Sorry Dollars

He's flint and bonfire, his tongue a scythe leaving ashes where it cuts. If I could I'd send him into the fields to roam and work, his capable hands. If you read aloud to him, the words settle deep and when he speaks of them and it, he is an older, wiser person than I, and if written down, a foreign language, gobbledygook. I drive down the alley to pick him up from school, shattered windows, a dumpster, and brace my hands on the steering wheel, uncertain whether a smile will climb into the car or a heavy backpack, bursting at the seams with the weight of years and unwanted history.

Yesterday, his eyes twinkled and he handed me a play check written out to me for 1,000,000,000,000 dollars. Pay to the order of Elizabeth Aquino, it said. I am sorry dollars. His signature an O and a swoop and a flourish. I wish that I could give him fields instead of the classroom, ease instead of angst.

Back from the Fields

Until nightfall my son ran in the fields,
looking for God knows what.
Flowers, perhaps. Odd birds on the wing.
Something to fill an empty spot.
Maybe a luminous angel
or a country girl with a secret dark.
He came back empty-handed,
or so I thought.

Now I find them:
thistles, goatheads,
the barbed weeds
all those with hooks or horns
the snaggle-toothed, the grinning ones
those wearing lantern jaws,
old ones in beards, leapers
in silk leggings, the multiple
pocked moons and spiny satellites, all those
with juices and saps
like the fingers of thieves
nation after nation of grasses
that dig in, that burrow, that hug winds
and grab handholds
in whatever lean place.

It's been a good day.

Peter Everwine

Reading over the vail

via City Lights Booksellers

I love the phrase this vail of tribulation and tears, probably because I find myself in one of late -- for some obvious reasons and some not-so. Reading novels is how I get through, to tell you the truth, and right now I'm reading three. John Irving's In One Person is a bit slow, a story of a small town and the mostly eccentric characters that live there. I don't know whether it's because I downloaded it onto my Kindle (I find it difficult to read novels on a Kindle) or whether I'm bored by Irving's contrivances, but I don't know if I'm going to finish it. I'm speed-reading through Leah Hager Cohen's The Grief of Others, a beautifully written story of a family grappling with tragedy, and have just started Michael Chabon's newest, Telegraph Avenue. I've also got Near to the Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector, sitting on my bedside table, an intriguing story by an equally intriguing writer that I read about somewhere -- where?

I've said a thousand times that reading might just be the only constant in my life.

Reader, how are you navigating the vail?

My kind of President

Henry was elected President of his Middle School Student Council, yesterday. His platform included improving the lunch line system and working on more community service projects in advisory groups. Oliver had the brilliant suggestion during the campaign to hand out Oh, Henry bars, and we decided that his title is Campaign Director.

Henry often slips through life with an ease and joy that belie his inner strength and wisdom. I'm so proud of my son and thrilled that he earned this position of leadership!

Pre-Debate Remarks from the Peanut Gallery

Oliver, on hearing that Paul Ryan would be debating Joe Biden tonight:

When he smiles, that Paul Ryan has a face you just want to smack.

Now that my ladder's gone

William Blake

I rode down 5th Avenue at three in the morning in a taxi, new to the city and enraptured, already. Much was broken but much was beginning, and when the taxi came to a stop, I peered through the windshield from the dark back of the car and wondered aloud what was going on. The circus is in town, the driver said, in a thick accent, and just then I saw them, the animals, giraffes and elephants, some horses, a zebra, walking across 5th Avenue in an orderly line, making their way toward Madison Square Garden, horns honking, lights shining, eyes blinking, a fantastical mirage.

This morning, I'm thinking that we make art and beauty, literally, out of shit. That that is my impulse and, I imagine, many others'.

Here's a Yeats poem that I haven't thought about in a while.

The Circus Animals' Desertion

I.

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain, I sought it daily for six weeks or so. Maybe at last, being but a broken man, I must be satisfied with my heart, although Winter and summer till old age began My circus animals were all on show, Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot, Lion and woman and the Lord knows what. II What can I but enumerate old themes, First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams, Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose, Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems, That might adorn old songs or courtly shows; But what cared I that set him on to ride, I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride. And then a counter-truth filled out its play, 'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it; She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away, But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it. I thought my dear must her own soul destroy So did fanaticism and hate enslave it, And this brought forth a dream and soon enough This dream itself had all my thought and love. And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea; Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said It was the dream itself enchanted me: Character isolated by a deed To engross the present and dominate memory. Players and painted stage took all my love, And not those things that they were emblems of. III Those masterful images because complete Grew in pure mind, but out of what began? A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street, Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can, Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.  -- William Butler Yeats

Santa Monica Blues

 Thank God I live out here, because when I have the blues, like I had today, there's nothing to do but take a quick ride to the beach and sit in the sand with a book.

Oh, and take surreptitious photos of surfers undressing.

A Blackbird Sings

I participated last January in a project called small stones, an exercise in mindfulness where I wrote a short, observant prose poem each day for a month. Some of these small stones -- and one of mine! -- were gathered and edited and published in a book just released today on the Kindle and will be available in paperback shortly. Edited by Fiona Robyn and Kaspalita, you can read more about the book here. I found the exercise incredibly helpful for my writing both online and off and would encourage you to try writing your own small stones.

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

William Blake 

Archives of my Small Stones

Boy and Mother

Me, after another bout of sixth grade homework and angst:

Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for a Dream

Him, after another bout of sixth grade homework and angst:

Oliver, decorating for Halloween

Or is he digging my grave?

After everything

some long ago beach, 1988

You can lie on your back on pale pink linen sheets and listen to a single bird's song but only hear the page of the newspaper turn, a cup brought to the lips, a swallow.

You can have felt the bed beneath you move like an ocean, two boats with lazy oars moving away from each other, the water dark beneath.

You can have climbed up a leaf-strewn hill somewhere outside of Hartford, scrambling, and grabbed hands for the pulling.

You can have walked up the stairs, dark, the house in the woods, and heard the low laugh, seen the pale form in the hall and turned to walk down.

Since the brothers flew their dream machine on a cloudy day, the pale sand piled up in dunes, and only the air remembered.

Love never dies; it just goes underground.

To my Expressing Motherhood friends

Last night was the last show of Expressing Motherhood, and while I'd grown a bit tired of my own story, I was sad to say good-bye to this beautiful group of women whose stories entertained and moved me so much over the past two weeks. I sat with many of them, none of whom I knew before this experience, and shared intimate stories of my life and theirs, a profound experience of community and commonality. Most of the other mothers were younger than I, some much younger with very young kids, and I was struck by how many of them professed anxiety about their children, about their worry for each of their futures. It made me reflect on my own experience raising Sophie, how consumed by worry I was when she was born and diagnosed and treated over the years, yet how that worry and anxiety finally succumbed, for the most part, to a sort of acceptance and resignation only tinged with true terror every now and then. As for Henry and Oliver, I don't remember ever being really worried about them beyond the trivial and certainly not in the way some of my fellow performers professed. I couldn't pinpoint how or when this happened, how suffering and anxiety and worry transform through surrender, and I wouldn't pretend to dole out advice on how to achieve this equanimity (after all, it was sort of imposed on me), but I thought of Pema Chodron's words:

Whether we’re seeking inner peace or global peace or a combination of the two, the way to experience it is to build on the foundation of unconditional openness to all that arises. Peace isn’t an experience free of challenges, free of rough and smooth—it’s an experience that’s expansive enough to include all that arises without feeling threatened.

 I remembered that I had written about this before and thought I'd re-post it here, as a sort of homage to my new mother friends. Thank you, ladies for a wonderful two weekends, for the laughs and the ease and for being so brave to share your experiences both on and off the stage.

Is the ability to hold two opposing feelings and/or thoughts something that one is graced with or something that comes with time and experience and exposure? I don't know the answer, but I see it all the time in those who share the experience of caring for a child with disabilities or who have lost a child to illness. I can look at Sophie and grieve for the loss of "normalcy," but I can also exult in her being exactly the way she is. I can sorrow over the absurdity of changing a near-seventeen year old's diapers and marvel at the gift of intimacy that entails. My friend Jody's beautiful daughter Lueza suffered from severe cerebral palsy due to gross medical malpractice when she was born, and she died unexpectedly nearly a year ago at the age of sixteen, but Jody told me the other day that it was such an honor to have cared for her daughter so intimately for so many years. I'm not talking here about all that unconditional love blather, although trite expressions are trite for a reason. I'm heading toward an understanding of openness -- of what it means to be truly open to experience, to the relinquishment of false notions of power and control, to, dare I say it, Love. I wouldn't be able to live, one person might say, hearing of the death of someone's child.  I could never do what you do, another says, I just couldn't handle it. 

Contrary to what some might say, we're not given what we can handle. We're opening to handle what we're given.

The Extent of Sunday

I have three children who know how to relax.

Pasquino the Protester -- a Sunday Sermon

Before you read the following rant (IF you read the following rant!), click here to see where I'm coming from.

I know a number of quite reasonable people who like and will probably vote for Mitt Romney in November, who believe that Obama is a good man but a terrible leader and that Romney's personal business acumen will enable him to lead the entire country to financial prosperity. Some of these reasonable people are close family members, and I've learned over the years to not go there.

That being said, I can say whatever I like here, knowing full well that many of these people and family members come and read what I write, feel angry, feel hurt, feel horrified or like they need to pray to Jesus for my damned soul, and that's all right with me, too. Today I read about Paul Broun, a Republican Congressman from Georgia (my home state) who claims that evolution and the Big Bang theory are lies straight from the pit of Hell. Congressman Broun is also an M.D. (holy shit!) who despite his medical and scientific training, believes that the earth is actually only around 9,000 years old and was created in six days by God and that said scientific training are all lies said to keep him and other folk like him from understanding that they need a savior. Congressman Broun is a member of the House Science Committee.

Holy shit, is what I say, no pun intended. And I know that some of my relatives and a few of my friends are reading this right this very instant, shaking their heads at my negative, unpatriotic, heretical soul, and while there's a teensy tinesy part of me that feels hurt by that, there's a much bigger part that has decided being connected by blood gives me no more commonality with some than the filtered water that comes out of our respective faucets in the various states we call home.

And if you're wondering where this rant is going, I just feel compelled to say that a vote for Romney is not just a vote for a billionaire to transfer his acute business acumen on a macro scale. It's a vote to confirm that the Bible and religion, of whatever ilk, trump reason and centuries of beautiful and breath-taking labor by human beings to move forward. It's a vote for a man whose base includes Congressman Broun, whose base, I'd venture to say, is dominated by people like Congressman Broun and others of his ilk, including the asinine Congressman Akin who parsed out the differences between legitimate and forcible rape. It's a group of people who believe that anyone other than Jesus Christ is a false prophet, that a woman's constitutional right to determine what happens to her body is akin to baby-killing, that men and women who love one another and want the same rights and privileges as everyone else are abominations, that women who apply for food stamps to feed their families while working three jobs are lazy-assed moochers and not working hard enough, that President Obama is a half-black, half-white man not born in this country who favors Muslim terrorists and who is bent on overtaking the country and turning it into some kind of Stalin-like dictatorship. It's a vote to use torture on our enemies in the name of liberty and even, peace. And even if you strip away all of my own hysteria, it's a vote for a pretentious, condescending man who bullied his peers as a young man and continues to do so as he campaigns and debates, a  lying billionaire whose character was evidently shaped by forced Mormon modesty and obscene amounts of privilege.

I completely understand why someone of a moderate bent sees appeal in a successful businessman like Mitt Romney, particularly when we're still mired in a financial quagmire. But I really don't believe that the office of the President is just about business. If it is, we're fucking lost and might as well appoint General Electric as president. You know those people who denounce those who honestly call out what is shameful in America (I've got them on my Facebook page, in my high school class, in my family), who scream U S A! the loudest and the shrillest? I think they're all scared shitless by progress, to tell you the truth, scared to move forward in a world that is rapidly changing in ways that we can't even begin to understand. Whether they're in my family, from my high school, my college dorm or my neighborhood, I just can't stand by them right now and walk that moderate path. I just can't.

Moles and Beauty Marks

It's another Actor weekend, and last night's show was, once again, a blast. I told some friends that I'm having literal FUN when I do this show, and it might sound pathetic, but I can't remember the last time I had such a good time. Maybe it's because I'm hanging out with a bunch of women who I don't know and who don't know me -- it's a release of sorts. During the last six months, due to things unbloggable as well as the relentless grind of seizures, I've sort of morphed into my Italian grandmother who was known to walk around the house in her black house-dress with rolled-down support stockings, fingering her rosary beads and muttering pray that I die, pray that I die. I don't wear black all the time or stockings, and I sure don't finger rosary beads, but I've been on the edge of a constant whimper, if not a praying to die and I have the moles to prove it. With the show, I've lined up enough childcare to get away and have a glass of wine or my favorite beer each night with either the women in it or my beautiful friends who've come to support me. Last night, I sat in the car with my friend Jody for nearly an hour after the show talking and laughing about nearly everything under the sun, suffused with the warmth and horror of our shared experiences. Today I'll be running around with The Athletes (my sons), but later on I'll dress in my black shirt and pants, put on more makeup and drive to Burbank where I'll meet some friends for wine and dinner before getting back out on the stage and doing my reading. I do believe I've been replenished doing this performance, so perhaps on Monday, when it's all over, I'll stop whimpering and shout How lucky am I? And when I pluck the errant hair from my mole, I'll just be thankful that I have so many beauty marks.

I swear to you, there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

Walt Whitman

Layers of Street Art

I'm not sure who painted this on a telecommunications box (Steve Reed, do you know?), but I love the Shepard Fairy wall across the street and behind it. I've grown to really appreciate graffiti and sometimes even downright love it --