playground some color replacement soy bean oil 1 ice ice baby

Monday, October 29, 2007

Play by Play

I start writing on the Lord's day. It is supposed to be quiet and restful. They are at church and she is playing "Love One Another" on the piano while her seven-year-old daughter tells knock knock jokes.

I have been in this city for almost 72 hours. It hasn't gotten me and I haven't gotten it, though we are both trying.

One of the first things I do is see a friend, my BFF since Mr. Olson and fifth grade and city bus rides to buy Snoopy and candy corn. I stand in her modern, edgy kitchen as she copies onto a note card a recipe for Candy Corn Sugar Cookies and later in her laundry room as she tells me about how cancer has invaded her life and the lives of others. We ease into and around the conversation like friends who have been friends a long time. We hug and kiss goodbye to talk of a 20-year reunion and children and when we will meet again.

An impromptu lunch with sisters and nieces and nephew and mother results in a ride to see the new condo that will replace the other new condo. The project supervisor runs when he sees my mother. She laughs it off as I swallow uncomfortably and sweat a little. It's four o'clock on a Friday and they want to go home, but she is determined to show me the emptiness. I am unimpressed and I can't hide it.

Later in the car with my almost youngest sister and her husband I recount this story of the unfinished condo which leads to talk of lice and bed bugs and parasitical behavior. We soon arrive in Provo, home to Brigham Young University and thousands of young married and procreating and wanting-to-be married and wanting-to-be procreating people. Provo feels as if a cultural vacuum has been taken to it, swallowed up dirt particles, crumbs and even carpet. As luck would have it, the vacuum has conveniently dumped its best contents into my aunt's house.

My aunt and grandmother and cousin gurgle surprise when they see me. I have not told anyone, but for a few, that I will be at the party. It is my grandmother's 86th birthday and she does not look a day over 60. "I am so glad to see you Jane," she says. "I'm 86 and I am going to die soon. I don't know if I will see you again." My grandmother has always been this matter-of-fact about death. She doesn't skirt the issue. At all. And as much as I want to be thrown by the prospect of losing this dear, feisty, high-heeled, little woman, I know that she is right. But I also know that she won't be passive about death's arrival. She will go pluckily and beautifully, especially if her hairdresser comes through. My grandmother, at the party while sipping punch and eating sugar cookies, asks this woman to take responsibility for her funeral hair.

I talk with anyone who will listen about the Red Sox and my cousin gives me a lead on a place to watch the game. It's called Fiddler's Elbow. "The fans are loud," my quiet cousin who favors the Yankees says. "But you'll find them there." Around midnight I feel like I am going to fall asleep in my Fresca and finally find someone to take me to Salt Lake. My parents live in a condominium complex where one needs magnetic cards and keys to get in. I borrow a card, but forget the key thus requiring a sit with my luggage outside their door. I read my plane book called How to Be Good by Nick Hornby and think about applying its contents. "How do I be good?" I wonder aloud to the stale artwork on the walls.

By 1 I am asleep on the blow up bed. Morning light and my mother on the computer wake me around 5. My parents want to go to Ruth's Diner, a favorite breakfast joint, and I am pleased. We take a drive up Emigration Canyon and wait for a table and chat. I embarrass my father when I talk about eggs, not the kind a person eats for breakfast. I do not embarrass my mother, yet. Eventually conversation turns to excessively large houses, first ladies, private jets and sexism, though they wouldn't call it this.

After breakfast we go separate ways. A few years ago out of guilty familial conscience I might have joined them for errands to buy scuba diving wetsuits and unnecessary furniture, but not this day. This day I try not to feel slighted and take myself to the Coffee Garden and to see Into the Wild. I sit in the dark Broadway theater and send messages to people I love. A woman asks how many seats I am saving and I chuckle and tell her that I am alone.

The game is in the top of the third when I arrive at the bar. Fiddler's is a "private club" which in Utah terms means that people have to pay for a membership in order to drink. The price is $4. A woman explains to me that before recently acquiring private club status for serving more alcohol than food, a person had to buy food if they wanted to drink. "So it's kind of the same thing," she says. "$4 for an appetizer or $4 for a club membership." I'm smiling big because I used to know about the private club rule and the food rule and the one shot rule. I don't tell her about Massachusetts and my local bar and the stiff drinks that the bartender pours with our without food for accompaniment.

I see comfortable leather sofas and a gigantic television. Red Sox fans occupy three of four seats. I ask if I can sit and we joke about the team for which I will cheer. They welcome me by offering up cold wings and Gorgonzola. I accept and by the end of the night we are hugging and high fiving and making plans to watch the next game.

Sunday seems the day to take a drive up Little Cottonwood. It is hazy and I am anxious with the idea that I might not see him. I decide to call and get him on the phone, which is a rarity. "I'm not going to make it to dinner. I'm watching football and drinking beer and I'm trashed," he says to me through the phone as my on-listening parents puzzle out the conversation. "Tell them I got called into work," he says. "O.k." I say. "I'll tell them that you got called into work."

Dinner passes pleasantly enough, but I can't stop thinking about my brother. Three weeks ago I wanted to fly out to see only him. I thought through this idea and waited. Now it's been over 48 hours in this city and nothing. At 7 I sheepishly excuse myself from dinner and go off to be with Sox fans and find him.

After the game is won I drive to where I can see the temple all lit up in the night. It is a beacon, a warning. He invites me in and introduces me to three women, friends, maybe lovers. The apartment is bare but for a shelf stacked with books, CDs and pictures. There is a sofa, an entertainment center and one painting hanging on the wall. We talk. We talk about Into the Wild and death wishes and family. We talk and talk.

At 1 I feel tired. I say that I'll be leaving. "I want to give you something," he says. "It's important that I give you something. What can I give you?" he asks. He goes to some boxes in the back of the apartment. "Here. I want you to have this." It is an old photo taken in the airport after his visit to New York City when he was 13, the defining visit, the one that "will fuck him up forever." The look on his face, then and now, tells me what I need to know. The sadness is heart stopping and thick and palpable. I want to rip it up, this photo and the sadness. I want to vomit.

Outside, the nearby temple throwing light, he looks me in the eyes like he is looking at me for the first time. "I don't know if I will see you again," he says. "I am sick. My heart is sick. My liver is sick. I am sick. I can feel it."

These words make me sick. "I don't want you to die," I say. You are 35," I say. 35 fucking years old. Not 86. Not my grandmother. This is my 35-year-old brother and I'm trying to talk him out of dying like a person would try to talk someone out of hang gliding or buying a motorcycle or walking alone into the Alaskan wilderness with a 10 pound bag of rice.

There is nowhere for this conversation to go. I am selfish and I tell him so. "This is about me, me, me. I would rather have you here in pain than not here at all," and as soon as the words leave my mouth I am floored. I think about the knife in the Nick Hornby book, the one that gets stuck in her gut. The question is one of severity: Do I remove it and bleed to death or do I leave it in and live with the pain?

I don't do either. I walk to my mother's car and drive to my mother and father's condominium at the top of the hill and enter the gate with the magnetic card and a key and quietly drop onto the aero bed and lie awake until the sun comes up and it is a new day.

The sun comes up and it is a new day. It is a new day and anything could happen.

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Being Obsessive has its Good Points

The album title Eveningland comes from the title of a D.H. Lawrence poem. This I didn't know until I couldn't sleep. Nettles, birds, beasts, flowers, kingfishers. Lawrence is eveywhere in the lyrics.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

I have been looking for comfort in familiarity, wrapping fingers around warm and swallowing melodies and harmonies and advertisement jingles. I have been smoking air and trying to understand the polite and not-so-polite ways people step over and around and between the subject of death.

I have been obsessively and compulsively listening to Hem, Eveningland.

As I waited in line at the wake for almost three hours to get in to give them everything I could while trying not to take too much this song played and replayed and played in the space of my head. It gave me comfort.

Carry Me Home

We were raised in the nettles
And they showed us how they grow--
Where a poison comes to settle
And what a poisoned man comes to know

So me and Jessie, we left Ohio--
Left him bleeding on the valley floor
I felt so dirty I could hardly stand it--
Carrying Jessie on my back

She said, hold on, I know you'll bury him for me
Hold on, I know you'll bury him for me
Hold on, I know you'll carry me and carry me and
Carry me home

Tell me nothing's wrong there
Tell me nothing's wrong there
Tell me nothing's wrong there

Nothing's wrong there
Nothing's wrong there
Nothing's wrong there

--Dan Messe

Monday, October 22, 2007

Prepping for Wednesday

Some of the best Sox photos I've come across. Slideshow will allow you to loop forever with photo popping black background.

Sunday, October 21, 2007

for Jane Z and her family

Because I don't have words right now.

autumn light

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Window Trickery

I have been trying to trick myself. But I'm onto me.

We tell ourselves things because we want to believe them. Vegetables are healthful. X, Y and Z make me a good parent. I can warm my hands with a patch of sunlight. Drinking too much makes it worse.

I've bought a plane ticket to Salt Lake City and I'm going. To see the lake. I'm going to see the lake.

I will dance with my grandmother and drip sarcasm with my cousin. I will say Happy Birthday and mean it.

No one will know that the windows need cleaning. That the lake is cold and not as salty as I had hoped. That I am pretending not to miss him with every minute. That I am pretending not to notice that he has almost slipped away from us all.

cloud shapes

window in need of cleaning

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Of Knitting and Football and Evil Penguins and Mothers and Daughters

rainbow knitting

This here is the rainbow knitting of Aidan. About a year ago we had a tearful, frustrating encounter with learning to knit. Two days ago she asked if we could try again. A lot must change in a year because we figured it out and then she couldn't stop. She knit in the car. She knit while riding in a grocery cart in a grocery store crowded with people preparing for a football game. She knit while watching Wallace and Gromit, not the one about the sheep rustling and the knit-o-matic, but the one with the evil penguin. And she knit before bed. I love this girl and her knitting and that now we can knit together.

She's making a scarf, by the way.

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Taking Happiness

I made soup today. I coarsely chopped collard greens. Chopped onion. Minced garlic. I poured olive oil into a stainless steel pot. Added tomatoes, beans and sausage, things the recipe didn't call for. I added Tabasco that forever reminds me of Lucy, red pepper flakes, freshly ground pepper and salt. I stirred. I gently boiled and then served soup. With fresh bread from Virgilio's, butter, Cole eating the middle and leaving the crust.

We talked of mothers and Mormons and doctors. Of baseball, in a roundabout way, and of love.

This is my happiness. In the middle of sadness. To sit at a table and break bread and drink coffee as babies squawk for cookies and life lives around us.

It's soup weather

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

Happiness Redefined

Lately I've been thinking about happiness, the definition of it, the impracticality of it. All this inspired by a "You should get more happier," comment that pissed me right off in the other direction.

I am not an "unhappy" person by definition or by nature. I smile and laugh. Unhappy people don't smile and laugh nearly as much as I smile and laugh.

Sometimes I play monster with the kids and kiss them or tickle them until we are all laughing. Sometimes when I'm watching them read a book or dig in the dirt or draw a picture a feeling comes over me that I can't explain.

I get out of bed in the morning, most days. I eat. I communicate. Or at least try to. I wash things. I drink coffee in the morning and beer at 6 o'clock. I do not drink beer at 6 o'clock in the morning.

Sometimes I yell. At people. And for this I am sorry. Sometimes I grumble into the air, mumble obscenities because sometimes I get angry with humans and the world. I can't help it. Really.

Yesterday as I walked my baby along the boulevard staring into the calm of the ocean, watching blue-grey water meet sand, I heard a familiar voice. It was my back yard neighbor. I hadn't seen her since the birth of the baby, Thea now over a year.

We took a few minutes to hear about each other, her three daughters here and everywhere and "happy." "It's a gift to have them doing what they want to be doing, traveling, working. It's a relief to have them 'happy.'"

"Yes," I say. I can imagine that it would be a relief.

"You are so lucky to be doing what you are doing. This is a wonderful time for you you know? You can't get it back."

"Yes," I say automatically. "I am lucky. This is a wonderful time," and we part.

I think for a minute. Sometimes I want to beat up the people who say this to me. "Do you remember?" I want to say.

But for some reason today I do not want to do harm to this woman. For one, I like her. I've liked her since I met her while teaching her youngest daughter my first year at the high school. And two, I believe her. Today I believe her.

Not yesterday. Not the day before. And probably not tomorrow.

But today I believe her. Could it be that I am happy? Today. Maybe tomorrow. And probably the next day.

Sunday, October 07, 2007

Scratch almost everything I said about laundry.

good old, old-fashioned washboard

Saturday, October 06, 2007

Go Sox

Up late folding laundry. Listening to the game on the radio. Folding laundry. At least 100 loads. Then falling asleep on the new, old red sofa only to be stirred by bits of excitement about the game. Tied. Tied. Then around 1 I hear ecstatic commentators. "They've done it." "Manny, Manny, Manny." The game is over. The laundry sits. And waits. Clean and folded, it waits. I go to bed.

This morning I drive to the bank. One clean and folded basket left. Small clothes for little people. A day's worth. But it only takes a minute to undo, to strew across their room, like confetti. After game confetti. For all the world to see. Or for no one.

Addendum--10 minutes later

"It looks like he was trying to put away his laundry and the other kids' laundry got in the way. What can you say to that? He was being helpful," he laughs, clearly unaware of the direness of the situation.

"Yes. Helpful?????" I say sarcastically. But I finally chuckle a little thinking about confetti and strewn socks and Sox and my four-year-old son putting away his laundry.

Friday, October 05, 2007

Rose the Duck

I'd like to introduce Rose the duck. She is three. Aidan made her at a clay workshop at the Sawyer Free. The workshop was indeed free.

This duck makes me happy every time I see her. I'm posting her here with a hope that she'll make someone else happy, too. At the very least me, every time I make a visit.

the duck

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Get out the Vote

Back corner last night
first time
reading Jim Dunn's book
makes me cry a little
while the jam
jams on
a candidate for mayor
peacocks by
for pretty eyes to see
through broken latticework
and another hole
punched by an angry man
in and out
of love.

We vote
ourselves silly
with anticipation
and say the same damn
things
every time.

The earth gets
warmer
and I can feel it
through
ice caps
fingerless fingers
mending hearts
with barbed wire
another night gone
gotten away from me
gone without so much
as a wave goodbye.