tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7628781873463133582024-03-13T06:24:11.333-04:00Suburban SoliloquyJaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.comBlogger200125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-59731998475550474892014-08-13T11:37:00.000-04:002015-02-24T07:54:48.976-05:00One Final Post...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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FEBRUARY 2015 UPDATE: My essay, <a href="http://pankmagazine.com/piece/bad-wife/" target="_blank">The Bad Wife</a>, was published in the January 2015 issue of <a href="http://pankmagazine.com/" target="_blank">PANK Magazine</a>, a badass print and online literary journal with tons of edgy, insightful and luscious prose and poems. Go read PANK!<br />
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<i>Suburban Soliloquy</i> has closed its doors. You can find me, now, at <i><a href="https://jayneguertin.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Banks of Noon</a> </i>(where I'm cross-posting the below piece), a new writing blog. I'm also taking this opportunity to introduce you to four friends and cohorts, from different pockets of the USA, who are genuinely gifted writers.<i> </i><br />
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I'm deeply grateful for all your support and for your friendship over the years, and I hope to see you around town in the future. :)<br />
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<b>Writing Process Blog Tour</b></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 11.45pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">My friend and partner-in-crime, Maria
Mutch—the boot-rockin' ingenious writer—tagged me some weeks ago when she
posted her contribution to “The Writing Process Blog Tour.” She asked me to
answer four questions about my writing process, and my first thought was: No! I
don't have a process! But Maria, author of, among many other brilliant works of
art, the poignant <i>Know the Night: A Memoir of Survival in the Small
Hours, </i>possesses criminal powers of persuasion, and she forced me to
confront the challenge (i.e., my fears). I’ve known Maria for some years now
(we met in a writing workshop when her memoir was still in its infancy), and I
know how brave and tenacious she is, and that she would not let me off the hook
easily, and so...<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 11.45pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Thank you, Maria, for inviting me; my
second and resounding thought is, Yes!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 11.45pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<b><span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">What are you working on? </span></b><span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 11.45pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Currently, I am working on completing
my thesis in partial fulfillment for my MFA degree in Writing and Literature
from the Bennington Writing Seminars, Bennington College. My thesis consists of
a collection of essays, a few prose poems, and perhaps a song and some
photographs. Okay, well, maybe not a song. Aside from the pseudo-scholarly
work, I’m also writing one or two essays that address the complexities of
conserving historic and open space in suburbia. Unfortunately, that exercise
involves dipping into politics, which is something I’m allergic to. I’m
sneezing a lot lately.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">How does the work differ from others
of its genre? </span></b><span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"> </span><br />
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">I have trouble with that
word—genre. (The hoodlum in me wants to confiscate genre from the landscape of
literature and bury its burden deep in the earth). I don’t know how to
categorize what I’m working on, so I can’t say how it differs, other than that
my essays are my essays (until they become the reader’s) and are of a somewhat
fractured nature. They are not necessarily crafted with a central theme in
mind, however, a thematic concern (danger, uncertainty, fear) does
seem to emerge as I piece my thesis together. But I don’t think about these things when I’m writing.
Sometimes I feel like I’m not thinking at all, and sometimes I’m thinking so
much it hurts.<b> </b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 11.45pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<b><span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Why do you write what you do?
</span></b><span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"> </span><br />
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Writing has been my passion for
as long as I can remember. (These days that’s not too long.) So has
photography. I've written off and on for years, it' in my blood, I come from a
family of logophiles. But I'm a late bloomer in terms of getting serious about
my writing. (Same for photography.) Now, I am in a program that offers me
an abundance of inspiration, advice, and the space and structure—which I
sorely need— to write. It’s been a fantastic experience and I do worry that,
without its structure, my space will become slippery and I will begin to
flounder. But I’ve come to realize that I <i>need</i> to write.
I write from a place of curiosity, to learn, to <i>know</i> and,
fortunately, I always want to <i>know</i>!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 11.45pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">I draw inspiration from the natural
world, particularly the mountains, seas, skies. Land, sea, sky: they are not
mute; they talk to me—we’re in a relationship, share a reverence for
one other, which is something I seek to emulate in my relationship with
humanity. As most of my writing is personal in nature, it consists of a lot of
interior thought—how the outer world affects the inner and vice versa—which is
oft obsessed with the interconnectedness of all things, with signifiers and
symbiosis. The lens through which I filter my experience of the world informs
how and what I write. When I say “lens” I mean that both metaphorically and
literally. Which leads me to process…<b> </b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 11.45pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<b><span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">How does your writing process work?
</span></b><span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"> </span><br />
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">I wish I could tell you that I rise each morning and
write. But I don’t. I’m criminally undisciplined. Sometimes I don’t write for
many days. Though I read every day, and am often lost in research (whether in
books or the interwebs). Then there’s the walk. It always starts with the
walk—a prelude to the actual act of writing. The walk sets a rhythm that
allows me to connect with the world and its swells and shifts. I
don’t leave home without my iPhone or camera, in the event I want to take
photographs while I’m walking. Photography is also a huge part of my writing
process. My handwriting is atrocious, I’m terrible at carrying a notebook, and
stuff just passes right through me, so I have come to understand that the only
way I’m able to take notes is through the lens of a camera. (Although I have,
on occasion, scratched something down on found paper in the middle of the
night. But I couldn’t later read it.) And photographing, like writing, is
also about <i>looking</i>, and I don’t think one can write well without
really looking.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 11.45pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626; font-family: Times; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">The interesting thing about the
picture-taking is that, more often than not, I manipulate the photo, apply various
filters, so the scene looks how it appeared to me in that time now gone, or how
I think it might have appeared to me, or to a deer or a loon or some other
living thing that is also looking and processing. Sometimes the result may
have a surreal quality. (But then, what is <i>real</i> is
relative, and we all have our own unique filters.) The filters may skew figures
or wash out color, may highlight little corners that tend to go unnoticed, or
may shade areas that don’t wish to be revealed. Mood is set, perspective is
established, and the resulting tone and feel informs point of view. And I
remember what I felt the moment I was present to snap it, remember what I
thought, where I came from and where I’m headed. Barthes said that the
“Photographer’s organ is not his eye … but his finger: what is linked to the
trigger of the lens, to the metallic shifting of the plates…” I think the
organ, the aesthetic organ, so to speak, is both eye and finger. Eye to the
world, finger to the trigger and keyboard.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #262626; font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Times;">Next up on the tour, look for posts from
four fantastic writers (and Bennington cohorts) who’ve agreed to accept
the torch: <a href="http://www.megangalbraith.com/"><span style="color: #0000f5;">Megan Culhane Galbraith</span></a>, Denton Loving, Susan
Pagani, and <a href="http://barrettwarner.com/"><span style="color: #0000f5;">Barrett
Warner</span></a>. </span><strong style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">Megan</strong><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">'s work has been appeared in </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">Hotel Amerika, </i><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">Danse Macabre</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">, </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">Drafthorse, The Notebook </i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">(a recent guest editor)</span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">, </i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">and </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">Rosebud.</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;"> Her essays have been featured on </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">51%</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;"> on WAMC-FM and have been twice selected for the Bookmarks Reading Series at The Arts Center in Troy, New York. She lives on a gorgeous farm in upstate New York, and knows how to wrangle a horse and throw a party. </span><strong style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">Denton, e</strong><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">xecutive editor of</span><em style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;"> Drafthorse,</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;"> and editor of </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">Motif V.4 - Seeking Its Own Level: An Anthology About Writings On Water</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">, is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection, </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">Crimes Against Birds</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;"> (Main Street Rag); he's also the recipient of several writing awards including the Gurney Norman Prize for Short Fiction, and the Alabama Writer’s Conclave Fiction Prize; his fiction, poetry and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">Birmingham Arts Journal, Appalachian Heritage, Minnetonka Review, Main Street Rag, Nantahala Review, </em><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">and in numerous anthologies including </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">Degrees of Elevation: Stories of Contemporary Appalachia</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">. And his southern accent woos us all. </span><strong style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">Susan</strong><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;"> is a journalist, editor extraordinaire (I know, she's handled my early drafts), foodie, and fiction and nonfiction writer. She recently coauthored </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">The Secret Atlas of North Coast Food </em><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">(Heavy Table, 2013), and contributed to </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">Minnesota Lunch</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;"> (Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2011). She can write about food and birds like nobody's business. </span><strong style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">Barrett,</strong><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;"> the author of </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">Til I'm Blue in the Face </em><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">(Tropos Press)</span><em style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">, and </em><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">the winner of Salamander's 2014 Fiction Contest, is an editor of </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">Free State Review</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">. His short stories, reviews, poems and lampoons of U. S. poet laureates have appeared in </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">Atticus Review</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">, </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">California Quarterly</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">, </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">Coal Hill Review</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">, </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">Comstock Review</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">, </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">Freshwater</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">, </span><em style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">Southeast Review</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 19px;">, and many others. He says he's lazy but his work says otherwise. These, my friends: I love them (even if they make me look bad). You will, too.</span></span></div>
Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-13595272537409412802014-07-08T18:25:00.000-04:002014-07-08T18:26:45.067-04:00Seeking Its Own Level<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-I692Pv9TQms/U7xn54OnsSI/AAAAAAAAFDA/L-qIRqrQFgw/s1600/Image+18.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-I692Pv9TQms/U7xn54OnsSI/AAAAAAAAFDA/L-qIRqrQFgw/s1600/Image+18.jpg" height="320" width="224" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Baskerville Old Face';">Friends,</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Baskerville Old Face;">This gorgeous anthology (two of my water photos appear on its covers!) has been released by <a href="http://www.motesbooks.com/">Motes Books</a>, and features writings from authors and Bennington Writing Seminars faculty </span><span style="font-family: 'Baskerville Old Face';">Amy Hempel, </span><span style="font-family: 'Baskerville Old Face';">Bret Anthony Johnston, Jill McCorkle, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and many of my friends and cohorts from BWS, as well as other emerging and renowned writers and poets.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Baskerville Old Face;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Baskerville Old Face;">David Joy, author of <i>Growing Gills: A Fly Fisherman's Journey</i>, says of <b>Motif <span style="font-size: x-small;">v4</span>: Seeking Its Own Level—an anthology <i>of</i> writings about water</b>:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: Baskerville Old Face;">"'Under the rocks are the words,' Norman Maclean wrote of the river, and in this water-themed volume of <i>MOTIF</i> all stones are thrown aside. What's left are the words. From established forces like Margaret Atwood to emerging voices like John Sealy, this anthology is a rare blend of literary current guaranteed to leave you breathless."</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">You can purchase your very own copy at <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Seeking-Its-Own-Level-Motif/dp/1934894559/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404857589&sr=1-1&keywords=seeking+its+own+level">Amazon.com</a> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Seeking-Its-Own-Level-Motif/dp/1934894559/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1404857589&sr=1-1&keywords=seeking+its+own+level" target="_blank">here</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">Many thanks to Denton Loving, editor, and Kate Larken at Motes Books for this stunning collection of <i>words on water</i>.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-67657520389752294262013-10-08T19:22:00.000-04:002016-10-21T17:43:53.323-04:00To Leap Again<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TaUbj2S9cXo/UlRBLT7bSSI/AAAAAAAAE44/6QJbF7g5RV4/s1600/Image+11.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="636" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TaUbj2S9cXo/UlRBLT7bSSI/AAAAAAAAE44/6QJbF7g5RV4/s640/Image+11.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">I look at the picture and it reminds me of what I’d done to
get it. The covered bridge in the photograph is pretty—timber trusses and
beams, tongue and groove vaulted ceiling, Burr arch—very New England. Had its
sides been wrapped with boards and batten it would be almost as quaint as the
historic covered bridges of Vermont. But it’s likely sturdier than most of
those old bridges—some of which are too structurally compromised to cross any
longer—as it’s constructed to merely allude to a simpler time. The wooden rail,
shiny in the left hand corner of the photo that I am now scrutinizing, runs the
length of the bridge and drops down to road level at either end. It sits just below
the Burr arch truss that sweeps over its span and against the beams and it is
only about three feet high. It doesn't look it though. Not in person. It looks
a bit higher in person. No, perhaps it looks lower. It looked to be, I had
thought, however high or low, something of which I could easily step on—for a
better view.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">What I had done first, that fateful Saturday evening, was
get out of my car at the bridge. I had just dropped my teenage daughter, Lulu,
off at a friend's house, and my husband and son were away, in Lancaster, for
the weekend. It was a lovely fall day and I had the evening to myself, some
free time to kill (<i>kill</i>, that's an odd thing to do with time), about
four hours, and I decided, before heading back home, that I would stop by Lincoln
Woods, take a few pictures, and then head on home to get some work done. Read.
Write. Clean the house. Do laundry. So I kissed Lu goodbye in the car, went
straight to Lincoln Woods and immediately parked by the bridge just yards from
the entrance. You might say the bridge marks the entrance. The beginning of a
serene wooded landscape. The entry point is as far as I got before I knew my
plans might change. It was such a lovely fall. Nothing more than photos is
really all I wanted and I determined there and then, standing in this tranquil
setting, that I’d be there a while, would explore the whole park (screw
everything else, it will always be there for the doing, especially the
laundry), take as many lovely photographs as possible. Home was not where I
desired to be; home was a place of calamity. Months earlier the kitchen had flooded
after the dishwasher's no-burst supply line cut loose, walls and wood flooring
were torn away, mold was found, the inside was dirty and dusty and displaced,
and I felt like I was living in squalor. And it had rained all day and now it
wasn't and the light was beautiful with early evening glow; the foliage like a
slick field of concentrated carotenoids, ripened pompoms of color.
Everything sprouting and dangling glistened.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Looking into the woods from this entrance point reminded me
of the October weekends I had spent with my grandmother, whom lived on a dairy
farm, and as I peered deeper into the woodland, beyond the bridge, I sensed a
sudden childlike awe taking hold of me. On those brisk weekend days, Grandmother
and I would hike through the woods bordering the farm to collect pinecones and
other gems—things my grandmother would sometimes have to identify for me—fallen
from the enormous conifers. Later, we would make wreaths with our takings, wiring
pinecones, seedpods, acorns and other dried botanicals to bent clothes hanger
frames. I thought of the crispness of those autumn woods, the smooth boulders on
which I had jumped and climbed that seemed to have fallen from the sky, plopped
in the woodland’s deep recesses, the crunch of autumn’s blanket beneath my feet
as I ran between swaying timber, and the smell of fresh pine tinged with the odor
of manure wafting up from the farm. Everything about the woods back then was
magical and mysterious, and when I entered it I always had the sensation of
something I can describe only as being put under the sort of spell that one
would never want broken. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">I walked across the road, and, near the wooden rail, looked
over the bridge to a silent stream running below. A better view could be gotten
from atop the rail—that was clear, and what became manifest was my impetuous
need to have that view. I placed my right foot up on the wood rail, which was
about eight inches wide, and tried to follow with my left, boosting up from my
toes, but I didn't have enough of a start since I was standing still. My shoe
choice didn't help—little brown ballet slippers. Truthfully, it wasn't as easy
as I thought it would be. I wasn't, it turns out, as strong as I used to
be and this surprised me. <i>What is this? I used to vault over a leather horse
and pirouette across the balance beam in gymnastics. I used to jump from rock
to rock. For chrissakes I used to fly across city rooftops when I was a kid.
Rooftops</i>! (This was close to forty years ago but I still had a spring in my
walk, I still <i>felt</i> limber and strong.) <i>Man I need to get back to the
gym. Boy I hate the gym.</i> That's what I thought, yes, I hated the gym and my
body was betraying me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Annoyed by my limitations, but only slightly deterred, I
worked out another approach: Step back from the rail. Step back, a slight
start, just a bit of speed and a hop onto the rail would get me up there. It
seemed a plausible plan. A running start and a bounce was all it would take. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Now at this point, you might ask why I did not simply walk
over to either end of the rail, where it bows down to the road, bend my foot up
onto it and pirouette across its top as if it <i>were</i> a balance beam—a
surface on which I had always felt comfortable maneuvering, my balance being
impeccable. I would tell you, though, if you asked, that this sensible idea
never occurred to me. My eyes locked on the rail, and everything but the rail
became a smudge—like the blurred edges of an old photograph, a tunnel vision
that narrowed my cognitive reflection of the scene. Standing on the paved road
of this pretty bridge, at the edge of luscious and enchanting surroundings, under
the tincture of fall, a spell had been cast upon me like the woodland spells of
yesteryear. My true age, the age I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">felt</i>
for that brief moment in time, was precisely the inverse of my fifty-two years.
(Though, truthfully, this feeling is not always short-lived and has, in the
past, proved a perilous idea to hold on to.) An uncontrollable optimism bubbled
in me, my body resonated with the same audacity and flushness as my backdrop
and, in an instant, a full <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">lionhearted </i>transformation
took place. I remembered all the hopping and jumping and leaping of my youth,
and, comparing what I used to do with what had to imminently be done to get the
perfect picture, hopping up on a wooden rail hardly seemed like some
insurmountable hurdle. Oh yes, <i>leap</i>, I thought. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">To leap again</i>! Yes, there was only one option: <i>leap</i>. (Lulu
would later ask me if I thought I was Spider Woman.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Looking back now, I see I may have gotten more than just a
slight start. I may have gotten a bit of a running start prompted by thoughts
of another familiar scene, that is, rooftop leaping with my younger brother.
Neighbors chasing us away. Hey, get off my garage! What do you think you're
doing, I'm going to call the police! (Today, my kids call them <i>popos</i>.
When I was a girl we called them pigs, and I think popos is much more civilized.)
And the neighbors certainly could have called the police, at least that is what
my brother and I imagined for we were stealing grapes off the neighbor's vines,
vines twisted around whitewashed arbors, arbors we had climbed and marauded,
and we were giddy with guilt. It was so easy—aloft, breathing in higher
altitude, fat grapes in hand, nothing underfoot, rooftop to rooftop. There had
been one close call: a toe hitting the edge of a tar shingle, a sudden jolt and
then a lunge forward to the safety of a black sea of sandpaper. Except for
scratched hands, we never got hurt doing it, though some grapes were squashed.
But, as we know, that was decades, a lifetime ago. Still, I don’t often get
hurt. Life is fairly uneventful except for, well, events. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Such as the time I fell and hit my head hard while skiing. I
probably had a concussion but I didn't see my doctor, I didn’t want to make a
big deal of it. Back then (that was a lifetime ago, too) nobody paid much
attention to a head injury. They shook them off. Nobody signed paperwork
confirming they had read all about the danger of concussion. If I <i>had</i>
seen my doctor back then, I may have healed quicker. I may not be so fuzzy
today.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">At six o'clock, as the sun lowered, I bent my knees slightly
and got my running start under the covered bridge, noting that the bridge did
not have a wooden floor, and too bad, for it would be even prettier and feel softer
underfoot than had it a wooden floor. Pavement is hard and cold and, on this
day, a bit slippery from the rains and the coating of wet crimson and gold
leaves. My stride, though, quickly narrowed to a skip, and I adjusted my body
above the hips to match it. Yes, three skips and...<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">...Ah, a leap!—I was in the air just like between
rooftops!—leading with the left (or was it the right?) leg, the other leg
trailing, one foot hitting the top of the wood rail. I felt so alive, body in
motion ascending upon the top of the rail, right or left leg following, soaring
above ground in unison with the mind's intent. Yes, yes, just as planned! The
air, sweet with the scent of plump Concord grapes, tasted the same as it did
from rooftops! I squeezed my iPhone tight like a stolen cluster of fruits,
and then my left (or right) leg came in for the landing, my knee like a hinge
thrusting my foot toward the wooden beam, and my foot stuck to its mount,
sliding in aside its size 9 mate...<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">...When, in that moment, the moment I stuck my mount, my
knees knocked together and I at once ascertained in a deep, panicky breath, a
sudden and horrifying loss of equilibrium. In the next second, a <i>second</i>,
my feet shifted and I teetered, my iPhone still in hand, reaching out
to nothing—no wall, no guard, no rooftop—and lurched toward the ground, and
down,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> down,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">
down</span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Insurmountable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">I hit the pavement hard, flattened like a grape in a crusher,
at a 45º angle from the rail, all the air from my lungs trapped in the same
panic I carried from the mount. My left elbow had dug into my abdomen just
below the rib cage and the palm of my left hand was scraped and pocked by small
stones. <i>Oh no, oh no, this didn't just happen</i>! The pain was sharp,
throbbing, spasmodic, it was everything an old body must feel when it
unexpectedly hits a hard surface with all its might and muscle and tendons
stretch and twist and bones splinter. A moment passed before I raised myself
from this, this <i>hurdle</i>, this terribly painful hurdle—more painful than
the ruptured ovarian cyst that had sent me to the ER two years earlier. But
unlike the agony and shock of this accident, the pain from the cyst had been building
momentum, orbiting through my gut for hours, and I had time to organize my
thoughts, chart the pain’s trajectory and prepare for the worst before it
engulfed me. I never went easily to the ER. I can tolerate a good deal of pain.
Once, as a young girl, I stayed in a soccer game long after my backside (the
part where the sun doesn’t shine) had been impaled with the branch of a broken
shrub. It was only after I had gone back to my keeper position in the goal,
wiped my dirty hand on the backside of my pants and saw blood on my palm that I
went running across the street to the old colonial. My mother quickly brought me
to the local ER where everybody discussed the merits of playing with the boys
as my little French derrière was sewn up.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> Did anyone see</span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">?
I was worried. Mortified, which was just how I had felt after being shoved into
the shrubbery; I felt like a child—having done something foolish, only I did
not have youth to blame. From my low vantage point on the ground, I scanned the
landscape and did not find anyone staring my way. In fact, I found no one
around. Thank goodness I was alone, for how silly, small and foolish I must
have looked jumping up on things of which I had often warned my kids to stay
off. I felt as foolish as a silver-haired man in a little red coupe (only he
would not feel foolish at all), as foolish as a woman far past her prime
wearing a mini-skirt (neither would she). Yes that's what I thought, as clichéd
as it was—had I become, like many other baby boomers around me, hooked to our
pitiable culture of youth, hypnotized to <i>deny</i> all signals of advanced
age? We are not in decline! We are really<i> </i>years younger, our
birth certificates lie, and if we are not we might as well be extinct! And yet,
I must confess, I might be tempted to wear the miniskirt—in a stylish wool
tartan—had I the nerve. Perhaps, after my children have gone off to college, I
would buy the coupe?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">There was a decision to be made now. I was up on my feet,
creased at the waist, gripping my sides with crossed arms around my chest. I
bent forward and back, turned from side to side, tiny, painful movements. I
wanted to cry but no tears would come, I was too angry with myself. <i>Now
what. Now what will become of this weekend</i>? <i>Should I go home</i>? <i>Should
I call the popos</i>? <i>911</i>? I didn't dare call my husband—I didn't want
to alarm him or my son. I limped over to the side of the bridge, the walkway
behind the rail, and made my way to the overhang above the stream where I stood
for a long while, gripping my midsection while chastising myself. When it
became apparent that the pain would not subside and I would have to soon leave,
I lifted my iPhone up to eye level and looked out over the stream, at its
dense, leafy fringe of rust and pine hues. I centered the pinhole
of the phone above the stream and pressed my thumb to the white circle three
times. Click, click, click. <i>There. I've got my lovely fall photos</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">My decision was to go home. But the pain my body registered
superseded pragmatism—or denial—I could barely walk, it hurt to move, to touch my
torso, to turn in any direction, and the car took me to the hospital as if
it wasn't my decision at all. I writhed in the car as the pain intensified, I
moaned, I ran two red lights, drivers glared at me with dirty looks, and several
cars honked at me. <i>So what</i>. <i>Fuck you</i>! Oh man, it hurt. It hurt
even if I didn't want to know, didn't want to believe it hurt. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">All the way to the hospital the accident looped through my
head making me shake incredulously; I simply couldn't believe I’d slipped or
done such a silly thing. Now I was worried that I had waited too long to go to
the hospital—that I wouldn’t be out by ten when I had to pick up Lu. I was too
embarrassed to call anyone for help. Should I have turned around? What had
happened to my judgment? But now in the hospital's parking lot I was
committed, having lifted myself from my car, a nurse in the lot saw me wobbling
and walked me to the ER.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Blood work first. Six vials. (Were they checking my blood
alcohol level? I'd drunk nothing but seltzer water and coffee all day, and I
was glad I hadn't gotten into the wine—I was saving my glass of red for when I
returned home.) X-rays—too many I thought. And to be on the safe side, a
contrast dye CAT scan to check for internal bleeding or other injuries. My pain,
tender in the belly below the ribs, had indicated spleen damage, and so the
doctor was concerned about the spleen, the physician's assistant confided. I
could have severed my spleen. Oh no, oh no, not that,<i> </i>I winced. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">That would mean immediate surgery. Surgery
on a Saturday night</i>!<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> What could be
worse</i>? I watched the clock over the nurse's station move its long arm down
to the six. It was now eight-thirty and I began to feel a chasm widen and sweep
me in, its jagged black walls consuming me. Will I be out before ten? I asked a
nurse anxiously. We'll see, the nurse said, staring at a monitor from behind
her desk, We're waiting for results.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Shaking the quiver from my voice, I called Lulu—I am fine,
don't worry, I'll keep you posted<i>—</i>bit my lip when Lu got
weepy, and then dialed up a friend. With the prospect of having my spleen
removed, back-up plans were now in order.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Moments before ten o'clock, a languid-looking young
physician shuffled beside me on my gurney just as I was expiring air from a spirometer
(precautionary measure to keep the lungs clear, prevent pneumonia) after
successfully keeping it in the "best" zone (like the assistant
had demonstrated, saying: <i>See good, better, best on this chamber? You
want the little yellow cap to float in the best zone. Pretend it's a hookah</i>,
<i>breathe in slowly, hold, then out, </i>prompting me to think, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a hookah, ha, right</i>! and I sucked the
air in, the cap rising and falling<i>, </i>and then let go the mouthpiece
and pushed air out, joking that I hadn't done anything like this since
college). <i>Eeerrr</i>, I whispered, holding the blue flexi-tube before
the doctor—for comic relief— like I was handing her a water pipe. She smiled
lightly with a sort of suspicious look that made me want to say,<i> Kidding! I
don't do that anymore, not in thirty years</i>! I was afraid I might implicate myself
in something I hadn't done; I was perfectly, perfectly, innocent. (Unlike the
woman on the other side of the curtain who was brought in handcuffed and
escorted by guards in gray clothing.) Besides they had the blood work to
prove it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">My failed attempt to make light of the situation, to make
the young physician laugh, made me self-conscious of the totality of what I had
done—dismissing the boring and brutal truths of my advanced age, behaving like
a teenager and paying the consequences. I couldn't possibly be more than a
half-century-old; I didn't feel it—at least not up until this very moment, when
the young physician looked at me with her long face of sympathy, as if I were
as fragile and historic as the old covered bridges of New England—and in <i>that</i>
moment I knew it had to be true, I <i>was</i> old, my body was not as strong or
as limber or as resilient as it once had been. The doctor straightened her
posture and told me that I would be able to go home. My ribs were badly
bruised, <i>contusions</i> was the word, but I would be all right.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">But I did not feel all right. Nothing seemed all right—the
fall, forgetfulness, moments of ambiguous limpidity—nothing about me felt sharp or balanced. I was getting the picture, a timeworn
version of myself, like a daguerreotype portrait—dark, silvered, antiquated—too
mature for miniskirts or sports cars or running around and leaping onto or over things. Everything does have a time, doesn't it? There was a time I leapt over rooftops like a cat , a time I swung from tree
branches as if they were uneven parallel bars, and there was even a time when I
skied five, six months pregnant (but never fell!), yes, there was a time when I had
done many foolish things, thinking myself invincible, and now was a time to breath deeply and digest the truth: I wasn’t any longer as limber or quick as I once had been. I was now a
cautious skier, and with each passing winter I enjoyed the quiet and
peace of skiing cross-country, along wide trails and fields, more than racing
down icy slopes. It now takes me longer to read a book, to fill a page with words,
to formulate plans and execute them. The truth of the matter is that some
things are not as simple as they used to be, and the creeping progression of
years has caught up to me, and I would have to accept and adapt to the alterations
of mind and body that coincide with aging, embrace my new limitations. After all,
should we not, in our advanced years, be freed from the need to have to prove <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">anything</i> any longer? Perhaps it was, it <i>is</i>, time
to let go of this persistent youthful image of myself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">I got in my car and back on the road, feeling like I had
regained some control over myself, and picked up Lulu, who plead with me to let
her drive, never mind she was too young to have her license. Her talk caused me
more discomfort—I didn’t want her to think me helpless. I snapped: I can do it,
don't worry! I didn't take any pain medication at the hospital! Enough! You
will listen! I was in control, yes I was.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Sunday morning I woke to a terrible headache and a call from
the hospital, someone telling me that the radiologist had found a fracture in my
tenth rib, and continued rest was the cure.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">On the couch, sore and sallow, I wondered if I would, or should,
ever leap again. I’d never before broken a bone, I told Lu. Lots of sprains,
scrapes and knocks, but no breaks, and I marveled at hearing myself say these
words, how it is that I managed to live through decades without one serious
injury. What the rib break indicated, I was sure now, was a <i>brake— </i>a
signal to yield to the years. And the headache was a trumpet in my ear, a high
decibel warning that I was moving closer to extinction. Soon, like the old
photos, I would be only a memory, and then, nothing, nothing at all.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">I looked at Lu and smiled, <i>Is </i>there a Spider
Woman? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Lulu scanned the picture of the bridge on my phone, gave me
a hard look, and said, Don't go out alone like that again. Not ever again.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
</div>
Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-53654449498489952322013-05-24T10:45:00.000-04:002014-07-08T17:21:34.790-04:00"Friday Night Frolic" — Meet Me at the Playground<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Times; line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-size: 15pt;">[</span><i>An FNF repost—initially
published in 2011—because I love these guys, and they know how to usher spring
into summer. Memorial Day is for remembering the past, commemorating and
thanking our loved ones, and glimpsing into future's shiny
possibilities. It's also the time of year that marks the beginning of days
that open wide and warm, reminding us that the world is chockfull of beautiful
things.</i>]</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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At the playground, or in the park. Or anywhere the sun's warmth and the cool, breezy air conspire to liberate those heavy burdens tucked in your worn, leather satchel. (Gosh, that arm must be sore.) You might want to swap the satchel for something light, like a crisp canvas tote bag filled with peaches and champagne and a Frisbee. Wear your All Stars. Or your woven slip-on sidewalk surfers. Or flip-flops. Or nothing at all. Bring your felt Indiana Jones hat, or a baseball cap, or a straw fedora, or anything brimmed and easily stolen by the wind.</div>
<br />
It's been a long time.<br />
<br />
How will I know you? Will you still look the same?<br />
<br />
Remember my small Brooklyn Heights apartment on Kane, where I gazed at Lady Liberty from the third floor paint-chipped window? I could walk to the park from there. A long walk. I won't do it like that, though. Not this time. I want to get there quickly. I'll take the subway from Cobble Hill to Prospect Park. (If I can still do that. If it's still there.) Up Flatbush. I always liked the underground surprises along Flatbush.<br />
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I'll be waiting for you. At the swings. Adorned in a long, gauzy skirt, white t-shirt, beige linen blazer and crinkle scarf. And flip-flops. We'll spread a colorful, vintage Peruvian blanket under a large singing sycamore, pop the cork and consume fuzzy fruit and bubbly. Our cheeks will blush with spring's lustrous shade<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 17px;">—</span>golden rays and mossy, ripening trees, cherry plumaged cardinals and deep blue, blossoming crocuses.<br />
<br />
Late afternoon you'll decide to pull the old drum sticks from your tote and bang them against the tin filled with chocolate mouse layer cake. I'll be amazed you've kept them all these years. I'll want to cry, but I won't. The ice cream guy will come by with his cart and you'll buy two vanilla bean ice cream cones, and we'll toss the Frisbee while licking streams of sweet goo racing down the waffled spires, running through our fingers. We'll put thick blades of green grass between our thumbs and blow. If it's not playing on someone's transistor radio we'll still hear music in the air. We might even sing. We might even dance.<br />
<br />
Then we'll head over to the playground. Remember how we used to play? Hopscotch or jump rope or the see-saw or monkey bars... You used to dangle from that damned center bar and never let me pass. We'd spin on the little merry-go-round 'til we were dizzy.<br />
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Remember some kid almost lost a leg on that spinny thing? We won't do any spinning this time. But we might hop on that little springy frog. We might go for a slide on the big one with bumps in the middle, and jump through recycled tires. (Though we might also need some Dramamine to do it all.)<br />
<br />
Or perhaps we'll just sit on the colorful, vintage Peruvian blanket, and eat ripe peaches. And layered cake. And vanilla bean ice cream. And we'll listen to spring's symphony: birds, swaying trees, the little waterfall, babies on the carousel, and pedal boats on the pond.<br />
<br />
And get to know one another again.<br />
<br />
When it's silent, in that shared-grin moment, we'll know it's time to pack up our bags. We'll meander past the playground one last time. You'll be whistling. I'll challenge you to a monkey bar duel. But this time, I know you'll let me pass. This time you might even hold my hand. In mid-air. As I pass. Your arm will no longer be sore.<br />
<br />
We'll remember that we were always layers of percussion and harmony.<br />
<br />
We'll still like each other. A lot.<br />
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I'll want you to take the subway back home with me. So we can get there quickly.<br />
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Percussion and Harmony.<br />
<br />
(And lots more over at <i><a href="http://pearlandthebeard.com/">Pearl and the Beard</a>. </i>Go visit!)Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-17014908575323634422013-05-09T20:11:00.000-04:002016-10-21T17:43:32.063-04:00What the Dogwood Says<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> When our
dogwood tree had a limb pulling away from its slim, moss-mottled trunk, my
husband, Michael, shored it up with a supersized rubber band and an ochre
poultice that made it look as if a jar of mustard had shattered up its scaly
arm. Watching Michael work on the rosy-petaled tree reminded me of the day
Father planted dogwoods in the back and front yards of the old colonial that
was on Collins Street years ago. He had acquired the trees from two elderly
spinsters, with whom he worked at Falk Brothers, Clothiers, downtown—a
part-time job he kept to supplement his teaching income. The sisters were
looking for another home for their young dogwoods, and were happy to give them
to anyone willing to take them away. So my handyman Father, always one to jump
on a deal, went over to the sisters’ place with his long handled round-point
shovel and dug up the trees.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Before the dogwoods, the front and
back yards were bare except for a bright pink azalea and a mauve mountain
laurel that Father had also dug up from elsewhere. The young trees with their
dainty petals made the yards look regal, and gave me a sense of being firmly
planted in our quarter-acre city lot homestead. Each spring after Easter mass
some adult would take photos of my sisters and brothers and me fitted in our
Sunday best—girls in white dresses, gloves and straw bonnets, and boys in beige
long shorts, jackets and ties— under the creamy blossoms of the dogwood out
back. We could always count on finding the golden egg nearby.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I’ve since learned that dogwood
roots are shallow, which would seem to make it less stable, more vulnerable to
strong winds that blow in. And I wonder, now, if I should try to find meaning
in this. If it is somehow a represents the state of my relationship with
Michael, which sometimes feels tenuous, fragile, as if we had neglected to lay
down thick roots, or to provide the proper nutrients to strengthen them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Michael and I didn’t plant the dogwood in our front yard.
The front beds had already been landscaped when we moved in our builder’s spec
house. Plantings were low to the ground and generously spaced, just as a
prudent landscaper would advise. I could see the prickly English holly behind
the weeping Japanese cherry. The rose of Sharon—my<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> tree of breath</i>—with its flat, luscious blossoms, stood upright
until it hit the second story. The fire bush was not on fire. The young hydrangea
teased us with the promise of blue mopheads. Then, my husband, gung ho to have
a lush, mature arrangement of flora wrapping the front of our house added to
the builder’s plantings, and now the beds are as crowded and unruly as Macy’s
at Christmastime. Greenery is cannibalizing itself, a mass of roots zapping
nutrients—the <i>life</i>—out of the mulch-covered soil. My rose of Sharon, two
stories high, lunges toward Providence. My hydrangea delivered dead stalks
clawing at Heaven. There are species in the way back with which I am no longer
familiar. Father warned against this.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Michael likes the overgrown beds. I
like to see out my front windows. Michael doesn’t like to snip the bramble. I
don’t like to watch plants suffocate or consume one another. So every once in a
while, when Michael is not looking, I grab the hedge trimmers and cut into the
crowd. This is a game we (or at least <i>I</i>) have been playing for a dozen
years. Sometimes he notices and gets sore at me, sometimes he doesn’t. Most of
the time he simply ignores the situation, and I grow more aggravated with the
overgrown beds and his failure to properly care for them—according to my
standards, that is. Even our own king-size bed is cluttered, extra pillows and
blankets in all sizes. This game is played out in many arenas: the yard, the
house, the budget, the kids. I state a concern, and Michael, if he is not also
concerned, ignores it. But nowhere is it played with more vigor than in the
front beds, where the level of neglect is beyond my understanding. I wonder if
most marriages are like this—Venus and Mars—and god forbid if the two planets should
ever collide. I make mental notes of our little conflicts, often I forget them,
sometimes I can no longer store them in my mind, so I write.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>My former sharp-witted,
perspicacious, writing advisor told me to search for meanings and opportunities
that may not have been apparent to me in my first drafts— thing that might
accentuate or heighten the awareness of a certain feeling. Dig deeper, he said,
but don’t <i>telegraph</i> the meaning with <i>hyperbole</i> (hyperbole—ha, <i>me</i>?),
or push hard to impart significance. Rather, the deeper meaning must speak for
itself, and I must allow it to present itself to me “to record with a colder
eye.” He is right. Why I don't do this in my first drafts, when my tendency is
to search for truth, meaning, in everything, I don't know. Maybe I'm afraid of
what I'll find.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I do know this: truth makes for
better writing.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">There was a time when my watching eye was very cold. Very,
very cold, and I could have recorded most anything I observed with the
harshness of an ice storm. But as I’ve aged, become a mother, my view of the
world has widened and warmed—it is not as sinister as I once perceived it, and
I am less likely to see it through cold eyes. I think about the shallow roots
of our dogwood, and realize that shallowness isn’t necessarily an indicator of
weakness. Yes, a shallow-rooted tree may easily topple in a hurricane, but its
roots won’t clog drainage fields, choke its neighbor, or crumble a home’s
foundation like some bigger, more showy trees might. Shallow roots, as in the
case of the pretty dogwood that’s fixed in our front bed, make for beautiful,
blushing petals that fold out to reveal the sparkling fruit within. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Still, shallow roots or not, our shrubbery is now wildly out
of control and beyond snipping—it would take a chain saw to lob off the
overgrowth—and neither one of us is qualified to remedy or mitigate the disorder.
What we need is a professional. I once called in a gardener friend to mediate our
front beds dispute. She agreed with me that we needed to cut the shrubbery way
back, and suggested removing some of the plants and bushes. Ah, an answer! Better
for the house, she said. We were giving all sorts of pests an invitation to
enter. All they needed do is march across the bridge of branches and leaves and
flowers abutting the wood siding of our home. (This would explain the ant
problem.) Yes, so true! I’d said to her. It’s the same advice Father had given
me—sometimes I wonder why I hadn’t married someone as handy as Father was. Michael
listened to the gardener’s advice but seemed little convinced, and so continued
to manage the property on his own terms. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">This September will mark our twentieth wedding anniversary.
We met three years before we were married. But for all our time together, I sometimes
feel that there’s little we really know of each other. We are apart each
weekday with our separate agendas, and like most families, the evenings and
weekends are full with domestic duties and obligations, rushing the kids off to
soccer or basketball or wherever it is they need to go. We argue about things
like front beds and light bulbs and deck furnishings. Too much, too little, not
right! I don’t know this man, I think. What’s become of the man I met all those
years ago? He’s changed. Or I’ve changed. The answer is, we have both changed,
of course. And some of the youthful idiosyncrasies that I then thought so
endearing in him—for instance, his easygoing, unhurried disposition, his
pensive if sometimes detached demeanor—now annoy the hell out of me. Especially
when things don’t get done when and how they should get done, which, I know, is
however <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I</i> would like them to be done.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">If these things are in fact metaphors—shallow roots,
disorderly beds—for our relationship, there are other metaphors, too. I suppose
it bodes well that Michael repaired the dogwood tree. I suppose that my cutting
away at bushes is a symbolic gesture akin to cutting away at Michael, opening
him up, attempting to gain access to what might be at the heart of his often detached,
pensive self. There’s a lot there, I know. His tolerance for the overgrown beds
might be his way of celebrating the beauty, the lushness, of a wild thing—a
thing that needs no confinement. But I’m torn about this metaphor, whether it’s
accurate or necessary, or whether I am <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">telegraphing</i>
meaning.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The dogwood’s fruit, I have learned,
symbolizes endurance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I read a Christian fable claiming
that the Romans used the strong and durable dogwood to make crosses on which
criminals like Jesus were crucified; and so the rose tint of a dogwood’s four-petal
flower—the vague shape of a cross—supposedly reveals the “blush of shame” for
how the tree was used, which made me wonder if my literate, Roman Catholic
Father had been aware of it. I doubt he’d have given it much credence, or
thought to root a dogwood in his back yard as a symbolic gesture, he was too
pragmatic, though he did like to recount a good moral story. If anything, he
planted the dogwoods because they were cheap—costing him his labor only, which,
knowing Father, made the acquisition all the more gratifying. And since we know
that the dogwood is a strong and durable tree, he could count on his effort
paying off. The bonus was the graceful shapes, the way those trees gently
opened to the world.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Yes, the roots of a dogwood may be
shallow, but they run at great lengths, anchoring trunk to earth with a heaving,
vascular bundle of tubes. The tree grows wildly, wantonly, holds on for years, and
even adult foliage teases the eye coquettishly. Nearly fifty years later, the
old dogwoods still stand in the front and back yards of the colonial in which I
grew up. Each year, they are a bit taller, a bit more regal, the petals that
cup the succulent fruit pinker and whiter. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Yet, deeper meaning—if there is a deeper
meaning—too often eludes me. I know I could keep digging into the dark, moist soil
of those overcrowded beds. I might find ugly, wiggly things, a labyrinth of
spider webs, or things that pinch or sting. But for the time being, I shall take
our now blossoming dogwood, on the surface, as a good sign. Michael’s no handyman
like Father, but the golden goo he applied to the tree has cured to a hard
gloss, and the dogwood’s arm is holding tight, as if to say it has no mind to
let go. I might be wrong, but I don’t think it will. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Vi93B9nO6sY/UYxdI1AqwZI/AAAAAAAAEzA/30Noh4xlH2Y/s1600/Image+29.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Vi93B9nO6sY/UYxdI1AqwZI/AAAAAAAAEzA/30Noh4xlH2Y/s1600/Image+29.jpg" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-33741171600297554822013-04-13T16:51:00.000-04:002014-07-08T17:11:52.459-04:00The Magnolia Has Come AroundIn such a way that not I, nor words, can express. Just look. And listen.<br />
<br />
No. Wo<span style="font-size: x-small;">r</span><span style="font-size: x-small;">d</span><span style="font-size: xx-small;">s</span>.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18px; text-align: left;">"<b>But to say what you want to say, you must create another language and nourish it for years and years </b></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18px;"><b>with what you have loved, with what you have lost, with what you will never find again</b>." ~George </span><span style="line-height: 18px;">Seferis</span>Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-8756142314929114982013-04-02T16:10:00.001-04:002013-08-19T13:38:51.025-04:00The Month of Rains<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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April has come to mean many things to me. April is often when we head south during school vacation, taking time for this little family to regroup in a warmer and less hurried setting. Although this year Max is taking Drivers Ed courses during his week off from school. <i>Driver's Ed for chrissakes</i>!<br />
<br />
Two years ago this month I wrote about Mary Gaitskill in <i><a href="http://www.suburbansoliloquy.com/2011/04/startling-subterrane-of-demons.html" target="_blank">The Startling Subterrane of Demons</a>, </i>and published<i> </i>eight other blog posts, including a little ditty about the <a href="http://www.suburbansoliloquy.com/2011/04/friday-night-frolic-la-la-la-of-anodyne.html" target="_blank">la la la of anodyne</a>, and a family trip to <a href="http://www.suburbansoliloquy.com/2011/04/force-of-gravity.html" target="_blank">Niagara Falls</a> (<i>slowly we turned, step by step</i>...). <i> </i>Last year, in April, I wrote about <a href="http://www.suburbansoliloquy.com/2012/04/temerity-of-light.html" target="_blank">losing my friend </a>Sheila, and a <a href="http://www.suburbansoliloquy.com/2012/04/friday-night-frolic-whats-happening.html" target="_blank">family trip to D.C</a>. It wasn't the best of months, yet there was still beauty, a lovely diffused April glow, in its lengthened days. This April has not offered much time to blog, try as I may. And so...<br />
<br />
Word of the day is <i><a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/splenetic?s=t" target="_blank">splenetic</a></i>. One meaning: <i>melancholy </i>(though obsolete).<br />
<br />
April is rainy. Around this time, two years ago, I told you that <a href="http://www.suburbansoliloquy.com/2011/04/barometers-of-character.html" target="_blank">Max loves a rainy day</a>. But that the rains tend to hurl melancholy straight to my mind's warped door. The magnolia has not yet come around. (True. I just looked.) This time last year, I told you <i><a href="http://www.suburbansoliloquy.com/2012/04/april-hath-thirty-days.html" target="_blank">April hath thirty days</a></i>. It hasn't changed.<br />
<br />
(If I'm not mindful I could eat a whole 12.60 ounce bag of frozen m&ms in one sitting—in which case, I might become <i>splenetic</i>. In a different way.)<br />
<br />
April is <a href="http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/41" target="_blank">National Poetry Month</a>.<br />
<br />
(This could be <i>The Blog of Links</i>.)<br />
<br />
This month, Lulu submitted her first poem for publication. She's been writing lots of poems. As <a href="http://www.suburbansoliloquy.com/2012/04/april-hath-thirty-days.html" target="_blank">she did last year</a> and the year before that and the year before...<br />
<br />
Here's one she wrote today:<br />
<br />
<i><u><span style="color: #20124d; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Pages</span></u></i><br />
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<span style="color: #20124d; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Dribble dribble drop<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #20124d; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There’s another thought<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #20124d; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">One, then two, then three<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="color: #20124d; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This is only mine</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
It was pouring yesterday when I picked her up from lacrosse practice. Rain and lightning and high winds, barrels and cardboard and all kinds of debris flying across the roads. She tossed her equipment in the trunk, jumped in the front seat and happy sing-songed, <i>April showers bring May flowers</i>!<br />
<br />
Yes, indeed.<br />
<br />
(I'll let you know when the magnolia comes around.)<br />
<br />
The picture of her that tops this post was taken in an April of more than a few years back. Maybe six or seven. Or eight. I can't remember. But it was April all those years ago, and we were in Gettysburg. Lemme tell you, if the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in D.C. doesn't get to you (I know: if you are human the VVMW got to you), Gettysburg will. <br />
<br />
After a <i>splenetic</i> meltdown in April in Gettysburg of all those years ago, we bought Lu a wood stock, steel barrel, pink Lady Kentuckian musket. Her brother had gotten a toy rifle the day before (against my wishes) and, thanks to her father, there was no saying <i>No </i>to her. We walked <a href="http://encyclopediavirginia.org/pickett_s_charge" target="_blank">Pickett's Charge</a>, where this photo was taken, and could feel the low drumming of that war. <i>Melancholy.</i> There were boys on that field. Boys.<br />
<br />
Emily Dickinson was thirty-three years old on July 3, 1863, the day Pickett and his troops charged across the open field. Though miles away in Amherst, MA, Dickinson was deeply moved by the events of the Civil War which made its way into her poetry, in poems like <i><a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=jNJlK1jzySUC&pg=PA729&lpg=PA729&dq=my+portion+is+defeat+today&source=bl&ots=CUslfpdcuJ&sig=77VcOiFKYixGOdP0hPIz-XuVS28&hl=en&sa=X&ei=dDFbUa34NMrk4AO2mYHIDA&ved=0CGQQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=my%20portion%20is%20defeat%20today&f=false" target="_blank">My Portion is Defeat—today</a></i>.<br />
<br />
But it is this beautiful Dickinson poem (that has nigh a drop of rain but water, water everywhere), the unabashed wildness of nature, a long, long way from Gettysburg, war, the wildness of man, that I'll share with you today:<br />
<br />
<i><a href="http://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/115/the-poems-of-emily-dickinson-series-two/4459/nature-poem-23-in-the-garden/" target="_blank">Poem 23: In the Garden</a></i><br />
<br />
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: 'Josefin Slab', serif; line-height: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 9px 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
A bird came down the walk:<br />
He did not know I saw;<br />
He bit an angle-worm in halves<br />
And ate the fellow, raw.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: 'Josefin Slab', serif; line-height: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 9px 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
And then he drank a dew<br />
From a convenient grass,<br />
And then hopped sidewise to the wall<br />
To let a beetle pass.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: 'Josefin Slab', serif; line-height: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 9px 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
He glanced with rapid eyes<br />
That hurried all abroad, —<br />
They looked like frightened beads, I thought;<br />
He stirred his velvet head</div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: 'Josefin Slab', serif; line-height: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 9px 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Like one in danger; cautious,<br />
I offered him a crumb,<br />
And he unrolled his feathers<br />
And rowed him softer home</div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: 'Josefin Slab', serif; line-height: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 9px 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
Than oars divide the ocean,<br />
Too silver for a seam,<br />
Or butterflies, off banks of noon,<br />
Leap, plashless, as they swim.</div>
<div style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-family: 'Josefin Slab', serif; line-height: 1.2em; outline: 0px; padding: 9px 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="color: #351c75;">Happy April. Happy Spring. Read poetry! Write poems!</span></div>
Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-9558220685864689092013-02-14T15:10:00.001-05:002016-10-21T17:44:08.119-04:00We Are In Lockdown<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mU89gMV06cE/UR0g5LMQCMI/AAAAAAAAEP4/TH-6MTc2dLA/s1600/Image+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-mU89gMV06cE/UR0g5LMQCMI/AAAAAAAAEP4/TH-6MTc2dLA/s640/Image+2.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<i>We are in lockdown.</i></div>
<i><br /></i>
<i>The police are on campus investigating an issue.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>The children are safe.</i><br />
<br />
These were not the precise words. They may have been arranged differently: We're in lockdown mode. Police are in the building and the matter is under control. The children are not in danger.<br />
<br />
Or: We are calling to notify you that the school is currently in a lockdown situation. Police are here. The children are safe and there is no danger.<br />
<br />
<i>Lockdown. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Police.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Safe.</i><br />
<br />
It was 8:08 AM when my cell phone rang this morning, and it didn't matter what the hell the exact words or sequence of words were. Something, a robot, a machine, dialed my cell phone number because that is the number on the emergency contact list kept on record at the school that my children attend. The school is in lockdown, the recorded voice announced, the school is in lockdown, police are there, children are safe.<br />
<br />
My bones froze. A second, maybe two, I could not move. Then, <i>Newtown, Columbine, Virginia Tech, Taft Union, Chardon High</i>. No, it can't be that. They are safe. <i>Safe</i>. Upstairs, Michael dressed for work. I ran, ran, don't remember the movement of my feet or ascending the risers, the rush was too great.<br />
<br />
"Something's going on at school," I said to him, "but the kids are safe. I'm not panicking<i>."</i> I pressed my hands together, my wrists, the veins, trembling, my heart's chamber os...cil...lat...ing. Something whirred in my head, like the fan Michael turns on each night. White noise. A scramble. <i>No, I won't get in the car. No. I will wait for more news. No, I will call my neighbor. Her son is in the same school. The same lockdown. The same police. Safe.</i><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">"What? Let's find out what's going on," <span style="line-height: 200%;">he said
bluntly—his sober response an attempt to contain alarm.</span></span><br />
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<!--StartFragment--><!--EndFragment--><span style="font-family: inherit;">I
punched numbers on the same phone that had only moments prior transmitted
horrific words. My neighbor hadn't gotten the message. I called another neighbor, another mother. She hadn't gotten the</span> message. More whirring: <i>How does this work? Who gets the messages? What does one do with the words? I'll call Lulu. No. What if she is crouched on the floor, in a corner, or under her desk, and her cell phone rings and the killer hears it? No! No. If she plays by school rules, her phone will not be on. It will be in her locker. No. Kids break the rules. She'll have it. But it will be on silent. I won't call. She's safe. Why are my eyeballs tearing? Is this magical thinking? No. I won't panic. Lu is safe. Max is safe. They are safe.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>The woman who cleans my house every month showed up at the door. I'd forgotten she was coming. Information about the lockdown is trickling in via text, she tells me. She knows someone who has a daughter or a niece, a relative, at the school. Rumor. Conjecture. Guesses. This is not what the school wants, I'm sure. They want LOCKDOWN. Do you know what that means? It means the opposite of evacuation. It means you are in a situation known as a <i>state of emergency</i>. An emergency holding. You are put in a hole, a quiet cell. A dark, silent hole. Hiding. Something outside of the hole is threatening you. Something threatening is happening. You don't know what's happening because you are not allowed to communicate with anyone within or without the hole. The hole is a <i>safe</i> place where you remain down and locked.<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I <i>cracked</i> and sent a text to my son. I know Max's phone, if he has it, is on silent. It is <i>never</i> on ring. In a large whale-like bubble, I thumbed (praying this wouldn't be the one day his ringtone was on): <b>Are you ok? School is in lockdown what's going on?</b> He thumbed back: <b>Fine ya. A drug search, lk 5 cop cars.</b></span><br />
<i><br /></i>
Then Lulu's text: <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>Ya, it might have been somebody with a gun... But we r all good now so it's fine. :)</b></span><br />
<br />
My body arched into a reflexive exhale, a warm, wheezy stream of air tumbling furiously from my lungs. Still. Lockdown. Anything can happen. Anything, terrible things, have happened. Columbine, Virginia Tech, Newtown... What kind of messages did they receive?<br />
<br />
(So far, in 2013, within the first thirty-one days of this new year alone, there have been eight, <a href="http://www.thetrumpet.com/article/10345.18.0.0/society/crime/a-rapid-increase-in-school-shootings-in-2013" target="_blank"><i>eight</i>, school shootings</a> in the United Sates of America.)<br />
<br />
Students began posting on Twitter: <span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><b>This is for <i>realz</i>! #lockdown; Valentines day and I'm stuck in the corner of TC #romantic #lockdown #BASICBITCHTWEET; this will be a valentines day to remember #codegreen; a senior went psycho and the popos had to come #wesurvived; Police supervised lockdown #awesome #CodeGreen</b></span>.<br />
<br />
On Facebook, kids were updating their statuses: I'm scared. I'm hiding in a corner. We're in lockdown.<br />
<br />
At 8:32 AM, my iPhone rang and lighted with another recorded voice message from the school, this time notifying parents, guardians, loved ones, people, human beings who love those kids <i>more than anything else in the entire fucking world,</i> that all was fine. The children <i>are</i> safe. Lockdown has ended. Everything is under control.<br />
<br />
An email followed from the school principal which gave me only a vague idea of what happened within or around the school's brick walls. He wrote that their security procedures were put into place as soon as the situation called for it. A protocol was followed which required the lockdown. The lockdown ended uneventfully, the situation addressed.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"In these times we have to treat every concern with the highest level of response necessary to ensure the safety of all."</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">God. Help us.</span></span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span"><span style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 15px;">The principal</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 15px;"> had been tipped off by some, I don't know how many, smart, thoughtful, concerned students as
to a possible—a possibly very real—threat. He took these concerns seriously and responded the way the world must respond now: swiftly, </span></span><span style="line-height: 15px;">peremptorily, </span></span></span><span style="line-height: 15px;">judiciously.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 15px;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 15px;">I am so thankful for this. But sad for the world. And I want the details. </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 15px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Details. As if the details will offer me comfort. Control.</span></span></span><br />
<br />
Now, more stories unfold, evolve, about a quiet, long-haired boy sending messages into the world, trigger warnings, that he was coming undone. Loosened? Mad? Disturbed? Who knows! How many of us are confused and distressed and angry? I can't say what the boy did or articulated. I don't know, I don't wish to engage in conjecture. Truly, I don't wish to engage with anything at the moment. Just the keys of my laptop. It's all I can do to stay sane. Everything else I'd planned for today is <i>finis</i>. We are all <span style="font-family: inherit;">so close to sudden ruin. Disaster. Immunity is nonexistent. Safety? Safety is an illusion. Vulnerable is what we are. We don't know what's around the corner. <i>In</i> the corner. Anything can happen at any moment. Any day. <span style="line-height: 200%;">Valentine’s
Day. While exchanging chocolates and candied hearts.</span></span><br />
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<!--EndFragment--><br />
Joan Didion's words haunt me:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Life changes in the instant.<br /><span style="font-family: inherit;">The ordinary instant.</span></i></blockquote>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;">When my
children leave the house I say two things:<i> “</i>I love you. Be safe.” All I really should say is, "I love
you." <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"> I love you, I love you, I <i>love</i>
you.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment--><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #073763;">[The photo above was taken with my iPhone at the local library—a former Monastery.]</span></span>Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-17336070116258950102013-02-01T17:10:00.001-05:002013-08-18T12:46:42.642-04:00Hitting the Triangle at the Right Time<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2M0qSD2gDpE/UQvwrShjNFI/AAAAAAAAEzA/wmqIViY0kC4/s1600/Image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2M0qSD2gDpE/UQvwrShjNFI/AAAAAAAAEzA/wmqIViY0kC4/s1600/Image.jpg" /></a></div>
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">I'm in the dining room, the warmest room in the house, back on Blogger, tapping the keys, attempting to hit </span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18px;">something, <i>anything</i></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"> (</span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">maybe it's the coffee pot—</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">which I've already too often hit—or, </span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">maybe it's the pavement that beckons me, <i>walk</i>! or, it might be—or should be—the books, or </span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">maybe it's my damn forehead)</span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"> at the right moment. </span></span></span><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><i>Smack</i>. Harder. <i><span style="font-size: large;">Smack</span></i>. <span style="font-family: inherit;">As it turns out, I hit my forehead more than anything else. And it hurts. </span></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">This snippet, from a paper cutout taped to a black and white photo found on Bennington alum <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/mary-ruefle" target="_blank">Mary Ruefle</a>'s </span></span><a href="http://www.maryruefle.com/" target="_blank">website</a><span style="color: #333333; font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">, was this morning's flash moment</span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18px;">:</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;"><br /></span>
<i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">Mine is like the role of a triangle player in an orchestra. </i><br />
<i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">Every once in a while, I have to hit the triangle at the right time</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">British musician/producer/composer Nitin Sawhney's answer to</span><strong style="background-color: white; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </strong><span style="background-color: white; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><i>How does the orchestra's triangle player earn a living</i>?</span><strong style="background-color: white; background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; color: #333333; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </strong></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18px;">(From </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18px;"><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/mar/02/popandrock.photography" target="_blank">The Guardian</a></i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18px;">):</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;">No on</span></i></span>e in an orchestra is paid by how many notes they play. They're paid, and rightly so, for the amount of time they spend in rehearsal and on stage. You might think a triangle player's job was pretty easy compared to, say, a first violin, but just think of counting all those bars' rest and what happens if you come in wrong.</span></blockquote>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sometimes, I experience extended moments wherein the weight of time flattens me. </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">The brows are </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">thinning</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">, people! </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I don't want to come in all wrong, I haven't the time! Jesus, how long do I have to wait before hitting it? And can you imagine if a writer were paid for the number of hours she put in sitting at her desk? <i>Rehearsing</i>? <i>Waiting</i>? Smacking her head with the palm of her hand. Repeatedly. <i>Rehearsing some more.</i> <i>Waiting, waiting, waiting</i>. To hit it. </span></span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">Smack, <span style="font-size: large;">smack, </span><span style="font-size: x-large;">smack</span><span style="font-size: large;">. </span></i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It might actually be worth all those hours of </span></span><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">self-flagellation.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;"><i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></i></span>
<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">I'm going for a walk...</span></span><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.milkysmile.blogspot.com/" target="_blank"><img alt="milkysmile" border="0" src="http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh145/nindynindy/newproject/greeb%20thief/green_scart43.gif" /></a><br />
<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">I'm back. Wait. Wait. Waiting... Rehearsing... <b>smack</b>.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">- - - - - - - - - - - </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">I'm going to pick up the kids at school...</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span>
<a href="http://www.milkysmile.blogspot.com/" target="_blank"><img alt="milkysmile" border="0" src="http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh145/nindynindy/newproject/greeb%20thief/green_scart6.gif" /></a><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">I'm back. </span></span><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">Wait. Wait. Waiting... Rehearsing... </span><b style="color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">smack</b><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">On Bennington:</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><i><br /></i></span></span><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">Here's the best thing about a writing workshop: You cannot escape from what you've failed to include. There's an (rhetorical) inquisition: Why has the shell hardened? Are you rich? You have kids(!)? Is it dead or gone? Are you ok? Are you wearing snowshoes to write? </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">Mute answers: I'm not sure (maybe I used the wrong adjective—or the wrong WIP altogether). Hell, no. Yes. Both. Yes. Hahaha... um, bad metaphor. <i>Really</i> bad metaphor.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">Writers are reading between the lines. They are scrutinizing the subtext. This is good, yes, but I'm thinking, <i>They are all so </i>much<i> smarter than me</i>. <i>How did I get here</i>? Perhaps I hit the send button, with my writing samples attached, at the right time. Yes, that was a triangle </span></span><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">at-the-right-time</span><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 18px;"> moment!</span><br />
<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">My two essays were workshopped on the last day of the </span></span><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">ten-day literary vortex that was my first residency at Bennington. <i>P</i></span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">retty easy compared to, say, a first violin.</i><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"> From there, I lunched and vortexualized with my new writerly vortexees (and, boy, do you ever bond quickly with writerly vortexees), and then set out (a little weepy) for my three plus hour drive back home. <i>C</i></span></span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">ounting all those bars' rest.</i><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 18px;"> Lulu kept me company on the phone for the last half hour stretch through Rhode Island, right to my front door. <i>W</i></span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">hat happens if you come in wrong</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">?</span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 18px;"> </i><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">There, she waited for me with a great big </span><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 18px;">zealous embrace.</span><span style="color: #333333; line-height: 18px;"> </span><br />
<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">I waited a long time for that hug.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333;"><span style="line-height: 18px;">(Lulu knows precisely how to come in right.)</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333;"><br />Happy, happy I was to be back home with the orchestra. Waiting, rehearsing, even smacking the head. You see, what I've discovered is that, as impatient as I am, </span><span style="color: #333333;">I can wait. </span><span style="color: #333333;">And don't I enjoy being a triangle player. </span>Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-25968684277780911342013-01-07T10:21:00.002-05:002013-01-07T10:21:46.575-05:00Happy New Year<div style="text-align: left;">
A week late.</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
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(What can I say, I got holed up in a Candian snowstorm.)</div>
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On this golden Monday morning, warming the day is this joyous polyphonic frolic:</div>
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<iframe frameborder="0" height="338" scrolling="no" src="http://www.npr.org/templates/event/embeddedVideo.php?storyId=167564228" width="600"></iframe></div>
<br />
Read more about this <a href="http://www.npr.org/series/tiny-desk-concerts/" target="_blank"><i>Tiny Desk Concert</i></a> at <a href="http://www.npr.org/event/music/167564228/the-polyphonic-spree-tiny-desk-concert?autoplay=true" target="_blank">NPR <span style="color: red;">here</span></a>.<br />
<br />
<span style="text-align: left;">Happy, happy... :D</span>Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-24952817601238504762012-11-19T22:16:00.000-05:002013-08-18T12:48:17.648-04:00A Secret World — A Special Soliloquy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Zu9I1dKZN2A/UKrXEoX7enI/AAAAAAAAEzA/f4nhTDjTkWQ/s1600/Image+3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Zu9I1dKZN2A/UKrXEoX7enI/AAAAAAAAEzA/f4nhTDjTkWQ/s1600/Image+3.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
Inside the books...<br />
<br />
Is where I find Lulu, in the family room scanning the tall shelves, the hundreds of books. <i>Have you read all of these</i>? she asks.<br />
<br />
<i>Ah huh</i>, I nod,<i> just about</i>. <i>Wait, maybe I didn't read </i>Sister Carrie.<br />
<br />
<i>Wow! I don't know why I hadn't noticed these before. I never really looked at them all. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Yes, </i>I say<i>, well it's not a big deal. I've had a half century to read stories.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
Lu swipes her paws across the paper spines and smiles, <i>Hmm, true, but it's still a lot of books.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
These books have been my secret worlds. Each one of them, with their own special suns and stars, seas and rivers, pyramids, canyons, gulags. They are made from <i>Poof</i>! Just like this multifaceted planet on which we make our home.<br />
<br />
Max tells me that it all started with a bubble, or foam, from which things popped. Or fizzed. I ask him where the bubble, or maybe the foam, came from. There must have been air. Was this the kind of foam in which you could take a bath? He shakes his head, up, down, <i>Yup, yup, that's the question</i>! <i>Exactly</i>.<br />
<br />
Planets, universes, worlds, or books—the <i>Poof</i>! came from something. May I suggest, a <i>mastermind</i>?<br />
<br />
This was the world before <i>Poof</i>: someone, some<i>thing</i>, yes, a <i>mastermind</i> conceived a plot, a situation, characters, conflict, tension, climax, resolution, catastrophe, revelation, and designed, created, this story within a dramatic structure, along a sweeping arc, born of a secret world, and put it (and run-on sentences, too) out there, in the air, in space, in the universe, on the planets, on Earth, on bookshelves, at <i>Amazon</i>, for us. For our <i>pleasure</i>.<br />
<br />
<i>This</i> is true.<br />
<br />
<i>Poof</i>!<br />
<br />
This January I will be joining another kind of secret world. For the next two years, in this mystical, somewhat secluded bubble of a world (a/k/a <i> <a href="http://www.bennington.edu/MFAWriting/Philosophy.aspx">The Bennington Writing Seminars</a> </i>at Bennington College), I will be working with some brilliant and highly regarded authors, and will be reading no less than one-hundred books. And <i>maybe</i>, writing one. Actually, I'm registered, matriculated, and have already begun the work. January will bring the first of five ten-day residencies over the following two year period. This full-time process, in theory, should culminate with a Master of Fine Arts degree in writing and literature. <br />
<br />
I'm pretty excited.<br />
<br />
And terrified.<br />
<br />
I am not a mastermind, but I'm hoping for a big <i>Poof</i>!<br />
<br />
This, of course, will require a lot of dark (or white) space for a while. Not quite a vacuum, but a space with clear, colorless, odorless air in which to breath, void of fiery comets or space debris, or anything that has the potential to crash into my secret world and throw me off course. You know what I mean. It will require many days at the library. Cloistered. So here, my friends, may be my last post for a long while. I won't say <i>forever</i>. But, well, you know I'm no multi-tasker.<br />
<br />
Saturday night, Michael and I went out to listen to <i><a href="http://www.redmolly.com/">Red Molly</a></i>, a girl band (as they refer to themselves), a really fabulous girl band about whom I wrote, <a href="http://www.suburbansoliloquy.com/2011/07/friday-night-frolic-pink-hyaline-dreams.html">in a Frolic</a>, nearly a year and a half ago. They were performing in a small town in Massachusetts. There, in an acoustically perfect coffeehouse, at the very end of the evening, past 11:00 PM and bordering on breaking some serious rules (<i>wrap it up girls—our traffic detail needs to go home</i>!), they sang their final song.<br />
<br />
<i>May I suggest</i>.<br />
<br />
And this song, I forward to you, a Thanksgiving of sorts, a Thank You. Until I once again emerge from my secret world...<br />
<br />
<i>Poof</i>!<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #2c1600; font-family: 'Times New Roman';">May I Suggest<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #2c1600; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">By Susan Werner</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">May I suggest <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">May I suggest to
you <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">May I suggest
this is the best part of your life <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">May I suggest /
This time is blessed for you <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">This time is
blessed and shining almost blinding bright <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Just turn your
head / And you'll begin to see <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">The thousand
reasons that were just beyond your sight <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">The reasons why
/ Why I suggest to you <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Why I suggest
this is the best part of your life </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">There is a
world <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">That's been
addressed to you <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Addressed to
you, intended only for your eyes <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">A secret world <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Like a treasure
chest to you <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Of private
scenes and brilliant dreams that mesmerize <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">A lover's
trusting smile / A tiny baby's hands <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">The million
stars that fill the turning sky at night <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Oh I suggest /
Oh I suggest to you <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Oh I suggest
this is the best part of your life <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">There is a hope <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">That's been
expressed in you <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">The hope of
seven generations, maybe more <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">And this is the
faith / That they invest in you <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">It's that you'll
do one better than was done before <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Inside you
know / Inside you understand <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Inside you know
what's yours to finally set right <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">And I suggest /
And I suggest to you <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">And I suggest
this is the best part of your life <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">This is a song <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Comes from the
west to you <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Comes from the
west, comes from the slowly setting sun <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">With a request /
With a request of you <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">To see how very
short the endless days will run <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">And when they're
gone <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">And when the
dark descends <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Oh we'd give
anything for one more hour of light <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">And I suggest
this is the best part of your life</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.com42tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-82202002919451909472012-11-12T15:47:00.000-05:002013-08-18T12:54:12.702-04:00Beyond Moonstone and Broken Stone<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-R_kNLsgr6b8/UhD8G31bIDI/AAAAAAAAEzo/ItDzq5HT0zM/s1600/Image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-R_kNLsgr6b8/UhD8G31bIDI/AAAAAAAAEzo/ItDzq5HT0zM/s1600/Image.jpg"></a></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I didn't tell you the whole story.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Back in South County, along the coast of Rhode Island. <a href="http://www.suburbansoliloquy.com/2012/11/the-aurora-is-rising-behind-you.html">The day that I stood on the seaweed and garbage-strewn edge of a chewed-away beach</a>. Sizing it up. Whole chunks devoured. Agape, I stood surveying a wounded shoreline, gnashed and sliced with mechanical precision, a chainsaw steel-toothed-blade slashing. <i>Here you are Lil Rhody: a newly chiseled ribbon of beachfront</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">That's what she said to me, Hurricane Sandy, as she flossed her choppers. I listened further. My ears buzzed with the saw's vibration. A tinnitus. <i>Hiss</i>. (I wondered if her steely jaw hurt as much as mine did after a night of vigorous grinding.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Now exposed a foot or more above the shiny, sabulous floor are three concrete septic tanks. Now an orange net of fencing assuredly tells visitors to not climb wood stairs, to not roam wood decks. We don't know what's safe. We don't know what might give under foot. Or what might topple overhead. And who knows, in this cycle of storms, how long it will take before we are able to tend to this beach's wounds.<o:p></o:p></span><br>
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</style> <![endif]--><!--StartFragment-->Sandy's <i>hiss</i> lingered. Driving Rhode Island's roads I had noticed how all the trees, with the exception of evergreens, in the area and around the state had been prematurely shorn bare. Another reminder that our fall has not been like ordinary falls past. None of the seasons, truly, have been like those past, and there has been, undeniably, altered weather patterns throughout the year, a change in our climate, and I feel the loss. The resulting melancholy that grips me has become inescapable.<!--EndFragment--> </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Out there, where the continent ends, a mob of seagulls swarmed above the churning waters, in search of... Something. Food. Companionship. Entertainment. They jostled above the smooth-stoned jetty, eyed its pummeling by the wildly relentless surf. They squawked discordantly, and hustled easily through knotty wind, steeling crab-scrap from one another. Scrap is plenty and they are a greedy lot. They are no better than ambulance-chasing lawyers, they are opportunists. (</span>This explains their longevity, as well their repulsiveness.) <i>Go away, you opportunistic kleptomaniacs</i>! <br>
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Why are seagulls called <i>seagulls</i> when they are not confined to the sea? In fact, they do not venture far out above the ocean, and very often, they are found inland: at freshwater lakes, in the parking lots of football stadiums or theaters, or at big-boxed shopping centers that sadly occupy corner lots of every other town in America.</div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">But before I'd reached the beach in South County, before stopping by at the <a href="http://www.suburbansoliloquy.com/2012/11/the-aurora-is-rising-behind-you.html">Shopping Center in Westerly</a> that I manage, before assessing the damage to a pylon sign, I had visited my dermatologist, Dr. Kirk in East Greenwich. There, I had <a href="http://www.suburbansoliloquy.com/2012/07/sea-of-unease.html">the angry, seething mole</a>—a
mole that had for many summer nights kept me awake, this, the mole from which I could not vacation, a
mole that had burrowed into the fold of my right armpit and maddened my mental
health—excised,
as well as another bothered mole that had, like any good, large-pawed mole, dug
itself a home and taken a seat on the backside of the equator of my body. The
waistline is not a sitting or nesting area. It is too heavily trafficked by
garments of the day and evening. There, fine silks, cashmeres and cottons
carouse, and stumble, get caught, on anything in their way. They do not
appreciate this. Neither does the no-sitting area. So there, they are hewn down
like all the trees or tree limbs that fell just days before. Or like any tree
that does not bear good fruit. They
are hewn almost precisely like trees, only on a smaller, more sterile scale: a
numbing agent applied to the area via syringe not only numbs the mole and its
underlying/surrounding skin, but also puffs it up into a small mound so that
the now protruding and exposed bugger may be sliced from its nest by a
hand-held straight edge blade. It is more efficient, in fact, than cutting the
tree, as no stump remains, no inviting perch or tunnel.</span><br>
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</div></div><a href="http://www.suburbansoliloquy.com/2012/11/beyond-moonstone-and-broken-stone.html#more">Read more »</a>Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-83776905417664225432012-11-05T21:15:00.000-05:002013-08-18T13:01:22.310-04:00The Aurora is Rising Behind You<div style="text-align: left;">
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Last week, after <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Sandy" target="_blank"><i>Sandy</i></a> gnashed her way northward, I took a drive down to the town of Westerly at the southwestern tip of Rhode Island (which, it appears, is too tiny to give mention in the <i>Wiki</i> link provided, other than to power-loss numbers), where I manage a small shopping center, and then turned back north, up along Rhode Island's coastline. Our 8,000 square foot center, which is about a mile in from the coast, did fine with the exception of the loss of two south-facing signs on the center's large pylon, but much of the southern coast of this little state was reduced to rubble by Sandy's outer bands of wind and storm surge, and several homes along Westerly's Misquamicut beach seemed to be devoured whole, trace timber crumbs scattered along the shoreline.<br />
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The she-storm's aftermath felt oddly quiet. Maybe, though, it was just my mind. My mind taciturn. I could not locate words as I drove past stretches of rough-surf beach and golden farm and tragically but beautifully broken stone walls—all kinds of debris spewed across field and road and beachfront but not a word to be found. I took pictures and made mental notations, wondering how many insurance claims one company can handle, absorb. I would need to make a call myself. When I found the words.<br />
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Just beyond the breachway, as I sat in my car at the edge of Wawaloam Drive in Weekapaug, overlooking Block Island Sound, I thought, too, about poetic sequence, in particular mine (you know, <a href="http://www.suburbansoliloquy.com/2012/10/ocular-allusions.html" target="_blank">the one I'm writing</a>, the theme of which is my expectation of and ultimate disappointment with New England's seasons), how I had developed only a loose narrative in the five poems I'd written to date, and how I hadn't yet written a sonnet. Here, certainly, was drama enough for sonnet, and, well, I <i>must</i> write a sonnet! On my northward drive I turned east toward <a href="http://rhodeisland.hometownlocator.com/maps/feature-map,ftc,2,fid,1217734,n,moonstone%20beach.cfm" target="_blank">Moonstone</a>, but when I arrived the beach had been closed off entirely. Standing at the cordoned off gate of Moonstone Beach Road, watching military helicopters whirling across the sky, listening to the ocean's post-Sandy low-pitched hymn, inhaling its aroma, swallowing the romantic pinks and purples of a warm aurora, the silent, wordless current cascading through the narrow valleys of my mind was instantly, galvanically, awakened and I knew at once what I hadn't before fully digested: my poetic sequence was not only about <i>my</i> expectations, <i>my</i> disappointments—how I perceived seasons to be failing in almost legendary fashion—but rather a sequence that speaks to the much larger and universal issue of climate change. And Sandy, this badly behaved November storm, came with her own tale, a growing thematic narrative, one of which might well be called <i>Global Warming.</i><br />
<br />
What had I taken on?<br />
<br />
Springsteen's <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4th_of_July,_Asbury_Park_(Sandy)" target="_blank">Sandy</a></i> may never have come back, but I have this woeful feeling that she-storms like Sandy will return with more frequency, with high drama and little romance, and in their wakes will leave the same catastrophic hymn, salty aroma and burning aurora as Sandy. I wonder how this will change the game, what bills we'll bring to congress, which shall pass into laws, and which laws—other than zoning laws which shall certainly be modified to address the rising seas—may be nullified or amended.<br />
<br />
(Just this morning, <i><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/11/05/1137491/november-5-news-is-hurricane-sandy-a-cuyahoga-river-moment-for-climate-change/" target="_blank">Think Progress</a></i> posted an article which asks if Sandy is "[...]a 'Cuyahoga River Moment' for Climate Change." <i>Cuyahoga</i> is the Ohio river that, at one time, was known for being the most polluted river in the US. Littered with trash and slicked with oil, it burned several times; it's infamous 1969 burning sparked a number of water pollution laws, including the <a href="http://www.epa.gov/lawsregs/laws/cwa.html" target="_blank">Clean Water Act</a>.)<br />
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What are <i>we</i> taking on?<br />
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At tonight's high school soccer banquet, no one seemed to be talking politics (but then again, I don't bring it up). But I know tomorrow, at the polls, I won't be the only voter wondering, and maybe gabbing about, which candidate will address and act upon the very real threat, the course, of global warming. Who will truly be compelled to honor the subject, ask central questions, demand answers, reckon with his presidential sensibilities, and see it through—bringing real action and change. This is much more than politics, and I wonder who prefers writing the poetic sequence over the punchline. There is an aurora rising behind and above us. Poetry. Pure poetry.Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.com27tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-62833868767037155892012-10-29T18:06:00.000-04:002013-08-18T13:04:29.975-04:00Don't Look At Me That Way<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Since there's no doubt, at least here in Cucumberland, that we are about to lose power I thought I'd take a moment to compose a post before the opportunity flickers into obfuscation. (Actually, I'm sneaking this in between outages.) See, this is how it works here. Things go dark. Not only during hurricanes or tropical storms, or even days that bluster gently (yes, this is possible), but also during a total, all-embracing tempest known as <i>writer's</i> <i>block</i>. This has been the case for me for the last two weeks. With the exception of poetry, I've written zilch. But throw an obstacle on my course—<i>please</i>!—make it something that—if it can't be avoided—I'll hit hard, make time <i>count</i>, right down to the wire, then maybe, just <i>maybe</i>, I'll produce.<br />
<br />
(Perhaps I trust that I really do work better under pressure.)<br />
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Then there is Lu, who, in her sparkly blue-eyed youth, has again drifted outside in the midst of this tropical storm. Her father found her in the street, barefoot on hard-packed tar, face lifted into the driving rain and howling winds, red maples and pines reaching out to her. She to them.<br />
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<i>What are you doing out there?</i> He calls to her.<br />
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(She is communicating. Does he not know?)<br />
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<i>Just wanna walk around, I need</i> <i>fresh air</i>, <i>it's raining, it's a hurricane, and I want to be outside in it</i>, she answers casually.<br />
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Fresh air. Really darling, come in. Come in to where it's safe. Come away from under electrical wires and trees that go snap in the wind. She can't though. She's compelled to be in and under all those things, these treacherous things that carry impellent power over all reason. Why is it we strangely and instinctively want to center ourselves in the core of a storm? In Rhode Island, mandatory evacuations have been declared in several low-lying and coastal communities. But by the seawall in Narragansett poncho-festooned people wait just behind the stone barrier for waves to crash against and over it, as if the rain and wind is not enough. It's not. They want to <i>feel</i> the surge. They want, they <i>need</i>, storm to surge flesh and soul. After all, this is the kind of obstacle that wakes us, isn't it? This is the surge that tells us we're still <i>alive!</i><br />
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<i style="font-style: normal;"><i>Don't look at me that way</i>, she says. </i>And if she doesn't say it, her face does. In what <i>way</i> does she mean?<br />
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Wait.</div>
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I understand the urge for a surge. Even in these partly-sparkly hazel-eyed middle years, I appreciate the rush of a dangerous storm surge, or a blackout, or a <i>deadline. </i>It speaks to my very core. A generative reminder that time passes in a flash. Grab it. Communicate. Write, dammit.Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.com34tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-54915518560272001322012-10-15T15:01:00.001-04:002013-08-18T13:33:06.527-04:00Ocular Allusions<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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What it is about the seasons lately, failing to meet my expectations by, one might say—at least here in New England—continually failing to season, has ignited in me a nagging sense of loss and, well, just plain glumness. (Nagging because it's a rare Day that performs as it should within the framework of its given season; Day has become defiant, belligerent—refusing to comply, he turns away and knocks Expectation on its head. He rebels! I nag!) This is the glum loss about which I am writing in a series of poems, a poetic sequence, for a poetry class that I'm currently taking with <i><a href="http://www.burningdeck.com/catalog/imbriglio.htm" target="_blank">Catherine Imbriglio</a></i> at Brown Continuing Studies.</div>
<br />
There are twelve of us, poets (though I'd hardly plunk myself in this particular category, but I will fake it for the duration of the six weeks), casting a sequence of poems linked, for the most part, by either form or theme. And I will fake it further because I <i>need</i> to believe that this can be done. Six poems, or more, linked by this glum/loss theme. Belligerent Days that become belligerent Seasons that become belligerent Years!<br />
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The good news: my eyesight is improving. It's true! Maybe it's the changing light of our seasons. <i>Maybe I really AM growing younger</i>! When my ophthalmologist had me sit behind what she called, and what I could not then spell, a<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoropter" target="_blank">phoroptor</a>—a word I couldn't release from my mind, what I heard as and what I quietly recited so I'd not forget</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;">: </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #351c75;">FROPPER</span>, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #38761d; font-style: italic;">FROPPER, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: orange; font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', sans-serif;">FROPPER!</span> (what a strange name for an instrument) (as it turns out <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #20124d;">FROPPER</span> is a social networking site specializing in Indian dating)—she found that, within the past year, I was minus (or is it plus in phoroptor language?) .50 from the prior year's examination. That puts me at -3.25! Which means that maybe I won't need readers in the supermarket. Heh. And wasn't I happy for the phoroptor, even if I couldn't spell it, but now that I can the image in my mind has turned to a beast—a highly photogenic (and perhaps Vietnamese) dinosaur. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">PHOROPTOR</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;">!</span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">That was this morning. When I left my </span></span>ophthalmologist's office I was so happy to be at positive (or is it negative?) <i>phoroptation</i> I decided to take a little walk so as to let it all sink in. And there, to the left, to where I turned my rejuvenated oculi, was this magnificent, <i>versicolor</i> (<a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/wordoftheday/" target="_blank">word of the day</a>) tableau and I quick-grabbed (because Day, like a smart-mouthed teenager, can turn on me at any moment) my iPhone and shot what was, what <i>is</i>, undoubtedly, Day behaving like Fall! Compliant <span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #783f04; font-size: large;">FALL!</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">(This is not good for my poetic sequence—</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;">which might very well be titled </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><i>Ocular Delusions</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;">. And which now seems as old as a dinosaur.)</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">And because my disposition has shifted widely from glum to blithe and I cannot, at this very moment, be too disappointed in Day (even if he still knocks Expectation sideways), I'm going to sign out by offering one last poem (<i>not</i> one of mine) from yet another former U.S. Poet Laureate, which shall also serve to top off the <a href="http://www.suburbansoliloquy.com/2012/10/a-callithump-parade.html" target="_blank">grand callithump parade</a> that is to come (believe what I say—it will!). </span></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 19px;">Introducing <a href="http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/19" target="_blank">Philip Levine</a> (in a video of much better quality than that of which I was able to capture), all the way from Brooklyn, NY, giving us a little lesson and believing everything he says:</span><br />
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<span style="color: #262626;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Black Wine</span></b></span></div>
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<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Have you ever
drunk the black wine - <i>vino negro</i> -<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">of
Alicante? The English dubbed it Red Biddy<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">and consumed
oceans of it for a pence a flagon.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Knowing nothing
- then or now - about wine,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I would buy a
litre for 8 pesetas - 12 cents -<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">and fry my
brains. Being a happy drunk,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I lived a
second time as a common laborer<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">toiling all
night over the classic strophes<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I burned in the
morning, literally burned,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">in an oil
barrel outside the Palacio Guell,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">one of the
earliest and ugliest of Gaudi's<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">monuments to <i>modernismo</i>.
Five mornings<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">a week the
foreman, Antonio, an Andalusian,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">with a voice of
stone raked over corrugated tin,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">questioned the
wisdom of playing with fire.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">He'd read Edgar
Allen Poe in the translations<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">of Valle-Inclan
and believed the poets<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">of the new world
were madmen. He claimed an affair<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">with Gabriella
Mistral was the low point<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">of his
adolescence. As the weeks passed<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">into spring and
the plane trees in the courtyard<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">of the ancient
hospital burst into new green,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I decided one
morning to test sobriety,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">to waken at
dawn to sparrow chirp and dark clouds<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">blowing seaward
from the Bultaco factory,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">to inhale the
particulates and write nothing,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">to face the
world as it was. Everything<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">was actual, my
utterances drab, my lies<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">formulary and
unimaginative.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">For the first
time in my life I believed<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">everything I
said. Think of it: simple words<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">in English or
Spanish or Yiddish, words<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">that speak the
truth and no more, hour after<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-align: center; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: #262626;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">hour, day after
day without end, a life<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #262626;">in the kingdom of candor, without fire or wine.</span></span></div>
Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.com31tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-40206900808903341242012-10-04T17:38:00.000-04:002013-08-18T13:31:42.650-04:00A Callithump Parade<div style="text-align: left;">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xG6zC_X6lSk/UG3awGcHW6I/AAAAAAAAEzA/4vLMW13_XVs/s1600/IMG_9926.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xG6zC_X6lSk/UG3awGcHW6I/AAAAAAAAEzA/4vLMW13_XVs/s640/IMG_9926.JPG" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Since I've been run down and not feeling well of late, making it a bit difficult to see the world, to read, never mind <i>write</i> (and <i>converse</i>, OY!, forgedaboudit!), I'm going to attempt to dazzle you, <i>first</i>, with some original photography; <i>second</i>, with more original photography; <i>third</i>, with engaging video; and <i>fourth,</i> with, well, more engaging video.</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
Part I</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
This is what I call the prelude to the Arrival of the Martians at Barnstable Harbor. They <i>are</i> coming, you know. After all, we did invade <i>their</i> extraterrestrial territory. They are due in three weeks or so, just in time for the grand callithump that is known as Halloween. (Now you believe me—don't you?—that I am quite ill.)</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
I'm posting this particular photo because, unfortunately, I will not be in Barnstable for Halloween and therefore will not be able to offer photo-documentation of the actual coming, or landing, of the Martians. But rest assured, the above is honest evidence that I was, indeed, in Barnstable Harbor for the psychedelic Martians-are-coming prelude. (I'd better warn my mother-in-law.)</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
Part II</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
While in New York a couple of weeks ago, I <i>met</i> (I'm using that term loosely, although I really do think, er, <i>believe</i>, that I <i>met</i>) U.S. Poet Laureate (2001-2003) <a href="http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/278" target="_blank">Billy Collins</a> at the Brooklyn Book Festival, as well as the Pulitzer Prize-winning, U.S. Poet Laureate (2011-2012) <a href="http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/19" target="_blank">Philip Levine</a>. Seated directly in front of me, he was, Billy Collins. Eyes penetrating my glazed, hazel irises. We shared a smile. A wink. A...<br />
<br />
You don't believe me, do you? Here, another photo—taken just before the shared winks:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5kl_UX6s5Ns/UG3maK0ErMI/AAAAAAAAEzA/UnbfhzIaJtw/s1600/IMG_0003.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-5kl_UX6s5Ns/UG3maK0ErMI/AAAAAAAAEzA/UnbfhzIaJtw/s400/IMG_0003.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">(OK, well I <i>practically</i> met Billy Collins.)</span></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
Part III</div>
<br />
But, let's get back to the Martians for a moment. Here, in this contemplative poem, Billy recites the derelictions of certain Martians with whom we are familiar, Martians whom, without thought or, sometimes, expression, land on, and feed off of, our verdant, selfless earth, often forgetting to reseed:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Fy9K4qnsHo0?rel=0" width="420"></iframe></div>
</div>
<br />
(The young gentleman seated beside Billy Collins is Ishmael 'Ish' Islam, New York City's 2012 Youth Poet Laureate. He may be one of those Martians, though, I think not. See Ish, the award winning poet and producer, <a href="http://www.nyccfb.info/public/VRC/ish.aspx" target="_blank">here, reading his poem</a> <i>Daydreaming at the Voting Booth</i>.)<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
Part IV</div>
<br />
And now, to round off this shivaree, one last reading by Mr. Collins, inspired by the poem <i><a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/drinking-alone/" target="_blank">Drinking Alone</a>, </i>written by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Bai" target="_blank">Li Po</a>, whom we might also describe as one of those self-indulgent Martians:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/A-VRM-lRJPA?rel=0" width="420"></iframe></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Beware the Martians. Do not, under any circumstance, let them drink alone! (Or just plain drink.)</div>
Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.com35tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-36048266526125297062012-09-21T13:56:00.000-04:002016-10-21T18:44:19.373-04:00Friday Night Frolic — Acorns<div style="text-align: left;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-B0q-DbgcCSg/UFuo92X9fbI/AAAAAAAADsw/J8ymZLt14Yo/s1600/Image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-B0q-DbgcCSg/UFuo92X9fbI/AAAAAAAADsw/J8ymZLt14Yo/s640/Image.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Tuesday was not just a wedding anniversary it<br />
was grey and blustery, rain-soaked<br />
intervals and intervals that couldn't<br />
decide whether they<br />
were intervals<br />
<br />
Nineteen years ago, Tuesday, it was the same<br />
grey morning spit which did not stop a golf<br />
game, a walk along the ocean and into<br />
church and everyone said it meant<br />
good luck<br />
<br />
But luck is hardly a factor except<br />
when you're <i>down on your luck</i><br />
and your spouse looks as<br />
grey as the day you<br />
were married<br />
<br />
Or the day nineteen years later when you're walking<br />
the dog, or the cat, or the pig or whatever it is<br />
you've domesticated and from the south a storm<br />
of all colors churns maple and oak leaves<br />
and acorns<br />
<br />
A day more menacing than the day you were<br />
married enamored of one another, long<br />
before sweet quirks actualized as<br />
annoyances that drove<br />
you crazy<br />
<br />
Like his pathological resistance to plan anything or<br />
engage in hyper polemics, as opposed to, say<br />
avoidance, or his addiction to e-bay and<br />
old movie posters too big for<br />
mere walls<br />
<br />
(And you thought, you <i>really</i> thought, that<br />
you wouldn't mind if he ate crackers in<br />
your bed)<br />
<br />
How is it one in every two marriages <i>survive</i>?<br />
When the veins of heaven distend with squalls<br />
and the oak's acorn-spittle flops on your head<br />
you quicken pace and feel bad that you ever<br />
loathed him<br />
<br />
That there were those moments, days, months, when you <i>loathed</i><br />
one another—year two, year five, year twelve, year...<br />
the sky and pavement bend heliotrope and two wide-eyed<br />
squirrels chase barb-capped nuts, acorns as dark<br />
as mahogany<br />
<br />
They taste of bitter tannin but the squirrels don't mind<br />
they pounce on fallen mast knowing the cache<br />
which is to be their sustenance in the cold<br />
dark months is all that will get<br />
them through<br />
<br />
And then, an interval<br />
decidedly!<br />
<br />
Great berry chromatic bursts, wind funneling acorns<br />
into its vortex, you're in the storm's eye which<br />
seems oddly not annoying or vile, and as it<br />
spins out on the tar it dumps brilliant<br />
green acorns<br />
<br />
In your pocket you place two firm, sage-lacquered<br />
nuts, bring them home as a warm breeze carries<br />
your back.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
* * *</div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/mQM5lh8C_dQ?rel=0" width="560"></iframe></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #1b1b1b; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18px;"><i>The Acorn</i>'s first release, <i>The Pink Ghosts</i> (2004), was a sumptuous tribute to the band's native Ottawa. Since then, The Acorn has gone on to record several albums, including the acclaimed <i>Glory Hope Mountain </i>(2007)<i>, </i>an anthology of mellifluous and vivid stories inspired by song writer Rolf Klausener's Central-American-born mother. And later, <i>No Ghost</i> (2009), described (direct from <a href="http://www.theacorn.ca/" target="_blank">their website</a>) as: </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #535353; font-family: "georgia" , "cambria" , "times" , serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px;">...a recording swaddled in dichotomy: togetherness and isolation, acoustic and electric, destruction and restoration.</span></blockquote>
</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #1b1b1b; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18px;">Which began as:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: left;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #1b1b1b; font-family: inherit; line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #535353; font-family: "georgia" , "cambria" , "times" , serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px;">...hazy late-night improvisations, early morning melodies pulled from the thinning threads of sleep. Modernity clashed with the bucolic via exploratory percussion, feedback, acoustic textures and the natural surrounding sounds.</span></span></blockquote>
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/7dS2iG3RVAE?rel=0" width="420"></iframe><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
Watch those acorns!</div>
</div>
Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.com44tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-76611735073120297242012-09-08T17:30:00.002-04:002012-12-08T23:31:31.484-05:00The Heart Dies of this Sweetness<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ojjKne9eENY/UEu3kYP7ImI/AAAAAAAADbQ/9N4c7vfq98k/s1600/Image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ojjKne9eENY/UEu3kYP7ImI/AAAAAAAADbQ/9N4c7vfq98k/s1600/Image.jpg" /></a></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;"><br />
</span></span> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: black;">Today's <a href="http://www.suburbansoliloquy.com/p/weekend-wisdom.html" target="_blank"><i>Weekend Wisdom</i></a> photograph (my rain-drenched Rose of Sharon) is inspired by poet </span></span><span style="color: black;"><a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/brigit-pegeen-kelly" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Brigit Pegeen Kelly</a><i>, </i>whose work was introduced to me last summer by </span> <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/darcie-dennigan" target="_blank">Darcie Dennigan</a> <span style="color: black;">during a three day poetry workshop.</span> The poem, a beautiful rhapsody/tragedy, entitled <i>The Rose of Sharon</i>, published in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Orchard-American-Poets-Continuum/dp/1929918488/ref=pd_sim_b_1" target="_blank"><i>The Orchard</i></a> can be found in its entirety <a href="http://lydia.bradley.edu/poet/breadandsteeltext/Kelly.htm" target="_blank">here</a>. This poem came to me yesterday when, peering through a southern facing bedroom window in my home, I noticed how my enormous Rose of Sharon (three of them grouped together, actually) was lunging forward toward lofty, water-jammed downy cheeks that pressed back the noon sun. Wet and heavy with storm, the branches dangled perilously above smaller hedges and a pine tree. We've let the lot go wild. It's outgrown the bed, become unruly and, I'm afraid, is moving toward a mass beheading.<br />
<br />
(And what I've done to <i>Tree of breath, Pride of my heart, Pool of my scented breath</i> is simply unforgivable!)</div>
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I didn't know a thing about Kelly's work before last year. I returned to her poems, more than just <i>The Rose of Sharon</i>, only of late—for their soothing, pleasing prosody, the juxtaposition of violence and splendor, and for Kelly's general approach to our protean world.</div>
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Here, a heart wrenching poem from Kelly's collection of poems, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Song-Brigit-Pegeen-Kelly/dp/1880238136" target="_blank">Song</a>.</i></div>
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<b> Song</b></div>
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<i><br />
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Listen: there was a goat's head hanging by ropes in a tree.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Felt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearing<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The song of a night bird. They sat up in their beds, and then<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">They lay back down again. In the night wind, the goat's head<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Swayed back and forth, and from far off it shone faintly,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The way the moonlight shone on the train track miles away<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Beside which the goat's headless body lay. Some boys<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Had hacked its head off. It was harder work than they had imagined.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The goat cried like a man and struggled hard. But they<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Finished the job. They hung the bleeding head by the school<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">And then ran off into the darkness that seems to hide everything.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The head hung in the tree. The body lay by the tracks.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The head called to the body. The body to the head.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">They missed each other. The missing grew large between them,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Until it pulled the heart right out of the body, until<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The drawn heart flew toward the head, flew as a bird flies<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Back to its cage and the familiar perch from which it trills.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Then the heart sang in the head, softly at first and then louder,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Sang long and low until the morning light came up over<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The school and over the tree, and then the singing stopped. . . .<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The goat had belonged to a small girl. She named<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The goat Broken Thorn Sweet Blackberry, named it after<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The night's bush of stars, because the goat's silky hair<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Was dark as well water, because it had eyes like wild fruit.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The girl lived near a high railroad track. At night<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">She heard the trains passing, the sweet sound of the train's horn<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Pouring softly over her bed, and each morning she woke<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">To give the bleating goat his pail of warm milk. She sang<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Him songs about girls with ropes and cooks in boats.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">She brushed him with a stiff brush. She dreamed daily<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">That he grew bigger, and he did. She thought her dreaming<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Made it so. Everything looked strange. It was as if a storm<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Had passed through while she slept, wind and stones, rain<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Stripping the branches of fruit. She knew that someone<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Had stolen the goat and that he had come to harm. She called<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">To him. All morning and into the afternoon, she called<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">And called. She walked and walked. In her chest a bad feeling<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Like the feeling of stones gouging the soft undersides<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Of her bare feet. Then somebody found the goat's body<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">By the high tracks, the flies already filling their soft bottles<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">At the goat's torn neck. Then somebody found the head<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Hanging in a tree by the school. They hurried to take<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">These things away so that the girl would not see them.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">They hurried to raise money to buy the girl another goat.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">They hurried to find the boys who had done this, to hear<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Them say it was a joke, a joke, it was nothing but a joke. . . .<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">But listen: here is the point. The boys thought to have<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Their fun and be done with it. It was harder work than they<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Had imagined, this silly sacrifice, but they finished the job,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Whistling as they washed their large hands in the dark.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">What they didn't know was that the goat's head was already<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Singing behind them in the tree. What they didn't know<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Was that the goat's head would go on singing, just for them,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Long after the ropes were down, and that they would learn to listen,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Pail after pail, stroke after patient stroke. They would<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Wake in the night thinking they heard the wind in the trees<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Or a night bird, but their hearts beating harder. There<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Would be a whistle, a hum, a high murmur, and, at last, a song,<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">The low song a lost boy sings remembering his mother's call.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Not a cruel song, no, no, not cruel at all. This song<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">Is sweet. It is sweet. The heart dies of this sweetness.</span></span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-6829313740539094202012-08-30T21:23:00.000-04:002016-10-21T17:47:32.849-04:00On Capturing the Surreal <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />
<br />
It was like this. Surreal. The Outer Cape. Come Saturday morning there were barely a dozen bodies on the beach. No. Twelve exactly. I counted. There had been an electrical storm the night before, morning was grey, but by 9:30 AM the clouds were beginning to slowly disperse southeast over the Atlantic. At 10:30 AM, lunch in backpacks, we mounted our bikes and peddled along the sandy, narrow road, following the deep grooves of wide tire treads set in clay. At the top of the wooded hill, we could barely see the ocean but we heard it like we hear, from a mile away, the soft hum of a highway during rush hour. The pine-covered path that wound down, in serpentine fashion, took us through tall, dancing oaks and merry, berried bushes and out to a paved road leading to the ocean. Lulu piloted the way.<br />
<br />
It was like this.<br />
<br />
Surreal. The Outer Cape. Nearly every day (and on a few days, very soon after the storms cleared), in northern Wellfleet, abutting Truro, we set our low chairs, blanket and small cooler along the wide expanse of Newcomb Hollow Beach, where the forest, gushing out to sea, falls off in a dramatic one-hundred foot sand plunge, and its rosehip, bearberry and boulder strewn dunes tell a marly, striated history of life along the coastline. (These are the great dunes that Henry David Thoreau called "the backbone of the Cape.") Vegetation clings perilously to the edges of these sand banks, and at the foot of the fallen earth lie injured, <i>traumatized</i>, forest scrub. It was on this beach, before the inexhaustible sea, that I read to my husband, from Thoreau's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cape-Cod-Henry-David-Thoreau/dp/1619492520/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346346212&sr=1-1&keywords=cape+cod" target="_blank">Cape Cod</a></i>, "The breakers looked like droves of a thousand wild horses rushing to the shore, with their white manes streaming far behind; and when at length the sun shown for a moment, their manes were rainbow tinted." To which he, eyes still fixed on Richard Zacks's <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Pirate-Hunter-Story-Captain/dp/0786865334" target="_blank">The Pirate Hunter</a></i>, replied: <i>Wow. Is that ever overwritten.</i> (Which makes me wonder, now, if I am doing the same.) But the breakers, the gurgling white breakers, from a certain angle, <i>did</i> look like the streaming manes of a thousand wild horses rushing to the shore.<br />
<br />
At least to me.<br />
<br />
It was on this beach, too, where little terns scattered and herds of seals bobbed in the aqua froth, that Max ran barefoot every day--straight into Truro, along deserted ivory sands, way, way out of our sight. On one such run, as Lu and I ate lunch, I became aware that Max had been gone a long time. Too long. And I had grown concerned. Almost an hour into his run, my phone rang. It was Max. <i>Mom</i>, he said, <i>Mom! </i>And then, the phone cut out. Now, I was more than concerned. I tried reaching him several times, but there was no reception. (On the outer Cape, the valleys and hollows, including the shoreline, are almost entirely dead zones.) Moments later my phone rang again. Max had climbed one of the steep sand slopes--the only spot in which he could find a smidgen of cell phone reception. Immediately I asked if he was OK.<br />
<i><br />
</i> <i>Yes!</i> he hollered into the phone. <i>But there's a seal! A beached seal, and I don't want him to die. I've been cupping water in my hands and tossing it over him to keep him hydrated</i>.<br />
<br />
<i>What? Max hun</i>, I explained, <i>seals don't get beached. They're not whales--it's normal for them to come on shore. They can scoot back into the water</i>. <i>He's probably just resting</i>.<br />
<br />
<i>Yes, but he's bleeding. His flippers are torn up. </i>He said, too, that he was the only person on the beach. No one else in sight. Which is the way it is in lower Truro, where few roads lead directly to the coastline.<br />
<br />
This boy. Kind heart. I felt his worry. (He is the boy who, once, as a four-year-old, eyeing the stations of the cross in church, cried out, <i>What are they doing to Jesus</i>! <i>They're hurting him</i>!) I told him that the seal would be fine. It would go back into the sea and the salt water would heal the wounds. And then I instructed him not to get too close to the seal, not to touch it, <i>especially</i> since it seemed hurt. And then--I don't know why, perhaps I felt deprived of mammal intimacy--I told him to take pictures with his phone, from a distance, to get off the dunes, where he was not supposed to be, and to run back to where <i>I </i>was beached.<br />
<br />
When Max returned a half hour later he told me that he had zigzagged down the dunes--so as not to cause this great escarpment to collapse--and then ran toward the area where the seal had been resting only to find that his friend was gone. Returned to the sea. But before he called me from the top of the sandy slope, before he even thought to set his fingers on any buttons, or worry about collapsing dunes, he said, he sat face to face with the seal on the empty shoreline. Just him and the seal. The seal and him. And the seal barked ever so slightly, and Max gently said <i>Hello</i> back.<br />
<br />
<i>So the seal is fine</i>. I said.<br />
<br />
<i>Yeah, he's good</i>. He smiled.<br />
<br />
<i>You had a moment with the seal. That's pretty special, don't you think</i>?<br />
<br />
<i>I do. Yup. I do</i>. And then he dug into the cooler and pulled out a water and a turkey sandwich.<br />
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<img border="0" height="457" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-gHkhPq1VxLI/UEE9r8i-UNI/AAAAAAAADEI/Qre_tEZF9_s/s640/Image.jpg" width="640" /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; color: black;">It was like this.</span></div>
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Surreal. The Outer Cape.<br />
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During an eight-year span in the mid-19th century, Henry David Thoreau set out on four walking tours of Cape Cod. Two of these tours were solo, and two were with the company of his friend and poet, William Ellery Channing, whom had previously advised Thoreau to go out into the briars and build a hut. Thoreau took Channing's advice in earnest. The book that followed that excursion is <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Walden-Henry-David-Thoreau/dp/1420922610" target="_blank">Walden</a></i>. The book that followed Thoreau's Cape Cod jaunts is <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cape-Cod-Henry-David-Thoreau/dp/1619492520/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1346379765&sr=1-1&keywords=thoreau+cape+cod" target="_blank">Cape Cod</a>,</i> which is the book that I read on the sand bar that <i>is</i> Cape Cod. It seems that these haunting, and <i>haunted</i>, sands are the closest I may ever get to experiencing a real desert. The Cape Cod National Seashore, in fact, is a kind of desert island. One can sit on the seashore for hours almost entirely alone, even in the hottest, dog days of summer. This graceful arm, especially its soft, sandy wrist to fist, has a history of luring artists and writers to its shores. In the dunes of Provincetown, through which we biked, we were reminded of the writer's shacks of years ago. A few still remain. Eugene O'Neill and Norman Mailer both, at one time, lived in these dune shacks. From a tiny, grey hut overlooking the Atlantic (so the story goes), Tennessee Williams wrote <i>The Glass Menagerie</i> and <i>A Streetcar Named Desire</i>. Here, on the Outer Cape.<br />
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Surreal.<br />
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And then, a friend of my husband's, who had led us, on our bikes, through several miles of hilly dunes at the tip of the Cape tells us that <a href="http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/265" target="_blank">Mary Oliver</a> is a Wellfleetian. Imagine. Mary Oliver in Wellfleet. (I hadn't heard or read this before, or if I had I'd forgotten.) I wanted to imagine that I would run into her the next morning while sipping coffee out on the deck in front of <i>The Flying Fish</i> in downtown Wellfleet. But then, I looked her up--<i><a href="http://travel.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/travel/05oliver.html?_r=0pagewanted=all&" target="_blank">the Bard of Provincetown</a>--</i>to find only a P.O. Box number in P-Town. Maybe I misunderstood when he said, "She lives right here." But we were sitting on the brick patio of a Main Street, Wellfleet, restaurant. <i>Right here</i>, on the Outer Cape, may mean almost <i>anywhere</i> on the Outer Cape. (Oliver's bio on <a href="http://poets.org/">Poets.org</a> states that she currently resides in Provincetown.)<br />
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We had dinner in Truro the night before we left the Cape. Most nights had been cloudy and threatening, but this evening, our last, was clear and dry. Before we returned to our rental in the woods we stopped by Newcomb Hollow for a last look at the falling sands, the beach, the breakers. Along the shore a few bonfires blazed, some had been abandoned and smoldered. We listened to crackling fires, to waves piling up against what seemed the edge of the universe. The night was very dark, black-dark, and we proceeded carefully down the slope, onto the beach, where we stood under the flawless dome of a flickering galaxy.<br />
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No. It was more than flawless. Impossibly beautiful, it was. Astonishing. To the left, to the right, north or south the sky pulsated, fiery dots shot through the sky, auditioned, as if they had waited for our reflection, for our very being so that they might demonstrate their capabilities. I think, truly, they were playing with us.<br />
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On the shore, by a pit of orange embers, I pulled out my cell phone. One photograph of the shimmering Milky Way and I understood that the evening could not be captured this way. It could not be digitized, put under any unnatural process, reimagined elsewhere. It was only here--Midnight under the Milky Way--below this celestial canopy under which its myriad characters glint and transmute, on the Outer Cape, land of the surreal, that this beach, this sky, this ocean, this sand was real. Very real.<br />
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Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.com40tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-34411585357354343932012-08-08T16:52:00.000-04:002012-12-08T23:34:28.141-05:00Sifting Through the Narrative<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; color: black;"><span style="font-family: Baskerville;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><i>"Better and better, man. Would now St. Paul would come along that way, and to my breezelessness bring his breeze! O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies; not the smallest atom stirs or lives on matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind." </i></span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; color: black;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Baskerville;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;"><i>~ </i>Herman Melville</span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #073763;">, Moby Dick</span> </i></span></span><img border="0" height="640" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ysptqIOmDGY/UCK9W1TmO6I/AAAAAAAACsw/M3DG32u5n38/s640/IMG_7043.JPG" width="640" /></div>
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Lulu's last day of fine arts camp was more than a week ago. Two weeks she'd been there; two weeks in which I thought I'd find an ocean of time to write. But I failed to get in the water. It was the sands, those turbinado-sugar-sands that were still on my mind, mind sands, dunes or desert, where grains of narrative filtered between my toes but failed to stick underfoot. Desert, beach, glass, quartz, black, garnet or volcanic for Chrissake—there was simply no semblance in the sands, and if there were, if by chance there may have been a granule of anecdote, this also sifted through the sieve-of-a-brain that is mine. No narrative, no structure. Nothing doing. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; color: black;"><i>Undoing</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; color: black;"> is what I did. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; color: black;">Undoing packages that I'd neatly tied up many years ago. I don't know why I have this compulsion to return to old boxes, to open the lids of rust-covered dreams. A strategy perhaps. Fear of marching forward. Up the hill. For whom do I march, anyway? Up which hill shall I march? What will I find on the other side? (Assuming I actually make it over the summit and across to the </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; color: black;"><i>other</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="-webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; color: black;"> side.)</span></div>
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While Lu crafted and beat the steel drums Max often went down to the fishing hole that is Howard Pond. I had plenty of time to climb a hill. To climb a <i>mountain</i>. But I didn't. I don't know what I did. There's lots with which to fill a day. Filler. I could tell you about all kinds of minutial chores I performed throughout the day. Taxi here and there. Pack, unpack. (Well, I have been traveling, too.) Dishes. Clothes washing. My god, <i>clothes washing</i>! Minutiae <i>fills</i>. It also numbs the mind. And sucks gobs of time and energy into its black hole of domesticity. It allows for disengagement. It's enticing. Which is handy now and then.</div>
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That path, that sandy, rosa rugosa lined path, is what I've been walking. Yes. Bodily present or not it's where I've been dredging my bare feet like some exotic ammophilous being. And I could tell you, also, that since leaving the turbinado-sugar-sands of Nantucket I'd been thinking about Herman Melville's <i>Moby Dick</i> and my own furling <a href="http://www.suburbansoliloquy.com/2012/07/sea-of-unease.html" target="_blank">wave of melanomic monomania</a>. (A wave of which I rode for too long.) This is an unpredictable wave, or so I thought. However, if you drift with it, let the current pull you, you'll eventually be delivered back to the safety of the shore. Should you panic, let it collapse over you, you'll plunge into a delirious spin unto the murky seafloor. </div>
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Back to an epic story... </div>
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(Which is what, I think, I should be telling.)</div>
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You know Melville's tale—the ship captain, Ahab, obsessed with destroying the great white sperm whale, the ferocious and cunning Moby Dick, to whom he lost his leg. Nantucket is from where Ahab's <i>Pequod</i> sailed. Melville wrote of Nantucket before he ever set foot on the "mere hillock, and elbow of sand." He first visited the island only after <i>Moby Dick</i> was finished. But it didn't keep him from envisioning, from writing about the island, and its people who... </div>
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<i>Moby Dick</i> is a book I never fully read. Until now, right <a href="http://www.classicreader.com/book/309/" target="_blank">here</a>, online. And in each line, each carefully chosen word, I come to understand that I've spent this summer <i>undoing</i> because my story, my <i>Moby Dick</i>, my <i>Ulysses</i>, hell, my <i>Dick and Jane</i>, is like Moby Dick himself: <span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.</i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i> </i>A</span></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"> <i>portentous and mysterious monster.</i></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Geneva, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; line-height: 18px;">I thought I'd slay him this summer. <i>Ha!</i></span><br />
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I am not Ishmael. I don't know where to begin. Somewhere, in the sand, I keep thinking. In the sand.<br />
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And speaking of envisioning, this <i>man cut away at the stake</i>, has to be one of the <a href="http://thecomposites.tumblr.com/search/moby+dick" target="_blank">coolest literary images</a> I've stumbled upon.</div>
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You can see more magic from Brian Joseph Davis <a href="http://brianjosephdavis.com/" target="_blank">here</a>. </div>
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I'm returning to the Cape in a couple of days. Out, above the elbow, along the National Seashore (where sharks, maybe whales too, are slinking about). I'll be a week or so there. In the sand. The children return to school in less than twenty days... at which time I plan to return to this space fully <i>engaged</i>. </div>
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Now, off to bring Max to soccer...</div>
Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.com37tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-46538682400683179942012-07-17T19:36:00.000-04:002016-10-21T17:42:55.725-04:00Sea of Unease<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;"> “This is not good</span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">,” I tell my husband. We're in bed. From the house in which we will soon slumber, or try to, we can hear the ocean stirring. It pounds against, and gnaws at, one of the most exquisite islands in the Atlantic. I have been searching for suspicious moles, moles that eat away bodies, since the morning of my physical. I've stretched out my naked right arm and, with my iPhone, taken a picture of what I consider to be a particularly suspect mole, centered, and burrowed deeply along the outer ridge of my armpit, and I am comparing it to the </span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">onerous looking</span><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;"> moles of the online medical journals that I’ve culled from the Internet with my laptop. Mine is an old, curmudgeon of a mole. At one time it was a pageant-worthy beauty mark, whether adorned by a simple black camisole or a paisley silk sheath. It was a freckle at birth.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">Now, it is swelled in various shades above the skin where it meets a charbroiled crescendo; it seems as maddened as a volcano on the verge of blowing, like the sick, angry moles I see on the vast Internet: multilayered and gibbous, some with dry, crusty patches, areas that look like burnt chicken skin, or tiny clusters of flying fish roe. I am jumping from website-to-website for evidence that will justify my fears, and with each hit my anxiety balloons. I see more: cancerous black lesions with uneven borders, red and blue-gray blemishes that indicate malignancy. The photos I’ve taken just won’t do so I tuck my head into my armpit, even though it’s nearly impossible for me to get a decent view of the mole from this angle (or any angle for that matter), and stretch the skin around the dark nub. Michael pulls his book away from his face and gives me a look. What am I doing? I know that he thinks I’m loopy. But this doesn’t prevent me from searching, armpit and Internet, even as I become aware of the increasing anxiety that will keep me from a solid night’s sleep.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">“This is bad,” I say to Michael, as if he has not heard my first complaint. “Does this not look like melanoma to you? And why is my doctor concerned about this one?”</span><i style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;"> </i><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">I point to the dark nebula.</span><i style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;"> </i><span style="font-family: inherit; text-indent: 0.5in;">“This one looks like all the others. Should I be worried about the others?”</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I know Michael wants to say, <i>Yes, you should be worried about the others, just as you worry about everything else. Yes, worry, dammit! Worry and then shut up.</i> But he doesn't say this. He tells me simply to have it removed when we return home. We are on vacation, after all. But I take Worry with me wherever I go.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Instantly I want to shout, <i>Easy for you to say, you're not the one with all the raging moles! </i>Instead I say nothing and he tells me to stop reading about melanoma. I think about my father, my brother-in-law, and one of my closest friends, all of whom I’d lost to cancer in short time. I think about my sister whom had layers of squamous cell carcinoma shaved off her nose. She is in the clear now. It was just last September when my now annoyed and fatigued husband spent three hours on the operating table having his prostate removed. (How in the world could I have wished to utter, <i>Easy for you to say</i>?) Cancer. I’ve become hyper-vigilant. It is quiet, <i>quiet</i>, and we can hear the sea, in and out, and the constant wind gusts, and we can smell the mist from the ocean that comes up in squalls, over the dunes, into the hollow and through the house. We are on the eastern side of the island and the beach is a walk away over the dunes. A large, gentle pond sits on the other side of the sandy, rosa rugosa-lined path that divides house from water. I could be anywhere, though. Anywhere, and I would still tend to Worry. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Earlier in the day, we had taken the high-speed ferry from Hyannis to Nantucket with our two teens. We’d come to visit and relax with my in-laws who own a small home in Quidnet. My father-in-law met us at the wharf where the ferry pulls in. It’s a lovely area of the harbor, trimmed with grey wooden docks, shingled structures and bricked and cobblestoned roads which spill into the island’s historic downtown, where, by way of special zoning bylaws, no large restaurant franchise or retail chain can be found with the exception of a Ralph Lauren store, which Lauren acquired at a cost of more than six million dollars prior to the passing of the bylaw. It all seems so quaint and pristine, so very removed from the rest of the world and all its commercial trappings and corruption. Madras-clad, Sperry-footed people strolling the streets, no hurry, no worry, no mission other than to pass the moment blithely. During one of our previous trips to Nantucket I had read that the island’s early settlers, the Wampanaug Indians, referred to this golden bib of land as a <i>Place of Peace</i>, or in their own language, <i>canopache</i>. To the native peoples, this island was also removed from the world, a faraway place, and so they named it <i>Nantucket</i>, meaning, in their native tongue, <i>faraway land</i>. And it occurs to me now, as I stretch out my armpit mole that the only thing that seems <i>faraway</i> to me is my ability to relax. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We loaded our bags in my father-in-law’s black Range Rover and he drove us out beyond the slick cobblestone, alongside lush, undulating pastures, and pretty ponds dotting the salty landscape, east, down Polpice Road and out to Quidnet, where we quickly changed into our bathing suits and charged back out to the island’s south side, to the narrow strand of beach known as Nobadeer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But even on Nobadeer’s ribbon of packed, turbinado sugar-like sand that falls out into the wide-open Atlantic, into the blue, blue horizon, I was too anxious to <i>relax</i>. On the shore I wondered how this fine-grained land must have looked when it first rose from thawing ice sheets, when it was nothing but sandur, an outwash plain from Earth’s last glacial period, separated from Cape Cod’s mainland by the icy retreat; how pristine it must have been! Pristine it still is, in many ways, and even more so during the off seasons, fall through spring, when the island’s population is one-fifth of what it is during the summertime. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Yet, it is not entirely unsullied. It overpopulates in the summer months, especially during the time when we are here—the days that flank both sides of the 4<sup>th</sup> of July—with a noticeable accrual of noise and litter, especially downtown. This summer, it may be even more populated due, in part, to being recently named <i>the</i> <i>best</i> island in the <i>world </i>by <i>National Geographic</i>. But even with its quaint village, and remarkable landscape, its dramatic drops from highland to sea, it’s hard to imagine that Nantucket would be more beautiful than, say, Bora Bora (though I’ve never been to a land <i>that</i> faraway).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Just above Nobadeer’s dunes is Nantucket Memorial Airport, and early afternoon during the week of July 4<sup>th</sup> planes descended above heads every ten minutes or so. Later afternoon, the same planes took off with such reverberating thrust that we could not hear one another speak across a beach blanket. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">On this island, a place where money is no object, where waterfront is often reserved for the rich, I peered out at the sea before me, at the narrow shoreline, at Max and Lulu on their boogie boards searching for the big wave to Bliss, and then turned back behind me to view the shedding dunes that make clear this earth is still undergoing a glacial warming. Nobadeer slowly erodes, I am told, by ten feet per year—which, to me, hardly seems slow. What was once a wide swath of silky sand is now this narrow strip of beachfront. One can still maneuver a car along the edge of the sandy fraying ribbon just above the high water mark, but it is tricky and, at times, hazardous. There are no lifeguards, no restrooms, nor any facilities, for that matter, at Nobadeer. Summer residents drive out to the beach in SUVs or Jeeps packed with provisions for the day. They open the backs of their vehicles, tailgate style, set up tents and tables and large, colorful beach umbrellas, and spread their feast across the sea-green tablecloth.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Nantucket style—as if there were never meant to be a care in the world.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I sat in a canvas chair by the water at low tide until tall, foamy swells began to wash in and overtake my canvas nest, and observed the busy airport. How long would it be before the constant process of the wearing away of expensive soil and pebble cut into the airport proper and all the turbinado sugar washed out to sea? It appeared that there was hardly a hundred yards from rolling tide to runway. Let's see, ten feet per year, a hundred yards, in roughly thirty years there would be no more fine dining at Nobadeer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Already, a good portion of Nantucket's seashore had been closed to protect the nesting piping plovers, so access to the ocean was restricted. If you are on Nantucket in the summertime you may not be happy about this, especially if you’re a big beachgoer and the island is swollen with company. Or, you may be elated and thankful for the efforts of conservationists. I was happy that we’d found a beach where the piping plovers do not nest, where we could gather with our hosts and new friends, and watch the children surf and in the rough littoral, and <i>literal</i>, tumble of the breakers, and rake up smooth, white shells. This was a place where the sun stayed pasted in the sky all day and I could simply be there, without obligation, except to sit in a low chair, <i>half</i>-way under a beach umbrella, book bag at my side, consuming food and drink enough to last us a week. Soon, though—maybe it was the pulsing heat—my attention to the distance from shore to airstrip, the sloughing of the beach and dunes, and the private jets and puddle jumpers descending above our sunburnt heads faded, and in a seamless shift I found myself hyper-focused on the itchy, dry, raised mole perched at the nape of my right armpit, above the grooves and swells of axillary folds; it was the nub that was sure to keep me from vacationing. Had it changed over the years? I wasn’t sure. Why didn't I know this? The more I inspected it, the more uglier, angrier looking, it grew. This was not the mole that my general practitioner tapped with her index finger and insisted—as she did the day before we left for Nantucket—must come out. <i>That</i> mole, what she called “irritated and suspicious looking,” floats atop the soft, creamy skin of my upper abdomen and is part of a constellation of small, chocolaty moles that, together, if closely observed, resemble the inverse image of the Little Dipper. That little nebula hardly looks suspect to me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“She’s wrong about this,” I say to Michael. I’m irritated. “The sick one, the angry one is this one!” I shove my iPhone before his face so he can bear witness to the gruesome, pixelated details of my monster mole, the one that’s infiltrated my body.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“You’ve got to stop thinking like this,” he sighs. “Let’s get some sleep, please.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The ocean stirs a savory potion, and I want to gulp it down, I want it to magically quell my nerves, to melt the stone in my chest, to make worries go Poof! But I torment myself with Worry into the wee hours before I'm finally lulled to a half-sleep by the salty elixir.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It is like this for the next week. We are on Nantucket, then the Cape. The mole stays angry, I double up on sunblock and get little sleep. A rock stays lodged in my chest. I <i>know</i> it's bad. I wonder if my GP should be the one to disturb the suspicious mole <i>and</i> the hostile armpit mole; mining them from my body. (Where are all the mined moles stored?) There had been a prior excavation—neighboring moles had merged just above the belly button. Moles that merge are always suspect and they are excised with little inquest. In the case of my conjoined moles, former constituents of the abdominal constellation, a half-inch core of skin, fat and tissue to which the moles were attached was cut out with a sharp knife by a Boston dermatologist, who dropped the gory specimen in a liquid preservative housed in a glass jar and jiggled it before me, like I was a spectator at an old wild west hanging. I later learned that the procedure was unnecessary as the mole cluster was determined to be benign. Yet, I was glad for the news, even the cutting, despite the fact that now set at a 45 degree angle a few inches above my navel is a one-inch scar that looks like the fossil of a centipede. I do not wish to have my torso marred by ghostly arthropods. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But I worry. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I say nothing to anyone but my poor, patient husband. I am disgusted with myself. I should be happy, carefree, grateful for the opportunity to be vacationing with Michael’s extended family, all of whom generously host our Cape Cod and Island excursions (of which, otherwise, we couldn’t afford). I resolve to find easy moments with family, and I do: warm, sea-salty moments that are sprinkled, no, <i>flooded</i> with lively, fresh seafood dinners, quiet walks on the bay, excited faces on the little Boston Whaler that takes us out to the little barrier island of Sandy Neck. I am able to shave layers of weighty anguish off the rock. The sky is blue, the weather temperate, and in the late evening the empyrean vault sparkles with amazing firework. All is well until I go to bed. There, I tell myself <i>I</i> am eroding. Like Nantucket’s ecosystem, <i>my</i> body is bearing its fragility. I am aging, deteriorating, and well, <i>something</i> is bound to go seriously wrong with this body. Can't we reasonably expect this? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Back home, where there is no ocean to see or smell for miles, I unpack my suitcase and empty the contents of my book bag. Tucked inside the bag's zippered pocket I find two well-preserved seashells that I'd plucked from the shoreline of Nobadeer. They are large, beautiful shells that look like marble or limestone spiral igloos, not the common mermaid's slipper found on Nantucket's beaches. These shells had once protected muculent inhabitants: snails of deep water—the moon snail. He burrows, too, into mud bottoms, searches for prey, clasps a clam with his gelatinous foot and bores a hole through his prey’s armor with his toothy, chitinous tongue, an acid-tipped killer drill. Even soldier crabs run from the moon snail.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But the shells’ inhabitants are gone, dead, their flesh devoured by other sea creatures, their armament souvenirs. Nothing is immune. I place them on my writing desk.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Monday morning I call my dermatologist's office and beg for an immediate appointment. I have a <i>seething</i> mole, I tell the receptionist. The offender should be extracted at once. I have another, less benign looking mole that my GP, with whom I don’t agree, wants removed from its cosmic configuration. The receptionist slides me into an 8:30 a.m. opening on Tuesday. She'd prefer, I'm quite certain, to slide me into a psychiatrist's schedule. I would not argue this. I try to remember when I'd last seen my dermatologist (or psychiatrist). Why had she not noticed the armpit mole? Or had she?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It was this time last year, late July, early August, that I observed my children digging trenches in tidal flats at the tip of Sandy Neck—a Cape Cod barrier beach—constructing hermit crab hotels designed for the protection of vulnerable crustaceans. This, they did, despite the shifting tide which would soon send these crabs scattering beyond the hotel, abandoning their fabricated home. They knew then, too, that as the crabs grew larger, they would eventually toss their borrowed shells in search of roomier ones. The borrowed and discarded shells were small, <i>tiny</i> snail shells, not at all like the heavy shells of deep seas (yet, as my moon snail shells reveal, weighty armor does not insure defense). Watching the kids attempting to offer the crabs a safe harbor reminded me that they would soon shed their own shells. It could be this very summer. Soon, they’ll traverse a world foreign and potentially dangerous, treading further into the deep sea. To where will they retract when threatened? Do they possess the moon snail’s killer instinct? Should they be fearful? Do they sense <i>my</i> fear? I try, I try hard, to keep Worry at bay. I wish them not to be frightened, only <i>aware</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Tuesday morning Dr. Kirk circles the innocent abdominal speckle with a purple indelible marker, writes "<i>2 x 3</i>" above it and takes a photo. She does the same with another in the constellation. With her magnifier, she zooms in on the mad, bulging blot <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">that now spits from the ridge at the nape of my armpit. <i>This one looks...hmm</i>, she says, as the magnifier scans the surrounding skin<i>, fine</i>. Given my skin's pigmentation, she explains to me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It is as if she has waved smelling salts beneath my nose. <i>Fine</i>? Fine! I breathe again. I am lucky. (But acutely aware that luck is the card not dealt to all, reserved for no one, and the game invariably changes, so I do not apologize for being an alarmist. I have lost my father, my dear brother-in-law, and one of my closest friends to cancer, all within short time.) Nevertheless, I explain, I would like it removed before it is <i>un-fine</i>. It has been bothersome and prone to snags. This is fine, too, she tells me, but today is not her surgery day.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The others, she points out, are on <i>watch</i>. Should these change, darken, enlarge, action will be necessary. In three months I will return to her office. It will mark one full year from my first skin scan. (<i>Skinscan</i>, I later discover, is an <i>Apple</i> application for the monitoring and analysis of moles. I don’t download the app.) At that time, and though she thinks it’s harmless, Dr. Kirk will remove the underarm mole at my command, along with another mole she’s deemed odd; she’ll hew them down like cleaved trees that do not bear good fruit, slicing them from where they’re rooted with a hand-held straight edge blade. Later she’ll tell me that the mole that kept me up for nights on end is normal. No sign of cancer. The other odd one, she’ll say, is atypical, which means I’m oddly fine for the time being.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“The internet is the worst thing to ever happen to doctors,” she tells me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">“And to patients,” I concur.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I thank Dr. Kirk for her support. I call my GP and cancel the procedure. The rock in my chest is a pebble, my face pink with embarrassment. Unlike the moon snail, I have no knack for slaying. Beneath my pale outer covering is only accumulated fear and worry. It feels counterintuitive, yet I know I must do this, I clearly sense it, I must shed fears, let them loose in my Sea of Unease, expose this timorous being to the elements, the rough seas, the cold winds atop ice-capped mountains, or to things like jets and puddle jumpers that I no longer board, or zip lines, <i>any</i> lines, the aging lines, rimples and knots of my body, all conditions approached with trepidation. Yet, the instinct is to flee.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Here is the rub. I cannot flee. Can anyone? Not even to faraway lands or islands where money is no object. It’s futile. Danger and risk are not unique to the mainland. I can only be aware. Watch the coastline and all things that sail on the horizon, listen to the ebb and flow of its waters and their simple message. Don’t make more of it. <i>You just get in the current and float—you’ll drift right back in round the other side</i>, I was told just days prior, as I stood on the beach of Sandy Neck’s duck-bill tip, fretting about my flimsy aquatic abilities. “Oh, yes, it looks so easy,” I’d replied, while surveying the cold current running a hook around the shoreline. And as I gazed out as a crow flies, into the bay’s channel, drifting peacefully in the horseshoe flow were my two children and Michael, coasting along, round to the other side.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.com57tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-86883588883254846782012-06-22T23:37:00.001-04:002013-05-07T20:57:52.780-04:00Not the Usual Frolic — Summer Hours<div style="text-align: center;">
It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up. <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: large;"> </span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">-<i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Somerset_Maugham" target="_blank">W. Somerset Maugham</a></i></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #202020; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">But I did. As I do every day, even if it's a day in which I cannot take a seat at my desk. And every day that passes, every day of these last two weeks plus some, as such reminds me of how little I've accomplished—at least in terms of scribbling out anything cogent. But school, you see, ended. Summer began. Maine awaited. Celebrations befell. The beach beckoned. Flower and herb pots called (although I've not returned the message). My niece, the Magpie, stayed with us for several days. She loves to flit about and take one thing from another to build something of her own. Anything really. She's a wonder. Then, there was the search for a new car which quite literally gobbled time. True, it ate up every last morsel. And drooled some. (How in the world could I have expected less?) Mourning the loss of the ten-year-old car: entirely <i>unexpected</i>.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #202020; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">I've gone and done something ridiculous. Three rows. For the kids. <i>Ridiculous</i>. Less efficient. She's a beast. An ebony zaftig. A sphinx I can't seem to crack. But she gets six to the beach quite comfortably. And what a beach. Not the beach to which absolutely everyone-and-their-in-laws-in-the-burbs clusters. Oh no. I never liked that beach. Not even as a teen. Back then it had a crowded boardwalk, loud radios, gum-snapping dolls, the scent of baby oil, and lots of gold chains. (But the bus got me there and so I went.) I doubt it's changed much. Maybe it has. Regardless. It's still <i>crowded</i>. At the beach, I don't want to run into people I know. Unless I've planned it. Otherwise, I want Maugham in my lap and a lifeguard who watches the kids. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #333333; font-family: verdana, Arial, Tahoma, sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveller through life comes to an acceptance of reality. It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched, for they are full of the truthless ideals which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real they are bruised and wounded. ~William Somerset Maugham, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Of-Human-Bondage-Bantam-Classics/dp/055321392X" target="_blank">Of Human Bondage</a></i>.</span></blockquote>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #202020; line-height: 20px;">I stored chicken stock in an old glass milk bottle. Lulu thought it was lemonade and drank it.</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #202020; line-height: 20px;"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #202020; line-height: 20px;"><i>Seriously, Mom? Did you have to put it in a milk bottle</i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #202020; line-height: 20px;">?! It was not the sort of thirst quenching drink she'd anticipated. Should I have labeled it? I thought that it so closely approximated a urine specimen that she'd surely steer clear. Besides, who would drink something from a milk bottle that did not even remotely resemble milk?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #202020; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">At the graduation party for her granddaughter, the valedictorian, Aunt Sue (Mother's sister) came bearing gifts for her three nieces. A box of Grandmother's books with copyrights dated from the 1920s (W. Somerset Maugham's <i>Short Stories</i>) through 1979 (Barbara Taylor Bradford's <i>A Woman of Substance</i>). Backwoods Betty grabbed <i>The Case of the Cautious Coquette</i>, from Erle Stanley Gardner's <i>Perry Mason</i> series. I took Roman MacDougald's <i>The Whistling Legs</i>, and Carter Dickson's <i>The Cavalier's Cup</i>. As well as the <i>Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham</i>. (</span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #202020; line-height: 20px;">Grandma, it seems, liked mysteries. Aunt Sue, it seems, was surprised by this.) </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #202020; line-height: 20px;">Mary glanced at the box and quickly turned and walked away before any of us could put a hardcover in her hand. I don't blame her. The dusty novels are not allergen-free. Mother, curious as to the box's contents, pulled out a few titles but ultimately slipped them back in, refraining as well.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #202020; line-height: 20px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">For a while, when I was a girl, Grandmother lived on a dairy farm. My goal for quite some time during those years was to finagle, each summer weekend, an overnight stay at her place on the farm. Once there, I stole eggs out from under the hens in the chicken coop, chased cats up trees, jumped from the third floor to the second in the hayloft, milked cows, hugged goats and played with the Wright girls at their homestead across the street from the barn. Sometimes, I got to ride Missy the pony. Back then, I welcomed the respite from the noise of the city and the opportunity to run wild while Grandmother baked a strawberry-rhubarb pie. </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #202020; line-height: 20px;">I do not remember ever seeing </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #202020; line-height: 20px;">on the bookshelves of Grandmother's apartment </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #202020; line-height: 20px;">any of the amusing old titles that Aunt Sue had packed in a box. Come to think of it, I do not remember ever drinking milk there, but I do recall whipping cream with a hand blender to the thickest peak in the state. And pouring it over pie.</span></div>
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From the bottom of the stairs Max calls up to me. It's late and he should be getting to bed. Instead he's asking: <i>Oh hey Mom, do you know what this stuff is that's in a dairy bottle?</i><br />
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<i>What stuff, Max?</i> I shout down to him, chuckling to myself, as I try to finish this piece.<br />
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<i>It looks like pee. Do you know what it is? It's in that milk bottle? What is it?</i><br />
<br />
Now, I cannot stop laughing. It's funny what one should decide to ask. Or what one thinks oughtn't (or needn't) be asked. I reveal the secret, and decide to close up shop and return to Maugham. I can no longer concentrate. So much for cogency.<br />
<br />
<b>Summer Hours</b>: Here and there, like the Magpie. Friday Night Frolics optional. Time off with the kids, mandatory.<br />
<br />
(By the way, is anyone reading <a href="http://joeblairwriter.com/index.html" target="_blank">Joe Blair</a>? I like this guy, and he keeps a blog, too. See his <a href="http://blog.joeblairwriter.com/2012/06/what-spider-has-to-do-with-rings-of.html" target="_blank">latest post here</a>. )<br />
<br />
<object height="81" width="100%"> <param name="movie" value="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F38667236&show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=959595">
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<embed allowscriptaccess="always" height="81" src="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F38667236&show_comments=true&auto_play=false&color=959595" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="100%"></embed> </object> <a href="http://soundcloud.com/wayne21/rusted-root-send-me-on-my-way">Rusted Root - Send Me on My Way</a> by <a href="http://soundcloud.com/wayne21">wayne21</a></div>
Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.com48tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-4305106647761272072012-06-06T17:11:00.000-04:002012-12-08T23:35:37.304-05:00With(in) Time<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5CYXiWZsWbc/T8-gEr3PekI/AAAAAAAACgA/xLq5gY9JIcQ/s1600/Lulu3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5CYXiWZsWbc/T8-gEr3PekI/AAAAAAAACgA/xLq5gY9JIcQ/s1600/Lulu3.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I know I haven't made myself present in the blogging world lately. I've been too present elsewhere, though I'm not certain one can be <i>too</i> present. In my case, being <i>too</i> present means I'm giving attention where attention is due, without the usual distractibility suffered by those of us with ADHD. Ah, if I could only manage the same with my writing.<br />
<br />
The past seven days or so, I've been helping the kids stay focused on their studies. Not studying with them (except for grammar with Lulu), but wrangling them into study mode. Semester exams began last Friday and ended at 11:20 this morning. As did the last day of school. Thus, begins summer.<br />
<br />
Another milestone, too: Lulu turned thirteen this past Sunday. We are now a true teen household. It's becoming increasingly more difficult for me to remember what life was like before the teen years. Childhood and the peri-teen years. (And for the girl, the peri-peri-teens. An agonizingly extended period.) I <i>genuinely</i> welcomed my children's growing independence. Perhaps my failure to summon certain stages of their development stems from an established management strategy; a coping, or defense, mechanism—a <i>survival tactic</i>—the subconscious suppression, or <i>repression</i>, of those infant and toddler days.<br />
<br />
There was a stretch of time, six years to be exact, after an ambivalent move to the burbs, when the kids were very small and when my husband traveled nearly every week, a time when this now thirteen-year-old sprite never slept and her older brother, the Nocturnal Knight, never stopped, when I was working full-time, three days in the office, two at home, a time of overwhelming single-mother type stress, when I felt desperate for help. And for sleep. Though I never would have admitted as much then. I barely remember that stretch now. <i>This too shall pass</i> was my mantra. And it did. Pass.<br />
<br />
Last night I watched the now 6' 2" Max lift himself from his comfy, curled position on the couch and stride over to the kitchen with a very <i>man-like</i> gait. Shoulders broad, head up, confident, but still rail-thin. When did this happen? This <i>man</i> thing? He won't be fifteen for ten days.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
* * *</div>
<br />
On the eve of her thirteenth birthday, Lu says, <i>Ma, you know I'm happy you're an older mother. I think older mother's are wiser. They don't spoil their kids as much</i>.<br />
<br />
I consider this for a moment. <i>But didn't you get everything you wanted for your birthday, Lu? </i>(She didn't want much, really. Just a few clothing items and perfume from her favorite <i>Pink</i> and <i>Hollister</i> stores.)<br />
<br />
<i>True, but you don't spoil me like some kids are spoiled, and some kids are not so nice to their parents because of that. They know they can get away with things.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>So, you're saying you don't mind that you don't always get what you want.</i>
<i><br /></i><br />
<i>Yup, that's what I'm saying.</i><br />
<br />
I punch my fists in the air, <i>Yes!</i>, and tell Lu that I wish I'd had her words recorded on tape. (There are many, many things I wish I had on tape. Or on notes. Or video, or any medium given to reproduction.) I try to expunge the thought that, at least in my mind, the essence of this conversation is that I am <i>old</i>. And Lu is anxious that I may not be around as long as some other moms. But that's another conversation. One that we've had. <i>Fears</i>.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
* * *</div>
<br />
I try to remember them as babies. I look at old photos lining the upstairs hall. I recall their smiles and laughs at various stages of their young years. (I heave aside the colic and tears.) Their pranks and late night prowls in their bedrooms and throughout the house. I almost remember the warm feel of them in my arms, but it is like the warmth of an an old friend who has moved to another country. And I don't have a passport. I want to go there. But I don't necessarily want my photo taken for the papers. What those days ultimately bring to mind, aside from some funny and absurd moments, is how well toned my arms were back then. I wonder if it would be any easier to get those back.<br />
<br />
Tonight, I head back to my old high school with Lu. She will present a certificate to the girl who won a college scholarship in my father's name. (Father taught English at the high school.) Max and his cousin Emmie presented two years ago, and another cousin last year. Lu will be at a podium. She will speak. She has prepared notes. She is ready. She does not seem worried at all. It's her time.<br />
<br />
_______________________________<br />
June 8, 2012 Postscript:<br />
<br />
This morning, I'm heading to the wilds of Maine with the kids to celebrate the end of the school year. We'll be at the family lake house (where internet service is taboo) for the next several days. I'll be catching up with all of you when I return next week. Have a wonderful weekend. :)Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.com44tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-79691610845623402742012-05-30T14:18:00.000-04:002012-12-08T23:36:06.826-05:00Every Pile is AtomicNever mind metals, <i>this</i> is an atomic pile, capable of splitting into fragments that release hundreds of millions of energy volts:<br />
<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-J58kU1OvFdA/T8ZLziLbiqI/AAAAAAAACeA/bXerQKRvDDs/s1600/atomicpile1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="258" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-J58kU1OvFdA/T8ZLziLbiqI/AAAAAAAACeA/bXerQKRvDDs/s400/atomicpile1.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The tallest one in the back row would be Max.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
A sweeter pile since taking it all at this past long, hot weekend's soccer tournament (yes, for this is why the Suburban Soliloquist <a href="http://www.suburbansoliloquy.com/2012/05/friday-night-frolic-crown-roast.html" target="_blank">packed--whilst sipping a glass of white with KW</a>). Their energy, though nearly exhausted at the final, earned them the championship. And it was, overall, you might say, I high voltage weekend.<br />
<br />
This is another atomic pile:<br />
<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PlARXlEPOKA/T8ZPbN8JQUI/AAAAAAAACeQ/OCgqlzVB1qo/s1600/atomicpile2+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PlARXlEPOKA/T8ZPbN8JQUI/AAAAAAAACeQ/OCgqlzVB1qo/s320/atomicpile2+2.jpg" width="239" /></a></div>
<br />
An atom-smashing force. But in case you are not familiar with the muse, a secret: she is one combustible chain reaction of I-don't-know-whats mingled with when-to-expects?, and often the encounters are altogether foreign, <i>alien</i> (except in controlled environments having limited variables and distinct parameters--or is it perimeters?). Nevertheless, she's highly efficient.<br />
<br />
It could be said that most teams, most relationships, no matter the sort, are atomic piles if carefully built and efficient in the maintenance, control and expenditure of energy.<br />
<br />
<i>Spent</i> is how the Suburban Soliloquist felt upon returning from the dramatic collection and subsequent fission of boys in colorful uniforms skirring across the turf fields of central Connecticut. Which is why she appears here, today, with little news other than that of <i>piles. </i>Laundry, dishes, bills, emails, appointments, etc., all of which are slowly being dismantled or dispersed, or, um, better yet, delegated.<br />
<br />
And here—not to be outdone by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, atomic piles expert extraordinaire—is John Hodgman, the marshmallow wrapped in hugs (aha, <i>that's</i> an atomic pile), sharing some universal truths.<br />
<br />
On atomic piles <i>and</i> alien encounters...<br />
(It's well worth the eighteen minutes of energy you are about to expend.)<br />
<br />
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<i>Make of that what you will</i>, but take note of alien encounters and piling atoms about you.Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-762878187346313358.post-417071741941278502012-05-25T21:50:00.000-04:002016-10-21T18:44:56.147-04:00"Friday Night Frolic" — Pretty Little Lamb(chop)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-e08DfXfIvPk/T8AhFPrSubI/AAAAAAAACc4/XvwRCz4FwqI/s1600/denyeverything.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-e08DfXfIvPk/T8AhFPrSubI/AAAAAAAACc4/XvwRCz4FwqI/s1600/denyeverything.JPG" /></a></div>
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Look, with an album named <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mr-M-Lambchop/dp/B006H99HDY" target="_blank">Mr. M</a></i>, cryptic lyrics hidden therein, boys slinking about their own island, scratching and whispering, mocking emotion, well, it seems this evening calls for the proper attire—though, the Suburban Soliloquist is having difficulty locating her black Ray-Bans. (Maybe that's because she doesn't own black Ray-Bans.)<br />
<br />
But she's got the T-shirt and she's guessing the geeky <a href="http://www.last.fm/music/Kurt+Wagner" target="_blank">Kurt Wagner</a> wouldn't mind her slipping it on. Not at all. Especially if she were pouring him a glass of white. Which she is. He will arrive, Wagner, yes, this very night (tell her traveling hubby and she will deny it), but she can't tell you when or how, or else...<br />
<br />
And because the Suburban Soliloquist is in the midst of packing (of which she can't, or won't?, again elaborate), and feels at this moment that she can say it no better, she will permit the <a href="http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2012/02/lambchop_mr_m.php" target="_blank">Village Voice</a>—which does not hide, scratch or whisper—to speak for her. But first, she'll tell you this: <a href="http://www.lambchop.net/" target="_blank">Lambchop</a> is a band. True. Lambchop is also a...
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444;">...vanishingly rare band allowed to exist over several geologic eras of pop-culture time, pursuing a singular, demented muse. Lambchop is an island, removed from the squalor of everyday world, so terrifically inscrutable that you even start looking for significance in their name: not pork chop, but <em>lamb</em> chop. Surely that must mean something. </span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #444444;"><em>Mr. M</em> is, at once, one of the band’s most open-hearted and acidic records. It opens with a flourish of strings that invoke memories of Frank Sinatra’s great, gloomy indigo-jazz records with string arranger Nelson Riddle. The clothes are old ones, slightly threadbare, and they are ones Lambchop have a winking relationship with, dating back at least to 2001′s<em>Nixon</em>. You can smell the used-record-sleeve on them. And so, apparently, can Wagner, something he’s quick to draw your attention to. When he enters the song, he appears to be both commenting ironically on its motion and somehow directing its action: “Grandpa’s coughing in the kitchen/ But the strings sound good/ Maybe add some flutes/ And how do get the cups out from over there?”</span></blockquote>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<object height="81" width="100%"> <param name="movie" value="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F28251515&show_comments=false&auto_play=false&color=959595">
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* * * </div>
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And now, she's pouring him that glass of white...</div>
<br />
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<br /></div>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><i>The wine tasted like sunshine in the basement</i>. </span>(For some peculiar reason, this little nugget <i>nudges</i> the Suburban Soliloquist to reach for her <a href="http://www.suburbansoliloquy.com/2011/09/raconteur.html" target="_blank">1960s flashcards</a>.)<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: inherit;">What were they doing in the basement? </span>Hmm...<br />
<br />
Wagner, and his pretty, pretty Lambchop. How they do it they'll never tell.
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Listen to more <a href="http://www.myspace.com/lambchopisaband" target="_blank">Lambchop here</a>. Lambchop visits Jimmy Fallon, <a href="http://www.latenightwithjimmyfallon.com/episode-guide/" target="_blank">late night, tonight</a>.<br />
<br />
(To be honest, er, um, the Suburban Soliloquist has no secret information, she's not even sure who wrote this post.)<br />
<br />
(But<i>, </i>the wine <i>did</i> taste like sunshine in the basement.)Jaynehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06694559900539722616noreply@blogger.com10