New year's rulins
It was a thin night of sleep, my dreams kept poking through the weak spots in my consciousness and my heart refused to leave me alone. It reminded me of its presence, knocking at my chest, pushing its rapid beat into my head, my fingertips, my toes. These reminders of life aren't so bad: I am here, I exist, my heartbeat is palpable underneath my skin. The blood continues to flow through this interconnected highway of arteries and veins. It feeds me.
The moments are fleeting and beautiful. I need to stay in them, to experience them fully, while letting them go all at once. Each letter is a moment, each word, each breath and they propel me into the future whether I want them to or not.
In anticipation of the coming January, the long remains of winter, I've been thinking about writing a happiness list, a list of things and actions and ways of being that will keep me in the moment while reminding me that I have a future. What better time to start making that list than New Year's Eve? I suppose these are resolutions, though I've never thought of myself as a resolution sort of person.
Happiness List
- Read more novels: they remind me of the depth and meaning of life and also take me out of myself
- Get out of the house more often to write or just to free up mental space
- Avoid all glowing electronic appliances -- the computer, the smartphone, the rare TV exposure -- after 8:00 p.m
- Keep open to other people; listen to what they say and how they say it without projecting my own thoughts and anxieties on to their words, their silences, or their body language
- Assume the best, but pay attention to warning signs that the assumption may be wrong and act accordingly
- Stop wasting food
- Be authentic to my emotions without wallowing in them
- Recognize my needs and give them a voice: they have a right to exist and I have a right to fulfill them as long as I do no harm
- Listen carefully and respond thoughtfully when the time is right
- Be grateful
- Be gracious
- Trust when trust is merited, but don't make the requirements for trust so onerous that I trust no one
- Be trustworthy
- Be reliable
- Give more money away
- Respond more quickly to email from friends
- Talk on the phone to people other than my immediate family
- Return Adam's calls promptly
- Stop telling telemarketers that Jennifer isn't home and start asking them to remove me from their lists
- Let the love flow ... when that feeling of warmth emanates from my heart (it's happening right now, it's lovely), nurture it; direct it to the people I love, the people I like, and even those who have caused me pain
- Forgive myself
- Understand that everyone has their own troubles, no matter how smooth things might appear from the outside
- Be compassionate
- Do more of the things that scare me (a return to driving lessons, for example)
- Recognize the core of strength, the length of pliable steel that centers me and has kept me protected since childhood
- Teach myself new forms of self-protection and preservation that keep me open and connected to family and friends
Sure, I don't have items like "Help win war -- fight facism" or "Wash teeth if any," but I am no Woody Guthrie. And this is just the beginning of my list, a start, a way to frame 2012.
Happy new year to you. I wish you happiness, luck and love. Be brave, be honest, be kind. I'll try my best to do the same.
Woody Guthrie's 1942 New Year's Resolutions courtesy of Boing Boing, with thanks to Holly for bringing it to my attention.
Let me be you tamagotchi
The big project in my theories of personality class is a paper in which each student analyzes their personality or that of a famous person utilizing six of the eight major psychological approaches to the topic (which is how I ended up reading about Laura Ingalls Wilder's possible penis envy). It's what I should be working on now, in the quiet moments before my family gets up (I am writing this paragraph at 6:50 on Saturday morning, though I just heard the stomp stomp of not-so-little feet, so I will soon be interrupted.). And you'd think I, with my self-obsession, my embrace of the Enneagram, would love this shit, this look at me under the microscope of "science." But the summing up of self without nuance makes me uncomfortable.
This lack of nuance, this labeling game, comes up in our aggravating class discussions, which have included such BS questions as whether each of us thinks we are a good judge of strangers' personalities. Most of my classmates, perhaps not surprisingly, think they are wonderful judges of personality. The research indicates that generally people are quick studies of other people, especially when it comes to certain traits, like extroversion and conscientiousness, but is what we are we just an amalgam of traits? I don't trust someone who tells me how good he or she is at seeing the core of someone's personality upon first meeting; some of us have hidden qualities that take time and trust to suss out. It's the kind of question you can answer without thinking, like the strange corollary question about whether there is such a thing as love at first sight (the question that begs "no" for an answer, but it's not as simple as that when you know the actual chemistry of love, the zinging dance of neurotransmitters, the addictive quality of the new other).
On one hand, I like being explained, like knowing that some things just are, that my introverted, non-risktaking self most likely has a brain that is overly sensitive to stimulation, while my extroverted and perhaps more excitement-driven friends have nervous systems that require more to really get going. See, folks? I can't help it. And neither can you. On the other hand, I think that what it is to be human is to be more than a sum of one's parts, more than genetics plus biology plus learning plus brain structure plus the situations we put ourselves in. All of these things contribute to what makes us who we are, but there is something intangible, too, something impossible to define or grasp in words.
Call me an existentialist. A humanist. And don't tell me that we have always have a choice to be who we are, that we can shop from a smorgasbord of traits, that all it takes is determination and grit. Some of it is fixed, some of it we chose, and some of it we need to learn how to handle.
Note on the title: This is from Me Write Book, one of the Bigfoot memoirs written and illustrated by Graham Roumieu. Unfortunately, a few folks have used it for their adult personals ads (google it), but what can you do? It still makes me laugh. And maybe is peripherally related to this post.
Image by spike55151.
Mission statement
I make lists of things I don’t want to regret, bottle up emotions to savor when I am alone. I am almost always alone. I engrave those I once loved into my core, I take what was essential between us and store it up for old age or loneliness, for the times when reality does not suffice. I try to take on the perspective of the other.
Bravery is doing something even when it frightens you. On Wednesday morning, I drove around and around a parking lot with an instructor. I drove with confidence. I turned right and right and right and then left and left and left. We ventured out and I drove from one parking lot to another. The instructor and I talked about the career she left behind, about kids and elderly drivers, as I maneuvered the car.
Was I scared? Kind of. But what really scares me is getting out into traffic and doing it again and again even while I am scared. Slowly, that’s the way to go. I need to use just enough imagination to feign confidence (versus imagining the worst of it, me paralyzed at the wheel, the panic, the crush of metal, the destruction). I need to gather my courage for the real test. I need to see myself in the distant moment, project into the future, the all-grown-up me at the wheel. The confident me speaking up in class. The capable me creating a whole new life despite my fears.
So that’s my mission. Not to forget. To hold those I once knew tenderly in memory. To see things from another's point of view. To be brave.
If I told you that’s why I am here, out of some sort of personal journey (the lousy childhood, the adult revelations, the beauty of fucked up me), would that get me in? Do I tell you a different version of the story, me the daughter of a plucky single mom, the lean years of no car and no money, the thinning of familial relationships, the thickening of barriers? Oh, yes, I survived it all intact, I was cunning and hidden and then had to undo the structure, take down the heavy blinds, unleash my needy heart.
How do I spin this past into getting-into-graduate school gold? Sure, from the outside I look like a well-off middle-aged white lady, not a care in the world, but can I tell you about the lonely trembling in empty rooms, the beratings at long-cleared dinner tables, the time it has taken me to feel almost at home in my skin?
The past wearies me. We’ve danced together long enough, though the facts stand. And I still stand before them. We will always be connected, though the connection may be frayed. If I have to conjure it up to explain why I am here, I will, but that isn’t the whole of me or of my reasons for applying.
I want to take what I know through experience and struggle to help other people. I want to help children, the most helpless of all, trapped and marked by adult circumstances. I can’t separate myself from the emotion this brings up in me because I can’t separate myself from my emotions. I will use my experience and this deep reservoir of feeling to assist others. I used to think my childhood and my emotions were handicaps, that I had to separate myself from them in order to live properly in the world. But now I see that they are essential, that they give me strength when I allow them to exist without indulging their more florid characteristics. I can harness them for good and tame them when they threaten to take over my perception.
So that’s my mission. Not to forget. To hold those I once knew tenderly in memory. To see things from another's point of view. To be brave. To help those who are helpless. To not let my past and emotions overwhelm me, but to accept them. Experience provides knowledge, emotion supplies fire and tears. Sometimes both are necessary, the past plus the upwelling of love and anger within.
Running hot and cold until the water runs out
Especially with the stuff I've been putting up lately, with all its heaviness, its harshness, its demands to show the worst, the most insecure parts of me.
So, while I am posting today, I'll spare you my prompt, another dense little number that was too personal even in its hiddenness. What counts as too personal, you might ask the one who compulsively reveals all? When it involves certain people in my life. When I write it as a message to those people. There is no point and this is no way to communicate and there is nothing to communicate about and those concerned aren't even reading.
Door closed. Faucet off. A mind as light as a helium-filled balloon weighted down with rocks.
One thing is clear: I need to get a job, for my own sanity if for nothing else. I have to dust off the resume, or recreate it, and come up with a list of my skills that I've added in the last six years. I will be taking an online class that starts in early October, too, part of the preliminaries for the MFT (did I tell you that? I hope to become a marriage and family therapist, most likely focusing on children.). The class will be good, of course, and I'll take more classes. After looking over the graduate school application, I became concerned that my lack of any sort of counseling experience will mean I won't get in.
My initial reaction to this uncertainty was that the path ahead of me, low lit anyway, had gone dark. Still, there are other options and I have to press ahead. I'll carry a lantern, a flickering candle to illuminate my way. I have to believe that I can make it all work. I have to.
When you let yourself do things that are self-destructive, that are obviously bad for your spirit, for your authenticity, you bruise your soul. I spent a year of soul bruising. I took it to the pathetic edge until I finally walked away. I had to. I have to believe in myself and my experience, and my rightness for me, that who I am (despite the faults) with all my feelings and tendencies to confess, all my needs, is just fine.
And so ....
This is a mess, isn't it? But I'm putting it up anyway.
Seventies dream landscape
I woke up thinking of choices and communication and how to do things better. I tossed and turned and when the boy came into our room, I changed venues and covered my head under his sheets before my brain quieted and I went to sleep again.
Other peoples' dreams are often boring, especially when we don't know the scene (water flowing over rocks on the Brandywine, the paths alongside, the old bridges and the race, the cars parked on clear spring afternoons with blaring music, the Victorian era zoo with its sad roaring lion). I apologize. And why was my mind resurrecting this world from childhood, from a long-ago time?
My mother is in town and we picked the boy up from his first day of first grade yesterday. Ah. When I was in first grade, we lived on Lovering Avenue, so near to Brandywine Park. Life was glass-fragile. I slept in a winterized side porch without any heat. My bed was skinny and I had a Mickey Mouse blanket, red underneath with various illustrations of the mouse on the white top surface. I had asthma attacks in the middle of the night in that room and bad dreams about intruders. In the summer I drank chamomile iced tea and plucked Italian cherry tomatoes off the plants out back. I practiced kissing on the pipes that ran from floor to ceiling in our kitchen. I played with the kid down the street whose mother had a greenhouse, an amazing thing in an urban neighborhood. I had a birthday party with a piñata and pin the tail on the donkey and one of our cat had kittens, while another cat was hit by a car and another chewed out his neutering stitches and died and yet another didn't make it out of kittenhood because of anemia.
It was a time of six-year olds in empty houses, walking by themselves down the street, of frustrated mothers and seventies poverty.
Does that explain my dreams?
Maybe.
There are some days when I just don't feel like sharing my prompts and this is one of them. My writing is OK enough, I guess, though it's often hard for me to tell in the moment. But it's not going up here.
Images (all posted before): Me, Frank the cat, and Christmas, Lovering Avenue, 1975-77.
When and where
Get to the coffee shop 23 minutes before I do. Sit with your back against the wall at the table by the bathroom. Open your laptop. Wait. Do not look at the door. At precisely 2:48 I will sit at the table opposite, facing you, my laptop yawning at my fingers. Don’t glance my way. My IM name is fussbdgt. Tell me why it happened. I don’t care if you lie. Just make it good.
Write it down on a piece of paper. Cover both sides. On a windless day in August ride your bike down to the marina. Sit with a picnic basket and blanket in the shelter of a hill. Bring me something vegetarian and luscious and beyond the realm of the caprese sandwich. Sneak in a cold beverage, too, a crisp Sauvignon blanc, an IPA. I will appear at 12:30 in wraparound sunglasses, a baggy t-shirt and sweater and the holey jeans that I can't bear to part with, will arrange myself across from you on the blanket. Pass me the food. Pour me a drink. Take your paper explanation (your apologia? Is that what this is about?) and fold it into an airplane. Float it my way. I will read it, commit it to memory, crumple it up and toss it into the bay.
This is not a difficult task. Tell me that I matter, that I am more than a ghost floating in the world. Tell me that my body is good for something, too, but not without my mind, my personality, my opinions. Talk to me about coming out of hiding. Show me that the world is generally safe as long as I am cautious.
Show up on my doorstep when I am least expecting it. Talk to me because you care, because you were thinking about me, because we are both strong. Come without expectation or agenda. Explain what you want if you want to. Pretend that the day is like a blank sheet of paper, waiting to be filled with musical notes, with bits of poetry, the unearthing of beauty out of ash, time, and pressure.
Edited for sloppiness, clarity, and to make it generally better on 7/9.
Photo by Renée Turner.
Scrap heap
I will build a bonfire in the backyard in the middle of the dry season, will underpin it with stained t-shirts and holey underwear followed by photographs that should be forgotten: me at 18 tipping a bottle of Captain Morgan down my throat, that guy down the hall in the dorms who looked innocent enough but wasn’t, a picture of the wall that I covered with ephemera in an attempt to express myself.
Would it be so easy to make it all go away, the evidence that I was weak and dependent and stupid. What I should be doing is embracing it, going back to support the former me, propping her up with kind words, with white lies, with the truth. “This won’t last forever, little girl, but it will haunt you. It will be a rich source of metaphor and scene, but you will also cry about it decades later and sometimes you’ll miss it, too, you will miss the intensity of it all, while wanting to go back and change it.”
I wouldn’t have believed myself either.
In preparation for the end times, I am leaving the notebooks alone, evidence for the weary. The photographs and letters and journals are stacked in boxes, proof of my earlier existence and a way of life gone. Destruction of artifacts does not erase the events they came from.
My grandfather would build a big bonfire every year in the backyard to get rid of scrap lumber and other things he no longer needed. The fire rose up as high as the tops of the Sassafras trees. He tossed in asphalt shingles, plastic toys, particle board. The family gathered to watch the flames lick the air. We breathed in the smoke, the toxins, which linger to this day, waiting for the moment of weakness to be written on the body.
Better to keep the old stuff, to let it wait for the moment of apprehension.
From the prompt "In preparation."
Image: One of those old ephemeral envelopes, the contents of which would become kindling, evidence that I actually used the word "rad."
Meet Jane Self
Let's consider the character, the alter ego. If I were Martin Amis, I'd give her a last name like Self, a first name like Jane.
Jane Self.
Jane Self is around forty, the mother of one or two kids. She lives near me, maybe across the avenue of death, San Pablo. She paints. Or she writes. Or draws. Or knits these fabulous sweaters, is known for them. Jane works part-time, just enough to keep her hand in the working world, but not enough to live legitimately on the outside of her contained family life. And now she finds herself in limbo, about to take a step in one direction or another or another. One on side, love without passion. On another, passion without love. On another, the sweet temporary relief of being alone. Across the divide she sees a meadow in bloom with potentials, possibilities, unknown, but it sparkles in the sunlight.
"I'm going to get what I deserve," Jane thinks. It has an ominous ring to it, but she choses (when she can, when her knuckles aren't tight and white in a fear grip) to think this is positive, that maybe she deserves an outside life, love plus passion, the world cracked open.
The image I have of Jane right now is of a woman in flight, pursued by no one. She's shedding guilt, it comes off of her in waves, as she runs barefoot on the sidewalk and the asphalt, dodging the broken glass and the dog shit. Slow down, Jane! Don't let your guilt propel you. Take a moment to sit in the grass. Stop to think about what is best for you. Fear and desire are poor life guides. Guilt is no engine. Leave them behind, concentrate yourself down to the essence, strong, sweet, present.
The rest will come.
I could sleep for a thousand years
From the beginning, the pedicure pushed my pain threshold. My feet plunged into water five degrees too hot, but I could take it, the minute of acclimation, the heat reddening my calves as it insinuated itself up my knees to my thighs.
I've always been a wimp, the one who screams when a splinter pierces the skin or who collapses on the kitchen floor with the accidental tip of a knife into a finger. At my pedicure on Sunday afternoon, however, I paid attention to the thin line between pleasure and pain, the dance across it. Crossing the threshold is less unpleasant than fascinating, a way to play with the edge. Maybe I'm feeling a need for punishment, for the excoriation of sin out of flesh. Or maybe I'm just tuned in. Aware.
The pedicurist ran a pumice sponge along the length of my foot, scrubbing against the heel, roughening the tender arch, until she reached the ticklish spot under my toes. As she returned the sponge to my arch, wielding it with malice, my skin ached. Just when it got to be too much, her hand moved and I closed my eyes in relief.
And the bruises: the way she palpitated them! Last summer, I stepped into a hole in the sidewalk and hit my shin against a crumbling edge of concrete (during a stray chihuahua rescue; long story). That bruise was bone deep and had me propped up in bed with an ice pack for the rest of the day. Six weeks post-fall, it remained, a concentrated spot of pain on my left tibia, bad enough that I had to ask the pedicurist to avoid it after a few painful moments. I have a new bruise in the same spot, misshapen and slightly discolored, mild enough that I forgot about it until Sunday's foot treatment. As she massaged my leg, pressed against the bone and muscle with strong fingers, the pedicurist hit the bruise. It was almost as if she was exploring it, feeling for weakness, for the blood underneath the skin. It hurt. Her fingers moved along, only to return a moment later, brutish and cruel. The cycle of pain and relief was compelling. When would it hurt again? When would I welcome the afterglow, the release of pain? The brevity of the discomfort and the anticipation of its end was enough to keep me from stopping her.
Finally, my calf massage complete, the pedicurist began to pummel my feet with her strong fists, punching them over and over again as though they had done her wrong. My bones hurt. My bruise cried out. My scraped arches wondered what was next. I sighed and closed my eyes, waited for the steaming towel, waited for her to paint my nails the shimmering color of old blood.
After it was over, I went down the street to La Fonda, where two strong margaritas with dinner eased the pain. On my walk home, I stole glances at my improved feet and occasionally touched my aching shin, humming Venus in Furs as I took on the rolling hills of Berkeley back to my house in the flats.
Image: My Hipstamatic feet, where you only see the tan lines, not the bruises.
Tongue slightly in cheek for this post.
Culpability
The hot air balloon, an effusive spot of color in the sky, the separation from earth and green and tree branch. People stand in a basket – a basket! – like a bunch of easily perishable fruit, soft-bodied and wide-eyed. From up here, there are no mistakes, just smudges on the landscape.
I want to believe there are no irreparable mistakes, that messing up huge is a temporary thing, that the skimming across oil-slicked water or floating on a rush of hot air is what life is all about. Simple. Fixed with a kiss or a kind word.
Then I remember: murder. Accidental death. The off turn of a wheel, the gaze averted at the wrong moment. A boat crash. A tumble from a basket. A series of bad decisions that lead to something impossible to fix. A railroad track of stitches bisecting a skull. The grave, deep and black. The stiff and uneven gait of the failed suicide.
In my dreams, I sometimes float above the world. I look down at the streetlights, the people safe in their dollhouses, squares of light coming from the windows. Everything is neatly packaged and I am free of gravity, of other people’s problems, of my sadness. I pilot the cigarette boat, my cocktail in my hand, the wind pulling my hair back. I laugh at the blurred landscape, the lake empty of other people. I am the only one in the basket, looking down on god’s world from his vantage point.
Other people. Other people. Other people. It is only in connection with others that we can mess up, can mess up huge. Or they can mess up huge, too, take us down with them in the sad crunch of fiberglass against bone, in the plummet from too high. Even suicides leave victims behind.
As I've been getting this ready for posting, My Kingdom by Echo and the Bunnymen has been going through my mind. It's related, though it's also related to a lot of teenage angst:
For another Echo post from a very different time: Living proof at my fingertips.
From a prompt: You messed up! You messed up huge! originally written on 11 March. Just seems appropriate right now. Almost unedited from the original.
Manifesto
With my resolve, small, compact, like a bullet, I will get what I want: catch and keep, write until my fingers bleed beauty, pierce the publishing mystery. I will take what I want like a man, my knuckles bruised from the struggle, from pushing through brambles and misperceptions and reluctance.
We collect history. Memories cloud our vision, they clog the landscape of thought, tributes to a dead past, cairns on a moor. We react before we know why we're reacting. I’m used to my own brain fog but I sometimes forget other people have sad pasts, too, that I’m not the only one with clouded vision.
The resolve cuts through all of that – it pierces the fog, it sees the others clearly. It’s a bullet of love and clarity. With it I will get what I want. I will rip off my own shirt, muddied, dirty with leaves and sand and cigarette butts and the smell of a barroom floor, to reveal the smoothness of my skin. My candor will make the others want to do the same.
Hands intertwine, with hope for connection, with concern for the roadblocks on the way. I prefer to feel my heart rather than use my head, to let the is-ness of it be, to live in the ontology of the other, of the moment, even when I don’t understand it. The more I think, the less resolved I am, the more my heart withers in my chest. Why not let it sing, let it call out, let it ask for nothing in return but love or a facsimile thereof, the regard, the explanation-defying connection?
One target, one set of eyes, the resolve like a bullet. The rest will fall into place. It’s part of my plan to live, to write, to love both selfishly and without self. The bullet is silver, it is platinum, it is made of blood and bone, brain and heart. It waits in my chest, to fly out of my mouth, out of my fingers, from the center of my soul. I concentrate, I let it be, I see what will happen, knowing that what happens will happen no matter what I do, that the more I let go, the more I will receive.
From a prompt: Keep your eyes on the target. Edited slightly and reposted because some of the wording was bothering me.
Image: One of Jasper John's many Targets. I got this image from The Nervous Breakdown. Where The Nervous Breakdown got it from is unknown.
Heroine pretend
Four years ago, at Redwood Regional Park.
At Disneyland.
At Morro Rock.
At Alcatraz, though at least I'm not in motion.
At Bothe-Napa Valley State Park.
At the San Francisco Wholesale Flower Mart.
I'm not turning my back on you, just giving something to see you through until my next meaty post or the unveiling of my new blog. And it comes with a soundtrack, a Belle & Sebastian song, which these pictures reminded me of in an indirect way.
Shifting ephemera
My freaky dreams: Like the one where I'm walking on a rocky creek shoreline in bare feet and come across a series of very bloody, very fresh footprints. I step carefully, my eyes scanning the rocks for broken glass. I'm paralyzed with fear, of what might happen to me, of what has happened to the other person.
Or the one where my husband, son, and I are in a small rowboat on this oceanic street in Emeryville, caught between a fear of sharks and a fear of place. The bridge behind us is from another one of my dreams, where I'm in a small souvenir shop in Chesapeake City. In the back of the shop is a door that leads to a spindly ladder that takes you to that bridge. Maybe that bridge can lead us home, or at least back to Chesapeake City, down the ladder, into the shop, into a past life.
Or the one where I'm riding on a train with my high school class (all of us middle-aged now), talking to a man I haven’t spoken with since 7th grade, about the recklessness of Reagan, his foolish use of weaponry. I’m topless, I move my knees closer to the man's. I wake up.
Author Richard Price: I love author Richard Price. Not just because of his well-drawn characters or his true-to-life dialog, but for the way he talks about research and writing. I also like the fact that, for a while at least, he was so unsure of his own words that he read them over the phone to his editor: I used to be a lot worse. My editor before this, John Sterling, I read all of Clockers and Freedomland over the phone. Everyday he would have to listen for forty minutes. It’s not like he had anything else to do, just run a publishing company. This guy is on the phone, listening to this oral reading. (2003 interview with Richard Price on Identity Theory) But reading Clockers -- a book about the crack cocaine trade in a fictional New Jersey town, on which The Wire was partially based -- before bedtime is a bad idea, no matter how compellingly written it is.
I've been gathering interviews, reading and listening, taking it all in, but haven't been able to distill it into a post. If you haven't read him, do. I'd start with Samaritan or maybe Freedomland. He's painful to read, but so real.
Blogging the things that scare me: This will be the basis of my next blog, facing down the fears and writing about them. They run the gamut from driving a car to taking a yoga class to interviewing someone to writing crap to being needy. I'm trying to think of a clever blog title, too. Stay tuned -- the blog will probably go live next month.
Furniture rearrangement: I've been changing my back room lair into a family space -- moving the TV and stereo in. Soon we'll take apart the bed back there and put in a sleeper couch, the one that's currently in the living room, and we'll have a slightly more grownup couch out front. My writing desk (pictured above) is now in the living room, in the light, in a more open space.
Why I should go to PTA meetings: For the writing material they could provide, the adult drama that underpins school life, the hidden relationships, the broken psyches, the flow of emotion underneath the dry surface.
And now off I go, to do something that scares me: contact total strangers to talk about stuff I barely know about.
Image: My desk in its new spot.
Edited to give the fiction its own post, later today or tomorrow.
The dazzling core
After it is all over and the body rots or is burned away or pumped full of chemicals and covered in makeup as a way to convince those who are left that the loved one still exists, light remains. The flash at death, the speed up to space, the dissipation of the distilled self: once freed, light moves at its own dazzling pace.
This is life, the essence, the sparkle, the dance. Contained in a body for ten years or 41 or 87, confined by contingent flesh, pulled along through various circumstances (happy childhoods, punch-drunk marriages, depressions of the emotional or monetary types), the light whips out of the withered husk, the self it used to be, at first opportunity.
Does light remember? Are we contained in hundreds of points of light in the night sky, stardust? Starlight? I’m still trying out this theory on myself, this idea that maybe there is an underlying spiritual layer, matterless, pure light, the mystery of life underneath the machines that are our bodies.
Light does not remember. Light exists, mysterious, animating, strong, the substrate, the core, but once it leaves a body, it breaks into a million different pieces. Or waves. Who we are scatters across the universe, to be gathered in a different configuration and shot into a body again. Maybe.
But it doesn’t end, light. It hurtles, it makes us who we are, it is the purest thing about us. Don’t cover the light. Try your best to see it, to acknowledge it through the worst of circumstances. Let it simultaneously ground you and lift you. And don’t get too attached. Light resists containment. It is not individual. We exist in a community of waves, of commonalities, sparks underneath the surface.
From a prompt: It never ends. I went with something positive and never-ending. A change of pace. Lightly edited from yesterday morning's original.
Image: Me, the mirror and the flash.
Red
Primary colors are unambiguous, unadulterated, pure. When I was a child, my favorite color was red, until the world began to enter my mind. Then my favorite color became maroon, or burgundy, the color of blood after it dries on the t-shirt, on the towel, on the sidewalk.
I was a dramatic kid, took acting lessons and went to drama camp. That all faded away as adolescence with its neglect and late nights and pursuit of boys and beer came in. The last drama camp I attended included lots of song and dance and I remember singing in a circle, each of us with a line about our favorite color, looping it into the rainbow, me singing way too low for a twelve-year-old : burgundy in the rainbow. Ah, the melodrama, me singing low and deep and too seriously about the color of spilled blood.
People like to ask children their favorite things. Sometimes they ask adults this, too, their favorite dish, their favorite place to go on vacation, their favorite television show. My five-year-old son has problems committing to favorites when pressed. There are too many nuances, too many variables. But he does have a favorite color: orange, the color of the flame, of the sky as the sun extinguishes itself in the bay, the color of pumpkins.
Committing to a color is easy at first. You know what you like. You only have so many choices. But then the rest of life marches past, the periwinkles, the variations of flesh tones, the espresso and eggplant. How can you choose?
I don’t do favorites. OK, I may have a favorite block in my favorite city (The 1700 block of Q Street NW in Washington, DC). Sometimes I have a favorite beer. I can list a handful of writers who are my favorites. But there are too many subtleties out there to hold tight to one thing and say that it is the one I prefer. I dress in blacks and greys. The room I sit in has shades of ocean green and earth-bound tan. My blood is scarlet, then burgundy, sometimes black. It is life in its infinite variety.
From a prompt, red, barely edited from the original. Last week's writing partner picked it as his favorite of my writes, so here it is, a little blog filler. More in-depth writing coming. Eventually.
Image by nahlinse.
Laired out
It’s sunny today, the air is fresh, cleaned by tears and stress and wonderment. I’ve opened the door to the lair, I’ve cracked a window and all the curtains are pulled back to let in sunlight. And I’m writing somewhere else, back on the couch in the living room where the sun is highlighting the opposite wall. The past week has been very lair-focused. The room became dense with animal emotion, thwarted with darkness and the unspoken. I could blame the rain, I could blame any number of outside causes, but the truth is that the lair was a hiding place, a temporary stasis station.
Yesterday, I worked and worked on a piece that didn’t want to come out. I holed up in the lair. Sometimes the boy and the man would come in with sustenance and distraction. This irritated me as I curled in place, tried to write, let myself get pulled into the Internet and pushed by my crazy mind.
But today all is sunshine and household tasks. I will take this space and make it clean again. I will let my emotions fall where they want to and will delight in the fact that I am feeling alive, that my melodramatic self is very much present, that she always has been present, just tied up in the back of my mind. I welcome her. We don’t speak of the past, but of the future, the rolling road out in front of us.
Somehow it’s possible to feel hopeful, scared, and sad all at once. I embrace every feeling. I dance and cry and fall down and get up again. I will live in the light and it will all be fine.
From a prompt: Last week in the rain. Written this morning. Basically unedited.
Image: Legs/lair/light
Recovery process
What she doesn’t know is that for years, under the newspaper clippings and the accumulated knowledge, behind the tough bone, her heart has been healing. Getting stronger. Over time, the beats have come with more force. The twinges she’s been feeling, interpreting as warning signals, as the pain of a phantom limb, are actually signs of recovery, like when a scar starts to tingle and ache.
In the past week, her heart has been a barometer of truth: it shuddered when she encountered a neighbor, plump as a tick and just as evasive, riffling through the bushes out front (“He’s not as dangerous as he looks. He’s just as damaged as the rest of us. Treat him with kindness.”). It plummeted when she told her second lie in fifteen minutes (“Why lie? What are you afraid of?"). It beat out a rhythm when she walked in the wind, was lifted free by the breeze, pulled up through the branches, whirled across the street with the plastic bags and leaves and then back again to her (“This is life: I am alive!”).
She presses a hand against her chest. Her heart thumps reliably underneath. She wonders at how the world heals itself eventually, at the moments of clarity and sweetness that we all experience if we would only let the healing happen, if we allow the knowledge that in order to live, we have to risk our hearts, ourselves, and that eventually, it will all be fine. We are human and to be fully human is to be vulnerable.
From a prompt: describe a process. Impossibly short, like most of what I've been writing over the last week. Barely edited from the original.
The fault lies in ourselves, that we are underlings
It's no wonder I want to see this woman again: according to my astrologer, I'm brilliant, perhaps charismatic, a leader. I'm someone who is goal-oriented, who needs a career (!!). I am reserved. My integrity is important to me. I seek emotional healing through my writing (hey, has she been to the blog?), but at the same time I tend to overintellectualize my emotions. In marriage, I'm all about love and commitment, but am a perfectionist and have a tendency to be nagging and cold when disappointed. Maybe I test my partner continually. Yeah. Maybe. And maybe I need to let go of the perfectionism.
It seems strange to pay someone to tell me who I am, to show the complicated relationships between the planets and me on the night I was born, see how they may pull me this way and that. And, of course, I am a skeptic about the whole thing, no matter how much I want to believe that this is the key to me. One of the first things she said to me was that she wouldn't have been surprised to hear that the last couple of years have been tough -- the planets were doing some crazy shit (I paraphrase). Her statement hit me in the heart. It can be a relief to see that things outside of my control may be influencing my life. I don't want to examine this practice too closely right now, want to let my rational brain quiet itself for a while. I want answers. I want hope.
I want a psychic.
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the occult and the unexplained: vampires, werewolves, ghosts, ESP, aliens, astrology, spontaneous combustion, out-of-body experiences, the ouija board, Bigfoot. I read whatever I could, was totally convinced of the reality of the soul, of the influence of planets on my psyche. I knew the dead floated among us and could deliver messages through a medium or maybe even directly. I had dreams of separating from my body, remember waking up one summer afternoon in the Little House after a nap with the distinct feeling that my soul, my spirit, had been trying to push out. I wanted to be free to explore the cosmos without the pesky physical world getting in my way. I was disappointed that it hadn't quite made it out, hadn't escaped for an hour or two.
This desire to elude my life, my dependence on others, to leave my physical needs and shell of a body behind, was strong. The one time I took LSD in high school, I hoped it would give me the ability to leave my body temporarily. I had Shirley MacLaine on the brain. My boyfriend D and I walked together in the dark from his car to the Little House, our steps crunching against frosted grass. I stared at the winter sky, jacketless. I felt no sense of the cold and D, concerned, made me put on my coat. The stars were close, I could practically touch them, but my soul remained stubbornly attached, stuck in the physical world with its out-of-proportion shapes and mangled ways of being.
Eventually, my rational mind took over. I discarded any official god, have toyed with the idea that all we are is physical, though I still have my doubts and hopes about the spirit. I am a person who believes in the things that I see and experience. For example, I know Kevin visited me the night after he died, so maybe I can say that there is something nonphysical about us, something that sticks around however briefly after our bodies give it up. Despite my skepticism, I am pulled to the intuitive, to the mystery, to the unsaid and unknowable. But to give in to it feels intellectually lazy. Superstitious. Or ridiculously hopeful. Who doesn't want to be reassured that there is something beyond our fingertips, that our souls are, as the astrologer claimed, eternal?
We all need something to believe in.
Title from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Cassius to Brutus: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Image of Shirley MacLaine in a publicity still from the 1965 movie, "John Goldfarb, Please Come Home."
Still waters
Some of my favorite people, the ones I am closest to, are talkers. A, a friend from library school, always has a lot to say. She knows it and wants to hear what's on my mind, too, so she usually starts our marathon phone conversations by asking about me. G, the best boss I've ever had, whom I also consider a friend, has entertained me for years with her funny and rambling conversations. She's also warm and sensitive and makes a point of keeping in touch. I'm grateful to know her. Then there are N and rcb, friends from my college days who could go on and on about philosophy and writing. They still charm me with their agile and ranging minds. Even my mother, who makes claims to being a solitary soul, a hermit, who needs almost as much time as I do to recharge, is a talker. From the days when I was a kid and would groan when we ran into an acquaintance at the grocery store (blah blah blah for the next 20 minutes and it always happened when we were on our way out) to the way she makes conversation with strangers on Baltimore's buses and trains, it's clear that she is at home with the spoken word.
I was a loud, bossy kid, sometimes getting in trouble for talking in class and on school trips ("I will not talk at the Delaware Art Museum. I will not talk at the Delaware Art Museum. I will not talk at the Delaware Art Museum. I will not talk at the Delaware Art Museum." -- teachers used to place a lot of power in repetitive writing assignments as punishment). I shrieked at slumber parties and giggled behind teachers' backs. But I also was an only child who spent a lot of time alone, reading, imagining, pretending. I didn't necessarily need other kids or conversation. I was bookish (sixth grade end-of-year awards: Most Intelligent and Quietest). Over the years, the quietness deepened. The seeds of social anxiety were already within me. They just needed an abusive type or two to come along at the right moment and coax them into full growth.
I have an uneasy relationship with my own silence. I wish I was more garrulous, less thoughtful, quicker to share. But I also like my cautiousness, like that I have a world between my ears that only the people I am very close to know about. I don't just give away those thoughts to just anyone. They are a gift, a sign of trust, and once you have access, it takes a lot to shut it off. Acquaintances misjudge me pretty easily based on my initial reluctance to talk. Sometimes I let them run with their assumptions, make me into something I'm not. And sometimes their suppositions and judgements get under my skin.
Here's the thing: extroverts, because of their effusive ways, run social scenes. They like everything out in the open. Sometimes they notice the nontalker, the quiet one in the back of the car, across the table, sitting in the overstuffed easy chair. And then they say it, make some sort of ha ha comment, like "Be quiet, Jennifer." Extroverts, loud people, bull-in-a-china shop types, do you think I've not heard this sort of comment before? Do you think noticing my quietness by calling it out will elicit words from me? No. It will make me much more likely to clam up in your presence and think unkind thoughts about you, all while I smile sweetly and hide behind my glass of wine.
Make me uncomfortable and my silence deepens. I am no longer in the moment. I sit back, wordless, and let you define me, think of one of Kevin's poems while I observe your every move:
I am who other people think I am.
What I assume that they assume, I assume.
I work an image out of supposed fact.
The image then determines how I act.
Must I suppose there is no other life?
I have no need to argue with that view.
The picture that I'm working on is true.*
But it's the holiday season, so I will give those who draw attention to my silence the benefit of the doubt, perhaps come up with some kind of pithy, but not unkind, comment to lob back: "I'm not quiet, just bored." Or "I'm working on my plan for world domination."
Surely someone else can come up with better ripostes than these. If you have any suggestions, let me know. I'll take notes and then pass on our comebacks to the kid. He'll need them in his quiet person's arsenal.
*The late Kevin Sheehan, poet, carpenter, my mother's boyfriend of 18 years, was a talker, a true extrovert. I've taken his words and made them fit my own situation. Click here to read Coming True, the full poem.
Image by h.koppdelaney.
Scar stories
Early on, when the skin is fresh and tight and we are still hopeful in matters of love, we offer our scar stories. Enamored, we sit too close and trace each other's skin with our fingertips, tell of the night of the emergency appendectomy, the fall chin-first onto a step, the fist through glass. Later, as things get more intimate, the emotional scars get the attention. The stories grow more complicated: the nasty drunk of a father, the high school bully, the silence around the dinner table. It's a great show of vulnerability before the gates come down and love gets old. We find reasons not to trust. Our eyes dart to the side, to the ceiling, before they close in exasperation. The scar stories become faint irritations, reminders of our past.
My ex-husband had a scar I never saw. I knew the story of the kitten who gave him cat scratch fever, which led to the surgical removal of a lymph node on the underside of Mr. X's chin. As soon as the incision healed, he grew a beard to cover the scar. He was bearded when we met and was still in full beard the last time I saw him in person. The scar was his to hide. His third wife (I was no. 2) convinced him to shave it off, to show his scar to the world. I see him now in Facebook photographs with his infant in his arms, looking confident, clean-shaven, and happy.
Me? I have a short dark mark by my right eye, some jagged lines under that eyebrow. Car accident sophomore year of high school. The uneven triangle on the underside of my left middle finger came when I opened a package of smoked gouda with a dull knife on a car trip home to Ohio from Maryland. There’s a mark on my right calf from an old boyfriend’s too-sharp toenail. I don’t have to look to find it. I feel it there, remember the minor moment, the former intimacy.
As we age, the scars get more serious, the minor ones knit over with experience. These become our scar stories: The near-fatal car accident survived. The place where a breast used to be, where they excised the lump, removed the shrapnel. My grandfather was in his fifties when he was burned in an industrial accident. I never knew him without scars, his skin melted and fused, ears damaged by flames. He was always the cranky near-deaf man missing one foot, with knotty pine skin and thick fingers. No one cared or knew whether he had stepped on a piece of glass when he was ten or what that mark on his knee was all about.
When surgeons removed my mother's boyfriend Kevin's spleen, they left a thick track down the length of his abdomen, the ghostly shapes of surgical staples like railroad ties. Eight years later, after the tracheostomy, Kevin had a scar marking the experience on his neck, a scar that was reopened twice and didn't heal before he died. His frequent emergency intubations scarred his epiglottis, which meant that he couldn't swallow food properly. The food would go into his lungs, which was a pneumonia risk. He "ate" via a stomach tube for the last five months of his life. But the worst scars predated his illness. They were from his boyhood, from the beatings and the cruel words, the experiences that marked him from the beginning as the family scapegoat. Those scars affected the way he interacted with the world.
Physical scars are experience written on the body. It's the emotional scars that are more sly. They form when we aren't looking, maybe before we can even talk. They are pre-rational. These experiences change the way our brains are wired, help determine how we react before we are even aware of our reaction. And sometimes talking about them disturbs the memories, makes us focus on their creation in unsettling ways.
After about a month of appointments and increasing anxiety on my part, I dropped my therapist. Maybe it was a matter of therapeutic fit. But maybe I was stirring things up that were best left alone, tweaking scars because I thought I should, over a backdrop of bland therapeutic platitudes. Some emotional scars need space, to be apprehended on their terms in a way that acknowledges their integrity. After all, these scars mark our strength, our history. We survived. They served a purpose, protected us from total ruin, from being hurt again.
Sometimes, when I'm feeling impossibly scarred, I remind myself how far I've come since starting this blog. Telling my stories in my own time works. Maybe the best approach is to deal with the scars as they surface and to let them be until they do.
From a photo prompt very much like this image by dougfelt.
From what I remember
The sky was leaf and branch. Mayapples sprung out of a thick mulch of dead leaf and rotten wood. Beams of sunlight broke through to highlight a tree, a cave made of briars, a pile of animal scat. The path crumbled at each footstep, releasing the wet scent of autumn, the stillness of winter, the deceit of spring. A woodpecker harassed a poplar trunk while robins and chickadees chorused, their trills high-pitched and showy.
Imagination lived: this was a swimming hole; the place the village women took their washing; a natural bath fed by a stream. Spring rains overflowed it with water clean enough to drink. A walk with a plastic bag stuffed with fresh clothes and a sturdy towel, the brace of water that held the memory of ice, cloying red clay against bare skin. Damp, mineral-laden earth spiced the air, made it hard to breathe.
Closed eyes in dappled sunlight. Fluttering darkness. Toes pressed into mud. First he was a shadow, then a silent moment, finally, a heavy weight.
Trust only what you can see, what you can gnaw or scratch, the smell of right now.
Image by stevebkennedy
The cold cold ground
When Kevin announced that he wanted to be buried, it seemed bizarre. In the ground? Smothered under dirt and grass and rock? In the end, we did it. Half of Kevin's ashes were buried in an urn in a cemetery in Chestertown, the same cemetery that my friends and I used to cut through freshman year in college to go to 25-cent draft night at Newt’s. My mother spent the first two years after Kevin's death driving every weekend from the Washington, DC suburbs to his grave, bringing Woody the dog along until Woody got lymphoma and died. Gradually she visited less and less until her trips tapered to one or two a year.
The tapering was bound to happen. Time changes grief, makes it less of a physical ache than an emotional one. Talking to the air can be as satisfying as a graveside monologue. Kevin wanted his little plot of land and he got it, with a stone that my mother dragged out of the woods and a beat-up concrete angel propped next to it. When we want to visit, he’s there. Except, of course, he’s not.
My husband dug the hole yesterday morning. He dug it deep, struggled to cut through cloying clay. We looked at Zoe one last time, touched her soft fur, and told her we loved her before rewrapping her body and lowering it into the grave. I tossed in the first shovelful of earth. It's a strange sensation to cover a body with dirt. It feels wrong or maybe stark, a jarring acknowledgement of death. The towel still contained her warmth. She was alive an hour before we buried her. Surely this was a mistake.
Eventually what is left of Zoe return to the earth. She will live on in our memories and in our stories. The cats we have now will grow old with us. Their time will come. I'll be dust myself some day, my ashes tossed to the wind or scattered into the water, or perhaps sitting in an urn on a mantel or a closet shelf, waiting to be forgotten.
A tribue to Zoe-cat
My first husband and I were newly married and had just bought a house. The realtor’s partner’s daughter had found this malnourished, Giardia-ridden kitten in a German Village alleyway. Once the kitten was done with her medications, would we like to take her in? We already had a cat, Sidney, and a sheltie dog, Loudon. But our new house was big and Mr. X and I had both grown up with animals and we were reveling in domesticity. So a month after we moved in, Zoe moved in too.
Her first night with us was not auspicious. She hid in the litterbox, growling and crying while Sidney lurked silently outside. Eventually she came out and showed her true assertive nature, but those first days of intimidation marked their relationship. She preferred the laps of humans to feline company.
Zoe has remained kitten-sized. In her early and middle years, she was actually somewhat zaftig. Rubenesque. In the past year and half or so, she has gotten heartbreakingly skinny. Her fur goes unwashed and she spends much of her time asleep. Her kidneys are failing. Her mind wanders. She is not the cat she used to be.
So here’s to Zoe, the cat who used to trill every time she leapt, the kitty who convinced us that she couldn’t jump up to her food bowl but who later scaled our 8-foot fence, not once, but twice, the tiny powerhouse who had to be subdued at the vet’s office for any procedure. Zoe who confidently crawled around the cab of the pick-up truck while Mr. X drove from Ohio to Washington, DC and Sidney mewled in terror from his carrier. Zoe who braved the long flight from DC to San Francisco. Zoe, the cat who used to perch herself up to bat at my dental floss every night.
It is time to let her go.
Tomorrow morning she will join the others, among them cats Regis, Sheba, Frank, Liz, Ming, Nicky and Sidney, and dogs Greta, Buttons, Barney, Samantha, Louise, Augie, Woody, and Loudon. I’ll ask myself again why we do this, why we take in animals who will be with us for such a short time.
It’s about love. Love comes with the threat, the almost-guarantee, of loss and we take it on anyway, hoping that the sadness won't outweigh the joy.
Image: Top, Zoe in her rounder days. Bottom, Zoe in her kitten days.
Shadowy figure
I’m having the dreams again, the ones where I can’t find you, where you leave the room moments before I walk through the door, or where I end up lurking by your apartment eavesdropping on your roommates or loitering around the lobby of your office building, hoping for a glimpse. When did I get so creepy? Last night's dream was one of full pursuit: I tried to track you down after an evening of my dissolution, a night in which we didn’t talk, we didn't even see each other, but I drank and annoyed. Not you -- no, as usual you were locus unknown, hanging out somewhere in the boxy house with pristine walls where we were staying. It was my other friend who got the worst of me. I was drunk and I ignored her and somehow missed you. But I was determined not to lose you again.
That wasn't the only dream you haunted last night. In the other one, my former boss, L, was giving a tour of the old school building where she worked and lived. Was she still a librarian? Did it matter? The school was small and square. Brick. It was proportioned for a different time when people were skinnier and had fewer belongings. (The 1930s?) L took me through long corridors and into strange empty wings. Two times she pushed me into an abandoned classroom while she stayed in the hallway, asking me if the trash can was full. I didn't notice the trash can -- I was too worried about ghosts. Why was the trash suddenly my responsibility?
There seemed to be no end to this school, with its linoleumed corridors and cramped rooms and stairways with cold metal handrails that left a tinny smell on my hands. Finally, we ended up on the top floor, which was another open office space. This one, lit by fluorescent tubes, was light without being airy. The staff was young, a few years out of college. Some of these people looked familiar and I realized this was where you worked when we first met. But you weren't there anymore.
I’ve been expecting these dreams, with their yearning and mystery, dreams where you are a recurring character in absentia. My subconscious is working something out (although what that might be is still a mystery to me). And I'm torn between accepting you as a symbol (of me? of my squashed desire?) and giving in to the yearning.
Hope you are well,
J
Image by zen.
godless wonder
—What’s ash?
Erica’s question—it was one of those brilliant moments. Kevin and Ciara looked at each other. They smiled. There were no coal fires in the house and neither of them had ever smoked. The cooker was electric. Nothing was ever burned. There was no real religion, at home or in school, so Erica had never noticed the gray thumbprints on Ash Wednesday, on the foreheads of the old and the Polish. A child like Erica could get this far without knowing what ash was, until she saw it spewing from a mountain. -- Roddy Doyle, "Ash," New Yorker, 24 May 2010.
I am not a religious person, though I received a bachelor's degree from the Catholic-to-the-core School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America. My closet friend there was a seminarian, a kind-hearted young men who accepted me, though he prayed for me to feel god's love, to take on the golden cloak of the believer. But it was philosophy that led me to atheism, to the idea that if you couldn't prove something, why cling to it? The proofs of god's existence seemed so medieval and naive, so pointless. I let go of my belief in an afternoon of paper writing, was not bereft at the loss of the First Cause. What protection had It offered me?
Belief in god was a given in my childhood, even without church, even without being baptized (my mother didn't believe that a newborn had any sins that needed washing away). I occasionally attended the Methodist church where a friend's father was minister and I also sometimes went to temple with a Jewish friend and her family. God was in the air. When I was eight, I read Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. After that, I talked to god in the shower at my grandparent's house, stared at my distorted reflection in the taps as I sat on the bumpy stool and let the water go cold. I gave him my confessions and hopes. Perhaps it was a form of self-mortification, the bracing water, the red round marks the stool left on my flesh. But I think it was the idea of having someone listen to me, someone who took a personal interest in my well-being that made these conversations so long.
My father-in-law eventually discarded religion and my husband has as well. My mother, who was briefly Catholic, now leans more Buddhist than Christian. My father has never been a churchgoer. I know I will never be religious, can never talk about god in any concrete way. I can't suspend my disbelief in the face of religious lore. If there was a first cause, it doesn't care about me or my problems. I don't see a divine need to suffer, only human beings and animals that live and struggle and feel joy and sadness before disappearing into the ether.
Still, I'm not a Christopher Hitchens, religion-hating type. I can distinguish between entities like the Catholic Church (which I have a lot of problems with) and individual Catholics, though I admit that any sort of fundamentalism gives me the willies. I know many religious people who are intelligent and thoughtful. Some are more conservative than others, but they are generally compassionate, kind-hearted folks who have taken it on faith.* They believe in god because he feels real, because they have an experiential knowledge that defies proof or rational surety. And I no longer describe myself as an atheist, even though I don't have any concrete belief. I can't say that there is no unifying force in the universe, that we are just soulless bodies waiting to rot (though we may be just that and I'm not betting on discovering the truth, if there is one). Life is a mystery.
The world my son is growing up in is devoutly secular, but it is also one in which we still need to talk about belief and religion, about god. I'm not sure how to do it without removing all of the mystery, without making it sound like I know something for sure. How do we leave the door open for him to make up his own mind? I want him to know about ash, about belief and how we think about death. He has questions. He worries about ghosts, buries skeletons in the planters, has seen enough to ask about the crucifix. My explanations of why we celebrate Easter and Christmas are painful: "There was a man named Christ who some people believe was the son of God . . . . " These are Christian holidays, even though you can celebrate them without a word about Christ's birth, death, and resurrection. To tell the kid that god is a story does both the kid and belief a disservice. But still I struggle, with the questions, with dogma, with how to frame the question of the god I don't quite believe in respectfully.
*And sometimes people are blinded by faith, use religion to dictate how other people should live. In this piece, I am not talking about homophobia or the anti-abortion movement, or about people killing in the name of god.
Images: Top: The kid burying Big Skully, the Skeleton King, in our former sugar snap pea patch. Middle: Newspaper clipping from the family prayer book.
Road trip
Elephant seals near San Simeon.
The boy on the beach in Santa Monica.
Towards the tail end of a graduation ceremony.
More later.
Thresholds of glass
It’s impossible to hide anything in this house. Even the attic space, something that we can only reach with a ladder that my husband drags into the living room from outside, has two windows, one on the front of the house and one open rectangle directly over the living room. But we still pack stuff into these spaces, boxes of old photographs (so useful for blogging) and books we mean to sell, clothes from my office days. I've sewn single-panel curtains for some of the doors, but in the closets it has been easier to staple burlap roughly to the inside, a way to hide the disorder within, if I do anything at all.
Over the last week we’ve sold some of this stuff on craigslist, carseats and breastfeeding supplies, the artifacts of our son’s infanthood, perhaps showing both an acceptance that he will most likely be an only child and a desire to jettison the things we carried with us across thousands of miles.
What will happen when the earth shakes beneath us, when the house jiggles and pops? I just discovered that we are in a liquefaction zone, which means the ground under the house isn't as solid as it appears, that in an earthquake the earth will take on the qualities of water. Before we moved here, I worried about living in a house where every threshold was marked with glass -- even the stairs and kitchen have glass-paned doors -- where there were 11 skylights and 31 windows. But then I got complacent, because that's what happens when nothing happens: who knows when the next big quake will hit? At least our son’s bed is no longer under skylights. He sleeps safely beneath a solid ceiling, though when he slips into our room he's stuck under glass with the rest of us.
Maybe it’s better to live in a dark space where the secrets can hide behind thick wood, locked against the discovery, where they won’t come spilling out when the world shows its instability. But we’re stuck with the openness for now, with the light, with all the riskiness that openness implies. Here are my secrets, boxed and contained in glass. We live with the danger, with the fact that it could shatter in seconds, that we will be crunching across shards after the tremors.
We have 19 glass-paned doors in this house. The slideshow above shows most of them -- if you can actually see the slideshow. Whether or not looking at slides of glass-paned doors is a worthwhile activity, I'll leave to you. But I do like the soundtrack.
Top image: the closets in our bedroom.
From a prompt, "Inside the closet."
Friends
Good things are going on. Hopefully I'll be able to write about them soon, or at least escape my distracted mind for some other kind of writing here. In the meantime, a picture for you, albeit a slightly blurry one: Big Skully with his friend Dress-Me Monkey. I think Big Skully won the sword fight, though Dress-Me Monkey doesn't seem to mind.
Thank you for all your helpful and warm comments on my last post. I'm doing better at the moment and have a plan in place to deal with the sadness when it feels overwhelming.
While my mind is on hold
Hopefully my brain will be fully functional tomorrow.
Bullets over Berkeley
We live in a tightly packed neighborhood in West Berkeley, with a house directly behind the back fence and other people’s yards and houses on either side. When was someone firing off a gun? Target practice seems unlikely, unless the shooter liked the idea of randomly hitting a house or killing a neighbor making breakfast or having a late-night snack. Maybe these were celebratory bullets, fired at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Day, or maybe something more sinister happened in our backyard long ago.
I wonder about what houses hold, memories and smells and the intensity of events long gone. Sometimes I walk into our son’s room, which was just an attic at some point – it’s right against the roof line and the ceiling angles, perfect for a kid’s room – and I smell old cigarette smoke. That stuff soaks into the walls, into the floorboards and rafters. You can never truly get rid of it. I picture an old guy up there, smoking and sweltering, listening to baseball on the radio or plopped in front of an ancient TV. Maybe a part of him is still there and he’s mystified by our setup, the Legos and stuffed animals, the piles of children’s books.
When my ex-husband was in his early twenties, he had an encounter with a ghost. He was visiting a friend’s house and was exploring the attic when the air was suddenly infused with the smell of pipe smoke. "I couldn't get down those steps fast enough," he told me years later. It was an overnight visit and as he slept he was visited by the house's previous owner, though X. described it as less of a visitation than being pestered by a lonely presence, like getting stuck next to a talkative guy on the train. When X. woke up, he knew the man's name, that he was a widower and a painter and that the man had spent many hours up in the attic smoking a pipe and mourning his dead wife. His friend's mother confirmed the man's name and widower status and said that she, too, had felt his presence.
I find a bullet and I want a story. I almost want a crime scene for the excitement of it, for the unexpected narrative, but I don’t want someone else’s real life pain to come out for my entertainment. I want to believe that everyone who has lived in our house has been happy. I want their happiness to fill me with joy or at the very least contentment. I don’t want to think of the pain of others who have come here before me soaking into the walls, into the dirt in the backyard where I will grow vegetables, cucumbers on the vine, juicy tomatoes, pumpkins that will be as heavy as toddlers by summer’s end.
I want us all to have the happy ending.
Image: Bullet in hand.
Dream police
You know the type of dream: the key doesn’t fit into the lock. It crumbles into dust before you even get a chance to try it. Or the door has a series of complicated bolts and attachments and there you stand, in the rain, in the snow, on a hillock of desert sand, holding this old-fashioned key. Or a roller skate key, which at first you don’t even recognize – does anyone use those things anymore?
But I’ve never had a key dream. There is nothing to unlock. I have no inaccessible thoughts, just a stream of consciousness and overflowing bins in the mind, intermingling. The kind of dreams I have are telephone dreams: me in a phone booth, the phone an old-fashioned dial model, and I can’t quite get my fingers to pull the dial to the comma of metal, to the kissing point. Or I’m a dark room heavy with curtains and carved furniture, waiting for the pick-up, the throw-out, the end, fingers tangled in heavy plastic. I keep on trying to connect (the key word here, no pun intended), but never quite make it.
In these dreams I’m always trying to call my mother, which is funny, because in my waking life I talk to her on the phone every day (on the cell phone, where I have her various numbers linked to single digits: the only possible mistake my fingers will make is hitting the wrong one and dialing my husband or my father instead). As I write about it, I remember that these dreams are more of a thing of the past, a symbolism my subconscious has rejected, perhaps as being too trite and obvious. I like to think that the connection between my mother and me, the path of communication, has opened, is free of static and complication.
Technology has changed as well. Maybe I’ll start having keyboard dreams: me sitting at the old-fashioned desk on this chair with the pillow for comfort, cozy in a circle of light against the early morning darkness, my fingers unable to find the right letters. I turn the letter “a” into a semi-colon, type symbols when I want numbers. It could be the keyboard is against me or my own mind, that my fingers, trained in typing class in ninth grade, are starting to stumble, to forget, the muscle memory fading away. So I’ll return to the pencil, scratching out my thoughts onto a piece of paper, my grip loosening, until all I can write is a series of scrawls.
Image from Vitroid.
From the prompt "Write about a key."
And just in case you want to hear the Cheap Trick song, here's a link. After watching it once, all I can think about is how unhealthy they look.
Ready to rumble?
What I've been up to: writing, thinking, staring off into space, and fighting some epic sword battles with the boy. Yes, I am Dress-Me Monkey. It's all in the mask, but a weapon and some armor don't hurt.
More words here by the end of the week. Maybe even by tomorrow. And if Dress-Me Monkey is too much for you, consider the below:
Image, top: Dress-Me Monkey in full battle regalia, suited up and photographed by my husband.
Image, bottom: What Nora dog and I found on our dog walk yesterday morning.
Cat from the past
What's new, pussycat?
My husband and I have always thought this was a funny picture of him, very 70s, very huh? When I posted it on Facebook, where the photo on the screen was larger than the original Polaroid, I finally really looked at the lion. Here was this a wild animal lying on his side like an overgrown house cat, napping while a seven-year-old boy straddled him. This was not a full leonine life. Even lions in zoos get to pretend they are wild occasionally, get to roar and faux-stalk the sunscreen-scented tourists.
Then the comments for the picture started coming in. They were variations on worry, about putting one's child on an actual living lion, no matter how moribund and perhaps drugged (and most likely toothless) the big cat was, with a chilling mention of Dave Egger's novel What is the What: An Autobiography of Valentino Achek Deng. Deng was one of the "Lost Boys" of Sudan, one of countless children separated from their families or even orphaned, "beset by starvation, thirst, and man-eating lions on their march to squalid refugee camps in Ethiopia" (Publisher's Weekly review as quoted on amazon.com).
In a few hours, the picture had totally changed for me.
But I still feel bad for the lion.
For the k.d. lang version of What's New, Pussycat?, click here.
Image: Mr. T at Magic Mountain, 25 February 1973.
Golden
I finally stopped running.
The routine felt oppressive and there was all that huffing and puffing. Everything went by so fast, the bungalows of Berkeley a blur, the friendly cats passed in a leap, the crazies of University Avenue or MLK deftly avoided (or ignored). I couldn't think beyond my heartbeat. When I first started running again, there was pleasure in the rush, in the pounding of my feet. There was purpose. But now I was getting bored with my routes and not feeling motivated enough to pick new ones.
So now I walk. Three mornings a week, I wander the sidewalks, sometimes stop to pet a cat or watch one hummingbird dive-bomb another. I still move quickly, a hair over four miles per hour, fast enough to get a workout, but slow enough to really see things. My weekday walks are relatively short, about three miles, but on Sundays I have the luxury (thanks to my husband) of going longer, often past six miles.
View of the hills from my street.
From our neighborhood in the flats, with its stubby trees and cozy two-bedroom bungalows, I head for the hills, where the trees and the houses stretch out in all directions. It's not that the hills are less populous: even more than in our West Berkeley neighborhood, houses here are packed in tight. And like the flats, there are places where large backyards have been taken over by second, income-generating houses. But there are all those trees, and the streets twist and get vertical before suddenly dipping and rising again. The houses are generally bigger and more various, fun to look at, to imagine myself in. The views are also incredible. My Sunday walk is a hike on sturdy sidewalks, much of the beauty with none of the mud of a woodland trail.
For the first half of the walk, I usually talk to my mother on the phone -- though I have to ask her to do most of the talking during some of the steeper climbs (and forgive me my heaving breathing). We've had some of our most interesting conversations during these walks, about books and what it means to be a writer, about art and spirit.
View of Marin County and the San Francisco Bay from Euclid Avenue, just before the Berkeley Rose Garden.
During the second half, I look at the houses and the view. I think. On a clear day, you can see the hills of Marin County across the Bay or catch a glimpse of the Golden Gate bridge. I imagine a life in a house perched high, where I would inch my way up from the sidewalk on a set of narrow steps edged into rock. The chill of pine-scented fog would accompany my morning coffee and I would watch every sunset from my teetering deck, stand wrapped in a wool blanket, sipping a glass of plummy Zinfandel as the sky fills with color. Near the base of one hill, I pass a small wooden house constructed around a tree. The house is rustic, with unfinished planks as siding. On colder mornings, a line of smoke trails from the chimney. What would it be like to live in such a house, where nature has been invited in? Here I would bake my own bread in a wood-fired oven, have a huge untidy garden, maybe a couple of egg-laying chickens out back.
The view down from Keith Avenue.
Around mile four, I'm going downhill and the endorphins start to kick in. I think about how lucky I am to have my husband, so funny and creative, smart and loving, how lucky we are to have our boy, how maybe I can do this writing thing after all. I don't worry about income or what is coming next, just feel appreciative for all that I have. Which is a lot. I realize that in many of my alternate-life fantasies, I am alone, and I wonder about my imagined bereftness when I have a loving family at home. I'm self-protective even in my imagination, and I make a vow to change that, to bring my family into these scenes, there with me as I sip the Zinfandel or collect eggs from the chicken coop. The recognition of my stubborn fear of loss makes my heart ache and I pick up the pace in anticipation of seeing my husband and son.
The trees start to get smaller, the houses less lavish. The sidewalk loses its slope. The hills are behind me now, a dramatic backdrop against cottony blue. My legs are starting to ache and my stomach growls in anticipation of food. By the time I reach our block, I have acclimated back to the flats, to the place where my family waits. I walk in the front door, tired and happy. Mr. Trinkle, the kid, and our various animals greet me with hugs, kisses, and licks, and the humans in the house sit down for our traditional Sunday breakfast of bagels and cream cheese with a side of the Sunday New York Times.
This is where I belong.
Top image: A peek at the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge, taken from just above the Berkeley Rose Garden. All photos from November 2009.
I can walk under ladders
My husband defended his dissertation.
I am typing in a sun-filled room, buoyed by three sleeping, contented kitties.
The laptop has been around almost six years and is going strong.
My marriage is better than it ever was.
There is more than enough food to eat today, this week, this month.
Our son is happy, healthy, and full of imagination.
Nora-dog is curled up in a patch of sun, perhaps dreaming of chasing squirrels or nibbling on giant biscuits.
Blogging has brought me both friendship and readers. I am grateful for both.
We live in a lovely house.
Twenty-four years ago today, something terrible happened, but I survived intact. Enough.
I am a writer.
I can transcend.
I'm lucky. I'm lucky. I'm lucky.
Thank you for being a part of it.
New blood
Nick’s existential angst or blood lust, take your pick, has taken the form of 2:00 a.m. howling. He’s the loudest cat I’ve ever known, full of throaty confidence and the ability to project, the kind of cat depicted in old-time cartoons, sitting on the fence yowling as neighbors hurl shoes. He’s an opera singer belting out a sad little tune, “Let me out!” or “I must kill!”
It must seem like a cruel joke when we get out the cat fishing line, the feathers attached to a stick. As I whip them around the bedroom, the feathers turn and beat through the air as though they were birds' wings. Like all cats, Nick has an active imagination and allows himself to be taken in for a few minutes. He hustles and jumps, takes a very strong cat arm and pins the fluorescent feathers to the carpet in one swipe. The feathers crunch and crumble as Nick snaps his jaws against them, tries to carry his prize downstairs.
I am actually tempted to let him out – it feels cruel to keep him from something he loves and clearly knows well. My other cats have all been indoor-only from the beginning so they didn’t know what they were missing. But I know that it isn’t a safe world out there and we signed a contract saying that his paws would never touch dirt or concrete sidewalks again.
Perhaps it’s time to take in a budgie or two, a little something to make life more interesting for our 2:00 a.m. howler.
Goodbye, Sidney
Sidney enjoying the yard, late June 2009.
He showed up at a coworker's back door on New Year's Day 1995, a half-grown kitten who needed to get out of the Columbus, Ohio chill. The kitty was charming, climbed up on her husband's back while he worked in the garage, greeted the couple with a high-pitched mew whenever they entered the room. But they couldn't keep him, so my boyfriend and I took the cat in, named him Sidney. We had a six-month-old sheltie named Loudon and he and Sidney quickly became buddies.
By January 1996, my boyfriend and I had gotten married and purchased a Queen Anne-style house in a downtown Columbus neighborhood. We'd taken in another foundling kitten, Zoe. By mid-1998, we were living in separate states, scheduled for divorce. I got the cats, he kept the dog.
Yesterday afternoon, after a long illness and slow decline, Sidney collapsed by the water bowl in the kitchen. My husband, son and I rushed him to the vet to be gently nudged into death. It was sad and it still is sad and I don't think I can write much about it.
We will miss our sweet kitten.
Sidney and Loudon, January 1995
Sidney looking at snow ... or at a ghostly cat? January 1995.
Sidney stretch, 2001?
Will blog for squirrels
Nora, researching a blog post.
The writing to survive household is traveling this week and next, from DC to MD to DE to NJ and back. In the meantime, Nora, our Russian Squirrel Hound, will be filling in. Or something like that. Expect a photo post or two.
P.S. -- People googling my name: You are freaking me out.
Would you like bloodworms with that?
He sold the whirligig mallards and Canada geese at a produce stand on Route 213. They were solid moneymakers, big sellers with the weekenders who clogged the roads every Friday and Sunday night. Lined up outside the stand, a bank of lures staked to the ground against a backdrop of cantaloupe and corn, the birds would be set off by the breeze, wings turning frantically in a frustrated pantomime of flight.
Wing tracing was not enough to keep sixteen-year-old me occupied for two months, however. That’s how I ended up, after a lot of maternal arm-twisting, as the sole employee at Eastern Shore Boats-n-Things (not its real name), a small marine supply store in Chesapeake City.
Eastern Shore Boats-n-Things was a muddle of motors and Docksiders, winches and water-skis. It didn’t know exactly what kind of store it wanted to be: hardcore marine supplies (motor oil, pumps, pulleys) or day on the water store (skis, shoes, inner tubes). For the fishermen, we had a refrigerator full of packaged live bloodworms. If you wanted to toss some cash at an Evinrude motor, we could get you one. And towards the end, Eastern Shore Boats-n-Things became the local dealer for Motorola car phones, exotic objects with a limited range, toys for the gadget aficionado.
Every day at the shop offered me a new opportunity to feel stupid. I knew nothing about boating. People would question me about sailing pulleys, or what weight motor oil they would need, would quiz me on outboard motor horsepower and I would stammer through a non-answer, look dumbly at the shelves, hope for an epiphany.
The store’s owner wasn’t much help. When he was there, it was mainly to down beers in the back with his buddies, an off-duty Maryland state cop and the rug cleaning guy from the shop next door. From the clenched jaw, one-sided phone conversations I overheard, I could tell that his marriage was disintegrating along with his business. Maybe the responsibility for both was too much for him, too many things to juggle.
Over the two summers I worked for him, the owner became more and more erratic. Though he hardly ever showed up during my shifts, my boyfriend D. and I would sometimes run into him at Bennett's Liquors or at the Canal House, the local boater's watering hole. He'd greet us with a high-pitched hello and a tight grin, insist upon giving us ice or a drink. "Want some iiice?!" became our catchphrase for him, a reference to the night he filled D.'s cooler with an intensity beyond the task.
My boss was a no show for my last week of work, the week before I left for my freshman year in college. Even his wife was calling, trying to track him down. Then another call would come in on the line, his distant voice over car phone static. He'd be at the store by noon. It never worked out that way.
Alone, I’d pace the aisles, line my white MIA shoes heel to pointy toe in a circuitous route around boating supplies. The occasional customer would show, hopefully with a simple request. I waited for business, drank diet Dr. Pepper, ran my finger along the bottles of teak oil. The sailing equipment fascinated me and I would finger the pulleys, try to figure out the knot chart.
When Dan, one of our suppliers, dropped by with beer for a farewell visit on my last day, I didn’t see a problem with cracking one open. We sat in the office and talked over a couple of Coors, had a meandering goodbye conversation about John, my college plans. At the end of my shift, I emptied the cash register, doled out my weekly salary. I locked up and delivered the keys to the rug cleaner, then hopped into my grandfather's waiting car.
Within six months, Eastern Shore Boats-n-Things was closed. I never saw the owner again.
Louise Peevish
"Oh, Louise is being peevish again," we'd say. "Louise Peevish."
It was the move back to Maryland that did her in. There were stories of other dogs that had cracked after hearing the tests at Aberdeen Proving Ground, dogs that pushed their way through second story window screens, desperate to escape the sounds of the bomb and munitions tests across the river. The aural bombardment contributed to Louise’s general nervousness, but now when a thunderstorm blew through town, she was absolutely inconsolable. No drug calmed her. By the time you got the pill down, the storm had passed.
One afternoon, my mother drove with Louise to the local grocery store. Mom rolled the windows down a safe distance, locked the doors, and entered the market.
She was filling a plastic bag with green beans when she heard a little girl’s voice. “Look, Mom, there’s a dog shopping in the Acme.”
“Not my dog,” thought Mom, as she weighed the beans and continued to the toiletry aisle. The little girl spoke again. “Look, Mom, the dog is still shopping in the Acme!”
“Not my dog,” thought Mom again. She glanced past the row of shampoos to the plate glass windows – were those thunderclaps she heard? – when she saw Louise, panting heavily, on the run from one of our favorite check-out guys, a kid who worked his way up from bagger and always made friendly conversation. Louise darted for the automatic doors, heading along the sidewalk in the direction of the Chat-n-Chew.
Abandoning her cart, Mom also ran for the door. Outside, storm clouds were gathering force. She watched Louise scatter a school of carpenters, men in dirty jeans and mud-caked work boots, as the dog passed the restaurant and made a left into the hardware store. Mom followed, pushing past customers, until she found Louise in the back of the store, trembling by the PVC piping.
My mother stayed there with her until the storm passed, then walked her back to the car and drove home, sans groceries. Apparently, the dog panicked when she heard the approaching thunder, pushed through an open car window and went looking for Mom. We were grateful that she wasn't hit by a car.
About two years after the Acme incident, I came home from grad school for a visit. Things were grim. Kevin, my mother’s long-term boyfriend, had been diagnosed with a rare bone marrow disease. My mother was close to declaring bankruptcy. And Louise was getting more peevish and skittish.
Her fits of panic weren't limited to thunderstorms; now the dulled explosions from Aberdeen were having a similar effect. She was terrified. If no one was home, she would attempt to escape -- Mom was afraid she would force her way through a closed window, pictured a return home to bloodied shards of glass and no dog. If someone was home, she would scratch and pace, pant and whine. Louise was suffering.
I went with my mother to the appointment. We sat with Louise, stroked her as the vet depressed the needle. It was over quickly.
On the ride home, we didn't speak.
Crushed
For a long time I thought the dreams were messages from my subconscious, a sign of our untapped connection. But they were always full of anxiety, missed moments, twisting city streets, long distances traveled for dissatisfying conversations. The longing was mine alone.
In one dream, my mind created a labyrinthine mental institution for our encounters. We were both inmates, living in separate dormitories. The buildings were part of a Victorian-era hospital, dark and complex with hidden meanings, completely separate from the external world. We would meet and part, meet and part, sometimes with a glance, sometimes managing a quick kiss, always with that awful ache for what could never be. I woke up wondering: Do you care for me? Do I exist for you?
That was the hold he had on me: the pursuit of acknowledgment, the desire to be seen for who I was, while he existed as pure symbol, out of reach and impossible to know.
Last fall, when my marriage was going through a rough patch, we started e-mailing more frequently. I liked the exchange, felt my latent crush expand, fill the spaces I thought were empty. It was innocent fun – no lines were crossed. Then, without explanation, he stopped responding.
Over time the dreams went on hiatus. Until last night. I’m not going to get sucked into this game with my subconscious again.
I don’t need his acknowledgement to know I exist.
Dashboard confessional
That's right: I don't drive. Yes, even though I possess a driver's license, I have not been behind the wheel of a car since 1996. That was back in Columbus, Ohio, where I took driving lessons and passed the test -- in a stick shift, no less -- only to continue with my non-driving, pro-walking lifestyle.
The Ohio license was my ticket to a Washington, DC license, which in its turn practically guaranteed me a California license, both sans driving test. California required that I take a written exam, which I passed by the skin of my teeth, with a score just good enough to get my golden pass to the highways. But, don't worry. If you are driving the roads of our fine state this summer, or any time in the near future, you will be relieved to know that I will either be safely ensconced in the passenger's seat or hoofing it.
Though I am a big supporter of public transportation (how could I not be?) and I am happy not to have to plunk down an extra car payment, my decision not to drive has nothing to do with a political stance or with economics.
I am afraid.
Five people from my high school were killed in car accidents in the space of a year and a half. When I was fifteen, I was in an accident on the very same winding Delaware back road where two upperclassman had been killed a month before, though I got off lucky, with a few stitches near my right eye.
I concluded early on that cars are big, heavy, and fast and can cause a lot of damage. The possibility of killing someone with a two-ton, gasoline-powered weapon is terrifying. I can't suspend disbelief, act as if there is no danger involved. Everyone shuttles around in these shuddering heaps of metal and plastic as though it is the most normal thing in the world. And I guess I do, too, as a passenger, though I'm not exactly a relaxed passenger.
It's a phobia, one that was relatively easy to live with when we were in the middle of convenience, in a fantastic DC neighborhood where everything was within walking distance and if it wasn't, I could hop on the Metro to get there. No one even needed to know that I didn't drive, which was wonderful, because I'm embarrassed by it, this dependency on my husband, this weird fear of mine.
Now that we're in a less convenient place, I am feeling the effects of life without driving. I know what I need to do, but I don't know if I can do it. Hey, if Sarah Vowell can survive without driving, why can't I? (But then again, if Katha Pollitt finally did learn to drive, what's my excuse?)
Gritty fingers
Last fall, when home life was strained, I stopped regularly watering our outdoor plants. The dirt beneath the scrub grass cracked like a drought-choked riverbed. Herbs turned brown in their terra cotta pots and the stressed lemon tree in the backyard dropped withered leaves. Every time the lawn crew (another thing I haven't quite gotten used to here) finished its work I would come out and find a shallow hole where yet another plant had perished, removed by the efficient men with their thick gloves and weed whackers.
We spent the late fall and winter rebuilding, nurturing our family life in California. The rains came. The greenery was rejuvenated. Herbs mysteriously re-sprouted and the grass came back a patchy grey-green, though the lemon tree did not undergo a spontaneous rebirth.
Yesterday we celebrated spring by planting flowers and vegetables: three tomato plants, a tomatillo, a pumpkin vine, a melon plant, and six tiny swiss chards (too much, I'm sure, but spring calls for optimism). Sunburned, shining with sweat, arms smeared with compost, we linked our gritty fingers after the last plant was watered. One tough year down and a lifetime of growth ahead.