Things Change

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Really, they do.

I don’t think I’d properly begun to realize that until this semester, perhaps even this Christmas. You see Christmas used to be this great shining thing set gloriously at the end of the year. School let out, we opened all our presents and drank eggnog, then the next day we were off to my grandparents’ in dear old Brookfield, MO.

It was just us and my Aunt Amy’s family when we were kids. Mary and Peter and Jacob and I sat at the kids table and wreaked havoc. Grandma would proudly set out her little individual salt shakers, and we would spend Christmas dinner salting each other’s milk and making up stories about my brother George’s latest escapades. Even when it wasn’t mealtime we would sit at the card table playing long games of Mille Borne (Creve! Creve!) and Monopoly. Usually Monopoly. Peter was always the banker and he always won, Mary cheerfully came in second, I came third for lack strategy, and Jacob came dolefully last, because Peter always had it in for him. Thus began the illustrious cousin tradition of bending and even, yes, breaking the rules.

As we got older, and my Uncles Bill’s kids also began to descend en masse every Christmas, we played Mafia just to cheat and peek, and generally win unfairly. All part of cousin bonding, you know. There was also an official cousin basketball game, in which I was always the official photographer, a job I was very bad at. Here we are in 2007 after that year’s game.

As I remember, 2007 was a particularly red-letter Christmas. Emily brought her new husband André, and we took joy in initiating him and giving him the official stamp of cousin approval.

Some of these signatures are forged, but who’s telling which?

The other notable thing about Christmas 2007 was Poopsie. Billy and Hannah went into town with Grandpa one day for some inauspicious reason, and came back a couple hours later with a puppy. He (she? I can’t remember…) was very cute, and also entirely unhousebroken (thus the name…) It wasn’t until Christmas night, when Mary and Tina and Joe and I took him for a walk that he did his business outside for the first time and we rejoiced. Then, while star-tripping, Joe fell and got that business all over his jeans, and we rejoiced only slightly less. (“Joe! That was Poopsie’s Greatest Achievement, and you fell in it!”) Wonderful Christmas.

Since then we have had a few family reunions in hotels which have brought us to some truly marvelous locations, like this unique antique mall.

As you can probably see written all over my face there, that was the Christmas that eight of us girls crowded into one hotel room and stuck this sign on the door.

It truly was, my friend. Santa was spotted just down the hall.

Mostly, the thing about Christmas with cousins is that it is a lot of very tall people in a house with very low ceilings sitting on couches together singing carols and giggling.

Three or four days full of lots. Lots of jokes about pantyhose, lots of games of Authors, lots of re-watching of State Fair, lots of racing out to the cold breezeway to grab orange balls, lots of Christmas.

Here we are, last Christmas—grown, haven’t we?

BUT…

This Christmas we couldn’t get there till the 23rd. It was the McLellans’ year off, Uncle Jon (better known as UJ) had done his familial duty at Thanksgiving, and as for Uncle Bill’s—Hannah and Billy had to work and couldn’t come, and Joe had already left for St. Louis. We had a nice evening, sang carols and all, and the next day an attempt was made at a cousin basketball game, which I rather spoiled, and that was it. The rest of them left. We went ahead and did the present opening on Christmas Eve, just to get it out of the way, it seemed. Christmas felt like any other Sunday, except quieter. Even in our unusually small numbers, we more than doubled the attendance at my grandparents’ sadly fading church. Merry Christmas and all that…

The holidays seemed to have matched my semester a little too well—quite lost from what I thought it would be. It all leaves me holding fast to the things that haven’t changed:

When we spent the night in Nashville, and the question of the evening’s entertainment was brought up, Peter Immediately said “We could play Monopoly…” and we all said “NO!”

When asked to pick a carol George made a show of deciding and then grumbled “We Three Kings.” It used to be the only song he’d sing with us, even in the summertime.

There was still a card table in the breezeway piled with cookies and leftovers.

A Christmas Carol was read aloud in the car, and It’s a Wonderful Life lives in that glorious black and white.

There’s something else too, that hasn’t changed. However I feel about the day, whether or not I even remember that it’s Christmas, it’s still the day Christ was born. It’s still the incredible beginning of God’s plan of redemption. It is a day that means even in the dreariest, most disenchanted place A SAVIOR IS BORN. Even when I’m drowning in self,  and dull, adopted hurts, my God sent his Son as a baby, even more vulnerable and prone to tears than I am, that I might know hope. And that will not change.

Tomorrow is new day and a new year in which I get to serve a living God who came to save me. Please remind me when I forget. Please.

Colors

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My junior year of high school I was in a creative writing class, and in my journal I always told my teacher what color my day had been–a linoleum green, aubergine, festive red, or a warm, linty grey. The bad days, the gag into a corner days, were always tan. I hate tan.

Recently, though I haven’t been paying a great deal of attention, my days have been mostly the same color. Not quite sure what color that is–not tan–(okay, maybe kind of tan…) This is why I haven’t been writing. I actually have a list of possible topics living on my desktop, but it takes at least a tiny bit of Walt Whitman’s “urge, urge, urge” to make myself write, and the urge only lives in color.

But I have been thinking about some nice things today. I picked up a copy of the Quad, because my poem is in it with a whole page to itself (!!!) and then I started thinking about the book review I’m going to write on academic tenure, and that made me very happy, and then I remembered Christmas and cousins, and I watched this video. Then I felt just a little bit like I’d found my feet, and I started writing to you.

And now for some more things which have the potential to make the days change color. Classes are over and finals are coming, and I’m looking forward to them just a tad. I’m good test-taker. I’m comfortable there. At some point Heidi and I are going to go to the library, find a T.S. Eliot anthology, and I’m going to read her “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,” sitting there in the stacks. I’ll drive to Missouri with my family, and Scrooge and the Grinch will probably come with. Over break I plan on reading The Hunger Games, Huck Finn and John Green’s new novel, if I can get a hold of it, along with some of those tenure books. And Hannah’s getting married–in January. A few sparks of pigment there, don’t you think?

One of my favorite lines of poetry from this semester is in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese  about the “gold and purple of thine heart.” She’s talking about an innate, unfaltering royalty. A nobility that lives behind the plainest faces, and beneath the flattest places–rich and deep and velvet. The color, perhaps, of peace, of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “dearest freshness deep down things.” Fresh, warm, patient, Princely peace.

So here’s to gold and purple days, friend. Happy Christmastime.

Grammy

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When I was in ninth grade my aunt took my grandmother, who was ill with what we then thought was Parkinson’s, and entirely isolated her from everyone she knew and loved. We never got her back.

I used to build all sorts of dream scenarios surrounding what I would do or say if I encountered my aunt. Sometimes she was coming to kidnap me, and I had to put up a fight, sometimes I defended my parents’ child-rearing, sometimes I protected friends from her grasp, sometimes she was escorted off the premises by an impromptu security force, and often there was a lot of profanity involved (mostly  on her side.) But years of such imaginings have worn me down a bit. I know now that there is one scheme in which she failed, and that is what I’d rub in her face. If my aunt ever shows up on my doorstep, or I run into her on the street, whether she is screaming at me or smiling beguilingly, I will look her in the eye, and say in a tone which compels her to listen, “I know that my grammy loved me, and you’ll never convince me otherwise.” (You dirty, rotten liar)

I remember Grammy once telling me with great pride that she bet I was the only child in all of my kindergarten who didn’t pick her nose. This was false. I did pick my nose. But when she said it, I believed it, and I glowed. Her approval was never hard to earn, but something in her eyes and smile made it deeply valuable. She laughed when I tried to be funny, she laughed when I didn’t. Once, when I was about eight or nine, she told me that I was going to be a comedienne someday. (The way she said it you could hear the extra “ne.” She was classy like that.)

She made you feel like a million bucks. It’s hard to describe just how, but everyone knew it. She had the best hands, the best laugh, the best cadence to her voice. As my uncle said in her obituary, “She was the best.” That’s all there is to it.

When Grammy was around, we never went anywhere without one of her sweaters tied around our shoulders, just in case we got cold. It set me apart—what other kid walked around with a yellow ladies’ sweater that smelled like perfume? It was a mark—I always felt that everyone passing me on the street knew I was loved. She believed you were a marvelous person, so, with her, you were.

One summer, we were out at my grandparents’ house in Napa, and we got an email telling us that our unsociable old cat had died. We went to the farmers’ market that afternoon and when some kindly passerby asked why I was weepy, I remember my grammy saying “We’ve just had some bad news.” A few minute after hearing of Grammy’s death, a college rep called to talked to me, and I remember my mother saying the exact same thing. “She can’t talk now. We’ve just had some bad news.” That was two years ago today.

In fact, now that I think of it, it was a funny thing for my mother to say. We had gotten bad news almost constantly for three years. I could always hear it my dad’s voice, which carries through walls like none other when he’s on the phone. This final email was the end of all that bad news, but it was also the end of all hope of good news. Things had no chance to get better. She was gone. After all that fighting we couldn’t have her back, because there was nothing left to have, not even a funeral.

When Grammy and Granddad came out to North Carolina every spring she always spent a day making lasagnas, and left extras in our freezer. I grew up assuming that no one could make lasagnas like she could. No one. But after that last spring visit, there were no more Grammy lasagnas to be had. So I just never ate lasagna. A month or two ago, it occurred to me that someone, somewhere had to make lasagna like she did. Or, you know, lasagna that was edible. The world is a big place, and there are lots of talented cooks in it. So I tried some in MAP. No luck. I think I need to find some more options. I’ll keep looking for the good stuff. Grammy loved the good stuff.

Because, if I am honest with myself, there is good news. For years, my aunt lied in almost every word and action, and I have no obligation to believe her. My grandmother loved me. She was delightfully unsurprised by every one of my accomplishments, yet delightedly surprised by me, by my entrance into a room. I had her for fourteen years, and, even now, I suppose I have her legacy. A legacy of small bits of love. She taught me how to iron tablecloths, how to clean a wound with witch hazel, and not to eat too many almonds. Someday it will be spring all over again, with gold jewelry, neighborhood walks, and lasagna. I’ll get to hold her hand and we’ll both feel like a million bucks.

Twenty Things About College

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1)      You have a roommate. She plays harp and draws you comics and dances around and talks to herself and is generally wonderful. But you’re very different in a lot of ways, and sometimes what with being in a small cinderblock room together for a very long time you yell some. And maybe get a little sarcastic. But then things boil down, and get understood, and you hug and giggle and go to dinner.

2)      Laundry quarters are a commodity.

3)      You have other friends too, and some weeks you are especially thankful for them. For things like being hospitable and patient, or accomplishing wonderful, commendable things, or just displaying a whole lot of goodness. Because those are the sorts of things people do in college, sometimes.

4)      You have school work. This involves professors and classes and pens and papers and computers. People still whine about their work, and you wonder why they came to college in the first place. You read some poetry and write some essays and learn a lot. You spend time contemplating the nature of humanity. Sometimes grades are connected to money, and it makes you angry and scared and sad.

5)      You don’t always get enough sleep and it’s not always your fault.

6)      You save tables with wallets and IDs and learn recognize all your friends’ stuff so you can plop yours down next to it, even if they’ve gone off to get food.

7)      There is no privacy. Because even when you are in a room by yourself you can hear people talking on the other side of the wall, and it’s not like there’s phone reception anyway.

8)      There are couples. I don’t really want to talk about that though. Take Courtship and Marriage and Dr. Thrasher will inform you.

9)     You have many long conversations with friends about your families. Also really good food.

10)   You’re constantly doing that thing where you meet people for the first time, and have to pretend you don’t already know their entire life story because they’re the friend of a friend or just plain famous and you’ve looked them up in the campus directory. It eventually becomes kind of comedic, so you tend to get giggly and awkward when you meet people.

11)   Tea.

12)   You look forward to weekends even more than you did in high school. (You’re worried that this attitude will only escalate throughout life. And you don’t think it’s healthy.)

13)   You still think poop is funny. Somewhere in your soul you will always think poop is funny.

14)   You really like intercampus mail. And sometimes you find an old packet of popcorn and write a random box number on it, drop it in the slot and giggle all day long.

15)   Sometimes you go exploring and this happens. Continue reading →

Happy Heart

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I missed a week. I’m sorry. In the meantime I have been thinking deeply about blog ideas. I thought about writing about going running, about heartsickness, about boldness and hypocrisy, about summer jobs, about Hopkins and Emerson, and about the letter V. So here’s that blog entry:

I’m bad at going running; heartsickness sucks; I am not bold, but I am often a hypocrite; I need a summer job; Hopkins and Emerson are marvelous to read; and the letter V is very passionate.

But the blog entry I’m going to actually write you today goes something like this:

I have a folder on my desktop called “Happy Heart” and it is full of other folders which are full of pictures.

My dad took this in July when he ought to have been packing up the car so he and Mom could leave Brookfield. I had just been a mechanic and gotten the belt back on the mower. Also, don’t you love the lake? I miss it.

I love this person.

This is my backyard–mostly my mom’s garden. It was my desktop for a while.

This is my French professor from last fall and my current Symbolic Logic professor. They’re married to each other, and I’m sure they have no idea I’m in possession of this picture.

This is cool.

These are some of my cousins and me on my grandpa’s eighty-sixth birthday. We ate pie and I like them. This was my desktop for a while too.

I love this person too.

This is my dad and my grammy. I like their faces.

We have Storytime tonight. In Heidi’s room. And it’s gonna be  Just. Like. This.

My Very Long Sentence

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If the furrows in the dirt were stray fingerprints, as if the entire field were old putty and someone had been fiddling with it while talking to their brother on the phone about the summer when they slept in the apple tree for three weeks until Beth fell out and broke her leg, and Adam took her in the wagon to the hospital, and Dr. Hayden set his first bone and it was Beth’s, and  they remembered it so hard and well that they were squashing the putty of the field down so flat that if that if you settled your feet in the dirt between two furrows and held your chin up like you had a reason, you could see the sunset in China,  now that would be a field to grow the kind of tobacco in that Grandpa grew when he hitchhiked into Royson County wearing only his brother’s overalls and his mother’s straw hat and bought a field from Widow Cohan, who had five sons in the army and whose daughter was mad but who never shed a tear over any of them, on the strength of his brown eyes and the way he held his shoulders, because that field was the one that Gil Cohan had farmed for three years before he went to fight for country and every night he walked the field in spirals and held his chin up like he had a reason and rhymed words to fend off the dark, so when Grandpa sowed that field it knew how to talk and give and grow poetry and the tobacco from it sold for 75¢ in the general store because it tasted like home and smelled like the hope of travel and if you had both those things in a tin of county-grown tobacco you held the world in your hand, and that’s something to remember hard and well.

Cavern

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Sometimes it is hard to start to write. You sit and your fingers itch. And you want and you want and you want. But you don’t write. Because your brain is only coming up with one word at a time, and none of them are related or even remotely interesting.

It isn’t writer’s block really, it’s more of writer’s cavern. You see this cave which looks dreadfully interesting, and you know you’d never forgive yourself if you didn’t drop everything to stop and explore, so in you go. The deeper you go into the empty darkness of your little subconscious, the more determined you are to find some marvelous treasure which will become the fiery core of some soul-searing novel. But all you find is the soup you had for dinner and the dog at your feet. So you sit down on a rock and think and think about these things and their philosophical implications, but you only come up with two words: “SOUP” and “DOG.” You get very annoyed and decide instead to write about how it is to write. That’ll show the dumb ol’ cave!

A while back I found something somewhere online called “Bernadette Mayer’s Writing Experiments,” and I find some of them intriguing.

Diagram a sentence in the old-fashioned way. If you don’t know how, I’ll be happy to show you; if you do know how, try a really long sentence, for instance from Melville. I don’t know how. Please show me. Also, I think I ought to read Melville. Just for kicks and giggles and bragging rights.

Take a traditional text like the pledge of allegiance to the flag. For every noun, replace it with one that is seventh or ninth down from the original one in the dictionary. For instance, the word “honesty” would be replaced by “honey dew melon.” Investigate what happens; different dictionaries will produce different results. This sounds like brilliant fun. If  I had a dictionary handy I’d be rewriting the entire Preamble right now.

Set yourself the task of writing for four hours at a time, perhaps once, twice or seven times a week. Don’t stop until hunger and/or fatigue take over. At the very least, always set aside a four-hour period once a month in which to write. This is always possible and will result in one book of poems or prose writing for each year. Then we begin to know something. I ought to do this. I will do this. Ready, set, go! November 5th or 12th. (But I know hunger will get me before the four hours does…)

Write the poem: Ways of Making Love. List them. I feel like if I wrote this poem…it would be very short. And boring.

Write occasional poems for weddings, for rivers, for birthdays, for other poets’ beauty, for movie stars maybe, for the anniversaries of all kinds of loving meetings, for births, for moments of knowledge, for deaths. Writing for the “occasion” is part of our purpose as poets in being-this is our work in the community wherein we belong and work as speakers for others. This reminds me of my dad which is great. Also, do you know how many people wrote poems about Wordsworth? A lot: Coleridge, Browning, Shelley, even Matthew Arnold! It’s rite of passage or something. I guess I better get on that.

Write the longest most beautiful sentence you can imagine-make it be a whole page. This sounds incredibly exciting and clause-y. Tomorrow maybe?

Write poems that only make use of the words included in Basic English. I don’t know what Basic English is, but I’m going to find out. And I’m going to perform this feat. (Except maybe not with a poem…)

Trade poems with others and do not consider them your own. I don’t understand. Why would you consider them your own? How is this helpful? For deflating egos or something?

Compose a list of familiar phrases, or phrases that have stayed in your mind for a long time–from songs, from poems, from conversation. I have always wanted to do this, but it would be a lot of work, and I’d have to be home with my Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. But really. This summer? A project for June?

Write a work that intersperses love with landlords. Love, landlords, love, landlords, love, landlords. Actually, come to think of it, I don’t feel fully qualified for this.

Choose a period of time, perhaps five or nine months. Every day, write a letter that will never be sent to a person who does or does not exist, or to a number of people who do or do not exist. Create a title for each letter and don’t send them. Pile them up as a book. I don’t know when I will have time for this, but I think this sounds like a wonderful idea for anyone who likes expressing themselves, whether they have a vested interest in writing or not.

Write a macaronic poem (making use of as many languages as you are conversant with). Wow. I wish I was conversant in more than one language.

Find the poems you think are the worst poems ever written, either by your own self or other poets. Study them, then write a bad poem. Hehe. This sounds marvelously therapeutic and mostly unhelpful.

Attempt writing in a state of mind that seems least congenial. Haven’t we all done this already? Eighth grade journal, anyone?

Get someone to write for you, pretending they are you. Okay, SURE! Who knew this would help?

Construct a poem as if the words were three-dimensional objects to be handled in space. Print em on large cards or bricks if necessary. I’m buying me some index card and poetry magnets. Hundreds of them. Hundreds of thousands.

If you have an answering machine, record all messages received for one month, then turn them into a best-selling novella. Goodness, I wish I my voicemail box had more memory!

Write a series of titles for as yet unwritten poems or proses. I actually tried this one and it was quite fun. The asterisks mark the titles I feel turned out particularly well.

Each Time He Kissed Me

Clinging to My Hat

Tudor Family Reunion

I Met a Horace Once*

The Last Wedding

Interminable Salt*

The Brink of the Basket

Michael Macintosh

A Year in Utero***

Pinholes

Feet for Standing

The Shampoo Aisle

The World in Cadence*

The Top of Her Laughter

So, think I’ve made it out of the cavern? I’m not sure myself, but it’s very late, so I’m going to go to bed and listen to the Syracuse rain on the roof. What a satisfying thought. Rain on the roof.

Anniversary

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A very important milestone was reached last week on October third, and I missed it.

Happy Birthday, little blog! Bon Anniversaire! Feliz Cumpleaños! χαρούμενα γενέθλια ! Buon Compleanno!  יוֹם הֻלֶּדֶת שָׂמֵחַ! Penblwydd Hapus! You’re a whole year old!

That was English, French, Spanish, Greek, Italian, Hebrew and Welsh. (Wikipedia helped.)

Every year on my birthday my dad writes me a poem, so I believe strongly that this is how one ought to celebrate one’s offspring. Sitting next to me on my bed to serve as inspiration is a box with nineteen birthday cards in it. Darn. I have no idea what I’m getting myself into. One of these is in FRENCH! Oh, one’s alliterative…that’s sweet. Here’s one my mommy wrote. Wow—a haiku, Dad? I can do that…

Sometimes blogs are hard

But mostly I write about

Me and that’s easy.

Pretty shoddy work, hunh? The truth is, little blog, that I’m not a poet, and I started you so that I could write prose. Prose, the stuff stories are made of, that takes up pages and pages of Microsoft Word, and is both easier to do right and easier to do wrong than poetry is. Dear little blog, thanks for sticking around and being willing to be so versatile. I’m going to utilize that soon. I think you’re cool.

And here’s your kinda lame present: a makeover, plus an extra entry next week! Hope you like it…

Sometimes

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I’ve had one of those weeks. Not the awful, overwhelming kind, or the traumatic kind, or the inexplicably sad kind, but the kind that I can’t remember. The kind where someone asks me how my week has been and I look at them blankly, because I can’t remember a single thing that happened. I know that I went to class and did some reading and wrote an essay and slept and ate and talked, but as far as anything worth latching onto and remarking upon… nothing, apparently. It’s one of those days where the last notable thing I remember happening to me is the time I played Vengeance in my high school gym. Right now my parents and George are in Scotland, and Abby’s at a wedding, and it’s Laura’s nineteenth birthday. I remember these things, and I think, “Someday I will go to Scotland. Someday I will go to a wedding. Maybe even have one myself. Someday I’ll have another birthday. ” And that’s true, but, of course, right now I’m just sitting here writing a paper about the tragedy of inaction in Dickens’ Bleak House. I’m thankful for the opportunity, but really? The tragedy of inaction? MUST WE RUB IT IN?

I’ve always believed, or said I believed, that real, vibrant, spirit-fueled life is made up of lots of tiny little puzzle pieces of  sharing blankets and having wet hair in the morning and giving hugs and having sandals that sometimes rub and saying “it’s you an’ me till three o’clock” to my paper. We were meant for these little things too. And yet, I am apparent ly not content to find that God lives in quiet lives, such as mine is right now. I want mountains and hurdles and heartbreak and rebirth. Yet here I am feeling dull and remarkably unspectacular. But perhaps I am, as Deut. 33:12 would have it, “dwelling between his shoulders,” and I’m just failing to notice or appreciate. It’s been known to happen, Lord.

New Things

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I wish you could see me right now. I’m sitting on a borrowed beanbag, cuddled in a blanket and an oversized purple sweatshirt, with the hood up. It has been up for hour, and I like it that way.

I don’t look like it, but I did two new things this week. The first one was that I wrote a poem. I love to write, but this was exactly the second time in my life I have voluntarily written poetry. I liked it, too, so I sent it in to The Quad. We shall  see. The other new thing I did was that I applied for a job at Campus Safety. I have great doubts that they will hire me, primarily because the man I to whom gave the application wasn’t even sure they had any openings, but can’t you just see me on patrol, 10-2 Saturday nights? Yeah, man. That would be an experience to relish.

I secretly find it a little exhilarating to do little new things like these. I will have to think of more new things. Maybe, when my roommate’s out, I’ll turn on some music and dance. Maybe I’ll study in the library for once and giggle loudly over my textbooks. Maybe I’ll make a pact to audibly say “Hello!” to seven strangers. Maybe I’ll read a novel. Maybe I’ll play Bach’s Prelude, and focus on smiling through the whole thing. See? I told you, very small things. I am not afraid of the big things, of my past or of my future. It is the little bits of here and now, the little sand grains of the present which make me cower. It is much easier to hold my head up and walk away than it is to hold my head up and walk in, and stop, and stand, and do.

So here’s to climbing trees, getting in the dang panini queue, and cinching in your hood so tight that all the world can see is a purple blob with a smile. “Happiness is finding out you’re not so dumb after all.”