We Can Do Hard Things, Monday 3/23/20

Fantastic Depiction of the Solar System, 19th century

I'm trying to remember what I wanted to write about today, but I just can't right now. I spent hours today doing virtual teaching, and I am beyond grateful for the precious children I teach and the wonderful folks who run the school and gave me this job. I took a walk through a largely deserted Los Angeles. Every person I passed gave me a wide berth. I love this city.

The POSPOTUS is going to gamble lives for the economy. "The cure is worse than the disease," he says. Meaning money lost is worse than suffering and death.










Everything, I know, is transactional in this culture.





My daughter's life is worth less than yours in the grand scheme of things. If she should get sick and need ventilation, she will be turned away if your "normal" child gets sick and needs ventilation. You know that, don't you? These are transactions that we must accustom ourselves to,



because






please, fill in the rest of that sentence. After the because.









A child injured or killed by a vaccine injury is a necessary sacrifice for the greater good. Children with disabilities shouldn't get funding for education because it takes away from those who are "normal." My taxes shouldn't go to a lazy ass person using food stamps to get by. If a person can't make it on minimum wage, he should get another job or another or another.










WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF, the Master of Ceremonies said in the dumbed-down string of letters we call language now,













On another note, my ex and his lawyer continue to hound me. Now they want me to go through a job evaluation -- something that will assess my earning capacity and what the hell I've been doing with my time for the last five years. I'd cry but why bother? We're in a pandemic, and life as we've known it goes on. For some.



Being quarantined is a bit like hospital time. It's not really time but time passes. Those of you who've spent lots of time in hospitals might understand this weak attempt to describe it.



On my walk I thought about God and god and religion and those who have faith in plans and order. I thought about absurdity and randomness, about houses made of cards, about human fragility and frailty, about beauty and hope and pure, dumb luck.

I choose to be dogged with not so much hope or faith but a belief in things as they are in the moment and the experience that what comes next is utterly and completely unknown.

Making the Vague Bearable

I got up on that little stage and expressed my motherhood and then sat down and listened while other women expressed theirs, and then I and a few of my friends who had come went out for a drink and chatter and laughter. I had an elderflower gimlet and a few calamari and some french fries and lots of laughs. It was a good night.

I had some really good news today about a job -- a really good job that will help to -- well, not help, but rather -- sustain me. Negotiating is still in the works, so I'm not going to say much more, but it's a flexible job that will enable me to be here for my kids and particularly Sophie. I am beyond grateful, sort of hushed by the whole possibility. I guess I'll slip in here that I'm going through a big transition right now, a divorce, to be blunt. Is a blog really the place to say this? Perhaps not. Despite what you think you know of me, you must know that it's not all, and there are certain things about my life that I'm just not going to write about -- ever.

I will include a poem, though, because poetry makes the vague bearable.




Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

Jack Gilbert, from Refusing Heaven

How We Do It, Part LII

Sophie on West End, NYC, 1997

As a writer, I squirm with words. Sophie woke up. Her father made her breakfast. She wouldn't close her mouth over her cup. Strawberries sat in her mouth, a clump of scrambled eggs, swallowed whole. Here, we said to her. Come on. She jerked her right arm and hand, sharply. Over and over, it wasn't so much a seizure as a perseverance, a movement that we interrupt with Sophie! Stop! Sharply, too. She stopped and then started again. The exchange of wondering between us, twenty years old. What is it? Is it neurological? It'll pass. Let's just wait. I mentioned the ambulatory EEG ordered for her yesterday. When the doctor mentioned it, just to see, I nodded and agreed. I don't really care, though. About seeing. There's usually nothing to see and no remedy for the seen. I watched a strawberry fall from her mouth, thick with drool down her bib. I left the kitchen, left her to The Husband.


As a writer, I squirm with words. I squirm to convey this -- what is it? -- feeling not quite despair and not quite hopelessness.  I took a crying shower, my forehead on the tile, imagined it worn, scooped out like a Roman step, trod on, trod on. I am at once mindful of the moment as moment, this too shall pass, yet isn't that a tail behind me made up of moments, stretching behind me, blue and green scales?

Swish.

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.

Riding with boys

Seal Beach, 2014

I barrelled down the 405 yesterday, heading south to Seal Beach for a day of lacrosse watching. The sky was so blue and so clear you could see the snow on the tops of distant mountains to the east, and the edge of the Pacific dropping off the globe to the west. I had three boys in my car on a Saturday morning -- Henry and two other players -- but no one was talking. I heard a grunt every now and then, though, and turned up the radio. When the phone rang, we all startled, and when Oliver's clear, still-high voice came over the Bluetooth, we winced at its brightness.

Mom?

Yes?

Where's the lemon costume?

Um. In the costume drawer?

No, it's not there.

In your closet?

No! It's not there! Where is it?

Well, I have no idea where it is, I said. You'll have to do your lemonade stand without it.

Great, he replied, and hung up.

Bruce Springsteen came on the radio for about two seconds before the phone rang again. This time it was The Husband.

Where's the lemon costume?

I have no idea, I said.

The Husband and The Big O are frightfully similar in temperament, and I imagined a flurry of feathers, chest-beating, sticks being thrown, the sky perhaps falling.

What the he ---

The phone went quiet and Bruce came back on. I thought about glue for a bit, how I am The Glue, and then I thought about Bruce Springsteen, his arms, and how he plays his guitar, that thing he does, and then I thought about surfers, how watching them makes me warm.




The night before I barrelled down the 405 and took a walk from the field to the ocean, climbed over a rise of sand into blue and then walked back and watched three hours of lacrosse, I had come home from a delightful dinner with three dear friends, my head buzzing just the tiniest bit from one very dirty martini and a bowl full of pasta, to a boy fight. Is there anything more aggravating or tedious than brothers bickering? Men fighting? I don't want this to be a lament against the male species, so let's make everyone an animal and do some anthropomorphizing. The small and stout chicken is incredibly industrious but also likes to peck. He pecks and he pecks and he pecks. He pecks on the ape and he pecks on the cheetah. The ape can't stand the pecking, would rather sit and chew on a blade of grass for the duration. He reaches his big, meaty paw out and swipes the chicken, and the chicken squawks far louder than is warranted and begins to peck and peck on the cheetah who is indolent for the most part and good-natured but at a certain number of pecks, he reaches his huge, lazy paw up and makes the chicken fly. There's a burst of feathers and chicken tears because the cheetah is so terribly advantaged and just so damn gorgeous but a mystery, a deep, primitive mystery. There's a wild animal keeper who happens to walk in, she radiates light, the animals are afraid of her, and they love her, too, neither animal nor human, perhaps a goddess, or maybe just glue, and she plucks a feather from her hair where it has landed after flying off the chicken who pecked on the ape and then on the cheetah. She twirls that feather in her hand and catches the cheetah's eye before he takes off with a lacrosse stick held high, and the ape? The ape with his heart of darkness chews his grass, unfathomable.

This Is Still Happening, Part Six, But There's an Upside, World War I Re-enactments and Poetry

The trench has now reached into the front yard, and in lieu of other treasure hunts, like yesterday's, or my going insane, I've decided to begin a World War I re-enactment. I will pit The Brothers as the Allies against The Husband as the Central Powers/Austria-Germany. I will be Wilhelmina Owen, the Poet, and stand at the front door shouting warnings about gas and the lie that is dying for one's country.***

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knocked-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

I will watch the three male species of The Family fight in vain to reorganize the World As We Know It and then fall with the 9 million other combatants in four miserable years. 

I, as Wilhelmina, unlike my brother Wilfred, The Brothers My Sons and The Husband, will escape the insanity by climbing into the Airstream that miraculously appears where the trench ends, still reciting poetry, The Mermaid swimming along right behind me.

Dulce et Decorum Est

***I've always gotten a kick out of those folks who do re-enactments -- they seem to take themselves so seriously. It's what I feel about people who watch a lot of pornography, too. I just start giggling and squirming and feeling like it's all so --- well --- silly. Anyway, the warnings about gas and the lie that is dying for one's country and the verses that I've quoted here are from the great World War I poet, Wilfred Owen. I've posted the entire poem here, if you want to read it, but don't if you're one of my patriotic, war-loving, ultimate sacrifice kind of readers. And dulce et decorum est means it is sweet and right and is taken from an ode by Horace.

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.

An Outstanding Article about Marriage, Gay Marriage and there's no cursing, like yesterday

American conservatives are frightened by this egalitarianism, or maybe just appalled by it. It’s not traditional. But they don’t want to talk about that tradition or their enthusiasm for it, though if you follow their assault on reproductive rights, women’s rights and, all last winter, renewing the Violence Against Women Act, it’s not hard to see where they stand. However, they dissembled on their real interest in stopping same-sex marriage.

Rebecca Solnit, from her article in Financial Times Magazine

How We Do It: Part XVII in a series

Turn up the volume while you're reading -- or not:

I took a break from the life and stood on the rooftop of our outdoor mall this evening and looked out on the city, the suburbs glimmering, the Hollywood hills shrouded in haze, the hot day dying. I thought about pulling Sophie, naked, out of the tub the other night while she seized, her beautiful body draped in my arms when it was over, my own strength, quivering, on the edge of the porcelain. That porcelain tub, so different from the one I sat in, naked, long ago, words typed on paper creased and folded into transparency, and we both vanished for a moment from each others sights which we thought took so long yet back again we were but this time we were hunched in the porcelain tub in the complete darkness where we had nurtured the hunger until it was flicked on light and again we vanished (I fold it back, just so, square by square). What's it all for? Oliver asked, his eyes filled. What is the meaning? Later, when I cried into the phone to a friend, I wondered how I could continue to do these things, the lunches, the pedicures, the combing down of cow-licks, the reading of another novel, the changing the hose from jet to shower and sprinkling the flowers in their parched pots. I should be dressed in black, like those old women in Zorba the Greek, I cried. I should be screaming in the streets, my hair on end, my hands wringing in step with my wails.

Am I not a man? Of course I've been married!

Wife, house, kids, everything ...

The full catastrophe!

Anthony Quinn as Zorba the Greek

Smashed Windows

The Husband walked back into the house this morning and told me that the passenger window of my car had been smashed to bits. I said Really? in just that tone that the word suggests and then I walked outside and down the steps to the driveway where I stood at the car and peeled off a few bluish shivers of glass and let them crumble to the ground. It doesn't look like they stole anything, The Husband added, and I agreed. The boys circled the car, amazed and titillated at random crime, I went back into the house to deal with Sophie and The Husband left with Oliver to take him to school. He came back to pick her up and take her to school despite having a late morning event he needed to cater. I found a place to fix the window, lay a towel over the pile of glass in the front seat and drove west on Pico Blvd then south on La Cienega. I travel this way at least four times a week, but I had never noticed the auto place or the coffee shop that the man recommended I go to while I wait despite the fact that both had been there for nearly fifty years. I sat at the counter and ordered blueberry pancakes and crispy bacon with a cup of coffee and read a tiny version of The Family Fang on my phone.  The blueberry pancakes were excellent, and I had whole milk in my coffee. Two hours later, the car was fixed and I paid the owner $237.00. The Husband said his luncheon went well.  Neither he nor I had lost our marbles that morning but had, apparently, resigned ourselves to smashed windows.

Two Small Stones

Polk Place, 1935, Wilson library in background: William Waters, IV

We stood on the steps of the old library at UNC-Chapel Hill, the fall of my sophomore year. We were on the top step, having emerged from the stacks blinking, blinded in the day's light. My backpack was heavy on my back. I was wearing a Mexican-inspired red ruffled skirt with desert boots, an ensemble that I imagined bohemian in otherwise preppy 1982. He put a hand on my shoulder, and I felt his dry palm through the thin cotton of my shirt. The same bumps on my skin rose at his touch as do when I step into sunlight. The bare skin receives warmth and then, shocked, feels a chill, the goosebumps, then the warmth spreads to the tips of the fingers. A sun sneeze. His hand lay there, on my shoulder, so that I couldn't move. I heard his voice, low, in my ear, a whisper. If we lived in Cro-Magnon times, he said, you would never have survived. I would be the wild cat that ate you up. The steps under my feet were hard, wide and shallow. I was stuck under his hand and couldn't open my mouth. I felt his fingers on my throat, cool and dry. Blinded, I saw spots, little black dots and at the bottom of the steps, the world, bare and primitive, stripped.

Small Stone 21 and 22

What's left

The leaves were raked up not down, Jesus Christ you said, too early and angry I thought, too dry, too old, what's left.


Small Stone 2