Eel the Komodo Dragon

Cole's class is making self-published, hard cover books. He is very excited about this project.

I found this draft on our dining room table.

PS--I asked Cole a little bit about his drawing and ideas. He reports that the picture is Eel in Antarctica, one of the many places the Komodo dragon tries out in his search.

Eel The Komodo Dragon

This story is about one Komodo dragon. He just doesn't know that where he is is where he should be so he goes to different places and tries to find his true home but when he finds out that where he was is his true home he has to fix his life.

Living

Rumbling thoughts. Trying to remember so that I don't forget.

Horribly sentimental, remembering my babies in the house. Round the table, the center of this house, talking about Howard Blackburn and what makes a hero.

Colored lights on the tree. Elaborate squirrel traps. Butter on steak.

Babies crawling across the floor give way to running children, through the yard, past peonies in full bloom.

Saint Francis in the garden says a prayer for us all.

Bless this family. Bless these people.

It is the people who make the memory.

We forget, sometimes, what we don't want to remember. Sometimes we forget what we want to remember.

But we try to hold on in some small way.

I remember fires in the fireplace and smokey living room, sitting in the sun, tea and coffee. Stone steps.

Halloween and masks and the piano. Knitting in the sitting room, knitting in the living room. Knitting hats. Mittens.

Her hands. His laugh. Our laughter.

Braided rug, in our house now.

Pictures and pictures. Listening with Aidan, assignment for school to retell a story that has been passed down from generation to generation.

The story of Nena with her sister and her German mother in Washington DC in the park and being asked not to speak German. Nena's memory. Nanny's memory and now Aidan's memory, recorded in her Book of Me.

The memories continue as I think. Some flutter in front of me and are lovely and disappear as quickly as I have remembered them. Some linger, like stringed instruments.

There is beauty and sadness in memories. There is something ghostly that comes from knowing that this is my memory and only my memory.

Others have different memories. We try to remember what we want.

Living becomes mixed up with dying.

Influence

e.e. cummings poem, followed by ra ra riot lyrics

dying is fine)but Death

?o
baby
i

wouldn't like

Death if Death
were
good:for

when(instead of stopping to think)you

begin to feel of it,dying
's miraculous
why?be

cause dying is

perfectly natural;perfectly
putting
it mildly lively(but

Death

is strictly
scientific
& artificial &

evil & legal)

we thank thee
god
almighty for dying
(forgive us,o life!the sin of Death


Dying is Fine, John Pike, Wesley Miles, e.e. cummings

To settle our thoughts
Never minding what for
nothing of a harm to dread
On my mind
Tell me what belies
Oh Tell me what I could have
Oh
Tell me what for

No more of this living dying
Just scientific analyzing
Forgive us oh life
The sin of

Death oh baby
You know that dying is fine but maybe
I wouldn't like death if death were good
Not even if death were good

Is this it
Maundering about and
All I have is too much time
To understand
One can only love
Life until its ending
Oh
And I can't forget

No more of this living dying
Just scientific analyzing
Forgive us oh life
The sin of

Death oh baby
You know that dying is fine but maybe
I wouldn't like death if death were good
Not even if death were good

The Turkey

Cole brought this message about the turkey home from school a couple of days ago. He seems a little conflicted about his turkey eating. He loves to eat turkey and he loves turkeys. What to do?

Our conversation:

Me: So you don't think that we should eat turkey on Thanksgiving?
Cole: Do you eat turkey on Thanksgiving?
Me: Sometimes.
Cole: I am only going to eat turkey on Thanksgiving.

The Turkey
by Cole S. Cunningham

The turkey is known on Thanksgiving. I have to state that it really hates it.

The turkey hates everything about the Thanksgiving day. They see one after another being slaughtered all day. Before they know it, they're being slaughtered too.

So please eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Aidan's Red

I finally found Aidan's red poem. It had been hiding amongst the hundreds of papers that inhabit the house. Someday those papers are going to have their own room.

Red

Red leaves in the fall
from the trees
to the ground, from the
top to the bottom.
Red, deep red deep as blood
flowing through the
heart. Red hearts, apples
in fall, like leaves
falling to the ground
top to bottom in
the fall.

Edge

Today I follow the small, black fin of a harbor porpoise.

I run. It swims. I run until I am out of breath and the fin is out of sight.

Yellow, the center of a flower, in the leaves and on the wall.

The long of it. And the short of it.

Walk until the edge is out of sight.

Cole's Halloween Poem

What Happens to a Thing from Halloween In November
by: Cole S. Cunningham

Ghosts groan
candy rots
witches go to China.

Zombies take the day off.
A Jack-O-Lantern is useless.

Now cats are just cats.

Bats go in caves.
Skeletons shatter down to their graves
bones and all.

It's stormy
the moon won't be glowing
like it did on Halloween night.

Halloween's frightened by November.

Halloween masks don't give people a fright
it's November.

No more spiders no more rats.
It's November.

Halloween is over.

At midnight I hear his voice; she has fallen out of bed and is crying and he is trying to soothe her.

It is confusing for both of them. He's been trying to get home for three hours, ankle deep in swamp, dark as hell.

She's in a strange, cavernous house.

I pick her up, carry her to my room.

I leave him standing in the half-lit hallway of broken promises.

Why wasn't he here? Why do they worry? What to do?

The story is the same.

At 12:24 the baby screams. We are separate and not sleeping, all of us under this roof.

I am here for him. They are here for them. He is here in a dream.

And Malcolm Gladwell is not the golden boy they describe.

A Postcard from Salt Lake City

Yesterday I bought the album The Suburbs, Arcade Fire and listened to it in its entirety (two times) while I sewed curtains. Sew. Listen. Sew. Pin. Listen. Remove stitches. Pin. Sew. Listen.

The album got in and got stuck and will not leave. Maybe reading Olson has something to do with its persistence--or memories of childhood or talk of the grid or self-aware lyrics (maybe painfully so) or the prettiness of the song about sprawl that made me want to find out more about this album, folks who live in Montreal now, but wanted to write about growing up in the suburbs of Houston.

In finding out about them I found what's below: The Wilderness Downtown--worth the efforts of installing Google Chrome--especially for people who grew up in the capital of grids, Salt Lake City.

I'm a bit haunted by this song and this video and the opportunity to write a postcard to my younger self as it brings up all sorts of stuff--the house that raised me, the city of salt, the people who have come and gone. It's a bit surreal, watching a memory explode with trees while listening to this band's postcard to and from the suburbs.

My Wilderness Downtown

About Walking

It is September and I have been walking.

I am taking note because James Cook and Peter Anastas and Charles Olson have got me thinking about walking. In Gloucester.

Do people walk? Do people in Gloucester walk? And why do they walk? And why do I walk?

1. Gloucester has walkers, walkers who make a person stop and think about walking.

a. Richard from Bananas walks. He walks from East Gloucester to Main Street and home again. Almost daily.

b. The man with the sandals from Lincoln Park walks. He walks and he sits and walks and he sits.

c. Aurora used to walk. Aurora used to live in Lincoln Park. I miss Aurora.

d. My backyard neighbor walks. She waves and I smile. I wave and she smiles.

e. The dog walkers walk. Sometimes they collect their shit and sometimes they don't.

f. Ernie walks. He is training his new dog Bogen with the three legs to walk long distances because Ernie walks long distances. With his camera.

g. The Boulevard walkers walk. I do not know their names, but I recognize their faces.

h. Main Street walks. Briskly. With packages. With purpose. With anger. With amusement. Pushing baby carriages. Drag feet style.

I walk because I like the sound of footsteps following footsteps. It is slow some days and I sit. I look people in the eye--if I want to. I notice the flap, flappity of the flags that I wish someone would take down after the holiday.

I count stars, lights, bits of sea glass. I count waves. I count people. Walking.

Some days I think about her and her and him and her. And you. Sometimes.

Tonight it came up about what matters.

I think that Gloucester matters. And walking matters. And people matter.

Tonight I am happy that people matter.

Thea Writes

Uh. It was a great day. There was just two rains and then there was two sunnies. And then dark.

We played on the park. We went to the gym. We had fun at the park.

I'm done.

The Bash

Storm

Last entry, December 21, 2009.

Why does a person write and then not write and then write again?

I'll start somewhere, pick word petals, throw colors to the wind.

Fall in love again with the click of the keys and the beauty that is around me.

I'll begin with a storm. The one that I can feel outside my window.

"No breeze. No currency of leaves," it presses into my spine wide awake with unrest.

The people on the news are unconvincingly frantic, as is their hair. They are too well kept for this coming storm, hairspray and hair dye whispering sweet nothings to Earl.

Earl pays them no attention.

Storm is one of those words, the kind that can get mixed up for another word.

Storm as a noun. Storm as a verb. Storm as finite.

For now. In, get it out, let go.

Mark time between storms until breathing eases, until words swallow little words and little words swallow little letters.

An i. An eye. Your eye. Always.

Summer

Of Winter Flowers

Sometimes little girls (who aren't so little anymore) make things out of paper they've painted, taped, tied with yarn.

Mother and son collect once-a-year songs.

We wrap ourselves into ourselves. We make. And then we give. Then we make again.

The shortest day is a song. The next, a flower. The next, they are grown.

Of Playmobil and Jesus

Apology

I want to write an "if I had the time" post. It's silly, decadent, not necessary.

But autumn makes me do it. Something about the way light hangs on a tree, cat on a branch. Everything orange. And sad--in a happy, loved way.

Bird on a wire.

A song. Flight.

Catch.

There are photographs everywhere. I breathe and take a picture. Pucker, sweetly.

To kiss a new baby. Nuzzle a cheek. Stretch.

Fingers--long. A kiss for each one.

For you.

August

Summer, it is here. Immediate. And demanding.

It is a breath. Fleeting. Green. And envious.

It is blueberries. Raspberries from the garden. Sweet peas. In a bunch.

Ankle deep. A whisper. A kiss.

A yawn. A moon, before a swim.

This sky. It is now.

Thread....

Fiesta is over. Shadow of rain competed with this year's festivities, but could not overtake the sense of community that staggers, leaving behind a path of invisible thread--a mystery weaving, of sorts.

I still consider myself an outsider looking in, but after 11 years, St. Peter's Fiesta is familiar. I've held candles given me by tiny Italian grandmothers. I've shouted. Laughed. Stared at a sky of cast off cares and swirling confetti. I've visited Ambie's famous sausage stand and been encircled by the sweet, greasy smell of fried dough.

I've watched children call out to one another, surrounded by a sea of rocks as men crab walk out to the end of the pole, oars quietly pushed through a threat of rain, the boulevard filled with watchers and drinkers and swimmers and onlookers--looking on for sport and to catch the locals doing what the newspaper says they do best.

Some describe Fiesta as nothing more than a ridiculous, drunken party that the city has to clean up after--but with this description comes a failure to see the invisibly fine strands of community that persist in Gloucester as soulless enclaves of nothingness creep up around the country.

We've got something here, but you've got to look beyond the surface of the party to see it. For every drunken fight that gets recorded in the police notes, dozens of significant connections go quietly unnoticed. Families come together. They anticipate. They plan. They take time to catch up. They dress up--little girls with fancy white ribbons, boys in handsome sweaters and shoes. People smile. They pray. They take notice. They care.

There is no question about it as statues are carried through the streets of downtown Gloucester on the backs of boys and men preceded by prominent religious figures that Fiesta matters--not just as an excuse to party, but as a time to honor God, to honor family and those who have died, a time to honor tradition, a time to reunite and reconnect. People come out of their houses to celebrate and to mourn and to talk to one another. Strangers strike up conversations. The feeling of community is palpable.

This time of year makes me feel lucky--lucky to be living where I am, raising a family with people I love. St. Peter's Fiesta brings this out in me.

Viva. Viva. Viva San Pietro.

Additional photos here.