The rope is going to break. It's inevitable. Why hadn’t he bought a new rope, something made out of synthetic fiber, white interwoven with blue strands, a miracle of modern technology? A rope that would never break, that you cauterize with a lighter or with a long match in order to melt the strands together forever. Something that would last through the apocalypse.

“This is an heirloom rope,” he told me, smiling as though he was joking but I knew he wasn’t really joking. “My grandfather gave me this rope when I was a boy.”

“So why don’t you put in a frame? You know, box it up and stick it on the wall? Why did you leave it on the boat?”

“The rope is fine. It’s a good rope. Strong enough. And if it breaks, what’s the big deal? We drift for a while. Our plans change. We adjust.”

He drove us here in a car the color of the sky before the storm, a car of no color, another heirloom piece passed down to him when he graduated from college twenty-five years ago. His shoes were hand-me-downs and I could see his heart beat, the quivering in the neck, underneath his frayed shirt collar. The man could throw nothing out, held on until the emergency, the car dead in the middle of the night, the sole of his shoe lapping up the rain.

I grasped the rope with both hands, pulled hard, willed the inevitable. The rope didn't break. It burned my palms, punishment for my lack of faith. I l waved them through the air, dipped them in water as absolution.

"See? Strong enough."



Image by Jane Underwood.
The image was the prompt.
Note: As was brought to my attention by an experienced sailor, on a boat one calls ropes "lines." This sounds vaguely familiar (I haven't been on a sailboat or motorboat since 1990 and even though I grew up around water, I know zip about boats. Read Would you like bloodworms with that? to get a sense of the extent of my knowledge). I just can't bring myself to replace the word "rope" with "line" here. So my apologies if the use of it is grating.

Tags: writing prompt, rope versus line, Round Robin, I'm a frayed knot

The photograph, pixelated for privacy:

Where it takes me:

*A hot Delaware day, late July or August of 1986, D. at the construction site. He wears cut-off shorts and a torn, sleeveless shirt, has wrapped a red bandana around his head to catch the sweat. Somehow on him sweat is sweet, necessary, like the damp of a spring rain. D. stands on a ladder at the roof line, swings his hammer. On the backstroke, the claw end meets his eyebrow, tearing a gash that requires fifteen stitches. I wasn’t there, but I can imagine it, the blood, the truck ride to the emergency room, the endless bowls of marijuana that he probably smoked to counteract the dull throb. Later I held my fingers above the stitches, lightly kissed the jagged rays of black thread.

*D. at the wheel of the Newport Custom, gunning it over 100 miles an hour on Town Point Road, the flash of grey-green cornstalks rushing past the window, the curve before we reached the woods, cool and dark, my heart pounding, the tape deck blasting Manic Mechanic. I cupped the wind, I caught it, let it flow across my body to his.

*Early on: waiting by the flicker of the television set in the Little House, falling asleep to Kung Fu or Fantasy Island reruns, waiting until 1 a.m.. Waiting even later. Just waiting, sometimes for nothing, a replay of my waits of early childhood.

*Still early on: The weekend he rode his bike home from college, logging almost 100 miles, to wish me a happy sixteenth birthday. Me, waiting. Him, appearing at 10:30 or so, a reasonable hour, with a half-consumed bottle of vodka. My present. He knew I would be leaving Maryland soon, but he didn't know why. He didn't find out until after the drama was over.

But it actually wasn't a photograph that brought this back, it was a poem from one of my Round Robin writing partners last week, something about the love of men who work with their hands. D. was (and still is, I presume) a talented carpenter, a man who framed houses and built furniture. Despite the endless nostalgia of my brain, the way the past rolls out of my fingers and clogs up my mind on a daily basis, I don't think about him very often. He's from the far-away past. I don't wish I was back in Maryland living the life I rejected when I was still a teenager, making the roundtrip from home to grocery store to liquor store and back again. And although I look back on him with sweetness, the pain I feel in writing this surprises me. It's a secondhand ache, pain at his early treatment of me that echoed my parents' treatment, sadness at how I ended up treating him ultimately.

I still puzzle over how people drift away after love, after the intensity of the burn is over. In early 2002, when my mother's boyfriend Kevin was in for his final hospitalization, I called D. to talk once or twice. I called him because he was there during the worst of my teenage years. He was my closest friend then, the only insider. He knew Kevin as a healthy, often cruel man. D. was there through nights heated by kerosene and electric heater, he held me when I cried, and he cried in my arms when he found out about my pregnancy after the fact. So I called him from Kevin's hospital after a particularly harrowing day. I was nervous, paced in front of the wall of windows in the Critical Care Unit hallway. We had an awkward, didn't-I-used-to-know you conversation. D. didn't remember much. Who can blame him? It wasn't his intense life, it was mine. I remain the only witness.

When old friends disappear, a bit of our memories go with them. I mourn the shared experience, the fading away. I wish I could gather them all up, friends long gone, the ex-boyfriends, the ex-husband. We would talk and laugh again, would remind each other of our once-live connection. I would pull them with me into the present, link the people we used to be to with who we are now. I would tell them, "Remember part of me is you."



Image: Pixelated D. in the Little House, Winter 1985/86. Some of my readers know this guy and I feel a little strange for putting his picture out there. Hence, the pixels.

Some of this is from a prompt, "Rectangular."

Tags: boyfriends, Loss, Nostalgia, Kevin, writing prompt, Round Robin, The Little House, Lyle Lovett "A Simple Song"

You know the type of dream:  the key doesn’t fit into the lock. It crumbles into dust before you even get a chance to try it. Or the door has a series of complicated bolts and attachments and there you stand, in the rain, in the snow, on a hillock of desert sand, holding this old-fashioned key. Or a roller skate key, which at first you don’t even recognize – does anyone use those things anymore?

But I’ve never had a key dream. There is nothing to unlock. I have no inaccessible thoughts, just a stream of consciousness and overflowing bins in the mind, intermingling. The kind of dreams I have are telephone dreams:  me in a phone booth, the phone an old-fashioned dial model, and I can’t quite get my fingers to pull the dial to the comma of metal, to the kissing point. Or I’m a dark room heavy with curtains and carved furniture, waiting for the pick-up, the throw-out, the end, fingers tangled in heavy plastic. I keep on trying to connect (the key word here, no pun intended), but never quite make it.

In these dreams I’m always trying to call my mother, which is funny, because in my waking life I talk to her on the phone every day (on the cell phone, where I have her various numbers linked to single digits:  the only possible mistake my fingers will make is hitting the wrong one and dialing my husband or my father instead). As I write about it, I remember that these dreams are more of a thing of the past, a symbolism my subconscious has rejected, perhaps as being too trite and obvious. I like to think that the connection between my mother and me, the path of communication, has opened, is free of static and complication.

Technology has changed as well. Maybe I’ll start having keyboard dreams:  me sitting at the old-fashioned desk on this chair with the pillow for comfort, cozy in a circle of light against the early morning darkness, my fingers unable to find the right letters. I turn the letter “a” into a semi-colon, type symbols when I want numbers. It could be the keyboard is against me or my own mind, that my fingers, trained in typing class in ninth grade, are starting to stumble, to forget, the muscle memory fading away. So I’ll return to the pencil, scratching out my thoughts onto a piece of paper, my grip loosening, until all I can write is a series of scrawls.



Image from Vitroid.
From the prompt "Write about a key."
And just in case you want to hear the Cheap Trick song, here's a link. After watching it once, all I can think about is how unhealthy they look.

Tags: Round Robin, writing prompt, dreams, rotary dial telephones, old-fashioned keys

My last boyfriend, Steven, had bay water skin, salty and weathered. He smelled of corn stalks and Maker’s Mark. His family owned the small gas station/convenience store off 213 where underaged kids bought beer and porn magazines and filled up on puckered cheese dogs gone too long in the warmer. That’s where we met, me parking the scooter on a Sunday morning, Steven pulling up in a Ford pickup. I was the only person he knew who drove a scooter and refused to eat red meat. The Eastern Shore was all four-wheel drive and gun racks, tire flaps with silhouettes of busty women: “beer, barbecues, and bosoms,” we used to joke. Steven lived in a small cottage on Gilly’s Neck, a spit of land named after a distant relative who had landed there in the early 1700s. His grandfather built a duck blind adjacent to the creek and on icy late autumn mornings Steven left the comfort of our bed, the pull of my naked body, to put on camouflage and hunker in the blind with a shotgun and a thermos of spiked coffee. I never got used to this, to the mix of blood and booze, the freezer filled with the dark flesh of Canada geese. We celebrated the difference, drank and fought and fucked with malice.

I moved west in part to escape the relationship, to wash the taste of salt and blood out of my mouth. And there was Shelton, clean-smelling, like soap, like a freshly-washed window, sitting across the aisle at our graduate school orientation. He was thin and pale with a cap of dishwater blonde hair. When he contributed to class discussions, he pushed his rimless glasses back and wiggled in his chair before over-intellectualizing a dot point into a master’s thesis. Silence filled him with anxiety. He adorned it with linguistic frills, explaining simple concepts with an academic loquaciousness. It was cute, for a time.



I've been working on a short story and doing very little other creative work (outside of the Round Robin). This is an excerpt of my story, still in infant form. And since I'm in the middle of it, I have absolutely no perspective on its quality, but I wanted to put something out here, a crumb, a thought, a naughty word, a study in contrasts.

Tags: fiction, Eastern Shore, boyfriends

Measure one and a half cups of water. Bring it to the boil. Add a pinch of salt, a handful of dark currants, an overflowing quarter cup of old-fashioned oats. Stir. Mix in a tablespoon or two of ground flaxseed and several pinches of cinnamon depending on your comfort level (though be careful not to overdo it -- the dish will taste of nothing but cinnamon, will be dusty with it). Simmer five or six minutes. Serve with chopped toasted walnuts or pecans, maybe some apple chunks. Add milk if you wish.

Pour sugar into a small bowl. Add cinnamon until you are satisfied with the mix. Will the sugar be light, café au lait? Or will you keep pouring in the cinnamon until the sugar seems like a sweet afterthought? Toast bread (Sprouted California Style), spread with butter. Sprinkle generously with cinnamon sugar. Cut each piece into diagonal quarters. Present to the boy.

Warm olive oil in a large pan over medium heat. Sauté onions, garlic, ginger and a seeded hot pepper (chopped, minced, whatever fits your mood) until the vegetables give in. Add cinnamon (use a light touch), ground coriander, maybe cumin. Toss in a small can of tomatoes with juice or, if the season is right, a couple of cups of peeled and seeded fresh tomatoes. Cook, crushing the tomatoes with the back of a wooden spoon until all that remains is their saucy memory. Add a cup and a half or so of cooked chickpeas to the sauce to warm. Sprinkle with chopped cilantro, an enthusiastic squeeze of lime juice. Serve with brown rice and cooling raita.

Think about cinnamon and its antiseptic properties. Use it during times of illness – the stomach bug, the flu that lingers in the lungs. Return to the day after your mother's surgery. You walked to her house to make cinnamon toast. She didn't own a toaster, so you used the oven rack, burned your fingers pulling the bread from the heat. Her days of fertility were over, so you soothed her with cinnamon. Remember the heavy feeling of your own body, the baby growing, hidden, suppressed.

Remind yourself that food is comfort, is nourishment. If you cook the right dish at the right moment, you could still save her. You could save yourself.



Back to the Round Robin prompts. Today's prompt was "Cinnamon."

Image from Chai Pilgrimage.

Tags: Round Robin, writing prompt, cinnamon, recipes using cinnamon, cooking

Scenes from the PiL show at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco Saturday night (PiL is the post-Sex Pistols band of John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten). Think of this as a concert review that doesn't actually discuss the music. If you want a music review, click on the link above.

Getting in: Security pats husband down for weaponry, palpitates my purse for contraband. What are they after? Drugs? A small caliber handgun? All I have is my ID, a credit card, and phone. I remember the Devo show at this venue and worry that the theater will be full of tall drunk obnoxious young men who will fill the space with pot smoke. As it turns out the crowd is actually "a motley collection of old-school punk-rock fans, curious onlookers and balding Brits, most of whom seemed to be the 40-60 age group" (so says Jim Harrington of the Oakland Tribune. He's right.). There is very little pot smoke or drunkeness. Sometimes I can see past my fellow middle-aged music-lovers and catch a glimpse of the stage.

Inside: One man in front of us (fifty-ish, totally bald) has tattoos of eyes and a nose on the back of his head. His multiple neck folds complete the smile: :0)))) Another man (pressed jeans, sensible shoes, short hair and glasses) stares at a guy to our left (long curly hair, manskirt over pants, combat boots) as the skirted one sways, dances, and plays air-bass in between bowl hits.

Ladies' room: There are only three stalls. I am thankful that the 1400-person capacity venue is half-full and that most of the crowd is male. Still, I wait. I stare at the feet in the stalls. Stall number three: leopard print platform sneakers, red tights. Stall number two: black ballet flats. Stall number three: pointy-toed spike heels, sheer stockings. I am wearing black ankle boots and unfashionably wide-cut jeans.

Home again: We go to sleep after midnight. Nick the cat wakes us up on Sunday with his six a.m. cries of existential angst. Dress Me Monkey still fights and loses. The kid asks us what the monkey plans to do with the proceeds from the treasure that he has not yet been able to steal. Our answers run from building a potty made out of gold to buying and harnessing hundreds of tarantulas to pull Dress Me Monkey's chariot. Kid wants more.

And the week begins.





Image: John Lydon from an interview in the Guardian.
This is what you want . . . this is what you get is the title of both a PiL song and album.

Tags: PiL, John Lydon, PiL show at the Regency Ballroom in San Francisco, dress-me monkey, aging punks

I pedaled down to the river;
it wrinkled dark and green.
A kingfisher caught a fish like a silver comma
and flew into a sycamore tree.

-- Kevin Sheehan, excerpted from poem published in Slow Dancer (North American Edition), No. 29, Spring 1993. Full text here.

Where I'm from the water is vast. Salty. It's twisting miles of mucky rush, river bottom composed of leaves and mud. Children swim with sleek eels and glimmering fish, fight the pull of container ships in the channel. Traffic gets backed up on 50, on 213. Bridges fling cars over the C&D Canal, the Chesapeake Bay, the Bohemia River. Below, fishermen hook rockfish and net crabs.

We spent summer holidays at Ocean City, basted ourselves with tropical coconut oil before stretching out on blankets anchored to sand, begged Mom-mom for quarters for skeeball. Aunt Mildred, who wasn't really an aunt but some sort of foundling my grandmother's parents took in, had a trailer on Striker's Gut, a brackish strait that fed into the ocean. At least once every summer Bert, Lucy, and I looped chicken necks with string and dangled them in the water, a bushel basket waiting for our catch.

In college there was the house on Smith Island, 50 feet from the water. Kevin spent one foul humid summer building a gazebo and dock, my mother the sunburned helper. He'd grunt and hammer, a thin muscular man with an inexplicable pot belly which later revealed itself to be a sign of his swollen spleen, a symptom of myelofibrosis. When the dock was complete, I tethered a raft to the end of it, careful to keep my limbs out of the water where the jellyfish pulsated, ghosts with shaggy legs. At night, midges got through the screens and we yelped and growled, our hands throwing shadows by candlelight.

But most of my memories are of the Elk River, the walk down to the beach, tar staining the bottoms of my feet, the line of benches, somebody's grandparent always sitting there, cigarette shedding ash. Depending on the heat and the tide, I would either wade in until I couldn't stand the feel of the muck or dive and swim out to the raft. The houses were beach cottages built in the 1950s and '60s and the landscape rolled with cornfields and small tracts of woods. Everything was green or brown or white or black. My grandparent's house was cigarette smoke and mildew, creamy coffee, sawdust, the sound of the tractor cutting another swathe of grass.

I was Vi and Allen's granddaughter, willful, brown as a berry by September.



Image: Elk River, Hollywood Beach, Spring 2009 (picture taken on our trip to the East Coast last year).

Some of the names have been changed, some of the facts moved around.

Tags: Elk River, MD, grandmother, grandparents, Smith Island, crabbing, river water, Nostalgia

What I've been up to: writing, thinking, staring off into space, and fighting some epic sword battles with the boy. Yes, I am Dress-Me Monkey. It's all in the mask, but a weapon and some armor don't hurt.

More words here by the end of the week. Maybe even by tomorrow. And if Dress-Me Monkey is too much for you, consider the below:

Image, top: Dress-Me Monkey in full battle regalia, suited up and photographed by my husband.
Image, bottom: What Nora dog and I found on our dog walk yesterday morning.

Tags: dress-me monkey, swordfighting, half a dog, odd things one encounters on dog walks

“Five and dime stores, five and dime stores. Let me tell you, missy, there ain’t no more five and dime stores.”

Herbert’s eyes are bloodshot. They move from side to side, eluding mine. His lids are creased with age and a lifelong propensity for quick anger and I resist taking my towel and wiping away the dark line of spit caught in the island of stubble on his chin. He doesn’t smell like alcohol this morning but gives off the odor of rancid cinnamon buns, of too many days spent on the slats of a park bench.

“It’s ok, buddy,” I reassure, nudging him back to his cardboard perch outside The Caffeine Bean. “Just ignore the guy. Has he ever been here before? No. Will he be back? I don’t think so. Do you want a cup of coffee or not?”

The man who tipped Herbert over the edge is crossing Ninth Street. I knew from the moment that guy came into the Bean that he wasn’t from around here. His hair was too long, for one, and it was kind of greasy, flipped back behind his ears. It was very continental, although his accent was hard to place, as if he had been here long enough to sound almost native. He fumbled around in a large billfold like he didn’t know what a dollar was. Maybe he is unfamiliar with our coins. Maybe he’s just cheap. Wherever he comes from, they apparently don’t believe in cleaning up their newspapers or even folding them when they are finished. They don’t believe in tipping the help.

Herbert shuffles after Mr. Continental, waving his cup around, still ranting about five and dimes. Quarters from the cup flash onto the sidewalk and a little boy walking by lets go of his mother’s hand to catch a dollar bill as it floats to the ground. The man, halfway across the street now, pivots, smiles at Herbert with thin lips, then returns to the foot traffic, slamming into Amanda, one of our regulars, knocking her to the asphalt. Amanda’s lunch bag breaks free. The zombies that work in this neighborhood flow around her, flatten her sandwich, smash her bag of pretzels into salty dust. One of them punts her apple into the intersection. Mr. Continental picks up his pace.

“I am not surprised. I am not surprised at all!” Herbert shouts from the corner as Amanda, slightly dazed, props herself up. The light changes. Herbert jumps out in front of the one-way traffic and holds up his hand in the universal sign for stop, scampering sideways towards Amanda as cars start to honk.

The next thing I know, I’m tossing off my apron and rolling up my sleeves, dodging a clutch of suits on my way to stop Mr. Continental. Herbert is tugging on Amanda’s arm, pulling her up. He gives me a high five as I run past. “Get him, Jesse!” he barks. Mr. Continental is about thirty feet ahead of me, but I am gaining on him. I am sly and quick, with the soft step of a panther. By the time my breathing tips him off, I’m close enough to tackle him to the sidewalk.

And he’s light, too light, with hollow bird bones, no meat on them. His shirt is stained. His tie is a clip-on, decades out of date. The impact has jostled his false teeth loose and they shatter and scatter like pearls. The zombies pause, grumble at the conclusion to our sad dance.

I ask a woman in Earth shoes to call an ambulance.



Image by Rob Hill. The image was the prompt.

Today is the last day to submit a story for NPR's Three-Minute Fiction short story contest for short stories that have 600 words or less. This was my submission for the last round (which, obviously, wasn't selected or recognized as brilliant in any way). So far, my favorite story from this round is Mars: In the Beginning, by Angela Muhammad-Ali.

Tags: NPR Three-Minute Fiction, Round Three, writing prompt

The chamber smelled of menthol and burnt coffee. A visiting nurse had muffled the window with a wool blanket, one of Schaefer the late, great golden retriever’s favorite sleeping surfaces. Schaefer attended my mother even after his death, lent his doggy odor to the room, the memory of salt water and mud and vigor. In the corner, on a daybed, my mother reached for her book.

“You come up with the first sentence and go from there. Don’t think about it any more than that,” she told me as she looked over the tops of her reading glasses. Giving writing advice like she knew what she was talking about.

“It’s like I don’t know how to put one foot in front of the other," I replied, "like I’ve never learned how to walk, metaphorically speaking. And who am I to think I can tell a story? I should have taken up poetry.”

“Leave it to you to make poetry sound like the easy way out.”

She waved at me dismissively and returned to her biography of Virginia Woolf. I no longer recognized her hands. Sometimes I would find her staring at them, too, the swollen knuckles and liver spots, the transparent skin. We were both thinking: is this what life comes to? A brief period of expansion, of shining hair and growing strength followed by decades of shrinkage? Aging, the long great loss of looks and faculties, terrified me. Yet it was happening to me. Sometimes I thought I visited her for the contrast, for the feeling of her papery skin against my plumped cheek. I planned to off myself before I got to her age, to embody the cliché of living fast, dying (relatively) young, and leaving an attractive corpse. Except I could stand to lose forty pounds and I wasn’t sure that being a law-abiding reference librarian qualified as “living fast.”

My mother had already set up the scene. Her life had become this room, food and liquid ferried in by home health aides, a bedpan on stilts to hover over when the need arised. Twice a week Noelle gave her a sponge bath, wheeled in a basin of soapy warm water and scrubbed off the must. Some old people stop washing. It is no longer worth the effort, or maybe they don’t notice the stink. But Mother didn’t sweat. She didn’t do anything. Frequent scrubbing aggravated her sensitive skin and a daily splash of scent covered some of the rot.

She slept, briefly, book still poised in her hands. She was a talented napper, had always been able to squeeze in rest. Me, with my permanent eye-circles, my aching temples and nap frustrations, I wasn't so lucky.

Her eyelids heaved open. “I made a point of never lying to you.” Here we go again. “There were no myths about the Easter Bunny, about Santa. When you lost a tooth, we just handed over a quarter. There was no sneaking about.”

“But what about that night with Henry?”

“Oh, him.” She let out a woosh of air. “Henry was just a friend.”

This room used to be mine. The walls were semi-permeable, let the moods of the household flow in without flowing back out. Everything was pink, from the rug to the ceiling to the canopy on my bed. On the night in question, my father was away on business. It was early summer and a breeze tapped on the blinds. Max, our fat tabby, pressed himself between the slats and the screen in my window, staring at the shaking leaves. I was supposed to be asleep, lights out by nine for the nine-year-old. But the house was restless. She was restless. The doorbell rang at 9:15. Their conversation was unrelenting, words like waves, eating away at my calm, the low rumblings and crashes of talk. I smelled pipe smoke, candle wax, the clean burn of the gas fireplace. My head pounded. The mattress felt like it was resting on gravel. I waited in the dark, tossed and flipped until my sheet wrapped around me like a shroud. When I woke at 6:00 a.m., I found my mother on the couch, snoring under a thin blanket, two glasses sticky with liquor on the the coffee table.

I recorded the white lies, the outright fibs, the sins of omission, the cover-ups. All children do. I was just more canny about it. I remembered.

Henry showed up periodically for family dinners. He was tall and extremely thin and dressed in an early 70s professorial uniform, tweed jacket with arm patches, a pipe that probably contributed to his death from mouth cancer. He and my mother had met in a freshman philosophy class. I tried to picture them in 1959, fresh and young, earnest in their discussions of Nietzsche and Sartre, living the cliché of what it was to be aware and thinking in those fraught moments before the sixties, before her marriage to my father changed the game.

“So, you don’t tell a kid the story of Santa Claus and that makes you honest?”

I didn’t know why I continued these conversations.

“You know what mistake most writers make today?” Now we were back to writing.

“No, Mother. I don’t.”

“They make it too complicated. They toss too much into plot, subplot. Isn’t the reality of life enough?”

As she continued to speak, I buffered myself with lousy poetry, described and contained her in my mind.

My mother’s hands
no longer grasp
the glass of bourbon,
but instead
hold onto the memory
of things that never happened.

Totally false. She wasn’t a bourbon drinker and her memory is tight.

My mother no longer drinks coffee,
but inhales the smell
of water filtered through
roasted beans
left on the burner
until all that remains
is black sludge.

“Phoebe?”

I looked up.

“Have you heard anything I’ve been saying?”

I shook my head and excused myself from the coffin. The rest of the house was bright, every curtain open. I stepped into her old room, into the walk-in closet where my father’s clothes hung, carrying the scent of cigarettes with them. Outside it was a May Saturday haunted by ghosts of other May Saturdays, the hum of the mower and the over-green smell of freshly cut grass, the chaise lounge getting damp with my sweat. I traveled in nostalgia and every turn brought me back.

It was a curse, a narrative without ending or moral, just endless scenes and scents. I wished I could transform it into a story, into paragraphs, with twists and turns and a narrative arc, and if I failed at that, into poetry.

Henry died six years ago, alone.
When my mother and I cleaned his apartment
I found a box of photographs,
her naked in black and white,
and decades of her letters,
the last one a month before he died.

My mother used to tell me that I knew nothing about poetry, that my language was rich without structure, that I should keep a notebook of words and impressions. When it was full I was to toss it into the air, to watch the words fall and form themselves into a facsimile of truth.



Image: the dark room by ~Mongibello on deviantART.

I am trying to rid myself of the shoulds -- what I should be writing about, how I should structure my fiction. I have to let go of some ideas about length and structure and just accept the fact that I have themes that I am drawn to (family, guilt, the past as constantly present, the difficulty of connection, what it takes to be good, to be loyal, how we handle betrayal and the trampling of trust) and that borrowing from my life is ok and necessary at this point. There are risks in all of this, the most terrifying of which is the risk of writing lousy crap. But I'm hoping (and thinking) I usually write better than lousy crap. Serviceable writing is fine for now.

Oh, and this is a draft.

Tags: Mother daughter relationships (fiction), aging, writing, writing notebooks, anxieties over writing and sounding like an idiot

The sky is already darkening, the blue is slowly being blotted out by thick cotton batting, grey and getting greyer. I haven’t written much in the last two weeks and I don’t know where my head is, so I am writing to figure it out, waiting for the rain to fall again and for the words to flow.

In the midst of our trip to New Jersey to visit my father and stepmother (the long flights, the Christmas presents, the one-sided conversations), I realized that I was no longer angry with them. It’s an unfamiliar feeling, a kind of lightness or a shifting of a burden. Of course, this new feeling didn’t save me from the usual visit hangover, a subtle thwack to my equilibrium. My emotions always need time to settle after these visits, though I've gotten better at recognizing that over the years.

It is possible to let go of anger without shedding sadness and guilt and that's where I am today, a little sad and perpetually guilty, replaying conversations from the trip and wondering what to make of them, how to fit them into my new vantage. My stepmother told a story of a breakfast in Bryn Mawr when I was nine or so, a scene at the diner with gleaming chrome and murals of 1940s college scenes on the walls. Apparently I had cut into my waffle with too much force and my plate flew onto the floor. As it shattered, so I did I, started to cry while they tried to comfort me. I didn't remember a thing about it, but I do remember being constantly on edge during my visits with my father, on alert, my guard up. It took very little to shake up my practiced calm.

So what can you do? For the first nine years of my life, my father wasn’t always reliable. He was intermittently present (despite some rosy memories on my stepmother’s part; she’s an optimist and my father’s protector and she wasn't around then anyway). His child support payments were regular, his love was constant, though often from a distance. Everything else shifted around. And then, in adolescence, he failed me. They failed me. How can you tell someone that they can’t make up for the first nine years? Or that maybe they aren’t as safe as they think they are?

You don’t. So I won’t. All I can do is approach them warily, be mindful of the gaps in our experiences, acknowledge their efforts and their love, see how blind the compassionate can be and hope to keep my own sight.

But the guilt, the uncontainable guilt. It's about not being good enough, ever, then and now, and it carries over in ways that can be paralyzing. Once again I'm left with the idea that I still have a lot of work to do before I forgive myself. How do you let go of the feeling of being wrong-hearted from birth?

I have no idea how to go about it. I am open to ideas, though. Suggestions are welcome.





Image: My father, mother, and me, Easter 1971. I know that by writing this, putting it out there on the Internet, I take risks. So they might read it. If it would make a difference in what we talk about, wonderful. If not, well, at least they are reading. And I'm sure they have their own ideas about the past. Perhaps I've got it all wrong. Perhaps.

As for the song, it's going through my mind and feels appropriate in some way.

Tags: guilt, childhood, forgiveness, self-blame, love, parental guilt

I shouldn't have opened an IPA before five p.m.

I can hear a seagull screeching and the patter of rain against the deck, against the grass, against the faded IKEA play tent on its side in the backyard.

Sometimes I want to escape, but I don't know where I would escape to.

I've been wondering if the mailman is angry with me. This is code for something else. Maybe I'll write about it someday.

I've been thinking about turning off the comments in this blog. I'm thinking about starting a new blog. I'm thinking that if I keep on blogging, I'll never write anything of substance.

If I no longer belong to the East Coast and I haven't pledged my allegiance to the West Coast, where do I belong?

My fear of being invisible is coming to fruition.

No one can save me but myself and if I believe otherwise, I am delusional.

Lately I've been thinking that poetry, with its economy of words and strong imagery, would suit me.

And I keep on catching typos in this post, which means I have to make the changes, export the entire blog, and upload it all over again.

Tomorrow will be better, right?



Image: Neighbor cat on the fence.

Tags: blogging, Comments, Poetry, self-reliance, rain, I think the mailman is angry with me

The kid at Belvedere Castle in Central Park on a chilly (but not rainy) Wednesday.

Santas in the pantry at my father and stepmother's house, watching me as I hopped onto a neighbor's wireless connection at 3:00 in the morning (Eastern time) on Friday.

Me and the kid at the long-term parking at SFO, 10:00 a.m. (Pacific time) on Friday. The kid stayed awake through the entire flight, even after being up since essentially the middle of the night, even though he was also sick. As we reached our stop on the parking shuttle, his eyelids finally started to flutter and I staggered off with him flopped in my arms.

More words on Monday.

Tags: travel, Santa, sick kid, Belvedere Castle, Central Park