Monday, January 29, 2007

A Matter of Degrees

It's been almost a month since my last post and I don't know why I've chosen now to get back on board. I have ten minutes before I meet a client and have no idea what I'm even here to write. The two, maybe three, readers I may have collected in this blog universe have probably given up hope of ever seeing anything new here.

It's been cold and busy and my head has been somewhat dormant. I collect things throughout the day and shape them, like bread dough or playdough, into paragraphs that scatter like dust bunnies once nighttime falls. I formulate little things to write about......like, when the temperature drops to fifteen below.... the way the tires sound on snow that frozen or the way your lungs feel like freezing metal when you breathe. I wanted to write about the night that my cow, Patience, gave me a kick in the head and knocked me over and made me cry. I've been wanting to write about my daughter's new ambition to be an animal right's activist.

But I think when it's this cold, I get all caught up in simply breathing. I drink hot water with lemon because when I drink the well water my innards shake with cold. The thirty yards from the house to the car and then from the car to work are intense ventures. I'm just waiting for the mercury to get above zero so I can go buy those new cross country boots and get the fuck outside. My house is full of furballs because I don't dare leave my mangy old farm dogs out in this weather for any length of time. B and I have been dreaming of islands and surfboards and sunshine...planning our vacation this summer. Crafting the tunnel through which we'll navigate our way past winter.

And yet it's so beautiful. So quiet.
Everything is white and sparkles.
The stillness beats all.

Friday, January 05, 2007

More Highway Lines


Heading back to the hometown this afternoon after I pick Ella up from school. The car is packed, the christmas presents are wrapped, and the cell phone is charged. It takes seven hours to get there, maybe a bit more with the two or so stops we make along the way. For some reason, Ella is particularly drawn to a specific rest stop on the New York Thru-Way. It's one of those gargantuan stops that only sell Mobile gas. I'm not a big fan or advocate of anything big and conglomerate but if I am going to drink a cup of coffee on the drive, I'm as guilty as the next one for being a patron of Starbucks. And this gargantuan stop has a Starbucks. It also has an Elby's Big Boy, TCBY, Wendy's and a great sunglass stand. I don't know why she prefers this stop to others. There's a great little deli we used to go to in Saratoga and a little breakfast joint in Glenns Falls but she prefers the box store rest stop. The corporate toilet. Life's little pleasures.
It will be a quick trip to the parent's house. My mom is turning sixty on Sunday. My dad will follow suit soon in March. They've known eachother since elementary school, dated in fourth grade (whatever that means when you're nine years old....) and grew up in relatively the same neighborhood. Their lives are so very intertwined at this stage of the game that it's nearly impossible to imagine one without the other. That's not to say it's all roses. I think I've mentioned in prior posts how the dynamic goes. It's not easy. My mom is fairly high strung, hyper-senstive and controlling. If my dad's blood pressure were any lower than it is now, he'd probably slip into a coma. He doesn't say much, has a cute little chuckle, a mustache and levels at 5'2". I'm an inch taller than the both of them.
My mom is a Capricorn redhead who grew enormous boobs by fifth grade and used to beat up Gracey, the neighboorhood girl who used to taunt her younger brother and sister. My dad used to cyphon gasoline out of cars with his buddies and steal returnables to cash in for beer in junior high. He got sent home in the second grade with a note from his teacher, asking if he had a bladder problem because he was asking to go to the bathroom so often. He was smoking cigarettes. (which may explain the lack of height?)
My mom and her mother (now 87 years old) are not speaking to eachother right now. My mom is the only sibling who still lives in the hometown with her mother and I know the lack of distance has made it hard for them. They're such different people. My grandmother is active and independent. When my pop went off to WWII in 1939, my nan got bored without him and enlisted. She's just like that. She does what she wants to, when she wants to and that tendency has only been exacerbated with old age. My mom has always acted out of obligation, family priority and guilt. She has a golden heart but in making so many sacrifices (most of them unnecessary) she's acquired a steely kind of resentment for my grandmother. Their issues are decades old and won't likely be resolved within my nan's lifetime.
It's always a ride for me to go back home. To walk back through the tunnel of family history, to look back on my own tunnel and see where the grass has grown over the cement walkways and then where the cement is still drying. Every time I go home, it's like I lean over that wet cement and leave my handprint. The little girl elongates, expands her vocabulary, shifts her perspective. I find I'm becoming the adult in conflicts, the peace-keeper. The only one in the family who understands what an "I-statement" is. By leaving, I'm able to look at my mother as a woman. A human. Not the mother who still desperately holds onto that role. By coming home, I'm able to put it all into practice. The more handprints I leave in the cement, the better the practice gets.
I grew up thinking one thing about my grandmother and now, as an adult, I see otherwise. When I have conflict with my own mom, I don't share it with Ella. Her relationship with my mom is not my relationship. My mom is not the same person to her that she is to me and for that, I'm grateful. It's allowed to me step back and see the value in not tainting another's perspective. I'm sure I will, at some point throughout the weekend, play mediator. I hope I can do it gracefully.
Family waters are thick. Kind of like cement. I think I'll wear my mudboots.

Fair Trade



I used to spend an exorbitant amount of time writing in diners and coffee shops. This was back before motherhood, before I kept jobs longer than the average three-month stretch. This was before barn chores and a mortgage and before I went grocery shopping weekly at the same grocery store and even went so far as to write lists so as not to forget basic household favorites. This was before the household.


At that time, the bottomless cup of coffee still existed. Maybe it was because the kind of places I frequented didn't sell organic, fair-trade coffees. Maybe it was because my favorite place was a silver diner called Palooka Joe's and it's patrons were mostly the down and outs in the dowtown area. I would sit at the bar sometimes learning sign language from Michael, my favorite down and out. He had big aluminum baskets on both ends of his bicycle, worked odd jobs for money and had no sense of hearing. For a long time, our exchanges consisted of words cluttered on paper placemats but I had had a deaf boyfriend in high school and so had learned the ESL alphabet. It was slow communication but I had time and was open and he was homeless and weathered. He loved the opportunity to sit with a young pretty girl and I.... I just needed substance. I was desperately searching for anything other than the hum-drum, mundane reality of middle class white America and all that came with that.


In the closet in the guest room of our 150 year old, crooked farmhouse is a black and purple bag, stuffed to the top with fat, little CVS spiral-bound notebooks. None of them are dated, there are likely more than a dozen, and in order to put them in any kind of sequence I would have to sit down and force myself to read through them. Force myself back into that time in my life. I always tell myself that someday I will put myself to the task. But it's been more than a decade since those fat, little spiral bound notebooks and more than a decade of healing old wounds. My new journals are formatted differently. I've begun to think in full sentences, starting combing my hair, stopped taking so many drugs and gave birth to new muse.


But I do miss my homeless friends. I miss Benjamin, who, instead of introducing himself right off, walked up to my table at a little downtown deli and asked me if I was writing love letters in those notebooks. I told him that I didn't write love letters and conceded that I was writing poetry (something I rarely admitted at that time in my life). He took a deep breath, grinned, and proceeded to recite the Raven line by line. A few minutes into his performance, he held up one finger, turned around and ordered a cup of coffee and came back to my table and asked if he might join me. The friendship was sealed already but he gave me more of the Raven, his life story and there would be days to come where we would meet up on the square and I would play harmonica while he would play a borrowed guitar. Oftentimes, the other old buddies would be nearby playing cards or checkers on the stone benches.


Back then, I was dodging the ghosts of a love gone bad and a given up pregnancy. I was medicating myself with lots of weed, a little speed, alot of booze and music and sex and dancing. I've always thought of those years as the golden years, as the Great Distraction. I was dancing out there on the very thin limbs of my own branches. Dreaming of houses with no windows, no roofs, and many rooms. Dreaming of little girls that might have been my own. I was writing the story of my life in scattered sentences over drip coffee, good company and fried eggs. And late at night, after the bands had packed up, I'd walk barefoot into the dark alleys to find my old buddies on some abandoned porch and they'd scold me for wearing no shoes as I'd sit there on the broken step pulling a sliver of glass out of the heel of my foot. I'd loan them smokes. They'd loan me their stories. It seemed a very fair trade.


I'm sitting here now in a coffee shop in a prime tourist New England town, a couple of blocks from where I work. In the place of a fat, little notebook or a placemat, I have my old, slow laptop. I've graduated from see-through coffee to a chai latte and I'm not stoned. There are no homeless people reciting poetry to me, this is not a silver diner and I am no longer in an old blue-collar mining town. Just some nice tables and chairs and the constant drone of the espresso machine.


My fingers move much faster on a keyboard than they do with a pen and paper and I think now in full sentences. My attempts at making sense of my life come easier and my ghosts are so much more transparent. I shake their hands now, pull up a chair and offer to buy them all a cup of coffee.