earplugs & manna

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.

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

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.

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

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.