All this time we've known each other

Ryan returned the phone to the cradle.

"That was Chris. They're running a bit late."

"Oh well. I guess that gives us time to have a glass of wine before they get here. Loosen up a little bit," Renee said. She selected a bottle of red from the rack and took two glasses down from the cupboard.

"I'll just keep the oven on low. Hopefully dinner won't get too dried out."

Ryan sank onto the couch with a grunt. "I'm beat," he said. "I don't know why you invited them over on a Friday night anyway. I'm not sure I want to make conversation with anyone."

Renee sipped her wine. She had seen Laura at the gym a few days before. She was stepping into the shower after yoga class and realized it was Laura in the stall next to her. She never realized how slim Laura was. She always wore shapeless baggy clothes and old-man cardigans. Renee always thought of her as a homely woman. She wondered what Chris saw in her, because he was tall with dangerously rumpled hair and a deep, gravely voice. Renee had to devise a ruse everytime she saw him to keep him from noticing how she blushed. She couldn't help herself. It was practically instinct. He was so amazingly hot and what was he doing with a woman like Laura? She couldn't make sense of them as a couple.

But in the shower she noticed Laura's tiny waist and her two, perfectly shaped breasts. Renee hated her own. They always felt too large and pendulous. But it seemed Laura had the perfect body. Perhaps that explained it.

"Well, Ryan, it just came out. We were standing there in the shower and all of a sudden I was telling her about my new recipe for goat cheese and tomato quiche. They next thing I knew, we had plans for Friday."

"The shower, eh?" Ryan wiggled his eyebrows. "Well I just hope they bring some more wine. I'm going to need it."

Soon the doorbell rang and Ryan rose to answer it.

"Hey, guys! Come on in! Let me take your coats," he said.

"Nice place!" Laura said. "I don't think we've ever been here."

"You know, you're right" Renee said. "All this time we've known each other and I don't think we've ever gotten together, just the four of us."

"It's about time, then." Chris said. "Hey, we brought some wine." He handed the Renee the bottle.

"Thanks! Ryan and I already started. I'll pour you a glass. Make yourselves comfortable." She went into the kitchen to get two more glasses.

"It's a syrah," Laura called after her. "We just love syrahs."

Ryan was back from the bedroom where he has put their coats."Oh yeah?" he said. "We've tried them from time to time, but we tend to like pinots."

"I like beer," joked Chris. "Lots of beer and good, hard liquor." They all laughed.

"Everyone makes such a big deal about pinot noir," Laura said as Renee handed her the glass. "But it's just not exciting. We like wines that are bold."

"Laura's been into finding the cheapest bottle that still drinkable. Who knows? The bottle we brought could be $1.99," Chris said.

Laura shot him a look. "It's not. But there are lots of good, cheap syrahs out there for like, ten dollars."

"Well, I don't care how much it costs," joked Ryan. "I'll drink it!"

"Come on everyone, dinner is served." Renee said. They moved into the dining room and Renee brought the quiche out and set it on the table.

"Ooh! It smells wonderful." Laura said. "I like these plates too. Are they fiestaware?"

"Yes. My grandmother's. It's the original stuff." Renee said. She loved being able to say that. She always enjoyed setting the table, placing her bright cloth napkins and vintage water glasses beside her vintage dishes. She knew how to create atmosphere. She was always surprised when she went to other people's homes. They would turn on the overhead, fluorescent lights and use paper napkins. It was like eating in a cafeteria. But Renee liked to dim the lights, set out candles, and put on a good jazz CD. People always remarked on her good taste.

"Man, you won't believe what happened to me today," Ryan said as he served the quiche.

"Cut me a big piece," Chris said as he passed his plate.

"Would you pass the salad?" Laura asked. Renee handed her the salad in its hand-carved wood bowl with matching utensils.

"So, I call my credit card company to tell them to take this stupid fee off my statement. All the sudden this nine dollar fee appears on my statement for services or something. I don't know what it's for, but it pisses me off, you know?"

"Oh, I hate having to call the credit card company," Laura said.

"Well, I'm on the phone and it take me forever to get to a real person. I have to press one, then zero, then listen to another menu."

"Yadda, yadda," Renee said.

"Well, when a real, live person picks up, it's this woman from India or something! I could hardly understand her!" He said something in gibberish as if he was imitating a foreign language.

"That sound more like Chinese than Indian," Chris said.

Laura laughed and repeated the gibberish, "yingyangwongchong."

"Well, whatever. All that money I send to that company and they don't even have an American on the line. I just hung up. I couldn't stand it."

"Are you going to pay the fee?" Renee asked.

"Hell, no! I'm going to write them a letter," Ryan said.

Renee took a sip of her wine. She looked across the table at Chris. He had a five-o-clock shadow. Usually she liked Ryan to be clean shaven, but on Chris, a little stubble looked good. She wondered what it would feel like against her face. "Ooh. I'm starting to feel the wine. I'm all glowy," she said. She felt warm and like all her muscles were loose and flexible.

"Mmmm. Me too," Laura said.

"I should open another bottle," Ryan said. He got up and went into the kitchen.

"Women," said Chris. "It doesn't take much."

Laura started to giggle and touched his arm. "Remember last weekend? It didn't take much then, either."

"Oh, yeah?" Ryan had returned with a bottle of champagne. "This is all I could find." He popped the cork and filled each of their glasses. "You had a little too much, eh?"

"We had kind of a crazy time," Laura said. She was still giggling. "I can't stop laughing!" She took a sip of her champagne. She looked at Chris, and he shrugged his shoulders at her.

"Well...we were over at our friends' house for dinner. Clark and Mary. You've met them, right?"

Renee nodded. "We met them at your summer barbecue. Remember, Ryan?"

"I think so," He said.

"You might not know this about them, but they're kind of...swingers."

"No!" Renee shrieked.

"We've known for a long time, but we never really talk about it with them."

"So what happened?"

"Oh, Renee. You just love gossip." Ryan rolled his eyes.

"We were over there for dinner and we had a few bottles of wine between us. We were all a little loopy."

"It didn't help that we smoked a joint on the way over there," Chris said.

"So they have a hot tub and after dinner we all decide to go in. But of course we didn't bring our bathing suits, so we went in naked," Laura said. Renee noticed Laura was rubbing the inside of her husband's arm as she talked. She moved her hand quickly up to his elbow and back down to his wrist. She kicked Ryan under the table to try to get him to look at her, but he was transfixed.

"So," Ryan said. "What? Did you swap or something?" Laura squeezed Chris' arm.

"We dared Laura and Mary to kiss and they did," Chris said.

"That's it?"

"Ummm. Let's just say one thing did lead to another."

"Wow." Ryan drained his champagne.

"I don't know if I could ever do that. I just don't know," Renee said. She looked down at her lap. She didn't know what to say next. She could hear the fizzing of the chanpagne bubbles in the glass.

"Well, we certainly killed the conversation!" Chris said. He pressed his hands together.

"No, no...I was just thinking I should clear the table. We have tirimisu for dessert," Renee said.

She stood up and collected the dishes. In the kitchen, she put on the kettle for tea. She heard Chris and Ryan laughing from the dining room. "Laura's had enough, I think! Throw her in the drunk tank!"

Renee rinsed the plates and stacked them in the dishwasher. She carried the slices of tiramisu and a pot of tea out to the dining room on a tray. Laura had her head resting on the table.

Renee couldn't help yawning as poured each of them a cup. "I can't believe how tired I am," she said. "Ryan, you had a hard day. You must be tired too."

Portland: January

This doggy, soggy winter. It has rained more than 30 days straight and that means 10 more days and we're going Biblical. Even Noah only had to wait out 44. Spring is coming.

We go about our days medicated with coffee. It is a window that draws in whatever daylight exists out there between the raindrops. Movies and books a drug too--tricking us with the illusion of life and activity. There is something happening, somewhere in the world beyond these pillows and blankets which we burrow down into for whole months. They are a like a bandage on a wounded man. They keep us barely alive. We eat avacados and tomatoes from Southern California--a rude and brash cousin who has too much and appreciates nothing--the bright fruit injects a bit of summer into our winter days.

The dog sleeps in its chair and wakes once a day impatient to be put on a leash and led out into the wet night in search of the doggy news that is printed at the base of every sign post and shrub. My eyelashes catch drops of fog and I think perhaps I see a rainbow. A promise that June will soon be here with its roses and long, clear days. I hesitate to wipe my eyes so that I can live the dream a litte longer.

Fries, please

Being sick is lonely. The whole world continues on outside as I lie here in this bed. People go to work, kids go to school, stock boys stack apples and oranges into pyramids in the grocery store, truck drivers hauls their goods. All this happens as I lie here.

I remember last year when the Pope died. I felt so sorry for him. I knew what he was feeling. After so many years of being among throngs of adoring people he was sequestered away in a bare hospital room. He must have lay in bed listening to the whispers of his cardinals as they talked around him. No laughter, no joy, no life. Just a hushed contraction of time while they waited for him to die.

I am not going to die like the Pope, but I am so sick that I can’t go to school. At 8:15 each morning I can hear the middle schoolers gathering for the bus and then it drops them off everyday at 3:30. I used to wish my window would overlook the street so I could see them too. But wishing is useless.

On one side of the room I turn my head to see a blue chest of drawers with silver pulls. It is there everyday. A constant. I get bored of looking at it; I have looked at it so much. To the left is my window, which overlooks the side yard. So instead of watching kids get on the bus, or old people walking their dogs, I look out to see what is happening in the yard. An awful lot happens there. Birds and squirrels wander through, the leaves grow and change and drop of course. I don’t need to tell you. I notice everything though. Every shade of green grass—from its emerald lushness in the early spring to its weak, limey green at the end of the summer. I notice the weeds as they sprout up and the way the laurel hedges grow at least two feet each year.

I have a tutor that comes once a week now on Saturdays. He’s a timid man who looks nervously around the room at the pill bottles and syringes and the IV drip that stands at attention in the corner just in case. He must worry that he’s going to get what I have, though you can’t catch it. He sits across the room perched on the folding chair mom puts there for him and he talks loudly at me, as if it were my ears that are failing, not my lungs.

At first he tried to do all sorts of work with me—math and science. But now we just read books and when he comes he talks about them. He yells his thoughts across the room for about an hour and then he gives me a new book for my assignment. He scurries out the door to where mom is waiting and I hear her say each week, “How’d it go?” while she writes him a check. I always wait to hear the sound of her ripping it from her checkbook—the perforations tearing with a satisfying zzzzip.

I feel bad for my mom. She feels bad about leaving me everyday but she has to go to work. She gets up before its light out to give me a bath and make me breakfast, give me my pills. She leaves a few hours later with nothing but a Ziploc bag full of Cheerios in her purse for her own breakfast. She leaves me propped up on pillows with the remote control in easy reach and kisses me on the cheek.

My favorite day of the week is when she reads me bits from the town Bee. She reads the articles about people we know or important things like that time when Wal-Mart wanted to open a store near the post office but everyone fought it. It comes every Thursday and she reads it out loud to me.

She gets especially into the articles about the mayor or the school board. Once, there was a proposal to build a skate ramp in the park and she was really upset about that. Half the town was for it, and the other half against. Some said at least it would get those boys out of the bank parking lots and movie theater steps where they were destroying property and scaring off senior citizens. The others said that skateboarding should just be banned altogether. Those kids were just waiting to crack their heads open and the town shouldn’t given them a legal place to go and do it.

I didn’t really care too much, because I was waiting for her to get to the school lunch schedule, which is my favorite part. Sometimes it’s grilled cheese on Monday, spaghetti on Tuesday and all the standard stuff. Sometimes the menu is out of the ordinary like the February when its African American history month they serve things like red beans and rice and okra. I’ve never had those but they sound good.

I wonder what it would be like to go to school. I would have a locker and eat in the cafeteria. I’d see the lunch lady every day in her hair net. She would ask me if I wanted peas of French fires and I would answer, “Fries, please.”

I’ve been at home so long that most of my friends have grown a whole foot or more by now. When I was first out of the hospital they would sometimes visit me, bringing flowers and had to be removed from the room right away, or candy that I couldn’t even open my mouth to eat. I remember my best friend, Michelle, with her long, brown hair and brown skin. Mom called her a “tomboy.” She came only once. She sat nest to my bed and didn’t say anything. Her mom and my mom were outside in the hall talking and she just sat there and stared at the floor. I couldn’t say anything either—I wanted to. I wanted to just say hi and ask her about Valentines Day and stuff. But finally her mom came and got her and she never came back.

I wonder if my friends ever think of me anymore or maybe they just pretend I moved away. I still remember how they looked. Timmy always had a runny nose, and Scott had the nicest freckles. I hated Amy and her bouncy, blonde curls. Cindy was tiny and had a funny laugh that always made me laugh too.

Mostly I think of Nathan. We always sat at the back of the bus together, even though boys and girls didn’t usually sit together. He had sandy brown hair and a scar on his chin from when he fell down the stairs as a little kid. He never did come to visit me, but he sent me a card with a big elephant on it that said, “Get Well Soon!”

I think of him everyday, especially when the Price is Right is over and the soap operas are on. They are never fun to watch. I think of the time he chased me during color tag in gym class. He didn’t chase any other girls except for me.

My friends probably do things like play sports after school and go to dances. If I were in school, I’d try out for the soccer team. That’s what Michelle plays. I know because sometimes the Bee has articles about how the team is doing so good. She is the star forward. I would be on the team too, and we would both be out there on the field and maybe it would be muddy that day so we’d come home from the game covered in mud. But it would be really fun and we would run hard anyway and be exact with our passes and outmaneuver the other team. We’d win, and then come in to the locker room cheering and excited. And on the way I’d see Nathan watching me from the crowd. And maybe he would have his driver’s license and wait for me so he could dive me home from the game.

Last year, mom read me a story about the homecoming floats. Each class would make a float on a theme, and the theme that time was fairy tales. One class made a Little Red Riding Hood float with a giant wolf’s head in a pink bonnet, and another class did Hansel and Gretel with a real gingerbread house and they threw candy to the crowd. I’d want to be one of the people throwing candy and watch the kids rush forward to pick up the peppermints and lollipops that fell to the ground.

There was a picture of Timmy in the paper too. He was homecoming king and there was a photo of him and his queen. They were wearing goofy tinfoil crowns. But I hardly recognized him. His note was bigger and it was like the whole shape of his head had changed. As if someone had pushed his jaw in and made his forehead stick out more. Maybe it was all the football he played. His neck was thick and he had hulking shoulders too. I wondered if he remembers coming to my birthday party once. He was the only boy I invited, and mom didn’t want him to come. But I invited him anyway.

Last night, I felt my lip split open. I sneezed and it tore open. There was nothing I could do until morning when mom checked in on me. By then, the blood was dried and my lip swollen twice its size. Sometimes it happens. It always hurts, but now I’m more used to living with it. I know that in the morning, mom will wipe it clean and apply Vaseline. She always makes me feel better.

Writing and other excretia

I've been home all week sick with the flu. A half-human, half-virus version of myself with chills and sweats, sore throat and mountains of mucus. Yuck. Being sick is such a drippy process. Every pore screams out, "I EXIST!" by excreting fluid.

In the midst of this, I got my first issue of Poets & Writers. I ordered it about two months ago. I was feeling good about the direction of "Lost." Praxis was about to come out. I suppose I was high on the idea of being a "real" writer and I thought the magazine would do me some good.

Maybe it was the phlegm, but it felt like it was P&W that was making me sick. EVERY $%^#& PAGE hosts an advertisement for an MFA program. The others hold ads for expensive residencies, and workshops. The articles are all written by writers that sit in cushy academic jobs. They spew analysis and intellectia. Rather than encourage struggling writers to keep going, it seems set up to discourage. This magazine is about the business of writing. It's not about the art of writing. It's about money, not love.

This past year I've accomplished a lot. I've written a few things I'm proud of. More importantly, I've kept writing. Every single week. No excuses. Whatever crap comes out. I'm there with my notebook. It may not seem like much, but it is. Just the commitment to keep going is huge for me. And the further I go, the more protective I feel about my art. I want to plug my ears when I hear other writers talking about blocks, or that they don't have enough time, or whatever. Even conversations about craft, or revisions are scary. I fear that anyone else's vision of what it means to be a writer--be it the almighty P&W or the Joe schmoe next to me--might infect my own and make me sick.

So...I think I'm going to donate my subscription to some local non-profit arts organization or something, if I can do that. Maybe there will come a time when I'm ready to dive into the business side of writing. But this year, my only resolution is to keep going.

Summertime in Union Station

As I walked here, coffee in hand, cookie balanced carefully on my journal, I passed men sitting on bus benches--men I knew not to look in the eye. For if I were to make eye contact they would try to talk to me. I draw this kind of attention wherever I go. Strange men with no boundaries like to see how far they can push me. I walked past the Greyhound station. The image of a dog, ever sprinting, made me dispair. We humans never let our fellow creatures rest. They must provide.

In the train station there are children. They are calling to each other like dogs in the night. They don't even know each other, I just realized, but one whines and then another calls back in response.

The great ceiling fans circulate. Are they whipping around to keep the air moving? Or to push the hot air down off the ceiling. Someone's feet smell. Not mine, I think. An old dot-matrix printer shrieks back and forth over a page. Tickets? Receipts for the day? A janitor comes by with a broom to brush the marble floors free of papers and dust. They miss the spaces underneath the massive wood benches. These spaces are perfect for little boys to crawl and hide away from their parents' eyes. They are small places where they can peek out on the world without being noticed. I hear little hands behind me. A boy is pulling himself up to peer over the bench at me.

Once this place was bustling, I'm sure. Many gates. Now they use just one.

It is quiet here. A man is talking on his cell phone--perhaps with someone who is right outside the station. "Why don't you come in here?" he asks. "It's probably a lot cooler in here than it is out there." He is wearing camoflauge shorts and a t-shirt with the arms cut off. He has a greying crew cut. He is absentmindedly jingling the keys in his pockets. His paunch sits on top of his thighs.

A woman hobbles by. She is wearing white platform flip-flops. Her toenails have been french manicured. It hurts her to walk, though she's not that old. Maybe 35? 40? No...she's older. 55 maybe. Her long, blond ponytail disguises her age.

The two are talking now. The train is late and they are both waiting for friends. She tells him that Union Pacific owns the tracks and Amtrak has to move out of the way if there is a UP train on the tracks. The toilets are backed up and there's a bad stench on the train. She knows this because the friend she is waiting for has called from a cellphone.

They begin talking about the recent shootings in Portland. The man is amazed that the shootings are downtown. He can guarantee they are over drugs. Innocent people can get hurt. He wants to buy a fifth wheel and move out to the desert with the coyotes. He says it "cay-oats." He also says, "shee-it."

He says he won't ride a Greyhound. I don't blame him. That damn exhausted dog on the side of every bus.

His laugh is high picthed like a maccaw. He says he quit smoking on April 12, 2002. He had to get the patch. 21 mg. 14 mg. 7 mg. He only had to take the 21 mg. patch and then he was quit. The patch stung his skin. He doesn't have the urges anymore. He hates the smell. But brags that if you buy the rolling tobacco you can save a lot of money. He went on a ten-day vacation with all his savings. Seventy-five dollars a month in a little kitty. He went to Crater Lake. He's spending this summer with his brother is Seattle. He hasn't seen his brother since his father died three years ago.

She keeps trying to butt in and say something, but he keeps piping up. Now he's talking about the Paul Allen Museum. He used to see Heart, Loverboy. Rush was the best concert he's ever seen in his whole life. He's seen REO Speedwagon and Santana in '76. He drank whisky and got loaded. Now that he's older he's amazed at what kids get in trouble for now. His trouble was getting drunk and playing chicken. Nowadays, the kids don't know how to have fun. They have fights, beatings, weapons.

A train is coming in from California. Only ticked passengers are allowed on the platform. The low rumble of the train and the bells clanging alert us all to its arrival. Everyone has gone outside to wait for it. The brakes are squealing. It takes so long for the train to fully stop.

People are flooding the station. They are wheeling bags behind them. A young girl stops to take off her sweatshirt. A blind woman is led by a golden retriever. The man in camoflauge shorts is still without his friend. He is pacing. The hobbling woman has dissapeared.

Against the side of the train the sun casts shadows of the people on the platform. The shadows move like squat, hunched versions of their other selves.

Sluts

We’re going on Burt’s boat today and you’re going…no ifs ands or buts about it, “she said.

I knew I would have to go, but I felt there was no reason I shouldn’t show my displeasure anyway. It was stupid. A whole Saturday wasted with some creepy old guy, my mom and dumb little brother.

“Well, can I at least go to Amy’s tonight? Will we be back in time for that, or are we gonna have to sleep out there too?”

She wasn’t listening to me anymore. “Go get your suit on and get a towel,” she said as she padded into the bathroom.

It was embarrassing realty, my mom dating. She was probably in there shaving her legs, or douching or something gross. Whatever women do to get ready for dates.

Burt. We had to spend the day with guy out of all the other losers. Burt was an old guy name. I had seen him once or twice at the neighborhood block parties and I guess he looked pretty normal, but Burt was a name for guys who wore white loafers with plaid polyester pants.

I picked up the phone and dialed Amy’s number.

Hi, Amy. Yeah…I can’t come over today.”

“Oh that’s too bad. Sara’s coming over at noon, and so are Brett and Joel.”

Crap! I was going to miss seeing Joel? Amy liked him, I knew it and now they were going to be together all day? I mean, I was prettier, but Amy was sluttier and guys like sluts. I bet they would be going out by the time I got back tonight.

“Well, yeah. My mom’s making me go out on some stupid boat with her boyfriend. I’ll call you when I get back.”

“Okay. Bye.”

Burt pulled up in the driveway pulling his boat on a trailer behind his big maroon Oldsmobile. He got out of the car and walked toward our front door. He didn’t know I was spying on him. I wanted to see him pick his teeth or adjust himself or something, so I could prove he was exactly the loser I thought he was, but he just walked up to the door and rang the bell like any other guy.

“PamSteve!” my mother yelled when she heard the bell, and came rushing to answer the door. She ran into me still standing behind the window curtain.

“What are you doing? Go get ready!”
I started to walk up the stairs, her perfume in my nose. Ew. She had perfume on for Burt.

“Wait,” she called after me. “How do I look?” She was wearing preppy white shorts and bright white Keds. She kept them that way by throwing them in the wash with a cup of bleach every week. They always smelled like chlorine. She had long legs, that luckily I inherited, and they looked tan against her white clothes.

“You look good, I guess.”

I hated the men my mom dated. They were always ugly stupid men. Ron Laetner, that creep. He already had a live-in girlfriend who he wouldn’t marry but he was still after my mom. Most of the time she talked tough about him saying she wasn’t interested in a guy who wasn’t available but I knew she had her hopes up anyway. There were others too, Ben, who had a wife, and John whose wife had died but it was still weird because he was my science teacher in seventh grade.

I climbed into the back of Burt’s car and dug down in my bag for my walkman.

“Hi kids,” Burt said as he smiled wide at me and my brother. “This is going to be a fun day, huh?”

“Yeah!” shouted Stephen. I didn’t say anything. I just put my headphones on and turned up the volume. This day was gonna suck, but at least I could listen to INXS and dream about Joel.

There we were, swimming in Amy’s pool. It was night but the pool lights were on illuminating the surface from below. Amy and Sara and Brett were having a diving contest, but Joel was sitting with me…

No, no…

There we were up at Amy’s house and it was night, and Joel, Brett and Sara were there too. We decided to play hide-and-go-seek in the woods behind the house and Joel was it. I ran and hid behind a big tree. Joel found me first but didn’t want to go find the others. Instead he wanted to stay there with me.

“Brett is going to find Sara,” he said.

“What about Amy?”

“Who cares about her,” he said and then kissed me.

I daydreamed that one a couple of times over while staring out the window of the car. Stephen was kicking the back of mom’s seat and fiddling with the power window switches.

“Up. Down. Up. Down,” he said to himself.

Mom yelled, “Will you stop that, Stephen Edward!” and then she turned back to Burt, who you could tell was trying hard to ignore the fact that Stephen was likely leaving scuff marks all over the leather interior and sticky prints on the door. He was red-faced, but attempting to smile.

“So, Pam, your mom tells me you’re real good in school,” he said.

“I guess so.” What did he expect me to say?

“Well that’s good.” Mom smiled at him and then looked back across the seat at me.

“And she’s a real good swimmer too, right honey?” she said. “She’s even on the swim team.”

“Yeah. I swim the free and fly.”

“Well great! There will be plenty of water for swimming today,” he chuckled. He obviously didn’t get what I meant by swimming the fly. There’s no way you’d swim the fly in the middle of Lake Erie. I didn’t want to swim in Lake Erie anyway. The only swimming I wanted to do was in Amy’s pool.

We got to the marina and my mom, Steve and I stood on the dock as we watched Burt back the trailer with the boat down into the water. He was having a hard time angling the boat just right so that it wouldn’t hit the concrete berms on either side. Since it was July, I wondered why his boat wasn’t already in the water. It was clear he didn’t do this too much.

Finally he had the boat in the water and we all climbed in. My mom carried a cooler full of pop and sandwiches. I sat facing the rear and pretended to be interested in all the other boats. Stephen got into the seat next to Burt and watched him drive. We motored slowly out of the marina and into the open water and then Burt opened it up. He was trying to impress my mom by going as fast as he could and making sharp turns. Stephen was screaming and mom was hanging on to him tight. My hair was flying in my face, but I acted like I didn’t care and just sat there.

Burt anchored the boat a quarter mile off shore from what looked to be a sandy beach. Several other boats were nearby. They were mostly families out for the afternoon—dads drinking Millers from the can and moms watching their kids dive off the backs of the boats and splash around in the Lake.

Except one boat. There were four boys on the boat. Two of them looked older, like maybe in high school. And the other two looked like they were my age. No parents. They were doing cannonballs off the boat and yelling swear words as they hit the water.

“Douchebag!” Splash!

“Pud wacker!” Splash!

“Dickweed!” Splash!

Aw man, and they were cute too. One even looked a little like Joel. I couldn’t believe I was here with my mom and her ugly boyfriend and they were probably going to think he was my dad and see me over here and thing I was a dorky baby to be out here on a Saturday with my parents.

“Do you want an orange pop?” I looked around to see that Burt was holding his hand out, offering me an orange Shasta.

“No, no. I’m not…thirsty,” I said.

“Why don’t you go swimming, honey?” mom said. She was helping Stephen put on his arm floaties.

“No. I’m…cold. I’m going to go lay in the sun.” I heard her sigh. I don’t know what she expected from me. Did she want me to play happy family or something?

I spread my towel out on the flat bow of the boat and laid down on it, closing my eyes. I hoped those boys hadn’t seen me, and if they did, maybe they thought I was cute or something. Maybe I did see the blond one looking at me? Oh but then he would have seen my mom and Burt too, and my brother with diving mask and floaties jumping into the water and doggie paddling around.

I sucked my stomach in to make it look as flat as possible and propped my legs up so they didn’t look like fat sausages. I could hear mom and Burt at the back of the boat.

“I should really watch him swim. The water is deep here,” I heard her say.

“”Just come here. Nothing is going to happen.” Burt was whining.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the boys were not sitting on the side of the boat laughing and talking. Were they talking about me? I heard one of them say something like “purple,” and I had a bathing suit with purple stripes on it. I didn’t move. I didn’t want them to think I cared or noticed.

“Pam, come get a sandwich,” my mom yelled.” I heard the boys laughing. My mom was making me look stupid. I tried to ignore her, but she climbed up around the boat’s windshield to the bow and stood over me.

“Come get something to eat.” She was stern and wide-eyed.

I’m not hungry.” I closed my eyes again. She crouched down.

You’re being a little brat,” she said quietly through clenched teeth.

“I am not. I’m just laying here.”

“Exactly.” She gripped my wrist and yanked me up. “Now come and sit with us.”

Burt was tight-lipped and strained to keep a cheery note in his voice.

“Do you want baloney, or peanut-butter?” she asked me.

“Peanut-butter,” I mumbled, just as Stephen spilled Coke all over the floor of the boat.

“Goddamn it!” yelled Burt. He scrambled to grab a roll of paper towels before the pop soaked into the red indoor/outdoor carpeting. “This boat is practically new and it wasn’t cheap either!” he yelled at my mom.

“Here, let me do that,” mom said and got down on her hands and knees and took the paper towels from him. Burt stood up and walked to the front of the boat where Stephen and I were sitting. Stephen was crying. He clutched the remains of his soda in one hand and wiped his nose with the other. Burt glared at us and then looked back to watch my mother who was doing her best to mop up the mess.

I could see that maybe his boat wasn’t cheap, but he had hoped my mother would be and he had little use for the two kids she had towed along. So I stared straight at the back of his head, the whole time silently repeating over and over, you’re an ass, you’re an ass, hoping he would feel those words come out through my eyes and strike his heart.
.
“Let’s just go,” he said and hauled in the anchor.

Everyone was quiet the whole way home. Burt switched on the radio and listened to the Yankees and Red Sox game while mom stared out the window. Stephen was asleep; his head rolled forward and bobbed around with the bumps in the road. I bunched up my towel and wedged it in the corner next to him and then pushed him over so he would lean against it.

When we pulled into our driveway, I got out of the car and ran into the house without saying anything. I was hoping Amy and Sara would still be around, so I picked up the phone to call Amy’s house. I could hear my mom from the kitchen as I dialed.

“I can’t just leave my kids and go off with you Burt!” What was he still doing here? I hung up the phone. I hoped she wasn’t going to invite him to dinner. If that’s what she was doing, I wasn’t going to stick around.

“Come on, let’s just go out. Just the two of us. There’s no reason today should be ruined just because of your kids. They can take care of themselves. Let’s go out and have some fun.” Burt said.

“I think you should leave.”

I heard the door slam and Burt’s car start and pull out of the driveway. I tiptoed down the stairs and poked my head around the corner. Mom had the fridge open and was pouring herself a glass of white wine.

“I can see you,” she said, her back turned to me. I stepped out from behind the wall and sat down at the kitchen table.

“You were a real brat today,” she said.

“Sorry.” I could tell she was mad. I had ruined her date with one of the only unmarried men who had asked her out so far. I wondered if she was going to ground me.

She went to the freezer for an ice cube and dropped it into her glass. She sat down next to me and took a big sip.

“I’m not that mad at you.”

“You’re not?”

“No. I brought you guys along for a reason. I didn’t really want to be out there alone with him. I know you were just trying to protect me.”

“Ha. Yeah.” I stood up to go to my room. I really hadn’t been thinking of her at all. But she thought I had been. I couldn’t believe she was happy I ruined her date.

“Amy called and left a message. You should probably call her back.”

“Yeah. Well…mom?” She looked up at me,

“Maybe we can just all go out to dinner tonight? Just the three of us.”

“Sure,” she smiled.

Discovery

She climbed once
to the pulpit
to be tempted by the devil.

On her way
she saw small signs
that said don't go.

A tree bent low to the ground.
It loved the earth,
a momma's boy.

And great ravens overhead
calling at her,
perhaps mocking her
from their black bellies.

She rose past them
with sweaty palms.

She was amazed her feet
knew how to caress every rock
into supporting her.

Loser

In sixth grade, I was tracked into Mr. Schroeder's class along all the problemed kids. The A-D-D dysfunctionals, the slow learners, the poor kids, the losers.

For such a short man, Mr. Schroeder managed to generate a lot of rumors. But he was the angry type. So it's possible that he stirred up people's imaginations whenever he got yelling. Several years later, when I was in that far-removed place called high school, it was rumored he was dying from AIDS. But that year, we heard he was having an affair with my teacher from the year before. We liked to call her "Mrs. Furrybutt." So I reasoned that's why I was in his class. Mrs. Furrybutt had specially placed me with him.

I had always been a smart kid. I got to go to advanced reading class and was in with the gifted and talented crowd. But I don't remember much about Mrs. Furrybutt's fifth grade classroom, except for getting into lots of fights. And she was supposed to teach me about fractions. I should have known how to add, subtract, multiply and divide 3/4 and 1/8. But I ignored most of those lessons and never really caught up.

So it was really my fifth grade failure that earned me classmates like rowdy boys Bobby Sparks, and Jim McCartney, and girls like Sara Sporol and Lynne Hazard who were already sneaking into their parents' liquor cabinets. Sara's fate was to become a deadhead. In high school, she dropped a lot of acid, and eventually dropped out, but not before coming to class once wrapped in a bed sheet and nothing else. Her sixth-grade self was wacky and creative. Too smart for her own good. She was there probably because her parents were alcoholics and didn't pay any attention to her or her grades.

I could have been her. Or Lynne, who got pregnant when she was 15. Or any one of those kids. My newly divorced mom and federal-assistance school lunch program scrawled "bad seed" on my destiny file. I couldn't do math, and I was in the habit of coming to school an hour early every day. I tucked myself into a secret spot next to the lockers so no teachers would see me because I didn't want to be home alone after my mom left for work. Another year of that and instead of coming straight to school, I might have been meeting another latch-key kid to smoke cigarettes or have sex before class.

But there were two new kids in school that year. Mike and Heather. And I think it was my destiny to know them. Their parents were friends and had moved to Aurora at the same time. As the new kids, they both got dumped into the same classroom. To the teachers, they were neither smart or stupid. They were complete unknowns, like two unshaped lumps of clay.

So they weren't related, but Heather knew everything about Mike, and made fun of him a lot. I think she was embarrassed to know him. Once, she whispered that Mike's older sister had made her and Mike pretend to get married. She made them walk down the isle and even kiss. Heather beat herself up over that.

But it wasn't hard to see why Heather said she hated Mike. He was a chunky, dim-witted kid. He'd do anything the other rowdy boys asked him to do, just so they'd be his friend. They would make him do weird things in the locker room after gym class. They would laugh about making Mike give himself a swirly in a dirty toilet. I don't know what else they made him do. Mr. Schroeder yelled at him a lot, not understanding that he was being bad because the other boys were egging him on.

Heather liked horses, a lot. She had a paper route and bought her own horse and paid for its board all by herself. She was the shortest kid in the class, and I don't think she ever made it past 5 foot, even by the end of high school. She was never popular but she was mouthy and unafraid and I liked that. She brought an element into to school that hadn't been there before. She introduced competition, and I latched right onto it.

We'd call each other to complain about how much we'd been studying for the science test the next day and then we would compare grades. We'd talk about our social studies essays. She was writing about the Romans. So I had to write about something harder. I picked Charlemagne. No one else in the class could even pronounce "Charlemagne."

We became Mr. Schroeder's math nerds. He was obsessed with computers, and made us learn to write in BASIC to create simple scripts that would determine the area of a triangle or the circumference of a circle. We were partners, and did the best. We were so good that while the other kids were crashing their Apple IIEs, Mr. Schroeder taught us how to create a picture on the computer screen, by assigning a color to each and every pixel.

Heather became my best friend. We fought hard against each other all through high school AP history and advanced science classes. I usually won. Except she was better when we went on a weekend trip to Cornell University for Model Congress. I just sat there and didn't know what to save. She won an award. I don't know where she is today. But I think she saved me.

Mike became my step-brother.

Garbage

The busier we get the more garbage we produce. Bike rides and long walks exhanged for short drives and road rage, gardens for fast food. Fat, sugar, caffiene to power through and alchohol to dull the pain. Guilt, excuses and dissapointment instead of closeness and connection. Promises. Promises. The toxic waste of our relationships neglected: misunderstanding, apathy, lonliness. Fall asleep exhausted on the couch and wake up with an aching back. Money spent on unnecessary things. Bribery to the soul to keep going a little longer...pint of ice cream to mimic pleasure, lovely colorful scarf to replace joy, new CD to substitute for soul. Stuff. Our garbage cans overfloweth with the packaging of haste. We hear ourselves say, "Just do it now, I don't have time." We dream of vacations, dropping out, the release of failure.

More "Lost"

G. told me I needed more sex in Lost so I added some. (She always tells me that.) I also got closer to ending the story, but it's not done yet.

Tell me what you think so far.

Mercury in retrograde

M: Begin the day by forgetting everything. Climbing out of the shower, remember a meeting that's to begin in 8 minutes. On the way, detour three times due to two accidents and a stalled train. Get to meeting a half-hour late. Once there, remember another meeting that starts in an hour. Leave the first meeting immediately to make it in time for the next. End day with a mental breakdown after getting lost in SW Portland. Discover exit under construction, get dumped into who knows where, try to recover by turning right, somehow end up disoriented at the top of Terwilliger. Tears.

T: 8 hours of furious work. Flight to San Diego rerouted to LA because of the fog that rolls in off the ocean. Drive 2 hours south to hotel in a San Diego suburb where all the streets are all named Bernardo. West Bernardo Drive. Rancho Bernardo Drive. Coranado Bernaro Court. Arrive at midnight. Fall into stupor. Dinner consists of a mint on the hotel pillow.

W: Get lost on the many Bernardo streets. 10.5 hours in tiny conference room with nine other people. Bleary eyed. Stuck an extra night in the same city for the same reason we couldn't get into it: fog. Drink heavily. Raid the mini-bar. Who cares how many m&ms eaten.

Th: Wake up at 4 am. Drive to airport. Catch flight. Land. Drive to office. Work.

F: Self pity, undoubtedly.

Lost

Let's get lost,
won't it be bliss?
Let's get crossed off everyone's list...

"Let's get lost," she said, making sure to stare directly into his eyes.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, lost. Really lost. Let's go somewhere we've never been and try not to remember how we got there."
"Okay, but why? Why now?"
"Because I want to see what happens."
"Well, I think it's impossible," he said. "Around here anyway. We could go someplace like Canada, without a map or anything and get lost. But around here, I just don't see how it can happen."

They decided the best place to start was the river. They went there in the summer to swim and to throw sticks for the dog to fetch. They had swum as far out as the middle of the river where the current pulled the hardest, but they never crossed to the other side. They didn't know what they would find on that shore.

"From the beach, there's just a line of trees over there. We could find anything ... a farm, a roa d, a factory," he said.

They were packing the necessities in small plastic bags: a shirt and shorts to wear over their bathing suits, a pair of sandals, matches, a candy bar each. They planned to hold their bag on top of their heads with one hand, and use their other arm to swim across the river. She wished there were more room--enough for a blanket or a flashlight--but it would be hard enough with these few items.

"We'll just have to make a fire for warmth and hope we can find berries for food," she said.
"Or we can catch a rabbit," he said.

That night, with her plastic bag on the floor next to her bed, she dreamed of the bottom of the river. She swam down and touched the silty bed. The seaweed wrapped its way around her fingers and wove through her hair. She swam through beams of light filtered down from the surface, and brushed against brown, scaly fish. She remembered how her grandpa said the scales were sharp.

When the sun came up, he was at her window. They hiked all the way to the beach before it was even eight o'clock. Stripping down to their suits, they packed their clothes into the plastic bags, and waded into the water. Crossing the river was easier than expected. Her shirt got a bit wet, and he lost the matches through a hole in the corner of his bag. But the water was calm in the early quiet of the morning.

They climbed onto the shore and looked across to where they had just come from. "It looks just like this side looks, when you're looking at it from that side," he said.

On the other side of the trees, they found a wide, paved road. It was black and smooth with a yellow dotted line running down the middle. It came to a dead stop at the river. It was empty. They walked right down the middle until the pavement gave way to earth that had been baked into deep ridges, cracked and crumbling in the heat of the sun.

She walked inside one of the grooves, one foot in front of the other and followed close behind him. She watched his shoulders move in time with his step. Noticed the things that caught his eye: a deep hole the perfect size for a snake, shiny stones, bits of milkweed fluff caught in spiderwebs. A mad chirping came from the bushes at the side of the path and he stopped to investigate.

"I think it's a baby bird. It must be learning to sing! It's making all sorts of silly noises, just like a human baby does when it tries to talk." He was easily amused.

Where had they met, she wondered. She couldn't remember. It seemed he had always been there, a boy on her block. She could always tell him from a distance by the way he walked. She would be sitting there in a pile of leaves, or peeling moss from the sidewalk and she would spot him in the top part of her eyes, ambling forward with a syncopated stride. She remembered playing games...kick the can, hide-and-go-seek... and then a moment where the object wasn't to hide anymore but to be found by exactly the right person, and then hide away with him. No matter how hard she looked, he stayed hidden. She found countless others. He must have found a spot she'd never think to look though other girls never had much trouble.

And after that, she'd spend days waiting for him to call, and then go out and return to her answering machine's blinking light. She'd leave the messages unlistened to, unanswered because she couldn't bear the sound of his voice and she feared she would reveal everything to him just by talking.

He was unreliable. Some days he would call to say he was coming over and never show up. Other days, she would meet him walking down the street and he would forget whatever he was about to go do just to be with her. It was those moments that she forgave him. It felt precious to be at his side. But those times he dropped everything for her, she realized the times he didn't show up he had been distracted by some other pretty girl. And so even though she was sitting with him on the park swings at that moment, it was likely someone else was out there waiting for him.

"I'm hungry," she heard him say. He stopped and turned around to face her. "I have no idea where we are either. Are you satisfied? We're lost."

"We're not lost," she said. She was irritated. She hadn't come this far to turn back now. "I know exactly where we are. We're on a road, and if we turn around and walk back the other way, we'll eventually get to the river, then swim across it, then be home."

"Oh yeah. Thanks for reminding me. I thought we were supposed to try not to remember."

"Well, it's hard to forget," she said. She didn't know why it always had to be so difficult with him. Why nothing ever meant the same to him as it did her. She was still waiting for the day when she would ask him, "What are you thinking," and he would answer, "I can't live anymore without telling you..." and for her face to flush and heart to stop beating.

She held out her hand. "Come here. Close your eyes," and she took his hand and led him off the road and through thr brush to the side of the road. Blackberry thorns tore at their clothes and insects bit their ankles but soon they were under a canopy of old trees. It was as if summer had ended and fall began here. She could smell the sugary sweet decomposing of maple leaves turning to earth beneath her feet.

In the clear space between two great tree trunks she stopped and faced him. Taking his other hand she whispered, "Keep your eyes closed," and then closed her own. She began to whirl them in circles so many times she felt dizzy.

Keeping her eyes shut tight she said, "Now you lead me. Keep turning different directions. If we can't forget on purpose, we'll make it was confusing as possible on purpose." And so they took turns guiding each other, making sure to take an odd number of turns along the way until the woods became dense and blocked out most of the sun. It was late afternoon already and only diffuse light filtered down. She thought she saw small creatures scurring past their feet like tiny glowing lights.

She really was beginning to feel lost. She couldn't tell whether she was heading East or West anymore. And it didn't matter whether she said left or right. They could walk in circles or straight lines in this forest twilight and never know the difference.

"It feels cool. It smells so good here," he said and turned to face her. He was glowing a little too. "I didn't know why you wanted to do this. I was afraid to show up this morning, but I suprised myself. It was all mysterious, I guess. I guess that's what I like about you. You're willing to be mysterious for me."

He had grabbed hold of her hand again, although they both had their eyes open now and for the first time all day, she realized she would be spending the night in these woods instead of in her own room. His fingers felt bony and calloused and she wondered why they hadn't seemed that way before. She couldn't think of anything to say, and so she said, "I'm hungry."

They walked on through the woods scouting for mushrooms and berries. Darkness was closing in around them and the woods around them seemed even bigger now, the ferns towering over their heads. They had to push the ladder-like fronds aside as they made their way through, and scale over enormous, fallen logs that filled their noses with a deep, decaying smell.

He led her down to the edge of a clear pool. The trees stood back from its edge as if on purpose to let the water reflect the light of the moon. A fish jumped out of the pond, disturbing its surface and pushing the light into ever-expanding rings.

"Let's go in," she heard him say. He dropped her hand and wandered off down the bank, shedding his shirt and shorts as he went.

She had wanted nothing but this all along. To be alone with him under the stars. In spite of her shyness, she stripped off her clothes and followed him in. He had already made his way out to the center of the pond and was treading water there. She pushed off and swam the whole distance without coming up for air, surfacing when she spotted the outline of his legs in the moonlight.

Floating there next to him, she wondered if she should say it. It was there in her throat if she could only make it come out loud, "I've always felt..." and then she stopped herself. Did she only feel that way because she had never thought to feel a different way?

She realized he was looking at her. "Your hair is beautiful," he said and stretched out his arm. He ran his fingers over the top of her ear and down her neck and rested his hand on her shoulder. She tried to smile at him, but she noticed that his nose looked bigger than it had before, and his eyes were dark and sunken. She pushed the idea from her mind thinking perhaps it was just the distortion of her vision in the darkness. She closed her eyes and leaned forward, placing her lips softly on his, and tasted the small beads of water that rested there. She felt him exhale and then move closer to her, and then wrapped his legs around her so they hung together in the middle of the pond.

She felt something deep in the pit of her stomach. A satisfaction. A terror. But only kissed him again, and let him kiss her back. She pulled away when his kisses felt too hard, the softness gone and all bones pushing into her face. She looked at him. "I'm cold," she said, because she was shivering, although she had never felt warmer.

They left the water and dressed. Her shirt and shorts would hardly keep her warm, and she wished he had not lost the matches so they could build a fire. They began to look for shelter, "A low hanging branch? A hollowed-out boulder? Something like that?" he said aloud, as if saying it would make it appear. But they found nothing but moss and dried leaves, and so they swept those into a great pile and lay down together in the woodsy bed.

"I think now that we're here, we should stay here," he said. His hand was resting on the small of her back. "I don't feel like finding our way home."

"Really?" she was surprised.

"We could just keep going. We need to find food, at least. But we could stay here too. There's fish in the pond. We could fish and swim and stay here together."

She couldn't imagine what it would be like to live here, only with him. Their clothes would soon be worn and shredded, and they would live naked like animals and huddle together for warmth. She felt his fingers sliding underneath her t-shirt, next to her skin inching forward like a caterpillar. She turned to face him. His nose had grown again, and his skin looked green or blue with gaping black pores. But then in the next instant he was the same again. She stared wide-eyed.

She stuttered, "I...I thought we'd go back tomorrow. I'm sure we can find our way back. It won't be that hard."

"But you're the one who wanted to come here!" He was snorting and whining. "I like it here!"

"I do too. I..." and then she was sure of it. He was not what he seemed to be. The moonlight had exposed him for what he was--black beady eyes and pig-snouted. She slowly sat up and got to her feet. This wasn't what she thought it would be. It wasn't what she wanted. He was wriggling on the ground, trying to stand. She backed away from him slowly.

"Stay!" he screeched as she ran into the dark, branched whipping her face.

She felt sick to her stomach, a heavy pressure in her abdomen at the thought of what she'd done. Her vision was closing in but she fought to stay alert and keep moving. She had brought this on herself. She had opened something up in him that made him need her. He was close behind her, shrieking like a bat and she had done this to him. She was leaving him there in that state, abandoning her creation in the middle of the woods where she had led him. It couldn't be undone. There was no returning to the way it was.

She was lost, and with him dragging just steps behind her, she ran blindly trying to put distance between them. She tried thinking about which direction they had come from, which way the sun had been overhead when they had walked that day, everything she had ever read about survival in those books she read about castaways and orphans. All she could remember is that were she to get trapped in an avalanche of snow she should dig herself a little hole and spit to orient herself to which way was down. But she remembered they had made it so there was no direction. No up, down, East, West, left, right. The only way to find her way out was just to imagine herself leaving, and then do the real walking along the same imaginary line.

She closed her eyes and heard him somewhere, now not even wailing half-human noises. The transformation was complete and he was bellowing like a half-cow, half-great cat. She was sorry for him. But not sorry enough to stay and comfort him. She had seen too many other girls taking care of thing just like him--cleaning out the pens and filling the troughs.

With her eyes shut, she walked one foot in front of the other along the path she saw in her mind. It appeared slowly, a brick, a section, then the whole stretch. Ot was there inside her, she just had to ler herself see it. A golden road so enclosed in darkness that she felt it was the right path, and it was. She was back at the river.

In the night the water was black and cold, but she plunged in fully clothed watching her t-shirt balloon out to her sides. She dove in deep.

Her path went down through the water so she followed it. Past enormous bulbous plants that glowed like lamps. There was a whole world down there she never even knew about. Houses and streets, dogs barking little bursts of air bubbles and cats swishing their tails through the water. Strange people with slightly bloated faces walked to and fro, sat at kitchen tables, went into bars and movie theaters. Hovering above them, she wondered if her path had been leading her there all along. Was she meant to remain here, her own face getting fuller and heavier with the weight of the water above her? It looked that way, for the path descended into the heart of the city and ended murkily there.

The current pulled her hard down the path but she only had a small bit of breath left. Though the path had led her out of the woods, she wasn't sure she wanted to continue following it. She kicked hard against the water, resisting it with her whole body until she surfaced, gasping in deep breaths of cold air, and soon crawling up onto the shore and out of the water.

Halloween deep

"Don't be scared. That's not a real clown. It's just someone dressed up as a clown."
-Either Dylan or Nick Elsbury

Shuffle off

Saturday night I slept curled in a little ball, preserving the scant warmth my body was emitting. Although frost licks the rooftops in Buffalo, and we were wearing scarves and hats that afternoon, Doug still hadn't turned his heat on. Eventually, the air under the quilt was heated by my body, and I felt warm.

Aside from that, I had a great time. I met Doug for breakfast early that morning. We walked down Elmwood Avenue, one of the last parts of the city that hasn't given in to decay and poverty. It's still thriving--the place where all the young people want to be. We headed into Allentown, where the Towne Restaurant is still serving up chicken souvlaki and oily coffee (bottomless cups--great for poor college students).

Later, we drove out to the lake, past the old grain elevators that sit where Lake Erie meets the Buffalo River. Their massive silos have been vacant for decades. The industrial decay gave way quickly to windy, country roads. It was a bright sunny day, and the autumn leaves were at the peak of their fall color.

Doug was caretaking for a friend's cottage. It was just down the street from Mickey Ratts, a place I spent many summers convincing my mother to take me to. It's a place where twenty-somethings come on summer nights to drink Bud Light, play beach volleyball and pick each other up. By day, families lumber down the dirty sand beach (trucked in from somewhere, I'm sure) with their beach chairs and heavy coolers. As a 12-year old, it was the closest I could get to a day at the beach.

Though the cottage was less than a mile away, it was in a different universe. The small, white building was tucked in at the end of a row of houses and looked right out onto the water. Doug's friend was a photographer who spends his summers working weddings and his winters travelling through places like Bolivia and Kenya, which was what he was currently doing. I poked around the house to find bookshelves lined with art books, good literature and weighty volumes on cultural studies. His house smelled clean. His linens were laundered. I thought briefly of meeting him, starting an affair...stormy...exciting...then remembered I am married. Funny. I don't even know what he looks like, but his home told me enough.

Doug checked the mail and then we climbed down the steep wooden stairs to the beach.

I never realized that underneath Lake Erie lies a massive bed of shale. It was everywhere, along with smooth, rounded sandstone rocks. The sharpness of the shale against the sandstones seemed impossible. How could two types of rock so different get in one place? I chose a egg-shaped stone that was white and heavy to carry home in my suitcase.

And we walked, which is always the most fun way to spend time with Doug, because he is not distracted by a million other things. In the city, he was checking his cellphone, saying hi to people on the street, stepping into stores. But on the beach with only the water, the rocks and me we talked about writing and making music, old friends, and the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

The beach was infested with ladybugs. They gathered on rocks, driftwood, dead leaves. Thousands of them. Were they dying? Mating? Laying eggs to hatch in the spring? We also discovered an odd form of water plant, the size and shape of a grapefruit, but bright green and covered with seed pods. Doug joked it was corn on the cob meets seaweed (meets christmas ornament, I added).

We walked until the beach ended, turned around and headed back until we came to a divey beach bar. We decided Baileys and coffee would hit the spot on a cool fall day.

The bar smelled like that combination of beer and stale cigarette smoke. It's the way every pool hall and bowling alley in the country smell, no matter what state you're in. College football was on the big screen TV. Doug told me a story about S.D. I had never heard. It filled in a piece of a puzzle for me. Something I had wondered about for a long time. Something that confirmed that the decisions I made long ago, based on gut intuition, were the right decisions. (That's vague, I know. I'm being purposely so.)

Though I could have stayed at the beach all night with a bottle of good red wine and a toasty fire in the fireplace at the cottage, we drove back to Buffalo for dinner. We stopped for pizza (as only you can get in Buffalo) and an extraordinary treat for a former WNY-er gone vegetarian: veggie chicken wings! Wedges of eggplant, breaded and fried, and doused in wing sauce (Frank's Red Hot and butter, if you must know) and served with a side of blue cheese sauce, celery and carrot sticks. Divine!

That night, we ended up at a house party. His roommate's band was playing there. The house was packed with college students mostly dressed as zombies (the undead was a a popular Halloween theme this year). We were the oldest people there.

As I waited for the bathroom, a guy in a Chewbacca suit asked me, "Whose place is this?"

"I don't know," I said.

"Cool. YOu know it's a good party when total strangers show up." Maybe it was his house and he was messing with me.

Down a flight of stairs and into a dark cavern of a basement, pipes exposed, and bent nails stuck dangerously out of big support beams. This was the kind of house that could have been part of the underground railroad, You could imagine secret passageways that were bricked off long ago. But that night, three men in nothing but white body paint, wifebeater t-shirts and tightie-whities were playing death metal. Their faces were painted to look like skulls. We lucked out, since we arrived right at the end of their set. The band we were there to see was up next: Knife Crazy, and they were good. A drummer, bass player and guitarist dressed up as two bananas and a hot dog (phallic?)

The skull band had only made peoples' heads bob, but two songs into Knife Crazy's set we saw it happen. A guy in front of us simply let himself fall sideways--started movement--created space. The tension broke. The dancing started. I was on beer #4 at that point, and more than happy to join. A John Cusack look-alike slammed into me, and made me spill my beer all over my coat, but I quickly forgave him. When was the last time I had the chance to be drunk at a basement punk show?

"DO YOU LIKE LAB COATS? I LIKE LAB COATS! LET'S BE SCIENTISTS!" they screamed.

After that, on to another bar with a Neil Diamond cover band (bad) and then to yet another party with another band. But soon, the eggplant chicken wings in my stomach were rising up against me, in cooperation with the amazing amount of beer I had consumed, so soon I found myself back at Doug's place to settle in for a cold, cold night.

Buffalo. It really is a beautiful city. It's old and crumbling. There's poverty and crime. But...it's cheap for exactly those same reasons, and that means that real artists, making real art can afford to live there. I saw it everywhere. There's art happening in basements and garages. Out of the decay of Buffalo comes creation. It's as if the death of the city creates a blank canvas available for the imagining of a new life.

Portland is a town of crafters and would-be artists. But let's be honest...all the people who could devote their lives to art are busy working in ad agencies so they can pay those West coast bills. We set aside a sunday afternoon for handmaking, but only after we've decorated our homes with Pottery Barn. It's a smooth affluence that imitates art, as Rebecca Solnit says.

When I first moved here, I was so in love with this city. I've outgrown my passion for it. Somedays, I hardly feel like I live here, and especially returning to it after a day in a broken-down town where I felt so alive.

Update: Men and women...

I updated Men and women in Key West. Those two paragraphs are the most difficult things I've ever written.

On being lost

Perhaps the only time I was truly lost was when I was seven. It was my first day of school in a new town. My mom put me on the bus in the morning, and I got off with all the other kids and found my way to my classroom. In the afternoon, I made it back to the bus somehow, but wasn't familiar enough with my new neighborhood to know where to get off. The bus was empty, and the driver had finished her route, and I was still on it. I don't remember how I got home that day.

As a child, I remembered places I had never been before. I blurred real and imaginative spaces. On a tour through an 18th century farmhouse, I felt I knew the place. That credenza, that drawer full of flatware. I knew them.

My friends have always called me the "normal one," because, I imagine, I have never appeared lost to them. I think the truth is that I have never tried to anchor myself too securely. I take comfort in knowing I can live anywhere, pick myself up, meet new people, make a new life. I have done it a dozen times.

In seventh grade, I cast myself off from my three best friends with a dramatic note:

Dear Libby, Amy and Sarah,
Goodbye.

I spent the summer in exile: babysitting, going to tennis lessons, watching television. I would do anything but play a part in the girl dynamics that had developed.

In tenth grade, my best friend forced me out. I had no choice. I remember coming home one night and spotting a party going on at her house. A dozen or so people we knew in common were hanging out on her back deck acting stupid. They were making jokes about getting high on oregano, rolling oregano joints from from the spice rack and stiff cardboard and lighting them on
fire. Perhaps they really were stoned, but it's not the cue I picked up. What I felt was their icy stares and unwelcoming recognition of my presence.

We are kept in place by the people who surround us. When we are cut off from them, we become someone else.

Both times, I found new groups of friends, neither as satisfying as the old. My new skin did not fit right.

I will return home in two weeks. I worry about seeing someone I know who will force me to locate myself. Their "hello, aren't you...?" will make my body flesh and tie me to that place again instead of allowing me to remain an observer in a parallel dimension. I also worry about not feeling tied. That the bricks and wood beams of buildings, the maple and oak trees won't talk to me. They'll refuse to play my remembering game.

Meditation on apples

Honeycrisp apples are the invention of mediocrity, come to fruition this fall. An enormous genetic windfall. It's the first time I've ever heard an apple promoted on the radio. The name: "honeycrisp." So literal and American. It the simpler, less sophisticated cousin of the gala and the fuji.

One has to eat a honeycrisp with a stack of napkins handy. Otherwise you will l have sticky hands and wrists and drips on your chin and all over the furniture. It is not an apple for the delicate.

Honeycrisp. Honeycomb. Crispy Crunch. Honey smacks. Crackle pop.

No matter how big and beautiful, I just can't trust a honeycrisp apple. Like a big, blowsy, Las Vegas trophy wife. Painted face, sequined jeans and stiletto heels. Not too much trouble but still disturbing.

It's what the executives wanted from a red delicious, which is truly a bit of marketing genius because although they are red they are never delicious but rather mealy and too sweet. Easily bruised. Over-waxed.

Red delicious. Superstitious. Regal bitches. Sew on stitches. Made for riches.

The list begins

Well...now it's official. There are people out there who hate me because of what I write on my blog. There's certainly one person out there who's on the list...and there may be two.

I learned tonight that B gave my blog link to a former co-worker who passed it on, and that person passed on, blah, blah, blah, ad infinitum, until the former co-worker whose bridal shower I raized got the link. Ooh. Ouchie. It's also one big possibility that a certain former boss has gotten hold of it too.

Oh well. It's not like I posted it naieve to the fact that she might read it someday. I knew it was always a possibility. The whole point of this was not to hide.

What is this expectation that we have simple feelings? That either we like each other or we don't and it's as easy as that?

I'm feeling more and more caught as I go down this path and leave the safe stuff for the riskier stuff. There's venom in there, darkness, a cheat, a hoarder, a two-faced liar, a critic. I can't write if I can't talk about that stuff.

B and I talked today about diving into the irrational. It came up in reference to gardens, when I told her to not be rational about plants. The same way you can't be rational about art, or god. How can I put this? I can read books upon books about where to put certain plants--in the sun or shade--and how much to water them, or whatever. But when you put the books aside, and just do it, and just listen in a slightly different way, you know exactly what to do with that plant. It's opening up to something beyond learned knowledge. It's like learning to dream when you're awake. Learning to feel the warmth radiating out of the shape of a petal and knowing that its meant for a warm spot.

And the more I practice it, the more I have to go for the venom. The more I have to write what is really there. The more you embrace the rational, the more you leave the rational stuff behind, like science, or being polite. It's just too hard to dig down so far and then come up saying, "Oh yes, I've had a very nice time."

Is it faith? Or is it sticking your hands down into the soil and feeling that everything is connected, and you are part of that connection. That love is connected to hate, that life is connected to death, and that flowers talk, and a person can feel one thing while feeling the exact opposite at the same time, and and that it is not so simple.

Ah, well. Sorry D. I didn't have fun at your shower. Doesn't mean I don't like you. Doesn't mean I didn't wish you well.

Prowling...

Foulbrood and queenless

Here's an update on the beehive from our beeman, Tom.

Hey Tony and Pam,

Yes, your observations are correct. One western super was removed and the honey was consolidated in the remaining one for stores for the winter. The hive is healthy but not as vigorous as I had expected. I havested only four frames of honey. The production for all the hives is down to only a third of what last year offered up. Kind of sad, plus I'm very sure that Janis's hive has foulbrood and will soon need to be destroyed. Its really an awful bacterial disease, plus I think her hive is also Queenless in the process, but it makes little difference when death is imminent. I hope all is well with you both. I'm not sure when extraction is going to take place but I wil keep you informed.........Tomas

Writing

I am here on the Oregon coast for a writing retreat. This is the first time I've connected to the world in two days. Writing is hard and lonely. I've been eating alot of junk, pacing around the room, drinking coffee, tea, wine, beer. My back hurts. I have a headache that begins in my right temple and ends behind my eye.

Men and Women in Key West isn't finished yet. I should have taken Harley Davidson's question to heart when I first read his comment...because it cuts to the heart of the problem...what is the resolution to the story? Did the narrator break up with Carlos? Did she marry him? What happened? It's a strong piece. My readers here have had intense reactions. But it's not done. Huh. Who knew?

Small House is just the beginning of what will be a much longer piece. I've been working on that most of the time I've been here, and it's hard. It's going into some deep emotional shit. But little bits of beautiful inspiration have come at important moments. I spent Thursday just free writing...blabbing my memories on the page with no shape. I went to sleep and woke up the next morning with the image of the staircase in my head, and then remembered pulling up the carpet when we moved in. I love it when that happens. I'm going home at the end of October to work more on it. I want to be there, to look at the house, walk around the streets where I used to walk. I think there's a whole book there in that little house.

It rained all day yesterday which kept me inside working. It's dry today and the beach is close by. My room overlooks a well-groomed golf course, and men in baseball caps and khaki shorts keep driving by in white-canopied golf carts. It's going to be hard to stay inside with the sun and ocean calling me out, and the stupid little men swinging their clubs around in my line of vision.

Small house

When we moved into the house, the first thing my mother did was pull up the old shag carpet. It came up easy to reveal smooth, oak hardwoods underneath. We swept up the carpet tacks and the years of dirt that had filtered down through the fibers to form a grainy sediment. The carpet backing had acted as a fine sieve, only letting the finest particles through.

It was a small house, but there was room enough for the three of us. It had a tiny pink kitchen with a pink push-button stove. A narrow staircase led to the second floor where there were three small bedrooms. My mother’s was the largest, and my brother’s and mine were exactly the same size, both with a ceiling on one end that followed the steep slope of roof above. Even though there was only a short stretch of hallway in between them, sometimes it seemed that my mother’s room was miles away.

I was a kid who wanted to exist below the radar. I had good grades and a bookish nature. My teachers liked me and I had friends, so there was little to worry about, especially in comparison to my brother, who kept getting into trouble at school. He took more of my mother’s energy. Sitting each night at the dining room table, struggling to get my brother to do his school assignments, her own college books piled on one end of the table and a mass of bills and receipts before her, she had little time for me.

But it was easier for me without my mother’s attention. So much so, that when I spent time at my friends’ houses I bristled to be around their parents. My friend Nicole, especially. When I was at her house, I felt uncomfortable until we escaped to her bedroom to listen to tapes and read magazines. Her mother stayed home during the day, and every evening her father would walk in the door and they would eat dinner together at exactly 4:30. Her mother would place neat piles of freshly laundered clothes on the foot of her bed. Nicole would ask her mom if she could go out that night. I thought, “Why bother asking?” Sometimes her parents would make her stay in, or ask her to be home by nine. My mother was just leaving the house by then, her friends pulling in the driveway ready to go out dancing. I didn’t ask to leave the house, I just went.

So on New Years’ Eve 1989, I expected my mother to be gone. She had arranged for my brother to sleep at a friend’s house, and had plans to go out with her new boyfriend. But by eight that night, she was taking off her smart red shirt dress and black heels, washing the makeup off her face, taking off the gold, braided hoop earrings, and putting on her pink bathrobe. From my room down the hall, I heard her crying.

I walked quietly to her door, and stood on the edge of the rose-colored rug. She was laying on the edge of her bed, with its large dark spindled frame that had to be arranged at an angle just so it would fit in the room. The matching dresser took up most of one wall, and a giant, heavy-framed mirror hung over it. I could see her back, reflected in its surface. She was breathing deeply, her head tucked into her chest and arms wrapped tight around her sides.

“Mom?” She didn’t answer. “Mom, I invited some friends over tonight. They’ll be here soon.”

“Shit,” she said. She got up quickly and went into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. She was running the water in the sink, and opening bathroom cabinets, banging their doors closed again. I heard her sharp footsteps across the tiles. The doorbell rang, and I went down the stairs to answer it. From the window on the landing, I could see Nicole’s parents pulling out of the driveway, dressed up for a new year’s party.

Nicole was there, and so was Gail, and ten minutes later, Seth and Erick arrived. They had a liter of Coke, potato chips, and a bag of M&Ms. We all crowded into the little t.v. room, Gail and Seth on the loveseat, and everyone else sprawled on the blue rug to watch a movie. I left my friends who were making rude noises and loud, stupid jokes to get glasses and ice for the Coke. The ice clinked, the floorboards creaked under my feet in the small kitchen, my friends turned the volume up on the television. I knew every noise was making its way up through the ceiling to where my mother was likely weeping.

She stayed upstairs all night in her room, maybe making a feeble attempt to watch Dick Clark, or maybe just listening to me and my friends. I knew she was trapped there, but I wanted her to stay out of sight. But just before midnight, she came down the stairs and went into the kitchen. She was still in her robe.

“Your mom is home?” asked Gail.

My mom appeared in the doorway. She had a stack of plastic cups and a bottle of champagne in her hands. “It’s almost 1990,” she said, and looked around the room at us. My friends were quiet. No one answered her. So she said, “Let’s have a toast.” She handed us each a cup, and popped open the champagne. She poured a small amount into every glass.

I sat there and just stared at her. Her hair was a mess. She looked tired. I didn’t want to know this lonely woman in her pink bathrobe. I had let others in to witness the look on her face, the same one I saw from the stairs when she thought I had long fallen asleep, and sat tucked in the corner of the couch listening to the same song over and over again. A tiny fragile thing, she was thinking of my father and where it all went wrong. The look that made me want to blow the roof off the place, shatter the windows and tear down the walls. Throw her out into the cold and walk the other way. The look that made me feel it was up to me to keep this place together. I wanted to wrap her up in a little package, bundle her tight and place her in a drawer or cupboard to hide her away where others couldn’t hurt her. Where she would be safe.

“Happy New Year, everyone,” she said, the tone of her voice strained into false gaiety. And then she disappeared upstairs again, leaving us to sip our champagne.

My friends’ parents pulled up shortly after midnight to pick them up. The house was quiet, and I made sure to sweep up the potato chip crumbs and stray M&Ms from the floor. My mother’s room was dark when I went upstairs, but I could heard her shifting positions under her covers as I got into my bed. I settled into place too, and drifted down into sleep.

The driveway

In winter, Gail’s mom would be outside in her red, knit hat, shoveling the driveway, even for only a quarter-inch of snow. She used a curved metal shovel to scrape along the driveway, getting right down to the surface, leaving it clean. Deep black against cold white, it clearly marked where our yard ended and theirs began.

In the summer, the driveway would be meticulously re-blacktopped and sealed. It ran in between our houses, hollyhocks and evergreen shrubs lining it on our side, and wild mint volunteering on their side, next to their side door. From my bedroom window, I looked across the driveway, to the mustard-yellow house. At night, when I was supposed to be sleeping, I would watch her mother through their kitchen window, doing the dishes, answering the phone, getting a bowl of ice cream. I’d see the upstairs bathroom light flick on and then off again, and then her dad would lumber down the stairs, past the window at the landing. Her older brother’s window usually remained dark.

Gail’s own room was on the other side of the house, but I would wait to catch a glimpse of her through the window on the landing of the stairs, padding up to bed. Sometimes, she would hear me calling her name, and she would come to the window. We would whisper across the divide. "What are you doing? Nothing. Do you want to do something tomorrow? " We imagined we could string two cans together on a length of wire, or rig a little bell so that we would know when the other was calling.

One August night, we slept out on the driveway, watching for shooting stars. There were too many street lights drowning out the stars in the sky, so we watched cars pass by instead. Tucked inside our sleeping bags we played word games and told stories, naming the mosquitoes that buzzed around our heads. Somehow we managed to sleep all night on the hard surface and woke early when the sun made its way down between the two houses, and the chill of the morning dew made it impossible to doze. When we woke, we were different people. We were no longer friends, because we knew too much about each other.

I would still wait at my window each night, but she would never come. I would think about our plan to string a wire across the divide, a line straight from my heart to hers, now disconnected. I was casting without catching anything, slack and searching.

Later that summer, I woke one morning in my own bed to the sound of voices coming from the driveway below. It was Gail and two others I recognized, Ryan and Sarah. They were just waking up too, or perhaps they had been up all night. I stayed there under the covers and listened to them talk, their voices raspy with the moist air. I knew I had to get up, go to the bathroom, make my breakfast, ride my bike uptown and pretend it didn’t matter she had left me out. I had to pretend that I hardly noticed I didn’t exist anymore. I had to pretend that I was just another neighbor, living in the house next-door.

Men and women in Key West

A warm, ripe tomato dressed in vinegar and salt is always a surprise. The sharpness of the vinegar balances the seductive feel of the fruit on your tongue.

I remember the first time I ate one that way. A small dish of tomato slices rested on the table between Carlos and me, his Mamí and Papí and Mamí's boyfriend, Ernesto. I took a slice and passed the dish to Carlos.

Carlos had warned me about his grandparents' unconventional relationship the day before, as we made the drive from Miami to Key West where they lived. Ernesto and his wife had been their neighbors for many years. When his wife passed away, he moved into the house soon after. Since Papí was too old to be interested in sex, it didn't take long for Ernesto to move into Mamí's bedroom too. Papí didn't mind too much, because he liked the company. The old men would sit in the front room together, watching television all day. It was clear from Mamí's fiery red hair stacked high on her head and her deep belly laughs that she wore the pants in the family.

The two old men piled their plates high and silently worked their way through them, as Mamí peppered Carlos with questions in Spanish. She didn't speak very much English, and I had only a semester's worth of Spanish class, so I gave up trying to follow their conversation, though I could tell they were talking about me. I took small bites of salty chicken, rice and fried plantains and tried to act like I didn't know it, letting my eyes drift around the bright blue kitchen and out the window to where neighborhood kids were playing in the street.

My plate was clean except for the tomato. They weren't my favorite, but since I didn't want to be rude, I divided it into quarters with the edge of my fork and took a bite. "Mmmm. This is the best tomato I've ever eaten," I said to Carlos, who quickly translated my words to his grandmother. "Ella dice, es major tomate que en la vida ha tenido." She smiled and pushed the dish of tomatoes toward me.

From where I sit now, hundreds of miles and more than ten years later, I can look back across that table and see what I was blind to then: an old woman full of pride for her grandson. She was expecting that he would soon have a bride.

For me, it was a cheap vacation to Florida. I had been waiting for it all winter, weighing the cost of continuing to date Carlos against spending a week on the beach. Trudging through the Rochester snow and wind, a few extra weeks seemed an easy price to pay. When we got back, my plan was to wait a few more weeks for the Viennese Ball, and then break up with him.

He was good at making a show of being a good boyfriend, bringing me roses and buying me little presents all the time. But he lashed out when I returned his phone calls too slowly, or spent an evening out with friends. Our arguments were tiresome battles, and when I would try to leave, feeling exhausted and mentally bruised, he would refuse to let me go. He'd keep me hostage in his room until I broke down and lost my anger.

Earlier that day, after we checked into the hotel where we were staying, Carlos opend a bottle of wine. He sat on the edge of the bed holding a delicately wrapped box in his hands. It was a present for me. I untied the ribbon, letting it fall to the floor and slipped off the paper. A black lace teddy lay folded inside a cushion of red tissue paper. He wanted me to put it on.

I tried it on in the bathroom with the door locked. It was cheap and itchy, something I would have never bought for myself. The material gapped between my breasts and was loose where it should have been snug. I stood on the edge of the tub so I could see myself in the small mirror above the sink. I saw the reflection of another woman--the woman Carlos wished to see. A woman who adored him and would never leave him. A woman who made him respectable to his family. A woman who would walk out the door to make love to him. I lingered for a moment on the cold tile floor inhaling the smell of rusty water and Dial soap until Carlos knocked on the door.

Mamí and Carlos chatted in Spanish as she cleared the table. As her guests, we were not allowed to help. I watched her make after dinner coffee by placing grounds and water in a small, stove-top coffee pot and set it on the burner. A pan of milk warmed next to it. She took down bright yellow cups and saucers from the cupboard, poured in the milk, then the strong black coffee and set it before me. "Café con leche," she said.

It was rich, like drinking dessert. It was more milk than coffee, which seemed odd to me, my only experience being greasy cups of coffee and single serving creamers at Denny's. Normally, I wouldn't think to sip a hot drink on a warm night, but it seemed the perfect thing.

This world, with its good tomatoes and dark coffee was like a slightly brighter version of my own. It was a place of intimate families and neighbors, spicy language and strong women. Where men and women fought and loved with a greater intensity.

Mamí smiled at me and said something in Spanish I didn't fully understand. "She says you're pretty," said Carlos. I looked at him and he looked back expectantly. "Gracias," I whispered, and stared at the floor, embarrassed.

Friends and coffee

Let no man grumble when his friends fall off,
As they will do like leaves at the first breeze;
When your affairs come round, one way or t'other,
Go to the coffee-house, & take another.
- Byron, Don Juan

Things that happen here

Firecrackers break the silence
Loose dogs roam without collars
Bees fly over the laurel hedge
Strangers walk down the back alley and kick up dust
The neighbor waters her lawn
The bus roars down Duke and passes me by
The medical marijuana card holder smokes his weed
The dandelions sprout from the dry grass
The for sale signs go up
The old woman washes her driveway with water from the hose
The earthworm is killed by the bus tire
The chicken sits atop the fence
The orange cat sleeps in the flower bed
The woodpecker shrieks at the dawn
The old woman goes to bed at nine
Four teenage boys with a pipe wrench chase after a man
The homeless search the recycling for pop cans
The ice cream truck haunts the streets
The roofs grow moss.

berry-licious

Meriweather complete

You'll be pleased to know that I finished "For Meriweather" this morning. Check it out and tell me what you think. It was hard to decide on how to end it. I didn't want to be too obvious or too trite. Other possible endings could include:

1. She discovers he doesn't have a real package, but a pair of neuticals instead.
2. He's a she-male.
3. It's a set-up! He's a undercover cop trained to ferret out genital-grabbing freaks like her!

On and on and on and on...

I went to a former co-worker's bridal shower yesterday. She wore a pink dress and a tiara. We ate bad food (everything had meat in it! the salad had salami, the pasta had ground beef...so I ate a few celery stalks and a piece of bread...no one ever thinks of the gd vegetarians), we played stupid games (bridal bingo), and watched her open her HUUUGE stack of gifts (registry: Crate & Barrel, Pottery Barn, aka. nice, expensive stuff).

Ah, it sucked. It made me depressed and self-loathing, because I had to be there for three hours with all these people I didn't know, pretending to have fun and be interested. I hate it when I can't act like myself.

It also made me sad that my mom didn't offer to throw me a shower.

I have to admit, the one really sweet thing was watching her with all her aunties and her family friends. Many of the older women there had obviously watched her grow up. Of course the shower was stupid to me; I've only known her for a short time. But to all the other women there, the crappy salad and the silly games had meaning. Behind the gooing and gahing over dishware is a powerful ritual of a girl growing up and becoming an adult, becoming one of the clan.

I resist ceremony. I know I do. It's my own fault. And then I long for it at the most inappropriate time. It would have been nice to have my mom and some of her friends that have known me all my life, all together. It's continuity, it's relatedness, and that's a good thing. When I break with the past by choosing to do things in non-traditional ways, I shoot myself in the foot, in a way. Because,

Non-tradtional=individual=an invitation for isolation.

Traditional=groupthink=accepting the will of the pack.

I can't say that'd I'd do it all differently were I to do it all again, because I've never been so keen on herd mentality. I think I'd rather chew my own leg off than be chained to the group. But observing the way other women choose to live their lives does make me question my decisions, wonder about their impact down the road.

Oh yeah...and speaking of impact...I hope that I never gave my former co-worker the link to this blog.

Spider bite

Itchy.

Supernanny meets psycho beast child

Many readers of this blog will have heard me rant about my recent theory regarding the rash of horror films that feature kids gone bad. Really bad. Like channeling-the-devil bad. For example:

The Ring

Hide and Seek

Both of these films feature a supernatural kid bent on murder. There are others where children just plain scary:

Dark Water

The Others

The Sixth Sense

My theory is that there's a surge of these films because the modern cult of childhood has caused adults to fear their children. Kids have too much power. The idea that "we should do it for the children," or that we must "protect the children," and all of that kind of rhetoric that gets tossed around has led to a climate where we are afraid to do anything even close to the kind of discipline that was common even 20 years ago. Parents have become permissive to the extreme, for fear that they might otherwise damage their little one's confidence. And without any sense of boundaries, the kids are going insane. That fear is coming out in the films of recent: "Oh my god! My kid isn't just a brat, he's Satan incarnate!"

As E. pointed out, these film are different than films like "The Exorcist" or "Poltergeist" which also featured creepy kids. In those films, it wasn't the kids themselves that were bad, but some evil, outside force that had taken advantage of the child's innocence. In "The Exorcist," they don't kill Regan, they just punish the devil that's inhabiting her body. But in "The Ring," it's definately that little stringy-haired chick who needs some ass-whoopin'.

It's no accident that television shows like "Super Nanny" have emerged at the same time. I've caught an episode where a tiny British woman rolls up in a VW beetle to a house swarming with screaming, reckless kids. The parents are besides themselves. They can't figure out why their two year old won't take a bath! The five year old won't stop hitting the dog! Their teenage daughter has dyed her hair pink and stays out all night. Super Nanny spends a few days coaching mom and dad to get a backbone and all is put right.

I suppose it wouldn't be as exciting if when, in "The Ring," Naiomi Watts makes a copy of the evil video to save her son, instead, Super Nanny arrives and gives the creepy girl a time-out. But I sure would have enjoyed it. And I suppose it would have prevented the making of "The Ring 2."

F-U-double-nizzy

Okay...here's something for the pure entertainment value of it (thanks to A&E). Here's my previous post, "The bee-hive having," translated into gangsta-speak, courtesy of Gizoogle. It's some funny shiznit.


The bee-hive doggy stylin'
I love this letta fizzy our Pusha.

Pam n Tony,

On thursday, I tizzy tha whole hive apart again. I couldn't find tha queen but there was lots of brood n I'm sure she is in there lost in tha piles of bees that is present. I did makes killa split, so I unloaded a few more of those bees n brought them over ta mah place ta requeen like old skool shit.

My gangsta attempt ta requeen tha fiznirst split failed. The queen was releazed but killed yaba daba dizzle. Don't ask me why but I placed her in tha hizzy too soon n tha bees were still stressed while in transport n relocizzles. At $14.00 a queen, I'd say its sum-m sum-m I need ta git shot calla at . Drop it like its hot.

Yo hizzle shows no signs of want'n ta swarm. It is an extremely strong hive tizzle is ready fo` tha honey flow ta start. My next move will be ta add a honey snoopa in `bout 10 days. I have bootylicious expectations as everyth'n is primed n any swizzay tendancy has ended n shit.

A couple of guard bees slipped out of tha split hizzy that I was mobbin' ta load into tha ride n a bee nailed me in mah left pusha eyelid . Slap your mutha fuckin self. When I wizzy up this AM, it felt n looked like I had been in a barroom fizzay . Keep'n it gangsta dogg. My left side of mah fizzle was really swollen now pass the glock Anotha dogg house production.. T-H-to-tha-izzat happened at `bout 4 o'clock, n I hoped thiznat you weren't return'n soon. You M-to-tha-izzust have noticed sum-m sum-m was up . Snoop dogg is in this bitch.

I left tha feeda in tha entrance but they dizzay need ta be fed fo' rizeal. At least, not in any time soon hittin that booty. Talk ta you playa. Give me a cizzay if there is any questizzles

I am from

My friend E. sent me this wonderful poem exercise, which is essentially a form of mad-lib style poem making. I had to stop everything so I could write my version right away. If you want to see the template so you can write your own, go here

Here is my poem:

I am from Fry Daddy, from powder puffs wafting silvery talc powder and Prell shampoo.

I am from the doll’s house, with its pink, push-button stove and counters, laundry chutes, sloped ceilings plastered with Duran Duran posters where I wrote the names of my crushes on the bottom of my desk chair.

I am from the Sycamore, the Linden, and the Elmwood, from Cazenovia creek, that wound its way past the cemetery toward Burger King, stinking like a sewer, from Sinking Ponds and four-leaf clovers.

I am from Amazing Grace in the kitchen, and maple spread, from Ruthie and Lois and Floyd. Audrey and Bud. Always an auntie, never an aunt.

From “practice makes perfect,” as I trudged toward ice skating or swim practice, and “you have to call them, even if they don’t call you,” when my heart was broken and lonely.

I am from speaking tongues in an evangelical church, kicked out of catholic school for wearing sideburns, asking the Sunday school teacher to define a virgin, and being stoned to death while spreading the message of Christ.

I’m from Motown and Staten Island, from Sweden and Deutschland. Pickled pig’s feet and liverwurst with mustard, Foosh soup, and little chicken, little salad.

From the stubborn toddler pouring a beer in her mother’s shoe to get attention, the ambitious girl who sold homemade potholders for change, the young woman who escaped her younger siblings by going to church.

I am from refrigerator door, dry sink, battered shoebox.

Bee bother

More Meriweather

I've updated "Meriweather." (See below.) It's such fun to write. I'm still thinking about how to end it though.