Wild Heart

Happy . . . um . . . you know . . . .

By the time you swear you're his / Shivering and sighing,
And he swears his passion is / Infinite, undying,
Lady, make a note of this: / One of you is lying.
~Dorothy Parker

Time to haul out one of my favorite Dorothy Parker poems, which I had memorized by the time I was 18. My cynicism about "true love" runs so deep that I felt it even before I was ever truly "in love," which happened to me once and was full-blown before I even had time to recognize it for what it was. But that's another story.

My favorite persona, QBU (Queen Bitch of the Universe) went grocery shopping tonight and was spitting sparks by the time she got from her car to the automatic door. It was all those men coming out of the store carrying big bouquets of roses and heart-shaped boxes of chocolates and they all looked so darned proud of themselves, some of them even giving me that, "Aren't I a good husband/lover/boyfriend" smile.

Note: On the outside I look like a kindly old granny; on the inside, well . . . it was all I could do to keep QBU from snarling.

What the heck does it say to a loved one that you brought home - from the grocery store, no less - a scentless bouquet of red roses that you had to pick through to find the flowers that weren't dropping their petals yet? And really, who wants a box of Whitman's or Russel Stover's chocolates or, for that matter, Godiva chocolates that you picked up at Barnes & Noble?

As I put lettuce and tomatoes into my basket, QBU was hissing, "Probably the only day of the year they bring home flowers! Wife probably told him not to come home without them. She's just as bad as they are! What does she do for him, huh?! Where's the love, I ask you!"

Mostly I lke QBU. She kicks butt. And I am fortunate enough to know several couples - gay and lesbian and straight - who truly love each other and make their relationships work by showing that love. Today I salute them with a blown kiss - even if they just came out of Albertson's carrying that questionable cargo of love. Because really, I think there's nothing better in the whole wide world than love, lots of it, freely given and openly received.

Happy Valentine's Day, loved ones!

Letter to Blaze

She thought she might be dying herself, and was curiously objective about it. For once she felt some relief from the itch that could be satisfied only by inserting a pen between her thumb and fingers and working it against ruled paper. ~ Gregory Maguire, from Lost

Dear Blaze,

You ask how I'm doing, how the writing is going. For days I've put off answering your email. Too embarrassed to admit that I am, once again, in a funk. I'm in a super-funk. I want to give up but I don't know how.

Today I'm finding it funny, but really, I have an undercurrent of who-gives-a-damn. My belly feels tight and my breath is shallow.

I have no faith in what I write or in the writing process. I've been writing since forever. My first journal was a tiny address book someone gave me when I was 12. It's red and the pages have come unstuck. I still have it. I say I have no faith in what I write, but I can't throw any of it away. When I die, build my coffin from all my notebooks and send them through the flames with my gnarl-fingered hands still clutching a pen.

That's how the writing is going.

I think about writing all the time. I think about the characters I've created and I wonder what they're doing. I think about that house in San Jose where most of my Married stories come from. I think about Childhood in San Francisco, and I mix up the true part with the parts I've incorporated into fiction. But what's the difference? It's all memory now, memory and photographs, and so I give a Stardust character my grandparents' home on Diamond Street. It's mine to give. In my memories, I meet her at the top of the stairs where it smells like Grandma's talcum powder and the shadows are deep.

It's February. And for some odd reason, I'm living in Colorado. Is that a story I made up?  I look out the window and see melting snow. Not San Francisco. I go outside to collect the mail and I hug the fleece jacket to my body and squint against the glare of the sun and skate carefully over ice and curse the ache in my bones.

Twenty years ago I had such an ache for the Bay Area that I moved back there, but what I ached for wasn't there anymore. My daughters were grown, and I couldn't go back and do it right this time. My grandparents were long dead, their San Francisco house almost unrecognizable from a street I remember being much wider. And where did the trees come from?

I talked to my youngest sister yesterday and told her I feel like I'm going through yet another mid-life crisis. Can you have a mid-life crisis at 66? Here's something I know from this wise old age. I can whine and complain and throw hissy-fits all I want, and each hissy fit is just an older (and more pointless) version of the ones I threw when I was 12, 27, 36. The big difference is that now I'm old enough to know better. Of course, that doesn't stop me, which makes it even more embarrassing.

There are as many ways to waste a life as there are stories about wasting a life. So I may as well tell the stories.

Nancy Blaze, here's where I land today about how the writing is going: The only thing I know to do is to keep putting the pen to paper, stop judging the stories, forget about how an audience will or won't receive the pieces I write. It's not about audience. It's never been about audience.

And it's time to stop whining. I wallow. I'm over it. For now.

Thank you for asking.

Wandering the Inner Road with Joni Mitchell

I wish I were a Joni Mitchell fan. I tried to be when I was in college and my friend Kate listened to Joni. Kate was cool, and I wanted to be like her. So I turned my back (again) on my country roots and bought a Joni Mitchell tape. I don't know what happened to it. Probably gave it to Kate.  I'm no nearer being an acolyte today than I was in 1982.

Today I'm listening to Joni, just to see if I've matured enough to feel that joy I feel when I listen to Leonard Cohen or Rufus Wainwright or Nina Simone. Nope. Not happening.

As I heated some homemade soup just now, put crackers on a plate, refilled my mug of iced tea, I wondered why this bonding with Joni never took. I love her voice. I think she's a brilliant singer, a stunning songwriter, innovative and influential. But I can't sing along to her songs. Really. Try it.

 

One of the things I do love about her is that she is a storyteller. Sheryl Crowe does the same thing: tells a story with her music. Listen to "All I Wanna Do."

I grew up with music in the house. My father played guitar, self-taught, and often wrote his own lyrics, usually to make us kids laugh. When we'd go to Grandma's house on Sundays, two uncles would bring their banjos, one uncle brought a ukulele, and if we were lucky, Aunt Helen would play her harmonica - should could make it sound like a train. They were all self-taught, and they filled my San Francisco childhood with the music of their Indiana childhood. It wasn't the style of music that was rural Indiana - it was the heart of the people who made the music. They played out of pure joy, and the music was toe-tapping and get-up-and-dance-with-the-baby. If we knew the words, we sang. If we didn't know the words, we sang.

I sing. Mostly in the car, singing along to Queen and the Beatles and the songs from Gypsy and Guys and Dolls. I come by this trait honestly, from a family that was, in the 50s, what I thought a family should be, and I was surprised that my friends' evenings at home didn't include music. It was just the way it was, like sitting down to dinner around a big table when Daddy got home from work at 5:30 and eating Mother's homemade potato soup and then watching "Gunsmoke." Who didn't?

Now I've wandered from Joni to Gunsmoke, taking a rambling stroll through music. Since Spotify, I've had the opportunity to expand even further my already broad rnage of musical interests. It pleases me, for example, to make an iTunes playlist with "I've Got a Brand New Pair of Rollerskates" tucked up against Kathleen Battle singing "Azulao." On Spotify I listened to the latest Little Willies album (For the Good Times) before it was released in the U.S. And I heard the new Leonard Cohen (Old Ideas) on the first day it was available.

Joni is an acquired taste for someone like me, who was raised on country, family, and rock and roll. Single-malt scotch is an acquired taste too, and I didn't let that stop me. Come to think of it, Joni Mitchell would make a great companion to a short glass of Macallam on a cold snowy night. Ah! I knew I could find the motivation!

 

February in Colorado

I took this photo at about noon today after a night of snow falling and blowing and accumulating. All day I did laundry, made soup, spent time at my computer - and the snow fell.

 

At dusk, I took this photo. Snow was still falling and the wind had subsided. I had eaten my first bowl of vegetable soup, burning my tongue as I always do because I can't wait for it to cool. So delicious.

 

Now I'm ready to settle into bed and read for awhile. Snow continues to fall. I canceled my plans to go out. I have soup. And clean laundry. And books. It's February in Colorado.

 

A Poet Writes about Life

Wislawa Szymborska, a Polish poet, died today. She was 89. I am grateful to her for writing her poems and getting them published. Below is one of my favorites.

* * * * *

A Note

Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;

to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain
from everything it's not;

to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.

An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;

and if only once
to stumble upon a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another,

mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;
and to keep on not knowing
something important.

   -- by Wislawa Szymborska

Reader Beware!

Dear Reader,

This appeared in my in-box today in my Public Radio Market newsletter:

I read it and immediately felt compelled to raise a loud HELLO-O-O-O-O!!! Did the blurb-writer actually read Moby Dick? I think not. I, however, have read it twice - because it was required reading in two college Lit classes - and I am here to tell you that if you want a "gripping adventure narrative," you'd best read only the first 10 pages and the last 5.

Moby Dick opens with the now famous line, "Call me Ishmael." I love the narrator and the ship; I love Ishamael's bunk-mate Queequeg. The opening is compelling - and then we wade through hundreds of pages of details about whale blubber. We don't get to the whale until the very last few pages. Yes, I agree that the story is told in "an uncanny and unforgettable fashion," but only because I'll never forget having to read it twice, both times wondering how the heck it came to be known as a "classic American novel."

An aside:

I just went upstairs to find my copy of Moby Dick and make sure of the details. All of my old text books are in one area of my shelves (unlike all my other books, which are tucked in anywhere, Harry Potter keeping company with A.S. Byatt who is next to the Dalai Lama), and I couldn't find it. I scanned the shelves again, looking for that big fat book among all my other big fat books that no one wants to read but has to read in English classes. Nope. Moby Dick is not next to a (relatively) slim volume of Melville's shorter works. It's not stashed in with the wordy Victorians or the wordy Russians. As I scanned the shelves for the third time, I cracked myself up with this thought: Maybe I lent it to someone. Right. Someone borrowed my copy of Moby Dick. For a doorstop, maybe! Then I wondered if maybe I had used it for a doorstop, but no - I use my two-volume set of the Oxford English Dictionary to keep my bedroom door from swinging shut.

I was an English major through two college degrees, and I've read a lot of books that - trust me - most of us would never pick up and read just for fun. And I loved every one of those big fat difficult complex fascinating enlightening life-changing books. Except for Moby Dick. Maybe I would have loved it if it hadn't been pitched to me as a "great American classic." Maybe I would have loved it in an editing class: trim all the fat and you've got a wonderful, engrossing 15-page story. I just never understood - and still don't - why it is considered "great."

So if you also get the Public Radio Market in your in-box and you read this lovely blurb and decide you've been missing something in your life because you haven't read Moby Dick, by all means buy it and read it. Enjoy the story of the whale hunt (of course, by the time you get to the end of the book, you will have forgotten the set-up for the hunt in the beginning and will have to read that part again). Enjoy the details of being on the open sea in a creaky old ship with creaky old shipmates. Enjoy the fascinating (I'm serious here) details of how to render whale fat. Learn everything you could possibly want to know about amber. Recognize where the name "Starbuck" came from in the TV series "Starship Gallactica." If you know anything about projection, note how Ahab characterizes the whale and ask yourself if the pot is calling the kettle black. In fact, I'm now feeling disappointed that I seem to no longer have my college copy of this enthralling story. Hmmm. Guess I'll have to run out to my local independent bookstore and get a copy - you know - to replace the one I lent to a friend.

Who Made This Mess!

A clean house is a sign of a wasted life. ~ Refrigerator Magnet

Here's something I've noticed lately: I do dishes, clearing off all the counters and wiping everything down and it looks great - for about five minutes. Then as if by magic, the counters are cluttered with cups and cereal bowls and the skillet I scrambled eggs in.

Same thing with the laundry. I do a couple of loads, fold everything, stow it, and while I'm wondering how my kitchen got cluttered, the dryer beeps and there's more laundry to do.

It's like painting the Golden Gate Bridge: When the painters get to the end, they have to go back to the beginning and start all over again.

There's something wrong with this picture. We can send a man to the moon, but we haven't figured out how to keep the house dusted and the floors mopped, the laundry washed and dried and put away, and the kitchen clear of plates with smears of tomato and bowls with a film of last night's mushroom soup.

And they call this the 21st century.

Holy Smokes!

LSMFT: Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco
~ TV ad from the 50s

I wake in the mornings with my mother's smoker's cough, though I've never been a smoker in my life - except for that time in my late 30s when, for some stupid reason, I decided I wanted to smoke and someone had left a package of Kools in my car and I smoked them one night when I was driving back to San Jose after meeting a friend in San Francisco, and by the time I got home, I was sick to my stomach. I understand why teenagers think they look cool when they're holding that cigarette - I am quite sure I was the epitome of cool as I drove down 101 blowing cigarette smoke from the side of mouth - but I can't, for the life of me, figure out why they continue, since puking never looks cool and tastes even worse. Oh. Maybe they don't get sick, as I did. Too bad.

Anyway, I have her cough for the first 15 minutes I'm awake in the morning. Odd, that.

After her mother died, my mother took on some of her mother's characteristics. Out of the blue, she started saying things like, "Well, bless your heart!" which she had never done before but her mother was famous for. And while I loved those things about my grandmother, it was just plain weird coming from Mother. One day when I was hanging out with my sisters and we were talking about this, it occurred to me that maybe such behavior was a sort of rite of passage when a woman's mother dies, and I looked at my sisters and said, "Okay, let's settle this right now: When Mother goes, which one of us is going to be her, and I'm telling you right now, it's not going to be me." We all voted for Carolyn, my next youngest sister, but she never did step into Mother's shoes. In fact, the older Carolyn got, the sillier she became, and Mother was never silly, although she did have a sly sense of humor.

Summer, 1972: I'm at Mother's house with my two daughters, ages 3 and 5. I am wearing a dress that it is so short, it barely covers my butt (1972, folks!).

Mother says to my oldest daughter, "That's a cute blouse you're wearing, Lisa." Then she turns her gaze upon me and says, "That's a cute blouse you're wearing, too, Verna."

Anyway, I somehow got her smoker's cough, and really, I'd rather be blessing people's hearts.

One night a few years after Mother died, I was lying on the sofa reading when I smelled fudge. Mother made the best fudge in the world, and it was her fudge I was smelling in my kitchen - where I had never ever even tried to make fudge. The next day I was telling my youngest sister this story, and she said that on her way to work she had smelled cigarette smoke in her car, where there had never been a lit cigarette.

"Great!" she said to me. "You get her fudge and I get her cigarettes."

Dad started smoking when he was 12, and he lived until he was 84 without ever having that awful cough or emphysema or lung cancer. Mother took up smoking when she married Dad and died at 74 with heart disease and half of one lung gone to lung cancer. They came of age during a time when everyone smoked and no one ever heard of the dangers. Lucky me that my lack of good sense at 38 led only to dry heaves and the yucky taste of tobacco in my mouth. So where did the cough come from? No idea.

 

 

 

The Schooks Blow

So I was a little flip about the wind yesterday. I changed my mind: Wind is a big deal. It tears into stop lights and snarls traffic, unscrews full-grown trees from the their earthy sockets, whips wires off the poles and takes down a whole neighborhood's power. Cars veer and small dogs take flight. Airplanes are grounded and branches fall into houses and tree limbs fly through windows. No one sleeps for the walloping weight of the wind against the western wall.

I've lived here for almost 30 years, and every January the wind threatens to blow us to Kansas. I learned that this wind is called a "chinook." When I was teaching in the mid-80s, one of my students at a local community college wrote about the annual "schnooks" in Colorado. I live in a place that is famous for schnooks, apparently. One of my first jobs here was with a bunch of meteorologists at NOAA, where they told stories about wind damage that would have been unbelievable, except that they were scientists and knew what they were talking about.

So this is to say sorry for being a schmuck about schnooks in yesterday's post. I won't do it again. Probably.

An Earthquake of a Wind

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another. ~ John Muir

The wind blows mighty here in Boulder, Colorado, barreling down the canyon and whipping branches off of trees and windows out of houses (sometimes). Driving this time of year requires both hands and complete attention because if you’re not blowing across the lanes, someone else might be. And forget finding your newspaper in the morning, unless you get up at half past crack of dawn to waylay the delivery person.

This time of year, cats fidget, dogs cower, and god only knows what the birds do. A friend who grew up here told me that her elementary school used to call wind days - like snow days, you know, only windy. I grew up in San Francisco, and the only weather phenomenon that troubled us was the occasional earthquake. Not weather, exactly, but still . . . . Mostly we just rode them out. When I was in junior high, we were so shaken by an earthquake that we had to file quietly out to the bleachers where the principal addressed us, telling us not to worry because surely our parents were just fine, at which point, most of the girls broke into tears and hung all over each other, imagining that the hillside had come down and buried Mother where she stood ironing Daddy’s white shirts.

That day we were all dismissed from school with the admonition to go straight home, and being a good girl, I did. When I walked into the house, Mother was changing the baby. “What are you doing home so early?” she said. That’s mostly how we dealt with earthquakes: What? They sent you home from school?!

That one was big enough to be accompanied by a night full of aftershocks. I slept in an Army cot kind of bed that was against one wall. By morning my bed had been shaken to the middle of the room.

Wind? Big deal.