Wild creating
An empty page; rough sketch paper, then black paint in arcs. I have no idea what my creation will be. I rip paper, and find I'm drawn (after all-day rainstorms,) to the bright images of peoney blooms in a glossy magazine page. I press the shreds of the hot pink pentals onto the page, then swipe them with the slick sticky gel on my brush. I let myself create a mess. Nothing makes sense. The images are incongruent, random, and incomplete. I add ripped bits of sentences I copied from online dictionaries about this word: wild (n) deviating widely from an intended course.
Then I talk on the phone with my best friend, my head and shoulder cradling the receiver, letting my mind travel elsewhere; letting chaos ensue on the page. When I look down and realize I've rubbed a lot of white paint onto the images a short brush, and suddenly a humming bird arrives. It’s flight path off kilter, angling down. This is my creation: a zig zag of wildness, this uncontainable, too-fast flutterer, almost like my heart tonight. When I allow the wild part of my brain to take over, creation invariably happens.
The theme at mamasaysom this week is wild. Go have some fun here, or here.
Being related
Having a mother, and being a mother is a polarity I thought about often this weekend—How someday, invariably, my boy will grow up and his thoughts and ideas will shear away from mine like an ice berg from the polar cap. With unswirving certainty he’ll find criticisms of me; see me as different from him in fundamental ways.
Blood is a limited connective tissue—biological relation is only a small part of who we become, and I felt that this weekend, talking with my mother. Sitting next to her on the couch, I see small pieces of myself: my cheekbones are like hers, my nose. Occasionally, I hear a phrase, or a handful of sentences she says that wrap their way around an idea, and resonate with me. But most of the time her conviction, her intensely burning idealism, and her far flung beliefs: in palmistry, astrology, anthroposophy, cosmology, numerology, cause me to veer the other way. The outlines of our differences are stark.
I lean towards relativism; my reality shaped more by day to day experience than by esotericism. I value truth—both sacred and factual, as it resonates for me, but I don’t expect other’s to see it as I do. There are as many ways for knowing god as there are people; similarly for living a good life or raising children.
Childrearing came up a lot over the past few days, and I found myself always second guessing the things I’ve grown accustomed to trusting. Her perspective on raising a child is based on the implementation of a strict rhythm: meals and bed times marked indelibly onto the meridians if the day. She values a certain stoicism too: crying it out is a method that works for her, and doesn’t rip apart her every nerve.
The teacher in me has already for years valued the way children thrive in the security of a structured day—and routine is an important, predictable background onto which the daily activities are superimposed. But I also feel like there is a place for the willy-nilly glee of deviation; of following a whim, of breakfast in bed, of dinner out late on occasion, or skipping a nap for the sake of an adventure.
I try to exhale and shake off the residual tension that’s found its way to my shoulders and heart over the past couple of days. Outside rain is falling again and the cherry blossoms are just about to burst into bloom. Suddenly the house is filled with shrieking, and the patter of small running feet, coffee being made, the cats being chased round and round the kitchen island. On the counter, the bright orange roses my mother brought home for me from the market. We’re both growing.
Ways of looking at the pieces
My mother is here for a visit, and seeing her come towards me from across the wide foyer of the airport, I felt a lurch of familiarity and distance all at once. Her shoulders felt small when we hugged—smaller than the shoulders I perpetually remember from my childhood. It always takes us a few days to synchronize, our interpretations of each other always slightly off at first encounter.
Sitting on stools at the kitchen island we sweet mandarins and talk about her past, my childhood, our futures. Words that keep coming up: comparison, criticism, home, happiness, choice. Hearing her describe the threads of her biography (misplaced affection, intense shyness, an affair, a baby, and then she married my father: a man she hardly knew, but whose ideals she loved) makes me feel a bit like I’m a bird trying to swim in the lake of her perception.
She’s brought good chocolate: hazelnut and currant, and I nibble on it, hardly able to fathom the gap in perceiving that spreads out between us. But we find much to laugh at together, and she makes incredible food.
The second day of her visit she stays with Bean, while DH and I hang drywall for hours. We work at first like giddy high school sweethearts, saying goofy things, laughing, so happy to be together. Then we grow steady, a rhythm evolving. Our movements become synchronized: each moving one step ahead of the other, our actions overlapping only when necessary (to hold each piece of gypsum up; to wield the drill, dimpling screws into its papered surface.)
When I come home for dinner, my mother has done the incredible: the house is clean, Bean has been fed fresh cooked squash with brown rice, and all the laundry is done. To me this is an incredible feat. Most days the house limps by, in a state of constant neglect. The laundry is the worst of it, and my best friend knows me well enough to say, “Oh god, you must be really stressed,†after checking on the status of our clean towel supply--- and finding none.
DH and I are a team with housework as with other things. We clean together, cook together, and neglect housework together. But we are also lucky that neither of us have particularly high standards of clean, or else we'd drive each other mad. My mother on the other hand: the domestic superwoman. I murmur my thanks between bites of succulent herbed chicken.
She doesn’t see her strengths: afraid to trust in her own innate power, she is terrified of finding a ‘real’ job. Work. Of creating a home that no longer has, for her, its customary center (my father). After Bean is in bed we try to talk about this. Try, though the words feel like they are weighted differently: meaning one thing to her, and another to me.
And then DH calls with low blood sugar, feeling off. Exhausted maybe, or worse, possibly. He’s type 1 diabetic, and every time he calls to tell me that his blood sugar is going low it feels like I’ve swallowed Draino and it’s making it’s way down my limbs, melting them. He doesn’t feel okay by the time he makes it home. The test strips read one thing but his body another, and he’s shaking (fear? or something worse?), so we go to the emergency room.
After a few hours everything returns to normal (we think he accidentally took extra units of insulin at dinner), and we are tear-drenched and grateful when we hear the first raw cries of a newborn baby entering the world a few doors away.
It shakes us up, in a good way. Sometimes this is needed. When working on a jigsaw you can look, and look, and look and not find the piece you need until you shake the box and let the pieces fall anew, and there it is. For us, this reminder: life is precious, sweet, and fleeting. No house, no deadline worth its loss. Stress, like a tangle of barbed wire, needs to be coiled and set aside.
So today we played. A late breakfast (omlets, jammy toast, iced lattes), and then went to a home expo where Bean batted at balloons and DH oogled viking ranges and slate roofing. Tonight, just the two of us got to take a walk along the empty streets of the city under one umbrella, our feet and knees freckled with raindrops, our bodies touching.
The past three days by the numbers:
8 hours spent writing applications.6 application packages sent out. 400 other applicants competing for the same positions. 1,000,000,000 units of stress about obtaining one of said positions.
1 mother visiting. 5 loads of laundry done by said mother. 1 happy grandson.
6 hours of drywalling. 1 diningroom completed. 2 black-hole hours at Home Depot.
3 hours in the emergency room. 2 new babies came into the world while we were there. 1,000,000,000,000, (x infininity) units of gratitude that everything is okay.
6 hours of interrupted sleep. 3 possible teeth on their way in. 2 exhausted parents.
I swear I'll post tonight & I heart you all for writing me emails wondering where I am.
Enjoyment at random
I’m feeling inklings of that today. The maples are all flirty with little red catkin blossoms, and the magnolias (one of my favorite flowers) are blooming everywhere. And all day I felt kind of haphazard, but in a good way. Carefree, non sequitur, goofy. Things are strewn about everywhere, the house is a mess, and Bean was off schedule all day, but for some reason I haven't minded. Instead I painted, and wrote a list of ten random things that strike my fancy.
2) I have the hankering this week to look at art by Gorgia O’Keefe. Again, this must be a spring thing. Her flowers. Surely you have seen them.
3) I just remembered how much I loved reading Jitterbug Perfume, by Tom Robbins when I was in high school. He writes in such a wild, heady, ridiculous, over-zealous, over-educated, over-the top way that I dig, sometimes. When I read it then, it was at the suggestion of my first serious boyfriend and we were all loopy for each other. Sappy, yes. But it really IS a great love story.
4) I’ve had time to mull over the changes coming up (re: going back to work,) and it seems okay to me now. Exciting even. This is what I’m like: it takes me a day or two to warm to an idea, and then I’m all game.
5) I’m over my chai tea obsession that lasted me through the many months of cold winter. Now I’m in love with iced, sweetened green tea.
6) I’m planning on buying bagfulls of wild flower seeds this weekend, and scattering on the hillside below our house. I won’t have time this year to plant a real garden, but it will be fun to see what comes up from the handfuls I toss about.
7) The Vanity Fair Green Issue is my bathroom reading this month.
8) I am daydreaming about my future studio. I can hardly fathom what it will be like not to be doing paintings on the dining room table. I’m looking at paint samples, picture hangers, and storage options. Pure heaven.
9) I’ve started listening to NPR’s jazz profiles. I could do this all day. Like higher math, jazz is something I find utterly mind-blowing.
10) We had a picnic tonight in the new house, in the room that will be my studio. Indian take out: chicken curry, aloo ghobi, naan with coconut, lassi, mango chutney, raita. Bean sat on the floor with us and fed me spoonful after spoonful of rice, and then ran circles around us, his face smudged yellow from the curry.
Your turn: ten random foot loose & fancy free things.
14 month old Beansprout
I looked at the calendar this morning and couldn’t believe that you turn fourteen months today. When did that happen? I thought we were still in the BEGINNING of April! Funny how my memory has been compromised, since you hit the scene. Starting with pregnancy, certain things become involuntarily selective in my memory. Appointments were missed (or arrived at late), and multi-tasking became a brain bending feat I was no longer capable of. Then I had you and it went even further downhill. Now, in the shower every morning I start to think of all the things I want to accomplish in the day. I make long, detailed mental lists. Stuff that is really important, that I must remember. Yet, when I towel off and walk out of the bathroom my hair still sopping, the entire list has been usurped by one thought: COFFEE. You’re teething again, nose running fiercely, thrashing about in the middle of the night with your feet in my face, looking for solace, and this only increases the severity of my addiction.
This month in your development has been fascinating from a linguistic standpoint. Your receptive language increases exponentially everyday, and I’m watching you make connections between words and things.
You point to the ceiling light sconce, “Light,†I say. You point to the bedside table lamp, “Light,†I name it for you again.
Then you point outside, up into the sky towards the sun, "La!" you say.
You can follow simple directions now—if you want. You run to find your monkey, or your shoes, or truck and bring them to me, grinning widely—when you feel like cooperating. Other times you totally ignore me, more interested in hauling the broom around the house or pushing buttons on my printer (which you are now tall enough to reach.)
“Go find your socks,†I can say, and you’ll run off and find them and bring them proudly. Or I can say, “Go find your socks,†and you’ll shake your head, run off, and come back carrying the cookie sheet from the kitchen. You know the difference, and seeing your own volition taking shape is at once thrilling and daunting.
I love listening to your first attempts at expressive language: “Ki-gi†you say, pointing to the kitty. “Duhg!†You say, eagerly pointing at every dog we pass. You say “Buh, buh, buh†when you see gulls or pigeons in the park, and “Bath!†when it’s time for the tub. You know what I mean when I say, “Okay, you can pull out the drain now,†and every night you look with a mixture of terror and glee as the water swirls down the drain after your bath. Almost every day you try out a new set of consonants and vowels, and yet I can’t imagine what it will be like to hear you really TALK, just like a few short months ago, it seemed inconceivable that you’d be walking, and now you’re running every place.
You no longer walk with your arms akimbo, and you know now to look down at the ground to help you navigate around obstacles. Tool use suddenly makes sense to you too, and you try to figure out the purpose of everything. You use your little hammer to pound the pegs on your workbench. You use both the fork and spoon and successfully get bites into your mouth. And you love using the broom to knock things off high shelves that you can’t otherwise reach, although you can reach many things now that you figured out how to CLIMB: on the dining room chairs, up the book case (at least onto the bottom shelf), onto the ottoman, the wheelbarrow in the back yard.
There is so much that I want to remember about this time: the way you burst into tears sometimes when Daddy leaves, and how you run to the window saying, “Dada!†when his truck pulls into the driveway (you also say “Dada!†every time you see a red truck pass by as though there is only one red truck in the world and it belongs to YOUR Daddy.) I want to remember how you’ve started to lie down on the carpet or the sheepskin fleece by my desk when you’re tired, tummy down, feet tucked beneath you, and start singing yourself little songs. I want to bottle you up right now: the way your skin smells, sweet and warm; the way your hair curls at the nape of your neck; the way when I smile at you always smile back.
A hundred kisses, Mama
Striking a balance
Hunger lurches through me and my fingers peck haplessly at the keys; my heart lurks at the edges of the room, where the lamplight doesn’t fall, licking the wound of worry like a dog.
It’s been decided—at least in part, that I’ll be going back to work next year, and it makes sense. But I've been balking a bit, since those words tumbled out into the room conspicuously like a pocketfull of marbles onto the floor in the middle of a sermon at church. It’s taking me a while to adjust to this idea.
Like always, my mind gallops off---the eager, sunny pony that it is, says: this will be wonderful, just what I need, I have been lonely and longing for the connections and meaning that work brings to my days. But my heart, like a donkey, is lurching about. I’ve grown deeply content with the span of my days, with the ampleness of creative time, with the simplicity of exhaustion after a day spent with only one little boy: mine.
So it’s been like this: cays of internal impasse (have you noticed the paucity of posts?) As though a permafrost has spread up from my heart to my head. Days of creative emptiness revealing the strange limbo of now.
I’m putting together my resume, cover letters, applications and I hate it. Like teasing out the burrs from wool; the inevitable process of preparation, before action. And also I hate how Murphy was right: things always converge like ths in piles, awkwardly, anxiety heaped upon stress, on top of exhaustion.
But even with all this (the creative freeze, the endless house renovations, the worry about next year,) it there is a part of my mind that keeps coming back to this phrase: what is meant be will be. What can go right, will go right. Perky and annoying , like dandelions in a lawn, but welcome just the same.
In the foreground, along the roadside, the pasture is turning green and old hay bales, round and taller in diameter than I am, sit heavily in a long row and wait.
Something will happen to them, eventually. A tractor might come, load them, lift them, toss them; or they might just stay at there at the edge of the field, as new grass grows tall, and slowly decompose. But right now there is no telling, they are just there, and beside them the fuzzy yellow heads of dandelions by the hundreds, heaping, golden, bustling, turn their faces up to the sun.
I maybe shouldn't have run to get the camera first...
...But I couldn't help it. It was just too funny: the sound of catfood falling, and then his immediate wail of utter woe. Catfood. Everywhere. He could not be consoled until I got the dustpan and brush and showed him how to sweep it up. Such a sweetie, he is.
Total sappiness
This guy rocks my world.
It's been a rough couple of months, especially for him, since he's carrying the brunt of this crazy renovation project—on top of his day job (day trader). Neither of us get down time, and sometimes everything hits us in the face like mud sprayed up from the tires of a passing car.
Sometimes it’s days on end of not enough sleep, no time to ourselves, and way to much to do. Sometimes it’s back to back days of feeling depressed, and worried, and just plain stressed. But in between are these bright moments, like sunspots—that linger even when your eyes are closed. Moments of lingering, of sweetness and touch, of passion, of pure goofiness, that are the antidote to everything else.
Lately, I’ve been feeling a bit like wet laundry on a line: flapping about, rumpled. I forget to tell him this enough: how wildly, whole-heartedly I’m in love with him. How he's an AMAZING dad. How incredible I think it is that he can go read a how-to book, and then actual BUILD A WALL, that actually looks (and acts) like a wall. How I love the fact that he's so affectionate with his family. How I think he's brilliant, and totally handsome, and really, just plain amazing--seeing as he’s been managing (mostly) to hold it all together, despite the 16 hour days, the too-small apartment, and the tight budget.
And then goes he does stuff like wash the dishes or buys me chocolate...or kisses the back of my neck, unexpectedly when I'm hunched over my computer typing away furiously. It doesn't get any better. It just doesn't.
In constant motion
It was amazing to feel my lungs expand, to not be out of breath, to just be able to continue at the same pace up and up. I wish I could transfer these effects to the rest of my life, but instead I find I’m whirling about like a dervish, trying to hold on the sacred in small things.
The way the maple blossoms are red and nubby at the end of every twig on the trees that line our block now; the moon, almost full in the early evening sky; playing chasing games with Bean, his giggles filling the room with delight; the five minutes DH and I snatched in bed this while Bean explored the bedroom—just the two of us, warm from sleep, snuggling; the fact that finally, finally fresh produce that doesn’t come from half the world away, is returning to the stores.
I look at the time and wonder how every night it gets to be nearly midnight so quickly. How is it possible that the hours after Bean goes to bed become a mere handful of seconds? Like humming bird wings in motion, a blur of minutes.
Delightful
The taste of dirt.
Spring is all about mud in these parts. The roads are thick with it, and around the edges of the lawn are patches of soaked ground, perfect for poking sticks into or finding pebbles, and Bean has fallen in love with DIRT.
Where my heart finds home
When my heart begins to flutter like the fins of a hundred small fish with worry about the things I cannot control, I seek out wild places where words no longer matter. Where language is the drip of snowmelt, the rat-a-tat-tat of the early woodpecker, or the calling of the chickadee.
Today I explored a small corner of the several hundred acres of woodlands behind our house.
With Bean in the backpack I begin to climb, feeling his weight transfer to my hips. Soon I hear the thrumming of my heart in my ears, my cheeks flush hot, and my lungs find a new cadence as I as I move. At first Bean’s small voice rings out clear among the stands of trees, branches still bare save for snow in nooks between limb and trunk, but soon he grows drowsy with the steady side-to-side movement of my gait, and drifts off to sleep. Then I hear his tiny breath whispering softly above my head.
I smell snow, metallic and sharp, and the tang of newly cut wood where someone has come before and cut away a tree fallen across the path. After a while, I’m not anywhere else. Just here, balancing on small stones to cross rushing streams where the water runs clear and cold and sparkling silt gathers in pools on the mud below. Just here, where everything is still, save for the dripping of snow melt falling from trees and the trilling of an occasional bird. Just here, where my muddy tracks cross the tracks of wild turkeys, then field mice, then a vole’s. Many tracks I see are partly obscured in the slush, their edges melting.
I come to pool after pool of water, each like a piece of amber with last autumn’s leaves glowing from below the surface. Snow fell yesterday here, and everything is saturated, slippery, muddy. Sometimes my shoes stick and as I pull my foot away, the mud sucks it back.
All around me is forest. Above me: a halo of delicate branches. A filigree. A vast network of capillaries: twigs running with sap, buds just forming everywhere. Most of the trees are young—small enough to wrap my arms around, wrists overlapping; but some maples have been here longer—their trunks burly and split open, their gnarled branches reaching up thickly into the sky.
After a while I turn my attention to the worry in my bones and find it has melted with the snow. This is now. This is all I have. Moss adorned with water droplets, new shoots of green pushing up through wet snow. Here my heart is home and this is all that matters.
(p.s. I am feeling better—thank you for your kind thoughts. A day of rest was seriously needed. I may have spent most of yesterday asleep. I'm not sure. :)
Also, more pictures are here.)
Time for sleep
Even now, after a year, sleep isn’t the same. Maybe it will never be like it was pre-baby: eight hours without a single moment of semi-consciousness. Now night is a blur of dreams, wide awake moments flushed with hormonal heat, moments yanked from sleep yet again, moments still nursing.
As a result some days my moods are like salmon migrating upstream. Often, they storm the turbines of my heart. Up, then down. Flailing. Inevitably.
Today, after a weekend of sun, fun, extroversion, and no naps, I woke up exhausted, with mastitis. Again. The cumulative lack of deep sleep has caught up. Things feel tangential and disconnected.
Most weeks I stay up late into the evening. These nighttime hours are my time for painting and writing; for locating the fragile connective tissue that holds my days together. This only works if I get a nap in with Bean in the morning, though.
We curl like puppies, a tangle of limbs under the down comforter. His bare feet pressed into my belly. We sleep like this for an hour at least. Sometimes two, and everything is okay. But last week there were no naps. Days of go, go, go. Days of longer sunlight. More to do. Friends visiting. Deadlines. It’s easy for me to try to live on credit with myself. To take out debt after debt in the sleep department.
I’m trying to learn how to listen to my body. To heed the warning signs. But it’s hard when most days I feel like I accomplish so little. A handful of sentences written maybe. Possibly a load of laundry. (And of course caring for Bean.) It’s hard to allow this to be enough. I’m so goal driven, so pushy, and impatient. It’s hard to bring myself back to the present and wait for the well to fill again.
Weekend mosaic: sugar on snow & framing walls
We wake up baffled about the time. As usual, the three of us are a tangle of limbs, warm skin against skin. Bean has taken to nuzzling into the nook between my chin and shoulder when he wakes up, and today he snuggles in and starts humming a little ditty that is tuneless and dreamy. Unlike us, he’s ready to start the day when the first sun rays poke through the shades. He scoots off the bed before we can catch him and runs to greet our houseguest.
We head to Starbucks for coffee this morning with our guest, and then to the little bakery kiosk for warm croissants with ham and swiss cheese. We take the paper sacks to of goodies to the park, where Bean runs after pigeons and tries to climb everything in sight. We take turns eating mouthfuls of flakey pastry and running after him as he goes after his fancy: up the courthouse stairs, after the dog he sees at the other side of the park, or towards the gulls that have gathered for handouts. “Buh, buh, buh†he says pointing at the birds.
After our friend leaves in a flurry of waved goodbyes (waving being Bean’s newest fascination), DH and I slip away to a sugar on snow party at our neighbor’s house while Bean and the babysitter head to the park. At our house we walk hand in hand down through the field with the gnarled apple trees and stalky grasses to the neighbor’s drive. Their dog lopes down to greet us, her ears as soft as rabbit’s fur.
We meet other neighbors over bowls of snow (saved in a cooler from the last snowfall a few weeks ago) with hot syrup poured on top. The syrup turns to taffy and is sticky sweet. Everyone we meet is kind, down-to-earth and genuine: the doctor who keeps sheep, the family down the road with teenage girls dying for baby sitting jobs, the stone mason, the carpenter who also is an avid cyclist. This is what home is like.
After hours of banter we make our way back up the hill, finding time to kiss in the sunny, sawdust filled dining room before embarking on the task of framing yet another wall. It’s hours of measuring, cutting, re-cutting, laughing, kissing, hammering two-by-fours into place, with a stop for Italian sodas and a trip to the general store. Like out of an old movie, it sells everything: ice cream, panty hose, hunting rifles, sandpaper, milk, wine, fishing lures, twinkies, steaks. A good place to know about when the roads are bad.
By six it’s still light out and I pull into the driveway to find Bean digging in the dirt in the front yard. He is so absorbed in his project I barely get a hello. For dinner we share a bowl of chicken soup, Bean using his very own spoon, and somehow the stars are already out.
Feeling giddy
What a difference a day makes. Not that yesterday was really so bad—it’s just that more than twelve hours of non-stop one year old can lead to moments of well, that picture said it so much better than words ever will. But the weather has been the perfect antidote to the stir-crazies, and today we went on our first bike ride of the season—just a lazy jaunt down to the waterfront & along the bike path to the beach.
Everyone everywhere is suddenly out and about, baring skin, kissing, or lying face up to blue glazed bowl of sky that was perfectly empty of clouds today. There was a certain aliveness in the air today. Everything is getting busy. Literally and figuratively.
With the onset of warmer days, drenched with hours of sun, everything is suddenly sensuous after a winter of comparative deprivation. The college kids are everywhere, in throngs, performing intricate mating rituals, much like the pigeons in the park and the wild circling gulls at the beach.
It was Bean’s first experience of sand—he went last summer to the beach but was so small then. A tiny, barely crawling big eyed boy who stayed on mama’s lap. So much changes in a half a year. He was running every where, willy nilly down the hill. Falling, stumbling, rolling, laughing. And then he came to the sand and stopped. And sat. And promptly fell in love.
Thankfully he seems to be past the stage of eating it. Instead he fingered it, looking in utter amazement at his disappearing and reappearing toes. He stuck sticks in it and stirred it, and scooped handfuls and stirred some more.
DH and I played with him on the beach, feeling the same wild spring fever as every other creature in sight, and managed to steal a handful of moments just us, after we got back. I’m still smiling.
Blueprints
After a few days off I’m back to writing, fingering the blueprints that make me who I am. I’m going back to my childhood in the Colorado mountains, and to the stories of my parent’s love and faith. I’m looking for meaning in their loneliness and isolation; I'm looking for maps that can help me to describe the context of my own life. Sometimes it feels impossible to make words describe the things my heart needs to say. Sometimes, barely, the right ones arrive on the page in the nick of time to save me from the heartache of knowing but not being able to explain.
Following the path of the dead
Opening and folding, flush petals move towards sun, where warm life stretches to the boundaries of stem pulling nectar upwards against gravity.
In the moonlight moths flock to the ghostly silhouettes of backlit petals. Their wings beat aimlessly, falling for the sham of appearances.
Hovering at the edges at twilight times, at dawn, worlds open and close like the finning gills of fish, pummeling the air like the call of a coyote.
Here perceptions shift ; the shape of the sea star gathered up becomes an interior space.
THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT by Mark Haddon
A wonderfully constructed story that it forces you to become attached to the strange habits and foibles of the lead character, Christopher, who is autistic. Without being pedantic or obtuse, the narrator's voice is exacting and transparent, bringing you into a world where the color of cars passing on the street decide the mood for the day: red cars, good mood. Black cars = bad mood; and where the mysterious death of a dog leads to an unraveling of family complexities. It is a book about love and loss, and it made me contemplate again how people make sacrifices for the ones they love, and how misunderstandings almost invariably arise when words are not enough. Hadden’s experience working with autistic youths gives his character’s voice validation, and he writes with a lithe humor and sensitivity, even when exploring issues of depression, anger and self doubt. A quick, easy read, THE CURIOUS INCIDENT pulls you from one chapter to the next with wry observations about human nature, wit, and well constructed sentences.
Self Portrait Tuesday: Time # 4--A sense of humor is about timing and possibly furniture
Ikea furniture is always packaged flat—for easier transport, and because it requires less packaging this way. It is up to you to haul your boxes of furniture home, usually tied to the roof of your too-small car or shoved precariously in the back, with the trunk open, and when you arrive, you stumble inside with the long cardboard rectangles containing what will be your bed or nightstand, and begin the hours-long process of assembling things. It takes a lot of patience, and with any luck, your techniques improve as you go along.
You take a heap of flat boards, pegs, an allen wrench, and follow the schematics that, if they have words at all, are printed in fifteen different languages. You are aware that what you’re doing is a little bit like magic. You are turning the nearly two-dimensional stack of wood and particle board, glass and wicker, into something three dimensional and useful.
You build a wicker backed chair, after putting the legs in place wrong twice. Your cat will later love to sharpen her claws on its rattan and soon it will no longer be presentable, but when you first put it together, all you see are its clean lines and lovely promise. You imagine dinner parties, and sunny mornings over coffee.
Or you put together a glass-topped table that will for years, show every condensation ring but you still can’t be bothered to buy coasters. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to make sense of the arrows and dotted lines: connect region B with point C using tool A. It might not be fine furniture, but it’s a start, and though you dream of owning REAL furniture, the kind you see in the windows of the home wares store you walk by every day, you’re happy with these flat-package creations for the time being.
This is pretty much exactly what the process of acquiring a sense of humor is like.
If you’re me, that is, and you were raised in a home with two of the most earnest, somber parents on the face of the earth. My home was also devoid of TV which contributed to a) the blossoming of my wild and vivid imagination an b) the utter absence of pop-culture sensibilities and all the accoutrements of humor that come with this terrain.
For me, sarcasm, silliness, wit, and comic timing did not come preassembled: an already functional part of my personality from day one. In fact, for years I was almost entirely lacking of anything that could possibly pass as an acceptable sense of humor.
Unfortunately sarcasm is still mostly lost on me. And, though you can slay me with a good play-on-words (my father, in all his etymological neerdieness would, on a cheery day, toss out one after another at the dinner table, and you’d have to be well versed in homophones and double-entendres to find them laugh-worthy, which I was), no amount of hanging out with boys has helped me to understand why it’s SO FUNNY to repeat one liners over and over again.
But I am gradually starting to get the hang of funny. It’s taken years for me to assemble, but I'm finally starting to get that it’s okay to JUST TAKE THINGS LIGHTLY sometimes. To NOT be serious every single minute. Years for me to finally understand that having a sense of humor, first and foremost, means having fun. It means giving yourself permission to make a fool out of yourself—to jump into things, arms and legs akimbo, laughing all the while.
And Bean is like the schematics that come with the furniture. He makes being silly easy. At 13 months, he watches everything I do, and then replicates it, often with unbelievably comic effects. He’ll take a sip of water and then let out this delightful, over-exaggerated sigh, and everybody just dies laughing. Or he’ll hear music and start wiggling his booty around with complete uninhibitedness. Finally, I'm starting to see that this is what humor is all about: over-exaggerated uninhibition. Gusto. Glee.
So we make time for this every day: we sit on the floor, roll around some, and act silly. I’m hoping that by the time he’s big, both of us will have a rip-roaring sense of humor.