Something that gave me a thrill this morning

was listening to John Updike, reading Frank O'Hara. It's the small pleasures that keep one from tipping over.

Read and listen HERE.

LA Moms Blog

Twice a month I write for LA Moms Blog. I hope you'll check it out, leave a comment there or here, make some noise, disagree vehemently, agree wholeheartedly or act lukewarm.

What I'm trying to remember

Mizuta Masahide's gravesite




The barn's burnt 

down, 

and now 

I 

can see 

the moon.


-- Mizuta Masahide
(thanks for reminding me, Andrea)

Bookshelf Tableaux

People Like That are the Only People Here

That's the title of one of my favorite short stories ever. It's by Lorrie Moore, and when I first read it in The New Yorker magazine, my daughter had recently been diagnosed with infantile spasms, the epilepsy syndrome that would so cruelly progress and evolve. The story is bitter and hilarious and tragic -- just the way I like it. I tore it out of the magazine and folded it up into a square and carried it with me wherever I went. The story became a sort of touchstone for me because the writer is a mother documenting her experience of having her child diagnosed with a rare cancer and the subsequent surgery and hospitalization of the baby -- the particulars are not the same as mine but the sentiment and feeling behind them, the brutality with which she faces her feelings and then articulates them really resonated with me and actually still does. I pull it out periodically and reread it, marveling at its power and wondering why some words, these words are so powerful. How can that be?

The story appeared in Lorrie Moore's excellent collection Birds of America. Here are a couple of excerpts:

She will live according to the bromides. Take one day at a time. Take a positive attitude. Take a hike! She wishes that there were more interesting things that were useful and true, but it seems now that it's only the boring things that are useful and true. One day at a time. And at least we have our health. How ordinary. How obvious. One day at a time. You need a brain for that?

How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler's mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye's instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. All that unsayable life! That's where the narrator comes in. The narrator comes with her kisses and mimicry and tidying up. The narrator comes and makes a slow, fake song of the mouth's eager devastation. 

She loves her friends, especially loves them for coming, since there are times they all fight and don't speak for weeks. Is this friendship? For now and here, it must do and is, and is, she swears it is. For one, they never offer impromptu spiritual lectures about death, how it is part of life, its natural ebb and flow, how we all must accept that, or other such utterances that make her want to scratch out some eyes. Like true friends, they take no hardy or elegant stance loosely choreographed from some broad perspective. They get right in there and mutter "Jesus Christ!" and shake their heads. Plus, they are the only people who will not only laugh at her stupid jokes but offer up stupid ones of their own. What do you get when you cross Tiny Tim with a pit bull? A child's illness is a strain on the mind. They know how to laugh in a fluty, desperate way -- unlike the people who are more her husband's friends and who seem just to deepen their sorrowful gazes, nodding their heads with Sympathy. How exiling and estranging are everybody's Sympathetic Expressions! When anyone laughs, she thinks, Okay! Hooray: a buddy. In disaster as in show business.

Unfinished Captives

When I visited Florence, Italy for the first time I was overwhelmed by the unfinished slaves sculpted by Michelangelo at the Academia. Arranged in a line down a long hallway that led to the more famous statue of David, I remember thinking that they couldn't possibly have been more powerful had they been finished. The figures of men were literally straining at the stone, their muscles taut and polished and trapped not only by stone but time. I had read The Agony and the Ecstasy that summer and was a graduate of English and French literature with goofy stars in my eyes. I felt as if I had channeled Michelangelo, himself, through centuries when I walked down that hallway, luminous in bright Italian sun.

Today I opened up the Borzoi Reader poem of the day and read this beautiful little poem. It brought back the captives to me on a cloudy Saturday afternoon, 6000 miles away and many centuries later.

The Fragment of Statue 

How is it
The marble
Fragment
Looks whole.

Full of its power
The lips
And chin of
The feminine
Stone.

Not that the whole
Would not have
Power but

How does the fragment
Flower
At all.

-- Stan Rice

Kudos to San Antonio and one awesome father

Morgan's Wonderland theme park for children with special needs and their families opens officially today in San Antonio, Texas. I rarely get teary at these sorts of stories, but I needed a few tissues when I watched this on Good Morning, America. Thanks to my own dad for bringing it to my own attention.

Click HERE and be sure to watch the short video.

Grandma Josephine

This is my paternal grandmother Josephine whom we called Nonni. Despite the youth and beauty one sees in the above photo, this likeness is one that I marvel at more than recognize. I only remember Nonni as a grandmother, short and gray-haired with housedresses on most of the time and thick stockings rolled right below the knee. Nonni lived in New Jersey, in an apartment attached to my uncle's and she was already a widow as my grandfather had died when I was about four years old. The apartment she lived in was extravagantly clean and neat and smelled like bleach and linen and tomato sauce. She had few possessions, almost none of which I can remember -- two crystal lamps on either side of a lace doily-covered bureau, ceramic figurines, perhaps -- photos of her children and grandchildren. Her bed was always made, its top so smooth and straight you could, literally, bounce coins off of it. She had a black pocketbook with a clasp at the top and whenever we'd visit, she would open it up and a waft of the most wonderful grandmotherly smell would escape. Out would come some crumpled tissues and creased dollar bills, one of which she would tuck into our hands and tell us in her heavily accented English for the ice-cream man, for the ice-cream man. She had a heavy television set, the kind that looked like a cabinet and we'd sit cross-legged in front and watch shows with her sometimes. Despite having lived in the United States for at least fifty years, Nonni could neither read nor write in English or Italian, and she apparently never understood that the shows we watched were not real. She would clasp her hands to her cheeks during crime dramas, the lame ones of the seventies, say, like Starsky and Hutch and gasp in horror, even moan in distress. Nonni, it's not real, we'd say, it's just television. She was a wonderful cook, a master chef, really, whose meatballs and sauces and meats and vegetables I can still just about taste if I close my eyes. Mangia, she'd say and if we picked at our food, she'd screw up her face and mutter whassa matta with you? why you no eata my food? She was a devout Roman Catholic who carried rosary beads with her whereever she went and who helped us to memorize the Lord's Prayer in Italian. She wore black on Fridays and legend says every day after her husband died. I seem to remember some blue, but my memory isn't clear. She had the dark superstitious character of the southern Italian but also shifted her false teeth so that they jutted out of her mouth to make us laugh. She suffered from dementia as she grew older and could be quite cruel and demanding to her daughters-in-law, one of whom was my mother. I remember the summer she lived with us when I was in high school, when she accused the housekeeper of stealing her housedresses and screamed when our Great Dane ran up the stairs (she thought dogs were filthy). She grumbled a lot that summer and moaned, too, all day. Pray that I die, she would mutter to us in the house, out of my mother's earshot. She sat at our kitchen table and mushed saltines into her coffee and when I brought my boyfriend home, she would smile and ask whether he was Catholic. Yes, I would tell her, he's Catholic. Nicea boy, nicea boy, she said every time. I believe she gave my mother a very difficult time, but when my father came home from work, she would smile big and act like a long-suffering saint. It was a relief when she left and not too long after had to go into a nursing home. Many years afterward, when I had graduated from college I traveled to southern Italy and the small town where Nonni was born and lived until my grandfather brought her over to New York. I slept in the bed where she had given birth to my uncle and aunt, in a stone house set off the road in a dusty, hillside town. I walked the streets with a distant relative who spoke no English, and we stopped at every little store and bar where he introduced me and drank a shot of something or other with the elderly people who clustered around me and thrust bags of figs and cheeses into my arms. I nodded and smiled and tried to shrug off the heat and couldn't stop wondering how in the span of half a century, Josephine would move away from this tiny town that had not changed in hundreds of years, to the chaotic streets of New York City where she would raise five children.

--to be continued

Lying in bed, in the afternoon, reading Janet Frame

at risk of copyright use infringement

Don't read if you're looking for inspiration

I cracked my eyes open this morning and wanted to close them. Wondered how and why and when. Felt the weight of everything and then some more. Heard the hum of Sophie in her room, the muted cartoon in the living room, the door click shut as The Husband left. Kept my face down in the pillow and said some kind of prayer in my head. Thought of the poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay about spring, a poem that I just read because it's April and April is Poetry Month and it's also the cruelest month, according to Eliot, but Millay tops him with this:

Spring
To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death
But what does that signify?
Not only under the ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Later, much later, after a blue sky day and army men planted all over the sidewalk, I read a few lines of Father Joe in the bathroom, in the late afternoon and Sophie was in her room and she'd had no seizures all week and I was thinking well, I was thinking, and when I left the bathroom and went to her room, there she lay, her head draped over the toy basket, her arms splayed out and eyes rotated toward the wet that came pooling from her mouth and it was all ready over so I picked her up or dragged her the few steps to her bed and lay down next to her and felt, almost, nothing.

I've been mulling

around for quite some time, now, and due to the absence of my sons last week and the concomitant sense of being freed from routine, in general, I just didn't have the capacity or desire to write it down. What's been mulling are my thoughts regarding the ever-increasing scandal/tragedy in the Catholic Church and my own relationship to it. If I told you that I think about it a lot of the time, you might think me neurotic or that old fly to shit thing -- I've gotten into "trouble" before airing my views about the Catholic Church and there is a part of me hesitant to stir the pot once again. But then I read a little more in the paper; I read other people's blogs; I read fancy essays that air on NPR; I listen to my Catholic friends and my non-Catholic friends. And I feel compelled to join in, to discuss what my own feelings are. I have drawn about as far away from the Catholic Church during the last year as I ever have been and that has next to nothing to do with the pedophile scandals and more to do with feeling uncomfortable espousing traditions that I don't believe in. I've struggled to reconcile my admiration for the artistic traditions of the church, for its great mystics, the art and music and charitable works that have come out of it with its male hierarchy, its repression of homosexuality, women and more modern mores. The ongoing obduracy and conflicts regarding the pedophilia scandals are, for me, the impetus to really make some sort of break.

I guess that I should emphasize that all of this has nothing to do with my own feelings about spirituality and everything to do with my spirituality. Being Catholic is an identity that I haven't nor do I wear lightly. I always felt particularly resistant to the evangelical designs of my college friends, comfortable that my own religious tradition stretched back beyond my Italian grandmother into the deepest recesses of my southern Italian heritage. And while my mother's roots were not Catholic, she converted before I was born and my two sisters and I were raised Catholic, went to church through high school, made our First Holy Communions and then were confirmed as Roman Catholics. The Catholic community in my neighborhood is a beautiful one, in many respects, and I count many very good friends as part of it. They were much of the reason why I chose to put my two boys into Catholic school, and while I landed up pulling them out a couple of years ago, it wasn't because of the Catholicism. I wanted to give my boys tradition, and since The Husband isn't particularly religious in one way or another having been raised in the dry traditions of German Lutheranism, it seemed only natural that I would raise them Catholic. What I've found, though, since I've removed them from parochial school is that I have less and less reason to take them to church each Sunday. Without the admonition of the monsignor who felt very strictly that one could only get parishioner status in tuition by going to church regularly, I've let many, many Sundays go by without any church attendance at all.

It's a relief to feel those traditional ties loosen, but it makes me feel strange, too. I wanted a place for my boys that was rich in tradition and reverence. I used to think that I would give them something to rebel against later. I appreciate the importance of ritual and worship, but as my boys have grown up, it's gotten harder to talk the talk when I don't believe it, at all. I can't revere the Pope as the infallible leader of the Church, no matter how good or gentle or intellectual a man he might be. I can't honor a church that judges homosexuals as sinners or deviants and that judges women as less able to perform its highest duties than men or that clings to ancient traditions whose original purpose was to mollify the ignorant. I can't ask my children to attend a church whose leaders enter into politics, even to fight healthcare reform because of its "pro-life" stand. I just can't. And I can't pick and choose anymore, either, cafeteria style.

As my faith increases, my attachment to Catholicism wanes. I feel relief in this but also sadness. I feel not a little unmoored. I'll search for ways to instill beauty and honor and faith into my children but it probably won't be through Catholicism.

That's probably all I need to say.

They're Home!

This is the Easter basket loot they brought home in an extra bag.

And here we are, happy, happy, happy (although a tiny bit bummed that Butler didn't beat Duke)

Day Eight

I'm off to the airport to pick up The Boys!

Check!