Monthly Archive

Now, finding fresh snow, I’m not sure I was ready for a new season, anyway. In fact, the snow is lovely, the day sublime.

This afternoon, I walk in newly cleared streets, not so cold, the old piles of snow that lingered through last week’s warmth new again, covered in softness. The sky is white, the world is white again, cushioned by the pale, puffed snow.

I like this, like this layered lightness, blurry at first glance, but distinct on closer inspection. Scents layer upon the clean slate: wood fires and restaurants. Sounds of the street are muffled, but only slightly, still fading faster.

I need this moment, one more moment, before spring. I need icicles and sweaters and just once more.

An online dating site offers its searchers options for goals in prospective relationships. Among these are “long-term dating,” “short-term dating,” “casual encounters (sex partners),”–yes, they clarify that one– “activity partners,” “new friends,” and “long-distance penpals.” Most seem pretty clear-cut, except one.

What is “short-term dating”? The more I think about it, the less sense it makes. My first thought is it is someone you date, and it doesn’t work out to turn into either a relationship or a friendship. But that is hardly something I can imagine looking for. So, is it just a “casual encounter” or an “activity partner” you meet several times? Is it dating on the side until you get caught? Or was the dating site expecting large numbers of exchange students to use that category?

I want the world on a string, sitting on a rainbow! strings like spider webs, interconnecting. Maybe I’m incredibly naive.

—————-
Now playing: Sinéad Lohan - Whatever It Takes
via FoxyTunes

For a day following rain, listening to Aretha sing love songs somehow suits my sleepiness well, my wet hair, my late night–way too late at night for how tired I am. It’s so hard not to get lost in it, God, it’s wonderful, awful…The first plaintive lines of the album just set the tone for a night of beautiful anguish:

“Where are you tonight?
Are you lonely like I am tonight?
Have we lied to each other about this affair?
If so, don’t make me suffer. Just tell me you still care.

Have you cried tears like I have, at all?
Do you wonder like I have, should I call?
I’ve hurt for a lifetime not knowing my fate.
Is there still any hope, dear, or am I too late?

I wonder, I wonder, where are you tonight?…”

Is there anyone who is spending this Friday night wondering? Is there anyone who never has?

Johnny Mercer’s “Skylark” (Aretha’s is not my favorite version, but the song seems to need to be here) takes flight, hopeful to the romantic dreams that seem to capture us with that “music in the night, wonderful music” that is so vivid a picture of somewhere, out there (but so much better than just saying “somewhere, out there”). I can’t say enough here, maybe later, maybe when I’ve slept. I just love this song.

By the time I make it to “Laughing On the Outside (Crying On the Inside),” I nearly find myself looking for that rainy day again myself.

Indulge in the depths of despair at love lost, as in “Only the Lonely”:

“Each place I go, only the lonely go.
Some little small café
The songs I know, only the lonely know,
Each melody recalls a love that used to be.
…
It well could be that one time
That a hopeless, hopeless little dream comes true…”

And a plea, in metaphoric shabbiness:

“I may get weary.
Women do get weary, wearing the same shabby dress.
But for one who is weary, try a little tenderness…”

But return, listen–lyrics alone don’t do it justice–as I always do, to “This Bitter Earth.” It always leaves me breathless with Aretha’s soaring voice, such torment from the harshness of love, life wasted, unwanted, but ending in the seeking call of hope.

And sleep well, friends. We’re all looking, all chasing that rainbow, or at least a friend.

—————-
Now playing: Aretha Franklin - This Bitter Earth
via FoxyTunes

I find today’s thunder soothing, like a cup of hot tea, like promises of spring sometime, hope—always hope.

The rainfall comforts, acknowledges the absence, washes away the cold snow that covered the gap left behind, the unanswered questions—cold snow, no virgin snow now, but a tired, stained white spot in my yard, now nearly melted, dirty leaves settling into the yard, becoming a part of it. Beneath the snow, somewhere, spring.

My little girl asked me this morning if I knew what she liked about rain. She said she likes that thing that happens when one drop falls on a quiet puddle, and it all spreads out. Rushing through the streets, late, I was surprised she noticed the change in the water, but it made me slow down, look at it, look at her again, just look.

Ripples cut through the surface of a lake, and yet the lake remains.

The last straw is when we run out of milk. No cereal. No healthy teeth and bones. No decaf lattes from that beautiful Expobar sitting in my kitchen.

So, having managed to get my son on the school bus for the fifth time since his hospital stay, I celebrated by heading to the grocery store.

Now, before I continue on down to the corner market, a bit of an aside. I hesitate, although only slightly, in revealing this much here, of all places. I mean, I have to wonder if there is a feeling of shock and dismay—or worse, pity—at the idea that I cannot get my older son to go to school many days because of his mental health issues. He is smart (which is how he still managed to get on the honor roll), funny, and not noticeably impaired when things are in the right balance… Still, I have found it much more difficult to bring myself to talk about him than it is about his brother, whose disability is developmental, intellectual, obvious—and not stigmatized in nearly the same way. Ah, but in not talking about the bipolar stuff, I stigmatize, too.

Stigma is a term that fits well when you consider the Latin/Greek origin: “tattoo indicating slave or criminal status”. I wish I could say that things have changed much in our world today. On the contrary, I find that when my son with developmental disabilities missed nearly thirty days of school a few years ago, it was at the insistence of the school staff that he stay home because they could not do anything with him. For my son with mental health issues, though, numerous absences (despite the school’s patience and help) may quickly become a legal matter, a crime… like so many other things. A psychiatric admission to the hospital is nearly impossible without entrance through the emergency room, and for so many, a call to 911 following an act of violence, self-injury, vandalism. A crime… but in these cases, a desperate plea for help, an acute illness demonstrated in frightening ways. What more can we do?

There is attention to this problem, but also resistance. Many posts ago, I mentioned a neighborhood’s resistance to a group home for adults with a Prader-Willi syndrome, more in the realm of developmental disability. What I learned later is that the owner of the house is a group that also provides homes and services to adults with other disabilities, including mental health issues. If some neighbors were only wary about any sort of developmental group home inhabiting the nearby real estate, they were positively aghast at the thought of recovering substance abusers or mentally ill individuals living next door. Again, the stigma, and in a world where in normal houses live the teenager who parties incessantly, the aunt who has lavish parties for weeks then retreats for even longer, the many among us who hide our afflictions, for fear of being different, of being noticed, of being shunned… And is it any wonder, when we ourselves fear those who are considered different?

If we do leave the denial, if we have to, finding help is not easy. I know this well, after repeated calls to try to restore services lost in a struggle—services not so easy to get in the first place. Calls to overburdened state agencies go unanswered, even as the calls turn to letters and move up the chain of command. It takes calling a representative and a commissioner, and then, for what? Psychiatrists who prescribe and then never return phone calls for day after day; others who are afraid to take on patients who present too great a risk—a liability; others who do not even take insurance. And then again, a few gems among them. But while we are on waiting lists to see the gems, in my frustration, I wonder again if omega 3s and martial arts and better feng shui could really be a cure-all instead of all this nonsense.

I go through this all in my head, and then turn to the things in my car, the less cold breeze in the parking lot that takes me back to summer breezes I remember so fondly. My car has made its way to the Market Basket, and life is good.

I really do enjoy my trips to the Market Basket. For one thing, it is far cheaper than the supermarket that is closest to my home. For another, I enjoy seeing so many different people. On most trips, I hear little English, but today’s trip was noticeably populated by older couples, most of whom did speak English, and most of whom were quite friendly, although I did notice a few strange looks when I turned around the coffee aisle just unable not to sing along with Andy Gibb.

You know, I still cannot get the song out of my head, and also cannot help thinking of another way to do it. I pondered that this evening, too, again imagining something on the back of a piano, but alas, a torch singer I still am not. “I Just Want To Be Your Everything” is a great song for shopping, though, and it really hit me as I found myself wanting to chant “Come On Eileen, too-loo rye-aye,” that supermarket music has certainly changed since I used to drag along with my mom through Vince’s IGA in Yorkshire Plaza, right on the corner of Laclede Station and Watson Road (which is really Route 66).

Grocery-store music then was characterized by rearranged Beatles melodies, even though most of the ones chosen barely needed it (“Yesterday,” “The Long and Winding Road”), and other pop songs that were rendered nearly unrecognizable by the arrangements… until in a sickening moment in the dairy section you finally understood that it really was a string version of “Havin’ My Baby.” Trips to the store are different now, and maybe a bit more disturbing.

Still, I am fascinated by the selection of tropical produce: chayote, malanga, batata. I like paying $.99/pound for apples instead of $1.49. I love being there with all the boxes moving around the aisles, and the woman in the electric cart asking me if I could reach and grab a can of Folgers off the top shelf, and the man who is telling the butcher not to hand him that hamburg because he’s on a fixed income and that he just doesn’t know about Hillary, and the woman telling her daughter, “Mira, ven aqui,” as the little girl sheepishly puts a box of vanilla wafers back on the shelf.

These grocery adventures are pleasant in themselves, but the soundtrack is part of the experience. Still, although I enjoy the tunes, I’m not really supposed to acknowledge that I actually noticed them. The music has a more insidious purpose that is really unmentionable. I realize this is a fact. The whole brainwashing thing, innocuous enough, it would seem, because it is everywhere. In the midst of it, though, I realized that I was barely noticing at all how happy I was that my kid actually left the house without a fight, and gave me a hug before heading down the street to his school bus stop, on time, and that the day was warm, and the other fifty thousand things that were going on right in front of me in that store because it had a soundtrack that kept me in a certain frame of mind, somewhere in the late 1970s to mid ‘80s, and made me not notice so much else. Well, Muzak’s philosophy is for me to ponder later, or to leave perhaps to the New Yorker, where it has been pondered already (by David Owen, “The Soundtrack to your Life,” 4/10/06).

It does make me think about comfort level, though. How does it feel to go into somewhere with so many people, all ages, nationalities, abilities, all collected there to hunt down the foods that celebrate our differences.. and yet to hear a soundtrack of my young adult life in the Midwest? I wonder.. what if they added a few different songs, something different, from another country, something I have never heard, just thrown in? something else… or perhaps, just no music. Just real people and real food, together. What a concept.

I had nearly forgotten until I was looking for the Gal Costa album that has “Estrada do sol” that I own a pair of cowboy boots. They almost went into the past when I moved a couple of years ago, gone to Goodwill along with oh so many memories, but I had apparently stashed them in the attic instead.

These boots may not be the type you have in your mind; they are ladies’ boots, short, lace-up, black with intricate stitching on the side in red, off-white and pale blue, sort of fancy in a western sort of way, and definitely not the type of thing I had worn before or have worn since. But I wore them then.

Hondo Boots are still being made in El Paso, Texas, as they have been since 1965, according to the company website. In 1992, the salesman at the Wrangler Corral West Ranchwear Store in downtown Cheyenne told me that they were well-made boots, specimens of fine craftsmanship and close attention to detail. He demonstrated this all quite convincingly, so of course I bought them.

The collection from my life in the west sometimes surprises me: the Pendleton bucking horse blanket that I got at Lou Taubert’s nine-floor emporium in Casper, western blouses with overlaid yokes of various designs, horses, stars, enhanced by fringe and sequins, the Black Hills silver (one pair of earrings, anyway), the red cowboy hat, various shirts from Wahmaker. I had nearly forgotten so much of this, even the trailer I lived in with the pink flamingos out front and the wood paneled living room decorated with mirrors and shag carpeting and a faux leather sofa and rocker with the western motif… and that Barracuda in the garage.

One thing I always knew about my dad: he had always wanted to live out west. That call to follow the sun’s path seemed to go back to the time that he was a kid growing up in central Missouri, listening to the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights, and trying to get off the farm. He did leave, drafted, stationed at Fort Carson. Pikes Peak. Garden of the Gods. We traveled that direction, the four of us, heading out in our 1969 Mercury Cougar to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in April, 1970. I remember my aunt and uncle’s front yard: no grass. I remember being afraid to climb a ladder in the Taos Pueblo, where my mom bought some beautiful pottery that I still have, along with the roadrunner pin my dad used to pin on his jacket.

We went to Yellowstone the next year, in our new baby blue International Travelall with the woodlike panels. I remember the ever widening sky until we approached the mountains, and then, the mountains themselves, snow, my ears popping, the elk antler arch in Jackson, Mommy and Daddy eating trout, us waiting forever for the geyser to go off while I froze in the poncho I had gotten the year before in New Mexico. The motel in Kansas on the way home was supposed to have a swimming pool—because what is a vacation anyway without a swimming pool?—but it was empty… victim of a broken pump or something like that, I think. My brother and I cried about it after a whole day in the car. My dad said he was going to kick the desk clerk’s ass, which for some reason made us feel vindicated, and maybe even happy. For years after that trip, we subscribed to the Jackson Hole News, and there was a lot of talk about moving to Wyoming. We started wearing ski jackets for winter coats, although we never learned to ski or ever went back. My dad wore a sheepskin jacket that my mom ordered for him from the Shepler’s catalog, along with the cowboy hat; boots came from Gravois Bootery, which must have been the only store in the St. Louis area that carried Tony Lamas. And finally, one day, I noticed we never talked about moving anymore.

My dad still set the radio on his basement workbench to WIL, and we kept hearing plenty of Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings and Conway Twitty, and of course the older stuff on the record player. We still watched Hee Haw, and Porter Wagoner, and then started going every Saturday, it seemed, to the country, and chased the chickens and shot beer cans off the fence posts with my dad’s 22, and sat around in the evenings listening to the grown-ups discuss what J.R. had done the night before, or the various family ailments or mini-scandals, or what my aunt might have heard on the party line, all while they drank gin and Squirt, and I wondered, as the timed air freshener spritzed hollyberry scent above the cigarette smoke, why we couldn’t just go home, or go somewhere, anywhere. So, years later—now—I do by golly know all the words to most Hank Williams songs. Only, now, I like them.

Colorado, Wyoming, the Wild West always seemed to be my dad’s territory. I was led there by coincidence, but never really stopped imagining him there—following his path, maybe I was, on the back of the Virago in the wind and the sun and the driving rain, chugging through Chugwater, holding on for my life flying by Hell’s Half Acre. It seemed so unlike me, but almost necessary, chasing some dream that was inside of him, some dream I never got to see him live or even really hear him talk about.

I do not recommend trying to live out another person’s dream, even if that other person happens to be your father, and even if he happens to have died too soon and too sorry. Searching for someone that way just makes you realize how little you really can know beyond yourself. Searching for my dad’s way made me feel that his spirit was even farther away.

But maybe we are guided to these paths for reasons within ourselves. Maybe those unmarked trails, those wrong-way turns, those errant paths that we find ourselves straying onto without understanding are set in front of us to challenge us, to teach us how to find our own way. We may not know another’s path, but we can know our own. Maybe when we wander, when we yearn, these paths are the ones that lead us back to ourselves.
—————-
Now playing: Southern Culture On the Skids - Liquored Up and Lacquered Down
via FoxyTunes

Larry the squirrel has taken up permanent residence around our dining room window. He has made himself notable by keeping up a corpulent physique, as you can see. He hangs out on our fence, and occasionally takes a daring leap, holding onto the outside of the window, peering in. I think he likes us. I don’t know why Larry was the first name that popped into my head for the creature, but my son thought it was funny, so it stuck.

You may wonder why I have had so much time on my hands to name squirrels, and why my son is home helping me name them. Well, I had fully expected to be back at my normal routine by Wednesday at 9am, but that was before Wednesday at 5am. It was at just that moment that my older daughter produced tangible proof that her tummy felt sick, as she assured me it did before she went to sleep the night before. She was staying home. Another hour later, her brother gave me evidence that he, too, could not be in school. That left one little first grader to return, all alone, on that big yellow bus, after ten days away. All alone, she reminded me. She started to make up a song about it. She does that kind of thing when she wants to make a point.

Even Larry was glaring at me by the end of it. I drove her to school.

I know that my little girl was especially concerned that her sister would spend the day learning the songs from High School Musical II, which they had just purchased themselves on Sunday. She was afraid that big sister would be the first to know “Humu humu nuku nuku apua’a” all the way through. I think my first grader really wants to play Sharpay herself.

No, I don’t think she wants to; I know she does. In fact, she told me that her new nickname is Ashley. She has taken to wearing sunglasses around the house, puts on leotards at night instead of pyjamas. When she reclines to go to bed, she breaks into “Fabulous,” and tells me, “I want MORE!” I’ll admit, she isn’t half bad. Between this and her sister’s Britney imitations, their brother has been groaning a lot. If I start in with the torch songs, he usually turns in early and puts on his earphones to Linkin Park… and he sings along (although he denies that).

This all started a long, long time ago, but really came to life last spring, when my little girl was a Munchkin in the Framingham High School production of the “Wizard of Oz.” It was there that she discovered that it is “not scary at all” to be on stage. In fact, she told me it was really fun, because you can hear people clapping, but when the lights are on, it is all about the “world up there,” as she called it. Her one regret–no, two: she didn’t get to be Dorothy, and she did not get to be in the Jitterbug scene.

Now, I mentioned a few nights ago some highly idealistic ideas I had long before I actually had kids about how they would be spending their free moments…. something about rehearsing Hamlet, I believe. Now, Shakespeare would be fine, not to mention impressive, but what I didn’t realize when I was twenty is that kids need to be kids. In other words, all those teachable moments I was envisioning really were more about who I thought my kids should be instead of who they really are. I just had no idea how special they really would be.

I may complain a lot about my kids’ not liking a lot of the music and musicals and movies and food and so many things that I think are just wonderful… But what I do love is watching them get really excited about anything that allows them to express themselves. (Um… except tattoos. And probably some other things they will ask me about in the next few years… I hope they ask me…) At this point, though, if it’s High School Musical and Hairspray, and they are also making up their own things about the little girl alone on the school bus, and the Pegasus and the unicorn, I am just going to enjoy the show. Larry the squirrel may enjoy it, too. I would not be surprised if there is a song about Larry soon.

And as for my little girl’s lost practice time, it turns out there were no “rehearsals” yesterday. My older daughter was pale, asleep, and feverish all day, and my son looked pretty pale most of the day, too. Larry was the only one up for theatrics, and even he wandered off for a rest at some point. Now, a day later, everyone seems well again, ready for rehearsals, ready for school, ready for life. And I am ready for bed.

Happy New Year!

I came downstairs this morning, flipped on the radio, and I think I heard a Latin version of “America the Beautiful” on vibraphone. They never announced what they played, but I’m sure that’s what it was. It was just too early for that kind of tomfoolery.

But, I must say, it did finally get last night’s anthem out of my head. After leaving the Worcester DCU Center a few minutes after we arrived, one among us hyperventilating and two crying—and that in itself more than a little tragic—my girls asked if they could listen to Kiss 108 on the way home, too. I cringed, “Oh gee, girls, isn’t that what we listened to all day?” but quickly said yes. Yes, anything.

They said they were counting down the top songs of 2007, but I could have sworn we heard exactly the same show on the radio the night before. Yes, we spent a long time in the car on Sunday evening, too, when an ordinary trip to CVS for antibiotics and antipsychotics turned into a two-hour joy ride through the western suburbs. Admittedly, the trip was not exactly a joy, given that the pharmacy technician had made a slight error in the names of my two boys. Rather than just assuming that their last names would be the same and the first names different, she apparently put them through the system with the same first name and different last names. It took them a call to my ex-husband, who called me (why they never called my cell number, which I gave to them at drop-off, I still do not know), three calls to one insurance company, and two to another to straighten it out, all while we kept coming back in half-hour intervals. Thank God for drive-throughs. But then, we heard a lot of Britney.

I must have heard that one really popular song before—no, I know I had, many times—but not repeated in such a short span and not day after day after day. We got home last night from our short-lived revelry (we at least saw fireworks), and after posting something here that I had written earlier, then popping upstairs to watch “Ratatouille” with the girls before bed, I had some unexpected time left to sit and think about 2007. But I wasn’t thinking, or even meditating. The year was about to end, and there I was, in the bathtub humming strange songs.

When I realized what I was doing, it really bothered me, and it also unsettled me just a bit that one thing I had learned on the last night of 2007 was that my older daughter does a fair Britney imitation. (She did nearly shave her head once, too, but that was when she was four, and her brother was responsible for starting with her bangs. I think that my blood-curdling screams when I first saw her hair all over the floor and the scissors in her hands will prevent any similar episodes in her adult life, but may also sentence her to a lifetime of therapy.) The thing is, I wasn’t sure she was getting all the words right, but I was also glad that she was not singing what I thought I was hearing.

I couldn’t go to sleep like that, though, the tune going through my head with no clear idea of what the song was about. I came back downstairs, and spent a good hour or so of my New Year’s Eve googling Britney lyrics. Reading the words aloud made me feel like Steve Allen.

“I’m Mrs. Lifestyles of the rich and famous
(You want a piece of me)
I’m Mrs. Oh my God that Britney’s Shameless
(You want a piece of me)
I’m Mrs. Extra! Extra! this just in
(You want a piece of me)
I’m Mrs. she’s too big now she’s too thin
(You want a piece of me)”

Oh dear. Somehow my effort to influence my kids’ taste in music seems to have failed almost as badly as it has in the food category. My kids used to like things I listened to (and things I cooked, too). I know I reported last summer that my kids’ acceptance of my own favorites seemed to have fallen off in the folk music genre, but I did not realize that their taste had gone so far into Britney territory. Even more disturbing was that after I found the lyrics, I also found the video for the song on YouTube, as well as two remix versions, and I watched them all the way through.

My daughter, the would-be Britney, has just come downstairs after her bath to inform me that she finds my recitation of “You Want a Piece Of Me” insulting, so I think this little writing exercise will have to come to a close. It is bedtime, after all, and tomorrow is a school day. Vacation is over, and hugs are necessary, for all of us.

They really do want a piece of me.