Rapid turnaround
Wow. That was fast. In one day (and, like, a year), I have posted new writing AND moved! Moved to a different blog home, that is. Don’t worry, WordPressers, it’s still a WP site, but I really, really, really felt the need to get some new digs. I moved all the old stuff over, but this will be the last ever post in my One Small Corner of the Universe.
Please continue to visit me In This House.
New construction
A few months ago I watched the film adaptation of David Auburn’s Proof starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Jake Gyllenhaal. Without going into too much detail, because you should watch the movie yourself, Paltrow’s character Claire is simultaneously unnaturally gifted and terrified that she has inherited her father’s mental illness. At the end of the story she says the following:
“How many days have I lost? How can I get back to the place where I started? I’m outside a house, trying to find my way in. But it is locked and the blinds are down, and I’ve lost the key, and I can’t remember what the rooms look like or where I put anything. And if I dare go in inside, I wonder… will I ever be able to find my way out?”
I’m sure there are multiple analyses of this text, because Auburn’s play won both a Tony and a Pulitzer Prize, and online study guides for it abound on the internet. But I have my own interpretation of Claire’s house analogy, and because none of those online study guides are free, I don’t know if my version matches Auburn’s intended meaning or not. I only know how personal that house is to me.
My last published work on this blog is from August 2009. I had stopped writing regularly long before that, but there was never a time when I stopped having something to say. I just couldn’t…say it. I tried to explain it to people. I tried to explain it to myself. I tried to ignore it, hoping my normal cadence would return, that natural feeling of having an idea spring into my mind and sitting down and forming it into phrases and sentences and paragraphs. But nothing came of any of this. I was frozen. I ceased to be a writer. And then I watched Proof. There are a lot of themes in Auburn’s work that someone with a gift, any gift, could relate to and understand, but nothing is so poignant to me as Claire’s fear, which is, to me, the crux of the house analogy.
In my own version of the metaphor, I am not trying to find my way into the house; I have locked myself inside. The blinds are pulled, and I can’t remember where I put anything, but I have not lost the key, I am just not sure how to use it. I walk up and down the hallway, and I can hear activity behind the closed doors, but I’m afraid to open them. Occasionally I peer through the blinds and see someone on the front step, but the thought of letting them in is terrifying. It is safe here in the hallway, but it is oppressive, too, because somehow, the contents of the rooms behind the securely closed doors continue to multiply as I pace. I try to occupy myself with other tasks, but I continue to be pulled toward the doorknobs, pressed to turn them. They are warm, vibrating with energy. I am afraid of my own reaction to the reveal. I have become weak in the putting-off, the inaction. In this way, like Claire, I wonder daily how much time I’ve lost, how I can ever get back to where I started.
I have said before that I stopped writing when my grandmother died. This is a lie. The archives of this website are proof of my own dishonesty. I was fairly prolific for over a year after her death, writing at least weekly, and most of the time more than weekly, and some of what I wrote was decent. As a matter of fact, a post I wrote about trying tofu with my almost-2-year old won me the recognition of an editor from Wondtertime. She wanted me to write something for the magazine. We traded several emails. She told me I had “the chops” for publication. And then Wondertime got the boot from the Disney Corporation. Around that same time, my new job started resembling the first trimester of a horror film pregnancy (wherein you suffer from severe morning sickness and lose a ton of weight, yet continue dragging around an immense mass that is not a cute, cuddly little baby, but is, in fact, some kind of demon spawn that fills you with perpetual despair and speaks to you angrily from inside your own head). I went on to suffer the worst depression I’ve encountered since my senior year of college, complete with panic attacks and nearly perpetual anxiety, a state that drove me to seek a prescription for antidepressants from my OB-GYN.
I wanted that little blue pill to restore me to my former self. It didn’t, of course. But it helped me begin the process, and I can honestly say as I look out my window at the fruits of March, I feel like I’m wearing my own skin again. Of course, another year has passed since then, and my typical mid-winter low has come and gone once more, and this time it wasn’t nearly as devastating to me as last year’s bout. Maybe I can thank Zoloft for that, but I can’t discount the blessings of real life, of the world that spins madly on whether or not I am feeling like myself or not: my beautiful, brilliant daughter; my mother and sisters; my friends, a few in particular who get what it’s like to be me; my health and home and humanity. It is a good life I have.
And yet, even on my very best days I seem unable to put the goodness into words. I find an excuse at every attempt: it has been too long, no one wants to read that, you should be doing something else, this is a waste of time. Even now, with my hand on the doorknob, the door slightly open, my heart braced for the mass exodus that is inevitable if only I can maintain my momentum and swing the door wide, I find myself hesitating, and I don’t really know why. I have been trying for some time to find the answer, but so far, nothing, and it’s becoming clear to me that maybe I’ll find what I’m looking for behind one of these locked doors, or maybe there is no answer at all. Maybe there are only questions, rows and rows of closed doors that need to be thrown open and rooms that need to be explored. Maybe.
I’ve been thinking a lot about house metaphors, obviously, and I’ve decided that this space needs some updating. I need a fresh start, a new coat of paint, and more than just a small corner if it’s going to contain everything I’ve got crammed into these cluttered rooms. This is the end, and the beginning. Today I raise the roof over a new house.
House (2001)
My life is like this house.
They sold my grandparents’ house last year.
Someone else’s bare feet walk
on the chocolate brown carpet.
Another pair of hands rummage
through the sticky kitchen drawer
in search of pencils and rubber bands.
I looked around the yard one last time,
picked through boxes in the garage,
clinging to metal and wood, knowing
all along what I most wanted to keep
was gone long before some stranger planted
the FOR SALE sign by the gate.My life is like this house.
I drove past your old house last week.
We used to walk your dog–now dead–
on those streets, fix wine-and-omelet
dinners in that kitchen, and once, we rocked
back and forth, back and forth on the foyer steps:
you cried and I held your head, your damp red
hair against my sweatshirt while your tears
soaked my shoulder. Now you live
in someone else’s house, eat gourmet meals
and cry only when you think no one hears
you, and I wonder still after all this time
if I could have somehow repaired you.My life is like this house.
I sit in my own house tonight,
at the table I salvaged before new owners
signed the deed, sipping wine we once toasted
over eggs and cheese and so much sorrow. My life
is like this house, settling, sighing in the night,
holding promise and regret and history–
mine and every life that’s crossed mine.
There is new paint and new furniture,
but underneath there are still cells
and slivers of what came before me, and what went,
and always there is more to come: stories,
sticky drawers, bare feet on carpet, firm foundation, strong roof:my life is like this house.
In the light kitchen*
It is dark, but in the light from the kitchen I can see the cat doing a mad sort of tightrope walk on the metal stair rail that frames the steps leading from the kitchen into the den. His shadow is enormous, looming, but not at all creepy. It’s quite amusing, actually; he is too large for such a balancing act according to the laws of physics, but he manages the length of the rail with amazing grace. The dishwasher is whooshing and clicking at the top of the steps, and for this reason I have left the light on there. The dishwasher’s noises startle me. Just when I think they are over, another round begins, and I am always unnerved by them, even though I know their origin. The hot water heater has the same effect, and just now I jumped a little when it hissed on, a direct result of the dishwasher. Perhaps they conspire against me.
Beyond the kitchen the house appears to be dark. Someone looking in from the street would say we’ve turned off the lights and called it a day. But in the dining room the bench seat is eerily illuminated by a weird blue glow emanating from a night light that glows yellow in the morning, like the sun, and by night looks nothing like the moon, even though that is the idea. “Mr. Moon” and “Mr. Sun,” as they are referred to around here, are supposed to signal the appropriate times to go to sleep and wake up every day, but the moon has been blue for almost two hours, and I can still hear my girl chattering to the eleven stuffed animals in her bed over the static of the baby monitor.
And is it any wonder? Eleven stuffed animals! This is no exaggeration. They are accompanied by two person-shaped night lights (The Light Men), three pillows, and a kids’ sports bottle. On Saturday when two were added to their number (and then there were thirteen!), I asked her if two others might go to the playroom to sleep, and she shook her head vigorously, her eyes wide and serious, as if I had suggested she go for a ride with a stranger in a car full of candy. And her room is not dark, really. Ironically it seems to be at its darkest during the day, but this is probably just an illusion, borne of the sudden absence of light and the eyes’ need for adjustment to it. There are giant flower-shaped lights on her wall that are rarely off, and the “Light Men” cast a colorful aura about her bed, and a small plastic mirrored arc manufactured by National Geographic projects a perfect rainbow onto her ceiling. Even her CD player, which contains a disc of “Mommy’s music,” by request, boasts a small blue lighted face. Everywhere, light. In the dead of night when I am pulled from sleep by some unseen force, and I cannot rest, or even breathe, until I have crept quietly into her room to place my hand on her tiny chest and smooth her damp hair away from her cheeks, her little face seems to glow in all that light. Or maybe it is the source of it. I have my suspicions.
In my own room the only light comes from the television. An episode of Friends is on, one I have watched before and will watch again, like a sleeping pill for my brain. The sound is barely audible, but I can hear well enough to be soothed by the cadence of the actors’ voices. When I hear no more conversation in the room next door, and when the rainbow has automatically shut off with no protests or demands to revive it, and when the music has stopped playing, I will lie down and fall asleep, finally, bathed in the light of some familiar scene, always with the same balm: friends, laughing.
Meanwhile, in the minutes after I have convinced her to stay put there in her little nest of light and plush, I move from room to room, and I am drawn again and again to the light of the kitchen. From there I can see almost every part of my seemingly dark house. The playroom window lets in a slice of moonlight. The streetlight shimmers through the curtains that separate my living room from the outside world. The wood floor in the hall outside the bedrooms glows pink and white and blue with reflections of flowers and Friends, and in the kitchen itself I am surrounded by warm yellow and orange light that seems to come from the very walls. Here in the den, where I sit in near-darkness with only the computer for light, listening to the dishwasher and the water heater, and the baby monitor’s on-the-scene coverage of Bedtime (Piggie is not tired, apparently, and the Light Men are holding hands, and Neko Case is singing, quite appropriately, “don’t let this fading summer pass you by”), I find myself returning to the light of my kitchen for this or that: a glass of water, a post-it from the fridge, a treat for the dog. I start my day in the kitchen every morning with my cup of black coffee and a bowl of kibble for the dog, and I end my day there each night, after everyone is fed and the dishes are clean and lunches are packed for the next day, with the dimming of the final switch, just before, like the neighbors surely think I have done hours ago, I turn off the light and call it a day.
*With regards to Mr. Sendak, whose other really famous book has recently become the favorite in this house.
Remembering MaMa
It was summer, and I was small–6 or 7. MaMa left the car running and walked me by the hand into the Prosperity Post Office. We were on our way to the grocery store or some other mundane destination, but time with her was never ordinary, and this was no exception. Stamps were 20 cents then, and she only needed one.She said hello and asked for a stamp, please, because she was never short on manners, and I’m certain the woman behind the counter was a family friend or distant relative. The postmistress didn’t even look up in response to the request; she simply ripped off a stamp and pushed it across the counter. It zipped across the worn formica surface and caught a breeze from the open door just before it reached the edge, and in slow motion, like a leaf falling from a tree, it zigged and zagged in the air before landing softly in the middle of the post office floor. MaMa looked at it there on the faded wood for a few long seconds, and then, with her trademark pursed-lip look of irritation and that impatient sigh she often made that never quite left the back of her throat, she picked up the stamp, placed her two dimes on the floor where the stamp had been, and took hold of my hand. She never said a word to me about the incident–it was not her style to speak badly of anyone, ever–but I have never forgotten the expression on her face in those few contemplative seconds as she decided on a response to such blatant rudeness and put into action. I never will.
Overheard on vacation
Thanks to all of you who were so excited about my sudden onslaught of habitual blogging. And also, sorry about it’s equally sudden demise. I am sitting in a rented condo at Cherry Grove Beach in South Carolina, and it is day 6 of 7 of a vacation on which I had planned to blog daily. But then, on the very first night, while trying to understand the complicated operating intricacies of a Cuisinart coffee maker, I burned my entire right hand and wrist with boiling hot water. Mostly it is fine except for a dime-sized angry red blister on the inside of my wrist that makes typing painful, so here I sit at the end of the week with a completely valid excuse for neglecting my writing habit and a head full of stories I will probably forget.
Mia has been a wealth of material this week, and she has uttered some phrases and statements I simply CANNOT forget, so I am ignoring the sting in my wrist to document the following gems:
SCENE: SHOWER
I am trying to rinse sand off of myself, and Mia is prancing around the shower squealing.
Mia: I’m cold! I’m cold! I’m cold!
Me: Get under the shower water and warm up.
Mia: Okay, Mommy, but where is the UNDER water?
(I can only assume she is referring to BATH water, because when she gets cold during a bath she says she has to get “under the water” to warm herself.)
SCENE: ANOTHER SHOWER
I am rinsing shampoo out of Mia’s hair with the detachable hose in the shower.
Mia: Mommy, what are you doing?
Me: I’m rinsing the soap out of your hair?
Mia: Are you trying to grow me, Mommy?
SCENE: BED, EARLY MORNING
I have slept with Mia and am lying on the edge of the bed; she is sitting up against the wall.
Mia: Mommy, is it time to get up?
Me: Yes, you can get up if you want to.
(PAUSE, wherein Mia just stares at me)
Me: So do you want to get up?
Mia: Yes, Mommy, but I can’t get up with you lying down.
What friends do
I started a post on Monday, it’s title* evidence that I am managing to make contact with my humor muse from time to time of late, and before I got very far into my tale my phone rang. It was Gayle calling to tell me that a mutual friend of ours who was in from Florida taking care of some heavy family emotional drama had broken her foot badly in a fall, and that she had been transported by ambulance from the tiny local hospital where her mother lives to our larger metro hospital and was about to undergo emergency surgery. I didn’t think twice. I shut down my computer, told my dean and the secretaries I was leaving, and drove to the hospital.
Last fall when I was trying to make myself write again I asked and asked for ideas, prompts, topics, and I got them, and then I couldn’t do anything with them, but one of them kept bobbing up from the depths of my murky thoughts. It came from my friend Passionflower, and its simultaneous simplicity and complexity intrigued me: Write about the Anns you have known. I’m not sure where this idea came from–I don’t think I ever asked her. Perhaps because it’s a pretty common name, and she had known a number of them? That makes sense, but the truth is, I have only known one, and she alone makes up for any loss I might have suffered from an absence of Anns in my life.
Ann moved to Florida a bunch of years ago–I have lost track–and I mourned her absence. We taught together for a few years, but in that time short time I felt like I had known her my whole life. She is one of those people who just makes everything better, and she “got me,” and I don’t make friends easily, so the distance was tough. Ann does make friends easily–I don’t think she has ever met a stranger–and honestly, I didn’t think she would have time to maintain our connection, what with the growing population in the state of Florida. So I was not a particularly good correspondent, even though Ann was, and to her credit she did a great job keeping in touch. Needless to say, I did not. My responses to her chatty emails and occasional phone calls were sketchy at best, and even worse after Mia was born, and recently she even asked if I was angry with her for some reason. Of course not, I quickly replied. But how do you say to a friend that this weird silence of yours has nothing to do with her, but with your own self-inflicted and insanely absurd insecurity?
Well, for starters, you do not think twice about leaving work and driving straight to the hospital and spending the better part of the afternoon looking for her elusive sister, whom you have never met, thus causing you to force yourself out of your introverted shell and walk up to complete strangers and ask, “Are you ___?” You walk into the room number the 118-year-old volunteer gave you at the front desk and then back away very quickly when you realize that although it’s been a while since you saw your friend, she is most definitely not a bald old man with a black mustache. You retreat to the nurses’ station on the floor and find out that the sweet little blue hair downstairs needs a new pair of glasses, and you make a move toward the correct room, but one of the nurses says, “She’s still in surgery, though. You can go down to the surgical waiting room and see if her family is there.” So you do that, but there’s no family there, and you know because you walk around and ask them all, and so you pester the volunteer at the desk (who, thankfully, is NOT 118 and seems to have a clue about what’s going on) and camp out next to her desk for the remainder of the afternoon, getting up from time to time to wander back upstairs and see if anyone has materialized in the room. You do all of this because you know if the tables were turned, Ann would be roaming these halls on your behalf. It’s what friends do.
I hate hospitals. I hate the way they smell. I hate the way I smell for hours after I leave. I hate the incessant beeping of machines and the clanging of beds on wheels. I hate that most of the patients’ doors are wide open and even though I try to look straight ahead when I walk down the halls, I cannot help but notice the brokenness and vulnerable despair looking back out at me. There are only a few people I’d spend time in a hospital for. One of them is my mother, and I willingly visit her at the hospital where she works with some frequency; she works in the X-ray department, so it’s not like I’m walking amid the sick and desperate, but I still have the heebie jeebies when I leave, and my repeated visits at my mom’s place of employment have not lessened my aversion. You can imagine, then, how I felt yesterday after spending an entire afternoon between a waiting room and a recovery ward. And yet.
In a few minutes I will go back and sit with my friend. I will take her the Hostess Snowballs I purchased for her at a truckstop, because they are her favorite, even though I cannot believe she willingly eats Snowballs, and even though I damn near channeled Karen Walker when an extraordinarily stinky trucker got a bit too close to me in line. I will try, in the way that friends do, to bring her a little cheer, to remind her that even though she’s stuck here with her, uh, batshit crazy relatives, for another 14 days when she wants nothing more than to be home with her love, cradled in familiarity, I’m here for better or worse. She has certainly done the same for me.
*Yep, I’m teasing you. You’ll just have to hope I get back around to it.
Cursing
I had this great mental post brewing today that I was absolutely planning to put in print this afternoon, and it was going to center around the literally hundreds of photos I was going to spend the morning uploading to Flickr. I have no actual idea how long it has been since I uploaded pictures to Flickr, but if the sheer number of pictures still hanging out on my memory cards, as well as the numerous folders of them accumulating on my computer, are any indication, it has been 14 years. Lord, I take a lot of pictures. I had it all planned out: I would bring in my laptop and connect to the university’s wireless network (check!); organize the gazillion pictures by date on my hard drive (check!); and then fill the uploader desktop by month (check!); and then, by the time I had done what I needed to do at work, my pictures would be in Flickr and I could pull what I needed to write a delightful tome highlighting some events from the past few months. Uh. Notice there is no CHECK! next to that last bit. Because after several “this program has encountered an unexpected error and needs to close” messages, I noticed a little box that kept popping up at the bottom of my screen offering me the opportunity to download the latest version of the uploader. So I did. And that was FOUR HOURS AGO. For four hours I attempted to upload the same batch of pictures to no avail. I reinstalled the new uploader, and I removed all the photos and then tried again, and NOTHING happened. Nothing but those cute little pink and blue Flickr balls twirling in the corner, indicating that they were doing SOMETHING with my photos. Lies!
And so now, after spending the better part of the afternoon fighing with the Flickr uploader, the post I was planning to write earlier today is just a long string of really bad curses, many of which contain the phrases “monkey’s ass” and “…in a rowboat.” (I am terrible at cursing.) I have eradicated the new version of the uploader and reinstalled the old one, and now I’m just sitting here waiting for an unexpected error to occur, so if you’re from Flickr and you’re reading this, you totally owe me a case of beer.
Just to hear myself talk
In the interest of keeping up with what would seem to be an abundance of posts on my part over the past few days, and in an effort to avoid another withering look from the secretary, who apparently thinks my recent late arrival to and early departure from work are unacceptable, I am forcing myself to sit at this desk a little longer and write, even though I am not really married to any particular idea or line of thought at the moment.
I could talk about that secretary, who has been snippy and short today, I think because she believes I am trying to get away with working less and being a slacker, even though our new boss, The Dean, has given me complete license to set my own schedule and work when and where I wish to work. This declaration from The Dean has made me very Zen about my job, which is quite a change from the batshit crazy swirling pit of despair I was swimming in a few months ago, and so I don’t really feel the need to set the secretary straight. She is not the boss of me, after all, and although it probably makes me a bad feminist to admit this, I am sure if she were a guy she would not be all pissy about my glorious new hours. Sorry ladies, but we can be real bitches to each other, yes?
I could elaborate on the work situation and attempt to piece together the sequence of events from last spring that filled me with such despair that I could hardly function. I could discuss how I actually miss teaching, and how this strange truth, coupled with the aforementioned despair, actually made me want to flee this job and go back to the high school classroom. And then I could go on to recount the state and local budget crises that are cutting teaching jobs left and right, and how, thank God, The Dean came on board in June and in one week completely changed the culture and energy of this office and made me feel like I could stay here and try this for at least another semester.
I could talk about what I would rather be doing right now–going to T@rget to buy muffin pans, because when I moved someone insisted I throw my old ones away because they were pretty gross looking, and I have not replaced them yet but must do so immediately because I have committed to make a dessert for an event on Saturday, and cupcakes are involved.
I could talk about how discouraging it is to look at my blog stats and see that my daily average is three, except for June 29, a day that saw 138 hits even thought I didn’t even post anything on June 29. I know it is not a given that my sudden return to writing will guarantee a sudden flood of commenting readers, or even silent ones, and I have to remind myself that writing is really about me, the writer, and not you, the reader, except that it is a little lot about you, too, and I get a pretty big charge out of double and triple digit stats.
I could tell you how I almost closed my browser and walked away from this lame post, and about how I looked at the clock telling me it’s almost 5:00 and thought, “Oh, what the hell,” and decided to publish anyway, and how it is a testament to my humble attempt to find my muse that I got this far in the first place.
Contents of the little girl’s bed
1 standard pillow
2 small pillows
1 pink stuffed pig (Piggie, the Chosen One)
1 pink stuffed pig travel neck pillow
3 dragons (red, gold, green)
1 large child-size Elmo wearing Elmo underwear
1 heart-covered dog
1 stuffed Horton, sans the Whos
1 pink rubber duckie
1 Jamba Juice kids’ sports bottle (filled with water)
1 MOBY Tyke Light (AKA The Light Man)
1 handmade crib quilt
1 twin comforter
Every few days I remove one or two things that I think might go unnoticed (NEVER Piggie, Beastie, the Light Man, or the Jamba Juice bottle) and return them to the playroom, and for a few days the bed will be spacious and cozy, and then one night I am tucking her in and there they all are again, having been returned to their nest with great stealth and without a word to me from their rescuer, and I just shake my head and bid my small Fred Sanford child goodnight.
Best day
Did you ever have one of those days when you go back to sleep after the 30-minute programmed snooze, and so you are already running late when the toilet stops up for no reason, and then that horrible thief-breaking-into-the-house sound thunders through the baby monitor speaker and causes you to jump and hit your elbow on the hard tiled corner wall in the bathroom, but it turns out to be the cat attacking an Easy Ups box in the hallway, and just as your heart rate returns to normal the Frog Pod bath toy organizer loses suction and crashes to the floor of the tub and nearly causes you to put out your own eye with a mascara wand, and then, while you are trying to put the dog’s harness on her so you can take her to your friend’s house for a doggie play date, your newly pedicured and sandaled feet get covered with mulch and dirt, and then after you finally get the dog into the car you accidentally slam her freakishly long tail in the passenger door, and when you open it to free her she shoots out of the open driver’s side door like a bullet fired from a gun and runs around the neighborhood at breakneck speed with her retractable leash dragging behind her, and so when you are finally in the car and en route to work you are drenched with sweat, and your hair is all wild in your face, making you look slightly crazy, and you are sure it’s going to be the Worst Day Ever, and then you look into the rearview mirror at your daughter in her Jackie O. sunglasses, and she sees you looking at her and she smiles and says, “Turn on the music, Mommy, I feel like singing a song,” and you know you were wrong, and it’s going to best day of your life. Did you ever have one of those days?
