Imaginary Bicycle

Moving . . .

2011-06-05T23:27:00.000-07:00

I've exceeded my photo quota for Blogger and am reduced to writing in just black and white. Since this is no better than speaking without hand-movement, I've decided to switch over to WordPress.

In other words, I will be riding my Imaginary Bicycle now only over at http://www.imaginarybicycle.wordpress.com/, which used to be my all-biking blog ("Dream Cycle") but which will heretofrom be known simply as "Imaginary Bicycle" and will now, in these hard economic times, consolidate into an all-service, unreliable and highly random ramble through whichever cycles of life happen to have me in their toils.

And I tell you this so you can come, too.

Can you really deny yourself the sight of cows with pedicures?

singular plurals

2011-04-02T18:13:00.001-07:00

a pair

a trio

These girls contend that some identities are more than numerical.

a trio (try again)

The earnest apple believes it's all within.

FEBRUARY 32, 2011 - the end

2011-03-04T19:59:00.000-08:00

How fitting, Thou drollest of Stage Directors, to call me out today for one more dove release.

why eye . . . must change my life

Okay, homing pigeon. Not the sign of inspiration winging in, but that common bird, hardy and resilient with a useful trick of knowing how to come home - and yes, I get the significance there. (I am willing to be Thy pigeon, if Thou wilt plant in me a sure way home.) A pigeon made dove by word alone : To conclude this service, this pure white dove will be released as a symbol . . .

"You and your symbols," is what my friend said when recently I, forgetting myself, waxed ecstatic describing the shabby but grace-full, fox-trotting middle-aged couple I saw enact the lightness and forbearing unity that is one kind of marriage. She was shaking her head at me like I made these things up myself.

why eye . . . still dream of flying

But did I do this? Did I arrange the plot so neatly? Did I set out to begin and end this long, overlong, stretched-over-two-years-long, who-am-I-and-where-am-I-going scene like this? I did not.

Pigeons and funerals? Not my doing.

I'm just catching Thy joke. Appreciating Thy sly wit.

why eye . . . remember I have wings

Because Thou knowest it was that long-ago funeral-bird-fiasco that drove me to begin this blog in the first place. As an incident too perfectly apt to my situation. An outward picture of an inward truth.

Only Thou and I remember how much I needed an Imaginary Bicycle, some un-ordinary vehicle, to help me to recover all those too-soon departing ~~doves~~ ~~pigeons~~ doves. My fledgling chicks, my long-flown ambitions.

I nodded Thy direction last month, when in January (#12) I was called out of the blue, after two years, to once again release another "dove" at a funeral. I acknowledged it as a sentence remitted, a curse undone, a silly but symbolic second cosmic chance

why eye . . . am not my cage

When nothing went wrong, I felt the holding pattern I've been stuck in - for lo, these two too-many years - was maybe breaking up, that the filibuster was maybe hemming and hawing into his handkerchief, going hoarse at last.

I held a laugh of release inside my chest last month (feeling inside something had finally died, something about to be reborn) while I watched, trying to keep my face suitably sober, after saying my magic words and putting the renamed pigeon-now-dove into their hands, as two tear-softened gray-haired brothers together tossed their dove into the air.

Surrounded by sadness, I was glad to feel that maybe my cycle was grinding into action once again.

why eye . . . have flown

Today the grieving family couldn't decide who should release the bird. "Would you?" they asked.

I held the bird in my own hands. Felt beneath my fingers the eager feathers, the certain strength within. Feeling inside mysef, the eager heart, the greedy mind, the glowing prospect of going back to school once more.

With mourners all around me, I -- who am no longer mourning -- swung my clasped hands up, jumping a little up onto my toes, watching this feathered hopeful creature take to the sky.

I stood a long moment, with all the other upturned faces, witnessing that lovely bird wing her way unhesitantly home.

And I just have to say, Nicely played, Maestro.

FEBRUARY 31, 2011 - what I told them

2011-03-03T18:33:00.000-08:00

What mi amiga said: "You can just go and totally reinvent yourself. Do not even look back."

What my dad said: "It's about time."

What my mom said: "Don't you think this is what it's been about - not anyone else, just you not wanting to end up a querulous old lady?"

What YoungSon said, after laughing, his face making all its sweet crinkles, because I'm swooping around hoom-hooming a manic rendition of Phantom of the Opera - which has, I hope, very little to do with my news: "That's cool, Mom. Will you be gone when I come home from school?"

What Middlest said: "Yay! I'm so happy for you!"

What Fritz said: "So we can meet for lunches. How long is it going to take? Because we'll need to set that much aside."

Because this is what I told them.

And now I'm telling you since - just now - the word came through that all the official prerequisite flotsam has been nailed down. So when I come back in April I will be talking like this. Or trying to.

(Now back to the swooping and hoom-hooming)

FEBRUARY 30, 2011 - taking questions

2011-03-02T20:44:00.000-08:00

Take One

What are you doing here?

I'm trying to write. At home the phone rings, the piles of gravel mutter, the second coat of paint in the bathroom whines for attention. Also the dog. While the same sad array of disappointed books and obdurately unlucky rocks stare back at me. I can be here. Dinner is already bubbling away: beans, fifteen varieties of. The laundry: quelled. The paperwork: up-to-date. Everyone who needs to be fed or cheered - or fed and cheered - in my immediate purview has been seen to.

What are you doing here?

I'm watching sea gulls fly across a patch of blue sky. And tons and tons of water flow west, north, northwest. Dripping from the sky, dripping down out of local watersheds in hundreds of small cascades and flowing now to empty itself into the wide immensities that are Ocean. And I'm watching an old lady in a crocheted cap - a black beanie with variegated neon seams - totter up to the rail overlooking the river. She fusses about in her pocket, wipes her face with a kleenex, totters away.

What are you doing here?

I'm sipping orange mint tea from a thermos. I'm eating a half-sandwich, one slice whole wheat: folded over, peanut butter: 100% and unadulterated. And peapods. And stunted carrots. I have an apple waiting. I am so very stuck in this age and place and socioeconomic profile, sitting here in my soccer-mom van at the water's edge.

What are you doing here?

I am trying to write something and crossing out lines like ~~the heart of what really matters~~ and ~~the thread of light in this mazy murk~~ and meanwhile my mind keeps wandering away to that article from Sunset (June 1993) in the waiting room at the DMV about braising/deglazing and now I'm thinking how a clutch of yellow onions in beef broth/with balsamic, respectively, would be rather divine if stirred (with a little garlic) into those 15 varieties of beans. And then maybe some smoked paprika? a bit of sage? Crumbled bacon. And collards cooked up in a bit of the grease to go along with.

What are you doing here?

I'm looking/ not looking at the young lovers who have wandered over to the gazebo down on the grassy shore. Their hands in each other's pockets. They lean into each other. They read each other's faces like everything they'll ever need is written right there. They ought to be in school this time of day. Or working. I'm trying not to remember what they look like. I don't want to recognize them later - or more probably just her - months from now at the food bank, big-bellied and abandoned.

What are you doing here?

I'm trying to shape a life I can live with. I'm trying to balance in and out, dark and water - which is so egregiously self-plagiarism, too utterly obscure and private metaphor that I might as well just say I'm aspiring to be the Telescope's Apprentice and have done with any wish to communicate clearly.

What are you doing here?

I don't know.

Take Two

I wrote a poem once. So long ago, it seems like someone else wrote it.

What the Telescope Hears

Channel for light, heavenly witness, what wouldn't I
give to see like you, forever
emptying your eye.

You scan the void with such aplomb,
gather light, reflect. I clown around
scrabbling in borrowed clothing,

my goatskin suitcase packed
with worn-out constellations. Spectator
pumps Andromeda wore,

Orion's studded belt, the Virgo's wig
and flowered caftan. I am so broken
down into question-

answer, mix-and-match coordinates -
still hoping to be seen through, still
yearning to be taken

in, absorbed by all that isn't
there: black holes, dark matter. O
you who see

it all: help me to the right ascension,
to the arc of declination where I
can give up every mask

and see the room
where stars dissolve and spin themselves
from dust. O deaf

and blind but filled
with light — heaven’s laughter in particle
waves — show me the way

between in and out, dark and water.
Let me see it floating to the lens: sudden
planet, white apple, pomegranate.

What does it mean?

It means I'm still not there yet.

FEBRUARY 29, 2011 - what? you didn't realize there was a Leap Day this year?

2011-03-01T20:05:00.000-08:00

How about a Leap Week?

The end of the month is upon me. In fact, we could say (thanks to a major power outage) that the End of the Month is been and gone, hit and run, abscondido. That it is the First of the Month now squalling and mewling for attention out in a basket on the front step.

We could say that. Or we could say February is far too short when among friends. We could, actually, consider today February 29th. We could decide that for once, February gets its full complement of 30 days hath September . . . even an all the rest get thirty-one. In fact, considering the amount of things I find I need to tell you before slipping back behind my vow of silence, we may need to stretch this month to a record thirty-two days.

Couldn't we? Actually, we could.

So, since the first of the month (which is still February remember?) I've been carrying around notes I wrote on the fly after one day at the Food Bank.

For weeks I've kept coming back to my little book and its quick scratches, trying to shape scribbles into something postable, trying to tease out some interesting angle, or shadow of insight - because something here mattered immensely to me:

Last Monday I worked at the HELP Pantry - unless that stands for Hunger Eradication League Pantry in which case I worked at the HEL Pantry. Which would be unfortunate. But a good sight warmer. However, it was achingly cold, so I suspect it stands for Help Everyone Live Properly Pantry. Or the Higher Eating Levels Project Pantry.

Anyway, as I was saying . . .

Though I never actually did say. I never actually got beyond playing around with what I wasn't saying, never put shape to the telegraphic notes I've carried around with me in the little moleskine notebook that I carry everywhere so that I am never prevented from scribbling down recipes copied from magazines in waiting rooms or meditational maunderings or, shockingly often, taking dictation from the unsuspecting who speak interestingly in my presence.

I have from a child upwards gathered small rocks. Overlooked treasures. And this habit of collecting the things that people say is the same habit. Check the pockets of my coats, the side pockets of my car, my recipe box, window sills, inside the covers of my books - everywhere: pinecones, bizarrely shaped pebbles, little rocks with intriguing glitters, scraps of paper, 3x5 cards of sketchy monologue, torn-open envelopes with snatches of other people's conversation scribbled on the back. Small undervalued delights.

I wanted to tell them to you. I was going to set the scene . . .

. . . how I breezed in, in a hurry as I so often am. How I greet the grim-faced helmet-haired lady and the pale young man beside her: his slicked-back 1920s poet's coiff and curly spurt of chin-hair, the heavy chain hanging out of his pocket. How even before I say anything they are wary, watchful, on guard against me, anyone, everyone. I won't know why until I hear the whole story later in the day of how the absentee I'm covering left in a huff in the middle of last week's shift.

"Hi," I introduced myself, brisk and bright, "Are you working the desk?"

The old lady bristles, "I usually work desk," drawing herself up to do battle, "Unless you have some Reason you need to? Really though it's much too heavy for me in the back room, filling the boxes - "

"No, no, perfectly fine. Just wanted to know where I'm needed." Other days there are some volunteers who find the alphabetizing a little onerous, and are glad for me to relieve them, though thankfully I do not suggest this might be the case with her. But my tone is still too bustling, and I can see the feathers are not unruffling.

So I step back to the warehouse, catch my breath, stroll around the shelves - to all appearances checking supplies but really just getting quiet. And then come back in.

And feel glee rising in me. Because this is something I know how to do. It's a pity (or maybe a blessing?) that I don't know how to make this knack, this whatever it is - pay.

But what joy in watching the transformation! As faces lose their tightness, eyes relax, open wider, begin even to shine sometimes, and twinkle. Those intriguing pebbles full of fool's gold. And I'm the fool that gathers them up like best treasure.

I was going to tell you how the thaw took place. How she at length reveals she's been a nurse - her nursing degree at Missoula whose campus we both admire for its clean, wide brightness. While she talks, the crisp white nurse's cap almost shimmers into its place on her head and I can see how her clean silvery cut still curves up in expectation of that badge of hygiene and progress. The young man, who it turns out is her grandson, asserts and I agree that nurses in his grandma's day were certainly lovely beings.

He loves to talk, swoopingly, dramatizing as he tells it - airing the heat from his collar and fanning his slender face, "Grandma has showed me her yearbook. Oh oo-wee! yes, they don't make nurses like that any more. Now they all look like they're from California."

His sad and scornful tone when he pronounces the name of our neighbor state makes me laugh out loud. Which you may not understand unless you've had to live too much in the neighboring shadow of that unreflecting, water-guzzling. self-proclaimed capital of the world. . . . Or, I suppose, if you happen to be Canada or Mexico . . .

But that's another tangent.

I wanted to tell you every utterly well-scripted, self-revelatory thing they said: trenchant commentary on the undeserving poor ("Drank his breakfast, he did. Almost knocked me out. Did you catch whiff of him?") - which explains the grimness with which she faces off with some of the clients.

Even if she says nothing, I can tell which ones she has no use for even before her grandson tells me why.

Though he does tell me why -- and so gorgeously: "So he's leaning up against the fridge like he was the cat's tuxedo and hectoring Grandma . . .

(who says "hectoring" any more? And I'm seeing the sleekest Cary Grant of cat-kind.)

. . . but when they give Grandma a hard time I can't abide that. I was about to give him a fat lip and would too if I wasn't working here. Lucky for him he didn't just quite cross the line."

He squares his slender shoulders. Translucent skin and an utterly refined profile, twisting his beardlet as he talks until it curls up like a pale candle flame. Grandma looks at him purringly, pleased to be defended retrospectively.

Though it doesn't keep him from comparing haggis favorably to Grandma's Lenten fish.

Her only recourse is to counter with blood sausage: "My dad used to butcher a couple of hogs and hang them whole. Then he'd send word to the Austrian ladies who'd come and catch up every last bit of the blood. They'd work it and work it - with their hands! - while it was cooling down so it wouldn't coagulate. It would surely make our stomachs turn, my brother's and mine, watching them."

I love it all - the disgusted expressions of the pigtailed girl she once was fleeting across her wrinkled face, the nurse's easy and precise pronunciation of "coagulate."

They know the stories of most everyone who comes through the door. And do not generally approve of any of them.

"And so crabby!" they comment as one old grump approaches our door.

They tell me about the regular scams and outrageous demands of the ungrateful and indigent. I make myself remember they are choosing to volunteer here, faithfully week after week, not the erratic pinch-hitting I do these days. But I notice when I shake my head with her and then sigh, "Lots of sad stories come through that door, don't they?" that her face softens.

I wanted to tell you how he described sitting down at dinner at one of his friends': "it's like Asgard - " (I'm nodding, thinking that sounds familiar? Famous restaurant? Or is that the Astoria?) " - like sitting down with Thor and Freya," he finishes with complete unself-consciousness, as if everyone is on first names with the Norse gods. And his love of all things bike - both motor and pedaled. "Don't you ride an old school cruiser?" he asks me.

"I do."

"I thought I'd seen you around town. I love those old school rides." He waxes eloquent on the lost values incarnated in Vintage. How it's more human, more full of sweat and courage. His close-set green eyes are freshly clear.

He starts to trash-talk the yuppie-riders who clog the roads on organized rides in their skintight Lycra - though, when I laughingly admit I might be one of them, with a gracious wave of his hand absolves me of any guilt by association.

By the end of our four hour shift, she's confiding that this is a hard town to make friends in.

"It can be," I say. Because I can see how it could be.

And she tells me, a little shyly, how she hopes we end up working together again. "Oh me, too." And I tell her what a pleasure it has been for me, too, talking with her and her grandson.

Because this is one of my deepest pleasures -- this connection that can be made. And that's what I wanted to tell you.

But I never did.

Instead, throughout all this month it was to my own marginal questions I kept coming back, " . . . it's a pity I don't know how to make this knack, this whatever it is, pay" because I realize what I really want to do with the rest of my life is wander around getting people to talk to me. That's it.

But do what with it?

And also, the exhilaration I feel - which is unlike the deadened and damped down way I feel after a day . . . doing other things.

How I feel incredibly alive (filled, fed - this grey little town we live in, this cold rainy day - bright and vivid and deeply dear) but also chagrined - who is this easy, open, laughing, helpful stranger and what is she doing in my body? And why won't she come home and talk with Fritz this way for me?

It's these questions I keep turning back to whenever I mean to write up these notes.

Instead of shaping this post, I keep writing something else for somewhere else or getting up and leaving without writing, asking myself - why can't I make it pay?

Until I begin to ask instead - Well, why can't I?

And instead of - Who is this person and why won't she come home and talk to my loved ones for me?, I ask at last - Well, why doesn't she?

I keep asking myself that.

Until I think that I can. Until she does.

Which is, my dears, something else I wanted to tell you.

in different lights

2011-02-24T22:22:00.000-08:00

1)

Finally the weather has turned cold and we are promised snow . . . maybe. But no one has been complaining at this stretch of unusual sunshine instead.

I never valued sunshine much, growing up in its relentless brightness, insistent clarity, bossy cheer. No scope for the imagination. Gray days - when they came, which was rarely - full of heavy clouds and a kind of plummy moistness in every breath, tingling with repressed lightning - promised, by withholding and obscuring behind fog and bluster, so many mysterious - read: superior - possibilities.

It's only now, at the rainy northwestern edge of my life, that I can welcome sunny days. I still love gray days, charged as they are with portent and urgency. But I have room in me now to feel glad for the dumb goodness of sunshine when it comes.

2)

- Did you hear what Z was saying? Middlest asks me, Z being a friend of hers who's been over lately, regularly, as he makes his way through his own changes.

- No, sorry. I was busy. What was he saying?

- He was telling me how sweet you and Dad were together.

- We are very sweet of course.

- He said you were watching that thing about families and both got teary-eyed and then you leaned over and kissed Dad on the top of his head.

- I suppose we did do that.

- He says he's always wanted that. The way you are together. He loves watching you. He's always been afraid he'll never have that.

- You'll have to reassure him that if we can have it, probably almost anybody can.

3)

If we made a talking action-figure of Fritz, it would

be permanently crouched in bike-position
come with non-removable helmet
say, "The hills are your friends! The hills are your friends!"

So many times has Fritz said this, that we've all found ourselves building our lives around the saying. Calculus, said Eldest when it threatened to do her in, - it's difficult, but it's being hard? That isn't a reason to quit.

It's just a hill.

And I know how to climb hills.

I made Fritz laugh during prayers the other day. This is my gift, making him laugh when he's decided to be serious. We were praying together, just the two of us. When I gave thanks for our "supple marriage," he let out a startled snort-cough and afterwards, gleamed at me over the top of his glasses, grinning still a little reluctantly, Supple?

- Yes. Don't you think so? Isn't it amazing when you think of all we put it through and still it's strong. Supple, not brittle. Aren't we lucky?

Later: talking with our biking friends, a couple married a dozen or so years longer, also juggling mostly grown children and diminished parents. When I tell how Fritz laughed at supple, the husband lets out a shout of laughter, Sounds like a tough old piece of leather gnawed down into subjection! While she laughs, risingly. They turn to each other and begin to nod.

He says, Isn't that the truth?

She says, I'm sure it's been me.

He says, My fair share.

They laugh, looking into each other's faces, touching each other's shoulder, ear, tip of the hair, sleeve. Very tenderly. Laughing.

(more tulips here)

good enough to be going on with

2011-02-23T10:55:00.000-08:00

Things I Will Stop Doing Sometime Soon

#1. I will stop disrespecting myself.

Yeah. And I guess that's enough of a list for now.

Maybe we could even break it down into tinier steps ~

I - as in me, remember me? loyal sidekick all these years of mortality? That friendly girl in the mirror with the sturdy-looking hands? Bridge-person. Honeybee-person. Bright little boat bobbing along. Remember me, my soul?
will - which means "can" which means "may" which means "you have permission" which means "why not"?
stop - as in leave off, cease from persisting, let go of the kite string, no longer hold the line, no longer hold the lie, shrug off, surge past . . . maybe there are even more verbs waiting out there once we get past these?
disrespecting - This is the tricky part. We don't mean stop caring, but do stop carrying burdens, can't you? Stop crouching. Stop cutting down to size. (Whose size are you aiming for anyway?) Stop apologizing to the world at large for who you are and what your life is - haven't you over and over done what you did with the best you had in you at the time? And when you haven't - well, you haven't. But you know where to turn to turn back to the path, how to learn how to mend what's worth mending, how to carry forward what will carry you through. That's good enough to be going on with. And while we're at it, do stop apologizing to your younger self - she didn't know what life was bringing, she likes you anyway, she's still here holding your hand. Start talking to the wise old woman you're going to be. Let go and turn away from the things you do that offend your soul - latch on to the graces and blisses that make you feel alive - which is what repentance is meant to mean. Live in this body: respect its needs for the hill-work, for early sleep and early rise, feed yourself as you would feed a cherished recuperating guest. Grant this mind access to the work it needs. We mean something like that. We think. It's anyway a place to start.
myself - Or just move the period over one word, eh? Just stop disrespecting. Loose myself to run in the meadow and enjoy the promises with all the other children.

So what's so hard about that?

tongues of love, the lettered heart, and other bad translations

2011-02-15T10:53:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, Valentine's Day, Fritz brought me white tulips - unos tulipanes blancos. They are even prettier pronounced in Spanish. New sounds to mean the same old thing, tongue and teeth shaping themselves around the unfamiliar words until throat and mouth themselves become the flower - la flor.

This flower-giving is uncharacteristic of Fritz, though not out of character. Especially as no words were offered, just flowers, with a silence which is a corrective, I believe, to the too many words said lately.

(When I am an expert in eldercare, I will write a chapter with a useful chart of all the words that ought not to be said. Especially by those who should be taking care. I will know what they are, because I will have said them all.)

Without opening his lips, Fritz handed me white tulips. And I was touched, moved even, though our hands barely brushed. It was, if you like, I like to think, a kind of speaking in tongues. A purer kind of language.

Or at least, less open to bad translations.

A mother and a daughter are driving in the car:

- I'm sorry. I'm interrupting you,

but I just can't stop feeling this anger at everything.

- So scream.

And so she did.
Suddenly. And for several seconds.

A sound frightening, bereft and furious.

Studying Spanish, I find something is happening to my inner brain. It's like I'm closing in on some deeper definition to words I thought I already knew. As if another word for the same things allows a triangulation of the meaning.

She hadn't known she could make that sound.
Though still she kept a steady hand on the steering wheel.

Then cried into her free hand,

little huffing, breathless, exhausted sobs.

The daughter said nothing,

made short soft pats on the mother's back.

- Thank you for making it safe for me to do that.

- Glad to be there.

- I don't feel so angry anymore.

- That's good.

- Am I going crazy?

- Not at all.

- If anyone had been driving past they would have thought so.

- They would have thought you were singing.

Very energetically singing.

Which sets them off, mother and daughter,

into whoops of gulping laughter.

There are tears in their eyes.
The daughter so wise, the mother so confused.

But shouldn't it be the other way around?

Or as if translating from one language to a second to a third helps to plot out the actual dimensions of the truth. The truths our words approach only as approximations. Like playing that addictive Minesweeper. Where you click-click-click on empty squares around the hidden target - which is a bomb that will blow you up and out of the game. Each safe click turns the empty square over, reveals a number: how many bombs border that safe square. Eight is the maximum number of potential bombs bordering any one square, because a square has only that many sides and corners. It's simple. Lucky clicks will sweep out whole areas that are safe and free of bombs, and bordering those open areas more safe squares that helpfully give you the number of bombs nearby - so that you can avoid them - after you flag them as dangerous.

It is of course about something that barely matters.
A third thing that stands in for the closer issues.
A man and a woman stand at the head of the stairs:

- So let's get rid of the dog then.

-Oh, yes. Why don't we, that's a great solution.

And the next day, standing in the same spot,
locked in the same unspeakable question:

- I've called the animal shelter and for fifty dollars

they're prepared to look at taking the dog.

- What? That's not what I need.
You're not listening to me.
You haven't been listening to me.

The man makes his way down the stairs, and in the background

their son begins to drip silent tears

squeezing out of his tightly folded face:

The son says:

-No, it's okay. If you have to take her away,it's okay.

If it's too hard to take care of everything.

Why is it so hard to take care of everything?

For example, take la escoba. In Spanish it means broom. Since learning it, the word will not sit still in my mind. What? what? I keep asking it - there's a word it reminds me of, what is it? Rushes, reeds, scouring - escoriating - that's not a word - what? Excoriate, excoriating - as in "The candidates have publicly excoriated each other throughout the campaign" - is that it?

Probably that's what I was thinking of.

Though excoriate is from the Latin ex (off) + corium (skin, hide) - in other words, "to flay," "to strip the skin from." And escoba is from the Latin scopa (which means, unsurprisingly, "broom") and enters English only as the scientific term scopa from the Latin scopae (plural, 'twigs, branches/sprigs tied together, i.e. broom') and refers to

a small brush-like tuft of hairs on some insects, especially that on which pollen collects on the leg of a bee

Not so much scouring out, after all, as gathering up and carrying in to nourish the hive.

I'm chagrined to recognize a familiar pattern in my characteristically dire mistranslation.

A mother and a daughter are walking out of the local WartMall:

-You know how Mila says people always smile and talk to you
more than she's ever seen.

-Mmm?

-Well, that's why. How you asked the check-out clerk if she had a dog

and what she did to keep them calm after being spayed.
Because your dog had you at your wits' end.

How you really wanted advice from her.

- Hmh.

- You talk to everyone like they're real people.
I think most checkers have people treat them like they're servants.
But you really care what they have to say.

- I just don't think.
I open my mouth no matter where I am.
Or who I'm talking to. I have no appropriate filters.

- You don't see differences.
You take the world with an open heart.
I think it's good to be so open-hearted.

- But better probably to be more close-mouthed.

Silence is golden. Discretion is the better part of valor. How would you translate that into, say, Spanish? A buen ententedor pocas palabras bastan. One word to the wise is sufficient?

- Do you know what that dog means to him

right now?

- You said it was too much for you.

- I said I was overwhelmed.

- You agreed it was a good idea.

- ! I was being ironic.

Or take the Spanish phrase la carta amatoria. I know this means "love letter" but how can it be just that? Isn't Magna Carta booming in the background? I want la carta amatoria to mean Love's Charter, declaring the open ways and rights of love, spelled out in sections and articles. With room for amendments.

I want la carta amatoria to be an Anatomy of Love, a doctor's chart with every vein and muscle fibre of the heart labeled in unquestionable Latin.

- You had too much to do.

I found you a solution.

- Look, we could just as well say,

Let's put your mother in a nursing home

as, Let's dump the dog off at the pound.

Translating, see?

into terms he'd understand?

Isn't carta a word for map? I want la carta amatoria to mean a kind of Map of Love - the kind sailors make once they're safe returned, with all the hazards they've escaped inked in carefully: the squally reefs where they weathered storms, where their ship's helm was splashed but never swamped, the places where monsters be and kraken writhe thoroughly charted, tight corners they managed nonetheless to sail past, the rocks where they did not founder after all. And all the peaceful harbors clearly marked.

Something so clear, it doesn't need translation.

guest post: Temple Grandin

2011-02-11T18:23:00.000-08:00

posted by YoungSon

To be a hero I think you need some special qualities. First, I think you should have a want to do the thing you're doing. Second, I think you should not be bothered by your looks overly much. Third, to be a hero you should be able to work hard. Last of all, you shouldn't give up if people think your invention is useless and never going to work.

My hero, or at least one of them, is Temple Grandin. She had autism but was a born genius. The great thing she did was rebuild the whole structure of slaughterhouses making it much more comforting for the animals. She paid attention to what cows naturally did. She loved cows and said that we were responsible for being as gentle as possible to them if we were going to raise them. If we didn't raise cattle then they would just be rare species kept in zoos.

Many people had faith in her project from the very beginning, but others didn't. People made fun of her and taunted her. She kept on working hard though enduring all the insults and found great success. About when she was finished, people started changing their attitude and saw that her plan worked and they could make a profit. They started supporting her and when she finished, most slaughterhouses changed their models and redid their whole factory.

I think Temple Grandin has encouraged me to work harder at the things I like to do. She taught me not to give up as easily as I might have otherwise. I think that helps me to think about my future and get the best life possible. Temple Grandin's mentor was her science teacher. He helped her think about ideas in a different way that led to a more constructive pattern of thinking which helped her to figure out what to do in life. Her teacher helped her until he died. She is my hero because she overcame the challenges of autism and helped our world.

the unexamined life

2011-02-09T17:45:00.000-08:00

Because - On the other hand - it was a happy month, last month was, in its privacy and busy-ness. All those quiet early mornings, all those unreported meals, thoughts that came and went like breezes, every step up and down the hill, things done and said that didn't even get a photo, much less a mention, things that were allowed to flow away and be forgotten.

And maybe what makes me unhappy now is that I've grasped after that flow, paraded its disconnected elements, moments yanked out of their place in the midst of movement into a static and uncomfortable prominence. Maybe it is exactly the killing freeze-frame of reflection, interiority, counsciousness that makes me unhappy. Maybe by writing I stand too much in my own sunshine, blocking my own view.

If I'm to continue writing here, in some way that feeds the soul, is the secret to erase myself? Step aside. Or just ride and cut the commentary? I love, for example, the almost daily posts of Spirit Cloth, a textile artist - mostly visual, glancingly philosophical, focused on her work - with the merest self-referential asides. I love how what she sees shapes what she makes. What she sees is so blessedly outside herself.

I think it is my coiled upon coils of self-reference that I'm wanting to shed. The me in all this.

It has become almost a commonplace, this comment I keep getting -

. . . what you write is so sad. I never realized before you were so sad?

. . . couldn't help but keep reading, it just sucked me in . . . writing is almost haunting, and so full of emotion. Whoa.

. . . it is quite emotional.

. . . the emotions your writing unlocks in me. I've lived a lot of my life being so guarded and little by little I've been able to let go and just feel...although sometimes that's not so convenient - this ability to feel.

. . . Dude, lighten up.

Until I ask myself,  Emotional? What are they on about? Is this sad?  Am I unduly sad? Doesn't everyone ride this same sea? Isn't it what we all know but don't talk about? What better to talk about than this unspoken depth that connects us?

But exhausting on the reader, yes?

Overconscious interiority, this emotionality ~ is that what I find irksome myself in these posts?  The way my own sad-nosed shadow keeps overshadowing whatever I look at. The way working on these posts compels me to turn every rock over to see what squirmy thing is hiding on the underside. And how that squirming makes me feel.

But more irksome still is writing emptily, more lightly and brightly than humanly warranted. And more irksome than that is writing and writing and never getting anywhere new.    Never getting beyond myself.

This is after all a vehicle, this Imaginary Bicycle, meant for going somewhere. But where?

And how?

Or is this just February and too many months of not long enough hours of sunshine? Sunshine? Haven't seen that since the chinook. I should say, not long enough hours of that skywide gray luminence we call Day here in this corner of the woods.

Enough perhaps to make anyone a little too interiorized.

and that was january . . .

2011-02-08T06:36:00.000-08:00

(with footnotes*)
(and endnote**)

{click on pic to embiggen}

*footnotes (or just skip to the end for **endnote)

Blissy sunshine on bedside books (Rumi, Barbara Pym's Excellent Women, and A Blessing on the Moon by Joseph Skibell, each miraculous in their own way). Because I am the birthday girl: a whole morning reading in bed, not these, but Pym's An Unsuitable Attachment and Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee, both miracles of literary clarity and human confusion.
While daughters bend over books and keyboards readying themselves for re-entry into what is now their real life, I contemplate the comforting shapes of containment. As if I could. As if I would really want to. By contrast, the image that stays with me the next day is Eldest, striding into the airport, hair swinging, scarf flung back, laughing over her shoulder at the young man, my friend's son, who happens to be travelling with her. Watching her I am suddenly joyous. And the rest of the day, buoyantly and curiously light and free myself. As if a world were opening up for me somewhere, beyond my expectations. I am in fact immeasurably happy - filled up and overflowing. Happy in a way I haven't been for a long time. Maybe it is the prospect of a whole month ahead of the Unexamined Life?
Tonight we open the last pomegranate of the season - no more until next autumn - Persephone's fruit. Gma W used to send these to me when I was a little girl. She grew them, my mother's mother. It made Demeter's story resonate strangely with me when I read it - knowing pomegranates only as a private fruit no one else ever ate in my 1970's suburb - the well-taped cardboard box that showed up around the end of October.
I do not actually bike (this picture from last week) but I consciously mourn the biking, shivering all day at the unheatable HELP pantry, missing the fine inner fire that warms me for hours afterward when I do put rubber to the road.
Among other things, seeking recipes for galette des rois - Kings' Cake - for tomorrow's last possible day of Christmas - the traditional 12th Night - and the final excuse for leaving up tree and lights to shine as long as possible into these long northern winter nights. I settle on sliced pears and frangipane in a rough puff pastry crust.
Twelfth Night: Whoever gets the fava bean in their piece of cake is king for the evening - YoungSon was sure it would be him.
Reading The Strangest Man: the hidden life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom by Graham Farmelo - at last I can make some kind of rudimentary sense of string-theory and begin to wonder why I am reading lately so many stories of sons and mothers. Not wonder why - notice that.
A long wet walk today - hills for six and a half miles - pain only at the very end. Dog loves the long hilly miles. I am beyond glad to be more and more back on my feet again.
Before family prayers - Fritz will leave the next morning for a half-week away in Arizona for work and already the children begin to miss him.
The Chinook - that weirdly wonderful sudden warmth that comes for a week or two most Januaries. I shovel gravel, mud, and wood chips all day - re-imagining order out of this void and formless while sweating behind the wheel-barrow. YoungSon comes home on his bright yellow school bus and helps rake gravel smooth. We see small improvements. We take a breather, he plays with Dog, I watch them in the sunshine.
Spanish, the study thereof, for beginners.
I have come full circle - Perils with Pigeons Redux- but like most sequels nothing happens except the expected. Dove released, on schedule, and I'm $20 to the good for an hour's standing in the rain at a stranger's graveside. Maybe the curse that set off this bout of blogging in the first place is finally wearing off?
After months (a year? really?) of workmen in the innermost chambers of my house, my domestic powers are returned to me. I would have shuddered to have foreseen how much that matters to me: Ham, Mashed Potatoes with Garden Confetti, Baked Pears.
Police procession for slain chief of police Ralph Painter of Rainier - we stand and watch the cars pass for 45 minutes before making our way to Portland's Union Station to meet a friend who had ridden in on the train.
Winter Ball. The girls cook dinner here, floating candles and flowers in small glass bowls, everything and everyone looks, behaves beautifully.
Our good old Cat takes a turn for the worse. I hear him outside, a pained and horrible mwror, but when I open the door he is lying on his side at the threshold and responds not at all even when we pick him up and carry him to his bed. We bury him a day later up on the hill, by the wild cherry.
To celebrate MLK Day: we Take a Buddy to the Beach. Rain on the way, and we peer anxiously through wet windows, but sunshine (dampish but determined) triumphs at the coast. We see a hang-glider dismount with the setting sun. We climb on the wreck of the Peter Iredale. Son walks Dog. Daughter walks Giraffe (kite) as well as Friend. I walk with Camera. We eat a picnic in the car - pita, hummus, tangerines, peapods. We talk loudly, laughing with the neo-wannabee-hippies in the VW bus parked next to us. We are all happy.
Running for the Hills: growing up on my mother's sheep farm in Wales by Horatio Clare. Another son and his mother, but this mother is not the central spider of Strangest Man but more like the immoderate and tardy mother in Lee's autobiographical Cider with Rosie. (And so I want to identify with her more?) Such a gift to a mother to be seen like this - unsentimentally and yet still with utter fondness.
And at midweek, at the midmost of the month, I step out one morning and realize I am at the other side of the fairy tale's East of the Sun,West of the Moon - that nursery geography for Dreamland. With day and night at either shoulder - moon setting on one side, sun rising on the other side - east of the setting moon, west of the rising sun - going into Day, not Night. So the fairytale is finally set on its head, completed, worked through? Maybe I've finally mastered all the impossible tasks, washed the blood from the shirt, maybe I've worked my way through the troll-queen's castle, have faced her and her machinations down, have cried and sung loud enough to be heard, maybe I've finally saved the prince from his encasing ice and now we can go home? Maybe it's a day newer than ever before.
And so I decide, now that my life is beginning again, to tackle the things that keep me from doing what I want to do, the things I can do something about - such as the weight gain since taking on the caretaking.
Domestic disorder. But this is just the messy part of making progress - in particular, paint remover for the front door.
Also - Training the dog - who is the son's dog in the morning and the evening, but mine in the meantime - the hope is she'll be a nice foot-warmer for the Writer as well as deer-discourager - slash - daily personal trainer with an insatiable enthusiasm for hard hill walks - slash - egregiously ADD pre-schooler frighteningly fixated on unattended wool gloves. We practice heeling - at least one of us does.
I will fix my entire life in fact! I revisit the schedules and schemes from that time of my life when I ran the house instead of it running me - readjust, reassign responsibilities so that I'm not trying to lift this piano alone. Minimal though unavoidable groaning from the crew.
In celebration of their return to regular, scheduled chores, I reprise my role as Breakfast Queen - blueberry pancakes and no one sleeps in this morning. Even oatmeal is not despised when there are apples and raisins and plenty of cinnamon. The minutiae of the mundane - but it is almost frightening to realize how a week of good breakfasts changes all of us. Maybe the secret to happiness really is this small? - solid breakfasts day after day, exercise in the fresh air, a regular eight hours of sleep.
Endorphins!! Ooo! I feel so good! Just like I knew I would! Yes, she went swimming. Yes, she knows she needs this in her life.
Early morning gravel and the start of the restoration of a provisional Eden.
Vegetable dreams - Japanese Black Trifele tomatoes, Rubine brussels sprouts, Veronica castellated broccoli, purple carrots, yard-long red beans, Nero di Toscana kale, Alvaro Charentias melons, winter squash - Sweet Meat, Red Kuri, Marina di Chioggia - and lettuce . . . Dazzle, Montecito, Devil's Tongue, De Morges Braun, Flashy Trout's Back, Drunken Woman Frizzy Headed, Merveille des Quatres Saisons . . .
The utter peace of a day well-spent. Rise wth sunrise. Mid has no school. Together we clean here, cook and clean at Gma's, make copies and grade at Young's classroom, then take Young early from school for basketball practice, teach Mid to drive stick-shift - whiplash!! laughter! - then all of us to Portland for library, look for a Spanish New Testament, and Trader Joe's has unsulphured dried apricots to restock our supply! Singing in the car. Home again, evening, watching Young's choice, swashbuckler Prince of Persia, with a picnic of bread, cheese, steamed broccoli on a blanket on the floor. Private study and early to bed.
Eight miles with the dog - she does well - tongue flapping from her toothy grin as she looks up for approval when she puts herself back in her place at my heel. And then Son's basketball games where he does well - his secret smile while his dad recounts his victories. Joy in their own motion afterwards.
This picture should have been a white crane - my favorite local tutelary being of the air - beating its wings against a background of faded grasses. I saw one, in passing, while in a hurry - and then further down the road the whole flock, feeding amid the blond winter reeds, there were so many they looked at first like snow lying on the marsh - and meant to return and wander the paths there on foot later in the afternoon on my way home. But when I passed again it was dark. I am struck how the camera, while it reveals, also limits not only what we see , but what we will remember. Like writing too.
Success! Dog comes every time I call her throughout the morning - when I let her in, she returns over and over to her Place when reminded,finally settling and sleeping by the side of my desk, then walks the home hill with slack leash all the way down and most of the way up.

**endnote
This is, of course, a whole month's worth of the kind of status update/ personal trivia that is and is not my daily life.

And yes, these short photographed moments are no doubt the ideal form (when posted each day, not dumped like this en masse) for this particular media - a daily log of small events. Isn't that what a blog is "supposed" to be (if we were at all interested in doing what we were supposed to)? It can be an appealing form. My Eldest, for example, publishes a picture a day with minimal blurbage. The window on her world while away at college is priceless to me. I was curious to see what it would look like if I shaped my site this way.

I don't dislike this kind of day-to-day exclamation ~ when others do it. But it makes me feel despairing when I come to post like this myself - day after day of ephemera. It was a happy month - with little reflection, much action, almost no writing. But looking at it now, as a whole, in this form, it feels like a mask, this calendar of photogenic moments - an oppressive display of the costume that already threatens to muffle and suffocate the living body beneath.

No living soul, no wider world to move out into. This is not what I want to be doing.

the recurrent CONFESSION:

2011-02-07T07:15:00.000-08:00

I am a Brevity-addict.

Because I lack it (brevity lowercase) so drastically and because it (Brevity uppercase) so often makes me laugh. And think. At the same time. Without the whole milk/nose thing going on.

Because during January, this last month of breathing rather than blogging, of neither writing (as planned) nor actually much Writing (contra-plan), a month of deeper, more personal revising than I had originally charted out, I couldn't refrain from reading Brevity. In particular its series of brief (of course) pieces on blogging vs. something . . . more . . . worthwhile?

This from January 17th, "The Made-Up Self," will stand for all the rest:

In this interview [culled from The Millions, another website worth your time] he [Carl Klaus, author of a new collection of essays] takes aim at the confessional “me-moir” genre and dismisses the oft-repeated notion that bloggers are somehow modern-day Montaignes.

Kudos to Klaus for holding us to a higher standard.

Full Interview Here and a brief excerpt below:

"Well listen, the differences between Montaigne and bloggers are so manifold that I find it surprising that anyone would even think of comparing them – because they have different agendas and completely different ways of going about writing. For example, Montaigne’s freewheeling style is grounded in an overriding concern with echoing the flow of his thought. Now the bloggers aren’t concerned with that kind of interiority. Their writing is largely concerned with topical subjects of the moment, and they have no consciousness of consciousness."

I lied. And besides, I myself am not necessarily constrained to practice brevity and so ~

This also from January 28th, from a description of sessions of the AWP conference going on this week in the wrong Washington (D.C. not PNW):

R217. Status Update: The Personal Essay in the Age of Facebook. (Jen McClanaghan, Phillip Lopate, Bob Shacochis, Debra Monroe, Jocelyn Bartkevicius, Susan McCallum-Smith) Between the ever-popular tell-all memoir and ubiquitous status updates on websites such as Facebook and Twitter, the confession has never been so popular or so utterly mundane. We know more about each other than ever before and yet little that’s truly intimate or insightful. This panel will discuss the tradition of the personal essay and what it might offer the contemporary reader and writer, namely the opportunity for real insight and reflection.

Of course, there is commentary to each of these posts both on Brevity and The Millions - bloggers who protest they for one (or more) are interested in interiority, in real insight and reflection, they themselves are conscious of consciousness, that they at least are doing more than just reciting the cake recipe of their daily doing, that they are offering uniquely intimate glimpses, valuable reflective views worth the attention of others in the thinking public.

Oh, but aren't we? All?

my own CONFESSION: This Brevity series tugs at my own dissatisfactions with what I'm doing here. I am wearied (again, always) of the form my blog has taken, does take, always threatens to be taking. My private focus (a word that means "hearth" - that most homey heart of the home) that keeps refusing to escape its own smallness.

What began as a way to say something unmuddied by the grasping fingers of time and change, a private writing room where those who would could read, a kind of oratory in the woods, a chamber like Dickinson's where the soul selects her own society, begins to seem to me a lobby. With glossy magazines laid out. Plants that look plastic. The always open invitation to indulge in what - when I write it - becomes the written equivalent of Muzak.

Caught by the pleasure of hearing responses from faraway friends and friendly strangers, I want that response more and more, that eye contact, that small applause.

But that wanting distracts, distorts. Everything I write becomes a self-justification, a bid for sympathy. Time is limited: what I need more is a chambered space - contained, restrained in the way the private journal cannot be - for what is being called variously consciousness - insight - reflection - but which is something more. Which one hopes is something more than those tired, and let's admit it, overused and empty words.

Something. Less solipsistic, more wide. More intimate, less confessional. A way out by way of going in. A way of moving into the clearing. A way of singing in the woods.

All of these terms are unsatisfactory.

I realize I have said all this many times before. Have revised myself. Or meant to. Have been always dissatisfied with what is written here. I realize freshly that I will be dissatisfied, without a doubt, until the day I get it right, the day I no longer need to write?

(Here? Anywhere?)

You don't have to keep reading if the prospect of recurrent dissatisfaction dismays you.

because of the sweet spot

2011-02-03T10:44:00.000-08:00

almost, almost . . .

Here it is, the optimal moment of my day
- el punto dulce -
the hinge my day moves on, the hour that sets the rhythm for whatever I can do within the white space that lies between sunup / sundown.

It is the present corruption of this powerful hour, the seige on this effective capitol of my long day's realm that is part of el porqué when I ask myself, ¿Por qué el rencor?

Porque el punto dulce.

. . . far, far too late

If I'm not writing by the sweet spot of the day, then forget it as pointless. No punto sin el punto dulce. If I waste that sweet spot on errands, meetings, scrubbing, attending to whatnot, then Sayonara to scribbling anything worth the candle. I might as well just go to bed, the writing day over before it begins.

This is of course superstition.

When first starting out, young and freshly determined, hearing some writers explain how they could only write with No.2 pencils sharply sharpened, or only facing south, or only with whatever however it had worked the first time it worked, I decided I could not afford such superstitions.

And yet my superstitions have crept in anyway. For example, I believe it jinxes the writing to talk about it. It puts me off the writing even to have someone ask, "So are you writing today?" And if someone asks me badgeringly about my writing, I can't write at all. If they say, "So what are you writing about? Of course you know what you're writing about. Come on, tell me. You can tell me. I just want to know," I am better off shoveling gravel or cleaning closets.

My closets are mostly all cleaned now.

And I can't afford this superstition any longer.

And as for the sweet spot - I love it that Edith Wharton began every day writing in bed for a few hours - no doubt while trim housemaids in starched cap and apron poked the fire, opened the draperies and brought tea in delicate Messein. You can almost catch the rustle of their silent assiduous bustle in the words with which Wharton finally found a way to populate her page.

But each of us must write out of what and who and where we are. So, my punto dulce has been colonized by blundering settlers who look to a motherland I cannot recognize, nor give allegiance to.

Happily I am a nomadic people.

Up tents and away.

The day is long. We make for ourselves all des puntos dulces we require.

el rencor se sienta sobre el corazon como un sopa pesado

2011-02-02T12:39:00.000-08:00

Reuters: David Gray

"You are my lifesaver," says my friend when we sit down to practice Spanish together.

Shaking off reversals, she had meant to start a new life this January. And then her father died. Her mother, increasingly blind and confused, cannot live alone.

My friend is lean and energetic, adept at finding the best in her possible worlds - the downsized townhouse so much easier to clean than that big house, for example. And taking care of her mother? "But it's a blessing, my cute little mother, she took such good care of me. It's a privilege to take care of her now."

I love listening to my friend's sparkling flow of optimism. I love basking in that affectionate energy.

She clasps my arm, praising a small virtue she thinks I need reminding of.

"This is what I needed, too," I tell her, smiling into her eyes, patting the back of her hand. I have needed not only her bright presence, not just the encouragement of working together to gather language skills (both of us looking still hopefully toward a next possible world).

But the Spanish itself I needed. And not just so I can make up satisfying (not necessarily grammatical) proverbs featuring the always useful sopa.

¡Sí! all this is good.

But I'm finding the sun-drenched mental climate necessary for moving my mouth into Spanish shapes a good remedy to the cloistered soliloquies I otherwise keep muttering, drippingly, in clipped quasi-Victorian-British stanzas.

In place of "Gr-r-r there go . . . " I can roll my tongue around el gorro de baño (which means, innocently, "shower cap"). When faced with this moment's particular "What's the Latin name for 'parsley'?" and all other daily games of 20 questions, I can innerly chant my conjugations ~

hablo, hablas, habla,
hablamos, habláis, hablan

before answering - remembering we all talk - hablamos.

So that more and more behind-beyond the "wise talk of the kind of weather, sort of season, time of year," I'm sending my soul south to all those countries sunny the year round, full of orange trees and bright blue skies and the warmly generous spirit of mi casa es su casa which mi corazón so sorely needs.

not afraid of butterflies

2011-02-01T06:28:00.000-08:00

something sensational (2009)

2011-01-01T04:04:00.000-08:00

You must indulge me . . . but no, there is no must. You may or may not indulge me. That is the beauty of our relationship. I do indulge myself sometimes, like Cecily who knows the Importance of such things:

"I never travel without my diary.
One should always have something sensational to read in the train."

And so I indulge sometimes in wandering back through my own archives, looking for something sensational. I'll be writing (or better, Writing) the odd months this year and so won't be posting regularly in January while I sweat out a good working draft of the Jaron Lanier novel.

It's possible I may pop back in for a word or two in real time if I find I just can't keep myself away from you. But in the meantime, good luck with your own good work - and you're certainly welcome to lurk in the archives. Here's what I've most enjoyed re-reading from long ago 2009 . . .

(click on the titles to read the full posts)

Monday, January 19, 2009 What Daughters Do

I sigh.

"What’s wrong?” says my oldest.

“Oh, just thinking of all the reasons why people wouldn’t like me anyway.”

Stay with me – there’s no reason yet to swoop in with reassurances. Does no one else have these moments of self-pity/loathing/weariness when you wonder how much longer you can count on other people’s forbearance?

And let’s get this into context.

It’s 5:47 a.m. . . .

Sunday, February 9, 2009 Dogsbody

What is true is that she is irreplaceable for me.

Which is amazing.

I have been unreasonably blessed with the friendship of remarkable people – . . . But none of them are her. None of you are. Irreplaceable all of you, I’m afraid, though (please) let’s not separate and see.

. . . "Dogsbody" is the title of what I thought I was going to write – about the time my friend and I, when we were still friends, confused the word dogsbody with godsbody and insights resulting therefrom that seemed to apply to my daughter and the diminished I.

But instead, all I can think of is what a stupid hound the heart is – you try to yell at it and order it back home and it whines and cowers back, until you aren’t looking, then bounds up around your heels again, ears flapping, tongue flapping, so glad to be out on the road with a friend.

Sunday, February 15, 2009 The Golden Apple

. . . I never understood the dubious appeal of “being needed.” Ack! Me, I ran away from neediness.

So much so – even with him. . . I remember once when we were engaged, this man and I, holding his head in my lap and his face looking up at me like a baby’s – happy like that and . . . well, what mothers like to call adoring, though it has more to do with the sweetness of mother’s milk - and the baby's utter and absolute dependency upon that milk.

That look shook me. I felt like a friend of mine who, on a whim, sprung a cartwheel on the parapet of the Glen Canyon Dam. Successfully. But she was ashen and trembling as soon as she landed back on earth, realizing how close she’d come to falling forever down. . . .

Monday, April 6, 2009 What my Great-grandchildren Would Want to Know about Today

. . . It's the first time I've heard them this spring - the guardian spirits of this part of the world. They have such a strange ridiculous call - so much the aah-ooo-GAH! clown-horns of the bird-world that I expect to see them rolling over each other and faking pratfalls and headbutts in the sky when they finally appear up over the edge of our roof.

"They're not flying in formation," notes Fritz. It's true. They circle like a skein unloosening above us, rising slowly, spiralling.

"Maybe they're scouting out a feeding place," I suggest.

"Not a very efficient way to fly," he says. . . .

Tuesday, April 7, 2009 Do You Recognize the Song?

. . . Because we are hardly different from one another, any of us, though we walk around thinking what we have and what we've done is what we are, thinking we are more than frightened children dangling our legs over the bank with bravado and tossing small rocks into the dark water.

Today a woman came in, the powder blue of her sleeveless sweater pefectly setting off the dark-blue undertones in her skin. Her voice is loud and sure, sweet as molasses, her wide-set brown eyes very beautiful - beauty is confidence and confidence beauty for her, "Bleach! Bless you!," she lifts a jug from the free shelf. "Can I really have this? Really! You are all working for Jesus - you know that don't you? You are working for Jesus. I can see your haloes!"

If so, we are the saddest, seediest group of angels you'll ever see. . . .

Monday, April 27, 2009 Finding It

. . . Fritz lets out a huge shout of laughter, plainly relieved that the paranoia is finally working itself out into the open, “No doubt!”

. . . “And instead of charades they’re going to act out stupid things I’ve done and try to guess,” I mime it, between gasps of laughter, “ – oh wasn’t that the time . . . ? And don’t forget that one time she . . . !”

“They’ll call it Were You There?!” he squeaks, trying to catch his breath. We’re both gasping with laughter and tears are beginning to roll down my cheeks.

“Who’s doing this?” demands YoungSon from the backseat. “Who’s having that kind of a party?” . . .

Monday, June 1, 2009 Quantum Guy and MicroNudge at dinner with their children Joy-of-Flight and Nature Boy

. . . “I don’t know,” I say, “Being able to stop evil plans from being carried out. Somehow.”

“Elasticity, now,” says Fritz. “It would depend on how elastic you were. If you were so elastic, you could stretch and stretch, thinner than threads, and then you could be invisible.”

“Except then everyone would keep getting tangled up in you,” I say.

“Yeah, people would keep tripping over your stringiness,” says Eldest.

“So, you’d just drape yourself along the walls,” says Fritz. . . .

Monday, June 8, 2009 Arcing up through Dark Water

. . . So. My story, for you, my friend – not after all about postpartum depression – but how I lived past that bleakness. How I came into a deeper kind of knowing.

How I know that God is there.

Is More than just the sum of everyone else’s platitudes.
Is Deeper than my sorrows.
Is the Firmament on which I can trustingly stand.

Is the water and the rising.

Is.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009 Talking Large

If I don’t write about my father having a heart attack a few weeks back, it doesn’t mean I am indifferent to it’s happening.

It may mean I want to pretend it didn’t happen. It may mean I don’t see any need to ask for comfort. Which writing about it would seem to entail.

He had 95% blockage, or 99% - the story changed as my parents told it. They said, Main aorta. Left ventricle.

They said, Widowmaker, laughing at the melodrama of it all.

My dad said afterwards, Wake up call. He said, Full healing and stent and successful surgery. He said, it’s probably not my heart that’s going to take me.

I don’t want to be the one to whom people say, Oh, I am so sorry . . .

Thursday, August 6, 2009 My Father Sings

. . . "The Merry Golden Tree," Mom would jump in, as she does tonight, with a good backup of her children following.

"The Golden Argosy," insists Dad, with a chorus of offspring following him.

"A Fam'ly Controversy," more of us each year sing laughingly.

These songs were the book where I read my father - even through the years where whenever Dad and I exchanged words it ended in tears and yelling, me shaking with rage, he shaking his head in bewilderment.

But in the bright safe place made by his guitar and the singing, I could read my father as someone standing in his own light: . . .

Sunday, August 23, 2009 Looking Pretty in Pictures

"I think my computer has a crush on me," I tell my youngest sister.

"Oh?"

We're sitting on the floor of her study. Beside the guest futon. Waiting for the computer to boot so we can check out the central Illinois weather report. Playing with her new baby. YoungSon and his 4-year old cousin run about.

"Yeah," I say, "every time I change my blog picture, my computer's all - " I make bedroom eyes, drop my voice an octave, "Fetching profile photo . . . '"

Saturday, September 5, 2009 some questions, some answers

. . . "Do you want me to put my book away and stew with you? Because I'm just reading this to distract myself."

"Read your book."

I read.

Fritz shifts in his seat. Then, "I don't know that anyone would CHOOSE to go into urology, you know? Maybe fall into it as a good opportunity . . . Now nephrology, I think that would be fascinating. But urology? I would think that's got to be one of the more unpleasant branches of medicine. Seriously, how many kids grow up wanting to be a urologist?"

Monday, September 15, 2009 Contentment :: Contain: Discontentment :: . . .

. . . He only taps his lower lip with his little finger, thinking, and looking over my shoulder.

More recently we sit at the window looking down the hill. "Ah, I love it here," says Fritz.

"I wish I could see it that way," I say. "All I can see is what hasn't been done. And the things we were going to do when we moved here."

Fritz begins to quote at me: "Two men stood behind bars - one saw the mud, the other saw stars . . . "

"Okay, but the one who saw mud," I tell him, "he says, Whoa, look at that! That ground's soft enough out there, I bet if I just dig this out a little further I can escape," I'm miming it, gesturing widely. "And meanwhile, the other one is still just gazing up through prison bars, Ah, the stars, the stars, how lovely the stars are."

"I have to admit," says Fritz. "That's a good story."

Friday, October 9, 2009 what this blog could become: The Bike Report: Gleaner's Season

. . . Say, you actually do, nominally, belong to a group called The Gleaners' Group - which group seems to have, sadly, though with melancholy aptness, died on the vine . . . The vision behind that group was a more thrifty and thorough sort of gleaning than what you do today (and really, what you do everyday you are out on the bike, or walking, during gleaning season).

Season begins in August when the growing-wild blackberries ripen.

You know with your nose it's time when you coast (around that corner by the old farmhouse, where the new development is going in) into a cloud of winey, flowery fragrance that is the smell of blackberries, plump and full of all the rain and sun of the summer, tiny dark globes shining heavily in a fat cluster.

Then it is that you come back from rides with the children into town, all purple- tongued and stained fingers. You linger in the creek bottom before climbing your last hill home, bikes propped at the roadside, stepping gingerly into the wild thorns, looking for a darker blackness amid the shadows . . .

Saturday, October 17, 2009 Pictures of Things that Change

. . . I have never been without you.
And yet, you would not want me to stay.

Neither has her mother grown out of the sense
of wonder at sharing the care of such an unique,
exquisite soul . . . So if I find my eyes wet now
it can't be because I see a lovely young daughter
crowned with honors, trembling on the threshold
of a bright, successful future.

I will miss your company
and your wisdom.
writes my daughter, October 2009

The tears must be for the dear old suitcase.
I don't know how I'm going to live without it.
wrote my mother, August 1985

Wednesday, December 23, 2009 stay forever.

I am watching Middlest negotiate a river crossing I've never had to cross. She who does not like to cry cannot speak about Eldest leaving for college without her throat filling with tears. She dashes the water from her eyes with a quick impatient hand, shakes her head, makes herself laugh.

She hates even the name of the university her sister is aiming for. Has already planned what she will do that first week - eight months from now - packing the days full with friends who have promised to stay overnight the first night, the second night, a series of different hill runs she will work her way through that week.

That first week she plans to gut their old bedroom, repaint it, rearrange everything. But not until then. For now, nothing must change. For now, they are always sitting together, running errands together, their heads bent together over the computer screen, whispering together in the other room.

Unless she's angry with her sister, which is also happening more frequently than ever in their deeply intertwined lives. Then it's - "I'll be glad when she leaves!" And when, later, I suggest it may be time to mend fences, "Why? It will never be the same anyway. She'll go and she'll never really ever come back again." . . .

Thank you, Apple & Almonds

2010-12-30T23:59:00.000-08:00

What satisfactions in simple sufficiency
Since the surfeit of this season's seasonings -
Superabundance of cinnamon, savory,
Sweeties and salties all sizzling and sparkling -
But ah! apple (one) and almonds (ten)
An easy handful raw, unsalted and unadorned
Nutty bite balancing bursting bite of fruit
Tantalizing tasty, tangy-sweet, crisply tart -
Simply sumptuous, sensuously simple,
I sing you soaringly in shadow and sharp sun!

Thank you, Forgotten Photos

2010-12-29T11:40:00.000-08:00

Look at you, Forgotten Photos, you who have been keeping yourself to yourself in a camera tucked at the back of a drawer.

Like finding five dollars in the pocket of an old coat - that same sizzle of pleasure unlooked-for.

You've been saving all this time morning light waiting to re-dawn.

You've been keeping bright a brilliance of leaves still unfallen in the stillness of your focused view . . .

fiery leaves from your silent and everlasting now that for me in this roaring parallel Now have faded and drifted down and been trampled and blown into dust and mud.

You've kept still even the momentary arabesque of clouds.

Written (graphein) in light (photos), you've saved for me a golden afternoon.

You've saved a moment of reflection as I sat aside from my family's grief at their grandpa's passing . . .

and a moment where nothing really happened, a moment I only remember the sweetness of now.

Thank you.

Thank you, Wooden Hangers

2010-12-28T22:16:00.000-08:00

Though you've done nothing more than hang around in your wooden and well-spaced sort of way.

I can't even say it was you who inspired the vehement closet-cleaning, the fanatic bagging up, the merciless depositions and dispersals. That would be thank you, the Miseries - but that was one thank-you just too hard a stretch for my gratitude.

Thank you, Miseries - for leaving, I could say that. Thank you for slinking out of the house along with the few-to-dozens of bags of that materiality which oppresses [see "The Tyranny of Things" by Elisabeth Morris nearly a century ago - coming to us now by way of Patrick Madden's Quotidiana by way of Dinty Moore's Brevity - both of whom I am shockingly often grateful for].

But you, Wooden Hangers, you I can thank wholeheartedly for just being you - which in your case means smoothly sanded and appealingly variable in grain and color. Thank you for campaigning in your quiet way for spareness and choice in our tiny closet, for rewarding us now with yourselves ranged all along the length of the closet rod, making space around only the things we use and like - and good riddance to all those maybe-sometime-might-come-in-handy obstructions to a simpler life, that load of excess materiality that went out with the Miseries.

guest post: Thank you, Small Things

2010-12-27T14:28:00.000-08:00

posted by Middlest

This year has held a lot of big things for me. Some good and some bad.

Christmas Eve was full of small things. All good.

Thank you red pepper full of small white seeds on a green cutting board. A reminder to have faith. "Faith is like a little seed. If planted it will grow . . ."

Thank you small vegetables being sauteed to be placed on pizza. Thank you for sizzling and sending off sweet and slightly spicy smells. Cooking peppers always makes me think of family. Maybe because the sound of the vegetables is cozy and everyone stops by the stove top to see what's cooking. Thank you for family.

And in the background, Taylor Swift singing about looking past the tinsel of Christmas and what would be left?


         "Something holy and not superficial
               So here's to the birthday boy who saved our lives - "

Thank you for Christmas. Thank you for this holy holiday that was spent with family. Thank you for the reason we have this holiday. Thank you Jesus, for giving your life for me.

posted by Middlest

Thank you, Owl and Pussycat

2010-12-26T22:21:00.000-08:00

"So talk to me. Tell me something lightsome."

"Okay," says Middlest.

We continue on in silence. Companionable. Not unhappy. We've spent many hours this autumn-into-winter, side by side here as she gets in her driving hours.

Out of this silence (for which I am also thankful, but it would be a profanation to insist too loudly on such a quiet thing) I sigh, gustily, clowningly, "Too bad we don't live in an Age of Poetry. You could recite poetry to me - calm this restless feeling and banish the thoughts of day?"

"I know poetry," says this endlessly surprising being.

"That's right." How could I have forgotten?

And she begins,

"The owl and the pussycat went to sea
in a bYOOtiful pea green boat.
They took some honey and PLENTY of money
tied up in a five pound note . . . "

from stanza to stanza, faultlessly, until my memory of her high-pitched high-speed four-year-old voice and my laughter now at this elegant fowl she's grown into are also dancing hand in hand at the edge of the sand by the light of the moon, the moon . . .

Thank you, Light in Darkness

2010-12-25T23:54:00.000-08:00

Nativity, detail, Kershisnik

Thank you, Morning Light

2010-12-24T10:08:00.000-08:00

And please let your friend Morning Mist know how much we appreciate her, too.

Thank you, Aspiration

2010-12-23T23:49:00.000-08:00

I love you, Basketball Dreams, Designing-Flying-Machine Dreams, Writing-Novel-of-Solving-the-Blowing-Up-the-Lincoln-Memorial-starring-Inspectors-Clouseau-and-Mom-what-was-the-other-guy's-name Dreams.

I love you Hopeful Hours spent shooting hoops, drawing and doodling, typing away - What! It can't be that long, I've only got two lines written!

I love the stars in your eyes, Aspiration.

Thank you, Singing Sister

2010-12-22T23:50:00.000-08:00

You know how much I love to hear you - that full-color, fathoms deep, mountain high and wide, open-throated voice of yours - but since you are leaving tomorrow and the singing will not be filling my house and heart for another year - six months - too long however long it is - I had to say thank you to you, Amazing Sister, for the singing.

O come Desire of Nations and bind

In one the hearts of all mankind.

Bid Thou our sad divisions cease

And be Thyself our Prince of Peace.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel

Shall come again, O Israel.

Thank you for knowing all the verses and singing all of them for me, even though the vagaries of my camera allow only a snippet to be recorded. Thank you for putting the heartache you've lived through into something so beautiful as this.

Oh, won't you go and tell my baby sister,

Don't do as I have done,

But shun that house in New Orleans

They call the Risin' Sun.

When I am very old, or very sad, or just whenever next you can, please come sing to me again.

If like the wanderer, the sun gone down,

Darkness be over me,

My rest a stone.

Still in my dreams I'll be,

Nearer my God to Thee,

Nearer to Thee.

. . . thank you, s'vester.

Thank you, Siam Village Thai

2010-12-21T23:59:00.000-08:00

Because how on a cold cold night can you argue with all the spice and reflected light and not to mention Holy Basil, Swimming Rama, Crying Tiger (is not Tiger Woods), Jungle Curry, Golden Cashew, and several entrees called Yum?

Even Fritz' mom thought so.

Thank you, Anything

2010-12-20T13:10:00.000-08:00

I didn't think this would be so difficult - these daily gratitudes.

I find myself more and more uncomfortable with the piling up of evidence how lucky I am, - the small blisses, the huge blessings. I'm more and more ashamed of the abundance that more and more begins to feel like it's weighing me down - the intangibles as much as the plenitude of material goods.

(thank you, Roof's Safe Shelter - thank you, Patient Fritz - thank you, Democracy - thank you, Flowered Wallpaper - thank you, CD Player - thank you, Curiosity - thank you, Opportunity - thank you, Daughter Friend - thank you, Great-Grandma's Recipes - thank you, Trunks of Trees - thank you, Wonderstruck Ten-Year-Old - thank you, Health - thank you, Health Insurance - thank you, Hope in Christ)

All the goodness so unstintingly showered down on me. So undeservedly that I feel ashamed rather than grateful.

I can hear you already, jumping in to set me straight. Bear with me. I know I'm wrong, I know I've got this tangled, but I want to figure out why.

Last week at the food bank (I had biked in that morning composing in my head an exuberant Ode to Joy - thank you, Sunshine; thank you, Muscles; thank you, Thoughtful Driver; thank you, Flutter of Birds), I scrubbed down walls and sanitized freezers and fridge for the quarterly inspection in between waiting on a regular stream of the needy. We had the radio on, playing happy Christmas music.

"Bah, humbug," said a woman not much older than I. "Not much to be merry about when you don't have any money and can't buy anything to give your kids."

I could have said . . . or I could have pointed out . . . but I didn't.

I believe she'd have felt happier if she'd looked around right there and been glad for this clean, well-lighted place that existed just to help her, the loaves of bread on the shelves, the cheese sticks in the fridge, the sign-up for the hot dinner and gift for each child the local Boy Scout troop would deliver to her house (or other central location if she didn't have a house) on Christmas Eve. She would've felt more fortunate if she'd let her thoughts dwell on all the people who donated cans to feed her, the hours volunteering, fund-raising, the local gardeners who planted extra so we could offer her more.

But was it for me to tell her?

Maybe. Maybe it would've helped. I've heard other people make the point and make it effectively, compassionately. But I didn't. I felt I couldn't. Because she was right. It's hard to be merry in the face of poverty and hunger. If I'd been facing what she was facing I'm not sure I wouldn't have been bah-humbugging myself. Why not allow her bah humbugging space as a valid response to this world, this time of the year?

Before she came in I'd been humming inside with pleasure at the bike ride, the vigorously effective scrubbing, the music playing. After she spoke I stopped my silent happy humming. Which did her no good but allowed me to listen a little better to what she was saying.

I looked at her, beheld her, the sad skin beneath her eyes, the angry tightness around her mouth, the bad luck that hung about her like a cloud. I nodded and made a sympathetic sound and then fetched the frozen green beans and plastic-wrapped tube of ground beef that we give everyone.

Later, this weekend, we drove down to see my brother's new baby. Along the way, at the rest stop, we saw a family - man, woman, two children - camped out with a sign asking for money to buy more gas for their bus.

It might have been a scam. They sometimes are. None of them - children, woman, man - might have even been actually related - except in the way we all are.

Waiting for my sister and my daughter, I watched a slim well-groomed woman jump out of her shining white SUV, cradling a fluffy white lapdog. She strode into the rest stop. On her way back, she stopped to say something to the woman holding the sign asking for money, then Ms. Fortunate in her scarf and tasteful beads trotted back to her car, looking pleased. Her Fluffy gave a quick happy bark.

"Did you hear what that lady said?" my sister asked me later. "She asked the other woman where she lived and the woman pointed to her sign - Homeless - and the lady said, Why are you here? She told her she should be in the city where there are jobs, she shouldn't be here."

I had seen others - mostly truck drivers, men in rough jackets - quietly slip a bill or two into the man or woman's hands. And because I wanted a picture of their bus I had gotten out, given $5, and asked if the bus was theirs, if they'd mind if I took a picture.

"Yes," she had looked at me a little strangely, "Yes, you may. And thank you for asking first." She lifted her chin, looking out at the world with dignity.

It had not been compassion that had moved me. They had something I wanted. And I would have been ashamed to take it without giving them something I had that they wanted in return. A trade between citizens.

When I was young, home for the summer between semesters at school, a girl I knew, visiting at my house to talk her troubles over with my mother, had accused me - "You've had everything handed to you on a silver platter."

I was tired. It was late in the evening. I'd been gone since 5 a.m., driving my dad's little truck over to the neighboring town, working 10 hours at the foundry, then another 4 copy-editing for the local Shopper-Advertiser newspaper. I was working long days to pay my way through college - though even there I had the help of a handful of scholarships.

I felt more tired still, looking up from the cold dinner my mom had set aside for me, looking up into this young woman's unhappy face. Because she was right.

Everything had been handed me. All I'd done was reach out and take it. Which is something - we all know that.

Nevertheless, I looked at this girl, felt myself torn with self-justifying irritation and grudging acknowledgement that she was right. My father hadn't abandoned us when I was a baby, my mother wasn't sickly, I hadn't been date-raped, no one had pressured me into getting a degree in elementary education when I disliked children, I wasn't stuck cleaning bathrooms at the Lake Geneva Lake Lodge. Health, height, metabolism, opportunity, web of support. Life had been unfair to her.

And yes, she had been unfair to Life. I knew there were gifts she couldn't bring herself to reach out for, blisses and blessings she had refused. There always are.

What I was grateful for, what I am grateful for today is that I could see that. How she was wrong and right, how I was deserving and undeserving.

I don't know the name for that.

I am grateful to be the watcher from the car. Not Fluffy's mistress.

And I don't want to refuse the gifts I know thanksgiving gives back again.

Thank you, Baby Born

2010-12-19T21:22:00.000-08:00

Thank you for this baby in particular, son of my friend Jackie, son also of my brother (also friend) Rob. For what the sight of you spells out in me about hope and optimism. For your tiny hands and the warm burden of you against my heart.

And thank you for every baby born. For the smallness that will grow large and strong; vulnerability that will ripen into ability; this limited present that will reach into a wider future. For the need in you that calls forth courage in us older ones to make safe, to make right, to make needed changes in the world you will grow up in.

And thank you to that other Baby, born in the middle of time, son of Mary and Son of God.

Thank You for being born in weakness, in an oppressed nation, in need. For growing into the Man who walked among fishermen and prostitutes, who healed many kinds of blindness and helped the lame walk back into the light. Thank You for carrying me and them and all of us against your heart, for changing us, for giving us courage to change. For reaching out to me and this baby and all babies born here, now, then, there, newly young and increasingly old. Thank You for offering us all the fullest gift of strength in weakness, safety in danger, and an ever widening future.

Thank you, Overcrowded Bathroom Mirror

2010-12-18T23:31:00.000-08:00

For what you show me.

.

Thank you, Swift Couriers

2010-12-17T23:30:00.000-08:00

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night

stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds

Firstly, you are open in the morning early.

Secondly, you are also open into the evening late.

Thirdly, you have little works of art for sale for under 50 cents.

Fourthly, you have flat rate boxes.

Fifthly, your crowd today is cheery, even merry -

"Have to get back in line?" says the tall man at the end. I've been sizing out the flat rate boxes.
"Looks like it."
"Why don't you go ahead of me."
"Eh, it's okay. Guess I need to stop for a minute anyway. Guess I need some peace."
"All the bustle," he nods.
He makes a point to squeeze up so there's room for more of us in the latter half of the line to slip into the warmth of the heated front office.
When we come to the front of the line, he insists I go first.
"No, I couldn't do that to you. I'm going to be quite a while."
"I've got all the time in the world this afternoon. Go ahead." and he waves me ahead. And I am grateful.

Sixthly, your desk clerks weigh everything for me and enter our best guesses at zipcodes to help estimate costs and suggest box sizes for the cheapest rates and are sweet and smiling the whole time.
Seventhly, you promise delivery before Christmas . . .

What can I say to all that but - Thank you.

Thank you, Hiatus

2010-12-16T22:46:00.001-08:00

Thank you, Canned Soup

2010-12-15T23:10:00.000-08:00

C you are so convenient - so canned, so close at hand, so canny a choice before one of the too-many carb-loaded festivities of the season.

A you are so all the time available - and at short notice.

N you are so nutritious - compared to the peanut brittle and Christmas cookies and chocolate-covered pretzels I could have filled up on instead - but you have spinach! and carrot juice concentrate! and 4% of the Recommended Daily Allowance for Calcium, 10% of the Vitamin A!!

N you are so natural (you say)- 100% Natural, in fact and, No MSG added* (*Except for the small amount naturally occurring in yeast extract). And Real (!) Parmesan Cheese!!

E you are so effervescent - not really and not a good sign if you were, but it was too easy to say you are so easy, though you are - something hot in the tummy on a cold night in less than five minutes - no wonder we're so under your thumb, Sir and/or Madam Campbell.

D you are so dang convenient.

S you are so satisfaction guaranteed - how many other things in life can make that kind of promise?

O you are so obvious - CAUTION, you say, Metal edges are sharp. And "Real ingredients" are ingredients you understand. I appreciate that kind of clarity on day like today. And also how you explain:

IN CASE YOU DIDN'T KNOW:
Potassium Chloride is a type of salt that adds flavor.
Maltodextrin is a carbohydrate that comes from potato or corn starch.
Xanthan Gum and Locust Bean Gum are ingredients that provide texture. (Yum. Yum.)

U you are so up-to-the-minute. You have your own website: www(dot)selectharvest(dot)com. You are cooked with care in the USA keeping our fellow citizens employed and helping lift the trade deficit. And moreover your label is printed with SOY INK.

P you have a pop-top lid - which is just another way of saying: you are so very, very convenient. Who cares if your meatballs look like kibble floating at the top of the thermos? You are warm and better than nothing and come Ready to Serve.

Thank you.

Thank you, Hydrangea

2010-12-14T23:50:00.000-08:00

Thank you, Hydrangea, for being so lovely, so simply four-petalled in your robust panicles, so soft-colored.

I like the story you tell me every time I see you on my kitchen counter, whispering now and faded.

A month ago you were brighter, but already retelling your story every time I passed you in your vase.

Two months ago you were fresher still, still part of the whole, and growing along the road that takes us to the high school and the grocery store.

A hundred times I've passed you this year, growing creamy white until the first frost when you blushed and reddened more and more each colder day. But one day - you remind me - a month ago or so I was not driving past, locked up in my car, but bicycling up towards you during the last week of hollyhocks, the first week of winter gloves.

You were a reason to stop - if I needed a reason to stop - and I was grateful for your graceful excuse, halfway up that long slow climb. And while I stood beneath your hometree's branches, breathing deeply, admiring you and all your sisters, the old woman who has tended you for years came home. I'd never talked to her before.

She rolled down her window, grinning so the gold teeth in the back got sunlight.

"They're so pretty," I said, hefting my camera by way of apology and explanation. "Had to stop."

And your little old lady nodded in complete agreement, "A fellow used to buy them at 10 cents a sprig - I'd mail a big box of them to him in New York City. For hats, you know? But I haven't gotten out to trim them back this year. So take as many as you want."

"Oh, thanks, but I can just enjoy the pictures."

But your little old lady was like you, eager to share her beauties, and soon hobbled back out with garden shears, "Take as many as you like. Fill up your basket," she said.

And so I did - choosing you four sprigs because you were the prettiest of all those pretty branches. When I offered your lady the dimes I had in my coin purse, she said, "Piff!" and waved my money away. You are, after all, priceless.

"I'll think of you every time I look at them," I called to her as I perched back up on the saddle, beaming over my bike basket mounded over with your rosy blossoms.

And your little old lady stood smiling with a golden glint and waving until I was out of sight.

And faithfully you've told me this story over and over, as I moved you from room to room so I could have you by me, so you could whisper your story to me.

And I'm still not tired of it.

Thank you, Orange

2010-12-13T22:52:00.000-08:00

Little sun

silent on the table,

permanent noon.

It lacks something:

night.

by Octavio Paz

(translated by Eliot Weinberger)

O Orange, uncomplicated golden O, you round your way around a sweet complexity of sacs of juicy sunshine saved for these dark days. You are winter's fruit, the solstice promise, so wholly Orange that scent of orange is both taste and color.

What could be more orange than you are?

Thank you, Someone Else's Turn

2010-12-12T15:03:00.000-08:00

I'm dry today - no springs of gratitude fountaining up in me. Just dry, dry - I should be thankful for that, at least, that something's dry in this world of wet - flood warnings these past three days and our dustbowl yard, narrowly perched above our house, no longer dust, no longer mud, no longer even swamp, but rivers and ponds of standing water.

I should be thankful for what wrought the dustbowl devastation in the first place - for the new foundation - that the water stands out there and not in the daylight basement.

I should.

I should be thankful for the day-by-day surcease from the pain that had kept me hobbled these past months, surcease partial but sufficient - as long as I do the daily 30 minutes therapy.

I should - I suppose - be thankful for the pain itself - I whose threshold for pain had been set perhaps too high - who, as only one example of far too many, biked 23 miles on a broken foot and then hauled rocks up and down the stone steps, lugging massive rootballs of shrubs and trees for transplanting, ignoring twinges until the cracked bone slipped and real damage was done.

I should - if I could - be thankful for the insights pain's hopelessness have given me into Fritz' mother and her years of suffering.

I should be thankful for everything, anything, the abundance, the choice, the too too much everywhere. But rather than piling up warming embers of gratitude on my chilled heart, all I'm getting is a steaming pile of should.

And I am dry.

So thank you to my friend Suzanne, whose words don't fail, whose flickering firefly pinpoints of light spell out a blessing that brightens inside my mind.

And thank you to my friend Neighbor Jane, who passes on an instance of transformation:

and sings her own hallelujah, bathing my dry heart in borrowed praise.

Thank you, Quiet Day

2010-12-11T22:32:00.000-08:00

Thank you so for coming: the dim lamplight you began with and the steady sound of rain. Thank you for insisting on the simple strengthening exercises that put the pain aside and return me to myself. Thank you for the wriggling eagerness of Dog who meets me at the door. The gloriously wet walk for miles around, Dog's cheerful steady trotting, tail waving like a flag all 8 miles, and thank you for this joy again of being able to move once more under my own power!

Thank you for the resumption of the weekly walking conversation (So his grandmother asked that she be buried with a book she hadn't read yet and I asked his mom what book she'd want to be buried with when the time came and she said Gone with the Wind . . . and it wasn't until afterward I realized - was that a joke? )

Thank you for the joy of Dog at the warm rub-down on coming home!

And thank you for this home to open the door on - Christmas music playing, YoungSon still in his fuzzy pajama bottoms and slick UnderArmour biking shirt. Fritz putting together a kitchen stool from Ikea. Middlest and her "soul table" from French class planning out a video project - more precisely waiting for one more arrival so they can begin planning out etc. and meanwhile putting together a 1000 piece puzzle while one of the boys plays piano, picking out by ear the music to the Quebecois song they're using as soundtrack:

(thank you for music, for bicycle rides, for trees, for sweetness in the young)

Thank you for the comfort of warm water and the rising steam, the clean dishes lining up in the drainer.

Thank you for the kettle singing out and the heavy mug of hot tea.

Thank you for the warmth of the heat vent right at my feet as I stand at the kitchen sink.

Thank you for the miracle that is bread: the fragrance of olive oil and honey and wheat freshly ground; the generations of hands that touch mine in the kneading.

Thank you for the soft chiming that is the rain hitting the stove fan exhaust vent.

Thank you for YoungSon who is Mr.Christmas, decorating the tree, lugging up tubs of lights and garland, even though he says he's sick and lies down in the middle of the day for a long nap.

Thank you for the basket of clean clothes, the watery sunlight pouring over my shoulder while I fold.

Thank you for hot bathwater and Maggie Fergusson's biography of the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown (for that matter, thank you for books and poets and library cards).

Thank you for the quiet moment you gave me today holding hands with my daughter, who tells me why it is we get along, while she practices her driving coming the long way home through foggy forest.

Thank you for dinner of canned soup and "special medicine" (orange juice and seltzer water and optional grenadine) and the four of us around the table.

And now thank you at last for the quiet kitchen, full of the smell of fresh-baked bread. And the sound of Fritz sleeping and the tap-tapping of the keyboard, the hum of the refrigerator . . . and nothing else but quiet.

Thank you, Listening Ear

2010-12-10T22:09:00.000-08:00

You are often all I need. A solution in yourself.
To be heard, to be acknowleged,
to be given space in which to differ.

You are Fritz' mother telling me how he explained, Emma J is going to write. Don't infringe on her writing. It's who she is.

You are the young daughterly doctor who, when various unavoidables make this week's testing impracticable says, That's fine. Why don't you just tell me how you're doing? and for fifteen minutes probes by word of mouth only, and then writes up a prescription of goals that addresses more than symptoms.

You are preeminently my mother's ear. A clear safe space where for years and years I have laid out everything at once until I can see what I'm saying and begin to untangle.

But not everyone believes in you, Listening Ear. A friend, a woman of great sense and reliable kindness, recently said, Nobody likes to listen to someone who complains.

Which gave me pause.

Because I do.

Well, yes, complain, obviously. But also, I do actually like to hear other people's sorrows, their secret stories and also the sideshows they put on to talk themselves up and over the present challenge.

Listening to complaints seems to me a useful way to recognize my scattered kindred - if I like the way you whine and grouse, if your moans melt my heart and your rants encourage me and your kvetching fills me with delight and if I can get you to laugh when I traipse out my own complaint, trailing its tragicomedienne rags and banners, then I know we're kissing cousins somehow.

Besides I don't know if I quite trust someone who never complains. Or I wouldn't if I actually met such an one.

I do know people who say they never complain . . . and have listened to them as well . . .

I suppose I can think of one or two to whom I have never come close enough to be trusted with any private lament. Should one be grateful to them for their reticence?

But I am most heartily grateful for the ears that have held my stories and sighs. And grateful, too, for you, my own Listening Ear, for bringing me material always for my work and many secret grins of delight and new windows of perspective, besides giving me something to do in this world both useful and obviously needed.

Thank you, Thank You

2010-12-09T23:37:00.000-08:00

Because of you, Thank You, all day lately I'm thinking, So I wonder what will I be thankful for today?

And whatever happens, I wonder, Is this a thank you? How could it be? Rain? What is good about rain so heavy not even the fastest wiper can keep the windshield clear? The cobbled fish-scale pattern of rain falling on water against the glass?

I forget to be impatient when the gushing deluge makes the traffic creep, though I am late for an appointment. Slow truck - pulling the horse trailer up hazardous Cornelius Pass - am I grateful you impose a prudent speed on us all?

All day at the edges of my mind other people's poems of praise play out, half-shaping themselves on my tongue - i thank You God for most this amazing day . . . O World, I cannot hold thee close enough . . . Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how) . . . For I will consider my Cat Jeoffrey . . . and a tiny but jubilant Hallelujah chorus sings out a regular soundtrack behind my left ear: Thanks, thanks, thanks be to God which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To a grateful mind, everything begins to look like a love letter from God.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful

green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,

Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we

may see and remark, and say Whose?

Thank you, Pillow

2010-12-08T22:35:00.000-08:00

Thank you, Pillow. Thank you, Bed.
Thank you, tired and aching head
that teaches me the value of
my pillow's sure restorative
therapy and furthermore
thank you, inner downy core,
thank you, soothing smooth exterior -
you merit praise
for days and days.
But I, who could not be much wearier,
can't think how this can be concluded . . .
except just to stop and go to bed.

Thank you, Little Christmas Lights

2010-12-07T22:18:00.000-08:00

I love you, Little Christmas Lights, the way you say - "It's getting darker and darker, and every night is colder than the last. Let's have a party!!"

Thank you, Due Time

2010-12-06T23:02:00.000-08:00

For coming for my dear old neighbor so neighborly.

Thank you for allowing her 97 years, completed with the dignity we all wish for.

Thank you for making room for her life to overlap with mine, for the moments you gave me for quick stops in her tiny tidy house with its constant pile of books and the well-weeded flower beds she tended on her hands and knees. Thank you for the moments you allowed me to catch my breath, perched on her flowered couch, before biking back home and up the hill, and the sparks of courage I drew from her dogged pugnaciousness and fresh feistiness.

And grant her, Time at last, in that library beyond the glass, the chance to finally read Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, which she had been saving because she knew it would be so good, saving it for when she might someday really need something wonderful to read - a habit we shared and recognized in one another - saving it to read in due time -

You, who have come for her now, so quietly and quickly.

Thank you.

Thank you, Safety

2010-12-05T23:42:00.000-08:00

I am afflicted at times with an unreasonable sense of endangerment.

Unreasonable, I realize for once/ once again within the very cells of my body and not just in my mind, working so earnestly to self-assure.

Because I am back at home, or rather my home is back with me, because my parents have come to visit. And both are healthy again and vigorous, full of plans for their future, my competent engineer father, my competent psychoanalyst mother, getting ready to put in their papers to serve an 18-month service mission - wherever they're needed. And I am safe, sitting together with my Mom who knits and my Dad who reads: the songs (from cowboy to Christmas) have been sung and the guitar has been put away and Fritz and the children retired to their beds.

Another day, Safety, that you have rested here with me.

Another day the Nazis haven't shown up pounding at the door, the mobs have kept their torches unlit and stayed at home watching crime shows on TV. Another day that there is food on my shelves and no fire is falling from the sky.

Another day, Safety.

And all the days that came before this when I thought you were about to leave, but you did not. Thank you for staying here another day. I trust to see you again tomorrow.

Thank you.

Thank you, Hills

2010-12-04T22:38:00.000-08:00

You are not easy but praising you is.

For you display a sweep of green grass ten months of the year, and on you, square-backed cattle graze.

For you allow the mists to roll and tumble up your sides, and you let the beautiful old barns sag beneath their mossy roofs.

For you make yourself a refuge for the orange-bellied newt and the well-contented bullfrog and in the winter you listen to the thin ice of the wren's song and in the summer, the bee swarm has suspended itself above your creek, resting on the air like one of God's thoughts.

For on you grow towers of Douglas fir and red alder with its tiny brown cones and muscular white oak and ferns of every kind and wild iris and bluebonnet and nootka rose and the white-blush bells of salal and moreover all around your feet you have accepted the early settlers' plantings of poplar which even in their gray season breathe out a balsam that is a pale sweet scent of ghostly tea-rose.

For you let me measure my worries and sorrows against your long flanks and bring me at last to the top where light breaks through the cloud, or stays hidden, but where always the view is wider and freer than below.

For you are the occasion of many years of walks with my friend and blackberry rambles with my children and bike rides with my beloved.

For when I have climbed you my veins sing and glow and you have sweated out of me many kinds of toxins.

For when I am back home once more, standing at the kitchen sink, you make that first dripping glass of water very sweet.

Thank you, Rubber Band

2010-12-03T23:35:00.000-08:00

For you do as you are expected and in particular -

For you are broad and stiff and creamy white

For you have printed on you ORGANIC Asparagus PLU# 94080 Produce of USA in regards to which can spring be far behind? and presently

For you hold together a dropped pocket camera which is under warranty from only yet this August but which warranty sadly says the salesclerk does not cover owner abuse which owner would claim rather accident but oh well

For you, dear Rubber Band, hold together bouquets of asparagus and damaged cameras and all else which you are bound around quite nicely.

Thank you.

Thank you, Sarcasm

2010-12-02T20:39:00.000-08:00

mikezuk

We're just two days into this parade of gratitude and already you show your scaly head?

All right. Sarcasm - thank you.

For . . .

For . . .

For resisting the easy and sweet in the name of thinking again.
For attending to the ubiquity of the ridiculous.
For liking to laugh.

For being that stubborn and irreducible gristle - of the mind I want to say, but it is you, Sarcasm, who stop me with your snarky eye-rolling over that gruesomely mixed metaphor. We all thank you for that.

And thank you for showing up so promptly. For providing proof within your very self, all prickled, pickled and sicklied over with dull care and self-regarding pride that an exercise in thanks is exactly what this silly human needs.

Thanks for that above all.

Thank you, Hilary Mantel

2010-12-01T22:10:00.000-08:00

by David Levine from The New York Review of Books

Not only for your generous, grand and humane Wolf Hall, but thank you also for your deftly shaped, finally flawed A Change of Climate. Your fluidly flexible handling in the one, your slight over-contrivance in the second both instruct - delightfully.

Thank you for the easy roll of your sentences, the graceful arcs of action your characters describe, the brilliant miniaturist details within the vast canvas of your plots - for the pleasurable hours the company of your words affords.

And thank you for passages like these in your memoir Giving Up the Ghost.

On how to write:

I will trust the reader. This is what I recommend to people who ask me how to get published. Trust your reader, stop spoon-feeding your reader, stop patronizing your reader, give your reader credit for being as smart as you at least, and stop being so bloody beguiling: you in the back row, will you turn off that charm! Plain words on plain paper. Remember what Orwell says, that good prose is like a windowpane. Concentrate on sharpening your memory and peeling your sensibility. Cut every page you write by at least a third. Stop constructing those piffling little similes of yours. Work out what it is you want to say. Then say it in the most direct and vigorous way you can. Eat meat. Drink blood. Give up your social life and don't think you can have friends. Rise in the quiet hours of the night and prick your fingertips and use the blood for ink; that will cure you of persiflage!

But do I take my own advice? Not a bit. Persiflage is my nom de guerre. (Don't use foreign expressions; it's elitist.)

Thank you for saying all this so well.

(And thank you, Melody, for your last month's litany of daily thanks. You've inspired me.)

simple chicken

2010-12-01T01:15:00.000-08:00

My dears ~

neighbors, friends and strangers, if any are still listening out there ~

you may have noticed that November has ended. And thus endeth National Novel Writing Month.

We must report there was no grand total of 50,000 words.

But I'm turning in tonight with a respectable 12,505 - just over a quarter of goal. And let us not forget, 12,505 is that much many more words than if no attempt at all had been made this particular year of craziness and acute distraction.

I have four strong chapter drafts - more than a quarter of my 15 nicely roughed out. In a much more usable form than last year's sprawl. And a particularly fruitful and excitingly generative modus of operandi going. And I am more fascinated than ever by this topic/ project/ exploration.

So, do you think I can pull off another 12,500 through the month of December?

Come on! That's just 12 and a half days of a thousand words - which is about two hours' steady writing each weekday until school holidays bring all the chicks home to roost once more.

Song dynasty, wikipedia

Chicken scratch! Eggs over easy! Simple chicken!

kiss

2010-11-17T17:33:00.000-08:00

Why is it so much harder this year, this writing?

the obvious - which is no big deal, right? which is what all who write must juggle, i.e. life, life in a family, life in a world that expects bills on time . . .
the extra - which includes daily care (meals, driving, shopping, appointments) for elderly parent and the construction zone that stretches from swamp-yard (dug up yet again - this time to locate a broken water pipe) and centers now on the innermost heart of my kitchen (of which I am not complaining, just taking into account.) And all this two days away from the arrival of my parents, six days away from arrival of my Eldest, eight days away from the arrival of slavering hordes who are expecting something that looks like Thanksgiving dinner.
the technical abyss - primarily, no pep-talks this year from NaNoWriMo. I'm not sure why I'm not getting these daily cheers, but had initially shrugged Fine, this is a more serious project anyway. I'm not sure I need all that rah-rah atmosphere anyway . . .
the deathly seriousness - and so all the harder to commit clumsy words to the screen, harder because of the fear of trespass, fear of failure, fear that I'm not doing justice to the subject . . .
the fear - (see Burning Houses) my constant writing companion anyway, both why I write and why I stop, this scab I pick at until I can't stand it and then cover it back up
the loneliness - of writing without a real audience, without a jury of my peers (which is what I miss most from the writing group days), without any outside expectation (though this is also a great freedom - but freedom is so lonely and frightening), without chocolate and/or other stimulant
the lack of outside stimulant - this I could change, I could, but I don't want the consequences of a month of at-desk nibbling, noshing - not just how it works upon my body but how it works on the writing, the shapeless, pointless manuscript that reeks of cocoa and desperation and is so largely worthless afterwards that revising is itself imponderable. The whole point (I decided at the outset) is that this piece needs to be written out of sparseness, out of want, not swathed against the prickles with that cockaigne blanket of lard.

Oh it is hard, so hard. But what is this . . .

In the midst of this my complaint to you, I open up the drawer of my ancient old metal desk looking for a pen to write down numbers from a phone message and what do I find? (Ah, so that's where my bike chick button got to! And lipstick? And - - - )

It is, I conclude, a message from my Muse who says:

Darlin', get over yourself, will you?

This singing you call writing, it's just what humans do. It's your own distinctive call. How the rest of us know where you're perching.

Me and the rest of the universe, we love you, but stop fooling yourself, will you? Stop worrying about doing the thing justice. That's my job. Your job is just to jab holes in the curtain to let my light through.

Each word is a pinprick.

Eat the chocolate, love.

And then write the words.

Stop slowing down the process with all the anti-.

And then, for emphasis, the Internet goes down for the rest of the day. All I can do is write. Not done yet for the day, but the chocolate kiss only lasts so long and I already need another small celebration -

forward motion! onward!

9,257 words down | 40,743 words to go

arctic kite

2010-11-12T12:22:00.000-08:00

kitemovement

Upstairs the young people are baking chocolate cake and reading picture books out loud. A mixed group from Middlest's French class. On a kind of field trip to their disappearing childhood, I gather, revisiting a protected pocket of that endangered habitat.

Honestly. I'm surprised they would entertain themselves this way. Aren't you? Did young people when I was young ever gather like this, so innocently? It was all videos and practicing dance moves when I was young. One house had a foosball table. Sometimes we would go skating - roller (Xanadu anyone?) and ice. Sometimes we would get a pizza. In other circles, according to reports that were common property at school, there were the keggers and drug partying and the cops showing up. That kind of fun. But boys and girls baking together belonged to the realm of grandmas and Christmas storybooks and the childhoods we all were fleeing.

I wouldn't have imagined this cozy homeyness when I imagined the social goings and comings that went on beyond me. When I opened a page later, in the library stacks at the university, Frank O'Hara's "Autobiographia Literaria" spoke to me like a post card from my past, a promise from a future self:

When I was a child
I played by myself in a
corner of the schoolyard
all alone.

I hated dolls and I
hated games, animals were
not friendly and birds
flew away.

If anyone was looking
for me I hid behind a
tree and cried out "I am
an orphan."

And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!

Though I have not ended up in that future. Instead here I am, not the center, but the encircling perimeter.

From the other room, their voices, the intermittent sound of piano, laughing, the smell of baking - all this warmth that happens with no doing on my part. A sense of wholeness, of things coming right for this moment.

I have only ever been the empty stage my daughters' plays have been produced upon. I am the closet of properties, the light crew. They are the maestros, director and cast, musicians and dancers - the costumes of hospitality inhabited. And I love it. Being part of the performance from the privacy of the sidelines. I talk to their friends. I come down to my work. But am still here at the edges of happiness and conviviality. And it is this, hugely, that I fear I will miss with my daughters' departures, coming and come.

I should be writing. Is this writing? Not really. I'm slipping out to talk to you, my Imaginary friends. But I am up against a sudden realization: it is this, my shyness as a young person, a loneliness that is still the truest truth about my inward me (If anyone was looking / for me I hid behind a / tree and cried out "I am / an orphan.") It is this, I think, that draws me to Lanier's story. His ache for connection, the lonely child. But it is this that makes it hard to write. I have hiked so far, climbed so many hills, forced myself again and again to talk, to listen, to make connection, to get over timidity, to work my way out to civilization and the light of other people's houses that it is diificult to go back there. To re-imagine a childhood even lonelier than mine.

But this is getting me nowhere. Not filling my sails. Let me bring myself back to an image I've had playing in my mind while working on Chapter 2 "Wind and Strings - the Most Eloquent Machines" - a brief encapsulation of what is the human endeavor:

And I will go and write.

not BAAAd

2010-11-11T22:04:00.000-08:00

But not so GOAT either.

And where is the fun fun fun?

I'm not going to make it by the end of the month - not with all the family coming and sweet-sour et cetera - unless I can double my total tomorrow. This is just barely in the Realms of the Imaginable.

But at least there was writing today.

8085 words down | 41915 words to go

C M J

2010-11-10T20:16:00.000-08:00

See Emma J. She is sad.

She is not writing. She is not happy.

Emma J, write, write. You will like it. You will have fun.

Write, Emma J, write.

Fun, fun, fun.

"Angklung" (Drive-by Anonymity)

2010-11-08T09:00:00.000-08:00

chapter 4

Is this project itself a violation of privacy? Is it the frisson of trespass that is helping to fuel my fascination? The lure of winkling out someone else's preciously kept secrets?

Am I the ({so far} benign) troll?

At this point of prewriting (though hopefully not by today's chapter writing?) I am not even sure whether Lanier will be a character in the novel or simply background music, the gorilla in the room, the white elephant, the ghost in the machine, or what have you?

And what are angklung?

. . . tuned rattles that are played in groups in Java and Thailand very much in the way that bells are played in bell choirs in the west.

To me this piece sounds threatening: the clank of prisoners' chains wound into a weird music of menace. Lanier explains that he composed the piano sections to echo the weirdness he heard in the anklung: . . . the fingering technique creates a phantom third hand, which I think of as an invoked demon." Though Lanier also claims Ravel as a "guiding spirit here," and explains that he "sought a bridge between impressionism and the jeweled sweetness of the gamelans of Sunda."

Of trolls and other viciousness that human mobs swirl into, in You Are Not a Gadget, Lanier details the vicious pack behavior of on-line trolls : hounding victims to suicide, harassing a randomly chosen victim with doctored images of her as a mutilated corpse intending to frighten her children, tormenting the parents of a suicide, sending pulsing messages to epileptics hoping to trigger seizures:

The culture of sadism online has its own vocabulary and has gone mainstream. The common term ****, for instance, refers to the gratification of watching others suffer over the cloud.

Lanier admits others blame him for being out-of-sync, clueless, growing old when he voices these criticisms:

What I'm saying, though, is that the user interface designs that arise from the ideology of the computing cloud make people - all of us - less kind. Trolling is not a string of isolated incidents, but the status quo in the online world.

Lanier argues "troll-evoking design" is largely to blame, i.e. design that allows-

effortless, consequence-free, transient anonymity in the service of a goal, such as promoting a point of view, that stands entirely apart form one's identity or personality . . . Computers have an unfortunate tendency to present us with binary choices at every level, not just at the lowest one, where the bits are switching. It is easy to be anonymous or fully revealed, but hard to be revealed just enough.

Lanier (in an interview with The Guardian) feels that the internet encourages mob mentality. In its openness "people lose their identities: they become pseudonyms and they have no investment, no consequence for what they do." He claims that "matching" the "biological flaws in our human spirit" with the "open mush environment" on the internet amplifies the basic meanness of human nature.

On the other hand, democracy and markets that "function well" precisely counter our biology - their "structures" compensate "for us as we really are, to allow us to act better than we otherwise would."

Is democracy a designed structure that corrects our pack-mentality human nature?
Do I agree? Are we biologically, naturally vicious with only artificial structures to lift us out of our nature raw in tooth and claw?

Do you agree?

Why would he believe that the openness of on-line culture magnifies our cruelty and tramples our kindness? Is he just wrong? Or is there something worth weighing in his rejection of this open-culture project he helped to midwife?

6,451 words down | 43,549 words to go

and now it's time for a little pop quiz

2010-11-07T23:42:00.000-08:00

~ Concerning Cake ~

True or False.

from Father Fox's Penny Rhymes

Answer: True and/or False.

Of course, this depends entirely on you as far as the cake goes. The snow snow and the rain rain rain are going to ply their trade regardless - unless you're sharing cake with rather more influential dinner guests than the rest of us.

Answer: (really?)

This should be a no-brainer. Oh, wait . . . it was. Ouch. Really though, I myself find if-then statements often a pain in the neck.

Answer: False? Probably?

Because does cake solve anything really? Ever? When possibly some of our troubles are actually brought on by cake?

~ * ~

On the other hand, I could be wrong.

It's possible.

Even the royal She up above has very probably reconsidered her position on cake vis-à-vis domestic policy.

Can we do any less?

And so, if your answer to #1 above was False in the sense (or absence) of cake upon your table you might consider the following:

a recipe for "Deep Dark Secret Chocolate Cake"

And I think I can venture to suggest that if you share your cake with plenty of friends and family, portioning out these rich moist wedges in moderation, you can still have yet more of your cake the following day and perhaps suffer not too much any lasting ill-effect.

from pemberley.com

"Mrs. Bates, let me propose your venturing on one of these eggs. An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome. Serle understands boiling an egg better than anybody. I would not recommend an egg boiled by anyone else - but you need not be afraid, they are very small, you see - one of our small eggs will not hurt you. Miss Bates, let Emma help you to a little bit of tart - a very little bit. Ours are all apple-tarts. You need not be afraid of unwholesome preserves here. I do not advise the custard. Mrs. Goddard, what say you to half a glass of wine? A small half-glass, put into a tumbler of water? I do not think it could disagree with you."

Or something like that.

(Because even the memory of a good cake is a small celebration.)

not so hazy

2010-11-06T05:30:00.001-07:00

Making progress through the fog finally. Chapter 1 (Come Along - An Approximate Fit) and chapter 2 (Wind & String - The Most Eloquent Machines) are functioning at last and producing some of their own light.

Today I'll re-tackle chapter 3 (The Story of Water Dancing in the Night Sky).

5,217 words down | 44,783 words to go

why I love my sisters

2010-11-05T15:59:00.000-07:00

"Three Sisters," Wayne Roberts
http://www.wroberts.com.au/html/watercolours.html

So (after the hours spilled volunteering at the book fair this morning - i.e. paying my Mommy dues - and the hours lost in phone calls to/from sundry folk and yet again consultations with builders and all the sweet-and-sour et cetera that is the rest of my life) I come at last to sit down again to this hard play, this silly work that is writing. (It has not been going well. There are reasons and no reasons for this.) But first I have to check email, make sure no one has died. They haven't. But there are Facebook notifications to which I think I must at last respond and lo! both my sisters are online. I do not, as a rule, chat on Facebook. Because I am superstitious who may be listening in. And because I'd rather . . . you know, chat - really chat with voice and gesture and all that. But nevertheless:

"Three Sisters," Judith Anderson

a short chat history with sister M (for Mighty Marvelous):

11:23

I'm going crazy and need to be rescued!

11:26
I'll rescue you!

11:26

Okay. What do you propose?

11:27
a plane ticket and a promise to keep your whereabouts a secret?

11:27

oooh, don't play with me. That sounds all all ALL too tempting!

11:28
escaping is always tempting, isn't it? And who says I'm playing?
What is the nature of your craziness?

11:30

house torn apart. still torn apart. mud everywhere. walkways torn apart. workmen who say "I think I'd just plant grass" where I want my rock walkway back and an herb garden. Husbands who are darling but work from home and impinge upon my SPACE. That I yelled at my dau on the way to seminary this morning. That I find myself repugnant - ugly in and out . . . . there's more - need I go on?

And how are you?

11:40
Oh EmmaJ! I'm so sorry. Stupid workmen. Stupid house. (I'll stop the stupids there.) If it makes you feel any better, I yelled at H before she went to school the other day, and J said I was a mean mommy. And then I felt truly remorseful all day long and sobbed in the dressing room at the gym. And you are absolutely NOT repugnant in anyway. Not even a particle of you could be described with that term (well, maybe parts of your small intestine could, but let's not get technical here.) I, who have superior judgment, find you perfectly lovely and good, and I adore you absolutely. I hate days like this, though. I wish on these days that I could escape my skin and burrow underground until everything has blossomed and been completed.

* * * * *

"Three Sisters," Charles Tarbell

An even shorter chat history with sister A (for Adorable and Amazing):

11:24

I'm going ga-ga and need to be rescued!

11:38
Me too!

I'll strap on my super sonic jetpack and will be in your place in one hour. Be ready!

* * * * *

"The Three Sisters," Henri Matisse

And that is why I love my sisters. Who are both offline when I return an hour later (more phone calls to/from sundry folk, more consultations and the various et cetera) so I never get to say in return . . .

To sister A:

12:38

You are offline already so I am assuming . . . jet-packing my way? I'll be the one waiting at the corner, umbrella and suitcase in hand (lacking jetpack), searching the skies for incoming identifiable objects of my affection . . .

To sister M:

12:46

I feel rescued already. You are blossom enough to keep me aboveground today.

and p.s.~ Fritz says thank you for stopping the stupids where you did. He was afraid he was next in line.

"Saxon Princesses," Lucas Cranach the Elder.
They of course are the ones with feathers. I am simply grateful to be included in the same frame.

looking at things

2010-11-04T06:00:00.000-07:00

I have nothing else to say about today:

not very many words down | lots more words to go

"The Story of Water Dancing in the Night Sky"

2010-11-03T05:30:00.000-07:00

chapter 3

In a collection of autobiographical sketches, Curious Minds: how a child becomes a scientist, Lanier writes:

I was also fascinated by the diaphanous luminous images called Lissajous patterns, which can be made by fiddling with musical signals and an oscilloscope, and I made a crude Lissajous viewer out of an old television set. At age eleven, as Halloween approached, a plan formed in my mind: I would build a fantastic haunted house out of my electronic contraptions and attract people worthy of being friends! I hung sheets around our tiny front porch and set up an old enlarger lens to project the Lissajous patterns from the TV onto them. Once the sun went down and the images appeared bright, I felt deliciously surrounded by fantastic dancing forms. The motions of visitors would alter the patterns, as if with the invisible strings of a puppeteer, courtesy of the magical theremin antennae. I wondered whether any girls, those beings of utter mystery, might be delighted by it. Who wouldn't be?

But it was not to be:

My haunted house pleased me immensely but attracted no visitors. Trick-or-treaters steered clear of it. I watched from inside my palace of imagination and freedom as one child after another rejected it, and me. It never occurred to me that they were probably frightened; at the time, they seemed sadistic.

But then, Lanier writes, a few months later:

One evening there was a remarkable breakdown of the local telephone system. Anyone who picked up the phone could hear everyone else at once. Hundreds of voices - some sounding distant, some close by - hovered in the first social virtual space I had ever experienced. An instant society of children formed, brilliantly superior to that of the schoolyard (which was straight out of Lord of the Flies). The floating children were curious about one another; they were friendly. . . . The next morning at school, though, no one spoke of what had happened. I looked around and wondered whom I might have talked to the previous night. Was it possible that these rude kids could suddenly become . . . knowable . . . if the medium that connected us was different?

"The Story of Water Dancing in the Night Sky" is played on the gu zchung (a Chinese classical harp):

. . . the Chinese classical tradition of harp playing brings us a deeper awareness of string articulations (types of plucks, vibratos, etc.)

And I've got a useful thread going now, a voice I can follow. Not what I had thought I would be doing, but interesting in a labyrinthine sort of way.

If you didn't get a chance, take a look at the YouTube link in Art Sparker's comment from yesterday - isn't that great?

2,811 words down | 47,189 words to go

"Khaen/ Violin Duo #6" - The Most Eloquent Machines

2010-11-02T05:30:00.000-07:00

chapter 2

Chapter titles (working chapter titles ~ who knows at this point what is skeleton, what is scaffolding?) are taken from this CD.

I'm having trouble finding the voice to carry me through. At this point I couldn't / don't want to write a straight biography of Jaron Lanier. Whom I don't know, am not researching in depth, and over whom I'm not personally obsessed.

I'm just playing.

I'm not sure I could make a useful character of him. But his territory of thought certainly gives plenty of space to play.

Says Lanier in last week's Wall Street Journal "On the Threshold of the Avatar Era":

People can inhabit awfully odd avatars. One of the early avatars was a lobster—a creature with more limbs than a human. By mapping values from body poses, it turns out people can learn to inhabit other bodies not just with oddly shaped limbs, or limbs attached in unfamiliar places, but even bodies with different numbers of limbs.

This phenomenon is called "homuncular flexibility." The homunculus is the mapping of the body into the motor cortex, which is a portion of the brain located approximately under the portion of the scalp that would be occupied by a Mohawk hairdo.

That the mapping of the homunculus could be so flexible as to adapt to non-human bodies was initially a shock, but a delightful one. The sensation of inhabiting a nonhuman avatar is a new kind of pleasure. Think about what it would be like to wear wonderful clothing, combined with driving a superb vehicle, combined with mastering an extraordinary physical skill. It is like all those things together, but more expressive.

When we can successfully inhabit a nonhuman avatar, we are exploring not only the brain's deep history, but also the potential far future of all the creatures for which it is preadapted—what might happen in hundreds of millions of years. Becoming an avatar is a form of extreme time travel for the brain.

Meanwhile, I'm playing his music over and over whenever I write on this project - outline, notes, chapters themselves - to disengage the ordering mind, to re-engage the ordering soul.

Says Lanier in his liner notes for this piece:

As the most eloquent machines, instruments predict the future of culture, when we will communicate increasingly through machines.

This piece is a structured improv between violinist Barbara Higbie and Lanier on a mouth organ from Laos/ Northeast Thailand, of which he writes:

The instrument looks a little like a hand held bamboo forest and sounds like a whole wind section. It has a keyboard-like agility and the expressive power of the voice.

1464 words down | 48,536 words to go

"Come Along" (An Approximate Fit)

2010-11-01T05:30:00.000-07:00

chapter 1

First chapters. For there is space there. Void but not empty. Like a yard of unmarked snow. Like the sound of the orchestra tuning itself, that hem and haw. Like the rising hum of the swarm about to take to the air.

This project seized hold of me suddenly in the midst of reading a short article (The Economist, September 4th, 2010, pgs. 25-26).

Who argues with the Muse?

Not me. Even if I do sometimes try to ignore her nudgings.

But not today.

Today I aim to write 2500 words set to the tune of "Come Along" by Jaron Lanier.

Of which tune he writes:

This piece was intended to have a salutary alchemical effect on a difficult love relationship. There are two lead instruments that play in completely different scales that would normally not be able to play simultaneously and sonorously.

One of the lead instruments is an Esraj, a bowed sitar-like instrument from the Bengal region of India and the other is a Suling flute from Bali. They alternate at first, in order to avoid conflict, but at the end there is a chord smeared on the background that has been extended to the point that it contains both instruments' scales, and in this context they can play at once. The abstraction of western harmony resolves conflicts, through an approximate fit, just like western laws.
00 words down | 50,000 words to go

the answer is YES

2010-10-27T13:26:00.000-07:00

To those who have enquired - yes (OH YES!) I am about to embark on a lovely luscious month-long glut of writing another first draft of a novel. This year's venue is the strange world of computer programmers - and all their bizarrely profitable poetry in binary code - also including fantasias on geodesic domes and dancing laser lights and New Mexican Medusa-hair.

Currently I am setting up this coming month's posts to encourage me along (and possibly entertain/ interest you?). I'll be letting you into it more than last year which seems appropriate with a techno-topic like this one because I'm going to be posting my outlined writing prompt of the day - so feel free to comment whatever off-topic, tangential, whimsical or contentious first thought comes to mind, I'll be looking to you for random bits of inspiration.

As for last year's novel - I have in fact been doing some revising/ rewriting/ reworking and y'know, it's not so lame as I had feared.

Even, maybe, a heartbeat there?

Maybe something perhaps living? (OH, the JOY!)

Meanwhile, and in the spirit of all things writerly: I do love Brevity this week. Would we were all so able to undercut nastiness so sweetly. And laugh at the very idea of rejection. And just laugh - you really don't want to miss this one.

And that's all in addition to Brevity's clearinghouse of calls for submissions - a few of which for whom (what? where? which?) I am readying mss as well.

all the things I'll never tell you now

2010-10-25T16:48:00.000-07:00

While Fritz' dad was dying I didn't post.

Which is different than saying I didn't sit down to my desk at scattered hours and think about posting.

And is also different than saying I didn't plan to post, take pictures thinking I would post, sit in parking lots, walk up the hill, dig out walkways all the while musing over possible posts.

So many posts that will never now be told. Because when I came to sit down at the desk, finally, late in the evening, I just could never see my way to words.

Too slight a post (such as, say, encouraging letters my old bike wrote me via the freezer and the answering machine, or disquisitions on the proper place of chocolate cake in the Grand Scheme of Things) and I'd be playing the fool at the edges of my dear ones' grief.

A grief that touched me only glancingly while they were principal mourners. I only cleaned up around it and supplied the necessary groceries.

Too heavy, I risked swamping this rackety lifeboat I paddle in. Because my life at sea has taught me I can't afford the interest on borrowed sorrow.

Grief has had an over-sticky quality for my psyche - it must be that my cells have an overabundance of receptor sites.

And I don't know how to do other than keep the deal I've made with MORTALITY - that if need be I will hold hands and dance with that Sovereign Somberness, but nevermore entertain His Grave Solemnity in state.

So now, coming back online, I feel this backlog of the things I'll never say.

The deliciously guilty pleasure, for example, of the first day I didn't have to stay all day, making breakfast, washing bedding, and trying to come up with something Dad would/ could eat.

The first day when all I had to do was check in first thing in the morning and do the shopping, and then I was free -- because Fritz' retired brother (whom I have never before appreciated to his full deserving) had swooped into town to take over the front-line care.

That day - when for once I didn't have anyone in the car too tired from doctor's appointments. That day - when for once, once more I could go all the way to the Island to Krueger's Farm for my fruit and veg.

Maybe I would've written more if I had only had small pleasures like these to celebrate.

Plans for a new herb garden in the place of what is right now just mud.

A bike ride I took full of sunshine and changing leaves.

Shell beans and concord grapes, fresh figs, gleaming purpleblack huckleberries, glowing honey, golden beets - I could've just posted pictures without words and let the shapes and colors and visible light make its own significance.

But there were also so many, many posts that were, frankly, Whines and Eye-rollings. Sourly amusing to myself but not too sweet for anyone else to suffer through.

Not to mention the posts of pure misanthropy. (My working title at one point: "Card Carrying, Dues-Paying Non-Member of the Universal Misanthropic Anti-Society for Even-Handedly Inclusive Despising").

Which title I stuck together, like an ugly awkward lego clump, the day I sat in the WalMart parking lot (never a great spot for seeing humanity in a better light) before carrying in an armload of packages of wrong-sized adult diapers and watched two unwashed men trying unsuccessfully to jump start their clunker.

I wished for my camera - for just a moment - the perfect illustration of all I was going to tell you. Then thought, really? I was so tired of trying to imagine other people's stories, trying to see anything at all redeeming beyond the ugly and obvious - beyond what was so very there - in this case, a fat man's bottom cleavage.

You and I are both better off by far not to have had to wade through all that.

Well, you are.

I did wade through - or paddle past. And of course, there were sweet moments, too quiet and small to say much about now.

But all of it, now, paddled past. And that's the point.

It's past.

And it wasn't so bad, now, looking back.

It never is, is it?

you come, too

2010-10-21T21:36:00.000-07:00

Because I'm here but hurried.

Because though I'm hurried there are some breaths of time worth stopping for.

Because I thought you might want to stop here, too.