love,elizabeth

Castles

2011-03-21T01:54:00.001-04:00

Over and over we built our castles, dug moats, made walls, only to see each construction erased by a careless wave, turned back in an instant into unmarked sand. I even laid my body down as a barricade (as I would do for you) but still the waves came on.

I know at least one very dear and patient person is still checking this sorry and neglected excuse for a blog (xoxoxo @ ATWB!), so I'll try to update things a bit more often. So...

I had a very difficult emergency visit to my mother. She has had two bad falls in the past few months and got lost on a trip to Philadelphia (and by "lost" I mean she ended up in Baltimore). I told her she had to move very soon to Pittsburgh and live with us. She said "No no no." I said "Yes yes yes." I eventually won out because
1. I was right
2. I'm bossy that way
But it's devastating for her. Her grandfather had dementia and (according to her) turned into an old lecherous caricature of himself, still going to his offices and groping all the women in the elevators. Her father, when he was diagnosed with possible senility, committed suicide rather than become like his father.

Of course she won't be groping women in elevators (at least I hope not!), but she has lived for a long time with the heavy weight of fear - as her father did - of losing herself entirely to this disease, or of losing what she considers to be the most important parts of herself. And in ways I see already that she is.

Wish us luck in finding a path together and through this that is more dignified and full of love than the paths her grandfather and father found.

Where I've been

2011-03-04T13:04:00.001-05:00

I've been working like a mad woman on revising my novel but also, as you'll read below, dealing with my mother's descent into Alzheimer's. Heart wrenching.

Specimens
1.
Opening my brother’s specimen room door
to pin a new one to the wall
it always seemed we’d startled a flock
of sunning butterflies. Wings wide -
palm-leaf green, sky turquoise,
sunset orange, star-lit iridescent midnight -
rising up the walls away, forever
stilled. Shadows wavered beneath
them so they seemed to move. Just
a trick of light.

2.
In those days my mother wore
sun yellow, grass green, American-beauty red
silks. Sleek sheaths, dresses
with tight bodices and skirts that fell
like bell flowers around her knees
fluttering as the ceiling
fans circled. Sinuous lines of cigarette smoke
rose above the chink of drinks
and cocktail party laughter. She floated
from group to group. Hostess’s antennae tuned to
too much, too little, too lonely, too late,
she skimmed each clustered group, landed, moved
on, spreading her bright
self wide. And where she lingered
they stilled and said,
There’s sweetness.

3.
The doctor displays
a cross section of two brains. “In the normal one,”
he points, “the cerebral cortex and hippocampus
are full.” The lobes spread wide, full and rounded
with nuances of knowing. “But here you see….”
The other is an ugly leering face:
its jagged edges draw the unkempt hair;
scooped-out hollows make the vacant eyes, the mouth
hanging open in sleep. Formaldehyde
also kills without destroying outer form.
I held the jar and watched
my brother put the silken creatures in. I watched them
struggle into stillness.

4.
This woman moves
uncertainly. Querulously angry she says
“The maid stole my sweater.
I put it here and now it’s gone.” She is
so fixed that I don’t even argue. My mother
would have known that
no one – least of all the pretty Ethiopian
who cleans the floors – stole her old
moth-holed cashmere. My mother
would have soothed this woman struggling
to make sense of an invisible
thief who is stealing
all her memory. My mother’s daughter
would have said, ‘That’s nonsense Mama.’
But I just hold my tongue. I watch
and sometimes see
the shadow of my mother moving
in this stranger, or maybe just
a trick of the light
of my memory.

More pictures from the dynamite crate

2011-01-09T13:09:00.000-05:00

There are more of this series on my flickr site if you'd like to poke around my grandfather's world.

Horseman by the shore, Nicaragua, late 50s

People at the swimming hole, Nicaragua, late 50s

Office workers, Honduras, late 1950s

Boy holding machete, Nicaragua, late 1950s

She's a little devil (Cousin in a mask)

Pirate cousin

Peace be with you

2011-01-07T01:43:00.004-05:00

I got a hateful comment today on a little piece of piffle I wrote some time ago. Generally I'm a pretty feisty person and not averse to mixing it up with bullies. But it's been such a heart-wearying Fall that all I want is to do is to give and receive peace, kindness, heart's ease.

So to that end let me share with you one of the great bright spots of my life lately. This summer I found, in my aunt's attic, an old dynamite crate full of slides and negatives that my grandfather took fifty +/- years ago, some in Nicaragua where he was working as an engineer, and some in the US.

Now let me tell you about my Grandfather. He was a right-wing, racist, homophobic good ol' boy just one sheet short of the KKK. But he was also my Granddaddy who taught me how to play chess and poker, bought me wonderful trinkets at junk shops, and put plastic flies on our grits to make us laugh. I might hate some of the things he believed, but I could never hate him.

And for a right-wing racist homophobe he took some stunning pictures full of love, beauty, and humor. By which I mean to say we are all complex, full of good and bad, and forgetting that makes everyone poorer, makes the whole world a sadder harder place. So enjoy the pictures and the strange and beautiful conundrum of the man who took them.

Women on the road, Nicaragua 1958

Rodeo levade, Nicaragua 1958

Diver at the water hole, Nicaragua 1958

Diver, Gran Hotel, Nicaragua 1959

Cousin in a mask, North Carolina 1960s

A (moderately) proud moderate American

2010-11-01T18:53:00.000-04:00

I wasn't able to go to "The Rally to Restore Sanity" in DC this weekend, but just seeing the coverage of it cheered me up about the way things are going in this country. I mean, hey, a rally of people who don't take themselves too seriously! Now that's my demographic!
Here's a selection of amusing signs snagged from The Huffington Post. There are hundreds more on the sight.

A little epigram-poem-thingy I wrote

2010-10-26T15:37:00.001-04:00

Regret

Regret I
know is just a bone gnawed
clean of its marrow, best buried
and forgotten. And yet
I regret.

And in the midst of it all....

2010-10-25T14:54:00.001-04:00

It's just one of those days. The weather is gray, drizzly, and sodden - glum in a way that only the rust belt can do. I'm supposed to be working on my novel revision (which is finally going well) but I'm jumpy and can't concentrate because my sister in law (who has brain cancer) is in crisis. So I feel guilty about not getting my work done (you know the drill) and heartbroken for my sister in law, her husband, her kids, and her big brother - my dear husband who has already lost one sister.

Yet.... when I went to let the dog out, waiting irritably in the rain while he did his doggy thing, I saw the cups of the nasturtium leaves, a raindrop gem in each one, like transitory white star sapphires. And in that moment I went from miserable to enchanted, running to get my camera, standing delightedly in the rain (while, in a nice turnabout, my dog waited impatiently for me to finish up my foolishness) trying to capture even a tiny bit of the casual perfect beauty nature made.

These are the things that save me every day.

I went to the Warhol Museum today.

2010-10-17T01:29:00.001-04:00

Andy says:

And I have to say I agree with him.

Hate mail

2010-10-13T15:51:00.003-04:00

(Advance apologies for the length and seriousness of this post! I won't make a habit of it.)

So I just got my first hate mail. And it was for writing a poem about the bible. Go figure. I was trying to explore the character of Job's wife whose only recorded words are "Bless God and die" (mistranslated later as "curse God and die"). Those are the words of a devastated broken-hearted woman. And what woman wouldn't be who had lost all ten of her children at once?

I was also writing the poem from my own experience as a woman who had lost two babies through miscarriage, both due to toxins in the water supply. After the first baby died, I had a D & C in the hospital under anesthesia. When they woke me I began weeping uncontrollably. They sent a nun in to me who held my hand and told me not to cry because Jesus had wanted my baby. I said angrily (only because I was still woozy from the drugs. Normally I would have just thought it.) "He didn't want it as much as I did!" So let's talk about God and Jesus and all those things I normally avoid because belief is such a deeply personal thing.

I believe in God. I believe that God is, first and foremost, love - my love for my family and friends, their love for me, and also my love of the stunning beauty of the world around me. These things are God's grace in my life, helping me get through the things that would seem otherwise unbearable. What I don't believe is that God put toxins in the Williamsburg, VA water supply to kill my babies as a test or because Jesus wanted them. God made the water and the air, but man poisoned it.

Now lets talk about Jesus. I was raised going to church in that habitual not-deeply-felt Presbyterian way. I was baptised, I wore a gold cross through my teens, my mother read me the bible sometimes (and I cried my head off when Joseph's very mean brothers threw him in the pit). It was simply a part of my life. But then people started to tell me that unless I believed that I was born in sin and that Jesus Christ died on the cross for that sin (of being normally procreated and born to a woman) and if I didn't accept Him as my personal savior, I was going to burn in Hell. Scary stuff, so I tried. I went to church and prayed hard to God and Jesus to show me the way. They never did. So I remain what the right-wing Christians would call a "Universalist." And I've stopped going to church because it no longer seems that church wants me.

But here's what I do know and believe about Jesus. He was a beautiful man who preached love and the loving particularly of one's enemies. In the parables, he taught us about the Good Samaritan (Samaritans and Jews despised each other) who took in the beaten Jew when the priest and the Levite left him to die on the side of the road. If Jesus were walking down a road today and saw, let's say, a beaten gay man (Matthew Shepherd or any of the other poor boys who died recently), he would have stopped and taken him tenderly into his care, put balm on his wounds, and tended him back to health with love.

If there is a Devil, it is hatred. Jesus said, "I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me." I will try to follow his example; to not hate, even those who are hateful, and to walk this Earth in the grace of kindness and love, which I believe is the hand of God in our lives.

National Coming Out Day: The thing that makes you extraordinary

2010-10-10T22:37:00.003-04:00

Here is a really touching video made by the pop star Darren Hayes for The Trevor Project (a suicide prevention hotline for LGBT youth). He says here, "The thing that made me extraordinary made me a target" and it made me think about all the extraordinary gay men and lesbians I know - people who are extraordinarily kind, extraordinarily funny, extraordinarily gifted in so many ways. And I wanted to say thank you to them, all of them, for being survivors even though they were targets. Because we're all "different" aren't we? And as I wrote here some time ago, when I met my first openly gay man, it was like a brisk and sweet-scented wind blowing away all those layers covering my own difference. If they could "say it loud, say it proud" then so could I. I see now that I gravitated to people who had felt within them some deep difference growing up and had learned to embrace it, so that I could learn to embrace mine. I still do.

My two beautiful teens who also happen to be gay, went through a phase of dressing in girly clothes, wearing make up, dating boys, twisting themselves into some idea of "normal." And they were completely miserable. I'm so proud of them for letting go of that, for having the strength to accept and embracing who they really are. Because they are perfect and extraordinary.

A little girl, her music, and the Dreaded Guitar-Store Guys!

2010-10-05T11:02:00.000-04:00

This charming short animation is both hysterical and really touching.

Lucille from Tali on Vimeo.

The firefly tree

2010-09-29T01:01:00.009-04:00

The firefly tree

This is a sketch I did tonight of one beautiful moment in my life. It was many years ago when Kirk and I lived in Wiliamsburg, VA. It was also a terrible time for us. We were trying to start a family and, unbeknownst to us, the water supply in that part of Virginia was tainted with a chemical that caused stillbirths and miscarriages. I had two miscarriages while we lived there and was just heartbroken.

Heartbreak has been on my mind because my husband has just come back from visiting his baby sister who has an incurable malignant tumor in her brain. He was there to visit her of course, but mostly he was there to help with her eight children. So I was remembering this night in Williamsburg when Kirk and I went on a disconsolate evening walk. We only lived a block away from Colonial Williamsburg so we wandered over there because there was no traffic. As we headed up the dark road through the old town we saw one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen in my life; a massive tree completely aglow with the twinkling lights of tens of thousands of fireflies. We stood still and gaped for I don't know how long and for that time the pure beauty of it erased all our grief and pain and helped me to go on.

In times like this, it does me good to remember those rare perfect respites - like coming upon the firefly tree - because it helps remind me that there will be other moments like it ahead. Sometimes I think this is the only way to get through these devastating things life serves up again and again; by leaping from moment of beauty to moment of beauty like someone leaping from stone to stone across a dark fast dangerous river.

Scandalous me!

2010-09-23T18:31:00.002-04:00

Someone just tried to register to leave comments here and she reported that she got this message: "Sorry but your website is listed as unsafe for children or dangerous by one of our website rating services."

First let me say how honored I am to receive this recognition from the Academy. Also I want to thank the big guy upstairs (by which I mean Bill Gates, who has made it so easy for me to offend complete strangers). But most of all I want to thank the gay boys who ensorcelled me into promoting their scary Big, Gay, anti-family (by which I mean pro-family) Agenda by being so kind, lovely, and funny. Without you I never would have scandalized anyone!

"About suffering..."

2010-09-20T09:13:00.004-04:00

My husband had a good, hard, exhausting, heartbreaking visit with his sister and her husband and children. She will have surgery on Thursday to try and reduce the size of the tumor and extend her life. But short of a miracle, it seems, there is not much hope, so we hope and pray for a miracle.

Kirk said that, because of the tumor, her personality had changed and that he felt she was slipping away. I keep thinking of a story he once told me of being a little boy - three-years old - and looking out his bedroom window to see the EMTs carrying the sheet-covered body of his older sister Laurie, who was five, down the front walk of his house and away forever. And now another sister is slipping away from him.

At times like this, I always think of W.H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts," which is, to me, one of the most perfect explorations of human suffering ever written.

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

A sad time

2010-09-12T10:14:00.002-04:00

We've just found out this week that my husband's sister has a large brain tumor. Worse, it's situated in a part of the brain that makes it very hard to remove and has spread into her brain tissue. She has eight children. The youngest is only eight months old. It's a very sad and frightening time.

Yes my dears, this is a real book.

2010-09-10T00:19:00.003-04:00

And it was written in 1885 by - I kid you not - Palmer Cox!
I think that shows some real prescience on his part!

(Image from lolaleeloo's flickr file.)

And a little child shall lead them

2010-08-29T23:52:00.003-04:00

My husband was chatting with one of our seventeen-year-old twins yesterday about a former babysitter of theirs who used to date women but is now marrying a man. The husband asked, "Why do you think she's doing that - marrying a man?" And our wonderful daughter answered, "Dad, it doesn't matter who you date or marry. What matters is that you love them and they love you." And he felt very proud and very humble.

It's my birthday!

2010-08-27T12:20:00.000-04:00

80s dating video

2010-08-22T00:30:00.003-04:00

80s Video eCard
Uploaded by plentyofbaggage1. - Classic TV and last night's shows, online.

I was trying to decide - if I had to choose one of these guys on point of death - which one I would date. So far I'm leaning toward the guy who says "One of my favorite foods is pizza" simply because, well, I do like pizza....

Which one would you choose, I mean if you had to?

Lemonade

2010-08-19T14:50:00.010-04:00

Yesterday the husband surprised me with a date night at an expensive gourmet farm-to-table restaurant. Which is a pretty big deal for us for a number of reasons:

1. We have those four pesky kids

2. One of them is special needs

3. And mostly because the husband hates spending money. His idea of a decadently extravagant dinner is buying it all in the frozen-foods aisle at Trader Joe's. So, for him, going to a restaurant where you'll pay $100 for dinner for two is a BIG STINKIN DEAL and it damn well better be transcendent. And since it had been rated as one of the top 100 farm-to-table restaurants in the U.S. by Gourmet Magazine, he was primed for Heaven on a plate.

So, of course, it wasn't. I knew things were not going to go well when the husband, who can't drink, asked if they had anything like lemonade. All they had was booze and soda pop. When the food came it was in those stupid skinny stacks (seriously, who stacks their food?) on huge, mostly empty, white plates decorated with nouvelle cuisine dots and squiggles of sauce. Excuse me, but I do not like my food skinnier or prettier than me, and I like enough sauce so that I can mop it up with bread from the generous bread basket. Which there also wasn't. The final insult (for the husband, who is a crazed foodie) was that the meyer-lemon tart had a soggy (shudder) crust! It was a major case of hoping for lemonade and getting a big fat sour bunch of lemons. Seriously, the poor boy was devastated. He's sensitive that way.

So after our nouvelle désastre I suggested we go for a walk around beautiful (by which I mean impoverished and decaying) downtown Sharpsburg, PA, where said restaurant was situated. Now kids, small-town Western Pennsylvania is not a scenic wonderland but we had the babysitter so....

For a few blocks things went from bad to worse. We saw a mother pull over her speeding minivan, smack her screaming kid hard, then screech off with the poor kid wailing like a siren. And as we strolled along, the natives stared at us because, I assume, we didn't have tattoos and bleached-blond mullets (not a good look for me).

Then, just as we were about to trudge dejectedly home, I saw a glimmer of water. From a river. That you could walk to. Which is unusual here even though we are literally surrounded by rivers. Because of Pittsburgh's industrial past, the waterfront is mostly blocked off by (abandoned and decaying) industrial sites. It is almost impossible to actually walk to a river anywhere in town. But there was the river, and there was the path to it, and so we walked.

We went through a long dark tunnel and emerged into a magical place.

We strolled over and dabbled our fingers in the miraculously touchable river. Amazing. Then we sat by it and just breathed it all in. People were fishing, feeding the ducks, or just sitting, talking, being there, like us. It was a perfect mild evening. The sun was setting, and everyone around us exuded that special peace that you get near a body of water. There were all classes and races of people, all just so happy to be exactly where they were.

After a while I started chatting with people, as I do. The guy next to us, with the tattoos, the blond mullet and the Lynard Skynard bandana said he was catching small fish, mainly crappies (or maybe he meant that he was just catching small crappy fish!), but added that "I really just came here for the peace." The black woman next to us with the akita and the toy poodle offered me bread to feed the ducks with. As we watched the ducks squabble, a friend of hers told me about taking his granddaughter ice fishing in Minnesota. It was the nicest evening I've had in a long long time.

On the drive home, I thought about lemons and lemonade and how happy I was that my husband and I are generally able to take the lemons we have been given in our life together, some of them pretty seriously sour and, one way or another, made some pretty nice lemonade out of it all. And next time we go to Sharpsburg, we'll skip the fancy exclusive restaurant altogether and take our lemonade - literal and metaphorical - and some sandwiches right to the river and share it all, which, for me, makes everything so much sweeter.

Another poem (what's gotten into me?)

2010-08-16T16:59:00.023-04:00

It's been a tough couple of weeks here. An old friend's daughter (a victim of spousal abuse) died, and a member of my extended family is struggling through, and I hope out of, a nervous breakdown. Thinking about all this brought me back to a poem I've been wrestling with for some time. It's about my grandfather, who had a nervous breakdown and committed suicide. It's very much a work in progress, but I thought I'd share it with you anyway. Feedback welcome but I also know it's, well, heavy to say the least (!), so no worries if it's too sad to read or comment on.

What I would say to my grandfather before he jumped

I know:

the unbearable weight of skin,

heavy as a suit of stone, pins you

under your smothering despair;

how your bones feel already broken

by your steep fall

from joy and your lacerated heart's

bled dry of all its hope. Madness

brought you to this high and burning room

but not alone.

I have stood at the same clear pane

you stand at now and seen,

on both sides of it, a broken life;

the only difference that on this side

skin covers the keening pain,

but on the other side your jailing skin

breaks open and the pain leaks out leaving you

in peace, at last. Your thoughts whisper

it’s logical, that step

up onto the narrow ledge between life

and its end. But I know

that, if you jump, the window never closes

over the unanswerable riddles

of Why? and then Why not?

So each of us you left in grief

must hold tight all our lives against the airless

vacuum of your fall. The open window calls

till some of us just tire, let go. Without you

your wife will drown herself

in a river of drink, a grandchild swallows

too many bitter pills, I always know

where the exits are in case

I need to get out. Still I stay

here. Here,

take my hand, stay

your feet. This living death will die

away at last. Stop

your ears against the poisonous Iago

of our traitorous chemistry, close

the window, reclaim the still-breathing body

of moments that make up the rest

of your life; the one you made from

countless things like love

of a girl with brown eyes and a red dress,

three children born with her Indian eyes. Wife,

daughter, son. These words that tell us who we are,

they grew from you. Remember

how you drove across three states, no stops,

windows rolled up just to protect them all

from polio which had no cure. But If you step out

onto that yearning air, what remains of you

will be just the hollow shattering shell

of your fall to death on a sidewalk

among strangers. Stop, stay, remember

us. Protect us now, again,

from the crippling incurable wound,

the aching phantom limb that you

become after,

if you fall.

Really peculiar record covers

2010-07-29T23:30:00.007-04:00

That I have found over the years. I did nothing to them but photograph them and giggle.

Loveless Missionary Adventures

"And in the end, my little ones, the lion ate the missionary. Sweet dreams!"

Roe v. Hair

(I think the hair is winning.)

Aunt ~~Carmine~~ Carmela....

has an adam's apple and wears size 12 shoes.

Prince Larry Valiant

Knight of Orlon, Dacron, and Polyester.

99 Luftwaffe balloons?

Those Germans know how to party!

And Adam awoke on the first day

and found he had some morning shrubbery, and it was good.

Overheard on sports-talk radio

2010-07-23T23:53:00.006-04:00

(Referring to a famous football player)
"And if he can't make it with an ugly, pregnant, felon, then who can?"

The book of Job's wife

2010-07-20T15:51:00.010-04:00

So I was avoiding revising my novel the other day by thinking of anything other than my novel ... like my miscarriages (I had two because of toxins in our water supply). And I remembered that in The Book of Job, God kills their ten children. So I wrote this poem from the point of view of Job's nameless wife.

Job’s wife

He gave it all back twofold,
so the story goes. Money, oxen, sheep.
“The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away,”
said he whose name is
righteous in the books of men,
those books that do not tell the names
of the ten children the Lord took
in vain. I escaped
alone to tell you:
Eli, the oldest,
had dark grieving eyes,
as if he saw his future falling
down upon him;
Rachel, my good girl, freckled
and plain, a bustling little mother
to the young ones;
Rona, little bird,
sang in perfect tune and pitch.
Dvora, the queen bee,
had eyes the color of honey
and a wit that could sting.
Baruch was slow and hid
behind my legs when strangers came;
Aaron and Lev,
the rascal twins, spoke conspiracies
with their eyes and smirked.
Micah, wild and fleet,
ran away from home three times. Now
I wish he had run faster.
And Zev - my last I thought;
his hair was red and curled
around his face like wisps of holy fire.
My children

did not curse the Lord. That day they gathered
together and, for the bread they were to eat,
they blessed the very Lord who felled the roof
that killed them.

I dug their graves and planted
my children in the ground
to grow like bitter herbs.
Job sat in the ashes
and called me foolish. Men came, scolded:
“This is the way of his joy and out of the earth
others shall grow.” As if that were enough.
“Great men are not always wise,” I snapped.

Now Job’s lips speak the names
of his rejoicing; Jemima, Keziah, Keren. Three
other daughters burnish him
like golden rings. Seven more sons raise
roofs they think are safe. But in the shadow
of my deaths I live blind
to his faith; an eye
does not replace an eye.
Only ten plus ten, and every single one
alive, would be enough for me. So I keep
my place. I am two verses
and a watchword in the good book
of God’s deeds. Nameless
as the dead, I stay and to his face I curse
the god who took my children. He
bet them like ten worthless coins,
in a game of dare with the devil
just to prove
His mighty
point.

Six-words

2010-07-10T10:42:00.003-04:00

Browsing in the library, I came across a book called Six-Word Memoirs. So here are two I thought of for myself.

1. Grandfather jumped. SSRIs invented. I won't.

2. Two miscarried. Two adopted. Two more.

And here's one more for comic relief:
Skinny. Chubby. Slim. Pregnant. Chubby again.

I'd love to hear your six-word memoirs!

It's that time of year again....

2010-06-06T02:15:00.000-04:00

Time for the end-of-the-year school talent show. Though perhaps talent isn't exactly the word for it. But they certainly make up in enthusiasm what they lack in skill. Have fun! I did.

2010-05-21T12:01:00.005-04:00

Shamed into full disclosure

2010-05-18T12:19:00.005-04:00

From Dill Pixels wonderful flickr stream.

I've been shamed by I need more cowbell and her prodigal-daughter blog update, to write a more complete update myself. Yeah, it really was an awful winter, but .... there was, of course, more going on below the shitty frozen surface of this long and shitty winter.

1. My husband

It's almost two years since my husband's last surgery and (better late than never!) I think I am finally getting "over" it. What that means is that I've finally incorporating into my life the reality that my husband has an incurable, life-threatening, condition instead of (as I had thought before) a one-time weird clotting condition that would be taken care of by surgery and blood thinners.

It's not an easy thing to accept. I worry whenever he's gone, whether it's out of town on a business trip, or out of the house for work. The only time I don't worry is when he's right next to me, where I can keep an eye on him, save him if he needs saving. Because my brilliant prize-winning husband is utterly incapable of taking care of himself. Seriously. This is the guy whose response to massive debilitating chest pain (from his swollen-to-the-point-of-bursting veins) is to decide to wait it out, hope it goes away, and not tell anyone. Good plan Einstein.

2. My novel

I love writing. It's easy for me and I'm good at it, and because of that, I write really good first drafts. I've even been lucky enough to have a couple of those first drafts (of short stories) published. So when I wrote my novel, part of me really truly thought that I could write it, send it in, and get it published too. But novels are big messy things and, unfortunately, I have to revise it. And revise it. And revise it. Revising isn't easy work and I don't like it because I'm not (yet) good at it. I would rather pull my toenails out one by one than revise my own work. I would rather clean house than revise my own work. And let's just say that my house is getting cleaned in places that have never been cleaned in the entire eight years that we've lived here.

But, with the help and advice of some very good readers and friends, I am slowly, painfully, dragging myself (kicking, screaming, whining, and hating every minute of it) through a real and deep revision. So you can see why sitting down to the computer to write even a blog entry might send me running for the mop, or the TV remote.

Anyway, those are my excuses for neglecting you. Oh, and did I mention that the weather was really really crappy?

Hello my darlings!

2010-05-11T11:48:00.005-04:00

Well, the Guinness Book of World Records, the National Weather Service, as well as every other expert in the world has finally determined that this was the Shittiest Winter Ever. I personally went through all of Elizabeth Kubler Ross's five stages of grief about it and added a couple of my own.

1. Swine flu whining - All the kids got it, one by one. Just when I thought any given child was getting better and I might have a quiet day to myself, the next one would get it. Oddly, all my whining did not help them recover.

When that was over, it snowed and snowed and snowed and I responded with:

1a. Denial - "No that is NOT two-and-a-half feet of snow!"

Fat lot of good that did me. So I moved on to...

2. Anger - "God I hate this F**KING snow!" and "I grew up in the tropics! I shouldn't have to deal with this shit!" Again, not the most efficacious method of making snow go away. So I moved on to...

3. Bargaining - "If you shovel the sidewalks I promise I'll make all the dinners forever and ever." Again, fat lot of good.... guess who shoveled (and shoveled, and shoveled). God it's annoying to have a husband with a "serious medical condition" and a surgeon on call to prove same...

4. Depression - "Oh my god, it's snowing again? I am so depressed" ad nauseum. This went on for a loooooooong time.

I might eventually have moved on to acceptance (or not) had I not, instead, moved on to The Deadly Virus That Almost Killed Me. So what I moved onto was accepting antibiotics. All I can say about that is - God I'm glad I live in the age of modern medicine especially antibiotics and I truly accept them as my personal savior. Amen.

5. True acceptance - Spring is here, the snow has melted, and despite the many recent late-spring frost warnings, I accept that winter is finally OVER! Halle(f***king)lujah!

I believe I will survive! (And maybe even start blogging regularly again.)

The way to world peace.

2010-04-10T14:14:00.002-04:00

Since I am indisposed with (self-diagnosed) TB, I will share with you this charming military ritual. I think if all armies were required to do this all the time it might bring about world peace (through everyone laughing too hard to shoot).

Where I've been

2010-04-03T17:32:00.015-04:00

NEW YORK was visited.

Gritty urban things

like subway acapella singers

and buildings with populations larger than our entire borough

were looked at with awe.

Family was bonded with

including a

new cousin

and a new kitten.

Outstandingly authentic

Chinese food

was eaten and ecstatically appreciated.

A child was completely

worn out.
And her mother too.
Mission accomplished.

Putting the ME in Camille!

2010-03-19T00:38:00.005-04:00

For the last ten days, I've been in a desperate struggle with some kind of vampiric virus that sucked the life force out of me, gave me a tubercular cough, and made me utterly unable to do anything but sleep and look pitiful. I was starting to see reruns of "Camille" in my head and was preparing myself for the inevitable - the doctor looking at me sadly and saying "...chronic fatigue... lifelong condition... so tragic." (When I was eight, the doctor told me that if I hadn't had my tonsils out I would have been an "invalid." I thought it sounded desperately romantic and would remind my brothers that "I could have been an INVALID" whenever they were mean to me.)

Miraculously, on the eleventh day I have risen! And gone to the grocery store. And bought all the ~~junk~~ good food my husband never buys and that we were getting perilously low on. My kids don't know what a close call they had and how lucky they are that I'm back on the job. Must remember to remind them I could have been an INVALID!

The Fairy Child

2010-03-11T21:43:00.002-05:00

Things are going better for the little one at school. She's getting some of the sparkle back in her eyes and the spring back in her step.

Bullying update

2010-03-04T14:17:00.007-05:00

We are in an ongoing conversation with the school administration and the classroom teacher. They understand, at least partly, the seriousness of the situation. The bully's mother has been spoken with and the bully herself has been put on probation. It's a start.

We have also discovered that another girl (who had formerly been a friend of our daughter's) was participating in the bullying. Very sad. For everyone. She has apologized, as has her mother.

We are asking the school to adopt a true anti-bullying curriculum, which would require that all the teachers complete a free, online course about how to identify, deal with, and prevent bullying. We'll see how they respond to that. We're also trying to take some proactive steps with our kid - who is small, bespectacled, and a bit fearful - that might help her have more body confidence. To that end, we're looking at a number of options - maybe one-on-one lessons with a female tennis pro, the idea being that more physical strength and confidence might help prevent this in the future.

So day by day, step by step, we're facing the problem and trying to solve it as best we can.

One really touching thing that has come out of all this is how many people have reached out to us, some to offer help and guidance, others who have shared their own painful stories of having been bullied. One friend wrote "I can still remember the dislocation and lack of confidence it produced." That's the crux of it right there. To be bullied is to be made to feel that you are worthless and helpless. The current research shows that bullying, far from making a person stronger, makes them more likely to suffer long-term from anxiety and depression. (And the bullies themselves are far more likely than their non-bullying peers to end up in jail!) So it's a very serious problem and we are doing everything we can to make our daughter's world is safer and give her the tools she needs to prevent this from ever happening again.

Here, for anyone who is interested, is an excellent website/course on bullying prevention (it's free!). It presents the most up-to-date research and techniques in a lucid and digestible way. I highly recommend it!
Pathways Bullying Prevention

My good girl

2010-03-01T00:22:00.002-05:00

I offered to max out the credit card and take the youngest on a vacation until this whole bullying mess is (somewhat) resolved. She thought about it for a minute and said, "No Mommy. It's OK. I'll go to school." Such a brave diligent little thing. If it had been me, I would have definitely made a break for it.

Well, we'll see what the week holds. Wish us luck.

My fairy child in the hard cold world

2010-02-26T00:23:00.010-05:00

Someone once described my youngest daughter as "like a fairy child." And there is something other-worldly and dreamy about her. Stories, pictures, voices fill her head. She writes them down on countless slips of paper that she leaves all over the house, forgets about. A day, a month, six months later, they resurface - these odd little fortunes from the quirky cookie-world of her imagination. I found one the other day that said:

"You will meet a tall, dark, handsome man and become
a hobo. Do not doubt us!"

I had no idea what it meant, but it made me laugh.

And since her head is so completely swimming with whimsies, she can be forgetful about things, things that - to other people - might seem more "real." Say, for example, anything in the physical world. She routinely puts her clothes on backwards (yes, sometimes even her pants!). And her hair would certainly go unbrushed till it became a nest for wild birds if I didn't wrangle her and it into submission occasionally.

But she doesn't have a mean bone in her body, and is so tender-hearted that she asked me, could she please give all her baby-sitting money to Haitian relief. Some might, in fact, say she's tender-hearted and sensitive to a fault; she was almost in tears when we got rid of our old living-room rug because it held "so many memories" for her. (Yeah, remember that time the dog peed on it here? and the time I spilled my coffee...) But whichever way you see it, she's a sweet, kind kid.

Somehow this strange mix that makes her so dreamy and dear, also makes her a magnet for bullies. In public school, she was verbally and eventually physically bullied. We pulled her out and put her in a tiny funky hippy school. There are less than 100 kids in the whole school, including a number of kids with ADD, Dyslexia, Aspergers, and other kinds of bully catnip. Those kids are doing fine. Nobody bugs them. But my daughter - bright, articulate, and yes, more than a little spacey - is getting bullied. Again.

Well crap.

I know that when she's older it will all be fine. She's going to go to college and blow people away (as she already does) with her perceptive, articulate, witty mind and her dreamy fey ways (that is as long as she doesn't wear her pants backwards). But that's all so far away and she has to go back to school Monday and deal. And it breaks my heart.

This conversation would not have happened when I was young and lovely

2010-02-23T14:12:00.008-05:00

Yesterday, leaving yoga, I was explaining to a friend why full lunges are so hard for me to do. I said, "I have a really long torso, but very short arms."
"So," she said. "You're like a T-rex, doing yoga."
"Exactly," I said.

All work and no play make mom a bad girl

2010-02-15T17:38:00.002-05:00

OK, this has officially veered off into horror. I really truly believed that worst was behind us. The husband was home, the furnace was new and waranteed, we were more or less dug out. What else could go possibly go wrong? And that just shows a complete lack of imagination on my part. Because this morning, with two kids still home from school the power went out. Which meant the the brand new furnace was off, as was the stove (electric starter!), and the phones (wireless). And my husband had taken the car and MY cell phone to a meeting which could not be interrupted.

So I'm officially done saying "It can't get any worse." What do you figure is next? Boils? Locusts? Or just flooding from the snow melting. Maybe I should start building me an ark.

I'm starting to feel like I'm trapped in the Overlook Hotel

2010-02-15T00:02:00.003-05:00

As you may recall, when last we saw our plucky heroine, she was battling the elements with only a snow shovel and what was left of her wits after two feet of snow fell, then a tree, fell, and then the furnace died. Virtuous Miss Elizabeth thought all would be well once the furnace was replaced. Her patience was sorely tested when her husband left town for a conference. But did she kill any of her children? NO she did not! Good, brave Miss Elizabeth!

She truly thought all would be well at last - the heat was on, the children not murdered or even throttled, and the husband home from his travels. But Miss Elizabeth faces yet another trial: six more @#$%ing inches of SNOW!!!!!!!

Let's just hope our heroine doesn't REDRUM anyone.

OK, I'm better now

2010-02-11T01:39:00.005-05:00

The elusive teenager (above) pokes her head out of her hole and predicts six more weeks of winter.

The furnace man came at 8AM this morning. A couple of hours and a couple of thousand dollars later, the heat was on and the icy gulag of our house was thawing out. To celebrate the warm inside, the kids went out and built an igloo (so that they could remember that good old icy feeling of a house without heat?). Then they came in, shedding clothes and clumps of snow all over the place (while I yelled ineffectually "Don't get snow all over the floor.......") and ran to sit on the heating vents and warm up. And, yes, I even made them hot cocoa.

Ahhhh. A functioning furnace is a very very good thing.

Hell has frozen over (emphasis on the frozen!)

2010-02-09T00:03:00.002-05:00

1. The New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl. (The good part of the list is officially over now.)
2. Two feet of snow in twelve hours.
3. A tree in our back yard split in half under the weight of the snow.
(Thank God no one was hurt, and the clever tree managed to fall right in the five feet between our house and our neighbor's house, so neither house was damaged.)
4. Our furnace started groaning and moaning and then conked out completely this morning.
5. It's 12 degrees out right now.
6. I'm cold.
7. I don't like being cold.

There. I'm done now.

I hope to write more soon when my fingers aren't frozen!!!!!

She-Devils on Wheels!!!

2010-01-17T19:32:00.002-05:00

I stole this from Mean Dirty Pirate, but how could I resist these bad bad girls?

Give

2010-01-15T13:59:00.003-05:00

Hospital Albert Schweitzer, 40 miles outside of Port au Prince, is one of the few functioning hospitals in the area. If you want to help them, please visit
Hospital Albert Schweitzer
The money will go directly to the hospital to pay for medical supplies and pay for the doctors and staff who are working around the clock.

Here's a link to their blog:
Heal, Grow, Celebrate

No man is an island?

2010-01-12T13:18:00.007-05:00

I was snooping around, as one does, in the profile of a new internet contact. I discovered that he is a successful artist and graphic designer. No jealousy there. 'Yay him!' I thought to myself and 'How interesting. Must find out more.' Which was when I discovered that he lives in Palma, Spain. Which I had never heard of, so I went, as one does when casually stalking someone, to google maps. And that is when jealousy bit me hard. You see, Palma is on the island of Mallorca, and Mallorca is smack in the middle of the Mediterranean. I always imagined that when I grew up I'd live overseas - somewhere sunny and warm and with access to an ocean. Not much to ask since I'd spent most of my childhood in precisely that kind of situation.

And then fate, with her wry sense of the absurd, intervened. I met and fell in love with a man who, despite being part French and speaking near-fluent French, wanted more than anything else to stay in America. I chose to ignore this, assuming that like a strange virus, it would pass with time and love. Then, when he was deciding what to be when he grew up, he asked me "Should I go to law school or grad school in art history?" To which I said, "Who needs the money and security that a career in law would give you? Go to grad school in art history young man. Follow your bliss, etc." And I thought to myself, 'He's part French. Mais biensure he'll choose French art. We can go to France, live in Paris for a while. Go to Aix where his family has a house which is not far from the coast....' Mais non, mes petits ! Oh la tristesse ! He said he wanted to go into American art "because I wouldn't have to travel or live overseas." This I was less able to ignore, but we were married by then so I was screwed.

Now, twenty-five years later, here I sit in the middle of America, a long long way from any coast, it's 21 degrees outside, and I haven't seen blue sky in God knows how long. So looking at the map of Palma, Spain, then looking out at the frozen tundra of my backyard, I had a weak moment of feeling this was not my plan! THAT was my plan!

Now, I do know that where you live physically is not really that pertinent to how you live emotionally. (And if I didn't know that, Willym would be sure to remind and or bitch slap me!) So I took a last longing look at the Mallorca - dotted with palm trees, surrounded by the shimmering Mediterranean - and closed the computer. Because, truly I know that when I stepped into the stream that was the beginning of my love for K, he became my island, and the life we've built together my coasts and oceans and sunny plazas. I really do know that.

I wonder if he'd be willing to wear a palm tree on his head once in a while?

Oh Momma...

2010-01-05T19:42:00.006-05:00

Here, for your delectation, is my mother's #1 corker of the visit (and possibly one of her top corkers of all time):

Elizabeth (explaining why she is interested in writing a book about her great great grandfather, a white man who was chief of the Eastern Cherokee): "I'm not so interested in him as a 'Great Man.' I'm much more interested in his contradictions. For instance, he championed one minority - the Cherokee - while buying and selling another minority - blacks - like they were sacks of corn."

Elizabeth's mother: Looks at Elizabeth questioningly as if to say 'And your point is?'

Elizabeth: "I mean, I think it's fascinating that the Cherokee who were themselves oppressed, owned slaves!"

Elizabeth's mother (in a very genteel Southern accent): "Oh yes, they were much more sophisticated than all the other Indian tribes...."

2009-12-29T23:14:00.005-05:00

Twenty-nine and a half years ago, a tall skinny blond guy walked in the door of the apartment I was living in - he was the cousin of a roommate - and the moment I saw him I thought, "That's the man I'm going to marry." Oddly, I was dating someone else at the time, but the heart, or mine at any rate, pays no attention to such things. Unfortunately, his did. After pining for him (and even breaking up with the boyfriend!) to no avail, I filed my odd little first thought about him sadly away in the circular file marked 'Idiotic thoughts and dreams I've had.' It's a big file and very full.

After some ascetic years for me spent in the serious pursuit of art (in artfully paint-spattered clothes of course), and some seriously misguided relationships for him (he dated a sorority girl! They had nothing in common. Go figure!), the wisdom of the heart prevailed. Four and a half years later, dear reader, I married him.

That was twenty-five years ago today. Looking back now, it seems like we were babies who hardly knew each other. But I know him now, and I'd do it again.

Ms. Muddle

2009-12-27T20:52:00.006-05:00

"My dear, I am worried about you. It seems to me that you are in a muddle... Take an old man's word; there's nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. It is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror--on the things that I might have avoided. We can help one another but little. I used to think I could teach young people the whole of life, but I know better now, and all my teaching of George has come down to this: beware of muddle."
(Mr. Emerson to Lucy Honeychurch in A Room With a View.)

I haven't been writing here much lately because, honestly, I'm in something of a muddle. I thought I'd sort things out, get through it, and be able to start writing sensible and thoughtful posts again, but it seems to be a fairly big muddle I'm in. The kind of muddle that is so deep that getting out of it changes who you are. So here, because you are all so sweet and deserve an explanation, are the basic issues I'm trying, inadequately, to sort out:

1. Lately, my husband has been more fatigued than is normal for him. Finally (after much hounding from me) he went for a check up. The doctor said that his liver function is somewhat compromised because of lack of circulation. Which means that, down the pike, we may be facing a liver transplant. When K. was first ill, we spent a lot of time in the transplant clinic, in waiting rooms full of transplant patients. Most of them were either desperately sick from organ rejection or bizarrely bloated from steroids. It's not a road I want to go down, but of course I will if I have to.

In three days we will have been married for twenty-five years. He is the pillar that holds up my sky, and all I want is another twenty-five years with him.

2. My mother is, it's clear to me, in the earliest stages of alzheimer's. She is still functioning pretty well, but I see that in the not-too-distant future she won't be able to live independently and will need to come an live with us. Which is as I want it to be, but it's a big change, the idea of caring for the parent who always cared for you.

3. My special-needs daughter is going through a seriously rough patch, crying and screaming a lot. She's gone through worse, and she always comes out of them, but it's exhausting when you're in the middle of it.

There I am in a nutshell (emphasis on the word nut). So if I'm writing less, calling less, visiting you and/or your blogs less, and am just generally not my usual peppy and voluble self, I hope you'll understand that it's not you. It's me and my muddle.

An utterly enchanting film!

2009-12-20T17:07:00.001-05:00

I just saw this film, The Beaches of Agnes, by and about Agnes Varda, a well-known French Nouvelle Vague filmmaker. I can't recommend it enough! It's brilliant, tender, and very funny. Go see it if it comes to your area!

Holi-daze

2009-12-18T19:30:00.007-05:00

I've been a very bad blogger lately. Let's blame it on the holidays and their various distractions, joyous and otherwise. For us as a family, one of the joys will be that my mother is coming for Christmas. My kids simply adore her. And I mean that they adore her in a pure and simple way I can't anymore.

So for me, one of the 'otherwises' will be that my mother will be coming for the holidays. I do really love her to pieces. But Laws-a-mercy (as my grandmother used to say) she makes me crazy as a loon. She inevitably comes out with a corker of some kind. Some of her recent winners are:
"If I hadn't married your father and had you children, I could have been a Virginia Woolf Scholar." And, on hearing that a fortune teller said I'd be famous "It will probably be because one of your children is famous."

But if she has a misguided head (and mouth) she does have a very loving heart, and for that I forgive all the rest. So I'm reading Deborah Tannen's book about the messages and metamessages of mother/daughter talk and I will try very hard to hear what she means and not what she says. And I will try very hard not to smack her upside the head. Really.

Me and my BFF

2009-11-23T23:57:00.005-05:00

I got an email from Oprah today (yeah, we email and "LOL" at each other like crazy). She wrote "Fifteen years ago, I wrote in my journal that one day I would create a television network...." Girlfriend, you too? Actually, fifteen years ago, my twins were babies and, if memory serves, I wrote in my journal, "One day I hope to create enough time in my life to watch a television network that doesn't feature a purple dinosaur." Anyway, like Oprah, I have achieved my goal. Why some nights I'm able to watch Law and Order on a couple of different channels! Hmmm.... Note to self, must have better goals to write in my journal.

Why I love the internet

2009-11-17T19:39:00.006-05:00

Today, because my youngest is home sick (again) with possible mono, I ~~wasted~~ spent more time than usual on the interwebs. And here's what I learned. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," by that famous stoner Samuel Taylor Coleridge, can be sung to the tune of the "Gilligan's Island" theme song! Oh, if only I'd known this in college!

Sooooo try it! You'll be glad you did. (And people say poetry is boring.)

(From "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner")

Water, water, everywhere
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere
Not any drop to drink.

The very deep did rot: Oh Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.

.......

Ah! Wel-a-day! What evil looks
Had I from old and young!
Instead of the cross, the albatross
About my neck was hung.

Elizabeth in Wonderland

2009-11-11T21:45:00.010-05:00

I lived in a lot of "exotic" places in my childhood - Laos, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Taiwan. Growing up, water buffaloes routinely wandered into our front yard, poinsettia bushes grew six feet high and pale green luna moths floated through them. It wasn't all ineffable beauty, though. You could find your way to market with your eyes closed by following the smell of dead fish. Birds nested in the venetian blinds. Termites swarmed in through the windows. Wild, and sometimes rabid, dogs roamed the streets in packs. There were coup d'etats every so often and gunfire sometimes at night. And all of it - the beauty, the wildness - was entirely normal to me. It was just the place that I lived, the place that everyone I knew lived. In retrospect my time there seems amazing, but when I was little it was just home.

There was one place I lived, however, that was entirely different and, to me, wildly exotic. It was a place straight out of the storybooks and fairytales I read. It was ... Michigan. We lived there for one year, when I was five, when my father was at the University of Michigan getting a masters degree. We lived in a stone house. Stone! Like castles were made of. We had a stone fireplace - or "chimney corner" as I called it - like the one Cinderella got her cinders from. I used to pose by it and imagine myself as an oppressed heroine of my own fairy tale involving ogerish older brothers. Me at play in Wonderland.
There was a field behind our house where I used to wander, with my four-year-old boyfriend Keithie, and pick wildflowers, and we never once had to run away from rabid dogs. Instead, there were tadpoles and frogs in a pond. In winter, the pond froze and I was thrilled at the prospect of ice skating. I went to that pond, got my wide learner skates on, and posed, one foot on the ice, one leg bent at the knee, like all the pictures that I'd seen of ice skaters. I expected to simply start floating across the ice because I'd never actually seen a person skating so I didn't know you actually had to move your legs to make it work. It was all so thrillingly new and strange.

After my father finished his masters, we moved back to the tropics - to seasons that went from hot and dry to hot and rainy; to mango and tamarind trees in the back yard; to running wild on dirt roads and getting every parasite known to man - to what was home for me.

I've lived in the States for thirty years now. I bitch about the cold, never ice skate because of a bum knee, and grumble when it snows. I've even been back to a place called Michigan. But it wasn't my Michigan - that place between the world that was home but wasn't mine, and the place that was mine but has never really felt like home - that Wonderland.

A bad day

2009-11-06T18:44:00.005-05:00

It's been one of those days. First I woke up to the fifth straight day and several consecutive weeks home with a sick child. Not the same sick child all the time. They've been taking turns, bless their pointed little heads. So I began the day at the end of my rope, and I very shortly fell completely off it (the rope, that is). My special-needs daughter, who was the one home this week, lost it in the bathtub, soaking me and the floor. I got angry enough to almost lose it myself. It was all I could do not to yell at her. We never yell at any of our kids, but especially not at her; it's counterproductive. We stay calm and explain consequences clearly. But somehow today I couldn't manage. I sent her to her room and then went downstairs and cried because I felt so awful about it.

The wonderful husband came home early so I could get a break. I decided to get out of the house, so i went to my community-garden plot, which is in a local cemetery. I thought a couple of hours of physical exertion, outside and with no kids anywhere near me, would set me back on my normal roll-with-the-punches track. But when I got there, this is what I found:

My little garden plot, which is fenced and gated to keep out deer, had been vandalized. The gate, which is never locked (because deer don't have opposable thumbs), was broken and knocked over. Fence posts were bent, things were strewn around. I was pretty upset, so I walked around the cemetery to calm myself down, get a little perspective on things. Which I did, but not in the way I had planned because I saw several headstones that had been knocked over. Worse and worse. So I decided to go back home, which was by then, seeming like a better choice because there, at least, I know and love the people who (occasionally) make me cry.

Then on the way home I heard about the second mass shooting in two days...

What sends us over the edge and into irrational, destructive, or violent behavior? For me today, why was this the day I couldn't manage what I normally manage without even thinking about it? What was it (liquor? drugs? hormones?) that made someone decide to destroy my sweet and harmless little garden or knock over somebody's mother's headstone? And what pushes a person who has never shot or killed anyone to suddenly open fire on strangers? I have no answers for any of this, but I do know that I hope tomorrow will be a better day for me, for you, for all of us.

And speaking of people who might need some "work" done....

2009-11-01T01:26:00.001-04:00

Granny got out and she's gunning for your candy!

(My youngest this Halloween.)

Mask

2009-10-28T23:53:00.009-04:00

I desperately want a new(er) living room rug, so cruising craigslist the other day, I saw a promising one being sold by a woman who was "moving to Austin to start my music career!" I pictured a 20 or 30 something, fed up with the grind, setting off to pursue her dream. We arranged a time for me to come by and I was surprised to hear that she lived in a well-to-do suburban neighborhood. When I got there, I was even more surprised to see a gleaming silver Porsche in the driveway. And when I rang the bell and the front door opened, I was absolutely flabbergasted when a woman who was about my age and looked slightly less natural than Donatella Versace answered the door.

She was wearing artfully (by which I mean expensively) ripped bright red leggings, a tight low-cut tank top (it was 45 degrees out), and a cowboy hat. It was all I could do to keep my chin from dragging on the pavement. I mean, this is Pittsburgh! The only "work" people have done on themselves here are Steelers tattoos or organ transplants. Anyway, thank God for my Diplomatic Corps training! I held myself together and followed her into the house. I didn't buy the rug, but I did look around looking at other stuff and we got to talking. After a while, being me (by which I mean being nosy) she'd told me her life story.

It was a sad one. Her handsome, successful tennis-pro and professional photographer husband had died. They had no kids. Their big fancy house was empty and loveless and reminded her only of what she had lost. I bought some books and a bike rack but, though she had nice things, it would have been too painful to bring anything that reminded me of her home. Not because she'd lost so much, but because she was so clearly running as fast as she could from so much. I mean, I understand; she's a middle-aged, heartbroken woman, with, possibly, her best times behind her in a society that completely devalues normal looking older women who aren't "cougars."

It was a weird and interesting evening. I'm not usually a very judgmental person, but I walked in there judging the Hell out of her for her Porsche and her face and her gratuitously top-of-the-line everything. But I left there hoping she would find a little bit of peace and happiness, and imagining her on stage - with her guitar, her bleached-blond hair, her bad-girl ripped leggings, her cowboy hat - singing her alt-rock heart out, in front of an audience that will only remember her for that ruinous caricature of a young woman's face that she wears in place of her own.

I also left there wishing I'd had the nerve to tell her "Honey,you're a sweet woman and you really need to stop having work done on your face. It's starting to get scary."

The good (mommy), the bad (mommy), and the H1N1.

2009-10-24T22:08:00.015-04:00

I put he youngest to bed at 9:00 last night. I had my feet up and was really looking forward to a few heavenly hours to myself. Then, at 9:15 I heard the heavy-sigh inducing, personality-splitting sound of her feet creaking down the stairs. Bad mommy reared her ugly head and snipped at her, "What's going on?" My daughter said "Mommy, my chest hurts." Now she really does have H1N1, but she's also a complete hypochondriac, so while bad mommy wanted to say 'Oh for heaven's sake! Just go to SLEEP!', good mommy said "Come lie down on the couch and let's see what we can do about it..."

Two hours of nonstop chest pain and several chats with the on-call doctor later, good mommy got in the car and took her to the ER...

Everyone in the ER had masks on - receptionists, nurses, kids, parents - everyone.

Friday night at Children's Hospital smack in the middle of an H1N1 epidemic. Good times. Every room was full. The hallways echoed with the sound of crying children. We were there for hours.

Anyway, it turns out that people's immune systems are fighting the H1N1 virus so hard that it leaves other parts of them undefended, and doctors are seeing lots of opportunistic secondary infections. So my little hypochondriac actually had an inflammation and infection of her chest wall. Just before we left the hospital (at 4 am) they gave her a dose of antibiotics. By the time we got home, her chest had stopped hurting.

Good mommy and bad mommy were both glad they'd taken her to the ER were very grateful for the miracle of antibiotics. And bad mommy was reminded that just because someone's a hypochondriac, it doesn't mean they're not really sick. She's learned her lesson. And now that a third child is getting a cough, bad mommy will no doubt have to learn it again. Bad mommy hates learning lessons.

H1N1 hits home

2009-10-22T00:35:00.002-04:00

Two of the four girls have probable cases of H1N1. When I took the youngest to the doctor today, they met us in the parking lot, gave us masks to wear, and whisked us in the back way. The youngest seems to have a mild case. Can't tell yet with the middle child. But I'm keeping a hawk eye on them, and hoping for the best.

I shoulda seen it coming....

2009-10-16T11:52:00.004-04:00

So yesterday my twins (you know, the ones who came out) said, "Mom, can you take us shopping. We need to buy some flannel shirts." Seriously guys, did one of you send them that "Now that you're a lesbian!" book?

Fixing Lizzy's heart

2009-10-11T15:11:00.001-04:00

I made this to cheer up a friend with a broken heart. So now you all know that if you need your heart put back together or just someone's ass kicked, call Middle-Aged Super Mom! She'll make it all better.

That's Mr. Nobel Peace Prize to you!

2009-10-09T18:48:00.003-04:00

Hey teabaggers, put that in your teabag and suck it up!

I'm alive

2009-10-06T13:33:00.004-04:00

It wasn't a great summer for writing and me. The kids, those ever useful excuses to not get anything done, were all home and, try as I might to ignore them, well, I couldn't entirely. And my mom is on facebook. And my novel was seeming utterly intractable. And etc. ad infinitum. So many excuses, so very boring. Even for me.

Well now school is in session and my excuses are all gone eight hours a day. I'm taking on the novel again, and I hope to be a better and more entertaining correspondent. (But not with my mom on FB. That just too weird.)

Pittsburgh welcomes the world and then is REALLY glad when the world leaves.

2009-09-28T16:33:00.008-04:00

Well, we made it through the G20 mostly intact. A sad little group of self-styled "anarchists" did show up and misbehave enough to get tear gassed. The little nitwits broke the windows of evil capitalist giants like Pamela's Diner, an independent and lesbian-owned and operated local business. Good going anarchists. Everyone knows that those lesbians, with their Birkenstocks, flannel shirts, and pancakes, are out to take over the world! The protesters also broke the windows of a Boston Market that is right next to a major cancer-treatment facility, terrorizing the already traumatized families of cancer patients. Nice work kids!

Which makes me wonder, when did I get to be such a fuddy duddy? Oh, I know, it was when I had to stop living life theoretically and had to start living it for real. I've actually sat in that very Boston Market with a friend whose husband was getting cancer treatments. Yeah, the food is corporate and mediocre, but it serves food your kids will eat (which is a huge mercy when you're going through a life crisis) and it's a brief haven from the misery of the hospital. It makes me sad to think of those poor families sitting huddled in their booths - just trying to gather themselves together before they go back to the hospital where they have to be strong again - suddenly having shards of glass rain down on them. And it confirms my belief that it's never, ever a good thing when ideology trumps our humanity.

I'll stop grumping now, and here, for your amusement, is a link to my favorite photo from the G20. It's of a cute little anarchist trying to get reception on his corporation-owned and operated cell phone!

So having recently been through a town-brawl meeting with right-wing extremists and now the G20 with left-wing nut jobs, it makes me want to toss them all in a padded cell and lock the door!

My husband has finally given birth!

2009-09-14T17:35:00.002-04:00

Afer twenty-five years of pregnant thought and six years of writing and rewriting, my husband's magnum opus is finally out! It really is brilliant. But don't take my word for it. Read what the reviewers say:

“No one does art history and the history of memory as sublimely as Kirk Savage. In this book of extraordinary research and widely accessible prose, Savage brilliantly shows how America's most sacred and visible public space has evolved.” (David W. Blight)

“Monument Wars is the best single work I've read on the idea of the ‘monument’ in American culture, the best single analysis and history of Washington's shrines.” (James E. Young)

"Now maybe he will stop dragging us to monuments all the time!" (Our kids)

Here's the website:
www.monumentwars.com/Site%203/Home.html

Vanilla Rice

2009-09-09T19:39:00.006-04:00

As you know, one of our daughters is autistic. She's very bright, but has a really difficult time getting her words out. We've spent lots and lots of time carefully modeling speech for her, and teaching her what to say and when to say it.

Today my husband was making dinner and as he was getting the rice on, my super intellectual book-writing Ph.D. of a husband was riffing on the old Vanilla Ice hit and singing "I'm making rice, rice, baby. (Boom ba da boom boom ba dum) Rice, rice, baby." When dinner was ready, my autistic daughter comes into the kitchen and says "I want Rice Rice Baby!"

I'm really hoping that, at the school cafeteria, she'll rock it out to the lunch ladies and ask for "Rice, rice, baby."

Lucky

2009-08-28T19:59:00.008-04:00

When I first met my twins, they were six months old, in an orphanage in Vietnam. They had inflamed eczema on their faces and, on their shaved heads, a two-day growth of spiky black hair poking up through the infected scabs covering the tops of their heads. You'd press on their little crusty scalps and puss would ooze out. I remember holding them proudly in our arms on the plane to the US and telling the stewardesses brightly "We just adopted them!" while they looked back at us with pasted-on smiles and deep pity in their eyes. Those babies were truly and seriously funky looking. And when we got home, we were told again and again how lucky they were - because they were a different race, from a third-world country, had been in an orphanage, and were, admittedly, kind of grungey at first. But I'd been trying to have babies for for a few years, had some miscarriages, and to me they were the instant cure for my broken heart, the happy ending to all my tears, splotchy infected little miracles, and I knew I was the lucky one.

They cleaned up pretty nice, didn't they?

They started talking (English) at seven months old, shortly after they arrived in the states. They learned to read and write very young, they draw astonishingly well, play the guitar with talent and flair, make mostly A's in school, and they're gay. Because of this last little detail, a lot of people have been telling me, once again, how lucky they are to have me as a mother. Yesterday was my birthday and, in a card she'd drawn herself, one of my twins wrote, "I owe you for everything I am today. I'll love you always." She was so embarrassed she had to run and hide while I read it. She is sixteen after all. But when I was sixteen, I think the deepest thing I had to say to my parents was "I'm going out. Can I have some money?" or "You just don't understand!" (It was the 70s. We had a generation gap to maintain.)

So I just wanted to say what a privilege it is for me to be the mother of these lovely, talented, kind young women. Just as it has been a privilege for me to know all the gay men and women I've known over the years. Because people who know that shit happens - that life doesn't always follow the script we're handed when we're kids, that "normal" is a myth - are the very best kind of people to have at your side through the ups and downs of life. They're the ones who don't get scared when things are rough, who stay with you every step of the way. Having people like that in your life, however they come to you, now that's lucky.

You'll laugh that hanky right off your ass

2009-08-27T10:32:00.004-04:00

I don't usually do this, but I have found the most hysterical updating of the gay man's Hanky Code and thought you'd get a kick out of it. Here's the link:
Hanky Code update
It's at a blog called Another Little Disappointment, which I now plan to follow religiously, or irreligiously as the case may be!
Enjoy!

Summer's end

2009-08-23T12:20:00.004-04:00

What an odd summer it's been. Because of the husband's broken foot we didn't do anything especially summery or vacationy, so it feels like nothing happened. But as I think about it, a lot was going on beneath the boring every-day surface of our lives.

In theory the biggest thing that happened was the teens "coming out." But really it was just a confirmation of what I've long suspected. I've got pretty hi-def gaydar, but even if I had been totally clueless, my lesbian friends (who, ever since the girls were in kindergarden, were saying 'You know, you might have some dykes on your hands there...') would have clued me in. So it's been less of an "event" and more a simple and welcome clarification.

The husband made full professor and an advance copy of his second book (more on that in another post) is in our hands, but that's what I've always known he could and would do. In a way, the biggest deal about it for me is that he lived to accomplish these things.

Which brings me to what, for me, the summer was really about - mortality. My mother is starting to fade - her memory is dimming and this woman who spent her life traveling the globe gets flustered now in new environments. My teens are growing into young women - they're falling in love, having girlfriends, and starting to think about college. They're almost fully cooked and ready to come out of the oven and make their own mistakes without me to cosset and guide them. And my husband, of course, still has his freaky incurable blood disease. So I see these fixed stars of my life - my mother, my husband, my children - as suddenly shifting, orbiting away from me. It makes me metaphysically dizzy. I went to talk to a therapist about it all and his advice was "You have to trick yourself into believing in the illusion of immortality again." Which I understand. You can't live each moment of your life in paralyzing fear that it will end. But Buddhism looks at the same set of circumstances and advises us to realize that impermanence is the true state of all things and that we should try to embrace it and find peace in the acceptance of that truth.

Honestly, I'm not doing very well at either approach. And since I am, as my husband tells me, "completely incapable of compartmentalizing," I've been grappling like Hell with all this. Which is why I've been less than normally communicative these past months. (Which is also a long-way about of apologizing for not commenting on your blogs as much lately!)

So what do you think? Does one try to dive back into the lulling youthful illusion of immortality, or does one look steely eyed at the passing away of all things and follow the stony path of non-attachment? Any advice or experience would be appreciated!

Town-brawl meeting

2009-08-13T18:55:00.009-04:00

Apparently Betsey Ross is against health-care reform. Who knew?

My friends and I did have a few allies in the crowd.

As you know from my previous post, I'm really concerned about how the national health-care debate is being hijacked by the right-wing fear mongers. So I made my little posters and did what I thought was my civic duty and went to a town-hall meeting. Or rather, I stood in the parking lot outside a town-hall meeting. The meeting was at 3:00 PM and, apparently, people were lining up to get in at 7 AM!

So my friends and I stood in the parking lot simply showing our signs. I was yelled at, called names, followed, and harassed. I walked by holding my little sign and people yelled "Get a job!" (as if it is the mere laziness of the uninsured that causes their pitiful condition). I was told I was naive, deluded, and too sensitive (go figure!!!) and that our democratically elected president was a "clown" and a "tool" of variously "the communists," "Wall Street," and "Zeke Emanuel" (Rahm's brother). I also witnessed a white crowd blocking a bus full of black people, taunting them. When the police finally intervened so that the bus could leave, the white crowd shouted "Don't come back! Don't come back!" I have never been so ashamed of my country.

There were some funny (in a sort of WTF way) moments. At one point a man I was talking to said something about "Communist countries like Canada." I said, "Wait a minute! Canada's not communist." To which he replied, as if he was making a brilliant point, "But Cuba is!" Oh my country, my silly silly country.

Show your support for health-care reform!

2009-08-12T23:10:00.004-04:00

I really believe that the scare-mongers are taking over the national conversation we are having on health-care-reform. If you want to show your support for reform, please feel free to print out on of these posters (or make your own!) and put it up in your window, your car, your cubicle, anywhere! We need to take control of this conversation and get real health-care reform for this country!

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming for a brief rant.

2009-08-10T23:23:00.015-04:00

I was at a store recently, shopping for clothes for my kids - my four daughters. And these are are what I found. Now, I have a healthy sense of humor, and am even not averse to sexual innuendo. But some of these shirts were the right size for my ten-year-old daughter, the one who still makes fairy houses in the back yard. The one who writes poems like this:

Barbie Meets Acid Rain

Barbie was walking in the grass

Knowing nothing about the Earth's mass.

Acid rain started falling down

And soaked her purse, body, and gown.

And she melted.

So this is what American Eagle Outfitters and Abercrombie and Fitch want her to grow up and into? Someone who flaunts sexuality before she's anywhere near ready to "Get Lei'd?" Someone who thinks school is a drag and being a "class cutter" is cool? They don't want her to have a broad mind and a tight argument, they want her to be a broad with a "tight end" and "tiny bikini" which she pulls off on Girls Gone Wild. Sigh.

So is it possible that these a**holes at American Eagle and Abercrombie don't have mothers/daughters/nieces/sisters? No, of course not. But clearly the value of a dollar trumps the value of their families.

OK. I'm done now.

Even though it has crappy pizza (Yeah, I said it!) I really do ♥ New York.

2009-08-03T14:36:00.018-04:00

(Image from Jello Kitty)
I just got back from a trip to New York to meet my newest niece. The baby was adorable, the new parents were smitten with her, and New York was itself - full of people, noise, smells (it was summer), and the buzzing energy it's always had. New York is one of the few places in my life that I've been able to return to again and again and gotten to know deeply over time. I've seen a lot of different sides of it and seen its changes over the years.

I first visited the city in the early 60s with my grandmother and saw it as a fairy-tale place of privilege. The ladies in that world all wore minks and pearls. We whisked around in cavernous Checker cabs, stayed in my Aunt's Park Avenue apartment, went to see Mary Martin fly over our heads in Peter Pan on Broadway, and had hot chocolate at (the now sadly closed) Rumpelmayer's in the Saint Moritz hotel.

The next era I remember was the mid/late 70s, when I was in college. New York was getting scuzzier by then, or more precisely, the scuzziness of it was spreading beyond the areas it was supposed to stay in. And I was hanging around places that my grandmother, in her mink and pearls, would never have dreamed of going. Like the subway, which at that time, was unairconditioned, wildly graffitied, stinking of urine, and full of hoi poloi. Oooh, the danger and excitement of breaking away from your family: of going to downtown galleries and clubs; of sleeping on someone else's dorm-room floor; of not taking cabs! I was young, intellectual, and living on the edge (when I wasn't safely ensconced in my Ivy-League college, that is).

Oh my darlings, then came the disco days! I had left the Ivy League, with it's inscrutable (to me anyway) preppies and its revolting winters, far behind. I moved to San Francisco and in short order fell in love with a sitar-playing poet, stopped being an intellectual (because he was more talented than me, or at least that's what he told me), started wearing peasant skirts, got my heart broken, stopped wearing peasant skirts, and became a fag hag. Somehow one summer, we hags and fags all went East and met up in Manhattan at (shall the circle be unbroken?) someone's father's Park Avenue apartment. Not a pearl, fur, or pump in sight though. I remember I wore a black slit-leg skirt and a gauzy, almost-but-not-quite-see-through top. I looked gorgeous, as we all did. It was our hobby, our defense, our gang insignia, and it was the 80s so we all (boys and girls) had to look like Brian Ferry's back-up singers. Soon Daddy's limo came to get us. Poppers came out and were sniffed. We pulled up to Studio 54 and, because we came in a limo, the bouncer pulled aside the velvet rope and let us in. It was the absolute height of Studio 54's fame. We were all desperately excited about who we might see, but no one famous was there. My friends told me about all the famous people they had seen on other nights - Mick, Bianca, Liza, Andy - but not that night. I did, however, manage to get propositioned for a three way, but even though I said no (they weren't that cute), I remember the fact of it fondly.

Then, in the late 80s, I moved to New York and went to grad school on the upper west side. It was the height of the crack wars. I lived right across the street from Morningside park and I never stepped foot in once. Two crack-dealing gangs were warring over it and we were always hearing gunfire from the shadowy depths below the leaf canopy. In the 80s New York, every time I went outside I had to harden my heart against panhandlers. Walking a few blocks down Broadway to get groceries was an exercise in psychological warfare - them trying to get, and me trying to limit what I gave because we were broke. But there were museums (Yes I am paying just one penny to get into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, thank you!), free festivals, free music, good street food, and such amazing things - some incredibly surreal - to take in just walking through the city. One cold winter night walking home on Broadway, we saw a gleaming black grand piano on the sidewalk. No one was paying any attention to it. It was as if it had just popped out of Lincoln Center at the intermission to get a breath of fresh air or catch a smoke.

Now the panhandlers, bums, and squeegee men are gone. (Where did they go? Are they all in jail? Or in New Jersey?) Morningside Park is being used by all and sundry as a park(!). Washington Square Park isn't full of ganja dealers, there's a Target and an Applebee's in the Bronx, and the only meat in the Meat-Packing district is the expensive organic, grass-fed kind the waiter serves you on a plate. Weird, amazing, and a little bit sad. But that's just pointless nostalgia. Because, really, all those parts of New York - the ladies in mink, the bums in rags, the middle-class families scraping by, the drugs, the dirt, the art, the pretty boys and girls, the excitement - are still there, just in different shapes, different places. And unlike London or Paris, the geographical facts of New York, the huge population crammed within its tiny boundaries, makes it a place where all those parts of the city get shoved, willy nilly, together. It makes for friction, unease, exhaustion, and unexpected beauty and inspiration. It's what made me go there, it's what made me want to stay, it's what made me leave.

God I'm glad to be home in a calm quiet city where I don't have to pay more than the monthly mortgage on my house to rent a cramped one-bedroom apartment. God I want to go back.

Where the hell have I been?

2009-07-14T11:50:00.004-04:00

When I was a kid I lived for summer: long days lying on the sofa, with a stack of Nancy Drew novels next to me, and just reading reading reading; biking the neighborhood streets with my friends and without helmets or rules; running through the sprinkler then drying off by sashaying through the neighborhood in my swimsuit; playing day-long games of Monopoly or Canasta. My father went off, in his stifling suit and tie, to the office. My mother ignored us as much as possible. How I loved the slow, hot boredom and freedom of it.

And now I'm on the other side of it. I'm the mother and: I don't let my ten-year old bike without helmets and rules; I worry if my kids disappear for too long; I try to organize "enrichment" activities for them and, when I don't, I feel guilty. And my husband still has a broken toe and my washing machine broke. I can't wait for summer to end.

And now for some comic relief!

2009-06-22T12:41:00.020-04:00

I've been posting some SERIOUS stuff lately, so I thought I'd give us all a break and take you along with me on my day yesterday at a classic old American amusement park. It ain't pretty.

Damn illegal aliens taking jobs from Americans! Why don't they stay in Roswell like they're supposed to!

One of the rides. Don't ask me!

The old carousel. Queen Elizabeth or a jester in drag?

She moves and laughs maniacally.

   The stuff of little children's nightmares.

   I think I saw Elvis in line here.

   Honey, I've told you a million times,

   those cowboys will break your heart.

   Oh My! (Photoshopped for the boys on the blog.)

   A cheap shot I know, but I never said I wasn't cheap.

   And finally, we might be trash, but by God, we're patriotic trash!

Requiem for a cool girl

2009-06-16T21:14:00.017-04:00

When I was fourteen, my family moved to Taiwan. At the time, Taipei had a huge US military base which supported an entire suburb of families and a school. My father was a diplomat, though, so we lived in Taipei proper, far away from most other Americans, and each day I took a long bus ride to and from school. At first I sat alone dreaming out the window at this new place called home. But at some point during that first year, an older girl started sitting behind me and talking to me. I don't know why she chose me. I wasn't cool. I was a fourteen-year old nobody. But perhaps that's exactly why she talked to me. Being a nobody in the social hierarchy of school, I was unable to judge or harm her. I was safe.

Her name was Anya Phillips. She was Eurasian and had a slight tendency toward chubbiness. She was not remarkably beautiful or remarkably ugly, or really, remarkable in any way. She was two years ahead of me in school, and way ahead of me in all other ways. She smoked, did drugs, though that was no big deal in our school. Taipei was an R & R (Rest and Recreation) base for the GIs fighting in Vietnam, and they brought lots and lots of recreation with them. Heroin, acid, pot, hash, were consumed like candy at my school, and if that wasn't enough, you could walk in to any drug store and buy speed or downers without a prescription. Only the Jesus freaks or the new kids like me didn't do drugs of some sort. So Anya was just following along with the crowd, trying to be hip. Unsurprisingly, she never talked to me in school, and never called me at home. But on the bus - that demilitarized zone between the worlds that mattered to her - she talked to me about all kinds of things - gripes about her family, music, boys she thought were hot, things she thought were cool. She wanted desperately to be cool. She wasn't quite. Because in high school there were limits on what you could do for the sake of coolness; school dress codes that had to be adhered to, parents who held purse strings and had to be kept mollified.

When the next year started, she took her place behind me on the bus and her confessional monologues began again. That year, for me though, things began to change. My friends and I began to dabble with drugs. Anya was dealing by then, and about half way through the year, she offered to sell and I bought. A few weeks later I received my one and only phone call at home from Anya. She called to tell me she had been caught dealing by the MPs (military police). Then she said, "They said they wouldn't prosecute me if I told them who I sold to, so I gave them your name because you were less popular than the others." As I said, there was nothing more important to her than being cool, and even upset and frightened as I was at the time, I understood the emptiness and self loathing behind what she'd just said and done.

Things changed, of course, after that. My father was a diplomat so I had immunity. But I got scared straight and stopped doing drugs completely and forever. Anya was suspended from school and, when she came back, I stayed away from her. And so, she faded from my life, though not from my mind. I dined out on the pitiful story of her ratting me out for years: "Can you believe she actually said to me...!" And, more seriously, Anya gave me the story I told my teens when we had our talks about drugs; "I bought drugs and got caught and if I hadn't been lucky enough to have diplomatic immunity, I might not have been able to get into college, get a good job, adopt you." It packed a wallop, that little story. So, in a weird way, her bald, craven need for social approval and her lack of loyalty to anything but that need, changed my life for the better. You don't forget people who - for good or bad - change your life.

Well, today I was in a bookstore, leafing idly through a book on the New York punk scene, and there, in grainy black and white, was Anya. It was a night shot of her and a group of punk No Wavers - Lydia Lunch of Teen Age Jesus and the Jerks, and some others. "Girls," I yelled across the store to my daughters, "here's the woman who ratted me out for buying drugs because I wasn't popular enough!" They ran over and were fascinated. When I got home, I googled her. She had been big in the New York punk scene, hung out with Debbie Harry, helped found the Mudd Club, worked as an exotic dancer and an S & M dominatrix, and dealt and did heroin. She died in 1981 from cancer. On a computer chat group full of old and former punks, I found a thread about her. One of them wrote, "I went to the hospital [to visit her] once...but was unable to handle it and quickly ran out to get another bag [of heroin]." Just for the record, Anya, I would have stayed ....

So Anya, you finally made it to cool, babe. You were always cooler than me, but that was easy. In the end, though, you out-cooled everyone: all those boys who wouldn't date you in high school; who you wouldn't rat on to the MPs; who wouldn't give you the time of day even after that. While in life, there was always a sad eagerness for approval about you, but In death you've finally achieved elusiveness, that necessary ingredient for cool. In the pictures from that time, you are thin, smoking, dressed in black, and self-consciously, painfully chic and posed. Strangers see those pictures now and make comments like, "Coolest girl ever!" The beautiful sculptured shell you gave up so much for is all that's left of you now. But in my mind you're still a real and unremarkable girl, riding on the purgatory of that bus, that space between the Hell of home and the unreachable Heaven of popularity in school. You sit, forever, on a seat of cracked green vinyl. But now I'm the one that leans over the dull gray metal of the seat back to whisper in your ear something like a prayer. And this is what I it is. Anya, I truly hope that, somewhere there, in the brief, white-hot heart of New York heroin-chic, wearing your own dreamed-up leather-bondage fashions, doing Chinese white, thrashing to the loud music, you found the antidote you needed to fill your emptiness, to slake your endless aching thirst for love.

Suffer the little children

2009-06-11T21:18:00.013-04:00

I am the mother of some obviously "different" kids. My twins are Asian, adopted when they were six months old. Another daughter is noticeably autistic. We get a lot of stares, questions, double takes, but I've worked hard to make sure we mostly live in a little protective bubble of a world that enthusiastically embraces the many differences we humans have from one another. I've also tried to talk about how the world treats and mistreats difference, and that it's not all goodness and light, but luckily for us these talks are mostly theoretical. To this end, however, when we were invited to a play called "Anne and Emmet," an imagined dialog between Anne Frank and Emmet Till, we decided to take the twins with us. It would be a cultural experience and good opportunity to broaden their knowledge of the world, but at a safe historical distance. The play was to take place at the Holocaust Museum in Washington on Wednesday. We drove to DC that day, arriving in the late afternoon. We were tired from the drive and, though my mother was urging us to leave immediately for the Mall, we dawdled and delayed. Finally, we got ourselves organized to go but, as we were about to leave, we got a call saying a white extremist had come into the Holocaust Museum and shot and killed a black guard. Had we left early to avoid DC rush hour, as my mother was urging us to do, my beautiful brown-skinned daughters might have been in the sights of a man who would have seen them, because of the simple fact of having extra pigmentation in their skin, as a threat to his idea of what America should be.

I can't express how grateful I am that my daughters were spared the violence, bloodshed, and trauma of being there. I tried my best to distract them from the shock that a man had been murdered that day, at a place we had been about to go to, for the crime of having brown skin, like theirs. I took them shopping, swimming, out for ice cream. But everywhere we turned, TVs and radios were blaring this man's twisted and hate-filled vision of the world or the tragic image of the man his hatred killed. The twins are level-headed girls and, having been abandoned at birth by their biological mother, having spent the first six months of their lives in an orphanage, they know that hard shit happens in this life. But this was different.

When they were little, they used to ask me, "What would you do to keep us safe?" And then they would proceed to make up scenarios that included all my worst phobias. "Would you bungee jump naked from the Empire State building?" And I would say "Yes, even though I would throw up, wet my pants, and faint if I did that, I would do it to keep you safe." And I would. And I'm sure that the mothers of Anne Frank and Emmet Till - those now no longer so safely historical object lessons - would have too. As would the mother of Stephen Tyrone Johns, the guard who died Wednesday and who lived, as do we all, in a world that, heartbreakingly, we cannot keep safe for our children.

(My husband was asked to write an opinion piece in the Washington Post putting the shooting in the context of the history of the Mall. Here's the link if you're interested:
Outlook op ed )

Coming out, 21st century style

2009-06-09T12:30:00.003-04:00

My teen-aged twin daughters came out to me today. Here's how it went:

(Mother and daughter sitting on the front porch on a quiet summer morning. Off stage the sound of an occasional car going by. Sun shines through a tall rhododendron, which screens them from the street.)
Me: "So, are you and N. dating?"
R: "Yeah. I was going to tell you...."
Me: "And you know that's totally fine with us, right?"
R: "Yeah. I know."
Me: "Good. What about Z? I haven't seen her for a while."
R: "She's on vacation. She and S. are.... I don't know."
Me: (Nodding) "When are you guys going out shopping today?"

Not exactly high drama, right? Which is as it should be, I guess. Honestly, I've been ready to join PFLAG since they were four and S. announced to me, "I don't want to ever get married, ever get pregnant, ever wear a dress again, or ever have breasts!" (To which I replied, "That's all fine with me, but you ARE going to have breasts. They'll be small though, since you're Asian.") And I have to admit that I suspected something was up before that, when they went through a phase of drawing pictures of themselves with penises. They would draw those cute circle bodies with eyes, nose, mouth, stick arms, and a little stick penis, then show me the picture saying, "This is me, with a penis!"
I remember saying, "But S., you don't have a penis. You could draw yourself with a vagina...."
"But I WANT to draw myself with a penis!"
No, Mr. Freud, it's not what you think.

The funny thing is that after (or because of?) all this emotional prepping and gearing up to be the MOST supportive parent ever!!!!!!!, I don't think they'll want me to join PFLAG. They're low-key girls who don't like making a big deal about much of anything. I'll ask them, but my guess is that they'll say, "Ummm... no...."

So welcome to the 21st century. We're here and we're queer, but we don't really want to make a big deal about it.

I had to change the title of this post because some weird website in China kept adding dirty links to it!

2009-06-03T01:54:00.006-04:00

I have seven kinds of old-fashioned roses blooming in my garden now. Seven! As I write this, the scent of Zephirine Drouhin is wafting in the open front window. Darlings, I might not be much of a housekeeper, but I do like to dig around in the dirt and plant things. And if you wait long enough, those little spindly leggy shoots turn into gorgeous blousey bombshells! Va va va voom!

The Grand Dames of the garden, two decades-old 10' x 10' beauties I call Big Pink:

A David Austin Yellow rose, a wild little pink climer and a big-pink bud:

A tiny pink sweetheart rose:

Zephirine Drouhin up close:

Zephirine Drouhin as it climbs up the trellis on my front porch:

Sock it to me

2009-06-01T15:54:00.007-04:00

(Warning: this post may bore you to death, but sometimes a girl just has to vent.)

Socks are the Aegean stables of my life. If I totaled up all the hours I've spent pawing through laundry baskets full of color-sorted unmatched socks, I'd probably realize I had found the true purpose of my life and immediately take to drink. And don't just tell me to throw away all those unmated socks. Those suckers are expensive! Those stylish little teenager socks, the ones I buy them for special occasions (as opposed to the usual Big-Lots irregulars I buy)? They are the price of a deli sandwich with all the fixins. I'm going to hunt those renegades down, rope 'em, and ride 'em back to the fold if it kills me.

So here's the way it goes. Each load of laundry spits out a few socks whose partners went AWOL. I toss them in a basket dedicated entirely to lonely socks. Then, each month, when the basket is full, I spend ridiculous amounts of time sorting them by color and hunting for matches. When I find a match, and I do find some, I feel like Tommy Lee Jones might have felt if he'd ever caught The Fugitive. But there are always socks, good socks, socks that have only been worn once, that get left behind, alone and unmated, in the Miss Lonely Hearts basket. And so the cycle (of laundry and life) begins again....

So, my dears, any advice?

A moment

2009-05-28T23:21:00.003-04:00

I was driving my very artsy (guitar-playing, picture-painting) twins to meet a friend yesterday. So I was surprised to hear R. say from the back seat, "I like science."
"That's great!" I said with WAY too much enthusiasm. "There need to be more women in the sciences!"
"Um... no, Mom. Scions. I like those cars, the Toyota Scions."

Unspoken: Oh Mom, you're such a dork.

The husband in print!

2009-05-24T15:05:00.005-04:00

My husband had a Memorial-Day op-ed piece in yesterday's Washington Post. It's about whether or not Obama should continue the presidential tradition of laying a wreath at the Confederate Memorial at Arlington Cemetery. Here's the link:
Washington Post
As with all things historic, it's a vexed question, and he's already gotten some hate mail (from neo-cons, by which I mean neo-Conferates) for his thoughtful piece. So we know he's doing something right! Anyway, check it out!

UPDATE!!!!
Obama did what Kirk recommended! He sent two wreaths - one to the Confederate memorial and one to the African-American Civil War memorial! He said he was "... starting a new tradition." Yay Kirk! Yay Obama!

Funk-y

2009-05-21T14:35:00.008-04:00

As my blog friends may have noticed from my recent and uncharacteristic silence, I've been in a bit of a funk lately. Not a bad one. Just a seemingly inexplicable month-long case of the blahs. Seemingly inexplicable, until I thought about it for three seconds (which I've naturally avoided doing). But once I did sit myself down, give myself a good talking to, and tell myself to snap out of it because it was annoying even me, I realized that just about a year and a month ago, my husband had his surgery. April fools day, to be exact. And for about a year and a month, I've been waiting for it to be over. Well, April Fools!, it's not. He's still pretty disabled (thank you broken foot!) and still has an incurable disease. The depths of human self-delusion are unplumbable. Somehow I was letting myself believe that, in a year, it would all be back to normal....

Anyway, I was cleaning house today and, appropriately, I found the purse I took to the hospital on the day of his surgery. I remember now, that the strap broke while I was waiting and waiting for his surgery to be over. I thought, 'Oh Christ! As if I don't have enough to deal with today!" When I got home I tossed it in a corner of my bedroom and there it has sat, broken and undealt with, like a good little symbol of the whole situation. But something led me to that pile today, and it all came pouring back: the florescent glare of the waiting room; the ten-hour wait during which I was utterly and increasingly terrified he would die on the table; the man with the leering skull tattoo on the back of his bald head, which didn't help calm me down. To say it was a bad day would not even touch on the misery of it. Which is why that purse full of memories sat in the corner for a year.

So, feeling like I was walking into a therapist's office, I sat down and opened the purse. In it were: multiple packages of kleenex, (for obvious reasons), eye drops (so that, at the end of the day, when I saw Kirk and the kids, I could look like I hadn't been crying); a pencil and pencil sharpener for the crossword puzzle I was never able to concentrate on; and a little notebook for writing deep thoughts or instructions, or something. There's only one thing written in it. A quote from I don't know where.

"...but the arts outlive governments and creeds and societies, even the very civilizations that produce them. They are what we find again when the ruins are cleared away."

Kind of gloomy, but also kind of perfect for me. My life has never been lived in the tidy spaces of the beaten path, never thrived in the tall gleaming buildings of "civilization." I'm more about picking my own way through weeds and the ruins and trying to find and make beauty of it all. Art. Which is and passes on consolation when buildings decay, when disease runs its course, when lives end, which they all do someday.

Coincidentally, again, (do you believe in coincidences? Me neither.) the husband and I are going out to dinner tonight to celebrate, not that IT is all over, but that a year has passed and he is still here, we are both still here, hobbling along on our messy happy path through the ruins.

Me memed

2009-05-19T18:51:00.009-04:00

Jason tagged me, which is a relief because it's hard to know what to write after an account of your grandfather's tragic suicide.

Meme Rules:
1. Respond and rework. Answer the questions on your blog, replace one question you dislike with a question of your own invention; add a question of your own. 
2. Tag eight other un-tagged people.

So here goes!

1. What is your current obsession?
I am a woman of multiple and simultaneous obsessions (to the point of mental sluttiness!). So:
The book on suicide I want to write.
The YA fantasy novel I've written.
The children's book I'm working on illustrating.
My garden.
Finding the silliest images I can for flickr, eg:

2. What do you see outside your window?
A gigantic (about 10' x 10'), thorny, decades-old, and utterly magnificent rose bush just beginning to bloom.

3. If you could have any super power what would it be?
Breathing under water.

4. Which animal would you be?
A mermaid.

5. Who was the last person you hugged?
My oldest daughter.

6.What is your favorite color?
Turquoise

7. What’s your favorite food in the whole world?
A perfectly ripe mango.

8. What’s the last thing you bought?
The cutest French-made shoes (Mephistos) at my favorite thrift! These are shoes that cost hundreds of dollars new! Yay!

9. What are you listening to right now?
Literally, at this moment I'm watching American Idol with my ten-year old and listening to Adam Lambert screech his way through a song. What's the deal ? I just don't get him.....

10. If you could buy one object right now, what would it be?
A painting, possibly this one: "Morning of the Red Bird" by Romare Beardon.

11. What’s on your beside table?
Piles and piles of books:

12. If you could have a house totally paid for, and fully furnished, anywhere in the world, where would it be?
Berkeley, California

13. What would you like to have in your hands right now?
Enough money to set up a trust fund for my special-needs daughter, pay for college for my other three kids, give my mother extra money (because her savings got wiped out in the bank crash), and have some left over to add to our retirement account.

14. What is your favorite children's book?
The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgeson Burnett

15. What is your biggest fear/phobia?
Heights. Absolutely terrified of them, to the point of hysteria and near-incontinence.

16. What's the bravest thing you've done in the past year?
Ride on a ferris wheel with my special-needs daughter.

17. If you could go anywhere in the world for the next hour, where would you go?
Berkeley, California - I'd have cheap Mexican food at La fiesta, then spend the rest of the time at Moe's books.

18. What did you want to become as a child?
Archaeologist, writer, artist, mom.

19. What posters/pictures do you have on your bedroom wall?
Pictures of everyone in my family. A painting my father bought in Cambodia in 1959.

20. What is your plan for tomorrow?
Try and get my garden in shape, try and get my house in shape, meet the kids when they get home from school. After that, it's all kid care and husband-with-a-broken-foot care.

21. What was your first job?
Babysitting.

22. Say something to the person/s who tagged you:
Jason, you're such a wry, funny, understated writer. You have a gift for dialog and dialect. I hope, someday, you write a book.

23.Post a favorite childhood photograph of yourself.
Me caught in imagination land. I'm still doing it, just in different ways.

I'm tagging these people, but ignore the tag if you like.
A Thousand Shades of Twilight
Oh Sasquatch
Willy or won't he?
Yellow dog granny
Sageweb
Kitsch slapped
Mean Dirty Pirate
What would Jackie wear?

Thank you

2009-05-17T02:03:00.004-04:00

The responses to my last post were so honest and searing. I've always been the one in my family who opened her big mouth and said out loud what everyone else was silently thinking. And yet I've never really talked with most of my family about this event that shattered some, and changed everything. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences, your family's experiences, with suicide. It makes me realize that I need to do more talking, to my own family and try to measure how deep and how wide this thing is. And maybe even write a book about it. (Because, really, I need another creative project to add to the crew I'm already juggling.)

And I just want to add how amazing it is to have you all out there, reading the messages I send out in this cyber bottle, sending back yours. On this difficult subject, as with so many others, it makes me feel less alone.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

Suicide is painless (except for those it leaves behind)

2009-05-06T14:38:00.005-04:00

A Jewish friend of mine says that, if you don't know how to process an experience, simply telling it can help, that telling has great power. Now the Jews know a thing or six million about losing and telling, so I'll give it a try. This is about my grandfather who, despite the fact that I never met him, has been a huge presence in my life, because of how he chose to end his. As long as I've known anything, I've known that my grandfather killed himself. It happened some years before I was born, and my mother, who adored him, talked to me about him a lot. I think she had no one else to talk to about the suicide, and I think she was afraid that I would kill myself one day too. Not because I was depressed or suicidal. Just because it's what people did in the family when things got too overwhelming. Some families drink (actually, we did that too), some families go on vacation, we kill ourselves.

As I grew older, I filled in some of the details. He'd had a nervous breakdown some months before he killed himself, because he was afraid he was getting alzheimer's. His doctors didn't give him the medication that was available at the time, and told him the best thing for him would be a vacation in Florida. So he dutifully drove to Florida with his wife, then drove back, and two days before Christmas, on December 23, 1952, went to work and jumped out the window of his office to his death. He left a note saying that his wife, my grandmother, should sell their large house. (She didn't and was rattling around it in an alcoholic haze by the time I really knew her.) But really, I knew very little about it, partly because our family culture is to not talk about unpleasantness.

So the last time I visited my mother, I asked her to tell me more. Here is what she told me:
My family was living in Bangkok at the time, which might as well have been Venus. My mother had just given birth to my middle brother, who she named after my grandfather. She received a telegram telling her that she needed to fly to Manilla and call her brother, but it didn't tell her why. In a panic, she made the long (at the time) flight, called her brother, who asked her if she'd "heard anything," but told her nothing. She flew back to Bangkok frightened and confused and only found out what had happened when she flew home to the US.

Now, before you think it unbelievable that my uncle said nothing to her, you have to know his part of the story. On the day his father killed himself, at the very time, in fact, that he killed himself, my uncle was going to his father's office to meet him. As he approached the office building, he saw a crowd on the sidewalk. He went over to the crowd. Someone said, "A man killed himself. Anyone know who he is?" My uncle said, "I do. It's my father." I can't imagine the pain he went through, then and after.

Please don't think that I am, in any way shape or form, thinking about suicide. I'm fine. Really. I'm just interested in the way this event, that no one talks about in my family, has shaped all of our lives, and how this man I never met has shaped mine. I don't know exactly what I think and feel about this, except that telling it, talking about it, can only be a good thing. As my friend says, perhaps simply the telling of it will help me understand it. If any of my wonderful cousins who read this blog, have further information/comments/thoughts, I'd love to hear them.

Journal of the plague week

2009-04-26T01:33:00.003-04:00

Barely alive, I bravely scrawl these words (can't really scrawl dramatically on a blog can you? Annoying.) Anyway, my house is littered with the (near) corpses of my loved ones. Occasionally they lift their heads and ask pathetically for a bucket to throw up into or some ice chips to wet their poor, parched lips. Now that I am risen from my own plague bed, I'm tending the other victims like a grumpy Florence Nightingale. Because really, there is nothing worse than feeling like utter crap, but still having to take care of people who are worse off than you.

So, friends, if I make it through this alive, well, I'll return anon.

Bad bad blogger

2009-04-15T17:52:00.005-04:00

Hello my dears. I've been distracted by those pesky children and their pesky needs. The nerve of them to be sick and have spring break and need food and attention! And I've also been preoccupied with the novel revision, trying to piece together an entire cosmology for it. And the silly thing is that, not only am I trying to create a cosmological order for a world that doesn't exist, but once I do figure it out, it won't even appear in the book. I just feel like I need to know what it is.... Silly me. So I've been thinking a lot and accomplishing nothing so far. I just have to hope that some part of this seemingly aimless thinking, will lead me to the answer I want, and that that will lead me to a good revision, which will lead me to a published book!

Just wanted to let you know. And let me leave you with one thing:

And all this time I thought it was Ben and Jerry.

Don't ask, Don't tell

2009-04-05T00:16:00.003-04:00

Thanks to Dollymae Dagger for permission to use this.

The U.S. government is reevaluating the military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy for gays and lesbians. Predictably, some people are organizing against its revocation, claiming that will "undermine morale." I could go on endlessly on how wrong-minded and simply wrong that is (In the Israeli Defense Force, for example, "It's a non-issue... You can be a very good officer, a creative one, a brave one and be gay at the same time."Link)
But nothing I say can possibly say it better than this incredible tombstone.

Things you didn't know about Buddhism (which you were probably better off not knowing).

2009-04-02T12:25:00.013-04:00

I've been working on a re-revision of the novel, for which I've been reading something called "The Mahavaga." It's supposedly a transcription of the original teachings of the Buddha and is what all the rules and teachings of Buddhism are based on. So here, for your illumination, are some of the pronouncements of the Buddha when he was here on Earth. Once you read them I think you'll understand better why he was so eager to get off the Earth!

1. No one under 15 years of age is allowed to be ordained UNLESS they know how to scare away crows. (What? Buddha had a crow-phobia?)
2. The ordained were only to use "decomposing urine" as a medicine. (That'll cure what ails you!)
3. The ordained should live only at the foot of a tree. "caves are extra allowances." (Cause only cream puffs live in caves.)
4. The ordained should cover "the three circles" on their bodies which are the naval and the knees! (Those aren't the "circles" I thought they'd choose.)
5. Things you must do for your teacher:
- Give him teeth cleanser to rinse his mouth.
- Empty the teacher's spitting box. (The fun never stops!)
- Smear his face with clay before he goes to the baths. (I've heard about a lot of weird things at the baths, but never that!)
6. You may NOT be ordained if:
- you are in debt (OK Americans, no Buddhism for you!)
- you suffer from leprosy, boils, or elephantiasis
- you are a robber who "openly wears emblems of his deeds" (The example given is a necklace made up of the cut-off fingers of the people you've robbed. They needed a special rule for that one! Hello? A necklace made of human fingers didn't raise any red flags for you guys right off the bat?)
- you are a eunuch or hermaphrodite (what did all these old guys have against eunuchs et al?)
- you are a serpent (Well, shoot! That shuts me right out.)
- you have had your hands or feet cut off (because that's just too gross even for Buddha?)
- you have hands like a snake's hood (that's not covered by my HMO either)
7. And finally, once you have been ordained you must "abstain from all sexual intercourse EVEN with an animal."
(You just know that at first the rule was just "you must abstain from sex" and then some monk got caught with his pants down with a water buffalo and said, "But Buddha, I thought that just meant with people!)

So now you know. And you're welcome.

Poem

2009-03-29T17:22:00.005-04:00

poppies-4, originally uploaded by ilophoto.

I'm sorry to inflict this on you. I do write poetry, always have ever since I was tiny. But I usually keep it to myself because, well, poetry is like nudity; unless it's perfect and artistic it's kind of embarrassing. But this poem has been bugging me to write it (and rererewrite it) ever since reading my friend 1000 Shade of Twilight's blog entry about a rare perfect day he had. They're like sustenance, those days. They carry you through the other wearying days and they are utterly unplannable. Anyway, here's my poem in progress. If you like poems and have any thoughts on this one, I'll welcome them. If not, I understand (me in my embarrassingly itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka dot bikini of a poem).

You get only a handful
of them, days when fate loses
track of you and the weight of being
brave slips off your mind. Everything falls
in unexpected place, the place you are. Once
we walked the rainy season
hills. The grasses, usually golden straw
were green as Spring
somewhere else. Around a bend
orange splashed the slope. Poppies
flared, burning their unaltered,
unplanned perfection for nothing
but us. Off leash we strayed
that waist-high wilderness of greening
grasses, drifting schools of coral
flowers, under an empty turquoise sky.
Like them we only breathed
in light, breathed out
air, no heavy lesson to bear,
like an awkward hothouse bouquet,
home to stand
for Eden.

Doc, he just hasn't been the same since I took him to see The Ballet Trocadero!

2009-03-18T11:01:00.008-04:00

Watch the Ballet Troc's hysterical dying swan!

Can I just vent for a minute? Thanks. You're so sweet. I knew you wouldn't mind.

So do you remember that guy I'm married to? The guy whose "Don't worry so much. It's just probably an ulcer" turned into two months in the hospital and some surgery. The guy whose "They're just stress headaches!" turned into a ten-hour surgery and a diagnosis of a rare blood disorder. Yes, that guy. So now his fractured toe (which would be easily healed by wearing ugly orthotic shoes) has been rediagnosed as a chronic fracture, which means that just by walking on the foot he rebreaks the bone over and over again. And it's not just any old chronic fracture. It's a chronic fracture in a bone that only ballerinas who dance a lot en pointe get. My husband, who has only ever danced with me once, and that was at our wedding, has an arcane injury that only professional dancers get. Well natch.

"What's the treatment for this?" you ask.
"It's SURGERY to get the @#$%ING BONE REMOVED!!!!" (Sorry, I'll lower my voice.) Other people break things and get casts and crutches, and POOF, after a month or so their bones are healed. But not my husband because he's an overachiever that way.

My only consolation is that now I can imagine him getting up in the middle of the night to secretly indulge his long-repressed desire to be a prima ballerina, putting on his pink satin toe shoes and pirouetting through the house while the rest of us sleep.

Overheard

2009-03-17T00:36:00.002-04:00

(A friend explaining to her boyfriend how it is that their favorite barista is also a well-known local tranny.)
"Every tranny needs a day job!"

I think that's going to be my new motto. I think I'm going to get a tee shirt that says that, just to mess with people's heads.

Spring is slow in coming here so this just made me happy.

2009-03-13T01:24:00.004-04:00

Hope you like it too. It makes me want to go out and commit art.

From the fabulous, provocative, inspirational Wooster Collective at http://woostercollective.com/.

Closet organizers

2009-03-06T22:54:00.007-05:00

I was reading last Sunday's Parade Magazine interview with Liza Minnelli (Oh, like you didn't!), and I chuckled knowingly when I read this exchange:

Interviewer: “You fear nothing?”
Liza: “Yes. Organizing a closet. I mean it. I’m hopeless at all that."

Oh yes, honey, I thought. We ALL know how bad you are at organizing things in the closet. And then it occurred to me that I could all too easily have end up like Liza - married to some David Gest-like creature with a Lalique collection, a very arch sense of humor, and a thing for the houseboy. Let's just say that if you're reading this, there's about a 75% chance you're a gay man. It has ever been thus. So it's pretty much a miracle that I ended up in a long and happy marriage to a straight guy. (No, really, he is. Yes, he's a foodie. Yes, he's in the arts. But his mother's French, which is almost like being gay.)

Anyway, I was pondering this odd state of affairs (or the lack of them), and trying to figure out how it is that I actually found a straight man I liked enough to marry. There are lots of straight men that I love - mostly relatives - and even straight men that I really like. But would I choose to hang out with them all the time, for ever and ever, I do? Nope. So how is it that I ended up married to one of them, and happily? Here's what I figured out. He comes from a truly miserable family. His parents were almost Dickensian in the amount of misery they spread around. My dear boy sensibly spent most of his time in emotional hiding from the cross fire, keeping undercover until he could find a safe place and time to emerge into the world. Like gay men do. Like women do too, though in a different way; women spend a lot of time hiding behind smiles, behind making nice, or paying in one way or another for not doing so (I have been accused of not being "ladylike" more than once....). So, luckily for me, I seem to have found that rare creature, a straight man who knows what it's like to live in A closet, if not THE closet. And thus I have been spared a life sharing plastic surgery tips in the closet with my very own Mr. Minnelli. Thank you Parade Magazine. Your incisive articles about how celebrities suffer (just like we do!) deepen my self-knowledge weekly.

High-school then and now

2009-03-01T21:59:00.006-05:00

By the time I was five, I had lived in four different countries. If you do something often enough you get really good at it, and I am really skilled - sometimes to the point of seeming heartless- at leaving things behind, at not looking back, at being gone and not being found again. There have been people from my past that have looked for me for years without finding me. Even in these cyber times of blogs and email I managed to stay hidden. So when I joined facebook, I was utterly unprepared to be suddenly and overwhelmingly found by many many people from many parts of my past all at once.

High school, for instance. Let's talk about high school. I found these pictures, recently, of me in my sophomore year of high school after my winter prom.

As you see from the faux-pearl tiara, I was elected sophomore prom princess. 'Oh Social triumph!' you say. But it wasn't really. It was more uncomfortable and perplexing than anything else. I went with a boy I didn't know well. We had an awkward time. When my name was announced as princess, another girl squawked, "But I'M more popular than SHE is! I should have won!" So I was not alone in my perplexity.

After the prom was over, my date took me for drinks (this was Taiwan. No carding in bars.) I ordered some girly drink - a singapore sling, I think - and offered my date the Maraschino cherry from it. And he, predictably perhaps, replied "That's not the cherry I want." That's high school. Not all of it. I had friends and joy, and read William Faulkner which blew my mind wide open. But the good things are so interspersed with squirm-making memories like the prom that, when I graduated, I was thrilled to leave it all behind. And I left it completely behind. Never went to a reunion, only stayed in touch with a couple of friends, and that was fine with me.

Now here I am, a middle-aged woman, found by a whole heap of people who seem to remember high school much more happily than I do, or who, at least, have a much healthier sense of the continuity of their own lives. And I don't like it. So here's a question for those of you who have lived more or less in one place - one country, one state, or one city - all your lives; how do you do it? How do you reconcile the self you are now with the self you were then, especially when you run into someone who, say, remembers that time you were puking drunk, or who might have leeringly implied things about your maraschino cherry? In the pre-cyber past I was always able to put all that far behind me. But, apparently, putting it behind me is behind me now because there it is in front of me. So what do you do with your pasts?

Of oceans and waves and the things we lose (and find)

2009-02-18T16:26:00.003-05:00

The Gonzales Effect, originally uploaded by Dill Pixels.

It's been almost a year since my husband had his surgery, and looking back, it's been a tough one for me. Mainly because I've had to adjust myself to the reality that my husband, my best friend and true love, has an incurable, life-threatening illness. Before the polycythemia diagnosis, I had thought of him as having a "problem" that his first surgery had taken care of. Now I understand that although he could live for another fifty years, he could also die from a thrown clot in five minutes. I also know that this is the reality for all of us, all the time; drunk drivers, staph infections, so many unknown things, are out there waiting for us around random corners. But it feels different, knowing what, specifically, is hiding around the corner waiting for him. I guess what I'm saying is that i understand now that he's mortal.

In a little bit of kismet, sorting through things today I found this letter I wrote my mother when my father was at the end of a long, degenerative illness and I was facing, for the first time, the mortality of someone I loved. It helped me then, and again today. Perhaps it will be of some value to you.

Dear Mummy –

Here is a shell. Nothing special. Just one of millions the sea pushes up on the shore. But we were at the beach today and I thought of how much you love the beach and I wished you were there with me watching the kids play, watching the tide go back and forth. It’s so restful and soothing and I know you could use some of that right now.

I’ve been sad since my visit – not because things were, in the end, that different with Daddy – but because I finally realized, in my heart, that my parents would not live forever. Stupid isn’t it? But I think it’s one of those things you don’t truly grasp until life rubs your nose in it.

I get it now though, and all week I’ve been going joylessly through the motions of life. I’ve been irritable with the kids and their constant neediness, when I NEED to sort this whole thing out. So today, on a stinking hot Florida afternoon I drove the kids, with some ill grace, to the beach because they were bugging me about it. The kids swam and played and I sat at the tide line for hours, letting the surf wash around me, thinking. Here are some of my thoughts – none, probably, original -- but they helped me so I share them with you.

1. First, the ocean is the greatest nanny there ever was. Take three hot, whiney, totally irritating children and hand them over to her and suddenly you have three absolute angels. She is (for today) gentle and playful but implacable. Play wrong and you get a face full of salt water, play right and all is peace and joy. Whining never alters her behavior.

2. I remembered how Daddy use to float in the ocean with his hat, glasses and flip-flops on. It was always a great amusement to watch a wave sneak up on him and make off with any or all of his accessories.

3. How many hats/glasses/flip-flops do you suppose Daddy lost in the ocean? Where are they now?

4. The ocean is such a perfect object lesson about the impermanence of things. Over and over I watched the kids build their castles, dig their moats, make walls, only to see each careful construction erased into unmarked sand by a gentle, careless wave. Sara even lay her own body down as a barricade (as I would do for you) but still the wave came on.

5. If you could sit long enough in the surf, I believe everything in the world would come your way. Today I sat there for, maybe, two hours. The waves gave me a five dollar bill (!), a stray pair of swim goggles, and, of course, a fine selection of sculpted rocks and shells. I made up a story about the person who lost the five. It was a man, because men have pockets in their swim suits. He brought five dollars to the beach because he was going to have lunch or a beer at the snack bar after his swim. He forgot about it and felt like an idiot later. He might have said, “Oh well, no one will ever see that five again.” I thought about a pearl earring I lost in the ocean at Bei Dai He. I hoped someone found it on a beach in Australia and wondered all afternoon about the girl who lost it.

6. At the beach, your children, instead of bugging you for things as they do at, say, Walmart, bring you things. All I did was sit still, always easily locatable, and they brought me fists full of treasure. All afternoon Eliza shrieked, “Look Mommy! A shell!” It was like someone being surprised by each leaf on a summer tree. She gave them all to me to keep forever.

7. How long is forever when you’re on vacation? Is it shorter than the forevers of home? And How does 'I’ll love you forever' stand up against the waves of time? I guess it’s like those sand castles. You build it up again and again on the invisible foundations of earlier castles, yours and everybody else’s. And some days you might take it all with good humor and keep trying. But other days you might get discouraged and simply stop after a couple of tries. But always you hope that these things that wash away are not lost completely, but find their way to other hands in other places. Who was that girl who lost this earring? Who was the man who lost this hat? And maybe the finder takes the hat and puts it on, wears it into their own time. And so we are carried on, like a relay race. Maybe that’s what it means to say “ I Love you Forever,” in this world. I don’t know. But in any case, I’ll love you both forever, and I’ll recognize you wherever I see you, whoever is wearing you.

My father died a few weeks after I wrote this.

Just an update and some craptastic crochet

2009-02-17T20:34:00.004-05:00

Hello my dears! It's been a long and moderately miserable week since my eye work. But I went back to the doctor today and he said it's healing well - no scarring or infection. So now it's just a matter of waiting to see if heals all the way. I'm looking forward to getting my energy and writing mojo back. But until then, here for your amusement are some hideous crochet fashion don'ts. (For my flickr friends, these won't be on flickr because I've already passed my craptastic-crochet quota.)

"My Mommy had an affair with Big Bird."

Granny's didn't mean for you to wear those undies she crocheted for you OUTSIDE!

These gender-bending outfits will make the neighbors wonder just which way he swings!

"You don't know what to do with this? Just come back to the locker room and I'll show you!"

Me? A Superior Scribbler? Yay!!!!

2009-02-09T21:14:00.003-05:00

The lovely Sparkle Neeley at 97thingstodobeforeiturn97 gave me a Superior Scribbler award! What a nice way to end a fairly awful day. My "superficial keratectomy" (aka cornea scraping) was painless but fairly icky. All I can say is that watching someone throw away part of your eye that he just scraped off is pretty freaky. It's sore now, but the big question is how it will heal. I'll keep you posted.

Anyway, it was so cheering to come home to her wonderful description of my blog:

I love this blog so much. Each time I click and begin to read, I feel as if I'm starting a lovely novel that I don't want to end. I savor every word, and can't wait for the day that I can read Elizabeth's words bound and on paper.

My eye feels better already!

So now I have to choose five other people to receive the award and show a link to This Post and choose five more award winners!

Eye can't stand it

2009-02-09T11:21:00.005-05:00

I'm getting my cornea scraped today. I'm pretty freaked about it. My eyes are so important to me. So much of my joy in life comes to me through them. So wish me luck and quick, complete healing.

Sometimes a girl just needs someone to fuss with her hair...

2009-01-29T18:59:00.008-05:00

I got some uncertain, but not great medical news today (the appearance of my optic nerve indicates possible glaucoma. Or I could just have a weird-looking optic nerve....) which was worrisome, at the very least. My eyes have given me some of the greatest joys of my life and my sight would be the last of my abilities I would want to lose. So I was upset and my response to it was to be utterly consumed by a desperate need to get my hair cut and colored. It's not the first time this has happened to me. Lets just say that, depending whether I was in or out of love, my hair has gone up/down/up/down like a Tressy doll's.

So I went to a hair salon I'd gone to before, but the woman who had cut my hair was no longer there. I must have looked so crestfallen and/or wild-eyed that the receptionist said, "But there's another salon down the road that's good."
I said, "So, it's really good? Really?"
She said, "Oh, yeah, it's great! My mom goes there."
Now, my dear readers, you will have immediately heard the clang of the warning bell; "My mom goes there." Danger, danger Will Robinson! But, like a junkie in need of her fix, I ignored it and soon found myself pulling in to a strip mall so desolate that it looked like the apocalypse had long since come and gone. Nevertheless, I got out of the car and walked into the promisingly named "House of Style." Of course, they didn't say WHAT style....

The Style-istas were Vito and Sharon. Vito was a guy with a paunch, a lot of chest hair with sparkles of gold chain peeping through, and a loud shirt. And he was not gay. I should have turned and fled right then and there. Sharon, who was to impart style upon me, was what you call a big gal; she was tall and "big boned" and big chested and big haired and big everything else. There was just a shole lot of Sharon and a whole lot of make up on top of that. Well, I was in such a state that even Vito and Sharon didn't deter me because, damn it! the crisis of my shaggy, roots-showing hair MUST be dealt with immediately! So Sharon, with her big hair, took me to the chair. I - the woman who never uses hair products - sat passively while she cut, colored, used a curling iron, hair gel, and even hair spray. And when she was done, this is what I looked like:
(photo from MsBlueSky)
You know, the eighties were a pretty good hair decade for me. I avoided the greatest excesses of the disco dos and overall looked pretty cute. But that was a few decades, a few kids, and a few pounds ago. Imagine me, today, with a hot stack of 80s hair, wearing old-lady-who-just-had-cataract-surgery disposable wraparound sunglasses (because they'd dilated my pupils) strutting out of the House of Style. It was a sight, and not a good one. When I got home I washed the product out of my hair and, by the time my kids got home from school, I was just me again. But for a little while, I looked like an AARP disco diva, and, all in all, I must say it distracted and cheered me. Sometimes a girl just needs hair therapy and it really doesn't matter where it comes from.

What I think the house Republicans are (because none of them voted for the stimulus package)

2009-01-28T21:52:00.003-05:00

Nuff said.