you are what you eat with

The day started out as usual, the baby calling to me from his crib, swaying and babbling like a drunkard, falling over and then climbing up again with a smile and a wave. There was the relay of the cereal boxes to the table and the discovery of the dead mouse in the dining room, though Emily, having vanished under the bed for the morning was not willing to take credit.

But on this day, all this normalcy couldn't stave off the weight of knowing: we'd be going to the dentist. Isaac had a check up and cleaning scheduled and like all our other appointments – eye exams, physicals for school – we were trying to get them all up-to-date before the end of the year when Mike's job and, thus, our insurance coverage runs out.

I didn't have any particular reason to dread the dentist really, on my behalf or Isaac's, except for the fact that like with most any visit to a western “specialist,” we'd be temporarily sucked into their world where, overwrought with everything dental, we'd thrash and spin until they released us again to the larger world unscathed to the naked eye.

I miss our pediatric dentist in Monterey. He had a son Isaac's age. He spoke quietly and often said things I almost agreed with.

On this day, that started out so typically, we find ourselves at a place where the staff speaks in the forced and predictable cadence of people who are trying to sound kid-friendly, but really have no interest in anyone shorter than their shoulder. Everything that is said to Isaac, naturally, is actually for my benefit and comes out in patronizing tones that imply we have not done everything humanly possibly to optimize our son's oral health and by extension that we are horrid, horrid people and even worse parents.

The hygenist continues to interrupt me while I try to read the annual issue on whether MFA programs are affective in the writer's magazine that gets all its advertising money from MFA programs, to show me a tiny dark spot on my son's molar. “That's a tooth to watch!” she says more than once. And, after I try again to return to my magazine (Can writing be taught??), “I'm just going to show mom one more thing on this side.” It's my cue to get the hell up and look – look at what I've let happen!

“Mmm-hmm,” I try as a show of concern. And Isaac with his perfect public demeanor, says nothing, just opens and closes obediently.

If it is under these conditions that I must write, then so be it. And so, I am drafting this essay real time as the passive-agressive hygenist berates me with her sighs and hums.

Chipper, faux kid-friendly hygenists' names are required to be things like Maricella, Kayla, and Leanna. The final “a” is important. Like the upturn in a smile, the circles over the I's when you are writing your name and the last name of the boy you have a crush on over and over again on your folder in high school chemistry class.

Isaac lost the two teeth that flank his upper front teeth ages ago and the replacements have not yet seen fit to grow in. This situation, as you might imagine, is impossible to bear – if you are Maricella or Kayla or Sienna or Vivianna. I might find it impossible to bear wearing scrubs with Tweety Bird on them, but there you have it.

She convinces me to do x-rays (that damn finite stretch of insurance) to see what's going on up in the gum line. Before she goes to take them though, she spells out all the tragic ways in which my son's teeth will ruin his mouth and his life. She recommends (strongly) what I've come to think of as preemptive braces to “help the teeth come down.” If, in fact, they are even there (gasp). When I ask for more information on the real implications of such a situation and the option of waiting as opposed to vomiting big bucks to spell out to my seven-year-old in orthodontia just how unacceptable and imperfect he is, she offers “He's going to look like he's missing two teeth.” To which I reply, very slowly, “That's because. He's. Missing. Two teeth.”

“I have a referral right here for you. We'll email over the digital x-ray today,” she says by way of response.

Release me, oh great goddess of orthodontia (who is married, by pure coincidence, of course, to our dental deity), out into my sordid world of dead mice and cereal. I have nothing for your altar.

sit up straight and look like a poet

I'm sure it's just jealousy. Most things are.

I've come to resent the book cover photos of the poet that looks out at you, his expression appearing as though he is startled to have found himself there, his most intimate thoughts published for all the world to see, by BOA Editions or Coffee House Press, by Michigan, Pittsburgh, Arizona, Georgia. And I have nothing to offer him in return but my undying devotion – after all, I am one of the few, the small pod of humans that buys poetry books, albeit second-hand.

And what has he got to look alarmed about? I mean, really. He must have known this was coming – writing in some disciplined way every day that he will ultimately reveal in a Poets & Writers interview from his light-filled house, churning out poems, essays, revisions, hob-nobbing electronically with his old MFA pals, submitting with some regularity to prestigious journals and being accepted half of the time. It's not as if he spends his days crawling under furniture, picking up gooey Cheerios, fleeing the house every couple days, or weeks, the baby wailing at him, stretching out his little arms for him like a drowning man going down for the last time, then having to avoid the questions from the older kids in the driveway: “Where are you going?”

“To write,” he'd have to tell them, as if none of this affected him and then get in the car, sweating.

At the cafe, the super-ordinary adultness and freedom of saucers clicking would make him want to close his journal into which he had managed in the course of 15 minutes to write the date, lower his head into his hands and weep.

No, it's not like that at all.

And it makes one think that every one of these author photos should be set up like an 80's Glamor Shot or posed on the top of a mountain – arms raised in triumph over their literary heads and silhouetted against a pink and orange sunset.

What is it with these photos anyway? Sly looks. Shy profiles. Pensive, pondering Bodhi tree expressions. Aren't poets meant to be the heralders of truth? The carriers of clarity? Open your eyes, man, and look at the camera! Isn't that what your mother, who probably spent her days crawling under furniture, picking up your gooey Cheerios so you could go off and become a freaking poet would want? And another thing on her behalf – pick up your damn feet when you walk!

musings on renovation

the dining room floor after we pulled up the fake wood vinyl

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack...

-- Talking Heads

I really want to write to my children. I want to write them letters and tell them how much they mean to me and who they were when they were tiny and who I was when they were tiny and who we grew into together.

When Isaac was a newborn I took a special little journal of handcrafted paper and carefully began an entry or two to this little being I barely knew.

Very quickly it became clear what was unclear – At what aged Isaac was I directing this writing? What kind of language made sense? Is he reading this as a 10-year-old? An adult? Other?

Then, very quickly after that it became clear that I could not keep up a journal to my newborn because I had a newborn.

When Obama was elected, I started another letter to Isaac. He was three then. I got farther with it, but it's still not finished.

I think it's a bit like our contractor who has never finished the renovation on his own house.

Yes, we have a contractor. We are moving ahead with putting a bathroom upstairs and creating a bedroom out of the store room. Why, Kitty, where will you store things? Meeee?? What on earth might I want to store? Everything is out in the open here, baby. Closets are for wusses; attics are for sissies; store rooms are for the weak and foolish!

The plumber is coming tomorrow. This may not sound like a threat to you, but when spoken to us by our contractor, it most certainly was. He was trying to get us to go choose the crap we want in the bathroom, and well, as you may have gathered from previous entries, we are stretched somewhat thin and this choosing activity has not been at the top of our to-do list.

And here is where we return to the idea of writing, sort of. Picking out fixtures is a bit like choosing a font – You can look at a whole alphabet/style line together and decide on the style that suits you – Serifs? Sans serifs? Square head faucets? Bold hardware? Italic? Condensed? Brushed nickel finish? You may like the main line, but then you see the F or the towel rack and you think, “No! No! No! That won't do! Why's that swirly thing swirling there?”

And while you are still caught in the showroom delirium wondering how and why anyone would bother to spend two hours doing this and screw it let's just go to a store and buy our own damn towel rack that's in stock and a helluva lot cheaper even if the contractor won't guarantee it for a year like he will if we spend 5x as much on it, and you suddenly have this revelation that will change your life forever: OMG. I now understand why Home Depot exists and maybe it's a good thing that it does. It was like when I learned that only the female mosquito bites, the males – wait for it – pollinate flowers.

The only person who was probably less excited than we were today about picking out shower valves and vent fans was our contractor who was calling messages in to the plumbing show room from his long weekend camping in the Berkshires. (Another path I wonder about – one minute you decide to go to school for architectural design because you like lines and you can visualize space well and the next you are talking to people about where the toilet paper holder should go...)

And you may find yourself using the word sconces more than you ever thought possible. Yet, it's a good word. A good word. Maybe even making my top 100 list. And here, again, is where we return to the idea of writing. Because, in fact, we always return to the idea of writing. What a relief.

dining room floor refinished

The Writer's Almanac

Every morning, for I don't remember how many years now, I get the Writer's Almanac in my email inbox.

I don't always read them, sometimes I am just too busy, and other times I've stuck my straw into the eternal spring of hope again, sipping, sipping, and thought that some better, more relaxed time would arrive to me where I could open the little missal and read it in luxury – quietly, while drinking tea, retaining all there was to know, growing inspired by a line of the poem or the life noted within to go off and write my own ditty that would be published somewhere fabulous and – well, gosh, why not – picked up by the Writer's Almanac.

I keep these unread messages and do open some on occasion. But there are many I haven't gotten to. April 18, March 5 and May 2 of this year, for example, as well as a trove of other unreads that go back a ways: December 26, 2011 and October 13, 2011. And I know there are many many more. Maybe someday I will open December 1, 2010 and see whose birthday it was, learn something.

Reading the Writer's Almanac you get a sense of a life made tidy by an intern or two, reported in that plodding Midwestern voice of Garrison Keillor. No matter what cruelty, insanity or banality the author might have been subject to as a child or dished out as a young adult or witnessed in old age, everything sounds perfectly natural and under control. The years dodging alcoholic parents, the three arrests, the ultimate decision to become a chicken farmer, take up a mere line and a half. Facts are facts and life's most treacherous turnings are spun into now plain and logical-sounding phrases that begin with “so.”

So, he spent the next 17 years traveling in South America.

So, she quit school at age 9.

And, of course,

So, he decided to become a writer.

You have to appreciate a format in which writers are made to sound sane and whole, where all of the drama and heartbreak of life is woven into a synopsis one can chew like a sweet digestive all because it's someone's birthday. They were here once. Maybe they still are. They wrote a book. How much richer we all are for it.

on rainy days, I take a shower: a wee vignette on gardening and parenting

California poppy and marigold seedlings in my garden

snaps with alyssum

I don't mean that I step outside into the rain and “shower” in a rain shower. While this conceit is quaintly poetic in a not very interesting way, what my gardening poet mama self means is in fact quite literal. Believe me, poetry aside, I know something about the literal. I live with an engineer.

I mean, on days when the weather is rainy, I step into the bathtub – a beautiful clawfoot tub one well-meaning former owner of my 116-year-old farmhouse painted green on some decorating bender which I'm sure at the time seemed like a glowing stroke of genius, and I turn on the water, which, thanks to that engineer, for the first time in 116 years, sprays from a shower pipe stationed above the green claw feet in my 5' by 7' bathroom that sits, naturally, as a modern afterthought – urban, city slicker cousin to the original outhouse – off our kitchen, itself a modern afterthought.**

I take a shower when it rains because I will probably do less gardening on these days and it seems a safe enough effort to scrub my fingernails and untangle my hair. Of course, I must qualify with “probably” because you do never know. One of my first acts of gardening after moving to Massachusetts was planting daffodil bulbs in a blizzard. But there you are.

The other part of my rainy day hygiene routine is that as a mom of a 9-month-old baby and a 7-year-old first-grader, the mornings get more than a little busy and the evenings no less so. Showering doesn't tend to happen every day, as unAmerican as that is to admit.

When I get to take showers, however, I am loathe to leave the green clawfoot. The world becomes a caressing stream of warm water, the knots in my neck show signs of wanting to unlock and ideas percolate among the synapses of my brain like gorgeous soap bubbles shimmering in rainbow colors.***

And then I get out.

“Mommy?!” “Mommy??” MOMmy!!”

** This is the kind of unending sentence that my husband tells me turns readers off. However, I like to think that someday (when I'm discovered, right?) it will be the kind of signature within my writing that marks my style. It will be, in fact, the REASON I am discovered -- some editor will be reeled in by such a layered and original voice and my college political science professor who handed me back my essays exasperated (“Kitty, can you please just give me a subject and a verb and move on!”) will have to write me an apology. (One sentence of substantial length will do, Jeff.)

***And here, I leave the literal to move toward the poetic once again, albeit in a somewhat trite fashion since these are the first comparisons that come to mind and the baby is due to wake up any minute and wouldn't it be nice to post a blog entry?

kale with rhubarb leaves

end of the allium

really tired and this is what came out

I was checking my email the other day with the baby on my lap when I noticed he was chewing something. My Page Up key.

It is difficult to capture the extreme chaos that is the first year. It is nearly impossible to explain to those with "good little sleepers" the overriding and absolute collapse that threatens hour by hour your life when you have a child that doesn't sleep well - day or night.

It is Mother's Day weekend and I arrive here broken, convinced that raising the next generation means nothing less than imminent self destruction. It should have been plain all along: They will take our place. I just had no idea it would be quite so soon.

Sometimes when I should be getting my full two hours of contingent shut eye, I instead read profiles in Poets & Writers magazine where the writer is described sitting in some beautiful room of her beautiful house with its beautiful art on the walls sipping what can only be assumed to be beautiful tea. They live in some town or city or village somewhere and no matter what you know of that place or have previously concluded about it, it now sounds beautiful. Beautiful and exotic and exactly the type of place a successful writer should live and I wonder why I don't live there and where on earth they got the money for that space they own.

And what, you may ask, does this have to do with children? Just everything. Everything.

I offer up Billy Collins' "Lanyard" (and here is the poet reading it on video) in honor of mothers this weekend and in acknowledgment of the lag time it takes children to appreciate theirs - hell, society in general still hasn't figured out what we're worth.

I swear, seven years ago, I never even gave a single thought to what might be in those strollers.

In a room where a baby is sleeping

In a room where a baby is sleeping, there is both an overflow of thoughts and a stagnation of thinking. In this indeterminate period while youth is so extreme, where fragility is named next to frustration, we move in isolation, quiet and bemused in our fortune and our hopelessness. There is a self, forgotten or misplaced that mocks us from its dark corner and we arrive before it desperate and out of breath just as the baby stirs again and on looking back we find the self has vanished into the shadows. In a room where a baby is sleeping, worlds are born and die away in instants, in our minds, in our fogged hours, in a room where a baby is sleeping.

the door collector

Doors red, blue, brown, white standard sizes, white one skinny closet door. one blue with window and glass, I collect doors but can't take them! 10 each

That is an actual line from a Craig's List ad. The person was moving and listing a variety of things for sale. After the hand-painted boogie board and before the list of mirrors was this list. Doors.

Collecting doors? Maybe he or she didn't want to miss Opportunity. It might knock on the beige one with the half-circle of stained glass at the top. Or, it might favor the steel door, impenetrable though it may seem. The screen door, flapping gayly open and closed through summer nights might be where it comes to call, or the one painted white and red with the ornate handle.

The call and the challenge for the writer is to notice. Through this year of chaos, I try. Often anymore, it is the only thing I can do. I can't seem to do anything about things, either because they are out of my control to begin with or because I notice them while walking a fussy baby, or while falling into bed, exhausted.

Before I moved, I had started on a longer work, now temporarily abandoned, that deals with my mom's passing and my tendency to search for and, by turns, embrace or reject what might be signs of messages from the other side. One of the main things I am grappling with in writing it – or should I say grappling with and so writing it in hopes of at least (and this is no small part) laying bare the questions though the answers may never find me – is even if I were to find what I believe with all my being is a sign, so what? A sign of...? The meaning of which is...? Because of it I'm supposed to believe...?

That's where the noticing comes in. For now, I just notice. It is what it is, as they say. What to do with the information, I have no idea.

I just notice, for example, that my mother declined open heart surgery before she died. And that the last time I saw her was in a cardio ICU unit. I just notice that a year after her passing I had a baby that requires open heart surgery. And that I will be spending time with him in a cardio ICU unit.

I also notice that I have bought a house with a lot of issues regarding doors and passage ways. I refer to it regularly as a Feng Shui nightmare. None of the doors to the rooms close right, entrances are obstructed, unnecessarily complicated, blocked. If everything in the world wasn't at the top of my priority list right now, from buying winter boots to scheduling surgery, I'd say I'd have those doors fixed ASAP. My baby, born to this house in so many strange ways – born at home the night we moved in, his middle name meaning “new house...” -- has passages in his heart that are blocked and other spaces that are open where they aren't supposed to be. Just noticing.

I laughed and laughed at the door collector when I first hit upon it. But really, why should this hobby be any odder than any of our other neuroses? French doors teeming with possibility. Barn doors with their two halves swinging independently. We live among closet doors, pocket doors, solid wood doors with see-through key holes. All the while, looking for a way out

Day Thirty-Two to Thirty-Five: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Leesburg, VA & Washington, D.C.

The earth is a homeless person. Or the earth's home / is the atmosphere. / Or the atmosphere is the earth's clothing, / layers of it, the earth wears all of it, / the earth is a homeless person...

from Sharon Olds' “What is the Earth?”

Our last day in Ohio, the heat broke. We even got caught in a rain storm and took refuge, shivering, in the impressive Hudson Public Library. And then, we were off.

More friends in Pittsburgh and Washington, DC – two places I used to call home. One has the most down-to-earth people I've ever encountered. The other has motorcades that always seem to happen just when you're trying to get to lunch.

Or the atmosphere is the earth's cocoon, / which it spun itself, the earth is a larvum. / Or the atmosphere is the earth's skin – / earth, and atmosphere, one / homeless one ...

Isaac got to go to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, where he encountered the climax of his fossil-laden cross-country adventure...

And he arrived at the much-hyped-by-his-parents Air and Space Museum on the Mall, personally my least-favorite of the Smithsonian museums, but as someone born in the summer of '69, I feel strongly that freeze-dried ice cream is a childhood rite of passage.

Both cities provided some welcomed preggo creds. A woman pushing a stroller at the Carnegie asked me when my baby was due. Oh, to be noticed! (I am consistently told I am small and can hide the belly with the right clothes still. I have very few actual maternity clothes, which adds to the potential for disappearing baby.) She then followed this question with the more than predictable statement: “You look great!” Other women say this to pregnant women all. the. time. It's code for, “You aren't that fat yet!” Consequently, I'm never really sure what to say in reply.

Unfortunately, Andrew Carnegie either didn't warm to great-looking pregnant tubbos, or didn't leave enough of an endowment to put some upper floor restrooms in – two bathrooms, both in the basement. Not. Cool. A preg might be hanging in ancient Egypt on the 3^rd floor and, go figure, need to pee. Hypothetically.

Or its orbit is the earth's / home, or the path of the orbit just / a path, the earth is a homeless person. / Or the gutter of the earth's orbit is a circle / of hell, the circle of the homeless...

Another preggo triumph: At the Air and Space, which now requires bags to be x-rayed and people to be subjected to a full body scan, the guard pointed at my belly. “Bomb in there?” he inquired. When I shook my head, he ordered me to bypass the scanner.

While for its part, the Air and Space Museum has bathrooms in sufficient locales, they were – impossibly – even louder than the din of the museum itself. They could have been their own exhibit with the noise and force of the automatic hand dryers. Have you encountered these dryers? The ones that caution you to remove hands slowly? You may think the warning odd, until you notice your skin rippling and curling away from the flesh of your hand.

Honestly, I can't take the auto-bathroom stuff. Toilets flush themselves, except when they don't, water comes out on its own, if you wave your hand around enough, soap, too, sometimes – although more often I've been caught flailing fruitlessly in front of the dispenser of gloppy pink liquid waiting for it to magically fall into my palm... and paper towels appear with a wave, unless, those trusty hand dryers turn on with gale force winds.

But the earth / has a place, around the fire, the hearth / of our star. The earth is at home. The earth / is home to the homeless. For food, and warmth, / and shelter, and health / they have earth and fire / and air and water, for home they have / the elements they are made of...

Perhaps I am alone in my ability to observe exhibits of early flight, of satellites and moon landers, to see full size skeletons of diplodocus and giant prehistoric sea turtles, and leave with my strongest memories attached to public restrooms. These are the things comedy routines are made of, and really dull blog entries.

Living in the moment may not be my strong point. Writing may simply preclude living in the moment. With the exception of newspaper writing, which comes pretty close to being present in one particular moment since you are constantly on top of dates and happenings. Newspaper writing is different than my other writing in many ways – for example regarding clichés. As a poet, I run screaming from cliché, but in newspaper, its the lifeblood. The best headlines are always clichés. I imagine journalism school must be full of courses on cliché: Cliché 101, Intermediate Cliché, The History and Politics of Cliché, Multicultural Cliché. I am a mere novice here, and defer on this point to the “J-men” as I like to call my editors.

While, in my theater previewing, I am loathe to copy down directors' many clichés regarding things such as the “magic of live theater,” regarding headlines, it's always fun to see if I can make up a cliché good enough to stick. A while back, I wrote a piece about the popularity of genealogy research. I named it, “The family you never had.” I thought it was pretty good! But it got bumped for “Find Yourself.” I had to admit defeat. And then there are the puns. Plentiful and glorious. There is a Broadway show called “Urinetown” that has been produced in Monterey a couple of times in recent years. I was sure I nailed it titling my preview article with “To Pee or Not to Pee.” Just goes to show what I know... “Urine Luck.”

Ah, but again I stray, and rather far this time, I'd say! I find I have less to say about my stays when I stay with friends. Perhaps I am subconsciously protecting their privacy. Perhaps I am just better at writing when disgruntled.

In Pittsburgh, I got to hang out on the porch on a warm summer evening, talking with long-time buddies and watching fireflies. Something I can't say I've done in a very long time. Monterey has no warm summer evenings, no fireflies, and few porches. In D.C., I had dreams of going to bookstores I miss like Kramer's and Politics and Prose, but ultimately, our time was short and our accommodations were far (Leesburg). I didn't get to those places. Instead, I store the unfulfilled desire to go, to browse, to replay this dream, while the impressions I write about must revolve around bathrooms and food courts – oh boy, food courts! Don't get me started. McDonald's, you sly devil, you.

as if / each homeless one were an earth, made / of milk and grain, like Ceres, and one / could eat oneself—as if the human / were a god, who could eat the earth, a god / of homelessness.

Days Ten & Eleven: Still Santa Fe

8: am – Curious George

8:30 – Cat in the Hat

9:00 – Super Why

9:30 – Dinosaur Train

10:00 – Sesame Street

11:00 – Sid the Science Kid

11:30 – Clifford the Big Red Dog

In case you need to know the PBS Kids line up and happen to be in the Santa Fe/Albuquerque area. It's guilty mode for me. I am exhausted, working on some terrible cold, my little sea-level sinuses suffering a (very dry) elevation of some 7,000 feet. Baby belly is protesting all kinds of things, unhappy again with its position on the priority list. Mike is at his conference all day every day. And meanwhile...

My boy is pure energy – never stopping. Banging, jumping, cartwheeling, yelling, from the word go. I am unworthy and simply not up to the task. I regularly get lectured in rocket science before breakfast. That is not a metaphor, that is in fact my life. Walking down the street with this child is like walking with a jackrabbit working up a nervous twitch who's already high on caffeine.

When I can manage and I've numbed his mind all I can stand with cartoons, we try to explore Santa Fe. I find myself impatient with its touristy essence, its midweek, deflated balloonishness, the sad clown waiting for the curtain to go up so he can turn on the charm. Empty rickshaws, half-hearted turquoise vendors, the plaza dotted with a few pan handlers. We stand outside the New Mexico Museum of Art while Isaac admires the FedEx truck parked out front. “I just want to wait and watch it drive away,” he whispers with the awed reverence of a teen girl outside in the alley by the stage door after the show.

We go to what I thought was a museum of fossils and minerals, but turns out to be a store. Isaac is unperturbed and we dive into this world of gems and rocks, ancient fish trapped in sandstone. There are pieces in excess of $5,000 next to me. I check my preggo balance and move toward the box of 50 cent shark teeth. I am stunned by my own aptitude with dinosaurs, as I discuss with the store clerk the importance of the discovery of the first archeopteryx fossil while milling around a replica, as if I do this every day. “Guess the original must be in Germany, huh?” I throw out knowledgeably.

The Georgia O'Keefe museum is closed for a new installation, but we go into the gift shop so I can show Isaac her style, talk about another artist. He is mildly impressed, but turns down my offer of a kids' book called My Name is Georgia: A Portrait, with its engaging story of her path and how she did what called to her heart. He wants to know if we can buy the hand-blown hourglass instead. Hey, a giant glass thing in the van for four more weeks. No, love. We can't. Why do I bother? If we head back now, we can still catch Clifford.

I buy the book anyway. I am a total sucker for those things – kids books on the lives of poets and artists – and soon I'll have another captive audience to read them to. I have a gorgeous one on Frida Kahlo. A children's book that I used to read to Isaac when he was too little to protest and ask for “the space one” again, too little to even eat the pages. It's perfect. All those things you want for your child before the child comes. A lesson plan before the students get to it. I will read about O'Keefe and Kahlo while we rock; s/he will know beauty and perseverance and creativity as central to our being. Often, all through my first nauseated tri-mester, and now, when I am feeling not so pregnant glowy, I will admonish my lack of writing: “Kahlo painted with a body cast on! She painted through all kinds of pain!” Then, I roll over and dream my self-pity dreams. 

War, Letters, Love

Pictured: Heath Proskin, Bill Minor, Richard Mayer.
Photo Credit: David Hall., Monterey Herald.

There is a project I've been a part of for a while called "Love Letters of Lynchburg" that is truly unique and interesting on many levels. Yesterday, we did a performance - a CD release party - that was a reading of love letters between two people from during the Civil War, backed by a live trio on an original score. All of it orchestrated by the charming and extraordinary Bill Minor, who happens to be distantly related to the two wartime lovers. Here is a link to an article about the performance that gives a little more background. I'm tempted just to copy and paste the article, since I'm not sure how long the link will be good for, but anyhoo...

It was one of those times when you realize late on the significance of what you're doing. Bill asked me to read the letters of Susan Leigh Blackford, essentially to be Susan, and I wouldn't think of saying no to Bill. Along the journey, I learned how fascinating she was, the time was, the relationship she had was, and yesterday, how much our merry little band could touch people with the story. As one person noted in thanking us, the exchange was plain and simple an anti-war statement, nevermind from a war none of us can remember or even imagine.

I want to refer back to two poems, of mine and of Ruth Fainlight - from which mine takes its architecture - that I posted on this blog two years ago. Fainlight's poem in fact speaks specifically of wartime letters again.

How much do you use pen and paper anymore? Do you? What can it change to see personal communication become electronic? What does each do to shape the time we're in? How do we participate in that shaping?

poetry events and other transformative musings

At the very start of 2010, I had the amazing privilege to take a week-long writing and improv workshop with Ann Randolph at Esalen Institute in Big Sur. Esalen don't come cheap in any shape or form, and staying there was out of the question. So I bounced around to a couple places, the stories behind which all deserve entries of their own. One of them that became home for two nights was the tiniest room at Deetjen's Big Sur Inn.

I arrived late – too late for a personal check in, so a map was taped to the office door for me. No keys. The doors don't lock from the outside.

My room was called “Petite Cuisine” and it charmed me instantly.

The room is made for one person. One. Different. If you go into a restaurant and see someone eating alone, do you, like me, begin to create stories about that person? Why they are there and what they are thinking as they sit in silence, the other place settings scooped up and swept away as if the table were always meant for solitary dining. In the case of Petite Cuisine, there was nothing to scoop up. There was a single bed in the tiniest room you've ever seen. Only solo sojourners need apply.

Here you can imagine away, though there are more clues to the backstories than in those restaurant scenes albeit with their own mysteries thrown in. The people that stay here don't do so in silence. The shelf over the bed is filled with journals which, in turn, are filled with the ramblings, poems, dreams and screams of past occupants. I could live there for months, just reading and recording these written treasures. The earliest guest book there is from 1996. The latest entry is from a week before I arrived. I obsessively put them in chronological order and notice that 2001 is missing. The year I got married. The year long stretches in my own journal contained sketches of towers – two of them side by side. Only that.

I pull a book with a flowery printed fabric cover off the shelf and open at random. The date I flip to: February 5, 1997. Before I ever set foot on the west coast. “I am 26 today,” it says. I continue to read. She's had her heart broken. They were supposed to come here together. She still decided to come, alone. She'll be about to turn 38 as I read along and I wonder how many more times her heart has been broken in the last dozen years and what she thinks now of her 26-year-old self.

In an entry that I barely catch as I flip through another journal there is this: “Don't forget to look in the copper tea pot.” The advice is 10 years old. Still, I see it. A small copper kettle perched on the window sill just over the bed. I open it with, I admit, a certain amount of trepidation. It is chock-full. Small slips of paper spill out as I remove the lid. Hundreds of scraps of loose leaf, business cards, notes and prayers on whatever people could find. I read a few and close up the lid again to save the whispers inked there for the next guest.

We are all in the process of transforming. Sometimes what we put on paper is a shedding of an old skin, sometimes it is a vision of a future life. In hashing ideas about in my journal trying to hit on possible themes for a couple upcoming reading/poetry events, the thing that kept coming up over and over again was people in the process of transformation, past and future selves.

I have not done a (poetry) reading in a while, but things are popping up again.

One is a reading next month for something that I've participated in several times in the past. It's called Women and Food (website is not up to date, but there is a past poem of mine on there). This year it is at 7pm on Friday, May 14 at the Felix Kulpa Gallery in Santa Cruz, CA. A group of women poets will read their work on whatever aspect of food and their relationships to it that they've dared explore in verse. The evening is also a benefit for the Second Harvest Food Bank, so if you are in the area and can make it, bring canned stuff for the bins. We also create a symbolic place setting for ourselves at the banquet table for whatever might be “on our plates” at the moment.

Here are a couple of my past place settings: One called “Starved for Time” (and no, I don't really eat the crap on there) and the other complete with seeds and dirt, based on growing food, since that year I read several poems about my former English as a Second Language students who are field workers.(Here's one.)

This year I have lots of food stuff going on, though none of it is feeling very poetic. “Gluten-free” and “hypoglycemia” don't make for the smoothest of metaphor candidates.

The other event will hopefully happen in June – a show of my poems presented as broadsides in a local cafe. Broadsides are basically framed, poster-sized pieces - graphically or artistically pleasing somethings behind the text of a poem. It essentially allows poetry to have a physical presence, just like visual art does. More on this as I actually convince myself I can do it, but suffice to say if transformations were tangible, this might be part of my old/new skin tangled at my feet, scales shining in an orange sun.

where it all begins: thinking about parenting and teaching, again

It's weird, really. How often on dates Mike and I end up in a toy store, milling around. I liken it to lesson planning. It's the perfect state of things – the time of imagining, before the people (the students or the boy) take those things (the lessons or the toys) and do what they will do with them.

It's before your best laid plans lie crumpled at your feet, shredded and bleeding. It's a beginning. I am obsessed with beginnings – mornings are my favorite time of day, before the fog lifts and the traffic is audible. My essays are all confused and muddled because I can't pick one way to start them, instead there are three or four introductions competing with each other.

It is the creative part, the wide-open. It is possibility and sunrise. This sounds pretty dramatic when you think about wandering around a store front turning boxes of Legos over looking at prices. But there it is. The hope. I don't subscribe to the parenting method of buying and over-buying stuff for your kids. Yet, maybe I can muster some sympathy for those parents if I imagine them becoming caught up in a dream of possibility over and over. You don't see at this point, the Clue Jr. game abandoned in the closet, its box smashed on three corners. Each made-in-China plastic piece of junk perhaps not a substitute for love and understanding, but a seed of hope for the realization of this small being whose lighted with them for a brief era. Of course, it would be misdirected. We are all misdirected, sometimes down the most harrowing of paths. But I am speaking now of intention.

I drive past the hospital, the parole office, juvenile hall, out toward the hills, toward my next class. There is a sense for me of a not so subtle evolution, or devolution, that is brick and mortar real. I have been thinking about the students I am teaching in relation to the students who used to sit in their chairs when I taught six years back. Six years ago, these kids, the ones here today, still had time to go anywhere, else, away, from here. They had innocence, if not shiny and new, at least to some degree intact; they had the chance of anything possible.

Frequently enough, I can't wait to get the real Isaac to sleep, freeing me of the vigilance of motherhood for that brief space, only to stay up half the night talking to his dad about him.

Am I an idealist happiest when I'm divorced from reality? But we create our own reality. This is never truer than when speaking of writers. If I share with you the story of the magical invisible alligator that Isaac works with to deliver toys and picture frames (?) to houses, will you think all of my days enchanted? If I tell you about the years of lack of sleep, the demanding voice that barks about food and play and socks and now, will you know me as cursed? Writing takes everything – it is as egalitarian a vocation as you can get – you are well, you are sick, you are rich or poor, you have 10 dogs, you hate animals. The story can start anywhere. But you don't have to put it all down at once.

I think it is why so many students get stuck writing – they don't know they can select out the pieces they want to talk about, leave the rest. That they can even ruminate, perhaps forever, in the beginning, in the land of potential, in the moment before the gun goes off and their heel presses sharply against the starting block, in the moment before the gun goes off, period. In the time when they were kicking it with their buddies before the lights of the police car came like ugly streamers around the corner. That what happens afterwards, is just that – an afterwards. That whole worlds are made and broken in the dark of a nascent fog. That to sit outside your story, to tell it, creates another reality. That to write, all you need is a moment.

Why do I feel like my days at this are numbered?

K: Why don't you read your book for a little while. I'm going to write about you now.

I: For real?

K: Yes.

I: For real-real-real-real-really-real?'

K: Yes.

Books, words, letters: a post about literary downsizing

We are staying in an incredibly beautiful apartment in Northampton, MA. Though I have not met the woman who lives here, I like her. This is easily explained. What I mean to say is, I like her books.

Nevermind the bedroom shelf, which already has me on board, stocked as it is with Toni Morrisons and Barbara Kingsolvers. And I won't even start counting at the bathroom reading material that includes Why Do Men Have Nipples? Hundreds of Questions You'd Only Ask a Doctor After Your Third Martini as well as 1,000 Places To See Before You Die.

The bookshelf in the hallway has enough to make me never want to leave (well, that and there are 53 steps up to this place). The eclectic nature of the gathered books is what strikes you first – Bloomingdale's Illustrated 1886 Catalog down from William Styron's Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. How about the plays of Sartre and Oscar Wilde and Shakespeare? In a pile that looks a lot like college texts we find a fat, weathered Webster's New World Dictionary, Cultures Under Siege and Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life. There is this all-star line-up: All's Quiet on the Western Front, The Scarlet Letter, Little Women, Breakfast at Tiffany's. There is the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Water Trails of Western Massachusetts, Best American Short Stories 1998, Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela and A People's History of the United States by the late Howard Zinn. Reading Lolita in Tehran is three shelves down from Lolita herself which is propped next to Michael Moore's Dude, Where's My Country? Frankly, just ogling this collection -- it's exhilarating, really.

I am currently reading a book called Reading the OED by Ammon Shea (OED = Oxford English Dictionary) (I think my sister gave it to Mike at some point. Thanks, Rita.) It's amusing to say the least. I thought Shea was a little loony talking about his fervor for dictionaries, but all I have to do is stop and catch my own reflection to see that those who live in geeky glass houses, should probably stay away from anything that looks too much like a rock. Or, something like that.

This man has read thousands and thousands (and thousands) of words and then chosen a few from each letter to share with us and comment on. I, in turn, will share just a portion of my favorites with you...like Porporate – the state of wearing purple; or Paneity – the state of being bread. There is Antithalian – opposed to fun or merriment and Bemissionary - to annoy with missionaries. After Inquilinate - to dwell in a strange place, the author relates his experience living in Los Angeles. I love Onomatomania - vexation at having difficulty in finding the right word. And of course there is Filiism – an excessive bias for one's own son.

Books, words. They are so much fun. Isaac still has a few amusing phrases I am loathe to correct, like “On your March, get set, go!” or “back and forest,” and, that old standby, “Elmo's Glue.”

Books, words. When you break it all down, we end up in letters. Isaac finds them everywhere these days. In tree branches. In his shoe laces. Twisting his craft material of choice – pipecleaners – over and and over again into letter after letter. He is fond of drawing letter combos as one-liners. (Graphic designer, anyone?)

Just in terms of full disclosure of geekdom, I have been writing a series of poems based on the letters of the alphabet and their historical derivation. Yes, it's that bad.

My poem for O is called “Learning to Write” and stars none other than my only son. The letter O is descended from the Semitic “ayin,” meaning “eye” in Phoenician. The poem begins like this:

“Look, Mama. I can draw an O.”

He meets the single, curved line perfectly, then makes another, and another.

If the writer is in love with sentences, she must be just mad for syllables,
have to cast herself prostrate before letters.

We begin here, before “Beowulf” in its squirrelly Old English,
before Dickinson's private genius, before Mandelstam
and whatever the last thing was he scrawled in that exquisite Cyrillic
the night Stalin's henchman dragged him away for the last time,
before Langston Hughes could sing out “Harlem,”
before Sharon Olds held poems “heavy as poached game” in her hands,

letters. O.

May you all slow down enough to notice and cherish the smallest among us.

The Twelve Days of Moving

This is a piece I wrote several years ago. It was pre-baby and pre-many other things. It marked the first of our many moves in not so many years, most of which seemed to happen around this season. I'm posting it now for Kim, despite the shift in life phase and the fact that she is moving farther than across town.

The Twelve Days of Moving

On the first day of moving…

People congratulated us heartily. Moving to a house? We would no longer share walls, and so they wished us well in our new place, in this new, exciting chapter of our lives. I was taken back by the level and sincerity of their enthusiasm. We smiled as they cheered us on. There were hugs and good-humored razzing about the work ahead.

On the second day of moving…

We've been driving back and forth, back and forth. The old apartment still looks full. Every road in Monterey County is under construction – no, I swear it! The rain and wind are here now. Mudslides to the south of us. Flash floods to the north. The boxspring struggles to win its freedom, bucks and lifts from the roof.

On the third day of moving…

I'm scrubbing the shower tiles with products I'm morally opposed to. My sinuses are coated in bleach. "Is this good enough?" I'm thinking, as I scrub some of the grout lines cleaner than others. "Our deposit was only $800."
("Only??" – this thought born of those too many trips back and forth, over the same four miles, back and forth, a numbness.)
"$800, eh?" I think. "I could earn that back in…" I start to scrub harder. "Shit!" I say out loud and with force. "Whadja say?" Mike calls, his upper torso inside the frig. I imagine his sponge red with the mixed berry jam that spilled after the Halloween party.

On the fourth day of moving…

"Who knew we owned so many cookie cutters? Do we need all these cookie cutters? When was the last time we made cookies? Does any one person really need more than one dinosaur cookie cutter?" Mike apparently assumes all of these questions are rhetorical, but he would be wrong. I am studying the human condition. I am out for data. When I look over, he's engrossed in a pile of old PG&E bills.

On the fifth day of moving…

is our garage sale.
"Is the glass suncatcher your brother gave you for sale?" Mike asks.
"No, definitely not," I tell him.

The early birds are there at eight, want jewelry and CDs. Others sleep in before coming for our junk. No one touches the electric potpourri pot my sister-in-law thought was just-what-I-needed, or the shoe rack I've always hated. But there are other finds. Colored bottles for a quarter. Our $10 Goodwill chair for five. I make change and strangers tell me about their cancer surgery, the size of their kitchen.
"How much for the suncatcher?" a round-faced woman in a bulky coat asks. "Three dollars," I hear myself say. "Will you take two?" "Sure."

On the sixth day of moving…

I'm so tired my wrists hurt. It's New Year's Eve. This evening, I'll turn down Angela's invitation to come hang out at her place—floor space free of boxes—in order to take a "nap" at 9:30 only to have Mike shake me awake at 11:55 and shove a Bailey's in my hand. "Happy New Year!" he'll say and mean it.
But for now, it's morning, and I'm on the phone with my mom telling her about our first night in the house and all its funny quirks. I mention something in passing about the washing machine. "Oh!" she squeals with delight. "Your own washer!"

On the seventh day of moving…

We're packing the car again in a perpetual cycle I feel is eroding my mental health. The grouchy alcoholic old woman from two units down tells me what wonderful neighbors we've been and how much she'll miss us. Apparently, all those days of calling the cops on my friends for parking illegally while dropping me off are bygones. I'm forgiven, exalted even. She gives me a huge bear hug. She is teary. She is drunk.

On the eighth day of moving…

My in-laws, who've never looked up the Central California housing market (as we've often suggested during conversations like these), want to know why we didn't buy the house instead of rent it. "How many bedrooms does it have?" my father-in-law, who can still count his grandchildren on one hand asks into the phone. "Two," I tell him bracing myself. "Interesting!" he replies, and the conversation steers dangerously away from mortgages.

On the ninth day of moving…

Perspective renters.
The property manager's son and his friend come to look at the apartment. "Are you students?" I ask the friend automatically. I don't know why I ask this. I hate it when people ask me this.
He is a strikingly handsome olive-skinned man with long dark curls pulled into a ponytail. "No," he says, "I work for a sculptor," then locks in on my eyes with his, extends his hand. "I'm John." Of course the ruggedly good-looking olive-skinned man of dark curls works for a sculptor. Yes. Of course he does. You would think we wouldn't notice things like him at times like these. But we do. We always notice.

On the tenth day of moving…

Looking at the garden we'd planted over five and a half years bloom and climb without apology, Torrey had been the one with the million-dollar question: "But what will you do if you move?!" She'd asked it with wide eyes and the wisdom of someone who knows – someone who's rented. At the time I just shrugged, not knowing the answer and not planning a move. My precious plants. Later, I'd decided: "I'll just do it somewhere else."
I was proud of my answer – the one Torrey never heard. I felt it was a kind of evolution. I could let go. I'd beautify a next place and that was okay. Keep moving, I told myself.
But as I survey for the last time the primroses bravely blooming in their fourth year despite the snails, or the bougainvillea – my troubled orphan, a Kmart clearance sale save – finally starting to bud after so much prodding and patience, my gardener's heart shreds on its thorns, and I feel "evolution" slip from me like old snake skin.

On the eleventh day of moving…

We have a fireplace at our new address which is nice since our old crappy couch is now firewood. Mike ripped it apart today, which is why I pull back my hand when he tries to take it as we leave for the new house again tonight. "Ew! Your hands are so rough!" I tell him. He looks at me dejected. "Did we eat lunch?" he asks. It's 7:30.

On the twelfth day of moving…

At the new place, the cats still hide under the bed most of the day. At first, they were afraid, now, they're just mad. Sometimes they come out to complain about their food or to scratch the carpet in the hallway. I leave the shades up and park dressers and bookcases under the windows.

Eventually, they'll love it here.

neighborhood vignettes

I.
I want to write about how my heart clunks to the ground and everything inside me goes all fidgety when I pass the chain link of Broadway dressed in popsicle wrappers and fast food bags. How my breathing goes ragged and my eyes hurry to the stop sign, the bus stop bench, anywhere else, but it's everything – plastic-coated wire defining yards of sand and rocks, planted in broken clothes hangers, soda straws, losing lotto tickets.

II.
I want to write about how my heart fills to capacity each morning before 8, when I see, along the trash-strewn sidewalks, the same two women – or sometimes three of them – walking - slowly - like there is all the time in the world. One limps profoundly and leans on a cane, all are dressed in long skirts and hats, the colors plums and wines, or chocolate brown and gold. In the crooks of their arms, they carry their pamphlets and books of dire predictions. They are beautiful in their mission, and I often regret politely shooing them away from my own door when they come. Sometimes we talk about the garden.

III.
I am in my car on Fremont. Beside me on the seat, a bottle of blue pills because I'm allergic to penicillin and the root canal is tomorrow.

It takes longer than it should to notice the singing. And just as the light changes to green, I turn and see him – a man of 50 belting out the blues, walking home through the Safeway parking lot. We have just enough time and his smile lights up the darkness of his face, of the night air all around him, and we wave and wave like little kids before I drive on.

IV.
If you are far enough up in the turn lane, you can see the giant cypress, its glory framed perfectly by the freeway overpass. Behind it, sand. I would do anything to rescue it – lonely bit of beauty – but I need it there too much.