Poem

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!

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

(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.

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

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

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)

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.