overflow

the best.

2012-02-07T15:54:00.000-08:00

Source: hooraytinyanimals.tumblr.com via Krist on Pinterest

BABY OTTER!

One side of It

2012-01-30T12:34:00.000-08:00

to stand as witness and be swallowed
in the returning wonder walls of sea
one side to be blinded
by the stinging tail of the miracle
drowned in the froth of its slamming shut
stuck in its sliding door still
unsure of the force you’ve followed

but here all our sons have died
strangled by angels
and the blood has dried
on the gaping doorframes
now the whole place reeks of a mystery
stronger than the heart can separate
or part back into two waves

fragments

2012-01-12T09:33:00.000-08:00

I'm reading Anne Carson's Sappho translation If Not, Winter, and thinking about lost things. I'm thinking about my favorite swimsuit in 8th grade (my first two-piece), my first CD collection, the pictures on my memory card when I doused my old camera with coffee, my green wallet, and one stack of 4th period's character analysis essays (I know, I'm awful). None of these things would be on my mind if I still had access to them. They all shimmer with unique beauty because they have entered the realm of the never-to-be-recovered. For an absentminded type like me, that's a large realm.

My curiousity about Sappho was peaked when I studied e.e. cummings. In college, cummings was greatly influenced by the fragments and shaken syntax of Sappho. Here's a poem of hers:

]heart
]absolutely
]I can
]
]would be for me
]to shine in answer
]face
]
]having been stained
]

The open brackets indicate torn or rubbed away fragments of papyrus. Anne Carson, in this version, has taken what is legible and morphed that into a poem, of sorts.

Now here's one of cummings:

(but

true

to the incomparable

couch of death thy

rhythmic

lover

thou answerest

them only with

spring)

The way he forces whole thoughts into fragmentation is homage to her fragmented thoughts. This fragmentation is arguably what made him such a popular poet.

While it was a clear choice for Cummings, Sappho never meant for her writing to be broken apart. Yet it's taken on a life its own because of this loss. For example, this one:

]
]
]Atthis for you
]
]

That's all of it. There's nothing particularly magical about those words. It's the emptiness surrounding them that sings.

There is something really powerful in silence. The situations that still haunt you, in all probability, are the ones for which you still don't have clear answers.

What I leave out

the whole pieces

of nights when maybe it rained

I trained

memories to flake away

like cheap gilding

like that was all you weighed

so truth patches

beneath other things

even for me

what I want

is to find the scroll

where you keep me

in scratches and [

there is no reason

except

things erased

still

factor

first crush

2012-01-04T12:37:00.000-08:00

I’ve fallen in love with a house. An old, rundown, oddly shaped house. It’s gone through many tenants, and I toured it once, when it was up for rent. It was perfect.

How do I know for sure it’s a full-blown crush? I’m rationalizing. I'm dusting away the quirks away with creative logic. That's love--the ability to see potential where others raise eyebrows.

For example, the yard is terrifying. A giant side-yard, overrun with shoulder-high weeds, a grove of unruly, snarled trees, and most likely a few woodland creatures. Instead of admitting that this would be a pain in the ass, I think to myself: what stress-relief weeding would become. I imagine myself, well-clothed to protect from spiders and sharp teeth of smallish animals, trekking into the heart of it all with a scythe.

Or, take the extremely long, narrow hallway that joins the kitchen to the rest of the house—I've decided there’s just enough room for a book-nook. Maybe squeeze a window-seat into the dormer. Cozy-chic.

Once I talked a walking buddy into trespassing (the house was still for sale, so we figured we could just say we were checking the place out.) We picked oranges in the backyard. If I’d had my way, would have spent the evening sitting on the crooked brick patio until somebody kicked us out.

My housecrush has recently blossomed to a fever, fanned by the flames of impossibility. Someone bought the house. Someone is fixing it up—he’s venting his aggression on the side-jungle. He’s taking out his long days rooting up the sagging front fence and putting in a (rather kitschy, if you ask me) white-picket number.

Once, while on a run, I saw him industriously rooting up old fence posts.

I opened my mouth and choked out, “I love this house,” and then, “and you’re making it look so good.”

“Well, thank you,” he returned, taking a step away from me. “Thanks a lot. My partner and I certainly enjoy the challenge.”

“You’re doing great,” I gulped, and jogged on, seething with jealousy, but also a little awed—this is the guy who can light the outdoor fireplace any time he wants. He (and his partner) are free to pick the oranges without a twinge of guilt. Perhaps they even see the nook-potential of the dormer window.

I like to pretend that I don’t have many real fixed dreams, that I’m content letting the current of life take me to what is next, and doing my best there. Outright expectations make me nervous. To outright try is to potentially outright fail.

But somewhere in the brick patio and beveled glass doors that lead to the kitchenette, I love this little white house enough to risk embarrassment and say, outright— I want this.

For now, I’ll try and keep content walking by (and perhaps staring in the window a split second longer than appropriate.) But someday, something stronger might develop. A girl can dream.

Works of Love--Love Builds Up

2011-12-10T12:41:00.000-08:00

There is nothing, nothing at all, that cannot be done or said in such a way that it becomes upbuilding, but whatever it is, if it is upbuilding, then love is present. Thus the admonition, just where love itself admits the difficulty of giving a specific rule, says, "Do everything for upbuilding," It could just as well have said, "do everything in love," and it would have said the very same thing. One person can do exactly the opposite of what another person does, but if each one does the opposite--in love--the opposite becomes upbuilding. There is no word in the language that in itself is upbuilding, and there is no word in the language that cannot be said in an upbuilding way and become upbuilding if love is present. Thus it is so very far from being the case that the upbuilding would be something that is an excellence of a few gifted individuals, similar to brains, literary talent, beauty, and the like (alas, this is just an unloving and divisive error!) that on the contrary is the very opposite--every human being by his life, by his conduct, by his behavior in everyday affairs, by his associate with his peers, by his words, his remarks, should and could build up and would do it if love were really present in him. Kierkegaard, 212

2011-11-23T17:15:00.000-08:00

Just earlier today, I asked myself if there were any new ways to describe sunsets. Yes, I really asked myself this question. I know, I know. Too much poetry.

So now I'm reading Christian Wiman, (who is coming to the SPU residency in March! hooray!) and I find this, which is so good, and fresh, and exactly what I could not make my little brain do while looking out my window:

I remember that. And I remember seeing,
Past Abilene, the sun come plunging down
In front of us and spatter back in the sky.
It was like no sunset we'd ever seen.
Thick light dripped and puddled on the far
Horizon, yellow smeared and flecked with red
Like a broken yolk that had begun
To grow. There was a moment when the sky,
Ground, and the air between were all one color,
My family's faces, too, glowing, fading...
Then everything was gone and we were driving
In the darkness toward whatever edge the day
Had fallen from, whtaever space it now
Was falling into. - The Long Home

some notes on music

2011-11-15T10:00:00.000-08:00

Over The Rhine played the El Rey this Sunday! So good.

During the show, Linford gave quite a bit of background on the songs. Not just what inspired them, but exactly how they developed. It was encouraging to hear their process: certain songs took years to complete, while others came in just a few minutes.

Well, I don't know if encouraging is the right word there...I don't know the word. It's such a mystery why some songs/poems just tug at your sleeve, asking to be recorded, while others ramble around inside you for years, always too ornery to be captured with words and written down. I guess it's good to know that's a universal issue for writers; it gives a feeling of solidarity.

Anyway, this is one of my favorite Over the Rhine songs, and this one, according the Linford, "wrote itself," so to speak. Have a listen:

Latter Days (oh please don't watch the video, it's so silly. Just listen.)

P.S. Oh! Oh! The Milk Carton Kids opened the show. How to describe them...Um, if a movie was to be made about my life, I would choose them for the credits/exit music. If that does not entice you, then you should also know that their music is ALL FREE off their website, and they sound like Simon & Garfunkel, if those guys had been listening to Bon Iver while they were writing stuff. Do with that what you will...

and feel a moment's space

2011-11-14T19:44:00.000-08:00

Aye, while your common men
Lay telegraphs, gauge railroads, reign, reap, dine
And dust the faulty carpets of the world
For kings to walk on, or our president,
The poet suddenly will catch them up
With his voice like a thunder,--'This is soul,
This is life, this word is being said in heaven,
Here's God down on us! what are you about?'
How all those workers start amid their work,
Look round, look up, and feel, a moment's space
That carpet-dusting, though a pretty trade,
Is not the imperative labor after all.

E.B.B., Aurora Leigh

2011-11-14T12:28:00.000-08:00

It's been a weird day so far, writing-wise. I'm exhausted from a long weekend: two shifts at Jones, two back-to-back princess parties. (I was Rapunzel this time, and we had some very skeptical four-year-olds...one even made an attempt to expose me as a fraud by yanking forcefully at my blond braid, and yelling, "it's a wig!" requiring me to think on me feet and remind her that the lock of brown hair she'd exposed was the piece the witch cut right before kidnapping me. I put a little scratch of sob into my voice and sighed, "oh, I don't like to talk about it." That left her awed and saddened. Or at the very least, it shut her up.)

All that to say, I slept in this morning, and now I'm trying to get going, and I got an email from a fellow student suggesting doing writing imitations. One of the poets suggested was Plath, not surprisingly. And so I decided to try reading some poems online, when I came across this comment stream. Plath didn't even write this poem, I think it's Christina Rossetti...but the two top comments made me laugh so hard.

2011-10-27T14:02:00.001-07:00

Here's the phenomenon--I'm just truckin' along, feeling pretty confident in my ability to compose a two-page paper, when I pause to re-read and realize I've unwittingly used the words "inspired" and "facets" about 5 times each. Ugh. Ugugugh.

digging

2011-10-14T14:07:00.000-07:00

sometimes my shovel nudges old bone
brittle remnant, probably just
some unmourned chicken.
I dust it off,

sing a short hymn
for the long-departed, and keep digging.

we'll break through around noon,
I announce to Dad, who is planting inpatients
in the far corner of the garden,
he coughs in approval.

to keep my strength up,
I picture orchid gardens,
fresh chapattis, rainstorms.
things I know I'll find

I practice the clattering way
my grandfather slides sound
slick of his tongue
in the kitchen after dinner.
(I hardly hear words in it, to me
just a broken necklace of seed beads
bouncing off floorboards).

I've learned one line.
I try it out, tossing
tu kasa aahe?
across the garden.

but Dad's stubborn English
boomerangs back:
fine, thank you.

when I ask if should maybe
angle a little to the left, he grins,
but doesn't answer.
He walks over
snaps the brittle wishbone
with his mud-crusted thumbs,
explains again:

Los Angeles used to be ranchland.

I know all about where we are now.
that is not why I am digging.

2011-10-02T19:53:00.000-07:00

Grace is the monarch,
bruised wings,
fallen and fluttering
in road among other leaves.

Grace when I see it
and swerve.

Grace as it wings back
behind my eyes in the evening:
struggling life, brave enough
to keep flapping.

I'm virtually pooped...

2011-09-30T10:42:00.000-07:00

I finally signed up for Map My Run. I've been obsessive about Gmap Pedometer, so I thought I'd try keeping track of all my routes.

Not two minutes after I finished figuring out how to enter my paltry 2.5 mile Lacy Park jog, the system congratulated me on burning 500 calories. When I examined my workout map, I found not only had I lapped the park from 8-9, but I'd mysteriously been playing basketball from 5am-6am.

I like virtual me! She's a real go-getter.

2011-09-22T22:11:00.000-07:00

okay, I was joking when I said I should buy myself a pair of "writer shoes."

but I just found these... and they are pretty cute.

The beginning of wisdom

2011-09-20T22:31:00.000-07:00

The clock reads 2:13, but it’s been that way for several minutes. I’d say about five. I am seven. I am swinging my legs so my Keds just skim the freshly waxed floor. My long hair, wrapped in braids around my head like no other girl in the second grade, strains against the bobby pins my mom stuck in this morning.

The bobby pins prick through my epidermis, a word that Cindy taught me today during recess by shouting that mine was showing, causing me to clutch at my pant’s zipper, my t-shirt, make sure everything was covered. My epidermis, or skin, as she finally explained after I, nearly in tears, begged her to, tingles with the all-dayness of those pins. I will get to take them out in exactly, wait...exactly 27 minutes. Or perhaps never at all, because time is not moving. An eternity of metallic aching in the space around my eyeballs.

We’ve just arrived at the auditorium. I was the line leader, a position that I do, indeed, enjoy, just quite to the extent Mrs. Pasco imagines. She always bestows the title as if it is something edible, something to be pinned to the fridge. It’s just walking. But I do a good job.

More importantly, we’re still stuck in 2:13. The chairs are hard, perhaps a little harder than they were when 2:13 started. I am sitting in the front row. Because I am an A+ student and often the line leader, I glue my eyes to the stage, hold my legs rigid, and look entranced. This is an extremely safe way to daydream, because grown-ups love to feel they have entranced small children. I have friends who take a less-subtle approach to daydreaming, turning heads and fidgeting, and I’ve learned plenty from watching them. A stiff neck is a small price to pay for freedom of the mind.

I'm thinking about time and the clock. One or both have clearly broken.

When we finally, if ever, escape 2:13, we’re going to see Grandpa in Sacramento. We’ll walk to Gunther’s, the only ice-cream shop in the world where they put real gumballs, gobs of them, into their candy-pink ice-cream. Jenny and I will spit them back out in little cups so we can count them up and see who won. Then we’ll go to the Nut Tree, where they sell iced gingerbread cookies in the shape of rainbows, painted with impossibly smooth icing, the kind that cracks and crumbles when you bite it. The gift shop has rocks for sale, the quartz and the purple one I can never pronounce, and my favorite, the one that looks like a normal rock on one side but, upon being flipped over, becomes a whole universe of spikes and shining crystals.

Then it finally ticks. 2:14.

Alright then. Time is moving.

But then I think about it: that black hole of 2:13 passed, which means every minute will keep passing, whether it is as boring as a end-of-the-day assembly or as euphoric as the first crunch of rainbow gingerbread. The whole trip will pass. All those minutes will just keep disappearing, the way the water from our hose keeps disappearing into the grass, even after Dad has forgotten about it and left it running.

The trip, then the year, and then I’ll move over to the big side of the schoolyard, the side where we’re all scared to go but where I sometimes go to wait for Jenny. And then the rest of life. It will all go about as fast, or as slow, as this very assembly, and I’ll spend much of it being line leader and sitting rigidly in hard chairs, looking like I’m interested and waiting for the clock to move me to the next minute.

There is clapping around me. I realize my teacher is digging me with her eyes, and my little hands come together, too, to thank the nice man on stage.

And when I look at the clock again, it’s 2:30, and it’s time to go.

world without end

2011-09-14T12:04:00.000-07:00

She bought herself a rosary ring

for a dollar at the mission, planned

to learn the incantations,

let them overtake her,

slip it on to

conjure up the coolness of adobe walls,

the comfort of the circadian,

of completion.

At home, his shoulders

rolled it when she held him

or he’d twirl it

like a roulette wheel,

the scratch of

cheap metal stinging the soft

flesh folds of her fingers.

She’d laugh, and tell him

to start praying.

an experiment--I need your help!

2011-09-11T22:03:00.000-07:00

Mark Doty (whose collection, Fire to Fire, is changing my life right now) says:

If you write a poem with the aid of a thesaurus, you will almost inevitably look like a person wearing clothing chosen by someone else. I am not sure that poet should even own one of the damn things.

I used one thesaurus aided word in the below snippet. Can you find it? I'm super curious about the conspicuousity (<-- should be a word, sounds less conspicuous than conspicuousness) of thesaurus-inspired verbiage.

Post your guess as a comment. C'mon...it'll be fun... :-)

An overdue conversation

"You shake your head. I scowl,
laugh, our voices mingle, swirl,
dizzy with proximity, relieved
to bounce around the others'
predicable tonality, to mingle
in such familiar vibrations, modulations.
Pitches pause, hitching with joy at
our squabbles, sighs, even our
silence."

ohmansogood...

2011-09-09T09:32:00.000-07:00

STARLIGHT

My father stands in the warm evening
on the porch of my first house.
I am four years old and growing tired.
I see his head among the stars,
the glow of his cigarette, redder
than the summer moon riding
low over the old neighborhood. We
are alone, and he asks me if I am happy.
"Are you happy?'' I cannot answer.
I do not really understand the word,
and the voice, my father's voice, is not
his voice, but somehow thick and choked,
a voice I have not heard before, but
heard often since. He bends and passes
a thumb beneath each of my eyes.
The cigarette is gone, but I can smell
the tiredness than hangs on his breath.
He has found nothing, and he smiles
and holds my head with both his hands.
Then he lifts me to his shoulder,
and now I too am among the stars,
as tall as he. Are you happy? I say.
He nods in answer, Yes! oh yes! oh yes!
And in that new voice he says nothing,
holding my head tight against his head,
his eyes closed up against the starlight,
as though those tiny blinking eyes
of light might find a tall, gaunt child
holding his child against the promises
of autumn, until the boy slept
never to waken in that world again.
Philip Levine
(Okay, sir. You can go ahead and be Poet Laureate.)

it was never merely chalk or cheese...

2011-09-07T14:01:00.000-07:00

Especially in the incandescent decade of 1900–1910, he wrote everywhere and anywhere—and about anything: “The Advantages of Having One Leg,” “A Piece of Chalk,” “What I Found in My Pocket,” “On Gargoyles,” “Cheese.” These 1,000-word bijoux he would scribble in cabs, public houses, upon shirt cuffs, the backs of play bills.
It was never merely chalk or cheese, though. In Chesterton’s hands, even the most pedestrian subject grew wings. “There is,” Chesterton assured readers at the beginning of an essay on Kipling, “no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject.” In “The Unthinkable Theory of Professor Green,” an astronomer delivers a lecture on his exciting discovery of a new planet. Only gradually do we realize that this marvelous new world with all its wonders is what we’ve already seen but somehow never known: Earth. What Chesterton called the “mere excitement of existence” countermanded boredom. “It is dull as ditch-water,” you say. But think about it: “Is ditch-water dull? Naturalists with microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.”
G.K. Chesteron: master of rejuvenation

WWTD?

2011-09-06T20:23:00.000-07:00

Checking the mail has become a bigger deal lately. It's an exciting little trip.

I checked the mail today, feeling rather old and sad for myself and my excitement, and got a flyer advertising a book study to help "put faith back into your busy life and arrange your life for spiritual transformation."

But I'm not busy. That was what hit me on the long walk back from the mail. I have nothing going on this evening, no one expecting dinner, no tense board meeting to attend. No game night. No essays to grade. I'm not wrung out from wrangling the joy of writing into 130 hormonal, hot, sticky 7th graders.

It's heaven. It's also really heavy, as in, the non-busyness of my life tends to make my pretty crazy sometimes.

I planned for this time, financially. I'm getting a ton of writing done. I'm loving the slow pace of things and the freedom. But what I didn't plan for was the emotional tension, the way I'd miss the rush. Our society encourages and celebrates (and subversively idolizes) the rush. Magazine articles, advertisements, everyday conversations, blogposts, facebook statuses, small talk...references to glorified craziness are everywhere. Laments, moans, admonitions of busyness all thinly disguise Puritanical pride at our over-doing. And they all make me feel guilty in my rest.

Who better than Thoreau to channel in defense of my new lifestyle? I feel much better. :o)

"When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence, that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the shadow of the reality."

"He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate."

"Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate."

2011-09-05T11:08:00.000-07:00

A whole book of found poems...I'm in good company! Who knew you could publish books of them? Annie Dillard, that's who. But then, I hear she's a pretty smart lady, generally.

earplugs & manna

2011-08-29T21:33:00.000-07:00

Last weekend, I took a road trip in the strictest sense: packed-in car, spontaneous sing-alongs (yes, Part of Your World made an appearance, and yes, it was magical), that dizzy relief of solid ground after hours of rolling over flat roads.

Our route was a good one: Santa Cruz to Pescadero, San Franscisco to Marin Headlands, Saucalito to Sonoma.

That last night we stayed in a motel in Sonoma, which seemed totally swanky after two days of hosteling. Especially since I spent most of our night at the Marin Headlands hostel huddled in a top bunk on a sweatshirt-thick mattress, serenaded by intermittent, maraca-like snores. I think I may have, at one point, prayed that God cut off that woman's air supply.

So we loved that motel. Especially that hot tub, in which we spent a good hour, sipping fizzy wine and admiring Sonoma's star-stitched quilt of a sky.

After some failed attempts to name constellations, our hot-tub conversation turned to the charmed nature of our trip.

A kind grace just wove through it: walking out of the Santa Cruz Boardwalk just as a zealous cop had walked toward our expired meter; stumbling into Saints Peter and Paul church to join the Saturday night mass in reciting The Lord's Prayer; the ipod shuffling up Simon and Garfunkel's Sound of Silence as we crested the mist-cloaked cliffs of PCH; and perhaps most miraculous of all, me remembering there would be a bin of free earplugs at the hostel desk (this just minutes after I'd prayed for that snorer's spontaneous suffocation).

I've always been obsessed with the story of manna. The Israelite people prayed for food, and were given only daily bread, falling from the sky in the form of manna. If they tried to keep any extra, it all rotted. They had to learn to live with the expectancy that grace would provide.

A really great trip brings about that same kind of awareness. Jars of Clay describes it as the faith of an empty hand. This was that kind of trip. The kind that helped me realize I've got to stop letting empty spots in my life shoot an ice-wave of panic down my spine. I want my lack to bring release, excitement, and wonder, instead of fear. I want faith enough to wait with expectancy for grace. I will not be able to horde it. But I want to receive it, palms up.

losing my mind, finding some poems & a lighthouse.

2011-08-25T22:11:00.000-07:00

This was going to be such a day of productivity.

The plan was to hit up Point Vincent Lighthouse Starbucks, soak up the ocean view while cranking out a few annotations. But that would have required a computer and several books, and as Amy finished the hour-long drive and pulled into the Starbucks lot, I discovered I'd left my book-bag in my car, parked at her apartment where we'd met that morning. I'd shown up with nothing but a 3/5" notepad with a otter sketched on the cover.

My first thought was locate a copy of the next book on my reading list: The Divine Comedy. As it turns out, Dante isn't sold at most bookstores. After several phone calls failed, I tried Mike's Independent Book Shoppe. In answer to my polite request, Mike replied, "oh, we're fresh out, sold the last one yesterday." Which seemed either unnecessarily sarcastic, or a little bizarre. I gave up.

After five minutes of stewing into my Chai latte, I got over my absentmindedness and gave myself some new homework: "Found Poems" from New York Times articles.

If you're unfamiliar with the process, it's simple: pull any words, in any order, out of a piece (novel, essay, newspaper article). And have fun doing it.

I don't feel like I wrote these, but they do make me laugh. Seriously, try it sometime. It's fun to poeticize headlines.

Jobs Steps Down at Apple, Saying He Can’t Meet Duties

From the near dead to its current, unmatched
fiery and mercurial
passed into legend

whose insistent view
so dominated
his genius
his risk-taking
his tenacity
his own judgement and
perfectionism and gut

Health issues hang
over a decision

Perhaps the greatest ever
every phone call
every time, he's a part

funny how you feel about
a stranger.

Cheney Says He Urged Bush to Bomb Syria in ’07

But I was a lone voice guarding
the secrecy of internal deliberation
hampered by communication
tough interrogation
the suffocation
technique:
relish the criticism.

Long struggle with heart
the eventual invasion.

The epilogue:
A prolonged dream, vivid.
And Italian Villa. He
paces stone paths
for coffee and newspapers.

Around the Corner, Inadvertent Galleries

life has become
peppered with things
they lie in wait
buoyed by more
anonymous, unsung
especially in summer
a narrow sliver
right in front of you
an encounter of the
conceptual kind

something like enormous
shoes on shelves
traveling among the elements
a greatly magnified glass mosaic

you turn a corner
it happens twice

invert the spacial experience
an immense blow up
of a small portion

the statue of liberty
has a 35-foot waist

nothing amazes
like reality.

New Numbers, and Geography, for Gay Couples

A decade is a long time.
Cultural training classes
met by stoney stares.
Social stigma starting
to ease,
attitudes softening,
stand up and be
counted.

So much for San Francisco.
Couples dispersed
farther afield.
Enclaves, safe-havens,
the upstarts on the list:
Pleasant Ridge.
The tip of Cape Cod.

These days he lives openly,
Mr. Hooper smiles impishly,
an island of tolerance
in a sea of outlet malls.

prewriting

2011-08-24T11:21:00.000-07:00

Joseph Yap, the boy

with the square head and

arms that seem to have been stretched

to an abnormally long, noodley shape

slouches

farther down, if that were possible

until I worry he will slither out

around the bottom of his

attached desk and escape

in the form of a puddle.

But no, Joseph perseveres,

letting neither accent

nor posture,

stop him from

shooting down my bright

assertion that

everyone has a story to tell.

I no story. Everything is so bored.

Lucky for him, I

have an affinity for students

like this, with the courage

to speak a language strange

enough still to wrangle tongues,

offend soft pallets

with its arcs and sailing curves

and renegade conjugations.

I tell him: think. When were you

last in big trouble?

He thinks, because I’ve told him to.

His eyes grow big, and flicker.

I burn down a house.

He brings the whole class

into nervous howls with this.

We wish he'd master past tense.

Wow, I stammer, straight-faced.

Was everyone okay? Emphasis

on was.

Oh, yeah. Sure. It was more just...little

fire. Everyone okay. I get in big trouble,

though.

Well, yeah.

You've got

your story, sir. He smirks.

He picks up

his pencil and strikes paper,

blessedly silent, sending out only

little flint-like scratches.

He bristles

with the warmth of it, the story

that has stayed so long inside of him

leaping out onto the page.

Soloist, Good Friday.

2011-08-23T14:14:00.000-07:00

In the front of the wooden pews, she shot

our souls clean through. Whose eyelids

swam with tears, reflected ebony.

Her soul,

see-through, a shade.

Hilltop injustice

she remembered for all of us,

what all of us had, have, done. It was

welling up inside her. Clawing out.

We were drowned in it, in the waves,

rocked in them, lost. I prayed, prayed

oh, to stay swathed

in spirit and so sure, steeped in

existence of Love that we did not feel

our skin, or need it anymore.

We grew roots, we grew wrinkles,

we rose and we died.

back-to-life shopping

2011-08-21T14:26:00.000-07:00

Not to make too much of it, but for twenty-two years, and that would be since the age of four, I have gone "back to school." I distinctly remember leaving kindergarden preview day...the sun through the dusty windows, the fresh masking-tape marks on the carpets, the easel sides brimming with pungent acrylic sets. I skipped the entire way home, absolutely bursting out of my freshly-scrubbed skin.

The first day, I wore a hand-me-down plaid dress, but this wasn't just any hand-me-down. This was my mom's first day of school dress, pressed and wrapped to survive the years in her hope chest. The patent-leather belt had to be abandoned to accommodate my chub, but otherwise, I could have been Linda Sue starting school in 1953. Our kitchen wall exhibits snaps of the three Lee ladies on our respective first days, all sporting the plaid ensemble. First day outfits were always a big deal. After kindergarden we, thankfully, got to buy our own.

As I grew, negotiations for style and fit and length turned shopping trips into blood-baths. My mom shaking her head, lips tight, proclaiming my outfits inappropriate for a classy young woman. She always won those battles, but I fought my hardest, knowing that those first-day outfits were not just clothes, but somehow a bigger announcement of who I'd become over the summer, and who I'd be that year.

Fast-forward to Christy-fresh-from-college. Handed the keys to my own classroom, I spent these early fall days pulling down crusty old bulletin boards, adorning the walls with freshly pulled butcher paper, hand-cutting speech bubble posters for the parts of speech, crafting calendars with the days' plan. Chopping up days into hours, and hours into sections, and then waiting for that structure to come to life with students. While I waited, I shopped.

A good friend picked out pinched, pointy-toed heels for my first-day outfit. I thought I looked a little witch-like, but she deemed them perfect. "You need to look a little bit scary," she explained. "You're far too nice in normal shoes." I got through that first day and wobbled home to spend the afternoon and evening soaking the blisters off my feet. I had no regrets. I had stood tall, been slightly scary but simultaneously stylish. Everything would be alright.

I'm a very contextual person. When I transfered from high school to junior high, I bought some loud, bright, pattern-happy dresses because I considered them "junior high-ish." I soon realized that I didn't need to dress like Ms. Frizzle in order to teach 7th graders. I donated most of those clothes to goodwill. Still, it helped me to have some costumes to help convince myself that I could fit that new part I'd been cast.

Now, I'm not officially off the hook. I'm still in school, it just happens to be a low-residency program this time around, and I'm back to being a student. So I've had my "first day" at our residency in Santa Fe. I even picked out a 'first-day' scarf (as a nod to the fact that I am now in a low-res school, I figured an accessory was enough.)

But now it's almost September, and people are asking, in a sweet, conspiratorial tone, if I'm ready to go back to school. I say I'm not going. Then I feel guilty as soon as it's said, like I'm a deserter. And I panic: what if this is all wrong? Teaching fulfilled the performer part of me, the people-pleaser part of me. Even more significantly, it was an easy answer to the ever-present question: "What do you do?" Which, if I'm honest, I have to admit that I always hear as, "Who are you?"

I've daydreamed about "being a writer," since, well, as long as I remember. But facing that life is a totally different thing. It brings up the same kind of fear of failure, resistance, and pressure that teaching always brought. I guess because it brings along me. I haven't changed; I have the same worries and hang-ups as a writer that I had as a teacher. I also have the same strengths, the same drive and determination. I just tend to forget that in the rush of change.

Perhaps I need a talisman of some kind, a costume for this "back to life" season. An accessory, an entire outfit. Maybe some good shoes. See, I believe in the power of good teaching shoes. It doesn't matter if they batter your feet a little bit--the important thing is that they lift up your whole self and make you stand tall.

Good writing shoes...is there such a thing? It's quite nice writing barefoot, but I think I want some new shoes anyway, just to let my feet know that we've got a new direction.

2011-07-23T23:04:00.000-07:00

GRACE

Tonight I am a willful prodigal

slurping the pig slop with

relish, deliberate. Beautifully brazen.

tonight my tongue rests,

all dialogue impressed under

my colorful re-tellings, silencing even,

my bent toward prattled repentance.

Tonight I will sleep well

as I used to sleep, in God’s Palm.

Nobody told me about this loophole, I’ve just

always known: it is open, regardless.

A mountainous flesh-space

to jump up and down on, slightly squishy.

The crevice between the thumb and the

soft underside is my preference.

There are many of us here, but I will find

a quiet spot

I will settle in, unseen by the ones who have

all of the answers.

A Stupid Faith

2011-07-22T13:19:00.000-07:00

( I think I've been reading too much Eliot. This is a piece I might take to SPU's workshop. Any thoughts are welcome, all 3 of you blog-readers. )

May 21st, 2011

Well, that dream bled out

with a tick of the clock, to

a soundtrack of maniacal snickers

and stifled sighs of secret relief.

Cementing a place among

our litany of

crack-job prophet jokes.

What now? A man’s shout

at the timid believer clutching his red suitcase

tears through the dank

Times Square Air.

Out of the rain, in the red booth.

I blow on my miso soup

Creating stippled cosmos, a swirling galaxy of perforated

Tofu. With the wind of my lungs, on the surface

I bequeath life, and feel my whole living self sink the red seat,

across from a man I love,

who is sipping green tea and staring at the rain.

I take his flesh-and-blood hand, to feel it,

And watch the news play on the TV screen.

Where is your God now? A jeerer

calls, probably not meaning

to echo anything.

Everyone’s thrilled

at faith’s fall. Yes, it was a stupid

faith

Still this man

packed a change of clothes,

chewed his cereal, caressed it, one precious last use of jaws predestined

to vanish soon.

He agreed to the cameras

believed the way few believe, told the crew,

I am blessed, I am, indeed.

If I were God,

I would have broken my silence

broken down at

the sad, naive hope of

such easy escape.

I cool my soup, watch the worlds spin.

A tiny world that can

begin and end, in time.

I wonder how God loves

him, all of us,

in our existence

in our stupidity.

Roman Candle #2

2011-07-02T11:06:00.000-07:00

(thanks, Jack Kerouac, for putting things stupidly well.)

Do I have to wear

dark glasses, do I have to sneer

at everyone who doesn't love

the things I love: the Wayfarers

and I, do we all have to be one throng

leaning forward to our next

crazy venture

under the stars? Do I have to catch

every reference? Can I live

a sweet, solitary life

where I don't always burn,burn,burn: only

occasionally? I know They won't

call it genius, but I also know

I'm called (yes, GodAlmighty

Splitter-of-Destiny, he told me) to

live a steady glow.

2011-07-02T10:37:00.000-07:00

The week, backwards...

Last night, lit white lights, we lounged poolside, tipping white-wine and playing catch-phrase. I looked around at some of my favorite co-workers and thought to myself, man, this is picturesquely wonderful. And then I realized, I'd thought that just the day before at dinner with my family as we choke-laughed about the rules we followed growing up (and let me tell you, it's pretty fun to be able to laugh with your mom and sister about that). Wednesday evening, we (Joseph and I) devoured sinfully good bread pudding with burbon sauce after a long, lovely ramble through Hearst Castle. Tuesday we camped, feasting on gloriously charred hobo meals and a marshmallow-smeared yam before snuggling down in our tent at San Simeon. Sunday, I hosted a picnic in the park (complete with badminton hijinks, obviously) followed by a fairly intense game of six-person Scrabble. Saturday, poetry-college crafting with a dear college friend, then a walk to the monastery while dissecting lenten discipline, boys (all of them) and the creative process. I am blessed tremendously in this Sabbath. It is a gathering time.

drafts

2011-06-19T11:13:00.000-07:00

It's not that I've stopped writing, or even stopped using this blog. It's just that right now, everything is in draft status. I count 53 consecutive drafts since "Sweet Potato."

That stat makes it pretty clear: my resolve to share my writing got trampled under the craziness of life. A full-time job, a new (fantastic) relationship, great friends, wonderful but hurting family, a church worth investing in, more creative outlets than I can, well, let myself out in. (?)

...See, sentences like that are responsible for all these drafts. I write a line like that, gag a little, promise I'll go back and tinker with it, and then forget all about the entire piece. I've been pretty disciplined with so many other things: teaching, grading, doctor's appointments w/ my Dad, evening running and cooking,...writing is the thing that gets shoved aside.

But that has to change. I'm taking a leave of absence from work and going back to school for an MFA in creative writing. I've been planning and saving for an opportunity like this since I started my credential classes. And this is the year: everything, from my pink slip being rescinded just yesterday, to my leave of absence letter going through with the board, has worked out perfectly. I have a little saved up, and I've made it into a program I'm really excited about.

Of course I'm nervous. I worry I've lost all hint of voice in my aforementioned lovely chaos; I haven't written a poem, really, in months; and my identity has become so rooted in my job that I wonder if I'll ever be able to relax and not need to be seen as "Ms. Lee."

But I can't stay with a job simply because it gives me an identity. It's so important to live honestly. And for me, right now, it would be dishonest not to take this year to write.

The discipline piece is the toughest for me. See, even this sad little whine-of-an-essay floated into draft status yesterday as I wandered into my room and started pushing furniture around, creating a "writing space" for myself. I spent the morning dreaming of thrift-shopping for a vintage tea station and painting a wall with chalkboard paint. It's so easy to neglect work in the pursuit of the romantic idea of "being a writer."

...I picked this up out of "drafts" on Monday, read it over, and cringed. But this little draft exists only to point out I've got to stop drafting. So the irony of it staying a draft is just too much.

On a happier note, I found a wellspring of hope and inspiration in this Ted-Talk sent to me by a dear friend. It's pretty much perfect, expresses all the reasons I want to write and teach writing, and I'm super tempted to simply delete my paltry thoughts and copy the transcript. But I'll let my draft live, and share hers as well:

http://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_kay_if_i_should_have_a_daughter.html

And immediately after listening, I wrote three poems of my own, which I hope soon to polish out of draft status and post up here.

sweet potato

2011-03-05T11:39:00.000-08:00

I like songs that tell half-stories. This is one of those songs. The specifics still leave space for your own story. It is so charming, and it sends out a clearer mood than message. Listen to it, and if you are like me, you will like it and listen to it several times, and make up characters for it.

Sia-Sweet Potato

She cooks you sweet potato, you don't like aubergine
She knows to boil the kettle when you hum bars from Grease
She senses you are lonely but still she can't be sure
And so she stands and waits, stands anticipating your thoughts

How can she become the psychic that she longs to be to understand you
How can she become the psychic that she longs to be to understand you

He brushes thoroughly
He know she likes fresh breath
He rushes to the station
He waits atop the steps
He's brought with him a Mars bar
She will not buy Nestle
And later he'll perform
A love-lorn serenade, a trade

How can he become the psychic that he longs to be to understand you
How can he become the psychic that he longs to be to understand you

So give her information to help her fill the holes
Give an ounce of power so he does not feel controlled
Help her to acknowledge the pain that you are in
Give to him a glimpse of that beneath your skin

Now my inner dialogue is heaving with detest
I am a martyr and a victim and I need to be caressed
I hate that you negate me, I'm a ghost at beck and call
I'm failing and placating, I berate myself for staying

I'm a fool
I'm a fool

He greets the stranger meekly, a thing that she accepts
She sees him waiting often with chocolate on the steps
He senses she is lonely, she's glad they finally met
They take each other's hands, walk into the sunset

Do you like sweet potato?

poetry 101

2011-01-27T19:04:00.000-08:00

In the evenings,

my neighbor and I nod

checking in on the state of ourselves, we inquire

and respond robotically,

he does not sound fine, and neither

am I, but it doesn't matter.

It's understood that there is no room for

more. Our insincerity hangs there, as

we fish for our keys

and then we shut our doors on it,

leaving it to dissipate in the warm butter circle of

streetlight.

My mother's hair curls out in two

even tuffs that are

perfectly symmetrical, when she talks

she looks like she could begin

flying, any moment, with a slight wiggle

of the ear.

My first poetry teacher talked of

the power of suspended images,

sans narrative. Day one he instructed us

on the end of the need for a story.

The next night he broke both his feet

at the Cat and Fiddle

stepping hard on a stair he thought

he saw. (He was wrong.)

He was

replaced.

Now I can't get it out of my head:

our tragic small talk, the streetlight circle,

the wings behind her ears.

All poetry.

It's distracting. I try not to

think about it, though. And I watch carefully for

staircases.

polish

2011-01-21T07:32:00.001-08:00

these words are unpolished

like the way I feel

about you, not

mulled through yet

tumbling, though, heavy

through the day they will whir

and knock against other words,

until I return home

exhausted and sore

from the clunking concepts

on spin cycle

inside me

(it's always like this, especially

mornings)

and sift through

in search of something

smooth.

wholly.

2011-01-20T19:12:00.000-08:00

Sun, morning, spills

Yolk of the world, breaking

over me, sizzling.

The bare bulb behind the stove

softening the whiteness of dawn.

God, I hide my face

from your Holiness. I know.

Besides, I've received

all the guidelines, drawn neat,

and I fall outside.

So I watch Your mountains

tinge pink and green and white

and writhe at

my independent wretchedness.

Isn't this, too

(coffee-soaked confessional of a morning)

Holiness?

No, I'm not boasting of it

What then, shall we sin more?

No, I am just

thankful for

grace and the mountain's graciousness

abounding.

full&complete

2011-01-08T12:29:00.000-08:00

On what should be beautiful days of rest, like this Saturday morning, I find my mind moves at its fastest. Is anyone else like this? The first real spot of peace, and I'm off in a million directions: clubs I could start at work, poems I ought to write, books I ought to re-read, friends I can't believe I lost touch with, goals and accolades which I ought to eventually work for, places I should move, letters I've got to write. Mind you, I'm not working on anything this morning, I am simply dreaming, reading a book and drinking coffee. So it's not a productive musing. It's chaotic and guilt-inducing. And mostly, annoying.

A few Januaries back, I resolved to pause for a full and complete stop at every single stop sign. (I live in a town with no traffic lights, so the resolution was sure to be tested.) It was not only tested, as most resolutions are, it fell completely by the wayside (as most resolutions do) and the result of that was a horribly wasted day last spring, slogging through the slowest online traffic school in the history of the World Wide Web.

The goal of my failed resolution was to give myself the reminder to stop. Just stop, even if only for two seconds of the day. The hope was that this habit would work its way into other areas of my life.

I'm invoking the spirit of that failed resolution this morning, to give myself permission to just roll back and feel that pure moment of suspension before I continue racing forward--sip my third cup of coffee, (oh right, my resolution to give up caffiene? failed.) look up at the mountains, and be alright with a full and complete stop.

Life Together- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

2010-12-27T12:44:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite things in life is the revisiting of a book. I remember reading Life Together in college, quickly, in order to fulfill a requirement for my summer travel band. I remember loving it, and I remember feeling like there was no better book for a group of college students attempting to meld our personalities (and egos) into a mini-bus for the summer. Bonhoeffer's ideas prove just as profound a challenge to my life today: in teaching, family life, and all relationships.

It is, first of all, the freedom of the other person, of which we spoke earlier, that is a burden to the Christian. The other's freedom collides with his own autonomy, yet he must recognize it. He could get rid of this burden by refusing the other person his freedom, by constraining him and thus doing violence to his personality, by stamping his own image upon him. But if he lets God create His image in him, he by this token gives him his freedom and himself bears the burden of this freedom of another creature of God.

This freedom of the other includes all that we mean by a person's nature, individuality, endowment. It also includes his weaknesses and oddities, which are such a trial to our patience, everything that produces frictions, conflicts, and collisions among us. To bear the burden of the other person means involvement with the created reality of the other, to accept and affirm it, and, in bearing with it, to break through to the point where we take joy in it.

2010-12-10T12:55:00.001-08:00

I do not want this world

of swimming words, where meaning

hangs contingent

upon mood. As nice as

misspellings are, poetically speaking,

I want you to know how to spell the words

(as I wash up in all their possibilities)

without hesitation.

on the spiritual life...

2010-11-23T07:39:00.000-08:00

"I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air."

1 Cor. 9:26

I very much like these images. How often does life feel this way? How often does prayer, worship, attempts to trust, feel this way. I like the image of someone beating air with all the intensity of a fighter. So futile and so zealous.

So that's my prayer this morning: a finish line in sight (or at least a mile marker) and something solid to punch against. Not the most peaceful of metaphors. But still helpful.

yes.

2010-11-22T12:51:00.001-08:00

yes

there were days when

everything mattered

but if everything matters

everything burns

everything

so much incineration

to the square inch

it's not

practical

to live like this

even fires

eventually

extinguish

what the body told - raphael campo

2010-11-19T13:47:00.000-08:00

I was recently asked to explain what makes a poem 'good'.

I could babble on for hours explaining poetry and finish by simply saying, it's something you know. But that's a cop-out.

I guess it's a clear image. That's the thing in a poem: the image. And beyond that, it's the universal made new. It's a feeling you know, expressed by an image you have not imagined. That's what ramrods you about good poetry. You've already felt it. You just didn't know it, and you've never articulated it or honored the emotion with an image.

So, see, I could babble on forever, but instead I will give you a poem. This one sums up, to me, what good poetry is.

Not long ago, I studied medicine.
It was terrible, what the body told.
I'd look inside another person's mouth
And see the desolation of the world.
I'd see his genitals and think of sin.

Because my body speaks the stranger's language,
I've never understood those nods and stares.
My parents held me in their arms, and still
I think I've disappointed them; they care
And stare, they nod, they make their pilgrimage

To somewhere distant in my heart, they cry.
I look inside their other-person's mouths
And see the wet interior of souls.
It's warm and red in there — like love, with teeth.
I've studied medicine until I cried

All night. Through certain books, a truth unfolds.
Anatomy and physiology,
The tiny sensing organs of the tongue —
Each nameless cell contributing its needs.
It was fabulous, what the body told.

Raphael Campo

Honestly, Joy.

2010-11-18T12:05:00.000-08:00

Today we read one of my favorite stories. Then I gave my kids a figurative language scavenger hunt, and I turned it into a race. And oh, my, gosh, all I'm hearing is students shouting at one another: Help me find that simile! Is this a good enough hyperbole? Draw that plot chart! Where does the exposition end?

My teacher-heart is absolutely soaring. It's times like this that I truly, deeply, love what I do.

a l l t h i s

2010-11-08T06:52:00.000-08:00

Steep in the steam.

Last night clears

to lukewarm morning.

The vertigo in awakening!

All the shadow-things

hunch in corners

until the next night speaks.

I want to explain all this. But

common sense balks,

pride desiccates thought.

Yet

we're ending up

happy,

most often wordlessly.

Out of grief's grip,

without

the clamp pulled so tight,

maybe the anger

wouldn't fester

or infect.

All guidance

seems ill-fitting.

It seems like cruelty.

God,

You are neither of these.

I wake up craving honesty

Ah, God, honesty.

You are honesty.

process...

2010-10-25T10:25:00.000-07:00

Ug. I hate looking back over a piece of writing that I cherished only to realize the extent of its badness. And no, I don't want to use a stronger word. Badness will do; somehow it fits perfectly.

Still, this realization of badness is not a complete negative. When I look at work from a few years ago, especially, especially, fiction that I've (thank goodness!) never shown anyone, I realize how much I've grown. I realize my expectations have grown. I have a higher standard for my own writing. I also realize that I'm a saner person than I was a few years ago, generally. So that's...nice.

a more solid joy

2010-09-23T07:43:00.000-07:00

We could do this always

I suggest,

kiss your wrist with abandon.

You sway my hand, grasped tight.

Breath a short gasp,

Tone on tip-toes,

recalculating, balance exact,

no sudden motions:

You're happy?

Yes.

Shameless grins,

Incredulous.

My answer floats above us

one of those giant soap bubbles

we blew on the beach at sunset.

We watch it undulate; transfixed.

A week or so

later, you'll go,

across oceans, even,

and pursue a more solid joy.

One which does not waver,

A joy which you can master.

One not prone

to burst, to shatter.

school's in session...

2010-09-11T09:51:00.000-07:00

Teaching writing, man. Today I'm looking at 138 persuasive essays introducing my students and their personal character. I've graded exactly 12. Grading is, of course, a nightmare, but I enjoy it. It's a masochistic, stubborn sort of a thing. I try not to write in red pen, or write novels of instruction on the side of the page, or write scarring terms like "AWK" or cross whole phrases out, even though sometimes I think those actions would serve the sense of the paper. Writing is so personal. It's so emotional. It's a very hard subject to teach, because even 7th graders know that writing is pulled from a source inside of a person, it's individual, and even if it flat out sucks (to employ the 7th grade vernacular) it still belongs to someone. Math problems don't belong to anyone. They belong to the universe, and by junior high most have figured out the universe can be an annoying and shittily unfair place. Math makes you angry (or ecstatic) at the grand Order of things. Writing makes you angry at yourself.

So grading is a delicate balance. It's also a crazy amount of work, for what sometimes feels like a ridiculously tiny pay-off.

But sometimes you come across a world in a sentence, and that's gold. It's a good thing I'm such a nerd about language...I mean I can't imagine most people enjoying the treasure hunt of one powerful sentence in a knee-high stack of general, meandering pulp.

I can never express what I love about student writing; it's usually sentences that were not intended to stand out. My favorite sentence so far is this one:

Since childhood, I have had the ability to create things. For example, a house complete with pool and lounge chair, and entire factory, and a fleet of 17th century sailing ships, all out of paper and tape. (All of these were miniature, of course).

Happy Saturday. Go create things.

cycle

2010-09-08T07:57:00.000-07:00

I wonder when he told her

about Kodi,

his favorite German Shepherd.

While they studied? Or

driving to the church pot-luck?

They must have discussed pets; that's such

a good ice-breaker. I mean, I know

she wrote out a list of questions

before date #1. She's shown me

that paper; it's tattered,

the crease 30-years worn

but still crisp.

He used to tell me

with that wolf-grin of his:

I'd hurl that tennis ball

against the basement wall

thunk it

again, again, again.

and Kodi never caught on.

Headed straight for it

every time.

Whimpering when the cement siding

rose up

from seemingly nowhere.

I guess

it never got old

to watch that dog

trust.

I wonder, when she heard it

if it sounded off anything.

A warning,

echo-y, like that basement.

For me, it always echos

behind scribbled prescriptions,

the 50 minute sessions

the cracked plastic pill case

the stashes of day-old medication.

his looping question:

is there really nothing more

you can do?

September Psalm

2010-09-04T12:33:00.001-07:00

Praise God for angled lines,

the punch-out mountains, black and white

cast in relief by the neighbor's light

resting on ebony, autumn sky.

Praise Him for fatigue

after long, full days of peace.

Alleluia for the re-paved street

for the acrid asphalt steam

just-poured, sticky sweet.

Selah,

Praise the Lord

for persistent metaphors.

The kind Reality cannot hold

though it twist our spinning worlds

right-side up to shake our souls.

Selah,

Sleep singing

praise for relentless believing.

Day-ending, day-beginning.

All the coming kingdom

glimmers,

safe from time's keeping.

wrong-side up

2010-08-28T20:10:00.000-07:00

I learned early

how to lift off the ground

my fondest memories--

the back porch shrinking

the receding of cold white cement

the dryer door hinge singing

waving a startled goodbye

It takes a formula

--not hand clasping or

phosphorescent dust--

just a lifting of the brain

to the exact middle

of the skull

A momentary vertigo

a concentrated lightness

Or a strong sneeze

You feel it first in your arches

The promise of freed soles

a delightful itching

I loved the tops of telephone poles--

dancing three inches above them

I'd mimic the tightrope artists

whose feet still cling with that ludicrous

dread of density

Flying is a peaceful sport

no puddles of sweat, loss of breath

But courage is necessary

to keep all the impossibility from aching

No one told me to stop

I just realized it was not the wisest of pursuits

So I set about a planned forgetting

and then nothing mattered much

Lately that learned loss

floats back up

my soles have begun itching

the telephone wires

hang wrong-side up

from way down here

a little summer reflection

2010-08-23T23:17:00.001-07:00

Who forgets how to ride a bike? Isn't there a cliche based on this very thing not happening?

If someone claps your back and chortles, 'just like riding a bike,' that's supposed to be a comfort, right? An assumption that buried knowledge will leap to your rescue, right?

The nice man in The Open Road bike shop gave me a bike to test-ride and sent me outside into the swelter and I stood, jeans melting onto my legs, sandals flapping off my feet, contemplating the bike seat's insurmountable gap between bike seat and ground. I circled the handlebars for about five minutes. When I finally jumped on, I think I may have closed my eyes. Sure enough, that inner knowledge gurgled up; I peddled, and I did not keel over.

I did fall later, though, while taking Bianca for her first real ride. (As I suited up, my roommate snickeringly dubbed my helmet "adorable," and I told her to shove it. Under no circumstances could I be considered adorable in this helmet. But I look alive. In the literal sense. And some, I'm told, find that an attractive attribute.)

Anyway, the fall: all knowledge of gear shifting left me. I lost all momentum and panicked. Realizing too late that my foot alone could not steady me against the concrete, I relaxed, tumbled down onto my hip, rolled a few inches down the hill. The girl walking behind me let out a soft gasp. I bounded up without making any eye contact, beaming a weird smile to try and look competent. I was shaking so hard that I had to walk it a few blocks. All the neighbors watered their lawns intently, sneaking glances when they thought I wasn't looking.

I know I'll figure the bike out, but right now it looms in my room, its menacing shadow haunting me even after I hit the lights.

It's been a summer of this sort of thing. No, not creepy bikes coming alive whilst I sleep. No, the other part, the metaphor in it all. I know, I know, I'm a sucker for a good, obvious metaphor. Still, I think I'll indulge: It's been a summer of leaping, closing my eyes and hoping what I need will rise up in me.

It's been a good, good summer.

Of course, if I end up breaking a leg while trying to meet my next goal (bike to work 3 days a week) this entry will be far less of an inspiration, and the metaphor will definitely lose some oomph. Let's just hope that's not the case.

To expand the metaphor and complete my truly self-centered blogpost, (what other kind is there, really?) here's my list of jumping things, the things I've wanted for a long time but avoided out of fear. Please only read them if you love me alot; otherwise I think they might be pretty boring. I just want to write them down because I'm happy with what I've accomplished.

1. Leading a fitness class at Elizabeth House. The last thing I'd picture myself doing is leading an aerobics class. But every week, the workout has been filled with laughter (go figure), joy, a little sweat, and a lightness of spirit that simply couldn't come from me.

2. Applying to (and being rejected from ! ) the Advanced Poetry Workshop at UCLA extension. Dusting off my ego and joining a class that would have me. Reading my first poem aloud in workshop. Learning from other poets. Learning to talk about poetry as something valuable in my life.

3. Running a 1/2 marathon. Two years ago, I trained heavily for the Pasadena 1/2, which was "smoked-out" by wildfires. I was horribly disappointed, and frustrated, and I really never believed I'd train and run another, but I did. My shiny medal is hanging above my desk as I type. It was an absolute blast, in the worst possible sense of that word. Quite impossible to describe--just do one.

4. Choosing to go to therapy. Talk about a jump-on-that-bike moment, admitting I can't handle the pressure of my Dad's illness on my own and seeking out help was the hardest leap I've ever taken. After a summer of wrestling and praying and observing and being really patient with myself, I feel...well, no, not healed, but healing. I feel healing.

immortality, matthew arnold

2010-08-20T11:24:00.000-07:00

Foil'd by our fellow men, depress'd, outworn,

We leave the brutal world to take its way,

And, Patience! in another life, we say,

The world shall be thrust down, and we up-borne!

And will not, then the immortal armies scorn

The world's poor routed leavings? or will they,

Who fail'd under the heat of this life's day,

Support the fervours of the heavenly morn?

No, no! the energy of life may be

Kept on after the grave, but not begun!

And he who flagg'd not in the earthly strife,

From strength to strength advancing--only he,

His soul well-knit, and all his battles won,

Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.

thank you, fireworks.

2010-07-31T10:20:00.001-07:00

I always overshoot hope and go 10 steps beyond reality. My dad agrees to try photoshop on a few pictures he took in Carmel. I'm thrilled to see him take positive interest in something. My headspace immediately plans a photo safari in India for us. We excavate our history and exorcise all demons and Bond.

I need to learn to be thankful for the things that are happening.

I want my soul wide open to manna--every moment able to give thanks.

---

On the 4th of July, we watch fireworks from the O.B. pier. All the fog makes the sky a whitish-grey so it looks like the fireworks are exploding indoors, right under a high ceiling. Different, but lovely.

At the end of the show, while we're still standing in a happy daze, a small boy pipes out, "thank you very much." After a pause, he reiterates (for clarification), "thank you, fireworks!"

People chuckle, of course, but only after the shuffle of shaking blankets and folding lawn chairs can cover up their laughter. Because he is serious.

(&)

As I was walk the Seal Beach shore, a girl about 7 pops out of the waves, wildly flourishing a glowy bit of green, shouting,"I...Found...Seaweed."

She's in danger of toppling over--not from the surf, but from the Wonder. Seaweed. In the ocean. In her hand. It is too much.

---

I want to be like that. I want the capacity for that.

The Groceryboy's Name was Andy: a story in many parts.

2010-07-29T13:00:00.001-07:00

Part Nine.

One morning I returned from my walk in particularly high spirits. I'd toted my walk-man along and found that running was much easier while jammin' to Shania's "Man I feel like a Woman." I popped some focaccia in the toaster and sat down to rest.

Today we'd wage battle against the garage. A rented, full-sized dumpster now sat in the driveway, waiting to be fed.

Our first project was the campaign posters for California State Treasure Ivy Baker-Priest. There were hundreds of them. Across each one stretched Ivy Baker-Priest's smiling portrait, eerily larger-than-scale. A tasteful beehive of pure-white hair, pearls circling a tan-but-not-too-tan neck, a stylish Jackie-O suit, giant brown eyes gleaming hawkishly. Her expression was difficult to pin down, but I think it could be described as hungry. Hungry for California's fiscal well-being, perhaps.

No matter how noble, a human head scaled larger than a human head is unsettling. To add to the weirdness, the stack of posters had fallen and fanned out through the garage, creating a Warholian army of smirking Ivys.

As I planned the most efficient means of her demolition, I listened to the morning hum: the whirring of Mother's hair drier, the rasp of the air vents, the thump of towels in the laundry spin, the light ticking of toaster-wires. The rosemary in the toast perfumed the kitchen. Everything felt rhythmic and warm.

Then I heard a howl from the bedroom. It sounded sort-of like an expletive, but I knew it was not. It was just a howl. After the howl, silence. Too much silence. No whirring, no humming, no thumping. My mother entered the kitchen, curly head half-dry, half dripping. Ratted up, curly tendrils beamed out and extended inches in every direction, her face still red from the shower. She looked like a cartoon sun.

"We blew a fuse."

I nodded absently, my full attention absorbed in a rescuing my fragrant slice of focaccia. I wedged a fork between the still-glowing toaster coils.

"You'll get electrocuted doing that," she observed.

"I won't...that's the problem, right?" I popped the toast out, "cause we blew a fuse?"

She pulled the cord out of the wall absently.

"I should have thought about this," she sighed. "This house is so old. I guess we'll have to call Gus."

"It might just be too hot to work much today," she added as she reached for the phone. "I hope he's around."

----

Gus was my grandpa's handyman. He was, by trade, a barber, but he'd served as a sort of general pal to Grandpa during his last days in Sacramento, and when Grandpa finally abandoned independence and moved to Pasadena, Gus had agreed (for a small fee) to pick up mail, look in on the property, and see to the gardening of 2772 Harkness.

Mother and Gus were not, shall we say, cut of the same cloth. He signed off every conversation with, "Welp, sees ya in church," a strange and untrue colloquialism which rubbed her so completely the wrong way that it took half an hour to regain her inner peace.

Still, he knew about the fuse situation. He was probably the only one who did. And the cool of the morning was definitely not going to be sticking around. Whether or not we would ever see him in church, I hoped to see him at the house, tool-box in hand, asap.

The Groceryboy's Name was Andy: a story in many parts.

2010-07-27T13:30:00.000-07:00

Part Eight.

My mother picked up the vibe the very next time we were in the store. Apron-boy approached us again, this time next to the cantaloupe pyramids, and asked if he could help. With anything.

"No," I said, managing a furtive smile. I even tacked on a "thank you."

As we left the store, she snickered. "Oh, to be 16 again. My mother used to laugh every time she took me for ice cream. 'I like to go with you,' she'd say, 'you order a small and get a double scoop just for being young and pretty.'"

"It's nothing to write home about," I said, grinning as I loaded the brown bags of fizzy soda into our trunk.

"Mmm," she smiled, thoughts far away. I wondered if the ice-cream story carried some sort of expectation: what good daughters do. How did this translate to the modern era? Perhaps my smile ought to procure us a double-slab of salmon teriyaki? Shoot, I would have been game, if I'd known how. That salmon was a miracle.

----

Mother waited each night for Dad to call. When I asked her why she didn't just pick up the phone and call him, she said, "I'm old-fashioned."

I was aware of this. I mean, we called her "mother," per her request/insistence. "Mom," for her, evoked a frazzled woman perpetually-swathed in stonewashed denim. When motherhood was new for her, she'd imagined referring to Dad as Papa. But that was one dream which my father emphatically squelched.

The phone thing still puzzled me, though. The weirdest part--he did call, always when she wanted, as if he could see us sitting there waiting. They conferred each night, Mother twisting the spiral-cord around her hand like a teenager. I never listened in on these conversations; they never interested me. My AP English class required Crime and Punishment and The Grapes of Wrath. The Russian nicknames alone demanded my full attention.

One night as she stared at the rotary dial, she laughed a little throaty laugh, the laugh of remembering something. I momentarily abandoned Rodya.

"In high school, I'd curl up underneath this table and talk to Marilyn every single night. At least an hour."

Marilyn was her high-school best friend. They'd both sustained long-running crushes, and had both given these boys a numeric "code" to preserve decorum. As she described it, I saw her, 16, curled up against the stately, carved legs, same cord twisted through same fingers, reporting on 'number 13' and the way he'd smiled at her between Chemistry and Concert Choir.

"Why didn't you go into your room?" I asked.

"It was comfortable down there." She smiled again and kicked the table leg gently. The phone rang, startling us both. She let it ring twice more, then picked up the receiver gently.

"Hello?" she answered in a tone reserved for strangers. Then, "Hello, dear." And the mash-up of the day, from the rat in the garage to the business of listing the house, began in detail. I turned back to Dostoevsky.

---

These reports on our circadian rhythm seemed to hold Dad's genuine attention. I didn't find much to be interested in: I woke up, walked to the park, and then shred something. Reports brought home from the state. Electricity bills from the 1950s.

During work hours, I sat on the floor of the back indoor porch, wedged between the fold-down ironing board and the washer-drier combo. One morning Mother gave me a box of pink Weinstock's credit slips.

Small, trim, the width of a shoebox but twice as long. This was Olive's box. I'd never met my grandmother; she died a year before I was born. The job should have taken ten minutes. Make sure a blank, signed check wasn't wedged between the receipts, and get on with it.

Two hours later, I was still cross-legged on the linoleum. The descriptions of purchase, credit slips ranging from '47 to' 79, read like a frivolous summer novel. She'd been a fashion plate, no question: Trim tweed suit, contrast-trim jacket, size 6. Red leather shoes, side buckle, size 7 narrow. A hat's description read: "feathery felt. Baby blue color with netting, grosgrain ribbon, jeweled bauble." I was lost in it.

I loved that Olive Reynolds Steinkamp bought it all on credit. We didn't buy anything on credit. Mother was not the kind seduced by style. She wore one blue button down skirt with a t-shirt tucked in to the waistband. It was utilitarian, it suited her service to her dad, to us. But I still bugged her about it. I thought she should have some fun getting dressed. She brushed off my concerns. When we went shopping, one thing mattered to her: Modesty. Just as fast as I picked something out, she'd deem it "on the make." An impossibly old-fashioned term. I hated it.

I felt accused. Of growing up. Of wanting to be pretty. Sometimes the outfits were ridiculous, were sluttish. I wanted to see what I'd look like if I dressed like the girls who got the attention. But sometimes I just thought something was jaunty, or I liked the way I filled it out, or it felt like me. These were real fights. The way all mothers and daughters have real fights. Tears, emotional blood baths, the dressing-room floor awash in taboo tank tops and too-short-skirts.

Impossibly, delightfully, the box smelled of Chanel No. 5. The smell of beauty. The smell of elegance; the smell of a woman who buys "jeweled baubles" on credit. The indoor porch swelled with the scent, it pulsed against the heat. I curled further back into my corner, leaned against the warm dryer, and breathed in deep.

steinbeck-sweet thursday

2010-07-27T13:03:00.000-07:00

"Where does discontent start? You are warm enough, but you shiver. You are fed, yet hungers gnaws you. You have been loved, but your yearning wanders in new fields. And to prod all these there's time, the bastard Time. The end of life is now not so terribly far away--you can see it the way you see the finish line when you come into the stretch--and your mind says, "Have I worked enough? Have I eaten enough? Have I loved enough?" All of these, of course, are the foundation of man's greatest curse, and perhaps his greatest glory. "What has my life meant so far, and what can it mean in the time left to me?" And now we're coming to that wicked, poisoned dart: "What have I contributed in the Great Ledger? What am I worth?" And this isn't vanity or ambition. Men seem to be born with a debt they can never pay no matter how hard they try. It piles up ahead of them. Man owes something to man. If he ignores the debt it poisons him, and if he tries to make payments the debt only increases, and the quality of his gift is the measure of the man."

The Groceryboy's Name was Andy: a story in many parts.

2010-07-23T12:38:00.000-07:00

Part Seven.

I didn't do too much driving after the Music Man fiasco. I was frightened, and rightfully so. And as time wore on, we grew lazy. At the beginning of the summer, we'd held abstract pow-wows to discuss enrichment activities for my Sacramento experience. My mother suggested I attend a church group and meet some nice people. Do you want to? I had asked. She just sort of shrugged.

We dropped it, decided that we already knew plenty of nice people. Woozy satisfaction settled over us. Besides, every moment was occupied. We were so docile in our daily labor. It was as if 2772’s ubiquitous dust was laced with laudanum.

-----

I did, however, drive to the grocery store.

And this grocery store was not just your average Safeway. No, no, no. Not in Land Park.

This was Taylor's Meat Market. Trim, tidy, polished cement floors, high wood-beam ceilings, wicker baskets. Mysteriously perfect temperature. Pristine pyramids of eggplant, shelves of freshly baked rosemary focaccia, slabs of teriyaki salmon, fancy fizzy exculsive sodas--not sold in any other grocery store in the state.

How, money-wise, were we able to shop here? I can tell you: we ate like birds.

We liked this phrase, and would often work it into suppertime conversation. It got to be ridiculous, actually. One of us would snicker and then, in mock-reverence, exclaim, "my dear, my goodness, you eat like a bird," and we'd both sit back in satisfied semi-emptiness.

My mother and I have always shared a voracious emotional appetite. Enough white cake (butter-cream frosted) will spackle any gash in the soul. Perhaps this sounds overly psychological? Simply put, we adore food. We find it immensely comforting. We're also consistently on a diet.

Our summer solution was to eat little bits of very delicious food. I did most of the shopping. We subsisted on salmon and focaccia, mostly. Oh, and fizzy sodas. Lots of those.

It was the third time I'd done the shopping. I was standing between the fresh-scrubbed yellow squash and a stack of drum-tight watermelon, wicker basked on my arm, when I was startled by a deep voice:

"Do you need any help with that? With anything? Any help finding...anything?"

"No, I'm good," I replied, flipping back my hair (it fell nearly to my waist). I looked up to find, walking away from me, the most handsome grocery-boy I'd ever seen.

He smiled over his shoulder. "Okay," he said, and returned to the check-out.

I recognized my egregious error. I did need help. I must. I floundered for a way that I (or that matter, anyone) might need assistance in the squash aisle. A different type of girl would simply have asked him to pick the ripest watermelon. This never occurred to me. I considered the implications of knocking over the entire squash display...perhaps he'd be charmed by a display of gamine clumsiness. No. Too risky.

He smiled at me, quite intentionally, from his spot at register #2. My eyes hit the floor and remained there throughout the rest of my shopping trip.

I could think of nothing to say. I was the most self-sufficient grocery-shopper in all of Sacramento. But in my defense, I wasn't exactly in the habit of seeing too many people my age. Especially not dark-haired, strong-shouldered, I'm-wearing-a-green-apron-and-still-looking-manly people my age.

gmap love

2010-07-21T09:36:00.000-07:00

I know I don't write much about my current life. This is intentional.

However, one thing I do want you to know is I am running a 1/2 marathon in about 1/2 a month.

I've done my first 9 mile run. Did that a week ago. T'was fun.

I've often tried to nail down what it is I love about running. It is so different from most everything else I do. I am not inherently an active person. I am not the type of girl who can, say, catch a kickball. In fact, I've been know to let a male teammate sprint across the entire kickball field in order to catch a pop-fly that was headed directly for me. (Buy hey, he wanted to. I didn't ask him to run in front of me, he just appeared there. And then he dropped it.)

I don't know why running has stuck, but I've been a fairly dedicated runner for at least 4 years now. I like that it's a solitary activity. I like sprinting the last block. I like the second wind around mile 3. I like the excuse to listen to cheesy/overly intense/downright bizarre music. (It's "motivation"--don't judge) I like the fact that, while running, I'm forced to be extremely present.

And I like gmaps pedometer. This is the greatest toy ever. When I finish an especially grueling run, I come home, plunk my laptop onto the carpet, and track my milage while I stretch. It is the most satisfying feeling in the world. I only wish someone could hack into real life and make those little red markers pop up at each mile.

mi thik aahe.

2010-07-15T11:38:00.000-07:00

Indians drink hot tea on hot days

cool their insides; sweat it out.

They put bits of curry powder

in baby bottles, so the spice feels

constant and normal.

I don't know if these things are true.

I know how to offer a hot meal.

I know how to ask how the day is.

Marathi is a clicking language of

perfect-fitting syllables

sanded rosewood inlaid in smooth carvings,

the backgammon board my Uncle sent,

the side table with the elephant

faces carved onto the legs.

(Those elephant eyes,

glassy and stuck,

met mine as a child.

Pleaded with me

to take that tabletop off their backs.

I didn't pity them.)

I don't know the Marathi word

for love or god or rain

or tin roof.

My aunt, alone in boarding school

lies in bed, listens, shivers

through Monsoon season-

she calls that the loneliest sound.

I saw the Indian trains in a movie.

The director cranked the colors,

to over-saturate.

People found it very beautiful.

My father, four, toe-headed

is lifted to the upper berth,

waves money out slotted windows to buy chapati.

Waves goodbye. His parents

walk back to their house where the

bamboo fans move across the high ceilings.

Would you like a hot meal?

How are you? I am fine.

This is all I ever imagine them saying

to one another.

My grandma's sari gapes against

places that were once curved--

she is too sad to eat in this country.

The Groceryboy's Name was Andy: a story in many parts.

2010-07-13T11:36:00.001-07:00

Part Six.

One morning I returned from the park to find my mother holding an oversized, poster-ish piece of mail and grinning.

"The Music Circus is in town!" she trilled, "And they're putting on The Music Man!"

(The Music Man was a Lee family favorite; the VHS often played on repeat in the summer. I watched it not for the plot, period costumes or score (all of which are, indeed, excellent), but in order to memorize the entire movie. Jenny and I would compete, harshly judging the other's speed and accuracy: "Weeeeelll you got trouble my friends, that's right I said trouble right here in River City why sure I'm a billard player always mighty proud to say I'm always mighty proud to say it...I consider that the hours I spend with a cue in my hand are golden..."

(...this could continue...)

(...the Psalms proved themselves an impossible challenge, but The Music Man libretto in its entirety is cozily lodged in my frontal lobe. I honestly don't know what to do with that, neurologically or spiritually.))

This particularly performance came from my mother's favorite local theater. The company traveled in a circus tent, plunking down in the Sacramento area only in the summertime. The closing show was this evening. She suggested we drive into the city to pick up tickets and make a day of it.

The thought of doing something outside of 2772 Harkness St. filled me with such divine and soaring joy, I barely had emotion left to react to her next mood-boosting overture: handing me the keys to the car.

(My license was only a few weeks old. I'd passed the test on the first try, a detail which my family liked to brag about. When congratulated on this accomplishment, I feigned modesty, replying, "oh, well, I'm just a kinda good test taker." Secretly, I suspected I did indeed possess a strikingly-above-average set of navigational skills.)

Without a twinge of fear, I bounded to the driver's seat. My mother, considerably less buoyant, buckled her seatbelt methodically and loudly. If a seat belt could clear its throat, hers did.

I really was decent behind the wheel, but I knew nothing about Sacramento's downtown labyrinth of abrupt one-way streets and furtive trolly tracks. Having learned to drive in the suburbs, I believed whole-heartedly that a two-way street had the moral responsibility to remaining a two-way street.

I held firm that belief. So firm, in fact, that I didn't pay much attention to the many, many yellow signs indicating various warnings and notes and tidbits that might be of interest to a driver, tidbits like "Lane Ends, Merge Left," "Trolly Tracks Begin," and "One Way."

We were coasting down an oddly deserted avenue when I heard an unrecognizably deep horn, looked over at my mother's blanching, slack-jawed face, and took sudden deep interest in the signs I'd been ignoring. I was headed against traffic on a one-way street which looked to be merging with the trolly line oh, say 100 ft.

The shock of silence inside our car was shattered simultaneously, two screams a perfect third apart in pitch. We sounded almost like two Music Circus chorus members in a desperate last-minute rehearsal. And then from out of my mother came a line of soaring soprano recitative:

"Turn the car around turn it around turn into this yes this driveway This One There Right There sweet mother of God."

In this way, generally, I was instructed to swing into a miraculous parking lot, where I hit the brakes and countered half-heartedly, "I was turning, I know, I know, I know, I'm doing it, looking, I'm turning now."

"No no no...park the car Christy, just Park It."

I knew I would not be driving much for the rest of the summer. I might not be driving much, ever. I also knew that this episode was a story which, rightfully, trumped my quick conquest of the Pasadena DMV.

We traded seats.

I eyed my mother's face--unreadable. My hands were still shaking. After a few moments of ticklish silence, she patted my knee slightly.

"I can't believe I didn't warn you about the streets down here. They're just crazy. I remember having so much trouble learning how to drive downtown." She squeezed my leg and put both hands back on the wheel.

"I'm so, so sorry," my voice convulsed, relief and embarrassment and sweat all dripping down into my eyes. "I'm really, really, really sorry."

----

The show was great. Top notch community theater.

in the valley of dry bones

2010-07-09T11:38:00.001-07:00

ezekiel 37

In the name of your own strength

you excavate.

in daylight--

bravery in your breadth and depth

and density.

Revisit all the sacred sites

without a hint of reverence.

Your head, your waking heart

resists the tug to bow--

remains erect.

Plow ahead

until all is pulled

scattered and brushed off

numbered and glassed.

Separate it all, create logical patterns.

Neat descriptions of each dead artifact--

you wrote the text yourself

(full of common sense).

And by twilight

brush off hands,

wash the deep chalky clay

out from underneath fingernails-

not a damned spot left.

Yet every night in darkness

all these dry bones coalesce:

behold a shaking.

the forms you snapped apart

methodically, your mouth set

in morning's harsh light,

now reclaim their improbable shape,

the unlikely truth of things--

dancing, full of breath and life.

The Groceryboy's Name was Andy: a story in many parts.

2010-07-06T11:23:00.001-07:00

Part Five.

The only part of the day which belonged to me was my morning run. The name was a bit deceptive--having never been athletic, running meant little more than sprinting a block or so, then a side cramp clamping down, slowing me to a weak limp. So I mostly walked. I didn't mind that too much. The neighborhood was beautiful. Giant leafy trees spread over the quiet streets.

Land Park itself was quiet in the mornings, just a few fellow runners and some zealous families lined up for the zoo. Most of the time I didn't even venture into the real park...the duck pond, fairy paths, carnival and gardens, all held wonderful childhood memories, but I was doing plenty of reminiscing as we cleaned. I found an empty baseball diamond with flimsy wood bleachers at the edge of the park.

This is where I spent every morning, Monday-Friday. My walks became a bee-line for the deserted diamond, where I would sit down quietly, staring intently at the empty field, as if absorbed in a game no one else could see. It was there I let my mind run, a good 20 minutes of just breathing in the quiet morning air.

As a younger child, my mother had strictly enforced summer quiet time. She provided a bevy of religious paraphernalia: The Picture Bible (a graphic novel rendition of the Old Testament with the stories creatively edited down to speed for young children), several volumes of religious poetry, the Bible itself, our memorization work (we each had passages from the Psalms we were required to learn) or the opportunity to journal. Wednesdays were the day...we set aside a half-hour, each crawled into our own corner with one of the selected items of devotion, and commenced communing.

Jenny, being older and scary when ill-pleased, usually secured The Picture Bible. While she reveled in the debauchery of Sodom and the badassery of King David, I was left with the hard stuff--shoving the uneven poetry of Psalms into my brain. I tried to set the lines to the rhythm of the sugarless spearmint Trident I chomped, but often I would lose my way, the words wandering out of focus, refusing to stay in the order the Psalmist had strung them, slipping together into a puddle of helpful hills, stalking pestilence, piercing arrows and a feathered god.

That was my sense of what good people did -- "devotions." Therefore, the cool peace of my leafy Sacramento mornings didn't really resemble devotion to me. Still I think that term was somewhere in my mornings, as I counted the grass blades on the field, as I asked what the day would be about, as I asked for some sort of strength and knowledge that I was doing something worthwhile.

Sacramento summer is a tease--every single morning is crisp and perfect, as if the sun is deliberating kindness over cruelty. But by 8:15 the dead flat heat creaks down, the city a giant cheese sandwich inside a Panini press.

The Groceryboy's Name was Andy: a story in many parts.

2010-06-28T11:45:00.000-07:00

Part Four.

The first few days were a sweaty mess of sorting. We didn't see many people, we worked through the day, tearing up useless bills and shredding others, dusting and appraising and packing up antiques and souvenirs from trips around the world.

During one of our short breaks, a wizened Croation woman appeared at our doorstep holding a giant bag of tomatoes.

"I've hear you are here and I bring fruits!" she declared.

"Yes!" I stammered. She shoved the bag into my hands with a sweet smile.

"Svetta!" My mother flung herself past me and enveloped the tiny lady in her arms.

I was getting used to this sort of thing. It was sort of like dreaming: complete non-sequiturs folded into our routine with a smooth, strangely comforting ease.

It turned out Svetta had been the cleaning lady for the Steinkamps for nearly 40 years. She'd grown these tomatoes in her backyard.

After she'd heartily embraced both my Mother and I several times, she launched into an unintelligible report on life. I could have sworn she was not speaking English, but Mother appeared to be tracking, at least her 'ahs' and 'hmms' all seemed to fall in all the right places. After Svetta left we sat down in the middle of the living room floor, cross-legged, both intrigued by the giant scarlet goodness of these 'fruits'. I picked one up and bit it like an apple. An explosion of gorgeous salty splendor filled my mouth. The word "tomato" failed epically: these were, I swear on my life, the sweetest, plumpest, saltiest...absolutely the Platonic ideal of the tomato. We couldn't even speak at first, the juice dripping down onto our bare legs, we communed together, silently, marveling at their beauty.

The very fact that the tomatoes were a high point, a source of endless wonder, exposed the sudden simplicity our lives had taken on.

---

The piles deflated slowly. We worked with great care, examining each expired coupon and postcard. Without ever discussing it, we we haunted by the same curiosity: The Great Depression impressed incredible parsimony into my grandfather. He saved everything; often in strange places. He'd lost much of his reason. These facts combined seemed to point to the possibility that Something of Infinite Value had been buried in the mess.

The only verbal acknowledgment of this theory came in occasional joking, 'you sure that's not the family fortune in there...you double checked?' as we pitched out the bulging Hefty bags at the end of each evening. I knew it was nearly impossible, probably completely false. Still the idea appealed to me.

The Groceryboy's Name was Andy: a story in many parts.

2010-06-25T11:11:00.000-07:00

Part Three.

I got the hide-a-bed. Really, I don't know why I was worried. We were the only two staying in the house, and even in my bitterness I didn't believe my mother would force me to sleep on the floor.

After the house was dark, I found my trusty spiral notebook, the first item I had packed. I expected to need nightly catharsis from the pain of cruel, untimely separation from my first-ever boyfriend. I placed my pen on the first empty page and waited.

I tapped aimlessly, trying to conjure something poetic, but reality pressed in: he was a boy who'd helped me carry a lemon cake to my car after it had failed to attracted many customers at a potluck dinner. On the way to the car he'd had about 10 fistfuls of cake, and the next day he asked my best friend (who he'd previously dated) if I'd go out with him. We'd been mini-golfing. We'd agreed to keep in touch.

I didn't feel sad about him. He wasn't dead, just back in Temple City. I didn't know him well enough to miss him. This was quite inconvenient.

In fact, I didn't miss anyone or anything. I just wanted to sleep.

But when I closed my eyes I was startled awake, dropped into a loneliness not unlike ice-water. I saw the blackberry seeds Mother had picked out of her pie and stirred on her white china plate, I heard Grandpa's diseased loop of repeated stories from the 1930s, I felt the silence of the strange, old street outside my window. The coils in my mattress celebrated their freedom after 15 years of folded storage, twinging and spiraling joyfully into my backbone. I thrashed the pillow, looking for a cool side. The sheets itched and smelled of mothballs. Everything here was rotting, stale, old. And then I knew what I missed: I missed normalcy, where the world, without question, centering on me and the excitement of my budding existence. I would rather have felt heartache or outrage, anything less selfish. I would much rather have felt my own bed, my clean, new, orange sheets, a mattress with less zealous springs.

Whether I closed my eyes or kept them open, I saw nonsensical piles of salvaged crap, their once-methodical system of organization lost in Grandpa's withering mind. And I saw my mother's face: her eyes misted over with a greifsoaked, overwhelmed haze. She hadn't shared any attack plan or timetable for our summer project. I wondered if she had one.

I did not want to think about it. I prayed, quite earnestly, for something to be larger than myself and this house, and for the springs in my mattress to stop jumping into my sternum. I found myself praying to the image of the gold and brown Yearbook Jesus...one of those terribly honest, easy prayers which left no record of words on my soul but still seemed heard.

---

In the morning, I found my mother transformed: wide-eyed, calm, and already sorting. She had plans, but no coffee, and I stood on the shag carpet blinking idiotically and watching her fingers fly through dust. I eyed the coffeemaker and exaggerated my yawns. When she realized she'd lost my attention, she paused.

"You don't drink coffee," she reminded me.

"I do sometimes. Just not at home. With friends...we go out for coffee."

"You get a milkshake with about 5000 calories crammed into it. That's not coffee. You don't like real coffee. We don't need it; it's not a good habit to start." She was, as usual, annoyingly spot-on and above any reproach : she herself never touched caffeine, let alone the Carmel Frappachinos she'd christened "Calories in a Cup."

"I think I'll go for a walk," I replied, secretly relieved. I hated the taste of pure coffee--it gave me the shakes.

"That's a good idea," she surprised me. "You need a little time for yourself. Come back around 8:30, and we'll start into the kitchen table."

The Groceryboy's Name was Andy: a story in many parts.

2010-06-24T10:24:00.000-07:00

Part Two.

We arrived at dusk, which seemed to be the time we always arrived in Sacramento. We'd been making summer trips our entire lives, always in August. What we had come to count on during those trips was threefold: the air conditioner would overheat and die, we'd sleep in musty, ancient sleeping bags lined with a flannel pattern of stags and guns, and we'd play hours of Clue off a board from the early 50s--Clue games in which Jenny would scitter down intense notes of strategy and I would resort to desperate off-key humming in a lazy attempt to throw off her game.

Really, that was what Sacramento meant. That and a frightening hoard of relatives--cousins and second cousins, a breed who loved, from what I could ascertain, storytelling, eating and standing up. It was the strangest family trait--whereas my father's family gatherings involved pods of relatives in expensive velvet sweatsuits lounging (always lounging...we were always told, or rather admonished, to 'just be comfy,') my mother's family stood, solid, in circles and in lines, with nothing, not even a sideboard to lean on, shouting stories over one another. Chairs were for the weak, the boring and the quiet. If food was served, it was balanced in hands. Sturdy German legs, I supposed.

The summer would be different. There was no tottering Grandpa Kamp to meet us in the dusky driveway, there was no sea-creatureish Beverly beside him, and I was praying that perhaps, seeing as I was nearly 17, I would graduate from the vintage hunter's sleeping bag to the spare bedroom's hide-a-bed.

So there was nothing to greet us, just the intense peace of the Peter-Pan streetlights and the quiet sloped sidewalks that always give Land Park its dignity.

Mother went straight in the house, and the rest of us went and got some dinner. She appeared a bit overcome by the emotion of it all; selling her childhood home, cleaning it out alone (she kept saying alone, alone, and I knew better than to point out the reality of my presence.) We (Jenny, Dad and I) drove to Marie Calendar's, where we munched on nondescript dinners and watched an inordinate number of people order pies to go.

"Ten pies," Dad observed, "the does seem a bit odd."

"Bizarre," we agreed, watching a dark, scruffy man with a Raider's tat on his neck stagger out under his impressive load of pastries.

"Perhaps," he suggested after a few minutes of silent chewing, "perhaps they are not really pies at all."

The rest of dinner we constructed elaborate speculations as to the true contents of the pie boxes. We settled on drugs. As if to corroborate our theory, the pie line continued to swell with unsavory patrons, people who just could not possibly enjoy that much pie. When the waitress asked if we'd like to finish with some blueberry pie ala mode, we all found her tone ladened with double entendre. Dad, face razor-straight, told her we'd prefer one to go.

She replied, with a wink, "excellent choice."

----

We did bring a pie home, and everybody ate it, but nobody began convulsing or got the giggles or saw any dead people or anything at all exciting. It was, disappointingly, just pie, and we ate it in relative silence as the last light left the windows and the old, dusty 60 watt bulbs sputtered their glow. I looked around at my summer world--the stacks of junk mail, German trinkets, large-screen TV from the 70s, my grandmother's piano, a framed photo of the Steinkamps shaking Reagan's hand in front of the Capital, and a rather iconic 1920's circular mold of Jesus, just his face, in browns and golds, looking off into the distance as if posing for his senior yearbook photo.

Jenny and Dad would head back on a plane in the morning. Jenny, a college senior, had a summer job back in LA and Dad his post as manager of a DMH clinic. The only ones suspended in this time warp would be my mother and I. I eyed her warily in the dim light. She looked exhausted and alone, aimlessly swirling her fork on her plate, stirring the berry seeds she'd picked out of her pie. I moved my chair a bit closer to her, almost imperceptibly closer, and thumbed through a thick pile of bills. Each had been slit open with a sharp knife on the right side of the envelope, then neatly filed with rubber bands, compressed into dense packets. The table was littered with piles just like this one. An endless sea of pointlessly salvaged Thrifty's fliers and church bulletins.

The Groceryboy's Name was Andy: a story in many parts.

2010-06-23T10:34:00.000-07:00

Part One.

The summer before my senior year, my mother hijacked my life. There I was, finally doing okay. I had friends, I had my first boyfriend, I was planning on spending most of the summer rehearsing for "Cinderella," the district's summer musical. Ever humble, I figured I was a shoe-in for the part. (No pun intended.)

Then my mother announced that my grandpa's home in Sacramento needed to be sold. She, and I, would be spending the summer preparing the house.

"All summer. To clean out and sell a house? How long could that possibly take?" I asked.

She did not dignify the question with a response. It was, in fact, a ridiculous question.

My grandfather, whom I referred to as "Grandpa Kamp," was born Alexander David Steinkamp, the son of German immigrant farmers. He'd worked his way up the banking system to become (wait for it) the Deputy State Treasure of California. A pretty big deal, no joke. He was an excellent investor and banker, a methodical, meticulous man who still managed to be warm, charming and downright debonair.

When he began to lose his memory, he was the last to notice. Or maybe, ever the successful and self-assured businessman, he was just the last to admit. Either way, his dementia-hazed exploits kept us all on our toes.

We'd encountered the largest exploit (pun intended) four years earlier. Her name was Beverly, a retired...retired...come to think of it, we never knew quite what she had retired from. She was a corpulent, dark haired, scarlet-lipsticked woman, at least 35 years his junior, who had first met us in his driveway with arms outstretched and a crackling announcement of, "Oh, the family! Welcome! I'm Beverly Peace, and I'll probably be the next Mrs. Steinkamp!" She wore a colbalt-blue pantsuit with long strips of fabric dangling down from the sleeves. As she wavered closer, my father, ever the understated observer, hummed an low-register rendition of "Poor Unfortunate Souls."

Beverly posed both practical and spiritual issues for my mother. Practically, she appeared galvanizingly close to cozening Grandpa, in his pathetic grasp at the straws of dignity and charm he'd once exuded, into a ruinous marriage. Spiritually, she was, well, difficult to love. My mother is not the type to admit her struggles to love the world. Ask her, and she will tell you that she loves everyone. She will believe herself whole-heartedly, which is, I believe, over half the battle. Still, the desire to love and witness love to all can complicate an otherwise simple situation.

That pesky love caused her to shake her head when her cousin spontaneously suggested a "ghastly chandelier accident" at Grandpa's 90th birthday. "It could drop," mused Jean, "quite naturally, just, you know, it's an old house," gesturing to Beverly, who, true to her name, was peacefully bestowing cake and punch as if the depression-glass ladle was already hers to wield.

Several years had passed since the dawn of Beverly Peace, and we'd managed, for the most part, to pry our sweet Grandfather out of her clutches. True to form, my mother loved her through the entire process. And sadly, it was not a strategic chandelier which severed her tentacles. It was the disease, coddling and curdling his mind deeper down into confusion. Dementia took him from his home in Sacramento, turned him from a charming storyteller to one who owned only one alarming loop of words, repeated every 10 minutes. He moved into the second home he'd wisely purchased next to ours. Round-the-clock caretakers moved in with him.

So it was clear, at this point, that he'd never return to Sacramento, and it was clear that he'd never be the one to sell his house. His impressive thrift, minted by the Great Depression, extended not only to his finances but into every corner of his world. As my question, "how long could that possibly take?" echoed against the silent wall of my mother, I pictured the packed closets, tables, garage and guesthouse of his Sacramento home. I knew we'd be lucky to finish such a task in one summer. I knew I'd be lucky if she didn't enroll me as a senior up in Sacramento. I watched my glass-slipper dreams crunch under the weight of 60 years' hoarded investment papers and table saws.

The summer began with a long car ride, on which I mentally composed a Guidepost Magazine essay about my martyrdom of a summer break. The theme revolved around Higher Ways: how miraculously, I had been placed in Sacramento for a reason no human being could have anticipated. (I saved a child from drowning in the Land Park pond...no, a whole schoolbus of children...no, I noticed a fire started by my grandfather's pot-head neighbors' carelessly lightin' up and I snuffed it out before it destroyed the entire Land Park and Downtown region...nay, the city. Maybe after the fire I met my husband--being 16, the though had no fear of actuality attached to it, simply romance.)

I spun out wild daydreams and watched the patterns in the crops as we wove up the grapevine.

the master of light...lit?

2010-06-23T00:10:00.000-07:00

This is just so weird. Also kinda heartwrenching...? All I know is I definitely called my mom (who was having a particularly terrible day) and got she and my sister on speakerphone, and broke the news, and we howled for a good 10 minutes.

Please click on the link for the creepiest photo EVER.

Painter Thomas Kinkade arrested near Carmel on suspicion of DUI

another 'really?' moment, brought to you by 7th grade...

2010-06-15T07:35:00.001-07:00

Kinda can't believe an email from a student started this way:

hullo ms. l :)

2day after skool, i had 2 go 2 smith's room so i

didn't hav time 2 turn in the paper.

Awesome.

idea density

2010-06-14T07:11:00.001-07:00

Agatha Christie And Nuns Tell A Tale Of Alzheimer's

This article has been completely tripping me out. Whenever I write, I can't stop calculating the density of my thoughts, which according to this study directly reflects my eventual memory loss/retention. The tone of voice on the audio clip at 5:38/7:18 is so ridiculously vapid, so obviously headed for quick deterioration of the brain cells, and I can't seem to get it out of my head! :(

...Seriously, though, this article is fascinating. Don't let the completely old-ladyish title throw you.

a r t i c u l a t e (n.)

2010-06-12T16:48:00.000-07:00

who me, tonguetied?

no sir. the mirror swells a bit with pride

at my eloquence (i can tell myself

most anything).

a r t i c u l a t e (n.)

...she says of me. a compliment

but i can't spell to save my life

still i complement myself just fine

me & my misspellings.

this year i swore, swore, swore

nobody, no sir not even God in his Glory

nobody could steal the solid

out from under me.

nobody.

not the disease

he flaunts & we sweep

to the back, back corners of the

souls of things.

not the updown look

of a puzzled world

deciding where to put me.

nobody, nosirnothing.

no, i diagramed

grand plans

to stand on trust

stand on joy, joy divine,

--just

climb, climb, climb.

yup. my long-suffering reflection

chews and strains over

every calculation/every

possible combination

of word's order, word's weight.

& the strangest thing--

i'll never breathe

a phrase or hint or word or gleam

of this, my beautiful

a r t i c u l a t e

philosophy.

Glen Davis: the most frightening dodgeball player in my subconscious mind.

2010-06-09T07:10:00.001-07:00

I had especially bizarre dreams last night.

I was watching a dodgeball match. I thought, oh, dodgeball, this seems fun. But it wasn't fun, it was pure terror. Huge hulking men (inspired, I think, by last game...that one Celtic, the big guy with the crazy eyes who looks like he's going to eat the Lakers) rawred and impaled one another with dodgeballs.

Then I was told to join the game, and I found myself on the sidelines trying to explain that I would not be at all good at dodgeball. In response to this, I was handed me a pink balloon which was apparently going to be my one defense. I wasn't really sure how it would help me, but that didn't stop me from feeling more prepared as I held it in my hand.

Next, I was sitting at a train station. A family, obviously on vacation, walked up to me. The father wore a Hawaiian print shirt and a camera around his neck. He was excessively normal-looking. He handed me a kitten and asked me to hold on to it for a moment. He lay the kitten down so its tiny belly rested against my upturned forearm. This felt unsafe, but I couldn't shift my arms to get a better grip. Sure enough, a moment later the kitten bounded off my arm and into the train tracks, which quickly became the 110 freeway. Cars swerved and honked and the tiny, tiny little ball of fur got squished and rolled underneath. The family disappeared.

I was in my classroom next. I told my class to put everything away and give their full attention up front. One girl kept reading (a specific student in my first period, who in reality is very sweet) so I asked her quietly to stop reading her book, and she looked up at me and spit her gum in my face. Shocked, I told her to step outside with me, but when I tried to discipline her, she spit her gum in my face again and then she snapped her jaw at me rather like a piranha. I was beside myself with outrage at the disrespect she was showing (I didn't find her actions strange, just disrespectful.)

That was it. My subconscious is tired now.

throw away the telescope

2010-06-01T19:37:00.000-07:00

In those earlier days he had been unable to see the great, the unfathomable and the infinite in anything. All he had was a sense that it must exist somewhere, and he had gone on looking for it. In anything close to and well understood he had seen nothing but limitation, workaday triviality and pointlessness. He had armed himself with a mental telescope and peered into the far distance, where that same workaday triviality, shrouded in the mists of remoteness, had seemed great and infinite, but only because it couldn't be clearly seen. This was how he had looked on European life, politics, freemasonry, philosophy and philanthropy. but even then, at times that he had mistaken for moments of weakness, his mind had penetrated the furthest distance and recognized the same workaday triviality and pointlessness.

Now he had learned to see the great, the eternal and the infinite in everything, and naturally enough, in order to see it and reveal in its contemplation, he had thrown away the telescope that he had been using to peer over men's heads and now took pleasure in observing the ever-changing, infinitely great and unfathomable life that surrounded him. And the more closely he watched, the more he felt himself to be happy and at peace.

-Tolstoy, War & Peace

good morning, dostoevsky

2010-05-15T09:04:00.000-07:00

"Above all, avoid lies, all lies, especially the lie to yourself. Keep watch on your own lie and examine it every hour, every minute. And avoid contempt, both of others and of yourself: what seems bad to you in yourself is purified by the very fact that you have noticed it in yourself. And avoid fear, though fear is simply that consequence of every lie. Never be frightened at your own faintheartedness in attaining love, and meanwhile do not even be frightened by your own bad acts.

I am sorry that I cannot say anything more comforting, for active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams thirsts for immediate action, quickly performed, and with everyone watching. Indeed, it will go as far as the giving even of one's life, provided it does not take long but is soon over, as on stage, and everyone is looking on and praising. Whereas active love is labor and perseverance, and for some people, perhaps, a whole science. But I predict that even in that very moment when you see with horror that despite all your efforts, you not only have not come nearer your goal but seem to have gotten farther from it, at that very moment--I predict this to you--you will suddenly reach your goal and will clearly behold over you the wonder-working power of the Lord, who all the while has been loving you, and all the while has been mysteriously guiding you."

-The Brothers Karamazov

happy hour

2010-05-05T07:06:00.000-07:00

We solve

love & all mysteries

(or most of them)

a little fuzzy

from the three-dollar beer.

Why not, on a Tuesday night?

So I proclaim

face still flushed

with the house red:

We deserve to be

ecstatic !

Ecstatic ! (they echo)

all the time? You can't

mean that, you

t w e n t y - f i v e.

We speak openly,

the wheels

suitably oiled,

we have loosened collars,

left off filters.

Still I watch us

turn ever-opaque eyes in,

attempt to screech curtains shut

discrete, lightning-quick.

I watch histories shift, asking,

inventory-taking

each life:

have I ever been?

Have I ever been?

poetry 180

2010-04-19T17:53:00.000-07:00

I'm having so much fun reading through Billy Collin's poetry project for students. A really fantastic selection of modern poetry.

Here are two simply great ones. But most all of them are just really wonderful.

I lovelovelove the cheeky allusion to Isaiah in line 7 and how it flows right back into the ironing. And the last line is so perfect.

Heat

Michael Chitwood

A Coke bottle stopped
with a sprinkle head
sat at one end of the board.
She'd swap iron for bottle,
splash the cloth,
then go at it with the iron.
The crooked was made straight,
the wrinkled smooth,
and she'd lecture from that altar
where rumpled sheets went crisp.
"If Old Scratch gets his claws
in your thigh or neck,
you burn a thousand years
and that is the first day."
Our clothes got rigid,
seam matched seam.
Our bodies would ruin her work.

And this one, I mean, if you teach, it's going to make you laugh. :)

Did I Miss Anything?
Tom Wayman
Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours
Everything. I gave an exam worth
40 percent of the grade for this term
and assigned some reading due today
on which I’m about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 percent
Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose
Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
a shaft of light suddenly descended and an angel
or other heavenly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
to attain divine wisdom in this life and
the hereafter
This is the last time the class will meet
before we disperse to bring the good news to all people
on earth.
Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?
Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human experience
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been
gathered
but it was one place
And you weren’t here

the capacity to hurt.

2010-04-18T10:21:00.001-07:00

I'm making a resolution to think less.

(I realize that blogging about this resolution does not bode well for its success. Still. Hear me out.)

I'm good at teasing through problems; I'm great at speculating. It's probably my #1 hobby. I plunk through things on piano, I tinker through phrases on paper, I type torrentially. All in order to understand life. A worthy effort, certainly.

The problem: I'm dishonest. I don't write truthfully. I write according to what I should feel, what I ought to want, who I ought to be. And that person, the ideal me, is not afraid of anything. And she is also incapable of embarrassment. And she is never, never, never found in a place of vulnerability. And she is stunningly articulate, all the time. She is not someone who can be abandoned--that would be impossible. It's not in her vocabulary. She is not someone who suffers hurt, because she is not someone who cares. If I don't care, I can't hurt. Simple enough.

I'm such a storyteller--I rewrite everything. So I rewrite my own story, mashing my imperfect, real, hurting self down into this mold. I over-think and re-write and then use that as protection from having to feel, to participate in relationships. By writing I can control.

But relationships are messy--I mean all relationships. I can't be so concerned about maintaining control; I'll miss everything. In fact, the same goes for faith. I can't profess to follow after Christ while keeping a death grip on my safely-constructed image. Our faith hinges on the willingness to be remade in the image of Christ. That's freedom. I can't be so concerned with avoiding hurt that I miss out on that freedom.

I don't mean I'm going to stop writing. And I don't mean I'm going to stop thinking. But I want to stop over-thinking in order to rationalize away pain. I've got to release the image that holds me hostage and keeps me far away from real emotion. If a situation is hurtful, I want to give myself permission to hurt. Even if it's humiliating. Even if I'd rather lie and say I'm unscathed. If I'm angry, I give myself permission to be angry. Even if it feels futile. Even if I feel weak. And if I'm twitter-paited, or joyful, or hopeful, I want permission to be that. Without probable cause or a visible safety-net. Without an escape route. Even if I end up looking like an idiot.

A shorter metaphor with the same theme:

I hiked Mt. Wilson yesterday. I woke up this morning aware of muscles I never even knew existed. Every time I stand a different twang in my butt or shoulder resonates. But I don't really mind. I know those twangs will turn into strength I didn't have before.

And I wouldn't mind if life felt more that way. I wouldn't mind waking up with some aches I didn't know I could feel: the realization of failure and the loss of my build-up, idealized identity. I know it will hurt. I know it will turn into strength I didn't have before.

mine eyes up

2010-04-13T12:16:00.000-07:00

teach me the word

up.

I lift mine eyes

up.

teach me the meaning

teach me seeing.

up.

at 6 I would sprawl

across the floor, pour out

the jewelry drawer, my mother's tangles

shoved into the corners, pull

at the metal lace rolled

into locked worlds.

I could sit for hours

happily freeing

chain link after chain link:

twisting, pulling, humming

lost and unable

to stop until everysingle tangle

pulled clean.

teach me the word

loss

to let it drop

and lift mine eyes

up.

hello lamppost, whatcha' knowin?

2010-04-11T17:50:00.001-07:00

Jenny and I like to pick on our parents. In a good-natured, naggy, look-at-us-we're-adults-and-we-survived kind of way. Specifically, we harp on our mother's total failure to expose us to pop culture in our youth. I'm unaware of a grand plan on her part to keep us from modern life in the 1980s; however, her utter lack of interest in current music, movies and trends did the job as well or better than any well-hatched plot.

Instead of cassette tapes or CDs, we had records on a large, boxy stereo. It's a beautiful piece of furniture, the kind you might see in Urban Outfitters now that these things are "vintage" and therefore achingly hip.

My childhood soundtrack was, shall-we-say, not achingly hip: a mixture of John Denver, The Beatles, musical scores, (specifically Hello Dolly and The Sound of Music) and Simon and Garfunkle, Leslie Gore and the Lettermen. But this music, though not current, was very important to us. I can hardly remember a day when the record player was not on.

This morning I woke up humming one of those old songs. It's odd--I heard this record a million times, but the strongest memory I associate with "The 59th Street Bridge Song" is not the stereo at all. It's my mom singing it to me on the cement steps in our backyard.

I loved those steps. They made a lovely seat, from which I could observe the entire back yard: the alder trees, the roses and the lemon tree, the swing-set.

I remember, at around age 5, scooting down the steps one summer morning, (they were still cool from night, even though the sun was warming the grass) and finding a caterpillar. I yelped in joy at my discovery, and my mother came and sat with me to watch him nudge through the vast cement plain on which he found himself. After about three minutes of mutual, silent contemplation, she started singing me that song. She sang the whole thing. And then she stayed beside me for a bit longer in the morning summer sun, just humming.

My mother had stopped sleeping just 5 years earlier, when her mother died. She went whole nights without even getting tired, she told me later. Months it went on like that. She describes healing from that insomnia as taking her life apart, deconstructing it, every last screw, and then re-assembling everything. Quiet, more orderly, very slow. So she could sleep. So she could take care of us.

She has a lovely voice, a soft soprano. I always think of her when I hear this song. She still tells me that I need to give myself a break sometimes. I think she's right.

Slow down, you move too fast

You've got to make the moment last

just kickin down the cobblestones

looking for fun and feelin' groovy.

Hello lamppost, whatcha knowing?

I've come to watch your flowers growin'

Ain't you got no rhymes for me?

Dum da duh dum, feeling groovy.

Got no deeds to do,

no promises to keep,

I'm dappled and drowsy

and ready for sleep

let the morningtime drop

all its petals on me

Life, I love you,

all is groovy.

Life I love you, all is groovy.

a little letter love

2010-04-10T22:04:00.000-07:00

Please enjoy the product of a particularly successful, serendipitous day of LA exploration. Not to brag or anything, but if urban letter-spotting was a sport, we'd be varsity. Nay, pro.

five things

2010-03-30T22:08:00.000-07:00

A quirky nod to KCRW's 'five things' blog. And to happiness, because that's the theme of these snaps.

1. Owl candle and owl pepper shaker on piano. Problem: Candle owl has graced our piano for 6 months or so. It's been a lonely time for him; he's the only owl in 39 F. Solution: Rach found an orange owl pepper shaker in her grandma's cupboard. Result: Owl Love.

French fry tray turned canvas. Artist: Alvin, 1st period. Intended function of tray: hold paint. Serendipitous function of tray: artfully convey the theme we're studying in class--keep looking for beauty.

Half-deflated balloon fish. Name: Schmeul. Creator: Winnie Fan-Joe, science teacher and balloon artist. Diagnosis #1: losing air quickly. Diagnosis #2: I love him.

Homemade earring hanger/artwork. Color: Robin's Egg Blue Cost: under $10.00. Origin: my desperate need of creative detox from pink slip season. Added bonus: I can actually find my jewelry now.

Elements Kitchen, Pasadena sky. Occasion: favorite New Yorker dropping by town. Consensus: pretty much heaven on a Saturday morning.

spring has sprung

2010-03-27T12:10:00.000-07:00

The girls in my 3rd period are having a very good time. We are painting murals today—it’s one of the few days I indulge my artsy-fartsy side and convince myself that a week of art will teach universal theme in literature and art. I’m not sure how it’s going, standards-wise…but I know the girls in the back corner of the room are loving it, because their group has merged with the boys in the adjacent corner. The conversation is going something like this:

Girl--Hey! I know where you live!

Guy (shouting)--How do you know where I live?! Stalker. That’s so weird!!

Girl--We live on the same street….we have for years!

Guy--Oh, well, that’s cool I guess!!*

Shrieks of laughter emerge from the girls. The guys look a little leery. Then they begin to warm up to the idea. The idea that they, their faces, their snarky, rude remarks, can elicit these shrieks. They perk up, shoulders straightening. The two groups merge, and all productivity and semblance of painting ceases.

In a matter of minutes, the ringleader of the guys, the one who accused the girl of stalking, is waving a bottle of paint with abandon, cracking scintillating jokes and dribbling yellow all over my floor.

Guy--Yeah, didn’t she like me in, like, 3^rd grade? That’s what I heard!!!

Girl--She totally did!!!! It was so obvious.

Guy (grinning)--That’s so weird. Ew. Weird!!

More paint pours from the carton. My floor would make Jackson Pollock doubt his artistic sensibilities.

I bolt over, scold him for not listening to my well-thought out, meticulous paint station instructions, and then I make him clean up and sit down. The girls look on in adoration. What a rebel.

I could get upset, but let’s be honest. Heart-fluttering, punctuation-satiated 7th grade encounters such-as-these are the only ones cemented in my own memory. Casting furtive glances at trumpeters #3, 5 and 7 left a clear, indelible impression, but could I name a single march we played when I was in junior high band? Hardly. I don't think I can even play a scale anymore.

On a warm, breezy day spring afternoon like today, it’s especially hard to pretend I'm a grown-up, terribly concerned with literary themes, paint procedures and orderly classroom conduct.

*The excessive punctuation is not a lapse of judgement in my writing style. It is a fair representation of how junior highers speak. If you come visit me, you will believe me.

on beauty

2010-03-19T19:37:00.000-07:00

walking home

it is the waving wishes

of the dandelions.

impertinent weeds hawking

fistfuls of weightless hope next to the boarded-up buildings.

it is the orange sun,

debutant black fingerbranches silhouetted

and the single orange stoplight

like a cut-out punched through the wrought iron

a perfect swatch-match, color-wise,

signal and sky.

it is the fact

that each of us is the nation of Israel

and we are led through rivers

and butchered calves and Sodom and

Manna (damn that chewy white stuff)

to break us and rebuild us into

a risen people

a city like transparent glass

and clear as crystal.

a soul as big as this valley

2010-03-09T06:51:00.000-08:00

He is wooing you from the jaws of distress

to a spacious place free from restriction.

two ways.

2010-03-04T18:14:00.001-08:00

hunker down

to write out, wring out

the truth, the mystery.

find the formula, words

to define God and all sadness.

wholly explain. ruminate.

or just watch

the hawk in the wind

above the canyon

(earth-still wings) drifting.

all knowing,

moving and unmoving,

aware of every angle

and arc of sky.

nostalgia

2010-02-23T21:34:00.000-08:00

Why am I looking through college pictures right now? I have no idea. I think I'm wistfully enjoying the memories of a time when life was all about me. Isn't that the point of college?

Anyway, I found some magnetic poetry that adorned our fridge senior year. I really think none of us could have known how applicable this advice was. I don't remember who wrote it; I'm pretty sure I didn't.

Also, while I don't consider the bit in the lower corner to have anything to do with the poem, it is still quite amusing.

moodstreams

2010-02-20T10:42:00.000-08:00

I totally forgot about this website and then I found it again. I think I've actually written about it before, a super long time ago. It's fun to play around with:

GETTY IMAGES MOODSTREAMS

natural faith casts out fear (john muir)

2010-02-14T16:23:00.000-08:00

Hiking in Yosemite last week, I couldn't stop thinking about beauty from ashes, and about the story of the Phoenix. I've watched a lot of mistakes turn into beauty lately. Everything smashed on the floor, shattered. But then the rebuilding starts. The bravest choice: to create beauty out of failure. Free of the restrictions of prescribed shape, lives take on an uncensored beauty.

Yosemite rocks make me less afraid of things, perhaps because their permanance has nothing to do with me and my perfection. They have been there so much longer than I have been sweating out my latest problem/failure, and they just don't care. That majestic disinterest is incredibly comforting, somehow.

classroom chats

2010-02-02T15:55:00.000-08:00

One of our vocab words is stifled.

I tell the class about stifling laughter, and how they've probably had to stifle a laugh when they knew it's an inappropriate time to disrupt class with a laugh. Then I ask what else can be stifled.

Girl on the left side of the room raises her hand, and shares the absolutely lovely reply, 'your creative spirit!'

Yes, I say.

Boy on right side of the room raises his hand and shares the absolutely honest reply, 'a fart!'

Yes, I say again. That is absolutely correct.

Oh, junior high, your highs and lows of maturity really never do cease to amaze me.

santa anas

2010-01-30T11:05:00.001-08:00

(written 10/28, revised this morning)

Praise You for this wind-

movement, in swirls and gusts.

This too shall pass.

It will not be my forever.

I wake up groggy: last night

shoved, as broken glass

inside me.

In daylight, I'm petrified

that my screaming seeped

from yesterday into morning,

a yellowing bruise,

a black ink smudge through a vellum sheet.

Self, we must forget.

Just for today, naturalize it,

rationalize it, make it

normal. It is not normal.

So just forget, shove it

in soul pockets somewhere

a corner.

Prayers for forgiveness

comes out lip service--

Heart does not want forgiveness just yet.

How would it help, just yet?

Praise the wind.

stirring things.

this wind

all angles, shifting.

So I smooth on, with a steady hand

calm eyes-

to expertly apply distance.

Peel away from reality's risk,

to love--but not too much.

Be present, show nothing,

want nothing, lose nothing.

The top layer, on which I care and

laugh and feel, most convincingly,

beneath which, if things go on this way

-my biggest fear-

there will be nothing.

Praise You for this wind

tearing away at my

amateur gilding.

I have to feel it. Let it soak

through my arms and up my elbows,

make me weak

let everyone see it

steep in it

wrap in it,

grieve.

JD Salinger

2010-01-28T16:43:00.001-08:00

When I heard that Salinger had died (I heard it on the radio, at the end of a near-perfect day of work; I was on such a high, for no particular reason) I felt the kind of loss that is usually reserved for people you know, except it sort of felt more real even than that, for some reason. I guess because he has shaped so much of my thinking. I know I'm not alone in that feeling, not at all.

This is just one of many favorite things that he wrote:

"The part that stumps me, really stumps me, is that I can't see why anybody- unless he was a child, or an angel, or a lucky simpleton like the pilgrim- would even want to say the prayer to a Jesus who was the least bit different from the way he looks and sounds in the New Testament. My God! He's only the most intelligent man in the Bible, that's all! Who isn't he head and shoulders over? Who? Both Testaments are full of pundits, prophets, disciples, favorite sons, Solomons, Isaiahs, Davids, Pauls- but, my God, who beside Jesus really knew which end was up? Nobody. Not Moses. Don't tell me Moses. He was a nice man, and he kept in beautiful touch with his God, and all that- but that's exactly the point. He had to keep in touch. Jesus realized there is no separation from God... Oh, my God, what a mind!" he said. "Who else, for example, would have kept his mouth shut when Pilate asked for an explanation? Not Solomon. Don't say Solomon. Solomon would have had a few pithy words for the occasion. I'm not sure Socrates wouldn't have, for that matter. Crito, or somebody, would have managed to pull him aside just long enough to get a couple of well-chosen words for the record. But most of all, above everything, who in the Bible besides Jesus knew- knew- that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look? You have to be a son of God to know that kind of stuff. Why don't you think of these things? I mean it, Franny, I'm being serious. When you don't see Jesus for exactly what he was you miss the whole point of the Jesus Prayer. If you don't understand Jesus, you can't understand his prayer- you don't get the prayer at all, you just get some kind of organized cant. Jesus was a supreme adept, by God, on a terribly important mission. This was no St. Francis, with enough time to knock out a few canticles, or to preach to the birds, or to do any of the other endearing things so close to Franny Glass's heart. I'm being serious now, God damn it. How can you miss seeing that? If God had wanted somebody with St. Francis's consistently winning personality for the job in the New Testament, he'd've picked him, you can be sure. As it was, he picked the best, the smartest, the most loving, the least sentimental, the most unimitative master he could possibly have picked. And when you miss seeing that, I swear to you, you're missing the whole point of the Jesus prayer. The Jesus Prayer has one aim, and one aim only. To endow the person who says it with Christ-Consciousness. Not to set up some little cozy, holier-than-thou trysting place with some sticky, adorable divine personage who'll take you in his arms and relieve you of all your duties and make all your nasty Weltschmerzen and Professor Tuppers go away and never come back. And by God, if you have intelligence enough to see that- and you do- and yet you refuse to see it, then you're misusing the prayer, you're using it to ask for a world full of dolls and saints and no Professor Tuppers."

--from Franny and Zooey

the impossibility of things

2010-01-24T17:25:00.001-08:00

I am more myself these days

-myself, a reoccurring theme with me-

but I'm also you

when I smile this way

determined, amused and beyond words

at the state of every union,

at the impossibility of things.

Every time you smiled, I read stories

in your eyes, which, objectively

were rather muddy

in color and creed,

but I was not objective

and didn't think color

signified much, certainly nothing

having to do with clarity.

Every time your smile spoke things

the poet in me

heard beyond the words.

This kind of listening became

a dangerous occupation

to say the least.

See to me you knew everything--

and your high elevation became

a dangerous position,

impossible to keep.

Still just now I caught myself

amused at everything

aware of everything

seeing everything

holding all the colors of all the world

at a safe distance

and laughing.

And that's either

what I learned from you

or what you taught me.

broken street.

2010-01-03T20:41:00.001-08:00

One time I ran away

got to the end of the broken street

(they've paved over since

now it's smooth, dark, neat)

then it was all cracks and gutter rivers.

I dodged each one, flying

free, and the whole time

barefoot, that whole minute

sprinting away. I was gone--

I was somebody.

I had a name I gave myself

not the one you gave to me

and I could sing, anytime

and you couldn't stop me.

and the moon danced for me,

sighing, 'oh, honey,'

'run while the night is still young.'

Hair streaming, in an undershirt and jeans

unpresentable--what would the neighbors think?

Feet burning, wheeling around corners

until running further

would have really changed things.

I walked back, the whole way

and sat on the porch

and cried,

and held the cold bruises

on the soles of me,

and the moon sighed with me.

botched sonnet

2009-12-14T22:50:00.000-08:00

We spill our guts, but casually, (and not really)

the way women just know how to do

easy as breathing, at once meaningless and vital

threading the freeway in the afternoon sun,

gorge on words with an old, rusty lexicon

so familiar it's frightening.

---

This song reminds me of you,

about whom I strung under 10 words

together today, moving on

to new schemes, over lunch. And it didn't sting.

So easy it was frightening: you are now story:

short story.

We played it over and again

on Santa Monica Blvd, no less. It did not fit us,

but we liked it,

I liked it,

the way it sounded sad.

why Tolstoy is the man

2009-12-06T09:42:00.000-08:00

'What happiness and peace of mind would be mind if I only could say now, "Lord have mercy upon me!..." But who would I be talking to? Either some indeterminate, inaccessible power, which I cannot have any contact with and cannot even put into words, the great All or Nothing,' he said to himself, 'or else that God sewn up in a little bag like Marie's icon? No. Nothing is certain, nothing but the nothingness of all that we can understand, and the splendor of something we can't understand, but we know to be infinitely important.'

-War and Peace

in its dangerous marquees, even fake sitars....

2009-12-01T21:49:00.000-08:00

Bon Iver's Re: Stacks is an amazing song. I've never listened to the words before tonight. They are much more powerful than I ever guessed. I always thought they were referring to, as I've posted above, dangerous marquees and fake sitars.

The real lyrics are epically cooler. In fact, quite amazing. One of my favorite poems I've read for a long time.

This my excavation and today is kumran
Everything that happens is from now on
This is pouring rain
This is paralyzed

I keep throwing it down two-hundred at a time
It's hard to find it when you knew it
When your money's gone
And you're drunk as hell

On your back with your racks as the stacks as your load
In the back and the racks and the stacks are your load
In the back with your racks and you're un-stacking your load

I've twisting to the sun I needed to replace
The fountain in the front yard is rusted out
All my love was down
In a frozen ground

There's a black crow sitting across from me; his wiry legs are crossed
And he's dangling my keys he even fakes a toss
Whatever could it be
That has brought me to this loss?

On your back with your racks as the stacks as your load
In the back and the racks and the stacks of your load
In the back with your racks and you're un-stacking your load

This is not the sound of a new man or crispy realization
It's the sound of the unlocking and the lift away
Your love will be
Safe with me

*Lots of the references are to poker--I didn't pick that up at first...

*Also, the first reference to Kumran (the day they found the Dead Sea Scrolls) is explained by this quote by the songwriter:
When they found them it changed the whole course of Christianity, whether people wanted to know it or not. A lot of people chose to ignore it, a lot of people decided to run with it, and for many people it destroyed their faith, so I think I was just looking at it as a metaphor for whatever happens after that is new shit.

stay with it.

2009-11-30T16:39:00.000-08:00

Poetry is just images

in some ways it is empty.

But the window--

the white lights' reflection

strung against the mountain line

cut across the sky--

exists, and speaks so eloquently

exactly what I've been wanting to tell you

all along.

for everything you learn, there's something you must let go of

2009-11-20T22:09:00.000-08:00

I saw The Swell Season on Thursday. I have to say-- the most incredible concert ever. Pretty sure it tops everything else--even Good Charlotte.

...okay, I've obviously kidding. I wish I were kidding about having seen Good Charlotte, but sadly I'm only kidding about that GC show being near the top of my list. Truthfully, and more seriously, this show topped Bela Fleck at Spreckels and Jon Brion at Largo. And yes, that's a bold claim.

The old Frames' stuff was my favorite part of the whole night...there's something so incredible about their lyrics, something so cool and subversively spiritual. I like that kind of lyricism the best, because when the spirituality is a little bit buried underneath something, oddly, it always seems like there's more there. That's when the important parts come through: redemption, creative love, creation, and humility.

When he introduced "Backbroke," and explained that it was about finding peace in the midst of hellish situations, Glen Hansard prefaced the song by claiming,

"I'm not a spiritual person, really, but this song describes the feeling of an old Irish song, 'Dancing at the Feet of my Lord', which I think is the most beautiful title for any song ever written, and the most beautiful description of peace I've ever heard."

Before he started the song, he said rather quietly, away from his mic, "so...here," and gestured sheepishly up toward the ceiling with his free hand. The look of his face was pretty indescribable, the most humble I've seen anybody look in a long time. There was more worship in that action that in 95% of the 'worship' I've seen. And, for better or for worse, I've seen plenty of people gettin' their worship on, if you know what I mean. I was a camp counselor, for goodness sake.

Listen to "Red Cord" and "People Get Ready"and "Backbroke" and you'll know what I mean. I think, anyway. I hope you do.

And then listen to everything else, too, please.

seeing visions, dreaming dreams

2009-10-31T15:02:00.000-07:00

Three short reflections on Narrative

1. I end up teaching narrative every year, it seems. You know, Freytag’s pyramid, what we all expect out of a story? It's always kind of hard for me to teach, because we have to know that a clear, cohesive plot structure exists, that’s good. But the genius is not found in following the plot structure. The genius is found in those who break, abuse, dismiss, reject the traditional. Just like good grammar, scansion of poetry, 5 paragraph essay structure. You have to learn it, then you have to learn how to go past it. You have to understand it so you can use it as a tool, not as law. It's hard to explain the ambiguity to 7th graders.

2. For quite some time now, I’ve had an eventual dream about running a program which teaches writing to battered/underpriviledged women. To some, it may sound ridiculous: why would women with so much physical need even care about a skill like writing? To me, though, writing is sanity. It is also power, and extremely empowering. Even in the most desperate, hurtful and potentially scarring situations, I write. This is the thing that matters about writing: The story is one you are telling, you are the creator, and the way you see things, they way you tell them, is in your control. To give this gift to women who, their whole life, have been told they have nothing to say--to give them voice--this would be amazing.

3. My pastor read an excerpt from a Donald Miller book on Sunday about the story that we live out. The point was that when we feel we have no control over what choices we make, we reach for the story which looks the most convenient, or the easiest, or the most comfortable, even if it is a story of self-harm and brokenness.

This obviously makes me think of my dad. He already is an excellent writer and thinker; he already knows all about the structure and the power of narrative, the kind on paper. But I don’t think he understands or ever understood the power of narrative as a shaping tool for life. I think, when he found himself in the hospital, discouraged and disappointed with his job and his life, sick in his body and his soul, he had reached the end of the narrative he knew how to live. And even when he came back home to heal, he saw nothing except more of the same: years of loneliness and sadness, stretching out into oblivion. He saw no better story, and so he fell into a story of illness and pain. A pattern of inflicting that pain on the people closest to him. A different story than he had ever lived before, something none of us saw coming, but the one which seemed to fit. And now, he lives that story, I must say, very well.

When I realize this, of course I become angry first, angry the he was not creative, spiritual or resourceful enough to grasp other options, But then, I wonder, perhaps it is not a solo endeavor, this creation of story. Perhaps we are responsible for one another’s story, for participation, for providing vision. Perhaps that’s as good as any an expression of what it means to follow Christ—isn’t that what Christ provided on earth? A new way to approach enemies, riches, pleasure, death…life in general—a new version of the story of humanity?

I want to give vision to Dad’s story, I want to write it all down for him, present it, make it easy to step out of what he’s become and into something whole and beautiful. But even as I write, I know that I will never be able to craft his life into anything—he’s got to do that himself. As impossible as it feels, I can only attempt to keep being a participant who brings reminder of Love, Grace, and Purpose.

Besides, it’s easy to bemoan the loss of vision in the people around us—it’s hard to focus on our own narrative. It’s hard when I love my job, and yet know I promised myself an adventure this very next year, which all of a sudden seems to be tugging at my hem, saying, remember me? Remember how you swore you’d go back to school? Move to a brand new city? Well?

And I realize I don’t know how to live a perfect story, but maybe that's okay. I think about Freitag’s pyramid, and my 7^th graders gasping at the end of Ray Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day", referring to their neatly drawn pyramids, pencils ready for the resolution, mouths gaping, confused that the loose ends were not neatly tied up. We have expectations for how stories should go.

But it's a more powerful story with the ending this way, I hear myself explain to the class. The imperfection in the story- This is what brings the theme, and the meaning, to the story. And I wonder if I believe what I'm teaching.

angelica

2009-10-24T09:45:00.000-07:00

There's a strange man bent over the garden

headphones in, world blocked out,

planting perennials one by one,

counting the money somebody will pay

for the services he can provide.

He bobs his head to the music,

bored with the dirt and the color and

the smell of the grass.

Angelica loved this garden.

That was the first thing she said

after she said we were beautiful

and lovely, and she would be happy to

have us at her tenants.

Angelica is a weed of a woman

tall enough to appear unbalanced

on tiny legs, her black hair flying

she speaks English cautiously, with

hums and sighs punctuating,

filling the space when she searches for words.

She used to bring out her gardening stool

in the afternoons, kneel, face stern

speak with the dirt.

The sort of relationship seldom seen:

a language without words, total peace.

no need to search for the correct tense

everything already understood.

And really, for an apartment lawn

everything was shockingly alive

we always said so when we saw her

and she just smiled.

This morning, Manny and I agree:

when people are depressed,

they don't see what they have

even all the beautiful things growing

right around them, in the spring.

But we must not take it

so personally. It is a disease.

She has lost, he says,

30 pounds. I picture

what would be left of her,

in a hospital bed. I tell him

that the garden does not look the same.

more nice music.

2009-10-18T21:43:00.000-07:00

I actually try hard soooo hard not to post lyrics. It seems like a waste of time, plus, if I posted all the lyrics I wanted to, that's all this blog would be, because I'm constantly hearing strains of stuff and loving them in that 'ahhhhhhsooogooood' heartachy kind of way.

Anyway, this is different for some reason. This is a really good song for a birthday, and I love the way she sings the first line.

Sorry I was cruel, I was protecting myself
Drifting along with my swords out, flying
Tattering my own sails, and I tattered yours, too
Took you and wrapped you around me like a spell.

Oh, how the night drags on, oh
but I think I see a pink light and the coming of dawn
Oh, how the night drags on, oh
but in the fading of the constellations I am growing strong
In the fading of the constellations, I am growing strong.
In the fading of the constellations, I am growing strong.

Laura Veirs, Pink Light

While we're on the subject of heartachy-good music: Lauridsen: Lux Æterna. Whenever I need total peace, this is what I listen to. The pieces are very similar to what we sang in my college choir. It's very fun to listen to something beautiful and know exactly how difficult it is to achieve that sound. It always makes me miss singing. Incredibly beautiful music.

nice music.

2009-10-05T20:00:00.000-07:00

Need a lift? Listen to Kick-drum Heart, off The Avett Brothers' new CD. Makes me really happy.

Heck, just listen to the whole record. It's pretty lovely, I think.