How We Do It: Part LVI

Somewhere along the I-5 in parched California

This morning I lay in my bed in the darkness with halfway thoughts. The light came only halfway into the room through the lowered slats of the blinds. If I live to be 85 years old, I'm only halfway. As children we are as unaware of the halfway as we are, at the halfway, of the end. Thresholds are always that. Liminals. I heard a breath, a halfway cry, a grunt. I slipped my robe on and walked to Sophie's room. She was lying on the floor, face-down, her arms in a fencing pose, quietly seizing. I turned her over, wiped the drool from the side of her face, the tendrils of wet hair and picked her up, lay her on the bed. Sophie has a seizure every morning, and I imagine it happens in the halfway when the light and the tides and the moon and the shifts of the earth on its axis conspire to affect the most exquisite, the tendrils of nerves, reaching for all of it.  She is halfway off the drugs she was on one year ago. She will be okay.



it launched forth, filament, filament, filament 
by itself

Walt Whitman

On a morning walk, without a camera

Picture what looks to be an enormous honeysuckle plant, the bloom as big as the palm of your hand, the pistil as long as your middle finger. Imagine the fragrance as you walk past it and look up to see what that smell is, look up and see it hanging over a wall. You pull one off the vine, apologetically looking up toward the window of the house behind the wall, in case someone is watching, but no one is, so you pull out the pistil (or is it the stamen?), slowly, anticipating the tiny drop of nectar that will appear at the end of the tube. It's dry. Hear, too, the sound of too many crows squawking as they dart and fly and hop over green lawns, the hiss of sprinklers on and off. Picture their black disfavored bodies, wings outspread, the one loud one just overhead. Jump at the crack beside you in the middle of the street, bits of a nut shell, scattered, the sound a tinny gun shot and the crow swoops down to peck at what is freed. Imagine your own head exploding like that, bits of bone, whatever is extraneous, littering the street and only the good stuff left to pick over.

Comments from the Peanut Gallery, Part 3,245,567

Oliver, still looking a bit peaked from his flu

Oliver woke up again this morning at about 5:00 am, hacking away. To his credit, though, he didn't wake his brother by turning on the light and instead used his flashlight and made his way to the living room where he turned on Duck Dynasty. I went back to bed and dreamed the craziest dreams that I won't go into here, but suffice it to say they included ex-husbands, dogs replacing babies, crevices in the hallway, and bank robbery. Oliver told me that at some point mid-Duck Dynasty, he came to my room and peered in at me, wondering if he should wake me up again. He told me this while I was toasting his English muffin and thanking him for being so less dramatic than he'd been the night before.

I was gonna wake you up and cuddle with you but from the doorway you looked sort of like a gorilla in bed.

Reader, the vanity is slipping away from me, at least the last remnants of it.

Mornings with Sophie (too early) and a poem

Antilamentation


Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook, not
the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication, not
the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punch line, the door or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don't regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You've walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the window.
Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation.
Relax. Don't bother remembering any of it. Let's stop here,
under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

Dorianne Laux

Listen to it HERE.

Mornings with Mulan

Mornings here are a careful orchestration of and restrained hysteria over coffee, breakfast, the packing of lunches, the feeding of Sophie, the dressing of Sophie, the arguing over who feeds the dog and today over whether the Taliban were in Cuba (Oliver and The Husband, two peas in a pod). I'm the one who keeps things moving along at a fairly rapid clip. Mornings now include:

Don't forget the egg!

If you're French and reading this, take note: apparently, if you're the grandmother to your thirteen year old's egg, you're still the one in charge. 

Mulan 3

Mulan 2

Mulan 1