Operating Instructions, Anne Lamott
The book that made me feel sane, during those early weeks of baby when I could do nothing more than stagger about, nurse, and gasp for water. Lamott is funny, poignant and accurate. My copy (paperback) is dog-eared and marked with pen. And, for the record, it's one of maybe a half dozen books I've ever read twice (once while I was pregnant, and again when Bean was born). Edgy, reverent, and slap-stick, reading this memoir of Lamott's first year with her Sam, is like having someone make you tea and rub your feet while riding a roller coaster. Both comforting and unnerving, she tells the universal story of new parenthood, but makes it uniquely her own.
Good things
The kids who run the skateboard shop down by the waterfront, grow radishes, sunflowers, tomatoes and cucumbers in their graffiti covered store window boxes. Our neighbor knocked on our door yesterday in the early afternoon. She'd brought us spanikopita she'd made from scratch. We've barely met, and talked less than a half dozen times. THIS is what neighbors should be like.
Our other neighbor, across the street, works at the bike store we frequent. He gave us a 10% discount from the first time we shopped there, just for living across the street from him. Of course, we now swap power tools, gruesome bike stories, and sidewalk conversation.
Everyone smiles here, and they act like they really mean it. Like they're smiling because they love their lives, not because it's the polite thing to do.
Almost everyone rides a bike here. I've seen every type of person riding a bike into town, along the bike path, or on the highway. I've seen punked out, goth teenagers on bikes, with more metal in their ears than I have in my silverware drawer. I've seen pro BMXers and cyclists going the distance. I've seen retirees, riding cushy up-right bikes with padded seats. I've seen ladies in skirts. A man riding a lady's bike with a bell and a basket. A hard-core chica riding a tricked out mountain bike, and the scars to prove she's worth it.
People have nice dogs here. And other people--store keepers especially--are nice to them. There are bowls of water on the street, and sometimes baskets of dog biscuits too. A town with happy dogs is a happy town, in my opinion.
Kids and adults play in the big fountain at the top of the main pedestrian only street downtown. Invariably, there are little ones squealing and soaking wet---but there are also happy young couples, kissing with their toes in the water. Or, like this morning, an old biddy of a lady with white flyaway hair and a flowered dress, who washed her flip flops off in the fountain, and then lingered there for a moment, barefoot.
People in cars slow down for pedestrians here, instead of speeding up. Even when they have the green light. And people on the sidewalks step to the side for baby strollers, and say nice things like, "Take your time, any time. Enjoy your evening," if they catch you rushing to get out of the way.
Ben & Jerry's has a weekly outdoor movie night---where they project a film onto a screen in the middle of the pedestrian walk and people bring chairs and hang out together and laugh.
The farmer's market is heaven. Taking up almost a block, booths are filled with fresh veggies, soaps, meats, and handcrafts, and everyone offers free samples. We always buy fresh flowers and a weeks worth of greens.
One-liner good things:
There is a wood-fired bagel bakery within walking distance.
There are four bakeries within walking distance from our house.
The girl in the local coffee shop already knows our drinks.
People smile at our baby.
Moms breastfeed here, in public, without making a scene. And nobody makes a scene!
The sunsets. Over the lake. Sheer beauty.
There are more than 20 miles of bike path around the city.
You can walk to a wetland from downtown and see beavers.
Live music outdoors all summer. On the street.
Sidewalk sales!
Street festivals.
The harbor
With chocolate croissants and coffee, we went to the harbor this morning and watched people walk out along the long narrow docks with supplies, getting their boats ready for the day.
View from the side of the bike path after getting a flat, with Bean in the bike trailer.
We made it back alight. DH, my personal fix-it guy, had a new tube. He used a dollar bill to patch the tire--and everything was smooth rolling.
Eating the Honey of Words, By Robert Bly
I remember exactly when I bought this book. DH and I had gone out to Nantucket the summer of my senior year in college. We went on the ferry and spent the day riding rented bikes around the island. I couldn't believe how quaint it was:shingled houses, gray from the weather and covered with rosebushes, beaches sheltered by grassy dunes, and a downtown full of little shops, including a book store where I fingered volumes of poetry, settling for this one. That night on the ferry back I remember sitting with my back up it's metal hull reading poem after poem, a certain hunger in me quenched. The span of Bly's poems in this collection (as in many of his collections) is huge: he speaks with the deeply personal voice of a man in love, caught up in nature, and then with the voice of a philosopher and activist, watching our country lurch forward, and saying words about it that might make all the difference.
Like postcards of memory on my mind:
Last night, nursing Bean I watched the wooden fish mobile from Mexico above his crib turn in slow circles, as though they were swimming in crescents through the air. The five bright sunflowers, each with rough stalks and thick green leaves, from the farmer's market for a dollar a piece, standing in a tall glass vase of water on the table.
The man I see often, his hair in long dreadlocks, with his huge Bull Mastiff who was being attacked by a Boxer off leash, screaming"Who's fucking dog is this, who's FUCKING DOG is this?" And then wiping the blood from his big dog, who was shaking, tail between his legs.
Bean grinning up at me after his morning nap: so happy to be awake in the world again, his pacifier imprinted on his cheeks.
The view from the shore at the beach near our house: college kids and families on picnic blankets, in the water, playing badminton on the grass. The smell of grills, sail boats their anchor's down, dotting the swimming area, the sky bright blue.
Bean and DH cheeks close on the beach, laughing together in the evening sunlight, trees folding shadows down around us, sand between our toes.
Cutting fresh sweet corn off the cob in the kitchen with DH after a day outdoors, making pasta with round ripe tomatoes cut into cubes and basil and sage. Then crashing gratefully into each other on the futon couch, eating dinner with the cats curled up against our knees.
Terrified
I was a complete wreck last night. We put Bean in his new bike trailer for the first time and took him on the bike path down by the waterfront. He fit snugly into it, and even fell asleep, but every bump, every stop, had me gulping. My heart, up in mouth. I kept imagining throwing myself off my bike in front of oncoming cars to protect the trailer. We all survived however, and will be trying it again. Soon, if not tonight.
The Sun Magazine, Sy Safransky-Editor
This magazine is responsible for making me want to keep writing. Each month I get this magazine and within hours, I've read it nearly cover to cover. I've met Sy, and several authors including Sparrow and Alison Leuterman. Both the magazine and the people who write for it convey a commitment to mindfulness in daily life, and a dedication to using words to affect change. I hit the "Reader's Write" section first--a self-explanatory section where readers write on a given theme each month--and then dive into the poems, and short stories, saving the longer nonfiction interviews about current events for last. Good through and through, this is as close to a "must read" as I'll ever come, I imagine.
Is there no market for joy?
Word has it, parent blogging is dead. This might be a good thing for me because I not sarcastic, ironic, or depressed enough to be a big-hitting, angst-driven, new-mommy blogger. I have, on occasion irritated people with my good nature and exuberance for life. Which is not to say that I'm a total Pollyanna. I've had my share of harsh and difficult times, where I felt derailed and anxious and depressed. There were dark, dark moments during the first weeks after Bean was born. Times where his crying shredded my nerves, and made me write in my notebook, "I want to just put him out on the back porch for a while so I can sleep" in February, when it was snowing. And before him, choices out of urgent necessity, that linger with me, hungry for acknowledgment and full of emotion I cannot name. And I lost my father to cancer; spent weeks before he died sitting with him, watching him become emaciated and ghostly. But even from inside those dark times, I feel a part of me reaching upwards, like a bean plant in a box, growing towards the light at the top.
There isn't quite the same market for exuberance as there is for sarcasm. Especially coming from a first-time mom. It's almost assumed my experience should be a miserable one, or that at the very least, I should dwell on those times. Except for a graceful few, most parent bloggers seem propel themselves through the day with one agitated post after the next. And, like the rest of the world, I'm somewhat enthralled by the daily trials and disasters of other parents bold and depressed enough to smear the messiness of their lives across the Internet. If I'm not mindful, I notice myself using a writing style that mimics the tone of the blogs I'm reading. Taking the things that irritate and spewing them out as in the form of a humorous caricature of my life. Twisted circus balloon, full of hot air.
Which isn't to say that there isn't a vitally important place for this. There is great comedy in these small tragedies, and I have certainly had my share of glycerin suppositories, sticky poop everywhere, and intolerable screams in crowded restaurants. But most days it isn't the bitter fragments that matter to me in the end. Rather, it is the small morsels of joy: rain falling fast and hard and then clearing to blue skies, the wild Queen Anne's lace growing along the railroad tracks, the cool of the lake after a run, that I gather up carry with me like a bag full of bright river stones.
Maybe this optimism for life is because I think of pain and sorrow as sacred things. I understand that I grow in response to change, and to grief. Yet it seems of late, sarcasm and bitterness are overdone just a bit, at least in realm of blogs. Our culture seem to be obsessed with the misery of others. The rubberneck factor on the highway, the headlines always announcing the latest deaths, famines, insurgencies. This is our world, for sure. And I am not suggesting we shy away from the messiness of it, or sink less deeply into our many moments of collective anguish. But lest I lose touch all together with the things that keep us whole, joy will continue to have it's place here.
Giggling weasel
Picture a wet weasel. Small, furry, hot, wet. Now picture it wrapped around your neck on a day with 90 %humidity. Then picture the weasel clawing you. That's what it felt like to carry Bean about yesterday, post a dip in the lake. But his giggles were worth it. It was our first adventure into the lake---and he thought I was so funny when I'd swim up to him blowing bubbles. He has laughed before, in response to being tickled, but nothing like this spontaneous laughter. From his secure perch in DH's arms he'd look out into the water, scanning back and forth until he'd see my face and then bust out into full-fledged giggles as I swam closer making helicopter noises with my lips.
Wet Heat
The humidity was unbearable today. Dark billowing clouds hinted at thunderstorms in the stratosphere but no rain came to rinse the water out of the air. I felt like I had bathed in apple juice. Made me wish for impossibly cool things: iced tea in a limo, an arctic cruise, the chill of an Imax theater watching Shackleton's arctic adventures. Anything but the limp, raggedy, wet-crotch feeling of walking around in the heat. We took a walk a Bosnian deli near the waterfront. They sell homemade tiramisu cake and smoked beef paninis and all kinds of packaged European goodies. The proprietor was a gregarious lady with a curly mop of hair, bug eyes and an accent who spent the entire time she was preparing our food, ogling at Bean.
We brought our sandwiches down to the waterfront, where we sat on the lawn in the shade and pretended to enjoy ourselves. Only Bean, rolling around on his blanket in the buff, was comfortable in the heat. DH and I could talk of nothing but our discomfort: about the inevitable chaffing that comes with walking long distances on days with 90% humidity; about my hair sticking to my neck like a woolen shawl; about the prickly heat rashes on our legs from sitting on the grass. We had plans to go running and for a swim in the lake, but came home instead, and sank gratefully onto the futon couch where we watched yesterday's Tour De France results and fell into a heat-stupor induced nap.
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, ZZ Packer
A collection of short stories that captures the scope of lives on the periphery of things. Often painful, poignant and well worded, most of the stories left me staring off out the window, imagining more. I was impressed with Packer's breadth of character's and her deftness at making them believable. Often short story collections make for a lurching ride on the reader's part, but DRINKING COFFEE ELSEWHERE, has a certain consistency between pieces that makes it a fluid read. Packer explores risk, sexuality, loneliness and anger in many of these pieces, and several pack a gut-slugging punch of reality. Packer conveys that life is raw, ripe, and dangerous. Something we all feel, I believe, though few of us know how to fit words around it.
20 Weeks Old
Dear Bean,You are a 20 week old bean today. That means you're five months old. Where did the time go? Holding you tonight, in the big white armchair in the livingroom, with your face against mine, I could hardly imagine you as the little grunty thing you were, newborn.
Today you went for your first nap in the running stroller. I ran all the way to the park by the water, three miles from home--and back. You slept the whole time, and then woke up when we were in our driveway, and gave me this sweet, sweaty grin.
You know how to do so many things now--like roll over from your tummy to your back. You look funny when you do this--you crane your head high and sort of rock back and forth like a drunk before flopping over. I imagine you must feel triumphant when you find yourself on your back all of your own volition. A little like a sea lion must feel upon galumphing his way back into the surf. Rolling over from your back to your tummy proves to be a bit trickier--though you're working on it. You can roll side to side, but it's still hard for you to get up enough momentum to roll ALL THE WAY OVER. But when you do, you grin and grin, even when your arms are stuck under your belly and you're doing face plants into the carpet.
You also know how to grab ahold of your feet now--and put them in your mouth. This has become an obsessive pastime of yours. You LOVE your toes.
And you've discovered how to WHIMPER. I'm not sure if I'm a fan of this discovery--but you certainly are. You love the feeling of power you get when I put you down and you make these little huffy fussy noises and I COME BACK AND SMILE DOWN AT YOU and put your pacifier in your mouth...or...pick you up! I am sure there are millions of people out there who will say I am spoiling you, but I don't believe it. I think our way of being together feels right and intuitive. And I think spoiling a baby is a bunch of crock. You are begining to communicate with your world, and I think that is exciting. Even when, like today at nap time, you just wanted to be with us so much that every time I put you down you'd fuss and look around frantically until I came and held you. But once I finally sat down with you and we rocked together in the quiet, cool bedroom, you fell asleep. And you took a lovely two hour nap and woke up smiling.
You can reach out with both hands and grab anything and everything that's in front of you--and put it in your mouth. You've tried watermelon (you LOOOVE IT) and banana and plums. Your eye's get huge when you taste something new, just like they get when you experience anything else for the first time. Like taking a shower with Daddy today, or seeing the grunting pigs at the farm last weekend.
You have also started to giggle, especially when I kiss your tummy or when Daddy puts you up his head and calls you "super bean." You're such a goof ball, such a ham--with your big, wet, gummy grin. It's amazing to watch you grow, despite the moments where I feel worn out and totally sick of lugging your little hair-pulling self around.
Love, Mommy
Procrastinate, write, repeat.
When I sit down to write, I immediately procrastinate. I start thinking about lists. I put my hair in a pony tail. I take my watch off. If I'm even the slightest bit hungry, like tonight, I'll peruse the cabinets and the fridge, nibbling on bittersweet chocolate, fresh blueberries, lemonade. I'll read the paper, circling workshops I'd like to attend (on writing, of course!), bluegrass concerts in the park, mommy-and-me yoga classes, and rock climbing refresher clinics. I'll watch my marmalade and cream cat slink through her kitty door and sip water from her bowl, flicking at the water's surface with a paw before drinking. I'll talk to my husband about the Tour results, about my girlfriend, who's breaking up with her boyfriend, and about plans for tomorrow. And soon, 10, 15, 20 minutes have passed. Usually during this time I'll think of at least eight things I should google; I'll upload pictures to my family's web page; I'll instant message with my sister. When did I become this internally fragmented chatterbox? Running along the waterfront today with Bean in his stroller, I got to thinking about how self discipline and practice are the vital ingredients to success as a writer and an athlete, both. Like doing sit ups (which are ALWAYS easier to think about than to do) writing well requires tremendous self-discipline. Yet if I write daily, it gets easier, until I've acquired a certain amount of momentum, like good karma, that keeps me moving forward faster and more accurately towards my goal. That's partly why I started this blog. Good karma in the writing department. I need all I can get because I have some stories I need to write. Words haunt me, and I keep coming back to them over and over again like an addict. I realize I have put a great deal of passion and hope into the promise of words. Reading a well-crafted story makes me acknowledge that words author our perception of the world. Stories, the stories we all have to tell, shape our culture, and in turn our future.
So it is with some urgency and anxiety that I buck up against myself nightly---wanting to write, yet feeling incapable of doing so for a lack of internal discipline. I resent the babble of my mind:the easy slope of distractions. Yet, each day I must begin again. Sit down. Write. Keep writing. Until something happens. Until I reach the well water I'm looking for and the words show up: the right words, to tell some of the stories I've been needing to tell.
One hard piece I've been working on is about my father dying from pancreatic cancer three July's ago. But each time I sink my teeth into it I'm totally overwhelmed.
My life is full. Since he died, I've bought a house, gotten married, had a baby, quit my job and moved to a new city. Each day feels full with small details: dishes, bread, newspaper, basil plants, cats, hugs, phone calls. Three years ago, in July after my father died I took long walks on the little beach by my tiny house and thought about how I wanted to put down roots and really settle into the present. Then, my notebooks were full of substance and pigment and ideal. I wrote poetry daily. Yet I felt somehow ripped away from myself: as though I were the skin of an apple peeled from it's core.
So I bought a house with my then-boyfriend, now husband, and started planting tomatoes and sunflowers. Together my husband and I laid new floors and re-tiled the counter tops. We re-wired ever outlet, and took down a wall. And during that time I felt connected to a different aspect of my father---the side of him that was practical and grounded. I've spent countless hours of my life with him on projects. I learned how to use a chain saw and a table saw from him. I did my only stint with a jackhammer under his supervision, rewire outlets, plaster drywall, cut grass, kill rattlesnakes.
But sometime after our house was finished, I stopped feeling close to my father in that grounded way. And except for the occasional time when a pipe would burst in our basement, or an appliance would break, and I'd find myself talking to my dad in my head, asking for problem solving advice, my life has been so full of other things that I've been somewhat terrified and hesitant to go back to the story of his dying that I've been writing over and over again. It's time now though, I know it in my bones. This move signifies a huge psychological shift for me: its all new terrain from here on out. And it's up to me to learn to back stitch. To retrace the thread to where I left off and pick it up; to carry my memories of him into the present, so I can start finding my voice again. So I can start discovering what other stories I have to tell.