You Can't Go Home Again

Simon pondering the
path ahead.  

The title of Thomas Wolfe's novel, You Can't Go Home Again, has been the refrain looping through my head over the last weeks. It's a book I have not read, know little about except its title and that the main character, a writer, has inspired ire in his hometown by writing about its inhabitants. But the phrase itself - being unable to return home, and the quest for home as a literary theme dating back to The Odyssey and before- gets me thinking. What makes a home? Is our first home the imprint on which all other attempts will be compared? Does nostalgia, loss, and the passage of time make us more or less likely to reach out for new homes? How does place define us, inspire us, imprison us?

In February, I sold my house in Florida, put most of what I possess in storage, put the rest in the backseat of my car with my cat, and started driving north. Next September, I will start a PhD program in English (Creative Writing track) at the University of New Brunswick, but until then, I have an unusual luxury of time to do a little traveling and exploring. As a single woman with virtually no commitments (for good or bad - my opinion on that fact varies depending on the day), my largest restraints lie in making sure my cat is both welcome and comfortable.

Given the (for a liberal Democrat) harrowing political times of early 2017, my first thought was to get out red-state Florida, and in fact, out of the whole country, and get at least a cursory feel for Canada, the country which will be my home for the four years of my academic program. Given that I will have ample time to explore New Brunswick and the Maritimes over those years, my plan was to head north to Toronto, a city with a well-deserved reputation of being diverse and livable. I'm writing this during my last few days in a very comfortable airbnb rental with my feline buddy snoozing on the couch next to me.

On the way here, though, in order to give both myself and my cat a break on the road, I spent a bit over a week staying just out outside of Washington, DC - the focal point of American political machinations, and also, my hometown. I grew up in Bethesda, MD, and over the years have lived in various parts of NW, NE, and SE DC, with a brief stint in Cheverly, MD, as well as two multiyear stretches in Takoma Park. Of the ten or so states in the US in which I have lived, the DC area is where I spent both the bulk of my childhood and large chunks of my adulthood.

During my recent visit, I caught up with many friends and family there. I was also near constantly reminded of other memories with other people as I drove through the city, rode the Metro, walked on paths that I'd walked over many time before, smelled the trees and the rivers and the dirt of my former home.  For me, DC was a memory minefield - I never knew what would blow up around the next corner when I was accosted by a familiar sight, sound or smell.

In some vital way, I could go home again.  The people that I've known and loved over years and decades continue to delight, inspire, and impress me. I basked in the familiar way my father told a beloved old family story. I laughed adrift in a sea of old jokes that came up when reviewing old wedding photos with a crew of dear female friends. The bride's daughter is now older (and likely wiser) than when her mother and I (her maid of honor) first met as teens. A former boss turned friend regaled me over lunch of travel adventures he had planned. Brunch with other friends acquired from one of my briefer forays into corporate America dissolved into snorting laughter but also had somber moments interspersed when reviewing difficult stories. I met another friend's crazily cute new son and witnessed some of his little boy's very first solo steps. I strolled a trail covered many times years ago with a friend who now had her son along for the hike, one who shares his mother's love of nature and dogs, despite being mildly dismayed by a soggy shoe from creekside slip. I wandered the Arboretum, the National mall and downtown taking photos and talking of art, light and very tasty ramen noodles. On my own, I wedged in visits to two museums and scrambled over the rocks on my favorite Billy Goat trail hike by the Potomac.

Some connections were missed - time was short, people were traveling, the stars don't always align. But in a short period of time, I saw a varied, lovely group of people and was reminded that I do indeed have beloved people in my life, even if I don't see them as often as I would like. In that people are home, in DC, I got to go home for a while.

But only for a brief time. While all those DC people were at home, I was not. I got to peep in on a tiny slice of their lives, but the day-to-day triumphs and struggles - I've no real idea.  Some emails, some phone calls, text messages and the funny pictures on FaceBook, sure, I know those, but I am more distant now, literally and figuratively. I'm less good about it than I used to be, but I do try to spend time keeping in touch from afar. But I've been away from DC for years now, and no number of emails will counterbalance that. I last lived in the area in 2012, a very different time.

In 2012, for instance, my mother was still alive. I drove by my childhood house, and would have loved to call her in Maine to report back on how it looked (I still can't abide by the blue shutters. They should be black. The front door should be red, as it was for 20 years - but it looks good other than that). But the phone lines don't reach across time, so I can't tell Mom much of anything, although I find her along with me on this trip more than I would have expected. You can never go home again, but you always want to tell Mom about your journeys, I guess.

And in leaving Florida, as I have in the many other places I've left, I've created another home to which I can never fully return. The friend's toddler daughter who was just learning to say my name and connect me as that goofy lady with the cat, her knowledge of me is already fading. Her family, who often welcomed me into their homes and holidays, are building their day-to-day life around those still in the area. Another friend's daughter is now, startlingly, old enough to start to drive, but I will only witness her mother's gradual release from chauffeuring duties and understand the specter of an emptying nest from a distance. The tides send some people out to sea and toss others up on the shore, and we adjust as we must to the ebb and flow.

New beginnings are built on endings, of course. Nothing new there. I know that, and yet some part of me sees the branching pathways over decades and spends too much time wondering: "what if"?  What if I had gone right instead of left? What if I had tried a little harder, stayed a little longer, been more uncomfortable, or conversely stayed more comfortable?  What if I had left [fill in the blank state] the year before or the year after? What if I had been a little nicer?  Or maybe more direct and meaner? What if I'd never taken that job? What could I have done differently in that job or friendship or tiny moment on a Tuesday in April? What if? What if?

I take probably too much comfort in the multiverse theory and think, well, in some simultaneous alternate reality, I did do that, or didn't do that, and life is unfolding in every possible way...somewhere.  Just not here. That the possibilities exist and are real in some theoretical physics ways provides to me with what people of more religious faith may translate to, well, it's all part of God's plan. In the meantime, (religious or not) we march on with our current chosen path, and see what bounties and boulders are thrown in our way.

In some multiverse, I never left DC any of the times I did leave DC, and so I accumulated a whole different life built on time in one place. In my head, I think there would be a continuity and intimacy in that, one I crave at times, although as I think on it, there is nothing to say that all of those multiverses where I stayed put would necessarily have more of that intimacy. I could have (and have in some times in some locations) stayed a cat lady with limited romantic prospects and varying friendships that fade out or fail to quite achieve lift off. You could make an argument that some of my friendships survive precisely because folks aren't stuck with me all of the time. I'm not unaware of the fact that while I can be kind, I can also be difficult. And my self-sufficiency and reticence can be a barrier to the vulnerability needed to connect.

On the day I sold my house, I spent the morning tidying up and saying goodbye to my first attempt as a homeowner. And while the house looked great, clean and bright, it no longer felt like home, as (warning: cat lady moment ahead) my cat had already been relocated. That day, that little furry beast was my home, my day-to-day companion who every morning continues to wake me up too damn early for breakfast. It was a comforting revelation on what I had feared would be an overly bittersweet day.

Home then is not only about location but company - it resides with the people (and critters) with whom through a combination of choice and circumstance we share our lives. As I have moved, I have witnessed other people's moves from place to place. And movement or not, I've also noted their homegroup of people change, as mine have too. Many have partnered or married (and sometimes, divorced, and sometimes again, re-partnered), and oftentimes many are now raising children. Friendships burst open and some flare out and others burn on. Some relatives have required care, and some parents and friends have passed away. Being long unpartnered and childless, I remain in some ways perpetually adolescent. This isn't as negative as it may sound, as it also leaves me open to new experience and with greater latitude to explore, which are some of many reasons why I will be starting a graduate program in the fall and am sitting in Toronto right now.

I move. And with each move I learn, and gain from that learning. But I also lose. The people that stay with you, day in, day out, over years and decades are in some ways the only people that fully know you. Having no current home and no long-term (non-feline) partner, in an in-between transition time, the allure of that depth of connection probably speaks to me more loudly than it does at other times when, as many will note, I have tended in the other direction, to have felt boxed-in or stagnant, strangled by ideas of what I am "supposed to be."  The truth is, over and over, I have chosen to move, I have chosen to leave, I have chosen some disconnection and dislocation in exchange for adventure, have foregone intimacy in the interest of possibility. As noted, at times I think this is a flaw, at times an asset, but if I put aside the strident need to judge, in the end, it is just who I am -- for now, in this moment, in this multiverse. Changes and choices continue every moment ahead. Who knows what kind of multiverse home you or I will slide into next?

You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.
-- Thomas Wolfe 

I dwell in Possibility –
-- Emily Dickinson

Anne Frank and Hope

In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.
 – Anne Frank

I looked up Anne Frank’s famous quote today, as at this moment in my life and this moment in American history, I am having a difficult time believing that people are really good at heart. Like many others, I am spinning at the edges of an existential crisis.  If there is no inherent goodness to human beings, should I really be rooting for survival of the species?  At what point do we cross over into becoming the villain in the larger narrative of the planet?  

And yes, I know, that wide a view can make people uncomfortable, and can make me sound like I’ll be retiring to a mountain cabin to scribble out my manifesto on cocktail napkins and staple it to pine board walls.  So to be clear: no, I’m not suggesting in any way to hurry along our species’ removal from the top of the predator ladder.  The philosophical view over centuries and millennia and eras is not the same approach as day-to-day life.  In day-to-day, short-view life, I vote, I protest, I advocate nonviolence, and when I can face it, I argue for the tenets that I believe best serve equality and health. In my judgement, those arguments are seldom if ever fruitful, and more often now, I just sigh and walk away, preserving my own skin (Americans are, after all, so very well-armed), and to some extent, sanity. And then I feel bad about humanity, about the intransigence and illogic of things like, say, racism and party-loyalty over ethics, and my own cowardice in persevering in the battle for fairness. I am the embodiment of the guilt of the liberal elite.  I know I should be doing more, but I feel helpless in the face of mobilized, enthusiastic fascism.

Women's March, St. Petersburg, FL, Jan. 21, 2017

The (overly) short view of the Republican party with focuses on things like Lock ‘Em Up! Lock ‘Em Out! Make Them Pay! Build a Wall! Fracking and Pipelines for Fun and (mostly) Profit! Shoot ‘Em Hands Up or Down! Send Non-Christians Straight to Hell! Grab Those Pussies and Force Those Pregnancies! looks to me, in my gloom and doom frame of mind, one that fosters violence – notably against minorities, immigrants, women, the LGBT community, non-Christians, and the environment – and has the potential to lead us into war. Given that the lead diplomat and commander-in-chief has thus far appeared capable only of self-aggrandizing ranting and bullying, often in a preferred format of 140 characters, hope is well buried under a barrage of alternative facts and the blind panic that he has the nuclear codes.  On the up side, the uber rich in their bulletproof compounds will likely accrue some nice profits for a time as deregulation of, well, just about everything, “frees” the market. On the down side, spending will drop if destruction of the environment leaves the planet inhospitable to human life. Sorry about that, kids.  Hope your gutted public schools can still provide enough education for you to put some quick fixes into place in time.  

Getting back to Frank’s quote, however, unlike me, she seems to find comfort in the long view. She knew that her personal survival was unlikely, as it was for millions of others during the Holocaust, that thundering systematized genocide would destroy them.  But also, she believed that Good would rise again.  From the ashes of human corpses, she believed that “peace and tranquility will return again.”

I am much less sure that a peaceful and tranquil world includes human beings.  I agree that there is no way to build hope on “a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death,” and sadly, that’s what I see blossoming further under the Trump regime.  To quote Yeats, “the worst /  Are full of passionate intensity,” a fury of competitive, mercenary self-interest that fails to recognize the rights of others.   And so I begin to think the cruelty that needs to end for tranquility to flourish is a cruelty inherent in human nature.  As noted, I am not at my most optimistic, and life did not work out well for Anne Frank.

With or without us, the planet may well continue to support life, and if it does, sturdy cockroaches and perhaps a multitude of mammals, insects, reptiles and such will as well, and perhaps something newly miraculous will crawl out of the primordial soup next. Who can say?  But I’m not so sure that in the long, long view, I don’t want human beings to go by the way of the dinosaur so as to give peace a chance.  And I may spend some time thinking on that in a mountain cabin -- in Canada.  Because on the level of day-to-day life, a country recently ranked as the most tolerant in the world with a prime minister that self-describes as a feminist and that has had publicly funded healthcare since 1984 sounds like the promised land, a place where hope in human nature could be restored.

Mascara

Digging through old stories while packing...This one (below) was one of two submitted with my MFA applications 'lo those many years ago. While still a little bumpy here and there, it seems an appropriate time to post it what with Valentine's Day just around the corner.

MASCARA 

Somewhere outside the women’s restroom at Miami International Airport, probably near the security gates through which I must pass before boarding my flight, Gary is looking for me.  Minutes before, I’d spied him stumbling down the terminal hallway with the foot-dragging sloppy walk he gets when he’s tired, and so I had dodged into the Ladies while hiding behind a gaggle of flight attendants. 

I stare at my face in the mirror, shutting first one eye, and then the other, noting how bright the whites of my eyes look in contrast to my sunburned face.  The remains of mascara have settled into tiny wrinkles blooming under my eyes, tracing maps to new territories of age.  I stretch out my tongue as far as it will go and waggle it around. My face glows a stunning, skin-shrinking, two-days-tourist red, closely matching the shade of my outstretched tongue.  Against the stainless steel of sinks and stalls and mirrors around me, I feel like a canned tomato – pulsing with red juices, trapped among metal.  Will I still stick out my tongue when I’m 40? Turning 30 ten months ago obviously didn’t stop it.  My immortality evaporated in a poof of smoke, but there’s my tongue, still zipping through the air, stained redder by a cherry-flavored Tootsie Pop. 

When I hear the door opening behind me, I retract my tongue and put on a grown-up face.  A middle-aged woman with sensible shoes and a heavy gait stomps by me heading toward the stalls.  Several other women follow her; another flight must have landed.  I dig in my bottomless beach bag, pushing aside sunglasses, a still damp bathing suit and my boarding pass until I find the bar of hotel soap.  I need get the rest of this mascara off my face.  It’s so just not me.  I rip the paper off the soap and lather up, thrilling to the feel of cool water as I rinse the suds and mascara and Florida sweat. 

Although I suppose I should worry about wrinkles and skin cancer, I’m smugly pleased with my sunburn.  Just at the turning point of pain, it makes every movement through the air feel a delicious, breezy relief from the furnace of heat pouring off my body.  The whispering of nerve endings enflamed by the sun feeds a tactile need, as the light seeping under my skin nourishes the soul (if, OK, also damages the body).  People need vitamin D, I kept saying to Gary on the beach yesterday.  Gary, currently wandering out there in the sterile airport hallways, can go back to DC pale as a ghost, free from the cancerous lesions on which he persisted in lecturing.  He can haul that umbrella and lawn chair and baseball hat and sunglasses and long sleeve shirt and sunscreen and sit cowering under the boardwalk like a vampire fearing the wrath of daylight.  Red is quite becoming on me just at the moment, at 8 a.m. at Miami International.  Maybe that’s something else that’s changing. 

Gary is milling around out there, standing between me and the airplane that will take me back home.  Knowing Gary, he’s got my engagement ring tucked in his jacket pocket, not so much because he wants to shovel it back on my finger, but because he is convinced that the moment he leaves the hotel room, the criminal element comes rushing up to riffle through his things, as if the big spenders bring their crown jewels to stay at the Sea Esta because the free donuts in the morning are just that good.  He paid good money for that ring.  How often have I seen that look in his eyes? 

The first thing I thought last night when I realized Gary was proposing was, well thank God, I’m wearing mascara.  I’m not one usually prone to wearing make-up – part of that awkward group of women who never learned how to apply it properly, and so end up looking like we’re a) not wearing any makeup or b) streetwalkers – but since Gary and I had gotten dressed up to go out to dinner, after pouring myself into the flowered skirt and the tiny black tank top, mascara and a little Fire & Ice red lipstick were de rigueur.  I did, after all, know he was walking around with a ring in his pocket.  (Is that a ring in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?)  I’d spent an unusual amount of effort trying to look sufficiently girlie on our Florida vacation. 

The setting was romantic; I should give Gary credit for that.  We stood on a deserted moonlit beach in South Beach, strolling along by the Atlantic after a fancy meal and wine at a trendy Cuban restaurant.  The waves crashed to the shore sending mists of spray into the air.  A brisk breeze stirred the sand and lifted little whitecaps on the ocean.  The landscape was straight off the cover of a Harlequin novel, although Gary is no flexing Fabio and I’m not known for my heaving breasts. 

The downside: the surf roared so loudly, I couldn’t hear what Gary was saying.  And, truth be told, I wasn’t paying that much attention.  Gary tends to repeat himself, so I often tune in and out to see where he is in the midst of his particular harangue.  I’ve become good at inserting appropriate comments that re-state his last emotion sympathetically.  “Wow, that must have been tough.”  “I can see how that would make you angry.” “I know how stressful your job can be.”  However, I’ve found I can free up a lot more mental space if I don’t attend to his every breath.  I can float along on the flow of tone of voice without getting too hung up by the minutiae.  Gary is a sales guy; he can talk.  He’s got that charming patter down. The first run of one of his stories can send me rolling in the aisles with laughter.  But the day-to-day complaints about Larry and Jane and Jeanne and the rest of his superiors and how much better things would be if he were in charge – it gets old fast.  Sadly, vacation doesn’t interrupt his thoughts on the general lack of appreciation for his special soul. 

So on the beach, the scenery had captured my attention.  In a humming, wined and dined way, I was standing with the waves weaving around my calves, splashing the water around with my toes, a windy tune playing through my mind.  Gary came up and would have taken my arm, but I was holding my shoes, one on each hand like a flipper.  I shrugged him off to frolic in the sea foam, to wave my arms (and shoes) and spin under the moonlight.  He chased me down with that particular brand of forced hilarity, caught my arm just a bit too hard and installed me under his shoulder so he could steer me up the beach, away from the water.  

We flopped down on the sand and he said “I feel like I’ve eaten a whale and then been splashed by its mate” while picking at the soggy laces of his shoes.  I nodded without comment.  Party-pooping, whining about wet shoes and being too full to walk, came as standard fare with Gary. 

We watched the moonlight reflect off the water.  Some clouds were rolling in from the south, blocking out most of the stars in a haze.  Once I finally put down my shoes, he took my hands and started to speak, looking deeply and slightly to the left of my eyes. 

At this point, the wind blew a blast of sand straight into my cornea.  I pulled my hands away from Gary and spent a few minutes struggling to remove the small boulder from underneath my contact lens.  Gary pinched his mouth up in that way he has, as if I deliberately meant to blind myself.    He cracked his knuckles, staring out over the water.  After the waves of saline tearing out of my eyes slowed, I rubbed off most of the raccoon effect of my running mascara.

Once I had settled my eyes, I said I was sorry.  For what, I’m not sure.  Gary smiled graciously and then latched back onto my hands.  He started talking again, speaking quickly, as if he had an appointment to keep.  Finally, I realized: good god, this is it, he’s actually proposing.  And I started to cry. 

I couldn’t have seen that crying coming.  What rolled toward me was this: here’s this man that I’ve shared a bed with for the last year, here he is, sitting on a moonlit beach, talking about how much he loves me (and god knows, it’s nice to hear you’re lovable) and how he wants to marry me (he chose me! someone chose me!).  I just caught the mood and burst into tears, the happy contestant.  Maybe I’ve spent too much time as a bridesmaid – three weddings in the last year.  Marriage spreads like a disease, an easy fever to catch.  Or maybe it was turning 30. 

In any case, I had the mascara on anyway, stretching my eyelashes out to abnormal clumpy lengths, so I felt a certain obligation to follow through with the pageant.  Through some sort of miracle, I even lucked into the pretty kind of crying, where the tears just slid down my face like (of course) diamonds, not my usual yapping, gasping, snotty sobs where I end up a swollen mess. 

Gary said all sorts of generic things about why I’m a fine person (kind, thoughtful, fun, sexy), and added a little speech about how he wanted to move the relationship to the next step, because he knew how that could be important to a woman.  After some rustling in his coat, he pulled out the ring.  The fuzzy gray box popped open with a chipper little snap, revealing the sapphire and diamonds in white gold.  Platinum was simply too expensive for our budget – his sales are down this year, and I don’t make squat as a word processor.  The diamonds flashed a little in the moonlight, but the dark swallowed up the delicate blue the sapphire, leaving it just an inky lump, flat and dead against the pseudo velvet.

Gary slipped the ring on my finger.  Somewhere in there I must have said yes. 

Which is interesting when I think about it, since I spent a great percentage of the last six months thinking about how to break up with him, how, even when we were sniffing around jewelry stores, I was thinking, eventually, I’m going to have to stop this, I can’t do this forever.  But sometimes it’s like the tide carries you farther and farther down the shore, and you start to forget just where you wanted to swim to at first.  I bet drowning is like that, where you forget that you have to swim.

 

Now I’m cowering in the Ladies Room.  After I finish rinsing my face, I give my hair a cursory comb and peer at myself in the mirror.  Do I look any different having been engaged?  What is the opposite of engaged?  Disengaged?  Unengaged?  What do I call Gary now? The person formerly known as my fiancé?  Hiding in the bathroom, with Gary out there with the ring, probably isn’t a good time to think about this. 

There’s a good chance that Gary wants an explanation, which I had been rather hoping to avoid until I could formulate something better than “I just can’t do this any more.”  All I know is that I woke up with a start at 6 am, went to the lobby to get our free donuts, came back, ate half my donut and then sat there watching the weather channel.  Gary stumbled toward the shower.  The weather, as predicted, is flawless outside; it always is the day you leave.  I watched the woman in front of the weather map while she waved a hefty 2-plus carat diamond in front of a cold front.  I looked at her hand and then I looked down at my left hand.  The sapphire, properly lighted, showed its translucence, that ripe color of deep twilight that moves in right after the sun sets.  This woman, with her fashionable suit and perfectly coiffed-hair, and I, were part of the same club, women of substance, women with men attached to them like anchors.  

I licked the sugary donut goo off my fingers and walked over to the dresser, looking for a napkin among the flotsam of spare change and ticket stubs.  I found one from the bar last night.  They had given us a free glass of champagne when we came in bubbling with our engagement news.  Later in the evening, Gary had been explaining something about sales ratios – the napkin was covered with graphs and numbers.  I wiped my fingers, and then noticed on the other side of the napkin Gary had doodled a big goofy rounded heart and written my name – with his last name – in the center.  I stared at the heart for a long time.  On top of assuming I’d take his name, he had spelled my middle name wrong. 

I listened as Gary fussed around in the bathroom, blowing his nose, flushing the toilet.  I heard the clank as he pulled out the mirror he brings with him so he can shave in the shower.  I heard the rattle of the curtain rod rings as he pulled the shower curtain aside to turn on the water and set the temperature.  He likes the shower set so hot that it is virtually impossible for us to shower together, although early on, we tried.  We couldn’t find a temperature that didn’t scald me and freeze him.  When he finally stopped trying to muscle his way into the shower with me, my showers stretched from 10 to 15 to 25 minutes until he started complaining about the lack of hot water.  I liked to stand and let the water wash off my thoughts in privacy, no applause necessary. 

The weather lady with her flashy diamond walked off camera.  I tired to imagine her at home, swearing at her husband like a harpy sent straight up from hell.  But all I could see her doing was folding laundry, sorting socks and putting them in neat piles, having used the correct brand of detergent and stain removers. 

I took off my ring and rolled the band between my fingers.  Then I buried it into the remaining donut half until only the sapphire poked up out of the glaze.  I put the donut back on its Styrofoam plate and left it on top of the TV.  Abandoning the rest of my luggage, I grabbed my beach bag, took the key to the rental car and slid the door closed behind me as quietly as possible.  I ran down the stairs, started the car and squealed out of the lot.  Although I knew Gary was still in the shower, sudsy and unaware, I skidded to a stop at the first red light and checked my rearview mirror to see what pursued me. 

I hadn’t figured on him making it to the airport so quickly.  His flight, our original flight, doesn’t leave until 2 pm.  After returning the rental car, I had to keep myself from sprinting toward the ticket counter.  I switched onto the 9:25 am flight, which, mercifully, had seats left.  If you get to the airport early enough, they let do things like swap flights.  The airline representative had been happy to help, and even made a joke about how I surely didn’t need any more sun. 

Maybe the vitamin D went to my head.  What am I doing?  I’m too old to be a runaway.  I’m too old to be hiding in the bathroom.  It’s just cold feet.  I’ll have the rest of my life to work things out with Gary.  The rest of my life.  Until now, I’ve drifted through my life, bobbing along on the currents of other people’s desires.  I can continue to float, numbly, and wait for decisions, life rafts or sharks, to tell me what my life is. 

I stare at my red face and listen to the rush of water down pipes as another toilet flushes.  Whatever I do, I need to get out of this bathroom. 

I push open the restroom door and immediately see Gary coming out of line at the coffee stand, coffee (cream, 3 sugars) and croissant in hand.  I hesitate to approach him, even on good days, before he’s sufficiently caffeinated.  But today, the best defense is a good offense. I crunch my legs into motion and jog up behind him.  I tap him on the shoulder and start speaking before he even turns.

“Fancy meeting you here.” 

Gary jumps and turns, yelping a little as coffee sloshes on his hands. “I was so worried….what are you doing here?”

He sets the coffee and pastry down on a table and pulls me into an awkward hug.

I stand stiffly, arms at my side and answer, “getting coffee.  Oh, and returning the rental car.”

“Coffee.  Ha ha.  Very funny…what the hell, I come out of the shower, and you’re gone. All that’s left is half a donut with the ring stuck in it.  How the hell am I supposed to take that?”  His eyebrows pull together and his nostrils flare like a bull. 

I knew he’d find the ring; Gary loves donuts.  I bet he ate the other half.

I shrug.  Right now, I can smooth this over.  I can apologize.  I can make this work.  I can put the ring back on and I can be Mrs. Gary.  We get along.  We have OK sex.  Our families have met.  I’m 30 years old.  This is what people do.  Grownups don’t have scenes in airports.  Grownups don’t expect perfection.  Grownups understand that you’re not in love every single minute.  Sometimes you just have to go with the flow, follow the path that’s laid out in front of you.  As Gary always says, relationships necessitate compromise.  I finger the shredded remains of the napkin in my pocket and say, “I had a change of heart.”

Gary pauses for a millisecond and then laughs, his eyes crinkling up and relaxing.  “You nervous brides.  You’re not going to leave me standing at the altar.”

I have a flash of Aztec sacrificial altars, radiant virgins roped down before anointed priests.  “I’m sure you’ll manage to find a suitable replacement.” 

He lifts one eyebrow and studies me briefly.  “Now I know we need to talk.  Something’s really not right here, is it?”

I shrug. 

“No, really, I can tell you’re upset.  I know you.  I can always tell.  I’m good at being able to read people that way.  I can tell you’re upset.  I know I’m upset.  Imagine me, getting out of the shower and finding nothing but a ring.  I was worried, I thought maybe something had happened, I didn’t..” Gary babbles when he’s nervous.  I call it his sales guy tic.  Usually, I let him wind himself down to a comfortable rut. 

“You ate the donut, didn’t you?” I interrupt.

He stalls for a minute, startled out of his routine. “Uh, yeah.  I ate it on the cab ride over.  Which wasn’t cheap, by the way.  Definitely not in our budget.”

“I can’t marry you.”  The words hang in the air.  I think if I reach out I can almost trace them with my fingers, glowing in a neon green.  I suppress a giggle as the words, liberated into sound, break apart and scatter like Day-Glo sparrows.  There, I’ve said it.  There’s no going back now. 

Gary laughs.  “You’re going to leave me over a donut and a cab ride?  Fine, I’ll pay for the cab.  Seriously, Maddie, I know we need to talk.  And we will.  Just give me a minute to absorb the shock.  I can’t believe you just left me standing in the hotel room.  I didn’t even check out – we’ll have to go back for our luggage.  I just had to make sure I found you and that we’re OK.”

I cross my arms in front of my chest and squint my eyes.  “You know, Gary, that’s interesting.  How did you know I’d be here?  Why didn’t you think I’d just left to walk on the beach?”

“Well, you left the ring…and took the car.  I just assumed that…”

“…that I was leaving you?”

“Well, yeah.  And if you were leaving, I thought you’d go to the airport.  So I came to find you.”

“To stop me.”

“Yes.”

“From leaving you?”

“Yes.  Look, Maddie, what’s with the 20 questions here?  I’m here now, and you’re not leaving, and we can talk this out.  We’re good at talking things out, like we have before.  You know you just get ridiculous some times.”

“So, you knew this was coming, but you figured, hey, you’ll talk and I’ll stay?”

He shifts his weight from foot to foot, and then picks up the coffee cup off the table, taking a sip.  “Well, yes, that’s the plan.” 

“Why?”

“Christ, Maddie, because we’re getting married.  Because I told my parents last night.  Because it’s what people do. Because I need you.”  He pauses, and then adds, “I love you.  Of course you know that.”

“You need me.”

“Yes.”  He sighs out a noisy exhale and rolls his eyes. 

“Gary, what’s my middle name?”

He leans forward, shoving one hand in his pocket, while he waves the coffee cup with the other.  “Your middle name? What is this a pop quiz? What has that got to do with anything?”

I grab the coffee out of his hand and shove it in the trashcan next to us.  Our eyes meet for a moment, equally aghast.  “Just answer the goddamn question!  WHAT IS MY MIDDLE NAME?”  Over at security, a guard looks up at my raised voice. 

Gary, a flush creeping up his neck, responds, “Anne.”

“With an e?”

“Yes, with an e. OK?”

“Wrong.  There is no e at the end.  There has never been an e at the end.  For the last year, we’ve been dating and you don’t even know how to spell my name.”

“Jesus, Maddie, it’s a little thing, I forgot.  It’s been sort of a tough morning, running around in cabs after my crazy fiancée.”

“The whole last year has been a series of little things.  I bet you can’t name my job title.” 

“I can too, dammit.  You’re the Supervisor of Form Creation.”

“Forms Production Team Leader.”

“Jesus, Maddie, you’re nitpicking.  An ‘e’, leader, supervisor, it’s all the same thing. You really need to relax. Our relationship is not about an ‘e.’”

“No, it’s not.  But it should have been.  All along, I should have said something.  But I just stood there and nodded like a bobble head doll.  My god, I’m an idiot.  This is all my fault.”  I pivot on my heels and swing away from him.  My eyes skim over the bustle of busy travelers until they land on the digital clock between the board of arrivals and departures.  I am 30 years old.  I am running out of time. 

I turn back to Gary.  His hair is combed and still wet from the shower.  On his jaw line, a cluster of hairs stick out where he missed them shaving.  And at the corner of his mouth, his million-dollar smile waits to burst forth with generous forgiveness for the excess of my foibles.

“I need to catch my flight.”  I heave the straps of my beach bag farther up my shoulder.  Gary’s eyes widen and bulge as his hand comes up to grab my arm.  Then his eyes flick over my shoulder to focus on the movement at the security desk.  His arm comes back down and hangs with his fist clenched at his side. 

“Bye Gary.”  I turn and start walking.  Behind me, I hear Gary sputtering, rooted in place, “Flight!  You can’t do this to me. You can’t just walk away.  It’s not fair.” 

I walk forward toward the guard who has watched our conversation, politely, from the corner of his eye.  He’s a tall man, a little round around the middle, with a feathery blond mustache.  I can feel Gary watching me and the guard watching me walk away.  The windows show blue sky without a cloud.  A plane floats by, suspended in the air, leisurely climbing to altitude away from Miami.  On the plane, I will think about packing up, about calling my mother and calling off the engagement party she started planning last night.  I will think about growing old alone, about the prospect of being a cat lady with a propensity for stealing the neighbors’ baseballs when I’m 80.  I will think about all the things I should have said, to Gary, and Rick and John and Matt before him, and my father and his belief that “children should be seen but not heard.”  I will sit on the plane and think about how much easier it is to make a change than to anticipate that change for so long.  I will think about cutting my hair, because I’m a woman, and that’s what we do when we lose a man, through accident or design.  I’ll sit in the window seat and think about these things.  But as I pass through security, all I want to do is gain the good grace of the guard, his blessing for my flight.  As I hand my boarding pass to the security guard, I grin up at him and say, “Great weather for flying, isn’t it?”  He nods his head slowly, with the hint of a smile around his eyes and says “Go on ahead, Miss.”  And so I do.  

Mild Painting Renovation

Since I am busily stalling on writing (too caught up obsessing on whether I will be accepted into a graduate program), I spent part of New Year's Eve day messing with another old painting.  It's from a crowd of old geometric-y abstracts, probably from several years ago (New Mexico era, perhaps?). I'm still not in love with it, but I like it better - the addition of more reds punches up the contrast, and some details give it a richer depth - so I will take as that progress. It will likely go through further transformations.

Happy New Year!

Triangle Renovations

Holiday Painting

Spent an evening doing some slapdash, make-a-mess&have-fun-with-it painting....Here are the results:

O Christmas Tree (Christmas-y abstract)

Sad Girl after the Rain
(Another Blue Person Portrait)

Disturbing Shakespeare

I finally, at long last, stood in front of my poor neglected easel last night and worked on something.  I pulled out an old painting from the forgotten Shakespeare series, and made Lady Macbeth a good deal more disturbing. I still need to fix a few things, but I find I'm weirdly pleased with the new gory approach.

Lady Macbeth

Of course, the Ophelias that preceded her weren't exactly happy-go-lucky either:

Ophelia (No. 1)

Ophelia (No 2)

That Day in the Yard

More old writing from grad school below... This piece came out of a prompt for class to write about "regret of a small incident" which I always thought evoked interesting elements.  As a short story, I am not sure it hangs entirely together. Someone somewhere along the line told that switching point of view in a short piece is a no-no. But I'm not much crazy about rules, and I still feel OK about the multiple voices; that is, for me, the absorbing element of the story, that different narrators tell different stories. I am likely more interested in the subjectivity of reality than most though.

That Day in the Yard

  

Fenced View

          Maddy’s father never hired that tree company again, although perhaps that was because there were so few trees left in the backyard by then that he could trim the remaining bedraggled twigs himself.  After the big elm came down, killed by a local resurgence of Dutch Elm disease, the backyard hosted only small squat trees, angry trolls.  Still, for months afterward, Maddy found herself looking for the Collins Brothers Tree Care's white van around the neighborhood.  Shortly after they dragged away the stump of the elm, she heard her father complaining at a barbecue, and she wondered if he’d put a word-of-mouth hex on the Collins’ business.  One rainy day ten years later, she looked for Collins Brothers in the telephone book under Gardeners, Trees, Trimming, everything she could think of, but the company was gone by then. 

            On that day in the yard, she watched the expression on Tim Collins' face as her father berated him.  From her view on the kitchen steps of the house, she couldn’t see her father’s face, only the reddish tint of a flush that had crept up the back of his neck, and his hands rising and falling as he illustrated his case.  He pointed once, and she saw Tim Collins’ eyes as they followed the path of her father’s bony hand to two broken panes on window of the garage.  As his eyes swept back from garage, they paused and stayed on Maddy standing in the shadow of the house.  He tilted his head ever so slightly to the left, and squinted his eyes. She understood then that Tim knew, and also that he wouldn’t argue with her father. 

            The only person who witnessed the breaking of the windows was Maddy, when she methodically put her fist through first the bottom right, and then bottom left pane of the window, an unsuccessful experiment in self harm.  Tim must have assumed that Maddy would lie to her father if he accused her, and her father would likely believe his daughter over a stranger.  There was nothing that directly linked her to the broken windows, although there was plenty that would have or could have or should have exonerated the Collins brothers. 

The windows had been broken for over a week by the time the Collins Brothers Tree Care first came to take down the elm tree.  After breaking the windows, she had taped cardboard over the empty spaces, and put a Band-Aid on the one small cut across the back of her right hand.  She hadn’t even known the tree trimmers were coming the following week.  She did know the breakage would be discovered eventually, but why rush it? She’d already spent the week arguing with her parents about SATs and college applications.  She decided if she were confronted, she’d say yes; by then, perhaps the dark burning feeling might have lifted.  She thought she could confess under examination, but her father never asked.  Instead, he made assumptions on the Collins brothers’ carelessness.  And she stood and watched her father yell – or not yell, as Davies only “politely discussed” – at Tim Collins.   She just stood there and did nothing. 

            Her father had theorized that the Collins brothers had backed a ladder into the window, and then covered it with cardboard and tape.  But why would the Collins brothers have gone into the garage to tape the windows? Opening the gaping carport door would have called attention to the invasion, and the side door was (however pointlessly) kept locked.  Had they broken the windows from the outside, they would have scattered glass inside the garage, where it would rain down behind the garden hoses and piles of scrap wood, not settle in the dirt outside.  Maddy had assumed her father would recognize the inconsistencies. 

            She watched as her father gesticulated at Tim Collins, who finally got a word in and they both nodded, an agreement reached.  The next day, she would see Tim out there, replacing the glass panes himself.  He worked efficiently, completing the task in an hour, but it was still time away from his business and supplies and labor she was sure her father would not be billed for.  Tim Collins paid the cost for her inability to confess. 

****

On that day in the yard, Tim followed Mr. Davies' hand to look at the broken windows, and as he turned his gaze back, his eyes met those of a scrawny teenage girl with messy hair hovering by the back door of the house.  When he saw her, looking so scared, he continued to half-listen to condescending tripe the father was laying on him, and he knew what had actually happened.  The panicked look on her face, the way she couldn’t quite look at him but also couldn't look away, well, he couldn’t help but feel bad for her.  He’d break some windows too if this guy were his father, the way he counted out every error and never missed an opportunity for indignation.  What a pain in the ass these suburbanites were, with that river of crap rippling under all those private school educations.  Now he’d have to spend an hour fixing the window, all because the dim old man couldn’t tell his perfect little daughter, standing there with one arm wrapped in against her chest like a rook harboring a busted wing, was so hung up or strung out or just plain clumsy that she broke windows.  Scratch clumsy, it couldn’t be that.  No one accidentally breaks two windows - unless, as Mr. Davies was taking pains to point out in detail, he were carrying a ladder to put against an elm tree. 

Tim couldn’t prove otherwise.  And even if he could, he wouldn’t, because cripes, just look at her.  Like he wanted to add to that.  He would fix the windows early tomorrow, and she would see the repair, and then maybe she would relax because clearly, this girl needed to relax.  From his peripheral vision, Tim saw Mr. Davies turning to see what Tim was staring at, and so Tim pulled his eyes away from hers and faced him.  The shift created a pause in Mr. Davies’ monologue of complaints. 

“I’ll fix the windows tomorrow,” Tim said to him.  And Mr. Davies nodded his approval, although Tim could tell, his reputation was sunk here.  Good thing most of the other elms in the area had already been pulled.  He’d had enough of this neighborhood. 

Tim did have one more job a few blocks away, just a few weeks later, and he admitted to himself, as he detoured to drive down the Davies' street, he wondered what happened to that girl.  He never even spoke to her, but every once in a while, her face would pop up, nervous and pinched, and he’d wonder if she’d made out okay.  Later on, after he got married, and his wife was pregnant, he hoped for a boy.  Fathers and daughters, it was too hard.  He remembered that from his own sister, when she’d slammed out of the house at seventeen.  Monica, his wife, had a boy, but after that, they had a girl, Abigail, and he and Mitch sold the business, moved into carpentry instead, more artistry, more reliable work, more money.  He didn’t want his girl breaking windows one day, but of course, he didn’t know how things would go.  He hoped for good days ahead. 

****

On that day in the yard, George Davies thought, if the kid just showed some remorse, he’d feel better about the whole thing.  Instead, what was that tree kid doing but staring toward the house, looking so intently that George felt obligated to turn and look as well, and what did he see? – his daughter.  This tree-trimming window-breaking boy was making goo-goo eyes at his daughter.  For god sakes, what kind of a fool idiot was he? And Maddy just stood there in her baggy clothes and that strange crumpled stance she’d adopted over the last few years.  What did this kid, who was much too old for her anyway, what was he thinking? George took a deep breath, and the kid must have remembered himself, and turned back to face him, and met his eyes calmly, politely.  And that shifted something for George, slowed his thinking down and he remembered.  He was like this kid once, checking out every girl, practically out of reflex.  He remembered the raging hormones.  Some days, he still felt that way about a stranger next to him in the elevator, like a chemical explosion roiling right over him.  Not that he didn’t love his wife, just that, after so many years, the terrain was so familiar.  Maybe this kid broke the windows on purpose, just to spend more time at the house.  Maybe his Maddy was a little Juliet.  Maybe this kid wasn’t careless, but smitten. 

And good luck to him.  God knows, getting Maddy out of the house was a chore.  He had had to practically set her on fire to get her to take the SATs again, and she should have known, after that last dismal performance, that she couldn’t let those scores stand.  She was smarter than that.  He didn’t know why she didn’t try harder sometimes, why she couldn’t apply her talents.  Sure, she wasn’t as smart as Cory, but she was a girl; she didn’t need to be.  What she needed was to perform to her ability, and sometimes, he wondered if she was lazy like her little brother Miles.  At least she stayed out of trouble.  But then, she’d mostly stayed away from boys too, boys like this nincompoop tree trimmer, staring at her like she was a six-layer cake and he had a big fork.  George opened his mouth to continue his speech to the lovelorn little sicko, but the boy started speaking before he could say anything. 

“I’ll fix the windows tomorrow,” the kid said.  And George nodded to himself, thinking, just the window.  Stay away from my daughter. 

Later on, he’d think of that boy, whatever his name was, Don Juan or Romeo or whoever he was.  And as the years passed, and there was Maddy, getting older and older, just making do, coasting, he wondered if maybe he’d sheltered her too much.  She never ended up accomplishing much, job, career, awards.  No marriage either, no grandkids.  He couldn’t quite figure out where things went wrong.  Of course, he was careful to say to himself that it wasn’t that he didn’t love her – his flesh, his blood, his child.  He’d cut off his right arm for her.  But sometimes, she was a mystery to him, a code he couldn’t decipher.  Sometimes, for no reason he could think of, he thought maybe he should have done something different that day out by the tree, asked Romeo in for lemonade, made something easier for her.  But then, it wouldn’t have made any difference.  It was just a day in the backyard with two broken window panes, the glass shining in the dirt near the remains of that dead tree.

In Other Words

A conversation about languages made me think about this poem, written some time in 2004 or so, well before the deaths of my brother and mother.  I've fallen away from poetry, writing or even reading it, but it may be time to correct that.  Poetry recommendations welcome.  

--------------------

In Other Words

Dada

My first word: “Dada” --

not at all referencing

Dada or Dadaism, a movement

based on deliberate irrationality, anarchy, and cynicism --

the rejection of laws of ordered beauty

the organization of social language.

Tower of Babble

My brief rule over language:

drop initial consonants

Red Pinto

becomes Ed Into

Collie Pop

Ollie Up

Irregular declensions:

My sister Susie -- Zusie and

Horses: Drop H, add W,

Worses. Tommy, noun, brother,

informally, Tom Tom

from the drum, silent except

when played, sound without words. 

Spanish Fly

In eighth grade love with Señora

Ramos, seagulls are gaviotas,

not the bloated scavengers that lumber

toward me at la playa.  Gaviotas fly, float

weightless over water like lazy curls in

black hair, soaring fuschia lipstick.

 

French Kissing

Ninth grade, Johnny Bouche in Paris

Hearts penned on the bottom of my shoes

oozing scented Valentines with every step.

Love, squish, squish. 

I stole a picture of him waving

all American Knight in front of the Eiffel Tower,

pinned him inside my locker.

Dadaism: French, from dada, a child's word

for a horse.

A decade.  Johnny is at the A&P,

buying brie and wine with his lover,

I say, Bonjour and keep pushing

my cart full of ripening pomegranates. 

Back in the USSR

Mariama Akimnova taught us to

toast properly with vodka.  We

memorized a Pushkin poem, so if we

were ever arrested by Soviets

They would recognize our

Ya vas luboul

I loved you.

They would whisper along

Я вас любил.

Last Words

Michelle, standing in line for

chemotherapy, swarmed by

paper bees.

So what are you in for?

K- k –k - she said, learning

a new meaning for an old word,

stung, allergic.   

Persian Love Song

Two phrases in Farsi:

The first

man toe ra doost daram

means I like you.

The second

gaeedamet means something close to

fuck you.

I learned to write I like you

I found meaning in squiggles and dots and

read right to left. 

I used man to ra doost daram

to mean not just I like you

but I love you. I couldn’t

pronounce the word for love, couldn’t form the

’ ’click in the back of my throat.

I didn’t know how to love

in Farsi. 

First  Love

Words from my brother

picked out letter by letter

assisted by facilitated communication 

assisted by Oijii board, experts say.

We ignore them.

Words took a 30 year wait.

My brother’s finger lands on a letter. 

An arm, not his arm, pulls his hand back. 

My brother’s finger lands on a letter.  Drip drip

the faucet leaks, no torrent, but steady. 

I_AM_GLAD_YOU_CAME_TO_VISIT_ME

he says. 

Coda

In yoga class, bald bandanaed Michelle

teaches me that in Sanskrit

satya means truth.  I move my body in sequence. 

I see my brother stroke his throat, using

the sign for thirst. Mariama toasts him

with vodka. Señora Ramos dances with Johnny,

flying birdlike across the floor. A drum sounds, and

my tongue flits over the roof of my mouth, mining for sounds

hidden between my teeth and caught in my hair, succulent

words singing: Dada, man toe ra doost daram. 

Rainbow Springs, a Florida Natural Treasure

Canoes and kayaks waiting to be rented. Stand-up paddleboarders can also
be seen gliding over the water. 

Rainbow Springs almost disappeared into development. In 1974, despite being the 4th largest spring in Florida with 490 million gallons of water pouring out each day, the faltering attraction closed. While benefiting from being close to Route 41 when the area first opened an amusement park in the 30s, by the 70s it was located too far off the new tourist routes on Interstate 75 to stay afloat.

Not until 1990 did the state of Florida, under pressure from locals, buy the land to add to the state park system. But given budget crunches, the state couldn't afford to do more, so the park sat for a couple of more years until volunteers gathered together to form a nonprofit to help to run the park. In 1992, the park opened for weekends and by 1995, daily access, allowing the springs to be preserved and enjoyed by all again.

Hiking trail  

Waterfall

A few days ago, I spent the day driving up to Dunnellon to visit Rainbow Springs, dangle my feet off the dock into the cool water, and explore the hiking trails through tall trees as well as take several zillion pictures. I can't tell you how delighted I am that public access remains, that Rainbow Springs wasn't swallowed up by condos, and that the state is now committed to returning the springs to its natural state -- with a few nods to its history. The man-made waterfalls still run, but the zoo enclosures are being allowed to crumble and only a sign marks the area near the butterfly garden that used to be a rodeo ring. The monorail has since long disappeared.  The timeless and startlingly clear turquoise water continues to enchant generations of swimmers, canoers, kayakers and lovers of nature.

Support your state park system!  https://www.floridastateparks.org/park/Rainbow-Springs

Clouds reflecting in the blue green waters. 

Mindful Writing

Pondering life's mysteries

Keep St. Pete Lit offers free (yes, free!) writing classes (http://keepstpetelit.org/litspace/litspace-classes/), so on Saturday, I hustled down to the Morean and spent a couple of hours on the 2nd floor in the library talking about writing and doing a few exercises. Anda Peterson did a lovely job of being both encouraging and practical, and I was reminded of some good advice, from Annie Lamott's instruction from Bird by Bird to write a "shitty first draft"  to Faulkner's counsel to "kill your darlings" in writing (that is, to edit out those bits that are overly precious to you because they are, well, precious in an annoying, eye-crossing way to your readers).  Largely, however, we talked about writing as it relates to paying attention. Being mindful of the details and the senses, employing that specificity, and withholding judgment can and often does lead to richer work.  As Natalie Goldberg says in Writing Down the Bones (and as read to us in class),

We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn't matter. . . Recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency. A writer must say yes to life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp's half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter. It is not a writer's task to say, "It is dumb to live in a small town or to eat in a café when you can eat macrobiotic at home." Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist – the real truth of who we are: several pounds overweight, the gray, cold street outside, the Christmas tinsel in the showcase, the Jewish writer in the orange booth across from her blond friend who has black children. We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.

It felt good to do a little writing, easy throw-away exercises simply for the fun of it.  For the prompt to describe my morning (a semi-dangerous prompt, as it can lend itself to pointless list-iness - but that can lead to good insight on editing down), I focused on the morning cat feeding ritual.  There wasn't anything earth shattering, but I ended with, "I drink my water and look at my favorite carnivores with bleary and affection-laden eyes" because you know, I'm a cat lady.  My description of the ceiling fixture while mostly dull did have, "the thin, flat metal bars covering the bulb are tooth-like, reminiscent of a small farming combine about the plow the ceiling."

Perhaps most illuminating was the exercise in writing down what, exactly, my nasty little inner critic says to me.  That crabby little voice sounds something like this: "Other people will read these things! How can you talk about these things in public? It will embarrass us. What will the neighbors say? Polite people don't talk about those things. You're wrong - that's not how it happened at all. You're too sensitive and you are the crazy one, not us. Never us. Certainly not me. We won't love you if you tell."  My inner critic is about as sophisticated as an eight year old on a playground, but is still surprisingly effective in shutting me up.  To which I say: fuck that.  That reminds me of one of my favorite Alice Walker poem that starts saying:

Because women are expected to keep silent about
their close escapes I will not keep silent
and if I am destroyed (naked tree!) someone will
please
mark the spot
where I fall and know I could not live
silent in my own lies
hearing their 'how nice she is!'
whose adoration of the retouched image
I so despise.

Read the rest here: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/208664-on-stripping-bark-from-myself-for-jane-who-said-trees

Write on, people.

Welcome Wonder Words: Poetry at the Dali

Peter Meinke and Denise Duhamel answering questions
after their poetry reading at the Dali Museum

Helen Pruitt Wallace (Poet Laureate of St. Petersburg) hosted a poetry reading of Denise Duhamel and Peter Meinke (Poet Laureate of Florida) at the Dali last Thursday.  I'm happy to report wonderful moments of remembering for me such as: Oh yeah! Feminism isn't dead! And poets are often really freaking funny! And words can be hysterical or heartbreaking or both.  In short, although I didn't know it, I needed a poetry infusion.

Denise Duhamel started out reading some collaborative pieces she wrote with Maureen Seaton. Since Maureen was one of my favorite professors in graduate school - not only a phenomenal poet, but also a unbelievably kind, supportive and insightful teacher - it felt like a literary reunion for a minute there.  Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton have been writing collaborative pieces for decades.  As Denise noted, they started out in a time before texting, cell phones, before email really; they would call each other and leave lines on each other's answering machines. This is what I'd loved about the poets I knew in graduate school - the playfulness, the humor, the just-messing-around that can sometimes end up being gorgeous (and sometimes not - I'm not any of our exquisite corpse poetry exercises featuring chicken testicles ever evolved into high art, although they did inspire some snorting laughter and a running joke).  One poem of Duhamel and Seaton's poems took on gender by adding it into pop culture references, e.g., "The hills are alive with the sound of gender," which ended up creating one of the funniest list poems I've heard in a while. You can find gender in the darnedest places.

Denise moved on to reading some poems from Blowout, her latest collection.  Many of them centered around life post divorce, and the awkwardness of reentering the dating world after a long absence.  As someone long single, the piece about the guy who worked on her kitchen asking her out hit some familiar mental acrobatics.  You know it's a totally bad idea - and yet, hey, he would be handy around the house, at least during those moments when he was sober.  Many of her poems had a funny-but-ill-fated theme running underneath -- for instance, the poem that featured the narrator and her (at the time) husband watching a young couple at the beach argue.  The older couple add in lines for the young couple, circling around their own marital discord, only to become disconcerted in the end as the distant young lovers reconcile, something clearly not in the cards for those who were providing them with dialogue.

The other poet of the evening, Peter Meinke, won my heart over early by starting by saying, "Well, after that, I'm sure hearing from an old white guy is just what you want." The theme of the evening was Memory & Desire, and he too wrote about yearning.  The poem of his that particularly stuck for me was about long married tennis players, and the empty space when one players is no longer there to send the ball over the net. He also read a section about children disappearing into the fog while sledding, a haunting image. His later book is a children's book, with illustrations by his wife Jeanne Clark.  Jeanne was in the audience, and when after the reading, the poets took questions, including on collaboration given Duhamel's long experience with it, Meinke noted that he did not collaborate; Jeanne piped in with "We collaborate in different rooms."  Each is in charge of their own art in their own way, which was perhaps the theme overall.  Collaborative or not, the words find voice through sharp and dedicated minds.

I left the theater with that good glow knowing that there are people out there creating, laughing, and transforming the painful into the sublime.  I love what words used well can do, the access they give to our messy little souls.

http://thedali.org/event/poetry-at-the-dali-hosted-by-helen-pruitt-wallace-2/
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/denise-duhamel
http://www.petermeinke.com/
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/maureen-seaton

Spring Bling

Wizard at Springfest

Spring in Florida explodes less obviously than elsewhere, but we locals have noticed that at last the crepe myrtles are leafing up, and we too rejoice (although perhaps with less manic fervor than those snowed-in up north for months). Spring in St. Petersburg also means high season for festivals and events. I managed to hit two this weekend: Springfest in Gulfport, where faeries and lawn art abounded; and, Art in Bloom at my former place of employ, the Museum of Fine Arts - St. Petersburg.  

Springfest involves a lot of wings and glitter and is great for creatures large and small, particularly those that like costumes. I attended with friends, including a toddler, who was thrilled by all the shiny stuff.  Bubbles and beads and friendly dogs went over big, even if a few of the (very kind and friendly) faeries were a wee bit overwhelming for a sometimes shy small person.  As for the grownups, we enjoyed the costumed crowd, music in the bandstand, the costume contest, and variety of stalls selling everything from plants and wings to floating clothing and geranium oil. We missed the Maypole dance, alas. But there was a wizard that was, as a friend said, straight out of central casting, a Gandalf doppelganger.

Faeries chatting

On an only vaguely related note, I was happy to see sidewalk chalk available; Saturday was the anniversary of Brendan's death, and sidewalk chalk (of all things) continues to remind me of him, since the day we met, we played with chalk on the back patio of a bar. So I got to scribble out his name and a trademark sun under the sculpture by Tom Pitzen of a winged woman  named "Nec mortem effugere quisquam nec amorem potest," which, I found out when I googled the Latin back home, means "No one is able to flee from death or love." Sometimes the universe conspires with you to find perspective. On Saturday, mostly I was happy to spend a sunny day in good company watching a child explore with delight.

On Sunday, I caught one of the last days of Art in Bloom, where floral artists find inspiration from

Art in Bloom floral response to Theo Wujcik's Canto II

pieces in the MFA collection.  The yearly event is beloved by museum regulars with good reason, as the floral art alongside sturdier artworks provides a lovely intersection of types of creation, those more wilting and ephemeral and those ebbing away at a much slower rate. I'm always impressed by the vision of the floral designers and the way shape and/or color are echoed and transformed from the original painting to the floral response. Floral designers often bring in inorganic elements to go with the flowers, and I am often struck by the incorporated sculptural elements, particularly those that evolve from a 2D painting to a 3D floral arrangement.  

Shiva as Lord of the Dance and floral response

While motivated to be there for the more substantially time-limited flowers, I did also finally get around to exploring the Contemplating Character: Drawings and Oil Sketches from Jacques-Louis David to Lucian Freud exhibit. Given my particular interest in portraiture and the endless expressions of human complexity they can express, I suspected it would be an involving exhibit for me, and indeed it was.  Not every piece spoke to me, but I was delighted by the breadth of pieces, from 18th century sketches to R. Crumb's work on place mats. As usual, I gravitated more toward more modern work, but not exclusively. Portraiture, as the exhibit makes clear, is so much about the relationship between the artist and subject (even when the piece is a self-portrait), and that emotion is what brings pieces to life. Happily, I also ran into a few former coworkers, which always makes the MFA feel like my special and personal museum; I know the folks working behind the curtain that bring the magic together. I look forward to returning for future exhibits, and other adventures out in my adopted hometown.