Jumping In

2009-04-18T00:46:00.000-07:00

old friend, old friend.

back here in the middle
of the night searching
for my wayward voice, where have I been.
hid down slim in the crevaces, listening
for some old train whistle wisdom to call me home.

my new home, city view
down the street.
crickets and quiet and my girls
asleep, stacked in bunkbeds in the next room.
stuffed animals and all the blankets they need
dragged from two houses
here
into this one.
Home.

Home.

I don't know.

flowers blooming beautiful
all around my yard in yellow deception.
spring vision.
still,i can't see.
they have no scent and their beauty
comes and goes and leaves those wilted miracles
rotten in the grass.

And I don't know.

Why we think
one new spring is as ever as fresh as the last,
the circle we follow looking for what wasn't.
bright. our memory,
reworked colors we retouch.

outside, the backyard now
smoke my smokes between the cement and the midnight sky.
let the taste go stale in my mouth and wonder
to the constellations
where i went.

that old bathroom window and
the street lights long and yellow across the trees.
shadows on the lawn.

and i don't know.

my words and the April daffodils all wilted down together.

wicked

2008-05-30T22:59:00.001-07:00

No person, real or fictional, no monster, goblin or republican president has ever terrified me like the Wicked Witch of the West. All my fears come through that green skin. Her cackling face in Dorothy's crystal ball.

I don't even have to see her. Just the thought, just a snip of Judy Garland singing over the rainbow, a flash of any part of that film sends a feeling down my back. Like something close behind crouching down to get me. I'm not making this up. At six, Amelia still hasn't seen the movie. I won't let her.

Wicked - the book that gave the witch a name, Elphaba; and a story, the misunderstood, altruistic green girl who slowly goes crazy fighting the good fight and believes she's a witch - was the cheapest, quickest, most effective therapy I've ever had. I get her now.

The book starts before Elphaba's birth and ends with a different perspective of the movie. It details Ozian politics and twists things around until you can see evil isn't evil and good isn't good. We are all both. She's not who you think she is.

Wicked, the musical, blurs it even more, in a gorgeous watered-down, Broadway, kind of way. In the end Elphaba, the wicked witch of the west, the only person who's ever scared me more than me, sings my song.

Fly on, girl!

birdsong

2008-04-29T05:02:00.001-07:00

The clock said 3:33 and it made me move. Half of something. Too late or too early, I don't know. Too much of everything undone around me, but I knew I wasn't going to get anything done. Not any kind of work. Not at this hour anymore. It's not in me right now.

That middle of the night kind of urgency isn't in me now. A passing something. But I got up anyway, told myself I had two hours, three hours to write something, anything, for work I could call done.

But, I didn't. It's the same something I didn't write last week and maybe won't write this week and maybe won't write at all, until I'm eating dog food. Or until I can't afford kibble. Anyway, I can't stomach the smell of dog food, smells like dog food.

Now it's 5:07. My left shoulder's tight. My eye's burn a little at the inside corners and the birds are chirping. But just one. One bird is singing her early morning song and there's a quiet surrounding the notes. Long train whistle blowing hollow, far off to somewhere. A car door and the wind wake of passing traffic.

It's too early to go back to bed, too late to smoke a bowl. Almost daybreak. I'm just sitting here doing the best I can.

The path to abundance. Acceptance. Because slow and erratic, inconsistent, that's just how I am. My head. I'm doing the best I can. It comes and goes. Like it's always come and gone.

Girls are sleep in the bedroom, whole nights through these days. Me, too. Mostly. But now it's 5:15 A.M. That lone bird is calling softer.

Wonder if she's thinking about crawling back into the nest, for just another hour of quiet before the day comes.

good morning gratitude

2008-04-24T06:04:00.001-07:00

Yesterday at the ACME gym-mart I was working sweat to the surface on the elliptical and trying to focus on one of the 437 TVs suspended from the ceiling. My eyes go nuts in that room with all the machines and mirrors and people in motion competing for my attention, but finally I settled on CNN, plugged in the head phones and steadied myself on election news.

Put all my focus on Obama. Tried to block out the smell one machine over, like halatosis all over his body. I ran harder, CNN shifted stories. The high price of gas and skyrocketing grocery bills. How it's not just fuel, but commodity traders I can thank for dropping $78 on two bags at Trader Joes. And, oh poor me, because I can't pay my bills and I can barely afford food and how can I feel abundant when buying pillow cases for J & A's school plays triggers panic? Blah, blah, blah, blaghty, blah.

Then my old friend gratitude came home.

And, I remembered.

To be thankful.

Because, guess what.

I'm working out for free. My friend Adam GAVE me two remaining years on his three year gym membership because he wasn't using it. Didn't want it to go to waste. Thanks, Adam.

I've been freaking out over how to pay for Amelia's vision therapy, thousands I don't have and insurance says fuck you about. My brother and his partner offered to cover all of it. Thanks Lou and Tom, just typing that brings tears.

I'm driving a car my friend because my friends Karin and Ben GAVE me one. Thanks, Karin and Ben.

When I moved into this apartment, my friend Heidi did up A & J's beds with matching sheets and blankets. Then she took me shopping to set up my kitchen. Thanks, Heidi.

My cousins in Phoenix have been giving me $50 round trip flight vouchers for years so I can get down to the desert and see my family. Thanks, cousins.

My parents pay for the vouchers and contribute $100 a month toward A & J's tuition, and much to much more to list. Thanks, Mom and Dad.

In the past year my family and friends have a contributed a combined thousands in cash money to keep me going, most of it unsolicited and some of it from people I'd never met or barely knew. You know who you are, thank you!

My eyes get overwhelmed with images, sometimes they forget to see there's a whole big wide open sky above me and solid ground here just beneath my feet.

photo: Joy Dutta

2008-03-04T00:17:00.000-08:00

Lookie here. I have a blog. Huh? I'm sorry, brain fog. I'm supposed to do what with this thing, write stuff. Hmm. Got no stuff to write. Got no words. Got nothin.

Got a few quarters in a glass pyrex bowl on the table, stiff in my neck and hurt in my head.

Got flowers dead in the vase and laundry on the floor.

Got snores from the bedroom and burn in my eyes.

Got my bare feet propped on the file case. Prop.

Got cat walk bridge dreams hanging on by a cloth. Got unopened bills and unopened thoughts.

Got dishes in the sink and play-doh on the wall.

Got two asleep.

Got to.

Got to got to got to got to got.

Got to keep on.

Going.

*Image courtesy of: http://www.nrl.navy.mil/NewsRoom/images/clem.jpg

story of my day

2008-01-29T12:13:00.000-08:00

Josie comes out of the bathroom, blond curls looking like Einstein on a bad hair day. Can't really even call what was happening on her head curls.

One hand is palm to the ceiling, the other a tight little fist trailing toilet paper.

Her purple flowered pants are at her ankles, yellow and white stripped skivies sticking out above the band. She comes foot and foot into the living, walking shackled like she's on the chain gain.

Looks her blue eyes at me and says, no orders, she orders.

"Mom. Wipe my butt."

I see patterns, too

2008-01-26T10:52:00.000-08:00

I meant to blog part two of I See Patterns the day after part one was posted. But I got busy, and my girls got sick and then I got sick, so here we are now a couple weeks later and I’m just getting to it.

Usually when my car is stolen the recovery time is three to five days. By recovery I mean, found by Portland’s finest and towed to an impound lot from which it costs me about $150 to claim.

Usually during those three to five days, I schlep my kids back and forth to school on the bus, buses, while I await word on how much it will cost to bail my car out of lock down. Then I look up and thank the gods I live in a democratic society that taxes crime victims for being robbed. My country tis of thee.

But, like I said before, usually I find the empty space and this time, this time nothing went the way it usually does.

Scott discovered the empty space, drove street by street in some valiant needle-in-a-haystack search for the car, checked the places it's been abandoned before, didn’t find it. We drove the girls to school, I took him to a bus stop and he left me with his car for the day.

Lunchtime I pick Josie up, meet Prema and River at Cup and Saucer. Two little girls playing horses on the table, under the table, across the table. Prema and me breaking it down.

I tell her the last two times my car has been stolen I’ve had the exact same thought the night before. Thought my life is getting too easy, too comfortable. I don’t think I really want chaos all the time, but when my life gets easy, when I’m not right there on the edge, my writing isn’t nearly as good. All my best stuff comes from the intensity of struggle and I’m afraid if my life settles down I won’t be able to write anything worthwhile.

I think that and Bam. There goes my car. And, you know what, it does take me out to a place where the writing soars. Only problem is It’s not practical to sustain struggle. It wears me thin, makes me crazy.

She says yeah, the work is how to stay that present without being driven to the edge.

I don’t need it. I tell this to the universe, really I don’t want all animosity all the time.

The girls are more under the table than at it when we decide it’s time to remove them.

I just drive. Josie sleeps. Turn and zag and straight-away without thought, let the car take a route without pre-meditation. See if it will lead to my car.

Portland gray, all around raining and I just go until I’m raining too. Tears down my cheeks, little splatters on my hands, on the wheel.

Pull into parallel in front of my apartment. Not enough time to wake Josie and take her inside before heading back out to get Amelia, not enough left in me to drive aimless looking. I just sit. Head on my hands, on the wheel. Tears on everything.
Really, truly, I say, I don’t want more chaos. I can learn to be present in balance.

When the phone rings, I know who it is. Just know before opening to the call.

The voice says she’s found my car. 76th and Morrison. Can I come get it?

And I can’t. I have to be at Amelia’s school.

She can have it towed for me if I want?

NO. Please. NO.

"I can clear it out of the system and leave it for you, but then it won’t be listed as stolen and it could be taken again."

Its OK, I say, It will be there.

It always comes back to me.

i see patterns

2008-01-13T17:29:00.000-08:00

Usually when my car is stolen I find out standing in the parking lot. Who the fuck starts a sentence usually when my car gets stolen? Like, usually when I grocery shop, usually when I pick-up the girls from school, usually when I pay bills. Actually, Usually my car is stolen more frequently than I sit down to pay bills.

Usually it starts with me in the parking lot, purple morning streaked skies, Josie on my hip, lunches stacked under my arm, backpack on the shoulder above the hip that does not hold Josie. We are late for school. There’s a key to nothing sticking out of my left hand and empty space above gray concrete where my car isn’t.

It usually starts just about like that.

7:15 Tuesday morning. There’s Scott in my door and I open it to let him in.

“Please,” he said, one foot in “Please tell me you didn’t park in the lot last night.”

He’s holding a tote bag with evenly spaced red and green and blue little footprints. It hangs down beside his leg. Reason for the stop, it has a book of Amelia's that's due back at school. I See Patterns. The book is called I See Patterns.

I see patterns, too.

north central pacific gyre

2008-01-04T05:29:00.000-08:00

It's 5:28, do you know where your used plastic is? Let me tell you. If it wasn't recycled and didn't make it to the landfill, chances are it's swirling around a ginormous ocean vortex A floating trash heap twice the size of Texas. This is where every stray piece of anything quietly dropped into a sewer lands, anything dropped into a river, stream or over the rail of a boat. About 10 million tons floating in the sea breaking down into tiny bit sized pieces. The fish eat it, and then so do you.

happy birthday prema

2008-01-03T13:39:00.000-08:00

Happy Happy birthday to my lovely friend, Prema at RiversGrace.

Your friendship, vision, wisdom have been a blessing and a light in my life.

Love to you!

new do

2007-12-26T19:08:00.000-08:00

The number one thing you don't want to hear from your child, or anyone else for that matter, after getting that new hair cut.

Josie climbs into my lap, her small hands on both of my shoulders. She pushes up to a stand, one barefoot on each of my thighs, and looks down at the top of my head.

I've just come home from a hair cut that opened with me telling the woman with the scissors. "I don't have a real vision of what I want it to look like when you're done. I want something kind of funky, just not too short or too big. Just do whatever you think will look cool."

Josie sizes up the results, looks her blue eyes right into mine, keeps her mouth a straight line of expressionlessness. "Mom," she says. "Your hair looks funny."

"Oh," I say. "Well, what do you mean by funny? Funny how? Funny like, not good or funny like you LOVE it."

"Ma-awm," she says. "You look like grandma."

Anyone want a three-year-old?

half a poem

2007-12-21T17:30:00.000-08:00

The way marked with borrowed petals
Pulled from Trilium, three white clues
Call out the spring, forward
Forward
She follows deep along the path to
Light, miraculous circles sneaking
Seeking softly through small spaces
Opening dense growth, up, around
Holding particles of dust as truth
She follows
Deep into the center – half way
Fern climbing Fir dripping moss
Green cat tail dreams
Halfway and that much more
The journey out, the journey in
Call

2007-12-20T21:37:00.000-08:00

Ok, I'm not going to be the one to deal Carrie a chimp. She roared me, which I think means I get to share three things I think make great writing.

1. VOICE, voice and more voice. My teacher says the story IS the voice. Hear, hear. If the narrator has an interesting way of saying it, that's my siren song. I will follow that voice anywhere.I could read hundreds of pages of nothing, just for the pleasure of how it sounds. I used to have this box set of Kerouac readings. At the end of one there's a conversation among three or four people. Someone asks "What's more important, the idea or the prose?" Kerouac says. "Ideas a come a dime a dozen, It's the prose."

2. Story - I don't really want to read 400 pages of nothing just for the sound. And, I think there has to be a sound idea behind the prose, or what's the point. Tell me a good story, challenge the way I think, take me to a place I could never go without you. And surprise me, who wants to know the end with 200 pages left.

3. Truth. Without it why bother.

I roar:
Tracy
Jerri
Michelle O'Neil
Terry
Kario

*I want to Roar Jen Johnson, but she doesn't have a blog to post her answer.

x-mas at our house: part 3

2007-12-19T10:41:00.000-08:00

x-mas at our house: part 2

2007-12-18T13:20:00.000-08:00

Hanukkah in a box arrives a few days post holiday from my brother. I'm holding the package, Amelia and Josie are grabbing with both hands.

Inside, mixed up in the packing peanuts, is a trail of Lou and Tom's last couple months. B is for Buckeye alphabet book from their football weekend in Columbus. Mexico T-shirts from their week in Cuernavaca. And, of course, the Hanukkah lute.

For the festival of lights its two little matching bear outfits: Happy Hanukkah T-shits and blue boxers with menorahs, dreidels and stars of David. And, two Build A Bear gift cards so each girl can stuff an animal to dress in the outfits.

Josie reaches her hand into the box, closes a fist around a half dozen peanuts, pulls them out and laughs as they rain onto the carpet. "I like these," she says. "I like to do this," she takes a peanut in one hand, pinches out a tiny chunk between her thumb and first finger. Another pinch and another until one peanut is 13 peanut bits on the floor.

"I like that," she says. "I want to keep doing that."

Amelia pulls the Hanukkah shirt onto Vanilla, her already built build a bear, and slides her into the boxers one purple leg at a time. Happy Hanukkah.

"Mom," she says. "Can we go to this week. I really need to go to Build A Bear this week."

I ask if it has to be this week. Tell her the malls will be crazy busy and I'd rather wait until after the holiday when things quiet down.

"Mom," she says. "Please can we go this week. I need to go before Christmas so I can get my new Hanukkah bear the Santa outfit."

x-mas at our house: part 1

2007-12-17T17:26:00.000-08:00

Josie and Amelia are on the couch, side by side, legs straight out so Amelia's feet hang just over the edge and Josie's stop about a foot short. They're snuggled close in, Josie leaning into Amelia, Amelia's right arm over Josie's shoulder, around her chest.

Both girls lean forward, Amelia's hair hanging soft brown over her cheeks. They've the got the holiday book. For me, another piece of junk mail. For them rapture. It's 99 percent Christmas and a page or two of Chunukah. Amelia holds it in front of them.

Josie's eyes go to big round blue, same shape her little mouth makes. "Amma, look at the baby in the nest."

The page shows every reason I celebrate that this is not my holiday. Fifteen-foot inflatable nativity scene. Baby Jesus on the blow up hay.

Amelia straightens her back, head up so the hair falls back to her shoulders. Slow turns her head to Josie with the look of a teacher, tight faced and trying hard to stay patient.

"Josie," she says. She says it slow and serious the way you talk to someone who obviously will not understand. "That's Baby Jesus and his Christ family. And that is his Jesus Christ nest."

"Aaaaa ma" Josie says. She laughs and slips out of Amelia's hold. "It's just a baby nest."

echo

2007-12-12T06:03:00.000-08:00

hello out there.
out there.
there.
there.

helloooooo?
hellooooo.
oooooo.
oooo.

Me, shouting into the empty echo of this silent space. Trying to shake the quiet from the air. Here I am.
I am.
Am.

And I've missed you all in the busy months of fending for myself. Fending for my self being working as a freelance writer, paying my rent and watching the unopened bills overflow my little wicker in box. But, good news. You can't ruin bad credit. When the collectors call, I say "If you're not nice to me, I'm moving you to the back of the line. And it's a long line."

It's coming together. More everyday. Better balance. New paid blogging gig. Paid blogging is just like getting free money. And, even better, I do it under pen name. Free money to be me posing as someone else in a place no one knows about. This writing thing is finally echoing back to me.

All this good going on, so tell me, why is it I want to crawl into bed, pull the covers up over and sleep the day away?

seven things you don't know about me

2007-11-28T16:13:00.000-08:00

Kario tagged me to share seven things you don't know about me. Here goes.

1. I'm (mostly) ambidextrous. I can only write with my left. I can only use sissors with my right. Most other things I can do with either/both.

2. I was the kid who ate glue.

3. I tried to hold myself back a grade to repeat fifth grade. My parents started me a year early. All my friends were a grade behind me. The summer between fifth and sixth my school merged with two others. I figured, with so many new kids, I could repeat a grade without many people noticing. No stigma. A week before school started the principal called me to a meeting where he convinced me to start sixth grade and "if you're unhappy, then you can go back to fifth." Yeah, right. Like no-one would notice that. And, you know what. I was right. Would have been way better off in my right grade.

4. I can pick up things with my toes.

5. I can wink my left eye, but not my right.

6. As a kid I had such an intense phobia of anything related to death, I had to close my eyes when we drove past a cemetery.

7. I wanted to go out for the football team in 7th grade, but my parents wouldn't let me.

i ching, therefore i am

2007-11-25T10:31:00.000-08:00

About synchronicity. The more I think about it, the more I see it’s just what I see. The way things will happen as they happen and synchronicity is all interpretation. The story we tell ourselves. The way the same cloud is a dragon to one person and bouquet of feathers to another. The way we don’t see what is actually there, because what is there shape shifts to fit our narrative. What’s meaningful rises to the top. How when we know ourselves, our directions, our paths, we see affirmation everywhere. Hear our stories from every wind song blown.

I play I Ching with books – Women Who Run With The Wolves, Black Elk Speaks, Charlotte’s Web and sometimes whatever I pull from the shelf. I play the same way every time – hold the book in my right hand flat beneath it. Run my left thumb bottom to top up the pages on the lower right corner. One, two, three times. On the third pass I cut the book like cards, slide my thumb in, open and read the paragraph it lands on.

And, Oh yeah, first I ask my question. Ask and play.

It works like this.

Question: What am I doing with my marriage, what do I need to know.
Book: Women Who Run With the Wolves.
Answer: Page 257, Third full graf:
You see, there is something on the wild soul that will not let us subsist forever of piecemeal intake. Because, in actuality it is impossible for the woman who strives for consciousness to sneak little sniffs of good air and then to be content with no more. …. Though you might try to get by on just a little air or no air at all, some big fist bellows takes over, something fierce and demanding that makes you eventually shovel the air in as fast as you can. You gulp it, bite it down until you are breathing fully again.

Question: What do I need to know about writing, right now?
Book: Women who run with the wolves.
Answer: Page 155, second full graf:
If it is love we are making, even though we are apprehensive or frightened, we are willing to untangle the bones of the Death nature. We are willing to see how it all goes together. We are willing to touch the not-beautiful in another, and in ourselves. Behind this challenge is a cunning test from the Self. It is found even more clearly in tales where the beautiful appears ugly in order to test someone’s character.

Question: What do I most need to learn from this book?
Book: Creating Money
Answer: Chapter Nine, Title Page.
Chapter Title: Coming out of Survival. (enough said)

Question (asked in March): What do I need to know about writing, right now. How do I find direction?
Book: Writer’s I-Ching (me flipping through it in a book store)
Answer: Chapter Title (don’t remember the Chapter number)
Chapter Title: Write Dangerously
*note – next day, cleaning out my brief case, I open an old reporter’s notebook. There’s a Post It stuck to the back inside cover. Haven’t seen that note in five months. That note, it’s just a couple lines, it says: Dangerous Writers. Below that: Tom Spanbauer. Below that his phone number.

See, see what I mean? That Universe, it just has no subtlety.

two things

2007-10-27T01:46:00.000-07:00

The front of the card says "Faith is believing that one of two things will happen,"
SHE SAID. "That there will be something solid For you to stand on
-- Or that you will be taught to fly."

My mind catches first on the sound of the words and how she said changes the rhythm changes the sentence. Changes the resonance. How SHE SAID is brilliant because She Said Makes this:

Faith is believing that one of two things will happen.
That there will be something solid for you to stand on
- Or that you will be taught to Fly.

Hallmark card into

This:

Faith is believing that on of two things will happen.
SHE SAID.
That there will be something solid to stand on -
Or that you will be taught to fly.

She said has that little roll of an up down wave with the water breaking on you will be taught to fly. I read it three, fours times listen to the sound of every word hitting the next. I'm a nerd like that.

I go to the meaning that faith is knowing you will be ok. And my mind takes it apart. Beleiving one of two things will happen. Something solid to stand or be taught to fly. Standing or Flying?

Ripped up that way I read a choice in it. Stand or Fly? For two days I pick the card off the bookshelf and read it as a question. Ask, ask, ask myself. Which one would I chose? The Ground or the Sky.

I look up to remember clouds know all the answers.
Like tea leaves and old gypsy women.
and I think, me, I'll take the sky.

Blogiversary

2007-10-25T20:02:00.000-07:00

It's my 1st blogiversary. Thanks, y'all, for making this trip around the sun with me. For holding the rope tight while I climbed. To see where this journey started jump into the wayback machine with me and travel to the first post.

All love. All ways. Always.
h

38

2007-10-24T06:36:00.000-07:00

Thirty-Eight starts off with my brain scattered like it is every school morning and me a little sad about letting go of 37. Not because the numbers are getting bigger. I'm ok with that and happy, really, that every year I seem to "get it" a little more. I wouldn't be 20 again for anything. Not unless I could take the wisdom of 38 with me, and then I wouldn't really be 20 anyway. I'd just have a younger body.

But I don't want to say goodbye to 37. Hardest, most amazing year of my life. Power year. And I'm terrified that what goes up must come down. And down, I know all about down.

Tuesday morning I drop the kids at school. I have 15 minutes to make the 25 minute drive south to Washington square mall for a 9 a.m. interview. My passengers are daisies dyed bright blues and greens and yellower yellows than they grew themselves, a glass bottle of bath salts,lavender massage oil, birthday balloon that keeps floating into my vision, box of 12 peeps ghosts and a bottle of Odwalla, Mango Tango.

Scott's been there. He's loaded my car up with goodies for every occasion in the last year. Even when I was barely speaking to him, saying only what I needed to parent together, and the gesture just pissed me off more.

Valentines day it was the first picture taken of us, 23 and looking just like kids. Leaning into each other on a picnic table.

38. I'm running late for this interview and what harm will eating one sugary peep do me? But I can't eat just one. I've eaten three by Washington Square.

Ten o'clock my brain remembers something. Jess is picking Josie up from school at 10:30 and I haven't left a car seat. The stroller moms are circled outside of Sears, babies now bored with the workout and tossing cheerios out their strollers.

In any other interview I would be mortified by what I'm about to say: "I need to go back to Portland. Right Now. I just realized I didn't leave a car seat at pre-school for my 3-year-old to be picked up. I'll have to take your number and call you later."

Any other setting it would betray my secret, incompetence.

Here, I'm just one the girls. Points for me. "Oh my god," they say, line up to give me phone numbers. "You go right now. Go, hurry. You can make it by 10:30. We can talk later." Your one of us they smile. We get you.

Half hour is no problem getting back before school lets out. The phone is ringing happy birthdays and I'm chatting it up. Tell my friend I hope this morning is not a sign of the year to come.

But wait, she says, it all good things. Maybe it means you will remember things before it's to late to fix them and you will be surrounded by people who totally understand you.

That's good, I say, I'll take that. Thanks, you just totally shifted my day. Bite the head off another sugar ghost and drive the highway back while we catch up the last few week

Drive and talk, talk and drive until Jess rings in.

Yeah I say, I'm on my way. I'm at exit. Oh my god, Jess. Shit. I'm going south. I'm half way to Salem. Shit. Okay, I'm turning here. Champoeg. Um. I'll call you when I get back to Portland. Shove a whole peeps ghost in my mouth. Sugar.

How do we put a positive spin on that, my friend says, when call her back.

Beautiful day for a drive I say. Summer blue sky, gorgeous fire leaves. I'm having good conversations. Peeps. I suck the sugar of another, half dozen now, and let the marshmallow dissolve in my mouth.

I've eaten nine peeps when I get back to josie's school.

Josie gets out of I Jess's car. Mama she says. We went to the book store and got you a present.

Thanks. I Kiss her forehead. I say I think that was supposed to be your secret.

But. She squeezes her eyes together. We got you a happy birthday present.

Later she says. I don't like you mama. I'm going to the mommy store and getting a new mommy. Next time I'm a born baby I'm picking a different mommy.

Ok, I say. Because what else do you say to that.

Prema and Jess and me, we are cackling at the giant sushi. At how table by table by table everyone in our diner row takes a picture of the platter before they eat.

Scott's at my house on daddy patrol with the girls. Birthday favor.

Hot saki, plum wine, red wine around the table.

You know what I learned today I ask and I don't wait for the answer. I learned the phrase sugar buzz is not just a phrase. If you eat nine sugar peeps you actually feel high. Not hyper. Not giddy. Stoned. From sugar.

That's a lot of sugar.

We talk about another drink somewhere.

I hedge. Saki warm all over my insides.

Um, I say. I have to get up early tomorrow. Pause. And there's a bottle of massage oil.

38.

If the first day of 38, Tuesday, Oct. 23, is a sign of the year to come. I'll take it.

new toothbrush

2007-10-17T05:55:00.000-07:00

Six a.m. comes 10, 11 hours into sleep. Same spot my body laid for just a few minutes to rest up then watch Weeds big on the living room wall with him. But I don't move. There was the moment of debate around 10, should I go home. I just take my contacts out of the itch, my eyes. Squint them into the red clock numbers and let my back sink into the soft stretch of of pillow top. My legs and neck and shoulders remember comfort.

My head holds remnants of a dream.

It's this thing I wrote for my teacher's teacher but the dream isn't about kissing or even about writing about kissing. My hands open an envelope from The Journal. A flash writing contest. I'm sure the letter says thanks for entering but ... but I'm not sure because I don't all the way look at the letter. Or if I do I don't remember the outcome.

Squint red into the numbers again, 6:04, and my legs know they should get out of this bed, out of this house before his kids wake up. My body, center of me, knows somethings else. And anyway, they're not his kids, they're my kids. But they're not my kids, they're our kids.

If you hear that same sweet song again will you know why? Anyone who sings a tune so sweet is passing by.

Let my body win. Sink back down in it with him. And, I'm ok. No chest clench panic, the way it answered a couple weeks back when I tried sleeping in my bed. Next to my night stand, clock. My bed. My nightstand. My. Breath. Breathe. I can breathe.

6:43. I say I have to go right now. Fast.

You have 45 minutes he says. Hands down my back.

What! They don't get up until 7:30 here? Are you fucking kidding me? 6:44 at my house, on the nose, everyday.

I put a tooth brush on the sink counter for you, he says.

Tell me all that you know, I'll show you snow and rain.

Then the chest. Chest can't get air.

Quiet my toes to the hardwoods, too late, little girl, pre-dawn chatter from the bedroom in my ears. I smile at my small victory, say they get up at 6:44 here, too.

New stiff bristles over my teeth. Then another small victory, I read two short stories to my two small babies. Kiss noses, cheeks, ears. Tiny mouths.

And, I don't stay for breakfast.

...

more later

*Italicized lyrics from Bird Song, Robert Hunter.

i, MEME, mine

2007-10-14T14:10:00.000-07:00

I've read about 10 of these now and I still don't have the first clue what meme means.I wanted to say first fucking clue here because I like the rhythm, but I'm trying to cut back on the gratuitous fucking.

And, you better believe I'm doing my Meme. Kim tagged me and she used to be an editor and even when I'm not writing another word of anything, you better believe I always write when an editor tells me to. Fucking always.

1. I started writing as a distraction in 9th grade so I could look like I was doing something productive in class when I was busy not paying attention. My friend Renee and I wrote three "books" back and forth that year. I'd write a chapter and give the notebook to her. She'd write the next and give it back to me.

2. I kept writing because my letters made people laugh. And because it was the only academic thing I didn't totally suck at. And because I could get a journalism degree without taking any math classes.

3. I would much rather meme than do any of the other things I'm "supposed" to be writing right now. If you give me three months to write something - I still won't start until the night before it's deadline.

4. I write long hand with my right hand - wrong hand - when I'm totally blocked and it opens the flow. sometimes. And, surprise, surprise, the only music I can listen to while writing is the Grateful Dead. Thanks, Jerry! I know it all so well it doesn't distract me.

5. Two-years ago I hadn't published in more than three years and knew I would never be able to write again. I was terrified of taking on 500 word recreation stories for the paper. One year ago I knew I could write newspaper stuff but thought that was my ceiling. Today my entire income is writing and when I say I'm writing a book, it doesn't feel like a lie anymore. Big thanks to all of you for believing in me with such fervor I couldn't help believing in me, too!

I tag Prema, Jess and Tracy. You're it!

scenes from a hood river coffee house

2007-10-14T09:35:00.000-07:00

me: I'd like a bowl of the veggie lentil
nosering: Oh, we don't have that.
me: Um, you might want to cross it of the specials baord
nosering: yeah, good idea.
me: ok, i'll have an iced-mocha. soy. and, what are the scones.
norering: that's one's blueberry? i think. I don't know about the other.
me: I don't want to be a bitch, but there are bugs in your pastry case. There are four stuck in the glazed donut.
nosering: yeah. said like this yeaaaahhhhh. goes on working and doesn't remove the donut. doesn't even look at the pastry case. not even a sideways glance.
me: I'll just take the mocha.

day 366

2007-10-10T23:44:00.000-07:00

I planned to use this space today to write about 366 days and contrast me, the me who hauled boxes into this place on Oct. 10 2006, to me, the me sitting here knocking at the keys.

However the me sitting here, bare-feet on the hardwoods, couch throw on her shoulders, eyes burning the best kind of tired, doesn't have time. That me has three deadlines to meet in the next two days and would very much like to complete a rewrite for class tomorrow.

Oh, and she's getting so pushy about sleep, that me is, she has forsaken all nighters.

Instead of a long post that me opts to share my favorite new (to me) music website. Check it out, you can listen to almost any album totally free.

soundpedia

It's perfectly legal because the music in not downloadable. Like listening to the radio.

freeeeeeeeeee

2007-10-09T10:09:00.000-07:00

I'm free, free,free!lancing!

Friday was officially my LAST day as an Oregonian employee. In 37 years, 11 months and 17 days on this planet in this body, I still have not learned to look before I leap. Don't get me wrong. Preparation is a fantastic idea and I always PLAN to prepare. I am a firm believer in the five Ps - prior preparation prevents piss-poor performance. Is that six?

Before leaving The O - I gave myself 30 days to lay the freelance foundation. Talk to editors, generate stories, create motion. Knew exactly how professional life after the paper would look. I planned to prepare.

Ideas and execution, there's a wide, wide river between those two.

Need an idea, I'm your woman. Execution, not so much. Thing about me, I'm not leaving the left bank of ideas until that river is swelling into serious threat. When the water runs highest and hardest, when the last dry patch of ground is too small to find a foothold, that's when I'm crossing.

Fortunate for me I learned to swim young.

I planned and planned and planned. Just planned. Planned to prepare.

Fortunate for me that the universe actually does respond to ideas. My secret is I've always known The Secret.

In the very last minutes of my very last night at the O, I sent five emails to five editors I've worked with, asking for more work The editors I meant to contact BEFORE giving notice - they are the base of my freelance life. Without them I'm on a freeway offramp with a card board sign.

Green lights in every direction!

And, bonus:
I would LOVE to talk with you about writing opportunities for the SOUTH Weekly. We have just lost a staffer due to the buyout, so I've been searching for another freelancer to work with. You inquiry is perfectly timed.

Fortunate for me The O is intentionally shrinking by attrition and adding stringers to fill the news hole.

Double bonus: I miscalculated my final check, turns out I get paid for all the accrued 2008 vacation hours. Three times what I anticipated.

Just enough to cover the income I didn't generate last month when I was so busy planning to prepare that I didn't actually do anything!

(question, savvy readers: when I'm working from a coffee shop, is the coffee tax deductible?)

ten missed

2007-09-22T19:12:00.000-07:00

Top things I meant to blog in the last few weeks while I've blogged almost nothing. In almost no particular order.

10. Amelia and the Honey Buckets -- I have the only child, the only human, on the planet who LOVES port-o-potties. Driving down Sandy, stopped at a light, two lanes from the curb Amelia said "Mom, stop, there's a port-o-potty." She said it like she was saying "Mom, stop, there's a giant chocolate fountain with marshmallow ducks." She said "stop, there's a port-o-potty right there and I have to go. I'm just going to jump out."

9. Preschool birthday parties and the politics of turning three.

8. Am I dating my family?

7. The Potty training season of toddlerhood or freshly baked training pants drying on my range.

6. Sleep is destroying my writing practice, I need to stop. Sleep deprivation is destroying my sanity, I need to sleep.

5. What's on my list today? Childcare. Meet my new nanny, Freddy. I have come to find while my children spend an hour in Fred Meyer's Playland, I can grab a book and get comfy in home furnishings. I don't think it's an accident, those recliners right next to the books and magazines. I'm enrolling them at Ikea next.

4. I quit my job and now I actually have to work.

3. Feeding street people with my Oregon Trail Card. Oregon Trail Card being a pretty way to say food stamps. I believe my self sufficeincy worker would be A-OK with this.

2. I can't think of a number two, lets call it a tribute to the other two-dozen that have come and gone this month.

1. On the stranger side of my life, I had a back rub that wasn't a back rub from my husband who isn't my husband the other night. Just in case my head is not fucked-up enough.

exactly

2007-09-05T06:04:00.000-07:00

Me after pulling Josie off the top of a table for the 5th time: It's not OK to crawl on the table Josie. Time out next time you crawl on the table.

Josie at 2 years, 9 months: Why?

me: Because people eat on the table and its yucky. Because it not safe. Because the table is for food to sit on, not Josie. Because it's the rule. Who makes the rules.

Josie: Mommy makes the rules.

me: That's right. Mommy is in charge and mommy makes the rules. Who follows the rules?

Josie: NO ONE!

greetings from

2007-08-09T02:53:00.000-07:00

Who needs sleep anyway?
I'll just raise a glass of red.
Here's to 2:53.
Syrah!

2007-08-09T02:28:00.000-07:00

Jerry Garcia Aug. 1, 1942-Aug. 9, 1995

An Elegy for Jerry
-by Robert Hunter

Jerry, my friend,
you've done it again,
even in your silence
the familiar pressure
comes to bear, demanding
I pull words from the air
with only this morning
and part of the afternoon
to compose an ode worthy
of one so particular
about every turn of phrase,
demanding it hit home
in a thousand ways
before making it his own,
and this I can't do alone.
Now that the singer is gone,
where shall I go for the song?

Without your melody and tase
to lend an attitude of grace
a lyric is an orphan thing,
a hive with neither honey's taste
nor power to truly sting.

What choice have I but to dare and
call your muse who thought to rest
out of the thin blue air
that out of the field of shared time,
a line or two might chance to shine --

As ever when we called,
in hope if not in words,
the muse descends.

How should she desert us now?
Scars of battle on her brow,
bedraggled feathers on her wings,
and yet she sings, she sings!

May she bear thee to thy rest,
the ancient bower of flowers
beyond the solitude of days,
the tyranny of hours--
the wreath of shining laurel lie
upon your shaggy head
bestowing power to play the lyre
to legions of the dead

If some part of that music
is heard in deepest dream,
or on some breeze of Summer
a snatch of golden theme,
we'll know you live inside us
with love that never parts
our good old Jack O'Diamonds
become the King of Hearts.

I feel your silent laughter
at sentiments so bold
that dare to step across the line
to tell what must be told,
so I'll just say I love you,
which I never said before
and let it go at that old friend
the rest you may ignore.

on traveling

2007-08-01T14:50:00.000-07:00

Keep thinking of all of us on our journeys. Traveling inward and traveling outward ~ and some of us doing both simultaneously!

So, for you, my dear travelers. With love.

"I see my path, but I don't know where it leads. Not knowing where I'm going is what inspires me to travel it"
~Rosalia de Castro

"All journey's have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware."
~Martin Buber

"Travel is glamorous only in retrospect."
~Paul Theroux

"Travel is flight and pursuit in equal parts."
~Paul Theroux (Love PT - read The Old Patagonian Express)

"Traveler, there is no path, paths are made by walking."
~Antonia Machado

"May your trails be crooked, winding, dangerous, lonesome, leading to the most amazing view."
~Edward Abbey

Traveling mercies. Love to you all.
h

shadow of the object

2007-07-22T05:18:00.000-07:00

We’re back in that same office, Scott and I. Same therapist sitting across the same floral rug, same issues holding the space between us. It’s different this time, me looking to him with no words, nowhere to begin. A year ago so much to say, me at the helm and clarity steering.

She sits in the overstuffed brown leather seeing all the way through me. I squirm against the arm of a small couch, leaning hard away from Scott. Am I here to reconcile or to, finally, clip those last remaining threads?

****

I stand in the bathroom watching street lights make shadows on the sidewalk; see the morning paper hit the doorstep across the street. God, what time is it anyway? There’s a rush of traffic off in the distance but I hear big wind blowing through Black Butte Ranch (Thanks, Tracy). Past that a hollow train whistle far off to the north and coming closer. 4:07 a.m. Seen the whole night through too much these last few weeks.

Oh, how I love the middle of the night quiet, house lights out, whole world sleeping. So I take down the screen to rest my elbows on the ledge. Stick my head, neck, shoulders out the window and light a cigarette, seen to many cigarettes the whole way through lately, too.

Why is it eminent to solve all of life’s problems at 4 a.m? Everything lost and pushed down in the bustle of the day comes rushing in with nothing to deflect it. Middle of the night panic. Debt collectors and wasted time, dead end jobs and narrowed vision.

And my girls are going on vacation, their first real vacation, down the coast and through the Redwoods. Camping on the beach without me. Not even eight years between them and they have a life I beyond me. Friends, relationships to neighborhoods I barely know. Store keepers and librarians who call them by name. People I’ve never met.

This restless madruga.

***

We fill dead air talking jobs and cars and about the trip until she says: “Ok, so what are we not talking about today.”

She’s older looking this summer, graying at the hairline.

I hold my silence; think “I didn’t call this meeting.”

She says: “Why do you want to rebuild this?”

I look over Scott’s head reading titles on the shelf until my eyes catch on “The Shadow of the Object.” White letters down the black spine. We never touch sitting on the couch.

“Holly?”

I want family vacations with my kids. The three-month road trips talked about when I was pregnant with Amelia. We’d go down the coast and through the desert, cross the Rio Grande, Rio Bravo on the other side. Maybe settle down in Yucatan. I want one parent in the kitchen while the other helps with homework. Maybe coach their soccer teams together. I want to give back the agony of Thursday afternoon goodbyes. I want to see Amelia’s wonder when she walks upright through the tunnel of a fallen redwood. I don’t ever want to share my girls with another woman. EVER. But I don’t know a thing about growing old together.

I say: “Maybe it could work. There’s so much I don’t trust, so much that I can’t lose again. But maybe it could be different.”

one branch higher

2007-07-14T13:12:00.000-07:00

I'm at the office working, or not working, to the florescent computer buzz. My phone rings, the same lullaby as Josie's mobile. Two-years ago it was endearing, now I have no idea how to change it. It's just annoying.

"Hello."

"Hi, Mama!" Amelia's sweet excitement.

"Hi, Sweetie. Whatcha doing?"

"Mom. Mommy, mom. Mom. You won't BELIEVE what I just did!"

"Yeah? Try me."

"I climbed SO high in this tree. I just climbed up, up, up. I was higher than the six and seven-year-old BOYS!"

"Wow. That is so cool. You rock. How fun was it?"

"Well...it was really fun. And then it was a little scary. So you know what? You want to know what? You want to know what I did when I started to feel scared?"

"Love to. Tell me what you did."

"Well... first I just stopped. Then I told myself 'don't panic. You're OK. You're OK. Don't panic.' And I breathed and kept saying 'doooon't panic, doooon't panic."

"Perfect. What a smart thing to tell yourself. I bet that really helped."

"It did. AND you know what else? You want to know what else I did? Well, every time I thought I was stuck, I just told myself 'Don't panic. Just climb back up one branch and look for another route. It's ok. You got up here, so there has to be a way down.' And I did it. I climbed right down. Then I climbed back up even higher because I knew I could do it. The boys were scared to climb so high."

"Amelia, Mila, that is SO awesome! I am so proud of you. And the great thing is you can use that anytime you feel scared. Breathe and tell yourself not to panic. That's perfect."

"Yeah, I know that. I gotta go climb again."

2007-07-09T07:33:00.000-07:00

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.
~Rumi

prema's here!

2007-07-06T09:49:00.000-07:00

Such a treat to start my week Monday driving to Prema's house, so close. Just a few miles across town. Love having Prema so near, look up to give thanks. Over the Willamette and up, up, up into the hills where the Cascades roll dark along the northern horizon, lump of Mt. St. Helens bulging into the blue. Then down the hill to two full-sized moving trucks and Prema directing the chaotic flow of fitting collected pieces into this new space.

Amelia and Josie immediately want to know "Where's River? Where's River?" So up the stairs we go to find her wide-eyed and quiet, reconnecting with her toys. I'd like to help in whatever small way I can, and what feels best is staying up here with the girls - keeping out of the way. A half a dozen people are on and off the trucks, arms full, calling for Prema in five rooms on three floors, simultaneously.

"Where does this go? What room? Where should we put this? Have you seen Prema? I need Prema, where does she want this."

River holds her space sticking close to her big sister, tentative about this invasion of two more kids into room that's barely hers. Into belongs she's just rediscovering.

The house is the house, beautiful for what it is. A big house, warm space, nice flow, amazing view. What's lovely though is seeing this blank space transformed.

The gorgeous Tibetan rug -reds and blues and greens - that I admired in blog photos unfurls across the living room floor. Piece by piece comes the antique furniture and the heavy Indian bed frame. Piece by piece the lovely feeling, same one alive in her words, breathes itself into these walls. Permeates.

"This is the table I grew up eating at," Prema tells me, one arm out, motioning to the delicate curves of antique craftsmanship. Deep reddish wood. Cherry?

River lets Amelia in first, then Josie (the other two-and-a-half-year-old) more cautiously. Until three girls playing their separate play become a spinning torrent, giggling as they jump from one section of couch to the rug.

Prema and I sneak briefly away for a tour, admire the new energy-efficient washer and drier in way only those in charge of the laundry can -(and yes, I will be over to do a few loads! Sunday night OK? :). A moment where I wonder "who am I? And when did laundry machines become exciting, pleasing?"

We're laughing. "You have to see the bathroom. This is the best part."

I climb onto a ledge, behind the deep oval tub, crouch up into a corner to see St. Helens out the window. The view. And I can still hear Prema months ago in Carrie's living room, October, Jennifer's workshop. A stranger reading. "It's good to have a view."

Indeed.

Follow the tree-tops east to west rolling along the mountains. Western Hemlocks are my favorite. Maybe because of the way they bend and twist, hook-over at the top. Maybe because I can identify them, even from miles away I know what I'm seeing.

"Prema," a voice call up the stairs. "They're asking for you in the basement. They need you downstairs."

I return to River's room, where Amelia has taken charge of shelving books. Organizing the room.

Mid-afternoon I see the signs - avalanche zone - Amelia is climbing on Prema's dear old friend. Rapidly losing capacity for good decision making. We make an exit before the meltdown. I'm slow, but eventually I learn not just to read the signs, to heed them.

All the way home I still hear: "its good to have a view."

And, it's so good to have you here, my friend. Welcome, Prem. Many blessings for this stretch of the journey.

And a quote from Edward Abbey via Jess this morning:

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.

Alevei!

dude, there's my car: part II

2007-06-23T06:24:00.000-07:00

It has, ahem, come to my attention that last month I posted about my wayward automobile ... and left you all hanging.

Really, the whole stolen car thing is getting a little dull over here. The car goes, the car comes. The car goes, the car comes. The car goes, blah, blah, blah.

It doesn't even go far. This time, if I had a clear shot and a solid arm, I could have hit it with a rock from my front stoop. It was "recovered" about one hundred yards from my apartment. (recovered meaning towed from the street to an impound lot that took two buses to reach and where it cost $120 to claim.) Really, they couldn't even muster the courtesy to JUST PUT IT BACK after riffling through it?

So, meet my car's new best friend: The Club. Next time I'll have the satisfaction of knowing they had to work for it!

ponderosa dreams

2007-06-17T23:55:00.000-07:00

I just had the most fantastic Ponderosa dream. Must be what it was because here I am laid out belly-flat across the futon. My feet over a pillow, shoulders pull tight from across my back, eyes burning - sleep, sleep, sleep. But my fingers come here to the keys and while everything else in me is screaming "shut down," they hit. They settle in, slightly bent, and go. What the hell just happened? How did I get here, and did I ever leave?

My dream is tall Ponderosa Pines, needles jabbing into my bare feet. It's freight-train winds cool across my arms, sending waves through the tall grass. I dream of red-winged black birds landing on cat tails, silvery water below. I dream in pieces, remnants of Taco Bell and shooting cans out on the prairie, lonely wedding nights and frightened children. Guitars and violins and a great Doe peeking through the sliding glass doors on us, darkening sky behind her. We are sitting in a circle, all angles. Blond hair, brown hair, gray hair. Sitting in lotus,legs out, laying on bellies. The images synch across my chest drawing my shoulders around to each other, propped on elbows. I feel it, open my shoulders back so the vertebrae stack one on top of another. The light changes, slant shadows, no shadows, long shadows and around the circle the stories ripple and flow.

I could swear I was there, it all feels so real. But I wake up on the futon, same place I always wake. The apartment is clean, thirsty spider plant dropping over the top of the book shelf. I prop myself up on elbows then push all the way to sitting, push the sleep away. Open the windows to let the night air in and the gas smell out. The apartment always smells like gas, but tonight it's thick. It's quiet and I can hear a train off in the distance. Scan the room for evidence but everything is as it always is; papers piled beside the computer, toys stacked along the wall, glass cobalt colored plate left on the table from dinner.

If it weren't for those two Taco Bell wrappers - brown wrappers, purple letters - on the plate, I wouldn't believe any of this really happened. But there it is - the evidence on the table; wrappers, empty hot sauce packets (not fire or mild) and Pepsi cup.

Thanks, sisters, for opening such an incredible circle. Thanks Jennifer for deep listening and deeper seeing. Thanks Carrie for opening another home in another space to another amazing weekend. Always a life altering experience.

I lay my head down, cheek flat against the futon, and drift back there in a dream.

must have been the roses

2007-05-29T09:31:00.000-07:00

There are roses in my car this morning. I can't find a vase. Running late for Amelia's school, running back inside to grab a notebook, running down to the fumes and there are a dozen roses, a cantaloupe and three Grateful Dead stubs stuck in a card - June 21, 22, 23, 1993 - Deer Creek Music Center. 7 p.m. Rain or Shine. The purchase date, bottom left on the tickets, May 22, 1993. Who could have seen down this road from there?

Summer 1993. Been all week listening to '93 summer shows trying flush out memories. Buckeye Lake. Soldier Field. Deer Creek. Richfield. The Palace, did I do Auburn Hills that year? There was an electrical storm at Soldier Field? Why don't I remember being wet? Sting opened those shows? Did I go inside for Sting? Lighting bolt crisp down into the stadium, thunderheads over Chicago skyline. I have those crackle flashes of it. And that's all. Selling gourmet grilled cheese made-to-order after the show. Driving straight on through the Midwest night to Noblesville and daybreak sleep.

Nothing about any of it feels so real as those old tickets in my hands. Funny how a murderous prison riot can alter the course of a life. Really, that's why I ended up getting Deer Creek tickets early on a Saturday morning in May and not in the mail a month earlier. The longest prison riot in U.S. history. There were two ways to get Dead tickets - actually, there were many ways to get tickets - but two ways sanctioned. You could go the traditional stand-in-a-long-line waiting route or order directly from Grateful Dead Productions, mail order. I preferred mail order.

Two reasons. 1. Interesting tickets that looked more like this than standard issue black type on blue and white paper. 2. No camping out for hours on a sidewalk to get them.

Mail order was it's own precise art form. Everything had to be addressed and assembled exactly right, and postmarked the day ticket sales started. Deer Creek mail order opened on day seven of the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility uprising. One hostage, a guard, had been hanged the day before. Another hostage, a local guy who's story I'd been covering at work, was freed. Supposed to be my day off. But I stopped at the paper to check on something and Tony Demons was freed and suddenly I was working late. The order was not postmarked on the day mail order opened. No tickets in the mail.

A month later Scott sits down behind me in line. He offers me a slice of cantaloupe that I take, even though I think I hate it. We talk, smoke and talk, talk, talk about nothing for hours until the ticket window opens. Then I go to change for work and he goes home.

On weekends the newspaper is dead. I'm putting away mail to entertain myself and listening to the police scanner for something better to do. There are only a couple of us in the newsroom on Saturday's and when the phone rings it's for me. My friend B, a photographer I went to college with comes to tell me I have a call.

"Hi, this is Scott from in line this morning," the voice says and I smile. All over smile. His voice is sure and unsure. "Um, you left before I had a chance to ask your last name, or your phone number, or what you are doing tonight. So, I got yesterday's paper out of the garbage to find your byline."

B. Asks me who called and I laugh, tell him it's the guy from this morning in line. He looked up my name in the paper and called to ask me out.

"You're going to marry him," B says. Laughs.

"Yeah, whatever," I say. "He's moving to the west coast at the end of the summer. But, he could be fun for a while,"

"No. You're going to marry this guy."

Summer 1993 blurs out from there. Mostly what I remember is sun, heat on my skin. Camping and music and suddenly I'm in love with my summer fling - the guy I wasn't getting attached to. Sometimes the songs that we hear are just songs of our own. And, he's moving to Spokane.

***

I soak in the tub every night because it's the only space that's mine. It's starts when I move in. Hot until my fingers and toes tingle baths; dark, steam, candles. Everyday and sometimes twice. At first it's about the water, this bathing. Soaking it in and soaking it out.Then it's about a habit, nightly ritual, some kind of normalcy, the only way I care for myself. Now it's about the space, the change of scenery. Just someplace to be out of the living room. So I can leave one room and be in another. It's crazy-making living all of life - eating, sleeping, working (sometimes relaxing) - in a single room.

The roses are in a spaghetti jar on the table, still can't find a proper vase. Fourteen years down this road. My girls sleep in the bedroom while I count tiles around the tub. Cream bordered by thinner black. Ten high by five deep. Who could have seen. That's the problem, not that I didn't see this. That I didn't see anything.

Watch the seasons change out that bathroom window. The line of oaks are all colors, then all bare. Puffy, wet buds that push out tiny bright leaves unfolding into bigger, darker summer. Just as I find the rhythm of one season the rhythm changes - odd time signatures - and I'm scrambling to recalibrate. Again. On still nights the trees look plastic bathed in halogen. Remnant from a long ago journey.

He says: "I can't believe I could have driven you so far from me. I hurt you so much you'd rather live in a one-bedroom apartment. You love the bed. You hate not having your own space. You HATE it."

I watch the door close, go into the bathroom and stare out the window.

That tight feeling of angry, isolation, smallness,trapped is gone. Can't remember how it was in my body, my head. Sure, I can rattle through a great string of insults and psychological injuries. But how was it under my skin? I can list the tangibles but even as I type them they feel petty. They don't feel.

How's this one: I get home late from work, 11:30, Midnight, the house is wrecked. I say "can you help with the living room and dishes so I don't have to start tomorrow in mess?"

He says: "If you spent half the energy cleaning it yourself as you did nagging me about it, it would be done already." Sounds horrible, but it doesn't feel that way anymore, it's just me telling. Like I can tell about casing the house, seething and screaming inside my head but there's nothing visceral left of it. Those body feelings - knowings from the inside out - evaporated into lingering caution. Why not go another round. Why?

Summer 1993. Been all week listening to Summer '93 shows. Buckeye Lake, Soldier Field, Deer Creek, Richfield. Never had such a good time. In my life before. I'd like to have it one time more. One good ride from start to end. I'd like to take that ride again. Lay on the lawn looking up at stars, boys in long hair and girls in long skirts. All of them spinning. Side by side so our arms and legs run along each other. I want to go back. Just for one night I want to go back. As long as I don't have to get from there to here again - I want to go back.

There's just all of summer and I can't put the details in place anymore. It's one long day spread over weeks, months. It's other consciousnesses and I can't reconstruct those either. I can talk about elastic time falling apart, bending and expanding. A day's journey that stretches over a single minute. Dissolving. Right there on the tip of my tongue, but I don't have the feeling. These stories are are just tellings.

*italicized lyrics borrowed from Robert Hunter.

dude, where's my car: Part II

2007-05-28T08:13:00.000-07:00

OMG. My car is gone ... again. I think my glasses are in it. I can't put in my contacts in for another 5 hours b/c they are in a dissinfecting solution.

WTF? What's the lesson I'm supposed to be getting here? Becuase, I think I handled this with very good humor last time.

I'll be on my couch, blind, if anyone needs me.

wide awake in america

2007-05-13T09:20:00.000-07:00

The latest jones is You Tube. Pair it up with Google Earth and go screaming through life, backwards. Mutlimedia memory guide. Rewind.

In 1985 I understood Bono's hair absolutely, but the lyrics to this song? Not so much. Twenty-some years down the path everyting spins itself, cirlces. The words are perfect, but that hair? Oh so stuning. Define stuning anyway you want. It's a multipurpose adjective.

What resonated then was rhythm of words. Words becoming the music itself. The gorgeous light of words with words. So powerful you could "get it" all the way into the bones. Reverberating through every cell, indefinable. Understanding transending understanding. Formless form. Quivering.

Bad - U2
If you twist and turn away.
It you tear yourself in two again.
If I could, yes I would
If I could, I would let it go.
Surrender, dislocate.

If I could throw this lifeless life-line to the wind.
Leave this heart of clay, see you walk, walk away
Into the night, and through the rain
Into the half light and through the flame.

If I could, through myself, set your spirit free
I'd lead your heart away, see you break, break away
Into the light and to the day.

To let it go and so to find away.
To let it go and so find away.
I'm wide awake.
I'm wide awake, wide awake.
I'm not sleeping.

If you should ask, then maybe
They'd tell you what I would say
True colours fly in blue and black
Blue silken sky and burning flag.
Colours crash, collide in blood-shot eyes.

If I could, you know I would
If I could, I would let it go.

This desperation, dislocation
Separation, condemnation
Revelation, in temptation
Isolation, desolation
Let it go and so to find away
To let it go and so to find away
To let it go and so to find away

I'm wide awake, I'm wide awake, wide awake
I'm not sleeping
Oh no, no, no.

Where were you on July 13, 1985? I was on the scratchy plaid love seat, in the air conditioning, all day looking out on summer through the sliding glass doors, MTV and Live Aid!

Know where I was then and know where I am, here and now. Wide awake, I'm not sleeping. Oh no

tin soldiers and nixon coming

2007-05-04T11:55:00.000-07:00

My first political memory is all wrong.

It's Kent State, but not the massacre that happened 37 years ago today. No way could it be that. I was 6-and-a-half months old on May 4, 1970. I don't remember the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. I don't remember angry students burning the ROTC building or Gov. James Rhodes calling in the National Guard. But I remember Kent.

I remember driving out to Kent, mid-70's, about 45 minutes from my house through Ravenna, past the Ravenna Arsenal, where Ohio turns from flat to beautiful low rolling hills. We were going to visit my cousin and ice-skate, me on double blades in the rink. The wounds at Kent hadn't fully scabbed over, students were still hurt and pissed-off, and doubly so because all the talk that spring was about a new recreation center slated for construction on Blanket Hill above the commons - right over top of the ground where those kids were killed. As we drove through campus in the light blue, wood-panel Country Squire wagon everyone talked how it was dis-respectful to break that ground so soon. Other people were thinking it was time to move on. And, the sooner the better.

I got that four kids had been shot to death. I got that. But I didn't get the context so my mind filled in the blanks. I can still show the the picture it drew. Four students sitting on a blanket - Blanket Hill - having a picnic, bottle of wine. It's dark and out of nowhere a sniper comes by and picks them off. That's it. Funny. I can't figure out why I'd come up with that scene. I mean, I grew up eating dinner to the nightly news. I must have known Vietnam and protests and body counts and I don't remember any of that. I remember my first trip to Kent and my own vision of four kids killed drinking wine on a picnic blanket.

Kent State is HUGE in my memory. Near the top of every childhood fear. It goes Wicked Witch of the West and then Kent. The place still spooks me. Wicked was all the therapy I needed to finally find compassion for Elphaba and let go of that witch. Somewhere inside I knew that was just a story, too. Pretend. But Kent, Kent State was for real.

Kent State was right next door. It was the sixth grade teacher who, in 1980, 10 years after the shootings, told us she was so thankful for having cut class that day. If she had been where she should have, she'd have been crossing the commons at noon. She'd have been crossing the fire.

Kent State was the bullet hole through a sculpture outside of Taylor Hall, the journalism building. It was a trip to campus 1988 to see The Alarm sing Spirit of '76 in a lecture hall. I went with my first "real" boyfriend, Mark. We walked the commons and he showed me that bullet hole and I came home with a black t-shirt with the outline of a flower sticking out from the barrel of a gun and the words "Flowers are better than bullets" Allison Krause, May 3, 1970, printed on the front. On the back it said "We will not forget."

Across a row of dorm windows "National Guard 4, Kent State 0." We we're both students at branch campus that spring. Both living at home. At 18 I would have followed Mark just about anywhere. Anywhere but Kent. In fall 1988 he went there and I went to Columbus.

Kent State is the Memorial dedication and annual candlelight vigil I covered for my student paper in 1990, 20-years after the shootings. Walking just behind one of the victims' family.

Kent State is the re-occurring backdrop for my dreams and nightmares, popping back up in the strangest of places. Still. It's me in a dream in college running trough the memorial, lost and looking for my mom. Dark. It's a dream I had a few days into my first pregnancy, Amelia. In that dream Scott and I are going to visit someone in the hospital. We're driving through Kent's campus. Across a row of dorm windows, in pink block letters: "It's a GIRL."

I know the context now. I know the images. I know that the tragedy is not just the kids who should be grandparents now, it's also the guardsmen - kids themselves. Earlier this week, finally, proof. It was not an accident. It was not one frightened, itchy trigger finger that sparked 67 shots in 13 seconds hitting 13 students, four of them fatally. It was a command.

This week the evidence. A reel-to-reel tape recorded out a dorm window caught the command "Right here! Get Set! Point! Fire!"

We will not forget.

Write Now

2007-05-04T11:04:00.000-07:00

Everything I know about me I find when my fingers press the keys. Everything I know about life comes out in broken sentences, fragments of a dream. Everything I know about love comes in every side of every circle where everything is everything. Everything I know about fear is this: is the door to truth is the door to freedom is the door to everything.

Everything I have to say to Jennifer Lauck and all the women Writing Life around her is Thank You, a hundred times, thank you all.

Jennifer has four workshops scheduled in three states on two coasts.

Go with an open mind.
Go with an open heart.
Go with a story to tell.
Just go.
The rest will just keep coming.

george says

2007-04-28T10:41:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-04-25T04:24:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-17T23:23:00.000-07:00

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)

2007-04-15T22:03:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-12T19:50:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-07T13:04:00.000-07:00

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

2007-04-06T00:33:00.000-07:00

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?

the nature of nurture

2007-03-31T11:27:00.000-07:00

On one of my last freedom days I head to Tryon Creek, a favorite spot in the woods. It's one of those places where you can forget urban surroundings. Forested ravines, covered in plants I can't name, drop sharply to the creek. I've been meaning to hike all week and the sun is so seductive. Can't stay inside one minute longer, so I leave the piles of paperwork and bills covering my floor. They've waited six weeks. They can hold for another day. Right?

The trails feel shorter without my girls, shorter than I remember. I've never been out here on my own. It's always been with the kids or with the dog or with the whole family. Never alone. I realize, not a revelation just an awareness, that I never go out into the woods alone. Even when I lived on 100 acres of rain forest, trails right out the door, I always walked with my dog, or Scott, or not at all.

But today I'm feeling easy about the whole thing. Comfortable by myself. Happy to be alone out here. Wow. I sit by the creek and wonder this: can upbringing coupled with temperament create trauma, trauma symptoms, without any remarkable, horrendous thing having occurred?

My startle reflex runs on hyper drive and has for as far back as I remember. I'm jumpy, skittish. The ever present something close on my heels, just behind the tree, poised to jump out and grab me. I am fear.

My parents, they're fearful people. In our house the glass was not just half-empty, it was cracked and leaking slowly. These are people who navigate life based on what could go wrong. Nevermind minor snafus. I'm talking about not being allowed to drive a couple miles across a suburban Ohio town to a friend's house at night because the car could break down. What if the car breaks down and you are alone on the road? Anyone could get you. And, I'm 17. For my mom and dad the world is a sensationalized news story waiting to happen.

In my early 20s I find the road. Before every trip I can count on the same two questions from my mom: "Why would you even want to go to that Godforsaken place?" and "What if some dies while your are gone? Because god forbid some one should die, in this religion they'd be in the ground before we figured out how to reach you." So, my stewards are people who decide based on "god forbid someone should die." That's just my mom. My dad is pacing the driveway, compulsively checking his watch, every time I visit from college three hours away in Columbus. I learn to tell him I'm leaving an hour later than I am, to save him the anxiety of me being on time, or god forbid, 10 minutes late.

But I don't escape their fears. I look in every window before climbing into the car at night. At five, I'm terrified of crossing the 20-foot gap to get to Hallie's house next door. In high school, I'm still locking my second-floor bedroom windows so no-one can scale the bricks and climb in. I lay in bed imagining super powers that let me disappear inside the mattress to hide. I Think about the girl a few streets over who was pulled out of her window(ground story), and found by her brother, dead in the woods, the next morning. Raped and beaten. That's the detail I catch. But that's not the whole story. She wasn't pulled out the window by a stranger. She climbed out to finish an argument with her psycho ex-boyfriend. He robbed a store and wanted her on the run with him. Details.

That's the thing about an ADD mind. Deficit is a misnomer. It's an over abundance of attention. Attention to everything all at once, all the time. It should be called Faulty Filter Disorder. An ADD mind takes the most stimulating detail, often the most frightening, and locks in. Fuck context.

When Scott and I are in our mid-20s and visiting my parents in Arizona, we tell them we're going out to hike in the desert. No destination. We need to get out of the city, out of their house, for the afternoon. It's a sanity thing. My mom panics. Says she doesn't like us just going off into the desert. People get lost out there all the time. Just the other day a woman was on her way to visit her daughter when her car broke down. She tried to cut less-than-a-mile across the desert to the daughter's house and she was lost out there for days. DAYS.

My sister laughs when I tell her this story. "That woman had alzheimers!" she tells me. Details. And all my mom heard was lost in the desert. DANGER, Wil Robbins, DANGER.

For better or for worse, our families leave us covered with marks. By nature and nurture, I am of these people.

So I sit by the creek wondering. Is it possible for this cocktail to leave me with every PTSD symptom? To fully mimick surviving trauma, without having come any closer to it than the evening news?

Stop Cyberbullying: speak up, speak loud

2007-03-30T10:47:00.000-07:00

There is no room for threats. Speak up.
There is no room for intimidation. Speak up.
There is no room for harassment. Speak up!
There is no room for violence. Speak up.
Boycott equals silence.
There is no room for silence. Speak up.
There is no room for hatred. Speak up.
Speak your mind. Speak it loud.
Let the ideas flow, let the words flow.
SPEAK UP.
Shout it.
Tolerate only love.

There is only room for positive here. Speak up.
There is only room for intelligent discussion here. Know it.
There is only room for thoughtful interaction here. Be it.
Boycott equals silence.
Speak love. Speak UP!

gratitude

2007-03-29T11:28:00.000-07:00

I'm back to work this afternoon. Rested and realized and ready to face the rigors of daily life again. I started to write a post about gratitude, but realized I already wrote it.

Five other stories are fighting to make it from my mind to the page. Instead of re-hashing I invite you who haven't read it (and you who have) to step back a few months with me.

Last month in workshop, Sunday morning, I said I hadn't done my re-write. That I had blogged that morning but wasn't reading that either. I was reading an older piece instead (I wanted to do happy). Jennifer asked for the fresher work, a rant about my brain, and I'm glad that I delivered it.

Still, I want to share my gratitude. On days like that, and days like this, I know. I have everything I need.

Comment here or comment there, because I LOVE your comments!

Love

learning to see: part 3 (take 2)

2007-03-26T11:55:00.000-07:00

Raaiiiin, I don’t mind. Shiiiiine, the weather’s fine.

I know precisley how this day should look. For months I built this vision, ached for the sea. The salt-air.

It looks like this: me on the cliffs following the ocean to where it flattens out and runs into the horizon. Big ship in the distance, a few kite-boards in the foreground. It’s not crowded. The beach is low-tide deep, left to the seagulls, the driftwood and me. Then I'm down in the sand - dry sand - with a book, a journal, a pen. Staring down the waves, eye level, as they come at me head on. Unceasing, endless flow of swells. It's not sunny nor is the sky solid, blue-gray textures and the truth of in-betweens. I've come here to know something. But, what? I've come here following voices inside and out, "Go to the coast," Jennifer says. "You'll find clarity at the ocean." This is my picture and I hold it. Attached to my mind's sketch of what will be.

It's pissing down rain, high-tide, almost no beach. Haystack Rock is way out there, surrounded by water. No point in hiking the slippery cliffs; height will not expand the view. One, two, three, four, five lines of white-cap breakers with the last row spitting mist back into the fog as it rolls over. Then nothing but fog. It's clear. I get it.

Doesn't matter what I can't see beyond the waves, it's all there anyway.

Follow through the mist to the southern most point I've been on this water. Oaxaca coast. Now it's called Mar Pacifico the water is peligroso. Dangerous. Playa Zipolite, 1996. That's me on the beach. Scott and me wearing nothing but brown borrowed from the sun. We sleep in hamocks, lay on blankets reading The Fellowship of The Ring to each other in the sun. Forever passing time with a journey: On The Road, Watership Down, The Hobbit. The days are books and joints and harsh Mexican cigarettes wrapped in sweet rice paper. We hike over the ridge to a secluded spot and lie down in the surf. Edge of the water.

Then on the water. Four months later we're on the water, same water way up north. Now it's called Kachemak Bay, Cooke Inlet, Alaska. My wedding day. White fisherman's sweater worn inside out to hide the dirt. We bring a Nalgene bottle stuffed with wild blueberries picked yesterday for the cake. No rings. Hersheys bar in pieces that say "HERS" and "HEYS" exchanged through laughter before a few friends. Gentle roll of the boat, glaciers baring witness from the peaks around Bear Cove. I believe my life's enchanted. I believe a bond built across thousands of miles alone together is indistructible. I believe the voice calling out "STOP" from the hollows of my belly is full of shit. What the hell does she know about me? Lean back into Scott, my husband, and watch orange billed Puffins bounce along the water.
It's all there.

********

Out of the car, into the rain. We park next to Mo's - the only restaurant at Cannon Beach where we can be inside and right on the water.

“Should we walk first and then go inside?” Jess asks. Pulls-up the zipper of a green rain shell.

She tucks a camera into her coat pocket.

"Yeah. Doesn't look it's going stop. So we might as well get wet first and dry off inside."

A flock of gulls collects and lands in the narrow strip of beach between the water and the pavement, the last of them holding a foot above the sand then slow-motion dropping.

The air is more deep-fried shrimp than raw brine. Neither of us has a change of clothes. (So intoxicating is the freedom of traveling without three sets of dry kid’s clothes, jogging stroller, toys, crayons and enough snacks to survive a month stranded in the backcountry, that grabbing a sweatshirt and rain shell is a lucky afterthought.) I have a journal, pen and two books - Monica's book and Creating Money - in one bag. In the other is my computer. I wanted to leave the laptop at home but, obviously, I have a problem. Are there meetings for this?

My shoes are soaked through before we've walked 10-feet. Let the rain come down. It's all fine. It hits from behind so the drops wick across my jeans until they're soaked too. Wet denim pasted to cold legs.

Jess talks, but I've lost track of the words. Rain drips from the tip of her nose and I watch, feeling how my head tilts to the right to keep focus.

Yesterday I'm sitting at a big gray desk connecting all the O's hidden in a jumble of letters. Letters cover a whole page, my face gets closer and closer while I scan and trace. The therapist keeps trying to put me at ease, but she doesn't seem at ease herself.

This is round two of Vision Therapy evaluation, a bunch of sensory-motor stuff - following scrambled lines and staring at beads to see how close to my face they come before they split into two. You're not supposed to see double when things get too close?

It's startling. I've been through this stuff a half-dozen times in 30 years. I have labels and explanations, definitions for why visual-perceptual disorder means the philospohy of logic makes no sense and why 10 percent of everything I mail is returned with mixed-up numbers in the address. Why reading puts me to sleep. Why it's so tedious I can finish and not know a thing about the content. Why spelling is a riddle and punctuation is impossible (you can't hear semi-colons.) None of this is news to me. And it's startling that still, as I work a pencil across the page, I swallow a lump and hope the tears stay down with it. The grief cycle doesn't end. It cycles.

There is something new though. She explains how I tilt my head right to compensate for my left eye. The ocular muscle is weak. It can't pull-in tight to my nose to focus so I help it by moving my whole head. My eyes don't work together, so when it needs to, my brain shuts down the left to keep me from seeing double. If I could eradicate one word from this language it would be compensate. Not enough can be made of how much I despise that word in this moment.

So I feel myself tilting right to watch one drop drip from the tip of Jess's nose then left to see the wide scope of the water in the distance.

"My butt is completely soaked," she says. And we laugh in the rain. Turn back toward the restaurant to be evenly drenched in the front. It's good, this Oregon wind and rain.

When it's wet like this the beach appears whole. You can't see how it's made of a billion tiny grains. Crunched up branches pile along the rocks, deposited peices of what was, breaking down into pieces of what will be.

Inside the restuarant I wrap both hands around a glass mug of hot chocolate and Baileys so the heat seeps into my skin. Jess talks about how she doesn't understand why it's so hard to make decisions. How she'll remain in something long after she knows it's not working just to avoid choosing. Wonders what the root is.

"Maybe I just need to learn to make a decision without needing to understand everything first," she says. Flips the pen around in her hand.

A gull flys straight at the glass, banks and turns back toward the water.

The therepist - the second vision therapist - said the same thing. She said maybe I could trust in the excercises to retrain my eyes - teach my left to work in stereo with the right - without having to understand the whole of how my brain works.

Let go of my ideas about the outcome. Try it just to see the results.

"Could you look at it as a great journey?" she asks. This experiment in reshaping parts of my brain by teaching my left eye to see. There is more than one way of seeing?

This day is not at all what I envisioned. And, it's perfect. Silverware clatter over breaking waves. Rain splattered glass and great conversation. There's no room for new vision where don't you release the old.

"Should we write postcards," Jess asks. Sucks the last of her second Mo-Mocha through a thin green straw.

"Good idea. You decide," I say. Jeans still wet around my thighs. "You pick them."

The tideline creeps toward the restraunt.

She returns with 11 cards and we quiet down to write. None are like the scene outside. Doesn't match the pictures. So what?

Back through the mountains same way we came. Rhythm of the road moving to Tracy's voice, violin. Into the warm, dry Portland evening. Blossom perfumed air. No-one cares that Jess is late for a show with Lisa and I am skipping dinner with the in-laws.

No one in this car anyway.

breakfast of champions

2007-03-26T10:40:00.000-07:00

Just spent hour, HOURS, finsihing part three of this epic journey-to-the-ocean post and guess what my computer had for breakfast this morning? F*&%ing machine. Who says this is more effecient than typing in triplicate? So what if the carbon leaves your hands a little messy.

stay tuned ....

learning to see: part 2

2007-03-23T22:17:00.000-07:00

I am attached to my plan. Clinging to my plan. Bear-hold, death-grip, white-knuckled holding on to this vision of me and the big blue sea. It's going to go my way. First there is struggle, damn this mama bear instinct, this ocean dream dissipating into the want of snuggling my baby on couch. Wrapping her in the security of her blue dragonfly quilt and settling in for another screening of ScoobyDoo meets The Wherewolf. Unt-uh. No. She is with her grandmother. What's more comforting than a Grammy? I push aside the hesitation left by my mother-in-law's question: "Should I take her to school?" asked while Amelia is vomiting.

First I dial Prema, where I know I'll find wisdom, another mama's opinion. Then Jess. Digits are flipping, numbers getting larger. If I spend too much time agonzing over this decision, the clock will make it for me. It will be too late to go.

"Come over," I tell Jess, still typing quotes from the Honda spokesman into my story as we talk. "Just come, and I'll decide while you're on the way. If it gets much later, it's going to be pointless." Wheels turning. Decision made.

Portland is all blossoms, pink and white and purple. Colors on the trees, on the ground; Camillas and daffodils and tulips. Colors that blur in streaks behind us as we climb into the green of the Coast Range, far-off gauzy ridgelines coming sharp into focus. I'm holding a spicy black bean burger in one hand and letting go of my guilt with the other. Before leaving town we stop at Scott's brother's to check on Amelia, and say hello to her visiting grandparents. The whole thing is awkward, Scott's mom and I trying too hard to be business as usual while his dad sits stone-faced on the couch. Amelia clings to my leg. "Pleeeeaaaaase mommy. Please can you change your plan? I want to go home. They said you'd come take me home."

We work it out, Amelia and me. I lay on my back, in the guest room, bed beneath me, Amelia on my belly. We talk, nose to nose, and I explain. "You're safe with Grammy, Sweetie. I would never leave you if it didn't feel ok to me. If you still feel sick tomorrow you can come home to mama's. We'll snuggle under blankets and watch movies and eat popsicles."

"Nooooooo. Today," she whines, turning to lay her check on my shoulder. "I want you today."

"I know sweetie. And, today Grammy is taking care of you. She'll take good care of you," my hand over her hair, to her back (not fever-warm.) "Today I need to do something for me. So I can be a better mom for you. I need to take care of me, to take care of you."

Maybe she understands. Maybe she doesn't. But she accepts it. And I let go of the judgments projected onto her grammy, but spoken from my head: "How selfish. How cold. Only a monster leaves her sick child so she can go play."

And in the car Jess reminds me what they think of me is none of my business. What I know about thier opinions of me is only in my head anyway.

Conversation carries us through the mountains, winding two-lanes through dense green to the open end of the sky. Don't notice the stereo, same CD repeating too low to hear. Don't notice the changes in the sky unill there, on the western slopes, it narrows into mist. Then drizzle all around.

to be continued ...

learning to see: part 1

2007-03-23T21:16:00.000-07:00

I wake up attached to my plan this morning. The ocean is pulling, pulling so hard, it's all I can do to finish the last third of this hybrid article and get out of the city. I am going to the coast. The weeks I was MIA from this space are a blur of deadlines and birthdays and posts that never got written. Amelia turned five. Scott turned 37. All of it turned into too much time as a foursome. But there, in the middle of everything, with one deep breath, two steps back, three minutes of clarity I take a turn toward myself. I take a 10-day leave from work to coincide with spring break and the in-laws' visit, when I can punch the clock, off duty. (I take advice!) It may be brief, but it's something. I am finding rest. Last time I had a day to do nothing was a January snow storm, before that October, September? I don't even know. All I know is the force of the tide carrying me west to the end of the continent, to wide, wide space.

That, this hybrid story (days past deadline) and the steeping tea in my red LOVE mug.

The phone rings too early for anything good to come of answering it. Caller ID shows my mother-in-law(I guess I still call her that becuase what else do I to call her?) and I relax. She probably wants to double check directions to Amelia's school, right? Wrong. Amelia is coughing and puking at the breakfast table, crying in the background. "I just want to go home. I just want my Mommy." FUCK. I just want to run.

It's right there in front of me, tumbling in on itself. My plan sucked down in the undertow.

"Mommy. I just want youuuuuuuu. I just want to come home. I want youuuuuuuuuu. I want my mommy," hoarse, pathetic words. Plees, rasped out desperately small between coughs. "I just want my mommy."

I don't want to be a mommy anymore. Not now anyway. It's not even my day. The quick flow of my hybrid story stops. Lay my head across the laptop - keys pressing into my forehead, feet on the floor, elbows on the table, so my face makes this: "gtyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy" on the screen. What kind of horrible mother doesn't let her sick five-year-old come home? What kind of selfish bitch says "sorry baby, I'm going to the beach?" Me. This child is with her Grammy and I've been trying since November to get myself to the water. If I sacrifice my unpaid leave, this time salvaged to keep my head from splintering into a million jagged pieces, nobody wins. Nobody.

I'm going.

to
be
continued
(today. i swear. this will have an ending. panicked a little when i saw jess linked to this story, but i hadn't posted yet - so this is the preface. story to be posted later today. REALLY. not sleeping until it's up. wait. not sleeping? that kind of defeats the purpose of resting. ok, so - up soon. with sleep.)

prepositions

2007-03-17T18:23:00.000-07:00

Over
Under
Around
About

With so many lovely prepositions
from which there are
to choose
Why must the one way out
be limited to
THROUGH

blogger's remorse

2007-03-08T10:13:00.000-08:00

All thanks to everyone for the supportive comments and concern, the love here is stunning. So many people stepping up to say: “I’ve been down that road.”

And, all apologies for any worry caused by the last post. It’s tricky to write about dark places in real time and sometimes I’m not sure where the boundaries should lie. I’ve been feeling uncomfortable with that last post, but not because of the content. I’m OK with raw honesty. My remorse lies in the context, in posting it as a part one instead of waiting until it was complete so you could have the whole picture. It is only a beginning, a true moment experienced as its written, but still not the whole truth. The rest of the story (here are the Cliff Notes, because I’m not sure when I’ll have time to finish) is me reaching an understanding: I can either keep going at this pace, meltdown and get help afterwards or chose to seek support (with child care, time off, whatever), to get rest to avoid coming undone. I choose the later. And it’s a hard lesson.

Please know as long as I’m lucid enough to write it out and post, I’m fundamentally OK. Even within the moments of terror, I know I’ll come out of this OK.

And, in the hours of post-posting neurosis – I’ve been equally bummed that the start of the story (which has a kind of circular ending) just drops off without coming back around. That my biggest worry is about the quality of the writing (considering the content). I’m not sure if that makes me more or less crazy!

All love!

Anyway, I chose Attics of My Life as one of my songs for the workshop disc because it best defines what this circle is to me. The version is from Autzen Stadium, Eugene, OR: June 17, 1994 – a show I was at, my first trip to Oregon. I went back to Ohio after that trip and immediately put notice in at The Columbus Dispatch – where I was working as a reporter. There is a whole other story about Scott and synchronicity at those Eugene shows but that is for another time. And this is for you:

Attics of My Life
~Robert Hunter

In the Attics of my life
Full of cloudy dreams unreal
Full of tastes no tongue can know
And lights no eye can see
When there was no ear to hear
You sang to me

I have spent my life
Seeking all that’s still unsung
Bent my ear to hear the tune
And closed my eyes to see
When there were no strings to play
You played to me

In the book of love’s own dream
Where all the print is blood
Where all the pages are my days
And all my lights grow old
When I had no wings to fly
You flew to me

You
Flew
To me

In the secret space of dreams
Where I dreaming lay amazed
When the secrets all are told
And the petals all unfold
When there was no dream of mine
You dreamed of me

LOVE.

finding rest: part one

2007-03-06T11:47:00.000-08:00

Sometimes it’s easy to forget the mountains all around. I’m in the car with Josie after dropping Amelia at school. What I can see of her when I find the right spot in the rear rear view mirror is blond curls and cereal bar extras stuck around her month. Closed eyes, head slumped into the side of her car seat. What I can see outside is gray solid to the horizon, the sky and the pavement, until they merge. After weeks of opaque skies the mountains just stop being there.

Amelia is at preschool for a couple hours. I am running errands with Josie. Where though? I can’t remember where I am going, or why. The rain doesn’t look real. Nothing does. My body can’t hold the weight of itself. Feels like it can’t maintain the weight of anything. Won’t produce anything but water and salt. A deluge. I stop at the light, shifting down to neutral and admiring the way my hand trembles as it lifts from the stick. There is a white mini-van in front of me, the light, then space. All the empty space ahead and I am terrified. Pull the other hand from the steering wheel to compare, the pair shake in unison. All week it’s been this way with the tears and tremors. A drug I haven’t taken and can’t come down from. I forget things.

I know something now. I need help. Such a simple sentence, and the hardest thing to say. I need rest and I need help and if I don’t find both soon, I will find them in a hospital bed. It’s not what I say. Instead, it’s hard but fine. I’m doing fine, busy but O.K. is how I tell it. I lie. And, I need help. Three words, so simple. So impossible. Anything but that. It comes in waves, this sanity tide, and recedes to negatives in the night. Those middle of the night knowings. It’s coming. It’s coming.

I don’t know how I old I was when I understood I’d go crazy one day. Small. For sure they would haul me to the Funny Farm and lock me there forever. Didn’t know what that meant, crazy. Didn’t know how it rises up from the body, overtaking the mind. A slow root rot invisible in the earth until the tree begins to topple. And is it too late then? Can any amount of nutrients right it?

I’m five or six-years-old cowered in the tiled shower in the bathroom that connects my parents’ bedroom to mine. My sister laughs above the sirens outside, “They’re coming to get you. They’re coming to take you away … Haha. Hoho. Hehe … They’re coming to take you away.”

She’s 13 or 14 and I know she’s teasing, trying to scare me the way she does in the dark. Leans her head over the top bunk above me, cackling: “I’ll get you my pretty. And your little dog too.” Cackling until I scream.

I pull the glass door closed, make myself tiny in the corner. Hold my face to the cool tiles until the sirens pass. She is right. She thinks she’s teasing. She’s right. I know what crazy is. It surges from my center - an energy I can’t hold, building until I scream at nothing. Only crazy people scream for no reason.

Sometimes it’s like watching. Not me. Watching someone else fall apart, but feeling it, too. It’s fascinating. Visceral. Who knew that falling apart comes as much from the body as it does the brain? Nervous breakdown. Breakdown of the nervous system. Duh!. Nerves. It’s a physical thing, these trembles.

Breakdown. Overwhelmed until I can’t do anything. Can’t write a check. Can’t check my messages. Can’t make a phone call. All this stuff that always needs doing and I can’t. So I don’t. And it doesn’t get done, keeps growing and piling. I lay in bed feeling my nerve endings unwrap one by one. I want to stop it and I don’t. I’m terrified and comforted all at once. When this melt comes I will have rest. I will have help.

to be continued

fare thee well, linksys

2007-03-04T17:28:00.000-08:00

It's a sad sunny day at the casita. A moment of silence for my WiFi connection please. Linksys has moved on, leaving me no good signal to steal.

Didn't see it coming. We've had our ups and downs, Linksys and me, over the winter holiday's we didn't speak for weeks. But my Linksys always returned, rebooted and renewed our connection.

Oh, my lost love. Thursday the screen went silent. When I refreshed, my Linksys was nowhere. Out the window, crossing the green, trip after trip with boxes and bags. I watched them haul away my Linksys forever.

extra batteries

2007-02-28T22:00:00.000-08:00

(Batteries not included - epilogue)

Here at Casa de What's-My-Name it's always a holiday. We can take a single Hallmark moment and stretch it into a couple months. We LOVE holidays.

Or, one of us loves holidays. I just smile and continue to fill the trick-or-treat buckets with pretend candy until Thanksgiving. For weeks after Chrismakah Amelia wraps plastic animals and Polly Pockets in tissue for Josie.

Valentines Day begins in the second week of January, just after the Christmas tree at Scott's comes down. The tree comes down, the hearts go up. Amelia is a slave-driver. More hearts Mommy, cut out more hearts. I said MORE HEARTS, bitch. NOW.

She ducks into her room on Valentines Day. End of the day, we've already discussed that the presents in the car were left by Daddy. "Well," she asks, "if daddy left the balloons and toys what did cupid bring?"

"Cupid doesn't bring things," I tell her.

"When did cupid come," she's not getting it. "Did he come when I was sleeping?"

"No. It was dad. Dad left the toy in the car for you. Cupid is pretend."

Oh.

She ducks into the bedroom, demanding privacy and shuts the door behind her. Mid-week the floor in her room could be the photo shoot for an I Spy book. If I wanted to find anything of mine that's been left in the girls' room the search would go longer than the marathon holiday.

If there is no cupid, Amelia's taking over. She re-emerges with packages for Josie and me. Josie gets a plastic dog, a plastic girl and a plastic chair that belong with the plastic house at Scott's.

She hands me a tote bag.

"Here mom," she pushes into my belly. "These are all your things. They shouldn't be in my room. They are not for kids."

I open the bag. What does cupid have for me? One sock, a screw driver and three AA batteries.

Happy Valentine's Day Senoir Bunny.

2007-02-27T01:32:00.000-08:00

how

i compensate

2007-02-25T07:57:00.000-08:00

*Instead of my workshop re-write this morning, I wrote this.

I hate my brain.

My spirit, I'm good with my spirit. Myself, me, whoever, whatever it is stuck inside all of this. I'm good with her, too. I like her.

But, my brain. I fucking hate my brain.

A wise woman once told me that twice exceptional means smart enough to know how fucked-up you are. Yeah, well. Plllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll. If I could choose, give me some physical impairment. Take my hearing. God, how peaceful it would be to have quiet. To not have to hear everything all at once, all the time. And need respond simultainiously to all of it? Take my hearing, please.

My brain hates repetition.
But, guess what?
Every time you eat, there are dishes. Dishes all day long. They never stop.
Wear clothes? There's always laundry. Even as you pull six clean loads from three industrial dryers, the clothes on your body are getting dirty. It never, never stops.

Eat food? Back to the grocery store. Eat the food. More dishes. The food is gone. The dishes are dirty again. More grocery store. On and on and on and on. It never fucking stops. Life in my head.

There is no break from life and the things it takes to power through it? All repetitive.

Specialist after specialist explains it to me, I'm not stupid. Thanks. Well, you know what? You can have twice exceptional. If I have to have a gigantic deficit in half of my brain, I'd rather just be plain old dumb. Some days.

Thirty-years of specialists. And nothing they tell me makes this muscle run more smoothly. Nothing. So, I smile. They all say the same things.

I'm 7-years-old when they tell my parents there is no logical explanation for the way my over the top verbal compensates for my retarded visual. Can I just say retarded? Because I'm tired of semantics. Typical? How is that different from normal? And why does it matter?

Compensate? Um, it's called survival. Surviving. Of course. Of course I can get by on what I have. Of course you can too. That's what life is, surviving on what you have. It's ALL compensation.

It's the trees along the coast. The ones that grow through impossible circumstance - slowly from the rocks, twisting beautifully to compensate for the wind. Gorgeous torment. Where there is no soil the roots grab rock, bare rock, and cling with every thread to keep growing. Beauty from the most impossible circumstance, because the circumstance is so impossible.

That's the rub, isn't it? Hardship grows beauty and hard is life and life is irrepressible. Build a city in the jungle, leave it unattended and the earth reclaims it in a moment. Grows through it, over it, buries it in green tangles of truth. We sit on the limestone tops of man made remains wondering at the nothing surrounds it.

It's all a breath and you can't stop breathing. Concentrate on it. Meditate on this. Hold your breath. But the air just keeps flowing in and out. Life is bigger than we are. And we are life. And it just keeps coming.

So, I go my friends' house last night. I can't go home to the dishes in the sink and the toys on the floor. Always with the toys and dishes. Never stops.

So I go to my friends house and attack my brain with everything I can, to anesthesize it. Make it numb. Shut it up. Ah, the quiet.

It doesn't matter that I hate my brain.

So I Compensate.

solstice shows

2007-02-15T06:39:00.000-08:00

"Mama, mama many worlds I've come since I first left home."
~Robert Hunter

May 1993

It's different the way they treat you at 6 o'clock on Saturday morning dressed just as yourself on the same stretch of sidewalk you cover five days a week looking just like them. There's no good reason to be hanging out across from the State House now, checking the morning paper in the box. I'm alone on the sidewalk and it's already full sunlight but not bright enough to burn the cold. Jeans busted out at the knees, flowy skirt over jeans, t-shirt under Guatemalan sweater - purples,blues, pinks. I'm not thinking about the morning paper, looking past the State Capitol dome, Ohio flag hanging limp, to the building across the street, where I need to be in a few hours, showered and changed and dressed as my other self. The reporter this cop would breeze by without a nod. Definitely not more than a "good morning." This way, this me, I'm out of place. He sees uncertainty, me looking like I'm not sure I should be here, and I'm not. There is no sign of anyone else coming for tickets.

I should not be here. Should have, would have, mail order tickets, if I
hadn't missed the first day of mail order. If my hostage, the guy who's
story I'd been following last month, whose mother I'd been talking to
for days, hadn't been released on day six of the longest prison riot in
history, I'd be right where I should be now: home beneath the covers
hours away from waking. That's not how it went down.

It went down like this. Friday morning, April 16, I stop by my friend Craig's house early to pick up his mail order for Deer Creek Solstice shows. We go, line by line, over the 3x5 index cards, make sure everything is just so. If it's not exactly right there Grateful Dead Productions won't process. If it's not postmarked on the day mail order opens, forget it.

The 3x5 card says:
Grateful Dead Ticket Sales – Deer Creek Music Center
P.O. Box C-S 8190
San Rafael, CA 94912

Craig pulls smoke through a purple Graffix so the cloud lifts past a Europe 72 sticker and fills in the lighting bolt of a Steal Your Face, then passes the "Bad Cop, No Donut" sticker wrapped just below the mouth. Bobby sings from the speakers "… alone in the rush of the drivers that won't pick me up…"

Craig's belly sucks in under his ribs.

" …the highway, the clouds, the moon and the stars …"

Smoke pushes into the room and Craig's belly pushes back out into his shirt.

"… Ah, mother, American night. I'm lost from the light …"

I fit the card into a #10 envelope, any other size will be returned unopened, with a money order and another #10 addressed to me, with 55 cents in postage to cover the cost of mailing six tickets.

"So pavilion for Solstice and lawn for the second two nights, right?" Taking the bong and lighter both into one hand, envelope in the other.

"Yeah. Ohhhh. Solstice is going to be so smoking." He takes the envelope from me and seals it while I fill and clear the tube.

And Bobby's still at it on the stereo "whats to be found racing around? You carry your burden wherever you go. All full of the blues, trying to lose. You ain't gonna learn what you don't want to know …"

"OK Bro." I'm standing, setting the Graffix on this mess of a painted table that has that same lyric across it in blue marker: You ain't gonna learn what you don't want to know.

"I'm going taking this to the post office. But, one more first."

Stuff the whole number 10 set up into my briefcase and I'm down the hall out into the sunlight of my day off. The thing is this prison riot. Half the staff in on it and no one really has a day off. I stop in to the paper to quick check on something before the post office. Too stoned to be there, I'm on the fourth floor where no one works. Where I can get in and out without a conversation. Why didn't I run errands first, let the buzz fade and then come here?

Doesn't matter now. Before I escape, Tony Demons is walking free from the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, skull cap on his head, cops flanking him as he passes through the chain link to the media area. Suddenly my day off is up in smoke. The number 10 never leaves my bag.

~~~~~~~~~~

"Good morning," the cop says, leaning almost to my face, "What's going on?" Not exactly accusing, but in this tone that has me feeling like, actually, I'm about to throw a rock through the one-story glass front of Players Theater.

I'm not sure whether to be pissed of at his judgment, his narrow assumptions, based on the cloths that look like I've slept on the sidewalk, or proud that he thinks I could be committing a crime. I probably walk past this guy six times a week.

"Do you know if Players is selling tickets this morning?" I have one hand on the newspaper box so my upper body is almost entirely over it. "I went across the street and called, I work at the paper, so I went over there and called, but I couldn't find out if they are selling Dead tickets here today."

I make a point of telling this guy, whose opinion means nothing, that I work at the newspaper, that I'm a reporter, to justify that it's OK to be me. That I can look like this, and he can be completely wrong. Really, it's just, I like the idea of being dangerous, of looking the hippie-rebel better than I like actually rebelling. A compulsive rule-follower masquerading.

"Yeah, I don't know," he says, easing back.

Why does he believe me so easily? I'm fidgeting and nervous and arrogant in a way that must be yelling "LIE! LIE! LIE!"

But he lets it go and I circle the newspaper box again debating, go somewhere else or chance it on staying here where I will be first in line, if there is a line, if there are tickets being sold. My head slowly swings from a little drunk to the edge of hungover. I want a cigarette. Should have bought smokes on the way down here. I'll go get a pack and find an open TicketBastard. For sure there would be someone else here if it were opening.

I turn to go, there is.

Three people, two men and a woman, all long hairs, round the corner and closing in from down the block. The blonds are obviously a couple and the other guy, brown hair down past his shoulders, green and black plaid flannel jacket, khaki shorts, Birkenstocks, is a half-step ahead of the others. His arms hang forward from his shoulders, swinging in a funny uncertainty, like his body can't decide between lumbering and swaggering. I'm watching like the cop, my own judgments coming quick
and then easily dismissed.

The other guy, the brown-haired guy looks good. The closer they get the better he looks. So by the time he's right up to me, I've totally forgotten his funny, lumbering walk. There's a short exchange about whether we should stay or go to another TicketBastard.

Then me: "It's such bullshit. This cop was just hassling me a minute ago and there's no way he would have done that if I was dressed for work. Total bullshit that he's watching me because of my cloths… I hate cops."

The brown-haired guy is agreeing, rocking back on his heels. "I fucking hate cops." He palms a whole cantaloupe in his hand and reaches out with other. "Hi. I'm Scott. You want a slice of cantaloupe?"

I hate cantaloupe. "Yeah. I'd love one."

To be continued … and continued … and continued ... and continued

batteries not included

2007-02-05T00:56:00.000-08:00

Let me tell you about the length of seven months. Seven months are 210 days, but whose counting? Oh, yeah. Right. Me. I’m counting. I’m counting that seven months can fly right on by, but 210 days?

Two hundred and ten days are a back road Sunday drive, interrupted by a washed out road, blockaded, detoured and … you get it. S-L-O-W. That’s seven months in my body. Without another body.

I’m at my friend Heidi’s the other day, have I mentioned how much I love my friends?

Anyway, I’m Heidi’s and Josie is shadowing Georgie. Josie adores George – the older man at three. It’s George and Josie jumping off the chairs and laughing, over and over. George in his blond hair, Superman boxers, Buzz Light Year shades and nothing else. Josie peeling shoes and socks, getting to bare feet before I stop the shedding.

Josie putting pirates on the Play Mobile ship: “OK. Piwate you go up here. Play piwates, Geowgie. Wanna play with me.”

George waving his light saber: “No, Josie. I’m a super hero.”

Heidi and I at the table, steam rising from the teacups between us.

In another life, not so distant past, she was a Passion Parties rep. Sales, like Tupperware parties, but with sex toys instead of airtight leftover containers. And now that she’s gotten away from it, there’s this whole box of lonely, unwanted, untouched samples somewhere in her house. Somewhere. But, where?

I’ve been asking that question for months. Where, where, where is that box, girl? And, she’s stumped. In the back of a closet? Buried behind her husband’s guitars? WHERE? See? See those capital letters? Those big letters mean URGENT. Desperation.

It’s nearly time to get Amelia from school and I need to go, but I am not leaving empty handed.

Trail Heidi down the basement stairs after her laundry.

“Ok, you NEED to find the box,” now it’s just "the box" and we both know what I’m talking about. “I’m going to rip your house apart, girl. SEVEN MONTHS. It’s been seven months,” I say. “Seriously, I’m going to rip the walls out to find that box.”

“Oh my god, I forgot to tell you. I FOUND IT! I was going to call you yesterday, but I was on the way out and I knew if I called you’d want to come over.” A pause, stuffing wet cloths into the dryer. “Oh my god. Seven months. I’m so sorry. That’s so long.”

We’re up in her room, highest back corner of the closet is a pretty pink case, white polka-dots, stuffed with black silk bags that are stuffed with vibrators. Choose your style. The Monarch. The Rabbit. The Jelly Osaka. The bullet. The G. Choose your size. Choose your features. Long? Stubby? Straight? Curved?

Anything. Anything will do now.

George is in the doorway, curious, and I’m feeling around the bags but not pulling anything out with Superman hovering.

“Go play with Josie. She came over to play with you,” Heidi says, leading curious George back to the family room.

“But, what are you looking at?”

We’re talking features and functions, but I’m an easily influenced consumer, Sex In the City girl. So, it’s The Rabbit. No point in discussing the others.

My friends take good care of me. I leave with the black silk bag, lubricant, a two-cup coffee maker and a can of powdered kitten formula she wants me to pass on to this animal rescue woman I’m supposed to interview later in the week. All of it mingling in a plastic Freddy’s bag.

Can’t get this kind of variety at Freddy’s.

“There’s no batteries in it,” she says as I’m sliding Josie’s shoes back onto her feet. “You need to get C batteries. I think it needs three.”

The whole bag hits the back of the car and I don’t think about it, or the three C batteries, until it’s dark outside. Dinnertime, then baths and stories and bed. Too late for battery shopping now, the rabbit sleeps in its perfect silk sac.

But, this is a kids’ house. Kids’ houses have kids toys. Kids toys, the kind my parents send - the talking, bleeping, blaring plastic kind I hate - they have batteries. The kids are sleeping, the toys are silent and I’ve got the screw driver out, gutting the Winnie The Pooh talking phone, the Backyardagins radio, the Diego drawing board that Josie calls her “Ego (com)puter.”

AA. AA. AA. Doesn’t anything in this house take an effing size C?

Let me tell you about necessity. There’s a little bit of McIver in all of us, even me. And you know what, three AAs may be a bit longer and a lot thinner than Cs, but line them end to end and viola, power.

Now I have power, but these things don’t fit right, keep popping out. They’ll need something to hold them in place. Think, Holly, think. Tape, can’t find the tape.

BAND-AIDS! Of course. A bright green band-aid, crossed with a blue one, reinforced with another green and now the rabbit is running.

Let me tell you about just one more thing: it’s amazing what a Band-Aid can fix.

all that's still unsung

2007-02-02T02:42:00.000-08:00

Here's this line that keeps going through my head now that I've been obsessively listening to the Dead again. I was one of those Deadheads who spent years, at least three years, listening to almost nothing else. And then, nothing. Hardly ever even put a single song in rotation anymore. I've been writing some back story and I know the tunes are all going to figure into the bigger story, if only as a soundtrack to my writing. A few well placed guitar licks to coax the memories.

But for now this just this line, this one verse from Stella Blue:

"I've stayed in every blue light, cheap hotel
can't win for trying,
Dust off these rusty strings just one more time
gonna make them shine, shine"

Certain lines, the crowd always erupted, like when Jerry sang that one. Cheesy as this sounds, I will miss Jerry Garcia for the rest of my life.

I've been playing with this thing in my head about the Dead and spirituality, trying to figure out how to write it without just coming off as the cliche.

Scott said this thing about us meeting in line for Dead tickets and me knowing who he is, he said, "You met me in line for Dead tickets. Who did you think you were marrying?" He said it in therapy. Led to this discussion with the therapist about how she always had gotten that there was this certain commonality that drew people to the Dead but never understood what.

It is spirituality, hunger for it. Always that was so clear to me. It's so simple. The words and the guitar work scream it, and here were all these mostly 20-something, upper middle class white kids struggling to find something. Raised on dogma in a plastic wasteland and knowing there is so much more. Something. That we are that, but with no way to get to it. Just a wanting. Wanting to be OK with themselves and the hardness of life and the connectedness of everyone, everything. The synchronicity. Ask any Deadhead what they loved about tour and they'll tell the tale of synchroncity.

All these lost people searching and believing in something. Screaming out to lines like these:

"I have spent my life seeking all that's still unsung
bent my ear to hear the tune and closed my eyes to see
when there were no strings to play
You played to me."

and:

"In another time's forgotten space
your eyes looked from your mothers face
wildfire seed in sand and stone
may the four winds blow you safely home"

and simple like:

"I'm still walking, so I'm sure that I can dance."

Weird, I know. But does it make any sense?

food glorious food

2007-01-26T02:14:00.000-08:00

The glass door slides open with my step and I move from cold to warm, Josie on my hip. Around the back of her scalp, her hair is a fuzzy blond tangle and I am too aware of her unkept look. This is my mom's thing, the hair, but I can't let go of it. Appearances.

Why should I care? I know I wash her hair, bath her, brush her teeth, read her the same story 438 times a day, sing to her, laugh at her two-year-old humor, hold her in the night when she wakes in terror. But, if I'm here then I must be failing, must not be good enough, must not be enough for my children.

The room is crowded, two-dozen people staring into any space that does not meet another's eyes. They sit on maroon vinyl chairs around formica tables wearing a singular expression. L.L. Cool J is talking to Jenny Jones on the T.V., but nobody looks at them either. Straight down, or straight ahead or straight through the faded avacado walls.

They are tight lips, streched thin and pulled down. They are weary faces, eyes blank with stress, eyes that hit the floor quickly, instantly, when they see me looking. A whole room full of people who'd rather be any where but here, who can't look.

I don't have to see their faces though, I'm wearing them.

They are a staggering statistic, a barely measurable percentage of the 200,000 Oregonians who fill their tables with food from an emergency box every month. TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND. Every month.

What the fuck? What the fuck is wrong with our society? We dump bazillions into fueling hatred and building bombs to drop on children guilty of praying to a different god, when 200,000 people in this one state, just one among 50, can't collect enough quarters for dinner. What the fuck?

You can recognize the regulars, they are tired but they don't care and their faces tell it They aren't humiliated by sitting in line for hours to get food stamps, so they can eat, just bored. So their children can go to school with full bellies, they sit and wait. And, good for them, why should they be ashamed?

Irate is what they should be. There is no dignity in this.

"Julie" a voice calls from one of the cubicles. Just a first name, like the signs on the wall say, they use first names only to protect privacy. And no one looks.

I sit at the kid's table, in a tiny chair, knees up to my chin, working through pages and pages. Do I have a 401K? How much is in it? How many hours a week do I work? How much do I make? How often am I paid? Am I married? Single? Divorced? Married but Separated? Does the father contibute? How much? Have I ever been convicted of a crime? I wonder, if I did have a criminal record, does that mean I don't deserve to eat? Do I receive other social services?

Josie matches wood peices to a cut out puzzle. "Mommy, look, a helicopter." Identifies the letters A-B-C-D on a coloring sheet and gleefully scribles purple across them.

When she tires of her sheet, she adds color to mine.

The woman across from me sits legs together to the knees, hugging a bright blue folder to her chest. Looking, but not looking.

"I'm tired as hell and a big part of it is her," a woman says to her friend, while watching her toodler scribble at the table with Josie. "It's good though. This will remind you of what you're getting into if you get pregnant.

"There's a double wide for sale for $8,000, $2,000 down." She looks around the room and back to her friend. Both women are overwieght, obeese. Easily 300 plus pounds. Jeans, Crocs, no socks, fadded t-shits, grey hoody sweatshirts. "It's sad that I recognize the ones that are always here."

The duaghter and Josie go for the same toy and the girl squaks.

"Honey," the mom says without looking "You've got to share baby. You know share, both of you have to use it." Then she dissapears past the cubicles into the back.

This is a way of life. Just something she does every month and there is no stress in her eyes.

Three people are reading and everyone else just keeps staring at nothing.

Straight ahead to nothing. Looking and waiting.

undone: part two - distance to the water

2007-01-14T10:31:00.000-08:00

10 a.m. New Years Day.

Panic. I wake in panic. Daylight. Eyes open, mind frantic, surveying everything, everything, everything – laundry, bills, work – essay and news analysis due tomorrow at work, write, eat, the car – return Laura and Neil’s car. Waking into a new year, no gradual fade into light, acute awareness of everything. Breathe in the resolution, “I can” slow my brain, “I can,” stay still “I can,” until I’m able to put my feet down without running.

Dirty clothes cascade over the wicker hamper, flowing into a lumpy pool on my closet floor so I have to stand at the edge and lean over it to pull a clean shirt from the hanger. I didn’t spend NYE with Scott. Took six weeks and four holidays, but I finally said “No.” Okay. That’s something, right? That’s progress, right? I can. I can. I can.

The car doesn’t have a chance to warm-up during the quick drive, but in the house it’s cozy – fire crackling, pancakes frying, kids on pillows watching Cars while dad cooks and mom sleeps late. MMMM. I want this scene, and it digs into my ribs. It digs and this essay/application, the one I’ve had weeks to do and haven’t started, kicks. Walk home smoking a camel light, fingers numb, down to the butt. I do this, smoke, and I’m not a smoker. Off and on, and off and on, and off and on, again. Smoke the stress in and out. Am I just so ADD that I can’t even follow through with addiction?

A New Year begins.

Climb into pillow nest, swaddled in blankets on the floor and stare at the computer. Read pages of white on black and pages that didn’t make it. Everything but this one day I need to dissect, rebuild and turn-in to the head of the online team tomorrow. I don’t.

Everyday I don’t. I can’t. Start tired and sleep less, lay awake worrying but not doing until “I can” is not a meditation nor a resolution, simple desperation. Unconvincing encouragement spoken quickly, unevenly. Begged.

I can I can I can I can I can I can I can I … Can I?

Exhuastion becomes a bizarre kind of forced mindfulness where I feel each foot fall, every bend in my legs to pick that foot up, because if I stop paying attention to my legs, they will stop going. Light and heavy, both. Step. Step. Step. Left foot. Right foot. Left foot. Step. Step. Step. Stepping in every step. If I stop being in every step, I will be laying on the cement. This is how it is in my body. This is me as the subject of my own sleep deprivation experiment

David Bowie climbs into my brain while I sleep so I wake to a tune I haven’t heard in months. There it is – David Bowie and Queen - sounding off as my internal alarm clock: “This is our last dance. This is ourselves .. Under pressure ... Under pressure ... pressure ... pressure ... ”

2007
~ ~~~~~~

It's next week. There is distance and there is the relief and there is the bud, not even the first bud but the puffy spots pushing out of the end of each branch quietly trying to become buds, tenatively preparing, of understanding. Of course it was the holidays. Of course last week was the ugly re-entrance into reality. Of course, last week was the end of excusing myself. Of course. Last week was me remembering, without any words, something I said to Karin a week before Christmas on the day I was meeting Scott and the kids at Saturday market.

We're standing in her doorway. I'm there for hannukah wrap and she's putting a kettle on. Saturday morning comfortable in slippers and a sweater.

"Are you staying for tea."

"I can't," I say, and I don't want to say the rest. "I have to stop by the post office and I told Scott I'd meet him and the girls I'd meet them for Pad Thai at the market." I say the last part soft and fast, hoping to sneak past it without calling attention to the reality of what I'm doing.

She doesn't need words to question this plan.

"I know," I say. "I know, but it's just the holidays. And this is it. Then it changes back, no more dinners together." What am I doing?

"Okay. The holidays, but after the first of the year, if you're still having diners with him, we're talking about this."

It's the end of the second week of the year and in the steam rising from my tea cup is everything I already know, it's from the voices across the table and it's rising in the steam and it's already huge inside of me. Now. Now it changes, again. The diners have to stop. The baby sitting has to stop. The nights of me coming home to him on my couch after two full workdays - first with the girls, then at the paper - and fighting about the same shit. Has to stop.

There are the ideas coming from across the table, swirled in with the honey, dissapating in green tea and they go down pretty easy this way. No Scott. I can go a month without seeing him, even for the transitions. Extreme maybe, but bounrdies are blury to me and, on this one, I'm not so different from my kids. The lines have to be fat and solid, inflexible, or I will just keep crossing further into confusion. Tell myself I'm still confused while hearing in everything I say, reading in everything I write, that I'm not. I'm not confused. No Scott. I'm done.

It's one more tiny, fucking ginormous, terrifying step into, into me. Why do I keep using these words "terrifying, horrifying, scary" and "Me?" Really, I'm not so bad.

~~~~~~

Five days into the new year everything crashes into me, within me. A Friday. Can't find my efffing phone again, can't find child care for this afternoon appointment I haven't prepared for, can't find a speck of anything within me to keep doing. And we are running late for school again.

I'm in the girls' room, floor peeking out in patches from beneath strewn toys, picking through the mismatched sock bag for something to put on Amelia's feet. If not a pair, something in the same shade.

The girls' voices singing from the living room.

"Lights dim, voices low, it's time for a puppet show ..." Amelia, tucked between the chair and the wall, fingers tucked into a frog, a cow and a pig, playing her happy play.

"I'm climbing onto the chair to see," Josie, half into the blue glidder.

I hear all of this. See it without looking.

"NO! Stay down. You are too close. You can't climb up. Josie get down"

A thump, tiny body hitting the floor. Screams.

I'm still in the bedroom. "Amelia Rose GO TO YOUR ROOM. RIGHT NOW!" The yell rakes my throat, broken glass pulled hard over vocal cords. Puppets laying like little soilders, down, on the floor.

I am a wretched mom. Short and angry and ruining her child's play. Damn it, what are you doing? now I'm scolding me. They didn't choose this. They have no say in this. This exhaustion is yours, your choosing to have life this way, not them. Don't take it out on them. You are the only mother these kids have and they have no say in these changes, so fucking pull yourself together and stop punishing them for the strain of YOUR life. You are ruining these girls. My head tells me.

Then it pounds. My head pounds in the car, throat still aching from the yelling, chia pet alarm clock harmonizing with winnie the pooh talking phone, tormenting me. The pounding sinks down through my skull, throbbing teeth. Breathe.

~~~~~~

Same Friday. Five days into the year. The phone rings at work, I answer and stand to look for the slot, the caller is looking for the slot, and I stand to look. Reach down for the desk, smooth beneath my hand, and stabalizing as I start to feel myself fade, hold on and surf through the rush. Dizzy. Sit down, regroup and type in the request: "If we have enough staff to cover the workload tomorrow, can I take a vacation/mental health day?"

~~~~

That we are 70 percent water has never made sense. How can it be?

I get it now. The tears come and come and come untill I'm not sure there is even one percent solid. Ninety-nine precent liquid rushing out while I walk through the warm of January down toward the park. Follow a street that dead ends into the high school, past the house Amelia likes. A yellow house with a for-sale sign on the lawn and prayer flags across the porch. We play this game on our walks, picking out houses it would be fun to live in. She picked the yellow one. I pointed out a dark green, Old Portland, craftsman.

"I don't want to live in a swampy green house. I want a color that's more delightful." I laugh, still hearing her, as I pass the yellow house. Tears and rain on my face. I know what I know.

There is the darkness, yes,and my eyes have adjusted. The quality of it has shifted, lightened, my night vision is keen. It might be hard and I may be unraveling, and still, I know what I know.

There was a time when I gaged the distance to the water from every bridge in Portland. But I know (without ever having tested it) just how to drop, and I’m a strong swimmer, and I don’t want to jump from bridges anymore, just safe passage across. Just get me to the other side and let me feel solid, steady earth beneath my feet. I want this life. Tears and terror and exhuastion and all. I want it. Hard maybe, but still better than it was when the work was divided between two of us. When I wanted to jump. No retreat.

Round the corner of the school into the park and duck under my favorite tree. Branches spreading above, perfect nesting spot out of reach. Maybe ten years ago?
Sit on the roots, looking through the canopoy. Eyes burning.

God. Oh please, God, let the fibers be strong enough. Let the fabric hold.

Out of the park to the library, to the Tibeten place on Sandy for diner alone with my book. Potatoes and spinich and "Little Miss Strange." I like my company. Everything will be alright. I will be. Alright?

undone: part one - the strain

2007-01-06T15:27:00.000-08:00

I’m home from work, taking a mental health day today. I’ve never done that before, taken a day off for the sake of sanity. When I was younger, I’d call-out to go to a concert or go to a party or whatever other thing I thought I HAD to do, so I didn't miss out on something. Or, I’d call in sick because I’d done one of those things and needed recovery time. The only class I ever had to repeat was the newspaper design class I got a “D” in after deciding, in the larger scope of my life, sucking down a puddle of liquid at a Dead show with my friends was more meaningful than studying for a final in a class I was probably going to repeat anyway. I was still tripping when I showed up for the 8 a.m. test, made a pretty pattern with the multiple-choice bubbles and left 10 minutes later.

Today is truly a mental health day. And it’s not about playing hookie to make poor choices or because of poor choices already made. Or maybe it is? It’s about feeling the fabric of me wear and thin and fray until I am completely thread-bare, without a sewing kit or patches. The fright of feeling those worn spots quietly begin to rip and knowing what happens when thin fabric starts tearing. And, of having no recourse beyond this keyboard and the raking sobs that shake me as I type. I slept for more than 10 hours last night, and the weight of everything undone has me staring back to the unmade bed ready to retreat.

It looks warm outside and I need fresh air, I need a good hike. I need to return the wifi card I bought last week, but don’t need. I need to return training wheels Josie doesn’t need. I need to take my car to the DEQ and the DMV (YEA! I have my own car that I’m not sharing with Scott. Yea for my friend Karin, who GAVE me this car. I love my friends. I love Karin!) I need to pay bills and deal with the collection notices pilling up. Who has the “no means to pay" file now? I need to do two weeks of laundry, but first I need to go to the bank or Safeway to get a roll of quarters for the machines. I need to clean yesterday’s lunch from the table and floor where Josie and Amelia were sitting. I need to make a cup of tea and break this habit of not nourishing myself. I need to grocery shop before the kids get back so I can do it quickly. I need to be quiet, let myself get quiet, and meditate. I need to do all of this, all at once, all the time, and every now and then the mundane stuff that keeps life going becomes so big and so present that I freeze. Can’t do any of it.

I need to cry, hard and long, to what Prema called "the zero feeling." And crawl back into my bed.

I need a week of mental health days to preserve my sanity. To deal with the weeks of life left undone.

The holidays were brutal. Is that what this is about? This week – post holidays – was total meltdown. Some things, I counted on, even forgave myself for doing, even before doing them. I knew I’d spend more time with Scott in awkward situations than I should. Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas … I knew I’d say it was just for the kids and that it wouldn’t be, and it wasn’t. What I didn’t count on was how shitty it would feel to be at parties without him when I wanted to go alone. Places we have always been, together, where everything is the same and everything is different. Place after place after place, full of situations call that for recalibration.

And, I didn’t count on the strain of constant doing. Two people quite at work, shifting my schedule. Scott finally gets a job, another change in my routine. Now my rhythm – built on separating me as a mom from me as a single working woman – is shattered, just when I had it down. Start the work week Thursday evening –life without kids – sleep in Friday and Saturday, catch up on sleep and bills and writing and taking care of me until Sunday night or Monday morning. Shift to Mommy-mode where, sure, it’s taxing to be on ALL of the time, but doable. Then two people quite and Scott starts working and my separate worlds collide, leaving me with no time, NONE, for me. My work week shifts from four days to five days so Tuesdays become this marathon of parenting for thirteen hours, then leaving my girls with a sitter at 8 p.m. so I can go to work. Thursday nights they go to Scott’s, but I can’t punch the clock and be done, because, guess what, I’ll work until Midnight and they will be back before 8 a.m. No sleeping in. No bill paying time. No time to work on the freelance stories that are supposed to be paying the rent. What’s left is a little slice of daylight on Saturday before work, and every other Sunday evening – and those have been devoured by the holidays. It goes on like this for weeks.

Then. MELTDOWN.

Saturday night, I stay at work long after the room is empty, writing until almost morning. Take the 6:30 a.m. bus home, the lone passenger from downtown to way up on Sandy, and watch the earliest dawn streak dark blue across the sky. It’s going to be a clear New Years Eve day. I sleep the lucid, fitful sleep that comes with laying down at the wrong time, never sure if I’m asleep and dreaming, or awake and having really bizarre thoughts. Dreams of running, and falling, and sex with Scott. A flash dream, awake? About what I think should be a book. But, it’s not my book, it’s Jess’s, something from an email conversation we had in the middle of the night, both of us still up and pounding at the keyboard. It goes on like this until I rise, shower and ride the same bus with the same driver back to the paper around Noon. It’s a different driver when I head home for the second time on New Year’s Eve. Now the first streaks of dusk are showing dark against the cloudy sky and I take three steps in the door, drop my bag and my coat on the floor and my body into the unmade bed. I sleep hard and dreamless for hours.

It’s close to 9 pm., when I wake. My stomach is turning and I have work to do and I could turn over and sleep the rest of the night. My plan was a quiet New Years at home, alone by choice, seeking solace in myself. Instead I drag myself back to the shower, dress and walk five blocks up the hill, past the big houses on Alameda ridge, to have diner with my friends. They are five blocks away and I’ve seen them twice in the three months since I moved here, to be nearer to my friends. I should go, I coax. Most of the night I’m too aware that my family is not there. My kids aren’t running around with theirs. A lot of their lives, a lot of mine and Scott’s, have been lived in this house. I see Amelia sitting-up frog style on the rug, five-months-old; taking wobbly steps, 10-months-old; Jesse feeding her cranberry juice from a toy spoon long before she’s tried anything but breast milk, all of us laughing that this will be the first of many things Jesse will turn Amelia on to. Likely, the most innocuous. Too much of my life has been lived here for me to be here right now. At two-minutes after midnight I borrow their car and drive myself home in the cold.

when change becomes change

2006-12-31T05:05:00.001-08:00

Fourth night of Hanukkah.

It's late when I get home from work. The apartment smells like latkes - grease and potatoes and onions. Talking plastic telephones and magnetic drawing boards and scattered Polly Pocket pieces on the floor. Dishes piled in the sink, across the counter. Leftover latke batter covered in black film in a bowl. Scott stretched beneath a down comforter so thick I don't know if he is there. When I lift the corner to check, he jumps, a startled jack-in-the-box.

"Sorry, I'm sorry." I say stepping back. "I didn't know if you were buried under there, or if you fell asleep cuddling one of the girls."

He rubs his face in his hands. Lays his head back down.

I'm picking up wrapping paper and packaging from the floor. Wiping the table. I'm not annoyed in the way I once would have been that he ate dinner with us before watching the girls and didn't even do his own dish. I just want him to go home, now, so I can clean-up this mess, take a bath and write.

He's tired. I get it, after all he's worked for three whole days in two months. Must be exhuasting.

New baby sitting rule: find another babysitter.

He sits up, rubbing his eyes, his face. Sage comforter still covering everything to his goatee. Asks me if I'm mad at him? Tells me about the job offer he got tonight - an IT position working with kids at a Catholic high school.

"Congratulations. I'm happy for you. Did you accept?" Stop circling and collecting, turn to face him, hands full of balled-up Hanukkah wrap.

He's been wanting to get into education, talking about getting a teaching certificate for years. Flip-flopping between that and law school. Still, it's funny, the universe showing off its wicked sense of humor. Scott spent his sophomore year setting a detention/suspension record at his Catholic school. He was a soccer player, recruited to it's state champion team, a notch above expulsion. They just kept letting him clean blackboards after school.

"I didn't do anything really bad," he says of that year, and well, all of his adolescence. "I just didn't do what they wanted. I did what I wanted. They said I had to wear a tie, so I wore it backwards. They didn't say how I had to wear it. That kind of stuff."

Hmmm.

"Remember that psychic I interviewed last Spring?" I ask, lowering myself into the glider so my hands are underneath me. "Remember what she told me?" I remember. Actually, I never forgot. I've been watching for this.

"Rob?" He's smiling now. Comforter around him on the couch and me across the room sitting cross-legged on the glider.

~~~~

It's May. I'm sitting with a clairvoyant who works high profile crime cases, a woman named tops in the Best of Portland poll last year. I'm gathering info to do a short profile for the paper. There's a low wood table between us, and Southwest prints on the wall behind her. Her kids' pictures on the shelves. Comfortable. My recorder's on the table, running.

She says she won't read me if I'm uncomfortable with it, and I consent despite squirming uneasiness. Free reading, right? I don't want to be read, though it's not the idea of someone else seeing into me, it's the horror of having to look myself. Besides, I have clear view down this path path. No narration for me, thanks. Not ready to put words to it. Especially if there coming from someone else's mouth. All I need is a head's-up if sees me falling from the sky in a freak skydiving accident tomorrow. If the parachute isn't going to open, this is information I want.

She reveals little about me, probably reading that I don't want to know. Asks who Robert is in my life. No Roberts, Robs or Bobs, I can think of.

"My stroller is named B.O.B. Bob Stroller."

She's puzzled, sees the name Robert all around me. Mostly she talks about Scott, reads him. Dead on. He's painfully sensitive, acutely intuitive but he keeps it all sealed off because it's too much for him. Absolutely.

"He hasn't figured out who he is yet," Shifts in her chair to stand. "You already know who you are. You know yourself."

I want to ask if he's going to figure it out. Ever. Is there a time frame? I just listen.

"Something good is coming up for him in the fall. A career opportunity. Maybe in education? He should teach, he's a natural teacher. If he went to law school, he'd be doing it for someone else, not for himself. He'll be happier as a teacher. I'd say, keep your eyes open for something happening in the late fall. October or November."

I think: 'We won't be together in November.' See, I can read me all by myself.

Scott laughs when I tell him, thinks it's all a bunch of crap.

~~~~~

"Okay, I still don't know who Robert is. I'll give you that," I can feel the chair pressing a courderoy tattoo into my hands. "Remember what she said about you? About a good career opportunity coming your way in the fall? Education, she said."

"It's not fall anymore," he gloats, smiles.

"It is fall. It's fall for 12 more hours, you can't get much later in the fall than that," I'm laughing. "And, geez, give the poor woman a break. Even if she was off by a month, she pegged it without even meeting you. Not even a picture of you."

Quiet surrounds the laughs. Laughing together. Then silence. Awkwardness.

He stands to leave, lingering. Building up to more words, but I just keep sitting weighed to the chair by confusion. It's the softness in his eyes, an open that lets me see right into his core. It's the tears, rolling over dark circles, a drop at first, then steady running.

It's what I've always seen. Frailty protected. What everyone, everyone else misses knocking into his walls. I see it though, right through the tiniest crack, and I know who's holed-up in that fortress.

Confusion. Confusion.

Maybe it's just the fear of what is real, but I can't stand. If I stand, I will hug him, hold him, hold on to him. With every step I take to disentangle this thing, the gravity of us grips tighter.

I can't stand. I sit in the chair, looking at the futon behind him. If I stand now, I will flatten it into a bed and lay him down on it. Maybe, it's fear. Maybe it's just been too long - July - since I've had sex. Maybe, it's just .... Whatever. I want to be with him right now, an urgency as strong as any I have ever had to leave. As true as anything I've ever felt.

I sit still. The couch behind him.

"This is so hard. And, despite everything I like myself better now than I ever have,"
he says. "I feel horrible and I feel so good. I've changed. I wish you could allow yourself to see that."

Despite everything? No, because of everything. It's because of everything, can't you see that?

There are changes I don't see, I trust what he's saying. Believe he feels something so profound that it's baffling others don't see it too. I believe the truth of his feelings.

And, yet.

He's tells me he loves me. Tells me again how he's changed, just one more chance to prove it.

My favorite professor used to say my characters pissed her off. "They have these have these great cathartic moments, these epiphanies, then they wallow around for pages refusing to change."

"All literature is about the moment of change," she liked to say. "Every story is the story of a change."

The thing is, outward change doesn't come in the moment of realization, it drifts out in the ether - morning fog lacing though the hills, dissipating slowly into blue. There is the realization, the getting there, and finally a moment, long after the spark of revelation, when change becomes change.

The plates in me slid for years, three-years, before anyone recognized.

"I believe in what you feel," I tell him, standing. "The thing is, nothing can be different unless I can see it, too. And, it's not just you. It was us. The two of us not being kind to each other. I hate how I treated you. I hate who I was, that I could hurt you so much. That I still do."

When he leaves, I lower the futon, add sheets, down comforter, and pillows, and climb in alone. Comfortable with confusion. Secure in the truth of uncertainty, and the rising clarity of my voice. Three octaves higher.

Everything is concrete for him.

Intuitive for me.

He needs more than the honesty of my confusion. Yes or no? When? How long? There are no answers, just the time stretching out between here and the place where change becomes change.

For now, honest confusion is the only real thing I can offer.

re-defining resolution

2006-12-28T22:46:00.000-08:00

The trick-thing about about making resolutions is they're just too narrowly defined. All about "I'm going to do this. I'm not going to do that." No point in the follow-through impaired starting each new year with a blue print for failure. How masochistic is that?

Year after year, I have steadfastly refused.

The 20s were a winking satisfaction with hedonism, happily skipping down the path to self enihilation and stopping to smell the ashes. College housemates drew-up maps for self-growth and started jogging, I loaded a tube and wondered why anyone would want to make changes that require running. Mystified. The early-30s were defeat, so why bother making promises I would keep for a week? The mid-30s were hopeless desire - the path overgrown, obscured under thickets of witch's broom that left long stinging cuts up my arms, across my back, as I belly-crawled through it. Now, late-30s, slathering salve on the wounds, I'm re-defining resolution.

Success isn't about following the formula, it's about reformulating to make things work.

So, this year, my first resolution:

"I can ..."

Simple, versatile, fluid.

perfect.

...about the purse

2006-12-20T01:44:00.000-08:00

My stripey little bag had another solo adventure this week. It's time my intrepid belongings start a blog of their own and stop hogging space here.

Last I remember is holding it between my teeth, one hand locking the car and the opposite arm craddling a bag of clothes and toys collected from the back seat.

Hours later I'm checking all the obvious places: freezer, linen closet, tv armoire. It's not on the hook in my closet or beside the chair at my computer. I'm a tornado of cleaning and orgainizing, spinning as if creating post-separation order will put it back on the hook. I look and I look and it's not there. Not in the freezer. Not under the couch.

Amelia watches in wonder as I sweep and sort and dig through dirty laundry. Now more entertained by the search than her third night of Hanukkah art supplies.

"OooHHHH," the long, pained sigh as I stand staring at her. Stumped.

"Mommy, you are fucked about the purse!"

Bite lips togther. Do not laugh. Do not react. Do not call any atention to her perfect word choice.

"I'm frustrated about my purse," I say, hoping she let's it go at that.

Apparently my purse isn't the only thing I need to keep closer tabs on.

"Just frustrated? That's not as bad as fucked, right?"

ripples

2006-12-14T01:54:00.000-08:00

Everything I know about Mary Gordon fits into a single paragraph. Maiden name? Left a small village near Ukraine, somewhere outside St. Petersburg when the Jews were swept from Russia. Settled a couple hours from Pittsburgh. Mt. Pleasant, Penn. How do Russian Jews end up in Appalachia? Her older sister was planning a wedding and when the fiance backed out, Mary wrote an appeal so stunning he did marry her sister. (I hear it was a crappy marriage) When he showed his best friend the letter, my great-grandfather became crazed to meet the writer. Meshuganah Mary, Crazy Mary. Don't know what my great-grandmother said, or if there was really a letter. If that record of family history ever existed, she probably burned in the bon fire of her journals and poems. Her husband was 10-years-younger, a closely kept secret. She had three girls and a boy and taught her self English reading the dictionary; but wrote and wrote wrote in Russian. Every word of it up in flames.

~ ~ ~ ~

Eight months pregnant with Amelia even water gives me heartburn. Her head is shoved way up into my left side, knocking against the little ribs, squishing my stomach to nothing. At 37 weeks, it takes several rounds of moxibustion - heating the pressure points on my pinky toes - to flip her, At 42 weeks it takes acupuncture and two Castor Oil-Root Beer floats to drive her out. The pre-natal prologue to every school morning. She comes in whole, exactly who s he is. For weeks while I wait, I chew Tums and Papaya Eczyms as the rest of the world sleeps. Wait for the 4 a.m. East Coast news feed

"From Moscow, CTV Bureau Chief Ellen Pinchuk." Stop surfing, caught on the name, Ellen Pinchuk. Ellen Pinchuk? My cousin Ellen? Has to be. Don't know her well. She's a third cousin from L.A. who I met every few years when her family visited Youngstown. Our grandmothers were sisters, Mary Gordon's two oldest girls.

I watch a web broadcast of Ellen in Baghdad, an American Jewish Woman covering the war. I see her sign off from Siberia, Moscow, Afghanistan, Jerusalem - and then this. There's my cousin sitting with Vladimir Putin in the Presidential Palace - one of them anyway - for an exclusive before the G8. What you don't see is her chatting with him in Russian about just stuff.

Not a fan of the man. But, if we are truly affecting seven generations in both directions while we are here, I'm thinking the great granddaughter of a peasant who was booted from the country sitting down with the President in his palace a century later???

Got to be sending some crazy ripples up and down our lines.

10 miles up

2006-12-12T07:35:00.000-08:00

Saturday morning. Snuggled in flannel sheets, so cozy lying beneath the windows calling old friends. Michelle and I go back forever; all the way back to the tops of the apple trees that covered our neighborhood, all the way back to as far as I go with anyone. Eight, nine-years-old maybe.

She’s pouring hot chocolates all around, already back from sledding the snowy Vermont hills out her door, I’m still in bed noticing how warm it is even without the heater running

It’s a funny, funny ball, this Earth we’re spinning around on. The bigger the circles the tighter the weave; colors on colors through colors wrapping one around another into one around another into one. This place where every time, every place, every thing is every other. Heading west on the St. Johns Bridge to Forest Park is crossing the Ohio River into West Virginia straight on through Wheeling on to Pittsburgh.

We’re different creatures, my old friend and I. She always with a plan, a goal, as I stumble through ordered chaos, tossing years of work onto the pyre and mastering 11th hour successes. Her words say one thing – sledding was fun, the girls are doing well, work is good and on and on but her voice tells the truth. Too even, metered laughs.

“I know you can’t really talk right now, but how are things really?” I ask, after we’ve exhausted the ups and downs of my life, the family updates – her dad’s retiring, sister is pregnant.

“Not good.” All the evenness drains from her voice. “Not good.”

Funny, funny how this Earth spun us right back together just as our divergent paths became the same worn trail. Was it ‘93 last time we met? Chicago and ice-skating downtown and drinking vodka until dawn to the Blues.

Years pass. Moves. Weddings. Children. Things go as they go as they go. We talk less and less. The yearly holiday card, baby gifts, a call for this occasion or that. The circle pulls apart, then snap! right back together it comes.

Old and new – the people we need arrive in our lives just when we need them and they us. The universe is kind that way. Funny how it happens. Her husband has business in Portland. We’ve never met, but it’s natural that he hangs with Scott and me when he’s here, two times a year or three. They connect and suddenly our husbands talk more than we do, every few weeks.

So clueless, our men.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It’s August, a few days after I told Scott I’m leaving, Michelle calls, Scott asked Brian to ask her to call me because they have problems too; and what is it that they’re thinking, these men?

What exactly do they think happens when two women, lifelong friends, start talking?

“Oh, sweetie. I know you’re miserable and he’s not treating you kindly, but just stick with it, girl. Stay with him. Give him another chance” Is that how they think it will go?

I pull fat tomatoes from the garden, lining them around the edge of the table as we talk. Bare feet in the grass, in the dirt. The parallels are unreal.

“There was just a point,” I tell her. “I was waiting for a better job, waiting for more money. I thought if I got the reporting job I was up for, I’d make my move. Then I didn’t get it and suddenly everything in me shifted. I stopped seeing obstacles and found the solutions. It didn’t matter that I was making no money and working nights …”

She opens. This is the most real conversation we’ve had in two decades. Maybe the most open we’ve ever been. She talks and talks and tells the stories she’s kept to herself for years. No one knows the ugly details, her pain, the truth of her life.

“I think Scott wanted me to call you to convince you to stay, but I think you’ve talked me into leaving,” she says. “I just have to figure out the money. I don’t need to live in my 4,000 square foot mini-mansion, but I want to know I can afford the little house on the corner.”

“You’ll do it when you are ready. And when you are ready the money won’t matter anymore.”

Funny how the answers come in flashes. Every now and then we hover 10 miles above our lives looking down at the tangle and we see everything, know where we fit in the flow, and then its gone in a blink. Among the dust particles in a shaft of light I see just myself and understand how the momentum of these shaky steps reaches across the continent to my friend and pulls her forward.

“Why am I doing this?” has a whole new answer that has nothing to do with me. I look the other direction to the friend who walked before me and know my courage is born of hers.

Around the edges of this new circle, still forming circle, so much synchronicity I know it’s been there always. Suddenly all these new people arriving exactly when I most needed them, to show me what it is to be taken to your knees (in ways beyond anything I can fathom) and still look up to give thanks.

Sweet, sweet synchronicity.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Michelle tells me she knows she will leave, doesn’t know when, still needs to figure out the finances.

I hear myself speaking the words I’ve heard again and again. “Baby steps, girl. Step by step. You’ll do it when you are ready, you’ll just switch over to autopilot and go.”

She’ll leave her giant house with her financial well-being and flourishing career intact. Not one step of her journey will be easier because of it. Less complicated maybe. She’ll still be the single mother of three daughters, the youngest an infant, stumbling to find footing on a new path.

Funny how in moments of grace I remember I have everything I need. Remember gratitude.

My apartment has only one bedroom, but I have three beds and two girls to sleep in them.

Sometimes I have to ride the bus, but I always have enough change for the fare and two strong legs to carry me to and from the stops. There is a book in my lap, and I can read. I can read!

By the numbers, I live in poverty; but my house is stuffed with toys and books,
and furniture and there is always good food in the fridge.
My toilet flushes.
I’m writing on a computer.
My kids have clothes enough to fill the closets and drawers in two homes.
No matter where they sleep they lay down blanketed in love.

Sometimes there is much I think I want, but in moments of grace I know.
I have everything I need.

And I am grateful.

For all of you, who show me again and again what it means to give thanks, I am grateful.

That my actions and words may give a friend strength and spread some of this light her way, I am grateful.

I lay in my flannel sheets, head sunken into feather pillow, talking to my old friend at the other edge of the continent.

I have everything I need.

disconnect

2006-12-06T07:10:00.000-08:00

The Zone took my phone right out of my pocket yesterday morning on the 75. Now this computer is the only way I can communicate with the outside world.

I’m on the bus, Josie smelling like a pancake breakfast beside me. She’s bouncing from her seat to my lap singing the “Open them Shut Them/Itsy Bitsy Spider” dance medly. Curls her fingers into two little fists and uncurls them in my face. Tickles my lips with the tips “But do not let them in!”

I’m going through the hand motions and laughing with her; and in my head I’m working my way through everything I intend to tell Scott. Fuming. Calculating all the ways I’ve been wronged, because that’s what we do, right? We add it all up, keep score in a game that nobody can win.

That I shouldn’t be on the bus because the car sharing deal is the car goes with the kids. Package deal. But here I am bright and early after working late last night. Point for me. That he is inconsiderate and selfish for asking me to take two buses to Amelia’s school so I can walk her into class and then take two more buses home with Josie when he’s responsible for school today. Point for me. That he is an asshole for not even saying “thank you” after I do this one hour and 45 minute, four bus, round trip commute to help him out. So he can drop Amelia at the curb and pull away to be on time for an interview. Pointless points and this is all just stuff. The same old stuff. Stuff, stuff, stuff – still piled everywhere, no changes here.

Why did I expect to change our relationship by leaving it anyway?

My mind is with the stuff and not the phone I’ve shoved into my pocket. I’m practically talking out loud to myself between verses with Josie. It’s been months since I’ve worn these jeans. Long enough that I forget how everything always falls out of the shallow pockets. And, I’m a pocket kind of girl. You can pull more crap from my pockets than a 10-year-old boy’s. Wrappers and old receipts, little toy pieces and coins collected from the floor, business cards and pen caps – I carry it all around. Just can seem to throw away old stuff.

But what have I thrown away?

I can’t keep up with the shifts. Leave for work Friday bouncing out the door; I’ve slept eight hours, made my bed, read, meditated, eaten two meals, cleaned the apartment and written before I go. Haven’t had a day like this in months. Something shifted while I was in Phoenix. I started eating again and sleeping full nights. Suddenly I can’t get enough food or shut eye. I’m gaining weight and there’s a sense of calm in me – a new ability to sit with things.

Friday night I take the late bus and while I stand at Burnside and Fifteenth watching the cops hassle a few kids and waiting for the next bus, self-pity floods that calm and me disappears into the fog. I’m 37, riding the bus home from my crappy job to my empty apartment at midnight.

Why Am I doing this?

I can have it all back whenever. Anytime. There are pictures of me, pictures of us, all over Scott’s place and it’s hard to remember why I’m doing this. He’s still wearing the ring. Even in leaving, I can’t completely leave. I have to leave it open-ended. Can’t bring myself to say the D word and finalize it. So I confuse things. Confuse him. The night before Thanksgiving I make Tofurkey and smash and greens. He brings gravy and apple pie and wine and we have a family dinner with the kids because I can’t take the thought of him alone. I still want the pretty picture. I want my vision and my freedom both.

He comes back early the next morning to take us to the airport. I know I should ask someone else, but he wants to and I let him. It’s awkward, all of us standing at the ticket counter, checking luggage, but him not going.

“I love you, Holly,” he tells me at the security stop, end of the line for him. “I wish I was going.” He’s hugging and I’m not hugging back.

“I know,” I say. I can’t say I wish he was going, too. I don’t.

“That’s it?” he says, his face cracking. “You know?”

“I don’t know what else to say.”

He’s crying into the glass wall of a news stand, head against the window, back to the airport, when I look back.

And, I hate myself.

~ ~ ~

There’s a memorial service for my brother-in-law the Friday after Thanksgiving, a day after Jeff would have turned 50. Almost two years after his death. The last five years were cross-country trips to specialists and three organ transplants and two amputations before diabetes completely overwhelmed his ravaged body. My brother puts the urn - a short, wide oval of amber colored wood - between a picture of them on a glacier, a snapshot of their dog Louie, a portrait of Jeff smiling and healthy.

“Jeff told me he wanted his ashes spread at Neiman-Marcus, and he was only half kidding. I think He’d be happy that this is the most expensive square foot of real estate in the city,” he laughs, tears down his face, splashing his shirt.

I’m surprised at the power of my grief. Stronger than it was at the funeral. Bigger than it was in that glass walled ICU when then erratic beeps ran into one alarming drone that I can still hear and the mountains on his monitors crumbled into a smooth streak. Where has it been all this time, this grief?

Amelia and Josie play with their cousins under the palm trees among the headstones outside, chasing each other in circles in the sun.

Have I ever grieved anything? I am mourning Jeff and I am just mourning. Mourning everything I have ever lost.

~ ~ ~ ~

Why Am I doing this?

It's easy to ask at Midnight. I get off the bus, round the corner of my complex, past the fountain I circled with Josie waiting for the manager to show me the apartment.

I ask over and over, calling it out the ceiling through tears that splatter the carpet. Lay on the floor holding my knees and crying loud enough for the neighbors to hear but I don’t care. All the peace of the morning is gone. I want to call Scott. I want to talk to my children, pull the covers to their chins and kiss sleeping cheeks. I want to lay on the rug and let myself fall apart. Cry until I can’t.

There's an old friend outside the door. I feel it lingering and twist the deadbolt. I can't pull the bed out for fear of what will crawl in next to me. Maybe I won't get out for months. There's a kind of peace in the center of depression - a quietness that settles during months in bed.

Only the edges feel like swallowing broken glass. It's calm at the eye.

I don’t know why I’m doing this and still that quiet voice inside persists. Insists. “Keep going. Keep going.” So soft it’s barely audible over the tears, so loud there is no other sound.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

We're off the bus at Sandy and 42nd, Josie greeting the cold with a little shake that rises from her purple rainboots to her red knit tomato top cap. I can almost still read the number "75" when I reach into my pocket and find nothing. Air.

The taillights shrink, disappear up 42nd.

I know what the zone is telling me this time.

Separate. Pull the rest apart. Ditch the phone that's still connected to a shared plan, let it disappear across TIllamook. Across Brazee. Across Freemont. Prescott. Let it go. Walk right down the street to Cricket and start fresh.

Stop sharing the car.

Stop sharing.

Let. It. Go.

Midnight Express

2006-12-02T20:55:00.000-08:00

I HEART Tri-met!

On the bus you experience so much of the city the average car commuter misses. And, you can read.

I ride the 11:32 p.m. bus home from work. I aways hustle to catch the 11:32 because the next bus doesn't come untill 12:02 a.m and I've arbitrarily decided that after midnight it's no longer safe to walk the four well-lit blocks from the bus stop to my apartment.

I board the bus and scan for possible serial killers while walking to the last open seat. From the back I can keep track of the others. The bus is unusually empty, a few street punks, a couple college students and in the very back row four African American kids - maybe late teens or early 20s - who are loud and drunk, but harmless.

Two men, two-women. One man - the quiter guy - is toting a five foot stack of green 10-gallon buckets and drumsticks home from a night of busking. His buddy is loaded and slurring and, well, obnoxious.

I open "Riding With Rilke" and the noise of the bus falls away. Actually the noise of the buss passes out across three seats, but I don't know this yet. I'm with Ted Bishop on his Ducati outside of Green River, Utah and "just south of here in a harsh red mountain range, the Hole-In-The-Wall Gang relaxed between robberies."

Bishop is talking about Jesse James and Butch Cassidy when I notice the bus isn't moving and look up from the page.

There's a thick blue leg, dark blue strip, beside me and a large hand wrapped around a handgun next to the leg.

A GUN.

Two guns.

Three Guns.

All drawn. All in the hands of cops. All less than two-feet from my head.

I'm thinking, if they decide to use these things, I'm in a very unfortunate seat.

They've come for the passed-out kid becuase he meets the description of some one reportedly seen waving a gun: A black man in back jeans and a black jacket.

Of course, it's crucial to have ready weapons when approaching an unconscious suspect.

All four are off the bus; and then all of us are off the bus - the yeasty warm smell of baking bread clinging to the fog.

The kid is not armed - just riding while black, which, I think, is a felony in Portland Police statuetes.

They keep us there untill the the 12:02 arrives.

Two possible serial killers on that one.

Can't get this kind of ride in a car.

I HEART Tri-Met!

Butterflies

2006-11-26T00:32:00.000-08:00

A Thanksgiving dinner conversation between Amelia, 4; cousin Sydney, 11; and Uncle Tom:

Uncle Tom: Both of you have really blue eyes.
Sydney: My brother has blue eyes, too. It must be in our genes.
Amelia: Yeah. Or in the butterflies on my tights.

In a Name

2006-11-15T03:54:00.000-08:00

The parent-teacher conference sign-up sheet hangs above the cubbies outside my 4-year-old’s classroom.

If I learned anything from her first year of preschool it’s this: telling your 3-year-old’s teacher you already know she is ADHD earns instant LUNATIC status. Big red L on the forhead. I’m just mom, the person who knows this being better than anyone on the planet, the one who can anticipate every move, action and reaction. How would I know?

“Keep opinions and armchair evaluations tucked between your ears,” I tell myself, printing A-M-E-L-I-A into the 12:30 timeslot. “Any sharing is over sharing. Don’t be the 'crazy women.'” This is my silent pep talk.

“She’s well within the range of typical behavior for her age,” the teachers say.

They didn’t spend three June days chasing this child – then 15-months-old - up and down, up and down, up and down the steep bowl of an amphitheater, passing family after happy little family relaxing on blankets with their content toddlers.

“Lots of kids have trouble sitting in circle at this age.”

“Yes, I know.” I say, and before I can stop the flow of words: “But this is different.”

(of course it is, you freaking nutball)

It's her birthright.

Mom, ADHD. Dad, probably ADD/ODD (but can't deternime that without some evaluation, introspection and, God forbid, a little work toward self realization - and, that's another post). Aunts, ADD. Cousins, three for four. Grandparents, check and check. Nobody questions the generational genetic path processing disorders travel. Nobody refutes that the likelihood of two impacted parents having an ADHD child is near 75 percent.

And, nobody ever says: “Wow, Amelia is such an easy child.”

She’s called spirited, strong-willed, smart, active, outgoing, self-directed, opinionated, persistent, and free spirited. She is a free spirit.

Beautiful words. Doubly so when they’re describing my girls. Positive, positive, positive. Add them together and you get the classic ADHD child, and it can still be positive. I’m not saying there’s anything easy about it, but who says easy equals good?

This ‘flawed’ thinking style – freethinking – as opposed to the other kind – linear thinking, it’s an asset. Or, it can be with the right nutrients - love, patience, understanding and humor. Love. (so true, Carrie, LOVE.)

Whoever my kids are, however they think, they come by it honestly.

But, oh, does our culture love and hate labels. ADHD and processing disorder diagnosises are prolific. Sure the explosion is partly driven by the poisons we eat and drink and breathe, but it's more than that.

We’re slowly starting to GET the brain. So we classify. And we label.

Why, why, why must there be a negative connotation?

I say: “Amelia is probably ADHD with a some processing glitch.”

Teachers hear, “When can I start medicating this child into submission?” They hear me saying something is wrong with my daughter, something needs fixing. They missunderstand.

If she’s evaluated, diagnosed and labeled, so what? Maybe meds will one day help her, maybe she’ll never need them. Maybe diet changes will harness her intrepid mind, this brain that comes with a lifetime guarantee of special chaos - a gift and an Albatross all in one.

Let the labels provide a measure for knowing the can’ts from the won’ts. Nothing positive, nothing negative, nothing more.

If they open her vision and lead to higher ground, a place from which she sees, seeks and finds tools to thrive, bring ‘em on. I parent better by recognizing the point where threatening with consequences becomes moot, understanding the exact expression that says she is physiologically incapable of “making better choices” to attain or avoid something. No matter how badly she wants to.

I see it. I get it. I change the approach.

Better she grow-up understanding why finishing a simple task is sometimes about as simple as climbing Mt. Everest barefoot in a blizzard, than believing the charges of indifference, laziness and lagging motivation – the chorus of “if she just applied herself. She just isn’t motivated. She just doesn't care.”

Labels are just words. A name, and what’s in a name, right?

If the label fits, go ahead, tag my kids, but don’t ever call them lazy. Don’t ever accuse them of not caring, not trying or not working hard enough.

Call me crazy for calling it right now as I plainly see it.

Meanwhile, I'll just keep my mouth closed and one hand tight around Amelia's, the other holding Josie's, while I guide them across the slick spots to the wide open space of their strengths.

four hours and thrity-nine minutes into Wednesday (might as well just stay up now)

Linking

2006-11-12T15:09:00.001-08:00

I have links. I have links! I am so f'ing proud of my technology-challenged-bad-self. I added them all by myself. Looked at the example in the template, picked up the phone to call for help, shut the phone and forced myself to figure it out. Yea for me!

Kept hearing Jerri tell the story of her transformation from "couldn't even change a light bulb" to home repair diva! Thanks Jerri, you're a huge inspiration.

I'm taking on the DVD player next. The stereo. The wi-fi connection. I'm taking over the whole electronic world.

Fifteen hours and twenty minutes into Sunday (my first daylight post)

restless ramble midnight hour song

2006-11-09T23:54:00.000-08:00

cant get enough water
soak it in and wash it out
steaming darkness
can't get enough air
big sky breathing lightly
walking, walking
can't get enough time
girls here and gone
twisted moments
can't get enough words
out of my head fast
enough for calm
can't get food
down my throat and into my belly
chew and swallow, chew and swallow
can't get enough rhythm
words and water, words and walking
breathe
breathe it all in
in it all is
enough

three minutes into thursday

The Zone Taketh

2006-11-06T22:43:00.000-08:00

Obviously, the Universe has an urgent message to deliver through my purse.

I have a Zone - a special break in the 4th dimension, a wormhole trailing a half step behind me - that nabs my things. Dangling purse strings, loose ATM cards, notebooks, wallets, mail, cheek books, phone numbers, hair brushes, one of every pair of earrings, money. Anything not bolted down. The Zone is undiscriminating, though it's partial to cash. The last few months, oh does it have a thing for my purse.

It's August. Thursday, August 2. One day after I look from the therapist, to my husband, to the sketch of two faces that must have been drawn by one of her kids, and tell him that I want to separate. Two days before I'm to stand before his family and marry his baby brother and fiancée in a ceremony they want me to write. *

The list is groceries and haircuts and cleaning before the in-laws arrive tomorrow, before work this afternoon. Then it grows by one, pick up a shoulder x-ray for the husband in Clackamas before noon, please, for his doctor appointment. All day, wherever I am, I am somewhere else. I am on the phone in the basement numb, sobbing, while the girls watch Clifford upstairs. "I told him. I said it exactly how I practiced with it you before the session: 'neither of us is getting what we need in this relationship, neither of is happy and we haven't been for a long time. I need to try something different. I want to separate.'" I am on the phone in the kitchen rehashing while I scramble the eggs and my girls watch Arthur. I am on the phone in the car driving, speaking in code, while my girls have free range with the bagels and cream cheese in their car seats. This is where I am when the cars stops outside Kuts 4 Kids.

I am on Hawthorne, on the phone, late for the appointment, outside of Kuts, and my purse is not. Cut the engine; turn the key, reach to the passenger seat for my bag. No bag. No bag, no X-ray, only an empty seat sticking its tongue out at me and the snapshot vision of the envelope and purse on the driver's side roof. Me getting the girls settled in with their bagels, buckling in and pulling out onto Sunnyside Road, then immediately onto 205. It's a small purse, not much inside. There’s wad of old receipts, travel toothpaste, work ID, wallet, checkbook, passport for ID because the driver’s license left weeks ago.

All of it off the roof and into The Zone.

The thing about The Zone is this: The Zone taketh, and The Zone usually giveth back. I circle 205 from Sunnyside to Johnson Creek four times, go back to the urgent care center for another copy of the film, pull into hotel next door overlooking the onramp. This day started hours ago and we have spent most of it in the car, on the same stretch of 205. The girls sleep and wake in the back. Amelia reaches over, takes Josie's small hand in hers, and bites. Screams. Heat. Ninety? Ninety-five? Hot. Just plain fucking hot.

The envelope is lying in a crosswalk, crises-crossed in tire tracks. The small purse, a flat rectangle of soft stripes, is gone. Then it is not. A woman calls me at the paper.

"I saw it there by the freeway entrance and it's just such a pretty little bag that I knew it must be really special to someone so I drove down to Johnson Creek circled back around to Sunnyside and got it. I just kept hoping, putting it out there, the whole time, that no one would take it. I can just tell how loved it is. It was run over a few times and the toothpaste got squished, so I took everything out and cleaned it. And, I washed the purse for you."

It's two weeks later. Mid-August. We leave the therapist’s office agreeing to continue our separation conversation over sushi. He leaves on the bike. I sit on the gnarled roots of a giant Oak, back against the trunk, smoking an American Spirit beside the car. I am not a smoker. Not a consistent smoker anyway. I'm not a consistent anything, but when it comes to smoking just add stress. Cigarettes, weight and Neil Young, the trifecta, my emitional health barrometer. I'm smoking a pack every few days and I'm two-sizes smaller than I started the summer, but I've replaced "Helpless" with "Never Too Late" and Michael Franti tells me in a continuos loop: "Don't fear the water, you can swim inside you with in your skin ... Don't fear the long road, on the long road you've got a long time to simple song ... Don't fear your teachers, if you listen you can hear your music in the school bell..."

Just keep moving.

When I get to the sushi train the purse is strapped across my chest: passport, checkbook, old receipts, work ID, Adderall. No wallet. It's not in the therapist’s office, not by the big Oak, not in the street. The Zone taketh.

A woman calls me at the paper. Her son saw my wallet lying on the curb at the corner of SW 11th and Morrison downtown, and grabbed it because he's always losing things and wants to make sure I get this back. There's no ID in the wallet so she uses an appointment card to track my work number and calls me there. And, The Zone giveth back.

I call it The Zone,you call it ADHD. I'm okay with labels. Semantics. They help reveal my brain to me and give me context for why I need the same lessons repeatedly screamed into my ears before I'm willing to hear. They help me understand me, have compassion for me, have compassion for others who's wires don't all connect - everyone. Celebrate the weirdness of being. On a good day, anyway.

It's November. Thursday, November 2. The heat is gone. The sun is gone. The therapist is gone. The house is gone. The rain is singing to me. The list is birthday present at Ross and get Amelia from school and hand the parenting baton over to their dad during a Birthday Party in Burger King play land. Josie refuses to take off her slippers - three days of Cookie. I'm raw and impatient, flustered as I double-check the kids have everything they need for the next four sleeps. This is where I am when the car stops outside of Burger King.

I am on Southwest Barbur, late for the party, outside of Burger King and my purse is not. Cut the engine; turn the key, reach to the passenger seat for my bag. No bag. Empty seat sticking its tongue out at me and the snapshot vision of the purse in the bottom of a blue shopping kart. It's a small purse, not much inside. There’s wad of old receipts, travel toothpaste, work ID, wallet, checkbook, passport for ID because the drivers license still has not been replaced.

Call Ross from the paper. A woman answers the phone. "Is there anything in it you can identify?"

"Yes. My work ID is clipped to the inside. It has my picture on it."

"And your passport?"

"Yes. My passport is in there, too."

"You shouldn't carry your passport. You could lose it." Pause. "You can get the purse at customer service." And, The Zone giveth again.

Three times in three moths. If The Zone takes this purse once more, I will never see it again. Never.

What's the lesson? Mindfulness? Replace license and stash passport? Whatever it is, it should be obvious now, this urgent message the Universe is sending via my purse.

Once. Just this once, can I PLEASE have the Cliff Notes?

Two hours and nine minutes into Tuesday.

****
*The wedding (the lament)
X and O,
I am honored to be an instrument in helping you voice your love and commitment to each other as friends and partners and voyagers in this epic life before you.

Marriage is so many things that slowly reveal themselves both subtly and starkly along the way. Above all, it is a love that I hope allows you to be for each other always with joy, peace and kindness. That pushes you to grow, to challenge yourselves and each other to become more together than you could have become alone. That lends you the courage to communicate openly, honestly, fiercely. To laugh and cry together without restraint so you may hold each other through your triumphs and your nightmares both, in a way that tightens your embrace on every step of this journey. So you may rest in the love that supports you. This love, the boat on which you will ride the ebb and flow of your lives together.

"The soul knows for sure only that it is hungry."

Maybe its true. If so, life is for sure only a journey to find things that nourish our quirky souls. In this quest to discover little things, evolving and elusive and happening all around, you have found each other to feed your phenomenal selves with one another.

Continue to find that richness as you do in green spaces where life is insatiable, unstoppable, and also where it sprouts from impossible circumstances, like trees punching through the rocks and crags. Wrap it tight around your entangled souls, a flowered vine that binds you.
These are the things I believe you HAVE found, that you know X and O, because here you are in this place surrounded by your families' love.

These are the things your two souls can express to each other in words that are yours alone.

May you find the joy and comfort in each other always that you speak today....

Vows ...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Bride's mom later in the afternoon: "I didn't realize you wrote that. That was just beautiful. You have such insight into marriage. How long have you been married?"

Me, twisting the ring, smiling weakly: "Ten years, next month."

Bride's mom: "Sigh. You must have an amazing marriage because that was just beautiful."

Me, three steps back: "Thanks. Um, would you excuse me for a moment please. I need to check on my kids."

a swing and a slide

2006-11-02T23:26:00.000-08:00

Thursday, November 02, 2006
Wind At My Back

It's the last of the sunshine-on-falling-leaves days, swirling color against the bright blue sky. We've been borrowing time for at least a month now and it's not just the weatherman that tells me this is the day to get out and do something about it. I know. I just know. Nov. 1, - it should have, could have been dumping on us all last month. Get out now or nurse those regrets to the rhythm of winter raining down for months.

Today is not a school day. It's special, because I don't get whole days to play and waste with my girls. There are school days and there are his days. Weekends are not mine. Weekends are work time. Weekends are late nights at the paper, then slipping, sipping, typing into my favorite hours - when quiet sanctuary lures whispered secrets into being. So much safer to tell a story when no one is awake to hear, isn't it? This day is rare. A diamond. No work. No school. Just me and my young travelers on our own with two buckets of Halloween booty and unscripted hours sprawling clear to dinnertime.

Amelia wants to go to the coast.

"It's morning," she announces, wrapped in pink footy pajamas, her footsteps rattling the apartment.

Morning. That's subjective. It's getting light outside, yes, but morning? Hardly. The thing about living in the living room is there is no place to send her. "Do you want to see what's on PBS kids?" Not an option. Not unless I want to watch Curious George, too.

At four-and-a-half Amelia is the size of a six-year-old and strong enough to take down a 10-year-old boy. My body braces for her hugs, a billion tiny strings pulled taught inside, just in case.

"Good morning, morning bright new day," a reflexive response, just like steeling myself for the hug. "Hurts aren't hugs, sunshine girl."

"Can I snuggle?" The bed shakes.

"Climb in, Sweetie." Her body softens until she feels like a four-year-old again, lying with me. Soft and perfect. "You know, it's not really morning yet. The clock is all mixed up right now." I'm stretching for kindness, but morning has never been my time.

And, Amelia has never been her age. "Has anyone ever told this child she's a baby?" people used to ask.

The moment they placed her on my belly, eyes wide and clear and blue, I saw a teacher. At less than 10 months she walked. At 15-months she spoke 5-word sentences, lamenting in the back of the car while our best friends were on vacation "I miss Laura, Jesse too." At 18-months she denounced diapers. At 20 months, during the first cold war, the first go at marriage counseling, she cut the breakfast table silence with the tiny plea. "Mommy loves Daddy. Daddy loves Mommy. Mommy hug Daddy."

She wants to go to the coast. The ocean has been pulling, pulling at me, too. Not today though, this is not the time. I can't reconcile my vision of staring at the water until I'm lost in the waves with the reality of chasing my children along the tide line until they are wet and whining, shivering and sandblasted. Can't let go of what I want it to be, but can have the grace to not attempt forcing it into being.

Anyway, the Subaru's alignment is off and a trip through the Coastal Range will push it past what I can afford to fix.

We'll go to the Gorge.

"Don't go to the Gorge," my best friend warns. "Do you know how windy it will be out there? Go to Forest Park or Tryon Creek."

"Yeah, you're right," I agree. "I just want to get out into the woods anyway. I just need to feel the earth under my feet."

But it's not right. I don't just want the woods. I want, I NEED, wide-open space and big water. I need the ocean and if I can't have that, then the gorge. Let the wind blow. The harder the better.

And the road, too. I need the road. These roads are as much my home as anyplace I have ever made a bed. All four directions converging on one point, carrying every possibility, all of it connected. My song is louder to the rhythm of the road. My mind turns faster with the rotation of the tires. My spirit is freer knowing with the turn of this wheel I am anywhere. I am following the harvest moon north along the Pacific to morning and breakfast in Arcata. I am racing the boar tide out of Anchorage along Turnagin Arm. I am churning through the Sierra Madre Del Sur, swift turns and unforgiving drops marked with peeling white crosses. I am chasing Spring north from Quintana Roo up the Gulf Coast to North Carolina, to rest and a month at the beach. Following the water, following the moon, following the flow always.

Pual Thoreaux said "Travel is flight and pursuit, both in equal parts," It echoes between my ears in ways that make me squirm.

Amelia and Josie are wrestling sleep when the big Columbia opens the sky above us. Clear blue to the Cascades, Mt. Hood piercing the sky and a million white lines chopping along the water. The baby's feet are nestled in Cookie Monster slippers that she refuses to trade for boots. I steer off the freeway to my favorite type of road - two lanes, no shoulder - passing waterfall after waterfall.

"Can we get out here?" Amelia asks at each. "When do we get to hike?" Nothing feels right. We keep going, going until I have looped down to I-5, dropped to the river.

Finally we are back to Rooster Rock, high basalt cliffs stretching above to the Crown Point. "How about here Mommy? How about the beach with the playground?" Yes. Here.

Amelia has never felt wind driving like this. "See all those white squiggles on the river," I point. "It's all the wind. The wind is pushing so hard along the water that it's making waves."

"Too cold, mommy. Too cold." Josie pleads to the open door. We make our picnic in the car, girls in the front and me squeezed between the booster and the car seat in the back. The baby at the helm. I've let them navigate and they chose to eat looking out to the playground (and freeway entrance), river behind us, because really there is no greater beauty than a swing and a slide. Wind pushes against the side of the car, nearly rocking it, and works the trees into a joyous dance.

"Playground?" I ask.

"Playground," they echo. We won't last long, but no way are we coming all the way out here and not playing.

The wind rips.

Josie shutters, drops to the ground balling herself into a tight blue heap with furry white borders.

Amelia runs, testing the wind. It pushes against her back and she leaps, laughing as it lifts her.

I spread my arms wide from my body, back to the wind, and let go. Let myself go, trusting in the wind. And the wind holds me.

***

Two hours and eleven minutes into Fiday.

The Adventures of Bilbo Doggins

2006-10-29T12:07:00.000-08:00

Once there was a girl. And the girl had a dog. And the girl loved the dog. And the dog loved the girl.

From Dog Fancy, July 2001

Blaze you own Oregon Trail:
Bilbo the eager AmStaff leads his pack up the Columbia River Gorge
By Holly Goodman Carpenter

If Bilbo were navigating this trip, he'd turn off he meandering Historic Columbia River Highway for the less remarkable Interstate 84 - a shortcut to the heart of his getaway: a five-mile romp through the woods, creeks, and waterfalls of the Columbia River Gorge.

What a tease it is when we follow the graceful two-lane road alongthe Sandy RIver, slowing to watch fisherman cast but not stopping for a swim. Bilbo, my intrepid 4-year-old American Staffordshire Terrier, shoves his brindle snout out the back window and sucks in the damp air. A wag starts in his tail, flows through his body, and build to an excited dance as we climg through the Oregon countryside.

He knows exactly where we are headed as we round the bend ti a sublime vista 700 feet above the Columbia River. The highway snakes down the demsley forested basalt walls of the gorge, passing under bulging fern-covered rock outcrops. Moss covers the guardrails, creating continuity with the landscape. It is as organic as a road can be.

Beyond the bridge spanning Shepperd's Dell State PArk, we stop for a short walk to the bottom of a waterfall that plunges into a pool where Bilbo balances on a rock working to pull a stick - a log really - from the water. Now the trip is getting good. But, it's a false start. Bilbo reluctantly resumes is spot in the back of the Saab.

THe falls come one after another: Bridal Vail, Wahkeena, and the grandmother of them all, Multnomah, plunging an awe-inspiring 620 feet. They are a tiny sampling of the tumbling waters that comprise one of the planet's most dense collection of waterfalls.

We stop at the last in the string, Horsetail Falls. Out come the water bottles, hip packs and trail mix that signify this, at last, is the real deal. We have reached Bilbo's road, a well-maintained that begins near the base of the falls and climbs up the gorge.

Bilbo is built for the forest: quick, compact, camoflouge and agile. He leads us up the dirt trail that switchbacks through dense fern, towering conifers, and velvety moss-covered deciduous trees, We hike to the top of the falls along Horsetail Creek, behind Ponytail Falls, out along the edge of the gorge, then across Oneonta Gorge _ a narrow chasm covered with endemic wildflowers. We pick up Oneonta trail and follow that creek higher until i collapse - 2 1/2 miles and 1,100 vertical feet later - before Triple Falls.

Bilbo wants more. He circles as my hustband and I make a small picnic. Bilbo would gladly continue guiding us along the network of trails that stretches to the summit of Larch Mountain, but my legs will not climb another 3,000 feet.

Back in the car and less than a mile down the historic highway, we reach its confluence with I-84. No longer with concerned with our route, Bilbo curls up in the back, dreaming of furhter adventures befitting a hobbit. Or, at least, befitting a dog named after one.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fare thee well, Meatball Boy. Baby, baby dog.

twelve hours and twenty-eight minutes Sunday.
Tri-Met doesn't do the gorge.

2:30 A.M (Am I 12?)

2006-10-27T02:37:00.000-07:00

Middle of the night. I love the middle of the night. And I love Trader Joe's. Give thanks for cheap wine that softens the echo of this empty white apartment. Chiraz. Rumpled twin beds and balloons bumped up to the ceiling to remind me my girls were here. And they are not. Just me here for days and days and no place to hide in 660 sqaure feet of white and color scattered in the toys on my floor sitting silently waiting for my babies to come home and play. Michael Franti singing to me. I love Michael Franti. Am in love with Michael Franti. Michael Franti and cheap red win.

Because:

I been down for far too long
Till my faith was nearly gone
I never knew somebody just like you
would be a friend I could call my own
Till I let go of a broken heart
I Let go to an open heart and
I Let go of my broken dreams
I Let go to the mystery and
I believe in the miracle
I believe in the spiritual
I believe in the one above
I believe in the one of love

And take one step close to you
I just take one step closer to you
Even when I'm falling down
my heart says follow through
I just take one step closer to you

I never meant to hurt you, no
And you never meant to hurt me too
but it seems like we always do
And even though I'm scared somtimes
If I ever see you falling down
I'll be the one that's there for you
I let go of a broken heart
I Let go to an open heart and
I Let go of my broken dreams
I Let go to the mystery and
I believe in the miracle
I believe in the spiritual
I believe in the one above
I believe in the one of love

And take one step closer to you
I just take one step closer to you
Even when I'm falling down my heart says follow through

See me walking on the streets sometimes
I'm walking
I just take one step one step closer to you
Even when I'm falling down my heart says follow through
I take one step closer
I just take two steps closer

Keep on walking sweet baby

And this is why I love Michael:

To the East to the West
To the North and South
One love people never gonna stop

One to creation
One to the sun
One to the morning
One to the one
One to the air and the freshness we breath
One the force of the change in the seasons
One to the mother from which all things come
One to the daughters and
One to the sons
One to the fathers who help us believe
that nothings ever gonna harm you see and
One to the soldier that walks city streets
One to the soldier that fights over seas and
One for the man who gets down on his knees
and prays for guidance and protection please
and
To the East to the West
To the North and South
One love people never gonna stop
One to the woman
One to the man
One to the culture from the time that it began
One to destruction
One to birth
One to the people who still fight for the earth
One to the people who suffer for their needs and
One to the rebels who love rockin to the beats
One to the healer who fights a disease
One to the Lorax who speaks for the trees
cause no amount of money can bring back to life whats gone when it's done and
One to the people who rise with the sun and
One to the people who sleep when it's gone cause
To the East to the West
To the North and South
This whole thing seems upside down
but the whole wide world keeps turning around
Life is to short to make just one decision and
Music's to large for just one station and
Love is too big for just one nation and
God is too big for just one religion

One to the practice of being in the flow and
One to the tears of the things we let go and
One to the moment we live in right now and
One to the East, West, North and South

And I love for Michael Franti for the song that kept me moving, rotating endlessly through my CD player for months:

Don't fear your best freinds
because a best friend would never try to do you wrong
And don't fear your worst friends
because a worst friend is just a best friend that's done you wrong
And don't fear the night time
because the monsters know that you're divine
And don't fear the sunshine
because everything is better in the summertime.

But it's never too late to start the day over
it's never to late, pick up the phone.
You know it's never too late to lay your head down on my shoulders
it's never too late just come on home

Don't fear the water
because you can swim inside you within your skin
And don't fear your father
because a father's just a boy without a friend
And don't fear to walk slow
don't be a horserace, be a marathon
And don't fear the long road
because on the long road you got a long time to sing a simple song (sing along)

But it's never too late to start the day over
it's never too late, pick up the phone
You know it's never too late to lay your head down on my shoulders
it's never too late just come on home

Don't fear your teachers
because if you listen you can hear your music in a school bell
And don't fear your preacher
if you can't find heaven in a prison cell
And don't fear your own self
paying money to justify your worth
And don't fear your family
because you chose them along time before your birth (yes you did)

Hold to your children
hold to your children
hold to your children
let them know.

And I love Michael for his body, mmm, says the woman who hasn't had sex since July ...
And I have to get up in three hours to write the stuff that pays the bills.
Ah, recreation.
Deliver me. Protect me. Keep me from standing in line for an Oregon Trail card.

Three hours and thirty-four minutes into Friday.
Yell Fire!

Hello, Cyberspace

2006-10-25T22:48:00.000-07:00

I'm bloggin.

Didn't think I'd be out here. Didn't think it. And here I am.

Just in from the cold, nightly ritual. Tuck the girls in, wait for them to come out. Tuck the girls in again, wait for them to come out. Threaten to turn off the lights if the door opens again. Tuck the girls in again ... pull blankets to chins, kiss cheeks, linger at the door lovin on the look of sleepy peace, turn out the light and punch the clock. Off duty. Check pockets three times for apartment keys - feel the keys, see the keys, hold the keys as I walk out onto porch. Do not, do not, DO NOT lock self out with children sleeping inside. Smoke half a camel light until I dislike the cold more than I like cigarettes. Blow warm breath into brittle fingers. Settle into the computer.*

*computer settleing replaces the previously favored: pour deep glass of red, refill generously.

Free-range Josie changes everything in a space where everything has changed. Making a major transition anyway, might as well move the little one from the crib to a big bed becuase why keep anything easier than it could be? Josie is my quiet child. The one who naps and builds and sometimes stops moving. And Josie has found her first love, free will. My babies found their voices quickly and joyfully raised them in dissent.

The baby, 23 months, says: "Let's go see Mama, Amma. Come on. Lets go out and get her in the living room."

Big sister laughs and knocks the door into the wall.

In my dream they are 20-something, themselvles carried upright into adulthood by uncomprimising spirits, unconcerned with appearances. Fearless Free Spirits. Powerful women. Wide awake I want to firebomb all that independence and bury the ashes in ice. If only I could pause a few of my favorite qualities for the next couple decades and restore them while we're unpacking dorm rooms. It's all there, raw and unformed. Unapologetic. My job deliver thier spirits whole as they grow. Oy.

Got to have the council of women and last weekend circled round .... Thank you, Jennifer Lauck. Thank you, Carrie. Thank you, Jess. Thank you, Jerri. Thank you, Oshanna. Thank you, Theresa. Thank you, Andrea. Thank you, Prema. Learned life. Learned me. Learned words. And realize, finally, learning myself is learning writing. Turns out it wasn't writing I been affraid of so long, it was me. Go figure.

So I'm here with my thoughts. Mind in my body. Fingers on the keys. Small piece of Quorn chicken stuck the roof of my mouthing making me insane.

Twenty three minutes into Thursday.