It's aturday and my s key i sticking

I'm not going to fix the "s" thing, so you'll have a little game today, I guess, this lazy Saturday afternoon.

Both boys have gone to the eat coast to spend the week in Hilton Head. I've decided to tay here with ophie and try to feel calmer and more relaxed. Hilton Head is not my happy place, to use a loathsome cliche, but I hall mis my family and the feeling of being together, however fraught with family drama. Perhaps it's a trial run for when Oliver goes to college in late August, and Sophie and I will be fairly alone and defenseless except for the large guard dogs we have and the crowbar I keep beside my bed, ready to swing at the first person who sets off my fancy Nest security system.

Reader, beware.

Today I went to see Dr. Jin, and when she stuck a needle in the flehy part of my arm just below my elbow crease, I felt a surge of -- something -- and then tears or were they water? started leaking out of my eyes and down my face where they pooled, I'm sure, on the white paper I lay on. What i this? I asked Dr. Jin, but she was already down at my feet and remarked, Almost done, it's good to cry. Cry and then relax. he put the tinny Chinese music on, and I cloeed my eyes and drifted, like I always do, to the past and a kind of lucid dreaming where I am at once aware that I'm lying on the table with needles sticking out but drifting through past lives and memories and boys and babies and it's all very zen and soft and humid and sensual without any exertion. Before I left, Dr. Jin reminded me to take the special pills she'd given me last week. I imagine they are some form of Chinese prozac and will help me to regain my former effortless composure and sunniness.

o.

What are you doing this weekend?

Musings

I had a massage last night in a weird little Thai parlor in Koreatown. The place is on the second floor of an ugly strip mall, right above the Very Very Rice Cake Studio and just past a pool hall. The pool hall is always open and reeks of smoke. The lights are bright, even in the middle of the afternoon, and the place is filled with Korean men. I like to watch them when I walk by, watch them chalking their cue sticks, watch them line up the balls on the green velvet. I played pool sometimes back in college, back when you could bend over the table and be certain someone was looking at you, at your ass, in that way. 

These days, just to get through them, I fantasize about running away, being another person. A
famous designer, Kate Spade, my age, died by suicide this week. She hung herself on her bedroom
doorknob. I thought about this off and on, all day yesterday. Then this morning I woke to read that beloved Anthony Bourdain had hung himself, too. I met him once in New York when I worked on the line of a famous restaurant. Life as a line cook in New York City in the early nineties was exactly how he described it. Today I don't know what to think, but I know how to feel, and I feel sad. Utterly sad. The whys and the hows and the rest of it. All the stuff about connection and love and staying kind. 

I don’t ever fantasize about killing myself, but I do wish I could disappear. Walk away, start over, be free. I’m aware that this is ridiculous, that if I were to end up somewhere in, let’s say, New Zealand, I’d rue what I’d done. I’m not trying to minimize Kate Spade's despair. Or Anthony Bourdain's. It’d be obscene to say that I relate. 

Outside the massage parlor is a little plastic stool. On top is a paper plate that has an orange, a cookie and a small glass of water with a flower in it. I thought maybe someone had left their snack there, but Carl said that it was an offering. Cool, I thought, and I automatically felt more peaceful. We walked in, got settled into the blue lounge chairs, put our feet into the plastic buckets of warm water that two women placed in front of us. I took off my glasses and closed my eyes. Despite the strip mall, the place is peaceful. The massage therapists are all Asian, both male and female, but they range in age. One time I was pummeled by an ancient crone who seemed to know all my secret places. There’s a place on my arm, the part that sags, that I know is soft because my Italian grandmother's was as well, that place where I ran my hand as a child just to feel it sway, and when the Thai masseuse touches mine, I can feel my throat back up with tears.

It was a grueling week with Sophie. She had wisdom teeth surgery last Friday which
triggered an unbelievable number of seizures. She can’t talk or express herself or tell me if she’s
in pain, but she can seize. One night she had more than seven of them, in a row, and it’s one of
my secrets that while most people would have taken her to the hospital or at least called the
neurologist, I toughed it out. It’s a secret because it sounds crazy, maybe even irresponsible.
Caretakers of children with seizure disorders have these kinds of secrets. Sometimes we count
only on ourselves.

There’s something about massage, like acupuncture, that gets me going. I have a routine when I
go – what I’m going to think and whom I’ll think about, in a certain order. If I were writing an
essay, I’d title it Dreaming About Sex During Acupuncture. My mind just goes there. The doctor has no idea that after she finishes putting all the needles in, asks me whether I want music and puts it on, walks away and shuts the door behind her, I’ll lie very still on the table and start thinking about my past. I lie very still because when I move, the needles hurt. Actually, the needles don’t hurt, but whatever they’re doing hurts. Actually, it doesn’t hurt as much as it feels uncomfortable. I'd edit the whole paragraph to just that last sentence, but somehow the progression is necessary. I try not to move once the needles are in because I feel like I'm impeding the flow.

That's what's so hard about all of it. Seeking help. Being still. Feeling. Not impeding the flow.







to be continued

RIP

Acupuncture Land

Chinese Doctor Doll

I visited Dr. Jin today, lay on the table with needles poking out everywhere, and when she left the room, I closed my eyes, drowsy under the heat lamp, my mind immediately going to the places where it goes when I visit her. I go to my other life, another life, the quiet Chinese restaurant where I worked briefly as a hostess, ushering people to their dark booths, skirting the desiring eyes of Jackson the Chinese waiter who permed his hair and told me that I was from a James Bond movie, for your eyes only, he'd whisper, the water in the plastic pitcher tremoring in his hand. I go to a house in the country, the top floor and a spindle bed where afterwards he'd lie on the floor, one ear pressed to hear the screams of the couple who lived below us and we'd laugh, raucously over the fields and then I'm in an office in Nashville in my business skirt and hose my glass office in front of Joni the receptionist with her frosted hair and her careful nails and the plastic wheel where she'd place the pink message slips and I'd spin it around and finally escaped into a walk-in closet, the floor rough beneath me, fabric brushing my face, the hum of the air-conditioner, my onion hands after work that took me to the city, the larger city and the doctor gently knocks and walks in so I stop and open my eyes. She smiles and takes the needles out.

Chinese Foot Chart


Every part of us
alerts another part.
Press a spot in
the tender arch and 
feel the scalp
twitch. We are no 
match for ourselves
but our own release.
Each touch
uncatches some
remote lock. Look,
boats of mercy
embark from 
our heart at the
oddest knock.


-- Kay Ryan, from The Best of It, New and Selected Poems

Acupuncture Dream

On the way over, I knew already what I was going to think about when the needles were in, the door was shut and the music was on. I knew that I was going to go back to you, to a house on the side of a road, a wooden porch, a Carolina dusk of sticky left off soft, a folding chair with rusty legs, your worn khakis and the reggae sway as I pulled into the driveway. I knew I'd think of it as I drifted off, my channels open, your guitar put down as I leaped into your lap, my head thrown back where you kissed my neck, your wide smile, tilting.