What Heather McHugh, Caregifted, Molly Ringwald, Robert Pinsky, Poetry, Respite, Seattle and I have in common

Victoria, 2013

That's me and Heather McHugh, the extraordinary poet, MacArthur Genius Award winner and founder of CAREGIFTED, the organization that sent me on a week-long respite trip, all expenses paid, last June in beautiful Victoria, Canada. Keep reading the rest of this post to learn about an upcoming benefit for CAREGIFTED in Seattle right around the AWP conference. I'll be at the benefit and would love to see any of you there! Please share if you're a caregiver or a Seattlite or just know of people who might donate to this worthy organization.


via Heather McHugh's Facebook page:


PRETTY IN PINK star Molly Ringwald not only won hearts by doing John Hughes movies, but she also sings JAZZ! She'll be coming to Seattle on Feb 28 to do just that, a performance for CAREGIFTED caregiver respite-- and so will emeritus US POET LAUREATE Robert Pinsky and world-touring jazz pianist Laurence Hobgood-- all three are taking time out from their own tours in order to come to Seattle to perform for the benefit of the weariest souls on earth-- and it'll all happen at the eye-boggling Chihuly boathouse (a private venue). Only people who get their tickets at this link can come!

http://www.strangertickets.com/Browse#search=Chihuly%20Boathouse

With more than 10,000 writers due to come to town for the AWP conference that week, and only 175 tickets, the slots will get swallowed up-- so if you have an interest in caregivers or if you already live in the incomparable Pacific Northwest, you might want to grab your tickets BEFORE the announcement is posted elsewhere this week to all the out-of-towners making their own plans for a week here.. ALL proceeds go to respite for the weariest of family caregivers-- these are the ones who have spent a decade or more giving up opportunies of their own in order to take care of someone who can't take care of him or herself. And they do it until one of them dies. Talk about love. No better Valentine's day gift than this one, for you or anyone else.

Caregivers of the kind CAREGIFTED serves are saving ALL OF US billions of dollars of institutionalization costs-- and they are invisibly working day and night in every extended family, every neighborhood. Most people turn away, if they notice at all. But the fact is, these caregivers can teach us the truth about love. Our first single dad caregiver (of a severely disabled teenager) is taking his CAREGIFTED getaway in 2014-- he and another caregiver who will be at this Chihuly Boathouse Benefit Soiree and both are featured in this clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ78gHne0LM

(The other is the woman who MADE the film clip, the cherishable Elizabeth Aquino). At the event Feb 28 (5 to 8:30) you'll be able to raise a glass to both of them, and 8 other CAREGIFTED awardees, and also see what Adam Larsen has been doing lately with our CAREGIFTED documentary (he just appeared on POV on PBS).

Not to mention a chance to bid on rare art works like a signed Samuel Beckett novel's first edition, and a signed Linda McCartney photograph, holidays in Whistler and Vancouver Island, and more...

This event ain't cheap, but includes all these amazing people, artists, performances, food, drink, and a location that you'll never see anywhere else-- one-of-a-kind, a real dazzler-- and your choosing THIS for a Valentine's Day present to someone who can be in Seattle Feb 28 will ensure we can go on giving our all-expense-paid weeklong getaways to these most desperately-tired caregivers from all over the country.

This is MY Valentine's gift to YOU, letting you know before the rest of the world does. Now pass it on, yourself, for love!

http://www.strangertickets.com/Browse#search=Chihuly%20Boathouse

Update from the School of Revolution

Homeschooling began again in earnest today, and I thought ya'll would like an update on it and perhaps a snapshot, of sorts, of a morning. Over the last couple of weeks, Oliver has begun going out in the morning for a run and is working toward doing a 5K. He claims to run for a bit, stop and do jumping jacks and then for a bit and then more jumping jacks, etc.  I guess we can call this P.E., and while he does that I scurry around and do whatever it is I need to do in the morning. When he gets back, he makes himself a smoothie (peanut butter, milk, frozen banana and chocolate chips) and starts in on a computer reading program that was suggested to me as being good for dyslexia. He works on that for about 45 minutes to an hour by himself with me checking in every so often. After that, we worked together on a few things. The first was writing and grammar, all laid out in an interesting way in a workbook that was recommended to me by another homeschooler. Today, we learned about declarative, exclamatory and interrogative sentences. We wrote captions to comics and finished with a mock invitation to an event. This is called an "Imagination Stretcher," and Oliver chose to create a Burning of Your Spelling Tests invitation that you can see in this post.

Awesome, right?

So awesome -- I think -- that the rest of our morning that included a chapter on property rights in a very cool economics book, with a corollary discussion of Plato, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, followed by some review of the early North American settlers, was sort of overshadowed.

I learned today (or had forgotten) that the Pilgrims were actually two groups of people -- the Saints and the Strangers. The Saints were the original Separatists who had fled to Holland when King James began to tax them for using church space (they had separated from The Church of England because they had given up on the church every properly "purifying" itself from the excesses of the Catholic Church). When the children of the original Separatists began to assimilate into the Dutch culture, the elders were alarmed and decided to move their people to North America, but before they could do so, they returned to England to get the money and were forced to take on many more people. These extra people were called the Strangers. I just love that.

And all of this.

This afternoon, Oliver will go to Mathnasium for an hour because I refuse to teach it. I love that, too.




Resources:

The Story of the World (History for the Classical Child)
Volume 3: Early Modern Times

The Economics Book: Big Ideas, Simply Explained
DK

Wordsmith Apprentice
by Janie B. Cheaney

Reading Horizons At Home

Holothurians and Autotomy

Autotomy

In danger, the holothurian cuts itself in two.
It abandons one self to a hungry world
and with the other self it flees.

It violently divides into doom and salvation,
retribution and reward, what has been and what will be.

An abyss appears in the middle of its body
between what instantly becomes two foreign shores.

Life on one shore, death on the other.
Here hope and there despair.

If there are scales, the pans don't move.
If there is justice, this is it.

To die just as required, without excess.
To grow back just what's needed from what's left.

We, too, can divide ourselves, it's true.
But only into flesh and a broken whisper.
Into flesh and poetry.

The throat on one side, laughter on the other,
quiet, quickly dying out.

Here the heavy heart, there, non omnis moriar--
just three little words, like a flight's three feathers.

The abyss doesn't divide us.
The abyss surrounds us.


Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012)

au·tot·o·my

ôˈtätəmē/

noun

ZOOLOGY

1. 1.

   the casting off of a part of the body (e.g., the tail of a lizard) by an animal under threat.

hol·o·thu·ri·an

ˌhäləˈTHo͝orēən,ˌhōlə-/

noun

ZOOLOGY

1. 1.

   a sea cucumber.

1. 
   

Los Angeles' Macchu Picchu

This morning, Oliver and I joined my friend D and climbed these stairs.

It was grueling, to tell you the truth, and I had to stop several times and contemplate the universe. Oh, and catch my breath. I think lifting and carrying Sophie has kept me in a modicum of shape, but man oh man, I was out of breath and my thighs are still quivering. When we got to the top -- a scenic overlook -- the athletic freakazoids were doing push-ups and what looked like twirling handstands. A group of very large Rastafarians were listening to reggae. Men, women, old, young, black, white, Asian, Latino -- a real slice of Los Angeles walked those steps and took in what is the best reason for walking up so many stairs -- the view of the mountains and the skyline to the east and north:

 and the ocean to the west:

We're living the life out here, aren't we?

Reading Benders

My sister sent this poster to me, and I love it.

I've been on a reading bender lately, in spite of the Plumbing Troubles, or maybe because of the plumbing troubles. No Virginia Woolf (one of my favorite writers whom I haven't visited in a long, long time), but I devoured Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, a novel about post-Soviet Chechnya that reminded me of  a more intense The English Patient. I had been reading The Goldfinch, too, the first hardback book that I've bought in months, but I put it down when I became so immersed in the Marra novel. I was going to start back in when I read about Wave by Sonali Deraniyigala and decided to download it. It's beautiful writing -- the true story of a woman who survived but lost both her young sons, her husband and her parents in the 2004 tsunami -- and don't ask me why this hideous subject makes for an incredible story -- and I can't put it down. I have every intention of finishing The Goldfinch and then might start on The Luminaries. As for Virginia Woolf, another read of The Waves might be in order, or my personal favorite, To the Lighthouse.

These were my five favorite books of 2013, in no particular order. I have several friends who published books this year, but I won't include them here --

I want to show you more by Jaime Quatro is a collection of rocking short stories that were weird, subtle and very sexy. Quatro got into my head and lived there for a while, and when I was finished with her book, I wished that I knew her.

Behind the beautiful forevers by Katherine Boo is non-fiction, the story of garbage collectors in Anawandi, a slum just over the fence from luxury hotels in Mumbai, India. The book is shocking in its depiction of extreme poverty, but it reads like a novel, and I felt immersed in these people's lives and in their humanity. Some people claim that the book was depressing -- I felt it was eye-opening.

Quiet Dell by Jayne Anne Phillips was as good as any of her other novels, all of which I've read and loved. This one was based on the true sordid story of a con man who lured widows with love letters and then murdered them. The story takes place in 1931, and Phillips includes some real newspaper accounts of the tragedy as well as photography. The characters she adds to the true life story are wonderfully drawn, particularly a female reporter and the photographer who accompanies her. I also loved how Phillips wove the haunting voice of one of the murdered children into the narrative.

I hadn't picked up Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert since my undergraduate days as  a French lit major, but this Lydia Davis translation made me embarrassed that I'd ever knocked the novel. If you haven't read it, you should.

All That Is by James Salter got so many good reviews by so many great writers who were near-cultish in their love of the writer that I felt compelled to read him. Salter was unfamiliar to me, and when I read this novel, I could hardly believe that I had never read or heard of him. That happened to me before, when I "discovered" Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road when David Sedaris recommended it at one of his performances in Los Angeles. Where the hell was I and why have I not read this? I thought for both the Yates and the Salter. The writing in All That Is is intense, male, beautiful and sexy.

So, those are my five favorite books of 2013, excluding my friends' wonderful memoirs. Looking back, each of them is intense and dark in some way, two are sexy as hell and none are particularly uplifting unless you're like me and feel euphoric when you read beautiful prose. I guess there's no denying the wild horse in me.

Dirt dominates the picture, but there's orange on the horizon

Have you or your children ever gotten lice? No, we don't have lice (praise Jesus!), but this plumbing SIT U AH CEE UN has taken over my brain in much the same way as lice did about eight years ago when Henry, Oliver and I acquired it. Prior to the infestation, I turned my nose up at the hysteria of other mothers who were "going through" lice situations at their households. There was all the washing and the bathing and the combing, and then, worst of all, the running off to the fancy de-louse businesses that began to crop up in the early years of the third millenium. I confess to looking down on these dramatics, convinced that lice was small potatoes, compared to -- well -- seizures, for instance.

You know what happened next, right?

There must be a proverb that addresses the woman who rolls her eyes at others' misfortune, then experiences the misfortune and runs pell-mell toward the Hair Fairies, spends nearly $1,000 on de-lousing efforts -- on a credit card --  and talks about it incessantly for approximately one month, even at holiday cocktail parties. Reader, do any of you know of such a proverb?

Anyhoo.

The Plumbing Troubles have taken over my life, my brain in much the same way. I might have dismissed a neighbors' chatter about the very same situation, nodded sympathetically while thinking god, how boring, how utterly bourgeois, you think YOU have problems. I know for sure that I've walked around for a half century never taking stock or truly comprehending what goes into the building of a house in a city, much less the amount of dirt that must be removed from the planet and piled in one's backyard and on the side of the house in pyramids before reaching eroding pipes. I've watched the shirts on the backs of the workers in my yard bloom sweat stains with every thrust of the pick-axe, knowing that all I can do is think and how lame and ineffectual thinking really is compared to back-breaking labor. I've felt a teensy bit embarrassed that my sons roll out of bed about five hours into the digging. Sometimes I fantasize about throwing myself or The Husband into the trench. What if someone forgets that there are no stairs at the side door in the laundry room, they open the door and step out and fall down, down down? I think at 5:00 in the morning. I stand at my back door, snap photos of the dirt pile and realize the useless tangerine tree behind the dirt is in riotous harvest-ready form with what must be thousands of tiny sour, seedy orange fruit. Damn, why can't that be a money tree? I curse. I really can't think or talk about anything else, to tell you the truth -- am effectively using the Plumbing SIT U AH CEE UN to ignore everything else that I should be thinking about or doing.

Reader, what's going on in your parts?

The Death of Iron-y

I haven't had time to post today, but I've been thinking a lot. I've been thinking about those pipes up there, not clay but iron, corroded and caked with roots, inch by inch, foot by foot the men drag them out of the ground. I read an article today about irony, about the difference between it and sarcasm or snark. I love irony, think in irony, write it with roots, corroded. Sophie has languished the past few days, slept innumerable hours, waking only to eat. She is better today, more alert, and I continue to give her the syringe of CBD. I read the threads on Facebook about Charlotte's Web, about the old stuff and the new stuff, about interactions with other anti-epileptic drugs, about toxicity, the liver, something called p460. The voices on these threads are loud and dogged, and I'm not up to the task. What is wrong with me? I think. I am not up to the task. I don't feel like figuring it out. Take copious notes, a woman posts at the end of a long trail of earnest information, it takes a while to figure things out. I don't want to take notes or figure it out. I want it figured out. I am depleted, corroded. Another thread rants, again, about the pharmaceutical industry. Everything is bad, everything. Everyone is against us. The urgency makes me tired. I felt urgent about fifteen years ago. There was no use in it. Time kept ticking by. Am I tired because it's been nearly twenty years of this shit or am I tired because I am corroded, weak, my irony dead? The Buddhist in me refrains from the clinging, skates the fine line of release/letting go and surrender/defeat. When I threw out the baby development books back in the days before information lay at my fingertips, I heard doors and windows slam. Sophie became who she is, despite. She became who she was, anyway.

Henry and Me, a Wingless Thing

The History of Mothers and Sons

All sons sleep next to mothers, then alone, then with others

Eventually, all our sons bare molars, incisors

Meanwhile, mothers are wingless things in a room of stairs

A gymnasium of bars and ropes, small arms hauling self over self

Mothers hum nonsense, driving here

and there (Here! There!) in hollow steeds, mothers reflecting

how faint reflections shiver over the road

All the deafening musts along the way

Mothers favor the moon—hook-hung and mirroring the sun—

there, in a berry bramble, calm as a stone

This is enough to wrench our hand out of his

and simply devour him, though he exceeds even the tallest grass

Every mother recalls a lullaby, and the elegy blowing through it

Lisa Furmanski 

via Poetry (2008)

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.

Sending the treasure to hunt for it

Notice the lump with the pinecone, a slice of bread, and a leaf on it, the two boys standing over it. The lump is me, lying on my bed under blankets, not able to keep warm, feeling sick for the second day. Sophie must be coming down with something as well because she had one, two, three giant seizures this morning. I'd say good times, but that expression has grown so tired. The objects reverently laid on top of me, the lump under the blankets, were objects listed on a piece of paper with the title Treasure Hunt. In a moment of genius, when The Brothers had begun to drive me over the edge with their squabbling, I made the list and told them that I'd pay them $20 to get each item and each item needed to be acquired outside of our house.

$20 EACH? The Big O inquired.

I sighed and said no. 

$20 and a metal detector? he came back.

I sighed and said yes.

Here's the list:

1. A straw from a restaurant
2. A photo of a cat
3. A leaf from a tree
4. Something heart-shaped
5. A piece of cement
6. A coin
7. A slice of bread
8. A pinecone
9. Something sparkly
10. A Christmas-related item
11. A yellow candle
12. A recording of a dog barking
13. A picture of a neighbor

They left and I congratulated myself on my cleverness, let the lump lie.





They returned, literally, about ten minutes later with every freaking object checked off. Now I'm a lump on  a bed under blankets with twenty less dollars and whatever it costs to buy a metal detector.

Stand in front of the mirror naked and admire what you see. Whatever you see. This flesh that curves and rolls like the earth. This decorated canvas upon which the world has painted the story of your life. 

from Sing Your Body by Brittany Tuttle 

The other evening when I sat and talked for hours with Brittany of Vesuvius at Home, at some point I lamented my lost girlhood, my aged-over beauty, the weight I'd gained, something dull and self-absorbed to that effect. Brittany was quick to chastise me for denigrating my body, and then we spoke of the brilliant piece she wrote a while back on her blog called Sing Your Body. Go read it now if you haven't, yet, and then come back. Brittany told me that I reminded her of a Bouguereau female. Bouguereau is a late nineteenth/early twentieth century realist painter of whom I knew nothing. Tonight, I remembered Brittany's comment and looked him up, found a series of beautiful paintings -- lush women, lovely children, portraits of great serenity and sometimes amusement. The first painting that I pulled up was this one:

What struck me was not my resemblance to the woman pictured (there isn't much) but the title of the painting which is Pleasant Burden. I thought, of course, of Sophie and my life with her, the paradox of burden and honor in the carrying of it. I then noticed this painting and thought of Sophie again:

When I saw the following painting, I thought that maybe, just maybe, I might have been a Bouguereau in another life, when flesh was exalted and burdens honored. This year I might just possibly exalt my own flesh, and at the very least, be amused by it. I will also honor my burdens more, recognize and reaffirm the dignity of carrying them lightly.

Caving before the Epiphany

The Christmas Shop our house is officially disassembled.

Peace reigns.

Egypt in Los Angeles

The Great Pyramids

The Nile

Tell me when you get bored by The Plumbing Troubles 2014. Or maybe don't tell me because I'm hard put to come up with something else to share here on the old blog, two days into the new year. I have a scratchy throat and that tingly feeling of being sick, there is Christmas clutter to put away, and there are bills to pay and teenagers to drive around. There is CBD to administer and waiting for miracles. I am still reading The Goldfinch and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. I would like to see the movie with Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts, but I'd like more to see the Italian one The Great Beauty. I think this year will cement my new aversion to the hoopla of BIG movies with mega-stars and millions of dollars spent and made. Perhaps it will cement my proclivity toward pretension in film, but hopefully not. You can call me on it when you like, right after you tell me that you're bored by the documentation of The Plumbing Troubles 2014. It all comes full circle, no?

Reader, what is happening in your parts?

MMXIV

graffiti artist unknown*** 

Today's no different than yesterday, really, other than it's 2014, four new numbers, a new year, an imposition. Dirt lies in three pyramids in our back yard -- some of that dirt, I'm certain, unearthed for the first time in nearly a century. I fancied something discovered while the men were digging -- pottery, perhaps, or arrowheads, some fine bones, a skull, even oil. The men filled plastic buckets with big brown clumps of it, and they filled wheelbarrows, trundled it toward the pile. The men smile when I come out to stand at the edge, look down. They wear long-sleeved dress shirts despite the heat and the swing of the pick-ax. They speak no English. I imagine they have only recently crossed the border from Mexico, picked up clothes at a Goodwill. They are the Italians and Irish of yesterday who built the bridges and mined the minerals, lay the tracks and dug the wells, raised the buildings, built the country. The pyramids in my backyard are dirt. There are rocks and roots. The clay pipe lies exposed at the bottom of a seven foot trench, the dirt around it clean of anything primitive or even civilized. The trees that grow alongside the trench are a deep green. Their secret is their roots, twisted and preternaturally strong, or naturally so. They've crept through dirt, worked their way through cracks in clay, pushed into man-made cylinders, a relentless search, reaching toward water like fingers and eyes toward light. They've nourished themselves on waste, channeled what's left back up through wood and out toward branches and leaves, thick and glossy.

It's a new year, and we're fourteen years into an age. Our minds are thoughts, our thoughts are thoughts, only, just.










***Henry and I saw this on La Brea as we walked home from breakfast yesterday. Henry thought it might be Banksy, but I doubted it. What do you think? Anyone know? Steve Reed?