I'm virtually pooped...

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.

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

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

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!

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...

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...

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?

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."

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.