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!