Caregiving Chronicles

to Heather McHugh

Your mind goes to what you might have been doing, what sort of career, what you'd wear and how much you'd earn. You think about that first job, so long ago, the stockings and mustard-colored pumps, the boyfriend back at the old church in East Nashville, just over the bridge. He was writing novels, parsing out Blake, and you were thinking about railroads and utilities, feasibility and warding off the good old boy gestures, that guy Bruce in the corner office with the curly hair and lecher walk. You went to a conference once, at the World Trade Center in New York City and it's just too, too, to mention that both towers fell -- that one in your mind, and then those others. Your mind goes to possibilities dashed but is filled up, again, by what came, what's still coming. Sophie couldn't go to school today. She's suffering from withdrawal. I can't go to work today because of that, and whose fault is it really? I've lost twenty years of wages. No one talks about that -- at least not out of the predictable and tired construct of the working versus the stay-at-home mother. Stunning vulnerability. No one talks about choices when there is no choice. We don't have choices. I wouldn't have it any other way, though. I can yearn for some kind of sea change in the way our society treats handles perceives reckons with deals screws pushes away the cost of caregiving. Or I can fill out the forms, get on my knees and swallow. Someone mentioned Chronic Traumatic Stress Syndrome to me the other day. Acronym is CTSS. I'm not complaining caresplaining. It is what it is.

Love Me Anyways

Sidewalk graffiti, La Brea Blvd.

A girl I went to high school with in Atlanta had a thick brown braid, about two inches across, that she wore down her back. I always wanted a braid like it and have the thick hair but could never get it to grow that long. Or maybe it's that as it grows longer and longer, it feels like more of an encumbrance than a crown of glory. I cut my hair today from quite a bit past my shoulders to just above. It was the longest I'd let my hair grow since the last millenium when married to my college sweetheart and living in Nashville, Tennessee after which (both the marriage and the city) I wore it the shortest I'd ever dared and moved to New York City. While I enjoyed the don't give a flying foo-foo about how I look mentality it took in this millenium to let it get as long as it did until this morning, I felt increasingly -- let's say -- haggard. How much can I possibly write about my hair without resorting to tired cliches about age and sexuality and what the hell has happened to me and where are you tonight, sweet Marie?  The tiny, wonderful hairdresser used a flat iron and a blowdryer on it, so I look a tad Barbra Streisandish (and not in a good way), but overall, it feels good. I think when I let it dry naturally (as I don't own a flat iron or blowdryer and plan on never doing so), I might hitch a ride in a convertible Mercedes like the one the girl with the brown braid drove in Atlanta and take off for my next destination.

Well, anybody can be just like me, obviously
But then, now again, not too many can be like you, fortunately.

Breached

Breached reservoir -- Nashville, TN 1912

Trampolines were involved last night when I dreamed of you. You were lying on a grassy knoll at one point (why, why are those two words only associated with JFK?), and when you disappeared, I made my way over a giant trampoline back to my real life.

Today, I have a hangover and it's not from alcohol.

I got an email from a publicist at IHOP who asked whether I'd like to write about their upcoming promotion. If your New Year’s resolution is to enjoy more of IHOP’s delicious buttermilk pancakes—and whose isn’t?—you’ll be happy to know that we’ve brought back ‘All You Can Eat’, one of our most popular traditions and one that guests look forward to all year long, the publicist wrote, and my memory cast back, way back, to Nashville, Tennessee and a guitar player I thought I loved but really didn't. We ate mushrooms together and laughed through the day and into the night. Did we really go to a mall and walk around clothing displays? He was always so enamored of my hair, and it was short then, way too short. I should have known. In the wee hours of the morning, we went to IHOP and ate stacks of them --buttermilk pancakes -- slathered in syrup, then made our way back to the guitarist's dark apartment, hungover, grim. 

Should I share this story with the publicist, my memories of stacks of buttermilk pancakes at IHOP entwined with hallucination, illicit and breached love?

What We Make

photographer: Alain Delorme

I was thinking about diamonds and the world's biggest necklace. 

Bob Dylan

I was thinking about how so much of our life consists of stories that we make up, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page. Days and then years go by in the telling. At worst, we lie to ourselves through story, believing it. At best, we are wildly creative in our elaboration.

I was thinking about how so much of life itself is a house of cards -- at least the life of humans -- everything stacked precariously, both ill- and well-intentioned, with nothing, really, at the base. If I cast my mind back to the days when I worked for a retail brokerage firm in Nashville, Tennessee, I felt that house of cards tremble when the stock market crashed in 1987, the grim faces of my work colleagues, the quiet and stifled panic. I looked across the huge room where we all sat behind glass walls that ringed the perimeter, can see as if it were yesterday, the face of a young man whose name I've long since forgotten, his bowed head in his hands. Marriage is a house of cards whose base is sometimes nothing more than a piece of paper. Men who love men and women who love women have added their own cards, and every time a card is added, the whole pile seems about to collapse. Dissolution is another card. The fragility of it all makes me tremble.

I was thinking about the Ebola epidemic in Africa, how the crazies are already blaming Obama for letting it in. I'm not sure why some things induce such panic (Ebola) and other things are pushed aside, even denied (climate change). 

I was thinking of how we make up stories, card by card, and fuel our illusions.

A Slice of Life

photo via Jeff Finlin

The Big American dream is dead. It’s hanging over them like a corpse swinging in the poplar tree out back. They see their quandary and they stand there in that awareness.  They have fallen back on banjos, sustainable food, craft beer and a hipster ideal.  On some level, behind the handlebar mustaches, tattoos, gauges and ego identification is a sensibility grounded in something more important than money and success. Can it be obnoxious sometimes—yes.  But I feel in some ways it’s a hope for the future that might have the potential to make America somewhat great again.

Jeff Finlin 

In one of my other lives, I worked as a waitress and then a cook at a restaurant called The Slice of Life in Nashville. The restaurant was on Music Row, and we served vegetarian food, mainly, to music industry professionals and celebrities. I waited on folks like Emmylou Harris, Garrison Keillor and once, Bono. The restaurant was owned by a crazy Korean woman who loved us as if we were her own but who chastised us as if we were her own, too.  She has since died, unfortunately, but working there was wild.  Being Korean in the eighties in Nashville, TN was certainly an oddity, and The Slice (as we affectionately called it) served homemade kim chi, scallion pancakes and other Asian delicacies, as well as hippie dippie natural food. All the baked goods were whole wheat, we had a juicer for carrots, and when I moved into the kitchen as a cook, I was trained by a guy named Paul who was the chef on work furlough from prison, where he'd been serving time for murdering his wife.

Anywho.

One of my favorite people at The Slice was a fellow waiter named Jeff, and like most waiters at the Slice (except for me), he was a musician -- an extraordinary drummer, songwriter and singer. We all grew up and moved on, and Jeff became quite a well-known musician. He's writing a lot now, too, and this morning I opened up his blog and read one of the most interesting and visionary things I've ever read about the youth of our country. It made my heart soar, and I think you should read it right this very second. Then you might want to click on over and listen to Jeff's gravelly, soulful voice and call it a very good day.

Here's the link.

Three Cities: A Short, Short Story

Urs Fischer exhibit at MOCA, Los Angeles, 2013

Nashville, 1988

A bed, a boat, it's all the same. She lay on the bed pushed against the wall, her back flat, sheets kicked out of the way. He lay beside her, hands folded over his chest. It was hot. The sun was high in the sky, visible from the bed. It was golden brown with fuzzy edges leaking into gray sky. The Laotians in the house behind them were cooking. I think it's dog, he said. She closed her eyes, ran a finger (she had long fingers) down, drops of sweat between her breasts. The air conditioner had fallen out of the window and lay in the dirt below. He had strained and cursed at the machine. The window didn't hold. They had laughed themselves silly, the bed a boat that rocked.

Nashville, 1990

That place was always in shadow. The bed was dark and wide, a mattress covered, no top sheet. Sometimes they started on the black couch in the front room. She was a silhouette, naked, sinuous (she had long arms and legs). He traced her. She looked over his shoulder out the window. A tree, bare of leaves, its thin branches reaching up, out of view, a tattoo on glass. Later, she lay on the bed and he smoked in the kitchen, leaning on the stove, holding the cigarette just under the fan, its cheap, electric hum.

New York City, 1992

Her bedroom was downstairs in the basement of the brownstone. It was carpeted, damp, quiet. A boy named Daniel walked through hers to get to his so she had set up a screen at the end of the bed. The sheets were expensive because she worked overtime, time and a half. He lit a candle before they started. It was winter. They were under the covers. She closed her eyes, head back. Was there a crackle? She opened her eyes, a blaze of light behind him over her. Fire! she shouted and they beat it back and out. The quilt had a hole burned through it as big as her hand (she had large hands), the edges charred.

Los Angeles, 2013

She wandered through the gallery, amused. Boxes placed here and there, drips of cement, a string of real fruit, a house made of bread, real bread, Persian carpets crumbed. Blue raindrops fell in a slant. The corner of her eye (she had large eyes) caught a bed, alone, a boat bent, black smudges on a wall. The bed was bent, alone. She closed her eyes, folded into it, on it, over and under it, the grey sludge of cement spilling.

Iris and the Guitarist

The old Station Inn, Nashville, TN

He lived in a dingy room in a dark corner of Nashville, Tennessee, and when Iris looked back, she realized that she'd acted inappropriately in a colossal fashion. She had found herself revelling with him under frayed sheets on a bed without a headboard in a room with one window that looked out onto a bare tree whose branches reached up into an iron-gray winter sky.

Waxing Gibbous

Waxing Gibbous Moon (more than half-lighted, less than full)

Who am I kidding?

I'll never post about the puzzle of family, the pull and the repel, the warmth and the isolation, the un-bloggable. I'll post instead about the moon, shining its cold, beloved light into my airplane window in the early hours of the morning and the one paragraph in a short story by Junot Diaz that set me back to a night long ago, a memory that pierced me and through whose tiny pinprick hole came despair and gratitude in equal measure, more than half-lighted and less than full. I wrote the memory down, the beginnings of a larger story:

The ring came in a little box, a coat of arms, a crown, a tiny bed of velvet. His mother had worn it before, or not. He was the second of the four sons, the first to marry. She always felt as if she were floating when she was with him -- floating through a forest near Mark Twain's house, a forest like the fairy tale, despite the thick undergrowth, his lightly drunken laugh. He dragged a guitar. She felt as if she were floating or, rather, drifting away in a small row-boat, the oars placed carefully inside, no effort and aimless after love on the white sheets, the air-conditioner humming, the smell of strange meat that the Laotian refugees cooked in the house behind them. The bed had swayed then, the growing distance between them an ocean as placid as the unsuspecting smile on his face. After he gave her the ring and they ate their dinner, they had floated down the road, their car enveloping them in silence. They held hands over the gear-shift, the new ring sparkled, floating reflections from the headlights of passing cars. The two people who trudged along the highway appeared to have just floated in, too, pushing a small stroller, the baby on the woman's hip, its blonde curly head buried in her shoulder. 


We have to stop, she told him, lifting her hand from his, his own down-shifting as they slowed and she rolled down her window and spoke to them, her words floating out into their open, surprised faces, white in the night air.

Love letters to friends

A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious

daring starts from within.

Eudora Welty

We ate shrimp and grits at a small round table, and we drank a lot of wine. We drank so much wine that I drew stick figures on a napkin proving that I wasn't a prude, and you leaned so far back in your chair (you might have been laughing) that it tipped over. We might have been screaming with laughter, as far as I know, the rest of the people in the restaurant receding, their mouths open, silent. Years later, I picked you up from a Greyhound bus station in Nashville, Tennessee, trailing an enormous suitcase. You fixed my air-conditioner and swept out my apartment, and when I came home from my shift, I lay on the bed and you on a sleeping bag beside me and we talked in the darkness, and we talked through the years on the phone and in letters and now over polenta and eggs and no one makes me laugh harder.