That Girl. Cubed.
In my other life (read younger, thinner, childless, selfish) I used to cross the line two, sometimes three times a day, and sometimes in my sleep. The line that separated the real OC from the greater nation of Los Angeles. Usually I could trick traffic. Go late, come back even later, but even in the thick of rush hour I thought nothing of it. Just pick a lane and stick to it. No sense in weaving all over the place. No sense in trying to force five early minutes by accelerating and cutting some poor bastard off. Just pick a line, adjust the radio dial and stick with it. I did this daily in a car I bought (and paid off) myself. The only “big” thing I’ve ever totally paid for off or otherwise entirely on my own. It was a two door Ford ZX2 and it was stick shift and sexy. It had no air, no CD player and hand rolled windows, but I loved it like you’d love anything big you paid for by yourself. And together we’d cross the line back and forth back and forth no official sign needed when you hit LA county the road changed and you just knew
So why, not even five years later, is it so hard to cross that line? (People said it would be. Not outright, but would exclaim–when I told them about my commute, how I’d cross the line for a coffee date of 45 minutes even–Why? I thought they were the crazy ones. Why the fuck not?) Soon, though, as the years wore on, and I got fat with the first baby, and then skinny(er) and then fat again the line moved. Or maybe it was that driving first the Porsche, then the bunghole Kia, and then the Stay-Way was just different. It f-ed up my flow. It impeaded my lane staying power. Blame the new track homes and the new new track homes. Blame urban sprawl and toll roads and all these people who didn’t used to be slowing down my drive. Blame XM and 6 CD changers and sunroofs and automatic windows. Blame cell phones and Cal-Trans and the guy who moved the line so far, so very very far away.
Which brings us to effort. And how we know, you know, I know, that if you just make the effort it will be worth it. Pack up the dog and the screaming toddler and make the drive to Redlands and you will be rewarded with smiles, and sparkly bangles and brilliant Yoga professors. But getting in the car and crossing that line… so. Damned. Hard. (Now.)
Or maybe it’s that they just don’t understand. Not the Yogi Profs. But the dog people and the singletons and the Hollywood types. Because would it really be so hard for them to get in the car and make the trip, alone, across the line. Free of fish crackers and leaky boobs, would it really be so hard for them to just drive, for once? Drive without complaining. Drive even though they can’t use the carpool lane. Drive because making the effort will be worth it. Because on the Calle I promise to have hugs and smiles and happy toddlers who won’t, in the safety of the backyard, embarrass you and your Hollywood friends at some swanky downtown bar.
watching boats
so we finally had that quiet family weekend. pushed the orange maclaren around town, stopped to play on the tire swing, and fell asleep crisscrossed three to a bed. but the clouds are back, the ubiquitous heavy rain clouds. with it come the seagulls diving into the sea-jellied sea. and yet we’re pining. o. keeps asking when we’re going to number seventeen and has an all out protest and won’t eat downstairs for breakfast. i keep telling m. we just need to get into our routine, and it has just been a week here in room 337 but it’s different and i find myself longing not only for the other sea but the sea of last year. we watch the trollfjord dock and check an old youtube and see a justtwo o. dancing on board as we return from bergen and i find myself really, truly for the first sustained moment missing my baby. longing for my wide eyed puddle stomping red and not for this, three year old going on seven who said to me last night, mommy don’t breathe. and there’s a line somewhere for that, of words searing, leaving craters, pockmarks. and i wonder, do we ask, do we expect too much or too little of them? ok, so as i think about that ghost poem the tv turns on, by itself, and the message allows me to breathe. a letter at reception. this is why seventydollarfaxes are important. don’t breathe. this air? this testing of injury. perhaps at two there was a shared wonder in it all. now at three we are just here in a small town waiting for
the four o clock ferry to come in.
Mail Call
Hour 67 of two kids, alone. And it’s pouring rain outside. Has been all day. We’re eating “dinner” at 4:30 in the afternoon because, well if you don’t eat when you can then you don’t eat (see microwave discovery of previous post). And because if we eat at 4:30 maybe someone will think it’s time for bed at 6:30. We can dream, right? Especially since j. went to work at 8am, Thursday…and is still at work (at 4:30 pm on Friday). 
So I guess you could argue who has it worse or you could eat when you can and then, halfway through Uncle TJ’s chicken lasagna you can remember the mail…and stop everything to go fetch it because maybe, just maybe a mail miracle will happen. And it does!
So you read the mail, in the rain, over dinner (so Hemingway) and then you discuss the mail, the weather, and some current events with you son, and it’s going to be alright.
Especially because of the stickers, it’s going to be alright.
Pixie Guilt
Pixie’s got tears in her ears. Because she’s been crying. And I’ve been showering. For the first time in three days. And this morning when I opened the microwave to warm a “clean” bran muffin–minus the raisins I picked out by hand–I found a plate of chicken and roasted veggies. Last night’s dinner? The night before? Does it even matter because I’m on the third verse of a Sheryl Crow song: “… I’ve been living on coffee and nicotine I’ve been wondering if all the things I’ve seen …” only the cigarettes are imaginary, of course. And w. went to school today because of the afore mentioned in a comment somewhere two alarm fire on the calle last night and the great big daddy absence and the looming book deadline, w went to school so I could write while pixie sleeps. Only she’s not sleeping. Not today. Today we both have tears in our ears.
Sometimes a bun, sometimes only a biscuit
For some reason I can’t seem to get this line, “spinning in the hope current, someone singing sometimes a bun, sometimes only a biscuit” out of my mind. It’s the last line of a Mary Jo Bang poem that I read in 2002. And it still echoes, even when googled to find out, yes! With the exception of a comma it was those words, that line, exactly. And if you don’t love her for her name alone, love her for the collection of poems called Louise in Love, a word tribute to Louise Brooks, of course, with entries like “They Chirp, They Whistle, and Words” and “Kiss, Kiss, said Louise By Way of a Pay Phone” and “Travel is Easy By Train” and “The Story of Small Cars” and “The Medicinal Cotton Clouds Come Down To Cover Them.” But the bun–or the biscuit– it has nothing to do with anything. An add-on. A superfluous tag to the poem “She Couldn’t Sing At All, At All.” But without it the poem, the collection, the medicinal cotton clouds, the reader would be lost. And not only that, but the spinning and singing, with hope. Like she too, (Louise? Mary Jo?) had been trailed by a three year old spouting the most elegant nonsense all the while trying to finish her book.
By the way…the haircut is so calling: Cara…Cara!
“this life is not the life of a writer”
was enjoying this article from bookslut on plath–and this seemed ever the addendum to the ongoing question of work and writing:
According to Kathleen Connors’s essay, Plath had mixed feelings about literary scholarship. In 1957, as an English instructor at Smith, she wrote to her brother, “I am simply not a careerwoman, and the sacrifice of energy and lifeblood I’m making for this job is out of all proportion to the good I’m doing in it… I wanted to write first, and being kept apart from writing, from giving myself a chance to really devote myself to developing this ‘spectacular promise’ that the literary editors write me about when they reject my stories, is really very hard. Also, I don’t like meeting only students and teachers… this life is not the life of a writer… I am needing to apprentice myself to my real trade… how I long to write again! When I’m describing Henry James’s use of metaphor to make emotional states vivid and concrete, I’m dying to be making up my own metaphors. When I hear a professor saying, ‘Yes, the wood is shady, but it’s a green shade — connotations of sickness, death, etc,’ I feel like throwing up my books and writing my own bad poems and bad stories and living outside the neat, gray secondary air of the university. I don’t like talking about D.H. Lawrence and about critics’ views of him. I like reading him selfishly for an influence on my own life and my own writing.”
bungholes and boatrooms–
for all the view they offer are tremendously claustrophobic. and like living in the hills of god’s country, there is no easy exit. there is no dramatic slamming of the door and zooming out of suburbia. there is the bathroom and there is the elevator. but both of which arouse spectators. you are, of course, not allowed to close the bathroom door–even if you are “making poopy presents” and any kind of move for the elevator initiates a parade of sorts marched to the shrieking tune of “moooooooommmmmmeeeeeeeeeee! where you gooooinnnnggggggg????”.
and maybe it’s because the entire situation has uncannily reminded me of those (not the first few but the second few) weeks of having that new baby. it’s the flipped out schedules, the new appendage that clings to your body for life, and the spousal closeness that has nothing to do with intimacy. and i’m aware that i’m making these compariosns rather carelessly– i’m missing the green poop explosions, the cracked nipples, and the tore up vjay.
but i last night after i insinuated with absolute terror that m. did not get it (because certain papers were not worth the ridiculous price of a seventydollar fax) i was struck by the relentless echo of the question of work and the value of work. add that these papers were literal evaluations, proof that my teaching was good, evidence that my work counted. and i heard you say again “but you can just get another publisher.”
maybe i just forgot how to cohabitate. isn’t that what i’m trying to re-remember? trying to do the horse show when the only thing that really works is the donkey trot?
and really, cattlekilling is so not mrsdalloway.
