Slightly modified version

I like this better. Am wiping out the last version.

Rain on Fresh Concrete



The sound of the downpour draws us
to the window like the circus come to town.
All that we had left outside is now initiated by rain.
True, much had been well on the road to rust and mold
anyhow. But the concrete, newly poured, was not yet set in its ways.
We rush the storm: wheel in the mixer, toss empty bags,
fling tarps over the new path. The rain never pauses for breath.
We are alone in our remorse. We, who celebrated
every square inch of adobe we buried with bricks and cement:
that much less mud the next time it pours.
Cover it up in lining, rebar, gravel, concrete.
Planter boxes on top filled with dirt.
Dirt in boxes over concrete over dirt.
The strata we make of our lives.

An old one, in honor of recent rains

Rain on Fresh Concrete

Darkroom in Samoa

(an old one, posted for Kate. And written for her, and Joe, to begin with)

Darkroom in Samoa

We swim through green abundance,
one last breath before the glade. Before the
schoolroom mausoleum, chalk dust and damp
cement. One last breath before the closet
where we inter ourselves.
There are chemicals used for this in the dark or
near dark; developer, stop bath, fixing bath, wash.
Acrid attacks on the senses, vinegar alchemies,
each in turn.
Faces surface from oddly bent buildings;
lovers; horizons. Not always what was meant,
yet each one making its own sense.
We inhale the fumes and the faces together,
exhale a sigh of the same.
Our nostrils still burn when we step out of the room
and raise ourselves from the dead.
We make hardcopies of a wasteland,
here where the breezes are lush,
where the air is ginger and palm.

First published in Disquieting Muses, February 2000
Quoted in full again in pifmagazine, May 2000, in their review of DM.

New Years Eve, Post the First

Like so many people, on December 31st I am prone to rank, rate and ruminate. I don't like to look back and analyze much in detail, but I do take stock. I look at where the accumulated year has brought me. I look at myself in this moment, now, and ponder where I'll be in the Nows to come.

I've just spent the last half hour or so chopping wood. We've been going through the knotty, hard, stubborn stumps that are all that are left of the free cord plus that we were lucky enough to get a couple of years ago. And so my lower back is itself knotted and I have a stinging callus starting on my left palm. But the blood blister from when I chopped with my wedding ring on a couple of weeks ago has finally healed, and the wheels in my head are spinning with the same inspiration that a brisk walk in the hills normally brings. It's one of those times when if I could forsake my family, the dinner the girls are so excitedly preparing, the groceries I need to buy and money I need to deposit at the bank, I would sit and write. And write. Poems, prose, emails, blog entries. I always get the desire to write on New Year's Eve.

But even as I type these very words, R comes in asking me to open a new jar of tomato sauce.

[Here the blogger weighs out whether to insert long suffering sigh or philosophical observation...]

More later.

Is there something my husband isn't telling me?

Yesterday, we received a Christmas box from my mother-in-law. It was addressed:

Mr. and Mrs. P*******
and Becky


Here are my questions:

Where has he been keeping this other wife?

Does the box contain fruitcake? (I've been afraid to look)
If it does, how long will fruitcake keep?

I guess this sort of thing is to be expected from my mother-in-law, the woman who once installed hospital wall colored pastel floral vertical blinds in our bedroom while we were away from our house one day. The woman who gave us a BRASS SADDLE BAG mailbox with "The Patrascu" engraved in it. In black. Come to think of it, maybe she's just confused about who lives at our house. Sometimes it's just one Patrascu. Sometimes it's D., the Mrs., and me. Apparently.


I may have told this story before, but for years we talked about "losing" the mailbox and then reporting to D's mom that it had been taken. I practiced saying incredulously, "Somebody stole our mailbox!" but I just knew I couldn't pull it off. It was only after a remodel when D. built a mail slot into our garage that we were able to justify taking down the saddlebag. I know she meant well. I'm sorry if I sound like an ingrate. But here's my point: there are some items that one should allow a person to pick out for his or herself. You know, items that display prominently by default at one's home.

Pics from the Company Party

You can tell from his hunched shoulders that D is not 100% happy. But for someone in tremendous back pain and medicated, I think he looks pretty good! I hadn't posted a pic of us here in forever, and thought I might as well take advantage of us being dressed up...








...and this is after I let my hair down,
although I didn't even get near the dance floor all night,
and in fact didn't even have a drop of alcohol either.
How tame is that?

The only benefit I can see

of blogging daily this month - or, I should say, of having an entry recorded for every day this month - is that I proved to myself that I could do so.

I might have stretched myself a little here or there, I might have gotten back into the grove of daily writing.

By thinking about something worthwhile to say every day, I realized both how much I get lost in trivia and logistics and how little I allow myself to sink down and contemplate and write about more meaningful stuff. So much for being a philosophy minor in college.

Honest review of monthly writing goals reached:
wrote 3 new poems, edited a couple of old ones
wrote most of one more chapter in the novel - the most I've added to it in probably a year

bah.
Onward, McDuff! (which allusion, by the way, I must have slightly wrong - because I cannot find the source for it online, only other allusions that must also be wrong. MacDuff doesn't get me any closer to the answer - suggestions, oh my 2 readers?)

Poetry

Ellen Bass' poem "If You Knew" was featured in Garrison Keillor The Writer's Almanac on 11/25/07. That's the second time in a week someone has pointed me to Keillor's page, and now I see from other poems that I like his selection, even if I don't always like the way he reads a poem.

The link to Ellen's web site, where she shares the poem from The Human Line, is here. But I hope she doesn't mind me quoting the poem itself. I consider it another way of pointing readers to her work.



If You Knew

What if you knew you'd be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line's crease.

When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn't signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won't say Thank you, I don't remember
they're going to die.

A friend told me she'd been with her aunt.
They'd just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt's powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon's spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?

Remind me again

Why I'm attempting to post daily this month?

Was it because I was feeling my life was too dull and I wanted to add something to my to-do list?

Yeah. That was probably it.


My schedule today, for my own future amusement:
4:07 drag myself out of bed by telling myself what a good person I am for getting up
5:00-1:13 work and all it entails
1:50-2:20 work out at gym (climbed around 100 flights of stairs while reading the beginning of a Connie Willis short story. I love Connie Willis)
2:30-3:00 go with D to his chiropractic appointment. See x-rays, the curvature, the results. Good news: no "underlying pathology" to worry about ("it's not a tumor!") Bad news: 60 weeks of appointments.
3:00-3:10 pick up S and one of her friends at school.
3:10-3:30 vacuum classroom
3:40-6:00 supervise playdate, make dinner (ratatouille from the Moosewood cookbook. My favorite)
6:00-6:30 take other child home, pick up R from her playdate, take R to math club
6:40-7:20 kill time with S at the outlet mall. Don't know what I was thinking. It only ended with bitterness because we walked away without buying her anything. Her. Life. Is. So. Hard. Sometimes.
7:30-8:00 pick up R at math club, talk to math teacher. He thinks she's extremely bright. Always nice to hear that from a teacher who is himself brilliant.
8:00-9:15 come home, take care of incapacitated husband and wound up children. Get all to bed.

D. had an acupuncture appointment at 5:00 and class at 6:00 (a quiz he couldn't miss), and maybe because of that or the above schedule, the rest of the night went like this:

9:16 realize that we COMPLETELY MISSED a rehearsal for S for the Nutcracker. Not good. Especially so close to the performance. I called the studio & left a message right away apologizing, and I'll probably call again today and grovel. I have advanced permission to use the "my husband is in so much pain and going to so many Dr. appointments it distracted me from my focus on the rehearsal schedule and it won't happen again" excuse. Fortunately, it's not like she's dancing the part of Clara this year or anything.

9:18-10:15 fret over what a failure I am for missing the rehearsal. Let dog out. Cover birds. Lock doors. Let dog in. Fret some more. Tell myself to lighten up on myself. Rationalize. Feel bad that I didn't write. Tell myself I'll get up extra early to wash the dishes and write. Recognize that this is probably a lie I am telling myself. Fret over lying to myself.

It's not a pretty picture, is it? But it's sometimes hard to jump off our treadmills, and I've been running on this one for a while, chewing the worry cud for years.

On a lighter and much more vain and shallow note, I've just bought new pants and they're 2 sizes smaller than what I was wearing a year ago. And they fit. Comfortably. I'm now smaller than I've been since I was 15, and have much more strength and tone to boot. Couldn't have done it without the support group I have, though. Kudos to them.

Currently listening to

The Stolen Child by Keith Donohue. It's a story about changelings. In Donohue's page describing the creatures, I'm reminded of myself as a child. I don't know that I was especially frightened of adults (apart from my terror over possibly making a mistake, heaven forbid). But my favorite thing to do (and therapists could have a field day with this) was to hide away in small spaces, like cupboards or under desks. Or to read. Or, ideally, do both at the same time. I also loved the woods, and was certain until I was in my mid-twenties that my ideal home would be a small house somewhere with trees on all sides. Ideally Oak, the Druid's tree, and Rowan, with its magical ability to fend of evil. Here's part of what Donohue says about hobgoblins:

they are hypersensitive; they can squeeze into small spaces; they are all we used to be. Hiding in the woods, burrowing under the library, holding on to their mythical nature, they are as frightened of us, as we are of them.

The book is interesting, and narrated fairly well, with alternating narrators taking the chapters that are told by the point of view of the stolen child and the changeling who took his place. But it's hard to say how much it would grip me if I were reading it and not listening to it. I've become so critical lately. No movies or books seem perfect enough. It probably reflects some deeply hidden dissatisfaction with my life or myself. Which makes me want to crawl into a cabinet, actually.

Consumerism Countdown

Christmas shopping.

I haven’t done any yet. Zilch. Zero. Zip.

And Saturday, according to the calendars I’ve been reading lately, is December first. Golly!

Usually, because of my controlling nature, adherence to traditional gender roles, and tendency to be a martyr, I do the majority of the Christmas shopping. But some years, D and I tackle the holidays together. This year promises to be one of those collaborative efforts, provided D has a diagnosis and better treatment for his back and isn’t in a fog of pain killers. (Actually, maybe one is better able to pick out presents in a freer, less inhibited manner, when one has had a little percocet...)

One year, when I was in college and before our year-long Break Up (after which we got back together again better, stronger, wiser) during the brief time when D and I (chastely, I might note) shared an apartment with a couple of other young adults our age, we made all of our presents out of gingerbread. We made gingerbread Victorians for the three people we knew who lived in Victorian houses. We made log cabins. We made classic gingerbread houses. We made our D&D playing friend a long sword out of gingerbread. And true to form, the piece de resistance (and I am not making this up) was a gingerbread Millennium Falcon. Ah, those were the good old geekier-than-thou days.

One year after we were married but when we were still broke, we made, with mixed success, about thirty candles for people on our lists. And yes, some of them were melted down from other candles we already owned. We were that broke.

This year, I may follow through with my annual threat to just get everyone a potholder in the interest of fairness and frugality (not to mention practicality). But the reality is, at some point, I’ll make a heroic effort to get everyone something good-enough-if-not-perfect, and will undoubtedly over-compensate in some areas and fall short in others, and do too much of it all last minute.

At least I can count on help from D again, as I can every year, with the Christmas cards. I just have to find or take the right Pictures of the Girls to send out. And I have the names and addresses of new relatives to add to the list – hooray!

Day of nonrest

The upside to working a Sunday is how much more productive I am once I come home; I know I have only a few hours to accomplish whatever else (like washing the last of the pans and filing papers in the office) I might want to accomplish over the weekend.

After we did work, homework, chores, the girls and I brought the bunnies in and let them play in the living room. It's hard to tell when a rabbit is truly happy, but they seemed to have fun.

Saturday, and Done with the Cooking

This morning I dropped off R. at the riding clinic, which was taught by an Olympic trainer. I delivered her to the barn just after 7am. It was 27 degrees outside. Brrrr!

I went to the gym (Dude. I had seconds and pie Thursday), and then got today's bird in the oven. The mangling and wrestling and negotiating that goes on between me and still-partially-frozen turkeys every year makes me feel like I'm living an episode of I Love Lucy. Today, for example, I spent twenty minutes running water into the cavity of the bird trying to defrost the ice that was holding its neck in place, periodically pulling and tugging at the neck in the hopes of yanking it free. The recipe I use calls for rubbing a special herb butter under the skin of the breast, and if that isn't a weird sensation, I might as well start delivering babies for fun.

D's dad came over for the dinner (as opposed to supper), and I picked up R and we all ate the traditional two-hours-later-than-I-think-the-turkey-will-be-done. We're having a friend of R's over for the night, as an act of compassion for a fellow human being in difficult circumstances. (Her 10-year-old brother has 4 friends staying the night for his birthday.) R had a great time at the clinic, and by all accounts, did very well with the flatwork and jumping. She shines after she's had time with horses. No amount of dirt and grime and horse drool on her shoulders takes away from how happy she looks after she's cantered a few jumps.

D's back is still hurting, but Monday he'll see a Dr. and a chiropractor about it, and I'm starting to preach P.T. I can't imagine how frustrating this is for him, and my heart again goes out to those folks (including the ones near and dear to me) who are living with chronic pain. It takes superhuman strength and grace to bear that kind of load.


...
Off to supervise the night-time routine, but I can't leave without wishing Kate a very happy birthday. Celebrate, K!

The day between

This is the day between two Thanksgiving meals, where I worked 7-3 then did errands and chores and spent the evening watching a fair-to-middling movie with my family. Sometimes what makes quality time with D and the kids is just that it's downtime, and we're together.

Having said that, I'm also so grateful to them for letting me dash off to the gym while they had dinner without me, because I so needed the workout!

Was up way way too late tonight cooking for tomorrow, and tomorrow I'll be up very early to take R to a riding clinic, and then I'll focus on getting the next turkey in the oven. With any luck, I'll manage to work on my poetry too, somewhere in there...

Grateful

I started to write out a Thanksgiving list - the expected "what I'm thankful for."
The short list: Everything
The details:
life on this planet, at this place & in this time
the people I'm sharing that time with: my husband,
my daughters, the rest of my family - relatives by upbringing, birth and marriage
my few but valued friends
my health - physical, emotional, mental (holding steady at the moment)
my home - even when it's at its cluttered worst, it's a roof over my head and a blessing

but all that seemed so EXPECTED, that I didn't want to put it down.

And I thought about writing the MENU from today's meal (just to impress you all, because there were more different gourmet dishes than there were diners), but that, too, seemed contrived.

So I'm just saying that it's a day-after retro-post, I don't have enough time to say anything profound because of clamoring children, and for those of you who are disappointed, I say if you're relying on me for entertainment or enlightenment, you should should consider alternatives. At least for the next few days of cooking, serving, cleaning, working, repeat.

The downside to aquarium ownership

The day was unremarkable, but the evening was marked by the loss of our youngest and (at the time of his demise) largest koi, Nanashi. His name meant "nameless" or "anonymous," and you would think that it's silly to be sad about the loss of a fish (especially compared to the loss of a dog or cat, as friends who have recently suffered in that way can attest). But we got him when he was about 2" long, and he was 18" long when he died, and we're mourning all the same. It's a little different when the fish are as big as a cat, and are hand-fed every morning in 400 gallon tank in your living room.

Nanashi is the gold & white fellow (or gal, it's hard to tell with koi) in the pictures from February below. We still have the light orange Lao Tsu, our elder koi, and the silver Yosho, but whatever suddenly affected Nanashi in the tank water was affecting them too, which meant a 200+ gallon water change tonight in the hopes of saving everyone else. They're all fine as of now, and we may never know what happened. It wasn't old age, though - koi can live 100 to 200 years, apparently, if kept right. Apparently, a pond in Japan is the best method, so we're already handicapped with our tank in northern California. But D does an amazing job with keeping everything running well, and it's hard to realize that one's best efforts can mean nothing in the face of some unknown agent of mortality.

























Post-script - those 18" are body only and don't include the tail, probably another 3" or more. And he was only 2 years old....

Consumerism and Mortality

Watching the ebb & flow of people through Costco today while I waited for new tires made me think about death, about how we're all going to die and buying things is not so much life-affirming as death-denying.

Apparently my negative feelings about shopping go deeper than I thought. There's a poem in there. I'm working on it.

Sick child went to school (well enough), well child had an all-day play date. I cleaned the birdcage, bought - more shopping! - most of what I still needed for tomorrow and Saturday (2 dinners again this year). And I drove R's classmates to the ballroom dance class last night although R herself didn't go. After I got back at 8:45 I made a frantic but incomplete attempt to clean the house for today's babysitter. I'm comforted by the fact that I've seen said babysitter's bedroom and can only hope that she doesn't hold others to standards of tidiness that are higher than those to which she holds herself.

And the bird cage waits one more day

But I promise I'll clean it out tomorrow. Honest. Not that the parakeets seem to mind, but I do.

I did manage to move the hutch and all the antique glasses (my great-grandmother's) from its temporary wall to it's original wall, now that the pantry piece of the remodel work is done.

Also cared for the sick child, met with the well child's teacher for a conference, made copious cups of tea and soup, and ferried the Little Tea to Nutcracker rehearsal. Not necessarily in that order.

Cursed dusk and the demise of energy

The good news is that after one acupuncture session, D. is much, much better (and to my relief off the questionably effective pain pills). The bad news is that R. is now sick. She missed school Friday - math assignment due, Spanish quiz, but I'm sure that has nothing to do with it - and rallied over the weekend enough that against my better maternal judgment I let her go to the barn & have her riding lesson today. Now she's miserable with a fever and bad sore throat and we have only ourselves to blame. I only hope she'll make it to school tomorrow.

S is fine and I'm fine. In fact, I was buzzing with energy and even feeling downright inspired most of the day, craving a top-to-bottom housecleaning binge after running up to R's school for my turn to clean her classroom. (The truth is, I think I made regular coffee instead of decaf by mistake. After a couple of months of decaf, it's amazing how optimistic and motivated 10 ounces of the real stuff can make me.)

I got quite a bit done - S and I cleaned out the rabbit hutch, I swept and raked the leaves off the front yard, did dishes, tidied in general. But sure enough, as the day grew darker and the hour later, I felt myself incapable of anything but getting the girls to bed (lots of soup and then tea for R) and crashing myself. So sad. If ONLY I could maintain the momentum I feel in the afternoon past 6pm, I could get SO MUCH done. Coffee at 4pm would probably do the trick, but that's a slippery slope for me, and best left alone. Besides, on the occasions when I do get a second wind, I'm often up to 10:30 or later, and back to the less-than-five-hours-of-sleep dilemma. As Pooh would say, "Oh, bother."

In the groove

Today, I wrote for about 3 hours: an hour and a half in two different cafes with two different sets of writerly companions: a duo of Nanowrimo novelists, and then another third of my writer's group. This creativity is a state of mind, and I just don't let myself go into that dreamy what-if, play it out, mark it down mode often enough. It's not magic. It's just work, and not always hard work at that.