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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.