Eighty Degrees and Holding
Posted on 3 May 2011 | 3 responses
On what was probably a class survey to make a graph, I was asked what my favorite outdoor temperature was. I was maybe eight or nine at the time, and I remember my answer clearly: 80 degrees. Fahrenheit, for you Canadians.
I also remember the odd look my teacher gave me when I gave my answer, and knew somewhere in my tiny, elementary school heart, that she didn’t think this could be my real answer, that I must be confused.
So all these years, decades even, I’ve questioned myself. Is eighty degrees really my favorite? Is that too hot for normal people? Am I somehow an outlier? A black swan?
Yesterday, it was eighty degrees outside. The breeze crept in slim wedges, then stilled, then spiraled across my forehead, gently, a lover’s touch. My bare feet were comfortable in the grass, easing in, not numb with cold, not wanting-to-shed-skin hot. I read. I wore sunglasses. I moved like a song, a hymnal, a sweet pea vine.
Eighty degrees is fine. Just fine.
Noise
Posted on 21 April 2011 | 3 responses
The river has no bottom. I write it, then I go on from there and it’s good, but suddenly I’m derailed by the yammering about publishing, mid-list, sewing machines, P90X, self-threading, and I wonder why I’ve left my home for quiet and ended up here, in external-conversation hell.
People always want to be social, want to talk, to fill their particular silence, but all I want is a quiet place where a woman isn’t shouting a sentence that ends, “want to know where you’re at!”
Where I’m at, where we’re all at, is longing for place, for connection, for love, for a fucking cookie.
Where’s my cookie?
The river has no bottom…
Speed Date With Editor
Posted on 16 April 2011 | 7 responses
I sit down in front of four scruffy, geeky looking guys at a table holding placards reading, “Poetry,” “Fiction,” and “Nonfiction.” I don’t know why I stop there, as I know immediately it’s the wrong place for me.
“It’s kind of…birthy,” I say, ducking my head, trying to disappear in that way I have, that way that I think could be adorable but also never actually works even though I desperately want it to. My inner voice says, “Birthy?? What the ever-loving fuck are you talking about? Also, just shut up and let the guy read.”
His feedback on my birthy (do I mean painful? bloody? squishy and kind of vulgar? or romantic and new agey? shit) piece shows just how wrongly I’ve chosen the literary magazine editor to speed date during this ten minute ordeal I paid for as part of my conference ticket. “Well, it’s good that you didn’t spend too much time on the whole, the uh, the birthing stuff part. I mean, maybe you could talk about the part, you know, when they hand you the baby, and you’re happy, and, I don’t know.”
My smile is frozen, my head nodding while I try to think of a good reason to leave well before the ten minutes are over, but instead I hand him another piece, a little blurb of poetry that isn’t, prose that has no plot. I think he asked me what it was.
“It’s my soul, dammit!” But I just stutter something about prosetry.
And later, when the hilariously blunt, cussing son-of-a-gun that is our keynote speaker signs my books, he asks me, “What do you write?”
I am looking behind me, for some reason, not at him, and then I realize he’s actually asked me a sincere question, so I stand there lolling my tongue in my mouth hoping the answer will turn up in there somewhere, along with that piece of lettuce I can’t get rid of from my lunch tartine, which is a fancy, open-faced sandwich if you don’t know, and the thing I want to say is, “Mostly crap.”
Because it is, mostly, true. Sometimes the crap looks like poetry, sometimes like copywriting. Sometimes, it looks like someone threw up skittles on a Rorschach test. But I say, finally, “Nonfiction.”
But the truth, the one I learned today in this lecture by Steve Almond, who also happens to be the guy signing my books, is that it’s all nonfiction.
I mean sure, bits here and there are shifted, altered, filled in more, dates are different. Uncle Harry has flaming red hair instead of his dying brown combover, or cousin Shirley never did get that surgery to correct her significantly shorter leg length. But our subconscious will prevail. That might be a quote, that last bit there, so Steve Almond, here is the attribution, just in case. Whatever is in us, real and difficult, will sneak out slyly and be unseen until it is much too late to prevent publication.
So write that story about the heirloom roses growing at the cemetery, that you have no idea is actually about the time you overheard your father saying he thought your cousin Rose was smarter and prettier. See, these things are tricky, and they will cut you. For realz, yo.
Tonight I write crap. Tomorrow, after a good night’s sleep and safely lured away from the ambien that helps me get there, I’ll write something tidier. More orderly. Less…birthy.
Traveling: Voices in My Head, Sneak Peek
Posted on 15 April 2011 | 2 responses
“Don’t forget to pack your medication.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake. It’s not like I’ve never gone anywhere.”
“I know, I know. I just worry, that’s all. Maybe you should call the doctor and get some Valium or something, you know how you…”
“Will you just shut up already? It’s a writer’s conference. It’s not like I’m going to the hospital, or to a funeral or anything.”
“It could be a funeral, you know. If you fuck up the speed-date-an-editor thing, I mean. I’m just trying to be realistic.”
“You can take your realism and shove it up that too-tight…”
“Whoa! Okay, okay. I get it. Go. Screw the drugs and the funeral thing. You could just save a lot of time and stress and money if you stayed home. If you forgot about this whole writing thing altogether. At this rate, it will take you ten years to get together enough material to form a manuscript, anyway. Why bother?”
“What the hell else am I supposed to do? I’m a writer. I write. It’s what I do. When I have time. When the kids aren’t driving me crazy, I mean. It’s the only thing I’m naturally good at, really. I’d do it even if it never amounted to a book, or a byline, or a single penny, for that matter. I’ll get there, someday. I will. Tortoise and hare, man. That’s what it’s all about.”
“Polyanna.”
“Asshole.”
Wasps and Hi-C Fruit Punch
Posted on 3 April 2011 | 1 response
You know what I’m talking about. The wasps, or maybe they’re yellow jackets, hover around the spout of the orange Coleman cooler, preventing the kids from getting at the sweet, red elixir inside. It must be the smell that gets them; they know sugar as well as any child does. While I watched them steal my drink, I licked at the droplets left in the Dixie cup in my hand and swatted away a horsefly.
4H summer camp, where I had yet to really kiss a boy, but got to slow dance with one at the final dance to the sound of ”Never Gonna Let You Go” by Sergio Mendes, was the highlight of my summer. I was twelve, I guess. Still spindle-legged, not yet come into my own.
Our junior counselor for the week was named Cinnamon. Cinnamon! She had lied about her age so she could be a junior counselor and get special privileges, including, apparently, sneaking out to hang out with the real counselors. She had enlisted all four of us in her cabin to keep her secret, and we were as charmed by her as anyone would be. She knew the value of sex appeal, even as it applies to getting kids to be complicit in trouble, and we were only too happy to help her.
As the week went on, we watched with something like awe, something like envy, as she prepared her dance for the the talent show: a number to the sweet sound of “Candy Girl,” which seemed especially appropriate for her. It was like she knew they were singing about her. The boys ate it up, with their eyes, at least, which seemed to me the only thing she would let anyone get near her with.
I don’t remember what the dance looked like, but I remember seeing everyone watch her from their cross-legged spots in the beat-down grass. Jaws weren’t really dropped, I guess, but I could swear eyes were glazed. She moved so confidently, and it wasn’t so much that she was a great dancer, but she was a charismatic personality. The kind of girl everyone wants to be close to, everyone wants to be friends with.
Years later, I saw her again in a mall pizza place. They called her name and I knew there couldn’t be more than one, so I worked up my courage and approached her. I could tell she didn’t remember me, but she was sweet and solicitous, and I was charmed again, so when she ended up at my high school years later, I was flattered to be among her close friends.
My life is filled with these people; people I saw as always just a little prettier, just a little more desirable. And sadly, I resigned myself to wall-flower position, and thought that made me something less.
But my pizazz is coming of age, lately, and I can appreciate that I have gifts, some soft words to share, some laughter to create. And I am sweet like Hi-C, and the bees buzz. They know my name.
Awkward Days
Posted on 18 March 2011 | No responses
Today is Awkward Day. Maybe it’s National Awkward Day, and it’s called NAD for short, which would be appropriate, since it’s kind of awkward to say “nad” and not have an ‘s’ on the end.
So let’s hear it for all things awkward, like maybe the time you had a crush on this guy, who was really too old for you anyway since you were thirteen and he was eighteen and you were riding shotgun in his car on the Blue Ridge Parkway and he said, “What of you?”
Now, part of you thinks, oh! The poetry! Listen to what he’s saying – he wants to know what I’m thinking and feeling right now beside him in this beautiful place! He’s good looking, and artsy and intellectual and EVERYTHING I WANT IN A MAN!
But part of you, the part that is awkward and, let’s face it, when you’re thirteen, everything about you is awkward, says, “What of me?” Like, did I hear you right?
But the windows are down, as it’s such a beautiful, warm day in the mountains, and when he repeats himself, “What of you?!” ever louder, and you keep repeating yourself, ever louder, you become less and less certain that you heard him right the first time.
Then, at last, after several exchanges growing in volume and intensity, and not in a good way, you realize your mistake:
“WHAT A VIEW!!!”
For the record, there is no response at this point that will save you from the knowledge that even if this guy ever signs up for Facebook when it is invented twenty-five years later, he will remember you only as that weird kid he used to hang out with.
Facebook, of course, has created its own measure of awkwardness, not the least of which is reconnecting with the boy who once compared you to an Italian race car. You were saved at the time by the fact that you were really too young to have sex, so you stopped at kissing for hours on end, because at that age, you are less Italian race car than go-cart, or vintage Volkswagen Beetle: easy to get going, easy to fix, but you tend to hesitate.
Now, you fear, you are more Edsel, or maybe a Yugo, but less compact. And who the hell knows what is going on in your engine?
So let’s give a big salute to those who persevere under a cloud of awkwardness, who sally forth despite their social handicaps, who could, possibly, have Ferrari motors under the hoods of their Fiesta bodies.
Linseed, Turpentine, Memories
Posted on 16 March 2011 | No responses
I bought myself a cheap set of acrylic paints the other day. The bottom of the barrel brand in huge tubes and garish colors named “hue” instead of the real deal, laden with cadmium and other poisons.
Acrylics use water for clean up and mixing, rather than the heady turpentine and linseed for oil paints, but what acrylics lack is time. They are fleeting things, not workable as oils, they dry in minutes rather than years. They have no smell, really, except maybe plastic.
So when I broke them out today, ready to try my hand with a brush again after eighteen years, I also pulled down the box of my remaining oil paints and media. Small bottles of turpentine and linseed oil lay leaking sticky resins into the bottom of the box, and tubes of Van Dyke Brown, bought on a minimum wage salary so long ago, oozed small puddles. But most of the paints were intact, and among them were Cerulean blue, still true and fluid at this age, and cadmium red, yellow ochre, viridian, umber, vermilion. I opened them and smelled them, rubbed them between my fingers.
Still, it isn’t the same as when my friend and I would paint together in class, before we knew loss and heartbreak, before we grew up, really. She smelled of Eternity and so my time spent creating was always a mixed brew of solvents, perfumes, like anointing oil. And still I can’t smell either without remembering both.
But I have to hurry, now, so I shove the box back on the shelf. I have only one hour to paint, not days stretching together, skipping homework to finish a piece, going without food, but not cigarettes, to buy more paint, more brushes. It’s small, what I’m doing, but in the end, I have something beautiful. And I can add one small thing to another, and who knows in the end what can happen?
Paint, write, raise, grow. Each thing a miracle unto itself.
Ideally vs. Actually: The Burden of Anyone Who Wants to Get Stuff Done
Posted on 15 March 2011 | 2 responses
Ideal.
I just finished reading a Poets & Writers Magazine article about the idea of artist residencies where children are welcome.
My first thoughts were, “Yes! That would be so great!”
My second thoughts, mirroring those of one writer interviewed, were something to the effect of, “Dear god. I hope that never, ever happens.”
Anyone faced with a task wrestles with the angels that are our desks, our workspaces, our noise levels, our internal weather, leaving scuffle marks in the sand, and that’s before we even get past the open-mouthed cries of “MOM!” or, the demands of a micro-managing boss, editor, gallery owner, or whomever our needs must defer to.
Today, I was invited by someone who apparently enjoys my writing, to participate in “blogapalooza,” and post something. Anything.
So I gathered my coffee, my computer, my oatmeal, my coupon binder, my homeschool materials, made my grocery list, updated my WordPress software, installed a spam filter, read Charlotte’s Web out loud…wait, what was I doing?
And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut liked to have his characters write, with what I like to think of as a sigh of resignation, for life, earthquakes, jobs, wars, and children, are always going on inconveniently. So what if I don’t have the beautiful desk table?
I have my faithful coffee cup, my scratched and dented arts and crafts table, some words to say. I planted some seeds in the ground, I made some notes to myself about ideas and thought about cutting up some beautiful paper just to feel its texture and absorb its color. In other words, it was a successful day, despite the unfolded laundry and the dinner yet to be imagined.
Good grief, if we all waited until we had the perfect space with the perfect view and the perfectly quiet or crazily busy room, we’d never have art! We’d never have literature! I don’t care what those asshole male writers demanded of their surroundings, if I have to wait until the kids take a break from mangling each other or until my husband stops sweeping (I only want him to stop so I won’t feel guilty), I’ll never write another word.
So sing! Dance! Paint! Write! Fuck it. The world needs us.
Ideal AND real.
Borrowed Fervor
Posted on 6 September 2010 | 4 responses
I’m in the cafe, and there is a boy who was baptized with my daughter. We were down at the river, and we sang that song with beautiful guitar sounds and voices lifted, and even though my friend disappeared, walking away from her family and whatever darkness was there, it was still a joyous day.
But this kid, this boy, was so full of new life and vigor and convertedness, or rather, re-ignitedness, he livened up the water, the sun, made everything shine brighter. He made me want to know him, to get inside that first love again and tell him how I’d been lost and look how very found I am now. But too young, my God, only a child, really, and here he was being baptized with my own daughter, nine years old. I was an old lady.
But I’m in the cafe now and there he is with his grown up beard and talk about a wood lathe, hand turned wheel, planning the garden and taking a class on growing mushrooms and I wonder at him. I wonder and think I could have had someone like that, couldn’t I? Wasn’t there a time?
But no, I was always too broken, too difficult. And the light is gone out from my eyes now and no amount of wood turning can fix it.
From Scratch
Posted on 12 August 2010 | 6 responses
Corn silks, those annoying little buggers that you can’t completely remove from your fresh ear of sweet corn, are linked to corn kernels, one to one. Each silk must be pollinated for a plump kernel to form at its end.
We husk the corn, my son cuts the okra we bought at the market, our own plants too wasted by their passionate affair with the Virginia sun to provide enough of what we adore. I make tortillas from scratch, corn meal, flour, water, salt, a simple recipe for something so delicious.
In the morning, it’s pancakes the little ones ask for, and my husband never stops wondering why I don’t buy Bisquick, it’s so easy. Instead I measure flour, Ethan cracks eggs, we stir gently, leaving lumps because the directions say to, and I never know why.
I am working on streamlining my life, incorporating routines, and I think about our mornings, how I make coffee every other day because I will reheat it the next day.
There there, now. Don’t judge.
The children love this little ritual of grinding beans, boiling water, scooping the coffee into my shiny, insulated press, but I think how nice it would be to have one of those one-cup makers, tidy little pods to put in the compartment, buttons to push. How much time I would save, and I’d hardly have to wait for it at all. No more microwaved coffee on off days, no more pots to clean.
Then I think about how my children would lose the memory of where coffee comes from. They would no longer see beans that looks like beans, and big canisters releasing their wonderful aroma when you open them.
They would see coffee not as a ritual, but as a machine, an invisible something that comes from…I don’t know where. They would see it as utilitarian.
But coffee is not, or at least, not just so. It’s made by a friend when you visit her farm and she tells you her father taught her to use her spoon to cool the liquid, dipping it, lifting it, letting the metal release its heat. It’s served by a HoJo’s waitress in the middle of the night while you solve the world’s problems at seventeen. It’s cupped in neighborly hands while you wait together for news, good or bad.
The farmer walks down his rows, arms shaking loose pollen from his corn tassels so it will do its work. The corn is ground into meal, mixed with flour and water, kneaded, rolled, cooked.
I wake, I grind the beans, boil the water, and wait. And I see that it is good.
