair put on black leather at night, trolling the streets for love and violence. I understand the businessman in his family car slowing down by the waterfront, looking for action, practicing the art of the "victimless" crime. We all need a little grey in our lives, the mix of daytime with night, the threshold of twilight.
I can borrow from smoking when I need to pass over the threshold. It's a shortcut to rebellion, but not the type that pins me to the past. This is not the resurrection of a habit. I am not returning to the old stories. The old songs and the old ways are gone and I can smoke one cigarette without worry about the next.
In the kitchen, my bare feet cool against the Mexican tile, I blur the meaning of my life in a one long exhale. The smoke holds together for a second, then dissipates, and I add another cloud to the cool night air, my other hand fidgeting with a match as I figure out my next move.
This post is kinda-sorta from the Round Robin. Part of it is from today's photo prompt, part of it is from the prompt "Enough is enough." I changed the title from a (seemingly nonsensical in this context) line from Reel Around the Fountain: Reel around the fountain / Slap me on the patio ...
Image: Me in the only black leather things I actually own (outside of pocketbooks): boots (the detritus around the mirror is a nice touch, no?). This is the outfit I mentioned here (last paragraph or so), sans tights. With the kind of play this dress gets on the blog, I should really wear it more often. And with the number of times cigarettes come up here, one would think that I would actually be a smoker.
Scrubbed clean
Sometimes I scrub the write clean, tart it up, obscure (hopefully) most of its resemblances to reality, and post it. Sometimes that’s impossible, or changes the meaning so much that what I was originally going for is covered over in an ill-fitting disguise. Changing a write is always a dangerous business: I risk losing the poetry of it, the truth of the matter, and I also risk hurting or alienating people I care about who may recognize their outline in what I write.
Then there’s me, the habitual self-revealer with the same tired old themes: the suppression of various emotions, the over-emoting, the whining. The depression. The isolation. How much do I want to reveal about myself here? How many times can I wrench my heart out of my chest and wave it around? To whom am I communicating?
I struggle with the desire to reveal all, the ugly bits, the wanting emotions, the feelings that I can’t seem to get out except through a keyboard. It’s the thrill of the emotional flash, the showing of vulnerability, the communication of my disease to others. But some things are personal (did I ever think I would write that?). And sometimes revelation is self-serving.
Because writing is seduction. And I want to seduce. I want your minds, your hearts, I want to show you pieces of me, to hold you in my hand while I occupy your mind. I want to form images that you will never forget, that you will always associate with me. I want you to think that you know me. I want you to never forget me.
What’s the harm in that? Maybe it’s the removed quality, the lack of risk. It’s the fantasy of seduction that I’m after, not the actual business of doing it. Once my words are out there, someone might pick up on them. No effort is needed from me. Nothing risked, nothing gained, and I go at it again the next day with the same emotions. Worst of all, it's a compulsion that fulfills an emotional need. I contain things so well (too well) and want a place to let them live, however briefly, in words, with an audience. Wouldn't it be better just to have them exist in the real world, to integrate them into me?
Leave the topic alone, Jennifer. Put the laptop down and slowly back away.
When I was twenty-five, a newly minted librarian living in Ohio, I struck up a flirtation with an artist/fellow state employee. He wanted to film me in black and white, riding an Italian scooter, smoking, always smoking, quiet, contained, something to show this undercurrent of suppressed desire he saw within me. We never followed through on his plan. I’ve lost touch with him. He had it right, though. Suppression.
I suppress and reveal. Suppress and reveal. And today I am trying to live with it while still keeping it under wraps, living with the things that perhaps are just part of who I am, destined to be hidden for the rest of my life.
As for the rest of you, the ones I've borrowed without thinking, you're safe, at least as far as blog posts go. I can't promise that the stuff of my life won't show up somewhere else someday. But I promise to blur the line between fiction and reality so well that only the larger truth remains.
One paragraph of this was from today's prompt, "Jumping."
At the moment, writing is begetting writing for me. Prompts, psych paper, posts. Feeling lucky to be able to fit it all in.
Image (Low flying dames) by me -- this was on the sidewalk near a Halloween witch display in our neighborhood. Maybe the connection of image to text is getting more and more obscure ...
Role play
Or, really, I think I need a little bit of drama, if not the interpersonal kind, than some healthy form of it. I’ve written here before about my recognition that I create unhealthy drama in my life. I’ve been thinking about this tendency for a while, fighting the urge to create it again. I am an addict setting up my next fix, gathering the elements of an emotional meltdown. I hover at the edge before stopping myself. No good can come out of it.
When I was little, I wanted to be an actress. I took drama classes, went to drama camp, and acted in community theater. My family thought I was (irritatingly) melodramatic with a quick temper. I see some of this tendency in the boy, too, in his recent seemingly irrational fits. After the tears and the “I hurt myself” pratfalls (when he is in meltdown mode, the boy takes more tumbles than Chevy Chase), in the rest periods between sobs, I tell him he can’t be having fun, he has to learn to calm himself. I like this, he yells before scrunching up his face and screaming again.
Maybe part of him does like it. He feels things intensely. There’s excitement, attention (with which he has a love/hate relationship), sympathetic parental proximity. Even when he slams the door and goes stomping off to his room and tells us he wants to be alone, he also wants us there, as though we are some sort of external soothing system, both needed and hated. I understand. Or perhaps I am projecting.
I get the pleasure in emotional release, the way it intermingles with pain, and everything seems important, vital, in need of immediate soothing solution: feed me, feed my feelings, let me lie exhausted in a swoon on the fainting couch in a room painted the color of blood.
What is the solution to my drama problem? Acting classes aren't possible at the moment and the people I am closest to prefer a calm home atmosphere. But a recent discussion in my psychology of personality class about whether people take on masks or roles in their everyday interactions got me to thinking. I play roles all the time. There’s the room parent role (oh why did I sign up for that again?), the mommy role, the former librarian role, sometimes the writer role. Of all of these, "writer" feels the most like me. The parental ones are more socially defined, with external assumptions about my motivations and how I spend my time. In my "librarian" days, I chafed against the irritating assumptions, the implications, the tight-bun-tweed-skirt-shushing stereotype, though now I wish I had played with it, tweaked the role.
When I go clothes shopping, I am often drawn to the dresses section. I’ve chosen cute sweater dresses, colorful sixties pattern dresses, and skirts that flare and sway as I walk. Yet in my most frequent role as mom, I dress in browns, blacks, and greys. Sometimes I wear jeans, sometimes simple pants. It’s parental camouflage befitting my housewife role. I don’t want to stand out. I feel especially strange if I am dressed up amongst the other moms, who are generally in casual comfortable momwear. Consequently, while I feel intense emotion on the inside and I sometimes shop to match it, my exterior is often bland blend-in middle-aged mama.
But what if I mixed it up a bit, took my assumptions about the parts I play and inserted more of myself into them? Stylish mom? Sharp dresser mom? I have the clothes for it. Going out in my new gear might give an air of excitement, of drama, to my drab afternoons. And then it would become a habit, my exterior self matching my "real" self, an acceptance of who I am presented to the world: My name is Jennifer. My emotions overflow. I love a good fight that ends well. I say I don’t need love but I do. I’ve been scared and I’m still scared, but I am also brave, I can show who I am, mother, writer, emoter, lover of beauty. And occasional drama queen.
Now I just need a little encouragement to start wearing my heart on my (fashionable) sleeve. I think tomorrow I’ll put on the dress pictured above with black tights and boots. Step one in my revealing of self.
Image: Me as . . . me: a body in motion.
It's a very happy day
I love my birthday.
I love things about my birthday. It’s in the best possible month, October, when the skies are generally blue and the weather is often beautiful, just warm enough with a breeze that brings the tantalizing threat of what is to come. My birthday usually falls on a holiday weekend in the U.S., so I often have the option of getting out of town and making it special. I like the fact that I am here, existing and struggling and sometimes feeling intense joy, or normalcy, or pain in all its exquisiteness. It is cause for celebration even as the years plunk down one on top of the other.
But every year on my birthday, a strange melancholia strikes me, a feeling of distance between me and the world. I am trapped in my own head. This happens on other occasions, too, like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, and even on the birthdays of those who are closest to me.
I remember keeping my birthday a secret in elementary school, avoiding the songs and the typical drawings of birthday cake that each child was required to create and hand to the birthday girl. I was proud of my quiet deception. This may have been because I didn’t want to be noticed. Or maybe I liked holding on to a fact, a piece of me that no one could have.
Later there were slumber party birthdays (six screaming girls conducting séances and looking in the family room mirror for Bloody Mary) and even later the college bacchanals where the drinking started early and I was supposed to consume one drink for every year. Later on things calmed down and I had dinner with other people, my boyfriend’s family and later my husband and then the husband and the kid.
Today, probably tomorrow and on the actual day . . . I’m moody. Clammed up. It’s not the kind of feeling I want to dwell on. I’d like to snap out of it. The day is gorgeous. It’s calling for me. The house is empty. I’ve done my studying and some of the boy's Halloween costume preparations. Even if I didn’t want to go out in the world, there is plenty to do here. Perhaps after I post this, I will do it, get off my ass, get out of my mind, and get back into life.
First, let’s talk about my real birthday, the one coming up on Monday. My 42nd. My former stepfather used to tell me I was like a 42-year-old woman. He meant that I was too serious, a little girl with a furrowed brow who offered smiles only to those she trusted and her trust didn’t come cheap. It wasn’t a kind assessment. As someone who is almost there, I raise the metaphorical finger to him, something I couldn’t have gotten away with as an 11-year old, but can as a 42-year-old woman. One of the benefits of age.
42. It’s the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. It’s eight years from 34 and eight years to 50. I’m accepting the fact that I am aging and changing, that there are things that I may never get to do again, but that there are also ways in which I have become more myself, have a deeper understanding of life. There is always a flip side to loss. I have to believe that through loss we gain something intangible, strength, or knowledge, or depth, that each year brings deeper understanding no matter what possibilities fall away.
Enough of the melancholia. I am going to accept my mood, not fight it, but not indulge it either. I am going to turn off the computer and open the door. In the sun-warmed herb-scented air of the garden, I will sit in the light and think about connection and love, feeling the rays of hope shining from my battered heart out into the world.
Happy birthday to me.
Facebook friends -- I am taking a break from the FB, pretending like it's two thousand and five. Or almost like that. But I will be back. You can always drop me a line at writingtosurvive(at)gmail.com.
The image is of Nick Cave in his Birthday Party days and the title comes from the lyrics of Happy Birthday by the same band. Not most peoples' cup of tea. You have been warned. Image from Made to Measure NY.
Life is just a fantasy
It was for wish fulfillment, the opportunity to recreate reality in a rosier hue.
Who can resist a life of fantasy, the ability to live in one's head? Unfortunately, it’s my head. The stories I come up with, the reworked scenes from the past, the present-day complaints, are all about me. My brain is no fiction factory. It’s a self-obsessed dreamworks with me as the witty, darkly sensitive main character.
I am slowing down my obsessive mind, discouraging it from wanting things it can’t have or from believing that want equals need equals reality, that desire and obsession have predictive qualities, that old hurts need to be palpitated until the sting fades. Still, the desire to fantasize reappears on occasion and I have to tamp down the story that forms. This morning, my mind lingered over a gesture. The gesture could have been two weeks ago, it could have been years ago. Maybe I still know the person, maybe we parted ways. We certainly aren’t confidants, but my mind holds this gesture, this last touch, tenderly.
It was a friendly, light punch to the arm, almost lingering, the warmth of what wasn’t. We were slightly out of context, separated by a foot or two, and there was the reach and recede. His aura, his energy, was palpable, a force field of comfort and heat, something to sink into. I was receptive, though it no longer mattered.
This was a moment to slow down and savor. To interpret endlessly. It was about possibility and hope, about what could have been. I could write paragraphs about it, sensual things on unfulfilled hunger and hidden intent. But I’ve gone on enough about it, have captured it. Away it goes, stored up for the really lonely times.
We kissed in the dark on the hood of a car. We fumbled against the wall. Your now-or-never lunge across the couch sealed the deal. All these memories, these ruminations and relivings, are part of a comforting fantasy that nothing ever really ends, that I am connected to everyone I’ve ever loved forever, that what happened between us gives me continued possession. I even entertain the notion that we could recouple, like those older people whose weddings are sometimes in the New York Times, the old flames who love anew, entire happy lives behind them and more happiness waiting.
On my new march towards realism, towards a life not lost in fantasy (still, the heat of the gesture lingers; I don't want it to go away), I remind myself how wrong most of these people were for me. Non-thinkers. Homophobes. A Republican? A hunter? A stoner? Our politics clashed. Our ways of being in the world did not match up. Long-term love was never an option.
Give it up, fantasy maker, I told my mind. Live in the now. Remember? Kid, husband, house, animals? Your good, lucky life?
It seems to be working. For the most part.
For those who now have the Aldo Nova song going through your head, I apologize. And offer this link.
Image by Biscotte.
handmade small things
We sacrifice the wood, the clay, the stones for our own pleasure, take tool to make tool, indent the surface with hammer strikes, slash our signatures in yielding earth. The items are useful (the bedside table, the chair, the bureau) or pure whimsy (the feather sail on a sacrificial boat). But all are art.
Handmade things, old things, have the texture of life, of the personal. Sometimes I imagine my grandfather working in his shop, running a sander over the surface of what is now a bookcase. I see the ghosts of workmen lightly tapping in our living room mantel. I see Kevin, 65 years old now -- I see his apparition everywhere, on a bike shimmering down Shattuck, walking distractedly past a restaurant, a shadow piloting a beaten-down truck. He defies space and time, is again driving posts into soft Smith Island mud or putting up drywall in a West Street townhouse.
It is the small movements, the bit by bit and nail by nail, that create something new. My living room fills up with the past, with carpenters and painters and potters. They swirl around me, busy assessing the smoothness of a plaster curve, the pattern of lace on clay, whether a surface is level or slanted. They are totally in the moment, lost in creation.
Writing is a form of creation, of making something again and again until it works in some indescribable way. But the point most of the time is to make it look effortless, unlabored. There is nothing of the handmade to it, even though hands are intimately involved in the effort, stretching across keyboards and plunking down heavy typewriter keys.
I could make a pocket-sized book with pithy sayings in my blue scrawl, my loopy g’s heavy over the blank spaces below, obscure epigraphs for the pretentious. Perhaps I could make it my confessional, a place for true secrets complete with illustrations and discursive footnotes. I would sew the binding with big stitches, mock up the cover. The mockup would become the real thing, the final version, a touch of creation in progress.
I would leave my message to no one out on the curb or would toss it into the air along a busy street, pure art for art’s sake. My book would become an infiltrator, a bit of me in someone else's hand, someone lost and lonely. Who else would grab at crazy scribblings on the ground? We touch through the page. My thoughts enter the other's mind. The intimacy goes one way. Still, the stranger contains me. Absorbs me. Transforms me.
The handmade small things were ideas once. They lived in someone else's mind until the someone made them real. I am buoyed by the invisible creative process of others.
How can I be lonely surrounded by so many minds?
Image of my scrawl on the recipe box my grandfather made, propped up against a ceramic piece probably pumped out by machine (but made to look handmade -- this was a 30th birthday present from my husband that came from the British Museum), with pictures of my paternal great-grandparents on either side.
This could use more work ... feels very draft-like. And so expandable. What about cooking as art, for example? Temporary, sensual, life-giving.
Private life drama
The darkness keeps me going, it feeds me, while at the same time it plants my feet in the mud, covers me over with dirt, until it feels like my life is a series of mundane tasks connected by moments of intensely felt, alienating emotion. I dig myself a metaphorical den, a safe hole in the ground, in which I am comfortable and invisible, alone with my exquisitely sensitive self.
As the school year loomed last month, I feared a return to emptiness and tears, to black moods hanging portentously over the grumble of the vacuum and the bright scent of furniture polish. I didn’t want to return to that terrible trapped feeling, the feeling that pins me to my life so that it feels like my life leaves no room for growth. So I sat down with my calendar and started to make a structure for my days, something to hold myself to (outside of therapy appointments) so that I am not washed away in the small invisible things.
Until recently, I didn’t see myself as creating drama or of consciously forming the tenor of my emotional responses to the world. I was more of a stuck soul, slowly getting myself unstuck, yes, but still under the control of some outside force, nailed to the wall by my life choices and circumstance. Now I see how I create this feeling, the upswell of frustration, and how I tried to relieve the endemic boredom last fall and winter by creating my own personal drama.
So. I have resolved to stick to a routine of sorts (including the two days a week I’ve allotted a couple of hours to GETTING OUT. Yes, it's in all caps on my calendar, too.). I will shower before noon. I will keep moving towards my goals. In a couple of weeks, I’ll be taking an online class, too, and that will help my the focus on forward movement. I’ve got the résumé books and the getting back into the workforce books. I’ve got a graduate school application to work on.
Maybe it’s the usual fall renewal and reorganization. But it feels like there is something else behind it, a bit more self-knowledge, an acknowledgement of the role I play in creating my emotional response to my life, and the fact that I have a plan in place now, will move forward slowly.
While on my brief writing to survive hiatus, I revised some of the other sections of the web page, including who, why, and best, and added a new section: stalk.
Image by rachel a. k.
Playing dress-up
Three years ago I wore nothing but faded fabrics and loose-fitting t-shirts. My shoes were generally athletic or practical, a-b devices. Then I decided to drop the mommy gear and focus on form. Form-fitting shirts. Pants that actually fit (necessitating trying them on versus buying them online). Shoes again, the glorious world of shoes. I realized that I wasn’t a preppy dresser, though neither am I one to toss around boas and chains, so my purchases began to reflect that.
Is this frivolous? Am I living life totally on the surface, with my cares about flattering shapes and forms? Can I help it? I’d like to be visible as long as I can, to acknowledge that what we wear matters, that one can look good and still be a mother (or, gasp, a middle-aged woman getting older every minute).
Yesterday, my mother and I went shopping at Crossroads Trading Company, a clothing resale shop. I bought skirts, the kind that flow in the breeze, and pants, and a loose-knit sweater (or she bought them, an early birthday present). And there in the back with the flats and the metallic sneakers and the strappy sandals was a pair of high-heeled black Mary Janes.
I haven’t worn heels since I was working, and even then the heels were generally low. But the shoes were cute and I tried them on and then tried them on with the skirts (always with the black and white, me, the stark patterns). They looked fashionable. They looked like fantasy, you know, the kind where I am always dressed up and feel good about myself, where I have a place to go and people to interact with. I pictured pulling on the silky flowing skirt with the black flowers on white, my shirt black (which one? I have a lot of them.), with those Mary Janes and my hair done right for once. I’d walk downtown to the psychiatrist’s office, prove to her that I was doing fine, just fine, and then I’d sashay to the drug store or the restaurant. I’d cross my legs and smoke a cigarette on the park bench outside the BART station with the rest of them, the crazies and the lost, the passengers.
OK: I need to aim a little higher in my dress-up fantasies. For now, though, I’ll take the outfit, the shoes, the plans and ideas, the way they hurtle me into the future and change how I think about myself.
From the prompt "A strain on the relationship."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image: the shoes.
Ironic pants
When did the poufy sleeves come back and the little gathers at the waist, the floppy jackets with the frou frou and the belts and buckles, like some romantic domantrix’s version of warmth in the city? I want flat, classic lines and all black. I want inscrutable t-shirts. I want formfitting -- but not second -- skin. I want a little hug near the tummy while I still have what it takes. I want non-ironic pants.
Slowly slowly, between the self-help books and the New Yorker and New York magazine and the New York Times Sunday paper (What I am doing in California? Clearly my literary loyalty lies elsewhere.), I’ve been rereading Martin Amis’s Money. His best book, I think, and quite a contrast to his last, The Pregnant Widow, which I read a couple of months ago. Still, there are parallels: Martin has a thing for women’s pants. Our pants have power, or they can, over the salivating male, the one who is helpless in the face of heavy breasts and a pendulous ass, helpless against the sway of hips. Pants are the thing, with their waist-love and the way they cling to form.
With this return to the 1980s in fashion, or the return I see reflected in the clothes at Crossroads Trading Company, my main source for duds, I wonder if complicated high-waisted pants are the next style to be resurrected. I wore them, yes, I did, those things that crawled up past the belly-button, with complicated clasps and foldovers, waistband compensations for style, an obfuscation of fabric, a militaristic series of pleats and flaps. Everything I’ve put on in the last couple of years has been hiphuggerish, though not hippieish, and I like the unfettered feel of shirt fabric against my belly, the unconstructed nature of pants that cling below the waistline.
I burnish my belly. I wave the kettlebells every other day, I praise the antidepressants that help keep me here, that wake me up at 4:30 in the morning, along with the dreams. I clothe myself in simple shirts made of natural fabrics, am continually in pursuit of the perfect pair of pants, of the right skirt with the right black boots and the soft clingy sweater. I am not going to give up on fashion, to pretend that it no longer matters. I will age gracefully or not at all, never having been one to embrace teenybopper, there in my flat-waisted pants and my too-cool t-shirt.
From the prompt "In fashion."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
And maybe someday I'll write a post about my heavy-on-the-symbolism dreams last night, me with a house ripped from its foundation, pulled on a truck, looking for a new place to call home. In the last version of it, right before I woke up, the house and I were returning to the original site, thinking, "why not back here again?"
Images by Huzzah Vintage and funkomavintage.
The sacrificial parent considers a career change
And my brain is blank or it is going places that I don’t really want it to go, or not exactly that – it’s rolling along the edge of howling, maintaining its balance on the thin line between despair and hopefulness. What more is there to say about that? Go, brain, go, you’re doing great, and inside me my world shifts slowly, it’s shifting now and I can be here and feel it and interpret the unsettledness as good.
But I woke up this morning cranky. I spent the morning wanting a drink, have been thinking about 5 p.m. or 4 p.m. or even 3 p.m. for hours now. I want to obliterate the line, mix it up, make it into something else. I want to be left alone.
My husband and I are trying an experiment: we now spend fifteen minutes every night talking about our feelings. Emoting. We switch the focus, him one night, me the next. I look forward to this, to the full attention. I am less good at asking him about how he feels than answering how I feel. The questions may come, but I don't always believe the answers, want to say, oh, but is that an emotion? Is your rationality showing? I can be an emotional bully sometimes, with my oh-so-accurate interpretations of other peoples' reactions and my spot-on intuitive analysis of what makes them tick (this is sarcasm, by the way).
What do I ask about? Right now there’s plenty to ask about, lots of material, but the asker isn’t always sure if the other person wants to go there. I want to go there. I think. Or at the very least I like having the time to pay attention and to have someone pay full attention to me. Perhaps I am starved for it, I’m starving for something, and I have to make a plan on how to feed myself, to fulfill the needs that my current life isn’t meeting.
Some of the recipe sounds deceptively simple: create a professional life. I’ve been going to a career counselor over the last couple of months, which has been extremely useful, and I think I’ve come up with a new career. (No, I am not telling. Telling often takes the energy out of such plans.) The career will involve grad school. It could involve having to fulfill prerequisites -- taking required classes before the big plunge -- or even taking the (gasp) GRE. I don’t want to spend another few years putting off a job. I don’t want to get into debt again. But I do want to do something that matters, something that I enjoy, something that feels right. Still, I imagine myself at the end of school, possibly in my late 40s, with a few thousand hours of interning (paid, I hope, oh please) awaiting me. And in the meantime I am a drag on our family income, more output than intake, more dependent than independent.
What are the alternatives? Go back to being a librarian? After being out of the full-time game for seven years? In a place where the salaries aren’t as good as Washington, DC, where my competition is much more eager and up-to-date on the technology? I don't want to go back. I don't think I can.
Hmm. In this case, examining too closely makes my heart race and the task ahead of me seem impossible. Better to do it, to not worry too much, to prepare myself, to make sure I have a back-up plan, an escape hatch.
Part of my reluctance, my fear, part of the reason I've been at home for so long, is an underlying worry about my parenting: what would happen to my relationship with my son if I had something outside these walls, something of my own to think about? It scares me. I picture myself running off, becoming unavailable, failing him in some fundamental way. This is not a rational thought, but is a reaction to a childhood where my needs didn't matter, where my mother had a hard time parenting and doing other things simultaneously (we could talk about the link I've clearly made between her inattentive parenting and tumultuous relationships, but that is a different topic altogether, the stability versus sex post that I will probably never write). For me, the kid is paramount. I've sacrificed a lot of myself for this child. I've done it willingly. And I am afraid of what will happen if I stop, if I have an outside life.
If I don't do something, if I don't create something else for myself, if I don't pursue an income, I'll continue to die inside. That's not good for him, either, to have a mother who is absent, maybe resentful, depressed. I can do two things at once, be a person in the world and a parent. Maybe I can even do three things at once and be a partner, too, a loving and available half of a couple.
One step at a time, right?
I have been feeling blocked lately (in more ways than one) and sat down this afternoon while the boy and his dad were out to see if I could figure it out by writing. And here it is.
Photo: Me and the boy, out of focus in Yosemite by my husband.
The fallacy, the push-pull, the conflict
Here’s what I can tell you: I still struggle with mattering, with being heard, with feeling invisible. I shadow box with copies of life from days long dead. The film projector gets caught, we run it backwards (remember how funny that used to be? The belt returning from the ground to the Easter coat, snaking around my waist, proprietary, the pile of leaves reassembling itself as my friend flew backwards onto the porch steps? I laughed until I almost peed my pants watching those things, at the way living life backwards makes a backwards sort of sense, but is impossible. You can’t make life the way it was before. The leaves will never be the same and the belt doesn’t care where it lands.) I point a finger, just like a toddler, the point of recognition, but there is nothing to point at but faded images from almost forty years ago. The moment of imprint. Let’s set the film aflame, shall we? But destruction of the images is useless. They are written on me.
We’re having a heat wave. The tomatoes blossoms are turning into fruit, not dropping off in the fogchill of a Berkeley summer. The ground out back is parched and cracked and the boy finds baby praying mantises hopping from leaf to leaf in the front and back yards, newborns from the egg cases we bought at the garden store. Nick the cat wants to be part of it, wants to lie in the dust, to sleep in the bamboo patch, to kill mice. He got out while we were away last weekend, an escape that whetted his appetite for freedom, and now he howls at all hours to let him out please let him out.
It is cruel to keep this animal trapped and we keep on talking about ways to make it work, some sort of personal cat door, a set of protective inoculations against outside disease, the acceptance of the risks of an outdoor cat (injury, disappearance, early death). This morning he and Asher were growling and meowing at the back door at a puffy-faced lanky grey kitty who was taunting them on the other side of the glass. I remembered the dangers of outside life, of others, of cat fights and attacks in the dark. What do you do when you feel stuck and then you force another living creature to be stuck, too, for their protection? It’s for our own good, Nick, better that no one opens the door so that we can dart into the dark corners, hide in the vines, get ourselves in trouble and have the family cry over our bloodied bodies.
Still. The two of us could slip out in the middle of the night, me in dark formfitting clothes, Nick dapper as usual in black and white. We would part on the sidewalk and I'd shamble toward University, walk on to the water. In the moonlit fantasy of a clear summer night, the wind at a standstill, my short sleeves mysteriously comfortable, I would stare at the glowing apparition of San Francisco across the water, the Bay Bridge lit up like the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island. I'd imagine a life where I am not me, where everything within shines like gold, the gold that can always stay, I am a goddess, untouchable without a need for touch, pure, good, inhuman.
I am a sucker for the fallacy of independence, of not needing, but even Nick craves human touch, wants to curl up on my lap. He purrs in my presence, drinks the fresh water I provide. This isn't a zero-sum game he reminds me as he brushes against my ankles. He can be free and I can, too, free and connected, the tiger in the grass one moment, contented homebody the next.
So teach me how to do it because I have no idea how to get beyond my emotional perimeter. I'm tired of feeling it, of writing about it, of pressing my face against the glass. Or tell me that I am getting there, that the glass is cracking, that you will be there with a hand outstretched when I emerge, or that I am perfectly capable of doing it on my own, that I need to embrace the fallacy of independence before I reject it. Tell me it will be ok more sooner than later, that this transition is only months and not years to the finish. Lie to me. Smile sincerely. But please don't reject me for who I am. That keeps me in the box.
I need you. I can't remake the past without you. Or maybe I can. So go ahead and turn your back. Let me prove to myself how strong I am. But don't walk away. Or go ahead.
I don't know what I need.
Image of San Francisco and the Bay Bridge from Berkeley hills by ianan.
My time at camp
Down the hill there was a creek and the boy and his friend dragged a log over it for a bridge. They crossed high water on real bridges, hung on the edges of rocks while I told horror stories of larger bodies carried down rushing rivers, of the man at World’s End who fell off a water crossing and had to be fished out a few days later, pried out from a boulder where only a month later the river would trickle. They tossed logs over the bridge railing and watched the churning, the way the falling water held the wood down before spitting it downriver.
The place was beautiful and the boy was free and close to his friend and at night after the children were asleep we sat in the dark on our friends’ deck and talked of faraway places and cartoon violence. We drank wine and bit into slices of sharp cheese and by the time we stumbled into our cots (the boy, miraculously, still asleep), I was so exhausted that I almost slept through the night myself.
On the second morning I got up before six a.m. and showered against rocks, drank coffee in a rocking chair by a communal fire, and wrote. I wrote and wrote and wrote, away from my computer and from my cell phone and from most electricity. I wrote on the deck later that morning while the menfolk were at the swimming hole and I wrote after quiet hour, too, pages and pages, some fiction (embarrassingly biographical, a projection into a future I wasn’t sure I wanted), some life kvetching, and then the loneliness set in again and the worries about where everyone was and I was on the outside, the deadened corner of a triangle.
In the dining hall we sat with friends and friendly strangers, people who knew the chants and the foot stomps. The boy and his buddy sat next to each other and made butt jokes while the grownups rolled their eyes and tried to make them stop. I sat apart, across from the boys, from my husband, from the shifting other half of our couple friends. The night the man next to me, red-faced, blue-eyed, sat with an almost-finished bottle of white and a drained glass, I tossed him questions: name, past, present. He told bizarre stories of Vietnam and the benefits of knowing senators, of living in antebellum homes the size of private schools.
For a writer, data in means data out. This conversation was fascinating, stimulating, and I remembered what it was like to be in the world, remembered a time when I talked to strangers or sat at the front of the bus to chat with the driver, a self almost lost but coming back, hidden under layers of reluctance and don’t-do and mistrust. Withdrawal from the world doesn’t work, isn’t me, I saw it clearly and knew I had to be in the world more, but how would I make myself?
The first dinner after our return, I cried again at the sink, reminded of the helplessness of children, of their necessary reliance on the capriciousness of adults, and I wrote this, a set of enigmatic instructions that I now instruct you to ignore:
I want to be held here, cold and delicate, like a shell, warmed by your hands , but not for too long. Tell me stories of long winter nights on the steppes, the woman in the reindeer coat, the snow like fluffy candy until your tongue ached. Put me on the shelf, dust me when you notice the accumulation like a layer of frost, the deadening of color and form. Grasp me in your palm when you crave beauty.
I will cry and no one will hear me, there in my Siberia, contained by leaden half-memory, the cloak between me and the world. Don’t listen. Pretend it is the rain, the scattering of snow, and I will pretend it too, another collusion, a way of staying safe.
Instead, we will talk of the pain rendered by desire, the way want leads to rejection, the way I huddle into safety like a cocoon, telling you never leave never leave because I am good and contained and crush my want, contain it like poison, slicing at the tendrils that come from underneath my boot-clad sole.
Image: The boy leaping over water at Yosemite.
Feed me
Actually, today there will be an escape. Back when I thought I had my career counselor meeting today, I scheduled a babysitter to watch the boy in the morning. He's not so sick that he needs me by his side constantly (though I will call the doctor about this fever thing). Even though my meeting was yesterday -- a meeting I ended up having on the phone -- I am still getting out of the house today. I am going to wander the sidewalks. I am going to get a pedicure. I am eating lunch in the open air and sunshine.
Here's what I've been up to: going through boxes of maternity clothes and things from early baby life. Reminiscing about long thin interrupted nights, the struggles to feed, remembering the worries about milk leakage during my rare forays into the world, all the other women in my moms' group checking for tell-tale spots on each other's nursing tops. I'm finally selling the cloth diapers from those sleep-deprived early months, the hallucinatory nights followed by zombie mornings. I talk to pregnant women on the phone, women who are as confused as I was about the complicated world of cloth. I've listed baby carriers on craigslist and I've cleaned up the miracle blanket for sale, that swaddling cloth that the boy absolutely hated.
I wake up way too early or in the middle of the night, Nick the cat howling for the streets, the boy's burning feet resting on my calves. I've been trying, and probably not succeeding, to eat enough. The antidepressants suppress my appetite (in addition to causing insomnia, though my current bout is more complicated than that -- think it might be time to actively encourage the boy to stay in his own bed all night) and I'm pretty sure I've lost a few pounds, not that I had it to lose. I am trim and model thin and, despite the four a.m. catcalls that pull me out of bed, I continue to function, though my mind is slowly slip, slip, slipping away.
I want to escape all of this through writing something transcendent, amazing, lyrical, but I don't have it in me right now. I attempt to escape through fantasy, through my imagination, but the scenarios I come up with taunt me, they leer with knowledge of what I can't have and what I should be focusing on instead. I know this is a blip in my life, that all will be well soon, but that doesn't stop me from feeling weary and whiny.
So I complain to you. I anticipate our four day weekend off the grid, my computer resting at home, my cell phone hibernating in the glove compartment. We'll sleep under the stars, under mosquito netting. We'll splash in the water and hike the trail. Maybe without cats or computers or digital clocks, without many obligations to drag me away, with the boy safely tucked in his own cot, I will sleep. I will gather ideas, snippets of conversation and snatches of sunlight.
The balance will tip. I will be satiated, full up on life.
Hipstamatic image of my hair and the front window by me.
Reality's shadow
That's what I scrawled on a notebook in the dark last night, knowing that just the action of scrawling would make it stick in my head. I had a character in mind, maybe a story, and was looking forward to taking off with it on my prompt this morning, the penultimate day of the Round Robin. I did use it, but I can't post it here, because the man for whom theory was bunk is not quite theoretical and some things are not meant for the blog.
I woke up at 3:30 this morning, was thrust into wakefulness by my overactive, theory-driven mind. Maybe it's because it is the last day of school for the boy. I don't do well with transitions. I'm sad about the end of kindergarten. I've gotten used to our little routine, the stroll to and from school, the regular play dates. The summer should be fun -- I am actually looking forward to some unstructured time with the boy and we'll see friends -- but still, endings always make me sad.
My thoughts are gathering in some unconscious part of my brain, or so I hope, because outside of the prompts, I haven't written a damn thing for the last month. I've been clearing closets, watering plants, putting away dishes, vacuuming carpets. I've been taking care of business, the checkbook, the doctor's appointments, the pestering of the sewer lateral folks. It's all action after quite a long stretch of the inability to act. So that's a good thing. I am trying not to be scared that my writing mind is an almost blank. I tell myself I need this time to learn how to live again, that I am gathering, always gathering. I hope I am right.
Sometimes I remind myself that I can write by imagining a moment and making it real. I create a facsimile of life, a copy of sensuality. There I am in the sun, propped up on a chaise lounge, my eyes closed. I'm wearing a bikini, my skin is oiled to catch the sun, my eyes are closed. The fabric of the chaise sticks to my skin. I bend one leg, then the other, reach for my fake lemonade. I am used to the taste of chemicals, the faux sugar, a chemist's tart notion of lemons. Only the ice is real, well-water sweet. I open my eyes and see it, the black snake winding around the maple tree. He's making his way to a bird's nest, is anticipating the broken eggshells, the featherless bodies of hatchlings.
I filter my life through metaphor. I obsess over theory and motive. I wonder if we can ever truly know ourselves or anyone else. The snake is doing what snakes do. The birds want to live but don't know it. I can't do anything about the brutality of nature or of my own weak needs, the need to create, the need for other people. I pretend for years that I am autonomous, I fake being good, I slither up trees and take what I think I need without asking.
The moment is almost real. It almost happened. I remember the snake. I remember days on the chaise lounge and count the wrinkles left by sun filtered through oil. The water from the hose was cool, the lemonade was a replicant of the real thing. The stretch marks, barely hidden by my white bikini top, were the only physical reminder of the long winter, of the thick layer of snow that I am only now digging myself out of.
Image of my shadow by me.
From me to whom?
No longer. Today in my Round Robin write I confessed. But I can't share it here. Some things are best held between one's ears or kept in short rasped whispers, told to a single stranger across email who doesn't know what is truth or fiction. The confession would be for whom? Unburdening passes it on, though I would argue that we should at least confess our trespasses to those whom we've trespassed against.
Lately my weeks have been appointment-filled. The eye doctor (today), a haircut (tomorrow). I have a lot of therapy jammed in at the end of the week, will actually go from my therapist to the psychiatrist on Friday (and then to Sacred Rose to get on a talented tattoo artist's waiting list). Me, me, blah, blah, blah. My eyes, my hair, my psyche, my skin. My stories, my guilt. I am desperate for someone else's stories, for some stimulation besides my sidewalk strolls, beyond the hall outside my son's classroom, beyond this living room, sunlit and open. The waiting rooms I encounter are all empty and my anecdotes come from half-read stories in the New Yorker.
I have been so sheltered and selfish, buffered against the world by time and home, by a kind man who protects me and takes on too much. I have forgotten what it is like to go without, to not have. Depression can be a form of self-absorption. You can't see beyond the sludge you travel in. You get angry at the world or at those who happen to inadvertently trample on some idiosyncratic sore spot. I'm lucky to have a supportive partner who has waited me out and taken some serious knocks along the way, has not abandoned me despite my difficulties.
This is the spot for a pronouncement, the climb e'very mountain portion of my post. I've made my confessions. I'm changing. Good things lie ahead. But I have no idea what any of it means or how to think about it. I am in the moment, feeling lucky, feeling in between. The changes may be all internal. My entire life could be altered. I don't know. I'm not sure who I am or what I will become.
My therapist says that times of ambiguity can also be times of great creativity. It doesn't feel like that right now. I'm actually afraid of the changes, wish that all it would take would be a few mental adjustments to make it good. No matter how directly I face the symbolic rationale behind my fears, I'm still afraid to drive. I haven't been riding my bike. I see all of this apprehension and am not sure how to deal with it. It hits me all at once, my many faults and weaknesses, the huge tasks that await. The biggest change of all is to admit that I need help to make the changes, need to ask for support from other people, starting with the ones closest to me.
Maybe that is enough as a first step: asking for help. Saying what I really think and feel. Taking the risk to make a stand and to enforce my boundaries even when it might mean loss or exposure. One small thing at a time.
There I go again. Me. Me. Me. But I hope that through all of this focus on myself, I can be more present to my child and husband, can teach the boy that it's ok to risk, that he, like the rest of us, is a flawed yet fine human being. I can finally be present. I am here, my boundaries are stronger, like my foundation. It's me, it's him, it's the family. It's other people.
Muddy rush
I look at the lush greenery along the sidewalk and in front yards and see that plants have a dignity and presence, a reach, are grounded, that the sidewalk itself, with its web of cracks and persistent weeds, is a poetry of fissures and history. I notice the other lives offered through house windows and on porches. It feels good to be connected, away from the buzz in my skull.
It happens at the playground, too, distraction followed by revelation. A couple of weeks ago, the boy and I were at Strawberry Creek Park, the boy playing a prince chameleon in his vast chameleon castle. Sometimes I swing at playgrounds, though those butt-hugging belt seats are uncomfortable, nothing like the supportive, jaw-cracking wooden-seated swings we had when I was a kid. I lean back and pump and pretty soon I’m high up in the air, almost as high as the top bar. This day, however, the swinging made me sick, or maybe it was the earthy smell of spring, a scent with the rot of fall and winter behind it, of death supporting new life. Dizzy, I got off and sat in the sun, and grunted responses to the boy while I tried to figure out how to load ringtones on my new phone.
Do computers and smartphones and the constant stretched out half-intimacy that is the Internet ever undermine your calm? That’s what was happening to me at the park, the realization that I was so not in the moment, that I wasn’t even in my own skin. So I put the phone away. I listened to the boy. And I looked around me.
Three redwood trees, stately ladies swaying in the breeze, looked down on us from across the street, their branches gesturing wildly. If you let yourself be open to it, you can feel the energy coming off of trees and other people and animals and the flowers still pushing out of the ground. That’s what I felt, a deep connection to those trees. It was the thing I was looking for on Facebook, through a passionate email exchange, through leaving comments on blogs.
Here it was. Connection. To the earth. To the trees. To my boy. It’s a special trick, to be able to plug in to the world. What human beings will go through for a moment of connection, of the perfect moment. The pursuit of sex, of friendship, of the chance touch. Are there really people out there who connect effortlessly? Am I one of a small group who experiences the world through a mist of self-doubt and history?
Later that week, Nora dog and I took a walk in a rainstorm. We followed Nora's squirrel lust to the creek, though the squirrels were probably sleeping it off in their sodden leaf nests. I held my phone under my hood, the cold rain coming in rivulets down my sleeve. My pants were soaked at the knee. The creek rushed with days of rain, with mud and washed-out banks and trash. I stood on the small footbridge while my mother talked. I watched the water flow, imagined dropping the phone, climbing up on the metal railing, and plunging into the wet. Instead, I acknowledged the weather, acknowledged my mother, and kept on walking, my hands chilled, while Nora snuffed the smell of spring.
I appreciate the small moments when the mist clears. I anticipate the smooth touch of a hand, admire the way the redwoods sway in the breeze, the muddy rush of water. I see the lives going on around me and know I want to live too.
Image: The boy and a friend at the edge of Strawberry Creek.
The nightly freakout
But now I remember the dreams. Me in a Whole Foods produce section desultorily piloting my cart. The space was all matte linoleum floors and rustic wood boxes stacked with unblemished fruit and vegetables. I was dressed down, way down, with holes in my clothes and shapeless pants. I hadn't showered. My hair was lank. And then I bumped into my exhusband. He looked sleek, well-dressed and happy. We had a pleasant conversation about his life and family. I slunk off feeling happy for him but unsettled about my place in the world.
There was a stint in an office building (a recurring dream setting), me waiting in this black modernist lobby for an elevator with all these men, some of them rumpled types that worked at my last employer, a think tank, some besuited or be-khakied and be-oxforded. Pressed and neat. But that dream didn't go beyond the lobby, or at least my memories of it have faded. Usually the dream building contains my old office. I show up, but don't have a job anymore. Or the elevator is unreliable. Or the elevator is huge, buzzing with people like a mobile cocktail party. Or the top floors are connected via a set of steep precarious escalators.
The final dream: I was alone on a beach, a dirty little stretch of coarse sand with a shack behind and a rusty container ship off in the distance. I was too close to the edge. The waves lapped at my feet, got my things wet, and then they pulled my phone into the surf only to spit it back out at me with the next set. The phone was waterlogged, maybe ruined. It squelched with wet when I shook it. How would I call home now? Why didn't we spring for the phone replacement package, just in case? Then I remembered: my assignment was to drive back from this beach, drive by myself back home, a long journey. I imagined fast highways, me rippling along, panicked behind the wheel. I couldn't do it. I barely knew how to turn the wheel. And now I couldn't call my husband for help because my phone was ruined, because I had been careless with it, unprepared, and what about the highways and then I woke up.
The dreams make sense to me, they are a part of the puzzle of my current life. I must prepare. Design the new blog, think about a job, learn how to dive how to drive again. I must take care of the present and prepare for the future, feeling the fear while not letting it take over, while my subconscious does its nightly freak out.
Image: Steps to the slide at a local park, taken with the Hipstamatic app on the iPhone. Like it for its washed-out dreamlike quality and the feeling of movement (or of choice of direction).
Adding it up
My mother and I have always been good at taking bad situations and making them funny, using dark humor to get through dark times. When Emmet the crazy black cat, a nice bit of fluff and bones and wild eyes, sneaked into my room and killed my dwarf rabbit, we joked that we could use the bunny’s corpse for a Halloween decoration, maybe tie it to some sort of noose and hang it on the front porch. When it came time to sell the house we had shared with my stepfather, we traced our outlines on the walls of his weight room, shaky portraits of us in victorious poses, leaping into the air, laughing at what he would think when he saw them.
I remember Christmas season 2001 in the hospital, a thin Kevin draped on the bed, the tubes and wires tying him down, the dark mucous that spewed from his trach when he coughed, our discussion of Christmas TV specials and Burl Ives. He was coherent for much of that month, almost like the old Kevin. “Have a hol –ly jol – ly Christ-mas,” he wheezed in a particularly ludicrous way, flopping his hands back and forth. We all laughed.
Kevin died nine years ago today. It’s raining here, raining very hard and as I type the rain drums along, not in any sort of rhythmic way. It’s never-ending and relentless. You couldn’t write music to it or make any pattern out of the falling. During Kevin’s funeral, a ceremony jammed in right before Easter, the priest made a reference to Kevin’s “elderly” dog, Woody. I don’t know what it was about that – Woody seemed in the prime of life, though he got lymphoma and died less than two years later – but Kevin’s son and I just started to laugh. The silent giggles enveloped us as we thought of solid sweet Woody, young and energetic, being characterized as something he wasn’t to make a eulogist's point.
Kevin, I’m sorry that I was so reluctant to read at your funeral, that I didn’t volunteer quickly. I don’t even remember what I read, but I do remember thinking that we were a pathetic crew, letting history and your too-strong personality influence how we said goodbye. You were the last of my mother’s husbands, though you never were an actual husband, and I hear the rain and wish I could make a sick joke, wish I could hear you laugh. But I know the ambiguity between us would have lasted until the end, that it's still here, stronger than death.
Dear Carol,
Today, riding my bike, I remembered a dream:
It was a cool, bright morning in mid-October.
We were bicycling through the part of town
where the past and the future are one.
We came to the little rowhouse
where I lived when I first met you.
An old woman who looked like my grandmother
sat in a rocking chair on the porch.
There was an empty chair next to her.
Beside her, on the floor, lay a big grey collie.
"Carol, Daniel," I said. "Wait. It's Barney!"
But you kept going.
"Here Barney," I said.
He got up and came over to the edge of the yard,
but not close enough so that I could touch him.
I started to get off my bike,
but my grandmother said,
"You can't come here now.
You have to go with them."
I looked up the street.
You and Daniel had stopped
and were looking back in my direction,
but I could see that you could not see me.
I pedaled down to the river;
it wrinkled dark and green.
A kingfisher caught a fish like a silver comma
and flew into a sycamore tree.
-- Kevin Sheehan, published in Slow Dancer (North American edition), No. 29, Spring 1993
Image: Kevin at 38. This was taken at Hoopes Reservoir in 1984 around the time that my mother met him.
I'm pretty sure he wrote this poem right before his diagnosis of myelofibrosis.
From today's prompt: Count them.
Worth it at any price?
The above email came from my husband before he was my husband, when my last name was Ingersoll-Casey (there, now you know) when our relationship was about four months old, a few weeks before my divorce became final. July 1998. I remember the circumstances that led up to it well: a joint business trip to Santa Monica, some scheduling conflicts with getting together, my solo dinner at Locanda del Lago where I flirted with the Italian American waiter, an aspiring actor from Brooklyn. It was the usual -- for me, anyway -- early relationship feelings of uneasiness and worry.
The astrologer I went to a couple of months ago mentioned that I test the people that I'm involved with. "Expensive, but worth it," was the phrase she used to describe me. I'll take her word on it, that I'm worth it. It's true, now that I look back at the early days of our relationship and see in this email and another that I printed out back then, where my husband is talking about visits with various cancer doctors for his mother . . . I think back to my petulance, my demands: expensive. Time-consuming. Maybe overwhelming at first. Not good at holding back, at least not in the beginning, no matter if a parent has cancer or if you're also working on a dissertation or working through other personal stuff. "Look at me," I shout. "Notice me! Aren't I worth it?"
And yet he loves me still.
I've been thinking about what to write for Elizabeth Harper's fabulous Write About Love Project, going through my small box of love mementos looking for inspiration. The box has letters from D (love letters and very sad post-breakup ones), directions to my former crush's house written in his hand, an inconsequential note left at my E Street apartment by the philosophy student who broke my heart, a postcard from Estonia from Peter, a joke Christmas card from J signed with someone else's name, and various cards from my husband. It's a mix of ephemera and deep love and silliness. Maybe it's inspiration.
At any rate, I'm working on my piece, Elizabeth, though it still may take me a while to get there.
What I've been up to: finishing up my class, working on writing about love, still doing prompts, working on the new blog in dribs and drabs. And, last night anyway, not sleeping.
Perils of procrastination
"I want to give this day the finger," I told my husband as we climbed back into the car after our lunch (Greek food with beer, the beer making me sleepy and melancholy). More rain, pillowcases worth, immersed the car as we drove to the Seymour Marine Discovery Center at Long Marine Lab, a research center associated with UC-Santa Cruz, where we looked at creatures who live in water, leopard sharks, monkey-faced eels, hermit crabs, and sea stars.
This is what I should be doing: writing a profile of a family friend for my creative nonfiction class. The profile is due at midnight tonight. I've written about 500 words, mainly background, and I have to take what little information I have and make it into something else. I've known about this assignment for weeks. It hung (it hangs!) over my head, this prospect of having to identify someone, figure out what to ask them, and then characterize them in an article. And now I'm in a hotel room, writing on my blog, looking at Facebook, talking to my son about the evolution of whales and where the turtle king lives. I'm exhausted from too little sleep, from silent upheaval.
In college I often got up at 4 a.m. the day a paper was due and wrote wrote wrote. I was a philosophy major, so in many cases supporting my arguments wasn’t difficult. I don’t remember having many problems with the writing (I do remember the morning I accidentally deleted a religion paper on my typewriter/wordprocessor and then recreated it in a few hours). But this is difficult, my brain is slower, there is the distraction and tension about the process and I'm not in my usual writing spot.
Not much to be done about it. I’m in Santa Cruz because it’s a long weekend and we’re celebrating my husband’s birthday. I’ll just have to push through, get as much as I can this morning and finish up by midnight.
So let me tell you about Father A., a friend of my husband’s from college, the man who was searching for something for years. He started life as Robert, bopped around the world until his early thirties, and then became a Serbian Orthodox monk. I spent an hour talking with him, but should have spent two, have never heard back on my follow-up questions. Instead, I have a very detailed story of his conversion, years in the making, I have my husband’s stories of the college years, and I have an ability to bullshit for a while. Still, it’s not going to be very good.
WIsh me luck.
Image by Alanna@VanIsle.
Layered
We share the memory of that night, and the rest of the trip to Tokyo, the boys with their long razor cuts, the girls with their striped stockings, the packed subways and trains. All unfamiliar and exciting, something our lives lack now, the little taste of the unknown.
At the time, I didn’t embrace the unknown. I’m braver now, or so I choose to think. Maybe I am more comfortable with making a fool of myself. All this bravery is wasted on cleaning and cooking, with the routine sameness our lives demand. Life is relentless and we can’t escape it, so why not embrace the relentless, think of it all as a kind of race, a slow walk towards release?
Our memories pile on top of each other, they layer, like the leaf mulch on the forest floor. The leaf becomes dirt, the dirt becomes stone, our experiences become transformed with time so that we no longer recognize them. But they are there, in the world, apart from us, intermingling with other peoples’ experiences. Because they don’t die. Please tell me they don’t die, that these parts of ourselves, these little intimacies, remain, no matter whether you or I still exist.
I can’t bear the thought of it, these little deaths. I remember those moments. I remember them all. I remember who we were and see who we are now, the layers transformed.
The photo, by Writing Salon mistress Jane Underwood, was the prompt.
Illusive permanence
I keep a notebook beside the bed. This is where I record the dark thoughts, the crazy optimistic stuff, and where, sometimes, when I wake up suddenly, my sleep cut through as if by a knife, I write down what feels like a snippet of insight. I write the insight down to remember it. In the morning, the evidence of my profundity or lack thereof is there in my own writing. I can discard it if I wish.
After a Monday night of broken sleep – the two a.m. wakeup, the nattering worries, the book and the computer muffling my darkness-crazed mind – I slept in the guest room last night. The point was to keep the boy from breaking my rest with his presence (the ghostly figure by the bed, waiting for me to move) or absence (the wake up where I wait for the ghostly figure to appear). I hoped that the guest room's green walls and comforter, oceanic and rich, would submerge me in dreamland. I brought my notebook, planned to erase the day from my brain by writing about it, but my book was more compelling. Asleep by nine, I woke up at one with a conversation dogging me.
Did I say that? What was that all about? Why bring up the ex-husband? I imagined Mr. X’s hangdog face, felt guilty about the house in Takoma Park I left behind in 1998 for him to clean out, my wedding shoes waiting accusatorily in a downstairs closet. I moved out weeks earlier to an apartment in Washington, DC. Mr. X put off his purge until the weekend before the tenants moved in. He tore across four states in an empty U-Haul. The truck veiled the turnpike in shimmering exhaust, rattled past livestock trucks and greasy rest stops. What a difference from the drive he had made a little more than two years before in a friend’s borrowed pickup, Loudon the sheltie dog resting his head on the steering wheel, Sidney howling from a cat carrier while Zoe, who had already soiled her carrier, traipsed across the dashboard.
I haven’t thought about this in years, the story of my brief first marriage, my role in it as villain, the one who wanted out, who stormed and yelled and flung insults. Or at least that is how I continue to present myself: the bad guy. Perhaps Mr. X still thinks of me this way (though we have never talked about it). Does the story require a villain? Why had I been talking about that anyway? I needed to attack the narrative, get the meaning, but did I need to be doing it at one in the morning?
The worries and thoughts and feelings were cracking through the thin crust of my consciousness. I hadn’t given them enough time, enough room to exist, so they exerted their independence, their right to be, by showing up at my moment of weakness. My brain was an egg, my thoughts the tapping of an about-to-hatch chick. Or it was the discarded husk of a cicada, a slit along the back where the thoughts emerged and moved on. I was being reborn in these nightly interruptions, remade. Or destroyed.
I scrawled my image of rebirth/destruction in my notebook. I laid in the dark. I flipped one way, then another, then back again. I pressed the pillow over my head and made a breathing hole. I wiped my mind clean, cluttered it with thought, and wiped again. Eventually, I fell back asleep.
In the morning came clarity. After eight months of waiting, we will be closing on our house by the end of this week or the beginning of the next. How could I not be thinking about my former rescuer, the ex-husband who tried to buy contentment by purchasing apparent permanence, buying first one house and then another, in the face of our unhappiness? These were acts of love and blind optimism. These were also my first houses. It was a trail of purchase, paint, make curtains, and move on. We lived less together less than two years in one house and less than four months in the other.
Houses. Marriage. Permanence is an illusion. Or so I tell myself when I get too close to the flame. It will burn out, it will take me with it. After the blaze I will float on the wind, a speck of ash, transformed.
Image: The first house Mr. X and I purchased in Columbus, OH. I have no pictures of second house, where I lived for less than a year.
Here's what I should have been doing today: working on a longer personal essay for my creative nonfiction class. Of course, the personal essay is my forte and I think I'll tackle something I've written about before, the day of Kevin's death. Still, it will take some work, but here I am, blogging again, giving into my thoughts.
The blog has a new category: insomnia!
Watery path
In Wilmington, Delaware, we lived near the Brandywine, a rocky creek surrounded by trees and parkland. This is where Kevin, my mother's boyfriend, found Louise, a shivering irish setter mix, where on my trips home from college, my mother, Kevin and I walked the dogs along the race where the mill used to be. In the fall, persimmon trees dropped their fruit and shook scarlet leaves. Winter exposed the muskrats. They swam from one side of the race to the other under thin sheets of ice, their bodies dense and quick. We discussed the voluptuousness of their fur, the fact that some people still ate muskrat, how Brandywine algae and chemicals would make the meat bitter.
There was Chestertown, the year and half in college and then dropping out of college, the walks by bobbing boats, the night Peter and I rode a tandem bike through sweet summer air across the Chester to his garden patch, the strolls along the river with my roommate Martha, our sob stories, our parental complaints, our barely post-adolescent struggles. Or J's family place across the lane from the Sugar Shack, the beauty of the creek, the ominous duck blind, the backfire of shotguns on November mornings. When I told him how beautiful it was, how I loved the tall trees along the driveway and the way the moon reflected off the water, he told me he had stopped noticing such things long ago.
College in Washington, DC wasn’t about the Potomac, it was about the place, the power, the buildings, the smooth marble and cool granite. I loved it all, lived in every quadrant but southeast, but left it for library school in Illinois. Champaign-Urbana turned out to be dry and featureless, flat and sparse. On deadly August nights, the thunder reverberated as it searched for a place to call home. My next-door neighbor beat his girlfriend with muffled thwacks and I, filled with women's studies courses and a strong sense of justice, called the cops. Nothing changed.
After graduation, my boyfriend and I moved to Columbus, Ohio, a city at the confluence of two rivers. We moved in the middle of a winter so frigid that we couldn't touch our bedroom walls comfortably without an intermediary: gloves, a thick blanket, the stretched woolen sleeves of a sweater. By spring I got my first library job in a building that overlooked the Scioto River. I can only picture the river in winter, the wind flying off the water's surface to slap me in the face as I walked to work from the Short North or from Old Towne East, the way the sun reflected pure light in the late afternoon. Boyfriend, then marriage, animals, a brick Victorian: it had all the trappings of a life, but my mind was on the East Coast.
We moved from Columbus to DC, from DC to a Takoma Park house near polluted Sligo Creek, where we walked our sheltie dog and had increasingly stressful conversations about my husband's bad work situation. His old job was still available and he took it, returning to the banks of the Scioto on the weekend of our second anniversary. Less than a year later, our marriage's dissolution pushed me back to Dupont Circle, where the brick buildings soothed and I could walk for hours contemplating, comforted by the flow of traffic. It was the flood from an upstairs neighbor's broken water heater, the gush that didn't stop for three days, that floated the cats and me across the Potomac to my new boyfriend's Alexandria apartment.
Years passed. We moved to Adams Morgan, within walking distance of two bridges. We ran along paths in Rock Creek Park, watched black-crowned night herons fish from the zoo grounds. We got married on a beach in Southern California against a backdrop of rocks and kite surfers, drove up the coast for a honeymoon. Two years later, the baby arrived. We stayed as long as we could in our one-bedroom apartment. Then, another move across the Potomac, one cold lonely winter in Alexandria scuffling through snow drifts, visiting National Airport with the boy to watch the planes take off when I couldn’t take another minute of being in that house.
Today I am in Berkeley, a 35-minute walk to the edge of the San Francisco Bay. We live in one of the cooler spots in the city, where the fog collects and the breezes whip off of chilled bay water. But I am not of the water anymore. Instead, I am beholden to the land, the way it contours. Gravity plants each step I take. I know the earth will shake someday, will rattle the bricks loose from the fireplace and crack the picture window in the living room. Perhaps the bay waters will rise and lap at the concrete slab out front.
When it happens, I won't hesitate. I'll improvise a boat and float away, letting the currents pull me where they wish.
Image of Brandywine Creek and bridge (fairly certain this is the Washington Street bridge, which is where Kevin found Louise) by tcd123usa.
From a old prompt: Where am I? Sometimes the water theme feels tired to me, but what can I say? It resonates. Looking forward to starting a new Round Robin soon.
notebook / sand / waves
mid--Jan 2010 (sic: 2011)
sitting on a beach in Pacifica. I'm wearing urban wear -- black boots, jeans, a sweater. Makes me think of SF beaches (Ocean Beach), the Japanese couple dressed all in black, like they'd wandered in from a nightclub after an evening of alternating between heroin and coke, but still so young that any traces of debauchery didn't show on their faces.
D and G are on the other side of the beach, having waded through a rushing stream. Not me. I sit and bask and listen to the surf, the sound of water rushing over rocks, grateful that my little notebook is in my pocketbook.
I don't normally come to beaches in my boots. We took Mom back to the airport and ended up here and all I can think about is how much she would have loved to be here -- She would have taken off her shoes and rolled up her pants, gotten wet in the waves.
Sometimes I wonder if my refusal to participate, my separation, is some sort of statement -- or is perceived as such. Here I sit. I listen. I watch. Maybe this is the writer's approach, or a certain kind of writer. Maybe all I have to do is hang out in nature and humanity. Take BART into San Francisco. Sit and drink tea at a local café. I miss people, the variety of them, their fashion choices, their shoes. But in the process of being an observer, not a participant, what do I lose? Do I remove myself from my own family? How much like my mother am I? She's rubbed off on me these last few days, as always. By the end of her visit, I could see how simple one's future could be -- the studio apartment, the cats, the silence w/out the difficulty. The hurdle (?) of other people. Surely this will wear off.
Back to observer/partipant: I am separated from my family. Removed. It's a choice, not necessarily a good one -- and what's that all about?
Maybe it's time to take off the boots and jump the stream.
The document:
.
Related post: Drum-tight heart.
Images by me using my lousy cell-phone camera.
talk talk
Not all of these discussions were of the deep talk variety. The mundane and silly came up as well. Some conversational examples:
What both of us remember best about seeing Star Wars in the summer of 1977 was the bus ride to and from the movie theater at the Tri State Mall. We sat in the back of the bus. The air conditioning blew against our hair, cooled our hands. And: “Why did we even go to that movie? It’s all about war.”
Bill Murray is a jerk and Chevy Chase may be a jerk, too, despite what kgbanswers has to say about it.
If possible, we never want to spend time in the hospital again.
Cats' foreheads get hotter when they are feeling affectionate (I'm not sure I buy this one).
Marriage is a marathon.
The kid pushes back as much as I did when I was little. He’s got his father’s otherworldliness, the tendency to high distraction, and my foolish stubbornness. Whether these traits will serve him well or will forever trip him up remains to be seen.
Nicolas Cage Losing His Shit is pretty funny.
When she mentions the "bad car" we had, she means the VW station wagon, the one whose windshield wipers flew off in a rainstorm, the one with no heat, not the Toyota with the non-working gas gauge that she drove around with expired tags because it wouldn't pass inspection.
My lack of appetite. My lack of sleep.
So I am full of talk, of conversation, my mind temporarily subdued. It's a good feeling, showing my thoughts to the light, giving them life.
Image: Me on the couch. I'm here at 5 in the morning. I'm here at 10:30 at night. I've got the caffeine, the hot water, the red wine, the IPA, depending on the time. But soon, I'll have the sleep again.
It's the life that I choose
Oh, I have friends (most of whom don't read this blog), but they are scattered. Even my local friends, women that I meet for dinner or drinks intermittently, I barely see. I don't talk on the phone except to my parents, my husband, and one good faraway friend. I don't often make plans to have coffee or tea with anyone. Once a month, there's the writing group. I interact with other parents, usually on a surface level. But otherwise? It's email or Facebook, the Round Robin. It's the blogging world. The occasional play date. That and conversation with my husband, though that is affected by illness (his, mine, the kid's) and by my sometimes abnormally early bedtime.
Middle-of-the-night thoughts are uniformly dark. I didn't wake up thinking about my glorious online life. I woke up thinking about my isolated existence, about how my husband needs more of an outside life, about how I must do something now about my fucked-up self. I thought about how I would jettison the modem, to end my dependence on online forums. I thought about how that would effectively end much of my communication with anyone. There was a brief moment of positivity when I remembered that I was once a lurker. No more. I am now a faceless participant!
I give my fucked-up self a lot of pep talks. ("There's no need to be so fucked up! You have a good life. You are a social animal, really!"). I berate her ("Why are you so goddamned obsessive? Stop it already!"). I sometimes soothe her with acceptance ("Oh, it's ok. What is normal anyway? Would you really want to be normal?"). These internal monologs are worse in the winter, the time of gray skies and sickness. I am even less social in winter -- come April, everything opens up and I'm a gadabout, or what amounts to a gadabout for a generally solitary person.
These were don't-go-back-to-sleep thoughts. I moved to the downstairs bedroom, thought more about my life, about how I would feel in the morning. It's a good life, but one in which I could reach out more, have more nights out with friends, more phone conversations. I picked up the book I'm rereading, Simone de Beauvoir's She Came to Stay and immersed myself in her strange existentialist life, barely fictionalized, the one she chose to live, deliberate, measured, ordered, perpetually deferential to Sartre.
Who's to say what's normal?
Image: This is how I look to my computer most of the time: unshowered, my teeth (hidden here) unbrushed, my hair uncombed, though I admit I choose a flattering light and angle, to spare you my baggy eyes. (And Anne -- I am wearing pajamas, or mainly pajamas, since I have to put on some normal clothes to walk the dog.) After I finish this post, it's off to get cleaned up before picking the boy up from school.
Character sketch
The pushes and pulls and heavy stakes of reality would float away. My life would be created, a story, a product of someone else's mind. What fictional character doesn’t live a life of second-guesses, of crisis and messes and broken hearts left in a rush? The responsibility for my behavior would lie deep within my personality, be out of my control, someone else's intellectual problem. All I would have to do is be me and react to the situations my author puts me in. I would have no choice but to traipse along in my fictional universe, living as a slave to my character traits.
My life would depend upon the skill of my author. Would my story be character-driven, or would I be pulled lazily along by the plot, beholden to circumstance? Let's hope I don't get some hack writing me, someone who goes for cheap thrills and easy melodrama. I don't want to live a cliché. This isn't a romance novel and I'm not going to see it all clearly by the end. I'm not even sure if I want to follow a traditional narrative arc, though I like the predictability of it, the idea that the crisis I've been waiting for will actually come and, through struggle, there will be (positive) change.
In the real world, I live an obligated life. This is a not a bad life. It's an incredibly lucky one, actually, but I find myself confused by the obligations, pulled between what I have to do and what I want to do, or not knowing what I want because I always do what I should. How is my character reacting to years of the tight grip, of the tamping down? Would her fantasies of acquiescence, her dreams (sometimes nightmares) of unloosing, correspond with the actual experience?
She has choices to make, though it doesn’t feel like she has any choice at all. Even doing nothing is a choice that will form the rest of the story. Inaction and passivity will move the plot along in ways that are eventually out of her control. (But what if it is one of her character traits to be passive? Oh, doom and gloom and sad stagnation!) Or maybe she will act, but choose the wrong action. Is she lazy? Is she scared? What does she think will happen to her if she risks it all (and risking it all means what?). This character is guarded, self-protective, even with the ones she is closest to. This is her defining trait at the moment and as she becomes more fully aware of it, the real choices come in: make herself vulnerable or risk a deadened heart or some sort of emotional watershed. Whether the watershed is necessary or self-destructive remains to be seen.
I’ve never written a fully sketched out fictional character before, though I’ve tried, with those lists that run the gamut from hair color to first memory. I’m not sure I could create one by making checklists and filling out an outline. It has to come from within, from the words, for me. I have to write it and then see how consistent my portrayal is. Or so I imagine, since I haven’t done it before.
But in this exercise, I have so many questions. I want to go to an oracle to find the answers. I want to play with various plot lines to see how my character reacts, to test the outcome, to see where the tendrils of cause and effect grow and tangle, how others get caught up in her story. The outcome I would like for her is to feel, to be fully present in her own life, authentic to her emotions, supportive of the ones around her. She believes her heart is covered over, still equates love with risk and risk with other people, but I see the change, the crisis looming. I know the twists and turns of her heart better than she does. I know what she needs: to live emotionally again, to tweak the balance between mother, wife, writer, and human being.
I'll have to prod her, to write a story line that gets her out of the house and her mind, reassure her that she is coming from a foundation of love, that she's ok, that no one will hurt her, or if they do, she will not be destroyed by the pain. That she has things to say, finally, after suppressing them for years, that her emotions aren't destructive, that art and stability do mix, and if the stability turns from stagnation to stone, she needs to act before her limbs freeze, before her heart crumbles in her chest.
Related posts: From you, I get the story and (peripherally) Because I am hungry for art
Image by dieselbug2007.
I posted this and then went back to tweak a line or two.
I can walk under ladders, Part 2
There is more than enough love and affection in my life.
We live in a beautiful house and -- more than seven months after signing a contract to buy it and a day after the fourth foreclosure auction was scheduled and postponed -- there is realistic talk of a January closing date.
We'll have a house full of family this weekend.
My mother comes for a week next month.
Berkeley has become home. Or close enough.
My husband supports my writing, he supports me, and I'm grateful that he helps me carve out time to take care of myself.
The blog has brought me virtual friendship (hello Anne, Jim, koe, Tracey, Karen, Grace, John, Holly, and Lydia, among others). I am grateful for this varied group of writers and photographers. Fellow travelers.
The kid is growing, is funny and sweet, is cuddly and creative.
My relationship with my father has become . . . good. Comfortable. (Mostly) free of subtext.
Wine country is only an hour away.
I live in a place where we can "visit" snow.
Often, when I reread old posts, I think: "Hey. I can write."
My family is healthy. We sit down to eat together every night. We laugh a lot together, too.
I'm lucky. I'm lucky. I'm lucky.
Thank you for being a part of it.
(I can walk under ladders, Part 1)
Image: Castello di Amorosa.
I thought I should have something a little more cheery here for the end of the year, especially after an old friend looked me up, read a few posts, and was concerned about my emotional state. I explained that, despite the tone of the blog, things are going well. That I just needed to stop getting up at 3 a.m. What can I say? I need to express the darkness. But not always.
Sleepless
I want to tell my brain: fuck rational thought. Stop thinking. Pursue happiness and pleasure. If you can recognize them.
Why? Because the pursuit of happiness and pleasure can be dangerous and you, brain, are not a risk-taker.
Sure, this space is all about me (tirelessly, pedantically about me. Oh, I am so tired of me. Sometimes I think: get a job, Jennifer! That would quiet your inner voice for at least a portion of the week.). But writing about me isn't an exercise in pursuing happiness. Or pleasure. It’s about my mind. About how I think. It’s about organizing and labeling the past, the creative work of making reality into a story. Controlling reality – that’s what this blog is about. That and bringing a few people into my head, making them witnesses to the past, a warm virtual circle around the person that I used to be. If only I could have let the old me know that was possible: Dear fifteen-year-old, sixteen-year-old, twenty-year-old Jennifer: you will tell your story, will be observed. You existed.
There is a fine line between controlling realty and having a death grip on it, on trying to get it right or trying to write around dangerous feelings. I’ve done a lot of that, have taken anger and guilt and desire and given them a framework. I’ve transformed them into something else, but sometimes, I just want to wallow in them, to accept them as part of me. To revel in being human.
I want to stop feeling so contained.
. . .
I SLEPT ON IT
I tossed on it, ground my teeth above it, nudged the boy across it. I hung onto the edge, I waddled away, I came back and slept again, eventually.
Originally, I thought my angst was about the situation, the differences between us, my own heavy history hanging over the room like an anvil on a worn rope, gently swaying from side to side. Only I know how hard I’ve worked to create a feeling of stability, how in the process I’ve pushed things aside, cleared the room of ambiguity and risk, of the chance to cause pain, to ruin everything. But now, this: the danger was palpable. Potentially life-changing.
By design, my life is small. Contained. My forays into other worlds shake me up. I want to be shaken up (need to be shaken up), but still my security, my stability, feels so tenuous. It’s as if I’ve been holding it together with my teeth and fingertips, my arms outstretched, pulling the protective netting over my family, keeping both the outside world and the worst of me out.
I need to drop the net, to expand my life, to be in the world. I am tired of hiding. How to do it safely? If I fill the room up again with myself, take on ambiguity and risk (if I cut the anvil loose, let it hit the floor with a BANG of relief), I am afraid of what will happen.
The desire for upset, for drama, is in my bones. Like any good addict, I must avoid temptation. My fear is that I won't be able to tell the difference between temptation and happiness, that openness means pain, that my desire will betray me and hurt the people I love.
JOY DIVISION: DISORDER
Image: Me, last summer.
DISORDER is from my mainly sleepless brain. I SLEPT ON IT is a modified prompt. Is all of this too obtuse? Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am sleepless, I contain multitudes.
Boho limbo
So he’s sick and it’s rainy and our days have a very strange flow. It’s like being in another world, half-submerged in water, in the computer’s eerie glow, in SpongeBob, and Dinosaur, in sweaty blankets. My brain softens and my limbs get floppy. But I have so much to do and so much to say.
I wish I could figure out what it was.
Yesterday my husband took kid duty while I attempted to complete some Christmas-related tasks. When my sewing wasn’t working out, I moved on to writing. There’s a lot going on in my mind right now, both above and below the surface, but none of it wants to come out on paper. I spent a few hours trying various approaches, but nothing worked. It was all smoke and posturing. I am hidden from myself and won’t have much of an opportunity over the next two weeks to figure out where I am.
Or I know where I am, but can’t put it on paper. Every time I sit down to write, Kevin, my mother’s dead boyfriend, keeps popping into my head. It’s like he’s here, tugging on my sleeve, wanting me to write about him. But I have nothing good to say. I don’t want to write about his bullying, how my perception of him is changing. I have no desire to focus on his illness and his long death. What I’ve been thinking about are the early days, his first few years in our lives and the whole bohemian nature of his life with my mother. There’s something to admire in an authentic life, lived for art, independent, all about the words and thought, with some tangible stuff tossed in – the ability to make things (he was a carpenter) and to think and write is a heady combination. My adolescence was steeped in conversations about art and what it meant to live authentically, about language and philosophy and the importance of working with one's hands.
Their relationship was tempestuous. Nasty. Shaky, despite its 18-year duration. And it’s fine and all to talk about being authentic when someone else is supporting you financially, as my mother did Kevin for years after he quit carpentry to get his Ph.D (and then got sick). Really, the whole thing gave me a taste for a romantic melodramatic lifestyle while also scaring me away from it. I'm in a sort of bohemian artistic limbo, which results in some conflicted feelings about art and my place in the world.
But I am grateful for the bohemianism, for the fact that I was exposed to a different way of thinking early on. That’s not all Kevin, of course. My mother was the one who read Gertrude Stein to me across the kitchen table when I was seven, who talked to me about description and language, who tossed the television set and the car away at various times (or, more accurately, couldn’t afford the car anyway). She’s the poet, the potter, the maker of jewelry out of broken glass and rusty X-acto blades.
It’s all still percolating. I don’t know what to do with these fragments. Hopefully they will work themselves out, piece themselves together, over the next month or so. Unless I've exorcised them by writing this.
In the meantime, so much to do. Good thing I got up early.
Image: Me and the kid on West Street. The house on the left (with the brick sidewalk) was the one Kevin was renovating when he met my mother. We lived three or four houses down the street. This is the same picture that is on the sidebar.
Fantasy interrupted
The other night it was an acquaintance, someone I've known peripherally for a few years. He is an attractive man, truly tall, dark, and handsome, and I’ve always had a bit of a crush on him. There he was, in the flesh, soon enough half-naked. Things were progressing when I put a stop to it: my husband would be there any minute. The acquaintance kept coming up with schemes to get together at another date, every one involving bringing our children somewhere for a rendevous.
It wasn’t going to work and I felt horribly guilty about it anyhow. I don’t have it in me to be unfaithful. I woke up, in fact, still feeling that warm tingly make out feeling that comes with new love intermingled with guilt. Although desire and guilt are a classic combination, I prefer to experience them separately. But the thrill of it all . . . not just the physical thrum of kissing someone new – it was the emotional thrill of being attractive, the idea that this person liked me and wanted to kiss me, too.
I love my husband and what we have together. Keeping my family intact and spending the rest of my life with this man are important to me. I can't imagine my life without him. But then I get these crushes, have these dreams, and I think: I am alive, I want the rush, the fluttering heart, the chance to kiss someone new. I want just a little taste again of falling in love and I want it without any of the fall-out, the doubts and worries followed by mundane reality, the clashes, the little irritations, the chores. Each relationship starts with the threat of loss, the end is written in the beginning, and couldn't I just skip all that and go for the endorphins?
So I develop crushes (long term, generally -- I am faithful in these, too), which isn't particularly satisfying, but allows me to indulge in escapist fantasy, where I am the object of desire, but also a paragon of virtue and fidelity. Sometimes I distract myself from the slog and drag with imagined scenes of a different life, exciting and dysfunctional and fueled by pursuit. In this life, I would yield to melodrama and romance. I would love and hate and fight dirty. I would experience fleeting joy (and intense sadness). I would stomp out a path of destruction, but surely life would be interesting.
I've been thinking lately about what purpose these crushes serve. A way to escape reality? Yes. A method of distraction? Of course. Compensation for the fact that, as a stay-at-home mom, the only males I've hung out with for the last five years are my husband, son, and cats? Yes: I miss men. But some of this feels like an attempt to recreate my father in other men. I want to be seen, to be noticed, to be interesting to certain kinds of men, incompatible ones who ignore me, despite my desire for attention (just like my father? well, close enough). My long-term crush was cool, unemotional, truly unreachable. My (imaginary) pursuit of him was fueled by a desire to be seen. His coolness kept my interest at a low burn for years. It was a relief when I finally figured out the mechanism and let the crush burn out. Fantasy interrupted.
I soothe myself with the idea that I tamp down these desires because of a stronger desire to do no harm, and because I already have love. I experience more moments of happiness than I often feel I deserve. Still, a small part of me wonders if I haven't taken the darker path because it isn't an option, because I am not attractive, a boring little wren of a woman, not worth the pursuit.
So I write about desire thwarted, evaded, rekindled. I duke it out in my mind. I pick apart the impure thoughts as I push them aside. Nothing is simple. The thoughts have a source, the source has a reason, and over time I uncover it and cover it up again. I file my wants, I organize them and pack them up.
I focus on the beauty of life outside me.
From a few prompts: I woke up, Down to the wire, and the photo, which is by the talented Jane Underwood.
Night vision
That night I couldn’t sleep, stirred up by a dream I forgot upon waking. From the bathroom came the litter box scratchings of Amber, her sad trill as she leapt down the hall. The cool air, the light of the moon, you barely stirring next to me, profile muted. The melancholy night noises. I tossed off the covers, wrapped myself in your flannel robe, and stared out the window. The full moon hung over the city, so juicy it looked ready to burst. It threw its light over the houses and parked cars and if I squinted your neighborhood almost looked beautiful.
Somewhere out there a man was going through a dumpster, clinking bottles into a cart like he was making overenthusiastic toasts at a party. It was eerie and familiar at the same time, the rattling of wheels, his mutterings, the explosion of each can as he crushed it, the crash of glass. A pair of women clicked on the sidewalk below, one lecturing the other, voice slightly slurred. "If he doesn't love you, what's he worth? Tell him to go to hell." You whispered my name.
Everything became clear to me, the way our relationship would deteriorate, not this year or the next, but when we were in too deep, how the things I love about you now, your hesitation, your unruly curls, your off use of slang, would be the first things to push me away. You would have your issues with me, too, the way I trampled conversations, left my clothes where I shed them, my increasing tendency to extend the cocktail hour past midnight.
In the now, you reached for me. I tossed off the robe and returned to your warmth. I let the lust last a little while longer, enough to get me through the night. In the morning the clarity of night vision would be mortared over by sunshine.
The photo, by Jane Underwood, was the prompt.
Too many to count
*A sampler CD from Absolutely Kosher records. I think I should know the guy on the sleeve, but I was never goth and I can’t say I was ever really punk, since I lack some of the necessary darkness. I’m my mother’s daughter, a goody-goody who lives on the dark side in my mind only. Favorite song at the moment? The very catchy Fireflies by Chris Garneau (see below).
*A platform for a Yoda figurine where my son (who can’t read yet) has pasted the thought bubble: A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. The Yoda figurine was a Halloween present to my son from my father and stepmother. Yoda's right ear broke off almost immediately and he's missing a few toes. When 900 years old you reach, look as good you will not.
*A human skull. Short (dull) story that reaffirms my desire to be cremated.
*An ear of Indian corn, with multicolored kernels. Outdated American narrative embodied in decorative dried corn. The kid loves this stuff.
*A penholder made out of a baking powder can decorated by the boy, a useless old-fashioned dial timer, a zombie finger puppet, bright green vampire teeth, the empty shell of a silly putty egg, a glob of silly putty, a dessicated zested lemon half, a sign that says “Free Cookies” from a cookie jar out of my husband's childhood, a cut-out figure of the children’s book character Art Dog that my husband made out of thin foam rubber, a rubber door stop, a 1956 rupee, a pile of Sunday's New York Times, a flaccid balloon, a small griffin toy, a glass lizard, miniature fruits and vegetables made out of clay, a lump of coal, pennies marked with green ink, a "blow-out," aka noisemaker or (in our house) lizard tongue. Oh, and cup of hot water, since I don't drink coffee after 8 a.m.
Just like your coffee table, right?
Time to start cleaning . . .
From a prompt: Four objects.
Image: The coffee table at 9:30 this morning.
Love letter
Dear DT,
Remember October 1998, when we went on the Gettysburg bike tour? I was brave and pretended that I liked cycling. You were kind and understanding when my bravery only lasted a few hours. The B&B innkeepers, a pushy woman and her Rick Moranis lookalike husband, were hard to take. That first night we went back to our room and laughed until we cried about the day, me struggling on a bike, the story of the lookalike tootling on a kazoo in a coffee shop as being the innkeepers' aha! moment, the awkwardness of it all. How we ever got into the Song of the Humpback Whale (smack smack smack the ocean is my s m o r g a s b o r d click click s m o r g a s b o r d) I don't remember, but I do remember feeling connected and happy. We had been dating for about five months and it was still new. One of the men in the group asked if we were married and another said "They like each other too much." Not a happy view of marriage, but proximity and responsibility do wear one down.
I still like you a lot. And I love you.
In those early months, I would sometimes stay at your place and then take the Metro back before work to my house in Takoma Park so that I could change. It was a rush, being in love, feeling exhausted from our late night conversations. Everything glowed. Everything was funny. Remember Smoothy Chops? Schnozola?
How about the mornings in my Dupont Circle apartment, the neighbor with the motorbike, our morning warm-up wake-up call? The motorbike rumbled and growled until finally it took off with a high-pitched buzz. "He's riding his bee to work," I said one morning. We laughed so hard that our stomach muscles ached.
Things weren't always easy. I was going through a divorce. Your mother was dying of cancer. My apartment flooded out when an upstairs neighbor's hot water heater died. You came over in the middle of the night to bail me and the cats out, took me away from that water-logged place. I never went back. It wasn't the best way of moving in with you. The cats and I were like friendly squatters at your place, loved, but not exactly welcome.
Eventually we worked it out, but in the meantime we united against a common irritation, your neighbor, C. C's house was in a constant state of renovation and repair, of work done and then torn out and done all over again. He dealt with his neuroses, about completion, about home, in public and it was painful to watch. C dug a 20 foot trench between your place and his, intending to build a brick wall. The trench was open for months. It filled with rain. The sides crumbled. It was a hazard. An eyesore. After much discussion, we set up plastic cowboys, Indians, and army men in attack mode in the trench, a mild form of revenge, laughing as we pictured him finding them.
Remember Hobo the cat? The tomato plants? The long weekend in London for my thirtieth birthday?
Sometimes I mourn the fact that discovery is behind us, that what was new will never be again. Routines and responsibility for a child change the nature of a relationship. We have a common goal -- raising a healthy kid -- but in the meantime we've settled ourselves into comfortable routines. Sometimes those routines chafe. They get me down and I wonder: is this it?
Then I remind myself of the sweetness of our early days and of our continuing story. I miss the lingering mornings, the time when all we had to focus on was the two of us. We have a good life together, the kid is great, but there is something to be said for a slow Sunday morning, no reason to get out of bed, for coffee and the paper and laughter. We'll get those days back, I promise. It will be something to look forward to.
Love,
Jenna
Image by -JosephB-.
From a photo prompt, edited 10/30.
Subprime
The house is empty now. The concrete front porch, cracked and unstable, falls in on itself. The paint flakes and powders in the wind. Thirty years, twenty years, ten years ago, someone planted flowers and pulled out weeds. They painted and caulked, patched the cracks. They grew old in place. They got sick. Their eyesight weakened. Their knees gave in to arthritis, until finally the people moved or died or were wheeled away. Only the man was left, too preoccupied or addled or unlucky to keep it up.
It’s not the only empty house in our neighborhood. There are a few of them, stucco bungalows limned with cracks, their front yards crackling with dead grass or lush with weeds. Passion vines crawl across windows. Tattered curtains veil darkened windows. The subprime mortgage crisis, the lousy California economy, are creating more of these houses. Our rental house, which is under foreclosure, could end up being one of them if our attempt to buy it fails. There are a dozen houses within a mile of us that may be going to auction in the next month.
Six weeks ago, I noticed a pile of junk in the driveway of a house around the corner where a white truck used to park. Every morning I would pass the truck as it warmed up. Some afternoons the grandma would be in the yard tending roses. Now No Trespassing notices are posted in the windows and a For Sale sign hangs out front. For Sale signs are everywhere in the neighborhood and I wonder: who will be buying?
The elements take over. Roofs sag, rain soaks into floorboards. Mold creeps, weeds tangle. Animals nibble at the crumbling edges. They nest in pantries and silverware drawers. And the property values, the property values. They fall all around us.
Image: An abandoned house in our neighborhood.
Originally from a prompt, Abandoned. Back to the Round Robin.
Litany
I am frustrated because all I can think about is being overwhelmed and tired and how this keeps me from focusing. I'm trapped in the moment of it, the obligations, the tiredness, my head not so much empty as stormy, gathering clouds, thunder, lightning.
I'd write about kittens, puppies, flowers in bloom, if I thought that I could make it less than trite.
Instead, I'm stuck inside my rushing mind, and this on a day when I have no other morning obligations but to the blog. Lately I've felt like this more days than not, and I know that more distractions lie ahead. Volunteer obligations, Halloween, a short trip to Southern California, and maybe, maybe if we're lucky, closing on the house. If that happens there will be insurance companies to call, meetings to schedule, money to juggle, ranges to shop for, furnace and hot water issues to fix. If it doesn't happen, there will be house-shopping and move-planning. All of this is in addition to the weekly slog, the cleaning and gardening, the cooking and shopping, the dishwashing, the dog walking and litter box scraping. The hour or so I spend each week in the kid's classroom doesn't count as slog -- I enjoy it and feel useful and he likes it, too -- but it is part of the distraction, the outside world coming in.
And what about my weekly therapy appointments? Going back to therapy feels good, though a bit self-indulgent, like downing a glass of champagne or three before pulling off the bandages. It also packs a wallop. I leave each appointment in a muddy daze, hobble back home with my mind elsewhere. Yesterday I made a post-therapy stop to Crossroads Trading Company, a used clothing store. There were too many racks, too much information, but even worse was the soundtrack. Every song was from the early to mid-1980s: U2's New Year's Day, Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Relax, 'Til Tuesday singing Voices Carry. It was time travel, and I'd already been back, thank you very much. Who wants to be reminded of their former helplessness by relentless pop tunes? I travel with the past neatly packaged, but the music brings back entire scenes and feelings and every conclusion is preordained.
Here's the thing: without peace, I can't write. My mind flits around. I have a hard time concentrating. I want to reassure myself, tell the words that it will be safe for them to come out soon enough. Then I look at the schedule and see it booked for the next four weeks, every week with something major to focus on.
I need to learn how to carve out time for writing, to tell myself that my mornings aren't "extra" or "free." Maybe I also need to learn how to relax, to not let the slogs and obligations take over my creative life. And, as Jim Murdoch wrote in the comments here a few weeks ago, "Love finds a way." I've got a story coming along very slowly that keeps calling me back no matter what. It could be the real thing. So now that I've gotten this bit of throat-clearing out of the way, I'm off to work on it.
Image: If I could just focus on calming imagery -- the Pacific Ocean from Point Bonita, for example -- maybe I would be writing something transcendent and amazing right now instead of coming up with this litany of complaints.
The thrill came slowly like a boom
* Walking the dog at dusk, our street empty, the horizon a heady mix of pinks, oranges, and frosty blues, fogless, Venus (or is it Mars?) a pinpoint of light. Sometimes the fog is low. It's like we're walking in a cloud. Sometimes it muffles the tops of the hills while leaving the flats clear. No matter the actual month, it almost always feels like late October, the wind blowing damp and cold, me in jeans and wool socks and a heavy sweater, bulked up against misty gusts. The grey twilight thrills in a melancholy way, my heart aches. The clear evenings remind me of a time when anything could happen in the dark.
*Cleaning alone on a sun-streamed Saturday, Led Zeppelin blaring loud enough for me to hear it over the vacuum cleaner. I swipe and toss and straighten until the chaos -- in the house, in my head -- is dusted and contained. Sure, my nightly task of kitchen cleanup, scrubbing off smeared plates, encrusted pans, and constellations of counter crumbs, feels good, too. It's like shelving books in alphabetical order by author or returning my grocery cart neatly to the stack. The real thrill, however, is in loud rock-n-roll, sunlight, and solitariness, the air saturated with furniture polish, my hand on the vacuum cleaner hose.
*Reaching an understanding with an animal: the tender glance of a cat, his paw gently touching my hand, the look Nora dog gives me when she wants to take the walk in a different direction. It’s the gulp of recognition that these animals are sentient, emotional and independent beings, with their own thoughts and preferences, choosing to be with me even when I don't have food in my hand.
*Being in the moment with my son, playing a game, cuddling, reading, walking hand in hand and making jokes. This isn't as easy as it sounds, quieting my worries about my parenting and how he is doing, leaving my household tasks -- dinner prep, laundry, cleaning, gardening, taking care of the animals -- unattended. I am not a perfect mother. I am easily distracted and often quick to anger. I yell, sometimes unreasonably. On occasion, I am scary.
Our moments of connection redeem me, the game where he is a fierce monster or a dragon, growling centimeters from my face, gnashing his terrible teeth and rolling his terrible eyes. He may pause to ask, “Did that scare you?” or say “I’m pretty scary, aren’t I?” He can be a little scary, perhaps like I am when I am angry. He growls until he collapses in my arms. If I am especially lucky, he tells me that he loves me. A small thrill, at the game, at our mutual trust.
*My husband making a joke or saying something funny thing right before I was going to say the same thing. We're goofy. Sometimes our jokes are scatological. We laugh a lot and we often think the same way. It's connecting, it keeps us going, and I am grateful for it and for those moments when I recognize it and feel the thrill.
Perhaps I am boring. I feel nothing but fear when the car accelerates past 65. Heights make me nervous. I have no desire to take on real danger. But give me twilight and a brisk breeze, a sunny Saturday against chaos, a true moment with an animal or my son, or a laugh with my husband, and my heart beats faster.
Image: A Santa Rosa sunset by bipoloarbear. The tree reminds me of some that we see on our twilight dog walks.
Title from a poem by Emily Dickinson.
All meringue
I've made a resolution to keep this space happy and deceptively light, like freshly whipped cream, like chocolate souffle or mousse, like flaky layers of puff pastry. The blog will be fluffy. All meringue.
OK.
Maybe this resolution is what is keeping me from being able to think, it's keeping my brain tied in knots and my fingers from the keyboard. Maybe what I want to write about can't possibly be lightened.
My trip to Seattle was fabulous, full of good food and good company, lots of walking, and an appropriately scary (and sometimes sad) ghost tour, but there was an undercurrent of tension that was based on an old and tiresome narrative. And, frustratingly, it's something that I don't feel comfortable writing about here, for various reasons, one of which is I don't want to indulge myself, would rather just give it up because resolving it by writing about its manifestation is impossible and complicated. At one point, this would have been perfect blog fodder, but I have no desire to go there any more. How much public kvetching and self-analysis can one person do?
The kid's first day of school was also fabulous. We hung out with him while the classes lined up, even got to accompany the kids to the classroom (parental paparazzi, with our cameras and our shout-outs to the stars), and then off we went. There was no trauma. He emerged at the end of the day unscathed. He was ready for it, to be with kids his own age, learning and playing.
There he is, a normal little kid doing normal little kid things. I've been holding memories of my own early childhood at a distance, the multiple moves and mid-year school changes and how they affected me. I am not him. His father and I are giving him things that my parents weren't capable of giving me. I've even been coming around to the idea that I might be a good mother, not a perfect one, but a good-enough one, that maybe he really can grow up like a normal, well-adjusted kid.
So, here the words are, light, but not overly airy, with a touch of sugar, yeah. The struggle will be what to work on if I'm not going to go heavy, dark, and bitter. How do I frame my writing life again after a month or more off, after years of indulging my dark predilections? I have stories in progress. I can always turn to memoir as long as I give it a happy twist. Otherwise, I'm out of ideas, feel like my imagination is stuck, stuck on me-me-me. I worry that I will never transcend the mundane.
I am so tired of me. I want to write about you, your quirks and funny ways, they mystery of how you make decisions, the way you exist in the world.
I guess we should start hanging out more, me and you, meeting in the coffee shops, skimming the whipped cream off our café mochas, burning our tongues on chai. We'll speak low over glasses of wine, bump into each other on the BART train, in the library, at the dry cleaners, while walking down the street. I'm certainly not going to find you in the guest room, standing by my desk. It's time to get off my ass and walk out the door.
I'll meet you at Caffe Trieste tomorrow at nine.
Image by Kristin A of the Meringue Bake Shop.
Dispatch from a foreign land
As my plane landed, coming down low over the highway, I had a flash of driving to what was then called National Airport with the philosophy student who broke my heart, standing beside his car in the dark, waiting for the rush of the landing planes, with their high-pitched whines and low rumbles, chilled by the fast wind and the thrill of wondering if one would miscalculate, would get too low.
On the light rail from the airport, zipping past a construction site, catching a glimpse of a worker through an open window, I remembered how D smelled at the end of the day, like spice and spent sweat; his steel-toed boots next to the laundry pile, the t-shirts he wore with the sleeves cut off, the bandana he wrapped around his head to catch the drips.
And remembering what it is like to be independent, to get somewhere on my own power.
Sometimes I have a strong desire to escape my life, but what I think I really need is a chance to be on my own occasionally, to show myself that I am a separate human being. The challenge is how to create this feeling in my day-to-day life.
Image: View from my hotel room (taken with cell phone camera).
The anxious in-between
And here I am, at a café, drinking tea, attempting to write. The sound bounces around, the music and the clang and rush of coffee machinery, the clink of cutlery against porcelain. From where I sit, in a corner in the back, it appears that this place is half-populated by women in-between (like me) and bald men. The other fifty percent are hipsters with their beards and pale skin and chunky glasses.
When I left the house this morning, I told our babysitter, "I'm not used to getting out of the house in the morning." He said he aspired to that, to not being used to the morning slog. Once again, I felt like a deadbeat, a producer of short blog posts and not much else, though being the mother of a small child certainly counts for something. How long do I give myself in this writing gig? At least another year or two, especially once the kid is in real school and I have more time to devote.
August has become the month of anxiety: how will I fill the time with the boy? (So far, so good.) Will he and his friend get along the two mornings a week that they are sharing a babysitter? (Remains to be seen.) What will our adjustment to school be like? (To be determined.) When I go away for three nights at the end of this month, will I pine for my family? Will I feel like a bad mother, missing the Kindergarten/First Grade picnic at his new school? (Oh, just be quiet, anxious brain.) And, finally, if I decide to take up meditation in order to quell all this mainly useless anxiety, will that take up too much of my time and not be productive? (Here I'm just being silly. I think.)
Then there is the Big Anxiety: that I suck. Mainly as a writer, but in other ways as well. I wonder if I will ever not-suck, whether it matters if I am never published, whether I need to write for myself or other people. I should write to please myself, of course, but the danger in doing that is that I am stuck with myself, without thinking about an audience, or about what makes good writing. It's not possible to improve in a vacuum. Not that I write in a total vacuum, but almost.
I start so many things, devote weeks to them, and then let them drop. I need to finish a story, two stories, three stories. More. I need to submit them and maybe get rejected and maybe not. I need to get out in the world. Even being in this cafe is a worthwhile thing: can someone be a good writer and avoid other people? For the last three years, I have moved from my guest-room office to my son's preschool to the occasional playground or play date. When I get out in the world and see all these other human beings, with their stories and distinctive ways of dressing (though we're all clad in dark jeans here and we all use MacBooks), with their different conversational patterns, I remember that I am connected to the world, and all the world is writing material.
Image: The crumbs of my croissant.
On not escaping
The road trip: the long car ride down and then back up the coast, along Highway One and Route 101, those final curves of Big Sur where the kid got carsick (and I was grateful that he'd refused food before then), the rental cottage in Pasadena where I realized that I had forgotten my inhaler and so spent a few hours on our first night there sitting up and trying to take deep breaths. Then there was the graduation ceremony, me and the kid running on the beach in Santa Monica beforehand, the long blah blah blah of the ceremony and the happiness afterwards. We spent some time with the father-in-law and the brother-in-law and the aunt. We ate in lots of restaurants and went through boxes of WWII memorabilia and old family papers and keepsakes.
We went to Disneyland, a day trip where we terrorized the kid by taking him on rides that he wasn't quite ready to experience. He was dying to go into the Haunted Mansion, but as soon as we walked in, he wanted out of there. It was too late. In the days since he's been going over the experience again and again mainly to the birdies in the car (that is, to my index fingers and thumbs, which make convenient bird puppets). He explains what happened and then he has them go through a mini version of it ("Birdies: the room is stretching!"). OK, OK, OK -- I get it. He's working it out. But I still feel guilty for exposing him to that too early. And it wasn't only that. We also got on Star Tours and the Pirates of the Caribbean rides. Star Tours merely scared him. The Pirates of the Caribbean had him burying his head in my chest, asking when it would be over. And I'm not so sure that finishing with the bizarrely psychedelic Winnie the Pooh ride was a good idea for any of us.
Then the trip back home, a greasy dinner, an overnight in Morro Bay, the chill of the wind coming offf the ocean, the seals and cormorants, Morro Rock.
What we brought back with us: a sword, a shield, a retractable dagger, a gumball machine, an old globe, rosaries, a prayer book, the carbide miner's headlamp that belonged to my husband's maternal grandfather. More plastic knights. An extra inhaler. A new pair of shoes. New used clothes.
And now I'm back, wondering where my head is, wanting to escape, really escape. Just me and a book, the swing of a hammock, a cool glass of chamomile tea, a long sleep. This is the state of my fantasy life. Safe, soothing, and solo. I haven't spent a night away from the boy since before he was born. I love him. I need a night away. I'm wishing that I was the type to build him a network, to take a thread here and there and connect him to other people so that we weren't the only ones. I wish all that was effortless for me. But it's not, and here I am, still in the intensity of it all, hoping that it will all turn out ok for him, and desperately wanting a little time to be a grownup away from the toys and the tears. Just a night is all that I ask. Maybe two. The second night for my husband.
Image: The kid at Morro Rock.
Disappearing act
Just yesterday, just this morning, even, I was wondering why I bother to be good – what’s the point in it? If I wasn’t good, fair, faithful, wouldn’t my life be more exciting? Would I start to dress in flamboyant reds and yellows, would wrap my body in stretchy, curve-revealing knits and dresses that are almost sheer? What am I afraid of? I imagine a trip to a different city, a clandestine meeting, the dark taste of red wine on our lips, the giving-in. But it’s a fantasy anyway, an impossible one. Not only would giving in cause pain to the people that I love and destroy the good life that I have but it's not who I want to be. I don't want to be untrustworthy, someone who hurts others for the sake of a cheap, temporary thrill.
I’ve thought about it with the Round Robin, too, my writing prompt class, how I faithfully respond to my partner every day, even when there are some that I know won’t do the same, even when what I get back isn’t what I put into it. Still, I treat others how I would wish to be treated and then feel vaguely resentful when they don’t follow through.
I’m good. I pay my bills on time. I remove myself from temptation. I follow the rules unless the rules seem foolish or would hurt someone else. I do my daily work even when it bores me and I understand that my son will only be a child once so I try to appreciate it all (not always possible of course), even when I’ve played the same game too many times to count.
The balance is off, though, and I’m not sure why. I’m hardening into marble, pock-marked and weathered, Mother Mary. Or a nun. This might be solved with a clothes-shopping trip or maybe I just need to take the next opportunity I have to flirt with a man. If I can find one in my travels. The world I live in is scented by estrogen and dirt. It’s skinned knees and snacks at 3:00 and is populated by mothers and babysitters.
I miss men, the tension they provide, the chance to pretend before I return to the safety of my husband's arms. But it could be that what I need is a day off where the only thing to pursue is pleasure and I don't have to keep track of the dirt, the stuff, and the meals, a day when I don't have to be the timekeeper.
From a photo prompt.
The few readers I have left are probably tired of reading this, but I am still distracted: house-buying stuff, stuff-jettisoning stuff (the joys and pains of craigslist), getting-ready-to-go-on-vacation stuff. I know I'll be back and present at some point in the near future. In the meantime, the only writing I've been doing is for the Round Robin class and I'm barely even reading magazines. Perhaps that's why I feel like I'm disappearing.
Houses are a sickness
It has to be this house-buying thing, the paperwork, the memories of the life I once had. The last remaining pet that Mr. X and I shared is getting weak and thin. She'll be checking out soon, too, my final connection to youth and early love. How I could have been so sanguine about buying houses with that guy, how I could undertake such a permanent thing without a thought? And then I remember: those houses weren’t permanent at all, no matter how solid they appeared. We were in and out, removed some wallpaper, slapped up some paint, and then woosh! it was back to DC or bang! back to Ohio for him.
Houses are a sickness.
Here’s what I would like: to live in San Francisco. Or Brooklyn. Or back in the right neighborhood in DC. Or, since we’re going to be here, I’d like to move this wonderful house just a tad bit north, maybe closer to BART, closer to where the hills start to roll. Or maybe I just don’t want to grow up and be beholden to a particular space. I want it to all be permanently temporary.
Mr. X left Takoma Park within four months for Columbus and I was out of the house by the next summer. There was nothing permanent about it. So now I struggle with my ideas about the past and houses and though I know buying this house is the right thing to do on so many levels, it scares me.
I look forward to thinking -- and writing -- about something else.
From a prompt, "I paid for it." I'm still very distracted by house-thoughts and haven't been to another blog in weeks (with a few exceptions). Don't worry. I'll be back.
Top image: The back of the house.
Bottom image: Our front porch.
Drunk on possibility
So. We may have an opportunity to buy the house we’re in. It’s a unique house, well-built and large, filled with light and interesting angles. Actually, it’s my favorite house out of all the houses I’ve lived in, and that includes the two I bought with my ex-husband when I was younger and more sanguine about committing to property. (And my family and I have lived here for three years, which is longer than I lived in either of those places). I’m not sure whether it will happen, but it’s more possible than not, and I’m thinking of all the things that need to be done, mainly minor. I’m thinking of how renting can be a relief sometimes, not having to shell out money for repainting or for broken water heaters or for figuring out why the plate glass window in the front leaks when it rains sideways.
But the opportunity to buy also makes me realize how temporary our lives have felt. We haven't been sure where in Berkeley we’d end up, whether we would move back to DC, or if it would be better to be in Southern California, where my husband grew up. We buy a house, we put down roots, we have some equity. We paint the walls, replace the gate, grow a fruit tree or two in the backyard.
We take on huge debt. We are forever grateful to the relative who is offering financial assistance. We sign the contract and the Neighbornator shows up with a pie, a bottle of champagne, a cup of sugar. An invitation to use the hot tub. With my newfound security, sense of place, I write a series of searing short stories. My first novel (literary fiction) is well-reviewed and sells better than anyone expects. Journalists interview me on the back deck (right outside my writing room, where the magic happens!). They listen intently for clues, take notes as I stare off into the middle distance, thinking, thinking. I turn out to be a brilliant interview, witty, urbane, deep.
Or, more likely, we slowly begin to feel at home, to really build a life. The house shows us its flaws and beauty and we share our insecurities with it. It listens to the fights, the discussions, watches as our son grows up and a series of animals come and go. Maybe we stay for five years. Maybe for twenty. But throughout, the house surrounds us, comforting, soothing. Home.
Image from nertzy.
This is why I haven't been writing much lately or visiting any blogs: I am highly distracted. And none of this may come to pass, I keep on reminding myself: don't get too attached, Jennifer.
This is what you want . . .
Getting in: Security pats husband down for weaponry, palpitates my purse for contraband. What are they after? Drugs? A small caliber handgun? All I have is my ID, a credit card, and phone. I remember the Devo show at this venue and worry that the theater will be full of tall drunk obnoxious young men who will fill the space with pot smoke. As it turns out the crowd is actually "a motley collection of old-school punk-rock fans, curious onlookers and balding Brits, most of whom seemed to be the 40-60 age group" (so says Jim Harrington of the Oakland Tribune. He's right.). There is very little pot smoke or drunkeness. Sometimes I can see past my fellow middle-aged music-lovers and catch a glimpse of the stage.
Inside: One man in front of us (fifty-ish, totally bald) has tattoos of eyes and a nose on the back of his head. His multiple neck folds complete the smile: :0)))) Another man (pressed jeans, sensible shoes, short hair and glasses) stares at a guy to our left (long curly hair, manskirt over pants, combat boots) as the skirted one sways, dances, and plays air-bass in between bowl hits.
Ladies' room: There are only three stalls. I am thankful that the 1400-person capacity venue is half-full and that most of the crowd is male. Still, I wait. I stare at the feet in the stalls. Stall number three: leopard print platform sneakers, red tights. Stall number two: black ballet flats. Stall number three: pointy-toed spike heels, sheer stockings. I am wearing black ankle boots and unfashionably wide-cut jeans.
Home again: We go to sleep after midnight. Nick the cat wakes us up on Sunday with his six a.m. cries of existential angst. Dress Me Monkey still fights and loses. The kid asks us what the monkey plans to do with the proceeds from the treasure that he has not yet been able to steal. Our answers run from building a potty made out of gold to buying and harnessing hundreds of tarantulas to pull Dress Me Monkey's chariot. Kid wants more.
And the week begins.
Image: John Lydon from an interview in the Guardian.
This is what you want . . . this is what you get is the title of both a PiL song and album.
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.
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.
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
Because I am hungry for art
But worse than feeling the real world slip away is the feeling that I get when I don't write. It's a kind of lovesickness, an ache of not-having. The only way to feel better is to sit down and start typing. Even if it's painful to write, even when I procrastinate, when I avoid turning on Freedom for the Mac and bop around the Internet looking up information on John Quine or Anya Phillips (I've been re-reading Please Kill Me and the 70s punk scene is haunting my brain), eventually I get around to writing. Because I have to. It fills me. Without it, I am empty.
I want to write all night, sipping on red wine and smoking the occasional cigarette. I want to go to sleep at 3:00 a.m., sated with language, and wake up for a light lunch of mineral water and salad, of warmed baguette slices smeared with roasted garlic and chevre. After lunch, I want to linger over a book, sip a cup of muddy espresso in preparation to wrestle with words on and off into the night. I am up at 3:00 a.m. these days, listening to a frustrated cat howl, staring at the billowing curtains as my mind forces me to consider various bleak scenarios, feeling the heat of a feverish, fitful boy as he pushes me off the cliff's edge of the bed. A week of just the two of us -- me and the words -- would cure my angst. One week of writing in a dark room, embraced by a circle of lamplight, feeling the sediment on my tongue as I drain a final glass of wine, letting my mind dance with the headrush of unfamiliar nicotine. Just a week. I would take the time to focus on this useless fantasy in order to discard it before returning to the here and now.
The Round Robin, with its daily prompts and sweet feedback, helps, but sometimes I still feel like I'm bouncing around in my own mind, where (as usual) it's all about me. Other times, though, I create something that I can't explain, but I like.
So here you go, a piece that is a mix of homesickness and the past and an attempt to transcend. And let's hope for a few weeks of health and clear weather, of writing and creating. Of sanity.
Stained
I want a cylindrical room made of factory glass, the door a piece of carved mahogany salvaged from the She-Wolf, Lord's old boat, the one that is sitting on a trailer in the backyard, the hitch supported by a stack of cinderblocks. Against the cool glass, set into block, the mahogany will seem rustic, warm to the touch. I will rub my hand against it before I enter the room, think of the times we went waterskiing or just bobbed around in the muddy waters of the Elk, my wet ass spreading a dark stain on the boat seat.
Even then that boat was a piece of shit. Lord wasn’t paying attention to it. He let it sit in the water all winter long. The varnish wore off, the gleam melted away. Every year he bought cans of teak oil, stacked them in the shed, and let them sit. Barnacles coated the She-Wolf's hull. They were rough against my hand, cut into my feet as I pushed against the boat into the heavy water.
So, the room. It is lit from within, white light/white heat. Even the ceiling is made of factory glass. The floor, too. It is empty. I will go inside, lock the door, and remove my clothes. I will press myself up against the glass. See if you can tell me what you are looking at, my blurry image refracted in each square. I will light a cigarette, will snuff it out on the rounded wall, again and again. You will see flesh, the death of ember, the end of the spark.
Lord is dead now, too, washed away, though not in the way you would expect. It had nothing to do with water. It was emotion. The dike broke, his water wings deflated, a big hole opened in his roof and the house filled with rain. You want me to tell you about it, to be more direct, but I won’t. I have his boat and my plan. Every weekend I sand down the mahogany, try to remove the stains, think about my cylindrical factory glass room. I picture Lord on the other side, horn-rims slipping off his nose, one hand marking his place in the book. I mystify him and he likes that.
Image by Vinje.
The slog and drag of the humdrum
Here are the things I don't write about here:
My son's colds and coughs
Chores, like vacuuming up the fur, dust, and sand that accumulate pretty quickly in a house with three cats, a dog, and three humans
The laborious process of rewriting my novel (well, I may mention this in passing, but not in great detail, since that would send all of you to snoreland, but it is indeed laborious, like work-on-the same-three-paragraphs-for-six-or-seven-hours laborious)
The difficulty of writing something that is long-term, of continuing through it without the instant feedback of blogging
Cooking dinner whether I want to or not
How we're figuring out where the kid will go to school for kindergarten in the fall
Tips and tricks for keeping one's sanity after weeks of rain and afternoons inside with an energetic four-year-old
Coping mechanisms I use to see us through one of Mr. T's business trips
My political views
Natural disasters
The pros and cons of having another child
The perhaps impossibility of having another child
My anxieties about the quality of my writing and the wisdom of my current career choice
RIght now I'm stuck smack dab in the slog and drag of the humdrum. The novel is taking precedence over the blog and I don't feel like I have enough time to really shine up any of my short pieces of fiction for this space. I'm not sure that many people want to read the fiction anyway. It seems that most readers are interested in my personal pieces, either angst from the past or my depressive musings on current life. Not that my current stuff is all darkness, exactly, but I think my views are cloudier than the average person's, cloudy with a little patch of blue sky that expands as I examine it, which can make the whole process hopeful, I suppose, in a Jennifer Trinkle sort of way.
It feels as if my mind is preoccupied, that it is working on something. I just need a few hours with a keyboard to find out what it is. But who has the time? I'd rather work on the novel or maybe that just feels like the right thing to do right now, a necessity, a way to lose myself in words and justify my existence.
So I'm not sure what to put in this space at the moment, but I know my mind will crack open again and offer itself up for material. In the meantime, I may be posting more short writing prompts, or perhaps reposting some of the oldies but goodies. We'll see.
Image: Everyday me, as recorded by my computer.
The power of positive and sometimes delusional thinking
I skipped ringing in the new year, chose to switch off the light five minutes before midnight on December 31st. Still, I was awake at the moment it turned, was lying in bed whispering to my husband in the dark. We heard firecrackers and whoops of happiness, the joyous drunken sounds of other people. My heart wasn't in it. I just wasn't ready to give up on 2009, didn't feel like shoving into another year with all that pressure to change my ways, to become a better person.
I finally celebrated 2010 on January third, got a little crazy. Yeah. I moved some furniture, switched an entire room around. The living room had become a stale and cluttered space. Even the furniture seemed bored, stuck in place for over two years. Our couch had stretched into a permanent yawn, the lamps sagged with boredom, and the chairs were slouching in defeat. It's been this way for so long because the kid has an attachment to sameness, to stasis, but yesterday I offered him a very compelling reason to shake things up: with the couch across the room, we could build a huge fort between it and the dining room table. Never underestimate the power of a fort on the will of a four-year-old boy: it did the trick. I've included a picture of the perked-up room at the top of this post. It's airy and wood-textured, a comfortable and open space. It fits.
This post was originally about spaces made fresh, about a new year beginning and the value of shaking things up. The living room felt stuck and so did I, but as I shifted the furniture things opened up. My possibilities expanded. My mind, however, wasn't quite ready to completely commit to this topic, or perhaps my mind just works in very mysterious and cloaked ways. Typing "living room" in a preliminary draft led to thoughts of the Bye Bye Birdie song "Got a Lot of Livin' To Do." Oh, yes, there are versions of it out there, including several high school productions muddying up YouTube, but I then stumbled upon Shirley Bassey (to see the movie musical version, in all its campy glory, click here). The song runs for the first three minutes of this clip:
Ms. Bassey is a little brassy here, not too subtle. She belts it out. Still I like her attitude. And look at the date of the recording -- February 22, 1966. This is the actual birthday of a significant person in my life and as I was listening I suddenly pictured him as a tiny thing, a mewling newborn swaddled in white. Maybe his mother cradled him from her hospital bed as she watched Ms. Bassey perform on television. There he was, untouched and innocent, with the whole of life ahead of him. He had a lot of livin' to do (still does, he's just lived almost 44 years of it). I started to cry. It was everything, the hopeful song, the image of the baby full of potential, this strange feeling of inevitable loss, the relentless passage of time, that brought me to tears. The tears weren't totally about him or about the time that we all lose just by living. They were about babies. Or about how we start off so small, so dependent, waiting to be imprinted by circumstance, by imperfect parents, by our own built-in limitations. But the song isn't meant for tears, it's meant for inspiration, an encouragement to live life to its fullest, a message that I may need more than most.
This somehow led to thoughts of another unlikely tearjerker of a song, coincidentally titled "Shirley", by the all-female grunge/punk bank L7. It's about Shirley Muldowney, the first professional female drag racer. L7 mixes simple, in-your-face lyrics with drag racing announcer commentary and the sound of an engine gunning. I have never gotten through it without breaking down, including the four times I heard it while writing this post. Maybe it's the naive idea that it proposes, that we are capable of anything: "How many times must you be told, there's nowhere that we don't go?" (The song is specifically about women being just as capable of men, but I think it can be a universal battle cry for the downtrodden.) I think it's also Shirley's absolute confidence in herself that gets me. In one sample from an interview an announcer asks "What's a beautiful girl like you doing racing in a place like this?" which Shirley answers with one word: "Winning."
Listen to the song if you'd like, though you may need to link to the music site above to hear it in its entirety. Shirley probably won't have the same effect on you as it does on me, though I'd love to know if it does. I've reprinted the lyrics below, but you'll need to hear the chords, the heavy guitars, the whiny machismo of the announcers' patter to feel the full effect. It's almost enough to make you believe in infinite possibility.
These two songs are connected by optimism, by the fantasy that we have time stretched out, a gleaming eternal path of joy, the idea that if we just have enough confidence, enough inner strength, we can let the bad stuff roll right off, can experience the heady completeness of fulfilled potential. "Halting me is a fantasy," as the L7 song goes. The line itself may be a fantasy too, but perhaps one worth believing in, the power of positive and sometimes delusional thinking. If either one of these songs doesn't convince you, try moving some furniture around. It can help to create the illusion of control.
Oh, and Happy New Year! You're alive, so come on and show it -- there's such a lot of living to do!
***************************************************
(This post is written in the style of Lydia of Writerquake. She often writes compelling mixes of song, image and word, pieces that point to the core, the heart, of the matter. I'm not claiming to do all that, just thought of her as I was writing it and wanted to shout out.)
Shirley by L7
Welcome the first lady to try and qualify in an NHRA-dragster competition ~ Shirley Muldowney!
Feels so real
Crushing the steering wheel
How many times
Must we toe this line
Halting me
Is a fantasy
Cha-cha! call her cha-cha!
What's drag racing coming to?
How many times must you be told
There's nowhere that we don't go
she's got good traction!
I suggest you find a seat in the grandstands, because you don't want to miss this!
She's just here wants
What she wants to do
I wonder if Shirley's got in her to hold that throttle down
kills your joke
as she's burning smoke
Shirley Muldowney is pulling ahead... and she takes the red light
And you will find
Crossing the finish line
Shirley Muldowney has just set a new track record!
Satisfaction!
How much times must you be told
There's nowhere that we don't go
She's got good traction!
What's a beautiful girl like you doing racing in a place like this?
Winning.
Winning.
Winning.
Winning.
Winning.
The lady got through it
Winning.
What's drag racing coming to?
There's nowhere that we don't go
What's a beautiful girl like you doing racing in a place like this?
Winning.
Winning.
Winning.
Winning.
Winning.
Thug life
We have family in town for the next week, so things may be quiet around here. In the meantime, Happy End-of-December and Merry New Year! And be on the lookout for these guys -- I'm not sure if they are carrying little Christmas trees or spiky clubs.
Image: Some of the many Santas in my father and stepmother's collection.
A sense of place
We lived in that first Adams Morgan apartment for five-and-half years. It was a stately, if somewhat shabby one-bedroom with a working fireplace in the living room and an ornamental fireplace in the eat-in kitchen. The ceilings were high and the front wall had three windows set in a subtle, pleasing curve. Just off the kitchen was a sliver of backyard space that I planted with impatiens and elephant's ear that first summer, before we figured out that the upstairs air conditioner dripped on our heads, left the small landing permanently damp, and that the dryer vent above would sometimes let loose flurries of lint. There was also no coat closet. Shortly after signing the lease we remedied that by buying the armoire at an antique shop around the corner on 18th Street. So the armoire was first. The dog, the marriage, the kid, they all came later. The apartment saw it all.
The one-bedroom was on the bottom floor of a four-story townhouse and the family that owned the house and lived in the floors above us had two girls and a pug. They weren't overly noisy, didn't have loud parties or screaming fights, but since our space was separated from theirs by a only couple of thin interior doors, we heard everything. There were pounding footsteps and scraping chairs, the sad howls of their dog when they left her alone over long weekends, fourth of July firecrackers set off three feet from our bedroom. Once the baby came along, the baby that slept like an insomniac, whose sleep we were desperate to encourage, we left the apartment for larger digs in Alexandria, Virginia, though our son was sixteen months old by the time we finally moved.
Moving to Walnut Street brought us full circle. The drafty three-bedroom house had a fenced-in yard, two floors, and a second bathroom and was on the very same block Mr. Trinkle and I had lived on when we first moved in together in late 1999. But it was temporary from the beginning: as we were packing up our DC apartment, we got a call that led to my husband's current California job. In the end we lived in Alexandria for only six months. I remember that time through a haze of rain and snow, of grasping grayness and cold feet. We were a 25-minute Metro ride into the city, but felt very far away from our cozy, familiar neighborhood in the heart of DC. My husband often didn't get home from work until after our son was asleep and we no longer had our occasional babysitter. I tried to keep sane, joined some mom's groups, bundled up the boy to get into the city when I felt up for dragging a stroller on the Metro or schlepping our 25-pounder on my back. Just as spring was beginning to dab the trees green, to coax flowers out of the soggy ground, we moved again, to Berkeley.
And it was tough. The first year here was lonely. Our son hated playgrounds and other children in general and I knew no one. Mr. Trinkle was grappling with a new job situation and I was grappling with an unacknowledged past. It's hard for me to believe now that up until the summer of 2007, I wrote nothing. Nothing. Well, maybe the occasional whiny journal entry, at the rate of one or two a year, but that was it. I started writing and Mr. Trinkle and I started repairing and then I found a friend or three and a writing group and a good place for the kid to go to preschool. And then Mr. Trinkle finished his dissertation (I could be calling him here "Dr. Trinkle," but he nixed that one), something that had been hanging over him, over the two of us, for our entire relationship.
We've been talking about what is next. It could be a move from here back to there, back to the center of the policy universe with its wonks and its humidity and beautiful houses. If we lived in Washington, DC, my family would be geographically closer. I have long-time friends there that I miss, and there are those cherry-tree lined streets and majestic buildings. I just don't know if it's home anymore.
Home. DC used to be home. It felt that way from the beginning, from the day I moved there at nineteen. It was all about the houses, the formal public architecture, the restaurants and street people. I took pride in living in the center of a very specific universe, the place where people would gather to march and protest, where the federal government would slowly crank out laws, regulations, and decisions. Even the wonks, in their rumpled suits, walking with a sense of purpose or the wide-eyed look of the permanently distracted, were endearing to me. (The K Street lobbyist/lawyer types left me cold.) I still feel truly alive wandering the neighborhoods there, sludging through summer heat or pressing my boots into the slush. However, I've never lived in DC without a shield, a barrier between myself and other people. The town was made for shields, all that talk about policy and none about emotion. The emotions go underground, are sublimated by intellect. It's so ... male and macho, in an über-rational sort of way.
Berkeley's architecture does nothing for me. My general reaction when I walk around our neighborhood is "meh, bungalows" though I do enjoy getting up into the hills where the air is rarefied. It's the people and the philosophies here that I love, the crunchiness of it all. Berkeley is where I had the freedom to come clean and to become a writer. I don't feel (much) of a need to explain myself here, to talk about why I don't have an outside job, to stumble over the "what do you do?" question. And I've made some real friends here, too, women that I want to know even better, that I want to have years with, so that our children can be lifelong friends, too.
Home is eucalyptus-scented. It's juicy local strawberries all year long. It's hills with bay views and streets with devoted bike lanes. It's where my son is making friends and where I am, too, friends who don't know me as a librarian but as a writer and a mother, a woman with a past who isn't defined by that past. This feeling, of home and openness, is fresh and delicate. I don't know if it will survive a move.
Ask me next week, though, and I might be pining for marble and brick, for trail runs in Rock Creek Park, for fireflies on June nights and snowstorms in January, for dinner with friends at Lebanese Taverna or Oyamel. I'll tell you that I can maintain those new friendships, can adapt to life back in the District, that proximity to my family will make things easier, will give my son the safety net of an extended family.
I'm split. We'll figure it out soon enough (I hope) and I'm sure you will be reading all about it.
Upper image: View out kitchen door, Washington, DC, Winter 2005?
Lower image: Our sidewalk, Berkeley, 2009.
Chiaroscuro
Look. I’m all out of words. They started drifting away from me this morning, when I woke up with the boy at six a.m. As the day continued – conversation with the visitors, trudging off to music class, trudging back, stopping at the store, fixing lunch for the visitors, making conversation with the visitors, entertaining my son, taking care of our various animals, fixing dinner, putting the exhausted child to bed, making more conversation with the visitors – the words just left.
I say I was making conversation with the visitors, but the truth is that by the end of the day I was mainly nodding and sighing sympathetically. It was all I had left. So here I am, bereft of creativity, my mind swimming with stories of thyroid nodules and nerves like tangled spiders’ webs, of early deaths and shattered psyches. What’s in store for me? Should I be so smug about my flexible back and thin, muscular legs? Should I be grateful that my mother taught me the proper way to eat? Or that I inherited her frame and general good health? Maybe I will fulfill my genetic heritage some day soon: develop an autoimmune disease, succumb to the rot of debilitating depression, start to feel my legs tingle and fret as if they were plugged into the wall.
Part II: Resonance
OK, OK, OK, Part I was the result yet another prompt, from a family visit in September. It was a photo prompt that had nothing to do with the resulting piece. I was going through my old stuff, looking for something, saw this, thought: Aha! That feeling some of us get after too much family time on Thanksgiving. Except I haven't gone home for Thanksgiving in years, and if I did, it would actually be wonderful to be with my mother, though Kevin's absence would still be palpable.
Sometimes I'm afraid that you're getting the wrong impression. Maybe you think that I sit around immersing myself in the past, feeling sorry for myself and penning various memorials to the me who used to be. Or that I prefer to dance with darkness rather than frolic in joy and light.
I write about what resonates and I have a complex relationship with both happiness and the past. The past is always present for me; it informs the present, keeps me grounded. And it provides me with great material. Don't even have to think about it. As for happiness: I am capable of feeling great joy. I'm generally happy, except when I'm not. The hollows, shadowy, cold as falling snow, call to me. Light is meaningless without darkness. I need texture, a rough patch here and there, a little complexity and strife to make it more interesting.
But maybe my next post will be about puppies. More likely about finishing NaNoWriMo. Or my husband wrapping up his dissertation. Or maybe it really will be about puppies, cute little fluffballs, good enough to eat.
Lordy, lordy
Guess how old I am today?
Just add one to this number.
I'm fine with it. Really.
Image: Me in 1970 at Hollywood Beach.
Nefarious times I live in
Forgive me, fellow bloggers, for I have sinned. I did not intend to leave this blog for almost a month while I frittered away five weeks with my son. My mother visited for ten days and I did not blog. I had eight hours of babysitting one week and I did not blog. This past week -- my son's first back at school in over a month -- coincided with the visit of an old friend and I did not blog.
But during those eight hours of babysitting, I started to think about writing again, about tackling the never-ending story in some different way, fitting in time for as-yet-nonexistent freelance work, attempting to keep this blog somewhat current (all while finishing household projects). Good writing grows best in the dark (thanks, rcb!). What sees the light here in fragmentary form tends to stay that way. Or sometimes it embarrasses me later in its undeveloped melodrama and weak attempts at capturing reality.
It's tempting, really tempting, to put up little bits and pieces on the blog. There's nothing like instant feedback to keep one going, except that I don't keep going. The past -- meh. I've dug into it, and created stories out of it, have exposed enough. Now I'm looking to take the facts of my life, the weird experiences and characters as twisted and lively as wisteria in bloom, and make them fictional. I want to harness the crisscrossing metaphors of my subconscious.
Blah, blah, blah. I'm continually on the edge of something, a change, a new way of being, perpetually on the hopeful precipice. But I've come so far from the first days of this blog, typing in the dark and yearning for more.
Image: My mother and me walking in Muir Woods, August 2009. Photo by Mr. Trinkle.
A crumb
But first, a preface to the crumb.
I haven't been here lately. My son is out of school until after Labor Day and we've had a series of pet-related good things and bad things. Cat dying: bad. Adopting a kitten and a new adult cat: good. Nora the dog passing a pea-sized bladder stone at the Emergency Vet: bad, though it could have been much worse. Attempting to dissolve remaining stones through antibiotics and diet: good, though if it doesn't work she will still need surgery. Me giving Nora cranberry extract pills with xylitol in them: potentially very bad, since xylitol can be fatal in small doses to dogs. Nora surviving xylitol exposure unscathed: amazingly, wonderfully good.
In between pet-things and kid-things, I'm still taking the Round Robin, a writing prompt-based class. So here is a crumb for those of you who are still reading this blog, from the prompt I remember.
I remember that her fingers were thickened by arthritis, were scattered with freckles. Helen’s nails were coffee-stain yellow, bitten down to the quick, and she kept fumbling at the wedding ring on the fine silver chain around her neck.
I looked at her hands because it was easier than looking into her eyes, or letting my gaze drift to her useless foot in its bright blue stocking. Sometimes after a visit I’d look at my own hands and realize that time is written on our hands the fastest of all. Already my knuckles are puckering in idiosyncratic ways and the backs are beginning to resemble the uneven surface of a barren planet, ropy with rocky veins and hairline fracture wrinkles.
Helen wasn’t a worker. The hardest work her hands had seen was the kneading of whole grain bread dough, maybe a bit of digging in the garden. She’d cracked open books, propped them up, her thumb and pinky keeping them open. Me, though, I’d scrapped carcasses in the field, held up splintery boards with the meat of one palm while I grasped a hammer in the other. Some jobs we worked all winter long, if we were lucky inside, but we weren’t always lucky.
I read a book once about men working on a tower, applying mortar and making repairs in the ice and slush of January. They were suspended from ropes attached to scaffolding, wore gloves with the fingers cut out as a symbolic act. Their hands were gouged and scuffed, palms smoothed by rough passes over granite, life and work written on the body.
Image: The kid, pretending to be a cat, because we don't have any good pictures of our actual cats being actual cats. Yes, he is holding an egg mold, which is this fictional cat's weapon of choice. It makes him fly or it's a bomb or he shoots it or something.
Diversionary tactics
Don't be disturbed by the photograph. It is only a diversion. In fact, I actually posted it a couple of weeks ago and then removed the post. I had nothing to say and the photograph wasn't adding to the conversation. Today it appears as filler, a little piece of San Francisco scenery. Or maybe it works as metaphor, too, though as a metaphor for what you'll have to be the judge.
Last night I was walking home from my food writing class, feeling energized and full of something (beans? ideas? hope for the future?) when I realized that I have a commitment problem. I've been circling working life for almost five years now, keeping decisions on hold, tossing words into the air. I fumbled into my first career, became a librarian almost by default, then stumbled when making what felt like a deliberate move into the world of cooking. And I've been floating with the current ever since.
I have to commit or I'll keep on writing 450 - 800 word posts here forever and ever. It's not a bad gig, though the pay is lousy. I love interacting with my blogging friends. But I need something more substantial. A career.
Do you know what I mean?
For your trouble, your time, maybe as a reward for leaving a comment, here's a recipe. Consider it another diversionary tactic or maybe just some picnic food for your next visit to Fort Funston, the hang gliding mecca.
Herbed feta and tapenade sandwiches
Briny tapenade and thyme-spiked feta punch up the flavor of this Mediterranean sandwich. A couple of simple tricks -- adding a sprinkling of herbs and olive oil to a supermarket cheese, roughly chopping a handful of olives with a touch of garlic – give it an effortless homemade touch. Bring extra bread along to sop up red pepper juices and the occasional escapee feta tidbit.
Makes 2 sandwiches
1/2 cup kalamata olives, pitted and roughly chopped
1 small clove garlic, minced
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
1/2 cup feta cheese, crumbled
1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves, minced (can substitute 1 teaspoon dried)
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
pinch freshly ground black pepper
4 slices country bread
1 small cucumber, peeled and thickly sliced
1 large red pepper, roasted, seeded, and quartered
Stir together kalamata olives, garlic, and mayonnaise in a small bowl. Lightly toss feta, thyme, olive oil, and black pepper in another small bowl. Slather each slice of bread with a generous amount of tapenade and layer the feta, cucumber, and red pepper on two of the slices. Top each sandwich with the remaining bread, slice in half, and serve.
Image: Hang gliders at Fort Funston, Memorial Day 2009. Photo by "Mr. Trinkle."
Alarmed by the seduction
The daffodils were just starting to droop, to turn brown along the edges, when J, my second serious boyfriend, the one who still shows up in cruel attempts at seduction in my dreams, for whom no pseudonym works, asked me out. That first April date kicked off a sweet season of mixed drinks with cute but somewhat foreboding names – Dirty Irishmen, Black Russians, Dark and Stormies – as well as watery draft beer. Sex took on a religious quality, became a sacrament. The chemistry kept us limping along as summer eroded into fall and the relationship thinned at the edges.
Impatiens on the front steps.
Then there was Mr. X, my future ex-husband, another April romance. After his estranged wife finally agreed to a divorce, we leapt into commitment. Mr. X brought me a bouquet of stolen lilacs, fragrant and in full bloom, along with a homemade tape of the band Squeeze. We ate thick chunks of asparagus over al dente pasta, moved on in summer to goat cheese, basil, and sundried tomatoes on seeded bread from Strawberry Fields. Those first six months were a bacchanalia of Berghoff bock and bacon, of homemade hollandaise, of chorizo burritos as big as our heads. Because he was not yet divorced, we tried to hide our relationship, played footsie under the table at the weekly library school happy hour. It only added to the excitement, to the feeling of being so lucky and in love. Chosen.
Mr. X is to blame for my love of gardening. After we moved to Ohio, he introduced me to seedlings and compost, to the pleasures of growing our own food. Our second spring together we planted a garden in the shared backyard of our downtown Columbus duplex. I couldn’t get enough of it, kept on putting flowers in here and there, wanted to grow eight different kinds of tomatoes. Unfortunately, our shaky relationship didn't survive past the fourth spring. After we moved to DC and his new job turned out to be untenable, he returned to Ohio State. He left six months after we moved, coincidentally on the weekend of our second anniversary, though it was not intended to be a separation. Distance brought perspective. One cold March day, I decided on divorce.
With that April came ... love. I'd been friends with D (now Mr. Writing to Survive), a coworker, for months, but suddenly our relationship shifted. It was a mixed-up, uncertain time. I was suspended between two lives. Mr. X and I had to come to an agreement over the house, divvy up our possessions, and fight over the dog and cats. D's mother, thousands of miles away in Southern California, was dying of cancer. My own mother, having left Kevin temporarily, was living with me.
But D and I were deep in the process of discovery, our minds tousled with passion. There were memorable evenings, late night dinners at Lebanese Taverna, sitting by the Lincoln Memorial in the pale pink of sunset watching the cherry trees turn into blurs of white, nights spent just hanging out talking, developing our shared sense of surreal humor. My mother liked him, too, and would smile when he told her "Goodbye, Mrs. Casey!" upon leaving the house. He was like the polite high school boyfriend I never had. One wind-whipped day, the weather damp and cold, D and I drove to Ocean City. We couldn't stop laughing, in part at ourselves for taking a beach trip on a day that was a holdover from winter.
It was the spring we started building the foundation for our lives. It was also a spring without a garden, when I let the lawn dry out and the dirt harden. Without water, the young azalea bushes that bordered the house died. I could barely cook a potato, let alone take care of plants.
Basil plants.
Spring returns, and with it the renewal of lust, the desire to stroke new greenery, run my fingers through the dirt. It is the beginning of love all over again, to join with my husband and make things anew.
It takes over everything, this garden lust, takes over my brain and my time, pushing everything else out. My writing has gone to seed and I haven't been visiting my blogging friends, choosing instead to sink my hands into the soil, to fill up pots with new seedlings, to transplant root-bound herbs. At my last count, we had over thirty pots filled with vegetables, herbs, and flowers. One plant remains, a sugar pumpkin that will go by the back fence, will eventually wrap its tendrils around a trellis, and that's that.
It is about time that I resisted temptation, maintained fidelity to the plants already in my life. I must avert my eyes from seductive seedlings.
Subterranean homesick blues
Detail from "Untitled (Big Man)," 2000, a sculpture by artist Ron Mueck, in the Hirschhorn Museum's permanent collection. Photo by Jennifer Trinkle.
I'm still here, still in DC, the blog and my blogging friends neglected. I'll be catching up over the next week, but in the meantime ...
When we flew into Dulles twelve days ago, I thought I was over it. We’ve been gone from DC for exactly two years and I’ve adjusted to life in Northern California. I prefer the open, laid-back vibe of Berkeley and San Francisco and the first thing I recoiled from when I walked the familiar avenues of DC was the attitude. Lots of self-important people with important tasks. This town is crammed with policy wonks, the young ones fresh from graduate school, green with enthusiasm, the old ones graying in their suits, cynical but perhaps even more full of it, the seriousness of their jobs, the weight of the decisions they make, a heavy surety of purpose.
But it’s beautiful here. I’ve always loved the brick rowhouses with their curving lines, the public buildings full of grace. Late April is too early for wilting humidity, too late for wintry mix. Rock Creek park is punctuated by the delicate whites and pinks of dogwoods, with twisted redbuds adding their outlines against the pale green of new leaves. Everything growing is green or white or pink, though we’re missing the explosion of azaleas that happens in late spring.
I was cocky. I told people that the pull I felt for my adopted hometown (which intensified greatly with Obama’s election) was gone. Then, tonight, our last night here, I felt the pangs.
I have no choice in the matter. We’ll fly back tomorrow evening and I’ll go back to my strange little life, return to my third incarnation, now playing the part of a stay-at-home mother with a writing complex. I’ll spend hours without stepping into crowds, wander the empty sidewalks of my moribund neighborhood, thinking back to the bustling streets of DC, to my quick jogs across busy intersections with only seconds to spare before the light change. Once a month I’ll meet with my writing group and feel awkward, without context, but still grateful to be there. And I’ll dig in my heels, try to grow a life without the context of work and a love of place.
Trivial pursuits
Butterfly in our backyard sour grass.
The February rains came. They cannonballed out of the clouds, burst against packed soil, strong-armed flowers and soft green leaves out of lifeless bushes. Our sour grass exploded. The backyard is now electric with it, lemon-drop yellow and neon green as it spreads over bare spots where the sprinkler didn't reach last summer. A few days into my blogging break the rains knocked out our internet service, though we're not completely sure how they did it. Water is wily.
Thanks to the wireless connections of two neighbors, we weren't totally internet free (I do not recommend sneaking onto someone else's wifi network, but desperate times call for such measures. It's a bit of an addiction, this internet thing.), but mainly we enjoyed the sudden stretch of time to fill. When the man from AT&T finally fixed the problem, he had to skitter into the crawl space, between the house and the mud, to put in a dedicated jack for the DSL. It was fixed just in time for my break to be over.
Here's what I did over my winter blogcation.
READ: I read Living with the Truth, by Jim Murdoch (I'm not going to write a review here, much as I would enjoy a chance for Aggie and Shuggie to discuss it on Jim's blog, but I suggest you order it); A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini (good, but brutal), and started Nothing to be Frightened Of, a kind of memoir by Julian Barnes (how have I missed his fiction?).
The shorter 'do.
TRIMMED: Is ten months too long to go between haircuts? I got my hair cut for the first time since last April, thinking of Karen, my blogging hair stylist friend, as I finally picked up the phone to set it up. The answer is, yes, ten months between haircuts is way too long. This time, I made an appointment before leaving the salon.
THOUGHTS ON WRITING: It's all about the questions and the quest. In the March/April edition of Poets & Writers, poet Lucia Perillo says she writes assuming there is no reader. Is this really possible? Is she being disingenuous or am I misunderstanding her point? If we assume no audience, I think it would be impossible to write. This might be worth a post, if I can liven it up a bit.
ACTUAL WRITING: I finished my stillbirth story and submitted it. While of course I am thinking positive, sugar-sweet, happy thoughts about getting it published on the second try, I'll probably have to keep on submitting. Maybe I'll need to give it another once- or twice-over, but I'll wait until I hear from this particular publication, just in case. Think good thoughts for me, please!
THE END OF THE BLOG?: Not yet. I won't be updating as much or getting as Entrecard-obsessed this time around. But I do want to get serious about my writing. That's why I've killed a chunk of the afternoon to write this post. Did I mention the internet is addictive?
Catch up and a writing prompt
So I barely dropped an Entrecard, didn't even go downstairs for two days, just sat in bed, didn't eat, and spend a lot of cuddling time with my son while my wonderful (and healthy!) husband took care of us and everything else.
But that's not why I'm posting. My writing class has started up again. Back to the daily prompts, thank goodness, which provides a break from harrowing memoir, gives me something else to post. Today's selection is White. The prompt is first draft, untouched, warts and all. It seemed like an especially appropriate choice for this blog, which operates in shades of grey and distrusts attempts to whitewash the past. And for another blogger's approach on colors as prompts, check out the most recent stuff at Yoga For Cynics. He's always worth a visit, no matter the topic.
White
Can you think of anything more bland? White bread, white rice, white collar. Something devoid of detail; the absence of pigment, of nutrients, of personality. Or perhaps you think of purity when you see the colorless expanse, a bride in her virginal wedding dress, the priest’s collar, the petals of daisy. What’s that all about? Then there’s a blank page or screen, waiting to be filled, the background to the rest of our lives, the tabula rasa. Let’s smudge it or spill the ink, write dirty words or talk about sex, reveal all our secrets. Let’s sully the white.
Dirty snow. Image from TreeHugger.
White is too much pressure. Don’t you cringe when you see the white pair of pants? The white shoes that must come out after Memorial Day and go back into the closet at the conclusion of the summer? Suddenly I’m picturing a pair of white shoes I had in high school. They were Mias, 80s fashionable, flats with pointy toes that beat my feet into submission. How long were they white? By the time I tossed them aside they were scuffed, grey. They smelled like sweat. Inside, dirty imprints of my heel and toes.
“Do we really need these details?” you ask. “Do we really want the dirt, the skinny, on your white shoes? OK, we can move to other formerly white things, can see how writing about something muddies the page, dirties a secret life. Underwear stained with menstrual blood; t-shirts with their half-moons of brown under the armpits; ring around the collar.
I’m actually thinking about lies, though, secrets, the kinds of lives we say we have and the hidden world underneath. Everyone’s hiding something, is afraid to reveal certain details, has some shame. I say show it to the world, let go of your lily white fantasies.
They are totally unrealistic.
What are words for?
So here are some pictures, a little holiday filler. I'll see if I can dredge up some writing before the end of the year.
Christmas morning pteranodon, courtesy of Uncle B.
Preparing the cioppino.
The final product.
Homemade Mexican chocolate ice cream.
This year's inadvertent (but popular) theme: dinosaurs.
I'll be catching up on comments here, there, and everywhere in the next couple of days.
Until next time ...
He sees you when you're sleeping
Family will be descending upon our household tomorrow. I'm looking forward to the visits (really!), but may not be posting, commenting, or dropping many cards until the new year.
Have a peaceful and relaxing holiday! If you can, with that guy staring at you.
Channeling Sam Kinison
Illustration from YTMND.
MOMMY! I WANT MOMMY!
(here I am!)
NO! NOOOOOOO! I WANT DADDDYYYYY!
(ok, he’s standing right there; parents switch positions)
NOT DADDY, MOMMY!
(well, Daddy is the one who is here right now. Would you like robot pajamas tonight?)
NOT THE ROBOT PAJAMAS – THE SHARK PAJAMAS! I WANT THE SHARK PAJAMAS!
(the shark pajamas, buddy?)
THAT’S WHAT I S A I D: THE SHARK PAJAMAS!
(parent begins dressing child in shark pajamas)
NO! I WANT THE ROBOT PAJAMAS ON!
(parent and child together): AHHHHHHHHRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!
Another day ends in tears at the writing to survive household. Maybe our three-year-old son is developing neural networks at incredible rates and his thoughts are pulling him in different directions. Perhaps he is experimenting with control – how much does he have? How will we, the beleagured parents, react to his cries of frustration? It’s normal (right??), but exhausting, and patience-trying, and sometimes it’s hard to see the humor in it all.
Bath time last night was a screamfest. I wasn’t there – baths are generally my husband’s responsibility – but I could hear every outburst. I finally realized what it reminded me of: my son was channeling the long-dead 80s comedian Sam Kinison.
Here is a little taste of my current home life, minus the lunges and hair pulls, with a very young-looking, relatively thin Kinison on the David Letterman show. The comedian was known, as Wikipedia puts it, “for his extremely vitriolic humor” and can be offensive, so viewer beware.
writing to survive – where one day you can read about Gertrude Stein and Edgar Allen Poe, and the next you can watch Sam Kinison.
Now you know about my tasteless side.
People stop and stare
Hugh Laurie as Bertie Wooster
I had a nickname name for him, a code word really, so that I could write it in my notebooks without fear of discovery. Bertie Wooster. It’s embarrassing, but 100% true: I was a 12-year-old P.G. Wodehouse fan, with a huge crush on my ash-blond, hazel-eyed classmate. Even in high school, after the thrill was gone, after Bertie had metamorphosized into a six-foot tall pothead, after I fell hard for a senior basketball player (another unrequited love), I would blush when we passed in the hall.
Crushes, I’ve had a few. They have ranged from the silly (the hot dog stand guy, summer of 1984) to intense (first husband, early days). These infatuations have been distracting, fun even. Nothing, however, has persisted like my 14-year obsession with Mr. H.
We met at work, my first week at my first real job. Mr. H. was cute and asked a coworker if I was attached. And so the internal churning began. I was attached – soon to be married, actually – but I couldn’t shake the butterflies, the deep blushes, whenever Mr. H would show up in the library. There he’d stand, feet away, hovering over the fax machine (the only one in the office); or he’d actually stop by to (gasp) ask me a question. My heart would race: it races now, as I remember those chance moments. Knowing he spent time in our neighborhood, I would survey the sidewalks evenings and weekends, on the lookout. The soundtrack for that year was a strange mix of Morphine and Holly Cole. Her version of On the Street Where You Live, with its stalkeresque undertones stirred up the ironic obsessive in me.
Today I am a happily married woman. Over the years, the crush has been mainly dormant, with a few volcanic moments. At this point, it’s academic – what meaning does this person hold for me? why do I continue to have those frustrating dreams? – but I am tired of it. And so, today, needing a new writing project to fixate on, I thought: why don’t I write a letter to Mr. H? You know, lay out my feelings in a literary sort of way, show them the harsh light of reality; get them out of my system. Maybe I send it, maybe I don’t. If I don’t, maybe I get it published. Everyone’s into reading about other peoples’ sick love obsessions! I can take this useless, ridiculous feeling and parlay it into art.
Yeah. I’ve been working on it for much of the morning, and I find that the writing process doesn’t purge the feelings: it makes them more intense.
My crush has morphed into a middle-aged thing, a yearning for escape from quotidian existence. I am ensconced in my (relatively) safe life, a housewife wannabe writer, parent to one tiring preschooler. Not much excitement here, though things are quite comfortable and loving at home. Maybe I need to take up bungee jumping or fencing, something to liven up the system.
So: Jennifer, let sleeping crushes lie. Oh, and Mr. H, if you are reading this (do you read this blog? I doubt it.), write me back, OK?
Only joking.
The rampaging dog chair
Nick Cave in The Birthday Party days.
Ten years ago I read an article about ballet dancers. All I remember about it now is this sobering fact: most of them end their stage careers by the age of 30 (a 2007 New York Times article puts the average at more like 35). After a handful of years of twisting this way and that, leaping, bending and living under tight calorie restrictions, the dancer’s body is just worn out. “Another possible career bites the dust,” I thought to myself, but that was the extent of my worries about my thirties.
Today I turn 39 and I find that I am worried about the years ahead. And I feel totally ridiculous about it.
So, reassure me, people! Please?
Bloodhound
Image courtesy of In Praise of Sardines
Last year this night bled into Sunday afternoon. Following a trail of crushed blackberries, I traced the stains with my fingers and watched as we went from mud to cracked glass to bruise. Late night notes, an errant bike ride, “drama at Inspiration Point.”
In a year, total turnaround, but, as always, I focus on dates.
Tonight’s bad mood explained.
Thanks, HaloScan and ... ominous piano practice?
Unfortunately, my elation at the retrieval of the missing comments has been tempered by the sound of one of the Neighbornator's offspring practicing the piano. Yes, it's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," though it's much improved from last year's attempts.
I am afraid that the annual jazz party preparations have begun. We have our bags packed in case we have to leave on short notice.
Jailbreak
It was the end of an incredible, challenging half-year. I’d spent June through October in New York, studying culinary arts at the Natural Gourmet Institute, living in a studio sublet in Chelsea. By day I’d take notes on “health supportive” food and create vegetarian gourmet fare with my fellow classmates. Evenings were for wandering Manhattan. The Hudson River was a few blocks away from my apartment, and the West Village was an easy, entertaining stroll. Sometimes I’d go the distance to Midtown where the streets were hopping with humanity and the buildings were a mix of architecture spanning three centuries, old brick storefronts intermingling with structures of concrete and glass.
The streets of Manhattan were overwhelming to me: too much stimulation, every block packed with shops and restaurants, with signs and graffiti (“Mama Loves Neckface”?), every address crying out for attention. Night subdued the signs, softened the calls. So I walked and watched, sometimes talked on the phone with my husband, who was back in DC. We’d go over the days humiliations and occasional triumphs. A few late nights in Brooklyn with my friend Jules – drinking, talking, attempting karaoke (never, never again) -- sealed the New York experience.
I went back to DC for six weeks before my internship at Greens Restaurant and spent the time preparing to start a personal chef business. During this break I appeared on a local television news program cooking contest, which led to a later on-air meeting with Anthony Bourdain. My world was opening up into something completely new. It was shiny and scary, anxiety-producing and freeing, a chance to create a business and change my life.
So. November 29, 2004. I was in my favorite city, San Francisco, about to work at Greens, my favorite restaurant. But something was distracting me from restaurant job panic. The day I started my internship, I also had to track down a drugstore. No matter how many tests I tried, the results were always the same. I was pregnant.
One new world slipped away as another one appeared. This was an alien planet created with an equal mix of worry, sacrifice and love. What would it be like to have a little creature totally dependent upon me? Was I up for the task? Was the pain I carried around hereditary, something involuntarily slipped in through the genes, a burden to be shared? I was terrified.
The 80-hour internship went by in a blur. I was a solitary, preoccupied figure, standing in place at the salad and dessert station as other employees, efficient in their clogs and hats, sharpened knives prepared for work, zipped around me. I would look at my slow, inexperienced hands as they grasped the serving spoon and tipped that night’s curry onto a plate. I methodically patted out tart dough as dinners were plated around me, carefully removed the skin and pith from scores of oranges in a haze of prep staff conversation, inexpertly mixed the ingredients for the filo pastry of the day in the cold of the isolated back kitchen.
It wasn’t enough time to even get my feet wet. My inexperience would never get the opportunity to disappear. I was going to be permanently interrupted.
But was I?
Since my son was born, I’ve been living as though all that was ever going to happen to me already had. I’ve let the experience of being a mother stop me from participating in the larger world. The stories I write here are about the past, about the life I had when I had a life outside of my house.
On the other hand, by writing these stories I am reentering the world, slowly emerging from my own head. And I find that my dreams have changed. That shiny new world of four years ago is no longer relevant.
I can’t wait to find out what happens next.
From the inside
Part of what unsettled me was the link back to my own words (which I’ve changed to better reflect my feelings). The “why” of writing to survive was initially a rather bleak description of what life was like for me for the first two years of my son’s existence. This was a difficult time with many struggles to maintain eveness. I lost a lot of myself, my marriage changed, and I’d have to say there was some depression tossed into the mix, too, though I was never treated.
So. I love my son. I am lucky to stay home with him. He makes me laugh. We dance and sing and talk and read together. He has also been an impetus for change, a reminder to slow down and enjoy. With him I am able to remake my own childhood, borrowing the good bits and discarding the bad. I am lucky to be able to do this AND write.
Which brings me to my husband, an amazing man who is my biggest supporter. When I need reassuring about my parenting skills, he is quick to soothe. He loves to read my work. He gets take-out when I am tired of cooking. He understands when I use naptime (when naptime happens) to write instead of clean. We are truly a team. I love you, H.
There are nuances to this angst, and as I’ve been writing here and privately, the angst shifts and dissipates. The words have saved me.
This is writing to survive.
So. What would I write if ...
This has been a hard week of slog and attempts to think my way through a muddled, sad brain.
There could be at least one reason I am struggling -- the end of July marks an anniversary of sorts (some might call it an antiversary). This, coupled with an overnight work retreat for my husband next week, a true triggering event, is bringing me down. These dates will lose their meaning over time, but the first go-round stinks.
So. Maybe that's it.
(Ever since my mother sent me this quote from Seamus Heaney on the use of 'So.' as prelude, a call for attention, I've been using it as a sentence all on its own. The quote is below, Famous Seamus on translating Beowulf and using the term 'So.'
There you have it -- a little esoterica to balance out the angst, to confuse the crowd. Oh, for courage and greatness.)
"And when I came to ask myself how I wanted Beowulf to sound in my version, I realized I wanted it to be speakable by one of [my big-voiced Scullion] relatives, [who had a kind of Native American solemnity of utterance, as if they were announcing verdicts rather than making small talk. ] I therefore tried to frame the famous opening lines in cadences that would have suited their voices, but that still echoed with the sound and sense of the Anglo-Saxon:
Hwaet we Gar-Dena in gear-dagum
peod-cyninga prym gefrunon,
Conventional renderings of "hwaet," the first word of the poem, tend towards the archaic literary, with "lo" and "hark" and "behold" and "attend" and—more colloquially—"listen" being some of the solutions offered previously. But in Hiberno-English Scullionspeak, the particle "so" came naturally to the rescue because in that idiom "so" operates as an expression which obliterates all previous discourse and narrative, and at the same time functions as an exclamation calling for immediate attention. So, "so" it was:
So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by
and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness."
On the way to L.A.
Greetings from scenic Cambria!
We're on a road trip down to the L.A. area, to visit my father-in-law. This morning we drove out past San Simeon out to see if we could find elephant seals.
We did!
More later. I have friends' blogs to catch up with, too.
In the beginning ...
When I started this blog in late December of last year, I wasn't in a good place. All the things I've been writing about since then were burbling just below the surface, barely suppressed, waiting to be given form and shaped into a story. I used a pseudonym -- Anonmomous -- and wrote pretty freely about my angst at the time, my desperation, the stifled creativity that I blamed on my daily mundane existence mixed in with a childhood hangover.
I had no creative outlet, but a strong desire to write and figured that starting a blog would force me to do it on a regular basis. Maybe I would find others out there like me, or attract an audience (even an audience of one would have been wonderful). But nobody reads a blog if they don't know about it. I started using my real first name, joined blogcatalog, and things started to look up.
Most of my early posts are gone, but I recently found an interesting one from right before I "came out." I've reproduced it below.
Thanks to Geoffrey for asking some questions that got me thinking about the early days and how the process of self-expression has actually changed the story I've created for myself.
I also have to thank The Fearless Blog for her kind profile of writing to survive, and her words of encouragement. As usual, she got me thinking about how a positive attitude can change the equation entirely.
Manufacturing interest
18 February 2008
As I was thinking about whether I would post tonight, not sure if I had anything to say, I decided I would manufacture something of interest to write about: the manufacturing of interest in what I am writing here.
I have no idea how you arrived at this blog, whether you find it entertaining, or relevant, or worth five minutes of your time. I could probably come out of the closet, quit being anonymous, and invite people I know to read it, or at the very least passively put up the address in my facebook profile and e-mail signature. Perhaps then the blog would spread like a benevolent virus across cyberspace, e-mailed here and there: you simply HAVE to read this.
Would more people read? Maybe. Would it affect what I write here? Most definitely. In a good way? I am not sure. Currently, I can write corny or stupid or revealing stuff here without worrying about hurting anyone's feelings or worrying about looking corny or stupid. I would probably remove anything non-writing related, which may be the cleaner and kinder way to go. I still have much mulling to do on the topic.
H and I took advantage of our holiday Monday babysitter to go into the city. We wandered around North Beach, did some vintage shopping, had lunch. We ended up at City Lights and I was suddenly overwhelmed by all that fiction, non-fiction, poetry, ecology, etc etc, titles and authors I have never heard of and will probably never read.
What a crazy idea it is to write when there are so many talented people out there who can barely sell a book.
But I can't worry about that now, can I?
Reality
True, I am happy not to be in the working world. I can't imagine anyone else taking care of the boy on a full-time basis. I am a worrier and a control freak and I would miss him. There is no job waiting interesting enough to pull me away and I'm a poor juggler. The rush to work, the rush home, the mad dinner dash -- I didn't like it when I was childless. Mix in a needy little one and I would be a raving lunatic, in a less fun way than I am now. A full-time care situation would also be less than optimal for my total homebody, somewhat mommy-obsessed son.
(Note: There are many reasons to be a working parent. My mother was a working parent. Most of my friends are working parents. I love them all and admire their ability to have a working life and a home life. Their kids are generally happy and well-adjusted. I have nothing against mothers who work.)
Then there is reality: money. Farting around with my fascinating life story isn't going to bring in the cold, cold cash. My husband bears the burden of supporting us in a very expensive part of the U.S. I haven't contributed to Social Security in almost four years (yes, I still cling to the quaint idea that Social Security will exist when my time comes to cash in). And I miss having an outside focus.
To make money writing salable stuff takes concentrated effort. A plan. It takes time to implement a plan. And seven hours a week of childcare isn't a lot of time.
My solution: stop sleeping.
Though I don't sleep much as it is.
All that jazz, Part II
I’m sure it was an oversight when Dieter neglected to give us an invitation to his jazz party. We had been out of town the previous week. Perhaps a strong wind had blown the slip of paper off our porch. Maybe Dieter, Jr. had inadvertently skipped our mailbox.
I watched from our upstairs bedroom as a small tent went up. Thinking back to Angelica’s mention of the party, I imagined flinging open the gate between the two yards. The hordes would spill in, clutching Coronas and Aquafinas, swaying to saxophone solos and smashing our sepia grass into the dirt.
Our landlord and Dieter were tight, friends from when she lived in our house. The fence contains two remnants of their relationship: a double-doored gate connecting the yards and a 2x2-foot window. The thick, beveled glass offers a view of birch and bamboo, visual access to the back corner of Dieter’s world. It's a sideways glance, no eye contact necessary, thank goodness. The gate came with a shiny new padlock. We’ve never bothered to remove the key, so there it dangles, a symbol of hope gone sour, of potentials never realized.
I was thinking about our poor neighborly relations -- where did we go wrong? -- when the dog nosed me in the thigh. Oh yeah. Time for a walk. I put my son in the back carrier, leashed Nora, and walked out into frenetic Birdland preparations. The Neighbornator family was bringing in more foodstuffs. I put on my friendly face.
“You’re coming tomorrow?” Dieter asked, his tone light. As we passed his dog, Nora growled and lunged, putting on her vicious cur act. She’s insecure and totally harmless, though you’d never know from her bark. I pulled on the leash. "Nora! No!" My son buried his face in my back. Dieter observed our little drama with a poker face.
With Nora subdued, I got back to the conversation. “Coming?” I asked blankly.
He seemed surprised. “I gave you an invitation! Are you sure? Didn’t we talk about this? It must have been your husband. Ja, that’s it! I talked to your husband about it a few weeks ago.”
I shook my head. Nein.
“I am sure I talked to him about it. Ja, I remember ... Oh," he interrupted himself, realizing the futility of this line of thought. "Ja. There will be music of all kinds! It starts at 1:00 and goes on all day. Invite all your friends!” Dieter was a little flustered.
I tried to be nice about it, to muster up a smile or some polite enthusiasm. We had just gotten back from a trip to the East Coast. Everyone was jet-lagged and sleep-deprived. My husband and I were in the middle of a marital mess. Given I could hear this man’s dinner conversation, what would an all-day jazz party sound like? An all-day jazz party that started at my son's nap time?
Saturday, September 29th 2007 was a beautiful day. The sky was cloudless and the air dry and warm. A light breeze ruffled the leaves in the trees, a pleasant sound, easy on the ears. At 10:30 a.m., in a yard hemmed in on all sides by houses, in a yard of perhaps 500 square feet, in a yard next door, it started. “Testing, testing, 1-2-3.” Someone was testing a microphone. Attached to an amplifier. Attached to speakers.
We were doomed.
At 1:00 p.m. sharp the warm-up act started. Gospel. This was followed by a traditional jazz quartet. At some point a pianist pounded out some classical music (was that Dieter's son? The one who kept on butchering "Ain't No Mountain High Enough"? If so, he had improved.) Then an R&B band took the stage, followed by a nod to Thelonius Monk.
During the intermissions, my husband and I would look at each other: was this it? But it kept on keeping on. The pauses were just long enough for equipment changes. We watched as vans pulled up and spilled out musicians and instrument cases, the next group on the marquee getting in line. We listened for the appreciative applause at the end of each solo. We looked up the Berkeley city code on amplified music. Dieter was well over his four hour limit.
From our backyard, the music was loud. Very, very loud. No wonder Dieter didn’t understand most of what I said: he was probably half-deaf from years of noise exposure, Pete Townshend without the guitar. The animals were agitated. Nora paced back and forth until she found refuge in the bathroom, while the cats would scratch at the back door to be let out, only to rush back into the house with flattened ears and disgusted expressions. My son skipped his nap. And the bands kept on coming.
Our last escape from the wall of sound was at 8:30 p.m.. Hoping to gain back sanity lost, hoping that our son would finally fall asleep, we went for a drive up in the hills. No one said a word as the car wound up steep inclines, pushed through eucalyptus-scented air to a quiet, dark place with a view. It was a surprisingly clear night and we could see San Francisco. We watched lines of cars snake across the Bay Bridge, felt wonderfully insulated from the sounds of engines and car horns, saxophones and vocalists. Our son was asleep. Time to go home. Surely the whole mess was over by now.
But it wasn't.
It seems funny now, funny that we came home to a Mexican band singing La Bamba, complete with horn section and what sounded like clog dancing. It was the most raucous gig of the day. It was almost 11 p.m. When would the madness end?
And then it just ended. As the song wound down, the crowd whistled and stomped, screamed for an encore. Ten hours of incredible music, well-performed, well-appreciated, and very loud, and they wanted more. It was not to be. Jazz Fest 2007 was over.
The hordes slowly dispersed. We brushed our teeth and went to bed.
For several months, we barely looked at Dieter, whom we christened The Neighbornator. We didn't confront and he didn't apologize. There were no arguments about the event or the noise level, just bitten tongues and imagined amusing scenarios, all with the self-centered surgeon as an object of ridicule, his accent exaggerated and his mannerisms cartoonish. We've gotten some good laughs out of it.
For Jazz Fest 2008, we'll be out of town.
All that jazz, Part I
Yes, our wayward next-door neighbor is originally from Germany, though his accent has been softened by thirty years in the U.S. “Dieter” is in his mid-50s, of medium build, tall, with white hair and sky-blue eyes. He’s a neonatalogist with a specialty in prenatal surgery. Maybe it takes his kind of arrogance, of surety, to operate on the not yet born. The hand must be steady and the conscience clear before you make the cut. You don’t toss that self-confidence aside upon leaving the operating room. Dieter prides himself on being a regular guy who does his own home and car repairs. He rides a sleek black motorcycle to the hospital. He blasts classic jazz tunes and world music while doing yard work. But these are not crimes.
Maybe we weren’t receptive to friendship. Perhaps we have nothing in common. There was talk of a barbecue that never materialized. He and his wife made a welcome to the neighborhood visit that ended at the front gate. Dieter didn’t seem to approve of our dog training or of our slow to smile toddler and most of our conversations left me feeling vaguely insulted. The relationship became one of brief smiles and half-hearted waves from car windows.
But we became very familiar with the patterns of Dieter’s life. We had no choice. The houses in our West Berkeley neighborhood are built tightly together. They tell the secrets of the lives held within: whose marriage is in jeopardy, who drinks too much, who cries before leaving the house every morning.
This knowledge of our neighbors' lives is forced, impossible to avoid. Unscreened windows let in fresh air and leak out unsolicited information. We hear the arguments, the sex, the banal exchanges on what is needed at the store. Glasses clink and sobs are suppressed into pillows. People curse during arguments and berate their teenagers for sullen attitudes. (As I type this from the deck, I hear a mother and daughter fighting. The daughter is screaming “I don’t care! I don’t care! I don’t care! “ over her mother's tirade. Closer, shoes crunch on gravel. Someone clears their throat as they open a back door. There. The door slammed behind them. Silence.)
When Dieter spent all of last August sprucing up the yard and power washing his house, I knew something was up. He was on the cordless phone all the time, speaking enthusiastically, making arrangments, using "Ja, ja" instead of yes. We’d heard about his annual shindig. “I told him that you’d be great friends, hanging out together, opening up the yard for his annual jazz party,” said Angelica, our landlord, naively before she took off for Arizona. Now I watched a small tent go up, saw the stacks of chairs and tables, observed as Mr. And Mrs. Dieter ferried cases of water and beer from the car.
My heart sank when the deliveries started. A medium-sized truck with ‘PIANO MOVERS’ in huge black letters on the sides was the first to pull up. Three burly men gently moved a wrapped baby grand to the backyard as Dieter supervised with pride. Over the course of the day, more trucks lined up, delivering equipment, microphones, lights and other mysterious things. The big event appeared to be imminent.
No one had said a word to us.
Continued ...
Schlump
Am I the only person in the world who needs time, real time to exist and think and be by myself, to write? Extemporaneous writing just doesn't do it for me. Just sit down and write ... but what if I have nothing to say? Sometimes I need to sift through my thoughts, to make sure everything is all clear, before words come out.
Write about what you know. Hmmm. Maybe I need to get out more. I don't particularly feel like writing Mom-lit. I love the little guy and find practically everything he does worthy of mention (did I tell you about his pteronadon song? "you are my friend pteronandon, you make me smile ..."). To write about him, however, would box me into this life. I need an escape hatch or, at the very least, a window to open to let in the breeze.
Just keep writing, 1000 - 2000 words a day, wrote a commenter here recently. I admit, I got defensive. It isn't so easy to just sit down and write so many words for me, partially because of the nature of my life (and I probably wouldn't be writing at all if I had a job outside the house) and partially because I've never written like that. I think too much, maybe, and the thoughts get tangled up in each other. My internal editor tries to sort things out, to make sure all is nice and neat before letting the words loose from my mind.
I have a friend (are you reading, Bob?) who shows up periodically in my in-box, long e-mails about his life, writing, academia, and philosophy. If he were working on the 2000 words a day quota, one e-mail would practically take care of it. Bob has always been this way -- the words flow. They're not always the most well-crafted, but he is a good writer and he gets there eventually. I'm jealous.
When I decided to start writing, Bob -- who has 3 children and teaches and writes for a living -- told me that he didn't know any writers who sit down for blocks of time and just write. Everybody fits it into the odd moment, writing ideas on a scrap of paper here, tapping away at a laptop there.
I'm creatively bereft at the moment. No ideas, no tapping. This is a theme here lately, but just writing about it makes me feel like I am getting back into the swing.
Say, how many words is this???
Watch this space
The hours were long and being exposed to the inner workings of the legislative branch got old. There was micromanagement. Basement darkness. So I quit and went to cooking school. Finished cooking school and had a baby. And when part of me slowly reawakened, I began writing.
One of the things I miss about the working world is creating things for the Web (another thing that might have my old colleagues scratching their heads). Although I'm not sure how many people read or use the web pages I created, I am still proud of them, though I've deleted links to them. This document has been edited now that I'm out of the closet.
I'm in the middle of redesigning this blog and putting together an Internet site using Rapidweaver. It's kind of like the old days, except I have more control and no technical support. I'm limping my way through and it's slow going. Hopefully it will be up in a week or so, but until it is I may not be posting as much or checking in with my friends.
See you soon.
experiment
the kid is asleep on my lap. the husband is asleep by my side. the visiting brother-in-law is coughing downstairs.
and I can't reach my cup of coffee.
Throw it away
Or write up my petty complaints on my blog? Bingo.
Right now I feel like a frustrated housewife who has this little writing pipe dream. I wish I had more energy at night to write with conviction. If only the kid went to sleep before 9:30. If only he went to sleep unassisted. If only I'd started writing a decade ago, when time spread out before me and my brain was just a wee bit larger.
I know I'm lucky to have this life, to have a little time. It's just enough time to waste.
And now he wakes ...
Schticktease
There are rays of light and days of song, where the sky seems ever-blue and the breeze off the bay refreshes, when C sleeps late and naps long, when words come flying out of my fingers onto the keyboard, and dinner is easy to prepare, delicious, and enjoyed by all.
But I have a schtick here, a theme, of apprehending the past and through that apprehension (!), forgiving myself and others.
Some days, a girl just isn't up to it. But the past will be there, waiting ...
Buzzer beater
(Begin boring complaint)
First, C got sick. Then H developed the same cold. When C gets sick, he sleeps like the baby he once was: poorly. Also violently, with lots of tosses and turns and kicks. When H gets sick, he snores more. My cold symptoms started on Tuesday, the same day C developed pink eye, guaranteeing that daycare was a no-go for Wednesday. Babysitter doesn't want pink eye either. Finally, after the first night of good sleep in five nights, yesterday C decided to skip a nap. I have pink eye for the first time since third grade. And I've spent most of his nap time today cleaning up in preparation for the babysitter (at least his pink eye went away).
(End of boring complaint)
Now he is awake. 'Later.
Nubbin brain
I'm 38 years old and I haven't written a creative word since I was an undergraduate. I don't expect it to come easily. The Mom and K project has an emotional heft that makes it difficult, too. And I seem to suffer from a twisted nostalgia, a real desire to inhabit the past, at least so I can write about it about it with some veracity. I'm trying to let go of my obsession with uber-accuracy, which helps when my literal mind gets caught up in the details.
Mark Doty has a good essay about memoir and truth in the latest Poets and Writers -- but now that I have H and C beside me reading a book, the nubbin brain is shrinking even more and I have a hard time bringing it to mind. Check it out if you can, though you'll probably have to get your hands on a physical copy.
Players win and winners play
Another long no napper today. My ole nubbin brain keeps on shrinking, with very little to show for it. I did learn that toddlers (at least my toddler) enjoy raking clean cat litter and can turn almost anything into a digger -- even themselves with the proper equipment (dust pan and litter scoop).
I'd like to transcend the day now, please.
I've been reading Beautiful Children , a first novel by Charles Bock. Some of it is very well done. The portrayal of how a marriage can slowly fall apart captures a sense of sadness and inevitability when people no longer communicate, can't bridge the distance they've built between themselves, but still care about each other. What happens to the couple when their only child goes missing is also poignantly written. Many of the characters are real and believable. It's a long and ambitious book with various interweaving story lines. I can feel the struggles he had writing it -- ten years and at least four rewrites -- and it is on the bombastic side, well maybe some lower form of bombasticity, since his language is simple for the most part. Just over the top. Maybe he should have stayed with the couple and their struggle, but I'm not sure that would have been as interesting for Bock or his readers.
Early sleep, no sleep nights
Then I wake up and can't get back to sleep again. My brain is buzzing. Lots to process in this do-little life.