That's me up there, in our office/guest room/exercise space, dressed in full stay-at-home mom regalia. Baggy cropped pants? Check. Shapeless long-sleeved t-shirt? Check. Hair in desperate need of a cut or at the very least a comb? Oh, yeah. And then of course, there is the room itself, the armoire mirror obscured by smudges, the partially-made bed, the pillow propped on my desk chair so that I don't get a backache when I write, the old boxes in the corner that my mother puts in the back windows at night during her visits to block out the neighbor's porch light (she likes to sleep in near darkness). Welcome to my glamorous world.

I don't tend to get dressed up during the week (or ever), because what's the point? Most mornings I sit around writing or letting my mind go in four or five dark directions, and afternoons are kid time. I'm not going to put on my fancy spandex pants to go to the library. Over the years I’ve worn many short and form-fitting outfits, but since my son was born I've apparently given up on looking good. It isn't worth the bother or the expense, and who am I trying to impress? My husband finds even frumpy-mom me attractive and I have no female coworkers to dazzle. The game of dress-up, of wrapping myself in appealing fabrics and styles, is no longer familiar.

But feeling frumpy is depressing, so I'm starting to think about what I wear, to attempt to dress like I'm still in the game, like I haven't given up completely on feeling attractive. It takes work, sometimes it isn't worth it, but I make the effort. I've started to go shopping for clothes in person again, not online or at outlet stores, but in resale shops, places like the Crossroads Trading Company, where I might find funky, offbeat duds on the cheap, where I'm likely to find interesting options in small sizes.

This is where I found the sweater dress.

The dress was short, slate blue and formfitting, with a princess waist and a cozy turtleneck collar. It went well with a pair of knee-high black leather boots that I bought at the same store. When will I wear this thing? I thought, but clothes shopping often puts me in fantasy mode, a sunny place where I shower seven days a week and get my hair cut four times a year, where I remember to brush my teeth hours before I pick up the kid from preschool, where I decide to put on cute dresses every day instead of baggy pants. The dress was under twenty bucks, so I went for it. I made an investment in fantasy. My husband and I were planning a nice dinner at Oliveto to mark the completion of his dissertation, so I had an occasion.

On the evening of our dinner, I laid next to the boy as usual, waiting for him to fall asleep, for his breathing to become even and light before I tiptoed out of his room to change. Boy asleep, dress safely on, I applied the tiniest bit of makeup and pulled my hair back. As I creaked down the steps, my husband was talking in the living room with our babysitter. She is freshly twenty-one, effortless with both adults and children, and as I came closer I realized that I was wearing a dress, that I was wearing the dress. It was as though I had just put on a buttless formfitting leather jumpsuit. I felt exposed, like I was pretending to be something I wasn't, a young person, a stylish person, non-maternal.

I had brought a coat with me downstairs and I whipped it on before the babysitter could see me, then ran behind the magazine rack to put on my boots. Indecency covered, I fluttered out the door with my husband before she could notice that I was dressed as an imposter, that I was attempting to play the part of an attractive, stylish woman. And in the cold restaurant, I kept my coat wrapped around my shoulders, covered my cheap disguise.

Did the blame for my discomfort lie within me or was it the dress? Was I over-thinking the whole thing? (Remember how neurotic I can be?) The dress had one more chance to prove herself. We had a cocktail party to attend.

The party took place in a typical Berkeley house, a small two-bed, one bath, and it was hopping by the time we arrived at 8:30. It was my kind of crowd, mainly parents that had escaped their kids for the night, a mix of thirty- and forty-somethings. The women were brightly plumed, showing off cleavage and shoulders, wearing dresses in thin colorful fabrics. The room was a tangle of bare legs, and men in dark colors, of manicured toes peeking out of exotic shoes. I felt positively demure in my turtleneck sweater dress with black tights and scuffed black boots. The princess waist seemed too youthful, like I should have had an oversized lollipop in my hand instead of a beer. And it was hot in there, so steamy that a bloom of sweat broke out on my wooled-over torso. I could have removed my boots and taken off my tights, could have swung the tights seductively around my head, grazed the faces of the other partygoers before tossing the hosiery out of an open window. But instead I pulled on my turtleneck, looked enviously at the bared collarbones around me.

Apparently clothes are all about context.

I haven't given up on my sweater dress or on regaining my fashion mojo. But I might need to start fresh, to begin with the foundation garments. Next week I will jettison my vintage underwear collection for a more contemporary look.

You won't be reading about it here.



First image: Me, in the office, this morning. The frump-quotient has gone up since then. I got cold and put on a fuzzy sweater and socks.

Second image: Sweater dress.

Tags: feeling frumpy, sweater dresses, aging, feeling forty, imposters, mommy-frump, stay-at-home mom blues

What is it about my son’s illnesses that plunge my life into despair, knock me into a pit for the duration? Four days at home with a sick four-year-old, four nights of not-enough sleep, his body sandwiched between my husband and me in the middle of the night, exuding heat, the constant bark of his cough punctuating my waking dreams.

“Just spit it out, cough it up and spit it out,” we told him Wednesday night as he hovered over the sink. His coughs have been from the center of his body, deep and hoarse. He let loose a fishing line of spit, coughed again, and threw up into the basin. It was very matter-of-fact, but he was concerned. "Will I need to go to the doctor now?" he asked. "That's not the bad kind of throw-up, is it?"

“I used to cough until I threw up when I was a kid, too,” I told him as I rubbed his back. “It happened to me all the time.” It did. I had a bum pair of lungs and was prone to bronchitis and middle-of-the-night asthma attacks. It didn’t help that my mother and I lived in a series of mildew pits, that I slept hemmed in by cats drawn by my little girl warmth. I was allergic to both mildew and cats and probably the cigarette smoke that twisted through my grandparent’s place. Used tissues would pile around me like snow drifts. I had a lot of “melodramatic” coughing fits.

The doctor said the asthma was nervousness or hysteria or some such nonsense. I remember turning it over in my mind, that these terrifying attacks, the desperate quivering of my lungs for breath as I sat up in the dark, were emotional. They were my fault, or maybe my mother's, for being a single Mom, for being a bit of a hysteric herself.

The unfortunate thing about running on fumes, about being stuck to the side of a sick boy for four days – I have no perspective. I wish I could tell you of the helpful doctor who helped me manage my asthma, who held out her hand for mine. There was no helpful doctor, though I did at least get an inhaler.

The truth is, I've never wanted to be helped, except maybe in my secret inner heart, and if you don’t want to be helped people generally don’t help you. Maybe it’s safer this way, but it’s also a drag, and when you’re in a funk it only drags you down further.

But give me two days of sunshine and maybe a week of health for the boy and the rest of us and I will leave the funk behind. I promise you that everything will be different, that I will smile back at strangers, will embrace friends and acquaintances. After the long gray winter, spring will come again and I will be filled with warmth and perhaps something resembling happiness. Or contentment. I'd settle for contentment, the absence of grayness.



Image: Kid in between colds, disguised as a mummy.
Prompt: Write about a time someone helped you

Tags: sick kid, writing prompt, Round Robin, asthma, complain, complain, complain, never-ending winter, spring, endless days of rain bring me down, winter of many illnesses

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.

Tags: drugged lion, boy sitting on lion, Magic Mountain in the 1970s

Stained

I want a cylindrical room made of factory glass, the door a piece of carved mahogany salvaged from the She-Wolf, Lord's old boat, the one that is sitting on a trailer in the backyard, the hitch supported by a stack of cinderblocks. Against the cool glass, set into block, the mahogany will seem rustic, warm to the touch. I will rub my hand against it before I enter the room, think of the times we went waterskiing or just bobbed around in the muddy waters of the Elk, my wet ass spreading a dark stain on the boat seat.

Even then that boat was a piece of shit. Lord wasn’t paying attention to it. He let it sit in the water all winter long. The varnish wore off, the gleam melted away. Every year he bought cans of teak oil, stacked them in the shed, and let them sit. Barnacles coated the She-Wolf's hull. They were rough against my hand, cut into my feet as I pushed against the boat into the heavy water.

So, the room. It is lit from within, white light/white heat. Even the ceiling is made of factory glass. The floor, too. It is empty. I will go inside, lock the door, and remove my clothes. I will press myself up against the glass. See if you can tell me what you are looking at, my blurry image refracted in each square. I will light a cigarette, will snuff it out on the rounded wall, again and again. You will see flesh, the death of ember, the end of the spark.

Lord is dead now, too, washed away, though not in the way you would expect. It had nothing to do with water. It was emotion. The dike broke, his water wings deflated, a big hole opened in his roof and the house filled with rain. You want me to tell you about it, to be more direct, but I won’t. I have his boat and my plan. Every weekend I sand down the mahogany, try to remove the stains, think about my cylindrical factory glass room. I picture Lord on the other side, horn-rims slipping off his nose, one hand marking his place in the book. I mystify him and he likes that.

Image by Vinje.

Tags: Round Robin, boats, writing prompt, sick kid, writing, existential angst

Here are the things I don't write about here:

My son's colds and coughs

Chores, like vacuuming up the fur, dust, and sand that accumulate pretty quickly in a house with three cats, a dog, and three humans

The laborious process of rewriting my novel (well, I may mention this in passing, but not in great detail, since that would send all of you to snoreland, but it is indeed laborious, like work-on-the same-three-paragraphs-for-six-or-seven-hours laborious)

The difficulty of writing something that is long-term, of continuing through it without the instant feedback of blogging

Cooking dinner whether I want to or not

How we're figuring out where the kid will go to school for kindergarten in the fall

Tips and tricks for keeping one's sanity after weeks of rain and afternoons inside with an energetic four-year-old

Coping mechanisms I use to see us through one of Mr. T's business trips

My political views

Natural disasters

The pros and cons of having another child

The perhaps impossibility of having another child

My anxieties about the quality of my writing and the wisdom of my current career choice

RIght now I'm stuck smack dab in the slog and drag of the humdrum. The novel is taking precedence over the blog and I don't feel like I have enough time to really shine up any of my short pieces of fiction for this space. I'm not sure that many people want to read the fiction anyway. It seems that most readers are interested in my personal pieces, either angst from the past or my depressive musings on current life. Not that my current stuff is all darkness, exactly, but I think my views are cloudier than the average person's, cloudy with a little patch of blue sky that expands as I examine it, which can make the whole process hopeful, I suppose, in a Jennifer Trinkle sort of way.

It feels as if my mind is preoccupied, that it is working on something. I just need a few hours with a keyboard to find out what it is. But who has the time? I'd rather work on the novel or maybe that just feels like the right thing to do right now, a necessity, a way to lose myself in words and justify my existence.

So I'm not sure what to put in this space at the moment, but I know my mind will crack open again and offer itself up for material. In the meantime, I may be posting more short writing prompts, or perhaps reposting some of the oldies but goodies. We'll see.

Image: Everyday me, as recorded by my computer.

Tags: blogging, writing, preoccupation, NaNoWriMo, preschooler, sick kid, school, National Novel Writing Month

I miss the tall ginkgos with their rotting fruits, the way the berries felt beneath my feet with just enough crunch, a pleasure to step on. The sidewalk was covered with ginkgo leaves, too, bright yellow fans dampened with the rain. A storm had come through the night before, had knocked the leaves off along with the fruit. The air was full of the smell of them, acrid, rotting, sweet.

We were lost and I was defensive about it, but if you were going to be lost, this was the neighborhood to be lost in. The street was tunneled in by wide brick rowhouses, voluptuous Victorians with turrets and whimsical windows accented with stone. Each house had a set of black iron steps, shiny and slick, one-two-three-four, up to the entry. The steps made little caves over doors to English basements, a term which conjures up mold and damp and a view of other peoples’ ankles, the angling of a dog’s leg as it releases a spray of urine against low iron window bars.

He got angry with me after I got angry with him and we had an embarrassing fight in front Martha, a hissy fit that revealed more than we intended. A tense moment with the map revealed my mistake and our luck: we were three blocks from Adams Morgan, a short walk to a few cold beers and a platter of Ethiopian food. The three of us marched from Swann Street to 18th Street, walked uphill against a thin wind. It was getting dark, people were bundled up against the cold. We walked without talking, single-file past the homeless, the crazies, the young people with their know-everything attitude. And then we shared a meal with all the awkwardness of something being over, knowing we had years to go before it would really end.

This is from a Round Robin prompt this week, my (slightly edited) response to a very different photograph.

Photo by Antediluvial.

Tags: gingko trees, autumn, exhusbands, writing prompt, Round Robin

This is a record of young love and wobbly stability. There's Mr. X in male cheesecake pose, lying in front of the newly-planted impatiens in the backyard of our first Columbus apartment. Here's Loudon the sheltie-dog, a ball of fluff, on his first day home. Sidney and Zoe appear as young kittens, playful, flexible, and sleek. In one set of pictures, Mr. X and I pose separately, each of us holding a champagne glass and wearing the dark-lensed glasses that came with my grandmother's 50s-era sunlamp. We look like goons, but that was the point. And then there are the shots of our wedding, that great party we gave, where his relatives filled the space and made it joyous while mine were reserved and inward, quiet in their happiness. These photos are relics of another time, part of my life but outside of it, too.

As time went on, Mr. X and I took fewer pictures. Fifteen months after we were married, we both got jobs in Washington, DC and life got much more stressful. Mr. X clashed terribly with his incompetent boss. Our living situation wasn't comfortable. The basement tenant in the house we rented, a man named Dewey Wayne (I've since forgotten his last name), had an intense personality. Dewey Wayne had sold his house in Raleigh and put all his money into a move to DC, which included paying a year's rent in advance. He had a habit of leaving his front door open while he took his dog on walks, which was his business, except that his place was connected to ours by a door that we couldn't lock and our neighborhood wasn't a good place to leave doors open. The washer and dryer for the building were in his apartment and he freaked out (rightfully) once or twice when we walked in on him, unannounced, to do our laundry.

Then there were the rats. The backyard, a rectangle of bare dirt dotted with ratholes, held a thriving rodent commune. We had a parking space out by the trash cans and the rats began to use our car as storage space, something we discovered on our way to the grocery store one weekend. As Mr. X pulled out onto 15th Street, the engine began to smoke. Over the course of our ten-minute ride, the car slowly filled with the odor of roasted, rotten meat. We rolled all the windows down and covered our noses with tissues to filter out the smell. When we pulled into the parking lot, Mr. X popped open the hood: two smoldering pork rib bones had adhered to the carburetor. The car stank for weeks. Later a rat actually chewed its way into Dewey Wayne's apartment ("I came in and there he was on top of the refrigerator, munching on a bagel. Like Mighty Mouse," he told us).

Mr. X and I finally fled the rental after five months and bought a house in Takoma Park, Maryland. The night before the house inspection, our car was stolen from our street, though it was recovered somewhat unscathed a week later. In the meantime, Mr. X's job had gone from horrible to intolerable. His old position in Columbus was still open and they were happy to take him back. On the weekend of our second anniversary, only eight months after we had arrived in DC, he returned to Ohio. There were solid reasons for him to leave that had nothing to do with our marriage, but it was the beginning of the end, or at least I can mark the final slide with this event. We were doomed from the beginning.

Mr. X is remarried now. He and his wife have a child on the way. We haven't spoken in a couple of years, though we are Facebook friends. And while the past is always present for me in some way, I don't think much about that time when I was young and in love and it was all fresh and new, when I was with someone who was my loyal protector, when I was learning to be an adult without drama. I wasn't good at living without drama and still courted it with alcohol and arguments, with cruel remarks and coldness, but there was an underlying sweetness to the relationship. Mr. X helped pull me out of my childhood, was the first person to hold out his hand.

The only evidence I have of that time is some paperwork and photographs. We had no children and the last living pet we shared is fading fast. There are no friends in common with which to reminisce, to verify that it all happened. But I'm still not sure what to do with the artifacts, the pictures that show the world that we created for a brief moment, now submerged in memory.

Image: Champagne on our first anniversary, Columbus, November 1996. I still have the glasses and -- strangely, but coincidentally -- my son just fished them out of a toy box this morning and put them on, even though he hadn't worn them for months.

Tags: exhusbands, Columbus, OH, guilt, love, Nostalgia, divorce, photographic evidence of the past

I skipped ringing in the new year, chose to switch off the light five minutes before midnight on December 31st. Still, I was awake at the moment it turned, was lying in bed whispering to my husband in the dark. We heard firecrackers and whoops of happiness, the joyous drunken sounds of other people. My heart wasn't in it. I just wasn't ready to give up on 2009, didn't feel like shoving into another year with all that pressure to change my ways, to become a better person.

I finally celebrated 2010 on January third, got a little crazy. Yeah. I moved some furniture, switched an entire room around. The living room had become a stale and cluttered space. Even the furniture seemed bored, stuck in place for over two years. Our couch had stretched into a permanent yawn, the lamps sagged with boredom, and the chairs were slouching in defeat. It's been this way for so long because the kid has an attachment to sameness, to stasis, but yesterday I offered him a very compelling reason to shake things up: with the couch across the room, we could build a huge fort between it and the dining room table. Never underestimate the power of a fort on the will of a four-year-old boy: it did the trick. I've included a picture of the perked-up room at the top of this post. It's airy and wood-textured, a comfortable and open space. It fits.

This post was originally about spaces made fresh, about a new year beginning and the value of shaking things up. The living room felt stuck and so did I, but as I shifted the furniture things opened up. My possibilities expanded. My mind, however, wasn't quite ready to completely commit to this topic, or perhaps my mind just works in very mysterious and cloaked ways. Typing "living room" in a preliminary draft led to thoughts of the Bye Bye Birdie song "Got a Lot of Livin' To Do." Oh, yes, there are versions of it out there, including several high school productions muddying up YouTube, but I then stumbled upon Shirley Bassey (to see the movie musical version, in all its campy glory, click here). The song runs for the first three minutes of this clip:



Ms. Bassey is a little brassy here, not too subtle. She belts it out. Still I like her attitude. And look at the date of the recording -- February 22, 1966. This is the actual birthday of a significant person in my life and as I was listening I suddenly pictured him as a tiny thing, a mewling newborn swaddled in white. Maybe his mother cradled him from her hospital bed as she watched Ms. Bassey perform on television. There he was, untouched and innocent, with the whole of life ahead of him. He had a lot of livin' to do (still does, he's just lived almost 44 years of it). I started to cry. It was everything, the hopeful song, the image of the baby full of potential, this strange feeling of inevitable loss, the relentless passage of time, that brought me to tears. The tears weren't totally about him or about the time that we all lose just by living. They were about babies. Or about how we start off so small, so dependent, waiting to be imprinted by circumstance, by imperfect parents, by our own built-in limitations. But the song isn't meant for tears, it's meant for inspiration, an encouragement to live life to its fullest, a message that I may need more than most.

This somehow led to thoughts of another unlikely tearjerker of a song, coincidentally titled "Shirley", by the all-female grunge/punk bank L7. It's about Shirley Muldowney, the first professional female drag racer. L7 mixes simple, in-your-face lyrics with drag racing announcer commentary and the sound of an engine gunning. I have never gotten through it without breaking down, including the four times I heard it while writing this post. Maybe it's the naive idea that it proposes, that we are capable of anything: "How many times must you be told, there's nowhere that we don't go?" (The song is specifically about women being just as capable of men, but I think it can be a universal battle cry for the downtrodden.) I think it's also Shirley's absolute confidence in herself that gets me. In one sample from an interview an announcer asks "What's a beautiful girl like you doing racing in a place like this?" which Shirley answers with one word: "Winning."

***************************************************

(This post is written in the style of Lydia of Writerquake. She often writes compelling mixes of song, image and word, pieces that point to the core, the heart, of the matter. I'm not claiming to do all that, just thought of her as I was writing it and wanted to shout out.)

Shirley by L7

Welcome the first lady to try and qualify in an NHRA-dragster competition ~ Shirley Muldowney!
Feels so real
Crushing the steering wheel
How many times
Must we toe this line
Halting me
Is a fantasy
Cha-cha! call her cha-cha!
What's drag racing coming to?
How many times must you be told
There's nowhere that we don't go
she's got good traction!
I suggest you find a seat in the grandstands, because you don't want to miss this!
She's just here wants
What she wants to do
I wonder if Shirley's got in her to hold that throttle down
kills your joke
as she's burning smoke
Shirley Muldowney is pulling ahead... and she takes the red light
And you will find
Crossing the finish line
Shirley Muldowney has just set a new track record!
Satisfaction!
How much times must you be told
There's nowhere that we don't go
She's got good traction!
What's a beautiful girl like you doing racing in a place like this?
Winning.
Winning.
Winning.
Winning.
Winning.
The lady got through it
Winning.
What's drag racing coming to?
There's nowhere that we don't go
What's a beautiful girl like you doing racing in a place like this?
Winning.
Winning.
Winning.
Winning.
Winning.

Tags: L7, Shirley Muldowney, Shirley Bassey, Got a lot of livin' to do, Bye Bye, Birdie

We have family in town for the next week, so things may be quiet around here. In the meantime, Happy End-of-December and Merry New Year! And be on the lookout for these guys -- I'm not sure if they are carrying little Christmas trees or spiky clubs.

Image: Some of the many Santas in my father and stepmother's collection.

Tags: Christmas, Santa, holidays

The one-bedroom was on the bottom floor of a four-story townhouse and the family that owned the house and lived in the floors above us had two girls and a pug. They weren't overly noisy, didn't have loud parties or screaming fights, but since our space was separated from theirs by a only couple of thin interior doors, we heard everything. There were pounding footsteps and scraping chairs, the sad howls of their dog when they left her alone over long weekends, fourth of July firecrackers set off three feet from our bedroom. Once the baby came along, the baby that slept like an insomniac, whose sleep we were desperate to encourage, we left the apartment for larger digs in Alexandria, Virginia, though our son was sixteen months old by the time we finally moved.

Moving to Walnut Street brought us full circle. The drafty three-bedroom house had a fenced-in yard, two floors, and a second bathroom and was on the very same block Mr. Trinkle and I had lived on when we first moved in together in late 1999. But it was temporary from the beginning: as we were packing up our DC apartment, we got a call that led to my husband's current California job. In the end we lived in Alexandria for only six months. I remember that time through a haze of rain and snow, of grasping grayness and cold feet. We were a 25-minute Metro ride into the city, but felt very far away from our cozy, familiar neighborhood in the heart of DC. My husband often didn't get home from work until after our son was asleep and we no longer had our occasional babysitter. I tried to keep sane, joined some mom's groups, bundled up the boy to get into the city when I felt up for dragging a stroller on the Metro or schlepping our 25-pounder on my back. Just as spring was beginning to dab the trees green, to coax flowers out of the soggy ground, we moved again, to Berkeley.

And it was tough. The first year here was lonely. Our son hated playgrounds and other children in general and I knew no one. Mr. Trinkle was grappling with a new job situation and I was grappling with an unacknowledged past. It's hard for me to believe now that up until the summer of 2007, I wrote nothing. Nothing. Well, maybe the occasional whiny journal entry, at the rate of one or two a year, but that was it. I started writing and Mr. Trinkle and I started repairing and then I found a friend or three and a writing group and a good place for the kid to go to preschool. And then Mr. Trinkle finished his dissertation (I could be calling him here "Dr. Trinkle," but he nixed that one), something that had been hanging over him, over the two of us, for our entire relationship.

We've been talking about what is next. It could be a move from here back to there, back to the center of the policy universe with its wonks and its humidity and beautiful houses. If we lived in Washington, DC, my family would be geographically closer. I have long-time friends there that I miss, and there are those cherry-tree lined streets and majestic buildings. I just don't know if it's home anymore.

Home. DC used to be home. It felt that way from the beginning, from the day I moved there at nineteen. It was all about the houses, the formal public architecture, the restaurants and street people. I took pride in living in the center of a very specific universe, the place where people would gather to march and protest, where the federal government would slowly crank out laws, regulations, and decisions. Even the wonks, in their rumpled suits, walking with a sense of purpose or the wide-eyed look of the permanently distracted, were endearing to me. (The K Street lobbyist/lawyer types left me cold.) I still feel truly alive wandering the neighborhoods there, sludging through summer heat or pressing my boots into the slush. However, I've never lived in DC without a shield, a barrier between myself and other people. The town was made for shields, all that talk about policy and none about emotion. The emotions go underground, are sublimated by intellect. It's so ... male and macho, in an über-rational sort of way.

Berkeley's architecture does nothing for me. My general reaction when I walk around our neighborhood is "meh, bungalows" though I do enjoy getting up into the hills where the air is rarefied. It's the people and the philosophies here that I love, the crunchiness of it all. Berkeley is where I had the freedom to come clean and to become a writer. I don't feel (much) of a need to explain myself here, to talk about why I don't have an outside job, to stumble over the "what do you do?" question. And I've made some real friends here, too, women that I want to know even better, that I want to have years with, so that our children can be lifelong friends, too.

Home is eucalyptus-scented. It's juicy local strawberries all year long. It's hills with bay views and streets with devoted bike lanes. It's where my son is making friends and where I am, too, friends who don't know me as a librarian but as a writer and a mother, a woman with a past who isn't defined by that past. This feeling, of home and openness, is fresh and delicate. I don't know if it will survive a move.

Ask me next week, though, and I might be pining for marble and brick, for trail runs in Rock Creek Park, for fireflies on June nights and snowstorms in January, for dinner with friends at Lebanese Taverna or Oyamel. I'll tell you that I can maintain those new friendships, can adapt to life back in the District, that proximity to my family will make things easier, will give my son the safety net of an extended family.

I'm split. We'll figure it out soon enough (I hope) and I'm sure you will be reading all about it.

Upper image: View out kitchen door, Washington, DC, Winter 2005?

Lower image: Our sidewalk, Berkeley, 2009.

Tags: Berkeley, CA, friendship, Washington, dc, home, homesickness

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.

Tags: Berkeley, CA, walks, Berkeley Hills, running, contentment, gratitude

Tags: Thanksgiving, luck, thankfulness, gratitude, Joan Armatrading, Pets

Part II: Resonance

OK, OK, OK, Part I was the result yet another prompt, from a family visit in September. It was a photo prompt that had nothing to do with the resulting piece. I was going through my old stuff, looking for something, saw this, thought: Aha! That feeling some of us get after too much family time on Thanksgiving. Except I haven't gone home for Thanksgiving in years, and if I did, it would actually be wonderful to be with my mother, though Kevin's absence would still be palpable.

Sometimes I'm afraid that you're getting the wrong impression. Maybe you think that I sit around immersing myself in the past, feeling sorry for myself and penning various memorials to the me who used to be. Or that I prefer to dance with darkness rather than frolic in joy and light.

I write about what resonates and I have a complex relationship with both happiness and the past. The past is always present for me; it informs the present, keeps me grounded. And it provides me with great material. Don't even have to think about it. As for happiness: I am capable of feeling great joy. I'm generally happy, except when I'm not. The hollows, shadowy, cold as falling snow, call to me. Light is meaningless without darkness. I need texture, a rough patch here and there, a little complexity and strife to make it more interesting.

But maybe my next post will be about puppies. More likely about finishing NaNoWriMo. Or my husband wrapping up his dissertation. Or maybe it really will be about puppies, cute little fluffballs, good enough to eat.

Tags: family, family visits, holidays, NaNoWriMo, Round Robin, Thanksgiving, writing prompt

Guess how old I am today?

Just add one to this number.

I'm fine with it. Really.

Image: Me in 1970 at Hollywood Beach.

Tags: birthdays, the big 4-0, aging

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.

Tags: Pets, Nick, Pet adoption, outdoor cats, cat rescue, cats, Island Cat Rescue Association

Forgive me, fellow bloggers, for I have sinned. I did not intend to leave this blog for almost a month while I frittered away five weeks with my son. My mother visited for ten days and I did not blog. I had eight hours of babysitting one week and I did not blog. This past week -- my son's first back at school in over a month -- coincided with the visit of an old friend and I did not blog.

But during those eight hours of babysitting, I started to think about writing again, about tackling the never-ending story in some different way, fitting in time for as-yet-nonexistent freelance work, attempting to keep this blog somewhat current (all while finishing household projects). Good writing grows best in the dark (thanks, rcb!). What sees the light here in fragmentary form tends to stay that way. Or sometimes it embarrasses me later in its undeveloped melodrama and weak attempts at capturing reality.

It's tempting, really tempting, to put up little bits and pieces on the blog. There's nothing like instant feedback to keep one going, except that I don't keep going. The past -- meh. I've dug into it, and created stories out of it, have exposed enough. Now I'm looking to take the facts of my life, the weird experiences and characters as twisted and lively as wisteria in bloom, and make them fictional. I want to harness the crisscrossing metaphors of my subconscious.

Blah, blah, blah. I'm continually on the edge of something, a change, a new way of being, perpetually on the hopeful precipice. But I've come so far from the first days of this blog, typing in the dark and yearning for more.

Image: My mother and me walking in Muir Woods, August 2009. Photo by Mr. Trinkle.

Tags: dreams, blogging break, writing, Woody Allen, Muir Woods

But first, a preface to the crumb.

I haven't been here lately. My son is out of school until after Labor Day and we've had a series of pet-related good things and bad things. Cat dying: bad. Adopting a kitten and a new adult cat: good. Nora the dog passing a pea-sized bladder stone at the Emergency Vet: bad, though it could have been much worse. Attempting to dissolve remaining stones through antibiotics and diet: good, though if it doesn't work she will still need surgery. Me giving Nora cranberry extract pills with xylitol in them: potentially very bad, since xylitol can be fatal in small doses to dogs. Nora surviving xylitol exposure unscathed: amazingly, wonderfully good.

In between pet-things and kid-things, I'm still taking the Round Robin, a writing prompt-based class. So here is a crumb for those of you who are still reading this blog, from the prompt I remember.

I remember that her fingers were thickened by arthritis, were scattered with freckles. Helen’s nails were coffee-stain yellow, bitten down to the quick, and she kept fumbling at the wedding ring on the fine silver chain around her neck.

I looked at her hands because it was easier than looking into her eyes, or letting my gaze drift to her useless foot in its bright blue stocking. Sometimes after a visit I’d look at my own hands and realize that time is written on our hands the fastest of all. Already my knuckles are puckering in idiosyncratic ways and the backs are beginning to resemble the uneven surface of a barren planet, ropy with rocky veins and hairline fracture wrinkles.

Helen wasn’t a worker. The hardest work her hands had seen was the kneading of whole grain bread dough, maybe a bit of digging in the garden. She’d cracked open books, propped them up, her thumb and pinky keeping them open. Me, though, I’d scrapped carcasses in the field, held up splintery boards with the meat of one palm while I grasped a hammer in the other. Some jobs we worked all winter long, if we were lucky inside, but we weren’t always lucky.

I read a book once about men working on a tower, applying mortar and making repairs in the ice and slush of January. They were suspended from ropes attached to scaffolding, wore gloves with the fingers cut out as a symbolic act. Their hands were gouged and scuffed, palms smoothed by rough passes over granite, life and work written on the body.

Image: The kid, pretending to be a cat, because we don't have any good pictures of our actual cats being actual cats. Yes, he is holding an egg mold, which is this fictional cat's weapon of choice. It makes him fly or it's a bomb or he shoots it or something.

Tags: Nora, cats, blogging break, writing prompt, Round Robin, xylitol and dogs, flash fiction

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?

Tags: Sidney, Sid-squid, Sidelish, Squidley, Kittle, Kitten

Don't be disturbed by the photograph. It is only a diversion. In fact, I actually posted it a couple of weeks ago and then removed the post. I had nothing to say and the photograph wasn't adding to the conversation. Today it appears as filler, a little piece of San Francisco scenery. Or maybe it works as metaphor, too, though as a metaphor for what you'll have to be the judge.

Last night I was walking home from my food writing class, feeling energized and full of something (beans? ideas? hope for the future?) when I realized that I have a commitment problem. I've been circling working life for almost five years now, keeping decisions on hold, tossing words into the air. I fumbled into my first career, became a librarian almost by default, then stumbled when making what felt like a deliberate move into the world of cooking. And I've been floating with the current ever since.

I have to commit or I'll keep on writing 450 - 800 word posts here forever and ever. It's not a bad gig, though the pay is lousy. I love interacting with my blogging friends. But I need something more substantial. A career.

Do you know what I mean?

For your trouble, your time, maybe as a reward for leaving a comment, here's a recipe. Consider it another diversionary tactic or maybe just some picnic food for your next visit to Fort Funston, the hang gliding mecca.

Herbed feta and tapenade sandwiches

Briny tapenade and thyme-spiked feta punch up the flavor of this Mediterranean sandwich. A couple of simple tricks -- adding a sprinkling of herbs and olive oil to a supermarket cheese, roughly chopping a handful of olives with a touch of garlic – give it an effortless homemade touch. Bring extra bread along to sop up red pepper juices and the occasional escapee feta tidbit.

Makes 2 sandwiches

1/2 cup kalamata olives, pitted and roughly chopped
1 small clove garlic, minced
2 tablespoons mayonnaise

1/2 cup feta cheese, crumbled
1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves, minced (can substitute 1 teaspoon dried)
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
pinch freshly ground black pepper

4 slices country bread
1 small cucumber, peeled and thickly sliced
1 large red pepper, roasted, seeded, and quartered


Stir together kalamata olives, garlic, and mayonnaise in a small bowl. Lightly toss feta, thyme, olive oil, and black pepper in another small bowl. Slather each slice of bread with a generous amount of tapenade and layer the feta, cucumber, and red pepper on two of the slices. Top each sandwich with the remaining bread, slice in half, and serve.

Image: Hang gliders at Fort Funston, Memorial Day 2009. Photo by "Mr. Trinkle."

Tags: Fort Funston, career, recipes, sandwiches, hang gliding, feta cheese, tapenade, what color is your hang glider?

In Baltimore, new people are moving in, are paying top dollar to remove the Formstone. Men, almost always men, come in with crowbars, pry the fake rock off the façade, tuck and repoint the newly exposed brick, repair tumbledown walls. Often the brick was already turning to dust when the first workers set up scaffolding, draped the famous white marble steps that the fastidious Polish ladies of Baltimore kept bright and clean. Entire blocks were caged in chicken wire and lathe as the men slathered cement mix on chockablock rowhouses, transforming old world brick into new world faux.

In San Francisco, they are propping houses up on jacks, underpinning foundations, retrofitting in case of earthquake. What do they find beneath the slatted wood? The houses rest on broad oak beams or heavy hips of steel propped up on concrete columns, strong, but not enough to take the shaking that is inevitable. The workers come with their heavy equipment and digging machines, extend legs deep in the ground. They marry house and foundation, bolt them together to ensure that the two don’t separate in a moment of crisis.

I dream that I am in a house, that I am the house, a faded Victorian, gingerbread rotting on the porch. My foundation is sunk and the slightest shaking will slump me into the street, or have me crying drunkenly into a neighbor’s garden, letting shards of my window glass dangle in the koi pond.

I am my mother’s house, an alley rowhouse no more than 12 feet wide and 27 feet deep, huddled with my compatriots on Finch’s Way, a one-block dead-end Baltimore street. The brick underneath my Formstone is solid and plumb. I am bright with open windows that let in Mexican music and the sounds of the crazy woman across the street cursing the traffic and the illegally parked cars. I am tolerance smelling of English tea roses and home cooking. But be careful climbing the winding staircase at my core, where the stairs narrow at the inside edge and you must climb in darkness.

One misstep will send you tumbling.

(Image: Looking at Kevin's old house on West Street, the one on the left.)

Tags: dreams, houses, metaphor, Baltimore, San Francisco, overextended metaphor, earthquakes, Formstone

Detail from "Untitled (Big Man)," 2000, a sculpture by artist Ron Mueck, in the Hirschhorn Museum's permanent collection. Photo by Jennifer Trinkle.

I'm still here, still in DC, the blog and my blogging friends neglected. I'll be catching up over the next week, but in the meantime ...

When we flew into Dulles twelve days ago, I thought I was over it. We’ve been gone from DC for exactly two years and I’ve adjusted to life in Northern California. I prefer the open, laid-back vibe of Berkeley and San Francisco and the first thing I recoiled from when I walked the familiar avenues of DC was the attitude. Lots of self-important people with important tasks. This town is crammed with policy wonks, the young ones fresh from graduate school, green with enthusiasm, the old ones graying in their suits, cynical but perhaps even more full of it, the seriousness of their jobs, the weight of the decisions they make, a heavy surety of purpose.

But it’s beautiful here. I’ve always loved the brick rowhouses with their curving lines, the public buildings full of grace. Late April is too early for wilting humidity, too late for wintry mix. Rock Creek park is punctuated by the delicate whites and pinks of dogwoods, with twisted redbuds adding their outlines against the pale green of new leaves. Everything growing is green or white or pink, though we’re missing the explosion of azaleas that happens in late spring.

I was cocky. I told people that the pull I felt for my adopted hometown (which intensified greatly with Obama’s election) was gone. Then, tonight, our last night here, I felt the pangs.

I have no choice in the matter. We’ll fly back tomorrow evening and I’ll go back to my strange little life, return to my third incarnation, now playing the part of a stay-at-home mother with a writing complex. I’ll spend hours without stepping into crowds, wander the empty sidewalks of my moribund neighborhood, thinking back to the bustling streets of DC, to my quick jogs across busy intersections with only seconds to spare before the light change. Once a month I’ll meet with my writing group and feel awkward, without context, but still grateful to be there. And I’ll dig in my heels, try to grow a life without the context of work and a love of place.

Tags: Washington, dc, homesickness, policy wonks, california

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.

Tags: Nora, dogs, Washington, dc, canine writers, blogging, vacation

Butterfly in our backyard sour grass.

The February rains came. They cannonballed out of the clouds, burst against packed soil, strong-armed flowers and soft green leaves out of lifeless bushes. Our sour grass exploded. The backyard is now electric with it, lemon-drop yellow and neon green as it spreads over bare spots where the sprinkler didn't reach last summer. A few days into my blogging break the rains knocked out our internet service, though we're not completely sure how they did it. Water is wily.

Thanks to the wireless connections of two neighbors, we weren't totally internet free (I do not recommend sneaking onto someone else's wifi network, but desperate times call for such measures. It's a bit of an addiction, this internet thing.), but mainly we enjoyed the sudden stretch of time to fill. When the man from AT&T finally fixed the problem, he had to skitter into the crawl space, between the house and the mud, to put in a dedicated jack for the DSL. It was fixed just in time for my break to be over.

Here's what I did over my winter blogcation.



READ: I read Living with the Truth, by Jim Murdoch (I'm not going to write a review here, much as I would enjoy a chance for Aggie and Shuggie to discuss it on Jim's blog, but I suggest you order it); A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini (good, but brutal), and started Nothing to be Frightened Of, a kind of memoir by Julian Barnes (how have I missed his fiction?).

The shorter 'do.

TRIMMED: Is ten months too long to go between haircuts? I got my hair cut for the first time since last April, thinking of Karen, my blogging hair stylist friend, as I finally picked up the phone to set it up. The answer is, yes, ten months between haircuts is way too long. This time, I made an appointment before leaving the salon.

THOUGHTS ON WRITING: It's all about the questions and the quest. In the March/April edition of Poets & Writers, poet Lucia Perillo says she writes assuming there is no reader. Is this really possible? Is she being disingenuous or am I misunderstanding her point? If we assume no audience, I think it would be impossible to write. This might be worth a post, if I can liven it up a bit.

ACTUAL WRITING: I finished my stillbirth story and submitted it. While of course I am thinking positive, sugar-sweet, happy thoughts about getting it published on the second try, I'll probably have to keep on submitting. Maybe I'll need to give it another once- or twice-over, but I'll wait until I hear from this particular publication, just in case. Think good thoughts for me, please!

THE END OF THE BLOG?: Not yet. I won't be updating as much or getting as Entrecard-obsessed this time around. But I do want to get serious about my writing. That's why I've killed a chunk of the afternoon to write this post. Did I mention the internet is addictive?

Tags: blogging break, reading, The internet, haircuts, writing

White

Can you think of anything more bland? White bread, white rice, white collar. Something devoid of detail; the absence of pigment, of nutrients, of personality. Or perhaps you think of purity when you see the colorless expanse, a bride in her virginal wedding dress, the priest’s collar, the petals of daisy. What’s that all about? Then there’s a blank page or screen, waiting to be filled, the background to the rest of our lives, the tabula rasa. Let’s smudge it or spill the ink, write dirty words or talk about sex, reveal all our secrets. Let’s sully the white.

Dirty snow. Image from TreeHugger.

White is too much pressure. Don’t you cringe when you see the white pair of pants? The white shoes that must come out after Memorial Day and go back into the closet at the conclusion of the summer? Suddenly I’m picturing a pair of white shoes I had in high school. They were Mias, 80s fashionable, flats with pointy toes that beat my feet into submission. How long were they white? By the time I tossed them aside they were scuffed, grey. They smelled like sweat. Inside, dirty imprints of my heel and toes.

“Do we really need these details?” you ask. “Do we really want the dirt, the skinny, on your white shoes? OK, we can move to other formerly white things, can see how writing about something muddies the page, dirties a secret life. Underwear stained with menstrual blood; t-shirts with their half-moons of brown under the armpits; ring around the collar.

I’m actually thinking about lies, though, secrets, the kinds of lives we say we have and the hidden world underneath. Everyone’s hiding something, is afraid to reveal certain details, has some shame. I say show it to the world, let go of your lily white fantasies.

They are totally unrealistic.

Tags: sick kid, writing, writing prompt, secrets, colors, white, whitewashing, shades of grey

And in between the writing and the reading and the card-dropping and the commenting, let's try to "pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America." At least those of us who live here. It's going to take a bit of work, but we are up to the challenge.

Tags: friendship, Barack Obama, writing

Christmas morning pteranodon, courtesy of Uncle B.


Preparing the cioppino.



The final product.


Homemade Mexican chocolate ice cream.


This year's inadvertent (but popular) theme: dinosaurs.

I'll be catching up on comments here, there, and everywhere in the next couple of days.

Until next time ...

Tags: Christmas, family, Photos, filler

Family will be descending upon our household tomorrow. I'm looking forward to the visits (really!), but may not be posting, commenting, or dropping many cards until the new year.

Have a peaceful and relaxing holiday! If you can, with that guy staring at you.

Tags: Santa, family, Christmas, holidays, Entrecard

Photograph from Wired New York

Many in the park are reading the white butterfly. Or worshipping the wrinkling God, exposing their winter-white limbs to the sun. Backs against thin towels, resting on hodgepodge quilts or supported by near-dead grass, they lie among the remains of dog shit and crushed beer cans. Four months of relative darkness, of travel wishes: the sea and sky clear, the beach unpeopled, a tropical drink supported by sand. Stuck in the city for the long haul, they celebrate the coming of spring.

They travel from studio apartments, from many-windowed penthouses, stream in from the train station, form in groups released from grubby cubicles. Maybe they are cutting school, calling in sick. It could be that they don’t have anywhere to be in the first place.

She props herself up on her elbows, surveys the landscape of bodies. Across a line felled by desire, a white butterfly floats, a promise fulfilled.

Tags: writing prompt, Tomas Transtromer, Streets in Shanghai, Poetry, sunbathing, Central Park

Illustration from YTMND.

MOMMY! I WANT MOMMY!

(here I am!)

NO! NOOOOOOO! I WANT DADDDYYYYY!

(ok, he’s standing right there; parents switch positions)

NOT DADDY, MOMMY!

(well, Daddy is the one who is here right now. Would you like robot pajamas tonight?)

NOT THE ROBOT PAJAMAS – THE SHARK PAJAMAS! I WANT THE SHARK PAJAMAS!

(the shark pajamas, buddy?)

THAT’S WHAT I S A I D: THE SHARK PAJAMAS!

(parent begins dressing child in shark pajamas)

NO! I WANT THE ROBOT PAJAMAS ON!

(parent and child together): AHHHHHHHHRRRRGGGGGHHHHHH!

Another day ends in tears at the writing to survive household. Maybe our three-year-old son is developing neural networks at incredible rates and his thoughts are pulling him in different directions. Perhaps he is experimenting with control – how much does he have? How will we, the beleagured parents, react to his cries of frustration? It’s normal (right??), but exhausting, and patience-trying, and sometimes it’s hard to see the humor in it all.

Bath time last night was a screamfest. I wasn’t there – baths are generally my husband’s responsibility – but I could hear every outburst. I finally realized what it reminded me of: my son was channeling the long-dead 80s comedian Sam Kinison.

Here is a little taste of my current home life, minus the lunges and hair pulls, with a very young-looking, relatively thin Kinison on the David Letterman show. The comedian was known, as Wikipedia puts it, “for his extremely vitriolic humor” and can be offensive, so viewer beware.



writing to survive – where one day you can read about Gertrude Stein and Edgar Allen Poe, and the next you can watch Sam Kinison.

Now you know about my tasteless side.

Tags: Sam Kinison, preschooler, tantrums

Tags: crushes, Columbus, school, Morphine, dreams, Bertie Wooster, Holly cole, P.G. Wodehouse

Tags: writing prompt, DC

Tags: birthdays, The Birthday Party

Tags: Music, Neighbornator, jazz, Comments

Tags: writing, New York, existential angst

Tags: grandfather, job

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.

Tags: family, Pets, Kevin

Greetings from scenic Cambria!

We're on a road trip down to the L.A. area, to visit my father-in-law. This morning we drove out past San Simeon out to see if we could find elephant seals.

We did!

More later. I have friends' blogs to catch up with, too.

Tags: travel

Tags: writing, secrets, storytelling

Tags: Columbus, OJ Simpson, child neglect

Tags: dreams, existential angst, crushes

Tags: driving

Tags: filthy lucre

Our landlord and Dieter were tight, friends from when she lived in our house. The fence contains two remnants of their relationship: a double-doored gate connecting the yards and a 2x2-foot window. The thick, beveled glass offers a view of birch and bamboo, visual access to the back corner of Dieter’s world. It's a sideways glance, no eye contact necessary, thank goodness. The gate came with a shiny new padlock. We’ve never bothered to remove the key, so there it dangles, a symbol of hope gone sour, of potentials never realized.

I was thinking about our poor neighborly relations -- where did we go wrong? -- when the dog nosed me in the thigh. Oh yeah. Time for a walk. I put my son in the back carrier, leashed Nora, and walked out into frenetic Birdland preparations. The Neighbornator family was bringing in more foodstuffs. I put on my friendly face.

“You’re coming tomorrow?” Dieter asked, his tone light. As we passed his dog, Nora growled and lunged, putting on her vicious cur act. She’s insecure and totally harmless, though you’d never know from her bark. I pulled on the leash. "Nora! No!" My son buried his face in my back. Dieter observed our little drama with a poker face.

With Nora subdued, I got back to the conversation. “Coming?” I asked blankly.

He seemed surprised. “I gave you an invitation! Are you sure? Didn’t we talk about this? It must have been your husband. Ja, that’s it! I talked to your husband about it a few weeks ago.”

I shook my head. Nein.

“I am sure I talked to him about it. Ja, I remember ... Oh," he interrupted himself, realizing the futility of this line of thought. "Ja. There will be music of all kinds! It starts at 1:00 and goes on all day. Invite all your friends!” Dieter was a little flustered.

I tried to be nice about it, to muster up a smile or some polite enthusiasm. We had just gotten back from a trip to the East Coast. Everyone was jet-lagged and sleep-deprived. My husband and I were in the middle of a marital mess. Given I could hear this man’s dinner conversation, what would an all-day jazz party sound like? An all-day jazz party that started at my son's nap time?

Saturday, September 29th 2007 was a beautiful day. The sky was cloudless and the air dry and warm. A light breeze ruffled the leaves in the trees, a pleasant sound, easy on the ears. At 10:30 a.m., in a yard hemmed in on all sides by houses, in a yard of perhaps 500 square feet, in a yard next door, it started. “Testing, testing, 1-2-3.” Someone was testing a microphone. Attached to an amplifier. Attached to speakers.

We were doomed.

At 1:00 p.m. sharp the warm-up act started. Gospel. This was followed by a traditional jazz quartet. At some point a pianist pounded out some classical music (was that Dieter's son? The one who kept on butchering "Ain't No Mountain High Enough"? If so, he had improved.) Then an R&B band took the stage, followed by a nod to Thelonius Monk.

During the intermissions, my husband and I would look at each other: was this it? But it kept on keeping on. The pauses were just long enough for equipment changes. We watched as vans pulled up and spilled out musicians and instrument cases, the next group on the marquee getting in line. We listened for the appreciative applause at the end of each solo. We looked up the Berkeley city code on amplified music. Dieter was well over his four hour limit.

From our backyard, the music was loud. Very, very loud. No wonder Dieter didn’t understand most of what I said: he was probably half-deaf from years of noise exposure, Pete Townshend without the guitar. The animals were agitated. Nora paced back and forth until she found refuge in the bathroom, while the cats would scratch at the back door to be let out, only to rush back into the house with flattened ears and disgusted expressions. My son skipped his nap. And the bands kept on coming.

Our last escape from the wall of sound was at 8:30 p.m.. Hoping to gain back sanity lost, hoping that our son would finally fall asleep, we went for a drive up in the hills. No one said a word as the car wound up steep inclines, pushed through eucalyptus-scented air to a quiet, dark place with a view. It was a surprisingly clear night and we could see San Francisco. We watched lines of cars snake across the Bay Bridge, felt wonderfully insulated from the sounds of engines and car horns, saxophones and vocalists. Our son was asleep. Time to go home. Surely the whole mess was over by now.

But it wasn't.

It seems funny now, funny that we came home to a Mexican band singing La Bamba, complete with horn section and what sounded like clog dancing. It was the most raucous gig of the day. It was almost 11 p.m. When would the madness end?

And then it just ended. As the song wound down, the crowd whistled and stomped, screamed for an encore. Ten hours of incredible music, well-performed, well-appreciated, and very loud, and they wanted more. It was not to be. Jazz Fest 2007 was over.

The hordes slowly dispersed. We brushed our teeth and went to bed.

For several months, we barely looked at Dieter, whom we christened The Neighbornator. We didn't confront and he didn't apologize. There were no arguments about the event or the noise level, just bitten tongues and imagined amusing scenarios, all with the self-centered surgeon as an object of ridicule, his accent exaggerated and his mannerisms cartoonish. We've gotten some good laughs out of it.

For Jazz Fest 2008, we'll be out of town.

Tags: Neighbornator, jazz

Continued ...

Tags: Neighbornator, jazz

Tags: wasting time, writing

Tags: librarian, job, blog redesign

Tags: sick kid, insomnia, coffee, sleep

Tags: sick kid, housewife, wasting time, writing

Tags: emotional striptease

First, C got sick. Then H developed the same cold. When C gets sick, he sleeps like the baby he once was: poorly. Also violently, with lots of tosses and turns and kicks. When H gets sick, he snores more. My cold symptoms started on Tuesday, the same day C developed pink eye, guaranteeing that daycare was a no-go for Wednesday. Babysitter doesn't want pink eye either. Finally, after the first night of good sleep in five nights, yesterday C decided to skip a nap. I have pink eye for the first time since third grade. And I've spent most of his nap time today cleaning up in preparation for the babysitter (at least his pink eye went away).

Tags: sick kid, sleep

Tags: writing

Tags: fiction, reading

Tags: sleep, insomnia