This Museum Kicks Ass

The Museo Frida Kahlo located in a suburb of Mexico City is one of the best places that I've been in my 37 almost 38 years of life. I hope that readers who want to know more about Frida and Diego will get there some day.

In fact, when (not if) I win the lottery I will pay your way. This because I want for you to see it. And this because I love you. Yes you.

Leap day diptych minus the hinge

As Is

Exhausting
idle
in my driveway
rust enough
to break hearts
across Texas
put her into overdrive
and watch
numbers tick
like dead soldiers
off miles
body bruised as fruit
backseat boneyard--
pizzas
not lovers.

She's got
glove box
maplines
across
the mainland
dollar in my pocket
piece of bubblegum
stuck
to the dash
keeps a door from jiggling
giggling like a drunk
girl singing
Pedal to the Metal, baby.

Speed up
slow down
sputter round
that
corner used
previously
if ever new
once
when a window
crank roller
smooth as piss
got a leak
that grew until
she blew up
in my face
like those windbags
in new cars
and I looked at her
and she said
soft yelling--
it's over.

Teenager Alert

Yesterday I woke up and Thea was 15. Her attitude--I am too wearing this skirt out of the house. And talk about sassy. She actually said, "Move it" to her father. Followed by, "I need you. Need you. Need you," to me. But once in my arms, there was little I could do to console my 19-month-old baby. "No mama. No."

I need you. But I don't. I need you. But I don't. If this isn't the never ending internal conflict of a teenage girl, I don't know what is.

Also, I think that she's been sneaking to the pub at night, learning how to shake it.

Like I said. 15. She's 15. And I'm in a cloud with what to do about it.



My kids go nutty for the unicorn song. Click here if you'd like to go nutty, too.

At That

I walk downtown, past the fire rubble for the first time. I see dead and gone Christmas wreaths tied to one part of the fence, a small, plastic wreath in the middle, remains of a marred temple visible against blue sky. It's black and blue and makes me sad.

I take pictures, not with my camera. Proceed, I say. Go like it didn't happen. But it did, I reason with myself. It did happen.

When I arrive at the cafe I am alone. I choose a seat in the back corner and try to read the paper. "People are dying," I think. People are always dying.

I want company so I make a call. We talk. And talk. And argue, maybe. But our arguments don't matter because in the end we agree--about something, if nothing.

It feels right to leave it at that.

Leave. It. At. That.

Bios, Interviews and Stephin Merritt

Today I met with a friend and we talked a little about bios. Some are silly and read like a resume. Some tell nothing about a person. But some say more than words on a page and give a glimpse into a person. I like those bios. I like to know.

Maybe I prefer interviews. Here are some excerpts from an interview with Stephin Merritt of The Magnetic Fields.

As Hundreds Cheer
The Glum Triumph of The Magnetic Fields
by Rob Tannenbaum
December 1 - 7, 1999

The part of the interview where Merritt says that he relates well to the English.

***


"I have a low voice and a sad facial expression, and I'm not enthusiastic about anything," Merritt explains unenthusiastically, "and I prefer honesty in conversation. That combination drives some people crazy. Almost everyone in California thinks I hate them. I relate well to the English; they understand that I don't hate them." The emotions detailed on 69 Love Songs, he says, include many unknown to him, like—er, such as ecstasy, joy, jealousy, and boredom. All are "emotions I don't actually feel," he says, because his own moods range only "between delight and agonizing depression."

***

The part of the interview where he talks about his upbringing.

***

"I was conceived by barefoot hippies on a houseboat in St. Thomas," he says with the practiced air of someone reciting a fable. An epileptic baby, he was raised by his mother, an English teacher to whom he is still close; he has never met his father, the obscure folksinger Scott Fagan, who recorded for RCA and Atlantic in the late '60s. In the hippie style, mother and son were "sometimes very poor." They lived in 33 houses in his first 23 years, mostly in the Northeast, including a stint in West Berlin when she briefly married an Army officer.

At 14, with a guitar, a synthesizer, and a four-track tape deck, he began recording. He preferred music and reading ("Other than sports, I can't think of anything I don't want to know more about") to socializing, and was regularly threatened with violence in school. To escape bullies—and to dodge mandatory sports—he went to the Cambridge School of Weston, outside Boston, a "leafy prep school for bohemian kids. The people who didn't seem different were looked down upon."

The school had a good music program, where he studied theory, augmented by a Berklee tutor. He was, he hints, a prodigy. "I'm a professional musician because that's what I've had the most success in. I was told I had promise in several other areas: poetry, acting, science." After seeing a TV program on tracking junk mail, he devised multiple spellings of Stephen, his given name, for different aspects of his life: "Stephin" was the musician, and the spelling stuck.

He never had to come out, he says, because "no one thought I was straight." Friends kept telling him he was gay, "and finally I said, I guess you're right." His mom gave him a book called The Gay Mystique, and he followed the author's advice on how to find sex: He went to New York and struck up a conversation about Fassbinder in a West Village bookstore. "But I hadn't read the part about what you're supposed to do," he laughs, "so it wasn't all that satisfying."

His college education was interrupted by a "crippling" bout with a fatigue virus, and he was an itinerant student: some NYU Film School, some art school in Boston, and several years at Harvard Extension School, where he fell one statistics exam short of graduation. He studied film and the history of the built environment, a discipline that applies semiotic theory to highways, suburban planning, and other artifacts of industrial culture.

***

This is the part of the interview where he talks about how The Magnetic Fields came to be. And about writing 69 Love Songs.

***

At first, a female singer fronted the Magnetic Fields, partly because Merritt was opposed in principle to singer-songwriters (Freudians can read a rejection of his father here), partly because he was "a terrible singer, very graceless and out of tune." Since then, he's honed a unique style, delivering his froggish baritone with a lethargic air, as though from a fainting couch. And TMF have expanded to include Gonson, a Harvard College grad now studying with queer theorist Eve Sedgwick at City University while pursuing a Ph.D., plus two of her college mates, Chinese American cellist Sam Davol, a Legal Aid lawyer, and Korean American guitarist John Woo, a graphic designer.

No one, Merritt says, believed he could write 69 good love songs. "It was clear they were humoring me." It took him a full year, "working whenever I was awake. I had no life. I sat around all day writing songs. Which is often what I do all day long, anyway."

One of the grandest of the 69, "A Pretty Girl Is Like . . . ," is a deconstructive answer song to Irving Berlin's "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody." Merritt had been reading Ulysses, and considering how writers objectify women in metaphors. In the lyrics ("A pretty girl is like a violent crime/If you do it wrong, you could do time"), he celebrates, mocks, and critiques song similes, adopting "an exaggeratedly sexist, male point of view. It's a lot of baggage for one song," he acknowledges, "but that's part of why it's funny."

He still listens to 69 Love Songs, and reconsiders his choices. For instance, he regrets not assigning "I Don't Want to Get Over You" to another singer. "My voice always says, 'I Don't Want to Get Over You,' " he grumbles. "I could sing 'Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah' and you'd remember it as 'I Don't Want to Get Over You.' "

He doesn't even delight in the record's acclaim, which routinely labels him a genius. "I prefer 'whiz,' " he deadpans. It's not fun to be called a genius by The New York Times? "Well, if it's in The New York Times, it must be true."

It's hard to gauge his sincerity when Merritt says, "I would like to be as successful as God. And as rich." He bristles at indie, but suspects the majors, who aren't leaping to sign him anyway. ("He's not exactly Kid Rock," says one A&R honcho, who considers the indie-rock experiment an expensive failure.) Given his British-identified distance, Merritt's view of himself comes clearest when he lists the people he identifies with.

***

This is the part of the interview where Merritt lists the people he identifies with.

***

First he names avant composer Harry Partch, "for his spunky iconoclasm and insistence on novelty," and Cole Porter, "for being a writer of light verse who has a facility with words—a big showoff." (Both were gay, he notes, "but that's not really why I identify with them.") And he cites Irving Berlin, "for being an artistic hack, but making a show of hackdom."

Next, he mentions the Buddah Records producers Kasenetz-Katz, "for inventing bubblegum pop, and doing everything themselves while pretending to be different people," David Bowie, for hiding within stage personas, and Annie Lennox "for making the subversion of one cliché the entire idea of a song."

Lastly, he names two folk artists: Grandma Prisbrey, a California senior who built "stained-glass windows from the junkyard," leaving behind a full village, now a registered landmark, created wholly from discarded objects; and Henry Darger, a Chicago loner who "had no life," and whose Byzantine writings and watercolors were discovered and celebrated only after he died a pauper.

Together, this motley comprises Stephen Merritt's self-portrait: visionary and crank, genius and charlatan, highbrow and lowdown. Music so encompasses his day, his mind, his identity, that he's become a human medley.

Set List

The Magnetic Fields
2/15/08
Somerville Theatre

California Girls
I Don't Believe You
All My Little Words
Come Back from San Francisco
Old Fools
Xavier Says
Walking My Gargoyle
Too Drunk to Dream
Till the Bitter End
The Night You Can't Remember
I Thought You Were My Boyfriend
Water Torture

* * * *

Lovers from the Moon
I Wish I Had An Evil Twin
Give Me Back My Dreams
Grand Canyon
Papa Was a Rodeo
Drive On, Driver
Nun's Litany
The Tiny Goat
Smoke and Mirrors
Zombie Boy

* * * *

Three-Way
Take Ecstasy with Me
The Book of Love

Lyrics to "Water Torture"

Lorraine MacLean's strange paintings change the rain-stained Maine terrain. Paint rain, Lorraine./ "Teasing bees is easy," wheezed Louise. "These bees are teased." Tease these, Louise./ Jill's drill skills instill ill will. A shrill trill fills the hills. Drill still, li'l Jill./ Jo-Jo knows the snow slows, no, no Jo-Jo slows the snow. Slow snow, Jo-Jo./ Lulu glues two blue shoes to tutus to lose the blues. Glue, Lulu, glue.

"My shirt is red. My skirt has red. My leggings, they have hearts and pink. My socks and my necklace have hearts. Everything I'm wearing is Valentine's. And my hair clip, too."

Letting Go

Mitt Happened

I can't stop thinking about or writing about Mitt. I don't know what it means. Yesterday at the coffee shop the Boston Herald headline "Mitt Happens" popped out at me. "That's a shitty play on words," I thought as I chuckled to myself. I never had a chance to read the accompanying text that probably reiterated Mitt's reason for leaving the race--to give the remaining Republican candidates a chance to campaign hard against those terrorist and terrorism softies.

I feel safe already. Safe from jello salad and shorts that are too long and revelations from God.

Later when telling Tad about the headline I said something like, "I don't think he'd like that," and Tad reminded me that Mitt lives in Belmont--at least when he's not living in Deer Valley. That means that he probably saw the headline in all of its play on (Mormon) swearword glory. He might have teared up to see his name like that. Maybe he even got on a plane and flew to Utah--like he did when he was our governor.

I'm not really a mean person--I swear. And I'd be nicer about Mitt if I didn't feel so used by his stay in Massachusetts. But how sad is it that he's out of the race? He provided comic relief--much better than that of fried squirrel eating guy. What's a girl to do? Pray? But to which god?

Mitt, I'm lost without you.

Oops, I didn't do it again.

I'm so embarrassed. I am actually on a *second name basis with my best friend Willard Mitt Romney. I won't make the mistake again. I swear on the Book of Mormon with which I sleep. Thanks Derek.

Mittmentum No More

I find it delightful and hilarious and maybe a tad disconcerting that minutes and hours after Mitt's (we're on a middle name basis) decision to drop out of the race, I've had a slew of phone calls and e-mails.

It's true that my disdain for the flip flopper is more than obvious, but I was not aware that so many people think of me when they think of him. I might throw up now.

My brother from Utah called to dissect Mitt's drop out speech minutes after it ended. He had two questions: 1) How did he get elected in Massachusetts?? How? and 2) What happened to the Patriots? Apparently there's a great deal of buzz about both subjects in the western part of the country.

After receiving a few e-mails of concern regarding my recent Clinton endorsement, I feel the need to say a few words. O.k., so almost anything leads to my need to say a few words hence the blog.

I am aware of some of the controversial aspects surrounding Clinton's candidacy. There's her Iraq vote. There's DOMA. There's Whitewater. There's Bill (good and bad). There's the Establishment. There's welfare reform. There's status quo. There's politics as usual. There's divisiveness. There's well-connected, political favoritism. There's: THE SYSTEM IS FLAWED.

This list of things makes me grumble and say, "what's the use?" until I shake myself and slap my cheeks and wake up. Even with the muck aplenty, I still believe it's useful to pay attention to politics and to vote and to try to have a say, not because my single vote can change things, but because having an opinion matters in the grander scheme of things. It's about thinking and mulling and talking. It's about conversations that I'll have with my mother-in-law or my husband or my friends at the bar or a dad at the bus stop or my children. It's about caring about, for better or for worse, the policies that shape our existence.

I'm not one for soapboxes (well, maybe just a little, cough, cough) and this isn't much of a political blog, but I know that when I sat and listened to those know-it-all guys in the coffee shop, I was appalled. And then I felt empathy. This is what Hillary's been up against her entire political life. These are the people saying that she's not masculine enough, she's not feminine enough, she cries, she doesn't cry. These are the people saying that there's no way for her to get it right--because she's a woman.

In the last few weeks she's proven (to me, anyway) to be scrappy and capable (if not a little underhanded) and commandeering and bright. I won't say that she's better than Obama because I don't see their platforms as radically different and I plan to support either Democratic nominee, but I will say that I'm proud to be voting for a woman who could become president for the first time in my life.

At the Other Coffee Shop

The three of us walk in and there's a couple sitting at the corner table. They're reading the paper.

We order a lemon poppyseed muffin and an untoasted sesame bagel with cream cheese and a mocha latte with 2% milk. The German-American woman behind the counter treats four-year-old Cole like he's a king--King Cole. He loves it.

Then others come, white-haired guys who hold or have run for public office. They all sit at a table together, talking--first of football and then of politics.

"I'm voting for McCain. He's the only person capable of running this country."

"Obama. He's Irish, right? If they're drunk enough in Boston, they won't know he's not. O'bama," he says again and laughs.

"I'm not voting for Romney. I know that."

I smile and laugh a little. Eyes turn to me. "I'm a recovering Mormon," I say. "And I wouldn't encourage anyone to vote for Mitt."

They laugh. And we banter back and forth. The couple in the corner throws in its two cents when asked, "Do they vote in Rockport?" "They usually vote Republican," the man says, wrinkling his nose.

There is more laughing. There is more talking about candidates. It is a scene. Aged white guys. The Gloucester political establishment (recently semi-dethroned by a woman) thinking they know how to run it all. Finally one asks, "So who are you thinking about?"

"I'm undecided," I say. Which I am. Still. But it's becoming clearer. I've been making the argument that it's Hillary that's the Establishment, that I'm tired of the Clinton dynasty, that the Clintons are sneaky as can be.

And I continue to think that they're sneaky and that they've made big mistakes and that they're ridiculously well-connected and well-heeled. I also wish that Bill would shut up lately and let Hillary do her job. But as I sit drinking coffee and eating muffins with my young son and my young daughter, I realize that Hillary is my candidate. I know it as soon as the words leave my mouth.

"I'm thinking about Hillary," I say. The solidly male table gets quiet, the hostile silence telling me everything that I need to know.

Monday

There's a Mitt Romney for prez sign in front of Tony's Porn and Lotto.

Eternity...

...is forever.

Wenders Inspired

Reconnect vs. Disconnect

Today I feel like part of a Wim Wenders movie, things surreal and black and white and German. After a Thursday evening bout with food poisoning and a Friday viewing of Wings of Desire I am thankful to be alive--in all seriousness.

Today I try to pay attention, at the coffee shop with Abby and Amanda, three chairs and a table. With Susan and talk of her studio in which I want to live some days. There's a woman whose MS is acting up and she and Ernie talk gently. There is other conversation about photos and writing and choices and editors.

There's a touch of spring in the air, though it is January. Spring makes me want to find people, reconnect. Ernie and I wonder back and forth about people we've known and where they've gone. I tell him about an old friend of mine. Yesterday I'd been poking around the internet when I found a website for calligraphy and handmade paper. My friend is a papermaker now and a small business owner and a workshop giver, offering paper making to public school children and adults around town.

I am surprised, this the guy I broke up with because, among other things, he'd never had a job. He hadn't needed to work because everything had been given to him. Last thing I knew he'd taken over his parents' clothing business and had recently become a father. That was 11 years ago. I remember because I took the call in the front room of our Newburyport apartment. I'd been married a year. We talked about kids. "You should have one of these," he said. "They're great." Then he described his typical day which did not involve much in the way of do-a-job work. He still had mostly everything he wanted, not much worrying or overworking. I felt a little jealous.

But I don't feel jealous now. I feel surprised and curious and wanting to know more. Spring is in the air and I want to know more. Why do people do what they do? Change? I'm going to ask. And I'm going to start by sending an e-mail to an old friend.

The Shins are the band that I am currently trying to kill with obsessive listening.

Mighty Joe go-into-youtube-abyss-and-find-the-gems video hunter extraordinaire sent me this. I like it.

Thanks Joe.

Lichen in the sky with branches

Photographic evidence from our "not a walk"

Some day they might figure out my tricks. And that I'm really not that tricky. But today it worked well enough to call what we were doing "not a walk." I'm glad.

This Morning

Time to do something about the windows.

Since I Could Write

For as long as I can remember, my parents, or church or someone required that I make New Year's resolutions. Often reluctantly, because someone was standing over me, I'd sit down and make a list. It usually went something like this:

1. Get better grades
2. Exercise (starting around middle school)
3. Lose weight (starting around middle school and one that shouldn't have been on the list but was for all sorts of hideous and ridiculous reasons)
4. Don't gossip
5. Be nicer to my brother (this is when I appreciated having a big family)
6. Be nicer to my sisters (some years I dedicated a line to all three)
7. Be nicer to my mom
8. Be nicer to my dad
9. Write more letters
10. Practice piano and violin more

Then once I got out on my own, leaving the home of my parents and religion behind, instead of ditching the lists, I started writing pages of detailed, elaborate and totally unrealistic resolutions. I will be a good person. I will. I will. I will prove them wrong, I think, was my thinking.

I kept writing lists, on and on, one for each new year until a few years ago. "Fuck it," I said. "Who needs resolutions?" People don't keep them anyway. And I went nearly two resolution-free years until last year when I made one: to get out more.

Getting out more has been good. It's made me feel like I exist somewhere beyond the world of three young children and motherhood. I've seen things, heard music, had conversations that I wouldn't have had otherwise. I feel human.

And perhaps this is why I've decided to make a resolution to write resolutions again. Not the stupid ones from childhood (o.k, maybe there is a little crossover). Not 10-page books of ways to betterfy and beautify (crossover again). But plain Jane, simple resolutions. The kind that might actually make my life different, or someone else's.

2008 New Year's Resolutions

1. Take a photo every day (or almost every day)
2. Write letters: specifically: Jason, John, my grandma, my aunt, Olivia, Issac and Grace
3. Deal with shit as immediately as possible--this applies to literal and metaphorical messes
4. Go outside, get walking, take notice
5. Let people know that I love them (I get to be creative with this)
6. Use less

I'm still not sure that I believe in writing resolutions. But it's difficult not to. Each year when the calendar rolls over, I find myself thinking about them and what they should be. This year I didn't fight it. I gave in. Which makes me think that adding a seventh is in order. There are times for fighting and railing against the establishment (my establishment). And there are times for quietly and peacefully giving in. This is one of those times.

Gloucester Fire

Link to Ernie's pics and words.

When I wake it is 16 degrees out. I put on a wool, stocking hat knit by Nena five Christmases ago and before Grumps died, mohair mittens knit by Amanda when Aidan was a baby and I wrap my neck in a soft scarf knit by Lee the Christmas before Cole learned to walk.

This is how I stay warm and keep time, wondering how I'd know what happened and when without these things. I negotiate the icy streets of Gloucester making my way to work via the part of Middle Street that is not closed. Though my father-in-law has already given news of the fire, I am shocked when I see the burning temple and burnt apartment building. It's devastating--a life lost, people without homes, this time of year, ice stuck to trees, billowing smoke, skeleton of a synagogue and charred wood that was once an apartment building. I see people weeping in the street and others excitedly spectating because they don't know what else to do. There is a sad, displaced energy on Main Street that makes me wonder out loud: "What can I do?"

I step over soot frozen to bits of thawing ice. I walk around thick hoses lying in the road, careful not to step on them. When I arrive, my coat and scarf and hat smell like smoke--the smoke of loss, of buildings burning in the cold night and early morning, of tears and fear and flame.

I do the best that I can at the store, but all day I am thinking about the people who have been hurt by this fire. Around three I walk home, the fire still going. There is more soot. There is smoke. And when I arrive at the house there is an e-mail. It tells of how she moved from the 90-year old building just two weeks ago after living on the fourth floor for four years. She had been unable to get used to the idea of a fire and no way out, understandably so.

I think about fires and ways out. I think about Dave holding baby Galen and Mac missing Amanda's father and Amanda missing them all.

Quietly out loud I say "I love you" to all of the people I love. I say it again. And then again. I want people to know.

snowing

Last night I had a dream that I met the children in the photos. They were nothing like their pictures.

I've been dreaming about snow. And snow swirls, the way the wind whips it around into a cloud. Then his voice in a message tells me to mind the snow.

It is a pile of snow, soft and light at first, but turning heavy and wet. It covers me. It covers me again.

By the end of the dream I can see my eyes. Not my mouth, but my eyes.

The snow is light. The snow is heavy. The snow is nothing.

The snow is not as I dreamt it.

Knitting Mormons' Christmas

The Mormons visit yesterday. It has been weeks, months even, our last meeting less than satisfactory for them. There is a new girl with the girl who talks, impressed that I know that Carson City is the capital of Nevada. The girl who talks talks and talks and I miss the other girl, quiet and pleasantly unassuming. I learn that the quiet girl has moved to Vermont and the girl who talks will be going home at the end of this month. This is what makes visiting my house again and again easy for them.

When they knock at the back door I am on my computer paying bills and listening to "The Rebel Jesus" (this is the truth), part of a Mostly Denominational Mix of Christmas tunes that I made at Cole's request. This seems appropriate backdrop to conversation about religious conversions. "Six baptisms," the answer to my question of how many since she's been out. "It's wonderful to be a part of," she gushes. "To see how people change when they discover the love of Christ."

After a few minutes, talk turns to knitting. "We had to return the knitting to Amanda," she says. "We feel bad, but we just don't have time to sit and knit." I think a lot of mean things about the ways they spend their time, but mostly I think, "If I'd had knitting, I might still be Mormon. I'd have had something to do during all that talking."

Knitting didn't save me then, but it's saving me now. And I'm not Mormon and that's a good thing, though it's complicated at this time of year. And difficult. I try to read things like "Burning the Christmas Greens," William Carlos Williams and other poems. I put together collections of Christmas music for my kids because they love this holiday and there's hardly a reason they shouldn't. I try to revel in their joy and their anticipation.

I try to do it all and in doing so I am reduced to a shell of a person. I'm a faker and I'm not fooling anyone, especially myself.

Modern Man

In the quiet afternoon of the coffee shop Cole starts singing loudly, "Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto. Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto. Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto."

We are finished with our coffee and I quickly head for the exit.

"Excuse me, was your son just singing Styx?" asks the man in the suit holding the door.

"Well, yes." "And if you're lucky he'll break into "Come Sail Away" next.

"Chuckle, chuckle," says the man.

"Man I love this kid," I think to myself. Another 4 o'clock gone by. Rainy afternoon sunshine. All because of a four-year-old kid in a coffee shop singing Styx. Utter horror. Utter embarrassment. Utter delight.

Addendum:

"Cole, where did you learn that song?"

"From the internets."

Of course. From the internets.

Daughter

Recently I watched Knocked Up a movie about a sassy, career motivated E! reporter getting knocked up by and with a goofy, loveable and broke website developer. I am a semi-fan of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up is done by the same people.

As can be guessed, at the end of this movie a baby is born. A baby is born and I cry. I almost always cry when babies are born and so I cried when this movie baby was born, its movie birth reminding me of the live and in stereo births of my three babies, the births of my friends' babies, the births of all babies.

I first heard Loudon Wainwright III's version of "Daughter" at the end of this movie. Naturally I cried. Probably because I have two daughters and probably because I'm a sap. Then I went and found the song. Then I read a bit about LWIII. Then I read a bit about his children with Kate McGarrigle, Rufus and Martha, also singer-songwriters. I found lyrics to Martha's song "Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole" which is supposedly about her father and begins "poetry is no place for a heart that's a whore."

After all of this reading and listening, I stopped reading and I stopped listening.

Until the other day while writing the daughter knitting post. I decided to find out more about the song "Daughter," my recent obsession with music history the direct result of a terrifically late discovery about 'Til Tuesday and Aimee Mann (Does my growing up Mormon in Salt Lake City in the 80s explain anything?)

I found this:

"Daughter" was written by Peter Blegvad, a singer-songwriter who used to play with the avant-rock combo Henry Cow in the '70s and the Golden Palominos in the '80s. "Daughter" comes from his 1995 album, Just Woke Up.

I have no idea what kind of a parent LWIII was/is. I will not pass judgment. Parenting is fucking hard. My children could very well write a song about me someday and it might not be pretty.

But I'd be lying if I didn't say that I'm happy that "Daughter" was penned by a man whose "lyrics frequently feature word games, literary references and complex and extended rhyme schemes. He can also claim credit for one of the world's longest grammatically-correct palindromes (from Kew. Rhone.):

Peel's foe not a set animal laminates a tone of sleep" (this about the lyrics and palindrome from the ever-semi-reliable source Wikipedia).

And because I am a freak and geek I am now going to listen to Blegvad's "Daughter" followed by Wainwright's "Daughter" followed by Martha Wainwright's "M.B.F.A."

I do not recommend that you do the same.

Geeks click here.

About Time

Ball of Mush or Bowl of Mush or Old Lady Whispering Hush

If I say something to you and you can't figure out what I'm saying or think to yourself "Now that's odd," I have an explanation. I've been listening to In Rainbows and it's bringing out all sorts of stuff. Good and bad. If I hadn't already been given and then rejected religion, I might consider, god, that is. Please don't tell any missionaries.

The Accidentally Stolen Car Story

First she tells us about the time she accidentally stole a car. "Accidentally stole a car" is the kind of statement capable of getting a laugh out of anyone. By the end of the story I am convinced that it was an accident--same car, same color, different steering wheel grip, different keys. If Volkswagen made a bunch of cars with keys that work in same-looking cars then that's an accident on their part.

I blame Volkswagen. What were they thinking? What am I thinking? What are any of us thinking?

One

This baby is one. One is one of those ages that is unbelievably cute and unbelievably menacing. Yes I called her a menace, mostly because she's been climbing onto the dining room table and computer keyboard all day, though I've almost forgotten about it, except for the bruise on her cheek reminding me that babies fall off of tables. And I did say cute along with menace.

This is also the age that is over in a second. She'll be stealing somebody's wallet and heart before we know it. Wait. Where's my wallet? And my heart? They're gone. Gone. Gone. My baby is growing up and I have no idea what to do about it.

B Y Who?

If you have been wondering to yourself or aloud what it might be like to attend Brigham Young University click here.

woolgathering \WOOL-gath-(uh)-ring\, noun:

Indulgence in idle daydreaming.

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.

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.

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

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.

for Jane Z and her family

Because I don't have words right now.

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.

Of Knitting and Football and Evil Penguins and Mothers and Daughters

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.

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.

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.

Scratch almost everything I said about laundry.

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.

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.

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.

Under the cover of darkness

Poetry reading at PA's Lounge in Somerville.

Good to see you all.

Baby Bites, Mad Jesus' and Small, Good Things

I was raised Mormon in Salt Lake City, Utah. I have not been a practicing Mormon for approximately 24 years. Yet they keep visiting. They keep calling. Yesterday I let two young girls in for approximately 45 minutes as tactics such as rudeness and asking for my name to be removed from their lists, asking them not to call or come by have not worked. I offered them a beverage. They accepted and sat side by side at our dining room table. I smiled and asked a few easy questions about whereabouts and numbers of siblings--5 and 6, respectively. Then I smiled and asked some hard questions about family. They smiled and didn't answer them, except to tell me to visit General Conference, the great meeting of Mormon minds. I smiled and said, "I don't need a bunch of nearly dead white guys telling me what to do." They smiled and asked if they could visit again next week. I said yes.

And then sent them to my best and most beautiful partner in crime's house to do some weed whacking, but with this warning, "Be careful. She might bite." And this might be a good thing for them. A very good thing. Maybe even "A Small, Good Thing" if they're lucky.

Love Conversations

Note to tired readers: This will definitely be my LAST reference to 69 Love Songs for at least a year. O.k, at least a month.

Every so often it happens. I fall completely in love with a song. I wanna make out with this song, get coffee with this song, and do other things with this song.

But it's a song and we can't do these things. So instead I listen. And listen. And listen.

The song I have most recently fallen in love with is "The Book of Love" by The Magnetic Fields. Yeah, I've mentioned them here before and yeah I'm eight years slow to recently acquire the three CD album, so bear with me as my love for this album plays itself out.

I like this song more for what it doesn't say than for what it does say. It starts out, "The book of of love is long and boring/No one can lift the damn thing." I imagine a big, brown, sturdy book with all sorts of dryly inaccessible information, "....charts and facts and figures/and instructions for dancing." But then comes the twist, which is often the case with Stephin Merritt. Interspersed between the description of the book is, "...but I/I love it when you read to me/and you/you can read me anything," this the first place that makes me want to drink red wine and read Creeley with this song. It's slow and sweet the way the words are drawn out to emphasize the beauty of this simple doing.

Then there's the place that makes me want to go out dancing with this song and afterward take it ocean swimming.

And finally the place that makes me want to have a conversation with this song, one that lasts a long, long, long time, maybe forever.

Without getting into a discussion of marriage here because, well, because marriage is hard in theory and in practice, this song makes me think about how some conversations between some people keep going because some conversations can't and won't be finished. Marriage can be this kind of conversation.

I love this song for its ability to make me keep wanting to have ongoing conversations with the people I love. I love this song for its ability to make me remember to fall in love, with a song, again and again and again.

Now please go have a listen. And I promise not to talk about 69 Love Songs ever again.

Domestic Still Life

Monkey

To see the set click here.

Saturday Morning Phone Call

"Is this Jane?"

"Yes. I can't hear you. I'll call you back on the other phone."

"O.k."

Dial. Music through the phone on his end. The music is intelligible. But he's kind of unintelligible.

We talk. About lots of things, death being one of them.

There are a lot of things I could say but I try to change the subject. To music.

I tell him about 69 Love Songs. He already owns it.

He mentions David Byrne, Massive Attack, a few others. He has 300 CDs. His life's worth, he says.

"My crappy t.v., my CD collection, a few other things."

"I'll be pissed," I say. "I'll be pissed if 300 CDs show up at my door. And you're not with them."

What am I supposed to say to him? What is there really to say that hasn't already been said?"

I'm cynical about this now, years of trying to be a saviour and years of it not working. This is the best our relationship has been. And we both know it.

He keeps calling. He keeps living. Barely.

I've decided that it doesn't hurt to keep saying, "I love you." It can't hurt.

I'll say it as many times as I need to. I'll say it and mean it. I'll say it if he's here. And I'll say it if he's not.

Cole

Cole and I have had a rough go of it lately. Crying, both of us. Yelling, both of us. Frustration, both of us. Finally smiling, both of us. Tomorrow is his first day of four-year-old preschool.

The crying and yelling and frustration are all well and good. But I want to remember the smiling. I love this boy. Love. This. Boy.

Here's the Thing (working title)

I have a fancy, new camera and I want to do something with it, though I could do what I want to do without a fancy, new camera. I'm writing what I want to do here because if I don't write it here I won't follow through. Also, I might need a swift boot to the ass if I start whining and acting like I can't finish what I'm about to start. The following is inspired by School House Rock, especially "Three is a Magic Number," the paper crane project, flickr's 365 days, Amanda's letter writing and 69 Love Songs, The Magnetic Fields.

Take at least one photo every day for 365 days.
Post one photo every day to flickr.
For 52 Fridays, print one photo, 4x6, taken during the week.
Choose one person--family, friend, or random--and write a note to this person.
Must be a handwritten note and person must not be expecting the note or picture.
For 52 Saturdays, mail note and picture.
If people want to write a return note they can, but there must be no expectation that they do so.
Cost of project not to exceed $35. Envelopes, notepaper, 52 stamps, 52 prints.
Punishment if I don't finish this project: A hairshirt.

Purpose:

To circulate handwritten mail.
To find cool stamps (I have a thing for stamps).
To make myself finish something that I've started, something long.
To surprise people by sending them unexpected, handwritten mail.
To write to people I want to write to, but for whatever reason, don't.
To make something. Call it art, if you want. Or, call it something else.


Don't forget about the boot in the butt, if I need it. If you know someone who would like a note, please send along their address, but don't forget not to tell them that they'll be receiving a note. Thank you. stewingham@hotmail.com

Relentless

Yesterday I came home to a voice mail message.

"Hi Jane. This is the sister missionaries. We were calling to see if there would be a good time that we could come and see you, um, or give you any kind of service if you need any help around the house or anything. We'd love to come and help you out and to meet you. We'd love to hear back from you.

Our number is xxx-xxx-xxxx.

Do hope you are enjoying this nice warm day (laugh). We hope to hear back from "ya." Have a good day and everyone else. Bye."

I do not feel mean enough tonight to list all of the inappropriate services that could be rendered by the sister missionaries. Two of them. But as I've been going through my day I've been listening to these lyrics by The Magnetic Fields, not to be confused with the Air Supply lyrics of the same title.

Kiss Me Like You Mean It

"He is my lord, He is my saviour and He rewards my good behavior
My secret soul, I know He's seen it He says, come here baby and
kiss me like you mean it He calls me baby, says kiss me like you mean it
He is my life and my salvation He's always right, He's always patient
I pinch myself It's like I'm dreaming it... He is my love, He's always been it..."

The sister missionaries make me think of this song, or vice versa. But I'm afraid to tell them.

Stephin Merritt says, "Of course it's not a gospel song, really, or if it's a gospel song it's--well, I guess it's blasphemy either way. It's more about a B & D relationship."

Either way, what these girls are doing to me, it's relentless and soon, when they call, I'm going to quote Stephin Merritt, the "rabid militant atheist."

Soon girls, very soon.

Think Rattlebrained

This morning I'm up early reading junk e-mail, trying to find the right place to buy my Viagra. How can a person not be intrigued by the following subject line:

"it use turban?"

So I keep reading.

"was so refute decorative pullulate"

I look up the definition of pullulate. It's a verb.

To put forth sprouts or buds; germinate.
To breed rapidly or abundantly.
To teem; swarm: a lagoon that pullulated with tropical fish.

I look up the definition for decorative.

serving or tending to decorate.
Fine Arts. serving only to decorate, in contrast to providing a meaningful experience.

"decorative pullulate"

the abundant breeding of unmeaningful artistic experience?

"Was so refute decorative pullulate"

That's good, right?

But my favorite part is the ending,

"think rattlebrained," it says.

I like that. I'm going to use it as much as possible.

One woman's junk is another woman's treasure.

keeping calm

Dreams

All of us in bed by ten. An early night with the boy to come in first. A bad dream. Then she wakes sneezing, enough to need a sip of Benadryl and a box of tissues. It is after I've moved the boy back to his bed and she's settled that I have the dream. I am wearing yellow rubber gloves, the ones my mother used to wear while cleaning the toilet or the sink. There's a picture on the package of a woman looking pretty and wearing the gloves. I am in our aqua-tiled bathroom and I am not cleaning. I am looking for a shower curtain, a brown and black and white and green one that I bought at the outlets when we pulled the tile. It has been replaced by a white, vinyl shower curtain and I am frantic. I tear at the white curtain with the yellow gloves, but nothing, until I wake him with a cry, the muffled scream that comes through in my dream. "I had a bad dream," I say, and he wants to know what about. I am embarrassed to say that it's about yellow gloves and a white shower curtain. I'm embarrassed that this is what makes a bad dream for me.

I go back to sleep by three and the baby's up at five. Her fever is gone and she eats a banana. There is peace in the early morning darkness. I hear the train against its tracks and I think about dreams, how we can't stop them or change them. I think about what your dreams must be like as you remember things or fear things or want things, as you remember who you've known and what you've lost.

Bedbug Sleep Tight

I get a phone call this morning, one I've been anticipating for three months.

"Calling to tell you and the kids that I love you," he says. "And to follow up on the birthday call. I'm not very good at follow up, but I'm here now."

"I'm glad that you're here now," I say.

Apparently I am the last person to know anything because HE has to tell ME about the bedbugs, summoned between early a.m. film job and late p.m. wait job to fetch ice and move furniture. The headline might read:

Wanted guest brings unwanted guests.

As if she needs another thing to fret about, my sister a single mother of three. The retelling of the story is funny; my brother spins a yarn complete with drama, humour, love, strange things encased in plastic and a high speed chase in her Toyota Rav, blasting "Highway to Hell" along the quiet streets of Salt Lake City, self motivational tape ejected for ACDC, a little sanity.

His stories always come back around to them. How we've changed, how they might have changed, how we might have changed them, when to give up, when to accept, and when to move on.

"She's our sister," he says. "We love her."

"Of course we do," I say. "But what is there to do?"

"I've go an album for you," I say. "Nebraska."

"And I've got one for you," he says. "Hail to the Thief."

We pause briefly, resume talk.

"No! there isn't litigation. Yes, my landlord is crazy. No, you shouldn't worry. Yes, I have a place to live."

"Can you let me know that you're around? More often? A text message--anytime--one word--hello. Because I love you."

"O.K., fine," he says.

And it is fine. This phone call is fine. He's fine. She's fine. They're fine. It's all fine. The Book says that it will be fine, and it will be. It will all be fine.

Finally, it is all fine.

"Sleeping Lessons"

After another sleepless night with their faces and his insomnia I'm back to being sort of o.k. with how answerless and messy this life can be.

But first a BIG thank you to those who replied to yesterday's post. Another thank you to those who distracted me with humour, and such. And another to those who did both.

Today I'm working on answering Cole's question that goes like this:

Mommy, how do YOU get money if YOU don't have a job?

I raise eyebrows. Then furrow. And furrow.

You don't think I have a job?? What do you think I do all day? I ask--while sweeping the floor.

But he's already run off leaving me to furrow and fume and raise eyebrows and sweep by myself. I've since been writing a list of all things a mother does and it turns out that there's not nearly enough space here to list everything. It turns out, also, that maybe a mother should get paid SOMETHING directly and deliberately if only to keep small children from asking questions such as these.

Perhaps my soon-to-be new toy will set things right. It's one that'll enable me to take off my mother hat and try on another, if only temporarily. And it could help me to earn some cold, hard, green cash if I wanted and needed it to. Curious yet?

I'm eagerly anticipating its arrival.

Another Day, Another Bus Stop

To the very small number of people who read this blog, I could really use some advice. I sometimes try to be funny here, but today I'm going to lay it pretty thick. And I'll take whatever you've got to give. There's stewingham@hotmail.com, that other address, the phone and my face.

It's been a full night of internal dialogue. It goes something like this:

Does it help to know that he's there?
Yes, kind of. I want to know who's near the kids.
But in a way it's creepy. Watching his house. Waiting for a sign.
But isn't it creepier if I don't know, if I go to another stop and don't know.
Isn't it creepier not to know?
And then there's the matter of public lynching.
Is it wrong to want to get the guy?
Is it wrong to silently question his parents, ask what went wrong, as they drive past the bus stop, on their way to work?
What's with Dad wanting to tell everyone?
He's got three daughters.
I get that.
He lives next to a convicted pedophile and he has three daughters.
I have two daughters and a son.
None are safe.
But I can't live in fear.
I can't live my life in fear.
But it happened to him. A friend of the family came for dinner.
And it happened to her. But who was it?
It can happen.
It might happen.
I can't live in fear.
Is this why some choose not to have children?
The fear.
The wondering.
Always.
I can't live in fear.
I can't keep them safe.
I love them.
I can't live in fear.

Bus Stop Chitchat

Today at 7:30 a.m. I walked three children to the bus stop to put one of them on the bus. I met a dad of three daughters. After about 10 seconds of chitchat, names, ages of children, etc, he told me about the level three sex offender who lives a few doors down from the stop.

"I want to get him out of here," he said. "He lives by a playground, a ball field, a bus stop. I think it's against the law. Lives with his parents, works out of town, so he's gone a lot. People like his parents."

"Oh."

Silence. Silence.

More chitchat. Schools. Bus routes. Chit. Chat.

But the whole time I'm thinking Little Children. It's Little Children. This is Little Children.

I think about my children. I spend the rest of the day thinking about children. And what it means to keep them safe.

Praise ye the Lord!

I caught the baby singing "Hallelujah" this morning at breakfast.

How is this so?

A) The baby's channeling Inge B.

B) I found god.

C) God found me.

D) I'm in love with a green ogre.

E) I'm in love with Leonard C.

F) It's one of AC's favorite words.

F) It's the first day of school.

G) All of the above.

Piano

If yesterday was a bad day, then today is a good one. I am no longer seeing red.

I walked into town in the sunshine and the air and sat for coffee, outside, in the air reading what Fanny Howe wrote about Edith Stein ("Immanence" from The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life). I lost myself a hundred times over. I'm nearly a convert.

I walked to the Fort. And looked for signs with which to catch the King.

I walked to the Boulevard. I looked at people. Until I saw a woman, small and thin and grey. She reminded me of Aurora, the sweet woman who walked our street and loved our children.

I haven't seen Aurora in months; it's been that long.

I got to thinking about JC and Looney Tunes and the piano. You know, the piano; the 'effing' piano (this is a child-friendly website). "The one that could drop on you at ANY second."

Yes, that one.

Life is beautifully fleeting. Or fleetingly beautiful.

Pirate Baby

Two Part Story

I.

It's a story about Turtle Wax,

half-used container

kicking around the garage as a kid.

Protagonist: suds mitt made of sheep's wool.

Antagonist: microfiber mitt, bright orange.

It's over before it's started, cell phone ringing

in Target.

Then a planned escape

via bath rugs, No. 2 pencils, and shoes.

II.

I am the person standing

in place of the person who is standing.

She inhales words,

and exhales,

brown tub ring

around the fine porcelain tub

that is us.

Cole turns four

"How does it feel to be four?'

"It feels kind of fourish, you know?"



Over the weekend, Cole thought it fun to purposely crash into the bushes on his bike. This photo was taken before we saw a black bear standing on its hind legs shaking a nearby apple tree for fruit.

Sunlight on a Building

I want to write about Hopper while it's still fresh. All of it. Driving around town for parking. Pizza in the cafeteria. The crowds. A tap on his shoulder. Audiophiles. The Gloucester room. The strange proportions of the woman in "Office at Night." "Eyeless people." The neat handwriting in his notebooks, his wife's descriptions. A film conversation between Mr. and Mrs. Hopper. And Jo, the face that launched a thousand ships. Later, finding A at the crowded bar and shaking it as Willie played. Getting EM to dance and Tad and the others.

At the beginning of the exhibit having not seen enough of Hopper's work, I could not describe myself as a fan. At the end of the exhibit, after seeing a large collection of his work, I will not describe myself as fan.

I appreciate Hopper's capabilities and I like some things about some of his work. I like his clean, simple lines--his use of light and color, and that he painted ordinary scenes in unordinary ways, sometimes from the bottom up or top down, sparse and austere. I like that he painted at a time of day when the light is long, that his favorite thing to paint was sunlight on a building and that he described his work with few words, allowing critics and historians and everyone else to interpret it or not interpret it however.

Some argue that Hopper was trying to make a statement about modern city life, isolation, solitude, ordinariness, and lack of privacy. But I'm not convinced that he was *trying* to make a statement about anything. I envision a deliberate, probably grumpy, somewhat anal man with an interest in outdated architecture and a longing for some unreachable something or someone, perhaps my own invention of this person getting in the way of the art. He painted what he wanted to paint and when he felt he had exhausted a place and himself, he moved somewhere else and painted that.

By the end of the exhibit, I felt emotionally vacant and withdrawn. There's something about the combination of unrealistic color and light with the realistic depiction of empty American landscape that made me feel sad beyond description, the fullness and richness and vibrancy of life sucked out of me in an hour's time so that what was left is life without life, no reason to exist beyond sunlight on a building.

Little Things

People have come and gone. And nobody fought. Or cried. Unless they were aged six or under. There is something to be said for this, I think.

We spent a semi-respectable week in one another's company, cooling ourselves in the waters of Good Harbor beach and eating fresh (as opposed to Utah caught) seafood at Lobsta Land. Saturday the women went to see The Belle of Amherst in which Lindsay Crouse plays a convincing Emily, at least as far as the poetry is concerned. We sat and ate around our long, dining room table, even told a couple of stories while cleaning up. We're a family of storytellers.

If stories could be rated, and sometimes they must be, the best goes out to my mum on the way to the Manchester airport, stuck in traffic, both of us wondering aloud if they'd make their flight. She talked at length about a dinner date she and my dad had with a couple who is in the process of buying my mom and dad's condo. During dinner my dad offered up opinions about his favorite restaurant and voila, another dinner date was born.

I try to imagine all of them eating together. A tall, white and conservatively dressed man (in the way that suits are conservative) with his partner, a small, black transsexual, appropriately attired, my sixtyish, white parents, conservatively dressed in a way that reflects their commitment to their Mormon values--no plunging necklines, sleeves covering shoulders and upper arms, and sensible shoes.

"What do you talk about?" I ask wishing that I could borrow an invisibility cloak and join them for dinner.

"Music and art," she says. "I made C a cd with some of my favorite music. He loves it." "They want to do things with us," she says. "Go to concerts, and dinner."

She even tells me a little about a passport problem due to confusion surrounding C's photo and surgery, this from a woman who leaves the room during discussions or readings of Everyone Poops by Taro Gomi because of the uncomfortable way this subject and many subjects make her feel.

"That's great," I say. And I mean it.

My parents have changed. A little bit and a little bit at a time. Person by person. Place by place. And thing by thing. Little, itty, bitty, bit of change. At a time.

Police Note Grief

To live here means to read obituaries and police notes. They tell a story. 23. Died unexpectedly. Wanted to be a cop. Worked as a security officer at a pharmaceutical company. I remember him sweetly, his love of music.

Died unexpectedly at 23 doesn't always mean drug overdose. It could mean died of heartbreak. Died of loneliness. Died of too much of something. Or too little. Just died, nothing attached.

Which kind of grief is the worst? Is it the kind that makes its way into police notes weeks after a son is found dead?

Which kind is the worst?

From this mother to that mother, I am sorry. More sorry than I am able to tell you.

Flowers for You, or Algernon

What do you say? You.

Drop me a line.

Or a poem even.

If it keeps, in my hand

or my pocket.

Like a bank note flower

on a 'bak yard' grave

Let's just say.

I'm yours.

git

Perhaps I'm slow to learn this word. It makes me laugh. It makes me laugh.

From dictionary.com....

git

noun
a person who is deemed to be despicable or contemptible; "only a rotter would do that"; "kill the rat"; "throw the bum out"; "you cowardly little pukes!"; "the British call a contemptible person a 'git'"

Forecast--snow

A life might be made of assessments. A series of. Then lumps and clumps and bumps. Then reassessments. Reclumps and relumps. When a person learns that something does not work, so a person reworks, until the thing is something different. No one has to suffer. No one has to cry. But someone might suffer. Someone might cry.

Sometimes the new way sneaks in. At night. Or even day. It is subtle. And a person hardly knows that anything is different, but for the old way, when reencountered, as obnoxious as an obnoxious drunk.

There is a period, maybe brief, of remembering. An engagement, of sorts. And then a disengagement. Not a breaking up or a breaking of, but a no. A loud no. A stop whispering no. Not meant to be hurtful. But meant to say I'm finished. I'm finished with this. Not you, but this. People can't be constructed, built to please, but boundaries can be. So I've drawn lines, in the snow, where I need them. Not out of anger. But out of love. For them. And for you.

stop

Is there no redemption? No justice?

Big questions for a Wednesday night.

I'm hoping that Radiohead has the answers.

Creep

Some of you Radiohead fans may have already seen this...but I thought I'd post it anyway. It's creepy (sorry, necessary pun).

P.S.--If you have an oldish computer like I do, it might take a minute to load up.

Because I don't have photos

Two Legs Bad

About a week ago, while driving and listening to the radio, I began to quietly fume as Bush talked about the Iraq war. He fielded questions, maintaining his stay-in-Iraq-because-I-say-so position. He went on about Al-Qaida and the threat they pose and after a few minutes of 'we have to get these guys' talk I realized exactly how long Bush has been trying to connect Iraq and Al-Qaida. I had to stop and shake myself awake to remember that we went to war over the threat of weapons of mass destruction, unseen and unfound weapons of mass destruction. I've heard his silly lines of reasoning so many times that I feel like a character from Animal Farm in that I've almost started to believe that what he says is true. I'm nearly guilty of not being able to remember what the farm was like before the pigs took over, foggy and distant as it is.

Then there are things that cause me to snap to, like an around the world headline found today in the B section on page SIX of the GDT. It reads, "Intel report: Al-Qaida threat is heightened." First line: "Al-Qaida is using its growing strength in Pakistan and Iraq to plot attacks on U.S. soil, heightening the terror threat facing the United States over the next few years..."

And now war supporters say, "Look, see, Al-Qaida...they're a threat." But why are they a threat? How stupid can a person be? How can someone not see this war's role in the mobilization of said groups? I want analysis...the straightforward, no nonsense kind that links the growing strength of terrorist groups to four years of chaos, destruction and violence in Iraq....to our middle finger up, poised and ready to fire, U.S. leader and White House cabinet middle fingers that say....well....they say precisely what a middle finger is supposed to say, the gesture universal.

Last Night at Harbor Loop

On 7/12/07 old folk and young folk and middle-aged folk of Gloucester and thereabouts came out to hear music at Fitz Henry Lane. Featured musicians donating their time and talent: Joe, Leo and Inge and a bunch of other local and semi-local music makers. It was a good time.



For more photos click here.

Summer

Cosmos about to bloom. I can see the tall stems from here.

A man in front of me at Market Basket tells me how to properly unload my cart. There's a right way. And a wrong.

Baby starts screaming, I take her out and a kid offers to walk my cart to the car. "At least you have a car," he says. "Mine got taken when my girlfriend smashed the headlights in with a baseball bat. Someone called the police. It got impounded and sold at auction for $300. I put almost 15 grand into it."

Baby in the car. Asleep. Listening to our leader drone on and side step, not looking any of us in the eyes.

I think about basil from the garden, fresh pesto last night for supper, the way the warmth of toasted pinenuts brings out the sweet, spicy smell of basil, garlic on the tip of my tongue this morning.

Summer makes me take notice, the way the light is long and drawn out, how sounds sit at the tip of the ear, the way sea-salt air is here. And there. And then gone.

Gift

There are things about being a parent that are difficult.

And then there are things that are easy, this afternoon, the kids and their sweetness, wanting to make cards and gifts for Thea who turns one on Friday. Cole drew a gasoline tanker sitting atop a yellow and black road. And Aidan made a card with a baby wearing a birthday crown, cake and presents within reach. Upon completing the card Aidan said, "A card isn't enough. I want to make something for her to play with." "Sketch it out," I said, and a few minutes later she'd created instructions for a wooden baby rattle. With a bell inside so that the baby can hear it ring, arrows pointing here and there so that she and the wood cutter will know what to do, where things should go.

This is a world full of sadness and disappointment and longing. It is also a world full of tenderness and beauty and love. I am glad for myself on days that I am able to see and feel both. My children help me to see.

Everywhere

It is everywhere. In the crevices of the sofa. My hair at night. The stone steps cold, we do a dance together. A jig, of sorts.

Her skin is brown and smooth and clean. Not sandy. But clean.

No lines. Smooth. No lies. But tender.

And beautiful.

The Girls

Familiar Word in My Inbox

Word of the Day for Thursday, June 14, 2007

proselytize \PROS-uh-luh-tyz\, intransitive verb:

1. To induce someone to convert to one's religious faith.
2. To induce someone to join one's institution, cause, or political party.
3. To convert to some religion, system, opinion, or the like.

Jesuit missionaries appeared; the Japanese allowed them to proselytize.
-- Walter LaFeber, The Clash: A History of U.S.-Japan Relations

It has given the world an example of what hard work can do, but in general Japan prefers to focus on its own affairs and let other countries proselytize for democracy, capitalism, communism, or whatever else they believe in.
-- James Fallows, "Containing Japan", The Atlantic, May 1989

He has a message and he wants to proselytize the whole world.
-- William Schneider, "The Republicans in '88", The Atlantic, July 1987

Proselytize is formed from proselyte, "a new convert, especially a convert to some religion or religious sect, or to some particular opinion, system, or party," from Greek proselutos, "a proselyte, a newcomer," from pros, "toward" + elutos, from eluthon, "I came."

New Sofa

Last week we gave away our 100-year-old sofa bed in exchange for a 100-year-old sofa, slightly bigger, longer, perhaps better for taking a nap or sitting three people. The sofa bed had recently been becoming uncomfortable, a small tear beneath the seat cushions had turned into a larger rip almost all the way across that made sitting feel like sinking. And when I learned that the 'new' sofa would be a palatable shade of green and that it would have funky wooden feet, I began plotting the white (if you can call it white) sofa's removal, the stained, threadbare slipcover free to be threadbare and stained in someone else's living room, someone else's attic. An enthusiastic woman from Maine came to take our old couch away; I nearly hugged her.

After a week of sitting on the new sofa in all sorts of configurations, it turns out that it sprongs instead of springs. It is tired beyond tired and this shows, especially when sitting. The outercovering might be nicer than that of the other couch, but the insides, they spring and sprong and rumble and threaten to break free when pressed upon by little feet. And while it's true that taking a whole-body-stretched-out nap is now possible, that's about all the new couch can do--one body stretched out, not moving, not springing or spronging, this type of couch sitting such a rarity in our house that we might as well enshrine it. In plastic.

The going and coming of the couches, along with a school year ending and children growing and the coming and going of people in my life, makes me wistful, thinking about the things that I once had that were slightly flawed but more than acceptable, exchanged for something that might be better. So I am not yet plotting the removal of the new green sofa, mostly because I know that it can't be replaced.

It's Only Time

Happy Medium

Aidan painted this a few days ago. It's one of my favorites.