Weather Empathy

Beverly Blvd, Los Angeles

Around five o'clock this afternoon, it got really quiet and still and I said to Henry that I thought something was going to happen. I texted The Bird Photographer, too. It feels weird. Something is going to happen. We thought earthquake. Everything was quiet. The only thing I heard was the air-conditioner kicking on. No birds, no cars, no horns, no ambulances or helicopters. What would I do if there were an earthquake and I was in the backyard? Henry asked on his way into the house from the backyard where he'd been hitting a lacrosse ball. I was lying on my bed reading. I figured it was a rhetorical question and didn't answer. Henry is feeling anxious about college. My schedule! My future! What will I do? What if I don't do well? I reassured him that no one knows the answers to those questions when they go to college, and if they do, they will probably change their minds once they get there. I told him that it'll all become incredibly clear one day. Ha. I said no such thing. He has no idea that it was only yesterday that I was walking through the Arboretum near midnight with my books on my hip, quickly, back to my dorm where I'd join my Jesus freak room-mate in our Carolina blue room. I'd go down the hallway, take a shower and wrap my hair in a wet towel, go back to the room and sit in front of the window, the fan blowing high, cooling the drops of sweat already beading on my skin.












It rained. Actually, it drizzled. Still! It's August! Well, it was more like a few drops. The sky got dark, there were a few rumbles of thunder and I saw a picture online of a lightning strike in Orange County. So that's what happened. At least for now.

Still

Somewhere in Durham, NC, 1982

I recently found a bunch of letters from friends and lovers in a box at the back of my closet. I also found a trove of negatives from a documentary photography class I took as a sophomore at UNC in 1982. I'd forgotten about the family that I visited over a period of three months and chronicled and with whom I became friends. I moved away. Still I remember developing them in the darkroom, my hands immersed in the bath, the slippery feel of the paper blooming shadows and light, the hands of the boy I loved mixed up with mine, his mouth.

Saturday morning. Complacencies of the peignoir.

Still. What makes me "happy" is fifteen minutes in bed meditating, then reading about authors I love and their new books, then hearing Sophie in the room down the hall humming again after more than a month of silence. Also, Costa Rican coffee from the man I love who is out there somewhere taking photos of burrowing owls.











Field Guide

Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake,
up to my neck in that most precious dement of all,

I found a pale-gray, curled-upwards pigeon feather
floating on the tension of the water

at the very instant when a dragonfly,
like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,

hovered over it, then lit, and rested.
That's all.

I mention this in the same way
that I fold the corner of a page

in certain library books,
so that the next reader will know

where to look for the good parts.

Tony Hoagland

Remember Me?

So, I've been absent for a while and just like exercising, once you miss a day and then another and another, you're back to being grotesquely inactive and have gained a thousand pounds.

I was quite literally on the road last week, touring a few possible colleges for Henry. We had an amazing time, driving through the beautiful country-side of North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland. Henry is a joy -- always cheerful, relaxed and so very funny. I feel incredibly blessed to have had the opportunity to hang with him, nearly 24/7 for a week.

What else is new? Things good that I won't blog about yet and things bad that concern the great job that I've had for the past couple of months. I won't blog about that either but would appreciate words of wisdom, jokes, some anti-corporate America ranting or whatever you hold in your dear minds and hearts.

Here are some pictures from my trip.

My beautiful friend Louise and I at her river house in Virginia

Gorgeous burst of forsythia yellow at the river

East Coast sunset at the river

Henry and I at The Old Well, UNC, Chapel Hill, NC

Henry on his device and me saying "grrrrrrr" in front of my beloved Wilson library
Chapel Hill, NC

Henry looking over Fetzer Field, home of UNC lacrosse

Henry running up stairs of beloved Wilson Library, UNC

Henry posing with the Salisbury University seagull mascot

The spectacularly beautiful, but way too conservative and country clubbish Washington and Lee University

Right after I snapped this picture of my adorable son, he picked up the tab on our fancy dinner. 

Robert E. Lee, rightfully overshadowed by Henry

Road fare, along with filling up the tank of the car for only $20!

Can I tell you that Henry was overwhelmed mainly by the amount of road kill that we saw along the way? I am not certain why there isn't nearly as much road kill in California, but I will admit to you that I actually peed my pants a tiny bit laughing at Henry counting the numbers of carcasses he had seen. Along with the usual squirrels, rodents, cats, dogs and possums, we counted two deer -- one being gutted by a bunch of buzzards and another being heaved into the back of a pick-up truck. Holy southern schmoley.

Here are some pretty road pics:

And here are some photos of our last day when we strolled the campus of UNC, again.

The main quad of UNC, whose trees originally made me fall in love with the school

The beloved Wilson Library Reading Room where I spent many an hour studying and mooning over the boy I loved

I would caption this "where my orgasmic pleasure in the Wilson Library Reading Room was misunderstood by my son" but that sounds inappropriate. His disinterest was entirely appropriate

A William Wadsworth collection in Wilson Library. I lovingly gazed at everything, much to Henry's horror

Seriously, how did thirty years pass because I could have taken this in 1985

A great demonstration against the bullshit law recently passed in North Carolina legislature

Add caption

a moon, worn as if it had been a shell

Don't forget to send me your wisdom and jokes as I'm feeling beyond anxious, like the carpet's been ripped out from my feet (cliches come in handy when you're blown away).

Old Books, Old Memories, Fresh Paint

Haysoos, Maria and Josef!

I'm having the old homestead painted for the first time since we moved in nearly fourteen years ago. Those are only some of the books that I had to pull down from only some of the shelves. Oliver told me that I had too many, and Henry reached up for the ones on the tallest shelves and wondered if I'd read any of them lately. Probably not, I told him. But they are who I am. I could give a flying foo-foo about that Mondo Londo woman who tells you to get rid of everything unless you can say that it brings you joy. The little French paperbacks of Balzac and Sartre and Rimbaud brought me nothing but agita when I read them thirty years ago, but when I run my fingers down the yellow pages and bury my nose, I remember Dey Hall and how hot it was in the fall without air-conditioning, how insane Dr. Daniel, with his American South French accent, pounded on the table and shouted OUI, OUI, OUI, HELL OUI! if we answered a question correctly, and how hard Sarah and I laughed when we quizzed one another on idiomatic expressions -- all 350 of them -- useless then and now. Il n'y a pas un chat dans la rue! we'd repeat, over and over, downing our Tabs and Mello Yellos, Sarah's curls riotous and as disheveled as her backpack whose contents slipped out and left a trail wherever she walked. I read La Nausee while swinging on a hammock on the rickety porch of a house we called The Shanty where I lived with my friends Missy, Hilary and Julia during my junior year. I felt literally nauseous while I read, the first time the body met the mind and one recognized the other and the exhilarating freedom of being alive. I'd meet my boyfriend Luke under the trees whose arching boughs had convinced me to give up my spot at the University of Virginia -- I loved the UNC campus, not the UVA grounds, loved the brick of Dey Hall, not the formal colonial architecture of Jefferson -- and we'd lie there on the grass in the quad, reading Auden and Williams and Yeats, Li Po and Tu Fu. They are who I am.

Cast my memory back there Lord, sometimes I'm overcome.

Blue Heaven, LA-Style, With A Series of Admissions

What was blue heaven to me, back in the day, was my years as a Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Blue heaven to Oliver, though, is Dodger Stadium. I went with him to a game tonight and admit that I had a great time. I used the hashtag motheroftheyearwhohatessports when I posted some pictures from the game. Oliver and Henry received a whole series of tickets from Uncle Tony last Christmas, all in the outfield section where there's an All You Can Eat theme.


Lila Downs sang the National Anthem, and I will admit to shedding tears.


I ate a Dodger dog with ketchup, spicy mustard and sweet relish. Although I'll maintain that they look nasty, I'll admit that they taste damn good.

I ate some tortilla chips and nacho cheese. I admit that I like this disgusting fake food.

I shared an ice-cream cookie sandwich with Oliver that cost $4,987,632 and was thankfully not in the all you can eat category. I admit that I really didn't need to eat it.

I drank a Diet Coke.

I did not drink beer although it looked tasty despite the plastic cups that I, admittedly, drank too much out of back in my blue heaven and thus feel a gentle snobbery toward --

The guy at the end of our row kept standing up and shouting insults at the opposing team's outfielder. When I expressed dismay, Oliver reassured me that they are "trained" to deal with the insults, that they don't care about it, and that they are making millions of dollars to stand out there so I shouldn't feel sorry for them. I admit that he had a point, so I texted with my friend Lisa a bit as a distraction.

One of the rookies is a guy that looked pretty darn cute, and when I asked Oliver who it was and said how cute he was, Oliver told me that he was twenty years old and that I was weird. Whatevs, as the youngsters say. I admit to a boy crush.

I have to wear my glasses for another ten days because I have some sort of inflammation under my eyelids. I can't believe that I wasn't picked to appear on the GLAM CAM, although the prospect of appearing on those giant cameras that hang in the LA skyline rivals the archetypal nightmare of walking down your middle school hallway nude. I admit to my vanity, particularly when it comes to glasses.

52 and Hot (not THAT way)

So far, I've had a lovely birthday. I had an early breakfast with my astral twin Debra (we have same exact birthday) and then a little later breakfast with my oldest friend Moye. I've received texts and telephone calls and Facebook greetings. We are waiting until 5:30 when The Air-Conditioner Man comes and replaces our air-conditioner with a brand-spanking new one. I am hoping that he gives it to us, out of pity for it being my birthday and 95 degrees in the house and all. If there's anything I've learned in my 52 years of life on the planet, all you have to do is ask and ye shall receive. In the meantime, the boys have built what you see above -- a sort of hacked air-conditioner that my friend Mary Beth directed me to the other night on Youtube. It kind of works. That's a cooler filled with ice, with holes cut into it for an insulation tube (the silver thing) and a fan. The video claimed it cost $8 to make, but we spent closer to $17. It blows surprisingly cool air, and I guess it's as good a day as any to remember the days of my youth, nearly thirty-five years ago or so when I lived in a dorm at UNC with no air-conditioning. Since we started school in mid-August, I spent my birthday there for four years, and the dog days of summer in North Carolina were brutal. We would take a cold shower, soak the towel in cold water and wrap our heads, then sit in front of the window fan to cool off. We've put the hacked AC in Sophie's room since seizures and heat are no good. I am waiting for her bus to get here and then will move out of the way and plant her in front of it. in the meantime, I'm reminiscing about some of the best years of my life and those left to come. Thank you for helping me to celebrate!

Girding My Loins

Edwardian woman boxer found on the internets

I've got to gird my loins and get to The Latest Insurance Snafu. You might remember that Sophie had some routine bloodwork done a few months ago, not for the hell of it but per doctor's orders, and the insurance company only paid an infinitesimal amount despite it being an in-network provider. When I inquired, The Poor Person Who Has to Work the Phone at an Insurance Company did her clicking around and told me that the labwork was covered but venipuncture is not covered. I already wrote about this, I believe, so I won't belabor the point. I put it aside because, if you remember another post I wrote, my coping mechanism is to Do Only One Thing At A Time. Mulling or mewling or moping (not musing) about why poking Sophie's vein with a needle is not covered, although the actual blood analysis is covered was just too much that day for my tiny little mother mind,™ not to mention actually addressing the problem full-on which means calling the provider, telling her to correct the wrong diagnosis code or ask for a more specific diagnosis, use the numbers V72.6 instead of 82036, etc. etc. etc.  It's time to gird my loins and do it.

I've got some figurative or mental loin-girding going on as well these days as the end of the year at Sophie's public school wraps up. This is the third year that Sophie is considered a senior, I think, or someone has neglected to remove her from the school's graduating class rolls, so I'm subject to a daily and sometimes thrice-daily robo call letting me in on all the fun goings-on for graduates. To be fair, because of the public education laws, Sophie is allowed to stay in school until she's 22 years old, and my gratitude is nothing short of  all holds barred. What comes next will call for more than just the girding of the loins, but that's a story for -- well -- another day. In these parts, we take living in the present to the extreme.

Anyhoo.

Last night, the phone rang, and Oliver picked it up and put it directly on speaker so we could laugh ruefully about the message. This one gave a stern warning that all seniors were to clean out their lockers by no later than 10:00 this morning and that fun festivities were in order later in the day to honor the outgoing class. So far, Sophie should have picked up her cap and gown, cleaned out her locker, gathered with her classmates for a celebration and even checked out the ROTC recruiters in the parking lot with all their cheerful guidance toward a life of bravery, courage and sacrifice. Tonight, I told Oliver to please hang up the phone I don't want to hear it anymore. Oliver asked me whether it made me sad, and I said, yes sometimes it makes me really sad. We both agreed that it's weird to think of Sophie being almost the same age I was when I graduated from college this exact time of year.

Who knew that space cadet grad with thoughts of medieval French literature, modern poetry and a summer ahead of perhaps teaching English to Chinese students in Taiwan or staying with the love of her life in Chapel Hill was going to have to gird her proverbial loins to just make and listen to telephone calls in about thirty years?

Books as a Constant

The stacks in Wilson Library, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill

When I feel afraid and overcome, I turn to books and stories.

I've written about them before -- the musty floors of old Wilson library at UNC in Chapel Hill where I spent hundreds of hours studying, wandering around, my fingers trailing the dusty spines of books forgotten. On the top floors you could find an empty carrel with a wooden desk scratched with the initials of long ago lovers, a peace sign, a curse word. I kissed my boyfriend there, sitting on his lap, our books and notebooks and pens scattered. Fifteen minutes before 11:00 at night, an ancient man, an Ichabod Crane with a head roamed the stacks, ringing a giant cowbell to warn us of closing. You rode creaky elevators down and then waited in line with other library rats (the less studious studied at the more open library or in the magnificent reading room where you could see and be seen) to have your backpack riffled through, the security measures of the last millenium. Then out onto the broad steps of the library, the campus spread out in front of you, the air velvet for the library behind you, the gracious oaks and lawns stretching forward into some impossibly benign future.

I can go there whenever I want -- to the carrels, to books, to metal shelves and scratched love notes, to kisses and love, leaves on trees and lazy days when my mind was busy with Auden and Li Po, with French verb conjugations and Nicaraguan history, figuring out whether he loved me or not and so on. That library, those stacks, that time in my head sustains me, sometimes, when I feel suffocated by the minutia of the life I live now. It is, in fact, books and my memory of them, how I felt as I read, how I lost myself in them, that sustains me in constancy. It is, in fact, books and the present, how I feel as I read, how I lose myself in them, that sustains me in constancy.



What are you reading?

A City Girl and a Squirrel and UPDATE

UPDATE: The squirrel has disappeared. Oliver noted that it was there one minute and gone the next, so we're hoping it recovered from the fall and scampered off to join its brethren.



That thar is a baby squirrel that might have fallen out of a tree that I nearly backed over but noticed as I walked to my car. I didn't scream out loud, but I screamed in my mind. In case you didn't know this about me, I'm a city girl. In fact, many moons ago, I had a roommate during my sophomore year in college who was a sweet, sweet young woman from Beulahville, North Carolina. Despite the fact that she had a Jesus is Lord Carolina blue frisbee pinned to her side of the room and I was the type gal who sometimes slept the night out, she never judged me nor tried to save me, and we became great friends. One weekend, she invited me to her home in Beulahville, and since I was dying to go to such a bucolic-sounding place and knew that I'd eat delicious food, I accepted. Her daddy was a turkey farmer -- he didn't have turkeys out in the dirt, pecking around (or is that chickens) but rather housed them in several vast football field sized barns. When you stepped inside, the din was outrageous. I think some people even wore earphones. There might have been millions of turkeys crowded in this giant barn, and the feathers were flying, the stench was outrageous, and I believe I raised my hands up to my ears and stood there stupefied. This was so many moons ago that I don't think we had expressions like organic farming or free-range, so when I stepped into those barns with my hands over my ears, a bit green at the edges, my roommate's daddy just hooted and hollered at me. He had the thickest of North Carolina accents and was as sweet as sugar on a stick, as my Alabama friend Sybil used to say, and later that day when he fiddled with his radio, he screamed at me, How'd ya like to get on my ham radio, city girl? 

Anywho.

That squirrel.

After screaming in my mind, I noticed that it was still moving so I ran inside and got Saint Mirtha who not only watches Sophie most Saturdays but is good in a pinch for things like taking a brown paper bag and scooping up a baby squirrel. I disappeared in my sexy Mazda and went to Trader Joe's, but not before posting that photo on Facebook with a request for advice on what to do. I got a bushel o' advice, my favorites being get it the hell outside from a friend in Nashville who apparently doesn't know me that well and thought I had brought the thing in my house, and Here in Texas they'd just throw him in the stew from a southern friend who always makes me laugh. Mostly people were helpful and suggested that I call wildlife rescue, and a few people kindly sent me websites that detailed How to Care for a Baby Squirrel, and when I opened up those links, I screamed again in my mind and immediately felt bad that I'm really not as good of a person as I might seem because, really, the last thing I want to do is nurse a baby squirrel back to life, even if it is dying a slow death on a bag on my front lawn.

Where, where are the coyotes that come down out of the Hollywood hills and kill small dogs?***







***I can't even imagine what Anonymous thinks of me now.

Marie Ange

I was just riffling through a small box, looking for the business card of The Foot Doctor, whose name I can never remember, so that I can make an appointment for Henry, whose big toe appears to be acting up again, not responding to the Epsom salt soaks. Anyhoo. I was riffling through the cards and pulled out the above photo that I haven't seen in years, sent to me by my old friend Mary Angel (or Marie Ange, as we said in our bad French accents).  I'm still a tad sick, as is Sophie, and I'm feeling all whimpery, edgy, like the end of the world is coming and it's all centered around me. Do you know that feeling? I keep reading people's gratitude lists and keep staving off the sinking feeling that --what? Just a sinking feeling, I guess. A sinking feeling that has nothing to do with anything in particular. I could chalk it up to the virus I'm fighting -- these sorts of viruses attack the central nervous system, I think, and push me into mild depression. I guess. I'm not really sure of anything, to tell you the truth, other than that I have a sore throat and a vague feeling of dread and weirdness. Mary Angel is one funny lady, and we shared many laughs during the four years we were in school together, many at the expense of the evangelicals that surrounded us in family, friends and atmosphere. There was no mockery, though, just amusement and solidarity. I guess. She took that photo many years after college, though, when we hadn't seen each other for a long, long time, and while I don't remember where I was when she sent it to me or what I was feeling, I must have thought it funny enough to save and stash away. Today, though, I felt buoyed up when I pulled it out of that stack of cards, buoyed up and out of myself and into laughter. Pierced. Saved. I know.

Thank you, Marie Ange. Body piercing did indeed save my life, at least for today.

Home School Field Trip Extraordinaire

Have I ever told ya'll about the time in college where I thought I'd branch out from the English and French literature courses, the Chinese language, folklore and history and take a course in the Engineering school titled Solid Waste Management? It's dim in my mind, but I trudged over hill and dale to a part of the UNC campus unknown to those immersed in Auden and Balzac and learned about how our waste is managed. God, it was awful. The textbook was graphic, as I recall, and the professor insanely dull. I have no aptitude for such practical matters. It was probably the worst class I'd ever taken, right after Advanced Calculus. I remember absolutely nothing about it except for that. I blamed myself for the desire to be well-rounded.

Anyhoo.

Nearly thirty years later, I participated in a field trip today with other homeschoolers to the Edward C. Little Water Recycling facility, the largest water recycling facility in the United States. After donning a hairnet, safety glasses, a vest and hard hat, we were taken on a tour throughout the actual facility, and it was easily the second best field trip I've ever been on (after Alcatraz). Fascinating stuff, ya'll, and not a little sobering. We walked over vast vats of bubbling sludgey water and were so high up at one point that I felt a little nauseous and had to talk myself out of crawling across what to you might have looked like a steel catwalk but to me was a precarious vertiginous path to nowhere. I knew Oliver would rather have jumped into said sludge than see his hair-netted matron of a mother on her hands and knees, so I sucked it up and looked straight ahead.

Weirdly enough, we've been delving into chemistry and had just read about chemistry and technology, so this was just about the most perfect accompaniment we could have imagined. Days like this make me so grateful that we've made this decision -- Oliver AND I learned so much today it was almost exhilarating. I'd even go so far as to say that in 2014, I'm far more well-rounded -- in every way -- than I ever was in 1985.

The Long Distance Casserole Brigade: A Guest Post

So, I was loathe to post anything about this amazing thing going on behind the scenes of my very active life, but I'm going to do it here in a lame attempt to accept grace -- well -- hopefully -- gracefully. Here's a guest post written by one of my oldest and dearest college friends, Missy B. 

There is an old tradition in the South (does this happen everywhere?) involving casseroles and frozen fruit salads.  This tradition demands that whenever there is a family crisis, a death, a hospitalization, a new baby, or an illness, friends line up at the door with food in disposable aluminum dishes that will hopefully bring some sort of comfort to the family in distress.  When my mother was run down by a hit-and-run driver in our lovely suburban neighborhood in the late eighties (she improbably survived with only a broken leg), my family received so many casseroles that my younger brother set up a ranking system where fantastic meals were rated a 10 and the not-so-yummy might even receive a 1 (green bean casserole with canned French fries on top anyone?).  When I improbably birthed twins at the age of 42 after years of infertility, we did not cook for a month because of the generosity of our friends who set up a meal brigade.  I will never forget the shit-kicking smile on the face of one friend as her family of four marched down our driveway, each person proudly holding a piece of their lovely meal: salad…casserole…crusty bread…dessert.

It is what we do to somehow participate in the joy or the sadness of our friends.  I mean, sometimes, what else can we do?  We can’t take the burden from our loved ones but by this symbolic act, we are saying: “Know that you are loved.  Know that we are thinking about you.  Know that we want to help in some way.”  It beats the hell out of handwringing and doing nothing, you know?

Those of you who love Elizabeth and her family from this blog might sometimes experience this feeling of desperation.  My God!  What can I do to help? Those of us who have known Elizabeth since college or even before and now live so far away join you, her new friends, in these feelings of inadequacy about our inability to somehow pitch in and help.  

Remember Elizabeth writing about her weekend reunion with her friends from college a few months ago? (read about it here) Well, we all decided during that weekend that we wanted to somehow create a long-distance casserole brigade because none of us live close enough to support her in the day-to-day of taking care of her beautiful Sophie.  We can’t bring her casseroles, give her respite, take her out for a drink, watch her in her plays, run a carpool one day or any of those things that we would be able to do if we lived around the corner.

So, instead of these things, we created a fundraiser page so Sophie can ride in style in a new Duet wheelchair bike.  You can visit the site here if you want to participate:  

https://www.youcaring.com/aduetforsophie

(nota bene: Elizabeth was reluctant to share this on her blog but we convinced her that you guys might like to join the fun!)

I am, as you can imagine, speechless. A rare thing, all around.

The Greatest Weekend in a Decade, at least

This is the year we all turn fifty -- and to celebrate we flew and drove to a grand house in South Carolina. We came from Paris, France and Los Angeles, California. We came from Georgia, and North Carolina. We came from Virginia and South Carolina and Maryland and Tennessee. We are married and divorced. We are with children and without children. We have adopted children. We have children in college and children at home and children with disabilities and children without. We are gay and straight. We love our families and we love each other, passionately.

We went for a big hike in DuPont park on Saturday morning. Some of you who saw the movie Hunger Games might recognize the gorgeous, wild beauty of the place.

We enjoyed the scenery and took many group photos,

But we mainly talked. We couldn't stop talking!

In fact, it was nearly impossible to take a photo of anything other than us talking!

After dinner, on Saturday night, we convened at the homestead for caramel birthday cake and champagne.

We ended the evening with wish papers that I brought from Los Angeles. Evidently, this has never been seen on the east coast, and I was roundly mocked for the whole ceremony being "very LA." But we all made wishes and watched them float up and into the ether.

I am home, now, happy to see my family, but I am filled with warmth and love and happiness and gratitude for friendships that have lasted nearly thirty years, for the women who knew me when I was oh, so young, for the beautiful ways that they live, for the beauty of their faces, for the sound of their laughs and their voices filling my heart.