The Quiet Dentist

My dentist works in half of a small brick building that looks like it has always been in that spot, trembling close to the ground while other buildings pop up around it. The waiting room has four wicker-seated chairs that could be new, or very old and scarcely used.

K-, the secretary, is also in charge of clipping the bib around patients' necks and handing them two tissues. She has a slight speech impediment and sounds as if she's chewing on her tongue when she talks. I am sure that the circa 1985 Toyota Camry wagon with the "Have you hugged your cat today?" sticker always in the parking lot is hers. However, it's possible that she came with the building and the car is the dentist's.

We found Dr. S- S- back when we had dental insurance but only one car. He was the only dentist in the Yellow Pages who was on our plan and on a bus line. Actually, he is listed after a Dr. I- S- at the same address, who I presumed was his father, perhaps dead.

Dr. S- is not a friendly man, although he can make sincere small talk for a few minutes. He doesn't smile much, which also means that he doesn't fake-smile. 1 has seen him several times and seems to like his quiet, earnest manner.

I used to wonder if Dr. S- became a dentist only because his father was one. His room is so small and so unchanging, though not quite joyless. A photograph his son took in 3rd grade of a bright yellow tree beside a large tombstone hangs on the wall. A window looks out toward the road.

The pale grey-green reclining chair, like the waiting room chairs, seems both old and new at the same time. I have only twice encountered another patient before or after my visit.

Why does anyone become a dentist? Today as I sat in the chair, squinting up at the ceiling, I wondered if the profession attracts methodical, obsessive people. A mouth, a domain with precise and controllable limits. Thirty-two subjects to be washed, dressed, fed and patted on the head, right to left and top to bottom. Do people become dentists because they imagine they will like the job, or because they ask, "How hard could it be?" Or do they become dentists because they need to, because they must bring order to something in this world and the mouth is a logical place to start?

Dr. S- has become noticeably greyer over the past seven years. He is entirely medium in height and build, with grey eyes and a smooth, medium-sized face and nose. His two sons differ widely in ages, the products of different marriages. I know this from our first visit, when he seemed to be trying to make us feel comfortable about bringing 1 there. My husband has never returned, saying Dr. S- is too rough in his handling of the tooth-scraping tools. This is true, or at least Dr. S- never asks if one is "doing all right."

Last month, I took 1 and 2 for a visit. While 1 was in the chair, I had to take 2 to the bathroom. We passed a second exam room, just as narrow, one that I had never known was there. The door was open, and I could see the white hair and white dentists' jacket of a man sitting, his back to me, in the patient's chair, slightly reclined, reading the sports section of the daily paper.

Surely it was Dr. I- S-, the father. Maybe he sits there every day, reading the newspaper for a couple hours. Maybe he sees a patient or two, or maybe not. Just before lunch, maybe he gets up and stands at the doorway of his son's exam room and asks him if he's hungry. Maybe they look out the window together and consider the options.

Super-Grouch

1: What's wrong, Mom?
Me: People keep asking me questions.

I think this is possibly the funniest thing I've ever said.

A Matter of Taste

I've been so sick, ugly sick. My body's capacity to manufacture mucus has astonished me. It has, actually, humbled me.

I started blowing my nose the Thursday before Thanksgiving and I still haven't stopped. Although I was most miserable--with fatigue and fuzzy-headedness--just a few days in, the strangest part of my illness beset me after the first nine days. For four days, I couldn't smell or taste at all. I've never had that experience before--muted senses, yes. But this was an entire loss of both functions.

Eating was joyless, even disgusting. Coffee, stripped of its flavor, is starkly a drug, chicken is dry flesh that refuses to be chewed quickly. Lettuce is even more pointless than usual.

It was unbelievable that I could tear a basil leaf right under my nose and not smell a thing, while someone sitting several feet away could easily catch the scent. For the sake of being attentive, I tried to put words to what my mouth was experiencing: a square of Hershey's chocolate felt thick, like curtain of very soft heavy cloth loosely wrapped around my tongue. I thought I could tell it was sweet. Coffee was like prickly sawdust. Granola was like biting the sound of falling dishes.

Well, I just made that one up right now. My most recent batch of granola wasn't the best to begin with anyway.

My smell and taste has been fading back in for the past two days. Oddly, as it was fading out, I didn't even realize what was happening. I remember eating Thanksgiving dinner with extended family and thinking, almost subconsiously, that it wasn't very delightful. Two days later, I wondered why the blueberries my mother served with the pancakes were so bland. At lunch, I could taste the vinegar in the souse my father waxed nostalgic over (souse? oh, never mind), but by the time we drove home to Virginia and my husband cooked supper, I had lost it all. I had a mouth was full of rice and I realized I was chewing soggy cotton batting. Then I took a bite of kim chee and my mouth ignited. That's when I knew something was wrong--I haven't experienced kim chee as a spicy food for nearly 10 years. But without taste, my naked tongue was cowed by the capsaicin.

It was a sad stretch of days, being without smell and taste. I hoped that my senses would return all at once, like a light switched on, and the glorious music would blare and I would taste apples! coffee! cheese! cranberries! green beans! like never before! But they're just creeping back and all I can do is swear to myself that I will appreciate them wholeheartedly for the rest of my life.

That's Neither Hair nor There

There's a barber shop in our neighborhood, owned by a neighborhood resident and fitted with grand old barbershop chairs, the kind that have an ornate metal footplate.

It also shows art on its walls and has a nails table.

I wanted to make an appointment there for a haircut, so I looked in the yellow pages, first under "Hair." O, the world is not that simple. I was directed either from "Hair Cutting" to "Haircutters & Stylists" or from "Hair Dressing" to "Beauty Salons."

Oddly, there are fewer than 2 dozen entries under "Haircutters & Stylists." It must be too straightforward. Or maybe too dissonant: if you just want a cut, you don't care about style.

Where does the term "hairdresser" come from? Who still uses it? I turned to "Beauty Salons." I didn't find what I was looking for.

Could it be, that in spite of its art gallery pretensions, its fingernail attentions, and, on top of it all, its female-turned-male one-who-cuts-hair named Cupid, our local facility is actually a Barber Shop?

It does, in fact, have "Barber Shop" in its name. I don't know why I was surprised to find it under that yellow pages heading.

My husband--he goes to a barber shop. It has one chair and one old Mr. G- with a pair of scissors and a razor. It's filled with plants and old men watching Godzilla movies. I've never been in; I doubt Mr. G- has cut a woman's head of hair in the past 20 years, if ever. Mr. G- charges $5 for a cut and used to try to give my husband the student rate of $4. Now that's a barber shop.

Subtitles Come In Handy

I forgot
I forgot how much I sleep once the sun starts setting before 7:00.

Things that give parents pause
You're in the bedroom folding laundry or plucking eyebrow hair. You hear your three-year-old in the next room, singing a little made-up song. As her voice gets closer, you hear the words: "It used to be a banana, but now it isn't. It used to be a banana, but now it isn't." You hear her steps enter the bathroom, and you hear a thunk in the trashcan.

Alight
Twelve feet up on scaffodling like hatches of a calligrapher's brush, men lay bricks in the chill morning. Some men squat or kneel; some have worked faster than others and they stand to lay their red rows higher. The white and yellow helmets they wear are dusty but still catch the sunlight like the undersides of the wings of the birds that rise above them, turning as a flock toward an invisible beacon, a future rest.

An art installation of 130 hand-built ceramic cubes, etched with labyrinthine designs on five sides, glazed and arranged on a bed of sand
Is art obsession?
Are artists possessed?
Can one become an artist without being possessed?

The Sound of Yellow Leaves

Autumn is running through its inventory of days. This morning we had mist, the kind that makes colors luminescent, more intense for not having to compete with the sky.

The air was charged with energy. A man walked down the sidewalk so briskly that when he stopped at the street as I drove past, his right leg kept going, flinging itself out over the curb. I could see his whole body stop and lean to bring his leg back.

*

I went to the gathering of protestors outside the George Allen event at which George Bush was to make an appearance. I didn't want to chant anything, yell anything or even hold any signs. I just wanted my body to be there in silent protest. It's hard to be quiet amid noise and feel like one is in league with the noisemakers.

Pat

Standing in the aisle at Party City, waiting for 1 to decide that she doesn't want any of the costumes, I look at the fishnet stockings. Astonishingly, I consider buying a pair. Red? Black? Purple? Wait a minute! Why would I want these things? I feel all right about my aging body in an abstract kind of way, but fishnet stockings are far too concrete. Someone might actually look at my legs.

My husband and I may go to a Halloween party. That is, he will go and I may go too. There will likely be many people there whose names I am supposed to know, since I played soccer with them all summer, but they're almost all men. Male names are very hard to remember, so frequently monsyllabic and gutteral.

If I can remember their names, I'd rather spend a social evening with men than women, I think. I'm not sure why I have more fun with men my age than women; sometimes I think that I must be an attention-hungry flirt; other times I think I'm more "male" than most women. Neither answer makes me 'specially happy. Good thing I like spending lots of time alone.

Maybe I'll go as an earthworm.

The Clock Strikes Mid-October

Little brown birds and leaves dart through this fall air. The yellow leaves on the sidewalk please me with their randomness. A slug moves in circles over the chilling bricks. When I pick the spent blooms from the petunia, the stickiness coats my fingertips but seems to dissipate before I get up the front steps to our door.

I used to not like fall, never gave a thought to the possibility of liking fall until one day in Kansas. C- walked beside me, visiting from out of state, at some intermediate stage of our confused relationship, and said fall was his favorite season. Was dumbfounded that I disagreed so avidly.

Since then, fall is C-'s season in my mind. The more I like it, the older I feel. Old enough to be looking backward; old enough to want shorter days for a while.

*
Finished "The Other Side of the Bridge" by Mary Lawson. A very autumnal book. Lots of nice bridge metaphors can be made; complaints about a gratuitous death at the end can be lodged--yet I liked it all. I'm a sucker for a good clean sentence. I'd quote one, but I've already loaned the book out.

Rooftop Ephemeron

July, 1993. Kansas. I'm living on the top floor of a shambly, student-filled house with two friends. We have no kitchen, just a hot plate and a fridge which must have grown up out of the floor boards because it seems impossible that it should have been carted up the narrow, angled staircase. We wash our dishes in the claw-foot bathtub.

The fire escape is a rope tied to a steel loop bolted into the floor beside our front window. It's great for party entertainment--rappelling down the front of the house and over the porch roof into the bushes below. I mention this only because it should not be forgotten.

J- and I eat so much garlic in an attempt to repel mosquitoes naturally that when we lay down to sleep, we can smell the hot scent of garlic breathing up through the skin on our arms. We take afternoon naps in order to have more dreams.

D- shaves his head so he can save money on shampoo and stays up until 7 in the morning playing Sim City. He disappears for stretches of time to work on mysterious projects and do laundry at his parents' house. He has hung a Russian flag from our front window with antagonistic hopes of fetching a hostile response from town residents.

I'm working odd hours at the college cafeteria, cutting apples in half and spooning corn into little white bowls. Once, the manager walks by as I'm working and snaps, exasperatedly but not unkindly, "Use both hands!"

I spend hours in the library, half-heartedly attempting to make headway on my poorly defined senior thesis. I have one more semester of college, and no idea what to do next. (That fall, my advisor--a woman I admire so deeply I'm not even aware of it--will tell me, "You don't seem to be suited for the sort of research required in graduate school. You should get an MFA and teach poetry at a ju-co." This is "junior college" in Midwestish.) As my summer wears on, I collect an assortment of disorganized notes on the backs of pages from the recycling bin, but no clearer sense of what original thing I can propose.

One day, I am alone in the apartment, trying to write thoughts or poems in a notebook. The air is thick and the sky glares grey with thin clouds. Suddenly I realize that I don't want to be alone, writing in a notebook.

I find some red poster paint and a brush and climb out the window, past the Russian flag and around the gable to the roof. The pitch is quite steep and there is another dormer window at right angles directly around the corner, but we've all done this before. Sitting on the ridge and forming capital letters upsidedown, I paint, "I don't want to write. I want to talk, and I want people to listen to me."

I'm a little choked up and weepy at first, but the effort of painting and balancing sobers me up. When I finish, I straddle the ridgepole and look at red letters and the mottled black roof and the close sky. I wonder if anyone can see the words from the street; I'm not sure if I want them to be seen or not, but it doesn't matter, since raindrops begin to fall. I slide back into the house as fast as I dare and get my camera.

Somehow, leaning out the window and hanging onto the frame, I get two shots. By now, I feel good, as if I had settled something.

When the pictures are developed, I put them in the notebook.

The next spring, I lose the whole book on the DC Metro. I call and leave a message at a Metro office. Nothing comes of it.

Sky-Blue and Empty

It was so beautiful outside today that I had a sappy grin on my face as I left the new coffee shop after a latte and some productive work. Then I heard Renee Fleming on the radio and got tears in my eyes, and I'm not even an opera fan. That's when I began feeling that something awful was bound to happen: I would either run over a child darting into the street, my boss would have been killed earlier that very morning, or I would get a call from the daycare with news that 2 was dreadfully ill.

In the office, under the fluorescent lights, shades mostly drawn, the giddy fear of pleasure faded.

My husband called--unusually--to tell me to check CNN for news of a fatal multiple shooting at an Amish school, perhaps not far from my relatives or friends of 1. So callous am I towards bad news that doesn't involve me--the school was not in the right town--that I didn't even think until many hours later that someone in Pennsylvania had her lovely-day premonition come true.

The livery of misery

I'm reading Oliver Twist now, and though I really want to finish it, if only to prove to myself (and, oh yes, the world) that I can, I'm not sure I will.

I wasn't prepared for such a dark world. The book is so unrelentingly and also so transparently miserable, I can barely stand the thought of 300 more pages. Of course Oliver is not going to return to Mr. Brownlow's house when he offers to take the books back to the bookseller's stall!

Who read this story when it first appeared? I've been trying to imagine the women and the men who took up the magazine, shook it out, folded it over, read, licked their forefinger to turn the page... what did they think? Were they shocked, and satisified to have been? Did they dread the next installment, or look forward to it? Did they have any hope for a happy ending?

I'm not the sort of person to read happy books, especially. So I'm having trouble figuring out what bothers me so much about this. I think, really, this book is far more explicit in its portrayal of evil wrought on children than anything being written today. And yet at the same time, it's so overbaked by today's standards of writing that one can hardly help feeling a bit of mockery towards it. So I have two conflicting emotions every time I read.

Here's a passage about Dick that really ate me up:

The child was pale and think; his cheeks were sunken; and his eyes large and bright. The scanty parish dress, the livery of his misery, hung loosely on his feeble body; and his young limbs were wasted away, like those of an old man. ...
"I should like," faltered the child, "if somebody that can write, would put a few words down for me on a piece of paper, and fold it up and seal it, and keep it for me, after I am laid in the ground. ...
"I should like," said the child, "to leave my dear love to poor Oliver Twist; and to let him know how often I have sat by myself and cried to think of his wandering about in the dark nights with nobody to help him. And I should like to tell him," said the child, pressing his small hands together, and speaking with great fervour, "that I was glad to die whan I was very young; for, perhaps, if I had lived to be a man, and had grown old, my little sister who is in Heaven, might forget me, or be unlike me; and it would be so much happier if we were both children there together."

Fool Service

This southern city has two indoor ice rinks, but this post is not about ice rinks. Maybe some other day I'll write about the absurdity of a building full of cold, or maybe that's plenty said already.

This post is about how I was driving 1 and 2 and a friend of 1 to the ice rink on the north side of town when I rashly decided to try to find my way to the ice rink on the south side of town.

I had never been to this rink before, but I could see from the address written on a coupon (burning a hole in my supremely middle-class Entertainment Book) that it was sort of close to something I might know the location of. Goaded on by protestations from the back seat--changed plans grate horribly on the nerves of my children--I pulled a u-turn and made a right onto a road that at least initially went in the direction I wanted.

After about 5 minutes, I lost my nerve and, seeing a highway number for something going north, I yanked the wheel right and sped up the ramp, hoping--trusting!--that I would soon see another sign telling me what road I was on. (Roads might be numbered, but everyone here calls them by their local names.)

Instead, I came upon a toll-booth and in the approach I realized that I had less than 50 cents in the entire car. What am I going to do? The girls are dithering in the back. What does anyone do? Will the attendant make me call home and have someone deliver 50 cents to me? Is there some sort of secret driveway that they'll let me slip down as long as I promise to return whence I came and never do this again? Do they take credit cards?

The hundredths of a mile are ticking by, the tollbooths are looming, I'm fumbling in my purse. I have 1 quarter and five pennies and my mind is counting off the words I should use as I pull up to the last slot on the right.

I began my apology and sensed right away that the attendant was fed up: "How much do you have," without even rolling her eyes, which might have been taken as a sign of commiseration. 1 called from the back, "Look on the ground!" and I made a show of peering over the edge of the door.

"There's nothing out there." She took my 30 cents without taking her eyes from mine. With some tollbooth-attendant sleight-of-hand magic, she pulled something from her back pocket, strained out the pennies and tossed two quarters into the basket. I knew it was two quarters because the only moment her eyes left mine to put the pennies in her till, I glanced over at the display as the coins tumbled in.

"Thank you," I said. Maybe I wasn't grateful enough--I admit the thought crossed my mind that the second quarter was a misguided one she herself had picked off the ground earlier--but I was truly relieved. She continued staring at me, never smiling, just a little flick of scorn? anger? at the side of her mouth. I drove away.

The Insect Demimonde

Have you ever left a restaurant, satisfied with your meal, and only then wondered if there were cockroaches in the kitchen? I never have, until today. Typically, the cockroach question rears its ugly, radiation-proof head much earlier in the dining experience.

I don't know why, but today as I walked out of the restaurant after lunch, the thought crossed my mind, much in the same way one might think, "I wonder if there are any decent swimsuits left on sale at Target" or "When did all those clouds roll in?"

I feel gratitude toward my brain for being so laissez-faire about the issue.

I don't think I had ever seen a cockroach in my life until I traveled in West Africa, where I encountered roaches that were--we'll say--substantial. They lived in the toilet pits and it was surprisingly easy to ignore them after the first few visits. I never saw them in the houses.

Our house has roaches; few enough that we can try to ignore them, but enough to be worrisome if you happen to be sitting downstairs very late at night, alone, with the lights dimmed and the radio off. Then one will race across the kitchen floor and into the living room, following an invisible route that doesn't seem to make any sense. (what's in the living room? the roach country club?) Soon, it races back--but from a slightly different point, to another corner of the kitchen, so that you're not sure if it was the same roach, or another. A third stanza of scurrying, and it's clear that multiple roaches are in residence: no roach could have that many errands to run in a single evening.

Having read that roaches despise dryness, I once pointed a hairdryer at a crack I had seen a roach retreat into. I know it didn't do any good, but it made a pleasingly nasty mental image, stiff roach wings curling up like a dried apple peel, legs moving slower and slower and slower.

Why am I writing about cockroaches, about killing cockroaches? (catch me another day and I'll give them more-than-grudging respect) Beats me. Anything more meaningful and the words would have felt too sticky, I guess.

Driver 8 take a break

I want to make beauty more important in my life.

What does this mean? Not fresh-flowers-as-dictated. Not things.

A pine cone holds its seeds in quiet, and when it opens its many tongues to speak, the seeds fall away. Lost or given. The pine cone's purpose for existence expires, but that's when we pick it up to admire. That's when it's most delicate.

Or, let's put it plainly: I want more risk in my life. Everything looks the same as far as I can see. My husband cooks the same three meals all the time. I've nearly stopped cooking because there's no pleasure in it.

I need to think more about the companionship of beauty and risk.

School is about to start and I will again be alone for most of my days. I am yearning so much for this that my lungs feel twisted around. I don't know why it's so hard for me to be around all three of my other family members at once.

I'm not sleepy, but I'm tired.

Safe

Squinting at the numbers on the combination lock for our storage shed, I thought I would be able to feel in the late twilight the hidden grinding that signals the moments to change directions, then stop and pull. But it didn't open, and I had to turn again, squinting harder and moving slower.

I don't even know what the inside of a combination lock looks like.

It could have been a beautiful, allegorical mystery, but then I went and looked it up:
http://www.howstuffworks.com/inside-lock.htm

Or the long version, with animation and (on the second page) detailed instructions on "high road" safecracking:
http://home.howstuffworks.com/safecracking.htm

But if you're short on time, just read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. You won't learn how to pick locks, but sometimes pretending is better anyway.

Jesus Christ

2's alter ego is a fuzzy stuffed bear, entirely blue. Sam has, in the past two or three months, developed a complex personality and is prone to extremes. For example, he "always sleeps," except when he "never sleeps."

Today we were late for her summer preschool program because of an altercation that climaxed with her hitting me and me carrying her screaming to her room.

Tears, kisses, we're on the bike to school. The little voice behind my head (amazingly clear, considering the bike is speeding along) says, "Sam hits me and I don't get mad."

Swords and pens

On Monday, July 10, The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page piece (column 4, quirky story placement) titled, "For Afghan Cabbies, A Poetry Tradition Spurs War of Words." The headline after the jump used the phrase "Fight a War of Words."

Briefly: two associations devoted to the recital of Afghan poetry exist in Washington, D.C. One takes a more scholarly approach, primarily discussing classical works rooted in Sufisim; the other spends more time in performance of contemporary Afghan poetry.

The author of the article, Masood Farivar, clearly doesn't trust WSJ readers to be interested in a story about Afghan poetry. I imagine a thought process along these lines: "Hmmm, where's the source of tension? Two groups, they're different, difference produces conflict... fighting poets, that's it!! I've got the story!"

(Too, he seems to be playing into U.S. perceptions of Afghans as never having left behind their warring clannishness: "But having given up battling over the merits of the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, exiled Afghans here have found a new outlet for factional debate: how to celebrate the ancient Afghan art of poetry reading.")

The real story isn't about the conflict. Of course people who are passionate about something, who love poems that reach deep inside them on emotional, cultural and intellectual levels, will occasionally passionately disagree about what they think is the best or right way to honor poetry. But I'm sure that the number of people who even perceive these two groups as seriously in conflict--let alone "at war"--is small compared to the total number of people who attend the poetry readings. Maybe Farivar thinks readers will be amused by the thought of poetry-lovers fighting. And maybe he's right. But he lost the chance to find and tell the real story.

Here's the part that interests me: In the early 80s, "At the end of 12-hour [cab-driving] shifts, dog-tired and sometimes hungry, they'd sit cross-legged in a circle. Over cups of tea and candies, they tackled some of the most technically difficult poems written by the great Sufi poets.... Every now and then, when they found themselves stumped, they'd call upon a ... former Kabul University professor... chipping in 25 to 50 cents each, they'd buy a phone card and hunch over the speakerphone as the professor brought the poems to life."

Was this act of reading and studying poems so important because the readers were tired, isolated in a new country, lost in jobs they never thought they's have to take? How was the ex-patriate Afghan community different 20 years ago compared to now? Who goes to the "contemporary" readings now? How much money do they make? How old are they? How long have they been in this country? Who goes to the traditional group's events? What occasions now do Afghans in this country have to chip in a quarter to a common goal?

***
I could not have said, 10 years ago, that one day I would be reading the Wall Street Journal. We get it free, you know, from airline mileage points, and sometimes it piles up in the recycling bin for days at a time. But I've come to appreciate much of its coverage. And really, how can I complain about poetry on the front page of ANY paper?

Through a glass

Today was one of those days--frequent, for me, a worker-from-home--that I saw no one other than the people who transport or care for my children. It rained all day, with little wind. I kept the front door open. When the trash truck came, I wondered if the workers even noticed the stench from our neighbor's can, the one into which he dumped the contents of his fridge before he moved. Other than that, I didn't think about other people in any kind of sensual, experiential way. The few phone conversations I had were brief and boring.

After supper, we drove to a bookstore and I was startled to see faces behind the windshields of other cars, glimpses of people with dark hair, people glancing down at their radios, people talking to their passengers.

People in cars give the world the unknowing gift of their intimate gestures. Sometimes I can't believe I exist, until I see the motion of another person, a person who doesn't know I'm watching. I don't understand this, but it's true.

The greens, the blue, the red and the orange

Saw an oriole in the cherry tree this week. I've never seen them around before the chicory goes to seed. But I'm not usually lying in the hammock at 1 in in the afternoon, either, gazing at the perfect sky between layers of leaves.

I had locked myself out of the house, so eventually I got on my bike and ended up at the salon, where I got my hair cut very short again.

The Public-Private Continuum

"Good morning!" says Mr. B- as I walk back from the school bus stop this morning at 8:30. I've got a cup of coffee in my hand, he has a can of Miller Lite. His voice always surprises me. It's a mid-range, well-tempered voice, reasonable and kind. But I've overheard snatches of thinly veiled racist--or at least xenophobic--conversation with the other men on that stretch of block.

I don't know what these guys do. Most are not old enough to be retired; most appear hale enough to not be on disability... though one can never tell. They lean on the window-frames of each others' 12-year-old cars, drive small loads of discarded household goods from one street to another, talk neighborhood politics--the old kind, about people; not the new kind about historic designation and housing in-fill and clean-up days.

Mr. B-'s greeting interrupts and caps my catalog of sounds I had been compiling as I walked:
1. The high "ping" of a real bell. A kitchen timer for someone's toast, maybe, singing out the front door into the world. This is why I love the city; the borders between private and public break down, but not usually so much as to be disturbing.
2. Blue jay scolding a cat.
3. Homeless itinerant workers having a breakfast of cigarettes in the alley. Their itinerancy is in question, as they've lived in our neighborhood's alleys for over a year now.
4. City bus roaring down P- St.
5. Robins
6. Whiny snargle of an ancient minivan engine warming up.
7. Scrape of a front door closing as the dark-haired girl goes to work.
8. "Good morning"

Opera in 3 Acts

1. For the second day in a row, 2 is wearing the dress I wore at her age. It tickles me that a minor consumer object has held up so long. I think it came from Sears.

2. This is the week of cat opera. Two in the morning, aria and chorus. Six in the evening, duet. I tried to tiptoe and peer between the houses, because I want to see what a cat looks like when it makes that sound like its stomach is being pulled up through its mouth. But they must have a modicum of decency left and stopped when I approached.

3. Yesterday I yelled at 1 in front of her friend because I was so angry at 2's tantrum. I apologized almost right away, but I can't erase how small I made 1 feel. She kept saying she was sorry, sorry, sorry.

The Word is "Okay"

May slips by in innumerable mild days. This blue sky has me by the jowl, like a fish eating a worm on a well-hidden hook. I'm a happy member of the school of okay.

It could be that my life is glorious. I do honestly feel elation when I ride to work (especially when I go to my coffee-shop office) or run errands on my bike and the neighborhood is purring, sun shining, food waiting at a perfect 38 degrees in the fridge: ticktock, this is life, and I shift gears, turn right on C- Street kind of hoping to see handsome D- at work, wondering if I like spring best of all the seasons, trying to remember to read that article on music production studios, thinking I should find out why there aren't any women producers and write an article about it but knowing I won't. Everything's okay, I say to the person who asks me, and it seems the best way to describe how I feel.