Saturday Poetry: Mantra (excerpt)

to be read aloud in staccato con brio:

Words words words

I make my loving from the

words words words

For instance

these words

the beginning of

another story.

Let's call it

2 trench coats

(or a cure is discovered

for polio).

She comes to he

who is a stranger

she is wet

through and through

her hair is

curling all around her

he is dry

as a bone

he has been

being taken pictures

of

for the Fashions of the Times

layout.

A trenchcoat in July.

But no matter

he doesn't sweat

his pores are too fine

for that.

Scuse me she says to him

tapping him on the shoulder

which he whose profile cuts

the air like an

origami bird

doesn't like

scuse me she ways

again and again and again.

Your attention

I want your attention

please.

he turns to her

he looks at her

trench coat

a good coat

in good shape

she may be worth

listening to

at

for

have you seen him?

she asks

him he says

him who?

God, she says

have you seen him?

He pauses poses

thinks

(Beauty can think, too)

and replies,

no.

No, he says

again

no.

But if I do

(for he expects to see him

but without leaving this earth),

if I do, he says,

you got anything

you want me to tell him?

Oh yes

she says

tell him tell him

tell him this for

me will you?

You're hurting me

You're hurting me

You're hurting me

You're hurting me

(how many times I got to say)

You're hurting me

You're hurting me

You're hurting me

You're hurting me.

 

Q: What's A Black Plastic Bag to a Foster Kid?

A:  Luggage.

For much of the semester and summer I have been watching The Wire.  I first started watching a couple of years ago when my sister ordered it via Netflix.  I was probably never so nice to her as when those DVD's would come in the mail.  But, all good tailcoating must come to an end.

Then, godblessamerica, I found out that the local public library had some seasons on their shelves.  That didn't last long -- they would get checked out and never returned.  (I'm sure there's some library parlance for people who build their personal collection from public holdings.  My term of art would be Lazy Assholes, but that's just me.) 

 By then I'd watched much, but not all of the first 3 seasons.  Between bouts of math anxiety I realized that I was going to school at a state university and surely they would have it in their collection, perhaps because some sociology professor was using it.  So, I put on my most impressive bowtie and waltzed over to the circulation desk and alternately growled and grinned at the helpful work-study circulation clerk and before you know it I left the building with Season 4.  And a promise to hold Season 5 for me.  Then I went back and got Seasons 1, 2, and 3 and watched them all over again.

For those who don't know this, The Wire has been described as the greatest show in the history of television.  A Dickensian masterpiece of the 21st century.  It is studied and taught, it has blogs and forums devoted to it, and I am just one of its many obsessive "readers".  Like other great literature and visual art, I will return to the entire series again knowing that my understanding and appreciation will deepen.

But.  A funny thing happens on the way to becoming the darling of critics and intellectual arbiters.  Perhaps it's an occupational hazard as a critic to feel ownership of what you write about.  Perhaps, when you're a white, male critic in a hierarchy that always places you on top, you don't have to be cognizant of, much less mitigate, your blind spots.  I'll leave that to be sorted out to Cultural Studies Ph.D.s.  But in the copious analysis I've read (in a vain effort to stay immersed even after having watched all 5 seasons) I often feel only half-sated because there's so much richness that goes unrecognized.

I felt it for instance when I read about the accuracy of Dominic West's accent.  An English actor speaking the dialect of a working-class cop in a mid-southern city.  And not often enough about Idris Elba's (Stringer Bell) or Clarke Peter's (Lester Freamon) (the former is English, the latter an American expat who's lived in England for years).  Or Chicagoan Wood Harris (Avon Barksdale).  And then it dawned on me it's because it's the assumption that the white actor is further away from his "essence" than any of the black actors, who are, regardless of role, speaking the way they speak anyway, y'know what I'm sayin'?  Therefore his work is more deserving of plaudits and the astounding craft that the other actors bring to their roles is underappreciated.

Or, as in this post from The Wire Blog, entitled "Dumpsters and Garbage Bags".  I'm glad I found it and will come back to it as this obsessive constructs her own map of the show.  But I think the blogger, who's dissecting the entire series while he teaches the show, missed what to me was the obvious symbology of the garbage bags and why they are so brilliantly apt.  I wrote him:  To kids who've ever been in foster care, often the only "luggage" you own are garbage bags.  Kids arrive at their short- and long-term placements with all their worldly possessions in those bags.  They speak of impermanence, disposability, cheapness and lack of individuality.  Which can be the life of a foster kid.  So, a garbage bag is as familiar a totem to poor folks as a laptop or an iPhone is to a hipster.   My initial feeling was he should know that.  Maybe he should, but the more important issue is that I need to hear from women writers, from other black writers, from city dwellers.  How they watch this show and the insights they'd bring.  A roundtable of Rashomon-like POVs.

Notes on The Summer So Far

It's been a while, n'est-ce pas?  What can I say?

I am in recovery mode -- recovery from last semester's Foundations of Mathematics class, from the greater than usual marital strife, from a winter spent in the arms of a physical therapist.  And now it's summer.  That season I hate where my feet, encased in rubber bands -- or at least that's what it feels like to my nerve endings -- proceed to swell.  I can smell again:  With this much moisture in the air all the globules of matter from sweat, toilets, the kitchen's compost bucket, perfumes, and cooked food attached to the water molecules and travel up my nose.  I've started counting the days until September.

Here's the thing:  if I don't get the tough work done in the morning, it simply doesn't get done.  And by that I mean the writing.  I'm working on a story, "For Those Who Think Young", and am at what I'll call the molding and paring stage.    I start with the knife and carve off pages.  I take off words and paragraphs here, add words and paragraphs there.  I pinched a scene off and attach it to another part.  I walk around the creation, still dissatisfied, but not dissatisfied enough to punch the damn thing into a mound, pour water (totally new ideas) over it and start the wheel again.  It's an exercise in finding the essence of the story.  Two things I know about writing fiction:  1) there's the story you think you want to tell and 2) there's the story that emerges as you struggle to do 1).  On a few rare days the work goes well.  I am here in the office ignoring my surroundings.  It's just me, the paper and my favorite purple-inked pen.  Other days, the more common ones, I'd rather be doing almost anything else than writing.  A root canal without anesthesia?  Where do I go for that!?  How about a colonoscopy???  Sign me up, please!  Or a stint as a short-order cook at TGIF's?  Can't wait to begin!!!!  Just don't make me write.

Two things I am doing this summer that are different than last.  I am going to the gym.  I've grown to look forward to it.  I'm not fooled; there's always a honeymoon phase.  For now, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I have a date with strength training.  I can see the difference in my body.  I even attribute the work to keeping my blood pressure shockingly low (at least for me), so much so that next time I see my internist I'll ask him to start tapering me off the meds.  And although my feet are permanently swollen these days they are are not nearly as huge as the watermelons of the Summer of 2012.  Don't get me wrong, my f(@#(#ked up back is still fckd up, my right hip still feels like someone stabbed me with a long needle, and I'm not too proud to ask for help to turn over, but still, things are much better.  I am stronger, nimbler and my arms don't look like cottage cheese dipped in chocolate fondue.

And I'm gardening again.  The peace treaty hammered out with Cuthbert left me with the front yard as my domain.  After hiring help to move raised beds, and turn the soil, I called on local gardener friends and pals and have planted a crazy quilt of hostas, echinacea, fewerfew, daisies, strawberry's, ferns, and who the hell remembers what that green thing is called.  Some of the transplants went into shock, but gardeners are patient animals, and I just whacked them back and sit in the dining room window with the day's first cup of coffee and imagine what next spring will look like. I think all this working out is so that I can get down on bended knee in the fall and plant some bulbs.

Crossing the Rubicon of Middle Age

This is one of my la-la-la posts.  It won't be peppered with anger about racism or shitty public education.  Or marriage and taxes.  All that is the background noise of life today.  (My NSA listener must be bored to death.  It's not like 2005 when in the middle of a phone conversation with a friend I'd gratuitously burp Fuck Bush and then continue with my conversation.)  What I wanted to mention is that for the first time in my life since I started to garden I hired someone to do some of the work.  The simple fact that somebody else's arms and shoulders were digging holes and turning soil and pulling bushes out by the roots seemed to inspire me.  I realized then as I watched J. work in the rain that the dread of going down on my knees was keeping me from turning the front yard (my patch) into a grass-free oasis instead of the weed factory farm it has been since the snow melted.

You may think that you are 30 but your knees and hips will tell you otherwise.  Now if I want certain kinds of physical work done I'll have to pay for it; either in cash or aching muscles.  Now that I think about it did Michaelangelo get winched up to the Sistine Chapel ceiling every morning after a mint latté?  Don't think so.

Saturday Poetry: The Big Blonde

from Turn Left at the Dead Dog:

There are dreams

that belong to you

long before you know what to do with them.

You are memory’s steward

so that when

a dream comes, it is

as the comics say

déja vu all over again.

It’s not the first time since childhood

she’s been on my mind

The big blonde, sheathed in black

singing into the studio microphone

back when

Jazz was a thing supreme.

Remote then, behind the glass

not to be touched, a porcelain doll

Inviolate.

Now she greets me at the Shipyard’s gate.

My head bows as sunlight bursts off her platinum hair.

I just know behind the tortoiseshell frames

there are sapphires glistening on her face.

Then she smiles at me

Teeth couched in fuchsia lips.

For me time stops.

I am awake.

I Was Sposed to Keep My Mouth Shut

I still have rules.  Not many, particularly not many that I haven't broken exposing myself as a Liar and A Hypocrite (as well as a Gentleman and a Scholar), but some nevertheless.  For instance, I never drink alcohol before 11 am.  Kept that one.  So far.

As part of a promising initiative to change the way we live now, Long Wharf Theatre and the New Haven Public Library have launched Community Conversations to discuss race and gentrification in New Haven.  Using Bruce Norris' "Clybourne Park" they've held Conversations hosted by Colin Caplan, Tom Ficklin and Clifton Graves at  different branch libraries with each site's meeting having a particular tenor.

 I attended the first one at the Stetson branch (in Newhallville) and wound up not only quoted in the Independent but photographed, too.  After that I said, if you go to another Conversation, you are Not To Say One Word other than hello.  Because, y'know, nobody likes a yaktivist, (my new favorite portmanteau), a person who talks incessantly about injustice and social change but does very little in terms of action.

I decided to go to the Fair Haven discussion last Saturday.  While the Dixwell meeting felt like a reunion of many of Newhallville's African-American families, Fair Haven's was a more astringent gathering in part because of the fascinating mix of people who live there and because there were no small number of folks who knew a lot about the history of US residential segregation thanks to legislative and judicial policy hand-in-hand with the standing practices of the banking and real estate industries. 

When it comes to talking about Race in this country when we get together in these rooms we are Very Polite.  And trust me when I tell you that I was trying, I really was trying to follow the rules of the game not to mention my own which was to come to Listen not talk.  But somebody said something and before you know it I had opened my mouth on the way to losing my shit.  Bam!! All she said was that her own daughters now lived in Brooklyn (I'm guessing Bushwick or East New York) but that when she was a student in the 80's she, as a young white girl from Connecticut country, she wouldn't dream of living in those places ....

And I shot back (and I'm paraphrasing here) that this is what gets to me in these discussions, that the normative perspective is supposed to be how white people see things and that even though all of those places (Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy, East New York, Bushwick) are full of complex communities that talk of specific neighborhoods in New York being dangerous for "me" is so reductive generally because it's based on ignorance and to use a fashionable phrase, white privilege, that it makes me crazy.  Now, this woman doesn't know me and it would be easy to think that I'd just become the "Lena" from the play her employer had produced.  It would be too easy to think that yet another Angry Black Woman doing what we do.  (Her:  Sheesh, I just speak my mind and a black person bites my head off.)  She certainly doesn't know that if a black person had started talking about not going into Greenwich to shop because blah-de-blah-de-blah I would light into their asses, too.

When the Conversation was officially over both she and I made it a point to approach one another and shake hands.  She wanted to finish her point about being a small town white girl from Connecticut and not being safe in the city.  But, again, I cut her off.  Well, yeah, I said (and again I paraphrase) you'd have to have some street smarts but frankly a white girl is more safe in a black neighborhood in a way a black person wouldn't be in a white neighborhood.  A fact and I'm not even angry about it.

Or am I?

Enervation

There are those words, that no matter how careful you are, you can't shake the original incorrect definition your brain has latched onto for dear life.  Enervation is one of those words for me.  I cannot help thinking such things as joyous, lighter than air, ephemeral, light, and so on and so forth.  Instead it means (h/t to Merriam Webster):
 Definition of ENERVATE

1: to reduce the mental or moral vigor of

2: to lessen the vitality or strength of

— en·er·vat·ing·ly adverb

— en·er·va·tion noun

Examples of ENERVATE

1. <a lifetime of working in dreary jobs had enervated his very soul>
2. <the surgery really enervated me for weeks afterwards>

And that, Dear Reader, is what I feel today after my first full body workout after about 10 years away from the gym.  How could I resist?  The university offers a 3 month membership for $25 (although godknows I've paid for this many times over in all the  "registration fees" I'm assessed each and every semester I enroll in a class.)  And since I've gotten tired of the sound of rotating helicopter blades every time I raise my hands above my head (and yes, my age cohort female friends, I'm talkin' about us) I thought why not?  Why not indeed?  I drove my sorry ass home, took a shower, sat upright for a half-hour and then promptly went to bed with my clothes on.  Tomorrow I expect to be put in an iron lung.

I've been through this twice before -- once in my late 30's when my friend Shawn seduced me into going to the Harlem Y with him.  (I should have put a camera around my neck and pretended I was a tourist.)  After that I told everyone who'd listen that I felt like I'd just birthed quintuples and then got run over by a Mack truck.  Then the bout of fitness in my late 40's because the Brooklyn Y was 2 blocks away.  That's where I started to lift weights and loathe yoga.  Both times I grew to love the bodywork; wouldn't miss it the way some wouldn't miss church.  Now, in my late 50's I'm at it again.

The stakes are higher for sure.  So far this year I've got a 4 figure physical therapy bill to pay down, and every time I stub my toe I fear I'll be paralyzed.  It's time to preserve what I've got and if I'm lucky maybe go at this long enough to actually experience an energy gain and significant weight loss.  I am my own summer project.  But first things first:  how am I going to get out of bed tomorrow?!

Mother's Day Observed

Only 2 things I’ve ever wanted to be in this world:

A Writer      √

A Mother    √

Lots of people I have to thank for that not the least of which is my own mother, Robbie, a woman who could put the loon back in lunatic and

Dailey

Khaalid

Lela

Lilli

Remo and

Shaquana

It is for them and because of them I live.

Happy Mother’s Day one and all …

C'est Fini

At least for now.  Having realized at this very late stage in my formal education that grades are obtained by a steady accretion of points, I think I got me enough points to pass Foundations of Mathematics with the requisite B so that I can return in the fall as a graduate student.  I thought I'd be delirious like I was a semester ago; sickeningly giddy spouting bad puns and skipping backwards around the house singing Jerusalem but oddly enough I'm quite mellow.  Perhaps it's because the past 4 semesters have been just to get to the door; I've got a long long way to go to the finish line, and less time than many to get there.

This orgy of contemplation probably comes from having time.  And, it's May, a season of graduations and farewells, a re-setting of the clock and a perceptible slowing down of the worlds of commerce and enterprise enough to give some a chance to play.  Me?  I've joined a gym and opened up my story files.  A summer for Body and Soul.

Be Good

Gregory Porter.  Enjoy.

Saturday Poetry: Venus (excerpt from East River Soliloquies)

Oh no.  I will never.

Ever.

Fall in love again.

My heart's weighted.

Hemp-tied in a thief knot

sinking in the East River

because once I saw a woman crawl

into that water

one liquid August night,

with her hair on fire.

I remember her braids:

one at a time, popping,

sizzling, filling her tracks

as she scuttled backwards

down the bank.

Maybe drunk, who knows?

Kerplunk! she clove the River

into an ovation.

And I watched as her arms

like blades scythed

the dirty River

yet, her face stayed

shuttered, above water.

Her eyes blinked, apertures

as the dissenting fire,

oblivious to its circumstance,

played on.

A homeless dog divined the water

to kiss her skin,

the head now a

blackness bubbling away.

The dog danced on her unshielded crown

until she pushed him under.

Get off, she brayed.

It was then I laughed:

She's going to live, I thought.

She swung her embered eyes on me

and I went blind.

By the time it took me to see again

I was hard,

waist-high in water,

reaching for her smoldering arms.

Women of A Certain Art: Zusaan Kali Fasteau

Kali and I met back in the early 90's when I was writing operas with the late Leroy Jenkins, a friend and colleague of hers.  We've known each other ever since mostly over a performance or coffee in the Village.  She's a formidable musician/force of nature -- if there's an instrument she doesn't play (and play well) it hasn't been invented yet.  A sample of her music ...

 

... and of her writing, from the Megaphone column in the March 2013 issue of The New York City Jazz Record, her essay, Spontaneous Composition in the Round.

Music
offers a sweet alternative to the mundane,
transporting us to a non-logical enjoyment of being.
If you read this journal, you feel the power of music.
We musicians are lucky making music that feels good to us.
Rather than ‘improvising’ (improving) upon a preset structure,
I prefer composing music in real time, shaping the sound
energy coming through me without forethought.
The body and spirit seem electrified by
the high-voltage energy of contouring sound live.
Spontaneous composition is almost magical, producing
amazing results when the musicians are well chosen.

This Has Already Not Ended Well ...

from Esquire's Charlie Pierce who says what I've been thinking and says it 100 times better:

The sawhorses were comforting because the events of the past week are now getting fed into a number of gigantic maws, none of which are likely to do the rest of us any good. They are being fed into the big media maw, with speculation now completely rampant as to what launched the Tsarnaev brothers on their crime spree. While Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was still at large, with a few notable exceptions -- coughNewYorkPostcough -- big media went out of their way to appear responsible. Now, though, with the younger suspect on a respirator at Beth Israel, all the shackles were off, and we spent the day hearing wild speculation of what may have been behind the murderous doings in and around Boston last week. The events also are being fed into the maw of big politics with the federal government invoking the "public safety" exception to the Miranda ruling in connection with a 19-year old who is, at this moment, breathing through a tube and who, anyway, by all the evidence available at this moment, appears to be still little more than Dylan Klebold with a funny name and a pulse.

Women of a Certain Art: Shelley Hainer

We are all many things; not all at once and sometimes not for long.  But some things that we are, we are.  I moved to New York when I was 37.  I thought of moving there for years, and though it wasn't an inevitable migration; when I did in 1990 I knew I'd come home.  New York is the people I know, the artists I worked with and the friendships we made.  I'm here, they're there still doing the work.  I celebrate my friends.

Today I share Shelley Hainer -- poet, headhunter, seeker, dancer, actress, impresario.  She founded Bamboo Jacket in 2008.

Saturday Poetry: Feet (an excerpt)

Next thing I know he said,

Girl, I need a break.

I called Mother right away:

You got to help me out.

What she sent me was a pumice stone

wrapped in a brown paper note:

                Scrub all ten of those toes.

                The shingled, smarting soles.

                Scrub them like I once cleaned your clothes

                In a washtub

                filled to the top with so much lye

                it was foolhardy to breath through

                my nose.

When I could slide pantyhose on

by the count of five

I called him to say

I want to talk.

I'll meet you wherever,

If you want, halfway.

When I got there I sat down

making sure that he saw me

slice off my shoes

giving him a nyloned glimpse

of my crimsoned toes

while they tickled my instep and

caressed perfectly rounded heels.

Gold heels, browned,

like freshly baked loaves

of bread for the starving man.

In Between Bouts of Math Proofs

I quilt.  Quilting is to me what cooking and eating is to Foodies.  An obsessive passion.  If I had all the world and time this is what I'd be doing with much of it.  So, I got one done.  It's small -- about 3' x 3', created to cover the front door window:

Photo courtesy of Cuthbert.

Life's Precious

Just ask anyone who knows their's is ending in a few months.  They'll tell you.

It's spring:  Trees and people have sap coursing through their veins.  I fall out of my bed in the mornings and there is daylight of which I'll never get tired.  (At my funeral I want Bobby Womack singing, "Daylight Has Caught Me Up Again".)

Guess what I've been doing?  Parallel parking.  No seriously, I do math like a bad driver parks.  Over and over and over again until I ram something into the space and the bumper in front of me and the bumper in back of me be damned.  Aaaargh.  In about a month It Will All Be Over.  Got a take home to do today and my goal is to be finished with it before the sun sets or before Cuthbert sues me for loss of marital companionship or some such phrase one uses in divorce.

Bloggers Gotta Blog ...

... or not which only partially explains the lack of outrage/commentary about anything on what is definitely God's Green Earth (and I can send my winter jacket to the cleaners).  It's spring.  Taxes will be due.  Death is not far behind once this year's bill gets determined.  I do nothing these days except trim my beard and mustache (oooooh, perimenopause that continues for 12 years introduces one to all sorts of delights!) and crack my skull trying to prove the following:

A ∩ (A U B) ≡ A

and I am almost at the point of Who the Hell Cares?  Typical this-semester-is-dragging-on-and-I-am-so-tired-of-spending-all-my-time-studying blues.  It's spring.  I got fever.  It's that simple. But, were I writing here's what interests me:

1.  The Atlanta public school cheating indictments and the future of NCLB-fueled educational policy
2.  The commemoration of the onset of the 2nd Iraq War
3.  The New Pope, same as the Old Pope
4.  The long odds of getting a job after 50 years of age
5.  and last, but not least -- the political changing of the guard in New Haven.

But, I'm not writing, so that's as far as those ideas get for now.  Won't make any promises except that after this course has had its way with me, and after I pass this emm-eff so that I can pleasepleaseprettyplease enter graduate school and go through this All Over Again, and after we've filed our taxes and I've scraped my libertarian husband's brain off the ceiling, well, I'll be writing more.  'Cause you know me:  I won't be cooking.




 

When Last We Left Our Heroine ...

I have not been writing.  Anywhere.  Much.  There's not much to write.  Here are the contours of my red-carpet life:

1.  Once a week I waddle over to physical therapy in a futile attempt to ameliorate a worsening case of sciatica that affects my right side.  The therapist and I chat as I lie on my back and let her push my big toe into my nostril.  On the other days I stretch myself while looking at a Dexter DVD upside down.  It all seems to help.  For a while.  Lately the pain has come back with a vengeance and if Husband No. 1, Cuthbert, is nearby I am prone to bite his shoulder, not with passion but with chagrin from having turned over in bed too fast.

2.  I am taking the same mathematics class that brought me to my knees last semester.  Different professor, different angle.  Up until this week it was familiar.  Now we are studying logic, er, make that Logic and its Rules of Inference:  Modus ponens and modus tollens.  Ugh.  I wasted hours 'net-surfing yesterday instead of cracking the code of this stuff.  Cuthbert thinks I am getting my comeuppance.  Maybe, but I still can't see what's wrong with the following:

All Australians have noses.
I have a nose.                           

Therefore, I am an Australian.

whah?  whah?

3.  Lately, I have been thinking what it'll be like to be student teaching at my age.  I will tell the students that they're actually quite lucky.  The odds are that while I may be in class on a Friday, perhaps I'll die in my sleep over the weekend and they won't have to take the exam.  Morbid and black humor is an acquired taste and I have a hunch it doesn't work with American teenagers (just like it doesn't work with Husband No. 1), so I'll have to come up with something else.

4.  Went to go see a marvelous work-in-progress last night at New Haven's The Big Room.  Abe Gomez-Delgado's "Isla de la Mona (Part I)".  One thing I will say is:  had me fooled.  You can read about it via the link.

5.  Spring is coming.  The days are longer and warmer.  Now that some of the snow has melted I've discovered that the leeks are still green.  (In a nuclear holocaust all that will be left are plastic bags, cockroaches and these damn leeks all over my yard.)  It is a season of renewal and I am hoping that it lifts my boat, too.

That is all.

As My Grandmother Used to Say ...

... well, suh! (aka will wonders never cease) when there was a wholly unanticipated turn of events that made life work out for the better.  And before le deluge d'hiver of the past few days, were Grandma Mamie alive she would have exclaimed twice -- once when the Pope of New Haven announced his resignation and the other when the Pope of the Rest of Youse announced his.

Well, I'm back.  No novel stories to tell about the blizzard.  We were relatively unscathed -- we have a driveway; we had food, heat, DVDs, fiction and copies of the New York Times dating back to 1967, electrical power and a block full of motorheads who like nothing better than using their snowblowers for hours on end.  So, what the hell.  If ever there was a time to sit back and enjoy it, that was the time.  And if you don't count the prospect of having to eat some long forgotten glass noodles crammed in the back of the cabinet (in case of culinary emergency) because there was no getting to a market as a tragedy, it was practically a no foul, no harm event .  Husband No. 1 and I both, ehem, work from home, so it wasn't like the enforced togetherness led to homicidal thoughts, and good weather and bad we always argue about who has to take out the garbage, recycling and compost so why let 3 feet of snow change that dynamic, n'est-ce pas? 
 
I leave you with this:  while it is beginnings that give our lives joy, it is endings which give our life meaning.

Saturday Poetry: The Circumcision (another excerpt)

She hit him with the lion's paw.

He punched her belly

then ran.

She left the cat running --

flopping, twisting

howling and hissing --

to chase my brother

down the hall.

Our head turned to follow the race.

There was nowhere to pass

only overtake.

At first he laughed.

He was 13 and fast.

She was his Mother!

His Mother!

For her, though

this was no game.

Desperate and cornered

he leaped through the plate glass door.

The glass and he screamed.

The crown imbedded in his skull

shone brilliantly

before he fell to the grass

his flesh and blood among the shafts.

He touched his brow in wonderment.

He turned to look at our Mother's face

her body framed in the pane's sunburst

the arm poised for murder,

and galloped from her rage.

She charged to sever him

and came to her senses

in the waning light.

She saw his teammates frozen

with mitts in hand.

The jagged glass.

(The money!  The money!)

My brother prostrate

His face bleeding

My father diminished

Our heart throbbing

The beast growling

Her chest heaving

The arm lowering.

Animal You're Most Like?

I finally figured it out:  I'm a hermit crab.  Met the little buggars walking to the beaches of St. John.  I don't know what sets off their sensors -- perhaps changes in air pressure as you prepare to step on them?  They retract into their shells, and like infants, think themselves disappeared.  As you can imagine, it hasn't been working all that well for me either.

My vow this year is to do less.  That translates into less studying (but more learning), less eating (period), less worrying and less carrying the same old baggage in the same old ways.  Some days are different; others a repeat of the past.  No need to catastrophize, though, I must try again.

So, yesterday, in the spirit of Doing Things Differently I went to a workshop organized by New Haven's Just Moves and I danced.  You could say it was dancing for social justice, which doesn't make any sense if you haven't done it yet, but the longer I've lived here during a time where there has been so much violent death, the more the work of Elijah Anderson and others I've read, the longer I've been conversation with people who classify disfiguring and murderous violence as a public health emergency and a human-made disaster, the more I am convinced that smart policing alone is only part of the solution.  Part of the solution comes from the heart (connectedness) and the belly (having a primal hunger satisfied in communion with others).

So, here I am a self-professed human crab who cooks two times a year (if pressed).  This should be an interesting experiment.  to be continued ...

Ungrateful Wretch That I Am

It has been more than 5 weeks since I last wrote anything about anything or anybody here.  Not like there has been a shortage of news, horror, privation, misery and human comedy of late.  Not in the world; not in this house.  But, the truth is that depression often gets the upper hand with me and I've long since outgrown the need to show the bloody stump.  So, I will talk around it's margins with the expectation (and hope) that it will all make sense.

Firstly, I was on vacation for about 2 weeks in January.  Vacation is still an alien concept to me -- my parents were too poor and disharmonious to take any real ones with 4 kids (and I don't count the 20+ hours driving to South Carolina every 4 years avoiding the segregated diners and peeing on the side of the road as a vacation) and I'm from the mid-west and what's the point of livin' if you ain't workin'?  On the other hand, my husband, the continental, thinks it's in the American Constitution that each and every one of us should have no less that 5 consecutive weeks off every year (and twice on Sunday).  So we have had this strange dance for years where you have to pry my cold dead hands off the keyboard and he would, if it didn't have the taint of slavery, truss me on top of the truck and drive towards warm weather.  The latest outcome was a trip that we took with Fred to St. John, of the US Virgin Islands.

I lied a bit.  I left messages that I was out of the country, if only so as not to rack up a $500 cell phone bill from all the roaming charges, but St. John is technically part of the US, a poor relation who gets less attention than does Puerto Rico.  They take US dollars and put up with mainland tourists, their life's blood.

We went there because of the snorkeling; it is considered to be one of the premiere places on the planet, and they were not disappointed.  I, who hardly bathes, was the third wheel to 2 men who stayed in the water for hours swimming with barracudas, sharks, stingrays, jellyfish, and all other manner of spotted and benign life.  I snorkeled for about 60 seconds and when I reached the moment where I couldn't touch the bottom I had me a good ol' panic attack and promptly tried to separate Fred's right arm from his shoulder.  That's enough of that, and I spent the rest of my days sunbathing and reading David Balducci novels.

This is my second snorkeling vacation, and for me it has the character of a teetotaler going on a wine-tasting junket in the south of France.  Other than the location, what really is the point?  So much of what makes being in St. John worth it is in the water, a place I spent little time in.  Left on shore to my own devices I spent time watching people watch us.  For, you see, the 3 of us are like the opening line to a profane, but very funny joke:  A nigger, a chink and a paddy walk into a bar ...  We are so unlike the usual recreational colonialists who go there because tourist = rich white American on St. John, that, especially with the absence of any identifying jewelry, no one could figure out what our relations were.  It was obvious we weren't swingers nor siblings.  But, it was ambiguous if any of us were married and, perverse bitch that I can be, I wasn't going to make it any easier for anybody to figure out.  (I'm reminded of that weight loss pyramid scheme where the slogan was Lose weight how?  Ask me now!!!!!)

As these things go, being the black one of the trio and a woman to boot, people will say things to me that they wouldn't dare say to 2 men who could jackhammer them into the ground with one hand tied behind their backs.  The best of the worst was from the dreadlocked fireman.  Each day we drove down from our vacation villa passing the firehouse on the way to the beach, and waved a greeting to these guys who have the easiest and best job on a land mass completely surrounded by water.  Each day they acknowledged us.  One evening in the car with Fred (the chink) on our way to see 2 friends who coincidentally were vacationing at the same time and spent most of their days laid up with the flu and ear infections, the fireman says to me:  I'm watching you.  I say to Fred, I want to stop there when we go back.  But, the evening was long and although I'd planned to get all passive resistance and gandhian with Mr. Race Man, I just let it go.

What was unsaid and unspoken between the fireman and I can be traced back to the long history of African bondage, colonialism, slave rebellion, class privilege (for St. John et al. used to be one of the playgrounds of the Rockefellers and their ilk), and supplicant status that is the Virgin lslands.  He and I will never have that conversation.  Like the Louisiana that I knew in the late 1970's, St. John is another place on earth that won't see me again.