With(in) Time

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 too present. In my case, being too 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.

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.

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 genuinely 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 survival tactic—the subconscious suppression, or repression, of those infant and toddler days.

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. This too shall pass was my mantra. And it did. Pass.

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 man-like gait. Shoulders broad, head up, confident, but still rail-thin. When did this happen? This man thing? He won't be fifteen for ten days.

*   *   *

On the eve of her thirteenth birthday, Lu says, 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 consider this for a moment. But didn't you get everything you wanted for your birthday, Lu? (She didn't want much, really. Just a few clothing items and perfume from her favorite Pink and Hollister stores.)

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.

So, you're saying you don't mind that you don't always get what you want.

Yup, that's what I'm saying.

I punch my fists in the air, Yes!, 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 old. 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. Fears.

*   *   *

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.

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.

_______________________________
June 8, 2012 Postscript:

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. :)

Every Pile is Atomic

Never mind metals, this is an atomic pile, capable of splitting into fragments that release hundreds of millions of energy volts:

The tallest one in the back row would be Max.

A sweeter pile since taking it all at this past long, hot weekend's soccer tournament (yes, for this is why the Suburban Soliloquist packed--whilst sipping a glass of white with KW). Their energy, though nearly exhausted at the final, earned them the championship. And it was, overall, you might say, I high voltage weekend.

This is another atomic pile:

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, alien (except in controlled environments having limited variables and distinct parameters--or is it perimeters?). Nevertheless, she's highly efficient.

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.

Spent 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 piles. Laundry, dishes, bills, emails, appointments, etc., all of which are slowly being dismantled or dispersed, or, um, better yet, delegated.

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, that's an atomic pile), sharing some universal truths.

On atomic piles and alien encounters...
(It's well worth the eighteen minutes of energy you are about to expend.)

Make of that what you will, but take note of alien encounters and piling atoms about you.

Friday Night Frolic — For The Children (and Daphne)

What is the use of a house if you don't have a decent planet to put it on? 

~ Henry David Thoreau

The brook is so low it's barely moving. The whole of our little riparian zone here in our corner lot in Suburbaland is a mess with fallen branches, twisted twig, and windswept trash. It looks miserable. This time of year, when mud season creeps in, I always feel like our land is telling us that it would like to be left alone. That it should never have been disturbed. That it wasn't meant to have been developed. We bought it, though, despite my general concerns regarding suburbia, after the cul-de-sac had been close to fully developed, and the biggish house (and in the grand scope of big-home suburbia--land of obscene McMansions--ours is the caretaker's home, which is still more than I care to care for) and pretty wetlands at its border drew us in.

We bought it for quality of life. For the family. We bought it for the school system (which, as it turned out, was rather overrated and spiraled southward soon after we moved in). We bought it because we got more home for the dollar here in lil' Rhody (oh, but the taxes!). We bought it for the dream.

Lately, I've been reading and reassessing our quality of life and what that means to me, my family, our environment, our ecosystems, the world as a whole...

Swift growth outside of urban areas is not unique to Suburbaland. Our town, to which I have before, by way of photo essay, referred, is like many other suburbs that hope to lure families to the dream with biggish new lots on which sit biggish new homes with biggish new lawns (and sometimes littleish lots with biggish homes and littleish lawns) and the pièce de résistance: biggish privacy. Though I'm not well versed in Suburbaland's permitting process, I'd imagine that developers love towns like ours that seem, or at least seemed at one point, quick to hand out building permits. Of course, we all know how that ended. Yet, it hasn't actually ended.

Several years after we moved into town, a new development went up on a hilly parcel of land along an old country road. The land comprised the few remaining untouched acres on this particular part of the road. Right under the bridge of a highway. McMansions set on steep mounds of craggy soil below the highway. I wondered if we needed housing that badly.

Eventually, the homes sold, with the exception of the first house built at the corner of the country road and the new road. What was also sold off was our buffer zone. Trees and brush and any living thing that offered padding from the noise of the expressway was flattened. A half-mile or so away from the new McHood, my neighborhood is now a little bit noisier. But certainly not noisier than the old Boston 'hood, on Comm. Ave., where most services were a walk away, and the T screeched by every fifteen minutes (which I never, ever minded).

It's all relative, as they say.

Still, I reassess. Our mayor, who hitherto has been the champion of town edification, has proposed a plan to create a town center on the protected lands of our old Monastery, in which the town library is housed. It's a beautiful 550 acre swath of grassy tracts, leafy trails and wetlands where I walk and cross country ski, and where the children run cross-country, and while I applaud the idea of a town center, the thought of transforming any portion of this slice of verdant land into what the mayor dubs an "Educational Village," containing a relocated town hall (in perhaps a more desirable location?) is shameful. The reason we don't have a town center is because of historically poor town planning. It's by this same reason, and at the hands of town solicitors and leaders who believe that land conservation easements were meant to be modified, that this community is at risk of losing even more of our valuable fields and woodland. 

So much for Suburbaland's open space priorities. 

Simply by virtue of living in this town, in this neat little subdivision without sidewalks, in this world of homes of unused living rooms and front porches, on the edge of the remains of a place that was once fully adorned with flora and fauna, I am beginning to feel that I am in collusion with suburban sprawl--the need to push our planet to its absolute limit, and the willingness to turn a blind eye at the cannibalization of every morsel of land. I am a part of the rapid consumption of open space, the degradation of environment, biodiversity, farmlands, our very quality of life. I am a part.

Yet here we remain. For the children. Until the time, not too long from now, I can remain no more. And when that time arrives I'm going to pray like hell that someone else wants the caretaker's home in the dream.

Will it be different elsewhere?

 Lia Ices - Daphne by Pop Culture Monster

Lia Ices released her sophomore effort, Grown Unknown, last January 2011. Pitchfork reviewed it soon thereafter:

When Ices indulges her avant leanings, the material provides a more suitable foil for her voice. A mixture of finger snaps, glinting piano, and subdued organ provides a suitably artful backbone over which she hangs a touchingly forlorn vocal turn on "Little Marriage", and there's a deft marrying of chamber music sadness and welts of distorted guitar on "Bag of Wind". But it's the standout title track that provides the most successful conduit for Ices' eclectic whims, with a militaristic handclap and acoustic picking alongside feather-light string parts. Here Ices sounds relaxed, locating a natural meeting point for her disparate sounds and easing into a vocal that effortlessly intertwines with the arrangement.

From Necima (2008):

Grown Unknown, has all the same haunting melancholy feel as her debut album, Necima, but is less shaky, more grown up than unknown, and clearly reflects her experimental theatre education at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, as well as her Shakespearian studies at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. 

 Lia ices -grownunknown by totosarg

Bravo, Lia.

The Franklin Line

She is on the commuter rail reading the restored edition of Hemingway's A Moveable Feast.  Her eyes are misting over like the city she's about to walk through. She can't let go the last line of the Forward, what Hemingway's son, Patrick, reveals to be his father's last professional writing and "the true foreword to A Moveable Feast: 'This book contains material from the remises of my memory and of my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist.'"

He'd taken his own life a few months before she'd been born, and she'd grown up with his books at her trinket covered bedside table, thinking the man—of the few author's she'd read at the time—the most rugged, brave, passionate. Perhaps she'd held too close this quixotic adaptation of the novelist, and this line, this last line of the Foreword, causes her a minor heartbreak for Hemingway. This is not her handsome Hemingway, she thinks.

The train enters South Station and she slips her cap over her head, walks down Essex to Surface to Beach and through Chinatown. It's early morning and the street vendors have not yet set their tables at the curbs. Snow melts from Chinatown's sloped rooftops and awnings and dampens the fleece toque on her head. She crosses over to Kneeland to Tufts Medical Center.

At the TMJ clinic on the sixth floor the receptionist asks her if she's there for sleep or TMJ. She pauses a moment, she wants to say Sleep! Sleep would be nice. Had she bothered with such pleasantries (as she ordinarily does) she would have engaged the receptionist in a short conversation about the joy of sleep and the dolor of insomnia. Oh, I know, wouldn't we all like more sleep! the receptionist would cluck. But she's too tired for conversation. What she says is TMJ, and does not elaborate, and the receptionist automatically hands her a clipboard with the usual craniofacial pain indicator.

In Dr. Correa's surgical suite, her day and night guards are adjusted. They're too tight and the night bite splint keeps her from a deep sleep. She can hear Dr. Correa, in an adjacent room, whittling away at the hard plastic pieces with a drill. She slides off the exam chair and moves toward the glass bay. The window washers aren't banging against the concrete on their suspended scaffolding today. She spreads the louvered shades with her hands and looks across the street at the Floating Hospital where her daughter had had surgery in May. She thought about seeing her in pre-op, Everything will be fine, just fine, she'd said, and then, after Lu was wheeled away, she'd walked out the heavy swing doors and fell to pieces.

She looks north, to the right, up Washington beyond the Paramount, and, if she could have seen that far, the Old State House at Devonshire, Faneuil Hall at the foot of Congress, and Mass General a brisk walk beyond where her husband had been admitted for surgery in September. But her attention shifts to Government Center where they had parted after their first date more than twenty years ago, and where, just across the way at One Beacon, she had secured her first job in Boston, at a lively law firm that occupied four of the building's thirty-seven floors. If she could have fixed her eyes west on Kneeland where it stretches along the edge of the theatre district, funneling into Back Bay and Brookline beyond, she might have remembered how much she misses the walk down Chestnut Hill Ave from her apartment on Commonwealth to Bangkok Bistro at Cleveland Circle for chicken massaman, and then up Beacon, past her old apartment above the Rabbi's brownstone, to the Tam for a Bass Ale. But the Floating Hospital blocked her view west and she could see only the enormous brick facade of the medical center.

She thinks about lunch with Max at Jade Garden, and how he'd happily annihilated an oversized bowl of boiled shrimp, scallops and octopus. She thinks about the spongy pork buns and fragrant lotus leaf wrapped rice at Hei la Moon's dim sum with Lulu, and Blue Man Group, where she'd dug herself out from under toilet paper with both of them. She reminds herself to pick up mangosteens, winter jujubes and guava—the kids' favorites—on her way back to the train station. This had become her routine. And she didn't mind, even if it had become pedestrian, it took her back to a place, or even a time, she wished to be. She was not constructed for the burbs. She didn't understand its particular syntax or mechanics, the conformities within its framework, nor the nuances of its assembly. It was a misplaced parenthetical where she bided her time as the children played in the streets, joined soccer and lacrosse teams, engaged in requisite and acceptable activities. She longed for the rack and pinion of the city or the notched ridge of a mountain. The in-between hollowed her heart.

Boston was the city where, among its quaint stone buildings, streetcars, glass skyscrapers, Irish pubs, emerald parks and broad river—a place she'd felt was home, and it was home—she'd grown into herself. Now she gazed out the window at the snow-lined streets of a place that seemed far away; had she really lived there for more than a decade? During the past year, Boston had become her destination for sober reasons. She was at Tufts to be deprogrammed. When did the grinding start?

Dr. Correa returns to the room with her newly shaped appliances. They are the first part of the program. The second and third parts are physical therapy and relaxation. He asks her to sit down and keep them on for a while to determine if they're comfortable. She sits and tries to relax. She snaps the upper guard in and moves her jaw forward and back. There's more tongue room now, she says. She takes it out and tries the lower guard which seems looser and more wearable, which is important, the doctor reminds her, because we want you to be happy. We want the program to work.

Yes, they're fine, she says, just fine. 

The doctor tells her to call if anything changes, otherwise, he'll see her again in three weeks.

She looks out the window one last time, packs her bag and runs back to South Station to catch the 2:40 so she can pick her kids up by 4:00pm. Under the split-flap she realizes that in her rush she'd forgotten to buy the Asian produce and would return home fruitless. She sits in a forward facing chair, because she does not like to ride backwards, tucks her Charlie Card in the loop on the seat in front of her and opens her book. The Franklin Line schedule marks where she'd left off at the end of Chapter 8: "All I must do now was stay sound and good in my head until morning when I would start to work again. In those days we never thought that any of that could be difficult."

___________________________________


Thank you to Leah, of Eating Life Raw, for gifting to me the Versatile Blogger award (which I've added to the sidebar).  I had the happy occasion of personally meeting Leah last October when she travelled north to visit family, and I can vouch that Leah not only eats life raw but does so with fresh insight and tenacious optimism! Her words inspire—each of her posts are wrapped in shiny paper and curly ribbon, like little gifts to the world.