Unexpected
My sister was in a car accident this afternoon, and I’m here, half the country away waiting for any news---there isn’t much yet, she’s in the hospital and her husband is trying his best to hold it all together while fielding phone calls from us and trying to get permission to see her.
Up until a moment like this happens, you can’t imagine what it will be like. The sudden prickly heat of fear traveling up your neck. The worry that makes your armpits damp, makes your voice quaver, makes you laugh nervously. There is no way of being able to know how the minutes suddenly slow. How you want to bargain with whatever profound forces are involved in such events: want to rewind time and have it happen differently.
Please send your thoughts winging out into universe her way. I love her dearly.
Notes
The cold air hits my face and make my teeth ache. On the sidewalk, a dusting of snow reveals the patterns of foot traffic, coming and going, that are usually invisible. I walk the same direction as another set of tracks for a few blocks, then they go on straight and I turn.
I push open the red door of a small bohemian café, order chai, and wedge myself into a corner booth with my notebook. The room swells with music. On the tiny stage about six feet away, a jazz band untangles a mess of notes that say more about sanguine longing, and bravado, sorrow and wonder, than anything I’ll be able to write.
It takes me a while to arrive. To stop feeling self conscious: with my long legs in a too small corner. But gradually I do. I let the music alter me the way a photograph changes hue under running water. I let the piano player’s wild notes dance across my brain, scattering the tension I’ve felt for days—and then the trumpeter picks up his horn and plays notes that are plaintive and tremulous and bold and I almost want to cry.
In between sets, when my eyes and my entire body are not wrapped up in the music, I take sips of chai and let my pen work its way across the page. First I write about the room: the heat, the red light spilling over the tables, the people in twos and threes mostly sitting around small tables sipping red wine. Then I sketch. Quick line drawings of chairs and trumpets, the drummers hands, the bass player’s back. When I write again it is about deeper things that have to do with love and loss, and my words, like my emotions scatter messily across the page.
Being here is somehow dislocating. I’m suddenly in limbo, not sure who I am. The person I am here in the midst of all this art and energy and verve is not the same person I am at home—where I’m somebody’s mother and dishes invariably need doing.
In the booth next to me two college girls chatter and I love their sloppy, carefree way of pulling together an outfit out of wooly boots, many necklaces and hoop earrings. When did I get so serious about clothing, I wonder? Almost everything I own is practical and understated. My camel colored cable knit sweater and sand washed jeans are boring in this room full of artist types who take risks with what they wear: horn rimmed glasses, hats with sequins, beaded chandelier earrings, plaid scarves and lovely faux fur trimmed coats.
The piano player is wearing a train conductor hat, and it works well with his jaw line. In the lamplight he is handsome—but more so because of the way his fingers move, pulling beauty and emotion out of black and white keys. I let my words follow the notes he plays—wildly, all over the place. I stop trying to write anything meaningful, and instead write whatever comes to mind, drawing lines between incongruous ideas like the pauses the players take between sets. Gradually, the words I scribble begin translating back and forth between the pieces of me, until I start feeling whole again.
When they take a break, the bass player, the drummer and the pianist go up to the bar and order dark beers in tall glasses. They stand around laughing, sipping their drinks. The place clears out a little an I let my shoulders relax. Opposite me, the trumpeter sits, still playing softly, eyes closed. I listen as he follows phrase, then carries out one string of notes until it becomes a wavering song of keening or rejoicing. He plays so tenderly, so quietly, it’s hard to hear against the ruckus gafaws and rowdy greetings.
More people push through the door, bringing the cold air with them, and as the musicians settle down for one final set before they count their tips in the big metal bowl, I toss my dollars in and leave—grateful for these moments of heat and wonder and song.
The days slip by, a blur of busy moments. Sometimes before I really feel like day is here, night returns. I catch myself going too fast. I try to pause. I make tea and savor the whole cup: chai sweetened with raw sugar and milk.HE'S BACK!
Oh glorious day, he came back! Skinnier, scragglier, and definitely hungry, but he’s here!
DH thought he saw tracks in the back yard shortly after he got back from printing up more LOST CAT posters, bringing me flowers to cheer me out of my gloom. Today I felt like giving up.
“I think I hear Mojo,†he yelled to me from the snowy back porch. “Come quick!â€
I sailed over the furniture in my way. I was at the backdoor in a heartbeat.
“There are your shoes,†DH called, “Hurry!â€
I ran out into snow in my pink cashmere socks. Sure enough, we could hear Mojo’s signature yowl. He was somewhere. It was faint. DH went out into the driveway, and I went back inside to get cat food.
“I think he’s by the front door,†DH yelled excitedly.
I could hardly move fast enough, pebbles of cat food raining down about my feet from the blue bowl.
And there he was.
He ate for about twenty minutes straight and is now cleaning his paws in his box on the radiator. I cannot quite get words around how happy I am to have him back. But let me say this: thank you to everyone who wrote with such touching stories and positive thoughts. You helped. A lot. And now excuse me while I go pet my cat.
Illustration Friday: E is for...
Working on this painting I thought of an exerpt from The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, by James McBride. When I picked up the book, with paint still on my fingers, the first page I turned to contained the text I wanted. I love moments when the universe and I agree. "...One afternoon on the way home from church I asked her whether God was black or white.
A deep sigh. 'Oh boy...God's not black. He's not white. He's a spirit.'
'Does he like black or white people better?'
'He loves all people. He's a spirit.'
'What's a spirit?'
"A spirit's a spirit.'
'What color is God's sprit?'
'It doesn't have a color,' she said. 'God is the color of water.' "
Full Moon
The moon fills the sky with light. According to the weather station, the temperature feels like -15 with the windchill. Ice has formed hard and transparent below the gusting snow on the sidewalks and stoops.
When I was a teacher, full moon days were always the worst. The kids were wild and peevish, and the air would almost crackle with pent up energy.
Now I feel the same angst. All day Bean wanted to be near me, touching me, preferably ON TOP OF ME. And all day I kept going to the door, calling my cat.
Many of you have told such great stories of cats that returned. I hope this will be the case. But with the wild moon, and the plummiting temperatures, I can't help but fear the worse.
I try to remember that this is the way things happen in nature. Without any warning, things shift course. I'm trying to keep up.
Lost
He ran away on Friday and we were sure he would return. But he didn’t. The weather turned cold. It snowed inches last night and today I put posters up on telephone poles and contacted the Humane Society. He’s such a love of a cat. Totally dopy, but will tolerate even Bean’s aggressive affection. He’s not savvy at all though. He’s run into walls before, and has never seen snow. I’m not sure whether to keep hoping he’ll show up, or give up hope now before I spend any more time teary-eyed at the door yelling out into the winter air. Kind of how I feel about my writing right now also.
Illustration Friday: Flavor
I use Indian ink waterproof pens in my notebook, following the contours my hand chooses randomly, letting the day’s weight fall away from me. I let crazy whirling color happen. A mosaic of possibilities is always waiting to unfold. Every possible outcome awaits.
Illustration Friday: Imagine
Sometimes painting is like this: moments of clear, vivid emptiness where imagination takes hold and wanders. Then, it is about allowing something that already exists to be. About being open.
I know all things are like this: parenting, writing, making love, communicating. And I know that most of the time I make it more complicated than it is. I convolute things by adding clarifiers, making preemptive sketches, planning in advance.
It is hard to trust the possibilities of imagination. Harder still to trust that what I imagine is possible.
I'm having fun Where the images went
Over the past few months I've discovered, again, that I am an artist. I knew this truth as a child, and I kept sketchbooks voraciously. I drew the everyday things of my life, and I'd sit for hours using crayons to imagine places I'd never been. I could lose myself inside the landscapes by artists I loved. At the museum, I'd be the one still staring after everyone else had gone on with the tour.
After high school, I went to Germany for a year where I learned silk screening, and produced vibrant, delicate scarves with sea horses or cherry blossoms or swallows in flight moving across them. I loved using salt: watching the paint marbleize where each grain landed. I used acrylics there too, in my long afternoons between work hours. I painted orchids, and a map of the world.
Before I came to college I spent two weeks in Harlem with people who had HIV. We did rapid contour drawings in charcoal: impermanent and bold. My sketchbook was full of figures dancing across the pages. People's faces, hands, eyes, done in graphite or pen.
But once I settled into my life as a student something shifted. My internal landscape became crowded with words.
I poured my inner imagry into my notebooks: word drunk, over stimulated, and exhausted. I wrote crappy poetry and some good poetry. I took some writing classes and gradually I learned to hone a decent sentence. I grappled with the stories of my life. I learned to interview. I worked sometimes for the college paper. I began thinking of myself as a writer. But after my required art class freshman year I stopped painting.
When I graduated, I plunged headlong into the world of teaching big things to small children. Their faces, each an entire landscape of wonder, watched me as I spoke--living into my words, my breath, my laughter. I wrote things every day in the context of the classroom.
I modeled writing that mattered to me, that was real, and packed with details that they could care about: the scratching sounds of pencils in motion; the sobbing wails of the angry girl with the nappy hair in dozens of small pigtails sprouting out of her head outside the kindergarten classroom; the smell of popcorn from the teacher's lounge or lunch in the cafeteria where they served green hot dogs, nearly a foot long, and salad drowned with dressing.
I told my students stories. I used these narratives to teach plot, suspense, figurative language, and metaphor. And I drew pictures of bivalve mollusks, of tidal marshes, of maple trees in autumn, of shag bark hickories in spring to accompany the hands-on social studies and science curriculum I designed.
But teaching pulled from me every ounce of my creative energy, and when I'd ride the train home, often as the sun was setting, I'd have the energy only to shut my eyes, or to scribble a few half hearted observations: the lady with the bouffant hairdo and the to-red cheeks who talked loudly, as though no one else were in the crowded car, to her travel partner who was standing in the vestibule, checking his watch and fidgeting with his leather gloves.
When I had my son, for the first few months I staggered about writing in my notebook, start time 11:15 right breast, nursed for 3 minutes, then stopped, but I quickly gave this up just started trusting my instincts.
Things evened out. My baby grew. I got some sleep. We moved. I started running, finding a rhythm, remembering to breathe. And I had hours, interrupted, fragmented hours, punctuated by squeals or roars or wailing, but hours none the less, to start letting my mind unwind.
I was tightly wound. And as the filaments of my mind unfurled, images started flooding in. I longed for paint. I bought a few on-sale brushes. I filled pages with collages and quick heavy strokes. And then I started to remember why I was an artist first.
Unwinding
I breathe in. I breathe out. I am calling to myself, looking for centeredness. It is past 9 p.m. The house is still tonight. Tues on my iPod. Stan Getz. I drink the second half of a glass of Pinot Noir from Chalone Vinyard in foggy Montery, California. The chair creaks under my shifting weight. The cat licks his belly and darkness settles down around te windows.
I think of figs, fresh and ripe, that I haven't eaten since I was eleven, at church, picked from the tree behind it's stuccoed walls. I didn't like them then, though I love them sweet and sticky and dried.
I write with a fat-tipped sharpie, letting go of control. Letting my messy writing spill across the page, trying to unwind after the past two days of inlaws and house hunting. Almost the house we want---but not quite.
I am trying to TRUST THE UNIVERSE. Already it has brought so much. My life is full and I am greatful. I gather up moments of stillness.
Illustration Friaday: Cold
It has rained here for two weeks straight, and the air has turned cold. I've almost grown used to indirect light of these grey days, and squinted yesterday when the afternoon the sun burst through.
We went running, wearing hats and fleece, and the light in the sky and on the lake was so beautiful it nearly took our breath away. The hills were red with turning maples, and in the light of the setting sun they were on fire. The clouds, backlit and dark. Leaves blowing in windy spirals.
We ran past the beach---where in summer throngs of people with beers and kids with plastic sandcastle buckets gathered around barbecue pits---and the picnic tables were upturned and stacked for winter in a heap. Along the path, sumac leaves the shape of spear tips, had turned to burnished gold. And in the sky above us, geese in long Vs moving south, kept calling out.
I couldn't stop running: my lungs sucking in the cold air, feet falling evenly on the wet pavement. We ran past dark puddles where I could see leaves, sunken like yellow boats, below the surface. I couldn't stop, because those glorious fleeting moments of late autumn sun and clouds, cold air meeting the heat of my cheeks, made me want to cry.
Mama says om
Parenting is hard. The world moves around us in a spastic rhythm, a swirling chaos of day to day activity: work, school, meals, rest, noise, play, comfort, nurture. Finding the breath to everyday life is an art and often we find ourselves hyperventilating. At Mama Says Om, we look at parenting as a spiritual and often humorous endeavor. We write from the heart about those things that give us breath. Ignore the chaos in your own life and visit with us; it'll all still be there when you get back.
Come on, Mama. Just say Om.
Saturday mosaic
A night of waking, but a later morning. Banana-pecan pancakes and coffee; enough time to finish my book. Bean asleep for a nap. Herb omelets and fresh orange juice. The cat wants in, out of the rain.
Skies the color of cement. Bright maple leaves like fallen stars under foot. Puddles in the low parts of the sidewalk, Bean in the Bjorn on DH, the three of us walking downtown.
At the farmer's market late, most of the stalls already packed up. Less people than the usual summer crowds. Gourds, squashes, pumpkins, bright root vegetables, their tips gathered up in piles. Organic local burgers from the farmer in the last stall who talked about his cows with an earnestness that was both sensible and loving.
Buildings stood up tall and stark against the wet autumn sky. The mercury hovered around fifty. Bean wore a hat, mittens, baby Uggs: shearling lined. I wore my boots, and felt my heels blister--the first christening of footwear for the season is always like this. In late spring, bands of blisters where my flip flops rub. Now my heels, soft, unused to boots, rubbed raw.
Later at a small harvest fest at the local market. A bright blue tractor. A bee keeper with a thin glass viewing hive. The bees circling round the queen, generating warmth in concentric circles. We picked out wine for diner with friends; apples to go in the wooden bowl on our coffee table at home. Bittersweet chocolate for a cake.
Small drops of rain fell, freckling the sidewalk. Clinging to grass. Making leaves stick wet and bright to our soles. Up high on a wire a lonely pair of shoesâ. I've always wondered about how shoes end up dangling there. I imagine boys, joshing each other, getting rid of an old pair of track shoes at the end of the season; or hoodlums pushing someone around, tossing up his shoes.
Hanging from their laces they felt like the small piece of my heart, wearing my father's blue flannel shirt this morning, as I wrote. It's been three years since he died, and more. And now my baby is taking steps around the coffee table, inching his way like he's up somewhere high, along the edge of a cliff.
Plout = Purple Lipped Trout
It appears that in my last post I called the delightful plumy apricot concoction my son loves so much a plout. Blackbird kindly clarified that a plout is in fact a Purple Lipped Trout. (You will have to ask her how she knew this amazing information!) It seems that our small family has developed its own vernacular. Both DH and I are glib and silly when it comes to words. We make words fit, where no words do. Things have names in our house that we give them carelessly, in scattered moments when the right name wont come, and for some reason, they stick.
Such was the case with the plouts. We started by calling them ploots. Then, realizing there was a "uo" in the spelling, we began calling them plouts, recklessly without noticing the "uo" spelling. We sang many a rendition of "plout, plout, let it all out, these are the plouts we are talking about, come-on!" You get the idea. (Bean of course, thinks we are hysterical and rewards us with the most exquisite peals of laughter we'll do just about anything to get more.)
Interestingly when I was looking for links about pluots so that the general blogosphere could be informed, I googled "plout" and was perturbed to come up with a whopping 59,700 searches including that word---but most of them unfortunately, a) had nothing to do with the fruit in question, b) were written in a foreign language, or c) were fan sites for the Greek biographer Plutarch.
Incidentally, when PLUOT is correctly googled, it procures only 39,000 searches, most of them actually having to do with said fruit.
The funny thing is, not one search for PLOUT led me to the amazing PURPLE LIPPED TROUT, so I was forced to go obscure reefs with my watercolors and brushes to procure a specimen.
