How We Do It: Part XXXV in a Series: Normal

Henry, March 2012

This is a meditation on normal. Last night, Henry asked me for help with his Honors English homework. I had to read the short story assigned to them, a John Updike titled A&P, that I'd never read before. I found it exciting and the questions that Henry needed help with, exciting, too. Henry is an incredible reader and a pretty damn good writer, but he currently states that he hates writing and Honors English. He hates getting so deep into a text for annotation and study that the actual reading of it is no longer enjoyable. We talked for a bit about that last night, and I told him about the time I saw Updike at UCLA a couple of months before he died, how his fingers were so long and tapered, how he loved his craft, how I wanted to jump onto the stage and into his lap. We also talked about the upcoming Homecoming Dance, about the girl he invited and what he needs to wear to the dance. I need real slacks, he told me, and shoes. I sat in rare normal, lay in it like a pig in mud. Those of us who are extreme parents generally shush those of you who are not when you counter your normal with comments like oh, I know this is nothing compared to what you go through. We don't want to be any more isolated than we are. We are told that normal is relative. There's no such thing as normal, I've told my sons. My friend who has a son who was normal at two and is now neurologically devastated by a rare disease grapples with a new normal. Last night I recognized normal for what it is. Normal.

Impossible Steps

Sometimes I think back or look back on the early days of caring for Sophie as a sort of exercise, a honing of the enduring part of me. If I could do that then, I think, I can surely do this now. I keep walking. The steps are shallow, a Chinese mountain, the path is still steep. When I watch her have seizures, and now she has them all the time, my body is a numb sigh. I hum as I walk, a drone more than a song. These are moments so disengaged that I know I am not enough, am never enough. I take a picture and another one. I am losing my confidence in light, the light, her light, wings of desire.

The Stuff of Tragedy

When I drove by, I noticed a chorus of gods and goddesses outside of the Launderland Coin Laundry this morning, a couple of Renaissance men and a monk or two. They had come marching south, down Vermont Avenue, disgruntled by the dry air, the crackling wind, the voices discontent. Rich people lack empathy, a wise man noted. Not to mention their difficulty getting through the eye of a needle. David flexed his muscles, held on to his stone. Venus took her hand off her mons and flicked back her hair. Donuts were passed hand to hand. The cars rushed by, their inhabitants intent on misery.


Heroes. Victims. Gods and human beings.
All throwing shapes, every one of them
Convinced he's in the right, all of them glad
To repeat themselves and their every last mistake
No matter what.

People so deep into
Their own self-pity, self-pity buoys them up.
People so staunch and true, they're fixated,
Shining with self-regard like polished stones
And their whole life spent admiring themselves
For their own long-suffering.
Licking their wounds
And flashing them around like decorations.
I hate it, I always hated it, and I am
A part of it myself

-- the Chorus, from Seamus Heaney's The Cure at Troy, A Version of Sophocles' Philoctetes

The Mystery of Boys

The Dyslexic Entrepreneur has been sitting outside in the baking hot sun, selling lemonade and chocolate chip cookies since 10:00 this morning.  He decided against selling cotton candy today, as there were still things to work out. The last time I ventured to the corner to check on things, he had made upwards of $100. I'm not kidding you. While part of the proceeds will go to the Epilepsy Foundation of Greater Los Angeles, Oliver is also intent on saving enough money for an off-road go-kart.

O.K.

Henry, on the other hand, slept until noon, woke and ate pancakes, made a few forays to get himself a couple of lemonades, did some homework, and I just walked into his bedroom where he was swinging a bat, practicing. When I expressed alarm at how close he was swinging to the window behind him, he condescendingly told me that when you swing a bat, Mom, it's not BEHIND you. 

These boys mystify me.

The Entrepreneur, Halloween, Christmas and The House of Crazy

If I told you the past week chez House of Crazy was crazy, it would be an understatement. Raymond Chandler and Santa Anas aside, between the Seizing Marijuana Chronicles and The Teenager and The Dyslexic Entrepreneur, I've been hard put to remain not just calm but even somewhat collected. I won't even go into The Husband. I've been wearing sunglasses all week to disguise my tears and have walked around the house whimpering when they're all at school. I've told you over and over that my Italian grandmother used to do so all day, whimper, sigh and mutter under her breath pray that I die, pray that I die. Last night I made a valiant and last ditch effort to cheer the Dyslexic Entrepreneur who had finished a horrific week of school that included about 5,321,789 emails back and forth to The Powers That Be at the school and the passing, Santa Ana-induced thought of homeschooling. He had just climbed into the car after baseball practice and begun another historic rant of negativity, how I suck at baseball and just about everything and how I'm just going to give it all up and be a giant loser, I'm really not supposed to be in this world, and while my eyes glazed over and my ears dripped blood, the tiny thought entered my mind, the valiant thought that I then actually voiced:

Why don't we go to Cost Plus World Market and get you some stuff for your lemonade stand?

If you're familiar with Los Angeles on Friday nights, and particularly with our local outdoor shopping mall called The Grove on Friday nights, you'd know just how outrageous this suggestion was -- how it was more the last ditch effort of a dying woman (pray that I die, pray that I die) than of a reasonable or even good enough mother. We went. We nearly killed ourselves wrestling a giant Exxon Valdeez SUV for a parking spot, and we walked the Christmas decorated clogged aisles (pray that I die, pray that I die) until The Dyslexic Entrepreneur decided that he'd use some of his earnings from last week's lemonade stand to buy a cotton candy maker for this week's stand. And given that I was dying, had contemplated buying some admittedly adorable silver-flecked Santa ornaments and wouldn't be spending the money myself, since the Dyslexic Entrepreneur has actually made about three times as much as it cost,  I said yes.

What's really cool about the cotton candy maker is that you can throw candies in the top to flavor the sugar.In fact, that photo of The Dyslexic Entrepreneur was taken at about 10:00 this morning, and his product became his breakfast. In addition, we're going to start decorating for Christmas early this year at The House of Crazy by putting silver flecks on the pumpkins and draping spider-webs over the life-sized Santa Claus that's sitting on my porch, a "gift" from my parents. The weird thing is that I'm no longer praying to die but actually getting excited.

Reader, what are you doing?

An Explanation for my Craziness?

It's rained less than .09 inches in nine months in southern California and is utterly and completely crispy dry right now. The Santa Anas are blowing, the palm fronds are swaying, Sophie is having more seizures, and it's time for the Raymond Chandler.

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot, dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that, every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

Raymond Chandler, from Red Wind 

Self-Absorption, Tolstoy, Mark Twain and Happiness

Leo Tolstoy and his wife, Sonya Behrs

I really couldn't have that picture of myself yesterday at the top of the blog anymore. Imagine what people would think if they hadn't been here before? The fact that I also posted a photo of myself in a Tinky Wink costume on Facebook must mean something other than complete self-absorption. The truth is that I feel a little crazy of late, like I'm closer to tipping off the edge than doing the customary pirouette. Surrendering to humor, to self-derision is probably just a defense. Behind all humor is sorrow, said Mark Twain, and I believe that. I flip the date on my Alhambra Poetry Calendar and read a poem called Nihilism that has entirely too many explanation points after words like gloom and tomb and hollow. It made me feel like shit, and I'd rip it off the calendar, light a match to nihilism and watch it burn into the blue sky of Los Angeles if I didn't feel a modicum of respect for Mr. Lionel Johnson who lived a short thirty-five years in the late nineteenth century. Here's the final stanza of his poem:

For all the things I do, and do not well;
All the forced drawings of a mortal breath:
Are as the hollow music of a bell,
That times the slow approach of perfect death.

Good lord, the drama! I like to imagine that living in another century I would have taken to bed with a draught of laudanum on days like today -- and yesterday, and the day before. Or I might have been in attendance to a great bearded writer, ministering to his own dramas, bearing his thirteen children and secretly aware that his fame was completely dependent on myself.

Yes, I'd say, as he picked up his quill, yes. All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Coming Out

 Given that we're all still feeling nauseous, frightened, anxious, angry, frayed, despairing and humorless, and that photo of me on the surfboard with the cute man behind me perhaps didn't do the trick for those of you most despairing, I've decided to come out as a survivor of the worst awkward adolescent stage -- if not in history, than certainly at my alma mater, The Lovett School in Atlanta, Georgia.  There I am, circa fall 1976, my shiny coffee-colored locks freshly curling-ironed and not brushed out, apparently. I had just grown out my Dorothy Hamill bob, I believe. A brainy eighth grader, I had yet to try hard contact lenses and that year sported rose-tinted goggles with rose-tinted lenses. It's too bad this photo isn't in color, because pink makes you look gorgeous, I'm told. Notice, too, the skinny cords of my neck, wrapped in a puka bead necklace. The collar of my polyester blue shirtwaist uniform dress is artfully arranged, and what you can't see is my wide macrame belt cinched around my fly waist, my chunky navy knee-socks, my bony knees and L.L. Bean Bluchers. I'm smiling, but trust me. I was miserable and had no idea that delirious beauty, an effortless ability to eat what I wanted and still stay thin, and a handsome man behind me on a surfboard would be in my future. All I knew was that the girls giggling in the bathroom as they stroked on blue and green eye-shadow or the boy who told me that I was a pirate's dream (a buried chest) were light years ahead of me in anything that mattered.

I sure showed them.












P.S. Don't tell me that I looked beautiful, like my mother always did, because I'll never trust you, again.

Succor

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things 
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Wendell Berry

Idle Thought of the Evening to Cheer You Up

If that old photo of me on the board with that cute man riding the waves doesn't cheer you up, then maybe this idle thought that I just had as I lay on Sophie's bed in her room will. I know everyone is feeling incredibly glum. Nervous, Anxious. Nauseous. Filled with anger. Overflowing with lassitude. A deep sense of futility.

I'll remind you, though, of that time Bush won the presidential election the second time.

Remember that? Remember that morning, especially those of you in Los Angeles who walked into the preschool parking lot with me and had to look at the folks who'd been sporting big Ws on their Range Rovers?

Remember how you felt?

Do you feel worse now or better?

I'm feeling so much better that I hauled my old doddering ass off of Sophie's bed, scanned that old photo of myself on the surfboard with the cute man riding the waves and typed out this post.

Come on! Don't you feel a bit better?

More Notes from the 18th and 19th Centuries and Back to Our Normal Programming

I cope by running to the hills with appropriate poetry. Here's some:

The world is too much with us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers --
Little we see in Nature is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

William Wordsworth
(1770-1850)

And if you're tired of it all, the whole damn mess, I'll take you back to my regular programming. You can even lick the frosting from the bowl -- or my fingers. Take your pick.

First there was this:

Then there was this:

And then, this:

And after, this:

Oh, and finally this:

If you're an old doddering fool, there's this:

Gulliver Travels to the Land of Morons

In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress -- or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress -- a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party's 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed this morning.

Read more: Government Shutdown - The Reign Of Morons Is Here - Esquire 

The best part of the day for the old gray mare

When a representative from Indoor Air Quality called me on the heels of Quality Home Improvements, I felt so frazzled that I said to the hapless telemarketer or operator or whoever the hell she was, Shut up and leave us alone! And I slammed down the phone and knocked her this far to Sunday. Is that the expression? Bless those people's hearts. I guess they're thankful to not be working for the government.

The best part of the day, though was the  little post-it sitting in front of the teller at the bank I visited, and there was something so cheerful and poignant about it that I had to take a photo. Even the crumpled up Dum Dum wrapper cheered me.

I told you that I'm a doddering fool.

The Old Gray Mare, Part 456

God, that's an ugly photo of me, isn't it?

I woke up extra early this morning and lay in my bed reading emails while simultaneously telling myself that I shouldn't lie in bed and read emails but rather go outside, exercise, meditate, bask in gratitude, do a devotional. I read the emails, finding a perverse pleasure in deleting, deleting, deleting, even the news, the expected news that the government was shut down. I heard through the grapevine that a beloved teacher at our school was fired, and I quelled the rising nervousness in my stomach, the uncertainty of the future -- the closed government, the powers that be in every institution, even our little charter school, mistrust -- the growing sense of futility I feel despite a bit of age and experience and, dare I say it -- intelligence? Delete, delete, delete. I texted a friend that I am particularly uninspired of late, and not even blogging, the daily practice of it that so inspired my off-line writing, is working for me. The old gray mare just ain't what she used to be. Ain't what she used to be, ain't what she used to be. Then I read this, by one of my favorite bloggers, and I'm up out of bed and onward.

Thank you, Pauline.