What did I know about anything?

I was in Spokane this past weekend, visiting with Henry for Family Weekend at his university. It was fall in Spokane, and the colors were brilliant.

I don't know what I felt -- joy, certainly, in seeing my son again, but there was something else, something faint and melancholy and in-between.

You know very well what it is. Was. That lonely feeling. There's not much time between now and then. I remember what it felt like, to be so new.

The hotel where I stayed had paper-thin walls. I drifted toward them in the morning, a ghost with a toothbrush I held still in my mouth, breath held, the lovers on the other side breath less.

It only takes a few trees on fire, sun-dappled leaves, just so, to make me eighteen again and wistful. The word hesitant. The word restless. The word yearn.

I'm a mother now, watching my son move forward.

Here's a poem that I can't get out of my mind.


The Five Spot

There’s always a lesson to be learned,
whether in a hotel bar
or over tea in a teahouse,
no matter which way it goes,
for you or against,
what you want to hear or what you don’t.

Seeing Roland Kirk, for example,
with two then three saxophones
in his mouth at once
and a kazoo, no less,
hanging from his neck at the ready.

Even in my youth I saw
this not as a lesson in keeping busy
with one thing or another,
but as a joyous impossible lesson
in how to do it all at once,

pleasing and displeasing yourself
with harmony here and discord there.
But what else did I know
as the waitress lit the candle
on my round table in the dark?
What did I know about anything?

Billy Collins

Fleeing to Poetry and ...

This weekend I'm determined to not be swept away by all the terrible stuff going down in our country. I'm fleeing, actually, to poetry and other ecstatic things.



I'm listening to the first of this intriguing series on the Poetry Foundation website called A Change of World.




I'm reading Emma Cline's novel The Girls. It's a bit creepy, but to be honest, I haven't been able to stick with a novel in months.

I'm also into this poem:

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun - 

In Corners - till a Day 

The Owner passed - identified -

And carried Me away -

And now We roam in Sovreign Woods -

And now We hunt the Doe -

And every time I speak for Him

The Mountains straight reply -

And do I smile, such cordial light

Opon the Valley glow -

It is as a Vesuvian face

Had let it’s pleasure through -

And when at Night - Our good Day done -

I guard My Master’s Head -

’Tis better than the Eider Duck’s

Deep Pillow - to have shared -

To foe of His - I’m deadly foe -

None stir the second time -

On whom I lay a Yellow Eye -

Or an emphatic Thumb -

Though I than He - may longer live

He longer must - than I -

For I have but the power to kill,

Without - the power to die -

Emily Dickinson

and listening to this poem by Billy Collins which, whether you look at it as a seduction of Emily's mind or body, is terribly sexy and just sets a good tone or tune or --- (as Emily would do)

Readers, what are ya'll doing this weekend?

The Enigma of Glass

CHRISTMAS SPARROW

by Billy Collins

The first thing I heard this morning
was a rapid flapping sound, soft, insistent—

wings against glass as it turned out
downstairs when I saw the small bird
rioting in the frame of a high window,
trying to hurl itself through
the enigma of glass into the spacious light.

Then a noise in the throat of the cat
who was hunkered on the rug
told me how the bird had gotten inside,
carried in the cold night
through the flap of a basement door,
and later released from the soft grip of teeth.

On a chair, I trapped its pulsations
in a shirt and got it to the door,
so weightless it seemed
to have vanished into the nest of cloth.

But outside, when I uncupped my hands,
it burst into its element,
dipping over the dormant garden
in a spasm of wingbeats
then disappeared over a row of tall hemlocks.

For the rest of the day,
I could feel its wild thrumming
against my palms as I wondered about
the hours it must have spent
pent in the shadows of that room,
hidden in the spiky branches
of our decorated tree, breathing there
among the metallic angels, ceramic apples, stars of yarn,
its eyes open, like mine as I lie in bed tonight
picturing this rare, lucky sparrow
tucked into a holly bush now,
a light snow tumbling through the windless dark.

Merry Christmas Eve! 

And thank you, Leslie, for this poem!

Where've You Been? and My Marijuana.com Link-A-Rama

Berkeley, CA

I flew up to the San Francisco area for the weekend and spent some wonderful time with one of my oldest and best friends, Jody. We sat in her kitchen for hours talking and laughing so hard that I now feel positively purged of any bitterness, fatigue, confusion, despair, encroaching old age, neuroticism,  dedicated overthinking, anxiety, sadness and melancholy. What we talked about is entirely private, but Reader: Laughter.

On Sunday night we met Sally and Lisa in Berkeley, ate a delightful dinner (my favorite mussels and fries, along with a cocktail made with bourbon and lemon and jalapeno) and then went to Zellerbach Hall to hear Billy Collins and Aimee Mann do a really interesting and unique performance of music and poetry. It was the first time that I'd ever been to Berkeley and quite thrilling. I've long held fantasies of going to school there and am a bit gobsmacked by its hippie history. I didn't really get a chance to see much of it, but I loved the name of that bookstore and my favorite site was a man sitting on the street, cross-legged with a MacBook on his lap that was plugged into the building behind him. His belongings appeared to be scattered around him, including clothes and toiletries and foil-covered food containers. I have no idea whether he was a student, homeless or just a Berkeley hippie of the twenty-first century.

What else?

The Virgin terminal at the San Francisco airport is exactly what I imagined the future to look like when I was a child. Really. Exactly.




This is my last week at Marijuana.com, so I'm tying things up and will have a new interview posted at some point. Below you'll see a list of the articles, features and interviews that I did while at Marijuana.com -- such a great opportunity while it lasted, and a somewhat devastating and certainly unexpected end. I don't feel free to discuss those details, but it's Big Business, ya'll. Marijuana is officially Big Business, and you know how many of us who frequent a moon, worn as if it had been a shell feel about that:

Better go down upon your marrow-bones   

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones   

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;   

For to articulate sweet sounds together 

Is to work harder than all these, and yet   

Be thought an idler by the noisy set 

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen   

The martyrs call the world.’ 

That's a bit of Adam's Curse by William Butler Yeats, the great Irish poet. It's one of my favorite poems and the reason for the blog's rather cumbersome title. Check it out here if you need diversion, but please come back and read the next line.





I am now officially LOOKING FOR A NEW JOB.

Did you hear that?

I am now officially LOOKING FOR A NEW JOB.

Are you Ten Thousands Minds On Fire? If you send me a lead, I will be of service to you in some significant way.


Cannabis Medicine and Autism: An Interview with Ana Maria Abba
How to Talk to Your Teenager About Marijuana: An Interview with Dr. Bonni Goldstein
Vaccination Injury, Seizures and Cannabis Medicine: An Interview with Georgia Smithson
The Literal Beating Heart
Keeping Monkey Neurons on Their Toes: An Interview with Allison Jackson
Purple Day
The Wisdom in the Room: A Cannabis Community for Women
Cannabis as Totem and Connector: An Interview with Allison Ray Benavides
A Passionate Mother's Reluctant Path to Lobbying
The Beginning - March 8, 1995
Making THCa At Home: An Interview with a Mother

An Espresso

We all need a pick-me-up.

An em dash.

—

My loud vernacular horn

My oldest Christmas ornament is an owl in a globe from 1971. In any given moment, my house, all decorated for the holidays, can look charming or like some hellish year-round Christmas shop.

I read a greeting card today that said, Any given moment you can change your life. You just have to be there.

I'm here.

So far, the places where some of my friends are going for Christmas are Hawaii, Cambodia, New York City, Park City, San Francisco, Mexico and Chicago. With the possible exception of Hawaii, I don't really envy anyone travelling during the holidays. When I feel a ping of jealousy that ratchets up to resentment, I read Billy Collins' poem Consolation. That might be because we've got Sophie to contend with, and the thought of travel anywhere without her is way more difficult than travel with her. Does that make sense?

My sisters and their families are going to my parents' house in Atlanta.   One of my sisters asked whether I was sad about not being able to go "home" for Christmas, and I didn't quite know how to answer that. I think the place that used to be sad is now numb. I guess I'm sad that our family can never pick up and go anywhere, to tell you the truth, and even if we were willing to suspend what remnants of sanity we have left and take Sophie on a cross-country trip, it'd be illegal to take her medicine to Georgia. And I don't wish that I lived closer to home because that would mean -- well -- Georgia. In an ideal world, Sophie would still be who she is, difficult to travel with, but everyone would come here to see us.

So, while I'm sure I'll miss a good time with the relatives, I love a Christmas in my own sometimes charming and sometimes hellish Christmas-shop home.

How much better to command the modern precinct of home
than to be dwarfed by pillar, arch and basilica.


Like Virginia Woolfe said, nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy.

Click and Read and Listen

It was Oliver that pointed to the billboard that you see above and noted the grafitti on it. What the hell? the three of us thought, quite rightfully. Even the Special Olympics isn't immune to slur, evidently. Because it's all too much sometimes, why don't we talk about books or things that we're listening to? Have you heard about Serial? It's a podcast produced by Ira Glass of This American Life, and it's utterly addictive. My eons and aeons in the car on the Ventura Highway have never been more enjoyable. It helps, too, when the skies are a brilliant blue, a near-full moon rises and the clouds are a bank of fluff.

Even Beverly Hills, that absurd suburb of luxury cars, plastic surgery, boutiques and paparazzi looks downright cheerful if you're listening to a murder mystery in your sexy Mazda.

Yes, that's Santa and his raindeer flying right over Wilshire Blvd. Or do you like this shot better?

I haven't been too entertaining over the last few days, and if I've offended anyone with my rants -- well -- I won't apologize because it's nothing personal. I'm just trying -- albeit in a very public way -- to work through a lot of conflict, both external and internal.

What are you reading? I'm immersed in Tana French's Into the Woods, recommended to me by the great writer Brittany of Vesuvius at Home fame and fortune. If you haven't read her blog or book, you have no idea what you're missing. Despite my aversion to the detective/mystery genre, I so respect Brittany that I dutifully downloaded the Tana French, and you know what? I really, really like it. That doesn't mean you should now tell me to try those Swedish detective series. I tried Henning Menkell and couldn't stomach it. Don't get me started on those bestsellers that were made into movies, about rape and murder or being skinned. I know, I know, I know. They're very well written. Hated them. I read my fair share of Agatha Christie as a teenager and a bit of P.D. James, but to tell you the truth, it's only one slot above science fiction and fantasy, my least favorite of all genres. This might be a bit negative, but here are five genres that I can't abide:

1. Anything by Dan Brown (it just depresses me that such schlock even exists)
2. Lite Fiction/Airport Bestseller/Those dreadful soft core porn books about S&M
3. Mystery/Detective
4. Fantasy  (except The Hobbit and The Fellowship of the Rings the books, NOT the movies)
5. Science Fiction

Anyhoo. 

Here are the top five books that I've ever read that I can come up with on the fly to balance things out:

1. Middlemarch
2. The Brothers Karamazov
3. The English Patient
4. To the Lighthouse
5. A Little Princess

So, between the murder mystery podcast and the Tana French detective novel, I'm really branching out of my comfort zone --

Here's a poem about a different kind of violence. Click and read and listen.

Man in Space

BY BILLY COLLINS

This, again

Yowza!

When the subconscious is simple

The Dream -- Pablo Picasso, 1932

This probably won't make much of a blog post, but I feel compelled to tell you about a dream I had last night. Those of you who believe dreams to be incredibly boring need not read any further than this, although I might include a poem at the end (hint: Billy Collins).  Also, if you're not a blogger or blog-reading addict, the dream entails a famous one. For the rest of you, settle in. I'll give you a moment.












So, last night I dreamed -- or is it dreamt? -- that I lived next door to Stephanie Nielson of Nie Nie fame. She's that beautiful woman and mother, burned in a terrible airplane crash years ago whose blog caught my attention along with the rest of the planet. She's what's called a Mormon Mom blogger, and while I have absolutely nothing in common with her (other than, perhaps, an unsurpassing love for my children), I have a nearly insatiable curiosity about her seeming ability to live a perfect life despite incredible physical hardship. She's basically a sainted Martha Stewart on steroids given to her by Jesus Christ or Joseph Smith Himself.

Anywho. Back to the dream.

I lived next door to the Neilson's and learned this when I paid a visit to their house to borrow something. I wandered right into the house, not knowing its occupants despite a party going on, and I caught sight of one of Nie Nie's daughters standing in a doorway. She was the one with the brown hair who looks exactly like her mother before her mother was disfigured in the plane crash (although the mother is still spectacularly beautiful in an ineffable way that comes out of her eyes). OK, I admit it. I know the girl's name because I've read about their family religiously for the last five or more years. It's Claire. The next thing I knew, I was running out of the house like some kind of Mrs. Cravits, eager to tell my friends that Nie Nie had moved into the neighborhood. I don't remember if I was successful in getting whatever it was that I had gone into the house to borrow, but on my way out, I had to make my way past a gigantic boat, the NieNie boat, that was as high as a skyscraper, parked in the front yard at the edge of a clump of sky-high bamboo. Now that I think about it, it might have been an ark, and it was difficult to run by, but I did and kept running.

That was it. That was my dream. When I woke up and recalled it, I felt embarrassed. Why the hell am I dreaming about these people? Is my subconscious a shallow creek when I thought it to be a deep and dark reservoir? Have Nie's recent postings of her childrens' ardent Mormon faith embedded themselves, like tentacles, in my agnostic brain? What would Jung say? What say you, dear Reader?

Here's a poem:

The First Dream

The Wind is ghosting around the house tonight
and as I lean against the door of sleep
I begin to think about the first person to dream,
how quiet he must have seemed the next morning

as the others stood around the fire
draped in the skins of animals
talking to each other only in vowels,
for this was long before the invention of consonants.

He might have gone off by himself to sit
on a rock and look into the mist of a lake
as he tried to tell himself what had happened,
how he had gone somewhere without going,

how he had put his arms around the neck
of a beast that the others could touch
only after they had killed it with stones,
how he felt its breath on his bare neck.

Then again, the first dream could have come
to a woman, though she would behave,
I suppose, much the same way,
moving off by herself to be alone near water,

except that the curve of her young shoulders
and the tilt of her downcast head
would make her appear to be terribly alone,
and if you were there to notice this,

you might have gone down as the first person
to ever fall in love with the sadness of another. 

Billy Collins

Again, Life is a Loaded Gun

I've posted this before and was in need of it.

Fan yourself.

Some Days

Some Days

Some days I put the people in their places at the table,
bend their legs at the knees,
if they come with that feature,
and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.

All afternoon, they face one another,
the man in the brown suit,
the woman in the blue dress,
perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.

But other days,
I am the one who is lifted up by the ribs,
then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse
to sit with the others at the long table.

Very funny,
but how would you like it
if you never knew from one day to the next
if you were going to spend it

striding around like a vivid god,
your shoulders in the clouds,
or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper,
staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?

Billy Collins

Questions about too many birds -- Random Poetry Sunday with Music

Listen to this while reading the following poem:




A Question about Birds

I am going to sit on a rock near some water
or on a slope of grass
under a high ceiling of white clouds,

and I am going to stop talking
so I can wander around in that spot
the way John James Audubon might have wandered

through a forest of speckled sunlight,
stopping now and then to lean
against an elm, mop his brow,

and listen to the songs of birds.
Did he wonder, as I often do,
how they regard the songs of other species?

Would it be like listening to the Chinese
merchants at an outdoor market?
Or do all the birds perfectly understand one another?

Or is that nervous chittering
I often hear from the upper branches
the sound of some tireless little translator?

Billy Collins, from his collection horoscopes from the dead

My Loud Vernacular Horn

While my kids are still in school until next week, summer has hit elsewhere, and already the updates from friends on Facebook include descriptions of trips to Paris and Italy and Mexico. Note the word include but don't think I'm feeling resentful or anything. I have other friends who will spend their summers working or freaking out that summer school hours have been cut once again by the school system. Still others are spending weeks in the PICU at nearby hospitals, whiling away the hours playing Words with Friends while their children are hooked up to respirators and waiting for induced comas to end and seizures, hopefully, to stop.

We won't be doing much this summer other than the usual harrowing trip to Hilton Head Island in July (more on that later) and various day camps for my strapping boys. Since Sophie's seizure activity has stepped up of late, I'm resigned to do a series of doctor visits with her, holding my breath. We'll do a lot of hanging out in our pajamas which is actually one of the best parts of summer. We'll work on a list of stuff we'd like to do and post about that later, but given the amount of fabulousness I'm witnessing in other's lives, I think it's time to pull out the Billy Collins and let him speak for me, once again.

Consolation


How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard
and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.


There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous
domes and there is no need to memorize a succession
of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.
No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon's
little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.


How much better to command the simple precinct of home
than be dwarfed by pillar, arch and basilica.
Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps?
Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyes camera
eager to eat the world one monument at a time?


Instead of slouching in a café, ignorant of the word for ice,
I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress
known as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morning
paper, all language barriers down,
rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.


And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone
willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner.
I will not puzzle over the bill or record in my journal
what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.
It is enough to climb back into the car


as if it were the great car of English itself
and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off
down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.


Billy Collins

Life is a loaded gun

Start fanning yourself.

Consolation in lieu of Resentment

Several times a year, when vacation times roll around, I post the following poem by Billy Collins in lieu of serving up a giant platter of resentment. As friends and family pack their bags for Cabo, Texas, New York City, skiing in Whistler, the sands of Fiji and Veranasi, India, I recite these words and head off to a day of lacrosse scrimmages in Mar Vista. And thanks to the ineffable beauty of poetry with humor thrown in, I am consoled.

Consolation


How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns.
How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets,
fully grasping the meaning of every road sign and billboard
and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots.


There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous
domes and there is no need to memorize a succession
of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon.
No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon's
little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass.


How much better to command the simple precinct of home
than be dwarfed by pillar, arch and basilica.
Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps?
Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyes camera
eager to eat the world one monument at a time?


In stead of slouching in a cafe, ignorant of the word for ice,
I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress
known as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morning
paper, all language barriers down,
rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way.


And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone
willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner
I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal
what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window.


It is enough to climb back into the car
as if it were the great car of English itself
and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off
down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.

-- Billy Collins

There'll probably be at least a million of these posted, but

when I first read this poem in The New Yorker, I loved it completely.

Here you go, and

Happy Mother's Day!

The Lanyard

The other day I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room,
moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano,
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one into the past more suddenly—
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted spoons of medicine to my lips,
laid cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the worn truth

that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hand,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.


--Billy Collins

Listen to him read it here.

Easter, or the day after, if Jesus came back as a regular man

Oliver exploring the ruins of the burnt mission church at San Juan Capistrano

I had nothing to write of Easter, of eggs, forgotten, still brown and white on their tempered shelf, of the slip out of church, the sidle down the two-year aisle, the children running to fill plastic eggs with candy and the pull away of ritual. I had nothing to write of Easter.

Last night I went to Royce Hall and heard the poets Billy Collins and Kay Ryan in conversation. They were witty and kind and funny and in love with words. 

Kay Ryan read this poem, and now I have something to write of Easter:

The Palm at the End of the Mind


After fulfilling everything
one two three he came back again
free, no more prophecy requiring
that he enter the city just this way,
no more set-up treacheries.
It was the day after Easter. He adored
the eggshell litter and the cellophane
caught in the grass. Each door he passed
swung with its own business, all the 
witnesses along his route of pain
again distracted by fear of loss
or hope of gain. It was wonderful
to be a man, bewildered by 
so many flowers, the rush
and ebb of hours, his own
ambiguous gestures--his 
whole heart exposed, then
taking cover.


--Kay Ryan

Lethe