Little Story #3

Oregon is the farthest north I've ever lived. The long summer days are even longer here. In late May it's already getting light by 5AM and stays light till 9 or 10.
Because I worked so many breakfast shifts I've always been aware of the lengthening of days. It's nicer to walk to work in the light.
Walking to work in the morning you see joggers, other workers, sometimes in uniform. You see people coming home from a possibly long ribald evening. Makeup has lost its line. Clothing is rumpled. We pass each other. The workers with a day just beginning and the players with a day finally ending.
In New York I walked with my eyes down, careful to step over the streams of urine flowing from a wall to the curb. Broken vials of powder. Still burning stubs of cigarettes. In some parts of San Francisco it's similar. But New York has 24 hour mess and throb. You need to be alert.
I live above a coffee shop in the middle of a small city downtown area. Oak Street is also highway 30. Semis that look like they might be bigger than my condo go by all the time. The mornings start early with delivery trucks, breakfast smells, mufflers grinding. If I wanted to sleep late it might be a drag but I never do. I wake up earlier in the summer.
I always went into work early. I'd set up and then make my own breakfast, drink coffee and smoke some cigs. I miss the coffee and tobacco combo. The still dreamy drifting minutes before the work begins.
People who are outside a lot love long summer days. I'm not outside but I do love having light late into the evening. But I also enjoy the fall. I like things getting darker and colder. I like tucking in. The dark days last longer here too.

Little Story #2

My parents were together for the first three months of my life. They had a dog named Pride. When they were divorced my dad said the only thing he wanted was the dog. Nice thing for a girl to learn about her dad.
Apparently, Pride sat beside my crib, guarding me. The mommie told me different stories about what happened to him. I think she gave him to a family who owned a farm. Maybe she was being vindictive or maybe she thought Pride would be better off with them. Pride jumped over a fence and was hurt badly enough to die. This is the narrative I grew up with and am not at all sure how much of it is true. Except for the part about Pride sitting by my crib. I want that one.
I was afraid of dogs as a kid and am still uneasy around them. I like them very much. I just feel nervous.
When I was very young Grandmom sent me to the store. I must have been old enough to go but I know I was very young. There was a short cut through the streetcar tracks. It wasn't really dangerous because the streetcars didn't go that fast. It was easy to stand on the side when they went by. (Or stand in the middle when two went by and enjoy the thrill. Probably a bit dangerous.) But she told me to go around the long way. I was walking down the street when a small dog came out from behind his house and began to bark.  I stood very still and began to talk to him. I was terrified. I talked. He barked. Eventually he got bored and went back behind his house and I hurried away. The trip took way longer than it should have (despite me taking the short cut home) and Grandmom was worried and mad when I got home.
Years later, I was living in my first tiny studio and going to a community college. I walked to and from school. I was headed to school one morning when a really big German Shepard came running out from behind his house. I thought I'd walk around him and stepped off the curb. The mirror of a truck hit me in the head and I spun around. My right foot went under the back wheel of the truck.
I had a surgery to close the hole on the side of my ankle. I think it was a four hour surgery. Maybe five. I was in the hospital for a month, home with my leg elevated for a month and on crutches for a month. I have a really big scar. It looks like someone has taken a bite out of my ankle.
If my parents had stayed together and I had grown up with Pride I might not have been afraid of dogs. There's really no way to know. But videos of babies and young children with their dogs put a lump in my throat.
As do videos and pictures of dad's with their daughters.

Little Story #1

Not waiting for June because ... I need to jump in.
The stories are still quiet but for one. And it makes me a bit nervous to tell it because it's about me and God. It is true that I'm thinking a lot about this kind of thing but it isn't true that I'm getting religion. I'm not trying to inspire belief. I have no belief. But (as I mentioned in that post I was whining about not getting any reaction) there is a connection between my feelings about God and my sense that it will take some kind of divine intervention for me to find a partner.
And me and God go way back. My life story has been a religious studies program.
I put a new picture in my FB header. It's a picture of me at about six years old. I'm sitting by a small pond, holding a doll staring at a tree. I have no memory of that moment specifically but that is how childhood felt to me. Alone. Lost in revery. Clutching a simulacrum of a friend. I really used to stare at nature. I remember marveling over leaves and rocks and water. I may have been praying. I was always praying. I did the usual our-father and now-I-lay-me prayers but mostly I had conversations. My dad was absent. I think I re-parented myself with God and I think that was really smart.
But none of that is the story. The story is about a key.
My grandmother had given me a key. I don't remember why. It must have been a key to our house but I don't remember our house being locked. I think I was supposed to give the key to someone. Somehow, I lost the key. I was distraught because I knew my grandmother would be mad. She was never a violent kind of mad. At least not physically. But she could make you feel emotionally smashed. I remember frantically looking around. I was tugging at my pockets. I sat down on a stool and prayed. I begged God to help me find that key. And then I fell off the stool.
The key was under the stool.
Looking back from my current perspective I feel so much tenderness for that little girl. I wish she hadn't been so worried about her grandmother being angry. I sort of love that she believed that a deity would hear her and help her. I'm really happy that it worked out. She lives in me. I am still a little girl beseeching.
I think the re-parenting ended when I went to India to be with Baba.
I actually have a lot of stories about things working out after beseeching God for one thing or an other. There's the how I got the money to go to India story. I'll save that for another day. 

Little Story Project

I really enjoyed the month of poems. Posting something every morning took me back to the days when I used to blog every day. I looked for poems on the interwebs during the day. At night I looked through my books. I woke up every day with a poem at the ready.
I miss blogging. I just don't have the same drive to do it. I don't have much to add to the political conversation. There's so much noise and I don't want to be part of it. My life is fairly boring. When I write a post like the last one I wrote and get no feed back it makes me sad. I always wanted my blogging to be part of a big conversation and it never felt like it was.
My blog-roll is token. I don't really go through it. I scroll through Facebook and Twitter and Instagram but it doesn't feel the same.
Also.
I've been wanting to rewrite my book and ... I just don't do the work.
So.
I had this idea to write little stories every day for a month. Memoir-ettes. I had the idea because I had been telling someone a few of my stories. The minute I decided to do the project all my stories fell silent.
This is going to be a challenge.
I was going to do it for the month of June. Which is a few days away. Which feels like a stall.
I thought about doing as Tweets. I thought the constraint of 280 characters might be cool. Tamp down on my loquacious self. But when the stories fell silent I decided I should just ... do what I can do. Just do it. Just write.
Judging by how long it has taken to write this much ... how many times I stopped to make food, sing along with a song, play Pokeman, any bleeping thing ... I better not try any constraints. Not this time. The goal is just to write. Get that muscle working. I'm not looking for advice. I should (maybe) be better at hearing advice but right now I'm working with a clenched jaw. I'm on my tip toes. I trying to sneak past my ... self.
Which is not to say that comments won't be welcome and they don't all need to be hyper-positive. (Although ... um ... praise is OK.)
(Heh.)
So I'm going to post this.
And then have a panic attack.
Nah. 
I can do this.

Lament

I've been listening to podcasts. It started on the weekends but has been slowly replacing most of my news consumption. I listen to a few that aren't newsy. Ana Marie Cox does With Friends Like These on which she has the kind of conversations I long to have. Recently she had a conversation with Chris Stedman who identifies as a public atheist.
In my life I've participated in a number of different religions and philosophies. I remember deep spiritual feeling from my earliest childhood. These days I say I believe in God but I don't know what I mean by that. There is often an apt distinction made between religious and spiritual. But these days neither of those really fits. I believe in something. I believe that a butterfly flapping its wings may cause a shift in weather patterns. There are forces impacting us all the time. Political, social and probably mysterious. What I'm not sure about is whether I believe in a responsive personal force.
There's a problematic intersection in my feeling about God and my romantic longings. It's one of the saddest things in my identity. I have felt like meeting someone who could love me would require(s) divine intervention. In many ways this is about being fat but I know too many fat women with wonderful loving relationships to truly believe that. I think it has more to do with my absent father and inappropriately affectionate stepfather. Or some combination of difficult psychology and social bad faith.
I've been suffering a crush on a guy. I'm not sure how it happened. It developed slowly and is based on a physical reaction. I don't know him. The very little experience I have of him leads me to believe that we would have very little in common. At first it was just fun to enjoy feeling attracted to someone. Eros. It feels good. And then I started deteriorating. Because I do want a relationship. So I began to wish that he could be someone who he isn't. I began to write dialogue that would result in a surprise happy connection. Oddly, he doesn't seem to have received his script. I'd like to own the hurt that I am feeling because in a very real way it has nothing to do with him.
There is another episode of Friends Like These on which she talks about a column on sex robots and incels. She says something about people not knowing what incels are and ... I didn't. I looked it up. It's about feeling oneself to be an involuntary celibate. At first I thought - oh that's me! But no. It's not me at all. It's about a kind of entitlement that I don't understand at all. It's angry and violent.
Wanting something that isn't available to you is just no fun. It's no fun materially but we sort of have a place for that. Maybe we feel like if we work hard enough we can get things. Or we just feel resentful and we pout. I feel like certain things are a right. Food, education, health care, housing.  And certain things are just about process. We have a process toward realizing what we want.
Love isn't guaranteed. I don't think it should be. I never understand the - you deserve - lines. I don't think we earn or are entitled to love or any expression of feeling from anyone else. We just live in our individual process and sometimes we (pardon the expression) get lucky. Or we don't.
There have been men who loved me. There have been men who brought me roses. Thinking about them makes me sadder than thinking about the men who didn't. Why has it never felt right? Why am I always asking why? I feel like I've worked on this for years and I don't feel like I've gotten very far.
But not long ago I had a strong feeling of ... well ... I'm not sure what. Something like wholeness and peace. I don't know why it happened and I don't know why it eludes me today. It may be in part about this boy drama but ... I'm not sure that's all it is. It may be early birthday blues. Maybe it was too much poetry. It may just be a part of who I am. It certainly has been.
So.
There's no where to go with all this. No easy resolve. I know I'm not alone in these feelings. Not that that helps. I know these feelings will fade. Sort of fall back. Not bite so hard into my day. I am trying to find a way to hold them.
But.
They suck.
I'm not sure I believe in a responsive personal force. Does the butterfly flap its wings and cause the wind or does the wind call to the butterfly, asking for a push?

My Month of Poems

I don't know if I came up with this idea or if I read it somewhere but I wanted to post a poem a day for the month of April, which is National Poetry Month. I remembered kind of late on the first and went straight to the Duino Elegies. There are poems, specific lines from poems that live in me. I can grab them at will. I wasn't sure I could get through the month.
It became immediately obvious that I needed a plan. I didn't know if many people would read a whole poem but I did think they might read a line or two. I feel like many of us hold a line or two from a poem in our heads (hearts). So I carved out fragments, which ended up being so much fun. A fragment that stands alone often changes and doesn't even call out the rest of the poem. There were a few times when I posted a whole poem. I posted part of The Red Wheelbarrow even though the whole poem would have fit because if you read or study poetry you probably have your own version of that one. I was kind of hoping people might post theirs. Some poets write in long lines and I didn't even want to carve lines.  It was a challenge. Uncle Walt does not write in Tweets. I only broke one line, the line from Howl.
Awhile ago I asked R to move my poetry shelve down so I could reach it. I don't know why I put it up so dang high in the first place. A month or so ago I moved it again. Now the poetry is right beside me when I sit in my little library. The nest had poetry books scattered about all month. I have one book of poems many of which are old school. I was surprised by how many of them I knew and how much of them I knew by heart, like the Song of Hiawatha. Similarly one night I woke up reciting the Gettysburg address. I know way more of it than I would have imagined. I think memorizing poetry, bible verses and such was a big deal when I was a kid. I may get a word or two wrong.
The best part of the whole month was "meeting" Sparrow. I've been reading Sparrow for years, Mostly in The Sun. I went looking for him on the Google machine because I wanted to include one of his poems and found him on Twitter. I followed him right away and .... he followed me back!!! It really made me happy.
It was fun to see who responded to what. Jabberwocky got the most response. I'm not sure everyone saw everything because of the way Facebook and Twitter feeds move. Today, the last day I posted a poem of my own. I write so few. They usually come to me fully formed. I may work on them a little but not much. I'm not trying to be a poet. 
I never really know what to do on Twitter. This was a lot of fun. I'm not sure if I'll do it again but there were a lot of poets I would have could have used. I just liked the nightly ritual of looking for a poem.

The Tub

I just finished a book of essays by Lawrence Weschler:Vermeer in Bosnia in which he wrote a portrait of Roman Polanski. I've only ever been peripherally aware of Polanski. I've seen a few movies and liked them well enough. I've just never had a strong interest. The essay felt like vague cultural memories for me. I did know he cannot be in the USA because he was charged and convicted for having sex with a thirteen year old girl. I did not know much about the case. If weren't for the strength of Weschler's writing I might not have read the whole piece.
Polanski's mother died in Auschwitz. His father was also interred and Roman lived rough until after the war when he was reunited with his father. In the essay there is a conversation in which Polanski doesn't accept that the thirteen year old was a child. He says she was almost fourteen, as if that makes a huge difference. But Polanski had been watching people being shot in the street when he was fourteen. That must have skewed his sense of maturity.
The trial is fraught with complication. There was the character of the time when everyone was still working through the perimeters of free love. There's a he said/she said quality about the whole thing and finally a punitive judge who may have been "over sentencing." I don't actually have an opinion about any of it. It's too messy. I do feel that Polanski, seen in the context of his early life and the culture at the time of the event, comes off as more of a cad than a lech.
I've been having a lot of mixed feelings about the Me Too movement. I wrote my own story because I believe our stories bring light into shadows. But it's been such a barrage of revelations. And I have been more sad than mad about many of the men. I was really bummed to hear about John Hockenberry, who it seems is a big jerk. I'm always going to feel like Al Frankin was tossed under a bus. His actions seem like a cross between stupid frat boy behavior and a kind of obtuseness. Garrison Keeler? I don't even know what the issues were. Louis CK? I feel like his act was organized around inappropriateness. He's been asking all of us to watch him with his hand in his pants and we have because it was so funny and human.
In a recent Harper's there is a piece in which Katie Roiphe talks about an editor of the The Paris Review who "had resigned under a cloud of acknowledged sexual misconduct." He had also been an advocate for women writers in the Review. Reading a tweet that celebrated his resignation the Roiphe writes that of the many things that could be felt about the end of his era as the editor, celebration was not one. 
Years ago a friend was visiting and I asked her if she wanted to watch one of the few movies I own. She didn't want to watch it because it was a Woody Allen movie. I had been gifted the disc and didn't really know it was an Allen movie. Again, I've never been a huge fan so I've never been overly interested in his story. He always felt a little creepy and I believe his step daughter's account. But I was slightly taken aback at the idea of boycotting his work.
I feel like we've lived for so long in a world where we accepted the bad faith behavior of men. Boys will be boys. At some point in life I stopped believing that and hoped for an awakening. The Me Too movement feels like an awakening but it also often feels like a hammer. In ending the silence of women to speak about what's happened to them we've created another kind of silencing. We allow no measure of consideration. There's a baby and there's bath water but there's also a tub. I'm always interested in the tub. I want to know about the scene of the crime. What is the context? I think there is a difference in the behavior of a man who created an unsafe environment at work and a man who did some goof ball grabbing. The difference is not about right and wrong. They're both wrong. It's about context. Does it matter if a girl is thirteen or fourteen when an older man seduces her? Not really. But there is a difference between seduction and rape. And again. The difference is not about right or wrong.
I think accountability matters, I'm just not sure what the shape of it should be.
In my work on the events of my life I have sought truth and healing. First and foremost my own but also in my relationships. It's been hard for me to accept when the other person won't or cant meet me in the process. I will always feel that I paid a huge price for someone else's bad faith. But I also became who I am. None of that can be measured or accounted for in conventional terms. Way too many moving parts. None of it ends up as easy narrative. 
Awakenings are fraught. When someone has been silenced they want to be the only voice in the room for awhile and that makes sense. But we can't just disappear people. Roiphe writes that being able "to hold a lot of opposites in our minds seems to be what the movement calls for, to tolerate and be honest about the ambiguities." Holding the tension of opposites is always where I feel the truest truth lives. It feels like the place where the healing lives.