george says

Becuase I'm working hard to put food on my family.



I feel so much better knowing we didn't really elect him. Twice.

4 a.m.

Half-way through the night and half-way through a year. Half-way between 37 and 38. And just halfway between. It's 4 a.m. I've been here six months. Happy 1/2 year blogiversary to me.

The birds are already chirping

It's weeks, not even weeks - one week and change - after I leave my marriage this blog begins. The apartment reeks of gas and fresh paint. Boxes are stacked against the walls. Every thing is bare white. Every night is like this one, sleepless. All of my plants are withering, the African Violet down to just three leaves. I have no idea how I can do this, no idea how I can't.

If the jagged fragments were not preserved in white on black, I wouldn't remember a fucking thing. Amazing how quickly the brain dismembers pain. Three months pass between the day I say I'm going and the day the U-Haul's loaded. The days between all begin with a haiku on the bathroom mirror. Every single fucking day. My stomach twists up into itself, but I can't pull the post-it's down, They multiply on the glass until just a tiny space is left to catch my reflection. And it's six-months before that when I'm done. Jump 10,000 feet into the open sky to know that I can do anything. I can jump.

Today is long, one long day. I'm off and my girls read it. Truth is, I don't want to be a mom today. So inconveiniant to wake with stories in my head kicking to write themselves when these little people need tending. SO annoying. Everyone feels it. Josie fights with Amelia all day. What the hell was I thinking? Certainly not about the 15-hour days brushing hair, brushing teeth, changing diapers, changing socks, zipping jackets, wiping butts, making meals and snacks and piles of little folded clothes warm from the dryer. Not ever that my five-year-old could push so hard with words that I shove her out of the bed before I can stop my hands. Never. But I do tonight.

And I hate myself.

I'm ruining them. I think. Everything they knew, I've hammered into pieces.

Fifeteen-hours later, my mind mushy, muscles calcified, feels like a dried riverbed along my back, rocks digging out from the chair. On the computer, a slide-show of everything I've taken: Amelia and Josie barefoot smelling flowers in the big back yard, playing in the pillow fort in front of the picture window, curled up with Scott and me on the Loveseat. If it just could have been like the pictures and not so easy to mourn these visions of what never was. Some pictures speak a thousand words, 900 of them lies.

This slide show doesn't tell a thing about the anger in this grinning four-year-old. Doesn't show the day I'm called to pick her up early from school because she's had her hands around another kid's throat, hit and bitten the teacher. Laying in the bedtime dark she says the best part of the day was choking Steffen. I can feel the grin, sociopath rising. They don't show that and they don't show this child a year later, happy and easy in her skin, easy with her friends. Don't show how she walks away when she is pushed. For the first time in five years she has peace and turns it outward. You can't see any of those things in these pictures.

Bedtime tonight she has a plan to share. Walks fast tight circles, head tucked to right shoulder, talking rapid fire flow, her legs moving with her mouth.

"OK. We'll make baskets of flowers - paper flowers, I can cut them out - and we will leave them in front of everyone's door. Then we can ring the doorbell and hide. They'll think it was a trick, but then they'll find out it was a great surprise," she walking and talking and walking.

"Good plan," I agree. "I bet they will like that."

She paces and revises. "They'll have to know who the flowers are from. So I can cut out one paper flower and a long stem so it sticks out from the rest. And I can write Amelia and Josie so people will know it was us. Or, I could just write "the sisters." They would know right? Now, Do we know names for the people who live in three and four? We know Miles lives in two, that's just across the hall. So we know that. Maybe, oh, I know, I could cut out hearts and glue them on sticks to put in the basket and write our names on those. And we could fill the rest of the basket with real flowers, but not flowers we pick. We have to find them on the ground."

She breathes in and pauses for my nod.

"Ok. I'll do the hearts right now." She moves for the door, the art supply cupboard.

"Wait, wiat. That's a fantastic idea. Let's save it for tomorrow when you have more time for cutting hearts and flowers. Right now it's getting late. How about, pick out your book."

And it goes beautifully until it does not. Stories and songs and then Amelia on Josie's bed, taunting.

"Bad baby," she's hissing. "You are bad, Josie." On and on, ignoring the direction to go back to her own bed. A shove, Amelia on the floor, cries. Fuck. We work it out, Amelia and me. Agree we've both made some terrible choices tonight, vow to work harder, be kinder. I lay in one bed then another until I can pull two blankets to two sleeping chins. Kiss cheeks and foreheads and noses. Six months.

Out in the living room the ruins of a blanket fort cling to the futon. Barely the energy to lift my arms and drop the futon to my bed.

The African Violet is blooming on the table, a half-dozen fuscia flowers from a plant that needs re-potting. Thriving. It needs bigger space.

Six months out and six months in. Half-way.

dude, THERE'S my car

A few things I learned today:
1. Easy come, easy go. Easy come back.
2. In fact, no-one else wants my piece o’crap car (that runs beautifully and that I love); they thought they did but reconsidered 40 blocks later.
3. If your piece o’crap car is stolen, illegally parked and towed, you have to pay $206 to get it out of lock down.
4. Some thieves do have manners: I mean, they jammed the screw driver into my ignition so delicately I can still use the key in it. Nothing was stolen (well, except the car) AND they unearthed things from beneath the seat I’ve spent months searching for. Thanks guys!
5. Thieves have better manners than tow truck drivers. OK, already knew that but, geez, my car was stolen and you’re making me PAY for it, is it so hard to just be nice? And, I know there’s a huge effing ding in the front end, but really that is not permission to ram it into a dead RV and add another.

A few things I’m grateful for today.
1.I don’t have to deal with finding another car.
2.I don’t have to take two buses to get Amelia to school, two to get home, two more to pick her up and another two to get home.
3.I don’t have to schlep groceries on the bus.
4.After a very long day that began with very little sleep, I stood in a post office line for an hour to claim a package (that I assumed was for my kids). Surprise! Two dear old friends (a couple of my college roommates who I haven’t talked to in months) show up in my mail with a yummy Bath and Body Works care package.
5.Several people shared gifts during Jennifer’s February workshop. Each was special because it was something of its giver, and I loved them. Then, true to form – I lost half of it. The CD from Jess, gone (thanks for sending me another copy, Tracy.) The oil from Prema, gone. The stone heart from Monica, gone. I open the driver’s side door and there, on the floor, in the middle of crumpled paper pulled out of the glove box, is the heart. Long after my piece o’crap car has stalled and faded into a funny memory I’ll still have my heart. Priceless.

forest dreams (google earth part II)

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream
~Poe The first thing I remember is a dream. I'm three or four-years-old and I have this reoccurring dream where my best friend and I have found a secret key in my grandmother’s closet leading to an invisible door behind her nightstand. We get the key, climb behind the nightstand and a tiny door appears so small we have to crawl through it. I turn the key and crouch to duck my head under the frame, Hallie follows me. It opens to a diving board above my back yard so when we walk to the end we are over the middle of the yard. When we jump we are in the woods behind my house. Not a forest, just woods. The trees are thin enough to walk between without a trail and you can see the houses on my street and the next one over the whole way. We walk four or five houses up, still in the woods, and come to a swimming pool in small park. Swings, slide, merry-go-round and these horse swings, the whole place feels like magic. Enchanted. The first time we visit the playground it’s summer, the next time it’s fall, then winter, then spring. Maybe I dreamed it over and over, one journey after another, in the same night. Maybe it was every night for a week? I don’t know.

All I know is how real it felt. I stand at the foot of my sister's twin bed in the gray pre-dawn grabbing strands of orange and yellow shag carpet with my toes. I’m talking fast, excited, and she’s still sleepy eyes. If I’m four, she’s 14.

“It was a dream,” she tells me. “You went there in your sleep. There is no playground in the woods. There is no swimming pool in the woods. It didn't really happen”

There is no convincing me. I was there and I know what I know. I look to my other sister in the top bunk for back-up, but she never has my back. She's 12 and I drive her crazy, in return she terrorizes me. Leans down over the side of the top bunk in the dark and cackles like the Wicked Witch of the West.

"It's just a dream," she says. "Go back to bed."

My Grandma and uncle, my mom's younger brother, live with us in the house on Longhill Dr. They each have a room. My brother has a room. My parents have a room. My sisters and I share the biggest bedroom, which feels like living in a red and yellow shag carpeted stable with John Denver. My Mickey Mouse poster gets one tiny corner of real estate on the wall, the horses and John Denver's goofy grin dominate the rest. At two I can sing Point me in the direction of Albuquerque and everyone thinks it's hilarious that a two-year-old can say Albuquerque. At five I can do most of The Beatles catalog.

"It did happen. It is there. Hallie can tell you, I know she'll remember going."

I'm dressed and in the woods with Hallie by the time the sun is up. I'm asking her how far she thinks it is. She, of course, has no idea what I'm talking about but she goes along with me.

For years after I concede that it was just a dream I tramp through the woods looking for that park. We laugh at the dinner table about that dream I thought was real, how silly, and into college, on weekend visits I still occasionally rummage through my Grandma Rose's closet sure I will eventually find the key. It never surfaces. I never fully subscribe to the dream theory because its as vivid as anything in my memory. The view across the yards from the diving board. The snow frosting the playground and pool.

So, I'm using Google Earth the other night to float over my childhood and there in the woods, exactly where it should be, should always have been, right in the place I could never find it: a bright blue spot that could only be a swimming pool.

dude, where's my car

Nothing left to do but smile, smile, smile
~Robert Hunter

A few things I learned today: 
1. Easy come, easy go. 
2. In fact, someone (besides me) would want my piece o’crap car (that ran beautifully and that I LOVED.)
3. Someone (besides me) would want my 18-year-old piece o’crap car, despite smashed-up front end and broken driver’s side lock. 
4. In fact, many people (besides me) want my car. The ’89 Toyota Camry is the most stolen car in America (I know? I couldn’t believe it either.) 
5. Thieves have no manners. I mean, come on, you couldn’t leave the car seats and sweet Giant, Aluminum, powder pink tricycle on the sidewalk before taking it? 
6. My key, the one that now leads to a bare patch of pavement, will work in almost any late 80s Camry or Corolla if I dull the teeth with a file. (Thanks for the handy tip Officer Doug! - if mine doesn’t turn up I can go grab another.) 

A few things I'm grateful for today:
1. I went out to the car to get my computer yesterday.
2. I went out to the car to get my briefcase yesterday.
3. I went out to the car to get my purse yesterday.
4. I can always count on sage words from my mom. "OH HOLLY. Auchhhh. STOLEN? Auuchhh. What do you mean stolen? It wasn't there? Did you call the police?"
5. Tri-Met.

ocean dreams

My new favorite obsession: Google Earth. Type in an address and - oh, I so love technology - presto, there's a satellite view that zooms in until the rooftop blurs, zooms out until the place is lost, just an arrow on the globe.

I'm so lazy I can't bother with the free download - googeling the address gets me just where I want to be - miles above my old neighborhood, looking down on the woods that surrounded my childhood.

Check it out. (click the satellite button on the map, couldn't figure out how to direct link it.)

My parents spent 27 years in that house, brought me home from the hospital to it and didn't move until I was a couple years out of college. (I haven't lived in one place for longer than three years since I left at 18.) Every inch of those woods was my playground, every curve in the trees my growth. My two favorites - the apple trees at the back edge of the yard, are gone. Before these streets became a cookie-cutter, middle-class subdivision, they were graceful orchards sewn by Johnny Appleseed. Every yard had at least one huge grandmother of an apple tree.

There's no way any of them could still be standing. Funny, even knowing those trees didn't have long, I cry for the vanished sentinels of my past. All the summers dreaming in my crow's nest, my castle, my refuge. Me and the little green apples. Winter's trekking through the woods, ice skates over shoulders, shovel in hand, to Twin Pond. Or, when we were really motivated, all the way to Hetzel's Pond where we could skate out to the island.

My friend Michelle, out in Vermont now, was the last house on the street. Right up against the best part of the woods.

Google carries me from the couch across years and miles until I'm squarely above it. So clear how the wind rushes cold against my face coasting the hill into the Elk's parking lot, late for swim team practice. My green banana-seat Schwinn is steady flying, arms to the sky, ready to lift off. I feel. Thirty-years gone and I feel it, smell the chlorine. All skinny limbs, tan and covered in welts; equal parts Ohio mud and scabbed-mosquito bites.

I zoom in and go street to street along the pavement and the paths for hours, following faded footsteps to long forgotten treasures: the German Sheppard puppy I brought home (and who's owner called to claim him hours after my mom caved to the begging, said I could keep him); the ice-caves carved in snow banks during the Great Blizzard of '78 (so high I could walk through them upright); Eastgate Pharmacy and pockets stuffed with penny candy (bought with change shaken from the United Jewish Federation charity box on the kitchen counter. If you slipped a knife in and jiggled it just right, quarters slid down the blade - NOT proud of this.)

Street to street until I am asleep on the couch without making it into a bed. Crashed in my clothes, the comfort of a favorite blanket, I dream of the ocean. Me on the shore, turbulent water coming wave and wave and wave. They break from every direction, smashing one swell into another. We're watching the water, me and a handful of people I don't see but know are there. It's a lifeguard training where we will swim cross-current, parallel to the beach, in the roughest part of the water. But, I'm not training to be a lifeguard.

"I'm not going to be a lifeguard," I tell someone who isn't there. "I'm just swimming the rip-tide to build strength."

I wake into daylight, Longhill Dr. still on the screen. Follow the roads to Packard Park, where I did lifeguard, and the pool is gone. It's just the guardhouse, locker rooms and a flat expanse of grass.

Survey Says

Ok. Of course I know that this blog is a public space with the content avaiable for anyone who stumbles in. Still, it really bugs me that Clustermaps generates ads related to content. Does anyone else out there find this borederline creepy?