On Capturing the Surreal

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.

It was like this.

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, traumatized, forest scrub.  It was on this beach, before the inexhaustible sea, that I read to my husband, from Thoreau's Cape Cod, "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 The Pirate Hunter, replied: Wow. Is that ever overwritten. (Which makes me wonder, now, if I am doing the same.) But the breakers, the gurgling white breakers, from a certain angle, did look like the streaming manes of a thousand wild horses rushing to the shore.

At least to me.

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. Mom, he said, Mom! 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.

Yes! he hollered into the phone. 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.

What? Max hun, I explained, 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. He's probably just resting.

Yes, but he's bleeding. His flippers are torn up. 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.

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, What are they doing to Jesus! They're hurting him!) 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, especially 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 was beached.

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 Hello back.

So the seal is fine. I said.

Yeah, he's good. He smiled.

You had a moment with the seal. That's pretty special, don't you think?

I do. Yup. I do. And then he dug into the cooler and pulled out a water and a turkey sandwich.

It was like this.

Surreal. The Outer Cape.

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 Walden. The book that followed Thoreau's Cape Cod jaunts is Cape Cod, which is the book that I read on the sand bar that is Cape Cod. It seems that these haunting, and haunted, 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 The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. Here, on the Outer Cape.

Surreal.

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 Mary Oliver 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 The Flying Fish in downtown Wellfleet. But then, I looked her up--the Bard of Provincetown--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. Right here, on the Outer Cape, may mean almost anywhere on the Outer Cape. (Oliver's bio on Poets.org states that she currently resides in Provincetown.)

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.

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.

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.

Sifting Through the Narrative

"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." ~ Herman Melville, Moby Dick 

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. Undoing is what I did. 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 other side.)

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 mountain. 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, clothes washing! Minutiae fills. 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.

Stop.

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 Moby Dick and my own furling wave of melanomic monomania.  (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. 

Wait. I've overdone the metaphor. 

Back to an epic story... 

(Which is what, I think, I should be telling.)

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 Pequod 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 Moby Dick was finished. But it didn't keep him from envisioning, from writing about the island, and its people who... 

... plant toadstools before their houses, to get under the shade in summer time; that one blade of grass makes an oasis, three blades in a day's walk a prairie; that they wear quicksand shoes, something like Laplander snow-shoes; that they are so shut up, belted about, every way inclosed, surrounded, and made an utter island of by the ocean, that to the very chairs and tables small clams will sometimes be found adhering as to the backs of sea turtles. But these extravaganzas only show that Nantucket is no Illinois.

Moby Dick is a book I never fully read. Until now, right here, online. And in each line, each carefully chosen word, I come to understand that I've spent this summer undoing because my story,  my Moby Dick, my Ulysses, hell, my Dick and Jane, is like Moby Dick himself: one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air. A portentous and mysterious monster. I thought I'd slay him this summer. Ha!

I am not Ishmael. I don't know where to begin. Somewhere, in the sand, I keep thinking. In the sand.

*    *    *

And speaking of envisioning, this man cut away at the stake, has to be one of the coolest literary images I've stumbled upon.

You can see more magic from Brian Joseph Davis here. 

*    *    *

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 engaged. 

Now, off to bring Max to soccer...

Accepting the Challenge

Never try to arrange things. Objects and poems are irreconcilable. 

~ Francis Ponge

It is the last day of winter, the young, well-dressed neurologist says, looking up from the folder.

Mmm, yes it is, though it wasn't much of a winter, she replies mournfully. In any event, you'll be happy to know that your magnesium/B2 cocktail has taken the edge off the migraines. I haven't spent a full day in bed, dodging light, for two months now.

He's pleased by this news, though not surprised. His patients find relief. This, he knows. He seems to know a lot for his young years. Though she wonders if he, who’s never felt a migraine’s crippling blows—the rapid-fire constriction of nerves and vessels (in her case a three or four-day, often monthly, basal ganglia guerilla warfare, in which she is the only casualty, shut-off, shut down, from family, words, writing, lifeblood)—could ever truly empathize. Nevertheless, what he certainly cannot know is that in less than two hours she'll be sitting in a greyed and splintered teak chair by the table on her deck, in her skinny jeans and black cardigan, kicking off her black flats, unwinding the scarf from around her neck, lunching on last night's leftovers of salad and grilled salmon, debating the tense and POV in which to write this piece, and staring down a pretty, yellow daffodil plant that Mother brought to dinner the previous night. (She had thought to begin with: Mother brought daffodils to dinner last night.) He is confident, but cannot know this. She did not know that the day would progress as such herself. She, nor he, did not know that she'd find Francis Ponge at Symposium Books downtown. Ponge, Celine, Paz, Toussaint, all at steep discount. But she knows that when she leaves, he'll be sitting in his office with his next patient, reading his or her chart, peering up from under his wire-framed glasses and saying, It is the last day of winter.

Tomorrow is the first day of spring, the doctor's receptionist, says, as she hands her her stamped parking ticket and receipt.

Mmm, yes it is, she replies. Spring is such a pretty word.

Oh, it is. Very pretty, a welcome word, the receptionist smiles.

Goodbye my anemic winter, she thinks. Outside, the world is warming. As she walks down the street to the parking garage, she thinks about the daffodils, the color yellow, not like the walls of her kitchen which are tinted the yellow of Provence--a baby mustard--but the yellow of the sun at noontime when, during days that ululate spring, she sits on her deck for lunch and watches the glinting sun center itself above the teak table, much like she'll do today.

"Accept the challenge things offer to language," Ponge says.

(Ponge, who wrote of the wasp [or bee]: A little itinerant siphon, a little distillery on wheels and wings, like the ones that go about from farm to farm through the countryside in certain seasons; a little airborne kitchen, a little public sanitation truck...  [they] carry out an intimate activity that's generally quite mysterious... What we call having an inner life.)

Where was she now? Yes, she's left downtown's brick streets and is back home. She's on the deck. Vital fluids flowing. Taking notes: they are Tête-à-Têtes, their heads gently brushing against one another, and they need beaucoup de lumière. So she sets the daffodils out on the weathered teak table for a dose of vitamin D. They are delicate, yet hardy things. Their outer petals are lemony and frosty like a Matisse star. The rippled center cup,  trumpeting spring (she can almost hear the music), is slightly darker. The tips of the rubbery, bright green stems are curved upwards in a gothic arch--like the petals--and spliced open where the flowers, in clusters of three, have burst from their casing like electrical wiring freed from insulation. Fireworks!

Her daughter is home from school, now, sitting next to her at the table, gnawing at a slice of watermelon.

Mom, don't you ever get lonely at home? she asks.

No, never. She leans her head back against the top of the chair, And it's so good not have to hide from the light any longer.

(She wonders if Ponge ever wrote about daffodils.)

The next day, it is spring. The sun shining all over again. Daffodils singing their songs and challenging.

Does not everything have an inner life?

Treehearts (and Songhearts and Sweethearts)

Last year at this time I wrote a bit about the history of Lupercalia in this Drunk and Naked and Running Wild post, which, given the title, I later realized might bring in more creepy keyword hits than I'd prefer. But it wasn't the case at all. Nope. Turns out that nothing ropes in blog traffic here at SS more than a man caves search. I almost wish I'd never written that post.

Yesterday, I researched the origins of the heart shape as a symbol of the human heart, love and Valentine's Day and pulled up several anecdotes, but I scrapped the idea. I thought about posting this poem by Gaius Valerius Catullus, but scrapped that too.

What I really needed was a  walk.

So, I marched down the slope of our backyard, through the woods, and along the stream in hopes of finding a naturally occurring heart somewhere in the water-washed stones or the brush or the tangled branches. It was no easy task in February, when we're long past (or presently looking forward to) blooming catalpas and bleeding hearts. I'd nearly given up when I turned to head back toward the house and noticed the shape of a heart six or seven feet up in an odd looking four pronged tree. Although it may appear, from the above photo, that the heart was carved into the tree, it was not. It's completely organic, formed naturally in the tree's bark. That's my Valentine's Day gift, I thought.

When I got back to the house, I heard Max (for any new readers who haven't been introduced, Max is my 14 year old son) playing his guitar but I didn't recognize the tune. Max, who's highly resistant to lessons of any kind, had been teaching himself a couple of Aerosmith songs (ouch) on the electric guitar (ouch) he got for Christmas, but what I heard was acoustic. I went up to his room, phone in hand, and listened as he played his old classical guitar. He'd composed the melody himself, he said, it was a work in progress, but he wasn't sure if he might have stolen it, he'd heard something similar, he thought. 

So I recorded it on my phone. And after hours of trying to figure out how the heck to embed audio on my blog, this is your Valentine's Day gift:

 Max's First Song by Suburban Soliloquist 

Later, I checked the tune with SoundHound, a music recognition app for phones. The results: There were no close matches. What do you know, Max's first organic piece of music, formed naturally in his heart.

Happy Valentine's Day.

Comfort Food

"Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each." 

~Henry David Thoreau

Friable vermillion, mocha and pumpkin scraped into piles and bagged. Grass crew cut for the cold that would set in. Silver shears buzzed the holly and fire bush. Wood piled in a hollow. The little brown bat tightened in the soffit. Soil turned to clunch.

All readied for winter's diet. 

But the season failed to season. It was as bland as young bananas and white rice. 

Then. The shaker's salt clotted. Scraped peppercorn clogged in the blades. The frother jammed. The iron grew tired of steaming--just as the milky billows above rebuked soft and airy deliverance. The humidifier clattered. Alarms screeched randomly. 

Except for the ransacked house. Inside, they took what they could fit in their duffle bags. Outside, silence.
Police notified neighbors. The immediate ward abuzz with concern. 

Footprints cannot be detected in clunch.

A little girl backed up a chair under the doorknob.

Had the odds changed?

Have a piece of chocolate cake, her mother said. We are as safe today as we were yesterday. No more, no less.

In the distance, a dog barked. Geese honked overhead. 

They're back. You know where they're headed, right?

Every year, same spot, the girl said.

Actually, I'm not so sure they ever left.

The girl smiled.  Mama, that cake's the best I've ever had. I'm gonna run out and see if I can find them.

She watched her round the corner, up to Ryan's plat where the pond water swept over the fall and the birds gathered at the edge of the brook, daring each other to jump in. This is the way it was. Clouds giving or not. Clunch. Seasons lapsing. 

Relax. Concentrate. Dispel Every Other Thought. Let the World Around You Fade.*

“In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:  

the Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages, the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success, the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment, the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case, the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer, the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves, the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.

Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.” 

~Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

*    *    *

Between required school reading, books gifted to her, YA novels downloaded to her Kindle, and compilations collected from various booksellers, Lulu read roughly seventy-six books last year. That's at least twice more than I've read during any year.

I'm the main character in Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. You are, too, by the way. You and I, we've peered through the shop window and sauntered among its aisles, following the book-lined trails. Books have mocked and scolded us, and literally, fallen on us in vicious acts of defiance, especially the books (the lonely ones back at home sulking on their shelves) that we, at one time, jump started with great enthusiasm, only to sputter out of gas midway along the track. We'd thought we had more fuel in the reserve.

But we can't read them all. We simply can't. Frustrating, I know. So we choose what fits best and we try to steal time and quiet space with our reads, hoping to lose ourselves in their thin leaves. And often we do. Unfortunately, time is not on our side. We've a myriad of other things to accomplish and daily minutiae with which to keep up (not to mention holding onto jobs to pay for our meals). Even if we read every minute of every day of all the remaining days left in our lives, we wouldn't get to read all the books we'd like to. 

So they mock us.

And that's OK. We've got a life to live after all. We have things we want to do, and learn and share. Lu comes out of hiding every now and then (well, often, actually—she's a magician of a reader: relaxes, concentrates, dispels all thought, world fades out entirely), as she did yesterday morning when she appeared in the kitchen announcing that she'd make the family's Sunday dinner, because: 

1) Surprise, surprise! Sunday's 6:00pm dance class had been cancelled; and, 

2) She had read another book—The Silver Spoon for Children—and was ready to cook her very first meal.

List in her hand, I took her to the market to collect the items she'd need for baked cod with vegetables. She, with her characteristic twelve-year-old vigor, shagged through the produce, deli and seafood areas, fetched the cod and pancetta and tomatoes and carrots and leeks and lemon, sailed toward check-out (briefly hitting the brakes to grab a warm baguette from the bakery), tossed everything onto the cash-wrap, grabbed my wallet, swiped my debit card and punched in my PIN. 

Back at home she did everything just like the book said. (And I do think it said.) She gathered all equipment and utensils, slid tools of the trade into the pockets of her apron, laid out cutting boards and commenced with the prep work. She pre-heated, washed and peeled, cut and drizzled, wrapped and squeezed, assembled and, finally, popped the overflowing casserole into the oven—the world around her completely faded.

Lu wore a particular glow at dinner last evening. The I-did-it-all-by-myself glow. I know that glow. I bathed in it when I bought and set up the new router last Friday, it was a sparkly I-switched-from-G-to-N-all-by-myself glow. The glow is born of a certain zone known as, you  know it, the let-the-world-around-you-fade zone. (A zone, or focus, that the remarkable Marylinn Kelly wrote of just this Saturday.) In it, you read all the books you've been planning to read for ages (so it seems), finish what you're working on at the moment, and shatter the barricades that keep you from performing a multitude of seemingly impossible tasks. 

One glow leads to another, too. The I-did-it-all-by-myself glow leads to the wow-I-can-do-this! glow, which is followed by the I-want-to-keep-doing-this glow, which inevitably flows into the I-am-the-master-of-this glow. Tu comprends?

Look at Lu. She's glowing. She read a cookbook and got inspired. In our finite lifetime, you and me, we may never get to read, do, listen or see everything we'd hoped to, but whatever our accomplishment(s), it's worthy in its own right. And if we've done it in that certain and all-to-hard-to-find zone, if we've sat down and really read the book, if we've relaxed, concentrated, dispelled every other thought, and let the world around us fade, we ought to be especially pleased by it. Doubly pleased if it opens us up to new worlds.

(Incidentally, dinner was fabulous.)

* From Chapter One, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.

Hallo It Be Thy Ween

Goodbye October. Goodbye. The nor'easter took you out in fiery-lion fashion, and ushered in a little lamb of November. Oh, she's sweet and lemony today except for the shaded corner of the deck where, on the edge of the rooftop, the storm's evaporating snowy surplus hits the wood planks in a fury. We were powerless at the end—had, even, to temporarily move to Mother's place when temperatures dropped suddenly during the weekend's electrical outage. Monday morning I returned home to a chugging furnace and well lit kitchen. We were lucky, others still remain powerless.

Mother's is always a treat. She has Enrico Caruso 33 1/3 rpm vinyls stored in their original accordion case. But the children... well the children had to plug laptops and printers into real live sizzling outlets and crank out end-of-quarter schoolwork. Kids don't write longhand any longer, you know. Teachers prefer the typed word, which is an impossible endeavor in a candlelit house.  So we clanked the night away at Mother's. 

(I'll be back to Mother's for Caruso.)

I imagined that the kids would be too old for trick-or-treating this year, but there's the candy. There's the neighborhood where Tedy Bruschi lives (with real candy bars!), there's peer pressure and teen-All-Hallows-Eve worshippers who are in no way ready or willing to give up the quest. There's being on the streets, in the dark, void of parental oversight. 

Doors will be slammed in your faces! I said.

Ha, Mom, they love us!, the monsters replied.

Who loves you? I don't want to see six-foot tall teens at my door. Don't come to my door!

Besides, they hadn't costumes—I refused to buy them, refused to give in to the high commercialism of holidays and hallow days. Refused to believe that my little Lulu was too old for handmade costumes!

(And this is no way to depreciate the value of my two-year-old sewing machine.)

Mama, observed Lu, this isn't about store-bought costumes or me growing up. It's about you wanting to make another oversized ugly doll or an ice cream cone, isn't it?

The Ice Cream Cone 2010

The Ugly Doll 2009

Actually, my favorite was the floppy-eared hound dog with her litter. Come on, it's tradition, Lu.

All right, well maybe it is more about me and the machine and wizardry. But look, I do have to make my Singer Confidence pay for itself.

Last night, the monsters managed to piece together suitable outfits for the spooky occasion. Both came home with giant sacks of goodies. No one slammed doors in faces.

After school today, Lu announced that she'd reached her maximum fill of chocolate for the day (she'd snuck handfuls into her backpack), so I promised that I'd remind her of the same throughout the evening, that perhaps we should take the bonbon trough out of her room. Don't worry, Mom, she responded. It's NOT a temptation! It's under my bed and it's not like I'm going to get up in the middle of the night to eat a candy bar.

... Not a temptation.

... Not eating candy bars in the middle of the night.

Of course not. Mama shouldn't worry in the least.

I'm packing up the glow pumpkins, Draculas and rubber bats. Halloween has closed for another year, but its remnant confections shall remind us of the night for some time to come. At least they'd better.

Maybe it's time to start sewing up something for Christmas. (Poor, poor forgotten Thanksgiving.)

Lu & Max -- Halloween 2008

Eighteen Years on the 18th

18 yrs ago--with a weird shadow behind our heads.

For a while, I called him my Chicago Guy. Technically, though, he's my New Jersey Guy. Born and bred, baptized by Springsteen. But he has the heart and soul of Chicago. He has its big shoulders, beautiful parks,  the cool and calm of its great lake and the tenderness of Lincoln Park's polar bears (oh, but how they roar). He does not have any of its corruption.

Twenty-one years ago I got to know him in Chicago. For nearly a year, back and forth, Logan to O'Hare, O'Hare to Logan. Our life together began along that corridor and from there extended itself far and wide. It is from Chicago and its surrounding Midwest areas, where he traveled, that his twenty-five year old self wrote long rambling letters in which he noted on "unused pieces of legal stationary about to be fulfilled..." things like this:

"As I put pen to this paper I'm driving I-94 to Detroit--literally. My current problem would seem to be navigational by nature as it's damn difficult to hold a Mitsubishi on the road while steering with your knees. Just imagine how Captain Kirk would have felt if every time he launched into 'Captain's Log stardate 9312.23...' he had to worry about the Klingon hanging out in the breakdown lane. In fact, now that I think about it, that's probably just about the only reason they had that scrawny little Chekov guy on the show--so he could steer while Kirk stardated up a storm."

Romantic, eh?

Not to mention, a bit... reckless?

(It would seem that writing while driving is not a modern phenomenon. Texting, at least, condenses the correspondence. Not that I condone it!)

Today, we've been married eighteen years. Before I met Michael marriage was something I avoided with all the criminal ingenuity I could sum. I would sabotage advances and plot escapes. I was a cat burglar--slipping in and out of hearts, taking what I needed and hightailing out of the affair, almost, almost, unnoticed--until my husband walked me down that straight but not too narrow path. Much like one of his favorite movies, The Quiet Man, he is Sean to my Mary Kate, balancing the downward force with the upward. He first appeared in my life when things were a little shaky, we went for a long walk along the Charles and he took me by the hand, a blade of grass in his mouth, and said, Slow down, you will get there.

I've never written about my husband, and probably won't again. He's a quiet and very private person, and probably wouldn't like it if I said much. Eighteen years is a long time. It's a long time of this and that and give and take and figuring it out together. I'm grateful for his Sean to my Mary Kate.

So, in lieu of telling more, I offer this gem of a video, a gift of love and literature to all: Litany (click for text), by another kind of thief, Billy Collins, who can ply more words from a literary device than I can from my husband:

So, did I get there? I don't know. But I feel like I know where I'm going. And I've learned to slow down. A little.

I wouldn't at all mind going back to Chicago. Soon. With my husband.
(And if you think this entry is a ploy to get him to read my blog, you are correct.)

Remembering September 11, 2001

The other morning I woke with this Sharpie-marked, carpe diem napkin-note draped across my chest:

I am having pie for breakfast! Thank u! -- Lulu

I smiled and thought, That rascal, that petite gamine, taking full advantage of her late-rising family! 

It is a  rare moment that the girl should wake and get downstairs before her mother. And that banana cream pie from the night before... how does a twelve-year-old resist? How does a twelve-year-old not seize the day?

We are holding one another a little tighter today. We are staring at the endless blue sky and listening to requiems and sad, so very sad, stories. My brother-in-law, Tim, took his ten-year-old daughter, M,  to the Hatch-Shell at the Boston esplanade today to volunteer at the memorial gathering and tribute for those lost ten years ago on this same blue-skied September morning. M got to hold a dove before a whole slew of them were released.

As night thickens I realize that I haven't accomplished much today. It's been, I must confess, an entirely unproductive day. I've tried to write. I've tried to do something, anything that might make me feel like I'm seizing the day, that would pull me from the tube or the laptop or my own deepened depression. But I've felt woozy with the pain of those grief-stricken moments from all those years ago. I know people who lost loved ones. We all lost loved ones.

My husband was headed to Washington on September 11, 2001. He had left early morning to catch his flight out of Providence. At work, where I had watched the events unfold on a centrally located television I ran to my office and tried to phone my husband after the second plane hit the South Tower. The lines were taxed and I was unable to get through. I sat in my chair in my office, stared out the window and cried, cried, cried. Back then, my husband traveled so often that I didn't ordinarily have his itinerary—I knew I'd hear from him when he reached his destination. That morning, I didn't know where he was. I didn't know that he had a connecting flight through Pittsburgh. I was panic-stricken for more than three hours. It was early afternoon when he first got through to me on his cell phone. The Pittsburgh flight, scheduled to depart for Washington soon after 9:00am, had been grounded and he'd been trying to secure a rental car in the mass confusion and frenzy. It would be two days before he was able to get himself home.

The morning of September 11, 2001. I cannot fathom the grief. I know the dread of not knowing. Not knowing if a loved one would return. The skies seemed brim with terrorists that day. Who was on what plane? Where were they headed? Where were they coming from? But a loved one not returning? The amount of utter grief. I cannot imagine. 

Tim sends me little updates from his Blackberry:

10:12am Boston. M is checking in choir members while I label seats for TJX families. Families of folks that could have easily been Betty [Backwoods Betty] or her Ad friends.

3:58pm. Boston. The bird of peace makes me wonder how hard it is for all of us to see that hate is senseless. Even as a response to violence, we still need to preach peace.

Today, especially, we mourn the loved ones who never returned to their families, we pay tribute to them and to those who willingly continue to risk their lives to aid and protect us. We count our blessings. We remember.

Listen to the stories. Tell the stories. Make peace with the world.

And seize the day, dammit. Eat pie for breakfast. Before it's all gone.

Passing By

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.                                                            ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

One Exquisite Picture
(Or excruciatingly sad violin
farewell to Boston's downtown Borders.)

Oh, hello there. I wasn't sure when I'd make it back either. Then, there was the needling question: Am I prepared to come back?  One minor issue: I haven't settled upon a few sensible words. Which, incidentally, seems of no importance as I've once again misplaced my steno pad. And I'm surely not dressed for a big return—barefoot, in rumpled clothing and disheveled hair. As it were, my writerly chapeau is not fitting well and is in need of a large, pearl-topped hat pin to keep it sitting squarely, and securely, upon my head.

Frankly, I'm not fit to step out, to pass by if even briefly, into grid-swoosh. (Maybe I'm troubled by the potential for gridlock.)

But, I have one little song for you:



(Zaz speaks—or shall I say, sings—for herself. The song title means: passersby. Here are the lyrics in French and English.)

And more—one good poem:

Passer-By, These Are Words 

by Yves Bonnefoy

Passer-by, these are words. But instead of reading
I want you to listen: to this frail
Voice like that of letters eaten by grass.

Lend an ear, hear first of all the happy bee
Foraging in our almost rubbed-out names.
It flits between two sprays of leaves,
Carrying the sound of branches that are real
To those that filigree the still unseen.

Then know an even fainter sound, and let it be
The endless murmuring of all our shades.
Their whisper rises from beneath the stones
To fuse into a single heat with that blind
Light you are as yet, who can still gaze.

May your listening be good! Silence
Is a threshold where a twig breaks in your hand,
Imperceptibly, as you attempt to disengage
A name upon a stone:

And so our absent names untangle your alarms.
And for you who move away, pensively,
Here becomes there without ceasing to be.

* * *

Today the children are back in uniform and at school. Everything passes quickly. Even the things we think will never pass, like babies in diapers, toddlers of the terrible-twos, threes and fours, and sleepless nights pass. I look back and can barely see where those moments once stood. I've not done much to record them but for photos and a few scribbled notes. I remember little bodies scampering about and firm biceps that could pick them up or stop them in their tracks. I remember little voices, loud and exuberant, and often, chafing. All these things pass.

Now, junior high and high school have become a slice of what is here.

My fourteen year old son still has his pre-pubescent early twelve year old voice recorded as a greeting on his cell phone. "Hi, this is Max. Leave a message after the tone."  I thought I might mention this to him before the start of high school. But I couldn't. The under-six-foot intonation is too cute. It makes me smile—and for the time being, is my oral token of what once was there.

We are all just passing by. I'm glad to be passing by here once again. But I really should get dressed and find my notepad and some sensible words.

The real Exquisite Picture
By Étienne-Jules Marey

August Ease and Interlude

Out at the tip of Sandy Neck, a coastal barrier beach whose duck-bill tip dips into Barnstable Harbor on the north side of Cape Cod, one can anchor a boat at low tide and walk long stretches of sandy, rippled tidal flat. This gorgeous and well protected stretch of Cape coastline is the result of thousands of years of littoral drift, that began as swept sands collecting around a small nub.

The tide charts tell us when to set out to the tip and when to return. The sun tells us the time of day. And I wonder what these warm New England months would be like had I the luxury of designing my entire summer by tidal charts and sun... 

If I didn't pick up pen and paper all summer long... 

What I might be learning through a quiet, sunny osmosis of these slowed weeks without trying to analyze everything I absorb, like the restoration of St. Peter's Church in Osterville—where my husband and I were married—which includes a raising of the structure to accommodate a real foundation (so I was told by a construction worker, as I drove the children past the chapel that sits, teeters actually, alongside Nantucket Sound).

Photo courtesy of the Gallery--St. Peter's Church

Is everything significant?

I think not. But then, I wonder.

Along the intertidal zone at the crest of Sandy Neck, Max and his young cousin dig a trench and construct a hermit crab hotel. They muse over the small, leggy creatures, explaining that they need to protect the crabs, keep the family together. But they know when the tide shifts the crabs will scatter beyond the hotel, abandoning their fabricated home. They know, even, that as the crabs grow larger, they will eventually abandon their own borrowed shell in search of a roomier one. Yet Max and his cousin do their best to protect them while they can.

It is August. In three weeks the children will return to school and all the harried scheduling that goes along with the same. Summer is short and my boy and girl are getting older. The sands continue to spread. Many waters wait to be explored. And so...

For the next few weeks of this warm interval, I'm going to take a much needed sabbatical—a hiatus from the Friday Night Frolic and other self-imposed blogging demands—to explore more of New England, including what's here at home, with my ever growing children. It won't be long before they shed their shells and inhabit an alien framework. 

And while it may not be feasible to live by the sun, or even the moon, or the tide, and whatever they may bring, I think it may be viable (if not advisable) to utilize these remaining summer days, which have been so unusually beautiful—almost like days borrowed from a tropical land—for the purpose of shoring up the foundation, and enjoying the little muses while they are still little muses.

I'll be back, though, come late August—or sooner, as I'm sure to return to the grid periodically to see what's going on here and with you. Until then, my friends, enjoy this splendid summer.

* - Photo taken from my iPhone (yes, I dumped the android!).

"Friday Night Frolic" - Examinations and Interruptions

These past few weeks, I've been inspired by, and reminded of, the remarkable resilience of my daughter. (And children in general.) Within a span of twenty-two days the girl has been through a quadruple tooth extraction, a series of visits with, and examinations by, several medical specialists, ultrasounds and MRIs, surgery, and today, her streak of health related matters capped off, literally, by the gold brackets and silver wiring of her shiny new braces. On her twelfth birthday, no less.

And not one complaint.

She, as well as all the other children we encountered along this course of medicinal forays, has worn the same determined warrior-face for each run along the path.

And me, fretting over a job interview for a position I've never held, in an industry I know little about. Not much to fret there, really. Certainly not by comparison.

But dealing with numerous and lengthy internet interruptions? (Cox Communications—can anyone tell me if FiOS is more reliable?) That's serious. I'll be lucky to find an open window in which to throw out this post.

Today, my girl is twelve. Twelve! I could never have imagined what I was to be confronted with in those dozen years now past. (And what to come?) Even though I had been a mother—an older mother, at that—for two years when Lulu was born, I was entirely unprepared for what would follow.

No one warned me of the degree to which my mental resilience would be tested by motherhood. Hell, by everything. But I won't bore you with tangential elaboration. You understand.

Anyway, I saw Ann Hood quote Allen Ginsberg on Facebook today. (Ann is a fellow Rhode Islander.) “Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness” she wrote on her wall. 

Speaking of such, I now see my window of opportunity in which to fling my inner moonlight and madness...  while a few escalating bars flicker access in the lower right hand corner of my laptop, and before Lu and I go get a manicure and, later, meet up with her father and brother at Cuban Revolution to have dinner, listen to some jazz, and celebrate the astonishing miracle of Lu's birth, and what she brings to the world.

 My muse. How I love her.



I think it's time for a to return to normal, don't you?



If you don't have Buena Vista Social Club in your music library, you may want to start here.

And thanks so much to all of you who've been so kind, patient and supportive through all of this. I've been unable to keep up with many of you, but I'll be by to visit this weekend (if Cox permits, ugh).

Jai Guru Deva om...

Irony is never lost on me. So when Paul kindly handed me this award, I must confess I felt somewhat of a fraud. (Hey, it's National Poetry Month, people!)

Truth is, I haven't felt inspired for some time. Thus, I don't know how I could possibly inspire.

For a while, though, a long time actually—perhaps since I started this blog last June—I'd felt like I'd been traveling through magnificently aureate high altitude terrain. I'd barely had time to acclimate. I just went. When one is in the zone, so to speak, one does not worry about acclimatization. One goes. One climbs. One keeps their eye on the zone, its horizon and zenith.

But here's the thing, traveling to, or at, high altitudes can be quite dangerous. As it was when some years ago I was out skiing Arapahoe Basin, CO, whose summit—at over 13,000 feet above sea level—is one of the loftiest (as in vertical and noble) skiable mountains in the States. Oxygen thins. Pressure increases against vital organs. Even when you think your marching along just fine, acute sickness—that hard headache—stealthily sets off its missiles. There's no bomb shelter for this sort of thing.

(And no matter what they tell you, you cannot see beyond the horizon. You simply cannot. Not physically, anyway.)

One morning, not long ago, I woke up and I wasn't at the top of the mountain anymore. I was in a plateau. I was looking at the mountains. Out there. On the horizon. It wasn't particularly ugly where I was—level land with just a bit of leafy growth and little fauna. Though not much to keep my attention, except for snow-dripped tips dotting the mountain range. This isn't a manic-depressive thing. It's not bipolar. It's just where I was that day, and where I remained until, well, this morning.

But last week Paul (of Pfeiffer Pfilms and Meg Movies and a major pundit of all things Meg Ryan and Michelle Pfeiffer), who I've met only by way of blogosphere, sent me the Inspiration Award—which I pass along (acceptance of which is not required) to Cricket and Porcupine, and to Shopgirl, and to Leah, and to Tim (who I suspect is one of his students' favorites), and to David. All wonderful writers. All inspire. (Really, you All inspire. In one way or another. You All deserve a great big Inspiration Award. Take it from me. Literally.)

And then, yesterday, Sean (whose blog—had he one—I would happily follow. Sean?), who I've met only on few occasions, family gatherings, sent me this:



(Yes—it's National Poetry Month, people!)

And this morning, a carpool conversation about this weekend's school trip to Washington (my son leaves at 4:00am tomorrow) in which—in a rather circuitous way—the following was discussed:

• The lush golf courses of Palm Springs (only because I thought someone had mentioned Palm Desert, where I had, in fact, golfed); 
• How one needs only a golf cart to get around Palm Springs or Palm Desert; and, 
• Golf shirts as appropriate Spirit of Washington cruise attire for boys. 

And as I made my way to the off ramp from the highway, on the opposite side, a flatbed carrying golf carts was about to get on the highway. Golf carts.

These types of coincidences happen often. I take note of them. It may seem a little kooky, but I don't believe that coincidence is just coincidence. I don't know what these coincidences necessarily mean, but I know a deeper meaning coincides within.

I don't have time to piece it all together, all of this babble above. Maybe you can help me out?

But I do know, I trust, that the World, indeed, conspires. Forging mind and matter, spirit and sensation, the World clears way for us all. It plots and schemes. The machination of all forces of life, animate and inanimate, in karmic swirls. Birds sing, fish leap from ponds, cicadas buzz on warm summer nights. Great works of art hang on white walls in museums. Musicians perform in the round. Shakespeare still appears in red velvet curtained theatres. Fiction continues to be composed. And poetry. Our voices, our words, are heard. The World awaits us with open arms and embraces us. It does.

So... Big cyber hugs to Paul and to Sean, to the kids in the car, to golf carts, and Across the Universe, where I know they will be felt. And I'll feel them back.

Sounds of laughter shades of life

are ringing through my open ears

exciting and inviting me

Limitless undying love which

shines around me like a million suns

It calls me on and on across the universe

Nothings gonna change my world.