2010: the year of openness

Often, as one year wraps up and another unfolds, I find it useful to reflect on the year. This year, I'm journaling with a community called reverb10. Some of these reflections I will post here.

One Word. Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you? (Author: Gwen Bell)

I can imagine my life as a house. Classic, refined, impeccably decorated with a mix of vintage and modern, with shelves and shelves of books. My house is shielded by trees, so light and wind are filtered. Neighbors and children rarely visit; the sounds within are muted, controlled. My house is often wrapped tight, curtains drawn, windows closed.

But this year, I have opened the door, torn down the screen, pulled back thick curtains and allowed winds to blow through my carefully arranged house. Even when the skies darkened and the clean air turned wet and angry, I held open the door.

Winds blew into the dusty corners of the living room, kicking up dust shapes that beckoned to me with glittering tendrils. You have choices, you know, they say. Don’t be afraid, they whisper. The winds have been brazen, kicking statues to the ground and watching them shatter, rifling through book pages and catching up the pressed flowers, setting a few violets down unharmed on the pages, and dissolving others to dust, sweeping them out the windows. The storm has penetrated every recess of my careful rooms, sweeping out the basement with my embarrassments, blowing open the attic with its disappointed hopes for love.

Out with a job that defined but controlled me. In with time to think. Out with some relationships I had hoped to keep, while others have been returned to me more precious than ever. Open, to a different job, to new friends, to love, to honesty, to faith, to a totally new life, and to what old lives still want to tell me.

Open. This year I’ve been open, like a book, like a room, like a womb. Unknowing, blindly, I have cracked myself wide and allowed wild winds to blow through this careful life, handing me back to myself. I have resisted the urge to cling, forcing my fingers to release, allowing this breath to take and leave as it will.

Next year, my house will be cleaner and less careful. Next year, I want to invite in more strangers, more neighbors, more children. I want light, and I want uncareful sounds, laughter, silliness. I want to welcome joy.

conversation at work

I'm reaching into the milk refrigerator, probably in order to refill a pitcher.

Cody: Be careful. The skim milk is topless.
Me: Umm... I'm not sure if I'm comfortable with that. But, I guess as long as she is.
Cody: Oh, who would notice anyway? She's skim.

timestamps

So, I work at a cafe now. Today was the first full day of school at MATCH High School, and I wasn't there.

7: 15 - Around this time, I realize, Kirsten would be waiting for me by the elevator, our high heels echoing in the dark, empty "big hall," unmuffled by the college pennants. We were rarely fully verbal until one or the other of us slunk across Comm Ave. to pick up coffee at Dunkin' Donuts. Instead, I'm scraping out the unused raspberry muffin batter the bakers left, then washing the bowl in cloudy water, letting warm sanitizer drip down my face and shirt as I hoist the clean dishes onto the drying racks above my head. I'm deep in thought, prayer even, as the water wrinkles the tips of my fingers.

9:00 - Last year, I would be in the middle of period one -- probably a brain frame or two on the whiteboard, probably at least one whiteboard marker dried out, probably trying to wake up a few sleepy sixteen-year olds leaning against the wall. Today, I'm wrapping lemon ginger scones in eco-friendly paper, and handing them over to salivating customers.

10:30 - Last year, period three begins. I'm standing at the doorway to room 203, shaking each kid's hand as she walks into the room. With some, elaborate routines have evolved. Salutes. Primitive daps. Mostly smiles. I remind one student about staying super-focused today, ask another about his weekend. Around this time a few days ago, a woman I recognized entered the store with her girlfriend. We used to be in a book club together. She asks if this is what I do now, if I'm not teaching. I confirm this. She says, "Oh. I'm sorry."

12:30 - I would be sitting at my desk right now. Or rather, at a table facing away from my official workspace (as I cannot work with my back to the open space). There would be a small pile of assignments haphazardly stacked on my desk, a scraped-together lunch (probably takeout from across the street) half eaten in front of me. There would be at least one other lion-hearted teacher within earshot, planning, processing, laughing. There would probably be swearing at the photocopier. Now I am standing in a narrow space before a long cutting board, frenetically assembling sweet potato sandwiches and turkey wraps for faces that are becoming familiar. I don't have to call John's name. I remember him. I know that this time of day, this ham sandwich will leave off the cream cheese. Got it. I'm in a zone, moving around my coworker like a dancer, grasping at tomato wedges and cucumbers without thought. If I make a mistake, there will be half a sandwich to throw away (or, more likely, foist upon a roommate); it will not translate into a frustrated child calling my cell at 10pm with questions.

5pm - I would still be at work... making photocopies, ravenous. Kirsten and I would be rushing each other out the door, trying to scheme up a justification for a beer or pizza run. We would rehash our frustrations, triumphs. The whole ride home would feel like a swift decompression or a slow high-five. Tonight, I am sitting on the green couch when she comes home. Though I showered after work, my wet hair is already completely dry. I'm wearing a tank top. No makeup. I'm laughing with another roommate, telling silly anecdotes from earlier years.

It's not better, exactly. Nor is it worse. It is change, though... needed change.

And we're ordering thai tonight. High five to that.

natural history

I envy the gryptodont, ancient car-sized armadillo,

his thousand-bone-coat

But you can’t buy one of those in the museum store

So I tug on the stretchy gray cotton and absently trace

my own collarbone

Such a frail little skeleton is mine, still scented of fig from the shower.

I stare into the eyes of the white-furred Asian tiger,

count how many times I would fit into the ribcage of the fin whale suspended from the ceiling

Standing straight?

Curled into a ball?

Somewhere between the vibrantly feathered tatingers

and the porous kickball sized egg of the extinct elephant bird,

the chill creeps past the pink polish on my bare toes, sinks deep into my calves, knees, up into my arms, shoulders

And I am shivering there, uninterested in reading about the evolution of the mammal jawbone or the helmet of the beetle

But bracing against the terrible cold

Trying to hide the evidence screaming from my own ribcage and its small pink thermometers

As the whirling of my own centrifuge begins,

Leeching all the strength out of the iron pinions on which my skin hangs

Melting down the muscles and bones and spinning them inward toward the center

Every fiber silent and serving

The one that waits

Weeping blood

For the child that I was

And the ones who won’t meet my eyes on the subway platform

And for the ones I will not bear

Even now in August, the misting raindrops by the train station greet like icicles

But I crane my neck toward the sky and close my eyes

As if I deserve the cold stinging

For being such a small thing in the wide world

Just another homo sapien in the great hall, yellowed bones like the others

Like the skull of the triceratops or the giant sloth

While in my abdomen,

Small worlds make and break themselves.

I am bodily.

Terrestrial.

Of the earth like a geode.

summer music shouldn't brood

Hey folks. I made you a summer mix. And it's of the giddy, irresistible movement-inducing sort. Just right for this weather.

Also, today is my last day teaching. Ever. Tomorrow I go home. Home! And then, on Saturday, I start my new job at a cafe three blocks from my house. Life is unspeakably good.

sometimes, when i walk...

Sometimes, when I walk, my heart whispers prayers for which my mind cannot find words. Today, most of them sought response to bitingly familiar words… “Fool, fool. You’re not enough.”

For an hour or so, I sit still on a bench beside the pond. I want to write, to use my pen to throw up my hands, shake my fist at the universe and its maddening predictability. Then I still and notice perhaps a hundred ducks swimming, one tiny body far behind the others, moving not with the placid floating wings and elegant face of the adults, but with the halting, imprecise movements of a toddler. It strains, each stroke of its new legs perceptible by the straining bob of its fuzzy head. It falls further behind, then skitters out of the water, flapping and running across its surface to join the older tribe.

I laugh.

Still quieter I become, drawing up my leg, listening to my breath. The tiny duck wobbles in the water, like a fat-legged child in a diaper, scooting too far to the left, then the right, then correcting its course. Stopping. Starting again. Irregular, urgent movements in a body that doesn’t yet know its own flow.

Dogs run past me, one that has the equivalent of a spiky crew cut holds its eyes wide open, tongue lolling with its head to the left, and smiles… really smiles at me.

A woman tosses bread to the ducks. Pigeons, sparrows take notice. I watch the purple glint off the necks of the pigeons, their territorial walk as they muscle the sparrows away. One bobs closer to me, so close that I can see the feathers on its feet. It takes no notice of me.

The sparrows bide their time, craning fragile necks, now inching closer, now backing away from the blustering larger birds. One sparrow is rather dopey, its beak hanging open during every hop, scratching its head against branches.

A chipmunk rustles among the sparrows behind my bench. I want to touch the sheen that glows along its hind legs. I imagine the softness, much like the downy lines of fur along ears and neck of the cat that curls in my lap when I sit down long enough.

I move a bit to see better. The chipmunk starts, runs away.

So much to see! So many languages being spoken here, almost silent but not quite, to me indecipherable. One sparrow shakes her wings, hops, directs her neighbors. I watch one reach into another’s beak to share a bite and wonder, as a pre-teen trying to understand the mechanics of French kissing, how do they know which way to turn so they don’t knock heads?

Each bird so singular! But awkward grace of the new ones, the bullying of the large, all this is so universal!

On my walk back from the pond, I reach out to touch the objects I pass – closing my eyes as the low stone wall transfers its sun-bathed warmth into my fingertips and palms; I close my eyes and try to isolate the smell of car exhaust and new tar from subtle green; I close my eyes and listened to the men chuckling deep and barrel-throated from the T station, the children giggling and then whining as the sprinkler drops dry cold across their bare chests.

I reach the end of the wall, look down at the pink of my fingers, then press their rough heat against my face. I study and caress the irregular bark of the birches I pass, smiling wide and yes, foolish, unconcerned that all the cars can see.

So many senses. The hair on my shins stands up as I catalogue them back to myself; I shiver and thrill. Like the sparrows, the ducks, like the birch bark and the squealing children, I too have a place here. I need never fear being insufficient, being a fool. To focus there is to miss a much more eloquent story.

I feel fairly certain that all manner of thing shall be well.

Sometimes, when I walk, my heart whispers prayers for which my mind cannot find words. And sometimes these prayers are answered.

lest you judge me for my caffeine intake

Today, you wake up with your head cemented to the pillow. You look down at your arms, without moving the anvil that is attached to your neck. Not gonna happen. And early morning yoga is out of the question. Your thighs and back laugh back at you when you silently pose the question. Ha! Woman! (Because sometimes, those things are irritable and downright rude. You might issue them demerits if you could.) What’s wrong with you? they ask. Bed. Bed is good.

There is a drip of dried beige paint on the cinderblock wall next to your right arm. You dimly acknowledge that taking notice of paint irregularities means you’re sufficiently awake to brush your teeth. Lump of weighty potatoes that you are, you flop gracelessly out of your bunk. Ergh. You stare down at your toes, blurry pink blobs, half-surprised to note that they are holding you up. It turns out you still have bones. And muscles. Somewhere in there, you have muscles.

You stumble down the hallway, tugging absently at your blue camisole. The door to the bathroom weighs more than you do, surely. You look down at your face wash and then up at the mirror.

Good. Lord.

The hair.

The entire left side of your head has dried in spiky straight porcupine lines, each wild tuft perpendicular to the skull from which it springs. The right side is such a poofy mass of curly reddish weeds that it might just be hiding a small animal. You grimace.

Then you grunt (womanishly, but with no sensible word-like sounds) at the perfectly well-coifed seventh grader who is staring at you incredulously with a toothbrush in her mouth.

Happy Monday. Let's celebrate with enormous quantities of coffee. Deal?

"she puts her hands against / the life she had"

It is late. Newly showered, with my short-shorn curls drying erratically around my ears, I keep the watch as eight thirteen-year old girls squirm about on their beds, allegedly trying to sleep.

I am living, for the moment, in an enclave of brick and marble and lawn, with maybe fifty middle school students in the middle of northern nowhere, Massachusetts. I am alternately their reading/writing instructor, their bananagrams adversary, and the one who forces it by ensuring solitary shower time and prompt compliance with rules. Each night, I collapse on my springy mattress utterly spent.

And as I so often do, I turn my gaze inward to make an inquiring sweep of my landscape, finding myself again amused and surprised by where I exist. I’ve just set aside a novel about piracy and time travel and romance, and find that the waves that crash and swell inside my own life, though perhaps of smaller amplitude than those in my book, rock me about as concretely as if I were one of its colorful characters. My own story continues to shock and thrill me, proving itself of greater adventure than if I had crafted it myself. I am, however, pleased to report significantly less mortal peril than that faced in the novel. Possibly also less sex. It's a pretty great book.

I have not written here – really written -- for some time. I am hard-pressed to explain this, other than to say that sometimes it is possible to live outside of yourself long enough that you forget your voice. I am coming back to mine, inviting it to hold my hand and walk forward with me in the open (not just releasing it from its basket under the stairs every few months for a frolic and then prompt re-containment).

For the last few years, I have been seduced by the specter of a Noble Life, and have silenced the Life that wishes to live in me. No matter how I try to corral my own story, submerge it in water like so much bamboo and train it into a shape that looks like those of people I so admire, the life that wants to live in me is unwilling to bend thus. It may be noble, in the end. Or not. But whatever it is, I am trying to unclench my fists and jaws… stop fighting, stop silencing. Whatever life I’m left with, post-MATCH, it will be my own.

To speak plain, I have finished my job. I am working in a one-month summer intensive program. And after that, I have no idea. No job. But my heart is open and clear, and I know who I am. Perhaps I will write more here, because I am no longer afraid of writing my way into truths I cannot face.

Goodnight, friends. I have missed you. And I have missed myself. But I am back.

10 good things

I make several lists each week, which give me the deceptive glow of organization. At least half of the lists I create are promptly lost in the abyss of my schoolbag or crumpled with receipts on my dresser. Still, I think it is useful and pleasing to create mental files.

Right now, I want to make a list of good things. There are always so many, and I rarely count them. Here are a few from the past two days:

1. a recipe for roasted pears from this cookbook
2. watching my brother sing Ricky Martin at karaoke
3. daffodils just beginning to break through our tough front yard soil
4. reminiscing about CFFC, the Caley family alterna-Halloween
5. reading for fun
6. all the hugs and high-fives students gave each other yesterday as they began their state standardized tests
7. yellow tulips in vases all over the house
8. friends who are always there, and to whom you don't need to explain yourself
   
9. learning about micro-expressions
   
10. having an extremely light work week (because of MCAS testing) coincide with visits from Amos and Sarah

You? Can you think of ten good things?

recycling

Two years ago, these were my kids.


I loved them.
And I left them.

Now, these are my kids.


I love them just as much.
And still...

Why is it possible to hold both certainty and guilt in the same hand?

a glimpse into my very specific place in the universe

Right now one of the AP Calculus TAs stands before the paper cutter in his pleated pants whistling Lady Gaga. A bad romance indeed.

best of 2009 challenge, much too late

best trip of 2009 -

I travelled around Europe this summer for eighteen days by myself. Well, that is to say, I went there by myself and came back by myself, but in the interim I spent all but a few moments with Lonette (from South Africa),David and Susan (from DC),

Liz and Lester (from Australia),

and Philip (from Texas)... and about thirty other people. We spent hundreds of hours, I should think, on a bus together.

At Heathrow, I wrote in my journal,

Strange to think that for $1000, I can transport myself almost anywhere in
the world, and can be there in under a day... You know, I'm rather proud of
myself -- finances aside -- for dreaming of what I might want to do this
summer, researching it, and making it happen. I suppose few would take
such a leap solo.

In Brussels,

Then we found infinite little chocolates and waffles (glaces), topped with
vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, and chocolate ganache. Heavenly. Really. Worth
the trip alone. Then we sat down on a sidewalk just off the Grand Place (loveliest square I've ever seen, gilded, with such overwhelmingly intricate carving that you want to collapse, fall to your knees and weep with the force of it all -- all the
brilliance and creative energy and skill and hope.) We watched another string
trio playing classical music on the sidewalk opposite, while slight Asian women
joined the throngs who ran their hands (sensuously) along the polished statue of
a saint, a man who tried to save Russian villages by importing chickens (I
think), Okay, so the story is muddled a bit. Anyway, it was a perfect moment.
Really perfect. So rare in this life, these.

decades

Thus I enter the second decade of this millennium: unceremoniously, sprawled flat on my stomach, sleepy and catlike before the fireplace at my aunt’s house (with errant bits of firewood jabbing irregular pink indentations into the skin beneath my jeans), willfully closing my eyes and ears to the tedious countdown of Carson Daly, surrounded not by friends or music or wine, but by curly-haired children and knitting grandparents and sparkling white juice (because red might stain the carpet).

This is also the year of my third decade, and every conversation I begin with old friends seems to acknowledge this specter bearing down, undecided about how to relate to such an occasion. We scan the pages of popular magazines, more interested in ages than in formalwear. Alexis Bledel is 29? If we’re the same age as Rory Gilmore, all is not lost. But we are not, we conclude, as we expected. Not at all. Even for those who pictured themselves married with children and find themselves acknowledging that this womanhood feels differently than any might have guessed… it feels. Perhaps the internal life of these years could not have been anticipated, nuanced weft to the fabric of reality which for me finds voice better now in Anne Sexton than in Ann Kiemel. So much of that exuberant faith-infused girlishness has been eroded by something wistful that stands on the plain unforgiving ground of questions.

I seek answers to so many questions; I try to chase after them, as if Great Truth might be found in a Viennese pastry shop or a Parisian burlesque, hiding in darkened temples along the Trans-Siberian railway, or even in an admirable Boston charter. There are truths here, yes. Still, many of the answers I long for are slippery ones, stamped softly on my own heart, but which take evasive action when I try to claim them too casually. I still puzzle around, Who or what am I? What and why is my womanhood, if it is not wife and mother? What of my own destiny do I carry along with me in my brain, my memory, my stubborn hair, my small hands, my place before the fire?

I try to read the runes of home videos – giggling five-year old nonsense rhymes with my brother, blocking his access to the trampoline, claiming I only want it for “a hundred more minutes,” and the tall, braided girl who curled up and wiggled loose teeth on her quiet twinkling bearded grandfather’s lap long after her body failed to fit. Petulance, affection, fearlessness. I cringe to watch my eleven-year old self, ashamed as I was at my height and roundness, trying to deflect attention from the hips that filled out hand-me-down stonewashed pleats by perming my bangs, walking carefully, softly. I watch my gentleness, and I read the shame of my sex beneath it. “You were always a lady,” my mother tells me.

A lady, she says, though was I not so often jealous of the solitude and competence that seemed available only to men?

Home videos tell such an uneven tale, patchy ordinary moments pieced into holy peculiarity… the past delivered up as a beautiful foreign film with no subtitles.

My body whispers stories, too. My hands are my mother’s. Though I smooth their planes with shea butter each day, by noon a thousand distinct skin trapezoids peer up at me. I could paint them large, in bright colors and plaster my walls with the perplexing geometry of a personalized mid-century modern. My no-nonsense knuckles, broad on child-sized fingers, make the hands look sturdier and more practical than they are, good for dishes and kneading. I can close my eyes and flash a thousand screens of my mother standing in front of our kitchen sink, speaking words that memory fuses… about pie crust, perhaps, or practicing the piano, or waiting, waiting, having faith that someone special might come along. Yes, I have my mother’s hands, and her fingernails -- round inverted gumdrops, flat on their beds and long, long. I scale their gentle ridges, playing each smooth moon against its cousins. I can close my eyes and trace the graceful lines my mother’s long nails drew down my back as I lay on my stomach in bed so many childhood nights...that calm, blissful moment of connection after the night’s story had closed and before the evening prayer. Delicate strokes from the beautiful nails on her practical mother hand. I am here with you, they said to me.

I do not know what meaning I should make of it all, how these fragments tell me of what is and may be. But I do know this: so often I still find myself with my arms curled beneath me, flat on my stomach in the space between the story and prayer, back exposed, with my mother's fingernails fixed on my own hands now, ready.