Jedi Mom

It’s not very cold in Minnesota today. At least not for December. December in Minnesota. The world is windy and damp and the air smells like earth. And at 34 degrees, I figured why tear my house apart looking for my coat. The kids were waiting by the minivan – both mine and not-mine – and we were going to be late. I threw the hood of my sweater over my head and grabbed my keys.

I have this sweater – it’s cable knit and dark gray and longish with a hood. I got it for my birthday and I adore it. I’d adore it more if it had pockets – my hands get cold when I write. But still. It’s a good one. I clicked the button unlocking the car. Liam, the little boy in the car pool, stared at me open-mouthed.

“Up you get,” I said.

“Leo,” Liam whispered. “Why does your mom look like a Jedi?”

Leo, god bless him forever, didn’t miss a beat. “Because my mom is a Jedi,” he whispered back.

“No way,” Liam whispered to Leo.

Mind you, I was standing right there. And the both of them are loud whisperers.

“All moms are Jedis,” I whispered. Loudly. (Have you noticed that whispering loudly is murder on the throat. I should have just said it.)

“Nu-uh,” both boys said.

“It’s true,” I said. “Ever heard of the Jedi Mind Trick? Moms invented it. When we become moms, we get our name added to the patent.”

“What’s a patent?” Leo asked.

“It’s a piece of paper saying that you invented something or thought of something. People will make a new idea for a robot and they’ll patent their idea so that everyone knows who thought of it. Or if you think of a new way to do a job. You think of it, you explain it, and then you can patent it. It’s kind of like owning an idea.”

“So,” Leo said, “if I think of a new game – like Predator and Prey – I can patent it?”

“I don’t think you invented Predator and Prey,” I said.

“We both invented it,” Liam said.

“Well, if that was true, then you would both put your names on the patent. And if anyone tried to sell it, they’d have to give you money.”

They thought about that.

“So,” Leo said, “Whenever anyone in the whole galaxy uses a Jedi Mind Trick, they have to give moms some money?”

“Well…” I said.

“Moms must be the RICHEST LADIES IN THE WORLD!”

“Well, you see…” I said.

“Hey mom – I mean Jedi Mom, can I have four hundred bucks? Because I really want a Lego Death Star.”

I made a motion in the air as though I was wiping it clean. “You will forget about the Lego Death Star,” I said in my Jedi voice. “You will only want playing cards for Christmas.”

The boys looked at me scathingly.

“You,” they said in unison, “are the worst Jedi ever.”

And then we went to school.

Wine, Women, and Song

I was a singer when I was young. I sang in a girls’ choir that traveled the world – we sang in China and Japan, Scandinavia and Canada and around the United States. The choir even went to the South Pacific, but I was too young to go (I’m still bitter about it). After that, I sang with a quartet in college, doing the occasional wedding and funeral – mostly funerals. And when I studied at the University of Sevilla, I made money singing show tunes to old men in a local bar with a ludicrously old piano player. They loved my performance of “Hello Dolly”, for example. Also, “Dream A Little Dream Of Me”, which, of course is not a show tune at all, but I like singing it, so there. For that, I got paid in tips and cigarettes and free drinks, which unfortunately, fed my addiction to cigarettes. Smoking is murder on the voice. Don’t ever start. I haven’t smoked in over twelve years now, thank god, but there are…. lingering effects. For example: I now, alas, I kinda suck at singing.

I only sing to my kids. (They hate it.) And to drunken strangers at karaoke. (They may also hate it, but it’s hard to tell.) And, once a year, to a bunch of my neighbors and friends at our yearly holiday party.

The holidays are stressful, they really are. Especially for moms. We perpetuate the Santa Ruse, even when it’s killing us. We fuss over who is getting what. We strive for balance. We look at our check registers and weep. We keep the tree watered and plan for our kids’ teachers’ gifts and try to minimize expectations while inexplicably heightening them. We run ourselves ragged.

I do the same. I tell myself every year that it will be different. I always lie.

But one day, in the run-up towards the holidays, we sing. Actually, I am super bossy when it comes to the singing, making sure that everyone participates. I have a zero-tolerance policy for non-singers.

And here’s the thing: I’m a sucker for holiday music. Actually, no, scratch that: I’m a sucker for music in general. Get a bunch of people in a room singing together, and I get all misty. Get a bunch of people who all love each other in a room and have them sing? I cry like a friggin’ baby. And holiday music is unique. When we sing the songs that we sang when we were young, I think we’re actually singing to our younger selves. And in the case of holiday music, we are singing to our hopeful selves, our wondering selves, and yes, sometimes our grabby, selfish selves too. But it’s the wonder that’s delighting me now. It’s the wonder that stays.

And so we sing. We throw back our heads and close our eyes and forget the words and make new ones up. We shove food into our mouths and lubricate our inhibitions with wine and curl our arms around eachother’s waists and sing of cold nights and crying infants and deep snow. We sing of sparks of light in a dark, dark world. We sing of bullied reindeer and wandering magi and ill-planned sleigh rides and tiny gifts hidden in the house, as proof that the world still cares about us. That we are worth caring about. That the world can, and is, and will be, saved.

Tonight, I will sing to the cold. I will sing to the warm hearts gathered. I will sing to the wounded world. And I will sing to you. Sit very, very still, and you might hear it.

I’ll be the one singing off-key.

Rudolph the Farting Reindeer

This morning, the power went out to about 4,000 homes in Minneapolis – mine included.

And it was a lovely morning – gray and damp, with the yellow glow of candles and a fire in the hearth. It was beautiful. And amazingly, though I’m normally hollering to high heaven trying to get these kids organized in the morning, this morning they were dressed, washed, brushed and minty fresh a good thirty minutes early. Leo and Cordelia nestled together by the fire with A Diary of A Wimpy Kid open on their laps, Cordelia reading to her brother.

And, I admit it, I got a little misty.

But the lack of power has consequences – mine being a car packed to the ceiling with kids. Here’s what happened: Because I drive a minivan, and because there were other folks in the neighborhood who couldn’t get into their garages to open their garage door since they only had one door to the garage and, without electricity, it only opens from the inside (D’OH!), my neighbors were desperate. So we shoved a bunch of kids into my car and trundled on into the road.

More kids than seatbelts? I’m not telling.

Anyway, it didn’t take long, in that crush of kids and backpacks and salt-crusted coats, that someone started to sing.

Jingle bells, Batman smells,

Robin laid an egg.

“Oh that is BORING,” one kid said. “Sing this instead:

Joy to the world!

Barney’s dead!

We barbecued his head!

The boys (they were, aside from Cordelia, all boys. It was a mountain of boys, a sea of boys, universes upon universes upon universes of boys) laughed until they drooled.

One boy – a redhead – said: “Do you guys know the Dreidel song?”

I have a little dreidel

I made it out of snow

I put it in the oven

HEY DREIDEL WHERE’D YOU GO?

I snorted to that one.

Leo piped in:

Silent farts,

Holy farts,

What’s that smell?

I can’t tell.

“MOM!” Cordelia roared. “THERE ARE TOO MANY BOYS IN THIS CAR!”

“I agree, darling,” I said. “Boys! No more fart songs.”

Apparently, a gauntlet had been thrown. The boys, opened their mouths and sang in unison. They already knew the words. It was as though they had tapped into a fart-joke-hive-mind.

Away in a butt-crack

A baby did fart,

They sang lustily, greedily, with wild abandon.
“That didn’t even make any sense,” I said.

“Yes it did,” they assured me in unison. Even their inflection matched. Then they began to sing again.

Rudolph the farting reindeer

had some very noxious gas.

And if you ever smelled it

You would…..

They stopped.

“We need a word that rhymes with ‘gas’,” one boy said.

“And it should have something to do with farting,” another boy said.

“What rhymes with gas?” still another queried. “Mass, lass….. think of words that have an ‘ass’ in it.”

There was a terrible pause. A car full of naughty minds all turned at once.

I had to think fast.

Up on the housetop, I sang at the top of my lungs.

Yellow snow.

Santa’s reindeer had to go.

The car erupted. And the boys joined in. And nobody swore on purpose. The boys, though potty-mouthed, remained relatively pure.

For now.

It was a Christmas Miracle!

 

 

 

LEGO CAKES!

I made them myself. And they are horrible! NO JUDGIES!

Still, as my husband worked his poor little soul to teeny tiny pieces in his efforts to coordinate and coach the Lego Robotics team (with, I have to say, very little support from the school. More on that when I can write about it without spitting on my computer), and as the kids both kicked ass and took names at the competition yesterday (and proud we are of all of them), I have spent the last two days baking Lego cakes.

And you know what, those kids deserve cake. Their school is a small, fairly new charter school, and this is the very first trophy that the school has won. The very first one. And I am proud to the teeth of these children.

I am not, however, proud of these cakes.

The cakes are, by every estimation, a miserable effort.

I swear to god, I’m an excellent cook, but I am baking-challenged. I am baking-deficient. I am the anti-baker. Oh, Julia Child! I have failed you! An entire childhood spent watching your show on public television, and so very little to show for it! Only this:

Mmmmmm....... Food coloring......

Here they are in all their gloppy glory. Do not laugh. I shed tears for these. Sweat too, but not blood. At least, I’m pretty sure.

Really, I blame my husband for this. For giving me the idea. For working so hard that I felt that I needed to increase my contribution. I needed to match. I needed to justify myself. I blame my husband for the fact that, when one fell and exploded on the floor with a sickening schllllllurlp, I honestly thought that I could fix it. “I’m sure it’s salvageable,” my Betty-Crockered brain whispered as I gazed at the crumbly goo on the ground.

And I believed it.

This is Ted’s fault.

Ted, my darling husband (god bless his infernal self) who came up with the idea.

“It’ll be fun,” he said.

“The kids’ll love it,” he said.

“Look! Here’s a website! It looks easy!”

He did not, I found out later watch the helpful video that was on the website:

Still I did it. I even have photographic evidence. Look:

Here I am, looking oddly crazy-eyed.

 

 

 

And now they exist. And they are messy. And lopsided. And gloppy. And honestly, not that good. But the kids will like them.

 

Or, they better like them, anyway.

Congratulations Team Lego Pandemonium and Team Sonic! You guys are AWESOME!

(have some cake!)

The Beautiful and the Strange

"Reading Chaucer" by Phillip Jackson

I may not be posting much this week. We’ll see. I’ve encountered a bit of a dark place in my work. Not dark insomuch as the subject matter is concerned (though, truth be told, I am prone to darkness) (Wasn’t it Kate DiCamillo who told us that “the world is light and dark and precious”?) (Kate DiCamillo is my hero). It is not my work that is dark. My work, right now, is nonexistant. My work eludes me.

I am in darkness. I cannot see the path.

So I need to unplug for a bit. Get back to working longhand (why do I ever think that I can switch to typewritten first drafts? It is always a mistake!). I also need to fill my brain with art.

Right now, I have two novels that have ground to a heartbreaking halt, each about four chapters shy of finishing. I cannot move forward. The way forward is blocked, obscured, washed away. I have another novel that is done, but is so broken that I don’t think I can repair it. And a fourth that is itching to go, but I’m afraid to work on it before the two stuck novels get unstuck, lest it suffer the same fate. I’m not sure what my problem is. I’ve been ignoring the problem for months, pretending to write.

(I am terribly good at pretending to write. Indeed, if pretending to write was a paying job, I’d keep my family fed for decades.)

"Flying Bottle", by Sergey Tyukanov

I’m intending to spend this week working at the Minnesota Arts Institute and the Walker Arts Center. Wandering. Sketching. Scribbling. I don’t think I’ll work on the books – I think they need to sit for a bit. I think I need to spend some time touching paper, smelling woodshavings and graphite, listening to the scritch of word against the page. I think I need to feed myself.

I’m sure I’m not the first writer who has found themselves halted in the process, staring – mouth open and eyes unblinking – into the glare of social media and market places and the alligator pit of buying and selling in which our little books are tossed, torn and devoured. And then they are gone.

I have spent so much time staring after a book that has left me, that I have allowed the books still here to drift from my fingertips, dry on the vine, and float away. And I am quite alone.

I am not a visual artist – indeed, if you were to see my drawings, you might laugh at me as small children can likely do better. But I like drawing all the same. And I like looking at art. Phillip Jackson (the guy who made the sculpture above) has been haunting my dreams as of late. And Sergey Tyukanov. And I’ve been collecting 15th and 16th century woodcuts and sticking them on the background of my computer, or cutting them out and taping them in my notebook, or tracing them on vellum paper and folding them into paper airplanes and launching them into the sky. Like this one, for example:

And this: 

I’m not sure why, but since the inclination is there, and since the inclination refuses to subside, I think my subconscious is trying to tell me something.

So that’s how I will be feeding my creative self this week. I will be seeking out the beautiful and the strange; I will be devouring bits of fantasy and surrealism, and licking the juices off of my fingertips. I will be ink smudged and paper sliced and leaving dusty graphite footprints wherever I go. I shall fill the room with my sawdust smell.

And how about the rest of you. What do you do to unblock the things that block your work? How do you restore the flow? What is it, for each of you, that feeds your sweet, sweet souls?

Sometimes I dream coyote dreams

Image via Wikipedia

I heard the coyote again last night. I am still hearing it in the ears of my mind. It is a cold, lonely sound. It is made of hard, crusted snow.

I live on a dead-end street; it teems with life. Little kids on wagons and skateboards and bikes hollering at each other; parents hollering at their kids; adults hollering their hellos as they haul their groceries into the house, or their garden supplies into the back yard, or their snow shovels into the garage.

The street ends at a footpath that leads to a small, wooden bridge that goes over a creek. The creek swells every spring, foaming and tumbling to the ocean (and from the ocean to the sky). In the summer, it becomes lazy and slow. In the winter, it is ice. We pour onto the hardened water, peering into the cold, looking for the crystallized remains of perch and sunnies and crayfish. Their eyes are slick and wide and aghast.

The creek bends back around the back of the houses and snakes towards the waterfall a mile away. My back yard ends at a field that slopes toward the water. Every day, I walk down to the edge of the creek and sit for a while. In the summer, I am accosted by bugs; in the winter, I am numb with cold. I watch for herons and foxes and neighborhood cats. I listen to the frogs perform their randy songs of love. I am a nature voyeur.

Lately, there have been coyote tracks. And scat. And every once in a while, it’s high, brittle voice. I have not seen it, though I long to.

Yesterday, the moon rose wild in a violet sky. I was driving my daughter from one friend’s house to another’s. I saw the moon and gasped and swerved. I pulled the car to the side of the road and stepped out.

“Not again,” my daughter said.

“Let’s howl at the moon,” I said.

“Let’s not,” she said. “People are watching.”

I tipped back my head and howled. People stared, but I didn’t care. My daughter slunk deeper into her seat. “Mommmmm,” she hissed.

I howled again – a wild cry. I wanted someone to howl back. I wanted something to howl back. I wanted the moon to reply. My howl was a coyote howl – cold, brittle, and terribly alone. The world was filled with the sound of engines and wheels and concrete and steel – the sounds of dead things and dead ends. There was no sound of living. I got back into the car and drove.

Last night, in my house of silent eyes and wet breathing, I woke suddenly in the dark. The moon had already slid away from my east-facing windows, and the sky was heavily black. I walked to the window. The room was cold; it bit my bare skin. I didn’t shiver. I pressed my hands against the glass.

The coyote was back there. I could feel it. If the moon had been on the field, I would have seen it. Instead, there was only the shape of the garage, and behind that, the shadows of the trees, and beyond that the thick gray of nighttime snow.

It howled. I felt it before I heard it. That desperate wail. It shattered the windows, shattered the floor, shattered my crystallized skin.

And then it was gone.

My voice was scratchy with sleep, but there, in my house, with my husband sleeping nearby, with my children dreaming, deep in their beds, I closed my eyes, tipped back my head, and howled back.

I wasn’t the moon, I wasn’t the sky, but that coyote was howling at something, and was getting nothing back. And everyone deserves to be listened to.

I slid back in bed, and dreamed of the pricks of my nails against the skittering snow. I dreamed of the smell of animal, the resistance of meat in the teeth, the thrill of motion and speed, the glittering of a dark, icy world, reflecting stars.

The sky poured in my head and the world rang blue

“I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”  Hamlet

The world I see is not the world I know.

The world I see is dead. It ceased from the moment it shed its light like a snake shedding its skin, sending image after irrelevant image towards my eyes. The moment we see a thing, the thing in the state in which we saw it does not exist. It has changed. We are time travelers, looking ever backward. This is the limitation of seeing.

The world I know is a living place. It exists both before and after I perceive it. There are no befores and afters in Time. Time simply is. Any linearity is simply a construct.

For example:

Two of my children are home today. I haven’t seen them for most of the morning, but my living room is so messy that they may be within the reach of my arms and I would not know it. Anyone could be here right now – small animals, extra children, exiled world leaders. This is how we build kingdoms of limitless space: we allow the debris from the excesses of the world to spill around us, to loop around our feet again and again. We allow the universe to dimple and gather and fold. My messy house is not a result of my laziness: I am expanding space.

Yesterday, on my run, I slipped on a patch of ice, and flew. Time, of course is relative. Under the tyranny of a stopwatch, the time from step to wobble to launch to landing was, doubtless, less than a second. But really – really – it was longer than that. Time bent, looped and lengthened. Time ceased. There was only the sky. There was only the air. There was only a woman in flight.

My dog is alive, though part of her is dead. She has a benign tumor above her leg, the size of a large orange. It doesn’t hurt her, doesn’t slow her down, but it is dead at the center. It is a zombie tumor. The vet says, at her age, surgery would open up more problems than it will cause. The dead tissue has been, we believe, walled off inside of the tumor, and will likely not be the cause of her expiration. Indeed, at the ripe old age of almost-seventeen, she could be killed by any number of things. And so, she carries on her body, a talisman of death. It wobbles and quivers with each step. It draws the eye. It grins through her fur. “I am coming,” Death says. “I am coming. Indeed, I am already here.”

Yesterday, for my birthday, we put up the tree. My house smells of sap and snow and wood. We pressed the lights deep into the branches and they shine like stars. My daughter made an angel for the top. She curled a brightly printed paper into a cone for the dress, and carefully attached a serene, hand-drawn face with yellow braids.

“That angel looks like you,” I said.

“Of course it does,” she said.

“But she has no wings,” I said.

“Her wings are invisible,” she said. “Everyone’s wings are invisible. They are secret and no one knows they have them. Everyone is sad because they don’t know how to use their wings.”

“Do I have wings?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said. “But you use yours all the time.”

“What are they made of?” I asked. “Skin? Hair? Feathers?”

“No,” she said. “You’d be able to see them if they were. Your wings are made of sky. Everyone’s wings are made of sky.” She looked at me as if I was the silliest person she’d ever met. “It’s obvious, really.”

On Birthdays: mine, specifically

Confession: I tell lies sometimes.

For example: I have, for the past six years, been telling people that I am forty. I am not. I haven’t been this whole time. But when I turned thirty-two, six years ago, (oooo! math!)  I figured that when people heard thirty-two, they were just thinking forty anyway, so why not just skip all the cognitive dissonance between what is and what is believed – the true vibrating painfully against the what just as easily may have been true – and just tell the damn lie. So for the last six years in my head I have been forty, in my mouth I have been forty and in the minds of others I have been forty as well.

Now, my break from my life of lies has always been on my birthday. On my birthday I own up, tell the truth, lay it on the table. On birthdays we remove pretense, we remove guile, we are laid bare for all to see.

Here is the truth:

• I am thirty-eight today. It is a good age to be.
• I have three kids who make me crazy and keep me sane at the same time. They do this, I’m pretty sure with magical powers. I’m also pretty sure that’s not a lie.
• I have a husband who carries me on his back, while I simultaneously carry him on mine. This is also not a lie. We also have magical powers. Magical powers are an essential tool of the long-married. This is well-known. Ask anyone you like.
• I have, by my daughter’s count, eleven gray hairs on the top of my head. They are short and stick straight out from my scalp. I am convinced that, if I concentrate hard enough, I will be able to use them as supernatural antennae. I will catch messages from other planets. Or from fairies. Or from the dead.
• I can run long distances and carry heavy things and do a back bend without breaking something, though really I shouldn’t be doing any of those things. I have arthritis and I know what happens to arthritic joints. One day, they will have to replace my knee with something ….else. I secretly hope it will be robotic. I have Cylonic aspirations.  (If Cylonic is not a real word, I suggest it should be. Let’s start a petition.)
• I have stretch marks on my belly from my pregnancies, so deep that I can hide crayons inside them.
• I have nineteen scars on my legs, four on my arms, one inside my belly button, and two on my forehead.
• My blue eyes are crinkled from excessive joy.

So there you go. Truthiness. Live it up.

Yesterday, I told people I was forty, and I will do so again tomorrow. But today, I celebrate the age I am. And while I loved being thirty-seven (prime! a singularity! a typographical dissonance – all curves and edges, all flesh and blade, all cushion and sting!) thirty-eight has a certain stability to it. It has feet firmly planted. It has strong arms, strong hips, a strong back. It is clear eyed and loud mouthed and laughs too long.

And I think I shall enjoy it very much.

A Mighty Fortress Is My Butt….

This morning Leo decided to sing some songs.

Cordelia was not amused.

“Jingle butts, jingle butts,” he sang as I handed him his hot cider. “Snow got on….my butt!”

“MOM!” Cordelia said. “Make him stop singing.”

I hadn’t had any caffeine at that point, and was only vaguely aware that I even had children. I struggled to find a gap in the press of clouds.

“Cordelia,” I said. “Your brother is just singing Christmas songs. Lighten up.” She stomped away. “Leo, I said, resting my forehead on my fingertips and waiting for the kettle to boil. “We’re having Silent Breakfast today. The quietest kid wins a million dollars.”

Leo, knowing full well that I am, was, and always will be, full of shit, began to sing. (though, bless him, quietly. In his sweetest voice.) “Silent farts. Holy farts.”

“MOM!” Cordelia said.

“Leo,” I said. “There’s no such thing as holy farts.”

“Anyone who’s holy farts holy farts,” Leo said in an infuriating holier-than-thou voice. “That’s what holy means.”

“Well, I’ve had enough of it,” I said. “Move on.”

The kettle boiled. A miracle! I poured the water over my tea bag and set the timer.

The timer in my head rattled against my skull. Which would come first, I wondered? Tea? Or an exploding brain.

“A MIGHTY FO-ORTRESS I-IS MY BUTT,” Leo bellowed. “MY BUTT IS SU-PER A-A-AWE-SOME.”

Cordelia erupted in a sound that was curiously similar to the sound that cartoon characters made when their faces turned red and their ears erupted with steam. In fact, I can’t say for sure where the sound came from. It might have actually been from her ears. Indeed, it might have been steam.

“MOM,” she said. “Punish him. Please.”

“I’m not punishing anybody,” I said. I poured the whole milk into the tea. Tea! I am saved!

“Leo,” I said. “One more song and you’re sleeping in the garage tonight. And I’m giving all your toys to the neighbors.”

He didn’t hear the second part.

“Wait, really?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Really.”

“And you’re not going to change your mind.”

“Not at all.” I said. Should I have been curious about his sudden enthusiasm? Yes, ladies and gentlemen. Yes I should have.

“YESYESYESYESYESYESYES!” Leo shouted, jumping out of his chair and punching his fists in and out.

“What?” I said.

“I GET TO SLEEP IN THE GARAGE?? AWESOME!!!!!!”

“But–”

“THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE!”

And he ran upstairs to pack a backpack and find his sleeping bag. Cordelia watched him run up the stairs.

“Oh sure,” she said. “Just reward him, mom! FINE!”

“But-” I said.

And she stomped up to her room and slammed the door. I could hear her rustling around. I assume she too was packing a bag. I decided not to notice.

And it was quiet. And the tea eased its way inside of my skull, disabling the dynamite lodged in my frontal lobes. I pressed my fingers against the curve of warm ceramic.

Apparently, my children will sleep in the garage tonight. I hope Child Protective Services doesn’t mind. It was, after all, their idea. Well, really it was my idea, but I am, as I mentioned before, full of shit. I wasn’t gonna make him. But now he says it’s the best day of his life. So I’m stuck.

With these thoughts I drank my tea. I let it slip its way down my throat, into the solar plexus, into the heart, like a prayer.

“A mighty fortress is my butt,” I sang quietly to myself. “My butt is super awesome.”

And you know what? I really meant it.

The Side-Effects of Catholic School

As many of you know, I went to Catholic School as a child. Here is me, in my plaid uniform, gazing at the viewer as though looking INTO YOUR SOUL.

FEAR THE CATHOLIC SCHOOL GIRL IN PLAID!

 

 

Given the sheer amount of time I spent as a verifiable Catholic schoolgirl, it is not surprising that there would be……lingering effects. Character quirks, tendencies, odd patterning of behaviors – both for good and for ill – that would continue to shape my life even now at my ripe old age of thirty-seven.

(Though not for long! I’ll be thirty eight soon. And I enjoy chocolate.)

Anyway, after spending the formative years of my life going to church on both Fridays and Sundays, I spend most Fridays knocking around my day, feeling as though I’ve forgotten to do something. And the smell of incense puts me instantly to sleep. And the rhythm of Mass puts me in a childlike frame of mind, and sometimes I even weep like a baby. But the thing that lingers the most is the music. And today, it’s driving me mad.

There’s a song – “The King of Glory.” And it is stuck in my head. It’s spinning around and around and around, and I CANNOT GET IT OUT. It’s one of those continuous-loop sort of songs,  like the music that accompanies circle dances like the Hora or the Kolo, in which you have two or three distinct musical narrations and each one leads directly into the one following, looping over and over again so you never have a reasonable stopping place.

And once it gets stuck in your head, you’re done for.

There were a bunch of songs like this that were introduced into Catholic liturgy in the late sixties and early seventies when liturgical music writers were looking to Eastern European and Jewish folk songs to borrow from as a way to make their music seem more authentic or mystical or whatever. I don’t know if “The King Of Glory” is actually borrowed from some Yiddish grandma, but it’s certainly designed to sound as though it was. In any case, we were forced to sing that durn song every Friday at Mass.

(That might have been an exaggeration)

(But even if it is an exaggeration, it really isn’t. The fact is that memory, even when faulty, even when clearly wrong, is true. It is the information that frames and informs all new information. It is the table upon which we set our new dishes. So we believe a thing, and, as far as our brains are concerned, it is, and no amount of patient explantations can unbelive our believing.)

(Descartes said that we think and therefore we are, which was a thing that I rather liked, despite the fact that I think if I ever met a French Philosopher, I would likely detest him. Or her. Too many cigarettes. Too much white bread and cheese, which really is not very good for you and is terribly binding. Take Sartre, for example. No exit, MY EYE. There is an exit right over there! So screw you, Sartre! It even has a sign.)

(Of course, it doesn’t really have a sign. And it’s not even an exit. Just a door from my room into the hall. Still, in my mind there is an exit sign, and in my mind it is red, and in my mind it whispers kind things to me as I walk in and out and in and out. “Come back,” whispers my sign. “Welcome home,” it breathes. And who is to say it doesn’t exist? I thought of it, didn’t I? Which mean it clearly does exist on some realm – just not the realm that we can see with our bulbous, watery eyes. With our inside eyes, however, we can see that which is  and that which might. We can see multitudes.)

(This is why I write fictions. I’m like the Golux. I make things up, you know.)

I think I’ve gotten off-track.

Oh, yes. The King of Glory. For those of you who were not raised upon the velvet breast of Mama Church, I can offer you Stephen Colbert’s version of that song (with liturgical dance! And it is glorious!) as he not only was raised on it, but is likely singing it to his Sunday School students, thus infecting another generation of sparkly-eyed, plaid-wearing Catholic kids with that damn song.

In fact, maybe you shouldn’t watch it. Seriously, it will be stuck in your head all day.

DON’T PRESS PLAY!

 

Oh, dude. You did it, didn’t you? Oh well. Might I suggest a little bit of Lady Gaga as a palette cleanser?

Nine things I am thankful for

Gratitude #1. There is a little boy (Leo? My son? I may have mentioned him here before…) who, upon seeing that his parents are sleeping late, says, “YESYESYESYESYES!” Then, after rubbing his hands together, takes two quick steps, then a flying leap, then landing between my husband and I with a soft thud. He squirms under the covers and buries himself between this parent and that parent, feeling for that moment as though he was the luckiest boy that had ever lived, and that ever would live. “There is nothing better,” he says as he links his arms with my arms, his legs with his Dad’s legs, “than snuggling. Nothing in the world.”

Gratitude #2. There are two bags of arugula in my refrigerator and a large, bright squash, and I intend to use them for a dish both savory and sweet, a dish both roasted and fresh, both caramel and herbaceous. A dish that begins with hello and ends with goodbye. And it shall be a triumph.

Gratitude #3. One of the perks of Catholicism is that we are gifted with very large families. I can hardly go around a corner without running into a second cousin or fourth aunt or that kid who dated my cousin or whatever. We are so large now that we can’t have Thanksgiving meals all together – we don’t fit – but I’m meeting a bunch of my cousins and second cousins (and aunts and uncles and great aunts and great uncles) for a hike.

Gratitude #4. I am grateful for the warm day. And the low sun. And the muted shades of brown and green rimming the pale blue sky.

Gratitude #5. The weirdest thing I’m grateful for is the fact that my husband and I had a fight last night. And it was a doozy. There is something cathartic about hashing it out over an issue that builds and builds. In fact, it’s not the fight that is hard or the fight that hurts. It’s before. The hurt had been building for days. Sometimes I feel that we put on extra skins to keep ourselves from facing issues that might be difficult or unpleasant. We put on these skins to buffer our points of tenderness, to hide our vulnerability. But they don’t last. They become hard and inflexible, scaly and brittle. And so we put on skin after skin after skin until we are thick, lumpy, ugly things. We are the color of old sawdust and beef jerky and rancid socks. When we finally break, when we finally hash it out, we peel back our layers. One, then two, then three or four at a time. We slice, peel, pull and kick. We are like snakes wriggling free again and again, until, by the end, we are supple and soft and vulnerable as babies.We are new. Last night I had a fight with my husband. And now we are new. And I am grateful for it.

Gratitude #6. My oldest daughter. She is hard, and brilliant, and shining. She is the jewel in the fallow field, the treasure that saves the dying farm. That child is so ruddy smart that I’m astonished that she sprang, twelve years ago, from the dark depths of my body. How does she come from me? It makes no sense. If it weren’t for the fact that she looks exactly like me, I wouldn’t be surprised if, one day, her real parents showed up from Fairyland or the Alien Mothership or Harvard or whatever and said, “Yeah. Sorry about that.”

Gratitude #7. My middle child. She is kindness personified. There is no soul more gentle, more patient, or more singular. She requires little, gives much. She is good at math, good at drawing, good in general, and I am wild for her. She also has me wrapped securely around her finger, so despite her singularity, despite her self-assuredness, (or perhaps because of it) I am absolutely unable to say no to this child. I can’t even bring her shopping anymore, because of my inability to deny her things. She is persuasive. She is the worst kind of bossy, because she convinces you that it was your idea in the first place. Which means that she will make an excellent politician someday. Or Queen of Everything.

Gratitude #8. Milk and eggs. I have this recurring nightmare – maybe two or three times a month – in which the children come bounding into my room, shaking me out of sleep, and saying, “Oh, mom! Can you believe it’s Christmas already?” And I’m all WHAT? It’s Christmas? I haven’t bought presents! We don’t have a tree! I haven’t bought milk! We’re out of eggs! And I panic and wake up in tears. And the thing is – it’s the milk and eggs that scares me the most. If I have milk and eggs in the fridge, I can make pretty much anything. I can make the morning special. I can give the kids something to remember forever. Milk and eggs. Okay fine – and sugar and flour. I’d need those too. Milk and eggs and sugar and flour is all I need for…..right. And butter. Milk and eggs and – did I mention marmalade? Okay, this is all I’ll need: Milk and eggs and butter and flour and sugar and marmalade. And tea. With milk.

I think I just gave myself a new anxiety dream. Goddamnit.

Gratitude #9. Pie. Nine kinds of pie. If I were Harold on his picnic with his nine kinds of pie, I don’t even know what pies I would draw. But I am grateful that I live in a world so plentiful with pie that nine kinds of pie (all my favorite!) is a possibility. Indeed, my mouth waters just thinking about it. When I was growing up, we learned a lot of prayers in Religion class at Catholic School. A prayer for orphans. A prayer for forgiveness. A prayer for peace in the world. Litanies upon litanies of saints. But never a prayer for pie.

I think I will compose a prayer for pie. I think I will tattoo it on my heart. I think I will sing it in the secret depths of my soul forever and ever and ever.

But really, I am grateful for this work, and for the people who labor in the same fields that I do – hot, bright, brilliant writers all – who work every day to make the world new again. And I am grateful for you, oh Internets, that great, wide, shining ocean, in which I throw my little messages in bottles – my heart in colored glass – again and again and again. To remind myself that I exist. That the work matters. That we are all alive.

How James Thurber Killed My Soul (and made it new again)

There are books that are – by their very natures – interruptions.

Sometimes, we read a book that is so goddamn good, that it stops us in our tracks, destroys the things we thought were true – about our work, about our reading, about books in general and about the world. Often, this is a good thing. As I’ve written about on this blog before, I had a bookus interruptus moment nine years ago when, while nursing my second child, I read Last Report of Miracles at Little No Horse, by Louise Erdrich. Then I read it again. Then I read it yet again, feeling the words of the novel write themselves on my bones. Then, for the first time in – hell, I don’t know. A lot of years. I started writing again.

And now, I’ve read a book that has made me stop. Maybe forever.

This time, James Thuber – oh, James! What have you done to me? – – reached from the grave and put The Thirteen Clocks into my hands. I think he did it on purpose. I think he wanted to bring me down a notch or two.

Check this out:

“The task is hard,” said Zorn, “and can’t be done.”

“I can do a score of things that can’t be done,” the Golux said. “I can find the thing I cannot see and see the thing I cannot find. The first is time, the second is the spot before my eyes. I can feel a thing I cannot touch and touch a thing I cannot feel. The first is sad and sorry, the second is your heart. What would you do without me? Say ‘nothing’.”

“Nothing,” said the Prince.”

“Good. Then you’re helpless and I’ll help you.”

This book is a marvel. The prose is spare and voluptuous at the same time. It is sure-footed and quick-witted and full of tricks. There are old ladies who weep jewels and jewels that become tears. There is a man who murdered time and a man whose secret name begins with X and a man who makes things up and a girl with warm, warm hands. And kings with feet in traps. And indescribable hats. And a spy you cannot see (and therefore cannot trust). It is a delicious language treat – a delight for the ear and tongue and eye. It does not hesitate. It does not falter. It snatches your heart right out of your body and runs away with it. And you chase it. You chase it as you expire. You chase it as your breath fails you. You chase it saying, “Oh! It is beautiful!” And “Oh! It is wise!” and “Oh! That I should live this day to hear this story, and that I may live another day to hear it again.”

And so I may stop writing forever.

Oh, James! Why do you play with my soul in this way!

If you want to ruin your life the way this book has ruined mine, feel free to watch this little video. It’s Neal Gaiman reading the opening passages. Just, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

 

The 13 Clocks from Juan Delcan on Vimeo.

OCCUPY CHRISTMAS TREE

In one of my many forays into the great sucking Time Sink that is these here Internets, I found a link to a Christmas tree made entirely from recycled materials. And it was a beautiful thing.

The subject of Christmas trees is a bit of a sore one in Barnhill-Land. Firstly, there is the question of when to put the thing up (I say ten days before Christmas; he says the day after Thanksgiving); secondly, there is the question of short needles vs. long needles (obviously short needles are superior); thirdly there is the question of the unnaturally full tree vs. the Charlie Brown tree (did you not SEE that show? Does your heart not MELT at the site of a spindly little tree with an awkward star?).

But the main argument is this: Alive? Or Not-Alive?

Holidays are a time in which the Nostalgia regions of our brains swell to the size of cantaloupes and we all become infantilized and illogical and grasping. We become set in our ways. We are uncompromiseable. I grew up with the smell of freshly cut spruce in the house at Christmastime. I remember the sharp smell of sap as my father sliced circle after circle off the base of the trunk, trying to get the thing to fit under the ceiling. I remember the clean smell of snow still clinging to the needles, the very real possibility of critters lurking in the branches, and the float of sawdust in the air.

Smell, after all, triggers nostalgia, and I want my damn nostalgia goddamnit.

Ted, on the other hand, in his infuriating reasonableness, offers numbers and statistics and facts. He talks about “dead trees” and “environmental impacts” and “carbon footprints” and “landfills” and other things that may or may not be nonsense.

He claims to have no nostalgia. And yet. He speaks so prettily about the yearly Christmas-tree-put-together that happened every year after Thanksgiving. No nostalgia, my eye!

Anyway, I may have found the thing that satisfies us both.

This morning, while wasting time (again) on the stupid internets (again) I found this:

Pretty, yes? It’s also a swing!

It was designed by architect/designer/artist, Kyle Martin, and is made from recycled plywood, PET strapping, bolts and lights. You can look at it, sit in it, stack presents inside it, and, granted, if it was in my house, my son would have found some way to destroy it in all of nine minutes, I still love the idea of it. And so did the kids:

“Look at this!” I said to them, and they gathered around the laptop. (Because that’s what we do in this modern era. The way that our ancestors gathered around fires or smoking meat or wise ancient family members or bibles or whatever. We gather around oddly-glowing laptops that are probably giving us cancer. And that’s progress.)

Leo was rapt. “Let’s make that today,” he said.

“So,” DeeDee said. “You can put your presents in there, but before christmas you can keep whatever you want in there. Like dolls.”

“Or swords,” Leo said.

“Or blankets and pillows and books,” DeeDee said.

“Or swords,” Leo said. “And guns.”

“And snacks,” DeeDee insisted.

“Yeah,” Leo concurred, “snacks are good. So are swords.”

DeeDee cradled her forehead in her fingertips.

“How is it made?” Leo wanted to know. I showed him the diagrams and I explained what the materials were. He wrinkled his brow and listened.

“But if we do it,” he said slowly. “We can make it however we want.”

“We’ll add cushions,” DeeDee said.

“And a trap door,” Leo said, folding his hands together and bringing his knuckles to his lips. He smiled.

“Why would you need to have a trap door?” I asked. This was getting good.

“To trap Santa,” he said, as if was obvious.

“Why would you want to trap Santa?” DeeDee asked, but then the realization of it started to spread across her face as well. “I see,” she said. “Well….” DeeDee, of course is my planner. “We’ll need to make extra cookies.”

“Boxes and boxes,” Leo agreed.

“And we’ll need a few bags of sugar.” She shook her head. “No. More than a few. The whole basement.”

“Why will we need sugar?” I asked.

“For the reindeer,” she explained. “They can’t fly without Santa, so they’ll be stuck here.”

“On the roof!” Leo yelled.

“But,” I pressed. “If they’re on the roof, and if they can’t fly without Santa, and if Santa is stuck inside the Christmas tree, then how will we feed the reindeer? We can’t get the sugar on the roof.”

There was a long silence. Leo scratched his head.

“I KNOW!” He shouted. “A crane. Quick mom! Find out how much it costs to buy a crane.”

I googled it.

“But if the reindeer are living in the yard – once we get them down with the crane,” Deedee said reasonably, “they’re going to make a lot of poop.”

“Is reindeer poop sparkly?” Leo asked.

“No poop is sparkly,” DeeDee said scathingly.

“Well,” I said. “This is entirely y’all’s idea. If you want to trap Santa, then you have to accept the responsibility of the consequences. The reindeer will look to you to take care of them, and you’re obligated to do so.”

“We can’t just give them sugar?” Leo asked.

“No.”

He looked at the photograph of the recycled Christmas tree, an expression of longing and loss on his little face.

“Well,” he said. “I guess it would be greedy. To steal Santa.” He sighed. “Can we get our Christmas tree? Today, I mean?”

And so it begins.

I wish all of my stories were like this:

Seriously, you guys, I love this so hard.

I like the idea that stories are love letters, though not always the kind that we expect. There are stories like this one – a letter of love from one person to another person, and it is lovely. But there are also stories that are love letters to the books we loved or love letters to the people we used to be or love letters to the world. Some stories are love letters that the writer constructs, and other are built entirely by the reader. I think that all of my stories are love letters to the lonely child I used to be. Except the ones that I write for my children. Or the ones that I write to my husband. Or the ones I write to the world (or every world).

Perhaps it is all these things at once.

In any case, I love the simplicity of the drawings here. There is an immediacy to the storytelling and an urgency to the tenderness that I find terribly appealing.

Narrative is an amazing thing. We think of storytelling as a linguistic art, bound by word and syntax and the cadence of sound, but that’s not true. Story – as a structure, as an art form, as an organism, as a thing that feeds and grows and multiplies and thrives – is wholly separate from language. Language is the medium that we often use to get at the heart of the story, but it’s a blunt tool most of the time. Language winds around the story, it catches it like butterfly nets or fish hooks or cages, but language is not the story. The story is the story.

I was having a conversation with some other writers recently on Twitter about outlining. I am not an outliner – and when I have made some attempts at outlining, I ended up killing the book that I wanted to write.

(there are dead novels in my desk drawers. They are mummified corpses. They are partially created frankensteins, that will never draw breath.)

But I wonder – I really wonder – if a pictoral outline would be a more effective tool. One of the lovely things about that flip book is that the story felt unbound. It unfolded in my head; it wrote itself in my heart. Perhaps I need to try my hand at unbound outlining.

If anything else, I think I would enjoy it very much.

Eleven Things for Eleven-Eleven-Eleven

1.  My desk faces a window that looks out onto the back yard and the park and the creek and the path along the creek that follows the water as it leads to the waterfall and then the river and then the ocean and then the sky (in truth, the path does not lead that far, but in my mind it does. In my mind there is a pathway that leads from my body along the grass and up the myriad trails sliced by the rain. In my mind, I follow a road made of rain, cutting my feet on water). But I digress. There are eleven trees framed in the square of glass of my window (my window is made from the liquid left over from the white glow of burning sand. My window flows like water. When I was little, the sand burned and the blue water licked my feet and cooled them down. Burning sand and cold water was the language of summer. Later, when I was older, I burned my hand on boiling water and cooled the burn on the frosty glass of an uninsulated window. When we grow, the world contradicts itself – that which is wondrous becomes more wondrous, and that which is strange becomes more strange, but we lose the words to call it so. This is the language of adulthood, and it is a dull thing.) Ten of the eleven trees have lost their leaves. Their branches hold the sky. But one stubbornly hangs on, and it is gold, gold, gold, its colors brazen against the blue.

2. There was only one last piece of pumpkin bread, and I fell into grief. I set it on an orange, plastic plate – the kind that we bought from Ikea when the kids were small because they would not break, but the kids refused to eat on them, and instead used them as frisbees (and terrible frisbees they were. The oblong shape made for a haphazard wobble. They could not be aimed, flung, chucked or caught. The could only make a chaotic splash of color against the world, before smacking against the ceiling or wall or floor.) There were eleven walnuts in the slice. I counted them over and over. The meat of the nut slices cleanly – a smooth, slick face, a fleshy give against the teeth. I ate it slowly, crumb by nut by crumb. And this is how it is: the work of our hands, though it is dead, keeps us alive. We feed upon the dead to slow our decay, and in this way we are one with the world.

3. My son and daughter are out of school and are banned from the computer and banned from the television, and banned from all media, and are banned from my room while I work (on a computer, for the media, because incongruity is the soul of family life). I can hear them in the other room, along with the sound of bells. There are no bells in my house, and yet my house rings and rings and rings.

4. There is a document open in my computer -the copy edits of a novel that will inch its way towards the world on legs that I did not fashion and eyes that I did not form. Writers will say that they do not play god, but we lie. We play god all the time. We create worlds and people and plot arcs. It’s just that we really suck at it – or we don’t realize that the worlds we create will swiftly leave the realm of our control. That our worlds have free will – a will that is almost instantly subverted by readers and publishers and critics and e-readers. My child’s e-reader has converted my story into a series of ones and zeros. This is a language I do not speak – a world I did not create – and yet somehow my characters live in it. I cannot help them there. I cannot assist them. I created them, but they have strayed beyond my reach. I wonder if this is how god feels about us.

5. During the fall and winter, I make soup almost every day – sweet potato soup and tortellini soup and fifteen bean soup and lentil soup and white bean soup and beer cheese soup and tomato soup and mushroom soup. I have never, ever used a recipe. This is why I cannot go back to graduate school – and really is the reason why I left teaching way back when. I suck at following the rules.

6.  I also suck at numbers. I have no idea what my cell phone number is and it took me three years to learn my home phone number. However, I learned my husband’s cell number instantly. He didn’t even have to tell me twice. Maybe this is what it’s always like for married people – they are tattooed on our skin, tattooed in our eyes, tattooed in the muscle fibers of my heart. His name is etched on my bones.

7. When I was eleven, I went to camp and rode a horse named Champion. He was an asshole of a horse – rude, arrogant, and pompous. I was terrified of him. He bit my shoulder, leaving a bruise, and bucked me off onto the ground, leaving more bruises. My counselor asked me what I was doing to make him so angry. I said, “being alive.” They switched me to an ancient horse named Horace. He had no teeth.

8. I own eleven pairs of wool socks, though only three are currently without holes. I keep the pairs of socks with holes because I am a nostalgic person. I hang onto the memory of warm toes, the whisper of wool against the cold, wood floor. I hang onto them because I think that one day I will learn how to darn socks. This is a fantasy. I only ever received one D in my entire academic career. It was in Home Economics. My teacher wrote this about my locker caddy that I had sewn as my end-of-the-year project: “This locker caddy has no straight lines and no right angles. The hanger does not fit at the top. The pockets have holes. This would neither hang straight nor flat. It would not fit in a locker. It would not hold a comb or a brush or a scissors or a packet of pens. The mirror is not affixed straight. It does nothing that a locker caddy is supposed to do. But I love the color, and the butterfly applique was a nice touch. D-”

9. Last week I consumed eleven pieces of halloween candy in a single day – though not all at once. I am not proud of this. Please don’t tell my children.

10. When I was a park ranger, my husband and I staffed a station at Marmot Lake, which was thirty miles into the back country. I brought eleven books with me to keep me in words for the summer. Unfortunately, the first one was TOMMYKNOCKERS by Stephen King, which scared me so thoroughly, that I was put off books for a long time – as even a casual glance would send me into a fit of shivers. I did end up reading my copy of Borges’s Ficciones, and my copy of Moby Dick. The rest of the books I left in the ranger’s cache, for the next park employee who needed something to read. I did not, however, leave Tommyknockers. That I brought home and recycled.

11. I have eleven notebooks in my desk with the outlines and synopses and character descriptions and drawings and place descriptions and histories and bank notes and shopping lists and music lists and possible futures and every other tiny bit of background and complications and information for eleven different novels. I have not written these novels. I don’t know if I ever will.

On Loss.

Our family lost a beloved member this week – Ted’s only cousin’s husband. He was in his early forties, a stay-at-home dad, and a caregiver to his grandma-in-law. He was funny, interesting, a great storyteller, into all the wonderful geeky stuff that I’m into (he was, for example, the only person in the family with whom I often had serious discussions about Buffy and Firefly); he was wildly in love with his kids and his wife, a dedicated family man, fun at parties…. and then, in a flash, he was gone.

And we miss him.

And so I’ve had several discussions with the kids about death and dying, about what happens to us when we die, and about the fragility and preciousness of the fact of our breathing and the fact of our living. Particularly Leo, who was most fond of our cousin’s jokes, who felt the strongest connection to him, and therefore most keenly feels his loss.

Each moment is a miracle, I told them. Though I didn’t entirely believe it.

Death is a part of life; life is precious because it is brief. Again, my words felt hollow and without meaning. I hoped the kids didn’t notice.

Last night, I woke up at about midnight to find Leo standing next to my bed. He had his hand resting on my forehead.

“What are you doing up?” I asked.

“You put on the flower blanket,” Leo said, ignoring the question. “It’s beautiful.”

“I’m glad you like it,” I said. “What are you doing up?”

“I was just checking on you,” he said.

I told him I was fine, and I kissed him, gave him a glass of water and tucked him into bed.

At two a.m., he was back, his hand on my forehead.

“Hey,” I said sleepily.

“I’m just checking on you,” he said again.

“Well, I’m fine,” I said. “But I’m a bit sleepy.” And I walked him back to his bed and tucked him in.

Then at four thirty, I was suddenly pummeled by a riot of arms and legs, as Leo scrambled over my body and wedged himself between his dad and I. “I though you might be lonely,” he said.

“How can I ever be lonely with such a nice family,” I yawned as I carried him back to bed.

Then, this morning, after breakfast, he went outside and gathered leaves. Red leaves, brown leaves. Leaves the color of mustard, and the color of gold, and the color of roses. He put them in the sink, pushed in the plug and turned on the tap.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“They lost their water,” Leo said. “So I’m putting their water back in and then they’ll be green again.”

“Honey, that’s not how it works,” I said, turning off the faucet. “They will never be green. We’ll rake them into the garden beds, and they will become less leaf-like and more dirt-like. Then they will become food for the flowers and the hostas and the vegetables. But they won’t be leaves again. In the spring, the trees will turn gold, then pale green, then the buds will burst open, and the world will be filled with leaves. Leaves as far as you can see. And everything will be green.”

“So,” he said, thinking. “The leaves become flowers?”

“Sort of. Everything is recycled. Everything becomes everything.”

“So.” He paused for several breaths. “Is Kurby a flower? Or is he everything?”

I picked him up. “Baby,” I said. “Every atom in your body was once in a star. Did you know that? And that star formed, and burned, and exploded into dust, and that dust spun, and collected and congealed into planets and our sun and your body and every blessed thing on this whole beautiful earth. When we die, our atoms become flowers and dirt and leaves and wind and worms and bunny rabbits and fire and stars. And we become memory and thought and song and stories and spirit and Word and children of God. I don’t know where we go, honey. But I’ll know it when I see it.”

“Will I know it?” Leo said. He wound his arms around my neck and hung on tight.

“Yes, darling,” I said. “I do believe you will.”

Ghosts I Have Known

When I was in seventh grade, I graduated to having my own room. This was a big deal. I was the oldest of five kids in a house in which we often had friends from the neighborhood tearing through the halls, or cousins visiting, or even strangers wandering in because….well why the hell not, right? Privacy was a foreign concept. It simply didn’t exist.

So when my parents finished a couple rooms in the basement so my sister and I could have rooms of our own, I felt like I was in one of those families on t.v. – when a young lady could shout at her parents and slam the door in disgust. If I slammed my door of my room upstairs, it would still contain about six or seven eight-year-olds emptying the contents of my underwear drawer, which really kinda defeated the purpose.

So I moved downstairs.

Into the basement.

With the ghosts.

Actually, that last part isn’t true. There was only one ghost. A tiny old lady that I started to call Bertha. Though before I called her Bertha, I called her nothing. I called her fear. But fear has no name, and I had no language in which to speak it. I could only live with it.

In retrospect, my sightings of Bertha ended shortly after my parents had to remove the ancient octopus furnace on the other side of the plywood wall – a beast that moaned and sang every time it kicked into action, and that was, most likely, kicking out small amounts of carbon monoxide. Which would explain the visions.

Still. Bertha.

She wore a nubbly wool skirt that stopped demurely under her knees and a matching jacket and sensible shoes. She had thick stockings, blue gloves and a smart hat that framed her face.

And she was old. Impossibly old. Still she sat at the end of my bed night after night, her hands folded on her knees, her ankles crossed discretely, and a look of anticipation on her face. She watched me. All the time. She watched me when I crawled under the covers. She watched me while I went to the closet. She watched me when I got up to turn on another light. I slept with the lights on for three years. And for three years, Bertha watched.

And after a while, I came to anticipate her. Sometimes she would remove her gloves – tugging at one finger at a time – and lay them next to her as she sat on the bed. Her fingers were as gnarled as trees. Sometimes she would remove her hat, revealing her flour-white hair, braided tightly and wound like a snake around her small skull.

And after a while, I began to appreciate her.

And after a while, I began to love her.

Then the furnace died.

Then it was replaced.

And then Bertha went away. And my heart broke.

I didn’t see another ghost for a long time after that. The next time was well after high school and college when I lived in a rental house in Portland Oregon with my boyfriend and two other housemates. The house next door was owned by a guy who was a packrat – like the pathalogic kind. Every window was crammed with junk. The yard was an overgrown jungle of sapling trees and tangled shrubs. The mail man didn’t even venture up the narrow path that served as a walkway, so I assumed that no one lived there.

Then I saw a lady at the window. She was young – maybe twenty – in a floral dress. A different dress every day. I saw her every evening for two weeks, though never for very long. I just saw her standing by the back window, her hand on the glass and staring out. It was always dinner time, so I would notice her right when I started cooking, and notice that she was gone when it was time to put dinner on the table. I assumed she must be a relative. Maybe someone was finally getting the house back in order.

Then the ambulance came.

The house was so jammed with junk that they couldn’t make it through front door, and they certainly couldn’t get a stretcher to where the guy was. So they cut a hole through the wall.

The next day, a woman – about forty years old – was hauling junk out of the house. I introduced myself and asked how the guy was. She said it was a close call, but that he would be fine, and what a blessing it was that they had reconnected because she and her father had been estranged for many years.

“He had no one,” the lady said. “No one visited him.”

“Well, it seems like I saw someone in the window for the last few days. A young woman. One of your sisters, maybe?”

“I’m an only child,” the lady said, confused. “There’s no one else. And certainly no one has visited. They couldn’t. You can’t even get inside.”

“Well,” I said. “I saw someone. In the house. In the window of the back bedroom.”

She stared at me like I was crazy. “There’s no way that can be right,” she said. “The back bedroom is packed solid. Floor to ceiling. Not even a rat could get inside.”

She then went on to say that the only reason why she came by at all, and why she called the paramedics, was the fact that she had a strange message on her phone. “She left no name, no phone number, no contact information. Nothing. She just said, ‘He’ll die if you don’t see him. He’s dying right now.’ Thing is, that voice? It was my mother’s voice. It was exactly her voice. And she’s been dead since the Reagan administration.”

She showed me a picture of her parents on their wedding day.

Her mother wore a floral dress.

Years after that, we bought a HUD house in Minneapolis. It was in miserable shape – awful, chemical smells in the basement, nicotine stains on the walls and the windows, a kitchen giving way to rot, waterstains on the hardwood floors. I thought we were crazy for buying it, but my husband had a vision.

And he did a beautiful job. The basement became a comfortable family room with a fireplace, and the kitchen had hickory cabinets and reclaimed bowling alley lanes as countertops, and reclaimed wood replaced the stained sections on the floors and saturated paints covered the yellowed walls, and it was beautiful.

Also: haunted.

There was a young man in a plaid shirt that sometimes appeared in the corner of my eye. Only in the basement. He had dark brown hair and ripped jeans and a permanent scowl.

And he was sad.

Heartbreakingly sad.

When we first started removing the horrors in the basement, there was one place in the wall board where a section had caved in. It looked as though there had been a fight at one point and one person had shoved another person into the wall, leaving the imprint of their body – a cracked, broken sketch in a poisoned wall. I would touch the cracks and shiver. And the figure at the corner of my eye would flicker, hover, and vanish, leaving only an ache of sadness behind.

I thought that once we made the space beautiful, once we had cleared away the debris of the past, that maybe the ghost would go with it, but no such luck. He remained. And his sadness infected me like a virus.

Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore.

“YOU,” I said, when the image returned. It gave a sullen flicker, but it didn’t go away. “You’re bringing us down, man. You’re acting as if you’ve been trapped here, like we’re keeping you here. But we’re not. The house has moved on. The people who lived here moved on. And you gotta move on too. There are better places than this basement. And this basement is going to be a better place without your sadness stinking it up. Go. Go on and be happy. Right now.”

And I never saw him again.

And I missed him.

And I wondered who was hanging on to his memory, who was lingering in the echo of his sadness, who substituted sadness for longing, and longing for love. And I wondered if that person forgave that boy. Or if the boy forgave that person. In any case, I have no doubt that the image I saw was real. Certainly, I never saw it again after I told it to take a hike. But now, after all this time, I wonder what ghosts I hang on to. I wonder who I have kept tethered to this plane of existence when they had every right to go on. And I wonder if they’re pissed.

There is, I am convinced, a veil. We cross the veil and we do not return. But on this side, both living and dead are charged to wander. Both living and dead bear the weight of memory and the burden of heartbreak and the pain of love. But the dead are supposed to move on. And when they don’t, it’s because the living cannot let go. Because we are frightened and lonely. Because we irrationally fear death. Because we suck on stories like junkies. Because we are bastards. And the dead deserve better.

And perhaps that is why these celebrations of the dead pervade cultures and countries and tribes. Perhaps this is our chance to celebrate the dead, to cast their memories before burning candles and melting sugar and dry leaves and scatter them to the wind, setting them free.

Free the dead. Perhaps that shall be my Halloween slogan. Perhaps it should be yours.

Okay, fine, another recipe

I’m not really a post-recipes-on-the-blog sort of person. This is not to cast aspersions on those who do – and indeed, I enjoy a recipe-posting blog just as much as the next girl. In fact, if I’m hunched over my computer, late on a deadline, too stressed to get up and make myself a sandwich, sometimes reading the oft-heavily-photographed displays of somebody else’s culinary endeavors can be…..voyeuristically satisfying. Sorta like food porn. Sometimes I can do that instead of the actual sandwich.

(Who am I kidding? I will always opt for the sandwich. Always.)

So I posted a recipe a while back, and I felt that I was done. Finito. I did it once and I don’t ever need to do it again. (I suspect many a meth-head said similar words once upon a time.) This is not a recipe blog.

However, when the lovely Stephanie Pellegrin put out an impassioned plea on Twitter for a squash casserole recipe, I leaped into action. Unfortunately, not only do I not post recipes, I don’t really use them either. I’m a shoot-from-the-hip type. Even if I have a recipe, I typically go off-trail, so to speak. I’m a culinary bushwacker.

So I had to do some deep thinking in order to recreate how I make this dish. This is as close as I can get it.

Now, I don’t have any experience cooking casseroles. Growing up in Minnesota, I have had too many casseroles foisted upon my person in the potlucks of my youth. They appear in my fiction only – typically in some sort of sinister situation. They do not emerge from my kitchen and they certainly have no place on my table.

This is not a casserole.

It is, however, a rather satisfying use of a good butternut squash. It can be eaten warm, right from the oven, or room temperature, spooned on some chewy sour dough bread, or cold, tossed with some greens. You can serve it along side scrambled eggs, toss it on noodles or shovel it straight into your mouth while standing in the glow of the refrigerator at one a.m. because you were feeling peckish. It refrigerates nicely, and is FANTASTIC a day or two later.

This is what you’ll need:

1 good sized butternut squash, peeled, seeded and diced.
1/4 cup olive oil.
1/4 cup good maple syrup
a small bunch of fresh sage leaves, bruised and minced (DO NOT USE DRY AS IT WILL TASTE TERRIBLE. if you don’t have fresh, skip the sage)
One purple onion, sliced thin
One goodly amount of fresh arugula or other dark green (like two or three good-sized handfuls)
One can Cannelli beans (you could use navy beans I suppose, but they won’t be as good. Cannelli have that nice meaty texture and feel better in the mouth. Some other options would be butter beans or fava beans – but I haven’t tried either, so I can’t endorse them)
Lots of salt and pepper
1/2 lemon
a handful of toasted cashews, optional.

This is what you’ll do:
Toss the butternut squash in the maple syrup, oil, sage and salt and pepper until evenly coated. Turn it out into one or two baking pans – you want it in a single layer – and bake at 400 degrees for 40 minutes. The squash should turn fragrant and gooey and browned. If you like a richer caramel, then at the end of the 40 minutes, turn on the broiler for thirty seconds to get that rich color. BUT IF YOU DO THIS WATCH IT LIKE A FREAKING HAWK.

While the squash is cooking, put your onions in a dry saute pan on very low heat. Cover and cook for ten minutes, stirring and shaking occasionally. After ten minutes, increase the heat to medium and add two tablespoons of olive oil (you could add another teaspoon of maple syrup too, just to be fancy). Cook on medium heat for another five minutes. Add your greens and allow to wilt. Once the greens are ONLY BARELY WILTED, add your beans and salt and pepper.

Take your squash out of the oven, toss with the onions and beans and greens and squeeze the half lemon over the whole thing. Sprinkle with the cashews if you’re using them, or with another scant handful of raw greens and serve.

Now you can manipulate this recipe any way you want – add a chopped red bell pepper to the squash for some added color. Parsley or Thai basil might also be nice additions. Or whatever. You’ll probably come up with something way better than this. But I like this dish quite a bit, and I’d probably eat it every day were it not for the fact that my stinkin’ husband is some sort of insane squash hater. My kids, on the other hand LOVE this dish, and often demand several helpings.

More proof that our kids are ALWAYS better versions of ourselves.

Moses….no, Pharaoh. No, wait. Moses.

I have a secret confession:

I love driving carpool.

This is a strange thing for me to admit, because I actually hate driving. Like a lot. I find it uncomfortable and stressful and a huge waste of time. Also, my car smells like cheese.

But I love the carpool because the kids forget that I’m there half the time and I get to listen in to their ridiculous conversations. Like this:

Kid 1: Your bathroom has a bad word in it.

Kid 2: No it doesn’t. What word?

Kid 1: Hot.

Kid 2: That’s not a bad word.

Kid 1: It is when it’s the love kind of hot.

Kid 2: It’s not the love kind of hot. It’s the water kind of hot.

Kid 1: That’s just what your parents told you so you wouldn’t freak out.

Kid 2: MOM!

I didn’t answer. I was too busy laughing hysterically.

This morning, we were driving a little boy who lives up the street. I love this kid. He has flaming red hair and delicate features and a somber, quiet, deliberate way of speaking. He gentles my car in the morning. This morning, he was trying to teach my son a blessing that he had learned in his Hebrew classes at the JCC after school.

Leo, unfortunately, was a poor Hebrew student.

We were driving along, and while passing through the Highland business district in Saint Paul, I saw a car nearly crush a mother and her daughter as they crossed the road.

“JESUS MOTHER CHRIST!” I yelled, and then rolled down the window to yell some more. (I did not, I’d like to point out, use profanity. Though I surely would have done if the kids were not in the car.)

The little redhaired boy was fascinated.

“Kelly,” he said. “Are you Jewish?”

“No, darling, I’m not. Why do you ask?”

“My mom says Jewish people get to say ‘Jesus’ when they’re mad. She says it’s a perk.”

“Well,” I said. “Sometimes people see it as more of a guideline than a rule. And sometimes lots of rules go out the window when you see a car trying to kill a lady and her kid.”

The redhaired boy thought about this and nodded.

Leo was interested in the JCC and Cordelia was talking about her project on President Lincoln and American slavery.

The redhaired boy perked up.

“We learned about slavery too,” he said.

“Really?” I said. “What did you learn?”

“Well, it’s an evil story,” he said taking evident delight. “Because the people had to carry REALLY HEAVY ROCKS on their backs up the sides of these humungous rock piles FOR NO REASON, and then Moses, when he got mad, would whip them just because.”

I paused.

“You mean Pharaoh?”

“Right,” he said. “Pharaoh.”

“Oh, I know this story!” Leo yelled. “It has a pillar of fire!”

“There’s no pillar of fire, Leo,” the redhaired boy said. “Oh, wait. Yes there was. But it was later.”

“The pillar of fire is the best part,” Leo said.

“No, the best part is when Pharaoh sent plagues to Egypt. Like frogs. FROGS!”

“You mean Moses?”

“Right. Moses. And frogs. And then Harriet Tubman-”

“THAT’S THE WRONG STORY!” Cordelia yelled. She’s bossy about details. She’s a detail boss. “That was America, not Egypt!”

“Well,” the redhaired boy said thoughtfully, “slavery is bad no matter where it is. Even Antarctica.”

“That’s totally true,” I said.

“And then Moses….no, I mean Pharaoh. Actually, no, it was Moses. Wait…..which one got all his hair cut off?”

Bible literacy, ladies and gentlemen! There’s something for everyone!

Twin Cities Book Festival!

It’s today! All day long!

Check it out:

I’ll be teaching a workshop for younger children at 10 called “Who’s That Knocking At My Door?” – which is all about developing characters, and another one for older kids at 4 called “Low-Impact Storytelling”. I’m also doing a reading at 2:30.

Which means I’ll be there ALL DAY. So come and find me. I’ll be wandering around, likely spending too much money and wondering who will sneak out and have lunch with me. I’ll be the lady with the stripy socks. And the tall black boots.