Isonomist

2012-01-26T19:53:00.000-05:00

....and then I lose my job. I got a call today that I'm being laid off in a little less than a month. It seems I'm one of the few in this rash of layoffs who's being asked to stay on past today. I suppose that's a small success. I've never told anyone at this company what this next few weeks means for me. It would be somewhat pointless now, anyway.

Here it comes

2012-01-10T20:58:00.001-05:00

January 6th- that's when he told a friend he felt "paranoid" about a cut that wouldn't heal. If he'd gone to the doctor that day, he would most likely have survived. There are other days and events I know but won't disclose here, because other people's hearts are involved, but I feel these past events move through me physically, displace me as they move the way a stone might sink through jelly. Events that, had they been slightly modified, if they'd happened a little earlier, or later, or differently, might have changed something. If someone had said or not said something. If he had let himself think about this or that, or stopped thinking about another thing. So many small moments leading always to the same place, a dark, depressing hospital room that couldn't be helped.

Life takes everything from you, but it's given you everything in the first place.

Most likely

2012-01-06T11:46:00.001-05:00

After he left with the box of old records, she opened the photo book to the shot he'd admired, and laid it on the floor, in the halo of light from her dresser lamp. Can you make me a copy of that one, he'd asked...She angled her phone so its shadow didn't obscure the shot, and zoomed in to the center of her own face. There was a bit of reflection from the floor lamp, but that couldn't be helped, she thought, and snapped the photo. Hit send.

The townhouse was quiet, all the lights were out except the lamp. Mutt had fallen asleep on the crumple of sheets and bedcover. She'd have to wake him when she climbed in herself. The papers she'd decided to keep, to take with them to Colorado, and the artworks she'd just shown J were still spread on the floor and chair; J said he'd straighten it out for her, since she had to go in to work so early tomorrow. Sunday. Last minute full day of work. She like the bridal shop. So many happy brides to be, and now she was one. Had been for almost a year. Brides would email her boss and praise her for her help. It would be a great job, if only the pay were better. But so was the art supply shop. The schedules could be weird, trying to juggle that and school and J, but it was worth it. Except it was exhausting. She could nod off at either job, or in class-- but then she couldn't fall asleep at home. Too quiet since Dad moved out. Thank God for Mutt, that pain in the butt little monster.

The photo was still uploading? Then Message Delivery Failed. Damn. She'd been laughing to herself at her little joke photo, but now she was irked. A storm was kicking up outside, maybe if she went downstairs to the patio it would go through. It wasn't quite raining so she just stepped outside with the phone and hit send again, watched the screen as the photo slowly churned through space to reach his phone. Why did it take this long? She smiled involuntarily, thinking of his expression when he got it. He might not see it till tomorrow, but that would be fine.

Ghost

2011-12-30T15:42:00.000-05:00

Today is warm (60F) and I go out for my daily walk from mom's place, picking a new route that avoids the main streets to her north and south. As I walk I realize I am very near the school I attended in second grade, then the street where our family's lawyer lives, which is also where I met my first real boyfriend. A little further on I pass the street with the name I can never get out of my head, but not sure why. Sometimes I forget who lived there. It's not till I see the dark clouds building on my left, the west, that I remember Michael Ruppert.
He was close friends with the lawyer's family, whose son had introduced me to that first boyfriend.
And what I remember is the two of us at a teen retreat my church gave, and we are sitting in front of a fire place in the main hall, everyone else is gone and we're just two lonely geeky kids happy to have someone to talk with. We really had so little in common, but we did, we were Catholic kids and it was the Midwest in the early 70s, after all. We talked for hours.

A few months later he's dead. Not just him, his whole family, shot on Easter day. We found out when we got home from a drive to my grandparents' farm in Indiana. My dad turned on the 11 oclock news, and there it was. I dont' think I quite believed it at first. But over the next months every newspaper had the Ruppert story on the front page, nearly every day. Go out to get the paper, see Mike's family sprawled dead on the floor of their grandmother's tiny house. Or the photos of his uncle, the killer.

But this is not what I was thinking as I got to Vinnedge. If I was thinking at all of anything except the weirdness of this Ohio town. I wasn't thinking about Michael at all at first. By the time I turned home I was talking to his ghost. He was surprised to see me. The rest is between me and Mike. But I was crying by the time I got to my mom's. The wind had kicked up. It was just about to rain.

And so this new age of reckoning begins

2011-12-16T14:57:00.000-05:00

We're moving. Leaving New York. I don't want to go. When people hear that we are moving they ask my husband if he is insane. You know, they tell him, Iso belongs in New York. They ask me if I think I can stand it. I've lived here my entire adult life. All my friends are here. Every job I've had since college, here. My only living son is here.

My family members take me aside one by one and solemnly grill me to make sure this is not some terrible mistake on my part. I'm not sure I can answer that. I tell myself, it's only a few years. It's only if I can stand it. It's only this or that.

I do my best, I know I agreed to let son have the loft and he's agreed to leave me a bedroom with many returns expected. He needs to be 22. He'll be ok. I look at the cupboard shelf full of teaboxes and tears well up. I have been here this long. My children were born right there in that living room. My son was dying in that same living room. Their father too. On his way to death. So much love and pain has fit into these narrow walls and it's time to let go. It should be easier. It shouldn't be so far. I don't have much choice in this. No other solution would do for my husband. Believe me I offered many. Many.

Fact is: we couldn't move at all if it weren't for me. I have the job, I'm paying for it, I'm the engine of it. It's husband wants, it's what I'm giving him, but I can't tell you what the price will be or who will finally pay it. I don't really care at this point. Something needs to be done. Something needs to change. This is why I took him to Bali. This is why I've agreed to let him move us to Austin. Not because I want to be there. But because right now, my son doesn't need me and I don't know what else to do. Maybe by giving my husband these last years of his mother's life will change things. Maybe by giving my son his freedom he will take charge of his life in ways I can't even anticipate.

It won't kill me to find out. And I can still cry.

Jungle Jim's

2011-11-25T23:44:00.000-05:00

My mom's having trouble getting around, so I go to the store for her. On Thanksgiving Day the only place open nearby happened to be the international landmark grocery extravaganza known as Jungle Jim's. Much like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you can walk the corridors of the place all day for a couple of days and still not see everything. It has aisles labeled by country, by Scoville scale, by alcoholic content. People from around the world who find themselves stuck in the Midwest travel here to find sticky rice, pork bangers, ghee, rattlesnake meat, Fiskekaker, tabouleh... it's probably the only place most of the tristate gets to see anyone in a hijab. You know what you're getting into when you get to the front entry with its cheesy giant fiberglass jungle animal display and the recorded chimpanzee laughter.
I really only needed milk and a couple of other things, but I've been there often enough that I no longer get lost among the singing animatronic cartoon characters and the towering stacks of unfamiliar food items. Let's just say it's a place where, even if you're from a hick town like this, you have to be capable of immuring yourself to the unusual in order to make it from the entrance to the checkout.

I guess that's why at first I didn't register the stares. I mean open, unabashed gawking. Not from everyone, but from certain let's say, poorly manicured? unkempt? -- mostly women. Maybe all of them women. And it happened again today when I went back for beer and crackers. I didn't feel the least bit embarrassed or self conscious. I guess that's what surprised me. I felt them staring and it made me feel glad. I knew why they were doing double takes, and I just stood straighter and prouder and looked through them like they were props designed to sell more Bud Lite and Miracle Whip and Velveeta. I hoped they took good long looks and felt every bit as embarrassed and scared and stupid as they appeared. I hope they ran home and told all their friends they saw me. I hope they all decide to never return to Jungle Jim's for fear of crossing my path. I hope they're all thinking long and hard about what they've been saying about my family, about me, and about my nephew and his fiancee, but that's unlikely. More likely they are trying right now, to think up ways to justify themselves. If these people were capable of change or growth they would have done some of it in the 30-some years I've been gone.

2011-11-22T15:25:00.001-05:00

I don't hate writing, or posting. I hate thinking. It's not helping me. The one place I get my dander up enough to post is full of kooks who hate me and my family and my family's family that I'm not even related to, and their friends, and their friends' friends. I mean, hate in real life, as much as that is possible with an intervening Facebook group. It'd be more terrifying of course if I lived in the same town with the rest of my family. A place I now refer to as Suckville, in honor of all the people who make it suck now more than it did when our family moved there in 1966. Back then my parents had to drag me there kicking and screaming from a suburb of DC. Now it's pretty much the same, except it's mom guilting me from NYC. And now I have to gird my loins and wade into the middle of what could be an episode of 48 Hours on ID, or just a very, very isolated and tense group of people in one or two places with the curtains drawn at all times so the stalkers can't tell which one of us drives a boxy car.

I suppose if you live in a boring little suburb with no cultural center and no intellectual life whatsoever, you will find that the local entertainment isn't tv, it's gossip. Even tv is gossip. They watch tv so they can gossip about what they saw there. And now we've been on tv, so we're fed into the grinder like Kardashians. I liked it better when we just moved there and no one knew us nor cared to.

2011-10-26T02:47:00.002-04:00

A friend once endowed me with his earthly possessions. I meant to keep them for him, but after a few years I realized he had a place to live again, and didn't seem to want any of it any more. It wasn't completely up to me, I was still with my ex and the only thing he was sentimental about was stuff he'd made himself. Now, my ex, he's been dead for 8 years and I still have way more of the stuff he'd made himself than I can count. When I moved back in, after his death, I threw a lot away, not a lot, just some of the bigger, less successful paintings. They took up way too much space. A whole room. I rescued the ones I liked; had to drag some back from the street when Jesse came back from school and started carving out his apartment from the body of the loft. But it was all his father had, you know. For the kids. Kid. I should have had more of them so I'd never have to stop using the plural.

It's mostly paintings, he made thousands of them. And pottery. Not much of it is useful exactly. The ceramics--he was learning the form while teaching it to seniors or was it kids? At a summer camp when he was young. There are some esthetically pleasant pieces. I don't know what my son will want with any of it, but that's not up to me. I suspect he may throw it all away when I leave town. That would be sad, and not because I have any real attachment to the works. Sad because it's what his dad would have hated most, and he still loves his dad. And I never hated the man enough to hate what he made. Or lie that it wasn't any good.

I'm up late tonight, or rather woke up really early-- midnight. I have no sleep schedule lately. I'm lucky I'm working from home. I'm here trying not to have a long, heartfelt conversation with my son because I think it would probably come out badly. What's the right way to tell your only remaining child that you will die if anything happens to him? I want to say that I want him to feel fulfilled in life, to pursue things he cares about; but it's all just a way of saying I'm terrified of losing him. I want his life to seduce him into staying alive so I can stay alive. Isn't that what it means, to be happy? Content? I prefer fulfilled. It sounds more valuable, and rare, and rewarding. I want him to be glad he's alive. Because that means he won't take stupid risks, or be depressed, or sit on his ass doing nothing. But you can't tell people this kind of thing.

So I try to shut up and be positive. He's too old to have his mom even hinting around at how to live his life. He's too much like me to listen, anyway.

I ran into that friend, many years later, out in the East Village. He recognized me, but I didn't recognize him at first. It was the Jamaican accent when he called my name that made me see his face as him and not some random Village guy. He'd aged so heavily since the day he left his boxes at the loft. He was wearing layers of lighter clothes to keep warm, none of them particularly clean. His hair was shot with gray and straggly. The edges of his eyes had started to yellow. When he talked I could see how long his teeth had grown and I fretted for him, but it wasn't really my place to ask. He told me he'd gotten a subsidized apartment, "just saving it for my daughter Aiana. That's all I care about. That she has a good place to live when she comes back." I hugged him then for the last time. I never saw him again.

Now here I am, saving it for my son.

Ready to cross that fine line...

2011-10-23T02:38:00.001-04:00

Only the young believe that you have to experience the lows to appreciate the highs in life. It's not my experience. Maybe the personal lows that exist mostly in your own mind, maybe the naturally paced lows of losing a parent or leaving school, or even divorce. But the real lows in life that are wrenched from your soul and leave scars? What on earth subverts that? I used to hope people didn't know what I meant about things like this. Now, after Jesse, after Katelyn, and what the town mob has done to my family, I'd rather more people understood exactly how miserable life is, really, under all the Disney bunting. Because if you understand that, you will not be so quick to visit your sick, miserable need to prettify life with easy lies that destroy the lives of other people who made the mistake of being victims even once. Those lies that make you feel good about your (stupid by definition) world view -- because if you have a world view, it's stupid, trust me. Or don't take my word for it. Wait until your ridiculous suppositions and assumptions leave you open to a good side-winding punch in the gut. Then dress that mess up and dance in it. Fucker. Oh, I'm sorry, did I hurt your feelings? Sorry. Sorry sorry sorry. It's better if I let life hurt them for you, I suppose. You've been warned. Be offended at me, but remember, life is still out there.

And notice I didn't say death, exactly. Life and death are the same thing. Do you see that yet? There is no life without death. You will either lose everything and everyone before you die, or lose it all afterward. You think life is all good and death is bad; but you're wrong. Do you think abusive husbands have two sides, because they don't. The "good" side is the mask that leaves you vulnerable to the bad. I shouldn't even use those childhood terms, good and bad. Life is what causes you to die. Love is what causes you to suffer. The Buddhists won't tell you this directly. But they don't deny it. They just narrow the definition of love until all it means is a form of desire. I want my son. I want my mother. I want to live. It is desire that causes suffering. You must desire to live in order to stay alive. Suffering is life. But that's not what they tell you. No one enjoys life more than the sadist or the serial killer. Like children their world is about pleasure in life, in the suffering (that is, the life) of other people. Why do you doubt me? You know people who enjoy watching you suffer, and who feel better about themselves when your life turns to shit. You may not admit that you know this about them, but that doesn't make their victory over you any less pleasant to them. And yes, the sadists and serial killers and children in grown bodies are lying to themselves. They are subject to every misery you encounter, with even fewer tools than you to survive them. They get theirs, you see. You may not enjoy that, though. You may wish that on no one, not even your worst enemy. Not even on yourself.

If you don't know what I mean, just wait. It's waiting for you, just like it waited for her.

Suspicions

2011-09-10T18:35:00.000-04:00

So now that there are hate pages online, blaming my nephew for her disappearance. The people who post there are at liberty to create innumerable scenarios, all of which end with him killing her. What is it in these people's hearts that makes their inner lives so ugly? A small sample for you: they argued over something, he killed her, then sent texts to himself to make it look like she was still alive. He lured her out of her townhouse, killed her and drove her 4 hours away, dropped her body and came back without anyone knowing he'd left. He took her out of her home in a sack and burned her in his friends' fire pit. There was a wiccan full moon ceremony and she was accidentally killed. He and six of his friends conspired to kill her and now the six friends are his alibi. He has the police completely fooled. He lies all the time. He cries too much. He never cries. His body language shows he's lying. He speaks about her in past tense. He didn't thank the searchers. He did thank the searchers. It all proves he's guilty.

One woman searched his name and found everyone in the area with the same name and all their criminal records. My nephew had 3 small speeding fines, all a couple of years old. She felt perfectly free to post this online. Another one found a poetry site he'd posted on when he was in high school. Which she mined for "dark" poems. She actually got upset and railed at the other haters when they weren't grateful for all her hard work snooping into his life. Another has no problem describing all the cars in my sister's driveway, who she believes they belong to, and where they go. Yet another who says she works with my sister, or knows someone who does, and claims my sister told them that my nephew has a learning disability. Some of these people say they live near my family, know this or that person, or know no one in the story, but know exactly what must have happened.

They say my nephew is a wiccan, a Juggalo (!), a slacker who K outgrew and he killed her because she was leaving him. They know where he works and tell each other to call his company and ask for him to find out where he is. They write scenarios where my nephew and his fiancee were playing poker with a third person, who flirted with her, and my nephew killed her out of jealousy. The spent literally days analyzing a photo from her missing poster, mistakenly thinking it's the same photo K sent my nephew the night she went missing. It's not. Yet they see his face, his glasses, a checkered shirt, in the shadows on her collar. But it's not the same photo, it was taken long before she disappeared. When someone who knows them tells them this, they quiet down for a few days, and then go back to the same photo, this time turning it black and white, and sideways, and analyzing what they think is his shadow taking a picture of her picture with her phone, to make it look like she sent him the picture.

They hate me. They call me the crazy aunt. I had gone to one page to correct what I thought were some mistaken ideas about what had happened. They told me I was lying, J was lying-- they sent me threatening messages. Then I saw a familiar pattern, I could tell that some of the profiles were actually fakes, what we used to call sockpuppets. One of the sockpuppets claimed he was a private investigator and that he was snooping around my sister's house. He gave a description of the house and yard. So I responded that I was cutting and pasting that post and sending it to the cops. Within an hour my phone was ringing-- a girl I knew who'd gone to high school with K. She talked a mile a minute. She said that the person with the fake profile had called her and begged her to convince me not to call the police. the girl would not let me speak, she hardly took a breath, telling me how it was really a woman, that the woman had two kids, single mom, afraid she'd lose her job, she was just trying to help bring out the message to find K....on and on. I finally got her to shut up long enough to tell her that if the woman wanted me to do anything, she'd have to admit what she'd done, and stop posting as all these fake names.

She never did. The same girl called my sister and told her that the cops had already visited this woman. To this day I have no idea what really happened. I don't care. The sockpuppet's been a lot quieter, and there are a lot less of them on the page. I think their owner has moved on to other things, or gotten tired of being called by the police.

how it works

2011-09-03T21:54:00.000-04:00

so we couldn't see really what the smell was. We hung over the guard rail and parted the screen of branches and there was nothing down there. The smell at that vantage was more like old garbage than death, and we cut ourselves some slack, no need to go verify that this was either runoff from Mount Rumpke, the local landfill operation, or someone's idea of a compost heap.

We spent the next few days coming up with new places to search, meeting up with other unofficial search teams, roaming around contracting poison ivy and chiggers, mostly. There was literally nothing to find. We saw parts of this town that I hadn't found in16 years of living there and looking for places to hide from everyone else who lived there, including my parents. At one point, my sister and I were poking around the woodsy banks of yet another dry creek bed, another party spot hidden under the arched brush, I told her I wished I'd known about all these places when I was a kid. And then I thought-- maybe it's better that I never did.

We stayed for over a week, till my mom was sick of looking at us, till we had run out of places to look, till we couldn't stand another minute of walking eyes to the ground, wondering what exactly we could possibly be looking for. There was nothing. We would run into other searchers, one the family of some kids I'd gone to school with-- their mother had been at my mother's birthday the year before. "I grew up walking up and down this creek," one said, of the run that intersected Groh lane. He had been friends with my brother, but I hadn't seen him since he was 11 or 12. It was hard to accept that that burnt brown, skinny little boy with the mop of dark hair was the same person as this 45 year old dad with the greying goatee. I guess because it meant I was old. I couldn't afford to be old. Not yet.

clues

2011-08-29T02:15:00.000-04:00

My sister and I had continued up the river road a bit from the cars. We checked every gap in the underbrush. I saw hidden places in the woods off the road that I wish I'd known when I was 16, ready to escape this tiny town. They're all empty though. No one's even had a beer back here in at least a month. We pass the woods, moving up the road to a small clearing. In the middle of it is a sign. On the other side it says "Welcome to Fairfield." On our side, it's just brown paint and wheel marks in the grass around a little planting of flowers that someone's been watering. We feel the same shot of dread and look at each other, then go for the perimeter. No new breaks in the weeds. Reach the next road, cross the river road, check that side as we head back to the cars. There's an abandoned van in a yard, with a cage door behind the front seats. But you can tell from the weeds, and the dirt on the door handles that it's been sitting there untouched for years. The woods behind it seems dense and overgrown, even in this humid drought. A few steps down the road from the van, along a small wooded ravine, we smell the sharp sweet scent of decay.

This undiscovered corner of life.

2011-08-27T19:45:00.002-04:00

Until a loved one is missing, no one considers how strange it is to talk about their loved one in the present tense. They text all the time, she wants to do x, he is excited about y... I mean, how would you know? But if you say they "were" then everyone jumps on that as a sign you have no hope or some complicity.

There is no tense for the abducted.

Search

2011-08-20T01:10:00.000-04:00

It's difficult to imagine the sang froid with which you can walk a dry creek bed looking for the body of someone you love, until you actually do it. The three of us who'd grown up here knew we'd have to go to this spot. It's wild, untravelled, overgrown, and close enough to her house that someone could have made it here with her unseen after midnight in the first hours of Sunday. We hike down the embankment from the river road into the ravine. I'm drawn to look under the bridge. The others begin walking the other way, toward the preserve.

It's hot and humid in this river valley town. Our clothes are drenched with sweat. The walk is slippery and the rocks wobble where the last of the water has collected. Here and there the stream pops into being, babbles over broken rock, fills a pool deep enough to swim. The ghost shadows of minnows race up and back along the last of the flow.

As we walk, we all look down at the gravel, sand and flat rock that line the nameless creek. Our conversation, before we split up, consists of deciding which direction looks like the more obvious way you'd drag a body or force someone to walk who is possibly barefoot. We look for bent grass and weeds, broken branches, anything that could indicate human passage along the creek bed, and into the woods on either side. I find a bootprint, and can recognize from the pattern that it's got a Vibram sole. My sister and my husband continue in the other direction, my brother, my niece, my son and I walk past the bridge, toward the river we already know has been searched by helicopter and on foot.

Suddenly there's a man standing near us. Are you guys looking for something? And then he says, is this about that girl who's missing? I'm from out of state, but I read about it. Yes, I tell him, we're family members. He says he's sorry, can't imagine what we're going through, the usual things people say when your life looks like hell from the outside. I check his boots to make sure they're not Vibram soles. He says he's writing a book about this little lick of water, that it used to be the mill race for a nearby town. He says he is rewriting the history of this area. It sounds so silly when he says it. But I'm sure to him it's a big deal. He's following this part of it back to the river, and walks on downstream, disappearing around a bend.

None of us cry, but we don't shout her name either. If she's here she probably can't hear us. We are looking for things we think she was wearing when she disappeared. A grey t shirt. A gold engagement ring. A red cellphone. And there's a grey t shirt tangled in the hanging roots of a tree. I take a photo of it, but it looks as if it washed into the roots during a storm. And I hope it's been there for longer than five days. Then my brother says, "What color was her cellphone?" And we all turn. There in the wet sand, he's probing at a red cellphone. We call my sister. She thinks it had some kind of lanyard or fob hanging off it, like a kid would have. That's how Kate was, nothing left unpersonalized. But it's not the right kind of cellphone. We photograph its location, then my brother picks it up to bring to the police station after we're done.

My son finds an abandoned camp site, with clothes and burn marks, but there's moss growing on the clothes. She's only been missing for a few days. He heads back down to the creek bed, but I step a little deeper into the woods, and find a trail. Ahead, there are branches hanging down and dying weeds that prove no one's walked this way in months, so I turn and hike back a ways toward the road and bridge, just in case. There's nothing. My family has moved down toward the river.

It feels odd to be alone in this abandoned place. I try calling out to the others and only my son responds-- by texting me to ask if I had said something. He and my brother and niece are at the river already. The historian has found some more bootprints, pointed them out, and then headed back. I never even heard him pass, from a few feet up the bank. When we meet at the cars, we plot out the next place to look, walking along the overgrown stretches, making sure there are no new breaks in the brush that would indicate someone might have been tossed back there recently. Then we drive back to clean up, because there's a vigil at a local church for her later tonight. And after that, we turn on the local news, and we're on every channel.

What is wrong with the Fairfield Ohio PD?

2011-08-16T20:49:00.000-04:00

Honest to God, this poor kid has been missing for three days now, the PD didn't do crime scene forensics on her house, never contacted the K9 search unit in Dayton, and doesn't even know you can subpoena the phone company to ping a missing person's cell phone-- and that it works even if the phone is shut off and the battery is discharged. When a searcher asked why they won't contact a K9 search team, one of the officers said that after a few hours the scent trail would be gone. HOLY CRAP. I understand that this is a relatively small PD, but for godsakes, they can google!

2011-08-15T15:43:00.000-04:00

Please help us find Katelyn. She's engaged to my nephew, recently graduated from art school and has a new job she loves. They were due to be married and move to Colorado this fall. John last saw her Saturday night at midnight; when he left, she was going to bed. He didn't hear from her the next day, nor did she respond to calls or texts, so he went over to see if she was okay. Her car, phone, purse and keys were still there, and her dog had been shut up in her bedroom (she never does that). No one has heard from her since.

Enough.

2011-08-14T22:49:00.000-04:00

I have seriously, seriously been through enough in my life. I don't want to have another miserable day, and right now I'm having way too many of them over shit that is nothing nothing compared with what's gone before. It's just a matter of how to get out of this, and how much of it I have to get out of. I do not stick around and wade through layers of shit to prove anything to anyone anymore. I can tell when there's nothing else but that on the other side. And right now, it looks like more shit the further I go down this road.

Photographer

2011-07-25T16:30:00.000-04:00

Alex takes me home with him afterward sometimes and we sit around talking about the other models, about other clients of his, art directors we hate, shop talk really. He's got a good eye, the problem is that for him the camera sees things the way he does, so when he doesn't have a good AD or doesn't like the subject, you can tell by looking at the shot. He finally started bringing his own stylist, taught her photography, really took her under his wing, the daughter of his friends, and it was a couple of years before he admitted to me he'd fucked her, too. But that was later, when we drove up to see her at her new school, Bennington, at the beginning of the fall semester when the students were roaming the campus looking for apples high in the trees, carrying long poles with wide-mouthed cans nailed to the top. You would see them clustered here or there at a trunk, like one many-legged insect, its long proboscis probing the branches. And she, her fingers were black with pigment. She'd been painting a lot which was good, but what of, and the sheer amount of black alarmed me. Counting backwards as I watch them talk I realize that she had to have been 13 when she started with him and this is sort of when I stop wanting to be friends.

But that hasn't happened yet, right now we're at one end of his nearly empty loft, and he's trying to tell me something about a trip and photos in the woods and...

I can't find the fucking fawn
he snaps as he's tearing through his drawer of slides and he sounds more upset than if there were an actual fawn trapped in the cabinet somewhere.

What my camera saw.

2011-07-19T12:35:00.002-04:00

http://s633.photobucket.com/albums/uu60/Isonomist/Rocky%20Mountains/

There are more, but that's enough for now. Like so much in life.

Rocky Mountain High

2011-07-11T15:48:00.000-04:00

I finally figured out that "Rocky Mountain high" is altitude sickness. Everyone staggers around like drunks once you get to about 12000 ft. It's hilarious. You can tell who the most devout Muslims and Mormons are because they don't have a clue how to look sober up here.

Coin-cidence
About 12500 ft up and a few miles into the park is the Alpine Visitors' Center. While I was there enjoying the view, an Irish family beelined to me to ask me to take their photo. They've been from NYC to Montana to Utah and now the top o' the Rockies with us, and about 30 elk and 3 marmots. Just so happens I was in Dublin this very time last year. More, I had just given the cafeteria cashier an Irish 20c piece I happened to have in my pocket.

This trip has given me some reason not to go to Kilimanjaro. I had several days of painful migraines, and spent the hours after the 4th of July fireworks in so much pain I nearly begged hubby to take me to the hospital. The thing about a migraine like that is, there really isn't much they can do except shoot you up with painkillers and steroids. if the triptans aren't working, you just have to hang on and try not to beg for sweet sweet death, until the searing pain and nausea decide to let you live. And that was at 7500 feet. Our 3rd night, I was over 8500 ft, and felt like I had asthma. We were following the "hike up, sleep down" technique but it took a lot longer for me to adjust to each level than I had hoped.

I was fine by day 4, up to 14000 ft. If this were Kili, I'd still have a mile to go. Straight up. I'm not sure I can take it. Maybe if we moved to Colorado...

Can we talk?

2011-06-30T17:19:00.000-04:00

First, the lady in the next cubicle really needs to stop eavesdropping on my phone calls and then asking me for more details about them because I was talking too quietly for her to hear it.

Next, note to everyone in every office, even you have a door: we can all hear you. We can hear you clipping your disfigured toe nails. We can hear your insipid ring tone even when you can't. We can hear you talking to your date/GYN/sponsor. We can hear you gossip/apply for jobs while you're supposed to be helping someone here finish a project. Heck, the cats in the alley downtown can fucking hear you.

I try not to talk loud enough for you to hear me. Kindly return the favor. If you could use a monotone while you're doing it, even better.

I have been emailing over-the-top suicide notes to my husband all day begging him to get a job, any job, just get one so I can get out of this shit hole before I kill someone preferably the vp who sits right next to me and can't mind her own goddamn business and just be happy I'm the best editor she's got and stop trying to fix me because I ain't broke, or maybe the HR person who tells me I can go remote as long as I leave town and take a 15% pay cut (why? Do I get to work 15% less? No. Can I make 15% more errors? Will I laugh 15% more when I quit?) anyway, each email more desperate than the last because who knows, it could be menopause, but it feels like I'm in the wrong job and doing too much for too many people for not enough. Oh wait, that's motherhood and marriage.

So that's what's happening.

2011-06-08T12:55:00.000-04:00

I just realized yesterday that I took my last zoloft some time last week. Now I finally understand why I've been hearing the "zaps" so typical of going off antidepressants, why I'm so weepy and forgetful, why every little ache hurts so much more. I have to laugh at myself for not putting it all together, or at least considering it might happen, but I tapered off so slowly this time that I was using a 7 day medication tray, and had gotten down to 25 mg every 3rd day when I quit, so basically I didn't even realize I'd quit. Now I'm not on any daily prescriptions at all. It's awesome. Even if I can't leave the house without a keeper.

A moment of grace is a dangerous thing.

2011-06-07T16:32:00.000-04:00

So I was walking home last night, singing Home of the Heroes and crying about Jesse, and this group of girls strolls around me and one goes, "I ain't gonna steal your purse, white lady!" And I said, "what do you need, five dollars? How bout we go for a drink?" And her friends were grabbing her saying come on come on, and I was like, really, let's go to the bar and get a drink." Looking her in the eyes so she could see that I wasn't joking, or angry at her. Letting her see into me if she dared.

I was crying because Jesse is gone forever, trying to hold my tears back so I could talk, and she's younger than he would be now, and she was just kidding around using me, a total stranger white lady on the street to make her friends laugh and didn't realize I ...was bleeding my heart out on a public street at 11 at night. Jesse. She and I would have probably had a nice chat, but her friends (understandably) did not want to cross that bridge from wherever they were to the bleeding hell behind my eyes.

She was looking then, you could see the micro expression (what you look like when you realize you just stepped in way over your head but this is a New York street and you get your poker face back fast as you can) and I could feel the tears streaming down my face again, and I know she saw them and realized that I wasn't afraid, I was just dying inside. Poor thing. I wonder if she'd ever seen that before in her life. Living death. I wonder.

And then she was my own daughter. I couldn't tell her that. I would have done anything for her.

Another slow-motion disaster for my people

2011-05-13T17:21:00.000-04:00

From Zachary Richard's excellent Zack's Bon Ton, a song I can't get out of my head as the Mississippi swells higher, and the government can only drown one Cajun homeland to save another.

Water’s on the river rising
More water come more land float away
People from Catahoula down to Berwick Bay
They got no place left to stay

When the water come out the basin
There ain’t nothing waterproof
Standing on the levee with the river raging
I’ve got nothing left to lose

Big river / Big river’s on the rise
Big river / Is gonna overflow
Big river / Is gonna wash us to the sea

Back in 1927
Six feet of water in Evangeline
Now the government trying to tell us
They say that the levee’s gonna hold next time

Big river / Big river’s on the rise
Big river / Is gonna overflow
Big river / Is gonna wash us to the sea

I’ve seen the water come under the levee
Boiling out from a crawfish hole
And before the sun was setting
Four feet of water in my front door

Big river / Big river’s on the rise
Big river / Is gonna overflow
Big river / Oh Mighty Mississippi’s on the rise
Mighty Mississippi is gonna overflow
Big river is gonna wash to the sea

Oh my baby come back, come back

2011-05-03T23:17:00.000-04:00

I miss you so much, I can't walk up 5th Avenue without seeing you at 2 running to the corner of a building and stopping, waiting for me, to grab my hand and cross the street. I can't stand walking by the little garden in front of your best friend's house, and all the things that happened in that little apartment, and how his mother stopped letting you be his friend.

It breaks my heart. All of it, everything you were robbed of in life, but most especially life. You were so full of life, the last person anyone would have pictured sick. I have a picture of you and that same best friend at 3, him with his braces and crutches, and you dressed like Robin Hood, oh my god. How am I supposed to keep living?

Neurologists are overpaid assholes.

2011-05-03T17:30:00.000-04:00

That is all.

Fortunately, tonight Peach is throwing a 70s theme party downtown, so I've got my black pleather jacket and striped shirt. And neon pink leopard print shoes.

So that sucked.

2011-04-29T13:13:00.000-04:00

I've been having headaches every morning that go away when I stand up (allergic to my bed?). I had a temperature swing about every day (hot flash?). I couldn't think straight and my typing was worse than ever (senility?). At night, when I closed my eyes, it felt like they would pop out of my eyelids, and bright white halos the size of pennies glowed against my eyelids. (glaucoma? thyroid? migraine?). Irritable at work and home (going insane?). Hubby made me go to the doctor, I forget what made him push, except I was still feeling crappy and it had been 2-3 weeks of this by now. The doctor nearly sent me to the ER. The only meningitis symptom I didn't have was nausea and vomiting. On the plus side, I lost 8 pounds.

Truth and Fiction.

2011-04-13T12:48:00.000-04:00

"The difference between truth and fiction is that fiction has to make sense."-- from The International, more or less borrowed from Mark Twain.

Stories are starting to form in my head again. I try to write down the bones, in case I ever have the energy to flesh them out. They're almost memoirs, things that really happened, that I intend to change enough to make sense of them. There's one in particular about my college boyfriend: he's fresh in my mind lately, because I saw his Facebook page a while back, and I wouldn't have recognized him, in looks or in manner. Back then, he was tall, slim, with curly hair and big brown eyes, Botticelli's Mercury come to life. He drew his own comic book series, read Rolling Stone, worked in a record store and created silkscreened rock n roll tee shirts from whatever I wanted. I still have a couple: Lou Reed's Coney Island Baby cover, a quote from life in the fast lane (Everything All The Time). Now he's a fat drunk Rush Limbaugh fan. I couldn't bear it. I feel sorry for his wife and kids. But the story would be about the time he used to work at a porn movie theatre. Which was porn during the week and on Sundays was jammed with Indian families for Bollywood marathon Family Day. But I ADD.

I'm always afraid I'll forget things. I know I have, things that were important, that friends and family have had to remind me of. Each of those is its own story, as well. I should list those, too I think. I realized that one of my worst flaws as a writer is that I like all my characters too much, and forget that they need flaws. It would be easier to write actual fiction if I felt a little more detached. Superior even. The best writers seem to be able to jump from utter identification with their characters to utter contempt. Or both at the same time. Or some formula like that.

And I've already forgotten what I was thinking of while trying to write that bit about college boyfriend. There's so much more. None of it yet makes sense.

Whatever.

2011-04-04T15:42:00.000-04:00

So I'm trying to talk to my mom about her possible visit this summer, and my aunt finds out I'm on the phone and literally snatches the cell out of my mom's hand. This is the aunt whose name means "narcissistic flake" in our family slang. As in "Don't be a (insert name of aunt)."

She has an annoying habit of presenting you with a gift and then telling you she bought it for herself in some exotic country and when she got home she decided she didn't like it and that's why you're getting it. It's like she can't help poisoning everything she does.

I feel bad for her that she is incapable of understanding why she alienates her family, and it's true that my mom and her other sister by their endless childhood taunts and torments contributed to her inability to embrace her full self, but it's impossible to fully love a narcissist. There's just not enough room for you.

So anyway, she's telling me how she's getting better and how much she weighs and I'm trying to be kind because I know she's been having a hard time with her health and I truly am glad that she's gone from 90 something pounds to 115, she needs the weight, and she has a whole litany of health complaints that she usually ticks off for anyone she can collar long enough.

Then she goes into more stuff about herself and wants me to send her all this information about health (because she knows I have that kind of stuff) and of course I will.

She tells me she's recently spoken to a cousin of mine who is within a year of my age (which my aunt knows because she was there when we were born, we were even born in the same hospital, you know what I mean?), she called him for his birthday and asked him how old he was and he says, "53" and she's telling me this and as if she suddenly remembered some rule about letting the other person talk, she asks me how old I am. And when I tell her, her response is, "I guess I can't keep telling people I'm in my fifties!" and she's not kidding.

She asks me about myself finally and after about three sentences (which is a lot of patience on her part, so I know she's trying), she tells me that she wants to get well enough to go back to Cambodia and help the poor children. Then she tells me that the last time she took a long flight she rewrote her will so that "half of it goes to poor children in Cambodia and the other half is split between poor children in India and Africa, and the rest will go to you kids." because it's so soothing to her when she's going on a long flight in case anything happens to her she'll die happy knowing that through her will she'll have accomplished the good she'd set out to do in life. Now I know she's probably spent almost every penny she's ever made, mostly on travel to places like Cambodia and India. But that's not the point. The point is that Aunt C. feels good about herself. Better than me, in fact, because she has sacrificed her fortune and her life to save the poor brown babies simply by flying to Turkey to see the Hagia Sophia again, or taking a bus with her (much) younger Indian lover to Kashmir and nearly getting kidnapped by terrorists.

"What a great idea," I tell her, and I can't think of any reason why it should be my business what she does with her will; I wasn't expecting anything anyway. Why would I? Whatever she willed me would probably come with a note saying she didn't like it and that's why I'm getting it.

Nostalgia food

2011-03-30T19:11:00.003-04:00

Creole Wednesday quick red gravy

1/4 cup olive oil (the more fruity the better)
3 cloves garlic, smashed and diced
1 med onion diced
1/2 c green pepper
1/3 c green onion tops
1 rib of celery or sm. handful of celery tops
2-3 tbs tomato paste
1 20 oz can tomato puree
3 bay leaves whole
1/3 cup fresh parsley
1 tsp ground thyme
1/2 tsp each dried oregano, and basil
1/2 tsp each black and white ground pepper
touch of cayenne or chipotle pepper, ground

Put a cast iron skillet on low heat, add oil, tomato paste, bay leaves and garlic, let warm until garlic is translucent. Do not brown. Add onions and celery and stir until coated with tomato paste, turn up the heat to medium, and cook until translucent to toasted. Add the rest of the ingredients, bring to a boil, stirring occasionally. Then turn down to simmer for 1/2 hour to 45 minutes. Taste, to correct seasoning. If it's not tangy enough, add a little lemon juice. If it's not sweet enough, add a touch of sugar or molasses. Serve over any pasta, top with parmesan or romano cheese. You can add browned ground beef or meatballs. Serves 4. Best if shared with Mom and Dad, and husband and your sons but take what you can get.

Doc

2011-03-29T12:42:00.000-04:00

I'm going after work to see my grad school advisor speak at B&N. I'm probably going to buy his book so he can sign it, even though he's already signed one for me before, when he was my professor. Keep Writing, he wrote back then. I wonder what he'd say if he asks me whether I'm still writing. Yes, a blog. Five blogs. I finished the novel, and sent it around, got an agent, but no publisher. I think about writing fiction now, but mostly don't feel like it.

I hardly read it anymore. I can't say exactly why. Maybe life has most of my attention now. Divorce, remarriage, losing a son can really snap you awake. Yeah, life got my attention alright.

I think about how fiction, a sports event, war, and political events work on the mind. The outcome is what you anticipate most, the outcome of each interaction, toward an end point; but with fiction one person is in control of the story. You may want to reread a book or rewatch a movie, but in sports and politics, few want to replay the whole process again. I've known people who will read the last page of a book before they start, but no one wants to know how a football game ends until they see it. No one wants to be telegraphed the end of a good movie. In war, the moves are replayed as lessons in what to do or not to do next time. In politics, there is no real end. That's the fascinating part. There's no season, no third act. It's always in medias res. If you believe in good vs evil, it can be maddening.

Doc used to tell us to keep a journal, that his idea for Ragtime came from simply describing the room where he was writing, then researching who the architect was, and reading historical accounts of his life and times. Stanford White and the Gibson girl. It happened that I read the Alienist around the same time I read Waterworks. If you want to learn the difference between a writer and an author, I suggest you do the same. In fact, I just might do so again.

To the 6 ft man in the blue columbia jacket

2011-03-17T18:26:00.000-04:00

and dark blond hair just long enough to prove it curls: I hope you weren't too nonplussed by the middle aged lady staring at you on Park Avenue yesterday. You reminded me of someone, so much that I had to force myself not to walk over to you. For a few minutes it was hard to convince myself you weren't him. Somewhere in my head, you were. So real that I could feel him walking across the street and coming up behind me, a little put off that I hadn't come to his side of the street. But I turned and it was a whole different person. I know it wasn't real. But still. I thought of all the times after he left to go live with his father, that we would run into each other on the street, or rather, I would only see him because he was standing in front of me saying, "Mom? Mom!" as if I were the one who had left him. He wrote it off to my nearsightedness; but I think it was a defense mechanism. Don't see the angry boy. Don't see the angry boy. And he would chide me a little for not noticing him, then chat with me as if he had never hated me. As if he loved me with all his heart and had no idea how he'd ripped me apart by choosing his father's flattery, bribes, and lies over me. Me not perfect, but better than being bought at 13. I understood. I did. Fathers hold most of the cards for 13 year old boys.
---
They sent his driver's license renewal in the mail. I opened it, half curious. What, I wonder, is the use of an eye test for someone who no longer has eyes? Organ donor selection for someone whose organs were so full of poison even the hospital didn't want them, and at any rate, gone to dust now. To anyone else this piece of mail is just another boring form to fill out, but for me it's the latest reminder that the loss that shattered my life down to the roots didn't register with the rest of the world.

Katrina=looting; Japan=stocking up on supplies

2011-03-16T14:53:00.000-04:00

‎I've been holding my tongue at comments from RT friends and Internet blogs alike about how wonderful and self disciplined the Japanese are and how terrible the Katrina victims were. There's just no way to compare the two events, not just because of the difference in proportion, but because the two countries' cultures are so different. Another false perspective employed by those who wish to demonize my hometown is the unmentioned fact that you can't single out New Orleans as an entity distinct from the USA in general (although sometimes I'd like to, especially since Plessy v. Ferguson).

For one thing, US media has a completely different philosophy and business model than Japan does; and than its own international desks. Part of this difference is based in culture: in Japan, you don't sensationalize tragedies, or crime. In the US, that's all we'll read when we pick up a paper. Both New Orleans and Japan have organized crime, New Orleans' revolving mostly around drug gangs. Japan has a huge crime syndicate called the Yakusa, that has its hand in pretty much the same things Drugs, prostitutes, theft, murder. Never heard of em? American news sensationalizes crime, Japanese news plays it down. Crime gangs are so accepted in Japan that they put up signs to advertise the location of their headquarters.

You cannot compare the news reports on the two disasters, because they are based on two different ideas of what constitutes news/journalism. As is now commonly known, the reports of crime during the post-Katrina flooding were greatly exaggerated. Even the mayor and police chief were reporting rapes, murders, looting and shootings that never took place. But if you watch Fox or read most accounts today (from people who weren't there), you would never know this. You probably believe that babies were being raped and helicopters shot down while TV sets were marched out on the shoulders of thousands of black teens in brand new sneakers, for months on end. You've seen the same handful of photos I have. So many times that in your mind it was an endless crime event loop. Stuff was taken, but mostly food, clothes, diapers and supplies.

People in Japan are taking stuff out of damaged stores, too. We're just not calling it crime because they're Japanese. They're calling it "scavenging for supplies." There are no doubt as many instances per capita of misbehavior and desperation in damaged areas of Japan as New Orleans. But in Japan they don't broadcast it, or exaggerate it through rumor and bad journalism.

This disaster is so much worse than Katrina. 10K people have died, entire towns wiped away. But it also involves an entire country, with its army and relief efforts on hand from day one. It also has been getting international aid and rescue from the first day. Do you even remember how long it took FEMA and the national guard to get into New Orleans. Hint: by this point, (five days later) NOBODY but the Coast guard helicopters were on site.

We don't know for certain what's going on in every damaged town in Japan. We have no idea what's going to be happening in the months after this ongoing tragedy, or what people have been, or will be driven to. It's only been 5 days. Katrina involved a total breakdown of government protection and disaster relief, including water, crim prevention, shelter and food, for a small trapped population of the poorest citizens of New Orleans who had fewer resources to survive on over a long period of time, than the average Japanese person caught in the earthquake and tsunami. Their standard of living, and level of government-based care was and is higher by far than that of New Orleans.

There's nothing wrong with identifying behavior you think admirable and contrasting it with behavior you think regrettable or destructive. What's insane is labeling the poorest and most desperate of your fellow Americans as somehow evil, lazy and selfish because they didn't act, in different circumstances, the same way you are being told a different group of people are acting in another country, another culture and other circumstances.

self discipline

2011-03-15T13:01:00.000-04:00

I realized how much time I spent farting around online with little gain. True, I was getting my thoughts in order, and learning the basic skills of presenting and defending a coherent argument. I was learning to interact in a competitive, negative environment and keep my wits. All important, but I've hit a wall. It's fairly typical of the autodidact, I suppose. Time to move to a more --academic? Focused? pursuit of the goal. I don't need the extraneous hysteria from outside sources. I don't need the socialization. What I need is more work on my part. More writing, more attention to the topics and material that lead to, well, something. I was spinning my wheels, and I knew it. Now, at least I'm spinning them in a direction.

I have five blogs. This one is the most personal. 3 are related to my home business. One is for a place I'd love to live again. They all need more attention than I've been giving them. It was easier to go somewhere else and argue with strangers. Done. Done, done done. You'll see me here, and on your blog, more often.

For you.

2011-02-08T13:12:00.000-05:00

One of the hardest things i ever had to do was to put Jesse's things away. He was always very private, played certain things close to his chest. There were things about him no one knew, even though he could be completely candid, and was always honest about how he felt. Everything I touched felt like a violation. He'd been living in the front apartment of our loft, so everything he owned was right there. I had to get into his computer, close out his bank accounts, go through his address books to make sure I'd notified all his friends. It took me months to get to the point of packing up his clothes. But I also had to go through his cell phone, his computer and his papers to make sure everyone was covered, that I had done what Jesse would have wanted for them. (Even though I could hear his voice saying, Mom! What are you doing with my THINGS!? -- where Jesse would have been the first to say how little they mean to anyone but him.)

It wasn't hard to figure out his passwords, but that's not the same as having to email kids who he'd coached in debate, to tell them that the mentor they'd just checked in on was gone. Friends from high school trying to get back in touch. His whole adult world was there, for the most part, not connected to each other yet, but there. What stuck out most of all in the personal correspondence, is the level of closeness, the depth of caring that he shared with his friends. He loved each and every one of you in just the way you think he did.

He may have been exasperated, sarcastic, mocking, or sweet, challenging, concerned, confiding, protective, doting. But above all that, or underneath it, he loved you. And he didn't want to leave.

I hate February

2011-02-01T13:17:00.000-05:00

I tried to make myself busy from mid January (when he was diagnosed with the relapse and back in the hospital) to February 8 (you know). But it just makes me more stressed, instead of preoccupying me. Irreverent class I'm teaching on um, relationship skills, not helping. Irreverent class "visual aids" arrived in the mail today, which made me laugh out loud (a box of small pink dildos). I know it'll be fun. I know I'll be fine, but goddamn it I'm not fine. Even when I'm fine.

Fuck this. I already knew how to cry without letting the tears fall.

confession

2011-01-26T12:31:00.000-05:00

In my ideal life, right now, I would have time in the morning to scribble down what comes to my mind on waking. It's the time when my mind is least inhibited by reality, is beyond it; when what I think is most likely to be creative and weird and free. I always think I'll remember to write it down, but I never do. By the time I get to work it's gone, the colors all have run together, the shine is off the shiny parts, and I am once again the automaton that earns my keep. I have to make myself be less alert, I guess.

Was chatting with a friend about risk taking when the risk is small. Another chimed in comparing drinking tap water to the higher chance of getting hit by lightning.

Lightning is nothing compared to regret.

The second summer of my first marriage, my husband and I started an interior renovation company. One of our clients had a lovely brownstone in Brooklyn that we were restoring. The kitchen had maple cabinets, which I spent the spring stripping and refinishing. I knew the label on the Zipstrip had warnings about benzene, carcinogens, open ventilation, and masks (I wore one but not a gas barrier). I mostly stripped outside, but I saw those warnings as overblown as the warnings on Sweet n Low packages. I figured, I'm never having kids, I'm not pregnant, I'm only doing this for a few days, I'm not a rat being injected in lab with 10000 x the possible lifetime dose...

Two months later, I got unexpectedly pregnant.

Twenty-three years later, I paid the price for my assumptions.

People tell me it's impossible, or at least highly unlikely, that this is the cause of Jesse's APL. I do searches on this topic every few months. I tend to look for blame ("something I did" + "APL" + "young adult" = not objective research).

The debate changes direction a lot. It's gone from an assumption that this only happens to children or the elderly, to the present evidence that it occurs most often in young adults; from arsenic as an old wives' tale to arsenic being the answer -- the doctor who treated Jesse in Chicago has his name on much of the US research on this particular form of leukemia, and the research is confined to populations as small as ten. They have to group it with other classes of leukemia to raise a population into three digits. Too much they don't know.

No one knows how long it takes for one misfolded gene to go crazy. Six cases for every ten million people.

I know the jury's going to be out re: causes of leukemia, especially one as rare (and curable) as APL. That's how science is. But my larger point is that ignoring a risk because it's relatively small can be painful, not just because of what could happen to you; but because when something does happen, at least you'll know it wasn't because you were drinking poisoned water.

Someone at work once said he had a mother-shaped hole in his life; for me, it's a Jesse-shaped Something. Not a hole, the opposite. Love is an easy term for it, I guess, but it really doesn't express this. This consuming wave of longing, guilt, regret, joy, love, relief, respect, pride, nostalgia, this unfinished song hanging in the air. This never ending grief.

he loved

2011-01-25T11:55:00.000-05:00

He loved the smell of my cooking, even when it wasn't something he intended to eat. The smell of frying onions and garlic, specifically. He acted like he didn't listen, but he did. He seemed so critical, so ironic, but he wasn't. He was so angry with me, but he didn't stop trying to move past it. He wanted to fix things. Lives. The world. Injustice. He loved.

I find myself unmoored in time.

2011-01-23T22:46:00.000-05:00

The first time this happened, it was intentional. I was 13, thinking about who I would be when I was 17. Would I recognize myself? Would I like who I had been at 13? If I met myself would I love me? At 17 I remembered that day, and thought back to it, willed myself back to that day, back to myself, spoke to myself at 13 so I'd know, in that past self, that the answer was yes. I do love you, I told that shy, lonely, younger me. I understand. There is nothing wrong with you and everything turned out fine so far.

Now I look back at earlier selves and realize that I have been doing this more than I knew. When I was pregnant with Jesse and his father tried to get me to have an abortion, I gave myself faith. When Jesse was little, I cherished every minute, because it was all beautiful, even the colic and the 3 am feedings. And because something told me it would be gone too soon.

Then there were the dreams. In one I was in my old bedroom from childhood, but instead of my sister on the other bed, there was a man I knew was going to kill me. He was telling me about how he had killed someone by driving a pen into her ear with a hammer until it punctured her brain. I could see it in my mind's eye as he talked (I can still see it vividly, almost feel it happening to me, too). I tried to casually say I had to go to the bathroom, but I'd be right back, and he said, "I know you will," and I turned to see my baby in a blanket on the bed next to him.

I had nightmares like this all the time. Each scenario got worse until one night I dreamed I couldn't save Jesse. I knew.

Now I take time to go back and let myself know what I need to know. I don't think I can change anything but my own attitude, my way of being. I can only give my past self encouragements, warnings, hints. But then, if anything else changed, how would I know? It would already be the past before I ever went back to change it. It comforts me to feel some responsibility to my earlier selves.

Maybe it's just an eccentricity, a self-indulgence. I don't care. It's not any crazier than a hundred things you believe and never question. It keeps me from being too hasty now, too sad. Maybe it's my future self, come calling, letting me know that better things will come.

nam myoho renge kyo

2010-12-21T11:40:00.002-05:00

I've been trying to embrace the course of my day. Physically and mentally. After so much time in bed, in pain, my first inclination is to take an escalator instead of the stairs, the train instead of walking, sleeping a little later. It's not always wrong. I just have to learn to slow down until I'm ready for each new action. Meditation helps. Not in lotus position or anything, but as I walk, I clear my mind, become conscious of the act as I move through space. Today I was thinking, or rather, became aware of the mantra of Nichirin Daioshin Buddhism, nam myoho renge kyo. You can look up all the sites that talk about this mantra, which roughly translates into 1. the entire meaning of Buddhism 2. the name of the teachings of Buddhism (devotion to the lotus dharma, or the cycle of enlightenment) but I come at it differently. Today I think I had a little breakthrough.

It would be a lot to explain, but think of the idea of grace, as enlightenment. Grace is a gift of spiritual or moral vision, of favor or love, if you believe in God. If nam means devotion, or "I devote myself" it can also mean, "I take refuge in" or "I surrender myself to" the lotus dharma, the path of grace. The path of grace is not something readily apparent, you can't always travel on it. You don't always know whether you're on it or not.

I've written about one of my favorite sayings, from a conversation with the guy who runs my local hardware store: there are two ways to do everything, the right way, and over and over again until you do it the right way. This is an essential spiritual teaching, for me. I want to believe with Buddhism, that all roads lead to paradise. That you can struggle all you want against this or that encumberment, but eventually, you will lean to surrender yourself to the lesson.

I heard a woman tell the story of her near death--- that her first words, on coming out of the coma were about herself in the third person. She had been out of her body for so long that her own life seemed to be someone else's. And after all, if we are spiritual beings on a human quest, how can we know who we are outside of this existence? The batch of chemicals we travel in guides our emotions, our thinking, our every moment. Until we are free of the illusion that the person we think we are, right this minute, is who we really are, we can't begin to answer our real needs. I'm not saying our emotions and thoughts aren't real, our physical bodies, too-- they're all real, but they are only temporary.

If I can surrender myself to the path of grace, take refuge in the cycle of enlightenment, devote myself to learning what can't be taught, where will I end up? All I can do for now is stay open to it. I can't fight and force myself past my own abilities and reach the path of grace. I can't stay still and protect myself from life and pain. I can only move along slowly, eyes open to what I might see, and encourage myself to take refuge in the hope that I might be moving in the right direction.

And so, as I walk out onto the street, I listen to the sounds around me, I see each person who passes by, I try to open myself to the day, to devote myself to the path, and take refuge in the grace of its wisdom. If all I get out of it is some peace before I start my day, the courage to walk up a flight of stairs, well, that's not a bad thing.

Hello out there

2010-12-15T00:54:00.000-05:00

I'm finally feeling better, dug into my savings and paid for botox injections to kill off the migraines and that plus a vicodin and a martini & there's a blissful-ish moment to think. For now. I barely made it through work, I reach a certain point where my whole body is buzzing and my head is a mile across, like right before you ge the flu, but I know it's the migraine trying to come back & it doesn't matter what I have in front of me, the outcome will not make sense. The night editor sent me home. People can see this in my face. Pinched and half focused, and a hundred years old. I drag myself to the curb and a cab. By some miracle I end up at home in bed but nothing helps until I assemble my arsenal.

Un-pain is my fantasy land.

The other day I saw a baby-- a man with a baby in a snuggly thing on his chest; I mean. But I saw the baby more than the man. Because the baby had that shock of fuzzy, staticky blond hair like an insubstantial halo. Like Jesse had as a baby. And I looked at the father, I was behind them, and it was in the subway station-- the father was in his mid twenties, with hair the same curly dark blond Jesse's would be. I'm telling you this because it's gotten to be a regular thing. Guys who look like Jesse. This was the first time that, like a dream, baby Jesse and adult Jesse were together and I thought, that would be life, my life. If we'd been that lucky. I wanted to tell this total stranger: be thankful. Get down on your knees and thank God you are alive in this crowded subway station with your sleepy baby on your chest. You have everything.

I hope he realizes it. I hope I can see my own everything before it's taken away again. I hope you see yours. Because that would make all this worthwhile.

Bone Soup

2010-11-15T21:11:00.002-05:00

My vegetarian son has been working at a barbeque restaurant that doles out Austin hill country flavor like nobody outside of Austin. It's better than anything I've eaten in Austin, but that doesn't mean it's better than Austin, just that maybe I was at the wrong barbeque places or something.

Anyway, it was his first job, delivering barbeque. I had hoped it would suck mightily and convince him to re-apply himself academically. Unfortunately this job is a great success, and he was made delivery manager after a few months there. He was also made the staff representative for the delivery squad, which he takes very seriously, aware that his position in management requires him to go the extra mile for his worker pals.

The owners seem to like him for all the reasons a mother could wish; but I think they're also kind of proud to have a vegetarian on staff to vouch for the purity of the side dishes. Or "fixins," for the cognoscenti. The cooks seem to like him too, and when he tells them he's bringing home a short rib for his mother, they bring out the biggest, juiciest one. "Carlos" says, "Now I can say I gave your mom the big bone." The previous delivery manager left to have a baby, but her response to him ordering dinner for me was, "tell her to suck my dick!" Which son immediately texted me to ask me if I was interested. I guess he's grown up.

Anyway, I spent a deal of my childhood poor, so these big rib bones are too beautiful to pitch once that juicy, fatty, rich meat is off them. I throw them in my stock pot along with any other bones that find their way onto a plate, and boil the mess, then let it simmer for a few days, adding bones as the week progresses. Beef, pork, chicken, duck. As long as it's simmering, flavor is leaving the bones and entering my broth. As long as the lid is on it stays sterile. What you end up with is a smoky, dark, marrowy broth that hardly needs anything in it but a few bay leaves. I like to cut up any leftover smoked brisket, ham, sausage, duck, and short rib leftover from the week's meals. We live half a block from the farmers market so into the pot go the season's parsnips, carrots, onions, potatoes, green pepper, garlic, green onions, parsley, fresh thyme and oregano. Throw in some lentils and let it simmer.

My grandparents bought a farm right around when the Depression hit, and fed their extended family while growing a family of their own. This is as close as I get, mostly. We're going to be fine.

why does it have to mean anything?

2010-11-10T23:11:00.000-05:00

I have a friend who's very interested in existential psychology-- the search for meaning, how important it is to know yourself, to know why-- as if there is a unifying answer. Why do I like cats instead of dogs, why did J Edgar Hoover dress up as transvestite, what was that weird trail in the sky, what do you see when you look at the moon, and why are we here? I guess it's natural to look for patterns, to want to find them. It's reflexive as the fight or flight response. That doesn't mean it's always useful.

I think it brings him some comfort to think that even if there is little deeper meaning, that we are meant to search for it anyway. The fact that we do it makes it ok, as if questioning existence were like eating or farting, something you probably shouldn't do where camera phones are present, since you never know how really foolish you look doing it until someone posts it on facebook.

It's not that I'm against philosophy, or self knowledge. I just think there's a limit. When you're looking for patterns, you start excluding information. You discard what doesn't fit what you think it's supposed to look like. This may be fine on an IQ test, but the world isn't like this. Sometimes there is no reason why you have five symptoms of whatever the disease du jour is, it's just a coincidence. Sometimes you work so hard to understand how the universe works and whether God is listening or exists or has qualities of any kind, and you forget to just listen.

Another friend went on a 10 day retreat that involved utter silence, and meditation, plus three meals a day and a place to sleep. It made me sad to think it could be that hard to learn how to be here now.

Frozen

2010-11-04T12:55:00.000-04:00

This is week 4 of an off again on again migraine that won't go away. I can't think straight. The two worst days were last Friday, and last night, but today is about to rival them. I can't stand it, having a thought so close at hand, only to have it swept away by the pain. I have too much to do to go hide in bed for days, but that point is coming. I paid for my own botox injections a couple of days ago, and all I can do is hope they kick in soon. It usually takes about 5 days, but I don't have five days right now. So I sit here at my desk and pretend to function.

Five Ways the Rally to Restore Sanity Sucked.

2010-11-01T18:42:00.001-04:00

1. There were lines out the metro station. My sister had to stand in one for an hour and a half just to buy a pass. We had bought ours in advance, but we still sat in the station, watching train after train go by, jammed full of the Sane. The Metro conductor told us that for these large rallies, the organizers have to pay the metro system to put extra trains on the line. It was clear to all of us that no such forethought was employed, as five or six trains passed us before we got the idea we should take the train back to the end of the line, and then we'd actually be on said train when it turned around and headed back.

2. More evidence they had no idea how many people were going to show up: the extra speakers and the jumbotrons only made it to about 1/3 of the way back from the stage; the last of the dense part of the crowd was back at the Natural History Museum, unable to hear much but a few snatches of music, and indistinct yelling. 4 blocks from the stage on 7th St. I could hear Cat Stevens, and even a few minutes of John and Steven bickering. We decided by 2 pm that we'd just have to watch the stage events when we got home. I still haven't seen the whole thing.

3.It seemed like a terrible waste of potential that so many Americans drove/flew here from as far away as California, all pretty much in agreement that we'd like to see more tolerance, more dialog and more cooperation in government, without any power to do anything about it except just to be there. It may be that's the only way we would all have shown up, but I think I secretly wanted a 4th party to arise from the Mall. It didn't.

4. It was too damn short. Woodstock went on for days. DAYS.
5. Even though a large number of the rational folks bused in and out, there were such mobs at the entry to every restaurant in walking distance, and back into the train stations, that the wait to either eat or get on a train was between one and two hours. So we stood in the shortest line, which happened to be a salad place called Chop't, and half an hour later we were eating chopped salad. So very filling, so classically Washington. Hunger does weird things to people. There's a Chop't across the street from us in NYC, that's been there for 7 years, and we've never bothered to go in there.

It doesn't get better, it just changes.

2010-10-22T14:16:00.000-04:00

For purple day, I found a picture of Jesse from college, a purple fleece blanket tied around his neck, posing as dorm room Superman. He's got that ironic-superman smile, the kind you would wear if you were posing as dorm room Superman. The intention was to show support for Jesse's gay friends on facebook, but after putting it up I started to feel worried that they might get upset to see it. I don't know why. I liked being able to see him there, but at some point I wondered how his brother would feel seeing it. Does it feel to him that I'm too obsessed with Jesse? It's impossible to compete with a dead brother.

I sang.

2010-09-25T18:40:00.000-04:00

I've been terrified to sing. Especially not karaoke, but just-- my voice sucks now. If I raise my voice I cough; I've lost my range, which wasn't very good to begin with. In college I took a class in opera singing, sang in a madrigal choir, and basically traded on what the nuns taught us in grade school, working myself just enough to sound ok at an end of the year party when my freshman crush and his band let me sing backup just one song. I knew almost nothing really. When the madrigal director auditioned me, he said I was second alto and I thought it meant, lower than a regular alto.

Anyway, I know I'm not that good. The songs I can sing, I mean, really, are the ones I've sung a million times so I know where I have to push from the diaphragm, where I can fudge an ascending progression (probably not the right word) with a little bluesy harmonic play on what's expected. It's scary. I'm about as good at it as I am at skiing, that is, who would want to watch but a sadist or someone who really loved me or wanted to get in my pants or both or all three.

But I need to work on it, not just because so many of my business acquaintances and friends are young and Asian or just young and into karaoke. Or just into karaoke. Mysterious shit. So maybe I should take lessons, but not yet. Anyway. The other thread here that matters is that I've been hanging out with the people I knew when I first moved to New York, because I'm lucky they found me again. Last week there was a Max's Kansas City reunion, and I showed up for two of the three nights. Sunday it was kinda slow, but the promoter and stage manager were my friends, Pete and Frank, and when the last band played, they saved House of the Rising Sun for Frank. He didn't know the all words, and for some reason I jumped up and sang backup on the chorus, then started the next verse myself.

I could hear myself in the monitor, so I knew I was on key mostly, and I could hear the power from deep in my chest. I knew I sounded fucking amazing. The hot asshat who'd been trying to pick me up earlier in the front bar had come in to see who was belting one. I saw the look on his face when he realized it was me. You can tell when people are horrified by the spectacle of your shame, and when they're mesmerized by your unexpected success. This poor guy had gone from she's a MILF to IMUSTHAVEHER in 30 seconds.

And then I thought of Meryl Streep in Ironwood, gave the guitarist one of those looks, and we killed it like the dregs of a good bottle. It kinda reminded me of the first time I read my poetry out loud. My first thought had been why are they staring at me like that?

I guess I need to learn to sing.

Fall.

2010-09-22T18:26:00.000-04:00

The tragedies destroy us
we fall
or do not fall
When you fell
I tried to catch you up
it was too late to soften
anything like a landing
you wanted to go
It was I who said no

Don't.

I think of you past judgment
past eyes

What you saw in me
your firstborn child the universe a piece of dust
the last thing you saw
falling away

and my son follows
farther
beyond my reach

I held his foot
as he was cut loose from earth
I kept that last promise
for myself more than him
my firstborn child, my universe, my jar of dust

Here's what I want to ask you both
When we break loose do we drift and die
like fireworks across the sky?
or do we roam
across this planet we once called home?

Yes, I said fuck 9-11

2010-09-10T12:13:00.002-04:00

I was standing on 5th Avenue with a crowd of New Yorkers from all walks of life,watching the biggest buildings in one of the biggest cities in the world burn like candles. No one knew what had happened for the first hour or so. Once we knew it wasn't an accident and the city began shutting down like a fort under seige, we began dialing family and friends and the schools where our kids were trapped by untrained administrators, getting dial tones and terrifyingly calm computer voices telling us the lines were down. No one panicked, you can see the footage. We did what we had to do. Boats poured across the Hudson from New Jersey to ferry people out of harm's way. People put their kids' schoolmates up for the night, companies closed, neighborhoods were blocked off, there were lines wrapped around the hospitals to donate blood.

The next day the stench was unbearable and unavoidable. I'm reminded of it today because down the block from my office, a restaurant is on fire as I type. The sickening smell of burning meat and building materials and ozone is all too familiar. We were out on the streets, collecting things to donate to the rescue responders. There were no trucks, no food or supplies could come into the city then. We were in lockdown. On my street, rescue workers walked from store to store looking for bottled water and food, covered to their hips in thick grey dust.

Within days, when the city was running again, but the fire was still burning and ash floating all over us, we went back to work. My route took me past the armory, the local operations for the rescue effort. On the walls of buildings surrounding it, were photos of the missing, smiling out at the camera. I felt myself in the very shoes of the family member or friend who had taken that photo in a moment of joy, and now had to xerox it onto a leaflet begging to know if this happy face still lived. I cried as I passed this part of town. We cried at my office. My kids wore paper dust masks to go outside. The dust and ash blew through our windows. The stench didn't abate for months.

It was March before the fires were completely out. And years before the hole was emptied. New Yorkers flinched at the sight of low flying planes. We stayed away from the site, or trepidatiously peered, in full knowledge that we were walking on sidewalks strewn with the ash of our neighbors' remains. We were angry at photos of tourists taking photos of the site with smiles on their faces. Fuck them. We tried to be tolerant when family members visited and wanted to see it. Like asking to see fresh scars from some near fatal collision.

The annual 9-11 ceremonies were tasteful, heartbreaking, and at some point, too boring to watch. When 9-11 was renamed Patriots' Day, when politicians started using it to scare people into voting for them, when radio talk show hosts and cheap tin pastors started using it to boost their audience ratings, when people who had never been there and had no right to wrap themselves in it began doing so, 9-11 ceased to be sacred. Now it's just another insincere glow in the dark plastic trinket holiday, co-opted by people who say we, who lived this horror, are not real Americans. The people who died on 9-11, and the people who ran in to save them, we're not patriots. The people who died together: Arab, Hindu, Christian, Jew, European, African, Latin, Asian, Indian--every strain of human bloodline, every religion or lack thereof-- and the people who ran in to save them, recover their bodies, and mourn them, all of us, are now the sworn enemies of the people who hold 9-11 up as their rallying cry. We're atheist godless, idol worshiping terorrist lefty liberal New York assholes who hate the constitution and the country and our troops and real Americans, and unborn babies and fuck you.

I'm done with that three ring circus.

Fire

2010-09-08T23:32:00.000-04:00

There were two fires today in Staten Island, one surrounded firefighters till a change in the wind opened up an escape. Last week there was another fire, on the Manhattan side of the Hudson River. Whenever fires occur so near each other I think arson, but that's not a professional opinion so much as a personal prejudice. When I was in college in Ohio, there were fires in buildings here and there throughout the years I lived in the town. It wasn't till the middle school gym, that I realized someone was doing this on purpose. The first building that went was an old granary-- my college town was in the middle of cornfields and rolling hills just north of the twon where I'd grown up. I'd seen the granary nearly every weekend when I was a kid. My dad drove us to his parents' farm on Sundays, and the route ran right through the town of Oxford.

At 9, I thought the word painted on the grey board building said "Canary" and wondered about the potential for yellow birds inside. I can't remember when I found out the first letter was a G; but I can remember the building as if it were still there, at a bend in Route 27, just beyond the main part of town. By the time I started school it had stood empty for a few years. And it was gone in a night. My freshman year.

The next building to go was an unoccupied frat house, I think, and then something else, and then the middle school gym. That burned near the beginning of my senior year, in late August, so there were rumors one of the students meant to extend the summer a few more weeks. But the lumberyard. People were working there, unlike the rest of the fires.

I'd been standing out on the street, a humble small town street, with cracked sidewalks and small houses; I was talking to friends whose faces I can't even remember. We were under these two huge trees, still flush with green leaves. An unexpected man in a suit ran past us, toward the center of town. We watched him. You never saw anyone in a suit in Oxford then. You certainly never saw one running. Next it was a group of college kids like us. We stepped out from under the trees an realized the sky was aflame. A crowd had gathered down the block where the lumberyard stood hidden behind a row of houses, on our side of the train tracks. Without thinking about it we were running with everyone else, but by the time we got there, anyone left in the lumberyard had been rescued, and there was nothing to do but watch it burn. The crowd became a bit festive once it became generally known that no one had been hurt. Someone suggested a keg party. The communal sense, the relief and excitement at this contained bit of chaos. It shocked me at first, that we were all so jolly. That was why he did it, whoever it was. He was somewhere in the crowd. Or nearby. But no one would ever be arrested, and for all I know there were more fires after I graduated.

I don't remember the fire department ever showing up, but I'm sure at some point they must have. Everything seemed to blend, one moment into the next, so naturally that, like the G in the Granary sign, I lost the recollection of anything but the most unexpected.

Back in the hole

2010-09-07T12:48:00.001-04:00

Today I found out that Jesse's favorite oncologist just moved to Sloan Kettering. The article announcing it appeared on what would have been Jesse's 26ht birthday. Welcome to New York, Dr. Tallman. If you'd gotten here 4 years ago, I'd still have Jesse.

Getting better.

2010-09-06T21:15:00.002-04:00

There's this feeling I get, nearly every day, when I realize Jesse is gone forever, as if realizing it for the first time and somehow in my mind I am crumpling onto the floor, while I seem to be standing up, perfectly fine. I may not actually be on my knees, but I feel it. I can hear myself screaming in my own head while on the outside I am calm.

And I asked myself today--is this any better? The pain of missing him has become more or less the same feeling as loving him. I see children who look a bit like Jesse did at a given age and there's some relief-- that there are still children? That I had Jesse in my life at that age? I can remember him without sobbing (mostly).

Looking at where I was 3 years ago, and where I am now, well; I can go all day without crying on the outside. It's not that I'm forgetting Jesse. It's just that I can make myself put off thinking about loss for a sustained period of time. It's an act of will. In a way, that's worlds better, but really it just means I have a little more control.

I don't want to forget him. I want to be able to be a full person even though he's gone-- a mother to his brother, a wife to my husband, a friend to my friends, and so on. It's just that every bit of love I feel for the world and the people in it has been touched by Jesse, and therefore, by loss. There is no world with no Jesse in it, not for me. It's just that I can't see him. Otherwise, he is always with me.

Broken Doll

2010-08-31T15:33:00.002-04:00

When I was little my mother still believed that we'd move back to New Orleans and my sister and I would go to Cotillion and take turns being queen of her Mardi Gras krewe. She taught us to behave as if we still lived in that tiny sliver of New Orleans society. Our manners were frighteningly perfect. We knew which fork, knife, spoon and funny shaped doodad to use for every moment of a seven course meal we'd never had. We stood out in Ohio like little Lady Fauntleroys, causing mirth and derision with our straight posture and little white gloves. My dad's family cringed when we visited, having now to put napkins in laps and abandon barehanded eating. It wasn't enough for them that my mom towered above them, at 5'9" -- but she sewed her own knockoffs of designer dresses, first Christian Dior wasp waists, then Halston's Jackie look, and wore them to the farm on Sundays. She thought she was showing respect. They didn't take it the right way at all.

She scoured the Cincinnati area to find a ballet teacher who had the right resume. Ours had been the dance mistress for the Cincinnati Ballet and Miss D often sent pupils to local ballet groups for auditions. I was probably about 11, slender and not gawky enough that you couldn't hide it with makeup and a lot of rehearsal time. Miss D. liked the way I was shaping up, rounding my arms into a tidy oval in fifth position. My biggest flaw was a tendency to grimace in self absorption when performing a series of steps. That and a not so secret detestation of barre exercises. Mom got to the point where she was bribing us with a trip to McDonald's for dinner after class, something her French soul rebelled against I'm sure.

I don't know how my sister and I ended up in a performance of Coppelia with a university dance troupe, but it happened. Ms. D. told us very little, perhaps to keep from making us too nervous, but this wasn't our usual dance review and we all knew it. The role was fairly simple. During the night, the toymaker's shop comes to life, and we were godknowswhat-- little Scotch dolls in red tartan topped tutus and tams. Finally, instead of boring me, ballet was fun. It had a purpose. I learned the piece, I smiled involuntarily when we practiced it. I wanted to be that little Scotch doll finally free of its wooden limbs.

Miss D noticed, and gave me a tiny bit of solo work to do. I would be the doll whose mechanism sprang loose when daylight put the other dolls into a coma. I could pirouette across our segment of the stage and flop down like a rag at the end of the piece. I loved it. Not only could I have a solo, but I could make people laugh. It meant that Miss D. understood me and I would never let go of that feeling.

We rehearsed on the stage the day before, to make sure we all had our marks and timing right. I could see all the empty chairs rising in front of us like an impending wave. Tomorrow the seats would be full. We could put on makeup. We could share the stage with the beautiful Coppelia. Whom I would never be as big or as glamorous as. I didn't mind. I had the only solo of all the students.

It came off better than I thought. I kept waiting to be scared but I wasn't. I should have been shy-- wasn't I always shy? I hesitated to look at the imposing wall of chairs filled with judging faces, as the curtain came up, but they'd disappeared. The stage lights had canceled out the audience. I could pretend we were all alone up there. I can still remember my sister and our classmates watching each other to help keep time as we went through the routine, and then a little explosion of fireworks in my soul as the music drew up on my part and I broke away, keeping my eyes on the invisible audience as my body spun 360s past my collapsed cohort, then the dramatic flop, my legs flying up into the air, tutu over teakettle. And the shock of laughter and applause from the darkness. I lay there on my back and laughed till tears came. It worked. I no longer had to be perfect, as long as I could be funny.

The next year I grew too tall to be in a corps de ballet, and not long after that, my dad had his first heart attack, and mom couldn't afford to send us to ballet classes any more. My mother cried when she realized that now we'd never go back to New Orleans, and my sisters and I would never be presented to society.

The irony that I had learned to love ballet just in time to lose it did not escape me, but what could I do? I was changing diapers for the new baby sister while mom drove back and forth to the hospital to visit dad. It was time to grow up, whatever that meant. For all of us.

Dishonesty corrodes every relationship it touches.

2010-08-02T13:38:00.000-04:00

This thought came into my head on the way to work today. I was thinking about a friend who had been dishonest with me once in a while, mostly by omission, but was the kind of person who, even when asked a direct question, would often tell you what you wanted to hear, rather than risk that you might not like the truth. I didn't realize this was going on at first, and then, when I would find out about a little lie, for example, I asked him if he smoked, and he said no; who cares, right? I would just ignore it, I guess. He was one of those people who always make you feel confident and strong: a booster when you're making a personal or career move, the kind of guy who would pay the bill at dinner just because it made him feel good to be generous.

Over time as we grew closer, more important things came to light: he'd cheated on his wife (but, he explained, he was really separated from her, even though they were living in the same house when the events occurred). He'd lied on his resume to get his first job. He'd lied to his fiancee about wanting to have children. There was always a good reason. He was a good friend, I thought, helpful and kind. Other friends liked him a lot, too. They of course, didn't know he was dishonest. He seemed very much the opposite, the kind of guy you would trust to be there for you when things went wrong.

I was so busy trying to believe my own excuses for this guy's behavior that when my pain medication started disappearing, I honestly believed it was someone else in our circle. I asked him directly at one point and he denied it.

"Of course I'd ask you first," he said. So I started hiding them around the house when friends came over, counting them religiously, worrying that I myself was taking them when I didn't need them and just not remembering. I even started keeping a tally on the pill bottle. Then one day I caught him with his hands in the drawer where I had hidden them. :"What are you doing?!" I asked him, nothing, he said and left the room. I counted the pills and sure enough, two were missing. I confronted him about it, and we had a bit of an argument. He admitted he was taking them "recreationally." Even though he knows I have herniated disks that cause me a great deal of pain, and knows that my doctor could cut me off if it looks like I'm taking too many.

He's since apologized, and says that was a "wake up call" for him. I don't know if I can get over that experience. It still makes me angry to think of it. At one point I was afraid it was my son, who was a teenager at the time, or one of his friends taking them. Thank God I never asked. Just imagine what that would have done to the trust relationship between my son and me.

Is it worse I wonder, that he let me distrust not just all my other friends, but my son, or is it worse that he made me question and distrust myself?

And all because this so called friend wanted to have a momentary rush of euphoria when no one was looking. I believe people can change for the better, but I'd be crazy to assume he really has.

I will not be death's handmaiden.

2010-07-26T13:08:00.000-04:00

This week's New Yorker talks about hospice care, and reading the article threw me into vivid recollections of losing family members, not just Dad and Jesse, but my grandparents, and my in laws. Although sometimes I feel I've learned so much about coping with tragedy and death, I can't bring myself to seek out more by working in the field. It's hard enough to cope with what I've already faced, for now.

I accidentally 'went off' the Zoloft for a couple of days, and was starting to see Jesse everywhere, to miss my Dad, to cry at Inception, of all things (I know!). So I guess I'm not ready to go raw, pharmacologically speaking. I caught up yesterday, and now I'm a little more vigilant about the evening's ritual. I'm off the Prilosec, trading forbidden food for a smaller handful of medication. And I'm down to only taking melatonin to sleep, which is somewhat a tradeoff, too I guess. Elaborate story-like dreams that seem real because people's faces, and objects and places maintain their visual integrity, but then an escalator ends at a glass wall and I suddenly realize I'm late for a plane but I can't check out of the hotel because there's no front desk at the lobby, only a bar where I talk to my companion, a small child, who is my guide in this crazy world of my own invention.

Back to The Europe

2010-07-14T14:32:00.001-04:00

We never do guided tours, but we did 2 in Dublin, because we only had a day to ourselves. We chose the historic tour, run by bubbly, wise-cracking Trinity history MAs, and the literary Pub Crawl, run by ironic, wise-cracking Irish actors. From the first we learned that every historical site in Dublin is ironic, except the Post Office (at least since they removed the statue of the Floozy in the Jacuzzi). From the second we learned that nearly every good Irish writer had a side business in enriching the local publicans. We also visited St Stephen's Green which we learned was a terrible place to attempt trench warfare for the first time.

The next day our friends drove us to Powerscourt where we learned that all the really big Irish homes are tainted with English pelf, then climbed Killiney hill, which was breathtaking in every possible way. The only downside is my friend's carriage house is down a narrow alleyway that the local soccer fans consider their personal toilet. And the floors had just been refinished so choose which reason your eyes will water.

The next morning we were in London, living with my friend, whose ethnicity is so specific I won't name it here for fear she'll find this and thrash me; and her extended family, who have made such an art form of family rows that you'd think you were still in Ireland except that 1/3 of the "conversations" are in their local language the name of which I still can't spell. Which I guess means exactly like Ireland, except with better cooking. Occasionally an English term will slip into the middle, like, "I'll chop your head off, sister," or "I'm not going to Nairobi to meet some man." So you can get the gist and laugh at the appropriate moments.

I made up my own walking tours of London and Paris, intended to wear us out completely and see so many historical and scientific sites that without photos we'd have no way to know where we'd been, and without photos of the relevant street signs and wall plaques we'd have no way to remember what's in the rest of the photos. Luckily, since I mapped the route out on my computer, I just have to match the angle of the sun with the point on the route and argue with my husband about what country it was. Couldn't be simpler.

My English friend was an excellent host, and I apologize to her constantly for our being American. Then I remember that we actually argued less than she and her mum did, and I feel a little better. She set up some terrific dinners, not the least of which was the Mango Room (perfect Caribbean in Camden Town), an Ethiopian family restaurant with a whole ritual built around roasting your coffee beans for you, and our final dinner with the extended family in Zanzi Bar, an actual Kenyan-style Indian restaurant. Her mum was in town to browbeat her for not being married, and to attend a cousin's wedding, more or less simultaneously. So this is why we went to Paris.

Paris. Noon. Jesus. I have photos of the sweltering sun that look like Nat Geo travel stills of the Sahara. My Paris migraine started in the Tuileries, which is essentially a big yellow roasting pan with a side of vegetation. Which means KA will be disappointed to know we barely did anything except sleep, but at least it was climatisée. We woke up in time to race to our dinner engagement an hour late (you MUST GO, Josephine Chez Dumonet in Montparnasse). Fortunately I know enough French to explain ourselves and get seated next to a lady suffering from heat stroke with her feet in a bucket of ice, and the kitchen, which I suppose could feasibly be cooler than the dining room, given the situation. No, nobody in Paris has AC except our hotel. Nor do they appear to own or comprehend the concept of box fans. Decently dressed middle class people were sleeping on the footbridge over the Seine, in the Champs de Mars, on balconies, anywhere to catch a breeze.

We walked from the restaurant to Les Invalides to the Champs de Mars/Tour Eiffel across the bridge to the Trocadero, where we discovered that there are NO FUCKING CABS IN PARIS. We walked up the Rue Kleber or Boulevard Kleiber or whatever, passing the same two American tourists sitting on the bench at every taxi stand along the way. At one point we even stopped and chatted with them, partly to determine their existence and maybe perform triage. I was certain when we got to the circus maximus that is the Arc du Triomphe that we could hail a cab there, but no. Apparently they can tell we want a ride, and are determined not to give it to us. Fortunately there's an M11 bus (I know, west side of Manhattan, but there it was), that runs down the Champs Elysée whose bus driver was about to faint from dehydration so he forgot to notice if we paid, which we didn't even know how to do if we'd wanted to. And it ran all the way to our hotel, so when I got out I took a commemorative picture of the sign pointing to the church across the street from us. Did I mention we could see the Louvre outside our window? And the roof of the church? Charmant!

The next day we went to the Louvre and took photos of Michelangelo's pornographic late works. Since my last visit, they've moved the Mona Lisa from the middle of a hallway across from the Raft of the Medusa (where I believe it had been since da Vinci hung it), to the far end of a large room that funnels her enchanted crowds against an outer bullwark suitable for blurry photos and lit like a pickup bar. I got much better shots of the Roman hermaphrodites. And the Venus di Milo, which I took from behind so it looks like she's hunching down embarrassedly in front of a dazzled crowd of Chinese tourists and their guide.

For lunch we got obscenely bourgie at La Coupole where we ordered the two tiered Royale, which is not a burger but an entire section of the bottom of the Mediterranean that will never recover. I believe the American students next to us were pretending not to be terrified, either of the sea life or our appetite for it, not sure which. The waiters were so thrilled that we knew of the existence of the Arenes de Lutece (thanks KA!), that they fell all over themselves to give us directions there, and insisted we walk or we'd miss the Jardin de Luxembourg, which they were right. It was hubby's favorite over the Tuileries, possibly because there was air.

So we had to run to catch a nonexistent cab in order to get to our hotel, pick up our bags and catch another nonexistent cab to the Gare du Nord and the chunnel train home. This is how we were forced to learn about the Paris Metro, which works fine, and may explain why no one is murdering all the cab drivers of Paris.

Our last full day in London involved small children who spoke French, Romanian and English. I wasn't allowed to take them home. Then we were force-marched (my friend has climbed Kilimanjaro twice, and most of the peaks of the Andes) across Kensington to see the World Music Festival. Which worked out ok because I want to climb Kilimanjaro, too and could use the practice, plus the bands were fantastic and I'm downloading all their mp3s. My favorite was a Moroccan band called Boujemaa Bouboul. Go ahead, listen.

After was the much touted dinner at Zanzi Bar. Mum sat at the head of the table and demanded the chef's head be brought to her for making such a disgusting korma. She told the waitress, he makes it this way for white people. Bring him out here and I'll give him my recipe. This just isn't right. And she meant unjust, not inexact. I said to my friend's cousin, so this is essentially a little pot of racism? And they all agreed, more or less. What, asked her mother, do you think makes it so sweet? Sugar? I say, realizing vaguely that I've stumbled into a rhetorical trap. And she nods her head as if I'm Dr. Watson. Luckily the Tusker was cold.

Anyway. We got home in one piece, I can't figure out what to get my friends as thank you gifts, and it's just as hot here as there except it's raining and I want to go back now.

Off topic: The Diaspora and Treme.

2010-06-16T11:40:00.000-04:00

I love Treme. It took me a while. I wanted a hard hitting look at New Orleans like the one that dissected Baltimore in The Wire. It doesn't. I realized this week, as I tried to watch it with the sound off because hubby was asleep, that the story is at least half told in and about music. (Duh, you non New Orleanians say-- but come on, fish don't have a word for water.) I wanted it to be about the obvious corruption, crime and racial tension-- all different in flavor from any other city, because of our complicated past, but this is good too. At least now that I understand.

There are annoying sequences, where I'd have preferred less expository dialog and more action. There are slow, aimless sections of narrative (Do More With Lambreaux!) that should be steaming along like locomotives. But with the apparent suicide of Creighton, finally one plot line is starting to come to life, and maybe it can bring the rest of the story along with it.

You had to know when he started crying as he was typing the line about the rain that he was going to jump, but in case you missed the clincher in his discussion with the freshmen in his lit class, that is what Edna Pontillier does in The Awakening. So when he says she's not going toward darkness but toward a spiritual transition, he is idealizing the concept of suicide. It was the best thing that's happened to this show, philosophically. It opens up a whole new range of ideas and possibilities for the characters and plot. Everyone in the story is tied in one way or another to Cray. His wife is Ladonna's lawyer. His daughter is Davis's pupil. His death merges the two other major story lines-- or should I say, the slow uncovering of it will do so, and bring some focus to this fucking narrative. Now if only Davis will jump in after him.

How to help.

2010-06-09T15:02:00.002-04:00

Report oiled shoreline or request volunteer information:
(866)-448-5816

Submit alternative response technology, services or products:
(281) 366-5511

Submit your vessel as a vessel of opportunity skimming system:
(281) 366-5511

Report oiled wildlife:
(866) 557-1401

The Mobile Bay National Estuary Program is asking for volunteers to be on stand by.

Mobile Baykeeper is also compiling a list of volunteers to be called upon to volunteer. You can call them at 251-433-4229 or email them at info@mobilebaykeeper.org.

The Alabama Coastal Foundation in Fairhope is also looking to build up a group of volunteers. Email or call the group at 251-990-6002

Also, The Pascagoula River Audubon Center will organize training on cleaning wildlife affected by the oil spill. The group says they are being inundated with volunteers, and they are asking that those interested contact them through the internet.

Neil Young on inspiration

2010-06-01T12:21:00.001-04:00

Last night I saw Neil Young on Charlie Rose. It was an old show; I'm not a big fan of the CR, but this was worth it. Young said that he believes inspiration is a gift, and when you have an idea, you have to stop everything you're doing and work on it for as long as you need to. He carries a notebook with him for this purpose, and said that when he gets an idea, he excuses himself from wherever he is and pursues it. It may take five minutes, he said, it may take two hours. But you have to respect it. It's a gift, you have to take it. The only thing he would make an exception for is family. If a family member needed him, that takes precedence over art.

Now I'm carrying my notebook again. Thinking of you, not just Jesse, but my writer friends who read here. I hope you're all carrying your notebooks, whether it's to write about family, tomatoes, buffalo soldiers, or your private maze. WRITE. I love you all.

This morning I dug up my little red notebook and saw something from my Bali trip: dreams are like stars- they're always there, you just see them best at night.

And I wrote:

You will notice little things
if you look
a tee shirt
not her size
in the back of the closet
tiny shoes
in a drawer
a cupboard of old toys, notebooks, video games, debate plaques, sports trophies, ribbons,
a shelf of law books
slowly slipping
out of date.
Address books of classmates from kindergarten through--in what order
do we let things go
after everything has been lost

I still remember all the names
of his imaginary friends

To other mothers who have lost a child

2010-05-26T10:52:00.000-04:00

I see you struggling, and even as a stranger to you I feel the urge to help. I don't know if my experience can help yours. I know that yours seems to follow the same path as mine in many ways. It's not comforting exactly, to know that you are where I was at roughly the same time in the calendar of loss. But it does help me to realize that some of it has passed for me. That my hope of another, less painful day would be fulfilled. And still the thought of talking to you about our lost children leaves me in mute tears. Is it too soon to look back unblinking? Or am I not as far along as I'd like to think?

Sometimes it's easier to bury the pain in words. To intellectualize grief. As if to explain all this well would somehow ameliorate it. If it works, even for a little while, that's all you can ask. How do we know when to tend a wound and when to let it heal by itself? The manual of maternal grief may as well be filled with blank pages.

Thanks, brain

2010-05-21T14:15:00.000-04:00

Last night I had a great, elaborate and realistic dream about living with Jesse in the same apartment. At one point he was leaning back and talking to a bunch of his friends, just really having fun and I looked at his face and thought, "I don't know how I thought Jesse was gone. He's right here. I should let people know he isn't gone any more."

I can live with this, I guess. Not that anyone asked my opinion first.

A year later

2010-05-19T13:26:00.000-04:00

Last year during a conference on positive discipline in the classroom setting, I kept busting up crying during the group activities. It was a particularly intense group of people, as I've written before, including a husband, wife and sister in law triad who had no problem upping the emotional ante for all of us during exercises and discussions. I couldn't get through the closing discussion, and realized I'd never make it through teaching a workshop in my state. I had to put the one thing I love most away for the last year. So I was a little worried about this year's conference on parenting. But I made it. I didn't cry (much), I shared my knowledge, learned new tricks, and met new colleagues. I now have a seven week program all mapped out. The next step though, is putting it out there. That, well. That may take more time.

Better living through chemistry.

2010-05-13T17:48:00.000-04:00

With ritalin: organized matrix of cost, mileage and time variables in potential trip to see Mom for her birthday, based on airports within 2 hours of each town, rental car prices, gas, length of flight, and number of frequent flyer miles per option.

without ritalin: forget to buy tickets until August, print out the itinerary at the last minute and forget to pack it, get to airport without drivers' license, pay son's round trip taxi fare to find it and bring it to me before the flight leaves.

With zoloft: spent Jesse's birthday at an emotionally intensive parenting education training session, with 25 of my newest best friends.

Without zoloft: spent it last year busting out crying during every class activity at an emotionally intensive classroom discipline training session by the same trainer.

With ambien: fall asleep by midnight, five minutes after telling husband it's not working. Wake up a little groggy but fine by the time I get to work.

without ambien: fall asleep at 3 am, after tossing and turning for four hours. Wake up at five, six, seven, and eight. Drag ass in to work where no amount of coffee will keep me awake.

With botox: one migraine a week, give or take, some that can be treated with a couple of alleve.
without botox: migraines every day, some that flatten me and cause projectile vomiting, and even triptans don't derail them.

With typical American diet: can barely keep my eyes open after meals, feel hungry within an hour of eating. First attack of sleep hits at 1130 am, and coffee doesn't help. Starving and dizzy within 2 hours.

Without starches, flour, sugar: pretty much at normal energy level throughout the day, minor slump when I get hungry. Can go up to 3 hours without eating.

Without meat and salt: actually have passed out from low blood sugar within an hour of eating a meal.

With meat and salt: I don't pass out, ever.

That was my price, Satan. You won.

A box of nothing.

2010-05-05T18:08:00.000-04:00

How quiet your mailbox is, knowing you will not return to it. Anonymous spam, updates from a news site you signed up for, that will not unsuscribe. Emails from your school account, labeled "from me." As if you were still sending yourself reminders about alumni meetings, lectures, web sites for law studenmts. Your friends are gone. They know you won't answer. I keep after it, peeking in, pruning the spam; knowing you will not return.

The rock farmer

2010-05-04T19:05:00.002-04:00

I was fascinated, while watching a documentary about IM Pei, to learn there is such a thing as a rock farmer. I would like to be one. Apparently it involves cultivating found slabs, stones and small boulders into acceptable pieces for Asian style gardens. Several examples of the type of sedimentary rock used by Pei appear in the new Chinese garden room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The idea, as you can imagine, is to make the particular rock more pleasing artistically, to remind the viewer of mountains or clouds, or vaguely biotic forms. Rocks with holes are especially prized, and rock farmers will often add one where it might enhance the evocative beauty of the stone, which I guess makes them sculpture. I imagine a field of subtly changed stones left out to weather like a crop of corn.

The idea of wandering through the landscape, choosing beautiful geological formations, subtracting the hole that makes the piece art, or if you like, adding the tao, for a living sounds pleasant. But of course I can neither carry rocks nor chisel holes in them.

"This unstable pose imparts a sense of movement to the composition."

Learned incapacity.

2010-04-14T19:44:00.000-04:00

I've been in bed so much this last three weeks that it starts to feel normal. Getting up and doing things is a project, even when it's nice out. Worse, even the simplest thing I can do at home becomes impossible when I realize, oh wait, I'll have to take my laptop over to the printer to finish this. What an insurmountable roadblock that is. I think I got here because I usually do too much. Now I'm hesitant to do anything. Last week I had a tooth pulled, one I've been dying to get rid of for at least a decade. There was nothing really "wrong" with it, it's just that my lower jaw was so crowded it pushed this one out so I was biting myself in the lip with it nightly. There was no room for it. When I was a kid my orthodontist pulled out all my bicuspids so I'd have room for the straight teeth he was planning. But even with two years of braces and all that extra space, this tooth kept popping back out of alignment and wreaking havoc on my smile. Now it's gone, and there's barely a 16th of an inch gap left, but it hurts. All. the. time. Healing. The other teeth moving to claim their share of the extra room. I'm out of pain pills. It hurts to eat, to drink, to think. It hurts not to feel sorry for myself, so there.

Lesson from the lotus pond in Bali

2010-04-07T23:40:00.000-04:00

To the fish the lotus is a shady stalk
mossy, dark
its leaves a shelter from the blistering sun
and hungry beaks
on the other side of life.

To the lotus seed the pond is the world
its surface the unreachable heavens
the bottom a dark and quiet home
safe, soft
a lap from which
it will someday leap
compelled by the flickering lights of heaven
the seed doesn't know what it will become

To you the lotus
was just a flower flashing pink as you passed by.

anchored

2010-04-04T12:33:00.001-04:00

Just as I was starting to feel a little more able, I realized that the real reason for it is that the cast is on too loose. When I cinch the bandage back to its proper position, I can no longer use the fingers on my right hand. Which is what I'm supposed to not be doing. I've discovered some more little tricks that help in the shower: I stole one of those plastic umbrella bags from the doctor's office lobby (the disposable ones they pass out so you don't drench the floor and kill some unsuspecting guy with crutches or old lady in heels). It slides up the arm much easier than the kitchen garbage bag I was using. If you slip the rubber band up over the cast to your shoulder first, the bag goes on and off easily. Trying to bring the band up and down over the bag is a waste of good standing time.

Yesterday I had to sneak into my office to get my tax forms and pubs, because I'd left them behind, thinking I'd be back at my desk by now. The floor was completely lit because the architects who are redoing the other half of our floor had walled off the lobby where our light switches are so we can't turn them off. I kept thinking I heard one of the editors on the phone somewhere, but there was no one to be seen. Eerie to break into your own desk for your own stuff and half expect to be challenged for it. A ghost in the office machine. I could have gone during the week and said hi to everyone and showed off my cast, but I hate being the center of attention. One or two people, fine, but I never know how to handle a large group unless I'm teaching a class (that's easy). Then it's more like they're all parts of one person who needs to know what I'm saying and won't think badly of me if I misspeak. The last remnant of what used to be paralyzing shyness.

Being injured and less able makes me regress: I'd almost forgotten what it was like to be this self-conscious, to plan an appearance in public like a war strategy for a small tactical force. I am unarmed.

Revelation

2010-03-28T12:51:00.000-04:00

I figured out how to shower with the cast-arm resting on top of my head. I still can't wash my left upper arm. Too close to the hand to reach it. I'm not sure how I'm going to make it through the next month with a four pound cast on my right arm, although if I've learned one thing from my life's trials, it's that when you start thinking "how am I going to make it" that's the turning point. The next day you wake up and it's been a month already. I suppose, like trying to watch an electron, becoming conscious of this revelation will change it.

When I woke up from the surgery, I knew my hand had to be on my chest, but it felt as if it were thrown over my head. The sensation stayed with me through recovery. At one point my blood pressure started to nosedive and the nurse started freaking out. She apparently hadn't been told about my blood sugar. A glass of apple juice and I bounced right back. I'm an impatient patient. I wanted to be out of there by 930, after walking in at 5 am. Next thing I knew, it was noon and I still hadn't made it from the gurney to the recliner. I knew the coffee would suck (I've been in that chair before) and the muffin would be a mushy one in a vending machine bag, but I wanted them. They taste like success.

I wonder sometimes why I started having all these joint problems in the last 3 years. Knees, elbow, shoulder-- even vertebrae, disks slipping around like wet flipflops at high tide. I tell my friends my warranty expired. I know, it started around the time Jesse got sick. But the first knee, first slipped disk, started long before. It just didn't seem to be a pattern till now. I could still do most yoga moves then. Now I'm stuck doing Pilates in bed. It's a challenge, and probably not as good as the mat, but bed is where I am most of the time. This weekend friends got me up and out, hubby took me to dinner, gf took me dancing, so I got a little sense of how atrophied I am. Good thing they were there, because they can run interference for my arm, and cut my meat for me. A few hours on my feet seems so small, and it wears me out, but it helps me feel just maybe I can find my way back to work soon. And now that this surgery is out of the way, I can start the long slow road to Kilimanjaro.

Yesterday I was napping with my back to the door (still recovering from dancing). It's one of the few positions I can handle, because the cast won't let me lie just any old way. I woke up because I felt someone behind me, leaning in near my left ear, and heard her whisper to me in an old woman's voice, "I just wanted to thank you for your relationship with Sa..." I couldn't tell if she said Sandra or Sarah. I turned around and there was no one there. And I was not asleep, and not on anything stronger than Aleve. What. The. Hell.

When I was the mountain

2010-03-19T21:08:00.001-04:00

to the mountains the stars whirl fast as snow no
sooner do we rise up than we are cast along the sky
our living flanks scored with green and ice the water
shoulders its way in like roots
exhales itself into the sun
then in darkness wrestles its way back inside
springs forth along the promontories
leaps away into the waiting sky
toying with form in changing mine.

i promised

i will keep very quiet. I will
not scream or lay blame only
i had to stay.
They made me hide and gently
pulled loose his moorings
he slipped across the jagged
across the broken flanks
lept bright and falling
I clung on
but he slipped away.

I wish I had a mom.

2010-03-12T17:07:00.000-05:00

I mean, I do, I just wish I had the kind that you call up and tell your troubles to, and she listens and understands and isn't afraid of what you're facing, doesn't run away or hang up when you're in distress, but comforts you somehow, and doesn't judge or blame you, or sound insincere when she sympathizes. Someone I could confide in who wouldn't turn around and tell others my secrets, or blurt them out in public in embarrassing and inappropriate moments. I wish I had a mom like me. But I don't. The mom I have would not be happy to know what I think of her, and how I see our relationship but I don't think she'd deny it, not anymore. At least that's a kind of progress.

Do I wish I had a son like me?

Before

2010-02-21T23:09:00.000-05:00

I remember the sound of Estes rockets zipping apart the summer sky. We'd be standing around together, my dad, my brother and sisters and I, my dad kneeling to light the fuse and stepping back. It meant liberation from the earth, power over fire, over gunpowder, over all of us, and all the neighbors who could hear it and looked up to outrace the sound with their eyes and catch a glimpse of the bright needle as it reached its zenith and poppped a tiny plastic parachute. It never occurred to me that we were the only family that did this, and why, not until a few summers later we heard that sound from someone else's lawn, off in the trees, across the endless flat terrain of our subdivision. We searched the sky but couldn't see it. And never found out who else had glued together the tubes and fins and stuffed the little cone with its chute.

My dad was always picking up new hobbies for us to try, rock polishing, glass art, candles, electric trains. Everything was a lesson in how things worked, what they were made of and why they reacted to what you did to them. Why can you cut glass underwater with a scissors? My father knew. He was half a class shy of his masters' in physics. He was nearly finished, out of Loyola in New Orleans, when the money ran out and my parents moved, with me and my baby sister, to Maryland.
(to be continued)

The terrible thing

2010-02-16T12:55:00.000-05:00

If I could explain what I feel, I don't know that it would help me at this point. I realize that not-thinking about what this time of year really is, has affected me, hopefully temporarily. I can't think clearly. I forget the most obvious things. I can't tell right from left. Ideas drop out of my head and I'm left standing, grasping for them, in front of my loved ones. They understand. They are patient with me. I am so lucky to have these friends and this family. I know it. Not just the ones who knew me before I lost Jesse, but the ones I only know because I lost Jesse.

I suppose it's possible I would have met these new friends either way, but I wasn't the same person when Jesse was still alive. I didn't have a big hole blasted through me that anyone could look into. I protected myself. Now I can't. I have to find ways to go from that introspective, self-reliant person to one who reaches out to others, who is weak and fragile and open. The terrible thing is that I had to lose Jesse to lose what kept me from the world. That's not to say that Jesse had anything to do with my introversion, far from it. In order to love Jesse I had to change throughout his life. As my firstborn, he was the person who took me from the stupor of my postponed girlhood to full adult parenthood. He made it possible by his existence, for his brother to be born. He made me look at the world, and at myself and take responsibility for my role in it all.

And here I sit, unable to grab a train of thought and ride it, afraid to say what I feel because I know what will come out of me. I already know that what I need is time. And activity. Things I can throw into the abyss until it seals itself. I just want this part to be over. I want to-- I can't say "be myself again" because I've learned that isn't a stable concept. I want to be back on the track I thought I was on, just a few short weeks ago.

The anniversary

2010-02-08T12:36:00.001-05:00

Really, it hit me harder last week. I started crying Wednesday at work and couldn't figure out why, till I realized that the next day was the Thursday when we pulled the plug. And for some reason, Thursday morning I felt Jesse's presence all around me. The sense that he would show up if I needed him. That I should already know this. That he's fine. Please understand, that doesn't mean I don't fall to my knees every time I realize I will never see him again. That this isn't some trip he took to another country, from which he will return. He's not just avoiding me, he's gone.

People try to comfort me by saying, well he couldn't have functioned in that body any more so there's no point in wishing he had lived. And what I don't say is, lived? I wish he'd never gotten sick! I spent a lot of last month imagining myself going back in time to early January 2007 and yelling to him to go to the doctor NOW. A week sooner and he might have made it. There's a little thrill to that, as crazy as it is. That somehow my voice can travel back through time and reach him. Not any crazier than thinking he can reach past death to comfort me.

And there's one other thing people say that I hope not to hear again. Last week I was telling an acquaintance about my sister's daughter, how she had been born exactly one month to the day after Jesse died. And the woman said some crap like one dies one is born and goddammit, that's not how it works. One 22 year old doesn't need to fucking die so his cousin can be born. I just smiled and said nothing. Just, don't even think about saying anything like that to anyone you know who has lost someone. Just. Don't.

What made me cry first, last Wednesday, was thinking about his foot. When he was a newborn, baby, we'd make such a fuss about those little feet, that had never touched the ground. And when he died, his foot was what I clung to so he wouldn't feel alone as they pulled the ventilator tubes out of him. Today is the third anniversary of his last heartbeat. I can't know the anniversary of his first. But I can remember like I just took up the stethoscope and heard it a minute ago, that fast flutter of new life in my ears.

I'm trying not to think about what happened. Not sure how it'll work. But I do feel better today than I have for the last three Februaries in a row. So that's something. Just pretend it isn't February.

Oh my beautiful boy

2010-02-03T18:05:00.000-05:00

where have you gone?

The whole cancer thing

2010-01-29T16:36:00.000-05:00

When the kids were little, right after I left their dad, they belonged to various ball clubs, Little League and soccer mostly. When my ex wasn't actively trying to mess with me on the sidelines, I'd sit with the other mothers and watch the kids play. Mostly we just shared mom things, but as we got to know each other, confidences slipped out. One in particular was from a woman who lived not too far from me. She had a son the same age as College was at the time -- so six I think. She had a car too, and would sometimes give us a ride if the game was too far away.

The confidence came after we dropped her car off at the garage one afternoon. Apparently she'd had a brain tumor removed about a year before, her husband had left her for a younger woman without brain tumors and was a real ass about spending time with their bewildered son. And now she was experiencing blurred vision and pain in the general location where the tumor had been removed. At the time, nothing was wrong with Jesse. I was sympathetic, and offered to help out when she needed it. I think she just felt relieved to talk about it to another adult. It probably helped to tell on her abandoning jerk husband too.

She never really did move past that moment of revelation, never asked me for anything. I was kind of relieved, not realizing then that most people who offer help don't really mean it, and she was probably assuming I was one of them. I would have done whatever I could. Past the point of it being a pain to accomplish.

I thought of her when Jesse relapsed. I didn't want to be someone whose life was ruined by cancer. I didn't want Jesse to be defined by cancer. It didn't quite sink it that I had no choice. That he had no choice. That it was all headed down the sinkhole. I didn't want to be standing on a street corner in Manhattan, deluging someone I barely knew with the horrible reality of living with cancer. Even now I'd rather use another word.

When I see those ridiculous tv ads for cancer clinics that show happy cancer patients who write defiant letters to cancer, I seize up inside. It's all such a phony Disneyesque prettification of the slow motion horror that has become this person's life. The prostitution of their disease for the profits of the clinic that's making money by not finding a cure, just a very expensive way to postpone death.

Yesterday and today.

2010-01-17T12:32:00.003-05:00

Of all the days between Jesse's first symptoms of relapse, and his last, yesterday and today are the easiest to look back on. The illness was still a nuisance. The hospital doctors were at turns negligent and annoyingly overreactive. He gently taunted the clowns and finger painting do gooders that showed up at his room, for trying to apply their stereotypes to his undeniable individuality. Even the PICC line was just an inconvenience. They didn't make him wear hospital clothes, so hospital-appropriate fashion and laundry was a chance to reconnect with me. He wasn't interested in shoulder rubs from me, but the girlfriends, as it should be in the natural order of life.

People say death is part of life, a natural outcome of life, a necessity for life. Right now, though I see the point of life as a struggle with death, just as all good drama is a struggle against its inevitable last scene. We love most those stories that fight to the end against fate, the ones that you wish hadn't ended but went on and on. The ones that still live in you when you walk out of the theater, that come unbidden to mind at times in your life long after you can even remember the date of the performance.

Of course there are stories that do continue on, some spectacularly so. Third acts can be the launch into greatness. Losing someone who is ready to go after a full life, while sad, isn't tragic, unless you aren't yet skilled in detaching from misperception that we are eternal. Think of it though. If you live to be 100, you will live to see everyone you know best, your childhood family and friends, to see them all die before you. How much more could you need to prepare yourself to say goodbye? The world exhausts our spirit and puts us to rest.

It was the end of Jesse's first act. We all, on this day 3 years ago, were backstage with him, keeping his spirits high, running his errands, like an eager entourage. We knew his second act would be as astonishing as all that had come before, and we would have done anything to make that curtain rise.

I wonder if my attachment to the suffering of Haiti is somehow related to my experience of losing Jesse. This is familiar, the sense that something must be done, should have been done sooner, something unprecedented, overdue, but morally unreachable unless somehow the world were smacked awake by disaster.

Haiti has never been a country you could put aside mentally and assume things were going well if you didn't hear about it. Like its sister, New Orleans and southern LA, its people came from the struggle between contest and commerce. Spanish, French, African, slave and master, free people of color, social strata created by skin color, income, language, religion, food, dance, blood. We trafficked with each other for centuries.

All our bills come due. When I saw that teams from Iceland, China, Norway, the US, France, Belgium, my God, everywhere, were working together to pull people out of the rubble, to get them water, food, safety, to usher Haiti away from the disastrous curtain drop, I felt something urgent move in me. Haiti had almost nowhere left to fall, unlike New Orleans, unlike Jesse. So the ground opened up and created an unbidden hell. What is it in me that wants to see Haiti, not just saved, but healed? To make this unspeakable into a new and better world?

A friend I met in Bali told me something recently that pissed me off a bit. She's young and beautiful and strong. She willingly lets her skin tan and refuses to dye the two strands of grey in her long, glossy black hair. We were skyping and she saw I was upset about the anniversary of Jesse's loss and she said, shower the flowers that live.

I think what made me angry is that she's right. I can better serve my love for Jesse by sublimating it into service for those I love. It's just that that definition-- those I love -- has itself begun to change shape. The people encompassed by the first word, the self encompassed in the second, and the entire concept of the third. I'm not sure where it's going. I just feel I'm supposed to be here.

Meds

2010-01-13T13:13:00.000-05:00

People often ask me about antidepressants once they learn I've taken them. I've been on a few, actually, and one thing I've noticed is that not only do they affect different people differently, but they affect me differently in the times I've taken them. The first time I was on prozac (for PTSD) it worked extremely well. The one memorable side effect, by the way, was extremely long and intense orgasms. Go figure? I was on it for about six months, during regular talk-therapy, then tapered off as the symptoms disappeared. Within about a year I was finished with therapy as well. After Jesse died, I had no problem asking the new psychiatrist to prescribe it again, but my response was totally different. It didn't really help. I felt a little better, but the insomnia was wearing me out. I had no appetite, and problems thinking clearly. Instead of switching me to something else, the new psychiatrist added amytriptaline (elavil), trazadone, and gabapentin (neurontin). I gained 20 pounds. I couldn't drink at all, not even a beer. My mouth was dry all the time. I lost interest in sex. On the plus side, the neurontin made my sensitive skin invulnerable. I could wear a wool sweater without an undershirt and think it was cotton. At one point the stress caused one (yes only one) shingle. I didn't even feel it, although shingles are supposed to be painful for months. Hope that means I'm done with that for the next 40 years.

At any rate, I began asking to go off the antidepressants after about six months (just like the previous psychiatrist's protocol), but the new doctor would not let me. I had to threaten to go off them without her help to get her to tell me how to ladder down. It wasn't until 18 months that I finally got off all of them. I fought to lose five of the 20 pounds I'd gained, and I'm still uncomfortably big-- and unable to lose it without getting sick from lack of eating. I've never had a problem like this in my life.

This fall, I ended up on zoloft, but not for depression. It's off-label prophylaxis for migraine. It did lift my mood, and doesn't seem to negatively affect my sleep, but it does cause some nausea. It helped me to restart my teaching sideline, and it's been a huge boon in social situations. Growing up shy and introverted, I have had to learn as an adult how to be a social person, so group activities can stress me out to the point of exhaustion. Gearing up to do a lecture or lead a workshop took months of practice and anti-anxiety strategies. With zoloft, negative emotional states feel, well, padded. Buffered. Kind of like neurontin for my inner skin. It's helped a little with the migraines, but mostly it's helped me suffer less, and over shorter periods, from the loss of Jesse, and allowed me a couple of moments of actual everyday happiness. Not euphoria, mind you, I don't think I'll be there for a while. But that mundane joy in being alive. I'd forgotten what that was for a long, long time.

I can hardly bear to look at him

2010-01-04T19:09:00.000-05:00

The sad faced boy in the photos. My heart nearly breaks just thinking of him. He is never smiling. Sometimes he looks off while others smile, as if he's seeing something awful, just off frame. Others he looks dead on into the lens, searching, longing. I know what he did was awful. I would have jumped him too. I don't believe he should be freed. But that's not everything. Who could have saved him? What if we did things differently now? Is he a bottomless pit of need, wishing to die for something, anything to give meaning to his misery? He was a child who was given everything and nothing. The void wasn't filled with hate, I don't believe that. Anymore than it was filled by anything else that was thrown in it. He was committing suicide. They just used that fact for their potential benefit.

Love keeps her in the air when she ought to fall down.

2009-12-25T21:30:00.000-05:00

Not bad for a sci fi flick.

I don't know what made me do it.

2009-12-24T19:41:00.001-05:00

Maybe because it's Christmas eve. Maybe I just haven't let myself miss him enough lately. But tonight I broke down and searched that "where the hell is matt" video that makes me think of Jesse (like he'd ever do that silly dance, that's not it). I probably started crying the second that dopey guy starts dancing. It's not the worst storm of tears I've endured, but I still felt that awful slipping toward disaster, toward some point within me I can't escape from once I'm there. I pulled back. I indulged myself. I typed "I miss you Jesse Smith" in google and read all the entries, looked at all the Jesse Smiths in the world and what they were doing and who they were. I saw a cached file about him on Lycos, but the page was gone. Someone from Fordham had put it up a while ago. Most of the rest were other Jesses. So many things he could have been. Doctor, musician, tattoo artist, teacher. Girl. Ok, not girl. Patti Smith's daughter, in fact. I calmed down a little. But still, it's impossible to accept that I will never see him again. Only people who haven't lost a child think this can be done.

Merry fucking Christmas.

Fate.

2009-12-22T17:41:00.000-05:00

I was taking eggs out of a carton to make breakfast. They were all white and perfect until I turned the middle one over as I pulled it out of its nook. A concentric break at its narrow end with little cracks running from the first circle out to the farthest. I stood wondering whether to use it or not-- if it were cooked through, would I still get sick?

As I was making coffee I realized that the broken egg had to have been a dream, because we were out of eggs. Turned the dream over in my mind-- how boring, I wouldn't even tell anyone about such a mundane dream. I forgot about it by the time I got to work.

At the grocery later, I called my son. I'd forgotten the list. He read out the items, including, of course, the eggs. Without recalling the dream, I checked prices, considered who'd be here over the week (three egg eaters, including my stepdaughter) and splurged on the carton of 18. Checked them all for breaks. Carefully put it in its own bag so the eggs wouldn't be crushed by heavy items or heated by the roast chicken.

My arms's in a brace because I'm having a bout of bursitis, so most of the heavy stuff goes in my backpack, the light, fragile stuff I hand carry out the door. This being New York, I don't have a car, so I only buy what I can carry. I get to the curb and hear a soft rustling and then a definite plop. The egg bag has escaped to the sidewalk. I open the carton and turn over the middle egg, exactly the one that had been broken in my dream, and was relieved that this one wasn't broken exactly the same way.

As I walked home through the park, careful now that the eggs had already fallen once, I thought of the dreams of Jesse dying. I've never dreamed of anything bad happening to Jesse's younger brother. He is always safe. Was this mundane egg dream a test of the system?

When I got home I found that 8 other eggs had been broken also, exactly like the egg in my dream. So much so that the smallest circle of shell popped into the bowl as I emptied each egg, yolk and all, while college helped unload the rest of the groceries.
As any good French girl would do with eggs broken after breakfast, I made a triple size custard. It's sitting in its bain-marie now, slowly becoming solid.

Love after death.

2009-12-21T13:12:00.002-05:00

In one of life's ironic twists, Jesse died at the same age I was when my father died. So now I see dawning adulthood from two different mortal points. At 21-22, it's rare to already have an adult relationship with your parents. I was sorriest of all that my father and I didn't know each other that way, that I was barely able to reach across the chasm of our ways to him. I had learned to indulge him some of his fantasies of me-- he had lectured me before Christmas, that I needed to marry as soon as possible out of college so I wouldn't be tempted to commit a mortal sin (I'm sure the Catholics out there know which one he meant). I didn't laugh in his face or tell him to go screw himself. Nor did I lie or meekly say, yes Daddy. I was growing up a little. And two months later he was gone.

So I search for indications that Jesse was trying to tolerate my parental idiosyncrasies. I'm sure they existed, and I can guarantee you I tested his tolerance more than I realized at the time (or even now). I can never ask him this. I can never know what it would be like to sit down with my first born and just talk about life like two grownups. And that was what I had been waiting for, for half his life. Don't get me wrong, I cherished every conversation we had. I knew all of his life that each moment we had together was special, irretrievable, precious. I don't know why I knew. I used to think I was just lucky to have some perspective, because of the loss of my father. Looking back though, I realized that somewhere in time, I would lose Jesse. I had recurring nightmares about it. I couldn't sing a lullabye without crying. Even before I became pregnant with him. He lived far beyond those premonitory dreams, though. I had him until adulthood. In my nightmares he never aged beyond fifteen.

Truth is, I cringe when people speak as if they take loved ones for granted. Calling a partner their "ball and chain" or complaining about the kids being around all summer. Or worse, openly wishing for them to grow up and leave home. They say they're only kidding around, but it hurts me to hear it. I want to shake them and tell them how horribly they may regret these words one day. How awful it is to buffer yourself against love like that.

Many of my most recent memories of Jesse were of him expressing some form of disapproval of me. His moving back home was rough on him, and, as with the divorce, I took the brunt of the blame in his mind. I'd made up my mind to just accept it, and wait for him to come out on the other side of that, too. Now I'll never have that. All I can do is replace the memories of his distance with the earlier Jesse, the younger Jesse who loved me unconditionally and lit up when he saw me. At first this seemed unfair of me: who am I to deny who he had become at 22? But then, who am I to deny his entire range of his life? If the closest time we had together is what sustains me, then that is what I'll take. Jesse may not have been very happy with me three years ago, but that was only a small portion of his short life, and to fix him at that point would be unfair to his nature. He wasn't the kind of person who would want anyone to be miserable for the rest of their lives over something he'd done in the distant past.

And I don't believe his unhappiness with me would have lasted, but suppose it had? Why should I pay for it now?

Dreams are a gate.

2009-12-16T16:38:00.000-05:00

Last night as I first drifted to sleep Jesse came to me as himself at age 5, and gave me a hug. I told him I wanted to come with him, but he said, no mom, not yet. I wasn't even sad. This morning I got out of the train and felt happy. Not for any reason, just that sudden, unexpected tug of joy to see the sky and to walk down the street. I realized that something had been lifted. I looked toward my destination and saw a guy walking toward me with, only briefly, Jesse's adult face, before he became again whoever he was. And I said, thanks honey. And then I cried a little.

Here we go again.

2009-12-14T12:55:00.002-05:00

I got home from my life-changing trip to Bali, only to hear from my husband that my sister in law has just been diagnosed with leukemia. I don't know if it's the same type as Jesse had, but dear GOD, my brother already lost his first wife.

Ashes

2009-11-25T22:37:00.000-05:00

Today College son told me as gently as he could that some friends of Jesse had said, around the time Jesse died, that he wouldn't have wanted to be stuck in an urn. He said, I don't know if it's been long enough that we can talk about this yet. You can tell me if you're not ready. He admitted that he felt somewhat the same as these friends. He told me who had said it, and I understood what he, and they, meant. I think a lot of us like the idea of scattering a friend's ashes someplace beautiful, someplace they'd have wanted to go or loved to be. His friends certainly knew Jesse was not one to be confined by anyone. College actually said, he wouldn't want to be in there.

I wondered if that were the reason we heard less from Jesse's friends as time went on, and not because that's what normally happens after you lose the child, their friends drift off toward their futures, the lives they need to live. Had I offended them in some way, because of this need to keep his ashes? I don't think so. I know they were being kind, in not expressing their feelings about this to me. I know that the lives they lead now are touched by Jesse, and that they'll never forget him. And after all, they were Jesse's friends, not mine, and I am not Jesse, so I couldn't fill that role for them. Still, I care what happens to them, and it comforts me to think of them working out the lives they're just beginning.

I can't really think of "the" place I'd scatter his ashes, and I can't really think about what it would mean to me to do this. I'm not ready, I suppose. But as I reminded my son, Jesse's not what's in that urn.

But that, and a few of his things, and memories, are all I have left of him.

It sucks

2009-11-24T19:35:00.000-05:00

to work on drug literature for what you were on at Sloan Kettering. It makes that time too real, too recent. Especially now that it's getting cold. I keep feeling I need to go up there and see you after work, even though you're gone. I can see the IV tree in my mind, all the bags hanging off it, your cramped semi private room with a cold draft off the river, and you a little irritated that I wouldn't go away. I couldn't. I wish I hadn't.

My future

2009-11-23T18:51:00.000-05:00

After the broken foot's week in bed, I started building back up slowly, and am now up to 4 miles a day walking. Sure, my feet are a little sore now and then, but I can tell it's just work, not damage. I like walking without pain and have probably annoyed the hell out of more than one companion with the number of times I've said more or less that. Like realizing you're happy to be alive, being happy to be able to walk is an earned experience.

I usually do physical work better if I have a goal in mind, say an upcoming hike on something with a scary name. Yes, I collect Scary Name Hike Experiences. I've hiked Mt. Horrid, Avalanche Lake, Breakneck Ridge, and Hellhole (which is actually the tamest of the bunch). Of course when I found out there was a volcano on Bali, that became the goal. According to legend, it was placed on Bali by Shiva, as the throne for the Goddess of Lakes and Waters, Dewi Danu. I was hoping for something a little scarier than an immortal Public Works manager.

And I got my wish. Last week one of the Bali Web sites posted a warning that Mt. Batur is now closed due to volcanic activity. Apparently, the locals can tell the volcano's probably going to blow, whenever the lake below it starts to heat up. They leave, wait till it's over, then come back and replant. The glorified heated office chair hasn't erupted since 2000, so I'm not sure why it's chosen to screw up not only my vacation plans, but my reason for perambulation.

Family Feud

2009-11-13T17:14:00.000-05:00

It's getting so the only time I hear about my dad's side of the family is when one of them wants to persuade me to gang up against another. We used to be very close, all of us. Dinner every weekend on my grandparents' farm, weeks and weekends at each other's houses, three day long family reunions with barbecues and hootenannies and camping around the bonfire every year that drew relatives from all over the US.

My grandmother was the glue that held them all together, and apparently my dad was the woodclamp, because since he passed away, things have gone downhill, and aunts and uncles on either side of the feud will take one of us aside from time to time, and say "this never would have happened if your dad was alive." As if this is all somehow our fault. Now keep in mind, these people are in their late sixties to late seventies, they're all healthy, living and working on small farms or in small towns in wholesome southern Indiana.

It's not that they fight about any one thing, they've been at each other's throats for over a decade now. Uncle L asked Grandma to give him power of attorney so he could help her with her affairs, but Grandma didn't like Uncle L's wife, so she gave POA to Aunt K. Now you can't say anything nice about Aunt K around Uncle L or he'll throw you out. And Uncle M will storm out of his own house if you don't watch it. That killed our rompin stompin gun and beer totin family reunion hoedowns.

When my grandmother wrote her will, she literally implored my aunts and uncles to get along, that she wanted them each to have an equal share of her earthly goods, and that she wanted them to care for each other and be glad for each other. Well that went to shit before she got a chance to die. They fought over who visited her most, who took her furniture when she moved to the old age home, who cut her lawn, whether one was stealing the farm or the other was abusing her somehow. They called the cops on each other, once from my Grandma's home.

I used to visit all of them every year when I came back, but the last straw was when Uncle L's wife told the whole family that my brother was a rich millionaire who was trying to steal grandma's farm by having Aunt K hold an auction for it across state lines where the rest of them couldn't bid on it. And yes, they've known my brother since he was born, and no, he's not rich. All he ever said was he wished the whole family could pitch in and buy the farm together so we wouldn't have to lose it. Aunt K had to sell it in anticipation of grandma's nursing home expenses. By now she was in her late 90s.

The winter before she passed away at 99, Uncle L started litigating to take over her care from my aunt, then when she was gone, he tried to get executorship of the estate, from Grandma's trusted family lawyer. He lost. He filed criminal charges against Aunt K and got her thrown in jail for a bit, but she got out. She used her POA to buy all of grandma's furniture right before grandma died for a dollar and sold it all and kept the money. She put a registry book in grandma's old age home and hid it at the nurses station, so that it would look like the rest of the family never went there. He sued the estate and accused Aunt K of hiding funds. Aunt M's son in law became his lawyer and they all decided the estate owed him and every other lawyer a yearly stipend.

This went on from 2005 until the present. My sisters, brother and I stayed out of the fighting. We didn't want to choose sides, we loved them all, and had reason enough not to trust anyone's version of events. Since our father had passed away, his portion was supposed to go to us, split evenly.

We don't know why the estate didn't just release the funds to us before the war started. We don't know why we're being made to give up our portion of the estate to pay for the lawyers our aunts and uncles are lobbing at each other. We just assumed there was some kind of lien on the estate until Uncle L and Aunt K settled. We figured they'd just waste the whole estate in legal fees, because some of their actions were aimed at the estate and its executor.

Then last year the court assigned a mediator, they hammered out an agreement, and three of the siblings signed it. They kind of forgot to invite me and my siblings, and worse, they forgot to make sure Aunt K signed it. She didn't. There was a hearing yesterday, and my cousin's husband tried to get out of having the estate pay the mediator, since he never notified us of the meeting, and never ensured Aunt K signed the agreement. But that was the only matter the judge wanted to hear about. He ordered the estate to pay the mediator, told the bunch of remaining family members to work it out, and left them. Aunt K never even bothered to show up.

My dad, the oldest, was born at home. They all lived in a farmhouse Grandpa built himself out of the former corncrib. The original farm house had burned before they bought the place. It was the Depression, but my grandparents made enough through farming and factory work to support five kids, and take in cousins on the weekends. Grandpa even hoarded nickels to buy his nieces and nephew ice cream of a Sunday. Every night, on the top floor where all the bedrooms were, the whole family would recite the rosary together before bedtime, telling the beads as they lay in bed, loud enough for each other to hear.

They woke up before dawn, milked cows, fed pigs, and headed off to school together. They all came home at the same time and did chores till supper, then played basketball/did homework/worked on their hobbies till bed. It was a good life, they all admit it.

I'd really like to just get it over with. My sister told the judge she was willing to give up a chunk of our share if we could just get out of it and never have to deal with it again. They're acting more like little kids than we were allowed to in all my childhood.

The social thing.

2009-11-11T17:56:00.000-05:00

One weird side effect (to me anyway) of Zoloft is that it makes me much more comfortable in groups. I never really realized how much energy it takes me to hang out with people, even (sometimes especially) people I like. It can be draining, but I do enjoy it: I guess this makes me an introvert? The last vestige of my childhood shyness is chemically removed. I expected to be able to write about Jesse without crying, and I expected to feel a little, well, elevation. I'm even okay with the piles of furniture and curtains and paint and construction supplies all over the loft now. (Sure, that's why I'm mentioning it. because it's okay.) But finding myself enjoying the prospect of hanging out with a large group of friends? I'm going to have to test run this new side of the Meyers Briggs attitude dichotomy. In Bali. Yes, I actually find myself sorry that I'm going alone. I never had that attitude about travel before, but here I am, wondering who I'm going to point out the fish to. Not sure I'm crazy about that feeling. I'll probably end up bonding with tourists.

The other weird side effect is mild nausea.

Discipline (right)

2009-11-10T17:15:00.000-05:00

Making myself write again. I took out a notebook that Jesse's girlfriend had left behind when she moved, and wrote my first day's entry into it: dreams are like stars, they're always there, just easier to see at night. It sounds romantic but it's also a current theory of dream production in your brain. During the day, reality checks. At night, not so much.

I try to give myself a lot of assignments at a given time, so that when I balk at doing one thing (say, building my web site) I can procrastinate while doing something useful (planning for Bali), educational (reading the dozen or so books I've bought this year). Enough plates in the air and you don't stop running around the table. Right now I'm reading Pink Brain, Blue Brain by Lise Eliot. Mostly sticks pins in all the gender difference studies, beliefs, myths. Once I'm finished, I'll do a review. That's going on my site. Which I can screw around with when it's too hard to write here. Right now, I'm writing here because it's too hard to confront my web page.

That's right. I am treating my mind like a toddler. Redirecting myself when I'm balky, toward something shiny. When I lose interest, I shake some new bauble at myself and propel myself forward in a different direction. This, I can do.

Blood.

2009-11-09T17:32:00.000-05:00

Yesterday morning I woke up with a slight nosebleed. It's happened to me once before, when the kids were little. I'd been sitting at the kitchen table talking to a friend, then a splitting headache and blood. Then I was at the ER. A volunteer held my arm while the nurse tried to insert an IV line in my wrist. Every time the nurse would jab me, the volunteer would suck air in hard between her teeth with a sharp hiss, and I'd jump, and the nurse would miss the vein. This happened five or six times before the volunteer said, "Oh, this tooth is killing me."

I told the nurse to just stop and leave me alone. They left, and I burst into tears. The neurologist came in while I was crying and began grilling me. He said didn't believe that the migraine could possibly be painful enough to make me cry. What happened before you came here? he kept asking me. What's going on? There's some emotional aspect, he said. I denied it.

I realize now that he suspected my ex of bloodying my nose. It still shocks me that he picked up that I was abused, even though he was wrong about the nosebleed.

Fast forward 15 years, and Jesse is in the hospital because his nose was bleeding uncontrollably for no apparent reason. A cut on his arm wouldn't heal but wept clear liquid lymph. Leukemia. Greek for white blood.

And I looked in the mirror at my bloody nose yesterday, and wondered if there's something in my blood that he inherited, that wrung the red out of his blood. Something wrong that I had passed on. Epigenetic? I grew up a few miles from Fernald, the nuclear munitions plant in Ohio that poisoned the aquifer in my town and others around it. And I think of all the things that could have been, might have been wrong, that could have caused this one mother cell to switch one chromosome. And that was the beginning of the end. Nothing I did from that moment on could have saved him, but that won't stop me from trying to figure out another way. A way to blame myself, a way to conquer death, as if I believe somewhere deep and childish, that I can go back in time with the answer, and still fix everything.

I remembered the moment after he died, as I began my closer acquaintance with death; turning his hand over to see the pooled blood under the skin of his lifeless arm. Exactly where I'd heard it would be. No longer his enemy.

Moving forward

2009-11-03T15:31:00.000-05:00

Today I voted, not so much for Michael Bloomberg, but against changing mayors. Is that so crazy? I got up early, limped over to the voting side of town, then realized that I could prop my foot up if I'd buy a footstool, and ice it at work if I only had a cold pack. Then it occurred to me that if I keep making these little 5 block trips, adding one or two more a day, I'll be walking a mile or two by the time I leave. And if I use my shopping pelf as free weights, I can do my upper body workout in the process. Yes, I am become Efficiency, Ameliorator of Time Constraints.

Bali, hi!

2009-11-02T16:07:00.000-05:00

Now that I can walk a little without the brace on my foot, expanding my range a block at a time, I'm starting to sketch out my two weeks in Bali. I'm going there because a dear friend has her home there, and she's been nagging me to go since she moved there. Now that she's threatening to move to yet another island altogether, the pressure is on, Bali now or never. Husband can't make it, so I'm on my own. This will be the first time I've spent that much time on a plane, seen the other side of the Pacific, been to a country where christians are few and far between, the first time I've left New York for thanksgiving... oh, you get the idea.

I want to climb the volcano. I know, broken feet are pretty lousy trail companions. But I'm going to build up my endurance. I have three weeks. And it's a pretty small volcano. I hear the trail is actually shorter than Breakneck Ridge, the mountain where I cracked the metatarsal in the first place.

Temper that with the snorkeling, the beach time, the touristy stuff, I think I'll be plenty busy.

Zoloft.

2009-10-26T15:15:00.000-04:00

That's where I've been. Surrounded by soft cottony zoloft. No crying fits, no overwhelming desire to rehash what happened. I can smile when I think of Jesse. I remembered the day that I knew he was moving back home for law school, I remember those weeks when I knew, and felt a glow as if I were pregnant. It was my happy non-secret. Not long ago, I stood in the hallway between the two halves of our loft and I remembered standing there, knowing he was there behind the closed door, safe and sound. I remembered and I didn't cry. I smiled. Felt the cool shadow of that happiness on me again. My baby had come home.

What I'm working on...

2009-10-02T20:32:00.001-04:00

Newsboy

I was stepping out of my favorite Joycean establishment (and by that I mean it looks like a set from The Dead) the other night to smoke my cherished CAO maduro (I tend to buy one cigar and keep it around for a few months in the humidor till I've wrung the anticipation (and probably too much of the moisture) out of it). Anyway, I was stepping out of the bar and up ahead of me was Ryan McMann (not his real name, but close enough). Hadn't seen him in at least 20 years, and he was more or less in the process of being asked kindly to exit.

He didn't seem particularly out of control, but that's the exasperating part of his charm. He's a big red headed Irish bull of a drinker so he probably didn't hear me call his name as he wrestled the air on his way to the cab his friend was about to drive off in without him. So that's where I caught up with him and proceeded, with a great deal of reiteration on his part, to catch up.

We managed between the two of us to get back to the sidewalk during the course of what can only be called a conversation for lack of a better term. Turns out he had just gotten back from watching a childhood friend die up at Mt Sinai, and was on his way to the wake, which in his terms meant the wake would probably be the next day, and he was trying to honor the occasion at every bar between here and Queens in the process.

When I said Ryan is big, I mean first, extremely tall and lank of jaw-- I remember now he once told me he had Marfan's syndrome, and spent a great deal of time at doctor's offices being studied and treated for it. But big too in other ways less obvious to the eye.

We hadn't been stationed at the sidewalk long before he'd learned I was married now and stopped asking for my phone number while simultaneously asking to meet my husband and petitioning the group next to us for a cigarette. What I heard was him mumbling and the group of kids simultaneously moving in and backing up a bit, wild eyed like nervous colts sniffing something new. He turns to me and says, "These crazy kids think I'm calling em a dirty name and I'm just askin for a fag!"

I give the group my maternal assessment-- they've never seen anything like Ryan before, they're all from good homes where no one keeps liquor or wears last season's shoes. Don't ask me what I said to calm them, but I'm sure by their reaction that they realized he was harmless. They skittered a little closer and one of them realizes what a fag is in his mind and hands him a cigarette.

This is a filter cigarette?! he asks as if it's not obvious. A filter? He rips the filter off it and mutters about the filter being what gives you cancer. The kids laugh and start to get a little comfortable and Ryan continues on his fag/fag theme and I realize as he's talking that two of the kids are actually gay, probably because one of them leans toward me as Ryan is rambling on and says we're partners, we're gay and I'm nodding and saying that's great, congratulations and Ryan is still oblivious when the kids amble off, but not before he begins a monolog (and in the ten years I knew him before the twenty in which I haven't seen him I had never heard him give off a shred of poetry, much less of all things Oscar Wilde, which made the colts even more skittish because Ryan keeps repeating his aside which is "and I have no idea what men do with young boys," along with the much more innocuous, "1888." And he's in full Irish story mode, beginning with the nights of revelry and dissipation leading up to Wilde's crafting of the poem we're all now dreading to hear. But first Ryan must pay tribute to the long-suffering wife and kids and now Oscar's pulling up in front of the house in a horse and carriage in the cobblestone street and staggering in the door, breezing past his bewildered family to sit before his desk and pen the poem we're about to hear, if Ryan ever gets to the point. The kids are getting a little terrified that there'll be consequences if they interrupt him again (which could mean he's going to start over at the beginning or take a swing at one of us). The poem, it turns out, is The Harlot's House, and he declaims it quite well, for a man with whiskey and cigarettes for a voice and recent death weighing on his mind.

The kids breathe a sigh of relief when it ends. Exeunt kids. My husband shows up for introductions and we're treated to more of Ryan till he manages to forget he's already given us Yeats but at least it's He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven. And each time dramatically lays the imaginary cloths at my feet, so it's a little embarrassing but not nearly so much as when he announces to the kids at his first recitation that he never slept with me and only wished he had.

The second time it gets a little annoying and I chafe a little at my bond of debt for what I owe him, just to stand here and let him talk before he staggers off to the next bar to try to forget his friend just died in front of him, a guy he'd known since he was five, they'd shot up together and cleaned up together and Ryan traded heroin for whiskey but for his friend it was all too late. He'd already gotten Hepatitis C, and his clock was ticking.

And I worry silently when he tells me this part, that Ryan's clock is ticking too, and he's pushing the hands faster and faster tonight. This bothers me because despite all the boozy blindness of his rambling and his big scariness, Ryan is as good as men get. He's telling my husband about his life in the Village, he plays some kind of music, I don't know what, he was friends with this and that jazz musician, and I'm thinking back to why I knew him from behind in the dark from thirty feet away and took the trouble to hobble after him with my foot splinted in this giant boot. And it has nothing to do with who he knew or what he played or recited or even that he made his money shucking stack on stack of the Daily News out of the back of a truck since he was a beanpole kid with barely the arms for it.

No. I met Ryan because he was a regular at my bar in another life I had back then, and he would stumble over to an unruly patron and whisper something to them and they'd put a big tip on my bar and walk out, expressionless. He'd hang out and tell stories I can't remember, and tipped well. And one night when I crashed at my girlfriend's loft and one of her other guests waited till we were all asleep to rape me, and I woke up and felt I was on fire, and everything hurt, not just the raw memory of what had happened, but the water of the shower on my skin, and the thought process that led me to take that shower instead of going to the cops, everything, even the air hurt me, and the next place I knew to go to in that part of town at that hour was Ryan's, and he made me breakfast and put me to bed and hovered over me like a mom and I knew that nothing else could hurt me that day. And I can still remember the icy white blue of the walls as the sun first hit them, as if that were all there was left in the world. And Ryan let me stay until I was ready to go, and never asked anything of me for it.

The truth is

2009-09-27T15:40:00.003-04:00

I didn't really understand what love meant until I lost Jesse. I don't think I can explain it to anyone in a meaningful way, except to say that you never really know a thing until you've been enveloped in it and then lost it, like water, or air. It's a horrible thing to say, I suppose, to tell people that love is nothing like what you think it is. That's it's a scam of nature. A great, important scam. A dirty trick nature plays on us: you love a person or thing because that's what makes you protect it most fiercely, that's what makes you willing to stand in their place and take whatever comes, past death. You feel the payoff, love makes you feel good, you seek it out, you nurture it. You look for ways to make it even better. But the payoff of love is not entirely for you. You may think it is. You think love is a positive emotion, that it makes you happy, it makes your loved ones happy. You think it's good. You think your bargain with life is that if you love someone and protect them -- if you're good, so to speak, you will be loved and protected too. Those you love will be part of your tribe, support you, that among the people you share love with, there will be some kind of comfort and perhaps even happiness. You don't think about what will inevitably happen. You can't really. If life lifts the veil of contentment (you may not call it that or experience it as that, I'm sure, but believe me, it's a relative term) from your eyes for a moment, and you see what's coming, how will you go on? In a sense, you only torture yourself if you try to cheat nature and see the world for what it really is.

The payoff of love is that some of what we love so flagrantly, heedlessly, intensely, that some of that will survive. Whatever causes us to love doesn't care if not all our babies make it. It doesn't care if we die from losing love. It cares that somehow, love makes some of us survive. It is designed to make us keep loving no matter how horrible and ugly it gets, because love is the bridge between now and tomorrow. It's the only way that human beings, for example endure. You don't believe that, you counter with the example of insects, bacteria, viruses, all these things that live and survive without love and how many more of them there are than us, you think of what propels their races forward. But it's because we aren't those things that love matters most for us. You think it's because we're smarter or faster, or stronger, but it's love that keeps mothers tethered the whole mindless scheme that brought you here, to read these words.

So that trite analogy of humanity to something insectlike, or microbe-like on the planet is wrong, in a sense. We're something else. Think of how the cells in your body all pitch in and divide the labor of keeping you alive, live and die in some forgotten corner of your body, for the sake of you walking around the earth, to whatever purpose you think you chose. Or those parts of you go to war with you and you die.

Human love is nature's way of stepping up the game.

There's a song I can't listen to without crying.. I've had the cd for years, and never knew the words because it's in a Portuguese dialect of Mozambique. I always thought it was a lullabye and you can see why from the sample. I wanted so badly to conquer that reaction of misery to this song, so that I could listen to it and enjoy it without breaking down. So I tried googling it, free translation sites, Web sites that mention the singer and the band, just blindly feeling around for some clue as to the meaning of this song beyond what it means to me inside. Today I read a brief translation of it that goes "Whenever I think of lazy people, I think of Cecilia."

Something about the end of the world.

2009-09-23T18:43:00.001-04:00

It ended before I knew it with a phone call in the kitchen just back from my first trip to the Caribbean, that was supposed to be a surprise birthday trip but a buddy had spilled the beans back in March. The phone rang at say 6 pm, it was July 10, 2004, a Saturday and I don’t ever have to check a calendar because you always know where you are when your world ends.

I picked it up. My college son, Jesse was on the other line. “Mom, don’t freak out.” And I knew it was bad, but college bad, not the other kind, right? “Okay, I’m sitting down,” I said. Mom don’t freak out but I have leukemia.

So that was the beginning. I was on the next plane from New York to Chicago. When his girlfriend’s mom took him to the ER there it was for a nosebleed that wouldn’t stop. Nobody hit him. It just wouldn’t stop bleeding. I thought of him in cargo shorts and low rise sneakers lugging bikes up and downstairs at his job, bumping himself, bruising. How easily he could have bled to death just doing his job.

They wouldn’t let me near him without a mask and gloves. He was livid that life threw this at him, right before his senior year. Wry, ironic in his suburban hospital room with nice carpets and a view of a lawn he would never walk on and a tree he would never touch.

We moved him downtown, the local hospital didn’t have facilities to treat APL. It was pure luck the admitting doctor recognized it in his blood, had seen one case before, once, and never forgotten. Another day, week, he’d have been dead. Chicago gave him two more years. He went back to school that fall. Chemo tube in his chest, he went to class. They let him use a handicap sticker for his car so he didn’t have to walk far, but the insurance didn’t consider this a disability that would let him stay insured and off his feet while he fought for his life.

But he did it.

And the rest of the end came later. After he moved in with his girlfriend whom he’d loved since freshman year, after they went to Europe together and nearly starved trying to stick to their vegetarian diets (in Paris, by God). After they skydived together and had the sense to take pictures so even now I can see the shot of him apprehensive at the door of the cabin, the shot of him holding in his terror as the plane climbs, and the wide grin as he leaps out into nothing.

The world doesn’t end in a split second, see. It rolls around a while before it comes to complete stop. So Jesse got to graduate and he got into law school furious it wasn’t the one he wanted but he’d try again later after he could get off the oxycontin for the endless pain in his back that no doubt started with the bone marrow samples they drilled out of him with an ice pick while I watched. He got through the first semester. Everyone loved him because he made law funny. Don’t ask me how; this is what they told me at his funeral.

Yes. He had all that before the world ended. When the nurse at the new hospital called me to come in even though I was sick and not allowed to be around him because he had no white blood cells, and I thought they needed me to sign some papers and she said no, just because you need to be here. And I knew and didn’t know what exactly she was saying. The world is a juggernaut that must destroy everything in its path before it can stop.

He was already gone when I got there. Induced coma. I called to him anyway as they wheeled him from the single room he’d had to fight them to give him, that he’d only spent a weekend in, while the drugs made him hallucinate he was anywhere else, back in the semiprivate. Watching a movie. The one weekend I couldn’t be there because I had a cold but now that didn’t matter and it would never matter again that I wasn’t there when he looked up from the toilet seat at the nurse and gave her his wry grin, his ironic take on his own death happening already in his brain. What I called to him was, I’m here Jesse. I won’t leave.

And still the world wasn’t quite done with us. They wheeled him down to the ICU and everyone who knew him or me flew in or drove or took a cab or somehow found us and we slept on the floor of the unit like gypsies. Kids from his high school, his law school. Generations of my family. None of us knew what to do, least of all me, the unofficial leader. And we believed in everything that couldn’t be true, that his brain would stop bleeding, that he could hear us. That he could wake up. That this could end any other way than how it did. I was a terrible leader. I wouldn’t leave him. I didn’t care if he came back without a voice or brain. I didn’t care if it took him months to die. I wouldn’t leave him. I threw away all my stupid voodoo healing amulets. They meant nothing anymore. Then I retrieved them from the garbage and tried to put them back together as if that somehow would reverse this. Nothing does. Because next the doctor with her pleading eyes comes to me as if it’s somehow my fault Jesse’s heart is still pumping and she says I’ve got to stop this. And I let her.

She won’t let me stand with him while they pull the tubes out of him, but compromises and I stand on the other side of the curtain and hold his dear swollen foot without seeing what his body is subjected to. I hold onto him like Thetis knowing there is only one end to this awful bargain of a world. They clean him up and let me back in and his heart is still pumping. He hasn’t got enough in him to breathe or even know he isn’t breathing, but it still beats. Slower until it fades. And that is the last of him and my world.

I sometimes wonder what life is beyond this one. Or how or in what fashion one might find his way there.

You never really know a person till you share an inheritance

2009-09-16T18:35:00.002-04:00

My Memere used to say that all the time, but she was from an old New Orleans family where any will was both an admission and denial of blood. When Jesse died, he had no will, what person that age would? I was the next of kin. So it was up to me to tie up the loose ends and settle everything. Relatively simple if you don't take the emotions into consideration.

Now though, my Indiana grandma's will is on the table. Different but just as ancient family: on her side no one had traipsed through the wilderness driven from the wintry flank of Nova Scotia to the low savage swamps of Louisiana. Nor had they sailed from war-torn Alsace looking for a teaching job in the French colony. No, her people had come with the rest of the early country, fought in the Revolutionary war, escaped hanging in Germany, or migrated from Ireland at the famine. A different strand of the European vine.

My grandma had five children, including my dad, who passed away at 45, when she was in her late 60s. I wear her shoes, I guess. My dad was the oldest, the stubborn, the loyal, the one who left, but came back and stood by my grandparents ever after.

The remaining siblings had been our surrogate parents when we were kids. We spent summers together, on weekends my dad would drive us to Grandma's and we'd spend at least a day with everyone, share meals, some ritualistic farm chores almost as ceremonial as they were practical. We bonded with our farm inheritance by tilling, planting corn, gathering berries, milking cows, pulling weeds. Work was love, was family. I don't remember much fighting then, just sharing of work and play, but I was a kid and there was a kid's table in that house. There was also an outdoors we were sent to, during which times some of these long-term resentments must have been laid out and fondled and honored and brandished and cradled and nourished, like another set of kids themselves.

Must have been my parents and grandparents protecting us, they were the ones sending us outside. The uncles and aunts careened more or less through life, didn't finish college, got into debts, premarital pregnancies, scrapes with the law and life, before settling down in the more or less forgiving but never forgetting landscape of southern Indiana, where their family had been for so many generations that our names appeared in history books simply because we were still there.

But there were always resentments and rivalries, regardless of what Dad did to corral them before or after his death (they would all say, if your dad was still here none of this would happen, every time they feuded). Because when Grandma died, even though in her will she split everything equally and admonished them not to fight over the inheritance, they had already started the war. They'd started it before she even left the farm for the old age home. And it got worse every year, until it threatened to swallow my brother and sisters and me up in it, and the few cousins I could still call friends. And now, four years later, the thing those uncles and aunts have been nurturing in their hearts has reached us.

They think we're going to let them use our share of Grandma's money to pay for their feud over it.

They've forgotten that we're my father's children.

Trying to be rational.

2009-09-10T12:20:00.002-04:00

Not a good end to the summer for me. Problems on the home front that I can't resolve because they're not, in the long run, my problems. It's harder to look in the mirror and fix what you're missing, than it is to see what others are doing wrong, but you have a lot less control over the latter than the former.

I wonder if that's why I blamed myself so much for all that went wrong between Jesse and me when he was a teenager: if it was something I did wrong, then I could fix that. I was the grownup, so no matter what Jesse did, thought, heard or was told, no matter what, it was up to me to figure it out and fix it. But the clock ran out before we could sit down and make sense of his teens. We were just at the beginning, him still angry, but willing to put it aside, to live in the same house with me. Me still scared, angry a little myself, but able to talk to him a little, trying to feel my way toward reconciling. And Mr. Nomist so positive that we would work it out.

Fall is coming. The beginning of his end. This time, in his last year, we were trying to get him and his girlfriend to come to dinner on us. He would have none of it, no matter how we tried to make it work out; he would barely talk in the hallway. But we ran into each other-- at the grocery store, on the street, and we would talk as intimately as if we were sitting around a table together, close, sweet, hopeful. He had a hard side, that kid.