Short-Winded and Sharp-Tongued

I've been writing a long time. My father sent me the scrap of paper above which I'll add to a little box full of poems and stories that I wrote long, long ago.

As the dreary news trickles in, my tongue smarts and the words to an old American song drift inside my brain.

Oh give me a home

As I wrote on a previous post, my arms aren't long enough to reach, always, with compassion toward everyone. Mea culpa. 

As my friend said in a text this morning, Trump is the whetstone where we sharpen our tongues. 

where the buffalo roam,

The picture of our President Resident Lech with six other white men standing round watching him sign legislation that tells women what we can't do with our BODIES

where the deer and the antelope play

Our President Resident Lech has given the go-ahead to fuck with sacred land and clean water, and we are being asked to reach out with compassion.

where seldom is heard a discouraging word

I don't think softened words are going to do much of anything.

and the skies are not cloudy all day.

How to Cope, Part 2,345,679

What sort of superpower would you have if you could?

I'd like to fly, I think. I'd like to soar. I love the word soar and how it conjures wings wide open, arms, too. Then again, I'd like the ability to go back in time.

Go back in time to fix things you messed up or change the outcome of your life?

Oh, not at all. I have few regrets and none that I'd fix if it made today a different one, at least in my life. I would like to go back to the moment when I learned to read. I'd like to hold onto that feeling and then maybe go back to what it felt like sitting up in the cherry tree in my front yard in New Jersey where I read The Hobbit and the Henry Huggins books, Lois Lenski, A Little Princess, Jane Eyre. I'd like to feel that feeling again -- being immersed literally in a book of fiction.


What are you reading?

God. So many things at once. Dostoevsky Reminiscences by Anna Dostoevsky. Don't roll your eyes. It's good. How could I call his novels my favorites and not have known that he married his stenographer after she transcribed The Gambler as a twenty-year old? Being the perfect wife to one of the great (male) writers was, sadly, something I was rather obsessed with as a young woman. I won't give you more details because like I noted above, I wouldn't change a thing. Also, the very funny Harrison Scott Key's The World's Largest Man. I follow Key on Twitter where he makes me laugh every single day, and so far I'm laughing through his memoir. Oh, and I just downloaded The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone a new book by Olivia Laing, described as "an expertly crafted work of reportage, memoir and biography on the subject of loneliness...." Weird. Lots of non-fiction, which is unusual for me. I'm still reading Lucia Berlin's short stories, though, and every time I start thinking about Drumpf and any of the goings-on in The New White Supremacist Republican Party of Spineless Humans, I pick up Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? and am lulled into a nineteenth century daze. Since the novel is probably tens of thousands of pages (I've downloaded it on my Kindle and am around 13% done), I'm reading it in a sort of bookworm's drinking game to deal with TNWSRPSH (see above to translate acronym). I also love Trollope so it's a win-win for me.











I'm trying to develop a sense of place in my writing.

The windows of lovers.

A broken window looking out onto a Georgian column, a sloped grassy hill only visible if you peel back the pizza box shoved in place of the glass. The smell of piss, the sound of a broom sweeping. Four panes broken by a cross, un-curtained with a view of a pond and scraggly field, over my shoulder if I lie flat on the bed, naked and laughing. A yellowed pull shade, darkened by cigarette smoke, the stark branches of a tree, black in a gray sky, if I lie flat on the black couch, the material slippery against my skin. Bars, a rusted fire escape, visible from the door where I stand, clothed. Blinds, slanted light, the sound they make, the rustle, when a breeze hits them, then me, peace.


What's happening, Reader? How are you coping?

The Big Purge, Continued

to my sister, Melissa 

who collects the Fisher Price toys and childhood books

that we threw away long ago 

by trolling for them on Ebay

Before driving up to Point Dume in Malibu yesterday, I tackled my bedroom. At one point I felt slightly panicked at all the shit lying on my bed, but eventually I finished throwing away, sorting into piles and otherwise tidying up. The thing is that I don't even have a lot of clothes or shoes or bags. What I have a lot of is books and stuff. By stuff, I mean things like my Brownie beanie and change purse or the strange little gingerbread man made of pottery that has a pink, indented stomach with the word GUM printed on it, for when you go to bed and need a place to stash your gum. I got it when I was about eight years old which makes it more than 43 years old.

I'm preternaturally neat so my clutter is very, very organized. I live in a very small California bungalow, but it might as well be a Chinese box for all the things stored inside. Ordinarily, you'd probably be impressed, but in these bourgeois stream-lined, mid-century modern times, you might suffocate or at least feel like you're drowning. The Japanese book that I've been using as a guide is fairly harsh in how it assesses what to throw away. You're supposed to do it all in a certain order, too, or else you'll supposedly slip back into slovenly ways. I read somewhere in it that you were to pick up an object or a book and say, Does this bring me joy? and if it doesn't or you can't answer affirmatively, you throw it away. That gum holder brings me joy, so it's staying on top of my dresser, next to the little wooden box that my friend Noa gave me when I got divorced nearly 25 years ago. When you slide open the secret panel, there's a tiny little note inside that says, in Noa's handwriting, The best part is always inside. That little box and note sustained me during one of the darkest periods of my life (when I had no clue on what was to come five years later!). While I appreciate the aims of this Japanese woman's philosophy and understand the whole yadda yadda of not allowing objects to own you or to be too attached to things because they're things, I think you can take the pathologizing of loving your stuff a bit too seriously. Does the little orange copy of Li Po's poems bring me joy? No, it doesn't. I haven't read it in probably twenty-five years. But it once brought me joy because The Boy I Adored gave it to me. Do the baby teeth in my underwear drawer bring me joy? Absolutely not, and I threw that away. I'm not a hoarder, ya'll!

You learn a bit about yourself doing this sort of purging -- the bit that's just plain weird, in my case.

For instance, gaze upon this old Charles Chips can that I once ordered from a Vermont Country catalog because it reminded me of the O'Connors, a wonderful family with whom we were friends when I was a little girl living in Convent Station, New Jersey. The O'Connors had five kids, all of whom were Teenagers, and they always had Charles Chips cans of potato chips delivered to their house and stashed in their rec room in the basement. Back in the late sixties and early seventies of the last century, having a rec room with cans and cans of Charles Chips was incredibly neat, as we would say, and when I saw it in the Vermont Country catalog, I probably flipped out a bit too much for comfort if you're a Japanese woman who's written a best-selling book about tidying up your life. If the memory of a shag carpeted rec room with some Barca loungers, board games, a pinball machine, a WiFi and an extra fridge that held popsicles and six-packs of soda cans makes you happy, you'll understand from where I'm coming. That I ate the chips and saved the can is probably not something that this quiet, serene Asian woman would approve, but you'll learn next that I put it to very good use.

Some years ago -- okay, maybe fifteen years ago -- I put a bunch of stuff inside it as an earthquake kit. I stashed it under the dresser, behind a basket that had one of Sophie's old giant therapy balls, deflated and folded up for -- what? When I pulled the basket out yesterday, I had to tug it so hard that I probably resembled those characters in the A.A. Milne Pooh Bear books who had to tug on Pooh to get him out of a hole where he'd been stuck eating honey. And yes, there was an inordinate amount of dust that came out, too. But I digress. Out of the Charles can, I pulled a first-aid kit, two jars of Ready Candle, one bag of emergency candles, a harmonica, a silver Tiffany baby cup and one set of silver Tiffany baby utensils -- clearly all essential to survival for three days (particularly stashed under a dresser and behind a deflated rubber therapy ball for easy access). Unless Baby Oliver or Baby Henry had somehow crawled back there one afternoon in olden times to stash their silver as the living proof of some kind of genetic proclivity to hoard, I have no idea why that silver was in there, but I do remember fancying learning how to play the harmonica, especially if I could wear one of those cool contraptions around my neck while I played the flute, too. Was I planning on entertaining the young 'uns over candlelight with some Bob Dylan riffs, our house caved in while the Sharpshooter Swiss Husband (long story) stood on guard, protecting us from those who were not as well prepared?

Does it bring you joy?

I took the silver cup, the harmonica and the baby utensils out of the Charles can and lovingly packed the rest of the stuff back into it, along with some pouches of water that have 5-year expiration dates stamped on them (due to expire in August 2015). Then I slid the can under the small wooden table that sits by my Barbie closet and right by the back door. This way, I can grab it on my way out to the shed where our 30 gallon tank of earthquake water sits, all ready to be siphoned. I have no idea where to store the silver things but know the secret lies somewhere in The Brothers' closet where I have boxes and boxes of keepsakes. And yes, they do bring me joy.

The Bookworm Thrills

The Bookworm, circa 1974 or 1975***

I've just been reading The New York Times Book Review, have downloaded several new books, added a couple to my Amazon wish list and spent several hours dipping into the old reviews of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude and a few of his other novels. That made me search for my old copy of the book, which I found and which I'm thinking I should re-read. Marquez loved Joyce and Woolf, and just the other day I was talking to an old and dearest friend, and he reminded me of Joyce's short stories, how amazing they are, how you can pick up anything of his and just dip in wherever, start reading, re-reading, whatever. I had told him that I couldn't get through the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Goldfinch, that it bored me and I wasn't sure why. I'm wondering if I can get through the Marquez, this late in the game or whether I should stick to shorter novels. I haven't read a biography in years, so I'm pretty sure that I'll be buying the hard copy of the new Updike one by Adam Begley. The review made it sound fantastic, and while I came late to the Rabbit books, I fell in love with Updike over the four summers I spent reading each of those books, culminating in my seeing him at UCLA right before he died. I can still remember my surprise at his warmth (I'd thought he'd be patrician and snooty), at how long and thin his fingers were, how I wanted to jump from my third row seat right into his lap. And then there's Barbara Ehrenreich's Living with a Wild God (that's the one I downloaded), described by the reviewer as electric, but then later as discursive, repetitive and claustrophobic, but Ehrenreich fascinates me, and so do people's lives and their mystical experiences so I'm going to read it. When I was a child, I'd walk into a library, move toward the children's section and have to kneel down, my foot wedged in my crotch, such was the urge to pee. This ridiculous side effect of book titillation carried on well into my adulthood when I still frequented bookstores, and even now, as I click and download and order, I feel the same sort of urgency and excitement at the prospect of so much to read, so many books. There's still time.






***Really, one can't exclaim enough over this perfect shot that my mother took one Christmas when I was ten or eleven years old. She always claimed that she'd practically shout at me such was my reverie when immersed in a book. I think she made that maxi dress for me, and I'm struck by my hair grown out and curled, evidently, with a curling iron. There would be several painful years of adolescence still to get through when the hairstyles got even more scary, and let's just say that being a bookworm was not a ticket to popularity and ease at a fancy private middle school in Atlanta, Georgia in the seventies. Oh, and let's not even talk about the couch fabric.

Favorite Jokes

via The Chuckle Book by Mel Crawford

I'm no joke teller, but there are a few that I've heard that keep me laughing. One is my favorite of all time, from a book I had as a child, and the other two were told to me by a fellow blogger. Here they are:

1. What goes HA HA PLOP? (Answer below)




2. A guy is sitting at home when he hears a knock at the door. He opens the door and sees a snail on the porch. He picks up the snail and throws it as far as he can. Three years later, there’s a knock on the door. He opens it and sees the same snail. The snail says "What the hell was that all about?"



3. Jesus and Saint Peter are golfing. St. Peter steps up to the tee on a par three and hits one long and straight. It reaches the green. Jesus is up next. He slices it. It heads over the fence into traffic on an adjacent street. Bounces off a truck, onto the roof of a nearby shack and into the rain gutter, down the drain spout and onto a lilly pad at the edge of a lake. A frog jumps up and snatches the ball in his mouth. An eagle swoops down, grabs the frog. As the eagle flies over the green, the frog croaks and drops the ball. It’s in the hole. Saint Peter looks at Jesus, exasperated. "Are you gonna play golf?" he asks "Or are you just gonna fuck around?"


Answer to Number 1: A man laughing his head off.

Crafty

I'm crafty, I think, but not in the positive sense. I am clever at achieving one's aims by indirect or deceitful methods and probably fall more on the "indirect" rather than "deceitful," but I'm not crafty in the sense that I have an ability or even desire to make things -- you know -- Do It Yourself kind of stuff. But the other day, I made this from an old picture frame to hang up the nearly obscene number of earrings (none of which I'd made or beaded or strung in a crafty way) that no longer fit in my jewelry box.

What do you think?


Making that gave me only a small bit of satisfaction, but it did pique my interest in my history of non-crafting, and I remembered that I actually did enjoy the occasional craft as a child. In fact, I was a bit obsessed with craft kits and went through a period in the mid to late seventies where I actually ordered quite a few craft kits from the backs of magazines. Do you remember doing that? I think I even joined a Frito Lay Fan Club at one point, cut out the order form from the back of a cardboard pack of snack size Fritos, filled it out with name and address, enclosed $1.50 in cash, put it in an envelope and sent it. I ordered Sea Monkeys that way, too, and then later joined those Columbia Record Clubs and Paperback Literary Guild. I think I was more in to the neatness of ordering something and then waiting for it to come in the mail, rather than the actual craft and work it took to put together, but I digress.


Here's a craft kit for a general store that I did when I was a kid, that now sits on top of Oliver's dresser. He shares my love of the miniature and often remarks that he wishes he could find a similar craft. This one is a bit shabby, but I'm fond of it. It reminds me, too, of a remark I made to my friend Johanna the other day -- that since I don't have the money to fix my house up an renovate it, I should perhaps find an old dollhouse and outfit it. 

Here's a bizarre little picture that I made with some kind of beads and the ugliest cardboard that you can imagine. I have it on the hallway book-shelf and find it oddly prescient that it's of a surfer. Reader, many of you know that I am a tad obsessed with surfers and have stated that if there were multiple lives, I would like to come back as a surfer, wear a bikini, work in a surf shack, smoke a lot of pot and have no cares to speak of.