poetry exhibit continued

Here is the audio link to the interview Rick Kleffel did with me about my poetry exhibit that aired July 18, 2010. It will soon show up on Rick's podcast site too and I can provide a more direct link.

Here's a little more lowdown on the show:

“Stumbling into Ourselves” is a dozen+ poems framed, printed on stretch canvas, coupled with photographs, or otherwise graphically displayed and hung for viewing. Two poems will be represented in three dimensions, while another will be accessible in audio as well as text. 

The connecting theme of the show is the idea of identity – creating or recreating it – and the transitions that get one there. The people living their lives in these poem stories are all at a moment of transition. Some have discovered that the people they thought they were they are no more. Some have found that they are being moved toward change, willingly or not. Some find humor and hope in their quests; others simply survive.

poetry on the walls

I was just interviewed on KUSP radio 88.9 FM, Santa Cruz about my new visual poetry show that's up at a cafe in Monterey. What fun! Link to the audio coming soon. The show is called "Stumbling Into Ourselves." An article about it is currently at this link. And here is an idea of what things look like on the walls.

Two of my (orange-y) poems at the cafe entrance and "Abandoned Car," handmade paper over canvas with blockprints (so fun!) and under it, "Birthday Present" (poem under lid of box, detail below)

"The Slide," photo poster on canvas and "The Truth About Princesses" detail. Notice the pink duct tape.

 

"Lightning." Floating frame with velum paper bolt and cafe reflections.

One of three panels of "The Simplicity of Travel" that hangs from a "lamp post" Mike made for me.

Shadow Shot Sunday

Never say never.

My mom, Bobbie, who always followed this meme, constantly told me I should do one of these, but I always just sent her pictures now and again to put up herself. Well, in her honor, here I am. My first Shadow Shot Sunday. Hosted by Tracy at Hey Harriet with Sunday a wee fluid as some of us are in different time zones/hemispheres. Check out all the new shadow shots there. Thanks, Tracy!

Over 4^th of July weekend, my family and I escaped the insanity/inanity of fireworks and the like and went camping in Big Sur, California – about an hour south of where we live. It was super windy when we first arrived and so I was uncharacteristically in the tent before Mike got the tarp on. Planted as we were under two huge sycamores, this is what I saw:

t

that would be Mike in there in this third one

and hey!...

how'd he get in there??

The next shot is from the Headlands Trail at Andrew Molera State Park, a short and beautiful loop that overlooks the beach where the Big Sur River empties into the Pacific.

the imposing shadow of the cliff I was standing on

Shadows on the hills of the Ventana Wilderness – view from the campground, late afternoon.

texting makes the world go round

Mike and I are happily behind when it comes to the new all-the-rage gadgets. We do not own a TV, much less an ipod or an iphone. The phones we do have are lame models with limited plans. The fact that Mike's can take pictures is purely accidental. Mine is so basic I'm lucky it has keys. With no cover there is always a danger something will ring up by accident. Just the other day I heard a little voice I thought I recognized coming from my purse. “Hello? Hello?” I dug around for the phone to discover that it had called my friend Angela all on its own. Apparently when it crank calls, it starts with the beginning of the alphabet.

“I've been thinking about you,” she says when I get on the line. “What do you need right now?” This is a far cry from most of what I hear – questions into my well-being that are really about the speaker, prying questions I don't want to answer, or promises to “be there for me any time” -- right after they get back from some extended vacation. It is from a woman versed in crisis herself. Late this spring, Angela's house burned down. With her dog in it. It's been a hell of a year for both of us.

Anyway, Mike and I just don't use our phones that much or for very much. So when Mike's phone rings two and three times in a night, we know something is up. Usually it's Lakota man. Mike started getting the texts from the Lakota medicine man from L.A. a few months ago. A wrong number he kindly wrote back to and informed of same. But Lakota man has yet to figure out the details of the similarity in the numbers and the messages keep coming. Mike ends up with all kinds of interesting information.


We saw awesome UFO @ drum practice Fri. We were practicing Yuwipi songs and saw these 2 amazing see-thru silent UFOs. Nice!

Mike writes back and tells him, he's got the wrong person again.


Youch! LOL! I apologize.

But a couple days later he gets another.


Come to this peyote ceremony with me tonight.

Mike writes back: I'd like to, but you've dialed the wrong # again.

And gets: Maybe it's no mistake. LOL. Call me and let's see if it's fate. Maybe Creator is trying to tell us something.

I hear Creator has the new iphone 4.

on waiting and camping

My mother waited for me. She waited while I wrapped up loose ends of a poetry show, rode an early morning shuttle, a plane. She waited through a storm delay, another plane, a rental car. She waited in the hospital bed she never wanted to die in, so I could say hello, then goodbye. Some afternoons hold too much.

In my hello I showed pictures, and poems, told her everything I could think to tell her, told it quickly, words falling over each other in a cresting wave, while she calmly took from my hands what I offered, nodded. We are always those children. Eager. Hungry. Caught in what love is and was and is supposed to be.

The boy is packing up to trek to the beach with his dad where they'll have to cross the river at high tide. It is not all that unusual. The mother left behind. Even before this mother lost her mother, even before this uneven grieving, there was the need, time to read, space to write. The boy is used to it and so his routine is not so upturned. Yet he clings just a touch more now. Each time she believes him gone, begins on a new paragraph, he bounds back through the vinyl flap. He is all a flutter, has pirate stories to tell, plans to fend off the squirrels; he has last kisses, special rocks to show, cloud shapes she must come out and see, one more game of pretend, questions about tree roots. She takes from him what is offered, nods. She reassures him that she will be along soon. And he makes her promise to wait for him when she gets there before crossing the river to the other side.

saving him from himself

We interrupt this grieving process to bring you our regularly scheduled program, already in progress. A geek and a poet sit at home gearing up to finally enjoy a quiet hour or two together, their son asleep, no obligations pressing.

Mike: (excitedly) “I think I'm going to be immortalized on Route 1! The Google Maps car passed me.”

Kitty: (displaying limited interest) “Really?”

Mike: “Yeah, I'm almost sure my car got in one of the shots.” (reaches for the laptop)

Kitty: “I am not sitting here while you search for a little blue Honda on Google Earth.” (makes to get up)

Mike: (shutting lap top) “Right. Thanks.”

Kitty: “Any time.”

(I'm a dork when it comes to embedding. So strip credits = www.dilbert.com. Thank you, Scott Adams.)

newspaper article about my mom

The Press of Atlantic City did a little piece on my mom. Kind of cool. Not everyone gets a column about them to add to their legacy! I am grateful for this little surprise gift.

I talked to the reporter for at least half an hour, which newspaper - I'm all too familiar with this medium - converted to a sentence. But that's okay. That's why I have this space.

I bet she'd be completely shocked that someone wrote about her. Life is full of surprises, mom, even when it's over.

real estate agent: the (ig)noble vocation

“You must be electric right now,” a friend said to me, “So open.” He was referring to my ability to sense signs from the Universe in the shadow of my mother's passing. I had been telling him about some of the things that went on for me in the days right after. More on that in a later post... For now, suffice it to say, I believe strongly that we all need to move more by instinct. Sometimes, literally – move.

We sort of have a real estate agent working for us. I say sort of because we are trying to buy a house, sometimes, when we have enough time and energy to think about it, from across the country.

We have lived in our current rental house for almost three and a half years now. That's a pretty darn long time considering our record the couple years preceding that. The horror stories were many and gruesome. At the last house, the landlady sold it out from under us nine months in. A lawyer who'd until then kept her claws hidden under soft, white gloves, she did a Jekyll/Hyde transformation on us once there was big money at stake. It sucked and I chronicled a bit of it in this blog (like here and here and here and here).

But the worst part of the whole thing was the real estate agent. No matter how much I begged the Universe to send a rogue crocodile or two her way, inevitably she'd arrive unannounced for another illegal showing, pulling up in her canary yellow Porsche.

After the sale was looking solid, the buyers' real estate agent gave me an ivy plant for a gift. How sweet. An invasive plant just for me? You shouldn't have. Really.

It was the first thing to sell at the garage sale.

I tried once to create a visualization in which I towered over the whole situation looking at all the players in miniature. I reached down and picked up the Porsche lady by the scruff of her be-otchy little neck and dropped her unceremoniously into the ocean. She got out though, and came back all dripping wet still just as evil. I think her little rat dog bit my ankle.

The first time we looked at houses for our big proposed cross-country move, we met two agents. The first showed us a crumbling mess of a house filled with leaky pipes and lots of sarongs for curtains. “Ever seen the movie 'The Money Pit'?” he asked us as we huddled hunchbacked in the damp basement. Then he laughed - a dorky guffaw that went on too long.

The next agent showed us a crazy sprawling house with amazing potential and an interesting history. (Mike is still in love with this house.) But the house had nothing to do with why ultimately we'd accept this man into our passive employ after receiving his out of date CV. The first time we met him he arrived in an old Buick with a rusty roof. He got out, a stout fellow in a knit hat. I know in my heart I hired him because of that Buick. This one was a keeper.

On a return trip to the area, I spoke to a neighbor at one of the houses we were investigating. We spoke about the neighborhood, the area in general, and about renting and buying. Without knowing who we were associated with, she volunteered about the man who is our agent: “He has a reputation for getting things done.” I'm not even sure I really believed it, but it only made me like him more.

He sends me emails in which he always inquires about my “fine family.” He's stuck with us though we can't be the most lucrative prospect around, partly because normally we aren't around. We're three time zones away. Unless of course we're there, for a rare in person exploration, standing in the doorway of another place mouthing “You've got to be kidding!” to each other, while our real estate agent nervously calls our son away from the curb.

Instincts. Maybe it's just a power thing that the relationship feels right. I've never been on the buying end before. But maybe we've reeled in a good one. I'd like to believe my instincts on this are good ones.

PS - Happy birthday wishes today to my sister, Rita.

words and pictures

I can remember a day when Isaac was about three. He was leaning over the back of the love seat in the garage (uninsulated family room anyone?). I asked him what was back there. “Oh, random items,” my toddler replied.

His articulation lags somewhat, e.g., he still announces things like, “A-tend it's 'nowing, and we're may-ting 'now angels...,” but his communication skills have been well advanced from day one.

He was still a tiny thing once when we were at my mom's and he was amusing her by arranging cereal into an empty egg carton. The next day he wanted to eat that kind of cereal and when I brought him the wrong kind, he ran for the egg carton, pointed, then pointed to his mouth. I got it.

We taught him basic sign language early on that he picked up instantly. Sometimes it was even hard knowing what my baby was thinking. Like when a nasty diaper rash came up and at each changing he'd press together the tips of his index fingers – the sign for “pain.”

When he began to speak, he was aware of the gap between how words were meant to sound and how they came out of his mouth: “This stick a trane, mama! Not train choo-choo, trane like has arm and picks things up.”

As he grows, it's his vocabulary and command of the language that blows me away. It does a writer-mama's heart good. “Let's consider our options,” Isaac might say to me. Or, “Wow, mommy the hood of the car is glistening in the sun! Isn't it stunning?” While I might not choose to describe a car as “stunning,” my five-year-old clearly would, and damn if anything out of my mouth ever “glistened” until I was maybe a decade beyond him.

Books, of course, are held in high esteem in our house, the default source from which I imagine him gleaning in depth knowledge and words. However, in my current state of insanity and sadness, I have relied more heavily than ever on videos. We have no TV and there was a day when the only thing Isaac knew of video was learning sign language through it. My son, the one who I used to try to make sit in front of the hotel TV until I got out of the shower but would cover his ears and run away in anticipation of the oncoming conflict in the Clifford episode, now runs to my laptop after school yelling, “PBS kids dot org! PBS kids dot org!” I can't say I don't feel kind of guilty about this.

My personal favorite is “Sid the Science Kid.” Though Isaac's been OD-ing on “Dinosaur Train.” I am ashamed to admit that there have been a couple afternoons recently when I simply loaded up the cartoons, left him on the couch and crawled into bed. The one consolation is that I realize he is learning things from these shows. Including vocabulary. Hears it once and he owns it.

After one day of too much screen, I turned it off and convinced him to come outside - likely more for my sake than his - and we were in the garden when I pointed out a large spider walking up his shirt. “That's okay,” my son said lightly brushing it off, “it's prolly not venomous.”

details

Honest to god, I was not looking for a fight.

Details. It's all in the DETAILS.

Some EIGHT days ago, I called the funeral home about getting my mom's obituary in. The person we'd worked with wasn't in, but they gave me the email address and assured me he'd get it. I emailed it, along with a question or two. I heard nothing back. Today, I call the funeral home again and get their answering service. Mr Director is out to lunch. She assures me a call back. I then find out from my very helpfully communicative brother that it ran already. Friday. Oh. Okay. Was anyone going to let me knooooowwww? And what about those questions I had?

So I go online to find it. I find it. I think, SHIT, I forgot to include a picture. Had asshole funeral guy ever actually spoken to me, I might have figured out that I had left out this piece. HE DOES THIS ALL THE TIME. Could he not know that perhaps someone who has just experienced the death of someone close to them night need some more assistance? Since it's his, uh, JOB. The kind of assistance he swore to offering while we stood in front of him and signed the estimated bill?? Or possibly, I dunno, a response saying he bloody GOT the stupid email???? Okay. No picture.

Then I read the copy. THE BASTARD CHANGED TWO OF MY SENTENCES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! One of them, so that it reads as if Mike and I have the same last name, which – I fucking hate to break it to you again, America, WE DON'T.

There are battles to pick from, and let me tell you, a long time ago I picked this one. MY NAME. My name is my name is my name. Learn to spell it. Learn to say it. Learn to love it. I am kind of invested in it. I have reasons, very personal, important ones for caring about my name. My first name is Kathryn. That's K-A-T-H-R-Y-N. Not a C or an E to be found. REALLY. Not even if you want one there. And my last name is NOT my husband's last name. I could give a RAT'S ASS how you feel about that. If there's something that would imply caring LESS than a RAT'S ASS, then, THAT is what I want to say here. It is for me to choose and everyone else to RESPECT..

Dear Mr. Funeral Director:

I am 1) a grieving family member and 2) a writer. Therefore, it would be in your best interest NOT TO FUCK WITH MY WRITING.

What kind of ballsy bastard just takes it on himself to randomly edit someone else's obituary ??????

So when you finally do send a message back to me instead of extending me the professional courtesy of calling, and include (ironically) the proof of the obituary from the newspaper as an attachment, why not misspell my mother's name on the attachment, too? Just for good measure.

I can remember approaching my grandparents' grave for the first time with a healthy dose of trepidation. I was afraid their name would be spelled wrong on the gravestone. Experience is a strong teacher. Luckily, that one was correct.

In my family, I get the angry label. I'm the angry one. So now I get to play into their expectations once again. Whatever I do will fulfill them. Fine. Then for the sake of not rocking the boat any fucking more, I'd love to play the part. They can think what they want to and bite me. Something tells me if I wasn't their sister, and one of their friends was pissed as hell about someone fucking up their mother's obituary, they'd be sympathetic, empathetic even. Tell me just this: What do I do with this feeling? Where do I put this?

camping and speculating on communication with the dead

What if talking to the other side is like this?

At Andrew Molera State Park in Big Sur, California there are 24 campsites that sit in a field on the ocean side of Highway 1. Quarter mile hike in, no reservations, first-come, first-served. On a busy holiday weekend, you and your husband are there texting back and forth – he racing around the field, vying with others doing the same, asking people if they are leaving to determine which site you can grab, you poised in the parking lot at the ranger station waiting to fill in the site number on the registration card. Cell service is unreliable, messages sometimes lost or inexplicably delayed. So four days after you arrive, stove, tent, camping chairs spread about site 15, your phone rings. “They took 17,” it says unhelpfully.

****

There is a boy of about ten running toward the climbing trees – two sprawling sycamores. His mother calls out to him from across the field: “Braaaaad- leyyyyy!” The boy hears her, pauses for the briefest moment, and runs further on, until he is completely out of her view before replying, “Yeah??”

*****

At night, an animal skitters around outside the tent. Sometimes its form pushes against the nylon wall. You never see exactly what it is, and in the morning you aren't sure if you dreamed it.

****

After the third day without a mirror, you catch sight of a distorted reflection in the sunglasses of the guy at site 9 who lends you his can opener. You're startled by this image, like you don't remember it quite that way; it's unfamiliar, foreign, fleeting.

****

After all the fires are out and the beer is warm, people finally crawl into their tents and the quiet you'd hoped for arrives, though it takes a good while for you to relax into it because, conditioned as you are to a world of traffic and car alarms, you at first mistake the sound of the ocean waves for the white noise of the highway.

****

Your son explodes before you with excitement, his filthy fingers at his gums, the gap his first missing tooth has left glowing like the empty socket it is above his bottom lip. “I think my big tooth is coming in! I think I feel something!!” You look and look and can see no evidence of anything there, though you want to and he wants you to, so you lie and agree that, yes, you see it, you can see something.

****

Your husband feels a lump in his shoe and when he shakes out his hiking boot a live beetle emerges and walks away across the thick glaze of dirt. You see more of this kind of beetle over the course of your stay – shiny and large, their six sturdy legs steering them through tall grass, brown leaves, your tent. You don't know what their purpose might be in the grander scheme of things, but you are pretty sure they have one. You are unnerved by their confidence. You think about your college professor, the one who taught you about ancient Egypt - the stories of long-dead kings and queens popping to life in your mind as he spoke, as real as a daytime talk show but with more drama. You think about how the Egyptians revered the scarab beetle believing it capable of regeneration all by itself, how they carved it into amulets, wore it around their royal necks, laid it against the hearts of their dead, this unlikely messenger of the immortal.

poems for my mom

I'm posting two poems I wrote several years ago. Neither award-winning, but my personal homages, I guess. The first is something that came out of me asking my mom what she wanted for Mother's Day. Her response was “Write me a poem.” Not a simple task.

The second was another attempt a year or so later. Marigolds are always something I've associated with her. I knew that in Mexico they are connected to the Day of the Dead, so I poked around and found some interesting information about them and their symbolism in various cultures here.

It was the first poem, though, that she framed and kept on her bedroom wall. The Budapest reference was our own – she came to visit me there when I worked in Hungary for a year.

How to Write a Poem for Your Mother

First, create many unsuccessful drafts,

follow ideas into oblivion,

metaphors into cliché hums and mumbles.

Next, check your email.

Read your new messages, but don't answer any.

Sing rainy day songs she taught you.

Wish in passing that you could whistle.

Wonder if it's her fault you can't.

Plant marigold seeds in the rain like she would.

Bring the open seed packet close to your face and sniff.

Know it smells like her.

Open and close your journal several times.

Write the date on a page, then, decide to change pens.

Look at a calendar to find out exactly when Mother's Day is this year.

Re-read all the starts to poems you've begun for her in the past –

they talk about fireflies and butterflies, Tagore and Milne.

Find potential in wings and words and light and flight.

Decide having potential is like being told you are "nice."

Convince yourself you're washed up as a poet.

Spend time wallowing in this thought.

Pull the covers over your head and sleep.

Dream you are with her, walking arm in arm

through beautiful, grey Budapest.

Marigolds

for my mom

I trail her

stepping high

through dewy grass,

the bulbs surprising us

here and there

with their plump greenness

from under piles

of last season's leaves.

The pyracantha looks like it'll

do well this year, she says,

moving through her universe,

red berry clusters

in her mind's eye.

Along the walkway, the azaleas

accost us in reds and pinks

and then, like an apology, white.

She names everything we pass,

a casual inventory, a prayer

of things to come.

I take the syllables in

through my pores:

hydrangea, lilac, columbine,

marigold.

At this last we pause.

Among the first orange blooms

a few dry heads already bow to her

in fervent homage.

Pinching them from their stems,

she scatters the seeds

like chicken feed,

pushes her subjects into the dirt

with the toe of her sneaker -

a haphazard optimism

in the propensity of life –

that it will sprout again

easily.

The scattering continues,

tiny quills dipped in black ink

spin to the ground

like soft propellers,

crowding each other into the dirt,

all clamoring to serve her best.

Toof!!

Woo-hoo! One down, 19 to go! Boy is very excited. Hear that whirring? Wings, baby, headed for the pillow.

In an unorthodox turn of events, Iz would like to KEEP his teeth. Not sure what his plan is, but the tooth fairy has been notified. She's agreed to still bring him quarters.

So what, if anything, does this mean for the saber tooth tiger costume this Halloween?

the revised stages of grief

Forget Kübler-Ross. She is sooo 40 years ago.

Here are my revised stages of grief.

1. 
   
   
   
   
   Bad Grammar. That phase where you constantly blend your verbs, mixing the present and past tense in close proximity, as in “Mom wanted us to go together... Mom always pays him on the first...”
2. 
   
   
   
   
   Idiosyncratic Awareness. When you become painfully self conscious of all the sayings you and others use involving death until it becomes dangerous to have any conversation. “I'm starving to death!” “I looked like death warmed over!” “This is gonna kill you!” Etc.
3. 
   
   
   
   
   Non Sequitur Confluence of Sadness. For example, one minute you are dragging around the Acme in your hometown looking through their pathetic excuse for produce, the next you tune into the music playing over the PA system. Hey! Is that the Hooters?? And though either would qualify for a spring board into deep depression, you aren't sure if you are crying about the state of the cucumbers or the crappy 80s band that played at your high school before they made it “big.”
4. 
   
   
   
   
   Contained Maternal Rage and Breakdown. The day you decide to play the audio tape your mom made for your son when he was born that includes stories of when she was little, her singing rainy day songs for him, and her talking about how after she's gone she thinks she will still be able to watch over him and he gets almost to the end before he says, “Can we turn this off? It's giving me a headache.”
5. 
   
   
   
   
   Concession to Outreach. When a book arrives in the mail – poems about grief and healing – and you are deflated and incredulous because you thought this friend knew better than to send this kind of shit. But then despite yourself you open to the table of contents where many familiar, contemporary names pop out at you and instead of setting it on fire, you set it on your nightstand.
6. 
   
   
   
   
   ABD. (All but dead.) The strong desire to call your deceased loved one to tell her about her own death (“Mom, you'll never guess what happened!)” accompanied by the rational acceptance of all the circumstances leading up to and following from the death of the loved one except for the fact that she will still not be here tomorrow. Or the day after tomorrow. Or the next day after that. Or the next.

and then there were four

That's me. The one wrapped up in the green and white blanket. I still have that blanket.

My mother has left us careful instructions. Or, more like strong directives. Okay, the woman left a paper out for us in her bedroom titled “When I Die” which basically yells at my siblings and I to take care of one another and stay in better touch. (Who writes stuff titled “when I die??”) Bitching at us from beyond the grave. She admitted as much in the note. Only my mother.

We are doing our best, the four of us, to honor her wishes. We've called each other more in the last ten days than we may have in the last two years. Of course it's early on, the real test still to come...

I once compared our family to the metro system in Budapest – It's built like the petals of a flower, the lines don't cross, you have to keep going back to the center to change directions. Now our center is gone, and we are in need of practice getting around.

The day after my mother passed, I sat on the futon in her house next to my sister, trying as hard as I could not to hate said sister for swallowing so freak-ing loud-ly. Like I said, we need some practice.

We may have a lot of ground to cover, but I know we are doing a hell of a lot better than some families. From her bed in the hospital my mother pointed at my sister Rita, “I want you to have my computer. You need a computer.” Then she turned to my sister Ruth, “You get my car.” The closest thing the woman had to a will. And so it will be. Not a problem.

A couple days after the futon scene, I get out of the shower and hear through the door my older sister trying to instruct my other sister on the computer she has just come into. I freeze. All the little red flags start popping in my head. I consider never coming out of the bathroom. I have water; I could hold out forever if I needed to... My sisters are different. Anyone who knows us will know that that is possibly the understatement of the century. And things haven't always been, shall we say, smooth between them. I listen nervously for a safe moment to emerge, but everyone is on their best behavior and the coast remains clear.

Communication is a challenge, but stuff? Not an issue. At one point as we gathered a few bags of recycling from my mom's house I announced, “I want the lighthouse photo (a framed black and white of the Cape May Light with a bolt of lightning striking behind it).” My sister shrugged and gave me a look that essentially communicated, “So take it already. Whattaya want outta my life?”

At the funeral home, the four of us sat around the requisite polished dark wood table and mock-argued about our “inheritance” -- half a dozen rolls of toilet paper, at least eight sheets of stamps (she kept losing them and buying more), and $35.56 in cash we found in mom's wallet. The funeral director peers up over the umpteenth form in front of him and tells us he's seen four fist fights already this year on his porch, although to be fair he also said that was slightly above average. I asked him when his memoir was coming out. Then, I revised my implied advice and suggested he take his stories on the road in a one-man show. He didn't seem that interested, so I told him I'd write it then and it would suck for him when it hit Broadway. My siblings rolled their eyes and shifted in their seats, but did not raise their voices or threaten to take away my share of the Charmin.

after

“Home. There was nothing to do but collect my suitcase and wade into it.”

-- from The Mermaid Chair (Sue Monk Kidd)

 This was the marquee of the church in front of my house when I arrived back in California.

Another crying fit over seemingly nothing.

“Do you think you're missing grandmom?” I ask.

He nods.

“But I'm not missing the castle!” he says through tears. The castle is the Playskool Castle with dragon and dungeon and wee royal family that I had as a little girl. It lived at my mom's house. Isaac adores it.

“The castle is coming to me!”

I am not quite sure if this is him reassuring himself with something he loves, that he's looking forward to, or if maybe it's his way of finally admitting he knows these two things – his grandmom and the castle – are separate entities. That it is possible for one to exist while the other is gone. New territory for him. Kind of like the concept of home feels like for me. How to separate it from mom?

I hate the town where I grew up. I could elaborate on my feelings of loathing, but let's just leave it there. I visited “home” to see my mom. Can there be “home” without her? What is any stronger sense of home than mom? Our first home.

From inside that vessel

that before him I could never have envisioned

providing anyone: the body-- my body-- as home,

a concept so foreign. Me, a base, a safe place

to be...

(from my poem “Could I Hear the Wind?”)

I feel like I am falling. Perpetually falling. There is no ground.

****

It is two weeks ago and I am in Big Sur with Isaac, we have fled there for the afternoon to escape other painful experiences that began this month, trying to dissolve them in the beautiful river, the soft red bark. My phone lights up with my sister's number, then, cell service sketchy at best, the call is lost. I just spoke to her that morning and I wonder if maybe she hit the call button again by accident. If only.

I arrive home to the news of my mother's heart attack. She is in ICU and she is sedated.

I tell Isaac in simple terms. Grandmom is in the hospital. She is very sick.

Isaac gets the concept of death about as well as any five-year-old can. He is well aware he already has a grandfather on the other side. And he has lost a cat. We talk about them. We talk about spirits. About ancestors. He puts one of his plastic horses on my altar next to the rose petals and the pictures of my grandmothers.

As the week progresses I tell him there is a chance his grandmom might die. He begins to cry.

“But what will happen to her stuff?”

“What stuff?”

“What will happen to the stuff in her house if she dies?”

“Then your aunts and uncle and I will sort it out and keep things we'd like and give things away that other people can use.”

The crying intensifies.

“But...”

“What stuff are you thinking of, Isaac?”

“The castle!”

“I bet Grandmom would want you to have the castle.”

The castle remained the focus of his concern through the week, along with how doctors don't think it's yucky when they cut someone open and whether you can keep your clothes on if you have an operation.

****

“From the moment he'd seen the mermaid chair, he'd loved Senara, not just for her mythic life in the sea but for how supposedly she'd heard the prayers of Egret Islanders and saved them, not only from hurricanes but from golf courses.”

-- from The Mermaid Chair

“Tailing the Stars,” one headline read the day I left. I felt murderous. “Tiger vs. Himself,” said another. Indeed, he can definitely go fuck himself.

The US Open in Monterey = I'm lucky to have gotten off this bloody peninsula for under $2500 in trying to get to my mother's death bed. If you ask me, wealth is really wasted on the rich and, surely, there is a special place in hell for golfers.

They had already pretty much lost me when they canceled the farmer's market for US Open parking. Not that the “official” US Open SUVs I encountered around town could actually park. The banners were everywhere as the shuttle drove me out of town: “Welcome Golf Fans!!” They might as well have just hung red lights in all the restaurants and businesses since it essentially comes down to whoring ourselves for the almighty tourist dollar.

I'm done with Monterey. And even as I say that there is a part of me that wants to cling mercilessly to its crumbling rock cliffs, its exotic beauty. But it's time for us to move on. We have been plotting a move for a long time now, and if things go as planned (ha!), it will happen in the first part of next year. The painful piece is that we are moving east. Not to Jersey, but still, we would have been closer to my mom, so much closer.

When I originally told my mom about our plans, you might think she would have responded like so many other mothers and grandmothers. Something to the tune of “Oh! It would be so great to have you closer!” What my mom said was, “Oh! I can't imagine you taking Isaac away from the California coast!”

My mother was difficult to sort out. She put up an ultra-casual, laid-back attitude. Nothing was ever a problem and there was always a next time. Too often I began to believe her hype. I regret that.

****

My mom insisted she was ready to go. And though I was not at all ready to see her go, nor was I prepared for the compression of time – arrive, talk to her about this and that like always, leave the room and return as she took her last breaths – I'm doing my best to take in the fact that this is part of the package. 

I am confused by the people who express their sympathy in ways that would imply it was all unnecessary, a complete surprise. The morning of my mother's heart attack she posted what would be her final blog, about memories, family, about her life. There are pictures on her camera from that afternoon, likely only a couple hours before she dialed 911. They are of her garden. There is life and there is death. We all share this cycle. No one is exempt. I wish I could say I felt as my mom did, that it didn't frighten me, but I'm not there yet. What I do get is that we are all meant to help each other along the way. We are just all meant to help each other. Can it be that hard?

The day before I got on a plane headed for home, for I didn't know what, for a panicked call from my sister (“You need to come straight to the hospital!”) as I waited to see if they'd pluck my name from the stand-by list for an earlier connection, only to be stuck anyway in a two-hour delay in Chicago due to a wicked lightning storm, the precipice to a season of storm, of meltdowns, that is only still just beginning, I had been climbing around on a rocky beach, exploring the Pacific tidepools with Isaac. The juxtaposition is jarring, though I clutched my cell phone through the low tide, though I never really forgot what was going on on the other coast..

It was a class I'd signed him up for ages ago, to have a little more information on the itty-bitty creatures in their wildly elaborate eco-system and a break from preschool, something special to do with his mom. There were about eight three - six-year-olds there with their parents watching crabs and touching sea anemones.

this and the next shot were taken by Isaac. ("I'm like Grandmom. I like to take pictures.")

About half-way through the class, as our troupe clamored over boulders avoiding limpets and barnacles, another five-year-old who happened to be next to me instinctively reached out and took my hand for balance. And I, instinctively, let him. His father couldn't stop apologizing. I kept brushing him off, telling him it was no problem, but he was embarrassed somehow, not willing to let it go. He didn't get it. He didn't get the fact that, for godssakes, we are all in this together.

mom

On this father's day, all I'm thinking about is my mom. She passed yesterday afternoon. More later. If you'd like to read a little piece I wrote on her blog or read her own words and what she was passionate about that blog is here.

What is this world? The one without my mom in it? What a strange and frightening space.

school search part IV

There is a school where Isaac goes every night while we sleep. He does his best not to wake us, then gets on his dad's bike and rides 50 miles to Big Sur where he meets his friends and Secret School commences.

It's been about five months, I'd say, that we've been hearing about Secret School. There are special keys involved – usually bits of plastic we find around that have no known origin. “That's my key to Secret School!” Isaac will shriek, and dive for it before it his the trashcan.

By all accounts Secret School is a very special place. Very fun. And, of course, very secret. He can't really tell us all the things that go on there. We wouldn't understand anyway.

His preschool teacher has a theory on Secret School. You see, there are five of them – the Fab Five I call them – who've been together now since, well, yes, since they were in diapers. Isaac, two other little boys his age, and a pair of sisters. Theses days, they are the cool cats. The older group at school. Inseparable. We take them to the park and they slide down the slides holding hands. (Yes, I forgot my camera, thank you very much.) And now it seems the group is breaking up. The sisters are moving. The other boys are going to a different kindergarten experience next year while Isaac will stay where he is.

This week is the last for most of them to be all together. Really, it's nothing short of heartbreaking. They've known it was coming, and Isaac's teacher believes that Secret School is their way of staying together. No matter where they live or where they go to school by day, by night they run the show, hanging out among the redwoods, learning only the fun stuff, no grown up rules, nobody has to leave.

Sometimes in the mornings, Isaac will ask us, “Did you hear me 'neak out for Secret School??” Or he might report on who wasn't able to be at Secret School, or even a guest speaker that showed up at Secret School. This morning the story was a new one.

“I didn't go to regular Secret School last night,” he told us.

“Oh, really?”

“Everybody else, they went to the usual Secret School, but I went to a different Secret School. Just to check it out.”

“To check it out, huh?”

“Yeah, you know, see what it was like.”

“And how was it?”

“Good. A lot of the things were the same.”

“There were different kids there though?”

“Yeah. One kid talked like a pirate. You know, 'Get the booty!' Stuff like that.”

“Hmm. So you think you're gonna go to this new Secret School?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

spiders and the spill

The Spruce-fir moss spider, its tiny two-part body stretching only four millimeters, a little longer than your thumb nail, is disappearing from the Appalachian Mountains. You may wonder how I know this about our dear eight-legged friends. It has to do with dull-eyed college students and Wikipedia and poem writing prompts. Their cousins – the spiders, not the dull-eyed students – who populate my clothesline are much bigger, their numbers apparently flourishing. Rather than comparing them to the length of your thumb nail, the ones that chill in my hood are closer to the width, length and girth of your thumb.

Spiders rule the territory around here. And there are many more of them than us, so I accept that they are just part of the deal. I have nothing against spiders. Sure, I held a small grudge against the black widow that I carried inadvertently to Isaac's preschool on the bottom of his dump truck to co-mingle with a dozen three-, four-and five-year-olds, but other than that, me and the spiders are good. Solid. Some of them, the light green ones that like to hang out on the underside of my kale leaves, for example, I've had quite involved conversations with. Things that go along something like, “Look, dude, either you get these aphids or I will. Now, I don't want to steal your thunder or anything, but step it up! Have you got the appetite it takes to live in my garden or not?”

It's frustrating, trying to help these creatures. Typical morning in my house: “Mommy! There's another one on the wall in the hallway!” I drop what I'm doing for the latest spider rescue. It's a huge black one and fast. I grab Isaac's latest addition and subtraction work from school – the booklet with his name on the cover colored just so, the one he is so proud of – and slap it down in front of the beast as it races for under the computer hutch. I stop it, but not before I crack my head into the corner of the hutch.

Ungrateful bugs always wait until I've almost got them out the door, then they try the daring James Bond escape down their silky threads.

Isaac has always been prone to bites – bug bites of whatever kind. And especially in the winter here when no major flying, biting insects are generally hanging out, when my son gets up in the morning covered in itchy bites, I suspect spiders. I brought this up to our pediatrician, however, and he informed me that there are only a small percentage of spiders that can break the skin of a human. Fine. Facts always get in the way, don't they?

One of my students' (the dull-eyed ones) favorite pieces that we read in the environmental writing class was about spiders (the eight-eyed ones). It was David Quammen's “The Face of a Spider” from Flight of the Iguana: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature. In it, the author debates just how humans are meant to behave toward members of other species. In fact, he brings up the question over and over again in just this way --”How should a human behave toward the members of other living species?” Quammen is faced with 100 black widow hatchlings swarming his desk in Tuscon, Arizona. The essay is humorous and down to earth, and though he is reflective and somewhat remorseful, he ends up killing the itty-bitty babies with a can of Raid.

The question that comes up for me is a little different than Quammen's: When did it happen that we came to believe we were so very much more important than anything else that lives here? The subjugation of the planet to our way of life has proven oh so charming. Birds are covered in oil. Sealife we don't even know the names of are dead. And on and on it goes. I can no longer listen. But it hasn't stopped the weeping. Or the desire to burn my car and never look back.

Unless each of us can think our way through the tiniest, daily, individual encounters with other species and decide what truly we can do for ourselves and our partners in this dance, then we're doomed. But first we'd have to have tiny, daily, individual encounters. I think all the BP officials should be sentenced to a life of gardening.

One more fact about that Spruce-fir moss spider: endangered as it is, it spins a web not to catch prey, but only for shelter.

school search, part III

Losing it. We are. Losing it.

After re-reviewing another alternative education website, focusing in on one school I know we've read about 1000 times before, and (again) searching for life and houses in its general vicinity and proximity to oceans and airports, Mike and I are still beside each other with the laptop, me zoning out, Mike at the keyboard when I shake myself from my reverie just in time to catch this phrase being typed in the Google search box: “Best elementary school in the world,” then he hits enter.

Since you asked, I'll tell you that what appears when you lose it and start typing this bizarre thing into Google is a school in Laguna Beach, California called “Top of the World Elementary.” And since you further inquired, “It is among the few public elementary schools in California to receive a distinguished GreatSchools Rating of 9 out of 10.” (Zzzzzz. Oh, sorry, I thought we were talking about the future of children. I must have wandered into the wrong meeting.).

There is also (since you insist on hearing more) an article that debates whether Finland has perhaps the top educational system around, though I don't suspect we'll move there since it can tend to be very cold and very dark and good as they might be at schooling, there are people there who eat reindeer, and I REFUSE to explain THAT ONE to the boy who talks non-stop about the magic of Santa Claus 12 months out of the year.

And (you just won't let this die, will you?) there is a link to a page for an out of print book on some of the best schools in the world as determined by a couple folks in New Zealand.

Hard to tell if it was exhaustion or clarity that kept Mike plugging away, and so he typed in “compassionate elementary” which headed us for an elementary school in Fort Collins, Colorado which boasts a Kindness and Compassion Club and a school in Saco, Maine that has completed a 7 month kindness initiative through something called the Kindness Center.

The search is still on. Maybe something we found today will be the ticket (just not the Rudolph murderers). It's hard not knowing. It's hard looking at your family's future in the form of small pins plugged into an electronic map denoting real estate for sale and then measuring how far each pin is from the school you just got a virtual glimpse of. And how far the school is from the town, when there is one. Mapping, mapping. Studying. Looking for the right key words that will unlock it all.