Adrift at The End of December

• Geez, I had a curl in the middle of my forehead when I wrote that last post, eh? Now, with a glass of red wine and Mendelssohn's octet for strings on the stereo, I'm not so horrid.


• I saw Across the Universe at the movie palace the other night and here's my review: Better than Hairspray.


• I took 1 and 2 to see Enchanted this morning. (Who the heck knew there was such a thing as a 10 a.m. Sunday matinee??? -must've been the oddest movie-going experience ever.) Here's my review: Better than I thought it would be.


• Actually, I thought Enchanted was a superb example of narrative a la mode: slip directly from parody into the the form being parodied. It was like The Daily Show for 8- to 12-year-old girls.


• Don't get me wrong: I like The Daily Show. But at its heart, it is Establishment.


• The rain, the rain.


• We went to the art museum today and managed to look at some things between asking the girls not to play combat hide-and-seek around the statuary pedestals. I liked "The Watering Pond at Marly with Hoarfrost" by Alfred Sisley, for its precise capturing of winter afternoon light and shade. I couldn't find that image, but here's his "Hoarfrost, Saint Martin's Summer," with what I think is morning light.

I Like You, Really I Do

M- wants to have a poker night this Friday. "Invite all your friends," he says.

Some days I just don't have any friends. At least not any with whom I would enjoy a convivial evening of drunken gambling, if we're talking about my sanctioned friends, as in: wives of his friends. (Note: these are women I like very much between the hours of 8 am and 8 pm.) Most of my friends are friends only in my imagination, which is to say, if I knew them better, we probably wouldn't be friends, by mutual decision.

Really-- I am a friendly person, not at all overtly misanthropic. People seem to like me. I don't know why I'm feeling so grouchy about this concept of "friends" right now.


I can barely touch my own self
How can I touch someone else?
I am just an advertisement
for a version of myself.

-"Angels," David Byrne, David Byrne

Now I'll have to read the darn book.

I still can't believe I actually bought these earrings. Wore them, too. Aren't they great?

The Blues

This Saturday is my birthday. I'm so tired of thinking about my life, I have nothing left to write.

Here's a rhetorical question: What the hell is up with my child?

Scene: Mid-afternoon. Child 2 walks up the stairs, making up a cheery little 4-note tune as she goes, unaware that I can hear her. The words:

I'm going upstairs and when I get to the top
that's when I say
My dad is always right and I'm always wrong
My dad is always right and I'm always wrong
My mom is always right
My big sister is always right
And I'm always wrong
Everybody is always right and I'm always wrong


I shouldn't have, but I ran into her room and asked, almost laughing, "What are you saying?" She looked at me guiltily, I think--it was as if an adult were staring out of a 4-year-old's eyes--and tried to pretend she thought I was talking about something else. I pressed her once and she became clearly annoyed, so I left.

At the rate I'm working through it, I will finish the book "Pianoforte: A Social History of the Piano" when I'm 67.

The epigraph for the chapter on Beethoven will carry me for several years:

"Beethoven is Lucifer's good son, the demon guide to the last things." -Ernst Bloch

So, some days I want to be the Trout Quintet and some days I want to be Beethoven.

East of Town

I love visiting N- and J-, who live east of town, down a long gravel driveway with grass between the wheeltracks. Their small house is calm and simple, heated only by a woodstove and surrounded by semi-tamed meadow and forest.

As I drove down the lane, I slowed so I could hear H-, their dog, galloping alongside the car. Laundry hung on the line and little watercolor drawings lay on the back porch table, where N-, J- and baby C- must have eaten all summer, as they had no usable dining room until recently.

While C-napped upstairs, N- made cups of peppermint tea and served mine in Fiestaware that matched my blouse. Sometimes talking with her is hard, because we have so much to say and I change subjects more slowly than she. Pauses in the conversation--which I need--are rare. But today was slower. The dog nuzzled my legs and we both watched her for a moment. The fire whispered and then it was time for me to drive west, back to the city.

The November afternoon lay down its sun and shadows across the road. If music has geometry, Loreena McKennit's voice on my car's stereo was the same angle as the slanted light. I was late picking up 1 from school, but not so late that it mattered.

Two Cute Stories About a 4-Year-Old That Happen To Be Entirely Different in Tone

At supper last night 2 asked, out of the blue, "Do you know what I wish for most, besides Thanksgiving going on forever, and wings?"

I was so disarmed by the question, I can't even remember what her answer was.

---
About a week ago, 2 was pestering 1 to get off the toilet so she could use it. 1 finally finished and hastily flushed, but it didn't take. From the living room, I heard some commotion in the bathroom, then little footsteps tearing down the hall and a panicky voice, "SOMEBODY GET A PLUNGER!"

Some Chicks

These are the survivors of the science class incubator. 1 brought them home over Thanksgiving break, and even dug a few worms out of the compost pile for them.

Clockwise from top: Ronnie, Nolan, and Too Cute To Name

Bailey was the lone quail hatchling. Dwarfed by his boxmates, he would try to clamber up on their backs when they sat down to sleep and push his head under their wings.

Bailey died as Thanksgiving day dawned, lay in state in a tin breathmint box for two days, and was buried beneath a daffodil bulb on Sunday morning.

My Absolute All-Time Favorite Liner Notes

This is the last paragraph of the anonymously written notes that accompany a recording of Schubert's Trout Quintet by the Endres Quartet with Rolf Reinhardt:

"It is amusing to note how almost every commentator, severely picking holes in the formal structure of the Trout, abjectly surrenders to its musical charm. In short, Schubert may not have made the greatest intellectual or emotional contribution to music with the Trout Quintet--but he went ahead and composed a work of genius, one that is so spontaneous, so lyric and free-flowing, that criticism remains pedantic and impertinent."


You may guess for yourselves why this analysis is so dear to me, with the italics-added portions standing as your clues.

No Returns

Last fall as I drove down M- Ave. under the yellow and red maples backlit by afternoon sun, I passed a hearse waiting to enter the street from the parking lot of a church. It pulled out behind me, then two blocks later, a different hearse crossed the street in front of me.

"A hearse in front, a hearse behind," I thought, and it sounded so good that I wrote it down on the back of a receipt at the next stoplight. It was an easy lyric to let flit through the air, what with all the sunshine and autumnal color.

I rarely think about death, not even my parents', and I'm not going to now. I'm glad that hearses pass by on our public roads, so I can remember death without having to consider it. But I have kept the receipt.

Does Your Forehead Hurt From Slapping It? Try Using Our New, Patented Sof-Touch Hammer!

This arrived in my Inbox with the subject heading "Quick Story Idea":

MEDIA ALERT
Do Your Children Have More Friends Online Than They Do in Their Own Town?

Some social experts are taking a closer look at the toll social networking is taking on human interactions and the eroding framework of local communities. The issue of social capital has [blah blah blah] role in its perceived demise. "Most social scientists acknowledge [blah blah] society as a whole [wah-wah wah wah] ,” said Dr. [of what?], Dean, Newbury College. "The potential benefits of these bonds [blah blah] often referred to as 'social capital.' Some experts worry that cyberspace or virtual networks are replacing the more traditional community or neighborhood interactions and eroding our 'social capital.'”

An Alternative: New Website Aims to Slow the Erosion of Social Capital

Today is the official launch of [hammer.com], an exclusive, private online service that organizes and connects families to people, activities and organizations in the towns in which they live. [Hammer]'s founder believes that because today's families juggle [expensive power tools], they can easily lose touch with the people and activities in their towns. The site intends to brings people together to create stronger communities…the ultimate goal is not to make "online friends,” but to connect people—in person—with likeminded individuals and organizations in their own town. In other words, while social networking technology has allowed people around the world to connect virtually, TownConnect uses similar technology to bring local people together, literally.


Believe it or not, the MEDIA ALERT continues for another 500 words or so. But nowhere does it explain how this website will allow me to step into my computer to literally get together--in person--with people in my own town. I am disappointed.

Evasion

For the first time in my life, I was inside a federal court building on Monday. The public entrance is astonishingly unimpressive. (On the back side of the building, along the street where we lucked into a free parking spot, are several grand old doors, one set of which I think is for prisoners.) A few steps sidle up to a single set of glass doors, which open into a bootroom-sized entry. Another set of glass doors led us to a small security desk and its accoutrements.

K- and I were cleared for entry--we were asked to show ID; I had considered leaving mine in the car, for the very reason that I wanted to be able to protest if I were asked to show it, but I didn't really think we'd be asked; I was then glad I had it with me, since we were running late and I didn't want to waste time with a production. A short older man in a wilting uniform gave us directions to Judge S-'s courtroom, third floor.

It was a silent hallway. The dark-wood-of-course-paneled walls and wine-colored carpet might have had a soporific effect, had I not been so focused on the events about to unfold in the courtroom we aimed toward. No one sat, morose, on the few benches; no suited lawyers strode by with 14-inch legal pads; no fervent voices and shadowy figures haunted the grainy glass windows of all the doors we passed.

The windows of the doors to Judge S-'s courtroom were of clear glass, and K- and I could immediately see M- sitting beside his lawyer at the table on the left. This was the day of his sentencing, and we brought equal parts curiousity and desire to be supportive. He is, after all, our employer.

The judge arrived soon after we did. Before M-'s case, a prisoner in a gray and black striped uniform was led into the courtroom from the rear. He was cuffed at the feet and hands. It took one minute to grant him a continuance--through the lawyer, of course; he didn't speak at all--then he was led back out.

As he moved down the carpet, he glanced past me to some family members or friends farther down the bench--a long moment of something: sorrow? apology? request for understanding? His forehead was not wrinkled, there was no tightness in his face. His eyes were dark hazel, but seemed lighter in contrast to his skin. He had another month of being somehow a hole in the lives of those people.

M-, unshackled, in a suit of his own choosing with a lawyer and letters from doctors, received 5 months in prison, 150 days of monitored house arrest and 3 years of probation. K- and I tried to console his lady friend in the hallway afterward. Some man was handing her a business card as she began to cry. M- and his lawyer sat down in a little room, made for the purpose of lawyer and client deliberation. We left quickly. Behind us, in Judge S-'s courtroom, another man in black and grey shuffled down the aisle.

Message to the World

Please, everyone, please listen to Brahms' "A German Requiem." Take it in segments if you want: one or two movements a day. Turn it up really loud when no one's in the house. Sit on the sofa and stare at the wind-rustled leaves outside.

(I have John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Monteverdi Choir and the Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique, but only by circumstance; I didn't search out any particular recording.)

Does This Explain Why I'm Awake at 1:30 a.m.?

You're Prufrock and Other Observations!

by T.S. Eliot

Though you are very short and often overshadowed, your voice is poetic
and lyrical. Dark and brooding, you see the world as a hopeless effort of people trying
to impress other people. Though you make reference to almost everything, you've really
heard enough about Michelangelo. You measure out your life with coffee spoons.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

You're Madagascar!

Lots of people don't really know anything about you, making you
buried treasure of the rarest kind. You love nature, and could get lost in it
whenever possible. You're remote and exotic, and the few people who know you
value whatever they share with you a great deal. For some reason, you really
like the word "lemur".


Take the Country Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid

Be safe, Mr. Simic

I can't entirely remember how and why I chose the Simic lines, top, for this blog, except that the book "Night Picnic" sits on my shelf and I knew it to be pithy when pithiness was called for. (Though I do like the synergy of the stanza with my blog title, which I had chosen well before the epigraph.)

I'm not a huge Simic fan--have never felt like I was slipping or being slipped into another world when I read a poem of his. Still, I think he's a fine choice for Poet Laureate, the nation's official lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Americans.

My book is inscribed "For Angela, Charles Simic"--but I don't really remember getting it signed.

Some years ago, I interviewed Simic by email for an article in a weekly magazine, in advance of his reading here. I scribbled and thought and crossed out and hawed for days, trying to strike the right tone somewhere between witty and bland. I had been writing for papers just long enough to know that clever can backfire, but had not been out of an MFA program long enough to be cold to the lure of fame's proximate heat.

I'm glad to rediscover, based on the notes that fell out of the back of Night Picnic, what I did NOT ask, but darned if I can remember what I did. Can't find the archived article online, too lazy go go upstairs to clips file. Can't remember much about the reading, can't remember approaching Simic afterward to have book signed, can't remember whether I confessed that I was the same Angela who interviewed him. I don't think I did; too nervous and shy.

Good thing I was such a low-voltage writer.

Why Crosswords are Superior to Sudoku

1. Sudoku is too much like a jigsaw puzzle. It just requires plodding through. In the trickier ones, you may try this and then that, or you may try this, try this, try that, but there's never anything to discover, only something to be fittted together. Crosswords, on the other hand, require knowledge, epiphany, luck, stunted humor, and crawling in through the window backwards.

2. Sudoku is solitary. And if you pick up a stranger's half-finished puzzle from the pocket in front of you on an airplane, you learn nothing about her. Crosswords can be a communal experience, a true entrepreneurial democracy of puzzledom.

That is to say, I suck at TV shows and you don't understand homophone jokes, so together we can mash out a most of crossword in an hour or so, along with R-, at a table in a Kansas truck stop. We're scanning for the easy stuff as the waitress brings water and coffee and orange juice (it's always late on a Sunday morning; liquid rehabilitates), then dig into the hard clues over biscuits and gravy (M-), homemade chicken soup (R-) and omelet (me). The paper is folded so just the puzzle shows, and we pass it around, as if holding the actual thing will prompt brilliance. The comics take their turns on stage, for relief, naturally, then get shoved under the toast plate, where Billy, Dolly and the Not Me ghost get jam on their hands. There's buckets of wretched coffee, musings on the meaning of "Lat." in clues, and a cameo by Dear Abby. Then we retire to R-'s tiny apartment where we battle each other on an ancient game of Tetris, occasionally jumping up to fill in another entry on the crossword puzzle as the brain sublimates caffiene into knowledge. Usually we finish the puzzle but sometimes we don't, and sometimes, at the poker game later in the week, dear, greying, reclusive R- will slide the folded newspaper from behind some sheet music on his piano and show me, under the din of pennies and beer-can-holding boys, the last strokes of insight, the final letters, the right answer.

Why I Like My Neighborhood

1. People plant vegetables in their front yards, in the space between the sidewalk and the street, in little patches by the back gate, in pots and empty lots. Today I saw a cucumber vine slinking between the pre-fab shrubs in front of the new houses on C- St.

2. I get a neighborhood discount at the barber shop.

3. I can learn neighborhood news while sitting in the leopard-print barber chair that says "KRAKEN" on the footrest.

4. When we show movies or whatever's on GOL TV on the side of our house from our neighbor's front porch (using a projector M has borrowed from his work) and a couple of us drag porch chairs out to the alley to watch, no one complains. Passersby stop, watch a few minutes, chat, and then go on walking their dogs.

5. Coming or going, people are always happy on the quarter-mile walk between here and the river. I love seeing the energy in the steps of people on their way to the river, and the satisfied, sun-burnished faces of people on their way back.

6. There's more, but I'm going for a walk. I love the thought that even at 10:30 at night, people will be sitting with friends on their front porches.

And Louis Armstrong was singing beside the zucchini

On Sunday evening we picked blackberries in the park across the street and I baked them into scones the next morning. I felt the most appallingly Hallmarkian glow of contentment at the thought of living in a city where I can do this.

Furthermore, on Tuesday, 2 and I biked to the new farmer's market, not five blocks from our house, where vendors set up stands under colorful tents in a lot next to a well-tended community garden... and wait! there's more!

In the middle of this garden there grows an enormous mulberry tree, under which is arranged a semi-circle of straw bales covered with checkered tablecloths. Every market day at 4:30, a neighborhood mother with a real! English accent reads a Beatrix Potter book amid the bales. As soon as we arrived at the market, 2 put on a gauzy bit up dress-up fluff from the play tent and held the hand of the Book Mother to walk into the garden.

What did you expect? Of course the sky was azure and the clouds symmetrical!

Rhymin' Simon and the Bright Colors of Immortality

4 p.m. Thursday. It's real hot. At the traffic light we pull up beside another car with all the windows rolled down, just as the light turns green. I realize music from Paul Simon's "Kodachrome" is spilling out, the frenetic instrumental bridge. I look over and it's two boys, probably about 20, probably Korean. My eyes meet the driver's eyes for the briefest of moments. He doesn't know why.

I can't help smiling.

"That's Paul Simon. Huh," I say to 2, riding in the back seat.

"I thought I recognized it!" she says. There's a pause. "I'm glad they're... I'm glad people play that music you and dad play. I want people to still be listening to it when I'm grown up."


It was a lovely moment and I didn't feel like ruining it with reassurances that if the song has lasted 35 years (for her, 3 1/2 lifetimes), it'll probably stick around for a while longer. I did break the news, however, when she asked me to put the tape on, that I had thrown it away a few weeks ago. It had finally spindled and warped beyond the point of playability.

Night Whistle

Down by the river, a train burdens itself with the melancholy wishes of insomniacs. Empty of coal, heading back toward the mountains, it moves along the rails, its horn calling the night thoughts of the city to tumble into its hollow cars.

Along the dark passageway of the tracks, farther west where the trees are bigger, the grit-crust shakes loose from the coal cars and leaves a black trail. By morning, it has blown back to the city.

Previous Nerd

J- was so cool, I couldn't believe she and I were walking down the street together. But there we went, small college town in Kansas, summer of 1990, the tall, slim, kinky-haired, scholarship-studded junior and me, a dork.

We were both living around campus for the month and had walked into town for something. She had her camera with her because she wanted to take a photo of a car on a used car lot. She said it was funny.

On the way back, we stopped by the lot, just a quarter-acre of grass and asphalt stalled next to the sidewalk with fading Hondas and Fords in short rows. As J- looked for the right car, we passed a white sedan, and a man in rolled-up shirtsleeves stood up from a crouch on the far side of the car. He had a bottle of White-Out in one hand, the little brush in the other, and a hangdog expression on his face.

J- imperiously ignored him and headed for the vehicle she had in mind. Across its windshield, in that soapy white paint that announces the merits of, or glosses the flaws of, used cars was written: PREVIOUS LADY OWNED CAR $4500

I laughed at the lack of a hyphen until I realized she was laughing at the sexism. Then I laughed at both and wondered when I would be as cool as J-.

Potential and Kinetic

The peonies are opening. Every winter, I forget exactly how they look, retaining only a general impression of innocent frowziness in my mind. Then every spring, they bloom, outrageous, excessive, irregular, and so delicately pink that I remember why I anticipate their opening.

A few days before the peony buds began showing pink at the top, praying mantises hatched. I saw one on the lid of our trashcan and helped it hop over to the faded ivy on our front wall, where another wandered.

Over the past 3 or 4 years, we have for various reasons gotten rid of their old nesting grounds: the persistent privet at the corner, the unfortunate bamboo, the wistful honeysuckle, all dug up. I worried that the mantises would leave. But as we're in no danger of becoming tidy-yard people, it seems there are plenty of good egg case spots left on the morning sun side of the house.

A katydid... now there's an insect I haven't seen for years. I remember watching one on our front door screen as a child on a summer evening. It was so otherworldly: silent and angular and still. Insects other than moths don't usually bother me, but I felt uneasy looking at the katydid.

Off-springing

I finished reading "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" to 1 tonight. She asked if there was a sequel. I said, "No, dammit, this was written before the concept of the money-making sequel existed." Which isn't true... I didn't say dammit, and sequels have been around as long as novels have, pretty much.

"It's so... so open-ended!" she sighed. I almost made another smart-ass remark, then she gripped the book and said, "This is the BEST book ever!!"

I love to hear 1 say that. She's not much of a reader. I used to qualify that statement to others with "yet." I'm not sure she ever will be. It's very uncomfortable, not liking a characteristic of one's own child.

My disappointment is deep, but of course my love for her is deeper, so I'm left with the perplexing realization that she is her own person, not, as I so wished for her first 5 or so years, a little me. Awe has built within me in the years since at her self-ness, even as it seems to turn out that she doesn't especially like the practice of reading.

Gallery, Part 2

"Hoc Corpusculum quo Induti Sumus"
Signed "McDevitt" on back, with an alien cartoon
Paint on wood, 2003 or 04


We bought this from the artist after M- saw his stuff at the too-cool-for-school street market. The one M- liked best was sold by the time we called, so we went to Michael's apartment to see more. We picked this one, though I dislike the rigid lines there on the right.

Michael says he was a biology major before he switched to art; thus the dendrites, etc. that are partially visible in this awful photo. I doubt he was a Latin major, but then, neither was I.

Michael was about to leaved for the summer to be first mate on a barge up the Hudson or something like that. I guess that's why he only charged us $50. M- brought him a beer, too, but not because he thought $50 was too low.

The Pussycat Stays Home

No, I didn't see The Queen Mum and that other guy. There was never any hope of my getting into the pool for a spot even remotely close, and I didn't care about the air she breathed, so I didn't bother.

Still, it's a great souvenier... the time someone thought I might have been a real reporter.

Gallery, Part 1

Here begins a catalog of the permanent collection of A- and M-, art collectors since 2005 or so. Each work's provenance will be elaborated beside its image, photographed by A-, a notably lousy photographer.



Untitled
Stamped on back: "Guan Wen Wu," with a Brooklyn address


M- bought this print about five years ago at some outdoor art festival in Baltimore during a visit to a former deep crush and her husband. He displays it above the family computer, where, he says, it is meant to inspire his stock-trading philosophies.


This photo doesn't show how the lines are drawn with a good-humored touch.





"At the tic-tac-toe-tal look salon" 5/12 lino print (I think)
James P. Nikkel, 1993 or 94
Signed and numbered by the artist

James is the best cartoonist I've ever known. I wish he were still making pictures, but I don't think he is. I bought this after his senior exhibition and it ended up in my parents' storage for over 10 years--I thought I had lost it in my travels. When it turned up last year, I wanted it to be a sign that James was okay.

I'm tickled

Smoke-filled rooms are bad for the editorial vision

Last month, The Washington Post Magazine ran a story about superstar violinist Joshua Bell's gig in a Metro station. In brief: Would morning commuters be stopped in their tracks by the music of Bach et al. played by the nation's most prominent violinist? No.

The article by Gene Weingarten is interesting, though written in an overblown glossy-mag style:
The violin is an instrument that is said to be much like the human voice, and in this musician's masterly hands, it sobbed and laughed and sang -- ecstatic, sorrowful, importuning, adoring, flirtatious, castigating, playful, romancing, merry, triumphal, sumptuous.

So, what do you think happened?

HANG ON, WE'LL GET YOU SOME EXPERT HELP.

He touches on the nature and purpose of beauty (always an interesting question for me, though I rarely, if ever, consider what Leibniz or Kant have to say about it; Weingarten managed to work them--and Plato and Hume--into the piece) and reports on several later conversations with communters who agreed to be interviewed for the article.

But the paragraph that stopped me in my own tracks was this:

In preparing for this event, editors at The Post Magazine discussed how to deal with likely outcomes. The most widely held assumption was that there could well be a problem with crowd control: In a demographic as sophisticated as Washington, the thinking went, several people would surely recognize Bell. Nervous "what-if" scenarios abounded. As people gathered, what if others stopped just to see what the attraction was? Word would spread through the crowd. Cameras would flash. More people flock to the scene; rush-hour pedestrian traffic backs up;....

(I left off the end of the final sentence, as it was clearly meant to be hyperbole.)

...In other words, these editors saw the city as populated by people pretty much just like themselves. They had no idea who really walked through that Metro station. No conception of a world outside their own spheres of awareness.

I feel like a shaft of light has singed part of my brain--a little dramatic, maybe, but think about the implications. If the people who largely control the content for major media outlets define what's significant by what they see as significant, how does that affect the way in which stories are told, and what stories get told? How does that affect who gets interviewed for stories, who gets to provide answers to reporters' questions, what the questions are?

I consider myself a healthily skeptical person, yet I used to think that by and large, editors and journalists honestly tried to approach things objectively--I suppose I still think that they do try. But this is such a revealing glimpse inside the editor's office.

But wait... yes, it's true: I am an editor. That's the other reason I can't let go of this paragraph. I know I'm guilty of this same solipsistic error. I justify it by thinking, "Well, I don't really know who the readers are, so I might as well make papers that I'd want to read." Or: "With 50,000 readers, there are bound to be a few who appreciate my editorial decisions." Or: "Writing is best when the author writes to a specific reader." (I sort of believe this, but not necessarily for journalism, even though once I did hear this point made in a workshop for journalists.)

But those are excuses for laziness. I always need to be asking myself: how is the world bigger than I realize?

WWJW?

At Saturday's impeachment event: a woman wearing a hat embroidered with "Jesus is my Boss" and a shirt: "Buck Fush."

Conversations in the car on the 4 1/2-hour drive to Grandma's house

2: What comes after Sunday?
Me: Monday
2: No, it doesn't!
Me: ....
Me: Well, what do you think comes after Sunday?
2: [irate] I don't know! But you know! So tell me!
Me: Zippity-do-day.
2: [kicking seat, screaming] No! [cries at length]

***

2: Why do far-away places have to be far away?
Me: uhhhh... because Earth is a big planet and... if everything was close together... um... the people would be too crowded.
2: No! You're not listening to me! I SAID, why do far-away places have to be far away?
Me: ...
2: Answer me!
Me: I have nothing to say to you.
2: ANSWER ME! [kicks seat, screams]

***

2: Will tomorrow be a magic day?
Me: What is a magic day for you?
2: It's when you go to sleep and wake up in the morning but it's still the same day.
Me: [relieved, somehow] Yes! Tomorrow will be a magic day!

Horror Discarded for Want of Bodies

The bodies have not piled up Zimbabwe, yet.

Baghdad and Blacksburg

I had just finished writing an editorial inspired by this reported quote from Iraqi mothers, had spent the morning looking at websites enumerating civilian deaths in Iraq and describing the correlative effects of the war on daily life.

Then I heard on the radio of the shootings at Virginia Tech, and even as the reported death count rose throughout the afternoon, I still, horribly, felt dispassionate about the whole affair.

This is a sickness, the comparing of one horror to another, only to discard one for want of bodies.

Yet I must let others feel burdened by the Blacksburg tragedy. I can't pretend that I feel anything more than passing sadness. Might as well try to keep the sorrow well-distributed.

Was It Something I Said?

I dreamed I said something clever to a room full of people, something about guilt and truth. No one laughed aloud, but I could sense appreciation. As I made eye contact with one man, he smiled at me.

I was leaning on a stool, one foot on a rung, bottom half on the seat, in a terribly Casual Manager pose, but my dream-brain was full of surprise at my own cleverness. I couldn't believe I had said something funny, and I didn't know what to say next.

Later in my dream, my husband wouldn't talk to me.

The Sheriff

As usual at our monthly staff meeting, two or three people were talking at once. A man walked in the door, smiled affably and passed our conference table in the front room to head down the hallway. He wore a modest, unwrinkled dress shirt and had neatly trimmed, greying hair. He spoke no greeting, but gestured toward the back of the offices, as if he had business there.

Conversation dwindled, and the eight of us stared at each other, raising eyebrows and puzzling over which one of us was expecting this visitor. Was he inspecting the HVAC system? Did someone call for a courier? Eyes turned toward our boss, who arose: "Can I help you?... Excuse me, can I help you?"

The man, whose eyes had seemed focused and sharp, began to explain that he was running for sheriff of the United States, that everyone wanted him to be sheriff and that he had a watch to prove it. His voice was clear, but he never quite finished any of his sentences.

I wanted desperately to hear everything, but he was on my periphery and N- began to talk to me directly, unnecessarily loudly, about something, a nonsequitur. I realized later that she may have been trying to protect the man from our undivided, baffled attention.

M- engaged him in conversation briefly, then managed to steer him toward the door. Some people wished him good luck on his campaign. He left the building and we could see him through the windows, walking toward the street.

The meeting went on. I still wonder why I didn't insist that we call the police. I still worry that someone was missing this man, or that someone nearly wrecked a car trying to avoid hitting him as he crossed the street (I imagined) oblivious to traffic signals. I wish I had not sat back in my chair, waiting for him to leave.

Distant Song

I wrote this poem 4-some years ago, when I was pregnant with 2 and the U.S. was preparing to begin war on Iraq. I have not been very outspoken against the war, and I regret that.


The Unborn Child Hears a Distant Song

One ear to the wall, she’s been listening
for months, the world concave around her.
This is what she knows: the world is dark,
it makes noise. So mysterious, so familiar,
what each grain of sand hears
as it rushes toward the neck of the hourglass,
what a bullet hears as it lunges down the barrel,
aimed for something it will never see whole.
In her chambers, she tucks her head
and dreams in sound.

The round
repeats, the parts
stave each other off,
the music shudders
and contracts, the child is
born screaming the same song.

Subtle Use of Incurable Romanticism

I have been educating myself over at the school of Pandora. I am an appreciative student, having had virtually no education in popular culture and its varieties of music for the years spanning 0 to 1989 and 1992 to 2007.

Yet I'm not sure I approve. Really, the Music Genome Project is to music as lepidoptery is to butterflies.

I type in "Cesaria Evora" and get an entire channel of music sung in nothing but Portuguese; I was looking for music that makes me feel wild with longing for something that's slipping from my fingers, a feeling which is not stirred in me by the Portuguese language in particular.

Or say I want a channel called "Music That Makes Me Weep." Pandora doesn't give me that option. I have to settle for songs with "mellow rock instrumentation," "subtle use of vocal harmony," "use of a string ensemble," "prominent organ" ... wait, that's not what I had in mind. (Pandora has not heard of double entendres, apparently.)

In theory, I despise the MGP for sucking the soul out of music, but I still listen to my Pandora channels. "What will they think of next?"

Walking without the cart

I tried to go to a weekly writing group for a while, but I never caught on to the performance aspect of it: everybody writes in each other's presence for 20 or 30 minutes, then reads aloud and... then things are said.

Here's something I wrote then. It's loosely based on reality.

----

Jimmy had a shopping cart. He kept it in the empty yard beside his house, and no one ever took it. Mostly he carried aluminum cans in it, sometimes glass bottles if they were pretty blue, then he’d take them to his sister-in-law over on Pine Street.

Every morning he’d shake the fog from his eyes and eat a bit of bread and peanut butter, then head over to Pine Street for some coffee with his brother, pushing his cart. Roger had a nice house and a clean old car; he was a deacon at the church. But Jimmy just somehow couldn’t do those same things Roger did, have a job, get married. He knew he wasn’t smart, he just didn’t know why. Things were harder for him. And recently his insides were hurting a whole lot. Roger’d taken him to the doctor once, but the medicine cost so much.

This old cart was getting pretty stiff and squeaky. Roger let him put some grease on it any time he wanted, but something gets so old, grease doesn’t help. But Jimmy never had to be anywhere fast, so he just walked slower. When he had a load of cans, they rattled around anyway, so it didn’t matter about the squeaks.

People all around the neighborhood would put their cans in a bag for him, tied onto their front gate or looped over a picket of a fence. Mike Wilton’s boys just threw their coke cans out in the yard. They just didn’t know it was getting harder for Jimmy to reach down and get them.

It wasn’t a big neighborhood, but it took Jimmy a couple days to get through the whole thing. In the summer, he also went down to the playground where kids hung out at night. Usually they just left 40 ounces, but sometimes he found a pile of cans. When his cart was full, Roger would haul him over to South-Central where they paid 42 cents a pound for aluminum.

One morning, early fall, Jimmy hurt worse that usual and he didn’t feel like eating breakfast. He left his cart in the yard and walked over to Roger's house. It took him longer than usual. He didn’t walk so much without the shopping cart anymore and he wasn’t so steady on his feet, first thing in the morning like this.

The dark criss-crossing of moss between bricks in the sidewalk looked like letters on a big sign, Jimmy thought. He didn’t usually see the sidewalk straight on like this. What would the sign say? Jimmy, you old man. Jimmy, what will they say about you when you’re gone?

He saw a Dr. Pepper can up ahead, but he figured he could leave it be until later, when he was feeling better. Or maybe someone else would get it, those other guys who came into the neighborhood with their big bags, picking up cans.

Just beyond the can, the sidewalk hit a new patch. The moss left off its scrawl. But Jimmy was still thinking about letters, and he was thinking that he wanted to write something. He thought he’d ask Roger to write down a few things for him, about how he appreciated people saving their cans for him. About how he still thought about his mother and the day she put her hand on the top of his head and told him he was God’s child. About his idea for a new shopping cart chassis that made it easier to get over curbs. Yes, he should get Roger to write that down.

With a capital S

It's spring and the edges of buildings look crisper, the colors cleaner. 78 degrees. I feel a tickle of pride when the guy on WCLM says "...right here in the capital city." Yes, it is a capital city.

The birds are proud, too. I didn't realize I missed them in the mornings until they began singing again. On S- St., A woodpecker surprised me with enormous sound, but when I watched and watched to catch it in the act of hammering--can it be true that a small bird and an old tree makes such a resounding racket?--it just hopped around the branches looking for insects.

Driving east, toward the sun, I saw a man toss his spit in a silken ribbon on the street. I spent four hours at the coffee shop banging through the April calendar and my car didn't get ticketed. As the sun went down, I played soccer in borrowed shoes. They were wrapped with duct tape around the ball of the foot and a teammate said I looked "bad-ass." Didn't help much, but we had fun.

This is the first day in months that I've felt so at peace with my life... though peace isn't really the word I want. I don't feel pacific. Actually, I feel aroused by life; that's what it is. But to say more would require reflection on the months past.

Letters of E. B. White (a reminder to self to check book out from library)

Library: A few weeks ago I took 1 and a friend to a branch library, one I had not visited for several years. Even though this branch is more convenient to our daily paths than the main library, I avoid it because the children's librarian there brings out the absolute stark raving misanthrope in me.

She calls me "ma'am" and I want to grab her upper arm, dig in my fingertips in the fleshy underpart and hiss inarticulately. (This is a woman who lives in my neighboorhood, not 3 blocks from my house.) There are other reasons, but this is the one I had forgotten: within 10 minutes of my entering, she approaches me with a book and tape case I returned three years ago and asks me if I've found the cassette yet. A little yellow sticky note with my name is affixed to the cover, still. Possibly she hears the repressed fury in my voice--I try to sound reasonable as I explain again that the cassette was in the case when I returned it, admittedly to the wrong branch, three years ago--and she backs away quickly. (The backing away part is not unusual; she's the kind of person who keeps talking, smarmily, as she backs away from one, so as to always have the last word. The quickly part was unusual.)

I wait a few seconds. After all, I don't want to appear petulant. Then I slam my magazine shut and gather up the girls and leave. Quickly.

Doormat

I tired of tripping over a little rug in our hallway--it was supposed to cover up a gap between carpet and threshhold, but it never stayed put--so I threw it into the front yard yesterday.

Today it rained. I looked out the living room window at the smoky blue rug with pale green and yellow flowers on top of our yellowed grass and it seemed to belong there. It's slightly more attractive than the grass, at least.

Brave little rug! Awkward, sodden and cold. Misunderstood by passersby. Pioneering rug, unafraid to cover new ground.

Tomorrow I'll have to give up and move it, I guess. I forget exactly why I threw it out the door; of course I wasn't really angry at the rug.

Usually when I'm most furious I manage my external reactions more carefully, I think, than when I'm merely at a peak of frustration. Fury is too pure to be expressed by a simple action. But when I recover from it--scarcely remembering what it felt like--I have to wonder if I am weak or demented for having felt it, or for having felt it but done nothing about it.

Both my children watched me throw the rug out the door. I wasn't yelling. Remarkably, even after 10 years of being my child, 1 doesn't display these stupid tantrums, yet. 2 does, experimentally.

My mother would sometimes leave me and my brother in the kitchen, saying, "I have to go outside and scream." Then she would step out to the back porch and scream. I don't remember feeling either chastised or frightened by this, though I'm sure I did the first time it happened.

In what play does a character--at whom the audiece is supposed to laugh--manage her frustrations by breaking china, piece after piece, tidily between the layers of a cloth handkerchief? I forget.

A spoonful of sugar keeps the little ones awake

It is 10:35 p.m. and 2's little voice drifts down the stairs, singing. I have to creep closer to the steps to make out the song: "Supercali, supercali, frajalisty ... expe-aladoshis... if you say it loud enough you'll always sound preto... toshis..."

She did have a nap too late in the afternoon, but still, this is crazy. Crazy but delishis.

The Note

Driving the bleak arteries of west mid-town, I hear an installment of "Musicians in Their Own Words" on Morning Edition. Cynthia Phelps, principal violist with the New York Philharmonic, speaks about the role of the viola section in shaping the sound, pace and texture of the orchestra.

Phelps calls herself a mediator. The spot ends with her saying, "I try and create a balanced middle ground. It really resonates with the way I am as an individual."

It's deeply pleasing to hear someone else say this, the same thing I feel about my role as an editor. I had never bothered to imagine that a musician might see herself this way.

Earlier in the piece, Phelps describes the opening of the second movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, in which the celli get the melody but the violas control the pacing and mood. She plays a lick of the cello part, then a recording of the actual piece begins.

This is music that too few people know, a rich swath of velvet melody, really much more singable than the first movement. (This is, I guess, the flashback, the tune you're humming just before Fate knocks on your door.)

So, yes, the celli are perfect, and now I'm listening for the the violas, watching the highway's yellow lines. Concrete walls and exit ramps, the overcast sky--this all is the empty theater for the music. After the opening duet, the full orchestra comes in and still--this is the Philharmonic, of course--the music is just as tender as before. At the last note of the phrase, where the music swells and holds, then drops as lightly as an eyelid, I am done in. I get teary and choked up.

To be honest, this probably has as much to do with my own sense of failure as a musician as it does with the actual music. Still, it's beautiful, and I need beauty. And it's powerful; all music is, the most powerful thing I know.

Phelps unabashedly acknowledges that one of the reasons she likes being a non-melody-getting viola player is that she has control at the base of the music. This control is not a dictatorship, though, because the power of music is a collective power. I think I could write more about this, but I'm not going to now. This post was just supposed to be about that one note.

Hot ... Now

On impulse, I stopped by the donut shop yesterday, shortly after 2 p.m., meaning to quickly get a donut and leave.

When I stepped through the doors, the burgeoning heat of afternoon sun through all the windows and heat still radiating from the now-quiet ovens slowed me down. I saw that everything was slow.

Behind the counter, a man mopped the same tiles over and over, in long flat oval pushes of a mop. The women in front of me in line carefully read the signs listing the price of donuts, and read them again. One of them asked a question about the price of donuts. The clerk listened, then thought about his answer.

When at last he brought the boxes of doughnuts to the woman, his mouth turned up ever so slightly at the corners in a slow smile. The smell of doughnuts, like a boa, wound around my throat and I was breathless. The doughnuts on trays beneath the glass case became, almost imperceptibly, browner.

I paid for my purchase in exact change and laid the coins into the palm of the clerk in separate piles, dimes and quarters. His skin was warm and dry. I folded the top of my doughnut bag one more time and left.

Little Thoughts on Music

Folk music Music that folks can sing or play from memory.

Folks The down-home people, the people in the cereal aisle, the people with a little hole in the elbow of their favorite sweater.

"Folk music" has come to have a musty smell. It supposedly lives only in church basements on Thursday nights when the banjo players and the singing family from the hills come to town to fiddle around. But I think that, for example, Bruce Springsteen is truly a folk musician.